The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science [1 ed.] 9781003156697, 9780367742317, 9780367742348

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Notes on contributors
1. General introduction: The Routledge Handbook of Existential Human Science
SECTION I: The Existential Perspective Across the Disciplines
2. Introduction
3. Existential sociology
4. Existential psychology
5. Anthropology as an existential enquiry
6. Existential psychiatry and psychotherapy
7. Existentiality and semiotics – are they compatible?
8. A Contested Legacy: Kant and existentialism
SECTION II: Interiority, Selfhood and Integrity: The Individual as regards the Social
9. Section II: Introduction
10. Unsociable sociability
11. Internal conversation: Interiority and individuality
12. Relational, but also singular: On the varieties and particularities of selfscapes
13. The ballad (or fugue) of William Cullum: Disciplining the body of prisoner 55552-052
14. The car driver’s being: A different direction to the auto-ontological turn
15. Existentialism and tango social dance: The anthropology of (moving) events
SECTION III: Intersubjectivity: Care for and Faith in the Other
16. Section III: Introduction
17. Existential care ethics
18. Faith and the existential
19. Existence against being
20. (In)dividual lives and existential narratives
21. Existential finitude in Indian Buddhist philosophy
22. Exploring the relationship between language and empathy: Some unexpected connections
SECTION IV: Singularity and Continuity
23. Section IV: Introduction
24. The loss of singular existence and personal experience: The problem of interchangeability in the social sciences
25. Sartrean existentialism and existential art
26. Volumology as existential anthropology
27. An empirical approach to studying human existence
28. Filming and describing an individual
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF EXISTENTIAL HUMAN SCIENCE

This volume is the first handbook to explore existentialism as epistemology and method. Transdisciplinary in scope, it considers the nature of human subjectivity and how human experience ought to be studied, examining the connections that exist between the individual’s imagining of the world and their everyday practice within it. With attention to the question of whether humans are ultimately alone in their self-knowledge or whether what they know of themselves is constructed in common with others, it enables the reader to recognize core questions that frame the methods and orientation of an existential inquiry. In addition to historical exposition, it offers a variety of chapters from around the world that explore the diverse global spaces for, and different types of, existential focus and discussion, thus questioning the view that the existential “problem” may be singularly a matter for the postenlightenment West. The fullest and most comprehensive survey to date of what human beings can and should make of themselves, The Routledge International Handbook of Existential Human Science will appeal to scholars across the humanities and social sciences with interests in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and research methods. Huon Wardle lectures in Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Nigel Rapport is Emeritus Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he was Founding Director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. Albert Piette is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Paris-Nanterre, researcher at the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS).

THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF EXISTENTIAL HUMAN SCIENCE

Edited by Huon Wardle, Nigel Rapport and Albert Piette

Designed cover image: © Huon Wardle. ‘On the Face if It’. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Huon Wardle, Nigel Rapport and Albert Piette; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Huon Wardle, Nigel Rapport and Albert Piette to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wardle, Huon, editor. | Rapport, Nigel, 1956- editor. | Piette, Albert, 1960- editor. Title: The Routledge international handbook of existential human science/ edited by Huon Wardle, Nigel Rapport and Albert Piette. Description: New York: Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge international handbooks | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023005734 (print) | LCCN 2023005735 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367742317 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367742348 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003156697 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Anthroposophy–History. | Social sciences–History. | Existential psychology. | Existentialism. | Individuality. | Research–Methodology. Classification: LCC BP595.A25 R68 2024 (print) | LCC BP595.A25 (ebook) | DDC 299/.935–dc23/eng/20230211 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005734 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023005735 ISBN: 978-0-367-74231-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-74234-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-15669-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697 Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS

Notes on contributors

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1 General introduction: The Routledge Handbook of Existential Human Science1 Huon Wardle, Albert Piette, and Nigel Rapport SECTION I

The Existential Perspective Across the Disciplines

7

2 Introduction Huon Wardle

9

3 Existential sociology Joseph Kotarba and Andrii Melnikov

12

4 Existential psychology Daniel Sullivan, Alexis Goad, and Harrison J. Schmitt

23

5 Anthropology as an existential enquiry Huon Wardle

36

6 Existential psychiatry and psychotherapy Hel Spandler and Philip Thomas

50

7 Existentiality and semiotics – are they compatible?63 Eero Tarasti

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Contents

8 A Contested Legacy: Kant and existentialism Pablo Muchnik and Lawrence Pasternack

75

SECTION II

Interiority, Self hood and Integrity: The Individual as regards the Social85 9 Section II: Introduction Nigel Rapport

87

10 Unsociable sociability93 Ronald Stade 11 Internal conversation: Interiority and individuality104 Nigel Rapport 12 Relational, but also singular: On the varieties and particularities of selfscapes115 Douglas Hollan 13 The ballad (or fugue) of William Cullum: Disciplining the body of prisoner 55552-052126 William Cullum and Andrew Irving 14 The car driver’s being: A different direction to the auto-ontological turn139 Andrew Dawson 15 Existentialism and tango social dance: The anthropology of (moving) events150 Jonathan Skinner SECTION III

Intersubjectivity: Care for and Faith in the Other

165

16 Section III: Introduction167 Huon Wardle 17 Existential care ethics173 Rasmus Dyring

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Contents

18 Faith and the existential183 Devaka Premawardhana 19 Existence against being194 Jean-Michel Salanskis 20 (In)dividual lives and existential narratives202 Samuele Poletti 21 Existential finitude in Indian Buddhist philosophy212 Roshni Patel 22 Exploring the relationship between language and empathy: Some unexpected connections223 Stéphanie Walsh Matthews and Dana Osborne SECTION IV

Singularity and Continuity

237

23 Section IV: Introduction239 Albert Piette 24 The loss of singular existence and personal experience: The problem of interchangeability in the social sciences244 Marine Kneubühler 25 Sartrean existentialism and existential art255 Catherine Beaugrand 26 Volumology as existential anthropology265 Albert Piette 27 An empirical approach to studying human existence275 Jan Patrick Heiss 28 Filming and describing an individual285 Gwendoline Torterat Index294

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Catherine Beaugrand is a visual artist, formerly a mixed media teacher at the National School of Fine Arts in Lyon. Since the beginning of the 1980s, after studies in anthropology, she has developed an artistic practice that brings together both separate and associated activities: production of forms, writing, teaching-research, and publishing. Combining drawing, sculpture, and video, the forms are displayed in large-scale devices. C. Beaugrand exhibited multimedia installations until the mid-2000s – PS1 N.Y (1987), Lyon Biennial (1991), Ashiya Museum (1994), Documenta X (1997), Château de Chambord (2000), Tokyo Art Front (2002) …. Between 2010 and 2016, she was invited to create an art research unit at the National School of Fine Arts ­because of the specificity of her works between practice and theory. Her current projects, particularly focused on modes of representation and singularity of the creative process, juxtapose artist’s books, academic research, films, and installations. William Cullum: Artist/Writer/Felon Andrew Dawson is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. His research, conducted in Australia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and the UK, focuses on post-­ industrialism and on mobilities. His ethnographies of driving experiences are used to reflect on several core debates in the social sciences, including, for example, the relationships between automobility and the senses, embodiment, temporality, memory and consciousness. Andrew’s latest book (co-authored with Simone Dennis) is Doing Anthropology: A Guide by and for Students and their Professors. Andrew is also co-editor of Anthropology in Action: Journal for Applied Anthropology in Policy and Practice. Rasmus Dyring is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University. Along with Mattingly, Louw, and Wentzer, Rasmus Dyring is the co-editor of Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life (Berghahn 2018) and he has published widely on phenomenological and existential anthropology notably in connection with the ethical turn in anthropology (see “From Moral Facts to Human Finitude: On the Problem of Freedom in the Anthropology of Ethics,” HAU 2018). Most recently, Dyring has worked in the intersection of medical anthropology and the philosophy of healthcare on such topics as viii

Notes on contributors

dementia and aging (see Dyring and Grøn’s “Ellen and the Little One: A Critical Phenomenology of ­Potentiality in Life with Dementia” Anthropological Theory 2022). Alexis N. Goad is a Social Psychology PhD student at the University of Arizona. Her research involves the exploration of historical marginalization and the resulting cultural norms, and how these forces work together to affect perceptions of marginalized identities. Specifically, she is interested in the history of settler colonialism in the US and how the cultural norms and practices that derive from settler colonialism affect non-Native perceptions of Native Americans as well as Native Americans’ perceptions of themselves. Jan Patrick Heiss is “Privatdozent” and Senior Lecturer/Researcher at the Department of ­Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (University of Zurich). He is especially interested in the anthropology of the individual, in ethnographic methods and the connections between philosophy and anthropology. He currently works on “Human Existence in Bassar (Togo).” His main fieldwork sites are in Africa: Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Togo. He has written Musa. An ­Essay (or Experiment) in the Anthropology of the Individual (2015) and co-edited Towards an Anthropology of the Individual (2015). Douglas Hollan is Distinguished Professor and Teacher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a research psychoanalyst affiliated with the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He is a psychological anthropologist whose primary focus is on how social experience affects health, emotions, empathy, embodiment, and different states of consciousness, including sleeping and dreaming. Using person-centered interviews and observation, he is particularly interested in how emotional health and well-being are conceptualized in different times and places, and the extent to which these conceptualizations affect the experience of health and well-being per se. Among a variety of writings on these topics, he is the co-editor of Whatever Happened to Empathy? (2008) and The Anthropology of Empathy (2011). Andrew Irving is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His research includes sensory perception, time, illness, death, urban anthropology and experimental methods, film and multi-media. Recent books include The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Beyond Text? Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology (Manchester University Press, 2016). Recent film, television and multi-media works include: See, Make, Sign (Exhibition; 2019, Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York). Wandering Scholars: Or How to Get in Touch with Strangers (Live film and sound installation: Museum für Volkskunde, Vienna, 2016). The Man Who Almost Killed Himself (BBC Arts, Edinburgh Festival 2015). Marine Kneubühler is a fellow researcher at the University of Lausanne. She mobilizes and develops a phenomenological sociology. Her reflection starts from an inquiry on rap music in French-speaking Switzerland – more precisely on one specific rapper. To train herself in phenomenology, she spent a year as a visiting researcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. In recent years, she has extended her investigation to the consequences of media, material and technical devices on the body, perception, and the constitution of a common world. Joseph A. Kotarba is Professor of Sociology at Texas State University, where he directs the Music Across the Life Course project. He also serves as lead qualitative researcher for the Institute ix

Notes on contributors

for Translational Sciences and as Visiting Scholar at the John Sealy School of Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Dr. Kotarba’s areas of interest include culture, science, health, and existential social theory. His current projects include studies of empirical and conceptual versions of frontier medicine and storytelling as lay ethnography. Dr. Kotarba’s most recent book is Music In the Course of Life (Routledge, 2022). Stéphanie Walsh Matthews is an Associate Professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Her areas of focus include cognitive and bio semiotics, Human Robot Interaction, as well as literary semiotics and socio-cultural analysis of literature. She is one of the Editors in Chief for the Journal of the International Semiotics Association’s Semiotica. She is the co-director of the Meaning Lab at TMU. Volumes include (with Tom Broden) A.J. Greimas: Life and Semiotics (2017) and Semiotics Post-Greimas (2017) and (with Jamin Pelkey) Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences (2023). Andrii Melnikov is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Structures and Social ­Relations at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. His research interests ­relate to sociological theory, the existential paradigm, sociologies of culture and everyday life, and qualitative methods. He has presented papers on the numerous international scientific conferences and has published over 100 academic papers, books chapters, and conference proceedings. The monograph Existential Sociology: Identifying the Paradigm (2022) summarizes ten years of his main research project. Pablo Muchnik is an Associate Professor at Emerson College. Educated in Argentina, he received his PhD from the New School for Social Research and studied a few years in Germany. He is the author of Kant’s Theory of Evil, editor of various volumes in the series Rethinking Kant, and coeditor of Kant’s Anatomy of Evil. He received various national and international scholarships and awards and directs the book series Kantian Questions (Cambridge Scholar Publishers) and, along with Lawrence Pasternack, Kant’s Sources in Translation (Bloomsbury). He was the President of the North American Kant Society between 2014 and 2017 and Vice President between 2009 and 2014. Dana Osborne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Toronto Metropolitan University. She received her PhD in linguistic anthropology from the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology, with a research agenda that focuses on the social dimensions of language. Lawrence Pasternack is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Religious Studies at ­Oklahoma State University. He has published extensively on Kant’s philosophy of religion, now and then on other philosophers of the period, and with Pablo Muchnik (with whom he co-authored this entry), is the co-editor of the series Kant’s Sources in Translation. Roshni Patel is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Social Justice Studies at Lake Forest College. She specializes in Indian Buddhist Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and Comparative Philosophy. Albert Piette is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Paris-Nanterre, researcher at the Centre for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology (CNRS). He has widely written about epistemology and methodology of anthropology. He claims a human-centered anthropology. His main x

Notes on contributors

books in French are Ethnographie de l’action (1996 and 2020), Le fait religieux (2005), Anthropologie existentiale (2009), Contre le relationnisme (2014), Le volume humain. Esquisse d’une science de l’homme (2017) and Anthropologie existentiale, autographie et entité humaine (2022). His books in English are Existence in the Details. Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology (2015), Separate Humans. Anthropology, Ontology, Existence (2016), Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being (2019). He has co-edited with Michael Jackson What is Existential Anthropology? (2015). Samuele Poletti was awarded his PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in 2019. His doctoral research focused on the perception(s) of death in the Sinja Valley of Jumla District (northwest Nepal), and how this may shed light upon the ways in which people make sense of existence. Samuele was then a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (LESC) at Université Paris-Nanterre, to work on a research project about the existential repercussions that conversion to Christianity in Nepal has had on the experience of personhood, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Now, he is writing an ethnographic monograph on the articulation of self and personality in Sinja, Nepal, tentatively entitled: Being, Made: Existential Narratives from the Nepalese Himalayas. Devaka Premawardhana is an Associate Professor at the Department of Religion, Emory University. Nigel Rapport, MA (Cambridge) PhD (Manchester), is Emeritus Professor of Anthropological and Philosophical Studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, where he was Founding Director of the St Andrews Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies. He has also held the Canada ­Research Chair in Globalization, Citizenship and Justice at Concordia University of Montreal. He has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW). His research interests cover social theory, identity and individuality, community, conversation analysis, and links between anthropology and literature and philosophy. His recent books include: Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology (2012); Distortion and Love: An anthropological reading of the life and art of Stanley Spencer (2016); and Cosmopolitan Love: Ethical engagement beyond culture (2019). J.-M. Salanskis is an Emeritus Professor at University Paris Nanterre. He has worked in the fields of philosophy of mathematics, on phenomenology and contemporary philosophy, and on Jewish tradition. Among his published books: L’humanité de l’homme Levinas vivant II (Paris, Klincksieck, 2011), Le fait juif (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2017). Harrison J. Schmitt is a PhD candidate in Social Psychology at the University of Arizona, where he is also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. His research centers on how culture and various forms of disadvantage shape the ways that people cope with and make meaning from experiences of suffering. His primary line of research involves a mixed-methods investigation into the psychological impact of environmental justice issues like water contamination. His recent publications include “Coping with chronic environmental contamination: Exploring the role of social capital” in the Journal of Environmental Psychology (with D. Sullivan, A.N. Goad, and R. Palitsky). Jonathan Skinner is affiliated to Department of Hospitality and Events, School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Surrey. PhD in Social Anthropology (University of St Andrews), teaching at University of Abertay Dundee, University of Oxford, Queen’s University xi

Notes on contributors

Belfast, University of Roehampton. Research interests in Caribbean, Northern Ireland, and the US, in terms of creative expressions of identity and cross-community relations from social dance to community carnival and festivals. Editor of The Interview – An Ethnographic Approach (2012, 2020) and a swathe of other assorted volumes, chapters, and articles. Currently passionate about Argentine tango and its impact on aged dancers through and post-COVID-19 lockdowns. Hel Spandler is Professor of Mental Health, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK. They are also Managing Editor, Asylum: the radical mental health magazine. Professor Spandler is the author of many books and articles about the politics, histories, and philosophies of madness and the “psy” disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy etc.). Their work is situated with the emerging discipline of Mad Studies. Ronald Stade is affiliated to Malmö University. PhD in Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Visiting professor at Hitotsubashi University, Japan. Guest professor at the University of Accra, Ghana. Research for UNICEF, Lebanon. Long-term resident of Jordan. Anthropological fieldwork in Guam, Washington, D.C., Lebanon, and Jordan. Research focus on cosmopolitanism, existentialism, ethics, and the connection among culture, institutions, and progress. Daniel Sullivan received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Kansas in 2013 and his BA in German Studies from the University of Arizona in 2008. He has co-authored over 100 articles and book chapters on topics pertaining to cultural variation in experience of and defense against existential threat. He is the author of Cultural-Existential Psychology (2016) from Cambridge University Press. Eero Aarne Pekka Tarasti is a Finnish musicologist and semiologist, currently serving as ­Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of Helsinki. Philip Thomas, Independent Scholar, formerly a full-time consultant psychiatrist in the UK National Health Service. Gwendoline Torterat is a post-doctoral fellow in social anthropology at the Center of ­Technology and Ethnology of Prehistoric Worlds (Paris-Nanterre, CNRS). Her research focuses on the work of the archaeological researcher and the construction of knowledge in relation to archives. She examines what the work of the past concretely does to bodies and to matter, by developing an approach based on audiovisual methods and tracking of individuals. Huon Wardle is an Anthropologist at the University of St Andrews. Author of An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica (2000), he focuses on the Caribbean, Kant’s Anthropology, and on cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical phenomena. Volumes include (with Moises Lino e Silva) Freedom in Practice (2017), (with Justin Shaffner) Cosmopolitics (2017), and (with Nigel Rapport) An Anthropology of the Enlightenment (2018). His essay, “The Artist Carl Abrahams and the Cosmopolitan Work of Centring and Peripheralizing the Self ” won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s J. B. Donne Prize in 2014. With Paloma Gay y Blasco, he recently revised How to Read Ethnography (2019).

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1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION The Routledge Handbook of Existential Human Science Huon Wardle, Albert Piette, and Nigel Rapport

The task the editors set themselves with this Handbook of Existential Human Science has been to map out and bring together the questions, cases and concepts that need to be discussed if a distinctively existential form of enquiry is to emerge more fully in the human sciences. We write this at a time when human lives are more interconnected than ever before, and human individuals have greater potential to change their world, for better or worse, than at any time in history. As such, this work is perhaps a more experimental and tentative exercise than the type of handbook that provides a comprehensive overview of a particular field of study. Certain chapters here talk of the enticing ‘prospect’, rather than the established fact, of an existential approach in their field. The work we have edited has, then, more the character of an initial view of a still peripheral theoretical frame than the confident assertion of a well-established set of principles. Certainly, existentialism is a well-known and historically delimited intellectual movement that includes a recognisable group of mid-twentieth-century figures, including Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, De Beauvoir, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty amongst others, drawing on nineteenthcentury forerunners such as Kierkegaard, Emerson and Nietzsche. These are undoubtedly touchstones for thinking about what an existential enquiry consists in. However, what we mean by existential human science involves something other than simply operationalising the thought of the mid-twentieth-century existentialists. Across 24 chapters, we attempt to trace out the task of existential enquiry in its full diversity of aims and outcomes. Even so, we also always return readers to a narrower thematic base, because, for the editors, the existential view involves a specific type of concern. The focus might be framed as a question: How to understand the irreducible living breathing human individual who is both a subject and an object in its own world, and whose life is ‘noninterchangeable’ with the lives of the other human beings around it? This concept of ‘non-interchangeability’ offers a useful initial frame within which to understand the aims and methods contained here. In Marine Kneubühler’s usage (see Section IV of our handbook), the idea of non-interchangeability acts as a challenge to social scientific accounts that would analyse human experience as normatively or structurally interchangeable, thereby treating individual lives in themselves as a residue of no intrinsic significance. From this angle, we see how the uniqueness and plenitude of human experience is lost to human enquiry when it is decomposed into social facts or psychological traits, structural roles or cultural identities, that DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-1

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Huon Wardle, Albert Piette, and Nigel Rapport

are re-organised to have analytic value at an impersonal or objective level of explanation, social, psychological, semiotic or otherwise. So, in this negative sense, existential enquiry begins by reasserting the truth about life as any actually existing person experiences it; that, whatever shape subjectivity may take in its social networks, or in cultural discourse viewed from outside, each life is and remains distinct to itself, unique and finite: human lives are social, certainly, though often in unsociable ways, but individual life is never fully absorbed into the wider structures, discourses and behavioural norms that emerge from its actions, and which scientists often treat as objective and causative of subjectivity. No human being, then, is ever simply an aggregation of relational traits but is rather a lifeworld and a whole to themselves. Whatever patterns may appear at cultural, social psychological or social structural levels, the non-interchangeability of human lives remains an irrevocable fact of human being, likewise an epistemological and methodological premise for existential enquiry. Beyond taking a critical stance towards a social systematics that does not want to look the human entity and its world-knowledge and world-making in the face, existential enquiry is, or should be, an ample and positive exploration of the lifeworld of this same human being. As ­M ichael Polanyi (1962, 1983) states, we humans always believe more than we can prove and always know more than we can tell—any human being can be by moments a scientist, an artist, a moral philosopher, a pragmatic bureaucrat, a food critic, a comedian, a mystical ecstatic, ad infinitum. Our existence, and our attempts to essentialise ourselves, in these many modes, and the thoughts and gestures this involves are not only non-interchangeable but also non-repeatable. As Heraclitus has it, no one ever steps in the same river twice. Put another way (and to reverse the subtitle of Paul Feyerabend’s final book [1999]), existential enquiry is, or should be, a tale of the richness of being versus abstraction. Likewise, it is an extended experiment in how to study—how to create the methodological and epistemological grounds for recognising—this ‘richness of being’. An existential enquiry comprises, then, the methods, concepts and theories we need to understand human beings in the amplitude of their subjectivity as they encounter the concreteness of their situation. It should engage ‘with the full range of human experience, intransitive and transitive, fixed and fluid, rational and emotional, coherent and wild, real and symbolic’ as this surfaces in everyday life ( Jackson and Piette 2015). It resists systems of thought that would reduce or disqualify this experiential abundance. Existential enquiry, in its search for methods, spills out beyond the canons of existentialism. For example, Ogden and Richards make little reference to existential thought when they point in The Meaning of Meaning (1923) to how there is no ‘meaning’ that is not instantiated by an interpreter: that is, however, cultural or inter-subjective the circuit of communication may become, the establishment of what we call meaning begins and ends with a creative act unique to each human self, facing others and its situation as it finds it. Any human science whose methodology ignores the human’s capacity to interpret its own situation, and to act on its own interpretation, is bound to produce results that are, literally, meaningless. Heidegger goes further. In coining his term Dasein, he criticises the division of human being into body, soul and spirit, which ‘designate areas of phenomena which are thematically separable for the sake of determinate investigations’ (Heidegger 2010, 48). He explains that human beings cannot be the sum of these various characteristics, an animal material and a human material, corresponding to specialised research (ibid.: 48). With Dasein, it is therefore not so much an interpretive subjectivity or consciousness that is at play, but rather an entirety, in that the elements that characterise it ‘are not pieces belonging to something composite, one of which might sometimes be missing, but a primordial coherence [Zusammenhaug] is woven in them which constitutes the totality of the structural whole that we are seeking’ (ibid.: 191). Sartre likewise finds in the person a ‘totality’: not ‘an addition or… 2

General introduction: The Routledge Handbook of Existential Human Science

an organization of the tendencies which we have empirically discovered in him’, but on the contrary, ‘in each inclination, in each tendency the person expresses himself completely’ (Sartre 1956, 563). Existential enquiry, then, aims to marshal strong arguments against, and present analytic and ethical alternatives to, the sway of objectivism in the social and psychological sciences. Existentialists have taken issue with eliminativist methodologies (whether positivist, social constructionist or post-structuralist) that would reduce subjectivity and self hood to the external behaviours, role-plays, relations, statuses, identities, bio-political and economic positions or bio-medical or neurological states that the person in question is considered to occupy. Rather than deploying nation, society, class, capital, discourse, rational choice or psychological type as objective descriptors, existential enquiry takes as its subject matter ‘Anyone’; what counts evidentially is Anyone’s experiences and knowledge in their situation taken in detail and understood as a whole (Rapport 2012). All meaningful knowledge is personal to the integrated whole that is a ­human being. Equally, knowledge, subjective states and situations are integrated contingently and i­rreproducibly in moments of meaning-creation, hence their reduction to external systems of signs and values cannot offer the final word. In this respect, Kotarba and Melnikov (in this volume) note the sometimes confusing ­‘excitement’ or ‘exuberance’ that existential theorists display in dealing with their subject matter. ­Existential enquiry wants to show how the singularity, separateness, finitude and wholeness of the human being taken together constitute a unique energetics or power. Power can be conceived of existentially as an inherent attribute of individuals as active beings: beings who, through their ongoing activity-in-the-world, create and recreate meaningful environments in which they live. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche refer in this connection to individuals’ native ‘force’, John Dewey to their ‘impulse’, Max Weber to their ‘will’; Gregory Bateson defines individuals as ‘energy sources’ (1973, 126). Residing within individuals, and lent to the relations and groupings to which they lend their allegiance, a notion of ‘existential power’ compasses the force, the will, the energy, in a word the agency, whereby individuals produce effects in their worlds: effect worlds, in fact. Such existential power is at once something metabolic, physiological and more particularly intelligent, pertaining to the capacity to sense and make sense. Human beings are equally social beings who continuously generate meanings and relationships in each other’s company—emotional and meaningful topologies that can reach heights of extraordinary complexity and can seem to take on a life of their own. How does existential enquiry work, at ontological and methodological levels, between centring on this separateness, subjective abundance, power and wholeness of the individual human life, and recognising that humans are ‘creatures intended for society’ as Kant notes (1952, 155)? There are different answers in this handbook, including perspectives that are critical of any straightforward existentialist reading. The question is rather how to describe these scenes in which human beings interact without dissolving human individuality and interiority into the roles and relations through which they insert themselves into the social sphere—even in those cases where dissolving individuality into a public role is precisely the aim (the soldier who wishes their distinct personality to ‘dissolve’ into her uniform, for example, or the member of an ethnic or religious minority who chooses to have themselves ‘strategically’ defined according to their community’s supposedly essential habitus). Each human individual emerges from the same unity of being as every other—their embodied humanity—and as such is already continuous with every other being in this primary way. But in struggling to communicate our individual common sense one to another through gesture and language, we try to recapitulate this primary ontic connection of ours paradoxically using 3

Huon Wardle, Albert Piette, and Nigel Rapport

symbols that reaffirm our outsideness to and non-continuity with one another (Brodsky 2021). Existentialists have described profound difficulties arising in every attempt to take on the other’s point of view—‘Hell is other people’ as Sartre puts it (see Section III of the handbook). And, certainly, existential enquiry does not assume any pre-existing moral symmetry or universal rule-book for how people should come into contact with or understand one another. Contrarily, it points to how ethical norms that appear as fixed and objective are in fact always asymmetric, incommensurable, ambiguous, situational and in-the-making. Perhaps then, the broadest intention of this handbook is that it should nudge readers to renew attention to the epistemologies that ground the study of the self-conscious individual human being. The kind of human science the editors have in mind would reconnect, in a new way and under different historical conditions, with the liberal cosmopolitan thought of the Enlightenment. Not without flaws and blindnesses of its own, the goal of Enlightenment philosophical anthropology was to place the free-acting, self-educating individual, guided by its own ‘regulative ideas’, into the centre of a description of the limits of human reason, art and morality (Kant [1794] 2006; Rapport and Wardle 2018). There is, then, a potential secondary outcome of this handbook. The shock of an existential approach of this kind that builds on the epistemology of human beings in the singular is that, suddenly as it were, it reveals how little interest in actual human selves the contemporary social sciences typically show, since the dominant discursive engagements are still with pre-modelled subjectivities and these only for what they demonstrate about a larger psychological or socio-relational field of which human individuals are considered to be simply an index or fold, a cipher or subject-position. Thus, for example, a given social science discipline may decide that taking account of ‘human needs’ is epistemologically essential to its self-definition (see Maslow 1943). But the analytic status of the ‘need’ in question—let us say the need for ‘affection’—is pre-established independently, hence what ‘affection’ might mean in the life of any actually existing human being becomes irrelevant. The map overwhelms the territory of experience, leaving only a place-marker. By pointing away from abstract generalities of this kind back to specificities (including the vagary, the inconsequence, the ambiguity) of actual individual experience as lived, existential human science establishes a counterpoint to (post-)structuralist or other modes of contextualism that historicise or otherwise ‘decentre’ the power of human experience. As we have suggested, existential enquiry casts a wider net than attention to the mid-­ twentieth-century existentialists alone. Nineteenth-century social philosopher Thomas Green, someone who again falls outside the existentialist canon but nonetheless within the purview of an existentially oriented human science, helps us shade in some themes. Green’s version of liberal idealism was posited against the social evolutionism of his day that would reduce individuality to an arbitrary expression of historico-social-environmental forces. For him, the human individual is a self-realising being whose self-consciousness freely and spontaneously, and as such inevitably, introduces newness into each of its relationships with the world. Personal self-insight and selfeducation develop not absolutely but rather in time out of a series of contingent, will-imbued interventions. As Green shows, the decision to prioritise the individual—as opposed to the social class, the in-group, the people, the state, culture, God or gods—is an epistemological one. The task, he argues, is to open out the Enlightenment’s dangerous idea that ‘each shall count for one, none for more than one’ (a liberal key phrasing of Jeremy Bentham’s and drawn on by such ­d ivergent figures as Max Stirner and J. S. Mill). In Green’s time (as now), this idea was challenged on all sides—by corporations, institutions and would-be discourse-creators and power brokers of every stamp; but there were other indicators of its resilience. Green found (as Bakhtin did later) that the emerging ‘modern’ art forms, particularly the modern novel, acted as ‘expander[s] of sympathies’, swelling the democratic and 4

General introduction: The Routledge Handbook of Existential Human Science

cosmopolitan impulse to recognise each individual life-project as holding equal ultimate validity to every other (Green 1862, 31)—an artistic democratisation that has been immensely intensified into our time. In this respect, the world we live in now was sketched out two centuries ago by Kant when he described the current condition of humanity as both ‘Copernican’ and ‘cosmopolitical’. In a world increasingly centred around the self ’s attempt to understand itself, an ever-expanding cosmopolitanisation of experience becomes unavoidable. In their imaginative reaching out to others, individuals continuously find themselves both somewhere and elsewhere—anywhere—while the claims we make on each other as we look for a place for ourselves in world society become ever more urgent (Wardle and Shaffner 2017). One result of the intensification of human communication is that we now live in an era where we are less sure, have less agreement than ever before, on what it is that defines being human. Shifting our gaze from already-exhausted psycho-social forms of explanation and interpretation towards potentials that individuals freely combine towards self-realisation can lead us to consider, to use Green’s words, the human individual’s ‘unapparent possibilities’, their ‘capabilities for [living in] some society not seen as yet’ (1883, 279). The individual’s project of self-education and self-fulfilment is never finished, and its latent potential is always more than anything it achieves at one given moment (Freire 1996).

References Bateson, G. 1973. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Washington, DC: Rowman Littlefield. Brodsky, C. 2021. The Linguistic Condition: Kant’s Critique of Judgement and the Poetics of Action. London: Bloomsbury. Feyerabend, P. 1999. Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Abundance of Being. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Freire, P. 1996. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage. Washington, DC: Rowman Littlefield. Green, T. 1862. An Estimate of the Value of and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times. Oxford: T&G Shrimpton. Green, T. 1883. Prologomena to Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heidegger, M. 2010. Being and Time. ( J. Stambaugh, trans.; D.J. Schmidt, revised). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Jackson, M., and A. Piette 2015. What Is Existential Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn. Kant, I. 1952. The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, I. 2006. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maslow, A.H. 1943. ‘A theory of human motivation’, Psychological Review 50(4): 430–437. Ogden, C.K., and I.A. Richards 1923. The Meaning of Meaning. London: Routledge. Polanyi, M. 1962. The Tacit Dimension. South Pasadena: Nighttown Books. Polanyi, M. 1983. Personal Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rapport, N. 2012. Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Rapport, N., and H. Wardle (Eds) 2018. An Anthropology of the Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury. Sartre, J.-P. 1956. Being and Nothingness. New York: Philosophical Library. Wardle, H, and S. Shaffner 2017. ‘Introduction: Cosmopolitics as a way of thinking’, In S. Shaffner, and H. Wardle (Eds), Cosmopolitics: Collected Papers of the Open Anthropology Cooperative. St Andrews: Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies.

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SECTION I

The Existential Perspective Across the Disciplines

2 INTRODUCTION Huon Wardle

How has existential enquiry been reshaped within distinct disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations in recent years? In these first chapters of the handbook, we examine this question through a survey of the directions that existential thought is currently taking through and ­beyond disciplines. Readers will discover that our handbook is divided into three thematic ­sections, each with their own brief editorial introduction. Described here in reverse order: Section IV develops the epistemologies and methods needed to recognise and understand the singularity of human being. Section III explores the existential self as a being who is social; who cares and empathises, who has faith in the other, but who also despises the other, who encounters ‘hell’ in them. ­Section II uncovers some of the many ways to approach the interiority of this individual self and the power and creativity of its encounters with reality. In this regard, our first section offers, then, a sampling of how existential questions, ideas and themes currently appear in the enquiry and practice of a range of human science disciplines. Existentialism is a sub-current throughout the humanities and sciences from philosophy, psychology, anthropology and geography, through semiotics and the history of science to psychiatric practice. Where it comes to the fore, in its diverse disciplinary framings, it builds a picture of a human being who is the maker of a meaningful world, albeit never a world free of conflict or contradiction. In centring its enquiry this way, existential enquiry grounds itself in empathic, typically phenomenological, description and analysis of people-in-their-situation. The experience of contemporary life—where radical technological and geo-political change is pitted against sparring visions of subjectivity, agency and human potential—inevitably provokes new kinds of existential concern. What responsibility can or should the individual take for their personal knowledge, their actions and the meanings they create? The revised interest in existential enquiry, tentative in some disciplines but assertive in others, speaks, then, to a need to reinstate individuals-in-their-situation at the centre of human science and to entertain a more open ­conversation between distinct human science disciplines. To introduce the book’s opening section that follows here in more detail: in the first chapter of this section, Kotarba and Melnikov propose that existential ideas have historically found a home and even become crucial to theoretical sociology as it has developed. Even so, existentialist ideas have also been ‘frequently and naively considered as expressions of rebellion, radical subjectivism and irrationalism, that reject abstract scientific method, depersonalized formal logic DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-3

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and social milieu as conditions of authentic existence’. Hence, not only did existential philosophy itself incorporate certain elements of a sociological approach, but it is also true that ‘the history of ­sociological thought is not exclusively the history of positivism and sociologism, and it is consonant with many existentialist themes’. These motifs include ‘the dehumanizing effects of mass society, overrationalism and scientific objectification’. There are distinctive principles or characteristics involved, notably ‘ontologization’—the removal of ‘fictitious or simulative aspects of the collective being’ in favour of ‘fundamental questions’. Thus, existential sociology serves to integrate the various schools of everyday life sociology by focusing on experiences, such as illness and music, that disclose the interplay of feelings and culture. Sullivan, Goad and Schmitt view the relationship between psychology and existentialism as ‘characterized by both promise and peril’. Existentialism is one of the philosophies ‘best suited as a foundation for psychology’, yet questions immediately appear regarding whether an existential viewpoint can be reconciled with ‘empiricist epistemology or normative praxis’. The authors explore existential themes as they appear in two sub-fields, clinical and social psychology. Existentialism poses its own valuable enquiries to clinical psychology, including ‘what it means for the “pathological” individual to “adapt” to mainstream society’. Equally ‘social psychology is confronted by the question of what is lost when we scientifically reduce individual experience to the statistical mean’. Existential questions can be treated empirically, arriving at conclusions ­including that ‘personal and social situations which reduce people’s feelings of relatedness, competence, and autonomy, or their ability to act upon their intrinsic motives, diminish psychological well-being and personal flourishing’. The authors point both to the relative isolation of existential psychology and to the notable successes its perspective has brought about. Huon Wardle asks why should prefixing ‘existential’ to ‘anthropology’ make any difference. The chapter traces a pathway from Kant’s programme for a cosmopolitan anthropology centred on ‘what humans, as free-acting beings, make of themselves’, through the Malinowskian ­epoché of fieldwork, arriving at a version of anthropology, as described by Gell, where ‘the spaces of anthropology are those which are traversed by agents in the course of their biographies’ and the anthropological task is to ‘articulate … the agent’s biographical “life project”’. In this ­process, anthropology has needed to liberate itself from an objectivism by which its ‘human subjects of study’ are regarded as ‘the bearers of an impersonal “culture”, or wax to be imprinted with “­cultural patterns”’ (Turner). One further step is to re-envision ‘structure’, not as that which gives ‘objectivity’ to a cultural field, but rather as an emergent property of any human individual’s autobiographical ‘handwriting’—their way of writing themselves into the world. Thus, the ‘­existential’ prefix re-orients anthropological conversation towards contingent yet ­actually o ­ bservable gestures of worldmaking, and away from the hypothetical power of culture or ­d iscourse to determine the biographical life-path. Spandler and Thomas trace the philosophical and historical tradition of existential psychiatry in the setting of the contemporary British National Health Service. While there is ‘little evidence of explicit existential thinking or practice within mental health social work or mental health nursing in the UK’, and the influence of figures such as R.D. Laing has ‘waned’, aspects of existential thought are nonetheless still present especially in the field of existential psychotherapy. A key problem has foregrounded itself in building progressive existential psychiatric perspectives into mainstream health work: ‘there is a potential conflict between teaching a specific psychotherapeutic “treatment” or “model” and the cultivation of open-minded enquiry which is central to cultivating an existential sensibility’. Equally the term ‘treatment’ is ‘anathema’ for many existentially oriented practitioners since it indicates a biological understanding of health. In contrast, ‘[o]ver the last 40 years, there has been a profound shift in the values and 10

Section I: Introduction

epistemology of psychiatry, further away from a concern for contexts and meanings to a preoccupation with more biologically focused theories of causation and the management of risk’. Notwithstanding this, while existential approaches remain neglected, there is evidence that an ‘existential sensibility’ still has value in the field. Eero Tarasti explores the complex relationship between existentialism and semiotics as his theme in his chapter. He uses the term ‘existentiality’ to describe a ‘fundamental metalanguage’ concerned with human ‘“being” and “existing”’ that emerged especially in Germany from the 18th century. Where existentiality posits the puzzle of human existence as the crucial problem, in semiotics ‘the prevailing trend has been to deny the existing subject’. Tarasti explores the make-up of Heidegger’s Dasein—Dasein incorporates ‘the reality that we learn to know’ due to its resistance to our ‘subjective ideas of it’. Is it possible to study Dasein ‘in its dynamic primary essence’ in semiotic terms? Can we create a semiotic of the ‘mind seen from inside’? The author introduces the idea of a ‘zemic’ model (‘emic’ plus ‘z’ to convey movement) involving a series of moments of sublimation taking place between dimensions of Dasein—‘body, person, praxis, and values’. These movements between levels of the interiority of Dasein are susceptible to a semiotic approach, he proposes. It is indeed possible to existentialise semiosis and vice versa. ‘Yet’, he ­a rgues, ‘it is too early to know in which ‘direction this will lead us’. Muchnik and Pasternack show how ‘Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1781–) opens the space for existential thought’. Kant’s critiques are revolutionary because ‘the Kantian “turn to the subject” is much more radical’ than that of his philosophical predecessors. Kant gives the subject the task of thinking for, and knowing, itself: it must ‘do without divine warranties altogether’. It must also learn to recognise the limits to its knowing, rather than, as with the rationalists, engage in generating an ‘“organon” of “objective assertions”’. The subjective orientation and ordering of knowledge are famously ‘united’ by Kant in three questions: ‘What can I know?’ ‘What should I do?’ ‘What may I hope?’ Here the emphasis is placed on the power of the subject to organise its own knowledge, for ‘the knowable as such is really just the knowable for us’. There remain key differences between Kant and the other existentialists. For example, the positioning of freedom in his system is significantly different to Sartre’s, his emphasis on the sociality of human beings differs from Heidegger’s emphasis on our ‘solitary orientation towards our own deaths’. Yet, for all this, Kant remains both the departing point for the existentialist canon and a way station for any new direction in existential enquiry.

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3 EXISTENTIAL SOCIOLOGY Joseph Kotarba and Andrii Melnikov

The various ideas of existentialism began to spread in sociology in the middle of the twentieth century. There were several thematic leitmotifs that shaped the genesis of existential sociology as a scientific approach directed toward theoretical and empirical examination of influential philosophical concepts proposed by Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and many other intellectuals associated with existentialist movement. These leitmotifs include consideration of authenticity, life meaning—orientations, death or negative experience, and triadic scheme of freedom choice—responsibility as the main program elements for the paradigm of existential sociology. The emergence of existential sociology involved both philosophical and sociological contexts. In philosophy, existentialism has become one of the most influential perspectives of the twentieth century. There is today a certain renaissance of its classical works. These works are frequently and naively considered expressions of rebellion, radical subjectivism, and irrationalism that reject abstract scientific method, depersonalized formal logic, and social milieu as conditions of authentic existence. However, as a detailed retrospective analysis shows, such stereotypes appear as significant overstatements, since many existentialist ideas are not only relevant for the social sciences but also demonstrate explicit sociological content. Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Nicola Abbagnano are reasonably considered to be the predecessors or even the founders of existential sociology as an academic discipline. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre, who formulated the central maxima of existentialism, existence precedes essence, developed an original theory of society and a typology of social groups (Craib, 1976; Hayim, 1980). Maurice Merleau-Ponty was characterized as an “existentialist of the social world” (Rabil 1967), and he published several works considering sociological issues (MerleauPonty 1951, 1988). Nicola Abbagnano made a significant contribution to the formation of sociological science in Italy, combining European theoretical traditions with the achievements of American empirical sociology. In 1951, he founded the journal Sociological Notes (Quaderni di sociologia) with his student Franco Ferrarotti and published the monograph The Problems of Sociology (1959), developing the perspective of “methodological empiricism” or “critical existentialism.” And there are numerous other statements that affirm sociological congruence of existentialism (Dufrenne 1946; Paluch 1963; Theunissen 1984; Malhotra 1987; Aspers 2007; Stewart 2011; Aspers and Kohl 2013). 12

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Existential sociology

In the same vein, the history of sociological thought is not exclusively the history of positivism or sociologism, and it is consonant with many existentialist themes. Positivism is often defined as an exemplary objectivistic and quantitative approach, while even its founder, Auguste Comte at a late stage of his intellectual path, took a subjectivist position and noted the centrality of observation which is the key research method of contemporary qualitative sociology. Max Weber’s theory of social action resonates with existentialism, and his brother Alfred Weber’s studies of industrial location are in fact an explicit version of the existential sociology of culture. Similar themes are found in Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of nonlogical action, in the sociology of George Simmel, and in the works of the Chicago and Frankfurt Schools. Karl Mannheim’s views can be described as an existential sociology of knowledge, and he was an early author who tried to replace the classic category of society by the term “social existence.” The points of intersections with the philosophy of existence include the theory of sociocultural dynamics of Pitirim Sorokin and even the studies of Talcott Parsons, in particular his voluntaristic theory of action and the late paradigm of human condition. The existentialists’ critique of the dehumanizing effect of mass society, over-rationalism, and scientific objectification contributed to the later development of interpretative and qualitative sociological methodology (Douglas 1970a,b). Even the alleged “antisocial” position of existentialism does not necessarily mean it is “antisociological” per se but rather expresses the need for humanistic view of society as social existence or a complex of “existential communications” (K. Jaspers). The recent critique of classic sociology reflected in the emergence of alternative approaches (e.g., symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, social constructionism, ethnomethodology, dramaturgy, and grounded theory) remains short of existential sociology’s relatively balanced argument for the integration of objectivism and subjectivism. One of the first attempts of systematic synthesis of micro- and macro-perspectives in sociology was made by American theorist Edward Tiryakian, a student of Pitirim Sorokin and Talcott Parsons. In 1962, he published the book Sociologism and Existentialism that presented a project of the new sociological discipline called “existential sociology.” The book contained comparative study and theoretical integration of the sociological views of Emile Durkheim and various existential thinkers (Tiryakian 1962). The author argued that, despite the appearance of a confrontation, sociologism and existentialism share general concerns about the crisis of the individual and society and can truly be considered complementary perspectives. Existential sociology could and should focus on the study of macro-manifestations of different ontological features described by existentialists—authenticity, choice, responsibility, becoming, openness, care, anxiety, boundary situations, ambiguity, intersubjectivity. Thus, authenticity and inauthenticity among individuals can be considered analogous to societal conditions of solidarity and anomie. Since the contrast between authentic and inauthentic existence is acute in boundary situations, it may be assumed that societal solidarity and anomie are also manifested in such extreme situations that destroy mundane social patterns. Tiryakian developed his project of existential sociology with the ambitious goal of reassessing the sociological tradition through the prism of existential phenomenology (Tiryakian 1965). He intended to show that there is a latent consensus in sociological tradition based on methodology of subjective realism and a “general theory of social existence.” Providing the principles of “relationism” (K. Mannheim) and transobjectivism, this methodology avoids the extremes of materialistic or idealistic views and considers social reality as a phenomenal experience of actors. Relationism is different from relativism and implies that truth for the social actor is always in existential relation to certain situations. Transobjectivism directs the study beyond the research object toward its more comprehensive explanation as “total social fact” (M. Mauss). Generally, 13

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existential phenomenology tends to overcome institutional reality (natural attitude) by focusing on the roots of social existence (existential nature of social structures) and the dialectics between institutional and existential dimensions of society. Another important elaboration of Tiryakian’s sociology is the “existential model of man” (Tiryakian 1968), consisting of four base elements of ontic and ontological levels of existence, an openness of the self to the world, and the situation as the key linkage of the self to social reality. Ontological and ontic levels correspond with authentic or inauthentic forms of being, and with the existential self and the person, respectively. The existential self is the deepest foundation of subject, the “real me”—dynamic and temporal unity which tends to actualize own integral possibilities and cannot be fully defined or objectified until it has exhausted all inner potential. Openness actualizes through the body, intersubjectivity, social time (historicity), and the sacred realm of existence. Main modes of this actualization are language, nonverbal communication, internal religious dialogue, responsibility, and morality arising from the call of conscience. Social situations transcend the physical site by the meanings that are found in them. The person for the existential self becomes a form of social presence, similar to the body as a form of physical being. That is, person is a social mask, “another self ” which protects and presents the existential self in situations of intersubjective reality. In certain boundary situations, the mask is damaged and the existential self opens to social milieu. The existential model of man connects to the wider theory of structural sociology. Social structures are defined as existential foundations of social life which combine social order and change into one. The social structure is not a physical entity, but moral or “…normative phenomena of intersubjective consciousness which frame social actions in social space” (Tiryakian 1970: 115). Social change is not so much a transformation of physical reality, but rather transformation of consciousness through the processes of structuration, destructuration, and restructuration. Meanings of social reality are not only individual but also collective phenomena that appear to consciousness as perceived here and now. There are three main elements of perception—sensory, cognitive (factual), and normative (moral), which unite into a multi-layered system of meanings that mediates the experience of physical objects (Tiryakian 1973). Phenomena are becoming from the “existential ground of possibilities,” which is latent, but the real social structure that can be defined as culture. Actualization of social phenomena is the process of formalization and institutionalization of social existence. Social structures define internal conditions of interrelated elements, while the forms are external manifestations of these structures. Under certain conditions, the latent structures break the institutional order and lead to large-scale transformation. Since social structures are covert, the mistake of sociologists is their main focus on the “visible” or profane level of society, while its sacred existential core remains out of sight. There is the metaphor of a spectator who merged into a movie (institutional order) and forgot about the screen, projector, director, that is, those structures that create the picture. Thus, sociological theory needs to be reoriented to the study of relations between institutional life and latent social structures. Edward Tiryakian tried to apply his existential approach to the studies of a wide range of social problematics in the areas of religion, culture, modernization, and national identity (see Melnikov 2016). These studies were aimed at uncovering how individual beings are reflexive in societal existence and how personal situations are becoming intersubjective or historical events.

The California School of existential sociology Another important contribution to the emergence of existential sociology was made by the group of scholars that have come to be known collectively as the “California School” (see Melnikov 14

Existential sociology

and Kotarba 2017; Melnikov 2018). The main ideas of this school were published in a trilogy of books: Existential Sociology (Douglas and Johnson 1977), The Existential Self in Society (Kotarba and Fontana 1984), and Postmodern Existential Sociology (Kotarba and Johnson 2002). The leader of this school was Jack Douglas, who began creating his own version of existential sociology in the late 1960s by defining its general task as a study of social existence or human experience in all its forms. He attempted to make a radical reversal in the traditional understanding of hard and soft science by arguing that quantitative and abstract macro approaches should be subordinate to qualitative analysis of direct interactive experience in everyday life and its deepest sensory parameters. In Douglas’ research program, the principle of situational determination of meaning indicates that contextual meanings and ethics are significantly different from abstractions and absolutist axiology. According to this principle, which can be also formulated as Douglas’ theorem, “the concrete meaning… is adequately given… only when its concrete or situated context is provided” (Douglas 1970b, 9). Situations produce “working agreements,” combine determination and freedom, order and disorganization. Simplified societal meanings tend to generate alienation and deceptions to cover deviations under abstract morality. Douglas’ inductivism embodies the Sartrian priority of existence over essence and presupposes an ascending interpretation of situations in the first-person perspective. There is an emphasis on the relative independence and dominance of feelings and emotions over the rational aspects of social actions. The central element of sensory experience is the “brute being,” as first noted by Merleau-Ponty, that is, the intuitive, primordial core of personhood that cannot be completely rationalized or verbalized. Brute being is characterized by a sense of basic security and trust, common sense knowledge, natural attitude, problematic meanings, and self-deceptions, through which the authentic self develops. Douglas (1971, 104) describes the construction of meanings as a problematic process, because it fluctuates and requires constant reinterpretation in new contexts of changeable social reality: …all human thought and action are necessarily existential: not only must we create our world of meaning (our essences) out of our existence, but we must also recreate some part of that world of meanings for every situation we face in everyday life. According to Douglas, the public sphere is ethically dual and contains both true and false meanings, and the latter conceals deviations caused by moral conflict in mass society. Social order is supported by institutional coercion and mystification strategies that create an illusory sense of justice under the influence of official propaganda. The myth of the welfare state (Douglas 1987) is assembled by the means of bureaucracy, media, expertism, and credentialism that repress the freedom and emotional needs of the brute being. Douglas elaborated on innovative empirical methods, including creative interviewing, life studies, and team field research (Douglas 1976, 1985; Douglas et al. 1977, 1988). These methods are characterized by openness, flexibility, empathy, and trust relationships, defocusing immersion, and grasping the latent meanings among team members. Douglas’ general methodological position is that method does not determine the reality, but reality determines the method. The programmatic ideas of Jack Douglas were developed in the work of his students and colleagues. John Johnson’s existential sociology of emotions reveals the problem of syncretism of feelings and thinking and the concept of “emotional generalizations” (Cuthbertson-Johnson and Johnson 1995), which are functional meta-elements of experience. Hierarchies of generalizations arise in the processes of emotional socialization and construction of emotional careers and are also characterized by sensitivity, which in acute forms turns into “capture” (Cuthbertson and 15

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Johnson 1992), limiting proactivity and the freedom of action. Johnson studied the phenomenon of “bureaucratic propaganda” and disparity between the public and private levels of social reality ( Johnson 1972, Johnson and Douglas 1978, Altheide and Johnson 1980). He systematized the thematics of existentialism (meanings, emotions, freedom, and choice), synthesized the perspectives of situationism and universalism in the concept of “occasioned transcendence” ( Johnson and Johnson 1977), and clarified the specifics of existential sociology among other micro-sociological approaches. Johnson contributed to the “reflexive turn” in sociological ethnography that implies transparency of field experience ( Johnson 1975), and together with David Altheide worked on the criteria of “interpretive validity” in qualitative research (Altheide and Johnson 2011). Following Douglas’ theoretical and methodological program, Joseph Kotarba elaborates ­existential ideas in the context of the sociologies of self, medicine, and music (Kotarba 1983; Kotarba and Bentley 1988; Kotarba 2009; Melnikov and Kotarba 2015). The experiences of health, illness, and music provide phenomena that disclose the interplay of embodiment/feelings and culture. These experiences can be painful, as in the case of illness, or pleasurable as in the case of music. He portrays social existence as dynamic, situational, problematic, and complex. Kotarba interprets the relations between the individual and society predominantly as a cultural confrontation. This vision contrasts paradigmatically with the conflict view of this relationship as society oppressing the individual through culture and the consensus view of society cooperatively sharing culture with the individual. The existential self is embodied, becoming, and represents the source of social change. The integration of personality is constituted by selfactualization, strengthening the sense of self and basic security, acceptance of permanent changes and openness to new experiences. Among the central problems of existential sociology Kotarba underlined, construction of meanings in uncertain conditions, dissatisfaction with the sense of self and requirements of society, interpretation of social changes as projections of new ways of self-reflections, and the situational plurality of the self are notable. Important features of personality are the “inner strength” (Kotarba et al. 2003) and authenticity or meanings of the “real self ” that is created in processes of solution of practical problems (authenticity work). In the area of qualitative empirical methodology, Kotarba developed heuristic methods of synthetic performative ethnography, video ethnography, and ethnographic tourism (Kotarba 1998, 2013). Andrea Fontana contributed to the conceptualization of existential sociology and its interdisciplinary ties with other micro-perspectives, which Douglas (1970a) intended to integrate within the general paradigm for the study of everyday social life (Fontana 1980; Adler et al. 1987). ­A lthough the negative attitude of existentialism to any forms of objectification that depersonalize the concrete experience, this conceptualization clarified the basic stance of the California School concerning the situated, problematic, and partially irrational nature of social order. Fontana specialized on the central existential problem of death (Fontana and Keene 2009), continued the innovative empirical research studies of the school with the method of “short stories,” and described postmodern trends in interviewing (Fontana 2002; Fontana and Prokos 2007). Douglas’ contemporaries Peter Manning, Stanford Lyman, and Marvin Scott expanded understanding of disciplinary specifics and particular themes of existential sociology. Manning (1973) provided a general retrospective of this approach and defined sentiments, body, self, situation, structure, massification, and leveling as a complex of its main concepts. The “sociology of the absurd” of Lyman and Scott (1970) emphasized the problem of order as a social product created through language and evaluative situational judgments (accounts) from the experience of the absence of objective meanings of reality. The individual is understood as an active subject, able to resist the absurd, set goals, and make choices in conflictual and competitive circumstances. 16

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Sociologists of the California School define existential sociology as the study of human existence or experience-in-the-world. They stress the relative freedom of individuals and their ability to construct meanings of social reality. There is also a strong focus on feelings, emotions, embodiment, and becoming of the self. Douglas and his students try to avoid any paradigmatic formalizations and use inductive methodology, beginning every “empirical” study (Greek ἐμπειρία—experience) from standpoint of concrete individuals in natural settings of the everyday social world.

European extrapolations Although the birthplace of philosophical existentialism was Europe, its sociological implications appeared in the Old World decades later than initial American developments. In Belgian sociologist Marcel Bolle De Bal’s presidential address at Congress of International Association of French-Speaking Sociologists, he presented the original project of existential sociology as alternative to abstract, quantitative, and “not enough human” perspectives. Bolle De Bal (2013) published a three-volume book, Fragments of existential sociology, where he presented six main principles of his approach, which include (1) consideration of existential sociology as a fundamental theory, (2) reliance as a central concept, (3) “action-research” as a fundamental mode of research, (4) “socioanalysis” as a fundamental practice for sociologists, (5) plurality of sociological models, and (6) clinical or applied sociology as a research, action, and training field. As a fundamental theory, existential sociology is concerned with stressing the importance of the person (the related versus isolated individual of capitalist and socialist societies) and of the actor (the active, engaged person). It is a humanistic instead of a positivistic sociology, and it is more Verstehen (Max Weber), phenomenological (Marcel Mauss), and interdisciplinary, paying specific attention to the dynamics of primary groups, subjectivity, irrationality, and affectivity. It uses qualitative, “dialectical” (Georges Gurvitch), and “dialogical” (Edgar Morin) methods. In defining the central concept of reliance, Bolle De Bal argues that social links in contemporary society are in a process of destruction and producing society of déliance or the “lonely crowd” (David Riesman), and there is a need for reliance or relinking the lost relations, including sociology’s systematic reintegration. In recent decades, several prominent theorists, whose views are not always associated with this paradigm, have shown interest in existentialism. For example, Anthony Giddens and Piotr Sztompka develop the problematics of becoming, existential contradictions, ontological security, self-identity, and life politics. Giddens (1991) describes the dynamics of the institutional (formalized) and existential (reflexive) levels of social life and emphasized the phenomenon of repression of existential experience. Sztompka (2006) presented his sociology of social existence in his presidential address to the International Sociological Association entitled “The Quality of Social Existence in a Globalising World,” in which he diagnosed a paradigmatic shift toward studies of everyday life. According to Sztompka, existential sociology is a “third sociology,” which replaced the second sociology of action and the first sociology of systems for the analysis of social existence or observed social experience of everyday life, which unites both social structures and freedom of individual choices. The ideas of Giddens and Sztompka resonate with such new trends as the existential theory of globalization (Bude and Dürrschmidt 2010) and trans-subjective existentialism (Ginev 2014), which reject the “disembedded,” highly abstract interpretations of social phenomena. The stagnation of the traditional theory of globalization is explained by distancing from everyday social reality and exaggerating the problems of mobility and deterritorialization. It becomes necessary to cultivate “transclusivity” as a balance of potential and actual, global unification and localization 17

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of social ties. In turn, the phenomenon of trans-subjectivity is opposed to intersubjectivity in accordance with Martin Heidegger’s dichotomy of the ontological and the ontic, which consists in the contradictions of the transcendent and immanent dimensions of society. In general, the contemporary paradigm of existential sociology can be structured as macro, micro, and numerous middle-range theories or sociologies of personality, action, choice, authenticity, everyday life, body, experience, emotions, negative phenomena (absurd, suffering, alienation, death, risk, fear, war, disasters), social change, culture and religion, space and time, visual, relational, and sensory sociologies, social ontology, and situational analysis (see Dubet 1994, Alexander 2003, Bull et al. 2006, Yair 2007, Vannini and Williams 2009, Lyng 2012, Bude 2014, Graziosi 2015, Wilkinson and Kleinman 2016). Thereby, it provides an important integrative metatheoretical function for certain segments of sociological knowledge. There is also current interest in other more substantive versions of existential sociology presented by Kurt Wolff (Backhaus and Psathas 2007), Deena Weinstein and Michael Weinstein (1978), Claudio Tognonato (2006), Danilo Martuccelli (2017), Hartmut Rosa (2019), Borer (2019), and others. Systematic study of different currents in existential sociology (see Melnikov 2018) makes it possible to distinguish several principles or theoretical and methodological stances of this paradigm:

• subjective realism reproduces social experience in its direct forms in the first-person perspective.

• •

• •

There is the claim that any object has explicit or implicit individual relations; situationism presupposes that contextual parameters of the problem under the study have crucial significance for the results obtained. Abstraction has a certain importance, but depending on the situation, it can change meanings and even become its own opposite; sensualism emphasizes that existence on its deepest level has sensory and pre-conceptual condition that precedes all other manifestations of human experience; totalism is demand for complete, “integral” (P. Sorokin) consideration of the phenomena that unite biophysical, psychical, and social elements. Within psychical elements, it is a pursuit of correlation of emotions and rationality. For social elements, this is an approach to analyze them as “total” (M. Mauss) and experienceable social facts; inductivism determines the ascending directivity of research from empirical facts to theoretical generalizations, and from individual to social layers of reality; theoretical minimalism is the denial of excessive speculations and informational parsimony known as novacula Occami or “Ockham’s razor,” according to which entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. It is the “apodictic” and preferably “slow science” strategy that focuses on everyday social life and uses an “infrasociological” approach that increases the scale and detailization of microsocial phenomena.

Paradigmatic principles of existential sociology represent its two main features or tendencies. First one is the process of ontologization that reorients sociology from abstractions and the priority of epistemology toward more concrete or “thick” descriptions of such diffuse terms as culture, social institutions, social statuses and roles, identity, self, and so forth. Ontologization aims to explain the material manifestations and existential boundaries of these fundamental categories in contexts of everyday practices. The second feature is the process of authentification that eliminates the fictitious or simulative aspects of the collective being, including sociology as its reflexive part. In many ways, this process is a specific attempt of existential paradigm to answer the fundamental questions about truth, ethical duality, and dialectics between formal and informal, public and private levels of social reality. 18

Existential sociology

Existential sociology today: The paradigmatic bridge As we have shown, European scholars continue to interpret and develop existentialist ideas as a response to fundamental sociological questions. One might say that this approach is primarily theoretical, as illustrated by Andrii Melnikov’s powerful work. This work is adorned with European sensibilities and desires to juxtapose existential sociology with other paradigms and intellectual visions. Existential sociology in North America has largely followed a different path in recent years. Although early writings by Douglas, Johnson, Manning, Kotarba, and their students called for some fairly serious changes in the way we conduct, conceptualize, and write about everyday life, a paradigm shift in sociology has obviously not occurred. Existential sociology’s early critics explain this “failure,” if you will, two ways. Ritzer (1983) has argued that existential sociology had not clearly developed beyond the principles and methodologies of symbolic interaction, from which it emerged in North America. In similar fashion, King (2010) has argued that existential sociology has never really been able to escape its ultimate foe: the reliance on grounding its research and analytical activities in social structural contexts in order to fully describe an everyday life world that is meaningful for as well as identifiable to the reader. Although the critics have raised some valid concerns with existential sociology, they all too often misinterpret the excitement—exuberance?—existentialist sociologists display in their writing as a dismissal of mainstream sociology. Tiryakian (1966) clearly displayed this congenial attitude in his comparison and contrast between Parsonian structural-functionalism and phenomenological-existentialist thinking. Most of them have been raised on and trained in traditional structuralist sociology. They celebrate the freedom which they write and teach about, but without great concern over the scholarly styles to which other sociologists adhere. So, in lieu of promoting a paradigm change, the success existential sociology has achieved to date is a bit more modest in professional scope yet theoretically significant. Existential sociology has served as a bridge across the varieties of perspectives within the everyday life (EDL) sociology paradigm. Existential sociology thus enriches the study of traditional EDL topics by including the author’s experience of meaning construction and use. Jack Douglas and his students (1977) contributed to ethnography as the preferred methodology in EDL by describing how complex human nature—in terms of early Sartrean notions of cognitive, evaluative, and affective potentials—informs the social organization of emergent social scenes such as the nude beach in Southern California. John Johnson (1975) contributed to the symbolic interactionist focus on emotions by describing the centrality of feelings and emotions in otherwise staid bureaucratic/ organizational settings. David Altheide (2014) reflected on the ethnomethodological emphasis on communications by ethnographically describing the hard work that goes into assembling complex mass media meaning-making work today. Adler et al. (1987) composed a postmodern literary, almost hermeneutic performance reading of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights that activates Victor Crapanzanos’ (1986, 51) idea that “Like the magician… [the ethnographer] clarifies the opaque, renders the foreign familiar, and gives meaning to the meaningless. He decodes the message. He interprets.” Candace Clark (2002) extended the somewhat biomedically and psychologically informed list of emotions sociologists study to include those commonly experienced by individuals in everyday life such as the “nice person.” Krzysztof Konecki (2021, 153) elaborated on the traditional application of phenomenological methods to EDL by designing the concept of contemplative grounded theory to encourage the inclusion of “self-observation and analyses of the work of the mind, emotions and the body of the researcher.” Joseph Kotarba (2023) modified the formulaic and behavioristic versions of the life

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course model by showing how music continuously serves as a dynamic and situational resource for meaning across life. In conclusion, two of the early members of the California School summarized the project in metaphoric and literary terms reflecting the tone and spirit of existential sociology. John Johnson (2002, 3) notes, “It is a sensibility, a way of life, a passion for living, an orientation to the emerging drama of actual lived experience.” Andrea Fontana (2002:3) simply states, “The structuralist sees society as a well ordered and coordinated symphony, whereas the existential sociologist sees it more as an improvisational jazz ensemble.”

References Adler, P., P. A. Adler, and A. Fontana 1987. ‘Everyday life sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology 13: 217–35. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.13.080187.001245 Alexander, J. 2003. The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Altheide, D. 2014. Media Edge. New York: Peter Lang. Altheide, D., and J. Johnson 1980. Bureaucratic Propaganda. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Altheide, D., and J. Johnson 2011. ‘Reflections on interpretive adequacy in qualitative research’, In N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (Eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research (pp. 581–94). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Aspers, P. 2007. ‘Nietzsche’s sociology’, Sociological Forum 22(4): 474–99. Aspers, P., and S. Kohl 2013. ‘Heidegger and socio-ontology: A sociological reading’, Journal of Classical Sociology 13(4): 487–508. Backhaus, G., and G. Psathas (Eds) 2007. The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Turn. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Bolle de Bal, M. 2013. Fragments pour une sociologie existentielle. 3 tomes. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. Borer, M. 2019. The thing and I: Existential sociology and meaningful objects. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. New York. Bude, H. 2014. Gesellschaft der angst. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Bude, H., and J. Dürrschmidt 2010. ‘What’s wrong with globalization?: Contra “flow speak”—Towards an existential turn in the theory of globalization’, European Journal of Social Theory 13: 481–500. Bull, M., P. Gilroy, D. Howes, and D. Kahn 2006. ‘Introducing sensory studies’, Senses and Society 1(1): 5–7. Clark, C. 2002. Taming the Brute Being: Sociology Reckons with Emotionality. Pp. 155–182 in Kotaba and Johnson 2002. Craib, I. 1976. Existentialism and Sociology: A Study of Jean-Paul Sartre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crapanzano, V. 1986. Waiting: The Whites of South Africa. New York: Vintage. Cuthbertson, B., and J. Johnson 1992. ‘Exquisite emotional sensitivity and capture’, Studies in Symbolic Interaction 13: 155–66. Cuthbertson-Johnson, B., and J. Johnson 1995. ‘Emotional generalizations: An integrative proposition’, Studies in Symbolic Interaction 17: 163–84. Douglas, J. (Ed) 1970a. Understanding Everyday Life: Toward a Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Douglas, J. (Ed) 1970b. Deviance and Respectability. New York: Basic Books. Douglas, J. 1971. American Social Order. New York: Free Press. Douglas, J. 1976. Investigative Social Research. Beverly Hills: Sage. Douglas, J. 1985. Creative Interviewing. Beverly Hills: Sage. Douglas, J. 1987. The Myth of the Welfare State. New Brunswick: Transaction. Douglas, J., P. Rasmussen, and C. Flannigan 1977. The Nude Beach. Beverly Hills: Sage. Douglas, J., F. Atwell, and J. Hillebrand 1988. Love, Intimacy and Sex. Newbury Park: Sage. Douglas, J., and J. Johnson (Eds) 1977. Existential Sociology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dubet, F. 1994. Sociologie De l’Expérience. Paris: Seuil. Dufrenne, M. 1946. ‘Existentialisme et sociologie’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 1: 161–171. Fontana, A. 1997. ‘Of heaven and hell: narrating Hieronymus Bosch’, Qualitative Inquiry 3(2): 237–249.

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Existential sociology Fontana, 1980. A. Toward a complex universe: Existential sociology. In Douglas, J., Adler, P. A., Adler P., Fontana, A., Robert Freeman, C., and Kotarba, J.A. Introduction to the Sociologies of Everyday Life, 155–80. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. Fontana, A. 2002. ‘Short stories from the salt’, In J. A., Kotarba and J. Johnson (Eds), Postmodern Existential Sociology (pp. 201–18). Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira. Fontana, A., and A. Prokos 2007. The Interview: from Formal to Postmodern. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast. Fontana, A., and J. Keene 2009. Death and Dying in America. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Ginev, D. 2014. ‘Social practices from the viewpoint of trans-subjective existentialism’, European Journal of Social Theory 17(1): 77–94. Graziosi, M. 2015. ‘Projecting selves: From insecurity to reflection?’, Current Sociology 63(2): 182–97. Hayim, G. 1980. The Existential Sociology of Jean Paul Sartre. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Johnson, J. 1972. ‘The practical uses of rules’, In R. Scott and J. Douglas (Eds), Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance (pp. 215–48). New York: Basic Books. Johnson, J. 1975. Doing Field Research. New York: Free Press. Johnson, J., and J. Johnson 1977. ‘Occasioned transcendence’, In J. Douglas (Ed), Existential Sociology (pp. 229–54). New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, J., and J. Douglas (Eds) 1978. Crime at the Top: Deviance in Business and the Professions. Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott. King, B. 2010. ‘Existential sociology in historical developments and theoretical approaches in sociology’, In C. Crothers (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. Oxford, UK: Eolss Publishers. Konecki, K. T. 2021. ‘Contemplative grounded theory’, Studies in Symbolic Interaction 52: 151–86. Kotarba, J. A. 1983. Chronic Pain: Its Social Dimensions. Beverly Hills: Sage. Kotarba, J. A. 1998. ‘Black men, black voices: The role of the producer in synthetic performance ethnography’, Qualitative Inquiry 4(3): 389–404. Kotarba, J. A. 2009. ‘Pop music as a resource for assembling an authentic self: A phenomenological–existential perspective’, In P. Vannini, P. Williams (Eds), Authenticity in Everyday life, 153–68. Burlington: Ashgate. Kotarba, J. A. 2013. Baby Boomer Rock ’n’ roll Fans: The Music Never Ends. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield. Kotarba, J.A. 2023. Music Across the Course of Life. New York: Routledge. Kotarba, J. A., and A. Fontana (Eds) 1984. The Existential Self in Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kotarba, J.A., and P. Bentley 1988. ‘Workplace wellness participation and the becoming of self ’, Social ­S cience and Medicine 26(5): 551–58. Kotarba, J. A., and J. Johnson (Eds) 2002. Postmodern Existential Sociology. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira. Kotarba, J., B. Haile, P. Landrum, and D. Trimble 2003. ‘Inner strength and the existential self: Improving managed care for HIV+ women through the integration of nursing and sociological concepts’, In J. J. Kronenfeld (Ed), Research in the Sociology of Health Care, Vol. 21,, 87–106. Bingley: Emerald. Lyman, S., and M. Scott 1970. A Sociology of the Absurd. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Lyng, S. 2012. ‘Existential transcendence in late modernity: Edgework and hermeneutic reflexivity’, ­Human Studies 35: 401–14. Malhotra, V. 1987. ‘A comparison of Mead’s “Self ” and Heidegger’s “Dasein”: Toward a regrounding of social psychology’, Human Studies 10(3): 357–82. Manning, P. 1973. ‘Existential sociology’, The Sociological Quarterly 14: 200–25. Martuccelli, D. 2017. Sociologia dell’esistenza. Napoli: Orthotes Editrice. Melnikov 2016. ‘Existential sociology of Edward Tiryakian: Toward an integrated paradigm’, In A. R. Robertson and J. Simpson (Eds), The Art and Science of Sociology: Essays in Honor of Edward Tiryakian (pp. 59–78). London: Anthem Press. Melnikov, A. 2018. Existential Sociology: Identifying the Paradigm. Kyiv: Millenium. (In Russian). Melnikov, A., and J. A. Kotarba 2015. ‘Existential sociology’, In G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Boston, MA: Blackwell. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405165518. wbeose083.pub2 Melnikov, A., and J. A. Kotarba 2017. ‘Jack Douglas: The existential sociology project’, In M. Jacobsen (Ed), The Interactionist Imagination: Studying Meaning, Situation and Microsocial Order, 291314. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Joseph Kotarba and Andrii Melnikov Merleau-Ponty, M. 1951. ‘Le philosophe et la sociologie’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 10: 50–69. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1988. Psycho-sociologie de l’enfant. In Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne. Résumé de cours 1949–1952, 245–302. Paris: Éditions Cynara. Paluch, S. 1963. ‘Sociological aspects of Heidegger’s being and time’, Inquiry 6(1–4): 300–07. Rabil, A. 1967. Merleau-Ponty, Existentialist of the Social World. New York: Columbia University Press. Ritzer, G. 1983. Contemporary Sociological Theory. New York: Knopf. Rosa, H. 2019. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. London: Polity. Stewart, J. (Ed) 2011. Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Social Sciences. Aldershot: Ashgate. Sztompka, P. 2006. The quality of social existence in the globalizing world. Presidential address at ISA World Congress of Sociology, Durban 2006: http://www.isa-sociology.org/uploads/files/presidential_ address_p_sztompka.pdf Theunissen, M. 1984. The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber. ­Cambridge: The MIT Press. Tiryakian, E. 1962. Sociologism and existentialism: Two perspectives on the individual and society. ­Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Tiryakian, E. 1965. ‘Existential phenomenology and the sociological tradition’, American Sociological Review 30(5): 67488. Tiryakian, E. A. 1966. ‘A problem for the sociology of knowledge the mutual unawareness of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber’, European Journal of Sociology 7(2): 330–36. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0003975600001478. Tiryakian, E. 1968. ‘The existential self and the person’, In K. Gergen and C. Gordon (Eds), The Self in Social iNteraction (vol. I, pp. 75–86). New York: Wiley. Tiryakian, E. 1970. ‘Structural sociology’, In J. McKinney and E. Tiryakian (Eds), Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments (pp. 111–35). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Tiryakian, E. A. 1973. ‘Sociological perspectives on the stranger’, Soundings 56: 45–58. Tognonato, C. 2006. Il corpo del sociale: appunti per una sociologia esistenziale. Napoli: Liguori Editore. Vannini, P., and P. Williams (Eds) 2009. Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society. Farnham, MD: Ashgate. Weinstein, D., and M. Weinstein 1978. ‘An existential approach to society: Active transcendence’, Human Studies 1: 38–47. Wilkinson, I., and A. Kleinman 2016. A Passion for Society: How We Think About Human Suffering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Yair, G. 2007. ‘Existential uncertainty and the will to conform: The expressive basis of Coleman’s rational choice paradigm’, Sociology 41(4): 681–98.

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4 EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY Daniel Sullivan, Alexis Goad, and Harrison J. Schmitt

The prospect of a synthesis between psychology and existential philosophy has always been ­characterized by both promise and peril. Kierkegaard was, among other things, a theoretical personality and clinical psychologist (Klempe 2017); and Nietzsche was a great cultural psychologist as well as an ideological forerunner of psychoanalysis (Richardson 1996). Parallel lines continued to run as psychology consolidated into a profession and discipline in the early 20th century, when Edmund Husserl’s (1911/1965) phenomenological method – essentially a kind of descriptive or qualitative psychology – deeply influenced the trajectory of the existential tradition. By interpreting deviations from psychological “normalcy” through phenomenological, empathetic methods, Karl Jaspers laid the groundwork for the modern synthesis of clinical psychology and existentialism (see Fuchs et al. 2019). Shortly thereafter, Ludwig Binswanger (1963) unified in a single framework – Daseinanalysis – the first modern psychotherapeutic technique, namely psychoanalysis, and Heidegger’s groundbreaking ontology of existence. Jean-Paul Sartre (1963) and Simone de Beauvoir (1952) – probably the last “giants” of existentialism – directly engaged with the psychology of their time, including psychoanalysis and Lewinian social psychology. Of all the bodies of ideas in philosophy, existentialism is one of the best suited as a foundation for psychology. At the broadest level, their natural affinity stems from the fact that existentialism is devoted to understanding what it means to be an existing human being, and in that sense is the philosophical equivalent of psychological science (or, perhaps, of psychology and anthropology combined). In many ways, existentialism represents the psychologization of philosophy, in that it not only reorients philosophy to psychological themes but also reveals the psychological origins of philosophical and idealistic worldviews and systems. The affinities also manifest in existentialism’s commitments to examining embodied self hood within concrete situations, and to probing various psychological experiences of emotion and exhilaration (e.g., Angst, awe) as well as defensiveness and repression (e.g., ressentiment, inauthenticity, bad faith; Guignon and Pereboom 1995). Although the object of knowledge would appear to be the same for both psychology and existential philosophy, the structure of that knowledge would seem to take on very different forms in the two enterprises. Psychology itself is divided, split most obviously between clinical practice and empirical research. Historically, this division of labor has presented challenges that apply with particular force to the integration of existential perspectives, namely questions of whether such perspectives can be logically reconciled with empiricist epistemology or normative DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-5

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praxis (Correia 2017; Vos, 2019). Existential philosophy has strong tendencies toward both anti-­ systematization and anti-subjectivism (in the Cartesian sense) and additionally places major emphasis on issues of personal authenticity and responsibility. How can these elements be addressed by a science and practice of psychology? Through engagement with existentialism, clinical psychology is confronted by the question of what it means for the “pathological” individual to “adapt” to mainstream society; and social psychology is confronted by the question of what is lost when we scientifically reduce individual experience to the statistical mean. Ultimately, despite the clearly productive dialogue between existential philosophy and ­psychology, these key questions remain largely unresolved. They indicate that a point of convergence between these approaches can be reframed as a problematizing query: If existentialism is in fact the philosophy of the existing individual, what could it possibly add to psychology to designate it existential? If one proposes that existential psychology is the psychology of existential concerns (as has been prominently done; Yalom 1980; Koole et al. 2006), one runs a major risk of either meaningless generality or culturally limited arbitrariness. It seems more reasonable to tentatively assert that existential psychology is an orientation that shares with existential philosophy three fundamental tenets or foci (Sullivan and Palitsky 2018): (1) the uniqueness of the human species (stemming from symbolic consciousness) and the human individual (stemming from temporal finitude); (2) the indissolubility of the person’s body/mind and the concrete, historical situation in which they are located; and (3) the ubiquity of freedom and threat in human experience. However, these themes have experienced a fractured reception across the different instantiations of existential psychology.1 The bulk of this chapter will be devoted to exploring the primary and divergent ways in which the clinical and social variants have demonstrated the importance of these themes. We will conclude by returning to questions concerning the promise and peril of this paradoxical enterprise.

Existential clinical psychology Most prominent contemporary approaches to existential therapy have their origin in either the Daseinanalysis of Binswanger and Medard Boss or the logotherapy of Viktor Frankl. Common to these original schools was the fact that their founders had early and thorough experience of psychoanalysis but sought to reorient psychopathology and therapy away from biologic models and toward a phenomenological understanding of neurosis as the patient’s wayward attempt to find meaning in the face of potential meaninglessness. Daseinanalysis in particular built on ­Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” as a new understanding of mental illness: When confronted by an anxiety-­inducing experience of major life disruption, the patient compensatorily responds by filtering the world in terms of rigid “either/or” dichotomies (e.g., everyone around me is either a friend or enemy; either I starve myself or I will be unlovable; Binswanger 1963). Contemporary Daseinanalysis adapts classic psychoanalytic techniques with the aim of interpreting the broader existential significance of problems that have been compensatorily reduced to symptoms by patients (Craig and Kastrinidis 2019). Logotherapy shares the original psychoanalytic impulse of providing the patient with cognitive techniques to confront and disempower the

1 This fracturing is partly a result of the historical process through which philosophy was carried over into psychology. Whereas existential clinical psychology was, from its origins in Jaspers and Binswanger, the result of a direct importation, philosophy reached social psychology largely indirectly via the mid-century works of humanistic social scientists such as Ernest Becker (1973) and Erich Fromm (1941).

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psychological “blocks” in their lives; but unlike psychoanalysis, it interprets these blocks as symptoms of thwarted needs for meaning and responsibility (Frankl 1986; Längle and Klaassen 2019). The ways in which these early schools re-conceptualized the notion of consciousness were pivotal for existential psychotherapy: in contrast to traditional Freudian ideas about the centrality of the unconscious, they moved toward a more distributed, relational, and volitional understanding of the mind. Such views suggested in turn that therapy was not so much a process of unearthing repressed thoughts as providing the patient with new interpretations and outlooks. These foundations have been gradually translated into a variety of existential therapies which can be distinguished along certain dimensional criteria; for instance, whether they primarily advocate rich phenomenological understanding of a client’s experience, versus explanation of that experience as shaped by confrontation with existential realities (Cooper 2003). In North American therapeutic practice, existential-humanistic psychology emerged largely via the mediating influence of Rollo May (Hoffman et al. 2019). In this context, the early synthesis of existentialism and psychoanalysis further merged with mid-century humanistic psychology, represented by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. This movement was substantively influenced by Otto Rank, who expanded the humanistic dimension of psychotherapy by incorporating insights from Nietzsche and other diverse sources. Existential-humanistic therapy is relatively distinctive in that it presents existentialism as a fundamental orientation that can be compatible with strategic use of more conventional therapeutic techniques (e.g., cognitive-behavioral). Therapists in this tradition tend to view individuals as beset by anxieties arising from certain existential “givens” (e.g., death, constrictions on freedom and self-expression), to which they respond with characteristic defensive patterns (Yalom 1980; Schneider 2010). The existential orientation manifests in intensive exploration of the relationship of co-presence between client and therapist and the significance it has for the client’s life beyond therapy. This includes, as needed, processing of novel and expanded experience in the client’s life, as well as confrontation of the client’s resistance to such potentially unsettling introspection. What is commonly called existential-phenomenological psychology – a tradition more associated with Great Britain and Europe – initially drew not on the German philosophies of existence, but rather R.D. Laing’s (1965) work to bridge psychoanalysis and the late phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Laing has become a controversial figure, in part because unlike the existential-­humanists, he participated in radical efforts to re-conceptualize insanity as rooted in social structure (in parallel with Foucault). However, his published work on therapy solidified aspects of existential practice that are quite common today, such as the need to understand the patient’s experience on its own terms (rather than in light of reductive theories) and the identification of routine defensive postures (Laing 1965). As existential-phenomenological therapy developed in more recent decades (via practitioners such as Emmy van Deurzen and Ernesto Spinelli), it has increasingly returned to the Daseinanalytic roots of existential psychology. In distinction from existential-humanistic therapy, this approach helps clients clarify the fundamental assumptions and motives of their lives as they relate to different levels or ways of being (such as the material, the personal, and the social), rather than necessarily fostering development in a particular guided direction (Spinelli 2006; Adams, 2019). Directly related to these movements is the recent resurgence of what was once called phenomenological psychiatric research and theory. Scholars in this area are resurrecting the vision of Jaspers and Binswanger of phenomenology as the foundational mode of knowledge for clinical psychology (Fuchs et al. 2019). Drawing on developments in clinical psychology over the last century, as well as newer fields such as cognitive neuroscience, this work uses qualitative methods to recast clinical case study and interview data in terms of fundamental categories such 25

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as embodiment and temporal-spatial perception. Some of the fruits of these efforts include: new comparative analyses of psychopathology; empirical insights that call into question the received “cluster symptom” approaches of the mainstream biomedical model; and renewed attention to psychological experience in philosophical writing on affect (e.g., Ratcliffe and Stephan 2014; Ratcliffe 2015). It is unfortunate that despite shared philosophical origins and concerns, the renewed discipline of phenomenological psychiatric research and the existential psychotherapies have not evidenced significant interchange. Their potential integration would represent a promising direction for existential clinical psychology. If clinical psychology is the science and practice of alleviating psychological suffering, then existential clinical psychology offers an array of perspectives and praxes attendant to the reality that such suffering always arises in the context of a situated individual life. Yet as alluded to above, existential philosophy is not exclusively concerned with understanding the particular person – it also offers an exhaustive exploration of the “givens” of human existence in general. Empirically documenting and probing these givens is the task of existential social psychology.

Existential social psychology As stated, the three major tenets of existential philosophy and psychology are (1) the uniqueness of the human species and individual; (2) the indissolubility of the person and the situation; and (3) the ubiquity of human freedom and threat (Sullivan and Palitsky 2018). The third tenet speaks to existentialism’s dialectical understanding of human experience; like psychoanalysis, existentialism views the individual as a perennial tension system, an unresolvable site of conflicting drives, motives, and passions (Bernstein 1971; Cole 1971). This dialectical understanding has permeated existential social psychology (or, as it is sometimes called, “experimental existential psychology”), which, since the 1980s, has produced major theories and empirical findings concerning the human “givens” of terror and autonomy.

Threat and defense Focusing on one side of the dialectic, terror management theory (TMT; Greenberg et al. 1986) was the first systematic endeavor by social psychologists into studying the effect of existential concerns on human activity. Based on the work of Becker (1973), TMT examines how the knowledge and salience of death can affect people’s attitudes and behaviors. Humans, like any other animal, have an innate desire for survival; however, unlike other animals, humans have the capacity to be aware of death and understand its inevitability. TMT proposes that this knowledge of death pitted against the innate drive to live has the capacity to create anxiety (“terror”) that can disrupt emotional and psychological functioning unless it is properly managed. In order to feel protected against the threat of death, TMT proposes that people construct, maintain, and invest self-esteem into sociocultural worldviews – ideas and systems that offer meaning and avenues for feelings of permanence or death-transcendence. These feelings of permanence may be construed literally, such as the belief in a form of life after death (erasing the threat of expiration completely) or symbolically, such as the belief that one will live on through their children, their work, their country, etc. There have been over three decades of social psychological research inspired by TMT, with much of the effort focused on a few key hypotheses. The most widely studied is referred to as the mortality salience hypothesis, which holds that if cultural worldviews act as a buffer against the threat of potential death anxiety, then reminding people of their mortality should cause them 26

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to uphold their internalized worldviews to defend themselves against the threat. Consider an illustrative example: one of the first relevant studies asked a sample of municipal court judges to set a bond amount for a hypothetical defendant arrested for prostitution (Rosenblatt et al. 1989).2 A transgressor against cultural values has the potential to cast doubt on the validity of one’s internalized beliefs, and therefore supporting the punishment of this transgressor is a form of psychological defense of one’s culture. In accordance with TMT, the researchers predicted that judges who were first reminded of their own mortality (by writing a reflective essay about it) would issue a harsher punishment for the hypothetical defendant than judges who were not reminded of their death. Despite being trained to be rational actors according to the law, the judges who were asked to think about their own deaths issued a bond amount an average of $400 more (around $1,000 adjusting for inflation) than the judges who were not reminded of their death. There have been hundreds of conceptual replications of this effect of worldview defense in response to the threat of mortality, with research indicating that defensive responses can be antagonistic or prosocial (Vail et al. 2012). Past research has found that reminding people of their own death can cause increased derogation of religious outgroup members (Greenberg et al. 1990; Das et al. 2009) and aggressive intentions toward political outgroup members (McGregor et al. 1998), but such reminders can also lead to increased helping behavior ( Jonas et al. 2008) and tolerance (Greenberg, Simon, et al. 1992) when such social values are salient. One of the most notable contributions of existentially informed research toward a better ­understanding of psychology was research into a temporal sequence of defensiveness in response to threats. In TMT, this sequence is referred to as a dual defense model involving both proximal and distal defenses against the threat of death awareness (Greenberg et al. 2000; Routledge and Vess 2019), which builds on earlier psychoanalytic theories of repression and existential ideas about bad faith. When thoughts of death are in conscious awareness, defensive responses to them are more immediate (proximal) and directly threat-reducing, such as showing higher intention to diet and exercise (Arndt et al. 2003) or using high SPF sunscreen (Routledge et al. 2004). These superficial but apparently rational actions work to immediately minimize the threat of death and assuage accompanying negative emotions. However, despite these efforts, when thoughts of death are no longer in full conscious attention, the activated potential for death-related anxiety continues to elicit defensive responses. Once the threat of death is outside focal awareness, ­defenses come cognitively online that are referred to as “distal” because they do not directly ­address the reality of death, but rather “fluidly compensate” for this threat by bolstering symbolic sources of security (i.e., through worldview defense and self-esteem striving; Arndt et al. 1997). By pioneering the incorporation of existential philosophical insights with empirical methods, TMT is credited with launching a broader existential social psychology (Sullivan and Palitsky 2018). Synthesizing much of this work, Hart (2014) offers a distillation of three main sources of existential threat and defense – interpersonal relationships, self-esteem, and cultural meaning/worldviews. The importance of healthy interpersonal relationships for proper psychological functioning has been reiterated throughout psychology – from developmental attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969/2982) to a posited innate human “need to belong” (Baumeister and Leary 1995). Feeling a sense of relatedness and belonging to the people and community around a person leads to positive self-regard and psychological well-being (Baumeister and Leary 1995; Deci and Ryan 2000). Moreover, the psychological security of personal relationships has been shown to operate

2 For this study, rooted in the cultural and social influences of the 1980s, the choice of prostitution was deliberate by the researchers due to the perceived immorality of the transgression.

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as a defense against existential threat (Florian et al. 2002; Mikulincer et al. 2003). Self-esteem is also widely studied within social psychology, and past TMT research has indicated that bolstering positive self-regard can buffer the effects of death anxiety (Greenberg, Solomon, et al. 1992). In addition to the previously discussed terror management function of cultural worldviews, other research has shown that people have a pervasive need to maintain a sense of meaning by perceiving expected relationships in the world, and they react with defensiveness when these ­expectancies are violated (Heine et al. 2006). With his general security system model, Hart (2014) summarizes much of existential social psychological research and expands the notion of (defensive) fluid compensation. According to this model, whenever one’s sense of meaning, selfesteem, or secure relationships is threatened, one experiences general anxiety about the vulnerability of the self-world relation; however, one can also compensate for the anxiety by bolstering a different domain of security (e.g., the threat of personal inadequacy can be compensated for by adherence to a social group or ideology).

Pursuit and denial of freedom Exploring the other side of the fundamental human dialectic, self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan and Deci 2000a) moves away from a focus on threats and defensiveness and maintains that people are naturally motivated toward personal growth. The theory shares with much of existential philosophy the idea that the type of motivation with which an individual performs a certain behavior matters almost as much, if not more, than the behavior itself for the person’s ultimate well-being. Much as Heidegger, for instance, distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic motives for engaging in everyday activity, SDT proposes people can perform the same action for either intrinsic or extrinsic reasons. When we engage in intrinsically motivated activity, we perform the action as a function of our own experienced desire to do so, rather than as a result of factors external to the self (e.g., peer pressure or financial incentives). Further, the theory posits humans will flourish and engage in more intrinsically motivated activity so long as their need for three fundamental nutriments is satiated: relatedness, competence, and autonomy. Much like air, water, and sunlight facilitate the growth of a flower, social and cultural situations can facilitate a person’s ability to act on their intrinsic motivation and their experiences of well-being and self-determination. Relatedness refers to the need for a sense of belonging and connectedness to others in one’s social group, and to be united with them in pursuit of common or similar goals (Ryan and Deci 2000a). Importantly, SDT argues that the development of reciprocal, positive, and supporting relationships facilitates self-determination by laying a secure foundation for the cultivation of the other basic psychological needs of competence and autonomy. For instance, Grolnick and Ryan (1989) showed that the extent to which parents engaged in various supportive parenting styles predicted children’s competence and autonomy in school, as measured by teachers’ reports, children’s self-reports, and objective measures of achievement in school. Feelings of competence are achieved when a person senses that their behavior is being executed effectively in a given social situation (Deci and Ryan 2000; Niemiec and Ryan 2009). Competence in the classroom, for example, can be achieved when a student receives good marks or constructive feedback, resulting in feelings of efficacy that bolster intrinsic motivation. Indeed, a classic study by Deci (1971) had participants complete puzzles and either gave them no feedback or positive feedback part way through the experiment. Participants who received positive verbal feedback during the experiment exhibited more intrinsic motivation to complete the puzzles than those who received no feedback, as measured by the amount of time they spent 28

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working to solve the puzzles during free time at the end of the experiment. Contrarily, negative or nonconstructive feedback may thwart feelings of competence and hinder intrinsic motivation and ultimate feelings of self-determination (Deci and Ryan 2000; Broeck et al. 2010). In order for one’s actions to be intrinsically motivated and to fully achieve feelings of self-­ determination, one must feel autonomous in their actions. Autonomy, according to SDT, i­ nvolves the feeling that one is acting according to their own will or volition and not according to the wills of an outside force (non-autonomous or controlled) (Ryan and Deci 2000b, 2006). One can construe their behaviors in any given situation as autonomous or controlled depending on the functional significance – psychological meaning – assigned to the situation by the actor (Deci and Ryan 1987). Early studies on the importance of autonomy for intrinsic motivation showed that giving children external rewards for doing activities that they were already intrinsically motivated to do (e.g., receiving an award for engaging in a novel and exciting activity) actually reduced the amount of their free time they spent doing the same activity a week later (Lepper et al. 1973). As an illustrative example of this phenomenon, a child practicing a piano piece for an upcoming piano lesson might find the task to be inherently enjoyable, rewarding and fully appreciate the purpose of the rehearsal. Thus, this child would wholeheartedly endorse the repetitive and sometimes tedious practice, imbuing the scenario with experienced autonomy. On the other hand, another child might be practicing the same piano piece for the same upcoming piano lesson but feel as though they are only doing so because they must be prepared for the instructor to judge their ability and to avoid poor marks, in which case such a behavior would be considered less volitional and more controlled. While both children understand that there is an external evaluation to be had based on their extent of practice, only one has engaged it autonomously – having endorsed the behavior and found the inherent enjoyment and value in the action. Past research has indicated a myriad of positive outcomes for those feeling autonomous in their actions. Relationships and social settings that facilitate feelings of autonomy have been shown to effectively reduce relational defensiveness (Knee et al. 2005), as well as to increase prosocial volunteering behavior (Gagné 2003) and overall well-being (Sheldon et al. 1996; Reis et al. 2000). Naturally, the reverse aspect of all of these empirical findings is that personal and social situations which reduce people’s feelings of relatedness, competence, and autonomy, or their ability to act upon their intrinsic motives, diminish psychological well-being and personal flourishing. Thus, SDT shares with the work of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Fanon, and de Beauvoir a critical edge, pointing to the many ways in which modern capitalist, global and (post-)colonial social organization sets (disproportionate) limits on people’s capacity to exert intrinsic motivation and achieve their psychological needs. When we combine the insights of existential social psychology on the dialectical relationship between threat and freedom, a comprehensive picture emerges. For instance, recent findings have indicated a potential buffering effect of autonomy against existential threats, reducing the need for defensive behaviors (Vail et al. 2020a). There is, in effect, mounting research evidence supporting one of the key insights of existential philosophy: The less people are able to act on their own volition, and experience the authentic positive regard of others, the more they will engage in defensive acts of repression and bad faith, which in turn continue to deny satisfaction of these needs to both self and others.

Toward integration of clinical and social existential psychology The clinical and social derivations of existential psychology, developed independently, split along the lines of the fundamental division of psychology into research and practice. These divergences are potentially exacerbated when viewed from the existentialist vantage, attesting 29

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to its unique epistemology. In “mainstream” psychology, there is no obvious or necessary philosophical conflict between research and practice, because a post-positivist, materialist understanding of humans rooted in evolutionary and neurobiological assumptions easily reconciles quantitative experimental research with outcome-focused therapy. Yet among those working with the ideas of existential philosophy, the philosopher-clinician’s focus on the existing individual may easily conflict with the theoretician-scholar’s focus on the universal categories of existence. It is likely for such reasons that there has been surprisingly little dialogue between the two sub-fields. Nevertheless, there are multiple potential points and instances of convergence beyond a common origin in philosophy. One clear commonality that will be apparent to readers of this chapter is that, in contrast to the way existentialism has been taken up in many other social sciences, its infusion into psychology has been closely linked to that of psychoanalysis. Indeed, it could be straightforwardly argued that existential psychology entirely consists of the merger of existential and psychoanalytic thought, with some additional methodological and technical elements stemming from “mainstream” clinical and social psychology. In the clinical version, this can be seen in the way that all major schools developed initially from psychoanalytically trained practitioners who appreciated the techniques of Freud and Rank but wanted to re-ground them in a humanistic or hermeneutic-interpretive worldview. In the social version, this can be seen in the paramount importance assigned to (cognitively reframed) ideas of the non-conscious, repression, and defense mechanisms (e.g., as proximal/distal defenses or extrinsically motivated behavior). This is a perhaps surprising eventuality, given existentialists such as Sartre were opposed to Freud on many grounds. But regardless of what it may ultimately say about the “existentialism” of existential psychology, the importance of psychoanalysis is certainly a unifying feature of its clinical and social instantiations. Other moments of convergence can be observed in productive cross-pollinations across the sub-fields. For example, drawing in large part on TMT research, clinical psychologists have recently mounted an evidence-backed case that death anxiety can be seen as a transdiagnostic construct integral to the development and maintenance of many forms of psychopathology, recognition of which should in turn improve diverse treatment efficacies (Iverach et al. 2014). Moving in the opposite direction, a new social psychological theory of post-traumatic stress – anxiety-buffer disruption theory (Yetzer and Pyszczynski 2019) – integrates ideas from TMT with the existential-clinical work of Janoff-Bulman (1992) and others. Existential-humanistic clinicians have also recently expressed affinity with and interest in applying the ideas of SDT, given a shared interest in the salutary effects of promoting the expansive motivational growth of the individual (DeRobertis and Bland 2018; MacArthur and Cooper 2018). For their part, social psychologists have mounted a compelling argument that most effective psychotherapies implicitly enact SDT principles, most notably constructing supports for the autonomy of both client and therapist (Ryan and Deci 2017). Ultimately, clinical and social existential psychology should be brought into closer interchange and their points of tension productively sharpened (rather than ignored). Psychology has always been the science of the individual person and of humanity. When this science is appropriated by existentialist thought, two paradoxical but important truths about the human are revealed: The clinical insight that the pathological is normal (mental disorder lies on a continuum with everyday defensiveness against oppressive realities), and the sociological insight that the normal is pathological (cultural worldviews are in large part psychological bulwarks against anxiety; Vail et al. 2020b).

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Promise, peril, and prospects As this chapter demonstrates in a necessarily succinct and global review, existential psychology – in both its applied/clinical and research/social forms – has certainly proven a productive enterprise. But what has this enterprise contributed to the broader effort of existential human science? What are the prospects for not only integrating the clinical and social forms of existential psychology, but also the entire discipline with other efforts to merge existentialism and social science? It is our position that seen in comparison to the other forms of existential human science reviewed in this volume, existential psychology presents unique relative advantages and disadvantages. It is first of all important to acknowledge the relative disciplinary isolation of existential psychology – the authors have not yet encountered a major work of existential psychology that cites, for instance, classic work in existential sociology by Jack Douglas and Joseph Kotarba; nor one that draws on the existential anthropologies of Michael Jackson or Albert Piette. 3 The isolation of existential psychology as a whole, and of the clinical and social movements within the discipline from one another, speaks to what is arguably most unique about existential psychology, for better or for worse: its relative level of success within the broader monolith of psychological science and practice. Certainly, existential clinical psychology remains a somewhat marginal effort in comparison to the massive infrastructure of training, research, and practice oriented to the biomedical model and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual; and existential social psychology has only recently begun to creep into the textbooks. But both have succeeded in establishing robust, multi-generational niches within the “mainstream” discipline, characterized by hundreds of practitioners, major works (including popular press books), as well as scientific and professional societies, meetings, and journals (e.g., Shahar and Schiller 2016). If one had to judge whether an “existential” psychology had established itself within and been officially recognized by the broader discipline, one would have to answer in the affirmative. This success is due in no small part to the fact that existential psychologists have compromised with, or even excelled in the adoption of, the common methods of psychology. As noted, existential-humanistic and existential-integrative therapists are often trained in and adept at using multiple modalities and approaches, while retaining a foundational existential orientation. And existential social psychology was essentially born from the effort to integrate existentially oriented theories with the same empirical methods (e.g., controlled lab experiments) that are utilized by all social psychological researchers. Thus, viewed in a certain light, a clear strength of existential psychology is the significant degree to which it has imported existential philosophy into conventional psychological research and practice. As noted at the outset, however, this very strength of existential psychology could be viewed differently as its weakness. In comparison to the anti-rationalism of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the accumulating mass of therapeutic efforts and empirical findings produced by existential psychology might appear like a neutralization of existentialism’s revolutionary message. Perhaps most troubling is the possibility that existential ideas have flourished within psychology because both existentialism and psychology share the same originary cultural biases – a “Western” focus

3 Existential psychology is not necessarily unique in this isolation, but it is nevertheless important to acknowledge. Hopefully efforts such as this interdisciplinary volume will go some way toward overcoming such silo-making.

