Hunter, lan, ‘Mind games and body techniques’ Southem Review, volume 26, no.2, July 1993: 472-185, MIND GAMES AND BODY TECHNIQUES I Introduction Inthe early days of the cultural studies movement there was a good deal of talk about the “anthropological” conception of culture, particularly with regard toits virtues as an antidote to the aesthetic conception that \washeld typify Iterary criticism, (This correctvestratenyfirstontined in Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, became stock in trade for the Bi Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.) Unlikeliterary criticism, the anthropological conception was supposed to refer to the “way of life as a whole,” hence permitting the material dimension of “society” to be restored to the otherwise effete and deracinated interest in “high culture.” There followed from this strategic reorientation a series of studies and projects in which artefacts of popular culture were analysed from the perspective of their place in the whole way of life. Tn fact this entailed a mode of analysis in which the ideological determinationof popular cultureby economics was played off againstits Sapacity to outflank this determination, through popular resistance, “style,” the ordinary and, more recently, the body. Ik would be unhelpful either to endorse or rojct this intlloctual tendency en bloc. Still it can be said that anyone who has in fact waited forthe substantiveappearance of anthropological analysisin the cultural studies movement has waited in vain. Of course almost nobody has ‘waited. Thereason for thisisnow fairly clear: the phrase “the way of life as a whole” had almost nothing to do with anthropology and almost ing todo witha disguised reaffirmation of thezestheticconception of culture. It should have been clear at the outset that the critique of aesthetic culture — in terms of capitalism’s fragmentation of formerly integrated culture and society — is a fundamentally aesthetic critique, ‘oriented as itis to thereconciliation of aesthetics and economics, theideal and the material in the human totality — “the way of lifeas a whole.” (I have provided detailed formulations of thisargument in “Setting Limits to Culture,” and “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.”) This helps to explain why the most lasting contribution of the cultural studies movement lookslikebeing its refurbishmentofliteraturedepartmentsin ‘Australia and the USA. “Anyway, that is water under the bridge. I have no interest in announcing the long-delayed arrival of anthropology in the domain of cultural studies—surely an empty gesture. To the contrary, my interests here are in contrasting the fundamentally aesthetic or dialectical style of analysisassociated with cultural studies and themore descriptive mode associated witha particular kindof anthropology. The ground on which this contrast is developed is the theme of the “body.” Ihave already Southern Revie, 26 Guly 1983)‘Mind Games and Body Techniques 173 indicated that the body is one of those spaces of desire and resistance to which cultural stucies supposed it had to fly in order to escape what it imagined to be the ravages of repressive power and instrumental reason. Onitsarrivalit found this refuge tobe quitecrowded. Phenomenologists, psychoanalysts and the aesthetic avant-garde had already taken up residence there for similar reasons, Soon they were to be joined by the “corporeal” feminists. Such a small space to contain the limitless emancipator of the intellectual stratum’s oppositional wing. Tn re for the body then, cultural studies was repeating a gesture of despair and hope that had a longish lineage; and in developing the contrast between dialectical and descriptive approaches to the body ‘we will be clarifying this gesture and its lineage. Notjust this though. In providing a brief exposition of Marcel Mauss's anthropology of human ly and mind techniques, we will also offer some pointers towards a more worldly and detached and less charged and less fraughtapproach to the body as an object of scholarly enquiry. Tl The Dialectical Body Let me begin by exemplifying, near its historical point of emergence, the practice of dialectical thinking as it applies to the relation between the ‘body and the subject. My example is taken from an carly textof Hegel's, the System of Ethical Life, and Lam as much interested in the resolutely dialectical form of Hegel's thought as in its content. In its spiralling ascent towards the moment where reason is embodied in history, humanity passes through a level that Hegel calls “natural ethical life.” *-Andatthe highest pointof this level we find aseries of subsumptions and mediations whose totalising character anticipates the inal completion of humanity. This series has a characteristic three-part structure, The first movement, in which the “concept is subsumed under intuition,” is the ‘ovementof feeling is paradigmaticrelation is that between the sexes and its product is the child. Hegel describes the child as the corporeal form of the feelings of its parents — their living substance (111-13). The reciprocal counter-movernent, in which intuition is subordinated to the concept, Hegel identifies with labour. Such labour is subjective and disembodied —a reshaping of nature