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Rendering the Body: The Implicit Lessons of Gross Anatomy

a
Brian Pronger
a
School of Physical and Health Education at the University of Toronto, 320 Huron Street , Toronto ,
ON , Canada , M5S 1Al
Published online: 16 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Brian Pronger (1995) Rendering the Body: The Implicit Lessons of Gross Anatomy, Quest, 47:4, 427-446, DOI:
10.1080/00336297.1995.10484168

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00336297.1995.10484168

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 QUEST, 1995, 47,427-446
63 1995 National Association for Physical Education in Higher Education

Rendering the Body:

The Implicit Lessons of Gross
Anatomy
Brian Pronger
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This paper explores the role played by gross anatomy courses in university
physical education curricula in developing objectifying attitudes toward the
body in professional physical education practices. Calling on postmodern
analyses of the politics of knowledge and the production of bodies, it is
argued that students' experiences of the gross anatomy laboratory is actually
an educational rite of passage in coming to see the body as a mechanical
object, a useful resource in the production of physical capital. This profes-
sional attitude toward the body contributes to the abuse of the body in
consumer culture, high performance sport, and the production of gendered
bodies.

The manner in which social interest becomes seamlessly incorporated in

the set of tacit assumptions about reality is the key to the social significance
of knowledge. (Comaroff, 1982, p. 50)

The instructor-a mature woman, who until that moment seemed more
like a nice auntie whose greatest pleasure in life was baking cookies for nieces
and nephews-pulled the cover from a partially dissected cadaver, drew back
the skin, lifted the abdominal muscles away from the gut and revealed the
intestines of what was a rather large man. This was my first visit to the gross
anatomy lab. She told me to stick my hands inside the man and move the intestines
around. "The only way you really learn anatomy," she said, "is to get your
hands inside and manipulate the parts of the body." While I was keen to learn
about the body, I was reluctant to make such a dramatic entry. But I did it anyway
and learned what I needed to know about the structure of the peritoneum. And
I felt a tremendous sense of power.
Normally I wouldn't consider sticking my hands into the abdomen of a
dead man, moving his organs about. I had always found the inner reaches of a
person's body to be a place of mystery, to which one is given access by the

Brian Pronger is with the School of Physical and Health Education at the University
of Toronto, 320 Huron Street, Toronto, ON Canada M5S 1Al.
 428 PRONGER

living (and I hadn't given that much consideration to the bodies of dead) only
under the most intimate, indeed mysteriously erotic, circumstances. Yet here I
was learning something important about the living body from a dead body: The
body need not be a mystery; any part of it is accessible to my probing hands,
eyes, or mind. It was a rich moment, a rite of passage. Here was the confirmation
of what science had always been told me about the body, but which from my
own experience had always rung false: The body is an object. In my hands, that
dead man's intestines were objectified, subjected to my manipulations. That event
of subjection was the source of my newfound sense of power. As a student of
physical education, I realized that the power of my profession lay in its ability
to manipulate the body, to make it an efficient resource. The study of gross
anatomy was integral to getting to know the body in this way.
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Introduction
The body is a malleable, useful object in (post)modern culture. There is
ample evidence of this: Michael Featherstone (1991), for example, has described
how the body has become an object of consumption for consumer capitalism;
the body is treated as an object much like any other one might own, an object
bearing social significance, requiring shaping and continuous maintenance. This
is the fashionable body purchased with the products of the beauty and physical
fitness industries. Such consumerist objectification of the body, Featherstone
says, has resulted in people engaging in physical activity not as a "sensuous
experience in harmony with embodied and physical nature," but as a vehicle to
"the welter of benefits called up by the market and health experts" (Featherstone,
1991, pp. 185-186). When this objectified body fails to deliver the promised
look or freedom from disease, as eventually all bodies must, people experience
disappointment and alienation from their bodies. Furthermore, Featherstone
(1991) states,

Part of the strength of consumer culture comes from its ability to harness
and channel genuine bodily needs and desires, albeit that it presents them
within a form which makes their realization dubious. The desire for health,
longevity, sexual fulfilment, youth and beauty represent a reified entrapment
of transhistorical human longing within distorted forms. Yet in a time of
diminished economic growth, permanent inflation and shortages of raw
materials, the contradictions within the consumer-culture values become
more blatant, not only for those who are excluded-the old, unemployed,
low paid-but also for those who participate most actively and experience
more directly the gap between the promise of the imagery and the exigencies
of everyday life. (p. 193)

Susan Bordo (1993b) has described the traditional dualisms of Western

culture that have established the body as separate from the self. This separation
renders the body a problematic object in need of disciplinary control. In the
modem setting, Bordo says, the body is experienced as a manipulable object that
needs to be molded so that it can fulfill culturally defined expectations, such as
the production and maintenance of the profoundly different shapes to which
 RENDERWG THE BODY 429

