Intro to Inside and outside the law (Social Analysis, Volume 62, Issue 3, Autumn 2018, 1–21)

Introduction

Despite the absence of shared public spaces, the serious environmental problems and the lack of centralized urban planning that characterize it, and despite the recurring political violence that marks its history (Hermez 2017), Beirut’s inhabitants of all classes, even if in different ways, often speak of a quasi-mysterious but nonetheless tangible “buzz,” a sense of “quiet pleasure,” a type of urban jouissance, woven into the texture of the city’s everyday life. What is more, this jouissance is seen as closely entangled with rather than in opposition to the sense of chaos and uncertainty that the city is able to produce in people. Lebanon’s semi-chaotic social life partly mirrors its economy. Someone, long ago now, defined Lebanon’s laissez faire capitalist economy as laissez tout faire, so bereft of any government regulation it is. The economic anarchy which allows investors and developers to pursue profit with little regard to the social, urban or ecological consequences of their investment is replicated in the way religious communal organizations, political parties and groups as well as individuals behave socially and politically in everyday life pursuing their interests with little regards to their impact on the collectivity. This is often found exasperating, and is part of what gives Lebanon’s periodic civil wars their particularly chaotic form. “Shoo hal fawda b’hal balad!” (What a chaotic nation this is!), “Ma fi nazam b’hal balad!” (There is no law and order in this nation!) or “Ma fi dawleh!” (There is no state!) are exclamations/moanings that are commonly heard. But it would be a very poor ethnographer indeed the one who does not notice that, without diminishing in any sense the general sense of exasperation that these exclamations contain, or the fact that they point to real often encountered problems, they nonetheless, and at the same time, contain a kind of mischievous enjoyment of the very chaos that they are bemoaning.

I refer to this enjoyment as “jouissance” because of its mischievousness but also because people speak of it as a state of the body just as much as a state of the mind. Of course, like everywhere people spend their time bogged down in the grind of everyday life worrying about practical and financial realities. And more than everywhere, people will be crankily caught up in an impossible traffic jam or trying to negotiate a transaction with the state bureaucracy. Yet, despite and alongside all this, people are able to express a certain joy in maneuvering through these very difficulties. And more predictably, on a quite evening alone or with family and friends, walking on the Corniche, having an arghileh (water pipe) in a café by the sea, or just sitting having a smoke and a coffee with the concierge and a few others in front of one’s apartment building, or having a man’ousheh in the morning and taking cover underneath someone’s balcony as the rain starts falling, people will readily tell you that “there’s something about this place.” A fisherman near Beirut’s Manara (lighthouse), who began by relating a variety of personal and financial problems he encounters on a daily basis finished by telling me “life is hard but every time my friends come and we play a game of cards by the sunset here, all my problems disappear, even the traffic behind us (GH: I was complaining to him about the traffic) seems like a nice traffic.” “I have the best of friends and this must be the most beautiful sunset in the world” he said. “Where else in the world did you see the sunset?” I asked, somewhat naively and genuinely wanting to find out. He hesitates for a second before turning his head and replying, “I haven’t been anywhere.” I inadvertently embarrassed him. “But it must be one of the most beautiful sunsets in the world, don’t you think?” he asks with a sense of pleading. “Yes” I said. “the most beautiful sunset and the most beautiful traffic.” Something I, being after all a Beiruti at heart, actually deeply believed.

While it is important to remember that almost everyone expresses these feelings every now and then, it is also the case, for obvious sociological reasons, that the more unburdened people are from the dismal local wages people receive, the uncertainties of the future, the effect of pollution, the weight of class, patriarchal, racial, bureaucratic and clientelist arbitrariness and domination, the more willing they are to be effusive about this “something,” this, “mellow and yet intense feeling at the same time” in the words of a man I was chatting to on the Corniche. Thus it is not surprising to note that middle-class Westerners who come to live in the city for extended periods of time have often expressed similar feelings. In her book Once Upon a Time in Beirut, the Australian journalist Catherine Taylor (2007) describes living with her husband Matthew in Beirut for a number of years while working as a Middle East foreign correspondent for an Australian newspaper. She reflects:

