The Shadow that Social Media Casts: The Doubled Offlines of Online Sociality
Karandeep Mehra
The attempt to write the ethnography of any object in the contemporary city, at one point or the other, becomes aware of how much thought or action in relation to this object is made possible through forms of new media. In the modes of engagement made possible through the circulations that the internet provides via personal technologies, there are innumerable genres of writing, modes of sharing and circulating images, videos, gifs and memes that have emerged with the world wide web — immersing us in online worlds such as social media, forums, lifestyle apps, service apps, and other such forms. Our immersion in these genres and forms mediate the discovery, access, perception, reception, and evaluation of objects towards which we, as people and individuals, may be oriented. More generally, this state of affairs points to a moraine of online experiences; accumulations of fleeting encounters with new media. Raising the question of how might these many dispersed encounters mediate the offline, which is best defined as the intervals of time in between these encounters. The simplest understanding begins with categorizing these numerous and different encounters under one monolithic term ‘online’, while the rest are understood on the other hand as ‘offline’. Leaving us then to conceive the relation between these two.
The empirical problem of the relation between offline and online, as two distinct categories of experience comes out best in William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), the novel that amongst other things coined the term ‘cyberspace’. Gibson’s novel has been used by many to stage their conceptions of our hyperconnected sociality. These conceptions have tried to understand and give value to the effects and implications of online relations. Though Gibson’s fiction is by no means a technical blueprint of what the internet came to be, you can hear even Gibson quip about how cyberspace had no cellphones. But it has helped us imagine the ineffable consequences of the internet on our psyche; we can recognize our own political climate in Gibson’s understanding of cyberspace as introducing billions of legitimate users into “mass consensual hallucinations”. But what is most compelling about the book is how it depicts the offline. In the novel’s universe the protagonist ‘Case’ ‘jacks in’ and ‘jacks out’ of ‘cyberspace’. Yet when ostracized from cyberspace, when there is no more a possibility of jacking in, Case suffers this separation from the ‘SimStim’ — simulated stimulations of cyberspace — and he crumbles in the hollow ache of this isolation “as the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bed slab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.” (Gibson 1984, 4). With Case here, the offline only becomes possible with the capacity to access or enter the virtual or online — and not as a space antedating the online world when it merely waited for an online world that it would enter. The offline is conceived first as nothing more than an interval that cyberspace made possible: a jacking-out after a jacking-in. However, Gibson goes further than writing it just as an interval between online engagements, and begins to compose a pure offline without this capacity, but only after it has become possible. This offline is not defined negatively but positively, and he writes it as a detritus that remains of jacking in and jacking out of cyberspace, a second offline; a hapless clawing dexterity with dreams that overrun an articulated, identificatory imagination.
When we take Gibson’s fictional composition of the pure offline as an entirely different condition into the earlier simpler distinction of the online and offline, it complicates this division by doubling the offline in relation to the online world. In the previous formulation it was nothing more than the interval in which there is no interaction with a personal technology. Here on the other hand, apart from those encounters with new media, where one ‘jacks in’ and ‘jacks out’ of social media, apps, and sundry circulations; there is a remainder of these in the form of an offline in which there is no such possibility. Nonetheless, this remainder, or the doubled offline, seeks out the first for a sense of order, meaning, and significance. Given the portability and ubiquity of technology this second offline may seem notional, for it is only in complete separation from technology that one may arrive at it. A separation that can otherwise be seen in the withdrawal from an addiction to new media. However, it points not just to a notional figure or a pathological psyche, but is the notion of, and in the case of new media addiction, pathological deviation of a normal condition that is a direct result of the introduction of new media. In this condition, the offline is first a product of intervals in between these fleeting moments, and then its double is in the form of a necessity felt by people or as a necessity commanded by objects, for a relation with the circulations of new media. It is this double that distributes the occurrences of these encounters. This double as a necessity or a capability becomes evident in manifold modes, the clearest examples of which are in verbs like ‘to google’, or qualities like ‘instagrammable’.
