David Graeber against Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the 'ontological turn'

Further to my last post, the new issue of Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory has an article by David Graeber, Radical alterity is just another way of saying "reality": A reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. As the title might suggest, it is a reply to de Castro's Who is afraid of the ontological wolf?, which, in turn, criticises another of Graeber's essays.

It is a long, often interesting but also often rather pedantic defence of Graeber's philosophical position against what he sees as the idealism of de Castro et al.

A fairly large portion of the piece involves 'unpacking' what I thought to be really rather stark, staring obvious: that when advocates of the so-called 'ontological turn' in anthropology use the word 'ontology' they do not mean it in the traditional philosophical sense of a formal, structured, philosophical account of being but rather use it to refer to the tacit, informal lived understandings and presuppositions that have ontological or cosmological consequences. I really don't know why it needed so much explication as, from what I've read, this is not in any way a controversial interpretation.

The reason for the longwinded explication is presumably that Graeber sincerely dislikes this redefinition (although he is relatively courteous, for the most part, with how he goes about stating this). Particularly at issue is the relativism that refuses the right of an anthropologist to posit a singular reality 'behind' the multiplicity of understandings of the world (the famous multiculturalism/mononaturalism).

For Graeber, the self-declared ontological pluralists are just radical idealists. He prefers the 'depth ontology' of critical realism that posits a singular reality that is unknowable. This unknowability is thought to leave enough room for cultural multiplicity and all the ontology talk is, at best, unnecessary.

As I see it, the accusation of idealism is the product of Graeber's own dualism. For the ontological turners, Graeber claims:

"[authoritative] statements must be treated as a window onto “concepts,” and concepts treated—through a form of “radical constructivism”—as if they were themselves realities of the same ontological standing as “things,” or indeed, constitutive of the world itself." (20)

For concepts to be of the same ontological standing as things simply means that one is not bifurcating reality – i.e. one is refusing dualism. To slip from that to "or indeed, constitutive of the world itself" is a conflation. He continues:

"The “ontological turn,” then, involves not only abandoning the project of ontology1 [i.e. traditional, philosophical ontology], but adopting a tacit ontology which seems indistinguishable from classical philosophical Idealism. Ideas generate realities. One could go even further. What they seem to be proposing is abandoning the entire project of philosophy (or at least, philosophy in anything like the forms it has historically taken in Europe, India, China, or the Islamic World.) Science, in contrast, would be preserved, but as the special property of “Westerners” or “Euro-Americans”—which if taken seriously, would amount to one of the greatest acts of intellectual theft in human history, since after all, much of what underlies what we now call “Western science” was actually developed in places like Persia, Bengal, and China, and in (dare I say?) the real world. Most scientific research is no longer being conducted by Euro-Americans at all." (21)

There are various claims here. The claim to be able to state what the entirety of the philosophical traditions of not only Europe but also India, China and the Islamic world have been all about is presumptuous bordering on pompous, to say the least. Even Western philosophy has been about rather more than magisterially postulating the furniture of the universe, although that has certainly been a part of it. The bit about science is a cheap shot that relates to nothing I can imagine de Castro et al. accepting for a moment.

The main claim, however, is that all the ontological turners are really doing is reproducing a tired, old and quite extreme form of idealism where concepts produce and/or exhaust reality. Now, I've by no means read the entirety of the relevant literature but this strikes me as a knee jerk reaction based on a misunderstanding that ultimately says more about Graeber's presuppositions than it does about anyone else's.

I do not understand the position of ontological pluralism to be claiming that concepts constitute reality without remainder. I understand the claim to be that concepts, ideas, whatever you want to call them, are on the same level of reality as everything else. That is, that it is illegitimate to say that one has concepts on one hand and things on another (bifurcation). Furthermore, that it is impossible to refer to a thing except in liaison with particular concepts. That doesn't mean that concepts are all that there is, only that to speak is to conceptualise. You cannot think without abstractions, as Whitehead put it.

So, yes, Amerindians and Europeans have different perspectives, different cosmologies, etc. But the trees and ants and spiders and so on presumably have their perspectives, too. Of course, the anthropologist qua anthropologist is not so interested in the perspectives of those things in themselves but in what their informants say about those things (although this is far from straightforward, admittedly). Hence why it might look a bit like idealism. But it simply does not follow that these things are equivalent. Methods and philosophies overlap and might confuse each other a little bit but a sympathetic reading can, I think, tell them apart.