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on the self ’s subjectivity and desire to glorify (particular) human capabilities at the cost of indifference to the more-than-human world. Such thoughts should be taken as a warning, rather than a pessimistic post-mortem. Existential psychology carries enough of the spirit of existential philosophy within it to meet such challenges and limitations; and indeed, in some instances, psychology as a discipline may itself be able to rescue existentialism from its more corrosive and solipsistic tendencies. Existential clinical psychologists have long fought on behalf of the suffering, existing individual against the abstract and corporatized holograms of psychology’s happiness industry. Existential social psychologists, on the other hand, are beginning to enrich existentialism’s understanding of the human by incorporating insights from cultural psychology into the diversity of forms of social experience (Sullivan 2016). As an endeavor that continually pushes back the borders of application of existential thought, existential psychology has amassed a corpus of engaged knowledge that should be foundational to existential human science. Yet that knowledge can only flourish if psychology looks beyond itself.

Acknowledgment The authors are grateful to Kirk Schneider for his comments on a version of this chapter.

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Existential psychology Deci, E. L., and R. M. Ryan 2000. The “What” and “Why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the selfdetermination of behavior, Psychological Inquiry 11(4): 227–268. DeRobertis, E. M., and A. M. Bland 2018. Tapping the humanistic potential of self-determination theory: Awakening to paradox, The Humanistic Psychologist 46: 105–128. Florian, V., M. Mikulincer, and G. Hirschberger 2002. The anxiety-buffering function of close relationships: Evidence that relationship commitment acts as a terror management mechanism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(4), 527–542. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.82.4.527 Frankl, V. E. 1986. The Doctor and the Soul. New York: Vintage Books. Fromm, E. 1941. Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart. Fuchs, T., G. P. Messas, and G. Stanghellini 2019. More than just description: Phenomenology and psychotherapy, Psychopathology 52: 63–66. Gagné, M. (2003). The role of autonomy support and autonomy orientation in prosocial behavior engagement. Motivation and Emotion, 27, 199–223. Greenberg, J., J. Arndt, L. Simon, T. Pyszczynski, and S. Solomon 2000. Proximal and distal defenses in response to reminders of One’s mortality: Evidence of a temporal sequence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(1), 91–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167200261009 Greenberg, J., T. Pyszczynski, and S. Solomon 1986. The causes and consequences of a need for selfesteem: A terror management theory, In R. F. Baumeister (Ed), Public Self and Private Self (pp. 189–212). Springer New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9564-5_10 Greenberg, J., L. Simon, T. Pyszczynski, S. Solomon, and D. Chatel 1992. Terror management and ­tolerance: Does mortality salience always intensify negative reactions to others who threaten One’s worldview?, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63(2): 212–220. Greenberg, J., S. Solomon, T. Pyszczynski, A. Rosenblatt, M. Veeder, S. Kirkland, and D. Lyon 1990. ­Evidence for Terror Management Theory II: The Effects of Mortality Salience on Reactions to Those Who Threaten or Bolster the Cultural Worldview. 11. Greenberg, J., S. Solomon, T. Pyszczynski, A. Rosenblatt, J. Burling, D. Lyon, L. Simon, and E. ­Pinel 1992. Why do people need self-esteem? Converging evidence that self-esteem serves an anxiety-­buffering function, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63(6): 913–922. Grolnick, W. S., and R. M. Ryan 1989. Parent styles associated with children’s self-regulation and competence in school, Journal of Educational Psychology 81(2): 143–154. Hart, J. (2014). Toward an integrative theory of psychological defense. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9, 19–39. Guignon, C., and D. Pereboom 1995. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Heine, S. J., T. Proulx, and K. D. Vohs 2006. The meaning maintenance model: On the coherence of social motivations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(2), 88–110. https://doi.org/10.1207/ s15327957pspr1002_1 Hoffman, L., I. A. Serlin, and S. Rubin 2019. The history of existential-humanistic and existential-­ integrative therapy, In E. van Deurzen et al. (Eds), Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy (pp. 235–246). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Husserl, E. 1965. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row. Original work published 1911. Iverach, L., R. G. Menzies, and R. E. Menzies 2014. Death anxiety and its role in psychopathology: ­Reviewing the status of a transdiagnostic construct, Clinical Psychology Review 34: 580–593. Janoff-Bulman, R. 1992. Shattered Assumptions. New York: Free Press. Jonas, E., A. Martens, D. Niesta Kayser, I. Fritsche, D. Sullivan, and J. Greenberg 2008. Focus theory of normative conduct and terror-management theory: The interactive impact of mortality salience and norm salience on social judgment, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(6), 1239–1251. https:// doi.org/10.1037/a0013593 Klempe, S. H. 2017. Kierkegaard and the Rise of Modern Psychology. New York: Routledge. Knee, C. R., C. Lonsbary, A. Canevello, and H. Patrick 2005. Self-determination and conflict in ­romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89(6), 997–1009. https://doi. org/10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.997 Koole, S. L., J. Greenberg, and T. Pyszczynski 2006. Introducing science to the psychology of the soul: Experimental existential psychology, Current Directions in Psychological Science 15: 212–216. Laing, R. D. 1965. The Divided Self. Baltimore, MD: Pelican.

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Daniel Sullivan, Alexis Goad, and Harrison J. Schmitt Längle, S., and D. Klaassen 2019. Logotherapy and existential analysis: Method and practice, In E. van Deurzen et al. (Eds), Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy (pp. 341–355). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Lepper, M. R., D. Greene, and R. E. Nisbett 1973. Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the “overjustification” hypothesis, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28(1): 129–137. MacArthur, K., and M. Cooper 2018. The future of humanistic psychology: Autonomy, relatedness, and competence, In R. House, D. Kalisch and J. Maidman (Eds), Humanistic Psychology: Current Trends and Future Prospects (pp. 160–166). New York: Routledge. McGregor, H. A., J. D. Lieberman, J. Greenberg, S. Solomon, J. Arndt, L. Simon, and T. Pyszczynski 1998. Terror management and aggression: Evidence that mortality salience motivates aggression against worldview-threatening others, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(3): 590–605. Mikulincer, M., V. Florian, and G. Hirschberger 2003. The existential function of close relationships: ­Introducing death into the science of love. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7(1), 20–40. https:// doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0701_2 Niemiec, C. P., and R. M. Ryan (2009). Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom: Applying self-determination theory to educational practice. Theory and Research in Education, 7(2), 133–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878509104318 Ratcliffe, M. 2015. Experiences of Depression. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ratcliffe, M., and A. Stephan 2014. Depression, Emotion, and the Self: Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Reis, H. T., K. M. Sheldon, S. L. Gable, J. Roscoe, and R. M. Ryan 2000. Daily well-being: The role of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(4), 419–435. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0146167200266002 Richardson, J. 1996. Nietzsche’s System. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenblatt, A., S. Solomon, T. Pyszczynski, and D. Lyon 1989. Evidence for terror management theory: I. The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57(4): 681–690. Routledge, C., J. Arndt, and J. L. Goldenberg 2004. A time to tan: Proximal and distal effects of mortality salience on sun exposure intentions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30(10), 1347–1358. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0146167204264056 Routledge, C., and M. Vess (Eds). 2019. Handbook of Terror Management Theory. Academic Press. Ryan, R. M., and E. L. Deci 2000a. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new ­d irections. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 25(1), 54–67. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999. 1020 Ryan, R. M., and E. L. Deci 2000b. The darker and brighter sides of human existence: Basic psychological needs as a unifying concept. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 319–338. https://doi.org/10.1207/ S15327965PLI1104_03 Ryan, R. M., and E. L. Deci (2006). Self-regulation and the problem of human autonomy: Does ­psychology need choice, self-determination, and will? Journal of Personality, 74(6), 1557–1586. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.2006.00420.x Ryan, R. M., and E. L. Deci 2017. Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness. New York: Guilford Press. Sartre, J.-P. 1963. Search for a Method. Tr. H.E. Barnes. New York: Alfred Knopf. Schneider, K. J. 2010. An existential-integrative approach to experiential liberation, The Humanistic ­Psychologist 38: 1–14. Shahar, G., and M. Schiller 2016. A conqueror by stealth: Introduction to the special issue on humanism, existentialism, and psychotherapy integration, Journal of Psychotherapy Integration 26: 1–4. Sheldon, K. M., R. Ryan, and H. T. Reis 1996. What makes for a good day? Competence and autonomy in the day and in the person, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 22(12): 1270–1279. Spinelli, E. 2006. Existential psychotherapy: An introductory overview, Análise Psicológica 3: 311–321. Sullivan, D. 2016. Cultural-Existential Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, D., and R. Palitsky 2018. An existential psychological perspective on the human essence, In M. van Zomeren and J. F. Dovidio (Eds), Handbook of the Human Essence. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190247577.013.1

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Existential psychology Vail, K. E., J. P. Conti, A. N. Goad, and D. E. Horner 2020a. Existential threat fuels worldview defense, but not after priming autonomy orientation. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 42(3), 150–166. https:// doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2020.1726747 Vail, K. E., J. Juhl, J. Arndt, M. Vess, C. Routledge, and B. T. Rutjens 2012. When death is good for life: Considering the positive trajectories of terror management. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 16(4), 303–329. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868312440046 Vail, K. E., D. Sullivan, M. J. Landau, and J. Greenberg 2020b. Applying existential social psychology to mental health: Special issue editorial forward, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 39, 229–237. Vos, J. 2019. A review of research on existential-phenomenological therapies, In E. van Deurzen et al. (Eds), Wiley World Handbook of Existential Therapy (pp. 592–614). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Yalom, I. D. 1980. Existential Psychotherapy. New York, NY: Basic Books. Yetzer, A. M., and T. Pyszczynski 2019. Terror management theory and psychological disorder: Ineffective anxiety-buffer functioning as a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor for psychopathology, In C. Routledge and M. Vess (Eds), The Handbook of Terror Management Theory (pp. 417–448). San Diego, CA: Elsevier.

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5 ANTHROPOLOGY AS AN EXISTENTIAL ENQUIRY Huon Wardle

If anthropology and its method, ethnography, are voices in a conversation about being human, what then does the prefix ‘existential’ add? One answer concerns how anthropology emerged historically and its changing aims. In the Age of Revolution, Kant opened a new meaning for anthropology when he redefined it as the study of what humans, as free-acting beings, make of themselves ([1798] 2006). Bracketing whatever might be biologically inherent (‘craniums and their shape …’, Firmin 2002, 6), Kant pointed not to the brain but instead to the structure of the human hand for insight into how ‘the human being [is] not suited for one way of manipulating things but undetermined for every way, consequently suited for the use of reason’ (2006, 228). What was crucial was the dimension of humanness that humans themselves learn freely to create following their own reasoning, what we usually call ‘culture’. But his interest was less in culture in-itself than in the human capacity for making it, and how we make ourselves out of it imaginatively. By opening an enquiry into the constitution of the free-acting human being, as Muchnik and Pasternack state in this volume, Kant ‘open[ed] the space for the development of existentialist thought’. In the era of 19th-century scientific racism that followed, the promise of what Kant was arguing for was not lost on Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin: the characteristic of all human beings, not only white Europeans, is to be free-acting beings who make themselves and their world in divergent ways ([1885]2002). It is the task of anthropologists to attend to all these movements and moments of reasoned self-making. Firmin also notes that Kant himself made other racist remarks that undermine both his metaphysics and the promise of his Anthropology (2002, 325); likewise that the anthropology of Firmin’s day arbitrarily classified ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ peoples as superior to all others in their schemes based on ‘prejudices and vanities’. Indeed, part of the perplexity of establishing an anthropology of the kind Kant proposed comes, then, as Mary Douglas has pointed out, from ‘how difficult [it is] to contemplate steadily our responsibility for creating our own environment’ (1973, 5). This applies as much to anthropologists and their specialised dialogues and vocabularies as to any other human being. Anthropology, Kant tells us, is an ‘impure’ discipline that studies human beings as they observably are rather than as they should be if they were purely ‘rational beings’.1 It begins

1 Cf. Louden (2002) on Kant’s change of focus with his Anthropology ‘from rational beings to human beings’.

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by describing what the human being actually knows and really does in practice—including the mixed toolset of habits, rules for life, loops of reasoning and stories each of us observably generates, accumulates and shares with others. This actually observable human being of anthropology is not, then, the ‘pure’ metaphysical entity refined by philosophy, it is rather, as Kant put it, ‘crooked timber’ out of which ‘no straight thing was ever made’. 2,3 Acknowledging this, the anthropologist takes their stance as a human amongst human coequals, thrown into a shared situation where the aim is to understand the lives (including their own) caught up, aiming to create an observation language for this particular scene of participation. Raymond Firth noted that the anthropologist as an ethnographic observer is always in the middle of the social world and of the interactions they hope to explain—‘a moving point in a flow of activity’ (1952, 22). Viewed this way, they cannot fix what it is they will study in advance, still less the best words to analyse it with: they must take their cue with the actual ‘crooked’ human ‘timber’ next to them, an actual human individual who constantly coins habits, idioms and world models. As Nigel Rapport notes, even when two people appear to do the ‘same’ thing, the acts indexed may be similar, but what is at stake, the projects instantiated, never will be (2002, 395–397). The focus of a specifically existential anthropology, then, is the first-person point of orientation of each and any biographical human being as they go about constituting themselves and their world and endowing these with significance. Existentialism adjusts Kant’s starting point. It begins from a puzzle which it takes to be universal: the self ’s awareness of the distinctiveness and finiteness of its own being resists any rational or other meaning self might try to impose on it. Each self layers analogy upon analogy, attempting to escape one definition of what or who it is into another. We manipulate structures and techniques in order to re-imagine ourselves for ourselves, reshape ourselves for others, rationalise and reorganise our place in a world with others. We are drawn to making ‘performative utterances’ (Austin 1955) or‘lies that bind’ as Appiah describes them (2018)—that would essentialise who we are as a fixed ‘identity’ that we share. From an existentialist perspective, though, what anthropologists call culture and social relationships are the situational products of these attempts at remaking and transcending being—­ constructing new meanings out of the fragile givenness of subjective experience that is common to every human self. Influenced (in this respect at least) by Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss described this human tendency towards self-transcendence as bricolage, handycraft, do-it-yourself. Humans are bricoleurs, experts in the make-shift construction, out of whatever lies at hand, of worlds (‘scale models’ as he puts it) that we then proceed to live in as if they were ordered by some external charter (2021, 27). For the individual, there is a ‘magic’ to this interpellation of personal being into a meaningful, already-given, world that explains the individual’s presence in it (O’Shiel 2019). The task of anthropology, though, is to observe what is involved through participation and observation. That said, Anthropology is itself a further version of this movement of constellation, re-purposing and authoritative inscription: Anthropology is a bricolage that deliberately contrasts and compares lifeworlds in order to make the techniques of improvisation involved visible and appreciable.

2 Cf Kant (1988, 34). Here the translation is, less poetically, ‘warped wood’. 3 Another articulation of the problem is Tim Ingold’s statement that ‘anthropology is philosophy with people in’: cf “Anthropology and Philosophy or the Problem of Ontological Symmetry”, La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), février 2014.

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Since the anthropologist is an instance of what they study, the practice of anthropology involves an ‘ethics of ambiguity’ (de Beauvoir 1976). The existential view begins by placing in brackets Kant’s transcendental analysis of a human subject who is literally not of this world (a ‘non-temporal phantom’ as Merleau-Ponty puts it (2012, 131). Instead, it shows how the rules for being human are observably put together in the moment and for the situation that brings all involved together—and this holds for the anthropologist too. The ‘collapsing’ of the ‘serious world’ (the hypostatised objective realm of rules and their genealogies) that this implies can be terrifying (a vertiginous embrace of ambiguity), but it also offers ‘a deliverance’ de Beauvoir proposes (1976, 42). There is the chance to recognise subjectivity for what it is and does; to learn from human projects by endowing them their fullest meaning and gravity. Indeed, for contemporary anthropology, a renewal of existential enquiry brings with it a further recognition that, as humans, we are finite individual points of knowing and doing who live, mutually entangled by infinitely complex global ties, as citizens of a ‘world risk society’ as Ulrich Beck (1998) labelled it. In response to Kant’s invocation of a universal ideal of world citizenship, existential anthropology points to our emergent, inevitably distorted, attempts to confabulate principles for living in this common world.

What kinds of answer does existential anthropology offer? The emergence of a distinct ‘existential’ branch of social anthropology can be understood in part as a reaction against—in particular—the modes of social science that dominated the late 20th century. These combined a project of objectivising cultural systems while relativising and decentring human subjectivity. Some anthropologists have long reacted strongly against the idea that only the objective cultural pattern counts when understanding human beings; as Victor Turner did, invoking the concept of a ‘liberated anthropology’; For years, I have dreamed of a liberated anthropology. By ‘liberated’ I mean free from … a systematic dehumanizing of the human subjects of study, regarding them as the bearers of an impersonal ‘culture’, or wax to be imprinted with ‘cultural patterns’, or as determined by social, cultural or social psychological ‘forces’, ‘variables’, or ‘pressures’ of various kinds. 1979 Arguing towards a distinct focus on individual ‘lifeworlds’ rather than objective societies or cultures, Michael Jackson argues, similarly to Turner, against the reductionism that accompanied the 20th-century disciplining of anthropology: In the establishment of anthropology as a science of the social or the cultural, entire ­domains of human experience were occluded or assigned to other disciplines, most notably the lived body, the life of the senses, ethics and the imagination, the emotions, materiality and technology. Subjectivity was conflated with roles, rules, routines, and rituals. ­Individual variations were seen as deviations from the norm. Contingency was played down. Collective representations determined the real. 2012 Existential anthropology does not ignore social relations or symbols or structures or rituals, but its attention is on the subject who generates and parses these imaginatively, giving them intentional meaning in their everyday projects; that is to say the unique human subject, a moving 38

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point in a flow, who, bricoleur-like, is constantly and contingently constructing a practical world out of this medley of relata, foregrounding some combinations whilst ‘nihilating’ others in order to foreground the meaning of their situation (see below).4 Indeed, for anthropologists such as Nigel Rapport or Albert Piette, there is no need to qualify Anthropology with the word ‘existential’: Anthropology is already methodologically the study, not of ‘a culture’, but of ‘Anyone’ (Rapport 2012), of ‘Separate Humans’ (Piette 2016). Observationally, the anthropologist-ethnographer finds that these separate beings cannot be detached from the lifeworlds they continuously generate. Each self with its projects reaches out towards experiences of community and relationship that will fulfil the promise of its lifeworld. Michael Jackson describes the individual ‘lifeworld’ as a force field (kraftfeld), a constellation of both ideas and passions, moral norms and ethical dilemmas, the tried and true as well as the unprecedented, a field charged with vitality and animated by struggle. 2012, 7 As Merleau-Ponty notes ‘[w]henever I try to understand myself, the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes too, and with it comes the others who are caught in it’ (1960, 64). In this sense, every intentional act is an answer to this interior, mutually interfering community that each of us carries with us, the ‘We’ of our lifeworld.5 Kant termed ‘common sense’ the intuitive right that anyone feels to universalise this community of the mind to speak on everyone’s behalf when it comes to defining the beautiful-good (Wardle 1995; Brodsky 2022). But, again, it is not solely the esoteric make-up of an individual’s ‘final vocabulary’ as Rorty calls it (1989, 73), that is the direct focus of an existential anthropology. It is also their ‘procedures of everyday creativity’ (De Certeau 1988, xiv), their characteristic manner, to use Heidegger’s words, of ‘handling’ and ‘taking care of ’ reality that is important. Gell has argued that what distinguishes anthropology (vis-à-vis laboratory psychology or sociology) is its ‘fidelity to the … biographical “life cycle” rhythm’ of human experience (1998, 10). With this in view, it is vital, as MerleauPonty shows, to pay attention to the ‘coherent deformation[s]’ that anyone’s autobiographically learnt capabilities and techniques set in train within the shared situations of social life (1993, 91–92, see below). The tendency, which Turner and Jackson criticise, that transformed anthropology into a ‘science of culture’ led to an unsustainable, coalition of relativism and objectivism. The foci of ‘existential’ anthropology re-emerge as a reaction to this. As Feyerabend puts it, ‘the urge to explain one’s ideas, not simply, not in a story, but by means of a “systematic account” is powerful indeed’. Regardless, ‘objectivism and relativism not only are untenable as philosophies, they are bad guides for fruitful cultural collaboration’ (1994, 180, 152). In response, existential anthropology re-opens a dialogue on human intentionality in time that can be rigorous in its tactics of observation without appealing to the determining power of external ‘systems’, ‘discourses’ or ‘ideologies’: the flower is not explained by the fertiliser, as Bachelard puts it (1994, xxx). We may, though, continue to need the qualifier ‘existential’ to remind ourselves of the anthropological focus and task in hand.

4 See Sartre on néantisation/nihilation (1956) (further discussion below). 5 ‘I am born into a world of directly experienced social reality … the experience of the We … in the world of immediate social reality is the basis of the Ego’s experience… of the world in general’ (Schutz 1967:165).

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Each of us ‘choose[s] our world and the world chooses us’ Merleau-Ponty proposes (2012, 481), but equally, ‘no project can be defined except by its interference with other projects’ as de Beauvoir insists (1976, 70). The more cosmopolitanised our world becomes, the greater the challenge our personal vocabularies and loops of reasoning present to others. ‘We’ insist (the meaning of ‘we’ becomes increasingly voluntary) on structuring and distributing reality in ways that inevitably,6 colonise, stereotype, overwrite and generally distort the lifeworlds of those around us. We reach for technologies that help us leverage our meanings vis-à-vis theirs. And yet, ‘[a]t the centre of each person is an incommunicado element’ as Winnicot puts it, and when it comes to the others’ attempts to categorise us, we refuse to allow this irreducible dimension of ourselves, the primary fact of our unique being, to be overwritten.7 Given this ‘unsocial sociability’ (see Stade, this volume), and the resistances, taboos and beliefs we confabulate in order to establish boundaries within and around our lifeworlds vis-à-vis those of the others, then actual unguarded recognition of the individuality of another may be rarer than we might suppose, provoking a genuine ‘astonishment’ that teaches us to ‘tak[e] a step backwards from their presence’ as Albert Piette notes in his Separate Humans (2016, 25).

Locating existential enquiry in the biographical lifeworld How, then, can we, how do we, come to understand the common sense fabric that someone’s lifeworld presents; the ‘force field’ (to use Michael Jackson’s term) or common sense of their world, as constituted by them? An example: I have been friends with Jeanette for more than 30 years through my ethnographic work in Kingston, Jamaica. Here she is telling a story about how her adoptive mother, Aunt Erica, appeared to her as a duppy, a ghost. In life, relations between Aunt Erica and Jeanette were volatile; I witnessed this many times because during the 1990s when I lived for an extended period in Aunt Erica’s ‘yard’ (house compound) with her family (and I have been visiting ever since); so I am in a position to recognise some of the density of autobiographical meaning the situation described here presents for Jeanette. After Aunt Erica died, Jeanette had found their capricious relationship being reconstituted by various forceful visits by her mother: Jeanette: Like when Aunt Erica dead. And [we were] painting up the house [Erica had previously owned]. Definitely, me and Sonny are painting and as me climb up on the chair and start up to paint me hear a voice say ‘I am not like that colour paint there, you know …’. And me say ‘wha you say a while ago, Sonny?’ And by the time me go up on the chair again me hear it again; and me have some water and me just throw the water on the chair and tell her ‘get up’ and tell her ‘fi you time done’—now she dead, you understand? Because she too bright [cocky] telling you fi …. So, if you don’t put the place in the colour she like she will take set (take offence). Yes, so you don’t give her what she wants and make sure [make it clear that] she dead; she who?! [who does she think she is?]—throw the water and tell her your time done now! She fi get up and come out. To put this differently, what do my friend Jeanette and any other human being, let us say the late physicist Paul Dirac, have in common? Each has built up structures in their life with the

6 Cf Rapport (2017) on how an individual-centred understanding of distortion can transcend a ‘structured and the systemic’ view of the social. 7 In Piette (2015, 60).

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result that there exists a certain ‘thereness’ for them of certain relationships and particular phenomena, to which I as an outsider will always have scant access. I can read a good biography of Dirac and understand his lifeworld and its objects that way (Farmelo 2009), and, of course, other physicists have replicated his ‘beautiful mathematics’ of antiparticles. Jeanette’s viewpoint is less favoured in this sense. Certainly, the answer, here, is not to try to ‘save’ her experience by rerouting what she says to an objective ‘system’, for example to a collective ‘culture’ or ‘ontology’. The answer from the point of view of an existential anthropology begins with a suspension of expectations—what Husserl called ‘epoché’—and from there, through empathetic introjection, the beginning of an enquiry into the structuring, equilibrating process through which anyone builds their lifeworld.

Epoché: ‘reduction’, ‘suspension’, ‘bracketing’ With his phenomenology, Husserl envisaged ‘a science that is, so to speak, absolutely subjective, whose thematic object exists whether or not the world exists’ ([1931]1960, 30). Achieving this view involves a reflective ‘reduction’ or scraping away of the structures of objectivity that we have layered onto the world and which stand between us and knowing about the subject who perceives and acts in a lifeworld—the world as it is experienced by them. Epoché, the phenomenological reduction, the method of scientific description that Husserl developed drawing on Brentano, has two sides. First, it requires, again, bracketing our assertions concerning ‘real existence’. Correspondingly, it entails a ‘disinterested’ empathetic observation of human intentionality, that is, of the ‘orientational modes of givenness’ that enable this kind of thing to be constituted for this subject in this given moment (1960, 134). Husserl criticises psychology (as had Kant) for routinely prefiguring how the world is oriented and constituted by and for human subjects regardless of the contingency of their situation. He saw a crisis emerging in Western society given the degree to which the discourse and technologies of scientific objectivism had become unanchored from how actual human subjects come to know their world in practice. What is critical is attending to things as they are perceived (what he calls noemata). The things of the subject’s world are actively, ‘intentionally’, constituted: when ‘naturally immersed in the world’, the subject’s perception is always ‘interested’ because the objects proper to their world emerge simultaneously with the social psychic-bodily activities they engage in. So, the phenomenologist’s ‘disinterested’ observation of experience must, by bracketing, by de-objectifying my world, make it possible to enter reflectively into the ‘flowing subjective process’ of thoughtaction—the activity that generates noemata. Hence an insight is achieved on these ‘moments of perceiving’ (1960, 34–35), when reality comes into being. ‘I must lose the world by epoché, in order to regain it by a universal self-examination’ (1960, 157). For anyone studying social situations, or the social aspect of world, Husserl’s priority on selfexamination raises a problem of how to explore the mind and experience of any other person as another world-constituting subject and not merely as one of the many ‘things’ in my field of perception. Knowing myself as a subject depends on acknowledging the others’ subjectivity too. Re-imagined auto-biographically, these subject-to-subject relationships with others are the material out of which my lifeworld is made. In this sense, self-reflection is the scene of a constant dialogue between the variously agentive bits and pieces from which consciousness is continuously making itself. When it comes to recognising and knowing others as individuals who are likewise actively structuring reality on their own behalf, for Husserl, this involves a specific mode of cognitive engagement, empathy (einfühlung, in-feeling).

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Einfühlung was a newly coined concept in the 1900s when Husserl began to investigate it (and with it). With empathy, the observer could ‘contain multitudes’ as Whitman put it. As investigated by Edith Stein, Husserl’s student, empathy is a technique of attention to the other and their project. It is learnt and can be developed, but without the primal urge and capacity for it, we have no way of building our sense of a meaningful world held in common from distinct perspectives ([1917]1989). With empathy, I do not dissolve or blend my perceptions and feelings with those of another (as the word ‘sympathy’8 can suggest).9 I try to explore and judge matters according to their way of constructing them, not by mine. I open a virtual space for this ‘foreign “I”’ of theirs, its unique orientation and architectonic—as an independent agent within my field of common sense. In doing so, as Stein puts it, I temporarily suspend my ‘zero point of orientation’ treating it as one ‘spatial point among many’ (1989, 63). Bakhtin, writing of Dostoevsky, notes how, in the 19th-century novel, the lifeworlds of fictional characters became independent of the narrator to an unprecedented, even astonishing, degree. The ability to understand the structure and meaning of another’s life as authentically independent of one’s own expectations is fundamental to empathy as described by Husserl and Stein too.

Ethnography as epoché Individual lifeworlds indicate unique ‘orientational modes of givenness’ in Husserl’s terms; that is, each lifeworld is both the point of access to and means to constitute, noemata. The things I know, and the world that envelops them, are stabilised by a mostly unchallenged intuition that they exist there for everyone to perceive just as I do. The practice of empathy does challenge, or help me suspend, this grounding illusion, since, with empathy, I gain an experience of others as similarly building up their world independently alongside me (1960, 92). As Husserl notes, though, when I encounter a community who I perceive as ‘alien’, the jolt is even stronger and of a different order since the unreflective ‘we’ I intuitively deploy to soften the recognition of subjective differences is now itself put in question. Husserl here raises a question to which it has been essential for anthropologists to find an answer; how to uncover, in what for me is an ‘alien’ culture, a ‘practical world … endowed with humanly significant predicates’? How to begin to describe the ‘constitution of such predicates’ (1960, 135)? To me and to those who share my culture, an alien culture is accessible only by a kind of ‘experience of someone else’, a kind of ‘empathy’, by which we project ourselves into the alien community and its culture. This empathy calls for intentional investigations. 1960, 134–135 Of course, it was the question of how to understand an ‘alien’ community in terms of its ‘significant predicates’ that had already given rise to the discipline of social anthropology in the 19th century, with its crude division of ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ cognition, and thence

8 We should allow that, e.g., Adam Smith uses ‘sympathy’ to describe many of the features Husserl and Stein assign to ‘empathy’. As suggested, ‘empathy’ seems to react both against a certain definition of sympathy as a kind of contagious sharing of emotion and responds in particular to the conditions of an increasingly anonymised urban life. 9 See, for instance, Throop and Zahavi’s recent discussions of ‘Dark and Bright Empathy’ (2020) for why empathy does not describe a type of emotional ‘contagion’ as it is sometimes presented.

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to the emergence of the distinctive method of fieldwork-based ethnography, in the early 20th. In other words, there was from the beginning a close connection between ethnography and phenomenology in the root problem and project they shared. In turn, through its construction of the fieldwork encounter, anthropology would develop its own mode of epoché, or experiential reduction, one arguably more challenging than Husserl’s, the comparative field method of ethnography. As Malinowski famously describes it, the task of ethnography involves radical empiricism. The fieldworker throws themselves into an alien situation in order to grapple with the fundamental common humanness we share. ‘Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village’. With this famous opening to Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski left behind an angst-ridden enterprise inherited by generations of students. Malinowski appreciated well the work of constructive imagination and empathy needed to constitute the life of a community and to enable readers who had not made the ethnographic leap to do so too. He insisted that it was crucial to see the fieldsite through the eyes of people local to it, as conveyed by their language and behaviour. The empirical focus would not only be on the institutions of everyday life (shared and repeated patterns of practical action), but it was also urgent not to lose sight of the ‘individual soul in relation to collective creations’, as he put it. ‘Social imagination = institution + individual ideas … language is an instrument, a vehicle for individual ideas’ (1967, 161). Indeed, activity in common answers personal creative needs; myths are charters for collective action that leave space for flights of subjective fancy; highly theatricalised warfare offers conduits for competitive violence; magic is a mechanism for the individual to impose their hopes onto reality. The anthropologist must have an eye, then, for seemingly alien predicates. Amongst other themes, Malinowski noticed that the logic of Trobriand kinship depended on an idea that ancestral ‘baloma spirits’ cause pregnancy. But the Trobrianders he talked to weren’t overly interested in how their ontology hung together, rather in practical outcomes. Malinowski’s method, posited against rationalist intellectualism, was deliberately aimed at intensifying the researcher’s exposure to the individual’s way of seeing at this practical level. Albeit the culmination of this was the picture of a functioning culture, Malinowski was profoundly opposed to any implication that, ‘in the last analysis, the individual is not a personality on his own possessing the capacity for free choice based in reason’.10 Hence, whatever empathy I may feel for ‘a culture’, at the centre of ethnographic work are individual people making a life for themselves in ways that, however strange I find it, are obvious and reasonable to them. The same exposure that forces the ethnographer to learn a new coin of institutional ­behaviour—a new ‘language game’ as Wittgenstein would say—through trial and error, should simultaneously jolt them into ironising their own confounded sensory reactions and expectations (self-irony is a staple of ethnographic description). Yet, despite the explicit architecture of Malinowski’s project, the near impossibility at a personal level of fulfilling the self-imposed task of ethnographic epoché (or his version of it) is revealed everywhere in his private diary; Ride in a dinghy with Ginger and Gomera’u. The latter gave me valuable information …. Violent aversion to listening to him; I simply rejected inwardly all the marvelous things he had to tell me. 1967, 166

10 Leach in Tambiah (1990, 67).

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Similarly, the appearance of two European colonial acquaintances, Wilkes and Izod, ‘foreign bodies’ as he puts it, temporarily ‘spoil[s]’ his perception of his fieldsite through a malformed empathy: What is terrible is that I am unable to free myself completely from the atmosphere created by foreign bodies: their presence takes away from the scientific value and personal pleasure of my walk. [through Wilkes and Izod] I saw and felt the utter drabness of the Kiriwina villages; I saw them through their eyes (it’s fine to have this ability), but I forgot to look at them through my own. 1967, 163 A moving point in a flow, what the fieldworker ‘sees’ is subject to constant re-equilibration in the company, and under the influence, of whoever else is present. We might, then, say that the primary aim of ethnography is constantly to put in question the objectivity of the researcher’s predicates as they try to take on the others’. Despite these phenomenological insights, Malinowski’s work was generally received in its time as essentially empirical, if not naively so. The posthumous publication of his diary in the 1960s caused a furore in part it revealed a more complex Malinowski, intent, like Husserl, on attending to his own perception. Beyond the apparent barrier to empathy presented by an alien community and its culture, Malinowski finds others akin to himself, intent on answering their own needs with whatever materials lie to hand. A central Malinowskian lesson is that we need both observation and participation, because, as phenomenologist Jakob Meløe put it well, ‘we are poor observers of whatever activities we are not familiar with as agents’ (1988). The aim of ethnography is to remove the coating of facticity or objectivity that attaches to a certain manner of constituting reality. From the beginning, the practice of ethnography was closely bound up with the epoché of the ethnographer who encounters another culture as an intensified ‘experience of someone else’.

The confluence of existential psychology and existential anthropology Existentialism points to the ‘thrownness’ of the concrete self-conscious individual (dasein) who strives endlessly to comprehend its ‘wherefrom’ and ‘whereto’. This individual tries to establish a final meaning—a ‘thereness-for-everyone’—out of its moving presence, but its solutions are biographically temporary, entailing an endlessly repeated ‘leap into absurdity’11. Sartre in particular stresses the need for the self to ‘nihilate’ entire dimensions of experience in order for the meaning-giving properties of reality to foreground themselves (existentialism owes much to gestalt psychology in this). In a café whose anxious significance for Sartre is the absence of Pierre, everything that does not concern this (anti-) presence is ruthlessly ‘nihilated’—consigned to a background ‘nothingness’. The individual who wants to know or find out is ‘condemned’ to the freedom that this wilful practice instigates. To know is to nihilate (Sartre 1956). Nihilation figures as a cognitive-practical structuring device by which the perceiving self attempts to constitute itself. Anthropology has picked up analytical insights here towards understanding the continuous subjective orienting, building up, modifying and decomposing of social life. We can use Alfred Gell’s exploration of what is involved in Umeda tabooing to show the flow of existential thought

11 Kierkegaard in Choron (1963). Death and Western Thought. NY: Collier Macmillan. 224

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back into anthropological theory and method ([1977]1996). Gell rejects the symbolic anthropology of his time as inadequate for explaining how taboo works in practice. Instead, he looks to Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology for pointers regarding how the self actively articulates itself ‘into a social world’: specifically, how the self constitutes itself as a moral-social being in the sight of others through moments of publicly witnessed ‘taboo’ and or ‘lapse’. The mood of existentialist description is strong, but here transported into Gell’s Papua New Guinean fieldsite: I happened once, during my fieldwork, to be peeling a stick of sugar-cane together with some companions from Umeda village. Clumsily, I allowed my knife to slip and it embedded itself in my finger. Unhurriedly, but still unthinkingly, I … raised my bleeding finger to my lips. The external world ceased momentarily to exist for me … [but] my lapse of consciousness was a lapse indeed, as the shocked countenances and expressions of disgust evinced by my Umeda companions told me soon enough, just as soon as I recovered my wits and looked about me …. It was evident that I had, in Umeda eyes, broken a food taboo … the prime one … the taboo on … eating one’s own self. Gell ([1977]1996, 116) The anecdote is provocative of Gell’s central argument that ‘to observe a taboo is to establish an identifiable self ’ (1996, 117). He argues that, in practice, the encounter in ethnography is not only with a cultural system of categories and taboos, but rather with other selves who, like the ethnographer, are perpetually orienting and constituting themselves, whose mutual gazes are aimed at eliciting moments of self-composition in the other. ‘[T]he effect of taboo is to create a relationship in the public sphere between ego and an external reality communicated by acts’ (1996, 126). For the individual-in-breach, the broken taboo makes its appearance distributed in all the disgusted looks of the others, however, taboo is most actively constituted and articulated by the self in its attempts at autobiographical repair (as someone who makes so many obvious mistakes, the ethnographer is in a unique position to recognise this).12 We should note, then, how Gell’s writing up of his ethnographic epoché points away from the idea of an ‘alien culture’ that exists independently as a ‘system of classification’, and towards the constitutive capacity that all human beings share for generating operative rules for the situation in hand, hence of making the situation biographically interpretable and meaningful for everyone. Even in this (for the reader) strange instance of a taboo on ‘eating one’s own self ’, then, the anthropologist’s perspective is that this is merely one of countless instances of how individual human beings collaborate in constructing a meaningful environment for themselves. Writing several decades after this Umeda episode, Gell underlines the distinctive ‘biographical’ spacetime of anthropology: the spaces of anthropology are those which are traversed by agents in the course of their biographies, be they narrow, or, as is becoming increasingly the case, wide or even worldwide …. Anthropological relationships are real and biographically consequential ones, which articulate to the agent’s biographical ‘life project’. 1998, 11

12 Cf Bateson’s emphasis on ‘differences that make a difference’ in Steps to an Ecology of Mind

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Freedom, structure, worldmaking The analytical ground of an existential ethnography is a situation—any human situation—and how the biographical life projects or lifeworlds of those involved are articulated in it out of their own free action and narration. We may usefully break the issues down into three inter-connected questions; In this situation, ‘what am I making myself out of and into (singularly)?’; ‘what are They making themselves out of and into (separately)?’; ‘what are We making ourselves out of and into (together)?’ As Simone de Beauvoir argues, an existential enquiry makes sense only if we insist on both the freedom and the contingency entailed in this process of making ourselves: ‘[o]nly the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening into the absurdity of facticity’ (1977, 77). For the existential anthropologist, this freedom in question consists in the ability to continue to constitute a lifeworld—singularly, vis-à-vis, and together. This freedom comes with an appreciation of how the structure and meaning of one lifeworld inevitably ‘interferes’ with, becoming entangled with, hence deforming and transforming, that of others—unthinkingly, disinterestedly, empathetically, aggressively, lovingly and in other ways.13 In this regard, anthropology is as well served by understanding one individual—Anyone—as by showing the interconnecting lives of many persons. How, though, to figure the alliance of freedom and structure that existential phenomenology elaborates? Levi-Strauss, who otherwise and extensively negates Sartrean existentialism in his writing,14 offers, in the figure of the ‘bricoleur’, a bridge to Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. He gives the example of the Postman Cheval (much admired also by the surrealists), who, on the discovery of a number of curiously shaped stones, began to compose an entire architectonic for his ‘ideal palace’ at Hauterives. The bricoleur, by combining elements according to a personal formula, creates a unique ‘scale model’ of the world, one that makes explicit what every human being achieves unwittingly (2021, 20). The Bricoleur’s idiosyncratic composition of their ‘palais ideal’ can stand for Anyone’s attempts at freely constructing theirs. As Merleau-Ponty analyses it, when we talk of some particular person’s ‘style’ what we are describing is a personal ‘set of equivalences’ that this individual builds up as a means of expression, likewise the special mode of ‘coherent deformation’ that this necessitates, by means of which this person intentionally concentrates and regulates ‘scattered meaning’ towards an end state they have in mind (1993, 91–92). ‘Our handwriting’ (the distinctive way we inscribe the present and the future), Merleau-Ponty states, ‘is recognised whether we trace letters on paper … or in chalk …’ (1993, 102). Freedom is again implicated here, the freedom to make the world as a certain kind of surface that matches this person’s handwriting; to continue to build, alter and extend the self into a universe that responds to their presence. The freedom of subjectivity, then, corresponds to a capacity for, and the continuing stylistic ability to practice, what Goodman calls ‘worldmaking’ (1978). A camera once recorded the work of Matisse in slow motion. The impression was prodigious …. The same brush, that, seen with the naked eye, leaped from one act to another, was seen to meditate in a solemn expanded time—in the imminence of the world’s

13 Cf. Lugones’ (1987) conception of ‘“World”-Travelling and Loving Perception’. 14 Levi-Strauss’ approval of the description of his approach as ‘Kantism without a transcendental subject’ in the Raw and the Cooked (1964, 11), is complicated by the fact that existentialism can also be described this way. Both approaches are crucially ‘Kantian’, both are critical of Kant’s Copernican transcendentalism, but with different outcomes. Levi-Strauss, C. The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Harper and Row.

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creation—to try ten possible movements, dance in front of the canvas, brush it lightly several times, and crash down finally like a lightning stroke upon the one line necessary. Of course, there is something artificial in this analysis …. And yet, Matisse hand did hesitate. Consequently, there was a choice, and the chosen line was chosen in such a way as to observe, scattered out over the painting, a score of conditions which were unformulated and even informulable for anyone but Matisse, since they were only defined and imposed by the intention of executing that particular painting which did not yet exist. Merleau-Ponty 1993, 82–83 Matisse’s ‘freedom’, as Merleau-Ponty envisages it, is the freedom of consciousness to hover across ‘ten possible movements’ then to zero on the structurally ‘correct’ reading of the overall pattern towards creating an object which does not yet exist. Schutz gives an even more abstract view of this freedom-in-construction. For existential phenomenology, he argues, freedom appears in the individual’s ability to scan across a ‘many-rayed’, or ‘plural’ future and to decide on a ‘monothetic’ version of it. ‘[N]ot satisfied with being a plural consciousness’, subjectivity narrows its ‘complex collection of objects’ into a singularity with a gesture that is, again, informulable by anyone else. Neither the determinist nor the indeterminist, Schutz points out, deals adequately with this ability of consciousness to drift across and select from the ‘many-rayed’ pathways that its project presents (Schutz 1967, 68–69). The freedom to transform the many-rayed into the monothetic impregnates each gesture of worldmaking with the individual’s recognisable ‘handwriting’. This is of the essence of intentional action or of having a project.

Methodologically, an existential anthropology has as its object Anyone, their ‘handwriting’ Methodologically, the scale and concern of anthropological enquiry is the human individual, their biographical lifeworld and project, including the relationships that articulate this project in time and space. We need an existential anthropology because each of us must learn to recognise both the singularity of our project and also how we are implicated in creating the world as our environment alongside every other human being. Anthropology is primarily a field of empirical experimentation in accordance with its focus and method, not an exemplification of existential (or any other) philosophy. As Albert Piette asks, ‘[w]hen are individuals really Levinassian, Sartrean or Nietzschian in their everyday activities? A few minutes a day …?’ (2015, 57). As such, the task of anthropology is to travel anywhere (imaginatively and in practice), not just to metropolitan Europe or North America, getting to know how anyone constructs their lifeworld and situation. The tendency to hypostatise, multiply, and objectify essences and categories (including cultural ‘systems’) does not provide an intellectual refuge: it rather makes it harder for us to see each other as human beings, harder to recognise ‘Anyone’ as the foundational subject of anthropology (Rapport 2012), and as such harder for us to constitute a world that we inhabit in common. Empirically, human beings dwell not only in a mutually imbricated, but also mutually interfering ‘world risk society’ (Beck 1998). It is not solely that, as Kant put it two centuries ago, ‘a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’ (1988, 118): the pursuit of a life project in one place puts lives elsewhere in jeopardy. Yet no one willingly gives up the attempt to make themselves their own way since this is fundamental to what it means to be human. So, there is a need to give a cosmopolitan frame to the interconnectedness of our projects and this requires understanding the lesson of Husserl’s epoché and the cultivation of what Kant called an ‘enlarged 47

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mentality’ (1952, 153). We must try to incorporate one another as subjects in this changing world community, not assign the others to the category of ‘nudgeable’ objects, or object clusters, or relational systems, or genealogical residues. In this respect, at the level of the individual human being, contemporary anthropology encounters ‘a fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood’.15 Adding the prefix ‘existential’ to anthropology reminds us, then, of a key concern and task: to understand the uniqueness of lifeworlds and projects, to show what these are being made from (their common sense structuring as ‘activity spaces’16) and to explore the situations where these gather biographical meaning. Despite our best efforts, we cannot hide from the inevitability that our attempts to understand one another also involve interfering with, and imposing meaning onto, each other. As Husserl showed, for each individual, there can only be one world of activity: every one of us must then, in a situation shot through with ambiguity, choose whether and how to include the others as co-constitutors of that world. Only by recognising myself as a singularity within the ‘community of all co-existing monads’ (1960, 139), do I gain a glimpse of the deformations or distortions that my own life brings into the lives of others (and vice versa) in a cosmopolitanising world society still under construction. In this light, ethnography bears testimony, as Mary Douglas says, to ‘how difficult [it is] to contemplate steadily our responsibility for creating our own environment’ (Douglas 1973, 15). The question for anthropology remains then; what are We, They, I making ourselves out of and what are we making ourselves into?

References Appiah, K. 2018. The Lies that Bind. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing. Austin, J. 1955. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bachelard, G. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Beck, U. 1998. World Risk Society. Oxford: Polity. Brodsky, C. 2022. The Linguistic Condition. London: Bloomsbury. Choron, J. 1963. Death and Western Thought. Sprinfield, OH: Collier Macmillan. de Beauvoir. 1976. The Ethics of Ambiguity. New York, NY: Open Road. De Certeau, M. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Douglas, M. 1973. Rules and Meaning. London: Routledge. Farmelo, G. 2009. The Strangest Man. London: Faber and Faber. Feyerabend, P. 1994. Killing Time. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Firmin, A. 2002. The Equality of the Human Races. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Firth, R. 1952. Elements Social Organization. London: Watt & Co. Gell, A. 1996. ‘Reflections on a cut finger’, in M. Jackson (Ed), Things as They Are. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Clarendon. Goodman, N. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. New York, NY: Hackett. Husserl, E. 1960. Cartesian Meditations. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Jackson, M. 2012. Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Kant, I. 1952. The Critique of Judgement. Oxford: Clarendon. Kant, I. 1988. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Kant, I. 2006. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levi-Strauss, C. 2021. Wild Thought. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Levi-Strauss, C. 1964. The Raw and the Cooked. New York, NY: Harper and Row

15 Milan Kundera in Rorty (1989). 16 Cf. Meløe (1988).

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Anthropology as an existential enquiry Louden, R. 2002. Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lugones M. 1987. ‘Playfulness, “world”-travelling and loving perception’, Hypatia 2(2): 3–19. Malinowski. B. 1967. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Meløe, J. 1988. ‘Some observations on agent perception’, in Herzberg L. and J. Pietarinen (Eds), Perspectives on Human Conduct. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1960. Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1993. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. 2012. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. O’Shiel, D 2019. Sartre and Magic. London: Bloomsbury. Piette, A. 2015. Existence in the Details. Berlin: Duncker and Humboldt. Piette, A. 2016. Separate Humans. Milan: Mimesis International. Rapport, N. 2002. Social Anthropology the Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Rapport, N. 2012. Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn. Rapport, N. (Ed) 2017. Distortion: Social Processes Beyond the Structured and Systematic. London: Routledge. Rorty, R 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J-P 1956. Being and Nothingness. Harvard: Philosophical Library. Schutz, A. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Stein, E. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy. Washington, DC: ICS publications. Tambiah,S. 1990. Magic, Science and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Throop, J., and D. Zahavi. 2020. ‘Dark and bright empathy: Phenomenological and anthropological ­reflections’, Current Anthropology 61(3): 283–305. TurnerV. 1979. Process, Performance and Pilgrimage. New Delhi: Concept Publishing. Wardle, H. 1995. ‘Kingston, Kant and common sense’, Cambridge Anthropology 18(3): 40–55.

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6 EXISTENTIAL PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY Hel Spandler and Philip Thomas

Introduction There has always been a significant, if marginal, interest in existentialism in the psy disciplines – that is, psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and allied mental health professions. Existential thinking is not just about being grounded in philosophy, because all approaches to mental health care are grounded in philosophy of some kind, whether that is explicitly acknowledged or not. Existential thinking has offered the potential to see madness and distress as something inherently meaningful and intelligible as an expression of one’s relation to oneself, others and the world. As such, existential philosophy has often been drawn upon to develop a more critical, or at least less medicalised, approach to mental health care. Existential thinking and practice has been primarily concerned with a person’s way of beingin-the-world and being-with-others. The expression ‘being-in-the-world’ can be attributed to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1962) and refers to the way in which human experience, or being, stands in an irreducibly meaningful relationship to the world, especially (but not ­exclusively) the social world (Bracken 1999a). Heidegger’s work had some influence on the wider medical field (Aho 2018) but this chapter focuses on the recent history and current status of ­existential thinking and practice within British mental health care. There is little evidence of explicit existential thinking or practice within mental health social work or mental health nursing in the UK. For example, although a small minority of generic social work textbooks refer briefly to existentialism (e.g. Payne 2005), and there has been at least one attempt to apply Sartre’s ideas to generic social work (Thompson 1992), there is little evidence of its influence within social work practice, particularly mental health social work practice. Whilst R.D. Laing certainly influenced ‘radical social work’ during the 1970s, as part of a wider critique of society and psychiatry (Spandler 2006), the influence of both Laing and existentialism on mental health social work has waned considerably. This chapter specifically focuses on psychiatry and psychotherapy.1 Whilst there is some overlap between these two

1 This chapter is largely based on interviews with key individual informants who we identified as being part of an existential tradition in the UK mental health scene. The majority of these interviews were carried out by the authors in 2011. Therefore, it might not take into account more recent developments in the field.

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-7

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disciplines, as some psychiatrists also train and practice as psychotherapists, we approach them separately here.

Psychiatry Historically, many individual psychiatrists have expressed an interest in philosophy to try to understand the human predicament, especially the paradoxes and conflicts experienced by people designed as ‘mentally ill’. Moreover, philosophical ideas influenced the foundation of modern psychiatry through the work of the German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher, Karl Jaspers. Although Jaspers and Heidegger are regarded as the founders of existential philosophy in Germany, the two had an uneasy relationship. Jaspers trained in psychiatry at Heidelberg and in 1913 published the first edition of General Psychopathology. This text had an influence on psychiatry for its attempts to describe, understand and explain the experiences of madness. Whilst he left psychiatry to focus on philosophy after this, he produced a fourth edition of General Psychopathology that introduced many ideas from the existential philosophy that he had developed in the 1930s. In attempting to approach human experience in an objective and scientific manner, Jaspers turned to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. There are contesting interpretations of Husserl’s (and indeed Jasper’s) philosophy, with some reading him as endorsing a ‘non-Cartesian’ view of the human subject. However, critics have argued that Jaspers used phenomenology primarily as a tool to examine the patient’s ‘inner’ world and to try and establish psychiatry as a scientific project (Bracken and Thomas 2005). This, they suggest, betrayed a more thoroughly hermeneutic existential project. For example, although Jasper recognised the importance of meaning and context, phenomenology in his view is not concerned with meaning; it is concerned with the ‘form’ of psychiatric experiences, not their meaningful connections. It involves a rational gaze into the patient’s mind that sees experience as a separate realm that can be described separately from the world in which it is embedded. In other words, the patient’s subjective world was seen as something that can be analysed, categorised and described, out of context. Not only is the person’s subjective realm detached from the person’s life story or narrative, but also from the body experiencing it. Consequently, the psychiatrist encounters the patient’s mental world in isolation from the totality of his or her lived reality. Such a decontextualised view of phenomenology closes down the possibility of understanding the meaning and significance of experiences which are framed as mental illness (Thomas and Longden 2015). This separation of person from context has plagued psychiatry ever since. The search for understanding and meaning is at the heart of more critical existentially inspired approaches to psychiatry. Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist, introduced existential ideas into psychiatry and developed a form of existential analysis known as Daseinsanalysis. Another Swiss psychiatrist, Medard Boss, continued to develop this approach but was critical of the approach Binswanger developed. Notwithstanding these differences, ‘Daseinsanalysis’ continues to have some influence in Europe. The work of the existential psychiatrist and holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, especially his classic text Man’s Search for Meaning published in 1946 (Frankl 1985), has been highly influential, especially in the US and in his native Austria, where the existential therapeutic tradition of ‘logotherapy’ is well established (Lukas 2019). Logotherapy draws upon Kierkegaard’s existential idea of humans being driven by a ‘will to meaning’, as opposed to Freud’s idea that they were driven by a ‘will to pleasure’, or Alfred Adler’s more Nietzschean ‘will to power’. The mid-twentieth century saw the development of an existential-humanistic tradition, spearheaded by Rollo May who co-edited Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology 51

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(1958), which included key texts by Binswanger translated from German. One of May’s students, Irvin Yalom, has gone on to influence existential and group analytic therapy in Europe, including the UK. More generally, existential thought is strongly associated with continental philosophy, especially Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and the nineteenth-century work of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Thomas Szasz, an Austrian-born American psychotherapist and outspoken critic of psychiatry, developed an existential approach to therapy which focused on individual choice and autonomy and rejected the idea of mental illness in favour of the idea of ‘problems in living’, a term first used by the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (Evans 1996; and subsequently taken up by Thomas Szasz). By the 1960s, whilst the scientific project of psychiatry was well under way, there was still space for experimentation and innovation within psychiatry, outside of this paradigm. Alongside the development of a vibrant counter-culture associated with the growth of new social movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a more radical form of existential thinking within psychiatry because possible, at least for a while. This was often associated with the work of the Scottish radical psychiatrist, R.D. Laing. Laing is often seen as introducing and expounded some of the main tenets of the European tradition of existential phenomenology into British psychiatry in the UK, especially his early work on social phenomenology. Through Laing, and the South African ‘anti-psychiatrist’ David Cooper, existential ideas flourished briefly in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Laing’s (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (first published in 1960) was especially popular amongst students and the counter-cultural left. In The Divided Self, Laing took complex ideas, both from existentialism and psychoanalysis, and made them accessible to a wider audience. Many people still cite this book as a key influence, including many psychiatric patients and service users, probably because it powerfully articulated a sense of individual and collective alienation (what Laing referred to as ‘ontological insecurity’). Even Peter Sedgwick, one of Laing’s fiercest, yet respected, critics, praised the book for the manner in which it brought existentialism to bear on mental illness ‘in a manner in which it, somewhat surprisingly, helped to clarify both’ (Sedgwick 1982, 94). Laing’s other books were also popular, if less widely regarded, such as Self and Others (1961); Sanity, Madness and the Family (with Esterson, 1964) and The Politics of Experience (1967). Laing also worked with David Cooper on a book about Jean Paul Sartre (Laing and Cooper 1964), although this was a considerably less influential text, perhaps unsurprisingly as it is a very theoretical work. Laing and Cooper both tried to put their ideas into practice through the development of existentially informed ‘therapeutic communities’ for people experiencing extreme mental states, such as psychosis. For example, Villa 21 in Shenley Hospital was David Cooper’s attempt to turn a psychiatric ward for young men diagnosed with schizophrenia into a therapeutic community (Cooper 1967). In addition, Laing co-founded the Philadelphia Association in 1965 which established a therapeutic community at Kingsley Hall, a community centre in East London. The idea was to develop places of asylum and refuge for people in severe mental distress, where extremes of mental distress might be experienced, seen and respected as (at least potential) existential journeys, rather than merely pathologised and treated to remove or manage disturbing symptoms. The Philadelphia Association has played a key role in the history and development of existentialism in mental health in Britain and later set up several therapeutic community households for people with long-term mental health problems. Hearing about this work, several individual practitioners, of various theoretical orientations, visited the UK from oversees, specifically to work with Laing and get involved in the projects he initiated. For example, on reading Laing’s Divided Self in New York in 1963, Joseph Berke left America, despairing of becoming a doctor, to work with Laing at Kingsley Hall in 1965. 52

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Berke later wrote Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness with Mary Barnes, who was to become the best known ‘schizophrenic’ resident at Kingsley Hall, a book which was later tuned into a stage play by David Edgar (Edgar 1979). Much has been written about their therapeutic relationship since (most recently, Chapman 2020) and it was one of the few accounts of Kingsley Hall’s practice (Laing, despite writing a lot about the theory and politics of madness, and critics of psychiatry, wrote very little about his actual therapeutic practice). Berke later co-founded the Arbours Association in 1970, which was a spin-off from the Philadelphia Association, providing crisis houses and therapy. Alec Jenner, a psychiatrist in Sheffield, took an interest in Laing’s work and wrote to him in 1980 inviting him to dinner with colleagues to discuss his novel approach to schizophrenia. Whilst the subsequent meeting wasn’t terribly productive, Jenner still pursued some of these ideas through setting up Asylum: the magazine for Democratic Psychiatry (now, the radical mental health magazine) and later published a collective attempt to make sense of this condition in Schizophrenia: a Disease or Some Ways of Being Human? ( Jenner et al. 1993). Most of the existentially informed theorists we have mentioned have been men. The field was certainly male-dominated, as was the broader counter-cultural movement of which these developments were a part. However, there were women too. Most notably, Emmy van Deurzen, who also came to the UK from the Netherlands, specifically to work with Laing. As we shall see in the next section, she has become a key figure in the development of a specific form of existential psychotherapy in the UK. Another visitor to Kingsley Hall was Loren Mosher, a US psychiatrist who set up Soteria House, what he referred to as a ‘second generation Kingsley Hall’ in the US in the 1970s (Mosher 1991, 48). Soteria adapted Laing’s ideas for working with people in psychosis with an approach called interpersonal phenomenology, based partly on the work of Sullivan and Fromm-Reichmann but influenced by Medard Boss, Sartre and Paul ­Tillich. Interpersonal phenomenology, a form of intensive interpersonal support, encourages staff to see the world through the client’s eyes in a flexible and non-judgemental manner. Mosher and Burti (1994) stressed the importance of staff responding to clients’ needs in deference to their own sense of what is right or wrong. For this reason, they preferred to employ staff who had no commitment to a particular model. They also stressed that interpersonal phenomenology is not a form of therapy. Whilst the original Soteria House was short-lived, and there has never been a Soteria House in the UK, there are several Soteria-like houses in other parts of the world, notably in the US (Alaska and Vermont), Switzerland and Israel. Despite lack of funding and commissioning, interest in the Soteria approach amongst critical professionals, service users and carers has continued over the last 50 years and this interest continues through the work of the Soteria Network in the UK, and similar networks in many other countries trying to develop Soteria-like initiatives for people experiencing psychosis. It is fair to say that explicit reference to existential phenomenology has faded, but Soteria projects have maintained an emphasis on ‘being-with’ individuals who are experiencing first-episode psychosis with psycho-social support in a homelike, non-clinical environment, with minimal medication. In other words, they have inherited and retained an ‘existential sensibility’ without the need to understand dense, and often overly complex, philosophical texts. It is also reasonable to say that whilst Laing is probably the most written about psychiatrist in Britain, and although his ideas were popular, especially amongst the radial counter-cultural left, it had limited impact on mainstream psychiatry or statutory mental health services. Laing had very little impact on general psychiatry, apart from a few individual psychiatrists who are guided by an existential approach to patients, and most of them work privately, rather than in the National Health Service (NHS). It certainly has much less of a profile now than in Laing’s heyday. 53

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However, a persistent interest in Laing’s work persists, although more so outside of mainstream psychiatry. The bi-annual R. D. Laing Conference is attended by psychiatrists and psychotherapists, and a number of books on Laing have recently appeared since the new millennium. For example, Gavin Millar’s R. D. Laing (Millar, 2004); Salman Raschid’s edited collection of essays, R. D. Laing: Contemporary Perspectives (2005); Allan Beveridge’s scholarly Portrait of the Psychiatrist as a Young Man: the Early Writing of R. D. Laing, 1927–1960 (2011) and R.D. Laing: 50 years since The Divided Self (Itten and Young 2012). There are also special issues of journals devoted to Laing’s work (e.g. a special issue of the International Journal of Psychotherapy in 2011); a myriad of chapters and articles (e.g. Spandler 2021) and even two films about him in the last ten years, All Divided Selves and Mad to be Normal (the later staring David Tennant as Laing), spawning renewed interest in his work. Beyond Laing, traces of existential psychiatry continued in some corners of psychiatry. For example, the work of the Philosophy Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists has been able to sustain some interest in existentialism in British psychiatry. In addition, some members of the Critical Psychiatry Network in the UK have maintained an interest in these ideas (e.g. Bracken 1999a,b). This network includes diverse voices within the psychiatric profession who are critical of the dominance of a bio-medical approach to psychiatry. Whilst by no means a dominant voice in that grouping, some have developed explicitly existential-informed critiques and alternatives. For example, critical psychiatrists Phil Thomas and Pat Bracken have developed work on the hermeneutic phenomenology of voice hearing, an experience historically viewed as merely a symptom of mental illness, in collaboration with networks of people who hear voices (Thomas et al. 2004). For example, Davies et al. (1999) and Thomas et al. (2004) have shown that the experience of hearing voices can be rendered meaningful when seen in the context of a person’s life story. More recently, there are some early signs of possible mini resurgence of interest in existentialism within psychiatry. For example, Sanneke de Haan’s Enactive Psychiatry (2020) argues for the centrality of an ‘existential’ dimension to the discipline Thomas Szasz has had probably even less influence on mainstream clinical psychiatric practice in the UK than Laing. However, Szasz’s rejection of the concept of mental illness, in favour of the notion of ‘problems in living’, has had a significant impact on some sections of critical psychiatry (e.g. Middleton and Moncrieff 2019). In addition, Anthony Stadlen, a follower of Szasz in the UK, regularly holds events for therapists and scholars interested in existential ideas. Like Szasz, he believes that ‘existential psychiatry’ is an oxymoron due to the coercive nature of psychiatry which, by allowing forced detention and treatment, betrays individual choice and autonomy. Whilst some psychiatric survivors share Szasz’s critical view of psychiatry, in terms of its reliance on coercion, their critique is not usually framed in existential terms, but more in relation to human rights. In addition, organisations like the Arbours and the Philadelphia Association have continued to provide some housing and crisis care in London to people struggling with severe mental health issues. Although they don’t explicitly describe their work as ‘existential’ (or indeed ‘psychiatric’), they have always been close to an existentialist tradition and have always had members who describe themselves in that way. Moreover, their houses, which have been running for more than 40 years, are very much preoccupied with questions of meaning, ethics, and responsibility. A few books have been written about the philosophy and practice of the Philadelphia Association communities, which drew on a mixture of psychoanalysis, humanism and spirituality, as well as existential philosophy. For example, a more theoretical set of papers about their existential and psychoanalytic influences (Cooper et al. 1989) and then, 20 years later, an account of the houses (Gordon 2010), and a collection of experiential accounts of life in 54

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the communities (Scott 2014). Individual therapists who worked in the houses have also written about their therapeutic practice (e.g. Gordon 2008). Despite, or because of their philosophy, these organisations have struggled with the changing nature of mental health care and have had to constantly fight to survive. The broader culture of both society and mental health services often seems at odds with existential philosophy, or at least more critical strands of existential thinking. For example, whilst ideas of ‘individual responsibility’ might find favour within an increasingly neo-liberal society, its more critical approach to psychiatry and madness, as developed by Laing et al., has been harder to maintain, especially within mainstream and statutory service provision. Over the last 40 years, there has been a profound shift in the values and epistemology of psychiatry, further away from a concern for contexts and meanings to a preoccupation with more biologically focused theories of causation and the management of risk. Moreover, turning psychiatry into a scientific project, allied to medicine, has allowed evidence-based medicine to become embedded within modern mental health policy and practice guidelines, and this directly influences funding and commissioning of NHS provision. Within this context, it is harder to introduce novel approaches outside this paradigm. Pat Bracken has ­referred to as the ‘technical paradigm’, which assumes there is a set of interventions that can be applied, studied and measured, independently of context, relationships and values (Bracken 2007). More technique-focused approaches to mental distress, like cognitive behavioural therapies and pharmacotherapy, lend themselves more readily to scientific empiricism and a particular medicalised framework which has dominated the funding and commissioning of services. ­Salman Rashid has referred to this state of affairs as the ‘continuing counter-revolution of ­science’ (Rashid 2005). Discrete interventions whose effects can, according to proponents, be accurately measured have become favoured, or hegemonic, within statutory clinical practice. This is often seen as a threat to the recognition, funding and provision of marginalised non-bio-medical ­approaches to mental health. The idea of ‘treatment’ itself is anathema to many existentially informed practitioners as it suggests a particular medicalised type of intervention. This context poses serious challenges to alternative traditions that seek to offer something outside hegemonic therapeutic ideologies. By definition, existential approaches resist systematisation and this makes it difficult to identify its ‘core ingredients’ to test, which a medicalised version of evidence-based practice relies on. It is worth noting that even when evidence does support alternative approaches, this doesn’t necessarily change funding or commissioning practices. For example, Soteria House in the US was actually originally set up as a research project, the results of which suggested that residents of Soteria did at least as well as patients in treatment as usual, which was psychiatric hospitalisation and anti-psychotic medication (Bola and Mosher 2003). Whilst not a strict RCT (randomised control trial), meta-analyses of the original study, and subsequent studies undertaken since, have supported its effectiveness and viability (Calton et al. 2008). Despite these positive results, Soteria House was not re-funded and such houses have not been funded or commissioned within mainstream services in the UK. The popular view within psychiatry is that Laing’s The Divided Self marked the origin of the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement, which died with the 1960s radical counter-culture that spawned it. However, existential psychotherapy is arguably a lot stronger than it was at the height of Laing’s popularity which, at that time, was often more focused on critique (of psychiatry, the nuclear family and wider society). Therefore, although existential thinking may have had a limited impact on psychiatric provision, it has had a much more notable presence within psychotherapy. 55

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Psychotherapy Not only did Laing’s work help spearhead an interest in existentialism in mental health care, but it also initiated a new generation of psychotherapists in the UK who continued to develop existential ideas. Fifty years ago, at the height of Laing’s popularity, there was no formal training in existential therapy, and very little written about the approach in practice. This changed with the publication of Emmy van Deurzen’s Existential Psychotherapy in Practice in 1988 and other influential texts, including Spinelli’s Demystifying Therapy (1989), and, later, The Interpreted World (2005), and Hahn Cohn’s Existential Thought and Therapeutic Practice (1997). These texts helped move existential thought from a critique to a practice and developed a specific therapeutic method of ‘existential therapy’. As a result, a distinct ‘school’ of existential psychotherapy has emerged in the UK, with its own style, training and organisations. This has gained some influence, as part of a range of types of psychotherapy offered in the UK, especially in private practice in London, and in small pockets elsewhere. van Deurzen is clear that whilst existential therapy in the UK was inspired by Laing, its practice owes little to him directly, as he didn’t really articulate his therapeutic approach (van Deurzen 2011). She defines existential therapy as a philosophical approach that conceives of human difficulties, distress and stress as problems in living which can best be understood through a philosophical understanding of human existence in general, and by a critical enquiry into the specific difficulties of an individual in particular. Joseph Berke, who worked with Laing and set up the Arbours Association, defines it as a focus on the nature of being, of being-in-the-world, in its social context, being as the primary essence and being in relation to the Universe. The Philadelphia psychotherapist, Paul Gordon, explained that the existentialist tradition always puts into question a search for explanations and origins, by emphasising ­attentiveness to what is here before us, to experience, to make meaning and to question human responsibility. Similarly, Darren Langdridge (2010) defines and sees it as operating according to two key elements. Firstly, that it is routed in the practice of phenomenology, i.e. listening to clients in ways that enable appreciation of their rich lived experience through bracketing (of our, and societal, assumptions as much as possible), horizontalising (attending to all aspects of experience equally) and verification (checking understanding with client’s themselves). Secondly, after a rapport has been built and a fuller picture of client’s lived experience and worldview has been developed, therapists draw on existential (and post-existential) theory and philosophy which involves particular concern with choice, freedom and responsibility, anxiety, death, being-with-others, antidualism (e.g. embodiment), etc. All existential psychotherapists emphasise human relatedness to the world, and working with how individuals cope with key existential themes or dilemmas (such as meaning, responsibility, anxiety and death). Ernesto Spinelli developed a more explicitly ‘relational’ strand of existential psychotherapy which puts a particular emphasis on relatedness. He suggests that the existential tradition always places the individual ‘in the world’ – meaning that nothing can be stated about individual experience without locating it within a relational context. According to Spinelli, existential therapy begins with the basic assumption of a foundational relatedness rather than a ‘separatist’ subjectivity. In other words, individuals spring forth from, and are expressions of, this relational grounding. Therefore, for Spinelli, the enterprise of existential therapy is to engage in an honest discourse focused upon the exploration and elucidation of how, and in what ways, individuals construe their selves in a series of relations – to self, to others and to the world in general (Spinelli 2014).

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The presence of existential thought within contemporary psychotherapy in the UK can be attributed, at least in part, to the impact of explicitly existential-based psychotherapy t­raining courses. The first was van Deurzen’s existential therapy programme at Regent’s College, L ­ ondon, from 1982 onwards. Some years later, Laing encouraged her to set up the Society of Existential Analysis (SEA). Founded in 1988, this organisation is often seen as signifying the launch of a formal British School of Existential Therapy and has been an important organisation in developing existential ideas in therapy in the UK, often through talks, workshops and its own journal, Existential Analysis. In 1996, the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling was established which was entirely based on an existential approach. Since then there have been several existential specific training courses, although they are mostly, but not exclusively, London-based (for example, there have been some developments in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, associated with the work of Dilemma Consultancy, set up by Emmy van Deurzen and her partner Digby Tantam, an existentially informed psychiatrist). Whilst still very marginal in the broader psychotherapy field, the courses are recognised by the national counselling and psychotherapy registration organisation (UKCP) as legitimate psychotherapy training and thus graduates from these courses get UKCP recognition to practice psychotherapy in the UK. In addition, there are some accredited doctoral programmes in E ­ xistential Counselling Psychology, which means that some counselling psychologists are trained existentially and some will be employed in the NHS, which means they may be able to ­implement existential ideas in existing services. As a result, there are now psychotherapists and counsellors trained and broadly working in an existential tradition. As well as the Philadelphia Association and the Arbours Association, there are some independent sectors providing existential-based therapies. For example, the Claremont Project in London offers low-cost existential psychotherapy and counselling and several local counselling services run by Mind (the mental health charity) are directed by existentially trained therapists. There are also a number of counselling services attached to NHS hospitals which are run by existentially trained therapists (e.g. cancer counselling services). The existential tradition is possibly stronger in specialist counselling services in cancer, drug and alcohol services, HIV/Aids and GP clinics, rather than in statutory mental health services. van Deurzen has suggested that the approach is quietly building up strength within mental health services without much public profile, visibility or fanfare. She regards this as a slow, evolutionary process, in contrast to the revolutionary fervour which characterised Laing et al.’s approach (van Deurzen 2011). Existential concerns have also had some impact on other non-existentially focused therapy training courses, such as group analysis, often through the popularity of the US psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, who worked with Rollo May, a key figure in existential psychotherapy (May et al. 1958). Yalom wrote key texts about Existential Psychotherapy (1980) and The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (1970) as well as many other engaging and popular fiction and non-fiction books, e.g. Love’s Executioner (1991). These explicitly engage with what he referred to as four key existential concerns: death, isolation, freedom and meaning, featuring key existential theorists such as Friedrich Nietzsche (Yalom 1993) and Arthur Schopenhauer (Yalom 2006). The popularity of Yalom’s books has influenced more mainstream psychotherapy courses too. However, this may have less to do with his existential focus, and more to do with his more transparent approach to working analytically, in contrast to traditional psychoanalysis. In addition, a ‘third generation’ of existential clinical scholars has emerged from the training courses developed by van Deurzen et al. See, for example, Existential Therapies by Mick Cooper (2008) and Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy by Darren Langdridge (2012). 57

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Collectively, through all these developments, existential concerns have, at least to a limited extent, been weaved into the overall field of counselling and psychotherapy. For example, existential therapy has been incorporated into more general books about counselling, and psychotherapy (e.g. Barker et al. 2010). Indeed, since the millennium, theorists (and services) have started to move away from a singular theoretical framework towards more ‘integrative’ and/or ‘pluralistic’ approaches to therapy. Integrative approaches attempt to integrate the key insights across different therapeutic orientations into a new approach, whilst a pluralistic approach promotes a diversity of methods and accepts that some models may work for some people, but not others, rather than assuming that one particular theoretical approach is superior to others (e.g. Cooper and Dryden 2016). This has allowed some space for existential approaches to survive and develop, if not actively thrive. For example, what has been referred to as a new ‘third wave’ of cognitive behavioural therapies has emerged, which is less technical and outcomes-driven and integrates other, more hermeneutically orientated, approaches. This can include existential ideas around ‘being’ and Buddhist-inspired ideas of mindfulness (Claessens 2010). This situation might mean that existential approaches become more accessible, practical, credible and legitimate. In turn, this may result in greater longevity and sustainability, and less dependency on charismatic male individual, like Laing. However, notwithstanding these possibilities, similar constraints that we noted exist for psychiatry, also effects the viability of existential therapy practice. For example, in an era of evidence-based practice and the continued dominance of the technical paradigm, the subtleties of an existential approach are hard to identify (such as the attitude of the therapist to the client) and its impact hard to measure (such as shifts in a client’s orientation to life). Mainstream mental health services have been criticised for having an overarching, limiting ideology, which has increasingly favoured short-term, goal-orientated approaches, and this situation has not tended to include existential approaches, either integrated within this or as an alternative option within a pluralistic approach. Similar concerns have been expressed by person-centred and psychoanalytic psychotherapies, which have also struggled to survive within this broader context. These, and more existentially informed approaches, rarely have prescribed ‘interventions’ or ‘outcomes’ that can be measured in any meaningful way, ­beyond qualitative feedback, from clients, staff and others. Some practitioners and researchers in the existential field have tried to promote a different kind of ‘evidence base’ for their work, based on qualitative research methods which are specifically attuned to existential concerns, such as interpersonal phenomenological analysis. For example, Les Todres has developed an approach to research and psychotherapy that draws on Heideggerian phenomenology (Todres 2007). Phenomenology has become popular, at least as a research method, within British clinical psychology research and training course. However, whilst existential ideas have been taken up in research, it is fair to say they have had less impact on clinical practice. For these reasons, people able to access existentially informed therapy tend to be limited to those who can afford to purchase private therapy and have the knowledge and ability to be able to access existential therapists (who are still relatively rare, despite the increasingly diverse therapy marketplace). Generally, they are more likely to be struggling with so-called common mental health problems like depression and anxiety, as well as more general life difficulties and decisions. Some people would argue that such a client base is more suited to a therapy that deals in ‘problems in living’ rather than actual ‘mental illnesses’, where the bio-medical paradigm still reigns supreme. Indeed, the new generation of existential psychotherapy post-Laing has sometimes been described more as ‘philosophical counselling’ aimed at ‘living life more fully’ rather than helping people with serious mental health conditions. 58

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Whilst this depiction is disputed by van Deurzen herself, who has remained positive about the promising future of existential psychotherapy, others have been more cautious. However, it does mean that the approach is not widely known about, or available, to people who experience acute and enduring mental health problems such as psychosis. Indeed there is much less evidence of existential practice in relation to what are regarded as more serious mental illnesses such as psychosis, mania or so-called personality disorders. This is especially notable since these experiences, especially the condition called schizophrenia, was the main focus of Laing’s existential work. After all, most long-term psychiatric patients are rarely able to access psychotherapy, other than perhaps a few sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy, which are usually tied to medication regimes (Bird 2007). Consequently, existential practice may be an even more remote possibility for those who experience extreme states like psychosis whose ‘treatment’ is usually limited to pharmacotherapy. The fact that the majority of psychiatric patients wouldn’t be able to access these ‘existential alternatives’ was a key element of Sedgwick’s critique of Laing’s anti-psychiatry in his classic text Psychopolitics (Sedgwick 1982). Moreover, the ‘third generation’ of existential therapists have sometimes been critical of the existential approach they inherited, which they felt had not evolved to address specific issues relating to oppression, nor taken on board more broader critiques of therapy. As such, they argue that it needs to draw more on other recent theoretical work, especially critical psychology, queer theory, and social constructionism which might offer more insight into the social constraints that individuals face in society. This has often resulted in existential therapy graduates being less aligned with a particular existential model or approach and their work has often developed in new directions. For example, some have incorporated existential thinking into relationship, sex and gender affirmative therapies, as well as self-help texts (Barker 2011a). Meg-John Barker, for example, has applied Simone de Beauvoir’s existential feminist insights to understand women’s contemporary psycho-social struggles with sex and sexuality (Barker 2011b). Finally, existential therapists have continually grappled with the tension between staying true to existential ideas and trying to gain wider acceptability (see Cooper 2008, for a good overview of these issues). For example, there is a potential conflict between teaching a specific psychotherapeutic ‘treatment’ or ‘model’ and the cultivation of open-minded enquiry which is central to cultivating an existential sensibility. In addition, some have expressed concern that any wider acceptance of existential therapies may come at a price. For example, it might result in their ideas becoming watered down and losing their more challenging ‘outsider’ basis. For example, existential therapists involved in organisations like the Philadelphia Association often valued and took pride in their marginality. After all, existential thought has historically adopted a critical stance towards certain aspects of modernity, although probably less so today than in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, the existential therapy movement has been less aligned with critiques of psychiatry, therapy and society, and has arguably moved closer to traditional psychotherapy. Moreover, there is an increasing danger of certain existential ideas being co-opted by, or aligning too closely with, neo-liberal forces to erode welfare state provision of mental health support. For example, the promotion of decontextualised ideas of individual agency, choice and responsibility can be used to justify withdrawing welfare support and services to people (Spandler 2022). This was, after all, Peter Sedgwick’s key criticism of existentially informed anti-psychiatry.

Conclusion We believe that existential thinking, inspired and influenced by the work of people like R.D. ­Laing, still has currency in mental health work, especially in the schools of existential therapy 59

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that have flourished in recent years. Whilst deep engagement with philosophy texts is not necessarily required to keep this tradition alive, it does require cultivating an existential sensibility which is often at odds with the contemporary direction of mental health care. At the same time, some existential ideas, such as the focus on individual agency and responsibility, can be used to service wider neo-liberal welfare agendas to the detriment of service users. Whilst existential psychotherapy is the area which has had the most momentum and influence, it is generally more focused within individual private psychotherapy, rather than in statutory mental health services, and has been less accessible to those experiencing ‘psychosis’ and people at the sharper end of the mental health system. We have only been able to provide a general overview of the state of existential thinking in psychiatry and psychotherapy in the UK, but we hope this gives readers a sense of the continuing relevance of existential ideas in mental health care, and the tensions involved in realising its contribution.

Acknowledgements Much of this chapter was based on information gleaned from interviews with the following people. Leon Redler; Allan Beveridge; Joseph Berke; Salman Raschid; Steve Ticktin; Alec Jenner; John Heaton; Digby Tantam; Emmy van Deurzen; Paul Gordon; Mick Cooper; Ernesto Spinelli; Meg-John Barker; Susan Iacovou; Darren Langridge; Mark Raynor and Pat Bracken. We are sincerely grateful for their insights and recognise that any errors are the responsibility of the authors.

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7 EXISTENTIALITY AND SEMIOTICS – ARE THEY COMPATIBLE? Eero Tarasti

An invitation to write to the anthology of Existential Human Science by Routledge is a true challenge to my own work, which, during the last three decades, has focused on the elaboration of a theory I call ‘existential semiotics’. I have already published on it so abundantly in various languages and lectured around it in many countries to most diverse audiences that it is high time to gather some possible results and ponder the present state of this approach, its reception and future – if it has a future. The last-mentioned self-critical and sceptical comment may be taken as an encouragement to reflect deeper on whether existential semiotics has really proved to be that new paradigm of human sciences to which it was originally intended. What is involved namely is to blend together two different themes: for the first, what is known about existentiality or consideration of it as an object of scientific discourse without being scared of the critics which one has often heard in the form that man cannot be himself object of his own science because he already is its subject. Existentiality, in the sense as it is here understood, refers strongly to the so-called continental philosophy and to its branch, which developed in Germany from the 18th century and which has been taken as the fundamental metalanguage regarding man’s ‘being’ and ‘existing’ – what Kierkegaard already mentioned by saying that one would think it to be world’s easiest thing but which was one of the most difficult tasks (Kierkegaard 1993). Of course, taking into account the human subject is no privilege of Germans’ idealist and speculative philosophy. In its many forms, it appears also in the phases of the Angloanalytic school beginning from Wittgenstein until McTaggart (see his Nature of Existence, 1988); yet, somehow the subject they are talking about and whose world view they portray is different from Kant’s transcendental ego or Hegelian world spirit or Heideggerian das Man or Jaspers’ living creatures in Dasein (1948). Not to mention the subject of the Frenchmen beginning from le moi profond by Henri Bergson (1938, 1939), or the responsibility carrying and the choice-making subject of Sartre and de Beauvoir. There the fact that one speaks about a subject does not tell yet much of what is in fact involved. In such an approach as semiotics, in turn, the prevailing trend has been to deny the existing subject, to deprive any epistemic value of it and even the complete ruining of subject and effort to show it as a mere illusion, erroneous reasoning of mankind. Semiotics has – according to its name – been interested in objects and particularly in signs which it thinks to support the significations. They exist objectively regardless of what an individual subject might think of them DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-8

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or how it experiences them. They have their own laws which can be formulated as exactly as in natural sciences. Thanks to this semiotics is strongly characterized by a certain instrumentality, i.e. it aims for rendering its concepts operational tools in the analysis of phenomena. In this sense, according to the critics, semiotics is a kind of technological science and the expansion of the sign universe in the digital age has given still more ground for such arguments. Therefore, if someone dares to speak about existential semiotics, is he not putting water and fire to the same vessel, is he not trying something which is contradictio in adiecto, bringing together incompatible issues. However, let us not allow such criticism to depress our scholars. Often precisely new, surprising combinations and connections yield to the world of science something radically new if one approaches it without prejudices. Yet, this is just very difficult. What does it mean to semiotize continental philosophy? (See Tarasti 2021, 2012b, 2015). By which right some linguist, sociologist, aesthetician, arts scholar goes and changes what Heidegger said about the subject? However, to speak about subject, meanings, and existence is by no means a privilege of any school or discipline in this world. Correspondingly, on which ground the iron firm semiotic categories are scrutinized by German metaphysics, a thought which ought to be a long time ago an abandoned standpoint and declared as ‘a conceptual poetry’? To this one may answer that despite the standardized schools of semiotics around such undeniably great figures as Peirce, Greimas, Lotman, Eco, and Sebeok, there is no reason to argue that semiotics would stay forever with those truths which these great men have defined and elaborated. Peirce spoke about the fallibilism of science and about the fact one always proceeds towards new, better models and ideas. As early as the Vienna Circle in its time took a rejective attitude towards semiotics; if the semantics was still somehow understood by Neurath, Carnap, and Frege, then semiotics was something ‘altväterisch’ and schematic. Yet, Carnap, in his Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928) and its constitutional system of the world, bases it on the category of the auto-psychic (eigenseelig) whose content of consciousness das Gegebene was however subjectless. Moreover, the speech about the subject was almost banned since the days of structuralism … or rather Russian formalism. Decisive was dialogue or rather the lack of it between Claude Lévi-Strauss and JeanPaul Sartre concerning his work Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) in which existentialism had to give the way to structuralism. Hence Parisian structuralists had all negative attitudes towards the concept of the subject. Perhaps the best known was the definition by Michel Foucault in his Les mots et les choses in 1970: man was an only recent discovery that disappears as soon as our knowledge reaches a new configuration. Man or subject did not, therefore, exist at all and even less could one speak of its ‘existence’, but it was only a meeting point of systems, the product of the Saussurean langue or effet de sens by Greimas school, meaning the effect on the surface level (Greimas and Courtes 1979, 116). Accordingly, if we think that existential semiotics is a combination of continental philosophy and classical semiotics in the line of Peirce, Saussure, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, Eco, Greimas, and Lotman, what do we try to show by this combination and gathering them under the same nomination … and which consequence it will have for both approaches? For the first, continental philosophy is a very broad notion, it consists of many schools like structuralism, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, postmodern studies, etc., which seem to speak different languages but which are all interrelated. Even so much that if one nowadays goes to speak in a congress of one of them, the same speech would be as valid in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and semiotics. In the cultural geographic respect, the French philosophy, which can be considered entirely its own world, is most closely related to the German one. Sartre’s L’être et le néant (1943) is based on Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (1832-45/1969), as much as the definition of myths by the Lotman school is indebted to the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer in his 64

Existentiality and semiotics – are they compatible?

Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (the chapter Das mythische Denken, Cassirer 1925). From this point of view, it is not unusual if one in existential semiotics dares to create bridges between these two universes of signification. Next, I try to observe the new concepts launched by existential semiotics, from the viewpoint of continental philosophy: that means to study how the concepts of Hegel, Kant, K ­ ierkegaard, (Kierkegaard 1993), Heidegger, and Jaspers become transformed when they are brought to the context of semiotic observation. Yet, the transformation is mutual. One has as well to ponder how the basic concepts of semiotics are changed when they are brought to a broader philosophical framework. In any case, existential semiotics endeavours in Greimas’ words, to be the surrounding theory, englobant which swallows its previous surrounded models which now prove to be its special cases – if therefore sign is no longer signifiant plus signifié but whatsoever from genosigns and phenosigns to as-if-signs or sig-zemic (see later), one is already renewing the whole foundation of semiotics. However, it belongs to the nature of semiotics that it includes competing views which do not necessarily understand each other, but that has not made any harm. One still has been able to maintain the discourse. Albeit someone would shout from the audience: ‘I hate transcendence’, it has been rather apt to instigate more about this notion which is certainly not found as little as other key terms of existential semiotics in the major encyclopedias of semiotics. Does it thus hold true for existential semiotics, what Saussure said about his own structural linguistics and ‘semiology’: it did not exist yet but it had the right for it in advance. Nevertheless, in any case, when we speak about existential semiotics as the combination of classical semiotics and continental philosophy, we are not connecting to the same union whatsoever semiotics and whatsoever philosophy. Choice has taken place. The new theory does not deny the old one, or whatsoever classical semiotic theory which is inserted to this new paradigm, it remains valid in its own genre and original context … and then we just think of Peirce, ­Saussure, Greimas, Eco, and Lotman. Correspondingly, we do not interpret semiotics in the light of any philosophy, but we have chosen those which seem to be relevant. The essential is the end result, i.e. whether new coherent metalanguage emerged from that combination, about the phenomena as its object or subject as an existing entity. In the following, I shall divide my examination of existential semiotics as particular humanistic research into two sections: first, I ponder which philosophy it has to take into account, i.e. in the light of which philosophers and their theories this new semiotics will be built. I take the liberty to use the term ‘new’ as earlier I already spoke many times in the congresses of the IASS about the so-called ‘neosemiotics’ although even this has been dealt with a fairly long time. In science, all takes place slowly. Second, I shall think about which semiotics concepts I shall include, to which extent I shall stay faithful to Greimas’ school, which theories in the framework of Paris school are already hinting towards the existential direction like the invention of modalities in the 1970s (Greimas and Courtes 1979, 230–232), that ‘third semiotic revolution’ according to the Master (in his speech at the Third symposium of the Semiotic Society of Finland, in the Jyväskylä University, 1983). Yet, paradoxically also at the same time to the most rigorous angloanalytic direction theories like deontic logic which had been developed by the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik v. Wright (1963), the follower of Ludwig Wittgenstein in his chair in Cambridge (Wittgenstein 1922/1971). One can thus pose the question of Jean Cocteau: Jusqu’ou on peut aller trop loin (­Cocteau 1918; Cocteau 1979) when one adopts from old classical semiotics theories as ingredients to the ‘new’ existential semiotics. How far can we stay faithful to Greimas, Eco, or Lotman at the same time when we try to become existential semioticians? 65

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Philosophical concepts Dasein My first model about existential semiotics was published in my book on the theme at Indiana University Press (Tarasti 2000). To a great extent, it starts with the idea of Dasein. The term again is borrowed from Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. For them, the Dasein – note I always leave this term untranslated due to its subtle nuances of German language and references to ‘being’, i.e. sein – means the world in which we live. In Heidegger, the emphasis is on my world, i.e. the subject itself, whereas in a broader sense it contains also the objects and signs surrounding us (Heidegger 1967).

Dasein is the reality that we learn to know due to the resistance it makes to our subjective ideas of it. For Charles S. Peirce, the being is also such an ‘objective’ instance behind his ternary sign processes. To some extent, Dasein can be defined as a kind of existence – the world in which our semiotic subject lives, acts, and reacts (Tarasti 2000). In the modern biosemiotic school, its founder Jacob von Uexküll speaks about Umwelt surrounding the organism. Yet, we could not limit our Dasein to the surrounding world because here it involves also the organism itself living in communication with it. So even in biosemiotics which one would imagine representing ‘the conception of objective reality,’ we note that there is no such thing as objective reality since it is formed in a continuous assumption of signs which it is sending to the organism, which or who either accepts or rejects them depending on its special inner ‘score’ it possesses, Ich Ton, as Uexküll calls it (Uexküll 1940). Karl Jaspers again would call these acts of Merken und Wirken by the special term of Weltorientierung orientation (in the world, Jaspers 1948, 25 et passim). Nevertheless, the reality our subject encounters can also be called the Other.

Being and not-being Now we go back to Hegel and his philosophies as one origin of existential models (see Hegel 1832-45/1969; Hegel 1973; Lindberg 2012). What always comes first to one’s mind in Hegel is his categories of being and not-being, i.e. logical operations of affirmation and negation. They yield what is then called Werden, becoming, the movement of the whole Hegelian universe in a dialectical sense. Bertrand Russell who learned Hegel via his friend McTaggart said that the Hegelian universe is like pudding, if you touch one end of it the whole material is vibrating (Russell 1957). However, for him, the world was rather like a pile of discrete atoms. However, the Hegelian 66

distinction appears also as a mirroring effect in Ch. S. Peirce’s two approaches: the synekhistic and tykhist (Peirce 1955). The latter being like Russell and the former like Hegel. Yet, the Hegelian logic leads him to articulate the being into two basic categories: an-sich-sein and für-sich-sein. The former is being as such without any external definitions. Insofar this being is a human subject, he has some qualities, but when he enters a society, he is determined by others, this primary being becomes für sich sein, i.e. socially definable entity. Kierkegaard adopted this view directly telling that a subject first is but then via negation observes itself and hence notices he is not what he thought or wanted to be. So, he becomes not only alienated but also conscious of himself. Now, when we try to sketch the existentiality of our subject, we can insert there as background categories those defined in French as Moi and Soi (used a.o. by Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Fontanille), so Me and They, Society. Then we get an-sich-sein as the primary Me, as a purely physical sensual entity without yet any reflection, and thereafter für-sich-sein the Moi as a socially existing entity, as a person, via habit, growth, and education. But now it is better to change the Hegelian ‘sich’ term into ‘me’, so we have to talk about an-mir-sein and für-mich-sein. Instead, the previous category of ‘sich-sein’ could be reserved for the Soi: Soi either as pure abstract norms and values: an-sich-sein or Soi as a concrete social institution, practices, realizations of those norms and values. Then we get four cases. Later we can see how the Paris school semiotic square would function well here to fix these categories into a scheme or figure.

I mention this as early as here before going to semiotics in the proper sense it is valid when we interpret Hegel. The model has two movements: sublimation, i.e. how the body, Moi1, becomes spiritual as Soi1 and embodiment: how the values of Soi1 gradually shift into physical entities of Moi1. I shall deal with this more a little later. As the model is a dynamic one, we can replace the square with ‘Z’ portraying its movement. And since it is about the human mind seen from inside, it is ‘emic’ following the definition of the American linguist Kenneth Pike.

Transcendence My theory is based upon the articulation of the real empirical existence in Dasein as the so-called zemic world, which has four entities: body, person, praxis, and values (Moi1, Moi2, Soi2, and Soi1). That is what I proposed above. The model postulates two semiotic movements within it: the gradual sublimation of the body or Moi1 towards values, and on the other hand, the gradual 67

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embodiment or making ‘corporeal’ of abstract values or Soi1 towards Moi1. Some have argued that my notion of transcendence means just the mode of Soi1, i.e. values and norms of a society or culture ‘as invisible categories’. This is quite right: it is indeed one species of transcendence and I call it empirical transcendence. To this class belongs much else – the German ‘understanding’ sociologists have pondered it, from Alfred Schütz (1932) to Thomas Luckmann (1994). The easiest definition of transcendence, in this case, is, it is whatever is absent – but present in our minds. However, the aforementioned zemic process can be arrested in moments we call existential. Our subject is not at the mercy of a blind organic zemic process but can stop it either by negation or affirmation. S/he can move to the world of the supra-zemic, which is above Dasein, on a level in which we reflect and judge our concrete being in its various modes. It is just on this level that many philosophical concepts like the Geist of Hegel, the oversoul of Emerson (Emerson 1950), the transcendental ego of Husserl, and the one of Sartre are situated. Even this is transcending and I call it existential transcendence. Nevertheless, the movement of transcending does not stop even here, since behind all is das Ding an sich of Kant, of which we cannot know anything directly, or the absolute of Hegel, which we either cannot determine, but which appears as a continuous process, as an actualization towards Dasein and history. I call this third transcendence radical transcendence. We can speak about this highest transcendence only with metaphors, said also the mathematician Solomon Marcus. Now we can understand what Goethe meant by his chorus mysticus at the end of Faust II: Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis. All that vanishes is only a metaphor. Now, also many theologically oriented reflections of classical philosophers become understandable; their concern is this final, ultimate, and ‘highest’ form of transcendence. The term ‘highest’ or supreme is misleading in the sense that we would incessantly think that transcendence is somewhere ‘up’ and thus it may fall down upon us. From an early stage, Kant distinguished the transcendental – which was an epistemological category or das Ding an sich – from the transcendent which had the usual religious type tinge of meaning as something which is beyond the extremities of life and death. Of radical transcendence, we can only speak by way of symbols. It is not only most challenging but also most far-reaching. To apply Kant, we could, moreover, speak about a priori and a posteriori transcendence. The latter kind of a posteriori emerges after our experience. This is a definition we meet for instance in existentialism: as our whole empirical Dasein is so incomplete and insufficient as it is, we reason that there must be somewhere something better, i.e. we transcend. Sartre (2003), inter alia, defines transcendence like this. Yet, another species, a priori, comes before any experience. When such knowledge changes from mere analytic into synthetic, i.e. becomes concrete in our experience, we encounter the appearance of radical transcendence in the world of the zemic. Some argue that what is involved is the phenomenon of theophany, i.e. announcement – portrayed, especially impressively, by Renaissance and Baroque paintings. Therefore, we are now in the moment of an epistemic choice: on the one hand, our starting point and the only ‘certain’ and evident thing is our empirical reality. Yet, what if our epistemic choice was an opposed one – radical transcendence as the only and ultimate kind of reality, anything else being merely a pale and gradually vanishing reflection as when one becomes distanced from the deepest source of being in transcendence. Such a choice has been made by many philosophers in Arabia, Persia, and Europe (from Plato to Dante). I leave the question open which standpoint is ‘right’, but nevertheless I accept that it is a relevant choice (see also Pihlström 2003). The next task concerns whether semiotic discourses can deal with so broad a variety of diverse world views and theories. Accordingly, we are at the transcultural theory of transcendence (see Tarasti 2017). Transcendence can thus occur vertically in two directions: 68

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Radical transcendence (a priori).

↓

existential transcendence or supra-zemic world (a posteriori)

↓

empirical transcendence (or the inner movement in the zemic world towards the Soi 1 – either from ‘up’ till ‘down’ or from ‘down’ till ‘up’). Figure 7.1 One may read more about these issues from Tarasti. (Tarasti 2023, “Culture and Transcendence – the concept of transcendence through the ages”, in Bankov and Cobley 2017: 293–322 and from the anthology ‘Transcending signs’.

Existentializing semiotics Now we shall scrutinize which semiotic theories and concepts are relevant in our project of existentializing this approach, almost bringing it closer to what one might call a metaphysical system (Tarasti 2023 in the Mouton anthology, ‘Transcending signs’). As said, much depends on which semiotics we accept as our starting point. I shall here discuss nearest ‘only’ the Paris school founded by the Lithuanian born semiotician A.J. Greimas. In the origin, Greimas’ first remarkable work in semiotics Sémantique Structurale appeared in 1966. It was the time of the shift from earlier more phenomenologically oriented schools like Merleau-Ponty and Jaspers cited by Greimas. It was the time of the glorious days of the emerging structuralism. Yet, Greimas continued from this starting point and made his school one of the most systematic paradigms in the semiotics altogether. He was a charismatic- and schoolbuilding person – unlike some other major figures such as Umberto Eco or Thomas A. Sebeok. However, many concepts launched in the above-mentioned work remained as the basis of his whole system what he started to call in the 1980s as ‘generative course’, parcours génératif following the idea of Chomsky. Regarding our key notion of existentiality, Chomsky is not rewarding since his ideal language speaker is no concrete linguistic subject but an idealized and artificial construction. However, a little later Greimas stopped speaking of generative course when this notion got out of fashion. Instead came the proximity to angloanalytic philosophy and formal logic. Amazingly this also increased the existentiality of his whole enterprise, particularly thanks to the notion of the modalities. Nevertheless, as early as in Sémantique Structurale (Greimas 1966) the structuralist analysis starts with the case of novel by Georges Bernanos, Le journal d’un curé de la Campagne (1938), telling the story of a young priest arriving at his first vicary in the French countryside and aiming at fulfilling his ‘Christ’ project, i.e. converting the provincial community into believers. He fails and all the story has a strong existential nature. The more surprising is thus the strictly structural semeanalysis of the whole leading to a formalized scheme of the entire narrative (I have dealt with this in my essay on formalization in semiotics appearing in Springer in 2022). However, some of the most popular notions of Greimas enter in that study like the one of isotopy, which we cannot directly blend together with the notion of topics in the arts. Isotopy is a non-empirical category, a kind of deep level of meaning which makes an otherwise fragmentary text coherent and continuous. His own example is an existential short story by Maupassant, Deux amis, and I have applied it to musical texts (say, for instance, the main theme of César Franck’s Prélude Chorale et Fugue or opening of Beethoven piano sonata op. 31 nr 3 in E flat 69

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major). However, we become most aware of the existence of isotopies in cases in which there are two superimposed isotopies or what Greimas calls ‘complex isotopy’. The puns are often based on such double-faced messages like Oscar Wilde’s drama The Importance of Being Earnest, or any witty discourse playing with understatements (look, for instance, Molière’s play Précieuses ridicules). Or from a guide book for etiquette: a gentleman at a formal dinner says to the lady sitting in his side: ‘It is so nice to be seated close to a goose.’ … and corrects soon: ‘I mean of course that goose on table’. Isotopies constitute the deepest of levels of the generation of text via layers of discourse, such as temporality, spatiality, and actoriality. Yet, the basis of the Greimas system was of course linguistics and the findings by phonetics with distinctive features of the language. So the terms s1 and s2 formed a contrasting pair in language, say, p and b in French, i.e. voiceless, voiced, and then the contrast could be expanded into non-s2 and non-s1 leading us to what Greimas nominated as the semiotic square (Greimas 1966). It became one of the distinguishing features of the whole Greimassian approach in any empirical study. Namely, those terms could be put to form the diagram: s1

s2

non-s2

non-s1

arriving at three kinds of logical relations: of contrariety between s1 and s2, of contradiction between s1 and non-s1 or s2 and non-s2, or implication or complementarity: s1 vs non-s2 or s2 vs non-s1. Now we can return to our zemic model already introduced above and look at what happens when we think of its origin as a semiotic square. In fact, it quickly loses its Greimassian origin by the fact that the very Cartesianism square is dynamized into a temporal system. So instead of square, it became a Z portraying its inner movement and tension. We can now also give it a more concrete empirical content which may be refreshing after the philosophical discourse on Hegel and transcendence above!

