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A Praxeological Approach to Subjectivation in a Material World

Jean-Pierre Warnier Journal of Material Culture 2001 6: 5 DOI: 10.1177/135918350100600101 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/6/1/5

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A P R A X E O L O G I CA L A P P R OAC H T O S U B J E C T I VAT I O N I N A M AT E R I A L WO R L D
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J E A N - P I E R R E WA R N I E R

Universit Ren Descartes Paris V Abstract This article aims at bringing together various lines of analysis that have been kept more or less separate until now, that is, studies on the body, motricity, perception, agency, material culture, the subject, unconscious drives, and power systems. By drawing on the work of Mauss, Schilder, Tisseron, Parlebas and Foucault, it discusses how the subject and its drives are invested in sensori-motricity in a material world. When it is socially validated and coded, such an investment amounts to what Foucault called the techniques of the self. The subjectivation thus achieved may be consistent or at odds with corresponding representations. The notions provided by praxeology, the science of sensori-motricity, may help in producing an ethnography of subjectivation in a material world. Key Words x drive x embodiment x emotions x governmentality x motricity x perception x praxeology x subject x subjectivation x techniques of the self

There is no denying that in the past 20 years we have gained extremely valuable insights on material culture, and that we have gone a long way in understanding its importance. But we can still perhaps go just one step further. The man who drives his lorry is probably less concerned with creating categories and an identity than with accomplishing properly the hundreds of bodily motions that will end up in delivering the goods by 6 am sharp at the supermarket, without having damaged the goods, the
Journal of Material Culture Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol. 6(1): 524 [1359-1835(200103)6:1; 524;015941]
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lorry, or himself. What I am hinting at is this: in addition to creating an identity, meaning and signication, is not material culture the indispensable and unavoidable mediation or correlate of all our motions and motor habits? Are not all our actions, without any exception whatsoever, propped up by or inscribed in a given materiality? Is not material culture not only good to think with, to categorize, to signify, to communicate, or to produce identity, but also to move and act upon, against, together, or with, billions of material objects? Yes indeed, and there is nothing new in this contention. MerleauPonty, more than 50 years ago, and more recently D. Miller, Th. Csordas, A. Gell and many others, have looked in that very direction. However, I wish to suggest that we can still go signicantly further by taking motricity into account, in addition to agency.
SENSORY-MOTRICITY IN A MATERIAL WORLD

How can we analyse motricity in a material world ? I sketch an answer below by commenting on the works of M. Mauss, P. Schilder, P. Parlebas, M. Foucault, S. Freud, and Serge Tisseron. Picking up on a long tradition that goes back to Cabanis and Condorcet, Marcel Mauss (1936) sought to force the attention of his contemporaries on the techniques of the body. This text is far less famous than the one on the gift, but since around 1990, it has been quoted more frequently than before in the context of a growing interest in the body. Unlike The Gift, it has not been the object of much in-depth exegesis and re-thinking. Recent comments include those by Bruno Karsenti (1997) and myself (Warnier, 1999a). What can we retain from that text? First, that all the techniques of the body involve motricity (swimming, walking, running, using spades, etc.). Even resting habits involve the sensori-postural apparatus (resting on one leg, sitting on ones heels, lying down in a given position, etc.). Second, techniques of the body are socially determined, and therefore variable from society to society. Third, they cannot be analysed unless one is willing to do so from three different and coordinated points of view: biological, psychological, sociological. By biological, Mauss meant what today we would call anatomo-physiological. Nowadays, the point of view of the neuro-sciences would bridge the biological and the psychological of Mauss. The other aspects of Mausss article are a matter of reinterpretation, controversy, or further developments, especially on two points he explicitly mentions. First, he leaves aside all the techniques involving the use of material objects what he calls techniques instruments, because, he says, we have made the mistake to think that one can talk of techniques only when there are instruments. However, he does not heed his own distinction between the techniques of the body and the

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techniques instruments, and he nds it necessary to consider spades, shoes, and musical instruments. Second, he writes that there are things he cannot understand, like how a Kabyle man can run down a slope without losing his slippers, and how women can walk with high-heel shoes. This double shortcoming comes from the fact that Mausss concept of the body was too crude to match the sharpness of his insights. The body he was thinking of was the anatomical body whose basic motor habits had been instilled by society. From the turn of the century onwards, Mauss had done extensive reading in German, British and French psychology. He was conversant with the work of Head, Freud, Janet and Dumas. There is not enough space here to discuss the relationship of Mauss to psychology. Sufce it to say that, when he delivered his lecture on the techniques of the body to the Psychological Association in 1934, he had not taken into account Heads contribution to the question, nor the essay by Paul Schilder (1923) on Das Krperschema, let alone Schilders The Image of the Body (1935) published after he had delivered his lecture, but before the publication of his article. Had he been in a position to read Schilder, Mauss would have perhaps understood why the Kabyle man does not lose his slippers. It is because they are incorporated into his motor habits by apprenticeship. They belong to his Krperschema. He is a man-with-slippers. Mauss would have understood that the body he was interested in is not the anatomophysiological sum total of all the human organs, it is a dynamic synthesis of sensori-motricity in a given materiality; as he aptly exemplies when dealing with the 8000 spades that had to be changed for a different design when a British infantry division replaced a French one during World War I. Schilder allows us to re-read Mausss essay, and to give it new developments. The core of Schilders theory is constituted by four elements: motricity, perception, apprenticeship, and the notion of an acquired synthesis. Schilder was a disciple of S. Freud, and, concerning motricity, he included in it the drive that keeps the subject on the move. He had fully integrated material culture in his views. He wrote, for example, that the blind persons cane is integrated in his sensori-motor apparatus to such an extent that the blind persons perception is not projected from his/her hand, but from the tip of the cane; where it comes into contact with the sidewalk, the wall or the stairs. Schilders notion not of the body but of the bodily synthesis turns it into something far more dynamic and versatile than the body of Mauss. Its boundaries are exible. They can be extended to include lots of objects, the dynamics of which are successively incorporated in the synthesis. It is a well-known fact that the phenomenology of Maurice MerleauPonty (1945) is partly based on Schilders work, on Gestalt psychology

