Koan in social sciences

Kōan in Zen-Buddhism is a story or sometimes an action that is used to instigate enlightenment. The closest equivalent in Christianity would be Christ's parables.

In social sciences, as in theology, we need to deal with complex intangible phenomena that nevertheless profoundly affect our lives. Often there are no names for them, or some kind of names need to be introduced to help the conscious mind deal with such a complexity. Good examples would be culture of fear,  structural violence or governmentality. They may come across as self-important inscrutable gobbledygook to those who have never pondered over complex process that make up our social life, but should quickly make sense to those who have. I've seen people having those lightb-ulb moments many times.

Sometimes one name is just to small to contain the whole web of relevant meanings, so we resort to parables or metaphors. The point is not in them per se, but in the truth at which they hint at. One of my favourite ones is about the all-too-oft misunderstood Lacan's mirror stage. Just like Budhist kōans it helps overcome binary thinking, analysing realities by way of binary opposites.

It seems to work for some and for many the spark just never ignites. We get answers to the level of our questions, forsooth.

Four best socio-psychological experiments

The four most beautiful and tale-teling experiments that combine the best of experimental science and participant observation are:

The Third Wave experiment

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

Stanford Prison Experiment  
Milgram Experiment

They all paint a rather bleak picture of the most of the humanity, however. Apparently, when given the chance most earthlings will turn into monsters. It is only their own pain or the fear of authority - God, government, parents - that keep most of them from that.

Interestingly enough, all the three experiments are considered controversial. All had to be terminated by emergency, as they, nearly or very much so, went out of hand - quite like actual life outside the ivory silo always does. 

Primary thinking process (definition)

Primary thinking process is what 80 to 90% of our mind is busy with, and of which we are only marginally aware  through dreams, Freudian slips, moods, insights, intuition, etc. Mental processes there are ideational, i.e., image-based, rather than what we commonly call logical or word-based. It is the playground of eternal myths and archetypes, where time and space conflate and the logic and common sense we earn through education do not apply.

This fundamental difference with the reality we are used to causes a lot of confusion among social scientists. Both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in the 1930s famously misunderstood Freudian psychology as being all about sexual urges. After the war, Victor Turner in his Forest of Symbols famously called the psychological "Medusa's cave", probably because social theory has no relevance to it whatsoever and thus effectively renders social scientists helpless/useless when dealing with human psychology. That's probably the main reason why, say, Rabinow was extra-careful to specify that he would by no means deal with anything even remotely psychological in his Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. This attitude makes anthropology, the science of the human, peculiarly devoid of the human. I blame it on Durkheim who was doggedly insistent on separating "social facts" from "sociological facts" to boost the position of sociology in the late 19th-century France.

One of the possible ways to bridge the primary thinking process with the secondary, rational one are kōans.

See also: how to marry social sciences and psychology 

Unlearn before learning

I see my objective as a  lecturer to explain how to think not what to think. That needs to start by getting principles of qualitative analysis under one's belt from sources, books and articles, where they are developed and elaborated on at length. Only after that we go on to learn to use them to make up our own opinions. In other words, we first analyse how knowledge is manufactured, evaluate the merits and demerits of each approach and then investigate how the state of the field has bee achieved by analysing its context. That way we can deconstruct public opinion, media influences social biases, scientific epistemes, personal opinions etc.: in other words, a meta-analysis of all existing points of view as opposed to simply asserting your own opinion at the expense of all others.

 

Some sources are very good to learn such principles of meta-analysis, mostly writings with a strong philosophical slant like Arendt, Baudrillard or Foucault.

Unlearning the old ways and accepting the uncertainty of new ways you are expected to discard as mere ideal types, can take a while. I saw first feeble flashes of light after about half a year and the process picked up the momentum at the end of the second year. I was lucky enough to choose a discipline with a major  epistemological preoccupation, namely anthropology, and also with a couple of lecturers extremely skilled at asking very good questions.

I recommend my students good sources as Zen-Buddism style kōans. There is no enlightenment in them, but in the truth at which they hint. Each attains their own, to the level of the questions they ask. Light never penetrates minds that are full of answers, rather than questions.

Epistemology (definition)

Epistemology in one sentence: 'How do I know that what I know is true?' 

Most scientists are never invited to ask themselves that question at any point of their professional training, because, as I have once overheard at one PhD research method seminar in a famous university, "that would undermine the very existence of our discipline". How very true.

Operationalisation (definition)

Operationalisation in social/psychological sciences is reducing the complexity of life (overdetermination) to two variables to try to explain the former by a quantified relationship between  the latter.

Serves to assert the status of a "proper science" by impressing those whose education never included mastering qualitative analysis.

Needs to be taken very seriously, as questioning its very premise will definitely yank the carpet from under the feet of many an academic discipline.

Green-washing

It takes A LOT of energy to develop and implement green technologies. As environmental costs are always disregarded in economic calculations, the madness of shipping Prius batteries twice around the globe for their production-assembling-sales cycle never registers in the mind of environmental activists. The so called green technologies are, in fact, another artificial "bubble" to sustain the growth of the credit-based economy, which exactly IS based on growth for the sake of growth. There is a name for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing

Now for a bit of constructive input: solutions cannot be found from within  the system that causes the problem in the first place, although the contradictions that arise in the process always contain the seeds of the gradual change that eventually will bring about a new system. 

