I presented this 10-minute talk at the senior thesis presentations for the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World on 19 May 2020. A video recording is available here; my presentation begins at 30:00. The full thesis is available through the Brown Digital Repository. A 26-page revised and condensed version is available here.
I begin my thesis with this map. This object was created by //Kabbo, a prisoner in Cape Town who spoke /Xam, an indigenous language of South Africa, in collaboration with two philologists: Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd. Between 1865 and 1875, they spoke with many prisoners in Cape Town who spoke San languages, to record stories and otherwise document their culture. Bleek and Lloyd, and many of the people who have accessed their collection since, saw their work as saving the relics of a people soon to be washed away by time. Thus, a nineteenth-century historian wrote that it was “a mere matter of time in an unequal struggle between the primitive bow and arrow, with which they fought, and the deadly gun in the hands of their invaders.” Indeed, the history of the San is marked by genocide and assimilation. Dutch settlers saw them as vermin; shooting four of them, an English traveler wrote in 1797, was discussed with “as much composure and indifference as if he had been speaking of four partridges.” In the nineteenth century, the San assimilated into the Coloured people of the Cape, a laboring underclass with mixed slave and indigenous origins. Since the end of apartheid, San people have re-asserted their indigeneity.
Starting from these objects and this history of representation, we come face-to-face with questions of objectivity and humanism. It is these questions that I elaborate on in my thesis in ways that I will show the contours of in my presentation today, before returning to another object of the Bleek-Lloyd collection. The question driving my project is: how can we assert both common rights and uncommon differences?
One way these questions have been treated in recent scholarship has come to be known as the “ontological turn.” Scholars like Eduardo Kohn, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Bruno Latour generally present an argument of the following form. Scientists like Bleek and Lloyd used to be invested in objectivity: the idea that we find the truth about the world by coming as close as possible to reality in our representations. One move away from that that became especially popular in anthropology was to emphasize the inherent subjectivity of representations. The ontological turn wants us to take difference seriously again by focusing on the power of objects. How do we get at the truth? Not by getting out of nature’s way, nor by focusing on our subjectivity, but by recognizing how involved in this process things are. //Kabbo’s map is not going to “really” tell us about San culture, nor is “truth” found by focusing on the circumstances of its creation and representation; rather, as an object it is involved in the creation of truth alongside //Kabbo, Bleek, and me too. For the ontological turn, truth is indeed social, but this realm of the social includes actors who were once labeled as merely “natural.”
In my thesis, I focus on the contribution we can make to questions like these that rise from the objects of the Bleek-Lloyd collection by focusing on the work of Hannah Arendt, a twentieth-century German-Jewish political philosopher. She had an expansive, idiosyncratic understanding of politics as world-making. Ideals like freedom, justice, and equality are for her not the ends of politics but rather consist in what we do when we act together in the public sphere. Both Arendt and the ontological turn emphasize that traditional philosophical projects — pursuing truth, or the good — are entirely social projects. To discover truth, or the good, is to practice the encounter with the other — what Hannah Arendt would call politics. It is this project of philosophy as a politics of truly plural interlocutors that I pursue in my work.
In my thesis, I dwell at length on Arendt’s intellectual history to emphasize what her work offers us. For instance, both Arendt and the ontological turn owe a profound debt to Martin Heidegger. His project was to answer the question: what is it to be? He found the answer to lie in that same encounter with the other that //Kabbo experienced with Bleek — the same encounter with the other that Arendt and the ontological turn both prize. Arendt was Heidegger’s student. She found the ingredients for much of her thinking in his thought, but was distraught by his turn to Nazi politics in the 1930s, when Arendt herself was exiled from Germany and became a refugee first in France and then in the United States. This was not just a personal slight: Arendt felt that Heidegger was representative of most of philosophy in his condescension to politics. Philosophers may make grand pronouncements about the importance of the other to their projects, she thought, but the interaction of people in their plurality is ultimately a means to their grander end, the pursuit of truth. The ontological turn, as much as it cares about this kind of interaction, is also often framed as a better understanding of how truth is produced. Arendt helps us see how this project is political at its core. Heidegger and Latour would both, like Arendt, tell us to pay attention to the objects of the Bleek-Lloyd collection. But Arendt is the one who helps us understand why we do this — not to pursue the truth, but because common objects are the condition for politics and indeed the world to exist at all: “to live together in the world,” she writes, “means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common.” We can affirm both common rights and uncommon differences because, for Arendt, a commitment to political ideals is identical to an expansive ontology.