for purely instrumental ends — and its mediating formisnot thechild but the took: “In thetool the subject severs objectivity and its own blunting from itself it sacrifices an ot toannihilation and casts the subjective side of thaton to the other” (113). Reconciling and totalising the corporeality of the child and the ideality of the tool — the irrationality of feeling and the excessive rationality of the concept — is speech, which is specified in the following way: the middle term must be intelligent, but not individual or subjective; only an infinitely: vanishing and self-manifesting appearance of that; alightand ethereal body which passes awa} asitis formed .. .real But in such a way that this reality is itself ideal and infinite, in its existence immediately its own opposite,17a Ian Hunter i.e, non-existence; and so an ethereal body which displays the extremes and therefore, while real according to the concept, also hasits ideality, since the essence of this body isto pass away, and its appearance is thus the immediate conjunction of appearance and passing-away . . . This ideal and rational middle term is speech, the tool of reason, the child of intelligent beings. (113-14) This densely dialectical formulation of the relation between subjectivity and the body — of which Hegel is only an exponent, albeit a virtuoso one—has proved remarkably durable. HegeY’s ethereal body is an early incarnation in a series that has included the Romantic body- at-play, Merleau-Ponty’s “livedbody,” Artaud’s body withoutorgans,” and a variety of desiring, resisting and “double” bodies. According to this conception the body is the form in which subjectivity is expressed in the world; but it is simultaneously a form that resists the latter's instrumental drives, by “embodying” them in a manner that does no violence to the senses, desire or nature. The idea of resistance built into thismodelallowsit to routinely assume an apparently paradoxical form: namely, one in which, in expressing subjectivity, the body in fact neutralises orsplintersit, through the reflux forceof itsown unconscious Grives or pulsions. ‘Through thisnotion of corporeal resistance the dialectical conception elaboratesa particularstyleof ethico-political critique. In basing itselfon the telos of balance and mutual modification thisconceptionisdiagnostic ofimbalance. Itthus registers the characteristicsymptomsof breakdown in the dialectic between subjectivity and body — alienated labour, excessive rationality, and an array of instrumental uses and disciplines of the body. Hence it also invests this dialectical notion of the body with particular ethical and potitical ideal. Thisis the ideal of a space outside the morally compromised exercise of power and the instrumental use of reasoryareserve of forcesdirected towardshuman emancipation (desire, resistance, the drives and pulsions); a home for the “reconciled” oppositions which provide a true image of human being (embodied ‘thought, the thinking body). ‘The scope of dialectical thinking is of course much larger than thought about thebody. Such thinking isitself perhapsa type of spiritual exercise through which intellectuals compose their persona as the reconciliatory fulcrum for “divided” social and intellectual worlds. Be thatas it may, this style of thinking remains as deeply embedded in the intellectual stratum as it was in Flegel’s time — indeed, it is almost certainly more widespread today due to the impact of mass aesthetic education. (In this sense it is we who live in the Romantic period, not Hegel.) Perhapsitis notso surprising therefore that much (though by no ‘means all) recent discussion of the body has a dialectical character that directly traces the Hegelian pedigree and filigree. ‘A few examples willstand formany. Inhiscommentaryon Delenze’s notion of “phantasm” — which,-in approximating to the dialectical image of “embodied meaning,” compares directly with Hegel's notion of “speech” — Scott Lash provides us with a familiar portrait of the body:‘Mind Games and Body Techniques 175 Deleuzian phantasms ... are constituted at the interface where meets human bodies. Inscribed on the human body by means of the social they govern not only our thoughtevents, but our political practices, our sexuality... In competition, for Deleuze, with the capitalist social formation for the creation of phantasms on the human body, is, of course, ‘desire’. Deleuze’s body is then the object of competition, for whose control the active forces of desire and reactive forces, mobilised by capital, engage in struggle. (265) Without Smmplying anything about the accuracy of Lash’s exegesis, let us simply note the formal characteristics of his dialectical conception and intellectual practice. “On one side lies “society,” with its instrumental repression of our thoughts, politics and sexuality. On the other, bodily desire with its scope for resistance and its promise of emancipation. ‘Mediating between thisrationalisticrepression and this corporeal desire, emerging on the “surface of the body,” are the phantasms — “ethereal bodies,” embodied meanings. Here, all theexemplary moral struggles of humanist sociok: ony — between structure and agency, repression and resistance, rationality and being —are played out “atthe interface