Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment

6. Anthropology

6 anThroPoLogy Anthropology was able to free itself of the curse laid on it by evil fairies at the time of its birth.Today,it has rid itself of a form of intellectual asceticism embodied (or, rather, disembodied) in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. The amateur intellectualism of analysis reduced ontological realities to nomenclatures, to words and abstract relationships among concepts. The mental absorbed the social and with it the historical (time) into an abstract space of forms and structures. This scientificity covered a series of illicit operations, carefully dissimulated within the envelope of structuralism.First,beneath the appearance of recognizing the specificity of the realities under consideration—socalled archaic societies—it submitted their differences to the categories of the Occidental Logos.The destructive activity of European reason— theoretically negative, practically devouring whatever resisted it—was revivified and now justified; intellectual reductivism completed the reduction begun by other means, claiming to compensate for earlier disasters. Second, anthropology sidestepped modernity. It appeared to indirectly approach the study of the contemporary world, but in actuality, it deflected critical lucidity by circumventing objective realities. By discovering “primitive” categories (family, exchange) in the contemporary world, it succeeded in erasing capitalism, the bourgeoisie, imperialism. Itsideologicalclumsinessissuchthatcountlessingenuoussouls,believing themselves to be part of an avant-garde, took this attitude as a sign of boldness, others as a sign of subversion. But in actuality, it was no more than an enormous circle, the most vicious of all: we conceive of others as a function of the self, and we conceive of the self in terms of others,holding to a conception of the self that is reduced to the absolute minimum. 80 Anthropology 81 The attack against structuralism,a reactionary ideology in the service of a neocapitalist technocracy, was initially conducted on a general, theoretical , and methodological front. This ideology retained a degree of strength and appeal, which had been established on what was thought to be solid ground—anthropology.Today,dislodged from the epistemological center it assumed it had strengthened, this ideology is threatened on its own terrain. Robert Jaulin discovered a connection between (a) logical relations of inclusion and exclusion, (b) spatial relations of interiority and exteriority ,and (c) affective relations of belonging or not-belonging to the same group.The relation of the self to the self and to other selves is inclusive, reflexive, spatially and affectively interiorizing. The relation to groups of others is exclusive, exteriorizing, and tends toward indifference and hostility. This overview doesn’t explain anything, however. It only enables us to address the study of populations (the Bari and Sara people,for example ) in order to identify effective differences.1 The fundamental social unit is defined by the connection (the intersection) between the people of the Self and the people of the Other. A society, a civilization experiences an everydayness.2 However, this everydayness does not consist of a vocabulary but of acts and usages that govern space and places of residence , productive efforts and the pleasures of consumption, skill and social behavior, the joys and sorrows of love, marriage, and procreation. In this way space enters the thought that describes and analyzes societies unlike our own. And this confirms its formation as a social space in societies described by history and the other social sciences, not only ethnology and anthropology. Relationships remained without support, for knowledge. The relations described and analyzed by Jaulin involve groups that are effectively excluded by their inclusion and are distinguishedanddifferentiatedfromoneanotherinadeterminatespace .Social units correspond,although loosely,to residences (collective homes,quarters ) in such a way that the society can be described in terms of its structures of production or marriage without inconsistency (although the connectionsarebynomeansmechanicalbecausetherearealwayschoices, preferences, areas of uncertainty). As a result, the knot of relations is not attached to contemporary vocabulary, to the terminology of relations. Nomenclature doesn’t have the privileged role given to it by linguistic dogmatism,for which relations 82 Anthropology and words coincide,as if words pointed to things.The proper name,left out by formalist linguistics,is a term,a knot of relations,that designates the relations between a person and those who call him by that name (Charles,Robert,Henry).This leads outside formalism to the search for those in question and their interrelations. These interrelations include residences and the distribution or attribution of space, consumption, and production, primarily of food.3 With spaces and names,sexuality reenters anthropology,not in terms of the sexuality...