Indeterminacy. Группа авторов

Theorizations of the former two areas typically decry indeterminacy while the latter celebrate it. In the final section, we identify our principal contributions to understanding the multiple registers of indeterminacy via our ethnographic chapters.

      A Brief Genealogy of Order, Indeterminacy, and Waste in the Modern Age

      Our main focus in this section is the interplay between ideas and practices of order and progress in the modern age on the one hand, and indeterminacy on the other. As we work through this genealogy, we highlight how ideas of indeterminacy, waste, excess, and ordering narratives have been woven together at different times in different ways, then how and where these ideas resonate with our volume. We begin with a sense of indeterminacy as something to move away from, toward enlightenment, order, and progress before turning to Walter Benjamin’s engagements with modernity as waste, which illustrate how waste and indeterminacy have often been cast as modernity’s other (Benjamin 2002; Lunn 1984). This section ends with Michel Foucault (1977, [1984] 1992) and Georges Bataille’s (1985) celebratory take on indeterminacy as transgression, and Theodor Adorno, whose negative dialectics and denial of the possibility of apprehending reality have been inspirations in locating lives in all their diversity and meaning-making outside, in parallel, or in response to centrally-determined, teleological grand projects (1973).

      We therefore start with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel for whom indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit) and recognition (Anerkennung) are fundamental preconditions to the development of individuals’ agency as social beings (Hegel 1977). Drawing on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is important here for two reasons (Hegel 1977). First, it starts with the condition of indeterminacy as the unknown point from which logical thought moves toward determinacy. The successive moves are toward first a determinate but abstract being. Then an actualized self emerges because of the recognition by another subject of our own subjecthood: full dynamic being, in other words, is essentially relational. In this frame, we need recognition, and the relation that it implies, in other words, to become agents.

      Hegel initially emphasized intersubjective encounters within social groups as linking mutual dependence to questions of recognition, solidarity, and esteem (Pippin 2000: 156) allowing (to use a different lexicon) the prosecution of life projects by a social agent. Later, in the Philosophy of Right, this shifted to an emphasis on the objective spirit of world history, eliding intersubjectivity, and creating a new idea of the ethical life and community where adequate re-cognition is achieved within an institutional system of rights (Williams 1997: 59–69): the three spheres of family, civil society, and the state. For Hegel, indeterminacy, alongside emptiness (or “loneliness,” as Axel Honneth translates Einsamkeit), is a pathology experienced as an unhappy self-consciousness, and indeed, Honneth suggests, is characteristic of the age (2016). While our take on indeterminacy differs from the Hegelian pre-thought void, the question of who recognizes, or refuses recognition of whom and what, is a central theme of this book, allied to the moral project of classifying.

Second, Phenomenology of Spirit outlines the dialectical process by which history (knowledge) moves to the absolute via the two steps between abstraction and concrete appearance that gives rise to a renewed idea and so on toward an absolute totality where idea/category and reality are fused into one. Hegel’s teleological vision of history is shared by many modern political projects. Thus, capitalism, socialism, and colonialism are all teleologically determined, grounded in Enlightenment concerns with development and progress, via science and technology, toward a goal of better, happier lives (see Negri 2004; Guyer 2007 for a discussion of capitalism’s temporality).⁶ Thus, as Vincanne Adams, Michelle Murphy, and Adele E. Clarke observe, modernist temporalities are anticipatory ones “in which the future sets the conditions of possibility for action in the present” and is able to “arrive already formed in the present” (2009: 248–49).

Drawing on Hegel’s method, Karl Marx offers a dialectical framework to address questions of change and structure, also rooted in a modernist temporality of progress and finalization (Berman 2010; Huyssen 1984; Lunn 1984). At its most blunt, the final resolution of the dialectic is reified as an absolute whole, and Marxist dialectical method is reduced to a prescriptive and predictive typology (Althusser 1970; Cornforth 1961) as it most notoriously appeared in Marxist-Leninism.⁷ More subtle Marxist work emphasizes the contingency of historical process and class formation (Chandavarkar 1994; E. P.Thompson 1978, 1991).

      There have been critiques aplenty of this narrative of progress. What interests us here is how the ideas of surplus, ruin, excess, and waste in many forms, but particularly the indeterminate and unrecognizable, are woven through these narratives and their critiques. Thus Marx’s materialist interpretation of Hegel’s dialectical method located historical movement in the material conflicts inherent in each socioeconomic formation. The final stage, communism, theoretically contained no exploitative relations and was thus the end point of historical development; the social/material equivalent of Hegel’s merging of idea and reality. The emergence of capitalism, as a mode of production, lay in the confluence of factors that enabled the production and appropriation of surplus for profit. Surplus labor can be interpreted in two ways, both essential for capitalism. The first is the labor that is surplus to the laborer’s livelihood needs and that creates profit for the capitalist. The second is the reserve army of unemployed people hovering in the wings to meet market demand. Such people are surplus to immediate requirements, outside yet connected to formal systems of value production; simultaneously potentially valuable and wasted.

Surplus is therefore integral to the capitalist process, creating and maintaining profit, and wasting human lives. But excess, as something overflowing that cannot be accommodated, can be threatening (Alexander this volume) and must therefore be expended (wasted), to follow Bataille’s reasoning (1991)⁸ if it is not to become harmful. Excess also appears as the detritus of the capitalist modern age. In this spirit, Benjamin excavated modernity through the trail of waste and ephemera it left behind, his own monumental Arcades project, unfinished, a half-built/ruin of fragments symbolizing as well as accounting for the failed promise of modernity (2002). And yet, modernity’s underlying framework of progress still seems to have a tight grip on dominant imaginaries of capitalism and socialism.

      In some post-Soviet contexts, for example, revolutionary logic seemed merely to transpose “communism” with “the market” as the goal, retaining faith in determinate historical rules (Alexander 2009). Elsewhere, in the 1990s, international lending agencies as well as local governments spoke of “transition,” the implication being that they knew precisely where they were heading: free market capitalism (Gaidar 1999; Lipton et al. 1992: 213; J. Sachs 1994). In the academy, the emphasis on transition moved rapidly, following Stark (1991) to languages of transformation and “path dependency,” where particular pasts, rather than futures, influenced continual change.

      But the modernist project of development, underscored by the same belief in progress and framed by market integration since the United States’ Marshall Plan in 1948, marches on for all the steady criticism it has received over the last few decades from Andre Gunder Frank’s insight that “development” was having the reverse effect (1966), and Arturo Escobar’s reiteration in 1995 that development was wasting the very places it was supposed to make anew. There have been calls for postdevelopment (Dasgupta 1985), alternatives to development (Friedmann 1992), and to move after postdevelopment (Nederveen Pieterse 2000). But still, as Katy Gardner and David Lewis (2015) describe, the appeal of progress continues with, ironically, a return to a belief in technological interventions. Indeed, Wolfgang Sachs (1992: 1) described development itself as an indeterminate ruin of modernity, still with us, but pointing to a discredited future. To paraphrase Benjamin, modernity can be characterized by the wasted lands, excess materials, and people it expels to keep the project on the road. For the anthropological endeavor, to think critically about normative frameworks of progress entails a willingness to engage with ruination (Dawdy 2010), and the modern forms of life created