Reading with care
“At some level we have not demanded even of ourselves that we ascertain whether we believe this hypothesis to be true; we have felt that there was so much to learn first by observing the automatic nervous system of a routinized dismissal of it in terms of today’s Theory. The moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past (maybe especially the recent past) is globally available to anyone who masters the application of two or three discrediting questions. How provisional, by contrast, how difficult to reconstruct and how exorbitantly specialized of use, are the tools that in any given case would allow one to ask: What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment of the past that it no longer is? And how are those possibilities to be found, unfolded, allowed to move and draw air and seek new voices and uses, in the very different disciplinary ecology of even a few decades difference?”
-Eve Sedgwick, on reading Silavan Tomkins, 2003 (Touching Feeling. Durham NC: Duke. Pgs 117-8.)
The strength of objects
“In talk about meaning and interpretation the physical body stays untouched. All interpretations, whatever their number, are interpretations of. Of what? Of some matter that is projected somewhere. Of some nature that allows culture to attribute all these shapes to it. This is built into the very metaphor of ‘perspectives’ itself. This multiplies the observers – but leaves the object observed alone. All alone. Untouched. It is only looked at. As if it were in the middle of a circle. A crowd of silent faces assembles around it. They seem to get to know the object by their eyes only. Maybe they have ears that listen. But no on ever touches the object. In a strange way that doesn’t make it recede and fade away, but makes it very solid. Intangibly strong.”
-Annemarie Mol, 2002 (The Body Multiple. Durham NC: Duke Pg 10)
Means of Production
“we do not live, act, and work ‘in’ space so much as by living, acting, and working we produce space.”
Neil Smith, 1984 (Uneven Development. Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell. Pg 85)
Freedom of Space
“Moreover, whenever the man-made world does not become the scene of action and speech – as in despotically ruled communities which banish their subjects into the narrowness of the home and thus prevent the rise of a public realm – freedom has no worldly reality. Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance”
-Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom” (via (Notes On) Politics, Theory, and Photography).
Partial-Vision
“the alternative to relativism is not totalization and single vision, which is always finally the unmarked category whose power depends on systematic narrowing and obscuring. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. Relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. The ‘equality’ of positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry. Relativism is the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective both make it impossible to see well. Relativism and totalization are both ‘god tricks’ promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding science. But it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry rests”
-Donna Haraway, 1988 (“Situated Knowledges” Feminist Studies 14(3) Pg. 584.)
More than connect-the-dots
“…not a network connecting agents which are already there, but a network which configures ontologies. The agents, their dimensions, and what they are and do, all depend on the morphology of the relations in which they are involved…
“In the social network…the agents’ identities, interests, and objectives, in short, everything which might stabilize their description and their being, are variable outcomes which fluctuate with the form and dynamics of relations between these agents…
“This means that the agent is neither immersed in the network nor framed by it; in other words, the network does not serve as a context. Both agent and network are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin. “
-Michel Callon, 1998 (“Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics” In The Laws of Markets. Malden MA: Blackwell. Pg. 8)
epistemologically otherwise
“if we embrace epistemological relativism we neither have to give up our concern for proper ways of finding out about the world, not…abandon our political and ethical commitments. To be a relativist – to recognize multivocality – implies no obligatory commitment to immorality or opportunism. Neither does it necessarily lead us to indifference to distribution. Rather…it may lead us to an important form of intellectual caution: the sense that all knowledges are shaped, contingent, and in some other world could be otherwise.”
-John Law, 1991 (“Introduction: monsters, machines and sociotechnical relations” In A Sociology of Monsters. New York: Routledge. Pg 6
Got some ’splaining to do
“Explanation does not follow from description; it is description taken that much further. We do not look for a stabilized and simplified description before we begin to propose and explanation. On the contrary, we use what they do to an innovation or a statement to define the actors, and is from them and them alone that we extract any ’cause’ we might need.”
-Bruno Latour, 1991 (“Technology is Society Made Durable” in A Sociology of Monsters. New York: Routledge. Pg. 121)
On the Need to Forget
“Perhaps too much value has is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value, in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead…But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. there is simply too much injustice in the world…To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.
If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another.”
