Indeterminacy. Группа авторов
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We end this section with Felix Ringel (2014) and Stef Jansen (2016) who both highlight an emerging strand of ethnographic writing that privileges the social significance of indeterminacy. Critically engaging with Hirokazu Miyazaki and Ernst Bloch’s analyses of hope, Jansen notes that recent anthropological attention to indeterminacy has allowed ethnographers to embrace global capitalism’s apparent “loss of direction” and to create new methodologies that consider the significance of exclusion and the emic inability to predict change through time (Miyazaki 2010: 250; see Bloch [1959] 1986; Ringel 2012). However, both Ringel and Jansen observe that many anthropological engagements with this topic deploy a Deleuzian analytic that overly fetishizes processes of “emergence and becoming” (e.g., Anderson 2007; Biehl and Locke 2010; Pedersen 2012). Such ethnography can too easily settle for “uncovering and valorising sparks of indeterminacy” instead of interrogating how they are formed and where they lead. Like Jansen and Ringel, what concerns us are the social effects produced by these sparks, which we trace by emphasizing ethnographic rather than analytical normativities. In the final section, we describe what our ethnographies of indeterminacy reveal.
Conclusion: Ethnographies of Indeterminacy, Waste and Value
We approach indeterminacy and its relationships with the material and metaphors of waste and value through two closely related steps, both of which draw on Hegel’s idea of recognition and Adorno’s negative dialectics.
Our first step is to explore indeterminacy largely as an issue of classification and mis- or failed recognition of that which cannot be easily incorporated into classificatory systems. We do this by interrogating how the mechanisms of power and resistance play out in classification and indeterminacy; how people negotiate mundane knowns and unknowns and confront foreshortened futures; and how the state reads its citizens and is in turn read—or dissolves into illegibility that is resistant to encounter. And while indeterminacy can foreclose engagement with a person or institution that cannot be discerned, or can create a space for personal rule and corruption (Reeves 2015), there are instances where people may embrace ambiguity via a multiplicity of meaning, refuse categories, and find other ways of counting outside dominant classificatory modes (Alexander and Kesküla this volume). One implication of rejecting an imposed category is that the system or imagined totality that gives that category meaning is also implicitly rejected. Thus, the unhappiness of both the expatriate Russians in Eeva Kesküla’s chapter and the repatriated Kazakhs in Catherine Alexander’s are caught up in their repudiation not only of how they are treated, but also of the system, or the new totality, in which they find themselves. They are denied full citizenship rights but some at least, in turn, deny the state (see Simpson 2014). While the power difference scarcely needs to be spelled out in such reciprocal refusal, there are suggestions that the state also needs, in part, these recalcitrant people. The integrity of the modern nation-state and the modern human subject is challenged by, and yet requires open-endedness and mobility.
This might suggest a structuralist approach to categorization and its antinomies, returning to Douglas’s classic definition of dirt as matter out of place (1966). The power of her observation is that a bewildering array of “wastes,” and the visceral revulsion that may accompany them, are culturally determined. However, thinking with the third term, indeterminacy, which may be negatively or positively valued, or neither (suspension), or both, complicates this approach and reveals (as in Thorleifsson and Eriksen’s contribution) that quite different instances are merged and lost in the category of “the anomaly.” At the same time, emphasizing those or that which is expelled may reveal contestation over who and what represents order. Finally, instances where an element may fit with the dominant order, but excessively so, or simultaneously possess wanted and unwanted characteristics, can threaten to shatter categories from within (Alexander this volume).
Our second step is the familiar anthropological argument that indeterminacy, as a mode of apprehension and being, can complicate modernity’s grand teleology. We focus on areas where movement, change, and transformation are not always predictable or follow more modest ambitions than state-driven narratives of an ultimate social or organizational whole to which progress is being made. But there are also instances where people neither resist nor counter teleological visions, even after the collapse of animating state regimes. Rather they may hope for the return of such projects, grieve their passing, act as though they still exist, or simply transpose the logic to a new context. Three related insights from negative dialectics follow.
The first is that state (or indeed international agency development) projects are typically based on a teleological vision of time; after all “to project” implies just such an engagement with the future. But change may be unpredictable, rarely proceeding according to a predetermined telos. This echoes interventions from Science and Technology Studies (e.g., Bijker 1995; Bijiker, Hughes, and Pinch 2012; and Latour 1996) that trace the contingency of successful technological developments, inventions, and the happy (but not inevitable) coalescence of enabling factors in the successes or failures that later come to seem predestined (see Ringel this volume for a comparable account in the case of urban infrastructure). Some ideas succeed and others fail to be taken up.
By focusing on lives outside formal scaffolds of developmental progress, we describe instances where people have been expelled from or denied full participation in mainstream societies, have embraced formlessness and open-endedness, or settled for getting by, muddling through, and attending to the job at hand. We also include those who align themselves with previous grand narratives and lost visions. It is perhaps worth noting that contemporary institutions increasingly expect employees to have their own life/career projects carefully articulated with the greater whole; those who do not subscribe to, or find themselves tangential to the latest institutional or state developmental mission or vision, are increasingly ripe for being “managed out” or cast as wasted (see Bauman, 2003).
But ethnographic attention allows us to see that a Baumanesque classification of outcasts as wasted lives is to fail to see gradation and difference, where tactics of imagination and reclamation may come into play, where value may be recovered both from rejected materials and by people whose labor is excessive for a profitable enterprise. Simply to call these wasted lives is to recapitulate analytically the expulsion into indistinction that modernity has inflicted on them. Rather, we suggest that, while regimes of modernity expel lives, materials, and places as excessive, the tension and often ambiguities of these indeterminate states can allow meaning and value to be remade, suspended, or lost. If capitalism itself is predicated on imagined futures, (Beckert 2016), then so, in theory, people can reimagine their own futures.
The next insight derived from negative dialectics is that progression to another state (whether a future condition, revaluation, or reincorporation) is not to be assumed. This is most easily seen in the complex relationships between waste and value that are imagined, practiced, experienced, and theorized. Thus waste can be matter out of place, its expulsion a restorative act of ordering. We know enough now to recognize that one person’s or system’s waste, might be valuable in another instance (Reno 2009). But one implication of the emphasis on structural/contextual understandings of waste (changing a waste object’s context can mean it is suddenly valuable) is that it appears as though wastes invariably contain the seed of value if they can only be placed again or converted, and indeed that all valued objects and people in turn contain the potential to be wasted. The relationship between waste and value is more complex and varied than that implied by the “matter out of place” maxim. One is not necessarily the simple inversion of the other. This is where indeterminacy provides a useful third term. Wastes can be indeterminate (value never) in the sense of a forgotten or postponed limbo, unattached in terms of property rights. Or indeterminacy can simply be a state where either, neither, or both negative waste and positive value can be discerned or imagined.
Examples of such an imbrication of waste and value, or rather, the precondition of an act or representation of wasting to release value are found in Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and Sara Peña Valderrama’s work on carbon sink accounting (2016). In the former, intensive industrial logging renders the land unable to support life except for one kind of fungus that thrives in such territory—and turns out to be a prized delicacy. Hope appears among capitalism’s ruins.