The Bad Multiplicity of Four: The Analytics of "Unwrapping" the Four-Field Bundle

Abstract

Daniel A. Segal and Sylvia J. Yanagisako, eds., Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology. Duke University Press, 2005, 184pp. Suppose biological anthropology and sociocultural anthropology went to see a therapist…. My so fancying was occasioned by the talk of a divorce provocatively entertained in the collection Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology. Rena Lederman's contribution to the collection directly took me to the most elemental of psychoanalytic wisdom: an opposition that I see in the Other actually turns out to be a correlative to my own splitting within. For she wrote: "while the fault line between the 'positive' and the 'interpretive' impulses is most certainly evident in conflicts among anthropological subfields…it can also be found within each subfield…" (50). Such a "two culture" splitting Lederman finds ubiquitous in "American culture." Her precipitous positive identification of the splitting tendency as "American" notwithstanding, the "therapeutic" implication of her initial intervention is far-reaching. I want to dwell on her piece as a kind of symptomal critique of the collection generally and show the potential [End Page 951] of a radical therapeutic wisdom at once opened up and foreclosed in her contribution. A similar potential and limit will be shown to run across the collection generally. "Two Cultures" Everywhere For Lederman, "our disagreements about the subfields are part of a rift that is not confined to anthropology, nor even to academic discourse. This fault line, which cleaves essentialists and contextualizing ways of knowing, runs through American culture" (50). Our local version of "two cultures," she adds, are "positivist" and "interpretive" (51). For my purpose, her thesis can be purchased more succinctly as follows: What seemed like an external opposition between subfields turns out to be also an inner opposition/splitting within each subfield. We have here a strange case of excessive differentiations. External differentiation and internal differentiation are redoubled. It is as though a subfield's attempt at external limitation (of its field of relevant phenomena) is always-already "staged" somehow, made impure and incomplete by its inherent problem of achieving the same sort of differentiation within. It is as though the attempt at external limitation is already haunted by its own internal impossibility fully to become itself. This picture of redoubling or conflation between internal and external differences, between intra- and inter- differences, it seems to me, strikes at the heart of holism's structural presupposition. For holism relies on what Stephen Gudeman calls the "layer cake view" of society (forthcoming:3). This view, which is based on an older "scientific" view of the nonhuman world, holds that nature consists of separate, hierarchical "layers" to be analyzed by an appropriate discipline, such as physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Projected onto society, this Comtean image calls for an intellectual division of labor among causally-linked multiple layers of human existence: e.g., "individual," "institution," and so on. Its aspiration is an ever-accurate approximation, on the part of intellectual representation, to the wealth and complexity of reality—four is certainly better than less-than-four. The scheme's external referentiality as well as inner orderliness relies on the integrity of the layers. For example, the "superstructure" icing such as culture/symbol cannot possibly be confused with the material base, and so on. But Lederman's "two cultures" thesis introduces a confusion at the layers through excessive repetition and redoubling. There are, as it were, more representations than there is reality. [End Page 952] Allow me to briefly entertain a common summary statement regarding psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis intervenes where there is an excess of representation—where there is a so-called abundance of the signifier over the signified— which animates the subject with a superfluous psychical energy and neurosis (Santner 2001:28-33). Lederman's formulation suggests that the "excess of representation" apropos of our inter-subfield neurosis might involve a certain confusion of levels/layers : Some differences...