As Spirit Becomes Flesh
23 March 2022
At the same time that Europe was overflowing with well-known contemporary psychologists and their forward-thinking work, French ethnographer Marcel Mauss was a leading figure in sociology and anthropology. In a 1934 lecture referred to as ‘Techniques of the body,’ he explored what are known today as cultural techniques, which is how the body adapts to knowledge and habituates processes. Mauss used the term “techniques of the body,” (Mauss 1) in which he stated that “I call a technique an action which is effective and traditional…. This is what distinguishes man from the animals: the transmission of his techniques and very probably their oral transmission” (Mauss 6). In addition, he paired his definition with multiple examples of “social phenomena” (Mauss 2) that exhibit his claim, such as how his own generation was taught to swim in a way compared to the way he claimed that the children of the 1930s are taught, which he found completely inconsistent with his personal technique. With this example, among others referenced in the text, depicting how children are conditioned in different ways depending on their culture, Mauss concluded that, at some point, these taught techniques become instinctual and therefore cannot be unlearned. Such is the case in Mauss’ own experience with swimming – although people are no longer taught to suck in and spit out water as they swim, his inner intuition has led him to continue this practice, saying “I cannot get rid of my technique. Here then we have a specific technique of the body, a gymnic art perfected in our own day” (Mauss 2).
In the twenty-first century, this interest in and inquiry into the anthropological and somewhat sociological concept of a cultural technique seems to have been reignited. Only a few countries over from Mauss’ native France, Germany soon took over in this field of anthropological research. German professors Sybille Krӓmer, Bernhard Siegert, and Bernard Geoghegan, although not currently teaching, have individually adapted Mauss’ terminology into their own rhetoric. In fact, the German term Kulturtechniken has been moderately adopted into English language terminology in regards to this topic, the word explicitly meaning “cultural techniques, cultural technologies, cultural technics, or even culturing techniques” (Geoghegan 67) as Geoghegan explained in his 2013 paper ‘After Kittler: On the Cultural Techniques of Recent German Media Theory.’
In his paper, Geoghegan linked linguistics with anthropology – challenging how can the word Kulturtechniken enclose so many variations and peculiarities of media and culture, both within the scholarly world of sociology but also in the ever-changing and ever-advancing twenty-first century in the age of electronic takeover. He defined a cultural technique (here, the word ‘cultural technique’ and Kulturtechniken are used interchangeably), as “a shared interest in describing and analysing how signs, instruments, and human practices consolidate into durable symbolic systems capable of articulating distinctions within and between cultures” (Geoghegan 67). As a German, Geoghegan intertwined his arguably prideful opinions on classical German media theory with his personal analysis of the cultural technique. He cited one of Mauss’ examples of a technique of the body:
Returning to France, I noticed how common [the way my nurses walked] was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema. This was an idea I could generalise. (Mauss, 1973: 72) (Geoghegan 70)
Next, Geoghegan compared this transferral of cultural technique via cinema to German media theory. With the foreign technique shifting into a trend, and the cinema serving as the media for which it is carried out, Geoghegan stated that “the actions of the human body [can be broken] down into a series of discrete, serial movements” (Geoghegan 71). This is followed by “Through motion photography, movement itself became a symbolic system characterizable by discrete series that could be quoted and recursively modified” (Geoghegan 71). When the human body is seen through the medium of photography, time is truly able to be stopped and every atom present in every frame can be examined. When the cultural technique of a physical activity (different types of walking, for example) is compared, especially when it is evidently transferable between cultures and/or groups of people, as it is in this case, the technique itself is broken down simply into the difference in movement between the two groups. From this viewpoint, the cultural technique would no longer seen be as swimming as Mauss was taught to but instead as breaststroke with head out of the water, spitting water out of one’s mouth as a steam-boat would. Breaking a cultural technique into its corporal differences helps to “articulate [a] difference between cultures” (Geoghegan 71).
Like Geoghegan, Siegert’s work in his book “Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real” reiterated the influence of German media theory onto a modern day study of the techniques of the body. He said:
While the American side pursues a deconstruction of the anthropological difference with a strong ethical focus, the Germans are more concerned with its technological or medial fabrication. From the point of view of the cultural techniques approach, anthropological difference is less the effect of a stubborn anthropo-phallo-carno-centric metaphysics than the result of culture-technical and media-technological practices. (Siegert 8)
While both anthropologists are similar in the way of comparing American and German media theory, Siegert defined himself by focusing on what is similar between human technique and animal technique as opposed to Geoghegen’s work in cultural diversity and finding differences. Further, Siegert wrote that the study of cultural techniques “is concerned with decentering the distinction between human and nonhuman by insisting on the radical technicity of this distinction” (Siegert 8). Rather than idealizing the independence of humanity’s technique as a whole, Siegert saw the cultural techniques used as a network that is only necessary when in the presence of a human culture that is able to properly utilize it. Siegert’s work was plausibly much more cerebral and profound topicwise than Geoghegen’s, much more centered on thought and the media that would convey it. Regarding the human body, he stated that the human body would be “a media-technological abyss of nonmeaning” without the presence and influence of cultural techniques among both individuals and the cultures from which they are a part of.
