A Venn Diagram of My Research

Ah, patriarchy in language.

On my OkCupid home page today, a profile edit that lists among the things this profile author enjoys "being wined and dined".  

Because enjoying an alcoholic beverage (for those who engage in such intake) and consuming a late day meal is something that is done to a person.  The deconstructionist in me is having a field day, but I want to hear what others have to say.  Case of self-objectification?  Unexamined adoption of passivity?

Ars Ethica: Political Quadrants and Ethics of Superiority

    There is an old joke among research psychologists, that the discipline suffers from "physics envy".  Alluding to a pronouncement of Freudian analysis, and thereby casting research psychologists in the position of emasculation, the assessment is marshaled to account for the recourse research psychologists often make to numbers to bolster the validity of their claim to psychology as a "science" on par with the "hard" sciences (the "hard" and "soft" distinction between disciplines already conveying a gendered discursive assessment that the "physics envy" quip exploits).  Reading Rabinow and Bennett's Ars Synthetica, I found myself wondering if we were not here presented with a case of computer science envy, or more specifically, invoking the connection with MIT, artificial intelligence envy.  Indeed, the extensive formulaic tables given in this text are reminiscent of the knowledge structures conceived of by A.I. researchers intent on representing (and implementing) in computer code the representation of real world knowledge in human minds.  As with such A.I. research, which seeks to represent a Cartesian mind apart from a body, and which has proven less successful than building "artificial life" from basic embodied (albeit robotic and/or virtual) components (perhaps an inspiration for the MIT "parts" initiative), one is left to wonder just what all this abstraction accomplishes or can accomplish.

    Yet, just when all hope of Rabinow and Bennett's project uncovering anything interesting is nearly lost, they enter into a trial run of their "diagnostic".  Here we are presented with three primary figures in relation to embryonic stem cell research:  embryo defense, human protection, and future abundance.  The description and analysis of each of the three would seem to map (using Mary Douglas's and Paul Rubin's respective nomenclatures as projective reference points) to the Hierarchist/Efficiency, Egalitarian/Insurance, Individualist/Efficient-Flattening quadrants of ideocosmological phase-space.  Further, insofar as the authors' invocation of a conception of in vitro stem cell remediation as an expression of "capacities [that] do not violate living systems" appears to represent their own views, and not necessarily the figure of future abundance, we would have the fourth, Fatalist/Insured-Flattening quadrant.  (Interestingly, where the other three quadrants are well represented in anthropological encounter, and in other analyses--of data from Pew Center for the People and the Press--appear each to account evenly for a third of U.S. voters, this last quadrant is dismissed by Douglas as a potential not realized in actual cultures, and likewise shows in said data analyses as a largely unpopulated portion of the map.)  The figural analysis offers additional material, however, as the discussions of variant figures reveals how political-discursive strategies aligned in their conclusions may nonetheless emerge of or straddle neighboring quadrants.  The figural variation of "duty to heal" from Jewish tradition, for instance, while aligned with a future abundance figure, would seem to be situated more in the Egalitarian/Insurance than the Individualist/Efficient-Flattening quadrant.  This speaks to the importance of identifying underlying heuristics determinative of an ideocosmological topology, as different ecologically rational needs/drives often articulate through strategies that appear, at the level of ontology, superficially similar.

    This all said, it is unclear how much the diagnostic tables actually contributed to the uncovering of these figural variations, or if the same variants might have been revealed without recourse to such diagrammatic abstractions.  Nonetheless, I found myself eagerly plunging into the text further, hoping to find the same figural analysis applied within the space of synthetic biology, only to be disappointed when none appeared.

    Instead, we are treated to repeated complaints about the unwillingness of life scientists to "collaborate" with the authors' project.  The authors' learned the language and the science of the life scientists, but lament that the life scientists are uninterested in doing the same.  Implicit here is an appeal to mutuality and equity, reminiscent, if I may be a bit judgmental, of playground politics:  having made an effort on their part, they are expecting to be met halfway by the other children--despite the fact that the other children never asked to play.  Here, one wants to take the authors aside and suggest, drawing on the most basic insights of nonviolent communication, that in a situation where one does not like the strategies being actualized by another party, it is perhaps not the most effective approach to demand of that party that they use your preferred strategies instead, simply because you would have them do so.  Where the authors do approach an understanding of the feelings and needs that might contribute to the attachment, on the part of life scientists, to certain strategies (as investment in career paths, for instance), there seems to be no willingness to go deeper, let alone to hold and honor the needs apparent in those commitments as real and valid for those life scientists.  (Although the discussion of trust and confidence, in the context of familiarity, is promising, it seems isolated in a text otherwise inattentive to such needs.)  Instead, we get the sense that Rabinow and Bennett would prefer that life scientists just transcend such petty concerns as an economically and intellectually fulfilling life-path out of a recognition of the overriding importance of conformance to strategies of "ethics" deemed essential to a 21st century science for all concerned.  Somehow, an ethics that relegates the needs of others to "blockages" hardly seems to be one conducive to "flourishing".

Epilogue: A Vigorous Standard

    I end this second semester, and the last of course of our core curriculum with a petulant refrain:  I am so done with ethnography.  It is not that I do not enjoy reading ethnography as literature, but rather that my anthropology, my study of the human, is not one in which ethnography features as a prominent technology, or at least, not one in which ethnography as it is currently conceived so appears.  My critique of ethnography is something I am still working out, but it boils down to the productive temporality of ethnography, insofar as the hermeneutic work of the ethnographer is generative of histories, of stories.  This narrative productivity is a failing that redoubles upon itself in the "present" or the "contemporary" mode, for where, to invoke Ricoeur, the traditional historian may configure an interpretation of a prefigured archive to produce a refigured experience in a reader, the anthropologist treads the dangerous terrain of configuring the archive in media res, reversing the position of present and past, such that stories are not excavated so much as elicited, the archival material following on the heels of the archivist.  

    Further, the product of ethnographic work, the story, however far any particular ethnographic text may stray from classical narrative forms, obscures the embodied experience of the populations studied behind the genre embodiment of the storyteller.  The hermeneutic tradition of thick description, with its attention to the prefiguring situatedness of actors in a story, unfortunately, fails to account for the very real effects of our situatedness within a genre, both the configuring situatedness of the author and the refiguring situatedness of the reader.  Research conducted by Jerome Bruner and Carol Feldman at NYU, when I was a research assistant in their laboratory as an undergraduate, and subsequent work by others, including linguist George Lakoff, call into question the Geertzian paradigm.  When a mere variation in introductory label, "spy story" or "travelogue", for instance, can significantly transform not only the interpretation of events in a story, but produce markedly different recall of the sorts of details upon which an interpretation would presumably be based--including the recall of details entirely absent from the story, yet consistent with the label--ethnography is placed in the unenviable position of unanchored pliability.  In contrast with commonly held standards of "rigor", the issue here is not that ethnography lacks rigidity, but that the yielding plasticity of the ethnographic form lacks the firmness, the vigor, of secure fixity at a point of soundable depth.  Or, to use a different metaphor, pliability is at best complaisance, absent secured rootedness in firm ground (from which a range of flexion takes shape).  This standard of vigor affords a suppleness unattainable within a regime of rigor.

    It was from a more nascent form of this critique that I entered Sites of Contention in Contemporary Ethnography, and embarked upon the first of our readings, No Aging in India.  My response to that text might be summarized as an appeal for just such an anchoring, in the face of a genre-embodied account that was troubling not merely as an example of hermeneutic narrativity, but also on the basis of the neo-colonialist genre position adopted by the author, as tourist in a foreign land of the aged, told from the geography of a visitor to a historically colonized people.  My request was and is a simple one, root such an inquiry in the conditions by which age is encountered, as such.  Begin with the singular human encounter, and then perhaps particular human experiences might be articulated from that anchor point.  Tsing's Friction, the next text on our reading list, was all the more frustrating, so shrill was the superficial squealing about "the global" (demonstrating a conflation of scale and scope deserving a discussion well beyond the remit of this essay) that even an otherwise potentially deep insight, that of friction, dangles precariously from dirigible mooring lines trailing in a hyperbolic wind.

