Intro to Generative Anthropology - TAS #3
This was just great. I don't know anything about those memes you're referring to, but this is definitely a high level of understanding, and very clearly explained. People can do what they want--I wouldn't object, and I doubt Gans would.
I don't think Eshelman really considers himself within GA--he found Gans's hypothesis useful for his own purposes, and Gans likes his concept of "performatism," but I only met him once, in 2009 at our conference in Ottawa and I doubt there's been much contact between him and others. Marina's great, and she's open to post-liberal, post-democratic thinking, but she doesn't write about politics and I don't know how comfortable she's be talking much about it. Most of the others are excellent scholars, with work well worth looking into, but also fairly specialized (although this varies) academics in the center-right to center-left liberal range, and I can't see any of them budging from that. But I have no doubt that everyone would be happy to see these people at conferences, or submitting essays for Anthropoetics. We have a book review section there, so if anyone wants to give that a try, rather than a full length essay, they can contact me. If there's tension, I'm sure we're well equipped to resolve it.
(By the way, one tiny correction--I think I heard one of them say that Gans is French--he's not, he was a French professor.)
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Gans is very dismissive of Deleuze. I have drawn upon his *Difference and Repetition* (he has, as I understood it, a notion of a kind of "originary repetition" that I use). Delueze actually draws quite a bit on Peirce's semiotics, whom Gans refers to on occasion but is much more important to me--but not so much for his understanding of language, I think. But Delueze seems to me focused on breaking down hierarchies and transcendence. And his theory of desire as "productive" rather than negative is, I think, very much at odds with GA. Delouse wanted to be an anarchist philosopher, I think--all horizontal, no vertical.
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Yeah, it's not a big deal, of course.
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Yes, that's interesting. Paradox and undecidability are central to GA as well--Gans usually gets at it through Godel. I suspect Gans's problem comes (and I would largely agree) with the discussion of "reterritorialization" that Ebert goes into. In a sense, these concepts that are meant to understand the conditions of structurality can't really be given a "real," causal status. Yes, when incommensurable mappings enter the same space, there is a deterritorialization and reterritorialization, but that doesn't mean we can see society or history as a series of deterritorializations and reterritorializations. That in itself would be to confuse the map with the territory. The all-at-once account of language from Levi-Strauss does, of course, "map" well onto GA. Leaving all that aside, he certainly seems like someone who might be interested in GA. I suspect a lot would depend on his institutional status.