philosophy – The Duke Reader

Writing French Theory in English

8 Dec 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of The Power at the End of the Economy, Brian Massumi, Duke University Press, 2014.**

Massumi Brian Massumi owes his career to his ability to translate obscure texts into plain English, and to his penchant for doing the reverse. His first notoriety came from bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to an English-speaking audience. Without him, what became an essential text for feminists, literary theorists, social scientists, philosophers, and avant-garde artists may have remained a local event, known only to the francosphere. His meticulous translation from French into English proved that translating untranslatable language constitutes a challenge, not an impossibility. He may have understood Deleuze and Guattari’s work better than they understood it themselves: going through the detour of a foreign language allowed the text to shed some of its obscurities, and to take on new ones as the translator engaged in his own rap and wordplays. Meaning always exceeds linguistic conventions contained in national boundaries and syntaxic rules. In this case, the obscure clarity of A Thousand Plateaus inspired many creators beyond the field of continental philosophy. References to Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be found in literary artworks, blockbuster movies, electronic music, and even in financial theory and military thinking. Massumi was both a translator and an interpreter of Deleuzian philosophy: his User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia remains the most accessible and playful introduction to one of the major intellectual achievements of the late twentieth century. If, as Michel Foucault prophesied, the twenty-first century will be Deleuzian, it will be in no small part thanks to Brian Massumi and to his role as a translator and a go-between.

The Deleuzian Century

But the most important lies elsewhere. Brian Massumi was not only the faithful translator of a thought originating from France and the commentator who explained its meaning to a general audience. He is also an author in his own right, and now can claim the paternity of an œuvre. He was the first thinker to write French theory in English. And if it wasn’t confusing enough, he did it from a perch at McGill University in Montréal, in the French-speaking province of an English-speaking country. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who first earned his living from copying musical scores, Massumi was first a copyist or a scribe, then an interpreter of others’ compositions, and then a composer of his own symphonies and sonatas. From his work as a passeur, a boatman taking cultural productions from one river bank to the next, he drew the resources to become a navigator in the rough waters of postmodern philosophy. Like Charon, the ferryman of the Ancient Greek underworld, he has to be paid with the silver coins put over the eyes of dead philosophers. In this case, Deleuze and Guattari provided him with the viaticum that allowed him to launch his ship into stormy seas. In a way, his work predates artificial intelligence: it is the text that an AI software system would have produced after having been fed with the complete works of Gilles Deleuze and other luminaries of postmodern thinking. One can also say that Massumi did to Deleuze what Deleuze claimed to have done to Spinoza and to Bergson: taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. Massumi invites us to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception.

Brian Massumi makes many references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Like Alice, the author identifies a rabbit hole as a point of entry to the Market in Wonderland. This entry point is called affect, and following the white rabbit of economic interest through it leads to a world where the rules keep changing, nothing is what it seems, and some people appear (like the Queen of Hearts) to be able to believe six impossible things before breakfast. When Alice was invited for tea, she naturally assumed that she would sit in one chair and enjoy her tea in the pleasant company of a collection of strange but interesting characters. Little did she know what would follow. At the Mad Hatter’s tea party, the time was always six o’clock and though Alice moved from chair to chair as she, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare moved places around the table, Alice never actually got any tea to eat or drink. Likewise, we assume we are invited to discuss economics and its limits whereas in fact we are summoned to a trial where language is put to the test and things are not what they seem. “Must a name mean something?” Alice asks Humpty Dumpty, only to get this answer: “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” Similarly, Massumi’s book, like Deleuze and Guattari’s, can mean many things to different persons. It is a remix of concepts imported from French theory, abstract notions and models used in scientific disciplines such as economics or physics, and the author’s own idiosyncrasies, such as the literary reference to Alice in Wonderland. The language used by Massumi can be highly metaphorical: “We are all paying guests at the Tea Party of choice, spreading our favorite jam on our very own slice of the bread of life, served on the silver platter of efficiency by the invisible hand.”

The Market in Wonderland

The Power at the End of the Economy is the power of economics at its frontiers, where economists dispense with the hypothesis of rational choice and efficient markets and experiment with alternative ideas. The idea that economics only deals with rational agents maximizing expected utility no longer characterizes economic science in its most recent developments. New fields of research, from neuroeconomics to behavioral economics and theoretical finance, are modeling how economic choices are made without relying on flawed assumptions and erroneous hypotheses. Bounded rationality implicates the idea that humans take shortcuts that may lead to suboptimal decision-making, and that emotions, habits, biases, heuristics, and environmental factors also contribute to individual and societal preferences. Massumi’s book starts where the explaining power of economics ends and has to give way to alternative explanations starting from very different premises. We find affects, hence power, at the end of the economy. Specifically, emotions and affects bind subjects together into collectivities, taking on a life of their own through circulation and exchange. We do not live in a world peopled by economic actors, producers and consumers, buying and selling at an equilibrium price on well-designed markets. We live in an economy of affects, and we must learn to detach these affects from the level of the individual. Affects operate at the infra-individual level, through and beyond the human actor: the pertinent scale of analysis is at the level of the body, the organ, or the body without organs. Affects are relational entities: they are generated by relationships between people, things, and their environment. They are trans-individual: they form packets and bundles of tendencies that are routed and rerouted through feedback loops and short circuits, bypassing the conscience of the self-contained individual.

Unlike many critics, Massumi has understood that modern economics no longer posits a rational actor as the foundation of the discipline. In neuroeconomics, behavioral economics, or certain parts of empirical finance, decisions are influenced by psychological, cognitive, emotional, cultural and social factors and may differ from those implied by classical economic theory. Economics may also dispense with the individual as the unit of analysis: not necessarily by taking collective units and aggregates, like in macroeconomics, but by focusing on factors at the infra-individual level: brain waves and neurotransmitters affecting the chemistry of the brain; rumors and pieces of information circulating in financial networks; discrete preferences and inclinations that may coexist in one same individual. Modern economics tends to consider goods as a set of functions: for example, replacing demand for cars with demand for mobility. Similarly, the individual in Massumi’s post-economics world is a bundle or an assemblage of tendencies and affects, wave packets and oscillatory processes. Nothing guarantees that these circuits and resonances will converge to an equilibrium or that they will conform to economic orthodoxy. We have moved beyond the mirror and through the looking-glass into a world of power and intensity. The telos or purpose of an economic system may not necessarily be described in terms of interest, utility, wealth, or happiness; it can also be characterized by intensities and forces, potencies and tendencies. For power is what lies at the end of the economy. Remember the dialogue between Alice and Dumpty Dumpty: “The question is,’ said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Mastering economics

Apart from economics, Brian Massumi takes his inspiration from other disciplines. I was surprised by the extent of his readings, which appear in the end notes and bibliographical references. He refers to a long list of popular management books to illustrate the notions of decison-without-deliberation and deliberation-without-attention: in the 1990s, managers were supposed to follow their intuition and “gut feelings” or practice Zen meditation in order to thrive on chaos and manage complexity. And indeed, experimental psychology has shown that intuitive reasoning leads to better choices than rational calculus or profit maximization. Giving too many reasons and considerations leads to bad decisions, whereas simple rules and heuristics generate the right course of action. The study of non-conscious decisions has become a thriving field, illustrated by concepts such as choice blindness, irrational exuberance, and strategic ignorance. In conditions of radical uncertainty, rational choice and intuition converge in a zone of indistinction where one approach can collapse into its opposite like in a Möbius strip. Footnotes include a reference to Elie Ayache’s book, The Blank Swan: The End of Probability, which applies ideas from modern philosophy and theoretical physics to the predictability of extreme events in a chaotic system. The same set of ideas were applied by Massumi in his subsequent book, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception, which tackles the issue of preemption in international relations and modern warfare. Together with this volume, these two books form an ontology of the present, shedding light on the ways we formulate political agency as well as validate ethical and political decisions.

By unpacking the notion of affect, Brian Massumi proposes to bring an end to the linguistic turn—the idea that everything is composed of texts, discourse, written signs, signifiers and signified, layers upon layers of interpretations and rewritings. Intervening where interpretation and hermeneutics ran master, he attempts to replace deconstruction with schizoanalysis, and Derrida by his rival Deleuze. Rather than discrete language structures, he emphasizes the continuous flow of vital processes; rather than social construction and differed meanings, the immediate nature of perception and affects; emergence and immanence rather than transcendence and metaphysics; ontogenesis in place of ontology; variations in intensity rather than differences of degree; virtuality and potential rather than probability and risk. The key word in this Copernican revolution is affect. Massumi pioneered the affective turn by acknowledging the intertwining of the material, the social, and the cultural as well as their interrelational articulations. As Massumi puts it, affect is neither about the cognitive realm nor about the discursive domain, but rather is in excess of a conscious state of perception and of bodily responses. Affects refer to pre-individual bodily forces, linked to autonomic responses, which augment or diminish a body’s capacity to act or engage with others. By linking affect to intensity or force, Massumi also sees affect as “body movement looked at from the point of view of its potential – its capacity to come to be, or better, to come to do.” This notion of affect gives rise to an alternative conceptualisation of agency. Affective agency is about relations of affective circulation between material elements and the intensive affect that a particular body is capable of at various degrees of potentiality. In other words, the subject emerges as a collection of circuits immanent to both bodily matter and to all matter more generally.

Built-in obscurity

What characterizes Massumi’s texts is their hermeticity and indecipherability. He laces his writings with obscurity just like manufacturers use built-in obsolescence in their products to sell more at faster rates. His thinking is only valid as to the extent that it goes beyond his own presuppositions and readers’ expectations. He doesn’t know at the start of a paragraph when it will end and where it will lead to. Like a crazy dancer, he is always ready to move one step beyond and be surprised by his own moves. Like the cartoon character, he is constantly running over a cliff and walking into midair until he gets caught by the gravitational pull. He knows that some of the sentences he is writing cannot possibly make sense, and that others, when translated into plain language, are trivial and commonsensical. But he doesn’t care: what matters is the flow, the rhythm, the scansion. What pleases him most is when he is able to write down things he didn’t think he could think. This is the definition of enjoyment according to Lacan: the jouissance of the thing as impossible, the excess or surplus of exultation which has no use value and which persists for the mere sake of pleasuring the self. Reading The Power at the End of the Economy made me remember a scene in the movie Lost in Translation, when the director of a TV commercial is talking to the actor Bill Murray and giving him detailed instructions in Japanese, only to be summed up by the English two words: “more intensity!” by the incompetent interpreter. Many pages and long sentences by Brian Massumi could be summed up as such: “more intensity!”