The question hanging around the entire article is 'okay, but you don't really believe it when they say that, do you?' The implication is that it may be good manners (or even, depending on the circumstances, good politics) to rhetorically accept the beliefs of others that strike the observer as being wholly untrue but that there is a deeper and more fundamental sense in which one can, and should, declare them obviously unbelievable. Belief is absolutised, underlying all other modes of action. The epistemic underlies and underpins the moral, the political and so on. Belief is sacred. To fail to give belief its sovereignty is simply incomprehensible.

The thing that Graeber really can't get away from, I think, is the idea that either you accept that there is a real world (I won't add 'out there' because I think he is sophisticated enough to avoid that artefact of common sense stupidity) or you deny the existence of a world apart from concepts altogether. In other words, he seems to presume that to say that there are 'many worlds' rather than just a singular world is to reduce reality to concepts. This just doesn't follow and doesn't grasp what I think ontological pluralists are claiming.

It's a tough thing to explain so I'll approach it from a bit of an oblique angle (I'm thinking this through more for myself than for anyone else, to be honest!).

When I used to live in London, I realised quite quickly that nobody actually lives 'in London' – it's an abstraction. London is just far, far too big to live 'in' it in any meaningful sense as a totality. You live in this or that street, that area. Perhaps you have friends here and there. You take this tube line, etc. It is quite obvious that you live inside quite a narrow and confined network and that the vast, overwhelming majority of the city falls between the lines that you travel. Most of it you will never see nor even think about.

The fact that the epistemic techniques of geography allow us to place these networks within a larger container that can be defined as the totality 'London' (and the fact that this may be a very useful and sensible thing to do navigationally, administratively and so on) should not determine the social ontology by which one understands this city as it is being lived in. In other words, the common sense fact that all these streets, offices, bars, pipes, drains and so on that make up an individual's city-as-lived reside within a definable, connected region does not mean that London is one, cohesive, singular entity – like a body of which one was a cell.

The claim I would make is that there is no one way of joining these various things up that can be said to be the 'reality' that would have parts from which particular perspectives could be assembled (not the planner's bird's eye view, nor the individual's lived experience, etc.). That singularity or totality is a superfluous hypothesis. The crucial thing to emphasise is that the bollards, the rails, the bins, the foxes, the concepts and so on – all of these things are part of this not-one, part of this multiplicity that cannot be assembled in any one way that can be declared the most real. Because they are not bifurcated into different realms, it is perfectly sensible and consistent to hold that there is no one way of joining them up, just connected and overlapping ways that never add up to a whole. Or, rather, when a particular manner of joining things up forms a totality, this is also just one kind of entangled complex among others. It may be more or less important, more or less useful relative to a particular task or problem but it can be given no transcendent, automatic priority.

What is true of London is also true of the world, indeed the planet. Yes, in a certain sense we all live on 'one' planet. It would be silly do deny this but in either affirming or denying it we have tacitly accepted certain premises with regard to the form of connection that matters most. Nothing obvious about how things are proves that we should think about this planet as a singular entity rather than as an intensively connected but nevertheless fragmented and discrete bundle of bundles – that is if we think about anything beyond our immediate locale at all (that might also be okay).

The banal fact that everything is connected to everything else in some fashion does not mean that there is one world rather than many. It is in no way obscure or contradictory to claim that there are many worlds, all of which overlap and are related in some way but some of which are quite distinct and should be understood and dealt with as such. Nothing obvious about the way things are licenses a 'real world' which would reside behind all merely cultural understandings of said world. It's a dogmatic presumption, which doesn't make it wrong but doesn't make it right either.

At several points, Graeber pulls out the old incommensurability argument, which suggests that the de Castro et al. think that the collectives for which they are describing ontologies exist as some kind of definite, bounded, billiard ball-type entity. That, again, is a cheap shot against a position that I doubt anyone involved in this debate is really claiming to adhere to. No collective, certainly not one that has had a Western anthropologist living in it for years, is absolutely pure and separated from the rest of the world. Of course these things overlap, of course they are complicated. The limitations of language sometimes brings us to suggest that such things are definite entities in the manner of classical physics (or ball-based sports) but that does not make it necessarily so. Every attempt to name a collective is in a sense an attempt to verbally lasso a loose and self-assembling bundle of bundles that may well shrug off that signification, that may even violently reject it. The degree to which one is successful in articulating a bounding that is acceptable to the larger proportion of those persons is the basic barometer by which the naming can be judged a success. Of course, this is complicated by all sorts of power dynamics – who gets to object? whose objections are heard?, etc. – but such is life. These are the problems that are to be negotiated by the trials of experience.