Matthew and I would often talk about why we liked Beirut so much. After all, it was polluted and chaotic and noisy. Don’t even start on the traffic. The politics was turbulent and sometimes dangerous… And… it was quite an expensive place to live... It was the little things, we decided, that we loved. The upside of chaos was that regulations were sporadic. We could drink cocktails hanging off the edge of a tower block with a view of the ocean; drive the wrong way down a highway when all other routes were closed and break the speed limit (what speed limit?). The pace of life itself was slow and rhythmic, soothing and full of things to like... We would wonder out loud to each other if perhaps it was simply that Beirut’s extremes exaggerated everything, made every moment seem alive. (233–234)

There is also a whole genre of light touristic journalism, regularly appearing in the international press, celebrating the way Beirut keeps being a city of enjoyment despite war and chaos, though without being based on long term experiences of life in Beirut. Radical activists and academics often bemoan this type of journalism and the clichés it circulates. They rightly see it as mystifying the serious problems Lebanon is facing. The way it is criticized, however, ends up itself being so absolute that it negates the fact that this reporting does point to a jouissance experienced by many. After all, mystificatory and light-weight as they might be, these same journalists do not write the same touristic thing about every single city. What’s more, such journalists are hardly the only ones who inflate their experience of this Beiruti enjoyment. Indeed, no one expresses this jouissance with as much conviction as returned immigrants, particularly (but not only) middle class returnees, who carry with them the economic and ontological security that they have internalized elsewhere in the world and who come to Beirut with a nostalgic desire for an imaginary Beirut where the enjoyment of anarchy and chaos is a, if not the, central feature. It is the experience of such a group of returnees that will be the main empirical focus of this paper. It should be clear from all of the above that I don’t see this enjoyment of Beirut as specific to the culture of returned immigrants. What is specific is the clarity and intensity with which it is present in this milieu, and which allow us to better understand the phenomena in question.

This paper can therefore be seen as a contribution to both an urban anthropology of Beirut and an of Lebanese diasporic culture. At the same time, however, it should be noted that urban anthropology and diasporic anthropology in general, have been more sociological and explanatory in their intent. That is, they have been anthropologies that participate in the general sociological endeavor of explaining and understanding as best as possible the nature and the dynamics of urban and diasporic phenomena. Anthropology here does not differ from sociology or any other sociologically-oriented discipline in its general analytical intent. It only diverges in terms of methodology and, in terms of the dimension of the phenomena that it chooses to analyze and emphasize. It is worth noting in this regard that with the exception of the thorough doctoral work of Kristin Monroe (2016), which explores the role of capitalism, corruption, and patronage in shaping the informal and unplanned character of urban space, some the best critically and theoretically-informed, sociologically-oriented and ethnographically-based studies of Beirut’s urban culture is neither the work of sociologists or anthropologists but of academics working at the intersection of architecture, urban design and politics (see the work of Fawaz [2009a; 2009b] and Harb [2010a; 2010b]). My approach here differs from this not so much because of a lesser commitment to the sociological project, but more because I want to wed it to what I consider a more specifically critical-anthropological quest for radical cultural alterity (Hage 2015). This can be summed up with one guiding question: in what way does the study of a particular socio-cultural phenomena expand our knowledge of the plurality of modes of existing in the world?  Though not concerned with radical alterity as such, the work of AbdouMaliq Simone (2004) offers, in a general sense, a similar direction. Studying something as intimately part of our everyday life, and as connected with capitalism and modernity as Lebanese urban and diasporic cultures are today, is not usually the ground on which such a classical critical anthropological question is asked. Indeed it is more often associated with “exotic” or “primitivist” anthropology where alternative forms of existence to our own are usually found. So there is something akin to a disciplinary challenge behind engaging in such an approach while studying diaspora. Therefore, notwithstanding the desire to elucidate certain dimensions of Lebanese urban and diasporic life, it is important to remember that it is this search for “another” sociality that is the primary driving intellectual quest behind this paper. As a necessary corollary of this, is the willingness to “do” anthropology (in the philosophical sense of the word) with one’s ethnographic material. This is similar to what Holbraad and Pedersen (2017: 80) describe as the “willingness to stage the encounter with ethnography as an experiment in conceptual reflexivity.”

