Quantum Anthropologies

Life at LargeBy Vicki Kirby

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5055-2

Contents

Preface: The Question of Supplementarity—A Quantum Problematic…………………………..viiAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………………….xiii1. Anthropology Diffracted: Originary Humanicity…………………………………………….12. Just Figures?: Forensic Clairvoyance, Mathematics, and the Language Question…………………223. Enumerating Language: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”……………………….494. Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture Was Really Nature All Along?……………………685. (Con)founding “the Human”: Incestuous Beginnings………………………………………….896. Culpability and the Double-Cross: Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty………………………………111Notes…………………………………………………………………………………..137Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………..155Index…………………………………………………………………………………..163

Chapter One

Anthropology Diffracted Originary Humanicity

* * *

As deconstruction aims to shake up the routine logic through which we conceptualize the world and our place in it, it is not surprising that all the different manifestations of the deconstructive enterprise show a special fascination with the notion of beginnings. Deconstruction scrutinizes the foundations of an argument, or what appears so firmly established that it requires no justification, because its fixation with origins uncovers their peculiar capacity for innovation, endurance, and even ubiquity. The suggestion that a beginning has something of a mutating existence tests our comprehension in a most fundamental way, for it seems only natural to think of an origin as a fixed and discrete event, captured forever in the aspic of one particular place and time. After all, we require initializing coordinates in order to discriminate one thing from another, attribute causal explanations, or arrive at even the most basic decisions and evaluations in our personal and public lives. We simply can’t assume a sense of self or hope to understand the world without them.

Although a deconstructive practice will certainly concede this necessity, these causal moments of initiation that also presume a terminus will suffer a dimensional collapse nevertheless. And yet the complexity here is that the origin’s existence isn’t snuffed out by this contraction, nor is the particular intensity of its energy diminished. It is more a case of trying to refine and elaborate the rather frugal conventions of measurement and comprehension through which we confer existence, hoping that an exuberance of fractal dimension might emerge. How else can we apprehend the immensity that is accommodated within the instant?

Geoffrey Bennington, a writer who seems quite at home in these paradoxical spaces, notes that deconstruction’s obsession with beginnings can have “scandalous” outcomes. Bennington draws on salient references from the Derridean opus to remind us that the origin incorporates myriad related questions, whose erratic provenance is simply “unacceptable” and even “ridiculous” in traditional philosophical circles. After all, deconstruction conjures with “an absolute past that has never been present … an originary repetition … a finite infinite … a supplement which ‘produces’ what it supplements.” And as if that wasn’t enough, it also insists that “perception does not exist … that the proper name cannot be proper … that the cogito is mad errancy … that there is nothing outside the text … that in the beginning was the telephone, [and] that I am perhaps dead” (Derrida and Bennington 1993, 18–19).

It is not surprising that curiosity about deconstruction’s more scandalous aphorisms has been diminished, and even dissolved, by years of repetition. How many students and teachers of contemporary critical analysis for example, would today experience consternation, alarm, or even wonder, upon hearing Bennington’s list of improbable conclusions? A more likely response is to disengage from the peculiar and especially challenging conundrums of deconstruction by interpreting them as signs of a particular style of literary and cultural criticism or philosophical methodology (albeit the methodology of those who eschew methodology). As a result, these difficulties become the identifying signature of a certain school of criticism rather than provocations for an urgent reassessment of how we comprehend reality. Thus, the more successfully deconstruction problematizes the origin and with it a battery of companion notions such as causality, identity, temporality, and so on, the more the intransigence of these “concepts” is demonstrated and deconstruction’s own identity is affirmed as “the theory that does that.”

On first glance it appears that the perverse existence of the origin, with its obstinate persistence and yet playful errancy, is not a mistake that can be corrected. And perhaps it is for this reason that the actual implications of opening the origin to a past that has yet to arrive simply can’t be taken seriously. We would be unlikely to say, for example, that things are naturally this ambiguous, that the ontological weight, or “hereness” of an entity, could have no location (nonlocality), or to put this another way, that the trace of an entity’s “being-itself” could be present in various and seemingly separate locations. Indeed, evidence of an object’s ubiquity or the mutability of its definition is regarded as incontrovertible proof that this existential perversity can be explained and, as we will see, thereby denied or put aside. The insistence that ontological complexity is merely apparent, that it is an attribute of Culture’s operations, or that its anomalous signature has a human author, is an attempt to hold the line on a more radical, or certainly more disturbing, investigation of what we mean by identity and causality. Within contemporary critical analysis, the accepted way to deal with this threatened meltdown is to attribute these complications to the vagaries and conundrums of language, and to insist that it is not the object itself that is under scrutiny but “the discursive effect” of the object’s mediation. Thus natural determinations assumed to be rigid, prescriptive, and capable of extinguishing any puny appeal to individual or social agency are replaced by cultural determinations that are regarded as plastic, contestable, and able to invite intervention and reconstitution.