The Old Mole

17 Feb 202117 Feb 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan, Gavin Walker, Duke University Press, 2016.**

Gavin Walker Why read Marx today? More to the point, why devote a book to how Marx was read in Japan in the mid-twentieth century, and in particular to the writings of a Marxist scholar named Uno Kōzō (1897-1977), Japan’s foremost Marxian economist and founder of what is usually referred to as the Uno School (Uno gakuha), Uno economics (Uno keizaigaku), or Uno-ist theory (Uno riron)? Books about this branch of Marxist theory now collect dust on the shelves of second-hand bookstores in the Kanda-Jinbōchō district in Tokyo. They remind us of Marxism’s surprising longevity in Japan’s academic circles: a Japanese publishing house, Kaizōsha, was the first editor in the world to publish the complete collected works of Marx and Engels (in thirty-two volumes), and Marxist theory was taught and studied with passion in the tumultuous years of campus upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The generation that imbibed Marx’s shihonron in its formative years is now past retirement, and the few remaining bastions of Marxism are only to be found in philosophy or literature departments, not in faculties of economics. But Gavin Walker considers that something important was at stake in these economic debates, something that can still speak to our present. In his opinion, we need to understand the “sublime perversion of capital” in order to situate and possibly overcome our contemporary theoretical impasses and debates: the surprising persistence of the nation, the postcolonial situation, the enclosure of the new “digital commons,” the endless cycles of crisis and debt. Indeed, Walker argues, “this moment of globalization calls for a fundamental (re)examination of the central questions of Marxist theory itself.” For, like Marx wrote to his German readers in the 1867 preface of Das Kapital, “De te fabula narratur!”—it is of you that the story is told.

De te fabula narratur

First, we must clear the ground from what the book is not. It is not a political essay à la Fukuyama that would try to apply Marxian or Hegelian lenses to a rereading of the present—Walker has only contempt for such literature, which he calls “supreme political cretinism.” Nor is it a rephrasing of Lire le Capital, an attempt to expose Marx’s theory along logical lines: indeed, this is how historiography remembers the main contribution of Uno Kōzō, who reformulated Marx’s Capital in conformity with an adequate order of exposition, with a necessary beginning, development, and end. But what concerns Walker the most is to think about what is at stake in the Japanese debates on Marxist theory for theoretical inquiry today. As he explains, “What I am interested in is to enter into the theoretical work in Marxist theory, historiography, and philosophy of this moment as theory.” He doesn’t study Japanese Marxism historically or in isolation, but plugs it to the scholarship of “world Marxism” in which the concerns of Japanese intellectuals echo, sometimes decades in advance, theoretical issues that were also picked up in the United States or in Europe. Just like Lenin identified “three sources and three component parts of Marxism” (German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism), Walter draws from three traditions of critical thinking: Japanese Marxism or “Uno Theory” which forms the main focus of the book, but also as minor voices or counterpoints French political philosophy (Althusser, Balibar, Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy, Badiou), and the Italian autonomia school of social critique (Paolo Virno, Sandro Mezzadra, Silvia Federici). His familiarity with texts written not only in English and Japanese, but also in French, Italian, Russian, and German is what commends Walker to the serious reader. And his rereading of Japanese Marxism provides an introduction to an important current of political thought that has seldom spilled over the national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries of academic communities.

Uno Kōzō and Japanese Marxism are unfamiliar to most readers, and some elements of contextualization are in order. However, Walker warns us that “this book does not privilege or even accept the biographical mode of analysis,” and that “it is hostile to the concept of ‘context’.” He provides only one paragraph on the life and work of Uno Kōzō, mentioning his studies in Berlin from 1922 to 1924, his arrest in 1938 on suspicion of political activism, his work as a statistician outside of academia until the end of the war, and his reappointment after 1945 in Tokyo University’s Department of Economics, where he was to develop his famous theory of the three levels of analysis, or sandankairon, and his formulation of the “impossibility of the commodification of labor power” (rōdōryoku shōhinka no muri). Walker provides more perspective on the debate on Japanese capitalism (Nihon shihonshugi ronsō) and the opposition between the two factions of Japanese Marxism, the Rōnō-ha (Labor-farmer faction) and the Kōza-ha (Lectures faction). Based on positions or “theses on Japan” adopted by the Comintern, and raising the issue whether the Japanese Communist Party should ally with other progressive forces in a popular front, this debate, predominantly held from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, deeply influenced political developments, not only in Japan, but also in the then-colonized Korean Peninsula, in China, in Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. The Rōnō faction argued that the land reforms instituted in the 1868 Meiji Restauration had successfully effectuated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and that Japan was now ripe for a socialist revolution. The Kōza-ha, representing the mainstream of the JCP and of the Comintern, held the view that Japanese capitalism was permanently crippled by emerging from a feudal basis and that “remnants of feudalism” (hōkensei no zansonbutsu), especially in the countryside, made inevitable the turn to “military-feudal imperialism” (gunjiteki hōkenteki teikokushugi).

Difficult words and torturous grammar

The political debates of the times were loaded with difficult words and expressions that the Japanese language, with its kanji characters and grammatical structure, makes even more abstract and unfamiliar. Especially hard to fathom was the work of Marxist scholar Yamada Moritarō, whose Analysis of Japanese Capitalism, published in 1934, was “one of the most simultaneously celebrated, reviled, frustrating, controversial, and influential book in the history of Japanese Marxist theory and historiography.” Yamada wrote in a particularly recondite and idiosyncratic prose, filled with “riddles” and “codes,” as his writing style was modeled after the German language used in the most abstract philosophy with its inversion of typically Japanese grammar, sentence structure, and diction. But Gavin Walker’s own immersion in this literature testifies that getting fluency in this highly theoretical language is no more difficult for the true believer than mastering Buddhist scriptures: mantra-like formula such as “military semi-serf system of petty subsistence cultivation” are treated as blocks of characters that are stringed one after the other and recited like a psalmodic shibboleth. They create their own world of meaning that bears little resemblance with ordinary life, and convey to the insider the impression that he or she belongs to the select few. Besides, Japanese scholars were also fond of colloquialisms and didn’t hesitate to call each other names in a prosaic manner: rivals from the Rōnō faction called Yamada’s text a “farce,” and reacted to one of Uno Kōzō’s key lectures by saying that “Uno’s gone nuts” (Unokun wa kawatta.) The most intricate discussions often centered on simple words, such as the “semi-” (han) in semi-feudalism or the concept of “muri” used by Uno in his “impossibility of the commodification of labor power” theorem (rōdōryoku shōhinka no muri.)

Gavin Walker devotes a whole chapter to Uno’s notion of “muri,” which he alternatively translates as “logical (im)possibility,” “rational impasse,” or “the nihil of reason.” But, as any child or Japanese language beginner will tell you, muri can also mean, at a colloquial level, “don’t think about it,” “out of the question,” or “no.” Disentangling the colloquialism from the conceptual is no easy task. The most abstract discussions in Japanese philosophy often focus on everyday notions, such as mu (not, without), ma (empty space), ba (place), or iki (lively). These concepts have their roots in Japanese Buddhism and especially in the Zen tradition, and were often picked up by nationalist ideologues and twentieth century philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō to emphasize the distance between Japanese thought and the Western canon. To attempt to translate them in a foreign language, or to discuss their meaning for a Western audience, raises a difficult challenge. On the one hand, foreign commentators need to convey the radical otherness of these notions rooted in a culture that gives them meaning and depth, and they can only do so by making elaborate discussions on the intricate lifeworlds that these words summon. On the other hand, they risk to lose their simplicity and childlike quality that makes their meaning commonsensical and straightforward. This contradiction is apparent in Walker’s treatment of muri. In Uno’s logic, the commodification of labor is the foundational basis of capitalism, and yet this commodification is made impossible by the nature of labor power as defined by Marx. Another way to express it is that although the commodification of labor power should be impossible, in capitalist society “the impossibility is constantly passing through” (sono muri ga tōtte iru). Again, the expression “passing through,” that Walker submits to a long exegesis, cannot convey the simplicity of the Japanese verb tōru.

Childishly simple

Another way to complicate simple notions is to resort to vocabulary borrowed from the hard sciences or to mathematics. To convey the notion of the impossibility of labor power’s commodification, Walker alternatively refers to mathematical figures such as the Moebius’ strip, the Klein bottle, the Borromean knot, the torus, or topology notions of torsion, inversion, loop, and fold. These topological notions were all the rage in the theoretically loaded context of the sixties and seventies, when Marx was often discussed in conjunction with Freud and Lacan—the French psychoanalyst who became enamored with algebraic topology. Walker also suggests that Uno’s use of muri may be borrowed from the concept of “irrational number” (murisū), although the evidence he gives to back his claim is rather moot. The mathematical formulae he introduces in his text—variations on the M—C—M’ equation in Marx’s Capital—, are at the level of a elementary logic and only contribute to his prose’s dryness. On the other hand, Walker is also capable of flights into hyperbole and metaphoric statements. The title of his book illustrates his use of colorful rhetorics and literary excess. Why is capital perverse, and what is sublime about the perversion of capital? As I understand it, capital is perverse in the sense that it thrives on our most basic instincts in a capitalist society: commodity fetishism and the elision the social relations between people as relationships among things, the forgetting of labor’s true contribution to value and profit, alienation from one’s true self and other workers through the act of production. The sublime is the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations: this is the feeling that grips the true believer upon the revelation of absolute truth and true science that Marx’s doctrine was supposed to incarnate.

Gavin Walker’s text is even more obscure when he discusses Japanese Marxism in conjunction with contemporary authors: French philosophers, Italian social critics, or modern Japanese thinkers reclaiming Marx’s heritage. The result is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. As if reading a commentary of Japanese scholars commenting on Marx wasn’t hard enough, Walker double-downs the challenge by bringing in other hard-to-read authors and by offering his own commentary of Marx’s original concepts such as primitive accumulation or the origin of labor power. Chapter 3 in the book moves from Carl Schmitt to Sandro Mezzadra and to Karatani Kōjin but loses sight of the author’s original intention to address “Marxist theory and the politics of history in modern Japan.” I understand his argument: he doesn’t want to be categorized in the “Japan slot” with other area study specialists, and he prefers to associate himself with high theory and Marxian scholarship. He sees a division of labor at work between his own production and the books of intellectual history that have mapped Marxism’s development in prewar Japan. I myself am not adverse to philosophical arguments and French Theory: I don’t mind introducing a few codes of Foucault, a dual use of quandary from Deleuze and Guattari, or a dash of devilish derring-do from Derrida. But I am also genuinely interested in Japan’s intellectual history and would have liked to read more about the Japanese context and less about Gavin Walker’s own thoughts on Marxist theory.

The Japanese management system

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was a debate that dominated scholarly discussions in Japan for decades. This debate, interesting in its own right for the logical arguments and rhetorical skills that it mobilized, has long passed its expiry date. It never affected Marxist theory—what the author labels “world Marxism”—in a significant way, and attempts to revive it in the twenty-first century are faced with the same conundrums that Derrida experienced when he confronted himself with the specters of Marx. Trying to rekindle the flame by rehashing the old theories of a Marxist scholar unknown beyond Japan’s borders seems to me like the epitome of a lost cause. Historically, the debate on Japanese capitalism was soon replaced by the discussion on Japanese management—some scholars, Japanese or Western, adapted to the changing times and made the transition between the two. I see some parallels between the two lines of enquiry. First, Japanese management scholars were also concerned with the nature of capitalism in Japan and the way it differed from the Western version. They insisted on labor relations and workplace arrangements: lifetime employment (shūshin koyō), the seniority-wage system (nenkō joretsu), and the enterprise union (kigyōbetsu kumiai) formed the “three sacred regalia” (sanshu no jingi) of the Japanese employment system—to be sure, the crown has now lost its jewels. Like the Marxist mantras of Yamada and Uno, strings of Japanese characters were attached in long formulations and found their ways in Western texts, or were lost in translation. Management specialists pondered endlessly about the everyday notions of genba (workplace), kanban (signboard) or kaizen (improvement) that sound commonsensical to anyone familiar with Japan. We even hear echoes of the disputes between the Rōnō and the Kōza factions in the opposition between proponents of Japan’s distinctiveness and those who favored neoliberal solutions—the latter won the day.