In this particular case, no amount of updating the basic concept of an ever-more-complex mechanical vehicle will ever get us anywhere close to the much fanfared "zero carbon impact". It  is as an unattainable pipe dream as perfect elective democracy or the American Dream. Both are ideals taken out of their context and with their actual cost disregarded.

In this particular case of "green technologies", we are to ignore the energy necessary for extracting minerals to produce steel, glass and plastic, moving them around the globe and building facilities to produce, store and sell the products made of them. The impact of later releasing most of the energy, previously bound in carbon fuel, into the atmosphere as heat, is never calculated into the environmental impact of "green technologies" either. It is as if wind turbines and hybrid cars fall ready-made from the sky and, upon the completion of their usage cycle, are miraculously absorbed back into where they came from without a trace.

Human psychology and the financial system

"But we travel in a world with a systemic bias to optimism that typically chooses to avoid the topic of the impending bursting of investment bubbles. Collectively, this is done for career or business reasons. As discussed many times in the investment business, pessimism or realism in the face of probable trouble is just plain bad for business and bad for careers. What I am only slowly realizing, though, is how similar the career risk appears to be for the Fed. It doesn't want to move against bubbles because Congress and business do not like it and show their dislike in unmistakable terms. Even Federal reserve chairmen get bullied and have their faces slapped if they stick to their guns, which will, not surprisingly, be rare since everyone values his career or does not want to be replaced à la Mr. Volcker. So, be as optimistic as possible, be nice to everyone, bail everyone out and hope for the best. If all goes well, after all, you will have a lot of grateful bailees who will happily hire you for $300,000 a pop."

Financial Week

Contemporary trends

This a backup of my notes for the Contemporary Trends in the Study of Society course.

Epistemic Histories: Modern Sciences and their Objects of Study

The making of modern epistemologies

1) debates over foundationalism

Descartes/rationalism: science - accurate mental representations of the external phenomena; knowing is a mental property (as opposed to sensation)

Foundationalism: search for timeless foundations of knowledge

Greeks: sensations are the base of knowledge; no clear distinction between external/internal

Post-foundationalism: Hacking 1980, Rabinow 1986 - how various kinds of knowledge come into existence through specific historical and social conditions

Hacking, Historical Ontology Chapter 5 / IChapter 1 Inaugural Lecture

Foucault The Order of Things : 

Renaissance's episteme: plays of resemblances and symbolisms (Pilgrim peering through the sky; the wheel of cosmos, the wheel of the human)

Modern episteme: graphic mapping of things (Velasquez's Las Meninas, observed spectators)

Visualism (ocular-centric understanding of knowledge) . How far knowing has become equated with seeing? (Visual Studies)

Levin (ed,) (1993) - for Martin Joy, although Enlightenment, 20th century French thought suspicious of vision and its hegemonic role in modernity (Foucault, Derrida, Georges Bataille)

Fabian, The Time and The Other (1983, chap 4)- the methods of modern anthropology have been biased toward vision. Anthro knowledge is based upon and validated by observation (107)

Daston & Lubeck (eds.) 2011 History of Scientific Observation; very detailed accounts off how "over the course f centuries, observation as both word and practice, wandered from rustic and monastic settings to learned publications, eventually becoming the cornerstone of all empirical sciences". No mention of Chinese, Islamic and Indian scientists

Jack Goody The Theft of History

3. Our "Organizing Concepts" have a history

Why are objectivity (objectivity, other and society( came to play such significant roles on the organisation of modern sciences)

Hacking wrote o the history of organising ideas and thought styles in both natural and human sciences

Hacking - Mad Travellers, Detaining of Chance. (Statistics became the tool to predict and control the conduct of people, the creation of the normal, the idea of society was created)

Paul Rabinow: focus on France and former colonies (French Moderne); society is not something out there waiting to be described, rather can be studied as modern construct whose history can be traced back to the early 19th century

Fabian (1983, 2006) - traces the career of the Other as a concept, and its designation as anthro's object of study. In 1991 (Ethnographic Objectivity , he questions the use of natural scientific models by early anthros, calling for a more critical notion of objectivity, one that emphasizes (as opposed to erasing) the role of the ethnographer in the production of knoweldge. 

Thomas Kuhn - application of humanistic model and ethnographic methods to the practices of natural scientists.

Bruno Latour - (The Recall of Modernity) anthro explanations often fall short when applied to hard sciences, because of persistent old dichotomies like human/nonhuman and culture/nature.  The task f an anthropology of sciece is not to recreate divides, but to sit on the fence, attending to the co-emergence of scientific and political authority, to the shared existence of humans and nonhumans. Actants have their ow life. 

Fischer 2009 Anthro Futures and Rabinow 1992; 2002 - also call for a conceptual retooling of anthropology  if it is to better understand the merging words of techno-scientific labs and practitioners. Fischer moves beyond typical cross-cultural analyses, proposing a cosmo-politcal framework,.He explores the possibility of scientists circulating and collaborating o a global level, but acknoledging the uneven access to these networks (an issue neglected by Latour). 

The changing relations between Science and Soceity - reconfiguration

Latour (19990, 2007) infiltration has always existed.

Corporatisation and commercialisation of the sciences, with market forces playing a major role in the organization of techno-scientific research (KS Rajan ed. 2012, Rabinow 1999) after the Berlin Wall fall.

