Praktognosia

The body, in general, can be seen as a dispositif, such as, in particular, the pendulum movement of the legs!…

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«“Dispositif” derives from the Latin “disponere”, “dispositum”, “dispositio”, and all of these terms refer to a sence of placement and ordaining. A dispositif implies a series of orders, of things that can or cannot be done. Regardless of rigourous comprehensiveness, we may say that a dispositif defines what a bio-political body can do.

A dispositif thus ties knowledge and power. Gilles Deleuze (1988), in reference to his friend Foucault´s work, has put the emphasis on how the Subject is the output of this tie (…), that is, on how the dispositif is tantamount to a process  of subjectivation. This way, a peculiar definition of Subject comes out: it results from a dispositif defined by that which can or cannot be done. Foucault, on speaking about-biopolitcs, underscored how dispositifs are able to be aplied on bodies, actually speaking about neoliberal orthopedics (…). This way, we are in front of a conception of the Subject and knowledge that is opposite to the classical model, according to which the Subject is mere conciousness while knowledge amounts to determining what a body objectively is.Though the dispositif, new light can be shed on the mind-body, Subject-object relation.

This Foucauldian perspective – akin to a post-structuralist take on the matter – mind and body, Subject and object do not constitute an antithesis. Conciousness thus is not the expression of a transcendental Subject, concious of itself and the world around it; instead, consciousness amounts to all that a body has learned – one could say, experience protocols (…). In this view, the body is not the noematic correlative of consciousness, a mere object, but instead it is everything that can be done with respect to these protocols. A body therefore is not a thing but a potency.

[DE FAZIO & LÉVANO, 2019: 23-24]

«Praktognosia is a portmanteau built by “praxis” (action) and “gnosis” (knowledge), and it stands for the strong tie between knowing and doing. This tie is double: it indicates knowledge of ways of doing, through it’s not just a preliminar kind of knowledge placed immediately before action; this would lead to suppose that there is a knowing Subject that can know independently from his own doing, thus returning to the Subject-object distintion. In order to avoid this difficulty, which would lead to subjectivism, there is another aspect of praktognosia: to do is to know already, from the very outset. Doing and knowing are the same thing, for both of them determine the structure of the world understood as an environment, at the same time known and done: the sense of this is that the relation between the body and the environment runs back and forth.»

[DE FAZIO & LÉVANO, 2019: 26]

«Plus, praktognosia also has to do with negativity, which allegedly constitutes its most interesting aspect: a body learns only if it is manages to create anomalies. This notion stands out in Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on nature, delivered at the Collège de France by the end of the 1950’s; like Canguilhem, he defines the body as a fluctuation with respect to given norms (…) in order to highlight its plasticity and its resistance to any kind of pre-established principle. This fluctuation takes place as the stochastic (dynamic) unity of experience protocols that define the feature of having a body.

It could be argued that Foucault dealt with the dynamic feature of these protocols in terms of governamentally, that is, in terms of the management of anomalies and abnormal individuals (…). But since there is no such thing as correct bodies, power (as in controlling the system’s anomalies) is obliged to enforce the orthopedics of bodies by instituting models of usage that go hand in hand with bio-political aspects of knowledge (…). However, this resistance may become a line of flight, through the proper understanding of bodies as holders of praktognosia.»

[DE FAZIO & LÉVANO, 2019: 27]

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BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE

DE FAZIO, Gianluca & LÉVANO, Paulo F.. Praktognosia: ecosophical remarques on Having a body.