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"PLEXUS OF INTERSTITIALITY".
Conversations with Abdel Hernández
(©by Alberto Mendez)
INTERVIEWS April 2024
INTRODUCTION.
The history of modern abstract thought has as its particular characteristic the emphasis devoted to the subject's self-reflection. This abstract thought deals with a knowing subject in front of the object as a correlate of the former. It is, in effect, the Cartesian cogito, and at the height of the abstract thought of the 20th century, the recovery of that cogito in the historical and theoretical and of course epistemological and linguistic passage that goes from Descartes to Husserl and later to Habermas through Kant. and Hegel, from Cartesian dualism and rationalism to phenomenological reflection, passing through transcendental criticism and dialectics to the pragmatics of discourse, intersubjectivity and the theory of performativity; In short, thought and rationalism identified in its critical and argumentative function of transcendental philosophical questioning and its regimes of a priori categories, cataloguing, structuring and classification of contents, of categorical syllogisms and their antinomies and mainly of the conditions of possibility of the a prioris of the philosophical and scientific knowledge of that original inquiry in the face of the real that gains its interpretive and significant value from the philosophical text and culture through the descriptive investigations of phenomenology.
The rational approach to this unresolved dichotomy between the intelligible and the sensible world, between the rational and the real, has become the "telos" of philosophy as a modern discipline since Descartes; in its autonomy as an authentic question of the subject in the face of the irreducible reality of being. For this, the modern subject as a reflective subject has turned on itself, being the fold and fold of the very tessitura of the real itself, ontic, cosic of being but also ontological as an inverted Möebius strip as it is revealed to us in the work. of Deleuze from the subject of philosophical questioning, understood as gnoseological, without stopping as such in that reverse of the symbolic unconscious and its linguistic syntax, articulated by Lacan in psychoanalysis, but, rather, in the semantics inherent to hermeneutics in the phenomenological path. by Ricoeur who revives from the semantics of Greimas and phenomenological hermeneutics those masters of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche and of course Freud.
However, in these conversations with the American intellectual of Cuban origin Abdel Hernández we will not have to dwell on the untimely obscurities of the idealisms of the 19th century nor on the shadowy sinuosities of the Freudian unconscious, nor on the logical analyzes of the Vienna Circle, even no matter how scientifically advanced the neo-positivist and post-positivist currents of the last century are proposed, but rather, Abdel Hernández's reflections will guide us through his own theoretical development and his own very unique way of reflection and systematic development of a method and analysis interpretive and performative of culture from phenomenology, hermeneutics and anthropology in the Saussurean specificities of the signifier that began at the dawn of the 20th century the linguistic turn in philosophy, epistemology, and the rest of the humanistic knowledge of culture , from whose destiny, he made Derrida's grammatology his preferred tool, and with it a large part of the post-structuralist constellation. We will approach from phenomenological description and hermeneutical interpretation to the exegesis of culture on whose path anthropology and ethnomethodology led us, to the logic of Peirce's interpretants, whose semiotics are persistently evoked in Abdel Hernández's inaugural research. We say inaugural in its pristine sense, pioneer in theoretical and phenomenological research not only in Cuba, Venezuela or North America but for its indisputable importance for anthropological studies throughout the continent and from the point of view of its own global reach.
It is essential to clarify that these conversations will not take place here between the arguments and propositions, discussed in their theoretical programs as a historical consequence of the Enlightenment thought of the 17th and 18th centuries from the advent of the scientific revolution since Bacon, Galileo, Locke and Newton and by the unavoidable decision not to leave any gap unexplored in philosophical thought and scientific knowledge and with it an emerging Cartesian dualism and a critical empiricism as a prelude to that enlightened project of modernity that culminated in Hegel but was already systematized in its beginnings by Kant. Nor will Carnap's analysis or falsificationism as demarcation criteria in Karl Popper's philosophy of science with that analytical rigor strengthened by logical thinking be found here as a task of the scientistic procedure since the beginning of the 20th century with the Vienna Circle. Anglo-Saxon since the logical-mathematical studies of Bertrand Russell who proposed not to leave a space unmapped or a liminal strip, no matter how weak, that would resist classification from a reductionist algorithm, thereby ignoring the differential, the intangible and the interstitial and whose fundamental purpose would be to process the homogeneity of universal sets. This reductionist strategy of neopositivism was denounced for its dogmatic nature by different variants of that same Anglo-Saxon approach and in particular, especially for the first time by the logician W.V. Quine in the mid-20th century through his seminal essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" where The former critically reviews all logical positivism since Carnap and the Vienna Circle and which can be traced back to the origins of the modern subject with Descartes and Leibniz but also through the research of Locke and Hume. Failing that, we find another answer to the same problem, in the essay by Georg H. Von Wright who also updated modal logic in the second half of the 20th century from the gaps left unresolved in the same analytical philosophy by the latter. Wittgenstein as an advent to the empiricist normative logical field of an inductive deontic. Finally, the recovered pragmatism of Richard Rorty would add to this critical review with his peculiar reinterpretation of Dewey, Wittgenstein and Heidegger in light of the new philosophical coordinates of the end of the last century from a radically anti-representationalism and anti-fundamentalism of a decidedly relativist nature.
Abdel Hernández's phenomenological research, which takes a healthy and emphatic distance, from his perspective from the characteristic spirit of these currents, will also travel, through a long journey, from the extensive and motley period of German idealism from the end of the Enlightenment to the twilight of Romanticism, in that period of time that passes in classical German philosophy from the transcendental criticism of Kant to the "Phenomenology of the Spirit" and the "Science of Logic" of Hegel and from there and through history through the Enlightenment and Romanticism until reaching the 20th century, diverse in its plurality and volume of currents and schools from the comprehensive sociology of Max Weber to the phenomenology of Husserl at the beginning of the century, passing through the Frankfurt School to the hermeneutics of Gadamer, the structural-functionalism of Talcott Parsons as well as the sociological and phenomenological interpretivism of Alfred Schutz, both of central importance in the sociological thought of the late 20th century, as well as the anthropological investigations of George Herbert Mead, will constitute the map on which the Abdel himself will draw the singularity of his own ethnomethodological investigations.
Also present in this constellation are currents such as Mead's symbolic interactionism, critical Freudo-Marxism from the aforementioned Frankfurt School to Habermas and his recovery not only of Marx and Hegel but, at the same time, of Weber himself, to which reflective sociology is summoned. of Bourdieu, the ontological hermeneutics of Gadamer and the phenomenological hermeneutics of Ricoeur, the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, the structuralism and deconstructionist post-structuralism of Derrida, the phenomenological interpretivist anthropology of Clifford Geertz, the phenomenological sociology ----again it is worth mentioning-- ---- by Alfred Schültz and the postmodern anthropology of the "Writing Culture" movement by James Clifford, George E. Marcus and Stephen A. Tyler. All of this is brought together by the postmodern anthropology of Abdel Hernández with his own proven articulation, his own substantial project of what he has described as a "Self Ethnography" or autoethnography of an ethnomethodological nature with which the Cuban-American anthropologist chooses to add particular attention to it. discipline.
On the other hand, the ethnomethodological praxis of Abdel Hernández stars in this scenario in the confluence of the most prominent voices of the philosophical and sociological thought of the 20th century, of the cultural sciences, of the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schültz, the anthropology of George Herbert Mead, Peirce's semiotics, Habermas's theory of performativity, ethics and normativism, in line with the latest generation of the Frankfurt School, as well as Austin and Searle from the Oxford School. Abdel is accompanied, in each conversation, by a thorough reading and study of Hegel's Science of Logic viewed from a rigorous approach through the deconstructionist prism of Jacques Derrida's phenomenological and grammatological analysis.
However, the book that will be developed below consists of starting from the entire previous journey through the history of philosophical and particularly sociological anthropological theoretical thought only in those moments of particular interest, essential, to understand, the semiotic and praxeological theoretical thought of the theoretical and Cuban-American academic researcher Abdel Hernández San Juan. The text that the reader will face constitutes the whole of a continuous series of interviews that we had cherished for some time but that the conditions had not yet conspired to make it possible and that only now had the necessary circumstances arisen to carry out such an undertaking. That is, the real possibility of invoking it and making tangible the fact, perhaps immaterial and inevitable, of the meeting, the conversation and the investigation --------through different digital platforms on social networks----- --- in a common effort together with a thinker, an American intellectual and academic of Cuban origin of the intellectual stature of Abdel Hernández whose authorial work is of central and fundamental importance in contemporary philosophical, anthropological and sociological theoretical reflection and of the coming years of the 21st century at even a continental level. The set of these interviews constitutes, due to its testimonial nature, the continuous flow of the same and unique conversation spread over time without major obstacles other than the pitfalls themselves woven by the complexity of that thought of Hegelian inspiration, in movement towards the concept. A thought that is not limited only to deobjectified thinking itself, since it transfers its value to the real praxis that constitutes it in act as thought as it is in itself. That is, the constant and permanent reflection of the Cuban-American sociologist and cultural anthropologist, Abdel Hernández San Juan, around the paths of his gigantic ethnomethodological edifice.
We will meet here ---first----- Abdel Hernández, conceptual artist, teacher and pedagogue, practical culturologist and social anthropologist in his early youth in Cuba at the end of the 80's, managing with a group of his art students, the sociological study of subaltern cultures, immersing and actively participating in the cultural management of heavy metal and punk rock groups in the metropolitan and suburban areas of Havana, and together with other colleagues and artists of the generation of the 80's in Cuba, immersing himself in the experimental study with peasant communities in the most rural areas of Cuba in the east of the country, putting into practice, then, Lévi-Strauss's theses on the symbolic effectiveness and the genesis and structure of myths.
We will also get to know here, throughout these pages of long and pleasant conversations with a high level of theoretical complexity, following an entertaining and didactic style of presentation, Abdel Hernández, a social scientist, sociologist and practical culturologist in the 90's in Caracas. Also to Abdel Hernández, an immigrant first in Venezuela and then as a resident in Houston, Texas, United States already in the late 90's and beginning of the first decade of the 2000's. In this sense, we will meet at the same time in these interviews the Cuban-American academic Abdel Hernández, first as a visiting professor in Houston, Texas and then as a speaker at the Chicago Congress of Anthropology and at the LASA International Congress in Florida. We will meet Abdel Hernández, lecturer at Rice University and Lake Forest College, the author of books on cultural anthropology and postmodern anthropology, the theoretical representative Abdel Hernández along with his colleagues Stephen Tyler, George Marcus, Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda and Surpik Angelini within and as part of the Writing Culture movement at Rice University in Houston, Texas of postmodern anthropology. Simultaneously and with special emphasis, we will meet Abdel, colleague and friend, a social science thinker and a sensitive, kind and respectful person, concerned about the most enormous problems of culture, which the social sciences of our time demand. A man of complex, high and systematic intellectual capacity and quality due to his interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical mastery and his gigantic erudition and theoretical capacity, in addition to his indisputable status as a teacher and pedagogue. We will continue here thirty years later the conversations that once in our twenties we began to rehearse in turn-of-the-century Havana in 1990.
“No one is a prophet in his land” seems to be the essential motto of these pages, the theoretical and phenomenological summa of these conversations with whom we can also consider, also, the most rigorous theorist of the Cuban visual arts of the late 20th century. And this is rigorously committed to sustaining itself. No one imagined more than thirty years ago in the Cuban intellectual context of turn-of-the-century Havana in the 1980s that that young theorist at the time and irreplaceable representative of that artistic avant-garde and maximum figure not only of the most radical conceptualist movement in all of Latin America but, and therefore Above all, the then youngest thinker and most radical leader of Cuban avant-garde art, would become de facto, due to his way of approaching real social praxis, the inaugural pioneer of the most radical project of anthropological art in the entire hemisphere. Its leader would first be the most emblematic and sharpest representative of Cuban conceptualist art, and would later establish himself as one of the most precise and rigorous sociologists, anthropologists, ethnomethodologists, semiologists, phenomenologists and social researchers of Cuban-American and Latin American abstract theoretical thought. from the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
Despite this, despite the rigor, quality and relevance of his theoretical thought, not only for Cuba but for an important part of North American anthropological thought, and for another substantial part of Latin American theoretical thought, the work of the North American researcher and intellectual of of Cuban origin, Abdel Hernández San Juan, has not currently received sufficient attention and relevance in the theoretical context and in the intellectual panorama of Cuban abstract thought that his intellectual stature deserves and demands.
EXPLANATORY NOTE
(Each interview that makes up this book or better, the same interview postponed for almost three decades that we will see continue ------while at each moment of time we will return to the same themes perhaps in one way or another including new passages and innovative and novel elaborations with surprising and very unique developments-------- it has been, of course, an opportunity cherished for many years, to finally begin, now, in an unprecedented opportunity in which luck has wanted it to happen provide the appropriate circumstances for its realization. For this first meeting, the day will have to pass through the space provided by social networks without a scheduled end with the purpose of exhausting step by step in the staggered manner of modules or conceptual blocks of questions. and responses, in which they will develop in stages, each time, a similar theme, according to each new level of complexity, in the manner of Ravel's bolero or like the lei motïf of Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelungs", always returning to a same theme, new devices and new developments, such as the very structure of the myths studied and rescued from the Amerindian tribes by the skill and faculties of the structuralist Levi-Strauss in linguistics and anthropologist for that profession that results in the living crossroads of crisscrossed paths of the philosophy and sociology of the last century. Here, these conversations will see other investigations carried out, other indications in the genre of a turn of the century period led by the leadership of the works and results of Clifford Geertz and the later postmodern school in anthropology led by James Clifford and the literary investigations and experiments introduced by the postmodern anthropology movement based at Rice University of the "Writing Culture" generation. In it we discover the names of George E. Marcus, Stephen A. Tyler, Quetzil E. Castañeda and Surpik Angelini as a group of the most prominent. In this, the name of Abdel Hernández stands out, who comes to inaugurate avant-garde thinking on the scene from the consequences left on him by art and ethnography, what he has defined as a "Self-Etnography" or autoethnography in which his findings of phenomenological sociology and hermeneutics, semiotics and theory of performativity, ethnomethodology and cultural anthropology are not the product of a mechanistic formula but the relevance of theoretical hypotheses staged and put to work in field research, its theater of operations, perhaps fundamental for the singularity of an author for his masterful mastery and transdisciplinary reach whose essential algorithms these conversations perhaps try to clear up and decode.)
Alberto Mendez Suarez, Analytical Philosopher, author of "Wittgentein: from the philosophy of language to the interpretation of culture", Pp, 15-37, Culture and Value, Ludwig Wittgenstein: posthumous notes, Exodus and of "Overcoming the Detours of the Dilemma Mind/body through Quine's holism/Durhem revisited", as well as "Indeterminism and Truth: Popper and Quinne", founding theorist of the first circle of Lacanian studies in Cuba, established in Florida, Florida International University
Analycal philosopher, author of Wittgentein: from the philosophy of language to the interpretation of culture, Pp 15-37. Culture and Value, Ludwig Wittgenstein, posthumous notes, Exodus, and Overcoming detours of Mind-Body dilemma through Quine-Duhem holism revisited, as well as of "Indeterminism and true: Popper and Quinne", founder of the first circle of lacanian studies in cuba, established living in florida, international university of florida
INTERVIEWS
FIRST CONVERSATION
First question:
Good afternoon, Abdel, as you know, we have agreed on this interview space, to make known to the specialized reader but also to the general public, what has been an extensive, perhaps the longest period -----and most certainly the most unknown and unpublished yes we think in the sense of a published systematic authorial work------ of your intellectual authorial career that begins in 1992 with the writing of your first book of aesthetic theory and art criticism entitled "Borders and overflows of art" (1992). But before beginning to inquire about what your intellectual development has been like as a social scientist and as a social science theorist and above all as a critical intellectual and as an author of books on social theory, phenomenology and research methodology, I would like to first that everything we do is a little history, necessary, if it seems good to you, of that first period in which, as a graduate of the vocational art school, you begin your pedagogical and teaching practice at the same time as your anthropological practice, a pioneer in this field. of cultural and ethnological studies in Cuba but also in the research of cultural theory. I would like you to explain a little about this period of youth and training as well as your practical experience in the field during what was that anthropological experiment known as the "Pilón" project and later systematized in a teaching and pedagogical project in the Hace workshop. What was all that? And how did the influence of Levi-Strauss's anthropology and what the structuralist movement meant in your first anthropological investigations determine you in your beginnings, first as a student and then as a teacher, as a cultural theorist and researcher? What did it mean in your intellectual career, in your radicalization, if you allow me the term, and how did you achieve that gigantic leap from young conceptual artist to practical culturologist? Could you tell me a little about this interview? For the reader who already knows you, it will be like a recapitulation and for the reader who is approaching your work for the first time, it will undoubtedly be an invaluable introduction.
Good morning Alberto,
Thank you. Yes, indeed. I conceived and understood those two projects from the beginning as fieldwork practices just as you describe and have understood.
These fieldwork practices, however, although they had at their center the theorization of the concept of culture, were not properly practices of anthropology but rather of sociology of our own Western and modern societies. Let us not forget that as I have specified in “Rumbos”, I see the Hispanic societies of the continent, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America, including Cuba and the Antilles, as Western societies, by which I understand a certain level of social differentiation of the systems and subsystems in the sense indicated. by Parson, of highly differentiated development and evolution of the person and the self in the sense pointed out by Jean Piaget and in the sense of the studies on social differentiation and formation of the self by Jean Duvinaud, in terms of specialized and professional technical reproduction and transmission in the sense of the secularization process in Weber and the social consciousness and social division of labor in Durheim, and that in the face of this, decolonization is an impossible racial myth and in reality a mythological mirage of the asymmetric economic domination relations of neocolonialism, a need for the latter.
They were therefore practices of sociology, not anthropology, speaking in a disciplinary way with high rigor. They were, however, forms of sociology that had at their center of attention so much and in such a focused and prioritized way the concept of culture, its theorization and understanding, that when one compares them with what the sociology of culture has been, one recognizes that the latter never differentiated field work as we understand it in the tradition of participant observation from a so-called field of culture understood socioculturally in which there is not the spatiality that there was in “Har” (urban) and in “Pilón” (rural) that distinguishes field work in terms of participant observation as an immersion in a spatialized social world of social groups in which the world of life passes between day and night seen from the situational universe of everyday life and the symbolic intercorporeal and intergestural interactions between social actors, when understanding this difference, should we talk about a new sociology of culture? Or should we rather talk about a new cultural anthropology?
I have searched about this in the tradition of both disciplines and I have certainly found research understood as cultural anthropology developed for example in the United States by Anglo-Saxons on cultural phenomena, for example, suburban in large modern or rural cities or American folklore, as well as I have found in Europe forms of urban sociology on modern city issues.
In this sense in which immersing and studying a Western social and cultural group is a way of understanding ourselves and our culture, we could speak of a self-sociology and a self-anthropology.
Now, in the type of field work that I conceived and carried out with these two projects, it is important to note two things: on the one hand, semiotic theory had much more relevance and participation than in the entire previous tradition of sociology and anthropology, While seen from semiotics, on the other hand, it has never, even where it focused on media or culture, ever developed as a social science in a strict methodological sense, much less involving field work in tradition. of participant observation, therefore, should we also talk about a new semiotics of culture?
It is for all this that I think about a new discipline that I call cultural theory. And why cultural theory and not culturology? I like the concept of culturology but this, like the sociology of previous culture and the semiotics of previous culture, lacks the immersive spatialities of the tradition of decisive and main participant observation in nature that those two projects that you are interested in had. you refer.
At that time I spoke precisely to make the distinction of a practical culturology. But today I'm talking about cultural theory.
We must accept, however, I believe as the years go by, looking back on today's experience, that the interest that exists in both projects, especially in the social sciences, pays attention to the very original and unusual fact in those two projects that Certain art media, such as photography, video, installation display and performance, become part of and intertwine with the research methodology both in field work, that is, mediating the process of participant observation, and in the rhetoric of staging that field work, that is, results of social sciences in new media, not only the book, the monograph and the film, which also characterizes my sociology and, as you call it, my urban anthropology of that period. .
On the other hand, although a sociology more than an anthropology, I could accept in the same way that George Helbert Mead being disciplinary a sociologist not an anthropologist, you call his sociology anthropology. Well, I would say that if we accept that Helbert Mead's sociology is an anthropology then we would have to accept that mine is also, even more so.
Let us not forget that I gave a lecture at the beginning of January 1997 on “doing” which I gave in the bag lectures main room of the anthropology department invited by Stephen A Tyler, that lecture was before even beginning the curatorial program of conferences and exhibitions, and it was about “Doing” as a project focusing precisely on how in that experience I developed new and experimental ways of immersion of social sciences between social and cultural groups in terms of methodology, and that that conference, which was actually two, generated a theoretical discussion and a very valuable and important dialogue in which I, Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda, Stanford Carpenter, Surpik Angelini, George Marcus and James Foubiam, among others, participated.
On the other hand, you talk to me about the structuralism of its influence on me. Yes, certainly, I must accept it, that was how it was in the beginning and I believe in a certain way the structuralist imprint is still relevant to me.
The absent structure of Umberto Eco was important at that time to read and study, the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, and the anthropology of Claude Levi Strauss, although let us not forget that at that time I also read Edward Sapir, linguist anthropologist, and Edward Burnet Taylor, anthropologist. focused on the concept of culture, in addition to the fact that I read The Golden Bough by James Frazer, its three volumes, however, I would say that if structuralism has had an important impact on me and if it has had since those years, it was really above all Through, on the one hand, semiotic theory, I read a lot of semiotics in those years, from the Prague circle beginning with Jacobson and many other Czech linguistics and theorists, passing through Barthes's The Fashion System, to structural and phenomenological semiotics of the objects such as Abraham Moles and Jean Boudrillard, I also read in those years semiotics of literature, art, reception, the sign.
Furthermore, on the other hand, I would say that my readings in linguistics at that time were also decisive, I read Chomsky's universal syntactics, I read Benveniste, Martinet and Hemslev, all linguists directly or indirectly as indebted to Saussure as semiotics itself. modern. Peirce and Saussure would then be the references here.
And yes, certainly Levi Strauss, of whom I was especially interested in his more theoretical and abstract texts, such as “The place of anthropology in the social sciences”, or his lectures on anthropology and linguistics and structure and linguistics, as well as his responses both in debates with other social scientists such as in response to Louis Charbonier, I also read Adam Shaft's semantic theory.
In short, many things that I read and studied in that first period could be mentioned, but I believe that the practices of field work projects that I conceived and did at that time are unique, my own elaborations, original, but yes, without a doubt a structuralist influence at that time. I agree
In reality, it is an honor and a pleasure to see myself before this interview conducted by you, who are not only one of the most brilliant Cuban thinkers inside and outside the academy on these topics about which you ask me, in addition to what I consider, just regarding this first question that without a doubt, you are the one who best understood how I conceived and understood those experiences or projects from the past that I today call remote
And I don't think I'm exaggerating when calling it “a remote past”, we are talking about 1988 precisely with regard to pilón and 1990 with regard to doing, that is, 34 years in one case and 36 years in the case. another looking back.
A whole life has passed Alberto, one has not been the same for a long time, not only because one has emigrated several times to other cultures, in my case Venezuela and the United States, but because maturity, adulthood and more recently proximity to what they call the elderly, with respect to a very early youth, both experiences occurred one year and the other two years after graduating from the formal studies of fine arts that you refer to, which was in 1987
Furthermore, because of the aspect of your question that refers to what you call the leap from conceptual artist to theorist of hard sciences and social scientist, we must go back even further, to what that transition was like from late adolescence to early adolescence. youth, a part of which occurred when they were still in the last years of those formal studies and these others of pilón and doing after 1987.
It is easier for me to answer you what that process of beginning to venture into the theory of culture and the practice of a sociology, mine, was like than for you, a bit like you also do with George Helbert Mead who was a sociologist, not an anthropologist, you call anthropology, in which I accompany you by agreeing that certainly as a sociology of culture and a cultural theory, it is also, and has begun to be since then, an anthropology, as was the influence on me of structuralism, it is even easier to talk to you about those two projects, to respond to you, to explain, and even to explain to myself what you call that leap from conceptual art to theorist of hard sciences, social scientist, ethnomethodologist, anthropologist
And in a way, although logically the different aspects of your question are also linked in my experience, and I must manage to explain to myself how they are connected and intertwined, because they certainly are, they are questions that never fail to evoke a certain thematic parallelism in So much entering fully into academic issues of social sciences completely distances us from conceptualism in the arts, and vice versa. But I will try to please your question by trying to locate myself or find, or find again, because of course it is something that I have asked myself many times, what and how all of this is related. The Leap, as you call it, and what a leap it certainly was, was a great leap.
Let's see. First, conceptual art is not taught in the art academy. Nobody teaches you to be a conceptual artist in the sense that on the one hand it is not a subject in the academic curriculum, there is no subject or subject in teaching that is called conceptual art, conceptualism in art is neither more nor less than a tendency, although I sometimes taking this concept that both Derrida and Bourdieu attributed to Bachelard, I have called it an episteme in the sense that it could be said that it is a way or mode of cutting down the world and seeing it from a certain specific sieve. . So being a conceptual artist, leaning towards it, choosing it, directing yourself in that direction, is a choice, a preference, even a taste, not a clear whim, nor something casual or random, but without a doubt something very personal to whoever decides it, is choosing a path among thousands of others that could be chosen in art.
But once you choose it, once you take that path, it positions you in a certain way even in relation to teaching, in relation to what you understand by learning, even in relation to how to conceive or understand didacsis, because, I try to explain this in a Synthetically, the academies of fine arts are structured in terms of an academic curriculum in subjects that have at their center, which are even subdivided into subjects that what separates them from one another is technique, what the Greeks called technec, a concept if you want, a family of crafts, because learning a technique is acquiring a mastery of craftsmanship, that is, the apprentices are placed in a certain way, their bodies and their dedication times are placed with each subject on the path of a technique that has also a certain tradition.
When you teach that technique, it is not the same as the techniques, for example in instrumental sciences, where what justifies that the proper exercise of that technique must be like this is the result; if you do not properly learn to extract a tooth, the piece will break and break. The patient's gum becomes inflamed. If you don't learn that the water in the carburetor must be changed, the car engine overheats and leaves you stranded on the highway. You either learn engineering techniques one way and not another, or the bridge falls down. when the cars pass by, or the building catches fire if you are an electrical engineer, you can be a better or worse civil, naval, or electrical engineer, to the extent that you have more or less skill in solving problems with more efficient solutions, but learning a technique It is learning something that is like that in only one way or the ship will sink, in art it is not like that, the Greek technec, which the Greeks by the way understood to be related to making which in turn they understood to be related to poiesis, in the case of art academies the bridge does not fall, the gum does not swell, the ship does not sink, the building does not catch fire.
Neither anyone nor anything stipulates that it must be in this way and not in that other, the only thing that establishes a rule, what Bourdieu called the rules of art, that learning or teaching must be in this sense and not in that other. of a certain technique, is nothing other than a tradition, he, like others have done it, therefore, in art academies the curriculum is organized in such a way that what the subjects do is put the apprentice, put his body and its time, on the path of some techniques and the tradition of those techniques.
Conceptualism flatly denies this. And by denying it, he denies the entire tradition relative to how art has been traditionally understood, therefore he denies the tradition of art as a tradition of techniques.
The fact that things are made in one technique and not in another is determined by the idea, by the concept, the first are instrumental, the techniques are available instrumentally from the concept and the idea, but the body and time are not given , on the path of some techniques and their traditions.
It is thus contrary to the entire tradition of art teaching but at the same time it is impossible to transform art academies into conceptual art academies because these would collapse, therefore, a conceptualist can found his school, make his own school and organize his teaching as a teaching of conceptual art but you cannot change art academies for conceptual art academies, you can at most in its most possible expression, found your own school of conceptualism, where techniques are learned according to the ideas or concepts you have , these, presumably, can be had without having learned this or that technique, you can have an idea or a concept, a thought, and then decide in which technique you communicate it, and only then learn what you need to learn to be able to take it to complexion.
So here we have a first genealogy of the reasons in my personal experience for what you call jumping. Once it is the idea or the concept that matters, you ask yourself, well, what is the school of the concept? What is teaching conceptualism? It is nothing other than teaching to have an idea, to have a concept, to conceptualize. , to ideate and to think, in this sense, what is the difference between teaching how to think like a conceptualist and teaching how to think like a psychologist, a philosopher, a sociologist?
If your school is the school of concept, of conceptualization, why not follow the path of tradition that is specific to the concept and not to artisanal techniques? Shouldn't he who must orient himself according to how he conceives ideas, how he conceives concepts and how he conceptualizes, shouldn't he who must learn to think, know what conceptualizing thought has been?
How can you teach conceptualizing without teaching Hegel, Kant, Aristotle, Leibniz, how can you teach conceptualizing without teaching Saussure, Benveniste, Martinet, Chomsky? How can you teach conceptualizing without teaching Piaget? Without teaching Peirce , and so on, sociology, anthropology, etc.
If the concept is freed from techniques, you do nothing other than put your body and your time on the path and in the tradition of the concept and conceptualization, and that path, in the same way that conceptualism denies the teaching of art as It has also been denied that you can train yourself in the tradition of the concept by learning the tradition of what the concept must instrumentally dispose of, which are the techniques, it makes no sense to give your body, to put yourself in the tradition of the techniques, when you have decided to be a conceptualist, you have decided to put your body, put yourself and put your time, in the tradition of concept and conceptualization, you will not find, in a few words, the path of concept and conceptualization in the tradition of art ever, You will undoubtedly find it outside of art, in philosophy, in linguistics and in the social sciences.
This on the one hand. When, even in that remote time of the transition from late adolescence to early youth, I decided on conceptualism and understood what I have just explained, the next thing I asked myself was, well, but even, and why do I have to have something that In other words, in the way in which it is seen in art? What they call exnihilo creation, that is, in art you are supposed to create something from the background of nothing, from a bit of formless matter, clay for example. , you are supposed to bring up a figure and the figure you make is supposed to be what you have to say or what you are going to say.
If you have chosen, preferred, if you have decided on conceptualism you have chosen a path contrary to it. So I asked myself, why should I have a concept or an idea that emerges from the bottom of nothing? If the path is the concept and I must conceptualize that concept, it will not come out as the figure that arises from a formless matter, something that is born on the depth of nothingness, that concept must arise on the contrary from immaterial matter, from the immateriality itself of the conceptualization process, where you do not work with matter but with something that is immaterial, dematerialized, something that is a thought and that was how I came up with my concept that at that time I called “the inversion of the creation process.”
I said, it is about reversing the creation process, instead of having something to say that arises from a material, we have something to think that arises from an investigation, and what is an investigation? I asked myself then, something that must arise from the posing of some questions and the posing of a research problem, therefore, we must reverse the creation process, before creating we must investigate or in any case understand that creating is nothing other than investigating based on questions and based on definitions of research problems.
The matter of the concept is therefore thought itself, I must then think and investigate. Pose research problems.
There you have another aspect that was at the base of the jump. But on the other hand there are things that are very typical of my individual experience. First, this just explained did not happen merely like that, to the same extent that I was arriving at those conclusions simultaneously, one thing came along with the other, I was already at the same time and in parallel reading linguistic theory, semiotic theory, philosophy, sociology, anthropology.
That is to say, since then I was already reading hard sciences and even when I was still doing conceptual art I already knew that I would also leave that, in 1988 I knew that I would leave art, I knew from then on that the path of my life, that meaning of my life would be theoretical thinking, I even knew that not just any theoretical thinking, but the hardest theoretical thinking, the hard sciences.
I already knew it, but it was still a process that had to take its shape. So if there is a transition there I already knew it since 1988 but it was not until 1992 that my authorial works began to be books on philosophy and social sciences, sociology and anthropology.
On the other hand, if you review what the conceptual art that I made was and what it was like, you will see that as a conceptual artist it had certain characteristics and I believe that in those characteristics you can also find answers to your question about what you call a leap. If we review some relevant aspects of what my conceptual art was like, we will see clear seeds of the path I took as a theorist and social scientist.
In those early days, around the age of 18, we were heading to inland towns and it often happened to me that I saw reality, things, objects, artifacts, fragments of reality in architecture, in a gate, a façade of a house, a patio or attic of accumulated things or a relationship with a gable roof and several facades and I saw in front of my eyes what for me was a work, I thought that there were in reality itself such as it was, perfect works, constructions or relationships of things in which my ideal work was achieved and consummated without any authorial intention having intervened, I imagined that considered as an author's work that was the maximum, they were simply provincial towns, sometimes rural.
As the years went by, thinking retrospectively about that taste, I asked myself if perhaps my authorial thought was either photographic or cinematic, filmic, because both photography and cinema often consist of just capturing something in reality as it is. It is picked up by the gaze, then I also thought that it could be due to an analytical philosophical or philosophy of language interest of mine on the relationship between language and reality, specifically a certain predilection for a conceptualist nominalism, that is, I am referring to the idea of naming something. , to designate it, would therefore be something like ready mades in reverse.
However, there was always something in the type of things, not everything interested me equally or with the same intensity, there was in a certain way behind everything a certain reading that had its accent on a certain anthropological dimension in reality, that is, it seems that the sense of culture, of man and of a certain aesthetic that could be read behind what was chosen was relevant so that I understood that my choices were nothing more than linguistic anthropological readings of reality.
