Flesh machines
In contemporary society, the body is increasingly perceived not as a shared condition of life but as an individual project to manage. It is no longer fragile, relational flesh, but capital to be leveraged: a set of functions, performances, and data to monitor and optimize. Calibrated workouts, sleep-tracking apps, wearable devices, personalized diets: the promise is well-being, but the effect is continuous, internalized surveillance, transforming self-care into a duty of permanent efficiency.
The capitalist system has thus carried out a silent subtraction: it has separated the body from its humanity and returned it as a surveilled machine. As in Bentham’s Panopticon, analyzed by Foucault, discipline does not need to be imposed from above: the prisoner must exist within a field of visibility of which he is aware, compelling him to assume the power dynamics himself. It is the logic of internalized surveillance: the subject measures their own value in performance graphs, feels incomplete on a day without productivity.
Foucault showed how disciplinary and biopolitical techniques do not merely repress but produce conforming individuals, ready to watch themselves and self-correct to adhere to norms. In the language of The Subject and Power, this is “a form of power that applies itself to everyday life, categorizes the individual, binds them to their identity, and imposes a law of truth.” It is a combination of individualization and totalization: each body is isolated and measured, but always in function of a collective calculation of productivity.
In this logic, vulnerability—illness, aging, disability—is not recognized as part of the human condition but as a deviation to be corrected or expelled. A body that does not perform is a body to be discarded: excluded from rights and relegated to the margins. The responsibility to remain functional is therefore fully individualized, erasing the social and material conditions that determine health and illness. The risk today is that emerging technologies—from genetic editing to artificial intelligence—may consolidate this paradigm. Far from freeing time and energy, new technologies can intensify the burden: more goals, more metrics, more comparisons, more speed. The body, already colonized by the logic of efficiency, would be subjected to continuous evaluation, with invisible prescriptions dictating the pace of life.
As in the plague-stricken towns analyzed by Foucault, every minimal movement is monitored, every event recorded, power exercised without interruption—but now the quarantine is voluntary, and the observer is inside us. Yet technical and scientific development could free us from capitalist logics. It could help reclaim the body from this reduction to a machine. It could redistribute work, reduce productive time, and value activities that cannot be measured economically: care, rest, creative otium. It could protect bodies from environmental degradation and wear-and-tear (psychological as well as physical) imposed by unsustainable rhythms, recognizing vulnerability as part of the human rather than as a flaw to correct.
Rethinking technology in this direction would mean inverting the logic that drives progress: no longer technology to maximize profit, but to realize the quality of life. As Foucault suggests, perhaps the political, ethical, and social task of our time is not to liberate the individual from the State, but to free ourselves from the type of individualization that state power imposes on us. Foucault, however, did not (fore)see that the real danger would not come from the State but from the capitalist system.
The challenge ahead is therefore to free bodies from performative pressure. In The Best Things in Life, moral philosopher Thomas Hurka argues that there are five types of goods that matter in life: pleasure, achievement, knowledge, virtue, and relationships of friendship and love. In each of them, the body plays a central role. But none of these goods requires performance.