What Comes Next?

15 Apr 2020 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of After Ethnos, Tobias Rees, Duke University Press, 2018.**

After Ethnos What is anthropology? What should it be about, and how should it be pursued? These questions were raised with great intensity in the politically loaded context of the seventies. Radically different visions of anthropology were offered; people experimented with new forms of writing and storytelling; and the discipline was mandated to take a political stance in reaction to the issues of the day. As a result, anthropology was deeply transformed. The two canonical concepts that defined its academic status, culture and society, were discarded in favor of other constructs or organizing schemes—although modern ethnography is still referred to as cultural anthropology in the United States and as social anthropology in the United Kingdom. Fieldwork, the close and sustained observation of native customs and modes of thought by a participant observer, ceased to define the discipline. The methodology was adopted by other social sciences—or even by other occupations such as journalism, militantism, and even art—, while anthropologists experimented with multi-sited ethnographies or with research based on archival work. As Clifford Geertz and other anthropologists working in his wake made it clear, the collection of data by the ethnographer on the field is just the tip of the iceberg: it is based on years of reading other anthropologists’ work and attending academic lectures, and it is followed by the nitty-gritty work of reconstruction and composition that leads to the journal article or the scholarly volume. The anthropologist was recognized as a writer, as a maker of forms and a designer of concepts.

A designer of concepts

In his book, published in 2018, Tobias Rees takes these questions anew. After Ethnos grapples with the state of anthropology after the great surge of creativity and experimentation that followed the publication of the volume Writing Culture in 1986. It builds on an impressive bibliography of theoretical texts, as well as on countless seminar discussions, email exchanges, and tea corner conversations. It remains true to the creativity, artistic sensitivity, and philosophically informed theorizing that redefined the discipline after the epistemological turn of the seventies and eighties. On the webpage of the Berggruen Institute in California, where he chairs the Transformations of the Human Program, Tobias Rees is presented as follows: “The focus of Rees’s work is on the philosophy, poetry, and politics of the contemporary. He is intrigued by situations that are not reducible to the already thought and known –– by events, small ones or large ones, that set the taken for granted in motion and thereby provoke unanticipated openings for which no one has words yet. In his writings, he seeks to capture something of the at times wild, at other times tender, almost fragile openness that rules as long as the new/different has not yet gained any stable contours. When it is (still) pure movement. His work on the brain, on microbes, snails and AI have increasingly given rise to two observations that have come to define his work. (1) A distinctive feature of the present is that the question concerning the human occurs less in the human than in the non-human sciences. Say, in microbiome research, in AI or in the study of climate change. (2) The tentative answers that are emerging from these non-human fields radically defy the understanding of the human as more than mere nature and as other than mere machines on which the human sciences were built.”

Tobias Rees claims that After Ethnos is a non programmatic book. And yet it reads like a manifesto of sorts, a rallying call aiming at offering a vision of what anthropology could look like after it has severed it ties to ethnos and, in a way, to anthropos. Many sentences indeed offer a programme or a platform for future anthropologists. New directions in contemporary research are assessed, lines of escape are drawn, and a new orientation for future research is proposed. The author doesn’t mean to condemn or be judgmental of certain forms of anthropology that remain tied to disciplinary traditions. But this is because traditional anthropology has disappeared from anthropology department in most American universities. As Rees soberly notes, “Classical modern ethnography has come to an end.” People who still focus on traditional societies now need an excuse for doing so. The burden of proof falls upon them to justify the choice of a research topic that was considered as mandatory by their predecessors. They insist on their distinctiveness from older forms of scholarship that were often tainted by racial prejudice and positions of power. Whereas it is still possible to situate oneself in the sociological tradition, paying tribute to the founding fathers and the great names of the discipline, the anthropological tradition is all but dead. It has been reduced to old books accumulating dust on libraries’ shelves, and that are turned open only to show how antiquated and prejudiced the founders of the discipline were.

The erasure of Man

For Tobias Rees, the conditions of possibility that have organized ethnography have become impossible to maintain. The abstract figure of “Man”, itself a recent invention, has been erased “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea” (to take Michel Foucault’s famous metaphor.) Likewise, the ethnos and its declinations—the ethnic group, the tribe, the singular people with its well-defined culture and mores, was understood as a social construct whose fiction was increasingly difficult to maintain. With these erasures, the great divides of modernity—man vs. nature, science vs. tradition, reason vs. emotion, human vs. animal, life vs. matter, etc.—have all been redrawn. Starting in the late 1980s or early 1990s a number of anthropologists began to enter—per fieldwork—domains that were formerly believed to be beyond the scope of anthropological expertise or interest, such as medicine, science and technology, media, the Internet, finance, and much more. The result was a flurry of innovative texts and monographs offering new departures for the discipline. Anthropologists took the perspective of the gingko tree or the matsutake mushroom that have been around from times immemorial to envisage the possibility of life without humans, to displace “Man” from the center and to make it little more than a late-coming and transient episode in the history of the earth. Others have described the world-making qualities of bacteria that effectively have produced and continue to produce our external and internal environment, from the steady production of oxygen in the atmosphere to their critical role in digestion and the immune system through the microbiome. The choice of topics for anthropologists seems limitless: there is now an anthropology of stones and rivers, of outer space and stellar systems, of the modern, the emergent, and the still-to-come…

As the author notes, it is not that the anthropologist after “the human” stopped caring about humans. On the contrary, a new sensitivity to emotions, attachments, suffering, and human care, came to inform many texts that were being produced. But classical categories like the social, the cultural, the historical, or the natural had to be discarded in order to give way to new formulations. New concepts were designed, borrowed in part from social theory or from philosophy: entanglements, assemblages, ensembles, apparatus, dispositifs, man/machine, multispecies, animacies… They each point to the composite nature of the stuff that anthropologists study, which is a combination of humans and artefacts, of nonhuman species and animate bodies. As pointed out, anthropologists have gradually expanded their inquiries to the nonhuman natural world. The emergence of an anthropology not concerned with humans, or taking humans only as an observation point entangled in technological and interspecies relations, reconnects our societies with non-Western worldviews that have always integrated nonhumans into their cosmology. Besides, “Man”, as it was formerly conceived and now seems to have faded away, is not something to be mourned or regretted. What appears in retrospect is the disarming poverty of the figure of “the human” on which anthropologists have been relying for so long. Their traditional interest in kinship systems, gift exchanges, rites of passage, and mythic structures now seems to us only to have scratched the surface. By decoupling curiosity about “things human” from the cultural construct of “the human”, anthropologists open up new possibilities and understandings. As Tobias Rees notes, “the reason I don’t want to start with ‘the human’ is that I want to ground my research not in an answer—but in a question, in boundless questions.”

Fieldwork-based philosophy

Rethinking and redesigning the discipline from the perspective of the “after” gives birth to what the author calls a “philosophically inclined anthropology.” Philosophy and anthropology have always entertained awkward relations. Many scholars were drawn to anthropology and fieldwork as a way to escape the abstract strictures of philosophy. Philosophers, for their part, often consider anthropology as an applied science in a division of labor that leaves philosophy the key role of providing general themes and ideas. Moreover, anthropologists tend to rely on a small sample of philosophical works, authors, and concepts. The great bulk of philosophical enquiry falls outside the purview of the discipline. For Tobias Rees, “once anthropologists break with ethnos, anthropology has the potential to venture into the terrain it formerly left, unwittingly or not, to philosophy.” The discipline can become philosophical by practicing fieldwork-based philosophy, or empirically grounded ways of “thinking about thinking.” Although he makes only a passing reference to Henri Bergson, I see a strong similarity between the kind of thought he advocates and Bergson’s conceptualizing of time and movement. Like Bergson, Rees wants to cut loose “the new” from any linear comprehension of time. His key concepts—the actual, the after, the movement—are meant to capture “something that which escapes.” He would be on familiar ground with Bergsonian notions of “la durée”, “l’élan vital”, “l’intuition” or “l’évolution créatrice.” Bergson conceived of philosophy as movement in thought and, ultimately, as dance. Similarly, Tobias Rees draws a parallel between his “anthropology of the actual” and artistic practice—its poetic aim “is to render visible instances of the invisible.”

Anthropology also has to cultivate a certain disrespect for theory. In a way, theories always already know everything. By contrast, anthropologists characterize themselves by the capacity to be surprised. They are drawn to the field by the possibility that “elsewhere” could be “different”. For Tobias Rees, “fieldwork is a bit like the desire to find—or to be found by—that which makes a difference.” It is to immerse oneself into scenes of everyday life in order to let the chance events that make up the stuff of discovery give rise to new concepts and metaphors. Anthropologists don’t go to the field to validate theories they have conceived in their ivory tower; nor do they practice armchair theorizing by exploiting the data collected by others. They never deny the possibility that things could be otherwise than they appear at first glance; they take nothing for granted. This is especially true for the new kind of anthropology that Tobias Rees has in mind. Rather than difference in place, the fieldworker seeks displacement in time. She wants to capture “the openings, the bifurcations, the troubles, the jumping forth, the new causes.” Fieldwork has not disappeared; on the contrary, anthropologists have transformed countless sites into fields that were once thought to be far beyond the scope of the discipline. Nonetheless, Tobias Rees leaves open the question whether anthropological research can be dissociated from fieldwork. “Is there any obvious reason, he asks, why fieldwork would be the only, the sole, the authoritative form of anthropological knowledge production?” He leaves the question open—but answers it implicitly by making no reference to empirically collected results in his book.

So what?

I leave this book with two questions. Is there a way to reconnect with the anthropological tradition? How to make anthropology relevant for our present time? Tobias Rees makes some references to the great founders of the discipline. He reminds us that Bronislaw Malinowski invented fieldwork only serendipitously and as a result of adverse circumstances. As a citizen of Habsburg Austria he was considered a political enemy of the British Empire when the First World War erupted. The only way to escape encampment was to leave Australia and to live on the Trobiand Islands, where his lack of financial means led him to plant his tent among the natives. Tobias Rees treats classical anthropology as archive, as a repository of texts that remains available for critique and contextualization. Can we do more, and consider accumulated knowledge as a building stone for cumulative science, or can we jettison the whole edifice without great loss? In fact, many basic tenets of the discipline, or truths that for a long time were held as self-evident, have been refuted and proven wrong by advances in the life sciences. Any discipline preoccupied with the human nowadays cannot do without the findings and insights provided by the cognitive neurosciences, evolutionary biology, gene mapping, primatology, or brain science. As Charles S. Pierce once put it, “any inquirer must be ready at all times to dump his whole cartload of beliefs the moment experience is set against them.” As for anthropology’s relevance for the present, the proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating.

