What is anyone to do about GameStop? Who knows?

Or
On the ignorant in capitalistic action

Like about everyone else I started the week of January 25, 2021, from a position of total ignorance about GameStop, Reddit, the Robinhood “Commission Free Trading & Investing App,” and the epic battle between hedge funds and young ones (mostly men I believe) As far as I can tell this is the position of many besides grandfathers who are not any more “dans le vent” as I might have said of my grandfather half-a-century ago. I am just one among the hundreds of millions who, like me, were completely ignorant and were also altogether irrelevant since we were not participating in the battle. This irrelevance may be changing as some among this crowd, like me writing this blog post, are starting to participate though mostly as an audience to a drama playing itself on a distant stage.  As we watch we discover significant actors, their networks, their conflicts, their tactics, their armaments and their uncertainties in a very dubious battle.

The more interesting ignorance, for a social scientist, is that of the significant actors—those whose activities might have a direct impact on the activities of others.  Many of those actors probably thought, a few weeks ago, that they were knowledgeable experts, and then found out that this was not true at all. Among these actors are the millions who knew about Robinhood and used whatever it provides.  And there are also the smaller number who populate the “hedge funds” and also discovered their ignorance about actors they apparently had not noticed or had dismissed.  As an ethnographer, I would open what should not remain black boxes (“hedge funds”) to reveal their internal organization.  I might chose as my site Melvin Capital who appears in the media as one of those funds who lost the most last week (possibly half its value a month ago). According to  Google, Melvin Capital has several “chiefs” (Chief Investment Officer, Chief Operations Officer, etc.). It probably also has hundreds of employees many of whom are those I believe are known as “traders.”  I suspect many of those are hired young men (and now probably also some women) who are in charge of actually doing the work of the firm.  I am sure ignorance was well distributed among all those. I would also not be surprised to learn that some of the new traders have now been fired for not noticing what was happening and for having almost bankrupted the firm. At some point the chiefs must have become aware of the losses and then discovered who were the actors producing these losses. How could they have imagined that young (some as young as 13!) men (where are the women in this fight?) would find a way to organize to defeat a bunch of famous experts at their own game: make a lot of money with little investment by playing on obscure possibilities?

I am not saying here that the young ones are more knowledgeable. They appear not to have known that the chiefs could organize themselves to demolish the young ones’ positions for the few hours it would take to mitigate losses (and probably make a lot of the young ones loose money some of them might not have been able to afford). An early story in the New York Times (1/31/2021) only mentions young men making money, not losing it.
While Rancière might celebrate the fact that they are mostly “self-taught” (that is that their education was not controlled by any authority besides each other), the grandfather in me suspects that only a very few will end up with more money than they started with. As far as I know, one rarely wins battles against “the Market” (and those end up managers of hedge funds…). As it is often put, the young ones are going to “get an education”…

Money is being made and lost on a grand scale. If much of this money is not essential for survival anyway, then one suspects that all this is also “fun” in the way deep play can be. So, let’s leave aside the money aspect for a while, and recognize what has been happening as, also, involving active explorations of possibilities given what one might call the “affordances” of the epoch. This would include the affordances of new software, the collapse of schooling as control of young bodies for hours on end, Zoom boredom, social media dares that may be less dangerous than others (no sex, no Trump, just “ready money” that is not quite needed for survival). And then, as the young ones could no longer be dismissed by the chiefs, there is the chief own explorations of aspect of Wall Street affordances they had not noticed before. I am about sure that those the chiefs manage will now use what the young ones discovered. I am reminded of Souleles’s work on private equity funds that surprised Wall Street in the early 1970s (2019a, 2019b). At that time a few young men had discovered a possibility, and soon many followed suit.

But Souleles had to work from 40-year-old documents, and reminiscences from some of those who followed the pioneers. What I  hope will now happen is that someone will keep ethnographic tabs on the actors in this GameStop moment in order to develop better models of what I understand as ongoing education through collective difficult deliberations (2007, 2019). I trust this kind of research would help move the field away from easy “explanations” that end with the mention of “capitalism,” “neo-liberalism,” “greed,” “white privilege,” and any other such purported root cause. Obviously, the moment is part of a broader epoch that started with Reagan and Thatcher, or the Bretton Woods agreements, or Adam Smith, or … But none of these, as moments in the history of capitalism, are, precisely, causes. They are at most new conditions (constraints and possibilities) in an ecology with affordances that keep emerging and evolving. Neither the chiefs nor the young ones of the GameStop moment are just billiard balls with habitus careening on some billiard table.

So, I propose to look at the event as a sequence of moves by life forms responding poetically to various triggers. From my reading of media reports (and expanding on my post of January 28, 2021):

Time 1 — GameStop was a failing business.  Its stock was  moving lower, perhaps to 0;

Time 2 —  Some hedge fund managers (probably low level ones at first) noticed this, imagined that the “overly” high price was driven by the ignorant (see the young ones above), and decided to make money by betting that the price would go lower;

Time 3 —  young men in various basements continued buying the stock and its price kept on getting higher (I wonder why they would do this: ignorance of business fundamentals? Nostalgia from the time when the shop was their utopia where to spend Christmas money?)

Time 4 —  some of the young men noticed that they were bothering New York hedge funds and organized to buy even more stock (with the idea they would bankrupt the funds).

Time 5 —  the chiefs of the managers noticed that they were getting played and got together to apply raw economic power over the actual market place (Robinhood) where the buying was taking place and got the price to get down;

Time 6 —  the young ones mobilized further and exercised their own raw political power by making the media notice, thereby leading to a backdown from some actors—though after some of them had limited their losses;

Time 7 —  …….. [to come] ……….

To generalize, we have here a conversation or deliberation during which the ignorant teach each other new possibilities even as they make some new ones and there by produce consequences that are far more than “texts” or “narratives.”

References

Souleles, Daniel & Hervé Varenne   2019a   “Redesigning capitalism.” Chapter 4 of  Educating in Life by H. Varenne et al., 63-78.  New York: Routledge.

Souleles, Daniel 2019 Songs of profit, songs of loss: Private equity, wealth, and inequality. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

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Educating into Corona, in life

In my case, and while on the road, about everything I have learned about the virus I learned through the media, mostly from the “traditional” media (New York Times, Le Figaro, etc.) and somewhat less traditional (Yahoo summaries, etc.). I have watched some television, mostly in restaurants where it was on. I hope that people in the medical profession, as well as various politicians and “officials” with power and authority, are learning from other sources—though we will never quite know where Trump or Pelosi, Cuomo or de Blasio, etc., are getting the information on which they base their decisions.

Obviously, no one among all those (except perhaps the medical people) learned any of all this at school, though some may remember some high school class, taken decades ago about viruses and the like.

So, this virus has not (yet) been taught in school. More interestingly, whatever one learns about it is not verified by a more knowledgeable person (say, a school teacher). There are no tests. And one receives no diploma for whatever knowledge one has gotten. The “media” (journalists, TV announcers and such) are the main teachers. But they are not school teachers. Not only can they not give tests, they have no way to control what their “students” are learning. It is not even clear to me where their “curriculum about the virus today” comes from and who vets it (producers? lawyers? “officials”?). They are all very much “distance teachers” with little feedback about their impact.

Most importantly, the students are not isolated from each other as they might be in a test-driven classroom where their knowledge is supposed to be assessed independently so that they can be sorted into more or less knowledgeable. The students (me, my family, my peers, people I briefly encountered in stores or hotels) talk to each other, and they teach each other. As soon as they hear or read something presented as “knowledge about the virus,” they start discussing this knowledge in all sorts of forums with different co-participants, etc. They dispute, disagree, criticize, suggest, cajole, enforce, etc.

All this could be said to be “Cremin 101″ (1976) as I and my students developed it recently (2019). I will be using “teaching/learning Corona” for the rest of my career. I strongly encourage students who might be reading this as the event still unfolds to keep an “educational journal” focusing not only on themselves but on the others with whom they engage (very significant others, parents, friends, etc.).

[Note that this is the first of a series of posts I will be making over the near future in my role as senior anthropologist of education. This will be accompanied by a developing web site with notes and further elaboration. Note also that everything said here is under my own responsibility and does not in any way represent the position of Columbia University, Teachers College, or my colleagues and peers]

References

Cremin, Larry   1975     “Public Education and the Education of the Public.” Teachers College Record 77:1-12

Varenne, Herve et al.   2019     Educating in life. Routledge

 

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What is there to learn now, here, under maximum stress? (a problem for learning theory?)

Learning with others is, necessarily, a political matter. Thus my insistence on writing about “polities” of practice. Still, it remains that “learning” post participation risks being taken as a somewhat automatic process in the movement towards “fuller” (political) participation. Through participation one may move from apprentice to master but focusing, as we must, on movement does not tell us much about the everyday activities of the one who moves (or of the activities of those who encourage the movement—or put blocks on the way), and particularly about the activity of sorting out what to learn (what to prioritize, what to ignore, etc.).

I thought about this in the interstices of other activities I was not  able to escape these past weeks. I found myself, much against my will, and my hopes, in the position of apprentice to “next of kin” practices, first in in the neurological intensive care unit of New York/Presbyterian Hospital, and then in the regular neurological unit, and then in a rehabilitation center. At 70, it is the case that I have never been in that position, legitimately or otherwise, and that I have had much to learn even as I worried about much more than learning.

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On hackathons, machines, and flamingos

Recently, Audrey Le successfully defended a most interesting dissertation about “hackathons.” Like me a while ago you may have no idea what those would be… Well, they are events when (very much mostly) young (mostly) men play/work over a weekend at developing some “thing” (app, process, and who knows what else) that involves some computer programming (or can be analogized to computer design). Until Le started teaching me about them, I had never heard of hackathons–like I had never heard of DoItYourself biology labs, venture capitalists, equine therapies, video badge games and so many other wonder-inspiring stuff that first appeared in the late 20th century. There is indeed much “new” here for anthropologists looking for the odd human beings they thought could only encounter up the Amazon or the Congo. An anthropologist just has to go down the corridors of Columbia (Harvard, MIT, etc.) to meet never-yet-imagined “others.”
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On the importance of reading footnotes

Those who know my work know that I am a great admirer of the historian Lawrence Cremin whom I happily coopt not only as an anthropologist, but also as an anthropologist ahead of his time even as he channeled the Boasian tradition he was taught at Columbia while a graduate student.

What I found this morning is a wonderfully clear critique not only of most definitions of education, including common ones from anthropologists, but, most impressively, of most definitions of “culture.”

This is the footnote:

Bailyn advances a definition of education as “the entire process by which culture transmits itself across the generations.” Yet, as Werner Jaeger made clear in the introduction to Paideia, until the word “culture” is clarified, such a definition remains obscure. “We are accustomed to use the word culture,” Jaeger noted, “not to describe the ideal which only the Hellenocentric world possesses, but in a much more trivial and general sense, to denote something inherent in every nation of the world, even the most primitive.” He was referring, of course, to the concept as developed by the social scientists-a usage he saw associated with “the positivist passion for reducing everything to the same terms.” By Bailyn’s definition, “education” is ultimately synonymous with “enculturation,” as that term is used by the anthropologists, notably Melville Herskovits. I myself am sympathetic to Jaeger’s insistence that true education implies the deliberate, self-conscious pursuit of certain intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic ideals, though I am perfectly ready to grant that nondeliberate influences are often, if not always, more powerful and pervasive and that the educational historian must be concerned with both. For a statement of a similar problem of definition that has long bedeviled literary historians, see Howard Mumford Jones, The Theory of American Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948), pp. 59-61 and passim. My reference to “the architecture of contemporary education” is taken from the lectures of my colleague Martin S. Dworkin in his course at Teachers College on “Education, Ideology, and Mass Communication.” (Cremin 1965: 75)

Note the attack on reductionism and enculturation; note “granting nondeliberate influences” as a kind of exception to “deliberate, self-conscious, pursuit” (aka, in my current vocabulary: practical meta-discursive work).

about Facteur ChevalNote also Cremin approving of a metaphor not be taken as “constructivist” but rather as a prefiguration of Latour’s ANT: the ‘architecture’ of education.  I am not sure what Cremin would have done of my added comment that the building, as an assemblage of rooms and corridors assembled on the basis of competing blue-prints with much cracks papered over would look more like the buildings that delighted Lévi-Strauss ([1962] 1966: 17): Cheval’s villa, or Mr. Wilmmick’s suburban villa as imagined by Charles Dickens (who must have seen versions of it!). And, among many others, a Texas version… Not to mention, from the ridiculous to the sublime, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

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On thriving children and the hegemony of psychology

And researchers who specialize in individuals will never understand humanity (or why psychology is hegemonic in America).

I always wonder about the way research on interaction gets reported in the media only (or about always) when it is conducted by psychologists.  Easy to chalk to “American individualism,” as institutionalized, and to its sub-forms like “culture of poverty,” or “child development.”

This time, my antennas were agitated by an interview in the University of Chicago glossy publication for alumni.  It is titled “Little scientists” with the descriptive subtitle “Think of children as pint-sized psychologists, says parenting expert Erica Reischer, AM’96, PhD’00.”

Not too surprisingly, the editors of the magazine chose, to illustrate, a picture of a child, writing in a notebook.  Many will notice that the child is a boy, white, with auburn hair, wearing a blue t-shirt.  I notice that he is by himself.  If there were a caption, it might be “the scientist at work”…

Irony aside, the underlying work is one I wish I could use when writing about family education.  The story starts with a common place: obedience class for dogs is really about training humans.  Having just been working on Jennifer Van Tiem’s chapter on horses and human (for our When is education), I know now how extensive the anthropological literature on animal/human interaction has become.  But, of course, the editor quotes Reischer for saying something about “teaching us how to think like a dog … so that [the dog] would learn positive behaviors.”

Note the emphasis on thinking for the human, behavior for the dog, and a causal link between separate entities.

On to children, analogically.

“What we really need … is pay attention to our children’s behavior”  (as if any human being could NOT pay attention) …. “[then] we can make choices about what we are going to do about [it]” (as if NEXT acts, in an improvised sequence, could ever be matters of choice under separate control).

Most interesting is the metaphor of the scientist (a conceit, really) Reischer proposes and the editor uses as title for the piece: “Kids are doing experiments because they have to figure out how the people in their lives work. I sometimes say, ‘Pretend your kids are wearing little white lab coats, and carrying little lab notebooks, and making notes all day long about what works and what doesn’t work with you’.”  Now that could have developed into something Rancière or Garfinkel might have written as instructions to researchers (and parents): notice intelligence at work; notice the noticings and the improvisations on suggested themes given tools and affordances.

Except, of course, that the editor goes back to the atomistic, individualistic, narrative and the “secret sauce” [sic] to happy parenting: Learn how to manipulate your child like a trainer manipulates dogs.

Pavlov? Skinner?

I have not read Reischer’s book.  So I am not sure how close the magazine story comes to what she wrote, what she “believes,” or what she could be shown to do when face to face with her own children if we had videotapes of the interaction.  My experience with the editors of such magazines is that their priorities are not mine, and may not have been Reischer’s.  Public relation editors must translate for their audience: alumni who are mostly not scholars, but may be imagined to be most comfortable with stories about human interaction written in terms of causation between separately acting (free) individuals.

And yet, one might go back and rewrite the story, the book, and maybe even the research (though there many not have been any in this case) to show how the child is indeed, a “scientist” with (ethno-)methods for figuring out what happened in collaboration with (and thus in struggle with) parents as consociates as, together, they improvise the family that will have been.  One cannot be a scientist by oneself.  And researchers who specialize in individuals will never understand humanity (or why psychology is hegemonic in America).

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On educating a democratic public, democratically

And, as we ponder the questions, we must face the fact that philosophers cannot control people, even when they are very influential on matters of state authority. That, I’d say, is what a century of anthropological research has demonstrated. Radical democracy may be the human condition.

Soon after Lawrence Cremin published Public education (1976), I gushed about the book to a senior colleague.  He did not like any aspect of the book because, as I remember he put it, Cremin made of education a form of “brain-washing.”  My colleague claimed Paulo Freire and, I guess, an alternate view of what it means to educate, democratically.

I must say I was astonished.  My take then, and I have not changed my mind, was that Cremin asks something surprising from us who are given the task to design education for the public.  He asks us to pay attention to what people are doing, in the streets and alleys of the world, far from the halls where pedagogy and curriculum are discussed.

I was astonished that my colleague had not noticed that Cremin was asking us to look at the crowds around us and was criticizing the John Dewey of Democracy and education ([1916] 1966) for not imagining any other educational institution than than the State sponsored school.  I could see how a very unsympathetic critic might notice that Dewey, as a philosopher who also read the psychologies and social sciences of his time, was quite sure as to what to teach the masses settling in the United States that they should learn to participate in an American democracy.  By Chapter 7, Dewey, unapologetically, claims an aim, a “Good Aim.”  In brief, in language Teachers College still uses (though we might wonder about mention of a “social ideal” and the measurement of “the worth of a form of social life”):

Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds of societies, a criterion for educational criticism … implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which to measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets us barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder. (p. 99)

It is probably the case that Cremin would not have disagreed with this.  Cremin’s concern was with Dewey’s next step, when he gets to assume that the institution of desirable education is the public school.  I was then starting my career in a department soon to be named “Family and Community Education,” that Cremin had been instrumental in creating and which he strongly supported.  With Hope Leichter, Paul Byers, Ray McDermott, we had to wonder about what might count as education in families and communities.  I do not remember us wondering much about who might control this education, assess the worth of the design, or worry that the education parents given their children, each other, friends and consociates, might not be desirable.

Thirty years later, I was introduced to the work of Jacques Rancière who, in many ways, is a scorched earth critique of philosophers-with-an-aim, particularly philosophers of education.  Rancière starts with the Plato of the Meno.  He sides with the various shoe makers whom generations of philosophers have used as example of people who should not be involved in what we know call “knowledge production,” and even less in the teaching of this expert knowledge.  Rancière keeps asking philosophers to pay attention to, and respect, shoe makers

Rancière’s work, like Cremin, is very congenial to the generations of anthropologists who have tried to tell other social scientists and philosophers that all human being produce knowledge, pass on knowledge, transform other forms of knowledge they may encounter and, of course, make different value choices about aims, and are ready to fight for these.

Rancière is also writing about “democracy and education,” but from the point of view of a radical democrat,  Rancière’s hero is a teacher who refused to teach his expertise because he believed teaching what one knows will always be a form of “stultification,” brain-washing—particularly if the “learner” is assessed as having (not) learned just what she was supposed to learn not only as knowledge or skills but also as dispositions (beliefs, attitudes, values).

And so, whether one deplored or celebrated what happened last week, we, as the philosophers of education we cannot help but be, must ask ourselves: what is our business.  Is it convincing or is it allowing people to make up their mind?  And what are we to do with people who do not make the choices we make?

As we ponder the questions, we must face the fact that philosophers cannot control people, even when they are very influential on matters of state authority.  That, I’d say, is what a century of anthropological research has demonstrated.  Radical democracy may be the human condition.

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on parents challenging schooling

Those who follow my work know that I look for evidence (empirical? evidential?) that Bourdieu’s hypothesis about habitus driving (mis-)consciousness is wrong as written. In this search, I prefer detailed ethnographic evidence (the kind sociologists dismiss as “anecdotal”). But descriptive statistics have their place as evidence opening routes for further exploration.

So, I am thankful to my colleagues Oren Pizmony-Levy and Nancy Green Saraisky for their report of a national survey they conducted on who opts out of standardized testing and why (Who opts out and why, August 2016). The media, particularly in New York State has been reporting on something that is often presented as new: parents (mostly prosperous) refusing to have their children take some high-stake tests. This may be a cultural innovation, either because more parents are doing it, because they have found out that opting out is actually possible, or because the media started paying attention, or for other political reasons. Historical research is needed. I would also relate this movement with other movements of parents organizing to do something those with official pedagogical authority (in Bourdieu’s phrase) wish they did not do. In New York City, Mayor de Blasio and others found out that their efforts to rein in charter schools would fail as parents, mostly inner city parent financially struggling, found a way to stop the reining in. At about the same time, other parents, many recent immigrants from China, many who could not speak English, appear to have stopped another movement by those with authority to change the admission requirements to the most academic public high schools. Elsewhere in New York City, other parents organize to home school their children, while others compete mercilessly to enrol their children in astronomically expensive pre-schools.

Whether all this is good for the children, for their parents, for the State, or for humanity is something else altogether. In any events, parents keep demonstrating that there are ways to resist the school-as-is, or the school-as-some-want-it, even as they participate in the evolution of schooling into un-imaginable forms.

Bourdieu and other structural-functionalists who keep Talcott Parsons alive might mark all this as a failure of early socialization into the practical acceptance of pedagogical authority. It could be that the schools have failed at reproducing whatever made Western schooling so successful for so many years and across the world. We may have a failure in maintaining homeostasis!

But it could also be that reproduction will always fail however determined the efforts to keep alive what was. It could be that (social) life will always be about constituting the heretofore unimaginable.

And so, as I like to say, we need a theory of culture that starts with the impossibility of cultural reproduction and sets aside concerns with enculturation. Instead, we need to pays close attention to the ongoing efforts both to preserve and innovate (Varenne 2007, 2011).

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NotSpeaking as communal achievement: emergence and termination shocks

Imagine a situation (from experience in a small town in Southern France):

Person A announces “I do not speak to person B” which, in French, might be reported by A to X, Y, or Z, as “On ne se parle pas.”  “On” here is an indefinite pronoun often used in French for “we.”  The declaration constitutes a community of A, B, X, Y, Z with the rule “A/B do not speak when they encounter each other.”  The rule is both description and prescription, or perhaps more precisely differentiated instruction about the meta-pragmatics of an interactional style.

NotSpeaking is a complex speech act, and a trigger for further speech acts.

NotSpeaking requires instruction since, everything else being the same, it is performed at a moment when the two could and should speak, as, say, when walking by each other in some parking lot.  In rural Southern France, at the turn of the 21st century, such moments start with an expression of acknowledgment that the encounter has started (smile, re-organization of the body, etc.), possibly preliminaries, then “la bise” (three “air kisses” on alternate side of the head with no body contact), and then either developments that might last very long, or else a brief comment about being in a hurry, leading to various closing statements about, say, “having aperitif before we leave.”  NotSpeaking, as speech event, involves turning away of the head at the time when the expression of acknowledgment should have appeared (or other bodily movements as, for example, turning away into a side street).  NotSpeaking ends after the two bodies have passed and return to their earlier state.

As Bourdieu explained in one of his best passages about ritual insults in the Mediterranean ([1972] 1977: pp. 10ff), Maussian gifts (of which NotSpeaking is a peculiar case)  do place obligations on both participants but the response is not automatic.  Much is involved.  For example, one or the other of the party might make an exaggerated display of greeting by directly looking at the other and saying something like “Bonjour!”, perhaps with a smile.  In this case, not NotSpeaking may actually be an insult, whether in intent or in subsequent assessment.   In any event, the field is very well organized indeed for what is definitively hard work!

In brief, NotSpeaking happens within what has also been called a “community of practice.”  But this is not the nice, cosy “community” of Wenger (1998).  It is a dark place as many, in the Summer of 2016, have found, whether in Paris, Nice or other such sites of interaction and political violence.  I prefer to us the work “polity” for the groups that emerge as someone or other starts doing something to others that what was not until then part of their “normal” but now becomes inescapable.  One cannot make war by oneself, and one cannot not respond to acts of war.  Anthropologists will have to think further about this.

One way to start is to wonder about the emergence of temporary polities when people become significant to each other (whether in love or war).  The question of emergence does lead to questions about beginnings and ends, as well as questions about participation.  NotSpeaking may start when one of the protagonists decides not to speak to the other the next time they met.  And it may be that this next time is when B finds out that A does not speak to him anymore—and that may be the “start” for B.  One could even look for the instructional moments when A asserts to B, in body movement if not in words, “I do not speak to you anymore” (or the reverse as these things do change).  Conversely, the actual performance of NotSpeaking can be said to start when the two notice each other and to end a few seconds later.  What is central to me here is that NotSpeaking is specific to particular persons at particular times and requires the setting up of the encounter as a NotSpeaking.   Not speaking to billions of strangers is not relevant here.  Only NotSpeaking to a non-stranger is relevant (whether the non-stranger is an erstwhile intimate, or an erstwhile total stranger).  NotSpeaking, at the turn of the 21st century, in Southern France, is a syntagm that inscribes something in history.

There may be a way of thinking about the emergence of a new polity in history (or the re-organization of an old polity) that I have never seen used in anthropology.  It would involved borrowing from physics what is called “termination shocks.”  I learned about those a while ago in an article in Discover Magazine about Voyager 1 entering interstellar space.  Termination shocks are ubiquitous (check you bathroom sink where you can make one by running water hard into it).  NotSpeaking, (making war, falling in love) similarly arises in the interaction between contradictory forces that makes something very real: a boundary marking different kinds of normal, and difficulties when crossing the boundary.  NotSpeaking catches people who may be hurt by it.  And then its effects fade into inter-communal space where the tiny drama can be safely ignored.

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