I add by way of conclusion shutting up and going to sleep that I'm not unquestioningly or naively on board with the ontological pluralist agenda as it's being articulated in anthropology (for a start, the things I'm describing above may well not be fair representations of or addenda to their arguments). First, I'm not an anthropologist, just someone with an interest in, for want of a better term, the comparative sociology of knowledge. Graeber's argument that it should be wholly legitimate for anthropologists to adopt the role of an instigator of dialogue between collectives rather than just someone who continually emphasises and safeguards radical alterity seems perfectly acceptable to me. However, it really depends on the collective in question. Making general ethical rules with regard to this seems not only impossible but also deeply unwise.

The really important question would be which ethical and political roles are appropriate depending on what circumstances. That isn't the conversation that is happening at the moment but there does seem to be room for it. I'm sure that this conversation will roll on, in any case.

Andrew Kipnis on agency, ANT and the limits of ethnography; or, Does ANT have a politics problem?

The fabulous Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory has a new issue out.

Among the articles is Agency between humanism and posthumanism: Latour and his opponents by Andrew Kipnis. It is the latest in a series of interventions in this journal on anthropology and the so-called 'ontological turn.'

It starts out with a thoughtful and well-reasoned argument that, in short, 'agency' as such is not really the important issue. This is rather similar to what I was trying to get at a few posts ago with regard to 'flat ontology.' The disagreements that many people have with ANT have more, I think, to do with its methodological prescriptions than with the philosophical underpinnings – or, at least, the ontological discussion needs to deal with the methodological aspects as well. Kipnis writes:

"The methodological problem that ANT poses for politically critical research is not so much that it considers the agencies of nonhuman entities, or that in “posthumanist” fashion it considers agency to arise in networks rather than to reside in the individualized subjectivities of conscious human actors, but rather that it requires researchers to engage in slow, painstaking, and careful ethnographic research." (53)

Ethnographic methods might be very important and underused in many of the social sciences but there are, quite simply, some questions that cannot be answered through the sorts of detailed, empirical, case study-based research that ANT insists upon.

This is also something that I was attempting to articulate in a paper I wrote a few years ago on ANT and IR, Offshore: Symmetry, Space and Materiality. I argued that offshore tax havens are an excellent example of the kinds of networks that not only cannot be traced in any particular detail in practice (the investigative resources of whole nation states struggle to get past these walls of silence, so what could a mere social scientist do?) but, more than that, their very untraceability is what makes them what they are.

Because ANT “starts from irreducible, incommensurable, unconnected localities” [Latour] it assumes disconnection as an omnipresent status quo, thus foregrounding connection as what is exceptional and, consequently, as what is to be explained. Moreover, it takes for granted that relational events and the traces thereof are accessible to the researcher in a quasi-ethnographic fashion. This is emphatically not true in the case of, for instance, tax havens, which are defined by their secrecy. It is not for nothing that tax havens are argued to be more accurately termed ‘secrecy jurisdictions.’ Take, for instance, the case of tax haven lawyers who utilise trust and confidentiality laws to shield their clients’ assets; their entire purpose is to make these links untraceable; these people are not ‘centres of calculation’ but rather centres of “calculated ambiguity”. One cannot trace these networks since secrecy, non-traceability, is precisely what makes these networks function. They create disconnection and presume connection – precisely the opposite of ANT. 

This is, indeed, the experience of those who try to gauge offshore. A report for the Tax Justice Network compares the “subterranean system” of offshore to a “black hole” since it “is virtually invisible and can be somewhat perilous to observers who venture too close. So, like astronomers, researchers on this topic have necessarily used indirect methods to do their estimates, conducting their measurements from a respectful distance.” Or, as journalist Nicholas Shaxson (who has gotten as close to these networks as anyone) puts it, “[e]ven if you can see part of the structure … you can’t see the whole, you cannot understand it.” Another tax analyst uses the black hole metaphor: “Identifying tax shelter activity can be as difficult as finding objects trapped inside a black hole – their presence is known only through inference.” 

