Scott seems to be arguing with herself. She ties herself in knots trying to find a way to recognize the fact of the subject’s distance from discourse while remaining committed to discursive determinism. The subject comes off badly, its reflections diminished to afterthoughts. Of course, I agree with Scott that the public world, including economic and political conditions and a repertoire of claims about the universe and human affairs, is extremely important. And in some settings, “total institutions” such as prisons, asylums, and concentration camps (Goffman 1961), the public world can be overwhelming, rendering personal agency socially inconsequential and suffocating reflection itself. Chaim E., a survivor of the Sobibor death camp, recalls:
You didn’t have any choices. You just were driven to do whatever you did. So it is not things that you planned that you do; it’s just whatever happened, happened. You don’t think . . . As I say: we were not individuals, we were not human beings, we were just robots where we happened to do things. . . .
It is hard really to tell what a feeling that is. . . . You think you are right, you know all the answers, and you try to find logic and things like that that doesn’t exist at all. It is one purpose there: that is, to kill the people, so that’s the purpose there. So all the logic doesn’t apply there. It is really hard to explain that, to have this feeling. It is easy to tell, but the feeling is very hard really to bring over to somebody . . . what really it means. . . .
You were not thinking for tomorrow because tomorrow’s thoughts were bad. Today was already better than tomorrow. (emphasis his)22
As Lawrence Langer observes, in the “crushing reality” of places like Sobibor, “the pain, the exhaustion, the cold . . . prevented [victims] from fantasizing that they were someone or somewhere else” (1991: 4). At Sobibor, the distance between self and (nonlinguistic!) experience, in this case between self and an abject present, shrank to zero. In more than one sense the self “functioned on the brink of extinction” (1991: 183).
Sobibor annihilated the reflective selves of the living dead trapped within its ring of towers and barbed wire, but not the capacity for reflection, which is quite evident in Chaim E.’s recollection above, made decades later. But in any case the death camp, as devastating and pathological a social milieu as one could imagine, is a poor metaphor (or metonym) for the social world most people inhabit, in which personal agency and reflection commonly have wide rein. I am arguing that reflective consciousness (and attendant agency) are not discursive constructs, but rather intrinsic endowments of human beings. That is, reflective consciousness is a substantial, albeit variably realized, human faculty whose maximal expression goes far beyond the navigation of discursive fissures or the selection of options from a cultural menu.
Reflective consciousness is variably realized because local social conditions (including, but not restricted to, discursive environments) differ. Sobibor is an extreme, a zone of death where even the living “are not human beings.” Elsewhere, reflective consciousness has space to assert itself, even if its precipitates sometimes evanesce, failing to harden into agendas for new forms of personal or social action (“The Hegemony of Discontent”). Indeed, people commonly step outside their mundane experience, their common sense, and even themselves (“Missing Persons,” “The Identity Path of Eduardo Mori,” “Do Japanese Brazilians Exist?”). Each case is different, a product of the encounter of specific people with specific forces and circumstances.
The invisibility of common sense and its occasional sedimentation into knowledge are pervasive themes of these essays. Reflective consciousness turns common sense into the consciously known, and potentially, therefore, the consciously questioned and transformed. I think one can identify conditions that favor such sedimentation—a high level of sociocultural complexity, for example (Levy 1973, 1990); or lived injustices of class, race, gender, ethnicity, or caste (Baldwin 1985 [1955], Chodorow 1999, Parish 1996); or the personal ordeals of international migrants (Linger 2001b)—but its accomplishment, which requires a mental leap or discontinuity, can generate dramatic consequences that challenge attempts at determinate human theory.
I did not make up “reflective consciousness,” though the term is, to the best of my knowledge, my own. I apprehended it in the writings of psychological anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson and Robert Levy, who emphasize discontinuities in learning and perception, and of social anthropologists such as F. G. Bailey, who describes the self-consciousstrategies of political entrepreneurs. And my own experience of life and history confers credibility upon it. My personal trajectory, my professional practice, the actions of those I know, and the actions of those I know about all become more comprehensible to me in light of such an assumption. The alternative suggestion that consciousness cannot turn back on its own products, or only trivially so, and that human subjectivity can therefore be treated as a mere mechanical effect of discourse, culture, or environment, strikes me as quite simply unbelievable.
It is well known that a deconstructively inclined philosopher can vaporize anyone’s foundations. Nevertheless, no constructive theory whatsoever is possible without some such foundations. And reflective consciousness more than meets the plausibility test: indeed, its absence from, or depreciation in, the axioms of Durkheimian and post-Durkheimian theory is what is incredible. Moreover, reflective consciousness enables bridging theory that accommodates subjective diversity, yields provocative analyses, and opens an immense field for further research.
The Essays
The perspective outlined above implicitly frames the following chapters. I have organized them into three topical sections: Meanings, Politics, and Identities. In each section, the emphasis is on theory and accompanying ethnography that span the gap between the public and the personal.
Part I: Meanings
Part I pries apart representation and subjectivity. All three essays criticize interpretive approaches that conflate the two. Interpretive analysts typically infer virtual subjectivity from representational evidence such as public symbols and performances, downplaying or ignoring personalizations of meaning. I advance an alternative view that meaning-making, a slippery and varied process, occurs at the interface between public and personal systems, and therefore accounts of meaning-making require attention to the ways specific people engage meaningful public forms.
“Has Culture Theory Lost Its Minds?” points to a cognitive skew among anthropologists themselves. The essay suggests that a commonsense model of linguistic representation misleads cultural theorists into thinking that words are like conduits or packages—that they carry meaning. This “conduit model,” which underwrites interpretive (and discursive) anthropology, has, I argue, strongly biased culture theory in the direction of culturalism. To defamiliarize the conduit model, I contrast it with an imaginary, defective, but nevertheless instructive “inkblot model,” which posits that, like subjects in a Rorschach test, people invent meanings for ambiguous stimuli. I emphasize that the actual production of meanings, captured in neither model, is best viewed as a double process: the circulation of meaningful public symbols coupled with discrete acts of personal meaning-making by those who encounter and respond to them.
The next two chapters elaborate the argument. They insist that virtual subjectivity, the product of symbolic interpretation, is no one’s subjectivity. The point is made first in “Missing Persons,” which advocates caution in applying interpretive methods to historical evidence. I draw on person-centered ethnographic research I conducted in Japan to show that the contemporary identities of specific Japanese Brazilians cannot be deduced from well-known public narratives of Brazilian nationhood and Japanese ethnicity. Such public narratives propose, but do not determine, identity sentiments. Because historians dealing with the distant past have access only to public records and other symbolic detritus, virtual subjectivity, a crude, unreliable proxy, has to stand in—but should not be mistaken—for the mentalities of the dead.
“The Metropolis, the Globe, and Mental Life” takes aim at virtual subjectivities adduced by Simmel (1950 [1903]) and Jameson (1984) for, respectively, urban dwellers and postmodern global villagers. These influential speculations, brilliant and provocative though they are, both falter in too readily inferring historically novel mentalities from generic aspects of the city and the globe.