The Volume of Being: The Current OAC Working Paper Seminar -- February 15th onward.

"The extremely high level of individuation in humans is a major anthropological fact ... Other living species do not possess it to such a high degree, to the level that defines consciousness of the self, awareness of existing as singular, regardless of any psychological, social or cultural slant that could be placed on that individuality. It is oxymoronic of anthropology as the science of human beings to homogenise these units socioculturally, since the characteristic feature of existence is that it is implacably private and singular." (Albert Piette, The Volume of Being).

This new forum discussion draws attention to a new OAC paper by Albert Piette. Albert's paper, the Volume of Being (click here), makes quite challenging, but also important, reading for anyone interested in contemporary debates in the field of anthropology. It consists of a short manifesto for an anthropology of individual human beings. This may not seem particularly controversial at first sight until we consider the lack of attention to the individual human being in contemporary anthropology where relations, actor-networks, assemblages and ontologies are taken to be the primary object of study: in all this the thinking acting 'voluminous' human individual is hardly to be seen anywhere. We might envisage these trends as indicating a profound attack on the one thing we have in common--our humanity--but in the current climate that kind of claim reeks of an outdated humanism; didn't Foucault tell us half a century ago that we must give up making claims on behalf of 'Man'? 

Albert Piette calls our attention to an anthropology of residues and leftovers--those parts of what makes up a human being that disappear when human intentionality and activity are turned into socio-cultural discourse.

This seminar is currently in progress.

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A remark by Alphabet (Google) Chairman Eric Schmidt, quoted in The Sociological Imagination blog.

*We have a product that allows 82 you to speak to your phone in English and have it come out in the native language of the person you are talking to. To me this is the stuff of science fiction. Imagine a near future where you never forget anything. [Pocket] computers, with your permission, remember everything—where you’ve been, what you did, who you took pictures of. I used to love getting lost, wandering about without knowing where I was. You can’t get lost anymore. You know your position to the foot, and by the way, so do your friends, with your permission. When you travel, you’re never lonely. Your friends travel with you now. There is always someone to speak to or send a picture to. You’re never bored. You’re never out of ideas because all the world’s information is at your fingertips. And this is not just for the elite. Historically, these kinds of technologies have been available only to the elites and not to the common man. If there was a trickle down, it would happen over a generation. This is a vision accessible to every person on the planet. We’re going to be amazed at how smart and capable all those people are who did not have access to our standard of living, our universities, and our culture. When they come, they are going to teach us things. And they are coming. There are about a billion smartphones in the world, and in emerging markets the growth rate is much faster than it is anywhere else. I am very excited about this.

Could this be the future of Existential Anthropology? If not, why not?

I would like to move on to an optimistic note: the future of anthropology, which would have hardly begun, now that anthropology is slowly getting out of social anthropology and social sciences, is almost entirely to create, conceptually and methodologically. 

 
Dear Albert,

You are, on my reading, a crusader, a romantic, a Quixote whose dream is to rescue the damsel Humanity from what you see as a monster created by anti-human tendencies in the thinking of an earlier generation of French intellectuals, thinking that has hardened into an orthodoxy against which you rebel. I am old, cranky, full of doubts, an aging Candide expelled from the ivory tower forty years ago, whose experience wandering outside the tower have left this "volume" wondering how his book of life will end. Candide's choice, to cultivate my own garden, has a powerful appeal. My own romantic desire to make some sense, to find some satisfying whole in what could easily be seen as a random walk, keeps me from succumbing to that appeal. Good luck and "mercy buckets" (my grandmother's way of saying "merci beaucoup") for a most stimulating conversation.

Dear John, 

Your message is very moving. I keep it... in my volume.
Many thanks for your presence during these two weeks.
 
A bientôt… I hope ! 

Albert, I will be closing the seminar now, but I would very much like to thank you for your exceptionally careful and thought-provoking responses throughout the last two weeks. Thanks are also due to Abraham, Annika, John, Keith, Lee and Ron  -- these seminars only works if their is a fruitful dialogue between diverse participants and that was particularly true of this one it seemed to me. 

In the paper and in the foregoing discussion Albert has defended an anthropology that explores human individuality for what is is--the fact of and capacity for human individuation--over a view variously omnipresent in social science of the human individual as representative of the social, a place bearer, a signifier of some other kind of socio-cultural potential. If we read back through his responses here we will find numerous fascinating insights, epistemological, methodological toward that end. I hope visitors do that; whether they agree or disagree it will be worth their while. Many thanks again, Albert.

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