Episode 10 Potties and bodies

‘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’.