A Materialist Reading of New Materialisms

13 Jan 2018 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010.

New Materialisms In everyday language, a materialist is defined as a person who considers material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. According to Madonna’s famous song, “we are living in a material world.” Says the Material Girl: “Some boys kiss me, some boys hug me / I think they’re okay / If they don’t give me proper credit, I just walk away /…/ ‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mister Right.” Madonna may not have had in mind the new materialisms referred to in the book edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Here materialism refers to the philosophical doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications, as opposed to spiritualism that posits a dualism between subject and matter. But the material girl’s lyrics may provide a good entry point into this volume. After all, Madonna’s kissing and hugging addresses a strong message to the feminists who have been accused of routinely ignoring the matter of corporeal life. In exposing her body, Madonna draws our attention to what really matters (sex), while referring to non-bodily retributions (money) that also matter a great deal. So my materialist questions to the book will be: Do we still live in a material world according to these new versions of materialism? Do the authors give proper credit, and to whom? What does the reader get from his or her cold hard cash? And are the contributors always Mr (or Mrs) Right?

In bed with Madonna, reading philosophy

For the editors, a return to materialism, albeit in newer forms, is a turn away from approaches dominated by post-structuralist theories of language and discourse. The humanities and social sciences went through a long period sometimes referred to as the “cultural turn”, which privileged language, discourse, culture, and values. New disciplines developed, such as cultural studies, gender studies, new literary criticism, and various forms of linguistic analysis, taking as their core task the analysis of texts and the deconstruction of meanings. The cultural turn was also a political phenomenon: it gave rise to identity politics and culture wars, which took university campuses as their battleground and became estranged from broader social trends and political movements. For the editors of this volume, approaches associated with the so-called cultural turn are no longer adequate to understanding contemporary society. In particular, the radicalism associated with the cultural studies curriculum is now perceived as more or less exhausted. As they state in the introductory chapter, “it is political naïveté to believe that significant social change can be engendered solely by reconstructing subjectivities, discourse, ethics, and identities.” To find new forms of social critique, one needs to turn to advances in the life sciences, while revisiting certain tenets of political philosophy that still hold potential.

To counter the cultural turn’s law of diminishing returns, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost propose a “material turn” that builds on bodies, affects, ecologies, living organisms, and life itself. The focus here is less on matter per se than on processes of materialization: “for materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationally, or difference that renders matters active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.” Their new materialism exposes the fragility of things, the vibrancy of matter, the agency of nonhuman actors, the affective claims of nonhuman animals, the social life of artifacts, the materiality of experience, and the generative power of life. The editors believe “it is now timely to reopen the issue of matter and once again to give material factors their due in shaping society and circumscribing human prospects.” Their founding gesture aims at establishing identity through differentiation from past approaches and by constituting a genealogy of ancestors who can sustain their materialist credentials on firm philosophical ground. Most importantly, they claim that the return to materialism can lead to more active forms of engagement with our contemporary predicament, attuned to ongoing changes in global economic structures and emerging scientific knowledge. Their approach takes the tone of a manifesto: “to succeed, a reprisal of materialism must be truly radical.”

A turn back to French postwar philosophy

Revisiting materialism takes the form of a random walk through Western philosophy. Three kinds of philosophers are brought to bear: classical philosophers, with a chapter on Hobbes and several references to Spinoza and to Leibniz; the “philosophy of suspicion” formed by the holy trinity of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, to which one could add Bergson and the vitalist school; and postwar French philosophers—the first cohort represented by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the post-Mai 1968 generation by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciere, and Louis Althusser, who themselves revisited the previous traditions. Indeed, the book seems to hark back to the French intellectual scene of the seventies, when philosophers had to steer a course between the two major intellectual currents of structuralism and phenomenology while all the while being sensitive to the legacy of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. The authors of New Materialisms replay a gesture already performed by Judith Butler, who wrote her PhD thesis on the reception of Hegel in twentieth century France and the appropriation of German philosophy by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Why this French primal scene is seen as so productive is left to the imagination of the reader. One suspects it has more to do with intellectual fads and academic conformism than by the urge to develop concepts and advance ideas attuned to our times and modern understanding of the world.

Marxism in postwar France was the “unsurpassable horizon of our time,” and it is only natural that the authors of New Materialisms turn to Marx as the godfather of materialism. For Marxists, the material conditions of a society’s way of producing and reproducing the means of human existence fundamentally determine its organization and development. Marx claimed to have turned Hegel on his head by substituting historical materialism to the dialectical idealism of the phenomenology of spirit. In Hegel, the abstract/ideal is realized in the concrete, whereas to Marx the concrete/material is realized, even when obscured, in the abstract domain of conscious thought. Vintage Marx is represented in this volume by Jason Edwards’ essay on “The Materialism of Historical Materialism”. Against economicist readings of Marx that focus solely on the sphere of production, he argues that Marx’s social philosophy took into account “the totality of the material practices that are required to reproduce the relations of production over time.” Here Marx is read through the lenses of Henri Lefebvre, who recognized the diversity of the forms of practices that are necessary for sustaining economic and political life. Nonproductive practices, such as theoretical work but also the everyday life of consumption and leisure, play a fundamental role in the reproduction of capitalism. For Edwards, Lefebvre’s work on the critique of everyday life and the production of social space should be extended beyond the strictures of the nation-state: the modern reproduction of capitalism has to take into account global processes under conditions of neoliberalism.

Orientation matters

The reference to Marx is also present in Simone de Beauvoir’s work, which develops a phenomenology of lived experience through which, as she famously put it, “one is not born but becomes a woman.” Unlike structuralism, in which subjectivity and the inner self arise as the result of outside forces, going as it were “from the outside in”, phenomenology tends to proceed “from the inside out”, starting from our experience of the world and going back to the subject as to a condition of possibility distinct from that experience. The question of orientation—outside in, inside out—is also addressed in Sara Ahmed’s chapter, taking “the table” as her primary object for thinking about how orientations matter. Philosophers usually sit at a table when they write, and often take this piece of furniture as the starting point from which the world unfolds. But Husserl’s or Heidegger’s writing table is part of a domestic space that excludes as much as it summons. Women writers have a different orientation towards tables, which may provide the support for writing, but also for cooking, eating, attending children, and doing domestic work. As Virginia Woolf claims in A Room of One’s Own, for women to claim a space to write is a political act. The table is not simply what she faces but is the site upon which she makes her feminist point. The politics of the table also involves racial and class-based divisions of labor, as middle-class women could access the writing table by relying on the domestic labor of black and working-class women.

In his 1978 introduction to the English translation of his mentor Georges Canguilhem’s On the Normal and the Pathological, Michel Foucault proposed a famous line of distinction between two strands of philosophy in postwar France. As he wrote, “it is the line that separates a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept. One the one hand, one network is that of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; and then another is that of Cavailles, Bachelard and Canguilhem.” Similarly, we see two brands of materialism developed in this volume: one one side, a philosophy of life; on th other, a philosophy of the concept. In Bergson, modern readers find what might be called a philosophy of vital interiority, a thesis on the identity of being and becoming; a philosophy of life and change. This orientation would persist throughout the twentieth century, up to and including Deleuze, who once remarked that “everything I write is vitalist, at least I hope it is.” On the other side, we find a philosophy of the mathematically-based concept: the possibility of a philosophical formalism of thought and of the symbolic, which likewise continues throughout the century, most specifically in Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, and Badiou. The choice here is between conceiving of thought as fundamentally arising from within the depths of animated matter (vitalism), or of conceiving of thought as a cut that interrupts or breaks with vital flux in favor of the strict assemblage of concepts (formalism). This debate between life and concept echoes throughout this book, with some contributions predicated upon the inertia of matter and others on the generativity of flesh.

Finding love and pleasure in the material world

Reading New Materialisms can be a frustrating experience. The chapters are designed as interventions in a debate that has stakes extending way beyond the covers of this volume. The opposition between “old” and “new” feminism, the epistemological challenge of the life sciences, the posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency: these broader themes are only alluded to in oblique fashion. It is to be noted that many contributors have authored books in which they develop their ideas in a fuller form that certainly needs to be addressed. I may come back on this blog to the works of Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Rey Chow, and Elizabeth Grosz (all of which are published by Duke University Press), who certainly deserve better treatment than what one can infer from the dozen pages in which they had to constrain their entry. In particular, the empirical aspect of their research is reduced to a minimum: there is no reference to fieldwork or to systematically collected observations of social realities. The authors limit themselves to the work of theory. Although they comment the texts of (mostly French) philosophers, none of them belong to a philosophy department, and they all come from American or British academic institutions. They all work in political science departments, women and gender studies or cultural studies faculties, or in programs focusing on the humanities. They dabble in theory and practice philosophy without proper qualifications, while pointing to practical implications that are forever deferred.

Despite their intentions, new materialisms remain deeply rooted in cultural theory. They inherit from cultural critics the same political militancy and strident advocacy that sustain their claim to be “truly radical”. In a poorly argumented shortcut, Jane Bennett draws a parallelism between vitalist philosophy exemplified by Hans Driesch (a contemporary of Henri Bergson) and the “culture of life” that opposes abortion, artificial life support, and embryonic stem cell research, but that supports preemptive war, state-sponsored torture, and civilizational imperialism. William Connolly moves from Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Perception to a denunciation of ubiquitous surveillance, cynical realism, and self-depoliticization that characterizes the national security state after 9/11. Pheng Cheah confesses that “it is difficult to elaborate on the political implications of Deleuze’s understanding of materiality as the power of inorganic life,” but nonetheless endorses a creative appropriation of Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude as a new agent of social change. Jason Edwards offers a return to Marx’s historical materialism as a solution “to the major problems of climate change, global inequality, and warfare that face the world today.” There are, however, different political conclusions to infer from a return to materialism. We can use the increased salience of materialist philosophies to develop a healthy connection to things material. Like it or not, we are living in a material world, and liking ‘stuff’ is OK, healthy even—we can learn to love and find pleasure in the material world. This is the lesson that seems to me implied in the lyrics and rhythm of Madonna’s songs.

Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson.

7 Oct 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Elizabeth Grosz, Duke University Press, 2004.

In The Nick of Time, Elizabeth Grosz wants to make Darwinism relevant for feminism, and for critical studies in general. This is a challenging task: social Darwinism has often been associated with a conservative or reactionary agenda. Darwin’s epigones, from Herbert Spencer to Francis Galton, who applied his theories to society and to culture, posited the hierarchy of races and the survival of the fittest. They in turn influenced Nietzsche and his theory of the overman, who was picked up by Nazis and by white supremacists for their nihilistic agenda. There seems to be an inherent contradiction between Darwin’s idea of natural determinism and a progressive agenda that emphasizes equal rights and opportunities. This contradiction is based, according to Elizabeth Grosz, on misreadings of Darwin and a deformation of Nietzsche’s thought. Darwin and Nietzsche never said what some people made them to say. The solution, for her, is to go back to the original texts and to read them in the light of recent advances in the biological sciences and in social theory. In doing so, one not only lays the foundation of a progressive social agenda; reconciling biology and culture, nature and society, is also a way to put back the body, and the corporeal, back at the center of political theory and feminist struggle. As Grosz argues, “the exploration of life—traditionally the purview of the biological sciences—is a fundamental feminist political concern.”

