Professional Documents
Culture Documents
edited by
Godofredo Pereira
Martin Holbraad
Graham Harman
Joo Maria Gusmo
Bjrnar Olsen
Eyal Weizman
Reza Negarestani
Susan Schuppli
Jonathan Saldanha
Regina de Miguel
Michael Taussig
Marcello Maggi
Ayesha Hameed
Paulo Tavares
Godofredo Pereira
CONTENT
11
preface
i.
17
Things as Concepts:
Anthropology and Pragmatology
Martin Holbraad
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45
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ii.
87
In Excess of Calculation
A conversation with Eyal Weizman
101
A Vertiginous Enlightenment
(JWST and telescopic view of the object)
Reza Negarestani
119
Impure Matter:
A Forensics of WTC Dust
Susan Schuppli
141
Vibrational Mediations
Jonathan Saldanha
157
An Eect of Verosimilitude
Regina de Miguel
CONTENT
iii.
169
Bodily Unconscious
A conversation with Michael Taussig
183
199
215
On the Earth-Object
Paulo Tavares
233
Underground
Venezuelas Territorial Fetishism
Godofredo Pereira
251
image credits
255
biographies
261
acknowledgments
Things as Concepts:
Anthropology and Pragmatology
Martin Holbraad
Within anthropology, much has been written about the possibility of a posthumanist critical social science that is able to
emancipate things (objects, artefacts, materiality, etc.) from the
ensnaring epistemological and ontological bonds of humanism,
logicentrism and other modernist imaginaries.1 The aim of this
essay is to take this project further by exploring the possibilities
for an anthropological analytics that is able to allow things by
which I mean something akin to things themselves, though
only in the strict heuristic sense that I shall specify presently
to generate their own terms of analytical engagement. Might
the feted posthumanist emancipation of the thing be shown to
consist in its peculiar capacity to unsettle whatever ontological
assumptions we, as analysts, might make about it (including,
perhaps, the ontological premises of a posthumanist turn itself)?
Might things decide for themselves what they are, and in so
doing emancipate themselves from us who would presume to tell
1
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Claude LviStrauss, The Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
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T H I N G S A S C O N C E P T S : A N T H R O P O L O G Y A N D P R A G M AT O L O G Y
Sensu Roy Wagner, Symbols that Stand for Themselves (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986).
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distinction between things as they are in the world and the various and variable concepts that people may attach to them. Indeed,
as long as the analysis of ach remains within the terms of an
axiomatic distinction between things and concepts, it cannot
but ask the question in terms of representations, beliefs, social
constructions and so on. Since we know that powder is just
that dusty thing there on the diviners tray, the question cannot
but be why Cubans might think that it is also a form of power.
The move to posthumanist analyses of things in anthropology has been motivated partly by a desire to avoid precisely this
way of raising questions, and in particular to overcome the blatant
perversity of seeking to parse alternatives to our own metaphysic
of concepts versus things in terms of just that metaphysic (for
Cuban diviners powder is power; we, on the other hand, ask why
they might believe it to be so, since, from rst metaphysical
principles, it cant be so). Hence the penchant in recent writings
on material culture (and note the telling ontological oxymoron)
for so-called relational ontological premises which seek, in one
way or other, to erase or otherwise compromise the concept versus
thing divide.6 Still, rather than placating the conceptual imperialism of modernist metaphysics by binding things to an alternative
6
E.g. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice
Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005); Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood,
Dwelling and Skill (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Tim Ingold, " Materials against materiality", Archaeological Dialogues 14, no.1 (2007): 1-16; Bjrnar
Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Langham:
AltaMira Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010).
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For more detailed discussion see Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari
Wastell, "Introduction", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically, ed. Wenare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 1-31; Martin
Holbraad, "Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: an afterword on the ontography
of things", Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no3 (2009): 431-441; Martin Holbraad, Can the Thing Speak?, OAP Press, Working Paper Series #7 (2011), available
at: http://openanthcoop.net/press/http://openanthcoop.net/press/wp-content/
uploads/2011/01/Holbraad-Can-the-Thing-Speak2.pdf
For classic arguments to this eect with reference to the things anthropologists
call gifts see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic
Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990); Cf. Amiria Henare et al.,
Introduction, 16-23.
