For the last few days I’ve been a bit remiss in responding to comments and email due to being swamped with other things. I apologize for this. Today, in response to my post on Orientalism, Jerry the Anthropologist writes:
Allow me to wonder how this post might look to someone reading it at Universitas Kebangsaan Malayu or at Gadjah Mada or at San Carlos. Its not that I don’t appreciate (or that they might not appreciate) the elegance of the argument.
Put another way, somewhat over 50 years ago, after having examined somewhat over 300 definitions of culture, A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn wondered whether its not so important what culture is as what culture does.
Hopefully my friend Jerry will say a bit more about his distinction between “culture being” and “culture doing”. For my own part, I have become suspicious of concepts like “society”, “culture”, “economy”, “language”, etc., because I think all too often these concepts tend to hypostatize phenomena that are really complex networks of interactions. South Park recently had an uncharacteristically good episode on precisely this issue with respect to the economy that is well worth watching. We treat the economy as if it itself were doing something, as if it were an entity– the episode is all about how we have “angered” the economy and must repent –when, in fact, the economy is us. The thesis of this post is that we tend to hypostatize things like “culture” and “society”, turning them into entities when, in fact, they’re processes. In developing this line of thought, I am not denying phenomena like orientalism, but raising ontological questions about the conditions under which it is possible.
This, I think, is part of the importance of the concept of “assemblage” or “network”, as opposed to that of “system” or “structure”. By system or structure I understand a form of organization where the elements are inseparable from one another such that their being is purely a function of their relations within that organization. For example, in structural linguistics the phoneme p is nothing apart its differential relation to the phoneme b. Indeed, according to this account we already speak poorly by referring to “b” and “p” as phonemes as there is only b-p or the differential relation defining the two terms. This sort of concept then gets applied to social phenomena as well, such that no element in the social exists apart from the other elements, or rather, all of the elements are what they are by virtue of belonging to the organization. From a system theoretical perspective, the analogy is generally to biology where all the elements are understood to have a functional role and set of interdependencies within the social system. From the structural perspective the analogy is to structural linguistics where the elements are inseparable and only take on identity differentially.
read on!
While I think both of these approaches can be fruitful research models, I also think they make for bad social ontology. That is, if we hypostatize the model and treat it as an entity in its own right– speaking of “culture” as doing something, for example –we’re led to all sorts of poorly posed questions and problems. The notion of an assemblage or network is at once cruder than that of structure or system and more fluid and open. Like the concepts of system and structure, the concept of network or assemblage recognizes the importance of relation. Unlike the notion of system or structure, the concept of network or assemblage rejects the thesis that the elements participating in a network or assemblage are constituted by that network or assemblage. The elements of a network or assemblage, unlike a structure or a system, can and do withdraw from their social relations and can enter into new social relations. In other words, relations in a network based approach are not internal to their terms but are always external to their terms.
Moreover, unlike the notion of structure (matters are more complicated with the systems theoretical perspective in the social sciences), assemblages or networks sustain themselves through ongoing interactions among their elements. Although Gregory Bateson does not himself formulate a concept of network or assemblage, his essay “Morale and National Character” in Steps to An Ecology of Mind provides a nice example of what a network based analysis of social phenomena might look like. If Bateson is relevant in this connection, then this is because he emphasizes the genesis of patterned forms of organization, rather than treating these forms of organization as transcendent and sedentary organizing structures. In other words, for Bateson pattern or organization is a product or result— which, of course, the scientist is free to examine as a snapshot of becoming just as a scientist might study a caterpillar for its own sake, ignoring how it becomes a butterfly –and is not a cause or a condition.
If there is a “cash-value” to the concept of network or assemblage, then it lies in the manner in which it draws our attention to the manner in which social relations must be made and re-made over time through the ongoing activities of their elements. It was this that I tried to get at in my post Entropy and Locality, where I attempted to make the case that the concept of entropy should play a central role in our understanding of social phenomena. In other words, 1) under what conditions do we move from a state of high social entropy or a low degree of organization to conditions of mid-level and low-level social entropy or high coefficients of organization, and 2) what are the processes by which these low and mid-level degrees of social entropy are produced and maintained?
