PHYSICS OF THE SOUL

Or, the Machinations that Animate the Body

T HOMAS M EIJER
SEMINAR PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

PHYSICS OF THE SOUL

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in
himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A
soul inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in
the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and
instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
~ Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.30

INTRODUCING SOUL INTO THE BODY

The soul is a mysterious concept. The question whether the soul exists or
not runs parallel to the problem of defining it: the discussion surrounding
it can stretch on into infinity, while never the twain shall meet. Those who
deny its existence oft do so based on some metaphysical notion that is
juxtaposed to that held by those who would subscribe to its existence. The
denial of a property attributed to the soul that there is an incorporeal
aspect of the body which is responsible for informing it with animation
is usually based on some hypothetical quality of matter that would enable
the explication of everything in terms of the mere functioning of matter.
This however, is an hypothesis that runs on equal footing with the
hypothesis of soul, but in the other direction. As both hypotheses try to
explicate the mysterious motion of being in terms of an as of yet unknown
property, be it material or ethereal. But stripped from all the ideological
squabbling, both depart from a single mystery: the force that animates.

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This animation is the quintessential problem. Back when the elements

still represented the four phases of matter earth, water, wind and fire,
the fifth essence, the aether, the soul, was the force that bound the elements
together as they transformed from one into the other. This ephemeral
quality of existence that there exists a power that creates and destroys as
it forces the elements into a complex itinerary of myriad configurations
is the basic problem the notion of the soul is concerned with: the breath
that animates matter. The problem of delineating the precise nature of this
notion is of secondary importance whether it is the eternal incarnate or
a mere epiphenomenon of the function of matter since the attribution
of these secondary properties tend to obfuscate the central notion with all
kinds of hypotheses, fantasies and fairy-tales that have infused it with all
kinds of religious or scientific dogma.
We could boil this conundrum down to the following question. Which
is of most importance: the substance that is moved (matter) or the
movement that moves (soul)? This dilemma traces one of the schisms that
have divided our intellectual history since its onset. While the dispute has
taken on many different names throughout the ages, it is still basically the
same battle from the same trenches, though these trenches have been dug
and dug again in every epoch, with new tools and new concepts every
time.
One of the great grandfathers of this history, Parmenides, was quite
prophetic in differentiating the two ways of knowing: mortal knowledge
(focussed on the things appearing and disappearing) and immortal
knowledge (focussed on things eternal). Those who followed in his footsteps
often went on either way, defending the ideal way or the real way.1 The
grandfather of the first way was Plato, exemplified by his preference of the

According to Peter Kingsley, in his study of Parmenides: Reality, the idea that he only approved of eternal
knowledge and the unshaken heart of persuasive truth while categorically denying the existence of movement, is due
to both the loss of a large part of his work (mostly concerning the belief in appearance) and a too hasty an
interpretation of that which still remains of the text which results according to Kingsley in a failure to appreciate
the purpose of Parmenides logic and how the deceptive nature of appearances functions in the scheme of
things. It should also be noted that this age old dispute is never clear cut and that the basic dualism often comes
intermingled. For instance, one of the most classic instantiations of dualism: Cartesian philosophy, can quite
easily be constructed as monist when reviewed with a focus on the problems of the passions and representation,
as they represent the border crossings of both extended space and our cogitations. Cf. Descartes Meditations, AT
VII:81 (following the editions of Adam & Tannery).
1

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ideal above the real and the corresponding sentiment that the soul has
become trapped in the body.
The idea that some eternal principle has become incarnated in the
mortal body giving it its animation with the infusion of its breath, is one of
the basic notions that could be given to the concept of soul. Again, central
here is the problem of animation. The secondary metaphysical property of
eternality attributed to it could be left aside. Especially since the mysterious
animation from inside is accompanied by a corresponding force from
without, informing the movement of the body equally well.
The notion of the soul is in many languages related to that breath. In
Greek there is , psyche; in Hebrew there is , neshamah, which both
mean breath as well as soul.2 The breath of life hits the spot because at the
moment of death an organism stops breathing. Breathing is a movement
from without to within and out again. But it is not only air were breathing.
The flora and fauna that were offered to take in and excrete out again is a
similar kind of movement. All of lifes processes have specific ways of
processing the flux between the inside and outside. This exchange is what
we call the metabolism. The different ways in which these movements
transpire characterise different organisms and thus different souls and their
specific ways of moving the material flux that is their body.
Similarly, the natural bodies of living organisms are not the only
entities that can be described in terms of the specific ways theyre
mediating the material flux that composes them. Families, tribes, cities,
nations and corporations are all entities that are characterisable by the
specific ways that they inform a within and a without in between the parts
that compose them. Thus considered the power of animation is implicated in
the social anatomy just as it is in the corporeal anatomy. The vital principle
informing the incorporation of these social entities is a breath just as
mysterious as the soul inside our bodies. Thus we can speak of a soul
enveloping the body from without just as it is informing us from within:
both are part and parcel of the animation that informs being with its form
and motion.
The Germanic soul, Seele and ziel have been related to breath too, but these connections are dubious at least and
there are many other contenders. See www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/ziel [1.2.2015]
2

