Warnier 2001 - A Praxeological Approach To Subjectivation in A Material World (JMC)

01warnier (ds) 14/2/01 2:22 pm Page 5
Articles
A P R A X E O L O G I CA L
A P P R OAC H T O
S U B J E C T I VAT I O N I N A
M AT E R I A L WO R L D
◆ J E A N - P I E R R E WA R N I E R
Université René Descartes – Paris V
Abstract
This article aims at bringing together various lines of analysis that have been
kept more or less separate until now, that is, studies on the body, motricity,
perception, agency, material culture, the subject, unconscious drives, and
power systems. By drawing on the work of Mauss, Schilder, Tisseron,
Parlebas and Foucault, it discusses how the subject and its drives are
invested in sensori-motricity in a material world. When it is socially
validated and coded, such an investment amounts to what Foucault called
the ‘techniques of the self’. The subjectivation thus achieved may be consist-
ent or at odds with corresponding representations. The notions provided by
praxeology, the science of sensori-motricity, may help in producing an
ethnography of subjectivation in a material world.
Key Words ◆ drive ◆ embodiment ◆ emotions ◆ governmentality ◆

motricity ◆ perception ◆ praxeology ◆ subject ◆ subjectivation ◆
techniques of the self
There is no denying that in the past 20 years we have gained extremely

valuable insights on material culture, and that we have gone a long way
in understanding its importance. But we can still perhaps go just one step
further. The man who drives his lorry is probably less concerned with
creating categories and an identity than with accomplishing properly the
hundreds of bodily motions that will end up in delivering the goods by
6 am sharp at the supermarket, without having damaged the goods, the
Journal of Material Culture

Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol. 6(1): 5–24 [1359-1835(200103)6:1; 5–24;015941] 5
J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 6 ( 1 )
lorry, or himself. What I am hinting at is this: in addition to creating an

identity, meaning and signification, is not material culture the indis-
pensable and unavoidable mediation or correlate of all our motions and
motor habits? Are not all our actions, without any exception whatsoever,
propped up by or inscribed in a given materiality? Is not material culture
not only good to think with, to categorize, to signify, to communicate, or
to produce identity, but also to move and act upon, against, together, or
with, billions of material objects?
Yes indeed, and there is nothing new in this contention. Merleau-
Ponty, more than 50 years ago, and more recently D. Miller, Th. Csordas,
A. Gell and many others, have looked in that very direction. However, I
wish to suggest that we can still go significantly further by taking motric-
ity into account, in addition to agency.
SENSORY-MOTRICITY IN A MATERIAL WORLD

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

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

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

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

pology, and what is needed to built up a praxeological approach to
material culture.
TECHNIQUES OF THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF THE

