Episode 12 Foucault, the panopticon and the tyranny of cartwheels

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.