Sarah Palin, National Oriental

Sarah Palin's Alaska is overwhelming me. The format of the show is the travel narrative: Sarah & co. fly to various parts of Alaska to see the sights. This travel narrative format makes every excursion a paradox, since Sarah is supposed to be both an Alaska native and to a certain extent a foreigner and every scene involves her simultaneously claiming to be an insider but also an adventurer. She is also at pains to defend her status as a "real hunter," "real Alaskan," a "real fisherman" and of course a "real American" with "strong values." She's constantly under attack and, just like in her political life, bothers to defend herself on the show. E.g., the season's final episode is a recap episode with additional commentary, including responses to mail they received after the "controversial" episode where Sarah shoots a caribou. Having been accused of not being a "real hunter" she proves her authenticity by taking the caribou antlers to the taxidermist so that she can further identify as an Alaskan.

"This is classic Alaskan decor. I don't know too many homes without a bear rug or antlers on the wall. Most Alaskan homes have something that brings the outdoors in."

Sarah's attempt to negotiate her own identity as a "real American" first by hunting then by demonstrating that she knows how to handle the animal aesthetically results in a dramatic restriction of Alaskan identity and a bizarre claim about the identity of Alaskans.

Sarah grapples with the phallus

Since it is obviously not true that all Alaskans have taxidermy on their walls it follows that there is a set of "real Alaskans" that Sarah belongs to and which, presumably, other residents of the state of Alaska do not. Her essential claim to be a part of the Volk then forces her to exclude a portion of precisely the demographic she identifies as traditional, natural, and of course real. The identification of the real and authentic involves the drastic shrinking of that category. Ultimately this logic would yield no demographic at all, but simply a field of singularities. Her identity and adequacy is thus tensed between an auto-Orientalizing, essentialist narrative of Alaskan and American identity and a logic that isn't productive of collectives, but of singularities that are capable of reversing the moral value of individuality and uniqueness.

"Some people would probably consider Alaskans as having this unique way of decorating our house, you know, because we have a trophy there on the wall. Well, unique maybe to others is the way we talk. Some people think we have an accent. Some people think it's unique that once in a while I make up a word."

"Unique" presumably means unusual or abnormal, but her normalcy is precisely what she's trying to demonstrate. Her thoughts on Alaskan traditional aesthetics are capable existing on a continuum with her individual behavior, the much-contested "refudiate" and whether or not it's a quirky neologism or an inability to speak the national language and thus belong properly to the class of those capable of successfully identifying as American.

Regular folks as such sit down for a moment of national mediation.

The contradictory travel narrative where the politician is tensed as a moment of national generality mediating between the authentic inside and the manufactured, political, economic outside is of course an essential part of modern American presidential campaigns. What we demand more than ever today is an impossible identity with the national politician that causes him to prove again and again his concrete identity in such a way that identities get voided of content.

Psycho-Analysis: What Is It?

Prince Paul may have been the first to ask - but Sturgeron Prandleforth shows he certainly won't be the last!

Naturalism, Analogism, Symbologism

I like Descola too, and am likewise especially taken with his grid (or perhaps we should call it his Generative Grammar?). TH's Question 1 - that is, how does Descola's schema account for the conditions of possibility of his own anthropology? - is one that would be interesting to pursue further, perhaps with access to his other writings. It is especially intriguing in that the alleged functionalist symbiosis with analogical societies would involve a discontinuity with the (Naturalist) local ideology of the functionalist anthropologists, presumably occasioned by putting on their anthropologist hats. This in turn would suggest that multiple positions on the grid are in fact available within a given society (or perhaps this is only rendered possible by the social forms of organized inquiry particular to modern/Naturalist societies, which may just be another way of saying that "Naturalism is an ontology capable of generating analytical systems that are not only capable of grasping themselves but all other possible ontologies"). This problem seems germane to (the critique of) symbology, which would probably have to understand in Descola's terms as an occasionally assumed, impoverished analogism underpinned by a practical naturalism. In order to pursue this line of thinking, it would be necessary to extend Foucault's investigation of analogism and naturalism as historical forms whose genealogy we can investigate, specifically the latter as a mutation of the former; analogism as it persists in symbology could then be understood as a collective memory of the form of organization whose suppression enabled our current classificatory schemas and social collective, retaining an unconscious structuring force as a kind of " limit-experience" of the social, to use a Foucauldian phrase. This would tie in nicely with Foucault's account (in OoT, not HoM) of the madman as "the man of primitive resemblances" (49). In some sense, the madman (exemplified by Don Quijote) is the lone analogist in a naturalist world. Madmen, as Jared Lee Loughner has reminded us of late, generally sound like symbologists, and this is no mistake if, as I am suggesting, both bring to the surface in different manners the unconscious remains of a largely suppressed analogical imagination. As I closing hypothesis, then, I would like to posit that symbological literature may be best understood in these terms as a colonization and instrumentalization of the limit-experiences associated with the analogical system by the local ideologies of naturalism proper to the late capitalist world order.

