School of Social and Political Science

Description

Resurrecting that which was oblivious to me: anthropology, the negative, and the now

It is difficult to argue for the coherence of an academic career that has to date encompassed thinking alongside the fragmented character of urban life in Malaysia, the violent genius of a long-forgotten Scandinavian silent film on the ‘witch craze,’ the perversity of nonfiction film generally, and forms of life in the United States ethically organised around naturalised notions of neoliberal capitalist enterprise. Yet an indisciplined coherence is precisely what I affirm in this inaugural lecture. As our social world exists in pieces, it follows that any intellectual ambition to provide an immanent critique of that world must itself bear the fragmentary, contradictory marks of its object.

Immanent critique is a philosophically negative practice. It seeks out what is typically held to be insignificant or rendered invisible; the silences, contradictions, and incoherencies that are effaced in regimes of affirmation that compel us to smooth over such rifts and consign them to oblivion. It is not at all a world-denying scepticism. Nor is there a transcendent principle or categorical imperative grounding this critique. Like the forms of life it refers to, this critical approach is itself marked by contradiction, opacity, and the constant spectre of failure. And yet, and in spite of all, the (almost) delusional moral perfectionism one fleetingly detects in the social itself drives this critique as it struggles to express hope.

This lecture is therefore a reflection on a scholarly disposition and a speculative, at times excessive, method of thinking about others. The examples are drawn from remembered fragments, prior anthropological work, and from an ongoing ethnographic project that has revived links to a past that I had (incompletely) banished to oblivion. Arising from memories of growing up in a community of frustrated, failed entrepreneurs ensnared in unfree lives they simultaneously defended and despised, this current project considers entrepreneurial subjects in rural Southwestern Colorado (USA) and the contradictions, dilemmas, double-binds, and forms of violence that inevitably emerge from such forms of living. As many Americans take up entrepreneurial life seeking freedom, rather than simply ‘doing business’ or acquiring wealth, the current project aims to sympathetically grasp the lives of persons who find themselves faced with the impossibility of achieving the freedom that popular entrepreneurialism promises. Consistent with the approach I have always taken, staging the engagement as a negative dialectic framing a mode of thinking alongside, this lecture reflects on how they (and we) face the impossibility of a damaged world and live on anyway.

Keywords/themes:

• Critical Theory
• Philosophical Anthropology
• Anthropology of North America
• Enterprise as a form of living
• Anthropological Method
• Freedom/Unfreedom
• Neoliberalism
• Art and Cinema
• Memory/Remembrance
• Anthropology ‘at home’
• Negative Dialectics

Please note that this lecture might be filmed.

Timings:

5.15-6.30pm: Lecture in Meadows Lecture Theatre, Doorway 4, Medical School, Teviot Place EH8 9AG

Followed by reception in the adjacent Chrystal Macmillan Building.