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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
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 –
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
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
a transformation witnessed within the history of philosophy about man and his external
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
engine of the materialist dialectic. While Marx was definitely one of the first to de-
ideological humanism of Feuerbach and Hegel, he was still caught up in the fallout of this
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
“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
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
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
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
“process” that sets man and the exterior not at opposite poles but as two sides of the same
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
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
mechanism for producing and recognizing the being that we ourselves are…”
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
what way has anthropology took in the problem of an “originary technicity of life”?
“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
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
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
machine’ still prevails in understanding man. But the posing of the question of, ‘what is
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
“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
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
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
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
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
the production of social life itself. But we have to be cautious to see in what ways these
social structure within the corporeality of the body itself. What Bourdieu famously states as
(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
strategizing becomes the primary mechanism. This structure of “interests” as habitus is also
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
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
correspond adequately to situations (manifesting the structure) if, and only if, 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
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
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
“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
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
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
happening concurrent to my proposition, then again it always follows the real happenings of
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
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
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
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
observant to the real happenings of what it means to be human as a cultural and social
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”:
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
This is where anthropologists and technology and technics must come together, and a new
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.