ANT grew up, so to speak, in the information-rich environment of STS. Whether following scientists, engineers, lawyers or psychotherapists, Latour, for one, has always examined actors who were relatively indifferent to their being followed. Thus he can write: “Our slogan ‘follow the agents themselves’ is not for the dogs. To it we sacrifice everything.” This methodological principle can be raised to an absolute without missing out on too much. IR, by contrast, is frequently an information-poor environment. Or, more accurately, it has huge quantities of data to sift through but these are generally traces of traces of traces; too much data, not enough information. Moreover, many of its actors are likely to be quite hostile to the notion of being followed in anything like an ethnographic sense! The mode of inference particular to ANT is basically limited to the ability to join the dots between one material-semiotic trace and another; consequently, it is quite ill-prepared to confront phenomena characterised by untraceability. While IR can learn a lot from ANT’s radical empiricism, for example its insistence that well constructed descriptions are explanations, it cannot swallow this pill whole.

After that point, Kipnis' arguments, for me, go off the rails a little bit. After suggesting that we can grant 'agency' to everything provided that we distinguish between different kinds of agency (okay, fine), he attempts to smuggle some fairly unreconstructed humanism and Marxism back in (reconstructed, I might be able to deal with).

First, he criticises Latour's lack of attention to questions of power and economics.

"[…] the lack of discussion of Capital and Power in his seemingly encyclopedic “Anthropology of the Moderns” makes me cringe. How can capital not be one of the modes of existence for modern humans?" (54)

How 'capital' would work as a mode of existence, I have no idea. This is a criticism of AIME that has cropped up repeatedly, in various ways: 'you've not made [this thing that is very important] a mode of existence, therefore you are devaluing or ignoring it.' Capital would, in the context of AIME, presumably be an ontic rather than ontological entity. In other words, it would be something constituted by a heterogeneous complex of modalities rather than being a kind of being in itself. That doesn't devalue it as a concept (although Latour's disinterest in such concepts is no secret).

Capital, for Kipnis, is:

"an instituted agency that pressures us moderns to make our calculations selfishly."

The ease with which this force of nature is injected into the text so casually, as though it were something that operated independently, autonomously and without mediation, is striking. One needn't undertake only detailed, local, empirical case studies of 'capitalism' (what a task that would be!) in order to recognise the value of the insistence that one look for the mediators by which any given force, no matter how powerful, is assembled, produced and made to act in the world – even as this force exerts pressures that are irreducible to the networks that mediate, stabilise and utilise it. Divested of the excesses of its occasionally fussy and fastidious empiricism, ANT can still help us to understand this much. Perhaps this is the shared task or middle ground that Kipnis is trying to get at but it doesn't come across as such in his writing on this point.

He then rolls out a familiar trope that I also discussed in my previous post on 'flat ontology,' the alleged ignorance of power:

"I find Latour’s relative disinterest in human power relations mirrored in his lack of attention to the concept of power. If I were rewriting his conceptual framework, I would substitute “power” for “felicity/infelicity conditions” as the primary dimension for differentiating types of agents." (54)

Felicity conditions in AIME concern different ways of distinguishing between success and failure. Of course, each mode has a kind of 'power' of its own as each is a different way of acting, of existing. Using 'power' as a differentiating condition would simply be restating what that mode is (hence the concept adds nothing and is superfluous, which is precisely Latour's point about it).

In the end, Kipnis rather undoes his previous good work by making a mess of agency, somehow 'granting it to everything' but then insisting that it differs categorically from power and describing human agency as "that contradictory space we experience whenever we attempt to make a decision about the unknown" (56). Far from offering a minor modification to the ANT take on agency, this completely undoes it since it re-locates human agency in an essential human reflexivity (which sounds a lot like politics, from Latour's point of view) and, presumably, any capacities that human beings have beyond this are not 'human agency' (and so what are they?).

The distinction between agency and power I just find strange.

"Barack Obama or Bill Gates undoubtedly have more power than I do. They get to follow their proclivities or gut instincts across a wider range of contexts than I do and their decisions certainly affect a greater number of people than mine. But this power does not give them more agency than me." (56)

Perhaps it is just me but I find this to be an irredeemably knotted jumble of thoughts. Making agency a qualitative condition of a kind of thing (specifically, humans) and power a quantitative measure (where some 'have' more of it and others less), again, completely demolishes anything that might remain of the ANT-type conception of the world.

