I must say that I felt as though I would be forced to perform an autopsy upon a corpse when first presented with a text as quaint and relatively antediluvial as Marcel Mauss’s 1934 essay 'Techniques of the Body'. Both Erika and myself had wanted to focus our attentions on Michel de Certeau’s work instead. Despite getting the short end of the stick, as it were, I will retain for Mauss’s text the sense of play and gamesmanship inspired by de Certeau. In this spirit, I wish to state that my initial reaction that he is unfashionably old remains with me. The various contemporary discourses invoking a politics and economics of identity can be seen to support my somewhat infantile claim that by talking about people of different national backgrounds in the manner in which he does, Mauss sounds like my grandfather. I may love him in the understanding that he is part of my extended family, but his stories bore me to tears, and thus my disapproval of the taste of his rhetoric. Due to my own psychological impulses, I tend toward playful subversion when confronted with an authority to whom I do not in all respects defer.
Mauss’s methodological strategy is to briefly interrogate disparate ethnographic surveys along with a few examples from his own personal life in order to outline a system of knowledge which understands and categorises the motions of the body as enacted within the field of culture. As the style of the movements of the body are the circumstantial adaptations of an individual agent as articulated within the biological and cultural systems which circumscribe any meaning elicited as a result of their expression, Mauss forwards the notion that psychology should be introduced as an equal participant within a discursive tetrarchy that includes biology and sociology. To the modern scholar raised on the critical discourse of poststructuralism, his study reads as the miscellaneous and archeological remainder of colonialism, to abuse the term ‘remainder’ which Mauss himself invokes in relation to the initial evaluation of his project to define the techniques of the body. After all, the collection, sorting, and deployment of bodies for the mutual projects of understanding and industry served as the intellectual foundation for colonialism. One could suggest that the project of instrumentalisation of the body, as a technology ritualising expression and producing and transmitting knowledge and discourse, was begun, long before Marcel Mauss, with the rationalisation of human consciousness by means of a tactical deployment of Cartesian philosophy articulated through the culture and technologies related to empire. Indeed, for many critics of colonialism the silently productive body of the colonised was the site of inscription from which the technique of empire was itself articulated.
Much like the habit and technique of mountain climbing, to invoke one of Mauss’s examples, and one which incidentally like the rest of the examples contextualized in his essay I would wish to see dehabiller – sans vêtements, the project of colonialism changed rapidly during the author’s lifetime. Like the colonial project, mountaineering was a technique inscribed with the silence of the voices of the indigenous whose bodies were shaped by their efforts. If, as he says on page fifty-six, that “there is no technique and no transmission in the absence of tradition”, I wish to know under whose tutelage and by whose name did Mauss come to understand the practise of sleeping while standing on a mountain. Gayatri Spivak in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason articulates the discourse of colonialism as including the silence of the colonised, and so I must remain frustrated in my desire to understand silence itself as an absence of tradition, for Mauss prefaces this example on page sixty-one with an important proximity which glosses the entire psychology and geography of empire: “The Masai can sleep on their feet. I have slept standing up in the mountains”.
This statement is a direct vindication of de Certeau’s conception in The Practise of Everyday Life, on page eight, of the Expert as person or discourse which, having “successfully submitted to [an] initiatory practise ... can, on questions foreign to his technical competence but not to the power he has acquired through it, pronounce with authority a discourse which is no longer a function of knowledge, but rather a function of the socio-economic order”. The Expert is a subject of modernity whose rhetorical self-legitimation is a quasi-poetry which comes to stand for the voice of the Other. The tradition of exclusion was one of a common and practical violence in the sense of it being a practise of daily ritual. And so we come to a slightly different evaluation of Mauss’s statement that education dominates every field of the body.
