FIGURE 4. A muzzle-loading shotgun (illapa). Photo by author.

      Teeeye, like tsupu, ta ta, and pu oh, is an image in sound. It is iconic of a gun successfully firing and hitting its target. The mouth that pronounces it is like a flask that assumes the various shapes of a firing gun. First the tongue taps on the palette to produce the stopped consonant the way a hammer strikes a firing cap. Then the mouth opens ever wider as it pronounces the expanding elongated vowel, the way lead shot, propelled by the explosion of powder ignited by the cap, sprays out of the barrel (figure 4).

      Moments later Lucio pulled the trigger. And this time, with a deafening teeeye, the gun fired.

      Teeeye is, at many levels, a product of what it is not. The shape of the mouth effectively eliminates all the many other sounds that could have been made as breath is voiced. What is left is a sound that “fits” the object it represents thanks to the many sounds that are absent. The object that is not physically present constitutes a second absence. Finally, teeeye involves another absence in the sense that it is a representation of a future brought into the present in the hopes that this not-yet will affect the present. Lucio hopes his gun will successfully fire teeeye when he pulls the trigger. He imported this simulation into the present from the possible world that he hopes will come to be. This future-possible, which orients Lucio toward taking all the steps needed to make this future possible, is also a constitutive absence. What teeeye is—its significate effect, in short, its meaning—is dependent on all these things that it is not.

      All signs, and not just those we might call magical, traffic in the future in the way that teeeye does. They are calls to act in the present through an absent but re-presented future that, by virtue of this call, can then come to affect the present; “Hurry, now really,” as Hilario implored his son moments before he fired his gun, involves a prediction that there will still be an “it” up there to shoot. It is a call from the future as re-presented in the present.

      Drawing inspiration from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu and his reflection on how the hole at the hub is what makes a wheel useful, Terrence Deacon (2006) refers to the special kind of nothingness delimited by the spokes of a wheel, or by the glass of a flask, or by the shape of the mouth when uttering “teeeye” as a “constitutive absence.” Constitutive absence, according to Deacon, is not just found in the world of artifacts or humans. It is a kind of relation to that which is spatially or temporally not present that is crucial to biology and to any kind of self (see Deacon 2012: 3). It points to the peculiar way in which, “in the world of mind, nothing—that which is not—can be a cause” (Bateson 2000a: 458, quoted in Deacon 2006).

      As I discuss later in this chapter, and in subsequent ones as well, constitutive absence is central to evolutionary processes. That, for example, a lineage of organisms comes to increasingly fit a particular environment is the result of the “absence” of all the other lineages that were selected out. And all manner of sign processes, not just those associated directly with biological life, come to mean by virtue of an absence: iconicity is the product of what is not noticed; indexicality involves a prediction of what is not yet present; and symbolic reference, through a convoluted process that also involves iconicity and indexicality, points to and images absent worlds by virtue of the ways in which it is embedded in a symbolic system that constitutes the absent context for the meaning of any given word’s utterance. In the “world of mind,” constitutive absence is a particular mediated way in which an absent future comes to affect the present. This is why it is appropriate to consider telos—that future for the sake of which something in the present exists—as a real causal modality wherever there is life (see Deacon 2012).

      The constant play between presence and these different kinds of absences gives signs their life. It makes them more than the effect of that which came before them. It makes them images and intimations of something potentially possible.

      PROVINCIALIZING LANGUAGE

      Considering crashing palms, jumping monkeys, and “words” like tsupu helps us see that representation is something both more general and more widely distributed than human language. It also helps us see that these other modes of representation have properties that are quite different from those exhibited by the symbolic modalities on which language depends. In short, considering those kinds of signs that emerge and circulate beyond the symbolic helps us see that we need to “provincialize” language.

      My call to provincialize language alludes to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), his critical account of how South Asian and South Asianist scholars rely on Western social theory to analyze South Asian social realities. To provincialize Europe is to recognize that such theory (with its assumptions about progress, time, etc.) is situated in the particular European context of its production. Social theorists of South Asia, Chakrabarty argues, turn a blind eye to this situated context and apply such theory as if it were universal. Chakrabarty asks us to consider what kind of theory might emerge from South Asia, or from other regions for that matter, once we circumscribe the European theory we once took as universal.

      In showing that the production of a particular body of social theory is situated in a particular context and that there are other contexts for which this theory does not apply, Chakrabarty is making an implicit argument about the symbolic properties of the realities such theory seeks to understand. Context is an effect of the symbolic. That is, without the symbolic we would not have linguistic, social, cultural, or historical contexts as we understand them. And yet this kind of context does not fully create or circumscribe our realities because we also live in a world that exceeds the symbolic, and this is something our social theory must also find ways to address.

      Chakrabarty’s argument, then, is ultimately couched within humanist assumptions about social reality and the theory one might develop to attend to it, and so, if taken literally, its application to an anthropology beyond the human is limited. Nonetheless, I find provincialization useful metaphorically as a reminder that symbolic domains, properties, and analytics are always circumscribed by and nested within a broader semiotic field.

      We need to provincialize language because we conflate representation with language and this conflation finds its way into our theory. We universalize this distinctive human propensity by first assuming that all representation is something