Variation, selection, and retention

Darwin’s ideas are very familiar to those working in the biological sciences, and have even given rise to whole disciplines such as evolutionary biology and genetics. Yet it is important to introduce to readers from the humanities the intricacies and details of Darwin’s own writings which, though popularized, are rarely read or referred to. They demonstrate that Darwin remains, in spite of feminists’ resistance to his work, one of the few thinkers of the nineteenth century to prefigure, not only an equalitarian feminism, but an ontology of sexual difference that has come to occupy a key position in contemporary feminist debates. Universalism, the claim that men and women are the same, always measures women in terms of how they conform to the characteristics and values of men. Darwin posits difference—between species, between the sexes—, rather than equality, as the criterion of social and biological value. Whereas sexual difference is often associated with patriarchal privilege, Darwin develops an account of evolution that is an open and generative force of self-organization and growing complexity. Elizabeth Grosz thus offers a primer in Darwinian studies, including a discussion of recent evolutionary scientists, such as Ernst Mayr, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould, that she laces with her own comments on Darwin’s philosophical conception of time.

She shows that Darwin’s model, based on the three principles of individual variation, retention of inherited traits, and natural selection, may provide an explanation for economic and cultural history as readily as for natural history. There are, for example, close resemblances between Darwin’s understanding of individual variation and Marx’s understanding of labor. Through their embodiment as use-value and then as exchange-value, differences in labor are ordered into systems of hierarchical structures that Marx explicitly models on biological categories. Similarly, by characterizing technological innovation as the result of a process of variation, selection, and retention, management scholars use the same model in business schools without even mentioning Darwin’s name. We see the same principles at work in the evolution of languages: here, less than the abstract discussions on the origin of language that were popular in his time, Darwin’s work find echoes in the modern theories of structural linguistics, from Saussure to Jakobson and to Chomsky. Human production, manifested most directly in the history of language or in the operations of economies, must submit itself to the same temporal exigencies as nature itself.

Darwin’s sexual selection and feminist theory

One thing is to posit Darwin’s influence over many scientific disciplines; another is to claim his relevance for radical politics and feminist thought. Darwin is not only the first theoretician of natural selection: he also introduced the difference between the sexes, and its effect on variation and selection of life forms, at the core of his theory of the origin and evolution of species. Sexual selection entails that the human exists in only two nondeductible forms: male and female. Two forms which not only divide most of life into divergent categories, but also produce two types of bodily relations with the world, and two types (at least) of knowing. The Darwinian model of sexual selection comes to a strange anticipation of the resonances of sexual difference in the terms of contemporary feminist theory. For Luce Irigaray, sexual bifurcation—the biological difference between male and female—introduces irreducible difference. She rejects the false universalism of the abstraction of the individual, emphasizing that individuals always come in two sexes. The idea that there can be no human substance without sexual identity implies that democracies ca not legitimately define human rights, which are attributes of this substance, otherwise than as the rights of man and woman. In political terms, this line of thought led in particular to the parité movement, which aimed to achieve full equality between male and female representatives in elected bodies. It should be noted that sexual bifurcation is not the same as the sex/gender argument that American feminists first used and then deconstructed. Gender is a social and cultural construct, while the duality of human (and other) species is a condition for the evolution of life and natural selection as understood by Darwin.

Emphasizing a politics affirmative of sexual difference can also benefit from a rereading of Nietzsche. Nietzsche enables us to consider the most abstract elements of Darwinism, Darwin at his most philosophical and political, even if Nietzsche does not provide a reading of Darwin himself and apparently learned about the author of On the Origins of Species only from secondary sources. His conceptualization of Darwinism is based on several misunderstandings. He sees in Darwin “a respectable but mediocre Englishman,” and detects in him “a certain narrowness, aridity and industrious diligence, something English in short, that may not be a bad disposition.” Darwinism, Nietzsche argues, is a discourse of the triumph of the weak over the strong, the herd over the individual, the servile over the noble, the mediocre and the average over the exceptional and the strong. What Nietzsche admires is not so much the survival of the fittest, which in his society takes the form of the bourgeois individual, as the survival of the noblest, the exceptional, even the abnormal and the monstrous. Only the human who joyously seeks beyond the human is worthy of consideration. Whereas the Darwinian model is based on lack and scarcity, Nietzsche emphasizes excess, a superabundance of energy and power. The struggle for more—that is, the will to power—is greater than the struggle for existence. Life is not about mere survival, but about profusion and proliferation, not existence, but excess, not being but being-more, that is, becoming. It tends towards a future that cannot be predicted but is yet to come. Humanity-to-come, or the overman, cannot be the product of natural selection but is the consequence of artificial selection, the breeding of the superior by means of the eternal return. Evolution, for Nietzsche, designates the precedence of a future that always overwrites and transforms the present, that directs the present to what is beyond its containment.

Moral Darwinism

For Elizabeth Grosz, it is ironic that much of what Nietzsche proclaims as part of his critique of Darwin and Darwinism is consonant with Darwin’s own position. In particular, Darwin provided a model of time and development that refuses any pre given aim, goal, or direction for natural selection. Evolution produces variation for no reason; it values change for no particular outcome; it experiments, but with no particular result in mind. Beings are impelled forward to a future that is unknowable, unconfined by the past, and forever new. Like Nietzsche, Darwin saw morality, reason, and other higher faculties in mankind, as resources that aid or hinder group and individual survival. His relativism provides a strange anticipation of Nietzsche’s own genealogy of morality. Moral Darwinism as seen by Nietzsche privileges the values of life at its highest, its most active and intense. The will to power is the concept that Nietzsche offers to replace Darwin’s account of natural selection. It is a force directed only to its own expansion, without regard for the perspectives of the multiplicity of other forces. The will to power may prove to be another name for the principles of emergence, of the chaotic, competing distribution of forces in systems as they reach a point beyond equilibrium to destabilize and convert themselves to a different mode of organization. It is the principle that underlies the world itself, the most fundamental principle of ontology, the single principle, for Nietzsche, governing all of existence. For Grosz, Nietzsche may help provide a way of understanding politics, subjectivity, and the social as the consequence of the play of the multiplicity of impersonal active forces that have no agency. His postulate of the eternal return, the culmination of Nietzsche’s understanding of a world populated by proliferating and competing wills to power, is a cosmological principle that strangely echoes recent advances in theoretical physics and contemporary philosophy. In modern cosmology, the time of the universe is seen as unlimited in both directions. But the matter of the universe, or equally its energy, is limited, finite, and is blighted by the prospect of the gradual winding down and dissipation predicted by the second law of thermodynamics. It follows that in the infinity of time past and time future, every conceivable combination of matter has already occurred, and will occur again, an infinite number of times. Even the Big Bang is not an origin, the birth of the universe, but a transition, a kind of quantum leap between one universe at its death and the birth of another.

Henri Bergson is another thinker whose fecundity for contemporary science and social theory has yet to be reassessed. Bergson’s writings demonstrate no evidence of having read Nietzsche, as Nietzsche himself never read Darwin; nevertheless, his understanding of duration and creative evolution brings together the key insights of Darwin, modulated by a Nietzschean understanding of the internal force of the will to power and the external force of the external return. The will to power is transformed in Bergson, not into a will to command or obey, but a will, a force, or élan vital, which propels life forward in its self-proliferation. Bergson must also be regarded as the philosopher most oriented to the primacy of time, time as becoming, as open duration. Like Nietzsche, Bergson wishes to elaborate a theory of time in which the past is not the overriding factor, and in which the tendencies of becoming that mark the present also characterize the future. Insofar as the future functions as a mode of unpredictable continuity with the past, the future springs from a past not through inevitability and necessity but through elaboration and invention. Bergsonism has often been equated with dualism, and the French philosopher is indeed best remembered for his couples of oppositions between mind and matter, space and duration, the virtual and the actual, habit-memory and memory-image, differences in kind and differences of degree. Yet Elizabeth Grosz shows that these oppositions are more complex than they first appear: at some point, couples of opposites can no longer be binarized, for they form a continuum and merge into each other, or coalesce into a new whole. The difference between differences in kind and differences of degree is itself a difference of degree. There is a fundamental similarity between mind and matter, between the object of perception and the images formed or memorized. The past does not come after the present has ceased to be, nor does the present become the past: rather, the whole of the past is contained, in contracted form, in each moment of the present. In the end, for Grosz, it all comes down to politics, which she defines as “this untimely activation of the virtuality of the past as challenge to the actuality of the present.”

Reading critical theory with practical concerns in mind

Elizabeth Grosz is concerned with advancing social theory and feminist thought, and sees in the works of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson a source of inspiration for scholars engaged in challenging the present. I come to the study of philosophy and critical theory with more practical concerns in mind. My modest ambition is to contribute to the understanding of business organizations in the context of globalization and social change. I am looking for ideas, concepts, and metaphors that I may use in my research, while being cognizant that reality has to be observed first at ground level and by using the domestic categories of social actors. There is a risk in the flight to abstraction that characterizes the discussion of general notions such as mind and matter, time and space, power and servitude. And yet I see value in rubbing shoulders and stretching minds with the great thinkers who have marked the history of the twentieth century. The three authors discussed in this book are indeed towering figures that dominate the way we approach notions such as evolution, power, and duration. One may think that the gist of these three thinkers’ work has already been extracted by successive disciples and commentators, and that they can now quietly rest on the dusty shelves of intellectual history. And yet, as Elizabeth Grosz successfully argues, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson cannot be reduced to Darwinism, Nietzscheanism, and Bergsonism. Going back to their original work, and attending to their texts through close readings, allows the social scientist to extract more juice from their pulp. To come back to this book’s title, it appears that the expression “the nick of time” comes from an old custom of recording time as it passed by making a notch or a nick on a tally stick. Ordering my reading notes by writing this review was my way to carve a nick in the (b)log of my reading habits.

Asian Studies in Asia

27 May 201727 May 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Duke University Press, 2010.

Asia As Method.jpg There are two kinds of Asian studies on North-American campuses. The first, area studies of Asia, grew out of the Cold War and of the United States’ need to know its allies and enemies better. It is politically neutral, although some critics would consider it conservative in essence, due to its modalities of topic selection, standards of scholarship, sources of research funding, and practical applications. It focuses on the production of experts on a specific region of the world which is of strategic interest for the United States. It usually requires the mastery of at least one Asian language, acquired through years of painful learning and extended stays in the country being studied. Great scholars have contributed to the field and have led distinguished careers that have brought them into positions of leadership within and outside academia.

The two kinds of Asian studies in the United States

Faced with a general crisis in area studies that may be linked to the decline of America’s Cold War commitments, the discipline was reinvigorated by renewed interest in Asia-Pacific as the new center of global economic growth. A number of social scientists who learned their trade in sociology, political science, or sometimes even literature studies, reinvented themselves by turning into business consultants and management specialists, offering to unveil the mysteries of Asian capitalism in its successive reincarnations (from Japan Inc. to China’s global reach). In addition, whereas other fields became highly compartmented, it is still possible to pass as a “Japan specialist” or an “expert on China”, covering all aspects of a country’s culture, economy, and political situation, in a way that is no longer possible for countries like France or Germany, let alone for Europe as a whole. Outside academia, one may even earn the reputation of an “Asia hand”, as one experiences successive postings in diplomacy or corporate management in various Asian capitals. As Benjamin Disraeli said: “the East is a career”.