In her 2003 article ‘Writing, Notational Iconicity, Calculus: On Writing as a Cultural Technique’ Krӓmer defined a cultural technique as “ routine, semiotic practices that enlarge our capacity for communication and cognition” (Krӓmer 12). Here, she expanded on how truly helpful a technique can be for carrying out an action. A certain cultural technique may help to advance one’s own society, while it may be neutral or even detrimental to other societies where they have a different way of life. In this article, Krӓmer inspected the individuality and inherent uniqueness that plays a role in distinctive cultural practices. As the individualized technique is transformed into routine, the “spirit becom[es] flesh” (Krӓmer 13). In addition, Krӓmer compared the concept of cultural techniques to “technical strategies used to enhance land productivity” (Krӓmer 12). When viewed this way, these learned techniques are a tactic for the body to perform better. From a cultural standpoint, the different methods to complete a task resemble or connect back to the culture from which the person originated from.
As the ideas of Geoghegen, Siegert, and Krӓmer all traced back to the findings of Mauss, they was not much differentiation between the four. While the three Germans have the advantage of more than fifty years of added research to pick from as well as added background knowledge on German media theory and the ideas of Kulturtechniken, their beliefs still coincide and overlap with those of Mauss published decades before. Mauss’ studies tended to focus on the familial and generational effect, while Geoghegen, Siegert, and Krӓmer thought of the world at large and the behavioral and emotional conditioning that would play into such a process. Krӓmer’s specification on orality and writing itself as a cultural technique is unique from Mauss, as his work does not focus on media at all but only on the social phenomena that effect it. Geoghegen’s and Siegert’s work are very similar, even quoting each other in their respective articles. They both focus in on the ontological process of adapting and using cultural techniques, and why the techniques of the body are so significant in the first place. While Mauss’ 1930’s findings have since been surpassed by the twenty-first century minds of Geoghegen, Siegert, and Krӓmer, he has provided a solid base for many anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, and psychologists alike to further their own research.
Pictures of Faux Women
13 May 2022
In his piece Media Archaeology, Wolfgang Ernst focuses on salvaging past representations of media and how “forgotten” technologies can be interpreted in a modern light. He explains the term “media archaeology” as “the rediscovery of cultural and technological layers of previous media” (Ernst 239). Revisiting these works with a modern take, Ernst believes, can present an entirely new set of media, with “techno-epistemological configurations underlying the discursive surface (literally, the monitors and interfaces) of mass media” (Ernst 239). In Malek Alloula’s work The Colonial Harem, he has gathered posed portraits of women from during the French occupation of Algeria in order to reveal the reality of the impact of French Colonialism upon Algerian women. He has separated the portraits, which are in the form of antique postcards, by category, inherently objectifying the women pictured. These photographs, Alloula offers, were handed out and dealt like trading cards by French soldiers stationed in Algeria, sexualizing these women who are, undoubtedly, posed unprovacatively. When The Colonial Harem is viewed through the media theoretical lens posited in Media Archaeology, women of color are commodified into a product of involuntary sexuality.
Working as an archaeology professor at Berlin’s Humboldt University, Ernst specializes in media archaeology and its historical connection, but also in the aesthetics of history. In Media Archaeology, published in 2011, he employs his study in historical aesthetics by analyzing technological processing and the effect that digitalized, data-driven technology has upon the interpretations of modern-day media. While Alloula obviously does not touch on twenty-first-century technology, with this collection having been published in 1986, he presents the deployment of the French and the subsequent absorption of French culture into Algerian society as the disruptive technology at play. Viewing the human as a technology therefore positions the French as the sole catalyst towards the “suppression and neglect of Arab[ian culture]” (Alloula xxvi) in 1800s Algeria. When Ernst’s and Alloula’s texts are applied in tandem, the Algerian woman present in the photograph inherently becomes media — a consumable “not only objec[t] but also subjec[t]” (Ernst 241). The women featured in these portraits become a vessel for information, an appropriated product that is used by the very culture that attempted to overtake them. While the French soldiers have tried to whitewash the Algerians, as is outlined in the introductory paragraph by Barbara Harlow, the men will still use the women’s culture for their own pleasure. The purpose of producing and exchanging these postcards, Alloula explains, it purely for sexual purposes:
…it goes from jocular smuttiness between correspondants (“The lucky bastard! He sure doesn’t get bored over there!”) to lover’s strategem (the solider who wants his girlfriend to believe that temptations are numerous) …. Given the range of possible uses, and to satisfy somewhat all the tastes of his faithful and extensive clientele, the photograph will operate in all registers: the exhibition of breasts will be carefully considered. (Alloula 106)
After the Algerian women's culture has been commodified, used purely as an eroticized object: “…media objects are radically present when they still function, even if their outside world has vanished. Their “inner world” is still operative. Both classical archaeologists and media archaeologists are fascinated by the hardware of culture, its artifacts…” (Ernst 241). Also, Alloula highlights the further exploitation of these women that these pictures are sent and received in the form of a postcard — where the images of these women, along with sensitive material such as their breasts, are available for anyone who comes across the card to openly view. These photographs are not even sealed inside the safety of an envelope, sent from one Frenchman to another. Instead, anyone in the mail process is involuntarily consuming this content as well. Alloula says in his conclusory paragraph “this Moorish bosom, which expresses an obvious invitation, will travel from hand to hand to reach its destination. All along the trajectory, from sender to addressee, it will be offered to view, without any envelope to ensure the intimacy of a private correspondence. Even after its arrival, it will be solicited whenever the colony and its indiscreet charms are evoked” (Alloula 105).
