Manuram Komassam Rajendran

Shiv Nadar University

Greater Noida, India

Anthropology and Technics.

Anthropology constitutes perhaps the fundamental arrangement that has governed and

controlled the path of philosophical thought from Kant to our own day. This arrangement is

essential, since it forms part of our history; but it is disintegrating before our eyes, since we

are beginning to recognize and denounce in it, in a critical mode, both a forgetfulness of the

opening that made it possible (critical philosophy and the discovery of finitude) and a

stubborn obstacle standing obstinately in the way of an imminent view form of thought. To

all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who

still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take

him as their starting point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other

hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to

formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without de-mystifying, who

refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these

warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh –

which means, to a certain extent, a silent one – Foucault 1973, 342-43.

This paper is about the relation between technics and anthropology, and therefore must

start from the first thinker of technics as an anthropological concept, i.e. Marx. In many

ways, Marx brought a rupture in philosophy with what we call now days as “dialectical

materialism”. As Balibar noted in his canonic work, The Philosophy of Marx:

“Marx’s theoretical thinking presented itself, at various points, not as a philosophy,

but as an alternative to philosophy, a non-philosophy or even an anti-philosophy.

And it has perhaps been the greatest anti-philosophy of the modern age. For Marx,

philosophy, as he had learnt it, from the tradition which ran from Plato to Hegel,

including more or less dissident materialists like Epicurus or Feuerbach, was in fact

merely an individual undertaking aimed at interpreting the world. At best this led to

leaving the world as it was; at worst, to transfiguring it.” (Balibar 1994: 2).

Balibar’s argument can be summed up like this: that Marx made sure philosophy to become

obsolete for philosophy’s sake. This is the transition from Marxist philosophy to the

philosophy of Marx (Balibar 1994). The shift from derivational suffix to a propositional

stance is a signification to an underlying change in the structure of how we understand

philosophy and knowledge in general1.

The transformation from Marxist philosophy to a philosophy of Marx, according to Balibar is

a transformation witnessed within the history of philosophy about man and his external

surroundings. This question appears to us in various forms of dichotomic conundrums: man

1The reader must not be confused with the intention that I’m writing about Balibar and his
work on Marx. I’m not writing about The Philosophy of Marx. But one should know their
Philosophy of Marx, in order to understand some of the terms I’ll be writing about. I’m only
using and citing Balibar because his work was really helpful and influential to bring home a
major argument of the paper, which I hope the reader will essentially understand.
vs nature; man vs other; mind vs body; nature vs culture etc. The Marxist understanding of

this relationship criticized the then hitherto biasness of philosophers for giving primacy to

man’s abstract consciousness and ideations rather than his actual material life. The “Marxist

philosophy” then began to be known as an inversion of Hegelian philosophy where, idealist

consciousness is replaced by materialist consciousness, and labor becoming the motor

engine of the materialist dialectic. While Marx was definitely one of the first to de-

territorialize man as an ensemble of material social relations; from a particular form of

ideological humanism of Feuerbach and Hegel, he was still caught up in the fallout of this

explosive rupture. The fundamental unapologetic existence of labor as the mediation

between man and nature; the motor engine of history, was still inefficient in supporting his

claim of a universal working class, i.e. the proletariat; and this was the greatest

contradiction and dilemma that Marx created. As Balibar stated:

“Philosophy quite evidently has not forgiven Marx for ideology. It is constantly at

pains to show that this is a badly constructed concept, which has no unambiguous

meaning and which puts Marx in contradiction with himself (this is not difficult: one

has only to place the irrevocable condemnation of the illusions and speculations of

bourgeois consciousness, delivered in the name of science of history, alongside the

monstrous layer of ideology that has been built upon the names of the proletariat,

communism and Marxism!). Yet philosophy comes back endlessly to this same point:

as though, by the very fact of introducing this term, Marx had set it the problem it

must master if it is to remain philosophy.” (Balibar 1994: 43).

Marx himself was caught red-handed in his own form of hypocrisy as he never managed to

admit the ideological connotations in some of his own works like The Communist Manifesto

or Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Marxist philosophy created its own version of
“theoretical humanism” as Althusser would note, while criticizing other thinkers like

Feuerbach for their own humanist leanings. It was mostly in Capital and Grundrisse, where

one can see Marx actually beginning to see ideology as a by-product of all sorts of modes of

production and not as something that is solely perpetuated for the control of the

production by the bourgeois. Thus one cannot see this movement of “philosophy of Marx”

in Marxist philosophy. Because Marxist philosophy is not only rooted in some sort of

