Transcendent Individual

Essays Toward a Literary and Liberal Anthropology

Nigel Rapport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134700592
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

Transcendent Individual argues for a reappraisal of the place of the individual in anthropolgical theory and ethnographic writing. A wealth of voices illustrate and inform the text, showing ways in which individuals creatively 'write', narrate and animate cultural and social life. This is an anthropology imbued with a liberal morality which is willing to make value judgements over and against culture in favour of individuality.
Rapport draws widely on ethnographic and theoretic materials bringing into the debate a range of voices, among them Nietzsche, Wilde, George Steiner, Richard Rorty, John Berger and Anthony Cohen. In doing so he approaches individuality in terms of a range of issues: biological integrity, consciousness, agency, democracy, discourse, globalism, knowledge and play.

Chapter 1
Writing Individual Knowledge and Personal Relations
Eschewing the paths to impersonalisation

Generalisations are true or false in proportion as they represent or misrepresent all the individual doings and happenings. …’The Book of the Recording Angel’ may be regarded as the ideal limit to which [social science] approximates as generalisation tends to zero.

A.M.MacIver

What MacIver claims above idealistically, William Blake (“Jerusalem” (1975)) would claim poetically: ‘Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organised particulars. To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is alone distinction of merit’. Kierkegaard (1940), meanwhile, claims it philosophically: ‘“the public” is an abstraction made up of individuals when they are nothing, when what makes them real people is inoperative’, and Aldous Huxley (1964) claims it novelistically: ‘the general in any man’s conversation must always be converted into the particular and personal if you want to understand him’.

And yet generalisation, ‘impersonalisation’, the conceiving, knowing and phrasing of the world and its features in terms which deny or devalue the individual, the particular and the personal in favour of the collective, the general, the impersonal, is ubiquitous. Whether the discourse concerns folk constructions of academic, lay or expert, commonsensical or theoretical, everyday or esoteric, profane or sacred kinds, there seems to be a common resort to the impersonalisation of generalisation.

Indeed, in social science it is commonly regarded not merely as a virtue, but as a sine qua non of verity. Durkheim’s notion of a “social fact”, of an objective and institutional phenomenon external to, constitutive and coercive of the individual, encapsulated both the fundamental explicans and explicandum of his discipline of sociology—was basic to The Rules of Sociological Method (1966 [1895]). While the notion of an impersonal, formal social reality above and beyond the actions, subjectivities, motives and intentions of individuals lives on in Giddens’ New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), in the form of a concept and domain of “action” which individuals in interaction unintentionally give onto and which ultimately comes to embody the causal conditions and structuring force of such interaction (1976:155–160). (Thus, it is through an institutional analysis of such macro-structural forms and processes, Giddens can conclude, and not in the “triviata” of everyday individual interaction, that basic socio-cultural truths are to be found (1973:15; also cf. Gellner 1959:263)).

In this essay, I set out to do two things. To enumerate a number of significant ways in which ‘the world becomes impersonal’: tentatively to specify reasons why we generalise, to isolate impulses toward generalisation, its possible purposes and benefits. Furthermore, to argue that the only real knowledge of the world is individual and particular, and that it is of this that social science should treat.

Reading a recent review of V.Gatrell’s book The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (1994), and of the ‘sleazy insouciance’ with which administrative tribunals, councils, home secretaries and prince regents would treat the petitions for mercy compiled and proffered by condemned criminals and their supporters—the absurd randomness and callousness surrounding who would be pardoned and who would hang—I was reminded of a sentence of Camus’s which had troubled me for some time: ‘One condemns to the death penalty a guilty man, but one always carries out the sentence on an innocent one.’ What I found haunting about this characterisation was that I believed it but I could not satisfactorily explain why: some murderers, (say terrorists, Nazis, psychopaths), surely were guilty through and through? In this essay, I should also like to provide myself with a greater understanding of why I sympathise with Camus’s sentiment. For I now think it perhaps hinges on a distinction between the impersonal and the personal. Only distance and ignorance (administrative, bureaucratic, social, cultural, emotional) confers a propensity to fix things forever: to posit an absolute, fatal guilt; only on an impersonal level can someone pass an absolute judgement and condemn to death. From close to—as close to someone as to carry out a death penalty—one accrues a knowledge of inevitable relativity and situationality, and hence an appreciation of a certain innocence: the personal ever confers the mitigation of contextualisation. (And maybe Camus would have agreed—if in other terms—with van der Rohe: ‘God is in the details.)