    With Farmer (Pathologies of Power) and Holmes (Integral Europe), however, a potential redemption of ethnography appears.  These two authors, in their own ways, map out ideological territories (for Farmer: neoliberalism vs. liberation theology; for Holmes: social modernism, Catholic social doctrine, neoliberal fast-capitalism, and right-wing integralism) that may provide cross-cultural verification of a vigorous theory of ideocosmological plasticity rooted in pliantly entwined fairness heuristics, deeply anchored in singular human needs. Unlike Tsing's freely traveling universals, here we make claim not for concepts that do work, but the conditions of fixity by which such work is articulated.  Here, it is not the temporality of situated narrative, but the situatedness of actors in conflict within the narrative, that tills the soil in which testable hypotheses may take root.  Would a post-Geertzian deep description of strategies of structural violence and liberation theological activism identify constellations of shared flattening fairness heuristics coupled with disparate heuristics of efficiency and insurance?  Can a nonviolent inquiry uncover the needs that commonly anchor situated ideologies ranging from Catholic social doctrine, to civil libertarianism, to Ghandian solidaritism, to Douglas's Fatalism?  Can Farmer's and Holmes's respective territorial maps be shown as cartographic projections of the same space as the Nolan chart, the Tripartisan Triangle, the New Political Compass, and the vulgar left-right spectrum?  Are the culturally articulated politics of international market interventions and nationalist resistance to post-national regimes of governance traceable to common anchors in the ground of mediated sociality by which animals cohere in stable groups?

    Unfortunately, after these promising (if troubling in other respects) texts, we find ourselves back in the realm of traveling universals, although without the same reflexivity as Tsing offers, as Das (Life and Words) imports a universal concept of "the state" no less pernicious than "the global".  Mired in the same conflation of scale and scope that troubles Tsing's work, Das provides a rigidly unanchored account of bodies animated as if by magic, a necromatic conjuring of marionette actors, strings pulled by apparatus of rumored "state" agency.  That in the course of this hand waiving, Das reproduces a post-Lockean misreading of Hobbes (who arguably offers a exemplary vigorous ontology of relation unrecognized in today's traffic of traveling universals), only compounds, upon an unmoored traveling universal, a genre embodiment in which gendered bodies are flourished in a slight of hand of theoretical misdirection. Clothing an essentialist hauntology (with all the convolutions of temporality Derrida sought to evoke with this term) in a feminist critique (let alone a critique that poorly represents feminism, so weakly anchored is it in the text that is its object), Das casts an illusion neither fixed nor pliant. 

    We do get another glimpse of ideological territories, with Rabinow and Bennett (Ars Synthetica), as figures of embryo defense, human protection, future abundance, and a fourth potential "non-violative capacities" figure, are offered up in a test run of a diagnostic that would seem at once unnecessarily abstract and ultimately underutilized (there being no similarly developed figural analysis of the primary subject of the text, synthetic biology).  Yet, insofar as it might have served to uncover figural variations, where the same discursive conclusions appear to be reached from different heuristic constellations, it might hold some promise worthy of further investigation (as does, for that matter, the resonances of "vigorous assurance" to a standard of vigour as anchored pliability).  Fortun (Promising Genomics) and Helmreich (Alien Ocean), meanwhile, thankfully rescue us from the epistemology of scale, offering new ways of articulating the indeterminate (χ) and of conceiving differently scoped bodies that operate across political, sovereign, somatic, and spatial territories.  Dealing not in universals (traveling or any other sort) so much as relationalities, Fortun and Helmreich prepare us for Langlitz's chapter on contextual mediation, as read through Latour, Gomart, and Wallace.  Indeed, it is with relationalities, both orthogonal relations and topological relations, that we find ourselves back at a critique of ethnography, both in its narrative involution of the temporal relations between pre-, con-, and re-figuration, and the second-order to first-order relation of different genre embodiments of interpreter and interpreted.  It is in just such circumstances that a vigorous anchoring, of methods that favor suppleness over rigidity, emerges as the defining characteristic of any meaningful study of the human.

Discussion about a Culturapology Historicized

    As I have noted elsewhere, my anthropology, my study of the human, asks questions about how a particular species is equipped to encounter singular social and political worlds.  Employing an existential-historical-libidinal materialism, these questions can be said to interrogate the historical as an object, without taking up the historical as a site.  Evolutionary trajectories of a species may be bounded in time, and may be enacted across temporalities, but any narrative accounting which may gloss (a term making explicit the double articulation inherent to a narratological trace) such rhizomic vectors are, in a Korzybskian sense (as contrasted with the Deleuzean), maps, not territories.  Thus, "the contemporary", from a position of applied evolutionary phenomenology, appears as a property attributed to particular encounters with social and political worlds, in the sense of Aristotle's conception of the past and the future as brought by the human to an encounter with movement in a physical world, for which theoretical work would offer explanatory tools (i.e., as to the material transmission of said attribution, and as to its situatedness within a topological space of possible attribution), but not a site to be entered into as a position of observation.  

    

    Thus, a Design for an Anthropology of the Contemporary largely leaves this reader unengaged, its discussants chewing over problems that simply do not resonate, so focused are they on a "peculiar burden" apparent from a stakeholder appeal for the continuity of a discipline conceived of, not so much as a study of the human, but rather as a study of the epistemological and behavioral properties of particular human-nonhuman assemblages, which we might term ethne (so as to differentiate the assemblage from its property set, culture, or its intra-relational set, society).  What we might call culturapology, or even colerepology, with its methodological attachment to ethnography, narratives derived from situated encounters in relation to particular ethne, is at best epiphenomenology in relation to a study of the human that interrogates the conditions of possibility for ethne configurations, as such, let alone the properties thereof.  Indeed, even the turn to questions of identity, for our discussants, devolves upon particularity of cultural properties.  

    The lack, even explicit disparaging, of theory, as compared to "concepts", simply does not offer much of interest.  The only point at which the discussion between Rabinow, Marcus, et al., would seem to provide purchase for an applied evolutionary phenomenology is in a brief consideration of a "triad", consisting of the emergent, and citing to Raymond Williams, the residual and the dominant.  It is perhaps no small coincidence that this appears in the passage on temporalities within the context of timing.  For it is upon the scaffolding of the emergent vis a vis the residual, whereby spandrels of evolution are occupied in the very occupation by a species of the niches opened upon by those spandrels, that an applied evolutionary phenomenology operates.  This double movement conditions ethne, and thereby dominant particular elements of the sets culture and society, and thereupon ethnographic accounts derived from such particulars, including those of any particular contemporary.  The historical (and too the prehistorical), in this conception, appears of the pendular ticking through Serresian intransitive spaces, the temporalities of particular ethne tracing singularly mutually inclusive scopes.  It is this very ahistoricity as conditioning history, this contemporaneous reciprocal movement of which all stories are determined, that is taken as a site of an applied evolutionary phenomenology.

    That said, there is little in these dialogues to suggest that an anthropology, a study of the human, that does not adhere to the concepts of contemporary culturapology would have any place in the design studio proposed.  One that finds the emergent and the residual not merely in culture, but as conditioning the possibilities of culture, of which the dominant appears as a determination of such conditioned possibilities, even less so.

Book Imagined: AEP in Abstract

Back of the Book Jacket:

    What does a dog's bark have in common with a human laugh, or both have to do with the ultrasonic emissions of a bat?  Dogs and monkeys, crows and cows, white tail deer and cellular automata, gods and corporations, Toxoplasma gondii and a cat named Searle:  just some of the cast of entities that accompany the reader on this nonlinear journey through the evolution of the queerest of psychologies, that attributed to an organism embodied through the very ambiguity of its body.  This foundational text in applied evolutionary phenomenology will have consequences not only for humanist philosophy, but for the very ways we communicate with our domestic animals, our love interests, our political opponents, and our own reflection in the mirror. 

Book Proposal:

    Beginning from a historical praxiography uncovering a Leviathan populated by human-nonhuman assemblages and self-reflexive identities, tracing the conditions of nature that organize the mechanisms of society, we explore the uncanny spaces opened up through mimetic extension and surplus sociality.  Leaving behind mushroom men to visit the Middle East some 15,000 years ago, we imagine the early interactions of a pack of small wolves and a band of extroverted humans as a cybernetic symbiosis of food and sentry flows are augmented by a playful loosening of agency perception.  This move from codependence to codomestication, however, will have occurred following a transformation of human signaling from reflexive to reflective, from ecological to technological, which we shall explore with the help of white tail deer and common corvids, modern dogs and ancient Homo habilis.  A linguistic revolution, it will be argued, where instrumental signaling with tools coincides with instrumentalization of communication as tool, broadened the scope of human language beyond sociality, even as the scope of sociality was expanding beyond both the human and the living.  It was from this space, formed at the conjuncture of multicast social grooming and universal agency perception, that the first human-nonhuman hybrid societies would emerge.