To tell the truth, later I understood that if I was interested in what was behind it, that is, the culture and the human being that generated it, although at one point I doubted it, that is, I thought that my choices and readings were enough for me, the interest being more aesthetic than that. properly social sciences, but neither one thing nor the other or rather both things were at the same time, in parallel and simultaneously without excluding one another.
In fact, years before this occurred to me, from the age of 13 to 15, it is true that my attention and interest always fell on everyday topics and above all that I found attractions in popular culture or folklore, domino players, buses. urban with their windows wet from the rain, certain relevant urban places such as the coppelia or the boardwalk where people went to sit or meet people, that is, certain customs and rituals in the culture, especially everyday, repetitive and typifiable, caught my attention, Just as I was also fascinated by studying and understanding how the so-called naive, naïve, popular or folklore artists saw reality and represented it.
Certainly over the years I realized that it was not the representations themselves that interested me but actually that live popular culture, going to it as it is to get to know it and study it instead of understanding it through its visual representations.
That direct interest was first reflected in the fact that I began to do experiments for them, that is, directed only at that popular culture, to be presented in it, in its spaces just as those spaces were the ones chosen by me, which became my works, which in turn They documented how these people reacted to the fact that I would nominally name, designate or choose things in the reality of their world as they were and treat them as my works, adding texts, indicative numbers and photographs to them.
After two conceptualist presentations on everything previously explained, that is, made in their live spaces as they were without modifying anything in them other than inserting my readings and analysis, I came to two conclusions, the first, it was not a mere aesthetic and visual interest, not even merely nominalist, although all of these were relevant components of my interest in themselves, they did not please me without something that went beyond, understanding that culture through the social sciences, studying it as one studies a culture in field work, my interest was first and foremost, I found complete satisfaction practicing sociology and anthropology, theorizing culture and doing field work.
And that was how my sociology began on the empirical side, but it also had a theoretical side at the same time. What was I really interested in? What was I reading and writing at that time theoretically?
Well, to tell the truth, the theoretical side of all this had its evolution and above all it did not acquire a definitive form but only with time, several theoretical investigations were carried out at the same time and it was not seen among all of them which would dominate over the others until years later. after.
Theoretical linguistics was extremely necessary and exciting to me because understanding language at an abstract level meant developing logical and analytical schemes that gave me resources to order, classify and coherently articulate everything, although I was continually faced with the dilemma of working theoretically with parameters. linguistic and in contrast in the concrete visual and material being about phenomena not always and not necessarily linguistic but rather spatial, material and visual, to translate into the non-verbal those logical principles of order that I acquired through a theoretical linguistic reflexivity, I I assisted with the theoretical semiotics that, as well as linguistics, I dedicated myself to reading and studying during those years.
However, semiotics, articulated mainly as a science of communication, reduced the sign even where it was not verbal but visual to a relationship between sender, message, receiver, and it turned out that the same empirical question in which I was involved in the fact The very thing of selecting things in reality as they were was moving away from the idea of having something to emit that was something like a message to someone, towards theoretical graphs, that is, logical pictograms and tables.
It abstracted logical/linguistic principles on the one hand but had to connect them in those pictograms with non-verbal phenomena, which in itself presupposed translations or translations of something thought about the verbal Signifier/meaning/referent, language, speech, grammar, syntacsis, discourse, morpheme, lexeme, phoneme, etc., to something thought about the non-verbal, as well as semiological logical pairs such as denotation and connotation, syntagm and paradigm, code, coding and decoding, etc., had to logically abstract them by applying them to something in which that there was not necessarily a message or a receiver.
Certainly the mere conceptual nominalism of reality meant that what was chosen as it was, not being a sign conceived as a message of something aimed at someone, nevertheless acquired such dimensions by the mere being chosen, although these were caused by the mere play between the name and what is named as well as by orienting it to an other ideal or idealized in anticipation.
In this way my theoretical logical diagrams and pictograms tended to lean towards the inferential deductive logical nominalism more appropriate to a matter correlative to the relationship between language and reality, representation and object, concept, subject and object.
Since I did not find all the answers in purely linguistic reflexivity, my linguistic research was leaning towards pure logic of a nominalist/conceptual nature, a matter mostly of philosophy of language, on the one hand, on the other, the theory of language stood out for me. the language/culture relationship versus the nature/culture relationship and it was on this side that from theoretical linguistics the importance of this in the definition and reflexivity of the concept of culture was left in my preferences, something similar happened to me with semiotics, By removing the semiotic tables from their usual subordination to the reductionist pragmatics of the sender, the message and the receiver, my interest in the semiological sign and in semiotic logical pairs evolved in a direction similar to that of theoretical linguists, the question of language and reference, denotation and connotation, although with a difference, certain areas of semiotics were more coincident with the type of phenomena that was of my empirical interest to what I was referring to at the beginning, both prosemics and kinesics, recognized areas of semiology were in charge as studies of non-verbal phenomena, on the one hand of spaces and on the other of gestures and the material world.
Thus theoretical linguistics and theoretical semiotics were acquiring in my logical pictograms, diagrams and tables an increasingly abstract logical content, nominalist philosophical on the one hand and relevant above all for the conceptualization, definition and abstraction of my reflexivity on the concept of culture.
But this was neither all nor enough.
On the other hand, if there was neither verbal language in the strict sense nor sender, message and receiver, what concept of work was I thinking about when, in reality itself as it was, I found the works that for me were ideal?
It was then necessary to define an important graph in my research of that period, what I then called, as I told you, “the inversion of the creation process”, that is to say, reversing the steps of what is understood by the creation process, instead of having something to say. or some message to order for some recipient, it was about selecting or choosing in reality, but with what criteria and to do what in it and with it, with that reality or fragment of reality chosen?
Therefore, it was necessary to have a research problem in advance and what was done or chosen to respond to that investigated problem, which, like an equation in philosophical logic, had to be a solved problem.
But what implications did this have? The questions of research methodology and epistemology of knowledge became more important than the motives of a creation, who should then be the creative author?, a researcher in reality and of reality therefore. Therefore he could not be understood as merely a creator in the traditional sense, as a researcher he had to be a practical culturologist, as I called him at that time, but that practical culturologist would ultimately make works, he should then be something like a maker if we go back to the Greek thought we accepted poiesis or poiein which literally meant what I was looking for, practical culturologist or maker were two names for the same thing, the first emphasized that it is research into theorizing culture based on the study of social groups. understood as cultural groups doing field work, the second emphasized that this researcher essentially produced authorial works, and was therefore also a maker in the Greek sense of poiein.
As it becomes obvious here then all the knowledge of theoretical linguistics and semiotic theory had to be integrated into a theory of culture that would first of all be a sociology and it was thus that my readings and studies of sociology came to the foreground, also of anthropology.
The practical or doer culturologist, of course, was the name I gave to my own research and my work, but later the question arose of how to teach and transmit that knowledge and how to practice it in research, that is, in methodology, therefore I had to theorize. a pedagogical system or rather a theory of experimental didacsis, of learning.
However, there were still questions not fully formulated and still unresolved problems. What were these? It will be necessary to explain these problems that we could understand as logical diatribes and what theoretical investigations were derived from them before explaining how I later conceived this experimental didactic theory.
Let's see in principle what resulted from these experiences on the empirical level: I made selections in reality as I explained at the beginning, I chose things exactly as they were in people's daily lives, people, as I said before, popular, that is, people who were not educated or In the humanities, neither in the social sciences nor in art, I selected fragments of their reality that could be considered of two types or one in which two things were assumed, on the one hand what I chose was an expression of material culture and visual but not necessarily still at that time things produced by those people with an aesthetic or communicative intention but just, as I said before, land, portals, patios, facades, interfacades, attics, storage places, accumulation areas, spatial distributions, roofs , etc., these terrains or areas, these fragments of material culture of course presupposed at the same time typifiable situations as well as situational micro interactions, some of the latter could be related to functionally localizable autonomous activities, for example, washing clothes and hanging them, What was I doing? I selected sets, fragments, areas separable from each other as codifiable or more precisely legible as works. The subjects who made them did not, of course, make them as works, they were just their accumulations, their spatial solutions, their modes of divide spaces, it was I who, on the one hand, saw them as ideal works and it was I who, naming them when designating them, logically defined them as my works, obviously what I defined as my work was not merely what was found there but the relationship between what was found there and my selection of it, therefore, it was my reading that made it a work, therefore I added written logical texts, analytical writings and photographs, but by placing these analytical texts and photographs in those same chosen spaces, it generated situational reactions as well as microinteractions caused Due to the modification or intervention that I made, a juxtaposition or superposition was then created between the situation and microinteractions that were there in itself related to what was chosen before my nominal selection and the situations or microinteractions caused by me, therefore that had three levels, the first level was my observation and analysis of the situation as it was before me, these observations in some cases I included them in my interventions, and on the other hand, studies that I did of their reactions as well as the documentation of the latter through photographs or videos, the visual physical result was logical installations between language and reality that included text and photographs before and after the reactions and thus what was born was what in a conference at rice university bag lectures Main room In January 1997 I called the triggers, these were nothing more than analysis of how these experimental forays became vehicles that facilitated the study of situations of social groups in terms of research methodology.
As I said at first, these incursions provoked were still surface studies, a kind of exchange was generated between me and those people as a dialogue focused on giving and receiving, but the interaction was still superficial in the sense that the social groups did not They were still selected by a sociological cut, but still in a first logical, nominal conceptual moment, neighborhoods, families, residential spaces.
But very soon this had to change, the initial emphasis on a fragment or selection of visual and spatial material culture was giving way to a more integral or holistic exploration and less visual perceptual, the analysis of the situations and the microinteractions was leading me towards the idea of social groups understood as cultural groups, and the logical nominal conceptual investigation was yielding to a sociological investigation of cultural theorization, the initially photographic, cinematic sequence of juxtaposition between situations prior to me and subsequent situations provoked and documented was yielding to a methodology of how to conduct immersive research, that is, field work.
Upon settling in Venezuela, however, the linguistic dimension of experience defined as intersubjective communication between speakers as in hermeneutic terms, the ways in which speech and writing, alphabetic language participate in the configuration of senses and meanings of social experience of social and cultural groups, well understood from ideal types constructed or considered empirically in the understanding of concrete forms of cultures, or simply at the theoretical level, I come to the foreground of my attention and priority within my phenomenological, hermeneutic and sociology of culture. That is to say, the verbal and alphabetic, not prioritized in the first period, became important in the second.
What things did I study from sociology in those two projects? On the one hand, in Pilón, I focused on studying first the coastal town and then 98 mountain settlements, thus studying the daily life of the town, the situational interactions, customs, habits, rituals. , I studied the religion, a specifically regional religion called cordon spiritualism, I concentrated on it, although there was also the Yoruba religion in the area and of course Christian, which is the regent, as for the rural area, it was ten months of work countryside between mountain and coastal farmers.
Then in DO I studied the social and cultural group of rockers, rockers then called geeks or geek geeks, as well as the social group of punks.
This is in reference to what I individually studied through my own practice of field work experience in participant observation, however, I can say that beyond what I studied individually, I also learned widely about other topics and social and cultural phenomena through submicroprojects that under my direction were developed by my guests who included both art students and artists.
There are topics covered by my students in their immersions that, although the immersions were developed by them, I, as project director and as a teacher at the HACER Workshop, directed, let's not forget that Hace was a program based on my lectures on cultural theory, semiotic theory and methodology of field research, therefore the immersions that were being developed and their results were discussed in my classes, in this way I can say that my knowledge acquired as a result of Making also includes urban social groups such as skateboarders, neighborhoods urban residential areas, relevant urban sites such as copellia, entertainment groups, night bartenders, bicleteros. etc
INTERVIEW A ABDEL HERNANDEZ
FIRST MODULE (FIRST CONVERSATION)
Second ask (2)
Taking into account as a starting point the entire almost detailed tour that you have developed in your first response to the initial question of our conversation, I would like to ask you, Abdel, if you don't mind, not only to give a little history in these initial moments of our interview but to specify more specifically the coordinates in which it arises and develops, its genesis and subsequent evolution as well as the theoretical framework that shaped it from a general point of view and more specifically from your personal and intellectual choices.
Since it seems pertinent to me for the purpose of these conversations, to underline and highlight not only the theoretical objectives and assumptions specifically explained but, rather, highlight the implicit development, the twists and overlaps, of your intellectual development, its predeterminations and its autonomy, just as your own development has been from the context in which you emerged and within which your own development as a critical intellectual first evolved when you took your first steps as an art theorist and as a cultural researcher.
I think it would be very helpful for your readers if you could develop your reflection a little about it, taking into account the emphatically Marxist character of the political context in which all this occurs in Havana at the end of the 80's and by the way of the fundamental role that your theories of the "maker" come to play in that historical moment of the first authentic artistic avant-garde within the period of the Cuban revolution that became critically aware and that became ideologically independent from the most official discourse, proposing its own narrative with its own telos. Could you draw, Abdel, for our readers, in the space of these conversations, the entire critically intellectual panorama, in which all this arises and is inscribed and later the horizon of expectations that emerges for artists, intellectuals and researchers and how this context influenced in your subsequent decision making and in the range of theoretical and investigative possibilities that opened up to the young Abdel Hernández of the 90's.
Thanks Alberto.
Complex question although it may seem simple, above all complex, at least for me, precisely because it evokes or suggests a certain idea of context or contexts, and one of the things that characterize my personal evolution as an intellectual, my choices and choices, as you call it. , in the subsequent development of my theories and my theoretical work, lies precisely in the fact that I became increasingly interested and positioned more and more in a phenomenological perspective among other things because I found in phenomenology, as well as in hermeneutics, but above all in phenomenology in order not to leave a certain suspicion towards a certain hermeneutic with a historicist tone from which I distance myself, an adequate balance between the subjective and the objective, (I do not fail to remember here my hermeneutical concept of adequacy as I develop it in my book “The Enigmas of the Ground” and as I develop it in “Rumbos: Explorations in Cultural Anthropology” our second book of dialogues together), especially appropriate insofar as seeing the meanings or ideas of the contexts from the texts, that is, found in phenomenology due to the proximity that this presupposes of the subject with respect to the object in epistemological and cognitive terms, to that understanding of the object, that which is in our attention, according to how it makes its presence known to us, according to how it is accessible to us according to a certain phenomenal, to its phenomenality, which in textualist terms with regard to our senses of context, is nothing other than understanding contexts from the texts, however, not to search in the texts as they make references to the contexts denotatively or descriptively, not to searching in the texts for collections of facts according to which the text remains as a mere reflection or a mere representational refraction subordinated to the objectivity of an idea of reality in which the text is trapped as its reflection, but precisely in the opposite sense, Due to the way in which, in terms of the senses and meanings that the text generates, the meaning of contexts cannot be separated from semantics.
If we are Peircians in this, reality itself in all its objectivity is nothing other than a succession of inferences given by interpretants who are in the place of their objects. On the one hand, the meaning of contexts cannot be separated from how they are. semantically produced the meanings in the text, on the other hand, being through texts, statements, phrases, alphabetic language, writing, words, speech, or visual languages, that we understand each other about the experience, that we make ourselves explicit in what we want to say or that we elucidate what others tell us or tell us, the very work of the generation of meanings whose genesis occurs in the text, the work through which we understand ourselves through the mediation of texts, establishes on the side here , that is, within, in the structural order of the text, a hermeneusis and a semiosis that are nothing other than reality itself, hence the intertwined relationship between phenomenology and hermeneutics, if we understand each other through oral or written, visual texts. or sounds, understanding ourselves and giving meaning to what we say symbolically coordinates the experience, both the experience that relates us to others intersubjectively and our individual and solitary experience between day and night, our own practice, what we do or don't do. In this way, reality is configured through language since it interpretively coordinates the relationship between symbols and experience.
I must add here, which possibly comes from his interest in Gadamer, that Clifford Geertz in "The Interpretation of Cultures" maintains that symbols coordinate, something that I liked about Geertz from the beginning, which is why it is not in vain that precisely that paragraph cites him. In my first book if you go and read there I quote this from Geertz, although I must say that even in Geertz a separation between language and facts prevails too much, it is Stephen A Tyler who in this sense maintains something more pertinent to how I I understand.
In short, because for many reasons, most of them theoretical and intellectual, although I believe that reasons also related to my personality, my temperament, my preferences and tastes are not negligible here, the fact that my choice was phenomenology and this makes us suspicious of the idea of context, talking about context seems and becomes complex to me.
However, I must recognize, and I believe that your question is related in a way that is both beautiful and profound to this complexity, that I did not see it in that way as it then matured from the beginning, but that it had a development and an evolution, I could say that this turn is already mature as a definitive choice in 1993, living in Caracas, therefore the challenge here to answer your question would be to try to explain in what ways I came to it and how I read or see it. then the evolution of my budgets, parameters, intellectual development before this perspective reached its complete maturity.
Let me first say what this step of mine was like, deciding on phenomenology. It did not happen in any way but gradually. After much exploring phenomenological perspectives, even where semiotics contains something of that phenomenological proximity to the object, let us not forget that Peirce said it clearly at Harvard in his 1902 course, as I quote in the entry to my book "The Correlate of World",
“Phenomenology is the first positive science, it is the normative science”
Even I maintained a certain equidistance because something of our relationship to the world or worlds was missing for me in the usual phenomenology, but reading Alfred Shutz, a book compiled by Ilse his wife and Luckman, "Knowledge in the worlds of life everyday", I found what I was missing, what I still objected to the usual phenomenology, I found it resolved in Shutz and through Shutz I then returned to my phenomenological readings and then I felt ready, I felt that there was my position, in fact, Still until a certain period, due to my distance from a certain habitual phenomenology, I kept separate, I did not allow the issues of micro methodology in sociology, ethnomethodology, to be completely diluted in issues of phenomenology.
It was Shutz, his work, that made me understand that it is phenomenology in the first and last instance that most completely encompasses my way of thinking and theorizing. I then accepted that although ethnomethodology is not entirely phenomenology, the latter is broader than that and ethnomethodology must remain subject to the social phenomenology initiated by Shutz just as in general I returned to my readings of already abstract phenomenology and recognized myself as a phenomenologist.
But to understand the development to which you refer we must go further back because it happened, what I say about Shutz in Caracas in 1993 just after concluding my first book which in many ways was already phenomenological but not without many reservations.
It seems to me that the genesis of this development must be found in certain questions that focused my attention from that first period to which you refer.
I will then try to answer you by contrasting between how I saw things then and how things supposedly were.
The very question of emphasis, of accent, of over-attention, of the tremendous interest and priority that the question about the relationship between the self and the social, between the individual and the collective, acquired in my thoughts and theories of that time, but above all everything seen as a relationship between what we consider internal, internal to the subject, what Derrida called "the ground of our inner world", and what we consider external, since my first 30 philosophical notebooks, this topic was at the center of my attention and then became, from the first drafts of the manuscript of my first book "Borders and Overflows of Art: Advent of transarte" back in 1989, the first and main topic of the book written in three years, already written in 1992 and concluded in 1993 in Caracas.
If you remember, if you read this book, I think I even talk about it in one of my educational videos, you will see that what I did there was comb, pan, offer an overview of the entire sociology of the 20th century with its different schools and trends from the perspective of this question, as in sociology according to the different schools and trends of sociology, this issue has been seen and what consequences did this have on the starting conceptions about what was considered internal and external, also with respect to the relationship between the author and his work, there in my first book whose manuscripts I started as I told you in 1989 in Havana, it is seen very clearly how since then I had been dismantling, deconstructing all the parameters on which determinism and contextualism have been based precisely in favor of phenomenologically restoring the place that corresponds to the individual, the subject, to his internal and interior perspective with respect to that external social world while discussing what epistemological clearances are required to overcome the presuppositions of mutual exteriority that have been presented to the self and to the social as foreign dimensions, the individual and the social as extrinsic, but above all to overcome determinism in the analysis of works, authors, meanings, senses and the ways in which the social is configured, autopoietically elaborated by the subjects. in this case still referring to the world of art.
Marxism, which you very clearly refer to as the dominant paradigm of analysis in that context, appears already in those manuscripts and later in the book, as, among all the previous known forms, the most extreme expression of determinism.
You could tell me in this specific sense that overcoming the old conceptions of Marxism, its forms then called dogmatic or doctrinal, was in any case a concern of many Marxists since then, you could mention in this sense Bakhtin in Russia, Terry Eagleton in England , to the authors of Frankfort in Germany, Adorno, Benjamin, and that in this sense all my perspective remembered here would not be in this sense but my own or new modality of also overcoming the old Marxism but opening new possibilities for it.
I would tell you in this sense that going through Eagleton, the Frankford school and Bakhtin was without a doubt necessary for me, that I also went through not only the reading and study of these authors but even at a given moment they were left as my only preferences regarding the entire Marxist tradition, although I do not fail to recognize that it is possible that the source or origin of my questions being focused in such a way may be indirectly related to a saturation that I felt of the consequences of Marxist determinism and that overcoming determinism was then a way in which I explored the possibilities of an indeterminist Marxism.
I wouldn't know what to answer to that, maybe yes and no. Yes, while I come from a Marxist context in which my thinking and my theoretical authorial work initially emerged, not as an indeterminist position in epistemology like mine, in theory of knowledge, completely abandons Marxism and I must recognize it.
Acknowledging that I am not a Marxist is more honest, however, recognizing, as you say, that I was trained in a Marxist context is also honest, my parents are in fact, so I cannot, a rejection of Marxism does not suit me because I love to my parents.
But you could tell me that my perspective, like that of George Helbert Mead, being a symbolic interactionist, could be understood as a neo-Marxist path in social psychology. We would then have to see Piaget, a genetic structuralist, as a Marxist path in social psychology, even Mead himself. ?. Without a doubt not. Neither Mead nor Piaget were Marxists, rather it would have to be said that not only was Marxism determinist, although it was the most extreme of determinisms insofar as it should be specified that it was never about social psychology in me, although I recognize my sympathy at that time towards social psychology.
In reality I had never seen myself from the outside, that is, as others see me, exactly as a Marxist, but at some point through panels to which I was invited, especially in Venezuela, I had the impression of being seen in relation to postcolonialism.
But you evoke Marxism in Cuba, some Cuban Marxists of previous generations were since then good friends and colleagues of mine. Once in fact, and perhaps this is a good anecdote, my grandfather Vega who raised my mother and her sister, I mean not the blood father but in the end my grandfather, a mulatto Chinese like Lam, took me to meet Jose Antonio Portuondo, my grandfather who had been a diplomat in Switzerland, made an effort, coordinated, I consider important just at the crucial moment in which I stood out in Cuba as one of the main theorists and intellectuals and protagonists of the avant-garde to which you refer, that we would get to know each other and he did, he arranged a meeting between Portuondo and me in his office. I remember very well the dialogue we had. In another sense, several of my friends are Marxists, let's say not from my grandparents' generation but from the generation of My parents, on the one hand very different from each other, and above all very different from me, dedicated a great effort to overcoming dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism not only through their books, but also with their editorial work, bringing to the foreground the relations between semiotics and Marxism, for example.
Other Marxists like Ambrosio Fornet, who invited me to his house to speak at that period, were interested in my theoretical perspective as an individuality and of course also as an intellectual protagonist of that avant-garde to which you refer, regardless of the fact that there were several meetings between me. and several Cuban Marxist intellectuals of the sixties were coordinated.
The connection, for example, between sociology and semiotics, as I have done from a completely different perspective in my most recent book "The Enigmas of the Ground", it could be said that some Marxists explored it, but they did so in a completely different direction than mine. precisely because what they did was connect Marxism and semiotics as not exactly sociology and semiotics as I do in "The enigmas of the ground" by relating the phenomenological sociology coming from Shutz's social phenomenology with semiotics, yes, as I told you in another time, I do not consider Marxism within sociology as a science. I disagree with Giddens that Marx is not only a father of sociology, I exclude him from it, but also that even if Marxism were accepted as a sociology, again, something that I do not accept, in any case it would not be a scientific sociology and as Since sociology is a science, a discipline in the strict sense, this would destroy sociology and its scientific nature. If Marx is accepted as the father of sociology, which for example Pierre Bourdieu does not accept, for Bourdieu as for me the fathers of sociology as a science are Durkeim, Weber and Comnte, sociology would have to be situated as a form of knowledge that Not only could it not have been a science, but it would still be very far from ever being one.
Now, on the one hand, these Marxists never stopped being determinists, on the other, they grasped and made their own precisely as the main characteristic of their Marxism, the primacy of context, on the one hand, and the social-historical conception of Marxism, that is. That is to say, historical materialism, exactly what I most separate from Marxism, for me neither historical materialism nor political economy are of interest to me.
The Cuban Marxists that I think of were contextualists, which inclines that Marxism towards the historicist or social-historical conception of Marxism or their contributions were in the field of cultural studies, it is true that some of them achieved as a previous generation because they take me more twenty or thirty years old and are another generation, overcome many things of the old dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism.
However, they continue to be epistemologically deterministic, in them the consciousness of the subject, of the subjectivity, of the individual, of the author, is more than impregnated, determined to such an extent by the historical, social and economic relations that it is treated as a by-product of the history, individuals are treated as forms of social consciousness in whose works, expressions or products irrevocably falls the entire weight of the history of a nation, of the narratives that relate history, nation and ethnicity, the acting subjects are seen as incarnators of the weight of history, society and economy and are treated as such.
But to be more precise even in my differences, some of them themselves, I would say that almost all of them, both grandparents and parents generationally, say it publicly, I think I have even read, I suppose it was a coincidence, some who said publicly and with pride “I am a journalist.”
There you have the main difference.
How can you be a postmodernist and be a journalist at the same time? I think it is not necessary here to expand on that irreconcilability.
If you are a postmodernist, you are inexorably suspicious of the very idea that the notion of language can be separated from the notion of event, the very idea of event, the very idea of event, postmodernists see it as something caused by language, you have it in Derrida. In his essay “A certain impossible possibility of saying the event”, you have it, I would even say that it is the main thesis of the book “The Difference” by Lyotard, considered the first to talk about postmodernism.
Lyotard's “The Difference” is in fact nothing more than a book of philosophy focused on demonstrating the thesis that events, events and facts are not only inseparable from language but also caused by language.
You could tell me that as Caribbean people, these are neological postmodernisms to use this beautiful definition by James Clifford when he refers to Aimé Césaire and he talks about the neologism, that being Caribbean, contradictions of this type can occur.
Yes and no.
I share and agree with James Clifford regarding the neologism, but I do not agree with accepting that someone who defines himself as a journalist can be accepted as a postmodernist.
But the fact that I deny that they are postmodernists and that I distance myself from their naive, naive and primitive visions of what an event, a fact or an event are, (although as you know, from very early on I took care of studying in depth the so-called naive, naive, primitive, folkloric visual culture) of the disproportionate weight that they gave to the social historical and the supposed objectivity of the ethnic and national social historical to the point of placing individuals and subjects as objects are placed in a list or in a shelf where the objects are exterior to each other, separated insurmountably by a supposed objectivity of history, society and the nation, subject to chronologies and contextually regulated orders of derivation, does not mean that I do not recognize the value of what they did as a generation. not only in overcoming the old dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, but above all, other efforts must be recognized, such as promoting semiotics in Cuba, or in developing cultural studies, but you will see that the way they dealt with what they called the third world was historic. social and economic, I was the first to approach it from the colon point of view.
That my perspective later influenced some of them? Is it possible.
I think that without a doubt in that period we fed each other, nor can we deny that in a period we shared the same sociocultural reality and we were equivalent exponents of it in addition to being friends and colleagues, perhaps fed by my perspective, some progressively leaning their vision from third worldism towards postcolonialist perspective that I was the first to point out, but however, as you well know, I have discussed it in Rumbos, although it is true that I was the first to see it that way at that time, I do not consider myself properly a postcolonialist Well, that would be having an image of me only through things that were made public at that time, certain works that approach in that way, plus ignore the whole of what I was writing and doing since then, the fact that in some works I saw things through Colon, Hernán Cortes, and the colonial encounter, contrasting the colonial encounter between Colon or Cortez and Amerindian societies, it does not mean that all my works were in that direction nor that it governed my thinking.
If I had to see myself with respect to Marxism at that time, I would choose, on the one hand, Frankfort, ornament, on the one hand, as a classical neo-Hegelian dialectical philosophy, I would choose Bakhtin as a dialogicist concerned with popular culture, I would talk about the debate on the death of neo-Hegelian art, I would talk about the primacy of the social sciences over art, even the substitution of the latter, I would talk about how in my thesis of the maker a cultural analysis or of culture focused on the most beyond our elite as high thought, in practices that studied peasants, urban groups, I would speak of alternativeness and underground worlds, in short, I would speak of an interest in subalternity more than in postcoloniality.
Even I could tell you that even today, being a phenomenologist and a hermeneut, not a Marxist, subternity still worries and interests me, what Habermas called the societal perspective, the horizontal reading of the social world.
So with respect to the Marxist context, I would speak in my case of philosophical dialectics and abstract logic versus historical materialism and contextualism or political economy, and I would speak in my case of subalternity.
Although I have to admit that my sympathy towards German idealism is increasing, which is also progressively distancing me from dialectical materialism. In no way do I consider that Marx surpassed Hegel. And the connections of philosophical dialectics with idealism, with the self, are irreplaceable by a history of matter.
But let's say a sympathy, which we see in Adorno, if with Marxism's interest in logic and dialectics.
From my perspective, subjects and social actors should never be collected under an idea of political, economic or contextual history, always over and over again the subaltern conditions of production must be rethought, including the production of thought and knowledge itself to deconstruct everything, contexts, nations, ethnicity and with them also deconstruct the ways of treating facts, events and events as objective things separate from language where reality takes its toll on language, demanding either its reflection or its journalistic verification, as if language and They could actually separate. Never. I dedicate an immense effort precisely to the opposite perspective in my book "The Correlate of the World." The world is a correlate of the text.
More in summary, if I had to say today that for me two things prevail daily, Marxism: the first, distancing oneself from capital and seeing it from a certain outside to make it an object of analysis was original, without a doubt, in this there is a Marxist achievement, which we later see better achieved in Bourdieu, we could not in fact fully develop the axiology or theory of valuation, a Weberian or post-Weberian problem in sociology without distancing ourselves towards capital, the latter participating decisively in the formation of the value system in the formation of values and as such a full and well-developed axiology is not possible without acquiring an equidistance towards capital.
I accept that this is original but not in the way Marx did it, although imagining it was an achievement, I also recognize the prevalence and interest of the theory of commodity fetishism, without understanding commodity fetishism it is not possible to develop studies on the forms that subjectivity acquires, studies for example of the forms of subjectivity that television generated, or those that today generate the Internet, or simply of forms of subjectivity that acquire form in conditions where commodity fetishism rules. The phenomena of reification and their importance in the study of subjectivity.
This was also original, but it does not leave Marxism a path or path superior to that of Psychoanalysis, the future of Marxism in my perspective presupposes understanding that this was never a science, but a type of symbolism, I see Marxism at the same level as psychoanalysis, as a critical theory, not as a science, and as such, as a self-criticism of capitalism.
You could tell me well, but insofar as you have developed the relationship between sociology and semiotics, and insofar as you have focused on cultural theory, cultural analysis, in a certain way they share the same Marxist position. Again, yes and no, while I have related scientific sociology, sociology as a science with semiotics, from Comte to Shutz, and ethnomethodology through Parson, but not Marxism. I think I would respond to anyone who asks me by saying read me and read them.
There you will see the differences, it is true that I have focused on relating sociology and semiotics from within, but in an entirely different way, it is also true that I have developed cultural analysis, but taking other epistemological paths, however, I think you are clear And I must anticipate in your question that it cannot be ignored that my theoretical thinking emerged in the same sociocultural context and that as such it participates in a certain ethos that links us. Well, I would say that today, in 2024, that connection in the ethos could be seen from my interest, accent, attention and prevalence of subalternity.
In no way do I think, as George Marcus maintains in his essay Multisituated Ethnographies, that we are experiencing the end of subalternity. I just see it upside down. I could even say, as I see things today in America but also in Europe and of course in India and Asia, that neoliberalism is the subalternity of the future.
As Canclini asked in "Hybrid Cultures", is rock hegemonic?, precisely relativizing the idea that everything that comes from the United States is hegemonic, of course rock has never been hegemonic, it has always been subaltern, it was and it is. It continues to be in the United States, as it has always been in all of the Americas, including Cuba.
Responding to you regarding what you call a political context, I would tell you that precisely to the same extent that the extreme left and the extreme right shake hands in solidarity (in the political unconscious, that is, unconsciously) today defending the same thing, ( not without remembering that Boudrillard foresaw this when speaking of the simulation he said that they are identical) ethnocentrism, the return to nations, the closing of borders, stimulating and setting fire to the firewood of the resurgence of neoconservatism and with it the return to political obscurantism and to neophasism, since they are structurally equivalent and are needed as much as sound to silence, from above to below or inside to outside, and that to the extent that from that political unconscious, to use Jameson's phrase, they turn against the neoliberal legal transparency that made it possible, on the one hand, for them to become legal and stop being persecuted, and on the other, to win in conditions of democracies, as has happened with the resurgence of the left in South America and Mexico in recent decades and more recently, they work to weaken and push back neoliberalism, the most advanced and progressive conception that emerged in developed capitalism in all its evolution, to the same extent, neoliberalism is progressively becoming transparent as the subalternity of the future.
