City intelligible : a philosophical and historical anthropology of global commoditisation before industrialisation 9789004414921, 2019046041, 2019046042, 9789004414914

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City Intelligible

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Studies in Global Social History Series Editor Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Editorial Board Sven Beckert (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, usa) Dirk Hoerder (University of Arizona, Phoenix, AZ, usa) Chitra Joshi (Indraprastha College, Delhi University, India) Amarjit Kaur (University of New England, Armidale, Australia) Barbara Weinstein (New York University, New York, NY, usa)

volume 38

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sgsh

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Figure 1

Eve passing the apple to Adam. Page-illumination from Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus (Ulm, 1473), fol. 3v. By Johannes Zainer. (Source: Library of the University of Heidelberg [urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-diglit-425213], Public Domain)

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City Intelligible A Philosophical and Historical Anthropology of Global Commoditisation before Industrialisation

By

Frank Perlin

leiden | boston

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Cover illustration and frontispiece: Boccaccio, Giovanni, De claris mulieribus—Ulm, 1473. Available on https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/ib00716000/0012 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Author: Perlin, Frank Title: City intelligible : a philosophical and historical anthropology of global commoditisation before industrialisation Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2020] | Series: Studies in global social history, 1874-6705 ; volume 38 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019046041 (print) | LCCN 2019046042 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004414914 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004414921 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Money--History. | Economic anthropology. Classification: LCC HG231 .P47 2020 (print) | LCC HG231 (ebook) | DDC 306.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046041 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046042

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1874-6705 ISBN 978-90-04-41491-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-41492-1 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents List of Illustrations  xi Foreword by Ravi Ahuja  xvii Foreword by Aditya Sarkar  xxv Acknowledgements  xlv Notice to the Reader  xlix More than a Preface or Introduction! The Transcendental Constitution of the Cultural, Historical and Empirical Object: The Problem and Task of the Two Anthropologies  1 1 Initial Notice—an Order of Reading  1 2 The Subject Matter and the Project  2 3 To Constitute History and Society … the Two Taxonomies  24 4 The Three Criticisms  40 5 A Critical and Transcendental Anthropology of Intercultural Translatability—the Question of Method  44 6 Final Resolution of a Dilemma: The A-Priori, at Once Universal and Empirical  59 7 The Composition of the Book  63 Illustrations Section 1: « Phenomenology-lessons »  66

Part 1 Artifice & Nature: A Kantian and Historical Anthropology of Commoditisation before Industrialisation 1 From the Closed World to the Open Continuum  75 1 Complexity, Language & Uncertainty  75 2 Order, Unit & Convenience in Economic History. Language-use as Problem  87 3 Production and Marketing as an Issue of Complexity  93 4 Alternative Principles of Order & Method  101 i The Propositions  101 ii Sampling as Method  119 iii Resources for Sampling, and a Hypothesis  129 A Textile Market-censuses  130 B Raw Cottons  133 C Pre-spun Wools & Woollen Yarns  135 D The Knowledge Problem  137 E Lists of Coinages Brought to Particular Markets  140 Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Illustrations Section 2: « Knowledge Wells » and « Knowledge Towers »  151 2 Unpacking, Disengaging and Linking  158 1 The Production and Marketing of Type: Phases, Extensions, Disengagements and Articulations  158 i The « Raw Materials » of Production  162 A Empirical Linkage  162 B Initial Implications  175 ii Cloth Typologies  179 iii Speciation in Field & Market (Autonomy for Connection)  190 2 Quality and Number  205 Illustrations Section 3: Flora & Fauna (Depiction of Seamless Corporal Continuity between Animal- and Plant-form)  211 3 A Second Object World  216 1 The Continuum  216 i A Problem of Method  224 ii Commodity Nature  231 A An Artificial Object World, & Its Taxonomy  231 a Continuity & Lexicality  231 b Artifice  232 c Artificial & Natural Botanies  234 B Marketisation as Communication  238 a Markets & Complexity  239 b The Issue of Translatability—Markets & Frontiers  241 c Markets & Information  243 2 Kant’s Tower of Babel & the Cultural Universal  244 i Metaphor & Construction  244 ii A Kantian Approach to Commoditisation & Translatability  258 iii The Universal and Cultural Difference  265 A  The Very Idea of a Universal Culture and Mind Posed as Problem   265 B First Invalid—the Biological A-Priori  266 C Second Invalid—Plurality of Societies as A-Priori  269 D An Answer—Historical Generation of the Universal as a Empirical Possibility  269 3 Cultural and Natural Space/Times  272 i Introduction. For an Explanation of Difference  272 Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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ii iii iv

Newtonian Space/Time & Practical Knowledge  281 Species Construction and Its Transcendental Space/Time  299 Extension in Space/Time  318 A Rephrasing the Coordinates of Choice & Limit with Respect to Reason  319 B Neither Closed nor Infinite, but Finite & Illimitable  328 a A Unity of Formative and Constructional Principle of the Exotic  328 b But What Kind of Unity?  342 c A Poesis of the Incomparable  349 d Not an Infinity but Finitude  354 e A Finitude Closed and Bounded? Or Open and Illimitable? Our Return to Kant!  358 f Thinking the Object into Being and the Reality-Status of That Thought  371 g An Edifice Built Only with Matter Accessible to Human Kind  380 C Further Thoughts about the Meaning of a « Universal » Culture of Practice and Mind  387 v Intersubjectivity and Non-Essentialist Construction  391 4 Postface  402 Illustrations Section 4: Typological Representation, the « Species Garden » and the Palace of Memory (Representation of the Phenomenal World)   405

Part 2 Taxonomy & Commodity: In Global Transfers of Plant Forms and Plant Products into Early-modern Europe (the Cultural Production of Nature, or the Foundations of Early Botany) Introduction to Part 2: Plant Artifice/Plant Nature  414 1 A General Framework  429 1 Introduction  429 2 Contexts, Empirical & Intellectual  432 3 Foundational Difficulties  434 i Problem Domains  434 A Botany  435 B Field Production as Commodity Production  436 C « Esoteric » Transfer and Its Institutional Context  436 Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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D  Commodity Form & Botanical Knowledge (a Conceptual Context)  437 E Artificial Botany as Culture (Unity and Diversity)  437 Substantive Discussion  439 A The Continuum of Culture, Language, Systematics: Translatability  439 B The Cultural Specificity of Any Grown Plant. Selection in Artificial Botanies  444 C Market Determination of « Artificial » Plant Variation  453 D A Partial Explanation in Terms of Transmission of Cultural Universals in the Kantian Sense  453

Illustrations Section 5: Principles of Exchange, Trust and Accord. The Act of Translation  455 2 Foundations of Botany in Western Europe  459 1 Europe & the World: Phases & Aspects of Botanical Abstraction  459 i Medical Botany, Horta Botanica, Taxonomies & Pharmacopoeia  462 ii The Concept of Type, Agricultural Part-Products & Market Continua  467 3 A Postface: Narrative Style, Evolutionary Form, and the Shaping of an Early Science: Botany  477 Illustrations Section 6:  Moneys and Portable Instruments  483 Appendix 1 Order in Artificial and Spontaneous Natures  493 Illustrations Section 7: Sherds of the Inter-Asian Trades in Ceramics  500 Appendix 2 « The Phenomenology Lesson ». A Commentary on the Illustrations  504 Bibliography  548 1 Introduction: Selection and Translation  548 2 Kant, Hegel and Husserl  550 3 General Bibliography  562 Index of Names  587 Thematic Subject Index   609 Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

Illustrations

Section 1. « Phenomenology-lessons »

1

(Frontispiece) Eve passing the apple to Adam. Page-illumination from Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus (Ulm, 1473), fol. 3v. By Johannes Zainer. (Source: Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg [urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-diglit-425213], Public Domain)  IV 2 Eve passing the apple to Adam. Title page of Jacob Rüff, De Conceptu de Generatione Hominis (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1587 [1st edn. 1554]), title-page of Chapter I. Artist unknown. (Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, London [B450-1994])  66 3 Jacob Rüff, De Conceptu de Generatione Hominis (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1587), title-page of Chapter 2 and of Book 4. Artist unknown. (Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, London [B450-1994])  67 4a Vietnamese domestic rice bowl (low-priced modern domestic ware). Phoenix and dragon pass the world from the one to the other in the procedural movement between the universal and the phenomenal. (Source: In Author’s possession)  68 4b Close-up of same.  68 4c For comparison and precision, the theme of dragon and phoenix more carefully designed on the ceiling of a Vietnamese restaurant in a small French town.  69 5 Edvard Munch, The Scream (Skrik), lithograph of 1895. The phenomenal arises from a universal ground of wave, matter as if composed of wave motion, evidence of his interest in contemporary science and the constitution of matter, as also in representing matter and sentiment by artistic means. (Source: Munchmuseet Oslo. Public Domain)  70 6 Edvard Munch, On the Waves of Love (På Kjaerlighetens bolger), lithograph of 1896. The phenomenon of sentiment and feeling arising from the nature of matter; his interest in wave theory and in the constitution of matter, and also in the metaphysic of spiritual love as the veritable expressive agency of essence in giving value to the phenomenal. (Source: Munchmuseet Oslo. Public Domain)  71 7a Edvard Munch, Galloping Horse (Galopperende Hest), painting of 1910–1912. As if attempting further to purify and synthesise that representation of wave and matter underlying all matter … all reality. (Source: Munchmuseet Oslo. Public Domain)  71 7b Edvard Munch, Galloping Horse (Galopperende Hest), painting of 1928. A later, as-if cinematic and more pure representation of motion. (Source: Munchmuseet Oslo. Public Domain)  72 Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Section 2. « Knowledge  Wells » and « Knowledge Towers »

8

The anatomy theatre, University of Leiden, executed in 1650 by Willem van Swanenburg. The analyst separates a corpus into each of its parts and that further into its sub-parts, and so on, to the ongoing astonishment and fervent discussion of his audience. (Source: Public Domain)  151 9 The anatomy theatre of Andræa Vesalius, frontispiece/titlepage of Andreae Vesalii Brvxellensis,… de Humani corporis fabrica Libri septem … (2nd edn. of Basel, 1555), frontispiece, said to have been executed by the school of Titian. (Source: Brotherton Library, Special Collections Research Centre, Leeds University Library)  152 10 Infinite rectangular tower of Babel. Artist unknown. (Source: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photograph by Tom Haartsen, Ouderkerk a/d Amstel)  153 11 Circular helical tower of Babel. Artist unknown. (Source: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photograph by Tom Haartsen, Ouderkerk a/d Amstel)  154 12 Square « helical » tower of Babel by Gheerært Harenbout, Breviarum Grimani, c. 1508–1519. (Source: Biblioteca Nationale Marciana, Venezia [fol. 288v, tav. 1011])  155 13 Christ Disputing with the Doctors, by Bernardino Butinone (1487–1507). National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh [Cat. No. 1746], courtesy of Sra. Laura Llobreras.  156 14 Medical gardens, circular and square, modelled on the helical tower of knowledge, from Olivier de Serres, Théatre de L’Agriculture (Paris, 1600). (Source: Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patrimoine, Toulouse [Res. B XVII 58])  157 15 Le Jardin du Roi in 1636 for the culture of medicinal plants. See top right for our medicinal Babel of herbal plant types. Engraving of 1636 by Frédéric Scalberge. (Source: Bibliothèque Centrale du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle & Gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France)  157

 Section 3. Flora & Fauna (Depiction of Seamless Corporal Continuity between Animal- and Plant-form) 16

Medieval relief sculpture in stone. Rodez Cathedral. (Source: Author’s photograph)  211

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17 Relief carving in wood. Imperial Academy and Confucian Temple of Literature, Hanoi. (Source: Author’s photograph)  212 18 Illuminated capital « L ». Olivier de Serres, Théâtre de L’Agriculture, edn. of 1600. Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patrimoine, Toulouse Res. [B XVII 58]  212 19 Vignette heading chapter of Olivier de Serres, Théâtre de L’Agriculture, edn. of 1600. (Source: Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patrimoine, Toulouse Res. [B XVII 58])  213 20 Vignette ending letter « A » in Diccionario de Autoridades, book I, 524. (Source: Author’s copy and photograph)  213 21a Carved wood shutter of temple Wat Khokkhormingmoungkhoun in Pakbeng, Oudomxay Province, Laos (viz. right-hand panel for depiction of seamless corporal continuity between kinnara and foliage surround). (Source: Author’s photograph)  214 21b Carved « decoration » in temple Wat Khokkhormingmoungkhoun in Pakbeng, Oudomxay Province, Laos. (Source: Author’s photograph)  214 21c A kinnara from the ruins of Vijayanagar in Karnataka, Southern India. (Source: Author’s photograph)  215 22 Modern Thai domestic ware. However, this style of portrayal of the fish is characteristic of Sukhothai and Sawankhalok Thai ware of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and found in shipwrecks. (Source: Author’s photograph)  215

 Section 4. Typological Representation, the « Species Garden » and the Palace of Memory (Representation of the Phenomenal World) 23 The « species garden » as introductory vignette in the Diccionario de Autoridades, heading each of the six volumes (each a p. 1) of the dictionary. (Source: Author’s copy and photograph)  405 24–26 « Species gardens » portrayed on title pages of the first two editions of Olivier de Serres, Théatre de L’Agriculture (Paris, 1600 & Basel, 1651). (Source: Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patrimoine, Toulouse [Res. B XVII 58, and Fa C 3182, respectively])  406–8 27 Popular chiromantic version of a memory palace intended for diverse kinds of ordinary user such as shop keepers, merchants and other market-users. Foldout in Jean Belot, Oeuvres (Rouen, 1647). (Source: Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patrimoine, Toulouse [F.M. D307])  409

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28 Division of chapter into categories and sub-categories in De Serres, Théâtre de L’Agriculture, edn. of 1600 (Paris, 1600), p. 441, list of content of the Sixième Lieu (or section). (Source: Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patrimoine, Toulouse [Res. B XVII 58])  410

 Section 5. Principles of Exchange, Trust and Accord. The Act of Translation 29 Frontispiece depicting the full cycle of events composing negotiation and accord of commoditised goods: exchange, packaging, shipment and sale, in Jacques Savary, Le Parfait Negoçiant, frontispiece/title page (edn. Paris, 1763, almost identical to those of Lyon, 1697, Paris, 1721 & Paris, 1752). (Source: Universiteitsbibliotheek te Leiden [727 B 20], Public Domain)  455 30 The path of a negotiation and dispute that leads to accord. Jacques Savary, De Volmaakte Koopman, frontispiece/title page (Amsterdam, 1683 [Dutch translation of Le Parfait Negoçiant]). (Source: Universiteitsbibliotheek te Leiden [2021C5], Public Domain)  456 31a,b&c Three vignettes from Savary’s Le Parfait Negoçiant, edn. of Paris, 1749, vol. I., & edn. of Paris, 1763. (Sources: Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patrimoine, Toulouse [Fa B 2468 (1-2)] and: Universiteitsbibliotheek te Leiden [MR296 and 2313A9 & 10])   457–8



Section 6. Moneys and Portable Instruments

32 Dutch portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance, with paste-on portrait of two Virtues and Death, [place not readable] n.d. (Source: courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, Amsterdam, the image generously provided by Dr. Arent Pol of the Universiteit te Leiden)  483 33a&b Dutch portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance, with paste on portrait of Death accompanying two persons weighing coin, Rotterdam 1625. (Source: courtesy of R.J. Holtman, photograph no. 10140; generously mediated by Dr. Arent Pol, of which my two photos. 26.1 & 26.2)  484–5

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34 Dutch portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance, with paste-on portrait of Death accompanying the Two Virtues, Amsterdam. (Source: Musée Dupuy)  485 35 French portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance, Lyon 1677. (Source: Musée Dupuy)  486 36a  English portable invention simplifying weighing of coin; ca. late 18th century. (Source: Ashmolean Museum)  486 36b&c  French portable invention simplifying the task of weighing coin; ca. late 18th century; lid with pasted-on list of selected European coin-types and their standard weights. (Source: Musée Dupuy)   487 37 Lid of English box of standard weights intended for overseas trade. (Source: Ashmolean Museum)  487 38 French and English box containing, respectively, different kinds of standard weight. (Source: Ashmolean Museum)  488 39 Wood-encased portable balances, part of a collection of such Chinese-type instruments for weighing different kinds of sycee. (Source: courtesy of Mme Palhana Boupha of the Palhana Boupha Antique House, Luang Prabang, Laos)  489 40 Chinese silver sycee of Yunnan-type encountered in Huay Xai, Northern Laos, and stamped with contemporary attestations of its value and authenticity. (Source: Author’s photograph taken at gold and silver stall at public market in Huay Xai; the inscriptions were read for me by Dr. Joe Cribb)  489 41 Cover page of a Chinese manual of 1800 concerning recognition of European and Hispanic-American coinages entering Chinese circulation and markets. (Source: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Munich [L. Sin. E. 401], cover page; Public Domain)  490 42 Two rough-cut réals d’ocho, rough in cut, pure in content and accurate in weight. produced as trade currency and shipped in barrels or sacks. (Source: courtesy of Dr. Arent Pol, ex-curator of the Leidse Penningkabinet)  490 43 Verso side of a half-penny stamped with the figure of death (skeleton holding spear and hour glass) minted by John Morse of Watford, with date 1600. (Source: Ashmolean Museum, with generous help of Dr. Julian Baker)  491

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Section 7. Sherds of the Inter-Asian Trades in Ceramics

44a

Chinese Ming blue-and-white sherds from the fields and path banks of Cheul and Revadanda (South of Mumbai, India). Personally collected in the mid 1970s and in 1981. (Source: Authors’s photograph and collection)  500 Chinese Ming blue-and-white, and Thai celadon Sawankhalok sherds from Si Satchanalai, Thailand, from site 1. (Source: Authors’s photograph and collection)  501 Chinese Ming blue-and-white, and Thai celadon Sawankhalok sherds from Si Satchanalai, Thailand, from site 2. (Source: Authors’s photograph and collection)  502 Chinese Ming blue-and-white sherds from Mrauk U, Myanmar. (Source: Authors’s photograph and collection)  503

44b 44c 44d

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Foreword

On Entering Perlin‘s Babel Ravi Ahuja A globally pervasive, dispersed and multiform process of commoditization before industrial capitalism: this is the « city » examined and conceptualized in this book. This « city » is approached, on the one hand, as a philosophical problem: how was an all-encompassing world of ever more diverse marketable objects even possible? More precisely: how could it be made possible? How could human mind and hand at all produce this boundless yet ceaselessly fragmenting object world? The « city » is examined, on the other hand, as a problem of medieval and early modern economic history and anthropology: how was it possible for commodities, for goods and moneys produced for exchange, to become and remain transferable across all geographic, political and linguistic boundaries despite a highly dispersed and fragmented institutional structure that seems barely discernible—intelligible—from a present-day perspective? How could commoditization sustain universal pervasiveness when numerous « niches » were simultaneously opened for ever more diverse commodities and while differences between local commodity cultures were further deepened? Perlin‘s metaphorical « city » has a name: Babel. The Babel epitomizing, according to biblical tradition, presumptuous human attempts to master the world that are rendered futile by inextricable linguistic confusion and the ensuing impossibility of communication between the tower builders. This vision of Babel may be seen as a foundational myth for identitarian ideologies of a humankind that must remain separated eternally by essential, ultimately unbridgeable cultural difference. At the same time, « Babel » may also serve as a metaphor for the « modernizing » gaze on « premodern » or preindustrial economies: « fuzzy » economies that appear to lack structure, standards, ­coherence—a congeries of essentially autochthonous, communitarian and local economies, only precariously connected by a chaotic and largely disfunctional mess of uncoordinated currencies and taxonomies, by primitive means of transport and communication, by haphazard and intermittent financial transactions and commodity flows. On accepting this latter historicist vision, the scholar’s conventional task would be to « reduce » to a « simple » narrative this « babble », this Babylonian confusion of voices and idioms, in other words: this complexity. Economic historians have been groomed, for instance, to dissect a messy, fuzzy « premodernity » with the chopper knife of simplifying models. Their task has been to identify « lack » and to assess « an economy » of Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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an earlier period a­ ccording to the standards of tower building of our own, supposedly enlightened, age of « globalisation ». Perlin‘s view of Babel is different, however. To him, Babel is a « city intelligible », though not without effort and not by way of simplification: complexity, and for his case the very complexity of the preindustrial commodity continuum, needs to be taken seriously as a research problem in itself. Hence, what may appear to us, at first sight, as lack of order or as « confusion of tongues », should be understood, says Perlin, as a dispersed but universal form of social organization, as a culture of boundless mental and material « translation ». Since much of the dispersed infrastructure of this culture of commodification has atrophied in a process of centralization of resources that was prompted by industrialization, its complexity may well appear to present-day social scientists as alien, disorderly, irrational, as the hallmark even of an age awaiting « disenchantment ». In this preindustrial commodity culture, argues Perlin, difference did not precede or preclude universality. Rather, the constructive principle of commoditization gained its universality, he holds, since the emergence of settled agriculture, from its very ability to feed off difference: exchange was pointless, after all, without difference, both between commodities and between commodity producers. Crucially, however, difference cannot be reduced to a constant factor: commoditization, as a historical process, could be sustained only through the perpetual exacerbation of difference—through the production of greater diversity, through the addition of further « niches », as he puts it, that participants in this process could claim and occupy for themselves. Perlin’s Babel resembles, therefore, more Pieter Bruegel’s unfinishable spiralling tower with its mass of upward creeping edifices or, the tower used, as he shows, by Kant as a metaphor for the complex creation of a conceivable object world by and in the human mind. Perlin, in his long-term project of rendering intelligible this Babel of preindustrial commoditization, can be seen to have built another tower, another sprawling, assurgent, open-ended city: his book resembles a complex structure of multi-storied buildings and annexes—at times leaning on each other, else linked by a labyrinth of curving lanes, parts of the edifice still under construction, some of its outbuildings even spiralling precariously into the clouds as in Bruegel‘s imagination. In other words, as it attacks conventional methods of simplification and while it insists that the complexity of preindustrial modes of commoditization must be considered a research problem in its own right, the book is neither a quick, nor an easy, nor a timely read. It is untimely in that it fails to conform to the market demand for slick, elegant academic writing that puts the reader at ease both with a familiar narrative structure of skillful simplicity and with references to equally familiar conceptual coordinates, ­usually derived, either consciously or by way of « common sense », from Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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­ ost-Nietzschean philosophy. Perlin’s Babel does nothing of the sort and the p author has paid the price for being unconcerned about the marketability of his own product, even as he examined the making of the commodity. The original manuscript, completed about two decades ago, apparently puzzled its few readers, seemed unpublishable and remained buried on increasingly obsolete data carriers. Readers of this now thoroughly revised and printed text may gain in unexpected ways, however, if they dare enter the labyrinth and explore the lanes of Perlin’s Babel. This foreword invites them to do so. For the book outlines a highly original approach to a problem global historians have been aware of for a long time without being able to solve it in a satisfactory way: how can we reveal and conceptualise structures of historical development in an early modern world that abounds with complex patterns of connectivity and fragmentation without ultimately retreating to the territorial containers and cultural binaries that we set out to overcome in the first place? The « Great Divergence » debate may be taken as a recent example for this conundrum: historians appear to be unable, despite all intentions, to overcome « methodological nationalism » without erecting new spatial « containers », essential closures and binaries in its place. Histories of « entanglements » and « connectedness » have been promoted as alternatives, but seem insufficiently theorised to be able to break the frame. For this purpose, a critical engagement with philosophies that set out to uncover universal patterns of human cognition appears to be fully justifiable and Perlin demonstrates both the difficulties and the intellectual potential of this approach. In other words: the manuscript confronts a key methodological problem of global historical research that has been around for a long time and is unlikely to disappear any time soon. It is, therefore, remarkably fresh and fully consonant with current debates in historiography even though it does not directly engage with the historiography of the last two decades: surely an indication that this is an important piece of academic work. In its engagement with classical German (and most explicitly Kantian and Neo-Kantian) philosophy it opens up new methodological avenues that can be explored in further research. To quote one example for an immensely influential and productive intervention of a similar kind we may refer to Henri Lefebvre’s La production de l’espace: a very unusual combination of philosophical, sociological and historical reflections; an analytically trenchant if occasionally opaque and arguably even eclectic text, which has been enormously suggestive, however, inviting researchers in various academic fields to draw their own, widely diverging theoretical conclusions and develop innovative methodologies. Perlin’s City Intelligible, like Lefebvre’s work, opens up from sharply formulated analytical insights numerous avenues into uncharted land—a richness that blends into opacity occasionally (and seems at the same time selective of which later Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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more), but an opacity (and selectivity) that provokes interpretative effort and opens up new possibilities of research. The parallels between the books go further: Lefebvre, the philosopher, ventured into history and even though his exposition of « premodern » spatial history—effectively the spatial history before industrial capitalism—is perhaps the least satisfactory and most schematic part of his seminal work, the intellectual risk of disciplinary transgression he took still opened up new possibilities for historical research. Perlin, the historical anthropologist, ventures into philosophy and while the explicit focus on Kant (and neo-Kantianism) may not always be compelling with Leibniz, Hegel and Marx left lurking in the background, the transdisciplinary risk bears fruit in this case, too: it allows to address the socio-economic complexity of the late medieval and early modern periods as a historical research problem requiring specific methodological tools and not as a cacophony of voices to be reduced or « simplified » to a single, authoritative voice. Perlin thus endorses Rancière’s critique of historiographical traditions like that of the Annales, but locates the methodological alternative in a different, perhaps more promising direction. Again, the conversation between philosophy and historical social science enables to think, quite literally, beyond the box or, outside the container. Between the two books, Lefebvre’s and Perlin’s, resonances are even perceivable: both examine, in very different ways, the « space-time » of commoditized societies—Lefebvre by focusing on the increasingly dynamized and evolutionary, serialized and mass-produced, non-Euclidian nature of social space after industrialisation, Perlin by stressing that a conceptualisation of time-space in Euclidian/Newtonian terms (i.e. as an a priori static and empty given in which clearly separated and taxonomically distinguishable objects move according to the rules of cause and effect) was a necessary precondition for building the “intelligible city” of potentially unlimited commoditization in the centuries preceding industrialisation. Perlin provides a history of an artisanal and agricultural « rurban » commodity space that preceded Lefebvre’s predominantly urban, serially « produced » space of industrial capitalism. Lefebvre explores, one may venture, the unfolding of the tensions within Perlin’s City Intelligible, which the latter merely hints at. Perlin’s manuscript needs to be located, too, in a specific historiographical context—the context of a 1980s historiography of the South Asian early modern. This was certainly one of the most productive and innovative historiographical developments regarding this world region in the latter half of the twentieth century. Along with the contributions of the late Christopher Bayly, of the late Burton Stein, of David Washbrook and several others, Frank Perlin’s writings opened up a fresh perspective on India’s seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had earlier been dismissed wholesale as an era of social ­chaos,

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political disorganisation and economic decline. Behind this appearance of messiness, which had been denounced in unison by generations of earlier historians despite otherwise strongly diverging assessments, this new historiography discovered in early modern South Asia patterns of social dynamism, processes of condensed state formation as well as of economic diversification and growth. One of Perlin’s major concerns in the present book can be traced back to this stream of research: earlier historians had severely misjudged an entire era of societal development in early modern South Asia by quickly dismissing its complexity and by seeking to reduce it to a « simple » explanation or narrative. However, only a painstaking examination of this very complexity allowed the discovery of a historical dynamism behind a diversity that had been misunderstood as a symptom of mere decline. These findings also permitted a very new assessment of the changes brought about by British colonial rule. After the 1990s, this historiographical current narrowed down thematically and lost much of its theoretical sophistication as some of its main protagonists went into new directions of research, passed away or—in the case of Perlin—left academia. Perlin’s later work in the 1990s moved, moreover, beyond the regional specialisation on South Asia already. Two volumes of collected essays (“The Invisible City”: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500–1900, Variorum: 1993; Unbroken Landscape: Commodity, Category, Sign and Identity, Variorum: 1994) began to explore a Euro-Asian « interface » of infrastructures of commoditisation that included, for instance, pioneering and as yet unsurpassed studies on overlapping circuits of coin manufacture and monetary exchange. The present book draws upon Perlin’s already « global » historical studies of the early 1990s, but deepens them through philosophical reflection, develops corresponding methodological procedures and widens the empirical range of his investigation. This foreword is not the place for a detailed summary or a systematic review and I will here only refer to what to my mind are some of the key propositions. The book consists of a long introduction (“More than a preface…”), of a first part (“Artifice and nature …”) and of a second part (“Taxonomy and commodity…”). The introduction and the final, third chapter of Part 1 develop the philosophical (“Kantian”) foundations of Perlin’s approach; the first and second chapters of Part 1 focus on textile production, monetary means of exchange and forms of accountancy to reconstruct, through these strategically chosen samples, the making of an artificial « second nature » the object world of commodities—and develop a methodology (through « sampling ») for a systematic examination of this object world. Part 2 then turns more specifically to the interdependency of this human-made « second nature » with the « first nature » on which it relies and which it can never ­entirely leave behind. It does

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so by focusing on plants and plant products—organic offspring of (the first) nature, which become marketable, are turned into elements of the commodity world (second nature) only through « artifice », through human work that transforms them into recognizable and exchangeable objects. The key innovation of Perlin’s approach, to my mind, is that it does not presuppose the utility of the commodity, but examines this utility as the result of a complex and interminable social process. If we think of the Marxian analytical distinction between the use value and the exchange value as complementary aspects of every commodity, it is evident that in most economic histories, Marxian or not, the emphasis has been squarely on exchange value and on issues emerging from this aspect of the commodity—e.g. on modalities of marketing and pricing, payment and accountancy etc. The use value of a commodity, however, i.e. the properties that define its utility and, in the last instance, its marketability, is often treated as a quasi-natural attribute that does not require interrogation: the coat that serves as the standard example for a commodity in volume i of “Capital” does not appear to require further specification—it’s a coat, plain and simple. Marx himself, in what are perhaps the most complex pages of his writings, thus assumes the utility of the coat as a given for the purposes of his analysis of the social relations that remain concealed in the commodity form. But if exchange value was a complicated, socially constructed matter as Marx proposed, so is use value and this is what Perlin focuses on. « Utility », we learn, is not a property of the thing itself, but an attribute that is socially defined as the thing must be adapted to a taxonomic grid to be transformed into an object of exchange and ultimately for our (i.e. the subject’s) use. A coat cannot be produced as a commodity for sale in a distant market if no understanding has been achieved previously, between both ends of the transaction, on what the essential properties of a « coat » might be. In other words, each and every commodity “species” needs to be defined and that not in isolation, but in the context of an ever expanding and diversifying object world of commodity species, as an articulation of universal culture. Frank Perlin’s book can thus be understood as an attempt to trace the « origins of the commodity species ». As he introduces us to this problem, we find ourselves at the gates of Babel and are led into a labyrinth of complexities. Most fundamentally and even though the commodity world is inseparable from the natural resources that make it possible, the logic of commodity « speciation­ », the modality of species formation is quite different. While speciation in the « first nature » is evolutionary, « Darwinistic » in the sense that it is driven by the very instability of « identities », i.e. the non-essentiality of ­species, speciation in the « second nature », in the socially generated object world of commodities­, is « essentialist » i.e. premised on the relative stability of e­ very « species ». Hence even though no grain of rice, no piece of woven Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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cloth, no coin of minted silver (or, for that matter, no coat) can possibly be precisely like any other, they can only function as commodities if they are recognizable as bearers of certain essential qualities—if they can be located, in other words, in a validated taxonomic grid. The tension between these two principles of « speciation » the evolutionary and the essentialist, are explored more systematically in the second part of the book with its focus on plants and plant products. But this is only one of several layers of complexity the book leads us to. For instance, it is evident that the process of commodity « speciation » involves procedures of standardization and taxonomy that required some form of institutional infrastructure. But it is equally clear that in the medieval and early modern periods such institutional infrastructures were dispersed, overlapping, seemingly incoherent, involved numerous acts of « translation » and « conversion » that have become unfamiliar in our own age of heavily centralized and accelerated late capitalism. The existence of geographical, political or linguistic frontiers is not denied, but they are conceived of as « places of passage » rather than as absolute divisions. Furthermore, the essentialism of the process of commodity speciation (or, the systematic attempt to reduce variation within certain commodity types) did not preclude, in Perlin’s view, an enormous dynamism of diversification between commodities, the emergence of ever new « niches » for commodity innovation. He emphasizes, moreover, with reference to Kant and the Neo-Kantians, the cognitive dimension of this process of « objectification » in which a world of commodities became conceivable. But he also underlines the universality of commodification as a social process, i.e. the involvement of all social groups and of all forms of work in this process: the day labourer receiving her wages in cowrie as much as the tax farmer dealing with gold currency; the botanist defining a market variety of cotton as much as the peasant seeking to stabilize, through knowledgeable manual labour, crop quality against environmental impact. This is an invitation to a text that is rich and dense. But readers may also locate many openings for future enquiry some of which Perlin will hopefully be able to explore himself. The book is intensely experimental, both in language and content, certainly not the last word on the matters it raises, an invitation to argument and further enquiry. I, for instance, remain doubtful whether the process of commoditization—including the process of « speciation », which is the focus of this book—can be separated, even if only for purposes of examination, from social relations of power, from social antagonism, coercion, war and destruction, from the breakdown of no doubt possible channels of communication. I doubt, as it were, whether Babel could even exist without arson, riot and execution. Perlin’s decision to focus on « speciation » as the social production of the commodity’s use value throws new light on a Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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key aspect of commoditisation that has remained in the shadows for long, but may in turn have privileged one « side » of the commodity problem over the other. Be that as it may, the author did not write this book to please everybody and the demand to hoe another hard row many not be reasonable. Most importantly, Perlin’s Babel is finally out in the open, a provocation for debate. Some will, I expect, see no point in entering that labyrinthine city and will have little patience with the academic nonconformism of its architecture. Others, I am equally certain, will accept the invitation and explore its alleys for themselves. Ravi Ahuja Bregalla, September 2019