    Stepping back into our theoretical present, we explore an architecture of spandrels, and the spaces cleared by these necessary byproducts of life.  Exploring the latest studies in emotion psychology and embodied philosophy, we ask how what we perceive may be conditioned by our repertoire of available responses.  We look to the architecture of social groups, to consider how spandrels of shared space come to be occupied by percepts of social affect, and how these coorganized spaces operate as public goods conferring fitness upon groups that condition genetic advantages to individuals and kin.  Prepared with this theoretical framework, we examine the mediation of contemporary, even virtual, human courtship display through lek formation, as a demonstration of evolved capacities that operate independently of procreative potential, as they operate indiscriminately across gender and gender preference.  

    With this approach of queer evolutionary psychology, we return to our now rapidly evolving Mesolithic assemblages, as the uncanny confluence of tool language and object sociality opens upon yet more spandrels, as, from agriculture to city-states, a neurophysiological ceiling on network capacity that bound primate social relationships having been obviated by inter- and non-specific meshwork identities, agents are increasingly encountered as organs without bodies, enacted in surplus spaces of mimetic prosthesis.  Yet even with the most "post"-modern of such augmentations, these configurations and constellations nonetheless trace historical-libidinal material existence, affective-perceptive flows that, however refracted, still originate with embodied organisms.  Picking up again with our spandrelist model of group selection, we examine the cosmological spaces opened onto by pre-Mesolithic affective-perceptive group processes, as scaffolds for ideological niches occupied within the environment of today's Leviathan, and consider the possibilities of nonviolent communication as a political strategy to turn the instrument of language toward the rearticulation of sociality with even the most nonhuman of agents: ourselves.

Media Orthogonal: Science and Religion, Experiment and Experience

    Langlitz, in an article/chapter concerning the "Contextual Mediation of Drug Effects" in pharmacological research, cites to observations by Anthony Wallace, in the 1950s, that the same hallucinogenic substance was observed to produce markedly different effects in population of whites under laboratory conditions as compared to native peoples in religious ceremonies.  Where Wallace attributes these effects to culture, which he argues needs to be taken into account as an independent variable in scientific experiments, Langlitz hints at another dimension, in providing an example of a trial run where two researchers, both presumptively of the same "culture", insofar as that term might be usefully used without reification, nonetheless experience wildly different reactions to the same test substance, in part, we are given to believe, as a function of their social (rather than "cultural") relationship to the substance, the experiment, their institutional setting, and to one another.  More on this in a moment.

    The characterization of this as a dimensional difference is important here, as like Latour's characterization of the religion and science as not being commensurable nor incommensurable, there being "no point of contact between the two, no more than nightingales and frogs have to enter into any sort of direct ecological competition", I would suggest that any idea of "culture" as interacting with, of being in any way commensurable or incommensurable with, the variables of scientific experiment is likewise, again in Latour's words, a "category mistake".   That said, unlike a nightingale or a frog, we cannot say that there is "no point of contact" between experimental variables and cultural conditions.  The very challenge of contextually mediated pharmacological effects is that cultural conditions and experimental variables make contact at every point.  When the very architecture of the space in which the experiment is conducted is a factor in the dependent experiential variables--the decorating of the walls in the lab by our two experimenters mirroring the introduction of wire mesh into rat cages in the experiments described by Gomart in his discussion of methadone substitution treatments for heroin addiction--makes evident that there is no point at which culture does not intersect with experiment.  This state of neither commensurable nor incommensurable is thus best described as orthogonal.  It is not simply the lack of opposition between nightingale and frog, but the lack of opposition between up and left.  Indeed, going back to Latour's discussion of icons in religion, and referencing Wallace's discussion of the architecture of religion, it is perhaps not too much of a stretch to claim that religion and science two, rather than being Gould's non-overlapping magisteria, the most uninteresting of Venn diagrams, religion and science hold an orthogonal relation congruent to that of culture and experiment, making contact at every point, without having to "enter into any sort of direct ecological competition".

    Let us, however, come back to the example of two experimenters subjecting their experimental setup to a trial run, acting themselves as test subjects.  If we hold that culture and experiment are in orthogonal relation, that they intersect at all points, what are we to make of the very different reactions of the two experimenters in the position of experimental subject?  If both are permeated by the same cultural and experimental axes, what is different?  Here, Gomart provides insight, when he describes the interaction between clinic, professionals, patients, methadone, and the jointly enacted "performance" of substitution treatment.  Drawing on Foucault's conception of capillary power, we find a mode of control, given and received, prepared for and depended upon, a bidirectional flow of control, in every way reminiscent of the flow invoked by Latour in his attempt not to speak about religion, but to speak religiously, to perform religion, just as one performs an experiment, in some other dimension.  In the story related by Langlitz, it is the experimenter who "wanted to keep everything under control", yet "was losing control", who "got all worked up" and thereby had deeply troubling hallucinations during the course of the experiment.

    Here, we are not talking about culture, nor experiment, but relation.  The experimenter in his dual role of experimental subject and experimental lead "tried to stay in charge supervising how Anna was looking after me", all the while trying to act both as observer of the experimental setup of which he was the subject.  These relationships play upon the field of which culture and experiment are dimensions, but are not dimensional themselves.  Rather, these relationships, the possibilities for flow, like the agape relationships explored by Latour in mundane love language, (de/in)form the topological geometry of the points at which culture and experiment orthogonally intersect.  Just as with love language, there is a movement, close or distant, the dimensions warping as points play in relationship.

    What then, of Langlitz's hope that "second-order observation should inspire the invention of new practices of first-order observation"?  If the first-order observer must always contend with a shifting field of orthogonal dimensions, where the weft of the scientific method of the experiment and the weave of culture (including religion) of the self-reporting subject describe a non-reproducible fabric of experience, how then can any practice relate meaningfully to these dimensions?  Experimental controls fail insofar as they fail to control culture.  Geertzian thick description meanwhile strand us in second-order observations, an unwefted weave of how out of relation to what.  Langlitz places methods "based on reductionism" in antagonism with "the complexity of life itself", yet perhaps the issue is not reduction, so much as reduction along a single dimension in ignorance of orthogonal relations.  I would suggest that the practice Langlitz seeks might be found by turning an orthogonal corner, to examine what elements of substantive experience might be found configured to play coincidently with the configuration of chemical elements that perform a pharmaceutical substance.

Cybernetic Difference

    In a discussion of Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, it has been argued that the author narrates the subsumption of difference by the war machine.  Whatever else Kittler may be doing in his text, I would suggest that he cannot successfully demonstrate the eliding of difference by technology, as a brief consideration of early microcomputer architectures can elucidate.

    Let us consider the machine instruction sets of two early personal computers, both of which I had the opportunity to become quite acquainted with as a child.  The first, we might note, was designed with a decidedly spare command set, emulating a Turing machine without a marked degree of redundancy. We find, for instance, an operator that might be translated as "if the accumulator contains zero, jump to the address of my operand".  In this particular architecture, the complementary operator for not equal to zero is absent.  

    This places the operator subsequent to the conditional operation in a position of privilege with respect to the distal operator targeted by the same conditional, a privilege necessitated by the inarticulability of the condition of the subsequent.  Unable to speak "not equal to zero", the processor must seek the operator of that unspeakable condition immediately proximate, where the distal operator reached by the spoken conditional may be positioned anywhere--except in the position of the subsequent.

    In this privilege, difference is evident.  The subsequent operator does not merely perform difference, is occupies difference, determines its own position through an uncanny difference from that which may be spoken.

    Such architectures did not last long, however.  We find in latter computers a much denser command set.  Not simply an "equal to zero" conditional but also its complement, "not equal to zero".  With this, the privileged position of the subsequent is vacated, as the position of subsequent and distal may be arbitrarily interchanged through an inversion of the conditional with its complement.  