The semiotic square becoming ‘zemic’ model In the aforementioned scheme of Moi1, Mo2, Soi2, and Soi1, one poses questions; in the cases of M, these questions are individual, whereas in cases of S, they are collective. This is very typical of existential semiotics – which always tries to imagine and portray the life of signs from within – that is how one feels to be in the position of S1 or S2, and so forth (Tarasti 2012a, 2021). M1: In the case of M1, one may ask: who am I in my body perceived in its chaotic and fleshly Firstness? I wake up in the morning, I breathe, I do not feel any pain, I exist, this is wonderful. The Persian philosopher Avicenna, in his psychology, imagined a man floating in the air without any external stimuli, and still being sure of its existence, this would equal to the state of M1. Yet, as early as this primary being has been modalized, with euphoric or ­dysphoric ‘thymic’ values as follows: which properties I have, what I am capable of, at which I am good – that is, what is involved is my sensuality, sensibility, my Sinnlichkeit, or to put it in terms of Lévi-Strauss, this is the ‘concrete,’ le sensible, this is the case of being in archaic societies, like Suya Indians in Mato Grosso, with a corporeal existence (but in direct touch with myths – that is, beliefs in the case of S1; see particularly the studies and video documents by the American anthropologist Seeger 2004).

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M2: How can I develop my properties so that I become a personality and assume an identity? This is the idea of personality by the Finnish national philosopher, the Hegelian, Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1848/1982), or Goethe's schöner Geist; how can I get training and education whereby I sublimate my physical essence into a man/woman with a certain competence? M3: How can I obtain a job, position, role in a social institution that would correspond to my personality, skills, and inclinations? How I become that and that, manager, artist, politician, administrator, teacher, professor, officer, priest, and so forth. How do I get a job and work that is equal to my capacities? How can I act in the community so that I become an accepted member of it and gain appreciation and success? M4: Can I accept the values and norms that are dominant in my community and society – if yes, then how can I bring them on this level of ‘Fourthness’ into their brilliance and efficiency. If no (as we can always either affirm or deny), then how can I become a dissident until the extreme negation and refusal, withdrawal from those values that I find unacceptable, and how can I then become a pacifist, ecologist, and so forth, with extreme attitudes? Here, we see that we are dealing with quite concrete cases and existential positions of our subject, not only with theoretical ontological varieties of different kinds of ‘being.’ However, from the standpoint of the society, its members, individuals (its Mois) are only carriers or vehicles of the Soi, its tools, and implementations. Therefore equally from the Soi, we can ask the following collective questions: S1: It represents the voice of the society, its ideology, and its axiology, which appears in sanctified texts, myths. It represents society as a virtual belief system. S2: Here, the norms and principles are shifted into manifest laws, rules, and institutions. How are the activities of individual members of the society regulated, dominated, and ruled by norms and social practices; how are they channelled into acceptable forms and genres of behaviour? This is the same as Bourdieu’s notion of habitus or what Foucault said (Foucault 1970). S3: To which extent can individual personal properties and characteristics serve the society – that is, which personalities and person-types are proper material for its institutions? How are persons recruited into these practices? The interviews in job-hunting, for example, are functional here. S4: How does society penetrate even to the physical sensible behaviour of an individual? How are even gender distinctions partly constructed? Here, we encounter those modalities whereby a Soi enacts its contracts and those passions that make it real in the innermost individual core by emotions and feelings of a guilty conscience, shame, glory, duty, and their quasi-physical counterparts of the behaviour. Involved here is the realization of Moi and Soi via four phases in two opposed directions, in the Dasein; the questions are linked to this movement and its goal-directedness, Kantian Zweckmässigkeit (1790/1974, pp. 322–325), hence this constitutes the Schellingian action, Handeln. Yet each phase also has its existential side – that is, each phase can stop, it can cease moving automatically, organically forward by stepping into transcendence, by reflecting on each developmental stage from the viewpoint of its essence (i.e. that ‘idea’ or ‘value’ that tells us how things should be); that would be the so-called supra-zemic level. However, as we know, from being itself we cannot infer in any way how it should be.

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Plato’s theory was that the most perfect form of ‘globe’ existed alone first; it did not need to perceive anything, to say or do anything; but then we may imagine that it was brought to a dialogue, and this caused the zemic started to take shape in the human mind:

Existential communication After all, we can think that the whole semiotics is a transcendental art. If semiotics is, simply said, as Umberto Eco has argued: communication plus signification, they are both, in fact, transcendental activities. Let us take as the basic model of communication the one from Saussure’s (1916) Cours de linguistique générale, i.e. Mr A says something to Mr B. He receives the sign when he hears it, something happens in his brain and then he answers. So, this is the dialogue. But in reality, Mr B is a completely transcendental entity to Mr A. He is what we call in philosophy alien-psychic, of whose mental state Mr A cannot know anything. The only certain thing is his own consciousness, its stream (as Husserl argued), cogito ergo sum, he is auto-psychic. Thus, the whole communication takes place always under a terrible risk to lead to misunderstanding.

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Then comes signification, i.e. the sign itself. According to the medieval definition, a sign is Aliquid stat pro aliquo, something standing for something. Or like Roman Jakobson put it: ­referring to something (renvoi). So, it represents something absent. Therefore, any semiotic process is ­possible only by transcending entities, which are signs themselves. In fact, our zemic model is an ontological one; it becomes properly semiotic when it is ­represented in signs of various nature. We might then call these entities ‘sig-zemics’, i.e. signs portraying the primary zemic. However, this process of signifying is a very complex one, and here the traditional sign categories of classical semiotics can be applied: icon, index, symbol, seme, etc., or to put it more dynamically: to convey, signify, express:

To conclude, we have scrutinized how existentiality influences the semiotics and what semiotics offers to philosophical theories of existence and to even its metaphysical systems. Perhaps this new combination may manifest in new types of research strategies and also new results in the human sciences. At least, a certain kind of neological metalanguage exists already in order to talk about phenomena that were hitherto considered to stay beyond the reach of rational scientific discourse. Yet, it is too early to say to which direction this will lead us in our enterprise to understand more deeply the activities and processes of the human mind.

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References Bankov, K., and P. Cobley 2017. Semiotics and Its Masters. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bergson, H. 1938. La pensée et le mouvant. Paris: PUF. . 1939. Matière et mémoire. Paris: PUF. Carnap, R. 1928. Der logische Aufbau der Welt. Berlin: Schlachtensee. Cassirer, E. 1925. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer. Cocteau, J. 1979. Le Coq et l’Arlequin. Paris: Editions Stock/Musique. Eero, Tarasti 2023. The Metaphysical System of Existential Semiotics in Eero Tarasti ed. Transcending Signs. Essays in Existential Semiotics. In the series Semiotcs, Communication and Cognition. edited by Paul Cobley and Kalevi Kull. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, p. 77–98. Emerson, R. W. 1950. The Complete Essays and Other Writings. New York: Modern Library. Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of Human Sciences (Les mots et les choses 1965). London: Tavistock. Greimas, A. J. 1966. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse. Greimas, A. J., and J. Courtes 1979. Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette. Hegel, G. Fr. W. 1832-45/1969. Wissenschaft der Logik I. Werke in zwanzig Bänden., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Hegel’s Logic. 1973. Translated by William Wallace. with a foreword by J.N. Findlay. Oxford: Clarendon Press Jaspers, K. 1948. Die Philosophie. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Jean-Paul Sartre. 2003. La transcendance de l’ego. Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique. Paris: J.Vrin. Heidegger, M. 1967. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Kierkegaard, S. 1993. Päättävä epätieteellinen jälkikirjoitus. Finnish translation by Torsti Lehtinen from ­Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift till de philosophiske Smuler. Mimisk–pathetisk-dialektisk Sammenskrift. Juva: WSOY. Lindberg, S. (Ed) 2012. Johdatus Hegelin Hengen fenomenologiaan. (Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel). Helsinki: Gaudeamus. McTaggart, J. 1988 Nature of Existence I-II, edited by C.D. Broad, Cambridge UK. Cambridge University Press. Peirce, C. S. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce, selected and edited With an Introduction by Justus ­Buchler. New York: Dover. Pihlström, S. 2003. Naturalizing the Transcendental. A Pragmatic View. New York: Prometheus Books. ­Humanity Books. Russell, B. 1957. Muotokuvia muistista ja muita esseitä. Helsinki: WSOY. Sartre, J.-P. 1943. L’Être et le Néant. Essai d’ontologie phenoménologique. Paris: Gallimard. . 1960. Critique de la raison dialectique. Tome i. Théorie des ensembles pratiques. Paris: Gallimard. Saussure, F. d. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Editions Payot. Schütz, A. 1932/1974. Der sinnhafte Aufbau des sozialen Welt. Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Seeger, A. 2004. Why Suyá Sing. A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. Urbana, Chicago, IL: ­University of Illinois Press. Tarasti, Eero 2000. Existential Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. . 2012a. ‘Existential semiotics and cultural psychology’, In J. Valsiner (Ed), The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology (pp. 316–343). Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 2012b. Semiotics of Classical Music. How Mozart, Brahms and Wagner Talk To Us. Berlin: Mouton. . 2015. Sein und Schein. Explorations in Existential Semiotics. Berlin: Mouton. . 2017. ‘Culture and transcendence – The concept of transcendence through the ages’, In K. Bankov and P. Cobley (Eds), Semiotics and Its Masters. Volume 1. Berlin: Mouton . 2021. ‘Existential semiotics and its application to music: The Zemic theory and its birth from the spirit of music’, In P. C. Chagas and J. C. Wu (Eds), Sounds from Within: Phenomenology and Practice. Cham: Switzerland. Uexküll, J. v. 1940. Bedeutungslehre. Leipzig: Barth. Thomas, Luckmann 1994. In Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann. Todellisuuden sosiaalinen rakentuminen. (Social construction of reality) Finnish translation by Vesa Raiskila. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Wittgenstein, L. 1922/1971. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wright, G. H. v. 1963. Norm and Action. A Logical Enquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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8 A CONTESTED LEGACY Kant and Existentialism Pablo Muchnik and Lawrence Pasternack

In many regards, Kant is not an existentialist. Unlike Sartre’s unrestricted conception of freedom, Kant interprets the will as intrinsically rational. Unlike Kierkegaard’s “Teleological Suspension of the Ethical,” Kant’s philosophy of religion is fundamentally grounded in moral concerns. Unlike Heidegger’s emphasis in Being and Time on our solitary orientation toward our own deaths, Kant regards our mission in life as fundamentally intertwined with our social natures. And yet, one would be hard pressed to deny that Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1781–) opens the space for the development of existentialist thought. This is particularly clear if we consider Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” and its coordinate critique of the metaphysical tradition. Here Kant introduced a shift in philosophical attention that prefigures the most enduring existentialist themes: the prioritization of “existence over essence,” the primacy of the practical over the theoretical, and the thoroughgoing examination of the subterfuges we use to escape our freedom. To make good on this claim, we will present a series of philosophical snapshots organized around the fundamental questions that motivated Kant’s thought: What can I know? What ought I do? For what may I hope? and, lastly, What is a human being? The purpose of this exercise is neither to turn Kant into a proto-existentialist nor to claim that existentialist thinkers are Kantians in disguise. Our goal is, rather, to let the philosophical affinities that connect them stand in productive tension, without erasing their undeniable differences. In so doing, we hope, the reader will better assess the power of Kant’s legacy.

What can I know? Toward the end of the first Critique, Kant tells us: All interest of my reason (the speculative as well as the practical) is united in the following three questions:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-9

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1 What can I know? 2 What should I do? 3 What may I hope?1 What is remarkable about the first of these questions is how much sacrifice it entails. Unlike most of his philosophical predecessors, especially those in the German rationalist school, Kant is willing to relinquish the grand possibilities that reason opens for knowledge and accept, instead, the insurmountable limitations of our cognitive faculties. Whereas thinkers like Alexander Baumgarten and Christian Wolff would employ their inquiries into our rational faculty so as to generate an “organon” of “objective assertions” about the ultimate nature of things (KrV A61/ B85), Kant’s Critical Project seeks to uncover how our faculties determine their objects, and thus, how the knowable as such is really just the knowable for us. With this drastic reduction of the bounds of cognition, Kant upends a fundamental tenet in the philosophical tradition. Rather than understanding truth as a correspondence between our representations and an object that stands in itself, independently from us, Kant reverses the direction of fit and makes objectivity depend on the structures of human knowledge. Instead of gleaning cognitive patterns from the world, Kant believes that the mind determines those patterns for the world. But in so doing, it does not behave like a God who creates the cosmos ex nihilo. The mind, rather, acts through organizing principles so as to bring about a coherent experience by way of spatio-temporal forms and rules of syntheses which lie within itself. Although this organizing process is eminently subjective, it is not thereby arbitrary, i.e., dependent on social and historical forces (as it was in Locke). It is bound by the fundamental constraints of our cognitive apparatus and, hence, follows rules that are shared by all human beings. Objectivity, so conceived, is subjectively patterned, constituted by our mind, yet in a way that proceeds according to necessary and universal (i.e., a priori) principles that operate – as it were – as the syntax of the world. The price we pay for this act of ordering is the loss of access to how objects are independently from the contributions the human mind makes in order to experience them. For Kant, there is no immediate conception of the world, no knowing of “things in themselves,” i.e., of objects outside their relation to our mind. Pure “noumenal” alterity is in principle inaccessible, a negative notion that goads and torments us. It goads us, for it speaks of a communion with reality that is the prerogative of a perfect rationality, i.e., a divine intellect capable of grasping essences directly, without the mediation of sensible intuition. It torments us, for such a promise of communion engages us in the impossible project of stepping outside our skins and escaping our finitude. To know the world entails for Kant in part to lose it, to accept the impossibility of grasping the unconditioned reality as it would disclose itself to a reason unencumbered by the limits of a finite, embodied consciousness. Since we find in the world what we have put into it, every act of cognition is ultimately self-referential. The unconditioned, the metaphysically independent object, ineluctably escapes us.

1 See KrV A805/B833. In the Jäsche Logic, Kant adds a fourth question, “What is man (der Mensch)?”, and accounts for its privileged position in the Critical System: “Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this as anthropology, because the first three questions relate to the last one” (Log 9:25). We will return to this point in the last section of the paper.

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The Kantian “turn to the subject” is, then, far more radical than the one attributed to Descartes. For while Descartes believes that we must first secure the epistemic reliability of our faculties by relying on God in order to make knowledge claims about the true physical and metaphysical order, Kant teaches us to do without divine warranties altogether. He is not ravaged by the anxiety of skepticism, by the Cartesian distrust in the power of our minds to know the external world. On the contrary, for Kant, human reason is overweening and exudes confidence in its own powers. If anything, it needs to guard itself from the temptation to adopt God’s point of view – the siren song of a world of pure essences, in which there is no metaphysical loss. The epistemic danger is not, as it was in Descartes, an “evil genius” – a power outside the mind. On the contrary, the enemy of knowledge is for Kant internalized: it lies in the tendency of our own reason to disregard its finite, sensible makeup and embrace the fantasy of a pure, disembodied rationality. This fantasy, Kant is the first to admit, is a source of both attraction and affliction, since in our attempt to tackle questions that we can neither answer nor dismiss (KrV Avii), it throws our reason into inner contradictions that threaten to tear it apart, yet also entice it to keep it going. Thus, Kantian critique, i.e., the examination of the scope and character of our cognitive capacities, is not a mere intellectual exercise in self-cognition: it also contains an important practical dimension. For the self-examination of reason must be accompanied by a rigorous discipline on our part, a continuous effort to respect our cognitive limitations and prevail over the ineradicable temptation to transgress them. If we read the first Critique this way, we come to see that for Kant autonomy is not confined to the moral domain but informs our cognitive activity from the very beginning. Kantian cognition is a form of self-determination in which we follow, and learn to respect, the principles we give to ourselves. The cognitive subject, therefore, does not exist as an essence prior to the exercise of her freedom, but establishes herself through it – and in this way brings herself into existence. There is for Kant no escaping the human point of view, such that all knowledge, all experience, all insight, all inquiry is fundamentally an expression of our subjectivity determining itself, taking charge of the world it constitutes through its own actions. Or, as Sartre pithily captured the Kantian mood in his popular Existentialism is a Humanism, “man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity” (2007, 24). This mood, Sartre tells us, encapsulates the “deeper meaning of existentialism” (2007, 24). It expresses the awareness of our ultimate responsibility for the world. Rather than being a mere thing in a network of things, a cog in the vast metaphysical machinery of the universe, the Kantian subject is answerable to the world she has constituted through her freedom, not only in the moral sense (as shall be discussed below), but also, ontically, in the sense that nature is not the other of humanity, but an extension and a mirror of our subjectivity. For just as we find in the world what we have put into it, we discover ourselves in the world we have made. In this process of interpenetration, the gap between mind and world, res cogitans and res extensa, vanishes. When it comes to humanity, there are no pure essences – existence goes all the way down. Sartre’s celebrated dictum is thus a page taken from the Kantian book. In sum, unlike Descartes who regards the objects of experience, their properties and their actuality, as independent from us, Kant’s Copernican turn brings us to the threshold of phenomenology and existentialism: there is no longer rupture, but an intrinsic tie between object and subject. From the Husserlian epoche, which allows us to suspend the epistemic ladling of meanings and examine in its purity how experience presents itself, to Heidegger’s inquiry into Dasein, Kant lays the foundation that inspires his successors to examine how our subjectivity informs and interprets the reality within and around us.

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What ought I do? Upon the altar where Kant sacrificed the thing in itself, he builds in the second question a new and mighty edifice – the edifice of a pure rational morality. This is a touch of architectonic genius on his part. For, as Kant conceives of it, morality does provide us not merely with guidance for our conduct (in his famous “categorical imperative”), but also with a path through which we can gain cognition –albeit for practical purposes only – of the most important objects that our theoretical reason was forced to give up: freedom, God, and immortality. These are ideas about the unconditioned which arise out of the very nature of human rationality, but which have no epistemic function, for they refer to objects that lie beyond the bounds of sensible experience. Philosophers have ignored those limits and confidently resorted to these notions, thereby strewing with their conflicting theories the “battlefield of metaphysics” and bringing the old “queen of the sciences” to disrepute (KrV Aviii). The energy they spent on sterile speculative skirmishes, however, need not go completely to waste. Kant believed that it can be redirected and channeled to productive immanent use. For, he argued, although as objects of knowledge freedom, God, and immortality still remain utterly inaccessible, these notions can be redeployed as “postulates” of practical reason, and thus play an essential role in supporting our moral endeavors.2 In this way, the metaphysical frustration of theoretical reason can find satisfaction in the practical domain, where the goal is not to know the world, but to make it better, to transform nature into a kingdom of ends. Since what morality organizes are not sensible intuitions but our desires and the form we give to our wills, practical reason can overcome some of the cognitive hurdles that limit its theoretical use. The loss of the metaphysical object, Kant realized, is compensated by the promise of moral liberation, a practical restitution he captured with the motto, “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (KrV Bxxx). Crucial in this reaccommodation of the interests of reason is the notion of freedom, “the keystone of the whole structure of the system of pure reason” (KpV 5: 3-4). Freedom plays a pivotal role in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, for the systematic distinction between the conditioned and the unconditioned, i.e., the object as it appears to us (the so-called phenomenon) and the object as we presume it to be independently of our epistemic activity (the so-called noumenon), secures a space for morality irreducible to the cognitive constraints we impose upon the world. This space allows Kant to preserve the truth of the mechanistic worldview of modern science, according to which every event is preceded by a determining cause, without thereby sacrificing our commitment to personal responsibility. This commitment is predicated on the capacity human beings have to be free agents, i.e., “absolute beginnings,” the sole authors of a totally new chain of events (KrV A445/B473). The truths of science, therefore, can coexist with the truths of morality, provided we enforce a strict division of labor between them: explanation and prediction hold sovereign in the phenomenal world (the sphere of knowledge), normativity and imputation in the noumenal world (the sphere of morality). As a corollary of this division of labor, Kant conceives of practical freedom as tolerating no excuses. Unlike the accommodating view one finds, for example, in David Hume’s moral writings, Kant rejects the soft-determinism of our psychological states, a model whereby the cause of our actions correlates with our most powerful desires or inclinations. The will, for Kant, is free from all external determinations, including personal habits, social expectations, situational pressures, and so forth. Accounts that resort to these plausible “explanations” of our conduct are

2 We expand on this issue in the next section.

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no more than clever attempts at self-justification, rationalizing stories we use to escape responsibility for our actions. Kant has no patience with such clever evasions, for he thinks of freedom as “the property [our will] has of being able to work independently of determination by alien causes” (Gr 4:446). Since this independence does not determine what we are supposed to do, he dubs it “negative freedom,” in order to distinguish it from its “positive” counterpart, i.e., the honorific sense of freedom he reserves to autonomous action. In the latter case, the will is not merely independent from alien causes, but also follows a practical law it gives to itself and can thereby attain complete self-mastery and self-determination. Sartre accompanies Kant only half way. He adopts Kant’s negative conception of freedom, which, in Being and Nothingness, he identifies with the “nothingness coiled at the heart of being,” the insatiable power of negation by which human beings can transcend their own pasts and undo any of the choices they have made. But this open possibility of remaking oneself is unable to guide us on how to respond to our present entanglements – precisely the job Kant reserves for rational self-legislation (the positive sense of freedom). While choosing entails for Kant a normative criterion with which to weigh options and justify our actions (both to ourselves and to others), Sartre considers any such criterion too constrictive, an underhanded form of tyranny by which we enslave ourselves to a transcendent ideal of what we are supposed to be. This submissive attitude bespeaks not only a failure of moral imagination, but also an abdication of personal responsibility: it is a deceptive way of letting our “essence precede our existence.” True freedom for Sartre is criterionless, or it is not freedom at all. The objective normativity of Kant’s honorific sense of freedom represents a subtle form of self-violation and self-betrayal – a charge Kant would reject as unfounded, for it is precisely in elevating our maxims to universal law that we first become who we truly are, namely, citizens in the kingdom of ends. A criterion-less choice is a selfish, counterfeit, and destructive form of freedom that exults in pure negation yet is ultimately sterile and affirms nothing. There are other elements of Kant’s practical philosophy, however, that made it all the way to existentialism. For example, we find in Part One of Religion an exploration of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, where Kant rejects the traditional idea that our moral condition is biologically inherited. If human nature is to have moral significance, Kant explains, it cannot possibly be determined by nature – it has to be chosen by us, and thus result from an act of freedom. In a passage that could be found in any existentialist manual, Kant writes: “The human being must make or have made himself into whatever he is or should become in a moral sense, good or evil. The two characters must be an effect of his free power of choice, for otherwise they could not be imputed to him and, consequently, he could be neither morally good nor evil” (R 6:44). That is, our fundamental moral outlook, along with the related aspects of our character, must be fully in our control if we are to be held accountable for them; as biological determinations, they have no ethical value whatsoever. So, while the traditional picture of Original Sin (as proposed by Augustine and amplified by the first generation of Protestant reformers) holds that our cognitive and moral faculties are thoroughly corrupted, and hence that we need divine grace to restore them, for Kant our moral fate falls squarely into our hands – and, if grace is needed to reform it, such grace must first be merited, earned through our own moral efforts. Those who think otherwise and wish to rescued from above operate “under the pretext of natural impotence” (R 6:51): since they find “moral labor vexing,” they overplay the extent of human helplessness and entrust to God what they alone must do. Behind a semblance of piety, they hide what is in fact their indolence and thus manage to preserve a good opinion of themselves. By blaming nature for what is actually their doing, they take refuge in traditional religious faith to conceal their bad faith. The Kantian connection between evil and self-deception had a lasting influence among existentialist thinkers. For Kant, evil (understood as the prioritization of self-interest over morality) 79

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has its roots in some sort of “inner perfidy” (R 6:38), by which we downgrade the demands of duty to make them fit what we want to hear. This act of obfuscation requires human beings to set in motion complex stratagems of self-deception: they must manipulate evidence, selectively marshal grounds, misuse norms of belief formation, and fabricate moral exceptions to be able to do, in false conscience, as they please. Immorality and self-deception go hand in hand, for duty is an inextricable incentive for the human will (R 6:24), making it impossible for human beings to reject altogether the authority of the moral law. This is something that only a “diabolical will” could do; for us, the trick consists in momentarily subrepting its demands. The goal is to leave morality in place while convincing ourselves that we can “take the liberty of making an exception […] ( just for this once) to the advantage of our inclination” (Gr 4:424). Evil, therefore, is a perversion of moral judgment that cannot be reduced to overt acts of immorality. Its roots go back to that spurious art of self-justification that allows us to feel vindicated in committing wrongful acts, be they horrendous or banal. Once again, the enemy of reason in the practical domain is not an external foe, a “devil” that exploits our weaknesses, “but is rather as it were an invisible enemy, one who hides behind reason and hence all the more dangerous” (R 6:57). Although there is still the question as to what brings an agent to choose to deceive herself (various answers are given in the secondary literature), Kant’s view undergirds much of Sartre’s treatment of “mauvaise foi” and the existentialist preoccupation with authenticity. For Kant, the latter represents the cognitive side of an upright moral agent. We cultivate it both “by contemplating the dignity of the pure rational law in us (contemplatione) and by practicing virtue (exercitio)” (MS 6:397). Practice is not enough, for, to the extent that we discover our moral character only retrospectively by reflecting on the patterns of prior choices, we get to know our moral identities too late, always après coup. For an evil agent, skilled in the art of self-deception, such reckoning may never come. Thus, the only chance she has to come to terms with herself is by contemplating the moral law, whose demands she can never fully rationalize away. This act of contemplation, Kant believes, is accompanied by certain emotional effects that can be known a priori, for the infringement of the demands of duty on our inclinations necessarily produce pain, a negative feeling (KpV 5:73) that results from striking down our self-love. It is by attending to this experience that we learn to keep the stratagems of self-deception in check. But this epistemically enabling lesson contains an inconvenient truth that most agents would attempt to forget. For, in “the way to godliness,” we must first pass through the “hell of self-cognition” (MS 6:441) – precisely the hurtful self-discovery that self-deception is designed to prevent.

For what may I hope? Kant’s third question, “For What May I Hope?”, is usually associated with his philosophy of religion. As it first appears in the Canon of Pure Reason, hope is meant to satisfy our desire for happiness (A805/B833), but in light of Kant’s doctrine of the highest good, which posits an ideal state of affairs in which happiness is distributed in “exact proportion” to moral worth (A811/ B839), the issue of hope forces Kant to revisit the strict division of labor that had heretofore governed his Critical Philosophy and venture into new theological territory. Although the problem of God was a long-standing preoccupation for Kant,3 it acquires a fresh meaning after his Copernican turn. In this new context, God is no longer the object of

3 See, for instance, one of his earliest texts, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763).

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metaphysical speculation, but the only acceptable response to what Kant considers an incontrovertible fact of our moral psychology: “it cannot be a matter of indifference to reason how to answer the question, What is then the result of this right conduct of ours?” (R 6:5). Without a final end in view, human beings would be “instructed indeed as to how to operate but not as to the whither (wohin)” (ibid.). Doing all they ought to, they would see no purpose in their conduct, and thus “obtain no moral satisfaction” (ibid.). Their virtuous endeavors would seem to them an exercise in futility, a pointless task. This overarching sense of meaninglessness, however, produces feelings of despondency and despair which are lethal for practical reason, whose motivational power depends (at least in part) on our capacity to find purpose in what we do. A perfect rationality would never face this predicament, but given our psychological makeup, our commitment to morality ultimately depends on finding an adequate response to these teleological concerns. In order to answer them, Kant introduces the postulates of God’s existence and the immortality of the soul. For, he thinks, in light of our psychological limitations (KpV 5:156, R 6:5), if we are to avoid moral desolation, we ought to adopt a worldview in which the incommensurable demands of happiness and virtue can be eventually reconciled. This reconciliation is the subject of moral hope, though it contains a perspective that is prima facie incongruent. After all, the Kantian system was built upon the assumption that there is an “insurmountable gulf ” (KU 5:176) between nature and freedom, between the demands of happiness and morality, and hence that the project of bringing about the highest good (and hence of bridging these incommensurable domains) may seem like a fool’s errand. The perplexity is compounded by a further difficulty: the moral worth which is supposed to guide the distribution of our happiness cannot possibly be assessed by human beings, whose cognitive apparatus confines them to the externalities of action and cannot possibly reach the underlying moral dispositions. Kant presents the postulate of God’s existence as an answer to all these conundrums. For God, as Kant conceives of it, is not only the “moral creator” of the universe, and hence author of natural laws that are receptive to our moral intentions, but also a judge with perfect moral insight, capable of penetrating the depths of the human heart. Faith in the existence of such a God is not a discretionary act, but one necessary to preserve the integrity of practical reason and sustain a life of virtue amid “all the evils of poverty, illness and untimely death” (KU 5:452) that surround it. Although we can never know whether God exists or not, we must believe in his existence if we are to take upon ourselves the duty of realizing the highest good. The theological underpinnings of this dimension of Kant’s ethical system, despite some claims to the contrary in the secondary literature, are evident throughout the Critical Period (e.g., KpV 5:113, KU 5:471, R 6:8n, TP 8:280n). Upon this foundation, Kant eventually builds what he refers to as his “pure rational system of religion” (R 6:12), whose capstone is his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), where he explores the scope of overlap between Christian doctrines and the moral principles which inform rational religion. Here he upends the traditional conception of God as a transcendent authority who authors and grounds the laws of morality, “elects” a few to receive grace, and/or requires ritual observances from us. Kant rejects this anthropomorphic picture, which we design with an eye to “win [God] over to our advantage” (R 6:169) and use Him to shield our self-love from the demands of duty. In its place, Kant puts an alternative, thoroughly moral picture of the divine, in which God receives only such determinacy as is required by our practical needs. Only such a God, the theological counterpart of the loss of the metaphysical object, is compatible with the demands of freedom. For if we somehow were to know God, be it through a rationalist metaphysic or empirically, self-interest in avoiding damnation would not only undermine our moral commitments, but also the arbitrary dictates of cosmic authority would occlude the rational grounding of duty (KU 5:459-60). 81

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Armed with this moral conception of the divine, Kant engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of traditional Christian dogmas (what he calls “revealed religion”), many of which he saw as historical remnants of human subterfuge and bad faith. These include the specifically Augustinian and early Reformation model of Original Sin, which he considered incompatible with our selfconception as autonomous agents, as well as the correlative doctrines of the Passive Reception of Grace, wherein our “sanctification” or moral transformation into a being “well-pleasing to God” comes through God’s actions upon us, and of “Vicarious Satisfaction,” wherein Christ takes upon himself our “debt of sin.” Though heretic in many respects and self-consciously critical of Christian orthodoxy, Kant’s religiosity would make many an existentialist flinch. Kant does not regard the concept of God (as the Sartrean in-itself-for-itself ) as incoherent, nor does he see faith (as Nietzsche would a century later) as an “otherworldly” escape, as a symptom of our physiological decomposition. Kantian religion is neither window dressing nor pathology, but the linchpin of the Critical System, an Aufhebung that allows nature and freedom to be reconciled through our moral efforts. Although there are no divine warranties that such a reconciliation will ever succeed, attempting it is not futile, for the hope in what we must do to get there puts us already on the path to the promised land. At the same time, it would be wrong to model Kant’s approach to religion in a manner too close to Kierkegaard’s, the hero of those existentialists (e.g., Dostoevsky, Maritain, Unamuno) who distrust the secularizing forces of modernity. This is because Kant does not present religion in terms of an inherent clash between faith and reason, as a schism between the “universal” and the individual, as an impulse to embrace an ethics higher than the moral law, or as an inherently solitary project. Making “room for faith” (KrV Bxxx) does not wed Kant to the absurd that characterizes the knight of faith, who marches in silence to Mount Moriah. On the contrary, the faith in question is a communal affair which remains strictly within the bounds of reason. A God that commanded the murder of one’s beloved son and forced us to use a language others could not understand would be, for Kant, a contradiction in terms (R 6:87).

What is a human being? The fourth question Kant asks, one he added to the original three in the Critique of Pure Reason, appears in correspondence (11:249), the Jäsche Logic (9:25), and Anthropology. In certain respects, this question seems to be the most obvious bridge between Kant and existentialism, given that the latter is generally construed as an examination of the human condition. Anticipating this focus in such thinkers as Heidegger and Sartre, Kant writes, for example, “[t]he greatest concern of the human being is to know how to properly fulfill his station in creation and to rightly understand what one must do in order to be a human being” (20:41). And, in a complementary passage: “The question is which condition suits the human being, an inhabitant of the planet that orbits the sun at a distance of 200 diameters of the sun. Just as little as I can ascend from here to the planet Jupiter, so little do I demand to have qualities that are proper only to that planet … I do not at all have the ambition of wanting to be a seraph; my pride is only this, that I am a human being” (20:47). As we have argued above, the issues of freedom and self-constitution are at the heart of Kant’s reflections on the human condition, just as they were among the existentialists. Our place in nature as well as our moral vocation, grounded in a capacity irreducible to the causal order, is the driving force of Kant’s philosophical anthropology. In his Logic, in fact, he proposes that the other three questions that occupy our reason (concerning the limits of knowledge, the demands 82

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of morality, and the need for hope) are to be “reckon[ed] all as anthropology” (9:25). This is so, Kant explains in related marginalia, because “transcendental anthropology” is tantamount to “self-knowledge of the understanding and reason” and thus incorporates all the other domains of inquiry, ranging from “geometry” to “literature… theology, law” and of course “morality” (15:395). To the extent that Kantian objectivity in all domains (epistemological, practical, and theological) results from the constitutive activity of our faculties, the inquiry into human nature is at the same time an inquiry into the fundamental structure of reality. For Kant, anthropology is – in a way – first philosophy. Perhaps the most striking difference with existentialism in this regard is that “existence” for Kant operates within a system of a priori constraints to which we are necessarily subject. Thus, the authorship of our selves is at best partial, for the syntax we impose upon the world obeys rules that are not chosen individually or collectively as conventional products of historical contingencies – they are facts we encounter as part of our natural endowments. These anthropological determinations condition the exercise of human freedom in ways that are as inescapable (since without them we would not have an “objective” world) as they are indemonstrable (since every attempt at demonstration already presupposes and relies on them). Kantian autonomy, therefore, is not fully transparent to itself – the question of how freedom is possible is opaque to us, and perhaps necessarily so, for if such knowledge were available (or more precisely, if there were in this “how” something to know), there would be no actual freedom at all. Accordingly, as Kant tells us in the second Critique, freedom is a “fact of reason” (Faktum der Vernunft), which we encounter as part of our deliberative activity, but which exceeds any attempts at knowledge or demonstration. The same could be said about the number of categories we encounter in our understanding or of forms of intuition in our sensibility, i.e., of the a priori structure that makes cognition of the world possible but which cannot fully demonstrate itself, for it is the “given” on the basis of which all knowledge must proceed. As we explained in the second question, Kantian freedom is not to be confused with Sartre’s, for whom freedom is primarily negation, pure indeterminacy – libertas indifferentiae in the Kantian jargon. On the contrary, Kant believes that freedom in the fullest sense is compatible with complete determination, not in the sense that it follows the causal order of nature, but in the sense that it is causa sui, for it follows the rational principles that lie within itself. That is, Kant regards the human will as inherently lawful: when we choose, we necessarily do so in virtue of self-imposed criteria by which we select between various options. These criteria belong to the nature of human reason, and the universalizability of the claims they generate, i.e., the fact that all rational agents could subscribe to them is the only warrant that we have properly applied them. This normative conception of rationality and freedom indicates that Kant is not to be understood as an existentialist with regard to human nature. Although he rejects the metaphysical reification of humanity that one can find, for example, in Aristotle, he nevertheless holds that the character of our agency, as free and self-determining beings, is necessarily rational – not as a matter of discretionary choice, but as an indelible trait. Such rationality imposes upon us restrictions and normative demands, limits that are no less strict because they arise from within us rather than heteronomous sources. A question which thus needs to be considered is whether or not this feature of human agency stands against the existentialist tradition, or whether, in its sheer formality, it remains compatible with it. For if the sort of (negative) freedom imagined by Sartre must still be harnessed by an agent, isn’t it inevitable that some criteria of choice are always used? If so, in spite of Sartre’s protest, would then there not always be a criterion or ground in the will according to which all ensuing criteria are chosen? Totally unconstrained freedom, Kant realized, is not freedom after 83

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all, since it would be indistinguishable from blind randomness: “the natural consequence of [the lawless use of reason]” is self-destruction, for “if reason will not subject itself to the laws it gives itself, it has to bow under the yoke of laws given by another; for without any law –not even nonsense– can play its game for long” (O 8:145). At the same time, given that criteria are norms and not fixed laws, for they do not apply themselves but require judgment on our part, they are always candidates for misuse and misinterpretation. Although Kant hesitates to regard action that falls outside of rational justification as free in the full sense (MM 6:227), such conduct is never beyond the pale – indeed, it is something to be expected from humanity. In its imperfect, albeit all-too-human expression, the Kantian conception of agency can well resemble the radical freedom of Sartre’s perspective. If we see Kant from this softer point of view, he has a valid claim to be considered the father of existentialism. Furthermore, Kant’s anthropological picture has also other aspects that are worth mentioning. One finds them interspersed throughout the corpus, particularly in Part One of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In the former, he speaks of a set of predispositions to good and propensities to evil, which seem to unfold in a necessary historical sequence and condition the a priori process of character acquisition – both by the individual and the human species as a whole. In the latter, this a priori dimension of Kant’s anthropological thought gives room to a more empirically minded methodology – a Beobachtungslehere (an observational theory). Here Kant reviews every significant facet of humanity, from our sensory faculties and powers of imagination, to our “passions,” temperaments, aptitudes, and differing “characters,” across cultures, nations, and races. He intends this comprehensive knowledge of the world to further our sense of being cosmopolitan citizens, with a common moral destiny whose achievement is uncertain and totally up to us. To conclude, although it can be argued that this complex grid of anthropological determinations is a betrayal of existentialism, for it seems to return human “essence” to its old hegemonic role, Kant would see it as nothing of that sort. He would take those determinations, rather, as necessary reminders of our finitude, the neglect of which is the death of human reason. For, as he puts it in one poignant image in the first Critique, even if “[t]he light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space” (KrV A5/B9), it could not possibly fly without friction and constraints.

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SECTION II

Interiority, Self hood and Integrity The Individual as regards the Social

9 SECTION II: INTRODUCTION Nigel Rapport

How best to understand the existent subject at the centre of all human action and discourse, without whom no meaning is possible? Existentialism understands subjectivity to prefigure, and not to be reducible to, the labels we give to ourselves, or are given from the outside. What are the ontological foundations of this existentialist position? This section explores human interiority and self hood. The profound question of what can it mean to be, to ‘possess’ existence, to have a self, concerns human beings’ inner life. In his celebrated essay, Existentialism and Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre asserted that ‘the ­subjectivity of the individual’ was the necessary ‘point of departure’ for a study of the human, ‘not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teaching upon the truth’ (1997[1946], 44). As Sartre elaborates: ‘At the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I think, therefore I am, which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to itself. Every theory which ­begins with man, outside of this moment of self-attainment, is a theory which thereby suppresses the truth, for outside of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable (…). [T]here is [an absolute] truth which is simple, easily attained and within the reach of ­everybody; it consists in one’s immediate sense of self. In the second place, this theory alone is compatible with the dignity of man, it is the only one which does not make man into an object (…)—that is, as a set of predetermined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which ­constitute a table, or a chair or a stone’. 1997[1946], 44–5 In their different ways, all the chapters in this section pay heed to Sartre’s pronouncement, beginning from the subjectivity of the individual human being, exploring the world, social, cultural, symbolic, institutional, material, historical, from this perspective. How does the integrity of the human being appear at different moments in different worldly settings? Another way to formulate this human condition is offered by Georg Simmel, one of social science’s founding voices, when he writes that: ‘society is a structure which consists of beings who stand inside and outside of it at the same time’ (1971[1908], 14–5). ‘Life is not entirely social’, DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-11

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Simmel continues, and human beings reserve part of their personalities from entering into interaction. Human beings’ extra-social nature—their interests, worth, temperament and fate— remain, Simmel insisted, for ‘the social environment does not surround all of the individual’ (1971, 13). What Simmel points to is the individual’s inner life, their interiority, the qualia of their consciousness, how it feels to be them, how they see the world, how they intend to project themselves into the world that lies beyond the boundary of their embodiment. There is a pure individuality to the individual human life, Simmel concludes, an individuality ungraspable by, and in direct conflict with, the exterior symbolic forms, institutions and habitualities of society and culture: the ‘greatness and depth, the miracle of individuality and the beauty of life, remains within itself ’ (2005[1916], 108). What the above leaves unspecified, however, is how in particular the individual experiences the external domains of society and culture, and the nature of power in this relationship. Even within a humanist tradition, rather different emphases are to be found. For Karl Marx, famously: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. 1996[1852], 32 Equally forthright is the contemporaneous statement by Ralph Waldo Emerson: All that you call the world is the shadow of that substance which you are, the perpetual creation of the powers of thought. (…) You think me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstance. Let any thought or motive of mine be different from that they are, the difference will transform my condition and economy. I—this world which is called I—is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me. 1981[1842], 95 Sartre, again, offers something of a middle position: [There is] a human universality of condition (…), all the limitations which a priori define man’s fundamental situation in the universe. His historical situations are variable (…) but what never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labour and to die there. These limitations are [at once] objective, because we meet with them everywhere and they are everywhere recognizable: and subjective because they are lived and are nothing if man does not live them—if, that is to say, he does not freely determine himself and his existence in relation to them. And, diverse though man’s purposes may be, at least none of them is wholly foreign to me, since every human purpose presents itself as an attempt either to surpass these limitations, or to widen them, or else to deny or to accommodate oneself to them. 1997[1946], 45–6 How individual human beings ‘surpass’, ‘widen’, ‘deny’ and ‘make accommodations with’ the objective condition of being in the world is the topic that the chapters below variously 88

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explore—enquiring of the Marxian, Emersonian and Sartrean version of this ‘limitation’—and all from the perspective of the individual actors themselves. One might formulate the issue as the nature of the relationship between structural power and existential power (Rapport 2003). There is the structural power by which a sociocultural environment endeavours to define and categorise, channel and contain individual life, but there is also the existential power whereby a free-ranging, authorial intellect defines its own objectives, and projects these into and as the world, without being subject to, determined by, external ­circumstance. Alongside an awareness of the structural power of what is institutional, corporate, collective, impersonal and not-individual to impact upon what is individual, there must be an appreciation of the existential power of individual human beings to create worldviews—personally meaningful and viable environments for themselves—and moreover to traverse these individual environments in the pursuit of their own gratification and on their own projected course. While social structures may aim and claim to constrain, even mould, individual expression, nevertheless individual consciousness remains a manifestation of uniqueness and a means of transcendence. In the rush to depict the ‘political power’ of techniques of influence and oppression, writes Michael Jackson (1996, 22), a recognition of the ‘existential power’ to act and constitute identity may be lost. In a focus on ‘institutional processes of governance’, a broader conceptualisation of ‘the power to do, the capacity to achieve things or projects’ may be negated (Eves 1998, 20–1). Residing in and deriving from abstract and impersonal entities and forces, such as social structures, languages, discourses, unconscious drives, habituated practices, and categorical designations, such as class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, an objectified structural power is seen to be somehow responsible for its own effects, controlling the individual ‘members’ seen as living within its compass—the ciphers and pawns of that power. We do not, however, do justice to individual human being if we understand the interiority of consciousness to be merely an emanation and expression of certain systems of structural-institutional formation, coercion and control. Power can be conceived of existentially as an inherent attribute of individuals as active beings, beings who, through their ongoing activity-in-the-world, create and recreate meaningful environments in which they live. Emerson and Nietzsche refer in this connection to individuals’ native ‘force’, John Dewey to their ‘impulse’, Max Weber to their ‘will’ (Beteille 1977, 49). Residing within individuals, and lent to the relations and groupings to which they lend their allegiance, ‘existential power’ compasses the force, the will, the energy, in a word the agency, whereby individuals produce effects in their worlds—effect worlds, in fact (Rapport and ­Overing 2000, 1–9). Such existential power is at once something metabolic, something pertaining to individuals as embodied physical organisms, and something intelligent, pertaining to the capacity to sense and make sense. It is a drive and an assimilation. Gregory Bateson spoke of individuals as ‘energy sources’ (1973, 126); as discrete centres of energy individuals drive themselves out into the world, assimilating what their senses reveal of its nature, and imparting to it their own interpretations in the form of wilful activity. While individuals’ bodily boundaries are permeable, then, and while they are dependent on energy-transfers across these borders, inasmuch as they exist individuals have an inescapable physical and experiential separateness which differentiates and distinguishes them from the rest of the world and makes them axes of intentionality within it. It can even be contended that the existential power—the energy, will and force of individual human life—underlies the extent to which social institutions gain prominence in public life and continue to be a manifestation of power—the power of classification and normativisation, of hierarchicalisation and exclusion, and so on. The structural and institutional is worked by the individual, the abstractions made concrete, animated; to understand the ‘power’ of institutions 89

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is to see their being worked, and resisted, and negated, in all manner of ways, for all manner of purposes and in every moment, by wilful individuals. There may be a dialectic between the structural and the existential—the structural social and cultural worlds of history becoming unavoidable—but such a dialectic should not obscure the recognition of the ontological priority of the existential, also its qualitative distinctiveness. One recognises existential power as a ‘real quality’, a ‘concrete thing’, prior to and independent of anything else (Helms 1993, 9). Existential power is an embodied attribute—originating in and manifested through individual bodies—and by its use human beings may be found inhabiting individual worldviews and pursuing personal life-project in environments that represent extensions of their subjective phenomenologies. And so to the contributions of this section: Ronald Stade’s chapter treats what are described as the ‘distinct and incompatible impulses’ of human sociability and unsociability: universally it is the case that individuals oscillate between a will to be sociable and a will to be unsociable. Stade’s point of analytical origin is a Kantian reference to the human ‘dilemma’ of being both social and wanting to have everything one’s own way. ‘Unsociable sociability’, as Kant termed it, means that human beings combine a propensity to enter into society with a resistance that threatens constantly to break up society. The inner life of the human individual entails the perpetual predicament of desiring an (unsociable) autonomy and at the same time needing to be sociable and recognised by others. Three strategies for life present themselves, Stade suggests: masked unsociability, radical sociability, and radical unsociability; his chapter is a review of each option. Stade’s conclusion is that unsociable sociability, while an existential dilemma, is also a rich source of human creativity, and that, for the most part, the comfort of sociability is compatible with voluntary periods of unsociability. What is needed, ethically, are social arrangements whereby individuals are able to manage unsociable sociability in ways beneficial and gratifying to themselves. The chapter by Nigel Rapport argues that to apprehend processes of social interaction, their course and content, calls conceptually for an appreciation of individual interiority: the stream of consciousness and internal conversation—the worldviews and life-projects—of the individual actors concerned. ‘The secrecy of subjectivity’ was, Emmanuel Levinas wrote, the foundational precept not only of a moral philosophy but also of any vision of ethical social relations; a liberal or free society must ‘render justice to that secrecy which for each human being is his life’ (1985, 79–81). Recognising human interiority, a subjectivity that is individual and personal, is fundamental to an authentic human science, the chapter urges, however secret that subjectivity may substantively remain. More precisely, human internal conversation originates within the individual self and remains individual in character; it is idiosyncratic in the meanings it allocates to specific symbolic, social and cultural forms, and it is self-directed, imbued with ‘selfish’ purpose. In dialogue with himself or herself, the individual expresses a stream of private meaning and value, of private style and intent, which transcend sociocultural anchoring. While it may be impossible to access the substance of individual interiority, it is important to recognise its capacities; also its consequentiality. The flow of articulate consciousness accompanies, animates, sustains and reinvents public exchange for its individual protagonists. The chapter by Doug Hollan is concerned with what is seen to be a dialectic between an individual, insular, gratuitous inner life on the one hand and on the other common sets of received social, cultural and material circumstances. Hollan’s informants, Nene’na Tandi and George, are entangled in the world, but their being entangled is characterised by angles of observation and by associations of thought, memory and image unique to them. Existence entails the developing and maintaining of a boundary and separation—what William James described as ‘absolute insulation’—between the self, its experiences and consciousness, and everything else in its world that does not possess the imprint of personal consciousness. This boundary is a porous, permeable, 90

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dynamic, and evolving one. An individual’s ‘selfscape’ is the emerging, implicit, systemic, moment by moment mapping of their embodied experiences onto the space and time of the contemporary socially, culturally and politically constituted world. The concept of selfscape thus attempts to capture a spiralling, non-linear, recursive, autopoietic process: the dialectic between received circumstances and the individual’s experience of those circumstances. The concept suggests the limits of thinking in terms of social types or categories alone, including relationality; for an individual’s ‘selfscape’ is both singular and socially and relationally constituted, the autopoieticism both consciously managed and an unconscious and unintended flow (as manifested in dreams). Entangled in sociocultural ecologies, the individual’s very presence alters those ecologies and the lives of others in both known and unknown ways; an interior scape of emotion and memory leads the individual to construct a particular kind of lifeworld for themselves and their consociates. The chapter by William Cullum and Andrew Irving explores the relationship between individual identity and physical movement, in particular where the state exercises the power to curb that movement—as in a jail. Movement is treated in the chapter as an existential capacity that responds to contingency and finitude, generating its character. The point of analytical origin is Montaigne’s characterisation of the ‘work of life’ as a perpetual journey, an unfinished project: a space of possibility whereby existence and even time itself may be bent to a person’s will and fashioned through movements, actions and relations with others. How does this manifest itself, however, in a state of imprisonment: incarcerated in the American penitentiary system? How are existential capacities for movement, action and expression realised, constrained, recalibrated in U.S. Federal Prison? Here is a recasting of categorical identity and legal status: a change in rights, verbal address, clothing—and freedom of movement. The outer public life of conventional activity and talk and the inner life of private and secret meanings represented a dichotomy in human existence according to Virginia Woolf, and it is within the capacity of the latter to ‘create what is outside itself and beyond’ (1938, 150). Focusing on how prisoners move—and are moved— within the U.S. penal system provides this chapter with the opportunity to understand how time and space, body and identity are lived, experienced and organised, as a particular category of person who is continuously subject to the will of others. Movement of a different kind is focussed on in the chapter by Andrew Dawson, and a different kind of containment: driving in a car. Motoring is examined as a practice that facilitates and mirrors states of consciousness, enabling the driver to wrest control over, work upon and refigure senses of being. This is in marked contrast to the way in which, within current ‘automobilities scholarship’, a Marxian narrative still dominates, car-driving being seen as engendering a controlled body, a de-individualised subject-position. Critiquing such a narrative, the chapter charts the frequent drives undertaken by Dawson in the company of Mira Celić between Tuzla and Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, portraying the personal relationalities between driving, consciousness and being. Through driving, it appears, Mira Celić purposively resists current collectivising political projects of ethnic-nationalism, escaping into a more comforting world of both privacy and Yugoslavism. In cars, people are ethnically un-differentiable beings who share the phenomenology of driving and the choreography of traffic. The being or self that Mira Celić inhabits while driving her car cannot properly be regarded as an outcome of ideological interpellation, the chapter urges, nor as an aspect of an actor-network that determines that self ’s assembling. Rather, as different states of consciousness manifest themselves in different stages of her journeying, Celić works out who she is and who she wants to be and gets to feel ‘well’ again in post-war Yugoslavia. Her car is her private sanctuary, and the roads, landscapes and day-scapes she traverses while driving provide Mira Celić with a reminder of her existential power. 91

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Finally, both the notion of a dialectic between an individual life and sociocultural circumstance, and the relation between individual identity and movement, come together in the chapter by Jonathan Skinner. Through an ethnography of ‘Michael’ as a tango dancer—and of Skinner himself—the chapter uses dance to investigate the nature of human relationships, the meaning of intimacy, and the question of individual identity, as bodies share in the rhythm and physical togetherness of the dance floor. More precisely, Skinner investigates an existential ‘knowing with and from the body’ when the reality experienced is a kind of communion, even ‘intercorporeality’, of responsiveness, empathy and synchrony. Tango facilitates an introspective gaze, Skinner argues, and at the same time demands an ‘authenticity’ between dancers, an immediate responsiveness due to the unchoreographed nature of the dance as an event. Considering the meaning to Michael, in particular of dancing Argentine tango in London as a weekly personal habit or on holiday abroad, Skinner urges an appreciation of these events not as moments of social definition or cultural habitus—as generic and generative miniatures of social structure. While structured around learned conventions of gendered movement and physical togetherness, the tango events have an ‘existential’ proportion for Michael; they are ‘excessive’, enabling him to imagine, improvise, create and reinvent, to ‘channel his inner gaucho’. Michael defines, narrates and embellishes an individual life as he engages in a social dance through which he may also imagine achieving harmony with the Other.

References Bateson, G. 1973. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Frogmore: Paladin. Beteille, A. 1977. Inequality among Men. Oxford: Blackwell. Emerson, R. W. 1981 [1842]. ‘The transcendentalist’, In C. Bode (Ed), The Portable Emerson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Eves, R. 1998. The Magical Body: Power, Fame and Meaning in a Melanesian Society. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. Helms, M. 1993. Craft and the Kingly Ideal: Art, Trade, and Power. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Jackson, M. 1996. ‘Introduction: Phenomenology, radical empiricism, and anthropological critique’, In M. Jackson (Ed), Things As They Are. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Levinas, E. 1985. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Marx, K. 1996 [1852]. ‘The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, In T. Carver (Ed), Later Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rapport, N. 2003. I Am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge. Rapport, N., and J. Overing 2000. Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge. Sartre, J-P. 1997 [1946]. Existentialism and Humanism. London: Methuen. Simmel, G. 1971 [1908]. ‘How is society possible’, In On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2005 [1916]. Rembrandt: An Essay in the Philosophy of Art. New York: Routledge. Woolf, V. 1938. The Common Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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10 UNSOCIABLE SOCIABILITY Ronald Stade

The human being has an inclination to become socialized, since in such a condition he feels ­h imself as more a human being, i.e. feels the development of his natural predispositions. But he also has a great propensity to individualize (isolate) himself, because he simultaneously encounters in himself the unsociable property of willing to direct everything so as to get his own way, and hence expects resistance everywhere because he knows of himself that he is inclined on his side toward resistance against others. Kant 2007 [1784], 111

Introduction Upon birth, human beings cannot survive without someone (or something) taking care of them. Commonly, such caretaking includes not just feeding the infant but also interacting with it, thereby supporting its neural development. In time, most human children will learn how to communicate verbally and with gestures. Some children will know how to communicate in the Weihai dialect of Mandarin. Others will learn how to understand and speak the Chamorro dialect spoken on the island of Luta, the Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language or the Glaswegian version of English. Some children will come to understand when to wave goodbye, how to fist bump and what a frown might signal. All of this is meant to say that, usually, human beings, in their early years, survive because of, and learn how to be human from, other human beings. In this sense, human beings cannot but be considered social. At the same time, human beings are typically born not just with a will to live (in the general Schopenhauerian sense) but also with the ability to direct their will outwards. The infant fusses, cries and screams, for example, to incur a reaction that helps it stay alive. At a certain age, the will of the child is bound to come up against the world and it experiences the resistance of others. It might react by ‘throwing a tantrum’, that is, by giving expression to the frustration that comes from not being able to have things its own way. These facts, known to anyone who has ever spent time with children, are both trivial and profound. They are trivial because they are unremarkable. They are profound because they tell us something about the inner life of human beings. Immanuel Kant (2007 [1784], 111) discussed the human dilemma of, on one hand, being social and, on the other, wanting to have everything one’s own way. He referred to this as ‘unsociable DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-12

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sociability’ (ungesellige Geselligkeit). According to Kant (ibid), human beings have the ‘propensity to enter into society, which, however, is combined with a thoroughgoing resistance that constantly threatens to break up this society’. ‘Man’—as human beings were referred to in the past— is ‘willing to direct everything so as to get his own way’, but also wants to be recognised by ‘his fellows, whom he cannot stand, but also cannot leave alone’ (ibid). Hence, the inner life of the human individual harbours two impulses: a desire for absolute autonomy (unsociability) and the need to be recognised by, and be in the company of, others (sociability). Together, these impulses present the individual with the perpetual predicament of unsociable sociability. Obviously, both sociability and unsociability are social phenomena insofar as one can be sociable and unsociable only vis-à-vis someone else or others. At an abstract level, this is nothing but repeating the Hegelian formula of x containing both x and non-x (that is, its own negation). In practice, though, sociability and unsociability are distinct and incompatible impulses in that they are individual in origin. There seem to exist at least three practical solutions to the predicament of unsociable sociability, the most common of which is to keep one’s unsociability out of sight by hiding it behind a mask of sociability. Less common solutions include radical forms of either sociability or unsociability. All three strategies to manage unsociable sociability—masked unsociability, radical sociability and radical unsociability—will be reviewed in this chapter. While the strategies are likely to be familiar, it is important to keep in mind that although, in practical terms, they tend to be discrete categories they nevertheless allow the individual to shift back and forth between degrees of sociability and unsociability:

A total commitment to sociability or unsociability can be found at the opposite and furthest ends of a categorical continuum. Everything in between, however, is how most of us seem to cope with the existential conundrum of unsociable sociability. Below follow four sections. The first is devoted to masked unsociability, the second to radical sociability and the third to radical unsociability. The final section consists of a brief conclusion.

Masked unsociability Are human beings essentially social animals? The often-quoted description of the human being as zóon politikón (Aristotle, Politics, 1253a), that is, as an animal of society—as opposed to an animal that just exists by itself or in the confines of its immediate family—suggests that sociability is part of human nature. Aristotle believed that ‘man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal’ because ‘man alone of the animals possesses speech’, which allows human beings to deliberate good and bad, right and wrong, and thus have the capacity to make moral choices. Epicurus, whose ideas we know primarily from accounts by his follower Lucretius, held an opposing view. Epicurus, who was born when Aristotle was in his 40s, is reported to have thought that human beings once began as selfish animals, who were unable to grasp the common good, had no customs or laws, each seizing what prey chance put in her or his 94

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way (Lucretius, V, 958–960). Only because sociability provided an evolutionary advantage did humans learn to take care of one another and subsequently adopt laws and customs that governed social interaction, believed Epicurus. His evolutionary model resurfaced in Thomas Hobbes’ (1657, 15) writings when the latter asserted that ‘the natural state of men, before they entered into society, was war; and not just that, but a war of all against all’. Hobbes considered human beings to be unsociable by nature, and extremely so, and to only have become sociable when it benefitted them by providing social peace and security. Epicurus, as well as Hobbes, assumed a natural state of human beings that was unsociable, but that changed in a fundamental evolutionary turn from initially each fending for her- or himself to subsequently living in aggregations. (Needless to say, this model of human evolution is not consistent with science.) Apart from agreeing with Epicurus on sociability as a product of human evolution, Hobbes was also convinced that sociability actually did not correspond to human nature, that it was just a veneer of courtesy. Instead, the human essence is unsociability: ‘men have no pleasure (but on the contrary a great deal of grief ) in keeping company where there is no power able to overawe them all’ (Hobbes 1651, 101). Centuries earlier, the Chinese philosopher Xun Kuang put it in even stronger terms: ‘Human nature is evil [è]; all goodness is man-made [that is, not really part of human nature]’ (Xunzi 23.1a). What Xun Kuang meant by calling human nature evil is that human beings in the absence of education, discipline and self-improvement act selfishly and just pursue what comes easiest to them. It is therefore necessary to instil sociability in humans, to turn them into social beings. This age-old idea of private vice being turned into public virtue through moral education and, if necessary, punishment was eventually subverted—and indeed inverted— by men like Bernard Mandeville, who argued that selfish individuals living in aggregation produce public virtue. From Mandeville to Friedrich Hayek, the key trope has been that unsociable individuals who are driven by covetousness, who do nothing but act in their self-interest, and who compete with one another, will create prosperity and public benefits. Whether the unsociable nature of human beings needs to be suppressed through dominance or self-discipline or given free rein to bring about a capitalist utopia, it is assumed that humans are not social animals by default. Rather, sociability is thought of as an artifice or achievement. Already in the early years of a human’s life, unsociability is considered an unacceptable trait by most adults and in most sociocultural contexts. Infants who have established a secure attachment to a caregiver will in the course of their development exhibit what is known as stranger anxiety (also known as eight-month anxiety). Adults are likely to tell the child that it need not be shy or afraid (that is, to express unsociability). Later, toddlers might be urged to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ to strangers, to not take another child’s toys, to be a good girl or boy—in short, to be sociable. To become a person, human beings have to put on a mask of sociability. (One of the more unsettling scenes one can witness is a young child being able to put on a flawless mask of sociability.) The word ‘person’ is borrowed from classical Latin persōna, the word for the mask, usually made of clay, sometimes of bark, used in antiquity by actors. As the characters in plays became standardised, the term persōnae came to refer to typical dramatic roles and, in extension, to the parts played by people in life. In a chapter entitled ‘Behind Our Masks’, Robert Ezra Park (1950, 249) wrote: ‘It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person in its first meaning, is mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role’. He went on: ‘In a sense, and in so far as this represents the conception we have formed of ourselves—the role we are striving to live up to—this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. In the end, our conception of our roles becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality. We come into the world as individuals, achieve character, and become persons’ (ibid: 250). 95

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Jean-Paul Sartre held a diametrically opposed view. For him, the mask is definitely not ‘our truer self ’. To let our roles become ‘second nature and an integral part of our personality’, Sartre considered an instance of what he called bad faith (mauvaise foi), that is, of the individual surrendering to social role expectations and disavowing her existential freedom. The medical doctor who fuses her being with her professional persona; the artist who turns himself into a caricature of what an eccentric artist is supposed to look and act like; the Muslim who assumes the identity of a devout believer in everything she says or does: they all would be accused of bad faith by Sartre, whose most well-known example of bad faith is a waiter in a café: His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually reestablishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. Sartre 1978 [1943], 59 By acting the way he does, Sartre’s waiter makes himself into a thing, a waiter-thing, just as ‘the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-thing’ (ibid). The waiter and the soldier disown their existential freedom that would allow them to burst out of their social roles. The difference between a thing and a human being is that the former is a being-in-itself (καθ’αὐτό), whereas the latter is both a being-in-itself and a being-for-itself. A being-in-itself simply is what it is. It is like a thing: a stone, a table, a tree, whereas being-for-itself is consciousness. Sartre thinks of consciousness as the negation of human thingness in that being-for-itself allows us to think about what we are, as well as about our past, present and future. This gives human beings the existential freedom to negate their own facticity, to transcend their being-in-themselves. To assume a blanket identity—like that of a waiter, soldier or zealot—is therefore, in Sartre’s view, to eschew one’s freedom. Because humans are beings-for-themselves, freedom is for them ­innate, that is, existential; which is why Sartre asserted that (for human beings) existence precedes essence. Whatever essence a human being is imbued with in terms of language, knowledge, beliefs, ­attitudes, practice, and so forth, it is preceded by her existential freedom. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz held a different view. For him, the cultural essence of human beings is what makes them human: ‘The problems, being existential, are universal; their solutions, being human, are diverse’ (Geertz 1973, 363). In the opinion of Geertz, one universal existential problem is ‘the characterization of individual human beings’ (ibid): ‘Peoples everywhere have developed symbolic structures in terms of which persons are perceived not baldly as such, as mere unadorned members of the human race, but as representatives of certain distinct categories of persons, specific sorts of individuals’ (ibid).1 These suggestions are a prelude to Geertz’s description of ‘Balinese culture’. Geertz claimed to have detected the cultural template for how ‘the Balinese’ understand personhood, time and social interaction. He argued that ‘the most striking thing about the culture patterns in which Balinese notions of personal identity are embodied is the degree to which they depict virtually everyone—friends, relatives, neighbors, and strangers; elders and youths; superiors and inferiors; men and women; chiefs, 96

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kings, priests, and gods; even the dead and the unborn—as stereotyped contemporaries, abstract and anonymous fellowmen’ (ibid: 389). Each Balinese individual, according to Geertz, does not play but is a social role. ‘The illuminating paradox of Balinese formulations of personhood is that they are—in our terms anyway—depersonalizing’ (ibid: 390). All social interaction is therefore a theatrical performance of roles, which is part of a cultural system that is maintained by a deep fear of failing to perform one’s role properly. This is why Geertz believed that the Balinese word lek, often translated as ‘shame’, in fact should be understood to mean something like stage fright. This feeling is said to have a key social function: ‘It is lek, more than anything else, that protects Balinese concepts of personhood from the individualizing force of face-to-face encounters’ (ibid: 402–403). The obvious question that arises from Geertz’s portrayal of Balinese personhood is: Who or what experiences lek? If the Balinese, in Geertz’s opinion, have perfected the art of antiindividualism—that is, of formulating personhood, ‘in our terms anyway’, in a ‘depersonalizing’ fashion—then it is surprising to read that there is some type of individual consciousness that has enough distance from the performance of social interaction to feel anxious about deviating from the cultural script. The portrayal of ‘the Balinese’ that Geertz (and before him Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead) presented to the world is of course a chimera. It takes public symbols, the public display of politeness and rhetorical strategies to avoid embarrassment to be the essence of ‘the Balinese’. Remarkably, Geertz never addressed the social and political tensions that raged on Bali when he conducted his field research there. Land reform and abolishing the caste system were two of the most contentious issues. Tensions ran high and political rallies took place one after the other. In the early 1960s Bali, there was an upsurge in membership of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), ‘so that by 1965 Bali was one of the PKI’s strongholds’ (Vickers 2012, 233). Then began the massacres targeting Communists, as well as minority groups, that began in Jakarta and that was coordinated by the National Party of Indonesia (PNI). ‘The wave of death was spread by black-shirted youths from the PNI who were so enthusiastic that Sarwo Edhy, the general whom left-wing Australian newspapers described as the “Butcher of Java”, said of the situation, “In Java we had to egg the people on to kill Communists. In Bali we had to restrain them”’(ibid: 236). Entire villages were burnt to the ground and Balinese were hacked to death by other Balinese in their tens of thousands. A macabre and tasteless question that could have been put to Geertz concerns whether or not the Balinese young man who swung the sword to decapitate a neighbour felt lek. Macabre and out of taste as the question may be, it reveals the inadequacy of Geertz’s cultural model, its superficial character. Having and using the power over the life and death of others, as the Balinese youth in their black shirts did, feeds human unsociability because it liberates the individual from having to care about the other. Unsociability as violence is something we will return to in the section on radical unsociability. Closely corresponding to Geertz’s portrayal of ‘the Balinese’ is the anthropological literature on ‘the Japanese’. While exoticising descriptions of ‘the Japanese’ did not begin with Ruth Benedict’s (1946) The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, her ‘homogenizing and timeless portrait of “the Japanese” added momentum to the growing interest in “ethnic nationalism” in Japan, evident in the hundreds of ethnocentric nihonjinron—treatises on Japaneseness—published since the postwar period’ (Robertson 2005, 7). In 1984, Nippon Steel published a book that summarises the key ideas of nihonjinron: the essence of Japaneseness is ‘the avoidance of friction between people; a propensity to work hard; conformity and concern about what others will think; awareness of hierarchy and an emphasis on vertical relations; the belief that man should live in harmony with, 97

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and not try to conquer, nature’ (1984, 322–325; quoted in Goodman 2005, 60). Even nihonjinron authors like Takeo Doi, however, knew that beneath the surface of sociability there was a tension between true feelings, honne, and social appropriateness, tatemae. The concept of honne is well known in Japan. It refers to an individual’s actual feelings and opinions that can only be expressed in intimate social settings. (To express honne can under the right circumstances also serve to create intimacy.) The mask that is tatemae, on the other hand, might consist of politeness, fake smiling or an expressionless face. While Takeo Doi and other nihonjinron ideologues argued that the dichotomy between a social mask and an authentic self is unique to Japan, it demonstrably is not. On the contrary, it is universal and normative differences can only be found in how and when social masks should be worn, in relation to whom, and how and when they can be removed. Most of this was conceptualised already by Erving Goffman, who analysed social life in terms of performance. What I have called the social mask or mask of sociability, Goffman referred to with a theatrical reference as the frontstage. It is ‘the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance’ (Goffman 1956, 13; again: in the past, masculine pronouns were used to designate all human beings). In a move that takes us back to Sartre’s idea of bad faith, Goffman (ibid: 10) distinguished between cynical and sincere frontstage performances: ‘When the individual has no belief in his own act and no ultimate concern with the beliefs of his audience, we may call him cynical, reserving the term sincere for individuals who believe in the impression fostered by their own performance’. While Goffman thought that movements in both directions occur—from sincerity to cynicism and vice versa—he clearly held a moral view on insincere cynical performances in that he considered them wicked (one can think of politicians and business leaders who pretend to act selflessly or conmen who gain the trust of others through subterfuge). Employing Goffman’s terminology, one could say that Sartre was less concerned with cynical than with sincere performances, in particular those that result in an individual fleeing her existential freedom. It is this aspect that the next section will centre on.

Radical sociability The idea that human beings are social by nature, or ontologically (that is, according to theories of being or existence), is ancient, as are extreme forms of sociability in which the individual loses her or his self, which we already touched upon with Sartre’s idea of giving up one’s existential freedom to make oneself into a waiter- or soldier-thing. The instances of radical sociability range in scope and severity of outcome: from dyadic relationships in which one submits completely to the other, to thousands committing mystical suicide out of religious fervour (to use Durkheim’s expression). In between, we find forms of both involuntary and voluntary radical sociability— what Sartre called bad faith. An example of involuntary radical sociability is the kind of servitude in which the slave served as a personal attendant who had to be at someone else’s disposal without end, and who was not permitted to make independent life choices. Voluntary radical sociability includes cases in which an individual submits to totalitarian systems like cults and sects and in effect turns her- or himself into a slave. It is common in these types of totalitarian systems that the collective, which is usually ruled by a leader, dictates even ‘the most mundane details of daily life’ (Stein 2017, 1). The extent to which individuals relinquish their existential freedom for the sake of radical sociability inside a closed-off collective can be illustrated with the example of Tamika Campbell, a German stand-up comedian, born in 1974 in New York City into a Black supremacist cult of which her mother was a member.2 The cult had been founded 98

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in the 1960s, in Brooklyn, New York, by Dwight York as one of many Black Hebrew groups. Girls like Tamika had to wear the abaya and hijab and were supposed to only communicate in Arabic. Subsequently, York refashioned the cult first as Muslim Sufi, then as a sect that mashed up myths and identities from monotheistic religions, ancient Egypt, UFO stories, etc. York’s cult, now called Nuwaubian, relocated to Georgia, which is where Tamika Campbell as a child was offered by her mother to male cult members for sex. The mother told her to relax so it would not hurt so much. The mother, according to Tamika Campbell, was completely devoted to York, the cult leader. For his recognition and care, she would do anything. Meanwhile, Tamika Campbell grew increasingly tired of her cloistered life in serfdom. At age 13, she left the cult and a few years later, in 2004, Dwight York, who over the years had raped hundreds of girls and women, was handed a 135-year jail sentence. A question that Tamika Campbell, who moved to Germany and has a daughter of her own, still struggles with is how her mother could hand her over to be raped as a child. Certainly, the archetype of sacrificing one’s child must be the story of the Binding of Isaac. In the story, God tells Abraham to slaughter his son and burn him to ashes as a sacrifice—in the Muslim version, Abraham just dreams that he will slaughter him as a sacrifice—which Abraham agrees to.3 Jewish, Christian and Muslim believers usually take the story to be about Abraham’s unwavering faith and God’s rewards to those who surrender to him without doubt or hesitation. From an existential perspective, however, Abraham’s decision is indefensible. He is prepared to murder his own son for the sake of an abstract notion like faith instead of holding on to the actuality of his son’s existence. Furthermore, if Abraham had believed in a benevolent God, he surely would have surmised that this was a test so Abraham could prove his humanity and he therefore would have refused God’s command. While a figure like Abraham, who is about to slaughter his child because he had heard a voice or had had a dream, in today’s world might be committed to a psychiatric hospital, the world is still full of individuals who are prepared to kill others—often indiscriminately—as a matter of faith. The physical elimination of the self by the self is called suicide. Durkheim briefly discussed a type of suicide he called ‘altruistic’. He defined it as a suicide that results from insufficient individuation. While this characterisation would probably not apply to an altruistic suicide that is considered heroic—for example, a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of his comrades—it surely would fit what Durkheim called ‘acute altruistic suicide’, a typical example of which is the kind of mystical suicide that stems from religious fervour. Nowadays, what comes to mind in this context is the suicide bomber who blows her- or himself up to kill others. Sociological, psychological and historical research has been devoted to understanding who becomes a suicide bomber and under what circumstances, and a number of books have been published on the subject (to mention a few: Speckhard and Yayla 2016; Berko 2016; ­Edwards 2017, and Kumar and Mandal 2014). Often the purpose is to figure out how to prevent individuals from turning into suicide bombers. A shortcoming of most of these studies is their narrow focus on a particular conflict, specific type of suicide bombers (especially female suicide bombers), or sociopolitical context (for example, ‘homegrown’ suicide bombers). Despite the particular circumstances of suicide bombings, it is possible to glean from the literature that there exist some commonalities worth mentioning. One such commonality is that suicide bombers are cultivated in an environment of radical sociability that resembles the totalitarian regime of a cult. Alternatively, they become dependent on a kind father figure like a sheikh who indoctrinates them (see the examples in Speckhard and Yayla 2016). Another commonality, which again reminds one of cults, is the promise of ultimate certainty and salvation. Yet, neither radical sociability nor the promise of certainty and salvation are sufficient to turn 99

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someone into a human bomb. A substantive message is required as well: mystical suicides are based on an idea of justified holy violence (which is why there can never be a Jain or Quaker suicide bomber). The three components of radical cultist sociability, of a promise of ultimate salvation, and of holy violence seem to be both necessary and sufficient to turn someone into a human bomb. To summarise, radical sociability involves the loss of self and the submission to a totalitarian regime, be it in a dyadic relationship or in a collective. The most extreme expression of radical sociability—or one of its most tragic and disastrous forms anyway—is the kind of acute altruistic suicide in which an individual commits murder as a suicide bomber.

Radical unsociability The inversion of radical sociability is radical unsociability. Both define a relationship between an individual human being and other human beings, but whereas the former is a total devotion to another or to others, the latter is a complete turning-away from others. Aristotle, who was convinced that human beings by their nature are meant to be members of society, wrote of the unsociable individual: ‘a person who is by nature, and not merely through circumstance, outside of any society ranks either beneath or above human beings’ (Aristotle, Politics, I, 1253a; my translation). Beneath human beings are the animals and above them are the gods. Hence, Aristotle thought that the unsociable human being is either like an animal or a god. In a time when every inhabitant of Athens belonged to a social category—member of a certain family, wealthy, poor, slave, immigrant, man, woman and so on—to remain outside of society was taken to be a sign of insanity (irrational like an animal) or holiness (being close to the gods). Another way of reading the quote from Aristotle is to infer that those who like animals are beneath human beings seem irrational from a perspective of normative sociability but in fact choose to turn their backs on society and other human beings for their own reasons. And those who are above human beings might seem closer to the gods because they are powerful enough to be completely selfish and exploit others. In the following, these two types of unsociable human beings, the recluse and the parasite, will be discussed as personifications of radical unsociability. Although the history of individuals who exit family and society to live in isolation probably extends backwards to the beginning of humanity, the prototype of the self-chosen recluse is the hermit who leaves the company of human beings for spiritual reasons. The word hermit comes from the Greek éremo, ‘desolate’, ‘lonely’, ‘solitary’, which, in a figurative sense, was used to refer to the desert. The hermit, in other words, is a desert dweller. In Christianity, it is the so-called desert fathers—Saint Anthony of Egypt, Arsenius the Great, Macarius of Egypt, John the Dwarf, Moses the Black, Syncletica of Alexandria (who actually was a desert mother) and others—who are celebrated as hermits and founders of desert monasticism. Anthony is quoted as having said: ‘Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of inner peace. So like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to reach our cell, for fear that if we delay outside we will lose our interior watchfulness’ (Ward 1975, 3). Arsenius the Great was asked why he avoided his fellow monks and replied: ‘God knows that I love you, but I cannot live with God and with men. The thousands and ten thousands of the heavenly hosts have but one will, while men have many. So I cannot leave God to be with men’ (ibid: 11). The desert has long served as a symbolic space of remoteness and seclusion. The desert makes saints and prophets, that is, human beings who are believed to transcend human commonality 100

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and to be in communion with the divine. The desert allows for the full range of unsociability. In the Imitation of Christ (Book 1, Chapter 20), Thomas à Kempis writes, The love of solitude and silence: Very many great saints avoided the company of men wherever possible and chose to serve God in retirement. ‘As often as I have been among men’, said one writer [it was Seneca; RS], ‘I have returned less a man’. We often find this to be true when we take part in long conversations. It is easier to be silent altogether than not to speak too much. To stay at home is easier than to be sufficiently on guard while away. Anyone, then, who aims to live the inner and spiritual life must go apart, with Jesus, from the crowd. The canon regular and mystic, Thomas à Kempis, here explains why unsociability as a radical solution to unsociable sociability is preferable to keeping a balance between sociability and unsociability by not speaking too much and being sufficiently on guard while away, that is, masking unsociability. The Japanese style of masking unsociability, tatemae, is known to create a modern type of hermit who also seems to find it easier to withdraw from social life than to put on a mask of sociability. This is referred to as hikikomori, a term that applies to both the social withdrawal and the person who withdraws from social life and usually becomes a recluse in his or her own home for months or years. Saitō Tamaki (2013, 24) defines hikikomori as ‘a state that has become a problem by the late twenties, that involves cooping oneself up in one’s own home and not participating in society for six months or longer, but that does not seem to have another psychological problem as its principal source’. Although exact numbers are impossible to come by, it is estimated that there are hundreds of thousands hikikomori in Japan. How many hikikomori exist in other parts of the world is even more difficult to assess, but acute social withdrawal is certainly not a ‘Japanese disease’. While social withdrawal can be an expression (or symptom) of ailments like depression and social anxiety disorder (commonly known as social phobia), hikikomori appears to have its own clinical features. As Teo et al. (2014, 450) put it: ‘On a psychological level, those with hikikomori are frequently grossly and globally apathetic and amotivated, with an attitude bordering on nihilism’. In other words, hikikomori and similar behaviours seem to be a type of radical unsociability rooted in a sense of indifference and resignation, ostensibly the opposite of what motivated the desert fathers and mothers. Recalling Kant’s (gendered) definition of unsociability as the ‘property of willing to direct everything so as to get his own way’, there is yet another type of radical unsociability and that is the power to have everything according to one’s will. Those with enough resources for coercion or corruption (or both) can have their own way because they can force or bribe others to do their bidding. In contrast to reclusive monks, they do not need to isolate themselves (with the exception of afflicted individuals like Howard Hughes). To possess the might or riches that allows an individual to direct everything so as to get his or her own way is an omnipotent fantasy for many, in particular those who suffer injustices and feel helpless. This type of radical unsociability is parasitic in that it can only function if others are subjugated or submitted and therefore do not have everything their own way. Parasitic unsociability relieves the individual from having to put on a mask of sociability. Affluent and powerful individuals can afford to be rude and unpleasant. In summary, radical unsociability involves either a voluntary (hermitic) or pathological (hikikomori) social withdrawal or else a parasitic existence that allows a powerful individual to direct everything according to her or his own way. 101

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Conclusion From a global perspective, radical sociability and unsociability are marginal phenomena. Most humans have to mask their unsociability and get on with life. However, unsociable sociability, while an existential dilemma, is also a rich source of human creativity. The struggle of an individual will against adverse social conditions and oppressive norms and values has always been the essence of literature and dramas. So has been the difference and tension between an individual’s true feelings (honne) and social appropriateness (tatemae). It is also important to remember that, for the most part, the comfort of sociability is compatible with voluntary periods of unsociability (alone time).4 What is needed is a society and social relationships that permit the individual to manage unsociable sociability in a beneficial and gratifying manner. Such a social arrangement grants the individual enough space to live out the unsociable property of willing to direct most things so as to get her or his own way, while making sure that this does not require someone else to exist in submission, servitude or fear. This social arrangement also needs to give every individual the chance to be as sociable as she or he wants and with whomever she or he desires (again without forcing others to comply with such wishes). A social arrangement of this kind will not deliver anyone from all evil or end human tragedy. But it will afford the individual the existential freedom to move between solitude and human company.

Notes 1 Geertz never made clear why the categorisation of individual human beings ought to be considered a universal existential problem rather than a solution to a different problem. 2 This section builds on Tamika Campbell’s book Wie die Freiheit schmeckt (2020). 3 Arguments by Jewish authors that Abraham actually never intended to sacrifice Isaac are illogical, unless these authors posit that God is not omniscient and thus can be easily fooled. 4 See Caplan et al. (2019) on ‘aloneliness’: ‘the negative feelings that arise from not spending enough time alone’.

References Benedict, R. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Berko, A. 2016. The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Campbell, T., with D. Linke 2020. Wie die Freiheit schmeckt. Wie ich einer Sekte entkam und das Leben entdeckte. Munich: Piper. Caplan, R., et al. 2019. ‘Seeking more solitude: Conceptualization, assessment, and implications of aloneliness’, Personality and Individual Differences 148: 17–26. Edwards, D. 2017. Caravan of Martyrs: Sacrifice and Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Geertz, C. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Goffman, E. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Goodman, R. 2005. ‘Making majority culture’, In J. Robertson (Ed), A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (pp. 59–72). Oxford: Blackwell. Hobbes, T. 1651. Leviathan or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. (Pdf copy downloaded from https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.54964/mode/2up) Hobbes, T. 1657. Elementa philosophica de cive. (Pdf copy downloaded from https://www.google.com/books/ edition/_/PeoTAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1) Kant, I. 2007 [1784]. ‘Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan aim’, In G. Zöller and R. Louden (Eds), Anthropology, History, and Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kumar, U., and M. Mandal (Eds) 2014. Understanding Suicide Terrorism: Psychosocial Dynamics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Unsociable sociability Nippon Steel Corporation, Personnel Development Division 1984. Nippon: The Land and Its People. Tokyo: Gakuseisha. Park, R. E. 1950. Race and Culture. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Robertson, J. 2005. ‘Introduction: Putting and keeping Japan in anthropology’, In J. Robertson (Ed), A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (pp. 3–16). Oxford: Blackwell. Sartre, J-P. 1978 [1943]. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated and with an introduction by H. E. Barnes. New York: Pocket Books. Speckhard, A., and A. Yayla. 2016. ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate. McLean, VA: Advances Press. Stein, A. 2017. Terror, Love and Brainwashing. Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems. London and New York: Routledge. Tamaki, S. 2013. Hikikomori: Adolescence without End. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Teo, A., K. Stufflebam, and T. Kato. 2014. ‘The intersection of culture and solitude: The hikikomori phenomenon in Japan’, In R. Coplan and J. Bowker (Eds), The Handbook of Solitude: Psychological Perspectives on Social Isolation, Social Withdrawal, and Being Alone. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Vickers, A. 2012. Bali: A Paradise Created. Second edition. Tokyo, Rutland, Vermont, Singapore: Tuttle. Ward, B. 1975. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications.

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11 INTERNAL CONVERSATION Interiority and Individuality Nigel Rapport

We fight our little battles alone; you yours, I mine. (…) when your life is most real, to me you are mad: (…) I look at you and wonder. Olive Schreiner 1986, 102

‘The secrecy of subjectivity’ was the phrase that Emmanuel Levinas used, the foundational tenet, of a moral philosophy and a vision of ethical social relations. The secrecy of subjectivity justified the claim that ethical obligations to individual human beings must supersede all assertions of specific knowledge about those human beings. The secrecy of subjectivity entailed the Other being shrouded in such mystery for Ego that Levinas would liken otherness to infinity, to death and to divinity. The distance and ignorance contained in the difference between Ego and Other was comparable to the distance and ignorance, the unknowability, of infinity, death and divinity. The other person embodied ‘alterity’: a dimension of separateness or ‘transcendence’— interiority—that Ego could never overcome. There was nothing in Ego’s experience—Ego’s perceptual, conceptual, personal, social, cultural, world—that warranted a claim to knowledge of the subjectivity of another human being. A sphere of commonality is ‘absent between human beings’, Levinas wrote (1985, 78): the commonality of a society where people become like things, identified, counted and known ‘is not primary’ because ‘true human subjectivity is indiscernible’. This being the case, any attempted encompassment or claimed comprehension of an individual Other was an act of violence, potentially totalitarian and possibly fatal to that Other’s identity and life. A society respectful of freedoms ‘starts from this secrecy’, Levinas went on (1985, 79–81), and not from a synthetic concept of ‘the’ collectivity that is ‘total’ and ‘additive’. The acknowledgement of secrecy is necessary to ground an authentically free society, conceptually, legally, including instituting forms of sociality that ‘would render justice to that secrecy which for each human being is his life’. Levinas was writing in the shadow of the Holocaust and his experience as a prisoner of war whereby he felt that the Nazis’ guard dogs had a more authentic apprehension of humanity—of who was a human being—than had the Nazis themselves. It is not to be tolerated, Primo Levi, another Nazi camp inmate, wrote, ‘that a human being should be assessed not for what he is but because of the group [ Jew, woman, Danish, working-class] to which he chances to be assigned’ 104

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(1996, x). The burden of this chapter is methodological and analytical: to argue that methodologically and analytically, recognising human interiority, individual subjectivity, is fundamental to an authentic human science, however secret that subjectivity may substantively remain. But the ethical aspect of this procedure is not separate—any more than the purported pathology, relativity and epiphenomenality of individuality was to those (Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, Dumont, Foucault, Bourdieu, and so on) who have argued for Society or Culture or Community as having an ontological priority.

Individual consciousness ‘The individual is a product of society rather than its cause’, posited Emile Durkheim (1915). ‘Men do not act as members of a group in accordance with what each feels as an individual,’ LeviStrauss elaborated: ‘Each man feels as a function of the way in which he is permitted or obliged to act’ (1962, 114). Or from Harvey Sacks: ‘The fine power of a culture (…) does not, so to speak, merely fill brains in roughly the same way, it fills them so that they are alike in fine detail’ (1974, 218). This being the case: ‘the goal of the human sciences is not to constitute man but to dissolve him’ (Levi-Strauss 1966, 326). This chapter is written in opposition to such structuralist or poststructuralist claims. It argues that ontological thefts are being committed on the individual by such claims: on individual bodies and minds, capacities and creativities, agency and wilfulness, as well as on individual, dignity, value and rights. In particular, such claims are thefts of an intrinsic privacy and personality of consciousness, an interiority that is an experiential human truth. It is by way of such interiority, moreover, that as a social scientist, I would anticipate and advocate approaching an understanding of both our awareness and our engagement with the world. William James (1890, 239) spoke of ‘the mind’s conversations with itself ’. This ‘stream of thought’ was not necessarily coherent—it was possibly rambling, inconsistent, whimsical, random—but there was nonetheless a constancy and continuity to the inner voice of personal consciousness. Human experience took the form of interior voices, multiple in character: rational and irrational projections into the world, emotional reactions, aspirations and intentions, discernments of worth, moral choices, loves and hates, sensations of pain, touch and smell. All found their speaking parts in an interior conversation. What might be the status of this conversation, and its significance? This question is fundamental. Even should it be allowed that individuals’ interior conversation represents a universal human norm, still it could be contended that what is conversed about, and how and why, have entirely social or cultural ontologies. Individuals’ inner lives, on this view (as above), are thoroughly overdetermined versions of their outer sociocultural placements; at best, here are sites of individual accommodation to, and possessing of, sociocultural norms. The ‘strong’ retort to this is to say that inner voice and internal conversation manifest individuality: refracted into different moments, moods, contexts and personae, they are nevertheless emanations from one creative source. In internal conversation, one finds the individual communing with ‘itself ’ in its own terms: construing and inhabiting its own worldviews, working out and furthering its own life-projects: worldviews and life-projects that have individual sources (cf. Rapport 1993, 2007). This ‘strong’ thesis need not become an argument for solipsism, or for sociocultural m ­ ilieux being seen as nothing other than idealistic manifestations of individual desires. Norm and institutionalism, discrimination and exploitation, violence and tyranny are components of real experience, but it is vital that one does not misconstrue the nature of that interaction between individuals which makes for the structurings and patternings of sociocultural milieux. 105

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An exchange of symbolic forms gives rise to sociocultural normativities, continually and routinely, but not as things-in-themselves. Cultural symbologies may formally synthesise ‘individuals’ into societal ‘members’, but living in alignment with others does not translate as living through, or by virtue of, others (Rapport and Overing 2007, 226–37). Social milieux remain sites where individual interpretations, worldviews and life-projects aggregate and abut against one another; ‘social facts’ ‘live’ by way of ongoing individual attendance to them, and as matters of momentary workings and re-workings (Rapport 1993, 2003). It is not possible to presume the meaning of sociocultural exchanges for individual actors, or their conscious experiences, from their forms — however normative and institutionalised the words and behaviours appear. Indeed, it is personal experience, interpretation, intentionality and desire which continue to source and guarantee the existence of the sociocultural. Consciousness, imagination and feeling, even conversation and interaction, power and exchange: these phenomena make appearances in sociocultural milieux but they originate, and in their significant fullness they remain resident, within individual bodies and minds. It is to be accepted that the relationship between the individual body and its environs is a fluid and dialectical one: the body’s boundaries are permeable and shifting. Nevertheless, it is not an hypostatisation to speak of the individual as an experiencing and interpreting whole. For the interpretative capacities which the individual exercises over his or her experiences are the individual’s own and remain so; they can, indeed, be no one else’s and nowhere else. It was in this connexion that Gregory Bateson spoke of individuals as ‘energy sources’, and as responsible for the life-world of the ‘organism-in-its-environment’ (1973, 126, 426; cf. Rapport 2003, 215–39). To say that the individual is the source of meaningful experience is to point to a complex organicism that calls for none of the special pleading behind collectively elaborated orders of existence deemed sui generis: ‘a culture’, ‘conscience collective’, ‘habitus’, ‘social structure’, ‘social facts’.

Interior conversation Hywel Lewis (1982, 55) observes: ‘My distinctness, my being me, is quite unmistakable to me, there can be nothing of which I am more certain’. For George Steiner, this ‘being me’ is bound up with interior conversation. Human linguistic production, Steiner suggests (1978), can be ­d ivided into two distinct portions: the audible and the inaudible, or the voiced and unvoiced. The unvoiced or internal components, private to the individual, themselves span a wide arc, from the subliminal flotsam of word- or sentence-fragments to the silently rehearsed text. Quantitatively, Steiner urges, there is every reason to believe we speak inwardly and to ourselves more than outwardly to anyone else: ‘it is very likely that [internal speech-acts] represent the denser, statistically more extensive portion of the total distribution of discourse’ (1978, 65). Qualitatively, moreover, it can be argued that the inward and unvoiced enact primary and essential functions of identity: testing and verifying our individual ‘being there’, fixing us in time and space, effecting our flights of fancy. Unvoiced discourse is the current and currency of every phenomenology of consciousness, sleeping or waking, fanciful or pragmatic: from self-knowledge to self-satisfaction. What breaches the surface of the self, on this view, represents a fragment of an individual’s linguistic identity. Why, then, should it be axiomatic to treat the origins of language as inter-personal communication, to treat the evolution of human speech as concomitant with and generated by inter-individual social behaviour? It is entirely plausible, Steiner concludes, to imagine how the dynamics of human survival entailed the early evolutionary development of inner-directed and intra-personal address—preceding external vocalisation or correlative with it—as a necessary safeguard of identity and the private spaces of being. At the very least, voiced 106

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discourse should be considered the partial expression of an individual interiority: understood in the context of the individual’s continuous and complex internal conversation, a sui generis phenomenon operating in its own terms and intending its own worldly course. Human beings, in Peter Berger’s phrasing, pour themselves out into the world (1969, 4). This being the case, the particular inner lives on which these outpourings draw—from which they are extracted and externalised—become a fundamental source of the character of the sociocultural. Our codifications of individual experience as cultural trope and social practice can be read as continuing expressions of personal self hood.

The writing of individuality The part of us that appears publicly is momentary and fragmentary compared with what remains unseen, Virginia Woolf observed (1981, 159–60). It is as if what appears on the surface of social life represent the pinnacles of the mind, while the connecting landscape remains below the surface, reverberating with memory, fantasy and anticipation so intimate and subtle that they might evade verbalisation entirely. (Perhaps when people talk aloud, Woolf pondered, it is merely because they are aware of disseverment among their internal sensibilities and seek communication within themselves, as if settling a dispute [1980, 192–6].) If one focused solely on the apparently factual outer public round of activity and talk, Woolf concluded (1938, 148), then ‘life escapes’: ‘Facts are a very inferior form of fiction’ (1944, 201). The paradox of the authentic nature of fictional representations of the human condition is taken up by E. M. Forster for whom it is archetypally the novel that reveals ‘the hidden life at its source’ (1984, 55–6). That is, the novelist lays claim to the secret life of personal consciousness and individual experience for which there may be no external evidence: We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly, and apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. Forster 1984, 69 In this way, Forster finds fiction to be truer than conventional social science. It is the case, however, that since Forster wrote, the ‘crisis of representation’ in the social sciences has led to much experimentation in the latter and a blurring of the genres between fiction and science (Rapport 1994). Rodney Needham counselled anthropology to aspire to the ‘humane significance’ of great art precisely by writing with the ‘acuity’ and ‘penetration’ of a George Eliot, Dostoevsky or Woolf (1978, 75–6). Edmund Leach likewise challenged anthropologists to be more than ‘bad novelists’ by realising their own capacities, their duty to provide the ‘deep understanding’ and ‘insight’ found in the work of ‘great artists’ (1982, 52–3). Anthropology, Clifford Geertz concluded, might recognise its proper realm to be ‘“faction”: imaginative writing about real people in real places at real times’, where the ‘imaginative’ need not be conflated with the ‘imaginary’, the ‘fictional’ with the ‘false’, or the ‘made-out’ with the ‘made-up’ (1988, 141). Where does this lead? To what methodological and analytical apprehension or at least ­a llowance for consciousness and interiority? A first step is to recognise the radical individuality of that voice, and hence its intrinsic ‘strangeness’ to outside ears and conventions of expression. A well-known observation of Wittgenstein’s is pertinent: ‘If a lion could talk, we would not be able to understand him’ (1978, 223). Meaning attaches itself so closely to lifeworld, Wittgenstein 107

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suggests, and connotation plays such a large role in determining meanings-in-use, that even if we were able to find a common language, a common symbolic form, in which we and lions might communicate, we should still not be able to claim that we knew what they meant. Such understanding involves co-habitation in a lifeworld, and we do not have that with lions. We might come to understand lion denotations, but we would still not know the personal, experiential contexts—the worldviews—of the individual roaring lion and not be able to share individual meanings. To extrapolate further, is the situation so different, moreover, when it comes to human ­i nteractions, human beings speaking to each other from within different and physically discrete life-worlds? Yes, we share a species membership but we do not and cannot share embodiment and consciousness. The ‘roar’ of radical otherness pertains here too. Another human being is absolutely other, uniquely, absolutely, itself, amid its own form of life. There is every reason to assume that were one to have the (extraordinary) experience of encountering that otherness in its pure, individual form, its expressions would possess an individuality, a strangeness, that would be absolutely ‘free’ of the norms, the conventions, the habits to which we were accustomed in our life-world. As pithily summed in the chapter’s epigraph from Olive Schreiner, the pure, free expressions of a human other would sound weird and mad, uncanny, unhomely, gratuitous, to our ear—as if the roar of a lion. It is surely an understatement on E. D. Hirsch’s part when he writes: Cultural perspectivism (…) forgets that the distance between one historical period and another is a very small step in comparison to the huge metaphysical gap we must leap to understand the perspective of another person in any time and place. 1988, 258

A methodology of consciousness and interiority Individuals, we have heard, pour themselves out into the world. The ‘sociological tragedy’, ­according to Georg Simmel (1971), describes the impossible fit between the conventional languages of social life and their idiosyncratic contents. Languages are ambiguous and general: their very currency makes them insensitive to the particular. Simmel speaks of inert symbolic forms and their ‘energetic’ contents. Languages originate in individual creativity but then they become independent of them and brittle, losing their novelty, their flexibility; symbolic forms become objectified and institutionalised, while the contents of individual consciousness continue to progress and change. Inasmuch as individuals project into conventional sets of symbolic forms experiences and interpretations which are idiosyncratic, multiple, fragmentary and endlessly in process, so subtleties of individual consciousness will continuously be coming into potential conflict with public formalities. The common symbols of social life and cultural traditions facilitate widespread communication and at the same time make it routinely ineffective: the norms act as an impediment, a constriction, to the individual subjectivity which seeks expression by them. Hence, the tension and ‘tragedy’. Simmel takes solace in the notion that such tension gives rise to the dynamism of social life, to cultural development and change: the individual creativity obstructed by clichéd languages is also responsible for their resistance and replacement. I find a possible opportunity, methodological and analytical, in the recognition that the tension between the symbolic forms of social and cultural life and individual consciousness that wishes to project itself into the world can on occasion lead to a kind of eruption: a rupture in the ordinary fabric of routine sociocultural exchange. 108

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There are occasions when the individual cannot or will not contain itself in common languages, will not or cannot pour itself out into the world by way of clichéd forms, finding them compromised and compromising, deindividuating and disempowering. In particular ‘free’—mad, gratuitous, weird—acts, individuals ‘violate’ the public conventions of expression and exchange. Something, apparently rude, anarchic, ‘violent’, shows itself to the eyes and ears of others as an essential individuality is revealed. Direct access to the inner voice of another—as a meaning ful, comprehensible, phenomenon—may be impossible except in fiction, but witnessing that voice in its pure emanation in the world might not be. The social scientist gains evidence of the inner voice of others (of otherness) through manifestations of gratuitous acts which break with public conventions of expression. The social-scientific significance of this is that the social scientist thereby gains access to the source of social life, the personal dynamo behind social process, in a pure form. One witnesses the individual energy and will that animate cultural forms and drive social interaction and change—but that normally operate under the guise of convention. One focuses on incidences of strangeness, of ‘madness’ and ‘violation’, as intimations of individual gratuitousness.

