Episode 46 Middle school, embodied

In an episode of This American Life, 14-year-old Annie relates middle school to a ‘whitewashed, brick-walled, iron-gated prison’ that she finally escapes from. Annie’s description gives us a good excuse to revisit the use of prison metaphors to describe oppressive social structures. Foucault’s Panopticon will spring to mind for many Structured Visions listeners, but we don’t have to rely upon French social theory to find prison imagery applied to the social world.

What Annie doesn’t do is compare middle school to a body. Human bodies are mentioned several times in the show – Alex Blumberg, for instance, describes middle schoolers as having to learn ‘how their bodies are now working’, and other guests describe ‘raging hormones’. But middle school as a social body doesn’t enter into the repertoire of metaphors. Middle school is understood as a prison or a ‘social order’, but not as a body.

But you may remember that I’ve argued that the social body isn’t merely a metaphor, it’s a real thing. What is reality? we ask each other, trying to remember what we learned in undergraduate philosophy classes. After exploring where there’s any ontological basis for the social body, I conclude that we need less ontology and more alterity (otherness) – and we look to Emmanuel Levinas  for guidance. If ontological questions are a matter of philosophical debate, alterity – a relationship with the other – is a matter of ethical responsibility. For Levinas, the image of the encounter with the other is the face: when we come into relationship with the face of the other, we have the opportunity to encounter worlds beyond those that we currently have the power  to perceive, know or understand.

The reason why I say middle school and other social structures are social bodies is because bodies have faces. Coming face-to-face with the social body of middle school – or any other social structure – makes it possible to for us to enter into new worlds, beyond our current understandings, and to be surprised, challenged and delighted by what we may see there.