    Yet in this evacuation of privilege, difference is not eliminated, but relocated.  Where before the inarticulable possessed a position determinative of the structure of the program, now structure hinges on, is articulated by, the arbitrary occupancy of the conditional position.  The difference between conditional and its complement is the difference between the performance of functionally isomorphic but structurally distinct programs.

    Here, we move from the realm of what has been called "spaghetti code" to the regime of subroutine.  The structure of programs no longer dictated by the poetics of inarticulability, the linear sequence of code may be strategically segmented and segregated, just as the hierarchical strata of corps are segmented and segregated in a modern military structure.  And just as with war machine subdivisions, for war machine subroutines difference in position is determinative:  as any German general speaking "eastern" or "westward" would know.

    In the circuit, position makes all the difference.

Abstract Imaginary: Potential Projects for an AEP

Abstract 1: 

Leviathan Multiple: Ontology in Social Contract Theory

    Two central concerns of applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP") are the excorporation of an experiential body through emgroupment, and the encounter of non-cospecific social entities as enabled by a tolerance for ambiguity in agency perception.  Where the former approaches identity as a process of reterritorialization of sedimented agentic singularities onto a body map, the latter uncovers the capacity for uncanny percepts emergent of deterritorialized deployment of sociality heuristics among coevolved codomesticates.  Hobbes, in the ontological girding of his Leviathan, anticipates an AEP both of excorporate identity, articulated through the actor-author structure, and uncanny encounters with a non-cospecific, multitudinous other.  Unfortunately, these insights are obscured in contemporary readings which conflate a "Mortall God", multitude in mediated relation to itself, with the actor upon which this identity relation hinges, nominally "sovereign", which unmoored of this fundamental structure, is reified as a heliophallic power over.  This work of historical praxiography begins an excavation of the corpuscular objects by which Leviathan was enacted within the mechanistic philosophy of its day, and the very different objects enacted as Leviathan today.  A reading that disentangles a "condition of nature" from post-Boylesian "states of nature" (ascendant in subsequent social theory) presents Leviathan as a foundational text of AEP.

Abstract 2:  

Just So Queer:  Group Selection for Human Courtship Mediation

    

    Research conceived of as evolutionary psychology tends towards a caricature of evolutionary theory as reducible to adaptations within a species as linear correlates to problems of biological reproduction and survival encountered by ancestral individuals.  Seeking legitimacy by grounding its hypotheses and results in implicit narratives of genetic fitness, such research more often than not founders on its own production of quasi-teleological explanations for patriarchal, heteronormative social behaviors witnessed among some human populations.  Adopting instead a spandrelist approach to uncover common phenotypes as necessary byproducts of scaffold architectures of sociality, an applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP") examines predictions of group selection theory with regards to the reproduction of public goods upon which genetic transmission of particular individuals is contingent but not determinative.  Drawing upon micro-political feminist theory and queer theory critiques of identity consolidation, this research situates leks, and specifically, human leks, as emergent of natural selection upon social groups, such that the mechanisms of lek formation and courtship mediation therein can be shown to operate in human social groups irrespective of the sexed bodies or gender identities of which such leks may be constituted.  Potential paths of further application of group selection and feminist-queer theories within AEP going forward are outlined.

Abstract 3:  

Deep Description:  Approaching an Empathetic Practice of Ethnography

    A methodology of thick description, as taken up within anthropology, rests on two corollary epistemological commitments:  (i) that inherent in any observed act is a meaning that can only be determined through interpretation within its cultural context; and (ii) that given enough cultural contextual description, a rational observer can accurately arrive at the singular meaning of said observed act.  Within an applied evolutionary phenomenology ("AEP"), by contrast, meanings are understood not to inhere in acts, but rather in the diagnoses, or analyses, that attach to such acts as objects enacted by situated observers.  Acts, here, as the constituting elements of practices, are not possessed of meaning given by context, but rather are appropriated by an interpretation (also, notably, an act) according to which meaning is attributed.  Drawing on the practice of nonviolent communication, an AEP seeks not to describe the particularity of context en route to a hermeneutics of specific meaning, but rather to hypothesize singularities of affect pointing to activations of general needs, and then to seek falsification (and/or elaboration) of those hypotheses through joint inquiry with informants.  Such a "deep description" is explored as an ethnographic method for tracing common conditions of human acts, including interpretive acts.

Contract and the State: a Violent Recourse to Magic

    Once again, we encounter a text that makes its argument through a misreading of Hobbes.  Here, it is Das's Life and Words, in which the author cites to an analysis by Severance.  The argument given, which Das invokes as explanatory of both abduction and rape occurring during Partition and the national government efforts of "recovery" following Partition, is that a hierarchical relationship between the father and the family mirrors a hierarchical relationship of the sovereign to subjects, such that "fatherly authority [is] based on consent", "within the framework of the seventeenth-century doctrine that women are unfit for civil business and must be represented (or concluded) by their husbands".  Severance is quoted here as stating "the members of each individual family 'consent' not to the sovereign's but to the father's absolute rule; they are not parties to the 'contract' that brings the commonwealth into existence."  The flaws in this argument are multiple.  First, Hobbes goes to great pains to establish an actor-author structure whereby participation in contract may extend to entities through representatives.  This structure is articulated as affording three ontological positions:  (i) a natural person, with authority to contract, on whose behalf a representative acts; (ii) an artificial person or person without reason, whether madman, child, animal, idol, building, or other fiction, without authority of its own, represented by an actor on the authority of the commonwealth; and (iii) either the Immortal God, with whom a natural person may enter into contract only indirectly, through His representative, on the authority of God, or a multitude, which likewise may not enter into contract directly, but only through a representative, acting on the authority of each member of said multitude.  

    With respect to Severance's argument, drawn on by Das, we are presented with a multitude, or in the very least, a plurality:  namely, the family.  Now, as the argument here is one of gender, we must consider the members of this body:  some number of men, women, and children.  Implicitly, there is only one man here:  if there were more, then we would have a condition in which one man consents to representation by another man, nominally father, which being entirely in keeping with Hobbes's actor-author structure would serve only to distract from Severance's claims.  Therefore, we proceed from a model of family in which there is only one man.  The issue of the children of this multitude is easily addressed through reference to Hobbes's own ontology:  a child lacks authority to contract directly, and thus is only representable in contract by an actor upon the authority of the commonwealth.  Thus, there is no question of "consent" where children are concerned.  Thus represented on authority of the state, however, children participate in contract as would any other artificial person.  Accordingly, as under Hobbes's laws of nature, contract is only legitimately enforceable within commonwealth, children, through their representatives, necessarily participate in the contract of commonwealth, despite lacking the authority to contract directly as natural persons, as they could not possibly be represented in contract except through their participation in commonwealth.  Now, Severance would claim that women are likewise, by doctrine, unable to contract directly, and thus must be represented.  (How many women?  How nuclear is Severances's family, one wonders?)  In this case, either women are of the same category as children, animals, madmen, and fictions, and may be represented only on the authority of commonwealth, or else they are of the same category of the Immortal God and a multitude, having authority but nonetheless only participating as parties in contract by mediation of the actor-author structure.  If Severance's assertion is in fact accurate, that women "consent" to their representation, said representative being named "father", then Hobbes's ontology would place women not in the same position as children, but rather in the  position of God and multitude!  For children, animals, madmen, and fictions can not consent (with or without scare quotes), but God and multitude can.  Setting aside the radicalism of this result, we can see that Severance's conclusion that women were not party to commonwealth fails.  If Hobbes would say that women lack authority, which Severance would seem to indicate he does not, then they participate in commonwealth through their commonwealth authorized representatives.  If, however, women have authority, can consent to their representation, then they participate in commonwealth through their representatives acting on their authority.