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Foreword

History and Philosophy in the Mirror of the Commodity: Frank Perlin’s Reflections on Difference and Universality Aditya Sarkar 1

History as Philosophy

A commodity, as a well-placed observer once remarked, may appear very simple and even trivial, but is in fact “a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties”. For over a century, these subtleties have recursively occupied the attentions of philosophers, especially though not exclusively those working within the Marxist tradition. Rarely, however, have they been unfolded by a practising historian. Frank Perlin’s new book, City Intelligible, uses the historical cultures of commodification, on a global scale, as a springboard for the development of a philosophical hypothesis about the universalizing capacities and potentialities of the social world. In the process, Perlin also develops rigorous methodological tools for tackling social and historical complexity. All this is anchored in an ambitious and original argument about a certain kind of universality as the enabling ground of a world of complex and continuous differentiation. The combination of historical and philosophical reasoning is not, of course, unprecedented, especially within the Francophone intellectual traditions which this book interrogates in several ways. Ranciere, de Certeau, Foucault, Lefebvre, and Ricoeur are names which spring to mind, as thinkers who in different ways have expertly blended philosophy with history. It is fair to say, however, that this combination has more frequently been attempted by scholars working within – or close to – philosophy than it has by practising historians. It is, to put it mildly, an unusual remit for a scholar whose best-known research concerns the field of early modern South Asian economic history. Perlin’s endeavour, in this sense, is without precedent. The originality of this undertaking more than occasionally « complicates » the argument. As Perlin observes, the project of developing a new language and vocabulary of historical research strains the resources available to historians, and semi-neologisms abound, as do passages of dense and difficult prose. Yet this is a price well worth paying: the density of the book is unavoidable. To enforce « simpler » formulations or « clearer » statements of purpose would Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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have robbed the argument of the precision which it ultimately attains. This precision is achieved precisely as a consequence of such apparently opaque exposition, which faithfully represents the difficulty and complexity of the subject-matter. The enormous intellectual labour expended on this project succeeds magnificently, for the most part, in uniting philosophical propositions with historical investigation. It clarifies the character of historical writing, not just as an accumulation and presentation of empirical discoveries, but also as the expression of a specific mode of thought. The unexpected twist – unexpected also because it is argued through so rigorously and persuasively – is that, in Perlin’s hands, philosophy prepares the ground and supplies the objects of historical research, while history produces the materials from which a philosophical architecture is constructed. To develop this mode of relation between the two disciplines, if not exactly unfamiliar, is a pointedly unfashionable exercise, supposedly long superseded in historical thought. Yet Perlin gives it new meaning by consistently following this grounding insight to its logical conclusions, drawing in the process on the respective rigours of both disciplines. Even more striking is the kind of philosophy Perlin deploys in this book. Kantian philosophy might commonsensically appear antithetical to historical research, since the Kantian a priori, on the face of it, runs counter to every principle of inquiry that historians are trained to respect. The idea of a historical work designed to demonstrate the validity of this philosophical framework seems almost absurd. Yet it is precisely Kant’s philosophy which animates this book, with an intellectual fidelity quite astonishing for a practitioner of a discipline whose theoretical impulses have, more often than not, tended towards eclecticism. Indeed, the founding question of Kant’s philosophy sets the argument in motion: how is something (or the thinking of something) possible in the first place? This is, in its specific context, a question about the presuppositions necessary to any act of comprehension, but this question in turn has two elements: logical and historical. Logical: how is something (say, the ‘commodity’ or ‘the economy’) thinkable – what epistemological preconditions must exist to make it an object of human knowledge? Historical: what social and material correspondences, interlinkages, translations and exchanges make “universally” valid formations and processes possible in a world apparently so irreducibly marked by difference at every turn? In other words, as Perlin puts it, how is an « empirical object-world » generated, both in itself and as an object of knowledge, both empirically and epistemologically? One of the stakes of the argument is that the question of knowledge and the question of « being » cannot be separated. This may seem familiar enough to the dominant modes of critical thought in contemporary Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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intellectual life: what makes it so fresh and challenging in this case is the fact that it is developed out of a Kantian-universalist framework, which is then modified for historical use by placing questions of translatability and communication (rather than incommensurability and radical difference, omnipresent in much contemporary critical philosophy) at the centre of inquiry. There is a richly productive twist here. For all the commitment to the Kantian a priori, this is not a work which seeks to derive « first principles » which mechanically determine historical and ontological truths (a common misreading of Kant will jump erroneously to this conclusion). Instead, Perlin develops, early in the text, a vigorous argument for the irreducible complexity of social matter, and a rejection of essentialist procedures and assumptions which, he argues, have bedevilled the ways in which we tend to think of the social world, and have hived off this world into epistemological and ontological compartments separated by stable, « given » frontiers. The recursive relationship between the objects of knowledge and the knowledge of an objectfield is developed in ascending degrees of complexity. (Consequently, we find the same arguments about universality apparently repeated – but in fact thickened and developed more articulately in each reiteration – throughout the book). The irreducible plurality of the empirical world necessarily sits in tension with the project of making this plurality intelligible in thought and language. This tension, however, is not simply an expression of the « inadequacy » of conceptual frameworks confronted by the richness of empirical and lived reality, but is in fact internal to the very constitution of that reality in the first place. 2

Commodity, Communicability, Speciation

The commodity – its conception, making, exchange, and « communication » across frontiers – generates the historical data which ground Perlin’s thesis about the necessary universality of human social practice. Perlin’s object, moreover, is very much the commodity prised open by Hegelian-Marxist dialectics. Notwithstanding this, however, Perlin does not base his argument upon the kind of commodity Marx was concerned with, which appeared on the historical stage with the development of mass industrial production. He is concerned, rather, with the commodity before the age of modern industrialization, at a point before its universality could be reproduced on the scale that fullyfledged industrial capitalism enabled. Perlin is both historically and philosophically precise here. The experience of global capitalism, flowing outward as it did from the experience of a particular corner of the world which stamped its dominance upon other regions, cannot provide the real grounds for a Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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d­ emonstration of universally (and « freely ») available preconditions of social activity. It is, rather, the extensive evidence of market exchanges stretching into much more distant and heterogeneous historical pasts which, in Perlin’s argument, demonstrates the « naturally and intentionally translational and universal » character of human culture. Before the forces of capitalism and colonialism generalized a highly specific mode of historical being across much of the world, Perlin argues, a properly global culture of commodity-production and exchange was already well set in place. And unlike modern industrial capitalism, this culture did not spread outward from a « core » region or development. Investigating the early-modern, pre-assembly-line culture of the commodity, therefore, brings us, counter-intuitively, much closer to a direct engagement with the problems of universality and difference. The counter-intuition here is important in another sense. Modern commodities, in a world of mass standardization, can effectively be identical with one another. Every commodity produced before modern industrialization, by contrast, necessarily differs from every other of its type in matters of weight, dimensions, etc. But Perlin’s conception of universality is not grounded in exact, assembly-line identity: it is precisely the opposite of this. It is the world of the early-modern commodity, not that of identical mass-produced wares, which most fully dramatizes the work of a certain kind of universality upon and within the object-world. It is because difference is irreducible that the production of « types » and « species », as well as the apparently limitless translatability of commodities across frontiers, acquire their analytical stakes. It is only in the absence of universal standardization and mass production, it could be said, that the problems of universality and translatability can be studied in their pure form. The development of an array of « cottons » in the world prior to the onset of fully-fledged industrial capitalism, in other words, illustrates the work of this sort of universality in a way that the history of the Ford Model T cannot. The commodity may be an object, but it always bears upon itself the stamp of diverse forms of human agency. Perlin conceives both material context and human agency as a «  continuum  », composed of recursive «  translational  » activity. Commodity-exchange, he sets out to demonstrate, “indifferently” crosses frontiers of geography, language and culture – and does this without possible exception: its very ground of existence is the capacity to cross frontiers. Where much social science and philosophy have turned the frontiers which punctuate human societies into apparently impassable obstacles to successful communication, Perlin, by contrast, is struck by the fact that such traversals of boundary not only happen, but can be found happening continually through human history. City Intelligible is, above all, an attempt to unfold the preconditions – s­ imultaneously historical and conceptual – for such traversal. In the field, in the craft workshop, in mercantile activity, in forms of transportation, in the ­circulation of Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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payment-forms, and in the taxonomies which come to bear upon and shape commodities, Perlin discerns an endlessly busy collective labour which renders commodification a universally intelligible process, despite the often rigid frontiers of place, culture and practice that the commodity travels through. Ceaselessly communicative forms of social action, then, mark the passages of the commodity before the era of modern industrialization. Peasants, artisans, transporters, traders, moneydealers, bankers and consumers are all locked into the dense web of translation across multiple frontiers (of language, custom, history, geography) which marks the production and exchange of commodities. But what is all this communicative action grounded in? What makes it possible? To confront this question, Perlin enlists a dual perspective, drawing centrally upon Darwin, but simultaneously enlisting a counter-Darwinist hypothesis. The ground of such putatively universal communicability, and of history itself, he argues, is, and can be nothing other than, the singular, irreducible individual. We begin from utter contingency: individual agency, accident and circumstance are to be found everywhere, and they set history in motion. Yet they generate society and history precisely as constraint, limit and condition. In contrast to the evacuation of individual agency developed by structuralist thinkers (the structuralist tradition is one Perlin periodically interrogates in the book), Perlin insists on the individual as the ground of history. His ontology begins from the singular and irreducible individual, conceived in strictly Darwinian terms, whose role is constitutive in the foundation of all social collectivities and activity. In this understanding, the individual is the basis of all « speciation », at the same time, this mode of speciation is always accompanied by another, which makes objects and persons invariably inhabit « stereotypical » (or ascriptive) identities. Group identities (“stereotypes ») mark out actors and objects as members of a “type” in the markets where exchanges – conducted on the basis of such taxonomic reduction – occur. Individuals are thus grouped on a thoroughly stereotypical basis: this happens everywhere with the force of necessity. It happens because human culture – by definition « artificial », since all culture springs from artifice – incessantly generates such speciation, in both its modes - « Darwinist » and « stereotypical ». Yet, in a telling twist, the fact that we find such artificial speciation everywhere, both in the taxonomy of objects and the taxonomies societies produce about themselves and each other, is for Perlin deeply significant. The fact that we find « types » everywhere generated by taxonomic practice – that we find « cottons » coinages, field cultivars, « cultures », « peoples », « tribes », etc – returns us, in this loop, to « first nature » itself, conceived once again in ­Darwinist terms, as “the universal factor englobing all that possibly and ­universally exists”. Such speciation is everywhere a product of contingent Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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­human ­cultures: precisely as such, though, they demonstrate an aspect of « first » nature. As Perlin’s concluding chapter – an application of his hypotheses to early-modern formations of botanical knowledge – argues at length, it is impossible to separate the knowledge of « nature » from the labours of « artifice »: the very basis for comprehending natural variation in species rests upon the arduous and conscious fabrication of « types ». By the same token, though, stereotype and taxonomic classification appear, in Perlin’s analysis, as universal propensities of mind – without such « artifice » there can be no human practice whatsoever, and the fact of human practice is part of « first nature » itself. To unravel these intertwined threads of historical social practice – singularity, speciation, communicability and translation, commodification – Perlin sets himself three tasks. The first is the project of an anthropological treatment of the data of economic history – in other words, the task is to understand the economic practices associated with commoditization as an aspect, and datum, of human culture. Operationally, given Perlin’s life-long research into the economic life of early-modern western India, this is formulated as the problem of how apparently enclosed, « local » worlds of economic exchange are thoroughly shot through with and traversed by global flows of commodities, knowledges, and persons. In itself, this is a problem familiar to practitioners of global economic history: less familiar, however, is the reflexivity of the second « task » which flows from this. This involves seeking to understand how the commodity – the economic object par excellence – is also formulated as a « cultural object » - both by the populations involved in its fabrication and exchange, and by the « second-order » engagements of researchers. A classically Kantian problematization follows: the problem is to understand the a priori conditions of thought and mind which must constitute the commodity as such. Both the production and the recognition of commodities as commodities reveal putatively universal properties of human mind and culture. There is, however, a dual character to such universality: (a) it appears everywhere without exception in the continuum composed of material exchanges; however, it is (b) also the consequence of strictly empirical and historical circumstance. The only ground of such cultural universality can be found in long histories of exchange and contact among settled populations, and it cannot be conceived as a dispersal from a singular « point of origin ». The third « task » Perlin sets his investigation is perhaps the most difficult to achieve. This concerns the need to formulate a method of demonstrating the validity of formulations which cannot avoid investigating our own (necessarily finite and imperfect) forms of consciousness, which are, after all, equally part of the « englobing » continuum of nature and culture which Perlin delineates.

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As Perlin remarks, to investigate this fully one would need to examine the constraints – especially those engendered by imperialism and colonialism – that have persistently deformed the production of anthropological knowledge throughout modern history. A « phenomenology of the academic mind » is needed. Perlin never fully delivers a final summation of this task; however, intriguing clues are deposited throughout the book and the extensive notes and appendices (a formidable text in their own right) which accompany it. 3

The Argument

The reflections summarized above occupy the very lengthy introduction to the book. They unfold the properly philosophical scope of the empirical investigation of commodity-cultures. In the arguments which follow, which take up the bulk of the book, Perlin undertakes this through a fascinating investigation of commerce, monetization and production-forms which linked « the old worlds of Europe and Asia » in the early-modern period. In contrast to essentialist modes of thinking, he argues that the « unity-in-complexity » which characterizes this world cannot in fact be assumed prior to the journey of investigation: it may stand at the fountainhead of the research project and undergird its direction, but it also has to be demonstrated. It is the point of arrival, not departure. A consequence of this is that the anti-essentialist presuppositions which guide Perlin’s research can only be fully unfolded at the end of the enquiry, when the principles that are stated at the beginning of the work are re-formulated on a higher plane, with the weight of historical demonstration behind them. Looked at in one light, this illustrates the tensions internal to a project which seeks to balance philosophical exposition and historical demonstration. The weight of this demand drives City Intelligible to continually restate its own premises, to sum up the broader philosophical implications of its project in advance of its empirical demonstrations. The architecture of the argument unfolds in precisely this way. By the end of the book, we are seemingly back at the starting point, but at a « higher » level of both complexity and clarity than before. Within the book, too, this overall procedure is repeated at various junctures, as a single line of argument is ­recapitulated, clarified, extended and elaborated at ever-higher levels in an ­ascending spiral. This demonstrative, recursive form of argumentation (where historical details are formulated within a philosophical structure, and demonstrate the validity of that structure at different scales and moments of exposition) may well irk a rigidly empiricist imagination: it is, however, the book’s

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greatest strength. Hard as it may be to absorb upon a first reading, it is a necessary feature of the very careful way in which Perlin establishes and builds his argument. At the heart of this is a set of propositions about the complexity of the social world. Two insights, methodological as well as philosophical, stand at the base of Perlin’s argument about complexity. First, society itself is understood as an ‘infrastructural network of institutions, relationships and communications’, all of which necessarily cross disciplinary compartmentalizations into (for instance) economics, sociology, philosophy and history. There is an integral unity to the social world which is the product of such complexity, rather than running counter to it. Symmetrical to this is a second insight, this one diachronic rather than synchronic: history itself is to be conceived as a « continuum » which transcends the periodizations that are generally deployed in thinking it. These two insights represent two levels of cross-disciplinary transcendence in both space and time, as it were. They form a grounding presupposition of the work – the claim to a sense of « system » in the sense of « systematicity » which, as Perlin puts it, is “rendered free of both definite and indefinite articles”. Structural connection within the historical object-world on the one hand, and the sequential and irreversible nature of historical change on the other, invalidate essentialist accounts of society and history. As he points out, most attempts to « theorize » the social and historical world posit a simple, law-like, homogenous ‘reality’ lying beneath the manifold surfaces of this world, and this opposition, in all its variants, constitutes the essentialist « problematic ». As such – a point developed in one of the book’s most brilliant passages of argumentation – it has become exceedingly difficult to grasp social complexity as complexity, since the very uses of language and metaphor by social scientists and historians alike tend, often unwittingly, to reproduce this essentialist binary. Perlin argues for a more self-conscious (and necessarily, therefore, more strenuous and sometimes seemingly opaque) use of metaphors like « scale », « level », « pattern », « phase » and « network ». A brief but illuminating analysis of the misuses of the category ‘level’ demonstrates the key point: the problems with the hasty assumption that language is « simply » an imperfect « means of expression » of a more complex reality, as though the content conveyed is independent of the vocabulary and syntax in which it is conveyed. At one level, this may seem close to post-structuralist critiques of the transparency of language (one thinks of Barthes, for instance). Where Perlin departs sharply from this tradition of thought, however, is in his urge to overcome (rather than reify) this linguistic/literary/semantic blockage, and to go beyond aporia to reconstitute our ways of knowing on a higher plane.

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Having achieved these initial formulations of his intellectual purposes, Perlin begins to move closer to the historical materials through which he will develop his arguments about complexity. A brief and knife-sharp engagement with dilemmas in economic history-writing sets the stage. Three economic historians who have implicitly or explicitly grappled with the problem of complexity – Nathan Rosenberg, Sydney Pollard, and Rondo Cameron – are taken up. Each of their revisionist analyses, it is demonstrated, gestures to a genuine problem of social complexity in the history of industrialization, but is eventually defeated by it. Rosenberg’s attempt to uncover the contextualist pressures needed to actualize a given technical invention is, Perlin argues, the most useful of these attempts, but ultimately reproduces the polarity of « West » and « non-West », and fails to redefine « technology » itself in a way which might bear the conceptual burden of his argument. Pollard and Cameron, for their part, seek to move beyond methodological nationalism in their comparative analyses of industrialization, yet they ultimately recycle nationbased definitions of the relevant units and scales of research. Even in their reconstruction of “Europe” as an economic entity, as Perlin perspicuously points out, “In place of national personae, a regional actor now appears possessing exactly the same attributes, as those for which it is supposed to substitute.” In other words, essentialism may be easy to critique, but is the hardest thing to transcend in actual practice. Essentialism also marks the existing scholarly treatments of Perlin’s own chosen subjectmatter: the commercial and monetary history of the « earlymodern » world. Here, too, as he points out, scholars have implicitly or explicitly hypostasized « frontiers » of geography, ethnicity, language, politics, and even theme and sector. The analytical conventions of historical research disturbingly replicate the rhetoric of nationalists, and a false model of understanding has thereby emerged. In this model, « atomization » is the starting point, as nations, cultures, etc. are understood to be ‘paradigmatically separated’ prior to the onset of modernity, and, in a second step, « globalization » (Enlightenment, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) is understood as overcoming closed and particularistic « local orders ». In place of this false model, Perlin seeks to work with a framework within with universality and particularity, globalization and particularization, are mutually constituted through thick, complex mediatory movements, connections and interdependencies. « Generality’ and « localism » are produced by the same historical forces. How, then, can essentialism be truly overcome? This is the most urgent of the argument’s methodological stakes. Perlin addresses this, in the central and longest section of the book, through an original and arresting engagement

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with early modern materials in « global » economic history. Characteristically, he does not come to these materials without an elaborate conceptual scaffolding in place, which derives from the conceptual labours of the early chapters but brings these progressively closer to the empirical materials, step by step. A set of seven « propositions » situates the “old worlds of Asia and Europe, down the east-west littoral of Africa, into sub-Saharan West Africa, and after the late 15th century […] the Americas” as the geographical and temporal domain of enquiry. This is postulated as an unbroken « continuum » characterized by interlocking forms and scales of production and marketing, social and administrative organization, a space which was traversed by merchants, commodities, payments-forms, and discourses. Markets, codes of behaviour, words and usages, and forms of exchange must, Perlin argues, have acquired a certain legibility across these otherwise very diverse social worlds and cultures: they must have communicated. Difference and diversity, therefore, must be conceived as part of a larger and coherent order (once again, « system » rather than « a system » or « the system »). In a telling example which demonstrates this, Perlin points to pre-Napoleonic weights and measures, as indicative not of a « simple » heterogeneity, but of a problem of order in the early modern world. This world was shaped by transformations within an integrative order, rather than by a movement from closed, atomistic local orders to open global markets. Other instances are brought into play to demonstrate this hypothesis about the early modern world. So Perlin dwells on the fact that the monetization of rights in the harvest, for instance, which characterizes all known forms of settled agriculture, has never simply « followed » village habitation, but has always been part and parcel of the very process of villagization. Patterns of monetization, in turn, presume flows of money across vast territories, and not only the experience but the expectation of durable patterns of exchange in copper, silver or gold. Economic actors – merchants, brokers, agents, peasants –involved in such exchanges had to be able to count on (and cognitively factor in) economic conditions enabling the regular production of goods to be exchanged against determinate stocks of metal. All this adds up to a « continuum » in medieval and early-modern economic life which, for Perlin, is not driven by a single centre with attendant peripheries, but rather is characterized by a « prolific multicentredness ». Every market, every entrepot within this world must be conceived of as a meeting point for an abundance of commodities, traders, words and ideas. These are the « presuppositions » armed with which Perlin sets out his research programme. As a usable research design for this project, he suggests a method of « reconstitutive sampling » that enables « runs of connection » ­between specific acts of production or market activity, and wider contextual Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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dependencies: forms of finance, credit, the development of means of payment, and, wider than all this, specific systems of meaning and representation within which economic exchanges are rendered legible. In other words, we have to move from the broad philosophically anchored formulations at the beginning of the argument, to extremely finite specifications of economic activity. The production and marketing of textiles, according to Perlin, provides a fertile site for the specification of the « continuum » developed in a more abstract form earlier. To this end, he takes up, in the first place, textile-market censuses in Pune and Ahmednagar, two small upland market towns in western India, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Though these were at the time relatively minor commercial centres, they were nevertheless destination points for a very large number of different types of named and priced finished cloths which had passed through several entrepots across vast distances prior to their arrival here. Institutions of exchange, and instruments of payment and credit, must have existed, therefore, at a multiplicity of scales and levels in order to facilitate this persistent, « multidirectional » traffic in finished cloth. Perlin follows this up with other instances of « reconstitutive sampling » which show us the existence of the « continuum » he has elaborated. Raw cottons in late eighteenth-century Bengal reveal an intense, highly specialized differentiation geared to specific market destinations well before they reach spinners in order to be woven into yarns for export to China and Europe. Prespun wools and woollen yarns are another fertile object of study, and are minutely taxonomized in commercial dictionaries, reports and memoirs which assemble accounts of commodities and payments forms. So we have a growing market in commodities, but also in information about these commodities: each act of exchange, indeed each act of production for exchange, has to presuppose an elaborate taxonomic grid, as well as various kinds of market institutions. The formal complexity of typologies and stages of textile production and marketing represent, for Perlin, “consciously-invented crystallizations” of very specific forms of commercial knowledge. Perlin also anatomizes the monetary diversity of these centuries across the « continuum ». The commercial manuals he draws upon hold various lists of coinages operating in different markets. Just like textiles, the diversity of payment forms and instruments points us not to the absence but the complexity of monetary (and more broadly economic) order. This alone can account for the very possibility of stable payment relationships across vast areas where very different local coin types and metrologies proliferated. Far from demonstrating the closed character and atomization of local orders prior to the full elaboration of global capitalism, monetary diversity in the early modern era Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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reveals a remarkably complex – and regulated – structure of socioeconomic linkage. Monetary diversity, textile taxonomies, and various production-forms thus all operated as elements of order within a highly complex and sophisticated commodity-world. Well before modern « globalization » in other words, constant and recursive processes of economic « translation » had produced a complex and differentiated world linking together “consumers, shopkeepers, warehousemen, merchants of many kinds, stages and scales of operation, means and facilities of transportation, craftsmen […] and numerous « contextual » structural dependencies and relationships: shipbuilding in Hamburg and Gujarat, iron extraction and processing into steel for coin dyes, or its fabrication into nails for ships, and so forth.” Perlin subsequently trains his lens upon the connection between forms of commoditization and various monetary relationships. Key to this is what he terms “the production and marketing of type” or “commodity speciation”: rather than difference and incommensurability as the irreducible residuum or basis of all economic and social life, he seeks to demonstrate the active, willed production of difference at work in early modern economic life, through the minute differentiation of raw materials, cloth typologies, varieties of agricultural production, and forms of payment and monetization. This is yet another way of conceptualizing the « continuum »: at every stage from field to market, from the field varieties of cotton, rice, millets, etc. to the eventual speciation of commodity-types for market exchange, there are mutually imbricated taxonomies at work. Speciation of field varieties presupposes the speciation of market categories and types; behind each rests a considerable and elaborate taxonomy. The intensive labour of agriculture presupposes a working knowledge of such taxonomies no less than the commercial operations of mercantile firms, and the typologies used by merchant and farmer have to recursively presuppose each other, and have to operate through « intermeshed reference grids » – i.e. production, marketing, payment and discrete knowledge-forms are inextricably interlinked within a single, complex nexus of commodification. From the « continuum » of agricultural field variety (bewilderingly profuse) to the more controlled but nevertheless extensive « continuum » of « raw cottons », cloth typologies and coin metrologies and payment forms, differentiation is never simply « random difference », but is organized into a pluricentric order from its inception. Following these arresting methodological exercises, Perlin reconstitutes the entire argument on a higher plane. The question of Kantian « universalizability » returns, and the commodityworld explored at the outset of the argument is articulated with the overall project of the work, the development of a m ­ ethod

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which is simultaneously “Kantian and historical”. At the core of the argument here is a thesis about the relationship between the « natural » world and a « ­second nature » constituted by production and exchange, whose « forms and densities » may mirror those of « first » or physical nature, but are also constituted according to a different logic, and very different taxonomies. The Kantian/Darwinian conceptual remarks in the introduction to the book are unfolded here at a higher level of empirical and conceptual density. The “second object-world”, as Perlin terms it, is marked by countless « knowing » acts (production, marketing, dealing, selling). Unlike « first nature », human agency and knowledge are present at every stage here. The growing of crops, the payment of rents, the establishment of markets are all necessarily based upon a « lexicality » – i.e. participants in this economic order have to be able to read this object-world; textuality, in other words, is woven into the very fabric of economic life, from production to exchange to market-forms. Markets of various kinds and at various scales produce an “empirical synthesis of organizational diversity” – they are always linked to other markets through the flow of coins and goods and taxonomies, and they also act as « frontiers » where economic vocabularies hatched in very different places are « translated » into each other’s terms. These arguments, conveyed telegraphically in the above passages, prepare the ground for another return, again at a higher level, to Perlin’s original formulations about « complexity », which is now linked to the necessity of abstraction within this second object-world. The very « empiricity of the cultural continuum » has an irreducibly abstract component, mirrored in each human subject’s experiential pathways through the social world. All this leads to the very bold claim that complexity itself can be treated in terms of a certain cultural universality, which can in turn be apprehended both through the rigorous application of Kantian philosophy and as a ‘real’ historical development. Classically Kantian (and neo-Kantian, particularly Cassirerean) themes – the relationship of subject and object, mind and world – are developed from the premises of commoditization and the ‘translatability’ that the commodityworld necessarily rests upon. Upon this densely argued basis, Perlin finally formulates the problem of a specifically Kantian universality in properly historical terms. Despite the challenging density of the argument so far, this formulation arrives with a pellucid precision and clarity, and is best conveyed in Perlin’s own words. Certain ­common taxonomic forms, he states, are found “running through vast countrysides, appearing in textiles fabricated everywhere, in curious sorts of money used in different places but which can be traded for one another, quantified in relation to one another, listed together as if the same thing, even converted (alchemized) one into the other […] all this implies true universality, true u ­ niversality, that is,

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in spite of the accidental character of human events and acts.” Everything, in a certain sense, is contained in this passage, and once again we return to the foundational question of how this is at all possible, given the vast and indisputable evidence of irreducible differences that characterize the world. As befits the complexity of the subject-matter, Perlin moves carefully here, working through and dismissing two opposite, invalid explanations of this conundrum. Universality, in the first place, cannot be derived from a « biological a priori » grounded in basic human needs and capacities as an explanatory datum. A common « human nature », developing biologically through time, cannot be the basis of explanation. Historically, the problem is precisely the opposite: how can any sort of « universal » emerge across both time and space through processes scattered across the world, through irreducibly different people speaking different languages and living in different social worlds? A reductive universality based on a common root is thus dismissed as invalid: Perlin develops this through a careful critique of Cassirer. The second invalid proposition, according to Perlin, is an a-priori assumption about the « atomized » plurality of societies which eventually converge upon a universal historical condition. He replaces these assumptions with a new postulate: “the production of the universal as a history of differentiation”. The commodity-domain is simultaneously a transcendental/critical problem in Kantian terms (how is it made possible in the first place?) and a historical problem which can be researched archivally once its full dimensions are disclosed and formulated. The different aspects of the commodity-world, Perlin argues, emerge “interdependently and simultaneously”. A finely dialectical formulation postulates difference as part of a development ‘in which difference itself is made possible’. Commodity-formations, market forms and monetization occur within a much broader historical process whereby a complex society is generated in all its necessity and contingency, as an « artificialist taxonomy » spreads in conjunction with other aspects of complex society – demographic change, state formation, agrarian expansion, trade, etc. The particularizations entailed by such processes of historical formation are intertwined, inextricably, with processes of integration which make societies thinkable wholes. The production and marketing of goods entails « translatability » at its very core. This leads on to the boldest part, in philosophical terms, of the entire argument, as Perlin unfolds a defence of Kant’s Newtonian a priori forms of intuition (space and time). Often travestied as abstract and irrelevant, these Newtonian formations, Perlin shows, have a domain of genuine applicability – culture itself, as « second nature ». There is an intriguing and arresting proposition which grounds this set of reflections. Nature and culture (or « first nature » and « second nature ») are of course irreducibly different in every way – and yet they cover an identical object-field. Humanity is constructed from Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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t­ horoughly « artificialist » materials, and yet these are, in themselves, no different from those which constitute « first nature ». The philosophical argument is now unfolded in more detail. The commodity, it is argued, belongs to the sphere of practical knowledge, where human intentionality is paramount. Commodities are designated, differentiated, listed and tabulated. They are organized by precise market-regulations. All this corresponds to Newtonian space/time, since potential users must be able to think the commodity within a sequence of cause-and-consequence activity. Production lines themselves must be assembled with clear and stable expectations of the sort of commodities which will be generated from them. Seen by a Martian, however, Perlin argues, all this would be seen – and rightly so – as part of « first nature » itself. So while first and second nature are based on mutually exclusive principles, they cover the same object-world, the same people, texts, objects, and taxonomies. From the perspective of users, the “culture” of the commodity-world must be thoroughly “essentialist”, without room for philosophical scepticism and relativity – at the level of the use of commodities, we have pure essentialism, even determinism; yet at the level of actual historical formation, we invariably have accident and contingency. Every participant in commodity-culture is unique in time and space, and yet commodity culture itself allows no absolute singularity in the goods it produces and mobilizes. Everything and everyone is different, unique, and follows a singular trajectory and yet all this difference comes to constitute an effectively universal order. Essentialism and its opposite are therefore irreducibly bound up together in the practical world of human action and exchange. Perlin now elaborates a key distinction, implicit throughout the work but only brought fully to light at this late stage. This is the distinction between the « organic species » (made up of irreducible individuals) and the commodityform, which presupposes universal, « regimental » taxonomic principles which authorize, indeed compel, comparison, equivalence and exchangeability. A textile or coin can only be intelligible as a commodity-identity, identical in principle to others of « the same » species – but the agency which lies behind these identities, in the final analysis, is that of human brain and hand, richly individual, part of an organic species none of whose members are equivalent to anything but themselves. (Even this selfequivalence, it might be added, is not beyond question.) The fabrication of identities at the level of commodity contrasts with the individuality of the agents who produce these identities. An essentialist commodity-world is produced by actors who themselves cannot be conceived of in essentialist terms. This is a familiar argument at one level, but is rendered profoundly original both by the scaffolding of the previous chapters and by the consequences drawn from this insight. The most radical consequence, as mentioned earlier, Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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is that the commodity-world is the very domain in which an « Euclidean geometry and Newtonian space/time » is fully relevant: an « external hand » produces an object-world in a « surprisingly traditional » kind of transcendental process. This matrix “must be accepted publicly as such by all buyers, users or consumers – that is, by all who participate as readers and knowers.” Conventional principles of production, marketing, behavioural codes, communication, all make up the ‘continuum’ of the commodity-world, through a dense and slow historical development of institutions for payment and trade, within a broader context of monetization and commoditization. At each stage in this development, frontiers of translatability are established and crossed. This world is not « infinite » but it is however « illimitable », and thus universal, in the sense that it admits of no predetermined enclosure. Universality is thus dialectically related to difference. In one of the frequent summative passages which throw the preceding pages into sudden and sharp relief, Perlin formulates this resolution as follows: “Difference – a fundamental ground of contingent, local and expressive diversity – pervades soeietal expansion: it is a principle for relationship, for unity, for taxonomy, for designation and for transformation. It affects culture, language, measure, forms of rights, and numerous ideologies of right in different territories, and thus the conception of the person.” Additionally, universality is based on difference just as necessity is based on accident: in the author’s very Hegelian formulation, “Accident becomes necessity; contingency is essence”. The social world of commodities, therefore, is necessarily built upon a foundation of accidents and contingencies, but, with equal force of necessity, such accidents render themselves into a system of social necessity, formulated and represented in « essentialist » terms. The argument is then brought full circle yet again, as this time Perlin returns to the arguments about industrialization made by Pollard, Cameron and Rosenberg, raising them to their full potential through a subtle and imaginative reinscription. He imagines a fresh economic history of industrialization more attentive to the “actual densities and intensities” which exist in the distribution of economic relationships within and between industrial regions. In such a reconstituted economic history, national units would lose their a priori relevance and the scales and frontiers of research would necessarily shift, in a methodologically self-conscious manner. Older forms of methodological boundary-setting and division would become obsolete, and new vocabularies would have to emerge to describe this reworked object-world. “Absurdity”, concludes Perlin in a gnomic (yet pointed and resonant) turn of phrase, « would have changed its sign. » The final section of the book explores these problems upon a different stage: the history of botanical knowledge, within the context of transfers of plant forms and products into early modern Europe. Here, too, we encounter the Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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formidably counter-intuitive alterations of perspective which characterize the whole book. Perlin sets out to consider local plant-species, vegetables, ­tobaccoes, fruits, etc as « cultural objects » - this aspect, he argues, is in no measure secondary to their aspect as organic nature. Peasant sources of botanical knowledge – such as those available in early modern Gujarat or in the ­Americas – pass directly into the intellectual development of botanical knowledge in Europe, crossing the variety of « translational frontiers » which dot the book. Perlin seeks to demonstrate that plants travelled across regions in concordance with the forms of commodification sketched out earlier in the book. Agricultural « types », moving from the pre-Columbian Americas through Africa, India and China, were « converted from one micro-local typology into others in such passage »: this is how products like tobacco, chillies, potatoes and mangoes spread, developing into diverse « types » in a complex process of artificially generated speciation. The many attempts by European botanists to assemble plants were thus, Perlin argues, grounded in the translational character of the commodity-form. On this basis, Perlin formulates more general insights into the character of plant life. It can, he suggests, be divided into two – the « Darwinian » character of organic plant life is counterposed to assiduously, artificially conceived, laboured and assembled plant life. Yet this latter variety is, of necessity, the very kind that all agricultural and agronomic practice is based on: plants can neither be grown deliberately, nor understood without this preliminary labour of sorting and taxonomy. The very basis of botanical observation, thus, involves a minimal degree of « artifice ». So the division between nature and culture, as Perlin puts it, must cut through the very conception of « organic » nature itself. In contrast to the Darwinian postulates of organic natural variety, all plant life which is subjected to human practice and understanding has an irreducibly « artificial » component. Yet, Perlin argues – in a twist which recursively punctuates the entire book, and perhaps achieves its most precise formulation at this point – all this is intrinsic to nature itself, in its most « englobing » sense and function. In this sense, it might be said, the Kantian distinction between noumena and phenomena is validated by the fact of plant life within a world of human practice, intention and translation. The distinction between « first nature » and « artifice » - in contrast, Perlin argues, to much contemporary neoDarwinist thought, must be factored into botanical analysis itself. 4