SELF
So what have we gained with a praxeological approach to material
culture? So far, not much, except that we are less naive about the tech-
niques of the body in two ways. First, we know that there is hardly any
technique of the body that does not incorporate a given materiality. It
follows that it is not possible to divorce material culture studies from the
study of the body, and vice versa, as is largely the case at present. For
example, one journal is devoted to material culture and another to the
body, as if they were clearly distinct entities. Second, we know that
incorporated material culture reaches deep into the psyche of the subject
because it reaches it not through abstract knowledge, but through
sensori-motor experience. To put it bluntly by quoting Nicholas
Humphreys (1984: 34): ‘Let a celibate monk just once make love to a
woman and he would be surprised how much better he would under-
stand the Song of Solomon; but let him, like an academic psychologist,
observe twenty couples in the park and he would not be that much
wiser.’ In other words, it is through motricity and the experience of the
senses, that the monk’s subjectivity can be altered. Techniques of the
body in a given materiality are thus in fact techniques of the self.
The expression ‘techniques of the self’ was coined by Michel
Foucault (1989: 133–4; see also Martins, 1988). By this, he meant:
the procedures, as they probably exist in all civilizations, that are proposed
or prescribed to individuals in order to fix their identity, maintain or
transform it, depending on a number of ends, and this by means of a relation
of mastery over oneself, or of knowledge of oneself . . . [The question is]
what to do with oneself? What kind of work to accomplish on oneself ? How
to ‘govern’ oneself by acting while being oneself the object of one’s own
actions, the domain in which they apply, the instrument they use and the
subject who acts? (Foucault, 1989: 134, trans. J.-P. W.)
The ‘techniques of the self’ belong with what Foucault calls ‘sub-
jectivation’. He never really cares to give tightly woven and unequivocal
definitions, but what he writes about subjectivation brings two dimen-
sions of the subject to the fore. First, the subject is the acting and desir-
ing subject in his/her relations to the other and to the ethical law. As
such he is also the self-knowing subject. Second, the subject is the acting
subject insofar as it is subjected to a sovereignty. The two aspects are
closely linked because acting means acting on oneself and on the actions
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of other subjects. The action on other people’s actions defines the space
of power, and, when organized, assumes the shape of historically con-
strued ‘governmentalities’.1
The body is central to the techniques of the self. The desiring subject
disciplines and shapes his drive by all kinds of means mediated by bodily
motion. These means are not necessarily devised by the subject itself.
Most of the time, they are part and parcel of a whole range of socially
approved practices and belong to ever-changing governmentalities. In his
History of Sexuality (1976, 1984a and 1984b), Foucault attempts to show
that even sexual practices, and therefore the sexual drive itself, are his-
torical and changing practices. As regards the mediation of the tech-
niques of the self by material culture, Foucault himself stresses the
importance of all the material contraptions of discipline, in the prison,
the asylum, the hospital, the school. However, in his writings, material
culture appears more as an exterior means used by the subjects than as
a mediation embodied in the subject.
This is where a praxeological approach to material culture can help
us in analysing what actually takes place in the techniques of the self: if
material culture is the mediation of any bodily practice of the subject,
then, there will be hardly any technique of the self which does not
involve sensori-motricity in a material world. Sports as a technique of
the self is an obvious example of such a tight articulation between a
concern of the subject for himself or herself, material culture, bodily
practices, and an elaborate social organization of sports activities.
Thus, Foucault provides key concepts for a praxeological theory of
material culture as inscribed in the techniques of the self and in given
governmentalities. But these concepts present a number of shortcomings
that are such as to mislead our approach to material culture if they are
not taken care of. There are at least four of them.
First, Foucault was not much of an anthropologist, and there is no
comparative dimension in his work outside Western tradition. True, his
History of Sexuality is basically a comparison between several patterns of
sexual desire from antiquity to modern times, but does not reach beyond
the Western world. This leads him to a theoretical contradiction. On the
one hand he tends to maintain, together with the unanimous Western
philosophical tradition, that a concern with the subject and subjectivity
is a unique invention of the Western world. On the other hand, he says
that being the subject of one’s drive, acting upon oneself, and meeting
other people’s drives so as to compromise around given moral standards,
occurs in any civilization, and that the techniques of the self are pro-
cedures proposed by society to the individual ‘as they are probably to be
found in every civilization’. I think most anthropologists would disclaim
that a concern with the subject is an invention of the West. In that respect,
Foucault falls victim to the ethnocentrism of Western philosophy. Clearly,
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what he theorizes under the expressions of subject, subjectivation, tech-

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

mentality, that is, the whole network of actions on other people’s actions.
Being a subject, for Foucault, is being subjected to given governmental-
ities.
THE THREE MEDIA OF SYMBOLIZATION