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and on his readings of Husserl. Contrary to Mauss, the French philosopher was not concerned with developing an anthropological agenda leading to an ethnography of the techniques of the body. In my opinion, all subsequent attempts at developing a phenomenological anthropology (as does Csordas, 1994, for example) have had difculties in that respect. The reasons are probably many, but four of them seem particularly worthy of comment. First, the concern of phenomenology with meaning was carried on to anthropology. And meaning is perhaps not the best pathway to reach an ethnography of motricity in a material man-made world as Gell (1998: 6) rightly says. Second, as a result, phenomenological anthropology has tended to concern itself less with the body (anatomo-physiological or bodily schema), let alone motricity, but with meanings and representations attached to the body. Third, whereas Mauss, Schilder, and to a great extent Merleau-Ponty, had insisted on motion, motor habits, movements and dynamics, the body of the years 1980 to 2000 has become very much a static body, displayed, manipulated, gendered, but certainly not the incarnated subject dear to Merleau-Ponty. True enough, phenomenological anthropology came a long way to integrate agency, but, as we shall see presently, it was decient in one crucial respect. Lastly, indeed, phenomenological anthropology and all the attempts at turning the body into an anthropological or sociological object (for an epistemological discussion, see Berthelot, 1995) were lacking in middle-range analytical and descriptive concepts that could generate an ethnography of motricity in a material culture. Human ethology, as developed especially by Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989) could have provided an agenda, especially because it focuses on motricity and the emotions. But it was probably too close to behaviourism and too far from the anthropological concern with meaning, language and communication to have much appeal. Also, when it comes down to the ethnography of motricity and emotions, it relies less on the techniques of animal ethology than on relatively commonsense notions and vocabulary. In the meantime, unnoticed by anthropologists, and perhaps also by human ethologists, a science of motricity developed a praxeology (a word coined by Alfred Espinas in 1890) in connection with games and sports, ergonomics, and the care of handicapped people. Parlebas (1981, new edition 1999) gives a thoroughly documented synthesis in the form of a lexicon of 180 items. It would take far too long to give a detailed account of it and to reveal its immense interest for an ethnography of motricity in a given materiality. Let me just give a couple of examples of analytical notions, and comment on a few salient points. Psychomotricity has now become a fairly commonsensical concept thanks perhaps to the work of professional psychomotricians. It designates the motor conducts of a single individual acting alone. Example:

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a child training himself in a gymnasium to dribble with a basket-ball will do it time and again for months on end until he has fully incorporated the habits of walking, running and turning while dribbling. At one point in his training, the child will engage in sociomotricity, that is, he will play as a member of a basketball team against another one. There will be some amount of verbal communication between the players, but non-verbal sensori-motor communication will become essential to the situation. This new dimension usually disrupts the motor habits acquired in a psychomotor situation, because it introduces a fair amount of uncertainty: partners move in ways that are not entirely predictable, otherwise the opponents would also be in a position to predict them. Besides, the opponents themselves try to coordinate their own game while disrupting the game of the opposing team. In other words, there is some amount of essential motor communication within the teams, and some amount of essential motor counter-communication between the teams, that is, a type of communication aimed at giving out false and misleading information in order to gain the chance of passing the ball or shooting in favourable conditions. All this occurs in a given materiality: the xed materiality of the gymnasium, and the highly mobile ball, clothes, etc. The game will be based on the acquisition of motor algorithms. Most of the time, motor algorithms are elaborated around a given materiality. These are procedures acquired by constant drilling, like shooting a ball to the basket while jumping, or dribbling while being marked by an opponent. These procedures can be readily adjusted to changing circumstances, depending on the distance from a partner or from the basket. It is what we acquire when we learn how to drive a car or to use a typewriter. They can be constantly adjusted depending on the uncertainty of the road, or when we drive a different model than the one we are used to. Motor algorithms are the kind of motor habits we use in given materialities when there is some amount of uncertainty or unpredictability in the situation, like in team sports, in driving, sailing, riding horseback, jogging in the countryside. Nearly all the techniques of the body mentioned by Mauss belong to this category. However, there are a few situations, in fully domesticated environments, from which all uncertainty has been removed. In such situations, the subject can develop motor stereotypes. This happens in some individual olympic disciplines such as pole-jumping. It is practised indoors, in an entirely controlled environment, in an unchanging materiality. The athlete drills himself or herself in performing exactly the same gestures down to the millimetre. These few examples will sufce to underline what praxeology can provide in terms of middle-range notions by means of which one can produce an ethnography of bodily techniques in a given material culture.