Stakes and Implications

With this we come to the conclusion of an argument of great depth and subtlety, built with a philosophical rigour which is rare in historical arguments. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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As a whole, the book has a very deliberate and a formidably complex ­architecture. To use a simple and well-worn metaphor, it has the structure of an onion. Yet the method of investigation reverses the usual ways we might think of this. There are concentric circles in the argument, but they extend outward rather than inward. So rather than stripping the peel away to reach at a simple, homogeneous core, the manuscript begins with a « core » of philosophical formulations about complexity and anti-essentialism, and then begins to explore the outer layers, arriving finally at a higher and more layered level of analysis, at a point where the structure of social reality unfolded through the successive investigations in the manuscript finally become visible both as historical research programme and as philosophical method. The stakes of the argument are ambitious and urgent. At the level of economic history, the work can be read as a sustained polemic against the ways in which economic historians have traditionally constituted their subject-matter. This has often taken the form of a certain methodological nationalism. Debates within the field of global economic history (the debate around Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence for instance), much of which actually happened after the bulk of Perlin’s book seems to have been drafted, sought to critique procedures which took the nation-form as the most relevant analytic unit. Yet it could be argued that Perlin’s book accomplishes a profounder settling of scores with methodological nationalism. Because of his philosophical rigour, he is able to identify the problem of essentialism, from which methodological nationalisms flow, in extremely precise terms. Perlin is able to overcome not only methodological nationalism but also, and more importantly, he is able to transcend the perspectival distortions of the essentialism it is grounded in. This is, by any measure, a remarkable accomplishment. The reason Perlin is able to accomplish this is his attention to philosophical questions. And these – in a manner hitherto absent from the work of professionally trained historians – are not an adjunct to his main work, nor even a conceptual « toolbox », but the nerve centre of the entire enterprise. Sustaining this commitment to a philosophical formulation and resolution of historical questions is formidably difficult: I cannot imagine it accomplished better than it has been in this manuscript. At the heart of this remarkable achievement is the way Perlin is able to establish Kant’s philosophy as an architecture of necessary preconditions. As a Kantian exercise, City Intelligible boasts an almost classical purity. Kant’s ­universalizing maxims are framed exactly as Kant himself framed them – not as ‘first principles’ from which one mechanically derives consequences, but rather as the formal and logical presuppositions which have to be in place for a certain condition or situation to exist in the first place. To take just one of many possible analogies, the categorical imperative (treating others as Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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e­ nds-in-themselves) as formulated by Kant sets out the formal structure necessary for freely enacted moral reasoning to exist at all: you cannot have the ‘good will’ or moral autonomy without presupposing the categorical imperative. In the same way, Perlin establishes the preconditions or presuppositions necessary to make a commodity-world thinkable in the first place, and describes an entire network of translatability and communicative reason at the core of these preconditions. Where Perlin takes a step beyond this, as befits a historian, is to unfold these preconditions not just at a logical or axiomatic level (commoditization cannot exist without translatability) but also at the level of history itself. He traces these preconditions at the level of their historical formation, rightly jettisoning along the way any essentializing « transition » from closed to open, local to global, orders (a fallacy characteristic of many ways of thinking about historical processes of globalization). Simultaneously, he develops an arresting and original methodology (‘reconstitutive sampling’) which may be appropriate for the historical problems he formulates. Through all this runs a profound methodological self-awareness: the fact that Perlin himself is constituting his object of study is part and parcel of the architecture of the argument. The deeply dialectical movement between concept and object, theoretical formulation and historical experience, is yet another way in which Perlin’s insights exceed those of global economic history. Adorno once wrote that the « dialectical method » denoted nothing but a patient, ceaseless immersion in the object at hand, in order to unravel it from within: in this sense, nothing could be more dialectical than the arguments produced by Perlin in this book. Two sets of questions can perhaps be raised. One concerns the ethical and political stakes of the argument. There are links made, at various stages of the argument, between essentialism, contemporary emphases on incommensurability and radical difference which pervade even the best critical philosophy, methodological nationalism, and contemporary forms of political exclusion and ethnic/national chauvinism. This set of linkages is interesting, but perhaps deserved a fuller elaboration. Without such elaboration, the leap from the cognitive to the ethical-political domain can sometimes seem abrupt and unmediated. Is a Kantian universality the only defence against a slide into implicitly essentialist, even racist and nationalist, modes of thinking which mirror the worst of contemporary politics? Conversely, do philosophical preoccupations with incommensurability invariably mirror – even unconsciously – such essentialism? The second set of questions concern universality as a template for the historical differentiations of the social world. Can the universality established so effectively by Perlin in this book, built as it is from the movements of the commodity-world, be applied to other, heterogeneous domains of human Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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e­ xperience? Can the commodity-world (which, after all, supplies the ground upon which Perlin constructs his argument about universality) really furnish a basic template for thinking through the problem of difference and universality on different analytical scales and bases? Can the same argument about universality sustain the study of other aspects of human culture? Perlin, of course, is well aware that his argument in City Intelligible implies the need for arguments about other aspects of the social world. In a few suggestive passages in the book, Perlin writes that these reflections will be supplemented by a further exploration of the forms of class relations and social power which accompanied the establishment of commodity-worlds. There are implicit tensions which such questions highlight, but these tensions only make the work richer. There are long passages, which punctuate the book, which demonstrate Perlin’s awareness of these tensions: to unfold them further and attempt to resolve them would, presumably, need to traverse frontiers other than those of the commodity-world. The enduring achievement of this work, it might be concluded, lies not in any “final” resolution of the philosophical quarrel between universality and difference. Perhaps the scores can never be finally settled. The great achievement of City Intelligible, rather, is its reconstitution of the terrain upon which this quarrel is conducted. By unfolding, with such philosophical rigour, the patterns and rhythms of a universality grounded in the commodity-form, and by showing the necessary ways in which this universality is the ground of differentiation itself, Perlin raises the stakes of the debate and also underlines possible sources of conceptual resolution. His work is as far from flat-footed universalisms which homogenize away differences as it is from the fetish of incommensurability. And by grounding all this in sustained historical exploration of a delimited object-field, Perlin is also able to unfold fresh and original methodological bases for arguments about both difference and universality (and, ultimately, an argument about universality as the ground of difference). This is a truly remarkable book, argued at a formidable pitch of intensity, which should occupy readers and scholars for generations to come. Its complexity is a testament to the complexity of the problems Perlin grapples with: it is part and parcel of the research object at hand. The fact that Perlin has been able to formulate these problems, in the way he has, immediately raises the stakes of economic history as well as historical methodology. It should raise historical, as well as philosophical, arguments about the relations of universality and difference to a new, and higher, level of debate. Aditya Sarkar Leamington Spa, 26 October 2019

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Acknowledgements A full detail and expression of these acknowledgements will occur in a subsequent publication. I have to rest with the manuscript submitted to the readers and thus reduce them to their minimum. There are three names of person without whose intervention this book would not have been possible. The first is Dr. Lien Hielkema. ex-chief Librarian of the History of Science Library of the University of Utrecht, who supplied me by international post with many of the books and articles concerned with science and philosophy used in this work, especially those concerning Kant and Kant-related issues (e.g. the important connection between relativistic physics and neo-Kantism), but who also answered many other kinds of question. Parts of this essay could not have been developed without her indispensable, fullyengaged help. Yet, the historical and other resources used directly to compose this essay, its two parts—the first drafts of which date from the mid 1990s—were by then obtained from many libraries, including the British Library (London); Cambridge University Library (including the Rare Books room); The Whipple Library, Cambridge; The Scientific Publications Library, Cambridge (especially its defunct (sub-) Library of Applied Biology); the Bibliothèque nationale (at its old address in rue Richelieu), Paris; the Bibliothèque mazarine, Paris; the Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patrimoine, Toulouse; the Musée Dupuy, Toulouse, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague (including the Rare Books room, but especially the magnificent reference section of that library); the Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden (including, once more, the Rare Books room, and its remarkable reference sections in the different departments of the library); The British Museum Department of Coins and Medal for its collections of moneys, books and manuscripts; The India Office Library and Records (a then separately sited department of the British Library); the Bibliotheek der Sinoloogisch Instituut te Leiden (Sinological Institute of Leiden University); the Bibliotheek Horticus Botanicus te Leiden; the Bibliothèque de la Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris; the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna; and the Biblioteca Communale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna (in which I encountered several merchants manuals and related papers dating from the early sixteenth century); the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden; the art-concerned library of the Lakenhal Museum, Leiden; The Netherlands Institute for Art History (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie), in The Hague, and the library belonging to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in Rotterdam. Many people have helped me, sometimes considerably, but I would like to make particular mention of Dr. Cristina Bacci of the Biblioteca Universitaria di Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Bologna, and of Mr. Peter Filby of the Applied Biology Library, Cambridge, both of whom introduced me to unexpected riches. The open-reference sections in The Hague and Leiden, referred to above, were of very exceptional value. I spent many long evenings at work in these much-neglected places, rejoicing in their wealth and marvellous tranquillity. To these I can add the more recent aid of Mr. Serge Niccolo of the Musée Dupuy, Toulouse, Drs Joe Cribb and Helen Wang of the British Museum (the first now retired), and Dr. Julian Baker of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and Mme. Valérie Dumoulin of the Service Patrimoine écrit of the Bibliothèque d’Etude et du Patrimoine, Toulouse. I wish, also however, to return to my archival experience and primary research of a now distant past, but without which, once more, it is difficult for me to conceive of the possibility of this book. With this in mind, to express my entire gratitude to the staff of the Maharashtran State Archives in Pune, and also with that of the library and archive known as the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, also in Pune, both of which, in the two years of 1975 and 1976, and in subsequent years, made me welcome inside their doors, introducing me to a remarkable and unexpected « carnival » of records that have since formed the inspiration driving many aspects of my later more comparative and interdisciplinary studies, determining developments in both approach and method. I refer readers to the relevant footnote listing some of the names of those concerned with what has remained an indelible experience. The book itself is directly based upon a paper first presented at the invitation of Professor Carlo Poni at the Università degli Studi di Bologna on 23 May 1995, and on a closely related paper on “Market Trust and Translatability” presented to the same audience. It is Dr. Roberto Scazzieri of the same university who generously introduced me to Professor Poni and other colleagues. The first draft of this book being soon afterwards stimulated by these occasions and the discussions I then experienced. Other immediate contexts for the research informing this book include M. Maurice Aymard, who organised two brief fellowships at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, and which enabled me to work in several major Parisian libraries, especially concerning sources and early examples of the essentialism also discussed in the course of my argument. At my behest, Michel Morineau and Krzysztof Pomian read the first complete manuscript of Part 1 of this book soon after its composition. I had been especially stimulated by Morineau’s brilliant essay Incroyables Gazettes et Fabuleux Métales (Cambridge, 1985) and by Pomian’s important L’Ordre du Temps (Paris, 1984). Where Part 2 is concerned, it was Carlo Poni who made possible its pre­ sentation to the conference held annually at the Instituto Internatzionale di Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Storia Economica « F. Datini », Prato. I owe much to Carlo’s intervention and encouragement, to our brief friendship, and to his support and stimulation during those few years of the 1990s, and I continue to bear him an unpayable debt. Roberto Scazzieri also invited me, in those same years, into generous participation with his international group of Sraffa-enthusiastic colleagues named after Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. I especially wish to mention André Gunder Frank; my debt to him may properly be understood in reading his last book ReOrient. But, yes, I regret having met him in the aftermath of the most difficult and dark phase of our lives, referred to in “More than a Preface”, a circumstance that interrupted the kind of close collaboration and debate I would have wished to have with him, and that he had hoped of me. I mentioned at the start that this book would not have been possible without the aid given me by Lien Hielkema. But the same is true of the equally incisive and disinterested engagement of Professor Ravi Ahuja, Director of the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at the Georg-August-Universität at Göttingen, who took a direct interest in having the first complete draft of the book re-read and accepted for publication, and in providing me facilities for preparing this definitive version. Then, I must also refer to Professor Aditya Sarkar, of the University of Warwick, Dr. Anna Sailer, of the University of Göttingen, and finally Ms. Camille Buat, of the same university, who have materially, often substantially (very substantially in the case of Camille Buat), aided the accomplishment of this publication. Finally, and a third decisive condition making possible this book, I might not myself be now present were it not for the material and moral support provided me, at a moment of distress and need, by my friends Lisa Klopfer and Lee Schlesinger, the first, professorial librarian at the Eastern Michigan University and the second, honorary research associate at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. It is Lee who has offered me constant attention in aiding me to complete this manuscript, debating every intellectual issue with me and responding to my considerable technical ignorance. Victor Bijlert, of the Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam, obtained the indispensable software used to produce the book, whilst Bhaswati Bhattacharya, introduced me decisively to her colleagues at CeMIS. Two friends, John and Margaret Hardiman, enabled me to engage with research resources in London by frequently offering me their generous hospitality. Enid Perlin is everywhere in this book. Forty years of close companionship and intimate friendship results in a sharing and mutual occupancy of mind that becomes virtually indiscernible (and of which one becomes fully aware only upon the decease of the partner), and this is true in spite of her own independence of spirit and opinion, and her own tasks and accomplishments Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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of research on cotton mill workers in the Indian city of Coimbatore during the early twentieth century. A final addendum in honour of the three staff-members of the publisher of this book who have intervened in their own names, and who are thus rep­ resentative of all those responsible for processing this book at Brill: Gerda Danielsson-Coe, Wendel Scholma and Thalien Colenbrander, all three for the excellence and good will of their collaboration with this author, and most ­notably the last-named for her sensitive adaptation to my personal idiosynccracies.

...

The book itself is dedicated to the memory of my first and closest friend, the friend of my childhood, Albert Louis Perlin, born in 1909 in St. Johns Newfoundland, … my father, and who passed on to me, seemingly without formality or any discernible rhetorical effort, the moral values and principles that had marked his own character: a rejection of mendacity, a desire for justice in the world, and a welcoming appreciation (far more significant than mere tolerance, which instead may change its sign in a moment) of the rich treasure before us represented by the cultural and ethnic diversity so marking our world. I add to his name that of Ena Hanna Perlin, my mother, the woman who guided my first footsteps during the years of war when migrating from place to place in search of shelter. Le Viguier, Fr-12350 Brandonnet [email protected] —May 2019

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Notice to the Reader City Intelligible! … invisible and yet intelligible! … an unbroken human landscape of constituted form that assumes all obstacles, frontiers and boundaries that simultaneously act to fragment the same content of that landscape, whether linguistic, cultural, political or other, and making appear those fragments, superficially at least, as if self-enclosed unities, incomparable with one another, fundamentally distinct from one another, and always so, thus as if from their origins, … as if composing a field of impossible translation and unengaged communication. This assertion of a unity embodied by the entirety of all such appearances refers directly, by its use of word, to the titles of my two previous books, The Invisible City and Unbroken Landscape, with which this book is in full argumentative continuity, … except, perhaps for its frank major engagement in welding to it a fully phenomenological dimension of enquiry, thus in investigating that landscape simultaneously as real, independent of the human who perceives and engages with it, and equally as a product of mind: a phenomenology, an anthropology in its two different senses and practices, empirical (thus cultural and social) and philosophical. For, what is at stake? The foundations for an argument, based upon considerable research, reading, personal enquiry and experience, and, let me add, conviction, favouring a universalist conception of human culture, … foundations of culture located in the basic a-priori conditions of human thought itself, and in terms of which cultural differentiation becomes, and can alone be conceived, as possible. What then is implied is a veritable « explanation of difference » in terms of an entirely empirical, materialist conception of meaning and matter. The sphere of the commodity before industrialisation—the entire economic history and culture we associate with commoditisation and with the early forms of capitalism—has been taken up in this book as a uniquely privileged, astonishingly rich domain of abundant evidence. It gifts the enquirer with a remarkably diverse and massive documentation covering many regions of the world and many centuries, and that enables me to argue … even to justify … this very thesis: this unity underlying all difference. In turn, it implies an equally fundamental continuity, without suture, between the phenomenology of mind and the empirical and historical matter of culture itself, thus between the two anthropologies, cultural and philosophical. If addressed to their practitioners, it is as if a Daphnis and a Chloe were invited to learn the arts of conceiving a single entirely unified anthropology. Then let us begin.

…

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Notice to the Reader

This is not a study in economic history but instead what we may better call an historical anthropology of what ordinarily is treated as the domain of the economic historian. But I mean anthropology simultaneously in its two very different senses: the social and cultural, on the one hand, and the philosophical, on the other. Indeed, it is that latter aspect that especially has come to concern this book: by philosophy I mean it in the phenomenological sense, thus as a phenomenological study of the culture of the commodity, one seeking to investigate the basic foundational criteria in terms of which the very fact and domain of the commodity had been constituted early in history as a product of the collective human mind,—in short, its very possibility as thought and as practice. I discuss, explain and seek out those principles of possible constitution of a whole extended world of objects, institutions and behaviours, but seek also to justify this kind of interrogation, one that (so I consider) must (should) be prior to any further questions concerning its appearance through the events and accidents of history, and the documented evidence of its incidence in different parts of the globe. It is the latter I thereafter treat as a cultural, anthropological history, … indeed as culture, a sphere of knowable, accessible knowledge and intention even for the historical contemporary and participant, those who lived it and participated in generating it, but that we readers and researchers, come from afar, must seek, often against the odds, to recover as our own knowledge. In so doing, however, I indeed seek to marry as closely and intimately as possible— ideally without sensible seam (an ideal towards which one must drive without the arrogance of assuming its realisation at the present stage)—these two very different manners of interrogating the human subject and its past. I do so by also interrogating the very means required in order to constitute a method and procedure capable of realising this purpose and its object, a focus of conscious, ongoing, methodological and practical definition discussed and justified in the course of the book. Paradoxically, it seeks an explanation, without notable discontinuity, affecting the overall interpretation and thus result, and yet that methodologically must constantly emphasise that very difference as a problem of method and also, because of the difficulties it introduces not only for the reader but for the author himself owing to its unfamiliar, explorative and necessarily interdisciplinary character. I am fully conscious that this unfamiliar manner of treating a historical material will cause such difficulty, and perhaps invite severe reproach and opposition, but I have long considered such a procedure necessary in order to understand my subject matter. I take the risk! For my ultimate intention is equally important, even pressing for the popula­ tions of the twenty-first century: it is that of arguing and justifying a valid basis for considering human culture as naturally and intentionally translational

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and thus universal in spite of all the differences we observe of it; it is in this very sense that we may also call the study an « explanation of difference »! And perhaps it is that very assertion—that provocative concern with the universal—that explains the priority I have given to the Kantian criteria of possible human thought and in terms of which any local cultural anthropology, be it Kwakiutl, Dinka or our own, can alone be conceived, indeed, possible. Each stage of questioning, it will be seen, entails yet new interrogations. In talking of the universal one then confronts its historical possibility in a world that has released itself from the old metaphysical forms of considering human origins, and, in this case, the dogma of a single human Adamic origin and dispersal, a conception that has dominated the historiography of the palaeontology and archaeology of the human, and that only currently has become opened up to a necessary doubt. My current intention is to continue this study in two further books, explained in the “Preface” below. First, one that extends the enquiry about commodity production to the sociological conditions of class, underlying state and societal development from the very beginnings of agricultural settlement, and that had necessitated, as complement, the particular fields of evidence studied closely in this book: the commodity, the market, forms of payment, and, above all, the whole web of what I term translational exchange. Second, a more thoroughgoing reconsideration and development of the phenomenological aspect of the study, both its philosophy in terms of mind and its remarkable, practical extension into what will be found to be innumerable, yet comparable forms of instrumental practice throughout the continuum; most notably it must investigate and then validate the possibility of identifying the universal traits giving rise to the whole diversity of human culture and that come expressed circumstantially through that very same diversity. For it is, above all, as a domain of generalised knowledge accessible to and exteriorised by human consciousness— as a rich matter of intention and drive—that it interests me, and that it can be seen to act as a counter-weight to all that at the same time has led to a dominant current emphasis in the humanities on cultural difference, and also leading on a more popular level to the many forms of exclusion and violence we experience all about us today. Then, as consequence, a final observation must emphasise the ethical drive that has impelled this study, and that, therefore, is also to be discussed in the inaugural essay. My advice to the reader is as follows: unless conversant with philosophical and conceptual reasoning, to begin with Part 1, Chapter 1, and continue to read in the order of the book until the end of Chapter 3. This should prepare her or him for the difficulties that engulf the essay that inaugurates the book, “More

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than a Preface or Introduction!”, but which then should enable that same reader the better to confront Part 2. This may seem paradoxical given the inaugural position of that essay. But a book can have a life of its own, and take on a form unexpected of it in public discussion. It is this that I hope of its reception and that I seek to anticipate in such a manner,—a book independent of its author and that enters free debate and even opposition. And it will be seen that its position at the front of the book is justified for reasons stated therein, explaining and registering a certain delay in bringing the main content of the book to publication, and bringing the whole task envisaged in the book into the perspective I now, following this delay, have come to hold of it. Yet, the reader should feel free to choose an own route that maximises interest and comprehension. One major reserve is that I doubt that one can or should economise on the order running from Chapters 1 to 3 of Part 1: it works developmentally and methodologically, returning back upon itself in order to progress in an understanding of the full unfolding meaning of its empirical content. Students have told me also that in beginning as I suggest they have become familiarised with a language and a realm of questioning that, until now, has not been their own, had been closed to them, and that in doing so they have come to open to themselves a path into the intricacies, towards which I seek to lead them, … to understand, which means also to become able to criticise my position.1 Eventually, I wish that reader to confront the essay since the problems it treats are intrinsic to the matter of the general argument of the book; and, in seeking to solve them, one leads the content thereafter into a succession of ever broadening perspectives that eventually determine my current vision of their significance. All translation into English is my own, especially from the French and German, but also from other languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or Marathi, except, however, in the very rare cases, each mentioned, where the original source has not been accessible to me. But this ethic of translation is especially true of Kant, with whom I engage systematically in certain parts of the book, as also of Hegel and Husserl on the few occasions when I need to refer to their works, thus in cases where the reader would judge, and with justice, that there are already available excellent translations of the works 1 I thank in particular Camille Buat of CEMIS, University of Göttingen, for conveying to me with remarkable sensitivity and critical intelligence this aspect of her own experience, and that of other doctoral and post-doctoral students who had shared this route occasioned by two seminars in 2016, prepared by distribution of some of my earlier publications.

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c­ oncerned necessarily much superior to my own. This practice cannot be because I consider myself a better translator than the professionals, … a remark made not in modesty, but with a strong sense of cause and realism. Instead, the reason lies in the very serious need for any serious interpreter of such materials, whether intellectual and conceptual or factual and historical, to make that foundation of words a field of meaning to be ploughed by one self, in order to come to judgements concerning meaning that alone can properly convince … appear credible … to both self and reader; because in rendering oneself to the plough, in « dirtying one’s hands », roughening one’s skin, thus labouring the text, one thereby engages in an intimacy of meaning entirely necessary for the work of comprehension itself. For I would remind the reader that the very act of translation is necessarily interpretation: that one must understand in order to translate, just as one must translate in order to understand, and that in engaging with the translation of others one engages precisely in perspectives and viewpoints not one’s own. And Kant’s writings, although often of remarkable beauty and of extraordinary clarity,—an aesthetic in their very own right,—remain disputable, sources of a rich literature of unending debate, and not least on the issues that most concern us: say, the space for a freedom of decision and of action under practical and historical necessitating conditions, and, most certainly, the very question of the validity of the kinds of criteria defined by Kant as providing the a-priori conditions and possibilities for a human being to constitute an empirical world of experience … and for experience …, both in mind as thought and language, and equally crystallised as a new world of cultural objects and concepts beyond, « outside », the human body,—what I shall treat as a second nature or artifice: an « intelligible human city ». This is to emphasise that I have chosen this path because convinced of its necessity: each serious translation of a single, identical much-translated text, differs substantially from the others; each translator has a different subjective approach and reaction to meaning constituted by his or her own experience and personality, and since all such translators are concerned with meaning, and such difference often concerns the more important problems associated with these texts, then, I too must assume the risk of grappling with those same original texts, even though aware of serious limitations of skill, aptness and learning before such a task. It is necessary to say this from the start. For meaning is indeed the issue, always controversial, but upon which further interpretation and heuristic advance must entirely depend. Then, one must be allowed to differ, yes, allow oneself to differ, foster that difference not only as a right but as a necessity, underlying the very fact and possibility of knowledge. One thus assumes the risk of differing in order

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to advance one’s argument and help generate a unified and universal knowledge. But that procedure does not excuse me from the duty and benefits of consulting other translations, even those in other languages: their authors have also faced the same difficulties and they are an evidence from which I, in my turn, needs learn. It is the old story of Marcuse « caught in the act » with Hyppolite’s translation into French of Hegel’s Phenomenology under his arm, whilst leaving a famous library: Marcuse; a native German speaker and a known expert on Hegel! This leaves the bibliography for comment. I refer only to works personally used;—in no sense do I attempt to constitute complete bibliographies of the authors concerned, which, besides, are generally available on the internet. My aim instead is to allow the reader to know the materials from which my study has been constructed, and, if that reader is critical, to facilitate his or her observation of the paths I have followed, and argue other … yes better … paths into and through the labyrinth of knowledge. I shall complete this preliminary notice with a warning to the reader. Any hint of anti-Darwinism on my account is mistaken, but in the current climate my approach to cultural matter deserves a few warning words. It will become clear in the course of the argument, especially as it develops in Chapter 3 of Part 1, that I possess a generally Darwinist conception of the construction of human society and culture. I say Darwinist in principle since I am not dogmatic; like every other element of scientific knowledge Darwin’s own theories are debatable, and it is debate indeed, dissension and open, thoroughgoing argumentation among individuals concerning the matter of that knowledge, that alone provides the necessary conditions in which knowledge is allowed to advance. I do not enter such debate concerning Darwin but advance a notion of human cultural construction founded upon what one perceives and defines as the acting « individual » just as his own theory of species-constitution and of the evolutionary process was grounded upon a foundational, yet circumstantial distinction that differentiates each and every « individual », « individual » considered at whatever scale of attention we happen to attach to such a difficult notion of identity. Paradoxical and problematic though such a perspective might initially appear, it is precisely a question that is considered at length below because intimately concerning the central theme of this book. The relationship of group and individual presents us not with a choice but with a problem … one I see as a complex dialectic of relationship that constantly calls for our attention and is part and parcel of our difficulties in comprehending the empirical. Nonetheless, where culture itself is concerned, the inner intentions and conceptions of human culture, I do indeed adopt a creationist position that Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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requires an explanation and justification: it is to say that it is the human being that creates this culture and does so according to universal principles that govern the constitution of the whole domain of culture in all its difference,—­uni­ versal principles of mind and practice. This aspect engages the transcen­dental phenomenological approach (and Kantian) in terms of which I develop my understanding of commoditisation as a field of cultural thought and practice. It is the culture of the commodity that develops a concept of kind or species founded upon stereotypical identity, as I explain below, and thus on principles contrary to Darwin’s conception of the species-constitution (and to which otherwise I hold). This interpretation means grasping back systematically and ruthlessly into the very creativity that a Hegel and a Marx had marked out as distinctly human properties, but that had become alienated in religious beliefs and metaphysical systems to some nameless super-powerful divinity or God. This creationism, then, is human creationism. And let’s be frank, I have been an atheist from infancy and remain so; anti-science and anti-Darwinism—­ science and Darwinism in the general and principled sense advanced above— would be contrary to my values, as to my ethic and conception of the very nature of knowledge. The problem arises especially when I come to consider commodity production in agriculture, and which I regard as a full part of the culture and economy of the commodity. It means that the two kinds of species concept—­individualist (Darwinist in principle) and stereotypical (creationist)—meet within the plant and create an inextricable problem of ultimate analysis that perhaps only the specialist in genetics and molecular biology might one day come to solve. But it means that I must consider this interaction, focus closely upon the confrontation of these two oppositional forms of practice within the same empirical object-field, thus in the constitution of the cultivated plant itself … of the type of which a plant is but an identified member … born both of nature and culture, and finally attempt to grasp the ultimate totality of what ultimately we also call nature and in which everything, including culture (thus artifice), must finally be conceived and understood: that universe considered on entirely materialistic principles. I do not solve this final enigma that constitutes my materials, go as far as possible in presenting it as a problem requiring attention, but that in doing so allows me to master my own limited theme and project. The only legitimate criticism of my position, in this general respect (aside from criticism of the specific detail of my argumentation), would come from those who believe human mind and practice entirely determined. And, indeed, Kant’s conception of the freedom of the individual to build his or her own tower of thought and activity (phrased as such in his First Critique), will come to concern the final steps of Part I of City Intelligible. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Nonetheless, in the present climate of fundamentalist anti-scientific public activity, this note is necessary. Moreover, it is precisely because my own thesis advanced below confronts the biological conception of the species question that it becomes particularly controversial, requires attention, and yet must continue to elude solution. The impression gained from familiarity with specialist dispute concerning the species problem among biologists and evolutionists, given to this question, is one of an unadjustable or rigid dogmatism, … of a « gut »-refusal to confront such difficulties as opened up by the empirical reality of a « frontier » between nature and culture (« nature » conceived in its two senses: as particular and other to ourselves, and as a universe that incorporates the human and the cultural). They might do so by establishing methods of research that would open the whole field of species formation in both nature and culture to a single programme of detailed interrogation, … thus, as a first step, admitting the necessity to « problematise » the issue. This is how I have come to regard the resistance which specialists in systematics show towards even addressing as problem such cultural forms of classification as are encountered locally among vast populations of peasantries actually cultivating and giving form to variety and plant identities in the field … « factoring the species », as it were. Somewhere a Darwinist systematics and a cultural systematics must meet (one that determines the very criteria consciously desired and selected in fabricating a type that will be marketable), … become synthesis, and not left as two disconnected aspects of a reality kept artificially apart. I leave it to the reader to judge my own attempt to address such a confrontation, but which cannot be conclusive since escaping the bounds of my own competence.