When confronted with the expressions of jouissance such as those noted above, it would be easy to see in them a mere individualized libertarian enjoyment of an excess agency, akin to the urban Dionysian experience described by Ulf Hannerz (1981), but magnified by the absence of any systematic law-regulated forms of sociality. But, to be clear, we are not dealing with mere chaos here. Firstly, because state laws in Beirut are never completely absent. They are merely selectively or incompetently implemented, both in terms of where and on whom they are implemented, and with what degree of tenacity and intransigence. Secondly, and as importantly, even when the state’s capacity to implement the law was at its weakest during the civil war, Beirut, except perhaps in the war zones proper, never descended into pure chaos. Indeed, while it is more customary to speak of how unruly and chaotic Lebanon is, the more astonishing, though less dramatically experienced, fact is how ruleful and disciplined it remains despite all the wars and the inability of the state to adequately govern and uphold the law. Everything continues to function: services, shops, traffic, schools, everyday social life, etc. – not wonderfully, indeed often very badly, but functions without collapsing nonetheless. It is this capacity of society to continue being one, to offer possibilities of everyday forms of relationality, co-existence and considerate interaction, in the shadow of the state, as it were, that invites us to think the presence of another, outside-the-law, mode of sociality that allows for the continuation of social life.

Anthropology, more so than other disciplines, has always had to come to terms with forms of sociality that are not based on state regulation of law and order. As James Scott (2009) notes:

Until shortly before the common era, the very last 1 percent of human history, the social landscape consisted of elementary, self-governing, kinship units that might, occasionally, cooperate in hunting, feasting, skirmishing, trading and peacemaking. It did not contain anything that one could call a state. In other words, living in the absence of state structures has been the standard human condition. (3)

And there is particularly a long lineage of anthropological work highlighting the “horizontal” sociality of the gift in opposition to the “vertically mediated” sociality of the state. The contrast between state-based and gift-based forms of social relations is already well-explored in Marcel Mauss’ classic work The Gift (2002 [1925]) and by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) after him who saw in reciprocal sociality the “elementary” organizing principle of kinship. This lineage continues via the work of Pierre Clastres (1987) as well as Marshall Sahlins’ masterful analysis of Mauss’s work in Stone Age Economics (1972), where he argues that: “Where in the traditional view the contract was a form of political exchange, Mauss saw exchange as a form of political contract” (169).

This paper sees itself as a contribution to this anthropological lineage, arguing that it is to such outside of the state form of sociality that the jouissance we have introduced above takes us to. To begin to do so we need to bravely enter the world of Beirut’s traffic, for nowhere is this sociality more present than in the way people have to negotiate the city’s streets.

Towards a lenticular understanding of extractive and distributional inequality

(This paper was presented at the Georgraphies of Inequality conference – University of Melbourne, March 2017)

I was administratively organizing, with my own university, a visiting position in Amsterdam a while ago. My chair of department wasn’t clear as to what I needed to do, and she suggested I go and see Human Resources. There an HR officer listened to me and said: ‘Since it’s a non-paying position all you need to do is have it approved by your superior’. I found the use of the word ‘superior’ genuinely off-putting. ‘My superior?’ I said with a hint of irony. ‘Your supervisor’ she said, not with any sense that she previously said something wrong and needed to correct herself, but more as if she is further clarifying her previous category.