where society meets human bodies.” Arthur Frank is another writer who believes in the existence of such aninterface. Offering usa typology of forms in which social structure is “embodied” in bodies, Frank in fact moves through an exemplary dialectical spiral. On the one hand there are bodies that have been tendered. “predictable,” either by discipline (“disciplined bodies”) or through emulation and imitation (“mirroring bodies”). On the other there are bodies that repress others, the paradigm case being the instrumentally used military body (“dominating bodies”). Mediating between the predictable and the dominating, the instrument and the ‘instrumental, is the “communicative body”: ‘The body's association with itself is no longer a mirroring, but is realization, Whatisrealizedissimply the body itself, recursively, through the variations ofa life which is no longer appropriated by institutions and discourses but is now the body's own. The ‘body continues to be formed among institutions and discourses, ‘butthesearenowmedia foritsexpression. Forthecommunicative body, institutionsnow enable more than they constrain, whilein the other body styles the opposite prevailed. (Frank 80) ‘Thepattenofthoughishouldbeclearenough. Thedialectical theorisation ofthebodyprovidesafigureofthoughthcugh whichallthe departments and meds of human existence ean be organised around a single contrapuntal exchange, between repression and expression, the “unconscious and knowledge. From this reconciliatory alchemy emerges the possibility that the enlire repressive apparatus of society might be ttansmuted, turned into the expressive body of the subject. “There are three: features of the dialectical ‘conception to which I wish to draw attention. In the first place it unifies the body and the mind (or Subjectivity) through the relations of mutual exclusion and dialectical17%6 Jan Hunter opposition that it establishes between them. All bodily attributes form a unity because they are the instraments through which an immaterial reason seeks to realise its instrumental purposes in the material world. ‘This remains the case even in those variants of thedoctrine that insiston the resistance of the body, on the unconscious character of desire, and on theconsequent splintering of consciousnessinto unconscious fragments, drives and pulsions. Here the fragmented body remains theoretically unified by its oppositional relation to disembodied subjectivity. The samecommentapplies'o disembodied subjectivity all“mental”etibutes are unified by a directive and purposive will that seeks to materialise itself by treating the body as an instrument. ‘Second, because it thus specifies and unifies them througha practice of mutual opposition, the dialectical conception is wedded to a single generalreatonbetween “body” and “subjectivity.” Tisisthe dialectical relation in which the mind’s will to control bodily desire (repression), and the body’s impulse for polymorphous satisfaction (perverse desire), reach an optimal reconciliation in the form of the controlled satisfaction Of desire (Sublimation). The bracketed expressions are not meant to invoke the workof Freud in particular, but to indicate the whole tradition of dialectical thinking of which Freudian theory is an instance. For the present, it is only the notion of a single exemplary relation between “body” and “mind” that concerns us —no matter whether in the form of Hegel'smaster-slave relationor Freud’sego-id dialectic. Theorganising telos of this relation is of course “the formation of the subject.” ‘Third, we can note that this dialectical theorisation of the body is simultaneously a means of establishing a certain social and “spiritual” position for the dialectician. In positioning the body as the space of Teconciliation between an instrumental rationality and an ineffable corporeality — between a too-conscious intellect and an unconscious soma — the dialectical exercise creates a privileged vantage for the intellectual. Situated at the point where “society” is unified by the “unconscious” subjectivity that it determines, itis the intellectual’s role to invert this determination, to give voice to the dumb resistance of the body, and to speak in the name of the society of the future, where institutions will become transparent to the long repressed drives and dreams of the body. ‘These three features — the oppositional mirroring of bodyand mind, the single general dialectical relation, and the privileged site of moral vision that it affords dialecticians — lie at the heart of recent dialectical meditations on the body, linking them to the moral thematics of post- Kantian philosophy. I have isolated them in this way in order to maximise the contrast with Mauss's descriptive anthropology of human attributes, contained in his essays on body techniques and the category of the person. Perhaps the single most important lesson of these essays —one that continues to elude many modern commentatorsand, indeed, flies in the face of the entire tradition of Christian philosophy, including its post-Kantian offshoot — is that those human attributes that we call “bodily” and “mental” have no essential relation to each other.