FIVE WAYS IN WHICH THE WORLD BECOMES IMPERSONAL

1 The cognitive impulse

We grant the world that we cognitively construct a (false) impersonal ontological status—we ‘ontically dump’ our conceptualisations onto the world—in order that we can keep thinking new thoughts and freeing ourselves from categorical givens.

“Ontic dumping” is a term of Carol Feldman’s (1987: passim), describing a cognitive process she says characterises all thinking adult human beings and which babies learn as they acquire language. Every cognitive act, she begins, contains two components: achieving a knowledge of the world—an ‘epistemic’ component—and forming a conceptualisation, a representation of (this knowledge of) the world—an ‘ontic’ component. ‘Ontics’ entail the constructing of states of affairs, the creating and construing of real objects, which can then be taken as given; ontics are concepts and notions and topics, descriptions and forms and images. ‘Epistemics’ entail the original mental acts we undertake so as to come to knowledge, solve individual problems, ab initio; epistemics are definitions, orderings, commentaries, interpretations. Epistemic operation, in short, engages with the new before it becomes the given and the taken-for-granted. Ontic conceptualisation, meanwhile, gradually builds up into an ontological theory: a theory of the nature of the world and its component parts; a cognitive store of how things are and might be, of past objects and possible future ones.

Moreover, while there is no linear or singular relationship between these two cognitive components—’a situation’ (epistemic) can be ‘described’ (ontic) in any number of different ways—there is an ongoing processual relationship, Feldman continues. For once epistemic processes of knowledge formation have resulted in (issued forth as) ontic objects, we treat the latter as though they were, and always have been and will be, external to us. That is, having constructed a world and its objects, we then treat them as if we had merely discovered them, as if they were ‘really real’ and not ours at all. As Bruner put the case, our thought may be “in here” but our conclusions we put “out there”: epistemic operations and their output are given ontological status; processes turned into products. Here is a situation of ‘ontic dumping’ which amounts to a universal human practice—and also failing (1990:24).

That ontic dumping is a failing, of social scientists as of anyone else, is the thrust of this essay as a whole, so let me leave Bruner’s judgement hanging for the time being and return to Feldman for further explanation of why such dumping takes place. First, ontic dumping occurs, she postulates, so as to make cognitive space for new epistemics (for what Goodman has referred to as the continuous act of new ‘worldmaking’ (1978: passim)). It is in our nature to keep thinking new thoughts, construing different worlds, with the result that new objects and concepts are made up, new conceptualisations. This in turn has the effect of prior, given objects and extant concepts being further externalised and distantiated—made increasingly ‘real’, ‘out there’. And so the process is continuous; ontic dumping is part-and-parcel of our continual freeing of ourselves from the lineaments of the present. We abstract ourselves from present structures and ‘go meta’, but at the expense of giving those structures a false, impersonal, ontological status.

Also, ontic dumping occurs because of the tool people most usually employ for their worldmaking: language. Here is a more or less shared fund of ready-made verbal forms, concepts and images, existing categories, symbols and representations, which people use to objectify the epistemic—and whose ready-made nature soon gives the lie to the personality and individuality of the original epistemic process. Once a world has been represented in language, it comes to be dumped because language readily appears ‘out there’, impersonal: a store of collective referents, the crystallisation and epitome of cultural forms and categories, of social norms and practices (Berger and Luckmann 1969:66).

In short, converting our ongoing mental processes into linguistic objects appears to endow them with a collective reality which renders the momentary and processual as precedent and static; also the private as public, and the personal as impersonal. The world is made impersonal because the formal “clothing of our language makes everything alike” (Wittgenstein 1978:224): causes us to forget, in Feldman’s words, that there is “a more personal language of thinking than the social language of discourse” (1987:135).

2 The social impulse

When the forms individuals create and adopt to house and carry their meanings come to be more broadly accepted and used, passed between innumerable hands and mouths, so they become ambiguous, featureless, clickéd, impersonal: the common coin of a generality.

The world consists of innumerable contents, Simmel begins (1971: passim). These are given determinate structure and identity by marrying them to certain forms. This relationship between form and content (or meaning) is necessary but not determinate, fixed or intrinsic. The same form can house any number of meanings, and the same meaning be housed in innumerable forms.