My reaction to the word ‘superior’ was clearly not motivated by any egalitarian impulse. Reflecting on it later it was clear to me that it was the very opposite of an egalitarian reaction: it was an elitist reaction. Having acquired my Professor title some fifteen years ago and having accumulated all kinds of national and international recognition, I thought of myself as a possessor of a lot of intellectual capital, and I wasn’t going to easily be made to think of anybody in the university system as ‘my superior’. At the same time, my reaction was not based on thinking that whoever was thought of as my superior was in fact my inferior. It was more that the order of distribution that was being used to determine who was superior and inferior was not an academic one. It was the order of ‘administrative capital’. Thus, in my resistance to the classification produced by HR, I was not only struggling to maintain my superiority in the order of distribution of academic/intellectual capital. I was also struggling to ensure that the latter order of distribution prevails over the order of distribution of bureaucratic/administrative capital in determining who is ‘really’ superior and inferior in the university system. And that is the point I want to illustrate: the social world is made of a plurality of intersecting orders of inequality that relate to each other, compete among or feed into each other in a variety of ways. I guess what I am arguing is a variety of what is now called intersectionality though, as will be seen, I am pluralizing the types, orders and scales of inequality to include more than the usual matrix of class, race, gender and sexuality. These orders of inequality can criss-cross or encompass each other. They are not all of the same type and they do not exist on the same scale. Nor are they necessarily animated by similar political or even moral imperatives. Social scientists and Humanities scholars who have read their classics know from Dumont that one cannot universalize too much about the moral value of equality. But this value does not only change from culture to culture, it changes from one plane or order of distribution to another. Thinking that symbolic equality between the sexes is good, that men and women deserve to be respected equally does not mean you also accept generational symbolic equality. You can still think that extra respect for the elderly is a thing worthy of being defended on the ground of an inequality of experience and wisdom that needs to be accepted rather than struggled against.

Equally important to highlight is that the struggle for equality in one order is not always a struggle for inequality in others. To stay in the university system: when I was a student in the mid-seventies radical lecturers and tutors engaged in competitive informality. I remember the very first sociology tutor I had wearing jeans and thongs and putting her feet on the table. She said ‘my name is Ann’ as she pulled her packet of Drum and rolled her obligatory cigarette. Today the same people who were part of this egalitarian impulse or at least people with a similar ethos look with suspicion at students who easily slip into ‘Hey’ mode as if there is nothing to it. Quite radical feminist academics now feel that they want to ask such students to address them by their title, Dr. or Professor. They feel that the egalitarian impulse to abolish titles is in fact non-egalitarian when seen from a patriarchal perspective or from the perspective of the conflict between bureaucratic and academic capital referred to above: while students are being very ‘Hey’ with their teachers they would never go ‘Hey’ to a Dean or a Head of School. This illustrates another important dimension of the intersection between a plurality of orders of inequality referred to above: some struggle for equality in one order can be part of both promoting inequality in another order, and promoting the dominance of one order of inequality over another order.

It is with this in mind that I want to now move to an examination of the intersection of two very broad orders of inequality. What I will refer to as ‘distributional inequality’ and ‘extractive inequality’. These orders are very different kind of realities: they not only assume different kind of inequality but also different kind of experiences as well as different dimensions of what are complex multi-faceted social subjects. Some also see them as assuming a different kind of analytics: distributional inequality is seen as a ‘surface’ phenomenon that can be recorded through observation while extractive inequality is perceived as more structural and as such requiring an analytics of phenomena that are beneath the surface of the social.

One of the most fundamental differences between the two is that extractive inequality assumes a direct relation between subjects doing the extracting and subjects from whom things are being extracted, while distributional inequality assumes no necessary relation between the unequal parts. Extractive inequality is produced by the very relation between the two unequal parts. One part gets more at the expense of the other. It is a relation of suction through which the growth in being of one party happens via a process of dispossession of, or the appropriation of something from, and therefore a diminishing in being of, the other. With distributional inequality the relation is of an epistemological. It comes into being through it being noted a posteriori via a process of observation and comparison whether by analysts or by lay people, whether by outsiders or by the people concerned themselves. It is in the process of comparison that one comes to experience or notice inequality. Distributional inequality, whether material or symbolic or both, can be attributed to a variety of factors: differential of skills and abilities, differential of inheritance, differential of valorization by the state, differential of valorization by cultural tradition, etc. Nonetheless, there is no necessary experience of a relation between the two unequal parties. That is, an analyst can declare two groups having an unequal possession of x or y without the groups themselves noticing that they are unequal.

