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10 body schooling
- “ So long as the work of education is not clearly institutionalized as a specific, autonomous practice, so long as it is the whole group and a whole symbolically structured environment, without specialized agents or specific occasions, that exerts an anonymous, diffuse pedagogic action, the essential part of the modus operandi that defines practical masters, is transmitted through practice, in the practical state, without rising to the level of discourse. The child mimics other people's actions rather than 'models'. Body hexis speaks directly to the motor function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual and systematic, being bound up with a whole system of objects, and charged with a host of special meanings and values. But the fact that schemes are able to pass directly from practice to practice without moving through discourse and consciousness does not mean that the acquisition of habitus is no more than a mechanical learning through trial and error”
(Bourdieu 1990, 73-74).While the state and the market are busy in the production and control of micro-territories (which, in turn, results in the built environment of the street), much of the work of establishing normalcy is done not by politicians or bureaucrats and their business friends, but through regimes of social-schooling in the home1, in public educational institutions, and through the media. This, mostly informal, education (taught, for example, at school but not necessarily in the curriculum) trains us in the micro-management of the body (as Giddens would call this).
The history and practice of body schooling has been attempted in part by Elias (1978) and by Foucault (1979, 1990). Elias looks at how the mannerisms and deferential courtly behaviors of the nobility were commodified and acquired by the middle class as “manners” and “courtesy.” Foucault points to an increasingly pervasive governmentality with an interest in the discipline of entire populations, and the consequent development of technical apparatus for this purpose (schools, factories, prisons, asylums, the use of clocks, the increase in surveillance, the discursification of “hygiene” as a public policy). Bourdieu (1984) would also add the vector of “distinction” which has both institutional outcomes (the creation of arbiters of taste) and bodily ones (such as a disgust of the lack of manners).
Body-schooling is the primary input to Bourdieu's notion of the habitus of class2. In its carceral mode, it describes Foucault's3 notion of a disciplined population. Advertisers use a more seductive variety (as Baudrillard [1990] noted) to feed consumer appetites. The sum effect is to teach our bodies how to act normal4 in the street and to expect and demand normal behavior in others (See also: Public Body).
dis-modernity
- “ Enlightenment thought (and I here rely on Cassirer's, 1951, account) embraced the idea of progress, and actively sought that break with history and tradition which modernity espouses. It was, above all, a secular movement that sought the demystification and desacralization of knowledge and social organization in order to liberate human beings from their chains. It took Alexander Pope's injunction, 'the proper study of mankind is man,' with great seriousness. To the degree that it also lauded human creativity, scientific discovery, and the pursuit of individual excellence in the name of human progress, Enlightenment thinkers welcomed the maelstrom of change and saw the transitoriness, the fleeting, and the fragmentary as a necessary condition through which the modernizing project could be achieved”
(Harvey 1989, 12-13)Compiling the recent accounts of body schooling can be a disheartening task. The resulting cocktail of historical, anecdotal, and theoretical descriptions and notions is simultaneously convincing and confounding. While the most basic notion of the Enlightenment might include the increase in “reason” against unreasonable authority (kingly or religious) and an increase in rational thought against revealed (and so unknowable) knowledge, the story of modernity seems to produce the opposite outcome: domination, misrecognition, authoritarianism in the most mundane arenas (such as clothing styles) and a general reduction of populations to uniform subjecthood and an epistemological coma.
Today, political power is wielded through a skein of democratic (or so represented) practices, from population polls to popular elections, but this power is also ubiquitous and intrusive on the lives of all residents. In contrast, in other, former times, the dictates of the monarch or pope were arbitrary and final, but they were also limited in scope. So much of everyday life seemed to go on without the attention of higher authorities. Power was apparent as the earthfall of some deadly asteroid, but those who steered clear of its path were also free of its effects. One of the unintended outcomes of modernity seems to be an astounding increase in available power, and a continuing acquisition of this by various institutions, against the power of individuals.
However, this equation, and the growing imbalance of power in favor of institutional interests is not somehow structurally fixed, but represents an opportunistic snatching of power. And so there is little to legitimate this taking. For this reason there are many opportunities for individuals (singularly or in groups) to take back resources and authority from institutions.
Giddens’s work on intimacy suggests that individuals can work against body schooling, creating reflexive knowledge that can return the imagination to the individual, and bring a new equation to bear on relationships with expert systems. The festival experience, both in the planning and rehearsal, and in its public performance, is another shared body schooling that is external to, and which confronts that of the disciplined social body.
1 A common feature of this year's US presidential election is the call for “the family” to shoulder a greater share of this schooling. Of course, “the family” here is only a front for “the church” as the wellspring of moral instruction. Also implied in this return to “family values” is a critique of the marketplace as a surrogate source of social edification, and an underlying sense that necessary skills are not being learned, because nobody is teaching them.
2 Normalcy is also a territorial outcome of class. Streets, neighborhoods, and districts become concretized articulations of class desires, moulded also by class-directed market forces. For example, in Kyoto, the city's several buraku neighborhoods have been obviously excluded from the massive real estate speculation that remade most of the city in the last 50 years. But the “hardware” of city life: buildings and trains and boulevards, are not the topic of this paper, although this is also important in the creation of the “reality” of the street. Here I will be looking at the “software,” at cultural practices and expectations, and at the use of space to express cultural imaginations.
3 It was, of course, Michel Foucault who noted the transformation of governmentality from an external, princely rule, to an internal pastoral rule as a condition for the modern nation-state. He also noted that this transformation created a break between the open display of violence upon the bodies of subjects—as, I would add, feature of normalcy—and the modern government's carceral programs of institutionalized (and hidden) re-schooling of criminals; a practice that was sequestered from the street. The rehabilitation of criminals in their prisons was not different, Foucault noted, from the training of children in government-run schools, nor from the regimenting of armies in military camps, nor from the disciplining of the workforce in factories. A carceral regime developed which acted upon bodies as docile instruments of this new governmentality. Having read this before I moved to Kyoto, I was at times struck by the visual uniformity of the street in Kyoto, which could very well have advertised itself as Foucault-land, except that it really is no different in this respect than other cities in the region.
4 This fulfills Aristotle's notion (in Nicomachean Ethics) of the “right education,” that is, one that teaches us “both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought...” (1941, 954).
