RB, Foucault

“Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” shouts a man wheeling around a cart piled with dead bodies in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A patron comes carrying a guy on his shoulders and drops the limp person onto the cart. “I’m not dead!” says the guy who is now lying in the cart. The dead collector says he can’t take people who aren’t dead. “Well,” says the patron, “do us a favor. . . . can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won’t be long.” The guy is nearly dead, and the dead collector won’t be back until Thursday. The dead collector says no, but then whacks the guy in the head, killing him. “Thanks very much,” says the patron. “Not at all,” says the dead collector. “See you on Thursday.”

Convenience wins out over life. It is unclear what the patron’s relationship is to the dead man, but the dead collector has no relation to either man and has little problem killing one of them. This system parodies “the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town” (94), the system observed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punishment as the basis of modern discipline and power.*

The system relies on surveillance. Surveillance requires no contact between those in power and those whom they control. It is convenient. But the convenience is not without its cost.

Foucault writes that the method of control used during the plague influenced the creation of the panopticon prison, which relies on ambiguity to control prisoners. If the prisoners know they might be being observed, then they’ll behave, so no contact with guards is necessary. As a result, “a real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation” (99). To the people in power, this lack of relationship dehumanizes the people being controlled. And so why not club to death a man if it is convenient?

* Disclaimer: Foucault is French and is probably describing France’s reaction to the plague; Monty Python is British, and England may have reacted differently.