Distributional inequality involves people who are individualized through their relation to the state, mainly citizens. These citizens can be individuals or collectives but there is no actual relations between them (they exist in a form of what Jean-Paul Sartre referred to as seriality). Because of its essentially comparative nature, it partakes in the order of abstract value at the same time as it invokes abstract state-defined subjects.

Extractive inequality, on the other hand, involves the pulling out of concrete value (labour, land, resources) out of others. As such it partakes in the order of people with concrete particularities relating to each other as such. It is characteristic of the radical Marxist and sometimes feminist traditions to see extractive inequality as the structural cause of distributional inequality. Thus, distributional inequality is conceived as superficial and less fundamental. Likewise the politics dealing with distributional inequality is seen as reformist, while the politics dealing with extractive inequality is seen as requiring a revolutionary transformation. Some Marxists take this as far as saying that distributional inequality is pure ideology, or pure appearance. As such, it masks extractive inequality which is of the essence of the phenomenon. While I agree that the order of extraction and exploitation is more of the essence of capitalism, I am not particularly sympathetic to attempts to minimize the reality of the experience of distributional inequality. Nor do I feel that extractive inequality is so ‘deep’ and ‘structural’, if by this it is meant to convey that it is less experienced in practice. It is because the order of distribution and the order of extraction are both experiential realities that I like to think of them as intersecting realities rather than one being more real or ‘deep’ than the other, or one belonging to the level of the structures and essence and one the level of experiential appearances. What does it mean to speak of orders of inequality as intersecting realities? And in what way can this be analytically significant? In what follows I want to begin answering these questions by reflecting on the way the distributional and extractive orders of inequality come to co-exist within settler-colonialism.

In his depiction of the impact of French colonialism in Algeria Pierre Bourdieu examines the way capitalist modernity introduced by the French deprived the Algerian peasants of their socio-cultural reality. Bourdieu makes clear that this is not a case of the Algerian peasants becoming like French workers or the French underclass dominated within French capitalist society. Rather than being dominated within that reality they were dominated by that reality which undermines the world to which the peasants habitually operated. It robs them of their own reality. This differentiation between ‘being dominated within a reality’ and ‘being dominated by that reality’ offers us a paradigmatic colonial situation that articulates itself to the differentiation between the order of distributional inequality and the order of extractive inequality examined above. This is so because, from the moment of colonization, settler colonial society and the colonial state face the colonized in an on-going colonial relation of extraction. At the same time, settler-colonial society sooner or later ‘integrates’ the colonized subject as a citizen who more often than not becomes an underclass within the distributional order of society.

Despite many political, and sometimes academic, subjects reducing this to an either/or choice, the difficulty of engaging in, and analyzing, Indigenous politics in Australia, for instance, arises precisely because Indigenous society is enmeshed in both those realities, not in one or the other. On one hand, we still have a colonial situation and an extractive order of inequality where one people are subjugating and dispossessing another of land and resources with the state being party to this subjugation and dispossession, and an active participant in the colonizing assemblage. On the other hand, we have a post-colonial society of citizens governed by a post-colonial and managerial state that relates to all the inhabitants of Australia as citizens, its Indigenous people included. Indigenous people struggle for more services, more income, more recognition, and in the process see themselves as citizens struggling against distributional inequality. But they also struggle as colonized people to re-gain whatever it is possible to regain from what has been extracted from them, particularly in the form of demands for land return and for reparations. These two orders of inequality and the struggle against each are not always, or even often, clearly separated. On the contrary more often than not they intersect and can only be separated analytically. Furthermore, as we began by noting the two orders can be played against each other. Because of its far reaching structural consequences, the most common maneuvre has been by the colonial states and the colonial white subjects to suppress the existence of the struggles to redress the effects of extractive inequalities by reducing them to distributional inequalities.