I will now address the question I have just raised about Foucault: by
what means does material culture embodied in motricity reach the
subject in its depths? In other words, what are the mechanisms of
sensori-motor subjectivation? A first answer consists in taking stock of
the role of apprenticeship. We may assume that the jet pilot is subjec-
tivized differently from the airport sweeper not only because their edu-
cational level and backgrounds are different, nor because their incomes
are quite unequal, but also because the pilot has incorporated in his
sensori-motricity the 200 tons of the jet liner, the take-off power of the
engines and all the equipment of the cabin, whereas, more modestly, the
sweeper has incorporated his mops, buckets, caddy, the intricacies of the
airport buildings and their complex rhythms and security rules. The skill
of the pilot is the result of a long apprenticeship, over several years and
through several highly emotional thresholds: the first time he/she flew a
Piper Cub unattended; his/her first take-off and landing at the controls
of a jet; his/her first heavy storm, and many other similar experiences I
can only guess at. Endless drilling of motor algorithms, of verbal and
non-verbal communication with the instructors or the co-pilot in the
interaction with the machine, repeated de-briefing after the flights, re-
training in a flight-simulator before piloting a different type of aircraft,
have built up bodily habits fully adjusted to the material culture of civil
or military aviation. Apprenticeship gives us a strong lead. The neuro-
physiology and the psychology of apprenticeship are in a position to tell
us how the nervous system can be trained and imprinted, and re-trained
in case it has been damaged. The psychology of motivation stresses the
fact that the success of neuro-muscular training depends partly upon the
emotional involvement and the positive attitude of instructors and
trainee. All too often, however, ‘emotion’ and ‘motivation’ are watered
down expressions for ‘drive’, ‘desire’ or even ‘libido’ that refer too obvi-
ously to psychoanalytical theory to gain easy acceptance. In these
examples, we find three dimensions of human activity tightly inter-
woven: perception, motricity, emotion. Let us say that material culture
reaches the subject in its depth through a sensori-affectivo-motor
medium. I shall presently elaborate on this point.
Many psychologists, following Bowlby (1978), Anzieu and others
such as Piaget, stress that psychic life elaborates itself by internalizing
sensory-affectivo-motor experiences with other subjects in a material
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world. D. Anzieu (1985) stresses that the skin provides the basic fantasy
from which a self can be built, as a psychic envelope open to outside
exchanges, verbal and non-verbal. Most skin disorders, he says, cannot
be understood unless one takes into account the fact that the skin is a
screen onto which the psychic life of the self projects itself, and an envel-
ope which contains and protects it. This is now becoming standard
knowledge in dermatology as well as psychosomatic medicine.
Serge Tisseron (1997, 1999) goes one step further by elaborating on
the concepts of projection, introjection and internalization coined by
Freud and Ferenczi in their analysis of psychic disorders. They noticed
that patients could project their fantasies on other subjects, introject
good objects or internalize intersubjective relationships. Typically, in
internalization, a patient will experience a conflict, take it into the envel-
ope of the psyche, and continue to carry it permanently with him, even
when the conflict has come to an end and the subject has gone far away
from the setting in which the conflict took place. Or, vice-versa, a subject
can project his/her aggressiveness on another person with which he/she
identifies, and feel aggressed by this person.
Whereas, in the example given just above, the processes of projec-
tion and introjection are dysfunctional, Freud, Ferenczi and their fol-
lowers soon discovered that they were essential to the construction of
any psychic life. In psychoanalysis, this remark provided the theoretical
grounds for the works of M. Klein, D. Winnicot, D. Anzieu, F. Dolto and
S. Tisseron, diverse as they are. They all stress in various ways that
intersubjective relationships are mediated by the seven senses (includ-
ing proprioception and vestibular perception) coupled with verbal and
non-verbal communication between embodied subjects.
S. Tisseron (1996, 1997, 1999) provides one of the most articulate
theories of the workings of internalization and introjection, or rather, in
his own terms, of ‘symbolization’. By ‘symbolization’, he means the
process by which a subject introduces into his psychic envelope his
experiences of the outside world. This process allows one, as it were, to
domesticate, tame, or let his/her experiences ‘sink in’. This symboliza-
tion uses three media: sensori-motricity, images and words.
In a personal communication to the ‘MàP’ (Matière à Penser)
research group, Tisseron gives the following example of sensori-affec-
tivo-motor symbolization: a woman walks in a street followed by three
little girls – presumably her daughters. She is in a hurry and walks fast.
She stumbles on a sheet of iron put on the sidewalk by the road workers.
She loses her balance, gesticulates, and, eventually succeeds in recover-
ing her balance. She turns round, looks at the sheet of iron, curses it,
and goes her way. We assume that the three girls have felt a strong
emotion: acceleration of the heartbeat, blushing, feelings of shame and
confusion. What do they do ? The first one comes to the iron sheet and
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mimicks what the woman did: she hits the iron, stumbles, turns round,
looks at the sidewalk, utters a few words and catches up with the
woman. The second girl accomplishes the same routine, and the third
one, being the smallest, shortens it down to kicking the sheet, making a
half turn and running to catch up with the others. By this process, they
have transformed what happened in order to make it acceptable and to
take it into their psychic envelope. They have domesticated the event.
They reproduced it, and, in the process, reshaped it to deprive it of its
potential for eliciting emotions of fear, shame and impending catas-
trophe. They turned it into gestures that could be performed without
damaging consequences. They included it into the normal sequence of
events. Given the essential connections between perception, emotion
and motricity, this type of symbolization can be said to be a sensori-affec-
tivo-motor one. In the psychic life of the subject, it starts right from birth,
and perhaps even before. This example shows that such situations are
not context-free: in the present case, the emotion depends on a strong
relationship between the adult woman and her daughters.
The second medium of symbolization uses images. The infant learns
very quickly to leave material traces of his/her gestures. Food on a plate
or taken from the plate and smeared with the fingers on the table leaves
a trace that lasts and can be looked at. This discovery is usually quite
pleasurable, and calls for repetition. As soon as they can use materials
such as sand, clay, paper, pencil, etc., young children enjoy drawing.
They usually begin with lines drawn with a gesture going away from the
body of the child towards the outside, thus reproducing the ‘fort – da’
game of Freud’s grandchild that mimicks the alternative presence and
absence of the mother. The pleasure experienced by children in drawing
usually comes to an end when adults impose upon them outside canons
of verisimilitude that prevent the child from using the image as a means
of symbolizing his/her own experience of the world as perceived by
him/herself, that is, as transformed into something acceptable. The
adults and especially the school push the child into a ‘representative
dead-end’.
The last medium of symbolization is language, that does not need
any particular comment, since it enjoys such privilege in Western
culture, and consequently, in Western anthropology.
Symbolization does not belong with ex-pression, nor with com-muni-
cation, but with intro-jection or intern-alization. It is a basic moment,
quite essential in the elaboration of any action of expression or com-
munication. These three dimensions of bodily activity depend upon one
another and are usually found at various degrees in a given conduct.
However, from an analytical point of view, they are quite distinct.
According to S. Tisseron (1997), symbolization operates on what he
calls two schemata: one of envelope and one of transformation. The skin
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provides the subject with the anatomo-physiological experience of the