| | | | ' i i stems swan: Mind Games and Body Techniques w7 Mauss treats these attributes as the products of a wide variety of ifferentdisciplines, techniques and institutions, with their own histories, their own departmentsof existence, and their own placeinourbiological, social and spiritual organisation. To divide these attributes into the bodily and themental makes sense for certain purposes —asforexample when we talk of “mental arithmetic’ as opposed to the pen and paper kind — but there is no difference of essence. For this reason the relation between bodily and mental attributes has no single dialectical form, organised by the polarities of the subject, and must be approached as a series of historically specific assemblages, put together by “civilisation and its institutions.” With this broad orientation in mind let us look at ‘Mauss's essays in a little more detail! IL Body Techni First, a few comments on Mauss's essay on the body. ‘The following provides an irresistible comparison piece to Hegel’s accounts of the body of the child and the ethereal body. Under the heading ‘heghniques of carefor the body,” sub-heading “Care of the mouth,” we this: ‘Coughingand pitting technique. Hereisa personal observation. Alitiegididnotknew how ospitandhemadeevorycoldshe had much worse. Imade inquiries. In her father’s village and in her father’s family in particular, in Berry, people do not know how tospit. Itaughther to spit. I gave her four sous per spit. As she was saving up for a bicydle she learnt to spit. She is the first person in her family who knows how to spit. (84) Now forall its geniality, even idiosynerasy, this example is put together with a host of others in order to make an entirely serious point. Bodily dispositions, actionsand attributes spitting jumping, digging, dancing, swimming, giving birth, resting, marching, eating, squatting, gazing — have no natural form. They are acquired attributes varying across time jand between cultures. In fact, this standard anthropological observation is only Mauss's point of departure, He is after bigger fish: namely, the larification of what itis that these bodily attributes are attributes of. Mauss records that, having observed the factand variety of different luses of the body, he had at first noidea under what heading to group the Phenomena. He began with the traditional anthropological division of actions into rites and techniques, the latter being the actions necessary to attain some definite end. ‘The role of instruments in this notion of technique proved a stumbling-block, however; and it wasn’‘tuntil Mauss conceived of the body itself as the instrument and object of its own making — the body as its own manufactory — that the phenomena fell into place: Inthiscaseall thatneed be said is quitesimply that weare dealing, with techriquss ofthe body. "The bodly is man's first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of=== 178 Jan Hunter instruments, man’s firstand mostnatural technical cbject, and at ‘he same time technical means, is his body. (75) In tying the attributes of the body to body techniques Mauss is able to makea number of advances. In the first place, he is able to side-step the problems caused by competing biological, psychological and sociological explanations and their associated reductionisms. (He has Comtein his sights here.) The notion of body techniques, argues Mauss, requires that we adopt what he calls the “triple viewpoint,” as such techniques are indesluble snd unprinipled assemblages of biological, psychological and sociological elements. Techniques of swimming and diving, for example, have an evident and irreducible biological and anatomical component; even'so, not all peoples have been swimmers. ‘(Gome were like Mauss's little girl who could notspit.) At thesame time such techniques, if they are to succeed, involve taking into account and ‘overcoming a specific psychophysical reflex — the reflexof closing one’s eyesunderwater. Finally, ifthisreflexis tobe overcomeand theanatomy put to a new use then specific techniques will have to be transmitted, a specific training undergone — as many of us will know who have been ‘systematically “ducked” as children in order to overcome our instinctive fear of submersion. ‘This transmission of techniques is the sociological component, assuch techniquesareonly developed, toredand transmitted through social organisation and social relationships. ‘Second, as is already clear, Mauss moves to identity the sociological ‘with processes of education and the social relations that they embody: Education is broadly construed to include imitation and apprenticeship in informal settings as well as formal instruction in armies, monasteries and schools. Inall cases, says Mauss, anexercise of authority isinvolved. Inleaming a technique, the child is engaged ina practice of “prestigious imitation.” He or she imitates a figure who has social authority, or is admired as an exemplar, and this fact is connected to what Mauss calls the “psychological momentum” of bodily skills and abilities — the impetus behind their mastery and the confidence in their performance. Inshort,theadaptation of the body towards a particular goal through the mastery of a special technique is inseparable from the Social order and relationships embodied in training. This set of observations enables Mauss to produce