It is this style of postmodern criticism and its permutations that I want to interrogate, that is, those approaches that interpret the self-referentiality of language as the constitutive self-enclosure of Culture. However, in anticipation that my imagined reader is sympathetic to the general reasoning behind cultural constructionist arguments and their successful assault on a conservative humanism—in short, the assumption that individuals have an autonomy that guarantees agency and intention as rightly theirs; that they are self-aware and therefore responsible for their own thoughts and actions—I can only reassure such a reader that it is far from my intention to repudiate the importance and complexity of these arguments. On the contrary, my dilemma is that I am entirely persuaded by the value of the work that I address; indeed, so much so that I think the direction of its interventions and insights have far greater reach than has yet been conceded.

My task then is to try to explain why I regard current understandings of “language,” even those that derive from the canon of postmodern and poststructural criticism, as restricted; and further, why these same arguments, viewed from another perspective, might be said to have scientific and quantum implications. The sheer exorbitance of these implications makes them difficult to work with because one can’t decide in advance whether they can usefully be enlisted into current ways of determining and resolving political and ethical quandaries. My conviction, however, is that our inability to contain these difficulties and accommodate them within current management strategies opens the question of use and political pragmatism to something that is easily censored, by definition.

The need to control and thereby deny difficulty is certainly not new. To mention just one example, the bizarre aspects of atomic identity and determination in physics tend to be handled in a similar way by most of us. Although we may believe, as quantum science indicates, that the nature of physical reality exceeds our everyday perceptions in quite fantastic ways, we tend to rationalize the discrepancy by attributing complexity to a particular arena of research and scholarship, as if the arcane nature of these findings is quite irrelevant to the stuff of the quotidian. Even among the physics community this same attempt to ignore the most astonishing implications of quantum relations was maintained even as the empirical evidence for their plausibility (Bell’s inequalities) began appearing in 1964. On this last point, Karen Barad comments, “Considering the profundity of Bell’s theorem, it is an interesting sociological fact that for many years after its publication scant attention was paid to this result…. It is difficult not to read this as a measure of the lack of interest in foundational issues in quantum theory in a resolutely neo-positivist period” (2007, 291). Another argument that discourages curiosity about the possible relationship between everyday life and quantum relations is the received wisdom that the minute scale of quantum behavior can have no application in the macroscopic world of human affairs. Again, Barad explains that although such behaviors are not readily discernible they are nevertheless operative and have sometimes been observed, such that “the question of macroscopic quantum states is not an idle matter” (2007, 270). Given an apparent need to quarantine the ordinary fabric of life, and importantly, how we think about it, from any troublesome complication, it is not surprising that the compass of deconstructive criticism is also quite small, confined to only a few disciplinary locations within the humanities and even there, appearing more like a historical curiosity than a viable contemporary challenge.

Despite the extraordinary scope of Derrida’s achievement, it has found a familiar home in those disciplines that profess special expertise in studying the vagaries of rhetoric, textuality, discourse, and representation; in sum, language itself. However, given that “language itself” in the Derridean corpus involves a generalized displacement of the way we conventionally think about language, there is something disturbing about the utter predictability of this localized accommodation. My interest here, however, is not one of broadening the purchase of deconstruction as if the inclusion of architecture, law, history, or a battery of other disciplinary formations might answer this sense of restriction. After all, these particular disciplines have already addressed and significantly elaborated deconstruction’s relevance. My aim, rather, is to interrupt the complacency with which we view “language” in all its forms, because even in the disparate areas of inquiry that concede the textual or informational nature of their disciplinary objects the notion of language is merely extended to accommodate different media, different genres of representation, or different behaviors whose metaphoric resonance with language structures is acknowledged but not explained. Derrida informs us, however, that deconstruction is not a methodology: it is not a procedural set of maneuvers, an application or template of inquiry through which an alien object might be ciphered. Nor can its implications be subordinated to the philosophical dialectic, whether Hegelian or Platonic, that pursues the self-experience of thought where truth promises to emerge as the accurate resolution of self-reflection. In other words, a Derridean intervention is not reducible to the Concept, at least not in any orthodox sense of what we might mean by this.

