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.