something like a ‘working definition of the techniques that compose the body: constant adaptation to a physical, mechanical or chemical aim (eg, when we drink) is pursued in a series of assembled actions, and assembled for the individual not by himself alone butbyallhiseducation, by the wholesociety to whichhe belongs, in the place he occupies init. ("Techniques” 76) This notion of the shaping of the body through the mastery of specific assemblages of actions, stored and transmitted in particular social organisations and relationships, is fundamental to Mauss's account. Let ‘ussay that thebodily attributes for Maussarenot the dialectical expression ‘fsubjectivitybut theculturaland historical artefact ofparticular “gymnic” arts and technologies. At the same time, this body is not the site ofMind Games and Body Techniques 179 ‘unconscious pulsions directed against the coherence of the subject, such thatsocial techniques arecalled into existence indefence of thelatter. No, body techniquesrelateto subjectivity in Mauss’saccountnotby expressing themind nor by repressing the drives but through a far more contingent interaction: their relation in specific social settings to another domain of techniques, techniques of the self. In order to clarify this pointlet us pass cn to some brief comments on the second of Mauss's essays. IV Mind Games At the heart of Mauss's essay on the category of the person lies 2 distinction whose exact form we still have difficulty in discerning. This is the distinction between the concepts of individual and person. Mauss's ‘use of the term individual is quite unlike our standard use. He uses it to refer to the unstructured, biological and psychological human being as “raw material.” The notion of person on the other hand is construc -aspecialised product of social organisationand cultural institutions. Let us say that by person Mauss means those instituted capacities, rights, duties, statuses, virtues and traits through which societies organise the « lives of their members. Personae are inventions for living. Mauss wages aheroicstruggle against ourreflextendency toidentify individual and person. He does this by discussing various peoples and eultures in which not all individuals have (or are) persons, and in which ‘those who do, do not possess personhood in a “personal” manner. In these predominantly clan-based societies persons are special configurations of rights, statuses, capacities, traits which arenotinvested in the first instance in individuals but in trans-individual entities or institutions. ‘These entities and institutions — among which we find totems naming systems, masks, ritual genealogies —are responsible for { distribution of personhood to individuals that need not be universal ‘and may not be permanent. For example, certain individuals acquire “their persons through the forms of cultural organisation in which they ‘reincamnate the person of an ancestor or spirit. And they do so not, as we ‘would have it, as an expression of their inner selves but through public institutions such as ritual combat or ecstatic dance. Under such ‘Grcumstancesitis possible, though no doubt difficult forusto understand, for individuals to lose their persons and for others to acquire them. Mauss exemplifies this in the case of the Kwakiutl: For instance, fromconquestin war are acquired: a rank, a power, a religious and aesthetic function, dancing and demoniacal Possession, paraphernalia, and copper objects . . . important ‘currency for presentand future potlatch: itsuffices to kill the one {1 possessing them, or to seize from them one of the trappings of Titual, robes or masks, $0 as to inherit his names, his goods, his, obligations, his ancestors, his ‘person (personne), in the fullest ‘sense of the word. In this way ranks, goods, personal rights, and things, as well as their particular spirit, are acquired. Category” 8-9)180 Jan Hunter ‘We of course think of our persons — our rights, duties, capacities, virtues and traits — as inalienable, as rooted in the conscience and ‘consciousness of every individual. But the leading tendency of Mauss's ‘essays torelativisethis conception of the ”personasself.” Thisconception is treated as a special case, peculiar to the modern West, of the cultural forms in which personhood is claborated and ascribed to individuals. 1 say “leading” tendency because there isa strong counter-current in the argument which wets the relation between ‘modern Western and other lat ‘of the person as one of evolution towards the highest possible form. ‘This teleological current is the source of important Ambiguities in Mauss's argument; however, I will not discuss it further here except where clarification is required. ‘For the moment itismore important that we clarify Mauss's account of the modern notion of the personas self; that is, his treatmentofitas the sign of a particular cultural elaboration of personhood and a particular cultural means of distributing personhood to individuals. Mauss's historical anthropology of this notion — in fact ahistory of theemergence ofthe subject —is organised around two key moments f transformation taking place in the institutions of law and morality. The first of these transformations concerns the emer of the idea that person is a status