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

ence for communication and expression to take place, and it comes
through sensori-affectivo-motricity, elaborated by means of images and
words. The reference to love-making, so invested with images and
words, is quite relevant, in view of the involvement of desire, the other,
and sensori-motricity. And (need I insist?) motricity incorporates ma-teri-
alities as an essential component.
Movement, however, is transient. It took a couple of seconds for
the woman to lose and recover her balance. It took even less time for
each of the girls to imitate her. Afterwards, one often wonders if any-
thing took place at all, and memory often fails to render what actually
happened, given the process of transformation at work in symboliza-
tion. The advantage of the image is to add up a permanent trace that
can be looked at, touched or felt. Photography, in that respect, has
retained the attention of S. Tisseron (1996). Following Barthes (1980),
one could make a semiological study of the printed image. But what
about the photographs that have been taken and are never looked at?
Tisseron remarks that this is the case more often than not. To him, the
gestures of taking the photograph should be investigated, because all
16
photographs have been taken, whereas few photographs are ever

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

If ‘the medium is the message’ as McLuhan liked to say, then there is no
reason to think that the three media of symbolization convey the same
messages. We can hypothesize that their content may differ in some
cases. Indeed, one of the theoretical issues raised by a praxeological
approach to material culture is the degree of fit, agreement or disagree-
ment between the patterns of subjectivation by motricity in a material
culture on the one hand, and the meanings conveyed by speech or rep-
resentations on the other hand.
A praxeological approach to material culture will never replace a
17
semiological or structuralist approach. By contrast, their articulation