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Now, the study of this micro-physics presupposes that the power exercised on the
body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are
attributed not to appropriation, but to dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques,
functionings; that one should decipher in it a network of relations, constantly in tension,
in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess; that one should take as its
model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest
of a territory. In short this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the
privilege, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its
strategic positions - an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position
of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not exercised simply as an
obligation or a prohibition on those who do not have it; it invests them, is transmitted
by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their
struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them.
~ Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.26

ENVELOPING BODIES IN SOUL

The human body is not only an assemblage composed of organs, cells and
enzymes that inform the body from inside with the processes that enable its
metabolisms; the body itself is assimilated too into the ecosystems
surrounding it and is as such interwoven into natural, social, cultural,
lingual, familial, economical, political and geo-political factors; thus
forming habits, families, organisations, institutions, corporations and
nations. The ways in which these factors are engaged with determine the
form of the institution that is generated from these relationships. This
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implies that for a certain institutions to exist specific types of relationships

and habits are required that enables the institution to exhibit the required
functionality.
Where agriculture required knowledge of the seasonal calendar in order
to know when to reap and when to sow; industrialised society requires the
internalisation of the clock by the minute. In order for a factory to exist
with a production line that is sequentially departmentalised into different
subroutines; wherein each labourer is to an extent interchangeable like the
cogs in a machine the human bodies making up this apparatus must be
informed with the regimentation of the clock so production can be relayed
into different shifts performing the same minute manoeuvres that are
incorporated into the totality of the production process.
The machine here is dictating a rhythm to the life of the body. Not
only is the ticking of the clock internalised, so too are we enveloped by the
pulsating rhythm of the engines that power the production lines. Thus
society comes charged with an animating force that informs the bodys
movement in a specific way so it can function properly within the societal
apparatuses.
Where the breath of the human body continuously exchanges air
from without to within, so too are human bodies exchanged inside
institutions. And just like our lungs are trapping the oxygen from the air
into our life processes, so too are the societal apparatuses trapping human
bodies into its production processes, relegating their potential capacity for
performance in line with that of the system.
Foucault introduces the very interesting idea of the Kings Body, wherein he
differentiates the corporeal king, the human being of flesh and bones
[Monarch] the nth as opposed to the king that pervades the throne, the
crown and the surrounding court and state apparatus. As the king dies, the
King reincarnates in the progeny that replaces him. This surplus that
pervades the throne, this non-corporeal duplication, is what Foucault calls
a soul.3 His position as king is granted because he is recognised as such in
the rituals that surround the throne. Thus the king becomes a kind of
3

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.28-9.

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avatar of the higher power that pervades the throne, which is what grants
him his power. But it is not only the king that is thus subjected to this
virtual kind of duplication. The condemned man too as he fails to
conform to the customs required of him is deemed a pariah that should
be punished, subjected or reformed. Here too there is a virtual entity, an
ideal character, to which the actual human body is measured and judged.
These duplicate bodies, these virtual templates, and their corresponding
practices are the elements from which the body politic is made:
One would be concerned with the body politic, as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as
weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest
human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge.4

The history of the disciplinarian techniques is what Foucault

considers to be the micro-physics that compose the genealogy of this soul.
The soul is the present correlative of the technology of power that reigns
over the body.5 Just like the notion of the soul that is the vital principle on
the inside of a living organism, this notion of the soul is a principle of
animation too. But rather than coming from the inside, it reigns down
upon the human body from without, imprisoning it.
Interestingly, Foucault stresses that this power is not something that
can be possessed by somebody. It is not something that can be
appropriated as property. It is rather something that is exercised,
something that expresses itself as a set of dispositions, manoeuvres,
techniques and functionings: a network of relationships, of strategic
positions, which are effected by the power of the soul which dominates the
body.6 Even in case of the king which as absolute monarch has the
appearance of being in possession of power, is rather someone who is
possessed by power, who is enveloped in a scheme of machinations that make
him into a king, that enables his sovereignty, but which is itself and effect
and function of the system surrounding him that invests him with it.