that should attach toall individuals. Maussattributes thisidea not to a fundamental philosophical discovery but to a new mode of distributing the names, genealogies, masks and insignia of personhood, together with their attached rights, obligations and statuses. This mode ‘emerged ina specific department of existence under particular historical ‘circumstances. It was Roman law, argues Mauss, that first dissolved the distribution of personhood on the basis of clan genealogies and reconstituted it on the basis of the citizen's rolein the republic. This first ‘general distribution of personhood toindividuals, then, was the product Of a new “universalising” regulatory institution, and the first modern form of the person was the legal person. (Slaves of course were not legal persons. They Jacked ancestors, names and ownership of their bodies.) “The second set of transformations occurred in the institutions of religion and morality. To be a legal person is not yet to be a self, as the attributes of the individual's person — a delimited set of legal rights, liabilities, capacities — need have no “inner” direction or bearing. The attachmentof he attributes of theperson toan inner principleresponsible for their maintenance and conduct occurred first in specialised miliewx of ethical speculation and practice — Stoic and Christian. Mauss notes, that the Stoics developed a language of conscience that still spoke int termsof the public persona: to developan inner self you must “carve out your mask,” put on your “role,” “type” or “character” (“Category” 19). ‘The changeis clear: this language now relates toa practice of establishing an inner regulation of the public attributes of personhood. But itis ix Puritan ethics that this practice is most clearly seen — and here we can supplement Mauss's account with Weber's. The Puritan ethic represents the partial dissolution of a system in which individuals acquired their religious personas through the| “domains. Certain “body” techniques ‘Mind Games and Body Techniques 181 distributive rituals of the church; and it represents the emergence of a system in which the status and attributes of religious personhood are attached to an inner principle of monitoring and control: conscience and ‘consciousness. Onceagain whatisatstakeisnota fundamental discovery but the elaboration and dissemination of a new ethical institution. For ‘Weber itis not the doctrine of predestination that alone constitutes the Puritan ethic but the set of ethical techniques and practices through which individuals learned to conduct their lives in the absence of ‘collective guarantees of salvation. That individuals came to conceive of ‘themselves as the objects of their own ethical attention, that they came to Bigblematise and modify their own conduct on the basis ofthe ethical ing they aspired to— this was the result of a particular dissemination of ethical technique. We can follow Foucault in calling such techniques “techniques of the self.” And we can say that ifin the modem West the attributes of personhood have become attached to the conscience and “consciousness of individuals, this is because individuals have acquired the mastery of techniques for relating to themselves as the subjects of ‘their own conducts and capacities. V_ Prospects ‘What sort of relation exists then between bodily and mental attributesin Mauss's twin accounts? To my knowledge this question is not one that Mauss himself addresses at any length. Still itis not difficult to draw out fhe implications of his workin this regard, particularly when contrasted ‘with the dialectical conception of the relation discussed in our opening Sections. The overarching point is that for Mauss bodily and ment attributes are not the polar principles of a process whose goal is the formation of the subject. They are related instead at the level of cultural technique, through specific forms of life — the “subject” being the by- Product of one such technology of existence elaborated in European Societies. {Let us develop this contrast in a little more detail. In the first place, “unlike the dialectical conception, in Mauss's account bodily and mental Attributes do not form two mutually opposed and intemally unified i for example, those in which the body istmade to undergo ascetic testing in order to strengthen composure 28d form the will — may have directly “spiritual” or intellectual aspects ‘and outcomes: ._<_,_ Tthink that the basic education in all these techniques consists of an adaptation of the body to their use. tests of stoicism, etc,, which constitute of mankind, have as their aim to teach composure, resistance, seriousness, presence of mind, dignity, ete. Themain utility 1sc¢ Jn my erstwhile mountaineering was this education of my composure, which enabled me to sleep upright on the narrowest ledge overlooking an abyss. (Mauss, “Techniques” 86)182 Ian Hunter In case this image of the anthropologist suspending himself over an abyss fails to charm, one might equally mention the techniques of ‘reathing and posture that form part of certain Buddhist meditational pret. These tooarebody techniques withno principled differentiation sm mental or spiritual states. To the contrary, they havea key role in indueing such states and in creating the