Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, people and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren, we have Samantha and Morgan in the booth and we’re all three of us different people—why?
 
Who determines who you are? Why do you pursuit the things that are important to you, whther they be published articles, a thin and athletic physique or a reputation of being a decent human being? Michael Foucault addresses the idea of forming “docile bodies” in Discipline and Punish.
This book starts with a graphic, contemporary description of someone being drawn and quartered and ends with the declaration that “The judges of normality are present everywhere [...] and each individual, where ever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements” (304). It’s a chilling progression. But if you think about it, there are things that we do because of “judges of normality” that we couldn’t be forced into by a tortuter. Can you imagine a prison where it would be moral to force you to wake up at 4:30 and run 10 miles and then lift weights, and then to relax with a glass of mysterious green smoothie? But if you think you need to look a certain way then you might do these unpleasant things to satisfy the “judges of normality.” The link between old-style torture and contemporary judgemental attitudes trace through this text. Here are the highlights along the way: torture as public spectacle (7). body as intermediary between people and sovereign (11). But a change occurs: punishment stops being about whether or not the accused commiteed the crime and more about whther the accused is guilty. That sounds like teh same thing, but really it’s a little different because justie began to consider “to what extent the subject’s will was involved in the crime’ (17). Accordingly, punishment became to be about straightening out taht will “the expiation that once rained down up on the body must be replace by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations” (16) and “a general process has led judges to judge something other than crims; they ahve been led in their sentencing to do soemthing other than jsut and the power of judging has been transferred, in part, to other autorities than the jduges of the offence” as sociologists, preachers and other just eh will and the inclination of the accused (22). Soverign maintains “right to punish” like the “right ot make war” (48) but “the role of the people was an ambigous one” as they also “caimed the right to conserve the execution” and “had the right to take part” of the specacle (58). This made executions a battle between the power of the soverign and the power of the people: “In these executions, whih out to show only the terrorizing power of the prince, there was a whole aspect of the carnival, in which rules were inverted, authority mocked and criminals transformed inot heroes” (61). So, “this hand-to-hand fight ebtwen the vengence of the princ aand the contained anger of the people, through the mediation of the victim and the executioner, must be concluded” (73). So reformers had to “define new tactis in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body” (89) not just committing a certain crime. ‘A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of (102) their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain” (103). So bodies in prisons are made docile, “subjected, used, transformed and improved” (136) as “working [the body] retail indivdually, of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds up on it at the level of the mechanism itself—movements, gestures attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body” (137). And this is by no means restricted to the prison: the classroom, the mil