The likes of Obama and Gates are only powerful due to their particular locations within various networks of all kinds of actors. Yes, they 'have' power in a sense – when they move or speak, ripples issue out far out of proportion in amplitude to those from you or me – but these networks also 'have' them (the 'possession' of power works both ways). These landscapes are full of asymmetries – as are scientific laboratories or building sites. Power is everywhere, so much so that pointing it out is rather trite and serves to convey nothing more than the author's self-identification as a 'critical thinker.' The well-beaten drum of 'power critique' has less, I think, to do with the urgencies of the world than with the proclivities of the academy but that is perhaps another post.

None of this, I hasten to add, means that ANT doesn't have a problem with politics. The case study-centrism, the ethnographic fundamentalism (perhaps these terms are a bit strong but rather too much than too little…) – these close off many important research questions from examination. The centrality of the case study, particularly when articulated in its somewhat vulgarised form as part of a 'theoretical framework' to be employed by graduate students, has the effect of creating legions of researchers that are tremendously interesting and productive but can all too easily disconnect their matters of research concern from dissensus, conflict and the embeddedness of their own research in wider political processes.

In one sense, this is nothing more than an argument for methodological pluralism (in additional to the ontological pluralism that AIME brings with it), which is usually, in my experience, pushing at an open door with regard to getting people to concur. Institutional acceptance is another issue altogether.

I am not, in this post or previous ones, attempting to pretend that there aren't flaws and limitations in the ANT approach to social science (I, for one, do not intend to employ them in any direct fashion in my own thesis work). I am rather trying to get away from criticisms that are, by now, misplaced clichés and get towards something a bit more productive.

Not quite there yet but hopefully I'm making some progress – and the better parts of this Kipnis article have helped in that regard.

Reflections on EISA 2015—Day 3

My Thursday at EISA started off with a panel on ‘Kinship in Historical International Relations and Beyond.’ This session was organised by the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI).

My notes are, once again, a bit sparse for this session and with the air-con on full blast (the room was sweltering) it was difficult to hear some of the discussion (my hearing isn’t the best, anyway)—plus there were some noisy aircraft making a nuisance of themselves overhead, preparing for the airshow the next day, which made negotiating the discussion-space even more interesting.

In any case, Iver Neumann, formerly of NUPI but now of the LSE, introduced proceedings by reflecting on matters of kinship in IR, particularly with regard to early state formation. Jan Harald Sande Lie gave a very short and very useful introduction to the history of kinship within anthropology. Ole Jacob Sending discussed how kinship is constitutive of international actors, drawing (to the best of my recollection) to a large extent on political theory circa Hobbes. Finally, and most usefully for my own thinking, Halvard Leira talked about kinship in diplomacy. He noted that diplomacy does not invent new forms of organisation but derives its rites and routines from the world around it. ‘Diplomatic culture,’ in other words, derives from the culture of the world(s) with which it is entangled. This is particularly apposite when considering how, before formalisation and professionalisation, ambassadors were quite often quite literal kin.

I am interested in the relationship between IR and anthropology in general and how these differing traditions and disciplines have intersected, are intersecting and could work together differently. Kinship is an excellent focal point for thinking this through and I’ll look forward to the book that is apparently forthcoming on the subject. As mentioned, I gave particular thought to Halvard’s paper. I wondered how European kinship traditions, as embodied in diplomatic institutions, functioned when coming into contact with non-European diplomatic cultures. Kinship was, for example, a key component in French North American colonial relationships with the Iroquois and Algonquian alliances. As Richard White has argued, lacking a common culture as such, Europeans and First Nations negotiated a ‘middle ground’ based not on mutual understanding so much as mutually beneficial misunderstandings. Differing conceptions of kinship, particularly fatherhood, structured the French and Algonquian relationship by providing a common (or rather ‘middle’) vocabulary with which to reach agreements (usually temporary, fragile and fleeting).

White’s book demonstrates diplomacy occurring on multiple levels at once: not only formal and institutional but also familial, sexual, cosmological and more. (This is something that I hope to explore in my thesis.)

I don’t have as much to write about Thursday as previous days (1.1, 1.2, 2), in large part because the two sessions I went to in the afternoon were roundtable discussion sessions and, consequently, didn’t have a structure or rhythm conducive to note-taking (also, I was beginning to feel somewhat fatigued at this point!). They were, however, very interesting.