And this may surprise you, but I can tell you that it comes from a very deep analysis.
Now, I believe that to account for both what unites us in the ethos and what distinguishes and differentiates us, it would be best to offer an overview of the conferences that I gave as a theorist in Cuba at that time, and then of the seminars, courses and conferences that I gave during my life in Venezuela and later when I settled to live in the United States
Returning to Marxism and Cuba, furthermore, as previous generations, and I could mention other Marxists, not only other Cubans, but also Americans, Europeans and South Americans, they did an immense job, a feat we could say to leave us to the new generations the inheritance of an old dogmatic and doctrinal Marxism already largely overcome by them. Well, obviously I recognize this and like others of my generation, yourself, I admire and respect them but in no way do I align myself with it.
My path is different. It is also necessary to recognize and accept it.
They also know it.
At that time, there were no coordinated dialogues between myself as an individual, a thinker and theorist alone, and Marxists of previous generations, also with non-Marxists.
Regarding the visual avant-garde of the eighties in Cuba to which you refer, I believe that I was one of its main exponents at the national level as a theorist and as a critic, I curated, coordinated, exhibited and made the texts of several anthological exhibitions of the decade, as well as projects.
Although I once accepted being called a Marxist, I did so precisely because of all those characteristics of the sociocultural life from which I come and it was not in vain that George invited me to speak on a panel with another Marxist in postmodern anthropology, Michael Taussig, as well as together with Paul Rabinow, a colloquium called Fictocriticism, in 1998 in the department of anthropology at rice university, 1998
FIRST SECTION: "ART, MARXISM, ANTHROPOLOGY AND EMIGRATION"
Third question (3):
Now Abdel, I am going to make a parenthesis in the thread of our conversation due to a topic or an aspect that is certainly very recurring in your previous answers to my questions -----which you have been answering rigorously, disciplinedly and very coherently--- -- to investigate a certain aspect, as I told you, that you repeatedly appeal to and that perhaps could go unnoticed by our readers, and even by yourself, because I have no idea if you have ever stopped to calibrate, no? not only its importance, but its consequences in your own evolution, not only theoretically, but in your role as an intellectual? I am referring to what you repeatedly name as certain "XXX Philosophical Notebooks" as you have defined them and that you repeatedly mention in other interviews each of the few questions formulated here so far. Could you explain to me what these Philosophical Notebooks are and what they consist of? And... why are there thirty Notebooks? What do you mean by that?
I would also like to add other questions in this regard that are closely related to my questions about your "XXX Philosophical Notebooks." Taking into account that the idea of the "Notebooks" is preceded by both the history of Marxism and the history of the various anthropological currents that have been happening chronologically since the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, going through all of Lévi's structuralism. -Strauss, until reaching the phenomenological descriptivism of Clifford Geertz to conclude with the postmodern approach of James Clifford, Georges E. Marcus and Stefan A. Tyler and the well-known movement of Writing Culture of which you were one of the most unique and eloquently figures end of the century as an immigrant intellectual established in the United States. Likewise, the idea of the notebooks is also preceded by the history of psychoanalysis itself. Regarding the very notion of "notebooks" I think of Lenin's "Philosophical Notebooks", Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks", Mircea Eliade's diaries, Freud's "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" as well as His Manuscripts and letters numbered and cataloged by himself with letters that functioned as types of personal Notebooks, as well as in Lévi-Strauss's "Sad Tropics", Geertz's testimonial records from "Behind the Facts" and "Local Knowledge" as well as in the testimonies and reports on travel diaries of writers and explorers such as Joseph Conrad, Michel Leiris, Aime Cesaire and Bronislaw Malinowski analyzed and reinterpreted by James Clifford in his book on the "Dilemmas of culture". I also think of the notion of "notebook" of the until now unpublished and very recently published "Black Notebooks" of the German phenomenologist Heidegger full of political and personal notes and at the same time I think of Adorno's "Minima moralia", a diary of marginal reports inscribed in a critical framework between aesthetics and metaphysics.
For all this, I would very much like you to delve a little more into the fundamental characteristics of your own "Philosophical Notebooks" of which we have barely spoken and about which very little is known and I wonder in what sense their writing contributed and stimulated the reflections of the young thinker Abdel Hernández? I wonder if, after three decades of intellectual and personal evolution, can you still remember if these Notebooks were a moment of continuity for the young conceptualist visual artist heading towards the laboratory of the maker where you would define yourself as a practical culturologist or researcher of culture or if this period was part of a moment of mediation between the young ethnomethodologist towards the cultural anthropologist and phenomenologist that you currently are? How did these Notebooks allow the young intellectual that you were to evaluate your condition as an intellectual as such and your position with respect to, on the one hand, a generation of creators, visual artists, writers and intellectuals and, on the other hand, a very unique sociopolitical context? ?
To what extent did these "Philosophical Notebooks" allow the young intellectual that you were then at the end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's, to establish a context of self-formation from the epistemological point of view that, starting from the foundations sedimented in your training together with the philosophical, semiological and sociological theories of structuralism and post-structuralism allow you to consider and advance towards a phenomenological and hermeneutic foundation in your subsequent research in the field of anthropology and ethnomethodology?
Thanks Alberto,
The first thing I thought about when reading your question was about me as a writer, about the life of a writer, about how many years I spent in my life dedicated to writing. It has been 39 years since I started writing and I didn't stop until today from dawn to dusk. However, I also thought that I didn't write books from the beginning.
I wrote my first book 31 years ago. Before, I only wrote loose essays that were not chapters of a book as an author's work. Between 1993 when I completed my first book until 2004, I wrote mostly loose theoretical essays. 11 years passed from 1993 to 2004, in 2004 I wrote my second book and from that year until today I have not stopped writing books year after year, sometimes it takes me two years, even three, but I finish one and start the next.
Today, in the year 2024, I am the author of 13 books of complete works, by which I understand books that I sat down to write from the beginning to the end as works, conceiving and composing them, whose chapters were born for them and that I wrote them as a whole each one as a work of author. I exclude from these books all my art criticism, that is, my literature on the work of others.
Sometimes I think that those who are only art critics understand their critical books as their works. It's not my case. I understand a book as a work that one conceives, has in one's head, begins to compose and write and sits down with it and does not stop until it is finished. My authorial books are theoretical works of thought. I have always developed art criticism in parallel. I have never stopped writing it but I do not integrate it into my authorial books, I summarize it in volumes but whose essays/chapters were not born for those books. If I counted the compendiums of my art criticism among my works, I would have 25 authorial books. More is only 13. The rest is my condensed art criticism, selected essays.
Those notebooks predate my first book, they were, in a way, its ancestors.
They were not authorial books at all, nor were they made up of essays, but I did write them with the same feeling, in the same soliloquy, with the same impetus and passion with which I began several years later to write books.
I already wrote loose essays back then, but the notebooks were not made up of essays, they were a passionate work of articulating my theoretical system and yet what I could call today my theoretical system was never fully understood or achieved, which Paradoxical is that only in them did I dedicate myself to articulating the idea of a theoretical system understood as a coherent whole that I even represented in tables and diagrams.
Obviously if I continue then and until today, as happens with every theorist seriously committed to his work as science and thought, articulating and developing a theoretical system, mine, but the latter is gradually being done with the theoretical development of the works, in books, not in that way, not long ago I sat down to try to represent what that system is, what its internal coherence in the philosophy of science, where everything supposedly has to fit into a coherent and systemic whole, how do you respond to ontological, teleological, epistemological and methodological questions, how your idea of method, of theory of knowledge, are systemically linked and related, what is the telos of it and what is its presupposed ontology. Obviously I have continued to attend to and update all of this, but in the very way of the books that I write, not in that way of making graphics, of seeing that system as a whole represented in the here and now of the page, as an abstracted whole. , separated from the works, and graphically represented.
Only in those notebooks did I make it an activity that I tried to represent myself by writing it down and visualizing it in tables and diagrams.
In those notebooks I subjected my own concepts to scientific scrutiny, developed hypotheses, contrasted ideas, developed logical tables and theoretical graphs. They were my first forays into the hard sciences. They were full of hypotheses. Eventually they included quotes from authors of my choice. Linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, philosophers. Short quotes chosen by me. One or two pages developing one's own theoretical idea exposed to analytical, systemic, logical scrutiny, followed by graphs and tables. And so on, two or three next pages of writing, and then graphs, and so on until I filled them.
Is the hypothesis scientific? I ask myself that question today, but I didn't ask it then, I mean I ask myself that question today but back then I didn't doubt it, I believed that the scope of a systemic theoretical elaboration rested on the potential to develop hypotheses and expose them to logical scrutiny.
Where did this passion for hypothesis come from? If I read mostly theoretical linguistics, semiotics and anthropology then, perhaps it is interesting to note that at that time I believed much more faithfully in an exact idea of scientificity and my obsession was to find a system, a logic. my own system.
Many of those writings and texts were very intricate elaborations of logical-deductive hypotheses about something that I was looking for, something however, in which it was scrutinized whether the hypothesis of a system was possible. I wrote them at night and they took up a considerable part of my morning. The dedication was such that they caused me chronic gastrodeudenitis that lasted about three years due to the constant getting up early, something that I never did again, I recovered my sleep, only My cousin Roberto, my grandfather Vega and my grandmother LLorca saw me writing them for approximately five consecutive years, I wrote them by hand, in manuscripts they were industrial lined notebooks, like those industrial lined notebooks that were in Cuba, but much taller and with a hard cover bound.
They were for many years placed as a collection next to each other listed on my grandfather's bookcases, antique mahogany-colored bookcases, although my mother and sister may have seen them on the bookcase, they did not see me writing them, on the other hand If certain friends who visited me when they arrived I was writing them and eventually I interrupted the writing.
In them my ideas of hard sciences were articulated, you ask me if they were related to art, I would say not as long as I articulated in them my idea of a new science, not of an art, however, it was imperative for them to articulate how it was related in my system the theory and the practical empirical, let's say that there was in them a sense of experimentality, of the very idea of experimentality that had to account not only for a scientific system hypothetically elaborated as the emergence of a new science, but also to solve in them how to do experimental things that are not usually done in the sciences except in very experimental forms of science, would logically be contemplated in that system, the work of hard science was combined in them with the sense of laboratory, in those notebooks were then the notions of hypotheses and thesis, they were more similar to the type of things that you like in philosophy due to the demanding level of belief in an idea of scientificity from which I later moved away.
Even phenomenology and hermeneutics did not govern me, I was still far from having later taken that path, they were still exercises in philosophical and theoretical logic, they were completely and totally far from anything political, the parameters and themes, the things about which I wrote were about hard sciences, linguistics, philosophical logic, systemic analysis, I was looking for my own scientific system.
Why did I believe so much then in science with that exact logical sense, but not since then taking the natural sciences as parameters, but rather linguistics and logic itself, perhaps a certain idea that Marxism had about itself as a science? , was behind, for nothing in what I wrote, it had nothing to do with Marxism, but who knows, perhaps living in a sociocultural world of faith in scientific salvation reigned in me, a little like what happened to Stephen A Tyler who He believed for a long time in the most extreme scientificity, and then he began to lean towards hermeneutics and postmodernization of his thought, from structuralism to philosophical anthropology. Something similar happened to me. I also, like Stephen, proposed a very scientific theory at that time, but they were both very theoretical and dense.
In the long and lonely path that I have traveled by completely surrendering to the solitary and solipsistic life of the writer, they had value.
I write theory, thinking in hard sciences, not literature in a strict sense, but ultimately one lives in writing. I am a writer. They make me think about it. On how I became a writer. In how I came to a life dedicated to writing. Writing those notebooks were my first exercise in living in the solitary activity of writing, concentrated, without doing anything other than thinking and writing.
My authorial books are descendants of those notebooks, but those notebooks were not yet books, nor works, that is, it was not that each notebook was a work, far from it, they were like a collection of my theories.
In them I still didn't have the clarity of my books, they were much denser, I even understood my own ideas less in them, they were like exercises in self-clarification, elaboration of hypotheses, they were very dense, I don't think they were as dense as my books because For example, “The Correlate of the World” and “Thinking Science” are very dense, but very dense on a theoretical level for the age I was.
I am not an adept at teaching theoretical knowledge. I think that when one teaches knowledge, thinking like a teacher who teaches students, thinking loses richness, it is simplified in a non-negotiable way, but I do think that theoretical and scientific maturity when reach, ideas, no matter how dense they may be, are seen and understood as crystal clear, so for example, Deleuze in “Logic of Sense”, I do not believe that Deleuze himself felt that in those three volumes his own thoughts were crystalline for himself. Even though they were dark, one was still searching, one was discovering, there was still a density in which everything was not completely accessible to oneself, especially the Deleuze that later emerges in “Empiricism and Subjectivity” or in “The Fold: Leibnis and the Baroque.” ” without ceasing to be very dense, theoretical, abstract, it is already crystalline for himself, he had already found himself.
Hegel for example, "The Science of Logic", it is difficult to find a more dense and theoretical book than that in the entire history of theoretical thought, but if you read it dedicatedly you will find that it is crystal clear paragraph by paragraph everything is understandable if you concentrate and therefore also teachable, the ideas are clear no matter how abstract, theoretical and difficult they are, my density today, and I would say since 1995, was already crystalline for myself, clear, not a single one of my ideas escaped my own understanding. clear, I could teach it and the ideas were logical, precise, clear, even more so later, since 2004 my books, including the most theoretical ones, are clear, every idea, you just have to make an effort to read and concentrate, to understand it can be understood by very abstract and theoretical as it may be. The same can be said of the philosophical dialogues between Stephen A Tyler and me, they are clear, although very dense, very abstract. Stephen's essay, for example, “Prolegomena for a Proximate Linguistics,” is one of the most abstract and dense texts you can read, but if you concentrate there is not a single idea that is not clear.
The notebooks were not like that. They were of a variegated density, I was looking for myself, I was looking for something that was not yet completely clear to me. They were very theoretical, very dense, perhaps there were flashes in it for a moment, I don't doubt it, there were in fact, powerful moments, but also, even though they were not crystalline, they were suddenly a skein yet to be unraveled. Something was born in them. I think that first I was born in them myself as a writer of thought in hard sciences, second I think that the authorial writer was born in them, even though they were not yet books, a discipline of sitting down to write in a systemic way was born.
A passion was also born to live dedicated to a task, that of finding my system.
I articulated a theoretical system that had to be coherent from one end to the other.
Writing authorial books, achieving that discipline was neither simple nor easy, it is not something that I achieved overnight, it is not for nothing that there are 11 years between my first book and my second book, it took all that decade writing loose essays that They were not part of books, and it took that entire decade of life experience as a person to achieve the discipline necessary to write authorial books. How to spend the day, how to internalize and what place to give things, how to economize the vital flow. As you know, I am a very productive thinker and theorist, I mean I am not one of those thinkers who wrote a limited number of essays throughout their life, I write without even premeditating it in a natural way no less than one hundred essays a year. We are thus the exponents of this trend, I think I told you at some point, Stephen A Tyler was also like that, especially Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda is like me, he writes no less than a hundred essays a year.
But for a long time those hundred essays were each independent, loose, not chapters of authorial books written from beginning to end, conceived and composed because the latter requires a discipline not only professionally but also as a person in life. It took me time to acquire that discipline, to find it in myself, it became continuous and systematic and irreversible since 2004.
Those notebooks, paradoxically, not being books and not having been made up of essays, were the ancestors of that discipline that I found later, they were not books but they had the type of discipline and dedication that an author's book entails, the idea of sitting down to write something in a continued. But I don't think at all that although I proposed it as the reason for writing them, I achieved in them that system, the systematicity and the scientific systemic whole of my theoretical thinking, not at all, I achieved the latter much later in my books.
But in those notebooks was where I only asked myself the question in the form of something that had to be seen with my own eyes on a page. What is my system like, what is its internal coherence? The idea of truth, for example, what idea of truth is behind it? On what idea of truth does my theoretical work rest and seek?
I asked myself those questions in those notebooks. There was also the idea of a type in them, although even then not seen as ideal types in the sense that I attributed to them after studying Weber, for example, if you read a pedagogical system you must define which type you are going to form, What is the learning theory on which that system is based, and what is the ideal type of what you want to obtain as a paradigm of a student who has learned and has been trained in it.
There was also a theory of learning in those notebooks, and a theory of the type that was sought to be achieved not only in the relationship between theory and experimentality, abstract and empirical theoretical knowledge, epistemology and method, but also between learning theory and the type of learner that was sought to achieve.
They were more like the kinds of concerns that you have today and have continued to have regarding analytic philosophy.
But I later moved away from that paradigm a lot. My readings and studies of Habermas, Shutz, Derrida, Deleuze, Todorov, in Caracas, Venezuela, but above all my studies of hermeneutics and phenomenology changed me a lot. Although it was also in Venezuela that I read in depth contemporary sociological theories from Weber and Durkheim, through Parson, to micromethodologies up to Shutz, Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Just as there is also a lot of that scientific systematicism in Bourdieu.
I have never abandoned scientific systematicism, on the contrary, I have deepened it, but not in the way of sitting down to see it in front of my eyes, since the nineties I have not sat down to make logical tables and diagrams representing for myself what internal systematicity is like. of my system and how it is defined and articulated as a whole of linked parts that can be visually captured with arrows, concepts, boxes arranged in orders of derivation, I have never again done this in the way that, for example, someone asks you what your system and you must explain it through justified logical graphics. Only in those notebooks did I do this, try to see my system as a logical whole, and yet, although I never did it that way again, that system was not yet achieved in those like thirty notebooks, perhaps it was searched for, explored, investigated, but not achieved.
Furthermore, that was not how I achieved it, it was not by sitting down to try to self-represent my system, how I achieved a system and a truly coherent scientific system from one end to the other, I did not achieve it by sitting down to self-represent it, I achieved it in another way by writing books. authors.
But I treated them that way and that's what they consisted of.
I don't think they were notebooks in the sense of tradition that the notion of notebooks has acquired in other writers like the ones you mention.
Perhaps one could talk more about the idea of the laboratory, the idea of experimentality, those thirty notebooks would be something like an experimental laboratory of five years that I lived and collected in them, and paradoxically in 1998 from Houston at Rice University As a complementary associate researcher I returned to the idea of the laboratory, I made a project program that I called the laboratory of ethnomethodology, theory of performativity and ethnography, (which I called “The Circle of the Lake”), a printed program with a folding sheet. I returned to the laboratory as a modality in Houston in 1998, thanks to that laboratory we developed the second part of the philosophical dialogues between Stephen A Tyler and I in the department of anthropology, where Quetzil and Surpik also participated, I also developed theoretical dialogues of methodology of the research based on my trips to various cities in 1998 where Stephen, Quetzil, Surpik and James Faubiam participated, also recorded. Even in Caracas, at one point I tried to return to the idea of the laboratory through a project that I called laboratory during my work as a researcher at the Research and Development Center of the Armando Reveron Higher University Institute, currently called the Experimental University of the Arts, in At that time I worked as a researcher under the direction of Miguel Posani, a Venezuelan epistemologist, thinker and environmental psychologist graduated in Italy in the line of Edgar Moran and Gregory Bateson, at that time although with his own developments in the theory of the imaginary. Center in turn under the direction at that time of Manuel Espinosa as director of the institute, Venezuelan thinker, writer and visual artist, I told you about both, theories of complexity, Manuel under the line of Pierre Francastel. The institute also had this line of theorizing an idealized type of learning and learning to achieve. I told you about both. Miguel was the director of the center, then he was director of the science museum, communications at CONAC and a television channel. Manuel was previously founder and director of the Gan, national art gallery and later of the Maracaibo contemporary art museum.
There at the CID in those years between '91 and '96 I also conceived a laboratory project and I gained a lot of nourishment.
Well, those two laboratories, my '98 laboratory at Rice University, and the one at the CID in Caracas, would be the much more evolved later forms of those early notebooks.
Obviously it is not a laboratory in the sense of natural sciences, but rather a laboratory in the sense of cultural sciences, but it is a science of experimental culture.
Let's say then that those notebooks were my first laboratory understanding the notion in the sense of a science of experimental culture. You could ask me if there is any relationship with the notion of laboratory as we find it, for example, in theater anthropology. In Eugenio Barba or in Grotowki.
If it were possible to imagine a laboratory with a similar impetus in experimentality but in which there was not theater but only cultural science, and then from then on a way of resolving the relationship between abstract theory and field work, I would say that my laboratory experimental of 1998 at Rice University, which he also called “The Circle of the Lake”, would be the heir to those notebooks. To return to them is to return to an idea of scientific experimentality.
What you called “performativity” for example when you talked to me about what happens with the subject in all the examples that I gave you in “Rumbos” to explain my theories and the relationship between abstract theory and participant observation, let's say that they were the writing of a five-year laboratory in which I sought systemic articulation at a scientific level between theory and participant observation, between abstract theory and field work.
In that specific sense, without the slightest doubt, of everything you have mentioned in your question, we could say that the only thing that truly understands them would be Levis Strauss, Stephen A Tyler and Clifford Geertz, without a doubt. They were the notebooks of the anthropologist that made me with that sociology that I practiced, they were the notebooks that accompanied the laboratory that I was carrying out all those years of field work. They were the systemic thinking behind what he did. They were the scientific foundation of my “maker theory” and of the practice of immersion theorizing culture that I then developed individually in urban and rural areas studying social groups as cultural groups, but they were however individual, completely individual, and had nothing They had nothing to do with either “the diary” or the “notebook”, nor were they “notebooks” as we understand them in field work, they were rather the literature of the field work laboratory but systematic literature, my think abstract theoretical while doing all that. I would say that they are at the same time the predecessors of my authorial books, on the one hand, and of my concept of laboratory and experimentality, on the other. See the anthropologist in them. Without a doubt.
Yes, Stephen, Geertz and Levis Strauss would be the most pertinent and appropriate of all your mentions.
Just as the systemic whole of a theoretical system, mine, had to be resolved, which involved those fieldwork practices, that participant observation, they transformed all that into a laboratory. Seen from practice, the immersions that I did were projects, one of those projects I called a “workshop” at that time, the other not, but both were forms of participant observation and field work, however, seen from the notebooks, The whole is perceived as a laboratory of five years from 1985 to 1990, an individual laboratory, these notebooks referred to my system of theoretical and scientific thought, they were very individual, that is why I tell you that they are the ancestors of my authorial books. In them I explored for the first time an idea of experimentality. No one knew them better than my cousin Roberto Salas, my first cousin, a playwright and theater director that you know.
Fourth question:
"Yes, of course I know Roberto. I don't know if you remember, but when two years ago I wanted to propose this project to you, it was thanks to Roberto that I was able to contact you again. By the way, he has done very serious theaterological research in recent years and very documented, which you know very well, about stilt walking, in street theater and its place in carnival, folk art and circus arts and varieties. Of course I remember him. indirectly, through you when we were young, in our twenties, and we met to talk and listen to you theorize in your living room about those authors, whose theoretical books we found fascinating, from Lévi-Strauss to Foucault. , Deleuze, Lyotard and Derrida to Bourdieu and Baudrillard. That was around 1990, when we met and began our theoretical conversations. I remember, then, that Roberto was a young theater student at the Higher Institute of Art. They were years, very intellectually intense. They were the experimental years of your anthropological and pedagogical project of the Hace workshop. I remember that we met at your house with other artists, friends and colleagues of yours, and also many of those who had been your disciples in the Hace project. And those times were also the prelude to what we are today. "They were, in a way, the beginning of our formative years."
After this short digression, I would like, Abdel, to resume the thread of our conversation following a line that you had been developing in which
----as you explain well----0 although you emerge in a Marxist context that takes historical and dialectical materialism as its first reference; However, you immediately react by distancing yourself from the growing influence of structuralism transmitted by Bourdieu's reflective and symbolic sociology and which is explicitly recognized from the methodological and synchronic linguistic influence inherent in Lévi's structural anthropology. -Strauss, as well as in your experiments and theoretical investigations also influenced by the post-structuralist grammatology of Derrida, whose influence is capital in your work, as well as the theories advanced by the philosophers of the Frankfurt School and in it, your reading of the " Negative Dialectic" by Adorno and also his "Aesthetic Theory" as well as the theoretical influence of Benjamin's work, and also of the Russian language sciences in the semiological and literary and aesthetic criticism work of Mikhail Bakhtin in your theoretical research. As you explain and later due to the direct influence of the thought of Habermas, the last Frankfurt philosopher in this direction and as any reader can recognize following your own theoretical development and taking into account that the first line of your work ----first in the sense of its hierarchy and priority character, not first in the original place of its genesis---- it is marked by a rigorous direct influence of Hegel's philosophy, I would like you to be able to delve with pertinacious incidence into the details that you consider most timely and more emblematic or perhaps more specific that explicitly express their reconstructive and prospective nature in a line drawn from fundamental axiological problems discussed not only from the point of view of the objectified effects and sociological results of your concretely semiotic Investigations but also already subjectified as such on the properly phenomenological and linguistic-descriptive level following the hermeneutic plot of interpretive purposes of Derrida's grammatology for example, distinctively indicated throughout your work with particular emphasis in your books such as "The Correlato de Mundo" to mention some.
(End of fourth question)
Thanks Alberto, I think it is indeed the way you explain it, that structuralism had that effect on me of starting that distance to which you refer.
However, let us not forget that Levis Strauss defined and recognized himself, he positioned himself in favor of historical materialism, so that although it is true that this distance is largely the result of the impact on me of structuralism, I would say that above all from the direct reading of the latter in theoretical linguistics and semiotic theory, not through the mediation of how these disciplines are reflected in the anthropology of Levis Strauss.
First here we must take into consideration, not only the pure theoretical linguistics that I read and studied a lot in those years, not only the pure and abstract semiotic theory, but also the specific type of linguistics and semiotics that dealt with forms of language and sign that presupposed an author and his work, either in the sense of literary criticism that discusses a literary work and its author, or generalized based on it, or the semiotics of the visual, etc., etc., forms of analysis in which structuralism operates precisely through a separation between text and context, where the work is brought to the foreground as an autonomous textual form analysable by itself in its language separated from that context.
It is this consequence of the linguistic synchrony to which you refer, the fact that the parameters of Saussure and Peirce enter the analysis of a mode of language by cutting the latter from its autonomy compared to or separating it from a context, which makes At the beginning, from my first book, the question about the relationship between “the internal” and “the external”, “the individual” and “the social”, “the inside” and “the outside”, was in the foreground right in the way it occurs in that book, that is, simultaneous the presumed separation of that text, which is the work to be analyzed against ideas of context, with the universal autonomy of the individual or the singular one versus the multiple of others. some, or the social or the contexts.
The way in which in me, as is made explicit in my book “The Correlate of the World” to which you refer, or in my book “The enigmas of the ground”, or even in my theoretical lectures on linguistics, for example on Peirce and Saussure, theoretical linguistics is given as a parameter of scientificity, is infinitely greater than in Levis Strauss, Levis Strauss used linguistics by homologies even helping him with Stephen and semantics, let's say by homologies/synonyms, helping him with the notion of semantic synonymy, because the homology is not entirely precise, that is to say that it was also done by analogies with all the unscientific ambivalences that the analogy presupposes in its debt with figurative and mimetic languages, in fact, I would like to advance here a comment regarding “Counterpoints” when I told you that Lacan and psychoanalysis were largely responsible for the crisis of structuralism.
Just as Levis Strauss is recognized almost as a symbol of structuralism, I think that he is in no way more than a symbol, not in whom structuralism finds its moments of true scientificity and for the same reason he is also one of the causes of its decline. of what he himself symbolized.
The scientificity of structuralism, in short, was achieved only in theoretical linguistics and modern semiotic theory since to compromise the scientificity of structuralism with Levis Strauss is to bet on its decline.
With this I simply try to point out that the way in which this basic synchrony of structural linguistic theory operates in the imagination of the Structural Anthropology of Levis Strauss, from the moment in which it refers to phenomena that are not entirely clearly autonomous as textual forms versus to contexts and not entirely structurally separable from the idea of “an I”, “a self”, “a self”, “a one versus the multiple”, it already bypasses inseparations between texts and contexts, in fact, the The notion of text does not operate at any time in the anthropology of Levis Strauss, but on the contrary, the structure transferred from linguistics to the study of non-linguistic phenomena such as lineage, consanguinity, kinship, the structure of Bororo villages, the raw , the cooked, the profane, the sacred, or the structure of imaginary systems such as myth, operates once in Structural Anthropology a transposition of the linguistic synchronic paradigm towards culture that at once certainly understands the latter "now and here” synchronized, but according to contextualist parameters, it is not for nothing that Levis Strauss approves historical materialism, although in another clear way, his way, which does not coincide in important senses with what Marxism considered historical materialism.
In the same way, the structurality that we can find in the symbolic/structural sociology of Bourdieu, who certainly in “The Logic of Practice” refers to Saussure and Levis Strauss (here it is important not to ignore that Bourdieu approves in his system
Saussure from the logic of practice, that is, the structure of the practice of speaking and the exercise of language but not of its systemic logical abstractivity), but he had not done so in his epistemological books where Durhkeim and Comnte seemed to govern before. , which, moreover, does not precisely operate with the strict paradigm of theoretical linguistics, although it does indeed attribute greater importance to the symbolic, it does not stop operating with an idea of a cultural field that is largely defined by physical relations of force. , positions and dispositions, habitus, as he called it, where again the distinctions of text versus context are only not clear but not even established.
But yes, indeed, this restitution of structuralist synchronicity in the passage from language to non-language undoubtedly also has an impact on my way of understanding cultural theory, but it happens in me in a much more linguistic, theoretical and textualist way from a principle in the direct sense of theoretical linguistics and semiotic theory, I do not transpose the first or the second directly to an idea of culture given as a context in which I insert that synchronicity to analyze non-linguistic phenomena such as in Levis Strauss kinship, myth, the Bororo village, the archaic or the Split representation, in Bourdieu, symbolic capital, habitus, dispositions or positions, but once again my concept of culture from cultural theory is already the same highly textualist and therefore Therefore, it brings with it directly from semiotics a reading of culture through its texts, its textual forms, the texts of culture and culture as a text.
Perhaps here it is important to remember that in “The Correlate of the World,” my book to which you refer, I dedicate a great effort to reconstructing the origin and structuralist genesis of the concept of text itself, the latter being in my opinion one of the main contributions and specificities. of structuralism. The concept of text.
There is not in me, there never was, a step that brings linguistic and semiotic structurality to the definition of non-linguistic phenomena in culture treated structurally as contexts, there is rather a step to culture, let's call them from within (the self , the self, the person, the individual, the work, the author) to the outside (society, others, culture), from the inside (consciousness, subjectivity, the work as an autonomy of language with its inside ) and the outside (that which connects in the meanings, in the reference or with respect to the world), which once goes to the culture looking for its texts and to read or understand it through these, not to the culture as a context without mediation of texts.
And here it would be necessary and necessary to remember all the development that I offer and elaborate regarding the concept of text, on the one hand we have the literal text or textbook, where text refers to alphabetical writing, but on the other hand we have the reading itself defines what is read as a text, in the same way that inference defines the sign, in this sense we omit or avoid the discussion on the ontology of the text as something merely referable to its material, coseic or structural autonomy, we undoubtedly have texts in that also sense of an autonomy, sometimes even functional, material, where some texts are subject to authors, writers, producers, from the work of art, through symbolic production, crafts, fabrics, etc., to material culture, but we have text also there where we have reading where text can be from a hieroglyph or petroglyph, through an urban framework of architecture in restoration or a tourist congromeration, to the same fashion as a legible text, or the consideration of narrative sets, even oral, the text that we others say, or what others say, hence the importance in me not only of semiotic and linguistic theory but also later and progressively of Derrida, as you say, without a doubt capital in me, however, note that this does not mean that Bourdieu and Levis Strauss did not exert an influence on me at the beginning, yes they did, but always not without taking distance, you see it clearly in my first book all those distances are already there, but if they did exert it, in Bourdieu, for example, it was very important For me to understand through it how the representations that subjects make of objective conditions become part of the latter, how the modes of symbolization, to the extent that they represent accumulated capital, participate in objectivity and conversely how that The supposed subjective dimension of the symbolic and cultural representations are in turn also forms of objective and material culture.
This understanding is crucial for me and I owe it to Bourdieu's impact on me at that beginning, but taken with tweezers from his sociology from a textualist, semiological understanding completely absent in Bourdieu's sociology, it is true that even in “Borders and Overflows "I approve your concept of the field, although with these tweezers explained before, not in your way, and then I also distance myself from it, that is, extracted with tweezers from a sociology and a textualist and semiological cultural theory, from an anthropology that is not approving painting, the landscape of relations of forces through which Boudieu wants to present the social and cultural world to us as a world of pre-existing objective contexts and perse predestined to language.
I can tell you the same about Levis Strauss, I extracted with tweezers here or there what worked for me, for example, when Levis Strauss said that symbols offer imaginary symbolic solutions to real contradictions, or when he said that an ax is a sign, although later did not make the slightest semiotic analysis of culture according to signs, or when he said what is the place that corresponds to anthropology in the social sciences, and obviously general theoretical considerations about the relevance that structural linguistics should have in anthropology, more Once again, Levis Strauss continues to subsume ethnology in history, he uses comparative studies to draw conclusions about the levels of archaicity of cultures considered as all contextually crystallized, from all this I clearly distanced myself from the beginning, you have made me realize with your question in which it is crucial and very important to state that I always had that distance towards both of them so that in fact I must recognize that since the eighties what has prevailed in me is semiotics, I think of “The Absent Structure” by Humberto Eco, for example. For example, or “The Fashion System” by Roland Barthes, they should be mentioned here.