The Bridges of Madison County An example from literary fiction still best illustrates how public life might be revealed under ‘its private aspect’ (Emerson 1981, 287): the distance between what appears on the surface of social life and what is being experienced beneath; also the mediating force levered by the latter on the former, the private on the public. The film version of The Bridges of Madison County from 1995 (directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Eastwood and Meryl Streep) is perhaps better known than the original novel (written by Robert James Waller 1992), but it is a faithful adaptation. Let me recount the storyline. At their mother’s death in 1989 at the age of 69, Michael Johnson and his sister Carolyn find that a strange request had been conveyed to her attorney. Their mother’s remains are to be cremated, and the ashes scattered at a specific site near her farmhouse: Roseman Covered Bridge, Madison County, Iowa. Cremation itself was an unusual practice in this part of America—viewed as somehow slightly radical—and as news of her request spreads around the township it engenders gossip. Her children do carry out her instructions but still wonder why their ‘rather sensible’ mother should behave in such an ‘enigmatic’ way, and not want be buried beside their father as was customary: perhaps it signals senility. The contents of a safe deposit box, plus their mother’s journals and a sealed envelope to ‘Carolyn or Michael’, gradually bring to light things that had remained their mother’s secret for 24 years. Much of the architecture of the novel is concerned with how that secret—in effect, Francesca Johnson’s inner life—comes to be feasibly made public. The key artefact is a letter of Francesca’s to her children. Following its revelations, son Michael contacts an Iowa writer (who might or might not be Waller himself ) and asks whether he would be interested in the rights to the story and in transforming it into a book. The details are delicate, the son and daughter know, and the outcome might be tawdry tale-telling: a debasement of their parents’ memories. However, they remained convinced that ‘this remarkable tale was worth telling’ (Waller 1992, ix). The Iowa writer comes to agree too; using Francesca Johnson’s mementoes, and conducting his own investigations in different parts of the country, the writer pieces together an account of what possibly transpired in Madison County, Iowa, in the summer of 1965, and the characters of the events’ protagonists: Francesca and one Robert L. Kincaid. I detail this architecture because it shows a sensitivity on Waller’s part to the distance that will be revealed between Francesca and Robert’s behaviour—in particular Francesca’s private 109

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knowledge—and the conventional, surface calm of rural Iowan farm-life that went on undisturbed between 1965 and 1989. The final revelation of what I would define as Francesca’s gratuitousness is deemed worthy of the heightened dramatic effect which the reader receives as the tale passes between Francesca’s own posthumous words and those given her, her children, Kincaid and others, by our narrator. The letter Francesca leaves for her children is written in 1987 (two years before her death), her children having by then set up marital homes of their own (and rarely visiting Iowa) and her husband Richard (their father) having been dead for eight years. She writes the letter, she explains, as part of setting her affairs in final order. If her children are to know ‘who [their] mother was’ (Waller 1992, 150), then, even at the risk of despoiling their memories of her, there is a matter too important, strong and beautiful for them to remain ignorant of it …. During four days in 1965, when husband and children had gone to the Illinois State Fair to exhibit a prize-winning steer, Francesca had met and fallen in love with Robert Kincaid, a photographer contracted by National Geographic magazine to make a photo-story of the wooden, covered bridges of Madison County. They had met by chance—he was no ‘Casanova’ and she was not ‘scouting around for any adventure’ (Waller 1992, 152)—when he stopped at the farmhouse to ask directions. She accompanied him to Roseman Bridge, but soon she found herself farther transported. He had a power, a unique shamanic, peregrine, unearthly quality, which she found irresistible. He, in turn, found through her a kind of certainty which, in ‘a universe of ambiguity, comes only once’ (Waller 1992, 117). Francesca discovered, too, her Iowa life being brought into sudden clear focus. She had come from Europe as a war-bride, content to enter America and escape an Italy without amenities, opportunities or men. Richard Johnson had provided her with ‘sturdy kindness’, ‘steady ways’ and an ‘even life’ of safe, caring friendships; for 20 years, she had practised the ‘close life’ of ‘circumscribed behaviour and hidden feelings’ in rural Iowa, rebelling only silently against the trivia, the fear of change, the suspicion of openness between men and women (Waller 1992, 17, 29, 33). Her relationship with Richard, she now saw, was more a partnership—familial and business—than an emotional or even physical sharing. And this was not her dream. For her husband, Francesca recognises she has a ‘quiet’ love; with Robert she experiences ‘transcending lovemaking’ (Waller 1992, 153). What were they to do? Robert begged her to go with him; he would even explain matters to Richard, if she wished. Francesca knew herself ready to go ‘anywhere’, ‘instantly’—were it not for her responsibilities …. For my purposes, here, Francesca’s personal deliberations and the actions they gave onto are the key insights of the novel. Her husband’s character, she reflects, his remoteness from passion and magic, does not make him an inferior person. He has been good to her, and given her children she treasures. Her leaving might destroy him: her physical absence on the farm, the pity and whispers of their neighbours. Her teenaged children, too, would know the township’s sniggering. She concludes that she cannot tear herself away from the realness of these responsibilities. It is likely, also, that living with her irresponsibility would change her from the woman Robert had met and loved; while if she were to leave with Robert, his wild, otherworldliness might become restrained—something that she loved him too much to risk. Her decision made, it had been respected by Robert. He had departed before her family returned from the fair and had not tried to intervene again in her life. Over the years, she had collected clippings of his articles in National Geographic and had lived with her memories. After husband Richard’s death in 1979, and her children’s moving away, Francesca had tried to contact Robert again (she was 59, he would have been 66) but without success. Francesca withdrew more from the local community; her neighbours would never have understood ‘what lay inside her’ 110

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even if she had told them (Waller 1992, 19). Once a year she had indulged, as a birthday ritual, in reliving precious moments from 1965: the drive to the bridge, a brief courtship, love-making in farmhouse and fields. The feelings inside had remained as strong; indeed, she dared not allow herself to dwell any more consistently on her memories of Robert Kincaid lest they overwhelm her. Then, in 1982, a package had arrived from Washington State and Robert Kincaid’s executors: his earthly effects, a hand-written letter and the information that the ashes of his cremated remains had recently been scattered at Roseman Bridge, Madison County. Hence, the final ­denouement of Francesca’s posthumous letter to her children: The paradox is this: If it hadn’t been for Robert Kincaid, I’m not sure I could have stayed on the farm all these years. In four days, he gave me a lifetime, a universe, and made the separate parts of me into a whole. I have never stopped thinking of him, not for a moment. Even when he was not in my conscious mind, I could feel him somewhere, always he was there. (…) I’m sure you found my burial request incomprehensible; thinking perhaps it was the product of a confused old woman. After reading the 1982 Seattle attorney’s letter and my notebooks, you’ll understand why I made that request. I gave my family my life, I gave Robert Kincaid what was left of me. The enormity of their mother’s decision is not lost on her children. As daughter Carolyn exclaims: ‘four days together, just four’, followed by ‘a lifetime’ of desperate wanting (Waller 1992, 159). An ‘innocent’ family life had carried on in routine ways for years while: all the time (…) the images she must have seen while cooking and sitting here with us, talking about our problems, about where to go to college, about how hard it is to have a successful marriage. Waller 1992, 160

Social science as existential and humanistic The very ordinariness of the plot of The Bridges of Madison County—a secret love affair—is grist to the mill. Individual gratuitousness is the animating force behind the mundane maintenance of social relationships, the continuity of the conventional, as much as it is responsible for ruptures in that fabric. Francesca’s role in the coherence of the Johnson family was empowered for many years by her individual interpretations of ‘a leopardlike creature who rode in on the tail of a comet’ (Waller 1992, 151–4). Routinely, the gratuitousness of personal consciousness plays itself out beneath the surface of the social; on occasion it breaks cover and erupts, transcending public conventions of expression and understandability. In the gratuitous act may be disinterred the pure voicing of a personal self-in-the-world, an individual nature: individual voice and projection, energy and action, in its pure form. The methodological and analytical conclusion is that to apprehend the processes of social interaction calls for an attempt to grasp the worldviews, the streams of consciousness, the lifeprojects, of the individual actors concerned. ‘[S]ociety [is] composed of and by self conscious individuals’, in Anthony Cohen’s pithy summation (1994, 192), and ‘[i]f we do not do descriptive justice to individuals, it is hard to see how we could do it for societies’ (1992, 229). One focuses on the everyday tension between the creative consciousness of the individual actor—‘the infinitude of the private man’ (Emerson 1958, 151), his or her private world of meaning and intention—and the public languages into which this projects itself. According to the ‘strong thesis’ 111

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advocated in this chapter, internal conversation is individual in character (in its syntax, its mix of words and images, of morality and pragmatism), it is idiosyncratic in the meanings it allocates to specific forms (in what ‘green’ or ‘Hamlet’ or ‘pain’ connotes), and it is self-directed (originating within the self and imbued with ‘selfish’ purpose). In dialogue with himself or herself, the individual expresses a stream of private meaning and value, of private style and intent, which transcend sociocultural anchoring—appearing ‘mad’ (Schreiner) in terms of public conventions of common exchange. But methodologically? Novelists, literary modernists in particular, have made it their project to endeavour to represent the subjective nature of consciousness and the ambiguity surrounding its connection to social life, but how might this be supplemented (‘improved upon’) in social science—and not always depending on literary example? Notwithstanding the essential ontology of the individual inner voice, how might the social scientist hope to know and represent the voice of another and connect it to the externals of social life and thus make personal consciousness and individual interiority central to the ends of the discipline? It is to Levinas that I turn, again, for a closing insight. Alongside Levinas’s emphasis on the irreducible mystery and integrity of individuality was his humanism: his recognising the universality of human being and insisting on its intrinsic dignity. ‘Humanism’, Levinas explicated (1990, 277), signified ‘the recognition of an invariable essence named “Man”’, and an affirmation of the central place occupied by this essence ‘in the economy of the Real’. ‘Humanism’ covered respect for the person—for self and Other—and the necessity of safeguarding its freedom; but also, a blossoming of human nature—freed from mere cultural conventionalism—as might be expressed in scientific intelligence, artistic creativity and authentic self-expression. (The State represented the highest achievement of the West, Levinas opined [1990, 216], since its sovereignty afforded space, a personal preserve, where the citizen might be free and exercise their will.) The role of social science, after Levinas, I would argue, is to help write the science of the species: what it is to be human. This can be conceived of as a dualistic enterprise: to do creative justice to the uniqueness of individuality, and to do systematic justice to the commonality of humanity. Writing the uniqueness of individuality alongside the unity of humanity combines two very different, even contrary, epistemologies and genres of expression; not novelist as such; not biologist. Here is a ‘cosmopolitan’ social science that endeavours to juxtapose the ‘cosmos’ of human species-wholeness against the ‘polis’ of an individually embodied life, and to bring these together in one stereoscopic viewing (Rapport 2012). There is the unique individual substance of a life, the ‘secret subjectivity’; and there is the universal human capacity that guarantees that life’s unique integrity, freedom and dignity. With one hand, anthropology writes imaginatively the individually substantiated life that exists in secret; with the other, social science writes systematically of a human nature that universally capacitates that individual existence (Rapport 2015). The social scientist would hope to do justice to individual research subjects by writing in such a way that the style, the structure and the content reflect an experience of that unique otherness: one does not write after a formula or a precedent; one fashions an oeuvre to respect the traces of the Other intimated by the ‘inspired’ way one hopes to have gone about one’s fieldwork. Equally, the social scientist would hope to add to the fund of scientific data concerning the nature of human embodiment. In order to exist as a human Other—agential, discursive, naked, needy, vulnerable, individual—certain universal capacities must have been operationalised. What were these? What distinguishes alter from other animal forms, and from inorganic life? It is managing the contrariety of these very different enterprises—imaginative and systematic—that characterises an existential human science. 112

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Paradox remains, however. It remains impossible to delineate and translate the gratuitousness of individual interiority, and any attempt analytically, conceptually, normatively to encompass it, however sensitively, is a corruption, even unethical. Notwithstanding, an anthropology of interiority can have a number of feasible objectives. One is to establish interiority conceptually as fundamental for an understanding of the course and content of sociocultural processes. While it may be impossible to access the substance of individual interiority, it is important to recognise its capacities; also its consequentiality. The flow of articulate consciousness accompanies, animates, sustains and reinvents public exchange for its individual protagonists. One cannot come to terms with this in any absolute sense: one may do justice, perhaps, to its immanence. This calls for a reconceptualisation of social relationships and exchanges, conventions and inventions, not as things-in-themselves but as continuing animations of individual understandings and intentionalities. Meaning and understanding reside within the bodily, cognitive and affective streams of consciousness of individual human beings. Finally, then, one moves towards establishing internal conversation empirically, as a universal human practice. The implications of this are ethical and cosmopolitan as much as analytical: a dignifying of the global individual actor.

References Bateson, G. 1973. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Frogmore: Paladin. Berger, P. 1969. The Social Reality of Religion. London: Faber. Cohen, A. P. 1992. ‘Self-conscious anthropology’, In J. Okely and H. Callaway (Eds), Anthropology and Autobiography (pp. 221–241). London: Routledge. 1994. Self Consciousness. London: Routledge. Durkheim, E. 1915. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin. Emerson, R. W. 1958. The Heart of Emerson’s Journals. New York: Dover. 1981. The Portable Emerson. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Forster, E. M. 1984. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Geertz, C. 1988. Works and Lives. Cambridge: Polity. Hirsch, E.D. 1988. ‘Faulty perspectives’, In D. Lodge (Ed), Modern Criticism and Theory (pp. 253–263). London: Longman. James, W. 1890. Principles of Psychology (vol. 1). New York: Holt. Leach, E. 1982. Social Anthropology. Glasgow: Fontana. Levi, P. 1996. The Drowned and the Saved. London: Abacus. Levinas, E. 1985. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. 1990. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. London: Athlone. Levi-Strauss, C. 1962. Totemism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, H. 1982. The Elusive Self. London: Macmillan. Needham, R. 1978. Primordial Characters. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Rapport, N. 1993. Diverse World-Views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 1994. The Prose and the Passion: Anthropology, Literature and the Writing of E. M. Forster. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2003. I Am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge. 2007. ‘An outline for cosmopolitan study: For reclaiming the human through introspection’, Current Anthropology 48(2): 257–283. 2012. Anyone, the Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn. 2015. ‘Philosophy in anthropology’, In A. Strathern and P. Stewart, (Eds), Research Companion to Anthropology (pp. 369–388). Farnham: Ashgate. Rapport, N., and J. Overing 2007. Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. Second edition. London: Routledge. Sacks, H. 1974. ‘On the analyzability of stories by children’, In R. Turner (Ed), Ethnomethodology (pp. 216–232). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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12 RELATIONAL, BUT ALSO SINGULAR On the Varieties and Particularities of Selfscapes Douglas Hollan

Let me begin by posing a bit of a thought experiment: Do you know whether I dreamed last night, and if I did, how that dream might be affecting my sense of self as I begin to write this chapter? If you are neurobiologically inclined, you are probably guessing that I must have dreamed something last night, since that is what most mammals do when they sleep, even if I might not remember today what I was dreaming last night. If you are more culturally inclined, you might be tempted to guess that whatever I might have been dreaming last night, it was likely greatly influenced by my social and cultural world, both in terms of who and what I was dreaming about, as well as the likelihood that I would consciously remember what I was dreaming or not. You might surmise that most people tend to dream, either literally or symbolically, about the most “important” people in their lives, as socially and culturally determined, and about the scenarios, or imagined scenarios, in which they could be entangled with those people, including the many potential conflicts and contradictions that could arise within them (Mageo and Sheriff 2021). You might also guess that I would be more likely to remember and pay attention to my dreams, affecting my sense of self in a more conscious and significant way, if my social world took dreams seriously and offered me ways of interpreting them (Kracke 1979, 1981), including whether some of them might be considered prophetic of my future life and well-being. So far, so good. But at this point, let us complicate things a bit further. Suppose I confirm for you that I dreamed of my deceased father last night, someone who had and has great significance in my life. When he was alive, my father and I had a complicated, and at times, troubled relationship. I not only admired him greatly but was also wary of him. He was an unbending man who could hold very critical, harsh views of anyone, including me, who disagreed with him about what he considered to be significant matters. Although I wear the watch he took off his wrist and gave to me just before he died, and although I think about him in some way almost every day, I rarely remember a dream about him, so that when I do remember such a dream, the dream always catches my attention and I wonder, why this dream now? It is at this point that the social and cultural analysis of my dream begins to reach its limits. Even if you knew exactly what I dreamed about my father last night, and even if you had guessed or investigated my social background and thought you knew something, or even a great deal, about father-son relationships in people from my background, you would not know how I experience my father and the dreams I have of him and how they affect my sense of myself. If you knew DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-14

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I had four siblings (one deceased), you might think that they could give you some insight into the kind of relationship I had with my father, since we all lived together in the same house with him for many years, my two brothers and I sharing one small bedroom, but you would be getting some version of how they experienced me and my father, not my experience of my father. As the middle child of five children and as the middle son of three sons, both of whom had even more troubled relationships with my father than I did, I had my own particular experiences of and with my father that were quite singular and distinct from any of my other siblings, even within this small monocultural, monolingual nuclear family. Although we all shared a common biological progenitor, from an experiential point of view, my siblings’ father was not my father. My father is mine alone and you can get a glimpse of him and his impact on me only if I am moved to share or say something about him, as I have done above. The point of this brief exercise is to suggest that while my consciousness of myself is entangled with the material, social, and cultural world from the moment of its inception, once in existence, I have been involved in a process of autopoiesis in which my selective memories of, actions in, and emotional associations and reactions to the world, some of which are completely unconscious, have been developing and maintaining a boundary or separation among myself, my experiences, and my consciousness and everything else in my world that does not have the imprint of my consciousness. This boundary is surely a selectively porous, permeable, dynamic, and evolving one, as is true of all autopoietic processes (Thompson 2007), in which the “moulding [sic]” of the boundary by past experience ( James 2021, 100) comes to influence what is allowed or likely to be experienced in the future.1 But it is a boundary nonetheless, and one that separates my thoughts, my experiences, and my awareness of myself from yours and from all other forms of consciousness in the world. This is the point that William James underscores in Chapter 9 of The Principles of Psychology, in which he notes the “absolute insulation” ( James 2021, 97) of one person’s thoughts and consciousness from those of any other person or consciousness—unless of course they are disclosed to others either explicitly or implicitly. Each mind, keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. James 2021, 97, emphasis in original James notes that our thoughts and memories have a “warmth,” “intimacy,” and “immediacy” to them that clearly distinguish them from anyone else’s thoughts and memories ( James 2021, 102). We may have knowledge or conceptions of other people’s thoughts, memories, and feelings, but we do not have felt ownership of them, as we do our own. Consciousness of ourselves, then, while always entangled with the world it both reflects and co-creates, is also quite singular and “insulated,” to use James’ language. It is this

1 Devereux (1967, 321–324) makes a similar point when he emphasizes that the boundaries of the self are not just highly dynamic and “mobile,” but they are “actually created in each instant” (324; emphasis in original).

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insularity, with the imaginative capacities it both affords and amplifies, that helps explain how and why people are affected differently by, and so react differently to, similar circumstances. The slippage between received circumstances and the personal experience of such circumstances also accounts for much of the pluralism of the world, according to James, and for the inevitable transformation of social, cultural, and institutional forms as they are interpreted, enacted, and lived anew by different individuals (Obeyesekere 1981, 1990; Hollan 2012). None of us come at the world and experience it as blank slates. No one simply internalizes and then reproduces the world they find around them (Strauss and Quinn 1996). We are historical creatures, and our histories matter in how we come to experience and interpret the circumstances around us. I underscore James’ views on the insular aspects of self-consciousness, as a few others have recently2 (Strawson 2017; Kirschner 2019, 2020; Chodorow 2020), to counterbalance the contemporary move toward a strong relational perspective on self-experience, one in which almost any notion of a private, singular, or insulated self is thought to be illusory or an artifact of Western “individualism.”3 As I have suggested elsewhere (Hollan 2012, Hollan 2022), it is clear from James’ overall work that he is not naively romanticizing the concept, philosophy, or psychology of “the individual,” nor is he claiming that experience is sealed within an isolated mind. Rather, he is merely drawing attention to the existential fact that things happen to one person that do not happen to another and that this difference in happenings continues to leave its mark on the way people experience and interpret the world. As James remarks, No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. Each, from his [sic] own angle of observation, takes in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a unique manner…Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. [1902]1982, 487 Even with this singularity of “attitude,” however, no human consciousness exists apart from the material, social, and cultural worlds from which it emerges and with which it is always entangled. The recursive processes involved in autopoiesis result in selves that have their own, unique internal topography and functional boundaries, but they would not have emerged without those material and social worlds and they die when no longer immersed within them. The semipermeable boundaries of selves mean that they are both relationally constituted and maintained and unique and singular at the same time. Both things are true of all selves all the time, though, at any given moment, selves are more or less reacting to the world or more or less acting in and on the world.

2 I am particularly grateful to Suzanne Kirshner for reminding me of James’ passage in The Principles of Psychology on the insularity of thought. 3 Views of the extent to which any notion of a private, singular, or insulated self is thought to be a historically and culturally bound Western concept have tended to oscillate over time (see, for example, Geertz (1984), Shweder and Bourne (1984), Howard (1985), Hollan (1992), Spiro (1993), Zahavi (2022), but we are in a moment when many scholars, in a variety of disciplines, are emphasizing the relationality of self-experience, rather than its uniqueness.

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Varieties and particularities of selfscapes Consciousness of self emerges and maintains itself in the material, symbolic, and imaginative space between body and world. I use the concept of “selfscapes” to gesture toward this space (Hollan 2008, 2014). Drawing on Damasio’s extensive work on embodied mind and emotion (1994, 1999, 2010), a selfscape is the emerging self-system’s implicit moment by moment mapping of its own representations of its own past embodied experiences onto the space and time of the contemporary socially, culturally, and politically constituted world. The “-scape” part of the term refers to both the intraself topography and other-than-self terrains that the self-system simultaneously navigates, maps, and represents during the course of a day and night—the mapping continues at night, especially in the form of dreams (Hollan 2003, 2005, 2017), as the example of my own dream above is meant to suggest—and from which a contingent and dynamic sense of self emerges moment by moment. The mapping is not only a complex and dynamic one in which contemporary experience of the world and received circumstances may reshape a person’s topography of memory and emotional proclivities, but also one in which the reverse may occur. A person’s experientially acquired ways of perceiving and interpreting may impose themselves on the world, transforming and reshaping that world, and becoming a significant part of the social ecology that others must contend with. The notion of selfscapes, then, is a bridging concept meant to capture the integrity of selfsystems—not only their singularity of “attitude” and relative insularity, from a Jamesian point of view, but also their contingency and looping dynamism in relation to their entanglements with the world. While such a concept allows us to consider the porosity of selves (Throop 2017), and the many ways they are shaped and influenced by their entanglements with the world, it is also meant to underscore the slippage between received circumstances and the personal experience of those circumstances that I emphasized above. It is this slippage, related to the fact that the prior experiences of uniquely situated persons always affect their current and future experience, that makes any notion of “conventional” behavior so suspect, since overt behavior that appears conventional and common from the third person point of view may yet be experienced and thought and imagined about quite differently by the people who are enacting those behaviors. There is a perceptual, imaginative, and symbolic gratuitousness to human experience (Rapport 2008) that far exceeds the limited forms of overt behavior we actually observe and which greatly expands upon and refashions the always limited and finite material and symbolic resources from which it emerges. In the remainder of the chapter, I use ethnographic and clinical examples from Indonesia and the United States to illustrate both the relational and singular aspects of selfscapes, but I emphasize how even those embedded within the same local world may yet experience and react to that world in unique ways.

An earnest man in Toraja When I got to know Nene’na Tandi in the 1980s and 1990s, he was an older man in his 60s living in a remote mountaintop village in rural Toraja on the island of Sulawesi in eastern Indonesia. Like most other villagers living in this area, he was a wet rice farmer living just above the subsistence level, worried about whether he would harvest enough rice to last through the year. And like many other people there, he was attempting to find a middle ground between the demands and expectations of traditional Toraja culture, including the competitive slaughtering of pigs and buffalo at elaborate funeral ceremonies, and the more “modern” teachings and lifestyle of Christianity as passed down by Dutch missionaries in the 1920s and 1930s, including the increasing 118

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value placed on education, whether actually affordable for most people or not. Like most other Toraja as well, he was concerned by the increasing outmigration of young people to other parts of Indonesia for work and education, and by his minority, and sometimes stigmatized, status as a member of a traditional and Christianizing group of people in a province and nation that was dominated by Muslim groups and institutions. In all of these ways, Nene’na Tandi was a fairly typical Toraja elder in the village where I lived and worked, entangled with and enacting the social, cultural, and political world he had been born into at a particular moment in Indonesian history. And yet, he was also identified by himself, by his fellow Toraja, and by me as being someone who was exceptional in many ways. For one, he was a gifted orator and communicator, not only someone who was capable of making even the most grim of people laugh, but also someone who was well known for offering “sweet” words of comfort and support to those going through hard times, even to people who might not have deserved such empathy from a conventional Toraja point of view. Such rhetorical skills made him a much more influential person than his commoner background and lack of education would otherwise have warranted, and because of this, he had become a person to be reckoned with on almost any issue of consequence in the village. But his reputation as a clever, entertaining, outspoken person was balanced by an earnestness he had about the importance of valuing and respecting what the ancestors and God considered to be proper and moral ways of living. He would often say that the advice of the ancestors and wise elders was like “gold,” its value unrivaled by anything else in a person’s life, and he often gave his own advice to people freely, whether they had asked for it or not. Given Nene’na Tandi’s outgoing and rambunctious nature, I was initially puzzled by this earnestness, which I eventually came to understand better only after a long series of open-ended interviews with him about his past and current life experience.4 In his own telling, Nene’na Tandi had been a very wild youth, strong-willed, and defiant. He knew in theory, and from his elders’ teachings and admonitions, that God and the ancestors were watching over him and would reward him for proper behavior and punish him for improper, but in William James’s terms (2013, 21), he had not yet experienced the “truth” of those beliefs, they made no “practical difference” for him. Rather, because he was enjoying his misbehavior and had not yet suffered any negative consequences for it, he was becoming more and more transgressive, up until the point his family finally ran out of patience with him and exiled him to a distant village—a true act of desperation on his family’s part, given how much the Toraja love and value children and consider them to be essential social and economic assets. Yet even after being sent away, Nene’na Tandi said he remained defiant. As soon as he found an opportunity, and against his parents’ wishes, he left his first wife and joined a group of young men heading to New Guinea to find employment. Once there, however, he quickly discovered that New Guinea would not be the haven he had hoped for. Almost immediately upon disembarking, he fell seriously ill with malaria, and then struggled to find work. He remembered being hungry for days on end, and fearing that he might actually starve. It was during this troubling, despairing time that he began to comprehend and accept what his elders had always told him: that God and the ancestors were keeping score and would eventually punish those who defied their ways, especially those like himself who consciously and knowingly defied their ways. He feared

4 I refer to this type of interview as a “person-centered” interview. For a discussion of the value and utility of person-centered interviews, see Hollan (2005). For a discussion of how to conduct person-centered interviews, see Levy and Hollan (2015).

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that these spiritual forces would allow him to die far away from home and family, and he was enormously relieved when a ship’s captain took pity on him and offered him free passage back to Sulawesi. When he returned to Toraja, he said he was a changed man. He moved back to his home village, he married a woman his parents approved of, he began to work the family’s rice fields and gardens, and he eventually became the respected elder that I knew and interviewed. This return to the fold did not solve all of Nene’na Tandi’s problems, however. Over the years, Nene’na Tandi discovered that he was unable to have his own biological children, which was very distressing for him, given the importance of having children I mentioned above. To the end of his life, he worried that his difficulty having children was a spiritual or ancestral retribution for all the trouble and harm he had caused people as a youth. One can see here how Nene’na Tandi was taking in his own “sphere of fact and trouble” from the world around him and developing a certain “attitude” toward it. Though many of these elements of fact and trouble were common to many Toraja people at that time—for example, how to balance obligations to self, family, and community, when and how seriously to take the possibility of spiritual or ancestral retribution—Nene’na Tandi was responding to these conundrums from his own “angle of observation,” which was uniquely troubling to him. Unlike many of his fellow villagers, Nene’na Tandi worried that he was especially worthy of retribution and punishment for his misbehavior as a youth because he had knowingly, willfully, and self-consciously acted in a way that had distressed and hurt others. Although he still took great pride in his assertiveness and boldness even as an older man, he realized that it was these same qualities that, as a youth, had led him to act so badly. While others might have conveniently “forgotten” about their own past intentions and willfulness, or found convenient ways of mitigating them, Nene’na Tandi could not allow himself such excuses. He knew that he had acted badly, and he knew that he was continuing to pay the price for that misbehavior, no matter how good his life had become in other respects. It was Nene’na Tandi’s deep sense of regret about his own misbehavior and the childlessness that had resulted from it that contributed not only to the strong sense of empathy he had for others, but also to the unusually earnest approach he took to encouraging respect for God and the ancestors. As someone whose “conversion” to actual belief in spiritual forces came relatively late in life, only after he had allowed himself to suffer the consequences of his previous disregard of those forces, he wanted to help others avoid a similar fate. He became an astute observer of the signs and indexes of spiritual displeasure directed at himself or others. His self-consciousness about these issues led him to inhabit and enact Toraja conceptions of ancestral figures, justice, and morality in a way that went far beyond that of most of his fellow villagers. He thereby helped create a particular kind of world for himself and his fellows, one that was, in some respects, unlike any other Toraja world either before or since. The attitudes and beliefs that Nene’na Tandi had developed through his own problematic encounters with the world had come to affect the lives of others in a unique, unmistakable way—illustrating an important aspect of the looping dynamics of person and context (Hollan 2014), in this case, how an interior scape of emotion and memory can lead a person to construct a particular kind of lifeworld for himself and his consociates. Nene’na Tandi inhabited his world in other ways that were unique as well. Although he had been unable to have children in his waking life, he was more successful in his dream life. When I once asked him about his dreams, knowing that many Toraja people at that time believed that people’s spirits could wander away from their bodies during dreams at night and comingle with other such wandering spirits, he surprised me by asking me in return if I had ever noticed how much one of the children in his village looked like him. He then told me that his spirit and that 120

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of the boy’s mother often had sex in his dreams, and so he thought of himself as the boy’s spiritual father, which explained the similarity in appearance, regardless of who the actual biological father was. While such dream experiences, and the thoughts that flowed from them, drew from widely shared beliefs about dreams, it is the creative way in which Nene’na Tandi used those common elements to express and experience something important about his own particular desires and “sphere of fact and trouble” that made his emerging selfscape singular as well as relationally entangled.

Experiencing shame in a US workplace I came to know George, a white, middle-class man, in my research psychoanalytic practice in southern California. George was troubled by a very unhappy childhood and family situation. He had grown up as the single child of parents who themselves had severe problems, according to George. His mother was often depressed, to the point of being hospitalized at times, and his father drank and gambled heavily and had a terrible temper. Both parents were also quite emotionally dependent on George, and throughout the time I knew him, he felt a grave responsibility to look after and care for his parents, even when this compromised his own chances at friendship and intimacy. George was certain that it was this unhappy upbringing and his ongoing entanglements with his parents that contributed to his own sense of depression and social awkwardness, as if there was a sheet of glass that kept him separated from other people. Despite these troubles, though, George had been able to become educated in a highly technical field that had enabled him to find employment in a large corporation. He had been working at this corporation for many years when I got to know him, and it was his hope that he could continue to work there until he retired, since the position suited him so well: it was a job that rewarded him for, and made him feel proud of, the unusual kind of cognitive and intellectual skills he possessed; it allowed him a very flexible work schedule, so that he could sleep late in the morning and work until late at night, which was his preference, and also allowed him to care for his parents; it allowed him to work in solitude for long periods of time, which enabled him to avoid the anxiety and awkwardness he experienced around most people; and it had the kind of benefits—good pay, health insurance, retirement pension—that were becoming more and more rare in US corporate life. It was only with the safety, security, and benefits of this job that George had finally decided to try psychotherapy as a way of improving his personal and family life. So while George was very unhappy and depressed in his private life, he felt fortunate to have the job he did and he took great pride in his work life and accomplishments. All of this began to change around 2007, though, with the coming of a severe economic recession in the United States and around the world. George’s corporation had begun downsizing before the recession of 2007–08 emerged, but with its arrival, the offloading of expensive jobs to lower paid and compensated foreign workers began in earnest. For months, George watched as many of his colleagues were being laid off, many of them being asked to spend their last weeks of employment training the very people who had become their replacements. When George himself got laid off, it came as no great surprise to him, because he had seen the writing on the wall weeks in advance of his actual firing. In his case, however, the shame and humiliation of being fired was intensified by the fact that he was almost immediately asked to come back to his old job as a short-term contract worker, minus many of the benefits he had previously received—which was like rubbing salt into an open wound for him. Feeling angered and humiliated, his first thought was to reject the job offer immediately, but he hesitated, knowing how much he needed the job for both financial and personal reasons. 121

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During this week or so of hesitation, as George discussed with me all these mixed feelings and motivations, he recounted a disturbing dream he had had in which a gang of men had been pulling him into the darkness to attack him. This then led to a number of recollections of himself being bullied as a child, and how ashamed he had been that he had never been able to stand up for himself, either then or now. In his current situation, he worried about what others would think of him if he returned to work. Would they think he had no shame, or that he could generate no better prospects for himself? Eventually, George decided he could not afford not to return to work, no matter how humiliating. But in order to do this, he would have to swallow his pride yet again and submit himself to a standard background and financial check, as if his long employment history at this corporation had never occurred. It was in this context of freshly stirred anger and humiliation that he reported another dream: “I am in a classroom of some kind, towards the back, feeling distant from the teacher and other students up front.” As he is recounting the dream, he says it reminds him of the second-grade teacher he has told me about before, the one who once pulled him out of class to tell him how disappointed she was with him. “You are smart enough to be at the front of the class with the other good students, if you would just put your mind to it,” she told him. Much of George’s story will sound familiar to anyone caught up in the structural entanglements of the neoliberal corporate world, especially anyone who was entangled in that world and structure during the 2007–08 global recession. And yet George is not just any disgruntled employee. He is disgruntled and humiliated in his own particular way. The humiliation that the corporate world inflicts on him does not come in an experiential vacuum. Rather, it resonates deeply with and is amplified by some of his earlier life experiences: his embarrassment about returning to work as a contract worker precipitates dreams about being assaulted and about sitting in the back of a classroom feeling alienated and ashamed. These, in turn, stir up memories of never being able to defend or stand up for himself and of being reprimanded by a teacher for his lack of attention and ambition. George’s manager, his colleagues, and others in the corporation might have anticipated that George would be embarrassed by his return to work as a mere short-term contract worker, but of course they could not have known from his overt behavior alone that he actually dreamed about and experienced this return as a violent assault on himself. George was “taking in” and being affected by a set of circumstances that were common to many people at that time, but he was doing so from his own “angle of observation,” which was unique to him and his experience of the world and his past. His emerging selfscape was entangled in the world, but the tangles were getting knotted in nonlinear, looping ways around an association of thoughts, memories, and images that were unique to George.

Concluding thoughts: Toward an ecology of selfscapes I have used the concept of selfscapes to highlight aspects of self-experience that are sometimes considered contradictory. One is that self-experience is always deeply entangled in and informed by the social worlds from which it emerges and continues to maintain itself. My siblings and I all shared many experiences of growing up with our father. We share or shared many of the same memories of him, and we share or shared a collective identity based on those common experiences and memories. We are all relationally and mutually constituted in that way. Many of Nene’na Tandi’s most compelling concerns in life were also those of his fellow villagers. He and they were all concerned with how to become “modern” Indonesians while also preserving their customs and identities as Toraja and as Christians. He and many of his fellow villagers were preoccupied with what role powerful spiritual forces, either ancestral or Christian, might play 122

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in their lives, and how those forces could be influenced to help and support rather than harm or punish. George’s concerns about his disposability as a worker, and the precarity that created for him, were shared by many others who were employed in the neoliberal corporate cultures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Yet I have also noted that selfscapes are singular as well as being socially and relationally constituted. The singularity arises because no one’s “angle of observation” on the world, no matter how small or local that world might be, is identical with anyone else’s, and these differences in positionality and perspective lead to different memory- and emotion-scapes, which then feed into and affect future engagements with and experiences of the world. This is the slippage that occurs between received circumstances and any individual’s experience of those circumstances. The concept of selfscapes gestures toward these spiraling, recursive, autopoietic processes, in which all people are engaged until the moment of their deaths. While people can and do attempt to consciously manage not only their entanglements with the world but also their emotional reactions to and memories of those entanglements, autopoietic processes often flow unconsciously, in unintended directions, as dreams so clearly demonstrate. It is an individual’s unique organization of and response to their received circumstances that make all selfscapes both relational and singular, and which distorts their analysis, comprehension, or appreciation if taken from one of these perspectives alone. My experiences with and dreams and memories of my father, however serendipitous and unintended, are mine alone, and they are “insulated” from those of my siblings unless or until I disclose them in some way, just as their particular dreams and memories of their father are insulated from me. Nene’na Tandi’s particular experience of spiritual retribution was also his alone, and it led him to be much more concerned about the propriety of his own behavior and that of others than most of his fellow villagers. His desire to help others avoid his own fate led him not only to be more empathic than most other people, but also to be more vigilant about seeking out the signs and indexes of improper behavior, thereby contributing to a social climate that would have been very different without him. George appeared overtly to comply passively with the demands and interests of his corporation, as did many of his colleagues, no doubt, but as we have seen, his sense of shame at the loss of his job was actually dreamed about as a violent mugging, resonating with earlier experiences of being bullied and reprimanded that were unique to him. He was not just any disgruntled employee, but a very particular kind. At the level of analysis of selfscapes, the social types of received circumstances—whether of race, class, gender, ethnicity, or any other—begin to dissolve into intersectionalities of all of these types, as a specific person begins to experience and live them. Of course, in any particular historical moment, one or another of these social types may play an oversized role in how a person experiences the world, but at the level of selfscapes, we will always find those who defy the social expectations and conventions of the period and whose autopoietic processes forefront some less historically prevalent “attitude.” When this happens, we find that people may impose themselves on other people and the world, as well as being imposed on, as Obeyesekere (1981, 1990) has observed, and with consequences that reverberate endlessly. The concept of selfscapes suggests the limits of thinking of or with social types or categories alone, including relationality, because it ties the varieties and complexities of social worlds to an equally complex and dynamic terrain of embodied emotion and memory. People do not react to received circumstances, they do not become engaged in social worlds, uniformly, but in particular ways. As a result, they act in environments not just of competing values, norms, classes, institutions, and ways of conceptualizing and labeling things like gender and race, but environments in which the people around them have animated these various elements in different ways 123

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and with varying levels of conviction and emotional intensity. In one’s proximate social environment, it matters very much who one’s co-actors and interlocutors are and how they inhabit the world, at the level of “insulated” emotion and memory, not just what rules, norms, or statuses they may be enacting overtly in the current moment. There is a complexity, dynamism, and unexpectedness to social and ethical action and reaction at this level of analysis that is reminiscent of the interactions and reactions within complex ecological systems of any kind (Bateson 1972), in which even small changes in one part of the ecology, small changes in a person’s selfscape, for example, may have very surprising and unintended consequences, as they feed forward and feedback into other parts of the social ecology. Nene’na Tandi, George, and I were all deeply and uniquely affected by the social ecologies in which we were entangled, but our very presence altered those ecologies and the people around us in turn, in ways we both knew or know about and will never know. It is this variety and particularity of social action and reaction that James is underscoring when he writes that it takes “the whole of us,” each with our own unique “attitude” toward the world and our own “sphere of fact and trouble,” to spell out the meaning of the human condition. And that meaning changes, no matter how insignificantly, with each change in a selfscape, and with each birth and death.

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Relational, but also singular 2020. ‘Beyond the oversocialized conception of the subject in psychology: Desire, conflict, and the problem of social order’, Theory and Psychology 30(6): 768–785. Kracke, W. H. 1979. ‘Dreaming in Kagwahiv: Dream beliefs and their intrapsychic uses in an Amazonian Indian culture’, Psychoanalytic Study of Society 8: 119–172. 1981. ‘Kagwahiv mourning: Dreams of a bereaved father’, Ethos 9: 258–275. Levy, R. I., and D. W. Hollan 2015. ‘Person-centered interviewing and observation’, In R. Bernard and C.C. Gravlee (Eds), Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition, (pp. 313–342). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Mageo, J., and R. E. Sheriff (Eds) 2021. New Directions in the Anthropology of Dreaming. New York: Routledge. Obeyesekere, G. 1981. Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1990. The Work of Culture: Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rapport, N. 2008. ‘Gratuitousness: Notes towards an anthropology of interiority’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 19(3): 330–348. Shweder, R. A., and E. J. Bourne 1984. ‘Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally?’, In R. A. Shweder and R. A. LeVine (Eds), Culture Theory (pp. 58–199). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spiro, M. E. 1993. ‘Is the Western conception of the self “Peculiar” within the context of the world cultures?’, Ethos 21(2): 107–153. Strauss, C., and N. Quinn 1996. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strawson, G. 2017. The Subject of Experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Thompson, E. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Throop, C. J. 2017. ‘Despairing moods: Worldly attunements and permeable personhood in Yap’, Ethos 45(2): 199–215. Zahavi, D. 2022. ‘Individuality and community: The limits of social Constructivism’. Ethos 50(4): 392–409.

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13 THE BALLAD (OR FUGUE) OF WILLIAM CULLUM Disciplining the Body of Prisoner 55552-052 William Cullum and Andrew Irving

Introduction This chapter explores the existential capacity for movement, as shaped by people’s decisions and actions when confronting contingency and finitude. It presents a co-written ethnography of the life and times of Prisoner 55552-052, focusing on the events leading to his arrest, trial and imprisonment in the U.S. Federal Prison system. The chapter is based on a collaborative fugue between anthropologist Andrew Irving and artist/writer/felon William Cullum (Prisoner 55552-052) who served in Federal Prison from 2004 to 2011. A fugue is a contrapuntal musical technique that employs two (or more) voices around a central theme or subject, in this case the complex existential relationship between movement, identity and state power. Beginning with Montaigne’s understanding of life as an unfinished project founded upon time and action, it employs a first-person ethnography of the US criminal justice system to examine the circumstances through which a person—who possesses a specific legal status and rights in terms of freedom of movement, social relations and decision-making—becomes transformed into a prisoner whose choices, actions and movements are restricted but not determined. In To Philosophise is to Learn How to Die ([1580] 2016), Montaigne argues the purpose of life is neither endurance nor longevity but how temporality and action are constituted in relation to our inevitable mortality. Montaigne’s Essai is of particular relevance to Bill Cullum, who was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the 1980s: a time when patients with HIV/AIDS filled 8.5% of all New York hospital beds and resulted in 72,207 known deaths across the city over the forthcoming decade. No longer planning a long-term future, a generation of young men and women in their 20s and 30s were thrown off course and had to learn to live with the prospect of an early death. Montaigne characterises “the perpetual work of life” as a journée—coming from the Old French: “a defined course of travel; one’s path through life”, and the Medieval Latin diurnata: “a day’s work”—through which time, god and nature all impact upon the person on their path towards death. For Montaigne, life is not determined by divine or natural powers but is a space of possibility whereby existence, and even time itself, can be bent to a person’s will or fashioned through one’s movements, actions and relations with others. It is a journée forged from the daily actions and modes of expression performed amidst chance, contingency and the “continual spectacle” of bones, tombs and funerals that remind the living of the fragility of the human condition.

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-15

The ballad (or fugue) of William Cullum

Although the body weakens and perishes, history shows us that we can still choose how to live by eating, drinking and merrymaking in front of the very “portrait of death” that shows our future destiny. “Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do?” asks Montaigne (2016, 289) “is there any thing that does not grow old as well as you? A thousand men, a thousand animals, and a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that you expire”. Beyond nature, beyond the gods and beyond desire, the path someone navigates through the life course is not fully of their making but subject to other people’s will, needs and actions. From birth to death, our waking and working hours are taken up with serving the interests of others or meeting our social, economic and moral responsibilities, leading us to ask who or what holds power over our movement, action and existence? Perhaps nowhere is this question more explicit than in regard to the circumstances and events that lead to a person’s incarceration in Federal Prison. The reasons for imprisonment are complex, diverse and cannot be systematised but emerge amidst specific and ongoing conditions of social, economic and existential possibility and constraint. This encompasses self-directed action, the actions of others and events beyond personal control that all combine to help define “who we are and what we might become” ( Jackson 2011, ix). Once incarcerated in Federal Prison, a unique ethnographic opportunity is opened from which to view how existential capacities for movement, action and expression are realised, constrained or recalibrated. Research inside prisons is typically difficult for anthropologists and as such there is a scarcity of contemporary “observational studies depicting the everyday world of inmates” (­Wacquant 2002, 385). Prisons exert tight controls in terms of access, information and communication. It is rarely possible to undertake anthropological fieldwork, not just because of bureaucracy and governance but also the wariness of prisoners to talk without fear of punishment by guards or other prisoners (Rhodes 2001). Even when visits are granted, anthropological research relies on long-term participant-observation and interactions across a range of formal and informal contexts, which is not possible in the restricted and often coercive research setting of prison (Cunha 2014). Accordingly, ethnographies of the Federal Prison system often gravitate towards institutional policy, regulatory practices and legal procedures rather than anthropological participation in and observations of daily prison life, or else they employ interviews carried out under restrictive conditions that are perhaps better described as quasi-ethnographies (Cunha 2014). Despite the thorny problem of access to penal institutions, insights into prison life abound in autobiographical accounts and diaries. Early examples include the Russian scientist and political activist Peter Kropotkin who was imprisoned in Russia (1874–76) and France (1882–86) and who examined his daily experience of incarceration (1887). In the U.S., Frank Tannenbaum, a university professor at Cornell and Columbia Universities, published Wall Shadows: A Study in American Prisons (1922) based on his year-long imprisonment following his involvement in Industrial Workers of the World protests. More recently, the sociologist John Irwin spent five years in Soledad State Prison for armed robbery. Irwin completed his PhD at Berkeley, published as The Felon (1970), and became department chair of Sociology at San Francisco State University where he worked on criminal justice and prison rights.1 However, perhaps the most wide-ranging ­resource is The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, which contains peer-reviewed articles by current and former prisoners to provide an alternate source of information about carceral institutions and constructions of criminality. In response to the difficulty of carrying out prison ethnography, this chapter adopts a collaborative approach to the research and representation of prison life, based around the musical motif of the fugue, based on a first-person account of the strategies of confinement and depersonalisation. Focusing on how prisoners move—and are moved—within the penal system provides a means of understanding how time, space and personal identity are lived, experienced and organised, not as 127

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a representative member of society or humanity but as a particular category of person who is continuously subject to the will of proximate and distant others. It is a control over personhood, body and movement that is re-enforced hourly through a nexus of techniques legitimised by custom and law. The prisoner’s body is ordered, organised, and managed in time and space in ways that chart the limits of agency and establish a new existential constitution for experience and expression.

In the realm of art and death William Cullum (born 1958) was raised in a well-to-do middle class family in Virginia. Bill originally trained as a classical pianist but turned to painting after enrolling in the School for Visual Arts in New York City. New York afforded many new social, sexual and working opportunities for a gay man from the conservative south. Bill took various jobs to support his painting, including working as a waiter, restaurant manager and sex-worker, ultimately focusing on sex-work, as combining art with well renumerated sex-work allowed him most time to devote to painting. On being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s, Bill gave up sex-work, locked himself in a tiny studio and worked day and night on his paintings with an energy and intensity coming from the knowledge that each painting might be his last. He tried to force as much life, colour and emotion as possible onto each canvas. The paintings were rough, unruly and intense as he attempted to challenge the flow of time by putting everything he ever wanted to express into a single painting (see Figures 13.1–13.3). Bill started “in the middle” of each painting rather than

Figure 13.1 “Red”. Source: William Cullum. 1995. Wax, oil, pigment, print, plastic paper, resin, wood.

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Figure 13.2 “Yellow”. Source: William Cullum. 1995. Wax, oil, pigment, print, plastic paper, resin.

at the beginning, as the very real prospect of death meant he had little time to carry out preparatory planning, research or sketches. Consequently, when starting a new painting, Bill never knew how it would turn out or whether he would live to finish it. If he painted something which did not work or made a bad aesthetic decision, Bill would simply leave it in to “irritate the eye”, given he did not have the time to repaint or refine mistakes. By the mid-1990s, Bill had established a growing international reputation and his works were regularly displayed in galleries and written about in newspapers and magazines. The advent of antiretroviral medications (ARVs) in the late 1990s saw a huge collective shift in mind, body and emotion. Over 100,000 people in New York City with HIV/AIDS— and whom had been preparing for death—now found themselves experiencing the world again through stabilised bodies and living in a future they never imagined they would see. Unfortunately, Bill was of a minority of people whose bodies reacted against antiretrovirals, which in Bill’s case included life-threatening side-effects and a massive, near fatal, heart attack that prevented him from taking medications that might otherwise have saved his life. Accordingly, Bill still imagined and anticipated he would be dead within a matter of months. As a long-time atheist for whom there was no prospect of an afterlife, the totality of Bill’s remaining life was concentrated into a foreshortened expectation of death that Bill referred to as his “horizon of existence”.2 However, having nearly died from his heart attack, a new and radical transformation in Bill’s worldview occurred whereby he began to see death as unfrightening and without 129

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Figure 13.3 “Green”. Source: William Cullum. 1995. Wax, oil, pigment, print, plastic paper, resin.

threat. Death and the state of non-being no longer provoked the same dread or anxiety and his new works revolved around soft, playful and cloudlike forms in pastel shades: a marked contrast to the chaos, dread and intensity of the previous paintings. However, Bill came to think this new work was no good and later threw these paintings away: hence, there are none to illustrate this phase of his life. Death had provided Bill with his creative muse. Having lost his fear of death, he no longer felt the same burning intensity to paint. Anticipating the kind of painful decline he had witnessed across the gay community, Bill decided instead to spend his last months of life in a state of intoxication by way of Crystal Meth, aka crank, glass, ice, quick, tina, yaba. Crystal meth is a powerful and highly addictive drug whose side-effects include brain damage, lung, kidney and liver problems, facial disfigurement, premature ageing and a decline in social functioning. The serious cognitive and physical damage caused by crystal meth was of little concern given Bill’s impending death and the sense of euphoria and abandon he experienced. Meth quickly became a daily necessity, but it was also expensive. In order to manage and pay for his decline and death, Bill began small-scale drug dealing: just enough to pay for his addiction and living expenses and thereby get high, pay rent and die for free. The end never came. Indeed, death rarely comes by order or appointment. A new combination of antiretroviral medications was developed that stabilised Bill’s health. Bill now needed to get off drugs and go cold turkey. The aim was to save some money find a cheap place away from New York and drugs to detox and put back the pieces of his life to resume painting. Bill discussed 130

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his plan with his friend and fellow drug dealer, Brandon Lee Boswell, who suggested Bill come in with him for a big deal he was lining up that would net them $30,000.

Breaking bad On August 10, 2003, I went to Brandon’s apartment in Chelsea to pick up the four ounces of crystal meth that I had arranged to deliver to a guy called “John”. Brandon had introduced me to John a few weeks before, saying he was a nice guy who he had known for years. Brandon told me he had loaned John large sums of money that he always repaid, and that John had just finished rehab and needed to make some money fast. Selling crystal meth was how John planned to do it. Brandon told me John was not streetwise and so I should charge John double the normal price and keep the profit. I had no qualms and actually thought this very generous given Brandon knew I wanted to quit and go away for a while. At first, I sold John one ounce so that he could get his drug trade going. A week later John called and said it had gone so well that he needed to up his weekly deal to two ounces. A couple of weeks later, he called and said he wanted 4 ounces. I went round to Brandon’s building and when I buzzed his apartment number, I noticed a pink-faced frat boy slip in behind me and run up the stairs but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Brandon and I chatted. I was nervous and on edge. He showed me a full pound of meth he had stashed away under a board in his kitchen. Anxiously, I stuffed 4 ounces of meth into my cargo shorts and opened the door to leave, when a phalanx of burly guys rushed in, pushed me face-first into the wall. Four guys hustled me into the bathroom, while the rest barged into the kitchen where Brandon was. Unbeknown to me, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had commenced a covert operation that targeted gay men’s drug use. Brandon had been caught in a recent DEA snare and in return for a reduced sentence he was now setting up narco busts of his contacts, including myself. Operating out of a large, non-descript, storage warehouse on West 17th St, (see Figure 13.4) the DEA had deployed undercover special agents around Greenwich Village and Chelsea where many gay men live. I later found out I had been under surveillance by DEA operatives since July 2003 when I was seemingly casually introduced to “John”. A few weeks later I was caught in the sting operation set up by Brandon and was arrested on August 10, 2003. I was handcuffed, put in the backseat of a car waiting outside and driven to the DEA building. There are no windows at street level, only a huge garage door. We drove down a ramp and I was told to get out. They removed the handcuffs and put me in a small cell with a group of men. I didn’t see Brandon again until I was taken for processing. We didn’t talk and that was the last time I ever saw him. I was processed straight after him. This is why our prison numbers are one number apart. His is 55552-051, mine is 55552-052. I was handcuffed, shackled, loaded onto a bus and transported across the river to the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn with a busload of men. One by one, we were called by name. There was a young white guy who fell to the floor, sobbing, curled up in a foetal position muttering that he couldn’t take it. When it was my turn, I was told to remove my clothes. These were put into a box and sent home. I was given a brown jumpsuit, a blue t-shirt, boxer shorts, and socks and from now on was referred to only by my number, 55552-052. Being issued with and referred to as a number, the repeated undressings and forced nudities, regular body and cavity searches and brown uniforms are all ways the prison system actively uses to strip people of their civilian names, identity and capacity for movement, speech and expression. It is a transformation not just in categorical identity but in existential possibility, agency and action. This recasting of legal and existential status is demarked by the change in rights, verbal address, clothing and footwear—from a civilian with a personal name—to a prisoner, a number, a uniform and to regulation footwear. A body whose movements, eating habits and social relations are restricted and subject to surveillance. It involves the reduction and breaking down of embodied and habitual being into the only terms that the prison recognises so that movement, will and action become more compliant and easier to handle. Ironically, I read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1979) 131

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Figure 13.4  DEA building, 10th Ave and West 17th St, New York.

Figure 13.5  William Cullum: Mugshot.

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many years ago but never imagined it would also be my fate. Now I was living it. I was on antiretrovirals for HIV and other medications for its side-effects. It made no difference. I received none of my medications. At my bail hearing, I was released into what’s known as “home confinement”. I had to wear an ankle bracelet and wasn’t allowed to leave the house except to see my pre-trial officer once a week and provide my urine for a drug test. I had not been to trial yet but the state had already established its rights over my movements and even my own bodily fluids. This went on for six months and I was agitated and stir-crazy. One day I went to the pre-trial office for my routine meeting. There was a new officer who wanted to know what was up with the five dirty urines I had on my chart. They were dirty because I’d never stopped taking crystal meth. I was facing a mandatory minimum sentence of over 11 years and figured if I was going to prison for that length of time what was the point of stopping now? Finding out about my dirty urines, the judge stopped my home confinement and sent me back to MDC Brooklyn to await sentencing. It was the same process as before. Because I was detoxing, the prison psychologist moved me to the top floor which housed prisoners who were high-profile: at risk from other prisoners or who had attempted suicide. It took another six months for my sentencing hearing to come up. The DEA had a covert videotape of me making transactions with “John” and my lawyer advised I had no alternative but to plead guilty. I pleaded guilty to seven felony counts and although I was facing a mandatory 11-years sentence, my attorney managed to get me a sentence of 7 years and 3 months. My brother was at my sentencing and

Figure 13.6  Feds target Chelsea crystal use; Gay City news, November 4, 2004.

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tried to hug me as I was being led away but the guards wouldn’t let him. To mark my incarceration, the US Attorney’s Office started a campaign and plastered posters of me all over the city, on phone booths, bus stops, in communal parks and on the sides of buildings (see Figure 13.6). Numerous gay activist groups canvassed against the campaign’s implicit homophobia and explicit targeting of gay neighbourhoods, and it was even front page news in the Gay City News; but by then, it had already done its damage.

Movement as existential capacity For the first years of my sentence, I was incarcerated in a high-security prison. In high security, movement is controlled by “ten-minute moves”. In other words, prisoners have to stay in the same place for 50 minutes out of every hour. After complying for 50 minutes, prisoners are allocated 10 minutes where they are permitted to move between locations. At the start of the next hour, they are required to stay where they are for 50 minutes before being allowed to move again, and so the cycle repeats. This defines the primary temporal and spatial structure of prison life, the exception being roll-call and meals, when inmates are called into one prison building at a time. The entire population of the building leaves and moves en masse to the canteen. Then everyone stands and waits in line before sitting and eating whatever is given to them. The control over what you eat, movement and social relations is part of Federal Prison’s policy of dehumanisation, of reducing a person to a location, number and impersonal mode of address, where someone has to use their prison number rather than their name when spoken to otherwise further restrictions are imposed. Numbered bodies always had to be located in the right place at the right time. This set up a punitive mechanism for the governance and depersonalisation of the body and movement. However, beyond the confinement of movement to certain times and within certain spaces inside the prison, there is also the movement and organisation of numbered bodies around the nation. Prisoners are frequently moved around the country from prison to prison usually without being told where they are being moved to. Movement is by bus or the fleet of old passenger aeroplanes owned by the Federal Bureau of Prisons known as “Con Air”. The first time I was moved I was handcuffed, shackled and driven out of New York City to Stewart International Airport. A bunch of us “cons” stood in formation in the snow of a freezing February night dressed only in T-shirts soaked by the freezing sleet. I don’t know how long we stood there but we were a shivering mess by the time we were allowed to board. The Marshal Service was our overseer and took control of our movements. They were like fight-trained pit-bulls. We simply weren’t human to them. Shortly after we were loaded onto the plane, one of the marshals dragged an inmate by his throat all the way up the aisle from the back of the plane. I have no idea what the poor guy did to deserve such treatment but it sent out the message that we should be very careful not to upset the marshals. After we had been up in the air for a while, we were given two bits of white bread with a slice of bologna in between. That was all we were given to eat the entire trip. However, it’s also very difficult to eat with the limited movement afforded when you’re handcuffed and those cuffs are connected to your leg irons by a chain. It involves lifting your feet while bending over to eat. As usual, we were given no information and had no idea where we were being moved to or how long we would be in the air. Information about one’s destination and itinerary is purposefully withheld so as to help thwart any plans of escape from inside or outside the prison. Eventually, we landed, and we waddled off in our shackles into a long hall. Our handcuffs and shackles were removed when we came to a door which opened onto a large octagonal room lined with cells on two levels, with a guard’s booth in the centre. This was Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. There was only one guard visible and it’s a testament to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ ability to cow prisoners that only one guard was required to supervise a hundred inmates—although we all knew that if the guard pressed a button, all the other guards working in the invisible spaces distributed throughout the complex would be summoned. Ultimately, and largely regardless of socio-economic status, your body, sustenance, and movements are controlled by a disciplinary administration that comprises guards, counsellors and all the other people involved 134

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in running the prison. They organised my capacity for bodily movement to such an extent that it soon became my life. By which I mean, although I could remember a life before prison where time, space and the body were under the control of my own will, I could no longer conceive of it in any practical or grounded way. Paradoxically, it was sometimes quite comforting to be subject to the ritual and institutional organisation of time and space. To live, move and be moved according to a kind of certainty and surety in which there is no decision to be made. It was as it was. But it does not prepare you for life outside. After about a month, I was boarded onto Con Air again and this time we landed at United States Penitentiary Atlanta. Atlanta is a medium-security prison and the second oldest federal penitentiary in the U.S. The building was completed in 1902 and, as one might expect, it has a long and checkered past, including housing Al Capone, Marcus Garvey, Carlo Ponzi, and Eugene V. Debs—and has witnessed periodic riots. My shared cell was 8 × 7 feet. I was lucky to be the second inmate to arrive and so I got a top bunk. Soon we got three more inmates, who all had to sleep on the floor on mattresses that were falling apart. We didn’t have sheets, just a blanket each and there were only two pillows for the entire cell. My bunky and I both had pillows but the guys on the floor didn’t. Worse still, the last guy to arrive had to sleep with his head against the toilet. The only time we were allowed to leave our cells was to get our meal trays. There was no dining room, so we mostly ate standing up. We were allowed out every two days for 15 minutes to shower. We were careful each day to save a morsel of bread that we would shove through the three-inch crack under the door at night so the rats wouldn’t come in. While at Atlanta Penitentiary, I was designated to a camp attached to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. Once more I was taken from my cell and boarded a bus bound for the camp. We only took back roads and the trip lasted four whole days. Four days were handcuffed and shackled and nights were spent in local jails. A camp is the lowest security facility in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The camp comprises restricted areas but, behaviour permitting, you are allowed out of your cell and are no longer controlled by “ten-minute moves”. We were used as labour for the Air Force Base. It was basically slave labour, a dollar an hour, but many of the inmates welcomed it as an opportunity to get out of the camp and working made the day go faster. After about nine months, the Federal Bureau closed the camp because of security concerns and the passing of the “Patriot Act”, and I was moved again: to Federal Correctional Complex Butner, North Carolina. The dorms where we slept at Butner were open-plan with only 5-foot cinderblock walls to separate the living areas called cubes. There were two men in each cube and we slept on bunkbeds, so the man on the top bunk could see and be seen by every other man on their top bunk. The showers were in an open room and the toilets were partitioned but open to the main room. The grounds were also open, and the trees were cut down, so inmates could be watched at all times. Butner houses one of the Federal Bureau’s hospitals and is staffed by doctors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Medical School. Living with HIV, I was thankful for the excellent health care at Butner. However, Butner was also a site of overt, unapologetic racism. Most of the prisons in which I was incarcerated were on average around 70% Latino and Black, and 30% White. At Butner, the use of race as a basis for locating and moving people in space was physically inscribed into its architecture. For example, there are two dining rooms, one for Black inmates and one for White inmates. And because there are many more Blacks than Whites, the Black inmates had to sit along the walls of the White dining room. After almost a year, I was put back on Con Air and transferred to MDC Brooklyn where I had originally started out. I thought everyone in MDC Brooklyn was either pre-trial or being held for transfer. I found out that there was a third group of inmates consisting of undocumented immigrants and foreign nationals who had been caught attempting to smuggle drugs through nearby JFK airport. One guy I met had been there eight years and still had two more to go for trying to smuggle a stash of 1,000 ecstasy pills through JFK. After ten years, he would be taken back to the same airport and deported back to Amsterdam from where he had flown ten years previously, having spent the whole time on US soil incarcerated. 135

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It’s hard to fully describe what a hellhole MDC Brooklyn is. The older buildings are particularly nasty and inhumane. There’s no natural light anywhere, just a slit in the top of the wall to let air in. The sky can’t be seen and the only exercise is walking in a circle around one’s bed or walking in a circle in a small court. Each floor had two huge open spaces, filled with bunkbeds on one side and showers and toilets on the other. There was a tiny room in a corner for watching TV but there were only a few chairs so only a few inmates could use it. Thankfully, I was only in transition for a week but my heart wept for the men left there. Once more I was handcuffed and shackled and herded onto various buses with loads of prisoners and transferred to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: a high security prison which sits alongside a camp which was my destination. The Federal Bureau lists the official population of the camp as 489 but when I was there the count was nearer 700. There were three of us in a 7 × 9-foot cube designed for one. The overcrowding was due to the “Get Tough on Crime” initiative which only achieved the U.S. having the largest prison population of any country in the world. The overcrowding didn’t just stress the inmates but also the staff. Nevertheless, after being cooped up in the nightmare of MDC Brooklyn, I was ecstatic to finally be in the camp and to be able to go outside into the sun and fresh air. I ended up spending four years at Lewisburg where I experienced extraordinary acts of kindness from my fellow inmates. I was strip-searched countless times for the flimsiest of reasons. I fell in love a couple of times. I found places to have sex. I made friends I have to this day. Many of the prison staff I encountered were kind, compassionate people who genuinely wanted prisoners to come away from the experience better people. Others were true sadists—sad, mean people with miserable lives—who took pleasure in punishing inmates. The Industrial Prison Complex in the U.S. didn’t just evolve, it was planned and developed since the 1980s. It encompassed a big push by the Republican Party to build prisons in rural, mostly Republican, areas. This not only provides funding, jobs and profit for overwhelmingly White, conservative communities who in return vote Republican, but also provides increased census numbers for rural areas that were previously unrepresented but now have extra legislative clout. It has been the cynical policy over recent decades to lock up and disenfranchise the Black and Brown communities in the U.S. who traditionally vote Democratic. This has demarked a wider shift in the practical purpose and economics of the prison system beyond a notion of reform and punishment to the establishment of a “corrections industry” which is crucial to local economies and national politics, and which supports a substantial workforce including those employed in local manufacturing and distribution, building and construction, agriculture and fishing. For whatever reason, there are individuals who cannot exist in society. It may only be until they aren’t kids anymore. It may be forever. We as a country haven’t even scratched the surface of finding a way to effectively treat these people so that they can become part of the world again in a way that is safe for themselves and for the people around them. I read Foucault many years before I went to prison. I re-read it when I got out but was still on parole. The state devises methods of reducing the body, its activities and capacities for movement. It then uses this as a platform to break down the mental state of its inmates. In some ways, the punishments have only very recently become less physically violent. Most of the guards at Lewisburg were wistful about the time when they were allowed to beat prisoners. For many years I was subject to the Federal Bureau of Prison’s regimes and mechanisms of power. My hope is that sometime in the future there will be treatment centres where these troubled souls can be housed and helped, as happens in other parts of the world. I’m not at all confident I will live to see that happen.

Conclusion: Your Tax Dollars at Work Your Tax Dollars at Work is a recent painting by Bill Cullum, painted after his release, to signify the financial cost of restricting and controlling his capacity for movement between 2003 and 2011. In New York City, the cost to process, guard and feed each inmate was estimated to be $167,731 per year, with the total cost to the taxpayer per inmate per year nationwide averaging $33,274. 136

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Figure 13.7 “Your Tax Dollars at Work”. Source: William Cullum. Gouache, graphite on paper, 2013.

Your Tax Dollars at Work would never have existed had it not been for the combination of contingency, choice and circumstance that created the specific life journey Bill ended up taking. The artwork’s production and material presence recalls Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of painting: “although it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that for that work to be done called for that life” (Merleau-Ponty 1994, 70, italics in original). The very existence of the painting is predicated on and is in direct relation to the existential contingencies of life, personhood, movement and their alternative trajectories, including the life Bill might have otherwise lived had he not come of age in the era of HIV/AIDS, had he not been diagnosed with a terminal illness, had he not decided to spend his remaining time on crystal meth, had his friend not been caught and cut a deal with the DEA, had Bill not fallen for the sting. This reinforces how life is an embodied and existential phenomenon before it is a conceptual or philosophical one (Jackson 2011), whose movements are shaped but not determined by various personal and impersonal forces. Recalling Montaigne, the journée of life is defined and individuated from moment-tomoment through movement and action in the face of random events and happenstance to create the conditions under which people experience and negotiate a world of possibility and constraint. Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number 137

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of days, to have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine ever to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? And yet there is no journey but hath its end. But if company will make it more pleasant, or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self same way. Montaigne 2016 [1580], 288

Notes 1 Other important works include Fleisher’s Warehousing Violence (1989) based on fieldwork undertaken at the Federal Penitentiary at Lompoc, California, where he worked as a correctional officer. Research on non-US prisons provides valuable comparative insights into everyday prison life (Reed 2003; CorralParedes 2014; Dietrich 2015). 2 Bill’s turn of phrase recalls Koselleck’s (2004) “horizon of expectation” whereby Koselleck argues that time was transformed and concentrated under modernity so that people are left with foreshortened temporal horizons within which to negotiate, understand and adapt to new circumstances and experiences.

References Corral-Paredes, C. 2014, “Being in the wrong place at the wrong time”: Ethnographic insights into experiences of incarceration and release from a Mexican prison. Unpublished PhD Thesis: University of Manchester. Cunha, M. 2014. ‘The ethnography of prisons and penal confinement’, Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 217–233. Dietrich, M. 2015. Sensing prison: The bodily and imaginative aspects of imprisonment among female prisoners in Peru. Unpublished PhD Thesis: University of Manchester. Fleisher, M. 1989. Warehousing Violence. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Irwin, J. 1970. The Felon. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Jackson, M. 2011. Life within Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Koselleck, R. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Kropotkin, P. 1887. In Russian and French Prisons. London: Ward and Downey. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1994. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Montaigne, M. de. 2016 [1580]. ‘To philosophise is to learn how to Die’, In Complete Works. Hastings: Delphi Classics. Reed, A. 2003. Papua New Guinea’s Last Place: Experiences of Constraint in a Postcolonial Prison. Oxford: Berghahn. Rhodes, L. 2001. ‘Toward an anthropology of prisons’, Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 65–83. Tannenbaum, F. 1922. Wall Shadows: A Study in American Prisons. New York: G.P. Putnam. Wacquant, L. 2002. ‘The curious eclipse of prison ethnography in the age of mass incarceration’, Ethnography 3(4): 371–397.

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14 THE CAR DRIVER’S BEING A Different Direction to the Auto-Ontological Turn Andrew Dawson

Automotive being In the Marxian quarters that were so academically and politically fashionable at the time, fear of American capitalism becoming Post-World War II Europe’s latest totalitarianism was commonplace. An especially potent symbol of this fear was the car (Bosquet 1977), from which modern capitalism derived its quintessential social relations of production – Fordism. The Marxian critique of driving that emerged focussed on a number of issues. They included its engendering capitalist-friendly temporalities (Dawson 2020), man’s [sic] alienation from the non-human and human environments through which the cocooned driver so speedily passed, and man’s alienation even from himself (Dawson 2017a) or, to use the appropriate theoretical terminology, his ‘species being’. This concern with being came to be the central focus of the Marxian critique of driving, albeit in another register. The auto in automobile speaks simultaneously of the mechanical capacity for movement (­automaton), reflexive self hood (autobiography) and crucially individuality (Urry 2006, 18). Driving promised to afford a route to being an autonomous self. Another great wing of post-war American capitalism – the entertainment industry – was particularly adept at promulgating that idea, especially via the genre of the road movie, novel and song. However, the depiction therein, of drives to freedom and individuality, was dismissed by the Marxian critics of automobility as an expression of, in fact, an insidious bourgeois individualism (Boltanski 1975). For the M ­ arxists, the kind of being that driving engendered was one primed to fulfil the interests of capitalism – the privatised consumer who increasingly lived in the suburbs and shopped at the out-oftown mall, capitalism’s quintessential forms of post-war urban development that were specifically ­enabled by mass, private, car ownership (Lefebvre 1971). Finally, and just as Marx had done in illuminating how apparently ‘free’ markets were freighted with relations of unequal exchange, so too did the Marxian critics of driving deploy the concept of ideology to demonstrate how the car’s promise of freedom and individuality disguised processes of control (Gorz 1973). Marxian conceptualisations of being in driving have been subject to considerable critique, not least because they render different kinds of drives as ontologically identical (Pearce 2016, 24), and they elide the discourse of individualism with the individuality that is the reality of being (Rapport 1997), including being in driving (Pearce 2016, 37). Nonetheless, the grip of Marxian

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-16

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thought has persisted within current automobilities scholarship. At the grandest level, for many of those who still foresee capitalism’s imminent collapse, class struggle has been replaced by climate change as its most likely primary cause, and petrol-guzzling cars are highlighted as a key factor in that (see, for example, Baer 2019). On the matter of this chapter – the question of being – the grip is no less tight. By way of illustration, it is useful to quote the far from untypical words of leading Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) scholar Jörg Beckman. Speaking of ITS Beckman states, ‘every new implant seems to dislocate the driver from the problematic traffic community and enhances autonomy…. however, this autonomy and independence is fictitious. The more human and non-human agents enter the roads, the tighter the actor-network is woven’ [my emphasis] (2004, 89). For ‘fictitious’ read ‘ideologically illusory’ and for ‘tight actor-networks’ read ‘control’. The theoretical (in this case Latourian) terminology may be different, but the Marxian n ­ arrative ­remains the same. Far from enabling freedom and individuality driving diminishes them. Indeed, I would go further than this to argue that new developments, both in the real world of the road and the theorising of it, have served to tighten the analytical grip still further. The first of these is new technologies, and especially communication technologies whose capacities to do things like transform cars from sanctuaries into mobile offices have tended to be emphasised (Laurier 2004). The other is an overriding scholarly focus on the driver’s body (Dawson 2017b). One type of largely Foucauldian scholarship is concerned with the interventions and regulations designed to make docile bodies that are optimised for efficiency of movement and safety (­Bonham 2006). Another largely phenomenological type is concerned with precognitive and sensate driving knowledge that is implicated in producing specific kinds of being-in-the-world at the expense of other types such as those that entail choosing to pursue alternative and distinctly capitalist-unfriendly lifestyles that are relatively slow or static (Latimer and Monro 2006). However, senses of a controlled and de-individualised being in driving come to the fore most in what I have described elsewhere as the ‘auto-ontological turn’ (Dawson 2021a, 1). At the heart of the auto-ontological turn is the claim that technological advances, especially in communication and ITS, are producing driver-vehicle-traffic system assemblages of such tightness that the nature of being is transformed. As Jack Katz puts it, ‘an intertwining of identities of the driver and car that generates a distinctive ontology in the form of a person-thing’ emerges (2000, 33). Peter Merriman refers humorously to this new hybrid being as the ‘carson’ (2006, 75). However, and especially in the predominantly Latourian brand of Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship most closely associated with this kind of thinking, within this hybrid, agency is rarely presented as evenly dispersed, but as lying predominantly and increasingly in ‘system’ rather than the driver’s self (see, for example, Beckman ibid; Sheller 2007). Leaving aside its rather obvious technological determinism and ethnocentrism – for the technologies that are seen to enable the intertwining of identities are hardly evenly distributed or even commonplace, especially in the developing world – the auto-ontological turn eschews the ethnographic record too. That record is replete with accounts of agency, individuality and being in driving in a double-sense. Firstly, surely the senses of euphoria that people feel when engaging in resistance through driving to their statuses as disempowered women (Garvey 2001), youths (Argounova-Low 2021), classed subjects (Redshaw 2008), racialised subjects (Gilroy 2001) or colonised subjects (Bishara 2015) are not merely by-products of ideological interpellation, or of ontologies being technologically dis- and reassembled into an actor-network. Secondly, and as Lynne Pearce (2000) explored initially in a path-breaking auto-ethnography of her weekly drives on the M6 between Lancashire and Scotland, motoring facilitates and mirrors states of consciousness that enable us to wrest control of, work upon and refigure our senses of being. In later publications, Pearce identifies several specific forms of driver-consciousness of 140

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this kind. Firstly, ‘the motor car is the quintessential “dream-machine” and, as such, lends itself to all manner or unregulated thought and fantasy’ (2016, 12). Secondly, she observes that ‘the driver’s ability to reverse, detour and generally explore the road network appears to simulate the journeys of our minds into the past or, through projection, into the future’ (2016, 6). Finally, she continues, ‘it is perhaps the persistent, repetitive nature of our journeying – in particular, the way in which we have used our mobility (by foot, by cycle, by car) to probe our environment – that seems best to capture the analogy between automobility and thought….’ [my emphasis] (2016, 6–7). The implication is that through various automobile-cum-cerebral manoeuvres of dreaming, memory/­ projection, and probing being gets worked out. Indeed, this is implicit in many accounts of driving that highlight its therapeutic potentialities. People often drive to feel well (Dawson 2017a).

Ethnography as a passenger This chapter considers some of the aforementioned themes. In particular, I explore driving as a medium for resistance against the collectivising political project of ethnic-nationalism. Although states have proven to be adept at ingraining ethnic-nationalism within popular consciousness through the medium of traffic infrastructures (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2015), senses of ­individuality are retained. Relatedly, I explore crises of being (or ontological crises as they are more usually called), in this case the kind engendered by post-socialist and post-war transition to ethnic-nationalism. Finally, and centrally, I explore the role of driving in working those crises out. The ethnographic context of the chapter is Bosnia and Herzegovina and, in particular, the many drives I have taken as a passenger with a key ‘informant’, Mira Celić. Through the years since we first met in 2000 – some ten years after the beginnings of the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and four years after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina that had precipitated (Silber and Little 1997) – we have taken many drives together. Some were long domestic drives (Dawson 2015a) and others were long international drives (Dawson 2021b). However, most of our drives have entailed the regular round-trip that Mira takes between her home in the city of Tuzla and the town of Srebrenica. While working mostly as a teacher and translator in Tuzla, Mira also runs a small agribusiness-cum-humanitarian enterprise for the employment of displaced people, on inherited family land near Srebrenica. As the years have passed the journey has become shorter as formerly war damaged and/or insecure roads have become easier to navigate. The round trip now takes about five hours. However, though we usually set off early morning, with all the stops, Mira’s apparently unnecessary detours and the business that she conducts at the Srebrenica end rarely do we get home before late at night. Mira is a mono-ethnic Serbian woman. However, typical for many people from urban ­contexts and people of the generation that came to adulthood under Yugoslav socialism and so have no direct memory of ethnic-national violence in World War II, Mira identifies strongly as pan-ethnic Yugoslav. Ontological crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Steele 2008) wrought by post-Yugoslav transition is experienced most acutely by Mira’s type. They are often rendered pejoratively as ‘Yugonostalgics’. As post-Yugoslav nationalisms become hegemonic, Yugonostalgia is increasingly pathologised. Worse still, as nationalist revision of Yugoslav history, which involves systematic demythologising of the successes of Yugoslav socialism becomes hegemonic too, the imputed pathology is lent a particular, and psychologically, destabilising edge. Yugonostalgics themselves come often to see that the past they are nostalgic for, and upon which their senses of being are founded, was never really real (Dawson 2018). What follows are observations of many of the drives I have taken with Mira condensed, representationally, into one. It always seemed to me that those drives followed a pattern, commencing 141

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with irritation and concluding with a degree of contentment on Mira’s behalf. Furthermore, particular states of consciousness manifest in particular legs of the journey. My exploration is framed in terms of these legs of the journey and states of consciousness. Mirroring Mira’s often scarily erratic driving and Nigel Rapport’s method of exposition (1994), the exploration ‘zigzags’ between accounts based on several sources of data. There is zig-zagging between contextual information on Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ontological crisis and Mira’s personal crises within that. And, there is a zig-zagging between ethnographic data on driving with Mira and illustrative quotations about driving experiences drawn from two sources: informants talking about driving in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, and literary accounts of driving from the dawn of private automobility in the early twentieth century. In different ways, each of these sources draws attention to relationships between driving, consciousness and being. During the Bosnian War, many of the residents of Tuzla were locked down for three long years as the city was put under siege by Serbian military forces. War’s end brought, for various reasons, a period of hyper-automobility in which residents came into contact with a country that was radically transformed and radically transforming, as was their place within it (see Dawson 2015a). Conversely, early private automobility provided a larger group of people than ever before access to a means of travelling long distances and at comparatively high speeds which they were able to control. Several scholars have remarked on how the new experience of driving at what then must have been considered the mind-bending speeds of 30–40 mph heightened reflexive attention to senses of consciousness and being (see, for example Virilio 1995).

Mira: Driving, consciousness and being Tuzla to Kalesija: Escape We might be divided in many ways, but underneath it all we are all the same…. these roads are in our bones. [Informant trying to calm me down by suggesting that the driver of the oncoming car that he has just overtaken into the lane of understands exactly what he is doing and knows how to deal with the situation—by swerving off the road as it turned out.] Mirsad Osmanbegović Unlike so many other places in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Tuzla Yugoslav identification ­remained strong and there was little inter-ethnic tension during the war. The only serious violence affecting the city came from the mortar of Serbian forces that had encircled it. However, things changed post-war with Tuzla’s incorporation into the multi-ethnic but Bosniak (Muslim) dominated entity of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the influx of displaced and o ­ ften radically nationalised Bosniaks from the eastern part of the country, the departure of local Bosnian Serbs who feared retribution and, in general, the replacement of Yugoslavism by ethnicnationalism as the country’s hegemonic discourse of identification. In Tuzla, then, the rise of ethnic-nationalism is commonly experienced less as a violent rupture and more as creep. Informants remark, for example, about how people ceased gradually to be described as ‘people’, but instead as Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs (Dawson 2015b). For many Yugoslavs such as Mira, this is tolerable when it is unfamiliar others doing the ethnic-national categorising, shocking when it is neighbours, friends and family, and thoroughly destabilising when it is oneself. She resents having to identify ethno-nationally but hates it even more when she finds herself so doing. She once described the feeling to me: ‘Nationalism felt like a kind of disease or madness. I was shocked when I caught myself describing a person as a Muslim, or 142

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whatever, and horrified when I caught myself mouthing typical stereotypes about them. It felt like when you wake-up and discover a nasty spot or a lump. It’s like a cancer or a psychosis. It can overwhelm you and govern your life. You know how it did that to me’. Mira was referring to what she regarded as her bad marital choices. She had left her first husband in part because of her discomfort with his increasingly militant Croatian nationalism. However, despite both this and her husband’s problem-drinking, she wonders if it might have been better to have stayed with him. Besides, the family rift that the divorce had caused, she had come to realise that, after all, she still loved him. The same could not be said about her feelings for her second husband. An old school friend from Srebrenica, she had taken him in when he became one of the many displaced persons who ended up in Tuzla. She regarded him as a ‘truly wonderful man’ but felt little love for him. She had, rather, confused as love the guilt she felt about what ‘“my people” (Serbs) had done to people like him (Bosniaks)’. Driving days with Mira always began with a light breakfast of cigarettes and coffee, and an opportunity for her to offload. Nationalist creep in various mundane forms, from little changes in the school curriculum to reports of old friends who have fallen out over the ethnic question, were a major source of her irritation. And, as a non-local, I was a good subject on whom to vent. However, Mira’s irritation would usually fade as we settled into the drive. The drive was a huge relief for Mira in the sense of an escape from the nationalist creep into a more comforting world of both privacy and Yugoslavism. Her car was clearly a private sanctuary, which she cultivated through its decoration with photographs of her daughters, little trinkets and creature comforts such as crochet headrest covers. But, the road was even more significant, a comfortingly enduring infrastructure of socialist Yugoslavia that cuts through increasingly nationalised landscapes (see below – ‘Zvornik to Srebrenica (and thereabouts): Difference’). It is decorated with fading socialist iconography and rusty signs still bearing the socialist names of places that have been changed on new nationalist maps. It still bears the World War II memorial sites that, in-line with the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia state’s memory policy, re-represent places of inter-ethnic conflict in non-ethnic ways, as sites in the struggle between the proletariat, the bourgeoisie and the latter’s internal quislings for example. And, importantly for Mira, it brings to mind happy memories of when, like many other people of her generation, she had done her bit for the future of a socialist Yugoslavia by labouring as one of Tito’s Pioneers1 on road-building projects. However, more important than all of this was the feeling that in cars people are ethnically un-differentiable beings who, regardless of which ethnic-national group they belong to, are governed by a shared phenomenology of driving and choreography of traffic (Thrift 2004) whose roots pre-date the current ethnic-nationalist milieu and go back to the ‘old Yugoslavia’. As another Yugoslav-identifying informant, Mirsad Osmanbegović, once put it to me succinctly: ‘These roads are in our bones’.

Kalesija to Zvornik: Bodiliness More than anything [why she likes driving] it’s because I get this powerful feeling of my body being one and my own. Mira Celić The rise of ethnic-nationalism even impinged on bodies, especially women’s bodies. With the melding of religion and state and in hopes of increasing or consolidating their ethnic populations, nationalists increasingly stigmatised birth control and promoted childbirth. In extreme cases, such as when Croatia’s president, Franjo Tudjman described ‘the foetus as a Croat too’ (Drezgić 1996), 143

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there were senses of the nationalist project coming to own women’s bodies or, at least, their reproductive organs. What had finally pushed Mira’s first marriage over the edge was her increasingly strident Croatian-nationalist first husband’s insistence that they have another child. By the Balkan widelogic of patrilineal descent, the child would, despite Mira’s Serbian-ness, be Croatian. Bodily impingement crept in through the national project from the state down to Mira’s family and into her own body. On our drive Mira holds off from eating until we reach Kalesija, where her favourite burek 2 shop is located. She gorges herself. And, the drive from Kalesija to Zvornik has a very different feel to what proceeded it. It begins with Mira smiling and making a show to me of putting on her leather driving gloves. She knows that I know what she is communicating – we are about to drive the bendy, occasionally hilly and always bumpy, badly maintained roads of the near bankrupt Serbian-dominated Bosnian entity of ‘Republika Srpska’. Relaxed, with stomach full and concentrating attentively on the road, Mira falls into a contented silence. There had been a time when, however, the pleasure she derived from navigating this part of the road faded. When her old Yugo – a vehicle sometimes referred to as ‘the worst car in history’ (Vuic 2010) – finally died, one of her daughters bought her a fancy new and powerful automatic model. She hated it. She hated that it was German,3 and, even more, so that it did all the work for her. So, she sold it and bought something closer to her taste, a very basic small car of some variety or other. She loved it. Unlike her Yugo, which teetered constantly on the edge of breakdown, this one was reliable. However, and most importantly, unlike the automatic that did everything for her, she had to ‘work with this one so it obeys me and does what I need it to’. Mira derives a whole-body pleasure from this, listening attentively for the right moment to depress the clutch and change gear, leaning purposefully with the car when turning tight corners, and throwing herself forward to get that last ounce of grunt needed to propel this tiny car forward when overtaking, etc. In times when she might feel that her body is less her own than she would wish, in driving she gets a ‘feeling of my body being one and my own’.

Zvornik to Srebrenica (and thereabouts): Difference For Filson Young…. the magic of the journey lies in its lengthy exposition and in the active, attentive thought processes that make us open to, and conscious of, the things that connect those worlds with each other, so that we see the change coming and know it has come. [Lynne Pearce paraphrasing Filson Young, late nineteenth – early twentieth author of books on private motoring [see, for example, Young [1904] 2012.] Pearce 2016, 12 Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia consisted of multiple military strategies including domicide (Porteus and Smith 2001). Built environments were stripped for profit and then purposefully destroyed. Neither habitable nor recognisable, they lost the qualities of home, leaving little incentive for displaced people to return. In the post-war era, many such places were rebuilt, often with a proliferation of neo-classical and explicitly ethno-nationalist architectures, especially the faux ethno-nationally traditional municipal buildings in places like Zvornik, and oversized churches and mosques almost everywhere. Additionally, built environments took on less expected, if sometimes only temporary transformations, especially as a result of the country’s internationalization. This included the military bases of international peacekeepers, the buildings of often interesting INGOs (‘Homeopaths Across Borders’ is one that stays in the mind), the huge rural 144

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marketplaces established in ethnically interstitial zones to allow mass trading, and the smaller markets, often set up by Chinese immigrants who traded their way village-by-village into Western Europe through the sale of imported foods, fabrics and plastic goods. Even in Republika Srpska where she is not ethnically ‘other’, the new ethno-national ­a rchitectures are confronting for Mira. For a woman steeped in Yugoslav socialism, an ideology at whose heart were anti-nationalism ( Jansen 2005), futurism (Pozharliev 2016) and atheism (Duijzings 2000), they are anathema. In contrast, as facilitated by the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s policy of Non-Alignment4 and (unusual for a socialist state) its open borders, ­Yugoslavs embraced and practised internationalism. This undergirded Mira’s reception of the landscape’s international transformation. All the way recalling amazing childhood driving holidays and shopping excursions with her Mum and Dad to Trieste, Milan and once even Monte Carlo, she excitedly meanders off route to see and sample through her wound-down window all the foreign newness, from cheap trinkets to chow mein. And, in the anarchic laneways of markets, a different kind of traffic ensues – one guided less by shared rules and phenomenology and more by polite negotiation. In the manner of an automobile flâneur, Mira comes across as though she is ‘at the centre of the world, and yet remain[s] hidden from the world….the lover of life [who] makes the world his family’ (Baudelaire 1964 [1863]). Indeed, making the world Mira’s family was precisely what these drives enabled. Through time the ethnic-nationalist architectures were transformed for her from objects of revulsion into curios worthy of fascination too. Likewise, these polite traffic negotiations were a comforting sign of how one could get along with potentially threatening ethnic others (Dawson et al. 2020). And, more broadly, assisted by long conversations with a passenger companion – myself – who came to spend more and more of his time in ‘Immigration Australia’, Mira’s drives salved that dimension of her personal ontological crisis that consisted of being a Yugoslav internationalist within a milieu of intensifying parochial nationalism. Through the drives she was able to begin to connect those apparently incommensurable worlds with one another and come to think about their peaceful coexistence within benign multiculturalism as constituting the change that is coming.

Srebrenica to Tuzla and around: Control and congealment The motorist’s road in never dead macadam; by daylight, for instance, it leaps towards him like a twitching tide, a white lasso uncoiling as it comes. But at night its direction is reversed. It moves with you, seems a part of your machine; you seem to make it as you go…. Scott [1917] 2012 : 42–4 [Dixon Scott – early twentieth century historian of modern life] ‘The motor’s come to stay,’ he [Mr Wilcox] answered. ‘One must get about. There’s a pretty church – oh, you aren’t sharp enough. Well, look out, if the road worries you – right outward at the scenery.’ She looked at the scenery. It heaved and merged like porridge. Presently it congealed. They had arrived.’. [Margaret Schlegal describes, in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, the experience of a long car journey coming to its end.] Forster [1910] 2008 The journey by day consists for Mira of driving a comfortably Yugoslav road through a landscape that is massively transformed and still rapidly transforming. This is both confronting in its nationalism and exciting in its internationalism. In contrast, denuded of the vision of the clashing material symbols of nationalism, internationalism and, indeed, Yugoslavism, the night-time 145

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return on Bosnia’s almost entirely unlit roads enables Mira to focus without distraction on the development of her thesis of a future of peaceful multicultural co-existence. This reaches a resolution on our arrival back in Tuzla. As ritual dictates, at Tuzla’s city limits we buy a few beers and drink on the meandering route home. This is, in part, a statement by Mira that, despite all the discomforting changes that have taken place since the collapse of Yugoslavia, ‘this is still my town’. In particular, and somewhat misguidedly I think, she claims to know all the traffic police in the city, and so is not worried about getting busted for drink-driving. We tour and marvel at some of the new developments, including, for example, the big new Wahabi mosque out by the second-hand clothes market (Dawson 2015a, 20). In an era of heightened Islamic fundamentalism, and what is seen by many, especially Serbian residents of Tuzla (including Mira herself sometimes), as being a symbol of a dangerous future, on this occasion is marvelled at by Mira as an object of beauty, albeit gaudy. Most importantly, as always, we stop to drink and gaze at the crowds in Kapija, a city-centre square that’s lined with cafes, bars and restaurants. As with most Tuzlans no doubt, Kapija is a bitter-sweet place for Mira which symbolises Bosnia and Herzegovina’s discomforting changes. She recalls how, in an urban Yugoslavia that cared little for ethnicity, it had been the starting place for her pre-marital romances with ‘all sorts of men’. She argues that is precisely why in 1995 the Serbian military launched a shell into Kapija that killed 71 mostly young people. More than ethnic-national others, ethnic-nationalism reserves its greatest disdain for urban cosmopolitanism (Ramet 1996). Then, in another bitter post-war turn of events, Kapija became the parade ground of another invading force, of highly remunerated international peacekeepers who dined in its now overpriced restaurants. Nothing, Mira recalled, could be more absurd than the ubiquitous Mastercard sign that appeared in all restaurant windows at the time. In a place that lacked any kind of electronic money transfer system, its only function was as a marker of international distinction. However, in recent years Kapija had taken a sweeter turn …. As part of the transition from socialism to capitalism, state-owned industries were privatised. However, in many cases, rather than seeking to make these businesses viable, the new owners asset-stripped them, failed to pay workers and filed for bankruptcy, resulting in massive unemployment. In early 2014, a small group of workers in Tuzla protested and at one stage tried to storm the local government building in pursuit of corrupt officials involved in the sell-offs to unscrupulous capitalists. The police crackdown was brutal but, in response, several thousand Tuzlans came out to demonstrate solidarity with the workers, in several places, including Kapija. Within days, the protest spread to other cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in a brief moment that came to be known as the ‘Bosnian Spring’. Mira had joined the demonstration in Kapija. This was certainly a demonstration against unscrupulous capitalism. And, as the demonstrators’ aspirations to topple the government indicated, it was also a protest against the dysfunctional ethnic-nationalist regimes that have governed Bosnia and Herzegovina through the post-war years. However, it was not, in Mira’s eyes, a socialist Yugonostalgic demonstration against capitalism per se. She and her type had come through the years to realise that the so-called Yugoslav socialist economic miracle consisted, in fact of Western loans that propped up an intrinsically flawed economic system. This has become increasingly apparent in quotidian life, including through driving roads whose decay and increasing bumpiness come to be seen as but one example of the substandard products and infrastructure of Yugoslav socialist industry (Dawson 2022). Furthermore, in Mira’s eyes, neither was it a demonstration against ethnic-nationalism per se. Besides Bosnian flags, many demonstrators waived flags denoting their own different ethnic national identities. Here, for Mira, was a symbol of a 146

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new Bosnia and Herzegovina. The end of our drive brings, as Mira gazes out from her stationary vehicle onto Kapija’s mingling crowds, a congealing of the images of ethnic-national difference and internationalism into something solid – the benign multiculturalism that she now sees as being in reach. She’s contented and at ease.

Conclusion: In defence of Hollywood Being in car driving cannot properly be regarded as an outcome of ideological interpellation, in which the infrastructures of driving – cars, roads, signage, ITS, etc. – are the tools of that interpellation. Neither can it properly be regarded fundamentally as a dis- and reassembled self hood within an actor-network in which those infrastructures of driving are ultimately determining. Rather, in this chapter, I have documented how different states of consciousness become manifested in different states of a car journey through the driver’s active engagement with the car on different kinds of roads and the different land- and day-scapes they traverse. Furthermore, I have demonstrated how cumulatively, both within the course of a journey and over longer periods in a person’s life these may play a part in the transformation of being – in the case of Mira from Yugoslavist to multiculturalist. This begs the question, however, of what role, if not a determining one, infrastructures of driving – cars and roads, and also the different landscapes and day-scapes they traverse – do play in the formation of such consciousnesses and ultimately the driver’s being? Across his related works on the perception of the environment (Ingold 2000) and mobility (Ingold and Vergunst 2008), anthropologist Tim Ingold provides the basis for a possible answer. He eschews conceptualisation of perception, consciousness and, ultimately, being (and one might reasonably include being in driving in this) as ‘made up of separable but complementary parts, such as body, mind and culture’ [and, indeed, environment]. Rather, they make up ‘a singular locus of creative growth within a continually unfolding field of relationships’ (Ingold 2000, 4–5) [that incorporates the broader environment]. Rather than a human-environment determination, here is a vision of mutualism, relation and affordance. But then this seems to suggest that a driver’s being is necessarily haphazard, subject always, at least in part to ever-changing sensations and thoughts afforded by the particular car, road, landscape and day-scape that is being negotiated. And again, however, this eschews the ethnographic evidence. It cannot account seriously for the utterances of informants such as Mira Celić. Through driving, she purposively resists the self-colonising project of ethnic-nationalism. Through driving, she works out who she is and who she wants to be. Through driving, she gets to feel well again. In these ways, driving is not like some psychoactive drug that is able to transform consciousness and senses of being by itself. Rather, driving provides a reminder of her own existential power. The roads and the landscapes and day-scapes that the driver of the car traverses take the shape of or, in other words, become objectifications of her- ‘self ’. For example, when Mira gazes from her stationary car upon Kapija’s bustling scene, she sees a reflection of the multicultural being she has, through time, made of herself. In representing driving as a means to realising and being an autonomous self, Hollywood echoed a truth that Marxian and later scholars of automobility denied.

Notes 1 Nicknamed after Josip Broz Tito, the life President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia was a substructure of the League of Communist Youth concerned principally with instilling the values of the state.

