Abstract
From his/her point of view, for who arrives, American communities and persons range between cryptic taciturnity and naive reception: beside the grim silence, the friendly gesture. But the foreigner dimly perceives that in the act of receiving that people opens up a site and give a new place that recreate in large the entire constellation of relationships. There, archaic epistemic-practical matrixes of creation show their greatest flexibility through and along the adversities of colonialism. These silent languages are the semiopraxis of sacrifice in which an extreme gift from other space-times introduces new beings in ritual relationships. Amidst them, we are transformed, we become others. Colonial ethics is inverted/invested by an excessive hospitality. Silence, delay, and affection abruptly touch the edges of the dominant order that is dislocated. We, as former (and perhaps permanent) strange, arrogant, armored upstarts, have ignored and despised this justice that comes from others who do not dominate.
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Notes
- 1.
“Phallogotropic” refers here to the trope orienting the crossroad of lógos with phallocentrism.
- 2.
Franz Boas (1966), who makes the first anthropological register of potlatch, states that in chinook the term refers to “what is consumed by fire.”
- 3.
“Prestations” is the word used in English language translations of Mauss’ Essay on the gift.
- 4.
- 5.
Lévi-Strauss (1975) does the same with the binary logic that operates already in The savage mind. These (Maussian, Levistraussian) are thoughts concerned above all with salvaging the arbitrariness of the imposition with an historicizing, archaicizing mythology; the thing that prevents them from opening themselves to the intercultural ruptures and strengthens their Eurocentrism.
- 6.
The “State” fixation of a unique “sense of reality” and a “state-of-being,” with its space-time, its identities, and its epistemes, seems to hinge on an elective affinity with the cumulative economy of capital that rationalized the expense (restricts it) or excludes it from “reason” (“rational” calculation and measurement), “a reason which keeps accounts.”
- 7.
War, on the other hand, unlike sacrifice, “subordinates violence to the most complete reduction of humanity to the order of things” (Bataille 1998:62); violence-calculation, a means in relation to an end. That colonial network of hospitality and war indicates a logic of sacrifice, or the sacrifice subjected to the argumentative continuity of the logos. Thus, “without slavery, the world of things would not have achieved its fullness (of ‘thing’)” (Bataille 1998:62). Morality establishes the sacred/profane dualism in terms of pure/impure, and reason allows it to endure and to be put into operation, establishing the “order of things” through the determination of the universal form—always identical to itself—of the thing and the action (Bataille 1998:73–75): “the divine becomes rational and moral and it rejects the ill-fated sacred (‘black’; that in archaic sacrificial intimacy was in polarity with the good-fated sacred, ‘white’) of the profane side” (Bataille 1998:76).
- 8.
Arjun Appadurai (1991:19) also notes that “to over-sociologize transactions in things” is a trend attributed to Mauss.
- 9.
Thus Baudrillard radicalizes his critique of capitalism, which rests on the habitus (in Bourdieu’s sense) of the “exchange”: “the ‘social’ itself does not exist in ‘primitive societies.’ The term ‘primitive’ has nowadays been eliminated, but we should also eliminate the equally ethnocentric term ‘society’” (Baudrillard 1993:158, note 13).
- 10.
Bajtin (1999) also noted that the natural sciences, in contrast with the human sciences, deal with “things” rather than talking to them.
- 11.
- 12.