This doubled offline is the synthetic product of separate fleeting encounters, it is a “shadow” (Perniola 2000) that these encounters — in all their specificity — cast, as it would be inconceivable without them. Mario Perniola uses the concept of the shadow to begin to understand the condition of art in a world saturated by new media to describe how art, which is always mass produced, would become significant in such a world where it has no aura. Despite this lack, art is found imbricated in varied symbolic investments, and Perniola outlines through the shadow how these investments in art would exist as a “cryptic incorporation”. This outline conceives these investments in art by factoring in the transformations produced by mass media, as such it describes equally the knot of necessities and demands that characterize the doubled offline. Where the encounters with new media continually produce these necessities and capabilities as their remainder; this Perniola understands as an incorporation. Where it is cryptic because
in incorporation an extraneous psychic entity is installed within the Self, in an almost magical and instantaneous way, endowed with its own autonomy that remains unknown to whoever is carrying it within. It constitutes ‘a sort of artificial unconscious’, different from the dynamic unconscious of psychoanalytical tradition. (Perniola 68)
This doubled offline is then two things a ‘shadow’ and an ‘artificial unconscious’. A shadow of our varied interactions with new media as it divides our experiences into the categories of online and offline, and the singular remainder of such an effect that then runs through our thought and actions as an ‘artificial unconscious’. In articulating this doubled offline across the series shadow-remainder-incorporation-artificial unconscious, the analysis of the process of mediation is given an object beyond the description of their surface effects. Further, in considering the different knots of necessities and capability the doubled offline produces through this incorporation, what follows is an attempt to approach this doubled offline as by understanding how it necessitates itself from within the current way of looking at how the online mediates the offline in anthropology. Towards the end, this paper attempts to arrive at an empirical conception of how this shadow, once incorporated, operates.
After the Online: That Which is Constituted.
I
There already exist a set of concepts that have helped anthropologists, and me as an anthropologist to be able to indicate the machinations through which online worlds effect a process of mediation. These concepts however begin with what circulates in the online world — text, speech, images, practices, and gestures — and what circulates within it — that the expanse of what circulates online is through particular forms, for example memes, blogs, forums, dynamic webpages etc. To this effect there are concepts like meta-culture (Urban 2001), which defines how there circulates a culture about culture to determine the categories by which something/someone should be recognized; meta-pragmatics (Silverstein 2001), which describe how circulating texts also determine the rules and conventions for the appropriate usage of language and gestures; and publics (Warner 2002), which describes how circulating texts in addressing individuals produce a public by investing them in a relation between strangers, along with or opposed to whom they act. All of these provide considerable explanatory value to begin to describe how the circulation of texts online, and the technologies produce the thing-state and person-state at the plane of perceptions, dispositions and practices. This line of explanation when pursued further, such as in the work of Tom Boelstorff (2016) dissolves any substantial distinction between the online and the offline, refusing to see the virtual world as ‘not-real’ and in incorporating the online world as a place on par with any other in the offline world in its capacity for being intrinsic to world-making.
Such a machination when pursued against the grain, to be able to arrive at a form for the sociality, or world, produced through such a subjection to contemporary information technology and media, gives us variant answers analogous to the title of the book by John Cheney-Lippold, We are data: Algorithms and the making of our digital selves (2017). Concepts such as Noopolitics (Terranova 2007), or Algorithmic Governmentality (Rouvroy 2013) evince a similar idea of subjects constituted through this media ecology, though the function that this constitution fulfils may differ across the authors. If Terranova understands noopolitics as the use of mass media for the constitution of the image we have of ourselves; Rouvroy builds on the implications of the technical foundations that make this understanding possible, to claim how this image, and ergo any self-conception or conception, is produced through an algorithmic way of thought and ratiocination. They converge on the understanding that the categorization and classification of human gestures, speech, practice, text, and images into an input-output cybernetic scheme, removes and redefines what it has to categorize and classify and in reintroducing them produces them and their world anew. It is based on such a removal and redefinition that Anna Munster describes Google as the “optimization of life through the experience of search” (Munster, 2013, 21). It would seem for an ethnographer that the offline even as an interval in between online encounters comes to takes place entirely through them.
However, it is assumed such is not the case, the online worlds’ constitutive function as a place is only one in relation to other places; the family, work, the city, and a dispersed set of institutions, also have an equally determining function. Yet, the portability and ubiquity of these technologies means that they intervene to mediate, and are a part of these facets of the sociality too. The heterogenous localizations of new media, do not allow for them to be delimited by opposing it to conventional social forms, as they already are transforming them; the speed and scale of their adoption has already yielded concepts to understand the transformations that they have wrought. Two such concepts — assemblage [1] (or agencement) (Phillips 2006) and supplementary enframing [2] (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003) speak of how one cannot refer back to these other facets as having being unaffected, and any attempt to imagine how they existed before they were transformed is an image that is itself produced by the circulations through new media: as a nostalgia for the present (Jameson 1991).