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This is, in my opinion, what is missing in phenomenological anthropology, and what is needed to built up a praxeological approach to material culture.
TECHNIQUES OF THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF THE SELF

So what have we gained with a praxeological approach to material culture? So far, not much, except that we are less naive about the techniques of the body in two ways. First, we know that there is hardly any technique of the body that does not incorporate a given materiality. It follows that it is not possible to divorce material culture studies from the study of the body, and vice versa, as is largely the case at present. For example, one journal is devoted to material culture and another to the body, as if they were clearly distinct entities. Second, we know that incorporated material culture reaches deep into the psyche of the subject because it reaches it not through abstract knowledge, but through sensori-motor experience. To put it bluntly by quoting Nicholas Humphreys (1984: 34): Let a celibate monk just once make love to a woman and he would be surprised how much better he would understand the Song of Solomon; but let him, like an academic psychologist, observe twenty couples in the park and he would not be that much wiser. In other words, it is through motricity and the experience of the senses, that the monks subjectivity can be altered. Techniques of the body in a given materiality are thus in fact techniques of the self. The expression techniques of the self was coined by Michel Foucault (1989: 1334; see also Martins, 1988). By this, he meant:
the procedures, as they probably exist in all civilizations, that are proposed or prescribed to individuals in order to x their identity, maintain or transform it, depending on a number of ends, and this by means of a relation of mastery over oneself, or of knowledge of oneself . . . [The question is] what to do with oneself? What kind of work to accomplish on oneself ? How to govern oneself by acting while being oneself the object of ones own actions, the domain in which they apply, the instrument they use and the subject who acts? (Foucault, 1989: 134, trans. J.-P. W.)

The techniques of the self belong with what Foucault calls subjectivation. He never really cares to give tightly woven and unequivocal denitions, but what he writes about subjectivation brings two dimensions of the subject to the fore. First, the subject is the acting and desiring subject in his/her relations to the other and to the ethical law. As such he is also the self-knowing subject. Second, the subject is the acting subject insofar as it is subjected to a sovereignty. The two aspects are closely linked because acting means acting on oneself and on the actions

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of other subjects. The action on other peoples actions denes the space of power, and, when organized, assumes the shape of historically construed governmentalities.1 The body is central to the techniques of the self. The desiring subject disciplines and shapes his drive by all kinds of means mediated by bodily motion. These means are not necessarily devised by the subject itself. Most of the time, they are part and parcel of a whole range of socially approved practices and belong to ever-changing governmentalities. In his History of Sexuality (1976, 1984a and 1984b), Foucault attempts to show that even sexual practices, and therefore the sexual drive itself, are historical and changing practices. As regards the mediation of the techniques of the self by material culture, Foucault himself stresses the importance of all the material contraptions of discipline, in the prison, the asylum, the hospital, the school. However, in his writings, material culture appears more as an exterior means used by the subjects than as a mediation embodied in the subject. This is where a praxeological approach to material culture can help us in analysing what actually takes place in the techniques of the self: if material culture is the mediation of any bodily practice of the subject, then, there will be hardly any technique of the self which does not involve sensori-motricity in a material world. Sports as a technique of the self is an obvious example of such a tight articulation between a concern of the subject for himself or herself, material culture, bodily practices, and an elaborate social organization of sports activities. Thus, Foucault provides key concepts for a praxeological theory of material culture as inscribed in the techniques of the self and in given governmentalities. But these concepts present a number of shortcomings that are such as to mislead our approach to material culture if they are not taken care of. There are at least four of them. First, Foucault was not much of an anthropologist, and there is no comparative dimension in his work outside Western tradition. True, his History of Sexuality is basically a comparison between several patterns of sexual desire from antiquity to modern times, but does not reach beyond the Western world. This leads him to a theoretical contradiction. On the one hand he tends to maintain, together with the unanimous Western philosophical tradition, that a concern with the subject and subjectivity is a unique invention of the Western world. On the other hand, he says that being the subject of ones drive, acting upon oneself, and meeting other peoples drives so as to compromise around given moral standards, occurs in any civilization, and that the techniques of the self are procedures proposed by society to the individual as they are probably to be found in every civilization. I think most anthropologists would disclaim that a concern with the subject is an invention of the West. In that respect, Foucault falls victim to the ethnocentrism of Western philosophy. Clearly,

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what he theorizes under the expressions of subject, subjectivation, techniques of the self and governmentality, has a considerable heuristic value as regards all known civilizations, simply because all human beings are acting and desiring subjects and have a knowledge of themselves to a certain extent. Second, as a historian and a philosopher, Foucault has never been concerned with making explicit what could be an ethnography of the techniques of the self. We obviously have partial leads in such a direction by reading Mauss and Parlebas. But one still has to show considerable methodological ingenuity to produce the tools concepts, lms, video, photography, scripts such as the Laban choreographic script, descriptions of a standard ethnography of subjectivation by motricity in a material world. Third, more importantly, Foucault never concerned himself with providing a detailed analysis of the processes by which the material contraptions of the school, the asylum, the army barracks, the prison, and all the material culture of love and seduction, with its cosmetics, clothes, fashions, furniture, shaping of the body, etc. reach the subjects and act upon them. I shall return shortly to this question. Fourth and lastly, Foucaults theory of subjectivation rests on a heavy hypothesis formulated in the History of Sexuality. For him, the shape assumed by human desire, the objects it elects, and perhaps desire itself, are fully historical phenomena. There is nothing natural in them. Incidentally, by de-naturalizing the subject, he denies its universality. The subject itself could indeed be an invention of the Western world. This radical position explains why Foucault has always been at odds with Freudian psychoanalysis, and why he has become an authority with some radical feminist and gay movements for which a subject is what it chooses to be: male or female, with homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual preferences. This article is not the best place for such a discussion. Sufce it to say that I part from Foucault on that issue. The process of subjectivation is a confrontation with other subjects mediated by moving in a material world. In such a confrontation, the subject nds a number of givens that are required for it to structure its own desire. Such givens are his/her own sexed body, whatever his/her own sexual preferences, the social setting in which he/she was born, with its language, material culture, social and political organization, and the signicant others such as parents or siblings that he/she did not choose. There is something universal in becoming a human subject (or failing to become one) by sensorimotor practices in a world in which a number of constraints are given. In other words: being a subject is not primarily being what one chooses to be, but constructing ones drives in a material world and gaining access to the moral law in ones relationship to others, under a number of constraints. It is unfair to pretend one is what one wants to be: the