In my view the shift from a system based or structural based model of social relations to an assemblage based model of social relations significantly changes the nature of the questions we ask with respect to phenomena like Orientalism. In both system based and structural based models, relations are understood as being internal to their terms such that terms do not exist independent of their relations. For the systems theorist, say Niklas Luhmann, there will be an emphasis on operational closure where information is constituted by a code belonging to the system. Insofar as any social system is held to be a totality organized around its own codes, any portrayal of the “other” as in another culture will be akin to the essentializing phenomena of Orientalism. Similarly, a structural approach, also endorsing the thesis that relations are always internal to their terms, will examine the way in which relations between one social organization and another social organization are diacritically constituted. In both cases the researcher begins with an idealized model of the social that is transcendent and determinative of interactions and then proceeds to interpret phenomena in terms of that transcendent model.
By contrast, insofar as an assemblage based approach begins with the thesis that relations are external to their terms, it begins with the question “to what sorts of assemblages do phenomena such as Orientalism belong?” Here the emphasis is on elements of an assemblage and interactions among those elements. The assemblage based theorist will be happy to concede that texts like Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and Lectures on History, and Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation are characterized by a high coefficient of Orientalism. However, the reason for this is not to be located in the legibility of their texts per se, but rather in the assemblages to which these texts belong. Crudely put, these are assemblages where the East is present more or less only as a signifier and thus where all the construction of pattern, social relations, and identity comes from within the assemblage. Just as speciation can take place through geographical isolation, social assemblages can shore up their relative identity through a relative lack of interaction with other elements from other assemblages. In short, in these situations there is no inter-assemblic communication.
The situation changes significantly when we do have inter-assemblic communication or interaction. Since elements are external to their terms, the encounter of new elements forming a new assembly also sets socio-genesis in action such that all elements in the assemblage become bricoleurs. Here you get not re-production of a particular assemblic organization, but you get new forms of socio-genesis and psycho-genesis where new identities and forms of organization are produced. If the bricoleur differs from the engineer, then this is because while both draw on local materials, the former has no fixed or sedentary rules to draw upon. This is the case with inter-assemblic interactions where there are indeed pre-existent customs, traditions, history, etc., to draw on, but where the heterogeneity of the relations sets all participants involved in becoming-other, inventing something new out of the amalgam of these materials. Due to the profound migrational shifts that characterize our own age, coupled with the unprecedented developments of information and communications technology, our world is increasingly characterized by these inter-assemblic relations.
Larval Subjects . 
May 29, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Perhaps I have taught you too well. Other readers of your blog will not remember that you and I once taught together. I recall that one day you seemed to have the hardest time understanding my refusal to use the term culture–indeed I have gone several semesters now without using the term at all in my Intro to Cultural Anthropology course. I should confess that this is not because of any concerns about totalization, but rather because the term culture simply became too ubiquitous (as in “the culture of my bowling club” or “the culture of the college”) to be of any analytic use; put differently, my students would use the term “culture” as a way to not attend to the details of the processes of life in, oh say, a portion of Japan or up a Balinese hill or wherehaveyou.
I have great sympathy for what you are calling networks or assembledges. I would agree that a lot of folks shall I say turned processes into things–fixed them as it were. I can’t myself quite decide whether this is laziness or some lack of imagination or what have you. But I would agree whatever the reasons, this sort of manuver has tends to close off and simplify what otherwise is open and multiplex.
