a clear distinction between the terms is useful. In the anthropological tradition, following Arnold van Gennep ([1909] 1960) and his “recuperation” by Victor Turner (1967), liminality is not only a condition between two fixed states but, crucially, also has the characteristics of transformation and transition. These are not qualities that fit our definition of indeterminacy as something that remains between or has an undetermined future. Recently, the term has been widely adopted elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, particularly political science, to refer to a general condition of being betwixt and between, which can be the locus of emergent political orders (e.g., Horvath, Thomassen, and Wydra 2015; Thomassen 2014). From literary studies, Arpad Szakolczai (2016) adds the oxymoronic notion of “permanent liminality.” These more capacious understandings of the term partly chime with our discussions, but also attenuate the charge of the original narrower anthropological use.
These are our working definitions for the book, but are far from the last word on how these terms are understood either in everyday speech or in different disciplines. Carla Namwali Serpell, for instance, reminds us that in literary and scientific theory these terms have become heavy with particular meanings: the New Criticism has appropriated ambiguity, indeterminacy is the driving force of Derridean deconstruction, while uncertainty reflects scientific theories roughly contemporaneous with James Joyce (Serpell 2014: 308n41).
There are three more parts to this introduction. The following section provides a grounding for our chapters via a brief genealogy of how indeterminacy has been theorized in philosophy and social theory vis-à-vis questions of order, recognition, and progress, which partly hinge on whether or not the infinite variety of the world can or should be caught in categories. From this, we move in the next section to the growth of invisible, unregistered, stateless people in the contemporary world alongside tightening systems of classification and control and the material byproducts of intensified political and economic production/wasting processes: uncontainable contamination. Here we also consider four areas where social scientists have engaged recently with indeterminacy: statelessness, economic precarity, ethics, and creativity.5 Theorizations of the former two areas typically decry indeterminacy while the latter celebrate it. In the final section, we identify our principal contributions to understanding the multiple registers of indeterminacy via our ethnographic chapters.
A Brief Genealogy of Order, Indeterminacy, and Waste in the Modern Age
Our main focus in this section is the interplay between ideas and practices of order and progress in the modern age on the one hand, and indeterminacy on the other. As we work through this genealogy, we highlight how ideas of indeterminacy, waste, excess, and ordering narratives have been woven together at different times in different ways, then how and where these ideas resonate with our volume. We begin with a sense of indeterminacy as something to move away from, toward enlightenment, order, and progress before turning to Walter Benjamin’s engagements with modernity as waste, which illustrate how waste and indeterminacy have often been cast as modernity’s other (Benjamin 2002; Lunn 1984). This section ends with Michel Foucault (1977, [1984] 1992) and Georges Bataille’s (1985) celebratory take on indeterminacy as transgression, and Theodor Adorno, whose negative dialectics and denial of the possibility of apprehending reality have been inspirations in locating lives in all their diversity and meaning-making outside, in parallel, or in response to centrally-determined, teleological grand projects (1973).
We therefore start with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel for whom indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit) and recognition (Anerkennung) are fundamental preconditions to the development of individuals’ agency as social beings (Hegel 1977). Drawing on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is important here for two reasons (Hegel 1977). First, it starts with the condition of indeterminacy as the unknown point from which logical thought moves toward determinacy. The successive moves are toward first a determinate but abstract being. Then an actualized self emerges because of the recognition by another subject of our own subjecthood: full dynamic being, in other words, is essentially relational. In this frame, we need recognition, and the relation that it implies, in other words, to become agents.
Hegel initially emphasized intersubjective encounters within social groups as linking mutual dependence to questions of recognition, solidarity, and esteem (Pippin 2000: 156) allowing (to use a different lexicon) the prosecution of life projects by a social agent. Later, in the Philosophy of Right, this shifted to an emphasis on the objective spirit of world history, eliding intersubjectivity, and creating a new idea of the ethical life and community where adequate re-cognition is achieved within an institutional system of rights (Williams 1997: 59–69): the three spheres of family, civil society, and the state. For Hegel, indeterminacy, alongside emptiness (or “loneliness,” as Axel Honneth translates Einsamkeit), is a pathology experienced as an unhappy self-consciousness, and indeed, Honneth suggests, is characteristic of the age (2016). While our take on indeterminacy differs from the Hegelian pre-thought void, the question of who recognizes, or refuses recognition of whom and what, is a central theme of this book, allied to the moral project of classifying.
Second, Phenomenology of Spirit outlines the dialectical process by which history (knowledge) moves to the absolute via the two steps between abstraction and concrete appearance that gives rise to a renewed idea and so on toward an absolute totality where idea/category and reality are fused into one. Hegel’s teleological vision of history is shared by many modern political projects. Thus, capitalism, socialism, and colonialism are all teleologically determined, grounded in Enlightenment concerns with development and progress, via science and technology, toward a goal of better, happier lives (see Negri 2004; Guyer 2007 for a discussion of capitalism’s temporality).6 Thus, as Vincanne Adams, Michelle Murphy, and Adele E. Clarke observe, modernist temporalities are anticipatory ones “in which the future sets the conditions of possibility for action in the present” and is able to “arrive already formed in the present” (2009: 248–49).
Drawing on Hegel’s method, Karl Marx offers a dialectical framework to address questions of change and structure, also rooted in a modernist temporality of progress and finalization (Berman 2010; Huyssen 1984; Lunn 1984). At its most blunt, the final resolution of the dialectic is reified as an absolute whole, and Marxist dialectical method is reduced to a prescriptive and predictive typology (Althusser 1970; Cornforth 1961) as it most notoriously appeared in Marxist-Leninism.7 More subtle Marxist work emphasizes the contingency of historical process and class formation (Chandavarkar 1994; E. P.Thompson 1978, 1991).
There have been critiques aplenty of this narrative of progress. What interests us here is how the ideas of surplus, ruin, excess, and waste in many forms, but particularly the indeterminate and unrecognizable, are woven through these narratives and their critiques. Thus Marx’s materialist interpretation of Hegel’s dialectical method located historical movement in the material conflicts inherent in each socioeconomic formation. The final stage, communism, theoretically contained no exploitative relations and was thus the end point of historical development; the social/material equivalent of Hegel’s merging of idea and reality. The emergence of capitalism, as a mode of production, lay in the confluence of factors that enabled the production and appropriation of surplus for profit. Surplus labor can be interpreted in two ways, both essential for capitalism. The first is the labor that is surplus to the laborer’s livelihood needs and that creates profit for the capitalist. The second is the reserve army of unemployed people hovering in the wings to meet market demand. Such people are surplus to immediate requirements, outside yet connected to formal systems of value production; simultaneously potentially valuable and wasted.
Surplus is therefore integral to the capitalist process, creating and maintaining profit, and wasting human lives. But excess, as something overflowing that cannot be accommodated, can be threatening (Alexander this volume) and must therefore be expended (wasted), to follow Bataille’s reasoning (1991)
