This post is about local knowledge. Interpretative anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously proposed a methodological intervention into the praxis of ethnographically oriented study, which he entitled "thick description," in which an effort is made by researchers not merely to record behavioral practices but to situate them within their sociocultural milieu. I want to argue that Carles intends to interrogate the validity of such emic analysis of cultural practices, positing instead, following French philosopher Alain Badiou, a theory of the community event as rupture, immediately present to the observer as such and yet resistant to immanent analysis.
To demonstrate, Carles claims he will "post a picture of what seems like a ‘community event’," anticipating that readers will "‘guess’ what kind of event it is, based on what it looks like in the photograph." Naturally, the term guess is set off in quotation marks, because the interpretative gesture always resides conceptually in the liminal space between nominalistic taxonomy and a constitutive structuration. In precisely this sense, and this sense alone, all names are guesses -- blind, linguistical-semiological stabs at essence... "Name that community event," indeed, as the act of naming itself establishes its rising to the level of interpretive significance.
But naming and knowing, of course, are two vastly different things. "Does n e 1 know what this place is," Carles asks, emphasizing the indeterminate status of all seemingly social formations, which straddle the line between psychological and sociological hermeneutics. The place, by virtue of its inhabitation in time, becomes ontologically ambiguous. It has become a "what" in addition to a "where" and possibly a "when".
But Carles, not content with an analysis that fixates on the distanciation of time and space, seeks to explicate the "how". The underlying phenomenological matter at stake for Carles in pursuing this "gimmick," as he calls this methodological feint, is the status of community -- do collectivities have their own ontology, or are they merely wisps of thought grasped by individual consciousnesses, such that a community cannot be said to exist outside of an event which fixates those disparate sentient beings on the awareness of their copresence? Is the event a mere simulation of community -- does it only "seem like", as Carles phrases it -- or is the event the psychic fissure that reorients cognitive systems to shared experiences, suppressing egoistic subjectivities as the fundamental needs are collectivized?
Carles, significantly, emphasizes the basic human needs: the event, he argues "Seems like it is really bringing people together to eat tons of authentic carnival food." That is, in the welter of sociality, sustenance merges with the carnivalesque; nutrition becomes saturated with semiology; food no longer is merely raw or cooked, edible or inedible, but also authentic or inauthentic. In other words, food begins to mark belonging to the collectivity established temporally by the dissemination of particularized practices of food consumption. The event triggers and bounds the significance of such tribalistic markers of acceptance. Carles adds that it "seems like it is some sort of mainstream community event, uniting an entire region/town." So it is that nativist impluses find expression in events that are immediately graspable in a single image, can be experienced as if it were second nature through the accident of mere presence.
But can the significance of "community" extend beyond the fundamental needs; or rather, Carles wonders, does the authenticity spontaneously generated with regard to social practices centered around these fundamental needs serve to underwrite a panoply of secondary and tertiary social institutions? "What kind of community event could really unite so many ppl?" he asks. Consider these items from his list of possibilities for what a community can signify, at a glance: "a state fair" -- the juridical complex of law and authority as manifest in modalities of consumption; "a fundraiser for a local church" -- religious authority trespassing beyond the sacralized spaces and consecrating, as it were, new ground in the public sphere; "a scene from the movie “Independence Day”" -- the culture industry as a simulacrum of collectivities, the systematic attempt to co-opt social spontaneity and subsume it to profit-making entities that manufacture affect; "the beach" -- the attempt to reinscribe the natural world within the domain of social practice, as itself derivative of communal usage rather than preexisitng social formations; "a gun show" -- the extrapolation of violence embedded as potentiality in any crowd and subjecting it to accumulation and exogenous direction; and so on. (The analysis need not be exhaustive to establish the point with regard to the list, as each item is masterpiece of philosophical compression and thereby demands its own exegetical elaboration.)
The "Community event" resembles the Badiouian event in that it demands an emplacement of subjectivity contingent upon a synchronic separation from itself. The event is outside ontology, as Badiou claims and as Carles seems to agree by locating the community event outside all epistemological processes. It can't be "known" but can be apprehended instantaneously and "guessed" at. It can only ever "seem" to be that which it "is." All community events remain dominated by the conditionalities that make them recognizable as "community," thus to remain unnameable may ultimately increase their effectiveness at organizing a collective consciousness. So what is ultimately most important, as the structure of Carles's argument here strongly implies, is that we continue to list possibilities for the meaning and name of any apprehended event without ever settling on an explanation that bounds it. As Badiou instructs: "Decide on the undecidable." As Carles glosses it: We must always "‘guess’ what kind of event it is" without ever presuming to know.
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