    Why is this important in the context of Das?  Well, first, because Das founds some of the argument of Life and Words on a patriarchal model of national masculinity evident at the time of Partition.  That such a gendered expression of nationalism was at play is not in question, but grounding an explanation of the phenomena of the violence of both Partition and state "recovery" campaigns in India on a second-hand misreading of a European theorist serves only to distract from, and ultimately runs the risk of undermining, that explanation.  Second, and perhaps more importantly, such ill-informed invocations of Hobbes signals a reified conception of "state" that runs through Das's text, but becomes most explicit in her ninth chapter.  Here, in a self-parody of anthropology that evokes Horace Miner's Nacirema, Das resorts to claims of the "magical" in her discussion of the illegibility of "the state" as an apparently holistic entity.   Somehow, the national state of India, the city of Delhi, and the territory of a single police station, are collapsed with various bureaucracies, self-interested functionaries, and political actors, to a single index of "the state".  Setting aside the absurdity of making the "founding violence" of India somehow contiguous with the civil authorities of a city that existed well before even the British Raj (unless we would say that there was no Delhi, with its bureaucrats and police officials, before it was founded in the violence of Partition), Das produces "the state" as an externally situated phantom force permeating life, yet not life itself.  The actions of a police official engaged in vigilante terror and of low-level civil servants trying to interpret undocumented directives are merged, by Das, into a single stream of action, such that the affective relationships individual actors have with each of these entities is mystified and obfuscated.  Having thus reduced everything to "the state", Das has no recourse but to appeal to "magic" as explanation.

     This is all the more unfortunate, in the case of this text, as Das thus performs the very sort of violence that the work was meant to uncover.  Here, it is not "the state" but the deployment of "the state" as conceptual frame, that "withholds recognition from the other, not simply on grounds that she is not part of one's own community but that she is not part of life itself".  Recourse to "the state" as explanatory language amounts to "denial of accepting the separateness of the other as a flesh and blood creature".  "The state" is not a flesh and blood creature for Das, but rather a spirit inhabiting rumor, having no body of its own, but speaking through the voices of those it possesses.  Hence the recourse to magic as explanation:  the theorist's fetish of "the state" allows no other explanation.

Monopoly Violence not Sovereignty: Leviathan as the Gift

    Klima, in his otherwise compelling "ethnography as theory", drawing on the social exchange with the dead and of images of death in a Thailand vacillating between democratically elected and military junta regimes, makes a questionable aside, in the midst of his ethnography, by invoking a muddled theory of Leviathan.  He begins by arguing for "two sovereign powers that emerged" from massacre of protesters at the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, which Klima identifies as the public sphere, enacted through free market capitalism, and the monarchy, expressed through a feedback loop between public confidence and international opinion.  Unfortunately, his argument here confuses power of commodity flows and reputation flows (both free exchange between parties, whether or not mediated by representatives) with "sovereign power" (the powers vested to a designated representative upon the authority of a multitude in enactment of contract with itself).  That is, Klima conflates the powers of multitudinous exchange between parties, on the one hand, with the rights of a representative, nominally "sovereign", to exercise powers exchanged by the multitude with itself, on the other.  "This is perhaps the meaning of sovereign power," says Klima.  Or perhaps not.

    Klima would have the power expressed through the action of flowing commodities (the market of the charnel grounds) and the action of the flow of trust (the reputation of the king) be "a power exceeding" the power of the junta, expressly because the power of free flow is not derived from a monopoly of violence (an exclusive freedom to act), whether legitimate or illegitimate.  It is here that Klima first invokes the Leviathan, assigning to it a power "to cow the awed and frightened populace into submission".  Except this is not the power of the Leviathan as Hobbes set it forth.  Quite the contrary:  the power of Leviathan is achieved through the covenant of each natural person in the multitude to give up their freedom to cow others into submission, so as to be free of the risk of being arbitrarily cowed into submission.   In giving up this freedom, a monopoly on cowing to submission, on violence, is established, yes, but this is a freedom to act, not the power of any such act.  The "awe" of Hobbes is a common power, but awe can mean veneration and/or wonder, just as easily as it can mean dread, and very little evidence to suggest that Hobbes uses the term in the latter sense.  Indeed, to venerate one's king, to stand in wonder at images of atrocity, seems more congruent with an expression of awe than facing off defiantly against armed soldiers.

    The junta may exercise a monopoly on violence, but such monopoly is enacted through international conventions of monopolized of violence.  That is, it is not that the Thai multitude are "united by consent" in the artificial person of which the junta is sovereign representative, but rather that the monopolists of violence are united by consent to territories of monopoly.  (At best, we might say that the artificial person of the junta acts on the authority of the multitudes of those true Leviathans that would cede other multitudes to conditions of war so as to preserve their own peace.)  Just because a "state" is recognized, in modern usage, as "sovereign" by other states (sovereign being a nominal designation, always), does not mean that recognition of such entity from without confers upon it the status of Leviathan, by Common-wealth, as conceived by Hobbes, where "sovereign" denotes a representative of a multitude in contract with itself.  The condition of nature described by Hobbes is one in which "the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary."  So long as there is a "known disposition" to fighting, whether such disposition is monopolized by a military junta or freely available to an anarchic multitude, the conditions from which Common-wealth naturally proceeds have not yet produced the conditions of Common-wealth as enacted.

    "The power of a man", begins Hobbes, in his discussion on the subject of power, "is his present means to obtain some future apparent good, and is either original or instrumental".  Here, the flow of commodities, of photos of the dead and bootleg satellite news video of the killing and dying, is at once original and instrumental:  original as an expression of "the faculties of the body" (here, its faculty for death), and original also as "eloquence", instrumental in that, such commodities are "acquired" by the faculties of body and mind and/or "by fortune" of a global infrastructure.  The flow of reputation, meanwhile Hobbes deals with quite succinctly:  "Reputation of power is power; because it draweth with it the adherence of those that need protection."  With international investors and local populations both needing protection, the reputation of the king plays like the valuation of any floating currency:  just as the value (and thus, the power) of the U.S. dollar is buffeted by confidence in its value, which in turn is influenced by confidence in how confident others are about its value, so the same occurs for the Thai monarchy.  

    The powers of Ratchadamnern market and of King Bhumipol, both being "compounded of the powers of most men" (indeed, where "most", here, includes persons natural and artificial not even of the Thai Common-wealth), may exceed the powers of the junta state, even if these are not compoundings "united by consent, in one person, natural or civil":  the market does not appear as a person, and insofar as the King participates in unity, it is a reciprocal unity of confidence, local and foreign, in the King, like confidence in any currency, and not unity in the King per se.  One need not invoke a monopoly of violence (or its lack) to understand why this might be.  The market and the king might both be greater, without being the "greatest of human powers", because the junta was not greatest, was not even "compounded of the powers of most men", whether "as is the power of a Common-wealth...of a faction, or of diverse factions leagued", even if the junta were a compounded of the powers of some faction of men.  The junta had the freedom to let violence flow, but doing so was not, as it turns out, a "means to obtain some future apparent good" for the junta.  Their actions compounded not "the powers of most men, united by consent", but rather compounded powerlessness:  if "riches joined with liberality is power", then control of television broadcasts surely serves to "defend not, but expose men to envy"; if "reputation of love of a man's country, called popularity," is power, then unpopularity surely is the opposite of power; if "reputation of prudence in the conduct of peace and war is power"... need more be prudently said?  

    Instead, Hobbes's conception of power is perhaps the very Maussian gift Klima seeks to uncover (and to contrast with the gift of Derrida):  "For the nature of power is, in this point, like fame, increasing as it proceeds", says Hobbes.  "One can see how if you are really adept at generosity, there is no limit...to the merit that can be made, shared, produced, and returned to you in greater proportions the more you give it away", says Klima.  Indeed, Hobbes's Leviathan is produced through covenant, a giving with only a trust of receipt, but here it is a covenant between a multitude and itself, "so that", in Klima's words, "it is terribly difficult to say who among [the multitude] are the givers and who are the receivers".

    "There is no other kind of economy than gift economy.  There is always a return on any transaction, whether visible or not.  There is nothing outside the gift."  This is not a surrogate or new Leviathan.  Common-wealth, conceived of as a contractual transaction with nothing outside of it (unlike contracts that are valid or invalid by justice of Common-wealth), whereby a "spiritual value" deemed Mortall God is enacted, "is only a clumsy signifier for this kammic effect of generosity so unlike the utilization of things, in the sense that the mode of its production is also its mode of expenditure, and spending is its accumulation."  The freedom to give is not the power of generosity, rather the power of generosity is the gift enacted.  So too the freedom to kill is not sovereign power, rather the power of the sovereign is the covenant of peace.

Fast-bigotry and Obligatory Obscurity: Revisiting Holmes

[The below is a more concise statement on the text originally reviewed in this blog on March 9.]