-Susan Sontag, 2003 (Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Penguin. Pg. 103)
problematization
“But what I am attempting to do as a historican of thought is something different. I am trying to analyze the way institutions, practices, habits, and behavior become a problem for people who behave in specific sorts of ways, who have certain types of habits, who engage in certain kinds of practices, and who put to work specific kinds of institutions…The history of thought is the analysis of of the way an unproblematic field of experience, or a set of practices, which were accepted without question, which were familiar and ’silent,’ out of discussion, becomes a problem, raises discussion and debate, incites new reactions, and induces a crisis in the previously silent behavior, habits, practices, and institutions. The history of thought, understood in this way, is the history of the way people begin to take care of something, of the way they become anxious about this or that”
-Michel Foucault, 1983 (Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Pg. 74)
Such a world as this one
“In a situation where economic forces drive people to become preoccupied with physical survival, the effects of leaving the value of a person undefined are far-reaching. In such a world, physical risks, abuses, and uncertainties escalate. The labor of the bio-robot appears ever more acceptable, desirable, and even normal.”
Adriana Petryna, 2002 (Life Exposed. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 3)
Another tack
“I start from another tack: from the premise that these discrepant stories provide ethnographic entry into the confused space in which people lived, to the fragmented and incomplete knowledge on which they relied, and to the ill-formed and inept responses that knowledge engendered. Coherence is seductive for narrative form, but disparties are ethnographically more compellingly powerful.”
-Ann Stoler, 2008 (Along the Archival Grain. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 185.)
Fail
“Those historians who draw a firm line between history and philosophy of history fail to recognize that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, philosophy of history.”
Hayden White, 1985 (“Fictions of Factual Representations” Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pg 126-7)
Counting (methodological) chickens
“…Hence inquiry begins midstream, always already embedded in a situation, one both settled and unsettled…
“…There are situations that may reach a determined state rapidly and others where it is not possible to tell before the inquiry is well underway whether, and in what manner, and for how long, it will take to move beyond a first loose state to one in which both the situation and its determinants become clearer, more determinate. Thus, to claim to know beforehand precisely what one is going to do, or to find, as grant proposals demand, would constitute bad method, poor logic, and falsely disciplined inquiry. Or, more accurately, it seems to me, run the risk of no doing inquiry at all…
“…since inquiry arises within a problematic and indeterminate situation, the inquirer is not outside the situation, nor is she in a position such that she could construct something that was not to a degree present already…
“…Hence, problems and solutions are terms that are joined in practice and in that sense coproductive…The solution to a particular problem consists in a series of steps whose particularities are not know before those steps are undertaken”
Paul Rabinow, 2008. (Marking Time. Princeton NJ: University of Princeton Press. Pp 8-10)
Flagrant violation
“It is difficult enough to understand that a nation which has just begun to liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between different sections of the people and to establish a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declarations of 1791) the rights of the egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community, and should renew this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic devotion can save the nation (and is, therefore, urgently called for), and when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is in question and egoism should be punished as a crime…thus even in the period of its youthful enthusiasm, which is raised to fever pitch by the force of circumstances, political life declares itself to be only a means, who’s end is the life of civil society. It is true that its revolutionary practice is in flagrant contradiction with its theory.”
-Karl Marx, 1843. (“On the Jewish Question”. In The Marx-Engles Reader. 1978. Robert Tucker (ed). New York: WW Norton. Pg. 43-4.)
Generics
“If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”
-Hannah Arendt, 1951. (The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego CA: Harcourt Brace. Pg. 300)
Wherefore art thou, politics?
“The second set of problems is global: it appears as a systematic use of various forms of extreme violence and mass insecurity to prevent collective movements of emancipation that aim at transforming the structures of domination…I do not hesitate to speak of a politics of global preventive counterrevolution or counterinsurrection. But from another angle this ‘politics’ is really anti-political, because in a nihilistic way it leads to the suppression of the very conditions necessary to build a polity…the fields of politics and violence – a violence that seems to lack rational organization, not excepting self-destruction – are no longer separated. They have progressively permeated one another.”
-Etienne Balibar, 2004. (We, the People of Europe. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 116-7 & 125)
The Price is right
“our colonization of each other’s minds in the price we pay for thought”
-Mary Douglas, 1975 (via A Social History of Truth. Steven Shapin. 1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pg 28.)
