bugsii

So, now I’m reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (thank goodness because I don’t think I could have read another word in The Order of Things).  This book is a history of the prison system and is interesting because it begins with this grotesque description from a newspaper in the 17th century (I think) of a torture and execution.  I won’t go into details, but the point of it was to show how inconceivable that is to us now.  That’s not to say that “we” (or the state or whatever) have really gotten any more humane, it’s just that the way that power is exerted over us (and flows through society) has changed in a way that is sort of more severe.  Foucault would claim, the state has trained us to discipline ourselves.  Not that we are tortured, but we are watched, regulated, trained, so much so that we barely need a supervisor.  We feel that we are being watched all the time.  He actually uses the example of school and discusses how our bodies are constantly regulated (line up, sit still, write this way, not that way, go here, not there, etc.).  He also uses the example of military training and the prison.  It’s strange how similar they all seem when you think about it.  He talks about how we are trained to be efficient machines.  He uses the analogy of a machine quite a bit.  He also uses the term “docile bodies” to describe how our bodies are sort of programmed in this way, without our conscious thought.

The funny thing about this was how much I relate to the analogy of a machine.  I am a machine.  I am very disciplined and reading this made me wonder why.  Take yesterday for instance.  My docile body jerked itself from the sleep it so badly needs to read in the pre-dawn hours.  And not just read, but read for 3 hours straight, forcing my eyes to stay on the paper, forcing my mind to stay focused, forcing myself to stay awake.  Then, I took a break to run, which feels good, but was also on my schedule, so I had do it.  I can’t skip it.  Then, I dragged my body to the bus stop, then to class, forcing myself to sit still, speak properly (or try to), take detailed notes, etc.  Then, I went straight to the library, where my non-docile body wanted to play around on facebook for a few minutes, but eventually, I made myself close my computer and open my book to read right up until I had to teach.  Then, I marched myself over to teach, focused on teaching for two hours (which always goes the quickest).  Then, back on the bus and home.  Again, my undisciplined self wanted to watch TV for a bit, just while I ate dinner (it was now 7:30pm), but it lasted a little longer… but again, I made myself turn off the TV, clean up the kitchen, and go up to my room to read.  I read until 11pm, until I couldn’t force my body to read anymore and tried to sleep, but instead worried for an hour or so about when and how I was going to finish this reading.  Not tomorrow, tomorrow, my docile body must work.

So, why do I do this?  Why do I discipline myself so much that I am an efficient machine, exhausted, but productive?  I wonder if it’s because of what I learned in school.  Do your homework on time or the teacher will think badly of you.  Listen to your teacher or your parents will be disappointed.  Do the best you can or you might lose your status as “smart” and “hard-working.”  Are these standards I set on my own or are they the power of American social norms that have a hold of me.  Could I do anything differently?  Could I relax?  Could I skim?  Could I do less than my best?  I really don’t feel like I can and maybe that’s a problem.  I don’t know.  My head hurts.

Yesterday was a blah day of reading and working.  Really, that’s ALL I did.  And today, I read all morning, then went to my class on Foucault.  I was nervous for this class because my professor had posted everyone’s “scholarly notes” and let’s just say that mine were a stand out.  They were different in style and form and formalism from everyone else’s.  I’m not trying to say that they were bad.  I think I did a pretty good job, but they were different and when you are in school, generally different is not well received.  I wrote a narrative, I wrote incoherent questions, I called one section crap, etc.  I didn’t know everyone else was going to write a pretty standard looking paper or a coherent outline of notes.  But, then I thought, “What would Foucault say about my ’scholarly notes?’” He would say that the knowledge that is considered valid in the university is a standard looking paper, but he would also say that that’s not because a standard paper is the best way to do things, it’s just because that is what is considered valid.  So, my crazy incoherent notes are actually, no crazier than a standard paper.  The paper just happens to be more accepted.  So, in the spirit of Foucault, I decided not to be embarrassed, but to embrace the space that might be opening up for my crazy notes to become valid and acceptable (It could happen).