Unlike my attempt to stretch an outline of the contingencies inhabiting both mountaineering techniques and imperial discourse without breaking the original metaphor, the larger colonial project was a technique which became increasingly hidden. This is true despite de Certeau’s claim that power brings attention to itself by means of its very visibility. For power has learned to hide itself within the common. The discourse as well as the bodily articulations of colonialism became increasingly occluded after the Second World War, as the horrors of warfare allowed a critical dialogue which examined the consequences of an articulation of human reason which historicised the bodies of certain human subjects as always-already excluded, and whose gait, and here I wish to remind you of Mauss’s love of this particular turn of speech of the English, is traced in the expressions of the dominant. The techniques of the body related to consumerism have rendered silent new bodies – some made necessarily poor and others necessarily ill – within the order of things as we bear witness to the full expression of a sublimated colonial process.
Perhaps it is a bit cheeky to mention here that I am getting slightly ahead of myself and should return to the beginning.
Mauss begins his essay by suggesting that his earlier work signalled his rejection of the commonplace, but quickly posits the body to itself be a technology of the common. The body, informed as it is by the practise of everyday life, becomes the site where humanity articulates and emotes. Indeed, to further the quotation from page fifty-six, he states that the body is “man’s first and most natural technical object”. I do wish to call attention to the gendered use of language in this statement, as I will return to it momentarily.
He provides numerous examples to indicate and categorise the various techniques of the body, for example poise at the dinner table, the different modes of walking, jumping, and running, and the different styles of swimming. Of course, in relation to this latter practise, we must take note of Mauss’s reflection on page fifty-one that his “generation has witnessed a complete change in technique” by remembering, as Goethe does in his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, that swimming was a newly-discovered novelty more or less exclusive to the leisure classes only a few generations prior to Mauss’s birth. While it was known to be practised among other cultures such as the Ancient Egyptians, in early modern Europe swimming represented a new technique of articulating the body: a body moving through the water and made mobile by means of a ritualised articulation witch exploited the principles of buoyancy – I should note here as a rather purposeful and distracting aside that buoyancy was a law systematised by Archimedes, whose texts had been redeployed by scientific discourse in the early modern period. This understanding was historically contingent with the development of swimming as a technique. The change to which Mauss refers as happening within his lifetime is the development of the front crawl by John Arthur Trudgen, who named the technique after himself after copying it from Native Americans during a trip to South America. Out of this colonial history of mimicking and displacing the silenced subject comes a space for the articulation of political agency, as we can witness the social capital authored upon those men and women who undertake extreme and heroic articulations of the technique – one could gain the prestige of becoming, for example, the first woman to swim across all five Great Lakes (the CBC posted an article on August 25 of this year celebrating the second completion of this feat by a thirty-year old woman from Belleville).
In the second chapter of his essay, Mauss elaborates on the principles of the classification of the techniques of the body. It is with this particular section that I find the essay to be most problematic while at the same time so very useful. When one reads of the many examples Mauss provides which essentialise instances of a gesture into a common behavioural tendency related to a characteristic, one can see in this methodology the articulation of power as conceived by de Certeau on page thirty-six: “The “proper” .... is also a mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and thus control and “include” them within its scope of vision”. And so we find in the sexual division of techniques of the body an explanation of how women and men hold their thumbs differently, with the Freudian semantic composition of a man with his thumb on the outside and a woman with her thumb inside. We also get a “biographical list of the techniques of the body” in the third chapter, which examines the mundane techniques of the body that are common to all humans as they progress through life; this section is a rhetorical device modelled on the riddle of the Sphinx. Interestingly enough, Mauss reflects the silence of his ethnographic subjects when on page sixty-five he states under the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” that “Here I could list innumerable facts for you” and then proceeds to censor himself entirely.
Here we get the incongruous, self-legitimating, and transcendent category which functions akin to the ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ from Jorge Luis Borges’s The Analytical Language of John Wilkins as interpreted by Foucault in his preface to Les Mots et les Choses. Let me quote the first paragraph at length, as Foucault states that his book
"arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that."
