A Response to Arjun Appadurai's "The Future As Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition"

Drawing on delineations of culture in the anthropological canon and their intersection with Appadurai's use of the term in his recent book "The Future As Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition", Hylton White thinks through the entanglement of culture, history and economy.

There is so much one could say about these essays, which advance but also reorient, or at least mark a quite significant shift of emphasis in Appadurai’s work, extending but retooling his effort to put together a theoretical vision that he thinks would be more adequate to the world that has been created since the collapse of the socialist project. As extensions of his earlier work, they of course take the global condition as a starting point, both conceptually and in the kinds of empirical objects to which almost all of the essays attend. Whether he is writing about financial speculation, or urban social movements, or the meaningful conditions of possibility for popular violence, especially against minorities, Appadurai is never very far from concerns that all of us, in every part of the world, would recognize as being some of the most immediately compelling ones that face us in our own respective surroundings. So although he quite emphatically takes the stance of “the view from Mumbai” (113ff) here, that view will not disorient or seem overly unfamiliar to people who engage the world from Johannesburg, or even from New York. Anything else would be surprising, of course, since Appadurai reminds us several times here of an idea that he has made key to his own understanding of the peculiar shape that “the structure of the conjuncture” (Sahlins 1981) takes in a world like ours: the idea that the local is not just a work in messy progress, just as much as the global is, but also, even more to the point, that the local is itself a space created only by, even as, the confluence of many lines of global composition. If Marx (1857) described the concrete as being concrete because of its many determinations, Appadurai says that the local is the local because of its concentration of many globalizations. To discern and give names to those lines of composition is his project here as much as it was in Modernity at Large, even if, as he notes in his introduction to this collection, the world of the new millennium is one that makes us attend as much to the “bumps” as to the “flows” of global order. 

As the title tells us, the making of the future is the arena where Appadurai wants to pursue this broader theoretical agenda now, and in that we already see a shift not just in object but also in orientation. On re-reading now, as Chapter 1 in this volume, the well-known introduction to The Social Life of Things, we are reminded that Appadurai has long conceived of the social world as a kind of informational space: a domain where diverse imaginations cluster on a topography of pathways, conveyances, enclaves, diversions, overflows. The reference to “bumps” will signal that this spatial conception of social facts continues in the new work as well. But by Chapter 15, on “The Future as Cultural Fact,” we have moved towards a much more pressing concern with time. By giving that last essay’s title to the collection as a whole, Appadurai positions the book in some ways as a response to Jane Guyer’s call (2007) for an anthropology of the futures people posit, fear, await, defer, or dissolve in their activities. Also much like Guyer, Appadurai wants to investigate these productions of the future by examining the interplay of economy and culture. That intersection is where I want to focus my remarks as well, but let me come to this gradually, by starting with just one of these terms: Appadurai’s notion of culture.

I start there because, as followers of anthropology’s recent intellectual history will know, the irony of the matter is that “culture” is a much less likely term than is “economy” to be found within the title of a major work in the field now. In polite speech among anthropologists in the early 21st century, culture is almost as abject a term as any of the discipline’s repudiated inheritances. Yet Appadurai uses “culture” in the noun form more than a hundred times in these three hundred pages, not counting bibliography, footnotes or headers, and repeatedly in that most avoided plural: “cultures”. Coming from a figure of Appadurai’s generation and stature, this insistence suggests not just analytical method, but manifesto: a statement about the nature and the promise of anthropology, at a time when all the social sciences face great institutional and intellectual difficulties.

To be clear, these are not the “cultures” of Mead and Benedict, let alone of Tylor and the like, and Appadurai is an ambivalent anthropologist. He begins the book by renouncing much of the field as a scrabbling about in a “cabinet of curiosities” (5), aka the ethnological record, and close to the end he complains that anthropologists’ concerns with what is passing from the face of the earth have “confined” (285) the imagination of the discipline. Statements like these have become obligatory gestures of self-distancing embarrassment, of course, and one has to ask what the ritual of their repetition in text after text is covering up in the broader self-conception of the discipline. But despite succumbing at moments to this impulse, Appadurai much more consistently and decisively follows another. Douglas, Dumont and other anthropological theorists animate most of these essays because the concern Appadurai shares with them is an interest in identifying, not so much how culture shapes the behavior of human others, but rather, almost the opposite, how culture allows human actors to make worlds otherwise through their practical activities. This interest in the otherwise of human life is anthropology’s signal contribution to the lexicon of modern critical thinking. Of course it can be made into a charter for fixating on the essentialisms of otherness, but most of anthropology’s major theorists have in one way or another treated culture as a doorway onto the open-ness of the human condition, rather than to its closure. As Andrew Sartori puts it in his account (2005) of the global history of the culture concept, wherever culture appears as a term in modern intellectual life, in South Asia, Europe or elsewhere, it does so because it articulates the emergence of a new interest in the underdetermination of human affairs by externalities or givens. Although he does not put it in so many words, and in fact refuses to offer us a definition of culture as such, Appadurai is firmly in that tradition here when he describes the making of futures as a cultural activity.