feminine and masculine bodies are supposed to conform. Seeing the body as
culturally manipulable, Bordo argues, has resulted in an epidemic of anxiety
about its shape. This is most striking in the increasing incidence of clinical
anorexia nervosa among women. Bordo adds that this anxiety is more widely
expressed in the discomfort with the body that is experienced by most women-
anorexia is only the most dramatic manifestation of a widespread cultural malaise.
Men, too, are susceptible to anxiety about the shape of their bodies, although
rather than leading to a wasting of the body, as in the case of anorexia (a
predominantly female problem), men go to great lengths to increase the size of
their bodies (Bordo, 1993a). The growing popularity of weight lifting and cos-
metic surgery (e.g., liposuction, pectoral implants) attests to this concern among
men. Recent profeminist scholarship on men in sport explores how the patriarchal
nature of male athleticism encourages young men to treat their bodies as objects,
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an attitude that is often quite harmful, inducing men to brutalize their own bodies
and the bodies of others in pursuit of patriarchal masculinity (Messner, 1992;
Messner & Sabo, 1990, 1994; Pronger, 1990, Whitson, 1990).
Michel Foucault (1979, pp. 135-194) shows how, in the 19th century, the
body came to be seen as a useful machine that needs to be trained to fit the
larger machinery of society. This, he says, is the body made docile, tamed to be
useful to the needs of society. He refers to this as the anatomo-politics of the
body. The power to make the body fit the machinery of society is inextricably
linked to knowledge of the body that conceptualizes it as a useful mechanistic
object. This power to know and thus produce the body in particular ways appears
in contemporary culture in high-performance sport training where the body is
trained in every detail to produce results, to be the perfect machine for the
production of athletic records, national prestige, and commercial success. John
Hoberman (1992) documents this phenomenon-albeit with no reference to Fou-
cault's substantial critique of how modem power is implemented through the
technoscientific production of the body as a machine-in Mortal Engines: The
Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport. Hoberman describes
the great harm that "the science of performance" has done to the bodies of
many athletes, in the form of overtraining, drug abuse, and in some cases, even
death.
As coaches, fitness consultants, personal trainers, and teachers, physical
educators play an important role in shaping bodies and attitudes toward them.
This paper will explore one element in the university education of physical
educators that facilitates an objective attitude toward the body as a useful machine:
the study of gross anatomy.
Gross anatomy has a privileged position in university physical education
curricula. It is a required course in most core curricula and is usually a prerequisite
for many other courses. Modem biological knowledge of the human body is
firmly rooted in gross anatomy. Indeed, Michel Foucault has argued-and few
would disagree-that the birth of modem medicine and the biological sciences
of the body was dependent upon the anatomical studies of the 18th century. And
the knowledge produced in those dissections in conjunction with the undeniable
preeminence of the biological sciences in the modem episteme (Foucault's word
for an historical period's conceptions of order, signs, and language, as well as
the conceptions of knowledge they presuppose) has shaped the modem conception
of the body (Foucault, 1973). While not all university physical education curricula
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 RENDERING THE BODY 43 1

From the perspective of Continental philosophy, it could be argued that

the anatomical body has no real ontological status, that this body is purely a
represented body, a body that finds its existence only in texts. In other words,
the anatomical body that students are taught to see in the medical, health, and
physical education sciences can be deconstructed by showing the historical social
sources of the texts that represent it. The body that modem students witness in
the dissection laboratories in the basements of medical science buildings is
anatomical only insofar as an indoctrination in anatomical texts compels students
to "read" the body itself as an anatomical text. This continental perspective
effectively denies the modem realist belief that the words about the anatomical
body describe an actual body, that there is a correlation between the anatomical
text and the "real" body, an identity of the sign and the signified. This modem
realist belief in the identity of texts with a "real" world independent of texts is
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fundamental to most modem scientific thinking and writing; however, there are
exceptions to this in the "new physics" and the more reflexive branches of the
human/social sciences that have become critical of the social construction of
their own scientific beliefs, methods, data, and conclusions.
In this paper I will not enter into the debate about the ontological status
of the world that texts supposedly describe. I will allow that modem science has
"found" an anatomical body and leave questions about the nature of that "find-
ing" alone. The anatomical sciences make a simple claim: The body described
by anatomy exists; when students learn anatomy, they learn the structure and
names of the body's parts. This claim will not be scrutinized here. And it needn't
be, for it cannot be denied that we live in a world that believes this claim and
has developed a host of medical, health, and physical educative practices around
it. Gross anatomy curricula work within this social system, producing people
with anatomical knowledge that is useful in that social system. This is the explicit
cumculum of gross anatomy, and will be left uncontested here. But anatomy
also has important implicit lessons. It is those lessons and their sociocultural
significance that I will address.
Methodologically speaking, this paper is an explication de texte. What is
explicated here is the pedagogical event in which physical education students
manipulate the parts of a dead body. This explication will attempt to show the
implicit significance of this pedagogical act. That act is taken as a crystallizing
moment not only for examining the sociocultural attitude to the body that the
act presupposes but also for considering the role of that act, the curriculum, and
the educative process in the production of bodies such that they will be integrated
into the needs-of modem technological society. I will gaze into the manipulations
of the dead body and see how they contribute pedagogically to the production
of the technological living body of modem society.
Using the work of Martin Heidegger (1938, 1954, 1962), I will argue that
we live in an epoch of technological domination, an epoch in which everything
is turned into a resource. A resource is a thing that has no significant being in
its own right but is instead useful for other projects. Over the last 150 years
technological domination has come to include the life of the human species: The
human body itself is marshaled as a resource. Made such a resource, the body
is under the control of a social project larger than itself. The body is thus produced
as a technological body. To establish the sociological connection between the
project of technology and the social function of bodies, I will draw on Michel
 432 PRONGER