Really Existing Cacognosis

Last night, D, a neighbor with whom I had always had relatively pleasant relations, subjected me to an aggressive attempt at proselytization. What follows are what I take to be the most significant of my observations:
1) D believes that the events narrated in the gospels are well-established facts. He claims that their historicity is corroborated by hundreds of witnesses, and denying the reality of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection would be as absurd as denying that the Second World War happened. My attempts to point out that a journalistic reporting of pure, unadulterated facts of the sort he was implying that the gospels were doing was more or less generically and epistemologically foreign to the 1st century Eastern Mediterranean, needless to say, did not really register.
2) D also believes that "no one else has ever claimed that someone was resurrected," and therefore it is unimaginable that several witnesses could have claimed that this happened without it actually being the case. My assertion that the motif of resurrection is common in, for instance, Greek and Hindu mythologies did not seem relevant to him since, of course, we are talking about historical facts and not myth. This made clear what I had already recognized: that for him, there is nothing even remotely metaphorical or symbolic about the gospels.
3) D presented me with a series of multiple choice-like options: either Jesus was God as he claimed, or he was a madman ("he couldn't have been just a 'great thinker,' because great thinkers don't go around claiming to be God"); either you believe in heaven and hell, or you believe that we simply turn to dust at death, etc. When I attempted to answer "none of the above" or respond that the question simply had no meaning for me, D insinuated that I simply had not thought about these things out of sheer apathy.

At risk of belaboring the obvious, I would like to note the following. All are points which I had never ceased to be aware of on some level, but it was illuminating to have them forced into my consciousness in such a violent manner:
1) D's claims about the warrant for his beliefs are exactly the same as those of militant atheists/secularists. He claims that he simply has the facts right, and appeals to the indisputable authority of the texts and institutions attesting to those facts in order to establish that their truth is simply transparent and indisputable to any reasonable person. It was important for me to be reminded of this, since it reminds me that literalist Christians and literalist scientific ideologues ultimately speak the same language. D, like Dawkins, believes that people who do not accept the truth he is promulgating are simply too apathetic and/or obtuse to accept the facts.
2) D would seem to be a real-existing cacognostic, at least in terms of our grid, in that he believes that the gospels have real historical referents and that these referents are strongly relevant. This reminds me that we need to think more about the socio-political significance of the fundamentalist as cacognostic in symbological fiction. Fundamentalists, as in the cases of Silas and the Camerlengo, can be cacognostics, or they can be quite distinct from the cacognostic as in the case of Senator Kurtz and some of Reilly's and Navarro's characters; but one of the things that symb-pologists (B) praise about DVC is that it is supposedly anti-fundamentalist (even though it shares the literalist epistemology I encountered in D). Given the symbiosis of fundamentalists and late capitalism, I hope this line of inquiry re: fundamentalism might productively intersect with the investigation of Vulgar Economic Determinism I proposed in my previous post.
3) The impossibility of this conversation, the sense that we were simply speaking two different languages, was far more extreme than I could have expected. It was especially notable to me that what I might have taken to be my most sophisticated and well-thought out positions (for instance, my claim that while I believe that there is "a truth" to the ideas of heaven and hell, but that that truth does not make me think that I will go to one of them when I die [i.e., although I did not put it this way, they possess a social truth, not a literal truth]; my argument that we cannot even know with absolute certainty even the "facts" of what happened last week in our own town, since facts are the result of people's cumulative narrations, much less the "facts" of some obscure events that occurred two thousand years ago in a radically different cultural and historical milieu) were clearly interpreted by D as expressions of ignorance and apathy. He didn't even do me the honor of considering me a dangerous relativist, he simply thought I was badly informed!
4) "The question of the neighbor." I sense that what I just described as the impossibility of this conversation is entirely emblematic of many of the problems we have been discussing here and on the other blog. So my question: How do I interact with the neighbor? Do I attempt to continue this impossible conversation? Do I instead attempt to confine our discussions to the weather? is one with many ramifications. And it is one I am, for the moment, completely unprepared to answer.