Specifically, in Appadurai’s scheme, culture is linked to the open-ness of human life by the fact that our assemblages of representation, disposition, practice and thought are the media for the development of two distinctive capacities for being otherwise. The first of these is the ability to imagine forms of human life as forms of life worth living: what Appadurai calls the capacity to aspire (126). The second is the capacity to devise the social ecologies, the material, institutional and intellectual arrangements, within which lives worth living are plausibly livable: a dimension of what Appadurai calls “the social life of design” (257ff). In both respects, Appadurai is pursuing a set of interests in the construction of worth as an aspect of human activity, in a way that marks the book, among many other things, as contributing to the renewal of a broader anthropological interest in questions to do with value (Graeber 2001, Lambek 2008, Robbins 2013). The capacity to aspire is a cultural one, Appadurai says, because it involves positioning oneself with evermore confidence and competence in a field that comprises, not just individual means and ends, but collective understandings of the good that make those means and ends the elements of value that they are. At stake here are the many visions of well-being and of worthiness in human life that people have developed and continue to develop in the context of particular forms of collective social existence. And likewise for the latter: Appadurai says that forms of life can be re-conceived in the active voice, not as so many given patterns of culture, but rather as the pragmatic, contested, aspirational making of valued social environments in the face of all the forces that oppose such human designs.

To put Appadurai’s argument in other words, the capacity to be otherwise that we call culture is a vector of ethical reaching: a capacity that always stands at least partially, potentially, in a negative, even in a critical relationship to given states of affairs--rather than simply reflecting or affirming them. But then what is the worldly life of this capacity? Where do we find it, and how can it be nurtured? Again, two things stand out within Appadurai’s account of this. One is that, being cultural, the capacity to aspire is not an individual property but a relational one. One cannot hope to be otherwise except through others. But the second is that it is not the default condition of a social existence either. For one thing, it is unequally distributed: more readily at hand for the rich and powerful than for the poor (188). For another thing, and this is the major theme of the essay that gives the book its title, the capacity to aspire involves “an ethics of possibility” or of open-ness, and this is an ethos Appadurai puts in stark contrast with another one, an “ethics of probability” that animates much of our social life as well. The latter is the ethic of the contemporary financialized economy as he portrays it, and so we come to the question of the relationship between culture and economy in his argument. In the present age, as Appadurai describes it, the relationship between culture and economy is an antagonistic relationship between two kinds of spirit or ethos: one in which the diversity of collective goods is imagined, another in which the impulse is instead to manage risks. What global futures emerge for us in coming years will depend on which of these spirits is victorious. 

There is much to find appealing and inspiring in this argument. I am especially drawn to Appadurai’s conception of culture as value-creating praxis, which I think will help us return to a range of questions that were once at the critical edge of anthropology, but which we have left unanswered since we turned away from realist approaches to the analysis of culture (Turner 1984; Munn 1986; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). But I also want to ask questions of Appadurai’s scheme, and especially about how far the economy of our time is really susceptible to being understood in terms of the language of spirit.