II
Faced with the enormity of the speed and scale of new media, as an ethnographer in the field I find a regularity in the fact that new media constitutes the sociality it is a part of, yet find no homogeneity within any set of these instances, but a heterogeneity that always escapes any general typology. Even here, it is not safe to presume the performative felicity of the circulating texts, or simply stated their capacity to effect a transformation or for us to recognize or identify it in case it does take place. For we already know that reading habits relating to online texts, and their hypertextual organization, reassemble their syntagmatic logic; Katherine Hayles (2012) has already written of the emergence of the “F mode” of scanning a page, where a line is read with ever diminishing length as one scrolls down a screen. The mediating role must also include how apps like Uber and Ola carry people, the electronic payment apps, and a host of other apps and forums that make possible the itinerary into which any object may fit. Moreover, even narrations by people about themselves invariably talk about apps, games, social media and the relation that people may have to these technologies. The ways individuals relate to these technologies and the modes in which they are incorporated are wildly contingent, and can range from an immersive engagement to a distracted, even superficial investment.
In paying heed to this variation of forms within the sociality that new media have constituted, ethnographers focusing on the same have centred their analysis by looking at new media as conditions of possibility that make available new and variant forms, yet do not close off in a deterministic fashion what these forms are and what they may be. A concept like “affordance” (Juris 2012), as taken from Psychology (Gibson 1966), and utilized to comprehend the mediated socialities (Hutchby 2001), exemplifies such a movement. New media here mediates by producing a frame through the plane of text, gesture, image, practice and speech that makes available variant trajectories of possible thought and action. In a way, ‘affordance’ makes possible divergent political and ethical projects, that are nevertheless sutured to new media; it conserves constituent power: the possibility for individuals to constitute rather than be constituted alone; and thus, explains the possibility of endless transmutations in social forms despite a system of subjection and control implicated in the constitutive power of new media sketched out in the previous section. This analytic also makes possible to see the feedback loop (Warner 2002, Dean 2010) that allows for an interactive engagement with new media as capable of a reciprocal efficacy (Pyyhtinen 2007), where a subject in being constituted by new media preserves the capacity to transform, and in use transforms the form of the media itself. The episode of Indians on WhatsApp sending Good Morning messages requiring WhatsApp to produce an automatic system that can recognize and delete them [3], throws best into relief the labile dynamic that a concept like affordance brings to understand the coupling between humans and new media.
For me as an ethnographer, the line of analysis made possible by affordance allows me to return to thinking of any object in these intervals called the offline; to its performance, its relations to the nation, city, consumption, family, law, identity, subjectivity, language, body etc, that the various media made possible, but no longer maintain a relation to new media. These latter concepts are reintroduced and their new formations in a mediated sociality can be plotted. The dispersed encounters and interactions are no longer a concern, never mind their specific differences. Tim Ingold (2018) echoes this disregard that affordance as a concept maintains towards these encounters. In his critical assessment of Webb Keane’s (2018) essay on the concept of affordance, he writes that he has moved past it because affordance “solidifies” and “makes inert” the object of perception. for the object of perception (here new media) takes on a form in relation to a perceiver’s actions and attributes. As an analysis of mediation, affordance dispenses with the requirements of specifying an origin or, more accurately in our case, particularizing a provenance. A concept like affordance then establishes a regularity across the different encounters, the different forms of new media and the numerous variations in their use and function are ordered through this concept that allows anthropology, and an ethnographer to conceive just the “possible action” as it materializes. As a result, such thinking finds itself squarely within the genealogy of digitization; by which I understand the systematization of human thought and action derived from the work of first, George Boole whose work now underpins the mathematical and logical abstractions that work like the grammar of computer code, and second Claude Shannon whose mathematization of the sender-receiver communication model underpins the co-ordination between computers as material technologies and human languages and gestures (Nahin 2013). Affordance thus sets aside provenance and concerns itself with only the facticity of effects, where the transformations of its anthropological subjects that it attends to, repeat Boole’s formulation of his position regarding the operations of mind,
[t]hat the operations of mind, by which, in the exercise of its power of imagination or conception it combines or modifies the simple ideas of things or qualities, not less than those operations of the reason which are exercised upon truths and propositions, are subject to general laws. (Boole 1958, 81)
And by plotting these combinations and modifications as subject to the general law of possible action (a possibility that is also expressed as a Boolean operation) it allies itself into thinking the offline, or the subject and its milieu as a stochastic source of data like Claude Shannon (1963), the father of communications theory. The work of the anthropologist becomes then to order this data entropy — the disordered production of data by a source as instances of possible action — into a significant form. In doing so, Claude Levi-Strauss’ lament that in chronicling the disintegration (read: valueless transformation) of societies, anthropology would be better served if it were to be called Entropology [4] (1961), becomes prophetic. Where anthropology’s task becomes to lower this entropy, and produce a significance by ordering these instances in our descriptions of the mediated sociality.