Please allow the joy experienced through Borges to signal your anxiety about the legitimacy of his taxonomy. I also hope to quel any worries you may have by stating that the category “Hygiene in the needs of nature” contains no content except for the authoring power by which the category itself came into existence. Mauss provides no techniques of expressing the production and containment of shit or urine, and we can understand the “hygiene” of this category to be self-censorship. While it might be a stretch a suggest that the hygiene of the colonial instinct at the heart of Mauss’s ethnographic project involved the erasure of human bodies excluded and silenced by the colonial body, I would like to Puckishly state that the individual who taught Mauss how to sleep while standing on a mountain probably had a technique of bodily excretions whose articulations were as informed by mountain life as were his patterns of sleeping. Indeed, these excretions were productive of more than culture for Mauss’s silenced Masai, for human and animal shit and urine were ingredients in the cement with which the Masai built their houses.
These sections are critically useful for two reasons. First, they do indeed foster a critical discourse which examines how specific deployments and intersections of the biological, the psychic, and the social come to render meaning for the human bodies who invoke meaning through the expression of common and mundane activities. More importantly however, the precise examples which Mauss uses serve to demonstrate the answer to a question fundamental to scholarly activity in general: has the object of a critical inquiry been altered by the enunciation which creates it and speaks in its name? On page thirty-six, De Certeau is explicit in defining this process, this power of knowledge, as the ability to “transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces” in order to “make knowledge possible and at the same time determine its characteristics”. It is this violence which sits dormant at the mundane sites of the common and the everyday.
Perhaps we can assume the Mauss essay itself to reflect the fact that scholarship is a technique of the body, and since Mauss describes education as dominating every field of the body, this articulation is quite literally specific to a body academic. If critical discourse is an activity which is as mundane as walking or swimming, and I mean by mundane the terms of their being activities which are bound to and articulated through the body, are there parallels in terms of the fashionability of their articulation? In this capacity and with the intention of provoking discussion, I propose a slight of hand wherein critical discourse is analogised to de Certeau’s conception of gameplay as fundamental to cultural expression. Scholarship is a tactical deployment which is not simply an organization of possible moves and responses but also a dialogue about itself, and thus we can define criticism and metacriticism respectively as scholarship about objects of study and objects of study which are scholars. Much as walking involves a particular habit which constitutes movement in pursuit of a destination or goal, scholarship involves a particularly self-reflexive gait in pursuit of the ordering of understanding.
I, for one, do not find tasteful Mauss’s particular fashion of rhetoric – neither the gender essentialism of the girl who can’t throw, nor the ethnographic tourism which invokes an 18th century travelogue of wondrous foreign people with faces on their chests combined with the quasi-science of a Ripley’s Believe it or Not exhibition – and thus I struggle with the fact that I can find his conclusions academically useful. Perhaps the rhetorical flourishes of the 18th century, the century during which the aristocratic institutions of Europe slowly transmuted into the bureaucratic processes and institutions of the modern age as it hybridised with the capitalist classes, were correct to assume the importance of fashionable discourse. Wit, as de Certeau explains, is a game signalling a self-producing adaptation to circumstance and the exchange and accumulation of social authority by means of a speech act. Scholarship is a self-producing institution which prides itself on a search for truth and the betterment of the human condition and justifies its existence by means of speech acts which render to academics institutional and social authority, and it is possible in this capacity to witness remuneration by means of public funding and private wealth for this properly ethical project. Critical discourses of identity politics, the ethics of science and human inquiry, and cultural relativism are flourishing in a postmodernity during which the trend of increasing corporatisation and privatisation of the academy, and this reality seems to reflect the domination of consumer activities over the critical articulations which respond to them.
Can we therefore interpret the changes in scholarship over the years to be any more politically progressive in terms of achieving the goals of academia (new SSHRC funding is increasingly tied to business-related research projects, as the institutional and intellectual fundamentals of economics are themselves increasingly under critical suspicion), than is walking (people walk much less than they did in the past, and for different reasons) or learning how to hunt for food (once the communal ritual of the hunt and the harvest, now the private ritual, enacted in a public space, of the packaged meat and processed meal made hygienic by the supermarket)?
I desire for a politics within this space which we have designated as confession class and so I ask the following in conclusion: is the body of the animal, a body silenced as it is articulated by the technologies and techniques of contemporary agricultural practise which render it fit for the market, is this body the final and most brutal articulation of the colonial?
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