Foucault and the Tragedy of the Commons

Michel Foucault, the Tragedy of the Commons and Crossfit - what do they have in common?

In political science, and more specifically in the field of collective action, there is a key concept: the Tragedy of the Commons. It is an idea that puts the focus of study on the existence of situations in which an agent, in the pursuit of a particular particular interestThe idea of the Tragedy of the Commons is an idea that focuses on the existence of situations in which an agent, in pursuit of a particular interest, can produce a result totally contrary to what the individual expected. And even more, that it is a "tragic" result in the general interest of society.

Michel Foucault and the Tragedy of the Commons: The Age of Biopower

The classic example taught in collective action classes on this concept is that of a village with a fishing tradition in which the problem of the disappearance of fish appears. In this scenario, if fishing is not stopped and there is no pact between everyone (regularizing or seriously controlling this activity), the fish will disappear and the people of the town will end up dying of hunger. But if there is no fishing, the population may also end up dying.

Faced with this dilemma, there is a solution: cooperation. cooperation. However, in the absence of cooperation, there are hegemonic forces that can benefit from monopolizing the goods (in this case, the fish) and feed on the misery generated by their own monopoly. For this reason, hegemonic hegemonic power is interested in eliminating any type of political or social culture that favors cooperation. Consequently, it is interested in promoting the culture of individualism. Let's take a look at some examples of how power puts this premise into practice.

Crossfit and individualistic consciousness

Michel Foucaultone of the great thinkers on the theory of power, points out that one of the ingredients on which power feeds in order to exercise control over the population is to try to instill an individualistic conscience. individualistic consciousness. According to this author, the ultimate goal of power is to make the individuals of a society as productive as possible, but at the same time, to make them as docile and obedient as possible. docile and obedient as possible. Going down to the concrete, it can be said that the practice of crossfit is a good example of this individualistic consciousness aimed at making the subjects docile, obedient and productive.

For those who do not know, the crossfit is a sport that has become very fashionable lately, thanks in part to a good dose of marketing. It consists of a kind of multidisciplinary military training (combining several sports such as strongman, triathlon, weightlifting, sports gymnastics, fitness) which is structured in a number of different exercises diversified in time, number of repetitions, series, etc...

For there to be individualism, there must be disciplineand crossfit is the king of sports in terms of discipline. Discipline pursues the ritualization of attitudes and behaviors, which we could synthesize with the term obedience. Obedience can be understood as the absence of seeking alternative options before an authority figure who provides the guidelines to follow. In crossfit, the discipline of the body allows it to act as a prison for the subjects. The highly mechanized exercises seek aesthetic and functional perfection of the muscle.

The final objective is to progressively become a sort of more productive machine, in which the time factor (time control) also acts as a controller of the subject itself. All this is based on a meticulous structuring that proposes combinations of series of exercises totally predefined and fragmented in time, by turns, as a mimesis of a factory production, only in this case, the factory is the person himself. Thus, we have as a final result a subject whose only objective is to be increasingly productive and who, paradoxically, ends up physically and mentally exhausted, submerged in this spiral of productivity and alienation.

The objectification of the subject and the figure of the entrepreneur

A further step for power to achieve its goal (the optimization of productivity) is the fact of creating the collective consciousness of what is in its interest, making these individualistic bodies join forces to generate a large collective body that produces for it (power). These are individualistic consciousnesses that eventually unite to better achieve their individual goals.

For this reason, power has always sought the normalization of societythat is, to create patterns, routines, norms, praxis in daily life that are established as habitual, common, normal and, in the end, acceptable (thus differentiating them from attitudes or behaviors that, due to their residual condition, can be roughly labeled as non-normal, eccentric or dysfunctional). For this reason, laws are used laws are used to define the limits of what is normalThe system revolves around a key element that defines it, always in conjunction with those behaviors or judgments related to the legal logic, which is an expression of a certain scale of values that is intended to be consolidated.

The system revolves around a key element that defines it, the company. If power pursues an objective, the next thing it will do is to convert people into that objective, to objectify the subjects into the corporate object, the famous "I am a company".I am a company"with the aim that all persons in civil society produce in the same sense, in the sense that interests power: that the subjects define themselves as a company, that they are a company.

Let us return to the example of the fishermen mentioned at the beginning of the text. The process of individualization and the mentality of "I am a company and therefore I have a company.I am a company and therefore I have to win over all the competitors in the market"."only favors those who want the fish to be finished before nature can reproduce the species[1]. However, it is appropriate to clarify that in this article we are not arguing at any time that the fishermen of the example or any of us are part of the oligarchy (it would be, in fact, to deny the term itself) but we could affirm that we act according to the interests of this oligarchy and against, sooner or later, our own interests, as an integral and unconscious part of a corporatist machinery.

This is why both individualism and non-cooperation (especially in times of crisis such as the present) are, in any case, the tragedy of the commons.

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• [1]: As far as the restocking of fish species is concerned, we could link cooperation with a model of economic degrowth, but this is another subject that we will deal with at a later date.