What does it mean to say that these two orders of inequality are intersecting? Intersecting can itself conjure an image of a very tidy encounter in the manner of a road intersection. The intersection we need to imagine, however, is anything but. It is an entanglement. There are situations where the order of distributional inequality and the order of extractive inequality are mapped into different geographies. In Israel/Palestine for instance, the Palestinians outside Israel in the West Bank and the Gaza strip are almost exclusively subjected to an extractive inequality, while the Palestinians inside Israel have to negotiate both. The Palestinians inside Israel can struggle for colonial and for distributive justice. The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories can only struggle for colonial justice. Even in Australia we can say that the Indigenous people living on remote communities and those who live in the cities experience different exposures to distributional and extractive inequality. Still, in those cases, as in most, it is impossible to neatly separate the two orders of inequality. The indigenous subject is continually encountering metonymic fragments of one or the other reminding us of the co-existence of both. It is this kind of situation that I would like to refer to as lenticular. Wikepedia’s definition of lenticular is useful here:

Lenticular printing is a technology in which lenticular lenses (a technology that is also used for 3D displays) are used to produce printed images with … the ability to change or move as the image is viewed from different angles.

Examples of lenticular printing include flip and animation effects such as winking eyes, and modern advertising graphics that change their message depending on the viewing angle.

Colloquial terms for lenticular prints include "flickers", "winkies", "wiggle pictures" and "tilt cards". Also the trademarks Vari-Vue and Magic Motion are often used for lenticular pictures, without regard to the actual manufacturer. In Britain and United States, they may also be known as "holograms".

There are a number of reasons why it is useful to speak of the intersection of orders of inequality as a lenticular space. Most importantly perhaps is that lenticular technology does not create a situation where we have one photo, and that same photo is perceived differently according to the angle or perspective from which it is seen. This kind of epistemological perspectivism is far from the kind of situation we need to theorise here. As should be clear from the above, what we are dealing with is not a multiplicity of ‘views’ of reality but a multiplicity of realities, what we called a multiplicity of orders of inequality. And this is precisely what lenticular technology allows us to think: what we have is the existence of two realities within the same space. Each of these realities come forth according to the perspective from which the surface is related to. This is ontological perspectivism: different assemblages of subjectivities, relationalities and forms of enmeshment in the world that are co-existing by being entangled with each other. The significance of the lenticular condition is that situations of ambivalence, vacillation and uncertainty which are subjective states of social subjects have to be theorized as properties of reality itself, an ontological condition.

Furthermore, as with the experience of looking at a lenticularly produced surface, the space inhabited by the colonized subject is unceasingly fluctuating between fragments of distributional and fragments of extractive inequality as well as undefined fragments that appear as an unstable combination that can become either one of the two forms at any point. It can even be some new form that is a fusion of both. The analytical task in the encounter with such lenticular realities becomes one of accounting for the varieties of experiences it entails: this can be an anarchic experience where fluctuations between one reality and another follow no necessary pattern or rhythm. But the political struggles that are part and parcel of this lenticular space, and the fact that some socio-political and economic forces have an interest in the salience of one reality over another, mean that there are sometimes logics and patterns behind the various durations, fluctuations, modes, degrees and intensities with which each reality and the move from one to another reality are experienced. This is primarily a sociological work of disentanglement.

States of Decay (short version)

A statement such as ‘we live in an era of unprecedented social and moral decay’ might be hard to substantiate empirically. Still, you are less likely to be ridiculed if you make the above statement than if you make a statement such as ‘we live in an era of unprecedented social and moral regeneration’. The mood of our time is depressive and we are more likely to hear of social, moral, urban not to mention ecological degradation, decline and atrophy than the contrary.

But what is really meant when we say we are in a period of moral or ecological decay? For Christians around the world Ash Wednesday (or Monday among eastern Christians) marks a day of ensuring that believers remember that they exist in decaying bodies, that they are ‘of dust and to dust they will return’. And as Masashi Kishimoto’s famous manga character Orochimaru tells us: ‘All things that have form eventually decay.’ But it is clearly not in reference to such a ‘normal’ process that one declares things to be decaying.

