Epigraff

“I hate travelling and explorer.  Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions…Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstaces and insignificant happenings?  Adventure has no place in the anthropologist’s profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months…The fact that so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side.  The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when separated from this dross.”

-Claude Levi-Strauss sets out, 1955 (Tristes Tropiques.  New York: Penguin)

“Even those intellectuals who have all the political arguments against bourgeois ideology at their fingertips, undergo a process of standardization…What they subjectively fancy radical, belongs objectively so entirely to the compartment in the pattern reserved for their like, that radicalism is debased to abstract prestige, legitimation for those who know what an intellectual nowadays has to be for and what against.  The things they opt for have long since been just as accepted, in numbers just as restricted, in their hierarchy of values just as fixed, as those of student fraternities…their views…are allowed to partake only of pre-selected nutrition, cliches against cliches. [Van Gogh, Proust, books about forest animals, some stalwart spirit, and a few noisy jazz records that make you feel at once collective, audacious and comfortable]  Every opinion earns the approbation of friends, every argument is known by them before-hand.  That all cultural products, even non-conformist ones, have been incorporated into the distribution-mechanisms of large-scale capital, that in the most developed country a product that does not bear the imprimatur of mass-production can scarcely reach a reader, viewer, listener at all, denies deviationary longings their subject matter in advance.  Even Kafka is becoming a fixture in the sub-let studio…they no longer desire anything that does not carry the highbrow tag”

-Theodor Adorno, on ‘Expensive Reproduction’, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 206-7)

“Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.  Though, having lost autonomy, no longer trusts itself to comprehend reality, in freedom, for its own sake.  This it leaves, respectfully deluded, to the highest-paid, thereby making itself measurable”

-Theodor Adorno, ‘IQ’, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 196)

“[Marx's] analysis implies that overcoming capital entails more than overcoming the limits to democratic politics that result from systematically grounded exploitation  and inequality; it also entails overcoming determinate structural constraints on action, thereby expanding the realm of historical contingency and, relatedly, the horizon of politics”

-Moishe Postone, 2006 (”History and Helplessness: mass  mobilization and contemporary forms of anticapitalism”.  Public Culture 18(1).  P 94)

“To large extent, is not the noise of the revolver fired into the condemned man’s temple the same as the gas expelled by the autocrat in a shattering burp after a sumptuous meal?  The fact is that power, in the postcolony, is carnivorous…”

-Achille Mbembe, 2001 (On the Postcolony.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  Pg 201)

“How, then, does one live when the time to die has passed, when it is even forbidden to be alive, in what might be called the experience of living the ‘wrong way around’?  How, in such circumstances, does one experience not only the everyday but the hic et nunc when, every day, one has both to expect anything and to live in expectation of something that has not yet been realized, is delaying being realized, is constantly unaccomplished and elusive?”

-Achille Mbembe, 2001 (On the Postcolony.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  P 201)

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.”

-Walter Benjamin, 1940 (‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’)

“…the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar…knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience…Every thought which is not idle, however, bears branded on it the impossibility of its full legitimation, as we know in dreams that there are mathematics lessons, missed for the sake of a blissful morning in bed, which can never be made up”

-Theodor Adorno, “Gaps”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 80-1)

“The contemporary proliferation of bullshit…has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticisim which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are…one response has been…a retreat from the discipline requires required by the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.  Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns towards trying to provide honest representations of himself…he devotes himself to being true to his own nature…But it is preposterous to imagine we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake.  As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves without knowing them…sincerity itself in bullshit”

-Harry Frankfurt, 2005 (On Bullshit.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.  Pg 64-7)

“…if indeed the Savage exists primarily within an implicit correspondence with utopia, the specialist in savagery is in dire straits.  He does no know what to aim at.  His favorite model has disappeared or, when found, refuses to pose as expected.  The fieldworker examines his tools and finds his camera inadequate.  Most importantly, his very field of vision is blurred.  Yet he needs to come back home with a picture.  It’s pouring out there, and the mosquitoes are starting to bite.  In desperation, the baffled anthropologist burns his notes to create a moment of light, moves his face against the flame, closes his eyes and, hands grasping the camera, takes a picture of himself”

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003 (Global Transformations.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan.  Pg 24.)

“In defense of a particular vision of order, the Savage became evidence for a particular type of utopia.  That the same ethnographic source could be used to make the opposite point did not matter beyond a minimal requirement for verisimilitude…But now, as before, the Savage is only evidence within a debate, the importance of which surpasses not only his understanding but his very existence.

Just as utopia itself can be offered as a promise or as a dangerous illusion, the Savage can be noble, wise, barbaric, victim, or aggressor, depending on the debate and the aims of the interlocutors.  The space within the slot is not static, and its changing contents are not pre-determined by its structural position…a critique of anthropology cannot skirt around this slot.  The direction of the discipline now depends upon an explicit attack on that slot itself and the symbolic order upon which it is premised.  As long as the slot remains, the Savage is at best a figure of speech, a metaphor in an argument about nature and the universe, about being and existence - in short, an argument about foundational thought”

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 2003 (Global Transformations.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan Pg. 22-3.)

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.  Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.  This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled - whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.  Closely related instances arise from the widespread notion conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.  The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more sever, needless to say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world”

-Harry Frankfurt, 2005 (On Bullshit.  Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.)

