Hello, and welcome to episode 46 of Structure Visions. Structure Visions is a space where I explore new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Jody Clark, and I'm very grateful for you listening today. You are very welcome here.
Today's episode is called Middle School Embodied. It's inspired by an episode of the radio show This American Life, which was aired on National Public Radio's episode 449, and my brother Mike brought it to my attention, and it's about this phenomenon of schooling called middle school, which from our UK listeners it's the period of schooling between the ages of 11 and 14. So what you would call secondary school. And often when you talk to Americans about middle school, they kind of, you get a sense of drag, a kind of memory of horrible things.
I don't know if that's just the people that I talk to. I haven't really encountered it so much when I talk to my friends in the UK, so I don't know if there's the same kind of phenomenon that's called middle school. But I thought I would share with you something that happens at the beginning of the National Public Radio, this American Life episode. And in it, the host, Ira Glass, speaks to a 14-year-old who sent this American life an email, and he rings her up and he asks her to read the email to him, so to read down the radio.
And so she reads, Dear This American Life, I just escaped the whitewashed brick walled iron gated prison that is commonly known as middle school, and I'm finally out for good. Then all the time I've listened to your show, I've never heard an episode devoted to what goes on inside the walls of the middle school. I hope you'll think about it. Okay, so there's her email.
And if you'll notice something about that email, first of all, when she's referring to middle school, she is referring to it as a commonly known phenomenon if you like. So she's not talking about this particular middle school, the San Francisco, middle school, number 321 or whatever. She's talking about a generalized entity, if you like. And she uses the direct determiner, the whitewashed brick walled iron gated prison that is commonly known as middle school.
So we have this notion that there's this common idea of what middle school is, and then she's using the metaphor of the prison. Okay, whitewashed brick walled iron gated. Okay, so she's describing in her sort of metaphoric eloquence, you know, the different aspects of the walls of the middle school and the gates of the middle school. There's a physical structure of it.
And we don't know from her email what's so terrible about it. And in fact, Ira Glass asks her to kind of expand a little bit about what was so bad about it. And when she does expand on it, it's not about the actual structure of the building, but so it's not just that she's describing the structure of the building metaphorically. There's something about those structural elements that serve as the metaphor for the prison that she endured, what she's considering to be the prison.
So the reason that I am so fascinated by this email is because middle school is understood as a type of social structure. So of course, that interests me, but also that she's drawing upon this metaphor of the social structure as a prison. So does that remind us of anything? And of course it does.
If you've been listening, it reminds us of Foucault's panopticon. And in Foucault's panopticon, he does a similar thing whereby he describes, he uses the analogy of a particular type of prison to explain a particular type of social structure. A particular type of social structure is one that is governed by disciplinary society or disciplinary techniques. A disciplinary society can correspond to a particular type of prison that is the panopticon.
And for Annie, this particular type of walled, gated building, the prison, serves as the metaphor for her experiences of middle school. Okay, so now think for a second, we're saying that this is a metaphor. Think for a second about any other type of metaphor she might have used to describe middle school. So you might go back to your own experiences of middle school or any kind of schooling, especially you didn't like.
And say to yourself, okay, well, what metaphor can I use to describe it? And so all sorts of metaphors might be popping into your mind. And I wonder if the metaphor of the body shows up. So you've often, if you've been listening to the show, you know that I have been experimenting with the notion of the social body.
Now interestingly, Annie doesn't describe, she doesn't use the metaphor of a social body to describe middle school. And I think it would be a little bit odd if she did. The prison metaphor seems a lot more apt. Now the reason I'm so fascinated by this notion of the social body is because I like to think of the social body as in relationship to human bodies, right?
Now this is interesting, Annie's email, she doesn't refer much to human bodies in her email. We have the iron gated brick walled whitewashed prison. And then we have the subject I, and we have the subject engaged in a material action process escaped. Okay, so there's a certain amount of embodiedness here.
We've got this subject I that we presume has a human body because that I, that subject, has to escape somehow those walls and those gates. And then later she says, I'm finally out for good. So we have this subject I in relationship to this prison. And the relationship is one in which the subject, this person, this presumably this body is trying to get out.
