Michel Foucault’s biggest contribution to contemporary philosophy is his reflection on forms of control. In his oeuvre, he distills three basic systems anchoring our modern economic model: prisons, psychiatric hospitals and schools. According to the French thinker, these institutions form the bulwark of a capitalist society, creating systems and institutions that decide who is “a criminal”, who is “insane” and who is “fit to work”, respectively.
Hannah Arendt and other post-Marxist thinkers shone the light on capitalism’s transformation of people into homo laborans, the cogs needed to keep the machine running. This reductio ad machina or reduction of everyone to a machine-like entity is most certainly at the root of many of our anguishes, depressions and mental health problems. When people ask, “who am I?” and only receive “tax-paying employee number 32” as an answer, no wonder they jump up and gobble all the antidepressants at hand…
However, according to Foucault, “school” is not only a military-inspired apparatus whose function is inserting able people into the workforce. His major insight was realizing how schools, prisons and psyche wards create a language web of meaning that props up the whole machine. (I know I’m butchering his philosophy, but let’s face it: you Tik-Tok watching folks don’t have time to read a whole essay, so I’ll speed it up ;-))
The language-value inculcated by school and society constitute the orthopedics of power, or a way of controlling us without directly controlling us. The idea here is that you don’t need a physical policeman bashing people over the head in order to control society. You just prop up a set of values and have the people police themselves. Ever walked down the street in a funny hat and had people staring judgmentally at you? That’s the orthopedics of power, right there. Now extrapolate that to “being unemployed” or “an artist” or whatever, and you’ll get the idea.
Foucault’s most famous image is the Panopticon: a prison with a watchtower in the middle that allowed the guard to see everyone while not being seen by anybody. We’ve turned ourselves into walking, talking panopticons: beings who do the system’s bidding through language and action, excluding, ridiculing and ostracizing whoever doesn’t comply. That’s modern “punishment” for you.
This sad state of affairs makes me hugely nostalgic for simpler times. I know, not having penicillin might have been a bit of a bother two-hundred years ago, but I’ll be damned if life didn’t seem freer and even more fun!
Case-in-point: Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Montecristo, a book that became the archetype for almost every revenge story, like the movie Old Boy or the graphic novel V for Vendetta, among many others.
I decided to reread it this summer and stumbled upon this great passage, when Villefort is trying to alert his Father, Noirtier, that the police are looking for political agitateurs working to bring Napoleon back to power in France. Villefort kicks off the dialogue:
-The police know something terrible: they have the description of the man who showed up at General Quesnel’s house the day he disappeared.
-Oh, do they? What description do they have?
-Brown skin, black hair and sideburns, blue frock coat buttoned up to the neck, a badge from the Legion of Honor, a wide-brimmed hat and a reed walking cane.
-They know all that? -asked Noirtier-. So how come they haven’t arrested him?
-Because they lost him yesterday, near Coq-Heron street. It’s just a question of time before they find him…
-Unless the criminal knows what they’re up to, right? -said Noirtier, looking calmly around the room-, in that case, he’ll change his face and clothes.
Noirtier got up, took his frock coat and tie off, and picked his Son’s toiletries up. He took out the shaving blade and made some foam with soap before proceeding to shave his sideburns. His son looked at him with terror and admiration.
Having shaved his sideburns, he combed his hair in another style, put on a different color tie and switched coats with his son. After looking at himself in the mirror, he donned his son’s hat and picked up his smaller, lighter walking cane.
-Do you think the police will recognize me now? -he asked.
-Not at all -said an astonished Villefort.
I understand doing police work without DNA tracing and cameras everywhere might have been difficult, and I also know that if I lived two-hundred years ago I’d have probably died in a bar fight at 28 years old. However, there is something romantic to this laissez-faire state of things, where a man can pop up in town claiming to be the Count of Montecristo and have everyone accept that, or where criminals could just shave their sideburns and change hats to become unrecognizable.
Or maybe I’m old and nostalgic.