But your question, I know, is much more complex than these clarifications and I will try to live up to its complexity by specifying other things.
Do you remember my book “The Correlate of the World”. Well, I think it would be a good occasion to remember that when we talked about that book of mine in “Counterpoints” you asked me many questions about my concept of “intramundane horizon” as much as I told you about “Superordination in the life worlds” and the concept of “correlation” in a sense that is both phenomenological and hermeneutical, what do I maintain? That a world is phenomenological, that the very idea of the world is, that is, it is a world for subjectivity and for the body, it is distributed to its once in a Hegelian sense between “phenomenal world” and “world in itself, but such a world is not yet intramundane, we must in turn grasp how that world is provided with senses and meanings that weave its warp and make it intramundane, here it comes in then the hermeneutical consideration, the way in which it participates ontologically in what makes a world intramundane. I will not explain here now how I elaborate and analyze what establishes the stability and pragmatic continuity of intramundanity, since it would lead us to an unnecessary delay to the objectives of this question, but both in the science of Peirce's semiotics, and in the criticism literary and as in the development that I give it in the book, and there it came out when you dress like me without ever losing the meaning and primacy that the concept of correlate has for the theory of the text, of the world according to the texts, or as an effect of these, the importance that the analysis of the relationship inside/outside language has acquired in me, a very theoretical problem, which if in fact I have worked especially in discussion with Derrida, when I said “the self” is at the same time “two selves” one “within the language” and “another outside the language”, in experience, the same “the being”, and all the concepts, are at the same time, once inside and once outside the language, the gateways that take shape In my retheorization of semiosis they occur because between that inside and that outside, they are the passage from one side to the other, both things operate in it, the phenomenological dimension of the text considered as a fabric, Derrida's texere that is already brought with it in that woven a step, albeit operated at the level of what, according to my analysis, Hegel called the “phenomenal world” in contrast to the ontological “world in itself,” and the Peirtian semiosis that is already culture.
I clearly remember when, while assimilating my explanation of what Peirce's abductive hypothesis is, you tried to represent what Dummet would say about the catwalks and you said that would see the world or the worlds according to the texts, when you said that, you placed yourself on the side of a care, first, and of a suspicion related to that care, then, but not of a distrust, a care that is presupposed in me from the moment I that if indeed this is scientifically very important not to neglect that proper place that corresponds to language above the world since it is through language that we understand ourselves about it, however, it is important to understand that precisely at this point my preference, my choice and my belonging by self-decision to Shutz's social phenomenology, only in Shutz did I find what you call "equilated" or "equilation" in allusion to the weight of gold metaphorically evoking that activity of weighing and weighing something carefully finding a balanced balance, between the understanding of the world according to the text and the language, from within, towards the understanding of the ontological world itself.
The latter is only in the right way for me in the sense of what you call qualified in Shutz's social phenomenology, it is about the world of life here and now between day and night as it is collected by experience and is about in the first and last instance of the reference to the world from experience.
Now, here you must take into consideration a scientific tradition in sociology that becomes main and decisive in me, from Venezuela, the tradition that goes from Comte through Parson and Shutz, without removing Mead from ethnomethodology, here we have first place a replacement of the macro by the micro, of micro methods in sociology as micro methodologies, a restitution that at the level of the object of study as well as the subject/object relationship at the base of knowledge, presupposes replacing the social considered as something naive out there, by notions that make it necessary to understand its configuration, first the relationship between the self and the social, where the social cannot be seen without the self and without its relationship to it, second the consideration of the social as a “unity act” resulting from the relationship between the social actor, the social action of that actor, the unity act that results from that action considered already in act and the concrete ways of verifying it in the micro interactions that include the concepts of “interaction” , “intersubjectivity”, “face-to-face relationships” and “situations”, the social world then appears solely and exclusively referred to both in the theoretical abstract and in its empirical consideration from these micro concepts.
Shutz's social phenomenology was based mainly on the distinction between “subjective” and “objective meanings”, on the consideration of how we have access or how one has access to the self of the other from their own self, or from their own interiority or subjectivity, to then arrive at those bodies in interactions, reestablishing the compression of the social world in this way, a way in which I have carried and elaborated, theorized and advanced in that direction much further in its possibilities than where authors such as Shutz, Garfinkel, Mead and Parson himself, let us not forget the crucial importance that Parson acquires in the subsystemic understanding of the social world as separated between functionally differentiated subsystems, the person is a subsystem, the individual person, distinct from the culture subsystem and the society subsystem and the economy subsystem. ,
Well, from linguistic and semiotic theory, from even hermeneutic understanding in the way in which I have developed it, to understand how by understanding the social world from language, our language practices are already those that configure that social world in its senses. and meanings, where the elucidation of what others tell us or what we read and what we tell ourselves about what we have experienced, come to configure what we do or stop doing and therefore passes to the pragmatics of experience and its ontological conformation, I have developed and elaborated an extensively more abundant path of those gateways, of that relationship inside/outside language, but be careful never abandoning the latter, language, always entering and leaving from it and towards it.
As I told you, I found in Shutz the world or the idea of the world with which they were “accurately” reconciled, using your expression, the scientifically adequate relationship that I found between language and non-language, between text and world.
Not because Shutz saw it as a matter of relationships between texts and contexts, not at all, this is my work in language theory as well as in sociology and anthropology, but because it was Shutz who found the appropriate balance on the importance that consideration of the subjective in the social sciences
At the same time, he who restored what is the appropriate plot phenomenologically considered from which that world that is outside the language or world of life should be considered, influenced by Hurssel, and well I don't think I have to go into detail here about the importance of Habermas. . Habermas enters here with his theory of communicative action, but I am not going to focus on Habermas now. We have already talked many times about the importance I give it.
Here the world replaces the context, we do not approve with the world a context because approving contexts is approving forms through which reality is assigned to data that are provided by representational ideologies that must choose between economic and macrosocial data, that must choose between texts. as those who are representationally billed with an idea of reality
The world is a world for experience and only from experience is it a world; it cannot be separated from those who live it, it cannot be taken as objective from the dispositionalities of many subjects involved in ideologies of representation, when the content of what we call contexts It is filled only through ideologies and representations that must choose between some representations and not others about what that context is, taking as true about events, experiences and experiences, some representations and not others according to, for example, parameters of authority such as approving with respect to the facts what a press report said that was written by someone who did not live the experience and wrote about it according to representations made about those experiences by institutions or policies that are too far from what was lived and experienced. face to face in the synchronous memory of social actors and their semantic memories or what Stephen calls “paschein”, the semantic memory of the body and its passions, episodic and synchronous memories in the memory of the body and its narratives.
And this is where postmodern anthropology comes in, entering and exiting language, comes to be, comes to acquire its best possibility from the perspective of participant observation and its tradition in the social sciences, participant observation that as a concept never abandons systematicity of these micro/concepts, actor, action, situation, intersubjectivity, face to face, in the turn that hermeneutics finds in postmodern anthropology, although not from the beginning and not in all its expressions in the adequate way in which I have been I who have really theorized and developed it.
Clear in the proper way as I incorporate it, they are Stephen A Tyler and James Clifford, James in his authorial books, Stephen also in his essays, not just books, and in his lectures although I recognize the germs of it also in Geertz as the initiator of this interpretive turn in anthropology, was no longer completely resolved in Geertz but was barely even in germ.
You have not asked me in what way, how, why, in what forms, the postmodern anthropology from which I became and I am one of its young main exponents in the United States since the nineties, enters into my system, you have not asked me nor have we I have elaborated on it enough, but I think it is important to mention here that it is this way on a systemic level in me.
More, however, not the only one.
The underlying reasons for my positioning from postmodern anthropology are many more but I believe this is the place although you have not asked me to advance it to advance in what senses.
The same problem of entering and leaving language is crucial for the methodological concepts of attention, registration, inscription, and for the forms acquired by the passage from experience to writing from participant observation and field work to works, this understanding has been developed by me from the postmodernism of my sociology and my anthropology and I delve decisively into postmodern anthropology also in the rhetorical or scriptural consciousness of the text, another element of relevance is the turn that Stephen initiates in the relationship between everydayness and extra-everyday life, the ordinary and the extraordinary, familiarization and defamiliarization, common sense and breaks with it, the relationship between writing, ritual and therapy, the restorations of harmony, the intertextual understanding of ethnography beyond dense description in postmodern ethnography, the middle voice, the balance between the subjective and the objective, the deconstruction of otherness, this added to the importance of the semantic move towards the componential that recovers and makes possible a scientific path for that claim of Levis Strauss but from the language and a more textualized understanding, the concept of the “system of art and culture” that James Clifford gives is also crucial, it is crucial for me and coincides with my way of understanding it and the most accurate definition of how I see it, finally the refigurations that James makes about the diaspora and migration, the establishment of a literature of the diaspora. .
Now, I must not ignore the fact, I must not ignore that you have asked me about Hegel, that you have mentioned Adorno and Benjamin with emphasis, and that you have asked me about Bakhtin.
Starting with Hegel. Excluding Hegel from the tradition of social phenomenology initiated by Shutz is a complete mistake, we cannot fully develop a sociology of common sense solely with the reconstructive processes through which Shutz establishes Hurssel in social phenomenology, work otherwise. without the slightest doubt initiated by Shutz but still very far from having been developed in all its possibilities, and very far from being exhausted, it is just in its infancy, it is also required to extend this entire program to all phenomenology and the science of Hegelian logic. not only here, in the sociology of that social world, to develop the ways found in it and what we can understand precisely in terms of comprehensive sociology, inscribing Hegelian logic in it, Hegelian phenomenology not only allows us to expand and enrich the phenomenological sociology but also the latter has to leave itself back towards philosophy and logic to find here new phenomenological paths between philosophy and sociology, and semiotics, paths that are not achieved on one side or the other but between them, interdisciplinary if you want.
Well, this is in addition to the fact that, as you know, for me Hegel operates as crucial from the philosophy of science itself to sociological and anthropological considerations.
Regarding Adorno, I must say that I consider these two books that have been mentioned by Adorno to be very important, both have not only my approval but also my best congratulations. They are two crucial works without a doubt. In Benjamin's case my approval is less enthusiastic.
It is true that Benjamin symbolizes the theorist who is both a classical philosopher and an art critic and that in that sense he is presented as a good example of the type of intellectual that I am who writes books on abstract theory and hard sciences, even classical philosophy. , while also practicing art criticism, it would be difficult to deny Benjamin this relevance as it would be to deny it to Barthes, and in this sense I recognize him as an undoubted reference, however, Benjamin assumed historical materialism in which I distance myself from him , so strictly speaking, in the Frankfort tradition I stick with the Adorno you mentioned, not all Adorno and with Habermas.
Finally Bakhtin, what can I tell you? As you know, his work was subject to the framework of literary criticism and it is from there that it takes shape, but in fact I would say that as much or even more than Lotman, even reduced to prototypes that take the literary work as parameters that are later extended to the culture, let us not forget that I criticize this extensionalization due to its deformations in culture, taking the work of art as a paradigm of culture is extremely limited to me and on the contrary I work with the concept of culture that we have directly from sociology and anthropology without consideration of literary criticism, but independently of this care and this distance, it is no less true that even more than Lotman, the Bakhtinian notions of heteroglossia and dialogicity both as notions in themselves due to their potential and because of the way in which Bakhtin uses them related to popular culture, are of great importance in certain aspects for cultural theory, as is the intertextualization that Kristeva initiates in this regard.
I have my objections, my distances and my concerns regarding this due to the way in which culture gives way to literature, producing deformations in the understanding of the former, but at the same time I do not fail to recognize its importance and therefore I have assimilated it. It is clear that Kristeva is the creator and founder of the concept of intertextuality, a concept that I consider to be of immense importance for the social sciences and as such I have developed it.
Fifth Question:
With the aim of explaining through a capricious and arbitrary metamorphosis -----perhaps necessary----- to immerse your current readers and the potential and future ones who want to approach your work and who have the aspiration of read and study it and understand it, gradually and in an almost pedagogical way, introducing them, as I told you, not only in the relevance of your work, to the extent that through these conversations we are immersing ourselves in it, but, rather, in its methodological prospectiveness. That is, to draw all the edges of its evolutionary development from your first forays into sociological and anthropological experiments in Cuba to your subsequent evolution in the Venezuelan experience and later to your consecration as an intellectual proper, already being part of the postmodern anthropology movement. in the United States and specifically already joining the current of "Writing Culture" that developed around the anthropology department of Rice University in Houston, Texas and alongside emblematic figures of postmodern anthropology such as Stephen A, Tyler, George E. Marcus , Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda and Surpik Angelini.
I would like to deepen, regarding the context, the genesis and subsequent transformation of your practical and theoretical work as an intellectual and as a creator and subsequently your role as a sociologist and anthropologist in order to understand in all its magnitude the importance and consequently, the nature and evolution of your thought, which, as you emphasize in the first of your "Video conferences on phenomenology, sociology and anthropology" ----which can be consulted on the visual platform of YouTube---- you emerge from a Marxist context but you take critical distance from that context, in your subsequent epistemological development, through the fundamental philosophical avenues through which your work has traveled until reaching its current derivations and the specific forms of scientific development currently achieved once these have already been specified from the point from a cognitive theoretical and concrete empirical point of view. You could delve into this by placing your role as an intellectual in that context and your subsequent transformation towards anthropology, explaining this process from a theoretical point of view. That is to say, although already explained in part by your theoretical and scientific development of philosophical notebooks as laboratories of systemic research, how did all this theoretical evolution of yours occur? Could you be more specific about the theoretical details of this transit during your stay in Venezuela and your discovery of the work of Alfred Schütz? That is, could you clarify here what principles you were starting from? What old theories were superseded by new ones? How did you get to your current system? And what did all this development consist of in general terms? How was this transition from conceptualist art first towards structuralism and sociology and then from these disciplines towards phenomenology, semiotics and hermeneutics towards cultural anthropology? Abdel, tell me a little about all this.
Good morning Alberto, thanks again
Your question requires a great capacity for synthesis and I think I am actually more analytical than synthetic. But I'll try. If I understand you correctly, this question would require me to make a synthesis of the whole from a theoretical point of view, accentuating my decantations towards my books with an accent on Venezuela, postmodern anthropology and the United States.
I would begin in this effort of synthesis by asking what the theoretical problems have been in metatheory, philosophy of philosophy, logic, if we agree that the philosophy of sciences as part of philosophy is the one that is responsible for airing what its corresponding place is. What I understand and define as cultural theory or culture, semiology, sociology and anthropology, in which place or places, semiological, sociological and anthropological issues are presented as theoretical issues within logic.
The word place was used by Levis Strauss in his essay “Place of Anthropology in the Social Sciences”, the last chapter and the one that I like and interest the most in “Structural Anthropology”. There Levis Strauss's developments were, in reality, mostly empirical, and empirically, I quite agree with him with some differences. But your question is from a theoretical point of view, not an empirical one.
Let's look at this in principle.
Where and how it appears, where and how specifically semiological, sociological and anthropological problems are presented within the theory.
First, it is required that in the considerations of ontological and epistemological questions we reach the moment in which the discussions on abstract questions related to concepts become problems of these three domains.
When the being is abstracted as “being in itself”, in its relationship to time and in its relationship to becoming, as a sensitive being that is abstracted in space and time, whether with respect to substance, essence, form. , to the phenomenal, either in the face of nothingness, the no of identity or its other, this is philosophy, it is phenomenology and it can ultimately be dialectic, dialectic in the sense of the movement of the concept, when the concepts do not receive what they are or their own identity of themselves but rather their relationship to other concepts, phenomenological and dialectical issues begin to relate, for example, the concept of "identity" cannot achieve its ostensible definition of itself and its ontology as something obtained from the underlying depth of one's own essence, when we try to grasp "identity" we do not find in the undifferentiated sameness of the identical something that matches its ontology or that makes it coincide in the grasping of the concept its ontology in words no longer as a matter of expression, as when we say put it in words, but not in its logic, if it is identical to itself it is an undifferentiated sameness and from that moment its other or its pair or its opposite, "the difference", begins to offer the logical parameters, both the words and the logic, which gives it its ontology, identity is identity because it is in its difference to another identity and to the difference itself, without resorting to the latter, we cannot know what identity is with only it from an underlying background of its own, but the difference cannot be captured in itself according to its ontology or its logic, without another identity or without the sense of identity, at the same time, identity and difference are broken into diversity, here we have as Phenomenology and dialectics can be related, this is pure philosophy.
To the extent that we deal with that which gives movement to the concept, that originates it and puts it in relation, it is philosophy.
However, if concepts receive their identity from their relationship to other concepts and not from the underlying background of their own sameness, it would have to be said that dialectics, while making explicit the movement of the concept, also makes explicit the phenomenology of its origin or origin, There is therefore, as I say in “The enigmas of the ground”, a relationship between dialectics and origins. I began to worry about this issue when I wrote “The enigmas of the ground” and I came to the conclusion that the sign was not always in the place of its object as its interpretant but that at the level of the ground we also have mutual origination as well as exchange in the same source between the sign and the object.
Now, can we consider this issue as one in which semiological, sociological or anthropological issues are presented or appear within philosophy?
This depends on how far we take the question. If we ask ourselves along with Derrida what is the origin of languages, how and in what way something like a language could occur, take that turn, acquire that form above nature, and how, something like a language could emerge without a culture and conversely, as something like a culture could acquire form without a language or a prior language, the antinomy about origin goes from being a philosophical question to being an anthropological question.
More than sociological even here, more than semiological here too.
Thus identity not only defines difference but originates it and conversely, both in turn originate diversity.
Is there something here that we can have like semiology, sociology or anthropology?
When the being appears before itself it allows us to distinguish that in the concept the being is for the subject that only in the subject do we acquire an extrinsication, we are a being that is but we extrinse ourselves before it when we notice that we are, if we do not notice we would not even have sense that we are and that we are a being, therefore, that “being in itself” begins to be a concept and is only for us as a concept, when we acquire a concept of what it is, when it is only an abstract concept If this development of the concept is philosophy, not anthropology, when that extrinsication that separates the being from the subject or rather shows the latter as a form other than the former, and the former as a form that is reflected and considered in its ontology as is captured in a concept, they are still philosophy, not anthropology, philosophy is also still that which makes us realize that what is in itself only becomes an object for the subject in a concept and that the object is nothing other than the concept of that which is for the subject is still philosophy, however, when we realize that this concept is a sign through which we make presence before ourselves, this presence before ourselves, which has two moments, a moment that begins in the consciousness, and in its phenomenology, and another moment, when that presence before oneself is externalized in a thing separate from itself such as the sign, first consciousness itself as the first form of the sign, second a language in which externalized that duality is captured anthropology begins to present itself to philosophy, let's call this philosophical anthropology, we make ourselves present before ourselves not only through a self-representation in which we realize that to think that presence is to think of ourselves as men, or as man, but as a sign , in so much language, in so much culture.
Now, what happens, if this thought remains abstract, we cannot separate semiology from anthropology, thinking the presence before oneself and thinking that presence before oneself externalized, being a form of the sign it is a semiology but supposedly semiology would have to be a science of that sign not so much or less with respect to someone for whom that sign is, that is, it is assumed that semiology should separate the sign in itself as a structure or a function in communication as it was defined in the modern semiotics, and it is clear that this abstract thinking is not even about signs in communication, but only about them in inference, about them as shapers of the logic itself through which we learn and interpret, even think, for Therefore, before semiotics as a modern science elaborated as a science of communication, we must represent a semiological stage that is not yet a science of communication and signs in this, but of the latter in self-knowledge, that is, according to making presence before ourselves is a sign or the sign itself is already that form of self-present presence, therefore, semiology and anthropology appear together in theory, philosophy and logic and as such it is from these, especially from logic, since philosophy in its generality encompasses many other spheres in its relationship with the natural sciences and theology, even cosmology that escape this semiological territory.
Paradoxically, in the same way that we cannot call this logic of signs semiotics in a rigorous modern sense, but only in a philosophical logical sense, Derrida on Hegel, on the one hand, Peirce on the other, his still non-communicational sense of the science of semiotics, but what I call inferential, nor can we say that this anthropology in theory is properly an anthropology if at least we agree that just as the subject of sociology, its object, is the social, we agree that the The subject of anthropology is culture because if we say that the subject of anthropology is man, we must admit that there is a man in a philosophy of being and consciousness, but that man is not even considered a man in the properly anthropological sense but philosophical, so that, if what makes anthropology is the consideration of that man as culture, or the consideration of culture itself as something in itself, we clearly grasp that semiology and anthropology appear together in theory, in the same way in that semiology begins in the existence of signs, anthropology begins in signs, in short, anthropology as well as semiotics must be a science of signs, but not of signs in communication, or less, and more in signs in culture, communication is undoubtedly a form of culture, but culture is not reduced to communication, --unless we expand the semantic meaning of the concept so much that we begin to call everything communication as, for example, cultural transmission or cultural reproduction, but clearly it falls outside the field of semiotics as it has been at least modernly understood-- this field is actually phenomenological therefore, in short, as much as the science of semiotics initiated by Pierce It is a form of phenomenology, or subordinated to it in the same way as anthropology, phenomenology is therefore the starting point of anthropology if we consider the latter from what Stephen called “anthropology in theory”, not “theoretical anthropology”. ” or “theory of anthropology”.
Now, in the same way that the development of a semiology of signs that does not refer to communication, being a science, is non-semiotic logic as a science of communication, anthropology that begins in the theory of signs as the first mode of appearing before ourselves in consciousness and in externalized signs, language, culture, which does not refer to communication is also logical, thus, the first anthropology would have to be logical, we would have here philosophical anthropology and theory of culture. It is therefore the concept of culture that is at stake here.
On the other hand, a second way in which anthropology appears in philosophy is through the ways or forms in which the subject, which is supposedly the opposite of the object, alters itself before itself and becomes an object of itself, without forgetting that The object is such in that through which it replaces a world merely of sensory data or palpable sensoriality, only as a concept for the subject.
Anthropology is therefore directly related to the subject, to subjectivity.
It refers not only to the signs through which we make ourselves present but also to the ways in which we alter the forms of the subject as forms of the object even where we know that it is a subject.
Neither philosophy nor sociology in the strict sense deal with the subject, in the first the subject is a mere concept in the second we do not have the social in the subject, sociology requires the relationship between subjects or intersubjectivity that acts as the first form of engendering of a “social world” for “experience”, for “interaction”, for interpretation and for “action” and the “situation”, there is no sociology of the subject but of his action and his act, of his interaction, internalization or socialization, I say that there is none if that sociology is science, if a sociology turns towards the subject it loses its contours, its autonomy, its disciplinarity and its scientificity, sociology is a science of objects even there where as in Shutz, sociology is social phenomenology and is presented as such taking as a parameter the subjectivity and typical notions of actor, anthropology is instead one of subjects even when these forms of the subject become an object for the subject that alters itself as long as it is present before itself. or before an other or an otherness that is nothing more than a multiple or heterogeneous form, plural of singular others.
If there is a mirror, it is psychology, not anthropology, I agree with you in reference to Lacan, what you call the symbolic dimension of the imaginary, however, if there is another that is not a form of othering of the subject that becomes an object for itself It is not anthropology either.
Stephen discusses, relativizes, considers something implantable as a non-issue unproblematic, otherness or otherization in anthropology, declares the matter null and maintains that anthropology must be in the “middle voice” according to which the subject must find or recognize itself in objectivity. of others and the object exists in the subjectivity of oneself. Stephen analyzes the latter in his essay “And Then Others Without Mirrors.”
Here you have a crucial epistemological point from which my system first welcomes, then immerses itself, and then positions itself from postmodern anthropology.
There you have how and where, in the first place, then, all this is already a development of mine and as such something that characterizes me and defines my own achievements from postmodern anthropology, influenced by Stephen, as I have explained to you.
On the other hand, representation is not anthropology, it is nothing other than the repetition of an identity or rather the illusion that the identity of the representation repeats as if it brought with it the identity of what is represented, rather, on the contrary, it is precisely the non-identity between the representation and what is represented, are the discontinuity and the difference that is forgotten in the representation, what makes anthropology, anthropology begins when we grasp that the repetition that is the representation is a non-identity is non-identity. identical and it is that difference that makes anthropology.
This is argued by Stephen in his essay “Evocation: The Unwriteable” in response to me. Anthropology is not about others or about others or about the other, nor about otherization, it is always about us, what Shutz called the “we” relationship between others, it is between others, but it is not about others, but about us among others, and then develops it in our philosophical dialogues of 1998.
If we pay attention here we see three things,
1-Presence before oneself or appearance of ourselves before ourselves in two forms: consciousness, which is already a form of the sign or of what makes a sign, and the sign itself externalized as a way of appearing or making presence when even that sign is not integrated into a communication but remains in logic, there it is anthropology, not philosophy
2-The inference through which something is a sign for someone and at the same time the form in which that sign is culture, this is anthropology before semiology
3-The Self-alterization through which the subject becomes an object for itself at another moment is also anthropology
4-When we represent ourselves as subjects in the objectivity of others and as objects in our subjectivity, the middle voice, this is anthropology
But something even more important. Entering and leaving language in two logical and methodological ways, what I have called the gateways from the texere between the inside and the outside of the language/non-language relationship is also anthropology, and above all, it is not philosophy, nor linguistics, nor sociology or semiology. Why should we be concerned that self is something in language, within itself, that being is something in language, within itself, and so on with all concepts, and then self is also simultaneously something outside language, and so on with other concepts? . This concern or accent, this repair and focusing is undoubtedly logical, but this logic is anthropological, why?, for reasons of both self-knowledge and methodology, perceiving the externalized language there as something in which we are and from which We leave and enter, we perceive that we are nothing but only in that paradox, it is not that we are outside where we are and we are everything that we are and that we enter as someone who has a thing understood as an exogenous, instrumentalized means, for an end, We cannot remove ourselves from language as if our identity or what we are could be found somewhere else outside of it, because we are language and with it we are culture, we are symbols, man is language because he is culture, this is anthropology, of the same way in which we are irreversibly a monad in the sense of Leibnis, that is, we see the world only from an inside or interiority that gives way or not to the light of an exteriority, in the same way that we cannot see the world but from the window of an absolute interior, through our eyes and senses, a world that is presented to us only on the ground or from that ground of our interiority, or inner world, and that this is inescapable, in the same way we cannot abandon the language, going out of its way, as if we could put on and take off a language, or take it from the toolbox like someone choosing between a hammer and an axe, language is not something we have at our disposal, we are language because we are culture and conversely we are culture because we are language. Our discourses have this irreducible interiority inscribed, the way in which we say and express, brings with it inscribed our ways of relating to the other and to others, the symbolic and intersubjective interaction makes a tradition that accumulated orders and inscribes the ways of addressing the other, more We can certainly get out of language but no more than in the same way that we can for a moment imagine that another cutie from its interiority surrounds us and runs through us on the outside, reaching an image of ourselves that we cannot obtain from ourselves, a outside that we cannot grasp or adopt towards ourselves, but only towards others, that so-called incomplete way through which only by seeing ourselves in the mirror do we acquire a sense of objectivity as others see us, as objects among objects , but we can never completely see ourselves as others see us, in the same way it happens with the relationship between language/outside of language, it is like animals that are aquatic and terrestrial, they live in water but cannot, like other animals, not get out. of water, they must at the same time live in the water and live outside the water, many animals are like this, both aquatic and terrestrial, if they do not have water only the land they die because they are amphibians, but if they only have water and not land They die, well let's say that we live in language and we can get out of it without a doubt but we cannot get out completely, we cannot be one thing or the other, we are both things, and each one is partial and incomplete, if we lived only in language Without the possibility of going outside of it to breathe we would suffocate, but if we could be entirely outside of it without returning to language we would die, we would suffocate.
Without a doubt there is an external world of face-to-face, intersubjective relationships, of interactions and situations, of actions and consummated acts, but we can only understand that world from the language meaning it, it would lack ontology without language as much as without exit from language, if we do not grasp that we are a self also outside of language, and a being, and an experience, we die, but we cannot leave completely but only enter and exit, this is undoubtedly a problem that is both logical, ontological and methodological, and to tell the truth it is a strictly anthropological problem, not philosophical, not sociological, not semiological, nor psychological.
Moving in and out of language is also the very nature of anthropology as I theorize, understand and practice it. Let's say that in sociology we play the game of staying outside in the open, perceiving how that self outside of language is in interaction and how these interactions are meaningful and engender a social world that we configure both seen from the self, internalization and socialization, and seen from intersubjectivity and interactions, situations or experiences and the way we mean them, in philosophy we stay inside, we see the outside only to capture the movement of the concepts that are already inside, more in “being itself” not Even in “being for oneself”, “being for oneself” is psychology, “being in oneself” is philosophy, “being for another” is sociology, what enters and leaves is anthropology.
In anthropology we want to know ourselves by knowing the other even when that other is ourselves othered or are forms of culture that are more or less familiar to us, familiarization and defamiliarization, we do not have to go to another culture to experience this, the mere endogenous/exogenous relationship between two concrete ideal or empirical typical “situations” already places us in front of this dilemma, or even when these forms of culture are our habitat or a habitat that is not usually ours, it is that strangeness before ourselves as Kristeva told him.
In anthropology, at the same time, we pay attention to experience as it moves between what is lived and what is recorded, between what is lived and what is narrated, between what is lived and what is represented, between participant observation and its inscription or memory, between experience and its documentation, that is, in summary, between language and non-language, we enter and leave language, on one side what is experienced, on the other the page, Geertz said "the ethnographer inscribes social facts", removes "facts" social”, moving away from Geertz there, and just saying “the ethnographer inscribes”.
I would say, the ethnographer (the anthropologist) enters and exits, stays in that interstice, lives in that threshold, in the threshold of the door or window, in the paradox of inside and outside. The philosopher stays inside, the sociologist stays outside even when that interaction in micromethodology is only such for experience, the sociologist's experience being one's own and for one, continues to be seen outside of language even where the question of language lies in understanding how that outside is at the same time meant and interpreted, it is again seen or captured outside transformed according to its pragmatics, as an anthropologist it is not worrying to continue seeing it out there, the entire chain of concepts is not integrated to see how it returns. being for that experience again and again, although for one externalized as a heritage or as an experience, as an anthropologist that experience, that heritage, that self is the culture and as such it cannot be searched outside again, nor always or every time according to the inside, but just always staying inside, entering and leaving.
My gateways in all their debt to semiosis, to texere and even ultimately to intertext are problems of anthropology in logic, or of what Stephen called “anthropology in theory.” Now, it is not going out to abandon the language and the text, but to know that by leaving we enter and by entering we leave, to understand that we can only read, interpret, understand the culture and understand ourselves in it by reading texts, reading the texts of the culture, the culture according to the texts and the text that the culture is, but at the same time as we cannot just go out and stay as in sociology in that environment or returning to it, our dual nature inside/outside, amphibians/terrestrials to continue using This metaphor, if you will, does not allow us to stay on the side of a text that was already a complete exteriority according to which that text would be a context, there is no context for anthropology, fantasy, the illusion that anthropology is context is wrong. and erroneous, and this is my main contribution and innovation, postmodern anthropology denies the context, if there is context, that anthropology is not postmodern, it refers to culture as a text but at the same time it is in the text and thus, it can only cut out texts and insert them among other texts, finding out how the self and the experience are constituted and meanings are transformed and symbolized in that movement that never remains on one side or the other.
Well let's say that this is one of the most important things that I have developed as entirely mine, original and innovative that defines me as an island and as a unique exponent in postmodern anthropology but it is necessary at the same time to grasp how and from where and in what In any case, this epistemological positioning once situated me and positioned me from it again, taking here in the tradition as references to Stephen A Tyler and James Clifford, this places me in the tradition of “writing culture”, without a doubt yes, but of a unique way, mine, initiated by me as a new generation, is the result of my originality and my exploration, of what defines how my own theoretical system is connected, coincides epistemologically, with questions that this tradition addresses, I have in fact differences with other aspects of “writing culture” such as those related to producing othering or managing it to build anthropology as it is invented by othering.
What inscribes me as a postmodern anthropologist from my phenomenological and cultural sociology is this entry and exit, that culture is text, that anthropology is intertextual, that its path is to enter and exit, the same thing, that writing It is still field work and field work writing, that when we write we mean and that what we produce our books are forms of that intertextualization, some have said, what defines postmodern anthropology is denying that an undisputed objectivity is possible, agree, but not to transform anthropology then into a science of special effects in writing according to which we renounce truth and scientificity, here I distance myself not from many other postmodern anthropologists but from postmodernism in general, agree it is that this pure objectivity as the true one is impossible, however, the place of subjectivity in the social sciences was Shutz who had it and as such the science of culture must be a phenomenological sociology, first, in which anthropology As a theory of the signs that we saw before, of the signs in logic before communication, it must be the science of the text and the intertext, but not the literature that, like fiction, is accepted as unscientific or against scientificity.
This is extremism and I agree with Habermas in seeing it that way.