Foucault's analysis of the subjection of human beings in the power relations of

capitalism.
One of the specific sites for the technological subjection of the body is the
practice of physical education, which includes the cultures of sport and physical
fitness. This technology of the body is reproduced in the education of physical
educators. To elucidate the relationship between technological culture and educa-
tion in the production of the technological body, I will adapt the theory of
reproduction developed in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, by
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1990), who argue that the dominant
culture is reproduced educationally by the creation of an implicit cultural habitus
for the lives of students. I will then return to the anatomy curriculum and
laboratory, arguing that the lab experience constitutes a rite of confirmation
of a technological habitus for physical educators, one that then facilitates the
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reproduction of the technological body as a resource in the lives of the students

or the clients of physical educators. I will conclude with some thoughts on the
possibilities of a pedagogical disruption or transformation of the reproduction of
the technological body.

Technology
That we North Americans live in a technological world is beyond dispute;
everywhere we look we see the artifacts of technology and people engaged with
them. Modem technology is usually understood as a host of advanced tools and
techniques that have been created by humans to maximize the effectiveness of
various projects. For example, medical technology is an advanced method for
curing the sick; nuclear technology is an advanced method for producing electric-
ity; computer technology is an advanced method for processing information; and
so on. Technology is understood as essentially benign. It might be used for
horrible projects, such as the atomic bomb, but this is not a problem of technology
itself, but of the misuse of technology's power.
Martin Heidegger (1938, 1954, 1962), on the other hand, has said that
technology is no technological thing. CAT scanners, megadams, super computers,
and atomic bombs are only the products of technology. Heidegger says that in
its essence, technology is a way of disclosing being. This is not in itself bad.
The problem arises when such disclosure becomes aggressive, foreclosing on
how beings would otherwise emerge from themselves. Modem technology is
aggressive in this way. It makes things into other things in a way that is completely
insensitive to the original's self-emergence. Modem technology goes about this
aggressiveness by marshaling beings as resources, that is, making them into
something that is first and foremost useful for something else. A terrain of rivers
and lakes in northern Quebec, for instance, is taken by Hydro Quebec not as
rivers and lakes in their own right, but as things that can be aggressively changed
and forced to produce massive amounts of electricity. Modem technology is not
the dams, but the aggressive stance that allows the terrain of rivers and lakes to
become mere resources for the economic benefits of Hydro Quebec. In beings,
modern technology seeks not their own self-emergence (not the presence of rivers
and lakes in their own right, as they might show themselves from themselves),
but seeks only their potential as resources.
 RENDERING THE BODY 433

The environmental destruction for which modem technology is responsible

is a well-known phenomenon. But technology has not stopped at the environment;
its aggressive resourcefulness is also directed at human beings. We have technolo-
gized not only the earth, its vegetation, and our fellow creatures but also ourselves.
Humans are now seen as resources. For instance, it is commonplace to hear that
"the nation's children constitute its greatest resource." Most large institutions-
including educational institutions-no longer have personnel departments, they
have departments of human resources. Formal higher education, in the main, is
geared to preparing people to be human resources of value to the economic
system.
The transformation of human beings as resources is not a fait accompli; it
is an ongoing struggle. The technological subjection of humans is not static; it
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is a social process taking place in the relations of power. Foucault (1980) offers
a comprehensive and active account of power in the project of human subjection:

Power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force

relations, immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute
their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles
and confrontations transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support
which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a
system, or on the contrary, the disfunctions and contradictions which isolate
them from one another; and lastly as the strategies in which they take
effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in
the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social
hegemonies. (Foucault, 1980, pp. 92-93, emphasis mine)

A full exegesis of power in the project of technology would fill volumes.

For the limited aims of this paper, however, it is sufficient to discuss how that
power is at work in the physical education of the body. I will briefly explain the
significance of force relations, process, and support in the production of the
technological body and then discuss the strategic role of the gross anatomy lab
in the process of subjection.

The Technological Body

The body is the site of a multitude of force relations. Consider how struggles
of gender, race, class, and nationhood are inscribed, instantiated, negotiated, and
embattled in masculine/feminine, BlackiWhite, richlpoor, or Muslim/Croatian/
Serbian bodies. Likewise, the body is a contested terrain for the struggles of
technology. Technology, I have said, is an aggressive mode for the disclosure
of beings as resources. The force relations here are between modes of emergence:
self-emergence and technological emergence.' This is the struggle between the
body emerging as a being in its own right and emerging as a thing that is primarily
useful. This is a relational matter, of modes of emergence playing off each other.
It becomes a question, therefore, of degree. To what degree is the body's self-
emergence negated by the aggressiveness of its technological emergence? And
contrarily, to what degree is the aggressiveness of technology undermined by
the self-determination of the self-emergent body? "Who," in other words, is
 434 PRONGER

