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.