Indeterminacy. Группа авторов
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John Scanlan suggests, is modernity’s other side (2005). We narrow this down here to indeterminate excess produced by the order of progress. Indeed, the shadows of formal rational progress appear via a scabrous version of indeterminacy as the menacing, wasted cast-offs of progress itself where the curiously contagious quality of waste leads waste workers to become as much symbolically as materially defiled by their contact with waste materials and places, the latter typically located on edges and borders just to add to their capacity for symbolic disruption. More famously, Marx’s excoriation of the lumpenproletariat merges those who live on waste with redundancy (or “uselessness” in Scanlan’s phrase 2005) in a revolutionary progressive order, and with the quality of waste itself: “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers in old society” (Marx 1967: 92); the dangerous class “living off the garbage of society” (ibid.).
Such language not only reappears in The Eighteenth Brumaire, but makes explicit the contempt and fear generated by those who are not readily classifiable: the rotting (between life and death), ruined, and indiscernible masses
the decayed roués … the ruined … offshoots of the bourgeoisie … ragpickers … in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème… This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he … pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally.” (Marx 1975: 148; emphasis in original)
This, Slavoj Žižek observes, is the ultimate statement of the “logic of the Party of Order” (2012: 20), where “the excremental … non-representable excess of society” (ibid.: 21) becomes the only medium of universal representation. Western modernity, if we follow Scanlan, tends to blank out “that which doesn’t fit” (2005: 80); ambiguity and confusion, he suggests, prevent meaning and lend themselves to the language of garbage (ibid.: 56).
Adorno’s devastating critiques of modernity give us a way out of this binary of rigidly ordered meaning or unmeaning via an explanation and a method. First, with Max Horkeimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1947] 2002), he locates the primal human fear of the unknown as the driver for attempts to dominate the world through technologies of knowing (see Feyerabend 1975, 2001). In such a society, unfree through fear, the other is exploited or expelled. This other, in our lexicon, is thus unknowable, unrecognizable—and rendered indeterminate. The second element we adapt from Adorno is from his Negative Dialectics (1973). His interpretation drew on Hegel’s method but was a nondogmatic philosophical materialism, as opposed to Hegel’s idealism (Jarvis 1998). Thus, for Adorno, unlike Hegel, the attempt to conjoin idea and object is negatively valued. Where unity seems to appear this is only by suppressing difference and diversity (Adorno 1973: 142–61). It is only by articulating such contradictions, and the misidentification of object and thought, that a “fragile transformative horizon” of hope appears where objects and people can flourish in their particularity.9 We too are attempting this dialectic between theory and ethnography, outlining in the final section of this introduction how we draw on negative dialectics to frame our approach to indeterminacy.
Other critiques of modernity emphasize the repressive domination of ordering practices by celebrating transgression.10 As William Viney suggests, accounts of people, places, and things that do not fit dominant orders are typically binary, casting matter out of place as negative (2014), the process of ejection, however, is positive (for those doing it): reaffirming system and structure (Douglas 1966). There is, however, another body of work that also counterposes waste-as-excess against rational order, but celebrates and glorifies disorder as a deconstruction of the humanist, unified modern subject. Such accounts typically draw on pre- or early modern and ethnographic accounts of alterity to challenge modernist accounts. Thus, Peter Stallybrass and Alison White’s historical work (1986), Mikhail Bakhtin’s on the excess of the grotesque body and carnival (2009), and Foucault’s work on transgression, infinite variety, and Dionysian excess (e.g., 1977, [1984] 1992) serve to destabilize singular subjects, aligning with Bataille’s invitation to consider open-ended forms of knowledge and economic exchange rooted in the productive consumption of excess (1985, 1988). This compounded excess in the modern world, its threat, and its potential is what interests us here.
The next section outlines instances of that modernist drive to domination, order, and expulsion that many of the theorists above describe—but we end by juxtaposing this with not only celebrations of open-endedness and excess, but reminders of more complex accounts of how promises of modernist order have been experienced and lamented.
Contemporary Excesses
Crisis hardens social categories, spewing people out who no longer fit. The implications of being outside the law are crucial to how political indeterminacy is experienced. The term outlaw is derived from Old Norse for wolf (Nyers 2006), implying a lack of distinction between human and nonhuman that can cruelly shape what it means to be outside the juridical community. Indeed, Hannah Arendt opens The Origins of Totalitarianism with “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth” caused by the chaos of war and reinforced nation-state borders (1950: vii). In this section, we consider the growth of political and economic indeterminacy as the volume of displaced people and precarious labor grows. Alongside such immediate violence (Sassen 2014), we consider the concomitant slow violence (Nixon 2011) of wasting materials and lands through ordering regimes, and how this has been theorized before turning to a different branch of engagement with indeterminacy: the realm of creative, hopeful imagination.
Thus, over the last few decades, wars, the redrawing of nation-state boundaries, and the restructuring of ethnic and citizenship categories have stranded people in temporary zones and camps that have calcified into permanence. The UNHCR estimates there are over 65.6. million forcibly displaced people worldwide, of whom approximately two-thirds are internally displaced and therefore unprotected by International Law (UNHCR 2016).11 In the same year, UNHCR estimated there were 10 million stateless individuals (ibid.). A crisis of recognition draws attention once again to the challenge of alterity: how to unite without forcing assimilation (Povinelli 2002), how, to return to the previous section, to recognize difference and common humanity. In such contexts, indeterminacy has typically been theorized as an undesirable condition, imposed by state authority, where resistance is the positive counter move to regain or remake political subjectivities.
Michel Agier documents a further “disquieting ambiguity” of refugee camps: humanitarian interventions that appear to be linked disturbingly to penal technologies of containment, and are an exercise in “managing the undesirables” (2010). He suggests a growing and carefully maintained division between “a clean, healthy and visible world … [and] the world’s residual ‘remnants,’ dark, diseased and invisible” (2010: 4). Following Giorgio Agamben (1998), Agier describes states of permanent precariousness where a rhetoric of constant emergency means that refugee camps “exclude past and future” in an exceptional but enduring present (2010: 79). Nicholas De Genova (2002) and Sarah Willen (2007) similarly focus on the production of migrants’ illegal statuses and spaces—and their attempts to resist ambiguity. Recently, a series of interventions have highlighted resistance, reclamation, and the forging of new political subjectivities in these atemporal, aspatial spaces (Gabiam 2016; Turner 2012) even when simple existence can be taken as resistance (Schiocchet 2010: 67). Julie Peteet notes that, for example, in Palestinian refugee camps, young men re-ascribe meaning to beatings as rites of passage that constitute forms of masculinity (2005).
Agamben shows that those who are excluded from society live exposed and threatened lives (1998: 29). Such impositions of structural indeterminacy go beyond ascriptions of criminality and move toward the negation of humanity—as in the evacuation of meaning (Thorleifsson and Eriksen this volume) of the common use of tropes for unwanted migrants as indiscernible, uncountable