Postmodern anthropology should not be a simulacrum, or something of the simulacra type, in no way should we renounce either the cognitive/semantic path initiated by Stephen or James Clifford's Greimian graph or table on “the system of art and culture.” ", although I distance myself from James Clifford to the point that anti-art places him at the opposite pole to authenticity, rather it belongs to the fullest authenticity, I still consider his table foundational in my way of understanding and exploring "anthropology postmodern” unlike Levis Strauss, this Clifford table places anthropology in the system of art and culture, crucial, not only like Levis Strauss among the social sciences, and I embrace it completely, as much as or after Stephen, James With that table he would be the second founder of postmodern anthropology, after Stephen, in no way do I consider that Clifford Geertz was a postmodern anthropologist, perhaps there were certain germs in the making but still too clueless, undefined and obscure.
As I have told you other times, I agree with Stephen that postmodern anthropology was not at all achieved or achieved in “Writing Culture”, it was not in Geertz, and it was not even in Reynoso's compendium.
Postmodern anthropologists are strictly only me Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Stephen A Tyler, Quetzil Eugenio Cartañeda, James Clifford and those who follow us, it is still being born, one or the other, those who follow me or are influenced by my books and my work, those who They follow Stephen, Quetzil and James. Lisa Breglia, Scott, there would be two cases
My books The Correlate of the World, Thinking Science, Semantic Elucidation, Rethinking intertextuality, Rethinking urban anthropology, The enigmas of the ground, The Self and the heritage
Another point is the problem of textualization, a central methodological issue in postmodern anthropology. On the one hand, textualization in anthropology, and in the same way in postmodern anthropology, has been limitedly reduced to writing, that is, textualizing amounts to inscribing on the page, treating culture as a text in this exclusive sense that writing is to textualize, the parameters of textualization reduced to the forms of discourse in which we speak or write, anthropology does not go beyond referring to how we manage to textualize in writing, what our voice is like, in terms of narratological analysis of the text, Although it is not always narratology, it can be the voice understood as the ways in which the relationships I/other, ethnographer/culture, subject/object, observation/reality are delivered, depending on how it is written when there is a referential or denotative horizon, the Textualization is understood as delivery in the written text, this becomes, in writing techniques, in objectifications of the written text, this is undoubtedly crucial, in no way do I exclude it, the fact of taking the understanding of writing as central textualization in the postmodern anthropology, and as rhetoric, although Stephen refers more to discourse and discusses this issue of textualization, it is nevertheless only a moment and very limited, we not only textualize in writing from the moment in which references to experience We do from it, we must first distinguish from the field work itself, from the same experience outside of language, from the same experience in the intramundane horizon, from the same participant observation, from the same semiosis and hermeneusis of culture as an experienced fabric, that defined it, understanding and cutting the culture itself considered before writing and outside of that writing as a text, must start from seeing and understanding that culture live as a text, it is not only and even less about writing being a activity of textualization, it is that we have before us a set of material culture, or of social interactions between actors, or of interactive situations in front of us in culture, or we have before us an architectural urban framework such as colonial architecture being restored For tourism, we have streets and bodies that move in them, or we have a complex heterogeneity that we call town, community, village, temple, rituals, habits, intersubjective communications, artifacts, objects, bodily expressions, gestures, things there. in the culture being lived, experiences, and we have to define a cut to establish some type of relationship with that culture based on understanding or knowledge, there we must understand that culture according to its texts, we must read it according to its texts, we must understand it textually itself before and after the writing activity is more or less textualizing or discursive, and the theory of reading the culture itself according to its texts and itself as a text is a semiology that cannot be reduced to semiotics as a science. modern but returned to logic and philosophy, and interdisciplinary disserted from phenomenological sociology, between day and night, there in culture to textualize is not to write, but to treat the non-textual as text, for example, the extraverbal or gestures , or the material culture or the rituals, but not only do we textualize there, that is, we not only treat the non-textual as a text, we also construct the text when there is not something that precedes us that is not textual and we treat it as a text, but We have to construct the text itself, we do not textualize something that is not a text and that we have before us, also without having something before us, we construct the text between different relationships and associations, for example, my analyzes on the interpretant in research methodology, We decided to analyze and understand tourism taking the restoration as its interpretant and we obtain a way of interpreting and reading tourism and its material or bodily, visual or empirical conglomerates, depending on the restoration, this is working with the interpretants and constructing the text, not strictly treating the non-textual as textual, and conversely, to read the restoration according to the tourism interpretant, on the other hand, we not only construct the text, we not only textualize, we treat the non-textual as a text, there are also things in culture that at once They are already texts and these are the most, we just have to pay attention to them. As I told you before, according to the discussion on the ontology of the sign in the criticism of signcentrism and according to the ontological discussion about the text, inferring makes the sign, where there is inference there is a sign, even if they are mere thoughts. In the same way where there is reading there is text. Anthropology then is about reading.
So while in the usual and recurring postmodern anthropology textualization has been reduced to a question of writing, narratology, how to treat the voices in the written text, how to deliberate what Geertz called the staging in the text of the work field, in my own phenomenological, semiological sociology, and in my own postmodern anthropology, in my books, I go much further, I develop the entire theory of the text from experience, from field work, there in the intramundane horizon of culture, in the very delivery of the subject/object relationship before writing. This is another characteristic exclusively mine, although again this does not exclude or stop prioritizing also the side to which I am referring relative to the ways of writing and the relationships between the part and the whole in the compositional activity of the book or author's books, This other thing is also important and defines me as much or more than the way I do in postmodern anthropology.
But to answer all the nuances of your question, the relationship between my readings, my thinking, my experience and my writing would have to be represented because the relationship between these four things or aspects did not have a homogeneous development that can be narrated step by step as a linear succession, some things were advanced in some periods, others less advanced, and over time they were coupled until they reached their current form.
Starting with the readings and my thoughts, reflections, analysis, and above all decantations, regarding them
It was not about pulling from here and there with tweezers like someone who chooses this or that among options without those choices going through a process of intense and deep reflections where on one side my own theoretical thinking advanced and on the other the relationship of This with a tradition from which it was nourished and in which it developed, at the same time, one cannot represent it with tweezers as a mere relationship between one's own thought and a choice, in that thinking there is already a dialectization, an internalization, an own elaboration, an introspection, an analysis, a synthesis, a decantation, which relates the experiences accumulated and lived as a person, the readings, and one's own reflective elaborations, that is, at the same time one must represent an experience that At the same time, it nourishes this process, an experience not only acquired in science, in theory and methodology, in empiria and metaempiria, metatheory and system, but also an experience in life as a person of how what one lives affects how one He ponders, decides, chooses, and goes hand in hand not only with what he thinks, what he reads, and what he practices professionally but also with what he lives and experiences, with the everyday and sociocultural life worlds, of the intersubjective relationships and the course that his reflective soliloquy takes.
Finally, also, writing, because thinking and writing is a dialogue with oneself and with the way one writes, and when you write thinking, you not only write what you think or think what you write, but you think by writing and you write by thinking.
So, thinking, writing, experiencing, reading, those four things in their relationships ruin how that evolution was.
Seeing it from the point of view of the scientific nature of my work and theoretical system, it has gone through different moments and periods. If I see it from the metatheoretical and theoretical point of view without even considering the empirical, I would speak of a first period in which the theoretical and semiological linguistic paradigm of scientificity ruled, Havana, (Peirce, Saussure, everything else, anything else, subordinated to it, semiotics), textualist was already from then and continues to be more and more until today, but in a second period, theoretical sociology and sociology in theory acquired greater importance and came to govern my paradigms of scientificity, Caracas, Venezuela (Shutz, Mead, Parson, social phenomenology and ethnomethodology, plus Habermas, everything else subordinated to it) but not, however, to the detriment of the ruling paradigm in the first period but integrating the former to this and vice versa, there would then be a third period in which postmodern anthropology rules, the United States (Stephen, James Clifford, everything else subordinated to it), but not in the way of dispensing with the previous but integrating the latter into the previous, and finally the fourth period , which goes from 2004 to today and would be a synthesis of all the previous aspects or paradigms, but at a new, more sophisticated level, in which logic begins to govern (Hegel, Derrida, everything else subordinated to it ).
But what I have constrained to a minimum cannot simply be seen that way. In the first period, the systemic consistency of my thinking was integrated into my own formation as a theorist, mainly the hundreds of essays and books that I read at that time on theoretical linguistics and semiotic theory, plus I also read at that time sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Burguer, anthropologists. like Levis Strauss, Edward Sapir, James Frazer, Tylor, then, in the development of my own thinking at that time the systemic was governed and my theoretical thinking was systemic from linguistics and semiotics, however, the practice of sociology that I developed and fieldwork, they demanded of me to see it completed, closing it on itself in a circle that left and returned to linguistics and semiotics.
It was here in the language sciences where science was, where the systemic and scientific part of my thinking was, in linguistics and semiotics, while it was towards the empirical where the hypothesis, or the relationship between science and hypothesis, entered, so that, Due to the conceptualism that even then was pushing forward as a logical principle, I sought in the conceptual logic, hypothetical deduction, the systemic relationship that I could imagine between an empiricism of social sciences, or more precisely science of culture and practice, research practice and experimentality, but There was not yet enough life experience, nor all the empirical experience, nor was there everything he achieved later as a writer.
Regarding the readings, it is true that since then I began to read phenomenologists like Moles, semanticists like Adam, since then I already opted for Marxism by Terry Eagleton, Bakhtin, Frankford but I had not yet read Frankford or Bakhtin enough, I began to read if then theorists like Boudrillard, or Foucault of “Words and Things” or “The Archeology of Knowledge”, and I was already talking about postmodernism in my theoretical conferences, and I considered it in my thinking, even more so the meaning of the postmodern It was greatly nourished by how it was reflected in art theory, in fact I even wrote some essays on art theory then.
The relationship, however, between science and hypothesis, inclined to the empirical side, extracted logical deductions nourished even by internal inferences to the theoretical and semiological linguistic field, but I had not yet read logical positivism then except for the way in which it could be indirectly reflected. in linguistics or in Bourdieu.
In that first period, reading and thinking were ahead, experience and writing were more behind, and the systemic integration of my thinking in a scientific sense was formed as a theory of linguistic and semiotic culture, textualist, empirically hypothetical/deductive, experientially novel, and as a whole of a daring and innovative experimentalism.
In Venezuela the second period then begins.
Complex, very rich and very important in my evolution as a thinker and theorist.
First I continue reading semiotics, for example, I read Todorov's entire work, but at the same time I begin to read contemporary theoretical sociology Weber, Durkeim, Parson, Shutz, Mead, and contemporary sociologists on these classics.
I read two important books that mark me: “Knowledge in the worlds of everyday life” by Shutz and “The theory of communicative action by Habermas”, these two books had a progressive but very important impact on my system.
I read logical positivism in those years, I even read Mario Burge, I read Jacques Derrida, Gillez Deleuze, Lyotard, even more so Derrida did not rule then, nor did any of the others, only Shutz and Habemas ruled, I read Geertz “The Interpretation of cultures”, to James Clifford, and “The advent of postmodern anthropology”, but none of it applied then, while at the same time I am a researcher in a research center for seven years where I come into contact and reading with the theories of complexity , the imaginary, Moran, Bateson, Maturana, Varela, etc.
In '92 I traveled to Havana for six months and there I gave lectures on Geertz, James Clifford, Stephen and postmodern anthropology. Return to Caracas in 93.
Returning to Caracas, I continue reading all this that I have just mentioned. In 1994, I taught a seminar on contemporary sociological theory in Caracas.
But I also taught in Caracas at the Petare Popular Art Museum in 1995 an interdisciplinary seminar in which I proposed and developed a conjunction between semiotic theory and postmodern anthropology.
And of course I complete my readings of Bourdieu, Boudrillard, Frankford.
Through Todorov I know Bakhtin better, although I read “The Dialogical Imagination” and “The Aesthetics of Verbal Creation” and this is a period in which I give many seminars, not only these two main ones mentioned, but also many on museum theory , axiology, sociology of art, aesthetics and philosophy in universities, museums, institutes, athenaeums.
The readings that began to have an impact on my theoretical system, scientifically considered then, were Shutz and Habermas, from these two matrices, above Shutz, below Habermas, I began to metabolize the tradition of theoretical sociology that I told you about in the previous question, The passage from macro sociology to micromethodologies, the social phenomenology of Shutz, Mead, and ethnomethodology. Linguistics and semiotics are no longer the only main references of the scientific and systemic conformation of my thinking, these new matrices are beginning to be: social phenomenology, the influence on me of Shutz, Mead, my readings of Parson and ethnomethodology.
Since then I begin to move away from Bordieu progressively, my sociology becomes more and more axiological and phenomenological, and semiological textualism, and linguistics to be systematically reintegrated and reconsidered from social phenomenology and ethnomethodology.
More, however, this is a period of great nutrition, my system was rearticulating itself from its own matrices but becoming very enriched and therefore progressively changing.
I write my first book in this period that ended in 1993 and an important essay in my theoretical work “The Postmodern Work” where even my sense of the postmodern remains within the axis of the Eco/Levis Strauss debate on the open or closed work, in a meaning, and I began to develop my own theory on the configurational paradigms at the phenomenological level of “The postmodern work” which becomes an intermediate or third alternative between the open and closed parameters of Eco and Levis Strauss.
I was then invited in 1996 by the department of classical and Hispanic studies at Rice University to share my theories in semiotic theory, theoretical anthropology and art theory, and on the occasion of that invitation and trip, I gave a conference where I read a summary for 45 minutes of my essay “The Postmodern Work”, I have a lot of success with this conference
This theory of the postmodern work, already phenomenological and already focused on the analysis of the forms of subjectivity that participate in the configurational paradigms of the work, is even if completely governed by linguistic and semiotic theory, and even in this essay it takes as a parameter problems of theory of art, however, my first book was already a first transformation of my concepts of work, in that first book I proposed a transdisciplinary phenomenological and sociological solution that surpassed the traditional forms of sociology in terms of considerations about the object. of sociology and its method refers, the internal and the external, the individual and the social, the inside and the outside, from conceptions about these things considered as pregiven, I move on to considerations about these things as configurational elaborations as things becoming all the time.
But this book, which already combs through the entire sociology of the 20th century and begins my decantations regarding it, I had started before reading Shutz and Habermas in depth, in it there was still Bourdieu's field theory, but Geertz already entered.
However, it is at the same time a period in which I live, I could say, a writing school, I train and become a writer because I am forced to write every week, I write a lot of criticism of contemporary Venezuelan art, a semiological criticism those years. . I made several attempts to inscribe in the new sociocultural environment the hypothetical deductive side of my empiricism but it was not possible to articulate it in that way, so the empirical side began to change, being chosen as a curator in a museum of contemporary visual arts was what conducive and made it possible to resume field work, however, it would no longer be field work empirically informed by a logical-deductive systematicity that dialogues with an experience, but rather it would be professionalized field work with high institutional demands, that is, subject to seminars. , courses, position as a project researcher in a university research center, collaborator as an essayist writer weekly in the media, and a continuous art criticism practice in museums, galleries, etc.
It could no longer respond to a hypothesis but rather to a professional contingency.
The challenge then was how to integrate a cultural life experience, in which I was also becoming established and transformed as an emigrant.
(about which I also began to write in the mode of theoretical self-reflexivity, to see myself as an intellectual in culture while at the same time reading about those modes of self-view, here I am very interested in reading European urban sociology, city, and the literature on the diaspora in which he agrees with James Clifford), with the demands of a Venezuelan socioculturality in which I immersed myself intensely, and how to carry out a new field work articulated from the theory of the museum and from the practice of projects made possible from the museum, or in the relationship between University, Research Center, Museum, my field work on the urban popular markets of Venezuela.
In 1994 I am a curator at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts doing my research on the museum and popular urban markets and I meet Surpik Angelini at the museum who is interested in my project and after reading it he proposes that we work together on a version for take her to Houston, Texas at Rice University
In 1996, after traveling at the invitation of the Department of Classical and Hispanic Studies at Rice University and giving my lecture on “The Postmodern Work” at Fondren Library, I was invited to the Department of Anthropology at Rice University to travel in the spring of year after teaching a spring course which I prepared and produced back in Caracas.
Returning to Caracas, I conceived and directed an “Experimental Workshop on Art and Anthropology” aimed at conceiving and producing, making possible the creation of seven exhibitions that I decided to curate as a small accompaniment to my lectures from the spring course to which I was invited. I co-curated this production and the small curation of seven samples with Surpik Angelini and we later presented it together at Rice University in exhibition spaces on campus.
The spring program, however, began as its first activity with two lectures that I was invited to give in the anthropology department of Rice University on the methodology of participant observation in my “Make” projects in Havana, 1990 and in my fieldwork project in the urban popular markets of Venezuela. These two conferences, given fifteen days before beginning the program of my conferences at the Rice Media Center and the seven exhibitions of the curatorship, gave rise to a post-conference dialogue on social science methodology in which Quetzil Eugenio, Stanford Carpenter, James Faubiam participated with me. , George Marcus, Surpik Angelini and Johannes Birringer, among others.
At the conclusion of the inauguration and closing of the seven exhibitions about which there were publications in the Houston chronicle by Patricia Johnson, in artlies magazine by Donald Caledare, and in the Houston Press, Television and press, in addition to the publication of Thomas Mc Evilley about our curation at Art in America magazine in New York, two things happened after the spring, Stephen A Tyler and I decided to start our dialogue and wrote our exchange of theoretical essays on the concept of evocation, Thomas Mc evilley, This art philosopher who gave his weekly lectures at the Rice Media Center, where I myself taught my course in the spring, offered an hour and a half lecture for the video around the seven exhibitions. Furthermore, Quetzil Eugenio and I, regarding a dialogue we had about my research project on the markets and his visit to it, wrote an essay together that we titled “Between seeing and scenes.”
It emerged, therefore, in all the participants in the dialogue regarding my lectures on the methodology of participant observation, me and Surpik as curators of the seven exhibitions, me as director of the experimental art and anthropology workshop in Caracas and lecturer of the course, me and Stephen regarding our dialogue, me, surpik and huberman the film director who made the video with mc evilley's conference, me and quetzil as writers of the text “Between seeing and scenes”, the need to summarize all of this in a documentary compendium. This is how two books were born, “At the Threshold of Art and Anthropology: A documentary book/catalog”, edited by me and surpik in which we summarize all this, and “An Expedition to the Threshold”, a little book of mine. about the workshop in caracas.
This, then, is the brief anteroom story, brief because it covered the three months of the spring and the following months that preceded the beginning in June 1997 of my academic position as a complementary research associate in the department of anthropology at Rice University, and which preceded the beginning of my position as researcher, artistic director of the transart foundation that Surpik and I had founded in 1996 in Houston, we had channeled through it the small curatorship of exhibitions and we were then preparing to articulate it as a center for theoretical art research. and anthropology in a house for it on Alabama Street.
Spring activities end and I start reading again. I read all the time, as you know and I read everything from beginning to end sometimes more than once. I concentrate then in this third period on continuing reading Derrida, I read more of his books and I reread others read in Caracas, I read more Deleuze, all of Derrida, all of Deleuze, and I reread the Deleuze read in Caracas, I read Gadamer in the United States , among a thousand other things, I read more essays by Stephen A Tyler, I read more by James Clifford. Also Roland Barthes, Noam Chomsky
I see the second period as ending with that curatorship and that spring course and the publishing books that it generated.
The third period then begins after that from June 1997 between the department of anthropology and the transarte foundation, but includes something additional and important, on the one hand, Quetzil Eugenio invites me to participate as a speaker in a panel about his film anthropology on the equinox in Yucatan, Mexico, panel that takes place at the University of Houston, department of anthropology at the ethnomethodology congress, this conference of mine was also very successful, George was also on that panel.
Then I had a subsequent invitation from the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College in Chicago in 1999 to give a lecture on a panel on tourism, anthropology, museums, cultural representations, ethnography, relationships between folklore art, crafts. , etc., between Mexico and the United States, especially in the Mayan world.
I travel to Lake Forest College and participate with Quetzil in a curatorial and museography about his anthropology, an exhibition, and I give my lecture on that panel.
We cannot exclude from here that in 1998 I published my laboratory program in Houston and Stephen and I began our oral philosophical dialogues, resuming our dialogue on evocation where Quetzil and Surpik participate, giving lectures on research methodology in my laboratory program in rice anthropology, which generate dialogues with Quetzil, Stephen, Foubiam, Surpik, as well as participating with a conference in the panels of the national anthropology congress in Chicago, 99, where Quetzil, George Marcus, Surpik Angelini and Lisa Breglia also participate. At the same time, in 2000, I, Quetzil and Lisa returned to participate in a panel together at the LASA congress in Florida.
It remains to be added here that I teach a one-year theoretical seminar in Houston, Texas, on philosophy, sociology and cultural anthropology after a conference on "living between cultures", the perspective on the diaspora in the Hispanic culture center of Houston, as well such as my publications, a catalog of my research on markets published at Rice University, and my semiological art criticism that I continue to practice in the city, among other conferences.
Then the next period that begins in 2004. This is the period in which, with the exception of my first book, before and after everything was thousands of loose essays, not born as chapters for books, and I write almost a new book every year until today, sometimes in two years, three maximum. My next 12 books are from this period. During this period I read “Hegel's Science of Logic” about three times and I studied it. I must say that Hegel was even mentioned in my art theory essays from the beginning, he was even in my art theory conferences in Caracas. , as well as Burguer, post-Hegelian, but not yet in force. I continue studying Derrida in this period, I reread his books again, I read “Duration and Simultaneity” by Bergson, I read “Sensitive Time” by Kristeva of whom I had only read individual essays, I read again “The Absent Structure” that I did not read. from Havana in the eighties, I read more deeply Pierce Live, his Science of Semiotics, I read the Aesthetic Theory of Adornment, the Negative Dialectic of Adornment, and selected essays by Benjamin, I reread “Structural Anthropology,” I re-read Geertz that I had read in Caracas, I read “The Argonauts of the Western Pacific” by Malinowsky, I study it in depth, I read more essays by Stephen A Tyler.
I distance myself from Deleuze, whom I became very close to in the United States, despite the fact that during this period I read his courses on Kant and What is Philosophy, I consolidate my definitive determination to distance myself from Foucault, whom I never got very close to but whom I considered always and from whom I began to distance myself after the first year in Houston, and I distance myself from Boudrillard to whom I became very close in the transition from Caracas to Houston. I'm also starting to distance myself from Habermas.
I am closer to Gadamer.
It is not possible, however, without a doubt, with regard to this new period with regard to postmodern anthropology before me to reduce all of Stephen to his essay “Postmodern Ethnography”, since we also have crucial essays such as “Prolegomena for a future Linguistics”, “Being outside of language”, “And then others without mirrors”, “Evocation: The unwriteable” in response to me, among many others, in addition to his books on India “India: an anthropological perspective”, The Said and the unsade: mind, meaning and culture, The Unspeakable, Discouse, rhetoric and dialogue in the postmodern world, and its edition Cognitive anthropology, although despite this it is the jewel, as I told you, the treasure of anthropology postmodern with everything and the tweezers, or the distances, or the moments or passages in that essay from which as a new generation we can distance ourselves, it is still a treasure chest, there is everything required and necessary.
The other treasure of postmodern anthropology is James Clifford's table
Let's start with her
This table establishes almost the entire field of what must be empirically the specificity of the entire territory, the limits, the perimeter and the relationships on which postmodern anthropology as I understand it must focus.
In a way, almost everything is there, at least as far as the axiological consideration of an idea of culture to be studied and understood empirically is concerned, including field work, although it is a table on the system of art and culture. Empiricity would lack field work, participant observation
If we observe in detail this table of what James Clifford calls “the system of art and culture” (a machine for creating authenticity), we will see that it can be read not only from the angle of material and visual culture but also Regarding this, it establishes, perhaps influenced by Greimas, a first frame of reference of what I call “axiology”, to understand how our evaluations and appreciations about the value and meaning of cultural artifacts move according to how we value them between high art and culture in general, between phenomena of material culture considered non-artistic, and phenomena considered artistic, thus at the upper end of the table we have the authentic and at the opposite end the inauthentic, on the upper left pole we have the art museum and the art market as parameters of valuation, at its opposite end in the upper right we then have those modes of cultural valuation and appreciation that look towards material culture and symbolic artifacts for their culturality versus their artisticity, that is, history and folklore, the ethnography museum, but also material culture and the world of bricollages or artisanal things called kraft but not necessarily art, let's think here of the geeks' costumes, their wristbands, their necklaces, their pollovers with silkscreen prints of icons aesthetically valued for their tastes, or let's think of skateboards as aesthetic artifacts, with names, decorated, painted, or simply painted bicycles, with names, decorated, intervened, all of this by a non-artistic popular culture.
Now let's start going down the table even without entering it, staying on its left and right ends, on the left we will see the "masterpiece of art", referring to the upper level "Art", art museum, art market, while on the far right we will see the word “artifacts”, that is, artifacts in general of material culture, kraft, expression of folklore, crafts or cultural symbolism, between one level and the other everything moves here, the selections of worlds of the reality of the neighborhoods valued as material and visual culture of those people of popular culture, in “Pilón” my attention to religion, my interest in daily rituals, in the coffee strainer, in the craftsmanship of the huts, in the way its inhabitants stand in front of the camera to show themselves as creators of their huts, in taking my photographs of the punks' dressing rooms, or the fact of sharing with three popular rockers a work that she herself created. goes beyond the usual parameters of the work of art
In “Make”, I work with the accumulations of objects and tasks from the neighborhoods, but let's continue further in the table.
If we stay at this level above/left/right we see that entering the table, we have, on one side, the art associated with the notions of the singular and the original, and on the opposite end, the culture considered according to the parameters of the traditional. /collective.
But if we stay inside the table we see how these two extremes exchange axiological relationships, for example, art/singular/original, feeds back or communicates with reproduction and commerce, which are supposed to be two notions corresponding to the culture/traditional/ collective, while conversely, this last area exchanges evaluative parameters with “non-culture”, new or not common, which was supposed to be more related to art, original, singular.
If we continue down the table along its exteriors we will find “tourist art”, or “crafts for tourism”, collections of curiosities and utilities, etc., as forms of material and visual culture, and we have on the left, museums of technologies , inventions and anti art.
We see how this table from an empirical point of view collects, with respect to the system of art and culture, an entire area within which everything can be seen, markets, museums, tourism.
Now I would like to highlight here some passages taken with tweezers but significantly chosen from an essay that both Shutz and Habermas had an impart on my system from the United States. I am referring to Stephen's Postmodern Ethnography.
Now I think of my authorial books as compositional relationships between the parts, chapters, and the whole, the work that each book is.
That is to say, here I think about the ways in which I process, elaborate and respond to the entire collection of my processing and self-determinations, my decantations and my syntheses, my elaborations and my positionings, my writing style and my way of reading. the relationship between works as scriptural forms, as forms of thought and as forms of experience.
I told you, one reads a lot and takes many things into account, but not everything influences it. My influences are Peirce, Shutz, Derrida, Hegel. Mead, Stephen, I do not attribute the importance of having influenced me to any other author, no matter how much I have approached him and no matter how much I have considered him. I would say that Bourdieu and Habermas were once among the influences, but I distanced myself from them.
Let's listen directly to Stephen in “Postmodern Ethnography from my selections. I do not think it is necessary to say here that what I choose also presupposes what I exclude, that is, with regard to Stephen I also work with tweezers.
“Evocation is not, in itself, a representation; not even a presentation. It does not present objects and represents nothing, although it makes evident absences that are impossible to be presented or represented. (…) It goes beyond the separations that are generally made to distinguish the sensible from the conceivable, in form and content, of oneself and the other, of language and the world.”
“Evocation - or ethnography, we should say - is the discourse of the postmodern world for the world that does science” (…)
“Postmodern ethnography lies in an enveloping and protean text composed of fragments of a discourse that seeks to evoke, both in the mind of the writer and in the mind of the reader, a fantasy thanks to which a world can be perceived that, Although fantastic, it possesses the keys to common sense; and that, incidentally, contains aspects of an integrative aesthetic that brings to that reading or writing mind, let's say, therapeutic effects."
“It is, in a word, simple and pure poetry. But we are not talking about poetry adjusted to the literary canons of the fomia. We are talking about poetry that returns to its original context, to the original function of the poetic, which is none other than to break the discourse.
of the everyday, transforming it. And making, in that transformation, the word evoke the substrates that the ethos lies in the community, and that that word, that evocation, owes to ethical behavior (read Jaeger).”
“Postmodern ethnography proposes, in short, the textualized recreation of a spiral in which the poetic and the ritual merge, in an ascending manner. For this reason, defamiliarized postmodern ethnography destroys the desacralization of that supposed common sense that must be thrown away in the name of an impulse of the fantastic capable of - based on fragments - returning to the world the authentic common sense of ritual, of the deepest values. , for a constant transformation, for a continuous renewal, for a new sacralization... Such a project contains the utmost importance of the allegorical, and not referring only to narrative modes or a vision similar to that of religious parables. .
“Postmodern ethnography is not a new and circumstantial department; Nor is it a simply formal rupture of discourse, a rupture that aspires to nothing more than a modernization of scientific discourse: to an aesthetic emphasis typical of experimental novels. It is simply a pilgrimage back to the most substantial and primal self-consciousness, to the most powerful notion of ethics that must illuminate all discourse, to the ancient values that are contained in terms such as "ethos" and "ethical."
“Precisely because postmodern ethnography prioritizes discourse over text, it presents dialogue as opposition to monologue; and places greater emphasis on natural cooperation with the subject under study, a situation that greatly contrasts with that in which the observer, the researcher, armed with ideology, takes himself to be a transcendent scientific observer. In fact, postmodern ethnography is a clear rejection of the very ideological foundation of the supposed "observer/observed", since it dilutes the distances that generally occur in field work, since such figures disappear: Nobody observes and nobody is observed. In this way, a dialogic discourse can be developed, a fragmentary, multiform and, therefore, complete narrative.”
“We can better understand the ethnographic context if we take it as a cooperation that must produce polyphonies (…). Enough, let us repeat, with the dialogue; and even a series of paratactic juxtapositions in the manner of the Gospels; or perhaps in separate sequences in which the narrative, dealing with a common theme, offers multiple variations, counterpointed interviews (consult Marcus, Cushman and Clifford)”
“It is not my desire, moreover, to suggest that each book is a kind of collage in which multiple authors appear; not even a compedium in the manner of American Anthropologist. This would end up turning the work into a kind of newspaper and journalism as models of literary imitation. A compilation, even a collage, can serve to fully account for different perspectives, although it differs in dimension: the accidental versus the purposes. It is true that we can think that collections of texts are, in fact, collages. And that each of the sections of that collage shows themes and topics. But it may well be taken for an accident.”
“The polyphonic is the meaning of the relativist perspective and it is not only about an evasion, evading responsibilities or purging the supposed faults of a very democratic feeling; It is about, as Vico would say, articulating, in the best possible way, social forms in fair correspondence with field work and its realities, but doing so with sufficient sensitivity so that the differences disappear.
problems arising from the conceptions of power, symbolized in the subject-object relationship; in the relationships between the presented and the one who presents..."
“Because the meanings are not meanings in themselves but thanks to the understanding, which is nothing more than a fragment of what is discussed, a fragment to be consummated, the ethnographer should no longer embark on the task of representation. From evocation few things can be represented. And evocation is the key that opens the doors of perception; the doors, also, of the understanding of difference..."
“In order to break such totalizing spelling we must attack writing in the totalizing representations it intends (….). Ong (1977) has already warned us about the effects of writing, reminding us of the world of oral expression in contrast to print. Benjamín (1978) and Adomo (1977), for their part, have contrasted the ideology of the fragment with that of the whole. And Derrida (1974) has turned the author into a creature of writing rather than its author. Postmodern ethnography builds its program, therefore, on deconstruction.
“Postmodern ethnography is fragmentary because it cannot be any other way. Life itself in the countryside is fragmentary; It is not totally organized into familiar ethnological categories, as if it were a kingdom; or as if it were an economic concert, or a religious creed... In short, we have, in the end, nothing more than a set of anecdotes, and that in the best of cases, which cannot go beyond pure textualization . In other words, the trees would never let us see the forest; although we may feel that beyond is the forest; or a few pieces of forest that we can access as long as the trees allow us, between one and the other, the existence of a small space of land to trample with our feet.”
“Where space and time cancel each other reciprocally and synchronically to draw that fantasy, so familiar to us, which we call the everyday; commonplace that, however, opens a gap in time; in that time that never corresponds to the supposedly simultaneous reality in which it occurs... This, like the voice of God Brahma, is pure power that does not need us to access a state of supreme perfection, since in the "I return, because it is eternal, it is not a climax, a final station, a stable image... Not even a homeostatic balance, but rather a reduction of tensions at that exact moment in which the transcendental seems close."
“Postmodern ethnography supposes a return to the idea of aesthetic integration as conceptual therapy in order to what is expressed by the proto-Indo-European sense of harmony between the parts that form a whole. Postmodern ethnography is an object of meditation that provokes a break with the common sense used to explain the world, and, at the same time, evokes an aesthetic integration whose therapeutic effects serve to restore a common sense of the world.
“We must, therefore, constantly renew ourselves to access that desired common sense, reaffirm ourselves in it and reaffirm it as renewed subjects.”