The second kind of Asian studies in the United States, cultural studies of Asia, is very different in its nature and its applications. It is born out of the Civil Rights movement, anti-war protests, the claim of ethnic or sexual minorities, and campus politics. It bundles together a set of disciplines sometimes referred to as “critical humanities”: literary criticism, media studies, cultural anthropology, women studies, and the ethnic curriculum reflecting the distinctive identity of Asian-Americans. Theoretically, it is grounded in or influenced by various kinds of post-isms (postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, posthumanism), as well as by feminism, queer theory, subaltern studies, deconstruction, and critical theory. It is also closely linked to practices of political militancy, social activism, human rights advocacy, and experiments in the performing arts. The focus of cultural studies of Asia is on transnational flux, diasporic mobility, immigration challenges, and shifting identities, as opposed to the centralizing state structures and fixed identities favored by area studies.

American cultural imperialism and Asian resistance

According to Kuan-Hsing Chen, a Taiwanese cultural critic, the second form of Asian studies is no less imperialistic than the first. It considers Asian countries only in relation to the US, and it uses American or European authors, concepts, and points of reference in order to “frame” Asia. Western scholars look to Asia from afar, and with concerns close to home. Not only do they present their partial view as the only legitimate one, but by monopolizing speaking positions they also block the emergence of alternative voices coming from Asia. It is by invoking the right to difference, to cultural identity and to affirmative action, that America exerts its cultural hegemony on a global scale. By promoting multiculturalism, it draws the best elements from the rest of the world into its universities, and dictates the terms of the cultural debate in foreign academia as well. America’s multicultural imperialism gives birth to a new generation of local informants and academic brokers, which Kuan-Hsing Chen labels as “collaborators”, “opportunists”, and “commuters”. In Asia as elsewhere, the staunchest advocates of cultural identity generally come from the diaspora: it is through exile and distance that they come to overemphasize the importance of small differences.

Knowledge production is one of the major sites in which imperialism operates and exercises its power. Kuan-Hsing Chen gives several examples where the West is used as “method” without it even being acknowledged. The existing analytical distinction between the state and civil society cannot account for democratic transformation in places like India, Taiwan, or South Korea. As Professor Chen explains, India does not possess the condition required to develop civil society in the Western European sense, because only a limited part of the Indian population, mainly social elites, could enter such a space. Instead, critical historians like Partha Chatterjee show that subaltern classes and groups have been able to invent alternative spaces of political democracy to ensure their survival and livelihood. Similarly, in Taiwan and Korea during their democratic transition, civil society virtually became the state, as major figures associated with the civil-society camp acceded to power or were coopted by the regime.

The demise of the nation-state is a luxury only the West can afford

Another issue with “the West as method” is the academic insistence on the demise of the nation-state and the advent of post-nationalism. For Kuan-Hsing Chen, this is a luxury only the West can afford: “at this point in history, a total negation of nationalism is nothing but escapism.” As he comments a documentary on Singapore made by an independent filmmaker, “one has to sincerely identify with the nation, genuinely belong to it, and truly love it in order to establish a legitimate position from which to speak.” His relation with Taiwan is itself ambivalent. He refuses the rigid binary structure that demands a choice between unification with mainland China and independence from it. He tries to sketch a “popular democratic” alternative, based on grassroot movements, anti-imperialism, and local autonomy. For that, he recommends an effort to liberate from the three-pronged grip of colonialism, cold war, and imperialism. But if attempts to engage these questions are locked within national boundaries, it will not be possible to think beyond the imposed nation-state structure and work toward genuine regional reconciliation.

Kuan-Hsing Chen wants to contribute to the emergence of the new field of Asian studies in Asia by proposing a radical alternative: Asia as method. “Using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point,” he writes, “societies in Asia can become each others’ point of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt.” In a lecture given in 1960, the Japanese critic Takeuchi Yoshimi intuitively proposed the notion of Asia as method as a means of transforming the Japanese subject. But he concluded aporetically to the impossibility of defining what such a transformation might imply. Mizoguchi Yûzô, a recently deceased scholar, took up from where Takeuchi left and proposed “China as Method”, by which China or Asia ceased to be considered as the object of analysis and became a means of transforming knowledge production. In this sense, the emerging field of Asian studies in Asia will have a very different historical mission than the Asian studies practiced in Europe and North America. Studying Asia from an Asiatic standpoint is a means of self-discovery and collective emancipation. As Chen puts it succinctly, “the more I go to Seoul, the better I understand Taipei.”

Using Asian frames of reference

A first step in pursuing “Asia as method” is by using Asian authors and frames of reference. This is what Kuan-Hsing Chen does, noting that “Asia as method is not a slogan but a practice. That practice begins with multiplying the sources of our readings to include those produced in other parts of Asia.” His references include classic thinkers such as Lu Xun and Gandhi, or more recent critics like Mizoguchi Yûzô and Partha Chatterjee or Ashis Nandy. He borrows from Lu Xun a certain critical tradition that addresses broad political issues by responding to concrete events, such as a campaign to expand Taiwanese investments in South-East Asia, or the claim of a group that wishes to register Taiwan as America’s fifty-first state. The non-violent philosophy of Gandhi is mobilized to broaden the concept of civil society and to discuss the emergence of subaltern classes in conjunction with the Chinese concept of minjian. Takeuchi Yoshimi complements these references by suggesting that Japan has gone through the opposite direction of India and China, and that its cultural dependence toward the US prevents it to build a more penetrating critical subjectivity at the societal level.

Professor Chen also uses foreign authors who have become common references in postcolonial studies, in order to design “a methodology specific to the colonized third world.” The central figure here is Franz Fanon, a Martinique-born French psychiatrist, writer, and militant of decolonization, whose work inspired many revolutionary leaders from the Third World. His basic affirmation, “the black man wants to be white”, suggests that Asian people also want to become American, and end up wearing the same masks and fetishes. The psychic dimensions associated with colonialism have also been studied by Octave Mannoni, who showed that the colonizer and the colonized are bounded together by a relationship of mutually constituted subjectivity, and Albert Memmi, who posited that the alienation of the colonized cannot be reduced to the question of individual subjectivity: it has to be addressed at the level of the social structure, which conditions the collective psyche. The use of these sources and others allows Kuan-Hsing Chen to build an alternative narrative of decolonization, deimperialization, and “de-cold war” that stands at variance with North American academic references.

Decolonization, deimperialization, and “de-cold war”

The author goes farther. Asian scholars have been doing “Asian studies” all along without realizing it, “just like Europeans, North Americans, Latin Americans, and Africans have also been doing studies in relation to their own living spaces.” “That is,” Chen insists, “Martin Heidegger was actually doing European studies, as were Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jürgen Habermas.” The choice of names is not insignificant, and quite ironic as well. Thinkers who attempt to “provincialize Europe” and call into question Western philosophy’s pretense to universality usually find themselves at home in the philosophy of Heidegger, that quintessential provincial who never left his Heimat and had only contempt for science and technology. Similarly, Michel Foucault dreamt of other horizons without ever using non-Western sources. “If a philosophy of the future exists,” he wrote, “it must be born outside of Europe, or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe.” Kuan-Hsing Chen does not rule out the possibility of a synthesis, but he sees universalism as the end of a process as opposed to a starting point. “Universalism is not an epistemological given but a horizon we may be able to move toward in the remote future, provided that we first compare notes based upon locally grounded knowledge. Universalist arrogance serves only to keep new possibilities from emerging.”

Between Marx and Anthropology

16 May 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, Kojin Karatani, Duke University Press, 2014.

There is a tradition of contemporary Japanese philosophers drawing from anthropology (the names of Shinichi Nakazawa and Akira Asada come to mind). There is also a Japanese tradition of philosophical re-readings of Marx (with Kozo Uno or Makoto Itoh). I am interested in the first tradition. I regard the second as negligible. In The Structure of World History, Kojin Karatani combines the two approaches. He offers a broad synthesis on the origins of the state, the market, and the national community, based on the works of classical anthropologists. And he provides a close reading of Marx’s texts in order to construct his own philosophical system, encompassing the whole of human history. I found the first part based on anthropology most valuable. I only skipped through the second part. Below are a few reading notes and commentary intended to provided a cursory reading of Karatani’s book.

A Japanese rereading of Marx

Marx, like Comte and Hegel before him, saw the history of the human race as neatly divided into historical phases. He identified five such phases: the primitive horde, Asiatic despotism, the ancient classic state, Germanic feudalism, and the modern state under capitalism. The principle of that division was to be found in modes of production and the type of labor relations they generated. The stateless clan society was characterized by primitive communism: there was no private property, and goods were shared among all members of the clan. It was followed by the Asiatic mode of production in which the despotic king owned everything and his subjects nothing. Then came the Greek and Roman slavery system giving power to a minority of citizens, followed by the Germanic feudal system with its relations of allegiance and serfdom, and modern bourgeois capitalism characterized by the opposition between capital and labor. Thus Marx famously proclaimed that all history was the history of class struggle, and that it necessarily tended towards the advent of communism, in which class would disappear and the state would wither away.

Other authors, mainly inspired by Marx, offered their own classification of social formations. To the five modes of production identified by Marx, Samir Amin added two others: the trade-based social system seen in various Arab countries, and the social formation based on the “simple petty-commodity” mode of production seen in seventeenth-century Britain. Building his own theory of world systems, Immanuel Wallerstein described a succession from mini-systems that preceded the rise of the state, to world empires that were ruled by a single state, and then world-economies in which multiple states engaged in competition without being unified politically. The modern world system of global capitalism itself went through the successive stages of mercantilism, liberalism, and imperialism, each dominated by a single hegemonic power: first Holland, then Britain, and then the United States.

Stages of development

Yet other thinkers identified various stages of development by the dominant world commodity or technology: the wool industry in the stage of mercantilism, the textile industry in liberalism, heavy industries in imperialism, and durable consumer goods such as automobiles and electronics in the stage of capitalism. Our present times may witness the rise of a new stage in which information serves as the world commodity. Still for others, each historical phase is characterized by the dominant mode of energy supply: from biomass and wood to windmills and hydropower and then to coal and steam, then electricity and the oil engine, followed by gas turbines and nuclear power or renewable energies. These periodicizations are only variants of a dominant scheme that locates the crux of world history in the realm of production.

While offering his own teleology based on modes of exchange as opposed to modes of production, Karatani introduces variants and correctives in these classifications in order to paint a more complex picture of world history. For instance, he argues that societies existed in the form of nomadic bands before the rise of clan society, and that the real turning point came with the adoption of fixed settlements, with its accompanying institutions of property, religious rituals, and political coercion. Contrary to the standard view of the Neolithic revolution that associates sedentarization with agriculture, he argues that fixed settlements preceded the appearance of agriculture, and first took the form of fishing villages located at the mouth of rivers and trade routes. Stockpiling was first made possible through the technology for smoking fish, not piling grain or herding livestock. Nomadic tribes on one side, and clan societies on the other, engaged in different modes of exchange and redistribution: pooling of resources and “primitive communism” for the first, and the logic of the gift and the forms of trade described by classical anthropologists for the second. Along with Pierre Clastres and Marshall Sahlins, he agrees that primitive societies were “societies against the state”, and actively resisted the concentration of power through warfare and reciprocity of exchange.