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result is to elide political coercion and what Foucault called governmentality, that is, the whole network of actions on other peoples actions. Being a subject, for Foucault, is being subjected to given governmentalities.
THE THREE MEDIA OF SYMBOLIZATION

I will now address the question I have just raised about Foucault: by what means does material culture embodied in motricity reach the subject in its depths? In other words, what are the mechanisms of sensori-motor subjectivation? A rst answer consists in taking stock of the role of apprenticeship. We may assume that the jet pilot is subjectivized differently from the airport sweeper not only because their educational level and backgrounds are different, nor because their incomes are quite unequal, but also because the pilot has incorporated in his sensori-motricity the 200 tons of the jet liner, the take-off power of the engines and all the equipment of the cabin, whereas, more modestly, the sweeper has incorporated his mops, buckets, caddy, the intricacies of the airport buildings and their complex rhythms and security rules. The skill of the pilot is the result of a long apprenticeship, over several years and through several highly emotional thresholds: the rst time he/she ew a Piper Cub unattended; his/her rst take-off and landing at the controls of a jet; his/her rst heavy storm, and many other similar experiences I can only guess at. Endless drilling of motor algorithms, of verbal and non-verbal communication with the instructors or the co-pilot in the interaction with the machine, repeated de-brieng after the ights, retraining in a ight-simulator before piloting a different type of aircraft, have built up bodily habits fully adjusted to the material culture of civil or military aviation. Apprenticeship gives us a strong lead. The neurophysiology and the psychology of apprenticeship are in a position to tell us how the nervous system can be trained and imprinted, and re-trained in case it has been damaged. The psychology of motivation stresses the fact that the success of neuro-muscular training depends partly upon the emotional involvement and the positive attitude of instructors and trainee. All too often, however, emotion and motivation are watered down expressions for drive, desire or even libido that refer too obviously to psychoanalytical theory to gain easy acceptance. In these examples, we nd three dimensions of human activity tightly interwoven: perception, motricity, emotion. Let us say that material culture reaches the subject in its depth through a sensori-affectivo-motor medium. I shall presently elaborate on this point. Many psychologists, following Bowlby (1978), Anzieu and others such as Piaget, stress that psychic life elaborates itself by internalizing sensory-affectivo-motor experiences with other subjects in a material

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world. D. Anzieu (1985) stresses that the skin provides the basic fantasy from which a self can be built, as a psychic envelope open to outside exchanges, verbal and non-verbal. Most skin disorders, he says, cannot be understood unless one takes into account the fact that the skin is a screen onto which the psychic life of the self projects itself, and an envelope which contains and protects it. This is now becoming standard knowledge in dermatology as well as psychosomatic medicine. Serge Tisseron (1997, 1999) goes one step further by elaborating on the concepts of projection, introjection and internalization coined by Freud and Ferenczi in their analysis of psychic disorders. They noticed that patients could project their fantasies on other subjects, introject good objects or internalize intersubjective relationships. Typically, in internalization, a patient will experience a conict, take it into the envelope of the psyche, and continue to carry it permanently with him, even when the conict has come to an end and the subject has gone far away from the setting in which the conict took place. Or, vice-versa, a subject can project his/her aggressiveness on another person with which he/she identies, and feel aggressed by this person. Whereas, in the example given just above, the processes of projection and introjection are dysfunctional, Freud, Ferenczi and their followers soon discovered that they were essential to the construction of any psychic life. In psychoanalysis, this remark provided the theoretical grounds for the works of M. Klein, D. Winnicot, D. Anzieu, F. Dolto and S. Tisseron, diverse as they are. They all stress in various ways that intersubjective relationships are mediated by the seven senses (including proprioception and vestibular perception) coupled with verbal and non-verbal communication between embodied subjects. S. Tisseron (1996, 1997, 1999) provides one of the most articulate theories of the workings of internalization and introjection, or rather, in his own terms, of symbolization. By symbolization, he means the process by which a subject introduces into his psychic envelope his experiences of the outside world. This process allows one, as it were, to domesticate, tame, or let his/her experiences sink in. This symbolization uses three media: sensori-motricity, images and words. In a personal communication to the MP (Matire Penser) research group, Tisseron gives the following example of sensori-affectivo-motor symbolization: a woman walks in a street followed by three little girls presumably her daughters. She is in a hurry and walks fast. She stumbles on a sheet of iron put on the sidewalk by the road workers. She loses her balance, gesticulates, and, eventually succeeds in recovering her balance. She turns round, looks at the sheet of iron, curses it, and goes her way. We assume that the three girls have felt a strong emotion: acceleration of the heartbeat, blushing, feelings of shame and confusion. What do they do ? The rst one comes to the iron sheet and