May I chid just a bit. Your history of anthropology gets events sort of backwards. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson developed a notion of emergent types, in which types and processes are not separable; Bateson says so very explicitly in Mind and Nature on p. 192, though he refers there to Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture. For an initial look at this history, see Sullivan (2004) A Four-fold Humanity: Margaret Mead and Psychological Types in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 40(2):183-206. I can provide further references and discussion as needed. Unfortunately a lot of less subtle people forgot to read carefully, so we ended up with the classic comics or anthropology for dummies version of what these two were up to, hence the need to revivify a thought through the generation of a new vocabulary of networks and assembledges. I must also point out that when Levi-Strauss took up linguistics he did so (at least he says he did so) because linguistics had attained a degree of formalization not found elesewhere. I am only now reading WHR Rivers for the first time, but I can already trace back the sort of thought you are revivifying back to him. You’d be right, these folks did not all agree with one another, don’t have precisely the same things in mind and so on. But with the addition of Marcel Mauss and a couple others they do form a kind of underground tradition in anthropology–yes I do mean underground–out there in plain sight.
So, please I’m not reifying culture or treating it like Durkheim’s social or even Kroeber’s super-organic when I refer to Krober and Kluckhohn’s distinction between is and does. Before I get to what I meant, please let me go down one other small alley; I do not mean this as criticism but rather as oberservation.
I do not know which thinker you refer to or have any idea about the nuts and bolts of the circumstance. I note that your references go all the way to Prague and the classic Mediterrean. Hence my puzzling over folks at UKM (just outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) and Gadjah Mada (old spelling, but a university in the royal city of Yogyakarta in central Java, Indonesia) and San Marcos (in Cebu City in the the central Phillipines). My sense from a few years back is that some of those folks would likely great your elegance with a sort of wryness and that others with a sort of exasperation that yet another Euro-American comments on matters of Orientalism without actually refering to (the lovely photo of the laughing Buddha aside) anything that is actually Asian. Whether wry or exasperated or with some other sensibility or combination thereof, these folks would probably all think that you had placed yourself outside of whatever network or assemblege or social order or whathaveyou one might mean by Orient or Asia.
So one of the things one might reasonably mean by refering to what culture does (without reifying the idea of culture or the idea of the fixed and sedentary for that matter) is generate those emergent forms one might call identity, with their boundaries and various boundary conditions. One of the ironies, here, concerns the much more fluid nature of Southeast Asian identies. In order to masuk malayu, to become Malay, one need only speak Malay (berbahasa Malayu), live in accordance with malay custom (beradat Malayu) and be Muslim (beragama Islam), so I could masuk malayu and people do so on a farly regular basis–note the ber- verbs here are all intransitive but clearly indicate process and that without the ber- these three terms become nouny verbs. My friend Rich O’Connor once told me that hill people become Thai by taking up Thai rituals surrounding rice. There are good accounts of this sort of thing from all over the region.
For all that, there are still insides and outsides, as in belum masuk malayu (not yet become, literally entered, Malay) or belum jadi wong timor (not yet become a person or people of the East). I could express this more harshly by using bukan (which negates predicates in their entirety).
None of this means that you are not right to contend that “Due to the profound migrational shifts that characterize our own age, coupled with the unprecedented developments of information and communications technology, our world is increasingly characterized by these inter-assemblic relations.” Of course you are right to do that. You might want to check out Anna Tsing’s notion of friction before you go further, however.
May 30, 2009 at 1:37 am
I tried to think the assemblage/network distinction through the paradox of Theseus’ ship, but came up a little short.
Theseus got his boat repaired every year, at which time some pieces were replaced by new parts. Unbeknown to him the unscrupulous ship repairer saved all the old parts, reconstructing the ship as he went along. At some point there were two ships, the one constantly repaired one that Theseus sailed out of the harbor. And the one that is composed of all the same original parts that is sitting in the hidden dry dock.
So I thought Theseus’-ship-qua-assemblage would be the reconstructed one in dry dock (since for an assemblage the parts’ identity separate from their relations is important) and Theseus’-ship-qua-network would be the repaired one he is sailing out on (since the relational facts have been maintained throughout).
Does that work at all? Of course any given complex object at any given time can be thought of in purely network style where the token-identity of its parts are beside the point, or in purely assemblage style when we are interested in the given token-identity of the part.
I realize that simplifies too much, because there is also the case where a part that is non-trivially type distinct ends up being good enough for the network to go on as before. I can replace a carburetor with another store bought part that is token distinct yet type identical, or I can jury rig something with a coffee filter. In both cases the lawn mower will still do what I want it to do.