Natural Duelists!

For our collective enlightenment I have saved two pieces by Rita Astuti to the Dropbox.  I have only read the first (chronologically - it's also shorter), the 2001 memorial Malinowski lecture entitled "Are we all dualists?"  This must be from before the scales fell from her eyes, since as far as I can tell she's using the sorts of cognitive psychology experiments Tevans-Britchard described to prove something a little more conventional, viz. that the Vezo are dualists in the conventional Cartesian sense, but (crucially) that they are not born that way.  She seems to implicitly endorse a linguistic model of culture and to think that her results demonstrate the pluripotency if not totipotency of the human infant psyche, rather than its limits.  The main point appears to be that you can't take what people say about, in this instance, their ontology at face value, but rather have to apply tests which will allow you to observe the "inferential reasoning" which they are actually using to discriminate between various categories of being.  This subterranean ontology still appears, in this lecture, to be very much like a language.

I am expecting something wildly different from the second piece, which I assume TTTB has either read or heard a version of in person, and which is called "Constraints on conceptual development: a case study of the acquisition of folkbiological and folksociological knkowledge in Madagascar (2004, co-authored with Gregg Solomon and Susan Carey).  It's a little long but is double-spaced, and I am guessing will provide some fertile points for further discussion of the limits of human cognition and the potential contributions of cognitive psychology and neuroscience (as opposed to their symbological counterparts.

Needless to say, I am a babe in the woods with this material and if Sir Tevans-Britchard has alternative recommendations I defer entirely to his hard-won expertise.

CORRECTION:
I can't save the Malinowski lecture, but it's freely available at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/471/

Asceticism is the Lutric Component of Lutrae

A fine initial foray into the demanding but necessary work of archaeo-lutrosophy.

It is also worth noting that, at least the last time I was there, the Monterey Bay Aquarium had installed a substantial, purpose-built basement wing to house a colony of Oriental Small-Clawed Otters.  At the time, I admit, I dismissed this as a venal attempt to capitalize on the rampant popularity of their captive sea-otters, at the expense of their stated mission to study, preserve and display the marine fauna of the Monterey Bay and its associated Trench (not the Orient).  However, G.B.'s analysis makes me quesiotn whether we should not rather discover a more profound movement here.  Let us recall Foucault's (1961) preface to Folie et Déraison, with a key substitution:

In the universality of the Western ratio, there is this division which is the Orient[al Small-Clawed Otter]: the Orient[al Small-Clawed Otter], thought of as the origin, dreamt of as the vertiginous point from which nostalgia and promises of return are born, the Orient[al Small-Clawed Otter] offered ot the colonizing reason of the Occident, but indefinitely inaccessible, for it always remains the limit: the night of the beginning, in which the Occident was fomed, but in which it traced a dividing line, the Orient[al Small-Clawed Otter] is for the Occident everything that it is not, while remaining the place in which its primitive truth must be sought. (History of Madness, xxx)

Is it possible that in fact what we were witnessing was a "primitive caesura" in the experience of ott(h)erness?  Did this installation mark the birth-pangs of an epistemic shift in the conditions of possibility of otter discourse?  I suspect so, and if I am right a return to that exhibit may produce a fuller understanding of what I propose is being constituted as a "limit experience" in the Western experience of the otter and, by extension and as Bremsëlhacker suggests, of "cuteness" as such.  It seems to me that the most important initial question is to delineate precisely the relations which are being constructed between Lutra marina and Aonyx cinerea.  Not to prejudice the investigation, but I fear we are going to find the rudiments of a Control Society among Mustelidae.