After lunch, I went to the concluding session of a section organised by my new friends at Aberystwyth on methodological challenges in research. We talked about the epistemic and institutional difficulties in doing research, particularly as PhD students subjected to the often dogmatic Research Council-imposed demands of research training modules and the ever-emphasised need to have a ‘framework’ clearly distinct from (and sometimes even hegemonic over) what one is studying. It seems to me, and happily I am apparently not alone in this, that these ways of framing and carving up the research process place limitations upon what can be researched.

Against this, how can mess, as John Law has written about, be not only accepted as a legitimate methodological mindset but also recognised as an inevitable part of any research project and even as something that needn’t be covered up as though it were some dirty, unfortunate secret?

Writing styles and methods of textual construction were also mentioned, including matters of reflexive writing, which got me thinking about my own projects ahead. I enjoy writing and like to approach it, whenever and wherever possible, as a creative activity. While my research is primarily historical and philosophical (in roughly equal measure), I spent much of my journey home to Wales thinking about how to wrap my own authorial voice up into my writing, to locate my subject-position not just by way of preface (as is common practice) but throughout the process, and to take the experience of research itself as a creative, structural principle in writing. This is easier to do with ethnographic or similar forms of qualititative research as these, quite often, involve a literal journey (or journeys) of self- and other-discovery. But all research is a journey of sorts.

I am drawn back to the idea of theoria, which at the time of Herodotus meant a voyage abroad in search of knowledge. In Plato this meaning is also evident (particularly in the Laws) but also slips into what we recognise today as ‘theory’: when one no longer needs to travel or even to move because one apperceives Ideas, which are placeless, timeless and fundamentally external to any fallen, earthly derivation. Historians and philosophers also go on journeys, also move, also transform and are transformed. How can this not only be accepted as part of the mess of research but also be taken as a principle of narration—as a part of the very fumbling, stumbling world-bundling process in which we are engaged? These are things that I need to think through and experiment with.

Following on from that, the final session of the day for me was also the final session of a section on ‘Diplomacy and Symbolic Violence.’ The panel included Paul Sharp, Costas Constantinou, Alisher Faizullaev and Marcus Holmes.

Costas (who, incidentally, taught me at Keele University all of a decade ago and whose On the Way to Diplomacy is what inspires my inchoate thoughts on theoria, above) began by affirming that one needn’t represent a territory in order to be a diplomat; that we are all diplomats in our own ways as we all negotiate relations of otherness in a world without certainty, simplicity or readymade sovereignty. The discussion touched on formal diplomatic relations but also diplomacies (and symbolic violences) of the everyday.

I was left thinking (although, having only been to this final session and not the ones that preceded it, I should throw a caveat over this) that the concept of violence probably needs a clearer and more carefully considered articulation. It is very easy to expand the concept to such a degree that more or less anything can be understood as ‘violent.’ I would prefer to relate violence necessarily to a conception of harm. An act is violent to the extent that it is harmful. One thing that did come up was the indeterminacy of symbolic violence—something may or may not be intended to be violent; whether or not it is will depend on how it is received by an other; this gap, this fissure is ineliminable. Consequently, we might say that no symbolic act is without violence or that we can never discount the possibility of an act (symbolic or not) being violent; however, not every act that exerts a force need be violent to a notable degree and nor should all acts that do cause harm be lumped into one category as there are ranges and degrees of violence. I see little to be gained by this critical slippage.

In any case, it was another interesting day and one that I am feeling tired simply by recounting! By around this point in the week the weather was turning, getting cloudier and more humid. Practically everyone at the conference was covered by mosquito bites. Many had also quaffed a fair quantity of the hyper-plentiful local wine (sold by the litre) the night(s) before. The fact that the debate remained so engaging and energetic is testament to the stamina and determination of all those involved!

The cultural lives and speciation practices of Reindeer; On 'Anthropology beyond Humanity'

I just watched this really excellent talk by Tim Ingold on Anthropology beyond Humanity.  I found it to be fascinating and engagingly delivered but argumentatively flawed.  First, Ingold claims that Latour claims that there is a radical disjuncture between humans and non-humans with regard to the socialisation of objects.  That huge diagram behind him disproves that immediately!  Non-human primates are included on the same diagram as humans.  So, there's a continuum, not a bifurcation!  I think Ingold has a point inasmuch as Latour doesn't adequately distinguish between different kinds of objects and how they differently socialise humans and allow humans to socialise but his point is overstated.