Emerging biotechnologies (genomics, swallable cameras, surgical implants) are

Rajan: Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics and Governance in Global Markets.

=======

Post-structuralism

Foucault
Derrida
Deleuze
Lacan
Kristeva
Lyotard
Baudrillard

• Deconstructing the underlying assumptions of Western philosophy
• Challenge the idea of structure, which presumes a fixed centre, a hierarchy of meanings , and a firm foundation. Attending instead to the multiplicity of meanings, t what has been relegated to the margins
• Rejecting meta-narratives (grand theories)
• Destabilizing binary oppositions (philosophy/poetry, literary/non-literary, writing/speech, self/other)
• Crossing disciplinary boundaries

"Post-structuralism was a product of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe which was 1968" Terry Eagleton

Michel Foucault 
Clifford Geertz: MF is "a kind of impossible object: a non-historical historian, an anti-humanistic human scientist, and a counter-structuralist structuralist". He resembled Foucault's work to an Escher drawing where doors leading outside bring one back inside."

1. Discontinuous History: both historical conditioning and historical openness, he disassociates from crude Marxism and liberal historians (free human subjects as agents of history).
huan history: constituted of ruptures and discontinuities.each entailing a transmutation in the possibilities of human action and thought. Early on: epistemes (Order of Things), later discursive formations

2. Discursive regimes: Order of things neglected them; rules and procedures according to which the normal ad abnormal and the true and untrue become established. Hence the intellectual is to change the political, economic and institutional regime of truth.

3. Productivity of Power through the Body 
not negative, the key site for its operation is the body and daily practices 


Jacques Derrida

1. Deconstruction 
"Not a method or same tool that you apply to something from the outside... Deconstruction is something which happens and which happens inside. There is a deconstruction at work within [fr example] Plato's work." (1997:9)

For Derrida, then texts self-deconstruct, even before someone tries to deconstruct them. They already and always contain with themselves what he calls aporia - contradictions of meaning. Texts embarass themselves, undo their own underlying logic. And the taks of a deconstructive philosopher is to spot and highlight those aporia (contradictions).

Syrotinsky 2007 Introduction on Derrida

2 Texts and writing: most Western philosophers vilified writing. They have installed valorised speech as something more pure and to our thoughts, viewing the written word as less authentic than the spoken word. Derrida rejects that hierarchy. For him, both speech and writing are filled with fragments, none of them conveys a supposedly pure and whole meaning. 

No last texts no final interpretation.  

All texts are endlessly marked by a spatial differing AND a temporal deffering. Derrida uses the term differance - how writing functions through absence. The meaning of the text  can never be fully realised. It is constantly subjected to the whims of future. 

2. Undecidability

to problematise all kinds of dualisms , "the undecidables". ghosts, hymen, the Greel god of Pharmakon - phenomena that do nto conform to either side of a binary (present/absent, cure/poison)  The undecidable threats classificatory orders, showing the limitations of established categories>)
Introducing Derrida (1996): zombies = cinematic life vs. death oppositions

Gilles Deleuze + psychoanlayst Guattari

Raijchamnn 2000 - lucid intro on Deleuze
  
1. Rhizome as the new image of thought: 
abandon hierarchical images (nt representation) of thought replacing them with horizontal ones

2 Singularity: zone of expressivity, although each individual singularity is unique it nonetheless reaches out, just like a rhizome, in order to connect to other singularities. when applied to  the social works, there no such thing as market in general, but individuals ad singular bazaars in this and that town. Each of them has the potential to connect to others, thus creating a network of markets.

3. A Becoming World and Lines of Flight: plasticity/fluidity of the social world of animals

The social world is a dynamic process of becoming, with unexpected turns ad complications. They do not limit individual possibility as there are lines of flight.

4. The crystal/diamond


CHALLENGING SUBJECTS

Subject as a philosophical idea

Freudian and Lacanian subjectivities

subjectivity - not innate ad inevitable, a fragmented product of incompatibilities (psychic vs. social), the human is a split entity, it 

Lacan: subject  decentred

1) humans are desiring, their needs are never their own, we learn how and what we desire from others

2) sense of selfhood through identifying with images that come from the outside ("The moment in which the mirror stage comes to and end... the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations")

3) no subject without language  Since language usage is caught up in the exchanges

4) three orders of the world: 

the Real (raw bodily desires and experiences) constantly infiltrates and battles with  the other two, the fart

the Symbolic - the blanket

the Imaginary - the mirror next to your bed

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks

psychoanaltical account of colonial subjectivities. Bodyliness of racism. Psychological workings of colonial power. 

Fanon's train accident: the pain of exclusion. 

Derek Hook (2012) - a critical psychology of racism, extra-discursive dimensions of racism. Anxieties over bodily proximity. Racism as abjection. Julia Kristeva - the abject (odours and fluids) that betrays our self-images,induce disgust, visceral reaction

Gayatri-Spivak - is uncomfortable with abjection, risks reproducing disgust towards the racial Other

Foucauld: Subjects-in-Process, power is not negative

The Subject ad Power 1982

dividing practices

the production of docile bodies (prison, schools, barracks, asylums) 

technologies of the self, ethical self-cultivation

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:gender is not innate, is produced through power relations (not negative)  

the repetitive "doing" making it appear stable and also become "undone" 

human agency can be "within" too

Mahmoud (2005): Butler's theory of performativity is framed in dualistic terms of doing/undoing

Deleuzian Subjects : Becoming-Subjects

A Thousand Plateaus: "becoming-animal" and "becoming-woman": anti-Freudian, wolf-man 

schizo-analysis: rejects pretraced destiny

rhyzomic animals: wolves and rats

Willard 1972 Daniel Mann

Rosie Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects

Holocaust - known to us through feature movies

First concentration camps (CC) -  Spanish in cuba, British in South Africa, the Boer war. Concentration of undesirables.