At its core, Arendt’s work aims to give dignity to politics as a fundamental capacity of human beings. As generous as I am in reading her commitment to objects, she remains humanist at heart — both in her deep respect for the classics (what some call her “polis-envy”) and in her anthropocentrism. Both these tendencies of humanism have come in for much critique in recent years, I think most astutely by critics in black studies and indigenous studies who interrogate the assumptions that animate the supposedly universal category of the “human.” These are concerns that Arendt was very open to: in her first masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she herself wrote about how the history of the Jews brought to light the inherent failures of Enlightenment ideas of human rights. Yet when Arendt herself wrote about the San, she called them “‘natural’ human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.” The San, in this reading, clearly do not belong to the category of the human.
The liberal response is to push the bounds of this category. There are many reasons to doubt whether the category is elastic enough to include everyone, even the San, as subjects. Indeed, many have abandoned ship; Frank Wilderson, for instance, wrote in 2008 that “if a Black is the very antithesis of a Human subject … even … the possibility of an emancipatory project for the Black position — disintegrates into thin air.” In my reading, Arendt does not argue for us to expand subjectivity in this way. She takes human plurality as the sine qua non, quite literally the very condition for the world to exist at all. Her vision of politics is not of a broader and broader subject, but rather of people coming together in their plurality and making things. As she writes, “The objectivity of the world — its object- or thing-character — and the human condition supplement each other; because human existence is conditioned existence, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence.”
What does this mean? It means that when we turn to the Bleek-Lloyd collection, we shouldn’t even try to write a political history with the San as subjects. Instead, we focus on the power of the things themselves — a move that I reckon many archaeologists would applaud. Take this poem, for instance, called “The Broken String.” Since its publication the poem has been reproduced both by people who unashamedly call it “the story of a lost language” or “the last words of an extinct people” and by people who use the poem to document the persistence of San culture. In other words, a plurality of political subjectivities is brought together by a common object, this poem. One way to understand this pull of this object — one way to recuperate objectivity from its supposed defeat at the hands of subjectivity — is to turn to aesthetics. Kant maintained a clear distinction between aesthetic pleasure, which was purely subjective, and judgments of beauty, which are in the first place only subjectively valid yet contain something that demands or imposes universal assent. What are the grounds for the “expectation of universal assent” as to an object’s beauty? Kant proleptically echoes Arendt; he says that it is only under the presupposition of a common sense that a judgment of beauty can be made. It is our grounding in such common sense, a world in Arendt’s meaning of the word, that “makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept.” Arendt says that in this last great treatise of Kant we find his “unwritten political philosophy.” For the first time, Kant writes about politics starting from a plurality of subjectivities rather than an ideal rational subject, thus affirming what Arendt came to recognize: that “politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man,” the subject of philosophy and theology.
So, what happens if we call “The Broken String” beautiful? This is to say that there is something in the poem that can help us orient ourselves in our plurality. Coming together around this poem, as so many people already have, might be the beginning of a politics truly founded in plurality, and one that recuperates objectivity along the way. My speech at this very moment is creating something in the world, something that hopefully endures past the impermanence of the world’s members. Our politics, our world-making, can aspire at best to this kind of objectivity of the beautiful. After all, making a world together is the highest form of virtuosic practice.