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| Edouard Manet, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863 |
This is Bora Mici's original translation from French to English of The Machinery of Representation from Michel de Certeau's theoretical work, The Invention of Everyday Life, L'invention du quotidien. In this text Certeau distinguishes strategies from tactics, with strategies belonging to an institutional authoritative and closed framework, while tactics are the unpredictable moves that individuals effect within these prescribed systems, individualizing their experience of them and turning them upside down on their heads. The translated passage discusses how the law and customs write themselves on other bodies only to reproduce themselves and make believe. In seeking a socially acceptable identity, people become signs and sacrifice their bodies to these systems of representation that precede them. I am not yet sure if this discussion is useful in order to describe a reality that is inescapable or if it hints at a system of transmission that we can transcend. The tone of the passage certainly seems critical but it seems to ignore the human aspect of this experience. Stay tuned for Les machines célibataires, a commentary on Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors.
La Machinerie de la Representation, Michel de Certeau by Bora Mici
The Machinery of Representation
Two main operations characterize these interventions. The first one aims at removing from the body a superfluous element, deemed unhealthy or not aesthetic; the other adds to the body what it is missing. Therefore, the instruments in question can be distinguished according to the actions they carry out: cutting, pulling out, extracting, removing, etc. or inserting, placing, attaching, covering, assembling, sewing, articulating, etc.—not to mention those that substitute missing or defective organs, such as valves, pacemakers, limb prosthetics, screws implanted in the femur, artificial irises, bone substitutes, etc.
Two main operations characterize these interventions. The first one aims at removing from the body a superfluous element, deemed unhealthy or not aesthetic; the other adds to the body what it is missing. Therefore, the instruments in question can be distinguished according to the actions they carry out: cutting, pulling out, extracting, removing, etc. or inserting, placing, attaching, covering, assembling, sewing, articulating, etc.—not to mention those that substitute missing or defective organs, such as valves, pacemakers, limb prosthetics, screws implanted in the femur, artificial irises, bone substitutes, etc.
Either from the outside or from the inside, they correct an excess or a deficit, but compared to what? Just like when we remove leg hair or paint our eyelashes, cut or implant hair, this subtractive or additive activity goes back to a code. It keeps bodies within a norm. In this sense, clothing itself could be considered the instrument thanks to which a social law secures bodies and limbs for itself; it regulates and trains them through changing fashion trends as in military maneuvers. Cars, just like corsets, mold bodies and make them conform to a postural model. These are orthopedic as well as orthopraxic instruments. The foods a cultural tradition chooses to sell in a given society’s markets model just as much as they nourish bodies; they impose a form upon them, a tonality that has the value of an ID card. Glasses, cigarettes, shoes, etc. in their own way reconstitute a physical portrait. Where do we draw the line between the machinery through which a society’s living members represent themselves and when they become its representations? Where does this disciplinary apparatus that displaces and corrects, adds to and removes from malleable bodies, subjected to the instrumentalisation of so many laws, end? In reality, bodies become bodies only when they conform to these codes. Because in what circumstances does a body exist when it is not written upon, reconstituted, cultivated, identified by the instruments of a social symbolic? Perhaps, at the extreme confines of these indefatigable writings, punching holes in them through lapsus, there remains only the cry: it escapes us, it escapes them. From the first to the last cry, something else bursts out, which makes up the other of the body, at times badly brought up and in-fans, which we find intolerable in the child, the possessed person, the madman or the mentally ill—a lack of self-control like the baby’s shouting in Jeanne Dielman or that of the vice-consul in India Song.
This first operation of removing or adding is therefore just the corollary of another, more general one, which consists in making the body say the code. As we have seen, this work “realizes” (in the English sense of the term) a social language; it gives it effectivity. What a great task it is to make bodies spell out an order through “machinization”! The liberal economy is no less efficient than totalitarianism in carrying out this articulation of the law through bodies. It just uses other methods. Instead of oppressing groups in order to better mark them with the hot iron of a single power, first it atomizes them and then multiplies the tight exchange networks which make individual units conform to the rules (or the “trends”) of socio-economic and cultural contracts. We can ask ourselves why this works, whether in one instance or in the other. What desire or what need leads us to make our bodies into the emblems of a law that serves to identify? The hypotheses that respond to this question demonstrate in yet another way the strength of the bonds that tools construct between our childish “natures” and social discourses.
The credibility of a discourse is what makes believers get going. It produces practitioners. Making believe is making do. However, through a curious circularity, the ability to make—to write and mechanize bodies—is precisely what makes believe. Because the law is already applied through and on bodies, “incarnated” in physical practices, it can be approved and make believe that it speaks in the name of the “real”. It becomes believable in saying, “Reality itself dictates this text to you”. We believe what we think is real, but this “real” is assigned to the discourse by a belief that provides it with a body marked by the law. The law constantly needs an “advance” of bodies, a capital of incarnation, in order for it to make believe and be practiced. Therefore, it becomes inscribed because of what has already been inscribed: it’s the witnesses, martyrs or examples that make it believable to others. It imposes itself in this way as the subject of the law, “The ancients have practiced it,” or “others have believed it and done it,” or “you already carry my signature in yourself.”
