to become harmful. Excess also appears as the detritus of the capitalist modern age. In this spirit, Benjamin excavated modernity through the trail of waste and ephemera it left behind, his own monumental Arcades project, unfinished, a half-built/ruin of fragments symbolizing as well as accounting for the failed promise of modernity (2002). And yet, modernity’s underlying framework of progress still seems to have a tight grip on dominant imaginaries of capitalism and socialism.
In some post-Soviet contexts, for example, revolutionary logic seemed merely to transpose “communism” with “the market” as the goal, retaining faith in determinate historical rules (Alexander 2009). Elsewhere, in the 1990s, international lending agencies as well as local governments spoke of “transition,” the implication being that they knew precisely where they were heading: free market capitalism (Gaidar 1999; Lipton et al. 1992: 213; J. Sachs 1994). In the academy, the emphasis on transition moved rapidly, following Stark (1991) to languages of transformation and “path dependency,” where particular pasts, rather than futures, influenced continual change.
But the modernist project of development, underscored by the same belief in progress and framed by market integration since the United States’ Marshall Plan in 1948, marches on for all the steady criticism it has received over the last few decades from Andre Gunder Frank’s insight that “development” was having the reverse effect (1966), and Arturo Escobar’s reiteration in 1995 that development was wasting the very places it was supposed to make anew. There have been calls for postdevelopment (Dasgupta 1985), alternatives to development (Friedmann 1992), and to move after postdevelopment (Nederveen Pieterse 2000). But still, as Katy Gardner and David Lewis (2015) describe, the appeal of progress continues with, ironically, a return to a belief in technological interventions. Indeed, Wolfgang Sachs (1992: 1) described development itself as an indeterminate ruin of modernity, still with us, but pointing to a discredited future. To paraphrase Benjamin, modernity can be characterized by the wasted lands, excess materials, and people it expels to keep the project on the road. For the anthropological endeavor, to think critically about normative frameworks of progress entails a willingness to engage with ruination (Dawdy 2010), and the modern forms of life created by processes of systemic expulsion and desolation (Massey and Denton 1993; Wacquant 2010).
Waste, John Scanlan suggests, is modernity’s other side (2005). We narrow this down here to indeterminate excess produced by the order of progress. Indeed, the shadows of formal rational progress appear via a scabrous version of indeterminacy as the menacing, wasted cast-offs of progress itself where the curiously contagious quality of waste leads waste workers to become as much symbolically as materially defiled by their contact with waste materials and places, the latter typically located on edges and borders just to add to their capacity for symbolic disruption. More famously, Marx’s excoriation of the lumpenproletariat merges those who live on waste with redundancy (or “uselessness” in Scanlan’s phrase 2005) in a revolutionary progressive order, and with the quality of waste itself: “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers in old society” (Marx 1967: 92); the dangerous class “living off the garbage of society” (ibid.).
Such language not only reappears in The Eighteenth Brumaire, but makes explicit the contempt and fear generated by those who are not readily classifiable: the rotting (between life and death), ruined, and indiscernible masses
the decayed roués … the ruined … offshoots of the bourgeoisie … ragpickers … in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème… This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he … pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally.” (Marx 1975: 148; emphasis in original)
This, Slavoj Žižek observes, is the ultimate statement of the “logic of the Party of Order” (2012: 20), where “the excremental … non-representable excess of society” (ibid.: 21) becomes the only medium of universal representation. Western modernity, if we follow Scanlan, tends to blank out “that which doesn’t fit” (2005: 80); ambiguity and confusion, he suggests, prevent meaning and lend themselves to the language of garbage (ibid.: 56).
Adorno’s devastating critiques of modernity give us a way out of this binary of rigidly ordered meaning or unmeaning via an explanation and a method. First, with Max Horkeimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1947] 2002), he locates the primal human fear of the unknown as the driver for attempts to dominate the world through technologies of knowing (see Feyerabend 1975, 2001). In such a society, unfree through fear, the other is exploited or expelled. This other, in our lexicon, is thus unknowable, unrecognizable—and rendered indeterminate. The second element we adapt from Adorno is from his Negative Dialectics (1973). His interpretation drew on Hegel’s method but was a nondogmatic philosophical materialism, as opposed to Hegel’s idealism (Jarvis 1998). Thus, for Adorno, unlike Hegel, the attempt to conjoin idea and object is negatively valued. Where unity seems to appear this is only by suppressing difference and diversity (Adorno 1973: 142–61). It is only by articulating such contradictions, and the misidentification of object and thought, that a “fragile transformative horizon” of hope appears where objects and people can flourish in their particularity.9 We too are attempting this dialectic between theory and ethnography, outlining in the final section of this introduction how we draw on negative dialectics to frame our approach to indeterminacy.
Other critiques of modernity emphasize the repressive domination of ordering practices by celebrating transgression.10 As William Viney suggests, accounts of people, places, and things that do not fit dominant orders are typically binary, casting matter out of place as negative (2014), the process of ejection, however, is positive (for those doing it): reaffirming system and structure (Douglas 1966). There is, however, another body of work that also counterposes waste-as-excess against rational order, but celebrates and glorifies disorder as a deconstruction of the humanist, unified modern subject. Such accounts typically draw on pre- or early modern and ethnographic accounts of alterity to challenge modernist accounts. Thus, Peter Stallybrass and Alison White’s historical work (1986), Mikhail Bakhtin’s on the excess of the grotesque body and carnival (2009), and Foucault’s work on transgression, infinite variety, and Dionysian excess (e.g., 1977, [1984] 1992) serve to destabilize singular subjects, aligning with Bataille’s invitation to consider open-ended forms of knowledge and economic exchange rooted in the productive consumption of excess (1985, 1988). This compounded excess in the modern world, its threat, and its potential is what interests us here.
The next section outlines instances of that modernist drive to domination, order, and expulsion that many of the theorists above describe—but we end by juxtaposing this with not only celebrations of open-endedness and excess, but reminders of more complex accounts of how promises of modernist order have been experienced and lamented.
Contemporary Excesses
Crisis hardens social categories, spewing people out who no longer fit. The implications of being outside the law are crucial to how political indeterminacy is experienced. The term outlaw is derived from Old Norse for wolf (Nyers 2006), implying a lack of distinction between human and nonhuman that can cruelly shape what it means to be outside the juridical community. Indeed, Hannah Arendt opens The Origins of Totalitarianism with “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth” caused by the chaos of war and reinforced nation-state borders (1950: vii). In this section, we consider the growth of political and economic indeterminacy as the volume of displaced people and precarious labor grows. Alongside such immediate violence (Sassen 2014), we consider the concomitant slow violence (Nixon 2011) of wasting materials and lands through ordering regimes, and how this has been theorized before turning to a different branch of engagement with indeterminacy: the realm of creative, hopeful