The colonial origin of CC.

Modernity as a necessary condition for the Holocaust (Bauman)

A social engineering project, social cleansing of undesirable elements

Agamben, Homo sacer - reintegration of Foucault's biopolitical, belongs to Western metaphysics (not a modern invention like for Foucault, sovereignty --> biopolitical)

zoeh (natural life, excluded from the political sphere) vs. bios (politically social life)

bare life - inclusionary act of exclusion, 

soveriegnty - to declare the state of exception

Home sacer - can be killed but not sacrificed, the worthy vs. the unworthy

"Muselmaenner supplementing their diet"

THE END OF HISOTYR AFTER THE FALL?

Was the pre-Fall worlds as dichotomous as many claim? (Yurchak, Verdery)

Doesn't the postsocialist doctrine of "transition" reproduce the very linear, tautological mdels associated with socialism? (Raman and West, Berdahl et al)

The language of collapse?

Socialism as a web f immmoralities?

Power through the control of financial institutions and money. Money is a yardstick of effort, energy and lifetime. 

Regime is only used for Socialist or Islamist states

Hypernormalisation of ideology

Hyper-adoration of the leader - sarcasm

David Harvey - A Radical Geography of Production

Spaces of Hope (2000) 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk

Reserve army of labourers

"Geographical expansion, spatial organisation and uneven geographical development", enables capitalism (23)

The Right To The City (Ew Left Review) cf. Lefevre: "The freedom to make and remake our cities is one of the most precious but most neglected human rights."

Right to the City Alliance

Hardt and Negri -  A Radical Ontology of Production

Empire (2000) 

Multitude: War Ad Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)

hybrid labouring multitides who can and msut strive for a cosmopolitical liberation

The Multitude Against Empire - Hardt and Negri

Derrida: Deconstruction and Marxism

Spectres of Marx: "Deconstruction has never been Marxist, no more than if has never been non-Marxist, although it has remained fatihful to a certain spirit of Marxism,to at least one of its spirits." (1994:75)

Zizek (2001): Hardt and Negri are "poets of mobility" who use Deleuzian jargon to conceal their "lack of concrete insight"

Eresto Laclau and Jacques Rancier: Towards a Radical Democracy?

Antagonistic (Laclau) and anarchistic (Ranciere) models of democracy'Where the old revolutionary roads breaks off ito shadows" (Adrienne Rich

Where a poor man stands and pees on the wall and those who mad it Youssra el Hawari

KIT

1. Another world is possible - utopianism

Anthro and critical thinking

Levy-Strauss:=, The little glass of rhum: 

search for societies that do not exist

our own society is the only one we can change without violence because it is our own

secular

- utopianism

- new thoughts

- unthought in what... thin

impertinent comparison

(It;s okay to eat people when shipwrecked, not okay to kill.)

[Montaigne's first exercise was on cannibalism]

All theory comes from life and returns to life (cf. Derrida, White Mythology in Margins of Phylosophy: metaphysics is White mythology, the sensory basis of philosophy)

Conditions of possibility 

Rats

Diversification of topics <-> unification of topic

studying alternate logics ==> studying social fields

"exotic other" -or looking at the familiar in a different way

"Anthropology is good to apply at weddings".

How can this be?

What would the world have to be in order for this to be different?

"Should I say it again? Should I say in a differet way? Not sure if I can say it in a different way."

You don't have to follow the logics of a concept/notion/belief.

"If we are to draw the internal organs. Spleen? Hmm? Pancreas? hmm?"

Body is the location of an illness, not the cause of it. vs. Disease is an organ dysfunction.

Order of Things: Anthro and psychoanalysis are counter-sciences that suggest there are other ways to our thinking, other logics.

Look athe principles of soceity as possibilites.

Hage: critical thinking is about stepping outside what wwe are.

David Braby and Occupy

"Is that clear? I need nodding."

Theory - Method - Subject (Problem) - Anthro is a tripartite discipline

Method; participant observation (physical presence, interlocution)

Theory chages in response to social order (questions arise from anthroplogits who are humans.)

Theory comes from ehtnography (Turner, Douglas)

"Levy-Strauss saved Anthro from its own stupidity in regards to theory".

Gender + Household - Kiship

New Reproductive Technologies vs. Kinship (marriage equality)

Theory changes, subject changes.

Method changes the slowest

Auge!

The hardest thing to think in a different way is material/natuarl world

"material semiotics" J Law

Agency is not confined to human beings,

Airy-fairy

"I used to go to fieldwork with atypewriter. It ahs a carrage. Evryoe know what a cariiage is. I need to check every time"

"Don't record. you won't have the time to transcrive that shit when you've returend form fieldwork. Life is short"

GLOBALISATION 1

"Before you open your mouth, the world goes in."