winning? An answer to these questions should become apparent by continuing

this analysis of the three other components of Foucault's definition of power:
process, support, and strategies.
Power, Foucault (1980) says, is "the process which, through ceaseless
struggles and confrontations transforms, strengthens, or reverses" (p. 92, empha-
sis mine) force relations. The process by which technology subjects the body to
technological imperatives is the aggressive marshaling of the body as a useful
thing. The more purely useful it is made to appear, the more dominance technology
is accorded. Thus the relative force of technology, its control of the body,is
strengthened by the recruitment of the body as useful. There are many examples
of this in our society. Particularly germane here is the body kept physically fit
in corporate exercise programs. There are many companies, especially in the
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insurance sector, that invest in exercise programs for the employees' in order to
keep their bodies more productive for the company (Shephard, 1986). High
performance sport is another example: The athletic bodies that are recruited by
national teams are coercively subjected to a vast array of unhealthy regimens-
drugs, violent interactions with other players, extensive overtraining, and so on
(Hoberman, 1992)-for various needs of the state (Macintosh & Whitson, 1990).
Athletic bodies are a nation's resource. And taking advantage of a complex
philosophical maneuver that separates the "person" from his or her body-
precisely the dualism that Susan Bordo (1993b) critizes-are a growing number
of people in modem society who engage in physical exercise so that their "bod-
ies'' can be more useful to "them." The "bodies" are used by their "owners"
as resources for some sort of disembodied mind, spirit, or person. And as Mike
Featherstone (1991) has argued, fit, healthy-looking bodies have become objects
of consumption in consumer culture, resources in the economics of consumer
capitalism. In these and many other ways, the forces that render the body as a
resource are strengthened.
Foucault also speaks of the reversal of force relations. Are there reversals
in the process of technologizing the body? The "fitness movement" and sports
industry are evidence of the strengthening of the technological body, and signs
of a reversal of this process are negligible. There is resistance on the fringes of
society, among some feminists, for instance, who oppose what they see in this
technologizing process as a patriarchal domination of the body (Bernstein, 1986;
Birke, 1985; Braude, 1988; Dreifus, 1977). There are some phenomenologists
who would like to bring the body back into its own right (Levin, 1985; Pronger,
1995; Shapiro, 1985). But in the world of physical education there has been little
resistance to the technologizing of the body; in fact there has been a significant
move to make faculties of physical education ever more technological (MacIn-
tosh & Whitson, 1990). Although in the overall process of technologization there
is the theoretical possibility of reversal, at the present historical juncture there
seems to be little actual resistance to the project. One of the major reasons for
this may be that there is considerable support within these force relations for the
continued domination of technology.
Foucault speaks of the support force relations find in one another. Techno-
logical and self-emergence are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the body can
so embrace the technological project that its self-emergence is technological.
Heidegger (1927) speaks of human beings as "thrown" into the world in which
they find themselves; being in that world, they become that world, emerging
 RENDERING THE BODY 435

integrated into the world in which they have been thrown. Thrown into a techno-
logical world, we emerge technologically. Describing us as cyborgs, Donna
Haraway (1985) emphasizes our technological emergence: "A cyborg is a cyber-
netic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism" (p. 65). Citing the widespread
myth of humans as machines, the body as a machine-a myth found not only
in science fiction but also in the metaphors of actual science-and pointing out
the degree to which human bodies are modified by the actual insinuation of
cybernetic parts in human bodies (pacemakers, artificial retinas, etc.), Haraway
shows the degree to which our bodies and our selves, have been technologized.

Reproduction of the Technological Body

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Strategy
Technology is not simply forced upon us; we are not made resources
completely against our wills. Many of us go about our lives striving to be ever
better resources, embracing our usefulness as an essential part of our identities.
In our social system, bodies will not emerge from themselves for long if they
do not make themselves useful. Most bodies' continued existence in capitalist
society depends upon their availability as resources. So one of the supports for
the technologization of the body is that the body must emerge technologically
if it is to survive.
While the body's survival may depend upon its technologization, it must
be taught to do so. Education forms one of the strategies for this process. Pierre
Bourdieu and Claude Passeron (1990) studied the way education forms a strategy
for the reproduction of power. While their theory addressed power in the sense
of the reproduction of power between various groups (i.e., classes), the theory
can also be adapted to show the way technological power is transmitted in
university education. Bourdieu speaks of "the contribution that the educational
system makes to the reproduction of the social structure by sanctioning the
hereditary transmission of cultural capital" (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 244). Cilltural
capital is a "cultivated disposition for appropriating knowledge and culture"
(Epstein, 1991, p. 41). The cultural capital in this instance is the disposition to
see and render the body technologically, by understanding and then treating the
body as a resource. Those who have sophisticated abilities to objectify and thus
use their own bodies and the bodies of others resourcefully are in a better position
to survive and reap the "benefits" of life in a technological society. Education
gives those who undergo it the cultural capital of technology.
From a political point of view, gross anatomy contributes to the production
of health professionals in physical education who are capable of seeing the body
as an object, of employing the scientific gaze, and ultimately, of marshaling the
body as an instrument of the project of technological modernity, a project that
is inextricable from the needs of capitalism (Turner, 1990, p. 6; Wexler, 1990,
p. 170). Gross anatomy is based in bourgeois medicine, which, as Aronowitz
(1988) states,
has developed a practice that reflects capitalist rationality, that is, corre-
sponds to the fragmentation of the worker in the labour process, and has
viewed the human being as an object isolated from its social context. The
 436 PRONGER

scientific object, the human body, is viewed as an autonomous organism

whose functions can be separated from its real existence. (p. 65)

Anatomy teaches the functions of the body, and does so as if these functions
have no sociopolitical foundation; that is, anatomy assumes that body functions
are simply there, independent of the political power relations of technology, of
the project of seeing the body as technologically useful. So, implicit in the
pedagogy of anatomy is a technological attitude toward the body; the bridge
between functionality and usefulness being easy to traverse once the body has
been rendered a functional object.