Okay. And so the notion of escaping, et cetera. So here we do have something like a human body, but in relation to something that is completely stable, completely fixed, completely unmoving. So not much of a relationship between the human and the social body there or the human in the prison, if you like.
Now, further on in the show, and I would encourage you to listen to it, it's a good show, you know, further on in the show, there is some reference to the notion of the human body in relation to the middle school. And that's when Ira Glass, the host, speaks to another radio producer, whose name is Alex Bloomberg. Now Alex Bloomberg again, he's a radio producer, I think he's a producer for this American life, but Ira Glass mentions that Alex Bloomberg taught science in a middle school for four years, and he clearly hated it. In fact, that's probably why he left him to another career in radio.
And so he interviews Alex Bloomberg and Bloomberg says, I don't know if they learned anything. They're so consumed with learning all these other lessons about where they fit in in the social order and how their bodies are now working and who they're attracted to and who they're going to be that facts and figures and geography and all the other stuff you teach in school, it just doesn't even penetrate. Okay, so here we have not a description of the walls or the prison or the gates of this phenomenon in middle school. Instead, the focus is on the they, and we presume that this is a reference to the middle school students, right?
They learned anything, I don't know if they learned anything, they're consumed with how they fit in the social order, how their bodies are working, how they're attracted to, who they're going to be, et cetera. So we've got this they. And so here we have this notion of the social structure in which we have these entities, these human subjects, if you like, and they are consumed with learning all of this stuff. And one of the things that they're learning, which you might have heard me kind of emphasize when I was saying it, how their bodies are now working.
Okay, so we have the subjects, the collective third person, they, in relationship to their human bodies and the relationship there is emphasized with the possessive pronoun, their bodies. Okay, so they have bodies. So these selves have these bodies, but what they have to do is learn about how they're working. So there's a kind of implicit metaphor of a body as machine.
It's working in a particular way. And with the advert now, we have to understand that the body is working in a different way from how it worked before. And that's one thing that they have to learn. So these students have to learn how their bodies are working, but they also have to learn where they fit in, in the social order.
So again, we have a notion of structure, social structure. And so they have bodies that work in a way that they're not familiar with, and they have to fit in to the social order. So the bodies are like machines that work in a particular way in the social order, maybe it's like a machine that you've got to fit into in some way. And so we've got the self is kind of negotiating the body on the one hand, the human body, and the structure, which is middle school on the other hand.
And to be completely honest, it does sound pretty dire. Like it makes me not really want to go back. Not that I'd want to go back anyway. But again, for Alex and Alex Bloomberg's discussion or description, for him, the social order is not a body either.
It's something else. It's like it's it's fixing place, right? And the human person, the self and the body has to somehow fit in to that. Now, so this notion of fitting in, and then we can compare that to Annie, who was in, it wasn't a question of fitting in, it was more a question of getting out, escaping, right?
I'm sure fitting it was an issue there as well, but in her description, it's not so much about fitting in, it's about escaping, wanting to get out of those walls. Okay, so the interesting thing in both the Alex Bloomberg description and the Annie description is the stability of the social structure that is middle school. It doesn't change. It stays in place and the selves have to negotiate it.
So they negotiate either by escaping it, like Annie said she did, or by learning about it, which is what Alex Bloomberg says that they do. In fact, the way they learn about it according to the book is to become consumed by it. It's almost like they're getting invaded by the social order. But in any case, the social structure itself is stable.
It stays in place like the prison walls. Okay. And that comes home even further when Ira Glass, later when Ira Glass asks Annie, what do you think could be done to make middle school better? Annie's response is phenomenally fantastic.
She says, I don't think you can really do anything about it. You know, so here she's going through all this trouble of writing this very eloquent email through this American life, and then she goes on to speak about it quite eloquently, and about how terrible it is. And he says, well, how could you make it better? She says, no, there's nothing you can do.
And then at that point, both Ira and Annie laugh a little nervously. Annie sort of repeats nothing. You know, nothing. There's nothing to be done.
You know, to quote what's the play with a lot of your nester gun. I can't think about that play. So waiting for Godot, nothing to be done. We can't do anything.