Globalisation - movement (value chains) of people, capital, ideas, objects, microorganisms

We rely a lot on government regulations 

"It's a good mnemonic fr this week: WTF. Very handy:What's beeng going this week? - WTF?"

Scoop, the novel (Wag The Dog)

Innovation - emergent forms of life (Fischer)

Exclusion: frontier 

Marginalisation

Collier: language that captures instability, explain the appearance of being stable, it's something that people are doing, not something that just exists out there.

Latour Jamais Modernes:

Scientific simplification - purifies the world by erasing complexity

Change

Object of research: What people do (change) in a social field

If you at any location close enough you will see every element of global in it.

apparatus (Feldman 2011) - multiple locations as part fo global movement always with elements of contingency because it is not fully coordinated

Manchester School - politicised approach to anthropologys

It's easy to be out of fashion clotheswise you can turn out f fashion into a fashion. it's much harder to be out of fashion in terms ideas, you need to be at least aware of,

Close study of specific instances is more important than generalisations because of unpredictable contingencies

"Stocking's writing is very boring, dunno how he manages that. It's like walkig across the Great Plains."

American anthropology - a lot of it driven by anxiety about how do you make a nation out of all these people.

"Boaz believed that in the US there will be broad racial and cultural mixing. Ahahaha optimist."

The primacy of ethical - militant anthropology.

Julie Livingston - historian, 

Choosing the problem and terrain is the most important part of science as social action.

Attentiveness to detail in a complex social world.

What do you put movement i relation to?

a lie - people lived in discrete communities unrelated to each other.

Berths in Jane Ayre - also in Vanity Fair

the only way to think of local hermetically sealed from everything outside.

evans-pritchard -  Introduction to the Nuer: the Nuer are very isolated.

Cattle pest brought by Italin troops from india wipedout African cattle and wild animals

Engaged anthropology takes a pre-existing problem

Multi-sited ethnography - moving physically following the object 

"When you are senior, you will have three years to follow the hamburger."

Globalisation

Modernity (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - ideally universal, in reality - only for some, savagery and barbarism for others )

US History: mainstream by Paul Johnson, of the repressed - by Roger Zen

Modernism

Post-Modernity

Post-Modernism

Creative destruction ( Thompson - The Making fo the British working class, Enclosure, fens draining)

Lindeburgh, London Hanged (standartisation, universalisation of weights and measures -- democratisation of values (coin-clipping etc.) 

throw-away line

The sky above, the mud below

Anthropos (Rennaissance, thinking outside religion; Enlightenment)

David Harvey - Condition of Modernity

Hobbs vs. Boyle (oxygen) - nature/ontology -

Anthropos - the custodian and exploiter of the nature

separation of nature

-ism - intellectual response (modernism to modernity)

Conditions of possibility (the Rats)

people having free choice to move and become what they want to be irrespective of their birth, to create themselves

the ideology of self-creation

the basis of democracy - with the market everything will work out in the end

the ability to sell one's own labour

WASTE: human waste, wasted lives, wasteland, waste materials --> 

"let's get this straight - skyscrapers started in Chicago, not in New York"

Skyscrapers was supposed to become the new cathedrals

The Eiffel Tower - demonic hubris

contract vs status.

Modernism - is a mode of operating that can be changed of overcome

Post = after but not necessarily over

Le Corbusier building was blown up, dimmed uninhabitable.

Just using elements for achiteecture, stripped of decoration = Modernist architecture

Ontology (why) vs. Epsitemology (how) 

Donna Haraway - 

Post-Marxism - gender or ethnicity?

Mike Hobart: "Anthropology does not exist any more." Don't worry it's just words!"

Logic of late capitalism. No confidence in human progress toward universal emancipation, very 

Structure of sign and play, Derrida, Structuralism taken to its logical conclusion. - if its' the structure that makes things meaningful, it can be made everywhere, there is no signified. 

Culture Wars in the US over PoMo

declaring the hegemonic discourse null and void undermines the ability to critique it

"We are not talking about society, it's cont trends in studies of society"

"Gated community withdraw from the broader society - don't wanna pay for sewage poor people might use it"

Latour - modern constantly creates new hybrids - human has the right to speak, so human vs. non-human

"Let's talk about malaria, we can do nothing about it, so let's talk about it."

Remove all attachments, talk about malaria in pure form

pre-modern - religion, medicine bound together into a messy ball

Hybrid forms are always there, we have never been modern

Haraway,  Modest Witness

Mitchell Can The Mosquito Speak? - 

Vincent De Spary - The Body We Care For, smart rats, stupid rats 

Latour: Science gives a voice to nature

post-human vs. biopolitical

Money - levels of abstraction (legal tender for all debts, public or private)

"Let's talk about it quickly, so you don't get the chance to fuck it up too much."

the exchange unlike things

fungible 

"When the stock market is down, when there is little money out there, arts and anthropology tend to get fucked up."

The value of a company depends not on what it produces but on how investors see it future prospects. That's how things become delirious

Anthropos is an object of study, not a reality

enclosure vs. cities

 no voxpops in Canary Wharf, private property

value  of crossing borders is created by ccreating borders

everything is productive

"Have lead poured into wounds simply for trying to kill the king, I don't know what's wrong with you people, overreacting."

Governmentality/biopower - support lives vs. letting die

Gotta see the whole, not separate it into compartments and ignore some.

