Making sense (of ethnography)

The philosopher must be sufficiently perverse to play the game of truth and error badly: this perversity, which operates in paradoxes, allows him to escape the grasp of categories. But aside from this, he must be sufficiently ‘ill-humored’ to persist in his confrontation with stupidity, to remain motionless to the point of stupefaction in order to approach it successfully and mime it, to let it slowly grow within himself…and to await, in the always unpredictable conclusion to this elaborate preparation, the shock of difference.

– Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” (1977)

The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs.  It flashed on him instantly that he didn’t hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it…But in this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

– Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (1977/1991)

How can ethnography achieve “the effect of the real” (Barthes 1989; Gallagher & Greenblatt 2000)?  Is it enough simply to expand our definition of the field, to allow (post)modernity to redefine our object of study as one that is not limited to particular temporal and geographic sites?  Or is something more required?  If “realism” need not rely on representation, then what might a non-representational realism look like?

For Deleuze, the alternative to the logic of representation is the “logic of sense” (Deleuze 1990).  The logic of representation is what we typically refer to when we speak of Platonism, and is the ontological distinction between bodies and ideas, substance and form, copy and model.  This is the order of the “limited.”  It is the order of that which stays still, of the present, of adjectives and nouns, and of the fixed relationship between what gives shape and what takes shape.

The logic of sense, however, exceeds and defines the logic of representation.  It is the distinction between what falls within the logic of representation and that which does not, between the real and the simulacrum.  This is the order of the unlimited: not without end but without limitation.  It is the disorder of that which resists staying still, of the past and the future, of verbs and the infinitive.  The logic of sense puts static categories and states of being in opposition to possibilities and “rebel becomings” (2).

Deleuze finds within Platonism the key to subverting it—the logic of sense destabilizes and brings into focus the logic of representation by placing it in irreducible contrast with that which exceeds it.  In Stoic terminology, the distinction between what falls within the logic of representation and what falls outside it is the difference between “things” and “events.”  In Deleuze’s reading, everything contained within the logic of representation are “things,” while everything that exceeds that logic are “events.”  Forms, ideas, models, and categories are granted the same ontological status as substances, states, objects, and bodies—they are all things, static and defined.  Events, on the other hand, resist definition and do not belong to the logic of representation.  They are the effects of things coming together and moving apart, and have either already happened or are yet to happen.  They are “becoming[s] whose characteristic is to elude the present” (1).

Events happen “at the limit” or “on the surface” of things in that they are the effect of an impact or collision, something that happens when the order of representation is perturbed or rendered inadequate.  They are felt as surprising moments, as feelings of uncertainty, as affects that resist our attempts to categorize and delimit them.  Sense, then, is “the thin film at the limit of things and words” (31).  It is what happens. The logic of sense is the (dis)order produced by our attempts to make sense out of the contradiction between the dissonance of events and the order of things.

 This juxtaposition of sense and representation—or, more precisely, this subsumption of the logic of representation under or within the logic of sense—and the rethinking of language that it entails has potentially dramatic consequences for how we think about the writing of culture.  If moving away from representation involves collapsing the distinction between the material and the ideal, then what is the ethnos in ethnography?  If what matters is not the order we impose on the world but how we make sense out of it, what kinds of narrative tools will allow us to call attention to this process of sense-making?  Can language be used to explore its own nebulous boundaries?

Language attempts to impose static categories on things, but it is consistently unable to do so—the moment we attempt to describe something, to capture it in words, we find that it is no longer what it was before we attempted to name it.  The significance of language, and therefore of culture, does not reside in the stable relationship between what we say and what we are referring to; rather, it resides in the play between them.  “It is language which fixes the limits (the moment, for example, at which the excess begins), but it is language as well which transcends the limits and restores them to the infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming.”  To consign language to the order of representation is to ignore its capacity to both fix and transcend limits.

When we speak of anthropology, who is this anthropos and what logoi does it inhabit?  Paul Rabinow sees us as living at the intersection of multiple and heterogeneous rationalities, each of which presents us with a unique set of problems and a unique way of engaging with ourselves and with the world.  “The act of thinking,” he writes, “is an act of modal transformation from the constative to the subjunctive.  From the singular to the multiple.  From the necessary to the contingent” (Rabinow 2003: 19).

Thought is the act of loosening the grasp of categories and rationalities.  It is a matter of identifying the assemblages of things and events that come together in particular times and in particular places, and which give form to the experience of the contemporary.  For Rabinow, ethnography is not about creating a faithful representation of the real, but rather about using language to hold it still for long enough to see what is happening.

As Foucault wrote in his 1970 review of Deleuze’s work, to speak in terms of sense and events is to see the real not as a static and predictable system of causes and effects but as something very different, something that resists our attempts to constrain it within a representational framework.  “Let us imagine a stitched causality: as bodies collide, mingle, and suffer, they create events on their surfaces, events that are without thickness, mixture, or passion; for this reason, they can no longer be causes” (Foucault 1977: 173).  Instead, the reality of the logic of sense is a space of shifting assemblages held together by “a more complex logic” than that of cause and effect, signified and sign, form and substance (173).

What is important for the philosopher—and, it would seem, for the ethnographer—is to be attentive to this uncertain excess of things and events in such a way that “the shock of difference,” when it happens, prompts us not to retreat into the darkness of the cave but to continue writing.

***

• Barthes, R. (1989). The rustle of language. Trans. R. Howard. Berkeley, University of California Press.

• Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense. Ed. C. V. Boundas, Trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale. New York, Columbia University Press.

• Dick, P. K. (1991). A scanner darkly. New York, Vintage Books.

• Foucault, M. (1977). “Theatrum philosophicum.” Language, counter-memory, practice: Selected essays and interviews. Trans. D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca, Cornell University Press.

• Gallagher, C. & Greenblatt, S. (2000). Practicing new historicism. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

• Rabinow, P. (2003). Anthropos today: Reflections on modern equipment. Princeton, Princeton University Press.