condition of holiness that accompanies them. Naither is the distinction any neater from the other side, from the pointof view of the “mind.” We know that post Kantian philosophy has osited a single point of consciousness — the subject of reason Enderlying and unifying all the different “conditions” or techniques of knowledge. This perspective hasbynomeansbeenuncontested, however. ‘The later philosophy of Wittgenstein, for example, is anti-Kantian in just thisregard, treating “mind” and knowledgeas loose domainscomposed ofa dispersed array of intellectual techniques and forms of life. More ecently Amélie Rorty has developed her own version of this line of analysis, providing us with this summary formulation: “{Haditionally, minds were characterized by their patterned, discriminating activities, usually described as conscious or {intentional and often taken to be susceptible to introspective examination. But the activities that were attributed to minds — thinking, perceiving, sensing, desiring, imagining, inferring, willing, being emotionally affected — are extremely heterogeneous, each being composed of quite diverse subprocesses... Litle ifanything, isadded to the explanation of theze various activities by the additional claim that they are performed by a mind, or that they are all mental activities, as Spposed, presumably, to physical activities. (6) Rorfy continues thatonce “mental activities” havebeen disaggregated in this way we will find that some are not clearly distinguishable fom aychophysoa! ‘activities. An example mentioned by Wittgenstein is "Rinese abacus-based arithmetic, an activity in which mathematical computation is inseparable from manual dexterity and visual patlery recognition. Inshort the boundary between bodily and mentalattributes js routinely crossed in both directions. Once these attributes have becn decribed to a variety of historically invented techniques and practices {then there is no reason to separate them by a division of substance or ‘essence, into physical and mental, body and soul. Second, because of this there are no grounds for positing a single I dialectical relation between attributes that might (for certain Blposes) be identified as bodily or mental. There will of course bs Perpos kinds of alliance and interaction between body and mind Techniques but there is no reason why these should have a general form. ‘xfundion. Thisrelationis givena general form nthe dialectical account because it is held to be go’ ‘by a single goal or function: the pecalifion of the subject. And, as we have noted, at the heart of this pecountis the notion that bodily attributes are unconscious, in the sense flying beyond the reachof consciousknowiedge, resisting tsrationality184 Jan Hunter histories of personhood provided by Peter Brown and Caroline Walker Bynum. ‘These histories scrupulously avoid speaking of the body and society in general and examine only the forms in which certain bodily disciplines have been deplayed as techniques of spiritual grooming inside the religious sphere. They eschew therefore that gesturein whi the intellectual, positioned as the privileged interpreter of the body's ‘ruth, presumes to speak for dumb humanity in the name of the body's ‘emancipation, This political modesty is not the least of the lessons that ‘we can leam from their work and from Mauss's. Griffith University Jan Hunter 1. The following exposition drawsheavily on the Person and Culture course in which Iwas reenough to teach at the Faculty of Humanities, Griffith University, in the Years 1986-92. Tam indebted to David Saunders Jeffrey Minson Dugald Williamson and Jenny Craik with whom Itaught the course and to Paul flist and Penny Woolley's Social Relations and Human Attributes ‘which helped us get our bearings. ‘Worxs Cire Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early ‘Christianity. New York: Cotumbia UP, 1988. Bymum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast The Religious Significance of "Food to Medieval Viomen, Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. Carrithers, MS. Collins and S. Lukes, eds. The Category of the | Person: “Anthropoligy, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Featherstone, M. etal, eds. The Bay: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1991. Frank, Arthur W. “For a Sociology of the Body: An Analytical Review.” Featherstone 36-102. Foucault Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. 1976, Trans. Robert Hurley. London: Alan Lane, 1979. Hegel, G.W.F. Systems of Ethical Lifeand First Pilosopty of Spirit, Bd. and trans. YS Hrs 9nd TM Knox. Albany: State U of New York P1979. Fist Paul and Penny Woolley. Social Relations aud Human Atiributes. London: “Tavistock, 1982. Hunter, lan, “Aosthetics and Cultural Studies.” C. Nelson etal, eds. Cultural ‘Studies, New York: Routledge, 1991. 347-66. _——. “Getting Limits to Culture.” New Formations 4 (1988): 725-38. Lash, Scott. “Genealogy and the Body.” Featherstone 256-80.Mind Games and Body Techniques 185 Maus M, 7 Category ofthe Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self.” Trans W.D. Halls. Carrithers etal, 1-25. ——.,, "Techniques of the Body.” Trans. B.Brewster. Economy and Society 2. 1.973): Rory, Atte. 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