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Andrew Dawson 2 Filo pastry filled usually with either meat or potatoes. 3 Antipathy towards Germany, especially amongst Yugoslav-identifying people, which dates back to World War II, was rekindled in the 1990s because of the key role Germany played in hastening the break-up of Yugoslavia by recognising Croatia’s independence. 4 The cornerstone of Yugoslavia’s Cold War foreign policy, entailing independence from and cooperation with both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

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15 EXISTENTIALISM AND TANGO SOCIAL DANCE The Anthropology of (Moving) Events Jonathan Skinner

I first came face to face with what I shall call raw existentialism when I watched my baby son reach hold of the crib, stare at me and rock from side to side. I found myself entranced and enraptured and copied his movements back at him. There was a similar reaction and we both together built a bigger movement from side to side. Whilst my son, Casian, became Casian – growing into and self-fashioning his identity – we were initially communicating through our bodies. We first came together in a synchrony of rhythmicity, a moving experience framed by rhythm for him and informed by dance for me. The non-verbal communication differs between us due to learning and meaning. My assumption is that the elementary forms of intersubjective reason have their origins in the pre-reflective, protolinguistic, sensuous and embodied patterns of the human infant’s relationship with its noise-making, of touching, smiling, looking, holding, clutching and playing. M. Jackson 2005, 36 *** This chapter is not specifically about my relationship with my son, Casian. But it is about meaning in life deriving from movement. That moment with Casian was one of many: they were collective connections of perception and movement with each other that came from being and doing, from existing in form and for that form to furnish an intangible rapport between us – reciprocated through ever widening movements, a growing grin and twinkle in the staring eye. Casian, pre-linguistic, with his learning limb movements and contingent identity, enjoys a changing, growing, developing relationship with me. Here, though, I want to concentrate on Michael, an articulate Argentine tango dancer from south-east London and avid fan of the practice who speaks his mind and works hard to sustain control of his limbs. Whilst Casian is young in the extreme, Michael is elderly. He is my token Everyman – Everyman’s social tango dancer with a more cooked existentialism, if you will. Whilst Casian is moving and exploring his movements – how to use his body and at the same time learn about his self (if the two can be disentangled) – Michael has had the seven score years and ten moving, exploring and now 150

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maintaining his body and his self. Learning Spanish and tango are ‘the two main features’ in his life, Michael explains, something distinct from ‘the normal dross of living’. In tango, he dances an existentially authentic lifestyle for himself. Michael and Casian are at opposite ends of the age spectrum and exhibit different experiences of control, equilibrium, identity and consciousness. This plays into their differing existential status. Because I can interview Michael, and because I have seen him and chatted with him and taught him tango on and off for several years, this is more Michael’s story than Casian’s. They are both, however, what I shall understand as existential beings-in-the-world, characters eternally becoming, and creatively and performatively identity and making-meaning. Between an existentialism of the raw and the cooked, I accept that Casian’s starting position is one more of presence with Michael exhibiting a more developed Dasein – to codify these positions between Sartre and Heidegger. The anthropologist Michael Jackson (2005, xxviii) refers to his ‘existential anthropology’ as an anthropology whose object is to ‘understand, through empirical means and expedient comparisons, the eventualities, exigencies and experiences of social Being’. For Jackson, what makes human life meaningful is not something to be found in the structures of the mind but in certain critical moments of living with oneself and others. These moments are transformative and often in ‘the interstices of everyday life’ (M. Jackson 2005, xxii). They are not only festivals and feasts but also apparently incidental happenings that carry special significance for us. They can be not only irreducible, seemingly without context, but also determinate in consequence (cf. M. Jackson 2005, xxvii) – undisputable, even, if you will. The anthropology of events, then, is for Jackson an exploration of these meaning-making scenarios, those personal epiphanies. Michael ­Jackson (2005, xxv) invokes Virginia Woolf ’s ‘moments of being’ in working towards a definition of the phenomenology of events and recognises complexity and indeterminacy in establishing all the variables affecting an individual, embedded as they are in biography and social history. Events and ‘happenings’ break into the mundane rhythms of everyday living and challenge and change the protagonist/s. Jackson qualifies the possibility of an academic study in anthropology as follows: As I see it, an ethnography of events seeks to explore the interplay of the singular and shared, the private and the public, as well as the relationship between personal ‘reasons’ and impersonal ‘causes’ in the constitution of events. M. Jackson 2005, xxvi–xxvii Michael Jackson (2005, xxvii) is dogmatic in his determinism: the event is irreducible of its meaning and cannot be broken down or broken up. The event is established and breaks through mundane rhythms in life: it has inviolate significance for those involved. It has prominence for the individual but is mediated by the group. These events have viability as well as vitality as legitimate occasions – Jackson opines – narrated through different mediums. For Jackson, the event might be an existential happening, but it also comes to be sharply delineated and fixed in its social meaning – clearly determined for all the seeming variety and complexity, the diversity and plurality of social living, and the confusions and misunderstandings that ensue given the ‘diverse worldviews’ of those involved (cf. Rapport 1993). This enables Jackson to write easily about key existential events in the lives of his informants in Sierra Leone, often traumatised by violence and human suffering – their apparently predetermined habitus torn asunder. Michael Jackson (2013, 251, author’s emphases) builds on this earlier work on a social and embedded and embodied existential anthropology, later qualifying his understanding of the 151

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‘existential’ in a subsequent collection of writings Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. There, ‘existential’ is referred to as part of our habits of life and living: he self-notes, ‘I have used the term “existential” to name that terrain of practical activity, thought, and endeavour that is there before it is apprehended academically and constructed substantively as the social, the cultural, the religious, the historical, the political’. This extant existential presence is part of our human lived experience before it becomes a semiotic interpretation of our bodily practices. Thus, Jackson (cf. 2013, 69) suggests, anthropological understanding derives from our habitus – as Bourdieu would have understood this: dispositions and patterns engrained in our body-mind complex and expressed in our social movements and social relations (cf. Bourdieu 1977). For Jackson, our relations are critical: we are social beings with social bodies and interactional habits. We can control and recreate our worlds through our habitus but do so together and not individually. This is apparent in his comment that ‘possibilities are socially implemented and publicly played out’ ( Jackson 2013, 63, author’s emphases). In sum, our human experiences stem from our body and its movements but are made meaningful only through social relations. This leads Jackson (2013, 57) to examine events at the ‘interplay’ between the physical or somatic on the one side and the habitual and conventional on the other – between the body and social constructions of the world. This is particularly evident in dance where the body movements – the techniques of the dance – facilitate participation in a community and link the one body to the common body. This can be felt not only through touch as proprioception, but also in the touching of minds as empathic understanding and consideration of others. The shared movement can be profound as the existential shock of an Other is recognised and ideally becomes integrated as a duet. Performance studies scholar Jonathan Bollen (2001) refers to this synchrony as a sense of ‘indistinction’ between the two figures as to where the one starts and the other one ends – a ‘queer kinaesthesia’ during Sydney’s Mardi Gras. This is not to the extent of ‘the collective pulse’ of Left-wing activists, enunciated by anthropologist Stine Krøijer (2015, 147): the body with synchronicity exhibiting ‘joint breathing’ such as when people find themselves crowded together. There are limits for all one getting ‘lost in the dance’, as the saying goes. The feelings of synchronicity extend the endurance of the human body; they intensify the sense of togetherness that flows across the dance floor. However, each body remains distinct and inviolable – ironically, just like Michael Jackson’s social event. From a cognitive anthropology perspective, the rocking together or synchrony of a coordinated activity promotes bonding, compassion and prosocial behaviour – even in babies (cf. Tunꞔgenꞔ et al. 2015). In experimental social psychology, this enhanced perception of groupness is a form of perceived entitativity and is ‘a shared psychological essence’ according to Lakens (2010, 707) with its existential twist. Further, this coordination of movement is suggested to be a signalling of unity bestowing evolutionary advantage. We evolved through movement; we dance our descent. *** I forget myself when I dance. On the dance floor, the music and the movements next to me and around me contribute to moving me. In salsa, they are comfortable patterns chosen and drifted into and out of. In tango, they are complicated steps and leads that can easily break down and leave me in existential pain and a partner walking back to their chair. Others have noted their being in a state of flow, and of meditation – grace and a state of prayer (Skinner 2015, 70), even – when they dance. The determinacy of the event does not, however, extend to my ethnography of events. Michael Jackson’s ‘interplay’ between the singular and the shared is more rigid than it suggests. So, too, is his invocation of Bourdieu’s habitus, conceived of not merely 152

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as an inspiration or influence than a sedimented and congealed self, a conditioning by practice. Bourdieu’s social constructionism is an attack on Sartrean existentialism, ‘circumscribing’ the individual with structure, reducing all to products of history (cf. Bourdieu 1977, 94, 80). Some dance anthropologists write in this way of the long memory of the dance, such as the supposed habitus of the Irish moving body (Wulff 2007, 46). Others, such as Brenda Farnell (2012, 71) would critique this Continental ‘disembodied social theory’ for its static and deterministic commentary on the body. In her treatise Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory: ‘I Move Therefore I Am’, Farnell (2012) finds that this attention to the unconscious disregards the living, moving, signifying body. For Farnell, the somatic and the semiotic work together in dance, and together are more than habituated practice. Contra Jackson’s strait-jacketed lifeworld, human action is encoded, enacted and made meaningful in movement. ‘Physicality [is] a site of meaning-making’ ‘checks’ Susan Leigh Foster (1996, xi) in her Introduction to her edited Corporalities. Body signification – its meaning in motion – takes place not only in choreographed movements, but also in the significance of social dancing, socially learned but not inherited: not only ballet’s arabesque on stage but also tango’s gancho in the middle of the ronda [circle of dance]. What of tango specifically? Julie Taylor (1998) writes in Paper Tangos of the melancholy of the dance, evoking the difficulties and pain of Argentina as a nation and the struggles of the individual. In particular, the shared disillusionment of living is sought by the sensitive tanguero at the nightly milongas around the capital, Buenos Aires: While thus dancing a statement of invulnerability, the somber tanguero sees himself – because of his sensitivity, his great capacity to love, and his fidelity to the time ideals of his childhood years – as basically vulnerable. As he protects himself with a facade of steps that demonstrates perfect control, he contemplates his absolute lack of control in the face of history and destiny. The nature of the world has doomed him to disillusionment, to a solitary existence in the face of the impossibility of perfect love and the intimacy it implies. If by chance the woman with whom he dances feels the same sadness, remembering similar disillusion, the partners do not dance sharing the sentiment. They dance together to relive their disillusion alone. Taylor 1998, 11 There is a vernacular existential angst about the dance: a ‘bitter introspection’ (Taylor 1998, 4). It is a space for reflection on the individual’s life, as well as the power and terror impinging upon them, Taylor suggests (1998, 44, 71). Argentina’s brooding tango contrasts with geographical neighbour Brazil’s happy samba. Moreover, if butoh in Japan is a postwar dance reaction to the darkness of the nuclear era, then Argentine tango might be a late-nineteenth-century workingclass migrant dance (between men waiting outside brothels) that was commodified and subsequently presented heteronormatively to a postwar 1920s Europe eager for a celebration of the end of ‘The War to End All Wars’. For Robert Thompson, there is also a contemplativeness to tango, even interiority: Tangueros pause as they start. In apart-dances, like disco or rock, couples swing into action at the very first beat. They cannot wait to get it on. Tangueros wait. 2005, 276 The order of the milonga is carefully set with tandas [collections of three to four themed dances]. There is the invitation to dance, the cabeceo [an inviting look], then the posture of a 153

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relaxed nestling together, all to create an emotional connection and matchmaking without any bruising to the ego or obvious decline. This latter characterisation will become evident in the following section where Michael discusses his commitment to the tango dance and its importance in his life.

Introducing Michael and his tango legs I interviewed Michael in February 2018 after knowing him for several years as a regular tango student in the classes I was demonstrating for with the teacher. We followed this up with his comments on this chapter, suggestions and revisions and a post-COVID after thought. He was regular to the weekly classes, as well as the tango party nights around my area of London, and became, for me, a self-fashioning cosmopolitan ‘anyone’ exercising lifestyle choices with a passion and a conviction (Rapport 2012, 33). His social dance ‘interplay’ very much came from the self rather than the other, I suggest in this chapter on existentialism and the anthropology of dance (moving) events. We chatted, discussed some of the harder tango moves, often complained about our dance partners not understanding us, and swapped versions of moves. We had an a­ ffinity throughout our wrestling with the dance. I appreciated Michael’s mobility issues – he often wanted softer versions of dance choreography taught to accommodate the restriction of his knees and ankle; and I liked Michael’s candour and authenticity, with his party nights at milongas ­often spent sitting watching, enjoying the milonga scene before him, sipping his cans of beer that he had brought for the night, rather than indulge in the complimentary glass of wine. For our interview, we talked for 45 minutes in his ground floor flat about his relationship with the tango dance and social dance scene, what the dance meant to him and the lengths he went to engage with the dance. It was, for Michael, a social passion that kept him together. The inventiveness necessitated by the tango dance kept him alert and all too human. It was his adopted practice to recreate himself in his retirement, weaving a performative narrative around the dance floor with his partner - evincing a personally embodied knowledge of the dance, a reflexive appreciation of his physical abilities, and a moral engagement with his environment. In a ‘post-cultural’ anthropology, self, world and other interleave from the body out (­Rapport 2001). People have different vastly different experiences and interpretations of the world, but their human capacities for giving the world personal substance (Rapport [2001, 99] hints at Bourdieu with the use of ‘dispositions’) remain intrinsically the same (Rapport 2001, 99). For Michael, the body is not what it used to be and he uses the tango to slow physical and neurological degeneration. He is in his late 70s and had been dancing for 3 years at the time of our interview. He initially wanted to learn ballroom dancing, an activity that would help to maintain his mobility after having replacement surgery on both of his knees. One of his friends in his Spanish classes told him about the Argentine tango that they enjoyed, and after posting an interest in social dancing more generally on social media, Michael started learning some lessons from a teacher at their home. With this brief introduction to the rudiments of the dance, he felt confident enough to walk into a local milonga venue that starts with beginner classes before an evening of social dancing. The relationship with the dance and other dancers proved to be complicated, as well as an expensive passion that led him to a number of international travels as a dance tourist (cf. Skinner 2015). Michael is new to dancing but has been physically active throughout his life. Like many ­d ancers drawn to the ballroom dances or social dances from a background in martial arts (Skinner 2007), Michael transitions from one movement form to another. One of the main pictures in the lounge in his flat is of him upside down in midair, thrown comfortably by a female 154

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martial-arts practitioner. This tango movement system that he now marshals is part of rehab for him as well as a reminder of his integrated body-self: Michael:

Michael:

It was very much lots of movements, and then turning movements and rolling, so its freedom in three dimensions really. I missed it – I had arthritis in the knees from old injuries, and eventually the knees had to be replaced. I thought tango is the nearest thing to me doing aikido really. […] This was twirling around so people lost their balance and fell over. That’s essentially what aikido is. With tango, it’s twirling round so you don’t lose their ­balance doing that.

Michael elaborates on his turn to tango with laconic wit, comparing it to his martial-arts background: Michael:

Michael:

Well, at the basic level I can say it’s remedial: its therapy for me. I wanted to do some exercises as well, but its sociable, that’s the other thing. There are nice and pretty women around. I can say it’s like Tai Chi with a woman on the end. […] Well, I mean it’s kind of magic. I may have a painful arthritic limp, and I’ve got every reason not to go. I think well, ‘I’m a bit tired, my ankle is sore, and my shoulder’s sore today.’ I go, and even limp into the room, and when I put my dancing shoes on, and the pretty girls are there it seems to have a magic effect, and I can get up and can dance around, yes.

This therapeutic intervention is deliberate and calculated. It is to stave off the boredom and possible physical and mental deterioration from old age. Like many other retirees who socialdance for health (Skinner 2013), Michael is aware of his status and self-medicates through movement to remain alert and prevent any onset of dementia. He explains it as a choice between tango and table tennis, but really indicates the significance of the dance nights at the end of his comments: On the basis that to prolong your life you need to do something for your brains, so I’m learning Spanish, and you need to do something for the body. It’s either tango or table tennis, or something like that, that’s sociable as well. Not like running on the spot, or just running up the canal tow path. Interviewer: You were thinking of this as well? Michael: No, no, I never was. But this is something that the BBC did a program with Angela Rippon and said these are the things that are good to prolong your life, stop you from getting Alzheimer’s and all those sort of things. Do crosswords or something. Learning a foreign language, that was another good thing to keep your brain alive. Spanish and tango go together very easily. They are the two main features really in my life now, plus the normal dross of living. Michael:

Michael understands the importance of the movement to maintain his health and capacity for life. The tango is a social dance for him, one way of meeting other people, of socialising at the weekly and monthly milongas, events that keep him active and sharp. Complemented by the Spanish language-learning, the tango is a key feature of Michael’s life. They are both cosmopolitan activities that expand his horizons in an otherwise ever-diminishing social and physical 155

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world. They are the extreme highpoints in an increasingly compromised and mundane life stuck at home watching TV, struggling with the weekly shopping, and attending the latest doctor’s appointments – ‘the normal dross of living’, as Michael refers to it. To dance the tango, Michael has had to unlearn his aikido movement system and to shift from confident instructor to uncertain and stumbling novice. His ‘Dojoitis’ (the condition of appraising places for their possibility to become an aikido studio) has been replaced by his hunt for an attractive tango school in Buenos Aires over the British Winter. Michael found, to his surprise, that tango movement is taught in a diametrically opposite way to aikido. Aikido teaches one to mentally move one’s body from its centre, a point just below the belly button. Tango teaches to move, and communicate with your partner, from the chest. In addition to this, the tango dissociation extends from walking (opposite hand with opposite leg) and generally necessitates a strong and consistent connection/frame with one’s partner. This, Michael found, is different from the rolling flows of aikido and strategic responses to the opponent such as the creation of a space for them to fall into. Aikido captures the opponent’s mind where the tango brings together the two considerate souls. They both are flowing movements, and the turning, yes. Well, this is quite technical now, we and a lot of the martial arts, and I think you’re one point down and so my knees is – your belly button down there. Whereas in tango they’re talking about ‘think of the top and move your shoulders’. We always move from the bottom first in the martial arts usually, whereas they say from the top, so it was different there. In aikido, you tend to move your left hand and left foot forward which is quite strange to do at first. You have to learn to do that, so you’re walking this way, and I still, because I did it for 18 years or so, I can sometimes slip into that which is ­opposite to the normal way we walk, which is left foot and right hand together. Interviewer: So, the dissociation and the tango. Michael: When I’m doing sometimes I will – it’s just as easy for me to use ‘the wrong leg’ or ‘the wrong hand’. I’m having to unlearn all that again. Michael:

The shift from semi-professional to novice has not been easy and has necessitated a lack of hubris. Michael has felt his body changing across the years and with the disciplines. In his youth, he was an engineer and a parachutist in the Territorial Army. These male-dominated environments were complemented by the muscularity of his aikido though none were fully sustainable. Old age has brought on retirement and severe crippling arthritis that makes the tango partnership so complicated and fraught. I was an engineer. And in the TA, I was a parachutist and that’s why my knees went. Well, you just tear a cartilage or something, arthritis sets in, and then 30 years later you need to replace a knee because arthritis sets in. Interviewer: You said tango was very good then therapeutically because of the walking and the soft movements? Michael: Well, yes I think so, it is. I’m trying to get my balance back as well. I lost my balance so the balance went for – I was ten years or more as a cripple, hobbling around with bad knees and a walking stick. So, my muscles atrophied and my balance isn’t the same as it was. At one time I could stand on one leg and say, ‘Try and push me over’ and you couldn’t really, you would find it difficult to do that. Yes, I know it’s good for me to do all those exercises, do all those moves. And that’s where I am. Well, that’s where I’m going ahead with it all the time, trying to learn more and more. Michael:

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Michael has to make do now with knees that don’t ‘bounce’, ankles that stick, and the occasional fall on the dance floor that he jokingly refers to as ‘big splatting’. On these occasions, he is saved from injury by knowing how to fall from his aikido and parachute training. The knees have been replaced but still won’t straighten. The pain and the scars on the body – as well as scar tissue within the body – are terrible. The fusing in the spine has also needed operations. And injections are needed every fortnight into his muscles to alleviate the rheumatoid arthritis in every part of the body. Again, phlegmatically, Michael jokes that if he had been a pet, it would have been kinder to have him put down than to endure this pain and suffering (‘My mate said if he still had his gun, he’d have taken me out and shot me out of kindness’). Rather than remain in the cold, isolated environment of his London flat, doubting his dance abilities, Michael tries to escape the depths of winter with dance holidays solo to a tango school in Buenos Aires. Michael becomes a tourist of tango, seeking dance training rather than leisure sights: ‘serious leisure’, as Robert Stebbins’ (2007) has described it, with a disciplined focus (‘I was on a mission to do tango and nothing else. I did not want to be side-tracked in any way. I wasn’t going to go off sightseeing’), or a Kantian ‘pleasure in the agreeable’ pursuit (cf. Zangwill 1995). It is also a commitment to bring an aesthetics into his everyday: ‘a lively sensory awareness’ (Smith 2005: x) of the special evening dance environment. Michael’s dance holidays thus extend to back-to-back lessons, for five weeks’ duration, either staying in a flat near to the dance studio or in a hotel above the dance studio itself – all to achieve a harmonious union, a balanced connection, equal and proportional or exchangeable in the movement together with his tango dance partner. Michael:  I look for harmony, that’s what aikido was for me, harmony a big one. I’m probably more susceptible to thinking, ‘Well, this is not going right’ or… Interviewer: What would that harmony be like, flowing… Michael: Well moving, yes absolutely two people moving as one, moving round one axis at one centre or another. That’s to me harmony. There are some women, you can spin them like a top and they’re light as a touch, and others it feels like Sumo wrestling. I don’t know what the answer to that is, both are probably right. Michael seeks in tango to regain that state of harmony that he once had in aikido. Both are ostensibly improvised activities. The learning gives him confidence and the ability to make a dance interesting for his partner, but he needs them to follow his leads. If they don’t respond or don’t know the patterns and ‘they just come and plonk themselves on you’, then he struggles to carry the dance. This anxiety extends from his early embarrassment of dancing very close with female strangers (‘tits for tits’ with his dance partner of the opposite sex). It is endearing and very down-to-earth. There is no pretension about the dancing. It is a pleasure; an occupation for retirement; and a concern that his dance partner enjoys their short tanda together (a grouping of approximately three dances before a break).

Michael as Everyman’s social tango dancer Michael is Everyman. He is a social dancer holding onto his life and using the dancing and its fraught learning as a figurative crutch to add to those at home. He is an individual resisting ‘social-structural containment’ (Rapport 2003, 66), and physical debilitations and pains, to pursue his imaginations and desires. He exists in a state of becoming and there is a singularity about his social dance project and projection. He is asserting himself and making meaning and 157

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eventfulness in his social dancing endeavours. According to Rapport (2003, 77), the will to present oneself, and to do so often with irony, is an exhibition of an existential ‘life of power’: a capacity and a proclivity for self-awareness. Here, there is this will to dance. This is an existential energy in the service of self-determination against all difficulties on the dance floor (and elsewhere) whether in London, Cagliari or Buenos Aires. For Rapport, the individual’s articulation of their life project – whether as farmer, painter, astronomer, poet, bodybuilder, migrant, anthropologist – an entextualisation or narration of living – is an extending of the self into the world. This can be achieved through meaningful movement, as ‘activity-in-the-world’ (Rapport 2003, 236). This self-expression, carving out a trajectory in life, Rapport, following Nietzsche, refers to as ‘Machtgefuhl’, literally a demonstration of existential power (2009, 15). This is more than a qualitative feeling of power, a perception or self-sustenance, and is more than an equal interplay between the singular and the shared. Michael very much chose to buy into the Argentine tango and its patterns and traditions in his own way and for his own purposes. In Michael, we hear not of habits or dispositions but ways of engaging with and overriding his physical limitations and how to dance through the pain, the falls, the embarrassments and anxieties or confusions. Michael gives an example of his knees and his ankles impeding his movement. They are not as strong or flexible as they used to be. This means that he has to be selective in his repertoire. Fortunately, as the lead in this generally improvised social dance, Michael can avoid those physical movements that he finds awkward, difficult, painful or impossible. I think it’s things like the sacadas [foot displacements] and things like that that my coordination doesn’t allow – I never seem to get it right and I end up kicking the women anyway. You see my knees don’t bounce: to tango they want you to have bouncy knees. My knees don’t bounce. The rebote [rebound], you are bouncing on your knee and on your ankle. I can do that to a certain extent then my ankle gets so sore. I’ve got arthritis in the ankle as well. I managed to do pretty well today. Saturday, but then in the evening I could hardly do any dancing at all. […] Interviewer: How big a place would tango feature in the everyday week? Is it at the core? Is it the high point or is it alongside other activities? Michael: Well, no, I think it’s going to be very major, principally because it’s my social life. Last night I really couldn’t dance at all, because my ankle was so bad, but I still went to Pavadita just to go and listen to the music, have a couple of beers, talk to some people. I really enjoyed doing that. The alternative was I could have stayed in and watched TV or something, or done some work. Michael:

Michael, as Everyman dancing, represents the social dancer adopting dance as essential to his identity, and using dance as existential succour to his human condition. It is not just a capacity but it is also a need. It also enables his connection with the Other in life. The alternative is social isolation. This dance as sociality is particularly apparent in social dancing: Michael shares his tanda of tango moves, but this sharing extends little inwards into his self-identity. It confirms status and ability with the compliments that he gets but does not impact upon his social dance challenges – he wrestles with his body just as much as he dances with it. The indistinction that Bollen articulates as dancers’ converge with each other, the ‘harmony’ that Michael achieves in his sport and in his dance: these represent the legacy of existential philosophy, namely the ‘dismantling of the subject-object metaphysics’ (Aho 2020, 171), the entitativity the psychologists announce, the uncertainty of the black box of our brains that classical anthropologists such as Raymond Firth (1981) qualify. 158

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Writing about salsa social dancing, Rebecca Lloyd (2021, 966) suggests that the power of the dance is to emanate from the inside-out: ‘to move in concert, in subtle, spontaneous rhythmical ways is to access sensations of vital power, of life’. The trope to explain this process is one of gut instinct or primordial power, a state of vitality and flow; this is as opposed to Don Handelman’s anthropological thesis of the proto-event as primordial.1 Though influenced, this ‘inter-feeling’ is not dependent on external influences: it is an ‘upwelling’ (Lloyd 2021, 959, 966). Crucially – though at play in-the-world – Michael’s engagement with the social dancing is not determined by sociocultural habitus, by Bourdieuvian ‘dispositions’ towards the world. Michael overcomes the contingencies of his body and the confines of any worldview or religious canopy in his days away in Buenos Aires and his nights out in London. The lived dancing is his being-in-the-world. Whilst it is Michael’s ‘social life’ that is discussed in the interview, and his preference for female company rather than the television alone at home, Michael asserts his own presence and frames his own environment to suit the leisure ‘skills’ that he has been investing in. Michael is being true to himself, authentic to his interests and his tango imagination: he dances the ‘existential authenticity’ of his lifestyle (cf. Cohen 2010). It belongs not to any object but to a particular skill, aesthetics and dance form. Michael’s dancing aligns with his sense of self and is a means to achieve an inner and outer coherence. The dance is particularly suited to Michael as a dance borne out of socio-economic difficulty that resulted in a performative inward turn. Dancing Argentine tango, Michael is committed to a social dance examined by dance anthropologists and dance studies scholars. Julie Taylor writes in Paper Tangos of the melancholy of the tango, evoking the difficulties and pain of a nation and the struggles of the individual: While thus dancing a statement of invulnerability, the somber tanguero sees himself – because of his sensitivity, his great capacity to love, and his fidelity to the time ideals of his childhood years – as basically vulnerable. As he protects himself with a facade of steps that demonstrates perfect control, he contemplates his absolute lack of control in the face of history and destiny. The nature of the world has doomed him to disillusionment, to a solitary existence in the face of the impossibility of perfect love and the intimacy it implies. If by chance the woman with whom he dances feels the same sadness, remembering similar disillusion, the partners do not dance sharing the sentiment. They dance together to relive their disillusion alone. Taylor 1998, 11 And so, Michael is able to fashion his self-identity as a tango social dancer in a modern society rather than be chained to the yolk of his profession (engineer) or class. Michael’s irony is evidence of the reflexivity and humble self-awareness so characteristic of individuality and self-identity in post-traditional ‘modernity’ (cf. Giddens 1991). He too shares the shared disillusionment of living sought by the sensitive tanguero at the nightly milongas around the capital cities of London and Buenos Aires.

Social dance, social anthropology and the existential (moving) event The meaning of the dance, and the limitations of the dancer, could be considered to be more authentic than those of the choreographed performer running through their theatre set. The improvised call-and-response nature of the dance opens up many possibilities of movement and necessitates careful listening to each other. In The Meaning of Tango, Christine Denniston (2007, 187–188), like Thompson, distinguishes the social art form from many others. She writes, ‘on the emotional level it offers an investigation of the nature of human relationships, of the meaning of 159

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intimacy, and of what it is to be human and a social creature in a world that is often lonely and isolating’. The singularity of the dance dominates for all its sharing on the dance floor. Moreover, Marta Savigliano (1995, 16, 30) goes further and politicises the dance and dancing, considering Argentine tango an exercise in decolonisation. This is social resistance in dance events rather than conformity. For her, the dancers’ embrace is an attempt at healing urban issues as races and classes become displaced in wider society. The connection is soothing and grounding. It gives rootedness to the displaced. And the restrained tango-murmurs in the music and in the whispers around the ronda denounce any sociocultural impotence or passive positioning in responding to the powers of fate. The tango nexus of song, music and dance retains the actor’s power to assert themselves – ‘skirting banality – tango’s closest foe’ (Savigliano 1995, 212). The indistinction between those in the embrace, the merger of humans, is a ‘wordless moment’; it is inchoate and poetic, ‘oceanic’ in the blurring of boundaries between self and world, Beatriz Dujovne (2011, 80, 206) summarises. We not only lose ourselves but also find ourselves. Or, as she (2011, 207) closes her study of the dance, ‘we find ourselves, we find each other, we find the tango’s strength in strangers’ arms’. This dance of uncertainty and possibility (Swindlehurst 2020), this dance of options (Dinzel and Dinzel 2000), this dance – tango – facilitates an introspective gaze. It also, in its unchoreographed ‘structure’, demands an authenticity between dancers as lives are lived and defined, lead and followed, narrated and embellished (small, subtle adornos of the feet). For Michael, tangomania extended to what Virginia Gift (2008, 119, 117) refers to as ‘total immersion’ in tango – tango tourism that at pre-pandemic levels averaged some 25,000 visitors to Buenos Aires each year. That authenticity is not just from the place of tango, but also the presence of the tango dancers during their dance on the dance floor. In her study of existentialism and contemporary dance amongst an aged group of dancers in Sweden, Cecilia Almqvist (2022) considers authenticity as presentfulness and immediate responsiveness. This is necessary in the contemporary just as much in Argentine tango with dancers communicating and responding to each other. Almqvist (2022, 99) refers to the concept of Bildung to reference the ‘inner, reflective, and self-constructive dimension’, an existential consideration of how one sees oneself and the world. The practice is meaningful. It connects with existential ideas of freedom and self-creation – the freedom to dance and the freedom to pass time within oneself. With similar steps, ‘I improvise my life as I go along’ declares existential phenomenologist dance scholar Sondra Fraleigh (2004, 213). In this unintentional homage to the dance of improvisation – Argentine tango – modern dancer Fraleigh writes about the freedom of her c­ onvictions, her feminist influences from De Beauvoir and how our performances on and off stage are opportunities for self-realisation. Though writing about contemporary dance, and expressing a metaphysical regard for existentialism, Fraleigh (2004, 217, 7) makes a wider point about our bodily powers: no dance, no life, she opines. This is because ‘dancing itself is metaphysics in motion’ – the latter being the subtitle of her treatise. Her postmodern take on dance and life is that they intersect as conjoined affiliates in her postmodern, anti-essentialist, anti-dualist life project. This position was established by Fraleigh (1987, xiii) in her first monograph Dance and the Lived Body where she asserts that dance is an aesthetic human ‘body-of-action’, meaningful movement with purposefulness rather than for contingency’s sake. Existentialism offers that route in understanding the body-mind state in motion: Existentialism, perhaps more than the other isms, attempts to explain the real. Its very name indicates its concern for existence and what ‘is.’ It attempts to describe the experienced reality of being-in-the-world. In short, it attempts the impossible but stretches us in the attempt. Fraleigh 1987, 175 160

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The philosophy made flesh by Fraleigh is an intimate ideology. It repudiates any predetermined essence. The irony is that we are inescapably free. This is disarming in its inward gaze. It is also modern for Fraleigh (1987, 5) who distinguishes between the traditional existentialist (considering life as accidental but transcendental) and the modern existentialist (seeking life beyond consciousness). Both, however, conceptualise individuality and vulnerability as intrinsic to the study of the human condition. This pathway differs from other dance scholars such as Serlin and Liu’s existential dance movement therapy KinAesthetic Imagining that deliberately articulates a group-(kin-)-based interaction practice. Or movement-based somatics that might constitute a similar dance form expressing for Amanda Williamson (2016) transcendence from within but avoiding the iniquities of sedimentation, acculturation and objectification that we find in the adoption of Everyman’s habitus. Similarly, in ballet practice, Jennifer Jackson advocates an ‘inside out’ perspective ( J. Jackson 2005) with a spectrum of points along the way. In this way, the creative processes and practices – their manifestation and their spectatorship – are all aspects of the dance. The aims of these dance studies resonate well with the work in anthropology of James Fernandez (1977, 478) whose stance considers the body as vessel and vector. In existentialism, he suggests we have ‘the individuality and subjectivity of perspectives on life’. Aimie Purser (2021) writes evocatively and similarly of her somatic practice, ‘tethered’ and secure with the existential. The ‘anchoring of the individual’ (Purser 2021, 168) comes from the experience of movement of the body-subject and its being-in-the-world. Once attuned to knowing with and from the body, one is existentially tethered. For Purser (2021, 175), then, dance is not only collaborative, but it is also deeply personal. This communion, or ‘intercorpreality’ as Aimie Purser (2019: 259) refers to it, develops a schema of responsiveness and empathy, a synchrony – Michael’s harmony – by social dancing. There are strong intersections between approaches to the human condition from dance scholars and – mostly the social – anthropologists. This is apparent from an existential stance that allows for an interplay between the inside and the outside, between the self and the other, through the body-mind. In the anthropology of events, the Argentine tango weekly events have personal meaning for Michael. They are structured around conventions, and follow the idea of the event as ‘reframing’ (Žižek 2014, 25), as possibility beyond the chemistry of its causation. It exceeds Michael’s norms and allows him to imagine, create, reinvent. In Zizek’s parlance, it ‘seems to exceed its causes’ (Žižek 2014, 3). There are possibilities in the realm of learning and then playing and improvising with the social dance. When videoed for a related film and dance project, Michael sat for close-ups in a crisp white shirt and a sharp brown fedora perched nonchalantly down across his brow. He was channelling his inner gaucho [Argentine cowboy], playing with working-class roots from one world to another. Post-COVID and back on the dance floor, Michael’s tango is ‘remedial’. It replaces the gym and has cleared up some of his back issues. He remains, though, an immuno-suppressed person taking the risk of dancing close to a careful stranger whilst masking up and acting ‘ultra cautious’ on public transport to the dances. In event theory, there needs to be a sense of difference or distinction between these everyday and social dance events. They are predominantly in the evening, unless they are in that liminal time and space whilst on serious vacation. Attending the social dances is a step across a threshold that Michael and others take. The unremarkable background world is ruptured, to paraphrase Wagner-Pacifici (2017, 42, 45, 55, 59). Just as the dance can have an existential reading, and the anthropologist a poetic view upon the participant, the event theorist can read ‘the “inchoative moment” of event formation’ (Wagner-Pacifici 2017: 59) whilst querying the event’s singularity and history, its context and recognition – let alone its representation. These existential considerations of Michael and his dance and his meaning-making are not events as ‘moments of social 161

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definition’ (cf. Kapferer 2015, 18), generative, generic and irreducible miniatures or simulacrums of social structure. They are moving, contrasting, social gatherings running counter to the quiet night in with the television. They are transformative times where touch is invited and reflected upon.

Note 1 Handelman (1998, xxiv) writes of the protean event as ritual presenting the lived-in-world with a bureaucratic logics about it – ‘the meta-creation jointly of the social world, of the imagination, and of horizons of possibility’. Conceptualisations of events are separate from the performance of the event but, akin to Jackson, view the event as discrete within a social context. As such, they have an autonomy about them. Where Bruce Kapferer writes of a virtuality in the tacit, Handelman (1998, 17) makes the point that public events are existential in design and origins: ‘Public events are profoundly existential, since no event qua event can exist substantively as a phenomenon apart from its practice’.

References Aho, K. 2020. Existentialism: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Almqvist, C. 2022. ‘Contemporary dance as being and becoming in the age of aging: Existential aspects of (arts) learning among older amateur dancers’, European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults 3(1): 97–112. Bollen, J. 2001. ‘Queer kinesthesia: Performativity on the dance Floor’, In J. Desmond (Ed), Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities On and Off the Stage (pp. 285–314). Madison, WI: University of W ­ isconsin Press. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, S. 2010. ‘Searching for escape, authenticity and identity: Experiences of “lifestyle travellers”’, In M. Morgan, P. Lugosi and J. Ritchie (Eds), The Tourism and Leisure Experience: Consumer and Managerial Perspectives (pp. 27–42). Bristol: Channel View Publications. Denniston, C. 2007. The Meaning of Tango: The Story of the Argentinian Dance. London: Portico Books. Dinzel, G., and R. Dinzel 2000. Tango: An Anxious Quest for Freedom. Stuttgart: Germany. Dujovne, B. 2011. In Strangers’ Arms: The Magic of the Tango. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Farnell, B. 2012. Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory: “I Move Therefore I Am”. London: Routledge. Fernandez, J. 1977. ‘Poetry in motion: Being moved by amusement, by mockery, and by mortality in the Asturian Countryside’, New Literary History (Oral Cultures and Oral Performances Special Issue) Spring 8(3): 458–483. Firth, R. 1981. ‘Engagement and detachment: Reflections on applying social anthropology to social affairs’, Human Organization 40(3): 193–201. Foster, S. 1996. ‘Introduction’, In S. Foster (Ed), Corporalities (pp. xi–xvii). London: Routledge. Fraleigh, S. 1987. Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Fraleigh, S. 2004. Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gift, V. 2008. Tango: A History of Obsession. Printed in Great Britain: Amazon. Handelman, D. 1998. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Jackson, J. 2005. ‘My dance and the ideal body: Looking at ballet practice from the inside out’, Research in Dance Education 6(1–2): 25–40. Jackson, M. 2005. Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects. Oxford: Berghahn Publications. Jackson, M. 2013. Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kapferer, B. 2015. ‘Introduction: In the event – Toward an anthropology of generic Moments’, In L. ­Meinert and B. Kapferer (Eds), In the Event: Toward and Anthropology of Generic Moments (pp. 1–28). ­Oxford: Berghahn Publications. Krøijer, S. 2015. ‘Figurations of the future: On the form and temporality of protests among left radical activists in Europe’, In L. Meinert and B. Kapferer (Eds), In the Event: Toward and Anthropology of Generic Moments (pp. 139–152). Oxford: Berghahn Publications.

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Existentialism and tango social dance Lakens, D. 2010. ‘Movement synchrony and perceived entitativity’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46: 701–708. Lloyd, R. 2021. ‘The power of interactive flow in salsa dance: A motion-sensing phenomenological inquiry featuring two-time world champion, Anya Katsevman’, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health 13(6): 955–971. Purser, A. 2019. ‘Dancing intercorporeality: A health humanities perspective on dance as a healing art’, Journal of Medical Humanities June 40(2): 253–263. Purser, A. 2021. ‘Movement as method: Some existential and epistemological r­eflections on dance in the health humanities’, Journal of Medical Humanities 42: 165–178. Rapport, N. 1993. Diverse World-Views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rapport, N. 2001. ‘Towards a post-cultural anthropology of personally embodied knowledge’, Social ­Anthropology 9(1): 95–102. Rapport, N. 2003. I Am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge. Rapport, N. 2009. Of Orderlies and Men: Hospital Porters Achieving Wellness at Work. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Rapport, N. 2012. Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Savigliano, M. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Oxford: Westview Press. Skinner, J. 2007. ‘The salsa class: A complexity of globalization, cosmopolitans and emotions’, Identities 14(4): 485–506. Skinner, J. 2013. ‘Social dance for successful aging: The practice of health, happiness, and social inclusion amongst senior citizens’, Anthropology & Ageing Quarterly 34(1): 18–29. Skinner, J. 2015. ‘Tango heart and soul: Solace, suspension, and the imagination in the dance tourist’, In M. Harris and N. Rapport (Eds), The Imagination: A Universal Process of Knowledge (pp. 61–76). Oxford: Berghahn. Smith, A. 2005. ‘Introduction’, In A. Smith and J. Light (Eds), The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (pp. ix–xv). New York: Columbia University Press. Stebbins, R. 2007. Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Time. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Swindlehurst, K. 2020. The Tango Effect: Parkinson’s and the Healing Power of Dance. London: Unbound. Taylor, J. 1998. Paper Tangos. London: Duke University Press/Public Planet Books. Thompson, R. 2005. Tango: The Art History of Love. New York: Vintage Books. Tunꞔgenꞔ, B., E. Cohen, and C. Fawcett 2015. ‘Rock with me: The role of movement synchrony in infants’ social and nonsocial choices’, Child Development 86(3): 976–84. Wagner-Pacifici, R. 2017. What Is an Event? London: University of Chicago Press. Williamson, A. 2016. ‘Reflections on phenomenology, spirituality, dance and movement-based somatics’, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 8(2): 275–301. Wulff, H. 2007. Dancing at the Crossroads: Memory and Mobility in Ireland. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Zangwill, N. 1995. ‘Kant on pleasure in the agreeable’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art 53(2): 167–176. Žižek, S. 2014. Event. London: Penguin Books.

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SECTION III

Intersubjectivity Care for and Faith in the Other

16 SECTION III: INTRODUCTION Huon Wardle

In this section of the handbook, we explore existential descriptions of ‘care’ for, ‘empathy’ for, and ‘faith’ in the Other as central aspects of an existential phenomenology. Existentialism is, of course, often associated with everything that is opposite to these feelings and concepts. Asked to sum up existentialist ethics, many may think of Sartre’s phrase ‘Hell is other people’. Indeed, it is useful to remind ourselves of Sartre’s stance on intersubjectivity since, of all the existentialists, it is perhaps he who lays greatest stress on the profound difficulty human beings have in making authentic connection one with another due to how we go about constituting ourselves as subjects. Both the prosocial and the anti-social tendencies of human beings are responses to an existential condition the self is trying to transcend the existentialist argues. The specific words in question come towards the end of Sartre’s play No Exit. Three characters have been condemned to Hell, consisting of a room in which the presence of the Others drives each one to insanity. When the door opens allowing them to leave, they decide not to do so, instead they close it again and continue to argue. Garcin comments: I’m looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I’m in hell. I tell you, everything’s been thought out beforehand. They knew I’d stand at the fireplace … with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. [He swings round abruptly.] What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. [Laughs.] So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl.’ Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is-other people! 1989, 45 Bluntly, didactically, Sartre tells his audience something like this—‘it is you who have freely constructed this social form, this moral situation, these as opposed to other possible meanings and emotional states: If you wanted you could have already exited—but you chose not to’. Looking at and being seen by Others constitutes the very ground of moral experience; the Self needs the Other to see and judge, but to be seen and classified is a kind of violence, or torment. One we choose to undergo. We treat the Other’s distorting reflection as a final judgement and even refuse to recognize what we have willingly given up by doing so. Why try to hide in this nexus DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-19

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of misrecognition? Sartre’s answer is that an unfiltered view of what we actually are would trigger a ‘nausea’ we are set on escaping. To look at the reality of our being honestly would be to acknowledge the absurdity of an existence over which we have no control; its throbbing, its dampness, its fleshiness: I exist … There is a little bubbling water in my mouth, I swallow it, it slips down my throat—and is again in my mouth. I have in my mouth in perpetuity a little puddle of water … And this puddle is myself, and my tongue and my throat are myself. Marcel 1948, 35 Of his hand, Sartre writes: It drags a little, hardly at all, softly, languorously, it exists. Wherever I put it down, I cannot get rid of it, any more than I can get rid of the rest of my body, of the damp heat which stains my shirt, or the warm fat which heaves lazily, as if it were stirred with a spoon, or of the sensations that come and go in it. ibid., 35 Honest reflection, then, either on this absurd bodily condition or on the illusions we create through our mutual gaze is equally unsustainable. We would rather project what we are as an external fait accomplis, mirrored back in how the Other looks at us, than face up to our freedom to alter the dishonest contract we have established. Sartre’s existential phenomenology seems, then, anything but humanistic in a received sense, except inasmuch it points in an acidic way to those aspects of the human and its moral-emotional constitution we would rather pretend did not exist. There is, famously, the waiter in Being and Nothingness who is busily escaping from himself into a presentation that he envisages others as desirous to see: ‘He is play-acting, he is enjoying himself; what then is his role? Whom is he impersonating? The answer is simple: he is impersonating a waiter in a café’ (ibid., 45). Looking at another café personality, Monsieur Achille, Sartre sees an entire life built out of concealing the absurdity of existence, representing it instead as the wisdom of experience: His face is handsomely wrinkled: it has vertical bars, the crow’s feet …. He has clearly been fortunate: it stands out a mile that he has suffered and lived. And he deserves his face: at no moment of his life has he been in any doubt as to how to use his past, and now he has stuffed it and hands it out as experience. ibid., 35 Monsieur Achille has managed perfectly to dissolve his own freedom into the norms and aims of a bourgeois social world. Here as elsewhere, Sartre’s detached observation of others (and of himself ) is ‘medusa-like’ as Gabriel Marcel puts it (ibid., 51), and by many standards cruel. The ethical axis for Sartre is not good versus bad, kind versus unkind, but authentic versus inauthentic. The interdependence of Self, World and Other are affirmed, but in the negative: self flees the indeterminacy of its individual being, to transcend itself by willingly taking upon itself the definitions given to it by the Others and, by extension, the World. A significant critic of the Sartrean picture, Iris Murdoch, has argued that, with its sparsely behavioural description of human interaction, Sartre’s description of (inter-)subjectivity is ‘­Satanic’ (Murdoch 1970). She means by this that without some intermediating notion, however confused, 168

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intuitive and or ambiguous, of the ‘sovereignty of good’ in people’s imaginative relations with one another, any hope of human co-dwelling becomes impossible. The phenomenological ground of every morality is an experience of putting the self into the service of the Good. In Murdoch’s description, ‘Good’ acts as a third party, another voice; however, this is understood. ‘Good’ may be something like Kant’s ‘regulative idea’ (cf. Kleingeld 2008).1 As such it may be a reification—an object of trust and faith or a pre-reflective common sense, but faith in it is not inevitably ‘inauthentic’ as Sartre’s presentation suggests; without it there may be no possibility of human fulfilment, which always involves fulfilment with, and care for, Others—with its attendant muddle and loss of personal clarity. Sartre’s phenomenology of the dysmorphia and self-distortion that accompanies the SelfOther relation is compelling. Its success is that many can discover their own experience in it. But it would be a mistake to see it as final and definitive. Sartre’s manner of describing self-experience is argumentative: it positions itself against more celebratory tellings of the human capacity for empathetic communication found in earlier (and more recent) phenomenological accounts. In these versions, it is my welcoming of the gaze or words of Others that enables me to transcend myself creatively. This type of view includes Scheler writing on love, Husserl and Stein on empathy and Bakhtin on dialogue versus monologue, for example. In these picturings, ego distributes itself to the Other, who returns what it hears and sees in its loving counter-utterance and gaze. What the Other makes of me—their faith and care—becomes for me a personal gift I can use both to recognize and to step beyond myself. In turn I see them and, in so doing, help them see themselves. Sartre’s existentialism feels the need to remind us of a flipside or background of this process of mutual self-construction. The existential orientation has, then, at least two sides that can be configured and described in multiple styles or moods. As Michael Jackson puts it: Every person is at once a who and a what—a subject who actively participates in the making or unmaking of his or her own world, and a subject who suffers and is subjected to actions by others, as well as by forces that lie outside of his or her control. This oscillation between being an actor and being acted upon is felt in every human encounter. 2002, 13 As Alfred Gell has it, the defining relation of Self and Other is that of ‘agent’ and ‘patient’ (1998). At one moment, I am the agent, actively ordering my world, at the next, I become patient, myself put in my place by the Other’s agency: at a third, we are both patients, ‘waiting for Godot’, then agents and so on, forever. This applies as much to relations internal to the subject as to those it perceives as external to it: now it is my hand that is in charge, now ‘I’ remain patient vis-à-vis my body; or now, in a memory, my mother speaks, while my child self waits. The ethical value of loving dialogue as described by the phenomenologists is that it enlarges and enriches the subjective capacity to act creatively both as agent and patient, listener and talker, giver and receiver. But we should note the pitfall: ‘recognition of oneself in the other may lead all too readily into resignation and narcissism … empathy may all too readily become a folie-à-deux, fostered by regressive dreams or utopian visions’ (ibid., 97). And of course, by no means does the oscillation of mutual gaze and action always or even usually have the quality of a virtuous circle

1 Cf. Kleingeld for how Kant’s ‘regulative ideas’ allow for guiding concepts that are ‘grand in scope, but modest and fallibilistic in their epistemic status.’ 2008:523.

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or cycle. Other people can be Hell, Heaven or something as yet unnamed; the task of existential phenomenology is to explore all the possibilities. Because understanding in the common situation is only ever shared ambiguously, communication easily gravitates towards what Gregory Bateson terms a ‘double bind’ (1973). Self wishes to express itself to Other but finds its intended meanings returned back to it, perhaps in a hostile, inconsistent or paradoxical form; one that distorts its further understanding of itself and disables its attempts at further meaning-making. Communicative double bind can, then, lead to a disintegrative feedback loop as ego searches within itself (how its words sound, how its body appears) for the cause of its failed interactions. The next step may be a frenetic search for modes of self-expression that the Other will recognize positively or maybe an outburst of inchoate rage. However, the experience of ‘double bind’ can also instigate creative solutions or workarounds that involve reframing the process of communication itself: reconstituting it as art, for example, or irony, mystical transcendence, comedy, or as an opportunity for shared laughter. The irreducible entanglement of self and Other is, then, at the centre of any existential enquiry. For good or ill, the Other is a puzzle that the Self can never solve and vice versa. For R.D. Laing, strongly influenced by Bateson’s description of communicational breakdown, existentially guided science ‘begins from a relationship with the other as a person and proceeds to an account of the other still as a person’: The other is seen by me as responsible, as capable of choice, in short, as a self-acting agent. Seen as an organism, all that goes on in that organism can be conceptualized at any level of complexity—atomic, molecular, cellular, systemic, or organismic …. The ultimates of our explanations are not his intentions to the world but quanta of energy in an energy system. 1966, 21–22 However entangled Ego and Other may become in each person’s lifeworld, existential enquiry nonetheless insists that any human being is defined by the uniqueness of their interiority and the non-interchangeability of their umwelt (see “Introductions to Sections I and IV” of this handbook). In an existential account, it is this uniqueness and non-interchangeability that makes someone a ‘person’, not their positionality as analysed from an exterior point of view—their intersectional position in a spatio-temporal network, for example. Even homo sacer as famously described by Agamben—the publicly cursed or ‘banned’ non-person—remains irrevocably a self, a lifeworld. From this point of view, Aristotle’s definition of the human as a zōon politikon, a political being, is true only to the extent that each self is defined by its unique and non-­ interchangeable project and trajectory. This section of the handbook deals, then, with this central and distinctive Self-Other and Person-to-Person concern in existential enquiry, the varying experiences involved and the ethical conundra these give rise to. And, centrally, there is the question of how best to describe these pairings and to analyse them; what are the most effective critical tools? All the chapters argue for the importance of understanding the Self-Other relation towards comprehending the ethical dimension of subjectivity. The first three essays aim at substantiating existentialism’s language of intersubjective care and faith. The latter three offer critical redescriptions aimed at engaging existential problematics while challenging the existentialist style and broadening its conceptual language. Two of the chapters see the need for a revision of existentialism involving a shift in emphasis from a phenomenological to a hermeneutic or semiotic strategy. Rasmus Dyring explores the concept of ‘care’ in existential enquiry where ‘care is a fundamental, generative aspect of existence’. Heidegger set up the problem: thrown into its world, 170

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self takes on itself the task of ‘taking care’. Care ‘includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Fischer and Tronto). Given our interdependency, care is thus inevitably as much Other- as it is Self-oriented. However, as much as it describes our dependency on Others, and hence our awareness of our own singularity, care also speaks to an ‘imperative of letting others be in their irreducible alterity’. Drawing on Buber, Dyring shows that care has meaning in a nexus of I-thou relations, but not in ‘the objective world of things, which is experienced in I-It relations’. He notes a compatibility between the existential figuring of ‘world’ as ‘care’ and an emerging ‘ecological’ understanding of world ‘as the geological substrate—the earth—that sustains biological life and “interdependency”’; both ecological and existential phenomenology acknowledge the ‘enmeshment of all life and everything else’. For Premawardhana in his chapter on Faith and the Existential, ‘living existentially involves profound commitments and pledges to an Other, whether human or divine’. If the problem of ‘faith’, then, like ‘care’, is at the core of an existential approach to human reality, the issue is to ‘turn attention from cognitive operations of the mind to existential commitments of the heart’. He reminds us that ‘credo’, ‘I believe’, is derived from ‘cor, cordis’, heart—hence where I cannot ‘know’, I rather ‘place my heart’. To understand faith phenomenologically and existentially is, then, to describe the experiential possibility of trust and faith in another rather than to reduce religion to its cognitive grammar. He notes how phenomenological approaches to religion have been subjected to a historicizing critique, but how, in turn, more recent perspectives emphasizing religious experience over religious discourse have returned to existential themes to the fore. ‘faith acknowledges the relationality and vulnerability that characterize human experiences of alterity’. Jean-Michel Salanskis shows how for Levinas, existence in the most human sense is understood as a fight with being, and not, as with Heidegger, the specific ‘meaning of being’ for human entities. The paper detects successive characterizations of this fight in Levinas’ work. At each step, Levinas introduces a move without displacement, which witnesses our antagonism towards being. In On Escape, the move is escape. In From Existence to Existents, it is the move of dragging oneself out of il y a and installing oneself. In Totality and Infinity, it is the move of taking charge of the Other. In Otherwise than Being, it is the move of leaving towards the Other, endorsing the ‘touch of madness’ of the One-for-the-Other. In On God who Comes to Mind, it is awakening. Finally, the paper examines Levinas’ reading of Jewish Tradition. It highlights Jewish acceptance of a mission coming from the past, celebration of study as the pursuit of intellectual achievement, and a Jewish recommendation of vigilant watchfulness as a basic tonality for humans. Poletti asks whether an existential approach may run the risk of ‘describing, over and over, the existential vicissitudes of the same person’? Is a focus on ‘existence’ immediately biased by the cumbersome legacy of existential philosophy and its underlying assumptions, especially in terms of how ‘a person’ is conceived? Starting with the derivation of ‘existence’—ex-sistere; ‘to stand out’—Poletti suggests that what defines personhood is the way it stands out in its cultural field and situation, a process which is intrinsically intersubjective. ‘I’ is, then, always an ‘Intersubjective-I’, ‘a relentless product of a mutable environment’ from which distinct subjects emerge. Hence, our knowledge of other selves is limited to how their subjectivity ‘stands out’ in their field of relations, while existential anthropology strives to grasp the singular continuum of narrative that constructs a person through time. Patel points to common themes characteristic of an existential viewpoint that are as apparent in ancient Buddhist texts as they are in the existentialism of Sartre and others. These centre on ‘attending to the standpoint of experience in enquiry and theory’, while noticing ‘the limit 171

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of one’s existence’ as well as ‘a certain experience of self-relation as conducive to torment’. She ­a rgues that central Buddhist teachings that are often characterized as metaphysical are deployed in texts with an existential address. Rather than float in a merely speculative register, they dive into the standpoint of a subject who is uneasy, vulnerable, and even fearful in their finitude. These texts suggest an alternative way to inhabit our limits, namely with interdependence as a function of finitude rather than a compromise to it. Patel’s argument follows two particular texts from different locales in the Buddhist corpus. These are the Pāli sutta The Simile of the Snake and the Precious Garland of Nāgārjuna from the Middle Way Tradition. As the phenomenologists have laid out, empathy and the subjective attempt to interiorize the Other’s point of view may be considered a ‘foundational human trait’. Walsh Matthews and Osborne offer a biosemiotic reading of the processes involved, focusing on the special relationship between empathy and language. Language (borne out of the capacity for sign-making) provides a generative medium for modelling ‘the subjective state of another […] through the subject’s own neural and bodily representations’. More specifically, language enables the complex ‘sharing of mental spaces’. As sign-relations and sign-making processes are common to all biota, biosemiotics ‘is an investigation into meaning at the very cellular level’. More specifically, empathy as a foundational human trait can also explain ‘the explosive use of signifying systems’ in ensuring the human survival. In considering the relationship between language and empathy, of special interest is its connection to theories of phenomenology and embodiment, as well as its continued mutability and context specificity found in multiplicitous and highly mutable forms of cultural expression.

References Bateson, G. 1973. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. London: Paladin. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jackson, M. 2002. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press. Kleingeld, P. 2008. ‘Kant on historiography and the use of regulative ideas’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39: 523–528. Laing, R. D. 1966. The Divided Self. London: Penguin. Marcel, G. 1948. The Philosophy of Existence. London: Harvill. Murdoch, I. 1970. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge. Sartre, J-P. 1989. No Exit. New York: Vintage Books.

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17 EXISTENTIAL CARE ETHICS Rasmus Dyring

Care and coexistence This chapter deals with the notion of care and the ethics of care that implicitly or explicitly underlies care practices. Rather than providing a straightforward discussion of care ethics as a concept to be applied in practice, the chapter will focus on the ontological undercurrents at work when care is somehow enacted or at issue. The chapter traces the existential dimension of care and presents a host of accounts of how care is a fundamental, generative aspect of existence. The first section outlines how care practices can be understood as practices of care for the self. The second section moves the emphasis to care for the other and shows how encounters with others are circumscribed by demands for a caring response to the other. The final section moves the emphasis to the world (in a broad sense of the term) as the aim of care. Here care practices seek to procure a meaningful and life-sustaining shared world. In all cases, the practices of care for the self, for others and for the world are taken to be responses to certain ontological conditions of coexistence. Existential care ethics, hence, is understood in what follows as a kind ethics that is enacted and embodied in the minutiae of concrete everyday practices, but that is charged by underlying, encompassing existential impulses.

Care for the Self At first sight, it might seem that care for “the self ” expresses some kind of base individualism that really goes against the grain of most moral intuitions. Simply taking care of one’s own needs, simply doing something for one’s own benefit and perhaps even at the expense of others, is thought to be in violation of both common sense moral understandings and philosophical and sociological moral principles. In Kantian deontology, the rational subject is front and center, but the acts of the individual subject that count as morally right or admissible would be acts that embody a universal rationality that per definition is supra-individual (Kant 1996). In the work of Emile Durkheim – who in essence translates Kant’s a priori rational normativity into a posteriori social normativity – the acts of the individual subject that count as morally right or admissible would be acts that embody the “collective being” of society (Durkheim 2010). In utilitarianism, the principle of utility ultimately demands that individual idiosyncratic interests be subordinated to the maximization of overall utility (Bentham 2007). DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-20

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This is obviously an eclectic collection of examples from the philosophical and sociological literature, but together they mark out a field of ethical thought that finds the truly moral in a domain that is seemingly rid of base egotistical interest, whether that domain is then specifically characterized by the universality of pure reason, the collectivity of the Social or the disinterestedness of the calculus of utility. Yet, while these doctrines combat base individualism, and in that sense foreground an element of universality, collectivity and disinterestedness that seems to gainsay the notion of self-care, they are driven on a deeper level by an existential interest in realizing the truly human. The doctrines presuppose an idea of what the human being is – a rational or a social being – and they presuppose the idea that such rational or social beings strive to enact the essential rationality or sociality that ontologically makes them the kind of creature they “are”. Without such a presupposed self-referential existential interest (cf. Dyring and Wentzer 2021, 57f ), i.e. an interest in being human, there would be no ultimate source of practical necessity at work in these doctrines. In other words, they presuppose an existential ethics of care for the self (qua ­human) that remains a tacit premise. In Aristotle’s virtue ethics, this kind of existential interest is made explicit as a driving force in ethical life. Ethics here is a matter of character1 formation, which immediately is a matter of the formation of the human psych ē, i.e. the human form of life. This is why “the good” in Aristotle’s formulation is that which is good for humans, the human good (anthropinon agathon). Doing the good is not simply something pleasurable or something that leads to a preferable outcome. It is in and through good practices that human beings actualize their humanity. Virtuosity means excelling at enacting one’s humanity (1934, 61). This also means that humanity proper is not a given, but a potential that for its actualization requires perpetual enactment – in Aristotle’s terms, it must be energeia, at work (ibid.) – and the enactment of the good deeds is immediately also something existentially desirable. There is thus clearly, at the very foundation of Aristotle’s ethics, an existential drive that prompts human beings to take care of their humanity. Although there is a clear self-referentiality at work here, it is not a base individualism. For Aristotle, amiability or friendship (philia) is among the master virtues (1934, 451). Since human beings are political beings (zoon politikon, see 1934, 29, 1944, 9), only those who care for the social dimension of being, i.e. those who cultivate good friendships, can themselves become truly good humans. Friendship, as it were, consists in sharing and promoting, more or less symmetrically, the human good for all parties in the amiable association (1934, 461). Moreover, in order to be a good human (and not a god or a brute), one must be a member of a political community, a polis, and care for the wellbeing of the political association at large (1944, 9). In sum, Aristotle’s ethics is an existential ethics of care in which, at once and of ontological necessity, the self, the other and environing sociopolitical world are at issue. Martin Heidegger – first in his readings of Aristotle (2009) and crystallizing in Being and Time (2010) – makes explicit the ontological dynamics that drives the “praxis” of being human. In Being and Time, the notion of care – or Sorge, in Heidegger’s German – becomes a, if not the,

1 Ēthos, whence ēthika, the ethical, is derived, means “character” in ancient Greek. Hence, ethics is originally, according to the meaning of the word, characterological virtue ethics. Interestingly, ēthos – notably in the Greek literature prior to the works of Plato and Aristotle – also and perhaps even predominantly, had the meaning of “accustomed place”, “haunt” or “dwelling place” of both animals and humans. Stressing this topological register of ēthos foregrounds a level in the existential interest at work in ethical practice that has to do, not with psychological formation, but with topological formation, care-for-place and existential emplacement in the world (Dyring 2020).

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core notion in the existential analytic of the human mode of being. Care, here, is the name of a fundamental dynamic at work in all human existence, and not to a specific class of actions that we might categorize as “ethical” or of importance to ethics. In other words, to exist is to care for existence. Or as Heidegger puts it more elliptically; in the human mode of being – Dasein – it is “being about which this being is concerned” (2010, 41). Hence, whatever else is at stake more concretely in the practical situations in which we find ourselves, there is always in the last analysis also an existential interest at stake, however implicitly or hidden it might be even for the implicated persons themselves. Being-in-the-world for creatures, whose being is somehow at issue in all they do, means “always already” having been thrown into a world of practical dealings and having to project oneself into a horizon of future possibilities that extends from the factical place of thrown existence. It is this dynamic of the so-called thrown-projection that Heidegger ultimately unfolds in detail in terms of the structure of care2 that ontologically characterizes human existence. On this account, the meaning of “care” can be expressed in temporal terms (2010, 309ff ). To exist for human beings, i.e. to be involved in a process of care for existence itself, is to be ahead of oneself in a horizon of future possibilities that is opening from a place that is always already outlined by a historical past. According to how much responsibility for existence one is prepared to assume in this process of care, the present moment will be more or less open for so-called “authentic” ways of engaging the possibilities of the world or more or less closed in (mindless) inauthentic reproduction of a given state of affairs (2010, 366). The introduction of these notions of authenticity/inauthenticity – pace Heidegger’s own express intentions3 – allows for a reading of Being and Time that foregrounds an existentialist ethics of the authentic choice of oneself that both echoes Kierkegaard’s work from the previous century and resonates with Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s subsequent elaboration of existentialist ethics in the reception of phenomenology in France (see Beauvoir 1976; Kierkegaard 1992, 2003; Sartre 1996). Whereas Heidegger sought to avoid the term ethics in any straightforward sense, Michel Foucault in his late work turned to historical investigations of how certain domains of practical life – notably experiential domains pertaining to sexuality, gender, procreation, health etc. – become problematized and give rise to particular forms of heightened ethical sensitivity. Under the heading of the concern or the care for the self, Foucault explores how ethical subjectivity is formed and fashioned, or rather how the subject constitutes itself by working on aspects of itself through certain concrete cultural practices, with certain concrete aims, and thus submitting itself to certain culturally available normative regimes (Foucault 1997, 290; 1985, 26). Painting with broad strokes, we might say that both the phenomenological and the poststructuralist approaches to ethics – here in the guise of Heidegger’s and Foucault’s works, ­respectively – are interested in the connection between the constitution of subjectivity, on the one hand, and everyday ethico-political practice understood as ontologically generative existential care, on the other. But the phenomenologists tend to be more interested in describing

2 Heidegger formalizes the care-structure as follows: “[T]he being of Dasein means being-ahead-of-oneself-already-in (the world) as being-together-with (innerworldly beings encountered)” (2010, 186). 3 Heidegger understood his fundamental ontology to operate on a level prior to the domain of “ethics” that is delimited in the traditional compartmentalization of philosophical topics. However, Heidegger concedes, his work in ontology can be read as an “original ethics” in sense of an investigation of the ontological place – the ēthos (cf. n.2) – of human existence (Heidegger 1993, 258).

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the dynamics of a kind of “innate”4 impulse that drives the constitution of subjectivity, while the poststructuralists with Foucault tend to focus on the “external” sociocultural forces that drive the constitution of subjectivity. Foucault’s care for the self is hence immediately shot through with power relations and framed by particular cultural ideas (1997, 290). So while both approaches agree that the practical, historical situatedness of existential care is central, they disagree about the relative weight of the innate, first-person impulses vis-à-vis the external, third-person forces. As Cheryl Mattingly shows, the debate about this exact issue has played a formative role in the theoretical debates in the anthropology of ethics since the early 2000s (Mattingly 2012, see also Laidlaw 2002, 2014; Robbins 2007, Zigon 2007; Lambek 2010; Dyring 2018).

Care for Others Joan Tronto, in her seminal Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (1993), writes that care is neither “self-referring nor self-absorbing”, but “implies a reaching out to something other than the self ” (Ibid. 102). While this characterization is put in binary terms as a choice between an inward-directedness and an outward-directedness, there is, as it were, also a more encompassing existential subtext to care practices, when Tronto recommits to her own and Fischer’s prior definition of care as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, lifesustaining web. 1993, 103; see Fisher and Tronto 1991, 40 What Fischer and Tronto here call a general “species activity” that unfolds in concrete practices of care such that a “life-sustaining” world is maintained entails what I am here calling an existential interest at work in ethics. If this is so, there is a notable similarity in the way the ontological subtext of both the care for the self and the care for others is conceived, while the specific self- and other-directedness of the concrete care practices that supposedly correspond to this more general ontological condition differ. Recognizing the similar subtexts of care practices, I do not think it is a matter of an exclusive choice between self and other as the true “objects” of care, but of noting how differences in the practical orientation of care highlight different registers in what in a broader scope can be viewed as a continuum of existential care (Tronto 1993, 203n3).

4 It is important to stress here that by “innate” I do not mean “natural”, “instinctual”, “essential”, “substantive” etc. From Rousseau (2012) and Herder (2004) through the phenomenological and philosophical anthropological movements of the 20th century, the fundamental thesis that the human being is characterized by a lack of biological determination has been explored in terms of how this “lack” is immediately experienced as an excessive impulse to settle a kind of delimitation of both the human life-form and the human lifeworld (see Gehlen 1988; Heidegger 1995; Scheler 2009; Plessner 2019). Hence, the innate impulse – this existential interest, as I have called it above – is empty as regards content and stems from the existential unsettlement of being ontologically undetermined.

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Authors, who focus on the care for others, tend to stress in various ways the condition of ontological interdependency5 (Noddings 1984; Tronto 1993; MacKenzie and Stoljar 2000; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Chatzidakis et al. 2020; Løgstrup 2020). Within this field, we might distinguish between two axes: an axis along which authors emphasize dyadic face-to-face relationships between self and other and an axis along which authors emphasize the more distributed relational character of caring that unfolds between a plurality of singular, interdependent beings. I will return to this latter axis in the final section below. Martin Buber’s notion of the “I/Thourelationship” (2010), K.E. Løgstrup’s work on “ethical demand” (2020) and Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of “the face” of the infinitely Other (1969) are all examples of attempts to not only explore the ethical space of the dyadic face-to-face encounter but also ground an ethics of care in the peculiar “ontological”6 characteristics of this space. For Buber, there is an ontological difference between the way we relate to, on the one hand, the objective world of things, which is experienced in I-It relations, and, on the other hand, the interpersonal world, which opens in I-Thou relations. Of importance here is the ontologically generative interdependency between I and Thou: “I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou. All real living is meeting” (Buber 2010: 11). Løgstrup similarly writes that we are not “accidentally”, but necessarily and essentially related; “[W]e are each other’s world, and each other’s fate” (2020, 15–16). In his phenomenological exploration of the face-to-face encounter as the paradigmatic site of ontological interdependency, Løgstrup points to “trust” as a “sovereign expression of life” that “naturally” arises between people unless pathology or trauma has destroyed the possibility of the immediate trustful encounter (see Løgstrup 2007, 52). As surely as a human being with the trust that they either show or desire places more or less of their life into the other’s hands, so surely is the demand to take care of this person’s life integral to our existence such as it simply happens to be. […] [I]t means that in any meeting between human beings there is an unspoken demand, irrespective of the circumstances in which the meeting takes place and the nature of the meeting. […] This is at the root of it, and is the basic phenomenon of ethical life. 2020, 17 Human beings are ontologically vulnerable and dependent on others. The ethical demand to care for the other, as Løgstrup describes it, arises exactly from this condition of ontological interdependency. With his widely influential framework of person-centered care, Tom Kitwood has developed the foundational ideas found in Buber’s social ontology into a practice-near ethical framework for dementia care. Practices of care here concretely consist in recognizing the person

5 Since the 1980s, the notion of “interdependency” has often been invoked in the context of feminist critiques of strong individualistic and intellectualistic notions of autonomy. This has led to a surge in literature on relational autonomy in bioethics. Here it is stressed that because the human condition is one of ontological interdependency, autonomy must be conceived of in terms of relations of dependence and care, rather than the supposed ideal of the classical liberal tradition of the independent rational individual (Dodds 2000; Holstein et al. 2011). 6 I put the term ”ontological” in quotation marks here, because of the fact that Levinas insists on the primacy of the ethical vis-à-vis the ontological. The encounter with the “face” of the Other cannot be exhausted in terms of traditional ontology, but unsettles, as it were, my being in the world. The encounter with the Other takes us to a place that is otherwise than being (Levinas 1969, 201).

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with dementia as a Thou and meeting the psychological needs7 of the other such that the personhood of this person is maintained as well as possible (Kitwood 2019, see Brooker and Latham 2017; Dyring 2022). Kari Martinsen has developed Løgstrup’s thoughts on the ethical demand as they pertain to the practice of nursing. In her analyses, Martinsen points out how nurses in the clinical encounter, face-to-face with patients, might find themselves in a situation, where both certain institutional logics and time constraints and certain societal moralistic ideals about the perfect self-sacrificing caregiver, who answers an altruistic calling, actually obstruct in the moment the truly trustful ethical encounter with the patient (Martinsen 2012, 60ff ). While he also considers the dyadic encounter the source of a demand to care for the other, Levinas’ exploration of the face-to-face relationship differs somewhat from Buber’s and Løgstrup’s accounts as regards the emphasis on alterity. According to Levinas, the face of the other is a kind of “epiphany” of infinite otherness that does not only place on me an ethical demand in Løgstrup’s sense, but that also exerts an ontological unsettlement of my world and “paralyses [sic!] my powers” (1969, 199). At the heart of my experience of the other person, I encounter an alterity that categorically resists my grasp and mastery, an alterity that forbids my appropriation or submission of the other to the world as lived from my perspective. By putting the first-person “I” (egological consciousness as such) in question, the encounter with the other is an instance of ethical resistance that unescapably singles me out as responsible for “my” world (1969, 195, 197, 199; 1996, 20). The more concrete demand that arises from this experience would be that of hospitality, of welcoming the stranger qua stranger (cf. Derrida 2000). Lisa Guenther has developed a “maternal ethics” from a critical, feminist reading of Levinas’ work. By focusing on birth as a paradigmatic instance of ethical relationality, and thereby foregrounding the field of reproduction and parental care, that is otherwise neglected in Levinas, Guenther argues that the kind of care ethics that arises from the radically relational experience of the gift of my own birth is an ethics that in turn commands me “to become like a maternal body for the stranger who asks me to be borne” (2006, 162). A central motif in the ethics of care for the other is the ontologically derived imperative of letting others be in their irreducible alterity, their natal newness and uniqueness; in a word, their singularity (e.g. Levinas 1996: 17; Løgstrup 2020: 14; Arendt 1998: 176). Lisa Stevenson, in her ethnographic work among the Inuit in Canadian Arctic, has described how “song” and improvised singing can be viewed as moments of care, where a person, rather than sticking to certain discourses that stigmatize the other, extends herself toward the other, “recognizing their potential as company, recognizing them as lovable beings, capable of showing up regardless of any subject positions they may have been asked to occupy” (Stevenson 2014: 163, see also Mattingly and Grøn 2022). Relying on an ethnographic episode in which a young girl – Tinag – has the bones in her broken arm reset by a tradition healer, Jason Throop has described how the “world-destroying” pain that washes over the girl exposes her in her irreducible singularity (not least to the ethnographer himself [Throop 2010, 282]) and how her family members, who are present at the session, respond to the unsettling situation by repeatedly chanting m’athamagil!, you endure! This, according to Throop’s phenomenological analysis, provides Tinag with “an intersubjective scaffold – also perceivable by the other participants in the interaction – for her attempts to endure … in the face of her suffering” (Throop 2010, 255, cf. 242). To care for

7 Kitwood presents a “strong” account of needs understood as the constitutive psychological needs “without the meeting of which a human being cannot function, even minimally, as a person” (Kitwood 2019, 92).

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the other – Tinag – here consists in an assemblage of singular beings working together to scaffold the being-in-the-world of the other at the point where her pain is at the verge of carrying her beyond the shared world.

Care for the world With this last ethnographic example, it is clear that alongside the “frontal” encounter with the other, a domain of “lateral” coexistence extends itself (Waldenfels 2015, 52, see also Knudsen 2022); a wider distributed “web of human relationships that exist wherever men live together” (Arendt 1998, 184). At this point, the care for others converges with the care for the world broadly understood as that which lies between us and sustains coexistence. In Hannah Arendt’s account, this space between is at once an objective in-between, consisting of the tangible things of the world, and a subjective in-between, which denotes the realm of meaningfulness constituted and maintained in ongoing processes of speaking and acting together (1998, 183). Like we saw in Aristotle – whose practical philosophy is an all-pervasive sounding board for Arendt’s exploration of the vita activa – caring for these worldly spaces, in which alone a plurality of human beings may appear before each other in words and deed, is immediately both caring for others and for oneself as unique persons and ultimately caring for the common world, which guarantees a shared sense of reality (1998, 175ff ). The kind of worldly care that emerges here has political implications in as much as it immediately exhibits a “democratic ethos” (Myers 2013, 138) that ultimately intends a “democratic cosmopolitanism” (Chatzidakis et al. 2020, 86). Informed by his extensive ethnographic work with drug user unions in Russia, Denmark, Canada and the US, Jarrett Zigon develops an elaborate account of how practices of care, as they unfold in communities of drug users who are otherwise largely excluded by the surrounding societies, their institutions and urban spaces, can be understood in terms of efforts aimed at worldbuilding (Zigon 2018, 2019). Care for the world here becomes a matter of building worlds that can accommodate the particular ways of dwelling required by the ways of being in the world of the implicated persons. Processes of interpersonal “attuned care” play a central role in the ongoing ontological generation and adjustments of worlds fit for dwelling (Zigon 2019, 138, cf. 2014). In the context of dementia care, I have proposed a concept of world-open care, as a critical supplement to Kitwood’s dyadic and needs-focused person-centered care mentioned above (Dyring and Grøn 2021; Dyring 2022). The fundamental idea here is that good care is not only sensitive to the psychological needs of this or that individual Thou. It must also be creative in the sense of being responsive to potentials that arise “anarchically” in spontaneous moments unfolding among people with dementia, caregivers, relatives, stuffed toy animals, care robots and other “beings” that populate the environment. This shift in the orientation has several implications: first, it is a shift in “the caring gaze” from gaining orientation by a centric hermeneutics of personal need to gaining orientation by an eccentric responsiveness to the anarchic, potentiated spaces between persons. From an ontological point of view, this implies a shift from an attentiveness to “lacks” ruled by an economy of deficiency and pathology to an attentiveness to excess ruled by an economy of potentiality. Second, following and perpetuating potentiality in life with dementia, at times means following impulses that from a neurotypical perspective seem absurd, if not contrary to common sense understandings of human dignity. World-open care here runs up against cases where good care might entail caring for worlds that existentially speaking remain off limits for the caregivers, who must weigh their own inability to truly understand a world 179

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against their sense that potentials of value and importance are nonetheless realized in this world (Dyring 2022, 119ff ). Whereas the aforementioned accounts of care for the world understand the worldliness of the world in a marked phenomenological way, “world” might also be understood in a more ecological way as the geological substrate – the earth – that sustains biological life and “interdependency” may be understood more explicitly as the biological and technological enmeshment of all life and everything else that is in the world (e.g. Harraway 2003; Fritsch 2018; Mol et al. 2010; Latour 2017). With the term “matters of care”, María Puig de la Bellacasa develops a view on how relations of care extend beyond the human to animals and machines and – critically – how, for instance, the employment of certain care technologies might reinforce the degradation of care work: “we all need this work, but we continue to value more the capacity to be self-sufficient, autonomous, and independent from others” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 55). The notion of matters of care aims at foregrounding the pervasiveness of care in all domains of the world and helps identify “the neglect of caring relationalities in an assemblage” (Ibid. 56).

References Arendt, H. 1998. The Human Condition, Second ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1934. Nicomachean Ethics, transl. H. Rackham. London: Harvard University Press. Aristotle. 1944. Politics, transl. H. Rackham. London: Harvard University Press. Beauvoir, S. de. 1976. The Ethics of Ambiguity, transl. B. Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press. Bentham, J. 2007. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. New York: Dover Publications. Brooker, D., and I. Latham 2017. Person-Centred Dementia Care. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Buber, M. 2010. I and Thou, transl. R.G. Smith. Mansfield Centre: Martino Publishing. Chatzidakis, A., J. Hakim, J. Littler, C. Rottenberg, and L. Segal 2020. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdepence. New York: Verso. Derrida, J. 2000. Of Hospitality, transl. R. Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dodds, S. 2000. ‘Choice and control in feminist bioethics’, In C. MacKenzie and N. Stoljar (Eds), Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self (pp. 213–235). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, E. 2010. ‘The determination of moral facts’, In D.F. Pocock (Ed), Sociology and Philosophy (pp. 35–62). New York: Routledge. Dyring, R. 2018. ‘From moral facts to human finitude: On the problem of freedom in the anthropology of ethics and morality’, HAU – Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(1/2): 223–235. Dyring, R. 2020. ‘Emplaced at the thresholds of life: Toward a phenomenological an-archaeology of borders and human bounding’, In A. Cooper and S. Tinning (Eds), Debating and Defining Borders: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives (pp. 97–111). London: Routledge. Dyring, R. 2022. ‘Dementia care ethics, social ontology and world-open care: Phenomenological motifs’, In C. Eriksen and N. Hämäläinen (Eds), Perspectives on Moral Change: Anthropologists and Philosophers Engage Transformations of Life Worlds (pp. 106–125). New York: Berghahn Books. Dyring, R., and L. Grøn 2021. ‘Ellen and the little one: A critical phenomenology of potentiality in life with dementia’, Anthropological Theory 22(1): 3–25. Dyring, R., and T.S. Wentzer 2021. ‘How life makes a conversation of us: Ontology, ethics and responsive anthropology’, In A. Brandel and M. Motta (Eds), Living With Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (pp. 50–72). New York: Fordham University Press. Fisher, B., and J. C. Tronto 1991. ‘Toward a feminist theory of care’, In E. Abel and M. Nelson (Eds), Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Foucault, M. 1985. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality 2, transl. R. Hurley. London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. 1997. ‘The ethics of the concern for self as a practice of freedom’, In P. Rabinow (Ed), Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, (Volume 1. 281–301). New York: New Press.

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Existential care ethics Fritsch, M. 2018. Taking Turns With the Earth: Phenomenology, Deconstruction and Intergenerational Justice. ­Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gehlen, A. 1988. Man: His Nature and Place in the World, transl. C. McMillan and K. Pillemer. New York: Columbia University Press. Guenther, L. 2006. The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Harraway, D. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Heidegger, M. 1993. ‘Letter on humanism’, In D.F. Krell (Ed.), Basic Writings. Revised and Expanded Edition, 213–266. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, M. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, transl. W. McNeill and N. Walker. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press Heidegger, M. 2009. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, transl. R.D. Metcalf and M.B. Tanzer. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. 2010. Being and Time, transl. J. Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Herder, J.G. 2004. ‘Treatise on the origin of language’, In M.N. Forster (Ed), Philosophical Writings (pp. 65–166). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holstein, M.B, J.A. Parks, and M.H. Waymack 2011. Ethics, Aging and Society: The Critical Turn. New York: Springer Publishing Company. Kant, I. 1996. ‘Critique of practical reason’, In M.J. Gregor and A. Wood (Trans), Practical Philosophy, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (pp. 133–272). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, S.A. 1992. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, transl. A. Hannay. London: Penguin Books. Kierkegaard, S.A. 2003. Fear and Trembling, transl. A. Hannay. London: Penguin Books. Kitwood, T. 2019. Dementia Reconsidered, Revisited: The Person Still Comes First 2nd edition. Ed. D. Brooker. London: Open University Press. Knudsen, N.K. 2022. Heidegger’s Social Ontology: The Phenomenology of Self, World, and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laidlaw, J. 2002. ‘For an anthropology of ethics and freedom’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(2): 311–332. Laidlaw, J. 2014. The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Lambek, M. 2010. ‘Introduction’, In M. Lambek (Ed), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action (pp. 1–38). New York: Fordham University Press. Latour, B. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime, transl. C. Porter. Oxford: Wiley. Levinas, E. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, transl. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. 1996. ‘Transcendence and height’, In A.T. Peperzak, S. Critchley, and R. Bernasconi (Eds), Basic Philosophical Writings. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Løgstrup, K.E. 2007. Beyond the Ethical Demand, transl. S. Dew and H. Flegal. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame. Løgstrup, K.E. 2020. The Ethical Demand, transl. B. Rabjerg and R. Stern. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacKenzie, C., and N. Stoljar (Eds) 2000. Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martinsen, K. 2012. Løgstrup og Sygeplejen. Aarhus N: Klim. Mattingly, C. 2012. ‘Two virtue ethics and the anthropology of morality’, Anthropological Theory 12(2): 161–184. Mattingly, Cheryl, and Lone Grøn (Eds) 2022. Imagistic Care: Growing Old in a Precarious World. New York, NY: Fordham University Press. Mol, A., I. Moser, and J. Pols (Eds) 2010. Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Myers, E. 2013. Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World. Durham: Duke University Press. Noddings, N. 1984. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Plessner, H. 2019. Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, transl. M. Hyatt. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Rasmus Dyring Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Robbins, J. 2007. ‘Between reproduction and freedom: Morality, value, and radical cultural change’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 72(3): 293–314. Rousseau, J-J. 2012. ‘Discourse on the origin and the foundations of inequality among men’, In J.T. Scott (Ed), The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (pp. 86–135). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sartre, J.P. 1996. Existentialism and Humanism, transl. P. Mairet. London: Methuen. Scheler, M. 2009. The Human Place in the Cosmos, transl M.S. Frings. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Stevenson, L. 2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Throop, J. 2010. Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Experience and Pain in Yap. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tronto, J. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care. New York: Routledge. Waldenfels, B. 2015. Sozialität und Alterität. Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp. Zigon, J. 2007. ‘Moral breakdown and ethical demand’, Anthropological Theory 7(2): 131–150. Zigon, J. 2014. ‘Attunement and fidelity: Two ontological conditions for morally being-in-the-world’, Ethos 42(1): 16–30. Zigon, J. 2018. Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. New York: Fordham University Press. Zigon, J. 2019. A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

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18 FAITH AND THE EXISTENTIAL Devaka Premawardhana

Introduction In the study of religion as a human science—Religionswissenchaft, or, as known in the Anglophone academy, religious studies, history of religion, or comparative religion—phenomenological approaches once prevailed. The field was largely defined by such phenomenologists of religion as Mircea Eliade who saw it as their task to give some accounting of religious practitioners’ irreducibly sacred experiences. In recent decades, this origination in phenomenology has been roundly rejected, more a source of embarrassment than a base on which to build. In seeking to uncover the a priori structures of religious experience, say the critics, what Eliade and others were really doing was proffering an essentialist and ontological theory of religion, attempting to secure metaphysical foundations beyond the analytical reach of the historian (see McCutcheon 1997; Fitzgerald 2000). The task of the religious studies scholar, in this post-phenomenological moment, has become to historicize the transcendental, naturalize the theological, and draw a clear line between religious experiences and religious studies. Useful as these moves have been in establishing a more historicist grounding to religious studies and in garnering it some respectability in the secular academy, their excesses have recently come under scrutiny. The pushback emerges from different sources, one of which is the existentialist strand of anthropology developed by, among others, Michael Jackson and Albert Piette (see, e.g., Jackson 2013; Piette 2015a; and Jackson and Piette 2015). This approach asserts the limits of rationalism and the salience of ambiguity and uncertainty. It bears witness to situations that evade conceptual or theoretical grasp. In an ironic instantiation of Eliade’s notion of “eternal return,” what we are witnessing today is a return to, or a revival of, phenomenology in the academic study of religion—only this time a phenomenology that is far more empirical, embodied, and existential than that which came before (see, e.g., Vasquez 2011, 87–122, Roberts 2013; Dunn 2016, Seeman and Premawardhana forthcoming). There is precedent for this existentialist line within the academic study of religion. One sees it in the work of the psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910), who came too early to engage existentialism by name but whose radical empiricism significantly underpins

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-21

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existential anthropology (see, e.g., Jackson 1989).1 James’s approach to religion, most fully elaborated in his Varieties of Religious Experience, urges that the specificity of individual cases be taken seriously, that these not be submerged under ideal types and abstractions. In his famously graphic example of this point, James writes: “The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotions feels to us as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. ‘I am no such thing,’ it would say: ‘I am myself, myself alone’” ( James 1985, 9). Another existential precedent for religious studies can be found in the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916–2000), a scholar of comparative religion and specialist in Islamic studies. In his best known book, The Meaning and End of Religion (1962), Smith historicizes the category of religion, becoming the first to engage systematically in this now familiar deconstructive endeavor. Anthropologist Talal Asad, whose (1993) Genealogies of Religion has become anthropologists’ touchstone for the conceptual critique of religion, has described Meaning and End of Religion as a modern classic, praising it for dismantling idealist constructions of religion as an objective systematic entity. Smith’s anti-essentialism attempts to recast the study of religion as the study not of religious systems, but of religious persons (1962, 119–153). It is, as such, consistent with the existentialist imperative, there also in James’s radical empiricism, to affirm the existing individual as a legitimate analytical unit. While Smith does not explicitly align his work with the philosophy of existentialism that, by his time, is already established, this likely owes more to his penchant for emic categories over those of European philosophers. When, for example, he discusses Lao Tse’s and Chuang Tse’s conception of the Tao as a dynamic and vital process, and their disinterest in “Taoism” as a neat and ordered system, Smith writes: “No modern existentialist thinker has debunked essentialist rigidity with anything like their vigor and verve, their grace and wit, their pith and brilliance” (Smith 1962, 69–70). Here Smith reveals himself to be both existentialist in orientation and skeptical of the commonplace conflation of existentialism with modern western thought. In this chapter, I contribute to the larger volume’s exploration of existentialism among human sciences by assessing how existentialist concerns have manifested in the academic study of religion. Specifically, my aim is to highlight religious studies’ implicit existentialist threads primarily in William James and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and secondarily in existential and phenomenological anthropologists influenced in part by them, with references also to existential philosophers and theologians more broadly. Doing so brings to attention the limits of “religion” conceived in terms of religious systems and of “belief ” conceived as a category of cognition. Yet it is precisely in advocating for alternatives to religion, belief, and belief systems—through, e.g., religious experience in the case of James and faith in the case of Smith—that what I am calling the implicit existentialism of religious studies has come under sustained critique. In his otherwise positive appraisal of Smith’s legacy, for example, Asad challenges Smith’s deployment of the category of faith on the grounds that it overemphasizes inner states and misses the importance of material and embodied practices. Asad promotes instead an understanding of religions as publicly enacted discursive traditions. In this, he lays the groundwork for the anti-phenomenological constructivist orientation of contemporary religious studies, much of it expressly dismissive of

1 Though James would not have engaged existentialism, given that he wrote decades before Heidegger, Sartre, and others most responsible for birthing existentialism out of phenomenology, James did engage phenomenology through correspondences with Edmund Husserl (see Edie 1987).

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James for similarly ignoring the institutional and political dimensions of religion. Constructivism is concerned largely with discourse and representation—as well as material practices and ­powers—over the vagaries of individual subjectivity.2 In exploring the work of James and Smith in relation to likeminded theorists of religion, I argue that their pro-existentialist stance can helpfully complement the anti-essentialist stance of the current humanistic and social scientific mainstream.3 An existentialist approach to religion valuably points to the limits of human knowledge and the role religion can play in marking the space of excess—epistemological, if not ontological—that secular rationality and scientific reductionism fail to acknowledge, let alone approach. It also allows for an accounting of areas of human existence that discourse fails to disclose—matters not only of the mind (which religious studies traditionally privileged) or of the body (which constructivists and poststructuralists valuably center) but also of what might be called, to invoke Søren Kierkegaard, the heart.4

Belief vs. faith The heart, in fact, figures centrally in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s sustained conceptual critique of belief. In a series of monographs (Smith 1977, 1979), Smith argues against the uncritical use historians of religion make of the category of belief. He disfavors the intellectualist meaning it acquired in post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment Europe. In his genealogy of belief, Smith notes that Christian creedal statements often begin with the Latin word credo, which, when translated as “I believe,” is easy to construe as an assent to doctrinal propositions. The pre-modern meaning of credo, however, is not about believing that something may or may not be true. Rather, writes Smith, “Credo literally means ‘I set my heart’ (from cor, cordis, heart…). In St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, and indeed as late as Vatican I, this verb means to pledge allegiance, to commit oneself, to give one’s loyalty” (1977, 41). Smith compares the statement “I believe” to the “I do” of a wedding ceremony. It is an affirmation that performs rather than propounds. It is the ritual sealing of a promise, an act of setting one’s heart upon the object of belief. Historically viewed, then, belief is not an intellectual assent to dubitable propositions. It is not a cognitive operation at all, but rather a pledge or a commitment of trust. This more ­experiential operation is better conveyed, according to Smith, in what he proposes as, in fact, the central religious category: not belief, but faith. Faith is a mode of engagement or involvement. It is “an orientation of the personality, to oneself, to one’s neighbor, to the universe; a total response; a way of seeing whatever one sees and of handling whatever one handles; a capacity to live at

2 While Asad himself is skeptical of the heuristic value of terms like “religion,” his project has been taken up by others confident in the value of “discursive tradition,” which is beset by the risk of being similarly prone to reification. For reasons that will become clear over the course of this chapter, I stand with Samuli Schielke in his critique of Asadian approaches to the anthropology of religion when he suggests that “we may have to talk a little less about traditions, discourses, and powers and a little more about the existential and pragmatic sensibilities of living a life in a complex and often troubling world” (Schielke 2010, 1). 3 Here I am echoing Michael Lambek’s positive appraisal of existential anthropology: “One of the lessons of existentialism has been to oppose speaking of human life with respect to essences. There is by now a large literature denouncing essentialisms of various kinds, but it seems to owe its impetus more to Foucault than to Sartre and it does not explicitly complement its anti-essentialist stance with a pro-existentialist one, or its rejection of essences with a positive account of existence” (Lambek 2015, 59). 4 I refer here to the recent biography of Kierkegaard by Clare Carlisle, titled Philosopher of the Heart, in which Carlisle writes of Kierkegaard that he “became an expert on love and suffering, humour and anxiety, despair and courage; he made these affairs of the heart the subject matter of his philosophy” (Carlisle 2020, xi).

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a more than mundane level; to see, to feel, to act in terms of a transcendent dimension” (Smith 1979, 12). It is, in other words, far from a mere holding of ideas; it is an all-encompassing existential practice. In developing an existential approach to anthropology, Albert Piette similarly problematizes the category of belief. His critique is not simply that this term as commonly understood elevates cognition over action, but also that “[r]eligious beliefs are often treated as synonymous with homogenous, shared cultural representations” (Piette 2015b, 191). In line with his plea for a methodological shift from collectivities—like society and culture—to singularities, Piette is less interested in systems of belief than in “moments of believing”: hesitations, changes of mind, contradictions. Such moments do not permit the reduction of individual experiences of religion to public expressions of religion. This parallels Smith’s recommended shift, noted earlier, from religious systems to religious persons. It can also be described as a shift from reifications to relations. Insofar as faith is about trust, and belief is about moments, religion entails the changing and shifting domain of relationships— with human others and with other-than-human others. Human existence (what H ­ eidegger called being-in-the-world) is relational and relationships are situational. What matter are events and interactions, not eternal essences ( Jackson 2013). Truth is not a question of objective certainties, but of subjective or, better, intersubjective involvements. This again recalls Kierkegaard—his notion of the human self as fully realized through unconditional commitments to and relationships with others, with all the risks, uncertainties, and leaps of faith these require. Faith and minor modes of belief are compatible with and often accompanied by doubts, hesitations, and even skepticism (Piette 2015b). Paul Tillich said as much in his own elaboration of an existential theology: “doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith” and, as such, “there is no faith without risk” (Tillich 1975, 116). Independent of existentialist framings, the intellectualist bias within the category of belief has come under sustained scrutiny by theorists of lived religion (e.g., McGuire 2008; Vasquez 2011) and anthropologists of religion reacting against the far-reaching legacy of E. E. Tyler’s classic definition of religion as “belief in Spiritual Beings.” Many of the critiques converge with that developed by Smith in the 1970s, his argument that belief is more a matter of feeling or experience, of trust or commitment, than of intellectual assent to propositional truths. Anthropologist Jean Pouillon, for example, distinguishes between “believing in” (croire à) the existence of something and “believing in” (croire en) as a gesture of confidence. Writing about the Hadjerai people of north-central Africa, Pouillon critiques the posture of scholars who, in describing Hadjerai relationships with margai (invisible, non-human powers), use the first sense of belief, which only really reveals how the scholars imagine they could believe in margai, if they did, which they don’t (Pouillon 2016). From the Hadjerai perspective, believing is about how one experiences, not how one knows, the margai. Similarly, anthropologist Mary Steedly records being questioned by her hosts in Sumatra as to whether she believes in spirits. For some time, she struggled to answer the question, not only wanting to be honest but also wanting not to offend, until she realized she was being asked not whether she believes in spirits, but whether she believes them, whether she trusts them, whether she maintains a relationship with them (Steedly 1993, 34–35).5 Few of those who note the limits of belief go along with Smith in promoting “faith” as a substitute. The reluctance owes to what Asad (as earlier discussed) identifies as a flaw in Smith’s project: the interiorist and individualist qualities of faith, no less than of belief. There is something

5 For additional anthropological critiques of belief, see Needham (1972), Asad (1993), and Keane (2007).

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to this critique, and I address it below. For now, I note that reframing belief as faith takes us one step beyond the necessary deconstruction of categories like belief because it posits, in a constructive mode, something else. Faith, as Smith has it—like “moments of believing,” to use Piette’s term—points positively to an existentialist commitment of trust in another. As such, faith acknowledges the relationality and vulnerability that characterize human experiences of alterity. Faith is not the same as objective knowledge; it need not be tied to epistemology at all. It is not about knowing with the mind, but rather about connecting with the heart. As such, it is key to an existentialist theory of religion.

Religion-as-excess In his widely read lecture “The Will to Believe,” William James takes a comparable approach to the question of belief, proffering in it “a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced” ( James 1956, 1). Belief, for James, has its justification not in epistemology, on the basis of sufficient prior evidence, but rather on the pragmatic grounds that believing something to be true increases the likelihood of it coming to pass. In the realm of interpersonal relations, for example, you can wonder whether another person likes you, but evidence that you are liked will probably only come if you treat that person affably, with trust and expectation. While standing aloof from them will more than likely confirm that they do not like you, approaching them on the faith that they like you—whether or not prior evidence justifies such faith—may be the only way to make it so. Similarly, belief in God can be justified on post-facto grounds, in terms of the positive effects stemming from living as if God exists. As James put it in The Varieties of Religious Experience, “Live as if I were true, she [religion] says, and every day will practically prove you right” ( James 1985, 113). As such, for James, belief is about trust and commitment rather than logic and reason, about relationality rather than rationality. As it is a matter of subjective orientations, it comes quite close to what Smith calls faith. It should be no surprise, then, that the same critiques leveled against Smith’s project—its interiorist and individualist qualities—have been directed toward James’ as well (e.g., Taylor 2002). James’s definition of religion makes him especially vulnerable to this challenge. He defines it as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude” ( James 1985, 31). Yet, it should be noted, James intends this definition to be not universal, but pragmatic—for the heuristic purpose of illuminating the experiential side of religion. Moreover, if read holistically alongside his philosophies of pluralism, pragmatism, and radical empiricism, James’ relevance for the study of religion can be seen as going well beyond the deliberately narrow psychological subjectivism of Varieties of Religious Experience and “The Will to Believe” (Carrette and Lamberth 2017). The fuller scope of James’s prodigious oeuvre does inform the tradition of existential anthropology as developed by Michael Jackson, its primary theorist. Jackson draws extensively not only on James’ pragmatist approach to religion, but also on his radical empiricism—his profound critique of the limits of rationalist approaches to understanding the human ( Jackson 1989). In claiming as part of reality not only things graspable but also the fleeting and ambiguous gaps between things, James makes analytical space for uncertainty and unknowability, for ambiguity and excess. Echoing James, Jackson urges that attention be paid to what he calls the penumbral regions—indeterminate and liminal, partly shadowed and partly illumined—that we all find ourselves drawn to and drawing on since “one’s well-being depends on one’s relationships or connectedness to an ‘elsewhere’ or ‘otherness’ that lies beyond the horizons of one’s own immediate lifeworld” ( Jackson 2009, 7). As Mary Dunn puts it in her application of Jackson’s and 187

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James’s radical empiricism to the historical study of religion, “faith acknowledges the relationality and vulnerability that characterize human experiences of alterity” (Dunn 2016, 9). Likewise, historian of religion Robert Orsi notes that narratives of divine encounter “are shot through with ‘unknowingness,’ studded with ‘opacities’” (Orsi 2016, 61). And anthropologist Mattijs van de Port describes mystery, excess, and incompletion as essential to Brazilian Candomblé. Also on Jamesian grounds and with reference to Jackson, van de Port develops an understanding of religion as that which gestures toward “the-rest-of-what-is” (van de Port 2011, 18–19)—the excess or what James calls the “more” (1985, 508) that remains once reason, logic, and science have run their course. Religion beyond the reach of reason is a major theme in the writings of existential philosophers and theologians. Both religious and secular existentialists reject traditional philosophy’s Greek-derived preoccupation with reason and rationality. But it is especially the Judeo-Christian tradition that presents a starkly different orientation: an understanding of truth based not on supra-historical ideal forms, but rather on the concrete, existing individual (Dreyfus 2009). For some of the better known existentialists—e.g., Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus—the individual, to be absolutely free, need not and ought not depend on transcendent sources of meaning. By contrast, Jewish and Christian existentialists have regarded as a condition for the possibility of human freedom the horizon of a transcendent deity (Martin 2009). Absent that horizon, pride easily surfaces, manifesting as an overconfidence in human reason. Thus, ­Tillich, for example, contends that God is not a being but the ground-of-being itself, whose essential feature is its incomprehensibility as an object of knowledge (Tillich 1973). Likewise, Karl Barth argues that it is God’s revelation in Jesus Christ—not human reason—that bridges the finite world of humans and the infinitude of the divine (Barth 1977). Thus, Barth calls on Christians to abandon their will to know, control, or coerce God. Karl Jaspers similarly opposes rationalist approaches to theology and epistemology, though he, unlike Barth, holds that transcendent truth reveals itself not solely in the content of the Christian worldview ( Jaspers 1967). To turn away from belief—through, for example, Smith’s “faith,” James’ “will to believe,” or Piette’s “modes of believing”—is to connect with existential anthropologists’ and existential theologians’ concerns with the limits of logic and science, of knowledge and certainty. These limits are key to understanding existentialism and may be key to clarifying the role religion can play—not as a definitive explanatory worldview but rather as the placeholder of excess, as the marker of a horizon that relativizes all else, defining the contingency and finitude even of human reason. Religion, in this case, designates what James calls the more, Jackson calls the penumbral, and van de Port calls the-rest-of-what-is. These are spaces of excess that can only be spoken of negatively, as that which cannot be conceptually contained, reductively known, or theoretically grasped. This experiential abundance is also a part of religion, and arguably what most constitutes it. It commands attention not in spite of its opacity but because of it.

