The Movement of Modern Experience

For our second session of Anthropology as a History of the Present, we are invited to read two chapters from Reinhart Koselleck's Future's Past (1979, as translated by Keith Tribe, 2004), two chapters from James Ferguson's Expectations of Modernity (1999), and Eric R. Wolf's introduction to his Europe and the People without History (1990). Presented under the heading “The Times of Modernity”, the materials serve as a foray into understandings of “temporality, notions of future, past and progress”, as encountered through the relations of “modernity” to the reflexively characterized “pre-modern”.

Koselleck illustrates, through an encounter, by a 19^th-century European scholar of a 16^th-century European Historie (a narrative embodied as painting)—Albrecht Altdorfer's Alexanderschlact—a transition from (i) expectation (as a transcendental category of futurity) contiguous with, indeed “bound” to, experience (as a transcendental category of history); to (ii) a “horizon of expectation” as uncoupled, from a “space of experience”. This movement—from a teleological history of Church, of a morally-graded world “being toward” (in a very Heideggerian sense) an actual, prophesied Eschaton (in essence, death of individual being as writ across all being), to a teleological history of progress, in morally-imperative pursuit of a prognosticated perfection (recapitulating, in its own way, a world beyond the End), itself forever drawing away, eternally virtual—renders a transformation of history from an accounting of chronicle to a progression of travelogue. If pre-modernity was about holding stable a world toward which the End “was approaching with greater speed”, modernity, as Koselleck artfully demonstrates, is about a dynamic acceleration toward a new world, a Neuzeit, of temporal “utopian surplus”.

Ferguson, in exploring expectations of a Zambian modernization and subsequent economic unraveling, begins by echoing Koselleck's modernity-as-movement, here heralded as “urbanization”, and extends this metaphor into “counter-urbanization” and movement “back to the land”, articulating a teleological failure of (in Koselleck's terms) “erroneous prognosis” that, unlike pre-modern prophesy (which contained within it, Koselleck explains, the symbolic seeds of renewal), has sown in the Zambian context a pessimistic refrain, “From now on, it's just down, down, down...” Divorced from (perhaps, in the non-Christian African context, never wed to) an End to be toward, the movement is from forecasts of an “emerging” modern Zambia to prophesy (bound as it is in a recoupling of experience to expectation) of progressive declination. Ferguson plays (without much conviction) with this being an articulation of the post-modern, but in light of Koselleck we hear something else again: an articulation of history at once unstable (thus not pre-modern in the European mold) and dystopian (and thus neither modern).

Ferguson sets out to pursue “a nonlinear, non-teleological” account of his story of the Zambian Copperbelt. However, in his “Expectations of Domesticity”, he leads us into a brier patch of a different sort of teleology, here not a historical, but a functionalist one. The Westinghouse kitchen with its streamlined refrigerator expresses a culmination of modernity as accelerating movement, while not “self-evidently called for on utilitarian or functional grounds”, these superficial markers of mobility nonetheless voice a horizon of expectation, just as fluently as Altdorfer's anachronisms bespoke the univocal co-temporality of Antiquity and Armageddon. To be modern is to pursue a progressive acceleration, and while this movement may have begun in Europe, it sped onward in America, where the housewife was at once a touchstone of “stabilized...nuclear family” (romanticized, it should be noted, perhaps with not so much irony as might first be apparent, as a retention of a pre-modern sensibility) and a marker of upward mobility (explicating in the body of the modern individual the teleological charge of modern society as a whole).

While Europeans may have scoffed at the embodiment of this sensibility of movement in artifacts of modern appliance, they nonetheless carried these same expectations with them in their colonial offices. For, despite the characterization of newly urbanized indigenous townsfolk as “migrant workers”, if any population in the Copperbelt context is to be characterized as economic migrants, it would be European settlers who, following a pattern of economic mobility perhaps first launched in the ashes of the Black Death (some two centuries before a Bavarian duke commissioned Altdorfer's work), continued their accelerating movement across oceans and continents in pursuit of economic progress, both societal and personal, arriving in Zambia with models of domesticity adapted to just such a history of ever more rapidly going somewhere.

