A Praxeological Approach to Subjectivation in a Material World

Abstract

This article aims at bringing together various lines of analysis that have been kept more or less separate until now, that is, studies on the body, motricity, perception, agency, material culture, the subject, unconscious drives, and power systems. By drawing on the work of Mauss, Schilder, Tisseron, Parlebas and Foucault, it discusses how the subject and its drives are invested in sensori-motricity in a material world. When it is socially validated and coded, such an investment amounts to what Foucault called the ‘techniques of the self’. The subjectivation thus achieved may be consistent or at odds with corresponding representations. The notions provided by praxeology, the science of sensori-motricity, may help in producing an ethnography of subjectivation in a material world.