The thing is set in place. All we can do is be consumed by it and hopefully escape it when it's required. Okay. So that's the image I want to kind of hold on to for a moment.
The metaphor of the prison, the notion of the social order, and the sense of stability in relation to it, and then the sense that the self doesn't have too many choices, right? That there are kind of victims of the damn thing, right? So now as you can imagine, I'm going to ask for a little bit of a reframe, and I know what you think I'm going to say. You think I'm going to say, okay, well, let's replace the metaphor of the prison with the metaphor of the social body.
But I'm not going to do that because a couple of podcasts ago, and I'm going to stick to what I said a couple of podcasts ago, a couple of podcasts ago, I said, let's not treat the social body as a metaphor. Let's treat the social body as real. So I made that sort of potentially controversial claim. Inbox hasn't been flooded with lots of complaints about that, so I'm just going to keep going with it.
So the idea is, let's see the social body as a real thing. Not as a metaphor, but let's see it as a real thing, because it's not a question of let's take that metaphor and let's replace it with a different way of thinking about it, and then maybe you'll feel happier. Now let's see it as a real thing. Let's say, yep, middle school is a social body, and it's a real social body.
Okay, so what do I need about that? Now, one of the things I said a couple of podcasts ago was, we could spend lots of time debating under the influence of our favorite substances, what reality is. Now, if you've had any dabblings in philosophy or philosophy classes like I did when I was an undergraduate, and I could assure you that when I was talking with my friends about what reality was after having sat through philosophy, one-on-one, or whatever class on philosophy we were taking, my favorite substance at the time was probably coffee with lots of sugar in it or something like that, but whatever it is, it's the kind of thing where you walk away from your undergraduate philosophy class and you think, oh, what is reality? I don't know what do you think reality is this type of thing.
But let's go ahead and do it. Let's not put on our sarcastic voices instead. Think about that notion of reality, but let's phrase it in the terms if you like a philosophical inquiry and let's say we're not thinking about reality, but instead we're thinking about the notion of being. Okay, so philosophical inquiry is frequently, it's obsessed with the notion of being.
Okay, and that kind of goes way back to Aristotle and Aristotle's question is, well, what is the being of a thing? What is the beingness of a thing like a teacup in front of me? So, the teacup changes, the teacup could lose its handle, but it remains a teacup. And what says that it remains a teacup, and I can pick it up and I can put it down and I can spill something on it and I can paint it.
In the midst of all those changes, there's something about the form of this thing that keeps it being a teacup, regardless of all those changes, unless something happens to the teacup whereby it loses the form of the teacup and if it loses that, if it loses the ground if you like of its being, that's the only thing that keeps it from being a teacup. So, if I smash it into pieces and it no longer has the form of a teacup. So, for Aristotle, there's some kind of essence of a thing. There's a kind of ground to each being that constitutes its being, if you like.
And so, it kind of doesn't really matter how I negotiate my world. A thing is a thing as a being as a being and it gets its being from some fundamental aspect or inherent nature of its thing. And so, philosophers who are engaging with that notion of being, since Aristotle start asking questions like, well, how is a teacup different from a person? Because there's a teacup here and there's a me.
And how am I different from the teacup? So, how is my being different from a teacup? And it's like, okay, I presumably have some kind of being, but I have consciousness of my being and I can ask questions about my being in the way that I presume my teacup isn't. So, surely that must be a different type of being.
And then, there's also what comes into question later is this idea of, hold on, the beingness of the teacup exists separately from my engagement with it, my perception of it, my consciousness of it. So, sitting in front of me exists my virtue of my perception of it. And I can change the way I perceive it and I can perceive it by touching it and I can perceive it by seeing it. But we need to have that conscious subject, that notion of subjectivity in order to even engage with the idea of being, right?
Okay, so I probably explain that very badly and I'm sort of reviewing all these things at the moment. So, who knows whether I've got this right? But these are the least of, we're throwing into this do these kinds of questions and these ideas. What we're talking about, the philosophical type of inquiry we're talking about here is ontology, right?