Habitus
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In the study of gross anatomy, students learn much more than the locations
of body parts and their physical~functions,which are the explicit lessons of
anatomy. Students also learn an implicit foundational attitude toward the body
that will structure their professional practice. Such a foundational attitude Bour-
dieu and Passeron (1990) call a habitus, which they define as a habitual "system
of schemes of perception, thought, appreciation and action" (p. 35). A major
feature of a habitus is that although it indeed structures consciousness and human
action, the habitus itself remains unconscious. In this way the habitus is beyond
question, relatively easily reproduced and, thus, effectively maintained. Our soci-
ety's technological habitus is for the most part unquestioned. As Comoraff (1982)
argues, modern science has a depoliticizing role (p. 59): The political aspects of
scientific work are not part of the science itself. Political agendas, such as the
power relations of technology, are disguised by the supposed neutrality of scien-
tific objectivity. In this way the technological habitus remains unquestioned in
the pedagogy of scientific courses such as anatomy.
Before discussing the methods by which the technological habitus is repro-
duced in the education of physical educators, I will give some consideration to
the "nature" of that habitus. What are the implicit lessons of anatomy that
contribute to the technological habitus? There are four aspects of the habitus
inculcated in gross anatomy: The body is seen as (a) an object, (b) a machine,
(c) completely accessible to the scientific gaze and therefore the needs of technol-
ogy, and (d) something separate and useful to a disembodied mind or spirit.
Students learn to see the body objectively, and that objective gaze comes
to assume that the body itself is an object. Rene Fox (1988) describes this lesson
as one of acquiring an attitude of "detached concern." Preparing for this paper,
I interviewed a professor of the gross anatomy course in a university physical
education faculty; he stressed the importance of students learning "objective
information," working in the laboratory efficiently, maintaining an objective
attitude toward the specimens, and "overcoming their emotional reactions."
Here is a collapse between one narrowly scientific way of seeing the body (i.e.,
objectively), and the total way that the body appears in the full emotional,
intellectual, and cultural complexity of our human engagement in the life and
death of the body. The distinction between the narrowness of the scientific gaze
and what is seen in the fullness of human perception is lost. This objective,
scientific way of gazing upon the body is privileged as being not just one culturally
produced gaze among others, but is proferred as being the truthful representation
 RENDERING THE BODY 437

of the body as it actually is, independent of culture. By this conflation, an

objective attitude produces the body as an object.
It is very difficult to be anything but objective in the gross anatomy lab.
Any emotional engagement is discouraged (Fox, 1988; Penney, 1985). The archi-
tecture of the anatomy lab--its extreme cleanliness, bright lights, and shiny
stainless steel and tile surfaces+reates an "aseptic, efficient atmosphere" (Fox,
1988, p. 53), thus encouraging an attitude of detachment. The humanity of the
cadavers is deemphasized in this situation. A medical student told Fox (1988),
"[In anatomy] the cadaver is pretty well mummified. . . . As a result, you don't
consider the cadaver as a former human being-but as a species of anatomy. Its
personality is wrapped up, so to speak" (Fox, 1988, p. 63). Another medical
student explained how he or she objectified the body as a result of gross anatomy,
"Now when I see a lung, for example, I concentrate on its structure. . . . I don't
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picture its being in someone who was once living, breathing, and talking" (Fox,
1988, p. 63). The body of the dead person is thus seen not as a fellow human
being, but as an object of study. Indeed, it lies quite simply on the stainless steel
table as an educational resource.
The body's fragmentation in the anatomy lab helps to render it an object.
The whole person is dis-integrated by anatomy. Physical education students at
my university are now instructed with prosected parts of cadavers; they never
deal with the whole body. Thus fragmented, arms and legs are only arms and
legs, they are not integral parts of human beings; the arms and legs lose their
reference in the whole. Another aspect of this objectification is that the body
can be acted upon, manipulated, and controlled by the students, and there is no
resistance from the body. In this way the body is seen as a machine that will do
what it is made to do. The metaphor of the body as a machine is very important
to anatomy; the gross anatomy instructor I interviewed referred to the "human
machine" numbers of times during the interview. Students are taught to see
machinelike qualities in the body. They are told, for instance, to observe that
the hand and fingers are made to move by muscles, which act as pulleys, and
the students pull on the muscles to make the hand move, just as they would pull
on pulley^.^
Another element of the technological habitus is the de-position of the body
as the source of mystery. Dissected, the body can be completely exposed. The
body thus holds nothing back. There is no mystery to the exposed cadaver; it is
shown purely as an object useful for learning, an educational resource. Now,
students are urged by the instructor to treat cadavers with respect, keeping in
mind that they were once living human beings. This respect, however, is not the
respect for once living human beings. This is respect for science and its objects
of study. It is not respect for the body as self-disclosing, but for science and its
power to show beings not on their own terms but according to the projections
of science (Heidegger, 1962). Thus exposed, harboring no mysteries, produced
scientifically, the body's power of self-emergence is diminished, made accessible
to the needs of technology.
And finally, something that has a profound effect on the power of the
technological habitus is learned in the anatomical play of life and death. Foucault
points out that the development of pathological anatomy in the 19th century
brought a new gaze upon death (Foucault, 1975, pp. 140ff.). Death was no longer
"that absolute, privileged point at which time stops and moves back" but is
 438 PRONGER