In that regard, Appadurai’s model is Weber, of course, and especially the question that Weber leaves to his readers at the very end of The Protestant Ethic, when he asks what will take the place of a Calvinist ethos that gave up its life as spirit when the technical and the institutional forms of modern capitalism objectified and materialized it. Appadurai says that the calculation of risk is more and more becoming the logic of this economy. (In the final part of the book, he also describes the emergence of a “spirit of uncertainty” (238) that gambles on the inadequacy of the instruments or devices that pursue such calculations, but the ethics of probability is nonetheless the driving force at work.) When Appadurai uses this argument to take on Callon (1998) and others who see the economy as an actor-network, I find myself in sympathy—but asking nonetheless what would have given rise to probabilistic thinking, as well as to gambles against it, if the calculating devices themselves are indeed not enough to explain the kind of spirit that puts them to work. Here I claim no historical expertise at all, but surely one could speculate that spirit and device alike are responses to the experience of an objective condition of practical uncertainty, created by the irrational and impersonal logic of capital as an overarching socio-historical reality. Ever since The Social Life of Things, Appadurai has resisted any attempt to conceive of capitalism as, in his words there, repeated here, “a vast impersonal machine, governed by large-scale movements” (52). But might it not be the case that the sheer abstraction, inscrutability, and crisis-ridden gyrations of a “vast impersonal machine” of growth are themselves the very conditions of necessity for the kinds of calculations, risks and gambles that Appadurai identifies. It is certainly an option Weber himself considered and left in play, when he talked about the way that spirit in general had fled from the metal forms of modernity. 

If this were the case, it would mean that several parts of Appadurai’s story could be narrated somewhat differently. It might help us think about modernization theory in another light, for example. Appadurai says that modernization theory is misunderstood when it is regarded as essentially, or formally, Eurocentric (228), a point with which I agree. But he also says that modernization theory is an example of a species of thought that he labels as trajectorist, or focused on progressive developmentalism. And trajectorism is a habit of thought that he does describe as peculiarly Western both in origin and in impulse (224). No doubt there are resources in the Western tradition on which such thinking could base itself, but within that same tradition one could just as easily find resources for cyclical and other nonlinear ways of considering time. Surely the question is not whether Western thought is itself trajectorist, but under what historical conditions its trajectorist possibilities become the most compelling ones by comparison with others. Could we not see historical experiences of capitalist growth as one major spur towards towards this selection of linear images? This would certainly help explain why we see a similar faith in development emerge in the non-Western world at times in the modern age as well, which we cannot do so readily when we root that faith in uniquely Western legacies.

More broadly, though, to take seriously the impersonal logic of capital would mean that the vectors of culture and economy relate to one another not as two competing spirits in the modern age, but rather as spirit and system. We would have to take Marx as seriously as Weber in constructing such an account of the economy, and then we would have to ask in what ways capital relates to the conditions of possibility for culture. If culture is the condition for the capacity to be otherwise, then what we would have to consider here is the relationship between capitalism and freedom. In such an account, the limit to the capacity to aspire would be more than its unequal distribution between the rich and the poor, as much as that is important. Understanding the limit to the capacity to aspire would require that we also trace how human action everywhere is mediated, deferred and disconnected through its dependence on the forms of economic life dictated by the peculiar nature of capital. And although he would not put it this way, I think this is where Appadurai’s conception of culture as freedom takes us almost necessarily.

Hylton White is senior lecturer and head of department at the Anthropology Department, University of the Witwatersrand

If we doubt ourselves, who will have belief in us?

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Assistant Professor of science, technology and society the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, speaks to the JWTC Blog.

Bruno Latour's work was very much at the center of the debates during the 2012 JWTC roundtable on 'Things of Nature|Nature of Things'. What, from his thought on nature/objects/things, should in your view be amended as he moves South?

Bruno Latour is obviously beginning to catch fire in the Global South. He is probably the next Foucault. Before Foucault there was, of course, Marx. One of Foucault’s most serious readers in African studies, V. Y. Mudimbe, has lamented the persistence of a “Western ratio” at the center of African thought. Mudimbe states very clearly that Foucault, despite his brief sojourn in North Africa, was not writing for or about Africa but (specific) Western societies. Nor was Marx; same for Latour.

We should, therefore, be cautious about what is universalizable about them; that does not mean they are not intellectually usable material. Even in Western academia, Latour has been criticized for his “executive approach” that privileges the lab engineer or scientist. This applies to actor network heuristics in general. My fear is that people bringing Latour or Science and Technology Studies (STS) into African Studies are simply going to trace the itineraries of Western artifacts derived from the labs that STS described, the infrastructures and thought systems transplanted to Africa from them, and make this the be-all end-all of science and technology in Africa.

 If that were to happen, my fear is that there will be no investment in investigating African modes of sciences and technologies—or the very idea that they exist. Latour does not have a formula for nonwestern ways of knowing (science) and means of doing (technology). Uncritical discipleship to him will be a trap because it saddles one with that baggage of theoretical insufficiency.