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mimicks what the woman did: she hits the iron, stumbles, turns round, looks at the sidewalk, utters a few words and catches up with the woman. The second girl accomplishes the same routine, and the third one, being the smallest, shortens it down to kicking the sheet, making a half turn and running to catch up with the others. By this process, they have transformed what happened in order to make it acceptable and to take it into their psychic envelope. They have domesticated the event. They reproduced it, and, in the process, reshaped it to deprive it of its potential for eliciting emotions of fear, shame and impending catastrophe. They turned it into gestures that could be performed without damaging consequences. They included it into the normal sequence of events. Given the essential connections between perception, emotion and motricity, this type of symbolization can be said to be a sensori-affectivo-motor one. In the psychic life of the subject, it starts right from birth, and perhaps even before. This example shows that such situations are not context-free: in the present case, the emotion depends on a strong relationship between the adult woman and her daughters. The second medium of symbolization uses images. The infant learns very quickly to leave material traces of his/her gestures. Food on a plate or taken from the plate and smeared with the ngers on the table leaves a trace that lasts and can be looked at. This discovery is usually quite pleasurable, and calls for repetition. As soon as they can use materials such as sand, clay, paper, pencil, etc., young children enjoy drawing. They usually begin with lines drawn with a gesture going away from the body of the child towards the outside, thus reproducing the fort da game of Freuds grandchild that mimicks the alternative presence and absence of the mother. The pleasure experienced by children in drawing usually comes to an end when adults impose upon them outside canons of verisimilitude that prevent the child from using the image as a means of symbolizing his/her own experience of the world as perceived by him/herself, that is, as transformed into something acceptable. The adults and especially the school push the child into a representative dead-end. The last medium of symbolization is language, that does not need any particular comment, since it enjoys such privilege in Western culture, and consequently, in Western anthropology. Symbolization does not belong with ex-pression, nor with com-munication, but with intro-jection or intern-alization. It is a basic moment, quite essential in the elaboration of any action of expression or communication. These three dimensions of bodily activity depend upon one another and are usually found at various degrees in a given conduct. However, from an analytical point of view, they are quite distinct. According to S. Tisseron (1997), symbolization operates on what he calls two schemata: one of envelope and one of transformation. The skin

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provides the subject with the anatomo-physiological experience of the psychic envelope. For the three little girls, the problem raised by the sight of their stumbling mother was to bring into their psychic envelope an acceptable, tamed and meaningful version of the unexpected, sudden, absurd and emotionally disturbing experience they had had. In the process, they had to transform the content and the nature of their experience. This double dimension is found in all the processes of symbolization. Of the three media of symbolization, the sensori-affectivo-motor one is the most efcient in reaching deep into the subject, because it is immediately geared to emotions and psychic drives. It is nearly always propped up against given materialities incorporated into the bodily schema through motor algorithms that mediate the agency of the subject, and between subjects. First-hand sensori-motor experience is a basic requirement of the subjectivation process. This is emphasized by scholars as different as Franoise Dolto (1984) and Nicholas Humphreys (1984: 63) who writes about the natural psychologist reading a poem of Dryden on love:
How is the uninitiated to comprehend the secret sore of lingring love? The words, if they register at all, may seem to him mere cynicism . . . To the reader, empowered by his or her personal experience to understand them, Drydens remarks are addressed as a salutary reminder and as an omen . . . the poem, like all good poetry, depends for its effect on lighting a taper in the readers memory. But it cannot illuminate what is not there.

In other words: there must be internalization through personal experience for communication and expression to take place, and it comes through sensori-affectivo-motricity, elaborated by means of images and words. The reference to love-making, so invested with images and words, is quite relevant, in view of the involvement of desire, the other, and sensori-motricity. And (need I insist?) motricity incorporates ma-terialities as an essential component. Movement, however, is transient. It took a couple of seconds for the woman to lose and recover her balance. It took even less time for each of the girls to imitate her. Afterwards, one often wonders if anything took place at all, and memory often fails to render what actually happened, given the process of transformation at work in symbolization. The advantage of the image is to add up a permanent trace that can be looked at, touched or felt. Photography, in that respect, has retained the attention of S. Tisseron (1996). Following Barthes (1980), one could make a semiological study of the printed image. But what about the photographs that have been taken and are never looked at? Tisseron remarks that this is the case more often than not. To him, the gestures of taking the photograph should be investigated, because all

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photographs have been taken, whereas few photographs are ever looked at. In a situation (birthday party, tourism in unfamiliar country, vacations) the fact of handling a camera, framing other subjects against a background, or taking a shot at the Jocunda or the Empire State building is a means of bringing within the material envelope of the camera and within the psychic envelope of the self an experience that goes too fast to be symbolized by sensori-motricity. Or rather, the tourist is in a hurry to see everything he has paid for. He does not take the time to elaborate his sensori-motor experience by coming several times, say to Notre-Dame, at different times of the day, on a Sunday service, or by having a leisurely picnic on the square in front of the cathedral. As a result, he needs to introject an image within a couple of minutes before boarding the tour operators bus and rushing to the next sight to be seen. This is the reason why we seldom take photographs of the usual and familiar. The images always material provided by photographs, drawings, and by all the material objects of a manufactured world, have the advantage of being fairly permanent. They help the psyche in its work of establishing duration, memory and a sense of continuity. This has been emphasized by M. Kwint et al. (1999) as regards Material Memories. Images have their shortcomings, which is their very materiality. I can see Notre-Dame provided I am standing by the monument. Back home, I have to rely on the post card or the photograph. If I have neither, the only things I can rely on are mental, internalized images, and the words that can recall them. This is the advantage of the third medium of symbolization: speech or words. They provide abstract means of recalling events, facts, images, ideas, at will, and of communicating them. The other, unique advantage of words, is that they allow one to elaborate a critical point of view on his/her own experience and its symbolization, especially by discussing it with others. This is why totalitarian systems suppress critical discourses while immersing people in motricity, material culture and images.
PRAXEOLOGY AND MEANING

If the medium is the message as McLuhan liked to say, then there is no reason to think that the three media of symbolization convey the same messages. We can hypothesize that their content may differ in some cases. Indeed, one of the theoretical issues raised by a praxeological approach to material culture is the degree of t, agreement or disagreement between the patterns of subjectivation by motricity in a material culture on the one hand, and the meanings conveyed by speech or representations on the other hand. A praxeological approach to material culture will never replace a