“theoretical humanism”, but also in some sort of “theorism”. What I mean by “theorism”

here is that, one always try to accommodate and compromise the real relations, the

corporal everyday practices of life into some sort of theoretical structure and thereby

creating a cyclical circuit, which at the end only serves that particular structure. This is the

exactly the aspect Marx sets to criticize and transform into a philosophy based on real

relations and practices. But he falls into his own form of theoretical structure (“theoretical

humanism”), and so do the followers who call themselves as ‘Marxists’. As Balibar states

“there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; on the other hand, Marx is more

important for philosophy than ever before” (Balibar 1994: 1). In short, there will always be a

philosophy of Marx. In fact, for philosophy and all forms of knowledge disciplines and

discourses to develop, there should not be any Marxists, instead there should be those who

practice the philosophy of and developed first by Marx. The philosophy itself being a

practice of what Althusser states like this:

“In the phrase real-humanism, in my opinion, the concept ‘real’ is a practical

concept, the equivalent of a signal, of a notice-board that ‘points out’ what

movement is to be put into effect and in what direction, to what place, must there

be displacement to reach the real earth rather than the heaven of abstraction. ‘The
 real this way!’ We follow this guide and we come out into society, the social

relations, and the conditions of their real possibility.” (Althusser 1969: 243).

What both Balibar and Althusser don’t talk about is in what ways this new way of

philosophy must be methodized. For Althusser, the movement of history is through

“contradictions” and “overdeterminations” (Althusser: For Marx). What Balibar calls as a

“process” that sets man and the exterior not at opposite poles but as two sides of the same

coin; an inseparable entanglement but where, nevertheless a soft differentiation is required

for analytic purposes. I believe the time is ripe to build on from this point and understand

what exactly is the mechanism of such a “process”. For Marx, “labor” is what that mediates

between man and nature. But man needs tools to do labor. Thus there is a second layer of

intermediation between man and labor, i.e. tools, machines, and technology. Technology

and technics become the mechanism through which this complicated relationship between

man and the exterior moves forward. Marx understood this and this is where he also

becomes the ‘first thinker of technics’ (Bradley 1988) but at the same time this thought was

completely antithetical to Marx’s own conception of labor and its alienation and

reappropriation. If Marx says labor is the mechanism that transforms nature into man’s

image, this also means the appropriation of an alienated world under his control. Labor is a

tool for this re-appropriation. But since labor itself is mediated through tools and technics,

then it means labor has already been alienated, meaning to say the re-appropriation of

labor back to man, an idea heavily influenced by Feuerbachian humanism cannot be realized

as the labor in its essential condition of possibility already exists outside and independent of

man in technics. Technics’ independent stance is a result of its own posing of itself.

Whatever that man does, if it can be considered as labor as life-activity, then this life also

must have an underlying technical mechanism which exists independent of man. The
practice of life as labor itself must have a technique(s) of its own. This is what I believe

Arthur Bradley meant by when he uses the term “originary technicity”. What Bradley carves

out as a basic conundrum of this “question of technicity”, comes fully fledged in the quote

given below:

“To state it very simply, I wish to argue that the theory of originary technicity from

Marx to Derrida is – despite its claims to the contrary – not technical all the way

down. It will become clear over the course of this book that something – or rather

someone – always preceded or exceeds technicisation. As we have seen, the theory

of originary technicity claims to reveal the essential ‘technicty’ of life itself – right

down to the process of replication of the biological cell – but I wish to argue that it

constantly privileges one form of life over all the others. For me, originary technicity

– whether transcendentalist or empiricist, idealist or materialist, phenomenological,

humanist or post-humanist, ontological, deconstructive or genealogical – still

remains in the thrall of what Agamben calls the anthropological machine: it is a

mechanism for producing and recognizing the being that we ourselves are…”

(Bradley 1988: 15).

At this point, I have to make an abrupt diversion to the continuity of the paper for the sake

of explaining the argument with which I started this paper. The idea of technics that Marx

began with must be continued not within the tradition of philosophy, but with something

that is close to the philosophical tradition: anthropology. The question to be asked is in

what way has anthropology took in the problem of an “originary technicity of life”?