The Index of The Shadow
I
In this line of thought what is elided are the fleeting and disparate moments of interaction with new media. The online here is turned into a monolithic ground on which a host of possible transformations can be plotted. Where the analysis of the coupling of humans and personal technologies is satisfied in only plotting its effects, in such a way that what new media effects can be unlinked from what mediated it: one need not speak of the interaction at all. The mediator becomes no more than a mute channel directing the transformations of the same. Yet it is within this relationship with personal technologies, and the shadow (Perniola 2004) they cast, that the horizon of possible actions can emerge. Despite certain interventions (Boelstorff et al. 2012) that try to incorporate this virtual world ethnographically, these methods only do so by peering through the aperture of technology. Whereas an ethnography must consider an inquiry where questions are posed directly to the private circulations around an individual that convey through Whatsapp, Facebook, Forums, Apps, etc. a series of transitory yet meaningful conceptions. However, this line of an inquiry is protected as an arena of privacy, even if this convention that prohibits moving into the personal can be overcome through an intimate and deep ethnography, it will nevertheless be partial. Such a relationship between body and technology cannot be successfully interrogated as a place. Though this may be true otherwise, here it is compounded by not only the enormity of the scale, but a threshold of privacy. For these moments, some of which Google Analytics calls interaction events, only the public face of this private relation becomes available; either through a technical aperture, or as possible actions; such that in these moments one cannot stand beside one’s ethnographic subject, but always opposed to them. Whether it be my questions posed to this private relation, or the interest that Google or any other media company shows, to call it a shadow, is to use Perniola’s concept and to utilize from his project the idea that the shadow is “a feeling of a difference” (14) to understand the process of mediation initiated by these private encounters and the disparate transformations they produce. The shadow here functions as a meta-conception that relativizes these encounters as dissimilar, disparate, and unequal, only to bring them to bear as the doubled offline that is left as a remainder.
The shadow indices the conatus of the possible actions, i.e. their motive force, the actions of which an anthropology as entropology plots. It is a double of that offline where one can describe the possible actions, but nevertheless what is insinuated in these actions is that the shadow has left a remainder that is causally linked to them. The series of shadow-remainder-incorporation-artificial unconscious is held implicit as a point of emergence of any possible action; researchers gather and collect for different purposes the content, the form, the expression, and the substance of these encounters to be able to enunciate the transformations that this motor produces as made obvious in the effort to understand the digital, new media, or the internet as producing new social formations, and even in the rampant collection of personal data. As such, despite the convergence on this horizon of disparate axiologies, apart from Andrew Shryock at al. in Off Stage/on Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture (2004), there are, in my survey, relatively few other attempts to address, in Shryock’s words, the thin descriptions produced by
the pressure to look away from intimate zones of cultural production, to look instead to the “finished products” that circulate beyond them. (Shryock 2004, 4)
Yet even the analysis in these essays, which tries by tracing in each individual encounter the remainder that it might have left, veers me towards a description encapsulated under the three concepts we began with, publics, metaculture and metapragmatics, plotting the same ‘modifications’ and ‘combinations’. Offering me a way to merely peer into this zone through texts, speech and practices; tracing the evolving contours of a circulating object to see what might grow in its shadow.
II
Even when one attempts to understand these intimate zones, the inability to include the sheer scale of these encounters returns us to an Entropology that would merely plots its effects. Yet what this indicates is that we must think its limits within it. To think, in short, how we might conceive the shadow that new media casts, the remainder it produces and how it operates once incorporated; where an artificial unconscious is posited as the implicit cause behind the transformations. To do so we would have to return to the relation of mediation between technology and humans.