So the initial distinction in terms of just being interested in the token identity of the parts (assemblage yes, network no) leaves something ought. There is also the perspective of being interested in the relevant type identities of the parts.
You can have mere change of composition by changing parts that are type identical (of course relative to the relevant standards of type identity) and token distinct. But if you want qualitative change you need to replace parts with parts that are type distinct.
This may be my immersion in too much a prioristic metaphysics, I need to be able to make sense of the assemblage/network distinction in terms of the importance of type identity of parts. Or do we need a third term?
Object-qua-assemblage = object qua actual tokens.
Object-qua-????? = object qua type identical equivalence classes of tokens
Object qua network = object qua relations
If that’s totally on the wrong track, don’t hesitate to tell me.
May 30, 2009 at 7:02 pm
I’ll leave Levi to discuss Theseus’ ship, though I think Jon that the distinction you raise about when we are interested in what should not be forgotten.
While I doubt anyone misunderstood me, I want to very clearly state that I do not think Levi and orientalist, just a westerner.
I want, if Levi will allow it, to say a few things from time to time about what further one might usefully mean by what culture does. In Batesonian terms this would be an example of loose thinking. But I want to do so by telling a couple of stories abouy insides and outsides. First one is about my Mom and the second one concerns myself, my wife and the country she is from and which we both regard as home.
In 1952, I think, my Mom returned to the U.S. from India (where she’d attended school) and Burma (where her father was stationed by what is now A.I.D.). Transport being what it was in those days, she stopped in Honolulu where some family friends took her around. I’m unsure of precisely how the families knew one another, but it had a great deal to do with the old China connection in my family, in this case through my mother’s parents. So at dinner it urned out that my Mom could use chopsticks very well (had since she was first taught to eat in Tsinan, Shantung, where she was born, as a wee child), could speak some Mandarin (her father was fluent and she would have spoken the language as a child). Her hosts’ children, by contrast, for all their eye folds and straight black hair could do neither; they’d been born in Hawaii. So apparently they had an interesting conversation about who was and who was not Haoli and how come.
My wife, Phillipa, was born in Dunedin, in Otago, way far down on the South Island’s east coast. So she’s a New Zealander, and in some contexts among some people so am I. However she’s a Kiwi and I am not and never shall be. My brother-in-law, her sister’s husband, has lived in New Zealand for 40 years or so, but having been born in Britain is not and can not be a Kiwi even though his 4 daughters are Kiwis, his wife is a Kiwi, his wife’s sibs and their parents are all Kiwis. I have friends who are Maori who would prefer not to be called Kiwi because in Te Reo Maori kiwi refers to a small, blind, flightless, nocturnal bird. The situation is complicated in that Maori are the original indigenous people of New Zealand, the tangata whenua or people of the land/placenta, while my wife’s people, the pakeha or strangers (literally strangers but increasing refering to people whose ancestors came from NW Europe) are an emerging indigenous people of the place. Our personal situation is complicated in that we live in Texas but very much as Kiwis live and often in a predominantly Kiwi idiom. This makes her second-cultural (to use another convenient way of speaking), that is a first-cultural person (a New Zealander) living in a second culture (Texas) while I am roughly third cultural (or to put it bluntly sometimes there are too many world in my head and sometimes I can just think the world from several places in the world without losing myself).
So, yes Jon, context can be everything. So, to borrow and no doubt mangle a phrase from Obeysekere, the work of culture has much to do with the generation of appropriate emotion in the service of the proper flow of life given some context or occurence. Thought through the ambit of Edelman one way and WHR Rivers another way (nuerology is on an apparently sounder footing now and Edelman as far as I can tell is not particularly engeged in a rethinking a Freud) human evolution compells us, unless we are schizophrenic perhaps, to live culture but also means that cultures differ, and for more and deeper reasons than differences in ecology or political economy. Said slightly differently culture emerges as cultures out of but is not reducible to psychology which emerges out of but is not reducible to nuerology and all in such a way that Levi’s grandfather’s gait could indeed bear the traces of every wave passing every barge or tug he ever worked on or that I like my mother pick up a pair of chopsticks without even thinking about what I am going to do because neither Levi’s grandfather nor I need to do so–we just walk(ed) and eat. In good Batesonian fashion, none of this requires us to reify culture.