Foucault’s quote at the beginning of this paper implicates a process of anthropologizing

“man” as an essential and unaccounted base from where very philosophical enquiry must
begin. If that is so, then anthropology is one discipline that can tackle the question of

“man”; it is capable of not only scrutinizing the ideological and theoretical pretensions of

the “anthropological machine” by looking at man and his everyday living-lived life. Such a

process instead of undermining anthropology can only widen its disciplinary boundaries and

scope. I believe anthropology is more equipped than philosophy to pursue an answer for

this question, because of the same reason Marx considered philosophy as inadequate to

address the real conditions of human life. Anthropology in my opinion can utilize the

concept of technics (techniques) to understand the intricacies of everyday life. But in order

to do this, anthropology must reevaluate its own forms of theorisms and ideations of what

it means to be human as a sociocultural and physical being. What Das said in her paper

“Wittgenstein and Anthropology”, is straight to the point and has very much influenced me

in my own conception of how can I use “technics” for the benefit of the anthropological

approach of understanding the human life and culture. Das says this:

“Despite the studies on socialization, rarely has the question of how one comes to a

sense of a shared culture as well as one’s own voice in that culture in the context of

everyday life been addressed anthropologically. If asked at all, this question has

been formulated as a question of socialization as obedience to a set of normative

rules and procedures. But juxtaposing the child with the builders seems to suggest

that whatever else it may be, the inheritance of culture is not about inheriting a

certain set of rules or a certain capacity to obey rules” (Das 1998: 174).

What is termed as “shared culture” in Das’s words is formulated based on the societal

norms but it is also important how anthropology considers these cultural norms and forms

in its own process of ‘anthropologizing’ human culture and human life in general. In what

ways it gives primacy to some sort of theoretical humanism; conceptualizing a monolithic

and a primordial version of the human figure? In what ways does it essentialize and

prioritize a particular form of life? How much do these so called normative societal and

cultural structures enable the perpetuation of these ideological concepts? Bradley notes

that whether one is a humanist or a post-humanist, the question of the ‘anthropological

machine’ still prevails in understanding man. But the posing of the question of, ‘what is

man’ presupposes a form ahistorical primordialism, an arrest of a progression of a particular

movement whose velocity and displacement can only be determined by trying to capture

the technicality of the movement itself. Steiglar is right to put both technology and

anthropology as the opposite ends, at least for a short while:

“Questioning the nature of the human means first of all questioning its origin. In the

final analysis, this is what anthropology does. But we should question the very form

of the question. We cannot, and neither can anthropology in general, postulate a

nature (that is, an origin) of the human, as Claude Lévi-Strauss does, assigning to

science the task of solving the “problem of invariance,” a problem that “appears as

the modern form of a question that mankind has always asked itself”. Leroi-Gourhan

interests us precisely because he apprehends anthropology as technology; in this

respect he is an exception” (Steiglar 1994: 93).

In his book Technics and Time; The Fault of Epimetheus, Steiglar criticizes anthropological

tendency to posit an origin of man (man being a product of culture rather than that of

nature) from the time of Rousseau onwards. Twentieth century anthropology has evolved

far from a Roussean position of a state of nature/culture but the remnants of this

ideological abstraction is still present in many anthropological theories. What Das said as

the rule of norms as societal and cultural structures in reproducing the individual is also an

ideological reproduction of the self-enclosed figure of man transforming the environment

into his own image. Man or at least a part of him remains the same while his external world

constantly changes. Moreover, the part that remains unchanged becomes the essential part

of him, makes him human and different from everything present around him. It is exactly

this that concept of technics must challenge. But when Steiglar says “anthropology as

technology” he seems to be still stuck in explaining technology as a theoretical structure. Or

at least he never talked about technics as a material practice precisely. This what we have to

bring out, and this is where anthropology becomes invaluable with its ethnographic

practice.

We are entering to the final section of our paper where I’ll be talking about anthropological

theories which deals with the materiality of the social as a (re)productive force to some

extend. But that is what technics/techniques essentially entail as a socio-material process;

the production of social life itself. But we have to be cautious to see in what ways these

theories presuppose a form of “theoretical humanism” (Althusser 1968) or

“anthropologization” (Foucault 1973). Theories of Mauss (1979) and Bourdieu (1977)

especially have influenced anthropological discourses in finding the “interiority” of the

social structure within the corporeality of the body itself. What Bourdieu famously states as

the “dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality”

(Bourdieu 1977: 72) plays an important role in the anthropologizing of knowledge itself

where both the interior and exterior is “theoretical human-centered”. In Bourdieu’s and

Mauss’s theories, the exterior always becomes a ‘social structure’ lacking of any ‘real and

dynamic sociality’. Bourdieu’s theory of practice is also a theory of strategy, where the

dialectical movement of the social structure depends upon how the individual strategizes

his daily social life. In this way, he succeeds in giving the individual a form of active agency
which if real can then transgress the normative structure of society. But, Bourdieu doesn’t

really express this transgression explicitly since he is set to totalize this agency under

another form of structure; which comes into light from this quote:

“To eliminate the need to resort to “rules”, it would be necessary to establish in each

case a complete description which invocation of rules allows one to dispense with)

of the relation between the habitus, as a socially constituted system of cognitive and

motivating structures, and the socially structures situation in which the agents’

interests are defined, and with them the objective functions and subjective

motivations of their practices. It would then become clear that, as Weber indicated,

the juridical or customary rule is never more than a secondary principle of the

determination of practices, intervening when the primary principle, interest, fails.”