The study of being. And so, you could ask what is the ontological basis for me saying that the social body exists, that the social body has being, right? It's not a metaphor, it's not a representation, it has being, it exists as a being and exists as a body. There's all kinds of ontological questions about that.
I suspect that the main box probably isn't going to be flooded with ontological questions, but just in case I'm prepared for them. And so, what I would do at this point is rather than sort of draw attention to all the criteria that would be required to convince the ontologists, if you like, that the social body has being. Instead, I'm going to draw upon a philosopher who I mentioned many podcasts ago, and I think I keep referring to him, but I'll bring him up again to the French philosopher Emmanuel Ledinas. And he engages with all of these ontological questions and he moves in a subtly new direction.
He's not actually done ontology, so the study of being, but he moves toward what he calls alterity. And alterity is the idea of the other. Okay. And so often you've got these two terms, ego, which is the self and alter, which is the other, you know, I and you.
So ego being I and you being the other or he or she or it being the other. And for Ledinas, he says the reason to engage in these discussions is not for the sake of philosophy, philosophical inquiry is not for the sake of philosophy, but it's for the sake of ethics, for ethical responsibility. He has says we have a responsibility to engage with alterity, to apprehend alterity, to allow for alterity to work its magic. Oh, he doesn't need to look magic.
So the notion of the other, we have a responsibility to the other. Now what does he mean by the other? So here's the thing. If I'm sort of swimming in my world of beingness, I'm sitting at my desk and there's all these beings in front of me.
There's a cup, there's a piece of paper, there's a pencil, there's a, there's a, some books. And so, you know, I can, as for my subjective position as a perceiving self, if you like, I can notice all of these things and I can have and I can engage with them through my perception of them. And I can bring them into my consciousness by thinking about them. So there's an eye, which is an ego who is conscious of these other beings, right?
And when I look around my room, I can pretty much name everything. And I can see its beingness in terms of how I understand each thing. There isn't anything in my sight at this moment that I can't name. And so there isn't anything in my sight at this moment that goes beyond what I can perceive.
Okay, now so that's interesting, right? So if anything, any being enters into my subjective experience through my perception, what about those things I cannot perceive? What about those things that are not possible for me to perceive? Or that are not possible for me to think about?
Or are not possible for me to grasp that are beyond, say, the horizon of my perception or the horizon of my consciousness or my knowledge? And you might say, okay, yeah, well, if you can't think about them and you can't perceive them and you can't see them, you can't know them, you can't grasp them. Well there's no point in even worrying about them. But what Levynos would say is nah, we have an ethical responsibility to engage with that which cannot be perceived.
And the reason for that is, if you can engage with, if you can acknowledge the other, that which cannot be perceived, then you will stop reducing everything in your field of existence to yourself. You will stop living in a world where everything is perceptible according to some totality, which is your notion of consciousness and perception. It's like he says you've got to get beyond, like you have a responsibility to get beyond what you know. So how does he conceive of how for many nah's?
The other is actually something that you can meet and you can meet this other every single day. And the way he describes it is he says that you meet all, all, all, territory face to face and he means that literally in the face of the other is what you see in the face of the other is that which cannot be perceived, cannot be understood. Okay, so let's think about this. So you've come across somebody and you look them in the eyes and you see their face and you've got a couple of different options.
You can do the thing where you can say, ah, I knew what that person is, they're Mary. Well, she's Mary or she is about, she's in her 50s, she's kind of overweight and she wears you know, unsnamish clothing. Okay, so if you describe Mary like that, then you're describing her according to some preconceived set of perceptual identifiers and you aren't engaging with her as if she were something completely outside of your understanding. And for Letting us, if you were to look in the face of Mary and recognize that her experience is completely beyond your understanding of the world, then you have the possibility for something new and something transformative.
But as long as you just allow her to kind of rest within your own sort of sense of the conceptual domain, then you haven't fulfilled your ethical responsibility. Okay, and for Letting us, that idea was the image is to face, you face the other, you look into the face of the other. Now what is interesting about that image? Isn't it interesting that he chose an image that is connected to the image of the human body?