Secondly, he gets Latour's 'collective' all wrong.  The collective, a I understand it, is a political concept.  To be within or without the collective is a political means/ends distinction.  When Latour says that some non-humans must be 'outside' the collective this doesn't mean that they aren't part of human life as such - precisely the opposite, in fact.  It is because humans are now entangled with the entire planet that we need to decide what is inside and what outside.  Historically, during modernity, nearly everything was treated as a means to humans' ends (masters and possessors of nature, etc.) - that is no longer tenable because of Gaia, etc.  However, we can't then make all things ends, either.  We wouldn't even be able to eat.  So, we have to decide.  It is because we are entangled with all earthly existence, so the argument goes, that there must be an 'outside' to the collective.  The reason why non-humans need 'representatives' is because their case has to be argued politically, which is most definitely something that cannot be done by non-humans themselves (Ingold argues that non-humans can 'speak for themselves' and I suppose they can but in a very limited way with respect to politics).

In all of this Ingold conflates different meanings of 'social' - there's the simple sense of one thing affecting and being associated with another (in which case humans are social with the entire planet, as Latour has argued again and again - in the way Ingold describes it at some points we might have to say that we are social with the entire universe) then there's social in the sense of fixing or unfixing social structures or social habits, in which case humans are most definitely social with non-human things but in a more limited sense (and so it goes for non-human sociality, too).  I think Ingold is right to point out that non-humans are just as involved with other kinds of non-humans as humans are and that this could be called 'social' in some senses of that word but he's wrong, I think, to suggest that Latour refuses these entanglements.  It's simply not a matter of 'non-humans amongst themselves' versus 'humans plus non-humans.'  I think that's a false reading.  Humans enrol non-human things in order to fix, reify and, if you like, mineralise their social relations (and thus make them extend over time and space) - humans do this at a far greater intensity than e.g. primates.  I see little to object to here.  Where Latour goes wrong, I think, is in arguing that all technological artefacts constitute this broader sociality.  Ingold points out that often tools are made from local materials and immediately discarded.  That is right.  The kind of artefacts that mineralise social relations are e.g. the colourful feathers made into a ceremonial headdress that reminds everybody of who the chief is (a somewhat ethnocentric example but, I hope, a fairly innocent one).  Fashioning a stick into digging implement and then immediately discarding it doesn't do much for social relations at all.  So, Latour's argument is a bit simplistic but I'm not at all convinced that it's wrong in the way that Ingold is arguing here.

Lastly, the idea that we must think of species in terms of ongoing practices of speciation is a fine one although pretty much compatible, I think, with Latour's arguments in general.

Overall, Ingold seems very determined to damn and blast Latour and goodness knows that I do a bit of that myself but his understanding is a bit shallow and some of his comments in the Q&A at the end are simply prejudicial.  He doesn't like the fact that Latour uses a speedbump as an example of non-humans because, for Ingold, humans are much more rich and diverse than that and they can be learned from as agents in their own right.  But when Latour says 'follow the actors themselves' he isn't just talking about humans!  Ingold makes it sound like Latour is only interested in humans and non-humans are simply instrumental and secondary, which is precisely the opposite critique that the vast majority of people have made of Latour, which tells a story in itself.  Latour clearly irks Ingold deeply (a common enough reaction, for sure) but unfortunately his ire is largely misdirected.

On Human Exceptionalism

Levi Bryant comments on a debate happening across various blogs on human exceptionalism and anthropology.

This is a really interesting debate and something I've thought a lot about lately.

This kind of problem always reminds me of a passage from Plato's Statesman where the Stranger reproaches Young Socrates for failing to 'carve nature at its joints' and instead making hasty generalisations about kinds of things; of failing to perform the labour required for accurate classification.

Stranger: The error was just as if some one who wanted to divide the human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, and have no ties or common language, they include under the single name of "barbarians," and because they have one name they are supposed to be of one species also. Or suppose that in dividing numbers you were to cut off ten thousand from all the rest, and make of it one species, comprehending the first under another separate name, you might say that here too was a single class, because you had given it a single name. Whereas you would make a much better and more equal and logical classification of numbers, if you divided them into odd and even; or of the human species, if you divided them into male and female; and only separated off Lydians or Phrygians, or any other tribe, and arrayed them against the rest of the world, when you could no longer make a division into parts which were also classes.