(Bourdieu 1977: 76).

The customary structure is overpassed by another total structure of “interests” of which

strategizing becomes the primary mechanism. This structure of “interests” as habitus is also

a “spontaneous interpretation of statistics” (77) as Bourdieu mentioned, adding on to the

scientific theory of probability and thereby in his own words “reversing the tendency of

objectivism” (77). But what Bourdieu manages to create as the structure of habitus

encompassing this constant computations and permutations of strategizing interests can

only persist and be legitimate, if these so called strategies remain dormant and unconscious

to its enactor until and unless it has been interiorized in him by the pedagogical aspect of

the structure. As De Certeau asptly points out:

“A temporal dimension is thus introduced: practices (expressing the experience)

correspond adequately to situations (manifesting the structure) if, and only if, the

structure remains stable for the duration of the process of

 interiorization/exteriorization; if not, practices lag behind, thus resembling the

structure at the preceding point, the point at which it was interiorized by the

habitus.

According to this analysis, structures can change and thus become a principle of

social mobility (and even the only one). Achievements cannot. They have no

movement of their own.

The habitus provides the basis for explaining a society in relationship to structures.

But there is a price to be paid for this explanation. In order to be able to assume that

the basis has such a stability, it must be unverifiable, invisible.” (De Certeau 1984:

57-58).

I mentioned above, how Bourdieu using “strategizing” takes in the theory of probability and

adds a social dimension to it, and through this he had sanitized his own theory from any sort

of “positivist objectivism”. Nevertheless, in trying to create social dimension, he in Steiglar’s

sense have also attempted a form of anthropologizing by positing a “nature (that is, an

origin) of the human” through what he calls as “interests”. The strategizing individual has

two exteriorities: the one of habitus which constantly feeds his interiority new ways of

strategizing which then he/she can exteriorize in the form of practice according to the laws

of probability. But here the objective exterior world represented by the theory of

probability is not only affected by the “spontaneous interpretation of statistics” but also is

stripped of its agency in determining the mechanism of the practice. By introducing

“strategy” and “interests”, Bourdieu had completely engulfed the exterior as an extension

of human interior-social nexus. The social, here is again a form of abstraction of theoretical

humanism creating a primordial man governed by the structure of the strategizing

mechanism of habitus.
If the reader is not convinced by my argument that Bourdieu’s conception of a practice of

habitus necessarily falls into the trap of a “theoretical humanism”, then I can only expound

on it by coming back to ethnographic examples. I would like to take an example from my

own paper which I wrote as my undergraduate thesis. In this paper, where I did fieldwork at

an informal factory in Northern Kerala; I want to talk about certain practices of informality

that I found very interesting. I’m not using Bourdieu’s idea of practice when I say “practice

of informality” because the mechanism of his “practice” is that of habitus and strategizing,

whereas my idea of “practice” of a form of technics, by which I mean what I said earlier,

what it ensues is a production of a certain form of sociality itself (in this case the informal

laborer). It is not appropriate to misconstrue this position as me trying to structuralize

“informality”; even if there is a consequential and unintended structuralization that is

happening concurrent to my proposition, then again it always follows the real happenings of

the everyday life of the laborer.

My informant (the laborer) was a regular smoker, and since he worked in an informal

factory there were no restrictions as such against smoking inside the factory premises (more

like the employer didn’t really care or never saw him smoking). So he comes out of the

textile factory room (the factory was literally a house made of concrete walls and mud tiles

for roof) every time when he wants to smoke. The inside of the factory, which is a single

narrow room consists of eight power looms arranged in two columns; four each controlled

simultaneously by one worker. The room, thus is already crowded with the machines, and

in addition to that, the noise from the machines when they operate together makes staying

in the room quite tiresome. The power loom which makes white Indian dhotis (long white

cloth with colored boundaries on two opposite ends) pretty much does the entire work by
itself except at the opposite ends of the product, where the threads have to be changed in

order to make the colored borders. The workers’ only direct engagement with the machine

happens when this exchange of thread happens, where they have to anticipate when to

exchange the thread, and how long the borders should be etc. My informant especially

when doing this part does it with heightened concentration as he places his hand on the

moving “breast beam” and mocks its movement with his own hands to reach a form of

spatiotemporal rhythm with the machine. After this part, when the loom weaves the large

white part of the cloth, the worker won’t have anything to do except just standing near the

loom watching it do its work. It is during this time he comes out for his smoke breaks, and it

is understandable as he has nothing to do and it wouldn’t hurt anyone to have a little smoke

break while the machine does its job.