The Asiatic mode of production revisited

Karatani also develops a more nuanced picture of the Asiatic state, considered by Hegel and Marx as well as by Karl Wittfogel as the symbol of despotism. Contrary to the vision of tyranny and oppression, he argues that the Asiatic social contract was based on a form of redistribution. People were not simply coerced: they voluntarily undertook to work for the sake of their king-priest, driven by religious beliefs and the offer for protection. State power is based on a specific mode of exchange, distinct from the first mode based on the reciprocity of the gift. Drawing resources from large-scale irrigation systems, the Asiatic state developed the first bureaucracies, created the first permanent standing armies, and organized long-distant trade with other communities. Through his bureaucrats, the despot was expected to rule, administer, show concern for, and take care of its subjects. It was not the Asiatic community that gave birth to the Asiatic despotic state; to the contrary, it was only after the establishment of a centralized state that a new community would emerge.

Karatani also offers a revision of our understanding of Greek and Roman antiquity. As he demonstrates, political theories and philosophy did not first emerge in the Greek polis, as is sometimes alleged. The formation of Asiatic states was associated with intense philosophical debates, as in the Warring States period in China which saw the emergence of the Hundred Schools of Thought. This is because the appearance of the state required a breaking with the traditions that had existed since clan society. Greece and Rome existed at the periphery of Asian empires and retained many aspects of clan societies. Rome in the end did become a vast empire, but that was due if anything to its adoption of the Asiatic imperial system, which survived the fall of Rome with the Byzantine dynasty and then the Islamic empires. For this reason, historians should regard the despotic state that emerged in Asia not simply as a primitive early stage, but rather as the entity that perfected the supranational state (or empire). Likewise, they should regard Athens and Rome not as the wellspring of Western civilization, but as incomplete social formations that developed at the submargins of Asian empires. Drawing from Karl Wittfogel, Karatani sees a subtle dialectics between civilizations-empires at the core, vassal states at the margins, independent polities at the submargin, and out-of-sphere communities that retained their nomadic lifestyle.

From modes of production to modes of exchange

Moving to his third mode of exchange, based on money and commodities, Karatani enters classic Marxian terrain, and offers vintage Marx analysis. That is where he kind of lost me, and my reading of this part is wholly incomplete. Drawing from the classic formulas M-C-M’ and M-M’, he argues that the world created by this third mode of exchange is fundamentally a world of credit and speculation, and that it still needs the backing of the first mode (based on reciprocity) and the second mode (drawing from the social contract offered by the state) in order to sustain itself. My attention also lapsed during his discussions on world money, world commodities, and world systems à la Wallerstein. It was only revived when he described the different schools of socialist thinking, seeing great commonality between Proudhon and Marx as well as with the Young Hegelians who first developed a theory of alienation of the individual through a critique of religion, state power, and capital.

Karatani then introduces his fourth mode of exchange, labelled mode D, which marks the attempt to restore the reciprocal community of mode A on top of the market economy of mode C, and without the state structure of mode B. Although this mode of exchange is an ideal form that never existed in actuality, it manifested itself in the form of universal religions and expressed the “return of the repressed” of the primitive community’s mode of reciprocal exchange in a higher dimension. His analysis sometimes borders on the bizarre, as when he warns of a looming ecological catastrophe and generalized warfare that may take humanity back to the stage of the nomadic tribe. His description of Kant as a closet socialist advocating the disappearance of the state and of capital also seems far-fetched. But it is his reading of Marx and Hegel through Kant that may provide the greatest food for thought to modern philosophers such as Slavoj Zizek, who quotes Karatani eloquently in his books. Based on solid anthropological data and a re-reading of Marx’s classic texts, Karatani’s work may generate a thousand theoretical explosions, placing the construction of world history systems back at the heart of the philosophical agenda.

The Philosophical Underpinning of Cinema Studies

6 May 201714 Sep 2021 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Gilles Deleuze′s Time Machine, David Rodowick, Duke University Press, 1997.

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There Is More to Philosophy for Anthropologists Than Just Foucault

5 May 201731 May 2017 Etienne RP1 Comment

A review of The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, Edited by Veena Das, Michael D. Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Bhrigupati Singh. Duke University Press, 2014.

The Ground Between.jpg My strong belief is that this book will prove as important as the volume Writing Culture, published in 1986, which marked a turning point in the orientation of anthropological writing. This is not to say that anthropologists didn’t engage philosophy before Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, or that they will with renewed strength thereafter. Many classical anthropologists were trained as philosophers, especially in the French tradition where disciplinary borders are more porous. Pierre Bourdieu described his work in anthropology and sociology as “fieldwork in philosophy.” Nowadays “theory”, which samples a limited set of authors from contemporary philosophy, is part of the toolbox that every graduate student learns to master, and that they often repeat devotedly as a shibboleth that will grant them their PhD. What is striking in The Ground Between is the variety of authors that the contributors discuss, as well as the depth of their engagement, which goes beyond scholarly debates and is often set out in existential terms. For many anthropologists, philosophers are a life’s companion, helping them to navigate through the pitfalls of scholarship and the vicissitudes of life.

After having been killed by Writing Culture, Clifford Geertz is back in favor

If Writing Culture was a gesture aimed at dismissing Clifford Geertz, killing the father as it were, several authors from The Ground Between move back to him as a revered father figure, or maybe as a grumpy uncle who may provide an unending collection of quips and aphorisms. Geertz indeed offers wonderful quotes as to how anthropology and philosophy stand in relation to each other, to the world, and to the self. He observed that anthropology and philosophy share “an ambition to connect just about everything with everything else,” and remarked that “one of the advantages of anthropology as a scholarly enterprise is that no one, including its practitioners, quite knows exactly what it is.” Asked by João Biehl what was his main contribution to theory, Geertz replied succinctly: “substraction”. While being generous and open to dialogue, Geertz could also strike back viciously at personal attacks such as the ones perpetrated by the authors of Writing Culture. “There is very little in what the partisans of an anthropology in which fieldwork plays a much reduced or transformed role… have so far done that would suggest they represent the way of the future,” he wrote, somewhat presciently.

Another move that many contributors enact is, although with much caution and the remains of a certain reverence, a distancing from Foucault. At the very least, they demonstrate that there is more to philosophy for anthropologists than just Foucault. Reproducing poorly rehashed quotes and concepts from Foucault will not automatically grant you access to graduate school. Didier Fassin exposes a research proposal submitted by a prospective student that reads as complete gobbledygook. Simply borrowing the lexicon of Foucault (biopolitics, power/knowledge, governmentality) or of his direct heir Agamben (the state of exception, bare life, thanatopolitics) will not get you very far. Similarly, Arthur Kleinman points out that scholars often engage in the “cultivation of the recondite, the otiose, the irresponsibly transgressive, and the merely clever,” with the effect of estranging the learned public from their discipline and turning scholarly debates into irrelevant wordplays. For João Biehl as well, “insular academic language and debates and impenetrable prose should not be allowed to strip people’s lives, knowledge, and struggles of their vitality–analytical, political, and ethical.”

Keeping Foucault at a distance

Didier Fassin writes his essay “in abusive fidelity to Foucault”, and prefers “a free translation rather than mere importation” of his concepts. Although he recognizes the heuristic fecundity of the master, he points out that many formulas borrowed by his heirs and epigones are just that: formulaic. As he soon realized in his research on humanitarian interventions, “I was indeed exploring something that Foucault had paradoxically ignored in spite of what the etymology of his concept of biopolitics seems to imply–life.” This led him to substitute the term “biopolitics” with the expression “the politics of life”, and to pay attention to the tension between the affirmation of the sacredness of life (as defined by Canguilhem) and the disparities in the treatment of particular lives (exemplified by Hannah Arendt’s work). Life is indeed a theme and even a word that is alien to Foucault’s writing. Attending to life as it is lived features prominently in several essays in the volume: “taking life back in” could be an apt description of the whole enterprise. Another common move is to go back to the source of Foucault’s inspiration, by rereading the scholars who had the most formative influence on his thinking: Georges Canguilhem in the case of Didier Fassin, and Georges Dumezil for Bhigupati Singh (who hints at a homosexual relationship between the master and the student). If Foucault is spared by those authors, they find in Agamben an avatar of “a negative dialectical lineage” (Singh) and reject his “apocalyptic take on the contemporary human condition” (Biehl).

While keeping Foucault at a distance, most authors remain firmly committed to French theory, and engage in a productive dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari, Bourdieu, as well as older figures such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre or Bergson. Deleuze in particular is mobilized by many authors, to the point one could speak of a “deleuzian moment” in anthropology. Bhigupati Singh finds in Deleuze “an opening, a way into non-dialectical thought” that he uses in his analysis of life in a destitute Indian community. João Biehl read Deleuze while documenting the fate of Catarina, a poignant character in a place of abandonment, until his editor commented: “I don’t care what Deleuze thinks. I want to know what Catarina thinks!” Ghassan Hage wrote the “auto-ethnography” of his deafness and capacity to hear again in close dialogue with Bourdieu, seeing exemplifications of his key concepts but also the limits in the way Bourdieu conceived of being in a world characterized by inequalities in the “accumulation of homeliness”. To be deprived of raisons d’être is not to be deprived of being: as João Biehl puts it, “language and desire continue meaningfully even in circumstances of profound abjection.” “If Sartre became for me a “natural” conversation partner in my anthropological work,” confesses Michael Jackson, “it was because his focus on the conditions under which a human life becomes viable and enjoyable implied a critique of metaphysical and systematizing philosophies.” As Geertz put it succinctly: “I don’t do systems.”

A return to the American liberal tradition

A cadre of young French philosophers such as Jocelyn Benoist, Sandra Laugier and Claude Imbert also find their way into the bibliography. But other philosophical voices are also making themselves heard. For some, it is a return to the American tradition, with prominent contemporary figures such as Stanley Cavell or Nelson Goodman and older ones such as Henry James and John Austin or Hannah Arendt. Arthur Kleinman finds in Henri James the life lessons that accompany him while giving care to his wife suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, making him “feel less alone”. He considers James’s Varieties of Religious Experience the best source for teaching a course on “Religion and Medicine”. Reading Hannah Arendt in Teheran, Michael Fischer notes that Iranian intellectuals were “no longer interested in revolutionary political philosophy but rather in liberalism. Habermas, Rorty, Rawls, and Arendt were all objects of much interest.” Veena Das finds in Cavell’s philosophy the kind of attention to “the low, the ordinary, and the humble” that helps her answer to the pressures from her ethnography by “making the everyday count”.

The anthropologists are careful to point out what philosophers owe to anthropology. João Biehl underscores that Deleuze and Guattari owe their notion of “plateau” to Gregory Bateson’s work on Bali, and that their key insights on nomadism, the encoding of fluxes, the war machine, or indeed schizophrenia, all come from Pierre Clastres’s attempt to theorize “primitive society” as a social form constantly at war against the emergence of the state. The habit of “writing against” that defines a large strand of contemporary philosophy is also central in the conceptual schemes of the founding fathers of anthropology, from Bronislav Malinowski to Margaret Mead. Bhigupati Singh reminds us that “Deleuze deeply admired Levi-Strauss” and may have found in his brand of structuralism a few nondialectic terms that he finds “helpful for thinking about power, ethics, and life.” Following his provocative advice to “take an author from behind,” he imagines the offsprings that may have been produced by an anthropologically-oriented Deleuze. Michael Puett invites us to use indigenous theories to break down our own assumptions about how theory operates: “the goal should not be just to deconstruct twentieth-century theoretical categories but to utilize indigenous visions to rethink our categories and the nature of categories altogether.”