Classic: Social construction vs.

repro-techs

family

Social construction: Method-theory-object (relational)

Ian Hacking: Making up people (dynamic nominalism, Multiple Personality Disorder, from the interaction between the doctor and the patient) - a person has power has a certain way of talking to a powerless person. MP - is the fuucntion of what thed  octor wants.

There are always consequences for definitions! Interpellation -

"BF's name on a tattoo on your shoulder. You stay in a hospital they will call you Walter.!

"I'm not gonna lie to you. I haven't  read that."

Sartre,Being and Nothingness. Even there is nothing physical about words/definitions, the very practice creates the embodiment and the enactment of a human being.

You can misrecognise yourself. 

Re-draw a circle around disparate symptoms = syndrome 

"in constructing the list they way I did - talking about social constructions!" 

Canguilhem - On the pathological and the normal

Pathology is not only a fact, it is also a vlaue

We re-equilibrate the norms that nature creates.

Pathology is a disvalued deviation of a norm that an organism creates 

The main point in life is to stay alive

Patient uses the doctor to re-establish the normal

"I will pile on examples until you say: stop, you're making it worse"

Normativity, make the environment adjust to us.

Environment is always value-laden, Some things are food and some are not. 

The difference between food and shit.

Shit enema - fecal bacteriotherapy

How we construct things changes what we do about them 

A good number of our cells are not us.

We are a natural experiment, combination of genes and foreig cells Every time we fall sik, it;s a test to that combination.

Normalisation  is the social imposition of norm

We are anormal naturally, we become abnormal when socially declared so.

Sarte, Anti-Semite and the Jew: the Oother without whom his  life would be perfect,

Simone de Beauvoir: On ne nait femme, on le devient. Men have the freedom of movement. 

Roland Barthes: Mytholoogies 

what is the real woman?

Men may not be in the picture but they define things

Independent woman = man in drag

Marriage equality with reference to social construction

Loving vs. Virginia 

The changing of the definition of the Other by Others themselves

The creation of Whiteness

Scherbiger: comparison between races - between males,  comparison between genders - among White

The state lets some live and lets some die: biopolitics. 

Post-Colonialism

• How can this  be?
• What can be done?

Post - After, Over, Beyond?

Differences can be with no value, they start to matter when given a social value,made into pathologies: difference becomes deviation (value judgement)

Damas - non-assimilationist

Diifference is not a pretext for inequality

It's not about the body, it's about the mind

Precedents and predecessors

Foucault (Order of Things) - foundation for Said's Orientalism

in terms of continuities of development.

it;s not about origins or stories

it's about discontinuities, disruptions and differences

Value, Life, Language, Labour

When thought changes, it changes at the same time in all areas in the same way.

Episteme has a shared set of values

is not an idea that gets traction

"SOAS is a unique biosphere for the internationalist of micro-organisms"

Derrida: differance - exclusion of the different

We cann resiist wwhatt we are called interpellated, but we need to respond

In interpellation, you will her what they think you are and what they think they are

Colonialism is based upon a notion that difference is what it is. 

Burke was badly treated by Englishmen when in disguise as Persian

Being Orinetal is something that you learn, it's socialised.

Mbembe

Orientalism

Post-colonialism: after or over?

Marxist: culture is secondary, political economy underlies this broader situation (Subaltern debates: Indian mud-wrestling)

Achille Mbembe vs, Mahmoud Mamdani

Mbembe: African political instability is not colonial, it IS post-colonialism

The role of author in the post-colonial world

Chebe (West African)- must write in African languages

wa Tiongo (East African, went to jail  for writing in vernacular) - English/French give a wider audience

Harlem Renaissance - establishing one's capacity for civilisation,, establish a voice to represent experiences of Black Americans.

Ebonics vs. "proper"English

Sati - self-immolation, whether it should be stamped out or t a device for Indian middle classes to control the poor

Joining the army is a socially accepted sacrifice

the sobbing soul of Negrohood

Orientalism - same ole, same ole

Django is about power

Race is a powerful denominator

Arguments that come from Post-Colonialism 

Gupta and Sharma, Globalisation of the Post-Colonial State

The US idea of freedom is tainted because of slavery: free labour needs no support. Justifies taking away support for the sake of being free. 

Slavery is only mentioned in the 13th amendment

Abolition was the fight for the Western states

Savage (developing, need to be taught, managed by the colonial master) vs. civilised

What does "weak state" mean? Post-Colonialism is a new form, not just over or

Good ethnography: Pay attention to what people say/think they mean.

Need to look ebyond the edges, it's there where everything is happening

What is the Post-Colonial condition?

Unpack the thing and look at the principles: relationship of the state and the society

Metropole vs colony: extractive (Sharma) 

Offshore taxation 

the relationship between the sovereign power and deterreitorialised capital is much more flexible

NHS and welfare cuts; Values in disease, value in poverty

The First World becomes open to an extractive relationship with corporations

, they become colonised

Sovereign power is crucial to many transactions even though states and nations become more fluid

Episteme vs. discourse 

Citizenship

Every tribesman now is a citizen of somewhere

Anthropology in a global world:

Themes:

Sovereign power - control over death/letting live vs. biopower - control over life/letting live

Falling outside the interest of biopower, re. race  ==> genocide

Citizneship is a condition, not a way of being. A set of laws and words that makes you such

dynamic population

political subjects

The darker side of Modernity

slavery, camps, bare life (Shadow entities related to citizenship) -does not equal citizenship

Human being as subject and as object

Enlightenments: Human beings are meant to be ends to themselves (but not animals, means to an end: they work you and then they eat you) - living objects (pets)

Slavery - human as a pet, baby as a pet

Living subject:

Anglo-Saxon law: Right for protection of your home; security of family life,participate in government (work, vote, fun for office), right to leave your country

Citizen vs. alien: once you leave your country, no one is obliged to take you in. No right that can be infringed.