“For postmodern ethnography, then, the text should not reveal its internal paradoxes, but, in any case, the tension that such paradoxes contain, a tension that will permeate the discourse until it is brought to a logical resolution... It is possible, We believe, a physical text, a text of the physical, a text of the word and transformation; a text in which the experience of everyday life is evoked, of the tangible reality that everyday discourse makes use of daily to establish what is concrete and not remain at the superficial level of abstraction. The postmodern must be a text that is read not only with the eyes but with the ears. It will be the only way to hear "the voices of the pages."
“Polyphony is the best metaphor because it evokes sounds and listening, simultaneously and harmoniously, without the need to represent a painting or a linear sequence before our eyes... prose is complicit in this to the extent that the reader, with his own voice becomes part of the textual polyphony. Yes, it is, in fact, one of the forms of realism; It does not describe things, objects or break the existing balance between the description and what is described. It does not describe, in short, because there is nothing to describe... More so, because the generic idea of ethnography is based on a supposed "description of reality." Descriptions of reality are nothing more than imitations of that reality... They use mimicry; although its mimesis only creates illusions of reality, as in scientific fictions... Such is the price that must be paid for making language pure work of the eyes. “There is little to do with perception. Ethnography is not a simple account of rationalized movements from perception to concept. It begins and culminates in the conceptual. There are no origins in perception, no prior visions, no observational data. No, it is not surrealism either... It is nothing more than the world of common sense; There is only surrealism in scientific fictions and science fiction. Who owns that common sense? “To everyone, if not to anyone, as Thomas Reid put it in 1895.”
“Ethnography does not express the cognitive virtualities of the author as a utopia that is uncontrollable for the reader, that paralyzes his response... The text, here, is at the complete mercy of the reader, who must complement it. The incompleteness, in the text, supposes the work of the reader; and from that work is derived, in large part, a recreation of the world of customary oral expression, an understanding based on a common and sensible feeling, There is where the world is born, the universe of the textual.”
“Postmodern ethnography puts an end to the illusion corresponding to discursive self-perfection. It does not seek a correction of the text in relation to what has been discussed, but rather continually retraces its steps to draw up an empirical study, not merely complementary, that lays a mark, that traces a groove... Each text contains a unique and separate meaning. of others, but immersed in discourse, without any essence subordinated to a further perfection or to the myth of what has evolved. Each text, like Leibniz's monads, is perfect in its imperfections.”
Finally, by way of closing, you mention globalization at some point and if it is true that I also participated, invited by the College of Fine Art of the University of Texas in Austin, to a meeting of about fifteen days on anthropology and globalization of culture developed around of the Kassel documenta and its book catalog in dialogue with Catherine David, its curator, who was present, there were me, Catherine, Harper Montgomery, Mari Carmen Ramirez, Jorge Judice, Eligio Tonel, among others, as well as I should not fail to mention here Regarding this, the two lectures on Cuban art that I was invited to give when the Latin American studies department at Lake Forest College took advantage of my presence as a guest of the sociology department on campus to ask me for them, as well as, I had told you, the edition that I did as guest editor of artlies magazine from Texas in 2000 that I shared with surpik, john bryan, sussie kalil and surpik angelini.
"PLEXUS OF INTERSTITIALITY"
Conversations with Abdel Hernández
Sixth question (6):
Thank you Abdel, for all your effort and cooperation in this project to which we have dedicated ourselves with the purpose of providing more clarity and transparency to the content managed throughout these last few years of return to Cuba, which have been calmer years, which have been, ironically, your years of dedication to table work, to theoretical construction and to the writing of your work written in black and white after years of activity and cultural praxis as a sociologist and anthropologist both in Venezuela first where you worked in popular markets and with indigenous communities such as the Waiyú culture or the Yanomami, as well as later as a complementary adjunct researcher to the department of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas in the United States where you played a central role in the then last generation of the " Writing Culture" combining your activity as a sociologist and ethnomethodologist with art theory and the aesthetic tools of performance at the service of anthropology itself.
In view of and with regard to the exhaustive reflection that you have developed in the previous response, very exhaustive, accompanied by an extensive commentary and a rigorous reflection of a high level of complexity, I would like us to explain to the reader, for a better understanding of your theoretical system, some points to clarify. For example, and taking into account the direct influence that the school of symbolic interactionism has on your system and in particular the interpretation that you make of the sociological contributions that George Herbert Mead made to that school, as you explain in the relationship that you establish between the self (self) and the social, between the self and the heritage -----using your own terms from that book of the same title The self and the heritage, representative of that problem of the relations of the self with the social that goes through much of your work ------ as you explain that in your sociological program greater priority is given to the social outside, where the other part of the social outside enjoys many more privileges than the ego system or the sphere of the self to which It is articulated in a two-headed module of two units or subsystems; that is, the ego subsystem and the societal subsystem. How is this possible, how can it happen and how does the sociological methodology in which you place yourself explain it based on ----and also from----- your own theoretical system in contrast to the weight that G.H. Mead What does it give to the sphere of the self, that is, the individuality of that self, on the sphere of the social? How is it possible, however, that on the other hand, you hold as much or perhaps more responsibility to the same sphere of the social for the leading role that in its executive function it gives to the self, relegating the latter to a second plane of otherness? subsumed in the other subset of the social, in the dyadic relationship in which both subsystems are articulated?
On the other hand, in a certain way, you seem to treat with a certain benevolence, these somewhat unjustified licenses by which the postmodern anthropology of Writing Culture manufactures more of an Other that justifies its own existence as postmodern anthropology, as Writing Culture. In view of being an anthropology written conceiving an Other in those different others in which it unfolds, prefabricating its own cultural substratum, it seems that -----in any case, in return----- to give a guarantee to its own condition of social science. Within your own system you seem to propose a way out through phenomenology to that quagmire in which anthropology has been succumbing by intellectualizing its own practices as a discipline, its own existence as a social science, first mythologizing it in James Frazer and The Golden Bough, then as the sociology of religion in the studies of Edward Tylor, later appealing to its original or primitive character with Levy-Bruhl, or split between the different functions as a community in Durkheim or Malinowski, or at another level of complexity until the limit in which it was conceived by the rules of kinship in Elvis-Strauss from the linguistic structuralism of Jacobson and the Prague School to the phenomenological-interpretivist works of Clifford Geertz, which would be the prelude to the postmodern anthropology movement in the United States led by James Clifford, of which you were also a part during those very productive years that you lived in the United States as a complementary researcher attached to the anthropology department at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
Could you develop Abdel, a little, all of this, taking into consideration ---first of all--- the epistemological assumptions put into discussion within the problem of antinomies around the pre-philosophical problem? Could you develop this idea taking as a reference the discussion around dialectics and the problem of genesis that you seem to initially draw in your previous answer and then abandon it for a deeper and more systematized approach in the scientific development of cultural anthropology itself? And all this, taking into account the position that your system acquires in the midst of these tensions, intercepted by its location and interdisciplinarity, also intercepted by all the references that precede you and that ---at least partially and approximately--- I have been previously mentioned, they are, without a doubt, the preamble to your own empirical fieldwork investigations, your own transdisciplinary theoretical developments from hermeneutical and phenomenological considerations.
Hello Albert,
Good morning. Thanks again. Beautiful question. To answer what you have asked me, I will first try to offer a development on how, in what ways and senses I have first attended to explicitly, that is, bringing it to thought, theorizing it, abstracting it, and systematizing what you call "egoic." "trying as much as possible for the moment in the first part of the development to consider it in an abstract and general way, that is, without going even into more complex diatribes that I will deal with later, also in this first part I will address those ways in which I I have treated this not only by calling it to the text and thematizing it, but rather by considering it as background epistemological assumptions that I make sure to treat systematically and not neglect it even if I do not call it to the text.
Maintaining a certain abstractive generality between an abstract notion of the “egoic”, without even discussing the very concept of “ego”, in your meaning of “egoicity”, but only momentarily giving as an undifferentiated sameness different notions that if it is required to differentiate them But I will do it later, I will talk to you, as I did since my first book and I have in a certain way kept it under the same prism of treatment, of the internal versus the external, of the inside versus the outside.
The concept or the very notion of “undifferentiated sameness” supposes not only the identity or self-identity of a one or something, which can be an individual considered as subjectivity or subject, or it can be a being or the being, or it can be understood as a monad, in the sense of Leibnis that Hegel later continues in the concept of “the one” versus “the multiple”, that monad, that “one”, that the internal versus the external, the inside versus outside, it is true that it can also be any one and any something, it can be, for example, the undifferentiated sameness of a concept considered in its being in itself and towards itself, considered by itself without a pair, without a dyad and without a triad, that individual that emphasizes a “one”, a same and its sameness, its identity, can be a concept, as I said, abstract, not precisely a subject with an interior subjectivity or what Derrida calls “the ground of interiority” and which I prefer to call “the internal world or self-absorbed interior”.
Although a concept already presupposes a subject since there is no concept without a subject and without subjectivity, it is true that a concept in its abstractivity acquires a certain logical value of its own per se and regardless of how we consider the subject or the self-absorbed subjectivity of an individual, let us not forget It is true that for both Kant and Hegel there was very little difference, like even German idealists, between the self, the concept and consciousness, they were different names for things that were very related and sometimes the same, before which I make more demanding differentiations, but maintaining for the moment the generality of not entering into fundamental distinctions such as the one I make between “the I” and “the self”, that I understand and treat them as two different things in order to be related, or how the ones I make between the concept and the self, or between the concept and consciousness, or between the subject and the being, between the subject and the self, between the subject and consciousness, leaving those distinctions for later, the first way in which in Its generality I attended to in this matter was that of a distinction between the internal and the external, between the inside and the outside.
It was necessary to qualify and qualify this distinction as phenomenologically there is in being and subjectivity an experiential, experiential, but also phenomenal and even habitable and existential distinction, between the sense of an inside and the sense of an outside.
Central I consider of course and yet, paradoxically, also the permeabilities that take shape between the inside and the outside when seen dialectically we see that they cannot be seen separately, that the inside is because there is an outside and it ceases to be without the outside and conversely, the mutual logical and ontological implication that assigns identity even from the dyad to both concepts, as well as the phenomenological relevance of their relativization when the inside becomes outside and vice versa.
More attention to this dialectic is relative to when it is required to pay attention to it in no way, ignoring that for the purposes of the subject, of being, of the individual, the distinction itself is relevant, it is relevant from the very sense of the habitation, it is relevant from the meaning itself. of the monad, that is, it is even as a phenomenological condition of possibility of sensoriality and of the “world within reach”, it is so from experience and also from biography.
So, first of all, I have dealt with this issue through the distinctions between an inside and an outside, an internal versus an external.
Moving now towards the precisions that make “the one” versus “the multiple” no longer the generality of a “the singular” versus “the plural”, “the particular” versus “the universal”, where “the one "can be a concept that is not properly an existent, where "the one" can be an integer before a multiple of numbers, its division, its addition, its subtraction or merely its quantum, or where the monad can be no longer the inside of the subjectivity that experiences the world from that interiority before an outside, the window of the being and its body, but rather the inside of a concept, or the inside of a cell versus a cytoplasm.
In the same way with being, distinguishing the being that makes sure that it is, that it is not only what mere time or space can be, or how it can be a substance that “is” chemically or how the verb “to be” can be. ” of anything, but of a being that we know is sensitive to what it is because it is extrinsic to itself, because it perceives itself externalized and feels that it is as much as it becomes a concept of it.
When undifferentiated sameness begins to differentiate and thought about the identical moves from the plural to the singular, from the universal to the particular, a being that feels, that perceives, that thinks, an individual or what Hegel called a life, in this human case.
I have attended to and treated the matter as seen in abstract theoretical terms in “Thinking Science” and yes, also in my essay “The Self and the Acquis”, but also in my developments around the monad in chapters of several books, as well as in my essays on being such as “The Chrysalis of Being”, “The Being and the Monad”, although I resort to it occasionally or sporadically here and there from time to time when the need arises to bring it up in chapters that are not about it, in empirical terms I made it between the internal and the external, the inside and the outside in my first book “Borders and overflows of art”, there I even related inside/outside, internal/external with individual/social or individual/collective, from the distinction of the author/his work. versus the world of the social, and more recently I have taken it up again in my books “The Enigmas of the ground” in the chapter “The preinterpreted character of experience and the world” and in “The metonymies of the museum” in a chapter on experiences noetics and noematics considered from the perspective of the relations of contiguity between pure spatiality and the symbolization of space.
And if indeed the matter can be treated in more and more depth, a book may even possibly be dedicated to it.
On the other hand, moving then to the modes of relationship between that internal or that inside and the outside, let's say that if what offers specificity to what I call cultural theory is culture, the concept of culture, and that which precisely outlines what cultural over any other dimension of experience, it is then presupposed to find the cuts that most adequately correspond to the culture
In the same way that what offers specificity to sociology is “the social”, and this makes us look for or find the cuts that make the social specific and that above all generate the social, its genesis, in distinctions of micronotions such as “the self and the social”, “social action”, “the unity act”, “symbolic interaction”, “intersubjectivity”, “the situation”, among other notions around which “the social” becomes specific. , we must specify those of the cultural.
In this way, for cultural theory, whether we understand it as a sociology of culture or as a cultural anthropology, we must find the specific cuts of the self that belong to culture rather than to society, to the cultural rather than to the social, and that is the heritage.
I do not establish the pair “self and heritage” to mean the same thing as when we say the pair “the self and the social.” Undoubtedly the “self/social” relationship is a very important part of the self, but not the only one, there is also a very important relationship of the self with experience, with memory, with accumulation, with the heritage that has both an expression towards the interior of subjectivity or the internal, which you would call “egoic” as it also has an expression towards the external both through the path that the heritage then plays in coding, decoding, compression, organization of experience, compatibility, communication, as well as through accumulated heritage subjectively and objectively considered.
The self/acquis relationship cuts culture over the non-cultural in the microdimension of the experience of the individual subject, however, at the same time it links beyond the individual, I understand this as a cut of cultural anthropology if the latter remains attended to. to microsociological-based sociological insights, indeed, social phenomenology, phenomenological sociology, Shutz and symbolic interactionism, Mead
The self in my theoretical development has three areas, the self/social relationship (this belongs to sociology), the self/acquis relationship, this belongs to culture, cultural theory or cultural microanthropology, and the self-self relationship, which belongs to philosophy.
At the same time I differentiate the self from the ego, the second remains identical from childhood to old age, we are the same person and identity according to our ego, but the self does not remain the same, it permeates and changes continuously, so that We are not the same person from childhood to adulthood, as I told you on one occasion elsewhere, from the point of view of the self, you are the same Alberto as always, from the perspective of the self you are no longer the same, now You live in Florida, you have been permed, you have transformed yourself in the diaspora or emigration, you perceive this more clearly when someone much younger than me emigrates, at twenty in my case, you at forty, my children one at four the other at seven, but as I also told you once, it is not necessary to go that far to understand it, it is enough to change provinces in the same country, from a town to a big city, or it is enough to go from student life to working life.
The second thing around which I consider that culture is cut back is language, not only because language comes to us pre-given and as such supposes a tradition that we receive, but because through language we signify experience and the world, We give meaning, we highlight, we give relevance to experiences, to words and to the world, the order of meaning, the semantic order is therefore the cultural order of language, thus in language, grammar and syntax belong to philosophy In logical terms, even within linguistics, semantics to culture, cultural theory and anthropology, communication to sociology.
Semiology at the same time moves between philosophy, psychology and sociology. But the specific field for culture is semantic.
At a third level from the point of view of social institutions, although we must accept with Derrida that language is in a certain way a certain type of first social institution, it is not exactly so, in reality it is the museum, in all what it represents for accumulation, memory, tradition and the establishment of valuation parameters, which allows us to cut out the cultural over the non-cultural.
So we have
Self/Acquis (culture/experience)
Language/Meaning (semantics/culture)
Museum (Memory/culture/heritage)
Moving even more towards the micro
The sign is philosophy
(logic, thought, inference, semiology)
The text is culture
(reading, weaving, texere, warp, weft, skein,
pretext, cotext, architext, intertext)
Speech is social
(face-to-face relationships, oral memory, dialects, ideolects, languages, sociolinguistics)
Writing is cultural
(Memory, inscription, mnemonics)
And with it all their ancestors or cohabiting contemporaries: scriptura, cone-shaped writing, pictogram, codex, palimpsest
It is clearly obvious that the issue of what is properly cultural is more complex.
And what do we do with the rituals, the habits, the customs? Or what do we do with the visual imagery, that is, with the visual culture and the material culture of that visuality understood as imagery? All of this is culture, whether it comes from the religion, altars, reliquaries, images of gods or deities, or come from other distinctions, the differences, for example, between the genre of visual images of the popular market since the colonial 15th century, the so-called vignettes, formerly colonial milk sellers, vendors of jams, their artifacts and ways of wandering, and their traditional images represented, the Sunday public square of the colonial market, and the images of the current urban or rural popular market, all of this is culture as much as the ancient markets are, in India , like those that Stephen studied, Persians, Asians, Mayans, Aztecs, Olmecs and the current ones, the Wayues displaying their sestas, blankets, or backpacks woven on fabrics on the floor, the native/American Indians of the United States, their markets, their shops, it is also culture, the modern relationship between colonial cultural heritage, restoration of memory and tourism, as much as it is the relationship between restoration, archeology and tourism, the material and visual culture of the communities, crafts, ceramics.
It is clear that norms and rules are social
But rituals, habits and customs are cultural
Norms/Rules (social)
Habits, customs, rituals (cultural)
The Transmission is cultural/this reproduction is cultural
However, reproduction has two orders, one biological and the other cultural, thus generation is a social expression of biological reproduction, therefore family and kinship are social, not cultural.
The question arises as to why anthropology adopted kinship and family if both are social, not cultural. And I consider that family ethics and kinship should belong to sociology, not ethnography.
This belongs to an indistinction between the biological subsystem and the cultural subsystem, and as you know I am a culturalist, even seen from sociology, my reference in this is Shutz not Mead, Shutz separates the social sciences from all the natural and biological sciences. I also do it, while Mead did not do it in the same way, let's not forget that many of his ideas took animal interaction as references.
I am not detracting from the fact that it is Mead who first moves sociology towards the micro-distinction of the self and its relationship with the social, and in this I recognize his influence in me, however, let us not forget that Mead ultimately does so to say that the self is made of the social, that the individual is the result of a society that configures him and in this we are ignoring the fact that seeing it in reverse, from the phenomenological configurationality of the self where the latter acquires more relevance than the social or acquires primacy as a source is mine not Mead's, similar happens when if one thinks that my concept of "intramundane horizon" is from Weber, it is not like that, neither Weber nor even Shutz used that concept, my concept of "intramundane horizon", It is true that it is a concept that I conceived based on or influenced by Shutz's concept of “lifeworld” which in turn is greatly influenced by Hurssel, we talk about this in “Counterpoints”, however Shutz does not speak of “horizon”. intramundane” since a phenomenological and hermeneutic ontology that considers the life world as an ontological fabric is not proposed, Shutz certainly relies on Weber's distinctions of subjective and objective meanings, but this leads him on the one hand to methodological issues of social science Well, it would have to be said that his concept of intersubjectivity has more of a Hurselian than Weberian basis in its origin, although it is his not Hurssel's, he developed it from Hurselian, Bergsonian/Shutzian considerations.
It is also true that my concept of “intramundane horizon” assimilates this relevance of Shutzian intersubjectivity, including some things that I came to after reading Habermas, but just as Shutzian intersubjectivity cannot be attributed to Hurssel even if it comes from his inspiration. In that, my “intramundane horizon” cannot be attributed to Shutz/Weber even though it was initially inspired by him since it acquires its own and unique developments in me, original and different.
In the same way, my developments on the self and the heritage, the same idea of seeing the self in front of the heritage or from the latter and not with respect to the social, significantly differentiates my theory of the self from Mead's, although without the developments of that perhaps I would not have arrived at mine
It is true that the structures of the world of life are cultural rather than social, however, not everything in the world of life is structure, perceiving the structures the world of life is culturalized, moreover perceiving the everyday life between day and night. night is deculturalized and acquires a social character.
Teaching is social/Production is social
Now, moving from an abstract theoretical level to an empirical one, I could tell you that in principle your question makes me think of a linguistic question that concerns the “ego” relationship as you call it, the transition from the experience or experience self to the linguistic self. or expressed in language, how this is reflected and becomes a problem that is both theoretical and empirical in ethnography. I would like to highlight here a paradox related to the question of the relationship inside/outside language brought to this topic that you call the self and the others or what I call “the social interperie”.
If we pay attention we will see that precisely of all the social sciences it is ethnography, precisely because it is the one that most recurrently involves participant observation, that is, the singular experience of a concrete empirical subject in a world, that in which the first person of the singular governs, almost all ethnographies or many of them, the majority are in the first person singular, even some of the best known, where the self speaks in the first person.
However, at the same time, paradoxically, it then jumps to a contradiction that results in how the external world, of others or the social environment is described for that self as a “participatory” world and I put participatory in quotes, because it is translates on the page into representation in the language of that participation with respect to the world of others, that is, it is not a real, authentic, true participation, but rather its representation in writing, a representation which, although sifted from the perspective of first person of the singular “yoica”, refers to a world of others that, as you know in traditional anthropology, is none other than the world of forms of culture considered strange, before which the presence of that first person of the singular “yoica” is exogenous, and in front of which that first egoic person takes with him an image of the culture to present it to another audience, that is, he represents the native and his culture in another culture, here it would be good to remember the crucial essay by Stephen A Tyler in discussion with the so-called “dialogical anthropology” in a text addressed to Dennis Tedlock, I mean:
“The Description unwrites as a speaking for.”
In that essay Stephen argues that “dialogical anthropology” wants to make participation an ideal by invoking the call of dialogue to the anthropological text, however, it is not the dialogue itself, but its representation and therefore, native culture is equally exposed to the imperatives of the authoritarian representation of the person who disposes of this dialogue in the representational form, even if the latter is egoic or testimonial. Given this, Stephen discusses the alternative of evocation versus representation. I believe that this crucial issue of evocation does not concern you. I have explained it sufficiently, and this may be a good time.
Dennis counters him with his essay “The Representation of Discourse in Discourse”, that is, effectively, how representing dialogue as a form of discourse within the discourse of the anthropological text becomes a form of discourse within the discourse for anthropology.
I do not think this is the moment to enter into the Stephen/Dennis dialogue regarding which I position myself on Stephen's side because I share with him that in ethnography we must abolish the relationship observer/observed, representative/represented, presenter/presented, as well as abolish the substitution of the participatory world for the representation of participation, and that this is only possible through evocation, although I also sympathize like Stephen with the idea of dialogue and “dialogical anthropology”, but despite this the Stephen's objections and deconstructions are crucial.
The field of evocation is vast and very rich. I'm not going to go into it too much here either, as it covers many sides and aspects.
But let's say that we understand evocation here as the result of what happens at the semantic level, of senses, meanings and concepts with the relationship between part and whole in the discourse, for example, parts of a chapter, or a chapter as part in a book and the relationship between chapters and book, how we resolve there the relationship between experience and writing, between experience and the written whole, between everyday life and writing, but also in the sense of how the dilemma of what Clifford Geertz calls “self-locations”, that is, the way in which, depending on the anthropology that we develop in a book, its theme, content, concepts, theoretical issues, etc., we resolve the diatribe of self-locating oneself as anthropologist, writing/author in the culture or cultural phenomenon about which one writes as well as how to solve the evocation of a participatory world in that culture, participant observation itself, without falling into representing participation.
As you will realize, the first person singular as an “ego” way of speaking, testimonial writing, does not resolve this dilemma at all.
For example, Malinowsky from the very beginning of “The Argonauts of the Western Pacific” begins in the first person, which is the person of the self and continues in the first person singular throughout the entire book, “they offered me tobacco, and I exchanged some words in pilgrim english”.
I even think I look for it and bring it to the text. Pay attention to Malinowsky's “testifying self”
But it seems to me that a comparison and a deeper analysis of how both cultural aspects depend on each other could provide some interesting material for theoretical reflection. In fact, it seems to me that it would give rise to a new type of theory
I returned in due course and soon gathered an audience around me. We exchanged some pleasantries in Pidgin Enlise, offered tobacco and thus made a first contact in an atmosphere of mutual cordiality. Then I tried to proceed with my business. First of all, to start with topics that could not arouse suspicion, I started doing technology
Bronislaw Malinowski, The Argonauts of the Western Pacific
There you have a literal testimonial “testifying self” including “it seems to me”, “I returned in due time”, “then I tried to proceed with my affairs”, it is just the self, and it is at the same time a self-location represented in the anthropologist's writing. in culture or with respect to it, (as you say your world of others, or as I say of the social environment) but, however, what happens when that I of the first person singular goes beyond saying “I thought?” , “I believed”, “I came back”, “I gathered an audience”, “it seems to me”, “I started doing technology”. etc, etc, and begins to talk about the culture, it happens that the descriptions, for example, of the voting of the canoe, or of the cutting of the trunk of the wood with which the cannon is later made, the rituals that are done to cut it , then to transfer it to the baku of the village where it remains for a time, the first person singular testifying ego is transformed into what Clifford Geertz called the “participant description”, that ego describes what it sees, and by describing it it represents its participation in that This is happening before your eyes, the result, paradoxically, is that the testifying self results in representational realism.
Let us also point out that Stephen, in his criticism of the observer/observed relationship, deconstructs here the use of the eyes, (description of what is seen), I suppose you remember here all the development I did in “Rumbos” about how observation from the natural sciences themselves has been at the center of what is defined as first-hand or accurate data, and how, seeing it from the point of view of cultural understanding, not only does it not understand anything, but not even the exegesis, the interpretation, the reading of culture manages to be moderately weighted and adequate, and the deformations it generates, everything I explained about adaptation, my concept, in the trend, or as you prefer to call it current, to which I belong, new innovative and renewing turn initiated by me , Quetzil, Stephen and Surpik from Texas.
In one of its poles, the most crucial, of course, it is an ethical issue and ethics that very clearly is at the center of all of Stephen's programmaticity in “Postmodern Ethnography”, this must first and above all be ethical.
Many examples of “egoic” solutions in ethnography could be given here, for example, Loring Danforth in “The Death Ritual in rural Greece” compares mortuary rituals in Greece with those of his own culture and the impact of encountering other senses. of death reflecting on his own.
“While I was sitting next to the corpse of a man who had just died a few hours earlier and listening to his wife, his sisters and his daughters lament his death, I imagined those same rites celebrated and those same songs performed at the death of one of my relatives, and even my own death...when the brother of the deceased entered the room, the women began to sing a lament that made references to the violent separation of the brothers. Then I thought of my own brother and I cried, the distance between oneself and the other had become really small.
There you have another example of ethnography in the first person singular, egoic. But in no case is that self the self-absorbed self of an internal monologue, for example as in Joyce's "Ulysses", where one reads the character's conscience, as if he were speaking out loud and one listened to his thoughts, nor is that self the form of a solipsistic self-reflexivity that is alone with itself and self-reflects on itself neither philosophically nor by drawing conclusions from its autobiography or experience, and much less is it the self that we have in German idealism, which is an abstract philosophical self through which The entire idealized universe of consciousness, self-consciousness and spirit is submerged in a reflexivity about everything: phenomenon, essence, appearance, reality, existence, nature, form, content, identity, difference, according to the self and for the self, or as they present themselves to that self and its abstractive dialectizations.
Nor is the self of phenomenology, which in reality would come to be in the latter, nothing more than the cutting of the analysis starting from consciousness, from one's consciousness as a thinker and from consciousness when there is consciousness in what we study, what Derrida calls “the ground of our interiority” or inner world, where we are concerned with how the world of the semiological senses, hearing, touch, smell, sight, participates or enters idealized in the configuration of that interiority and its subjectivity and where the theory Knowledge itself is based on the subject-object relationship always remaining certain according to that phenomenal proximity.
By understanding that the mere passage from an idea of the self or ego to a form of writing in language that corresponds to that self as the first person singular does not resolve the dilemma of the contradiction that you have placed between speaking from the ego and appearing more or less externalized or extrinsicized in the world of others or the social environment, we realize that the matter is much deeper and more complex.
First, we have this linguistically with everything, not only with the self, and I am referring precisely to the point that you place on othering, let's think about the gaze, we look at a landscape, or a face, in that look we do not externalize our gaze, we do not we extrinse ourselves towards it, in any case it becomes the other when it is a face that externalizes our gaze, however, we externalize the gaze or otherize it when it becomes a sign, for example, we take photographs of an experience that It has made sense to us, when we looked there was in our gaze not only a seeing and a perception, there was also, as Barthes told you on one occasion regarding (the gaze and the soul), a soul, if we distinguish the gaze from the seeing it is because in There is a soul or spirit in the gaze, but seeing only sees, very well, but when we see the photographs taken, no matter how much soul there is in what we feel when taking it, we obtain a sign of externalized, extrinsed, othered looking. We see the looking of the gaze from the outside as a sign.
The same thing happens with the self and with every form of the subject or subjectivity when we move from the noetic experience in experience to writing and language in which this is externalized in signs, which Derrida calls the appearance of ourselves before ourselves. In consciousness and in the sign, when we see it from the perspective of the noetic experience in terms of Hurssel, the experience that flows and fades among others, or even more abstractly in the pure dimension of the being that is, there is no othering or extrinsication, but there is more; however, as soon as we move from the noetic to the noematic, even without moving to an externalized sign where the extrinsication becomes more evident, we have it only when in the noematic experience the first experience becomes a pretext of a second level of experience that, unlike the first, has another experience as its object, highlights, makes relevant, assigns senses and meanings, retains some things and not others, memorizes, evokes, reflects, now, what I want to emphasize here that, even though in the noematic experience there is superordination with respect to the first noetic experience, this superimposed superordination continues to be also noetic on another level, since it flows again in a present time in which it is, even when it now does so. through memorization or self-reflexivity, in the same way the being that is extrinsic from itself by perceiving that it is and capturing it in the concept of being that is in itself, continues to be on another level, Hegel distinguishes this in two ways, on the one hand the immediacy of being, on the other hand a “placed” or “extrinsic” being, that is, mediated or mediated, the first remains in the second and the second becomes the first, one immediates the other, the first the second, the other mediates, mediates and intermediates the first. This is Hegel, world in itself/phenomenal or reflected world, two moments of the same.
Language, writing more precisely, although we should also say speech, has something of this nemesis, or primitive memory, it in a certain way memorizes, highlights, but at the same time it superordinates because it pretextualizes the experience, it returns to it. , highlights, and beyond, it generates a linear distribution that does not follow the same simultaneous order of what was experienced. How, in what ways to go from the experience outside the language as it is experienced, to the experience in the language and from within it and from it. Tremendous ontological, epistemological and methodological problem both at the theoretical and empirical level.
I have not written about this enough even in the way of calling it to the text, of thematizing it, of making it theme and subject, nor have I thought about it as much as I should as a focused theme, but I have taken it into consideration continually book by book, That is to say, if I have resolved, and given solutions to it, my own according to the way in which I have worked the cuts between semiotic theory, linguistics, sociology and anthropology in all my books, I have determined how to resolve it as a thinker, theorist and author. /writer, developing my own original ways, and constructing my works with awareness of this, then what I can do is, as I have resolved in my books, advance some reflections from personal experience.
In my experience this is an issue that requires us to make a distinction between an “ideal type”, an “empirical experience in the intramundane horizon” and a “social science question”.
Let's start with the intramundane horizon, let's remember my essay on this matter, the chapter in which I discuss and propose my theory of it, there you see how I resort to explanations that make intelligible what I call elucidation and explicitation, both in the self-elucidations of the subject, the actor, the solitary individual, as in his intersubjective communications and how the interpretive arrangements resulting from this elucidation/explanation relationship generate the shared horizons of expectations that are what ultimately structure what we do or fail to do, say or We stop saying, based on the meaning that things make to us and those interpretive arrangements, I thus give or communicate to the reader a sense of the intramundane horizon that he can validate in his own experience but not represent that intramundane horizon through descriptions or mimesis. that they become representational illusions or imitations where language mimetically repeats what the eyes see, where reality passes the bill to language, as I have said other times, but in a way that appeals to the reader's heritage and his own experience, or to the relationship between what I explain and your experience, I evoke that intramundane horizon as if by chance, in a later chapter I then move on to talk about supradiscursive overordinations, asking how experience, typifications, pertinences and significances are overordinated, that is, understood. in a way in which a previous experience is its pretext, while at the same time they are added, they continue to occur at the ontological level. There is neither description nor mimetic imitation of reality in language, there is no representation of the world or at least not in a way in which such a reference comes to govern the ways of putting the levels of experience into contact for consciousness, subjectivity and an idea of reality.
An ideal type can be a conceptual abstraction that facilitates these forms of entry and exit, for example, the concept of self is an ideal type, it is an abstract concept, which can in its possible, hypothetical or potential empirical dimension be my self, my own, but it can be yours, and it can be anyone's.