May 30, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Great stuff, Jon. I’ve written a lot about the Ship of Theseus on the blog (though for some reason I’ve been calling it the “Ship of Tarsus”). In the spirit of Derek Parfit, you can built all sorts of interesting thought experiments out of the Ship of Theseus pertaining to questions of identity and individuation. I use the terms “assemblage” and “network” as synonyms for one another, while I reserve the term “aggregate” for a collection where the elements don’t form an object. The issue I’m trying to work through with the concept of networks is the question– sorry to sound Hegelian here –of the relation between relation and relata. Apart from the fact that this goes straight to the core of the discussion between realism and anti-realism (anti-realism privileging one particular relation), it seems to me that there’s a very significant sense in which objects or relata are products of their relations. I am not, of course, talking about relations here like being-to-the-left-of or being-taller-than, but rather interactions between and among objects or relata. Consequently I am talking about dynamic relations or interactions.
This dynamism of action and response is what I have in mind when I refer to networks, where the relata in a network provoke and evoke one another in particular ways as they “communicate” with one another. I think this is one of the problems with the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, as the relata in the thought experiment are fairly inert in relation to one another. My vague idea is that the properties of an object are a function of these dynamic, interactive relations. Often these relations of dependency are fairly invisible because objects exist in fairly stable environments. Thus, for example, we think of “rising” and “dancing” as being non-relational (intrinsic) properties of fire because of the stability of earthly environments. When, however, fire burns in outer space it flows like water and behaves very differently. If you put me in a deep freezer I become very solid and hard, whereas if I’m placed on Jupiter I become very flat (or would were I able to survive the heat of the environment). At network is these relata evoking and provoking properties in the various objects composing the network, characterized by asymmetry in time as each interaction in the network provokes new states in the objects of the network.
One of the assumptions of epistemology, I think, is that the being of the object is betrayed or undermined by relation. Yet I think these sorts of examples show how the object is what it is in and through its relations. However, as per Graham’s critique, I have to answer what the question is in addition to its relations. If the object is nothing but its relations there’s no-thing to provoke properties and no properties to be found.
May 31, 2009 at 12:53 am
Jerry- As I read your comments and thought of how immensely complicated this all actually is in the real world, I kept remembering this bit of Shakespeare, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
In that spirit–>
Levi- Oops. I got so excited about the ship of Theseus thing that I got the terminology wrong. It should have been:
Object-qua-assemblage/network = object qua actual tokens. The reconstructed ship hidden in dry dock.
Object-qua-????? = object qua type identical equivalence classes of tokens. The repaired ship that Theseus leaves in.
Object qua system/structure = object qua relations. My jury-rigged lawnmower.
-I really like your point about how focusing on such thought experiments leads you to not characterize the complex manner in which an object’s parts’ identities are reciprocally determined by each other and determined by their role in the emergent structure and environment.
Also if we’re strictly talking Parfitty identity over time stuff, (1) an object’s internal relations can change radically and it can still be correct to say its the same object. That’s not covered by the above. And (2) the characterization of the relations in question will often be relative to some explanatory end (c.f. Geach’s claim about all identity being relativized to an often implicit sortal).
I think that one Graham’s point is that there is nothing especially relativistic or idealist about (2) because any object’s revealed as-structure is a function of the other objects it is interacting with. So of course when an object interacts with us the same thing is going to happen. So you can save Geach’s “all identity is relative to a sortal” claim without going the way of Richard Rorty’s crude neo-Kantian (where culture = the scheme part of the scheme/content distinction) relativism.