LEGAL ALIEN

Whether the Government s entitled to remove pregnant women and babies and send them abroad

Migrant makes a contribution to economy,they pay taxes, but they will not draw down. (Whiteness

the Caucasian  - ontologically capable of self-governance in the US (in Europe - only aristocrats)

Citizenship bound with sovereignty

one's political capacities vs. one's status as a subject

state of exception through terrorism

"The queen cannot call me in the middle of the night and tell me to kill someone because you swear allegiance only in law"

sovereign/incest -both in the legal system and outside of it

military service -  citizen duty for men

dynamic population - population movements - deconstructing citizenship - entitled to demand (the Katrina)

sovereign -> teeritory, population

deterritorialisation of nations because people move 

Citizenship can be manipulated

biological citizenship 

Petryna, Life Exposed

Cosmopolitanism -  cosmopolitan bonds (cosmopolitan Nazis) sharing similarites

mode of creating cultural tolerance and sharing, city life, uprootedness from the countryside, mixing and ecumenism are enoucrages, hence frowned upon 

cosmopolitanism in the military

we have to have a way of undertsanind ghee way people operate even if we don't liek them."

Jessica Stern - The Protean Enemy

militarisation of social life

3-5 questions that are important to you as a citizen (find your core) your main interest is your main organising device

dynamic populations - people with different legal statuses within the same family, people take advantage of multiple statuses

you want their intelligence but not their subjectivity

public value to biovalue

CITIES

Human subject - freedom as opposed to slavery: the right for peaceful assembly, vote, safety of your home

Human object - using people as tools, prove that as an object you're worht appropriating

Once outside your country, you're not a citizen, then it's down to your usefulness - utilitiarianism

Urban life: compromise of the human subject within a certain space. 

contract vs, status - voluntary entry into an arrangement, defined by your activity rather than by your birth

The French Republic changes the status of marriage from a sacrament to contract, then need to acknowledge diivorce

people detached from the land and from their statuses, rootlessness

Spatiality of the body - moving in the city Merlaut-Ponty - our bodies establish here and now, they keep us alive (there is not mind and body spit - Latour, if you rmoved either, you're dead)

Lefebvre "Right to the City" from Writings on the City

Harvey - Right to the City (Paris vs.. capitalism - > the boulevards) 

City in two ways

1) as a planned entity (De Certeau), plan- utpoc model how the city should  work => control

city grid - don't need to know  where you are now

Medieval city - small area, ruled irrationally , local performative logic

Humans always live in a human-affected habitat

Cities - environment of human choice to be in certain relationships to each other and other forms of life

Sassen, Harvey: cities vs global economic isssues, increasing scale of capitalism  (house prices, housing benefit cap pushing people out of the city)

Sassen - capital does not move in a friction-free way, there are workers who move it, global cities are partly affected by the work force that they require, people in the WTC were not big-time brokers, just office workers

Bangkok - increased exposure to capitalism and globalisation

urban renewal - urban removal => politics of urban space

Chicago  Hyde Park - the only area with no covenance

Matt Davis - city not planned by overview, most humans live in cities, in self-organised communities (slums) )slums ->ghetto-> black community), infrastructure - self-provided 

Wacquant - hyper-ghetto, people can't  get out of for economic reasons

Simon - humans as infrastructure, ways to have things done

Lagos should not exist in terms of city planning, looks like a disaster, potholes slow traffic down so people can sell things, market under a flyover, biggest electronic market

skateboard pit in the Southbank - hip and down with the folks, remnant of what it used to be

human subject <-> human innovation

human subject vs. human object

relativist - how can you celebrate innovation in slums, things should be provided, how

once things improve, a different set of people comes in

(in)visibility, how people can be pushed to the margins <--> public good, competing public goods 

"homelessness is very easy to achieve" and very hard to get out of

"divorced - hold on to the booze"

medicalising homelessness, making an individual problem, rather than a structural problem

the hardness of urban living - construction of space in terms of urban neighbourhood, cross-species relationship (having a dog)  

neigbourhhood as experience (have a dog, go out for a walk -- purposeful  aimlessness ==> urban human relationships can be harmonised or disharmonised by these practice

interstitial places

Wacquant - hyperghettoes <==> prisons , can't get out of the cycle as the capacity to  earn a living is diminished 

war on the poor, criminalising the poor peeps behaviour, cut people''s money to the point where they can't engage in

the spurious idea that you can just walk into work 

homelessness -- you constantly exposed to random events

as if experience is a human universal, some people don't have experience, because they don't link things they way others do

dejaley

experience depends on the ability to deliver a logical self-story (Michael Jackson)

knowing how to be invisible 

certain deprivation is inflicted upon people for the sake fo the public good (no schooling without a vaccination certificate)

responsible for oneself as an individuals (freedom vs. slavery) 

public good is not served by that kind of logic

criminalisation vs. medicalisation

"Homelessness in the theatre of repression"