According to Bourdieu, the worker taking a smoke break can be seen as a form of

strategized habitus, where he makes free time out of his work for smoke breaks. One might

even hypothesize that it is a strategy to get him ready for the work even better as the next

round of changing thread will soon come. This is a fair assessment but it can only be fair if

one choses to overlook a plethora of other evidences. First of all, one has to note that these

smoke breaks don’t happen at regular intervals. The worker definitely how much it’ll take

the loom to complete the white part and he could easily regulate his smoke breaks. But his

urge to smoke comes often sporadically. Sometimes he stays inside the room a lot then

takes a break; other times he takes two or three breaks in short intervals. The chance of him

actually doing this as a strategy to prepare himself for work or exploiting the ambiguities of

an informal setting is really small. What happens here is cannot be really explained by the

work either. He smokes because he like to smoke and he does it whenever he feels like it.

There is no strategizing that happens here, and his smoking develops only as a technic of
dis-engagement and re-engagement. His dis-engagement with the loom happens when it

starts to weave the white part of the cloth. The worker standing besides the machine in the

factory room is an attempt to do his work, but he can’t do so because the labor has been

objectified and transferred to the machine. This is a technical dis-engagement of not only

between the worker and the machine but also a dis-engagement in another form of

production; the production of the worker’s subjectivity as a worker. He needs to do

something, this is his work time and the machine won’t allow him to do any work. His smoke

breaks become another form of work to him, another form of engagement and production

of the working mind. He doesn’t consider it as a break from work, but work itself. Smoking

and observing the surroundings of the factory becomes as much a part of his work as the

work inside the factory room. This technic of working is also influenced by the cloth; the

large white part between the borders at the end requires no change of threads for a very

long time, thus creating a technical transition from work inside the factory to work outside

the factory. At the end of the day he feels like he has done a day’s work, only because he

doesn’t really separate between the work inside and the work outside. This is not a strategy;

this is a way a number of external and internal conditions subjectify the worker as he is.

There is an underlying technic visible to whoever ready to look. This is a technic of everyday

life of that informal worker and this is (in part) what makes him an informal worker at a

textile factory in Northern Kerala.

I’m concluding this paper hoping that I’ve justified myself in explaining what I set out to do.

What I’m proposing is a methodical observation of the everyday life as real techno-

expressive phenomenon rather than employing a selective vision induced by theoretical and

ideological pretensions. Anthropological discourses play a major role in constructing the

crux of terms like human, culture, social life etc. The least we can do is stay true and

observant to the real happenings of what it means to be human as a cultural and social

entity rather than legitimizing unsubstantiated ideological abstractions or prematurely

attempting to create a “total theory” (theorism). Life as Das affirms appears to us only in the

form of “forms of life”; there are no singular essential aspects to sociality of life. But this not

to discourage anyone but on the contrary is exactly what Das said in “Wittgenstein and

Anthropology”:

“From a Wittgensteinian perspective, these seem to be only possibilities of recovery

through a descent into the ordinaries of everyday life, of domesticity, through which

alone the words that have been exiled may be brought back. This everydayness is

then in the nature of a return – one that has been recovered in the face of

madness.” (Das 1998: 183).

This is where anthropologists and technology and technics must come together, and a new

form of anthropologization must happen where it doesn’t presumptuously separate human

life from other forms of life. If life is technical then man is also technical.
References:

1. Balibar, Étienne. 2007. The Philosophy Of Marx. 13th ed. London: Verso.
2. Foucault, Michel. 1973. The Order Of Things. 3rd ed. New York: Pantheon Books.
3. Marx, Karl, and David McLellan. 1972. Grundrisse. New York, N.Y.: Harper and Row.
4. Althusser, Louis. 2010. For Marx. London: Verso.
5. Bradley, Arthur. 2011. Originary Technicity: The Theory Of Technology From Marx To
Derrida. [Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar]: Palgrave Macmillan.
6. Das, Veena. 1998. "WITTGENSTEIN AND ANTHROPOLOGY". Annual Review Of
Anthropology 27 (1): 171-195. doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.27.1.171.
7. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics And Time, 1. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

8. Mauss, Marcel. 1973. "Techniques Of The Body∗". Economy And Society 2 (1): 70-88.

doi: 10.1080/03085147300000003.
9. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline Of A Theory Of Practice. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
10. Certeau, Michel de. 2008. The Practice Of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of
California Press.