The body and technique

To some respect, I keep harping on the same issue in these response papers, but as my ideas evolve, I seem to take a stauncher stance against our desire to work within the framework of a generic “state”. In this response, I would like to further things by drawing off of Omur’s response, which wonderfully attempts to bring things back to the body – the “people on the ground,” as it were – when discussing technologies of the state. I really like this approach, and I hope to build on it here. I will take a slightly different approach.

The body does indeed have a major stake in the relations and running of the state. Varying engagements of the human body and practices (ritual, celebratory, vocational, and so forth) help to crystallize relations and expectations. We stop at stoplights, pull over for blue and red flashing lights, vote on the first Tuesday of November, etc. Our bodies participate in the engagements with certain buildings, sounds (police sirens), sights, duties, such that movement and response help to condition us to certain overarching expectations while at the same time creating the framework for those expectations in the first place. We condition as much as we are conditioned. Where I wish to depart is in the discussion of these things as techniques of the state.

Here, I think we can boil things down even further than mechanisms or techniques that employed by states, eventually reaching the conclusion that these techniques are part of the human condition very generally. Take Bourdieu’s Kabyle house, for instance. Or any house for that matter. In this example, the body engages with, among other things, the way the house is constructed, the placement of objects within the house, where certain activities occur within the house, and so on. The physicality of the body is coupled with (cultural) notions of what is appropriate to perform at any given point in time. Some of the examples discussed in our reading describe similar performative interactions between bodies and expectation, only writ large, and in the context of state control.

But this is precisely it. A set of circumstances that applies broadly to all social interactions has been removed from this amount of generality to describe the mechanisms of the state, and in doing so, the state takes on the appearance of having the unique capacity to shape social form. If, however, we reintroduce this as part of the broad human condition – that our bodies are actively and reciprocally engaged in creating norms of behavior – then I think we will find it much harder to use this as a technique to describe the state, because such things happen in all cultures at all times, regardless of their stateliness. The techniques of the state, in other words, can be writ rather small, and are actively employed by non-states.

I’m not quite sure what to do now, though. Obviously, and rightly, a counter argument can be made that it is a matter of the specifics of these techniques, and the aims toward which they are applied. Even so, a rephrasing of the issue from “states employ this mechanism to garner social control” to “states employ similar mechanisms as non-states, only differently” could impact how we approach the state archaeologically, sociologically, etc., and certainly, I hope, forces us to engage more with the specifics of practice, to potentially answer questions about how it is possible to arrive at the second phrase from the first at all.

Tom: In many respects I think I agree. But would you consider that your argument (if I understand it correctly) leaves us questioning the utility of 'state' as a concept with which to work? If behaviors and performances operate in roughly cognate ways in both 'states' and 'non-states', then understanding state as constitutive of those types of performance would seem to be false. Once again we seem to be drifting away from state, and toward the social | cultural - fair?

Posted at Oct 04/2007 12:55PM:
Brad: That is a fair assessment of what I wrote. But I see nothing wrong with it, since I feel that serious challenges to the way "state" is used have been raised but not satisfactorily answered. I guess this is where the notion of complexity comes into play, but even that left the class lukewarm. Again, I'm not entirely sure where to take this, but I feel there are some open-ended questions hanging about that merit being brought to the fore every so often.

Posted at Oct 04/2007 01:21PM:
Brad: The more I think about it, the more inclined I am to say that it is less about the mechanisms or techniques employed than it is the aims of these mechanisms and techniques. This might help us escape complexity in the discourse on states?

Tom: Right! The harder you push 'state' the more it seems to look a little flimsy. Nice point on aims rather than means.