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More than a Preface or Introduction!

The Transcendental Constitution of the Cultural, Historical and Empirical Object: The Problem and Task of the Two Anthropologies

Notably, [the author] has deployed Kant’s great idea: not one of learning philosophy but of learning to think philosophically, like Husserl. He refutes the separation between philosophy and non-philosophy, seeking to make possible for an every-person to philosophise, and to do so on the basis of a community of thinking and experience.1 1

Initial Notice—an Order of Reading

I must first affirm my decision to place this essay at the very beginning of the book, whilst, at the very same time, advising … guiding … the curious reader to begin with Chapter 1 and proceed at least to the end of Chapter 3, of Part 1, before turning back, in progressing through the book, to confront what now follows in the present introductory essay. I explain this advice in the “Notice to the Reader” with which I expect the reader to begin. At least for most readers, the Chapters 1 to 3 will be a kind of apprenticeship into the complex world with which I find myself concerned; s/he will feel the more enabled, the less put off, in confronting this difficult content, but by means of which I seek to haul the matter and concerns of the book up to the surface of the present of current attention and apprehension, and, in so doing, explain the evolution 1 Nathalie Depraz, “La Sixième Méditation cartésienne: fécondité et tensions d’un dialogue philosophique”, the introduction by the translator, of Eugen Fink’s Sixième Méditation Cartésienne, 20 (my translation of her remark being necessarily free, but in seeking to be accurate). Stated in this way, the point is perfectly compatible with Cassirer’s authoritative demand that in order for a science to justify its status as a « science », it must show itself conscious of its own constituent formation as a corpus of inherited thought and presumption, … of making known to itself the corpus of ongoing a-priori judgements that have come, unquestioned in themselves, to constitute and structure it. But, as stated, it is also compatible with my own position, that which I argue below and also to be worked out as a more complete argumentation, and in more complete detail, in what I propose as a part-two of the present work: that such formation is as much a matter of study for historian and cultural anthropologist as it is for the philosopher. It concerns the internal formative status of history and cultural anthropology themselves as an anthropology of the self, and this too is a corollary of my argument. No doubt, both Fink and Husserl would have disagreed. I shall mention certain difficulties with Depraz’ remark below.

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of my own position. That evolution denies nothing of what appears below but instead takes account of own improved understanding of the very nature of the task I had set myself to fulfil. Then, it is in the retrospect of a first approach to the book that the reader should become enabled to understand the inaugural position of the following essay. 2

The Subject Matter and the Project

This “More than a Preface” seeks to justify an approach that gives identical significance to the material history of the commodity and to the principal role of the individual in generating that material facticity. These two aspects always seem to be called forth into consciousness when discussing commodification: both the objects we call commodity and the human agency responsible for their existence, both aspects treated as problems for detailed description and explanation, treated therefore like one of the old « anatomy lessons » of yore. But let’s be clear: in reality what we have before us (the object and the the agency) is an undivided completitude, a complex of closely interrelated empirical detail tied directly to the finite circumstances of time and place, and for this reason seen constantly altering before the eye. But, in considering it so—as an agency of activity and realisation and, secondly, as a material context engaging such action—we become able to consider commodification as a form of global, cultural, intersubjective exchange that we come to comprehend as inherently translational, … intentionally translational and expressed so through the very drive and intention of all participants of whatever kind throughout the globe. It is actively translational to the extent of constituting a dense and ongoing subjective practice of exchange traversing indifferently topographies, oceans and continents, as if constituting a vast continuum of unbroken relationship escaping all conventional forms of assumed obstacle or frontier, whether linguistic or cultural, ethnic or religious, sociological or anthropological, or, say, even political or military. Its translational drive … the drive invested by participating populations in commodity-related activities … is to controvert all such obstacles to successful exchange … to efficacious communication. Yet, it is the very concept of the frontier, no matter of what kind or of what scale of incidence, that is habitually utilised in the social disciplines to characterise such human relationship, placing the obstacle prior in significance to the act. Fully argued in the humanities, it concerns numerous kinds of frontier that interrupt relationship and prevent full and efficacious communication between individual persons (this, for example, is how Husserl perceives it), but

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more usually we encounter it in the secondary literature being argued as ­limiting relationships between ethnic, linguistic or, say, national collective ­entities, without the question of the group or the frontier … of what oughts compose or define such concepts and entities … ever being subjected to prior systematic interrogation. I argue the very opposite. The very notion of what constitutes participation must come under interrogation, must constitute a problem in its own right. It must be extended to include the entirety of any population, to the consumer as much as to the producer and merchant: indeed into a multitude of different kinds of behaviour and practice all of which are determined by and engaged with the facticity of commoditisation … that enter the market place for whatever reason. This is, then, to treat commoditisation as a matter of general cultural construction, by which I mean to regard it as a concern of both thought (mind) and practice (externalised materialisation of such thought), and, moreover, that concerns a dense and generalised field of variously engaged activity affecting an « everyperson ». Furthermore, this point being of particular importance, it concerns all that goes in a societal complex that enables its continued sustainment through time, and that if recognised as altering constantly, both in the detail and in the major structuring of its content of its content, remains a domain of human activity that we can continue correctly to define as commodification. In doing so, we therefore distinguish two aspects of the question: (a) the principles that a-priori govern any definition of what constitutes commodification (commercial capitalism, and so forth); (b) the external circumstantial cultural, social, time/place conditions governing their local expression. In this manner we already distinguish a universal dimension of the question from that field of empirical differentiation focussed upon by the humanities, the historian and the anthropologist, thus the question of the two anthropologies and their relationship. By « sustainment » I mean what Marx referred to as the « replacement » in time of some socio-economic order, of its constant self-investment of resources enabling its reproduction in the course of time, reproduced in all its given complexity, and, whether consciously or not, that concerns the survival through time of what at any time exists and sustains life. It is not that in qual­ itatively renewing itself it ceases to alter in the detail and in the structure; but that, quantitatively speaking, it reproduces through time the means of maintaining its social and institutional order at a certain established level of development and complexity. Both Hegel and Husserl (and his assistant Fink) make this distinction of the two dimensions very clear: the universal from the local expression; that which continues to be from that which alters; it is that between any action at the moment of its occurrence, and that which it helps to

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compose and that should be seen to endure through time whilst altering historically and empirically. This notion of reproduction … of replacement and sustainment … covers especially the basic criteria or principles that determine the form and order that will be deduced below as having informed both production of commodities and their exchange. Such criteria, identified as such, Kantian in kind, and that lie at the centre of discussion in this book, characterise a pervasive global commodification centuries before the industrial revolution and emergence of industrial and finance capitalism. To repeat, this is not to assume that such organisation of things remains static, essentially unchanging, despite its internal content of accident and contingency, and thus as if statically awaiting some special moment of momentous tension for a general transition affecting the very principles of the kind of order deemed as constituting it, leading to its transformation into some other order of socio-economic existence … say as have long characterised debates concerning the so-called transition from feudalism to capitalism. Rather, it is to regard all social and economic activity as actively devoted to its maintenance, to its survival, whether the work in the field or in the workshop, or that devoted to the means of trade or lines of ­transport—concerned not only with producing means to exist but for the whole order, at every scale of appreciation, to replace itself in time through concrete action, to continue as means of social and individual survival. Yet, in so doing, the consequence, in spite of itself, is a constant process of ongoing interactive alteration. In such a regard, all society is inherently dynamic, which is to say inherently transitional. Commodification provides an abundant, virtually omnipresent global evidence both for its omnipresent translational character and for such inherent transformation. The point, however, of this dual approach—at once both philosophical and empirical—is methodological: that of a need felt to maintain these two ­dimensions of the question distinct from one another in spite of their indistinction in any empirical reality; this is in order to enable our exposure of commodification as indeed culture, and universal in its incidence: there is the thing itself, objectified, or « realised » in Hegelian terminology, and there is the subjective drive and individualist complex of collective activity in which it comes embodied as forms of knowledge in mind, thus as thought, intention, decision, thence practice, so that the thought becomes embodied physically, given a material substance and form, whether intended or not, and thus, in a general macro-societal sense, definable as culture: yes, subject/object, the subject in the object, but that then presents itself as external object and a context of objects that confronts the subject. This is to extend Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle into the instrument we call mind, treat it as a preeminently

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­ henomenological concept, the implication of the instrument of thought that p must process what it receives as sensory impression and produce that field of the objective. This is to say that the problem, as I emphasise below, is that Heisenberg’s rule applies directly to our own instrument of thought, to our own minds as researchers, thus comes to us doubled as two sets of problematising: both to the « mind » of the participant and to that of the one who in turn has chosen to understand that other mind. In giving form to our own object of research and description we too, in constituting that object, come to influence its very formation as an object of attention. This question aside, let’s be clear: dividing the object of my concern into two, in this manner, is but a conceit of method: it constitutes my approach in engaging in this anatomy-like lesson concerning that centuries long process and incidence of commodification. I confess to Hegel’s influence, in this respect, wishing to keep the question of its active birth and that of its initial generation by and among entire populations inhabiting the full extents of the global continuum of exchange, becoming habits and thence procedures of mind, apart from the descriptions of it when already formed and already constituted as contexts which fully confront the individual by the time I have chosen to take it up for examination. In such later times, by the later fifteenth century, it can be seen to constitute an entire and complex field of necessity and possibility dominating a person’s ordinary daily experience … say in producing, transporting, warehousing, classifying, packaging, or simply in a consumer’s selection of some item for purchase … in bringing all such activity to language. None of these activities are indifferent to form and rule, and to the need to learn the rules of a specific kind of « game » made appropriate for some commodity-related task. All the instrumentation that accompanies the phenomena of exchange, and that forms part and parcel of its operations or that otherwise facilitates it in some way derives from a shared practicable and practised knowledge of what constitutes that game: why possess a « pocket » mini-balance for checking the authenticity of the weights of a given kind of money—token of value—if one had not possessed the knowledge governing the field of phenomena including what now or later was to be weighed, in some or other market? This single example suggests the generalised spread of such an accessible knowledge of the rules of this « game ».2 The act itself and 2 Balances and boxes of exemplary monetary weights from the early modern past appear still to proliferate in spite of the natural destruction affecting such « banal » instruments of daily use. In examining those for Europe (boxes with mini-balances) and East and South-East Asia (specialised encased mini-balances), one is astonished by both the number of survivals and the huge range of quality affecting their often production-line like artisanal manufacture. In a small shop in Luang Prabang, I encountered some fifty or so balances from the past

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the thing that eventually results from that act, needs be conceptualised as if composing the paces of a step by step procedure each of which is necessary for its generation both as thought and thence as a practice. Neither should be assumed natural, immediate, or simple, merely because they appear to us so instantaneous and immediate. It was precisely in order to satisfy this conception … the need to problematise them, so to speak, open them out as complex procedures of creative composition in their own right, procedures that enable a « you » or an « I » to give form to the cultural object, but also to bring to ­knowledge—this question of a phenomenology—how mind accomplishes this task, be it that of a scientific concept or a flint arrow-head, that Hegel had constantly experimented with working through in writing his dialectical method. Then, yes, there are the acts of that procedure … all that goes bit by bit to compose, in sequence, a commodity arriving eventually in some shop or in a consumer’s pocket or on a kitchen shelf, and what exactly has been realised in this manner: the forms of this object before the eye. Alexandre Koyré gives a remarkable and clear description of Hegel’s method in this respect: of process spelled out in time and space; all then seen as the constituted object, a multitude of related objects, a complexity, the phenomenal « city » so to speak, this cultural ensemble confronting a population of acting subjects; an antique manner of looking at things from which space and time have been removed: the philosopher’s construct. I too follow that method in order to reconstitute this thing called culture,—in this case the culture of the commodity. And then I need to test that approach as producing a result that I and others may consider first credible, and then true,—as close to the true, that is to say, as what I as a contemporary human being is capable of bringing to consciousness. And I need rules of observation for such an exercise of judgement and justification, but which, seen from another angle, might equally be dangerous vehicles of self-delusion, the very rocks which one had sought constantly to avoid.3 Say, the illusions wrought by internal consistence and coherence, by relationships to context that meet no exception or obvious contradiction, but yet which, nonetheless, might in their entirety be self-confirming products of culture

­ resenting such variation. The same sentiment of proliferation and variation has been p gained in examining European boxes of money weights and balances in different museums. Once, as below, one comes to understand the context, one fully understands why even the consumer would need such instruments, together with possessing the knowledge upon which use was based. The characteristic museum or catalogue description—that generally assigns them only to specialist « money-dealers »—is unsatisfactory. 3 In “Suzerain”, Fureur et Mystère, 184–185, René Char poetises his own sense of having been induced upon such a path of apparently credible self-deceit.

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i­tself and be deceptive: true as fact, not true as explanation. It is with such problems that a phenomenology is also concerned. But put thus, the questions I raise concerning commoditisation, and its treatment below, are clearly and wilfully intended to be controversial. One must call into question the inherited economic historiography relating to the commodity, habitual approaches to it, and the corpus of generalised shared assumptions that appear to dominate such approaches and limit questioning, and, not least, made fatally evident in habitual forms of self-evident languageuse—a particular syntax and a customary vocabulary—habitually brought to bear in treating that history. One lifts it up into full conscious attention above such a field of habitual and customary approach in treating it as a veritable anthropology possessing global incidence requiring a global and inter-­ disciplinary contextualisation for its adequate description and comprehension. Eventually we come to ask ourselves whether or not the very possibility of such an evidence of the commodity must rest upon inter-cultural, inter-­ subjective universally shared principles of mind, once again in a Kantian or Hegelian sense. And remember, to use that word « universal » requires a certain rigour if its full implications are to be understood; « universal » does not mean « general », the latter admitting exception; the term « universal », properly used, admits of no exception! I am attracted to Julian Steward’s principle in this respect: to share cultural traits or be influenced by those of others, requires a certain degree of structural and conceptual compatibility for that sharing or influence to be possible.4 Then everywhere where commodification is seen to have been in evidence as a complex differentiated culture of being and behaviour, the « minds » of all those involved, populations from Shandong to Aberystwyth or Marsulipatam, must be sufficiently compatible and alike in kind for that very specific culture of global translational exchange to be considered even possible. A statement that raises yet a fresh set of problems for how, under strictly empirical and historical conditions, should we envisage the eventuality of such a universal? And do not these judgements possess yet further implications with ­regard to present social and political events and conditions, events that have stimulated my own engagement? Part 2 will act as a means of testing the relative acceptability of my general hypothesis: it is not necessarily correct in itself and in its detail but it opens up paths of principle whereby such application and testing may be carried out.

…

4 Steward, A Theory of Culture Change;—given the need to define what should be meant by « structural » and « conceptual » in this respect.

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When taken up for examination, in this book, it is already seen to constitute a ready-formed and prolific, globally-distributed field of dense evidence— of production, markets and trades—upon which I, in my turn, have sought to concentrate a certain kind of detailed analysis that I describe as anthro­ pological, in the two senses of a cultural anthropology and a philosophical anthropology. It is in this sense that I treat commoditisation as it manifests itself between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries, already long-formed, already prolific as a multi-form, global evidence. My focus, then, is that of defining its forms, and the conditions for its existence, prior to the extensive processes of industrialisation and imperialist conquest that altered the very societal nature characterising the intercontinental field in which capitalism was progressively extending itself. Yet, as such, even on an inter-regional and inter-continental scale of production for exchange, the history of previous, interregional marketmediated exchanges goes back several centuries. There is now plentiful evidence of considerable inter-regional trade in Asian waters and the Indian Ocean, thus of commodity production, closely associated with vigorous generalised surges of inter-regional state formation involving not only the exchange of goods but also that of ideas, whether material or religious and metaphysical, leading to major cultural developments. There is considerable evidence concerning the migration of persons together with their customs, habits and experience from region to region, evidence of successive waves of ongoing societal, religious, state-institutional and commercial development from at least the fourth century, and again, in a new wave, from the eighth, and finally that vast surge and expansion of settlement and state-formation that particularly concerns this book, covering vast territorial hinterlands, in and after the fifteenth century. Seen in a more general perspective, we might regard each such surge as but parts of a continuity of societal development, both temporal and global. In one sense this is to regard the exchange of persons, ideas and goods as parts of a singular, globally incident historical process, which we would equate with a closely-correlated development of settled agricultures, extending over relatively vast continents (for example of rice agriculture in China, of dry grains in the black-earth regions of western Russia, and so forth), yet always, it seems— and this is a major point concerning the very conditions of commoditisation, and that I hope to consider for itself in yet a later publication—under the structural constraint of simultaneously emerging social classes, classes concentrating both power and wealth, especially in the form of access to landed territory through the institutional form of multiple fractionary rights and forms of hierarchic domination, thus at once « landed », as the jargon has it, and controlling access to what may appear to us as if freely available unsettled

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lands awaiting an agricultural use; such class concentration of wealth, means and access constituted the structural conditions for state-formation itself. For this very reason, the new village settlement and associated agriculture, thus the settling and labouring of all the lands concerned, should be considered as penetrated from the start by such relationships of power and ­domination, … thus subject to limited rights of access that rendered peasant labour a productive source for the wealth that supported state and society. The consequence, indeed, were the powerful forces for commoditisation itself upon which alone such developments could be financed and founded, since enabling the transfer of wealth across all social and topographical distance, but which, in their extent and increasing complexity, required—again necessarily—a complementary development of marketing and transportational networks—of services and industries—facilitating such trade and exchange, and facilitating the distribution of the commodity through societal and territorial space. The further consequence is an accompanying invention of payment forms, thus of abstract systems of quantitative valuation and measure—of all that we regard as money. It is as if the very language of intercultural translation—what I have described as inherently translational—were itself founded upon—or better were the fuels that made run—such macrosocietal growth … part and parcel of the latter. In short, by the time I take commodity exchange in hand, the records have become dense, varied and abundant with the content of such phenomena, whether directly or indirectly related to the commodity:—whether we turn to the development of legal rights to fractions of agricultural wealth—the products of agricultural labour, peasant or otherwise—or to the prolix production of different kinds of commodities for trade, or to the surprising variety of different kinds of metrology, we are generally confronted by a provocative evidence, subjected to successive land surveys, mapping, frequently repeated lists of local rights, monetary accounts of agricultural exploitation, and a considerable mass of other kinds of institutional evidence flowing into the minute detail of the lives of discrete, named individuals, particular named plots of land, lists of crops grown or taken to market in a particular year, discrete payments and transactions, while equally concerning the most general levels of state organisation and administration, even regimes of conquest, and in which individual names, specific kinds of task and forms of labour, details of work listed by day or by field or family, thus a complex variety of references to the endowments and burdens affecting ordinary, often very poor inhabitants, … all becomes evident in the written record. This is not to deny that the density of such evidence—especially of exchange and trade—varies considerably from place to place, … a veritable

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« patchwork » rich and dense in one place and scarce, even absent, in another, a more or less as we traverse the regions of the globe, and that leaves us entirely in ignorance at the present time concerning some regions of the globe, but that, in contrast to many other kinds of evidence we might have chosen to investigate in order to resolve this question concerning the dimensions of human identity, surprises one by its mere presence, by its contra-expectational, translational character and, comparatively speaking, by its sheer relative abundance. We find that even the rules by which the contemporary mind had constituted that recorded evidence had imposed forms and a content that may be sufficiently precise concerning the necessary art of production of a given category of object (say a cloth or coin) that they act virtually as indications of the phenomenological processes whereby they are so produced. They provide us the rules governing the conscious constitution of this artificial nature, surprising one by the very fact of their explicit presence in the words of a document and by its status as such. Marketisation, especially, has been shown to have become ever more dense and extensive, binding together hinterlands and complexifying societal order itself, whether in, say, China, India, South East Asia, Muscovy or Western Europe, and, at least, from early medieval times. Such market coverage of entire newly settled landscapes … marketing networks … served to mediate transfers of wealth from agricultural populations, those who laboured the fields under various institutional conditions, funnelling them at distance to the numerous administrative households of the social elites distributed through a relatively vast, potentially culturally-varied, often politically oppositional, landscape, and feeding a considerable array of different kinds of complementary institution, in short to all that informally we regard as the « state » (the state as an institutional societal assemblage). It is for this reason that it becomes possible to investigate … yes, interrogate … the commodity in terms of the inner detailed forces that brought it into being, its sources, and the series of possible steps through which it eventually became a finished good, thus its stages of marketing towards its final destinations: it is as if the commodity bore within itself this inner gene-like complexity that we who interrogate it attempt to unfold and read in the quest for an explanation of its origins and its vectorial power, opening out the solid object like a parchment that we attempt to uncode. It becomes lisible in this manner as if composed of a text setting out its internal constitutive sources and its properties as an artifice … an object, both material and as conceived, and thence, interpreted under such conditions more broadly, in its world-wide ubiquity.5 That is to say, we become able to 5 It would be just to accuse me of being much influenced (biassed, as it were) by the particular case that formed my primary research, thus, when combined with considerable comparative, Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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question the very criteria underlying its formal possibility as an object of culture and exchange, thus too that govern the defining character of the content of all possible commodities, and the very reasons underlying the choice of such primary criteria, the constraining limits within which reasonable choice would operate, thus of what I shall refer to as the very nature of its human, phenomenal, artificial presence … in short, a veritable phenomenology which can often be investigated in the most detailed quantitative and qualitative terms, and, above all, according to what I have judged as its universal principles of constitution: those enabling exchange alike on a regional and intercontinental scale.—We find ourselves thus confronted by a vast and shared field of commodity formation and exchange, all the parts of which of which must be considered strictly conformable with one another according to their defining ­constitutive first principles of formation (speaking phenomenologically), despite, simultaneously, constituting a vast field of exotic differential cultural expression (speaking empirically). It is precisely such a global field of common principles of constitutive formation and translational passage (the act of exchange) that alone made possible the evidence encountered of global, inter- and intra-societal trades and exchanges: that domain of human interaction defined as being, through will and drive, necessarily « translational » in purpose and kind. Thus, one thinks again of Julian Steward’s principle of cultural compatibility and equivalence, here applied to the very possibility of such a formally defined object world, indifferent to cultural, or other kinds of human difference, or, better said, their condition. One does not reduce the implications by retorting that such an secondary reading, of choosing to generalise from the kinds of complexity then observed: notably, the peculiar form and remarkable social complexity mirrored in the distribution of fractional rights in the agricultural production of land and village—to the product of the soil—covering vast politically variegated landscapes, among which holders of such rights were scattered near and far, often beyond the merely apparent political frontiers that have defined the limits of the various sub-national state-based historiographies that have fractionated our own attention to such phenomena (true of South Asia, but remarked upon also by Marc Bloch concerning Europe); financial institutions and instrumentation and the forms of monetary payment were intimately and flexibly associated with such a distributive facticity and the necessities it determined. One might then judge that commoditisation was codevelopmental with such complexity, necessary for its possibility, and in turn a leading cause for the further precocious monetisation affecting institutional relationships among the populations concerned, and to which those who appear to a modern consciousness to have been the most socially and economically marginal, such as day labourers and landless peasants, were the most radically exposed. But such conditions can be followed in numerous monographs treating the medieval and early-modern countrysides: those of Marc Bloch and George Duby concerning France; Smith, Confino and Robinson concerning Muscovy and Russia; Littrup of Shandong, Mahalingam of Vijayanagar, Gune of Maharashtra, … to cite arbitrarily but mere examples from a very considerable accumulation of local and regional studies. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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e­ vidence is but « economic », thus of secondary significance, for what would we mean by such a qualification? Instead, it is of primary significance for an understanding of cultural difference itself and thus for an objective understanding of our present world. Then, in turn, one can but ask how such relationship—seemingly indifferent to all the kinds of radical difference affecting the social and cultural fabric of human society—is even possible; in order to answer this question, one must first address it in a phenomenological sense, thus philosophically, and above all in Kant’s sense as one concerning the very question of possibility for any human mind to constitute the commodity. It is thence, given our answers to this enquiry, that we may, thereafter—secondly, so to speak—enter the anthropology of exotic difference that equally characterises the domain of culture, not least the culture of the commodity, and that, once so considered, must lead us to conclude that such difference—the very process of differentiation—must, in turn, be grounded circumstantially, as possibility, upon such universal formative principles. This too is one of the principle objects of discussion in the following pages.

…

A first historical and fully empirical answer to our question is perhaps obvious, yet deserves mention and emphasis because fundamental: the attribution, wherever commodity exchange is observed, of a quantificational medium of translation between qualitative instances: I use this awkward formula to refer to the systematic evaluation of commodity difference through quantitative measure such as value and price, and thus the transformation of such difference, between one thing and another, into the continuum of measure. Number acts as a unifying reduction of quality to quantity through valuation and through which objects become entirely comparable with one another because, as number, solvent and dissolvent, one measure of size or weight of a given commodity exchangeable as an equivalence of value with a different measure of size or weight of another. That medium, quantity, facilitates, ideally speaking, unlimited exchange of all things with one another, with all that seems qualitatively incomparable in matter and kind, thereby rendered indifferent to their otherwise irreducible qualitative differences: say a bafta for a muslin or a ducat; an hour of labour expended to factor that same ducat here and elsewhere; that brand of tea and another; and so forth;— and thus commodity now seen in an entirely reductive and universalist sense of an object-world fabricated and judged according to the identical universal principles.

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What is remarkable is that unlike the metaphysical ideologies that had accompanied such historical pasts, monetary evaluation provides an empirical equivalent at once accessible, knowable and practicable to an « everyperson »: the forms of payment being at once empirical, phenomenal, and yet equally thoroughly conceptual and abstract, conventional … a money as value is but an accepted token of value, an abstraction, a matter of culture! Indeed, this rule applies everywhere we meet the commodity, say in urban Birmingham in the eighteenth century as much as in urban Surat in the seventeenth or rural Shandong and Muscovy in the fifteenth, and we can say that nothing can be called commodity without satisfying this universal possibility of dissolution into a universal quantitative medium entirely « indifferent to difference ». For, as we know, value mediates quality and quantity, the two in strict interdependent relationship, not as two poles with a something else lying in-­ between but precisely as two inter-related aspects of one and the same thing! Quality and quantity means, at once, radical difference and radical identity, the two faces of any single commodity-identity. However, this is true on every scale of consideration, both that of the finite micro-detail of any particular act or object concerning the commodity, but also with regard to commodification itself, thus when viewed in terms of its entirety as a global culture focussed upon the production of difference according to a unison of formative p ­ rinciple,— thus, to put it most provocatively, as uniting the universal with the particular. Then these two poles of identity are no longer viewed as contradicting one another, say as if the two far-distant poles of some evolutionary step ladder leading to some eventual universalisation, but, to the contrary, two necessary perspectives of a single open and extended culture. And they are cultural in both regards, even the price and the interest rate, invented everywhere through human artifice, are of cultural significance. In short, we find ourselves confronting here Marx’ famous double-face of Capital: use-value (value as quality) and exchange-value (value as quantity), entirely inseparable from one another in their existential possibility. Then this description must define the principle according to which the entirety of what I have called a cultural anthropology of commodification comes studied and judged. Above all, it defines even the field of possible judgement of every participating contemporary of this his­ torical world, since accessible as a knowledge (say in the form of costs and prices, as daily accounts of expenditure, and so forth), and thus practised as an empirical knowledge by that « everyperson ». Such contemporary, perfectly banal accessibility is a point of major importance that will be taken up again and again below, but that, in anticipating what immediately follows, differentiates my approach from the structuralists. The question left hanging here, so to speak, and that I leave as such, is the relationship of a such a ­knowledge of

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necessary object formation to the fundamental criteria of possibility termed phenomenological or Kantian, and less accessible to intellectual identification and verification. As we shall see, commodification may indeed depend upon such rules, but forms only part, albeit important, of the veritable scope for creative thinking and practice available to the human mind. Its status remains, therefore, problematic, severely debatable, and left without final issue below.6 Then, yes: I seek to marry these two unfriendly unlikes, the two anthropologies, the philosophical and the cultural—teach Daphnis to do more than just lie alongside Chloe—accustomed as we are to observing the two distinctive disciplines systematically turned back-to-back in contrary directions: the first, the philosophical, evidently universalist, and the other, social, cultural, linguistic, most ardently particularist, although both are concerned with the very same subject-matter, the human mind and its practice. I seek to bring them together as two aspects of a very same field of rational and genetic reconstruction and description and to do so with an argument that ultimately should run in seamless continuity from that initial concern with the a-priori conditions of human possibility, such as those to be discussed in Chapter 3, §3, of Part 1, and considered necessarily universal, into their expressive practical realisation as distinctive local and supra-local cultural expressions of the commodity. It is as if such differentiation and procedure of specification were, in each case, entirely intentional … as if made to be different from its close fellows, one kind of muslin from another, a Hungarian ducat from one minted in Venice, even when of the same distinctive family of kind, thus intentionally discerned and planned as such, as a question of specific productive means, yet, indeed, according to those universal constitutive and constructive principles. Yet, it is as difference that such an empirical field meets the eye of an observer, this ducat listed next to another and another, Kwakiutl from Dinka, thus as of distinctive identities in a varied cultural landscape resistant to synthesis, furnished with multiple obstacles to communication, and for which the very word comparison seems an affront to the specialists. That first Kantian corpus of a-priori formative criteria, those criteria conceived as the very condition making possible a transformation of what is 6 It seems to correspond to what Husserl call the « eidos », or essence of an object, that must be distinguished from the empirical object, but that alone enables that object to be thought. Yet, there are serious problems attached to what seems an entirely metaphysical conception of such words. See the very useful definitions of « eidetic » and « eidos » given in Moran and Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary, 92–3. One understands why Fink speaks of an abyss distinguishing the two dimensions, and why I prefer Kant and Cassirer’s approach to the a-priori conditions of possible thought.