Ibid. p.28.
Ibid. p.29.
6 Ibid. p.26.
4
5

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This investment is a function of knowledge, of the act of recognising

something as something; of recognising the king as king and thus act
accordingly. Similarly, the bodies of the populace that are not properly
subjected and do not function as a productive element of the political
anatomy, are in need of torture, exclusion, execution, punishment,
correction and all the other possible forms of disciplinary action in order
to reintegrate them as functional parts of the political anatomy.
Thus the entire body politic is made up of different types of model
citizens that represent the ideal forms of disciplined bodies: bodies which
have been properly subjected to the soul of society, once they have
incorporated the proper ways of acting and judging. The history of which
reveals a genealogy of the political anatomy with a sequence of different
ideal typical characters and their corresponding networks of relationships
and techniques of enforcing them. Where we once had a king we today
have the CEO, who reigns over his company from a throne invested by the
shareholders. Similarly, we have the gradual evolution of the peasant,
civilian, proletarian and consumer, which are all different ideal typical
persona that suit the different political anatomies that have evolved
throughout the ages, as they have been subjected to different types of
power-knowledge and their techniques which have enforced the different
ideal-typical schemes. These are the machinations that have animated the
human bodies in their image, informing them with some form of power.
The Knowledge that incorporates these forms and is thus informing the body
politic could be considered as a kind of spirit, the dynamics of which could
be understood as the physics of the soul.

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KNOWLEDGE: THE INTERFACE BETWEEN BODY AND SOUL

When our subjectivity is subjected to some form of discourse that engraves
ideal-typical pathways in our social operating system, our functioning
within the political anatomy is altered. The idea of the soul animating the
body and giving it its shape from within thus finds its supplement from
without in Foucaults provocative notion that the body is imprisoned by
soul.
Ever since the time of the Greeks one of the ideas of civilisation has
been that a virtuous order of the soul furnishes the standard for the right
order of human society. Being virtuous means that ones conduct is
informed with some notion of excellence in the way one handles oneself in
public life. Crucial here is phronesis, which is knowing how to judge a
situation and act aptly. This leads to a life which of proper function and
purpose which is the fulfilment (energeia, ) of ones potential.7 This
is achieved through education. Aristotle wrote:
Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both
to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; for this is the right education.
Again, if the virtues are concerned with actions and passions, and every passion and every action is
accompanied by pleasure and pain, for this reason also virtue will be concerned with pleasures and pains.
This is indicated also by the fact that punishment is inflicted by these means; for it is a kind of cure, and it
is the nature of cures to be effected by contraries.8

What is important for us here is that from its onset, civilisation has
expressed a correspondence between knowledge, the order of the soul and
the order of society and the necessity of enforcing that order with
discipline and punish.
Throughout history, this correspondence has always been grafted unto
some kind transcendental ideal: be it the idea of the Good, God or the law
of Nature; the ideal set the standard (both pompously and pretentious as
well as sincere). But with the onset of postmodernism, is was precisely this
Note that in these concepts of potentiality and actuality, of dunamis () and energeia () have their
corresponding version in physics, where potential energy is the force, or power, of something. But at the same
time, there are the same words used in the realm of politics: power, ,dynamics, the Potentate, to act, etc. Now the
question is whether this correspondence of the language between the ethico-political and the physical is merely
metaphorically, or metaphysically. But that might be a too far reaching question for current time and space.
8 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.3.
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ideal that was pushed from the throne, unmasked to reveal the play of
power underneath, deemed by Nietzsche to be human, all too human.
With the Aristocracy no longer armed with an unambiguous notion
of arte, of excellence, used to engineer and maintain the political order
and to justify it by referencing this transcendental ideal; we are left with a
will to power. No longer do we subject the order of our society to a
transcendental ideal. Is is rather the mundane (though exponential) growth
of power and wealth.
And what we are left with is perhaps the technocratic self-referentiality
of power. Where the powers of the state are growing for the sake of the
power of the state, in a similar way that capital is invested solely for the
purpose of the growth of capital, often without recourse to any ideal
outside of it, nor consideration for the often very real consequences.
Meanwhile the panoptic capacities of the state are growing at an
exponential rate increasing the information that that state has of their
constituents a thousandfold. There is the explicit wish to know everything
of everybody.9 Which is in effect realised today, as virtually all types of
electronic communication are tracked and analysed, with the government
structurally hacking into our communications and computers, as revealed
by Snowdens leak of NSA documents.10
Nonetheless there is a very specific and particular vector pervading
the contemporary dynamics of power, even though this is not explicitly
expressed as ideal. It pervades the machinations of the political anatomy,
while it escapes ones grasp if not critical of the powers that shape the
world.
As Ill attach this document to an email and send it to the relevant
recipients, it will be scanned by Google, analysed in its content, in turn
influencing the commercial offerings that spring up around the internet.
9! Even though old laws like the habeas corpus prohibit that, government have done so anyway, and now try to
make the laws so it is fully legal.
10 The amount of reference here is astounding. With the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden and the myriad of
publications from Glen Greenwald about it in both the Guardian and his new web platform the Intercept. Recently
though, Nafees Ahmed, investigative journalist, uncovered that seed funding of Google came from groups that
are strongly related to the pentagon, the CIA, and the private contractors working for them: How the CIA made
Google https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e
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Exemplifying at the same time that the nature of societys constituents are
approached as being consumers, while also revealing that the systems of our
virtual representation have a profound and very real impact on the order
of our society.11 The analysis of the content of our communications have
become grounds for the exclusion from the political body, even without
ever having committed a crime. Because of this the current fad of freedom
of speech in the media post-Charlie Hebdo is totally ominous, in a cynical
way.12 As Manning, Snowden and Assange are persecuted for the
revelation of secret government policy. Which, if government
accountability is in any way important to to ideal of democracy, bodes
even worse for the current state of the political anatomy.
The man whom Foucault invited us to free, has been enveloped in the
effects of a subjection even more profound than Foucault could have
envisioned: that the panopticon he recognised as an ominous symbol
representing the change in the techniques of subjection employed by
modern societies, would find such an all pervasive instantiation in the
internet. Once it was heralded as one of the most liberating and
emancipatory technologies to have been invented, is now revealing itself to
have turned the panopticon inside out, virtually enveloping the entire
world with its all spying eye.
The troubling conclusion to be drawn from this is that the mastery
that power exercises over the body and which enables its soul to inhabit
our body, is running amok. The interface between public and private space
is dissolving, leading to a world where increasingly public matters are
treated as the concern for private corporations with healthcare, water