Who’s in and who’s out in the philosophical market

But this book is not a popular chart of “who is in and who is out”, whose ratings go down and whose go up in the philosophical market where anthropologists do their shopping. The authors are careful to distance themselves from “anthropologists who look to philosophy as providing the theory and to anthropology to give evidence from empirical work to say how things really are.” Ethnography is not just proto-philosophy, and anthropologists do not need authorization or patronage in their pronouncements. The idea is to “work from ethnography to theory, not the other way around.” If philosophy can be defined as “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts,” then perhaps anthropology constitutes “a mode of heightened attentiveness to life” that builds on “experience-near concepts” in order to show “how ordinary life itself gives rise to puzzles we might call philosophical.” The Ground Between therefore doesn’t herald an “ontological turn” or a “philosophical moment” in modern anthropology, in the way that Writing Culture was perceived as a turning point affixed with various labels (“postmodern”, “reflexive”, “deconstructionist”). But it is an attempt to step back, take stock, and reflect on what anthropologists are doing, in order to make their contribution to social science, to knowledge, and to human life more meaningful.

Getting It Up in China

15 Apr 201722 Apr 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of The Impotence Epidemic: Men’s Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China, Everett Yuehong Zhang, Duke University Press, 2015.

Everett Zhang was conducting fieldwork in two Chinese hospitals, documenting the reasons why men sought medical help for sexual impotence, when Viagra was first introduced into China’s market in 2000. He therefore had a unique perspective on what the media often referred to as the “impotence epidemic”, designating both the increased social visibility of male sexual dysfunction and the growing number of patients seeking treatment in nanke (men’s medicine) or urological hospital departments. At the time of Viagra’s release, Pfizer, its manufacturer, envisaged a market of more than 100 million men as potential users of “Weige” (伟哥, Great Brother) and hoped to turn China into its first consumer market in the world. Its sales projections were based on reasonable assumptions. The number of patients complaining from some degree of sexual impotence was clearly on the rise, reflecting demographic trends but also changing attitudes and values. There was a new openness in addressing sexual issues and a willingness by both men and women to experience sexually fulfilling lives, putting higher expectations on men’s potency. Renewed attention to men’s health issues since the 1980s had led to the creation of specialized units in both biomedical hospitals and TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) clinics. There was no real competitor to Pfizer’s Viagra, as traditional herbal medicine or folk recipes clearly had less immediate effects in enabling sexual intercourse.

Taking Viagra along with herbal medicine

And yet Viagra sold much less than expected. In hospitals and health clinics, Chinese patients were reluctant to accept a full prescription. Instead, they requested one or two single pills, as if to avoid dependence. The drug was expensively priced, and customers were unwilling to sacrifice other expenses to make room in their budget. In addition, Viagra did not substitute for traditional remedies, but rather developed in tandem with them as people switched between Viagra and herbal medicine, taking both for seemingly compelling reasons. Viagra addressed the issue of erectile dysfunction, and its bodily effects were clearly experienced by Chinese men who reacted to it in much the same way as male subjects elsewhere. But it did not bring an end to the “impotence epidemic”, which continued to be framed as more than a health issue by the Chinese media. Viagra did not “cure” impotence or restored men’s potency because it was unable to do so. Pfizer’s projected sales figures had been based on false assumptions, and the Chinese market proved more resistant than initially envisaged.

Zhang proposes a compelling theory of why it was so, thereby demonstrating the value of a fieldwork-based anthropological study as distinct from other types of scholarly explanations. In contrast to the dominant biomedical paradigm, he rejects the notion that male potency can be reduced to the simple ability to achieve an erection. Impotence is much more than a bodily dysfunction or a “neuromuscular event”: witness, as Zhang did, the despair of men who complain of having lost their “reason to live”, or the frustration of women who accuse their companion of having become “less than a man”. But impotence is not only a metaphor, as some cultural critics would have it. Impotence is often presented as the symbol of a masculinity in crisis or as a sign of the “end of men” and the rise of women in postsocialist China. But these generalizations do not reflect the practical experiences of impotent men, nor do they explain why the demand for more and better sex resulted in anxiety for some men, leading to impotence. “In fact, notes the author, none of the discussions surrounding Chinese masculine crises was either soundly conceptualized or empirically supported.”

Male potency cannot be reduced to the ability to achieve an erection

Zhang’s fieldwork confirmed the rise of women’s desire or increased people’s longing to enjoy sex throughout their adult life, but did not go as far as to validate the claim of an “impotence epidemic” or to testify to a “new type of impotence”. During the Maoist period, people were discouraged from seeing doctors about impotence, as sexuality was repressed and the desire for individual sexual pleasure was regarded as antithetical to the collective ethos of revolution. If anything, patients came to consultations to complain about nocturnal emissions (yijing), a complaint that more or less disappeared in the post-Maoist era. When men’s health clinics or nanke departments emerged in the new era, they medicalized impotence and established it as a legitimate “disease” warranting medical attention. Private selves emerged when the overall ethos of sacrifice and asceticism gave way to the exaltation of romantic love and then to the justification of sexual desire and pleasure. But structural impediments to sexual desire did not disappear overnight, such as the physical separation of married couples and other constraints on intimacy induced by the danwei (work unit) and hukou (household registration) systems. Other biopolitical interventions created gaps between the revolutionary class and the outcast relatives of counter-revolutionaries, between the urban and the rural or, more recently, between the rich and the poor.

The main value of the book lies in its rich collection of life stories and individual cases of men and women confronted with impotence. The amount of suffering accumulated under Maoist socialism is staggering. People interviewed in the course of this research retained collective memory of starvation during the Great Leap Famine, and feeling hungry was a common experience well into the sixties. Maoist China was a man-eat-man’s world, where middle-aged men would snatch food from school children or steal from food stalls to assuage their hunger. It was also a time when children would denounce their parents for counterrevolutionary behavior, or would call their mother by their given name in a show of disrespect in order to draw a clear line between themselves and bad parents. Sexual misery and backwardness also provided a common background. Some of Zhang’s interlocutors never touched a woman’s hand until they were thirty years old; others confessed that the first time they saw a naked female body was when they saw a Western oil painting of a female body, or when they glimpsed scenes of a classical ballet in a movie. A nineteen years-old girl didn’t understand the question when the doctor asked if she had begun lijia (menstruation) and thought lijia was a foreign word. Many persons consulting for impotence confess that they never had sexual intercourse or had tried to have sex once of twice but failed. Their conviction that they were impotent was based on very limited physical contact with women or was merely a product of their imagination.

Bedroom stories

As Zhang argues convincingly, it takes two to tango; or in words borrowed from phenomenology, “in the final analysis, curing impotence means building intercorporeal intimacy.” In paragraphs that could have been borrowed from Masters and Johnson, Zhang describes the various components of sexual intercorporeality: bodies need to be in contact, as in “touching, kissing, licking, rubbing, and so on”; but they also need to be in sync, geared toward one another in a process of “bodying forth”; and other sensory inputs (such as “seeing, touching, and smelling the naked female body, tasting the tongue of the female, or hearing her scream”) may provide additional stimulus. Male impotence very often originates in the failure of one of these intercorporeal dimensions: lack of touching, as when the husband lies side by side to his wife, waiting to achieve an erection; ignorance of the most basic facts of life, due to the lack of sex education; and withdrawal from the sensory world that is symptomatic of a more serious loss of “potency” in life. As the author notes, with a good deal of common sense, “women’s involvement in managing impotence is not any less important than men’s, and, in fact, at times may be more important. Impotence, after all, is not only a neurovascular event affecting the individual male body. It is also a social, familial event and an intercorporeal, gendered event.”

The Impotence Epidemic is not only ethnographically rich, it is also theoretically elaborate. Zhang received his PhD in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley, in a department known for its emphasis on social and cultural theory. One of his teachers, Paul Rabinow, initiated generations of English-speaking students to the thought of French philosopher Michel Foucault. His thesis advisor, Arthur Kleinman, who teaches medical anthropology at Harvard, recently edited a book (reviewed here) about how anthropologists engage philosophy. Zhang confesses he took classes in philosophy, including one with John Searle, who involuntarily provided him with a way to think about erection (“Now I want to raise my right arm. Look, my right arm is up.”) Throughout the book, he makes frequent references to Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, as well as to Freud and Lacan.

Confronting theory with fieldwork observations

Engaging the thought of these canonical authors can sometimes feel as intimidating as having sex for the first time. Zhang shows it doesn’t have to be so. What is important is to build a rapport. Zhang graduated from his theory-heavy curriculum with a pragmatic mindset and a heavy dose of common sense. He uses what he can get from the theoretical toolbox, without forcing his erudition onto the reader. He is able to summarize complex reasoning in a few sentences, and to turn difficult words into useful tools. Sometimes only the title of a book or one single expression coined by one distinguished thinker can open up an evocative space and act as useful heuristic. Zhang refers to Deleuze and Gattari’s A Thousand Plateaux to label his collection of life stories and medical cases as “one thousand bodies of impotence.” Impotence is itself a kind of plateau, defined by Gregory Bateson as a force of continuous intensity without any orientation toward a culminating point or an external end. Throughout his book, Zhang provides succinct and transparent definitions of key concepts–Deleuze’s assemblages, Bourdieu’s habitus, Foucault’s biopower, Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeality, Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, etc. He then tests their validity by confronting them to his fieldwork observations, sometimes giving them a twist or new polish to make them fit with his ethnographic material. In many cases, theory is found lacking, and needs to be completed with the lessons learned from participatory observation.

Zhang’s two main sources of philosophical inspiration are Deleuze and Foucault. The first allows him to think about the impotence epidemic as a positive development that signals the rise of desire; the second provides him with a method for investigating the cultivation of self in post-Maoist China. Criticizing Lacan’s notion of desire as lack, Deleuze and Guattari introduce useful concepts to think about the production of desire or, as they say, “desiring production”, which includes “the desire to desire”. They describe the force of capitalism in terms of generating flows of production and desire, which are coded (restricted) and decoded (loosened) in a moral economy of desire. Their analysis focuses on the decoding phase that is the hallmark of capitalism, lessening restrictions on desire to create deterritorialized flows. Zhang prefers to focus on the “recoding” of flows of desire or “reterritorialization” as exemplified in the cultivation of life through an ethic of “yangsheng” which advocates preserving seminal essence. Sexual cultivation in contemporary China, like the “care of the self” in ancient Greece as studied by Foucault, is an ethical approach to coping with desire. Yangsheng involves everything from sleep to dietary regimens, bathing, one’s temperament in response to changes in climate, qigong, walking, and the bedchamber arts. It is a way to regain potency over one’s life. Foucault, in order to account for unreason and madness, chose to produce a history of reason in Western civilization. Similarly, studying impotence leads Zhang to delineate life’s potency, a notion that goes well beyond the ability to achieve an erection.