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s­ ensorily perceived of the world into objects of thought, thus produced and made conscious in mind, marks a further, more profound conception of the unity necessarily conceived as inevitably underlying the entire possibility represented by commodification, and concerning which quantification itself is but a secondary voluntaristic expression, so to speak. It must be plain, therefore, that I oppose—and do so resolutely and systematically—long-rooted traditions of sustained assumption and belief affecting the humanities regarding the very nature of human connectivity, those that have come to permeate the social disciplines from their very origins, as they also do, more obviously, opinion at large, but in which, indeed, « science » finds its roots, resulting in conscious assumptions, that seem incontrovertible, concerning race and ethnicity. These beds of assumption constitute a ­powerfully-based inheritance from the immediate past with all the authority of a current common sense, thine and mine, held by the population at large, but at the same time absorbed uninterrogated, regarding its burden of assumed meaning, into the assumptions and languages of our own learned fields and disciplines, … sedimented as such into the fields of knowledge as reasonable forms of truth, fact and thus approach. For this reason such assumption concerning human connectivity underlies and gives form a-posteriori to the terms on which conscious theory and debate are formulated and practised, an inherited corpus of naturalist language, determining method, but absorbed as such from our immediate social and linguistic origins, and that, in which, as Cassirer had put it for a comparable case, both thesis and antithesis united as one where debate is concerned. This is not to deny that the world has been, and remains, traversed by severe racial conflict and pogrom, nor that there are cultural and biological differences distinguishing human beings. But it is to affirm that simultaneously the very continuum of global exchange had also brought these same populations, throughout the ancient and early-modern world, into a common field of accord, thus of intention and practice devoted to traversing the multiple kinds of human obstacle dividing the experienced world, efforts both spontaneous and institutionalised, ritualised, given clear forms in language and ritual, thus in kinds of specialised comportment and work themselves organised in order directly to handle tasks concerning commodities and payment forms, and thus devoted to that task of communicative translation, and that, so we find, were densely and actively translated into decisions concerning manufacture, naming and labelling, market-comportments, and much else, and all of which we may consider as constituting what nowadays is discussed under the label of « trust ». There need be no doubt concerning the multiple forms of qualitative difference (indeed, of a continuing processes of qualitative differentiation

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o­ ccurring even today before our eyes), affecting both the matter of the commodity and its broader societal and cultural expression and its contexts of ­occurrence, thus its general phenomenology as a field of facticity, nor its continuing phenomenologisation, nor our need to explain those very processes and emphasise the intentional drive behind such differentiation, nor the urgent need not to let this datum of difference and contrast rest as if an ultimate satisfactory ground of explanation of human culture, that accepted as such— as only difference—implicates all those assumed difficulties of translation for which the cultural anthropologists have been so dangerously loquacious and eloquent. It is that these two seemingly opposed aspects are equally true of the object concerned. But what is equally noteworthy alongside such difference is indeed that constant conscious social work of translation encountered everywhere we encounter the commodity, and engaged in, as such, and with relative facility, by an « any-person ». Daphnis and Chloe are different, they seek to unite, they compose a method in order to do so, and, having done so, they bear fruit! Commodification is only possible through such intercultural, intersubjective effort: that which, perhaps provocatively, I have called translational. Consequently, it hardly seems reasonable to deny that our famous City of Babel is at once a domain both of radical differentiation and equally of successful translation in terms of such difference: and it is this symbiotic and necessary relationship between opposites that then requires explanation: it is that essential duality of being that composes and defines our culture; our Babel has turned out not only to be riven by contemplative and militarised difference but, simultaneously, proffering a constant creative response and an efficacious solution:—thence, the unity of the two aspects is strictly universal: a Babel governed by translation. What is more, this focus on intention and of its generalised ubiquitous practical expression, must be true of an « every- » or an « any-person », and not just the specialised money-dealers or bankers, or traders in woollen or cotton cloths and grains. Instead, every person involved in the production and transmission of the commodity, and not least the end-consumer, or that poor peasant walking to market in some remote region of upland western India, must possess such a natural access because formed from common sense, from Newton and Euclid and not from the reversals of common sense furnished by a Galileo or a Planck. Every such knowing and intended decision or act locates its context with networks of compromising and pressing relationships, formed in the very same manner, and that we call the context, requiring judgement, an avoidance of error, and thus, indeed, the use of reason. That such a peasant held but a few copper coins or cowries in hand, and not a gold muhr or silver rupee, is beside the point. He or she seeks to make a payment, buy seed, pay a

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debt or tax, a rent or some other kind of due, and even confronting the obligation to make that payment in particular kinds of coin manufactured for such very purposes. It is for this reason we investigate the commodity as an ongoing system of organised knowledge that in one form or another must be and proves to have been directly accessible to the human mind, to that « every-person », in contrast to the kinds of severely abstract, abstruse theory developed by the structuralists and inaccessible to the vast majority of human beings (one has only to mention the names of the structuralists to support this statement of difference: Jakobson, Lacan, Mandelbrot, Lévi-Strauss, and so forth). Then it is a universal kind of culture—universal in the cultural status we accord to it— that concerns us, no matter the exotic kinds of expression in which it is ­encountered, or … better put … in terms of which it comes circumstantially ­expressed in one place or another. What else can signify the name of an annual ritual played out in order « to save the soul of the rice », other than the maintenance in being of the very species-like integrity of the micro-category, its identity, constituted and maintained in being only through hard-labour (a question that must also concern us below)?7 Put in this manner, must it not, however, seem that there is much to connect what I propose, thus what follows below as an approach and a method,—and, indeed, my entire hypothetical position (resolutely comparative and interdisciplinarian),—with the structuralism that engulfed the social sciences in the decades immediately following the second world war? An earlier draft of this book was accused of having ignored or of not declaring that apparent parentage from structuralism.8 But, I do not agree: such a reading entirely misunderstands both my own concerns and the basis from which my approach to method and approach is drawn; notably, it fails to identify the primary constitutive role I give to history, to accident and individual, in the very constitution of societal reality. The latter—this constitutive role placed on what traditionally in 7 To “save the soul of the rice” concerns certain ritual activities mentioned by Wayne Fogg, in his “Swidden Cultivation of Foxtail Millet by Taiwan Aborigines. A Cultural Analogue of Domestication of Setaria italica in China”. I include the whole title because of its relevance to this question. 8 It is Krzysztof Pomian who voiced this opinion on reading a first draft of City Intelligible. There are many sources that detail the principles informing structuralism. The recently published correspondence between Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss discusses such criteria in the detail. For example, Benoit Mandelbrot, inventor of fractals, “believed he had discovered in linguistics certain laws of thermodynamics”. This assumes a kind of scientism dominant in post-war social « science », but that I reject. It is also not equivalent to the questions of a knowledge accessible to entire contemporary populations. See both the letters and editors’ introduction to ( Jakobson & Lévi-Strauss, Correspondance, 146–7; on Mandelbrot, see, for example, the letter from Claude to Roman of 9 January 1952).

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the humanities has generally been emphasised as marginal with regard to any such question—must also place a positive significance on the role of the individual, and also on such terms as « event » and « contingence », seeing them all as constitutive of « necessity », social constraint and the issue of the « freedom » to act and decide. Necessarily, in questioning our intellectual inheritance from the past (an inheritance recent enough to form part of my very own past experience and context), one also asks of what such words consist and to what kind of facticity they should attach? What is « individual »—noun or adverb—and what is « event » or even « necessity ». « Contingence » itself is a term laden with negative value, used with reproof in the sociological and anthropological tradition. Then, to what do (but also should) such words attach and of what do they consist? Questions, indeed, that have come to be asked fruitfully in theoretical biology in the last century. One comes to question the « obvious »! To open out such words as categories to be unpacked. Although once, as a student in the 1960s, I had been much stimulated by the advent of structuralist studies, there is a radical contradiction, not just a difference, between my point of view regarding this concern with meaning and that generally and explicitly expressed by the structuralists, which remains within that past sociological tradition in such respects.9 The very principles that govern my approach to a subject matter, although likewise social, societal and cultural, are founded upon very different ideas of historical possibility and human agency than those that, explicitly, have guided the structuralists. My emphasis upon the constitutive role of the finite individual in giving form to culture, to its organisation and structuration, and thus to the collective institutions and social groups, classes and productive forms to which such words attach, and thus responsible for constituting the societal and the cultural, runs entirely against the criteria defined by the structuralist as required more generally for « scientific » explanation and approach in the humanities. Thus, I am radically opposed to its incessant scientism (not to science but to such scientism), thus to structuralism’s drive to peel away what it considers « contingent » to explanation, according that word, and those associated with it (such as « event » and « individual »), with entirely negative significance,—a trait of central and explicit significance regarding the theoretical ambitions of the post-war humanities. However, for me, difference at 9 This should not be read as implying rejection of the entire content of, say, Lévi-Strauss’ works; to the contrary, on an ethical level and with regard to his broad critical stance and comparative, structuralising framework especially as encountered in his early writing, I continue to be fascinated, often in agreement. But this question goes beyond such particulars. It concerns the general epistemology of our subjects.

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every level and scale, thus of one finite individual with another, one seed with another, is foundational and constitutive, the very ground upon which generalisation and association must justly be constructed and understood, and as we indeed encounter as a foundational ground of Darwin’s evolutionary ­theory,—in short, a matter for comprehension in its own right. The historian, anthropologist and philosopher should focus his or her very attention upon the significance of such customary terms, … on what we should mean by, « contingence », « event » and « circumstance », and not qualify the kind of facticity they are deemed to cover as a kind that should not concern a true scholar concerned with a science. The very word « science » becomes a source of misunderstanding, its narrow pointed usage in English, loaded with a kind of ideology, thus selective of what it is held to cover as being « really real ». Structuralism was surely caught up in the same general scientistic movement that affected all the social studies in the immediate post-war decades, dominated by a need to justify themselves by proximity to the hard sciences, and doing so by seeking to shed themselves of their worldly dress.10 And as already remarked, but most notably, because at the very centre of what we consider history and society, I disagree about the significance to be given to the role of the individual in generating and structuring the collective realities of human culture, … disagree with its apparent subordination to structure in cultural anthropology, generally speaking, and to structuralism, particularly, and precisely in being considered « contingent » to explanation. In contrast, I regard that role as primordial, and thus in the significance to be accorded to the circumstantial difference distinguishing individuals, regarding it as itself entirely constitutive of what we later find collective and structured, say organised, or say grouped in classes and genres. The field governed by agency and intention is, in effect, composed of and by such difference, both intentionally and unintentionally, and it is this active circumstantial differentiation between persons that, in my judgement, should be regarded as fully ontological and ontogenetic of the societal, however paradoxical this may seem. Such difference among individual items constituting what is recognised as kind or type was a point that Robert Hooke had also discerned when examining the seeds of a particular variety of plant. The same sentiment of surprise may be felt by anyone observing the oak leaves of any tree or field: that no identity can 10

Slicher van Bath expresses similar reservations in asserting, with considerable critical irony, that he avoids use of the word « description » (“beschreven”) in presenting his study because “in recent years the terms descriptive and description have taken on perjorative meanings” (“Voorwoord”, Spaans Amerika Omstreeks 1600, 7: “Met opzet vermijd ik het woord « beschreven », omdat aan de term descriptie en descriptief in de laatste jaaren een perjoratieve betekenis wordt gehecht”.). The book was published in 1979.

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be found between any two individuals. But if so, a serious question arises:— who is to judge and decide which seed, leaf, person, state and moment of social organisation, should be taken as « type », say, and thus considered ­definitional? … There are indeed definitional criteria that depend upon morphology and similar structural factors, but even these when scrutinised in time and place, where say the societal is concerned, are like the seed and the leaf of the tree, in a state of more or less constant individual differentiation and subject to a constant alteration and even development (even if such development is too gradual to be visible or measurable by the human eye): they all are in a transitional state, whether detectable on a historical scale or one more geological. That regard concerning the formative role of the « individual » proves decisive for it implies that society too, as such—through the mere fact of individual human agency and social interaction—must always be in a state of alteration, whether regarded generally or in the detail. But the issue becomes especially important, … and, yet, apparently paradoxical, … where commoditisation is concerned, … so that what constitutes commoditisation requires a careful and detailed description in what follows: yes, both in a definitional and a transitional sense, a search for meaning bound up with its existential character as objects of human activity, as products of the latter, and also as aspects of the ongoing evolution of capitalism, such questions of definition and identity are brought entirely and necessarily into question. Yes, I define it phenomenologically as an enduring kind, something I can identify whether in Cathay or Shangri La, in the fifteenth century or right now before my eyes, whilst justly recognising at the very same time that all is different in their appearances between such distances of space and time. I observe, historically, that everywhere one looks at it, it is altering even in what we consider its constitution as kind, say as a « species »,—a « species » of this kind of commodity or another, to use the contemporary idiom regarding type; it alters, from this perspective, in a historical and cultural sense, thus bringing into question our very means for stating its identity, for defining what « properly » should constitute it; and yet like Darwin’s pigeons it is always recognisable as an identity, as the pigeon, or as this or that variety of pigeon.—It is to port one’s attention upon such a question as if regarding the internal intimate evolutions of a palaeontology, a question of definition—of the confrontation of mind with the real—that coincides precisely with the kinds of difficulties and ambiguities affecting definition oft expressed by Darwin in his notes and letters, and that give his work such a high degree of credibility and integrity. Constitution: it is the person who, everywhere, because of the particularities of location, experience, personality, conditions of class, and so forth, is, in each case, observed acting in accord with a generalised context that also relates to

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that person in entirely circumstantial terms, thus upon it. It is Darwin who sought to draw an entirely consistent theoretical hypothesis from such a reading of things. That historically engaged participant must not only be seen by us to regard that context, relate passively to it, as its effect, but also to read it and be able to read it, discern and decide, act upon it: he or she is actively engaged with that context, in its presence and in its constant formation and re-­ formation. What concerns me here is the capacity of that same contemporary humanity to practice what it thinks and to factor the thought held in mind as an externalised, material constituent of the world, thereby constructing … giving particular form to … the material and conceptual matter of the context … to what we call that person’s culture! Thus comes under our scrutiny—inevitably so—the qualitative aspects of difference implicating circumstance itself,— circumstance as being itself profoundly constitutive, as giving form, in its own right, to structure, of what comes subsequently to face those same individual actors as their contexts that constrain all reasonable and possible action between limits of free and reasonable action. It is thus that I come to judge the meaning to be given to such words as « circumstance », « event » and « accident »; « individuality » itself is determined by its reference to all the kinds of circumstance that meet together in the constitutive synthetic moment of its being as an individual, but that, together with collectivities of other acting individuals, determines what become, at every simultaneous moment, the constraints or necessities acting upon the person imposed by any context, … the necessity of what we later discern … describe … as structure and organisation, and that we encounter in field and archive, or construct from the detail of what we observe. However, a properly full explanation of this position, its adequate working through as an argument, must await a later publication, one that I posit here as the second part of this very same study of the phenomenological culture of the commodity,—as its continuation. For the present, the field of our interest remains centred on the historicity of commodities and markets, formed of multiple heterogenous exchanges and comportments, by intentional practices driving a translational activity traversing all of the frontiers of the habited world. Later, I intend publication of yet a further, second study devoted to a central aspect of commoditisation: to what preeminently is at once its sociological and societal dimension, the source of that generalised economic drive that produced and sought the commodity as an integral aspect of its proper functioning, but that, after much reflection, I have intentionally distinguished from the more phenomenologically concentrated present study. This concerns the class-conditions, mentioned above that gave original social form to ­commodity

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production, as if constituting its primary genetic and foundational ground. In this sense they form part and parcel of the same singular integrative societal nexus of interdependent relationships that necessitated commodity production as their complement, in order to generate and distribute the means of wealth that would support an elaborate institutional class-formational society and state.11 Then, it is to regard commoditisation as having been necessitated by the development and extension of settled agriculture itself, and thus with the formation of those sociological structures in which such agriculture was fostered and developed, as previously mentioned. A caveat: my advanced age: it is fortunate that this latter study has long been researched on a broad comparative and global scale, although halted before final preparation as a book owing to the cessation of my career in the mid-1980s, and the consequent diversion of energies that such circumstance had entailed.12 However, this is to situate the present study within a broader framework of what, from an interdisciplinary angle, must be understood on a general level to have determined and constituted commoditisation: on the one hand, the phenomenological anthropology that largely governs the present study, and, on the other, the historical and social conditions underlying its historical and empirical reality, two perspectives which, for methodological reasons, as mentioned above, I prefer to hold apart. The present study needs to be kept distinct from these other social and historical questions in order to focus and hold the reader’s attention on this unfamiliar phenomenological aspect of my questioning; it must be led to stand for itself. Phrased in this manner, it should be clear that I oppose the tendency of historians to underestimate the economic life of the past, and not only where it concerns territories beyond Europe. It seems to have become convention to underestimate the propensity to seek and achieve some basic level of rational

11

12

This concern with the sociological class conditions of commoditisation follows a second criticism of my earlier draft by Ravi Ahuja. Although preeminently interested in such class conditions, I had considered that aspect as being outside the largely phenomenological concern and scope of this book; indeed, I remain so convinced, but equally of the necessity of ultimately completing this study by addressing more fully the historical sociology of the question of commoditisation, thus of resuscitating my old research into the question. I refer to the profoundly dark years that engulfed our lives between 1977 and 1991 (for my wife had been equally affected, in her case definitively; during this interval, her career prospects were definitively arrested, her precocious and adventurous historical and anthropological research on cotton mill labour in Coimbatore brought to nothing). The Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the University of Göttingen, are collecting some of her documentation and work.

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efficacy and organisation, especially where the means, use and organisation of payments encountered in the records are concerned, and, especially also where the spontaneous contribution of largely anonymous populations to economic activity, form and institution must be judged (as if all should be seen, anachronistically; under the central organisational perspective of a later epoch). Non European parts of the world are contrasted in this manner with Western Europe in the specialist historiographies concerned, but Western Europe is also considered likewise, from its own historiographical perspectives, in such negative terms. In this respect it becomes paramount to regard the task of explanation as wholly inclusive, seriously opposed to convenient exclusions of certain kinds and levels of seemingly irrelevant fact, to making exceptions of one kind or another; instead it must comprehend the entirety that falls beneath the eye, be without systematic exception; once an evidence arises that contradicts one’s explanation it is the explanation that must fall. It is not that one absorb the whole of any reality into observation, but that the field of explanation can not exclude exception, without disqualifying itself. For this reason, peasant and artisan-forger are considered as of at-least equal importance as notable, king or an authorised mint, copper and tutenague coin regarded as important as gold and silver, and possibly more so, when considered in terms of the increases in volume and participation in monetary circulation to which they contribute, thus in the volume and frequence of occasions of payment, to their extension throughout society, and their integration within the the institutional life of the villages and hamlets of the countryside (as sedimented within the very terminologies used to name fractional rights, measures of all kinds, and so forth), and thus as a signal complexifier of societal construction and development. The importance of privately produced coinages, whether domestic or in workshop, should not be underestimated for their very major role in spontaneously seeking to satisfy the ubiquitous never-assuaged thirst for means of circulation and payment throughout the continuum of exchange, in say India and China as much as in Europe. Yet traditional treatment, looking back in retrospect from the cultural perspective of our own very different order of legitimacy, has concentrated its attention on the official and precious, the rest being treated either as causes of disruptive disorder or as marginal, and even irrelevant. A singular, once orthodox example of such kinds of explanation, preventing comprehension of the past, is the widely-held notion that the vast, increasing and continuous imports of silver and gold into Asia prior to the nineteenth century were thesaurised rather than entering circulation, thereby preventing perception of the global reach and populational significance of commoditisation, of the digestion of such imports within extensive fields of marketisation governed by values and prices,—yes, of its anthropological

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significance.13 The question should be turned instead to the very possibility of what we observe inscribed in the record of a payment: the hidden complex of local and global relationships that made it possible and is thus as if embodied in some tawdry, worn coin made of Japanese, Swedish or Peruvian metals by a mint in Surat or Guangzhou (or, say, embodied by a Maldives cowry), in the purse of some poor peasant going to market;—for such possibility implies an extent of order and system, of what must be judged properly as effective organisation, that differed in kind from the forms of institutional order operative in industrial times and dominated by centralised colonial, national or state sovereignties.

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3

To Constitute History and Society … the Two Taxonomies

I repeat: this whole programme of work rests provocatively, and perhaps naïvely, upon a conception of history and of societal structuration creatively driven by the constitutive activity of the individual human being, the person in all its particularity, as the creative agent who, in spite of him- or herself, generates history by means of distinct, selected acts, thoughts and words, whether efficacious in their purposes or not; … as if, to paraphrase Hegel, stepping forth before the abyss of nothingness that confronts the present, thus constantly generating that present, … virtually composing time’s continued arrow and his or her concretisation in space, filling space/time with events, objects, institutional conditions and relationships, and social inter-subjective collectivities, thus as ­actively responsible for generating and simultaneously sustaining the entire dynamic anthropology and inheritance from the past of the commodity-­ continuum. It means, as I have argued, that the accumulation of entirely contingent, individual acts and events comes to constitute fact itself, to realise facticity, determine the constraint that presses in and limits decision and sensible act, and thus be entirely responsible for the structuration and organisation we perceive constituting that order of things concerning the commodity. 13

The notion of the « moral economy » is characteristic of such avoidance; when studied we find it concerning domains of belief parallel to, and far from excluding, market economy. Thus, Dumont’s hypothesis of caste exchange, as in Homo Hierarchicus, that excludes markets and use of money, or that treats them as an outside interference resulting from colonial and post-colonial intervention, is entirely disproven by an abundant historical research, as by my own concerning pre-colonial Western India.

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However, this is far from being a denial of the agency of social groups, of collective forces, let alone of social class, conceived of as such in the Marxian sense, but, instead, a re-consideration of what we should mean by such terms as group and individual (thus by « a culture », « a nation », yes, even « class », and so forth), then of how social and cultural groups are formed, and, most especially, of what they consist;—in answering that question, and based upon observation of the empirical evidence, I take a thoroughly Darwinian position in respect of the debates concerning category and group, and it is in this Darwinist sense that I focus on the question of what should be considered an individual and its relationship to a group constituted by its members. It will be remembered that Darwin had incessantly debated this question with himself over many years, had debated it also with his colleagues, as we can now read in his voluminous notes and correspondence. He had the singular merit of not just being consumed by doubt, and of frequently questioning his own premises, but of expressing those doubts, noting them down, and frankly admitting to himself and to others the extents and ambiguities of the problem, its seemingly irresolvable subject/object aspects …. It seems now a precocious address to the very phenomenology of mind concerning the empirical identity of natural groups of organisms and of the role of individuals in composing them:—for were such groups a mere artifice of mind or to be identified with nature itself? Can we even separate the subject from the object in this respect? The question returns us to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle! At least, however, where culture is concerned, we need have no such doubts: the human being is responsible for their real empirical existence, for the appearance of types and kinds as aspects of culture: the subject really gives form to itself in the object! Finally, however, Darwin’s theory of speciation gives that primordial role to the individual, whether individual organism or constitutive property or part, what we would now conceive of as molecule and gene, and so forth, as the formative ground giving rise in nature to the identifiable natural group;—yet his decision to do so (a swing of the balance in its favour rather than a decisive yes or no) does not ease the problem of determining the subject/object status of what constitutes group-identities of organisms, since even if considered theoretically correct (as in this book) where nature is concerned it is always the friable human subject that must choose what falls in and what out of such notional groups, and that thus remains debatable. However, it is the principles that determine Darwin’s choice that concern us here: that very emphasis on the constitutive role of the individual. This Darwinist preference may be extended to any social collectivity of human individuals as equally composed entirely of difference, be it Dinka or German, like oak leaf or Darwin’s pigeons:—the emphasis is on the difference ­distinguishing

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each one of its members, and the role of such difference in driving speciation. The consequence is to focus our attention on the natural and social selection in time of those properties constitutive of that particular individual and that affect its relative chances of survival as part of the group, the recognition that such persons are constituted of properties that in each individual case form part of the definitional content of that group: that it is some properties, some traits, thus some aspects of the make up of an individual, as it were, that may survive or else disappear into the past, that may or may not be complicit in the formation or decline of that group. It is to say that Darwin fastened upon such particularity in all its micro-existential prescience as the very basis of his universalist theory of natural speciation. And, to put it more generally, when equated with the Marxian theory of class, the group, social class or organic species are each viewed in that Darwinian light as first and foremost composed of contexts of acting, existing individuals differing from one another, and doing so according to both acquired and inherited characters that constantly vary in their circumstantial character and incidence. If, then, we see the individual transiting social and cultural space/time in terms of a lived biography of accumulating experience, the very notion of exception has become entirely alien to the need for explanation: the latter must, indeed, and in principle, be entirely inclusive. Then, we might also term this kind of taxonomy « natural », that is to say independent of human volition, its character, however, accessible to observation and description. It is to say too that this marks out the very position that founds my perception of historical process and societal formation: that perfect equation of contingence with necessity (since, obviously, the human being cannot be distinguished from nature, except in the secondary sense of the cultural artifice it constructs)! Yes, but there is more to the question once indeed that we consider culture as artifice, and thus the culturally formed group, say that of « Nuer » or « German », or that of Setaria italica, or some local and named variety of cutivated rice. For, seen in this manner, the Darwinist conception of the group contrasts radically with another foundationally characteristic mode of conceiving group identity, and that I call stereotypical, and that, as we shall see in the detail of this study, happens to be that characteristic of cultural expression, thus too of the entire human artifice of the commodity. It is stereotype that may be seen to determine the intended content of thought and the criteria of judgement and recognition, in terms of which commodities and payments forms were produced, valued and circulated. And when speaking of value and circulation we necessarily imply, as we shall see, the very possibility of attributing an indifferent form of universal measure (quantitative) to what qualitatively if, left to themselves, are strictly incomparable, the one with the other. That very

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c­ oncept « commodity » is founded upon such a universal standard of possible comparison in which all commodity difference disappears into the account book, constituting an unified explanatory edifice for all communications and exchanges, … indeed, an artifice, the cultural or phenomenological « City ».14 Let’s put it thus: the person acts circumstantially, « Darwinistically », according to all the differences that constitute his or her unique place in this universal, entirely material city, thus, in even reading that context of commodity conditions experientially, and thus differently from all others, not Jack but Jill, or vice-versa, and who, if at my side, can not be considered identical to me, since not occupying an identical circumstantial location (in all its senses),— nor as having traced the same sinuous accumulative path of experience that goes to compose a certain corpus of individualised practical knowledge, nor, after all, faced by an entirely identical context. All that goes to constitute the relationship of subject to object must differ. I shall need to consider this question below, but especially in that second socio-historical part of my study of the commodity proposed for a future production. Yet, in spite of this Darwinist perspective, the conceptual matter consciously and intentionally thought, that learned as a practical and applied knowledge, according more or less to a just reading of the constraints upon efficacious decision imposed by the context— where the form and the content of the commodity itself are concerned (where we consider type as applied to commodities and their internal evaluation and organisation)—is necessarily, unavoidably, not Darwinist at all: the type or « species » of any given commodity is, without possible exception, thoroughgoingly stereotypical in character; … in the manner in which it is consciously given form and socially recognised, all visible individualising traits are annulled ­before the cultural and critical gaze, being entirely subordinated to the social convention (thus as if to a kind of implicit social contract) determining a thoroughgoing collective identity, cognisable as such, and which is the primary condition allowing goods to be exchanged in the mass, priced collectively as singular identities, and so forth. Only such a condition, the identity as stereotype, allows a sack of ducats or rough-cut réals, or a package of cotton baftas, to pass on trust through a succession of markets, as being all true of their group identity. What else does the regimental sergeant major seek to make of his rough cut individual recruits, but to forge them into an undifferentiated unity 14

In the Jenaer Realphilosophie, Hegel applies a particular term of description to such a condition: « gleichgültig » (« indifferent » … ie. not differentiated in itself), that stands in contrast to its logical and genetic expression as difference among its fully realised items or parts. It is an example stemming from what is described as his having brought the notion of essence—the singular and simple—« down to earth », to materialist consideration and possibility!

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of them as a group, each item hammered, chiselled as it were by a ruthlessness of rules into a stereotype of that group-whole, and generating, like Fogg’s upland Taiwanese, regarding their different varieties of Setaria italica, the « soul » (or discrete identity) of the group under his charge? This matter too will engage our detailed attention, especially that labour of mind and act that seeks to maintain a precarious stability for that stereotypical group, … that prefers by convention to recognise the group identity and ignore even the most obviously visible differences. There is a whole practice throughout the continuum of making such group identities publicly cognisable—recognisable—in the market place, of using the selected signs and symbols to grace their physical appearance, to mark the object or a container of such objects with an identity potentially knowable throughout the global nexus of exchange, and thereby allowing them to pass each difficult frontier on mere sight … thus to translate! These very signs being acts of willed, desired translation. Then, this difference between taxonomies is fundamental: it is seen in Darwinist terms, as argued above, to determine the very character of the historical process itself, history as an aspect of nature rather than artifice (of the nature within which human artifice is produced), thus of what goes to compose societal history as a complex structured reality, and in human terms goes to determine the particular and contextual conditions of decision and of choice of any act. In this natural respect, history as part of the natural process, the role of the individual thinking, acting subject is primordial and the production and ­marketing of each finite commodity engages a multiplicity of such subjec­ tively constituted objective individualised acts, accumulating an intersub­ jective field of action and result, thus in which those other phenomenological ­criteria—those I have termed stereotypical—can be decided and enacted,— and yet strictly, objectively, within a broader context of understanding we associate with Darwinist criteria of possible being. Thus ultimately Darwinist, and yet also to be understood internally and culturally in stereotypical terms, rules, that is to say, determining the fully conscious, intended form, thus form-giving properties, that dote the commodity with its particular translational exchange-destined character, and that serves to distinguish commodities as a series of like objects … as a specific kind of phenomenal domain … from others ordered according to different rules, say Darwinist. For here we are concerned with the how and the what of the conscious thought that necessarily, yet freely, has chosen such stereotypical criteria for the production, trade, and evaluation of the commodity in order for it to be « commodity », … and be apt for entering a quantitative system of comparative evaluation and marketisation. Every commodity of any particular kind, each commodity identity, constitutes but one of a potentially infinite

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­ embership of what are assumed by convention to be identical items of each m category of difference among such commodity-related phenomena. We should again remember that before the modern industrial production line with its precision of measure, physical differences among such craft manufactured items were perfectly visible, say between a handful of ducats, just as had been the seeds of a plant brought to our attention by Robert Hooke. We may describe them accurately as universal rules from which no exception can be admitted, and governing the whole field of particularity we call commodity. Yet, this is by convention, rules of phenomenal particularity established merely through the historical accumulation of human actions in time associated with the genesis of market forms and pricing, means of establishing equivalence among unlike objects, of which, perhaps we know necessarily ­little, but that I have chosen to seize at a moment in time when they systematically concern human culture throughout the globe. An earlier historical process, prior at least to the fourth century, and perhaps long before, through which such a continuum of production and exchange had come piecemeal to be generated, is entirely ignored in this essay. We seize the commodity in its maturity as a globally omniscient and pervasive culture of exchange and translational practice organised to translate across all frontiers of particularism and difference. What is seized and characterised in these pages is an organisation of production and exchange that we may consider fully-formed, globally distributed, even though continuing to evolve and alter in time. Then let us continue. A cotton bafta or a Chandore rupee, or Hungarian ducat are each covered by their particular group name, formed specifically as a production-line of what are designed to be « like » objects, seen to be identical to one another, all accorded the same identifying name, and that must be recognised as identical, to pass each frontier of exchange, or make a payment at such a frontier. It is such identity, perfectly stereotypical in spite of appearances, thus by convention, that they are universally accorded a price that can vary circumstantially but not when subject to identical circumstance between one item and another. This is in spite of what the eye may with ease discern concerning their visible differences! It is a strictly cultural form of taxonomic determination and identity that comes to form the constraints of a context acting back to limit free action, whether individual or intersubjective, before the commodity-object. But what makes this stereotypical form of particular and further interest is that this same stereotypical, form-giving drive happens also to traverse human thinking through many other kinds of cultural domain, and also, in those other domains, found to be equally global in their incidence, most notably in domains concerned with the characterisation of the human group itself: the s­ o-called

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« cultures », « peoples », « nations », « civilisations », « castes » and « tribes » and so forth, and that compose our ordinary thought and language concerning human identities, this being indifferently true of mainstream popular and academic thought, alike. Each one of that list of terms we give to the human group is ordinarily doted with a definite and indefinite article, as if a substantive object, solidiary and complete, and treated as such, thus also treated as plurals of such groups, as if exact typological equivalents of kinds of cloth, rice, ducats or rupees—collective persons, as it were—in which the individual perceptual details of the members concerned are, to repeat, entirely and conventionally subordinated in mind to what are deemed their stereotypical group identities. This question of taxonomy has come, necessarily, to form an especially serious theme of the study below. Both kinds considered above, the individualist and Darwinist, on the one hand, and the stereotypical, on the other—the one so contrary to the other both in kind and in implication—must be considered both for their differences, but also for the manner in which, they seem constantly to meet together in constituting all that, from one angle or another, confronts us as human culture and agency. The obvious example is that of the cultivated plant: at once, both artifice (cultural) and nature (biological). But it is also true in a more difficult sense of the relative status we needs accord culture itself, as if both different from our conception of nature, yet also « of ­nature », factored from it, when we consider the latter as the universal factor englobing all that possibly and universally exists.15 But taxonomy will be considered more completely for itself, thus interrogated and argued only in the second complementary part of my study, yet to be 15

I quote from the introduction of a book only recently obtained in the final stages of revision of my manuscript, George Di Giovanni’s introduction to his English translation of Hegel, The Science of Logic, lix: “… it is nature which in the abstract medium of logical discourse attains the self-comprehension, and the efficacy, which we attribute to spirit. Nature is for Hegel, just as it was for Schelling, the « pre-self » of the « self », not the « other-than-self » of Fichte”. Self-comprehension means, as I read the sentence, a knowledge of one’s constitution in thought of the object-world confronting the senses of the human being; efficacy refers to its active, agent like presence in an otherwise un-agenced world; it is a formula that brings into profile Hegel’s manner of thoroughly materialising the old metaphysics of divine agency. Were I to re-write this manuscript, the manner, in the quotation, of formulating this englobing relationship between nature and culture would be accorded considerable importance; I discuss this question directly below, these two ways of conceiving « nature »: first as opposed to culture, second as the englobing fact of all existence, including culture. Thus we read, lviii, that “the strength of [Hegel’s] Logic lies in the fact that it finds a ground for the contingency in the indeterminacy necessarily inherent in the structure of things which are in becoming”, ie. in process of dialectical conceptual realisation (my emphasis). An indeterminacy that is constitutive of what we read as the real!

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written and separately published. However, it will soon be seen that we cannot but be concerned also below with its description and definition where the properties that go to constitute and give social, communicative form to the commodity are concerned:—its stereotypical taxonomical determination penetrates every aspect of that object we call commodity, determines its inherent forms and defining properties, the manner in which it transforms from free decision in mind into the intended physical object, and moreover in being so consciously packaged as an object specifically intended for communication and recognition across the frontiers of exchange (thus as one form or another of applied language-use);—and by « language » I refer to the signs and symbols vesting the visible surfaces of object or packaging of objects in order that its identity be repeatedly confirmed and publicly recognised across all frontiers of communication and exchange encountered on its marketed trajectory through time and space, thus directly influencing all the intentional, highly specific choices that go to make up a potential succession of processes involved in its production … thus what goes to compose bit by bit that final and complete identity, say all the agricultural acts that go to compose one or another micro-variety of rice, or one or another micro-variety of muslin, bafta or nansuk. Is it not remarkable that, even the botanical products of agriculture (varieties, say, of maize, millet, rice, tea or cotton) must also, in this same ongoing carefully practised definitional sense, be considered cultural artifice, because produced, given form, as a marketable commodity by human mind and hand, and often maintained in being through a hard-laboured technology of work acting to controvert the undoing forces of nature? It is for this very reason that I must engage myself in controversies concerning the very systematics of cultivated plants, and although perfectly Darwinian in personal spirit, must seek, nonetheless, to engage the neo-Darwinists in serious argumentation concerning the very nature, consistence and characterisation of their subject matter. Yes, the forms taken by such procedures and judgements must also determine the form, character and active purpose of all the kinds of institutional arrangement and formalised organisation seen to mediate the trade of the commodity at all the innumerable points of exchange, thus, say, quotation of values and exchange-costs, besides the innumerable forms of ritualised comportment that compose, here and there, what collectively comes categorised as « trust » (thus, again, concerning forms of language—whether written or gestural entirely devoted to what evidently constitutes an intentionally translational practice), and that has so come to engage the economic historian. The purpose is, precisely, to suborn perceptible individual differences distinguishing objects composing any such type of commodity, suborn the cultural and

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linguistic obstacles that confront exchange, and leading such difference by convention to escape recognition: it is their particular commodity identity indifferent to the individual, like that of the members of that notional regiment all reduced to the collective stereotype, that determines production for a public space of recognition that is the condition of marketable transfers across space. This is not, I insist, because individual differences between, say, one piece-of-eight and another, are not immediately perceivable to contemporaries (as if they were governed by some conceptual inadequacy for accurate measure and perception, as once was claimed by the historians of mentalities), but, instead, because those differences disappear per-intention before the knowledgeable appreciation of their collective identity and use. The creative consequence is that common identity in terms of which one item can pass and substitute for another, be accepted at the same price and cost as all other members, because, conceptually and practically, participating in a quantitative field we accept as being a generalised, systematically organised collective unity,—a veritable universe of artifice, and that constitutes the culture of the commodity! A full comprehension of this difficult interactive combination between nature and artifice may appear to be inaccessible to the understanding, thus without, at the least, a considerable specialised supplementary labour such as that devoted to the exact description of a chemical element or an organic molecule, or to the mineral composition of a rock such as a granite or diorite. Even then, such corrective, such as that applied as correction by a Galileo to what the senses lead us to think, may also be insufficient. We are responsible for the generation of the categories in which we identify phenomena, but the question that arises is whether we are able or not to distance ourselves from such acts of the subject in identifying objects, and thus in comprehending their real subject/object constitution? Theories about granites treat them, at once, i) stereotypically as all caused by certain kinds of thermal and pressureforming conditions on certain kinds of preexisting, possibly sedimented rock, and that, thereby, lead them all to possess common characteristics that in turn cause us to group them as scattered examples of a single identity, say as « migmatic » (as Sederholm chose to call them), thereby distinguishing them from what, until then, had been generally taught of as being igneous in origin (thus of deep-seated crystallisation from original magmatic sources); in both cases each sample of such a rock, wherever found, is a stereotype of the kind: all are « granite », whether migmatic or igneous. The study of particular granites may distinguish each one as a unique kind of granite in its own right, like you and I, each with its constitutive character, and in this sense particular. On the one hand every specimen of say a Shap or Rapakivi granite is but a sample of the

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general category, judged stereotypically according to the composition and appearance that goes to compose its identity. But, on the other hand, ii) any such rock—just like the contexts of human society, thus of the commodity—vary constantly and circumstantially through space, whether, say, in the proportions of the different minerals that are seen to compose it or in their size, content of inclusions, their states of decomposition into substitute minerals, and so forth: two specimens are never exactly identical, any more than two Hungarian ducats. They are at once nature (variational) and artifice (subject to our categorisations, each specimen a stereotype of the type!). This is but a simplistic manner of regarding the problem for, in reality, as Darwin discovered, it is extremely difficult to discern what is nature and what mind! What enables Dawin to decide that a given plant variety is a natural variety or an ambiguous, impossible-to-fix artifice? We must remember that such questions of identity and category were strongly debated in Darwin’s time. Throughout its thoroughly differential constantly altering compositional incidence, it is encountered as a mass of rock extended in space and visibly subject to entirely circumstantial and micro-local conditions of temperatire, pressure and chemical variation caused by the inclusion of the rocks from which it had been metapmorphically derived; nonetheless we recognise always that identity, say as a Shap granite, and more collectively, as a Rapakivi, thus, again in stereotypical terms, ignoring their differences owing to our choice of certain common characteristics to compose their identities. Yet, in contrast, it is perfectly reasonable to study that Shap granite in terms of its circumstantial variation, even do so in order to enable us the better to give it an accurate yet, in this case, individual identity and gain an idea of its particular formation and origins … It seems to me in these cultural respects equivalent to the present focus in this book on the circumstantial differentiation of the contexts in space and time in which the commodity—what we shall come to ­define as a universal—had been given form, and like society itself, or like Darwin’s emphasis in the differentiation of all individuals composing a category of organisms. This is to revise the very idea of a stereotype, to reconsider entirely what we should come to imply by such stereotypical past usages as, say, « feudal » and « capitalist ».16 And if applied to the commodity, or to a regional incidence of administrative institutions, we would thereby possess a window onto the phenomenalising conditions whereby we human beings fabricate that necessarily stereotypical commodity, or conceive that falsifying s­ tereotype 16

I refer here to two landmarks of past geological writing, J.J. Sederholm’s pathbreaking Selected Works. Granites and Migmatites, and H.H. Read’s general considerations concerning the question in The Granite Controversy.

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we make of a thoroughly variable and experimental field of local administration encountered in some region of the past.17 The latter is a particularly fertile example. It is that experimental character, varying among numerous different local administrations, from the household possessed of numerous fractional rights leading up to more and more complex and comprehensive administrations, that provides that domain of experiment and contemporary comparison through which what we call the state itself developed, trying out locally invented language forms and administrative devices for themselves, often found coincidentally operating in one and the same regional space, and the attention to which is necessary in enabling an accurate description and understanding of the phenomenon of administrative development. To disregard questions of circumstance and variation inhibits accurate generalisation. Slicher van Bath chose to pour his irony on the sociologists’ falsifying contempt for such circumstantial description (mentioned above) with good reason. In short, such societal matter may be observed in natural terms, formed naturally, like the oak leaf and or like Hooke’s seeds. Mind likewise may be considered as a collectivity of significantly differing constituents of any collectivity. I put a particular emphasis below upon the particular experience and corpus of knowledge that each individual brings to the composition of the commodity world, each individual differing in what he or she contributes to the commodity-related context affecting an entire population: each constitutes a unique experiential trace through the life-world, each person a rolling snowball accumulating practical knowledge. This is to make the choice for Darwin’s theory of evolution whilst distinguishing from it the typologies forged collectively by such collectives of individuals, in order the better to comprehend the difficult relationship between individual and society, individual and context, freedom and necessity regarding the global facticity and universal status of the principles of constitution underlying commodification. The point, of course, is that, when seen from a distance, from an historical and anthropological perspective, we may perceive such categories of objects as generated and thence regarded according to generally accepted rules and conventions of doing so, and yet within such forces of reasonable efficaciousness, thus preference and necessity, in terms of criteria freely chosen that are cultural, thus artifice. We wish mind itself, both individual and intersubjec­ tive, to come under scrutiny, to read its limits and adaptations, its mode of ­contributing to the world before us, expressed both in record (rules of the market, ­commercial letters, traveller’s descriptions), or fact (say the commodities 17

I take this example from my “State-Formation Reconsidered”.

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t­ hemselves, or their facilitating institutions). But as Husserl had put the point repeatedly in the first volume of his Ideen, a « tree » made object in thought is not the object « tree » in the garden, and to which observation one may then add that it is the « tree » in thought that has then been worked by arduous human labour upon a « raw » matter provided by nature when fabricating a new cultivated variety of that tree, thus the wild medlar transformed by generations of work into those orchards of new kinds of medlar that had once helped feed the hungry populations of Europe. Then these two forms of taxonomy, both « natural » and « artificial », refer us to a phenomenology, in mind itself, concerning the composition in-and-as practical thought of those very rocks … trees … social groups … organic commodities, making of that thought a material physical and cultural object that comes into conflict with a different kind of speciation guided by natural forces. The proposition is also that “the « tree » in the garden”, the object deemed to exist prior to thought, is, as such, problematic, perhaps even indiscernible to mind in any fully objective sense (and thus as Kant had argued); they come to form parts of a culture of knowledge that is an evidence of the historical cultural anthropology of those who hold that thought, those we study, and ours by means of which we forge that study. There comes to mind, where we earnest students are concerned, that colonial culture of tribes and castes characterising a certain kind of anthropology that illustrates more about those who thought in this manner than about those so categorised, and yet which have passed so easily as credible and veritable into the humanities of my own youth. That search for craniometric measurements in order to confirm and justify an infinite variety of possible tribal classifications in the Nigerian Census’ of 1921 and 1931 may serve as an example of a certain kind of instrumentation with all the spurious objectifying authority ported by its use of measure and number, and that typifies a certain manner of stereotypical objectification of the human being, and thus that may be described as strictly artifice … strictly a matter of « our » culture, that of the measurer and not of the measured. Yet we are speaking of the development of means for conceptually approaching some given reality; but that turns out, at the least, to present that troubling and indiscernible face of what inevitably can be no more than a subjectively worked object!18 But, take note, it is to treat the collective human subject in the very same stereotypical terms as past and present populations have treated the 18

As I have pointed out elsewhere, persons responding to the 1921 and 1931 Nigerian censuses are said to have had difficulty in attaching their persons to such identities, thus to such typologies of tribes and their nomenclatures. For precise references, see my “Languages of Separation and Closure”, in Unbroken Landscape.

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commodity, and in this latter case as part of the objective fabrication of the experienced world. When I describe the stereotypical mode as also common to … and even continuous with such other domains of thinking, past and present, and everywhere evident, and most notably that affecting our conceptions of human groups, say in terms of ethnicities, races, nations or civilisations, and so forth, we also encounter not only a familiar matter of present day political rhetoric, but one that engages subjective judgements and values, becoming thereby a controversial matter with ethical repercussions—judgmental and evaluative— as they seek to be naturalistic and objectivist. I confess that this does interest me … It concerns me, … And to an extent of guiding my concerns and my search for an adequate method by means of which to approach this problem and make of it a true knowledge of what such thinking institutes, together with clarity on the false premises on which it is based. This is matter I can but allude to in the introduction, and hardly at all in the serious matter of the book. It concerns me because, where the human group is concerned, it covers not only popular notions of referring to and characterising race, ethnicity, or national and regional type, but, precisely as such, as if constituting purely objective categories of incontrovertible social being, that have penetrated the very core of the humanities themselves. We shall encounter such a problem—the less nocuous problem of the national cadre of historiographic reference—when ­seeking a satisfactory methodology with which to deal with the global, translational aspects of commoditisation in Chapter 1 of the book. —It is in this respect that I follow Cassirer in requesting participants of the humanities to look again at the continuities traversing all apparent heuristic revolutions that different generations of scholar are deemed to have generated in seeking to alter the historical development of the discipline, but in spite of which, traversing that history, nonetheless, there persists that same seemingly unquestionable colonial inheritance. Then, I insist: those forms of knowledge are forms of knowledge of our very own culture, of the subjects who formulated them, and highly specific in that respect, and that manifest their force of authority in causing us to refuse the need to interrogate them, or to seek broader, alternative approaches, or to refuse them legitimacy (such as affects dependencia theory). Such past authoritative thinking deserves study and description as facets of a distinctive anthropology, rather than being accepted as parts of a universal knowledge. I mention a recent and surprising example, one I had not expected: in speaking of translation between languages, Paul Ricoeur—for whom otherwise I have high regard (especially for his remarkable study of Freud’s phenomenology)— contrasts languages in an entirely holistic, thus stereotypical manner, the one

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versus the other, just as, in speaking of the economic history of an industrialising Europe, Sydney Pollard and Rondo Cameron revert to national states, treating them as representative statistical, populational and developmental unities, and thereby contradicting their own introductory warnings against doing so; we shall see below that they contrast them as if constituting internally indifferent « billiard balls », to use Eric Wolf’s pregnant simile.19 But when I pick up Walther von Wartburg’s etymological dictionary of southern European Romance-based language, I find myself before another and different perception of the real, very close to my own: we find ourselves traversing continuities of differing local usages and transformations of consonant and vowel often running through habited and historical space between Portugal and Romania, and at the least shown traversing French speaking regions, and in which entries are filled with the evidence of minute micro-differences, tiny adjustments and minuscule modifications that must be judged conditional, as subject to local historical circumstance and dialect, and thus to the contingency of time and place that also comprises the kind of empirical basis on which I treat the constitution of commodification, and thereby transcending in form the conventional nationally accorded definition and orthography of words provided by any ordinary dictionary and that characterises Ricoeur’s essay. The generalisations we draw from such sources must also vary in kind and cogency on our choice between those dictionaries that treat language in terms of contrasting national wholes and those that treat it as factored across continuums of varying practical constitution and usage. It might even cause us to interrogate the circumstances leading to the authority of a given national form of a language, such as imposed progressively by the French Academy. This must lead us to ask questions concerning the very meaning of language … What does it mean to say that someone « knows » a language? In my optic, no person ever « knows » a language: we learn and forget until death. But especially to the point are the unwitting implications resulting from unquestioned usages encountered where culture and society are concerned: what does it imply to impose an « a » or a « the » before words like « language » and « people », given what we observe in von Wartburg’s dictionary (confirmed by my own research on the long stretch of country running north to south in Western India, from Rajasthan down to Karnataka )? We pass ineluctably, without frontier posts, from one form of French usage into different forms of Provencal and Oc, together with micro-adjustments of sense, and thence imperceptibly into 19

Paul Ricoeur, Sur la Traduction. The references to Pollard and Cameron are given in Part 1, Chapter 1. That concerning Eric Wolf is to the “Introduction” of Part One of Europe and the People Without History.

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­ atalan and through, afterwards into other neighbouring Spanish languageC forms and dialects, leading us to deny Ricoeur’s conventional holistic manner of referring to them and consider the formation and conditions of national languages in a very different manner. Should it not be the very form of von Wartburg’s evidence that engages our theoretical exploration of the means of generalisation and understanding? Then likewise with Nuer and Dinka, Kwakiutl or the Germanic languages: for there are but these two ways of looking at such identity, Darwinian, on the one hand, being composed of such irreducible difference running in all directions, and the stereotypical, where every Dinka or German is, for the observer, like every other Dinka and German, and worse, graced with group characteristics: honest or shifty, clean or unclean, members of a « criminal caste » (a designation met with in some Indian Gazetteers of the colonial period), or gifted with some mysterious national or racial qualities (as in Heidegger’s treatment of Germanity), … to be accepted or excluded, influencing even a language of exclusion and privilege, that now accompanies the violence, displacements and inequalities of the modern world, and concerning which it is essential to take a position. But one may also look at history and society in the same light, as discrete differential entities representing different value-judgements or, as if objectively occupying differing and disconnected stages of development, a collection of billiard balls to be juggled with, altering the order of significance one considers primary, or sometimes as a balance in which the rise of the one is seen to entail the fall of the other, and despite popular rhetorics and appearances, that come legitimated as such in perfect negligence of cause by our disciplines. Or they may be seen instead, and to the contrary, as an inherently connected co-developing space of generally transitional movements and relationships, thus in this latter respect in continuity with one another, and as such interdependent. Does the resolute task of self-interrogation, that then seems to come into question, offend our instinctive desire to give ready name and form to closed collective identities, or else best passed over because the alternatives are so inconvenient and, for the moment, inelegant?—But as Galileo’s Salviati had said to the equally learned and thoughtful Simplicio, “I pray you, apply not this term « inconvenience » to something that may necessarily be so”, and which, besides, it should be our concern to know.20 20

The complete reference is given in my Unbroken Landscape, xv. One must be careful in understanding what Simplicio is held to represent; it is, of course, the science of The Sphere and the standpoint of the Church, yet that comes contradicted by Galileo’s observations and computations; but the very word « Simple » is not to be understood in modern terms; « God » was defined as « simple », meaning undifferentiated, entire, even perfect. We are entering a controversy between veritable poetics of knowledge. Brecht had a

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In my view, this discovery—a recovery of our own anthropology from the fabric of what seems no more than an objectifying body of purposeful ­knowledge—implicates an at-once both true and false production of knowledge that determines popular and academic attitudes and methods, beliefs and theories. It is true as fact and consequence; and false partly … sometimes wholly … in its pretension to be an accurate description of its objects (Kant’s regard on mendacity as possessing ontogenetic consequences!). When translational difficulties are argued by the anthropologist as distinguishing Nuer from Dinka they seem to be considered as two perfectly discrete identities, like a Chandore rupee and an Ankusi rupee, or like Ricoeur’s « languages », all members of such named entities being considered in their respective cases as representative, thus alike, being doted with distinctive stereotypical group-­ characteristics, that in more populist circumstances come to be evaluated in positive or negative terms, possibly tolerated, possibly not; … yes, that very word « toleration » is a direct indication and result of this dangerously stereotypical manner of comprehending our object world, tolerant and intolerant forming a continuum of affective response subject to short-term forces of circumstance. I would wish—from my own point of view—to oppose to that word some other notion that would fasten upon the recognition of such difference as naturally constitutive, … one that would proclaim difference as a signal aspect of the wealth of the human environment invocated by the excitement felt when journeying through a modern West European city such as London or Paris. Aladdin’s treasure was not composed of one kind of jewel or a single coin but instead of a wealth of different kinds. The question presses itself upon one as an ethical duty to be studied, make one’s knowledge and positions publically evident, make gift to all of us the possible arguments for a knowledgeable response to the languages of exclusion, based, in short, upon an understanding that we can justify as true. That understanding would include a knowledge of how positions on such matters have come formed in mind, become language, become a phenomenology, and have come about historically, as a-priori determinants of human interaction, thinking and acting. This, in turn, might form a phenomenological basis for a treatment of the very problem of knowledge concerning the humanities. Then, the very subject of « commoditisation »—a veritable anthropology of the commodity—whilst intended to stand below entirely for itself, can also be seen to occupy a privileged domain of readily abundant and interpretable globally-prescient evidence permitting that stereotypical thinking and practice to be studied in their good realistic comprehension of Galileo’s position before the old poesis of knowledge (his admirable The Life of Galileo).

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signal formative depth, and, where science or the humanities are concerned, to make of them a question … an interrogation … implicating the entire gamut of method and approach and concerning the very disciplines themselves, in their entirety. That indeed is my position. An abhorrence of the fact that in confronting arguments embodying racist, nationalist or ethnicist discriminative thinking, an opponent such as myself generally find him-/herself without means for constituting a rationally composed response based upon what we may hold to be a true if disputable knowledge, and that effectively opposes the spurious assumptions and falsehoods of the stereotypical when touching upon the human kind. Study of the commodity then seems to provide a serious means of anticipating such a knowledgeable response, because forcing us to consider those two contrary facets of observation represented by the contrast between object-forming (phenomena-constituting) taxonomies. Moreover, it provides a positive side for that response: the translational drive that globally enacts the exchanges that mark everywhere the domain of the commodity. I make this point in this « not quite introductory » essay because it can rarely be permitted to raise its head in what necessarily follows below as a strict study of the very different objective field of thought and act concerning the commodity, and, if it happens below to be mentioned in passing, it is so without presentation or further analysis of an evidence. It is here that I may state the need for a thorough investigation of the presuppositions and ideological accompaniments that have become integrated within the long history of ­anthropological thinking, traversing one apparent revolution after another, … now historicist, now structural-functionalist and anti-historicist, … thus, from colonial times composing an unbroken, hardly questioned fabric of assumption stretching into the present and giving unwitting form to approach and ­method;—it is a sense of current urgency, in addition to the quest for knowledge, that insists upon its being undertaken, and which awaits realisation in some future publication.21

…

4

The Three Criticisms

An initial draft of this study had, indeed, been criticised on three grounds, two of which I have considered justified, and the third a misreading of my method 21

It is Aditya Sarkar who pointed out this problem, and which I have interpreted as a polite criticism for having evaded the question. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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and intentions, and yet which, in opposing it, has allowed me to develop my own conceptions concerning the very nature and significance of my questioning. The first criticised me for ignoring the conditions of social-class underlying commoditisation, pointing to those kinds of class relationship through which all aspects of the labour of commoditisation was organised. Initially I rejected this criticism as not having recognised the specific, phenomenological nature of the questions concerning my enquiry. Gradually, however, it came to press upon me as an essential and irrecusible aspect of the content and ontic condition of production itself, and especially significant with regard to the very basis of pre-industrial economy, notably the labour-conditions of agriculture. The latter are frequently treated as if marginal or external to the questions of a properly capitalistic development, and yet reveal themselves as being of primary significance for what is constructed from its product, and that must therefore be treated as fully and systematically, institutionally, integrated into the broader organisation of any societal complex, fully conceived in its order and functioning. Then these class conditions affecting rural production are at once macro-societal, on the scale of regions and states, bound up with stateformation in its own right, and yet also closely and densely connected with the unequal social relationships governing access to land (in truth, an institutional access), the forms of possession and labour in the countryside. Yet, I have explained above this matter as being a task for another and different book, not only because of the sheer magnitude and disputational status of the problem, but more essentially because I continue to consider its largely historical and empirical concerns as requiring a treatment kept apart from the Kantian, phenomenological interest that now propels City Intelligible.22 The second criticism argued that I had failed to demonstrate my proposition concerning the broadly common nature of the kinds of stereotypical classificational thinking that cover’s both the culture of commodification and that of approaches towards human group-identity and difference that have long predominated and guided both academic and public discourse. I also agree with the critic concerning this neglect, but in having explained that, as with class, it cannot be the focus of the present study, although mentioned in order to make clear the ethical concerns that lie behind this phenomenological approach to the commodity. It must be clear that a study that reveals universal conditions of mind and a translational practice with a global incidence must possess profound implications for the terms of normative discussion of group identity and for the sense to be read of cultural, linguistic and other kinds of 22

Whether I live to produce this book is of course in question, but its research and initial drafting is already largely complete. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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group differentiation. I have chosen to illuminate the facts of these implications, to point to the culture of the commodity as a privileged well-­documented domain that allows us to address this question, but, at least for the present, not to allow it to interfere with the Kantian and phenomenological demonstration that follows. As said, the latter must be allowed to stand for itself, to show its importance from its own resources, and not subject to interference by associated questioning however important the latter may seem. The third criticism is only more important because it has caused me to penetrate and review my entire processes of thinking an historically constituted ­reality and the role of individual and collective in that constitution. This question indeed concerns the matter of this book and I seek to address it in the pages that follow. I have sought to find answers whilst working to revise my earlier version of City Intelligible, to which the three criticisms had been directed, and I have been much helped by attention to the more recent extensions of phenomenology provoked by Husserl and his assistant Fink. It is not, in my view that they have taken Kant and Hegel’s thinking considerably ­further;—often I feel that in minimising, even at times denying the influence of their most often unmentioned forefathers (Kant and Hegel), they cannot prevent themselves retreating before the sheer radical audacity of Kant’s and Hegel’s initial questioning. Nonetheless, reading their writings has enabled and provoked me into rethinking the very grounds of my own position. As for the criticism itself, it is mistaken, resting upon a misreading of both my method and its intentions. The critic concerned had considered my study structuralist but that I had not admitted such parentage or referred directly to it in developing my arguments. Its merit had been in forcing me to confront my precise position concerning structuralism, which latter, as a student, returning to university a second time in the 1960s, had immediately fascinated and even inspired me, without me questioning it intellectually in subsequent years or wishing to associate myself with it. A Kantian, Hegelian and Marxian interpretive preference pointed in quite other directions which I have had now to work through in their precision in order myself to understand this difference, and it is this work that has considerably influenced the present revision of City Intelligible. It seems to me that a phenomenological concern is unreconcilable with structuralism, pointing to other interpretive and methodological resources for understanding the formation of the empirical world and the relationship of the human agent to its formation and existence. It is Kant who pointed to the possibility of investigating the formation in mind of an objectworld in terms of my own historical research and materials, and to the universal possibilities of a fresh treatment of human culture in terms of them … in terms of the materials I had been researching for many years and the kinds of

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e­ xplicative emphasis I had placed on them, always pointing to the problem of the collective interpreting subject for what we regard as a knowledge of the past. In short, these preferences have guided me in directions that run contrary to the fundamental precepts embodied explicitly by structuralism. That « accusation » has impelled me to return to the Kantian question, and, most important, to the problem of affirming and justifying the possibility of « universal » traits of culture in empirical conditions; once more this word « universal » must be strictly distinguished from « general », the first admitting of no exception, and the second, to the contrary, indicating mere preponderance.; the first then is of a qualitative nature, whilst the second we may consider quantitative and relative. Then question must be of whether a true notion of the universal can be associated with the empirical, or must it be considered a philosophical or metaphysical concept unattachable to any possible reality? But if the former is deemed indeed possible, as I choose to argue, then it becomes necessary to judge both the means of that possibility, how amidst circumstance and change a universal can be conceptually thought possible, and yet, where culture is concerned accepting it in all its empirical and exotic differentiation on every scale of historical circumstance, and thus ineluctably variable character, an observation that descends to that most negative of metaphysical judgements: the phenomenon itself, and where we are concerned the cultural object. The evident consequence is that any such attempt to reconcile the two poles—universal and cultural difference—entails what I have described above as “an explanation of difference”, a « going before » difference in order to locate its unifying factors, in short a thorough re-understanding of this relationship of a universal with its empirical possibility. Under what conditions can it be possible, and what must this ask of the very concept of the universal? It concerns me, first, as underlying the possibility of commoditisation as a global cultural evidence, embodied by all that evidence of difference, by a world in which everywhere we look appears different and exotic from its neighbours, one place from another, one expression of that universal from another. In drawing such a relationship it must in its entirety be empirical and materialist, avoiding any metaphysical dimension or support. And this has seemed possible only in confirming in the fact Kant’s approach to human reason and judgement, and to do so in terms of what I have described above as the circumstantial conditions of a historical anthropology of societal development and of the role in it of human agency. The term « universal » must be given a social, empirical grounding founded in the objective realities of empirical circumstance, absurd though this may at first seem; Daphnis and Chloe must be helped to conceive, and the possibility of the universal not left an empty epithet. Commoditisation

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c­ onstitutes a field of privileged evidence for introducing and investigating this possibility. It is to this task that I turn in what follows of this introductory essay.

…

5

A Critical and Transcendental Anthropology of Intercultural Translatability—the Question of Method

The project implicates three distinct yet closely related tasks, each concerning the possibilities and facticity of mind and culture, each distinct and operating at a particular level of our own conceptual approach to the cultural and historical object. They overlay one another methodologically, and in coming to accumulate their findings into a single architectonic conceptual and explanatory edifice, … to compose, as I would have it, an ideally complete synthesis of comprehension and justification. The reason for qualifying that synthesis as no more than ideal will be mentioned below: let’s say that it is a legitimate target … a necessary target … that nonetheless tends to dissemble before the limits and fragility of mind itself faced with the task of grasping a reality resistant to precise definition, especially where the final and third steps are concerned and on which, it will be evident, one advances virtually blindfold, so to speak. In short, I cannot be sure of accomplishing even one of these three tasks: I seek to do so as best as best can in the conviction that even a relatively successful definition of tasks will best serve the understanding as a more adequate­ly and accurately directed approach than otherwise to what I have designated as this anthropology of commoditisation, providing a path leading towards affirmation of the universal traits lying within … embodied by … all the oppositions and exotic forms of expression characterising human culture on a global scale. At worst, I pose necessary questions, the attempted answers to which await debate and disputation, and that may be taken up by others … the community of all those who seek such truth in the quest for knowledge. I consider these three tasks in turn: 1. The first task, evidently, is the historical anthropology of commoditisation as a distinctive culture, yet with universal status: particular in its kind and yet universal. It represents a dynamic, never static condition of existential being that is usually classified as the strict concern of the economic historian: prices, forms of production, the organisation of tasks and labour, trading and marketing in all their facets, production, use and circulation of the means of payment, thus tokens of value, and much else. But I am no economic historian; I lack even

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the most basic statistical and mathematical skills that qualify the latter. Instead, I choose to treat this very subject matter—even prices, costs of production, organisation of markets, and so forth—according to the much broader and more inclusive concept of culture, and thus as that anthropology of the culture mentioned frequently above. As a researcher, in the mid-1970s, devoted to the « uncovering », thus discovering, of the empirical foundations of a particular societal and institutional complex covering an extensive and varied inhabited territorial tract of Western India in the centuries prior to colonial occupation, thus charged with an attempt to reconstruct an entire historical societal experience buried in littleused archives written in the archaic, eclectic forms of a language spoken today but now shorn of much of the technical vocabulary and linguistic usages absorbed from diverse inter-Asian sources (notably from Safavid and other Near Eastern cultural and administrative sources), and utilising a script, Modi, increasingly outmoded in modern times, I found myself day after day increasingly astonished by the unexpected abundance, wealth and remarkable quality of detailed information encountered in local archives, not least in their offer of a remarkably magnifying perusal of the finer detail of the economic life of a world of villages and small town markets penetrated through and through by influences stemming from the intercontinental oceanic trades of the day and also by those cross-cultural linguistic and religious influences affecting popular culture previously mentioned. Such a diversity of formative influence leads one to conclude, as consequence, that it was profoundly implicated in the very genesis and constitution of the culture of Western India: its economic forms, the nomenclature and forms of fractional rights in the soil, its rituals and ideologies, the kinds of crop gardened and sold in small rural markets, the nature of the payment forms utilised by the poorest inhabitants, … and much else, all bore the marks of this diversity, yet organised, one might say, around the central linguistic continuity, itself diverse, discovered in following its empirical spread across territory of Gujerati, Maharashtran and Kannada and Konkani culture, languages and dialects. Certain important aspects of this diversity have, as said, been lost before forces of later regional nationalisms, seeking especially to wipe the slate clean of such borrowings and formative influences, but which a historian might consider an admirably eclectic synthesis, as encountered in the archival records of the past.23 23

Examples are the richly Persianised Marathi language of the times, evident in the copious documentation at all administrative and social levels and of all kinds, and also the mix of re­ ligious inputs from afar that came to affect the spiritual life of the times. The archives were first the Pune State Archives, largely consisting of government-related d­ ocumentation

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The first conclusion from this encounter with the archives concerned the clear well-defined abundance of an evidence for a globalism that affected local life in its fragmentary constitutive detail,—thus in both the finite evidence of daily life and with regard to organisation and structure,—and even as early as the sixteenth century, yet augmenting thereafter, increasingly making that extremely particular kind of society and culture inextricably connected with a wider world of multiple dependencies. Secondly, and equally consequential, were the interdisciplinary implications affecting any serious attempt to comprehend that evidence of societal construction:—and yet true of what had initially seemed … and that could still be considered … a remote and economically underdeveloped territory. It is quite clear that much of my discussion indeed concerns economic matter, but it concerns me as means for an interdisciplinarian approach to the anthropology of how such global societal relationships penetrated and affected the forms of local society, thus its culture … the anthropological status of such influences. This leads to a further judgement; that such local cultural and societal difference was itself constitutive, in its turn, of what we read as being global and economic. Furthermore, when I speak of economy I do so in conventional terms: thus, those of prices and goods, markets and forms of labour, demand and supply, appropriation and exploitation, and not in that of a moral economy, as advanced by a Karl Polanyi, a Clifford Geertz or Louis Dumont, but which latter attracts the anthropologist seeking to affirm the distinctiveness of what he or she observes, but who, so it seems to me, makes the mistake of confusing … confuting … ritual and belief-centred forms of circular exchange, without economic significance, with the forms of economy itself; the Kwakiutl engaged both in potlach and also struggled for economic survival under unequal social conditions; the village Indian engaged both in the cultural v­ aried in kind and penetrating right down to the village levels of survey and annual assessment; second, the private archive of the Bharat Itihas Sanshodhak Mandal, the unrivalled documentation of which enters the researcher into the finest detail of the economic life of the countryside, individual field accounts, names of the inhabitants and the different kinds of labour performed by family members, components of income of peasant family, administrator or noble court, distributions and accumulations of fractional rights and their management, money lending on a virtually « microscopic » daily level, and so forth. It seemed a privilege to be allowed to work in such an archive and I commend all those of the Mandal who, in spite of their fears and sense of duty, allowed me access to it (Prof. G.H. Khare, and Drs. G.T. Kulkarni, M.S. Mathe and V.D. Divekar, and finally the elderly person who taught me to read and understand the language of those old documents and who sought to transfer both his rich knowledge and experience to me, Shri M.M. Omkar). I commend also the friendly and generous help provided over those first two years of research by the staff of the Pune State Archives.