Bremsëlhacker's analysis of "cuteness" and his question as to whether otters are fetishes for one another seems to me to return us to a question which emerged from the Cotswolds Wildlife Park Circle in 2005 or so, viz. "can animals be interpellated?"   It seems clear from at least Lutra marina's apparently incessant self-offering as a "cute" object of adoration that in some sense it participates in maintaining the relations of production which are manifested in, say, "Hairy Otter" t-shirts "all by itself."  However, I for one (following Goefferey Galt Harpham,) am inclined to believe that whatever the phenomenological events in otters which produce their constant photogenic displays are, they are part of a broader ascetic imperative and are perceived as such by the otters.  Thus, it would be an oversimplification to consider them simply as fetishists or interpellees without understanding the larger structure of their ascetic Weltanschauung.

Archaeologies of Capitalism in Monterey, Part I: Tracking the Ott(h)er

"Sea otter pelts were the prize sought by early Spanish mercantile companies engaged in a triangular trade with China via the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, exchanging the valued Pacific Coast fur for Chinese quicksilver, essential to mining in Mexico. Pelts were traded between ships' captains and the missions, usually with official mediation by presidio officials. With a contract on offer, including promises of rare precious imports such as religious artifacts and manufacturing equipment, the padres then turned to Indians for the collection of otter skins. As the trade flourished in the 1790s, English and U.S. ships began cruising the coast in search of direct hide deals with missions and local Indians. This avenue of exchange also prospered judging from local observations about better prices from British and American traders and Spanish concern over 'contraband.' Mission San Carlos played a prominent role in the otter trade and joined the smuggling with a Boston ship in 1796.

"Although the trade continued into the 1820s, when the sea otter population declined, it never became a major industry for California . . . Yet if the otter trade fell short of economic transformation, it provided valuable precedents for the immediate future. It initiated California's participation in the global economy and began undermining Spain's mercantile monopoly. It introduced English, U.S., and South American merchant sailors to the coast, preparing the way for trade expansion in the Mexican period. Missions and Indian communities found new opportunities in commercial relations with the outside world, including experience with shipping contracts that would prove useful in subsequent transactions."

John Walton, Storied Land: Community and Memory in Monterey (University of California Press, 2001), p. 95




(Monterey Bay Aquarium Gift Shop, 2011)







Nearly two hundred years after the collapse of the regional pelt trade, the otter remains the privileged nexus between Monterey and the circuits of global capital. Just as the fashionable ladies of nineteenth century Shanghai and Moscow could adorn themselves with its alluring fuzziness, today's stressed office employees in New York, Houston, or indeed Moscow or Shanghai can vicariously enjoy its winsomely ludic self-absorption via the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Sea Otter Web Cam. On a casual stroll down Cannery Row, one hears a Babel of languages comparable to what one might have heard in the rowdy taverns of Spanish and Mexican Monterey; then as now, the Portuguese, the Chinese, the Russians, the French traverse oceans for the sake of an encounter with the bulkiest and most thoroughly aquatic of the mustelids.




(T-shirts sold on Cannery Row, 2011)





Now, Hardt and Negri might identify in the changing roles, functions, and forms assigned to the otter an emblematic shift from the production of and circulation of objects as commodities towards the production and circulation of affect, and yet Georg Wilhelm Steller's description of the lutra marina, one of the earliest offered by a natural historian, suggests that the production of affect was always crucial to the otter's exchange value: "These animals are very beautiful, and because of their beauty they are very valuable, as one may well believe of a skin the hairs of which, an inch or an inch and a half in length, are very soft, very thickly set, jet black and glossy. The soft underfur also among the longer hairs is black; but the tips, or the hairs from the middle on, are black, while the bases or roots are whitish, lustrous like silk, and silvery" (De Bestiis Marinis, 1751). Note here that the vocabulary of Enlightenment aesthetics unfortunately lacked a term for the "cute" even though the category was not infrequently invoked in recognizable fashion by Kant and Baumgarten in addition to Steller; in most cases, the solution was to subsume the qualities associated with cuteness (fuzziness, etc.) into the generic category of the beautiful. Thankfully, some of our colleagues in animality studies are making every effort to redress the perennial neglect of cuteness. This line of research is essential to any future efforts to comprehend the otter as actant in the capitalist incorporation of the California coast and the particular nature-cultures it has engendered, since the key to the otter's long history as a vehicle of commercial expansion is the appropriation of cuteness, in the rich visual and tactile dimensions in which it manifests itself in the otter.