However, while meanings are innumerable, forms are not. At any one time, there is a finite number of words, images, gestures, signs—symbols (Geertz’s ‘vehicles of a conception’) in common usage in a socio-cultural milieu; there are only so many ways of speaking, dressing, signing, behaving, whatever it is an individual wants to mean. Moreover, these finite forms assume a certain fixity and inflexibility. The individual can feel himself trapped in a world of unresponsive, insensitive, generalised forms, inadequate to his personal needs. This is “the ambiguity at the heart of all social existence” (Jackson 1989:33): the eventfulness, flux and creativity of individual life faced by the seemingly frozen forms of ongoing cultural tradition.

It is not that forms are any less individual creations than meanings. It is that once created, once objectified (made into something others can recognise as an object of exchange, an object for their own potential use), forms begin becoming independent of their individual creators. Indeed, the forms become the very vehicles of sociality, the means by which individuals come together, interact, and ‘communicate’ with one another; forms become synthesising mechanisms. In the process of this synthesis, however, forms change their nature. No longer intimately tied to personal meanings, expressions and needs (in particular those of their creators), they can serve the expressive needs of many, and may serve the interactive needs of all.

Indeed, as interaction becomes wider still, sociality more inclusive, so the shared forms which make the mutuality and reciprocality of interaction possible become further and further reduced in terms of their complexity, subtlety, idiosyncrasy. The forms become common- denominational and institutionalised; from being the intentioned product, the subjective invention, of the mental activity of an individual, they become the stable but rigid medium of interaction and communication of a group; from being the original outer covering or clothing of personal contents, they become hypostatised, seemingly things-in-themselves, self-sufficient systems, empires functioning according to their own logic and law. And while, in their use, individuals continuously rein-corporate these objective forms into their personal world-views, translate them back into the domain of the subjective, as a cultural set of symbols in a social milieu and beyond, the forms can seem to amount to a detached, stultifying, oppressive array. “The words in my mouth have gone dead”, Ionesco could lament, now muddled, cheapened, petrified, made imprecise, through overuse (Steiner 1978:196).

In short, Simmel concludes, the world is made impersonal by sociation: by individuals interacting in terms of mutually shared forms whose very commonality detracts inevitably from those forms’ original provenance in and pertinence to an individual and personal world-view.

3 The religious impulse

When the gods and the cosmic order which human beings create (bolstering their nomic constructions of order in the world with other-worldliness) inexorably become independent of their human creators, we find ourselves living in a world which is impersonal inasmuch as it is outwith human causation, choice and control

Historically, religion has been the most widespread and effective means of maintaining, legitimating and validating the worlds which human beings have individually and collectively constructed, Berger begins (1990: passim). Human societies are enterprises in world-making, affording human beings a sense of meaning, order and routine which is not provided by their biological circumstances alone, and thus potentially keeping at bay the anomy of a random, entropic, absurd universe. And yet, there are occasions when the facticity of everyday routine, when the commonsensical expectation of mundane interaction, is not sufficient to deal with life’s eventualities. Ignorance and forgetfulness, suffering and misfortune, dreams and daydreams, accidents, insults, fights, failures, above all, deaths, may all call into question the interactional routine and commonsensical knowledge by which life is usually lived, and threaten confusion (cf. Leach 1969:1). These uncalled-for occasions and occurrences bring into stark focus the dividing line between order and disorder and emphasise the precariousness of the former, its constant dependence on human activity and consciousness. To alleviate this dependence, to make the order of the world seem more sure, more autonomous, more proper and permanent, ‘religion’ is called into play: something which substitutes human agency and responsibility by the superhuman and which bolsters a frail human order by subsuming it within an ultimate, universal, ‘cosmic’ meaning and order. The human order or ‘nomos’ becomes a microcosm or reflection or incarnation of an all-encompassing universal order.

Religion serves to “cosmize” the order which humans have created, therefore, projecting it onto the universe as such, endowing the order with ‘natural’ law, grounding the order in ‘sacred’ reality: in a nature which is awesome and mysterious, which transcends human beings and yet includes them. Nomos is substituted for a ‘cosmos’ which is more or less inevitable, ineffable, infinite, immortal and independent of human will, wish or control. In short, religion, the establishment through human activity of an allembracing sacred order, is something capable of maintaining itself whatever the disorder which threatens and irrespective of human weakness.

Another way of defining the sacred, however, Berger continues, is the creation of otherness. Human creation (causation, production, responsibility) becomes a world apart, and circumscribed; ultimately, human activity becomes ‘destined’, ‘fated’, ‘the will of God or the gods’. In short, the sacred world becomes one in which human beings lose themselves, their personalities, their personal responsibilities, their frailties.