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semiological or structuralist approach. By contrast, their articulation opens entirely new perspectives in the analysis of material culture, especially in case of discrepancies or disagreement between the two approaches regarding a given corpus. Tisseron remarks that such discrepancies may be at the origin of cases of psychosis. For example, in the typical systemic interaction analysed by Bateson and the Palo Alto school, some individuals convey a given message through the sensori-affectivo-motor medium while denying it by speech. A mother (albeit in rare cases), may convey rejection and aggressiveness towards her baby through the sensori-affectivomotor medium, while exaggerating her verbal expression of love. In such cases, and depending on the context, the baby will keep the two media and the two messages separate. He/she will be engaged in a process of schismogenesis. But the same result may be achieved by a brain or sensory disorder which will twist one of the three media of symbolization and introduce a discrepancy between them. If this is the case, then, there would not be any contradiction between an ecological and a neurophysiological explanation of psychosis. If everything goes well in the subjectivation process, there will be no contradiction between the three media for a given subject or category of subjects. But there are reasons to think that this is seldom entirely the case. Most subjects are more or less divided and in several parts, and most cultures and societies produce subjects that are divided against themselves. Birgitt Meyer (1997) for example, has shown how, in Africa, missionaries came with a highly complex and conspicuous material culture incorporated in motricity, insisted that the African adopt it (in matters of technology, hygiene, dress, etc.), while partially denying its relevance as regards faith and salvation, and came into conict with the Africans on that account. Another example is provided by the notables of the highlands of Western Cameroon, also known as the Grasselds. To this day, they behave in their bodily practices as vital piggy-banks. They contain life essence, semen, saliva, and substances that extend the reach of their motricity-cum-material culture: camwood, palm oil, raphia wine. They contain everything in their bodies, while unmarried males do not contain anything. Typically, a chief or notable will spit on people to transmit his life essence to them. They will maintain large polygynous households and dispense their semen to their wives, and to the foetus of those who are pregnant. They will smear camwood and palm oil on the skin of women given in marriage or successors to turn their skins into shining, red, healthy and leak-proof envelopes. In such an inegalitarian system, notables and unmarried cadets are subjectivized through the sensoriaffectivo-motor medium into different categories of people, with radically opposing interests that are seldom recognized as such by the people

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themselves. There is a built-in and muted system of domination, or Foucaldian governmentality. By contrast, in the same society, speech insists on complete solidarity, sharing and redistribution between all the members male and female alike of the household, the descent group, and the chiefdom. In a sense, this is true: notables who possess all the ancestral substances in their bodies do share them out. But if the anthropologist stresses that there are many unmarried men deprived of substance and living in precarious conditions and dissatised women in polygynous households, this is resented by all, including the unmarried cadets, as an unwarranted aggression, and strongly denied: A father, will be the answer, is under the obligation of providing each of his sons with a wife. How could he possibly fail to do so? Therefore, according to the commonsense of the Grasselds, he does not fail to do so (which is actually not the case). Unmarried men are perceived as young boys. They are not perceived as marriageable men. Their status takes precedence over their age. Words contradict the evidence provided through the sensori-motor medium, and the latter takes precedence as a technique of the self to shape two different kinds of subjects within a given governmentality. All the systems of domination rest on such unrevealed and even denied contradictions. Motricity in a given materiality goes without saying. It does not need any verbal commentary. The bodily practices of Grasselds notables and cadets are performed daily without any verbal comment. The subjectivation achieved in such a way is hidden. There is no conscious manipulation on the part of the notables, and this is why it works so well and why it is usually denied by unmarried men and by the women themselves.2 This is a clear-cut case which illustrates the essential connection established by Foucault between subjectivation and a power system or governmentality. One is a subject by being a subject of his/her own drives. But those drives are shaped by the techniques of the self proposed or imposed by society. One could rightly speak of techniques of the other, which would cover what Foucault analyses as actions on the actions of others. By retaining, accumulating and distributing given substances and material objects, a Grasselds notable acts on the motricity of other people. Provision systems of given materialities are the standard means of mediating between acting and moving subjects. An investigation of sensori-affectivo-motor symbolizations helps us to integrate an anthropology of sensoriality, passions, and motricity in cultural and political analysis.
TOWARDS A PRAXEOLOGICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

The main trends of modern anthropology have tended to rely on speech and communication as their trading stock. This is obvious in the case of

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Lvi-Straussian structuralism. When material culture is taken into account, it is often for what it means rather than for what it does to subjects. Studies on the body have tended to introduce a more balanced approach to material culture. However, the body is not equivalent to sensori-motricity. All too often, the body that is an object of phenomenological or Foucaldian analysis is not the moving and perceiving subject in a given materiality, but a representation of the body. We nd here the discrepancy illustrated by Magritte and Foucault (1973) between a smoking pipe and the painting of a smoking pipe, under which Magritte writes: this is not a pipe. He is right, of course. The smoking pipe is handled, stuffed, lit, and put in ones mouth to draw the smoke. The representation of the pipe cannot be used in such a way. It is only good to look at and to signify with. This raises the basic methodological question of how to do the ethnography of motricity in a material world. Human ethology is of limited help because, given the complexity of human behaviour, it has not really been in a position to use the standard tools of animal ethology. Motor praxeology is of much greater help. There is still a long way to go to elaborate an adequate methodology based on photography, lms, choreographic scripts like the Laban script. However, most of the ethnography can be done with the vocabulary of everyday life. There are now many convincing descriptions of movement in a material world by N. Argenti (1998 and in press) on innovative performances in the Grasselds, P. Parlebas (1999) on sports, Kaufmann (1992) on household activities, not to mention earlier works by Michel de Certeau (1980). The theoretical directions I am sketching in this article consist in bringing together various lines of analysis that have been kept more or less separate until now, that is, studies on the body, motricity, agency, material culture, the subject, unconscious drives, and power systems. This is admittedly ambitious, but, after the work of Head, Schilder, Parlebas and the neuro-sciences, I fail to see how one could possibly keep analysing the body and material culture independently from each other and from sensori-motricity. After the work of Freud, Ferenczi, Anzieu and Tisseron, I fail to see how one could possibly keep analysing sensorimotricity in a material world independently from the drives that keep the subject on the move. After the work of Foucault, I fail to see how one could analyse material culture, sensori-motricity and subjectivation as divorced from historical governmentalities.3
WHAT IS AT STAKE?