As Foucault died before the fulfilment of the internet, he might not have realised that systems of information
is possibly a more suitable notion to denote the role of knowledge in the dynamics of power and the physics of
the soul. But this question might actually be a book in itself.
12 Ironically, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the world wide rally in support of the sanctity of free speech,
multiple people in France have been arrested for posts in social media which were supposedly supportive of
terrorism. Cf. Glenn Greenwald: France Arrests a Comedian for his Facebook Comments, Showing the Sham of the Wests
Free Speech Celebration,The Intercept, 1.14.2015, firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/14/days-hosting-massivefree-speech-march-france-arrests-comedian-facebook-comments/ [1.2.2015]
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supplies, and even justice departments becoming privatised the system is

infringing ever more directly into our life world.13
The surprising conclusion would be that the effects of what might be
dubbed the totalitarian technocracy necessitates us to think of it in terms of a
profound spiritual crisis in which the soul of our political anatomy is
undergoing a rapid and fundamental transformation which is subjugating
and incorporating the bodies on a scale never before seen
Breathing life into the panoptic Leviathan within our souls.

Not only have prisons been privatised, so too now have certain parts of the justice departments with the rise
of arbitrage-tribunals that have been included in international trade-agreements, without any democratic
recourse. Cf. Robin Broad & John Cavanagh, Meet the Company Suing El Salvador for the Right to Poison Its Water
Foreign Policy in Focus, 3.9.2014 fpif.org/meet-company-suing-el-salvador-right-poison-water/
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.3,trans: W.D. Ross.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii.html
Descartes, Ren (1641): Meditations.
Foucault, Michel (1975): Discipline and Punish, the Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan,
Random House NY, 1977.
Kingsley, Peter (2003): Reality, The Golden Sufi Centre, 2010.

ARTICLES
Broad & Cavanagh (2014), Meet the Company Suing El Salvador for the Right to Poison Its Water Foreign
Policy in Focus, 3.9.2014 fpif.org/meet-company-suing-el-salvador-right-poison-water/
[1.2.2015]
Greenwald, Glenn (2015): France Arrests a Comedian for his Facebook Comments, Showing the Sham of the
Wests Free Speech Celebration,The Intercept, 1.14.2015,
firstlook.org/theintercept/
2015/01/14/days-hosting-massive-free-speech-march-france-arrests-comedian-facebookcomments/ [1.2.2015]
Korteweg, Ariejan (2013), Reportage: de liberaal in Rutte verzet zich tegen visie, De Volkskrant, 3.9.2013
www.volkskrant.nl/dossier-kabinet-rutte-ii/reportage-de-liberaal-in-rutte-verzet-zich-tegenvisie~a3502974/ [1.2.2015]

IMAGERY
p.1 Paula Braconnot:
p.4 Ben Sac: untitled, 0.05 Staedtler pigment liner pen.
p.8 Unknown.

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