Foucault on a Fixed Gear: Power, Discipline, and Riding Through the City

Michel Foucault would not begin with the bicycle.
He would begin with the street.

The city announces itself as a system of permissions. Painted lines, signal phases, kerbs, curbs, cameras. Circulation is never neutral. It is designed, optimised, surveilled. Traffic is not simply movement but governance in motion. Bodies are sorted by speed, weight, vulnerability, legitimacy. The car is centred, the pedestrian marginal, the cyclist conditional.

Into this apparatus rolls the fixed gear rider.

Here is a body that refuses automation. No freewheel, no delegated pause. The machine does not decide when effort ceases. Pedalling is compulsory, continuous, exposed. The rider is therefore hyper-visible, not merely seen but legible. Cadence becomes a public statement. Every slowdown is intentional. Every acceleration is accountable.

Foucault would recognise this as a curious political posture. Not resistance in the grand sense, not revolution, but a micro-politics of movement. The fixed gear rider complies just enough to pass, yet never entirely. They obey the red light, perhaps, but arrive at it differently. They share the lane, but not the logic. Their velocity does not match the expected curves of traffic engineering.

Power, here, is not confronted head-on. It is slipped.
Not refused, but rephrased.

The absence of coasting matters. It eliminates plausible deniability. One cannot claim the machine carried them. The rider is always implicated. In Foucauldian terms, the subject is fully produced in the act. There is no exterior. The cyclist is not merely disciplined by the city; they self-regulate continuously, minute by minute, junction by junction. A moving panopticon, but one powered from the legs upward.

And yet, this self-discipline is not docile. It is chosen, stylised, sometimes excessive. Skidding before a stop line is unnecessary, inefficient, faintly theatrical. It draws attention. It says: I know the rule, and I am showing you how closely I can approach it without collapsing into it. This is not lawlessness. It is a performance at the boundary of law.

Foucault would not ride brakeless. That would be too easily moralised, too quickly folded into narratives of risk and deviance. But he would observe those who do with care. He would note how brakeless riders attract discourse: danger, irresponsibility, purity, authenticity. How the absence of a component becomes an ethical problem. How the city responds not only with enforcement, but with stories.

He would likely write about fixed gear riders as anomalous circulatory bodies. Neither fully integrated nor entirely excluded. They reveal the seams of the system by refusing to disappear into it. Their labour is visible. Their effort is audible. Their errors are theirs alone.

In this sense, fixed gear riding is not freedom from power. It is power made muscular, rhythmic, audible. It is governance encountered at cadence.

A city expects compliance to be smooth.
The fixed gear insists it be felt.

And in that insistence, something flickers.
Not escape.
But awareness.