Structured Visions

How do you know if a social structure is having an impact on you? Have a look around and notice if there’s anything you recognise. If you’re using language to label the things in the room, for instance, you’re participating in a linguistic structure. A language structure is a social structure inasmuch as it is designed by and for the community that uses it. Also: how well do you recognise the people on the bus? If you can refer to ‘the old man’ or ‘the smelly woman’, you’re drawing upon a social structure that is organised around the qualities of age and smelliness.

Recognisability is limiting if it keeps us from even seeing those things that are not already part of the social structure. For me truly open, welcoming and progressive social structures would be dynamic, and they would organise themselves on those things that we can’t yet recognise. I’m on the lookout for social structures that allow for new possibilities that might emerge from the unrecognisable. Some of those new possibilities present themselves to me in the form of a 6-year-old boy speaking up for his big sister.

Download Liza Got Hair: Thwarting Recognisability.

Last week I talked about how bodies are disciplined to conform to societal norms. This week I discuss the pressure to conform to a consistent identity. I explore this idea in relation to two renowned scholarly figures – Michel Foucault and Monica from Friends. I get curious about how the enjoyment of the body might have the power to challenge or change social structures. And a young woman named Maryam takes to the dance floor to challenge narrow perceptions of identity.

Download Let’s Dance!

We’re still talking about bodies but this week the focus is on how they’re disciplined. I explain some of the ideas in Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish. An important component of Foucault’s work is the mechanisms that keep societal structures in place. In a feudal society, structured hierarchically according to the birthright of the royalty and the landed gentry (and the lack of birthright of the peasantry), social structures stayed in place through a collective belief in the power of the king. If ever the king’s power was threatened through a usurpation attempt or an enemy invasion, some public and gory displays of ritual torture would remind everyone of how powerful the king was. After the French Revolution and the subsequent removal of the aristocracy, power takes on a different form. People now have power not by virtue of birthright, but according to how much money they have or how many valuable goods they have accrued. This measure of power is less stable and more vulnerable – because what’s to stop other people from simply stealing your stuff and thus having more power than you?

According to Foucault, a new disciplinary system needed to be put in place in post-Revolution France, whereby individuals had to be convinced they were members of a social contract, and that they had to obey the rules of that contract. Laws became codes that served as reminders of the contract. In addition, a capitalist economy required the generation of more goods and resources, and human bodies became seen as powerhouses that could be exploited in factories and workhouses to produce more goods. The best way to control individual bodies, Foucault explains, is through convincing them to self regulate, to worry about how well they’re measuring up and how well they’re conforming to the demands of the system. Foucault illustrates this principle through his description of a type of prison called the ‘panopticon’.

I illustrate the principle through a story about trying to train my 9-year-old body to do cartwheels the length of the floor of a school gymnasium – and the shame I felt when such a feat proved impossible.

The impulse – produced in a ‘disciplinary society’ – to self regulate encourages us to fixate and obsess about our individual selves and how well we’re measuring up. There is little incentive to look at the bigger picture and ask questions about the societal structure that requires such oppressive self regulation.

In this episode I ask: How might society be structured such that a different relationship between self and body were encouraged? Imagine a social structure, for instance, in which individuals were welcome to enjoy the experiences their bodies offer. What if society shaped itself around the joy of embodied experience? That’s an idea worth thinking about. More on that next week.

Download Foucault, the Panopticon and the Tyranny of Cartwheels.

If you were in a position to make a judgement about someone – in a job interview, for instance – would you take into account what their body looked like? One widespread societal message is that the uniqueness, the individuality, the ‘personhood’ of a person has nothing to do with what their body looks like. Why is the idea that the ‘person’ or the ‘self’ is separate from the body so prevalent in our society? In this episode I put forward three possible reasons:

I analyse a conversation in which a young woman named Rachel recounts her experiences working in the plus-sized department of a women’s fashion retail store. Here’s how Rachel describes typical customers:

These old ladies would come in and they’d be like ‘Ugh. I’m so fat and so short. I hate my clotes. I hate the fact that I have to shop in here. I don’t want to buy anything.

Rachel structures her account such that it is not individual women who are speaking, but a group of women united by shared bodily features: being women, being old, being fat. Notice that it’s OK to judge bodily features in a way that it’s not OK to judge a person for having those features. There’s a strong tendency to see the body as fragmented – divided up into parts, all of which can be separately judged.

Download I’m So Fat and So Short.

‘Fairness’ and ‘equality’ are at the heart of the modern justice system, as I explained in last week’s episode. This week’s idea is that basing notions of justice on fairness and equality will never work. Why not? Because such a justice system requires us to think in terms of disembodied individuals – and we simply can’t keep the body from showing up, sometimes in embarrassing ways.

When society tries to erase the body, it ends up being fetishised. One way this shows up is in taboos. A foray into a four-year-old’s preoccupation with ‘going potty’ illustrates the ways in which people are socialised into treating aspects of the body as shameful.

I also take up threads from Episode 8 on politeness theory. To attend to someone’s ‘negative face’ is to recognise that they don’t want to be bothered. The extended ritual apologies that accompany instances in which our body does something outside of our control (sneezing, burping, dozing, farting, tummy rumbling) suggests to me that one thing we assume others don’t want to be bothered by is our bodies. I’ve also noticed people erasing the unique aspects of themselves in order to anoint another’s negative face. It’s as if they’re saying, ‘I know that you don’t want to be bothered by those aspects of me that are different from you.’ So negative politeness sometimes entails ‘neutrality’. But neutrality, as it turns out, is not so much an erasure of the body as it is a bodily performance. We ‘do’ neutral, we act it out, we display it – we force the body (in the way we speak, dress, act, etc.) to conform to a set of behaviours that our society has decided constitute ‘neutrality’ or ‘rationality’.

Download Potties and Bodies.