Earlier in the first section when we understood mediation as taking place through a removal and redefinition from the offline to the online, we encounter the limit from which we must begin to think mediation. The limit here concerns the scale and extent of this process of removal and redefinition. This limit can be grasped in the simplest of assertions that no matter the scale and speed of circulations pertaining to any one object, this object nonetheless will have a nature or property that is not a product of the circulations (political, economic, or aesthetic) of new media, an assertion that is made often when people are advised to avoid echo chambers for example. This particular limit is offered often as criticism to the hyperbole regarding new media and its constitutive efficacy. It poses a question about the extent of the efficacy of new media based on the significant yet dispersed moments of interfacing with them. The justification for this assertion simply stated is that first, it cannot take primacy in relationship to moments where new media are not directly present. Secondly that even when new media are present, they do not have an unmitigated access to the subject, but are themselves partial. They are dependent on the stipulated ends and functional capacities determined during the production of the forms of new media and in the implementation of logics of their interface in dispersed sites of expert cultures. Through this limit they add to mediation a set of opposed determining factors, by dividing en masse large arenas of the intervals of offline life into those untouched by new media and those constituted by it. This limit brackets the constitutive capacity of forms of new media to the immediate confines of a relation with the interface of a particular technology. In doing so the technology becomes nothing more than a passive medium for any information external to it. This limit though first separates the online from the offline, it can be understood as the relation between the offline and its double, between the offline as an interval between online states, and the shadow of the many fleeting online encounters. For in trying to speak of an offline that is undetermined by the online it negates these online encounters as having any significant bearing on this offline. In doing so, it limns the very horizon of this shadow — relegating the shadow into muteness, while acknowledging tangentially certain effects it may have produced or may yet produce. It is at this moment to understand this negation that it would be fruitful to turn to the philosopher of technics Gilbert Simondon, who understands these unaffected arenas of the offline as a categorization that is an integral product of personal technologies and new media themselves.
When we think new media as the relation between humans and technology, Simondon directs us to think this interface, and the limits of the technical notion of information (removal and redefinition) to understand this relation, through two terms — predictability and indeterminacy (Simondon 2017, 147). In a simplified version of his understanding, for this interface to have access to a signal that can be transformed into information, these signals must have a predictability, to distinguish them from background noise. Yet at the same time if these signals are absolutely predictable, or display a stereotypy, they would not count as new, that is as information — requiring within this predictability a certain limit of indeterminacy. As such it turns these unaffected arenas into background noise, while that which is accessed by the interface is the signal. Whereas the limit of indeterminacy “between pure chance and absolute regularity” (Simondon 2017, 150) transforms this noise into a signal that is information. In articulating how something can become information and what becomes information is determined by how the technologies of new media function, Simondon provokes us to understand that the deliberations of individuals in this matter are subordinate to the processes of technology. Yet this subordination does not efface the individual; it inseparably tethers the individual and its capabilities to technology. For on reading Simondon, we find that he has in effect drawn a distinction between two kinds of signals, one of regularity, but another marked by a novelty in being derived from a background noise. This second signal that brings something new, or something different each time, exists as the attention or consciousness of an individual. Moreover, this second signal is not merely a cognitive apperception, but embodied into the very gesture of thought and intention. The fact that ‘google’ is a verb, or ‘instagrammable’ a quality describes how the material world that we conceive is predicated with a capacity and necessity through social media. If ‘to google’ or ‘instagrammability’ are taken as examples of this second signal, the limit of indeterminacy that produces them is felt as the urge of a necessity we exercise, and as a capacity that exists. As such this limit of indeterminacy in being deeply incorporated into what urges our attention and also how we are capable of exercising it, is the very operation of the artificial unconscious. When we fold this understanding back into the limit asserted between the online and offline, which we understand as also the limit between the offline and its double, what we come to understand is that the offline that is sought out or asserted as entirely independent of online circulations is determined through how it is not the series of online moments. That the offline emerges as something that is indeterminate precisely in relation to its predictability established by a series of online moments (the shadow), and the specific offline that is sought out will be based on the particular arrangement of this series (remainder), and that this seeking out will have a primary, or substantial significance (artificial unconscious).