In his book Modernity at Large, A. Appadurai (1997) has underlined the difculty of analysing the enigmatic relationship between embodied material culture and representations. What is at stake with a praxeological approach to material culture is precisely to elucidate the depth, or

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the various layers of this complex relationship, given the fact that these layers are fully interconnected, yet potentially at odds with one another. What I wish to do (see also Warnier, 1999a and b, Julien and Warnier, 1999) is to re-open in new ways the analysis of such diverse phenomena as the SAPE of Congolese youth (see also Gandoulou, 1989a and b), the Cameroonian Pajerocracy with its champagne, luxury cars, and threepiece suits and silk ties, the Congolese (Zarian) and Angolese gemmocracy (see also Misser and Valle, 1997), with its mines, armed youth, planes, villas, the material culture of armed violence, the popular urban culture, the reinvention of chiefdoms and kingdoms in Africa, with their regalia and palaces displayed in TV shows, etc. I have given two examples above: the missionaries, their material culture and their preaching; the Grasselds cadets and notables. Let me elaborate on a last example: that of the Liberian child-soldier among the some 300,000 children enrolled in various armed factions throughout the world, on whom Olara Otumu, the Deputy Secretary general of the UNO has collected detailed information. Given the fact that the child-soldier incorporates in his sensori-motricity the kalachnikov and the 4 4 Toyota, plus all the trappings of armed material equipment, we are not dealing any longer with a child compelled to ght against his will and capable of keeping some critical distance from what he does. Sooner or later, in daily bodily practices and motricity, he will be fused with his inventory of material culture. He will be subjectivized as a kalashnikov-wielding-child. The gun and the 4 4 Toyota we look at can be taken as signs, with a signier and a signied in a system of communication. When they are in daily use for months on end, when moving without them has become inconceivable, they do not only make sense as signs, but rather as part and parcel of a subjectivity that has been transformed in its relationship to self and others. Only then can one begin to understand why and how this child can practise killing or cutting off the hands of other children as a technique of the self of sorts in the governmentality of armed conict. His drives, passions, physical appearance, perceptions, have been shaped in a different way, especially because he/she has been drawn into armed violence when he/she was so young, whatever the discourse of liberation, revolution, peoples democracy or hatred of the assigned enemy he/she can utter at one point or another. A subject cannot be produced and undone like a Lego toy. Once the child-soldier is withdrawn from the armed faction by Unicef or a Non-Governmental Organization, his sensori-affectivo-motor, psychic and discursive retraining is highly problematic, especially in view of the fact that the materialities provided for him offer nothing to be compared with the stock of violent sensations and emotions experienced by him when he/she was armed. Speech alone will not sufce to do the trick. In such a perspective, the contradictions, the failures, the sudden and abrupt reorganizations of given subjectivities-cum-materiality and

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their political dimensions are likely to be given more emphasis than in the anthropology of material culture (and still less the anthropology of art) in their current state.
Acknowledgements Many thanks to N. Argenti for copy-editing this article, and for N. Argenti, R. Bertrand, J. Ferreux, F. Hoarau, M.-P. Julien, C. Rosselin, N. Schlanger, Z. Strougo, S. Tisseron for their help with earlier drafts of this article, and for their critical comments. I am indebted to the research group Matire Penser (or MaP) at Universit Ren Descartes (Paris V Sorbonne) where I undertake my research and which provides me with much information and intellectual stimulation, and to Jean-Franois Leguil-Bayart and the CERI who helped me a great deal in testing my research. The formation of the MaP group was much facilitated, over the years, by a constant stream of exchanges with M.J. Rowlands at University College London. Notes 1. In January 2000, a conference was held in Paris on Material culture and political subjectivation. Organized by CERI and the MaP research group, it will be published in the spring of 2001 under the direction of J.-F. Bayart and J.-P. Warnier. M. Rowlands and I are presently working on a ethnography of the Grasselds of Cameroon from a praxeological point of view. By taking sequences of events we have personally witnessed, by analysing the motricity of the subjects in their own materiality, and by comparing the three media of symbolization, our intention is to show that one can write the various chapters of a standard ethnography with unexpected results. In recent years, many social scientists have developed valuable insights pertaining to these various domains of investigation. In particular, and amongst many others, I am indebted to D. Miller (1987) and his concept of objectication (not quite, however, the subjectivation of M. Foucault), to M. Featherstone et al. (1991), P. Falk (1994), M. Lock (1993), J. Selner and S. Crowley (1999) for their interest in the body, to C. Lutz and G.M. White (1986) on emotions, to D. Best (1974, 1978), B. Farnell (1994, 1999), A. Kendon (1997), D. Williams (1999) for their work on movement, to A. Gell (1998) for bringing agency (but not the subject, however) to the fore in his study of art and material culture, and to The Journal of Material Culture for providing a forum for such approaches. Yet, I would suggest, there is still some amount of theoretical and ethnographic work to be done to unravel essential interconnections between these various lines of analysis, and to articulate a semiology and a praxeology of the sensori-motricity of the subject in a material world.