I recently quoted Latour's allegation that "[t]o accuse something of being a fetish is the ultimate gratuitous, disrespectful, insane, and barbarous gesture." But do otters invite fetishization, or rather what is it about otters that has invited their successive fetishization by the various human groups they have come into contact with? What kind of a hybridization is the appropriation and circulation of cuteness? Also, are otters cute to otters, that is, do otters fetishize each other? Is their fuzziness an adaptive trait in sexual selection as much as in survival in cold Pacific currents (surely some would want to tell us so)? Are otters fetishes-among-themselves?




(Aleutian fetish of otter mother and pup)

"It is not only the objects of science that resist. . ."

"The mistake would be to believe that we too have given a social explanation of scientific facts. No, even though it is true that at first we tried, like good critics trained in the good schools, to use the armaments handed to us by our betters and elders to crack open—one of their favorite expressions, meaning to destroy—religion, power, discourse, hegemony. But, fortunately
(yes, fortunately!), one after the other, we witnessed that the black boxes of science remained closed and that it was rather the tools that lay in the dust of our workshop, disjointed and broken. Put simply, critique was useless against objects of some solidity. You can try the projective game on UFOs or exotic divinities, but don’t try it on neurotransmitters, on gravitation, on Monte Carlo calculations. But critique is also useless when it begins to use the results of one science uncritically, be it sociology itself, or economics, or postimperialism, to account for the behavior of people. You can try to play this miserable game of explaining aggression by invoking the genetic makeup of violent people, but try to do that while dragging in, at the same time, the many controversies in genetics, including evolutionary
theories in which geneticists find themselves so thoroughly embroiled. . .

"Objects are much too strong to be treated as fetishes and much too weak to be treated as indisputable causal explanations of some unconscious action. And this is not true of scientific states of affairs only; this is our great discovery, what made science studies commit such a felicitous mistake, such a felix culpa. Once you realize that scientific objects cannot be socially explained, then you realize too that the so-called weak objects, those that appear to be candidates for the accusation of antifetishism, were never mere projections on an empty screen either. They too act, they too do things, they too make you do things. It is not only the objects of science that resist, but all the others as well, those that were supposed to have been ground to dust by the powerful teeth of automated reflex-action deconstructors. To accuse something of being a fetish is theultimate gratuitous, disrespectful, insane, and barbarous gesture."

-Bruno Latour, "Why critique has run out of steam"

Biological Constructionism, or Organisms as bricoleurs

"It is not that organisms find environments and either adapt themselves to the environments or die. They actually construct their environments out of bits and pieces. In this sense, the environment of organisms is coded in their DNA and we find ourselves in a kind of reverse Lamarckian position. Whereas Lamarck supposed that changes in the external world would cause changes in the internal structures, we see that the reverse is true. An organism's genes, to the extent that they influence what the organism does in its behavior, physiology, and morphology, are at the same time helping to construct an environment." - R.C. Lewontin

Questions on language and language-likeness

I intend this post less as a positive contribution than as an invitation to further discussion on a specific question raised in my colleague Tevans-Britchard's latest post. I refer to the provocative but somewhat truncated assertion that "thought is not like language," followed by brisk criticisms of the "culture-as-text school" and its "assumption that culture is language-like." In the context in which these remarks are made, I do not quite follow how they proceed from the foregoing statements advocating a "learning and cognition" approach. As it is summarized here, the ethnography of the Vezo summarized brings into focus a gap between what people may state their beliefs to be and what their behavior would suggest that they "believe." Describing how this kind of cognitive gap works is, of course, relevant to the question of ideology in its classic Marxian formulation: "sie wissen es nicht, aber sie tun es." Also, and very superficially, the experiment seems to suggest that the gap separates two kinds of knowledge/belief about heredity, one kind which is by necessity imbricated in the social imaginary structuring the subject's participation in complex intersubjective networks, another of which bears a less direct relationship to the maintenance of those networks (hence, I assume, the researcher's decision not to use domesticated animals, which of course belong to those networks, in the attempt to elicit alternative assertions about heredity). All this is very intriguing, but I am not clear on what the precise implications for language and linguistic models are here. On one hand, language is part of (the primary instrument of) the experiment, and the medium in which the beliefs that are in question come into view for the researcher; on the other hand, there appears to be a question about whether the category distinctions made by the Vezo with regard to heredity are best understood in terms of linguistic models or innate cognitive apparatus (I am not clear that this is what is being asked, but if so this would seem to me to be a false dichotomy).