When class began, the professor started by saying that the notes were looking pretty good, but that some of us might want to consider the difference between the notes we take for ourselves and the version we turn in (glances at me).  Sigh.  Dude, I do not have time to write two versions of anything.  And besides, Foucault likes my notes.  He thinks they embody the possibility for a new episteme.  So there.

Dan and I headed up to Canton for the night.  We got to see Katie play volleyball (they beat St. Paul’s!) and then I spent most of the rest of the night trying to get my Foucault reading done.  I only have about 11 pages left for class on Tuesday and I am psyched! Why did I not finish those measly 11 pages tonight?  Well, because I read Foucault at a rate of about 10 pages/hour.  So, yeah.

Tomorrow, we are going to the Browns/Bengals game with my mom and Guido and I am just so excited that it’s not going to be -13 like last year, that I could pee!  Guido has made a TON of food and I’m looking forward to playing some cornhole and tailgating before the game.  The Browns have been doing so terribly that I brought my Bengals sweatshirt to wear.  I know, I’m a bad Northeastern Ohioan.

Yesterday, I spent darn near the ENTIRE day reading almost half of The Order of Things by Michel Foucault for my Comp Studies class.  The foreword and preface were interesting, but the rest was more challenging… to say the least.  I have to keep “scholarly notes” to turn in each week and I felt like the first part was worth sharing.

When I was in high school, I was kind of poor and went to a Catholic school, where most people were, if not kind of rich, then most definitely not kind of poor.  At this time, I hated the rich kids because, as I saw it, they had done nothing to deserve their privilege, yet they owned it like they had.  Like, they hadn’t just been pooped out into a world where they had an unfair advantage, an advantage (at least in my perception) that they perceived as the status quo, which therefore put those without the same advantages (namely me), in a lower class.  And this lower class had not simply been born into their situation, but had actively done something wrong or something to deserve their station beneath the bourgeoisie.  Clearly, I’m over this now, but as I read the foreword of The Order of Things, I thought, Foucault would tell those rich kids that they had nothing to do with their own privilege, that they could just suck it.  Of course, he uses slightly more academic prose and does this in a sneaky way by studying the history of the sciences, but nevertheless, he, when discussing the “problem” of the subject says: “I should like to know whether the subjects responsible for scientific discourse are not determined in their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity, and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them” (p.xiv).  It all just seems like happenstance to me.  Foucault wants to study the conditions that made knowledge valued at a specific time, which seems to me that he sort of thinks that those ideas that became established were just lucky, sort of like the rich kids.  Which, as it happens, also sounds like a very structuralist position to me, which would apparently provoke him to say I have a tiny mind, which I probably wouldn’t disagree with.  I wonder, though, why he despises this term structuralist.  Is it because he is trying to see the hidden structures?  Would this make him a poststructuralist (I’ve heard he wasn’t fond of this term either)?

Anyway, around this same time in my life, I also held a contradictory belief that I did not acknowledge as contradictory.  I believed that I could change my circumstances, that I could “succeed” (oddly enough by the rich kids’ standards) even though I had not been born into circumstances that may usually lead to inevitable “success,” like having a father who owned a prominent law firm.  So, at the same time that Foucault’s words noted above make me feel redemption, they also make me feel like I also sort of got lucky.  If we’re all just swimming in the stream of a combination of circumstances, then our individual trajectories (from privilege to privilege or from lack of privilege to privilege or any combination thereof) are not the result of our own agency, hard work, determination, or what have you, they are just happenstance… luck… that’s it.  Of course, Foucault is talking about how knowledge gains validity and not meritocracy, but I think it has parallels.  He does make a small caveat to say that he “doesn’t wish to deny the validity of intellectual biographies, or the possibility of a history of theories, concepts, or themes” and goes on to say that he just wonders “whether these descriptions are themselves enough, whether they do justice to the immense density of the discourse” (p. xiii).   So, maybe I had a bit to do with my own progression through the hierarchy of our society, but there’s more to it than that, and I can acknowledge that I worked hard, but was also sort of lucky.

PS- What exactly are “scholarly notes” anyway?  I hope these count.