Episode 40 Discipline and Punish, part 1

The first few pages of Michel Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish, describe (in gory detail) a ritual execution from pre-Revolutionary France. I tend to be very squeamish about these things, so it’s a miracle I kept reading. Somehow I did, and in this episode I describe what it is in this book that inspires me. It’s not just that Foucault uses what has become my favourite metaphor – the image of social structure as a body – but also that he makes it possible to conceive of the social body as in relationship with human bodies. This image has been a springboard for my own ideas – a jumping off place where I can start imagining new social structures – more open, inviting, welcoming ones.

That said, there’s an important difference between Foucault’s views and mine. Foucault’s image of the social body shows it as antagonistic toward the human body. The social body is always the bully, scaring the lights out of the human body in the same way that Tiffany Wood terrified me when I was five. In pre-Revolutionary France, for instance, the social body took the form of the reigning monarch, and it displayed its power over human bodies through ritual torture and execution.

Luckily, Tiffany never went to those kinds of extremes.

It’s hard to disagree with the idea that the social body bullies the human body. If you’ve ever felt guilty about something you should be doing, you have a good idea of one way that type of bullying operates – it’s an example of what Foucault calls ‘disciplinary techniques’ of power.

However, I have a new way of thinking about the relationship between the social body and the human body. I propose that the human body has the power to transform the social body. Yes, the social body might understand the human body as a threat. But the human body only need be a threat if the social body is averse to transformation. My idea it that if the social body were ready to change, the human body has the power to transform it.

Anybody wanna play with that idea for a while?

Read my forthcoming book with Palgrave to learn more about what I’ve taken from Discipline and Punish: Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds.