The structural format of this book actually works with it’s intellectual aims—which seems to be a rare and difficult endeavor. But Tsing’s lists, diagrams, anecdotes, actually feel like she has organized her book into “ethnographic fragments” and “engaged universals.” Formally, Friction feels like a swidden of its own, with the forests of history and globalism cut back, burned down, and merged with new growth, lots of very different ideas spouting in the same place.
It is sort of an uneasy co-existence; at times, her subjects seem to be conspicuously absent, and I hear my self asking, “Where are the people?” But then I remember something Adriana said once, about how in ethnography, the people were the prize, the specific ethnographic details were somehow the pay-off for slogging through all the theory. So why do I seek that?
“Friction” as it applies to commodity, how commodity subsequently applies to nature, and how knowledge of nature is always cultural (170) made the most sense to me when Tsing talked about coal. As a commodity, coal goes through the process of scaling—at times it is something mineable, something saleable, something transportable, something burnable. Those somethings overlap, conflate, and supersede each other. Coal mining cannot just been seen as a universal, homogenous process that effects every environment and people in the same, monolithic manner.
Lastly, at the risk of sounding too critical, I would like say that I was slightly horrified at Tsing’s lack of reference to Strathern. The whole idea of “friction” seems to follow directly from the reading we did last week, and Tsing fully utilizes “space of partial agreement” and “scale.” Give Marilyn some credit here!
FIrst, I enjoyed Tsing's use of metaphors and visual imagery throughout this book. As someone who has to reread anthropological theory passages several times over, her descriptions of the road as friction, and of the forest as a site for collaboration and friction between humans and nonhumans, and the imagery of rats coming out into the fields, and weedy spaces was not only enjoyable to read, but I only had to reread some passages once.
Although Tsing asserts that the ethnography of globalization includes fragments, I kept bumping into dichotomies in the text such as universal/particular, conservation/destruction, public/private, foreign/local, visibility/smoke, magic/reason, rural/urban, wild/cultivated. Some of these are explicit section headings within chapters which makes me think that she perhaps using these to show fragments of these dichotomies as part of her task?
It also seems that in the text Tsing uses different definitions of globalization. In some parts in the text she appears to use it in the imperial sense, then in the economic/commerce sense, and then still in the sense of space flows. She says that cultures have always dealt with outside forces. Is she saying that culture has always been global?
One, if not the overarching, though not outspoken, trope of the text is a shift of perspective. Tsing proposes a different perspective to engage the classical global vs. local diatribe departing from an in-between space and concept that shapes them and their relationship: friction. The idea is to concentrate attention not on both (together as glocal or individually as A vs. B) antagonists, but rather on their encounter The term is deconstructed along the text through a series of “synonyms”, each one differing slightly from the others: Contamination, frontier, intersection, gap (the most powerful of all nemesis), translation, utopianism and global connections are different means through which not to create an overarching theoretical framework, as much as a heuristic tool. What Tsing does not seem to emphasize is her indebtedness to chaos theory and the butterfly effect (“Friction can be the fly in the elephant’s nose” p.6) and in particular the related concept of Cantor’s dust (her “gap” seems to mirror to it clearly: “gaps are conceptual spaces and real places into which powerful demarcations do not travel well” p.175 and also p.178) expressed in Strathern’s partial connections (she refers to her, but not to that text in particular. This seems a limit to me insofar it concerns both Cantor’s dust as well as the concept of scale). What strikes me is that the idea of friction as interpretative tool for “worldly encounters” (I do not find the page) poses an oxymoron: it is based on contextual dis-encounters between global and local as well as between different fields (economics, sociology, anthropology, environmentalism, nature loving) and people (“Indigenous” -term that Tsing substantially does not adopt nor “problematize” along the book- foreign and local contractors, government, herself). This making “opposites” contextual renders friction a present and at the same time a-historical phenomenon: friction creates a new reality acting as a space and moment of interaction between bodies and concepts, interaction that has a development in the future, but will find it’s dynamics altered by other multiple frictions in the process of becoming. Thus friction is a-historical but engenders history (?) Furthermore, friction has no intrinsic limits, and no intrinsic identity: it is created and defined by the dis-encounter of two or more tropes (global-local, natural-“historical”, etc.)
Aside, I would like to emphasize that Tsing, in recognizing Anderson’s contribution to the concept of pemuda (youth), does not propose the colonial dimension that culturally and historically associated the idea of youth with progress and success/liberty.
Anna Tsing’s discussion of the tension between the global/universal and the local is important in understanding how social formations are constituted and undermined. Capital, which has a built in tendency to produce its own universal truths, a process that is encapsulated in Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, attempts to build social networks through what Tsing describes as “spectacular accumulation”. The de-territorialized nature of these universal networks is often undermined by local truths concerning social relations and natural resources. This process is integral to the operation of capitalism on a global scale and is useful in understanding why the friction between global/universal and local is relevant. The global enclosure of the commons is driven by the attempt to make the standards and truths of capital universal and global. The numerous struggles over the constitution of new commodities and the privatization of public space bears this out. The hegemony of capitalist forms of property often rejects incommensurable local truths such as public space and property-less economic forms. Tsing’s project is not to reject the constitution of new universals, but to bring this friction to light. Her persistent idealism with respect to the building of global networks is refreshing in an era when it is so easy to succumb to the hegemonic global status of finance capital. This work can and should be applied to many more such situations of friction.
4 Comments:
At 1:26 PM,
amber said…
Globalization is not a pizza.