instead "multiple and dispersed in time" (Foucault, 1975, p. 142). A transforma-

tion of life and death occurred in the 18th century:
Instead of being what it so long had been, the night in which life disappeared,
in which even the disease becomes blurred, [death] is now endowed with
that great power of elucidation that dominates and reveals both the space
of the organism and the time of the disease. The privilege of its intemporal-
ity, which is no doubt as old as the consciousness of its imminence, is
turned for the first time into a technical instrument that provides a grasp
on the truth of life and the nature of its illness. Death is the great analyst
that shows the connexions by unfolding them, and burst open the wonders
of genesis in the rigour of decomposition. . . . Analysis, the philosophy of
elements and their laws, meets its death in what it had vainly sought in
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mathematics, chemistry, and even language: an unsupersedable model,

prescribed by nature; it is on this great example that the medical gaze will
now rest. It is no longer that of a living eye, but the gaze of an eye that
has seen death-a great white eye that-unties the knot of life. (~obcault,
1975, p. 144)

The crucial turn here is that death becomes a technical matter which facilitates
the scientific gaze. Death is a point of technical access to the body. The scientific
gaze sees the body, not through the mysteries of life, but through the exposure
of death.
The anatomist has access to the body by virtue of its death. By looking at
the ethical rationale for this access, one will see something important about how
anatomy sets the habitus that gives technology access to the body. Vivisection
is not usually allowed in scientific practice because it does harm to the person
vivisected. But in death the person is understood to be no longer there. The
anatomy instructor explained it: "The owner has vacated the premises." Here
is a classical dualistic statement. The body is property owned by a disembodied
owner. This owner might be called mind, spirit, or soul. The point is that the
body is something the owner uses until death. The person is not the body; the body
is just something useful to the person. This dualistic relationship is highlighted in
the "legitimacy" of the anatomist's scientific or pedagogical use of the body
once it is dead. Since the body is no longer being used by its "owner," it can
now be used by anatomists and their students. And as Foucault argued, the crucial
point of the pedagogy of corpses is that one learns from the dead body the true
nature of the living body. Implicitly, this is the lesson that the body is useful.
And so one learns that in life, the body is useful, a resource for the owner and
the owner's society. Anatomy reinforces a dualism that produces the body as a
useful thing, somehow subsidiary to its owner. Therefore, the final aspect of the
technological habitus is this dualism that places the body at the service of some-
thing else. To summarize the nature of the technological habitus before going
on to a discussion of how it is pedagogically inculcated: The technological habitus
assumes that the body is an object, a machine, accessible to science and useful.
The technological habitus is reproduced in the education of physica1,educa-
tors. But this does not happen in isolation. The habitus is the product of a long
chain of technological development. We see technology everywhere. Technology
is reproduced in virtually every aspect of modern life. The "formal" education
 RENDERING THE BODY 439

of physical educators Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) would call "pedagogical

work." This pedagogical work is a strategy within the power relations of techno-
logical culture, enjoying, as it were the whole sociocultural system of support
for technology. Because pedagogical work is part of this chain of technological
development, the authority of the habitus is reaffirmed by the omnipresence of
technology. This, Bourdieu argues, is part of the logic of habitus. This circular
reproductive logic has the effect of keeping control, that is, of ensuring the
domination of technology.
It is unlikely that teachers of anatomy and the designers of physical educa-
tion curricula have any explicit intention of reproducing a technological habitus.
There is no conscious conspiracy at work here. Physical education is not designed
and perpetuated, on the whole, by evil people who have set out to dominate
everyone else with the power of technology. A habitus is produced in the interplay
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of implicit pedagogy (the unconscious inculcation of principles that manifest

themselves only in their practical state-in this instance, the body actually used
as a resource in physical education) and explicit pedagogy (articulated and formal-
ized principles-the lessons on the names, locations, and functions of body parts)
(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, p. 47).
The pedagogic work of anatomy most effectively reproduces the technologi-
cal habitus "the more completely it is reduced to a familiarizing process in which
the master transmits unconsciously, through exemplary conduct, principles he has
never mastered consciously, to a receiver who internalizes them unconsciously"
(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, p. 48). The principles of understanding the body
as an object, a machine, accessible to science and useful are never consciously
taught. Indeed, the instructor I interviewed told me that no time is spent in
gross anatomy considering any of the philosophical principles of the discipline.
Instructors in the anatomy lab proceed in a serious, relatively impersonal, matter-
of-course way, thus teaching by example the "right" attitude. That the instructors
are not bothered by what is going on tells the students that they should not be
either. They are clearly expected not to react emotionally. And the instructors'
silence on the philosophical questions of anatomy implicitly suggests that these
things are not to be questioned.