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analytical task, in other words, cannot be to add to the theoretical purchase of the term thing by proposing new ways to think
of it e.g. as a site of human beings objectication,9 an index
of agency,10 an on-going event of assemblage,11 or what have you.
Rather it must be eectively to de-theorise it, by emptying it out
of its many analytical connotations, rendering it a pure ethnographic form ready to be lled out contingently according only
to its own ethnographic exigencies. To return to our example: if
calling the powder babalawos use a thing implies that it could
not, properly speaking, also be a form of metaphysical power,
then let us not call it a thing in any sense other than merely as
an ontologically and analytically vacuous heuristic identier
merely a tag for identifying it as an object of study, with no
metaphysical prejudice, and particularly with no prejudice as to
what it might be, including questions of what it being a thing
might even mean.
Step II: concept = thing
If the rst step towards letting things set their own terms of analytical engagement involves emptying them out of any a priori
9
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987); Daniel Miller, Materiality: an introduction, in Materiality, ed. D. Miller
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-50.
10
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998).
11
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice
Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
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Martin Holbraad, "Ontology is just another word for culture: against the motion",
Debate & Discussion at the GDAT 2008, Critique of Anthropology 30, 2 (2010): 179185, 185-200 passim; Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
13
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What I wish to make explicit here, however, is the irreducible contribution that, heuristically understood, things themselves can make to this work of conceptualization. Indeed, with
reference to the case of powder in If, one might say that while
ethnographic information derived from babalawos serves to set
up the anthropological conundrum that ach in its dual aspect,
so to speak, poses, it is what I shall call the pragmatographic
information culled from its peculiar qualities as a thing (viz. as
powder) that delivers the most crucial elements for its solution.
Step III: thing = concept
Consider what powder actually does in the diviners hands. As we
saw, spread on the surface of the divining board, it provides the
backdrop upon which the oddu, thought of as deity-signs, come
out. So powder is the catalyst of divinatory power, where that
power is understood as the capacity to make divinities come out
and speak. Now, note that, considered prosaically as a thing,
powder is able to do this due to its pervious character, as a collection of unstructured particles its pure multiplicity, one might
say. In marking the oddu on the board, the diviners ngers are
able to draw the conguration just to the extent that the intensive
capacity of powder to be moved (to be displaced like Archimedean
bathwater) allows them to do so. The extensive movement of the
oddu as it appears on the board, then, presupposes the intensive
mobility of powder as the medium upon which it is registered.
In this way powder renders the premise of the oddus revelation
explicit, as a matter of these signs inherent motility: by way of
gure/ground reversal, oddu gures are revealed as a temporary
displacement of their ground, the powder.
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of the powder upon which they are physically marked: its pervious quality as a pure multiplicity of unstructured particles,
amenable to intensive movement, like the displacement of water,
in reaction to the extensive pressure of the diviners ngers,
and so on. Each of this series of material qualities inheres in
powder itself, and it is by virtue of this material inherence that
they can engender conceptual eects, setting the parameters for
the anthropological analysis that they aord the argument. As
an irreducible element of the analysis of ach, it is powder that
brings the pivotal concepts of perviouness, multiplicity, motion,
direction, potential and so on into the fray of it own analysis,
providing its own answer to its own problem its savage power,
if you like, analytically (conceptually, ontologically) to unsettle.
So what is at stake in this mode of analysis is the capacity
that things have to engender conceptual transformations of
themselves, by virtue of the conceptual dierences their material
characteristics can make. Indeed, this irreducibly pragmatological
element, as we may call it,14 of anthropological analysis is nothing other than the corollary inversion of our earlier concepts =
things formula, namely things = concepts. If the formula concept
= thing designated the possibility of treating what people say
and do around things as ways of dening what those things are,
its symmetrical rendition thing = concept raises the prospect of
treating things as a way of dening what we as analysts are able
to say and do around them. At issue, to coin a term, are a things
14
Cf. Christopher Witmore, The realities of the past: Archaeology, Object-Orientations, Pragmatology, in Modern Materials: Proceedings from the Contemporary
and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference, eds. B. R. Fortenberry and L.
McAtackney (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), 25-36.
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15
See also Martin Holbraad and Morten A. Pedersen, "Planet M: the intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern", Anthropological Theory 9, 4 (2009): 371-94.
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