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.