Plato's method of division and classification is particularly laborious in this dialogue and it has irritated more than a few classicists (I'm not one but I've read a few) who wonder why he doesn't just make broad distinctions and jump to the end where everything is nicely carved up; why go through the process of division (which frequently goes off on tangents that are subsequently abandoned) if you can just state the end product and be done with it? I think Plato realised that that's lazy and that philosophical method is as important as philosophical claims. In short he recognised the importance of working things through, of honouring the mediators rather than fixating on the end products, if you like. But I digress.

Who is more 'barbaric': the multitude of peoples chatting away to each other in their various tongues or the puzzled-looking philosopher who, as if to subconsciously repress his shame and incomprehension, waves his hand and decrees them all 'the same'?

Etymologically, the word barbaric connotes 'babbling' and the sensation of hearing someone talk a language you don't understand. The truly barbaric reaction is to take this incomprehension as a sign of homogeneity - not of the inadequacy of one's comprehensive capabilities but of the uniformity of the phenomena presented.

Such is the phenomenological experience of any anthropologist at the start of their journey: they are clumsy, awkward, incompetent, thoroughly stupid when placed among their tribe. Their genius lies in correctly deducing that this is an inadequacy of theirs, not of their hosts! Such powers of intuition allow them to gradually become less clumsy, awkward, incompetent and stupid - the generic babbling becomes a flooding plurality of clearly articulated and endlessly diverse conversation. Eventually their hosts become literally familiar - family. They become beings capable of stating their own differences; their babbling disappears as they impress themselves upon their own categorisations. They become subjects, endowed with depths and agencies, possessing unique characteristics.

I'm keen to ontologise this principle.

The reason why we need a conceptual vocabulary that can articulate the qualities and relationships of all things - human and non-human - i.e. the reason why we need a metaphysics, is not because all things (human and non-human) are the same; on the contrary, it is because they are all different. Not just the human and the rock but the rock and the tree, the tree and the ... etc. etc. etc. We can't have a separate conceptual scheme for every possible relationship so we are left with only two options: have an abstract scheme that is vague enough that it can accommodate any thing or engage in the arbitrary bifurcations whereby we have one language for one side and another for the other and then sit around wondering how the two can ever be reconciled.

The reading of Plato's/Socrates' 'cutting of nature at its joints' is always that there are natural kinds that can be rationally deduced. And this has always been used to justify hard-boiled naturalisms that say we must scrub away any trace of our pitiful subjective perceptions from our definitions of objects, etc. etc. On the contrary, I understand it to mean that we should try to learn from things, open ourselves to things, risk ourselves in front of things as Stengers might say. Let them define themselves, let them cease to babble. But don't expect them to suddenly 'speak our language'! This isn't Star Trek - the aliens won't miraculously have a grasp of American English. It takes work to turn that head-spinning babbling into comprehensible conversation.

This, for me, indicates what an object-oriented epistemology would be: a theory of becoming-sensitive to things, of how we can allow things to define themselves while acknowledging that they won't just speak our language as if by some miracle. This would show us that we don't need to purge subjectivity to have objectivity. On the contrary (and my Latourianism is coming out here), becoming-sensitive is an object-loaded activity!

Anyway...

The moral of the story?

One is barbaric when one suppresses one's own ignorance and incompetence by ontologically homogenising all that which one has not gone to the effort of telling apart.

If a phenomenon's nuances are elusive this could simply mean that the phenomenon is entirely disinterested in you! The ultimate narcissism is to assume that this disinterest reflects badly upon the phenomenon! Maybe it wants you to think it's babbling!

Indeed, this is a precautionary principle for all metaphysics: beware babbling, things might be plotting against you and your ignorant ways! Ignorant in every sense of the word.

The real barbarians were the Hellenes and we are their heirs so long as we worship Kant and weep over the white man's burden (homogenising things or peoples, it matters not). Neither things nor folks have any problem differentiating themselves or going about their lives without us. We struggle to keep up - and then we blame it on them!

Carving nature at its joints doesn't indicate that nature is a neatly segmented totality just waiting for the cut and thrust of our instruments. (One surely needn't point out the phallic implications of this modern interpretation!) On the contrary, I think it means that we need to learn how to segment and how to carve.

Even a corpse won't cede so easily to the wild flailing of the butcher's apprentice - he too has to learn his trade, knife in hand, babbling to himself.