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sphere of jajmani and caste, but also in a vigorously active market economy, exchanging crops for coin in the market, crops commoditised in their very conception, doted with properties determined by their status as commodities, and coins made of metals mined overseas and at cost, minted first in say Peru or Mexico, reminted in Dordrecht or Birmingham, and then later especially in Surat, but also in the small towns of the Deccan such as Ahmednagar. In short, the very same kind of society studied by a Dumont or a Mousnier, had also long been penetrated by dense webs of market types of relationship, and these two different and distinct aspects of local life, ritual exchange on the one hand and economic exchange on the other, must be considered integrally as parts of a single social local existence. 2. The second task, in contrast, is distinctly philosophical or Kantian, and concerns the very possibility of what we encounter: it should be thought of as the first of two steps in the study of such material,. The first focusses on the manner in which the cultural object, the commodity, came to be constituted by the populations of this historical past, while the second is concerned, in its turn, with how we, as researchers, come to constitute that same historical past as object. This second stage has already been pointed to and described above when considering the problems surrounding normative conceptions of the ­human group: it concerns the task of considering critically our very own procedures of generating the object of concern, thus the investment of our subjectivity in giving format to its object, in this case the object of research. This second case must be able to incorporate the first. In both cases, mind is led to turn back upon that empirical culture comprising our first task; it is led to labour that past as its own soil for a fresh understanding, but one that is more inclusive … more comprehensive … than the first stage, which is still coloured by a sense of pure objectivity: that effort of others to constitute the object we call the commodity. This second task is also focussed on the historical but in order to discover how it could even generate and sustain that material object-filled and institutional anthropology of the past. The third task will be seen to go even further, become even more comprehensive, now working even further back into how that past constitution of the object (that past cultural anthropology) becomes, in its turn, constituted by ourselves, thus by mind current, and equally globally, so that in journal and conference participants from diverse origins and places can discuss and dispute that complex accumulation of knowledge without confronting necessary and unfranchisable translational obstacles to the will of all, intersubjectively, to understand one another.—I have formulated these tasks in a manner that should provoke any person knowledgeable of Hegel’s early writings, especially those of Jena, to see clearly how the dialectical method of argumentation may

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come to our aid. I point here to the example of the poet Paul Celan, who in a handful of brilliantly conceived words, had formulated his own task of comprehending a difficult present in which much that he continued to encounter, in his post-war years of exile in Western Europe, had survived the defeat of the Nazis. This was a period of post war history long before France or Germany had learned to look back on its past, a task, we should add, that continues to this very day. Celan requested in poem and prose address that we work back upon that past, bring it to consciousness and learn to understand it, both our past and that of his audience, in order to advance beyond the ills of the present and thereby produce a renovated future freed of what had been inheritances from the past.24 It is a distinctly dialectical formulation, a dialectical mode of working a problem that is hardly to be noticed as such, and yet orders that response: one recovers that phenomenology of the past, labours it in order to produce a reformed future. And I mention this example in order to clarify the nature of our own three tasks, set out here, and that build up upon one another in succession in order to produce the comprehensive order or edifice of a knowledge now required—as Cassirer had put it—of any « science » worthy of the name. It is to show that such a method should indeed be dialectical in its structure and concept, but that, properly formulated, it should be accessible to us all, as unselfconscious of this chosen methodology as in the case of Celan. It is the method I pursue below. It is this that leads me to ask “what is a commodity” and the reasons that should explain its role as such: not just as any factored or natural object, but as one doted with a certain corpus of constitutive properties that allows that object to function as « commodity »! How is it possible that it exists as such in a small market town in interior China besides in Basingstoke, Metslawier or Brandonnet, and that products fabricated in the one are exchangeable for those fabricated in the other? Here I refer to what Kant considers the a-priori conditions of possible thought in constituting a world of objects, and that I carry over into the constitution of the commodity, to the physical forms and properties that enable it to pass as commodity, first as object, and secondly as a specific kind of object, subject to the space/time determinations of possible thought, and thence to the sets of categories that give it its more particular form and character. This question concerns, moreover, the whole complex of different aspects concerning that phenomenon, commoditisation: not only 24

“Ansprache anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen”, in Paul Celan Werke. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, i, Abteilung Lyrik und Prosa, xv, 23–6 (“Speech given on Reception of the Prize for Literature awarded in 1958 by the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen”).

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production but recognition; its translatability through a sequence of markets at distance, its common evaluation with all other commodities of whatever kind, be it an hour of human labour or a bale of cloth. It is here that, knowingly, I take up and justify Kant’s use of Newton and Euclid to define the commonsensical structures of thought accessible to the human mind, and that as such determined access to and image-form transforming what enters mind through sensory reception of the world beyond into thought and the objects of thought. As I shall argue in the third chapter of Part 1, below, I do this in conscious opposition against the reserves of those modern commentators who dismiss Kant because, necessarily, he had been unaware of later advances concerning time/space with relativity and quantum mechanics. His likely answer, as I imagine it, would surely have been: “So what, you are free to criticise me! But, take note, I am not concerned with the ultimate truths concerning the physical matter of the world, but instead with the truths of the human mind and its limits, of what mind can do, perceive and factor of that physical matter in bringing it into thought, and rendering as thought what you now understand as Einsteinian and Planckian correctives to common-sensical thinking, terms whose common-sensical forms were so well represented by Newton and Euclid and so accessible to the common mind, to yours and mine. As one of my offspring would have it (yet that rascal refuses to recognise his father), « the tree in mind is not the tree in the garden ». And that, precisely, is why I call my critique an anthropology!” I too have spent much time at this task of defining the a-priori conditions of possibility enabling an understanding of commodity- and market-related matter: this concerns a realm of artifice, of human creativity, and thus should not be confused with the ultimate nature of matter that concerns the physicists, and yet which, in its turn, can hardly be considered freed of culture, of the implication of the subject in formulating its object (say, that of Planck or Einstein)! However, I should also point out that the first task, as listed above, the cultural anthropology of commodification, must procedurally succeed … come subsequent to … the determination of these a-priori conditions of thought. It comes instead to inform the intimate detail of how the commodity comes, thereupon, to be realised historically and globally … as a conscious field of accessible knowledge … by multitudes of at once constrained and yet free actors (free in terms of such constraints) … as a field of entirely exotic difference forming the matter of all the differential cultural appearances that come to confront the enquirer. We find determining contexts that allow a certain range of freedom to make error, to decide and choose everywhere the nature of one’s action, and based upon that accessible experiential knowledge we associate with the commodity: conscious of such contextually determined constraints,

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the person concerned may compose a good in China that will, so it is hoped, sell in Amsterdam, or a good in Kayseri or Aceh that will sell in Fujian or Hangzhou, and yet, whilst conceived and planned in order to do so, nonetheless often so based upon local characteristics of cultural expression and formation. Much depends upon the excellence of the person’s judgement where the successful outcome of such an act is concerned. Then, such a description, if considered credible, must by implication cast a radical doubt on the stubborn conventions characterising our own social disciplines that lead to negative conclusions concerning the possibilities of communication and translation across the frontiers of culture and language. A Mexican ducaton made in workshop or household in Birmingham or Rouen may be designed for reception and circulation in Guangdong, yet be doted, for this purpose, with specific signs and forms, indicating say a particular mint-year and a recognised known mint mark that had come to compose part and parcel of the experiential knowledge possessed by the merchants of Guangzhou and enabling such coin to circulate as an acceptable medium of value. There is nothing false about such a coin: it would be true to its conventionally acceptable weight and pure-metal content, that defines it as type and recognised as such throughout the continuum … Is this not Alice through the looking glass? A truly efficacious alchemy-like practice that may unwittingly have stimulated, in its turn, the alchemical activities of a Thurneisser or Paracelsus? Instead of the conventional field of frontiers and obstacles to comprehension, we discover that culture to be inherently and intentionally translational, rendered so by the active intentional drive of all participants, the exotic goods and payment forms that characterise the lists and dictionaries of commodities being expected in their visible or sensible form, as received at the points of exchange by contemporaries and thereby capable of traversing every kind of frontier, even that of war. It is these two aspects and tasks, the first historical-cultural and the second Kantian, that thus form the basis of an objective and universalist treatment of commodity culture, with the implication that this universalist status accorded to such traits deserves a focussed attention in its own right, one that will come to encompass what also will be recognised as the specific aspects of a human culture possessing universal traits, thus itself universal as I have chosen to define this term (but which is to say that although universal it is not indifferent to meaning). It requires, of course, reconsideration of the very possibility of the judgement that such a culture could even be « universal » under empirical conditions, given a strict, rigorously-kept-to definition of that word. It covers traits observable without exception throughout the exchange continuum, and yet that can only have evolved under strictly empirical and historical Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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c­ onditions, a sense of history in the long and encompassing sense of an archaeological and palaeontological path towards unison. This implies the necessity of giving clear thought to the very possibility of such unison. It is what seems to me difficult and paradoxical in this proposition central to my task, the task of this book.—And we would need to conceive that possibility as being founded in a history comprised of innumerable contacts and communications, thus as a consequence or confluence of human kinds located here and there but following a long evolution of contact and exchange leading towards what now composes homo sapiens, the whole variety of the human being as found now settled around the globe. This clearly is a conception of origins that necessarily completely reverses the old Adamic concept of a dispersive migrational origin from a single paternal source (certainly, a Biblical-type inheritance absorbed unquestioned into the later sciences and humanities): the tree, say Darwin’s tree, the family tree of the evolution of the organism, in this case, would be from the branch to the trunk and not vice versa: a flow from dispersal towards unison rather than unison’s dispersal into the plural and different. However, even then, if we continue to take seriously Steward’s principle of a minimal degree of cultural compatibility as necessary for such mutual influence, communication and juncture, an arduous work must remain to us before we can really speak of a comprehension of this process, and thus of the empirical possibility of such unison. It is an enigma of explanation that must be left as such since I lack the skills, perhaps genetic, with which to address it. But, I insist, the evidence is before the eye: that extraordinary fact of commoditisation on a global scale! Nonetheless, the major aspect of a treatment of commoditisation is the need to perceive and describe how the objects of thought translate into the practices of a culture crystallised as a material, objectified reality that thereafter confronts externally the senses of the human being,—a culture in terms of which those same human beings would then find themselves ineluctably caught up as their constraining and engaged contexts, contexts that act to limit reasonable choice and decision: each individual must rationally choose the path of a procedure by means of which to address efficaciously any commodity-related task. We become confronted by the problems of successive scales of such contextual determination and necessity, and with judging the variable room for possible choice and decision within such sets of constraining contexts, say between Kant’s invariable a-prioris and subsequent contexts of thought and action that permit a range of choice, thus allow error, if at a price.25 25

In “State-Formation Reconsidered”, in The Invisible City, I show myself struck by the sheer circumstantial variety of the content of ritual occasion concerning documented property sale and possession, the creative invention displayed in each new case, all separated from Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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This is an especially important aspect of the study: that where culture is concerned, a treatment of phenomenalisation transcends mind and becomes realised as a collectively recognised and reproducible material and tangible culture comprised of objects, customs, comportments and so forth. One then also wants to know how this is historically possible and how it has come to characterise what we encounter as the known world of experience. One faces the local and the exotic and the fact that this Kantian aspect allows us to determine the universal criteria through which that exotic differentialism in the development and expression of historical culture had been fostered whilst remaining intersubjective and translational. 3. However, it is the third task that causes difficulty. The first is rightly debated in the search for an adequate and credible factual dimension of empirical fact or truth, whilst the second, the Kantian, is controversial because a hidden and internal aspect of the social and cultural object studied by the historian or cultural anthropologist: how any population that comes under scrutiny comes to give form to, and embody its cultural resources, act with a certain distanciation and freedom in terms of such a crystallised material and spiritual culture, this being quite separate from what the third task must address: what that same historian and anthropologist does to the object of study in the very process of studying it, yet without, generally speaking, being aware of doing so, seeming merely to contemplate that object from afar; the former (or second task) concerns a more complete purview of the object of study: of cultural formation; the third goes much further into difficult waters, questioning the researcher’s own processes of thought not even formulated as such, thus not ordinarily formulated as a matter for concern, let alone subjected to interrogation. It is the interference of the « instrument » with what is instrumentalised, once again! This third task is difficult for an additional reason, and seemingly, because of it, it seems an infinite task: it concerns that task of working back upon the presumptive grounds of one’s very own mind, individual and collective, on the sources in mind for the various anthropologies we see before us, and in this case our very own most intimate mind;—it seems to defeat comprehension, and yet it is of great importance. There are always new aspects and suddenly discovered neglected fields, uncovered from that past that constitutes the self, and that must be added to what we currently know in the path towards that the others in time and space, and which thus acted as a learning context of many publicly known events, in terms of which local choice and decision would thence each time be made; yet all such events are perfectly recognisable in their general play on a known lexicon of word and act used to constitute any such ritual. I am speaking of a documentation concerning a wide stretch of territory running north to south in Western India, covering the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries.

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ideal of a complete knowledge. For, yes, this third task concerns ourselves and we come to ask whether it is even possible to forage in a thoroughgoing manner such anthropological information concerning one’s own consciousness, whether individual or collective, personal or intersubjective, or whether, in doing so, one can even validate as true and objective what one seems to discover concerning our own subjectivity. The paths into mirage and fiction seem legion and enforce one’s modesty. Is there a means to tell? There are means in the circumstantial sense of contexts within and from which, from infancy, one socialises and gains one’s intellectual inheritance of right and wrong, true and false, and that enable one to compare through hermeneutic, interpretive methods of judgement the matter of our own anthropology of cultural being, and that indeed deserves an unrelenting interrogation and investigation, in order to comprehend more fully the truth status of what we call a knowledge. Obviously, this remains a level of investigation apostieriori of the a-priori Kantian determinants of possible thought;—the Kantian element itself being the truly a-priori, although considered identical to that to be analysed in Chapter 3, §i, with regard to commodification. But it is by this therefore secondary means that one may discover the weight of the colonial and imperial attitudes of the past on what we ordinarily regard as our own objective knowledge, veritable forms of knowledge that we ourselves inhabit, as it were, that compose our own naturalistic culture of appreciation, and, therefore, that constitute what may be regarded as a signal element of our own anthropology; we encounter its evidence, its crystallisation as it were, in the long « exhaustive » lists of castes and tribes that compose the Indian gazetteers and African census reports of that dismal past, that apparently obsessed their authors with their seeming necessity: expeditions of gentlemen armed with calipers, rulers and absolute authority for measuring the capacities and forms of « native » skulls according to their designated tribal categories: those categories may be 25 or 250, according to the disputes of the day affecting the given context of measure; how like the lists of commodities encountered in the commercial dictionaries now seem such categories, this one of the properties of cottons, that one of the properties of castes. The question, then, concerns the relative truth status of such forms of knowledge. However, the point I have sought to make is that if a historical portion of recent humanity is considered by the academic, say the historian, as having necessarily been constrained and even determined by such an inheritance of mind in its giving particular cultural expression to the experienced world, so too must that historian, say a historical anthropologist, who therefore cannot simply consider the academic self as an exception to that rule and a mere spectator observing tranquilly and objectively the facts beyond; there is no

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­ ecessary status of truth attached to the modernity of science that would acn cord us with some objective exception to that rule; what is involved are the rules of subjectivity … also universal as such … in their implication in giving form to an external object penetrated by the senses; and to paraphrase Heisenberg’s thinking about instruments of measure and observation, mind itself is required to give form to facts in making them its objects of thought, this being so whether through direct sensory reception, or through an instrument such as the microscope. But this is also true in a cultural and philosophical sense of brute possibility; it is true of any third-party observer who chooses to judge the conditions whereby others, elsewhere or in the past, have constituted their particular world, true without exception whether concerning some Jack or Jill, or a Professor X or Doctor Y. To repeat, there can be no exceptions to such a rule, such a structure concerning the mind as such, and that gives specific kinds of form to the matter of the world in reacting conceptually and sensorially with it … in processing it (perceiving, reasoning and imagining it): and to repeat again and again Husserl’s dictum that the tree in thought is not the tree in the garden, even though inescapably related to it: the subject processes what it converts into thought, gives it the forms proper to thought, and thus enters as form into the very constitution of object or concept: subject/object. Then, it is not common sense, say Newtonian and Euclidian, that allowed Einstein to determine the two laws of relativity but, to the contrary, an abstruse knowledge ­utilised in countering the senses, just as Galileo had worked on his chosen audience; and so too Lacan, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Mandelbrot or Lévi-Strauss. And the matter with which we others, concerned with culture, are involved is precisely common sense: that of the common sense of historical populational ensembles giving particular shape and content to any cultural field we choose to study by means of their natural aptitudes, that common sense. Commoditisation is not only such a case, but one remarkably privileged: offering to us an extensive and accessible field of abundant and varied global documentary evidence in which its constitution can be studied and debated in the detail of contemporaneously written down, explicit statements, facts and even surviving objects that offer up to us the very rules applied in constituting the commodity-object. But what of ourselves and the manner in which we, in turn, give subjective form and content to the objective constituents of such culture … that of the commodity? But this time unwittingly, under the positivist illusion of a veritable ideal of objectivism? The task of bringing this to consciousness is above all problematic. The quotation that introduced this very essay (this « More than a Preface or Introduction ») suggests that, for the phenomenologist, an « every-person » oughts be enabled to be taught to philosophise such questions with relative ease. Yet, in

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reading Eugen Fink’s text, one discovers that he himself repetitively refers to the implacable difficulty of such tasks even for the philosopher, so that he constantly seems to delay engaging himself in the task we expect of him, always appearing to be approaching it, regarding it from outside, as if it were some unknown land, some impossible Paradise of an absolute knowledge, and thus a task for some unattainable future. He expresses its inaccessibility to the ordinary mind, … even an experienced scientific mind; and, in doing so, he implies the necessity of a kind of Rousseauan leap in imaginative powers for any given population to be enabled to think phenomenologically (for Rousseau, for an any-person, to be a­ dequate to the General Will, for Fink to think self-consciously phenomenologically); it becomes in his words what his French translator, Nathalie Depraz correctly describes as an « onto-theology », something like a retreat to the old de-materialised essentialism of the past, as if, as I read it, a retreat backwards from that audacious materialisation of the old metaphysic that we rightly associate with Hegel’s Phenomenology (if prefigured by Kant’s own phenomenology, the First Critique). However, In returning to the example cited above of Paul Celan, thus of a generation encountered in the mid twentieth-century for whom dialectical thinking was unremarkable and natural, thus to a process leading to a strictly, unselfconscious materialist phenomenology, one may surely reject Fink’s dramatic retreat whilst nonetheless recognising the difficulties of this third task.26 Rousseau’s question, we may remember, concerned how it could be possible to engage a civil population in an entirely novel frame of mind, as required by his General Will, given that all persons would have already been socialized (­intellectualised conceptually) by the ordinary experience constituting their lives and that surrounded them as an intimate and contextual order of unquestioned reference. And his response was the kind of radical educational project for which he has also been notorious.27 He poses a problem, but, in effect, does not, where vast populations are concerned, resolve it in practical realisable terms. But it is a similar kind of question that Fink here engages, explicitly suggesting that to think and philosophise the phenomenological grounds of our own thought must be equally unattainable: he seems to wait outside the gates and keep us await beside him, shivering in unrewarded expectation. Might we not judge for ourselves and choose to refute that notion of closure and inaccessi­ bility, and argue that it is accessible through work and procedure, in contrast to

26 27

Depraz, “La Sixième Meditation Cartésienne”, 24, but repeated subsequently. In this sense, we may already regard Rousseau a phenomenologist, sensing this as one of the principle reasons why Kant and Hegel so admired his writings.

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Rousseau’s own kind of problem? Accessible, that is, in the sense applied by Kant and Hegel, in their different ways? Each one of these three radical tasks, concerning commoditisation, should be accessible, and if the reader finds it not to be so, the fault is surely mine, say one of method, say of expression, and not that of the objective inaccessibility of that task, thus of satisfying the ethic I attach to it. For, a phenomenology of the academic mind can only be thought worthwhile if accessible as a normative, regulative practice for an « any-person », an « any-academic », not just to « clever » Joe but likewise to « less clever » Jim. It is already a task achieved just to have understood the necessity of making that request, thus of the need to confront, understand and even contradict our natural manner of p ­ roceeding.— As Cassirer had confidently sought of us and asserted:—it should be part and parcel of the full scope of a conscious ethical concern to gain true knowledge, part of that truth, and one that constitutes a full aspect of a « science ». Then, it is what, subjectively, the researcher should actively seek to make part of an own method of approach, adding what is thus encountered and laboured to that more « natural », un-self-questioning way of doing things (as we saw of Celan).28 If we agree that mind, at the least, is as much an instrument of thought as microscope or telescope are instruments of vision, then we agree with Heisenberg that such instruments influence what comes processed as objective thought! The subject, a you or an I, is undetachable from its object! It is how I too approach that question, but believing it accessible to a work of mind, to all our minds, not only to the privileged philosopher, but to a you and I, and necessarily so;—it may be regarded even a duty to perceive it so, and, furthermore, a duty to make it the task! And—having accepted as true the arguments of Kant’s First Critique concerning those primary a-priori, subjective conditions of generating an objective world,—in treating the formation of the commodity world according to the same principles and criteria as proposed in the Critique. I have become especially concerned with interrogating what I have referred to above as our common historical anthropology inherited from the historical, literary and linguistic conditions of our immediate forbears and own pasts and that now fill our libraries with normative concepts and notions, forms of judgement posing as fact, manners of perceiving, of thinking the empirical world « out there », and as if a cadre of natural reference, formulated culturally in terms of societal forces of power and organisation … colonial and imperial … 28

This is surely « science » in the broad German sense, Wissenschaft, and best translated, especially as I take it up, not as « science » but as « discipline », thus covering the humanities, that we might prefer to think of as hermaneutic.

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that no longer exist in their military and political forms but persist as forms of knowledge, as if objective but in truth cultural and specific. Why should Hegel, Hölderlin, Zola or René Char all consider the sun as an apt representation for the essence of the world and as the source of its organic and intellectual vitality? Hegel who materialises essence, makes it an aspect of thought’s own procedural path of making sense of the world, and Zola the « realist », yet a realist burdened with that same particular metaphysical inheritance, yet one that may be observed globally, like the commodity, in many different local forms: East and South East Asia, Safavid Persia, and Europe from medieval times up to the present day! I wish to study closely that anthropology of the past, say where it touches Hegel, and below, where it is seen to touch the remote contemporaries of a precocious production of a vast relational material field of exchangeable objects, a novel phenomenal world we term commoditisation, and doing so because believing it necessary to do so, … necessary to question not only the kinds of consciousness prevalent in a remote past that gave material form to that past, but, simultaneously, in questioning our own collective self as participating in that same process of production of a thinkable object world, and, yes, in thinking that « other », those social conditions of the past, including a past collective phenomenological procedure encapsulated within our very own! It is for this reason that I question constantly and especially that knowledge inherited from the past concerning non-Western regions and the categorisation of past populations, taxonomies governed by stereotype, not Darwinist, such as have come strongly to affect the twentieth-century appreciation and approach to my own area of original research, and that seem to determine, limit, even direct further interpretation. Such an inheritance of normative standards of perception lead ineluctably to marginalising of attempts to diverge from them and thereby generate other broader and more inclusive grounds of debate and interpretation, as in the case of dependencia, long excluded from the mainstreams of serious debate. One need not accept the particular hypotheses advanced by a Gunder Frank in order to be struck by their radical overturning and reversal of the very principles that have long organised the orthodoxies of normative attention to the questions of development and underdevelopment, thus to the historical implications of an expanding capitalism for non-western history. One passes from perspectives that conform with a colonial ideology of justification for colonial conquest to those that particularise and objectify that ideology in terms of a much more holistic conception of the historical process. They lead not only to a different perception of such questions of global relationship, but bring also into clear view the responsibility of the cultural and historicised collective self in generating and maintaining such cultures of perception. They also lead to

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such an extension in the scope of explanation as to possess constitutive implications for how we understand the finer detail of what is encountered and observed on any local level, and in turn, methodologically, lead us to a radical conclusion: that every aspect and level of a given societal environment, no matter how marginal it seems, possesses equal status as a content for synthesis, and without exception: the poor woman besides the rich male potentate, the cowry besides the golden ducat and muhr, local village administrations as much as the court in the ongoing development of administration, and so forth. The cowry may come, thereby, to seem even more significant than rupee or ducat, and for diverse reasons, say in multiplying the volume and density of circulation and payment, in considerably spreading the use of calculation and counting. It leads to that dense participative, populational view of technical progress and invention that Nathan Rosenberg has advanced, and which I shall mention again below. « Nuer and Dinka » are seen, in the period when Evans Pritchard studied them, as part and parcel of a history of colonial thinking and structures, of colonial views of otherness concerning a colonised, subordinated, expropriated humanity,—of the « speciation » and hierarchisation of the populations into tribes, castes, peoples; and of the hidden influence within mind of that unquestioned inheritance of word-forms, phrasing, image-giving, and so forth composing our own thought and practice, as if natural and yet a fully cultural inheritance from the past. One then ceases to assume disorder of the past, especially where non-Western regions are concerned, and, instead, questions the very possibility of such order, observing its possible necessity, thus opening it to view as a fresh subject to be investigated in broader more open terms than in the past, thus opening to view a new and unexpected phenomenology of objects and concepts, and concluding its absence only on a basis of a firm foundation of adequate knowledge. None the less, it is reasonable to have doubts concerning the full accomplishment of this task. One can engage in it to a certain extent but, ultimately, as one works back upon one’s own processes of mind, interrogating them, as Hegel did (I phrase the question dialectically, as seems necessary in this case), one labours back into one’s conscious mind ever further into the hidden recesses of one’s own subjectivity, of its mechanisms of formation, labours it in order to produce an augmented, more complex and satisfactory corpus of thought. But, as mentioned above, one cannot but come to ask, eventually, how it is possible to validate one’s findings and conclusions, and distinguish them from false, even arbitrary paths of thinking this question. This is to ­express the doubts to which I myself have frequently succumbed, and yet with the conviction that, in so far as it is possible—in order to research the facticity of one’s collective past—there are criteria that support one’s interpretive path, certainly not a scientific proof nor even a Poperian disproof, … but Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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­ ermeneutically credible, supported by criteria that cannot be simply set aside h as irrelevant. One seeks methodological principles, say that all must accord with what one knows of the context, that no internal contradiction can be allowed, and so forth, upon which judgement can properly be made! But such consistency can be itself a trap, cultural in its derivation and consequences. However, it is the Kantian categorisation of what one constitutes as thought, of how one does so, that seems so resistant to the possibility of such judgement, but once one is convinced of its relevance and necessity one must persist just as one has done with the subject matter, itself, that matter of commoditisation that opens itself out as one questions as if an anatomy lesson by Vesalius. Then it is not the ultimate accomplishment of a drive to know about such inter-subjective, anthropologic productions of a knowledge, that necessarily count, but instead the very procedure and pathway in driving towards them, that must matter, and that one must seek ever constantly to judge. Coherence and consistency are indeed rules of judgement, given that one is aware that they can also be traps for the incautious mind. But:—Neither « difficulty » (Stillman Drake’s translation of Salviati’s precious words), nor « inconvenience », (Thomas Salusbury’s choice in his own near contemporary translation in the midseventeenth century), can act as an excuse for not persisting on a path one has come arduously and, so one believes, productively, to believe in as necessary in the search for truth.29 It is with one’s own historical and societal anthropology that one must be concerned to do battle in order to free oneself, as far as possible, thus relatively, of an ancient baggage of assumption we call knowledge, as devoted agents of objective description and explanation, when facing the historical and societal anthropology of the « other », but which, as knowledge, is, inevitably, also culture. But this is especially true when guided by the light it seems in turn to throw upon a verifiable evidence for universal traits of human culture. 6

Final Resolution of a Dilemma: The A-Priori, at Once Universal and Empirical

In conclusion, I wish to suggest that we can approach the answer to the question of translation, its possibility, not least of that of the evidence we encounter of its prolific, populous, universal practice, by taking most seriously the entirely circumstantial character of the actual practice of language, its constant 29

“Non usate digratia questo termine di chiamar’ inconueniente quel che pottrebb’ esser necessario, che fusse cosi” [sic.], in Galileo, Dialogo, 317; Stillman Drake, Dialogue, 320–1; Thomas Salusbury, His Systeme, in Mathematical Collections and Translations (1661), 294. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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invention, variation in space and time, per individual, per knowledge, acquisition and accomplishment, and thus its constant variation in the actual practical expression of the form and content given to it on each occasion of its use, and precisely in the sense marked out by the entries to von Wartburg’s great dictionary. I shall conclude in dialogue, as it were, with Ricoeur, as he considers this very question in his essay “Le Paradigme de la Traduction”, since it is he, as I discover in reading it at this very moment in time and in seeking to conclude my book, that comes closest to me concerning a reading of the facts to be explained, and thus to what my hypothesis also seeks to explain: the very fact and prodigality of translational acts and the human drive that lies behind it, … and in spite of the radical « differences » that seem to distinguish « languages », so designated, from one another; thus two facts that seem in contradiction but for which he has no answer. And where this book is concerned it is the global and prolific exchange of the cultural object and the intention that lies behind it, faced by the constraints of the contexts, that also constitutes this duality and opposition, but for which we have indeed proposed an explanation. It lies in the seizure of the true status of that universal, the key of that explanation. Ricoeur, to my astonishment, leaves the problem as being per nature inexplicable: there is no universal ground which explains translation so that such acts are always doomed to relative failure. There are two central problems that lead Ricoeur into this dilemma: the first in treating consistently language, in his discussion, as if entire holistic, undifferentiated entities, identities—French, Nuer, Cambodian—radically unidentical to one another. This is the very same problem treated in Part 1, Chapter 1, below, a conception that awakens the very frontier-problem it fails to resolve. In contrast, I have here regarded language as entirely circumstantial, thus necessarily different in all and every use of it, entirely Darwinist in this sense. Secondly, it lies in his identification of a possible universal with language itself, thus with the doomed attempt throughout post-Renaissance history to discover a universal language behind that difference. It is astonishing that a Husserlian, such as he, had not differentiated the thought from its expression, and thus had not sought that universal in the Kantian grounds of thought, as Husserl had done. The reason, so far as I understand it, lies in a more fundamental metaphysical ground for his thinking: that of his inheritance of the old essentialist notion of the duality between facticity (the world we live) and the source, beyond nature, for any possible universal, as if in some mastering conception of an essence or divinity responsible for the creation and existence of the phenomenal. This belief overrides the Husserlian drive to identify the universal with the a-priori conditions of thought through which the c­ ircumstantial facticity of language and its expression are constituted. In contrast, I have identified the universal with the empirical, sought to define and explain its Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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possibility in strictly historical and empirical terms: it may indeed be particular in its kind, say as encountered above in the culture of commoditisation, but what defines that word « universal » is not some mystical indifference to difference, prior to reality, but that it must be judged wherever encountered to be without possible exception. This is to judge that the search for a universal language had mistaken its object: language is historical and empirical, thoroughly circumstantial; so too human mind and its principles of thought. But they differ in kind and status from one another, thought being not identical with language (once indeed a post-war but false dogma), but its ground … yes, its empirical ground! … and it is in that empirical ground that we have sought and succeeded in finding our universal: in the a-priori conditions for the constitution of the object, thus for the production of culture—the philosophical conditions preceding, yet in complete continuity of cause and effect, any cultural anthropology. Remember that we have then sought to explain, in turn, that empirical possibility of a universal a-priori in precisely historical and particular terms, in terms of the circumstantial reality of event and experience, and by referring consistently to Steward’s principle concerning the structural and conceptual compatibility necessary for sharing of traits to occur, and thus for any influence across a frontier, of whatever kind, to occur. The sharing of a cultural good, say the fabrication in China of gold sycee according to the criteria of demand deriving from Marsulipatam in Southern India, for production of a gold pagoda, strikingly resembling the European ducat, in form and content (and many other examples of a similar kind), presumes, precisely, that Stewardian principle. Ricoeur seems locked into a phenomenology according to that Adam and Eve illustrated in 1473 in Boccaccio’s work; we would remind him of the Kantian, Hegelian and Husserlian principles to which he was also attached, but had subordinated to the former.30 Then let’s conclude. There are a large number of « different » languages but of what do such « languages » consist? … what is the nature and unit of incidence of such a conceived difference? We contrast such units—as they occur to mind—in terms of absolutes, as if a pile of Eric Wolf’s « billiard balls », of identities assumed entirely distinct from one another, and thus, of necessity, presenting before us, in turn, that apparently intrinsic frontier-problem that must inhibit « true » communication. It is the manner in which, in the past, dictionaries have been constructed, university departments named and 30

