Structured Visions

All this talk of social structure and how it could be better: does it match your own experience? Last week I talked about a social structure that is divided along gender, and requires boys and men to behave in one way and girls and women to behave in a different way. But I can hear you saying: 'But Jodie, I never felt constrained in that way! I was a girl and always wanted to roughhouse with the boys.' Or: 'I was a boy and liked to paint my fingernails.' 'It was never a problem. Every individual has a choice.'

When is a choice not really a choice? When none of the options you're choosing from are particularly desirable. The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, for instance, gave children the choice to have one marshmallow right away, or wait 10 minutes and get two.

But what if I want something other than marshmallows?

Or what if I want to enjoy my marshmallow now and spend the next 10 minutes doing something other than sitting in agony, waiting for more marshmallows?

I explore in this episode the tension between the idea of the individual, who goes through the world making choices and the idea of social structure, whereby choices seemed to be constrained. I mention the notion of the community of practice again, and talk about the various ways people can engage with, or adapt to particular communities. This week I propose the idea of a new type of social structure in which individuals would not be required to adapt to social structures. Instead, social structures would adapt to individuals – and recognise the possibility for transformation that each individual offers.

I've been talking a lot about recognisability in social structures. Closed social structures divide up the world into particular categories such that it becomes impossible to think outside those categories. What doesn't 'fit' within those categories, or identities, or ways of being, or ways of feeling are rejected, ignored or simply not allowed to exist.

How might it become possible to think beyond the structures that structure thought? We'd have to think more than we can think. 'A thought that thinks more than it thinks,' writes philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, 'is a desire'. To imagine new possibilities within a structure requires moving beyond thought, into a different realm of experience.

But is it appropriate to call that realm of experience desire? Desire is a loaded term – just ask Banarama and U2. In fact, it is sexual desire that is at the heart of that compelling social structure in which human beings are divided into two – and only two – distinct groups: males and females. As part of this dividing practice comes the requirement that sexual desire only occur between the two groups, and not within them. This requirement starts early. Indeed, I remember participating in heterosexual matchup games – which boy do you like? which boy are you going to marry? which boy are you gonna chase on the playground? – from about the age of 5.

How do social requirements about desire shape social structures? I share some discoveries from my ethnographic study of a women's field hockey team (detailed in my book, Language, Sex and Social Structure). Anxious about the fact that there were lesbians on their team, the heterosexual women I spoke to made a point of distinguishing the hockey team from other university women's teams, like rugby. There really aren't that many lesbians in women's hockey, I was told. Women's rugby is where the real 'problem' is. One of the ways they depicted women's rugby as a problem is by portraying rugby players as having desire for women. Hockey players might have sexual encounters with other women… but they don't desire them (which by implication would mean they're not really gay).

Clearly a desire that is entirely shaped by a closed social structure isn't really a desire at all – or is it? It's certainly not the type of desire that Emmanuel Levinas was writing about. What would it be like to experience the Levinas form of desire: to think beyond the thinkable, to imagine new possibilities for being?

When I was teaching conversation classes in France I invented a game designed to encourage students to speak more English to each other. Each player started with 12 paperclips, and they'd have to forfeit one each time another player caught them speaking a language other than English. The goal was to acquire as many paperclips as possible by catching out fellow players.

The response to the game was devastating. The students became so obsessed with accumulating paperclips that everything else – compassion, fun, openheartedness, wit – lost their value.

The 'Paperclip Game' is an illustration of how a closed, or 'totalising' social structure works – in such a structure, only certain defined terms are meaningful, and thus valuable.

What, then, would an open system look like? French scholars Emmanual Levinas and Jacques Derrida offer some clues in their writings on the ethical importance of responsibility to the other. To accept responsibility for the other means to avoid the temptation to see the person before you in terms of the values and meanings determined by the social structure you're operating within. If you're playing the Paperclip Game (in whatever form the Paperclip Game is taking at a particular moment in your life), responsibility to the other might mean seeing your fellow players in terms of something other than how many paperclips they have.