    While honest bigotry has numerous consequences, proximal and distal, at least the honest bigot is not sanctimonious.  Not so for the hypocritical bigot, whose disdain for honest bigots serves as shibboleth for inclusion in the superior class.  Holmes, in his Integral Europe, is unrepentantly of this latter type, formulaically delivering at once obligatory and offensive aren't-these-people-delusional commentary throughout.  That said, Holmes does at least seek to engage the honest bigots.  

    Unfortunately, Holmes does so through jargon held forth as words of significance, without signification.  Two terms, in particular, go unsatisfactorily explained throughout the text, despite frequent invocation.  The first, subsidiarity, is at best approached obliquely.  The closest we get to a definition is that "Subsidiarity requires..." on p. 52.  Indeed, had this sentence begun "The principle of subsidiarity is...", we'd have had an adequate definition, but instead we are offered a requirement of an undefined.  This, after a disingenuous claim, on p. 30, that "The effort to define subsidiarity discloses not merely a single concept but a range of concepts...".  No such range is ever demarcated, and the only effort required would have been to actually say "this term means", rather than such hand waiving.  The very next sentence tells us that "Subsidiarity denotes a means for...", following upon which we are told something about what it does, but again, not what it is.  "Hammering denotes a means of fixing materials to a surface." would be a comparably unelucidating move.  

    Holmes likewise foists upon us the hyphenated fast-capitalism as a shroud of obscurity, or perhaps vapidity.  Our author notes that his source for the term (Agger) "steadfastly refuses to define" it, by which Holmes apparently gains license to likewise use the word without definition.  A (very sparse) Google search result suggests two usages:  a) the edging out of capital production by financial speculation in instrumental markets; or b) the convergence of capitalism, per se, with globalization, that hobgoblin of liberal thought we last encountered with Tsing.  In the former case, calling it "capitalism", fast, slow, orange, or strange, serves only as epithet.  In the latter, the "fast" prefix (again, how does "fast-" work?) is so much hyperbole.  Given that Holmes attributes immigration to London's Isle of Dogs to the forces of "fast" capitalism, I will hazard to guess that it is in this latter sense that he uses the term, but an explanation, both of what the term means, and why it and not merely "capitalism" or some other vernacular would have been insufficient to express his conceptual intent, is, it would seem, intentionally withheld.  

    Yet hidden in this prejudice and obfuscation is what might be a useful account of political topology.  French social modernism, Catholic social doctrine, neoliberal "fast" capitalism, and right-wing integralism, as developed by Holmes, seem recognizably congruent with political quadrants that recur in other models of ideological space for nominal political types in other sites.  Despite glaring flaws in his work, Holmes has provided a frame for development of deeper cross-cultural comparison of political cosmologies.

Keep Meeting Up!

    Three years ago, inspired by my experiences with Meetup groups in the city, and wanting to share my pedestrian lifestyle with others in and around my then home in central Nassau County, I launched the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group.  At that time, my goal had simply been to see if I could find some friends to experience the diversity of Long Island's communities by foot.  The response was unexpectedly enthusiastic!  

    At that time, very few Meetup groups were available for Long Island residents to come together and share activities in their own neighborhoods, and many groups that were launched previously had struggled to get established and so subsequently closed.   A group that held regularly scheduled events, with an organizer who was willing to start small, and let participation grow as a function of word of mouth, was just what many of you had been waiting for.

    A group dedicated to walking was likewise well received.   The few walking and hiking related organizations located on Long Island having been founded prior to the ubiquity of the Internet--and still operating through snail mail calendars and newspaper listings in order to communicate with current and prospective members--it was the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group that would show up in Google search for walking on Long Island.  Those older organizations, likewise, tended to meet at times or in places that were inconvenient for casual walkers, and here again the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group filled a need.

    Given how much interest was shown in that first group, I created the Nassau County Brunch Friends Meetup Group, which over time co-hosted events with the walking group, and also developed a series of special events and games nights as additional activities beyond those of the walking group.  All the while, members would approach me from time to time suggesting ideas for events.  In response, I asked some of those members to join on as assistant organizers.  They were then able to contribute more directly to organizing and hosting events.  Thank you to Kathleen, Glenn, Joanne, and Helen for all your hard work making the groups so successful! 

    Others suggested ideas that fell outside the scope of my groups as I saw them, and so I encouraged those individuals to consider starting their own Meetup groups, thereby creating even more opportunities for Long Island residents to come together and share their interests and one another's company.  Eventually, based on these conversations, I started my third Meetup group, Making the Most of Meetups, with the intent of creating a community of Nassau/Queens area Meetup organizers, assistant organizers, and those interested in organizing Meetup groups around their favorite activities and passions.

    Among those members who decided to take on the challenges and pleasures of running their own Meetup groups, two have been especially successful in building interesting and energetic Meetup communities.  Lee Zett presently organizes three Meetup groups, B O A R D W A L K, Long Island Dining Out, and (([ FLICK-PICK ])), and Paul Levine organizes the Long Island Gardening & Arboretum Walks Meetup Group, Long Island Meetup and Go, and the Young Entrepreneurs Meetup Group of Long Island.  If you haven't joined any of these groups yet, I heartily encourage you to check them out!

    Both Lee and Paul began their first groups after discussions with me about potential walking events.  Lee thought it would be a great idea to hold walks on the beaches of Long Island, Paul was really excited about the prospect of leading walks at various horticultural preserves on Long Island.  Now, the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group was focused primarily on suburban walking, encouraging members to take advantage of their own neighborhoods as venues for healthy activity, but what Lee and Paul envisioned were amazing ideas just the same.  Indeed, many of the members of my group had asked for just these sorts of events, and I told Lee and Paul as much when they offered the same ideas.  Where these two individuals made the difference was when I asked if they'd each be willing to create their own groups to host just those sorts of events.  First Lee and then Paul, each after careful consideration, decided to go for it!  I, like many others, am glad they did!

    Other active Meetup groups on Long Island that I have been privileged to see launch and develop are The Gamer's Table, the Long Island Compassionate Communication Network, Mo'Joe Mondays:  Games Nights, and Caring for the Caregiver.  However, a lot has happened in the past three years, as well.  When the recession hit, I lost my job, and made the decision that it was time I leave Long Island and return to school.  I am now in my second semester at the New School for Social Research, in New York, pursuing a Master's degree in anthropology, with a focus in applied evolutionary phenomenology.  Additionally, this winter season, I also got married, and am now learning (slowly) to balance the demands of an intensive degree program, an ongoing job hunt, and the responsibilities of being a spouse.  

    As it is, I have not been hosting events through any of my Meetup groups for some time now.  Nor do I expect to be doing so in the future, as, while my partner and I have not yet decided on a place to settle down (she is currently completing a degree in Glasgow, and then has a teaching commitment in Silicon Valley for a year after that; I have at least one more year of my program here in New York), it is unlikely that we will be moving to Long Island.  

    This being the case, when my Meetup organizer subscription came up for renewal this month, I decided not to continue said subscription.  As a result, when my subscription expires in the coming days, the Nassau County Walking Meetup Group, the Nassau County Brunch Friends Meetup Group, and Making the Most of Meetups will each be without an organizer.  My hope is that one or more people will be willing to take up the reigns of leadership and transform each of these groups into something more amazing and inspiring than even I could have imagined.  If this does not happen, and the e-mail alerts sent to members of these groups asking for someone to step up as organizer go without response, then these groups will close forever.  

    All things come to an end, of course, even as new things come into being.  I am thus all the more grateful to all the members, assistant organizers, and new organizers who have gone on to contribute to and build other Meetup groups on Long Island.  There are so many more opportunities on Meetup today for Long Island residents to come together with neighbors and friends than there were only three years ago, and it is due to people like Kathleen, Glenn, Joanne, Helen, Lee, Paul, and all the other Meetup organizers and Meetup members who during my time on Long Island brought their enthusiasm and friendship to Meetup group events.

    Then again, we could still do with many more Meetup groups on Long Island.  What is your passion?  What do you enjoy doing that would be even more fun with a few (or even more than a few) new friends to do it with you?  What sort of events would you organize, if you had the chance to do so?  Because of course, you do have that chance!  There's a new Meetup group waiting to be launched.  Consider organizing it!

