The corporeality of expertise

Bibliographic Data

ID7285387
AuthorsD Boyer (0000-0001-8944-406X, Cornell University, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume70
Issue2
Pages243-266
Publication date2005-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnos (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0014-1844 • E-ISSN: 1469-588X
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00141840500141345
OpenAlexW2087787752
LanguageEN
Citations received42
References cited46

In this essay, I write about the relationship between corporeality and expert knowledge while simultaneously, and only partly successfully, trying to avoid writing about 'theintellectual's body.' The first half of the essay enlists Marxian social theory to model how the division and specialization of intellectual labors generates a certain experiential relationship between expert and objects of expert knowledge that I have termed elsewhere the 'phenomenology of expertise.' I argue that the focus of intellectual labor upon rationality decorporealizes intellectual self-aware-ness while lending 'objects' of rational attention a peculiarly material character. The second half of the essay complicates the theoretical arguments of the first half with an ethnographic engagement of the corporeality of eastern German journalism in the 1990s. Here, I focus on the norm of professional corporeal 'calm' and on how gesture and reflex can be interpreted to exhibit a mode of critical expertise that is otherwise actively policed in the professional environment of the contemporary eastern German media. In conclusion, I reflect on how expert anthropological engagement with other modes and cultures of expertise creates opportunities for an improved reflexive awareness of the social character of knowledge practices that are neither 'ours' nor 'theirs.' Intellectuals, taken generally ... seem to lack a starting point from which their scriptures come: where are their bodies? This is the simple question I wish to register. Sometimes, but rarely, the body is there - fleetingly and sparingly in journals, diaries, sometimes in letter. ... [I]t is noticeable how amongst male intellectuals this is the most remarkable and yet unremarked absence. philip corrigan (Citation1988:369) Keywords: KnowledgeprofessionalismjournalismGermany Acknowledgments I would like to thank several individuals who allowed themselves to be provoked by this text and who, in turn, have generously helped me to make this text's arguments more sound: Thomas Broman, Jean Comaroff, Davydd Greenwood, Katherine Young, Everett Zhang, an anonymous reviewer for Ethnos and all of my colleagues in the faculty reading group in Cornell University's Department of Anthropology. I particularly appreciate Terry Turner's thoughts on how to write about corporeality without writing about 'the body.' I also wish to thank Don Kulick who has been a profoundly generous and effective interlocutor and editor as always. I am indebted to the Alexander von Humboldt and Wenner-Gren Foundations for supporting the fieldwork upon which the ethnography is based and to Johanna Schoss for continuous dialogue and support. My deepest debt remains to the German journalists who shared so much of themselves with me during my field research. Notes 1. It is important to note that the German word, Arbeit, that is normally translated as 'labor' signals both 'work' but also a more open sense of 'activity' (similar to the semantic range of the term, Ta ̈tigkeit). Since the term 'labor' has acquired such strong associations with Fordist industrial wage-labor, it is vital to distinguish the broader referentiality of Marx's use of the term from the more specific referentiality of later usage. In this essay, I mean 'labor' to recapture the nuances of self-realizing activity. 2. I use the imperative in both instances to acknowledge Marx and Engels's position that capitalism and the division of labor are historically teleological and that they generate systemic social conditions for individual action and consciousness, 'For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape' (Citation1978:160). 3. Even in Emile Durkheim's more positive evaluation of the division of labor Citation(1984) as an effect of the recalibration of solidarity in complex societies, he stresses the 'distress' and even 'agony' wrought by the specialization of labor (pp. 180-86). 4. Media professionalism in the gdr was a highly-systematized and rigorously state-controlled venture in keeping with the Leninist model of journalism as the 'agitator, propagandist, and organizer' of the party of the working-class (Boyer Citation2003). 5. Despite the fact that there had been a genuine renaissance of investigative journalism in eastern German media institutions between the collapse of the sed regime and the political unification of the two German states, West German journalists tended to see this as another suspect 'socialist journalism experiment' qualitatively distinct from democratic western journalism. 6. Coverage of scandals relating to the gdr Ministry of State Security (known colloquially as the 'Stasi') has been a staple of western reportage in eastern Germany since the early nineties. 7. It is remarkable, for example, that West German media institutions hired virtually no East German journalists into full-time positions after 1989, instead relying on their own correspondent network and eastern stringers to provide them necessary coverage of so-called Ostthemen (eastern themes). 8. This was true in other professions as well. See, for example, Andreas Glaeser's study of the unification process among the Berlin police (2000). 9. Bodily metaphors routinely arose in such determinations. I heard on more than one occasion the transformation in social systems likened to a heart attack. 10. One journalist in his thirties said to me in passing, 'My editor once told me that he wanted me in this Stuhl here because he valued my creative abilities, not because he just needed an ass to fill it.' 11. Parenthetically, I believe that Freud's constant touchstones of the 'intelligence' and 'creativity' of hysteric patients offer evidence, especially in light of Freud's later study of femininity Citation(1965), that Freud intuited that hysterics' bodies were taking over a creative agency denied their voices, that their bodies were not only rebelling against the discipline of their sexuality but also against the gender discipline of upper middle-class Austrian society (recall the parable of the landlord's and the caretaker's daughters) (1966:438-440

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Sociology · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Philosophy

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