re-presented in the present.
Drawing inspiration from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu and his reflection on how the hole at the hub is what makes a wheel useful, Terrence Deacon (2006) refers to the special kind of nothingness delimited by the spokes of a wheel, or by the glass of a flask, or by the shape of the mouth when uttering “teeeye” as a “constitutive absence.” Constitutive absence, according to Deacon, is not just found in the world of artifacts or humans. It is a kind of relation to that which is spatially or temporally not present that is crucial to biology and to any kind of self (see Deacon 2012: 3). It points to the peculiar way in which, “in the world of mind, nothing—that which is not—can be a cause” (Bateson 2000a: 458, quoted in Deacon 2006).
As I discuss later in this chapter, and in subsequent ones as well, constitutive absence is central to evolutionary processes. That, for example, a lineage of organisms comes to increasingly fit a particular environment is the result of the “absence” of all the other lineages that were selected out. And all manner of sign processes, not just those associated directly with biological life, come to mean by virtue of an absence: iconicity is the product of what is not noticed; indexicality involves a prediction of what is not yet present; and symbolic reference, through a convoluted process that also involves iconicity and indexicality, points to and images absent worlds by virtue of the ways in which it is embedded in a symbolic system that constitutes the absent context for the meaning of any given word’s utterance. In the “world of mind,” constitutive absence is a particular mediated way in which an absent future comes to affect the present. This is why it is appropriate to consider telos—that future for the sake of which something in the present exists—as a real causal modality wherever there is life (see Deacon 2012).
The constant play between presence and these different kinds of absences gives signs their life. It makes them more than the effect of that which came before them. It makes them images and intimations of something potentially possible.
PROVINCIALIZING LANGUAGE
Considering crashing palms, jumping monkeys, and “words” like tsupu helps us see that representation is something both more general and more widely distributed than human language. It also helps us see that these other modes of representation have properties that are quite different from those exhibited by the symbolic modalities on which language depends. In short, considering those kinds of signs that emerge and circulate beyond the symbolic helps us see that we need to “provincialize” language.
My call to provincialize language alludes to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), his critical account of how South Asian and South Asianist scholars rely on Western social theory to analyze South Asian social realities. To provincialize Europe is to recognize that such theory (with its assumptions about progress, time, etc.) is situated in the particular European context of its production. Social theorists of South Asia, Chakrabarty argues, turn a blind eye to this situated context and apply such theory as if it were universal. Chakrabarty asks us to consider what kind of theory might emerge from South Asia, or from other regions for that matter, once we circumscribe the European theory we once took as universal.
In showing that the production of a particular body of social theory is situated in a particular context and that there are other contexts for which this theory does not apply, Chakrabarty is making an implicit argument about the symbolic properties of the realities such theory seeks to understand. Context is an effect of the symbolic. That is, without the symbolic we would not have linguistic, social, cultural, or historical contexts as we understand them. And yet this kind of context does not fully create or circumscribe our realities because we also live in a world that exceeds the symbolic, and this is something our social theory must also find ways to address.
Chakrabarty’s argument, then, is ultimately couched within humanist assumptions about social reality and the theory one might develop to attend to it, and so, if taken literally, its application to an anthropology beyond the human is limited. Nonetheless, I find provincialization useful metaphorically as a reminder that symbolic domains, properties, and analytics are always circumscribed by and nested within a broader semiotic field.
We need to provincialize language because we conflate representation with language and this conflation finds its way into our theory. We universalize this distinctive human propensity by first assuming that all representation is something human and then by supposing that all representation has languagelike properties. That which ought to be delimited as something unique becomes instead the bedrock for our assumptions about representation.
We anthropologists tend to view representation as a strictly human affair. And we tend to focus only on symbolic representation—that uniquely human semiotic modality.16 Symbolic representation, manifested most clearly in language, is conventional, “arbitrary,” and embedded in a system of other such symbols, which, in turn, is sustained in social, cultural, and political contexts that have similar systemic and conventional properties. As I mentioned earlier, the representational system associated with Saussure, which is the implicit one that underlies so much of contemporary social theory, concerns itself only with this kind of arbitrary, conventional sign.
There is another reason why we need to provincialize language: we conflate language with representation even when we don’t explicitly draw on language or the symbolic for our theoretical tools. This conflation is most evident in our assumptions about ethnographic context. Just as we know that words only acquire meanings in terms of the greater context of other such words to which they systemically relate, it is an anthropological axiom that social facts can’t be understood except by virtue of their place in a context made up of other such facts. And the same applies for the webs of cultural meanings or for the network of contingent discursive truths as revealed by a Foucauldian genealogy.
Context understood in this way, however, is a property of human conventional symbolic reference, which creates the linguistic cultural and social realities that make us distinctively human. It doesn’t fully apply in domains such as human-animal relations that are not completely circumscribed by the symbolic but are nevertheless semiotic. The kinds of representational modalities shared by all forms of life—modalities that are iconic and indexical—are not context-dependent the way symbolic modalities are. That is, such representational modalities do not function by means of a contingent system of sign relations—a context—the way symbolic modalities do. So in certain semiotic domains context doesn’t apply, and even in those domains such as human ones where it does, such contexts, as we can see by attending to that which lies beyond the human, are, as I will show, permeable. In short, complex wholes are also open wholes—hence this chapter’s title. And open wholes reach beyond the human—hence this anthropology beyond the human.
This conflation of representation with language—the assumption that all representational phenomena have symbolic properties—holds even for those kinds of projects that are explicitly critical of cultural, symbolic, or linguistic approaches. It is apparent in classical materialist critiques of the symbolic and the cultural. It is also apparent in more contemporary phenomenological approaches that turn to the bodily experiences we also share with nonhuman beings as a way to avoid anthropocentric mind talk (see Ingold 2000; Csordas 1999; Stoller 1997). It is also, I should note, apparent in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s multinaturalism (discussed in detail in chapter 2). When Viveiros de Castro writes that “a perspective is not a representation because representations are a property of the mind or spirit, whereas the point of view is located in the body” (1998: 478), he is assuming that attention to bodies (and their natures) can allow us to side step the thorny issues raised by representation.
The alignment between humans, culture, the mind, and representation, on the one hand, and nonhumans, nature, bodies, and matter, on the other, remains stable even in posthuman approaches that seek to dissolve the boundaries that have been erected to construe humans as separate from the rest of the world. This is true of Deleuzian approaches, as exemplified, for