In Chapter 3, Alloula reveals the subcategory of postcards portraying female imprisonment. In these obviously faked scenarios (in some photos, the woman is standing in front of the set of bars, in others, on the opposite side of the same set), the ‘trapped’ woman is elaborately posed leaning against the bars, seemingly yearning for the outside. Among other pictures featured in other chapters, there are multiple portraits included of women, masked head to toe in their veils, referred to as “forbidden” (Alloula 7). He likens the veil to an “imprisonment” (21) of the woman, comparing these two photo sets by saying “If the women are inaccessible to sight (that is, veiled), it is because they are imprisoned. This dramatized equivalence between the veiling and the imprisonment is necessary for the construction of an imaginary scenario that results in the dissolution of the actual society, the one that causes the frustration, in favor of a phantasm: that of the harem (Alloula 21).” Published in 1986, The Colonial Harem views these postcards critically, not necessarily with the perspective of feminism or even female liberation but with an anti-assimilation mindset. Regarding historical context when interpreting past media, Ernst puts forth that “Hermeneutic empathy here clashes with pure data navigation: there is a world of difference between an archaeology of knowledge and historical imagination, which seeks to replace positive evidence by an act of reanimation (Ernst 249).” This statement does not mean surely that context of the past in which the media was created should be disregarded, but that the current day viewer should take into account both the intent with which the media was created as well as how it should be interpreted in the modern day.
The unnaturality of the photos featured in The Colonial Harem also contributes to the story that it executes. The posed images create a false perspective, knowledgeable only to those that are aware of the staged set and the further Colonialism that comes with censoring and therein not even allowing the photo set to reveal even a touch of real life. Concerning the effect of history upon media, Ernst says “Archaeology, as opposed to history, refers to what is actually there: what has remained from the past in the present like archaeological layers, operatively embedded in technologies” (Ernst 241). The “artifact” (Ernst 241) of the postcard remains as a relic of sorts to document the women in question, their real-life rituals blurred by the sexualization forced upon them. The postcard, within itself, carries a seductive appeal to the spirit of adventure and pioneering. In short, the postcard would be a resounding defense of the colonial spirit in picture form…. It is the propagation of the phantasm of the haram by the means of photography. It is the degraded, and degrading, revival of phatasm” (Alloula 4). Shrouding an act of racialized sexualition via “the nostalgia of the colonial empire” (Alloula 4) creates an untrue retelling and representation of the Algerian women pictured. Their objectification (both on emotional and physical planes) places their private rituals into the public view, erasing the culture, meaning, and individual behind these moments until all that remains is the female body and the sensuality that comes with it.
In these two works, The Colonial Harem providing the content and Media Archaeology providing insight, the postcards, when viewed as a medium, reveal how the Colonial gaze of the white man has been inverted into an outright objectification. Hermeneutics is defined as the way that the body interprets something within its own mind. Ernst likens hermeneutics to empathy, and mentions that one’s own mind and ideals may get in the way of understanding media. When reviewing The Colonial Harem, Alloula knits his own views with the racist imagery, some stemming from concerns for his Algerian ancestry but also from his unbigoted point of view. By entertwining his own thoughts, he is able to provide background and historical context on the French Colonialism aspect of the postcard, then immediately denounces the French, saying this book is an attempt to “return this immense postcard to its sender” (Alloula 5). The transformation of the Algerian woman into an object purely for sexual consumption, removing their culture and indivuality and replacing it with a stereotypical take on their society. When observing these postcards, keeping Ernst’s principle of separating one’s own viewpoints from the media they are consuming in mind, it is impossible to not impose one’s own bias upon the imagery. Instead, the audience sees the postcards, and with it, views it through the lens of their own personal standpoint on French Colonialism. Alloula’s forceful criticism condemns the photographer of these aforementioned shots while mentioning that the full extent of guilt is not wholly his to take. He states that the photographer was just taking orders, one that he knew would gain a lot of profit, but it also happened to be an order that would annihilate the women’s sense of self and pride in personal culture. Through the making, exchange, and sale of these postcards, the women that are being profited off of are simply being used for an outlet of sexuality or as a tangible example of exerted domination.