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Executives and government officials place great importance on the physical presence of experts of technology transfer, as if the human body is a conduit for information apart from the costly but dry reports sold as end products. This raises the problem of determining the value of the body as a type of end product of expertise.
The intersection of expertise and the body suggests an image as “de-corporealized” (Boyer 2005: 247; Brydon 1998). Borrowing a phrase from Bruno Latour, the expert is a “mind in a vat” (1999:4). That is, the physical body of the expert does not belong to those characteristics for which we commonly identify and evaluate intellectuals and their labor. This is because, the argument goes, intellectuals encourage each other to experience their mental activities as originating in a purely cognitive process. Experts evaluate and consider genuine knowledge only that which derives from mental activities (reading, thinking) (Abbott 1988; Bourdieu 1998).
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Jonathan Stern & Arild Moe, Energy Experts Oslo, Norway, 2010
Protecting the imitable quality of corporeal expertise invites a great deal of security. The ubiquity of bodyguards, turnstiles, identification badges restrict the body in relation to expert knowledge.
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