This is a point we will return to after we first touch upon Wolf, and his admonition against “turning dynamic, interconnected phenomena into static, disconnected things”. Wolf suggests a cultural genesis for this tendency, emerging at a fixed point in historical time, and attributes to our modern pedagogy of history the understanding of “ancient Greece” and “the industrial revolution”, “the East” and “the West”, “Society”, “the community”, the “nation-state”, and the “political culture”, each the error of “turning names into things”. This “habit”, Wolf further argues, is an outcome of modern social sciences—sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology—each specialty seeking to work out the interrelationships between abstract “aggregate[s] of individuals”, however any such aggregate may be characterized and construed within any given specialty.

Here, I would challenge Wolf's claim of both the contemporaneous genesis of such understandings and the causal trajectory (name begets thing) he posits. Instead, I would suggest that what the social sciences have done is more intricately articulate not a learned habit, but an embodied experience of aggregate individuals as phenomenological agents onto themselves. This is a tendency seen in political economy of class (which Wolf correctly points out, long predates Marx), as well as encounters of race (in both its early and contemporary usages), of country (as distinct from the later conceptions of nation and state), of tribe, of village, of family, of lineage. Only in the midst of such encounters, I counter, does naming occur; before “collectivization” there is an experience of collective. Social sciences may bring theory and dictates of empiricism to such encounters, but such mechanisms may only be applicable in the presence of phenomena that would be experienced even in the absence of such intellectual equipment. The move toward “the study of what is 'in the heads' of single culture-bearing populations”, which Wolf so disparages, merely re-articulates experiential encounters of aggregate others as intentional, such encounters being part and parcel of human experience (despite rationalist moves to discount such experiences), with or without formalized specialties of social sciences to color them.

Even those Wolf credits with “trenchancy” and “scope”, Andre Gunder Frank and Emmanuel Wallerstein, would not appear to be immune from this encounter of phenomenological other: Capitalism penetrates and “turns other areas into dependent satellites of the metropolitan center” (compare this account with DeLanda's nonlinear history), “Firms (be they individuals, enterprises or regions) meet” in a “world economy”, “the core subjugated the periphery”. Here, capitalism, firms, the core, each operate as named things, or more properly, named agents, understood not as blind processes, but as actors performing upon a world. Although a thorough exploration of this theme is well beyond the scope of this essay, my contention is that Wolf's “global market” and “global division of labor” are only possible in a phenomenological world populated by aggregate others, and that naming is a means by which we organize our understanding of such a prior phenomena, rather than a mechanism by which “aggregates of individuals” are so-reduced, post hoc. To be clear, I am not arguing that said “named things” have any substantive independent existence apart from our experience of them, only that our experience of such as things precedes the act of naming by which we organize said experience, and indeed is necessary to any such act of naming.

Which brings us back to Ferguson, and the “modern” nuclear family “that figures as the end point of the evolutionary narratives of modernization”. Compare this with Arland Thornton's contention (Reading History Sideways, 2005), that the nuclear family is centuries old precursor in northwest Europe to the industrial revolution, and thus to modernity, rather than a consequence of industrialization and modernization. If we allow this possibility, then the experience of the nuclear family in modernity can be understood differently.

In particular, the understanding of nuclear “Christian marriages” as forming “one living being, one entity, a new organism” captures starkly the European encounter of nuclear family as aggregate other. The salience of the nuclear family to white settlers in understanding and organizing their social world is likewise evident in the following passage:

The missionary observer, though finding the Watchtower teachings about the role of the sexes to be “rather naively Western,” also added that “[W]hile it was rather difficult in most other congregations to find out who was married to whom, because husbands and wives neither came to church together nor sat together at service, the Watchtower families were easily recognized in their meetings as little clusters of father, mother, and children.” (Taylor and Lehman, 1961, 112, 235, as cited by Fergson.)

The ontological significance of the nuclear family for white colonists ability to encounter aggregate others is likewise evident in the housing policies in the Copperbelt, and the frustration of colonial anthropologists confronted with “living arrangements that confounded the 'decent' nuclear family model”, given that “almost every household included some kinsman of the householder or the wife among its inmates, while it also frequently turned out on closer inspection that the resident children were not the householder's own but belonged to a relative either of his own or of his wife” (a pattern of habitation that, it might be noted, continues to this day to confound modern suburban whites in their encounters with migrant Latin and South American domestic arrangements in the midst of their middle-class “family” neighborhoods).