A similar motif, modeled after Mauss, is that which prompts Appadurai: In the origin of capitalism there is a “cultural narration” in which “things” are used with a rhetorical and political sense of social differentiation and distinction (Appadurai 1991:56), intensifying its “semiotic virtuosity” (that of pepper in cuisine, silk in fashion, jewelry in self-presentation; as had been the case with relics in the cults of saints) (Appadurai 1991:57). Capitalism is a “complex cultural system” (Appadurai 1991:68) which in financial speculation as “meta-fetishization of goods” (it is not just that goods conceal the social relations that sustain and produce them but also that movement in prices hides the very goods themselves, in standing in representation of them) is on display in all its agonistic, dramatic and playful, rhetorical and semiotic glory: as in the kula and the potlatch, the stock market, the cockfight, the horse race, the casino… where the thing that matters is appearance, confidence, rumor… (Appadurai 1991:70–71). Still these frictions as “contests of value” do not come to be described as symbolic struggles, which would be more radical fights, ones of intercultural ruptures. Despite what is said here, something similar (analogical) occurs with the concept of “field” (champ) in Bourdieu, which turns out to be (quasi)determinant. Bourdieu sees in the economic field of “management” the performative generation of its own “reality,” a theory between positive and normative, which brutally confronts the struggle between commercial and financial interests, with a cynicism “entirely opposed to the denegation and sublimation that tends to prevail within the universes of symbolic production” (Bourdieu 2001a:228). “Objectivism” in the field of science was denounced by Bourdieu as that position most interested in showing the greatest indifference, interested in disinterest itself, as shown in Practical sense (Bourdieu 1991). Here there is a pragmatic “objectivism” at work in the “economic field.” But Bourdieu here softens the symbolic twisting in the economic field and strengthens the determinant force of big business and first movers of production and market in the performative definition of “reality”; as well as simultaneously, in the scientific field, he will be ensuring ever more explicitly the illustrated “truth” of the mutual critique between scientists as the realism of Reason (see Bourdieu 2001b). Thus is lost what Bourdieu had identified as inherent in symbolic distortion (transfiguration and disfigurement): that the bets and struggles, the original inversion and the belief in the dominant value in the field, are naturalized in the interest in disinterest (see Bourdieu 1998). The economic “structure” is precisely symbolic: imposed as “reality,” and this is what causes competition to emerge among market agents as “indirect conflict” (in the words of Simmel, quoted by Bourdieu 2001a:232). In the economic field (and in the socio-analyzed scientific field) would there not still be a symbolic distortion at work? Or would we rather be looking at their most accomplished operations as “symbolic violence”? The fact that Bourdieu sees such things as the following as “external” factors of change introduced in the economic field—the oil discoveries of the nineteenth century, demographic changes (such as low birth rates or extending lifespan) or in lifestyles (such as women in the workforce and their new markets) (Bourdieu 2001a:232)—is indicative of the stability with which Bourdieu has invested the “economic field,” and it indicates how narrow Bourdieu’s insight has become in (not) accounting for bio-power as the politics of consumer capitalism; as if these changes had not been generated by the economic agents themselves (by their own internal forces in competitive struggle, anticipating and intervening symbolic struggles, drowning them in the capitalist realism of “modernity” and “development”), in his hegemonic eagerness, which always runaway from the minimum of the “structural” institutions, because otherwise they would de-actualize and perish. Economics is cultural to the point that it does not seem so, to the point that it does not show itself to be thus under sociological critique, because, rather than being supported on firm “structures,” it is supported on the solid rock of trust, “the granitic fanatical solidity of ‘popular beliefs,’ which have the same energy as ‘material forces,’” in the words of Gramsci (1998:82). And this must not (or rather, has the power to not) be confused, despite all the rigidity of its “realism,” with the objectivism of the “structures.” In those beliefs, the “symbolic struggles” cannot be canceled under any formation of “symbolic violence” because they depend on neither conscious will nor objective forces—in this sense, the options are not either interactionism or structures (see Bourdieu 2001a:235), as in the old dispute between phenomenology and structuralism, which Bourdieu himself said he had been surpassed some time ago, in an explicit and programmed mode (Bourdieu 1991), but that are active in the oblique semiopraxis of the discontented, in the infinite heteroglossia of the discourse of bodies, ever already underway and never finished in their (ant)agonizing replicas. I return to the concept of symbolic struggles and I do it, in any case, paraphrasing Baudrillard (1993), putting Bourdieu up against Bourdieu.
- 13.
If everything is goods (either actually or potentially), in Appadurai’s (1991:33) terms: if anything can go through a phase of its social trajectory as “goods,” and if “goods” means a single thing—as opposed to “culture” and associated with “calculation,” “the calculated exchange rate that, in my opinion, is at the center of mercantile exchange” (Appadurai 1991:35)—then there are no symbolic struggles surrounding a market that has become autonomous. Appadurai’s “market” remains prisoner to capitalist realism: the capitalist reification of hegemonic “reality” that turns back its own terms as ruler that measures everything and cultural-hermeneutic universal realm.
- 14.
For a further discussion see Grosso (1994).
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Grosso, J.L. (2015). Excess of Hospitality: Critical Semiopraxis and Theoretical Risks in Postcolonial Justice. In: Haber, A., Shepherd, N. (eds) After Ethics. Ethical Archaeologies: The Politics of Social Justice, vol 3. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1689-4_6
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