hat inspired its life…! What prayers for its preservation in it! For every member must be worthy to perish for the body, for which alone the whole is” (132). To be a thinking member of a body thus requires you remember you are part of a body. Willfulness thus refers to the part that in willing has forgotten it is just a part. The consequences of such forgetting are shame; the part that is ignorant of its status as part compromises the preservation of the whole.
Implicit in the drama of Pascal’s description is how the will binds memory and utility: the part in willing only the goal of the whole body must remember that body by becoming useful to that body (you can see how my research on will and willfulness led me to a project on “the uses of use”!). Explicit to his model is the intimacy of general will and what we can call general happiness. Pascal notes: “To make the members happy, they must have one will, and submit it to the body” (133). If having one shared will is deemed necessary for the happiness of each member, then failure to submit to this will compromises the happiness of the whole body. Unhappiness and willfulness embody here the same sort of threat to the “whole body.” Or to be more precise: willfulness becomes the cause of the unhappiness caused.
One could learn so much from Pascal’s mischievous foot. We might even say: his feet become rebels when they are not willing to walk or to work. The rebel is the one who compromises the whole, that is, the body of which she is a part. When we think of this “whole body” we might tend to think of “the organic body,” but we also think of how the social is imagined as like a body, as a sum of its parts. The idea of the social body has a long history. As Mary Poovey notes in her book, Making a Social Body, this idea is “historically related” to the classical metaphor of the body politic (1995: 7). She suggests that “the social body” acquired significance as a more inclusive metaphor than that of the body politic, as it gave a part to the labouring poor who had previously been excluded, who were deemed “not part” because they would compromise the health of the body. Poovey concludes: “the phrase social body therefore promised full membership in a whole (and held out the image of that whole) to a part identified as needing both discipline and care” (8, emphases in original). To be a part is to be the one who receives a promise: the promise of membership.
If to be a part is to be the recipient of a promise, then to become part is to acquire a duty, what I call in the book “a will duty.” A willing part would be for what it is assumed as for. To become part is to inherit this prescription; it is to acquire a function. The feet must be willing to walk. The arms must be willing to carry.
Willfulness as a diagnosis could be a historical record of moments in which some parts fail their duty to carry and support to the whole body. Arguably all parts of the whole would be diagnosed as willful if they are not willing to provide this support. But we learn that some parts who are willing “the good” of the whole body escape the diagnosis. Remember Pascal: “they accomplish their own good.” This is how some parts in accomplishing their own good might be diagnosed as not only willful but also selfish (as willing away from others); whilst others who are also accomplishing their own good might be diagnosed not only as not willful or selfish, but even as will-less or self-less (as willing for others). The point of this difference is how the general in expressing the will of some parts allows the will of those parts to appear as general rather than particular.
If the will of some parts is accomplished by the general will, then those parts acquire a freedom not to be supportive. This is how the distinction between willing and willful parts – between those whose will is accomplished by the general and those whose will is not – functions as a moral as well as discursive frame.
Let’s take two contrasting examples. In the current landscape of cuts to public spending or austerity a much repeated spe