I too am uncomfortable with the return of substance in Graham’s metaphysics. That doesn’t mean that I reject it! I want to spend a few years seriously thinking about it. I want to keep what I perceive as his radical externalization of the scheme/content distinction. I don’t know if you have to defend substance to do this (this is one of the major questions I want to pose as I read through Guerilla Metaphysics).
I’m really excited about being able to contrast you and Graham on this very issue.
May 31, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Of course a crudely externalized scheme-content distinction just is the form-matter distinction. So your comments on this distinction are highly relevant to the task.
So going backwards from the critique of correlationism (which I presume is accepted by all parties), the task is-
(1) Characterize the form-matter distinction as holding of objects in themselves (for us, at least as relationally as Harman does), and (2) argue that the supposedly epistemic scheme-content distinction is just an instance of these non-subjective metaphysical facts. If that can be done without substance, then we are home free.
One thing I’ve thought about is just Vorhandenheit(subsantial)/Zuhandenheit(modal/relational) reversals all the way down to infinity. I don’t know if this works given that on Harman’s view an object’s as-structure (Zuhandenheit) is in the first place a function of the objects that object is interacting with. I think this is one of Harman’s arguments for substance.
I realize this may all be bonkers. Please feel free to correct it.
May 31, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Jon,
I often recall that bit of Shakespeare…keeps me sane sometimes too.
June 1, 2009 at 2:25 am
Yes!
June 1, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Let us assume that one of their number [a Melanesian presumably from Eddystone Island], fired with a desie to understand the mental processes of other peoples, sets out to investigate the condition of these islands [the British isles]. The extreme importance of relationship on his own community will naturally lead him to decide that the best way of procedure would be to study in particular our system of relationship as a means of understanding psychology. He would soon find that we use terms of relationship [our kin terminology] in a way which to him is hopelessly confused and inexact. In studying the connotation of such terms as uncle and aunt, he would find that we includeunder these two terms relationships which he distinguishes very carefully. He would also find that we often apply the term cousin not merely to persons of our own generation but to those of older and younger generations than ourselves, betraying, it would seem to him, an almost inconceivable looseness of thought, so that he is tempted to suppose that we are not subject to the law of contradiction but believe that persons may be of the same and of different generations. He will return home and announce to his fellow-islanders that the English people, in spite of the splendour of their material culture, in many ways show serious mental incapacity; and that in spite of their fine houses and towns, their trains and their ships, their talking machines and their flying machines, they are victims of the most appalling confusions of thought. It may even be that, at a meeting of the native Philosophic Society, he propounds the view that the hyperdevelopment of material culture has led to an atrophy of the thought-processes, and suggests as a suitable title for the condition that of post-logical mentality.
W. H. R. Rivers from “The Primitive Conception of Death” (itself a response to Levy-Bruhl’s notion of a “pre-logical” so-called primitive mentality) printed in Psychology and Ethnology 1926 London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. pp.44-5.
N.B. Rivers died in 1922; this essay originally apeared in the Hibbert Journal in 1912.
Rivers hypothetical Melanesian ethnographer would indeed be appalled as our kinship system generally fits well with our preference for stranger marriage predicated on notions of love and companionship; being civilized, our hypothetical Melanesian would prefer that a man marry his mother’s brother’s daughter and a woman marry her father’s sister’s son, thereby preserving a proper order and respect for relations.
June 3, 2009 at 1:07 pm
If I’ve been making any sense to this point, the next set of questions begins to concern how. At one level that’s where we get into ethnographic descriptions, bearing in mind that at different moments in the history of anthropology, various ethnographers have felt a variety of elements of the sorts of processes which generate among other things insides and outsides to be important. Nonetheless a couple of high points…Ruth Benedict’s theory of cultural selection, this being bricolage avant la lettre. This idea is usually overlooked in favor of her metaphors about great arcs of possibility and the formal similarity between a person seeking after coherence and a culture doing so, her shorthands for one or another pattern of life. For a more recent and philosophical examination of this problem, see Jonathan Lear’s book Radical Hope. Equally, see Roy Rappaport’s late life essays on ritual as well as Levi-Strauss’s essay Social Structure–at least for starters.