And another way of talking about this would be a recognition of religion’s propensity for alienation. Precisely the same quality which stabilised the human order also dehumanises and impersonalises it, transforming human products into alien mystery, into superhuman facts; while it may no longer be frail, precarious and contingent, instead, the order of the world is mystified and made other, its human accountability and immediate accessibility denied.

In conclusion, then, religion is “an immense projection of human meanings…which comes back as an alien reality to haunt its producers”—even unto death (Berger 1990:100). The world is made impersonal, in short, by a fictitious inexorability serving to negate its human plasticity.

4 The objective impulse

In a desire to know others as we know ourselves, to extend the certainties of a subjective, personal knowledge out into the world beyond ourselves, we imagine objectivity: a mimicry of subjective perception but magically I rationally independent of an individual observer. In the process we misconstrue the phenomenon of knowledge, and invent a world of abstract concreteness, of impersonal and disembodied points of reference.

The perceived world is always the reaction to the world by a self, Wagner begins (1991: passim); here is a refracted world, deflected through the prism of the self. Moreover, subjective perceptions can only be elicited in others through iconic means and in iconic forms: by embodying them in verbal or non-verbal imagery. Meaning is a personal, internal perception (both in terms of the things perceived and the means of their being perceived), but in attempting to externalise and communicate this, one inevitably has recourse to the institutionalisation that is language and the mediation that is visible behaviour.

This gives onto a perennial uncertainty and doubt which Wagner calls “the reflex of subjectivity” (1991:40): can intuitively apprehended, subjective experience be objectively described? is an individual ultimately able to communicate his self-perceptions or share those of others? is not symbolic meaning (both that intended and that elicited) always hermetically sealed within “the personal microcosm” (1991:37)? is not others’ behaviour only ever construable as a formal (iconic) analogue of one’s own? Nothing, Wagner concludes, is more “clear, distinct, concrete, certain, or real than the self’s perception of perception, its own sensing of sense”, but other selves, other perceptions and senses, remain ‘outside bodies’ only, whose meanings are invisible (1991:39; cf. Laing 1968:16).

It is from this subjective doubt, this contingency, this despair at doing justice to personal perception, to internal certainty, that the impulse towards objectivity is born. Inspired by subjective knowledge as an archetype, we imagine gaining that knowledge of others: we wish for an objective verity and verifiability. ‘Objectivity’ is an impersonal idiom or discourse which becomes a magical token promising a manageable “word-world”: order, orientation, determinacy and systematisation in regard to others; a self-like knowledge in the disorientating environment of other people (Jackson 1989:3–4).

However, such knowledge remains a pretence, a self-delusion. Moreover, it is a delusion which undercuts the very means and process of our actual (personal) knowledge of and being in the world, which distances us from the realities of phenomenological existence. In particular, we isolate seeing from other modes of knowing, give the visual primacy over other senses as the basis and validation of data, and proceed to use the distance which vision affords to claim a knowledge which is non-interventionist 0and independent of the thing envisioned (cf. Bias 1994:164–5; Jonas 1954: passim). Thus we reduce drastically the complexity of the ‘experiential sensorium’ (Fernandez 1992:127) which is our actual engagement with the world while claiming thereby to engage with it more reliably. In short, in an attempt to extend our knowledge of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Transcendent Individual
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Manifesto: Towards a Liberal and Literary Appreciation of the Conscious and Creative Individual
• Chapter 1: Writing Individual Knowledge and Personal Relations: Eschewing the Paths to Impersonalisation
• Chapter 2: ‘Going Meta’: Structure and Creativity
• Chapter 3: Individual Narratives: ‘Writing’ as a Mode of Thought Which Gives Meaning to Experience
• Chapter 4: Movement and Identity: Narrations of ‘Home’ in a World in Motion
• Chapter 5: “Surely Everything has Already Been Said About Malinowski’s Diary!”
• Chapter 6: Writing Fieldnotes: On the Conventionalities of Note-Taking and Taking Note, Local and Academic
• Chapter 7: Domino Worlds: At home on the Dominoes-Table in Wanet
• Chapter 8: Hard-Sell or Mumbling “Right” Rudely the Hold of Conversation: The Power of Discursive Surfaces
• Chapter 9: Discourse and Creativity: Sheikh Alwan: Fathalla: Sid Askrig
• Chapter 10: Individual Morality: Between Liberalism, Anthropology and Biology
• Bibliography