Disciplining Madness, Disciplining Yoga

Abstract

This paper will examine contemporary North American yoga, specifically the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center in Toronto, using theoretical frameworks taken from the work of Michel Foucault. Drawing on his work in Discipline and Punish, it will look at yoga as a modern “carceral” institution. Using Foucault’s analysis in Madness and Civilizaition, this paper will explore how yoga intersects, is some ways, with madness. The underlying argument is that yoga and madness, as discourses, are both based upon institutional disciplining of pre-discursive experiences. This paper contends that the pre-discursive “sources” of experience should not be seen as unified points of origin, but as an underlying “difference”, or capacity to be otherwise. This “difference” points to multiple, undifferentiated, mutual sources of yoga and madness.