The empirical location of this artificial unconscious is in this second signal, where the offline emerges in relation to the doubled offline as an incorporated necessity or capacity that breaches the limit of indeterminacy. What remains then is to arrive at a manner, in a way still speculative, of incorporating this tremulous second signal, such that those momentary encounters that we termed the shadow come to exist as something more than a muted assumption. The first of course is an attention towards the media archive, to comments, posts, and largely the writing/practices that make up the interlocutory exchange on social media that Boellstorff at al. have already pointed out. The archive which indices the shadow of the disparate moments that this archive disperses. Yet, this signal cannot be understood as a mere symptom (Sebeok 2001) or effect of that archive, or a sign as itself. By which is understood that the signal is not in a determined relation to a sign such as that of memory or interiority. About this kind first kind of a signal, Sebeok has written that it functions to “trigger or elicit certain actions” (44), and that the “signal appeals to a destination” (45), the destination being a certain specific action, a thought, or a memory. As such it defines for us the signal as a regularity, however it is the second kind that we must understand, which being free from this relation to a specific action, or an intentioned determined path would be the operation of the artificial unconscious, as it accretes images, forming a dispersed and disparate set of intrinsic necessities and capacities. To think of this second kind of signal in these terms is to then understand that it does not so much appeal to a destination, but is itself one. And as a destination, it may or may not be available to compose itself into information through an uncertain, perhaps tentative action, word, or thought; as we listen, question, see or hear people surrounded by these circulations through the forms of new media. This artificial unconscious is an incomplete and always a particular and distinct object; tethered to the technical transformations of new media it exists only in relation to the very specific and contingent online moments of which it is a remainder. This relation can be plotted through an analysis which relates the processes of this ever-evolving media archive to the speech and gestures in which they become meaningful to give us a sense of our mediated condition, rather than utilizing an atavistic model of psychology on which media is superimposed.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have taken the relation to new media as a priori and refused to think the offline as a pre-existing place punctured by apertures of new media in making this village global. Beginning with Gibson then, was to reverse our line of questioning that safely presumed what the offline was, to a conception of the offline as emerging only through our entry into the online world. In doing so, I first moved through anthropological and philosophical literature to assert the scale of transformations wrought through new media. If the initial conceptual tools of meta-culture, metapragmatics and publics helps us to attend to the minutiae of the modes of transformation that circulating texts effect, then concepts like Noopolitics and Algorithmic Governmentality construct the implications of such transformations when we take them as a whole. These tools of analysis are not faulted, but are understood as incomplete, as the scale of mediation encompasses traditional ways of historicizing or contextualizing our objects. Their incompleteness reflects in the activity of an ethnography that can only catalogue these transformations, as an entropology. In this vein, I have tried to understand this scale by attending to the offline as it emerges in-between and besides the online that this analysis omits to incorporate. Where these fleeting encounters produce a doubled offline as a shadow, and the variant manifestations of the relations between new media and people are incorporated as an artificial unconscious. The cipher of which can be traced in the way it modifies a signal into a sign (of information), as the very possibility of thought and action. These encounters with new media in such a formulation are seen as producing a remainder, regulating how we may think, act, and feel. This remainder is not just a residue, as Perniola informs us, but a ‘psychic reality’, a ‘reality block’. A reality that is not a traditional interior psyche, but a topography that is deepened through and between the itinerant relations to new media.
Endnotes
[1] Assemblage, or agencement, is a concept taken from the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and used by anthropologists like Aihwa Ong to understand the conduct of life made possible in the specific contemporary arrangements between technoscience (science, technology, media), political institutions, legal institutions, businesses, ethics, communities, individuals etc. Phillips (2006) clarifies that assemblage, as a translation of Deleuze’s agencement, concerns what we know, that the meaning and sense in the conduct of this life, are derived from the relations between these arrangements, and are a part of them.
[2] Supplementary enframing, or the ‘supplementarity that enframes”, is for Gaonkar and Povinelli (2003) a concept that captures the process of how our recognition of objects as to what they are, and what their place is in a larger schema, is continuously made and remade by individual circulating forms.
[4] For Levi-Strauss, the disintegration of societies and the elimination of insurmountable cultural differences due to the homogenizing vectors of modernity, despite the heterogeneous effects of these vectors, had changed the prospects of anthropology. In such conditions, anthropology could only map the process of disintegration, and us such only report the measure of disorder within these societies, and the transitory states of equilibrium that made possible human life. In such conditions, as a chronicler of disintegration or of repeated ceaseless transformations, anthropology for Levi-Strauss could be termed an entropology.
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Author
Karandeep Mehra completed his M.Phil. in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. His primary areas of research are urban anthropology, anthropology of media, and the anthropology of science and technology. He is currently working as a Writing Tutor in the Centre for Writing & Communication at Ashoka University.