I don't know whether he was talking about faces of animals, he doesn't mention that yet, no, no, no, no, I read. So it seems to me that he's connecting to the human face and the human face is an element and element of the human body, right? So in order to, you know, he doesn't say it like this, but in order to come into contact with otherness, which he says we have a responsibility to do, we need to see that otherness as embodied, having a body, having a face. And so I would say, okay, you can kind of see where he's coming from when you're starting to think in terms of like coming across another human being, another human body.
And this is, but can you imagine a face as part of any other thing whereby you might want to come into contact with something as another? So what do we mean? I want to say that middle school is a social body that has a face. So I want it to be a real body and I want that real body to have a face and I want us to be able to look at the face of that social body and see it as something completely other.
Prisons are already in our notion of understanding. I give social order, all of that's within our perception. That's all possible. So I can look at the middle school and say, oh, it's a prism because prison is part of my conceptual universe, if you like.
And the second I do that, I'm seeing it as something that can't change. Now, I could say, oh, I'd rather see middle school as a beautiful garden in which things grow, you know what I mean? And then I have a different metaphor. But I also have within my conceptual environment, if you like, the notion of garden.
So when I draw another metaphor, I'm still drawing from within what's in my realm of knowing. So I still haven't confronted the possibility that this social body might offer something completely foreign to my understanding of the world. And if I can interact with middle school face to face, then I have the possibility for opening into a world that I don't know about yet. And this is what's so interesting about Foucault's panopticon, right?
The image of the social world that he has, the metaphor he uses, his particular prison. The reason why that prison is so intimidating and so oppressive is precisely because you can't see its face. If you remember in the middle of the prison, so that you've got all these cells on the periphery, and in the middle of the prison, there's a tower. And there's a guard in the tower who can look out, but none of the prisoners can see that guard's face.
So the panopticon is completely faceless. This notion of being faceless is something that is often applied to institutions that are repressive, faceless, nameless, bureaucracy, for instance. And so for me, if the social structure becomes embodied, then with that body it has a face, and we can see this face in lovey-noss terms, right? Where you engage with the face as something that opens up a completely new way of understanding things.
Okay, so let's just end with an image to maybe allow that idea to settle into our minds. And I'll tell you the story about my friend from school, Ben, he was visiting his hometown a couple of summers ago, I think, and I was visiting my hometown too, so the same hometown. So we met up with Ben's sister, Julie, and their partners and their kids, and it was really great to see them. And we were in our hometown with the kids, and at one point, Ben's son, Atticus, who I think was three at the time, about three, and he goes up to look in the window of a nearby shop.
So he's kind of staring into the window, and the rest of us are doing who knows what. And Ben comes up behind him and kind of stoops down, and he looks at the shop window with Atticus, and he says, Atticus, can you see something in there? Can you see there's something there? There's someone looking at you there, and so he points to the window, and he draws Atticus as attention to the window, and then suddenly Atticus can see his own face looking back at him from the window.
So this thing that really had just kind of a thingness, it was just a building, suddenly has a face that's looking straight back at him. Atticus goes, kind of gasps in a kind of maybe a little bit of fear, maybe a bit of surprise, certainly some delight, and when this kind of shadowy face of his building is kind of back and looking at him, and that notion of the kind of delight, but the delight is of the delight of complete otherness, right? You have to at least imagine that what's looking back at you when you look at the building is not your own face, because it's your own face that's boring, but if it's a completely other face, then new possibilities present themselves, almost at the feeling level like, oh, the building has a face. And so at that moment Atticus's sister, Touli, who I think was about five, turns up behind and she says, oh, it's just his reflection.
Which I thought was fantastic. You know, it's just his reflection. Let me give you a reason not to be delighted by that, because it's just your own face, and it nails it, because if it is just your own face, if it is just your own reflection, there's no reason for being delighted. But if you can entertain the possibility that the building or the structure has a face and that face is not your own, then you can potentially allow yourself to enter into a new way of thinking.
A world that you don't yet have access to. So that's the thought that I would love for you to sort of sit with for a while, and maybe we'll talk about the middle school thing again next week, and maybe we won't. But in any case, thank you so much for listening today, and I hope you'll join me again.