Derrida’s “point de méthode” (point/lack of method) (1981a, 271), then, is not compatible with the circumscribed aims of philosophy proper—”the closure of philosophy” in its disciplinary form, as Derrida calls it (2001, 114)—nor is its “object” simply contained within what we conventionally call representational systems of whatever stripe. Making a similar point, Rodolphe Gasch? one of deconstruction’s most erudite and careful commentators, makes the provocative claim that “deconstruction is never the effect of a subjective act of desire or will or wishing. What provokes a deconstruction is rather of an ‘objective’ nature. It is a ‘must’ so to speak” (1986, 123). Although Gasch?is certainly not reverting to any sense of scientific instrumentalism here, noting that “deconstruction, as a methodical principle, cannot be mistaken for anything resembling scientific procedural rules” (123), his comments remind us that deconstruction is difficult to place.

Deconstruction can certainly appear to adopt a meta-position in relation to its object, a gesture that seems compatible with the instrumentalism of scientific methodologies and claims to objectivity. Indeed, we might remember that Derrida’s earliest attempts to explicate the difficulty of his project actually consider grammatology as a positive science. In the particular chapter in Of Grammatology that explores this question, Derrida concludes, “The constitution of a science or a philosophy of writing is a necessary and difficult task” (1984, 93). And in answer to Julia Kristeva’s question in Positions, “To what extent is or is not grammatology a ‘science?,'” Derrida refuses to reject the term. “Grammatology must pursue and consolidate whatever, in scientific practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure. This is why there is no simple answer to the question of whether grammatology is a ‘science'” (1981b, 35–36).

If Derrida’s “double-science” encourages us to “understand this incompetence of science which is also the incompetence of philosophy” (Derrida 1984, 93), then perhaps deconstruction’s home is as uncomfortable yet essential to the sciences as it is to the humanities. Certainly, its point de méthode is not a distinct analytical approach with a definite object and limited disciplinary application. To put this differently and perhaps too obtusely at this stage, deconstruction need not assume that the object that emerges is simply an interpreted object, a discursive effect, a cultural product—as if the reality of its identity is the meaning bestowed by an individual or collective (human) subject. In the rest of this discussion I will attempt to unpack this rather opaque assertion by looking at a fragment of Derrida’s earliest work that reinvigorates the terms of the debate about the nature of reality, representation, and even truth.

Before doing this however, it might be helpful if I explain my own appreciation of what Derrida might be trying to evoke by his disclaimer about methodology that nevertheless insists on rigor and precision. The history of my particular intrigue with questions of language, and deconstruction in particular, rests on the marvelous contradiction that attends two of Ferdinand de Saussure’s most well-known assertions; namely, his insistence on the arbitrary nature of the sign and his equally forceful assertion that a sign can only make sense because a system of signs gives it expression. The tension here is that a system involves a relational coherence—an interdependency of some sort—and this relational binding is something we might define “the arbitrary” against. If we say that a system’s internal coherence of what is necessary to its identity as this particular system (of language, for example) and not that system (of ecological processes, perhaps), then the decision that something is arbitrary must refer outside the system to secure this determination. However, the difference between what is internal and necessary to the system and what is external and independent of the system must remain within language as Saussure defines it—”in language there are only differences” (1981, 120) and “language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms” (80). Language cannot take its measure from anything that isn’t language because it lacks positive terms and can only refer to itself.

This potential exorbitance of language and its overarching comprehension certainly exercised Saussure’s thoughts, leading him to acknowledge that linguistics was not the master template through which the world was given reference and value. “A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable … I shall call it semiology…. Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts” (1981, 16).

In one tiny sentence that captures the energy of deconstruction’s provocation, the now canonical assertion that “there is nothing outside of the text” (Derrida 1984, 158), the science of semiology is born as grammatology. However, whereas semiology envisaged an aggregation or assemblage of different systems that would somehow communicate with each other across the distance that identified them as separate, grammatology regards these different “entities” as articulations of the system. In other words, their respective identities are what we might describe as “mutualities” with no simple independence, and where their difference involves no distance at all. If these different systems do not preexist the communication that might pass between them, then the very notion of communication requires review.

At least for now, we can understand why Derrida might refuse to describe deconstruction as a methodology in any conventional sense, because grammatology begins with the assumption that the difference between the interpreter, the interpreting apparatus, as well as the difference between the object or concept under investigation, is compromised. Method cannot be an operational instrument of determination (making the causal decision about where to cut, where to delineate, where to merge) because the entire scene or system is actively involved in its own decipherment. According to deconstruction, differences are cut from the same cloth—they are all of a piece. This means that a deconstructive methodology is a mired business, of necessity, and one whose insights must follow rigorous protocols in order to demonstrate the complex nature and incisiveness of its practice. Importantly, the sense of textual play that accompanies these determinations is not capricious: it is not the case that anything goes.

(Continues…)

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