In The Practise of Everyday Life, de Certeau conceives of the Expert as a subject of modernity whose
rhetorical self-legitimation is a jurisdiction which comes to stand for the voice of the Other. The Expert,
whose competence is transmuted into social authority, is becoming commonplace. The common slips into
a rationalisation of exclusion and difference. Since the critic cannot find a truly objective place from which
to interpret common language, and since the interpretations which do exist are illusory, the fact remains that
there is no outside from which to exteriorise ‘alien-ness’ itself. As noted below in the survey of an article
by Marcel Mauss, the tradition of exclusion was one of a common and practical violence in the sense of it
being a practise of daily ritual. In order to legitimate itself, “every ‘strategic’ rationalisation seeks first of
all to distinguish its ‘own’ place” (36), from which it is able to define and authorise itself.
And yet power is not static, for users and consumers of that power equally adapt to the circumstances
of engagement akin to gameplay. 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 they hybridised with the capitalist classes, were correct to assume the
importance of fashionable discourse. Wit, 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.
Adaptations on the part of those who engage with language are crucial to the negotiation of power dynamics
within a cultural economy, and over time they come to determine ‘style’. De Certeau’s text allows the
conception of a geography of play within culture. Countercultural movements, positioned at the cracks and
fissures of dominant culture, involve a deconstructive gameplay in which users ‘bricolent’ a transformation
signalling a simultaneous critique of and inscription within a field of discourse which marginalised them.
The violence inherent to this struggle is assumed within the fabric and textures of daily life.
Techniques of the Body by Marcel Mauss serves exemplary in this context. His methodological
strategy is to synthesise a few brief ethnographic surveys with examples from his 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. The body, informed as it is by the practise of everyday life, is “man’s first and most
natural technical object” (56). 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 instrumentalisation of the body, as a technology which ritualises
expression and produces and transmits 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. The voices of the colonised are displaced, and through their silence Mauss can speak
as expert on their behalf.
Mauss begins 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. In the second chapter of his essay, he
elaborates the principles of the classification of the techniques of the body. It is with this particular section
that the essay is 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: “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” (36). 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. Much like the various fantastical classifications of the animals belonging to the Emperor, whose overlapping and exclusive categories signal not the power of reason but rather the power to reason, 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.
These sections are critically useful for two reasons. First, they 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? 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” (36). It is
this violence which sits, sublimated but deterministic, at the mundane sites of the common and the everyday
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