Thompson - Square Park in NYC shared by different groups 

demonisation (Heygate@The Guardian)

("The Secret History of Our Street")

The map (plan) is not a territory (experience)

The territory is the place itself, unmapped . Psychogeography (Will Self, walking to the airport) 

"all right, fair enough"

pre-arrest - making police control invisible

VIOLENCE

modes of self-invention

win by substantial plurality

violence as labour (modes of labour) when living in precarious economic situation 

precariousness of life - not the only cause of crime, also profitability

Dick Hobbs - detectives in the East End need to share the culture with thieves

mafia exist where police and state can't be trusted, mafia sells violence and protection from others and themselves

exciting, adventure, solidarity, unpredictable, control one's own time, life purpose 

crime -> mafia -> army -> bandits  (political agenda) -> insurgency -> counter-insurgency ->  privatised military (manual labour - bodies)

insurgency -> groups with smaller loyalties (bands, local gangs that stay put in their violent ways even when the political situation is resolved)

Jesse James - underground fighter for the Confederacy, never gave up fighting , robbing banks, became a celebrity  like Dick Turpin, low-intensity terrorism against local communities 

London Hanged 

 fighting skills, combat experiences, trained in violence, willing to commit violence 0 then it becomes labour, internal loyalties based of hsare experiences

violence as relationship

almost all crime needs some kind of organisation for economic purposes to enforce an agreement: economic relationships are guaranteed

violent entrepreneurship

citizenship - human object/ human subject

social exclusion -> structural violence (violation of citizenship) systems politically disenfranchised, politically excluded (Philipp Bourgeois - drug addicts)

lacking judgement --> no rights

social exclusion in cities

"There is always a bit of snow just to remind us who is boss."

De Certeau/Scott: normal everyday kind of resistance

economy of  violence

humanitarian aid/situation - exists where there's no state

humanitarian law - no human rights as not  state, so only civilian vs. combatant

humanitarian assistance needs to be violent 

every situation is full of local complexities/histories, multiple social networks that not only move people around but create people in place

Fassin, D. 

Humanitarian situation: outsiders, witnesses "in it but not of it"

trauma and victimcy become transactable

passivity is emphasised to justify support

holistic theory of viictim - people can do opportunistic  things and still can be victims 

gendered - men are excluded, establishing deservingness

people choose options that would kae tham looks less appealing

we are inclined to be predator, need to be recognised 

Frankl - pressure shows that we are different, but under pressure we do things that we otherwise wouldn't do

we should never give over power to others (cf. slavery)

when you live in unfavourable circumstances: keeping degradation outside your inner life (I'm in that but not of that)

the trusted witness of science

Medicines sans frontiers - Human rights advocates, the Red Cross - non-political, do not testitfy

"Anthropology - cheerful pessimism."

Modern battle tends to be urban

nation-on-nation wars are on the wane, national defence is shrinking

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

indeterminacies

uncertainties

bioethics/ethics

Life is capable of self-preserving activities, of staying alive (Canguilhem)

normal vs. pathological 

"For a dying person you're not bad"

Life is constantly changing process, values about it change continually.

heath is a combination of  physical circumstances and meanings people attach to it

we are set of process that harmonise among each other, otherwise they readjust

Monica Greco 1998: illnesses of undetermined cause (somatisation)

Margaret Lock: death is a protracted process, brain death is the standard of death, in Japan is terminal  disorder, down to the family to decide (social)

we need classify things to make them definite and start building meanings around them

Susan Sontag, illness as metaphor 

US Surgeon General is a military office: In NYC if you have a TB and don't take your medicine, you can be incarcerated.

Health and well-being

Foucault: Biopolitics - making live and letting die. Population as a productive force, come with the modernisation.

Letting die by creating the state of exclusion for those who are made out to be sick

Briggs - racial discourse to naturalise health inequalities

Briggs: Race is social and have a biological effect. 

Latour: fact is the purified form of how things work

People always look for a generalisable rule 

Social inequalities essentialised help people ignore  people. Structural violence.

We can be many different things in community.

International public health issues. 

HIV and SARS are people's friends and they are friend of anthropologists

When something does not  respond to treatment, need to look into social

Helen Epstein, book reviews

Global funds pumping money, based on pilot research into microogranisms

Investment in bog-standard public health standards would help more

http://cureviolence.org/ ceasefire (cure violence): criminality as a public health issue, interrupters are called in, used to be part of gang life themselves, but left, they are trained, they recruit people at emergency rooms funerals, try to intervene in the cycle of violence

Changing the view of the process form a policing mater to a broader community issue, medicalisation of sorts, restore  abilty of participation by decriminalising it.

David Graber's book First 5000 Years

Ethics - attempts to draw line across things that are fuzzy and confused, to minimise hharm

Kleiman: in theory a universal principle but also happens in local contexts. Rather than eradicated polio, direct that money into more general things.  

Miriam Ticklin: ethics - universalism/localism, decision-making -> distribution of good, harm/protection.

Significance of witnessing, politicisation of medical decision: who deserves humanitarian aid

Lead paint and low levels of intelligence - NYT Book Review

Tuskegee experiment: syphilis, Disposability of life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

Predacious impulse of the human instincts

"Try to look like you're listening."

 "I'm a genius." - 3 times, Audrey Cantlie

Ethical variability - Petryna