2.

3.

References Anzieu, D. (1985) Le Moi-Peau. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion. Appadurai, A. (1997) Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Argenti, N. (1998) Air Youth: Performance, Violence and the State in Cameroon, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute incorporating Man, IV(4): 75582. Argenti, N. (in press) Childrens masquerades in Oku, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Barthes, R. (1980) La Chambre Claire. Paris: Gallimard. Berthelot, J.-M. (1995) The Body as a Discursive Operator: or the Aporias of a Sociology of the Body, Body and Society, 1(1): 1323. Best, D. (1974) Expression in Movement and the Arts. London: Lepus. Best, D. (1978) Philosophy and Human Movement. London: Allen and Unwin. Bowlby, J. (1978) Attachement et perte (4 tomes). Paris: PUF. Csordas, Th., ed. (1994) Embodiment and Experience. The existential ground of culture and self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Certeau, M. (1980) LInvention du quotidien, vol. I: Arts de Faire. Paris: Union Gnrale dEditions. Dolto, F. (1984) LImage inconsciente du corps. Paris: Seuil. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1989) Human Ethology. New York: Aldine. Falk, P. (1994) The Consuming Body. London: Sage. Farnell, B. (1994) Ethno-graphics and the Moving, MAN 29(4): 92997. Farnell, B. (1999) Moving Bodies, Acting Selves Annual Review of Anthropology, 128: 24173. Featherstone, M., Hepworth, M. and Turner, B., eds (1991) The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1973) Ceci nest pas une pipe. Ed. Fata Morgana, illustrations de Ren Magritte. Editions Fata Morgana. Foucault, M. (1976) Histoire de la sexualit, I, La volont de savoir. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1984a) Histoire de la sexualit, II, LUsage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1984b) Histoire de la sexualit. III Le Souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1989) Rsum des cours 19701982. Paris: Gallimard. Gandoulou, J.-D. (1989a) Au Coeur de la sape. Moeurs et aventures des Congolais Paris. Paris: LHarmattan. Gandoulou, J.-D. (1989b) Dandies Bacongo: le culte de llgance dans la socit congolaise contemporaine. Paris: LHarmattan. Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Humphreys, N. (1984) Consciousness Regained. Chapters in the Development of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Julien, M.-P. and Warnier, J.-P., eds (1999) Approches de la culture matrielle. Corps corps avec lobjet. Paris: LHarmattan. Karsenti, B. (1997) LHomme total. Sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie chez Marcel Mauss. Paris: PUF. Kaufmann, J.-Cl. (1992) La trame conjugale. Analyse du couple par son linge. Paris: Nathan. Kendon, A. (1997) Gesture, Annual Review of Anthropology, 26: 10928. Kwint, M. et al. eds (1999) Material Memories. Design and Evocation. Oxford: Berg. Lock, M. (1993) Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge, Annual Review of Anthropology, 22: 13355. Lutz, C. and White, G. (1986) The Anthropology of Emotions, Annual Review of Anthropology, 15: 40536.

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Martins, L.H. et al., eds (1988) Technologies of the Self, a Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. Mauss, M., (1950[1936]) Les techniques du corps, in C. Lvi-Strauss (ed.) Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF, pp. 36386 (1st ed. Journal de Psychologie, XXXII, 34). Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) La Phnomnologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Meyer, B. (1997) Christian Mind and Wordly Matters. Religion and Materiality in Nineteenth-century Gold Coast, Journal of Material Culture 2(3): 31138. Miller, D. (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Misser, F. and Vallee, O. (1997) Les gemmocraties. Lconomie politique du diamant africain. Paris: Descle de Brouwer. Parlebas, P. (1999) Jeux, sports et socits. Lexique de praxologie motrice. Paris: INSEP. Schilder, P. (1923) Das Krperschema. Ein Beitrag zur Lehre vom Bewusstsein des eigenen Krpers. Berlin: J. Springer. Schilder, P. (1935) The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energy of the Psyche. London: Kegan Paul. Selner, J. and Crowley, S., eds (1999) Rethorical Bodies. Bloomington: University of Wisconsin Press. Tisseron, S. (1996) Le mystre de la chambre claire. Photographie et inconscient. Paris: Flammarion, coll. Champs. Tisseron, S. (1997) Psychanalyse de limage. Des premiers traits au virtuel. Paris: Dunod. Tisseron, S. (1999) Comment lesprit vient aux objets. Paris: Aubier. Warnier, J.-P. (1999a) Construire la culture matrielle. LHomme qui pensait avec ses doigts. Paris, PUF. Warnier, J.-P. (1999b) Autour dun livre: Construire la culture matrielle, Politique Africaine, 76, dcembre 1999, pp. 18195. Williams, D. (1999) Anthropology and Human Movement: Searching for Origins. Readings in the Anthropology of Human Movement, Vol. 2. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. x J E A N - P I E R R E WA R N I E R is Professor of anthropology, at the Facult de Sciences sociales at the Sorbonne. His research interests are material culture, praxeology, Foucault, Cameroon Grasselds and Africa. Signicant publications: Echanges, dveloppement et hirarchies dans le Bamenda pr-colonial Cameroun, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesebaden, 1985. Construire la culture matrielle. LHomme qui pensait avec ses doigts, Paris, PUF, 1999. Approches de la culture matrielle. Corps corps avec lobjet, Paris, LHarmattan, 1999 (co-edited with M.P. Julien). Address: Dpartement de Sciences sociales, Facult des Sciences humaines et sociales Sorbonne 12, rue Cujas, 75230 Paris Cedex 05, France [email: jp-warnier@wanadoo.fr]

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