opens entirely new perspectives in the analysis of material culture,
especially in case of discrepancies or disagreement between the two
approaches regarding a given corpus.
Tisseron remarks that such discrepancies may be at the origin of
cases of psychosis. For example, in the typical systemic interaction
analysed by Bateson and the Palo Alto school, some individuals convey
a given message through the sensori-affectivo-motor medium while
denying it by speech. A mother (albeit in rare cases), may convey rejec-
tion and aggressiveness towards her baby through the sensori-affectivo-
motor medium, while exaggerating her verbal expression of love. In such
cases, and depending on the context, the baby will keep the two media
and the two messages separate. He/she will be engaged in a process of
schismogenesis. But the same result may be achieved by a brain or
sensory disorder which will twist one of the three media of symboliza-
tion and introduce a discrepancy between them. If this is the case, then,
there would not be any contradiction between an ecological and a neuro-
physiological explanation of psychosis.
If everything goes well in the subjectivation process, there will be
no contradiction between the three media for a given subject or category
of subjects. But there are reasons to think that this is seldom entirely the
case. Most subjects are more or less divided and in several parts, and
most cultures and societies produce subjects that are divided against
themselves. Birgitt Meyer (1997) for example, has shown how, in Africa,
missionaries came with a highly complex and conspicuous material
culture incorporated in motricity, insisted that the African adopt it (in
matters of technology, hygiene, dress, etc.), while partially denying its
relevance as regards faith and salvation, and came into conflict with the
Africans on that account.
Another example is provided by the notables of the highlands of
Western Cameroon, also known as the ‘Grassfields’. To this day, they
behave in their bodily practices as ‘vital piggy-banks’. They contain life
essence, semen, saliva, and substances that extend the reach of their
motricity-cum-material culture: camwood, palm oil, raphia wine. They
contain everything in their bodies, while unmarried males do not contain
anything. Typically, a chief or notable will spit on people to transmit his
life essence to them. They will maintain large polygynous households
and dispense their semen to their wives, and to the foetus of those who
are pregnant. They will smear camwood and palm oil on the skin of
women given in marriage or successors to turn their skins into shining,
red, healthy and leak-proof envelopes. In such an inegalitarian system,
notables and unmarried cadets are subjectivized through the sensori-
affectivo-motor medium into different categories of people, with radi-
cally opposing interests that are seldom recognized as such by the people
18
themselves. There is a built-in and muted system of domination, or Fou-

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

and communication as their trading stock. This is obvious in the case of
19
Lévi-Straussian structuralism. When material culture is taken into