Practicality
Bourdieu (1988)points out that the more the pedagogic work is concentrated
in practical concerns and the more rigorously the material conditions of the
student's existence subjects them to the imperatives of practice, the less possibility
there is for transformation of the habitus. One must learn gross anatomy because
the practicalities of being a physical educator demand it; if one is going to teach
others how to maximize their bodies' physiological and athletic productivity, it
goes without saying that one needs to know the anatomy of the body. This
practical imperative, compels everyone involved to address themselves to the
practical issues at hand and not concern themselves with other things, such as the
suitability of the technological habitus. And most importantly, there is economic
pressure on students to concern themselves only with the technical matters and
just accept the habitus unconsciously. This, of course, is almost necessarily the
case in professional schools, such as physical education, where mostly middle
class students are training with a primary goal of seeking employment. Practicality
 440 PRONGER

must come first. The habitus, therefore remains uninterrogated. As I said earlier,
one must become technological if one is to survive in technological society. The
implicit pedagogy of the habitus and the preoccupation with practicality make
this relatively easy. The implicit nature of the pedagogy of habitus, the discursive
silence on its significance, in conjunction with the fact that those who are the
pedagogues of the habitus learned the habitus in the same unconscious way that
their students do, virtually guarantees that the habitus is reproduced without
question by all who are involved.
There is a functional aspect to this reproduction of the habitus. Professional
medicalhealth education, of which physical education is a part, by its very
existence, is mandated to produce the conditions that reproduce technological
culture. The educational system "must reproduce itself as an institution (self-
reproduction) in order to reproduce the culture it is mandated to reproduce
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(cultural and social reproduction)" (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, p. 60). The
educational system strives, therefore to maintain homogeneity, excluding, without
explicitly forbidding, practices, perceptions and ways of thinking that might be
profoundly at odds with the reproduction of technological culture. For this reason,
nonscientific and nontechnological approaches to the body, such as phenomenol-
ogy, do not form part of the anatomy cumculum. Every student, for example,
has a subjective, experiential understanding of the body that is very unlike the
objective, mechanistic, technological approach of gross anatomy. A pedagogical
focus on that subjectivity could go a long way in the deconstruction of the
technological approach. But gross anatomy, and all modem scientific study of
the body, rejects that subjectivity as a legitimate knowledge of the body. Indeed,
the insistence on objectivity is the hallmark of modem scientific thinking. That
objectivity, of course has been heavily criticized in feminist philosophies of
science (Fee, 1981, 1982; Haraway, 1978; Hein, 1981; Keller, 1982, 1985, 1989,
1992). This rejection of alternative views of the body is not an "evil" program,
but simply part of the logic of reproduction. Clearly, it would not be strategic
for the reproduction of technology to admit approaches to pedagogical work that
would undermine technology.
The cadaver itself has an important, controlling function in anatomical
pedagogy. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) say,
The teaching tools which the [educational system] makes available to its
agents (manuals, commentaries, abstracts, teachers' tests, syllabuses, set
books, teaching instructions, etc.) must be seen not simply as aids to
inculcation but also as instruments of control tending to safeguard the
orthodoxy of [the educational system] against individual heresies.

One of these tools of control is the cadaver, which is allowed to appear in the
lab solely as an educational resource, an implicit testimony to the technological
habitus, a confirmation of the control technology has over us.

Confirmation
The gross anatomy laboratory sessions given to physical education students
need to be understood in the larger pedagogical project. Students do not enter
these laboratories and undergo a sudden, unprecedented conversion experience
 RENDERING THE BODY 44 1

in which the body is transformed for them from a self-emerging phenomenon to

a technological resource. The technological habitus does not burst on the scene
'from nowhere. Students are prepared for this experience. They live in a technologi-
cal culture. Other courses in physiology and biomechanics, for instance, have
prepared the students intellectually to view the body technologically. And the
lectures and textbooks of the gross anatomy course itself have contributed to the
inculcation of the habitus. The laboratory experience takes place within the whole
range of force relation, processes, supports and strategies that constitute the
project of technology.
The laboratory experience is best understood not as one of conversion, but
as one of confirmation. It is a flash point at which everything the students have
been taught about the technological body is displayed. And because of the
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unconscious and implicit nature of this pedagogical action, what the students see
cannot be denied. This is similar to the episcopal rite of Christian confirmation.
Following baptism and many years of indoctrination, the bishop lays his hands
upon the faithful, and the faith is confirmed. Likewise after years of indoctrination
in the faith of technology, the marshaling of all that is as a resource, that faith
is confirmed as the anatomy students turn their trained gaze upon the body of
the cadaver, and in testimony to the power of technology stick their hands inside
and manipulate the body, thus controlling it. In a dramatic moment students gaze
into the body-which is impossible in virtually any other setting but the site of
a terrible accident or in an operating theater-and see the "truth" of the body
as an object. The cadaverous body lies before the students as an object. An
essential part of the rite is picking up fragments of the body and manipulating
them, subjecting them to the control of the habitus.
Students of anatomy are not simply taken into a room and asked what they
see; it is not an empirical experience in the sense of being open to what is there.
They are told explicitly what to see and implicitly how to relate to it. Students
are prepared to enter the lab with the authority of objectivity, in which they have
been indoctrinated throughout a long education of objectivity. The lab is the
crucial moment that confirms objectivity. The lab does so by a rigorous insistence
that the students see what they have been taught. This is what they will be tested
on; it is the basis of their success or failure. Alternative readings of the body
are not possible in the pedagogical situation of anatomy. Students who would
refuse to see the body technologically, who would refuse to employ the technologi-
cal habitus in their educational experience would fail physical education. The
threat of educational failure is a strategy of technological coercion. Seeing what
they are told, the technological habitus is confirmed. The pedagogic work of
anatomy, producing the technological habitus, having reproduced itself in the
student, confirms and consecrates the authority of technology.