Studying religion existentially The conventional overemphasis on beliefs extends to an equally problematic concern with “belief systems.” Wilfred Cantwell Smith calls this relatively recent coinage a uniquely modern way of conceptualizing, and ultimately managing, human difference (Smith 1979, 120). The systematizing of piety and faith into discrete belief systems arose especially in situations of intercultural encounter: in global and specifically in colonial contexts, where the imperative to know the other may not only have arisen from a place of genuine sympathy but also resulted in making the other amenable to administrative rule. Classifying has almost always gone along with conquering 188

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(Chidester 2003). It has been about heroically mastering a topic, if not a people. Hence there is not only a methodological but also an ethical justification for an existential approach to the study of religion, one in which “we suspend or set aside the terms whereby we conventionally categorize and classify institutional religion under such rubrics as Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism in order to explore the experiences that become cognitively certified… in these ways” ( Jackson and Piette 2015, 13).Yet cognitive certification has emerged as a worthy end for the study of religion, whether as an act of political power or of epistemological privilege, on the poststructuralist grounds commonly assumed today that, to remain within the bounds of scholarly convention, one must access religion not through embodied experience but through what Thomas Csordas calls the “hungry metaphor” of textualism or discourse (Csordas 1999, 146). To critique the reification of religions as belief systems is not to deny the necessity of r­ eligious organizations. Institutions shape and affirm specific religious selves and transmit religious ­learning. That this is part of how religion is experienced suggests that a complete rejection of conceptual categories and institutional forms is not tenable, even on existential grounds. The personal and the social are inextricably bound up with each other, and thus the most productive way forward may be what Csordas calls a cultural phenomenology (1994). This approach to ­human existence is situated between experience and episteme, between individuals and institutions, between lifeworlds and worldviews (see also Premawardhana forthcoming). Yet care must be taken to not allow the solidity of the collective once again to overwhelm the elusiveness of the idiosyncratic. Institutions matter, but they are not all that matter. The more knowable aspects of social life—not just religions and belief systems, but also political structures, cultural histories, and symbolic meanings—are more accessible to the analytical outsider. But there is a cost to fixating on such things. As Robert Desjarlais and Jason Throop note, “this strategy has the effect of neglecting important aspects of people’s lives. As a result, the most compelling cares and concerns of individuals, families, and communities are often passed over or at times missed altogether” (Desjarlais and Throop 2011, 95–96). Exploring the existential may be epistemologically fraught, but disregarding it altogether raises arguably the greater problem. How to adequately make space for the social, the collective, and the institutional alongside the personal, the experiential, and the individual? This is a challenge for an existentially grounded approach to the study of religion. Here I present two possible answers. In their volume Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion, editors Daan Beekers and David Kloos argue that recent theoretical moves in the anthropology of religion emphasizing ambiguity and indeterminacy—often through existential and phenomenological lenses—need not be set against the concern raised elsewhere in recent scholarship with religious habituation and moral perfection (Kloos and Beekers 2017). One need not choose between the idiosyncratic practices of everyday religion, on the one hand, and the cultivation of pious subjects in an institutionally structured fashion, on the other. That is because the experience of falling short is not outside the domain of religion proper. Shortcomings and setbacks can be conducive, rather than detrimental, to the ethical formation of religious subjects. Ultimately, this volume joins others (e.g., Schielke and Debevec 2012) in pointing to the inherent ambiguities of everyday religion, to what Mattijs van de Port calls “religion as an ever wavering curve of intensities, peaking in moments, dropping at other moments” (2017, 130). Another reconciliation of the experiential and the abstract, of the everyday and the institutional, begins with the observation that religious traditions concern themselves not only with moral perfection. It is easy to take this as the entirety of what religions are about—and, consequently, to treat religious affiliations as master categories that preordain an individual’s entire faith and practice—since religious traditions do in fact tend to demand total allegiance (McGuire 189

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2008, 186). However, is it not also the case that certain traditions—and perhaps most traditions, when viewed existentially—contain within them resources and indeed catalysts for thinking beyond them? In this case, existential mobility would be, at least potentially, not only about going beyond what has been prescribed by custom or internalized as habit but also about going beyond because of what has been prescribed by custom or internalized as habit. There is a power in cultural structures and inherited idioms “both to shape and discipline thought and as well to give rise to religious creativity and improvisation” (Orsi 1997, 16–17). I have argued just this in my own research on the intertwined indigenous and Pentecostal religiosity of a Makhuwa-speaking people in southern Africa (Premawardhana 2018). My observations reveal that both Makhuwa indigenous religion and Pentecostal Christianity, each in its own way, promote mobility from within. In both cases, practitioners are urged or even impelled to make moves, sometimes within these traditions, sometimes beyond them. In other words, there are qualities of religion that are themselves expansive rather than reductive, existentialist rather than essentialist. Take, for example, phenomena associated with mysticism. Across religious traditions, mystical practices and negative theologies have developed around the inadequacy of human language regarding the divine. Iris Murdoch, in her essay “Existentialists and Mystics,” notes that existentialism and mysticism commonly emphasize a full inhabiting of the present moment, an experiential abundance that contests the allure of abstraction and reification. Ultimately, though, Murdoch critiques existentialists for elevating the striving, struggling, assertive man over mystics’ virtue of humility and willingness to purge themselves (Murdoch 1997). This is, indeed, a difference. Yet religion understood existentially, as a way of life or as a set of spiritual exercises, does offer possibilities of self-transformation through selfsurrender.6 The difference with mystics may be that existentialists consider the ultimate goal of religious experience to be not the erasure of the self, but rather the bolstering of it. As Jackson and Piette put it, “To submit to a higher power is not… to forfeit one’s own agency but to recover it through a relationships with something beyond oneself ” (2015, 12). Religion—including aspects of specific religious traditions, even institutional ones—is not a barrier to existential projects, but rather, at least potentially, a resource for realizing them. An existentialist approach to the study of religion would allow space for mystical modes of awareness that are largely off limits in the radically secular form of constructivism and historicism dominant in certain sectors of religious studies today. Yet, while there are some who argue for casting the study of religion as a species of the natural sciences, others acknowledge that there are aspects of religion that escape our explanatory paradigms, that exceed what can be observed in the material conditions of our lives (Roberts 2013; Dunn 2016). There is no good reason to privilege rationalism above all other ways of knowing, and it is mystical traditions that clarify the existentialist insight developed here—that experience (lived experience no less than religious experience) often exceeds both logic and language. So understood, the role of the scholar becomes less to locate and contain the object of study— within this or that belief system or religious institution, for example—than to make oneself vulnerable to it. This is the mystical path of humility rather than the rationalist path of mastery.

6 Consider, for example, Pierre Hadot’s study of how Stoic, Epicurean, and other ancient philosophical schools promote philosophy not as a theoretical discourse but as a way of life. Importantly, though, ancient spiritual exercises for self-transformation were specific to one or another school and could only happen within that setting. They were not generic or context-free or the prerogative of autonomous, self-governing individuals to determine for themselves (Hadot 2002).

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It is scholarship, writes philosopher Tyler Roberts, “not simply as the production of knowledge, though it is that as well, but as work we perform on ourselves. It is criticism as spiritual exercise” (2013, 143). As such, it connects with the spiritual exercises developed within and particular to religious traditions and philosophical schools themselves. These elevate the practical and existential over the discursive and theoretical, the imperative to change over the impulse to know.

Conclusion The themes running through this chapter—of mystery, opacity, and excess—not only gesture to an existentialist approach to religion that acknowledges the limits of human reason. It also lays the grounds for a response to common criticisms of existentialism—its excessive individualism, its interiority, its solipsism, its overall failure to account for questions of context, structure, and power. As already discussed, these largely are the reasons why both Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s and William James’s classic contributions to the academic study of religion have come under critique. It is true that institutional structures and embodied practices are mostly missing in accounts that emphasize such subjective factors as faith and the will to believe. Nevertheless, I have argued, these accounts are still worth attending to insofar as they turn attention from cognitive operations of the mind to existential commitments of the heart. To focus only on publicly available and empirically accessible aspects of religion is to leave out many of the cares and concerns that drive people to religion. Moreover, the critique of existentialism as decontextualized and self-centered misses the relational quality with which alterity is apprehended and brought into experience. Existentialism is less about the isolated individual than about the individual in situations, the individual in relations. One sees this in the work of existential philosophers and theologians, from Søren Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel to Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. For all of them, living existentially involves profound commitments and pledges to an Other, whether human or divine. It involves relational ties that cannot be captured and analyzed objectively, but that are experientially real. That is why Jackson lists intersubjectivity as the first overarching theme of his existential anthropology, one that “shifts our emphasis away from notions of the person, the self, or the subject as having a stable character and abiding essence, and invites us to explore the subtle negotiations and alterations of subjective experience as we interact with one another” ( Jackson 2013, 5). There is a risk that the poststructuralist and constructivist critique of subject-centered approaches will in fact be the one to stray from this intersubjective methodology and advance instead a bifurcated analysis—one that emphasizes social practices, disciplinary constraints, and exercises of power to the exclusion of willful, conscious, and creative subjects. This is where Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s notion of faith as a commitment, an act of trust, a reaching beyond oneself, provides at least the conditions for the possibility of a relational ontology. This is not far from William James’s much-critiqued definition of religion, which, in full, centers not “individual men in their solitude” but rather “individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine” ( James 1985, 31; emphasis mine). In the end, what matters is neither the subject nor the object, but rather the relational, indeterminate, and intersubjective space between. Existentialism is not a philosophy of either/or but rather of both/and. This, despite the commonplace caricature of existentialism as atheistic and anti-religious, is what stands behind existentialism’s suitability as a partner for religion and, no less, for the study of religion and for the human sciences at large. 191

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References Asad, T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barth, K. 1977. Church Dogmatics, translated by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Carlisle, C. 2020. Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. Carrette, J., and D. Lamberth. 2017. ‘William James and the study of religion: A critical reading’, In R. King (Ed), Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Methodologies. New York: Columbia University Press. Chidester, D. 2003. ‘Classify and Conquer’: Friedrich Max Muller, indigenous traditions, and imperial comparative religion’, In J. K. Olupona (Ed), Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. London: Routledge. Csordas, T. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Csordas, T. 1999. ‘Embodiment and cultural phenomenology’, In G. Weis and H. Fern Haber (Eds), Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture. New York: Routledge. Desjarlais, R., and C. J. Throop 2011. ‘Phenomenological approaches in anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 87–102. Dreyfus, H. L. 2009. ‘The roots of existentialism’, In H. L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall (Eds), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Dunn, M. 2016. ‘What really happened: Radical empiricism and the historian of religion’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 84(4): 881–902. Edie, J. M. 1987. William James and Phenomenology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fitzgerald, T. 2000. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Hadot, P. 2002. What Is Ancient Philosophy? Translated by M. Chase. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jackson, M. 1989. Paths toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Jackson, M. 2009. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jackson, M. 2013. Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Jackson, M., and A. Piette. 2015. ‘Anthropology and the existential turn’, In M. Jackson and A. Piette (Eds), What Is Existential Anthropology?. New York: Berghahn. James, W. 1956. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover. James, W. 1985. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jaspers, K. 1967. Philosophical Faith and Revelation, translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Harper and Row. Keane, W. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kloos, D., and D. Beekers. 2017. ‘Introduction: The productive potential of moral failure in lived Islam and Christianity’, In D. Beekers and D. Kloos (Eds), Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion. New York: Berghahn. Lambek, M. 2015. ‘Both/And’, In M. Jackson and A. Piette (Eds), What Is Existential Anthropology? New York: Berghahn. Martin, C. 2009. ‘Religious existentialism’, In H. L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall (Eds), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. McCutcheon, R. T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. McGuire, M. B. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murdoch, I. 1997. ‘Existentialists and mystics’, In P. Conradi (Ed), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Penguin Books. Needham, R. 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Orsi, R. 1997. ‘Everyday miracles: The study of lived religion’, In D. D. Hall (Ed), Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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19 EXISTENCE AGAINST BEING Jean-Michel Salanskis

In Levinas, humans are portrayed as those who basically experience a kind of shivering. Correspondingly, such movement does not mean any change of place. In some strange sense, it seems to be a motionless move. It draws ultimately back to our escape with respect to being: a paradoxical notion expressing at best, according to Levinas, our most intimate humanity. Such a new ­conception of existence was first disclosed in Levinas’ small essay On Escape.1 Existence was brought into phenomenological conversation by Heidegger, who induced scholars not to speak anymore in terms of consciousness, but rather in terms of existence. A ­ ccording to his view, existence is our mode of being – the way we cross the general condition of being. It is also the gesture of our opening a world, or opening to a world. We should analyse ourselves as existing, which means projecting ourselves towards a world originally connected with us. Existence is heard with a Greek ek at its beginning: ek-sistence. Levinas sees things differently. According to him, to experience existence means to discover being and its suffocating self-sufficiency. Still, we have embarked on existence and cannot escape it in any conceivable way. We discover how we are trapped in being, and at the same time, we experience the insane wish of escaping. In Levinas’ founding essay, both are phenomenologically the same. It is necessary to add an important point here. What is the right way for making philosophical discourse concrete and bring it back to our sensible concern? How can we change philosophy by making it close to us, to our body, to our needs, to our feelings? How do we avoid famous ivory tower for philosophy? If we follow Heideggerian or post-Heideggerian views, we become concrete by forgetting about consciousness as an impartial distant instance, construing reality from within its infinite difference. We have to replace it by existence, as an original function opening to a world and bearing our motivations and adventures. We do existential philosophy (and write it) in such sense. Levinas tells another story. Our wish to escape expresses our most intimate humanity. Consequently, as we recognize in experience our original conflict with being, we come back to our

1 First published in 1935 as a paper in the Journal Recherches philosophiques, before becoming a book released by Fata Morgana in 1982; Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, tr. Bettina Bergo, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003.

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concrete layer. We have to understand how our experience phenomenologically validates what remains logically impossible: escape from being. Levinas invents then a different existential philosophy. It also considers body, sensation and feeling. However, not in the context of opening a world and exerting existence as a way of being, but rather in the context of our conflict with being.

First picture Levinas deals with existence and describes it in an explicit way most specifically in his early work. More precisely, in that period of time, in two books: the aforementioned On Escape, and Existence and Existents.2 On Escape expounds the basic principle: discovering ourselves concerned by being and crossed by it, we experience at the same time self-sufficiency and inclusiveness of being as suffocating, and we feel the urge to escape it. The book also gives concreteness to such phenomenological analysis: it presents and recounts at least four common episodes where imprisonment is felt and urge to escape emerges. These are: need, pleasure, shame and nausea. In each case, Levinas pictures us as getting loaded by a strange weight, which is the weight of us as being, an immediately ­unsufferable weight. In the case of nausea, we do not tolerate ourselves anymore and would like to liberate ourselves by vomiting. In the case of pleasure, we are involved in a kind of happy climbing, seeming to free us from everything, to cast off our moorings: at the end though we fall back and find ourselves still being. This first description of existence as our intimate burden, witnessing our urge to escape, comes with a refined and convincing phenomenology of the weight of being. In Existence and existents, Levinas goes further and derives from the burden of being the very concept of subjectivity. Existence, which we experience as our prison, also means the universal all-encompassing regime of the absurd process of being. Heraclitus was right, being is before all and above all flowing. There is nothing but move, nothing stands still, which means that no focus is ever possible and relevant: Being with a capital B recombines in itself anything that would apply to the role of a being with a small b. Existence absorbs and destroys in itself any supposed existent. Levinas calls il y a (more or less there is) this Heraclitan figure of being as absolute process of becoming. To count as a subject, we would have to get separated from the unlimited process of being, from the hurly-burly of being. We would need to appear as a distinct something interrupting the flow, concentrating attention on itself. Let us insist on following point. In Existence and existents, existence does not mean us as going through the adventure of life, but rather Being with a capital B: the universal encompassing process of being as such, as opposed to any local existent. After having dealt with this book, we shall use again the word existence in its usual meaning, as referring to human episodes. Further in the book, Levinas introduces the notion of hypostasis, the gesture or the event of tearing of il y a, of subtracting from its process, of extracting from an absurdity where no ‘something’ may ever appear. Hypostasis, a new name for human subject, is the first existent, which il y a as an absurd flow forbade. Hence, we have a new character in the drama, the existent: it comes with a now and a here. Hypostasis prompts a place and a moment, but we should avoid to locate each of them in a general spatial or temporal frame that includes every being. They are rather taken as self-referential

2 French edition Vrin 1963; English Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, tr. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 2001.

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ascription of now and here. Hypostasis as a figure of existence (in the usual existential sense here) is self-referential. Hypostasis also comes as a body. Hypostasis’ here and now are not purely abstract, they are supported by a body, expressing separation. Our body is like our anchor, allowing us to come back to us. It is for us an original home which Levinas describes as our basis. We sometimes need to withdraw from ontological configuration, i.e., we need to sleep. We succeed to fall asleep by coming back to our basis. We lay down our body and use it as a basis helping us to disconnect. Hypostasis has to be regarded as a move or an event, but it does not find its coordinates in any ontological framework, which means that in some sense it is a not moving move, or not an event dividing time into past and future. The present of Hypostasis is purely self-referential. It involves self-location through a body which is not a real place, but rather a basis for disconnecting. This is, roughly speaking, Levinas’ first approach of existence, as experience of the urge to escape and of the overwhelming self-sufficiency of being. It is also shown as existence of an existent extracting from il y a and imposing its coordinates (here, now and body). Existence is read through a variety of typical experiences, like pleasure, nausea or laziness, each of which provides phenomenological content to our urge to escape or our rebellion against being. Importantly, existence up to that point involves no world and remains existence of a solus ipse. In Existence and existent as well as in Time and the Other,3 Levinas begins to add to the scene – rather timidly – a second person, who is going to be named the other (autrui) and will take the greatest importance. Still, for the moment, the other person simply stands at the border, breaks original solipsism and provides for heterogeneous self-transforming time, opening horizons beyond self-separation. We don’t have the ethical meaning of the other yet. Existence, after having severed from Heraclitan absurdity, remains enclosed in itself, and, in some sense, vain.

New framework In Totality and Infinity4 (1961), Levinas comes to consider the other as well, who becomes the gravity centre of his thought. In his view, human destiny is only endorsed when the subject becomes responsible for the other. When we meet what he calls the face, we experience the other person as incumbent upon us and discover morality as the cogency of such responsibility. Levinas describes in a vivid way the new landscape, where the subject is in charge of the other. He shows how the usual dimensions of truly human life are coloured by our responsibility and transformed by it. What does existence become in such new context? Existence stands in the background, still in the sense of our specific human motionless move. In the beginning of the book, Levinas describes what he calls metaphysical desire: the wish of a true elsewhere, the aspiration to something beyond any given frame, to strict otherness. Metaphysical desire counts as fundamental propensity of human kind. In Levinasian language, we could see that as an elaborate version of the urge to escape, happening at the level of our words and our explicit dreams: metaphysical desire appears as heir of the urge to escape. Religions, not surprisingly, recognize in metaphysical desire the root of religiosity in human soul. But Levinas, by calling corresponding feeling metaphysical, wants us to hear it in a larger way, including, for example, poetical longing for elsewhere.5

3 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, tr. Richard Cohen, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1987. 4 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1969. 5 Levinas quotes Rimbaud’s verse “La vraie vie est ailleurs” (“True life is elsewhere”).

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We should also count as existential move the very fact that, standing in front of the face, we immediately become ‘for the other’ (as biblical ‘Here I am/Hineni’ of Abraham expresses). That move is not a move in the usual sense, though. It means readiness to help, to give, to listen; it means switching from indifference to being available. At some point, it means opening and moving, in the sense of leaving the circle of self-concern. Such positive existentiality contrasts with the negative one, carved in our usual innocent way of seizing the world as given to us. Levinas uses famous literary voices in order to communicate our ingenuous attitude: the eponymous character of Victor Hugo’s drama Hernani describing himself as an outgoing force, or Pascal’s moral assessment (‘That’s my place in the sun: this is the beginning and image of the usurpation of all the earth’). We are ontologically determined as a kind of power moving its path and taking control of anything that comes across. The ‘for the other’, the ‘Here I am’ are not inherent tendencies of ours: they should rather be seen as anti-essential counter-moves arising at the intimate level, as did the urge to escape. Levinas also pays attention to other modes of our existentiality. Famously he devotes a chapter to what he calls ‘Phenomenology of Eros’: a description of erotic desire as a male subject may feel it. According to his analysis, Eros means our throwing ourselves towards the feminine. The feminine is felt as a ‘not yet’, promising an indeterminate future. It gets accessed through caress, which never seizes, takes possession or assimilates. Again, existence, here, is our caressing move, different from the ethical ‘Here I am’, even if it may superimpose itself to it. To sum up, existentiality is not only ethical existentiality in Levinas’ eyes. Still, it does not seem to ever come under the scheme of ‘being-to-the-world’: our original motions, as we feel them, are not basically oriented towards the world. On the one hand, Levinas’ descriptions depict heirs of the urge to escape (like metaphysical desire); on the other hand, he rather highlights moves towards other persons. This does not mean that Levinas ignores ontological classical existentiality. As a matter of fact, he also describes what he calls atheist subjectivity: us as looking for our enjoyment and using the world in that purpose. It means coming back to us after going through the detour of the world, in the guise of consumption, work or knowledge. With these descriptions, he covers usual existentiality even if he interprets it more as consumption than as handling or opening. Object’s basic figure is the one of food, rather than of tool. But of course, our worldly business amounts to keeping ourselves: to Spinozist conatus essendi. There is after all an ontological logic and an ontological reading of existence. Only Levinas comes to it from another angle, determined by the urge to escape on the one hand, by ethical emotion on the other hand.

Otherwise than Being In 1974, Levinas publishes Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence,6 which again seems to expound the heart of his thought, in a quite different way though. According to the most classical account, this second book changes underlying metaphysics: human subjectivity is not understood anymore as coming first, ethics and ethical destination getting discovered only after the other/ the face is met. Now human subjectivity is haunted by the other from the very beginning. It lives a dedication that is described as haemorrhage or as maternal carrying. Many readers understand this dedication as oriented towards sacrifice.

6 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, tr. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1998.

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I do not agree with this reading. Because as we saw we cannot read Levinas as telling the story of the true essence of human being: he does not write some piece of anthropological metaphysics. Levinas is not interested in existence as an ontological mode: he rather understands our existential dimension at the level of our fight against being, the most radical layer of which is ethical emotion. Therefore, the good question is: which new existential moves (in the sense of Levinas) do we come to know in Otherwise than Being? These added fundamental ‘gestures’ bring about a new figure of the conflict between subjectivity and being, a more radical one as a matter of fact. However, this does not refute Totality and Infinity’s description, in the same way as this description did not refute early Levinas’ vision. Levinas only comes to understand in a more profound way his original intuition of subjectivity against being, which leads him to portray a not observable, improbable subjectivity. Otherwise than Being contains, to begin with, the existential move of ‘one-for-the-other’, as Levinas calls it. This motion is our original dedication, the urgency and cogency of which has no temporal origin we would be aware of. Again, it’s not a real move, not a displacement in space: it rather means giving to the other the bread source of my enjoyment, or not finding anything else, coming back to my core, than my dedication itself. As if the loop of atheist subjectivity was perturbated in an immemorial way and could not close, turning rather into the arrow towards the other (cf. Figure 19.1). Such would be the story of us as ethical subjectivities: a story which does not express our essence but prompts the craziness of an improbable stance. Our existence reduces to care-forthe-other, which devours us since a point in time standing further than our memory may recall, because only effective episodes could be kept track of. As if care-for-the-other forbade any coming back to us as a safe core, standing before dedication. We are not such existence, but we understand such narrative. The mediocrity of us communicates with the tale or the myth of such subjectivity, it validates or recognizes it. Then we also find at the end of Otherwise than Being a second gesture, which could be called the gesture of de-confinement. In the last chapter of the book indeed, Levinas describes how, along the one-for-the-other, we connect in a way some real outside. It has to be reminded that many philosophical discourses in France longed for the great or the true outside. Usually, they imagined such outside as outside of the system, outside of any law or even outside of morality. Levinas thinks he is able to define a more authentic and radical outside: outside of the logic of being, simply. Clearly, we shall never stand actually outside of being: it is paradoxical and

I

arrow of one-for-the-other (gift)

Economic loop of coming back to oneself: I move towards the world in the way of work, enjoyment or knowledge, but I do that aiming at myself and I come back to me

Figure 19.1 Subjective loop.

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impossible. Still, we build a life, we weave the thread of existence against being, which culminates in our for-the-other-person. We disregard our interest, which Levinas reads as inter-esse: we escape our self-concerned logic of organisms, towards a society of ‘one-for-the-other’s. And this gesture of moving from our interested metabolism towards a collective level of responsibility puts us in some sense outside. In very strong and moving sentences, Levinas depicts our very breathing as radical opening: we are lungs at the core of our substance. Biological breathing has to be read as our body turning towards the other. Being inspired by the other, we immediately come to our expiration towards them, opening like space, says Levinas, while not ‘to-the-world’. In that way, we are committed to an outside where all winds rage. The gesture of de-confinement is understood as the gesture of breathing: again, a motionless move.

Awakening Another piece of existential description in Levinas’ trajectory is to be found in the collection Of God who Comes to Mind (1982).7 A new basic ‘move which is not a real move’ appears in the crucially important essay ‘God and Philosophy’: the move of awakening (éveil). If we understand the notion, we come to realize that Levinas often mentions it or alludes to it in the various essays composing the book. He seemed to be aware in some way that awakening was the significant addition brought by his collection, the new thing coming with it. What is awakening for Levinas? It is our original surge as invaded and summoned by Infinity. We don’t need to refer to religious categories for saying that infinity addresses us. It does so as a cogitatum overcoming the cogitans, as an ungraspable cogitatum. Here Levinas simply takes up Descartes’ third metaphysical meditation about the ‘idea of the Infinite’. But what is expounded with such words is more than an epistemological issue. Experiencing infinite, we feel it as invading, potentially destructive, and at the same time as ‘non indifferent’. Such experience leads us to waking up. Awakening appears as our move, summoned by Infinity. Again, it is clearly not a real move, there is no displacement in it, but rather the surging of awareness. More precisely, Levinas reads awakening in two ways, along two threads that we as interpreters hardly manage to disentangle. On the one hand, awakening means moving for the infinite, moving as our way of answering the infinite’s non-indifference. But, because the infinite stands beyond any accurate concept, because it cannot be included in being in any way, we cannot be said to effectively relate to the infinite. Therefore, our awakening move tolerates its translation into our moving for the other: as if both meant exactly the same. Waking up means making ourselves available for the other, means saying ‘Here I am’. Infinite deformalizes itself into the other person, one could say. Levinas goes as far as saying that by moving for the other, we take responsibility for the absence inside the realm of being of any supportive power protecting the other person from distress. Infinite ultimately only shines in our ‘Here I am’, without finding place in being. There is another side to this story: awakening also means entering the narrative of the same. Waking up, the subject finds the forms of consciousness, self-reflection and intentionality as fitting gloves. Hence, Levinas adds, in the context of such functions, awakening is always at risk of forgetting itself in regularity: as if it came back to anonymous process of absurd il y a. Such narrative entails that we always need a new awakening. In his 1982 collection, Levinas often describes

7  Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, On God Who Comes to Mind, tr. Bettina Bergo, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998.

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and celebrates typical restlessness of Mind. He also associates with the key notion of awakening the way theorizing or interpreting never reaches any satisfying end, never stops aiming at a better understanding or theorizing. Awakening seems to also account for the open character of intellectual search. We could try to illustrate this last existential move in a more accessible way by connecting it either with examples of a recent political movement and of a Hollywood movie. Everybody heard about a new political trend called woke. (The issue is controversial, and I do not take here any position in the political area, as well as I do not try to commit Levinas’ legacy in any way.) On the surface, it corresponds – at least partly – to the 1982 additional existential notion of Levinas. Isn’t the woke movement about becoming conscious of the difference between destinies, imparted by social, gender or racial determination? Wouldn’t it even be, as in Levinas, about taking upon us the other person’s care, at a level at which we first did not even see any problem? Still at the purely conceptual level, we may acknowledge the connection and consider Levinas as having anticipated the woke movement, even if there are substantial differences. In the case of the woke movement, I have the impression that is more about conceptualizing correctly how some destinies are blocked than about rescuing. Also, we do not recover, in woke conception, the part about being assaulted and bothered by something that comes to mind but nevertheless cannot be grasped (Infinity). And one could argue that woke conception is not mostly concerned about what the other person suffers: it may focus on how I endure being categorized or minimized inside a category which seems to apply to me; woke movement, as I understand, may provide a new way for subjects to fight their cause and formulate their protest (as it probably has to be in the political context). Still, how important such differences may be, I think there is a continuity between Levinas’ motive and woke movement, without deciding whether it has to be approved in general or not. This new contemporary political category, indeed, insists on the idea of breaking with evidence and comfort, of allowing ourselves to be invaded, while turning such idea ultimately into practical ways. Such trajectory sounds to some extent like Levinasian. The Hollywood motion picture called Awakenings (1990, dir. Penny Marshall, based on a novel by Oliver Sacks) is another illustrative example. In a New York hospital, there are many catatonic patients who survived an epidemic. Thanks to a scientific advance, a new drug is given first to one catatonic patient, then to all of them. Each of them comes back from immobility and silence and seems then to recover normal life. However, scientists anticipate that observed recovery will not last long. And indeed, each concerned patient returns to catatonic state. At the end, some lessons seem to emerge. The whole process has awoken everyone to the idea that catatonic patients should still be considered persons. And no matter what we should use life with enthusiasm, not take it for granted, especially the possibility of moving our bodies and enjoying the world. The topic in the film is real movement, not existential move without displacement as in Levinas. Catatonia as a condition means exactly the disappearance of move in its standard sense. Nevertheless, the plot goes beyond such level. The story of this awakening with its symmetric decline metaphorizes life as a move which is not a real move and is bound to lead us to immobility again. The pure fact of life means a lot of moves in the basic sense but does not reduce to any such move. And the film seems to draw conclusions at the level of ethical move, whether concerning distress of other persons, or pointing to our intimate enjoyment, as this existential nonstandard move Levinas brought forward. I mentioned these related notions of awakening in order to show that Levinas’ conception, although quite uncommon and probably contradicting any attitude of human sciences (because 200

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human sciences have to focus on our actual behaviours and moves), finds support or shifted ­illustration in our experiences, the stories we can tell, or our ideas.

Conclusion and Jewish existence In this chapter, have been collected and examined a few modes of existence according to Levinas’ perspective: basic motionless moves, building our human concreteness. We met, in that order, escape as an impossible wish, hypostasis as tearing ourselves out of absurd il y a, here I am as making us our neighbour’s guardian, one-for-the-other as recurrence of our dedication, awakening as witnessing infinite demand which summons us. Those would be indeed the conceptual figures to be found in Levinas’ philosophical writing. Still, if we consider only them, we are losing something important. One should also pay attention to what Levinas installed in his life: Jewish observance. An important part of his writings deals with what could be called ‘Jewish existence’, the way Jewish people live their lives when they try and obey Jewish law. In Difficult Freedom, Levinas says that Jewish existence should be regarded as a category of being.8 This mysterious phrase could be taken as expressing that Jewish life provides for him a picture of existence (possibly a normative picture). Here are three points or facets that Levinas insists on, in numerous papers printed in Jewish journals, or in his talks given at Colloque des intellectuels Juifs de langue française. 1 Levinas values a way of dealing with temporality which does not focus on present situation considered in the perspective of its overcoming. We also live our lives in relation to what comes to us from remote times, and possibly nowadays counts as mission for us. Through its texts, tradition may transmit requirements making our earthy trajectory meaningful. Levinas explicates such ideas already in his paper ‘Être juif ’, contrasting Jewish existentiality with Sartrian one9; he convincingly and beautifully reformulates the same idea in his paper about Hanukhah festival in Difficult Freedom.10 In his words, Jewish tradition teaches us how to really have some past behind us. 2 Levinas regards study – meaning unlimited reading and interpretation of texts – as a kind of nerve of our existential career. Navigating through our days means learning, understanding, discussing: a bundle of motionless moves bringing our life to the level of concept. According to Jewish tradition, as taught by the 16th century Talmudic scholar the Maharal of Prague, such elevation is mandatory for accomplishing the commands of Jewish law at best. 3 Human existence, in the last instance, is about ethics, and ethics calls for the right politics ­a llowing justice to organize the city. We are drawn, or should be, towards terrestrial Jerusalem. This means watchfulness. Jewish life requires vigilance: it is about promoting awaken persons who are ready for the other. Here we cross the last theme of previous path. Justice works as an impossible goal calling us to more responsibility at every moment.

8 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, tr. Sean Hand, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1997, p. 183; Difficile liberté, Paris, Livre de Poche, 1976, p. 256. 9 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Being Jewish’, tr. Beth Mader, in Cont. Phil. Review n 40, 2007, pp. 205-210 [‘Être juif ’ in Confluences, n 15–17, pp. 253–264. Reprinted in Cahiers d'Études Lévinassiennes, Paris-Jérusalem, 2002, n 1, pp. 99–106]. 10 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Light and the Dark’, Difficult Freedom, pp. 228–230.

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20 (IN)DIVIDUAL LIVES AND EXISTENTIAL NARRATIVES Samuele Poletti

Over the years, there has been a proliferation of studies that have privileged (subjective) existence over (sociocultural) essence as a focus of anthropological concern. The classic ethnographic commitment of sociocultural anthropology seems uncapable to provide a suitable theoretical, epistemological, and methodological bedrock to dwell on what the existential vicissitudes of the people encountered in the field might have to say beyond their generalizability to larger social units. Sure, in anthropology, there has long been awareness of the potentially hegemonic effects of concepts such as “culture” and “society”. From an existential perspective, though, there is more to it than the anti-essentialist critiques of feminist and subaltern studies, and the postmodern “crisis of representation” launched by the writing culture movement in American anthropology. As Sherry Ortner showed, cultural worlds are inseparable from the kinds of subjectivities they tend to give shape to – subjectivity which is, in turn, the sphere where paradigmatic social changes are set in motion (2005; see also De Sales 2011; Poletti 2021). The solution may look straightforward: “subjectivity” ought to be put at the forefront of anthropological investigations. But this is not quite as simple as it may sound. Subjectivity, and the individual agency ascribed to it, are not innocent tropes. The ghost haunting this epistemological move is that of the independent, modern Western human subject. Namely, a “buffered” individual entity that, after the death of God, is condemned to find meaning only within itself, and to thus become the only maker of its own meaningful world (Lambek 2015, 64–65; see also Taylor 2007; Poletti 2020). Given the fact that different cultural sensibilities entail diverse understandings of personhood, this view is far from being universally applicable. The main peril is the tacit, uncritical universalization of what Jarrett Zigon has labeled “metaphysical humanism”: a restricted set of metaphysical attributes deemed to be shared by anyone in this world prior to any actual engagement with others (2018, 121; see also Pedersen 2020, 627). Of course, for anthropology, it is paramount to consider human beings as having something in common. Otherwise, without Anthropos, “anthropology” would become the logos of what exactly? Yet, the problem of “humanity” should remain an open question, not an a priori assumption. If personhood is to be conceived as the historical result of a specific social environment, an existential approach in anthropology should then start with a close look at how subjectivity is articulated in a given context. Put differently, “the individual subject” needs to be questioned cross-culturally instead of being treated as a transparent field of inquiry. So, by briefly discussing 202

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the problem of subjectivity in anthropology from my theoretical standpoint on such matter, in this chapter, I shall respond to the biting criticisms that some renown scholars in the discipline have leveled against what might be called an “existential anthropology”. In so doing, I delineate an epistemological and methodological means of approaching the coming-into-being of particular persons without constraining their existence within the limitations of metaphysical humanist assumptions about what those lives are essentially supposed to be. Self hood, I argue, should be seen as an ongoing product of specific circumstances that rearrange its foundational structures in light of the events that punctuate a person’s life. At the same time, it would be hard to deny that something holds together the manifold transient manifestations of someone’s self. The crafting of existential narratives appears to tackle precisely this issue. The significance of existential analyses would hence be diminished by the lack of an explicit focus on the various narrative devices that people resort to cross-culturally to fashion their existence in different ways and how they are in turn transformed by those very narratives.1 As Richard Kearney suggested, “narrative self hood can […] respond to anti-humanist suspicions of subjectivity while preserving a significant notion of the ethical-political subject” (2002, 152). While the essence of someone’s being is well beyond the reach of anthropological understanding, looking for existential narratives permits us to account for what holds and what changes in life without sacrificing either of these tendencies.

Existence and the problem of (in)dividuality The critique of Western individualism has a long legacy in anthropology, which is way too complex to be thoroughly reviewed here (but see Dumont 1985; Mauss 1985; Bloch 1988, 1998). Within this multifaceted debate, it is however worth mentioning a couple of emblematic examples that are particularly salient for the sake of this discussion. A seminal contribution in this direction comes from the work of McKim Marriott (e.g. 1976). According to him, in South Asia, people mature the sense of who they are in contiguity with others amid networks of relational interactions. This means that they are partible entities inextricable from the network of relationships and exchanges in which they are embedded. Consequently, Marriott put in opposition to the supposed stable bounded autonomy of Western individuals, the fluid, unbounded permeability of South Asian “dividuals”. The notion of “dividuality” has been further developed by Marilyn Strathern, thanks to whom this concept made its way into mainstream anthropology. Strathern (1988) offered a sophisticated analysis of gendered relations in Melanesian society, where, she argued, personhood is articulated in and through an economy of gifts. The products exchanged in such way are not to be seen as mere objects, though. Rather, gifts are parts of people themselves, which, being exchanged with others, brings about deeply relational and indeed “dividual” persons. That being the case, the distinction between independent individual subjects vis-à-vis an abstract collectivity that characterizes modern Western social models is unfit for grasping how sociality plays out elsewhere, such as in Melanesia. The above has been a ground-breaking contribution in showing how we might think of ourselves differently from how we are accustomed. Yet, the opposition between Western individuals and non-Western dividuals has been largely based on overgeneralized models, leaving its phenomenological implications uncharted. In effect, while “individualism” ought to be seen, above all, as an ideological construct, “dividuality” has been illustrated in such abstract terms as to make it hard to envisage what the life of a dividual person would actually look like. Throughout the world, people’s lived experience of their supposed (in)dividuality does not validate the simplistic opposition of relational dividuals to be found in “traditional” societies to “modern” autonomous 203

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individuals – a juxtaposition that now appears, more than anything, as a fairly “tired theoretical antinomy” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001, 267). Invitations to more nuanced positions recur in the anthropological literature (see e.g. McHugh 1989, 76–77; Ortner 1995; Bialecki and Daswani 2015; Appuhamilage 2017). Essentially, as Philip Descola succinctly put it (2013, 117), highlighting the specificity of Western individual-ism does not overshadow the – potentially universal – feeling of being distinct entities different from others, albeit of course not operating within the same Western mindset. Besides, individualism does not adequately render the whole experience of self hood even in the so-called modern West, where cases of “dividuality” of some sort do not certainly lack (see e.g. Lester 2017). Among the biggest challenges for an existential approach is therefore that of avoiding describing, over and over, the existential vicissitudes of the same person, while, simultaneously, managing to provide a robust phenomenological account of (inter-)subjective experience. In terms of method, this implies problematizing that which exists; namely, what the very notion of “existence” itself is taken to mean within this framework. Martin Heidegger resorted to the Greek word aletheia to address “the unconcealedness of what-is present, its being revealed, its showing itself ” (1972, 79). For my part, I privilege instead its Latin etymology, ex-sistere: “to stand out”. Thus conceived, existence comes to designate the process whereby “self hood emerges and is negotiated in a field of interpersonal relations, as a mode of being in the world” ( Jackson 1998, 28). Instead of postulating a universal subject with a given set of qualities, self hood is approached as a relentless product of a mutable environment, acquiring a certain degree of autonomy as an effect of primeval engagement with the world, not as a pre-existing attribute. The result of this irreducible existential process is what I have elsewhere labeled an “Intersubjective-I” (Poletti 2020), relentlessly existing out of particular conditions and constantly rearranging itself to the situations and the relationships in which it is embroiled. This shift from the subjective domain of “me” to the intersubjective domain of “me-in-themidst-of-others” escapes the cognitive solipsism of a private self firmly distinct from its surroundings. Actually, emphasis on the existential does not equate to losing sight of the general, favoring the unique at the expense of the shared. Within the scope of an existential approach framed in these terms, idiosyncratic and sociocultural elements cooperate more than competing for attention. At the same time, it also prevents the post-humanist outright denial of “the subject”, whilst avoiding treating subjectivity as a passive by-product of collective identities. The focus of an existential anthropology thus falls on how different subjects come to stand out against a precise intersubjective horizon, which is but a constant (re)negotiation of their intertwined existences. So, argued Rebecca Lester reviewing the problem of self hood in anthropology, “the question is less ‘what is the self ’ in a given context, but ‘how is the self?’” (2017, 33, original emphasis). What is at stake, in other words, is not to reach a conclusive statement on the nature of subjectivity, but rather to explore the ways in which “the self ” is enacted through specific practices across time and space. The critical anthropology of self hood put forward by Lester has the a­ dvantage of disentangling the cross-cultural exploration of the self from a psychocentric perspective. The existential anthropology that I am formulating here cannot in fact be linked with ease to the remit of psychological anthropology. The scope of the inquiry is not that of illuminating the unfathomable recesses of other people’s psyche, which the researcher needs to penetrate ­somehow. Such a task inevitably requires an approximation – which is in some ways also an appropriation – of their inner states. This tends to be achieved by pairing someone’s experiential life with the researcher’s own, in the attempt to close the gap between their respective alterities. The interiorities of Self and Other thus acquire relevance only insofar as they reflect and shed light on one another, which conveys yet another kind of (psychological) “interchangeability” like that 204

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criticized by Marine Kneubühler (this section; see also Poletti 2021). What I suggest is instead to explore the various modalities of people’s existence, with no need to evoke any chimeric capacity to access others’ inner depths.

… and yet something holds: Singular experiences and existential narratives The way I have presented it so far, “existence” is a highly dynamic affair. Distinct subjects emerge and dissolve amid specific networks of intersubjective meaning and relations. Nonetheless, were self hood solely linked to the particular occurrences from which it arises as a suitable response, this would make it quite difficult to address the undeniable cohesion of any one person through time. Something holds across the situational manifestation of an Intersubjective-I, and, epistemologically, an existential approach to subjectivity needs to be able to account for such a continuity as well. After all, as Jonathan Parry noted, It is, no doubt, difficult for us to think ourselves into a world in which persons conceive of themselves as quite such protean entities ready to be shaped anew by every chance encountered, or to imagine a social world in which my intimate associate of today may be a substantially different person tomorrow. 1994, 113–114 Excessive emphasis on the multifaceted fragmentation of being is likely to merely reflect the disorientation of the (post-)modern consciousness and its emblematic aversion to consistency (see Ortner 2005, 41–44). The indiscriminate projection of this specific predicate onto any one person notwithstanding of their context of belonging would take my argument full circle, ­becoming, effectively, just another manifestation of metaphysical humanism. No matter how disparate the conditions giving rise to a different aspects of the self, its multifaceted appearance is not compartmentalized into situational fragments of personhood totally disconnected from one another. It is empirically incontestable that a common thread runs through the variegated expressions of an Intersubjective-I. The process by means of which selfhood stands, out each time, under particular circumstances, is also an interpretive endeavor to situate its existence within a broader horizon of meaning that confers to it some sort of continuity. The cross-cultural exploration of how people become certain kinds of persons requires then, firstly, to foreground the narratives thanks to which personhood is enacted in numerous ways. Self-fashioning is, indeed, primarily a narrative endeavor. In Paul Ricoeur’s words, “Subjects recognize themselves in the stories they tell about themselves” (1990, 247). Existential narratives are what ensures the uniqueness of anyone’s story and, simultaneously, what grants the relative cohesion of a person over time. The particularity of any existential trajectory, however, does not implicate the linearity of a single plot. Like any story, existential narratives are prone to dramatic twists and are always liable to be retold anew. Divergent narrative sensibilities may come to intermingle in the storyline, altering the interpretive register informing someone’s life. A mutated hermeneutic standpoint does not affect only present and future experiences, but past ones too. This for instance the case of religious conversions, which introduces a radically different meanings in light of which past events are re-experienced in an utterly new way to open up an alternative future (see Poletti 2022). But the case of conversion shows also that it is crucial not to conceive of narrative merely as a practice of self-cultivation. Stories are not mere instrument resorted to by people to structure their lifeworlds. Particular narrative structures, such as that of the Bible, operate also as external forces that, acting upon the self, shape it accordingly. 205

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“Experience” is therefore not necessarily a trademark of an individualist perspective. Nor does emphasis on the experiential domain suggest a naïve desire to circumvent the murkiness of interpretation to reach “truer” insights aping a quasi-objective accuracy reminiscent of the natural sciences (Lambek 2015, 64). Michael Lambek is certainly right in highlighting the fact that the concept of “lived experience” has been oftentimes fetishized in phenomenologically oriented studies as a means allegedly capable of moving beyond logocentric representations toward the more authentic domain of human life as it is lived, not as it is thought about. However, Lambek’s reading bears also a profoundly empiricist understanding of “experience”, which is not necessarily accurate. His concern would indeed appear unfounded were Lambek to consider the hermeneutic position that, since Heidegger (1996, 140–141), has made clear that already the primeval act of perception entails interpretation. Stressing the interpretive nature of experience consists above all to foreground how people perceive, that is, how they make sense of their lives and of the world around them. In this sense, the existential anthropology that I theorize and practice qualifies much more as a hermeneutic position than as a strictly phenomenological one. Actually, distinct narratives are not superimposed onto a “bare ground” of unmediated experiences. Experience itself is held to be intrinsically interpretive in its ongoing attempt to accommodate, within the broader spectrum of a shared narrative, multiple life events and the kaleidoscopic self hood they generate (see also Poletti 2018, 2020). In this light, subjective experiences cease to be treated as an individual’s private inner matter, but, rather, as intersubjective events taking place in a world of others. Even so, “experience” retains a twin side, as Lambek pointed out (2015, 64). On the one hand, it has the immediate quality of idiosyncratic insight. This is what I properly designate as the experience of a situation that, happening amid a specific network of intersubjective meaning, spawns a corresponding subject. On the other, though, the situational manifestations of this Intersubjective-I feature a cumulative dimension, expressed in the form of an existential narrative that confers some continuity across its multifaceted existence by bringing together the events that make up one’s life. Without the recourse to narration, the problem of personal identity would in fact be condemned to an antinomy with no solution. Either we must posit a subject identical with itself through the diversity of its different states, or, following Hume and Nietzsche, we must hold that this identical subject is nothing more than a substantialist illusion, whose elimination merely brings to light a pure manifold of cognitions, emotions, and volitions (Ricoeur 1990, 246). Methodologically, therefore, it does not suffice to explore the phantasmagoria of experiential reactions to the world that make up one’s being. It is equally important to present what are the narrative(s) through which these distinct fragments of personhood are woven together, giving rise to a precise person. The singular continuum that I am addressing here is then not to be conceived in reference to an aloof autonomous subject that precedes the situations from which it stands out. Tropes such as “singularity”, “unicity”, and “continuity” are not necessarily ontological, but rather narrative. The stories that structure people’s existence differently are what allow them to recognize themselves and one another as particular persons without this implying any a priori assumptions of ontological independence of the protagonist of the narration.

Existence precedes essence In light of the above, it would be misleading to consider an existential approach in anthropology as having an altogether different aim compared to the discipline at large. 206

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Neither I think “existential anthropology” does constitute a separate field of study. As Lambek suggested (2015, 72), and I agree with him on this point, just like, say, a Marxist approach is animated by a distinct touch, this particular take on anthropology too tends to put the accent on some analytical aspects over others. More than anything else, existential approaches in anthropology, as in the social sciences more broadly, share a certain discontent toward how scholarly inquiries have tended, throughout their history, to overshadow the concrete lifeworlds encountered in the field, treating them as mere instances of larger social dynamics (see also Piette, this volume; Jackson 1999). Within these broader agendas, actual people and their stories seem to provide, at best, engaging vignettes to hook the reader’s attention, yet soon disappear in the pursuit of grand schemes deemed of greater academic relevance.2 Such a critique is not bearer of any moralistic plea, nor does it necessarily mean embarking on a salvific crusade, as alluded to by Morten Axel Pedersen (see 2020, 623). Simply, existential sensibility sparks from the conviction that limiting anthropological deliberations to communal features, neglecting the more intimate, personal sphere, can lead to miss much of what any single story can reveal. The risk is that of flattening (any group of ) “people” to essentialized portraits that they are never allowed to challenge or refute, reducing thus the potential insights that a closer look at those lives is likely to generate.3 This is the main factor that sets existential anthropology apart from the Ontological Turn (OT), which, Pedersen aptly argued (2020), is, ironically, probably its closest interlocutor. In all fairness, these are among the only academic analytical frameworks that do not function as a hermeneutics of suspicion. Instead of looking past people in search of the hidden forces that are supposed to shape their lives,4 both aspire to validate other modalities of being(-in-the-world) through “a stance of creative respect towards the object of ethnographic inquiry” (Graeber 2015, 21; see e.g. Scott 2016). The epistemological project to know different cultures which characterizes sociocultural anthropology is replaced by the wish to ponder instead what it means to be part of a specific reality, and how this might illuminate key areas of anthropological interest. The OT has gone very far in showing how deep ethnographic engagement with other peoples can help us rethinking and reconceptualizing fundamental assumptions of Western thought. However, in postulating incommensurable (verbal) realities, the OT ends up eclipsing the “Anthropos” behind its “Logos”, in a sublimation of alterity that appears impervious to the actual lifeworlds that lay at the core of its elaborate theoretical ruminations.5 Within these accounts, people feature (if they feature at all!) as deprived of their agency, in quite abstract renderings of their lives that way too often reduce them to passive carriers of the ethno-ontology they are reckoned to embody (see also Vigh and Sausdal 2014). Still, it is worth keeping in mind that “essentializing and exoticizing the Other is one way to avert the challenge of cultural difference” (Gupta 1992, 207). To accept the challenge of cultural difference is indeed a tricky business. As Lambek depicted it, it is comparable to climbing a sharp, sheer ridge, with the precipices of excessive Otherness on one side and of excessive Sameness on the other (2015, 68; see also Poletti 2021). The rarefied intellectual atmosphere of the OT is far too sweeping to prove adequate for such a delicate task. To keep a balance between these two extremes, I rather let myself be guided by the principle that “existence precedes essence; or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be our point of departure” (Sartre 2007, 20). This, however, ought not to be mistaken for methodological individualism. The point is not to trace the roots of macro sociocultural phenomena back to individual actors and their motivations. Rather, subjective experience is crucial because it is there where personal agency and external constraints come together and collide. Existential anthropology is not an apotheosis of individual freedom. People are, of course, always living within larger realities by 207

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which they are shaped. Though, as Albert Piette and Michael Jackson noted in their introduction to an influential volume on the subject: While individual acting, thinking, and feeling are always situated historically, socially, and environmentally, every person’s existence is characterized by projects, intentions, desires, and outcomes that outstrip and, in some sense, transform these prior conditions Jackson and Piette 2015, 3 At the heart of an existential approach is hence the aim of foregrounding the irreducibility of people’s lives to the abstract superstructures that are supposed to mold them. Existence matters not because it denies essence, but as it always escapes, indeed precedes, any attempt to be reduced to the latter. Why, then, choose to tell one person’s story over another’s? In other terms, there is the shadow of nominalism potentially lurking over this endeavor. But setting oneself free from the urge to say something that must necessarily be representative of a larger whole does not unavoidably lapse into a sort of existential butterfly collection. The overall goal is to privilege certain stories and situations not by virtue of their generalizability to broader social entities, or even to “Humanity” as such, but rather as a philosophical starting point to reflect on “the conditions and the possibilities of being human. That, precisely, is to do anthropology” (Ingold 2014, 388). Actually, if one were to accept Tim Ingold’s definition of anthropology as “philosophy with the people in” (see 2014, 393), I would be happy to just call what I am addressing here “anthropology”, without any additional specification. The “existential” prefix, though, further underlines the aspiration to disentangle the anthropological quest from its sociocentric legacy, to recenter its focal point on people’s actual lives.

A negative existential approach This brings me to a crucial question: what is, then, existential anthropology all about? An existential approach, we have seen, starts with a closer look at subjective experience in an attempt to close the gap that has alienated erudite forms of knowledge from the world they are supposed to address. This kind of “philosophy with the people in” strives to generate philosophical insights on existential themes of anthropological concern in and through a fresh perspective informed by fieldwork encounters with specific lifeworlds.6 In doing so, it operates as a critical hermeneutical approach based more on wonder than on suspicion. That is, it offers an interpretive stance toward knowledge eager to be enchanted by the countless stories to be found in the world rather than striving to systematically debunk their mysteries in light of a scholarly agenda. To provide a clear, comprehensive definition of what is existential anthropology beyond this general outline, though, is no simple matter. As Saint Augustine mused, reflecting on what is “time”: “Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know” (1998, XI[17]). But in this case, the problem goes further than that. Actually, if the whole point of emphasizing existence is to foreground its irreducibility to any essence, “existential anthropology cannot ascribe to itself an essence without risk of self-contradiction, or at least paradox” (Lambek 2015, 59). Perhaps this is the reason why attempts to conceptualize what existential anthropology is have been framed more in terms of what it strives to disengage from than what it really argues for (ibid.; see e.g. Jackson and Piette 2015). A negative epistemology may, in effect, be a valuable device for the development of an existential theory that remains wary of the paradox inherent in attempts to crystallize it into an 208

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essence. The basic principle of a negative logic is that any attempt to affirm that something is, for instance, “red”, precludes immediately the possibility that it is “blue”, or “yellow”. This is especially problematic when it comes to providing a definition (from Latin finis, i.e., “border”) of concepts that are supposed to be inherently illimited, such as “God”, or “the Absolute”. “Existence” too falls within the category of these all-encompassing ideas. Thus, to elude the constrictions imposed by a positive description, some religious systems in particular have devised a negative way of reasoning as a viable alternative. Instead of saying what something is, the subject matter in question is designated as “neither this nor that” – neti-neti in the Sanskrit tradition (see, e.g., Blackwood 1963), known in Western thought as via negativa (see, e.g., Mortley 1982). Saying that this is neither “red” nor “blue” still makes an idea intelligible, yet without enclosing it within the arbitrary limitations of a definition. Contrary to Joel Robbins, who asserted that “when one does not define a concept, then statements about what one excludes from it take on a weight they might not necessarily have to bear otherwise” (2016, 801), I believe a negative logic may help theorizing a truly existential approach deeply concerned with how people become who they are and in what way they make sense of their lives without losing sight of the broader sociocultural context within which these existential vicissitudes take place. In striking a balance between a solipsistic rendering of an independent subject and the socioconstructivist determination of self hood, existential anthropology emerges as neither a sociocentric nor a psychocentric stance on subjectivity, but rather as a third way between these opposing poles. This demands, first of all, bringing to the fore people’s actual stories. More, it entails exploring how different subjects come to exist, that is, stand out, as a product of the situations in which they are involved – experiences that are then threaded together so as to fashion a story. To postulate and describe an individual self with specific features attributed to it a priori, would indeed be tantamount to making of existence an essence, resulting in a fundamental contradiction. In its relentless existence, though, the unfolding of a person’s life-history escapes the conceptual categories within which one might try to make it fit, undermining any attempt to essentialize what is, instead, irreducible by its very nature. Inter alia, the inclusion of others in the practice of anthropological philosophizing has also the virtue of problematizing the classic tenets of Western existentialism. Without repudiating the influence that existential philosophy has had in sparking the distinctive sensibility underpinning this handbook, anything that might go under the name of “existential human science” ought to avoid living in the shadow of its philosophical ancestor. Too much existential-ism would diminish what a discipline like anthropology can really bring to the table and merely turn any person in the world into an awkward caricature of an existential philosopher. The contribution of existential anthropology should not be that of providing ethnographic evidence to validate classic (Western) existentialist theories. Nor is it just a matter of generating “ethnographic theory”, which, Ingold remarked, is tantamount to “look[ing] through the wrong end of the telescope” (2014, 392). Rather, an existential approach in anthropology becomes concretized in its close attention to particular lifeworlds as the privileged source of insights that may help us (re)thinking the vicissitudes of being-in-the-world. For this reason, I believe, “existential anthropology” is something that, ultimately, can only be done rather than defined, as reducing it to a programmatic essence would end up compromising its intellectual project. Better still, only when it is put into effect does existential anthropology manifest as what it really is, while any attempt to grasp it conceptually is bound to be, essentially, elusive. It shall be seen, first and foremost, as a distinctive way of working. Philosophy with the people in, indeed. 209

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Notes 1 By way of example, Hindu astrological divination is one such narrative device that plays a key role in structuring people’s lives in northwest Nepal (see Poletti 2018). 2 Truth be told, existential anthropology too entails a degree of philosophical abstraction. However, as I make clear toward the end of this essay, the main epistemological motion is not away from particular stories, but further within them. 3 For a daring, book-length critique of such an attitude in anthropology, see Fisher (2017). 4 Depending on the theoretical paradigm of reference, classic examples would be “culture”, “the power of discourse”, “the structures of the human mind”, “hegemony and inequality”, “the unconscious”, etc. In any case, this suspicious attitude elects “the truth” as the prerogative of a restricted circle of enlightened experts trained to identify it, in a supreme act of suspicion, behind the veil of misleading appearances. 5 See for instance the case of the “dividuality” of personhood discussed above. 6 In the case of my own work: loss and grief (Poletti 2016); predestination and freedom (2018); experience (2020); being-with-others (2021); self hood (2022).

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21 EXISTENTIAL FINITUDE IN INDIAN BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY Roshni Patel

While the term “existentialism” originates in the work of twentieth-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the referent of the term exceeds the intellectual and literary movement he claimed to name.1 In an effort to encourage scholars to approach studies of existentialism with less Eurocentrism and more comprehensively, I provide analysis of two ancient Indian Buddhist texts that showcase the tradition’s demand for a radical shift in one’s relation to existence. To be clear, in calling this aspect of Indian Buddhism existentialist my goal is not to show sameness across different philosophies by presenting correlates of terminology or motifs between this corpus and the works of writers such as Simone de Beauvoir or Søren Kierkegaard. That approach would risk compromising interpretative integrity in a deferential attempt to find alignment with European existentialist philosophies. Rather, I argue that the existentialist method of attending to the standpoint of experience in inquiry and theory is a critical feature of the Buddhist project to remove suffering. Both texts I analyze here discuss the experience of Buddhist transformation from an affective state of vulnerability to a state that is no longer encumbered by a feeling of weakness. I argue that the shift occurs with respect to one’s relation to the limits of one’s existence and is not produced by any claim to strength. The first text is a famous discourse, or sutta, of the Buddha from the Pā li canon titled The Simile of the Snake, or Alagaddūpama Sutta.2 I offer an existentialist analysis of its conclusion wherein the Buddha draws an analogy between a sense of self and a sovereign kingdom with structures of defense. Because this sutta is already relayed by way of imagistic similes, following the likeness of this image is continuous with prevailing interpretative practices. However, I argue that an existential focus elevates the text’s description of a certain experience of self-relation as conducive to torment. I characterize this as the standpoint of vulnerability and

1 I am grateful for the feedback I received while workshopping this piece in the Five Colleges Buddhist Studies Faculty Seminar. I thank Alex McKinley, Maria Heim, Jay Garfield, Ajay Sinha, Andy Rotman, Karl Schmid, Kristin Culbertson, and Constance Kassor for a thoughtful conversation. 2 Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., “Algaddūpama Sutta: The Simile of the Snake,” in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, A Translation of the Majjhima Nik āya (Somerville, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 2015) 224–36. I reference the Pali using the edition of the Tipi ṭaka established at the Sixth Buddhist Council in Myanmar in 1956, available online at tipitaka.org. I parenthetically cite the pagination standardized by the Pali Text Society because it is used by both editions.

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argue that the sutta presents the possibility of enduring the exposure that is inherent to our being without the same misery of precarity. The second text I engage is Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland, or Ratnāvalī.3 This work is presented as a letter to a king and gives advice on how to enact the teachings (or Dharma) of the Buddha in his role as ruler. In this work, Nāgārjuna delivers the characteristic teachings of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way tradition, but in addition to presenting arguments about metaphysics and epistemology, he addresses readers’ difficulty in absorbing the implications of his philosophy. Nāgārjuna appreciates the severity of the dizzying and destabilizing unmooring of anti-foundationalist Madhyamaka thought. Moreover, his engagement with this type of fear reveals a sense of vulnerability in our status as knowers that I argue is inherent to the otherwise operative schematics that oppose existence (astitā ) and nonexistence (nā stitva). In contrast, the Middle Way provides a path that completely removes one from the arena where such a sense of vulnerability is even relevant. I argue that the affective elements to which I bring focus are integral pieces of each text presented. While my reading diverges from the dominant scholarly approach of studying Indian philosophy in heavily analytic modes—an approach inspired both by the rigid analytical structures of Indian philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy—I do not believe that the affective or experiential findings I present are reducible to my reading of Buddhist texts. In early discourses, the Buddha himself says that his teachings attend to practitioners’ suffering rather than speculative metaphysics.4 For this reason, many aspects of Buddhist philosophy are meant to facilitate and respond to an experience of dislocation in one who holds a view or is reckoning with a demand to shift their view. My analysis here develops the need for interpretative care toward the texts’ address to the experience of learning or hearing the Buddha Dharma alongside the very ideas that constitute this Dharma. We see the priority for experience more centrally figured in other genres of Buddhist texts, such as meditation and tantric texts directly related to practice.5 By reading these texts that are more explicitly rendered philosophical (especially by academic philosophical scholarship) in this way, I offer a way to integrate the otherwise dichotomously positioned terms of theory and praxis to shed a divide that has been overly hegemonic in determining what counts as philosophy.6 I suggest that presenting this emphasis offers modes of reading

3 John Dunne and Sara McClintock, trans., The Precious Garland, an Epistle to a King (Somerville, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 1997); Parashuram L. Vaidya, ed., “Ratn āval ī,” in Buddhist Sanskrit Texts 10 (Darbangha: Mithila Institute, 1960) 296–310. I quote from Dunne and McClintock’s translation and reference the Sanskrit from Vaidya’s edition, as it is available. I provide parenthetical citations of the verse numbers. I occasionally modify the translation to facilitate the imagery and note where I do so. 4 Padmasiri De Silva, “The Alagaddūpama Sutta as a Scriptural Source for Understanding the Distinctive Philosophical Standpoint of Early Buddhism.” Buddhist Studies Review 35, no. 1–2 (2018): 114. 5 The interpretative method of this article is significantly influenced by Jay Garfield’s conception of “moral phenomenology” as the mode of Buddhist ethics. He argues that Śā ntideva’s Bodhicaryāvat āra, a practice manual, demonstrates that the moral project is fundamentally rooted in the way one understands their existence. “What Is It like to Be a Bodhisattva? Moral Phenomenology in Śā ntideva’s Bodhicaryāvat āra.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33, no. 1–2 (2010), 333–357. 6 For instance, as a scholar of cross-cultural philosophy Leah Kalmanson, citing Leigh Kathryn Jenco, argues that cross-cultural philosophical research has long neglected certain textual forms and features through a dismissal of their relevance to philosophical study. Moreover, she develops a reading of Confucius that incorporates the practical elements as significantly philosophical. “The Ritual Methods of Comparative Philosophy.” Philosophy East & West 67, no. 2 (2017): 399–418. The effects of such methodological exclusions are substantively harmful. Feminist philosophy scholar Sarah Tyson synthesizes an argument in the history of feminist scholarship to show that the exclusionary patriarchal practices in the history of philosophy are not practices that stand outside of the theory afforded the name “philosophy.” Tyson shows that theoretical boundaries can amount to practices of exclusion from the field. Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

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that can be applied beyond these passages to reveal features of Indian Buddhist philosophy that may be fruitful for other cross-cultural engagements, such as with continental phenomenology and feminist philosophy.

The Simile of the Snake The Simile of the Snake Sutta appears in the Majjhima Nik āya in a section (Opammavagga) that is dedicated to teachings with similes as a pedagogical medium. While many scholars have treated the vividly developed images of grasping a snake and carrying a raft to elucidate what relation we ought to have to the truth,7 in this exposition I foreground an image of a citadel that the Buddha only briefly employs near the end of the sutta. To describe someone who is skilled in the Buddha’s teachings and regards the aggregates of the self 8 with the attitude of, “This is not mine, this is not the self, this I am not,” the Buddha says: Bhikkhus, this bhikkhu is called one whose crossbar has been lifted, whose trench has been filled in, whose pillar has been uprooted, one who has no bolt, a noble one whose banner is lowered, whose burden is lowered, who is unfettered. 139 The sutta brings forth a vision of a castle that is no longer structured to assert sovereignty and lets this stand as a metaphor for a person who has integrated the wisdom of no-self. The Buddha then relays each of these particular maneuvers to features of Buddhist insight: lifting the crossbar is the cutting off of ignorance, filling in trenches is the abandoning of the cycle of rebirth, uprooting a pillar is the abandoning of craving, dispensing the bolt is abandoning the lower fetters, and lowering the banner is the abandoning of conceit (asmi, I am) (139–140). Charles Hallisey comments on the way that the features of images are often interpreted to deliver a summary of teachings from other texts. This point explains why, for instance, the “lifting” of the crossbar can be relayed to the “cutting” off of ignorance despite the absence of any imagistic similarity. He further argues, however, that imagery plays a role in “generating ‘religio-aesthetic experiences’ which would have enriched an understanding of particular doctrinal points.”9 Thus, in my analysis I appeal to the symbolic aesthetic of the image. The sutta’s use of this image allows implications of political sovereignty to illuminate the implications of claims to individual self-assertion. To unpack this comparison, I begin by reflecting on standard features of castles or kingdoms. Ordinarily, a citadel is fortified with multiple obstacles to obstruct any foreign invader from entering. It may be encircled by a moat; secured with a gate, crossbar, and bolt; and safeguarded by armed humans. These barriers defend a sovereign from being compromised and forced to bow to another will. Thus, each structure from the sutta effectively enacts sovereignty in an ordinary citadel by challenging anyone who encroaches upon the integrity of that very region that is to be only governed by its autonomous ruler. Additionally, the Buddha mentions symbols like flags

7 For example, Jonardon Ganeri, “Dangerous Truths: The Buddha on Silence, Secrecy and Snakes,” in The Concealed Art of the Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) 39–60; Padmasiri De Silva, “The Alagadd ūpama Sutta as a Scriptural Source for Understanding the Distinctive Philosophical Standpoint of Early Buddhism.” 8 The “aggregates” or khandha (Pā li) refer to the teaching of the five constituent elements of what we call “the self.” They are form (r ūpa), feeling (vedan ā ), volitional formation (sa ṅkh āra), perception (sañña), and consciousness (viññ āṇ a). 9 Charles Hallisey, “Nibbā nasutta: An Allegedly Non-Canonical Sutta on Nibbā na as a Great City.” Journal of the Pali Text Society XVIII (1993): 106.

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and pillars that exhibit a declaration of identity for the sovereign power who reigns in a given space. Together, the structural and symbolic features demarcate the internal dimension of one’s own from an external dimension of what belongs to others. The fortitude of a heroic kingdom thereby generates security and pride for its own and fear for its foes. While these structures symbolically exude strength, they exist to counteract the inherent vulnerability in embodied life’s exposure to violence. Judith Butler writes: Violence is surely a touch of the worst order, a way a primary human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way, a way in which we are given over, without control to another, a way in which life itself can be expunged by the willful action of another… In a way, we all live with this particular vulnerability, a vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life, a vulnerability to a sudden address from elsewhere that we cannot preempt.10 Butler asserts bodily vulnerability is both primary and the condition of possibility for violence. In Precarious Life, Butler provides commentary on the Bush administration’s retaliative wars after the September 11 attacks. They describe the sense of injury that Americans feel to US sovereignty and thoroughly analyze the way that this wound is at the basis of the rhetoric justifying the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed. Because of an American experience of vulnerability, Americans clung to sovereignty more vehemently. While Butler comments on an extraordinary moment in US foreign policy, the Buddha’s image of the citadel displays that we are continually constructing the self. The sutta implies that we associate the person with a standard self-relation to a standard kingdom, while one who has abandoned a sense of self is like a kingdom that has relinquished certain structures and declarations. Thus, the sutta presents a conventional self as the assertion of a domain for which a particular will has been proclaimed and security measures constructed. If we consider the function of crossbars, trenches, pillars, bolts, and banners, then the choice of elements in the Buddha’s description implies that inhabiting a self requires (at least) the functions of assertion and preservation. Moreover, the image gives us a fuller view of what occurs in the disposition of an ordinary person who views the aggregates thus: “This is mine, this I am, this is my self ” (135). These are claims of a disposition that continually stirs the proprietary and protective affects of an ego enacting the very mechanisms of sovereignty. Thus, grasping the aggregates is intimately entangled with a singular assertion of control and a fortress built to protect the integrity of that will. I argue that the metaphysical teaching of no-self delivers a restructuring of one’s abode such that the finitude of one’s existence does not present itself as a set of limits that one strives to protect and enlarge.11 In other words, in the paradigm of no-self, being finite or particular does not

10 “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004) 28–29. Throughout the essays of this volume, Butler argues that injury is an occasion where we are able to feel the degree to which we are dependent and laments the more rapidly and readily available responses of deterrence and retaliation. To be clear, neither Butler nor the Buddhist sutta are advocating for a passive submission to violence. 11 Thinking in these terms allows for a certain type of ethical reading. I borrow the term “abode” or “dwelling” from Martin Heidegger, who argues for an originary ethics grounded in a less frequently referenced sense of the Greek ēthos as a dwelling. “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks, ed. by William McNeill, trans. by Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 271. For a study of the relationship between having a worldly and interdependent constitution and the infelicitous reach for control, see my “Releasing Boundaries, Relieving Suffering, Becoming Pained: An Engagement with Indian Buddhism and Martin Heidegger.” Philosophy East and West 69, no. 4 (2019): 1053–75.

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present the sense of a lack to overcome as is the case with a vulnerable self. This is evident if we follow the affective transformation from inhabiting a delimited self to the released dwelling of no-self. The sutta tells us that claiming to be sovereign—an individuated, autonomous entity—is not conducive to ease. The sutta tells us that a person upkeeping sovereignty is not actually able to enjoy the feeling of being in control or the status of dominance. Earlier in the sutta, the Buddha says that in the absence of one’s objects of clinging, one becomes agitated,12 thinking “Alas, I had it! Alas, I have it no longer! Alas, may I have it! Alas, I do not get it” (136). This grief is relevant when one desires to incorporate objects that are wholly external (bahiddh ā ) into the domain of the self. Referring to the characteristics and features that we integrate into our very identity, the Buddha says the same set of disappointments occur with respect to what is internal (ajjhatam). Because one’s desires are inevitably frustrated by impermanence and conditionality, they correlate with the feelings of sorrow, grief, and lamentation (137). In this respect, the continual effort exerted toward securing and maintaining one’s boundaried domain generates suffering. Moving beyond particular objects or qualities, one also clings to the self existing substantially. The Buddha says that this person, hears the Tathāgata or disciple of the Tathāgata teaching the Dhamma for the elimination of all standpoints, decisions, obsessions, adherences, and underlying tendencies, for the stilling of all formations, for the relinquishing of all attachments, for the destruction of craving, for dispassion, for cessation, for Nibbā na. He thinks thus: “So I shall be annihilated! So I shall perish! So I shall be no more!” 137 Because the ontology of the Dhamma disrupts the existence of the self, it also disrupts the security we grasp in our futural dispositions of anticipation. This description is of the vulnerability one feels in one’s very nature as impermanent. While the Dhamma directs one to the positive sense of pacification in Nibbā na, cessation is shocking when one holds a fundamental desire to exist as a substantive entity with an eternal essence. In contrast to this unskillful self-relation, a person who is progressing on the Buddhist path is first disenchanted (nibbindam) by the aggregates of the self and then dispassionate (virāga) (139). Once they are able to relate to the aggregates thinking, “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not myself,” they are likened to a kingdom in which the mechanisms of protection (crossbar, a moat, bolted gate) are rendered defunct and the symbols asserting a particular identity claim for the palace (a pillar, a banner) no longer stand proudly. In the conventional view, this kingdom seems unprotected, exposed, or perhaps already defeated and absorbed by another polity. However, the sutta tells us that it is simply unburdened and unfettered (pannabh āro visa ṃyutto). Moreover, the Buddha does not mention the anguish of vulnerability for one who has relinquished their sense of self. This absence is especially notable because the sutta otherwise explicitly comments on affective states for those both skilled and unskilled in the dhamma. This subverts our expectations of what leads to distress. The citadel of no-self is not the image of a sovereign whose dominion over others pervades the cosmos. I argue that its unexpected characterization illuminates that the status of no-self requires us to inhabit our limits differently. The image of the citadel is especially reminiscent of

12 The Pā li is paritassan ā which has the same verbal stem as craving or longing. The correlating Sanskrit is pari + √t ṛṣ. The translators’ choice of using “agitation” reflects that the disappointment of craving is effectively agitation.

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efforts to fully separate the self from what is other, while the image of a liberated person does not continue to understand the self as a sequestered and distinct entity whose governance is selfcontained. Furthermore, it is important to note that the palace was not destroyed or entirely torn down. In this sense, even as one relinquishes practices that solidify a boundary, one still has a finite appearance. This aligns with our experience of a world that has texture and differentiation rather than monistic sameness. In the narrative of the sutta, we see the Buddha models the sort of disposition of one who is not seeking to assert, preserve, or enlarge their domain. The discourse begins when one monk, Ariṭṭha, tells others that some of what the Buddha has called “obstructions” are not necessarily obstructions for everyone. This raises confusion, so the group then takes the matter to the Buddha, who unequivocally critiques Ariṭṭha’s mishandling of the Dhamma. After delivering his corrective, the Buddha emphasizes that all his teachings are deployed for the sake of addressing suffering beings and removing this suffering. However, the Buddha is not upset at Ariṭṭha for distorting his words or misrepresenting him. He says that whether people put forth positive or negative judgments and representations of you, one should not generate correlating feelings of either delight or hurt. His attitude while relinquishing control demonstrates the disposition that correlates with the citadel whose sovereignty has been laid down. The Buddha is neither passive nor resigned—after all, he does redirect Ariṭṭha and the rest of the community—but he is also not wounded by the way that someone twisted his own words. Most importantly, not being wounded means that he does not engage in the antagonistic maneuvers of either defense or offense.13 This subversion with respect to the image of a city is not commonly repeated in Theravādin literature. Hallisey states that cities are effective in representing Nibbā na because they offer security, represent a destination for a wanderer, and have a firm outside that gives them an independent existence. For instance, he shows that in the Dhammapada Athakath ā the mind in Nibbā na is likened to a city that cannot be violated, penetrated, or perturbed.14 While the image in The Simile of the Snake Sutta seems to go in a completely different direction, the common concept that runs between these two texts is that when the limits of the self are no longer asserted or defended, vulnerability is no longer relevant. I see the difference between the city of Nibbā na and the “No-self Citadel” to be simply the register of the appeal of the image: in the Nibb āna Sutta, the “conventional metaphor” appeals to a version of a city that is already attractive, while in The Simile of the Snake, the image encourages value for a status that goes well beyond such convention. Commenting on other Buddhist texts, Steven Collins similarly discusses the contrast between the “city of robbers” and the “safe city” of Nirvana.15 Hallisey affirms that the station or place of Nibbā na has tranquility and pleasures that are incomparable to the sorts of pleasure in descriptions of heavenly realms.16 If it is the case that the supramundane happiness of Nibbā na is inconceivable to mundane paradigms, then the no-self citadel exhibits the sort of radical transformation that Nibbā na is. There is no assertion of a particular domain and therefore no effort to fortify or enlarge it.

13 A larger set of Buddhist texts could generate a certain ethics of hospitality from the teaching of no-self. The Simile of the Snake provides the imagistic suggestion. Moreover, since the image is of a polity, there is ample room to generate a political ethics from this image. 14 Hallisey, 112–13. 15 Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities, Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 226. 16 Hallisey, 114.

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Nāgā rjuna’s Precious Garland Beyond exposure to another and impermanence, we can experience the limits to our understanding as threatening. In the first chapter of the Precious Garland, Nāg ā rjuna repeatedly references a sense of fear that many people feel in response to hearing the profound teachings of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way tradition. I argue this response is linked to epistemic security—the assured stability of certain grounds in one’s gross understanding about the order of things. For many, the critical ontology of Madhyamaka is radically distressing because it dismantles the categories one relies upon to make sense of the cosmos and the predicates one might assign to entities. Like the Buddha in The Simile of the Snake, Nāg ā rjuna’s approach to calming fears does not simply fill what is lacking by promising more stable grounds. He points to a pacified awareness that no longer has any priority or value for the security of certainty. In other words, Nāg ā rjuna does not resolve the vulnerability by providing what may have been conceived as a lack; he reorients one’s cognitive disposition so that this absence is neither felt nor lamented. In what follows, I argue that a critical part of accepting the limits to one’s understanding is related to how one configures the limits of entities. Nāg ā rjuna recognizes the sense of vulnerability his teachings will stir in initial verses wherein he prefaces his discussion about the insights of the Middle Way with some words of caution. He says that those who do not discount the Dharma with desire, anger, fear, or confusion have confidence (śraddh ā ) (1.6). He further elaborates on varied reception to the wisdom of no-self: But the Victors said that the Dharma of the highest good is the subtle and profoundly appearing; it is frightening (trā sakara) to unlearned, childish beings (b āla). (1.25) “I am not, nor will I be. There is nothing that is mine, nor will there be.” Stated thus, (the teaching of selflessness) terrifies (sa ṃtrā sa) the childish. For the wise, it puts an end to fear (bhayak ṣaya). (1.26) These verses evince that Nāg ā rjuna appreciates the need for a certain type of preparedness for the more profound teachings of the Dharma. He then delivers a dozen verses of metaphysical argument to unseat the dichotomy of being and nonbeing and concludes this portion of the chapter by saying: Having listened to this Dharma that puts an end to suffering, the undiscerning, afraid of the fearless state (abhayasth ānak ātaraḥ),17 tremble (sa ṃkapati) because they do not understand.18 (1.39) Throughout the text, Nāg ā rjuna uses a few different terms (bhaya, sa ṃtrā sa ḥ, sa ṃkapati, and k ātaraḥ) for what is rendered in English as versions of “fear” and “terrify.” Monier-Williams lists

17 Hallisey comments on the way that sth āna (Sanskrit) or th āna (Pā li) frames Nibbā na as a spatialized destination (113). In the context of this verse, it is helpful to think of the object of fear as being conceived like a place. 18 Translation modified.

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“anxiety” among the possible English translations for trā sa. Moreover, k ātaraḥ incorporates senses of fear associated with being confused or perplexed.19 Because Nāg ā rjuna says one’s reaction to the teachings hinges on whether one understands or is wise, we can incorporate an epistemic quality to this version of the affect of fear. Rather than a threatening external condition, the object of fear is what the Dharma implies for the views one already holds. The reaction of fear evinces the experience of being existentially threatened insofar as the status of being a knower is integrated into one’s holistic disposition. These verses also assert that the same teachings that stir fear for an unlearned person are what end fear for wise people or what carry them to a fearless state (abhayasth āna). Nāg ā rjuna frames a sense of vulnerability as a regular, perhaps unnoticed, feature of the mode of being for someone who is characterized as unlearned. Moreover, he remarks that Buddhist teachings shift away from the gross misunderstanding of the world underwriting this sense of vulnerability. Thus, fear and anxiety are not relieved by gaining control over the domain of understanding. Rather, these feelings are disrupted by understanding dynamic, conditioned existence in such a way that disrupts a dichotomous distance between being and nonbeing (1.38). The primary teaching of Madhyamaka philosophy is that all entities are empty (śūnya) of an intrinsic or inherent nature (svabh āva). This emptiness is not deflationary or nihilist. Rather, it emphasizes an ontology that appreciates the fact that all entities arise interdependently (prat ītyasamutp āda). While Nāg ā rjuna develops these terms more significantly in other works,20 we see him relay these concepts in the initial chapter of the Precious Garland as he repeatedly challenges the location of limits for familiar entities. His general technique is to take a set of related categories and demonstrate them to be incoherent via an argument of the reductio ad absurdum form. For instance, in one of Nāg ā rjuna’s arguments, he concludes that when the fixation on the “I” (aha ṃk āra)21 ceases, so does the cycle of rebirth and karma since these three concepts situate each other (1.37). Moreover, he argues that we often have a mistaken understanding of the quality of existence for so-called existents. When we behold an “I,” this sort of perception is similar to seeing a reflection in a mirror (1.31–1.32) or the image of water in the distance (when there is actually only heat rising off the earth) (1.53–1.56). The object we think we see is not actually there. This does not mean that the perception itself is wrong, such that the appearances of the world are completely illusory. Indeed, when one sees a reflection in a mirror or a mirage, one is generally able to recognize that one is not looking at an actual object or water. Likewise, seeing a reflection or a mirage is not the same as hallucinating or having your vision impaired. Thus, the point is not that we should forsake our sense of perception but that we ought to relate to the objects of experience, including the self, in a different way. These misapprehensions eventually lead Nāgārjuna to say that what comes into view for the wise is that, “The world is ultimately neither existent nor nonexistent” (1.38). One of the reasons

19 Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Langauges, New Edition (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956) 270, 457. 20 Treating the minor movements of the arguments as they are presented here is beyond the scope of this chapter. Extended versions of the same arguments occur in Nā g ā rjuna’s other works. For translations and commentaries of his major works, see Jay L. Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, N āg ārjuna’s Mū lamadhyamkak ā rik ā (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Mark Siderits and Shoryu Katsura, N āg ārjuna’s Middle Way (Somerville, Massachusetts: Wisdom Publications, 2013); Jan Westerhoff, N āg ārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartan ī, The Dispeller of Disputes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 21 Ahamk āra literally means “I-making.” As we saw in The Simile of the Snake, Buddhist thought situates the self as a process of construction rather than an ontological substance.

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that the dichotomy of existence and nonexistence falls apart is that the metaphysical organization opposing identity and difference falls apart. For something to exist, it must be a unified thing that is distinct from what is other to it. Nāgārjuna illustrates the impossibility of such a purity in existence. For example, he argues that the evident process of change in causal structures does not allow us to draw any neat lines that temporally separate one thing from another. Moreover, he refers to the compound structures of entities to show that any particular existent for this composition (whether the whole or a part) is necessarily dependent upon something else. In considering a person, Nāgārjuna says that we can take a person and observe that it is a composite entity, meaning that it has a plurality of constituents (whether the aggregates or the elements of earth, air, water, fire). This plurality defies the unity that is integral to the concept of a self, but an account of the self as a plurality is also insufficient because each element of the plurality can be further divisible and is dependent on the other constituents. We could never be done taking inventory of this plurality. In this part of the Ratn āvalī, we see that the point of demonstrating an incoherency is not merely logical. It is rather meant to inspire a new epistemic topography since there is no particular foundation or building-block, as each available entity is only determinable in relation to other entities that are themselves dependently determined. Similarly, about the four fundamental elements, Nāg ā rjuna says: Earth, water, fire and wind are each not essentially existent, since each one does not exist without the (other) three, and the (other) three do not exist without each one. (1.84) We see this logic repeatedly throughout the chapter. The point is so pervasive that Nāg ā rjuna finally announces: This approach also applies to colors, odors, tastes and tactile (objects). Such is also the case with eye (faculty), consciousness and form, ignorance, karma and birth, Agent, patient and action, also number, conjunction, cause and effect, and time, long and short, and so on— Designation and designated. (1.91–1.92) Each line in this verse represents a related nexus of elements that we use to give accounts that allow us to make sense of the phenomena we observe. They allow us to do things like make meaningful distinctions (e.g., long and short) and develop intelligible ways to process time (e.g., cause and effect). The fundamental mechanism for generating these entities, however, is drawing limits that contain what is internally the same and that distinguish what is externally different. Such limits are integral to how we think. By refuting the ground of this practice, Nāg ā rjuna is effectively triggering trembles and quakes at the base of our understanding. He centers the paradigm that opposes “existence” and “nonexistence” in such a foundation: Thus, the all-seeing, complete Buddhas have said that the Dharma of the highest good 220

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is profound, devoid of grasping (ni ṣparigrahaḥ), and also without any foundation (an ālaya). (1.75) But persons who delight in foundations, not having transcended (notions of ) “existence” and “nonexistence,” are terrified (bhīta) by this foundationless (an ālaya) Dharma, and, being unskilled, they are devastated. (1.76) While translating the Sanskrit ālaya as “foundation” works well for connecting Nāg ā rjuna to circulating terms in studies of epistemology, the word also can mean “abode” or “dwelling.” A foundation or abode offers the image of a structure that offers stability. If one’s thought is tied to some structure, then the Madhyamaka program—insofar as it disrupts the coherency of any such ground—is profoundly unsettling. On the Madhyamaka view, analysis that reveals that an ontology of determinacy and distinction is incoherent gives relief (1.97). Thus, the determinations that Nāg ā rjuna shows to be elusive remain so, but this being the case does not pose a threat if one is able to have an awareness that is liberated of the practice of applying rigid limits. This sort of awareness better satisfies the aim of knowledge being veridical but necessarily rearranges what constitutes knowledge.

Conclusion The two texts I study treat vulnerability without providing more security. Their approach is rather to reveal the misguided views that underwrite a sense of vulnerability and reshape the ontological topography. Because no-self problematizes determinately locating the boundaries of one’s existence, the self-other binary that is integral to the status of being vulnerable necessarily falls away. Similarly, because emptiness disrupts the very force of a determinate identity, securing one’s understanding in precise ascertainment becomes a fool’s errand. Thus, these expositions show that the very composition of limits that provide only a limited sense of security in our mundane habits also constrain us within their parameters. The existential reckoning with no-self and with emptiness reveals these restrictions’ egregious function.

Bibliography Butler, Judith 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Collins, Steven 1998. Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities, Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire. New York: ­Cambridge University Press. De Silva, Padmasiri. 2018. “The Alagaddūpama Sutta as a scriptural source for understanding the d­ istinctive philosophical standpoint of early Buddhism”, Buddhist Studies Review 35(1–2): 111–123. Garfield, Jay L. 2010. “What is it like to be a bodhisattva? Moral phenomenology in Śā ntideva’s Bodhicaryāvat ā ra”, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33(1–2): 333–357. Hallisey, Charles 1993. “Nibbā nasutta: An allegedly non-canonical sutta on Nibbā na as a great city”, ­Journal of the Pali Text Society XVIII: 97–130. Heidegger, Martin 1998. “Letter on humanism”, In William McNeill (Ed), translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, Pathmarks (pp. 239–276). New York: Cambridge University Press. Kalmanson, Leah 2017. “The ritual methods of comparative philosophy”, Philosophy East & West 67(2): 399–418. Monier-Williams, Monier 1956. A Sanskrit-English Dictionary Etymologically and Philologically Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages. New Edition. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Nāg ā rjuna 1960. “Ratnāval ī”, In Parashuram L. Vaidya (Ed), Buddhist Sanskrit Texts 10 (pp. 296–310). Darbangha: Mithila Institute.

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Roshni Patel Nā g ā rjuna, Ācā rya 1997. The Precious Garland, an Epistle to a King. Translated by John Dunne and Sara ­McClintock. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications. Ñāṇ amoli, Bhikkkhu, and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans. 2015. “Algaddūpama Sutta: The Simile of the Snake”, in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, A Translation of the Majjhima Nik āya (pp. 224–236). Fourth Edition. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications. Patel, Roshni. 2019. “Releasing boundaries, relieving suffering, becoming pained: An engagement with Indian Buddhism and Martin Heidegger”, Philosophy East and West 69(4): 1053–1075. Siderits, Mark, and Shoryu Katsura 2013. N āgārjuna’s Middle Way. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications. Tyson, Sarah 2018. Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better. New York: Columbia University Press.

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22 EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND EMPATHY Some Unexpected Connections Stéphanie Walsh Matthews and Dana Osborne Preamble The main aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship between language and empathy. Its innovation is to do so by linking foundational observations in the biological and language sciences to the semiotic field through an explicit connection to biosemiotics. This approach allows for a comprehensive, gradational, and non-dualistic evaluation of the role of empathy as prosocial behavior, without reducing it to the silos of specific disciplines, thus building a case for a comprehensive view of the relationship between language and empathy as a fruitful framework through which to nuance our larger understanding of human existence. We scaffold our argument by exploring ways in which empathy can be studied through measurements in the brain and go on to discuss it as a symbolic process that constitutes an essential human glue that makes social coexistence possible. Critically, this analysis highlights the ways in which empathy bolsters the statement that language emerges as it does to support symbolic thinking, and that symbolic thinking is in a constitutive relationship with language. In humans, empathy is explored as resulting from symbolic processes, linked to the dynamics of complex social forms of recognition of the seen and unseen states of selves and others. In considering the relationship between language and empathy, of special interest is its connection to theories of phenomenology and embodiment, as well as its continued mutability and context specificity found in multiplicitous and highly mutable forms of cultural expression. As the study of empathy engages us to consider human behavior and human experience, it stands to reason that a phenomenological approach is a natural space for exploration. Interestingly, as Tønessen et al. note, recalling Husserl, that the study of human experience via intentionality and experience places subjectivity at its core (Tønessen et al. 2018 citing Husserl 1900). Complimentarily, as biosemiotics considers the phenomena of all living beings and draws heavily on the concept of Umwelten as introduced by von Uexküll, strong ties can be drawn between Kant, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies and the project of biosemiotics. Thus, the philosophy of phenomenology and its inherent connections to biosemiotics helps us navigate the species-specific use of empathy as a sign-based phenomenon, underscoring the ways in which

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-25

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a biosemiotic approach forges connections to questions of existential significance in uncovering the texture of human experience in novel ways.

On the evolutionary and biological basis for the development of empathy To begin, in understanding the links between language and empathy, it is important to trace a conceptual path that will enable an exploration of its emergence in humans, setting the scene for an eventual discussion of the potential value of the biosemiotic approach as a site for theoretical exploration. Such a project will also allow for the differentiation of forms of empathy that may have emerged in conjunction with language from the kinds of empathies that may be expressed without language or have been in existence before the emergence of language as we know it among our non-languaged ancestors. As has been explored in many analyses, some critical differences between language and other forms of communication exist among highly social animals, but that there are many similarities. As de Waal articulates, “the core of empathetic capacity is a relatively simple mechanism that provides an observer (the ‘subject’) with access to the subjective state of another (the ‘object’) through the subject’s own neural and bodily representations” (2007, 59). How does language enter into this equation and add complexity to this system, and what is its relationship to questions of human existence? One question that may bring us closer to an answer about the generative capacity of language to engender and generate new forms or depths of the empathic project and to understand the connection to language is to briefly examine the biological foundations of the emergence and evolutionary depth and “fitness” that empathy has conferred onto our species and that of many other animals (Preston and de Waal 2003). In exploring this dynamic, de Vignemont and Singer (2006) examine the role and function of foundational biological mechanisms inherent in the brains of highly social animals in an examination of so-called mirror neurons which have been observed using fMRI scans to activate in monkeys engaged in various tasks. While not an uncontroversial topic, an exploration of the concept of mirror neurons as material evidence for the “action” of empathy opens new possibilities for the ways in which the affective and physical states of others may be measured as being activated across brains. Based on various findings from studies across the field, de Vignemont and Singer (ibid.) articulate that a series of conditions must be present in order for the process of “empathy” to be identified – that empathy exists if: One is in an affective state; This state is isomorphic to another person’s affective state; This state is elicited by the observation or imagination of another person’s affective state; One knows that the other person is the source of one’s own affective state. [excerpted directly from p 435] The authors take care to argue these points in light of a number of existing theoretical positions in the field and go on to demonstrate that empathy in this analysis serves a dual epistemological and social role in evolutionary history. Along the epistemological dimension, the emergence of empathy among highly social animals may have lent itself to the construction of predictive models that increased chances of survival – the actions and states of others and their future actions and behaviors could be surmised through perspective taking and in accessing 224

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similar motivational and internal-state systems. In evolutionary terms, such elements may have also taught our ancestors about existing perils of the environment – indeed, touching a poisonous fish or eating a mystery mushroom may have resulted in pain, discomfort, or even death and these were important lessons for the question of survivability. Socially speaking, the emergence of what may be called “prosocial behavior” has also been of particular importance in understanding the role and value of empathy in these models. Although empathy does not need to exist to elicit apparently prosocial behavior per se, the authors argue that there is a complex, mutually constitutive connection between empathy, sympathy, and prosocial behavior. What emerges from this analysis fundamentally is a complex picture of both the ways in which empathy is both necessarily cognitive and behavioral, linked to having a body and isomorphically recognizing the bodies of others as similar to one’s own. In this way, for example, linking back with the motor theory of empathy, a kind of internal representation of observed action (see Galantucci et al. 2006 for a review) carries a high degree of automaticity that confers the creation of an isomorphic effect of affective states across bodies. This too suggests that emotive intersubjectivity is the product of attunement whereby behaviors are learnt and mapped, formulating the core of one of the most foundational elements on which shared meanings are built (Gärdenfors 2013, 149). It also suggests the central importance of embodiment in the process, development, and unfolding of empathy.

Contagion While it is possible to observe such phenomena in fMRI machines, similar processes may be observed in the comfort of one’s living room among family members in what is often referred to as the “contagion effect.” Here, observed yawning by one family member may lead to a cascade of “contagious yawns” by others in a given spatial setting. Such behaviors, which often occur below the level of conscious awareness, are argued to be linked to the predisposition among humans to tend toward prosocial behavior, an observation backed by extensive theoretical and experimental data (see Franzen et al. 2018). Fascinatingly, in this domain, persons on the autism spectrum (Ochs et al. 2004) or those with other neuroatypical characteristics have been experimentally observed to not be as “susceptible” to circumstances that may otherwise invoke “motor contagion” in ways found among persons predisposed to prosocialiality founded on neurotypicality, which may be traced in part to observed differences in the activation of the mirror neuron system (see Hadjikhani et al. 2006; van Dongen 2020). Indeed, the value of moving together, following a beat, or even replicating certain physical actions in similar ways engenders feelings of closeness, affiliation, and friendship (Lakin et al. 2003). In parallel, the effect of what is sometimes called “emotional contagion” such as laughter or panic can also take hold among people as these follow similar circuit pathways in the brain (Gärdenfors 2013, 149).

Mimicry Related to the question of emotional contagion is the role and function of mimicry. When a person mimics, the activation of their emotional body schemas also creates an emotional reaction with correspondences to the movements being mimicked (i.e., the act of smiling, or seeing another smile, even if virtual, may make us feel happier [see Ma et al. 2016]). This was first known as “facial feedback” but research has now documented similar effects for gesture, posture, and vocal prosody (see McIntosh 1996 for a review), and so may be more accurately referred to as “afferent feedback” (Hatfield et al. 2014). In this way, the coupling of the automatic tendency 225

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to mimic others and the effects of afferent feedback on emotional states may shed light on the ubiquity of emotional contagion: as we unconsciously match the emotional movements of others, we unconsciously tap into the emotions of others as we interact with them. Similarly, this account of mimicry may explain its psychological utility whereby emotional contagion may allow human beings to intuit the feelings of those around us when we interact socially (Rogers and Williams 2006). Later in this chapter, a critical connection between mimicry and its close cousin, resemblance, will be explored as these are closely related within the realm of emotions and are believed to be linked to the evolutionary processes underlying the role and function of empathy.

Empathy and the cognitive environment In understanding the role and emergence of language as it relates to empathy, a fascinating set of complementary analyses linked to shared physical and auditory environments are of special relevance. Work by Gazzola et al. (2006) has observed that the hand-mouth connection is particularly linked in the brain using fMRI data from participants, demonstrating that similar areas of the brain may be activated both during listening to the sound of an action and observing an action linked to what the authors describe as a “left hemispheric temporo-parieto-premotor circuit,” bolstering claims for the existence of a “human auditory mirror system” (1824). Such an observation in many ways links the fact that auditory communication, of which language is a part, may activate similar parts of the brain and in turn may engender possibilities for the recognition of others, or prosociality, in ways that go beyond base-level neuronal activation. Indeed, linking back to the observation that spoken language is fundamentally motor, it may be worth posing a question that interrogates the extent to which this too may be influenced by social factors, where a sociolinguistic style, borne of a complex process of socialization, itself can be framed as a habituation of motor and behavioral “habits” that has been well theorized and described in the social sciences (see Bourdieu 1977).

The “interactional engine” underlying empathy and language What is apparent from this work is that the seat of empathy and language is in the brain and is linked foundationally to processes of embodiment. Recent exploratory work by Steven Levinson (2018) on the topic of language and empathy takes an unexpected direction in examining the ways in which the brain is involved in spatial cognition, and the ways in which our species’ inherently poor “internal GPS” may have necessitated the emergence of a more complex set of communicative tools calibrated centrally to the project of describing the spatial surround. Predicated centrally on the gestural system and its links to language in the planning and execution of coordinated action (Tomasello 2014), Levinson theorizes the historical necessity for an increasingly complex suite of cooperative communication among humans in history that fed into a mutually constitutive interplay between brain structures (specifically the hippocampus), spatial cognition, and language that has today resulted in many different ways in which language can “deal” with the problem of increasingly complex spatial reckoning and reasoning beyond local descriptions and identifications of things “out of sight.” Interestingly, Levinson notes the existence of gestural systems among great apes and observes that our Homo erectus ancestors (noteworthy for tool use and production), likely also linked to elements of gesture and spatial cognition that became supercharged in Homo sapiens, with further entailments in and around the flourishing of increasingly complex forms of language. In many ways, Levinson’s fundamental observation is predicated on the foundation and functioning of the “interactional engine” underlying the 226

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evolutionary impetus for the coordinated development of language and empathy that is linked critically to the “theory of mind” (2018, 19). Simply stated, the theory of mind enables the “reading” of intentions and the ability to recognize the internal states of others in order to increase (perhaps primarily forms of maternal) care that among humans is believed to be requisite for species survival. Related to this evolutionary process is as Gärdenfors points out, “the evolution of semantics is best explained by assuming a co-evolution of intersubjectivity, cooperation, and communication” (2013, 155). As language allows for the sharing of mental spaces and therefore elements of sociality, cooperation is highly dependent on conventional forms that the “central cognitive requirement concerning conventions is that they presuppose enduring joint beliefs or common knowledge” (Gärdenfors 2013, 157). To this point, we have explored language and empathy’s intertwining relationship; their dialectical correspondence is fundamental and extensional to the human experience. However, new theories in cognitive and biological semiotics suggest that empathy may be more than reflected mapping (i.e., existing in a 1:1 relationship) and may be best investigated as a form of modeling. To address this gap, we introduce the field of semiotics, the science of signs, which offers us a unique opportunity to study the intrinsic relationship between language and empathy by asking overarching questions related to emerging biological adaptations to the production of generative interpretative powers.

Moving toward semiotics: Phenomenology and biosemiotics As “phenomenology was among the first fields of study to recognize that subjectivity emerges from personal experience” (Tønessen et al. 2018, 23), biosemiotics is interested in the very same questions but considers these for all living organisms. At its core, biosemiotics “explores the nature of mind, consciousness, and intentionality” (ibid.) and is interested in all that compose the sphere of existence for all living organisms. In fact, the relationship between semiosis and phenomena can be explored via empathy and its very particular link to language. As biosemioticians would argue, following von Uexküll’s phenomenology, all animals inhabiting a Welten have conscious experience. In fact, Uexküll’s call for a subjective biology echoes Husserl’s call for a return to the things themselves in the most meaningful way possible, by in effect implying a return to the study and perception of nature qua individuals, nature qua living creatures. cf. von Uexküll (2010, 145–146) in Tønessen et al. (2018, 325) In this way, the key distinction between philosophical phenomenology and biosemiotics is that conscious experience extends beyond the human. More importantly, our focus and use of biosemiotics is primarily interested in the perspective that all subjective experiences can be understood as being sign-based. If phenomena are species-specific, language makes the study of empathy to be a phenomenology of living behavior specific to a uniquely human Umwelten. It should be noted further, that both Husserl and von Uexküll’s theories emerged around the same time, and that these thoughts were extensions of Kant’s transcendental subjectivism (Tønessen et al. 2018, 325). As specified earlier, biosemiotics’ interest in subjectivism as it relates to phenomena can also further interrogate the species-specific phenomena of intersubjectivity, which is precisely the study of sign-based interpretations of others’ phenomena. The conscious experience of another person’s conscious experience (as a sign-type) is the way biosemiotics intends to review empathy phenomenologically. This also allows for an extension beyond the human and places in review a biosemiotic evolution of empathy as well. 227

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Empathy and semiotics: Toward language Empathy: A biosemiotic perspective As discussed in the foregoing sections, empathy is in many ways a foundational “human trait,” borne in part of our highly social nature as a species. Our empathic brain is undeniably in a complex, mutually constitutive relationship with evolutionary pressures and its systems (including language), but may be shaped additionally by the contexts in which it develops. As such, local contextual conditions that contribute to the interpretation and understanding of signs in themselves are in a generative relationship with empathy such that “empathy is not merely the consequence of the passive observation of emotional cues but that it is subject to contextual appraisal and modulation” (de Vignemont and Singer 2006, 437). As these processes are mediated and subject to heterogeneous, contextual forms of interpretation, they emerge as symbolic. More specifically, empathy is not a sign to be deciphered statically. Rather, it is to be interpreted and processed in a system we call semiosis. In light of this, the offerings of biosemiotics place at the core of its theoretical epistemology the observation that the human body and its cognitive processes are inseparable both in evolutionary terms and in practical terms. Cognitive semiotics, a subfield of biosemiotics, is interested in the production and co-evolutionary processes responsible for a species’ ability to understand and live in its environment, and it is interested in doing so by way of the study of signs and signrelations. In this section, we will briefly introduce bio and cognitive semiotics and key concepts of relevance to the interconnection between language and empathy. How is empathy surveyed as a critical human construct, structurally fundamental to the production of all other mental schemas necessary in the understanding of the functioning of the world? Importantly, what can these systems and processes tell us about the complex relationship between empathy, language, and human existence? Although biosemiotics will certainly support the aforementioned notions of exchangeability, it will further support a need to move away from isomorphic (1:1 correspondences) explanations toward a semiotic triadicity and beyond. As mentioned above, biosemiotics is an investigation into meaning at the very cellular level, and it is interested in living systems and semiosis. In this way, the biosemiotic argument is that this same principle of “non-isomorphic, non-deterministic response to singular causal stimuli” appears not only on the level of the individual (i.e., the organism’s actions as a whole) but also similarly within the internal interactions of organisms themselves (Favareau 2007, 2).