The concept of a clear ideal type is a strictly sociological concept, of sociology as an autonomous discipline, it is not a concept of either anthropology or ethnography, precisely for this reason, it tends to be seen from the latter two, especially from ethnography, as a type of anonymous subject, this is wrong, it is like talking about electrical engineering in a Spanish grammar class, treating the words as if they were electric cables with positive and negative poles, and the meanings as if they were the result of both poles. of the cables join together, the ideal type has nothing to do with anomisity, it is seen this way from a certain, in my opinion, obsolete ethnography that has no way of renouncing the Manichean identity of the representative culture and the represented culture, which has no how to move between the particular and the universal, the ideal types did not emerge as concepts from parameters that can be asked between the concreteness of a subject with identity and not anonymous, this is a distorted perception that makes the ethnography of a sociological concept, the ideal type It is a Weberian notion of Kantian origin that abstracts a form due to its universal a prioriism.
I am not going to go through here the entire path that the concept of “ideal type” has been following since it would become very extensive, but to maintain that the ideal type is anonymous would be the same as maintaining that the philosophical notions of “the one” and “the multiple” ” are anomimes, that is, from the Hegelian relationship between one and multiple where one is one, one is oneself, but there are many ones that make the multiple, between oneself as an identity singular and the self of any one, as a universal plural of a particular singular, the one and the multiple are universal categories since Leibnis refer precisely to the singular/plural, particular/universal relationship, if we cannot abstract the one from oneself and the one from any one when we say the one, versus to the multiple, we could not even develop the universals not only of identity and difference, but not even of quantum and mathematics, to say that the one of philosophy is anonymous would be the same or worse than saying due to its quality versus quantity, that a natural integer is anonymity, nothing more absurd.
The ethnographic representations of the concepts of theoretical sociology are based on a disability that ethnography and ethnology bring, the subordination of all discourse to the identity of a literal subject with identity in the face of a literal culture with identity.
In the end, it is not a question of a non-identity, but simply of a conceptual abstraction operating due to its level of generality and universality, due to its logical aprorism and possibility of being articulated as a formal universal for all particular cases with similar value.
It is about going out and extracting from the empirical through the abstractivity and universality of concepts and moving between them and experience, it is also about resolving the diatribes about the relationships between part and whole, metonymies and cultures, fragments and wholes, in ways that enter and exit on the one hand between language and non-language, but also, evoking non-language from language, for example, moving from the mere world of life, Hurselian noetic experience or Hegelian immediacy, to the intramundane horizon that is the same world of life but hermeneuticized and phenomenologized from its threads, from there towards a greater superordination, the noeticity of memory, inscription, repetition, pretextualization, highlighting, and more supradiscursively, superordinated orders of reference to experience, abstractively moving us between the ideal typical apriorism of the abstractivity of the concept or concepts, their universality, and the references to the concrete empirical experiences of participant observation or field work, as well as, for example, between the self outside of language and then inside, recently. We have seen with the self, just as at times situated tangibilities, places, spaces, encounters, dialogues, references to concreteness can enter.
It is true "I lived", "I felt", but the self of another one also lived it, he also felt not only what was his different from what was mine, but he heard me say "I lived", "I felt", and since he also felt and also lived, although he did not experience mine or feel mine in his body, he knows what I am talking about or has at least a sense about what it is about, he knows that I have a conscience as much as he does. in which I revisit and self-represent what I have experienced, he knows that it can be expressed, that it can be lived in many ways, and that there are ways in which he has lived it that have some kind of relationship with my experience and my experience, for example, I believe that good friends are necessary, he also believes it, I think it is good to take care of friends, he also believes it, or things that we do not see the same.
Shutz put great emphasis and asked how we have access to the self of the other, obviously we see his action turned into both practical and discursive acts, but we do not have access to his motives, nor do we know the source of his motives or the way in which he is represented and However, we see an act that occurs in front of us and we hear some words, from which we deduce why? and a why? of his action, but in order to elucidate both his actions and his words, given that we do not have access to his self, we have to resort to our experience and knowledge of what the motives, motives, why and why of his actions usually are. such, such an act or such a word generally has a why or a reason of a certain type as confirmed by our heritage, according to Shutz this difficulty of having access to the self of the other, while at the same time, located in a space in which that we see their actions and hear their words, and we try to grasp their meanings by resorting to our sense and experience of why and the park of similar acts, we would say ontologically organize the irreducibly intersubjective character of the life world.
On the other hand, the irrevocably typifying character based on the experience of the ways in which we symbolize and represent our interactions with the social other, we do not have nor will we ever have access to their self, other than by contrasting their actions and trying to elucidate them in recurrence through one side to our heritage about similar acts and in recurrence to how that act is completed within a typified world in which many, if we are many, a workplace, a park, a supermarket, a sudden dialogue between speakers, also typify resorting to their heritage and experiences, a world therefore irreducibly intersubjective on the one hand, and irreducibly typified according to experience and heritage on the other hand through common sense, there we have certainly already begun to leave that first self of the first person of the singular of whose motives, motives, intentions, “I think”, “I believe”, “I lived”, assuming that it is my concrete self or yours, I Abdel, your Alberto, or we would say my self Abdel or your self Alberto , thus arriving at Shutz's classifications, I/you relationships, I/them relationships, I/we relationships, but also relationships that leave the I, such as your/him relationships, your/them relationships, your/we relationships, or he/they, he/us, until we reach relationships we/they are moving away from the reflective or self-reflective self and from the empirical operating self to different forms of relationality of that self that are moving away from its self-absorption and are articulating with others in different ways until arriving via you, him and us progressively more and more to the social environment, to return back to the self-absorbed reflexivity, either this phenomenological abstraction where what you call ego is presupposed at the sensory level of consciousness, or be it in the noematic mode of a sensory, monological, solipsistic or experiential self-reflexivity, even autobiographical.
Now, what happens, as I told you at the beginning, if the self is not literal, even if it is not absorbed through self-reflexivity in the phrase, for example, the internal monologue in literature where suddenly you are suddenly located in the consciousness of an ego and seeing how it self-reflects, although there it is already the ego of a character, it is not that of oneself, but let's suppose my internal monologue is the thought of my soliloquy, or yours, let's also think about it in its most egoic form, As you tell him, that is, in an internal monologue about himself, since the internal soliloquy can be of the self with itself absorbed but not about itself and if it is not about itself but about what its feet feel while it walks there too. The self is dispersed or disseminated in experiences and in relationships with others, but let us suppose a solipsistic interior monologue, an egoic soliloquy, the most egoic, would be an internal monologue of consciousness whose content is self-representational, that is, a thought or feeling about who has been. one and about who one is, because if they are experiences we must distinguish between those solitary ones as they have been for the body and those that have involved others or that social environment, since we would have to imagine a social science written in that self of the first person singular but in the generic form of the interior monologue.
All social science thinkers who believe methodologically in the egoic or self perspective would then have to write our books in the first person singular within the genre of an interior monologue of consciousness that at its most egoic pole would also be an internal monologue. self-representational.
I mean, effectively, what I am trying to establish here is a matter of the relationship between the self and language that relativizes the fact that all the ways of treating the self in language can necessarily avoid that social interperience.
It is not about replacing the concrete empirical experience of participant observation and field work, with a participant observation that is not what one has practiced and experienced, nor about abandoning the scenes of experience that cities and urban groups, towns, coastal and mountain villages, popular urban markets and museums.
What do I do? On the one hand, I share with the reader the dilemmas that I myself find myself facing, that is, let's say, I am studying a certain phenomenon in culture, I situate myself and the reader in the suspended time in which I I find myself faced with the diatribe of taking one path or another, I express for the reader my thoughts about alternative possible ways to pursue a way of developing my research and cultural understanding, in a certain way it is as if I shared with the reader two temporalities in one, on the one hand the temporality of participant observation but not describing a world around me or representing my participation, but rather placing what my questions are at that moment of time and space, and what dilemmas I find myself facing, At the same time, I share the structure of the text suspended in the time in which I write, that is, the essay, its own sequential course I suspend in time and it courses as an essay to the same extent as the diatribe that makes it take a path and not another in the experience or experience at the same time that to the same extent that I make the reader participate that this time suspended from the text is cut according to and at the same time as the time suspended from the experience, from participant observation and from field work, I commit that participatory temporality to that of the written text and that of its reading by a third party, that is, I place them together as if the essay were the same writing at the same time as the process of experience, this is what Derrida calls “ A certain impossible possibility of saying the event”, it is as if social science writing were itself the event, the happening, to use this notion.
Of course, it is not literally a happening as this notion is understood in art when, for example, an entertainer announces the start of the play and immediately the theater lights turn on, focusing on the audience with point lights and the actors are sitting between them. the spectators and get up from their seats in the attitude that the play has concluded. It is not about that, but it is about the way in which it captures the relationship between the spatio-temporality of the experience and the spatio-temporality of the text, which in this case would be a play that has consisted of nothing other than entering and leaving their own limits.
Let's think for a moment about Jacobson's definition of the phatic dimension of language, what did Jacobson persuade us of with this? And in anthropology this would be my counterresponse to Dennis, logical of course, Jacobson persuaded us to think that in a dialogue we perceive the phatic dimension of language when the speakers pay attention to the channel and the dialogue turns to the channel itself, thematizing it, can you hear me? Is this or that other what you wanted to say? Do you prefer that I repeat it? I don't understand your sentence, could you tell me again?, we see that the phatic dimension is the happening of language, it is as if the perception we have of language was together with procedural time as a suspended time, as if it happened here and now always every time, from what As if we were living it in action, a noetic experience, that which flows and fades among other experiences, we notice that the dialogue has a channel, that channel is, on the one hand, its physical measurement, its tangibility, its contiguity, me Do you hear?, its perception between an axis of selections and an axis of combinations, is at the same time its aesthetics or its poetic dimension, and is at the same time its code, what makes it what it is, and understand it as such, yes You ask me what you are saying, you confirm that I am telling you something and not precisely what I am telling you, you make me draw attention to the saying more than to what is said, the fact that what we talk about is what it is over time, a space and a code, the event that it is with its temporality, its spatiality and identity, at the same time it is the metatextual dimension.
Well, I try as much as possible to unite the phatic temporality of participant observation with the phatic temporality of the essay, the chapters and the books, it is as if the fieldwork were a happening, something happening, although of course not It really is, although I could be doing field work and you ask me, what are you doing? , and I will respond to field work, noting its fate, but the interesting thing about this notion is that Jacobson extracted it from Malinowsky although in Malinowsky it had other meanings.
Jacobson's move here was to look for spatial contiguity and substitute it for description, but perhaps at some level the illusion of a world of things one after another that description tends to suggest, a world of distributionalities, perhaps in state. The basis of the imagination that led Jacobson to notice contiguity and grasp its link to fate is therefore about replacing representation with contiguity, about shortcutting in time the very logic of the relationship between space and symbolization.
Even at the ethical level, at times I not only place the reader before my own diatribes when I must choose between one path or another, but I also bring to the text the ethical dilemmas that are involved in the questions about how to know certain subjects, groups or cultures. .
My essay “The Indeterministic Truth” is the illustration of the latter, it places an urban seller of waste cans who collects them and focuses on the ethical dilemma before which I am faced with whether to tell him that I want to buy cans from him like others who approach him to buy them. , or on the contrary if I share that I want to know how a can collector in the city sees the world, “Performativity in research” in turn is the chapter where I almost illustrate the first thing I explained about how I put the reader before my own rants about the alternatives of a research.
In other words, I discuss what images of culture we would obtain if we took this or that other path that we would take if we chose these assumptions and not those others, or if we put these textual forms in relation with those others and not with such others, and vice versa, but everything in the same text, I display other possible alternatives and contrast the consequences, both alleging what the methodological questions would be if one path were taken and what if another were taken, and to the extent that I sort through possibilities I build, on the one hand, the theoretical development, logical and reflective of the chapter, on the other, at the same time I am superimposing, juxtaposing possibilities, among which possible images of a world and distinctions between its understanding and its exegesis are elucidated that, while apparently digressing into partial alternatives, ultimately offer and to those images that my essay proposes in the understanding of the culture or cultural phenomenon in question.
I can solve this literally, that is, by bringing to the text as a form of its development, both theoretical and rhetorical, the problems and questions themselves before which I am situated, or I solve it not in the way of a single chapter that illustrates the dilemma, but through how he logically articulates the relationship between the chapters and the whole.
On the other hand, I start from a metonymic conception of the relationship between part and whole, that is, I do not seek to give a total image of a whole contextually crystallized through data or observations, but rather I evoke a whole through fragments, these fragments Of course, they are not arbitrary or capricious, they are chosen for their relevance generally for the textual understanding of culture, that is, understanding culture through the relationship of its textual forms that ultimately destroy a vision. of that culture as a text, this generally involves a journey through pretexts, cotexts, architexts and intertextual relationships that can at times evolve towards logical/semiological figures, but also towards figures or forms of what I call the cut.
Without a doubt you were very accurate and sharp in “Rumbos” when you spoke in me of performativity to move between different forms of the subject, I think that your appreciation was accurate and visionary and in a certain way it captures well the appropriate way for a response that is as complete as possible to this new question you asked me. I would tell you that I solve the matter performatively.
Let us ask ourselves how the object of what we can literally understand precisely as cultural anthropology is formed. The very notion of cutting, phenomenologically understood, warns us that unlike sociology, which has its object in the social and in treating everything as things, , anthropology must work with cuts, the idea of cuts refers to scissors, that is, we are cutting, when cutting we remove something from a place that has been cut, but at the same time we leave a void where we remove something and that void also forms a trimming, we trim by removing and putting, extracting and superimposing.
That scissors of course does not follow forms that things already have, it develops cuts of cultural anthropology over a culture understood through its texts, since I maintain that in cultural anthropology the object is defined through cuts, not as an object predestined there. outside as in sociology or inside as in psychology, at the same time, I do not work only with cuttings of cultural anthropology, as I say in my compendium “The couples of epistemology: practicing sociology, composing anthropology”, sociology is the practice , participant observation is and must be sociological in the highly disciplinary sense of sociology, never ethnographic, therefore, sociology works at the level of the prelinguistic world, which involves experience, experience, life world, intramundane horizon, symbolic interactions , relationships between the self and the heritage, situations, cultural anthropology, on the contrary, works at the level of exegesis of the texts of culture, treating the non-textual as a text, textualizing and constructing the text through cuts, with it I work at the compositional level.
Ethnography is then the loop of the self, the moment of that literature that returns to the dimension of the self, drawing conclusions from the relationship between oneself and culture, the relationships between isotopies and exotopies proper to the distinctions between genotexts and phenotexts, as well as between the endogenous and the exogenous, and between the emic and the etic.
In my books and works, she is the one that deals with interculturality, dialogue between cultures, intercultural, interculturalized and transcultural learning. Ethnography for me is that part of social science that deals with oneself, in this I share I have proposed what I call self/ethnography, even compromising biography and autobiography. Some have spoken of autoethnography.
I speak of self ethnography not of autoethnography since an autoenthography could be understood as the self-representation that a culture makes of itself from the point of view of its ethnicity, what some have called native ethnographies. It's not about that, when I talk about self ethnography, I'm talking about an intercultural and transcultural ethnography that deals with the transformations of one's culture as a sociologist and anthropologist in the culture that range from experience to diaspora and even diaspora. as a methodology. That is, we talk about ethnography as multiethnic and multicultural learning. For me, ethnography is the social science that deals with living between cultures, communication and intercultural learning. So if you now turn the dial to my books from recent years you will clearly see in what sense many of them are also ethnographic, “Semantic Elucidation”, “Rethinking Intertextuality”, “Rethinking Urban Anthropology”, they are the most ethnographic by At the moment, there is also my book about Quetzil “Anthropology of archaeology”, which I don't know if you have read.
But there will be others that are even more ethnographic. There is a lot of material from my ethnographic research still pending to be written and turned into books.
I reserve ethnography for this in my system and I then define research on religion within my sociology of common sense and religious studies. Ethnography is not concerned with others but with ourselves.
And if this is certainly seen from a Tylerian perspective as a crucial issue not only from “Writing Culture” but from before in “The Anthropologist as Author” by Geertz where we understand anthropology in its relationship with rhetoric, from that book Geertz already asked whether the evocation initiated by Stephen would not perhaps be a way out of the diatribes discussed.
I maintain that yes, evocation is the way.
Although for me the theory of the text in methodology does not refer to ethnographic writing but to the exegesis of live culture, to the ways of reading culture, I do take into consideration this awareness of the anthropological text in writing and it is initiated by “Writing Culture”.
Although on the other hand one of the ideals towards which what was started from “Writing Culture” coincides and leads to ways of sharing anthropology, for example with the natives doing them with two hands or four hands, this is something, as you know very Similar to what I did in Havana, the research on skateboarders, for example, was mine at a superordinate level as director of the project from the theory and methodology classroom, but it was Monica's, who was herself a skateboarder who was in her own right. time a student in my workshop, while she, in turn as a participant observer, did research on urban skateboarders who in turn made an exhibition of skateboarders for their project that was in turn theirs and Monica's as their work in the workshop, who also shared it with Fowler, and in a similar way was my research work and its results that I shared with punks and rockers, even creating works between me and three geeky geeks.
Your work with the rockers Alberto is also an example of this shared modality of social sciences, in your case involving more theatricality or theater.
The obvious difference between us as a new generation of postmodern anthropologists and that tradition is that “Writing Culture” proclaimed it mostly with people from cultures other than the anthropologist's culture, while I have done it – and so have you – with people from my own background. own Western urban and metropolitan culture, either in modalities of anthropology on cultures to which I emigrated and of which I became an exponent, Venezuela, the United States, or in Cuba where I did them with people of the same culture of origin.
That is the difference, “Writing Culture” to a large extent uses these collaborations with two or four hands to manage the otherization of the represented cultures considered different from the culture of the anthropologist, depositing in these forced otherizations as you rightly say, and I am right. with you in it, the possibility of reinventing anthropology, I radically distance myself from it, not because I am for or against it, simply because it does not interest me, it does not motivate me and it seems outdated to me, I did it in another way although It has been a long time since I ventured into that modality, the last work that still had something of that meaning was “The Market from Here”, my anthropological museum of popular urban markets that I exhibited at Rice University resulting from my research as a curator at the Museum of Visual arts Alejandro Otero on the theme museum/markets
I have tried to adjust to your wish, when you told me, “Could you develop Abdel, a little, all of it.”
A bit
OK. But I do believe that your question, sharp and beautiful, but complex, also contains a criticism that is subtly objectionable to certain aspects. Agree that I should work more on it in the future. That not everything that could be has been worked on.
I will take your critical observation into account, I need to reflect on it in time and find more ways and means.
"PLEXUS OF INTERSTITIALITY"
Question seven (7)
Alberto Mendez Suarez
Abdel, I would like us to also specify beyond the theoretical details developed in the retheorization of the concept addressed in your last response, an important aspect that analyzing in your biography ----I am referring to many autobiographical texts of your authorship---- appears again and again reiterated here and there and is very recurrent both in many of your interviews and, for example, in your videoconferences on the visual platform Youtube, on anthropology, sociology and phenomenology, the direct relationship that guard your work with your own intellectual trajectory from the context of a Marxist society in which you grew up in Cuba and where you took your first steps in your intellectual formation as an art student and, later, as an art ethnography researcher, until the neoliberal stage in the mid-90's after having left Cuba, and fully immersed himself in the midst of neoliberal capitalism, first in Venezuela as an art critic, theorist, sociologist and cultural anthropologist and later as an immigrant and later established as a resident in Houston, Texas, United States, also as a cultural anthropologist, as a sociologist and as a phenomenologist, associated with the Department of Anthropology at Rice University as a complementary research associate. It is not my purpose to reduce this conversation -------focused on your work and centered on your abstract thinking where on occasions when it becomes evident, also focused, why not? in its autoethnographic character in what you have called a semiological sociology ------ to reflect on the relationship between Marxism and emigration with respect to your self-conscious condition as an emigrant and the relationships that this condition has with phenomena inherent to specific axiological considerations within the field of anthropological, sociological, ethnomethodological and phenomenological research. The influence of emblematic references of philosophical and sociological thought such as Alfred Schütz or Jacques Derrida are recurring constants in your speech and in your theoretical and methodological research. But above all the influence of James Clifford at the forefront of postmodern anthropology, the weight that his work gives to the phenomena typical of the travel diaries of explorers and first anthropologists. I think of his essays on Joseph Conrad or Malinowski in "Transcultural Itineraries" and his theory of museums as contact zones. Or as you point out -----and you do very well in mentioning it and bringing it purposefully into our conversation----- that scheme that James Clifford reinterprets from Greimas's actantial model with which he defines what he has called in "Dilemmas of culture" the art and culture system taking as an example the encounter between the tribal and the modern in the exhibition of "Primitivism at the MoMa" on the relationship between tribal artifacts from other cultures and avant-garde works of art modern 20th century a work about which you make reference in your latest book "The enigmas of the ground".
I would like, please, if you don't mind, if you would help me go deeper into it to illustrate to our readers in that direction and the deep relationship that these iconic references have with decisive elements in your personal life and your condition --- --if you allow me the term----- of a nomadic intellectual and an emigrant, as a writer of nearly fifteen unpublished authorial books around your theoretical research on cultural anthropology, ethnomethodology, semiotics and phenomenological sociology carried out in Venezuela and in the United States and residing again now in Caracas, Venezuela. How do you position yourself in the face of this hybrid condition of immigrant intellectual in the midst of this crossroads of cultures that is very reminiscent of Todorov's essential text on the crossroads of cultures that is part of a chapter found in his book The Morals of History ? That is to say, how do you live, from your position as an intellectual, as an anthropologist, the very concept of "hybridization" as it has been brought to anthropology by Peter Burke or by García Canclini? At the same time, following in this reflection that Todorov from "The Crossing of Cultures" that you surely remember because in Cuba it was Desiderio Navarro who made him known through the magazine "Criterios", I invite you to reflect a little and respond in a certain way. In what way can it be said that as part of a generation that had to be formed in a Marxist society, not only did you distance yourself personally and intellectually from dogmatic Marxism, except for the influence that the theorists of the Frankfurt School such as Adorno, Benjamin and very fundamentally and first of all Habermas continued to be an obligatory reference in your writings and conferences until not long ago, a Marxism in whose environment you were formed as an intellectual in your youth and how much the experiences lived as an intellectual helped in that distancing immigrant gone through the processes of "hybridization" and "nomadism"? How much did this decide your choice for the profession of anthropologist twenty years ago?
Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Thanks Alberto, again.
I began to become sensitive to a theoretical and intellectual self-reflection on the migratory condition as a result of two simultaneous processes, the process of permeating and assimilating to my new cultures, on the one hand, and the process of becoming aware that the native always extrinsizes you. whether you want it or not. And I would add one more ingredient, or a third. The awareness that your culture of origin stops perceiving you as endogenous.
On the one hand, I felt in my feelings and in my values, in my ethos and in my commitment, part of the cultures to which I had emigrated, their problems crossed me becoming mine and thinking about them became ethically, intellectually and spiritually for me. me the same as for the Texans in Texas, and before that the Venezuelans in Venezuela, therefore I felt not only an exponent of those cultures and their socioculturalities, both from the academy, and in the cultural field in general, in which I wrote and thought, in what I theorized or resulted from my life experience, but also as a person in my life, I had completely assimilated to those cultures with which I had permeated and had been permeated by them, or, at the same time, I had completely incorporated into them, however, that feeling, that ethic, in a certain way presupposed, without me realizing it at the beginning, such a level of universality that it excluded or overlooked how the native sees the migrant, that is, how the native native of those cultures perceives you.
Certainly the more cosmopolitan a culture or society is, the faster the assimilation process is. If you arrive from the countryside to Caracas, the Caracasian doesn't care where you come from, you assimilate and he assimilates you quickly, in the same way, you are assimilated faster to Texas, and even to New York or California, or in Havana, it doesn't matter if you are from Santiago or Holguín, you see in Cuban culture, countless intellectuals assimilated as capital residents are from Camagüey, from Holguín, Manzanillo, Santiago, etc.
But despite this, when it is no longer just about an experiential process or feelings, when it is no longer just about how you feel part of a community, but it is also about how what you write is seen or considered. by the natives of that culture to which you assimilate, things get more complicated, I have no less than 100 essays written about Venezuelan art and three books that collect those essays, you wonder why if you have written for a long time from a dynamic sociocultural of which You are an exponent, why does the native continue to extrinsic you? That is, he sees you as from another origin.
The same thing happens in Cuba.
I remember Argentines, for example, who studied in Cuba from the age of thirteen to the age of twenty, who participated as active protagonists in important dynamics of Cuban visual culture, some as critics and others as visual artists, they were never included in the history of Cuban art, They are excluded in all the compendiums and in all the anthologies, Argentines entered and Argentines left, Cuban culture never incorporated them. So the feelings, the ethos, the community values, integrating, adapting, being assimilated, participating, are not enough nor do they resolve the dilemma. The native culture, ethnocentrically, will always consider you something other than the native.
But at the same time, ethnocentrism is a complete fallacy, if an intellectual, writer, theorist, artist or person of any profession, let's say, originally from a small, intricate and provincial town in Venezuela, lives thirty, twenty, ten years.nyou in Caracas, and then return to your little town, the little town will never consider you from there, if you look for work in the little town, your resume will reflect thirty, twenty or tennThe things done in Caracas, ipsofacto, do not give him work, if he works among groups expressing himself they will always see him as a stranger who is no longer from there.
If you, who have been in Florida now for decades, return to Havana assuming that that is your ethnic culture, where you belong, what you are in essence, that culture, if you returned to it, will never and will never accept you back as belonging to it. it, even completely outside of ideological parameters, due to the mere strangeness that you bring with you a relationship with values and things lived and done in other metropolitan dynamics.
But now let's see it from the point of view of the culture to which you have emigrated, in which you have been permeated, to which you have assimilated and of which you have become an exponent, also in that sense ethnocentrism is a complete and absolute fallacy. . On the one hand, it is false that the native, although he maintains a sense towards you that your origin is another, can dispense with the endogenous, emic, isotopic place, which both at the semantic level of the senses and at the level of the formation processes of cultural values, you mean it from the very vitality of the culture in which you both find yourself, if your processes of idiosyncrasy or cultural identity mean a loss or crisis due to the persistence and homogenizing incidence of the process modernizing, market and technological, the cultural values that you are contributing within the same community contribute to its progressive transculturation, the process of multiethnic coexistence of multiculturalized globalization, implies multiethnic learning resulting from intercultural coexistence and communication that has consequences in the receiving, welcoming, or host culture while in that culture new processes of sensitivity and cultural identity are taking shape.
But, although ethnocentrism is an absolute fallacy, and a hypocrisy, since the universal over the particular is obviously not possible, without cultural relativism that elevates the human right where more languages and more values of cultural traditions of varied origins are in relationship beyond its limits or its edges, it is true that it continues to be a moment at the pole of culture that will always have its origin and its nativity, therefore, having a sense that you as an intellectual, theorist, writer, author, of which You, even as a person, as a friend, as a member of a community, and as its exponent, continue for the native to represent something nomadic, something diasporic. It is also having an awareness that these different axes make up the specificity of the way in which you are contributing to that community. culture and from it, as much as towards your culture of origin.
To have a sense that there is a literature of the diaspora is to be sensitive to this inevitable fact, one can of course simply keep quiet about it, not talk about it, but that would be complete hypocrisy, honesty, purity, ethics, and the important thing My consideration of the issues introduced by James Clifford into postmodern anthropology in this sense is that he situates the need for this field as a verbalized field, as a literature.
Now, James Clifford's concept of the system of art and culture is broader and much richer than the narrowest scope of a literature conscious of the problem of diasporization and nomadism, since it refers to the system of art and culture in all his expression. What seems to me most important about this table and concept initiated by James, is that it places the place of anthropology, to remember this expression of Claude Levis Strauss when he asked about anthropology from the point of view of what its place was. among the social sciences, is that James places the place of anthropology in the system of art and culture, this expands, extends, multiplies, widens, pluralizes, enriches the field of anthropology and its contemporary scope, loosening it from its old coordinates.
But I have never treated all of this that I have told you in this way in my authorial books, with the exception of my co-authored book with you “Rumbos: Explorations in cultural anthropology” which does address it head-on, I have been dealing with the matter in several ways. forms, of course making it part of the anthropological and ethnographic methodology, I work on it, for example, in my book on Quetzil Eugenio “Anthropology of Archaeology” in a very peculiar way there, I work on it in other different ways in my books “The Semantic Elucidation”, “Rethinking intertextuality” and “Rethinking urban anthropology”
Meanwhile, for example in my books about media I exclude it as a theme, in the same way I exclude it as a theme in my books “Self and Heritage”, “Thinking science”, “The correlation of the world”, “The intramundane horizon”, as well as in the most recent “The Enigmas of the ground” and “The metonymies of the museum”.
I mean, the books in which I have dealt with this topic are only five so far, as I told you “Semantic Elucidation”, “Rethinking intertextuality”, “Rethinking urban anthropology”, “Anthropology of archeology” and in a book titled “The Couples of Epistemology” which includes a chapter on the diaspora, as well as others on cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and the relationship between metropolises and provinces.
If you go to this last book, you will see there that I include in the bibliography the essay by James Malcon, Diaspora as an ethnographic method: decolonial reflections on researching urban multicultural in outer east London, school of media, film and music, university of Sussex which discusses Diaspora as an ethnographic method in which I completely agree, I also include references to Anthias Floya, evaluating diaspora: beyond ethnicity, sociology, August 1998 v32 n 3 p 55724, british sociological association, publication ltd, Clifford James, Diasporas, center for cultural studies, university of California, santacruz, Cultural anthropology, 9 -- 32-33, 1994, American anthropological association, Clifford James, Traveling Cultures, cultural studies edited and with an introduction by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A Trichler, with Dayal Samir, Diaspora and double consciousness, Bentley college, the journal of the mid west modern language association, , vol 29, no 1, spring 1996, , pp 46-62, Tsagarousianou Roza Rethinking the concept of diaspora: mobility, connectivity and communication in a globalized world, communication and media research institute, university of Westminster, Westminster papers in communication and culture, 2oo4, university of Westminster, London, vol 1-1, 52-65, Toninato Paola, Translocations: migration and social change, an interdisciplinary open access e-journal, issn number 2oo9-o42o, department of Italian, university of waewick, authors all who in different ways have aligned themselves and have decided like me to contribute developments within this perspective pioneered by James Clifford in the field.
I was talking to the girlfriend of a friend of mine who lives in Florida about it, by the way, we share ournI was a teenager as friends during studies in the same group. I emigrated before him but he lived half of his life in Valencia, Spain and the other in Florida. She asked me how the immigration process was experienced in the United States and Venezuela. , since she was then thinking of emigrating with her partner to the United States. And I asked him where you are from originally, from Santa Clara, he told me, how many years have you lived in Havana?, 10 tonShe told me, and she was 40, that is, she had lived in Havana for 10 years and she felt like she was from Havana and she did not feel excluded by the people of Havana who saw her as integrated into the Havana culture, however, she had lived 30 years of her life in Santa Clara, I asked her what was your process of assimilating to Havana?, and she explained to me. And I told him, that was your first migration. You're just going to live it again. What happens in Caracas and the United States is exactly the same from the point of view of subjectivity and cultural identity.
I was also talking to a young man from Holguín that I met during a trip of mine to Holguín when I was 19.nos and he was then 16, and that I met him in Havana after 20 years of living in Havana and me three decades living in Texas and Caracas before that. What would happen, how would they see you in Holguín if you returned, like a crazy person, he answered me. There you have the two examples, the process of assimilation not without its extrinsication by the native, and the process of exogenization in the culture of origin.
But there are other ways in which I have treated this topic that are not strictly authorial books. The first time I dealt with the subject was through an experimental book that I thought of writing in Venezuela in 1994, to which I invited Félix Suazo and Eric Splinter to participate as co-authors. You know Félix, a Cuban curator and critic who lived for many years in Caracas and a few years agonEric Sprinter, a Cuban journalist who has lived between Canada and Caracas for decades, moved to Florida.
Then I returned to focus on the topic in my dialogues with Surpik Angelini, we dedicated long developments recorded for the tape recorder to this topic, as it was crucial both in our friendship and in our relationship as colleagues and what we did together. His exhibition “Pyche ethnography report” was entirely dedicated to the topic, and in editions we did together such as “Thresholds of Art and Anthropology,” and “An Expedition to the Threshold,” both in Houston, I spoke extensively about it, as well as in essays on your sample.
I then dealt extensively with the topic in a workshop with the American artist of Cuban parents and Puerto Rican descent María Cristina Jadick in Houston, a six-month workshop that resulted in three exhibitions of her “Cultural Bodies” at the Sicardy Sanders Gallery where the text of a catalog focused on the subject was mine, “El Sonido del Silencio”, in Texas Art Suply, as well as in “Conexiones y disconnectiones” an exhibition of his at Fotofest, Photography Biennial of Houston, and in my essays about his work.
Then I returned to the topic in a conference I gave at the Institute of Hispanic Culture in Houston, “Living between cultures,” which was so liked and interested by the participants, mostly Hispanic immigrants, that it was later organized as a one-year seminar of mine.nor coordinated by Diana Gland, Argentine psychoanalyst.
Both with Surpik and in this one-to-one seminarnor I dealt extensively with my concept of self ethnography.
I believe that awareness of this issue has been important in my profession as an anthropologist. The percentage and in what ways I do it, I think, is a matter of considering each one of my books, since each time I offer alternatives and different or specific ways for each book regarding it.