This opinion is a mistake…
“Anthropology is often considered a collection of curious facts, telling about the peculiar appearance of exotic people and describing their strange customs and beliefs. It is looked upon as an entertaining diversion, apparently without any bearing upon the conduct of life of civilized communities”
-Franz Boas, 1928 (Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: Dover Publications Inc. Pg 11)
General ripening
“By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the process of production, [the concentration of capital] matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one”
-Karl Marx, 1867 (Capital Volume 1. New York: The Modern Library. Pg 552)
A big if
“If emancipatory politics is to meet the challenge of neoliberal capitalism, politics needs to be retheorized not as a science or set of objective conditions but as a point of departure in specific and concrete situations. This means rethinking the very meaning of the political so that it can provide a sense of direction but no longer be used to provide complete answers. In short, such a politics entails that we ask why and how particular social formation have a specific shape and come into being, and what it might mean to rethink such formations in terms of opening up new sites of struggles and movements…In the absence of such languages and the public spheres that make them operative, politics becomes narcissistic, reductionist, and it caters to the mood of widespread pessimism and the cathartic allure of spectacle or the seductions of consumerism”
-Henry Giroux, ‘The Poltics of Hope in Dangerous Times’, 2004 (The Terror of Neoliberalism. Boulder CO: Paradigm. Pg 133-4)
Theory of volume
“Anyone with a very loud voice is almost incapable of thinking subtleties”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, on ‘Danger in the Voice’, 1887 (The Gay Science. New York: Vintage. Pg 210)
Public terror, private terror
“The key point is that [Richard] Wright connected the violence found in the private, domestic sphere to the ritual public brutality that was a means of political administration in the South. This public terror did more than help create conditions in which private violence could thrive. It was shadowed by the domestic authoritarianism and violence which it also required if the racially coercive social order was to function smoothly. Both varieties of brutality were shaped by the active residues of slave society in which lines between public and private became hard to draw.”
-Paul Gilroy, 1993 (The Black Atlantic. Boston: Harvard University Press. Pg 175)
The punster
“Puns are frequent in ethnography. They position the ethnographer between his world of primary orientation, his reader’s world, and the world of those others, the people he has studied, whom at some level, I believe, he is also addressing…Through the pun he appeals collusive to the members of one or the other world, usually the world of his readership, thereby creating a hierarchical relationship between them, He himself, the punster, mediates between these worlds”
-Vincent Crapanzano, 1986 (“Hermes’ Dilemma”. In Writing Culture. Clifford & Marcus, eds. Pg 69. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.)
Test of translation
“…’Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English, into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English…The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue…He must expand and deepen his language by means of the foreign language. ([Pannwitz, in Benjamin] 1969: 80-1)’
…the good translator does not immediately assume that unusual difficulty in conveying the sense of an alien discourse denotes a fault in the latter, but instead critically examines the normal state of his or her own language. The relevant question therefore is…how she can test the tolerance of her own language for assuming unaccustomed forms”
-Talal Asad, 1986 (“The Concept of Translation in British Social Anthropology”. In Writing Culture. Clifford & Marcus, eds. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Pg 157)
Worried about his heirs
“it is important to say something and not just threaten to say something, and there are better things to do with even a defective inheritance than to trash it”
-Clifford Geertz, 2000 (Available Light. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pg 18)
Factory enthusiasts
“It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of the labor of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory.”
-Karl Marx, 1867 (Capital, volume 1. New York: The Modern Library. Pg 391)
Standard issue
“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)
Assignment
“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)
Shall we overcome?
“[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)
Man-eaters
“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)
A million-dollar-question
“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)
Emergency history
“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’)
Thought so.
“…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)
Sincerely yours…
“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)
The Trinity: Order-Savage-Utopia
“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.)
Proliferating Bullshit
“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.)
A passionate science, then?
“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
Surprise!
“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)
Moral (vs. Cultural?) Relativism
“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)
(Multi)cultural relativism
“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)
These Old Wars
“[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)
A Task
“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)
Rupture Ready
“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)
Relativism, simply put.
“Cultural relativism is first and last an interpretive anthropological—that is to say, methodological— procedure. It is not the moral argument that any culture or custom is as good as any other, if not better. Relativism is the simple prescription that, in order to be intelligible, other people’s practices and ideals must be placed in their own historical context, understood as positional values in the field of their own cultural relationships rather than appreciated by categorical and moral judgments of our making. Relativity is the provisional suspension of one’s own judgments in order to situate the practices at issue in the historical and cultural order that made them possible. It is in no other way a matter of advocacy.“
-Marshall Sahlins, 2002. (Waiting for Foucault, Still. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg46)
Anthropology, or nothing.
“…The phonetic alphabet is made up of all known phonemic distinctions: of all differences in sound-segments known to signify differences in meaning in the natural languages of the world. So in principle the objective description of any language consists of its comparison with the meaningful order of all other languages.
The same for ethnography. No good ethnography is self-contained. Implicitly or explicitly ethnography is an act of comparison. By virtue of comparison ethnographic description becomes objective. Not in the naive positivist sense of an unmediated perception— just the opposite: it becomes a universal understanding to the extent it brings to bear on the perception of any society the conceptions of all the others…ethnography is Anthropology, or it is nothing”
-Marshall Sahlins, 2002. (Waiting for Foucault, Still. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Pg 12)
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