account, it is often for what it means rather than for what it does to sub-
jects. Studies on the body have tended to introduce a more balanced
approach to material culture. However, the body is not equivalent to
sensori-motricity. All too often, the body that is an object of phenom-
enological or Foucaldian analysis is not the moving and perceiving
subject in a given materiality, but a representation of the body. We find
here the discrepancy illustrated by Magritte and Foucault (1973) between
a smoking pipe and the painting of a smoking pipe, under which Magritte
writes: ‘this is not a pipe’. He is right, of course. The smoking pipe is
handled, stuffed, lit, and put in one’s mouth to draw the smoke. The rep-
resentation of the pipe cannot be used in such a way. It is only good to
look at and to signify with.
This raises the basic methodological question of how to do the
ethnography of motricity in a material world. Human ethology is of
limited help because, given the complexity of human behaviour, it has
not really been in a position to use the standard tools of animal ethol-
ogy. Motor praxeology is of much greater help. There is still a long way
to go to elaborate an adequate methodology based on photography, films,
choreographic scripts like the Laban script. However, most of the ethnog-
raphy can be done with the vocabulary of everyday life. There are now
many convincing descriptions of movement in a material world by N.
Argenti (1998 and in press) on innovative performances in the Grass-
fields, P. Parlebas (1999) on sports, Kaufmann (1992) on household activi-
ties, not to mention earlier works by Michel de Certeau (1980).
The theoretical directions I am sketching in this article consist in
bringing together various lines of analysis that have been kept more or
less separate until now, that is, studies on the body, motricity, agency,
material culture, the subject, unconscious drives, and power systems.
This is admittedly ambitious, but, after the work of Head, Schilder, Par-
lebas and the neuro-sciences, I fail to see how one could possibly keep
analysing the body and material culture independently from each other
and from sensori-motricity. After the work of Freud, Ferenczi, Anzieu
and Tisseron, I fail to see how one could possibly keep analysing sensori-
motricity in a material world independently from the drives that keep
the subject on the move. After the work of Foucault, I fail to see how
one could analyse material culture, sensori-motricity and subjectivation
as divorced from historical governmentalities.3
WHAT IS AT STAKE?
In his book Modernity at Large, A. Appadurai (1997) has underlined the
difficulty of analysing the enigmatic relationship between embodied
material culture and representations. What is at stake with a praxeolog-
ical approach to material culture is precisely to elucidate the depth, or
20
the various layers of this complex relationship, given the fact that these
layers are fully interconnected, yet potentially at odds with one another.
What I wish to do (see also Warnier, 1999a and b, Julien and Warnier,
1999) is to re-open in new ways the analysis of such diverse phenomena
as the SAPE of Congolese youth (see also Gandoulou, 1989a and b), the
Cameroonian ‘Pajerocracy’ with its champagne, luxury cars, and three-
piece suits and silk ties, the Congolese (Zaïrian) and Angolese ‘gemmoc-
racy’ (see also Misser and Vallée, 1997), with its mines, armed youth,
planes, villas, the material culture of armed violence, the popular urban
culture, the reinvention of chiefdoms and kingdoms in Africa, with their
regalia and palaces displayed in TV shows, etc.
I have given two examples above: the missionaries, their material
culture and their preaching; the Grassfields cadets and notables. Let me
elaborate on a last example: that of the Liberian child-soldier among the
some 300,000 children enrolled in various armed factions throughout the
world, on whom Olara Otumu, the Deputy Secretary general of the UNO
has collected detailed information. Given the fact that the child-soldier
incorporates in his sensori-motricity the kalachnikov and the 44 Toyota,
plus all the trappings of armed material equipment, we are not dealing
any longer with a child compelled to fight against his will and capable of
keeping some critical distance from what he does. Sooner or later, in daily
bodily practices and motricity, he will be fused with his inventory of
material culture. He will be subjectivized as a kalashnikov-wielding-child.
The gun and the 44 Toyota we look at can be taken as signs, with a sig-
nifier and a signified in a system of communication. When they are in
daily use for months on end, when moving without them has become
inconceivable, they do not only make sense as signs, but rather as part
and parcel of a subjectivity that has been transformed in its relationship
to self and others. Only then can one begin to understand why and how
this child can practise killing or cutting off the hands of other children as
a ‘technique of the self’ of sorts in the governmentality of armed conflict.
His drives, passions, physical appearance, perceptions, have been
shaped in a different way, especially because he/she has been drawn into
armed violence when he/she was so young, whatever the discourse of
‘liberation’, ‘revolution’, ‘people’s democracy’ or hatred of the assigned
enemy he/she can utter at one point or another. A subject cannot be pro-
duced and undone like a Lego toy. Once the child-soldier is withdrawn
from the armed faction by Unicef or a Non-Governmental Organization,
his sensori-affectivo-motor, psychic and discursive retraining is highly
problematic, especially in view of the fact that the materialities provided
for him offer nothing to be compared with the stock of violent sensa-
tions and emotions experienced by him when he/she was armed. Speech
alone will not suffice to do the trick.
In such a perspective, the contradictions, the failures, the sudden
and abrupt reorganizations of given subjectivities-cum-materiality and
21
their political dimensions are likely to be given more emphasis than in