For the European settler, then, the nuclear family, tied as it was to an identifiable “household” (as embodied through occupation of a unit of housing), wasn't simply a sign of modern progress, let alone an end point of modernity, but rather operated as a meaningfully clustering of individuals in the aggregate, without which modern white settlers were “confounded”, finding it “rather difficult” to understand the social relations of their indigenous neighbors. Yet, if we take the presence of nuclear families as a given precursor to industrialization and thus modernization, as Thornton argues, and we further recognize that modernity is about accelerated movement toward Neuzeit, then the dependence of the economic migrants from Europe on aggregation of individuals in the form of nuclear families, in the encountering of a phenomenologically meaningful world, can be more clearly understood: just as the modern individual recapitulates the movement of modern history in her own socio-economic mobility, so the modern nuclear family accommodates the perceptual limitations of an accelerated modernity—through its decoupling of aggregate other from both bloodline (or “substance”) and “soil”—and thereby makes modernity experientially tenable.

The confusion experienced by migrant Europeans, if we approach the nuclear family as an ontological entity making possible modern phenomenological experience, comes down to a necessary (in the modern context) conflation of markers of relatedness with markers of habitation. Where “pre-modern” systems of -linearity (whether matri- or patri-) and -locality (again, matri- or patri-) provide for encounters with aggregate other, either and both as clusters by descent and clusters by place, both operate within temporalities and spatialities that, I would submit, simply are not conducive to encounters of aggregate other in the moment of accelerated movement. Thus features of linearity and locality, of blood and soil, clearly recognized by Zambians for whom those aggregations are phenomenologically apparent, are not easily perceptible (if at all discernible) from the temporal and spatial vantage of accelerating modernity.

Instead, with acceleration, relatedness and habitation are experientially blended and truncated (just as objects passed from the vantage of a speeding vehicle appear at once run together and foreshortened): a house contains a nuclear family; only a nuclear family occupies a house (an understanding seen even today in the requirements of blood-relatedness of cohabitants still extant in the ordinances of many a modern American suburb). Further, in keeping with the movement of modernity, even the household is mobile, a territory only affiliated with place in the abstract, a characteristic that the nuclear family may share with some forms of extended linearity (although operating still in different temporalities: e.g., pastoral nomads), but which moves in a spatiality alien to systems of locality. Thus, even as co-habitation stands in for linearity, household—being far more portable than the typical village—fills the space of locality.

Ferguson rightly challenges the tradition-as-pathology model, arguing that “the household should be understood not as a given natural unit of human society” but that “all domestic groupings—nuclear or non-nuclear, sexually exclusive or plural, stable or unstable” operate as, in the words of Moore and Vaughn, “a nexus of overlapping interests and activities whose (sometimes very temporary) coherence is itself an achievement and not something pregiven”. My contention here is that while no given “nexus of overlapping interests and activities” is a pregiven, existential encounters of such nexus as phenomena of aggregate other are an a priori condition of experience. Where modern and purportedly “pre-modern” experience differs is not in the forms of overlapping available to them, but rather in the subtle forms of aggregate other discernible from the vantage of accelerated modernity as compared to other temporal modalities.

In other words, the nuclear family, while accurately characterized by Ferguson as an “image of a single stable form”, does not operate merely as “an imaginary norm” or a “fiction”, both attributing to the nuclear family a purely conceptual status, without reference to the experiential context of encounter amidst which such aggregate others are perceived. That the ontological categories perceptible from accelerated modernity do obscure certain features of the political, “of gender and generation”, is not in doubt. To implicate such obscurity to an obfuscation worked by said “image” or else “master narratives”, however, redoubles the self-same mode of phenomenological illusion (as distinct, ontologically, from fiction) the Ferguson would “take apart” (and Wolf likewise would declaim were he to recognize it as a “named thing”), by encountering agency not of nuclear family as encountered, but of image thereof as conceptualized.

This is Ferguson's teleological brier patch, through encounter of the “image” as actor, which having “worked to inhibit” and “helped to depoliticize” stands implicated as purposefully oriented to these tasks, such that only a “taking apart” can free us of its nefarious influence. I would submit, instead, that “reimaging the domestic” is not an endeavor of dispelling imaginary norms, but rather of shifting temporalities, such that other phenomenologically “single stable forms” are more readily apparent.