The corporeality of expertise

Abstract

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)

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