How semiotics is the key to understanding the connections between empathy and language “Fitness” related to the co-evolutionary relationship between intersubjectivity and communication within a particular environment is central to semiotics. One who is familiar with the science of signs may wonder how it is capable of handling so many competing factors. Biosemiotics has in fact been interested in the intersection of evolution and the animal world for over a century. As certain forms of language are exclusive to the human animal, it too has developed and adapted alongside its interactions with the environment and others (Deely 2005, 476). The prominent work of Thomas Sebeok (1920–2001) brings into focus semiotics from the standpoint of the animal (and, as such, the processes of evolution of semiosis) and offers an excellent exploration of modeling theory helpful in illuminating the frameworks of relevance to the question of language and empathy (Sebeok and Danesi 2000; Sebeok 2001). Modeling theory explores the ways in which the mind evolves with external signs and adapts internal models to 228

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represent external objects of perception. The models are then reintegrated into the external objects and provide contextual information about the world (as explored above in 2.4). In this way, empathy can, as such, be studied from the standpoint of modeling schemas. In this way, what is perceived by others reflects on internal models. Without this important translation, the species and its singular trait may not have arisen. Why and how did we do this? As explained in “How Fit is the Semiotic Animal?” (Walsh Matthews 2016), semiotic fitness reflects the species’ specific ability to produce and interpret within its signifying environment and has allowed for the exaptation (the co-opting of a trait that may serve a purpose that differs from its original evolutionary function) of early communication strategies and language (see also Pelkey and Augustyn 2022). Empathy may have been one of the earliest dynamic exchanges between individuals to have allowed for the explosive use of signifying systems in the species’ survival, with extensive possibilities for adaptation and context specificity. In fact, we agree with Favareau’s biosemiotic perspective that “even the simplest of biological relations are always both highly context-dependent and consequently context-creating, and that such relations are very often deeply ‘representative’ of other biological states and processes …” (2007, 1).

On semiosis and beyond isomorphism First, let us consider the important term “semiosis.” Kull defines this as “the process in which meaning arises or emerges” (2019, 90). Additionally, as noted by Stjernfelt (2013), semiosis is not a process isolated in the mind. In reflecting on the work of Peirce, Kull notes that semiosis is in fact anti-psychological as it resides in logic that extends well beyond the limits of the mind: “semiosis as the process in which meaning emerges is also a system of physiological processes …” (2019, 90). Following Kull and Deacon, we understand empathy as both a process (semiosis) and as an empirical object (a sign). We align ourselves with Kull and Stjernfelt and state that sign types “are rather aspects of semiosis” (Stjernfelt 2012 in Kull 2019, 93). In other words, while it is important to understand empathy as a sign, it is perhaps more significant to understanding the meaning-production capacity of empathy by studying it as a sign-action (in semiosis, or the production of meaning). At its core, empathy is the recognition of another’s felts (the experience of feeling which can be described as an abducted sign, or a stimulus and its associated responses). Empathy is the response and interpretation of another’s sign-expression (how an internal emotion is being expressed physically, for example). At first, one may suggest that empathy is a reflection of “pain” (for example) in someone else, interpreted as such and experienced as an intersubjective response. Mimicry of this type (although, evolutionarily speaking, likely a precursor to empathy) refers rather to the iconic (the resemblance) process. When a sign is perceived through the act of recognition by resemblance, it is referred to as iconic.1

1 In Peircian semiotics, signs evoke the relationship between the object (the thing or change in the world) and the response (the “Interpretant”) which places in relationship the stimulus (the felt) with the object in the world. Peircian semiotics evokes a triadic relationship between three elemental sign functions. Iconicity refers to the relationship between a sign and its object as having a very close likeness. Iconic representation is that of likeness in representation. For example, the picture of someone looks like the person represented in the picture. In addition to icons, Peirce also defines indexes as a sign type that is indicated (pointing toward the object of reference) and symbols, where a convention (previous knowledge) binds the sign representamen to its object (such as a tricolour flag of blue, white, and red to stand for France).

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However, heeding Eco’s words when considering empathy as a simple iconic signal: Finally I propose not to consider as “iconic” the so-called “expressive” properties of certain signals, by which they are supposed to “induce” a feeling of similarity between the signal and a given emotion. 1979, 2032 We agree and are too implored to investigate the limits of the categories for signs. By investigating empathy as a sign-type and a sign-action,3 other semiotic principles are carefully evaluated. Sign-actions, as we shall see, provide an additional lens through which empathy (as both a sign and a sign-action) can be evaluated. This will allow for an exploration of modeling beyond isomorphism and the intricate bond between language and empathy.

Exploring empathy as a sign and its relations In simplified terms, signs represent objects in the world via an interpretant function. Should the sign closely resemble its object, we refer to this representation as “iconic.” Should the sign indicate its object, the representation is “indexical.” Finally, a sign conceptually and by convention calling into interpretation its object is referred to as “symbolic.” This is the summum of Peirce’s triadic sign system. When exploring empathy via this sign designation, we are presented with an interesting opportunity to move both beyond isomorphism and the static view of signs themselves. Instead of this isomorphic relation contained in the iconic sign, we are also advancing the notion of empathy as a particular sign-type: an emon – here, “emonic signs, which are at work in imitation and social learning, while being more complex than indexes and less complex than symbols” (Kull 2019, 88). Moving away from the static understanding of sign-types (as we will soon discuss), sign-action and the process of semiosis with regard to empathy will provide a new mereological field (the action of signs) where empathy is biosemiotically central to the human semiotic modeling processes.

Empathy: Language as a generative vehicle Empathy is therefore an interesting starting point for understanding human modeling processes. What was first mimicry (a first-level modeling) becomes a second-level modeling where further information and interpretation are required, and finally in its third form, the model becomes an exapted necessary human trait for survival (not purely of the biological) but critically, of the cultural (Sebeok and Danesi 2000, 108). Seen through this lens, one appreciates the role of empathy as a specific phenomenon that also provides essential references to notions of modeling and other foundational biosemiotic elements. And while Sebeok and Danesi (2000), citing Ekman,

2 Eco does provide additional context for separating what should belong to the physiological and which are universal vs. coded as cultural. Nonetheless, we retain from Eco the importance of such signs and signals as being elaborated over time by the species and that are enacted at the level of both the natural and the universal as well as the encoded and cultural (1979, 203–205). 3 Kull defines sign type as the typical taxonomical signs of icon-index-symbol. Mereologically, the signs’ actions call into focus particular elements of semiosis. With a focus on action, the triadic typology reveals another signaction: the emon (Kalevi 2003).

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provide the cross-cultural value of facial expressions as being excellent examples of natural primary nonverbal composite modeling, these are in no way limited exclusively to the human being. However, in humans, the emonic process is further developed from the primary scaffolding of “imitation and social learning” like other vertebrates (Kull 2019, 95). Empathy comes about in part by way of the evolution of the interpretation of physical signs. In evolving into indexical models of internal forms, this process of recognition will become (as Kull states) emonic. This is specific to anthroposemiosis: “extensional modeling is a uniquely human capacity, but the nonverbal form of indicational modeling has been documented in various species” (Sebeok and Danesi 2000, 85). As we noted earlier, facial expression and mimicry can similarly be found in other vertebrates. What makes this link between mimicry and language so anthroposemiotically unique? Both extensional (extension of primary models into secondary models) and indicational modeling (a secondary model that allows the referencing of things to other things [ibid., 82–83]) produce modeling strategies. Empathically speaking, icons (e.g., facial expressions that purely mimic other facial expressions) constitute a primary model (i.e., things that look like other things); indicational signs (and their modeling) require referencing. In other words, “indexes are not substitutes for their referents” (Sebeok and Danesi 2000, 83). Finally, the extensionality principle underlines the important relationship between the modeling strategies. Tertiary modeling happens through abstract and complex modeling strategies (Danesi 2014). These have antecedents in concrete sensory-based processes. Language is such a model. Although often considered “first,” speech, a very complex neuro and biological phenomenon, is only generated after the onset of language as a modeling schema.4 In fact, the ability to communicate through gestures and sounds would have preceded speech. Following Sebeok and Danesi (2000), extensional, dimensional, and representational processes allow for further protractions that will develop into its tertiary component: that of complex languages. As stated by Gärdenfors, “planning for future collaboration, essentially a task of coordinating goals, requires coordination in the physical domain, the category domain, the action domain, and the goal domain” (2013, 156–157). He also adds that iconic communication can be achieved through miming, with the exception of the category domain and states that “arbitrary symbols are more efficient for the task [… and that] cooperation about future goals and symbolic language coevolved, presumably with iconic communication as an intermediary stage” (ibid., 157). As such, it appears that a new sign-type, something between the icon and the symbol, emotivally (or emotionally) motivated, is a missing step in this important evolution.5

The semiotics of empathy: An interconnected approach necessary for human communication As Sebeok and Danesi (2000) explain, moving from one modeling system to another (while carrying essential qualities of the first into the next) is part of the human evolutionary success story. More specifically, “[e]xtensional modeling is a uniquely human capacity …” (ibid. 2000, 82). Very importantly, the models here need to be shared and experienced via embodied practice. Semiotically speaking, should we be able to reproduce empathic signs outside of the body today stands as an example of the evolving process from primary to tertiary modeling systems

4 As Pelkey and Augustyn (2022) argue, language is an adaptation of animal cognition. However, speech (and other written or signed forms of communication) is an exaptation of language. 5 Ibid.

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(from the production of facial expressions after feeling, to the mimicry of such expressions, to the complex descriptors afforded to us by language). In the case of empathy, very specifically, and the emonic process, the Other is required, even in absentia, to generate the sign. Although empathy is a priori a recognition of one’s potential pain (for example), it does at first reside within the other’s expression. Using similar analogies of schemas, Descola (2005) in Par-delà nature et culture, explains how various schèmes (models) are organized by experience of the body, relations, space, and difference. From this we can understand “I” by way of the relationship to an “Other.” Descola highlights embodied fundamentalism that generates the Welten and sets up the schemas for interactions with the world. These schemas are responsible for the formation of social cohesion and adhesion; they are also formed by them. This dialectic further entrenches the need for such bonding. These needs are then generated through multiple schemas and called upon to interpret all manner of things. For this reason, once again, empathy can be extended well beyond an agent of similitude (hence why empathy is not pure mimicry or emotional contagion) but rather a telic communicative process, established in early sign-action, captured in language, and represented in all forms of meaning exchange. Explained through modeling processes, embodied ones, generative and constitutive interpretative processes, empathy foregrounds the need to recognize another’s expression and is reflected in the ability and the want for meaningful exchanges. There is no development of language without empathy, and empathy without language is not the fully developed interpretative system with which we experience the world. As explained, it is possible to interpret all phenomena as sign-based. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of von Uexküll examines the important relationship between the body and its experience with subjective experience (Tønessen et al. 2018, 325). The interaction between Welten and body, in biosemiotic turns, bridges the perceivable gap between classic phenomenology and biosemiotics.

Interplay: Some examples in context As we have seen, language and empathy can be seen as biological, semiotic, and biosemiotic. In this sense, language both exemplifies and is a semiotic process in itself. If we take empathy as representing the process by which isomorphic states are evoked in the minds and bodies of others as well as a process that models and extends this dynamic, it stands to reason that language as a semiotic communicative tool would engender new, generative possibilities in bringing about and reflecting the emotive states in others. Language in this way is an emonic-telic process. As Throop identifies, in social contexts, empathy at its core is an intersubjective process predicated on the “[cultivation] of a shared horizon of understanding between interlocutors in which some access is provided to their respective subjective states” (2010, 772). We have already mentioned the example of pain as a foundational experience that would have a high degree of recognizability across entities with bodies in the world and therefore could be a source not only of foundational recognition, but also of cultural and semiotic complexity with necessary connections to embodiment. What is pain, exactly, how do we experience pain, or know that someone else is experiencing pain? At a foundational level, pain can be seen as a biological process represented by the activation of parts of the brain that indicate that some part of the body is out of balance (Gooberman-Hill 2015). Pain can also of course extend into more expressively complex contexts as well and is therefore a domain in which symbolic entailments can be generated. 232

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Indeed, some elements of pain may be read universally – a cry, wail, or doubling over are immediate, non-linguistic ways through which the experience of pain can be “read” by others. But what if pain is less physical in nature, and more psychological? What if these forms of psychological pain are complicated by cultural entailments? For the purposes of illustration, we consider the bringing about of physiological and psychological reactions resulting from the death of a loved one that can be “read” as a process that entails non-languaged and languaged elements that may be described as grief. Here, body postures, crying, and gestures that may directly attend to the body of the dead (as we see both in humans and in highly social animals [see King 2013]) index a state of physical and psychological pain that may evoke empathy in others (noteworthily, physical pain and psychological pain have been found to have a partial overlap in the brain [see Meerwijk et al. 2013 for review]). Such processes among humans and highly social animals often engender the activation of states through which others recognize or even feel the multiplicitous forms of pain associated with the experience of grief. However, as we have defined, the relationship is not isomorphic but rather extensional, representational, and interconnected. Using Kull’s (2019) mereological demonstration, the emon demonstrates this important step in modeling internal worlds and the development of complex abstract thought and the production of language. Moving away from the static understanding of sign-types (as we have discussed), sign-action and the process of semiosis with regard to empathy allow for the discovery of a new sign-type in the form of the emon. The emon makes the emotive sign central to the categories of signs; it also supports modeling theory’s proof and moves empathy beyond isomorphic explanations. Moreover, it shows empathy as a necessary precondition for the evolution of language. Upon consideration of the ethnographic record, it becomes apparent that an important part of this discussion is that cultural entailments may enter heavily into this unfolding – Hollan and Throop, drawing from the ethnographic record demonstrate that in some cultural contexts, “empathetic awareness may be mistrusted or curtailed” and that in these cases often “every attempt to hide or conceal emotions and motives is at the same time a subtle way of revealing them, if one knows how to hear and see” (2008, 394). As Throop points out, such a system may be “imbued with deep ambivalences on the part of empathizers and empathizees alike” (2010, 772). Such a formula suggests that cultural processes may mediate and intervene in the experience of empathy in complex ways, highlighting the analytical value of the emon as a sign-type that enables the generation of contextualized and locally calibrated meaning, moving thus from the emonic to the symbolic more specifically due to need to interpret culturally and contextually specific signs. Some compelling examples of the locally enregistered calibration of meaning surrounding the concept and experience of grief can be found in R. Rosaldo’s famous essay, “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage” (1989) among Ilongot peoples of the northern Philippines, where grief after the loss of a loved one was interpreted and expressed centrally as rage and was materially manifest through the cultural practice of taking heads. Another compelling example is N. Scheper-Hughes analysis, “Death Without Weeping,” (1993) where the death of young children in the Alto do Cruzerio of Brazil was met with a belle indifference, shaped by “the art of resignation and ‘holy indifference,’ to the vagaries of one’s fate on earth and a hopefulness of a better life beyond” (429). In both these cases, the experience of grief, and the ways that it may be felt across people in a given context was highly mediated by the cultural contexts in which the experience was couched. In this sense, cultural factors may act as intermediaries or complicating factors that may shape possibilities for a given experience that in some contexts may be seen to be universal or even enduring or immutable across and within species. We understand cultural acts and ritualized events as the symbolic sign-type, with clear antecedents in emonic signs and their processes. 233

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In the aforementioned cases, it is clear that the cultural entailments may impact the experience of empathy in the context of grief, and these experiences are thus necessarily mediated by language. Such an analysis opens up additional possibilities for the locally calibrated ways in which empathy can be mapped onto language with specific cultural entailments – it may also be a source of deception, highlighting the highly mediated nature of the phenomenon in cultural contexts (Bubandt and Willerslev 2015). Such a scenario suggests that the local linguistic and cultural conditions that contribute to a given context may carry special capacity to generate Welten in relation to interpretations and recognitions of similar (or dissimilar) states across brains and bodies, underscoring the mediated nature of embodied experience. In this way, while language can be a way to externally express possibilities for experience that may be creative and generative, specifically calibrated cultural laminations may shape sensibilities afforded to them by the implications brought about by and imbricated in language. In this way, language, and the cultural contexts in which it is couched, both frames and mediates the semiotic entailments that contribute to the interpretation of experience of the self and others.

Conclusion This short chapter has explored the ways in which empathy can be seen as a kind of symbolic process, linked to the dynamics of complex social forms of recognition of the seen and unseen states of selves and others with links to theories of phenomenology and embodiment. Interrogating three angles not typically considered together, this analysis has demonstrated the necessary interconnection between the biological foundations of empathy, the semiotic entailments, and the generative potential for language as a semiotic process to give rise to new and more complex forms of empathy that may be mediated by culturally specific contexts. It pushes us to think about the ways in which language can not only foster possibilities for empathy, but also the ways in which it can give rise to particular intersubjective interpretations about the internal states of others. We also end on the question of whether language can act as an abstracted stand in for and embodied sense of intersubjective experience, as it, if it operates in a certain capacity, can both communicate a shared experience and may also give rise to other entailments or experiential states (such as the perception of deception). To what extent do the cultural mediations in place that give us scripts for behavior create an environment of abstract expressions of empathy but may not be backed by corollary experiences across bodies and brains? Such questions push us to think about language not only as a reflector and generator of experience, but also as a vehicle that may or may not be saddled with the pathos upon which empathy is built, to experience the emotions of another, upon which our success as a species has been theorized to be built in prelinguistic environments. At the very least, it pushes us to think about the ways in which engagement with the experiences of others in language carries with it a high degree of generativity but may also be limited in its abstractness. At the same time, it shows how we can use language to connect with the experiences of others who may be different than us, and to link the fundamental experience of having a body in space and a relationship to the world in ways that go beyond those who we may consider quite different from ourselves.

References Bourdieu, Pierre 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bubandt, Nils, and Rane Willerslev 2015. ‘The dark side of empathy: Mimesis, deception, and the magic of alterity’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 57(1): 5–34.

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Exploring the relationship between language and empathy Danesi, Marcel 2014. ‘The concept of model in Thomas A. Sebeok’s semiotics’, Proceedings of the World Congress of the IASS/AIS. DOI: 10.24308/iass-2014-163 de Vignemont, Frederique, and Tania Singer 2006. ‘The empathic brain: How, when and why?’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10(1): 435–441. de Waal, Frans B.M. 2007. ‘The “Russian Doll” model of empathy and imitation,’ in On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy (Advances in Consciousness Research ,ed Stein Braten). 68: 49–73, Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Deely, John 2005. ‘Defining the semiotic animal’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79: 461–481. Descola, Philippe 2005. Par-delà Nature et Culture. Paris: Gallimard. Eco, Umberto 1979 (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Favareau, Donald 2007. ‘How to make Peirce’s ideas clear’, In Guether Witzany (Ed), Biosemiotics in ­Transdisciplinary Contexts (pp. 163–173). Helsinki: Umweb Press. Franzen, Axel, Sebastian Mader, and Fabian Winter 2018. ‘Contagious yawning, empathy, and their ­relation to prosocial behavior’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 147(12): 1950–1958. Galantucci, Bruno, Carol A. Fowler, and Michael T. Turvey 2006. ‘The motor theory of speech perception reviewed’, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 13(3): 361–377. Gärdenfors, Peter 2013. ‘The evolution of semantics: Sharing conceptual domains’, In Rudofl Botha and Martin Everaert (Eds), The Evolutionary Emergence of Language: Evidence and Inference (pp. 137–159). ­Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gazzola, Valeria, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, and Christian Keysers 2006. ‘Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans,’ Current Biology 16(18): 1824–1829. Gooberman-Hill, Rachael 2015. ‘Ethnographies of pain: Culture, context and complexity’, British Journal of Pain 9(1): 32–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/2049463714555439 Hadjikhani, Nouchine, Robert M. Joseph, Josh Snyder, and Helen Tager-Flusberg 2006. ‘Anatomical differences in the mirror neuron system and social cognition network in autism.’ Cerebral Cortex 16(9): 1276–1282. Hatfield, Elaine, Lisamarie Bensman, Paul D. Thornton, and Richard L. Rapson 2014. ‘New perspectives on emotional contagion: A review of classic and recent research on facial mimicry and contagion’, ­Interpersona: An International Journal on Personal Relationships 8(2): 159–179. Hollan, Douglas, and C. Jason Throop 2008. ‘Whatever happened to empathy?: Introduction’, Ethos 36(4): 385–401. King, Barbara J. 2013. How Animals Grieve. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kull, Kalevi 2003. ‘Ladder, tree, web: The ages of biological understanding’, Sign Systems Studies 31(2): 589–603. Kull, Kalevi 2017. ‘On the logic of animal umwelten: The animal subjective present, or zoosemiotics of choice and learning’. In: Marrone, Gianfranco (ed.). Zoosemiotica 2.0: forme e politiche dell’animalità. Palermo: Museo Pasqualino, 143–156. Kull, Kalevi 2019. ‘Steps towards the natural meronomy and taxonomy of semiosis: Emon between index and symbol?’, Sign System Studies 47(1/2): 8–104. Lakin, Jessica L., Valerie E. Jefferis, Clara Michelle Cheng, and Tanya L. Chartrand 2003. ‘The chameleon effect as social glue: Evidence for the evolutionary significance of nonconscious mimicry’, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 27: 145–162. Levinson, Stephen C. 2018. ‘Spatial cognition, empathy and language evolution,’ Studies in Pragmatics 20: 16–21. Ma, Ke, Roberta Sellaro, Dominique Patrick Lippelt, and Bernhard Hommel 2016. ‘Mood migration: How enfacing a smile makes you happier’, Cognition 151: 52–62. McIntosh, Daniel N. 1996. ‘Facial feedback hypotheses: Evidence, implications, and directions’, Motivation and Emotion 20: 121–147. Meerwijk, Esther L., Judith M. Ford, and Sabdra J. Weiss 2013. ‘Brain regions associated with psychological pain: Implications for a neural network and its relationship to physical pain’, Brain Imaging and Behavior 7(1): 1–14. Ochs, Elinor, Tami Kremer-Sadlik, Karen Sirota, and Olga Solomon 2004. ‘Autism and the social world: An anthropological perspective’, Discourse Studies 6(2): 147–183. Pelkey, Jamin and Prisca Augustyn 2022. ‘Semiotics in Evolutionary Linguistics’, in Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences, London, UK: Bloomsbury.

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Stéphanie Walsh Matthews and Dana Osborne Preston, Stephanie D., and Frans B. M. de Waal 2003. ‘Empathy: Its ultimate and proximal bases’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25: 1–72. Rogers, Sally J., and Justin HG Williams 2006. Imitation and the Social Mind: Autism and Typical Development. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Rosaldo, Renato 1989. ‘Grief and a headhunter’s rage: On the cultural force of emotions’, in Culture and Truth. Boston, MA: Beacon. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1993. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley, CA: Univ of California Press. Sebeok, Thomas 2001 (1994). Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics. Second Edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sebeok, Thomas, and Marcel Danesi 2000. The Forms of Meaning: Modeling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sorlin, Sandrine, and Laure Gardelle 2018. ‘Anthropocentrism, egocentrism and the notion of animacy hierarchy’, International Journal of Language and Culture 5(2): 1–31. Stjernfelt, Frederik 2012. ‘The evolution of semiotic self-control: Sign evolution as the ongoing refinement of the basic argument structure of biological metabolism’, In Frederik Stjernfelt and Terrence Deacon (Eds), The Symbolic Species Evolved. Schilhab,Theresa (pp. 39–63). Dordrecht: Springer. Stjernfelt, Frederik 2013. ‘The generality of signs: The actual relevance of anti-psychologism’, Semiotica 194: 77–109. Throop, C. Jason 2010. ‘Latitudes of loss: On the vicissitudes of empathy’, American Ethnologist 37(4): 771–782. Tomasello, Michael 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tønessen, Morten, Timo Maran, and Alexei Sharov 2018. ‘Phenomenology and biosemiotics’, Biosemiotics 11: 323–330. Van Dongen, Josanne D. M. 2020. ‘The empathic brain of psychopaths: From social science to neuroscience in empathy’, Frontiers in Psychology 11: 695. Walsh Matthews, Stéphanie 2016. ‘How fit is the semiotic animal?’, American Journal of Semiotics 32(1/4): 205–217.

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SECTION IV

Singularity and Continuity

23 SECTION IV: INTRODUCTION Albert Piette

Three points are the basis of this section. They are its axioms1: (1) Existence is the passing of hours and minutes and, at another scale, the passing of a life, (2) There is a being, an individual, an existent, an entity (several terms are possible) who crosses these moments, acting and feeling, with habits and ways of doing things, (3) Each being, at the same time as he is separate from others, is different from every other, with his observable singularity. Is it usual to describe a human being? Without a doubt, it is not usual and it is not easy either. No scientific discipline is really devoted to it. Even writers recognize the difficulty of the exercise. Virginia Woolf notes that “they leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened” (Woolf 2002, 79). This section explores the epistemological, theoretical and methodological stakes of the possibility and creation of a science of existents, which would depend on the possibility of detailed observations and descriptions of them. In the multidisciplinary spirit of this book, the discussion calls upon several fields of knowledge: ­philosophy, sociology, anthropology and art. With a view to this research, it might seem simple and efficient to appeal to the methodological knowledge of anthropology, particularly its live observation of ordinary situations. But throughout its history, most of the time, anthropology has not really examined human beings in their singularity and uniqueness. I am not going to highlight the already-old criticisms of anthropologists—criticisms against, as Huon Wardle reminds us, “structural understandings of character and personhood that implied ‘a systematic dehumanizing of the human subjects of study’” (Wardle 2018, 315). Many anthropologists have in fact integrated this criticism but, in their various alternative propositions, what concerns them are individuals (with a certain subjectivity and a capacity of interpretation of course) insofar as they share a situation or context, which actually constitutes the true centre of interest. One human being in particular can be observed, yet in relation to other beings or institutions, in a specific configuration, most often in order to understand social relations, activities or events. Hence, even though he is sometimes presented

1 An axiom is defined as “an accepted statement or proposition regarded as being self-evidently true” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary).

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as a literary or humanistic argument, the individual is not for himself the topic of anthropology, reduced to mainly social and interactional/intersubjective characteristics, or diluted among other beings. When the objective is to observe, describe and conceive individual singularity, ethnography cannot be considered something obvious. This tension between the individual and his context, focusing on that one or this one, on one and the other, is noticeable in the texts of this section. Ideally, in order to keep the focus on an individual, the observer of the singularity should avoid: the significant addition of beings around the human entity chosen to be observed, be it; the look that crosses a human entity to look at something else, to think of other things (for example, social facts); the fragmentation-reduction to certain components (e.g., emotions, or actions, or social roles); the discontinuity of the situations that can be usually found in the narratives; and the idea of the exit of the components out of the entity, as if it was possible to work on these components outside the entity, creating thus social themes or fieldworks (social relations, a ritual, religion, illness, work, etc.). Ideally, because the description of an individual singularity is an asymptotic work. This section is made up of three parts. The first contains two chapters that are critical, in that they question the theoretical difficulties involved in describing the singularity of a human being. They do this particularly on the basis of philosophy, sociology and contemporary art. This critical detour is necessary before entering into the theoretical and methodological texts that follow. In carrying out this critical work, Marine Kneubühler has a powerful tool, the notion of interchangeability, or rather that of non-interchangeability, which questions the foundation of the social sciences. Marine Kneubühler stresses their almost intrinsic difficulty conceiving of the singular existence of each human, as well as their tendency to postulate the interchangeability of individuals. Beyond the Durkheimian base that theorizes a society without singular persons, she highlights in Schutz’s philosophy an idealization of the interchangeability of perspectives that functions as a common-sense axiom but becomes a principle of observation and description in ethnomethodology. In this connection, Marine Kneubühler points out that phenomenological anthropologists tend to understand self and other as one, and thus to always-already situate themselves within an interchangeability of individuals and perspectives, and therefore beyond the singular existence of each of them in favour of the social unit. Conceiving, observing and describing singularity does mean not just looking at one individual but also looking at him in his non-interchangeable entirety. Hence the importance of such a deconstruction of the epistemology of the social sciences also reaches into its phenomenological t­radition. Where, then, is non-interchangeability hidden? To make it reappear, Marine K ­ neubühler proposes a social theory that starts with the singular existence of “volumes of being”, endowing each of them with a minimal self (Zahavi) and an own body (Merleau-Ponty). These are two concepts originating in phenomenology, the importance of which phenomenological anthropology has not sufficiently taken the full measure, as it immediately seeks, through various modalities, “a conceptual bridge” between individual existences and sociocultural systems (Willen and Seeman 2012, 6). The critical dimension of Marine Kneubühler’s reflections can be linked to the comparison, made by Catherine Beaugrand, between Sartre seeking to understand the existence and work of artists and writers, and artists themselves having favoured the expression of singularity and continuity. What interests Sartre in Flaubert? An existence in a domestic and historical context, presented in accordance with the progressive-regressive method, above all does not want to favour the continuity of moments, but instead establishes a back-and-forth, indeed a tension, between this contextual backdrop and the figure himself with his ability to choose and to go beyond. 240

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With Allan Kaprow, Lee Lozano and On Kawara, what becomes a real heuristic for observing an existence is, on the contrary, according to various representation modalities, an extreme attention to the details of gestures, of effects that activities have on oneself, and to the continuity of dates. Of course, one cannot say that Sartre’s existentialism (like all philosophers of existence, see general introduction) did not show an interest, including a methodological one, in the individual. Let us say that it posits singularity more than it shows or demonstrates it. On the one hand, the individual is ceaselessly pushed back into, and on the other hand, when he tends to detach from them, this individual is part of a totalizing project that encourages the draining away of the small details of what constitutes a singular person different from others. It is the criticism that Iris Murdoch makes to the Sartrean thought (Murdoch 1953). Philippe Lejeune also points out that Sartre’s goals in his biographies and autobiographies involve not respecting the chronological order which would imply a restricted way of conceiving time, conceiving the human being as a type of “freedom” which, in a situation, “invents a way out of it”, and identifying the “project” of the individual “perceived as the sole direction of the individual’s most characteristic ways of behaving” (Lejeune 1989, 100–103). To explain that existentialists do not like “instants”, there is ultimately a conception of time and the Heideggerian concept of existence as an “ecstatic structure”, associated with the “fact of being outside of oneself ” (Dastur 1998, XXX). It seems empirically regrettable that the idea according to which “the ‘authentic’ meaning of the temporality of a finite being springs from the future, that is, from the anticipation of death” (ibid.) moves away from a thought of succession of “nows” along on a timeline (Heidegger 2010, 422). It is indeed this succession of punctualities that is criticized by Heidegger, thus almost automatically suppressing any interest in the microcontinuity of the human entity from moment to moment, with its overlaps and its constancies. In the second part, there is one conceptual proposition. One could say that it is theoretical, in that it is a way of looking, of directing attention, by selecting one’s focus more or less strictly. Below all metaphysical interpretation, Henry James helps us think about this when he writes that “relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so” ( James 1986: 37). Albert Piette thus practises a kind of “existential reduction”. It consists in methodologically extracting a human entity from what surrounds him. Having doubts about ethnographic methods and the heuristicity of the existentialist thoughts on the “wrenching-away” that leads to look outside the individual and towards others, his objective is twofold: to offer a conceptual response to the difficulty of describing a human being in his moments, by going into non-interchangeable details; and to understand the internal structuring modalities of what he calls the volume of being, by presenting a set of “existentials”, which include a certain stylistic constancy. He prefers to stress the Latin “sistere” (meaning to hold together, to maintain oneself, to subsist) rather than the “ex” and wonders what makes a being hold together. The volume of being is a concrete form observable in all regions of the world necessarily in its singular details, whatever, of course, the cultural representations of the person. Let us remember Simmel’s phrase: “The image of external things possesses for us the ambiguous dimension that in external nature everything can be considered to be connected, but also as separated” (Simmel 1994, 5). In this case, according to the chapter of Albert Piette, existential anthropology would not be an existentialist reading of social life. It would be the science of separated beings, as separated, unlike sociology and social anthropology, which would be sciences of beings in relation. It is not the dynamics between separation and union which is in play in such a perspective, but the being as a separate entity, with its modes of structuring, without reintegrating it in the world with the others, to avoid this slip in a science of the links of each one with the others. 241

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Finally, this section includes two chapters more directly revolving around methodology. Here we are concretely confronted with the asymptotic dimension of the quest for singularity. It is a type of shadowing—with no camera, over a long period, creating a close relationship of trust, which Jan Patrick Heiss practised with Musa, a Nigerian farmer. This type of shadowing involves “participation in a specific field-subject’s daily life and the development of a relationship that qualifies as ‘being with this person’”, but necessarily with interruptions in observation. It is based on this type of method that he describes Musa’s skills, character, desires, moods, ideas and values, contained in what he calls a “gestalt”, which recalls the volume of being. While pointing out that he does not use any theory, Jan Patrick Heiss concludes that individuals are “wholes with their own structure, and their features are systematically integrated”. He makes it clear that what he has in his sights is indeed Musa, but that he does not want to describe him as an individual independent from his material and social relationships, which are also other structural elements of his life. The scale of description and analysis is not that of details of successive moments, while the individual’s context, environment and relations take on a certain importance in describing him. Also using shadowing, Gwendoline Torterat is convinced that the micrological use of audio-visual technology is necessary for describing the reality of beings and avoiding grand narratives. It is also in contemporary art, particularly experimental cinema with its concern for representing duration and continuity, that she finds her heuristics, mentioning for example Mekas, and ­Warhol with his “anti-films”. Gwendoline Torterat gives a detailed presentation of what she calls an “existence-specific focusing”: from the first contact with the individual, to the analysis modalities, to the manipulation of the camera and the framing choices, with the aim of following—or more precisely preceding—the observed person. In order to capture as many of an individual’s elements as possible, particularly sensations and feelings, Gwendoline Torterat insists on a methodological mixture of film and explicitation interviews. While offering conceptual and methodological propositions, this section also shows the ­d ifficulty of sustaining the focus on singularity and continuity all the way to the end. Theoretical presuppositions and methodological resistances are deep-seated, and in the face of them, each individual is not far from resembling the boulder of Sisyphus. To observe an individual in his singularity is in tension with the project of the social sciences and of ethnography, but is it not legitimate to also wonder if existentialism does not contribute to the volatilization of reality, including the concrete individual, precisely through its fear of looking at him and thus taking the risk to lock him up? Some reflections in this section move in this critical direction. The warnings of the philosophies of existence remind us that existence cannot be integrated into a system, that it evades abstraction or that it is a contingency that cannot be reduced to categories and classifications. The aim of a science of existents cannot forget this, but overstating the fact that reality is indeterminate and inaccessible can prevent it from being taken seriously, and risks diminishing the empirical stakes in the description of a human being. These are also questions that this section raises and attempts to address, with different answers. When Merleau-Ponty evoked the crisis of philosophy in the 1930s, he noted that one of the lost causes was existence. And he added that “we are not ‘equipped’ to conceive existence, and all of the work remains to be done” (MerleauPonty 1997: 39). Let us say that a few years later, our “equipment” still needs to be completed.

References Dastur, F. 1998. Heidegger and the Question of Time. Amherst: Prometheus Books (Original work published 1990). Heidegger, M. 2010. Being and Time. Albany: State University of New York Press (Original work published 1927).

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Section IV: Introduction James, H. 1986. Roderick Hudson. London: Penguin Books (Original work published 1875). Lejeune, P. 1989. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Original work published 1975). Merleau-Ponty, M. 1997. Parcours 1935–1951. Paris: Verdier. Murdoch, I. 1953. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. New Haven: Yale University Press. Simmel, G. 1994. ‘Bridge and door’, Theory, Culture and Society 11: 5–10 (Original work published 1909). Wardle, H. 2018. ‘‘Characters… stamped upon the mind’. On the a priority of character in the Caribbean everyday’, Social Anthropology 26–3: 314–29. Willen, S, and D. Seeman 2012. ‘Introduction: experience and inquiétude’, Ethos 40–1: 1–23. Woolf, V. 2002. Moments of Beings. Autobiographical Writings. London: Pimlico (Original work published 1972).

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24 THE LOSS OF SINGULAR EXISTENCE AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE The Problem of Interchangeability in the Social Sciences Marine Kneubühler Do the singular existences and personal experience of human beings matter when studying social phenomena? Off hand, this question might seem irrelevant since societies are composed of humans. However, in this chapter, I examine widespread tendency in the social sciences to overlook these dimensions, which leads to their loss. By singular existence, I refer to the life of each human being whose existence, from birth to death, is specific to them and excludes everyone else. By personal experience, I refer to the first-person nature of subjectivity, which includes dimensions such as the body, consciousness, and perception. I claim that the key to understanding how these dimensions are lost by the social scientists lies in the assumption of humans’ interchangeability when it comes to maintaining social phenomena. I begin with Durkheim to provide the reader with a foundation for the typology on which I will elaborate. Durkheim is a key author because his social theory is not only the first target of “existential sociology” (Fontana 1984), but also an invariant reference of all the authors I will be examining. The second part, which forms the core of the chapter, consists in the presentation of various kinds of interchangeability, which combine – or do not combine – two forms: the interchangeability of individuals and the interchangeability of perspectives. My main purpose is to offer an analytical grid that can be used to study any social theory in light of interchangeability and its theoretical consequences. I offer an initial typology by carefully following the thought of four authors representative of important sociological tendencies: Bourdieu, Latour, Schutz, and Garf inkel. Finally, I sketch a social theory that avoids interchangeability by returning to Simmel, and I def ine the minimal but essential conditions necessary to preserve the singularity and subjectivity of humans by drawing from aspects of phenomenology and Piette’s anthropology. Fundamentally, I insist that any use of phenomenology or existential philosophy to study social phenomena is not suff icient to avoid interchangeability.

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The society without eyes: An impersonal unity with interchangeable individuals When it comes to offering a “sociology that attempts to study human beings” and that is sensitive to the complexity of “human experience,” the first step consists of outlining the shortcomings of “traditional sociology,” starting with Durkheim (Fontana 1984, 4). These shortcomings would lie in the oversight of “feelings and emotions” and in the reduction of the human being as a “mere performer” of the rules “determined and shaped by society” (Ibid.). To a certain extent, this criticism seems fair, since Durkheim argues that “social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual” (1952, xxxvi) whose “ideas and feelings” depend on their social conditions (p. 286). However, the criticism is also partially incorrect: in his early work, Durkheim aimed to construct a “division of labour” wherein it is “not sufficient for everyone to have his task: it must also be agreeable to him.” If our “tastes and aptitudes” are neglected, “if they are constantly frustrated in our daily occupation, we suffer, and seek the means of bringing that suffering to an end” (1984, 311). Given this quest for “harmony between individual natures and social functions” (p. 312), existential sociology’s criticism seems to have missed its target. Nevertheless, Durkheim did not provide the means to grasp the entirety of the human being. The reason for such a paradox lies precisely in his conception of human nature. Essentially, Durkheim never leaves the individual completely behind. This is clear concerning his later hypothesis on the distinctiveness of “collective representations” from those of individuals, which nonetheless come from the association of the “multitude of different minds” (1995, 15). In return, the collective representations must somehow be related to the individuals to determine some of their actions, thoughts, and feelings. Durkheim is, then, trapped with some form of consciousness situated outside individuals’ minds but still determining their existence. To overcome this contradiction without solving it, he locates the separation of individuals and society at the very core of human nature by postulating a homo duplex: “man is double. In him are two beings: an individual being that has its basis in the body […], and a social being that represents within us the highest reality in the intellectual and moral realm that is knowable through observation: I mean society” (pp. 15–16). Durkheim never denies the possibility that some parts of individual existence might remain singular or be unaffected by social facts. They are simply not relevant when it comes to society. This “duality in our nature” (p. 16) is reinforced by the so-called social being within humans characterized as an “abstract and impersonal unity” (Durkheim 1952, 345). By definition, something impersonal does not involve personal dimensions. Indeed, for Durkheim, the personal qualities “are mutually eradicated during the elaboration resulting in the collective phenomenon” (1952, 286). Therefore, this social and impersonal being does not exist as a person. Society is a no-body, and it lacks eyes to see the humans who compose it and a heart to take care for them. The consequence of such a perspective for social scientists is a serious phenomenological problem of perception: adopting the impersonal standpoint of society – which is not, properly speaking, a point of view – to study the social aspects of human beings inevitably implies considering them as interchangeable. From such a non-perspective, one can learn that humans exist somewhere; but from this strange place, which is probably nowhere, the differences between humans are simply unattainable and irrelevant. Personal experiences and singular existences appear necessarily as something one should ignore at best or eradicate at worst. As Merleau-Ponty says, “As long as I cling to the ideal of an absolute spectator, of knowledge with no point of view, I can see my situation as nothing but a source of error” (1964, 109).

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Postulating a form of interchangeability is related to this absolute-and-impersonal standpoint of the society from where human nature is indeed considered, but only if the social unity is understood as having the primacy over personal dimensions. In that respect, an interesting point can be raised about Durkheim. Despite his thesis concerning humans’ double nature, at some point, he also appears to consider individual personal feelings regarding society. This ambiguity is certainly due to the fact that his dualism was strengthened throughout his work. In The Division of Labour in Society (1984), Durkheim still meant to observe the forms of societies by including individual nature in the picture and by looking for harmony, rather than separation, between individual aspirations and social functions. Significantly, at that time, Durkheim considered the interchangeability of workers, which supposes that anyone can occupy any function in a system, as an “abnormal form” of the division of labour, namely an “anomic form.” This evolution reveals two essential things: the way social scientists perceive human beings is never insignificant for a social theory, and the premise of interchangeability seems to impose itself when the antagonism between social phenomena and the individual becomes a problem one needs to avoid.

What is interchangeable? Individuals, perspectives, or both? By examining the diversity of social theories, one can observe that interchangeability is almost always included in their premises. However, it takes various forms, and an important distinction must be drawn between two main types: (1) the interchangeability of individuals that loses singularity, whereby it is supposedly unimportant whether X or Y is speaking or doing a certain action when considering social phenomena, since the latter has primacy, and (2) the interchangeability of perspectives that loses experiential dimensions, whereby there is no difference between X and Y’s perspectives because either their standpoints are characterized by their potential reciprocity and sharedness or the very idea of an experience with a first-person perspective is simply denied. In this section, I introduce various theoretical combinations of those two forms of interchangeability, while acknowledging that one type does not necessarily imply the other. The purpose of this typology consists in offering a reading-grid for helping the reader to analyse other approaches through the prism of interchangeability and to discover other combinations.

The interchangeability of individuals with the same social perspective (Bourdieu) Initially, Bourdieu (1977) seems to offer a serious alternative to the Durkheimian homo duplex and his impersonal problems, insofar as the main purpose of Bourdieu’s sociology of practice can be seen as an attempt to move beyond the opposition of subjectivism and objectivism. Bourdieu eliminates the problematic hypothesis of the collective consciousness through the concept of the habitus, which allows him to situate the whole body at the core of the social world. However, if we take a closer look at how the habitus functions, Bourdieu hardly does justice to subjectivity. Indeed, the objective structures determine the “class habitus” (p. 80) that shapes the “socially informed body” (p. 124) and operates “as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (p. 83). In other words, the social classes necessarily have primacy over the agents, who are fully socially constructed. The body is entirely social, and what could be called subjectivity is understood as a form of passivity. In other words, the habitus is an incorporation of “the material conditions of existence” (p. 72), which merely reflects the objectivity of society’s structure. There is definitively no double agent in Bourdieu’s sociology, as human nature is altogether social: “all its senses, that is to say, not only the traditional five senses […] never escape the structuring action of social determinisms” (p. 124). Singular existences and personal experiences

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are, then, the mirror of a certain position occupied in a certain society. However, a form of duality remains with this conception of sociality, since the habitus constitutes “second natures” (p. 79) and, in a sense, false natures. Therefore, social nature differs from the earliest forms of biological nature, and social bodies are considered distinct from the “organisms,” which, following Bourdieu, “one can, if one wishes, call individuals” (p. 85). Each new-born is thus a kind of organic unity who is, early on, conquered by the habitus, which operates as an impersonal bearer of social conditions: “The habitus is precisely this immanent law, lex insita, laid down in each agent by his earliest upbringing” (p. 81). Curiously, the relationship theorized here does not exactly take place between structures and individuals, but between a structure and its habitus that is not the individual person. Therefore, it is unsurprising that “sociology treats as identical all the biological individuals who, being the product of the same objective conditions, are the supports of the same habitus” (p. 85). By rediscovering the body, Bourdieu comes closer to a situated perception, but only through the prism of the social classes that produce homogenous conditions of existence. Thus, the unique singularity or distinction that counts is the one created by society; beyond that, “the objective coordination of practices and the sharing of a world-view could be founded on the perfect impersonality and interchangeability of singular practices and views” (p. 86).

The interchangeability of perspectives and the heterogeneity of actants (Latour) On the classical side of social theories, where the ubiquity of an always-already-there social and impersonal phenomenon is postulated, seeing individuals as interchangeable seems inevitable. Thus, it appears appropriate to examine a sociology that completely rejects the use of the adjective social to “designate a stabilized state of affairs” (Latour 2005, 1). In contrast to those sociologists who refer to the social as “a homogeneous thing,” Latour proposes defining it as “a trail of associations between heterogeneous elements” (p. 5). Those associations can be literally anything: “to Microsoft as well as to my family; to plants as well as to baboons” (p. 29). As he puts it, “social does not designate a thing among other things […], but a type of connection between things that are not themselves social” (p. 5). Interestingly, then, the heterogeneity of elements which combine to constitute various forms of association becomes the foundation of his proposal. Such a deconstruction of what social means, “like a once formidable castle now in ruins” (p. 76), has at least two central implications for our issue. First, to embrace the primacy of heterogeneity, Latour draws from Tarde’s monadology by putting difference at the core of his definition of existence: “To exist is to differ, difference, in one sense, is the substantial side of things, what they have most in common and what makes them most different” (Tarde quoted by Latour 2005, 15). Therefore, the multiple elements, which Latour calls “actants,” are necessarily all singular and non-interchangeable because they must differ to exist. However, Latour’s proposal is not exactly about existence, but about action. In other words, what could be reassembling is a priori every-thing, human or not, which could make “some difference to a state of affairs” (p. 52). This explains the choice of the term “actant” (p. 54): it is supposed to make sociologists more adaptable regarding “what sort of agencies populate the world” (p. 55). For Latour, action is always “overtaken” or “other-taken” (p. 45). That is, an “actor is what is made to act by many others” (p. 46). Latour’s famous will “To be symmetric” (p. 76) comes from this claim about action, and it leads us to the second implication. Because Latour’s proposal relies primarily on action and secondarily on existence, he can ignore anthropological differences easily. Therefore, in a world in which everything can equally be made to act by other things, it seems ingenious to treat humans as just another group of 247

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things: “Please, treat humans as things, offer them at least the degree of realism you are ready to grant humble matters of concern, materialize them and, yes, reify them as much as possible” (pp. 255–256): “Far from being ‘lowered down’, ‘objectified humans’ will instead be elevated to the level of ants, chimps, chips, and particles!” (p. 255). Thus, for Latour, every human is singular and not a social entity, since what is social is the way they associate with other things. However, their impersonal dimension is even more radical than in the traditional social theories. This posture implies that all the phenomenological dimensions of experience (the body, consciousness,1 subjectivity, intentionality, and first-person perspective) should simply be ignored, if not denied. Even the very idea of perspective makes no sense to Latour: “Show me one standpoint and I will show you two dozen ways to shift out of it. Listen: all this opposition between ‘standpoint’ and ‘view from nowhere’, you can safely forget” (p. 145). The perspectives of the actants are thereby either genuinely interchangeable or merely non-existent. This is logical enough: a thing has no eyes, just like an impersonal society. The loss of perspective and, thus, of experience, is apparently the price of symmetry.

The interchangeability of individuals in imagination and the idealization of the interchangeability of standpoints (Schutz) Whereas Latour enables us to deconstruct the homogeneous impersonal society to regain a constitutive heterogeneity and a form of singularity, his impersonal interobjectivity takes us as far from human existence and experience as possible. Thus, the next step in exploring our issue leads us to social theories that sustain a strong affiliation with phenomenology and the problem of the constitution of intersubjectivity. Husserl left this problem unsolved (Schutz 1962), and all of Schutz’s work consisted of constructing a phenomenological sociology in which intersubjectivity is no longer a problem, but rather the key to highlighting “the common-sense experience of the world in daily life” (p. 313). His solution consists of engaging in a sociological reversal by claiming the primacy of intersubjectivity over private experiences: “the world of my daily life is by no means my private world but is from the outset an intersubjective one, shared with my fellow-men […], it is a world common to all of us […], an historically given world which […] had existed before my birth and which will continue to exist after my death” (p. 312). Without the emphasis on intersubjectivity, this argument is typically Durkheimian. Nevertheless, Schutz has elaborated on it in a contrary manner: instead of examining the primacy of sociality from the non-perspective of an impersonal society, he theorized it from the perspective of the subjects themselves. Two successive general theses formulated by Schutz enable us to detail this approach and to consider the manner in which interchangeability intervenes in a new light. The first general thesis refers to “the alter ego’s existence” (p.  174). Following Schutz, in a face-to-face situation, the other’s stream of thought “is simultaneous with our own stream of consciousness” (Ibid.) so that “I” have an immediate experience of the other’s subjectivity. This supposes “that the Other is like me, capable of acting and thinking” (Ibid.). Importantly, saying, “The Other is like me” does not mean “The Other is me,” since everyone is unique for Schutz. In the “pure We-relationship,” which can be seen as the ideal type of this thesis, “the Other is grasped as a unique individuality […] in its unique biographical situation” (p. 17). The other and “I” are thereby essentially non-interchangeable. However, apart from this pure We-relationship, the reach of one’s “contemporaries” occurs through imagination. Through imagination, the Other becomes an “anonymous fellow-man” (Ibid.), and the “more anonymous the typifying construct is, the more detached it is from the uniqueness of the individual” (p. 18). Crucially, this means that in “complete anonymization the individuals are supposed to be interchangeable, 248

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and the course-of-action type refers to the behavior of ‘whomsoever’ acting in the way defined as typical” (Ibid.). The substantial difference with classical social theories should be clear: the interchangeability of individuals is not a sociological fatality for Schutz; instead, it is the result of imagination when the other is inaccessible regarding one’s own perception. Thus, it is theoretically possible to change this perception during a concrete encounter, allowing the individual to grasp the singular existence of the other. The second “general thesis of reciprocal perspectives” (p.  12) aims at transcending all subjective considerations by overcoming the “individual uniqueness” (p. 18) in every situation. According to this thesis, actors take for granted that “the ‘same’ object must mean something different to me and to any of my fellow-men,” because each “here” never perfectly coincides with another: individuals “experience other aspects as being typical of the objects,” and their “biographically determined […] systems of relevances” never exactly coincide (p. 11). This is why “commonsense thinking” (p. 12) needs to overcome “the differences in individual perspectives resulting from these factors by two basic idealizations” (p. 11). The “idealization of the interchangeability of standpoints” (Ibid.) is one of these. It states that “I take it for granted – and assume my fellowman does the same – that if I change places with him so that his ‘here’ becomes mine, I shall be at the same distance from things and see them with the same typicality as he actually does” (p. 12). The other idealization concerns “the congruency of the system of relevances” and supposes that “for all practical purposes,” “the differences in perspectives originating in our unique biographical situations are irrelevant” (Ibid.). Clearly, this interchangeability is not a social fact. On the contrary, it is an idealization that is never achieved, an assumed practical method of interaction: it “is the presupposition for a world of common objects and therewith for communication” (p. 316). What is called common knowledge is, then, “conceived to be objective and anonymous, i.e., detached from and independent of my and my fellow-man’s definition of the situation, our unique biographical circumstances and the actual and potential purposes at hand involved therein” (p. 12). Ironically, that which defined the Durkheimian objective society becomes, with Schutz, the supposed idealization of anyone in order to live together, and interchangeability is a common-sense axiom. Nevertheless, an important issue remains: beneath these idealizations, it is impossible to really know what happens for the persons regarding their singular existences and experiences, which, as for the Durkheimian homo duplex, seem to still exist but are irrelevant “for all practical purposes.”

The combination of both kinds of interchangeability (Garfinkel) Regarding the interactionist and ethnomethodological approaches in the social sciences, particularly Garfinkel’s work, Schutz’s legacy is significant. In the preface of his Studies, Garfinkel puts so-called professional sociology on an equal footing with lay sociology accomplished by any member of the society. Thus, the Durkheimian fundamental principle of an “objective reality of social facts” becomes “an ongoing accomplishment of the concerted activities of daily life, with the ordinary, artful ways of that accomplishment being by members known, used, and taken for granted” (Garfinkel 1967, vii); in short, “Ethnomethodological studies analyze everyday activities as member’s methods for making those same activities visibly-rational-and-reportablefor-all-practical-purposes” (Ibid.). One can easily recognize in this “study policy” the idealized axioms that Schutz assigned to common-sense knowledge, which receives the only relevant focus from analysts. This is problematic, especially given the observable tendency to abandon the idealization aspect in favour of the “ordered properties” of “indexical expressions” and “actions” (p. 11). 249

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This indexicality, whose model must be found in the common language, supersedes all phenomenological characteristics of the subject still present in Schutz’s first general thesis. Therefore, “perspectival choice, subjectivity, and inner time” become, by principle, “problematic considerations” (p. 68). What counts are the “rational properties of indexical expressions” (p. 11) that imply “fact, impersonality, anonymity of authorship, purpose, reproducibility” (p. 13). In addition, the Schutzian idealized bases for communication become “socially sanctioned grounds of inference and action that people use in their everyday affairs” or, in other words, “Sociallysanctioned-facts-of-life-in-society-that-any-bona-fide-member-of-the-society-knows” (p. 76). At this particular level of social reality, which is above personal existence and experience by definition, it is no surprise that the central “notion of member” does not “refer to a person. It refers instead to mastery of natural language” (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970, 342). Even though Garfinkel’s idea seems closer to that of human individuals, unlike Durkheim’s impersonal society, the standpoint ethnomethodologists are supposed to endorse seems just as unusual. Indeed, producing “descriptions from the point of view of the collectivity member” (1967, 76) literally means producing descriptions from the perspective of a non-person. In other words, taking the member’s standpoint means taking the perspective of the idealization of interchangeability of standpoints itself. In this mixed-up perspectivism, both forms of interchangeability are combined perfectly: analysts must observe the “good” members based on the “standardized expectations” (p. 67) that involve the suspension of one’s own “perspectival view […] in favor of a position that is interchangeable with all positions found in the entire social structure” to take a standpoint “interchangeable with that of  ‘Any Man’” (p. 109). In the end, within the ethnomethodologists’ world, singularity is at best a “perspective by incongruity” that enables one to display what is ordinary “seen but unnoticed” (p. 180) and at worst a sign of incompetence or even of immorality.

Towards a social theory without interchangeability After examining the various forms of interchangeability discussed above, one point should be clear: singular existences and personal experience are considered threats to the coherence of society or the common world, and interchangeability intervenes, much like a magic trick, to eliminate those threats. One important consequence, with respect to the social theories themselves, is that human individuals, although they are the primary concern, are separate from the object of that concern, which seems perfectly indifferent to their particular existence or is interested only in conquering them in totality. In radical terms, through the prism of interchangeability, social phenomena are dehumanized. The point is not to argue that the very idea of interchangeability is useless. For instance, the two solid approaches to the interchangeability of individuals discussed above, namely the interchangeability in imagination when others are not within reach of someone’s perception (Schutz) or the anomic interchangeability of workers in an industrialized society (Durkheim), could even be used to produce a critique. However, using interchangeability to claim that humans’ singularity and subjectivity do not matter in social theory seems a twisted manoeuvre. The question, then, is how to overcome this difficulty. A first step is to restore the continuity between human individuals and social phenomena without losing the singular humans on the way. This is precisely what Simmel offers, and, crucially, his sociology does not imply any interchangeability by principle. Following Simmel, the “socialized-being” (1910, 381) is always “determined or partially determined by the sort of his not-socialized being” (p. 382). This is by no means a threat to 250

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the constitution of society: the individual, being partly non-socialized, is even a “sociological apriori,” namely the very condition of possibility for the constitution of society. In Simmel’s words, “the individual, with respect to certain sides of his personality, is not an element of the group, constitutes the positive condition for the fact that he is such a group member in other aspects of his being” (Ibid.). Significantly, this does not imply building a theoretical homo duplex because the individual is thought of as an anthropological unity: a “closed organic whole” that is, as a member of society, simultaneously “an existence (Sein) for it and an existence for itself ” (p. 386). Many readers have seen in this unity an argument in favour of understanding individual unities as mere social constructs: this interpretation does not do justice to Simmel’s sensitivity to singularity, which presupposes the primacy of a plurality of differentiated individuals as a constitutive condition for social life. In that sense, I argue that this “sociological apriori” can better be understood as an invitation to examine more carefully not only the social forms, but also the individual unities themselves. For this purpose, and to avoid losing singularity and subjectivity, I suggest investigating human unities by seeing them as forms. In that respect, as the term implies, Piette’s volume of being (this section) seems to be a relevant solution: it involves an essential singularity and enables us to remain open regarding how the volume is structured and constituted through the recommendation of concretely following one human at a time before taking a definitive stance about human nature and its relationship to Others and social phenomena. It is one thing to provide humans with singular existence to avoid falling into the interchangeability of individuals, but regarding the phenomenological problems in sociology, I assume that their subjective experiences are just as crucial for not falling into the interchangeability of perspectives. Therefore, I argue that the volume of being should also encompass minimal phenomenological dimensions. The first dimension can be found in the individual’s own body, as discussed by MerleauPonty, who pointed out that human’s perception and understanding of the world always depend on their embodied situation: “my own body is the primordial habit, the one that conditions all others and by which they can be understood. Its near presence and its invariable perspective are not a factual necessity, since factual necessity presupposes them” (2012, 93). The second dimension refers to the definition of the self implied by this irreducible first-person perspective: it can be found in the “minimal form of self hood” offered by Zahavi (2021, 9) that necessarily precedes any kind of normative self. This “minimal self,” as tiny as it is, refers to “a built-in feature of experiential life” and can theoretically serve as a reminder that “experiences are necessarily like something for a subject, they necessarily involve a point of view, they come with perspectival ownership. Experience entails what-it-is-likeness and what-it-is-likeness entails what-it-is-likefor-me-ness” (Ibid.). Crucially, one can argue that the latest phenomenological approaches in anthropology also take embodiment seriously and, thus, that the approach I suggest here already exists. However, as I point it out with Piette (2019, 24–27), phenomenological anthropologists do not necessarily escape interchangeability: for instance, Jackson aims “to discover a common ground where self and other are one” (quoted in Ibid., 26). In the light of this chapter, oneness is simply another combination of both kinds of interchangeability. As Zahavi rightly puts it, “To conceive of the we as an undifferentiated oneness is to misunderstand the very notion” (2021, 14). Therefore, seeing humans as volumes of being with their own bodies and minimal selves is not a loose reference to phenomenology aimed at investigating new aspects of humans in social and cultural contexts. Fundamentally, being sensitive to the human experience without clearly defining it beforehand regarding the premises of social theory does not ensure that human unities and subjectivities will be kept in mind at all. 251

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As Desjarlais and Throop observe, phenomenological anthropologists have been interested “less in philosophical reasoning than in ethnographic research” and “have tended to shy away from the more general, categorical, culture-free pronouncements often sounded by phenomenological philosophers” (2011, 92). For instance, within those approaches, Bourdieu and Schutz remain central references without any questions regarding their positions vis-à-vis the issue of interchangeability. What is mostly retained from the phenomenologists is, then, “a foundational intersubjectivity” that is supposed to warn the reader “not to focus myopically on subjective experience” (p. 91). Such precautions concerning subjectivity indicate a persistent worry about personal experience and singularity when it comes to accounting for the stability and potential homogeneity of cultures. The approaches in existential sociology, despite their will to restart sociological inquiries from “feelings and emotions” (Fontana 1984, 4), and with a “total person” (p. 5) have not addressed the issue of interchangeability either. To open sociological “inquiry to anything that forms the context of human action,” such as “formal behavior, informal behavior, rational elements, irrational elements, genetic dispositions, psychological traits, and social rules” (p. 4), without clarifying the articulation between the various aspects of experience upstream, does not allow us to consider singularity or subjectivity. Furthermore, emotions themselves cannot be considered a premise for a social theory. They obviously display multiple forms and levels of normativity with regard to subjectivity through the relationship with others, and they are part of what is observed. In contrast, the minimal experiential dimensions I draw from phenomenology are unobservable. Such experiential dimensions are pre-reflective, pre-linguistic, and, then, unobservable per se because they constitute how any existence is experienced or lived through. As Merleau-Ponty says, “I observe external objects with my body, I handle them, inspect them, and walk around them. But when it comes to my body, I never observe it itself. I would need a second body to be able to do so, which would itself be unobservable” (2012, 93). This does not mean that the body cannot be at some point an object of thought or that, as the self, it is not in some way social. Rather, we cannot properly understand the nature of social phenomena if we begin by ignoring or denying this formal first-person character of any human existence and experience or by only focusing on one specific aspect of the volume of being in order to claim the primacy over all other aspects.

Conclusion The volume of being, along with those experiential dimensions, seems to constitute a viable way of preserving non-interchangeability on a formal level. As we see with Simmel, as well as with Zahavi, “plurality and differentiation” (2021, 14) are not optional to give a proper account of the nature of collectives and sociality. The body and the self are “multifaceted” (p. 8), just like the various forms of collectives, and they come with minimal and initial conditions of existence. Thus, the task of social scientists should be to grasp their very articulation without restricting themselves to only one social definition that corresponds to only one facet of the self or one very particular level of consciousness, which is then used to deny the foundational aspect of the minimal features of experience and existence. Such a solid foundation that does not lose sight of the idea of human unity over and over again would provide the opportunity to observe how, for instance, traces of Bourdieu’s habitus and Garfinkel’s rationality coexist by identifying their precise position with regard to the structure of consciousness. Non-interchangeability is more about exploring the possibility of reconciling the various social theories from the perspective of human singularity and subjectivity than taking a stand against all of them. However, it means, 252

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one way or another, giving up the primacy of impersonal, always-already-there, social phenomena as a premise. Interchangeability goes along with this so-called primacy, and a typical sociological argument states that the ultimate proof of the indifference regarding singularity and subjectivity is that social phenomena are there when a person is born and are still there when they die. Does attributing a longer lifespan to social unity than to one human’s singular existence imply that there is never any finitude for collectives and for society? Even if the answer is “no one can possibly know,” it seems fair to recognize that everything I know about others and any kind of social phenomena derives from my own experience and existence. The fact that I know most of it through the mediation of others and objects – in other words, through the mediation of the world – is no rebuttal. I am part of these mediations, and in order for me to see them at some point, they have to happen to me, even at distance. It seems perfectly absurd to deny or to not consider this fact because it is true for others, too. Fundamentally, this argument also avoids the possibility that each singular person affects what is common and shared in their own way. To put it differently, following Arendt’s words, this argument hides the fact that, even in a totalitarian society, with “each new birth, a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being” (1973, 465).

Note 1 Although it is true that Tarde’s monads endow humans with the same qualities as any other thing, Tarde would strongly disagree with Latour on this objectification. Indeed, Latour neglects to mention that Tarde remains faithful to Leibniz on a very central point: his metaphysics is a “psychomorphism” (Tarde 2012, 15) according to which everything is spirit by essence. Everything is constituted by invisible “spiritual atoms” (p. 14), and “consciousness” is the “most influential and powerful element” (p. 34) for understanding the universe.

References Arendt, H. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: University Press. (Original work published 1972). Desjarlais, R., and C. J. Throop 2011. ‘Phenomenological approaches in anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 87–102. Durkheim, É. 1952. Suicide. A Study in Sociology. London and New York: Routledge. (Original work ­published 1897). Durkheim, É. 1984. The Division of Labour in Society. London: The Macmillan Press. (Original work ­published 1893). Durkheim, É. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press. (Original work published 1912). Fontana, A. 1984. ‘Introduction: Existential sociology and the self ’, In J. A. Kotarba and A. Fontana (Eds), The Existential Self in Society (pp. 3–17). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Garfinkel, H. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, H., and H. Sacks 1970. ‘On the formal structures of practical action’, In J. C. McKinney and E. A. Tiryakian (Eds), Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Developments (pp. 338–366). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Kneubühler, M., and A. Piette 2019. ‘Following and analyzing a human being. On the continuity and singularity of an individual’, In F. Cooren and F. Malbois (Eds), Methodological and Ontological Principles of Observation and Analysis (pp. 13–43). New York: Routledge. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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25 SARTREAN EXISTENTIALISM AND EXISTENTIAL ART Catherine Beaugrand

Am I (Or Approaching) a Singularity in my Life? Lee Lozano1

To associate art and existence, at first sight, may seem commonplace. Art provides everyone with an experience of the world other than that of their daily lives. There is transformation of emotions into artworks, and there are specifically artistic emotions that broaden the discernment of feelings and self-knowledge. But what is meant by “art” in conjunction with “existence” in this way? Is it about the work or the artist at work? Is it about the interpretation of the work to understand the artist better than he has understood himself? Is it a way of saying that what matters is not the world interpretation by the artwork but the capacity of art to transform the world? How does being an artist manifest itself on a daily basis in a person? Does an individual artist remain an artist throughout his or her life? To put forward some elements of reflection on these non-exhaustive questions, the method used in this chapter will be deliberately heuristic in that it will start from the works themselves.2 To do this, I have chosen to draw on the work of Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, and Lee Lozano, who in the 1960s established new forms of art by blurring the boundaries between everyday existence and artistic practice. I will refer to them as representing existential art.3 However, I will first question Sartre’s “regressive-progressive” method in his existential biography of Flaubert in relation to the kind of analysis he engages in when he stages affects and gestures of art in the essays devoted to the artists in his close circle. Indeed, the number of writings Sartre devoted to literary authors and visual artists is far more substantial than his philosophical and political texts combined, and he frequently expressed the view that this often-unfinished research allowed him to abandon his theoretical analyses to “demonstrate whenever necessary how this method is created through the very work itself in obedience to the requirements of its objects. […] What is the relationship between the man and the work? I have never said so far. Nor has anyone else, as far as I know”, he insists in Flaubert’s preface (Sartre 1993, IX–X). Sartre’s answer is to reduce the relationship between the artist and his work “to the choice he has made of himself (to be this, not to be that) […] at the foot of the historically defined wall of his ‘situation’” (Leiris 1988, 13). The confrontation between the Sartrean method and the implementation of art and existence DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-29

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together, elaborated each in its own way by Kaprow, Kawara, and Lozano, will allow us to identify the contribution of artistic practices more precisely to understanding the modes of presence of individuals in their singularity and continuity.

Sartre and existential biography Sartre began writing essays on visual artists just after the war. From the 1950s onwards, he produced literary biographies through individual experiences that he considered unsurpassable (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet, Flaubert). If the essays on art are about living artists, in the manner of an art critic, it is obvious that these texts do not show any commitment to the art of his time among the various contemporary currents. The various artists he called upon4 did not give rise to any simultaneous reflection on the part of Sartre on the avant-gardes of the 1960s, which were in full swing in the Anglo-Saxon world. Moreover, the problematic of Sartre’s texts on art does not coincide with one of the major preoccupations of these avant-gardes, namely the demand for a radical break with the forms of art prior to themselves to transform the relationship between art and life. This is evidenced by the way Sartre speaks of Lapoujade (1921–1993). Lapoujade’s abstract painting, says Sartre in 1961, achieves “what figurative art could not do […]. No longer is the object of his art the individual or the typical. It is the singularity and reality of our age” (Sartre 2011b, 120). Thus, it is the Sartrean motif of the being in situation in his time that fills Lapoujade’s images. For Sartre, he is the painter whom Hiroshima demanded (p. 121). Lapoujade was certainly committed to the disasters and events of his time, to which he refers through the figurative titles he adds to his abstract paintings. The pure expressiveness sought by abstraction needed, for him, a written complement, provided by the title, “as the revelation of the concerted meaning of this painting” (Lapoujade 1956). In this sense, Lapoujade agrees with Sartre when he himself confirms that in the non-realistic pictorial forms he produces, the catastrophes and plagues of his time slip in as if by magic. When Marguerite Duras describes the way Lapoujade works to “construct” her portrait and then that of Sartre, she begins: “You are here for Lapoujade to do your portrait. But Lapoujade is not looking at you”. He needs, she continues, Sartre to be present but “he must not look at the Sartre who is present”. Why not look? So as not to risk being absorbed by the “psychological passage”, the details of the emotions and moods that run through the face from moment to moment (Duras 2019). Lapoujade wants to produce a timeless figure of the person, and he proceeds in the same way as for his abstract paintings embodying catastrophes and acts of violence. Just as the title rushes into the painting, the portrait flows, slips into the pictorial material. “The movement of the gaze is guaranteed never to stop, says Sartre, it is this whirling of the eyes that produces the permanence of indivisible unity - so we will turn; if we stopped, everything would burst” (Sartre 2011, 128). Thus, the face portrayed in small, accumulating strokes returns to the magma of the background as soon as it emerges. From this observation, it seems important to me to consider this disappearance of the figure at the same time as its appearance is to be compared with the movement of “coming and going” characteristic of what Sartre calls the existentialist method that he openly sets up in his existential biographies of writer-poets to “elucidate the relationship of the man to the work”. The “back-and-forth” is how “it will progressively determine a biography by examining the period, and the period by studying the biography” (Sartre 1963 I, 135). More precisely, I will develop the way it works from The Family Idiot. I will then distinguish it from the game of turnstiles, a metaphor so frequently used by Sartre in contexts quite different5 from Lapoujade’s. The 256

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most general question of the Sartrean project around Flaubert can be summarised as follows: how did the individual Gustave Flaubert, born in a given historical period, educated in a particular family belonging to a specific social class, determine to become the author of Madame Bovary, a novel that reconstitutes the contradictions of his time? The regressive-progressive method that Sartre has been pursuing since his previous biographies consists of a systematisation of back-and-forth between the individual history and the socio-historical context (Sartre, 1968). The regressive movement follows the chronology in reverse, “up to the phenomenological description of a childish sensibility” to find the fundamental structures of Flaubert’s life. The progressive approach is an ascent, “a synthesis which will retrace the genesis of this sensibility […] the material is the same, the lights new; the qualities of the child pass from the structural to the historical” (pp. 40–41). This approach is possible, on the one hand, because it applies to the fully completed life of an individual, and, on the other hand, because it seeks the explanatory cause of this individual’s behaviour in the original choice of his or her own way of being, his or her existential project. Thus, “personalisation”, a dialectical process that allows the preservation and overcoming of dispositions inherited and marked by the events of early childhood, is a kind of accumulation of reiterations of original determinations that assimilate events to the project itself (Sartre 1993). This to-and-fro that Sartre operates on all sides in the 3,000 pages that seek to “reconstitute in all its phases the dialectical movement by which Flaubert progressively makes himself into ‘the-author-of -Madame Bovary’” (Sartre 1993 II, 14) is, in addition, punctually animated in the factual chronology by the motif of the turnstile. In this case, it refers to a mostly endless movement where the positive passes into the negative and vice versa: “by a common reversal of thought, Gustave thought to draw something positive from the negative itself ” (Sartre 1993 III: 629). It applies on very different scales, ranging from the “Promethean pride” of the enlightened elite, who “appear only to fall into shame” as they build a society based on injustice (Sartre 1965), to Emma Bovary, who, “the moment she escapes banality through dreaming, sees her dream recaptured by banality” (Sartre 1976a,b). But it is above all a “pre-dialectical mode” of knowledge that Sartre lends to Flaubert in the situations he reports, interprets, or imagines. Gustave would replace any contradiction leading to a decision or action with a turnstile. “In truth, both points of view are defensible and as each challenges the other, the best thing is to make one pass into the other indefinitely” (Sartre 1993 IV, 315). Sartre makes this turnstile process a recurring motif in Flaubert’s existence. It comes to be presented as an ordering of sample-events that, while scattered in time, exemplify this mechanism. In this way, in Sartre’s presentation, the continuity of moments is eliminated in favour of what he calls “a totalisation” (Sartre 1993), making each moment a condensation of the whole life. The means Sartre uses, the coming and going and the turnstiles, “boldly constructing where facts are lacking”6 compose an image of Flaubert made up of an accumulation of touches, like the technique employed by Lapoujade when he makes the figure appearing in the background of the painting disappear. It is true that the addition of data and the stylistic overabundance of Sartre’s writing bring out a Flaubert producing his work, but this is never free of the methodology deployed. It is the method itself that prevails as a typically Sartrean tourniquet. Thus, there is a gap between the asserted will to seek to “elucidate the relationship of the man to the work” and the analytical-synthetic reconstruction of Flaubert’s life. The meeting with the three artists chosen will allow us to better perceive a contrario the Sartrean propositions and to pose the possibility of detailed explorations to reach the notions of singularity and continuity. How did these artists relate their artistic practice to their daily lives? How did they engage with the relationship between the work and ordinary continuity? Through which forms do they propose other methods to better grasp art and existence? 257

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Allan Kaprow: “lifelike art” Allan Kaprow, one of the most emblematic artists of the New York art scene in the second half of the 20th century, developed in his writings and lectures a set of positions inaugurating an art practice anchored in the artist’s daily existence. Formulated as early as 1958, these proposals have become principles that have been definitively adopted in the contemporary art world.7 Kaprow is credited with the invention of “happening”.8 Michael Kirby, dramatist, and theorist of the New Theater, insisted on the mythical dimension of the first happenings, whose conceptions immediately diverged according to the artists who chose the practice of an art composed of actions executed in each time and place (Kirby 1965). There are few traces of them, and many have spoken of them without having seen them. Thus, it is specifically from the words of Allan Kaprow in his early texts that I propose to examine how art and everyday life were intended to merge. Consciously living everyday life became more interesting than conventionally making art identifiable as art: “What Kaprow hopes to know is the meaning of everyday life. To know that meaning, he must enact it every day” (Kelley 1993). To do this, on the one hand, it is no longer a question of using the traditional materials of painting or sculpture and, on the other hand, of not recounting personal facts of life. Indeed, there is the conviction that it is possible to search for an art of action without the dimension of representation and that it is conceivable not to re-present. It is not a question of abstraction or non-figuration, but of literality. Therefore, the happening represents nothing but itself, existing only in the exact time of its unfolding. It can be said that the experience is the medium that Kaprow uses and explores to produce art. The following example shows how he intends to proceed. In the first place, Kaprow says, it is not a matter of being an actor eating strawberries on a stage but of eating them in the way we are used to eating them. You must have felt in everyday life the sensations, the expectations, the greed that we have when we are eating strawberries and have perceived how this translates into our gestures. And this applies to all our activities. Life becomes strange, he continues, when we really pay attention to what we are doing (Kaprow 1993). It is tempting to contrast Kaprow’s observations with those of Roquentin following the first lines of Nausea: “The best thing would be to write down everything that happens day to day” (Sartre 2020, 1). If he first declares that he wants “to neglect no nuances or little details, even if they seem unimportant”, Roquentin immediately moves away from them as soon as he tries to describe an object. So, he says, “you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out”. Roquentin dismisses the scale of details as soon as he is aware of it, as if this one, demanding too much vigilance, was impossible to keep. Then he rejects his first intuition on the grounds of the risk of over-interpretation: “what must be avoided is putting the strange where there is nothing” (p. 1). The strange, for Kaprow, is, on the contrary, the fact that observation, by practicing it as precisely and as widely as possible, leads to a new discernment. When he decides to pay attention to the way he brushes his teeth, Kaprow looks at his gestures as a “traditional” artist would, concerned with the smallest detail of the processes and gestures of fabrication. Alone in front of his bathroom mirror, he begins to realise “how much this act of brushing my teeth had become routinized, nonconscious behavior, compared with my first efforts to do it as a child. I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed; that my mind was always somewhere else; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each minute were ignored. I guessed also that most people were like me in this respect” (Kaprow 1993, 219). The action of taking the gestures of an everyday activity seriously corresponds to what Kaprow calls “ordinary life performed as art/not art” or “lifelike art”.

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There is a second major opposition between the Sartrean vision and Kaprow’s proposal. When Sartre claims experience as the starting point for existential psychoanalysis, he assumes that every human being, even if he or she can “ignore the indications contained in a gesture, a word, a sign and can look with scorn on the revelation which they carry […], nevertheless possesses a priori the meaning of the revelatory value of these manifestations” (Sartre 1956, 568–569). But what he is aiming at is a method to lead this understanding step by step. “The essential task, he continues, is an hermeneutic; that is, a deciphering, a determination, and a conceptualization” (p. 569). For this reason, it is not desirable for the individual to “undertake a psychoanalytic investigation of himself ”. If he does, “he must renounce at the outset all benefit stemming from his peculiar position and must question himself exactly as if he were someone else” (Sartre 1956, 570). This is not at all what Kaprow envisages when, little by little, after two weeks of scrutinising his toothbrush, he notices the heuristic force of his method: “I looked up once and saw, really saw, my face in the mirror. […] This was an eye-opener to my privacy and to my humanity” (Kaprow 1993, 220). Kaprow believed that through his relentless work of self-analysis, he would succeed in making it transform the everyday life of anyone who did it for themselves after experiencing the moment of the happening. “The purpose of lifelike art was therapeutic: to reintegrate the piecemeal reality we take for granted. Not just intellectually, but directly, as experience - in this moment, in this house, at this kitchen sink …” (p. 206). Lifelike art is not giving ordinary life the appellation art. It is a continuous and difficult process. “It was continuous with that life, inflecting, probing, testing, and even suffering it, but always attentively” (p. 206). Kaprow’s words are strong in reminding us that every moment is to be explored. It is inconceivable to follow Sartre when he makes Roquentin say that the time of existence is made up of “wide, soft moments” (Sartre 2020, 29).

On Kawara: “I am still alive” On Kawara’s early work responds almost directly to the Sartrean vision of the engaged artist, using Marxist discourse to criticise post-World War II Japan. Seeking to give new forms to the human figure, On Kawara wanted to translate the anxieties not only of the war period but also of American capitalism invading daily life. A new materiality surreptitiously permeates all familiar objects. “Humanity is material-ized” (Braxton 2018, 106). Thus, On Kawara could be called an existentialist artist to account for his obsession with making this mortifying process visible in a radical pessimism. This corresponds, in part, to the way art critics have often used the term existentialist to characterise works that deal with general themes of human existence and arouse the viewer’s affects. But On Kawara was also an avid reader of Sartre, at least until he left Japan and moved to New York in 1959 (Woo 2010). Between 1964 and 2014, On Kawara produced a body of work radically different from his earlier work, organised in series and sub-series whose implementation was strictly regulated. I summarise here, in a sufficiently faithful manner, the whole of his working process, which makes it possible to describe the succession of the artist’s days. The issue at stake is not a small one in the debate with Sartre on continuity. The 3,000 paintings in the ToDay or Date Paintings series, which began on 4 January 1966 and lasted until his death, were all produced following the same protocol of daily time use. Each painting that started during the day had to be completed by midnight. If it was not, it was destroyed. All of them are covered with a monochrome paint without brush marks. The paint is made every day from standard colour powder pigment. This technique of mixing by hand to get the right substance creates variations in colour from day to day. It takes four to five coats of paint to achieve a perfectly uniform background. The letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, 259

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perfectly centred, are drawn and painted by hand, always in white. Seven to eight coats are needed. It takes between four and nine hours to complete a painting, depending on its size. The language and abbreviation of the date vary according to the country where the artist is located (136 different cities). It can be said that each of the Date Paintings represents a day, designated by the date on which it was painted. While each painting has an individuality in the combination of pigment concentration, surface, typography, size, language, and date itself, it says nothing about On Kawara’s perspective on that day. The literal form of the Date Paintings constitutes a series in which each canvas is a specific element possibly comparable to the other 3,000. Sartre saw in the series a mode of being for individuals both in relation to each other and to what they have in common in the given situation. Each can play the role of a third party (Sartre 1976a,b). The chronological series of Date Paintings is an embodiment of this (Osborne 2013). In addition to this main daily series, other series of a different temporality were implemented. Between 10 May 1968 and 17 September 1979, two series were set up. For the series I Got Up, On Kawara buys two postcards each day showing his location, on which he notes the time he gets up. These postcards are sent to friends, acquaintances, collectors, gallery owners, etc. I Got Up is printed with a stamp made for this series. The address and time are handwritten. The I Met series consists of a page dated at the bottom of the sheet on which is typed a list of people with whom Kawara had a conversation that day. The sheets are then collected in binders. The I Went series began on 1 June 1968. On photocopies of maps of neighbourhoods and parts of the city, Kawara traces his movements of the day. I Got Up, I Met, I Went together form a separate section that ended on the same date. On that day, the various materials and tools used in each of the series were stolen from him in Stockholm. The impossibility of replacing them to ensure formal continuity forced the section to be stopped. Between 1966 and 1995, on the days when he managed to make at least one Date Painting, Kawara extracted one or more articles from the newspaper of the day, sometimes annotated or highlighted, and labelled with the date. These newspaper clippings form the I Read series and are arranged in plastic sleeves in binders like I Met and I Went. Between 1970 and 2000, On Kawara produced a series of less regular temporalities, in the form of telegrams with the same message, I Am Still Alive. These were sent not only to his friends and family, but also in response to requests from the art world. He stopped this series when telegrams became obsolete. This description offers only a summary to begin to visualise Kawara’s day in the manner of a diary page, especially when several series are superimposed, and then to the continuity of the days of his existence. Describing the actions and the time of realisation of the pictorial objects, the acceptance of the material reality of the work (e.g., the time of drying of each layer before being able to apply the following one) requires great slowness of analysis because there are only details, and each one counts. One is always forgotten. It is possible to find the minutes and hours, every day, every month, every year. Conversely, what would The Family Idiot be if it had attempted even a brief sketch of situations, hour by hour, day by day, as the documents allow? For he could have done so from the enormous mass of texts and archives of Flaubert and his entourage on which he relied, but Sartre privileged the events to associate them freely outside any chronology. Pamela Lee takes On Kawara as an example when she revisits the history of the avant-garde in the 1960s, characterising this period by its obsession with time, “as chronophobic: as registering an almost obsessional uneasiness with time and its measure. Cutting across movements, mediums, and genres, the chronophobic impulse suggests an insistent struggle with time, the will of both artists and critics either to master its passage, to still its acceleration, or to give form to its changing conditions” (Lee 2004, 8). But this focus on the passage of time, as other art historians 260

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have done, misses an essential aspect of On Kawara’s artistic practice, evident in the systematic use of the I in series like I Got Up, I Met, I Went. On Kawara has gone through and fully assumed his social role as an artist by giving his work the overall form of a documentation. However, this documentation only has the appearance of impersonality. It is the person of On Kawara who is at the centre of the formal systematisation. Kawara’s ambiguous expression, I Am Still Alive, is close to Sartre’s own “autobiography”: “tin order to deprive death of its barbarity, I had made it my goal and had made my life the only known means of dying. I was going quietly to my end, having no hopes or desires other than what was needed to fill my books” (Sartre 1964, 198). But we must insist, it is by giving form to temporal segments that are added from moment to moment, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, in the ordering of a flawless continuity that On Kawara proceeds. However, this does not mean that they are collections of “data” to be added up, which is what Sartre reproaches temporal continuity for. Nor is it a question of “the inadmissible concept of the infinite divisibility of time and of the temporal point or instant as the limit of the division” that instantaneism that Sartre is so determined to evacuate (Sartre 1956, 28). This Sartrean refusal of temporal enchainment is formulated differently in La Nausée. “Roquentin does nothing: he is only concerned with being” (Sartre 1983, 185). Kawara does. He produces works where the time of elaboration, from moment to moment, asserts its singularity in duration. He has made one of the most successful attempts to experience art and life together in the continuity of existence.

Lee Lozano: “LIFE-ART”9 Lee Lozano, an American artist who was very involved in the New York scene until 1970, has a singular aura for having conceived a work consisting of a gradual withdrawal from the art world. At a certain date, she decided to disengage herself from the environment in which she had been living and working up to that point, and she put this slow process into shape. To this end, she pursued what she called Art-Life Pieces. Although considered language pieces, a generic term in art history for art practices that use instructions or scripts to produce actions and performances, Lozano’s Art-Life Pieces are different because they are instructions that she addressed and applied only to herself: “Why not impose form on one’s own life the way one makes art?” (Lozano 2009). Thus, the directives she imposed on herself concerned daily activities (e.g., Wear & Eat Moreor-less the Same Thing Everyday Piece), excessive experiments (e.g., Grass Piece, which consisted of continuous smoking of cannabis for 33 days), or social situations (e.g., No-Info Piece, which involved living “in solitary confinement for as long as I could stand it. No telephone, radio, records, reading, drugs, visitors, mail, window view, clock”) (Lozano 2009). She scrupulously followed the programmes she set herself for predefined and not necessarily successive periods of time, and she recorded their effects on herself in carefully handwritten notebooks in regular capital letters. Although announced as private, these constitute a plastic ensemble analogous to any other art object, capable of being exhibited or published in facsimile. Neither introspective nor truly intimate, neither precise nor vague, they testify, in a condensed formulation, to the experience of the directive to be respected. In short, removing the boundaries between objectivity and intimacy, Lee Lozano has used art to conduct her life with lucidity. Her individual behaviour is the subject of a permanent and intensive study. The quest for her singularity is carried out by applying quasi-scientific constraints in her method of self-observation to track down her own irreducibility in each of the activities she has set herself. Dropout Piece is the name Lee Lozano gave to the process that began in 1970, continued until his death in 1999, and is still active in its posthumous aftermath. There is no documentation of 261

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it, as this could have served as a formal system that could be re-engaged by being exhibited in art institutions. Lee Lozano’s commitment to the socio-cultural disengagement of the art world was absolute. In other words, from the moment she conceived the idea, the theme of disengagement from the art world has dictated all her decisions and choices in every moment of her daily life. How does she leave her public career behind? Will she manage to give up all recognition? Does this mean breaking off from friends and acquaintances, no longer keeping up to date with the various art events? Is it a matter of carrying out her activities privately to continue being an artist in the sense that she understands it? It is difficult, she says. “The reason Dropout […] is the hardest work I’ve ever done is that it involves destruction of (or at least complete understanding of ) powerful emotional habits” (Lozano 2018). From the dialogue with Sartre, I would now like to bring out a new aspect. The gradation between a necessary understanding of emotional habits to destroy them with full knowledge of the facts reflects Lee Lozano’s willingness to analyse almost scientifically each of her actual experiences. She writes, for example, that: I WANT TO GET OVER MY HABIT OF EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCE ON LOVE. I WANT TO START TRUSTING MYSELF & OTHERS MORE. I WANT TO REALLY BELIEVE THAT I HAVE POWER & COMPLETE MY OWN FATE.10 Lehrer-Graiwer (2014, 18) Are we not at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Sartrean viewpoint? Indeed, Sartre insists on “showing how Flaubert does not know himself ” by pointing out that experience, “the whole dialectical process of psychic life, necessarily remains opaque to itself ” (Sartre 1976b:, 91–115). Dropout Piece could seem like a life project according to the Sartrean vision. The individual may be fully conscious of this project, as Sartre explains. But what is not known by the subject who lives it is the lived, “that ground on which the individual is constantly submerged by himself ” (Sartre ibid). Dropout Piece creates situations to be rigorously observed in everyday life. These experiences are organised and multiplied to carry out and experience day after day, year after year, the disengagement from the art world. Lee Lozano claims access to full knowledge of her lived reality through her incessant self-observations. Thus, to be an artist, in this existential configuration, is to constantly observe one’s own life to make it more intense and to be able to grasp one’s singularity. Like Kaprow, she imagines that her practice of art and life together, which has allowed her to transform her existence, could be transmitted and change the lives of more and more people. Dropout Piece lasted some 20 years. Over time, Lozano dropped her artist’s name for Lee Free and then the letter E. Her ashes are kept unmarked, anonymously. Sartre is one of the few philosophers to have attempted empirical explorations. He claims this very strongly. By confronting him with three artists who wanted to define art and life together, I have tried to show how he ignores the demands of artistic practice when it comes to the singularity and continuity of human beings. However, it should not be assumed that Kaprow, Lozano, and Kawara fully succeed in this search. Thus, Kaprow’s experiments are only segments of actions, even if they are investigated in detail. And the happening cannot take place without a minimum of conventions between the performance space and the audience (Schechner 2003, 18). His performance practice therefore did not remain in the claimed absolute and was built around scenarios that quickly led to the ambiguities and aporias found in relational art and participatory art today. In the end, On Kawara’s methodological rigour enabled him to construct a work that loses some of its strength by being totally integrated into the art market and the circuit 262

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of art institutions. Lee Lozano, on the other hand, seems to be able to really look at herself and transcribe her experience, but she escapes from herself in psychic and material difficulties. But rather than associating art with life forms (Sansi 2014), I have tried to suggest that art could be the heuristic force for observations of the details of moments, of the succession of moments, days, and years until the end of life, to think of everyday experiences as a methodological laboratory, and to practise self-observation according to precise protocols, without leaving this exercise to postmodern thinking.

Notes 1 In unpaged facsimile printing, underlined and formatted by Lee Lozano (Lozano 2018). 2 For an example of the heuristic use of art in anthropology, see the work of Nigel Rapport and his ­observation of the works of Stanley Spencer. The descriptions of the deformations that the painter ­applies to certain parts of the human body allow him to return to the forms of distortion that occur in individual life and social interactions (Rapport 2016). 3 These three artists are considered to belong to conceptual or performance art. 4 For example, Tintoretto, Giacometti, Wols, Masson, Calder, Lapoujade, and Rebeyrolle. 5 For example, Sartre uses the turnstile motif (tourniquet) to say that Merleau-Ponty makes it his “true method” (Sartre 1965). 6 French Flaubert scholars have questioned the documents on which Sartre relied and have pointed out and criticised inventions, even fictitious facts and free adaptations that alter the meaning of the original texts (Bruneau 1976, 230). 7 Point of no-return. 8 The term brings together the different names used at the beginning of these artistic practices (­happenings, environments, events, performances) and militates for a theatre that is transformed by them. 9 The capital lettering is the only one used by the artist. 10 Typography and layout used by Lozano.

References Braxton, M. 2018. ‘“A weapon to change modern reality”: Action and agitation in on Kawara’s Thanatophanies, 1955-1956’, October 163: 102–130. Bruneau, J. 1976. ‘L’intervention’, In Langages de Flaubert, actes du colloque de London (Canada). Paris: Minard. Duras, M. 2019. Me & Other Writing. (O. Baes and E. Ramadan, trans.). St Louis, MO: Dorothy Books Kaprow, A. 1993. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kelley, J. 2004. Childsplay: The Art of Allan Caprow. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kirby, M. 1965. Happenings: an Illustrated Anthology. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Lapoujade, R. 1956. Une peinture existentialiste. Les Lettres nouvelles 37–4. Lee, P. 2004. Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lehrer-Graiwer, S. 2014. Lee Lozano, Dropout Piece. London: Afterall Books One Work. Leiris, M. 1988. ‘Preface’, In J-P. Sartre (Ed), Baudelaire (pp. 11–16). Paris: Gallimard (original work ­published 1947). Lozano, L. 2009. Lee Lozano: Notebooks 1967-70. New York: Primary Information. Lozano, L. 2018. Private Book n°5. New York: Karma. Osborne, P. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso. Rapport, N. 2016. Distortion and Love: an Anthropological Reading of the Art and Life of Stanley Spencer. London: Routledge. Sansi, R. 2014. Art, Anthropology and the Gift. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Sartre, J-P. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. (H. E. Barnes, trans.). New York: Philosophical Library. Sartre, J-P. 1964. The Words. (B. Frechtman, trans.). New York: George Braziller (original work published 1964). Sartre, J-P. 1965. Situation IV. (B. Fleisher, trans.). London: Hamish Hamilton.

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Catherine Beaugrand Sartre, J-P. 1968. Search for a Method. (H.E. Barnes, trans.). New York: Alfred. A. Knopf (original work published 1960). Sartre, J-P. 1976a. ‘Critique of dialectical reason’, In vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles. (A. Sheridan-Smith, trans.). London: Verso (original work published 1960). Sartre, J-P. 1976b. Situations X, politique et Autobiographie. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, J-P. 1983. Carnets de la drôle de guerre. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, J-P. 1993. The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, vol. I–V. (C. Cosman, trans.). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press (original work published 1971–1972). Sartre, J-P. 2011. Essays in Aesthetics. (W. Baskin, trans.). New York: Philosophical Library. Sartre, J-P. 2020. Nausea. (R. Baldick, trans.). London: Penguin Classics (original work published 1938). Schechner, R. 2003. Performance Theory. London: Routledge Classics (original work published 1988). Woo, J.-A. 2010. ‘On Kawara’s “Date Paintings”: Series of horror and boredom’, Art Journal 69(3): 62–72.

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26 VOLUMOLOGY AS EXISTENTIAL ANTHROPOLOGY Albert Piette

As was said in the general introduction, the uniqueness of existents and their way of being in time are, almost by definition, points of reference and themes favoured by philosophies of existence. But from an empirical and methodological point of view, is it so obvious to observe and describe an individual in his details if he is also considered a “being-ahead-of-oneself-already-being-inthe-world” (Heidegger 2010, 192), sometimes a “non-being” (p. 176) in “a mode of groundless floating” (p. 177), or in his “subservience to others” (p. 126), especially if it is recommended not to look at “present ‘attributes’ of an objectively present being which has such and such an ‘outward appearance’” (p. 42)? Likewise, is there really an invitation to look at a human being when the existent is rejected as “a stable substance which rests in itself ” and presented as “a perpetual disequilibrium, a wrenching away from itself with all its body” (Sartre 1963, 151), “always outside of himself […] in projecting and losing himself beyond himself ” (Sartre 2007, 52)? When Sartre adds that “my intimate discovery of myself is at the same time a revelation of the other as a freedom that confronts my own” and that this means we discover “a world that we may call ‘intersubjectivity’” (pp. 41–42),1 are we also led to watch not only one human being in his radical singularity, but also at the same time those that surround him, that is to say relations in a situation and a historical context? Likewise, is it not difficult—maybe even illegitimate—to look at an individual who is not understood as a “real unity” but always “indivisibly demolished and remade by the course of time” (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 255), whose body “is not where it is, nor what it is” (p. 229)? Finally, is it relevant to observe and describe an individual when it is thought that seeing “a nose, eyes, a forehead, a chin” is reductive and that “the best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes” (Levinas 1982, 85)? Starting from these ideas, there is a constant risk of bypassing the entity himself, which each existent constitutes, of not really looking at him, not wanting to look at him or looking at him alongside others, almost swallowed up by his contextual situation. Though one sometimes gets close to him, one immediately turns away.2 For the social sciences, it was almost easy to retain this hesitation especially, to rush into it, finding themes that were intrinsic to them: for example, Sartrean intersubjectivity, Levinasian responsibility towards others or the Heideggerian dwelling. It is to avoid these difficulties that I will view an individual as a distinct entity, with a clear, firm and constant edge.3 This is the point of departure of my reasoning, based on which I will offer a conceptual solution making possible a detailed look at each human being, without going DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-30

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beyond that individual. Such a way of looking could be a radical aim of existential anthropology that would be specific to it: the human existent, as a singular unity, in his structure as an entity, and not primarily as a being in the world with others. Such an anthropology would pursue its objective by positioning itself as a critic of, and alternative to, the social sciences and ethnographic methodology.4 The question of this chapter can be formulated in this way: how does a human being—who lives with others in an intersubjective world, in the process of projecting himself in time, who always seems to be overflowing himself, even wrenching away from himself—­ succeed in holding together, in maintaining himself, in being held together? There is no moral or anatomic connotation in these verbs. I posit them as a necessity of existence. The notion of the volume of being will serve as my guiding thread. It will be associated with a set of characteristics, which I will call “existentials”.

Focus on the existent as a volume of being With its lexical field, the notion of volume presents a set of important heuristic points.5 In geometry, “volume” designates a three-dimensional figure, with a container and contents, that is to say a depth and a certain consistency. Likewise, a human entity conceived as a volume of being presents himself with his boundary perceptible by others. That which is considered the volume of being is nevertheless not the living organism. Though rooted in the organism’s boundaries, it does not include the lungs, heart or muscles, nor viruses or bacteria, but rather a set of components, those that are of interest to the human and social sciences: actions, gestures, words, emotions, moods, thoughts, sensations, memories, social roles, social or cultural markers and distinctive stylistic traits. These components constituting the volume of being have the possibility of different expressions and contents (for more details, Piette 2019). On the one hand, the idea of volume, thus conceived, helps focus attention directly on the empirical unit constituted by a human being in his entirety, separate and detached like a figure from its contextual background. And on the other hand, presenting and describing an individual as such a volume of being implies integrating, at every moment, these various components as interlinked,6 without getting rid of the volumic entirety; some of them are often subjects of fragmented analyses according to various research themes. In that case, the existential argument for looking at a human entity is not just the fact that this entity is irreducible to society because of his freedom, subjectivity, interiority or moral autonomy. It is the entity in his volume that becomes primary, something that is not associated only with a role, activity, experience or emotion. It is a matter of favouring an existentism7 that specifically proposes to look at a human existent as a volume of being, frontally and without any detour. In anthropology, the phenomenological reduction primarily consists of a “practical relativism” ( Jackson 1996, 10; Throop 2018), a kind of suspension of prejudices to better discover the wide range of social and cultural situations as they are experienced by individuals, giving a lot of weight to contexts of description and analysis. Conversely, the existential reduction consists in extricating the individual from all that surrounds him, that is to say from other people, from objects, from the situation in general.8 This situation becomes as if blurred, in order to favour a radical astonishment at the human entity in himself, and at what constitutes him. It then becomes almost astonishing to (re)discover a human existent as a unity with a certain continuity and with his decipherable singularity. That entity imposes himself on the observer who stands before him and is independent of him. This is not to say that a human being is a thing. He not only moves (this is obvious) but also has a certain constancy, and this movement, as we will see, is not a movement outside of the entity. The question outlined above becomes more 266

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specific: how can a human entity, who is an open, evolving system, remain this volume of being? I do not tautologically answer that he is in relation, in intersubjectivity, in excess or in separation, but I wonder how such a “problematic” being manages to retain a certain singularity and continue. What are the conditions—not biological or organic, but existential—of this singularity and this stability, without which a human being would not exist? They answer Blumenberg’s question: “how is man only able to exist?” (Blumenberg (2011, 214).

