Episode 38 You’re outta the game!

Picture the scene: my nephew, Lane, at four years old, at Christmas, playing with his new racetrack, shouting ‘You’re outta the game!’ to anyone whose car comes off the track. Now let’s imagine that Lane is the personification of a social structure. He is, in fact, doing what social structures seem to do – classifying (by setting up a binary opposition between in the game and out of the game) and inclusion/exclusion (by determining which constituents are in and which are out).

Now let’s take this personification and turn it into metaphor. First let’s use the metaphor I’ve been drawing upon in several past episodes: social structure as computer programme. The computer programme that is my nephew is setting up the IF-THEN statements that serve as parameters for inclusion: to be in the game, a constituent must (a) play by certain rules and (b) achieve certain demonstrable outcomes. Failure to fit within these criteria results in expulsion from the game. Nothing personal. (Or, as my nephew would say, ‘No offense’.)

But I promised that for this week’s podcast I’d try out a new metaphor. So this time let’s not see Lane, the Social Structure, as a computer, but as a squirming, four-year-old body. Here are some of the ways bodies aren’t like computer programmes:

They’re not rational They have energy They have power They come into contact with other bodies They have emotions They have desires They’re unpredictable.

I could go on, but Social Structure – this time personified as my latte-drinking buddy, no longer as my nephew, tells me it’s not particularly comfortable with the new metaphor. It doesn’t want to be a smelly, farting, yawning  body. It wants to keep on being those cool characters from The Matrix.

But seeing social structure as a body has its benefits, as I try to explain through the grammatical analysis of an another account of exclusion, shown in the transcript below. Here Chrissy’s explaining the difference between inexperienced and experienced field hockey players:

Close attention to how the selves are construed in this transcript – particularly the two different roles played by the generic second-person (you) – shows social structure becoming embodied. In fact, it seems to take on a body that is remarkably similar in shape to Foucault’s Panopticon.

My analysis of this extract comes from my forthcoming book with Palgrave: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.