Beyond Bigotry: European Political Types

    I've said elsewhere that I am the worst kind of bigot:  I am bigoted against people who are bigoted against bigoted people.  Call me a bigot in the third degree.  As much as I may disagree with the sentiments held by honest bigots, I am nonetheless deeply offended by the sanctimonious attitudes held by hypocritical bigots.  This, of course, makes me all the worse, as being bigoted against hypocritical bigots is still to be bigoted against bigots (even if they are bigots of the second order), but that is a cross I shall have to bear.  Holmes, in his Integral Europe, is unrepentantly a second-degree bigot, and this being the case, his obligatory aren't-these-people-delusional commentary throughout this text is deeply offensive, at least to me.

    That said, Holmes's does at least seek to engage the honest bigots he holds in such disdain.  He deserves credit for this.  Unfortunately, he does so through a cloud of jargoned theory that does more to mystify, in his opening chapters, than to clarify his project.  Two terms, in particular, go unsatisfactorily explained throughout the text, despite frequent invocation.  The first, subsidiarity, from Catholic social teaching, is repeatedly waved about in an oblique manner, yet never explicitly defined.  The closest we get to a definition is that "Subsidiarity requires..." on p. 52, this after a claim, on p. 30, that "The effort to define subsidiarity discloses not merely a single concept but a range of concepts...".  No such range is ever demarcated.  The very next sentence tells us that "Subsidiarity denotes a means of...", following upon which we are told something about what it does, but again, not what it is.  ("Hammering denotes a means of fixing materials to a surface.")  Despite a footnote claiming the contrary, Holmes never marks an actual definition of subsidiarity, preferring instead to tell us repeatedly of its centrality to Catholic social theory.  For a theme so central to the author's argument, it does not bode well that one must appeal to Wikipedia to get a clue what he's going on about.

    His use of the term fast-capitalism is likewise shrouded in obscurity, or perhaps vapidity.  Here, however, even an extensive Google search did little to clarify what the term means, as the resources using it all seem to assume its definition (much like Holmes does).  As near as I can make out, fast-capitalism (since when was "fast" a prefix?) refers either to:  a) the edging out of capital production by financial speculation in instrumental markets (as evidenced by share of GDP); or b) the convergence of capitalism, per se, with globalization, that hobgoblin of liberal thought we last encountered with Tsing.  In the former case, calling it "capitalism", fast, slow, orange, or strange, serves only as epithet.  In the latter, the "fast" prefix (again, how does "fast-" work?  is this like "post-"?) is so much hyperbole in the tired vein of "omg, the world is faster! smaller!! flatter!!! the singularity approaches!!!!")  Given that Holmes attributes the migration of southeast Asians to London's Isle of Dogs to the forces of "fast" capitalism, I will hazard to guess that it is in this latter sense that he uses the term.  

    What is most unfortunate about the above, is that hidden in this jargonbabble and racist baiting is what might be a useful account of political topology.  French social modernism, Catholic social doctrine, neoliberal "fast" capitalism, and right-wing integralism, as developed by Holmes, seem recognizably congruent with the four political quadrants that recur in a number of models of ideocosmological space articulated in the American context.  This would bode well for a cross-cultural study of political typology, and in this sense Holmes has provided a rich analysis that would inform the development of such deeper investigation.

Ghost of Meaning: Marx est mortuus lingua

     "In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new."  So says Marx as quoted by Derrida.  What then, of one who never knew the "mother tongue", who finds their own tongue does not contort to pronounce the spectral words of a maternal (paternal?) fear? 

    Derrida might channel ghosts of a man, but it is a man who was perhaps apparition even in life.  There are moments of meaningful clarity here ("no Dasein without the uncanniness...of some specter" would seem to bespeak specter as immanent soul distinct from transcendental spirit; "then impossible to discern between the specter and the specter of the specter" can be heard to voice a plane of immanence), but largely Derrida is speaking what, to my ear, is a foreign language, an Orue-Nacirema dialect of magical idiom no doubt freely expressing the fears and terrors of a discourse born of 20th century wars and thrown into ecstatic confusion in that Jericho moment that was 1989.

    An experience of time as "out of joint" (whether we read this through the French idiomatic translations of "time is off its hinges", "time is broken down, unhinged, out of sorts", "the world upside down", or "this age is dishonored", as Derrida explores in chapter 1) is not something this reader is finding within the realm of grokability.  Could we ever say that gravity is off its hinges?  That electromagnetism is broken down, out of sorts?  That space is upside down?  That quantum dynamical processes are dishonored?  Like the rhetoric of the "world will never be the same again" that characterized events in 2001, the end of history hysteria of 1989 simply doesn't (nor did it at the time) resonate (even if only as a strawman for Derrida's critique).  

    Indeed, the chorus to Billy Joel's patter song released the same year (after the mass migration of East Germans via eastern bloc countries had begun, but before protesters in East Berlin has begun to demolish the wall) sums up my sentiment on the issue pretty clearly:  "We didn't start the fire \ It was always burning \ Since the world's been turning."  The "world" (which world? whose world?) is "going badly" only insofar as we human beings are aware of a world, as such.  So it was in 1949 ("Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray..."), so it was in 1989, so it was in 2001, so it is today.  Derrida was right to dismiss the claims to the "end of the problem of social classes", but his laundry list of societal ills is just that, a laundry list.  There will always be dirty laundry.

    

    After that, his text descends into barbar gibberish, at least to this ear.  If Marx speaks contradictory nonsense, Derrida's attempt to channel the ghost(s) of Marx amounts to speaking in tongues.  

    

Borders of Agency

    The question of "self" and "other" may be read to interrogate how the border between these two categories is drawn.  If in a developmental mode, we might begin with Freud's account of differentiation between infant and mother.  In a socio-cultural mode, we might explore processes by which outgroups are produced across borders of identity and identification.  Any such approach, however, begins with an implicit expectation that there are entities that might be sorted into self and other, me and you, us and them, mine and thine.  Yet, we might also differentiate between those that might be self or other, and those which are neither.  The infant that smiles and coos in recognizing its mother as other reserves such affect for her and like entities, and not for bottle, crib, chair or bib.  The individual who identifies according to borders of nation, ethnicity, religion, region, profession or class, relates differently to the outgroup "other" than to the assortment of material and immaterial objects by which such borders are marked and enacted.  

    The border between self and other, then, is predicated upon a border between selves and things.  Yet, where a story can be told for how the border between self and other is worked out through mechanisms of sociality, the working of the border between selves and things is not so readily discernible. Attempts to historicize this border fail to fully account for other expressions of the same mode of distinction, as made among animals human and nonhuman.  There is a salience to this category comprised of self and other, of selves, that conditions the affective economy of cultural and social discrimination.  This salience points to a perceptual border, by which territories of sociality and physicality are ordered.

    It is through crossings of this border, between a kingdom of selves and a kingdom of things, that a world of hybridization emerges.  Immigrants from the region of things are excorporated by selves, as bodies and identities are extended outward in new modes of sociality and physicality.  Imports from the domain of selves are subsumed as components of things, inhabiting and informing structures and architectures as new artifacts and situations.  In encountering such assemblages of trans-border migration, the perceptual is challenged.  The salience conferred by the border is rendered in an uncanny register, as we encounter entities in the act of crossing.

    It there is a history to the border, it is an evolutionary history.  This border differs from species to species, both in where it is drawn and in how easily it is crossed.  In human animals the border guards seem especially lax, such that assemblages of selves and things pass easily from one realm to the other.  Increasingly, such assemblages seem content to straddle the border.  Things act as if selves.  Selves perform as if things.  Hybrid entities lay claim to citizenship in both countries.  Less a third estate, than a state of flux, these nomads are encountered as wave forms, arriving at no particular point either side of the border.

Manifest Ontology of Agency

    "My strategy is to focus attention on the distributive and composite nature of agency," states Joan Bennett in her account of a electricity blackout that effected North America in 2003, "Are there not human, biological, vegetal, pharmaceutical, and viral agents?"  The answer is mu (無).  To respond to this question otherwise would be to reproduce what might be termed a compatibilist realism, whereby something akin to a will (although for Bennett, perhaps not as strong a nominee as "free will") is deemed to inhere in an otherwise historically determined assemblage, or else be forced (by way of the inclusion of the "human" in her query) to abandon ourselves to a nihilist solipsism, in which we can not even admit to our own ineffable experiences as agents.  Although Bennett would rightly move the loci of agency from subjects, relocating it to assemblage, nonetheless she retains an idea of agency as inhering in such loci.  Agents, here, are still things-in-the-world, even if those things aren't specifically human bodies.  It is telling that she adopts Latour's term for such nonhuman agents, actants, a term taken up from narratology.  Narrative actants are not found in the world, they are found in the stories we tell about a world.  If it has become my tired habit to parrot Korzybski, this would be the time to do it:  "The map is not the territory."