Nietzsche has differentiated between a normal and pathological deay. For him, the pathological state was a specifically modern disease associated with Christian morality. As he put it ‘…when anemia is construed as an ideal, and contempt for the body as “salvation of the soul”—what else is this if not a recipe for décadence?’ One should note the etymological connections between decay and decadence here.

As Heike Schotten explains, Nietzsche’s decay ‘is a decay that has exceeded its healthy boundaries and convulsed the entire organism.’ It seems to me that the latter sentence puts us on the right track towards understanding what people mean when they use the term decay to refer to decay as a perceived problem. Being a process, decay has a temporality, a pace and a tempo. Pathological decay is an acceleration of that pace and tempo. Martin Demant Frederiksen has written a rich ethnographic piece detailing the oppositional politics triggered by public renovations that have decayed too soon in Tbilsi. Frederiksen’s piece conjures the spectre of so many development projects in the world that begin as a vision of a better future but then decay too soon.

In all of the above decay is felt and is feared as announcing a premature death, or less anthropocentrically, it is announcing that another non-anthropocentric principle of life is taking over the individual or the social body. Simmel, in his brilliant essay on ruins, sees the latter as a taking over, by natural forces, of what were architecturally-inspired spaces (buildings) defined by a kind of balance of power between human design and nature prevailed: “… decay appears as nature's revenge for the spirit's having violated it by making a form in its own image.”

In this sense decay is a perspective. We can watch a leaf on the ground that is rotting and speak of decay. But from the macro-perspective of the rainforest where it is located it is part of the process of the forest’s regeneration. Likewise, from the micro perspective of the rot itself, decomposition is itself an effervescence of a multiplicity of forms of life. In that regard, Baudelaire’s famous Une Charogne (The Carcass) is an avant-garde text:

The flies the putrid belly buzz'd about,
Whence black battalions throng
Of maggots, like thick liquid flowing out
The living rags along.

And as a wave they mounted and went down,
Or darted sparkling wide;
As if the body, by a wild breath blown,
Lived as it multiplied.

‘Jazz is not dead’ announces Frank Zappa ‘it just smells funny’. He at once takes us to the two most distinguishing dimensions of the phenomenon: First, decay is metaphorically and metonymically connected to the figure of the not-yet-dead, or worse, the figure of the should-be-dead-but-isn’t, the zombie. Second, decay always plunges us into a sensory and particularly olfactory order of reality.

In what way can we say that decay necessitates an ethnography of zombie-ism? The figure of the not-yet is the figure most associated with hope in the work of Ernst Bloch, the not-yet meant the ‘not-yet-born’. Decay is the direct opposite for it conjures the figure of the not-yet-dead. The living that is pregnant with the signs of its decomposition and disintegration.

It is also hard to read someone describing an experience of decay without reference to its stench. As with Baudelaire’s poem above:

The sky regarded as the carcass proud
Oped flower-like to the day;
So strong the odour, on the grass you vow'd
You thought to faint away.

It is interesting that in her essay Imperial Debris where she concentrates on the trail of ruins and ruination that colonialism leaves behind, Ann Laura Stoler encounters the stench of decay in many places but her gaze at them from a ruins perspective reduces them to precisely that: ruins without the sensory and affective dimension that is attached to them.

The point is not to reduce all decay to organic decay. But it is to argue that this olfactory dimension here is more metonymic than metaphoric, that it connects us to an unavoidable sensory/affective dimension of decay that needs to be captured ethnographically if we are to fully answer questions such as ‘what form does rot take?’. This is the sensory/affective dimension where Fanon was particularly at home and which made his experience of a ‘tinge of decay’ a non-metaphoric one. Nietzsche’s is also at home in this domain:

My instinct for cleanliness is characterized by a perfectly uncanny sensitivity so that the proximity or—what am I saying?—the inmost parts, the “entrails” of every soul are physiologically perceived by me—smelled...

An ethnography of decay unlike an ethnography of ruins might have to capture decay bodily and sensually. It has to experience its stench and feel the disgust of being present in its proximity. It might need to be a politically disgusted ethnography.