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.