In any case, I would be interested to hear in greater detail what the consequences of this kind of experiment, and of the approach (or approaches) that it embodies, are for the use of language as a model of a) "thought" and b) "culture," because I feel like I lost the thread at this point, and the general problem of language as a model/point of reference for social and cognitive processes is in general a matter of great interest to me. Part of my difficulty in following the argument here is that I lack much of the context for these remarks because of my ignorance of how the "linguistic turn" has played out in anthropology post-Geertz, but allow me to add a few of my own observations, which I believe have some resonance with T-B's.

One of the most infuriatingly lazy manifestations of what I have been calling "stupid foucauldianism" as I understand it is the reduction of complex social phenomena to "discourse." One of the conveniences of this approach for literary scholars is that it opens up vast new arenas of study: if "culture" is structured like a language, then it has a "poetics," and the traditional tools of literary analysis can be applied to any area of culture. This is, crudely put, Stephen Greenblatt's (avowedly Geertzian) model of "cultural poetics," which has begotten an astonishing array of studies of practically everything under the sun from within English departments. Much of value has emerged from these efforts, but what tends to get lost when we examine Elizabethan midwifery or the China trade or the colonization of Paraguay from the standpoint of "cultural poetics" is any sense of the the manner in which social and cultural phenomena operate under and respond to constraints which are not coterminous with those of a literary text, such as the availability and circulation of raw materials or the presence of specific diseases; N.B. I am not invoking these latter entities as constituting a "hard reality" against the background of which culture exists, but rather as social constructs as well, but social constructs whose construction does not follow the same rules and patterns as other kinds of constructs such as literary texts. The tendency just described, in which social construction is reduced to one more or less discreet set of rules, constraints, and practices, offers a good example of one potential misreading of the project of interpreting social phenomena "against a background of emptiness." The other obvious problem with the approach just described is that it assumes on some level that linguistics (generally an impoverished third-hand version of Saussure) provides a solid grounding for knowledge of other phenomena: it thus could be described as "vulgar Saussureanism." A more interesting line of inquiry to my mind, beginning in some sense with Jakobson and continuing to some degree with Barthes and especially with de Man, takes the "literary" as a standpoint from which to probe the limits of linguistic models; from this currently unfashionable angle, "poetics" cannot provide a master code in that it marks the limit points of "the code" as such as a framework for analysis and explanation. Although I shall claim a certain degree of agnosticism here, I should make clear that on some level I am fundamentally uncomfortable with rejecting the implications of the "linguistic turn" altogether, particularly insofar as lines of thinking informed by it have brought to the fore in what was at least initially a novel and salutary manner the rhetorical dimensions of social facts, which I believe to be crucial component of any productive description of them.

In any case, I would be interested to hear more from T.T.T-B and our other illustrious contributors on the subject of the "linguistic turn" and linguistic models of both cognition and culture. While Geertz provides one model of reading culture as "language-like," that approach looks very different if we take, say, Lévi-Strauss as an example. In other words, when we say that culture looks or does not look like or follow the same patterns of language, what kind of model of language are we proceeding from? In my own case, the relevance of such models mainly pertains to what has frequently been situated in the realms of "rhetoric" and "poetics," i.e. "figural language," metaphor, metonymy, etc. Despite the reservations stated above, I remain committed to the vitality of a kind of inquiry that foregrounds these dimensions in their pervasive use throughout social life, even as I stand opposed to any form of reductionism that takes their operations in isolation from other structures and constraints.