Existentials as a way of structuring the volume of being I would say that these conditions are “existentials”. An “existential” is here freely defined as a characteristic intrinsic to each human existent. Each existential corresponds to a specific type of structuring of the volume of being, and with a mode of articulation between his components. It is possible to say that through their reciprocal dynamic, these existentials form an “existential system”—even if this expression might appear paradoxical.9 It is indeed together that they enable the entity that the volume constitutes to maintain himself as such in his social life. It is also together that their heuristic force must be considered, with the aim of urging the eyes to stop on one human being, to follow him in the course of moments, to describe him in his detail, based on the most precise methods possible.10 With a view to clarity, I am choosing to focus my presentation on these conceptual tools,11 and to occasionally refer to endnotes. The first existential is “relateity”, posited in contrast with relation. I link it to relatum, the supine of the Latin verb referre, which means returning towards oneself, carrying a thing to the point from which it departed. While the notion of relation conceives actions with and towards other individuals, relateity specifically attempts to conceive what it means to “hold together” as an entity, with the elements that constitute it, when it is also “in relation”. Contrary to biological and anatomical parts that can be removed, exchanged or given, the components in question here are not themselves separable from the volume, neither as container (the capacity for memory, action or emotion), nor as contents (memories, types of actions, of emotions). Depending on the situation, they are of course activated or not, able to remain either in a potential state or buried. What may seem obvious deserves to be thought through firmly, with its consequences. No one can observe an action, emotion or gesture circulating outside of its entity. Each of these is of its volume, is attached to it, and stays there, no matter what echoes or traces an act allows and leaves in other volumes. A volume of being is also different from social systems. Because unlike the parts of these (individuals, various objects), which are mobile and separable from the social system, an action, gesture or emotion, as components of the volume, have no objective autonomy. The volume of being is therefore a structure—let us say a universal one—that does not allow his components to leave (they are retained in it), but only to express themselves and to succeed one another. Thus, a volume cannot literally exchange an emotion with another volume.12 Therefore, when a volume of being does, feels or says, he also shows that his actions, feelings or words are attached to himself, as if retained by the entity. This applies just as much, and according to the same principle, to the selfish, timorous or modest as to the altruistic, powerful or open to change, influences and emotions. This is why in a certain way, relateity tightens the volume, since as soon as he does, feels or says, the acts are retained, not escaping him. In short, it is difficult to separate actions, experiences and emotions from the volumes of being that carry them, with their other characteristics. Making them come out of the volume—“dividualising” them, as often happens in descriptions that aim at an element in particular by extracting it from the entity—means placing or re-placing the entity itself in the background.13 267

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Thus conceived, relateity is a form of intrinsic attenuation of relational movements between volumes of being. But this does not imply that there is not a kind of permeability between them and with what is happening. In fact, words and actions, even if they do not escape the volume of being, are not without effects on himself or others. This is where lessereity, as capacity for detachment, enables new adjustments.14 Linked with relateity, it is the second existential. It is a diffuse detachment, not an intentional or deliberate one, as in Goffman’s interactionism, according to which distance from a role remains a role that either is addressed to others or—if it causes embarrassment—needs to be managed in interactions (Goffman 1974, Chapters 7 and 10). Based on the particularities of the volume of being, with variable intensities and impacts, lessereity makes it possible to filter, to forget, to not (or no longer) think about something, to not be conscious or lucid, to be present with a certain absence, to habituate oneself and thus to soften the impact of these traces. With its various expressions—which, at almost every moment, are possible to observe (but cannot be further explored here)—lessereity regulates the impacts of actions, emotions or thoughts. Lessereity can be understood as an operational principle of the entity himself, because he is an entity, a separate unity, and cannot be otherwise, no matter what he does and thinks. This being the case, lessereity is an existential that protects the volume of being and his singularity.15 It is not a way of closing the volume in the strict sense, but to contain his components in the face of what happens. A new question follows: below the inescapability of the entity’s components and their regulation by lessereity, how are they linked within him? An answer can be found in density and consistency. Both are characterised by specific modes of articulations between components. The density of a volume of being—the third existential—operates according to two registers: on the one hand according to the degrees of intensity and weight of his components, regulated by lessereity and generating a volume-filling effect that varies in strength; on the other hand according to the number of components, with their links in the volume of being, when they are used simultaneously at a given moment of presence (an action, thought, mood, emotion, word, social role, sociocultural markers etc.). The components of the volume of being thus find themselves in different, more or less “tightening” forms of connection. This is particularly the case when a given component has another component for “direction”: for example, thought, speech, emotions and feelings are directed at the action in progress; consciousness takes as its explicit object a particular gesture, role, social determinant or emotion; likewise, it is possible and also very characteristic that thoughts are embedded in one another, something that is particularly specific to human beings (Dehaene 2014). Whereas an intensely sharp consciousness of an unfolding action can complicate its development, consciousness and language explicitly directed at the entity himself enable a certain sentiment of self and continuity, with various feelings and at different intensities.16 In that case, it is a kind of looping thought within the volume himself about himself. Consciousness then contributes to a potential “tightening” effect in the volume of being, rather than to a form of “decompression” as Sartre would say (1956, 112). When the volume of being is frequently without any consciousness or thought of his action, connections between his components break up, but the volume has his own way of relaxing with his own distinctive stylistic traits—what tightens him in reality, as will be shown below. For the observer, this presupposes entering into the details of what he sees and what is experienced. Between the components, a connection of generation is particularly clear when a desire or thought triggers an action that itself creates an emotion and so on. Whereas wandering thoughts can lighten an action, parallel memories or emotions can intensify and disrupt its development, creating tensions that are felt to varying degrees. It is these cushions, tensions and feelings that maintain connections within the volume of being. Contradictory contents of certain 268

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components, for example between values, a new role and a habit, can also generate experiences and feelings in the mode of division or contradiction. As a result, the volume of being is not necessarily a unit of coherence, but typically, this does not prevent tense links between his components. Between these, there is also the possibility of a relationship of actualisation when a certain action, statement or gesture actualises (uses or expresses) knowledge, know-how or a role—these being able to give a foundation or particular strength to the entire presence of the individual concerned. It is therefore important to look closely at these different forms of connection accumulating in the volume himself at moment t, and at the same time to follow the variable hierarchisation of the components, with their intensity, in the course of moments, without immediately giving theoretical weight to this or that component or systematic connection. In any case, density implies a strong descriptive requirement: not reducing to one component or another (for example, experiences, action, cognition and the social); for each moment t, always adding other components that are activated, or in any case perceptible, and thus obtaining details on nuances of presence in order not to lose the thickness of the moment. The fourth existential corresponds to another particular form of connection between components of a volume of being. I call it “consistency” because it is the strong marker of singularity. A moment of presence is made up of actions, gestures, emotions and thoughts, but their emergence, realisation, expression, density and effect of lessereity are marked and permeated by stylistic traits that singularise them.17 They are specific forms proper to an individual, and are involuntary, durable, more or less easily pinpointable, and are not the result of social class membership or cultural codes.18 These stylistic traits concern different registers: gestural, linguistic or cognitive modalities, mimicking, corporeal and psychological expressions (“character” and “temperament”, to which can belong, for example, desires, wishes, ways of feeling, of being moved).19 In what constitutes “style”, one can add habits that are proper to a volume (like doing something at a certain time) and his ways of performing them, as well as memory and recollections since they are proper to each individual. Relateity, as a movement of attachment of the components to the volume, has thus its own modalities and that reinforces it. For the observer, not “seeing”, not “wanting to see” these stylistic determinants can be an effect of lessereity, as well as increase the importance of contexts. In this whole, all of whose traits of course do not actualise at the same time, there are “localised” stylistic traits like the form of a smile or of the performance of a certain gesture, and there are also transversal traits like those of temperament or character, which run through several components of the volume of being: actions, thoughts, moods, emotions. It is not a matter of pinpointing—as is often the case in many psychological theories of the personality, based on standardised observation protocols—predefined traits and establishing “types”,20 but rather seeing, in the lives of existence, how modes of being, “tendencies”, are expressed and re-expressed in relatively stabilised ways, without being fixed, and especially with singular expressions, specific to each individual. It is not just saying that this or that person seems ill-tempered or cheerful, it is saying, when he is so, that he is ill-tempered or cheerful with his own ways of being. It is all of these stylistic traits—which are not solely psychological—with their permeation modes, that I link to a form of consistency.21 It is a way of “maintaining” the volume by linking the manifestation of his acts with certain recurrent forms. Out of all of that, emerge gradients in the singular dimension of the style of a volume: habits, desires, wishes, temperaments or characters, recollections, right down to the specific forms of deployment of these elements. Therefore, describing a volume of being is not solely to consider separate and differentiated beings. It is necessarily to give ourselves the means to pinpoint, at every moment, the details of 269

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the stylistic traits infiltrating actions, gestures and emotions. Thus, it implies pushing the case study to the extreme, since it is a matter of observing and describing X as X, in the continuity of moments, and not as an example or representative of an activity, experience, group or event. Very often, in ethnographic descriptions, including portraits, there is, with a few exceptions, an almost natural erasing of singularising stylistic details that imply a precise level of detail. These are what make X non-interchangeable with Y. One thus understands that it is not enough to supplement social roles with emotions and moods that can be just as typical and general as roles, nor therefore is it enough to take a volume of being in the “singular”, alone, separately. One must also look into the details of his entirety so that he appears “singular”, this time in the sense of non-interchangeable,22 at every instant in the course of moments, with the details that make up his exclusivity, in the activation of what is permanent or almost permanent in him. The volume of being changes, is exposed to punctual perceptions and impacts, to various external events and to emotions with medium and long-term effects of varying strength.23 He is influenced, he imitates. What I mean to say is that these external elements, their traces, even if they are lessened—but not removed—generate changes that are, however, also more or less covered, integrated, by the continuity of the volume. This is the fifth existential. Several points can be raised starting from a focus on the microtemporality of an existent, that is to say on following his moments.24 First, from one moment to another, alterations of certain elements of a volume of being do not necessarily entail the alteration of all other parts. A human being does this, then does that, shifts from a concentrated attitude to a distracted mode, from acceptance of what is happening to a decision to change, from one emotion to another and so on. But it is not the whole volume of being that is concerned every time. Other aspects of him are not affected by these “shifts”, which are furthermore reversible. Superficial changes, on the face for example, with traits that are mobile and others that are less so, seem to constantly rebalance. The observer can therefore look at which components are changing, either returning or not returning to their previous state, and which of them are not changing, seeming to remain constant, from moment to moment. From one movement to another, there is also something like a transition leaving a trace of the presence of the previous action and anticipating the next one. These binding details can be not only gestures but also thoughts, memories, states of mind from other moments, even a vague feeling of existing or being “oneself ”, maintaining a sort of thread with a style specific to each individual.25 In the course of moments, there is an overlapping of parts that remain the same, as if holding or retaining the volume during his shifts. But there is more than an overlapping. From moment to moment, continuity manifests itself in the form of permanences, as shown above. It then becomes apparent that although the volume is not simply a juxtaposition of his components, neither is he simply a succession of moments of presence with successive roles and identities, made up of their different components and their different kinds of expressiveness. He is precisely a volume with his continuity designating not solely an uninterrupted duration, but precisely a certain constancy. In the course of moments, even if the volume of being also receives impacts and reverberations from what he sees, hears and feels, many elements remain unaffected, like character traits, traits of corporeal style, as well as most knowledge, specific ways of interpreting or making sense, skills and values. Not only do these elements, creating a kind of consistency, infuse the act of the moment, its performance and reception, but they also infiltrate, absorb or determine the traces of what happens, in particular according to the specificity of temperament and character traits. Usually, the trace buries itself in the content of this or that component, which will barely be altered. Installed changes sometimes become perceptible after a long time. Furthermore, some components, like knowledge or memories, are more variable than others, whose stock increases or diminishes, alters on the 270

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surface, but in a whole specific to each individual, more or less buried and ready to be partially revived. This results in few alterations relative to what the volume of being is confronted with at every moment: this is the whole process of lessereity and of specific appropriation in a volume of being. But for all that, in the volume of being, as I have said, stylistic traits that are actualised and manifested, that thus continue, are not always the same ones in all moments, even when they are indicating a certain temperament. One could ask oneself: which ones, at which moments, with which components and in what combinations? The constancy of these traits is not “perfect”, leaving an uncertainty—though limited—in their expression. From moment to moment, the continuity of the style is not an uninterrupted monocontinuity or simply a homogeneity. A trait can be interrupted, or return later, followed in the meantime by other traits that are just as unique. In reality, it is a polyconstancy. It should also be noted that the possible contradictions between the contents and components of a volume of being, or the inconsistencies between moments of presence, can be accompanied by the same stylistic traits and thus be determined by characters or temperaments. This does not preclude an existent from no longer recognising himself or perceiving himself in discontinuity with himself. Is this not part of his character, his mode of being, which, moreover, permeates his way of no longer recognising himself? In this case, in fact, stylistic elements as an existential are not only a way to link components of a volume of being at moment t. They are also a way to link a volume’s moments, showing his attachment to himself from one moment to another. *** A volume of being who retains himself, who is retained in his existence: is this not a line of thought that Levinas pursued, but did not continue, preferring to be concerned, in his ethical aim, by the other, by his “mystery” and his “excess?”26 He had furthermore used a very specific lexicon, describing a form of enclosing of the existent, which “gathers itself together”, “with a base” (Levinas 1978, 71), which “cannot detach itself from itself ”, in “an enchainment to itself ” (Levinas 1987, 55), no matter what it does. This gathering of the human subject “riveted” to himself is “the indissoluble unity between the existent and its work of existing” (p. 43). And Levinas adds: “My being doubles with a having; I am encumbered by myself ” (p. 56). This is what this chapter aimed to translate, by providing a conceptual clarification and an empirical possibility. These reflections by Levinas show that in the philosophies of existence, one can find propositions that have an affinity with the volume of being, including with his closing, but they do not pursue the possible heuristicity of these, as if at a certain point they let go of the entity himself and the possibility of looking at him or describing him, reinserting the world and other people, making him withdraw to the background. It is probably not insignificant to consider that “theorising” and “looking at” a human being, going as far as possible into the details, implies empirically rediscovering the relevance of the lexicon of unity, consistency and continuity, which much of existentialism and anthropology have set aside. The work of existential anthropology is to multiply these observations that can enable comparisons that explore both structuring modalities and the combinations of components in different volumes of being in the course of moments. It cannot be separated from the question that should motivate all of anthropology: “What is a human being?”. Such is the clear niche of an existential anthropology, with an object and a specific method. In many American universities, anthropology includes four main fields determining research and teaching: archaeology, linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, and social or cultural anthropology. From the perspective developed here, existential anthropology would be a fifth field. 271

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Notes 1 Even if intersubjectivity is always complicated in the Sartrean discourse (see Introduction to the “­Section 2”). 2 This point is emphasised in Catherine Beaugrand’s chapter, commenting on Sartre’s existential biographies. 3 “Entity” is defined as “a thing with distinct and independent existence” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary 2011). It is therefore a matter of viewing an individual in his objective reality, without dissolving him in the cultural representations that can disqualify the human being as an entity. They constitute only one component of the entity among others. 4 Michael Jackson advocates a more moderate conception of existential anthropology, which he presents as “an anthropology whose object is to understand […] the eventualities, exigencies and experiences of social Being” ( Jackson 2005, xxviii). Michael Lambek sees it as a “frame” that is not exclusive of others, and not a distinct field (Lambek 2015, 72). See also Poletti (“Section 2”). Basically, despite nuancing the sociological weight, the relational and intersubjective are kept at the centre of their focus. 5 At the same time, it avoids the confusion that Spiro, and later Bloch, noted particularly in the anthropologists’ lexicon, using various terms: me, self, person, agent etc. (Spiro 1987; Bloch 2012). 6 Heiss has proposed the potentially similar notion of “gestalt” (this section). There exist various meanings of the idea of the human being as a totality (including those of Plessner, Mauss and Sartre). See a critique in Piette (2019). 7 This is the word I have chosen, as if one were lacking to designate this focus on the existent, just as Markus Gabriel uses “neo-existentialism” to reflect on the body-mind relationship avoided by the ­existentialist tradition (Gabriel 2018, 69). 8 Note that in this debate, Merleau-Ponty did not consider suspending “intentional threads which attach us to the world”, but rather bringing them to “our notice” (Merleau-Ponty 2005, XV). On Husserl’s thought linked with these empirical consequences (Piette 2019, 81–92). 9 I am thinking of the critique of the notion of the system, which pervades the work of Kierkegaard (2009, 100–106). 10 See Gwendoline Torterat’s chapter on filmed following, and on interviews clarifying mental states. Life stories—far from the literal continuity of situations—cannot be a sufficient methodology to obtain the details sought in this volumographic perspective. See also Kneubühler and Piette (2019). On explicitation interview methods, see for example Petitmengin (2006). 11 The conceptualisation of these existentials results from earlier gradual observations (Piette 2017). 12 See Hollan’s reference to the Jamesian idea of “absolute insulation” (this volume, “Section 3”). 13 The lexicon of the “outside of ” or “beyond” oneself is very present in the thought of both Sartre and Deleuze. In anthropology, the thought behind the theory of dividuals typically concerns the separability of components and their exiting outside the human entity. 14 For many years, I have been stressing this point, which is entirely unconsidered in descriptions and theories (Piette 1992). See more recent works: Harrison (2008), Candea et al. (2015), Piette (2015), O’Neill (2017). 15 Lessereity is not something to be overcome so that an individual can appropriate himself in a more “­authentic” way or realise the possibility of being “himself ”, to use Heidegger’s words (Heidegger 2010, 126 ff.). 16 It is particularly on the basis of this part of the volume that one can understand the “existential ­narratives” analysed at a more macrological level by Poletti (“Section 2”). 17 On this point, it is possible to draw a parallel with the definition of the individual as a “symbolic ­bubble”, proposed by Rapport (2003, 131–152). 18 Owing to lack of space, this chapter does not concern sociocultural markers and those of social roles, which are also present in a volume of being, among the other components. On the former, see the ­critiques by Faubion (2018) and Wardle (2018). 19 Anthropologists obviously recognise the particularities of each individual, particularly psychological ones, but usually posit them in relation to a broader scale, that of the cultural microcosm whose impact is sought—something that dilutes the objective of detailed description of the singularity, as understood here. For example, according to different modalities and different moments in the history of anthropology: Sapir (1949, 140–171), Nadel (1951, 93–95), Levy and Hollan (1998). 20 On this discussion, see for example Shweder (2005).

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Volumology as existential anthropology 21 This stabilisation is of course more or less firm depending on age, and this is the whole issue of observations of continuities. 22 On this subject, see the chapter by Marine Kneubühler. 23 This point is essential in the anthropology of M. Jackson enlisting Arendt against the possibility of speaking of stable essences ( Jackson 2005, XIV). 24 The chapter by Catherine Beaugrand shows that Sartre did not favour a “continuist” conception of time, which is that of instants or moments following each other. 25 On this subject in particular, see the synthetical and critical article of Fuchs (2016). 26 On the importance of Levinas in anthropology, see Rapport (2015).

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Albert Piette Piette, A. 1992. Le mode mineur de la réalité. Paradoxes et photographies en anthropologie. Leuven: Peeters. Piette, A. 2015. Existence in the Details: Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Piette, A. 2017. Le volume humain. Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau. Piette, A. 2019. Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being. London: Wiley & Iste. Rapport, N. 2003. I Am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power. London: Routledge. Rapport, N. 2015. ‘Anthropology through Levinas: Knowing the uniqueness of Ego and the mystery of otherness’, Current Anthropology 56(2): 256–276. Sapir, E. 1949. Culture, Language and Personality. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sartre, J.-P. 1956. Being and Nothingness. (H.E. Barnes, trans.). New York: Philosophical Library (original work published 1943). Sartre, J.-P. 1963. Search for a Method. (H.E. Barnes, trans.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Sartre, J.-P. 2007. Existentialism Is a Humanism. (C. Macomber, trans.). London: Yale University Press (original work published 1945). Shweder, R. A. 2005. Toward a science of the person: paradigm change in psychological models of human nature. Lecture delivered on 11 June 2005 at Columbia University. Spiro, M. 1987. Culture and Human Nature. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Throop, J. 2018. ‘Being open to the world’, Hau 8(1–2): 197–210. Wardle, H. 2018. ‘‘Characters… stamped upon the mind’. On the a priority of character in the Caribbean everyday’, Social Anthropology 26(3): 314–329.

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27 AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH TO STUDYING HUMAN EXISTENCE Jan Patrick Heiss

While socio-cultural anthropologists interact with their field subjects to draw general conclusions about socio-cultural institutions and processes, existential anthropologists interact with their field subjects to find out about their existence. The existence of human beings is, however, a more intricate concept than the existence of substances that exist as dead matter. When we speak of the existence of human beings, we think of them as living their lives, accumulating experiences, engaging in work or falling in love. There is a “human way” to exist. Each human being, however, lives his or her own life. Human existence is always an individual existence. The most fundamental object of existential anthropology would therefore be an individual in their personal life. The existential anthropologist researching a field subject’s life would thus ask “Who is she/he, what life does she/he lead or what is it like to be him/her?”. The anthropologist’s research results would provide the ground for more far-reaching ­questions. Existential anthropology needs to ask how we should understand human existence in theoretical terms, how we might research human existence methodologically, how human ­existence differs between social milieus, societies and epochs, what the relationship is between ­human existence and society, and what the benefits of studying human existence might be for the discipline of anthropology. Anthropologist Michael Jackson has, however, issued a warning against the feasibility of “systematic analyses of the struggle of existence” (2005, xxv) and his argument, as I understand it, also pertains to the idea of researching an individual’s existence. In his foundational book “­Existential anthropology”, Michael Jackson depicts human life as a struggle for existence. Human beings strive for recognition, health, love, a good life, a self-determined life. However, circumstances are often not conducive to these goals and this results in a “struggle for existence”. He writes (2005, xxv): Methodologically, it is difficult, if not impossible to produce systematic analyses of the struggle of existence in the way one might produce, for example, analyses of the ­Darwinian struggle for survival or the ‘lineage system’ of the Tallensi. The reason is that we can never grasp intellectually all the variables at play in any action or all the repercussions that follow from it, partly because they are so variously and intricately nuanced, and partly because they are embedded in singular biographies as well as social histories. DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-31

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Jackson seems to refer to the fact that every person’s life, even every situation in a person’s life, is particular and that understanding human action results in a sheer endless act of interpretation. I have no doubt he is right about this. Jackson’s warning can thus also be understood to be against a project to study an individual’s existence. In spite of these warnings, I nevertheless intend to show how an anthropological analysis of human existence is possible and fruitful. I propose to study an individual’s existence by inferring the main structures of their existence. This more structural perspective admittedly implies leaving out quite a lot of detail, but it also offers new perspectives. The anthropologist might now be able to compare an individual’s existence with other cases to find out about a shared commonality between different individuals’ existences. This, I would argue, would even be necessary if one wants to understand the uniqueness of an individual’s existence as opposed to the shared commonality that is inherent to any individual existence. At the same time, such a study would be an important first step, as I see it, in researching the more far-reaching questions I have raised above. It should be noted that Michael Jackson (2015, 2016) has advanced the field of existential anthropology in many more ways than this, and other authors, most notably Nigel Rapport (1993, 1997, 2003) and Albert Piette (2015, 2019), have done this as well. Unfortunately, due to space constraints of this chapter, I am not able to discuss their work and the relationship between my proposal and their ideas. However, there are significant areas in which their work overlaps with mine and in which their work and mine complement each other.

Analysing individual existence I will now outline my approach to studying human existence. Trivial as it may sound, the idea that each individual lives a life is at the centre of this approach. Living a life is conceptualised as follows: individuals have a gestalt, i.e., they are wholes with their own structure, and their characteristics are systematically integrated. When they come into a new situation, an interplay between the individual and the situation evolves from which the individuals’ inner and outer behaviour emerges (cf. Joas 1996, 236). As individuals are always in a situation, they always behave in a certain way. Over a lifetime, individuals thus are involved in a continuous stream of behaviour across a sequence of situations. To give an account of this is to give an account of their existence. However, an existential anthropologist would also uncover the underlying structures that characterise an individual’s existence. Two factors deserve particular attention in this context, i.e. the individual and their daily life. As individuals experience the same or similar situations time and again, their behaviour tends to become repetitive. Daily life is characterised by variations of these repetitive structures. An existential anthropologist would thus abstract from their observations the structures of a field subject’s daily life. Furthermore, they would infer the individual’s gestalt from their observations as the individual’s gestalt cannot be observed directly but manifests itself in the individual’s behaviour. Taking these considerations as a guideline, I propose that a study of human existence should explore individual existence in three analytical steps. It would roughly describe the diverse contexts of a field subject’s daily life, analyse the structures of his or her daily life and determine his or her gestalt. I will exemplify this approach by drawing on my study “Musa – An Essay or Experiment in the Anthropology of the Individual” (2015a). Musa1 is a Hausa peasant from Niger and the major part of the book intends to give an empirical account of his existence and analyse it. To set the stage, I will briefly introduce the reader to the field site and to Musa’s living circumstances. 276

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Furthermore, I will expand on the methodological aspects of such an inquiry before illustrating the three steps mentioned above.

The field site Musa lives in the village of Kimoram,2 located about 150 km east of Zinder, in the Republic of Niger. It has a population of around 400 inhabitants. Most of the villagers live in mud huts, which typically house a man, his wife and some children. Their most important economic activity is field cultivation. In this community, a man owns one or several plots of land on the sand dunes around Kimoram where he sows millet and cowpeas during the rainy season. In theory at least, the man is able to feed his family with this harvest, and even sell some of it to buy necessities such as clothing. While her husband is working the fields, the wife does the cooking. She brings food to her husband in the field, the children help him to cultivate the fields and she might do this as well, although she is not obliged to. The husband provides his wife and each of his older children with a small plot of land for their own use. However, the harvest is often not sufficient for the family to sustain itself for more than three to seven months per year. Some men manage to raise money in the local area. Others need to travel further afield. Young men, in particular, leave the village during the slack period when there is no work in the fields and go to Nigerian cities. They roam the streets hawking bread and tea. They bring home their earnings to supplement the insufficient income from agricultural produce. When children get older, they marry and establish their own households. Initially, the son will continue to work on his father’s fields, and he and his wife are sustained by his father. The new household then slowly gains in economic independence. When the son reaches the age of perhaps 35, the father divides up his fields and the son then cultivates his share of land independently. All villagers are Muslim. The village is ruled by the canton chief who resides in a town about 12 km from Kimoram. His main duties with respect to the village are tax collection and jurisprudence. At the time of research, there were no schools or government employees in the village.

Introducing Musa When I first met Musa in 2006, he was approximately 37 years old. Shortly after my arrival, he married his second wife Mariama. As a consequence of this, his first wife left him. His father – one of the two Imams in Kimoram – who was around 70 years old, had two wives and lived on his own compound. With one of them he had two small children. Also living on the compound were three teenagers named Babangida, Awalu and Ali, who were Musa’s nephews and his father’s grandchildren. Although Musa had his own compound, economically he was fully integrated into his father’s household. He worked his father’s fields, and the field produce was stored in a granary belonging to his father, who controlled the contents. After going to Nigeria during the slack period, Musa would hand over to his father the earnings he had brought home. Since his father was too old to work the fields and his teenaged nephews too young to be efficient workers, it was primarily Musa who carried the burden of providing for both households. But it was more than one person could handle and so both households suffered from a shortage of food. By 2009, Mariama had given birth to two children. In the same year, his father made the decision to divide up the fields. Musa now had his own household, fields and granary, and he controlled his own harvest and the income he earned from labour migration. Furthermore, Musa integrated Ali from his father’s household into his own. Babangida and Awalu stayed with his father, and they were now old enough to work his fields under his supervision. 277

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Methods Research that is carried out according to the three steps mentioned above needs to adopt methods that enable the researcher to focus on an individual and to accompany them across a large variety of settings over a longer period of time. The main research method used would thus have to be participant observation in the form of shadowing. Correspondingly, Musa and I spent nine months living and working together. To be more specific, these nine months were divided between four field visits. I made three field visits to Niger ( July-October 2006, July-September 2007, July-September 2009) and one to Nigeria (Nimari, 3 Plateau State, December 2010 to February 2011) where Musa and many villagers from Kimoram spent the slack period. I would like to elaborate on this research method. Participant observation means that the researcher spends a longer period among the people he or she works with. Participant observers try to integrate themselves into their field subjects’ social life to enhance their understanding. Furthermore, in a place like Kimoram, the villagers expect the researcher to want to integrate and become part of their everyday life. Participant observation then develops towards greater immersion into the field subjects’ daily life and shifts from “being among the field subjects” to “being with them”. Correspondingly, the villagers gave me a hut, I set up my own “household” there, spent my days in the fields, participated in village assemblies and joined in discussions at the borehole and in the village lanes. Participant observers who study society or culture usually divide their time and attention between several field subjects to collect the data they need for generalisation. This is different if the researcher studies an individual. In this case, participant observation turns into what is known as “shadowing” (Czarniawska 2007). In shadowing, the researcher observes a field subject throughout the day or, at least, in all situations he is permitted to participate in. Shadowing in a context like Kimoram means participating in a specific field subject’s daily life and developing a relationship that qualifies as “being part of that person’s life”. I shadowed Musa in this way. Over the nine months I stayed in the field, I spent most of the time with him. In the village, I saw Musa every day. Sometimes we spent whole days together, sometimes a large part of them, sometimes a small part. We greeted each other in the morning, we went to the fields together, we spent the afternoons together and collectively reflected on the issues of daily life. Even if we did not see each other for part of the day, we would later tell each other what had happened in the meantime. Shadowing Musa or “being with Musa” was thus a particularly dense form of participant observation. I will now characterise my relationship with Musa in greater detail to further specify the method of shadowing when it is used to explore someone’s existence. First, the relationship could not be agreed upon by both sides as if it was a contract or based on informed consent. The close and confidential relationship between Musa and myself − I would even go as far as calling it a friendship − did not exist right from the beginning of my field stay but developed over time. We were soon discussing Musa’s economic situation and his despair, his relationship with his father, aspects of his wife’s behaviour, etc. At the same time, I discussed issues in my own life with him, such as my children’s behaviour or the loss of my father. As time went by, we got used to each other better, wanted to spend our time with each other and our mutual trust grew. To cite an example, Musa’s nephew Ali had broken his arm and his bones grew back together in the wrong position, so the local bone specialist had to break them again to realign them in the correct position. In this situation, I took Musa’s place, who was scared of suffering vicariously, and held Ali firmly while the bone specialist broke his arm again.

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Second, my relationship with Musa hinged on the precondition that our characters were compatible. Otherwise, I would have presumed that tensions would have arisen or the wish for the other to be absent would have been more likely to arise. Third, closeness or friendship are seldom purely altruistic forms of relationship. Musa and I both had more self-centred interests in the other and had to find a way to deal with these interests within the context of our relationship. For some of the villagers, what counted most was that I was a potential financial provider. This motive was not absent from the relationship between Musa and myself either. Anyway, this could hardly have been otherwise since Musa was poor and in need of financial support. So I bought millet for his and his father’s household several times. Supplementing Musa’s income was probably part of my relationship to him. At the same time, friendship in the context of “Hausa culture” means, on the one hand, companionship, trust and being sociable, and, on the other, support, including financial support. Hausa do not keep financial transactions separate from their social ties. In a way, our friendship thus comprised the reciprocal exchange of knowledge and financial support. Most of the time, I tried to downplay my interests in information in order not to make my relationship to him appear interest-driven only. At the same time, it seemed to me, Musa did the same by putting his financial expectations in the background. Fourth, my closer association with Musa not only opened up more and more spheres of his life, but it also had repercussions on my relationship with others. Thus, it slowly made my relationships with others be similar as his relationship with them. I got closely associated with his household. I was well hosted by his kinship group. Furthermore, similar to Musa’s position in the village, there was considerable distance between me and the majority of the other villagers from the northern part of Kimoram. In as much as I became identified with Musa, the problems I had with others also had repercussions on him. To cite an example, a villager had taken out a loan with me and did not pay it back. I kept paying him visits until he finally gave in. Later, he took revenge on Musa, evidently suspecting him of advising me to take a stern stance. He only delivered sandy soil to Musa who had paid him to deliver mud for his house repairs. Finally, the growing closeness to Musa brought me into an ethical dilemma. Soon after my arrival in Kimoram, Musa became the focus of my study. The fact that my relationship with Musa became closer provided me with confidential information and details of his life that were relevant to my research topic. At the same time, I was not sure if I could tell Musa what my actual aim was, because this, I supposed, might have a substantial impact on his behaviour. He might then have been inclined, for instance, to withhold information. I found myself in a dilemma. So, when I saw that my research on Musa would probably work out, I told him that my study would focus on him and his household. He did not see a problem in this new approach. I asked him if I should anonymise his name, but he rejected this idea. However, his openness did not solve my problem. When I was writing the report, I came to the point where I found that identifying some villagers would necessarily imply the identification of all others. However, I could not assume that they would agree with this. I had to finally anonymise all identities. But another question remained. To what extent could Musa imagine what the resultant book would be and what a scientific readership would be? I would have liked to discuss the book with him, explained its use to him and determine whether he agreed with it. However, the lack of money for travelling and the activities of Boko Haram in the wider region made this impossible. Hence, all I have is Musa’s willingness to be the subject of my book and I hope that I have done enough to protect his identity and those of the others involved. To sum up, researching individual human existence makes it advisable, in my view, to study individuals using a particularly dense form of participant observation and shadowing. 279

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This enables the researcher to be with the field subject and accompany him or her across a wider array of social settings. Yet, this presupposes that the researcher gets on well with the field subject, that their relationship has time to develop, and both can find a way to contain any tensions that might arise between them. Furthermore, the issue needs to be addressed of anthropologists being open about their intentions and taking care of their field subjects’ interests. I will now turn to the research results that this methodology has yielded and explore Musa’s existence in three steps.

Musa’s existence As noted above, my attempt to explore an individual’s existence would start with a rough description of their daily life.

Daily life – A rough description of contexts, activities and interactions As the rough survey of Kimoram and Musa’s living circumstances has shown, Musa shifts from situation to situation throughout the day, month and year. When he was in his home village in Niger, he would get up in the morning, interact with his family, greet the villagers on the village lane, cultivate his fields, spend the afternoon on his compound, have his evening meal with his kinsmen and spend the rest of the evening either with his kinsmen or his family. When he was in Nigeria for purposes of labour migration, he would stay in a bakery overnight, get up in the morning, interact with the other migrant labourers, hawk bread and tea in town, return to the bakery, buy lunch, have a rest until the afternoon, hawk bread and tea in town again and then return to the bakery to spend the evening with others. An analysis of Musa’s existence would therefore first involve identifying these different contexts, then describing these contexts and Musa’s behaviour in them. These descriptions thus provide the basis of the analysis of Musa’s existence. For the purpose of illustration, I will give two examples to illustrate Musa’s involvement in such contexts. The first one pertains to field cultivation (Heiss 2015a, 66–67). …, he took his weeding tool, the hauya. […] With his hauya, Musa first marked a rectangular space on his field of approximately 200 square metres. […] Musa inserted the metal blade into the ground, pushed it into the soil so that it came to a standstill under the surface. Then he pushed the hauya forward. While pushing the hauya forward, Musa had to take care that the metal blade did not enter into the soil too deeply. In its correct position, it cut off the roots of the weeds. When he reached the other side of the rectangle, Musa turned around and came back to the side from which he had departed. The second example gives a glimpse of Musa’s behaviour when he returned from the field (Heiss 2015a, 71). When Musa came back home, he was usually tired and Mariama was cooking the evening meal. The first thing he wanted to do then was to rest for a while. He told Mariama to bring him a mat and water to drink. If he was too hungry to wait until food was ready, he asked her if there was anything to eat. Mariama took some of the food which she was preparing, put it into a bowl and brought it to him. If no food was ready yet, Musa had to wait. 280

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Putting scenes like these together, we get a picture of Musa’s behaviour in the diverse contexts in which he lives his life. The same consideration would pertain to any individual.

The structures of daily life As noted above, an anthropologist would not be satisfied with just knowing what an individual does in the diverse contexts of their daily life. They would rather strive to analyse the main structures of that individual’s daily life. This implies focussing on their main activities and on their main social relationships. Among Musa’s activities field cultivation, interactions with his family and prayer would rank as activities of major structural importance because they occur frequently, are considered important by Musa himself and have many ramifications for other parts of Musa’s existence. The same consideration should be given to some of Musa’s relationships. The most important social relationships would be those with his wife, children, father, neighbours, kinsmen, fellow villagers, work mates and clients in Nigeria. Furthermore, he also had a relationship with God and with himself. To identify and study the activities and relationships of major structural importance in greater depth, the researcher needs to repeatedly observe an individual’s activities and interactions and more thoroughly than he did in the first step. For the purpose of illustration, I will shortly ­describe Musa’s relationship with his wife Mariama. Musa’s relationship with his wife is an intimate one. Intimate relations play a role in many different contexts of life and derive their complex and multi-layered character from this. I thus observed the activities and interactions between Musa and Mariama in different settings. Mariama is Musa’s fourth wife. At the time of research, Mariama and Musa had first one, then two children. From a more utilitarian point of view, Mariama was important for Musa’s standing as a mature person among the villagers, for having children and as a remedy against loneliness. Furthermore, rights and duties governed their relationship. After establishing an independent household (see above), Musa had to supply all material goods the family needed, including food, new clothes for his wife every year and he had to pay the annual taxes. Mariama was obliged to ensure that Musa felt good and was content with her, while Musa had to respect her feelings. Rights and duties established a relationship of authority between them that did, however, have its limits. Several mechanisms stabilised the authority Musa had over Mariama, among them the age difference between them. At the same time, Mariama had some strategies at her disposal to counteract Musa’s will or impose her will on him. Mariama could, for instance, reprimand Musa or ignore his instructions. Furthermore, his parents-in-law would have intervened if he had transgressed the boundaries. Both Musa and Mariama had entered into arranged marriages before. The relationship between Musa and Mariama was, however, a love marriage. Even when they were in arranged marriages, they were still in love with each other. I often experienced signs of affection and no open argument between Musa and Mariama, although Musa admitted that they did also quarrel. Nevertheless, Musa did not believe that Mariama was the only person to love in his life – “the one and only”. In his view, there could always be other women who he might love. Moreover, he thought that there were other matters in life that outweighed love and marital relationships. Observing an individual’s most important activities and social relationships in detail and repeatedly across different social settings, I was able to discern the structural grid of activities and relationships along which Musa’s life unfolds. On the basis of this, I was also able to understand how the different components of the structural grid interact. To cite a simple example, field 281

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cultivation and the relationship with Mariama interact when Mariama helps Musa to cultivate the fields, although she is not obliged to. Her help then becomes a sign of affection between them. At the same time, Musa feeds Mariama with the field produce and this has consequences for his standing as a man and responsible household head among the villagers. Moreover, their shared history interacts with Musa’s present mindset. He still feels pain when he remembers the time he was in love with Mariama when she was still married to other men and bore them children. The network of interacting activities and relationships not only gives some stability to an individual’s existence, but it also changes over time, either in response to changes in the material or social environment or in response to tensions that are inherent to it. Correspondingly, I noticed changes in Musa’s main activities and social relationships and followed the repercussions of these changes within the context of Musa’s life. I will illustrate this. Before my third stay, the Imam handed over a part of his fields to Musa. From then on, Musa was responsible for field cultivation in his own fields, he controlled his own resources and had to feed his family with the millet from his own granary. This change partly occurred in response to Musa’s age and the tension that simmered in the relationship between him and his father about economic matters. Musa had felt that the brakes were being put on him. The separation of the households transformed Musa. His own aims suddenly seemed to be within reach and seemed to depend more on his own efforts than before. He was more motivated and self-assured than before. At the same time, his new ambitions and the new responsibilities weighing down on him also made him graver. So far, I have presented Musa’s existence as if it consisted only of how he acted and interacted in different contexts. However, one major activity Musa was involved in was reflection outside interactive contexts. Reflection could revolve around a variety of topics, about his own behaviour, about politics or Islam, but his thoughts often dealt with the question of how to carry on with his major activities and relationships. I will illustrate this point. When Musa was on labour migration in Nigeria, his mobile phone enabled him to keep in touch with those at home. Mariama told him on the phone that one of their sons was suffering from rab’a, that his body had become stiff and he wasn’t able to move, he had fever and had hardly been able to breathe for about 30 minutes. Rab’a can cause child death. Musa felt sorry for Mariama since she had to deal with this all by herself. Moreover, he was worried about his son. The news about his family’s situation made him pensive and, at times, also undermined his ability to work. Although I present my approach in an abbreviated manner, its main thrust should be clear. An anthropologist describes the daily life of an individual and analyses the structural axes of their daily life in greater depth, thus unravelling their network-like character. At the same time, she or he remains attentive to structural changes in the individual’s daily life and their inner life.

Detaching the individual from his or her existence As noted above, not only do the structures of daily life deserve attention, but also the individual himself or herself. When Musa shifts from context to context throughout the day, month and year, his behaviour not only depends on the context but also on himself. He has a more enduring set of features that shape his behaviour in different contexts. When an actor weeds his field, for instance, he uses a tool, works with the plants and cultivates the field. The tool, the crops and the field are contextual features, but the individual also draws on his or her technical skills 282

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and knowledge of weeding and applies their long-term desire of feeding their family. In other contexts, other skills and desires play a role in shaping that actor’s behaviour. An account of an individual’s existence should therefore also strive to extrapolate those features of the individual that pertain to them over an extensive period of time and across several situations. I thus extrapolated (Heiss 2015a, 206–237) Musa’s most basic desires that propelled his behaviour across a wide range of settings. In a nutshell, Musa wished to be a peasant who could sustain himself, and he wanted to do economically well, be married and have many children. He had a need for social interaction and company, a desire to study Islam. He wished to become the next Imam of his village, and be recognised as a well-liked and generous person, was striving to enter paradise in the afterlife. Furthermore, I tried to identify the interests he had in others when he interacted with them, the norms that guided his behaviour, the means of power he held vis-à-vis others, the emotions he felt towards them and his social skills. The summary of Musa’s relationship with Mariama might give a rough illustration of this. At the same time, Musa had a set of values which provided conscious guidelines for his behaviour or even shaped it in many situations. Among his core values were, for instance, peacefulness, patience, reason, self-control and equanimity. I also ventured into Musa’s style of reasoning and decision-making. I thus pointed out that he was involved in a process of rationalising his life practices and that he favoured a slow mode of decision-making (cf. Heiss 2018). Finally, I tried to explain his stable and confident mood and described his self-image. However, the individual does not merely combine characteristics. The individual is a structured whole, a gestalt into which the more endurable features of the individual are integrated (cf. Piette’s notion of the volume) and which is in interaction with itself and the environment. In contrast to the field of philosophical anthropology, however, the discipline of anthropology has not yet progressed in developing an explicit theory of the individual as an integrated entity. Most anthropological work is carried out on the basis of an implicit understanding of the individual (Heiss 2015b). I thus also worked with an implicit understanding of the individual’s gestalt. Being aware of the need for a conceptualisation of the individual as an integrated whole, however, I repeatedly drew inspiration from Ernst Tugendhat’s “Egozentrizität und Mystik” (2003) in which he discusses man as a structured entity. In the course of my research and writing, I used parts of Tugendhat’s theory as a template to see the interrelatedness of some of Musa’s more permanent features in his behaviour. I will thus limit myself to illustrating the idea that Musa has a gestalt-like character by referring to a simple example, in which one of Musa’s desires, agricultural skills, his self-control and mood (cf. Tugendhat 2003, 30–36, 53, 91–92) are interrelated in a series of actions. As noted above, Musa had the desire to sustain himself. This desire gave rise to the activity of field cultivation. His agricultural skills enabled Musa to carry out this activity. At the same time, field cultivation is tedious, and Musa often felt the incentive to do something else. Self-control thus enabled him to carry on. Furthermore, Musa’s desire to sustain himself was part of the totality of his desires. According to Tugendhat, individuals constantly keep track of the relationship between their desires and the reality of their lives, and this determines their mood. Most of the time, Musa’s mood was rather stable and content. Correspondingly, his mood reflected that he was confident to extricate himself from poverty one day and thus fulfil his desire to sustain himself. This example illustrates how some of Musa’s permanent characteristics, including his desires, skills, mood and ability to control himself, shaped his actions. At the same time, it points to the fact that anthropology has not yet found an answer to the question of how an individual’s more 283

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permanent features are integrated with each other and relate to that individual’s environment. It would appear that much work still lies ahead of us. * Despite Jackson’s caveat, I have shown that empirical research on human existence is possible. I have presented an approach to analyse individual human existence in three steps. It roughly describes an individual’s behaviour in different social contexts, it analyses the structures of their daily life and abstracts the permanent features of the individual as parts of the individual’s gestalt. I have also shown that dense participant observation and shadowing are appropriate methods to carry out such research. Furthermore, I claim that my approach contributes to the research of the more far-reaching questions raised in the introduction. At the same time, I admit that Jackson might be right in criticising my approach for losing many details of individual life. Finally, I have argued that the elucidation of the individual’s gestalt in their relationship with their environment and themselves is a task that the field of anthropology could and should address.

Notes 1 The name is anonymised. 2 The name of the village is anonymised. 3 The name of the town has been anonymised.

References Czarniawska, B. 2007. Shadowing and Other Techniques for Doing Fieldwork in Modern Societies. Malmö: Liber. Heiss, J. P. 2015a. Musa: An Essay (or Experiment) in the Anthropology of the Individual. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Heiss, J. P. 2015b. ‘Assessing Ernst Tugendhat’s philosophical anthropology as a theoretical template for an empirical anthropology of the individual’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 140(1): 35–54. Heiss, J. P. 2018. ‘A Hausa man makes a decision: A contribution to the anthropological perspective on decision-making’, Anthropological Forum 28(3): 236–254. Jackson, M. 2005. Existential Anthropology. Events, Exigencies and Effects. New York: Berghahn. Jackson, M. 2016. As Wide as the World Is Wise. New York: Columbia University Press. Joas, H. 1996. Die Kreativität des Handelns. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Piette, A. 2015. Existence in the Details: Theory and Methodology in Existential Anthropology. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Piette, A. 2019. Theoretical Anthropology or How to Observe a Human Being. London: Iste. Rapport, N. 1993. Diverse World-Views in an English Village. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rapport, N. 1997. Transcendent Individual: Towards a Literary and Liberal Anthropology. London: Routledge. Rapport, N. 2003. I Am Dynamite. An Alternative Anthropology of Power. Abingdon: Routledge. Tugendhat, E. 2003. Egozentrizität und Mystik. Eine anthropologische Studie. München: C.H. Beck.

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28 FILMING AND DESCRIBING AN INDIVIDUAL Gwendoline Torterat

In anthropology, it is mainly through life histories that researchers attempt to grasp individuals (e.g. Shostak 1981; Smith 1981 [1954]; Onselen 1996). These studies are very often carried out thanks to a few dozen biographical interviews conducted with individuals whose “whole” life is narrated through some of the key events punctuating it. When the investigation adopts longterm participant observation, this manages to restore a more complex continuity: “details, often dramatically narrated, revealed the nuanced fabric of singularities and the logic that keeps things the same” (Biehl 2005, 19). The details of this continuity are those of a life history observed from a considerable distance, rehumanized by narrative effects and systematically apprehended in comparison with other stories and many other individuals, each of them irremediably representing ideal types (Nadel 1951, 92; see also Heiss and Piette 2015). The contours of an individual described for him/herself fade, sometimes vanish completely, replaced by sociocultural mechanisms and collective trends which at the time of enquiry were already the only ones that counted since they determined all the rest. Because it first consists in following an individual over time, the shadowing method and more specifically video shadowing1 make it possible to access a corpus of individual details which participant observation often does not enable one to grasp (McDonald 2005). In this approach frequently adopted in some disciplines – mainly in information and communication science, the sociology of organizations and management studies – the observer usually follows in the steps of a multiplicity of beings when the latter begin to interact, whether they are human or non-human (Cooren and Malbois 2018). This recording method can be compared to that used in research inspired by ethnomethodology, notably in interactional linguistics (Mondada 2006; Haddington et al. 2014). The development of a trend for naturalistic and observational visual recording has also resulted in point of view filming and subjective cameras. The latter are adopted in the context of ethnographies connected to the reflexive turn of a return to the actor (e.g. Pink 2015). They are also used in a precursory manner – particularly in the work of Saadi Lahlou – among those committed to a theory of distributed cognition, especially relevant for augmented environments. The particularity of this video following individuals is to give priority to the filmed individual’s subjective point of view thanks to miniaturized cameras attached to the actors’ foreheads (e.g. Lahlou 1999; Skinner and Gormley 2016). Finally, we should note that video shadowing was already being used in the late 1950s to categorize forms of behaviour and quantify the time DOI: 10.4324/9781003156697-32

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needed for standard tasks (Barker and Wright 1954; Barker 1968; Mintzberg 1968). This is particularly the case in ecological psychology with the development of time sample techniques in day-long specimen records: “The result is that arbitrarily limited samples of behavior are often like a part of a page torn from a book” (Barker and Wright 1954, 199). These various methods correspond nonetheless to the different paradigms part of every ­d iscipline, each one excluding in fine any possibility of studying the continuity of an individual’s existence for its own sake. In order to propose tools corresponding to an existence-specific ­approach, I shall consider (1) the different advantages of continuous films and shots (including in contemporary art), (2) the implementation of my system, (3) feedback and explicitation interview methods and (4) the scripted writing of an individual’s day.2

Multiple shots and sequence shots Following an individual in real time while concentrating on him/her alone is a familiar practice for many film-makers who popularized filmed journals and one of whose main objectives was to capture moments of life.3 The length of certain experiments is impressive, such as for Five Year Diary (1982) – the chronicle of Anne Charlotte Robertson’s daily life lasting 36 hours with 85 reels covering two decades – Diary by David Perlov who filmed over 27 years (six 52-minute parts, 1973–1985) or Alain Cavalier’s Le Filmeur (2011) filmed between 1994 and 2005. These years of life – which are then edited and without any real radical continuity – conform to a ­d istributable format thanks to editing which turns years into seconds. Some nevertheless tried to reduce the artificial length of this time-lag, as in the case of Andy Warhol’s three “Anti-Films”, Sleep, Eat and Kiss. The first is an 8-hour cut focused on John Giorno sleeping. This experience of length does not only concern the individual as it is also interlinked with the possibilities of the technical system implemented.4 The film Walden (1969) by Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) contains in addition film material shot from 1964 to 1968. During an interview conducted on 26 November 2012,5 he had this to say: Something happens, there, in front of you, something. I feel I want to record this moment of humanity repeated for centuries which has already happened millions of time and which is there, happening again and I want to film it, for an unknown reason (…) I don’t want to film disasters, great events, but small events, where you’d think there is nothing, but where something essential is happening. I don’t understand big things. The tsunami in Japan, 11 September. Two thousand people, it’s abstract. We can’t really feel or understand it. To record certain moments of the human history of tiny, tiny, tiny events, feelings, emotions, everyday life. I always say that I’m perhaps an anthropologist. Although some video artists very often choose to cut long fragments of the reality captured, I have found, on the other hand, in the work of some creators of cinematographic fiction the desire to film uninterrupted, lengthy – moving or fixed – shots thanks to the sequence shot technique. Even if the most trivial scenes developed from this technique are often useful for the plot, I have observed in the work of the director Béla Tarr a radical impression of realism. In The Turin Horse (A Torinói ló, 2011), during the six days corresponding to the film’s 146 minutes, the daily life of a father and his daughter passes in the silence of an isolated farm relentlessly beaten by the winds. Behind this director’s work lies the intention to not concentrate on the plot but to let daily time go by. Therefore his audiovisual descriptions are not on the look-out, are not searching for anything in particular apart from what happens from a few individuals’ point of view. 286

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In the same way, but using non-fictional material, Jonas Mekas advocates a return to h ­ uman existence with no intervention on his part, nor creation or invention. Although the artist s­ upports unconditional fidelity to the present moment while almost regretting he is not an anthropologist, I am well aware when reading him that anthropology is still only groping its way in this direction, even refusing to take it. As regards Albert Piette, he has made a quest of this, with his inestimable obsession that our discipline may in its turn be able to aspire to harvesting reality.6 With this perspective, I again note a simple project here: to observe human existence and to ­restore it. And it should be possible to carry out this project with individuals in the long term – as in filmed journals – and concretely implement it by using shots with as few interruptions as possible – like the sequence shots of certain films. The aim of this chapter is also to show that this kind of ­audiovisual process enables one to go as far as possible in the description of practical details.

Technical system I was able to develop and refine my own film methodological system in the context of research taking place on the Ormesson archaeological excavation site in France, a deposit dating back to the Palaeolithic. Here I observed the work of a team of archaeologists and volunteer diggers who appeared to me year after year very united by their exceptional discoveries. My aim was to question the impact of individuals’ singularity on the collective organization of work during a workday. After an investigation using the tools of all participant observation (mainly notebooks of handwritten descriptions completed by semi-directive interviews), I finally decided to constantly follow three workers with very different roles and professional experience – Émile, Isabelle and Mélodie7 – by favouring the camera as my main captation tool (Torterat 2018). I thus obtained sequence shots resulting from several non-consecutive days of following them individually.8 I first had to clearly explain my approach to each of them, both concerning anonymity and the unauthorized distribution of images9 as well as the position that would be mine – in the background and silent for more than 10 hours scrutinizing them from behind the screen of my camera. Every day and for each of them, their relationship with the camera had to be re-established through friendly renegotiation. Once the first few hours of following them with the camera were over, I noticed that my presence attracted less attention. My presence could also make certain simultaneous verbalizations easier during action – which were addressed to me directly or indirectly like spontaneous thinking-aloud – and add “natural” interactions – that is, ones not due to my presence. Aware of this impossible neutrality linked to an outside presence, the researcher filming must therefore take into account gradual, mutual habituation, a process whose speed depends largely on prior knowledge of the actors in the field who must be patiently introduced to the idea of being filmed and to a system of filming reduced to its bare minimum. I filmed alone, using only a small hand-held camera. My constant movements entailed continually changing frames without losing the individual. I had to concentrate on him/her and the situations in which he/she was involved. The intensity of this action of continuously following renders this method particularly exhausting on a daily basis, but it makes it possible to both a­ ttentively follow actions in detail and to maintain an intense level of observation from one situation to another. To do this, I had to anticipate the different frames as the situations evolved. For example, should I follow Isabelle from a three-quarter reverse angle in order to grasp her point of view or from the front to capture the expression of her emotions? What should I do when both seemed necessary to grasp the meaning of a moment or an event? I decided to frame each individual in one of the following ways: (1) when they moved from one point to another on 287

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the site, I was positioned behind them; at every significant halt, I widened my frame to include the elements to which they seemed to pay attention positioning myself at a three quarters angle, (2) more or less fixed work situations were filmed from the front or with a high-angle shot; the shot scale was medium, that is, from the waist up; what the individual looked at was filmed, notably the archaeological ground and his/her movements and facial expressions and (3) during times of work or breaks in interactive situations, front angle shots were used; the shot scale was medium to wide. All the individuals whose presence had an impact on the situation experienced by the individual were placed within the frame. During the filming experiment in 2016 by the two video artists Catherine Beaugrand and Samuel Dématraz “Réellement 12 heures”, Albert Piette was the focus of a film of some 12 hours also shot without interruption (Piette 2017). Focused most of the time on him alone, the only unity is that of time as captured in an uninterrupted stream of different places, from the close intimacy of a sitting-room at home to the public space of public transport. The video-makers worked as a pair so as not to miss a second. One of them would explain that there had been a technical transport incident, an unintentional break. We too could make this confession as constant vigilance is impossible for 10 consecutive hours. We should also point out the technical problems that can arise due to a lack of knowledge of one’s equipment such as the maximum length of time a battery allows for filming or problems of overexposure and the recording of illegible images. These human and technical limits give the daily filming pattern the air of a performance and, despite all the preparations, the latter would prove just as singular and unforeseeable as the day itself.

Writing to restore The existence-specific approach supposes the restitution of entire days filmed from sunrise to sunset when this is possible (some 12 hours’ work in my case). To do this, I propose a very particular form of writing inspired by scripts written for the cinema. For who better than a scriptwriter to describe only what should appear in the image? In fiction cinema, writing is subject to strict typographic codes for anyone who wants to see his/her script directed. The textual restitution of the existence-specific approach takes place in two stages: a first version written before a return to the actor and afterwards a second. To begin with, it involves ­describing what happens in front of the observer filming, no more no less. Before any return to the actor, this version is thus purged of most peripheral elements or those inferred from the context, stemming from value judgements or induced mental states. Expressions such as “he does this because” and “due to” are absent just as are “she thinks of ”, “he remembers” or “reflects”. The text is thus reduced to the visible and audible elements which a person viewing the video and unfamiliar with archaeological practices would be capable of restoring, that is to say, able to see instantly. This makes it possible to do without all the analytical premises which are often all too easily inserted into texts intended to simply describe individuals, without the words chosen or the meaning of what is observed being really understood. In a second phase, these elements will be specified and detailed, reformulated or deleted during an explicitation interview. I shall return to this. The temporal dimension of this script technique is one of its main assets. In anthropology, writing only traditionally takes time into account by using clues intended to mark the different scales useful for understanding the text (later, yesterday evening, a few years ago, on 7 May 2017, etc.). Anthropologists therefore select the markers which they deem important to communicate and do not restore the real amount of time passed. In scriptwriting, it is thus quite the opposite, both with regard to form and direct aims. For a page produced according to the rules – that is 288

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to say, standardized according to specific writing software10 – corresponds to a minute filmed. The text includes the scenes’ numbers, title and description, the stage directions (indications of what happens) and dialogues.11 The presentation is such that the reading time is approximately the filming time. Thus reading a script makes it possible to follow the temporal flow of the future film (Figure 28.1).

Figure 28.1 Page taken from Final Draft in the context of one of Mélodie’s filmed days (see Torterat 2018) captioned with the different typographic categories. It corresponds to an estimated 1 minute, in both reading and real time.

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According to the software codification descriptions, 10 video hours correspond then to 600 manuscript pages, 600 pages for just one day’s work. When Albert Piette also tackles the description of the 12-hour day during which he is filmed, he obtains 200 pages, what he calls a book of 1 volume. It is possible to imagine a large number of these and even thicker ones if the descriptions are based on screenwriting grammar. Let us take the example of an individual living his/her day from waking up to going to bed, 16 hours. We would need about 960 pages just to describe it. If the time scales swiftly become unfathomable when we continue these calculations – 350,400 pages for a year of life, 3,504,000 for 10 years, 175,200,000 for 50 years – the descriptions of the lives they observe left to us by anthropologists appear tiny; a book of 300 pages for a “biography”, for example. This transcription proposal is an approach which many would describe as positivist, among those who fear having to confront the will to describe unendingly and accuse those who set about this of syllogomania. This restitution stage, although laborious, is therefore also connected to issues of an epistemological nature, for it allows us to constantly call into question what we describe of reality and what escapes us. Some elements – such as the mental states of a certain individual at a certain time or details which seem insignificant to the observer – are in fact indescribable without a meticulous return to the actor. Writing them is the first step necessary in order to recognize them and give them meaning. They are also the keystone to another anthropology of the individual that is associated with his/her volume over time. What changes this often remains in texts and memory (events, traumas, happy memories, failed acts, strong emotions, etc.). But what can be said about what does not alter, does not change enough to be well localized in time and space? I wager that permanency and constancy are to be found and analysed in these long filmed temporalities described as in a script before being re-viewed and re-questioned by the individual him/herself.

Feedback interview and explicitation interview My methodological standpoints find many echoes in psychological anthropology and in culture and personality studies which apprehend the relationship between, on the one hand, individuals’ lived experience and, on the other, the social, cultural, political and economic characteristics of the context (e.g. Levy and Hollan 1998; Hollan 2001). I thus share the same critical conviction: studying primarily what is within individuals is often neglected. If I attempt just as much as these authors to propose a methodological solution to the constructivist paradigm by re-placing the individual at the centre of the scene, it is less in order to focus on this kind of relationship than on the individual as he/she exists in “real time”. The existence-specific ­approach does not first try to make the interview express or reveal what the anthropologist did not really witness or describe in detail. This approach consists above all in observing and recording a singular experience lived in real time before being discussed subsequently. The audiovisual material collected, as well as the script resulting from it, therefore enable a framed, detailed return to the actor. Filming filmed days by following an individual and conducting an interview on the basis of this is very specific to the existence-specific approach. This methodology makes it possible to obtain (1) segments of existence filmed continuously and (2) a recapitulation of experience with the individual filmed after a complete viewing of the rushes. This self-confrontation stage is inspired by interview techniques using photographs already implemented in the social sciences in the 1960s termed photo-elicitation and talking picture interviews (Collier 1986 [1967]). These interviews would become generalized thanks to the popularization of the use of video in the social sciences from the 1980s on. 290

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However, we have to admit that without a certain amount of guidance from the researcher what the interviewee says runs the risk of remaining formal, abstract and distant. For the ­individual expresses him/herself on the basis of the knowledge he/she has of his/her action and which she/he discovers in a form of immediacy. The description of the said action can remain detached from its effects or be treated as a general case. It is then usually accompanied by standard expressions, such as “in general”, “for example” or “as I always do”. The filmed individual’s ways of being present disappear replaced by more encompassing, generalizing and collective temporalities. In order to be able to refocus the individual on his/her own particular experience, we need to aim at re-immersing him/her in the most fragile moment of his/her experience. To do so, I suggest carrying out this kind of feedback interview according to a procedure in three stages consisting in suggesting to the individual filmed (1) to re-view all the audiovisual material from the video shadowing (one day at a time and in a fairly short space of time), (2) to read and annotate the scripted version at the individual’s disposal and (3) to be interviewed from questions concerning chronological elements of the day he has viewed (based on the film material) and reread (based on the scripted description). In addition, I suggest concentrating more on the experience lived in its continuity. This was largely the option taken by the psychologist Pierre Vermersch when in 1980 he laid down the methodological bases of what he would later call the explicitation interview. The main specificity of this “resituating” interview is that it emphasizes verbalization of the action as it happened in detail. The individual then recalled the sensations he felt when he was filmed – probably the only part of them. Albeit differently, he/she lived and felt for a second time, through the eye of the camera, what he/she had already lived and felt the first time. This reiteration of the temporal flow of a past experience makes it possible to say something quite other. When the past action is approached through this type of interview, it is thus once again present in thought. An essential point distinguishes my methodology from that of psychologists who claim to leave out the use of video because this kind of equipment is too unwieldy and takes into account only the memorial traces associated with the activities. This is in fact what differentiates his “resituating” approach from the first attempts at self-confrontation developed in ergonomics during the same period by L. Pinsky and Theureau (1987a, 1987b).12 On a first level of the self-confrontation interview care will be taken to question the individual concerning the sensorial and emotional modes of the experiences recorded and, on a second, the individual will be asked to return more analytically to his/her experience. The importance of this type of feedback based on the material filmed has also been stressed by those practising POV filming, for “actions that may appear strange at first sight are often explained by the far reaching consequences they may have in the global organization or past experience of the subject. Situations may be more complex than visible because every detail is connected to many issues in the full life-cycle of the system” (Lahlou 2009, 124).

Coda Questioning the individual using all the material available gives considerable scope to the different aspects which can be broached depending on the time of day filmed. The only directive aspect of this last stage lies in fine in the chronological following of the experiences lived during the day. It is of course essential to be able to spot and describe the various ways an individual has of changing from one moment to another (mood, emotion, appearance, verbal delivery, etc.) while remaining the same. It then becomes possible to spot constancy, repetition and the banal 291

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to the detriment of salience, the original and the memorable. The existence-specific approach therefore does not consist in seeing the individual in this way because certain research questions require it. Pushing back the limits of an inductive method, this approach is also an epistemological stance specific to existential anthropology (Piette 2019) considers that any collective dimension involves first and foremost an individual with his/her own particular characteristics. This singular element is both (1) unique (constant) and (2) dynamic (variable). Filming an individual without interruption makes it possible to attain these two dimensions at the same time, without inference, and to describe them in detail without selecting some aspects to the detriment of others. It is no longer just one course of previously selected actions which interests me, unlike other approaches adopted by video shadowing, but above all the course of existence. Synchronic – what happens for an individual at a given moment – and diachronic– what happens for the same individual several years later – dimensions thus restore the whole substance of a non-interchangeable being in motion without for all that removing the possibility of understanding what takes place in the wings of collective scenes. It is when caught together empirically and methodically that they mutually enlighten each other.

Notes 1 Shadowing is a method which consists in following someone “like their shadow”, with or without a camera, while video shadowing consists in following them using one or several cameras. 2 I thank the Prehistoric Ethnology team (UMR TEMPS, CNRS) for their support and Ms. Deborah Pope for her translation. 3 Basing one’s audiovisual artistic approach on a set of technical constraints decided in advance and mastered during shooting (like filming long static shots) is directly linked to the North American context of the 1960s in which structural cinema developed. 4 Catherine Beaugrand’s Preface (2017) proposes a critical reflection which has greatly motivated the reference to the filmed approaches of video artists. 5 Interview conducted in Paris by Arnaud Widendaële (Débordements), Louise Delbarre (Revue ­Zinzolin) and Alexandre Prouvèze (Time Out). Retranscription: Louise Delbarre. Layout, for Débordements: Raphaël Nieuwjaer See: https://www.debordements.fr/Jonas-Mekas. 6 As I shall be discussing again, Albert Piette was filmed by Catherine Beauregard and Samuel Dématraz during a sequence shot of 12 hours, which represents a novel experience in anthropology used again in the French edition of the work “Le Volume Humain. Esquisse d’une Science de l’Homme” (Piette 2017). 7 The first names have been changed for the sake of anonymity. 8 On the basis of 12-hour work a day on the site, all the rushes amount to a hundred hours. The selection of nine daily episodes had to be negotiated with the individuals filmed who agreed to participate for just a few days each. 9 A standard authorization and taking of video images form was drawn up. It details (1) the different types of means likely to be used to distribute video images publicly (projection, teledistribution, etc.), (2) the conditions of reproduction and archived conservation of these recordings and (3) stipulates that the video-maker/researcher “specifically refrains from using images and recordings likely to damage a person’s private life or reputation, dignity or integrity”. This document must therefore be filed, signed and dated in the context of any scientific undertaking of this kind involving the image reproduction right of the people followed. 10 Among the most used in the United States are ©Movie Magic Screenwriter, ©Movie Outline, ©Scrivener or, more commonly in France, ©Final Draft. 11 In a dialogued form much less detailed and precise than the coded transcriptions generally used for the conversational analyses of the multimodal analyses employed by researchers part of/affiliate with ethnomethodology. 12 These specialists say they developed their methods in opposition to what was being done in social ­psychology in the 1980s and to have found a source of inspiration in cognitive ethology. See Cranach et al. (1982).

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293

INDEX

Note: Page references in italics denote figures and with “n” endnotes. Abbagnano, N. 12 abducted sign 229 absolute beginnings 78 absolute insulation 90 action 127, 153, 267–269, 276; of empathy 224; Latour on 247; and mortality 126; nonlogical 13; social 13, 124 actualization 14 acute altruistic suicide 99 Adler, A. 51 affect 26 Agamben, Giorgio 170 Alagaddūpama Sutta 212, 214n7 All Divided Selves 54 Almqvist, Cecilia 160 Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language 93 Altheide, D. 16 Anglo-American philosophy 213 an-sich-sein 67 anthropology: cosmopolitan 10; of (moving) events 150–162; existential anthropology 37, 38–40; as existential enquiry 36–48; Kant on 36–37; liberated anthropology 38; phenomenological anthropology 240; social anthropology 38, 42, 159–162, 241; transcendental 83 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant) 84 ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement 55 anti-rationalism 31 antiretroviral medications (ARVs) 129 Arbours Association 53, 56, 57 Arendt, H. 179, 253

Argentine tango 92, 153–154, 158–161 Aristotle 94, 170, 174, 179 Arsenius the Great 100 art: artists 2, 96, 126, 241, 255, 258–262, 287; conceptual art 255; lifelike 258–259; performance art 152, 160, 261–262 Asad, Talal 184, 185n2, 186 Asylum: the magazine for Democratic Psychiatry ( Jenner) 53 Augustine, Saint 208 authentification 18 autobiography 139, 261 automotive being 139–141 autonomy 29 awakening 199–201 Awakenings 200 axiom, defined 239n1 bad faith 96, 98 Bakhtin, Mikhail 4, 42, 169 Barnes, M. 53 Barth, Karl 188 Bateson, G. 3, 89, 106, 170 Baumgarten, A. 76 Beaugrand, C. 240, 288 Beck, U. 38 Beckman, J. 140 being: and consciousness 142–143; existence against 194–201; and not-being 66–67 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 79 Being and Time (Heidegger) 75, 174–175 being-in-the-world 50 belief vs. faith 185–187

294

Index Benedict, Ruth 97 Berdyaev, N. 12 Berger, P. 107 Berke, J. 52–53, 56 Bernanos, G. 69 Beveridge, A. 54 Bildung 160 Binswanger, L. 23, 24, 51–52 biography 41, 151, 255; existential 256–258 biosemiotics 223–224, 227–230, 232 Blumenberg, H. 267 bodiliness 143–144 body 2, 11, 127, 152–153, 157–161; as entity of Dasein 67; as form of physical being 14; hypostasis 196; individual and environs 106; signification 153; socially informed 246; and subjective realm of person 51 Bolle De Bal, M. 17 Bollen, Jonathan 152 Bosnia and Herzegovina: ethnic cleansing in 144; Tuzla Yugoslav identification 142 Boss, M. 24, 51, 53 Boswell, B. L. 131 Bourdieu, P. 71, 152–154, 244, 246–247, 252, 253 Bourne, E. J. 117n3 Bracken, P. 54–55 Braxton, M. 259 bricolage 37 The Bridges of Madison County 109–111 British School of Existential Therapy 57 Bruneau, J. 263n6 brute being 15 Buber, M. 12, 177, 191 Buddha Dharma 213 Buddhism 189 Buddhist texts 171, 212–213, 217, 217n13 bureaucratic propaganda 16 Butler, Judith 215, 215n10

“cluster symptom” approaches 26 Cocteau, J. 65 coexistence and care 173 cognitive environment: empathy and 226 cognitive semiotics 228 Cohn, H. 56 Collins, Steven 217 common sense 39 communicative double bind 170 competence 28 complex isotopy 70 Comte, A. 13 consciousness 2, 41, 64, 88–90, 116–118, 141–142, 199, 252; collective 246; embodied 76; and existential psychotherapy 25; freedom of 47; individual 97, 105–106, 108; methodology of 108–111; motoring 91; Sartre on 96, 268; social change 14 consistency 205, 266, 268–271 constancy 105, 241, 266, 270–271, 290–291 “contagion effect” 225 context 51, 55, 282; daily life 280–281; interplay 232–234; relational 56; social 56; sociocultural 209; sociopolitical 99; specificity 229 continuity 206, 240–242, 260, 268, 270–271; between human individuals and social phenomena 250; Sartre on 259; temporal 261 Cooper, D. 52 Cooper, M. 57 Copernican Revolution 75 Corporalities 153 cosmopolitan anthropology 10 Crapanzanos, V. 19 critical existentialism 12 Critical Psychiatry Network 54 Critique de la raison dialectique (Sartre) 64 Cullum, W. 126–138; background 128; HIV/AIDS 128–129; paintings 128–130, 128–130; Your Tax Dollars at Work 136–137, 137 cultural symbologies 106

California School 14–17 Campbell, T. 98–99 Camus, A. 12, 188 Candea, M. 272n14 care: and coexistence 173; for others 176–179; for the self 173–176; for the world 179–180 Carlisle, Clare 185n4 Cassirer, E. 64–65 categorical imperative 78 Cavalier, A. 286 character 174n1, 269; acquisition 84; moral 80; superficial 97; traits 270 Christianity 189 Christian orthodoxy 82 The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Benedict) 97 Clark, C. 19

daily life 98, 242, 248–249, 258–259, 262, 276, 278, 286; activities 280–281; contexts 280–281; description of contexts, activities and interactions 280–281; interactions 280–281; structures of 281–282 Dance and the Lived Body (Fraleigh) 160 Danesi, Marcel 230, 231 Dasein 2, 11, 66, 66 Daseinanalysis 23, 24, 51 De Beauvoir, S. 1, 23, 29, 38, 40, 46, 160, 188, 212 Deci, E. L. 28 de Haan, S. 54

295

Index Dématraz, Samuel 288, 292n6 Demystifying Therapy (Spinelli) 56 Denniston, Christine 159 Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Carnap) 64 Descartes, R. 77 Descola, Philip 204, 232 description 266–267; of activities 280–281; of contexts 280–281; ethnographic 43, 270; in ethnomethodology 240; existential 167, 199; existentialist 45; of interactions 280– 281; phenomenological 257; producing 250; scale of 242; scientific 41; software codification 290 Desjarlais, R. 189, 252 detachment 39, 51, 168, 241, 248–249, 266, 268, 271 detail(s) 269–271, 285; non-interchangeable 241; singular 241 de Vignemont, Frederique 224 De Waal, Frans B. M. 224 Dewey, J. 3, 89 Dhammapada Athakathā 217 diary: Malinowski’s work 44; prison life 127; private 43 Difficult Freedom (Levinas) 201 Dirac, P. 40–41 The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Laing) 52, 55 “dividuality” 203–204 The Division of Labour in Society (Durkheim) 246 Doi, T. 98 ‘double bind’ 170 Douglas, J. 15–17, 19, 31, 48 Douglas, M. 36 Douglas’ theorem 15 Dropout Piece 261–262 dual defense model 27 Dujovne, Beatriz 160 Dunn, Mary 187 Duras, M. 256 Durkheim, E. 13, 99, 105, 173, 244–246, 250; acute altruistic suicide 99; on individuals 105 Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory: ‘I Move Therefore I Am’ (Farnell) 153 Dyring, Rasmus 170–171

emotional generalizations 15 emotions: existential sociology of 15; feelings 10, 15–17, 19, 26, 28–29, 245, 252, 268 (see also feelings) empathy: biological basis for development of 224–227; biosemiotic perspective 228–230; and cognitive environment 226; evolutionary basis for 224–227; interactional engine underlying 226–227; interconnected approach for human communication 231–232; and language 223–234; language as generative vehicle 230–231; and semiotics 228–232; as a sign and its relations 230 empirical: approach to studying human existence 275–283; Dasein 68; experimentation 47; research 23; study 17; transcendence 68, 69 Enactive Psychiatry (de Haan) 54 Enlightenment 4 Epicurus 94–95 epoché 41; ethnography as 42–44 essence: existence precedes 206–208 “ethical demand” 177 ethnic-nationalism 142 ethnography 141–142; as epoché 42–44; fieldworkbased 43 everyday life (EDL) sociology paradigm 19 existence: authentic vs. inauthentic 13; awakening 199–201; against being 194–201; course of existence 292; in domestic and historical context 240; German philosophies of 25; God’s 81; Heideggerian concept of 241; human sense 171; individual 276–277; Jewish 201; for Kant 83; new framework 196–197; and nonexistence 220–221; Otherwise than Being 197–199; over essence 75; preceding essence 206–208; and problem of (in)dividuality 203–205; real 41; singular 240, 244–253; social 13–16; see also Dasein Existence and Existents (Levinas) 195–196 Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology 51–52 existence precedes essence 12, 96, 205–208 Existential Analysis 57 existential anthropology 37, 38–40, 185n3; existent as volume of being 266–267; and existential psychology 44–45; existentials and volume of being 267–271; volumology as 265–271; see also anthropology existential art 255–263 existential biography 256–257 existential care ethics 173–180; care and coexistence 173; care for others 176–179; care for the self 173–176; care for the world 179–180

Eat 286 Edgar, D. 53 Ego: and Other 104, 170 einfühlung 42 Eliade, Mircea 183 eliminativist methodologies 3 embodiment 16–17, 26, 67–68, 251, 260; and brain 226; and phenomenology 172, 223, 234 Emerson, R. W. 1, 3, 88

296

Index Existential Therapies (Cooper) 57 existential therapy 56 Existential Thought and Therapeutic Practice (Cohn) 56 existential transcendence 68 experience 16–17; anxiety-inducing 24; conscious 227; foundational 232; human 1–2, 4, 15, 24, 26, 38–39, 50–51, 105, 118, 152, 187– 188, 223–224, 227, 251; personal 244–253; psychiatric 51; religious 171, 183–184, 190; repression of existential 17; sensory 15; of shame in workplace 121–122; singular, and existential narratives 205–206 explicitation interview 290–291

existential clinical psychology 24–26; integration with existential social psychology 29–30 existential communications 13, 72–73, 72–73 Existential Counselling and Psychotherapy (Langdridge) 57 existential enquiry 2–3; anthropology as 36–48; biographical lifeworld 40–41 existential (moving) event 159–162 existential finitude in Indian Buddhist philosophy 212–221 existential-humanistic psychology 25 existential-humanistic therapy 25 existential human science 1, 4 existential interest 174–175 existentialism 9, 87; “antisocial” position of 13; central maxima of 12; critical 12; existentials 241, 266–271; existential sociology (see existential sociology); and Kant 75–84; and philosophy 12; and psychology 10, 23; Sartrean 255–263; and semiotics 11; and tango social dance 150– 162; trans-subjective 17; Western 209 Existentialism and Humanism (Sartre) 87 Existentialism is a Humanism (Sartre) 77 “Existentialists and Mystics” (Murdoch) 190 existentiality: defined 63; and semiotics 63–73 existential narratives 205–206; (in)dividual lives and 202–209 existential-phenomenological psychology 25 existential phenomenology 13 existential philosophy 10, 23–24, 158, 171, 194–195, 209, 244 existential power 89; and individuals 3 existential psychiatry: overview 50–51; and psychotherapy 50–60; see also psychiatry existential psychology 23–32; and existential anthropology 44–45; existential clinical psychology 24–26, 29–30; existentialism of 30; existential social psychology 26–30 Existential Psychotherapy (Yalom) 57 Existential Psychotherapy in Practice (van Deurzen) 56 existentials 241, 266–271; as way of structuring volume of being 267–271 The Existential Self in Society (Kotarba and Fontana) 15 existential semiotics 63–66; being and not-being 66–67; Dasein 66; transcendence 67–69; see also semiotics existential social psychology: integration with existential clinical psychology 29–30; pursuit and denial of freedom 28–29; threat and defense 26–28 existential sociology 10, 12–20; California School of 14–17; of emotions 15; European extrapolations 17–18; paradigm change 19–20; as scientific approach 12; Tiryakian 13 Existential Sociology (Douglas and Johnson) 15

faith: belief vs. 185–187; and the existential 183–191 The Family Idiot (Sartre) 256, 260 Farnell, Brenda 153 Faubion, J. D. 272n18 feedback interview 290–291 feelings 10, 15–17, 19, 216–217, 245–246, 252, 268; of competence 28–29; of permanence 26; of self-determination 29; true 98, 102; see also emotions The Felon (Irwin) 127 Fernandez, James 161 Ferrarotti, F. 12 Feyerabend, P. 39 fieldwork 10, 208, 240; anthropological 127; -based ethnography 43 filming and describing an individual 285–292 Firmin, Anténor 36 Firth, R. 37, 158 Five Year Diary 286 Flaubert, G. 240, 255, 256–257, 260, 262, 263n6 Fontana, A. 16, 20, 244, 245, 252 Forster, E. M. 107 Foster, Susan Leigh 153 Foucault, M. 64, 175–176 Fragments of Existential Sociology (Bolle De Bal) 17 Franck, César 69 Frankl, V. 24, 51 freedom 46–47; pursuit and denial of 28–29; and rationality 83; to write and teach existential sociology 19 From Existence to Existents (Levinas) 171 fugue: defined 126; Irving and Cullum 126–138 fundamental metalanguage 11 für-sich-sein 67 Gabriel, M. 12, 168, 191 Gärdenfors, Peter 227, 231 Garfinkel, H. 244, 249–250, 252, 259–260 Gazzola, Valeria 226 Geertz, C. 96–97, 107 Gell, A. 44–45, 169

297

Index Genealogies of Religion (Asad) 184 General Psychopathology ( Jaspers) 51 gestalt 242, 276, 283–284 Giddens, A. 17 Goffman, E. 98, 268 Goodman, N. 46–47 Gordon, P. 56 Green, T. 4–5 Greimas, A. J. 69–70 grief 216, 233–234 “Grief and the Headhunter’s Rage” (Rosaldo) 233 Grolnick, W. S. 28

I Met series 260–261 impersonality 247, 250, 261; impersonal society 248, 250; impersonal standpoint 245–246; impersonal unity 245–246 The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde) 70 Indian Buddhist philosophy: existential finitude in 212–221; Nāgārjuna 218–221; Precious Garland 218–221; The Simile of the Snake Sutta 214–217 indicational signs 231 individual(s) 246–250; consciousness 105–106; defined 3; entity 202; existence 276–277; and existential power 3; explicitation interview 290–291; feedback interview 290–291; filming and describing 285–292; individual entity 202; multiple shots 286– 287; sequence shots 286–287; and society 16; technical system 287–288; writing to restore 288–290 individual identity 92; and physical movement 91 individuality: and interiority 104–113; writing of 107–108 individual lives 92; and existential narratives 202–209 inductivism 18 Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) 140 interactional engine: underlying empathy 226– 227; underlying language 226–227 interactions: daily life 280–281; description of 280–281; social 90, 95–97, 109, 111; symbolic 19 interchangeability 204, 205, 240, 253; combination of both kinds of 249–250; idealization, of standpoints 248–249; of individuals in imagination 248–249; of individuals with same social perspective 246–247; of perspectives 247–248; problems in social sciences 244–253; in social sciences 244–253; social theory without 250–252 interchangeable individuals 245–246 interdependency 177n5 interior conversation 106–107 interiority 3, 9; of Dasein 11; human 90; individual 90; and individuality 104–113; methodology of 108–111 The Interpreted World (Spinelli) 56 interpretive subjectivity 2 interpretive validity 16 intersubjectivity 13–14; emotive 225; and existential anthropology 191; and private experiences 248; Sartrean 167, 265, 272n1; species-specific phenomena of 227; and trans-subjectivity 18 interview: explicitation 290–291; feedback 290–291

Hadot, Pierre 190n6 Hallisey, Charles 214, 217 Handelman, Don 159, 162n1 Hayek, F. 95 Heidegger, M. 1, 2, 11, 12, 23, 29, 52, 58, 64–66, 77, 82, 170–172, 174–175, 175n3, 184n1, 204, 241; aletheia 204; being-in-the-world 50; and Jaspers 51; readings of Aristotle 174; thrownness 24; thrown-projection 175 Heiss, J. P. 242, 272n6, 280, 283 Hernani (Hugo) 197 heterogeneity of actants 247–248 hikikomori 101 Hindu astrological divination 210n1 Hirsch, E. D. 108 HIV/AIDS 128–129 Hollywood 147 Holocaust 104 homo sacer 170 Homo sapiens 226 hope 80–82 Hugo, Victor 197 human being 2–3; bricoleurs 37; Dasein 2; existential enquiry 3; Kant on 82–84; Simmel on 88; as social beings 3 human communication 231–232 human existence: analysing individual existence 276–277; contexts/activities/interactions 280–281; daily life 280–281; detaching individual from existence 282–284; field site 277; individual’s existence 280–284; methods 278–280; structures of daily life 281–282 human experience 1–2, 4, 15, 24, 26, 38–39, 50–51, 105, 118, 152, 187–188, 223–224, 227, 251 humanism 112 Hume, D. 78, 206 Husserl, E. 41–42, 47–48, 51, 169, 184n1, 223 idealism, liberal 4 I Got Up 260–261

298

Index Irving, A. 126–138 Irwin, J. 127 Islam 189, 282–283 isomorphism 229–230 isotopy 69; complex 70 “I/Thou-relationship” 177 I Went series 260–261

Lakens, D. 152 Lambek, M. 185n3, 206–207 Langdridge, D. 56, 57 language 228–232; and empathy 223–234; as a generative vehicle 230–231; interactional engine underlying 226–227 Lapoujade, R. 256–257 Latour, B. 244, 247–248, 253n1 Lee, P. 260 Le Filmeur 286 Lehrer-Graiwer, S. 262 Lejeune, P. 241 Le journal d’un curé de la Campagne (Bernanos) 69 Les mots et les choses (Foucault) 64 Lester, Rebecca 204 L’être et le néant (Sartre) 64 Levinas, E. 1, 90, 104, 112, 171, 177, 177n6, 191 Levinson, Steven 226 Lévi-Strauss, C. 37, 46, 64 Lewis, H. 106 liberal idealism 4 liberated anthropology 38 “LIFE-ART” 261–263 “lifelike art” 258–259 Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology ( Jackson) 152 Lloyd, Rebecca 159 logotherapy 24–25, 51 Løgstrup, K.E. 177–178 Lozano, L. 255–256, 261–263 Luckmann, T. 68 Lyman, S. 16

Jackson, Jennifer 161 Jackson, M. 31, 38–39, 151, 169, 183, 208, 275–276 James, Henry 241 James, W. 90, 105, 116, 183–184, 187; self-consciousness 117 Janoff-Bulman, R. 30 Jaspers, K. 12, 23, 51, 65, 66, 188; and Heidegger 51 Jenner, A. 53 Jewish existence 201 Johnson, J. 15–16, 19, 20 The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons 127 Jusqu’ou on peut aller trop loin (Cocteau) 65 Kalesija 143–144 Kant, I. 3, 5, 38, 68, 169, 223, 227; on anthropology 36–37; categorical imperative 78; Critical Philosophy 11, 75, 78, 80; and existentialism 75–84; hope 80–82; on human being 82–84; practical philosophy 79; and religion 80–82; revealed religion 82; unsociable sociability 90, 93–94 Kantian autonomy 83 Kantian deontology 173 Kantian objectivity 83 Kapferer, Bruce 162n1 Kaprow, A. 255–256, 258–259 Katz, J. 140 Kawara, O. 255–256, 259–261 Kearney, Richard 203 Kierkegaard, S. 1, 23, 29, 31, 51, 52, 185n4, 191, 212 KinAesthetic Imagining 161 Kirby, M. 258 Kiss 286 Kitwood, T. 177, 178n7 Kneubühler, M. 205, 240 Konecki, K. 19 Kotarba, J. A. 16, 19–20, 31 Krøijer, Stine 152 Kropotkin, P. 127 Kull, Kalevi 229, 230n3

Madame Bovary 257 Madhyamaka (Middle Way tradition) 172, 213, 218 Mad to be Normal 54 Maharal of Prague 201 Malinowski. B. 43–44 Mallarmé, S. 256 Mandeville, B. 95 Mannheim, K. 13 Manning, P. 16 Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl) 51 Marcel, G. 12, 168, 191 Marcus, S. 68 Marriott, McKim 203 Martinsen, Kari 178 Martuccelli, D. 18 Marx, K. 88, 139–140 masked unsociability 94–98 Maslow, A. 25 Mattingly, Cheryl 176 May, R. 51–52 The Meaning and End of Religion (Smith) 184 The Meaning of Meaning (Ogden and Richards) 2 The Meaning of Tango (Denniston) 159

Lahlou, S. 285 Laing, R.D. 10, 25, 52–53, 170; existential psychiatry 53; radical social work 50

299

Index Mekas, J. 286–287 Melnikov, A. 19 Meløe, Jakob 44 mereological demonstration 233 Merleau-Ponty, M. 1, 12, 15, 25, 39–40, 45–47, 52, 223, 232, 242, 245, 251–252, 272n8 metaphysical desire 196 metaphysical humanism 202, 205 methodological empiricism 12 methodology: audiovisual method 286–287; of consciousness 108–111; explicitation interview 290–291; of interiority 108–111; observation 39, 44, 258, 278– 279; participant observation 278–279; regressive-progressive method 255, 257; shadowing 242, 278–279, 284–285, 291–292, 292n1; videophenomenography 285–292 Middle Way tradition 172, 213, 218 Millar, G. 54 mimicry 225–226 mind 41, 227; body-mind complex 152; conscious 111; Kant on 76 moment 41, 68, 90–92, 117n3, 151, 266–271; of believing 186; post-phenomenological 183; succession of 263 Montaigne, M. de. 126 Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care (Tronto) 176 Mosher, L. 53 movement: ‘anti-psychiatry’ 55; as existential capacity 134–136; physical and individual identity 91 multiple shots 286–287 Murdoch, I. 168–169, 190, 241 mystical suicides 100 myths 43, 64, 99, 198

Ontological Turn (OT) 207 ontologization 10, 18 Orsi, Robert 188 Ortner, Sherry 202 Other: and Ego 104, 170; and Self 169–170 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Levinas) 171, 197–198 Paper Tangos (Taylor) 153, 159 Par-delà nature et culture (Descola) 232 Pareto, V. 13 Park, R. E. 95 Parry, J. 205 Parsons, T. 13 Pearce, L. 140–141 Pedersen, Morten Axel 207 Peirce, C. S. 229n1, 230 Peircian semiotics 229n1 Pentecostal Christianity 190 perception: cognitive 14; normative 14; sensory 14 Perlov, D. 286 personal experience 244–253; loss of 244–253 personality 16; inner strength 16; real self 16 personalization 16 person-centered care 177, 179 perspectives: biosemiotic 228–230; interchangeability of 247–248; interchangeability of individuals with same social 246–247 Petitmengin, C. 272n10 phenomena/phenomenon 14, 78 phenomenological anthropology 240 phenomenology 58, 227; Jasper on 51 Philadelphia Association 52–54, 57 Philosopher of the Heart (Carlisle) 185n4 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer) 65 physical movement and individual identity 91 Piette, A. 31, 39, 40, 47, 183, 186–187, 208, 241, 251, 276, 287, 290, 292n6 Pinsky, L. 291 Plato 72, 174n1 Polanyi, M. 2 Poletti, S. 171 political power 89 The Politics of Experience (Laing) 52 Portrait of the Psychiatrist as a Young Man: the Early Writing of R. D. Laing (Beveridge) 54 positivism 13 Postmodern Existential Sociology (Kotarba and Johnson) 15 Pouillon, Jean 186 power 3; existential 89; as inherent attribute of individuals 89; political 89; structural 89 Precarious Life (Butler) 215 Precious Garland (Nāgārjuna) 172, 213, 218–221 Prélude Chorale et Fugue (Franck) 69

Nāgārjuna 172; Precious Garland 218–221 Needham, R. 107 negative existential approach 208–209 Nene’na Tandi 118–121 New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling 57 Nietzsche, F. 1, 3, 23, 29, 31, 52, 57, 158, 206 noemata 41, 42 No Exit (Sartre) 167 non-interchangeability 1–2, 170, 240 noumenon 78 novacula Occami 18 observation see methodology occasioned transcendence 16 Of God who Comes to Mind (Levinas) 171, 199 O’Neill, B. 272n14 On Escape (Levinas) 171, 194–195 ontological interdependency 177

300

Index The Problems of Sociology (Abbagnano and Ferrarotti) 12 psychiatry 51–55; scientific project of 52 psychologization of philosophy 23 psychology: clinical practice and empirical research 23; existential-humanistic 25; and existentialism 10, 23; existentialphenomenological 25; social 10 Psychopolitics (Sedgwick) 59 psychotherapy 56–59; and existential psychiatry 50–60; overview 50–51 public sphere 15 Puig de la Bellacasa, María 180 Purser, Aimie 161

Rosaldo, R. 233 Russell, B. 66 Ryan, R. M. 28 Sacks, H. 105 Salanskis, Jean-Michel 171 salsa social dancing 159 Sanity, Madness and the Family (Laing) 52 Sapir, E. 272n19 Sartre, J.-P. 1, 2–3, 11, 12, 23, 25, 29, 52, 53, 64, 87, 167–168, 184n1, 188, 212; bad faith 96, 98; and existential biography 256–257; existentialism 255–263; on mask unsociability 96; negative conception of freedom 79; “regressive-progressive” method 255 Savigliano, Marta 160 Scheler, M. 169 Schielke, Samuli 185n2 Schizophrenia: a Disease or Some Ways of Being Human? ( Jenner) 53 Schopenhauer, A. 57 Schütz, A. 68, 244, 248–249 Scott, M. 16 Sebeok, Thomas 228, 230, 231 secrecy of subjectivity 104, 112 self: care for 173–176; and Other 169–170 Self and Others (Laing) 52 self-determination theory (SDT) 28–29 self-esteem 28 self-examination 41 selfscape(s) 91; defined 118; ecology of 122–124; experiencing shame in workplace 121–122; varieties and particularities of 115–124 Sémantique Structurale (Greimas) 69 semiosis 229–230 semiotic fitness 229 semiotics 227; defined 63; empathy and 228–232; existential 63–66; and existentialism 11; and existentiality 63–73; existentializing 69–70; interconnected approach for human communication 231–232 Semiotic Society of Finland 65 sensualism 18 Separate Humans (Piette) 40 separation 90, 116, 196, 241, 245–246 separatist subjectivity 56 September 11 attacks 215 sequence shots 286–287 shadowing 242, 278–279, 284–285, 291–292, 292n1; see also methodology shame: experience in US workplace 121–122 shots: multiple 286–287; sequence 286–287 Shweder, R.A. 117n3, 272n20 sign-expression 229 The Simile of the Snake Sutta 172, 212, 214–217

“The Quality of Social Existence in a Globalising World” 17 radical cultist sociability 99–100 radical empiricism 43, 183–184, 187–188 radical sociability 98–100; radical cultist sociability 99–100; voluntary 98–99 radical transcendence 68 radical unsociability 100–101 Rapport, N. 37, 39, 158, 276 Raschid, S. 54 Ratnāvalī (Nāgārjuna) 213, 213n3, 220 R. D. Laing (Millar) 54 R.D. Laing: 50 years since The Divided Self (Itten and Young) 54 R. D. Laing: Contemporary Perspectives (Raschid) 54 realism, subjective 13, 18 Recherches philosophiques 194n1 reflexive turn 16 relatedness 28 relation: relationship 10–11, 27–29, 40–41, 55, 92, 98, 150–151, 186–187, 223–234 relationism 13 religion: -as-excess 187–188; and Kant 80–82; revealed 82; studying existentially 188–191 Religionswissenchaft 183 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Kant) 81, 84 religious experience 171, 183–184, 190 repression of existential experience 17 richness of being 2 Ricoeur, Paul 205 Robbins, Joel 209 Roberts, Tyler 191 Robertson, Anne Charlotte 286 Rogers, C. 25 role 18, 38; dramatic 95; hegemonic 84; social 96–97, 224, 261, 264, 268, 270 Roquentin 258–259 Rosa, H. 18

301

Index Simmel, G. 13, 87–88, 108, 241, 244, 250–252 Singer, Tania 224 singular existence: loss of 244–253 singular experiences 205–206 Sleep 286 Smith, W. C. 184–188, 191 social anthropology 38, 42, 159–162, 241 social change 14, 16, 18 social dance 159–162 social existence 13–16 social interaction 90, 95–97, 111, 283 socialized-being 250–251 social order 14–16 social psychology 10 social reality 13–17, 250 social sciences 4; crisis of representation 107; as existential and humanistic 111–113; interchangeability in 244–253; interchangeability problems in 244–253 social-structural containment 157 social structures 14 social theory 250–252 society: and individuals 16; without eyes 245–246 Society of Existential Analysis (SEA) 57 Sociological Notes (Quaderni di sociologia) 12 sociological tragedy 108 Sociologism and Existentialism (Tiryakian) 13 sociology of the absurd 16 Sorokin, P. 13 Soteria House 53 Soteria Network 53 Spinelli, E. 56 Spiro, M. 117n3, 272n5 Stadlen, A. 54 Stebbins, Robert 157 Steedly, Mary 186 Steel, N. 97 Stein, E. 42, 169 Steiner, G. 106 Stjernfelt, Frederik 229 Strathern, M. 203 Straying from the Straight Path: How Senses of Failure Invigorate Lived Religion 189 structural power 89 style 46, 56, 112, 269–271; existentialist 170; sociolinguistic 226 subjective realism 13, 18 subjectivity: atheist 197; ethical 170, 175; and existentialism 87; first-person nature of 244; freedom of 46; interpretive 2; secrecy of 104–105, 112; secret 112; of self 32; separatist 56; trans-subjectivity 18 sublimation 67 suicide 99; acute altruistic 99; mystical 100 Sullivan, H. S. 52

Szasz, T. 52, 54 Sztompka, P. 17 Tamaki, S. 101 tango social dance 150–162; and existential moving event 159–162; Michael and his tango legs 154–157; Michael as everyman’s social tango dancer 157–159; and social anthropology 159–162 Tannenbaum, F. 127 Tarde, G. 253n1 Tarr, B. 286 Taylor, Julie 153, 159 technical paradigm 55 technical system 287–288 temperament 88, 269–271 terror management theory (TMT) 26–28, 30 tertiary modeling 231 theoretical minimalism 18 theory: social theory 240, 244, 246, 250–252; theory of mind 227 The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy (Yalom) 57 Theravādin literature 217 Theureau, J. 291 Thomas, P. 54 Thomas à Kempis 101 Thompson, Robert 153 Throop, C. J. 252 Throop, J. 178, 189 thrownness 24 Tillich, P. 53 time: duration 242, 261, 270; temporality 70, 126, 201, 241, 260 Time and the Other (Levinas) 196 Tiryakian, E. 13–14, 19 ToDay or Date Paintings series 259 Tognonato, C. 18 To Philosophise is to Learn How to Die (Montaigne) 126 Torterat, G. 242, 287 totalism 18 totality: totalisation 257 Totality and Infinity (Levinas) 171, 196, 198 transcendence 67–69; empirical 68; existential 68; radical 68; transcultural theory of 68 transcendental anthropology 83 transcendental subjectivism 227 transclusivity 17–18 transcultural theory of transcendence 68 transobjectivism 13 trans-subjective existentialism 17 trans-subjectivity 18 Tronto, Joan 176 Tudjman, F. 143 The Turin Horse 286

302

Index Turner, V. 38 Tuzla 142–143 Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness (Berke) 53 Tyler, E. E. 186

Wall Shadows: A Study in American Prisons (Tannenbaum) 127 Warhol, A. 242, 286 Weber, A. 13 Weber, M. 3, 13, 89 Weinstein, D. 18 Weinstein, M. 18 welfare state 15 Werden 66 Western existentialism 209 Western individualism 117, 203 Wilde, Oscar 70 Williamson, Amanda 161 “The Will to Believe” ( James) 187 Wissenschaft der Logik (Hegel) 64 Wittgenstein, L. 65, 107–108 Wolff, K. 18, 76 Woolf, V. 91, 107, 151, 239 worldmaking 46–47 world-open care 179 world risk society 38, 47

Umwelten 223, 227 unconscious 25, 91, 116, 210n4 unobservable phenomenology 252 unsociability: masked 94–98; radical 100–101; as violence 97 unsociable sociability 90; masked unsociability 94–98; overview 93–94; predicament solutions 94; radical sociability 98–100; radical unsociability 100–101 unvoiced discourse 106 van de Port, Mattijs 188 van Deurzen, E. 53, 56–57, 59 Varieties of Religious Experience ( James) 184, 187 Vermersch, P. 291 Verstehen 17 video see methodology voiced discourse 106–107 volume of being: existentials as way of structuring 267–271; focus on existent as 266–267 volumology as existential anthropology 265–271 von Uexküll, J. 66, 223, 227, 232 V. Wright, G. H. 65

Xun Kuang 95 Yalom, I. 57 York, D. 99 Your Tax Dollars at Work 136–137, 137 Zahavi, D. 117n3, 251, 252 ‘zemic’ model 11, 70–72 Zigon, Jarrett 179, 202 Žižek, S. 161

Wagner-Pacifici, R. 161 Walden 286

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