Conclusion
The existence of the technological body is confirmed in the pedagogical
rite of the gross anatomy lab. Thus confirmed in the education of physical
educators, the technological body can be reproduced in the practices of physical
education, thus contributing to the social reproduction of technology. Bourdieu
and Passeron (1990) say, "The specific productivity of a pedagogic work . . .
 442 PRONGER

is measured by the degree to which the habitus it produces is transposable, i.e.,

capable of generating practices conforming with the principles of the inculcated
arbitrary in a greater number of different fields" (p. 33). The objectification of
the body in the gross anatomy lab is transposed into the practices of physical
education which reproduce the body as an object: high-performance sport, the
fit body, and so on.
The technologization of the body in physical education is not yet an issue.
There seems to be no resistance in the field of physical education; indeed, the
field is becoming ever more scientific and technological. The reproduction of
the habitus has been very successful. What hope, then, is there for change? There
are at least two possible sources of change, one within the power relations of
technologization and the other from without.
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Foucault's concept of power leaves open the possibility of the subversion

of power: Where there is power, there is the possibility of resistance. The field
of physical education is generally populated by people with an intense interest
in the body. They are drawn to physical activity because of the subjective bodily
freedom it affords them. This playful subjective experience of a moving body
is an experience in which there is some escape from technological resourceful-
ness-although there is tremendous pressure to contextualize play as useful,
another strategy of technology (Pronger, 1991). It is possible that the appreciation
for the free play of the body felt by those in the physical activity field could be
marshaled as a touchstone of resistance. This would require teachers of physical
educators with similar experience of the body to take Postman and Weingartner's
(1969) plea from a quarter century ago, to make teaching a subversive activity,
and bring this consciousness of the body to the fore as a challenge to the
technological habitus. This would disrupt the power of the habitus. (This is not
to suggest that we can escape technology, but we might be able to disrupt its
wholesale appropriation of the body. While it is true that in a technological world
we must be able to deal with the body technologically, it need not be completely
technological. We can be immersed in technology and still be critical of it.)
Part of the anatomy course should deal explicitly with the implicit cunicu-
lum, encouraging students to react emotionally to what they are seeing. It should
encourage students to question the habitus. Instead of being a rite of confirmation,
the anatomy lab could be a crystallizing moment in which the legitimacy of
scientific objectivity/distance is questioned. The practicality of anatomy and the
instrumental attitude to the body should be pedagogically contextualized as a
historical, cultural, and political instance of the power relations of technology,
rather than as a simple, neutral matter of scientific "fact." Anatomy should be
taught directly in conjunction with other mappings of the body that are not
controlling, manipulative, or objective (in short, technological). Examples of
such alternatives would be David Michael Levin's (1985) exploration of the
body's experience of being as a deconstruction of the nihilism of modernity (our
technologization, he would say, is part of modem nihilism), or Gilles Deleuze
and F6lix Guattari's (1983, 1987) descriptions of the "lines of flight" from
overdetermining discourse that the "body-without-organs" can take in plateaus
of erotic intensity. There is also a substantial literature and a host of practices that
come from "movement awareness" (Alexander, 1969; Dowd, 1981; Feldenkrais,
1972; Johnson, 1977).
 RENDERING THE BODY 443

There will be resistance to such a subversive course of action, because it

is very difficult to convince those who have deeply appropriated the technological
habitus (i.e., most teachers of science) that there are other legitimate ways of
understanding the body. Technology, the objectivity of science, the status of
science as the fountain of truth, are deeply entrenched in modem culture. Much
of academic work has its legitimacy in the extent to which it conforms to the
technological habitus. Is there not a powerful tendency in the academy to require
that all research, all thinking be geared to the practical needs of society? What
this means is that academic legitimacy comes from the degree to which academic
work serves technology. At this time in history, physical education is attempting
to secure its professional credibility along scientific lines. It is not, therefore,
amenable to questioning the technological foundations of science. Therefore,
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considerable resistance to attempts to subvert the authority of technology in

physical education can be expected.
There is also a chance that there will be pressure from the peripheries of
technological culture to change its wholesale appropriation of the body. Modem
technology is a Western phenomenon that has spread to many parts of the world.
The "benefits" of technology, however, have not been evenly distributed. And
in parts of the so-called Third World, the project of technology is an unwelcome
intrusion on traditional ways of life (the native peoples of North, Central, and
South America being cases in point). There is a possibility of resistance from
those who have not yet been technologized or who have been technologized
only reluctantly, and who therefore have little commitment to the habitus. Such
resistance could eventually have an impact on the technological foundations of
physical education. It remains to be seen, however, if the power of technology
is actually vulnerable to such resistance.

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