mug shots and mauss, concept rhyming paper #2
By emily
Created 6 Nov 2007 - 8:50pm
Emily RitchieOctober 28th, 2007Fashioning the BodyConcept Rhyming Paper #2 Mug-Shots and Mauss We are creatures of habit. From the ways we learn to tie our shoes to the ways we approach the world, our movements, mannerisms and ideas are conditioned and solidified through processes of routine. We are also consistently over-stimulated. Because of this our brains are forced to minimize and simplify what sensory data is translated into what we perceive. The more straight-forward and accessible the data that we interact with is, the easier time we have processing and remembering it. Therefore, it is not surprising that the routines we adopt arise from the sensory input we can most easily manage. Mauss calls “technique an action which is effective and traditional”(p.75). The creation and utilization of mug shots is a manifestation of how humans depend on straight-forward categorization. They are a technique of classification that have been made into a routine procedure through the appeal to over-simplified material. Mug-shots have become a tradition. The creation and practice of this tradition is biologically constructed. While being able to process sensory data smoothly is to our species advantage, it may not be as advantageous as we think it is to categorize. The key to being able to reverse possibly damaging traditions, like that of the mug-shot, is by understanding how categorization is not always beneficial to our survival. The tradition of mug shots is biologically constructed because their format is a product of our need to order and simplify to make sense of what we experience. The positioning of a face on a mug shot is easily processed: frontal and profile view. There is no distracting addition to scenery or clothing: all emphasis is placed on recognition of the facial features. The composition is based on utility. This technique is effective in the sense that it hones the viewer’s perception to very specific characteristics. Whenever these mug-shots are used for identification there is nothing to get thrown off by. However, in making these photos so over-simplified they also become removed. They become lifeless, static, a relic testifying to a human who used to embody this uniformed number. So in that sense the photos become disassociating and unbelievable. There is a fine line between making sensory data manageable and over-simplifying it to the point at which the viewer no longer has to interact with it. This is where categorization becomes dangerous: when critical thought is no longer required at all because the object is so glossed over or removed, we lose our ability to process any of the data in a meaningful way at all. This is what a lot of techniques originally implemented to supplement our survival turn into: means in which we actually lose our ability to remain self-sufficient and aware. Take Number 968 for example: there are no signifiers lending to the context of this situation. Simply because of the format, the viewer is led to categorize the subject of the photograph as some kind of criminal. There is no history or details available, except for his height, and because of this the photograph becomes dead in a sense. There is nothing to understand in this photograph, only something to observe. There is nothing you can change in this photograph, only something to endure. It is a passive experience. Yet regardless of its inactivity, the mug-shot continues. As Mauss states, “This above all is what distinguishes man from the animals: the transmission of his techniques”(p.75). Another to continue the tradition of the mug-shot, even if in a different context, was Andy Warhol. Commissioned to create a piece for the 1964 World’s Fair, Warhol fashioned an extremely large silkscreen titled ‘Thirteen Most Wanted Men’.It is interesting to see that out of such passive material Warhol was able to create a piece that has at-least somewhat more active qualities about it. The way he has positioned the figures has them confronting one another and interacting on some imagined level. However, the piece still seems very rigid and dictated by its past. “The child imitates actions of adults, which have succeeded and which he has seen successfully performed by people in whom he has confidence and who have authority over him. The action is imposed from without, from above, even if it is an exclusively biological action, involving his body. The individual borrows the series of movements which constitute it from the action executed in front of him or with him by others”(Mauss, p. 75). Warhol has just directly reproduced a format which he has seen elsewhere. What is interesting here, however, is that because these mug shots are seen in the context of commissioned art instead of a utility they take on a whole other potential. Even though this piece ended up having to get painted over, it portrays how wealth and stability can provide the means to alter routines of how things are used. So where does our intrinsic need to categorize and over-simplify integrate with an opulent and padded modern existence? Are we doomed to continually dumb things down and make things easier as our lives get built up around us by the surmounting technology? Or are there ways to harness the resource we have and channel it to alter our destructive patterns, such as over-simplification? “These ‘habits’ do not just vary with individuals and their imitations, they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashion, prestiges. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties”(Mauss, 75). If we could begin to understand the origins of our habits, we could begin to understand how to shape them.