In fact, as I told you regarding another of your questions, for me anthropology must itself be transcultural and when I speak of self ethnography, I do nothing other than situate the field that is specific to anthropology, and especially to Ethnography refers to this dimension of the self, to how we solve the inevitably intercultural dimensions involved in moving, but above all in moving our works, between some audiences and others, between some cultures and others and in the consequences that this has for the relationships between the self and the heritage, considered this relationship in its two forms, inside and outside of language, that is, as experience in one sense, as field work in another sense, and as writing and cultural representation in other senses. , in how we write and compose.
As I say in “The Couples of Epistemology”, practicing sociology but composing anthropology.
I could tell you that it is even a topic that has defined my dialogues with the theaterologist, theater theorist and performing artist Johannes Birringer of German origin, who in himself has lived an experience similar to mine as an emigrant, also a complementary associate researcher in the department of anthropology. from Rice University.
We have talked at length about the importance of Habermas for me, as well as about Adorno.
More and more my solutions are dialectizing in a neo-Hegelian sense that requires considering Adorno, in another sense Habermas has been crucial for me. Now you somehow relate all this in your question to Marxism.
In an issue I did as guest editor of artlies magazine in 2000 that I shared with John Bryan, Sussie Kalil, and Surpik Angelini, I wrote about a Luis Camnitzer show focused on this topic, a show of his at Blue Star Contemporary Art Center in San Antonio, Texas. Camnitzer is a Marxist. And to that edition I invited several Marxists such as Mari Carmen Ramírez and Gerardo Mosquera so that you see how I continue my friendship and my dialogue with Marxism.
Desiderio Navarro, on the other hand, who did the most to raise awareness of these things in Cuba through his magazine and his cultural center Criterios, was not only a great friend of mine, but we also shared together important theoretical and intellectual forays in the decade. We were both protagonists. main in different ways, each one from the specificities of their individuality, but committed to the same sociocultural scene and responding to the same problems, of the Cuban intellectual avant-garde of the eighties and its visual movement, we were together in panels, we gave conferences together. Like the same and in another way Gerardo Mosquera who by the way wrote a prologue for my first book “Borders and Overflows of Art”, which I do not have, but I remember very well, titled “A Theory in pursuit of the flood” from 1992 as well. like Desiderio, a Marxist.
Desiderio, as you know, was the first to introduce semiotics, Gerardo was the first to introduce cultural studies into art criticism. But they lived their entire lives in Cuba, they never emigrated from their cultures of origin, they always saw other cultures as something to which they go for a short time and return to the culture of origin. They did not live the migratory experience, which is why the issue is neither decisive nor contingent to them. My experience is in that sense diametrically different from both of them. In my art criticism books, for example, you can also see that difference.
INTERVIEW WITH ABDEL HERNÁNDEZ
SECTION II
DEL ART ETHNOGRAPHY AL SELF-ETHNOGRAPHY
SECOND CONVERSATION
First question (1)
With this question I want to start Abdel ---if you allow me--- a second block of questions leading to our second conversation. That said, let's move on to the first question of this second block.
Starting in 1991 when you left Cuba for Venezuela as a curator ------together with the Cuban artist Feliz Suazo and a group of plastic artists of your generation----- at the head of "Born in Cuba", that traveling exhibition of visual artists of the Cuban avant-garde of the 80's, on that trip you began a long journey within the field of contemporary art as a critic, curator and specialist in museology and as a cultural theorist -----in the sense that Bourdieu gives to theory of the very familiar cultural field and present in your work at the beginning of your professional career----- and living a progressively transformative experience as a critic and art theorist that would make you move through art on the way to ethnography and cultural anthropology following theoretical and practical routes previously outlined by the great representatives of anthropology of the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century from Taylor, Morgan and Frazer to Franz Boas, Radcliffe-Brown, Ruth Benedict, Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford and the most recent young anthropologists from the different most up-to-date and most contemporary theoretical currents with the current of "Writing Culture" integrated by Stephen A. Tyler, George E. Marcus and others from, until more recently, Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda, Surpik Angelini and you himself crowning ----in a very peculiar way---- that story.
I already know that you do not represent exactly all currents or any of them in particular, but rather your own way of assuming this discipline in a very own and singular way, I would say idiosyncratic, which you have defined as "Self Ethnography." "or autoethnography inspired after a thorough and in-depth study not only of the history of anthropology as a science but, rather, of a significant understanding of phenomenological sociology and hermeneutics adapted and applied comprehensively to anthropology as such as a discipline in a certain sense ------if you allow the term------ "transdisciplinary" in a similar perception that Gregory Bateson gave to the notion of "transdisciplinarity". However, your own very unique -- shall we say -- idiosyncratic understanding of anthropology placed you at the forefront of the postmodern school of anthropology and especially as part of the "Writing Culture" trend in the that you earned the prominent place that you currently hold as a deserved member of this contemporary movement during the period that you worked in "Art Ethnography" as an associate researcher in the anthropology department at Rice University from 1997 to 2004. I would like you to go into more detail about what this transition to that school was like, especially how you learned about this current of "Writing Culture", how you came to them, what your relationship was like with Stephen Tyler, one of the most important representatives. emblematic of this trend and what relationship did this entire transformative process experienced by you in the transition from art critic to cultural anthropologist, from cultural theorist to ethnomethodologist, from "maker" to "self ethnographer" and what role did it play in all of this? experience an exhibition curated by you in Houston, Texas, titled "Artists in Trance." What was your place within "Writing Culture"?
Good morning Alberto, thank you again,
I think that at some point, in our compendium “Rumbos: Explorations in cultural anthropology”, I told you about my theory of the self. I don't know if this would be the occasion to recapitulate and expand on it but you asked me a question that focuses on it. I consider that the main contribution and development that I have made in this sense is that I situate my theory of the self from what we could call "the inner world" or the "internal world", the inside, let's say, of subjectivity, and development then its understanding by undertaking the phenomenology of that self seen from that interiority of the inner world, this notably distinguishes and differentiates my theory of the self from that developed by George Herbert Mead who was clearly characterized by a social determinism about the self, to see how it is is formed by society, although Mead's theory is a precedent in whose tradition mine is found, I have taken the theory of the self much further, and have done in a certain way the reverse, discussing and developing how the social world It is configured from the self or more precisely, because beyond this autopoietic understanding that focused my first book where I literally maintained that we configure the social world from our self, in my later developments I was more concerned with reading, interpreting, understanding culture from the interior of the self, as if that, culture, did not find a more privileged place and a more precise cut to what we can consider properly cultural, than when we see it from the phenomenology of the self understood in this way, since it is from there that we acquire a sense of The intrinsic relationship between the self and the heritage, which in my theory becomes one of the three aspects of the self, the specifically cultural one, where culture or the cultural are located, is the relationship between the self, the experience and the heritage.
Understanding the self in its relationship with the heritage, defining this pair and deepening this relationship in its ontological mutuality, is the main specificity of my theory of the self, its mutual conformation and permeability, on the one hand through the experience/acquis relationship, that makes culture or the cultural, on the other hand, through the processes of internalization and socialization, which define the micro relationship of the self and the social, thus making the social from the internalizations of the self and permeating the self with This, but why is the social done with the self? It is not a mere functional relationship, the process of internalization of the social is a symbolic process and internalizing symbolization, as such it is intrinsically related to the meaning-giving activity, it is Well, a hermeneutic process, which then returns in socialization with the symbolic forms resulting from that introspection, and that is why it configures the social, that is, it is not merely a participation functionally understood as the action of a actor who socializes and as such inside, what is returned to the social in the mode of socialization of a symbolized internalization is already or presupposes a hermeneutical process, it is in fact, something ontologically hermeneutical, and here we have two things, the first, the attention of that hermeneutic process as it takes shape within that phenomenologized self, that is, understood phenomenologically, here come my theories and developments on the character preinterpreted of experience and the world, one of the chapters of my book “The Enigmas of the Ground”, where between the noetic experiences, which flows and fades here and now, and the noematic, which memorizes, selects, chooses, makes relevant , highlights, assigns meaning, elucidates, reflects, a whole process of implicit threads is established in the meaning-giving activity, in making sense, which then coordinates the entire course and the pragmatic course of the experience, which I define as ontologically preinterpretive.
And finally our self-perception from the self, which although it occupies like the phenomenology of consciousness or the spirit of Hegel or more precisely what Derrida calls "the idealized ground of our interiority", an internal place as internal is the consciousness to which subjectivity but it differs from that since by perceiving ourselves from the self and according to itself, we perceive ourselves as becoming, in the autopoiesis resulting from this process of mutual permeability and identity, my theory of the self is therefore a phenomenology of this relationship which is also developed at the same time as a hermeneutic, my essays “The self and the heritage”, “The self and the symbolic”, and “The preinterpreted character of experience and the world” would be the references here.
This phenomenology of the self is a cultural theory, but it nevertheless has two ramifications, one conceives the self as an abstracted “ideal type”, that is, it proceeds through the relationship between the particular and the general, the singular and the plural. , speaking of a universalized self as if we were speaking of a single individual but since this self thus understood and cut down is then in turn abstracted outside of a concrete individual, it can be any self and as such the principle of an individualized monad remains as the budget cut the singular one but abstract, and becomes an “ideal type” of general cultural theory; on the other hand, its empirical dimension literalized in cases can only be applied, at least as I have been able to develop it so far through specific cases of individual experiences. That is why I told you that where I have been able to empirically develop the dimensions of what I have called self-ethnography with more depth and efficiency is specifically around concrete experiences, mostly involving individuals or starting from them.
The first time I conceived and used this concept was during an experimental art and anthropology workshop that I directed in Caracas in 1996 aimed at the production of seven exhibitions of which I curated and later presented as a guest professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rice and the Houston Transart Foundation in 1997 at Rice University, an experience you refer to in your question, more specifically I used it to refer to what I found and I found myself theorizing and semiologically analyzing the process in the workshop of Surpik Angelini, who in addition to being my co-curator of the seven exhibitions focused on the theme of the relationship between art and anthropology, also presented an exhibition, during the preparation of this exhibition the theme or The issue focused on was Surpik's own autobiographical experience considered as a process of cultural formation of her subjectivity as a Venezuelan, daughter of an Armenian father, Armenian grandparents, American mother, born in Venezuela, emigrated to Houston, Texas, married there to an Italian with whom she had two children, Surpik's cultural formation was the subject of her own exhibition, here the notion of self/ethnography referred to an intrinsic relationship between the phenomenological consideration of that subjectivity seen from his culturally speaking self and the hermeneutics of language modes that semiotically theorized put in relation the analysis of installation language, that cultural analysis workshop and the way in which it was staged for the collections of the viewer, the exhibition was called “Ethnographic Reports of pyche” and established a relationship between his narratives of autobiographical experience, the theme of modesty, nudity, eros, the pyche in ancient Greek culture, its more or less contemporary prevalence in a Jungian sense in women today, their travels and their relationship with both their Armenian, Venezuelan and Texan heritage.
The second time I conceived and developed my concept of self ethnography was during a six-month workshop with the Cuban-American artist, American, born in the United States of Puerto Rican and Cuban parents, María Cristina Jadick, in a similar way. With Surpik here it was about three of his exhibitions, the first titled “Cultural Bodies” for which I wrote the catalog essay, the second “Sound Silences” and the third, “Connections/disconnections” respectively presented at Sicardi Sanders Gallery, Texas Art Suply and Foley Fotofet.
Here we deal with and focus on the issue of bilingualism and its cultural heritage in relation to its self, relating for cultural analysis semiotically objectified language phenomena around materials, signs, objects, choices, modes of realization, related and interpreted. In its link with narratives of autobiographical experience, through the first exhibition we analyze weaving and embroidery in its family tradition, its relationship with memory and the consideration of that memory among the heritage of its heritage, the heritage accumulated in his self from the culture in which he was born and educated, the United States, the Anglo-Saxon world, bilingualism, the Hispanicism of his home. The Second focused on the relevance and importance of the sea and the coasts in Texan subjectivity, usually neglected, but relevant, as well as on the connections of the sea experienced from that subjectivity with the sea of its cultural heritage. The third sought the relationships of all this with its metropolitan or city heritage.
The third time I worked with this concept was as a result of a lecture I gave at the Institute of Hispanic Culture in Houston in 1998 titled “Living Between Cultures,” and more specifically in a year-long seminar of the same title that I developed as a result of that conference for Hispanic immigrants in Houston, Mexican/Americans and Argentine/Americans, this seminar was developed coordinated by the Argentine psychoanalyst Diana Gland, and it dealt head-on with the self-narratives of experience in the relationship between the self and the heritage of each participant as forms of cultural analysis that I called self/ethnography, as with Surpik and Cristina.
Finally, at this moment I find myself developing a cultural analysis project of the same type that I define as self/ethnography. This time it is in Caracas, where I have been living since March 2024, with my partner and life partner, the Venezuelan museologist, researcher and curator Victoria Galarraga, (Vicky). This project is between three, that is, me, Carmen Michelena, an artist born in Spain and established in Venezuela since she was a child, and the Italian archaeologist Alessandro Morganti, born in Italy, nationalized French via a French mother, who has lived since he was a child in Venezuela.
This Italian archaeologist developed a thesis in the nineties, a book on prehistoric archeology doing field work and excavations in Paraná, in Monte Cano, Venezuela, an archeology of lithic remains focused on the hunters and gatherers of the area in the Neolithic period.
Alex is an archaeologist with an Arthuserian orientation, and Carmen is, in addition to being a visual artist, also a historian in the line of everyday life as she defines herself.
With both Carmen and Alex, I am currently working on a cultural analysis project within this line of self/ethnography where again our topic of attention is none other than migratory subjectivity, the imaginary of the emigrant, we are developing this around a sample project that Carmen prepares focused on her autobiographical experience narratives conceived from a perspective of what I call the relationship between the self and the heritage.
To date, these have been the experiences that I have developed under this concept.
I do not consider that my authorial books are specifically self/ethnography; on the contrary, they are books on the sociology of culture and cultural anthropology, although of course I take this into account or consideration in some percent because ultimately I am myself among cultures, but I do not thematize myself in them based on my narratives of experience, rather it is implicit but not brought to the foreground.
However, it is true, as you have recently maintained that you see a relationship between these specific experiences that I just mentioned and the projects that I developed in Cuba in social sciences and art, it is true that those experiences were forms of self-sociology and self-anthropology, and it is seen or considered from that perspective that these are experiences that essentially respond to the same logical structure, I share your perception in this sense because although I did not see an immediate relationship because I developed the latter around to cultural subjectivity diaspora of the emigrant, my own and that of my participating colleagues and friends, while those developed in Cuba were not, it is also true that there is a logical relationship that is the same, especially in an experience that I developed at the end of the project “Doing” that focused on individualized narratives of participant observers' experiences about themselves where we discussed how immersive participant observation studies on urban social groups were in turn self-studies of cultural analysis.
Now, you ask me in particular, you put your emphasis on the project of the seven exhibitions that I curated and exhibited at Rice University in 1997, and you ask me what relationship that experience has with this explained above, on the one hand, and with “Writing Culture ", on the other hand.
Of the seven exhibitions, I only approached Surpik's as a self/ethnography workshop, but not the remaining six, plus the seven did focus from different perspectives on the relationship between art and anthropology.
Well obviously here in these seven exhibitions the relationship with “Writing Culture”, if we consider with high precision the essays that were included in the book called “Writing Culture” published by James Clifford and George Marcus in Berkeley we will see that no essay refers to experiences of an individuality's self and its cultural heritage, or of the relationship between that self and that person's cultural heritage as a form or means for theorizing and understanding culture, there was no attention in “Writing Culture” to the heir sociology of the legacy of George Herbert Mead nor to the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, as if there is in an accentuated way in me, but in that curatorship that I conceived, however, although there is no essay in “Writing Culture” focused on the perspective of the individual person, if we can say that my project of seven exhibitions presupposed such a novel, original and innovative rethinking of the concepts of anthropology and ethnography, of how we understand these concepts and notions, that the only tradition In anthropology as a discipline that has been making the self-critical revisions of both concepts that this presupposes and requires is the tradition of “Writing Culture” and more specifically within this tradition two individualities, Stephen A Tyler and James Clifford.
Both, not only in “Writing Culture” but in their books and essays as anthropologists, begin the development of a revisionist self-criticism of the foundations of the concepts of anthropology. If you want, it is essential in the discipline to have rethought in order to understand then from what parameters They have been self-critically reconceptualizing the very concepts of ethnography and anthropology as we consider them in the exhibitions you refer to, and especially in Stephen with an ethical sense, this curatorial project and the exhibitions that I presented with the same, presuppose in anthropology a self-criticism without which the innovation and originality towards which I led anthropology and ethnography in this project would not have been possible.
The concepts of anthropology and ethnography that are necessary to understand to understand what I conceptualized, conceived and did with those seven expositions only find reference precedents in anthropology in Stephen and James Clifford.
We have already talked about it before, the way in which James Clifford places anthropology in the system of art and culture, and from the point of view of a review of the concepts of anthropology and ethnography, the way in which Stephen A Tyler retheorizes them in essays such as “Postmodern Ethnography” and “The description of writing as a speaking for”.
This is in regards to my perspective from anthropology with those seven samples.
Then from the perspective of art, the benefit of this approach is clear, it has allowed me to develop in art criticism what I have called semiotics of art and cultural anthropology, the conjunction between both things in a single mode of semiotics of art and anthropology of art. Here the individual focus in the phenomenology of the self returns to relevance, since the analysis of an artist's work presupposes this cut, on the one hand it is about an individual person and his consciousness, what Hegel called the living individual or the life, on the other hand, the relationship of this phenomenology with the semiological analysis of visual language, as well as the hermeneutics and semantics of its meanings.
Returning to anthropology.
In my essay “The Eclipse of Evocation” addressed to Stephen when we both decided regarding this curatorship to start a dialogue about this concept, I made a critique of the text, something complex when I am a textualist in and of itself, but it is necessary to understand here that my criticism of the text did not refer in that essay to the interpretation of cultural texts and the consideration of culture as a text, but rather, to the reduction of the textual to merely a rhetorical matter related to the text that is of for If the essay or book that one writes, undoubtedly I also share this rhetorical understanding of anthropology, my authorial books on sociology and anthropology are clear examples of this, but with this curatorship it was about exploring other genres beyond the usual essay, monograph or book, even beyond the ethnographic film, I considered the scope, possibilities and alternatives that could be offered to anthropological cultural analysis if studies were staged in new media such as installation and conceptualism in art. And this is, or in this specific sense, if it can be considered a continuity taken up clearly, much later, of my projects in Cuba, but also and above all, its verification and exploration from anthropology.
To expand on these seven exhibitions and the curatorship as such, you should read a chapter about them included in my book “The Metonymies of the Museum: The textual exegesis of visual culture between semiotics and postmodern anthropology”, a chapter titled “The Complementary Text” It is dedicated to the seven samples. From the point of view of art, not only art criticism, which, as I explained before, was for me a crucial experiment to practice combining semiotic theory and cultural anthropology, my book “An Expedition to the Threshold” can be read in this sense. in Houston, Texas, but also the catalog book edited by me and by Surpik in Houston “Threshold of art and anthropology”
Something that I have then extended to all my art criticism, but also in the perspective of the artists it is clear that this curatorship laid the foundations for a completely new understanding on the one hand of the relationship between anthropology and art previously understood in such narrow ways, limited or full of stereotypes or clichés, opening a new field of research, emerging if you will, interdisciplinary.
This is in addition to the importance for the artist of analyzing the relationship between the self, the cultural heritage and the languages of his works. But the ideal thing would be to read “The Metonymies of the Museum” which has persuaded me to resume my attention and focus on museum theory in the nineties, to return to this topic that I developed so much in that decade although from a new perspective, I made references to this in the last chapter of my book “Los enigmas del ground” and more recently in my book “Las Metonymias del Museo” both written in Caracas this same year.
To give you a more complete idea of your question, perhaps I should give you a little history.
In 1994 I was curator in Caracas of the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts as curator of Contemporary Venezuelan Art, and the exhibition I had to do had to be about the relationship between the museum and popular urban markets, I conceived a curatorial project and began to make field work in popular urban markets, as well as reviewing the entire photo library, video library and collections on popular markets since the 15th century. For this project that I conceived as a museographic staging in the museum about popular urban markets, including contemporary works by Venezuelan artists, I had planned a theoretical panel in which I would be with a presentation and after inviting James Clifford.
While at the museum, curator Surpik Angelini became extremely interested in my project and talked to me about taking it to Houston, Texas. I, who planned to include James Clifford on the panel, told him that the Department of Anthropology at the University of Houston was in Houston. Rice where Stephen was and that I could present it there, in 1996 a trip invited by the Department of Classical and Hispanic Studies at Rice University where I gave a lecture at the Fondren Library, a 40-minute reading of my essay written in Caracas “The Postmodern Work”, several faculty members such as Stephen A Tyler, James Foubiam, Julie Taylor and George Marcus came to my conference at Fondren Library, and after that Surpik was very motivated to present the project with the Department of Anthropology, and he did, for that reason, I was invited again in the spring of 1997 to bring to Rice University a project with the transart foundation of Houston and the department of anthropology, so I traveled with official and institutional stationery of the University invited by Adria Baker from the Office of International Scholars, the Department of Anthropology, George Marcus, and the transarte foundation, to present the project in different spaces of the University in which they were additionally involved with the spaces the Rice Media center where I taught the course, and the art and architecture departments.
The project in the museum had not been able to be implemented as an exhibition, but only my research, the written project and my field work, therefore, we decided to produce it independently Surpik and I in Caracas for which we created the Transart Foundation that we initially had our offices in Telares de Maracay, the offices of this industrial fabric company of the Surpik brothers as well as the support of the Artquimia Foundation, Atenea, with my friend and colleague the Italian curator and businessman Domingo de Lucia, from Telares de In Maracay, we produced an Experimental Art and Anthropology Workshop that I directed aimed at generating seven exhibitions that addressed this relationship between art and anthropology from different perspectives, one of them was my museological staging project, an anthropology museum of urban popular markets, “The Market from Here: mise in scene and experimental entography” presented between March and April in the bag yard Sewall Hall of Rice University between the departments of anthropology and art, in the catalog of this museum a essay of mine about my field work in the popular markets of Venezuela, an ethnographic essay, and in March Quetzil came to the museum and we had a dialogue there that we both decided to take to a joint essay that we titled “Between Seen and Scenes.”
But before starting the project at the university, Stephen A Tyler and George Marcus invited me to give two lectures in the Department of Anthropology where I spoke about the methodology of participant observation in my projects in Cuba, one and in my project on markets in Caracas, the other. From this arose a dialogue about this in the social sciences where I, Quetzil, Surpik, George, Carpenter, Faubiam, among others, participated.
As I told you, the other exhibition that was born from this workshop was “Psyche Ethnography Report” by Surpik Angelini where we explored the possibilities of self ethnography, focusing on the topic of diasporic subjectivities, we presented it at the Rice Media Center Art Gallery.
From that workshop was born “Installed Ethnography”, an exhibition by Venezuelan artist Juan Carlos Rodríguez about his experiences in the marginal neighborhood of La Bandera, focused as a collaboration between him and an urban waste collector, Maira.
“Arguments with Betara Desa” by the Venezuelan artists Juan José Olavarría and the Cuban Ernesto Leal was also born from that workshop.
And because all of this came back in some way to a new perspective on the type of social science and conceptual art projects that I had developed in Cuba, we also invited two artists who had been on those projects with me, Lázaro Saavedra and Alejandro López .
During those three months, Quetzil invited me to give a lecture on his ethnographic film about the equinox in Yucatan, a panel at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Houston, at the ethnomethodology conference where George Marcus also participated.
From the point of view of anthropology, what I call self ethnography begins or refers to oneself as an anthropologist, to one's culture as an anthropologist, to what happens to one when as an anthropologist one finds oneself between several cultures, because for one thing On the other hand, one writes about a culture to publish, move or circulate what one writes for diverse audiences that include exponents of the culture about which one writes and exponents of the culture from which one writes, one's heritage changes and with the changes of that collection The conformation of the self is also modified, finally why do we write if not to better understand ourselves.
On the other hand, from the point of view of writing about art, it is about the fact that there is a relationship between heritages between writing and that language, discourse or rhetoric that makes up that language, writing about art is undoubtedly a metatext with respect to the art text that is its object, but that language about which you write is the same a language/object, that is, where the subject/object relationship has been exposed to experimentality, where the notion of object is exposed to an exploration experimental, then Since what you write about is a language/object, one cannot start from the traditional subject/object parameter that governs the epistemology of knowledge, if the object about which you write is the same a language for which the object dimension has been exposed to exploration, as occurs for example with anobjectuality in art, then what do you do? You write about an object that has made the object itself experimental, what you write is an interpretation but what you interpret is also an interpretation, it is That is to say, you interpret an interpretation, then we have a phenomenology of the relationship between the self and the heritage that moves beyond those subject/object parameters, phenomenology and hermeneutics, thus becoming a type of semiotics and anthropology according to which the relationship between the artist's heritage and the language of the works, as well as between your heritage and your writing, and both with the viewer of those works, and with the reader of that writing that becomes a modality of self ethnography.
Now all this refers to self ethnography from the point of view of writing, but in this area the possibilities of self ethnography are very limited, its true possibilities are found in other languages.
My first contact with postmodern anthropology was in Havana in 1988 when I read an essay by James Clifford entitled “The Collecting of Art and Culture”, as you know, at that time I was completely devoted and dedicated to the development of a theory of culture. , of the concept of culture and above all, in the elaboration of theoretical theses aimed at developing projects of urban sociology and cultural anthropology, but also of rural sociology where anthropology, seen and understood by me from my theoretical perspective in linguistics and semiotics, played a predominant place, almost all my essays from that period were focused on developing what I understood, from participant observation, as a type of anthropological fieldwork, and from art criticism, in an anthropology of art, I read this essay by James Clifford thanks to my colleague and friend Desiderio Navarro who published it in his magazine Criterios, and I was very impressed and interested in how James Clifford placed anthropology within what he called the system of art and culture, unlike Levis Strauss, who in structural anthropology placed the place of anthropology in the social sciences, undoubtedly, it is a social science, but at the same time, the difficulties of anthropology to insert itself and become relevant as contemporary anthropology understood as social science in its own tradition were very great, James's perspective developed in that essay published only on the other hand, seemed to me much more suitable for what I then understood as forms of anthropology of the contemporary and more precisely of our own Western culture, that is, in addition It was crucial that James expanded the scope of this system of art and culture in terms similar to how I was considering it. I think that at another point in this interview we already talked about James' table, how he places the poles of art/culture. culture, singular, collective, tradition, artifacts, material culture, ethnographic vision, anti-art, tourism, consumption, etc., it could be said that there was something of an anthropology of our own Western culture in certain passages of Levis Strauss, for example, when he spoke from the museum of anthropology, said that today it is easier to study oriental cultures or cultures from other latitudes in New York due to the ebb and flow of cultures that settle, that is, he evoked the idea of not only moving anthropologists towards the traditional locations of tribal cultures , or local, but to imagine circulation and mobility in reverse, how cultures are established one within the other, in a certain way it already evoked the phenomenon of migrations or diasporas, On the other hand, especially in responses to opponents or critics of his work, Levis Strauss justified himself by saying that structural anthropology could also be developed on our own cultures when he compared, for example, the forms of English, French or Chinese cuisine, but these perspectives They were clearly not only extremely isolated, you could count on the fingers of one hand the articles in which here or there something could be drawn in this direction, there was undoubtedly no well-structured theoretical system in the evolution of the humanities, of the philosophy of science and social sciences, truly developed on its own foundations, certain elements could be found in philosophical anthropology, for example by Cassirer, but it did not then find a way to incorporate and make its own those problems that within classical philosophy itself could be considered the sources. of anthropology in classical thought and not reduce it to the alleged assumption that subordinated it to natural history according to a certain idea of man.
By placing anthropology in the system of art and culture as James Clifford developed it in that essay, in that table, it could be said that the matter could be taken a little further towards new possibilities, however, James's developments in this senses more developed than those of Clifford Geertz were still scarce and limited. I could tell you that the theoretical system that I was beginning to develop at that time was very much in the opposite direction, that is, that I had advanced much further in that direction, what I had advanced a lot of at that time was in new ways. to articulate the relationships between an urban and rural sociology, and an anthropology of our own Western culture developed based on the relationship between semiotic theory, cultural theory, sociology and anthropology, surrounding urban groups that were dessert car shapes anthropology, but at the same time, and above all imbued by the decisive presence in my system of art theory, and the arsenal of media, languages and concepts of conceptual art in the tradition that comes from the avant-garde, to the post-avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde and postmodernism, which Peter Burguer had studied.
However, several years had to pass before I, living in Caracas in 1992, read James' complete book where that essay was a chapter "The Dilemmas of Culture", published by Gedisa, The Predicament of culture, published at Harvard, a Year before reading this complete book by James I read “The Interpretation of Cultures” by Clifford Geertz, which I must admit that I liked very much, tremendously, as well as reading Carlos Reynoso's compendium “The Advent of the postmodern anthropology", it was in this compendium where I first read Stephen's essay "Postmodern Ethnography" and his essay in a letter from Dennis Tedlock "Description of writing as a speaking for", I liked Geertz and James Clifford, a lot, but not enough to feel an influence from them, as I have told you on another occasion, if one were influenced by everything one likes, one would not be able to take one's own paths, one would not be able to develop a work, an investigation, a style and one's own path. as an author, theorist and thinker, everything would influence him, and it is not like that, taste is one thing, influence is another, I told you at another time that my influences were in Cuba Theoretical Structural Linguistics and Semiotic theory, structuralism without a doubt, In that sense, my first influence in anthropology was Levis Strauss and in sociology Pierre Bourdieu, more like I said, not everything, but choosing here and there with tweezers, but around that time, 1992, I was changing, I had completed my first book, “Borders and Overflows of Art,” and I felt more and more imbued by the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz, ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, when in Caracas I read in more depth the postmodern anthropology of culture in Cuba I only knew James Clifford's essay, my influences were Structuralism in linguistics and semiotics, Levis Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, but I began to progressively distance myself of these two, and The Phenomenological Sociology of Alfred Schütz began to interest me more and influence me, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, reading Habermas's theory of communicative action, was also crucial then, it is from this perspective that I then read Geertz, to James Clifford, the Reynoso compendium, and other books by Geertz.
In 1992 I traveled to Cuba for six months and took all this with me, and I gave lectures on postmodern anthropology, I talked about Stephen A Tyler, James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, and yes also Bateson, back in Caracas in 1993 I continued reading postmodern anthropology, in In 1994 I gave a seminar in contemporary sociological theory, Parson, Schütz, Melton, Garfinkel, in Caracas, and in 1995 I gave a seminar in Caracas at the Petare Museum of Popular Art on museum theory, semiotics of art and culture, collecting and postmodern anthropology, an interdisciplinary seminar that proposed combining semiotic theory and cultural anthropology in a postmodern perspective.
My relationship with Stephen began as a theoretical position before we met, that is, after reading “The Advent of Postmodern Anthropology”, and studying the phenomenon in depth from Geertz, through James Clifford to Reynoso's compendium, I made, As it is called in English, I realized, I came to the conclusion, that within that debate my position was not only similar to that of Stephen A Tyler, but that I agreed with him while on the other hand, the reading of their essays began to have an influence on me.
It was thus through Stephen's influence on me that I began progressively with tweezers, here and there from my own theoretical system to gradually incorporate epistemological and hermeneutical issues of postmodern anthropology in my authorial work until I reached what I have been then in Texas and from Texas and to what I am today, to the current balance of my style, my theory, my own sociology and anthropology.
I have recognized Stephen as one of my main influences since then and it is in this way that I progressively became an exponent of postmodern anthropology itself within which I am certainly an island, unique and clearly different from the others.
In 1997 Stephen A Tyler and I decided to start a theoretical dialogue in the Department of Anthropology about the concept of evocation. As I told you before, I wrote him an essay in the form of a letter “The Eclipse of Evocation” that he responded to with another essay “Evocation of the Inscribable, a response to Abdel Hernández San Juan” and in 1998 we decided to continue our dialogue orally, that is, directly within the spaces of the department, recording our dialogues and transcribing them where Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda, Surpik Angelini, Teresa, José Saúl Martínez came from, this was developed in the context of the program of my entomethodology laboratory in sociology, theory of performativity and ethnography, from which I developed trips, conferences and dialogues, So we had a conversation about James Clifford's “Routes” in my office in Sewall Hall, me, Quetzil and Surpik that same year.
Despite that singularity or island that defines me, I considered that since Houston, I began a new line, trend or current, a boom or new imposition in postmodern anthropology, starting with the very fact that I have been the first to initiate the new and currently in formation and at the same time booming field that we call art and anthropology, this field, which includes in its areas and developments, anthropology of art, the conjunction of semiotics of art and cultural anthropology in writing about art, which includes towards the anthropology new developments in visual anthropology, graphic anthropology, experimental ethnography, but also the very space of intersection between the fields of anthropology and art, which George defines with respect to me when he says that I have blurred, effazing the boundaries, between anthropology and the art as institutions, is where I am with my books, Stephen A Tyler, Quetzil Eugenio Castañeda with what has been done since that moment, Lisa Breglia with what has been done since that moment, Surpik Angelini, with what has been done since that moment moment, our two books together, you and I, Counterpoints and Directions, and I would mention the Scott of the two volumes of The Entertainment Park in its first version.
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