The Dissertation Committee for Richard Neill Hadder certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Apparitions of Difference: Essays on the Vocation of Reflexive Anthropology Committee: ______________________________ Kathleen Stewart, Supervisor ______________________________ Richard Flores ______________________________ Ward Keeler ______________________________ Elizabeth Keating ______________________________ James Wilce Apparitions of Difference: Essays on the Vocation of Reflexive Anthropology by Richard Neill Hadder, B.A., M.A.I.S., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The University of Texas at Austin May 2007 Preface Dear Reader(s), Hi, how are you? It has been suggested to me that a few pages of prefatory remarks of the form “dear reader” would help “prepare the reader to be disoriented” in the essays I’ve written. I’m very happy to do so, insofar as corresponding with you in this way somewhat lessens the natural readerly tendency to demand—intentionally or not—that I correspond “to” you. This distinction might be the most important cord running through the essays, which all in some way discuss coping strategies for how to deal with irrevocable, incommunicable difference. The maps by which we tend to conceptualize “diverse” people in familiar or categorical terms are inadequate. Disorienting? Yes, insofar as the reader holds to a protocol that does want some of its categories to remain unquestionable. Common sense tells us that one has to stand on solid ground to swing a hammer effectively; whereas my project has turned out to have more in common with Derrida’s, in that one can’t write about what underwrites meaning without either violating one’s own thesis or else finding some other technique for swinging the hammer—or wielding the scalpel, or unwinding the threads of a fabrication, or any metaphor you choose, so long as it means fundamental anti-foundationalist critique. I’m not interested in linguistic foundations as a philosophical matter, however. Deconstruction of meaning goes hand in hand with my rather urgent need to break apart the naturalized idea of experience. No matter how astutely we observe the cultural construction of experience from a critical distance, there remains an uncritical fall-back operational presumption that a report on one’s embodied experience (as an ethnographer, for instance) is concrete; as if there were a simple sentence (see how we’re back to language again) that could accurately communicate basic shared elements of sense data, as if there weren’t learned and arbitrary iii forces behind what one is primed to notice, to ignore, to recall, to interpret, to infer as causality—and as if what one sees can be assumed to be all there is, merely because one doesn’t see anything else. Awareness of the learned and arbitrary character of experience has, during the past thirty years, attached more readily to the Balinese than to the anthropologist. I’ve needed to understand and circumvent this level of presupposition. The differences between my experience and yours—differences which shared practices of common language gloss over—matter more than is generally supposed. Neither are the products of these fallen-through differences small matters: their products are things like trauma, disability, and the tipping point between an argument and a fight. My target is the cultural force of presupposition, then, which is a classically anthropological subject matter I approach through an emergent set of techniques and widely divergent literatures. My aim has not been to “disorient the reader,” and in fact I think such a reaction marks a certain kind of resistance to the ways my text explicitly asks to be read—namely, my assertion that all texts, including anthropological ones, and particularly this one, ought to be approached anthropologically. Every text is a cultural document, even if it disguises itself as a report. Orientation itself, then, is very much the topic to keep in mind. Its outlines re-appear in various guises again and again. It occurs to me, too, that what some readers find disorienting may be the fact that my text is not primarily organized according to the principle of linear development. It is organized according to the principle of repetition, which is native to human socialization. I was able to recognize somewhere along the way that this was going on in my writing, and I was able to recognize the usefulness of refining it as an intentional technique. What linguists call “parallelism” is basic to the voice and consciousness constructed here. Similarly, I don’t believe the present work can be read properly if read once and/or from a single perspective. I say this not as a conceit, but simply because of the way books are written and how my own work has inevitably reflected on and multiplied that process. For one thing, I began and completed all the essays at roughly the same time and wrote them iv concurrently during 2006. Most passages migrated very freely from one chapter to another before the thing took shape from the connections these passages left behind as the residue of their being sewn into new contexts and then ripped out again to be tried someplace else. Gradually, I found myself learning to use a peculiar lexicon and set of images, such that the reader now has to be socialized to their meaning rather than being taught them formally. This wasn’t on purpose, but it does faithfully produce the document of an in-vivo thought process, thus providing the texture I am asking you to work through. Second, bear in mind that the few minutes required to read from one paragraph to the next very often maps onto a year of intensive writerly work, including my digesting hundreds of texts in the meantime. This holds true from front to back. Thus, it was written from multiple perspectives and in multiple layers. It’s a text that wants to be lived with for a while and/or understood within a conversation among several readers. This multiplicity is itself the technique for encountering individual differences, those unshared qualia that culture fails to present. They aren’t presentable without a mechanism for bringing out contrasts within seemingly unified entities like mono-graphs or narratives about an individual’s field experiences. By these means, one’s own presuppositions can be foregrounded and one is prompted to formulate the idea that one has an orientation, and isn’t at the origin of a simple vector between sense and sense data. “Dialogue” is of course the well-rehearsed but still-elusive philosophical term for this dynamic. Another binding agent within the collection became evident to me only after letting the whole manuscript sit for a while, during which time passages and images revisited me. “The theory” that gradually constructs itself here deals with the anthropological study of the present, perhaps as opposed to the cultural Other; as such, it keeps company with Brian Massumi (1995) and recent work by Kathleen Stewart (2005, in press), neither of which I quite appreciated until I had derived my own approach based on many of the same texts they cite. Here is my version. Individual difference exists solely in the present. Once it is recognized and schematized as an experience of v something or of some kind, the particularity of the present has been abducted into practical categories steeped in past and absent contexts. Husserl concluded at the outset of the last century that what we experience as the present is already past—a re-cognition—while vision science made similar observations at the beginning of this century, as I note in Chapter 2. Put another way, individual difference always constitutes the present, which cannot be conventionally experienced (I suspect that affect, which we tend to think of as a phenomenon floating somewhere near emotion, is instead our unqualified registration of the present). I’m not especially concerned here with that aspect of the present concerned with time, however. The other constituent of the present is, quite simply, the fact that one is in it; it isn’t happening any place else. Reflexivity is the avenue for sensing this field, insofar as direct observation instead apprehends a field that is confined to the space in front of the observer. The way to encounter the present, and especially presences, is through a reflexive interrogation of one’s own presupposing knowledges and values that leaves one less certain of what one knows. Things become contingent and questionable. I will refer to this practice as ethics. Reflexivity, the present, and individual difference have therefore turned out to comprise a system. The result is a critical theory of how radical difference enters into or becomes dissociated from awareness. All these entirely too meta-reflexive comments about a text—itself a text that tries to account fundamentally for its own production and the textual production of authorial consciousness—are only made necessary by the fact that readers are apparently likely to encounter this work as something at once more internally connected than a simple stack of seven essays but less obviously cohesive than an ethnography. You are free to read any assortment of the essays in any order without reference to any of what I have mentioned; every essay has a topic sentence and sports a more or less conventional structure. I summarize the essays as separate texts in the next section (I recommend chapters 3, 5, and 6). If you feel prompted to understand the collection as a single work, on the other hand, then I recommend that you encounter it as the artifact of a thought process being vi carried out on the page, where it can be studied.