 What would be in your view the most efficient use of Latour and others in the African context?

I would urge that we critically utilize Latour as a methodology for writing narratives in humanities and social sciences, viz., to take seriously the role not just of humans but also nonhumans as actors (or actants), as heterogeneous actors in the making of the social.

He wants us to pay attention to the process through which things come to be constituted. And one would say Africanists have always been too human-centric or social-constructivist in their narratives, with animals, the physical environment, and technology as mere anecdotes, wax in people’s hands, or simply nuisances and hazards. Foucault made Africanists even more social constructivist. Two nonhuman elements, technology and ‘nature,’ are quite central to Latour’s analysis. The former constitutes some kind of Western idolatry—Western society is crazy about technology in the hi-tech sense - which means we must question what ‘technology’—alongside ‘experiment,’ ‘science,’ ‘nature,’ ‘environment,’ etc.—really mean in the context of African people’s lived realities.

Are you suggesting that we go beyond some of the foundational dualisms that have been so central to our craft?

Yes, definitively. The division between nature and culture (and spirituality) is tenuous to say the least in the African context. By contrast, Western orders of knowledge, since Hobbes and Boyle, follow a distinct Fact vs. Faith, Reason vs. Religion, dichotomy. In African contexts, this tradition of thought confronted another in which faith and religious structure anchor and inspire fact and reason - one that, like most Global Southern cultures, was more concerned with the whole (earth) than the bisected parts. Vivisection did not have a life of its own; it acquired purpose and meaning within the whole, hence as Joseph Needham remarked once, if one went into Chinese society looking for Science, one would not find it; only sciences.

Whereupon one might ask: As China expands into Africa, Africans into China, and as books get translated from Chinese to English, what might the growing collection of Chinese texts tell us about systems of thought similar to pre-European African modes, now that Western modes of thought have been around and are familiar to us? Is it time to expand our intellectual vista so that we no longer always have to look to Western philosophy for grounding our theories? Why must we always gain universality by looking West?

Should modes of theorization emerging from the South necessarily aspire to be "universal"?

Erudition in front of global audiences, or the desire to impress, should not drive our theory; it should be for the right reasons.

We speak with more strength, authority, and originality if we can tap into registers emergent from local creativities, and if we exercise patience in developing our ideas.

It should not be about taking the theories of others and running with them. Our own material can gain universal reference. We should endeavor to make ourselves aware and read in the registers of others, but never aspire to become miniature others, merely good imitations of Foucault, Latour, or Derrida. The exercise shouldn’t be one of wholesale consumptionism. The goal of literature reviews must always be as precursors to stating our own positions, not making them our own.

Our problem is always that we need to be like them in order to gain universal appreciation. I think we can speak from here with tools from here about materials from here and still acquire universal validity. Subaltern Studies did this.

How do you explain the poverty of theory in 'African studies"?

Any culture of writing and knowledge production emerges out of a specific moment or inspiration. Ours was the Hegelian framing that gave us no history. We were mere hostages to nature, mere moments in the Eurasian passages through space. Even nature (especially the wild) had history. We did not, unless we were part of the wild (hence my ambivalence about the concept of ‘nature’ or ‘the animal’). So it had to be a social history and anthropology searching for empirical evidence, as much of it as possible, wherever it could be found, to prove we had a history too.

My experience of ‘philosophy’ in university was of a syllabus on Thucydides, Socrates, and other foreign people—never about my ancestors’ proverbs and other idioms or their technological achievements, like Great Zimbabwe which, in any case, had been attributed to foreign construction. Until we take idioms generated from here seriously ourselves, they will always be caricatures to and of others.

It could be that the colonial system of education had no interest in making us thinkers. Our failure to decolonize our education system and foster a new way of training students to think and innovate, to be creative beings and not just potential employees, to move beyond a system where we were supposed to be only ‘baas boys’, good only at taking instructions instead of thinking critical, is the biggest liability we confront.

Spaces for creative thinking must therefore be utilized wherever they may be found, and our youth encouraged to take a kind of creative recklessness toward received registers. Governments and universities can facilitate the creation of these spaces.  Africa’s vast intellectual pool at home and abroad has enough networks now that could be marshaled into spaces of intellectual ferment—right here on the continent.

Any thoughts about the future of critique in Africa?

