Episode 42 Discipline and Punish, part 3

Be prepared in this episode for a bit of dramatic irony – a term I learned when I read Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘Charles’. A little boy, Laurie, comes home every day from kindergarten with stories about a classroom bully named Charles. At the end of the book the parents find out that it’s Laurie who’s the bully; there’s no child named ‘Charles’ in the class.

Another way of putting it is to say that Laurie has attached his ‘self’ to a bullying character called ‘Charles’.

Hold that thought.

Now back to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. What this book does for me is make it possible to imagine a different dichotomy to one we’ve been exploring up to this point. Before we spoke of the individual and society. Now we get to think in terms of the social body and the human body and how they relate to each other. For Foucault the social body is the bully, the human body the victim.

In this episode I invite listeners to attach a self to one or the other of these types of bodies. Would you attach the self to the human body, or the social body?

My research involves poring over everyday conversational data, locating the way the self shows up in all its many grammatical forms. Focusing on grammatical construals of the self makes it easier for me to avoid the assumption that the self necessarily coincides with the human body.

In fact, in many instances, the self that shows up through grammatical analysis coincides with the social body. An oppressive social body, at that. One that bullies the human body. Remember ‘you just don’t do that at training’? The self we’ve been trying to protect from the kindergarten bully turns out to be the bully.

So what do we do? Try to get the self to stop bullying the human body? Tell it to detach itself from the social body? I propose instead that we research the possibilities that show up in everyday texts. Lots of social bodies show up when I do grammatical analysis of everyday conversations –  a whole range of possibilities, and not all of them are oppressive. Let’s start putting our attention to these non-oppressive social bodies.  Another possibility: let’s look at some of those instances in which the self attaches to the human body. My research shows that in these instances it’s less of an identification (I am my body) and more a co-creation, an integration that ends up being transformative.

We’ll explore all of this and more in upcoming episodes.

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.