The structural format of this book actually works with it’s intellectual aims—which seems to be a rare and difficult endeavor. But Tsing’s lists, diagrams, anecdotes, actually feel like she has organized her book into “ethnographic fragments” and “engaged universals.” Formally, Friction feels like a swidden of its own, with the forests of history and globalism cut back, burned down, and merged with new growth, lots of very different ideas spouting in the same place.
It is sort of an uneasy co-existence; at times, her subjects seem to be conspicuously absent, and I hear my self asking, “Where are the people?” But then I remember something Adriana said once, about how in ethnography, the people were the prize, the specific ethnographic details were somehow the pay-off for slogging through all the theory. So why do I seek that?
“Friction” as it applies to commodity, how commodity subsequently applies to nature, and how knowledge of nature is always cultural (170) made the most sense to me when Tsing talked about coal. As a commodity, coal goes through the process of scaling—at times it is something mineable, something saleable, something transportable, something burnable. Those somethings overlap, conflate, and supersede each other. Coal mining cannot just been seen as a universal, homogenous process that effects every environment and people in the same, monolithic manner.
Lastly, at the risk of sounding too critical, I would like say that I was slightly horrified at Tsing’s lack of reference to Strathern. The whole idea of “friction” seems to follow directly from the reading we did last week, and Tsing fully utilizes “space of partial agreement” and “scale.” Give Marilyn some credit here!
At 2:32 PM,
Kadija Ferryman said…
FIrst, I enjoyed Tsing's use of metaphors and visual imagery throughout this book. As someone who has to reread anthropological theory passages several times over, her descriptions of the road as friction, and of the forest as a site for collaboration and friction between humans and nonhumans, and the imagery of rats coming out into the fields, and weedy spaces was not only enjoyable to read, but I only had to reread some passages once.
Although Tsing asserts that the ethnography of globalization includes fragments, I kept bumping into dichotomies in the text such as universal/particular, conservation/destruction, public/private, foreign/local, visibility/smoke, magic/reason, rural/urban, wild/cultivated. Some of these are explicit section headings within chapters which makes me think that she perhaps using these to show fragments of these dichotomies as part of her task?
It also seems that in the text Tsing uses different definitions of globalization. In some parts in the text she appears to use it in the imperial sense, then in the economic/commerce sense, and then still in the sense of space flows. She says that cultures have always dealt with outside forces. Is she saying that culture has always been global?
At 8:22 PM,
Hugh said…
This is Gabriel's commentary:
One, if not the overarching, though not outspoken, trope of the text is a shift of perspective. Tsing proposes a different perspective to engage the classical global vs. local diatribe departing from an in-between space and concept that shapes them and their relationship: friction. The idea is to concentrate attention not on both (together as glocal or individually as A vs. B) antagonists, but rather on their encounter The term is deconstructed along the text through a series of “synonyms”, each one differing slightly from the others: Contamination, frontier, intersection, gap (the most powerful of all nemesis), translation, utopianism and global connections are different means through which not to create an overarching theoretical framework, as much as a heuristic tool.
What Tsing does not seem to emphasize is her indebtedness to chaos theory and the butterfly effect (“Friction can be the fly in the elephant’s nose” p.6) and in particular the related concept of Cantor’s dust (her “gap” seems to mirror to it clearly: “gaps are conceptual spaces and real places into which powerful demarcations do not travel well” p.175 and also p.178) expressed in Strathern’s partial connections (she refers to her, but not to that text in particular. This seems a limit to me insofar it concerns both Cantor’s dust as well as the concept of scale).
What strikes me is that the idea of friction as interpretative tool for “worldly encounters” (I do not find the page) poses an oxymoron: it is based on contextual dis-encounters between global and local as well as between different fields (economics, sociology, anthropology, environmentalism, nature loving) and people (“Indigenous” -term that Tsing substantially does not adopt nor “problematize” along the book- foreign and local contractors, government, herself). This making “opposites” contextual renders friction a present and at the same time a-historical phenomenon: friction creates a new reality acting as a space and moment of interaction between bodies and concepts, interaction that has a development in the future, but will find it’s dynamics altered by other multiple frictions in the process of becoming. Thus friction is a-historical but engenders history (?) Furthermore, friction has no intrinsic limits, and no intrinsic identity: it is created and defined by the dis-encounter of two or more tropes (global-local, natural-“historical”, etc.)
Aside, I would like to emphasize that Tsing, in recognizing Anderson’s contribution to the concept of pemuda (youth), does not propose the colonial dimension that culturally and historically associated the idea of youth with progress and success/liberty.
At 8:24 PM,
Hugh said…
This is Conor's commentary:
Anna Tsing’s discussion of the tension between the global/universal and the local is important in understanding how social formations are constituted and undermined. Capital, which has a built in tendency to produce its own universal truths, a process that is encapsulated in Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, attempts to build social networks through what Tsing describes as “spectacular accumulation”. The de-territorialized nature of these universal networks is often undermined by local truths concerning social relations and natural resources. This process is integral to the operation of capitalism on a global scale and is useful in understanding why the friction between global/universal and local is relevant.
The global enclosure of the commons is driven by the attempt to make the standards and truths of capital universal and global. The numerous struggles over the constitution of new commodities and the privatization of public space bears this out. The hegemony of capitalist forms of property often rejects incommensurable local truths such as public space and property-less economic forms. Tsing’s project is not to reject the constitution of new universals, but to bring this friction to light. Her persistent idealism with respect to the building of global networks is refreshing in an era when it is so easy to succumb to the hegemonic global status of finance capital. This work can and should be applied to many more such situations of friction.
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