    Bennett's constellation of efficacy, directionality, and causality, can help explode this notion of inherent agency.  For efficacy, Bennett would "locate intentions within an assemblage".  Here, theory of mind rears its head:  for how exactly do we "locate intentions", whether within a human, a nonhuman, or an assemblage constituted of any number of both, except through a working theory of that presumes such intentions?  Are intentions more observable in an assemblage than in a human?  If yes, then we have empirical access to an assemblage that is deemed impossible with a human:  which would cast a human as ontologically not an assemblage!  If no, then we "locate" such intentionality only insofar as we tell ourselves a story about it.  As for directionality, Bennett's elaboration on Derrida's account clearly undermines the essentialism of inherent agency:  "things appear to us only because they tantalize and hold us in suspense" and, quoting Derrida now, "someone or something that, in order to happen . . . must exceed and surprise every determinate expectation".  Directionality here "appear[s] to us", "hold[s] us in suspense", "surprise[s] every determinate expectation":  directionality as experiential, phenomena as an existential encounter.  Finally, in her movement from "efficient causality" (ringing back to efficacy) to "emergent causality" to Arendt's sources (falling back to "intentionality"), agentic processes are revealed as distinguishable from deterministic processes only insofar as the agentic effect "can never be deduced" from its originating source.  To draw upon Hacking's historical ontology, the agency of assemblage comes down to our inability to deductively "make up" their cause.  Would Laplace's demon (with omniscient "degrees of possibility") find our world so populated by agents?

    It is Hacking's dynamic nominalism, whereby he differentiates between a realist account of horses and planets and a nominalist account of gloves and multiple personality, that provides a way to approach Bennett's agency of assemblage.  To do this, however, we must explode the dichotomy that Hacking likewise takes as a given:  "a contrast between people and things".  For, Hacking tells us, in contrast to horses and camels, and other such things (when not interfered with by us), "some of the things that we ourselves do are intimately connected to our descriptions".  But this is our critique of Bennett's constellation!  Where we can "locate intentions", when "things appear to us" that "surprise every determinate expectation", that is, their effect "can never be deduced" from an originating source, then we name such things agents, or actors, or actants.  Bennett's shi then is a property not of an assemblage, but of our encounter with and description of said assemblage.  However, we can be more exacting here, for an encounter is not a description, and indeed, it can be argued that the latter is predicated on the former.  For both Bennett and Hacking implicitly admit into their arguments a raw ontological distinction:  as much as the world may contain real things in which we do not "locate intentions" and which do not "surprise every determinate expectation", so too the world is peopled by actants, ourselves among them, "intimately connected to our descriptions" of them.  It is on this basis that I would augment Hacking's dynamism with a manifest nominalism, whereby, in order for our descriptions of agentic people "to happen", there must be the surprise encounter, holding us in suspense.  Such a nominalism is manifest, as opposed to say, evident, in that such agency, whether of people or assemblages, is perceived by the surprised senses, felt by the suspense-bound body, before any conclusion is drawn, any description formulated, any intention located.  Agency, by this argument, is not a real thing-in-the-world, not an empirically accessible essential property of actants, but rather the perceptual predicate for our naming of agents as such.

Statement of Purpose

    My study of humanity, my anthropology, is organized by a singular question:  how is a human organism equipped to encounter social and political worlds?  I have come to term this project Applied Evolutionary Phenomenology (AEP).  AEP is a phenomenology, in the existential sense, in that it seeks to reveal a structural ontology that conditions consciousness, whether conceived in terms of rationality, narrative, ideology, humor or empathy.  Drawing together insights from historical-libidinal materialism, praxiography, object-oriented programming, and nonviolent communication (NVC), AEP as phenomenology looks at the ways in which a human being does its humanity.  AEP is an evolutionary study in that it carves out a field of perception as an ontological space, distinct from cognition and deeply intertwined with affect, the formation of which space can be looked for in the evolutionary trajectory of a species.  Distinct from adaptationist modes of evolutionary psychology, AEP adopts a spandrelist stance, asking not how conditioning structures solved environmental problems in a prehistorical environment, but rather how said structures—as byproducts of adaptive traits—opened up new environments of possibility, across which subsequent adaptations might play.  AEP is an applied study, in that it would support the work of political organization, social activism, NVC practice, and peace and conflict studies, by articulating an understanding of human being based not in rational subjectivity, but instead in terms of excorporate bodies and enmeshed spheres of sociality.  Providing an alternative to humanist epistemology, situated in movements of scope rather than degrees of scale, AEP is positioned to shape new approaches to governance, social justice, strategic choice, community organizing, and conflict resolution.

    "Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?", asks Calvin, the perpetually 6-year-old boy featured in Bill Watterson's popular syndicated comic strip, "When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny. Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?"  The response given by Hobbes, Calvin's constant companion, stops the precocious philosopher in his tracks, at once awestruck and deeply unsettled:  "I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life."  Laughter, an embodied response that takes up the whole of our organism, is here presented as integral to our ability to act.  Moreover, this action is oriented to things that "don't make sense":  laughter as an alternative to sense-making, yet implicitly these "things that don't make sense" are still encountered through our senses.  If we can laugh at it, we can act concerning it, we can think about it ("We think it's funny"), and we humans laugh and think about things that appear to elicit no discernible response from other species.  Laughter, as understood through an AEP, is an essential perceptual apparatus, by which a human is able to encounter a significant range of phenomena that are simply not sensible by nonhuman lives.  There is a congruence here between affect and percept:  emotion emerges as essential to sense.  Homo sapiens as Homo sentiens.

    Laughter is one site of inquiry for this AEP.  Agency is another.  Here agency is a perceptual category, a sense experience according to which an organism discriminates situations for which an innate theory of mind might be activated from those where less expensive forms of cognition can be relied upon:  a percept of agency determines whether an animal interacts or merely reacts.  Agency, in this model, is recognized by an animal just as faces are recognized by a human:  so as to preferentially orient to some configurations of stimuli over others.  Where it may be adaptive to perceive faces or agency, however, so-called "false positives" can result when systems must be tolerant of ambiguous inputs.  Where the "agency detection" hypothesis (promulgated by some evolutionary psychologists) begins with predator-prey dynamics however, agency perception is posited as a condition of sociality.  The question then becomes: how has an increased tolerance for ambiguity in agency perception among humans—this, an adaptation to sociality among co-evolved domesticates—opened an environment populated by phenomena inaccessible to other forms of life?  Intergroup relations, cultural institutions, social categories, market exchange, mechanical Turks, corporate identity, social contract, all become possible where social affect is loosed to shape interactions with entities markedly unlike ourselves.

    With laughter and agency as sites of inquiry, AEP also includes fairness.  Here, we examine a tension of multiple fast and efficient heuristics—by which the social cohesion of groups as public goods is maintained—and their double articulation across the phenomenological environment opened on to by the forgoing forms of sociality.  Again, the affective-perceptive structures of divergent fairness heuristics may be adaptive, but their confluence describes a phase space of possibility, with stable attractors taken up as niches for new adaptations:  cosmologies and ideologies staked out as territories in an environment of risk perception and cultural norms.  Where a capacity for laughter opens up a space in which the nonsensical may be sensed, and a tolerance for ambiguity in agency perception may admit humans into worlds populated by plethora of social phenomena, the topological surface emergent of differential fairness perception conditions our encounters with politics, ethics, morality, and justice.

    This all said, it has become clear in the last semester that there may not yet be an audience prepared to embrace an AEP.  Thus, I have begun exploring how I might set aside further inquiry into the foregoing sites, so as to focus instead upon one of three less audacious bridge projects, to serve as abutments from which a fuller study of AEP might, at some time in the future, be built:  (a) a historical praxiography of Leviathan as a work of science; (b) a queer evolutionary psychology of lek formation; or (c) a development of nonviolent communication as ethnographic method.  Each bridge project would serve as a stepping stone toward a deeper study of AEP, but I have not yet settled on one over the others, and will be looking to my experience here at the New School to determine what that next step might be.