“Anthropology is not a dispassionate science like astronomy, which springs from the contemplation of things at a distance. It is the outcome of an historical process, which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human beings have had their resources plundered, their institutions and beliefs destroyed while they themselves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases they were unable to resist. Anthropology is the daughter to this era of violence. Its capacity to assess more objectively the facts pertaining to the human condition reflects, on the epistemological level, a state of affairs in which one part of mankind treats the other as an object.”

-Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1966 (“Anthropology: Its Achievement and Future,” Current Anthropology, vol. 7, 1966, p. 126.) via Open Anthropology

“If it is really true…that what makes us human is above all our capacity to make history, and if history consists of actions that could not have been predicted beforehand, then that would mean that the fundamental measure of our humanity lies in what we cannot know about each other. To recognize another person as human would then be to recognize the limits of one’s possible knowledge of them. Their humanity is inseparable from their capacity to surprise us”

-David Graeber, 2007 (Lost People.  Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.  Pg 388)

“Consider for example the doctrine of moral relativism.  By this I mean the doctrine that, starting from the (entirely reasonable) premise that one cannot fully understand any action except in the context of the actor’s cultural universe, concludes that as a consequence, no one has the right to stand in judgment over any action committed by someone with a fundamentally different world view…this is a doctrine that could only really emerge as a product of imperialism.  It could only have been produced by members of an elite population whose dominance over the world was so complete and so reliable that they could live their lives in full confidence that no one with a fundamentally different world view would ever be in a position of power over them…Pretenses to some kind of moral superiority, based on their unwillingness to morally condemn ‘the Other’, it seems to me, are often entirely underpinned by tacit support for real walls to shut real other people out…what basis would we have to criticize the structures of power  in the world, unless we at least admit that everyone in the world shares certain things in common?”

-David Graeber’s ‘Anti-Relativist Diatribe’, 2007 (Lost People.  Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.  Pg 386-7)

“The impression of great open-mindedness given by multiculturalism should not hide the price that peoples had to pay for the preservation of their existence in the form of culture. “You possess meaning, perhaps,” they were told, “but you no longer have reality, or else you have it merely in the symbolic, subjective, collective, ideological form of mere representations of a world that escapes you, although we are able to grasp it objectively. And don’t be mistaken, you have the right to cherish your culture, but all others likewise have this same right, and all cultures are valued by us equally.” In this combination of respect and complete indifference, we may recognize the hypocritical condescension of cultural relativism…To the eyes of the cultural relativist, those cultural differences make no real difference anyway, since, somewhere, nature continues to unify reality by means of laws that are indisputable and necessary, even if they are not as charming and meaningful as these delightful productions which human whim and arbitrary categories have engendered everywhere.”

-Bruno Latour, 2002 (War of the Worlds: what about peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 14-15)

“[W]e are not faced with a peace unfairly shattered, nor with a “war of civilizations,” …a war of the worlds has been raging all along, throughout the so-called “modern age”—this modern parenthesis. Still, nothing proves we are on the wrong side, and nothing proves either that this war cannot be won. What is sure is that it has to be waged explicitly and not covertly. The worst course would be to act as if there were no war at all, only the peaceful extension of Western natural Reason using its police forces to combat, contain, and convert the many Empires of Evil. That is the mistake those who still believe they are moderns are in danger of making. On the other hand, if we are going to bring the wars of modernization to an end, we cannot afford to declare that all bets are off, that premodern savagery will be met with premodern savagery, that senseless violence will answer senseless violence. No, what is needed is a new recognition of the old war we have been fighting all along—in order to bring about new kinds of negotiation, and a new kind of peace.”

-Bruno Latour, 2002 (War of the Worlds: what about peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 3-4)

“The technology presents itself as a feel-good solution for politicians who’d rather not face the more profound, persistent and difficult questions of politics and distribution…[T]he danger of such crops…is not merely that they are ineffective publicity stunts.  They actively prevent the serious discussion of ways to tackle systematic poverty…

…The structural problems facing rural communities can only be addressed by concerted public action.  The intervention of genetically modified seed, however, postpones the need for this action, delaying the imagination and creation of more robust alternatives”

-Raj Patel, on GM crops, 2007 (Stuffed & Starved. Brooklyn NY: Melville House. 2007. pg 137…157)

“People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us”

-Theodor Adorno, “Johnny-Head-in-Air”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 56)

“What if we accepted that the people who Columbus or Vasco da Gama “discovered” on their expeditions were just us? Or certainly, just as much “us” as Columbus and Vasco da Gama ever were? I’m not arguing that nothing important has changed over the last five hundred years, any more than I’m arguing that cultural differences are unimportant. In one sense everyone, every community, every individual for that matter, lives in their own unique universe….

By “blowing up walls,” I mean most of all, blowing up the arrogant, unreflecting assumptions which tell us we have nothing in common with 98% of people who ever lived, so we don’t really have to think about them. Since, after all, if you assume the fundamental break, the only theoretical question you can ask is some variation on “what makes us so special?” Once we get rid of those assumptions, decide to at least entertain the notion we aren’t quite so special as we might like to think, we can also begin to think about what really has changed and what hasn’t.”

-David Graeber, 2004 (Fragments on an Anarchist Anthropology.  Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.  Pg 47)