In other words, the normative discourse does not “work” unless it has already become a narrative, a text articulated upon a reality and speaking in its name, that is to say, a storied and historicized law, told by bodies. Its implementation as a narrative is the necessary presupposition for it to produce other narratives and make believe. And tools ensure the passage from discourse to narrative through interventions that embody the law by making bodies conform to it, and in such a way, accredit it with the ability to be recited by the real itself. From initiation to torture, all social orthodoxy makes use of instruments in order to give itself the form of a history and to produce the credibility attached to a discourse articulated by bodies.
Another dynamic completes the first and becomes entwined with it, that which pushes living beings to become signs, to find in a discourse the means by which to become a unit of meaning, an identity. From this opaque and scattered flesh, from this outstanding and murky life, transitioning finally to the clarity of a word, becoming a fragment of language, a single name, readable to others, citable: this passion lives in the ascetic who is armed with instruments against his flesh, or the philosopher who does the same through language, “losing his body,” as Hegel used to say. But everyone is a witness, thirsty to have or to finally be a name, to remain one who is called, to transform into a saying, even at the cost of his life. This textualization of the body corresponds to the incarnation of the law; it supports it, it even seems to be its foundation, at any rate it serves it. Because the law puts it into play: “Give me your body and I will give you meaning, I will make you the name and the word of my discourse.” The two problems are related, and maybe the law would have no power if it did not rely on the obscure desire to exchange one’s flesh with a glorious body, to be written, even if mortally, and to be transformed into a recognized word. Only the cry, apart or ecstatic, rebellion or inner fire of that part of the body that escapes the law of named things, stands in opposition to this passion for becoming a sign.
Perhaps all experience which is not a cry of joy or pain can be assembled under an institution. All experience which is not displaced or undone by this rapture is captured by the “love of the censor, “ collected and used by the discourse of the law. It is channeled and instrumentalized. It is written by the social system. We ought to also look at cries in order to find that which is not “reconstituted” by the order of the scriptural toolbox.
This first operation of removing or adding is therefore just the corollary of another, more general one, which consists in making the body say the code. As we have seen, this work “realizes” (in the English sense of the term) a social language; it gives it effectivity. What a great task it is to make bodies spell out an order through “machinization”! The liberal economy is no less efficient than totalitarianism in carrying out this articulation of the law through bodies. It just uses other methods. Instead of oppressing groups in order to better mark them with the hot iron of a single power, first it atomizes them and then multiplies the tight exchange networks which make individual units conform to the rules (or the “trends”) of socio-economic and cultural contracts. We can ask ourselves why this works, whether in one instance or in the other. What desire or what need leads us to make our bodies into the emblems of a law that serves to identify? The hypotheses that respond to this question demonstrate in yet another way the strength of the bonds that tools construct between our childish “natures” and social discourses.
The credibility of a discourse is what makes believers get going. It produces practitioners. Making believe is making do. However, through a curious circularity, the ability to make—to write and mechanize bodies—is precisely what makes believe. Because the law is already applied through and on bodies, “incarnated” in physical practices, it can be approved and make believe that it speaks in the name of the “real”. It becomes believable in saying, “Reality itself dictates this text to you”. We believe what we think is real, but this “real” is assigned to the discourse by a belief that provides it with a body marked by the law. The law constantly needs an “advance” of bodies, a capital of incarnation, in order for it to make believe and be practiced. Therefore, it becomes inscribed because of what has already been inscribed: it’s the witnesses, martyrs or examples that make it believable to others. It imposes itself in this way as the subject of the law, “The ancients have practiced it,” or “others have believed it and done it,” or “you already carry my signature in yourself.”
In other words, the normative discourse does not “work” unless it has already become a narrative, a text articulated upon a reality and speaking in its name, that is to say, a storied and historicized law, told by bodies. Its implementation as a narrative is the necessary presupposition for it to produce other narratives and make believe. And tools ensure the passage from discourse to narrative through interventions that embody the law by making bodies conform to it, and in such a way, accredit it with the ability to be recited by the real itself. From initiation to torture, all social orthodoxy makes use of instruments in order to give itself the form of a history and to produce the credibility attached to a discourse articulated by bodies.
Another dynamic completes the first and becomes entwined with it, that which pushes living beings to become signs, to find in a discourse the means by which to become a unit of meaning, an identity. From this opaque and scattered flesh, from this outstanding and murky life, transitioning finally to the clarity of a word, becoming a fragment of language, a single name, readable to others, citable: this passion lives in the ascetic who is armed with instruments against his flesh, or the philosopher who does the same through language, “losing his body,” as Hegel used to say. But everyone is a witness, thirsty to have or to finally be a name, to remain one who is called, to transform into a saying, even at the cost of his life. This textualization of the body corresponds to the incarnation of the law; it supports it, it even seems to be its foundation, at any rate it serves it. Because the law puts it into play: “Give me your body and I will give you meaning, I will make you the name and the word of my discourse.” The two problems are related, and maybe the law would have no power if it did not rely on the obscure desire to exchange one’s flesh with a glorious body, to be written, even if mortally, and to be transformed into a recognized word. Only the cry, apart or ecstatic, rebellion or inner fire of that part of the body that escapes the law of named things, stands in opposition to this passion for becoming a sign.
Perhaps all experience which is not a cry of joy or pain can be assembled under an institution. All experience which is not displaced or undone by this rapture is captured by the “love of the censor, “ collected and used by the discourse of the law. It is channeled and instrumentalized. It is written by the social system. We ought to also look at cries in order to find that which is not “reconstituted” by the order of the scriptural toolbox.