Responsibility to the other means thinking beyond the Paperclip Game, thinking beyond recognisability, thinking beyond all of the structures that structure thought itself. We're in the realm beyond thought now, says Levinas. 'A thought that thinks more than it thinks,' he writes in Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity, 'is a desire' (Levinas 1987, p. 56).

In a dialogue with Giovanna Borradori about the events of September 11, 2001, Derrida explains responsibility to the other in terms of hospitality:

Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other. I would call this a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation. (Derrida 2003, p. 128-9)

In this episode I explore the idea that responsibility to the other also means making space for those ideas one is not yet capable of imagining. Closed social structures put limits on thoughts, concepts, values. What would an open social structure look like, one where there is space to desire as-yet-unimaginable ideas and ways of living?

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.

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.

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.

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:

• We want to see the 'self' as rational and in control, and the body is not always something we can control.
• We want to see the 'self' as consistent over time. But the body sometimes changes dramatically in unexpected ways.
• We judge bodily characteristics as if our bodies were commodities – and we don't want to judge ourselves that way.

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.

'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'.

This week I turn to the concept of individual that's produced by the legal system: the 'rational person'. The rational person is a disembodied individual, who is stripped away of all uniqueness, embodiment, emotion and desire. It turns out that a justice system, like the modern one, based upon the idea of 'fairness' requires us to think of other people as rational, with exactly the same needs and entitlements as every other 'rational person'.

What would a legal system look like if not based upon the idea of 'fairness'? In the classical period, it was the idea of 'natural order'. In the medieval period, it was the idea of a hierarchy with an authoritative God at the top.

Fairness sounds obvious, because it's what we're used to. But the implications are troublesome: in order to treat people fairly, we have to treat them as if they were all the same. Worse, we have to pretend they don't have bodies, emotions and desires.

I share some anecdotes about people who are silenced when they're expressing their unique desires. Four-year-old Amy is told she has to use her 'happy voice' – meaning, she has to sound neutral and emotionless if she wants to be listened to. Twenty-year-old Nemo is told to shut up by her peers when she acts out what it's like to sexually desire another person. Read my book, Language, Sex and Social Structure, for more on the discursive erasure of sexual desire.

Read Costas Douzinas's chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, 'Law and justice in postmodernity' for more on justice, fairness and the legal subject.

In the past two episodes, I've been talking about how society needs to be structured in order for particular types of individuality to exist. In this episode I discuss two types of social structure: the system of traffic laws and culturally specific politeness norms. My interest in traffic laws comes from spending lots of time as a young girl annoying my parents while they were driving. My interest in politeness comes from having lived in a few different cultures and getting things very very wrong (like slamming my jaw into the cheekbones of complete strangers).

Legal systems in most societies are based upon the principle of rationality: laws dictate what is the most rational choice so that people are compelled to make that choice or face unpleasant consequences. When someone breaks the law, they are usually held to a standard of rationality: they are judged according to what a rational person would do.

If people were rational – and only rational – would we need politeness norms? Politeness norms are based upon the principle that other people might be offended by our behaviours. But why would rational people be offended? In their seminal work on linguistic politeness theory, Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson argue that politeness behaviour is not irrational. They based their theory on the idea that people are rational, but that they also have something called face. Face is the thing that keeps people from stating what they want in a straightforward way. Rather than 'You there. Wrap this plaster around my finger so the nail stays in place', they might say something like, 'I'm so terribly sorry, I know this is very cheeky, but can I ask a big favour of you? Would you be willing to help me out? I know you're in a rush….' etc. To use a politeness strategy that attends to negative face, acknowledge that the person they're talking to would rather be left alone, as in the example above. To attend to positive face, make the person you need help from feel like they're just like you – part of a select group of people, as in 'Help a fellow Goth?'

Whereas the legal system relies upon the notion of the rational or the reasonable person, the politeness system (at least as described by Brown and Levinson) relies upon the notion of the 'Model Person' – someone who has both rationality and face.

I bring these notions up here because I want to explore the idea that these two types of system create a notion of a particular type of individual – an individual whose uniqueness has been stripped away and who is strangely disembodied. Next week I'll discuss how difficult it is for some social systems to theorise in terms of individuals with bodies.

For more on Linguistic Politeness, check out the Linguistic Politeness Research Group.