Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations

Epilogue. To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable: Return(s) to Subjectivities

introduction: forget descartes, watch makhmalbaf What are the returns to subjectivities today—the interest payments in subjectivity ; the stocks and bonds (and modalities or paths) of returns to constructions of, or subjectivations of, the feeling or cognitive self or plural selves; the payoffs and paybacks for excavating or reconstructing painful illusions , the occulted or hidden injuries of fantasy, the erotic charges and their penal codes (or intensities of identification and their prosecutory/persecutory charges), the centaurian or chimera terrors of war and politics?1 The implications, exchanges, and transductions of these returns play out in four registers: The political subject of moral sentiment or public solidarity: Durkheim’s conscience collective, Weber’s legitimate domination, Gramsci’s hegemonic order, Marx’s universalization of a ruling fraction ’s or a state’s ideology, or most generally, the subject position of citizenship (moving from subject of a feudal lord to assertion of personal responsibility and agency in a political community). Psychological subjectivity (self,selves) and private ethics:family-peer self-constructions (distorted by conditions of insecurity and violence or by security and cluelessness about the insecurity of others whose 423 Epilogue: To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable Return(s) to Subjectivities michael m. j. fischer We have to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe—in short, think . . . to live with what would otherwise be unendurable. —Gilles Deleuze (1990/1995: 111, 113). 424 / Epilogue lives condition one’s own);selves constructed as continuous,coherent, and whole; or selves experienced as fractured shards, either in pain or in pleasure because they need not be maintained as sutured wholes. The linguistic subject: the split enunciative and grammatical functions —that is,most simply and obviously,the differences between the subject of enunciation (the I who speaks), the grammatical subject of a statement or sentence, and the deictic physical body of a speaker. In Lacanian-Freudian notation,the subject,S (homophone of Freud’s das Es and the shape of a Möbius strip),is a split or barred S (S / s s),the splits being between the symbolic order (the subject is a subject only by virtue of subjection to the linguistic-symbolic order, Freud’s das Uber-Ich, or superego), the imaginary-enunciative order of the ego (Freud’s das Ich), and the order of the real, with its fleshy substrate and independent order of memory and response.2 And thus the tremulous biological subject, the body’s organism; the carnal,nervous,vascular,mucal,and immunological substrate with its reflexes, responses, cascades of chain reactions, transmissions, parasites , symbiants, sensate folds where the body feels itself (the “reversible flesh of Merleau-Ponty); expressions of the body’s training and injuries as well as its genetic, cellular, and muscle memories and mutations;“orchestration”of Lyotard’s (1993 [1974]:73)“semiotic of intensities,” which “always involve an amnesia.”3 In our high-velocity age of circulating media images, phrases, sentiments —outrage, calls to action, laments, catalogues and archives that place suffering elsewhere—suffering, witnessing, and testimonies are increasingly split modalities within each of these registers. Suffering is discounted (revalued) by political geopolitics, indirect chains of agency, and emotive enunciation that has subjective, but little objective (predicate, judicial, evidentiary ), weight. Subjectivities, thus, for the anthropologist, are raucous terrae incognitae, landscapes of explosions, noise, alienating silences, disconnects and dissociations, fears, terror machineries, pleasure principles, illusions, fantasies, displacements, and secondary revisions, mixed with reason, rationalizations, and paralogics—all of which have powerful sociopolitical dimensions and effects. This feedback between the linguistic, personal, sociopolitical, and biological—which allows nothing to be taken at face value or at first sight—is becoming a foregrounded anthropological terrain .Moreover,this terrain is no longer on the margins of civilization:in the Epilogue / 425 realm of the wild man and the shaman (Taussig 1986), the medusa’s hair of ecstatic priests (Obeyesekere 1981),the healing zar cults of the Persian Gulf for hysterical conversion reactions brought on sometimes by the terrors of deep pearl diving (Sa\edi 1966), and the singularities of those who escaped the ethnic cleansing of Armenians (Archile Gorky) or the extermination camps of the Nazis (Primo Levi).Today, with sadness and confusion, we can add to the list the widening circles of the disappeared in Argentina and Central America; the holocausts of Cambodia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia ; the Palestine-Israel feud; and...