Originality and self-belief will be critical as we move forward. It is as if we are not confident to think we can stand on our own feet if we think and speak like Africans and engage the outside as such. If we doubt ourselves, who will have belief in us?

Identity and Property in Precarious Times

John and Jean Comaroff with Eric Worby, JWTC

Jean and John Comaroff’s session on ‘Identity and Property in Precarious Times’ took a different look at themes that had also preoccupied the first day of the workshop. How do we study the forms of subjectivity associated with economic action at the present time, and what does doing so teach us about the larger trends that are shaping the future? Arjun Appadurai came at these issues on Monday through a return to Weber in light of Callon, leading to a call for work on the kinds of ethos inspiring how various actors (traders, for instance) animate the instruments or devices of contemporary markets. The Comaroffs’ intervention was to lay out the terms for an immanent critique of what they called the emerging identity economy. How are we to understand a world where (some) people make a living by owning and selling their culture? What configurations of justice and recognition emerge around this activity? What kinds of social entities congeal through it? How does the commodification of culture relate to other historical iterations of self-possession?

The Comaroffs’ approach to these questions started from a (Foucault-inspired) sketch of continuities and disjunctures between the logic of classical liberalism and a present moment they variously termed post- and neo-liberal. According to this narrative, the world at present is witnessing the involution of categories, distinctions and relationships that once marked the constitution of civil society through acts of exchange among self-possessed individuals: free subjects who exteriorized their selves in forms of property produced by work, protected by law, and circulated in markets. Most importantly for their argument, neo-liberalism sees the narrowing--to the point of collapse--of any residual gap between the self and the forms of property on which self-realization in the liberal world depends. With this comes the collapse of the idea of a social world mediated by acts of labour, and into the resulting space step subjects like the South Africans and others whom the Comaroffs cite as (self-consciously) possessing and selling not labour, but identity itself.

This is the basis for what they call Ethnicity Inc., the object of their recent book by that title. Increasingly naturalized modes of belonging (genetic ones, particularly) become the means of membership in legal corporations that control the rights to exploit and profit from heritage, indigenous knowledge, ancestral land, and other such ethnic properties. (Things that in more modernist times were seen as the very antitheses of the logic of the commodity form.) The result is a new configuration of self, culture, and social being--including new forms of harm and exclusion the Comaroffs identified particularly with life in the waste ecologies of the formerly industrial zones of the world (both North and South).

The early round of responses focused mostly on the way the Comaroffs traced the genealogy of Ethnicity Inc. Several participants asked how the emergence of the identity economy would look if narrated specifically from the South. How would the story of ethnic tourism look if one saw precedents in Fanon’s account of the black subject rendered dependent on white recognition, for instance? Would the communitarian dimensions of cultural property look different if one started, not with the logic of Lockean liberalism, but the history of the constitution of property in the colonial world? From a different angle, what is occluded by moving from classical liberalism to its neoliberal involution without thinking through the impact of the first ‘post-liberal’ era: that of 20th century state capitalism?

In answering these challenges, as well as subsequent questions on the status of high theory in the contemporary moment, the Comaroffs insisted that their project is to understand a world that more and more understands itself in terms of the intertwining of property and identity. Thinking through the logic of the subject-as-commodity is motivated not by traditional theory, then, but rather as a way of engaging the terms of thought in the neoliberal age.

Myself I find that a deeply compelling argument on the interplay of method, theory and history. But it seems to me that hard work still lies ahead to discern, in a rigorous way, exactly where developments cross the line from continuity to epochal difference. One participant pointed out the affinities between Ethnicity Inc. and the central tenet of post-workerism: the idea that we have shifted from a condition where the isolable and measurable industry of factory workers manufactured valuable things, to one where value stems from our ineffably subjective contributions to an economy of images, attachments and desires. Without a doubt this illuminates some aspects of an ongoing shift, but it also draws its force from a strangely artisanal account of what industrial labour was even at its height in the Fordist economy. What if one sustains instead the idea that even classically proletarian subjects never survived by commodifying their labour or its products (both of which belonged instead to the capital employing them) but instead by selling the time in which they exercised their own subjective capacities for action? If subjectivity is time, and time is the most important form of property that industrial labour constituted and alienated, then the lines between industrial and identity economies begin to seem less radically distinct than implied by a contrast between the selling of labour and culture.

Hylton White

Wits University