the anthropology of material culture (and still less the anthropology of
art) in their current state.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to N. Argenti for copy-editing this article, and for N. Argenti, R.
Bertrand, J. Ferreux, F. Hoarau, M.-P. Julien, C. Rosselin, N. Schlanger, Z.
Strougo, S. Tisseron for their help with earlier drafts of this article, and for their
critical comments. I am indebted to the research group ‘Matière à Penser’ (or
MaP) at Université René Descartes (Paris V – Sorbonne) where I undertake my
research and which provides me with much information and intellectual stimu-
lation, and to Jean-François Leguil-Bayart and the CERI who helped me a great
deal in testing my research. The formation of the MaP group was much facili-
tated, over the years, by a constant stream of exchanges with M.J. Rowlands at
University College London.
Notes
1. In January 2000, a conference was held in Paris on ‘Material culture and
political subjectivation’. Organized by CERI and the MaP research group, it
will be published in the spring of 2001 under the direction of J.-F. Bayart
and J.-P. Warnier.
2. M. Rowlands and I are presently working on a ethnography of the Grass-
fields of Cameroon from a praxeological point of view. By taking sequences
of events we have personally witnessed, by analysing the motricity of the
subjects in their own materiality, and by comparing the three media of
symbolization, our intention is to show that one can write the various
chapters of a standard ethnography with unexpected results.
3. In recent years, many social scientists have developed valuable insights
pertaining to these various domains of investigation. In particular, and
amongst many others, I am indebted to D. Miller (1987) and his concept of
‘objectification’ (not quite, however, the ‘subjectivation’ of M. Foucault), to
M. Featherstone et al. (1991), P. Falk (1994), M. Lock (1993), J. Selner and
S. Crowley (1999) for their interest in the body, to C. Lutz and G.M. White
(1986) on emotions, to D. Best (1974, 1978), B. Farnell (1994, 1999), A.
Kendon (1997), D. Williams (1999) for their work on movement, to A. Gell
(1998) for bringing agency (but not the subject, however) to the fore in his
study of art and material culture, and to The Journal of Material Culture for
providing a forum for such approaches. Yet, I would suggest, there is still
some amount of theoretical and ethnographic work to be done to unravel
essential interconnections between these various lines of analysis, and to
articulate a semiology and a praxeology of the sensori-motricity of the
subject in a material world.
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Politique Africaine, 76, décembre 1999, pp. 181–95.
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◆ J E A N - P I E R R E WA R N I E R is Professor of anthropology, at the Faculté de Sci-

ences sociales at the Sorbonne. His research interests are material culture, prax-
eology, Foucault, Cameroon Grassfields and Africa. Significant publications:
Echanges, développement et hiérarchies dans le Bamenda pré-colonial – Cameroun,
Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesebaden, 1985. Construire la culture matérielle.
L’Homme qui pensait avec ses doigts, Paris, PUF, 1999. Approches de la culture
matérielle. Corps à corps avec l’objet, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999 (co-edited with M.-
P. Julien). Address: Département de Sciences sociales, Faculté des Sciences
humaines et sociales – Sorbonne 12, rue Cujas, 75230 Paris Cedex 05, France
[email: jp-warnier@wanadoo.fr]
24

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Key Words ◆ drive ◆ embodiment ◆ emotions ◆ governmentality ◆

There is no denying that in the past 20 years we have gained extremely

Journal of Material Culture

lorry, or himself. What I am hinting at is this: in addition to creating an

SENSORY-MOTRICITY IN A MATERIAL WORLD

‘techniques à instruments’, and he finds it necessary to consider spades,

and on his readings of Husserl. Contrary to Mauss, the French philoso-

a child training himself in a gymnasium to dribble with a basket-ball

This is, in my opinion, what is missing in phenomenological anthro-

TECHNIQUES OF THE BODY, TECHNIQUES OF THE

what he theorizes under the expressions of subject, subjectivation, tech-

result is to elide political coercion and what Foucault called govern-

THE THREE MEDIA OF SYMBOLIZATION

provides the subject with the anatomo-physiological experience of the

In other words: there must be internalization through personal experi-

photographs have been taken, whereas few photographs are ever

PRAXEOLOGY AND ‘MEANING’

semiological or structuralist approach. By contrast, their articulation

themselves. There is a built-in and muted system of domination, or Fou-

TOWARDS A PRAXEOLOGICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

The main trends of modern anthropology have tended to rely on speech

Lévi-Straussian structuralism. When material culture is taken into

their political dimensions are likely to be given more emphasis than in

◆ J E A N - P I E R R E WA R N I E R is Professor of anthropology, at the Faculté de Sci-

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