A significant evidence of Ricoeur’s problem, in this respect, is the essentialist slant I read him as giving to the translation, thus to the meaning, of much of Husserl’s terminology, and that seems to cause an unnecessary obstacle to comprehension of Husserl’s text in his French translation. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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divided­, rules of identity and difference determined, and nations ideologised, an essence of every collective identity imagined, Deutschtum, … Yugoslav, Serbian or Indian nationalism … the collective identity of the « miserly Shylock » or « dangerous other », and so forth, thereby producing the stereotypical, nonDarwinist objectified category, equivalent epistemologically to our rupee, yarn or rice: this « one » possesses verbs of time, this « other » does not, « one » contains the concept of possession which the « other » lacks, and so forth. Whole civilisational contrasts and definitions follow directly from our very habitudes of thought,—the manner in which we constitute our object. The entirely circumstantial practice of language and its gradual modification in time and place, and thus the circumstantial variability of language, should lead one, therefore, to reflect instead on the danger and consequences of identifying language with thought itself, of reducing the one to the other;—one needs instead to argue that it is not some lost universal language that lies at the origin of the possibility of translation (lost through « original sin », because of its inaccessibility to mere human comprehension, or through some accident of history, as, say, in the Biblical account of Eve’s acceptance of the apple), but instead the universal manner in which the human being has evolved through a history of association and communication, and come through such a process of evolution to possess shared faculties of mind, thus of giving thought to the world, whilst its modes of linguistic expression remain necessarily entirely circumstantial and contextual … results of ­practice … and like any cultural object, … yes, like the commodity … subject to radical and constant differentiation. This whole conspectus may thus be treated as what I have sought to describe as an « explanation of difference » (the universal in terms of which difference becomes circumstantially possible, expressible and so expressed): language is itself object of such practice and usage. It is so in the very sense that Derrida describes of Husserl’s thought, but also historically so, circumstantially so, as we see so clearly depicted in the von Wartburg dictionary. « Description » is indeed central to the tasks of theory and generalisation!31 Language is thought’s external « vestment » or form and its instrument (both in the strong sense described above). And yet it is formed by the subject, by mind … according to the structural » and « structuring » possibilities of thought in giving form to its object, and it is that very thought, therefore, that should engage the ­interrogation concerning this possibility of translation, … that translational drive and practice that we must assume as being the active principle of the global exchange of cultural objects called commodity!—We are pointing, here, in short, to the Kantian or phenomenological conditions whereby thought of 31

I refer here to Slicher van Bath’s ironic observation concerning « social science » scientism mentioned above. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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the object world is possible and comes constituted, identified independently of its different local forms of necessary expression, and that fully engages the following study. It matters not whether we agree with the one or the other, say Kant or Hegel, in assuming this need; the point is the principle engaging that need (I am in the neophyte’s uncomfortable position of agreeing with both!). We have judged that the commodity represented, in these centuries prior to industrialisation, a factual problem engaging its constant translation on any scale upon which we happen to apprehend its production and exchange; it constitutes that very field of differentiation on every scale of its appreciation. Yet we add to this another dimension of that facticity: that of human will, social and individual, of that desire and practise to communicate, and thus act, upon the « raw material » that constitutes any context one confronts,—the word « act » taken in all its general phenomenologising, consequential significance, thus the will to translate and the expectation … the assumption … of the relative efficacy of such action; thus, that the human being acts in terms of its context, wrestles with that context, as Oliver Cromwell said of his God, modifies it by some infinitesimal degree in so acting, but that, indeed in so doing, we, from afar, may consider that there must be a ground that enables such translation and that validates the very will of individuals to translate … even in the present case where it is ourselves, the researchers, who are the subject, and thus the enquirer who is in train of constituting that object. Then, that ground is not some utopian return to a mythical Paradise Lost, but the recovery from self-ignorance of the universal traits of possible thought, and according to which I may believe I too have understood Ricoeur’s argument, although written in a « foreign » language.32

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7

The Composition of the Book

The first drafts of this book were written in the mid 1990s. I had but recently been deprived of my career as a practising academic researcher, and for this reason did not succeed in getting the manuscript read by a publisher, let alone accepted for publication. At that time my several previous publications, much delayed in coming to print, had not had the impact, relative though this may be, that they would later possess. A first version was read by Michel Morineau and Krzysztof Pomian but thereafter lay on the shelves of the Maison des 32

To do Ricoeur credit, my argument eventually came of fruit from the intelligence of his reflexions in a second essay “Le Paradigme de Traduction”, in Sur La Traduction, and in which he raises some of the themes mentioned in this paragraph. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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S­ ciences de L’Homme (msh), without my ever obtaining a decisive answer: I had hoped for its inclusion in a series entitled Studies in Modern Capitalism. The manuscript went to sleep on the shelves of its editors. I occasionally returned to it, revised it, as in 2010, but its publication became only feasible in 2016, after colleagues at the University of Göttingen made unexpected contact with me, invested their own considerable efforts in having the manuscript read, and, thereafter, recommending it for speedy publication. I am now eighty years of age and the need to revise the argument in the light of research and publication carried out since the mid-90s is evident, yet has become impractical. I have too little time left, I feel the « bony fellow », with his hour-glass and scythe, chasing close at my heels, asking politely for an appointment; and I have other urgent tasks to pursue before I meet him, those, for example, mentioned in this very introductory preface. Furthermore, the publisher’s « peer-readers », chosen to assess the manuscript, consider that later secondary work concerning globalisation has not advanced the matter beyond the point to which I have taken it below, at least in the aspects considered central to this book. Then let’s take the risk … and publish, if having substantially corrected and improved throughout the quality of both argument and language.—If that language remains difficult, I ask the reader to consider the very difficulty of the task, besides the fact that in advancing one seems to do so at the very edge of possible expression. In rejecting the adoption of certain common and accepted habits of ordinary languageuse, one edges both self and reader into the unfamiliar and experimental, thus into unavoidably inelegant soils of expression. My rejection of the definite and indefinite article for such words as culture and people is but an example, difficult to maintain and leading to notable awkwardnesses of expression. But convenience, as I repeatedly remark above, must not be used to justify fault! The book consists of two distinct parts: the first part is the general « thesis » or argument for a universal culture of the commodity prior to industrialisation; the second part is an example of its possible application to a particular global subject matter and complex of problems and connections. I explain its different but complementary purposes more fully in the “Introduction to Part 2”, that seeks to articulate closely the two Parts of the book. In contrast to the first, that second part had indeed been published, in a collection of conference papers issued in 1998 by the Instituto Internazionale Di Storia Economica « F. Datini », of Prato. I submitted the first draft of Part 1 for independent ­publication to the msh in 1997. But, I insist, Part 2 is wholly complementary with Part 1, part and parcel of the very same moment of regard and interrogation, but much corrected and improved in quality. Other, equally justifiable choices for such exemplification of the thesis, as attempted in Part 2, are certainly possible, but this particular choice had Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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f­ulfilled a long standing desire and drive to unite and join several empirical extremes that, conventionally, have been led to stand irreconcilably apart as separate fields of study, and a desire to do so against what many will consider the limits of available evidence and good reason, especially as they had presented themselves to a curious enquirer in the mid-90s. I want to show the possibilities set free by my interpretation and method, and besides, to draw it towards further identification and confirmation of the cultural universal. In this case, I join Asia and Europe in a continuity of exchange of idea and matter that went directly to stimulate the formation of an early science, and also to give it form; it joins what conventionally is known as the ethnographic, thus, say, an ethnobotany, as part of a continuity of experience and knowledge-­ formation that flows directly into what came to be that science. To propose, perhaps establish, that connection between the active populational levels of the generation of a differentiated factual knowledge, such as in botany, with the grounds of the early sciences, has always seemed important to me, not least because of the ready and hardly proven assumption that the order of genesis is the reverse, thus percolating from the academic downwards into the popular. I also seek to join what we now conceive of as remote, thus the poor peasant inhabitant of some upland South Asian village, with the well-educated urban intellectual of Western Europe, both in an equally continuous passage of constitutive form-giving idea, … the growth of a universal knowledge in which the commodity, too, finds its place. One should remember that the very notion of the « remote » finds its reason in the invention of modern roads, railways, monopolising central seaports and airports that came to replace the essentially dispersed distribution of such facilities in the past.33 And it is the domain of the commodity, its culture and its human-activated translational drive, that had allowed this historical process of contact, communication and conceptual formation of a knowledge to influence the early development of the science of botany, as proposed in Part 2.

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33

I first encountered this point of view concerning the word « remote » in Ivan Illich’s writings for the New York Review of Books, but it has been confirmed again and again in my experience, for example when tracing by foot and pencil the pathways joining the villages of my research region in the Western Deccan, or in considering the disappearance of the many small ports on the coasts of Western India, such as Rewadanda (where I found abundant sherds of Ming blue and white Chinese pottery in field and pathway in the mid 1970s), and of Guangdong, before the centralising monopolising forces of the new capitals of the region such as Bombay, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Walking the pathways to the ruins of Bagan and Mrauk U in Myanmar this summer has generated the very same impression. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

Illustrations Section 1: « Phenomenology-lessons »

Figure 2

Eve passing the apple to Adam. Title page of Jacob Rüff, De Conceptu de Generatione Hominis (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1587 [1st edn. 1554]), title-page of Chapter i. Artist unknown

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Figure 3

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Jacob Rüff, De Conceptu de Generatione Hominis (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1587), title-page of Chapter ii and of Book 4. Artist unknown

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Figure 4a Vietnamese domestic rice bowl (low-priced modern domestic ware). Dragon, phoenix, sphere and lotus, with close-up

Figure 4b Vietnamese domestic rice bowl (low-priced modern domestic ware). Dragon, Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 phoenix, sphere and lotus, with close-up Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Figure 4c The same theme on ceiling of present-day Vietnamese restaurant in provincial France, for comparison

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Figure 5

Illustrations Section 1: « Phenomenology-lessons »

Edvard Munch, The Scream (Skrik), lithograph of 1895

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Figure 6

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Edvard Munch, On The Waves of Love (På Kjaerlighetens bolger), lithograph of 1896

Figure 7a Edvard Munch, Galloping Horse (Galopperende Hest), painting of 1910–1912 Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Figure 7b Edvard Munch, Galloping Horse (Galopperende Hest), painting of 1928

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Part 1 Artifice & Nature A Kantian and Historical Anthropology of Commoditisation before Industrialisation

∵

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Chapter 1

From the Closed World to the Open Continuum We need to presuppose the immediacy and universality of gravitational attraction in order to develop a rigorous method for comparing the masses of the primary bodies in the solar system.1 1

Complexity, Language & Uncertainty2

Two notions, one deriving indirectly from economics, the other from biology and history, mark a turning away from the old ideal of « simplicity » as knowledge and virtue, towards the idea of the complex: to complexity as problem and as subject of description and comprehension in its own right, no longer then as the inconvenient contingency of a too detailed reality that must and can be avoided by science and method; instead, it becomes the veritable constituent of the empirical—its problem—to which description must now discover means for representation. These notions refer, (i) to a sense of society as an infrastructural network of institutions, relationships and communications, formal and informal, transcending all the perceived levels, frontiers and periods that have traditionally divided our fields of specialisation, attentions, and theoretical ingenuity; and, thus, (ii) to the idea of the time and space of history as a « historical continuum », a continuum that not merely linked different parts of the old world but 1 Michael Friedman, Kant & The Exact Sciences, 157–8, paraphrasing Kant’s interpretation of Newton’s approach to the law of gravity. 2 The title of Chapter 1 reworks that of Alexandre Koyré’s From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, but adapted from Koyré’s cosmological perspective to my own matter of the societal space/time global continuum for which the term « infinity » is clearly irrelevant (but a question to be discussed in Chapter 3). It is thus adapted to finitude, a finitude without closure, thus an unending, ever-unfolding, series of contexts that explains and re-explains the possibility of all particularity in terms of its empirical location in circumstantial space/time (equally to be discussed below). As for my regions of focus in « Europe and Asia », they are but choice,—chosen for their exemplary character, and also for their proximity to what I have learned about them and am able to discuss in the detail. However, the « continuum », as defined, is potentially or actually global, not confined to one region or another. Moreover, in spite of all boundaries and distinctions—cultural, national, linguistic, and so forth—that characterise that continuum, I treat it and regard it as essentially unbroken, indeed a continuum. See infra Chapter 1, §4, i. “The propositions”.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004414921_003

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linked them systematically in a pattern of mutually generative interdependency for which the traditional histories of tribes, nations, language-identities and ethnicities have not prepared us. On the one hand, a strong emphasis is placed upon a novel idea of the « systematic », in a sense of structural and dynamic connection, thus of « system » rendered free of both the definite and the indefinite articles; on the other hand, emphasis is also placed upon « narrativity », which—as epistemology, as observation, as modes of activity, or as a plurality of actual and possible styles of thinking and writing, and thence as a personal itinerary, trajectory, or career—must be seen as the central key to an understanding of how this world has taken form, and to its existential character. Whether we look to Kant or Marx, for the characterisation of cognition and society, or to Darwin, Mendel, or later molecular and genetic biology, for that of nature, or else to the modern study of market relations and production activities, the very narrativity of social activity and of evolutionary process (however conceived), their sequentiality and non-reversibility, their essentially and inevitably transitional status, can be seen as central problems underlying both method and empirical reconstruction. By complexity we mean organisation, a complexity of ordering; yet, to turn organisation into a problem of complexity must, temporarily at least, involve reversion to a language of metaphors—­ conscious or not—in order to depict a landscape no longer «known», the organisation of a world whose complexities have lain hidden beneath older, ­often falsifying conceptions of knowledge. This older conception of knowledge (thus a set of certainties which we now choose to question), is associated with what I shall refer to as « essentialism ». Essentialism, that is to say, in all its contentious, disputational variety, and yet, in its general consensual singularity with regard to ultimate meaning and concept (that of a way of reading a certain dualism affecting the world we experience), and that promulgates a sense of a true reality as lying anterior to appearances. Such « true » reality is thus considered, in such an optic, as anterior to the surface of the existence we see and inhabit, the latter being treated as but the merely visible « appearances » of that hidden and true « essential » truth. To this sense of the invisibility of the « real », there was added a second principle, the idea of a process or procedure—both historical and ontological, and also logical—that served to connect the visible surface of appearance to this « behind » of the hidden real, an ontology at once epistemological and a poesis pervading all domains, varieties and variations of expression and thought. Appearance equalled the visible, equalled the profuseness of the domain of manifold objects, equalled natural and cultural diversity, equalled the seeming ­disorder that these presented to mind. In this sense, then, « complexity » (complexity of composition, of form or relationship, as implied, say, by dissonance

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and difference among phenomena) must signify an existential disorder—in contrast to the simplicity and thus law-full-ness [sic.] assumed to mark the hidden « real ». « Real » meant « simple », and that word « simple » implied virtue, one conceived of as unmixed … unalloyed: then, “God is simplicity of being”. (“Dieu est un être simple”, in Furetière, Dictionnaire, 1690); “What was created one and simple, is become subdivided”. (“[W]as man auf einfache Art vortragen sollte, das haben sie zwiefach eingetheilt”, in Goldhagen, Phraseologia, 1766); “[M]an of all other things is of the most compounded mass. The soul on the other side is the simplest of substances”. (Bacon, Essays, 1605).3—Newton’s laws of motion were « simple » as also was their reinterpretation by Kant in order to redefine the source and location of order perceived as nature.4 3 I translate these past definitions with difficulty but as best I can; the very simplicity and economy of such definitional formulations of the past renders translation the more difficult, not less! Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire Universel, Contentant Generalement [sic] tous les Mots François…; Hermannus Goldhagen, Phraseologia Germanico-Latina…, 225ii; Francis Lord Bacon, The Proficience and Advancement of Learning … , 82–3; and cf. Diccionario de Autoridades, vi, 116–7: “[P]iro, único, solo, y que repugna composición, lo que solo se dice propria y rigurosamente de Dios” (“Fire: unique and single, uncomposed; what properly and rigorously can only be said of God”). 4 In the First Critique, Kant transcendentalises Newton’s laws into necessary a priori means of making possible « objects » of perception (in Husserlian terms, of determining the possibility of constituting the object), the means by which an exterior in-itself, imperceivable as such, becomes available for thought as a process leading from sensory affects, to appearance, and thence to the scientisable and mathematisable « object » of thought, thus the construction in mind of an object world that merely represents undifferentiated world matter (Friedman’s Kant & the Exact Sciences, is a remarkable exposition of this « relocation » of Newton as properties of mind). Kant’s « noumenon » is also « simple », and in definition opposed to the manifold of phenomenal appearance, yet is also reinterpreted—relocated as mind—by Kant as being of transcendental significance, referring to a stage of a priori cognition (e.g. Opus Postumum Ak. xxii. 384, (Förster & Rosen, O.P., 120–1); & Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, entries for « Einfach » (« simple »), 107–8, & « Noumenon », 388–90). Cf. infra, Chapter 3, §§ 2 & 3, concerning Kant’s « tower ». The problem of whether God and space are « simple », or have parts, is also central to disputes about the cosmic significance of such « concepts »: cf. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 217–9, with respect to Newton: “And yet we are not to consider the World as the Body of God, or the several Parts thereof, as the Parts of God. He is an uniform Being, void of Organs, members or Parts …” (219, the quotation being from the English edn. of the Opticks); & 244 & 247, concerning the dispute over Newton’s theories between Clarke & Leibniz (Leibniz: “Space is something absolutely Uniform” [244]; Clarke: “For Infinite Space is One, absolutely and essentially indivisible… The Immensity or Omnipresence of God, is no more a dividing of his Substance into Parts.” [247]). The problem will follow us into Ch. 3, where we need to consider Kant’s views of space and time. For him, space cannot be plural; cosmic space, prior to experience, must be « thought » as indivisible, without parts: it is the understanding, owing to it’s a-priori subjection to Newtonian space/time coordinates and to their application in constituting an object of experience, that transforms sense-stimuli into

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« ­Simple », in short, was at once indeed simplicity and yet a simplicity wholly obscure to knowledge, difficult, beyond the possibility of human comprehension (the muteness of Moses contra Aron’s loquacity in Schoenberg’s opera Moses and Aron), or else, only attainable through metaphysics, magic, or, later, science (wave and atom of the new mechanics and physics of the early twentieth century), and thus, in the latter case, through method and procedure, controversial and never fully attainable, positions made inherent in the very organisation and conception of knowledge.5 This is not, then, simply a description of the theological or metaphysical standpoints of a distant past, but of something that became very fully absorbed into the sense and idea of science itself, into scientific modernism, and embodied in its approaches, models and methodologies, its rules of procedure, its criteria of evidence, and especially its languages. What seems unconventional and new becomes celebrated because recognisable as fulfilling the stereotype of what a science should be. As such, it should be seen to characterise the very long development of the ideal of a science, and, in its turn, to become fully embodied as ideal by the so-called « social sciences », by the various humanities, and right into the immediate post-war decades of the second half of the 20th century. The thread runs unbroken across all the fractures marking the movement from Ptolemy to Copernicus, is absorbed into Galilean and Newtonian mechanics, and thereafter into neo-classical economics and the social such objects, that is, that acts to divide first matter into the differentia of phenomenal experience. The issues are identical, but their location and treatment is transformed. 5 Paraphrasing de Condillac (in 1798), Ernst Cassirer, in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I, 146, refers to “That original impulse towards knowledge, which moves from the complex to the simple, from the particular to the universal”. Kant’s intensive discussions about the possibility of the « Soul »’s « simplicity », is analysed at length by Karl Ameriks, in Kant’s Theory of Mind. As for its transition from the essentialist framework of thinking of the past into an eventual frame of entirely materialist thinking, and characteristic of the first critique, viz. Blumenberg, Genesis of the Copernican World, 589, quoting from Kant’s precritical General History of the Nature and Theory of the Heavens, of 1755, nicely remarks: “Kant [postulates] an initial state of space, uniformly filled with matter, which at the same time possesses, for him, the advantage of the highest rationality, namely, that it is « the very simplest [state] that can follow upon nothing »”. « Simple »—highest rational—Newton’s God—Kant’s undivided world matter/moving force. Whereas, for Newton, as Blumenberg puts it (588–9), the problem of the unity of space (its emptiness between the planets) indicates “The immediate hand of God” (citing the early text of Kant, again), for Kant it is the idea (metaphor, analogy) of God, the necessity of giving thought to such a subjective euphemism, that indicates the material unity, homogeneity, simplicity and infinity of space, despite its apparent emptiness. For Newton, space provides a window onto God, while for Kant-critical, God becomes a mere « name for » material space: the essentialist lexicon is not only relocated by Kant (as mind/ matter), but actually turned on its head.

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s­ ciences, and incarnated especially in anthropology, but also entrenched in linguistics and sociology—even in history, in spite of the notoriously fluid and phenomenal character of its object field.6 In a certain fundamental sense we can say that the seductive lexicon of meanings and significances generated by the Ptolemaic/Sacroboscan Sphere—the transmutability of the poesis from one domain of expression to another—has, in spite of the « scientific revolution, continued to enchant the modern world.7 At its door lies at once the dilemma in which modern social science now finds itself: the idea of culture and the question of an access to it by method; the very possibility of the economist’s idealised model being reduced to an aesthetic of pure abstraction; and the gross falsifications associated with nationalism and ethnicism, with their rhetoric of type and stereotype. It is at once an inherited common sense and an aesthetic,—at once specific and interpretable, yet generalised and shared. A recent discussion by Jacques Rancière interprets the scientistic pretensions of the Annales E.S.C. « school » of historians, of the 1950s and ’60s, as representing yet another attempt, garbed in modern language, to plumb down to that « really real », hidden below the confusions and dissensions, the accidents and contingencies, of ordinary words and voices—the « paperasse » seen to block the historian from the lawful science hidden behind the phenomenal disorder of private interest and sentiment.8 The influence of Annalist history, if highly 6 This is all discussed in various essays in my two books, The Invisible City & Unbroken Landscape. 7 For The Sphere, see the discussion and references, in Chapter 3, §§ 2 & 3, below. 8 Jacques Rancière, Les Mots de L’Histoire. But in City Intelligible, the paperasse becomes the subject matter of interpretation, « accident » becomes identified as necessity, the first one of the fundamental empirical forces at work in the making of our « second nature », culture. One may compare Mikhaïl Bakhtin, for whom vocal dissonance and the polyphony of the social and the text were indeed the problems to be considered. Bakhtin’s writings are provocative and of particular importance; viz. The Dialogic Imagination; Rabelais and his World; and Problems of Dostoievsky’s Poetics. (I should add that while critical of their scientism, I was much influenced by the great Annalist theses of the early years, those especially of Pierre Goubert, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Pierre Vilar, René Baehrel, and which as student I read and combed from cover to cover; the method; … the remarkable corpus of annexes accompanying each thesis … was at once inspirational and troubling, one approached, wished to simulate, and yet also distance oneself at one and the same time, … both dispositions justifiably). Ernst Cassirer, Langage et Mythe, makes much the same point for his own generation of linguists and ethnologists: he cites Plato in the Phædrus, who, in the person of Socrates, remarks with respect to the myths and names of the gods: “I want to know whether I am a kind more complicated and more blind than Typhon or some being more gentle and simple who derives from nature some part of illumination and divinity”; he continues: “It seemed that the philosophical and scientific study of myths was equally concerned, on its part, to appropriate such presuppositions as its own”; and finally, as example, “For Max Müller, the ­mythical

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beneficial in its initial contexts, was accompanied by a more doubtful, more widespread and uncritical flirtation by historians with classical anthropology, sociology, economics, linguistics, and much else, and we should see this movement, in the light of present developments, as one in which genuinely fundamental change was mixed with equally, possibly more, fundamental continuities in conduct and conception: the continuing advance of scientistic essen­tialism into all the departments of knowledge: old languages and dispositions putting on new clothes, old wine decanted into new bottles.9 Similarly, economists proceed—and feel that they must do so for both practical reasons and aesthetic (« scientific ») principle—by shedding facticity in favour of the purest forms of possible abstraction, the virtuous simple.10

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world is no more than a world of appearance, but an appearance one explains in revealing the illusion from which it proceeds…” (my translation from the French translation 10, 10–11 & 14, resp.). Rancière situates (and I shall be seen to agree) the « Annales E.S.C. school » in a similarly 19th-/early 20th-century tradition of scientistic social-science explanation. The point here is that, as such, it continues unbroken right into the present— for example, explicitly into modern economics, but implicitly through the social sciences into our own historical and societal matter of attention: it is a specific aesthetic based upon a certain implicit metaphysic of reality. This continuity is in spite of the radical changes affecting ostensible general approach, such as in anthropology—that is, it operates at a more fundamental, grounding level concerning the epistemology of the fields. And take note: we shall later encounter Hegel stating that “appearance is the truth”, which also is the consistent position taken up in this book. E.g. Recent reinterpretations of the significance given to Saussurian linguistics in the 1960s, also suggest this: Marc Angenot, “Structuralism as Syncretism: Institutional Distortions of Saussure”, in Fekete (ed.), The Structural Allegory, 150–63. An excellent discussion of the developments in positivistic thinking is given by Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, i, esp. 163–72; it seems plain that 1960s-structuralist applications of de Saussure culminate this long period of scientistic development, beginning in the early 19th century, now associated with modern neo-Newtonian mechanicism in the cultural fields, passing by way, for example, of a quasi-physiological approach to language—in which the ideal of explanation gives way to more modest descriptionalism—to that of Radcliffe Brown’s theoretical essays on anthropology of the 1920s and 30s (Structure and Function in Primitive Society), and later to the bio-ecology, that we find attacked recently by Adam Łomnicki (“Individual Heterogeneity & Population Regulation”). Despite the frequent defence of this procedure on grounds of convenience, the shedding of the lineaments of factuality from the economic model has continued to drive theoretical developments in economics from Hayek to Leontief to Sraffa, thence to Pasinetti and his followers, and can be followed backwards to Kant (cf. Friedman, Kant & The Exact Sciences), thence in continuing retrospect back to Leibniz and Newton, and eventually back into the properly essentialist classical tradition. In all this work, even in modern writings, simplicity is a dominant value, the first principle of a specific aesthetic ideal of what should constitute a « true » science. (However, this comment is not an attempt to diminish the importance of Sraffa and Pasinetti’s work on economic theory, but to characterise a continued metaphysical ideal that helped guide them).

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An attempt to break away from this past must thus encounter a serious « problem of knowledge », and thus of language—of the means with which to express dissension from that poesis/epistemology of the « simple ». Word and syntax become serious problems … difficulties … obstacles … when attempts are made to work out, and phrase a dissenting comportment towards the ­object field. Thus novel uses of metaphor, together with strained exercises in syntax, as mentioned above, can already be seen to pervade description and terminology in the new biology, and it will certainly and necessarily come to pervade the language forms of the sciences of the human as they shift course towards a concern with the complex.11 Thus, a conscious use of metaphor in this essay marks a necessary sense of modesty before the incompletely known: for us, words like « level », « scale », « overlap », « order », « phase », « network », « pattern », « architecture » … &c., are all words of necessary description, but, when turned to the depiction of a world whose complexity has yet to be discovered in its detail and forms, they need, nonetheless, to be surrounded by warning signs. The phrase « as metaphor » (the warning that it is mere 11

They do so now, but note that this is not in the sense required in order to represent such transitional complexity, used knowingly as instrument, without illusion, to express lineaments of a new but still obscure sense of order concerning what we now may realise is much less known than previously presupposed. Instead it provides colour and style, the conviction of a certain enthusiasm and disposition towards science, glossing evaluative statements with a sense of precision foreign to them. The graphical and mathematical metaphor, vocabulary and syntax, liberally used by the early Annales e.s.c. « school » historians (Le Roy Ladurie, Braudel, &c.) is a case in point: generating conviction and credibility through its self-conscious scientific reference, but which is used rhetorically, clouding over the literary, even ideological uses to which such metaphor is actually, if unintentionally put (« cycle » or « mathematical envelope », for example, applied in order to characterise the very form of society, but covering whole territorial spaces and epochs, again holistically, and even assumed collective « mentalities » (constraint on the very possibility of dissonance and disbelief, for example), thus, in consequence, the very nature of « culture », so-conceived, of whole continents and populations). The « graph » itself, say three centuries of village demography—in spite of representing innovative original research and containing much undoubtedly valuable data—comes to represent a model of long-term developmental stasis—that rural domain separated from things more general, urban, the latter more likely to be subject to capitalistic influences. Even a table, or a statistical formula, may function in an exactly similar manner, a bearer of unintended idea and assumption, shaping the evidence. But, speaking more generally, the « statistic » and the « equation » came to possess an apparently neutralist and objectivist, vulgar-positivist credibility and self-assuming authority, as if shorn of all opinionation or conceptual heritage, shorn of the thinking human subject, that belonged as much to the broader ideological currents affecting general opinion and politics in the 1970s and ‘80s, as to an advance in focus and treatment of historical matter.

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­ etaphor) will then indicate a careful choice of words, and a full consciousm ness of that choice, together with concomitant reservations concerning the kinds of signification to be understood in that usage: that they mark out incompletely, and somewhat inaccurately, a territory of complexity that words can only point to—thus, they are serious words that should not be taken too liter­ ally.12 The task must be to open up the spaces of empirical reality to involve a sense of complexity for which habitual forms of expression are unsuited.13 For example, words such as « level » provide means to describe societal space in terms of a variety of different sites on which historical or economic action can be unpacked, distributed, observed and—as in molecular ­biology— in which the very idea of cause and agency can itself be decentred. Yet, in stimulating such possibilities—tending to a descriptive pluralism, a flexibility and a dissonance absent from accepted perceptions and usages—we must not take this usage as literally implying a vertical series of separate horizontal strata of organisation and activity, thereby creating a specious secondary problem concerning the means of connection linking such apparently « isolationable » levels. Instead, on the plane of imagination, our « levels » might better be seen as running into one another, as inclined, as losing and gaining « height » (thus as losing or gaining general application), as merging, as altering in density, and certainly altering in significance, adding and losing significance, as the matter associated with them traverses social and territorial space, and time (thus a further play of metaphor added to the first and yet also necessitating care). Then, the point to which this notion of « level » should lead is that of a kind of labyrinthine pluralism—of an entirely empirical kind—operating across a range of scale and generalisation in an interactional complex that affects (or better characterises) every locality, every point of perception, and that fills the conventional void left between « most local » and « most general » among societal phenomena. Such usage will mark a gain in descriptive potential to the extent that it is embodied by signs and symbols, indicative of possible societal form and relationships concerning which we currently lack adequate research. Initially, it would be a world of potentialities for which we need mere metaphorical markers of description. The need to possess a linguistic/conceptual strategy concerning materials already over-described in a voluminous literature, thus in rethinking them, is justified by the gap now opening up between linguistic 12 13

Marjorie Grene, ed., Dimensions of Darwinism, Alexander Rosenberg, The Structure of Biological Science, and more recently Stuart A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order. Both Darwin and Kant, among many others, expressed the same difficulties imposed by inherited language-use, its capacity to betray intentions. This point is opposed to George Steiner’s view, in After Babel, that reference to the insufficiencies of language lacks foundation, since mind is itself language, a conflation which I do not accept.

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­ sage and the ostensible objects of description. To repeat, a loss of innocence u concerning past habits and certainties, the introduction of discord between subject and object, that recognises as a form-doting obstacle the role of the subjective in social science (but only damaging when left unquestioned by reflexion), is a necessity of method that must become a full and inherent part of any approach to the problem of complexity; it borrows from a long tradition central to the development of the physical sciences, from de Cusa to Copernicus, to Galileo, and thence to Heisenberg (his uncertainty principle) and the neo-Kantians (Reichenbach’s and Einstein’s simultaneous debt to Kantism), and, beyond, to Husserl’s phenomenology: one cannot dispense with subjectivity perhaps but one should be aware of its multiform presence and penetration in the formation of « knowledge ».14 In short, there is a need to find « passages » or crossing points—to forge new uses of language—that do not thereafter shortcut or blunt the problems of recovering complexity. Convenience must cease to act as an excuse for error. This, of course, is to mark language-use as more of a problem than specialists generally admit, for, apart from the question of consciously forging a 14

Copernicus, Galileo and many others used such interference of subjectivity through perception of the object as a basic principle of argumentation: the implication of the subject in giving form to the object in thought and through observation. It is well known in the particular form of Heisenberg’s « uncertainty principle » where the physical sciences are concerned. As Kant put it in the “Vorrede” (“Preface” or Introductions to his 2nd edn. (1787) of Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 19–20 [Ak. iii, 11–12, B.xvi–xviii)] (Oeuvres Philosophiques, i, 739–40, and Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 22–23, and 25, note a), “…In noting that he could not explain the motions of the heavenly bodies by making them turn around the observer, Copernicus, instead, sought the better to succeed by causing the observer to revolve and to leave the stars at rest. Might one not in metaphysics make an experiment of a similar kind concerning the intuition of the object? … Newtonian attraction … would have remained ever hidden had not Copernicus assumed the risk, contrary to sense and yet true, of seeking their motions not in the sky but in the observer… In the present preface, I expose the manner of thinking that characterises the Critique in an analogous manner, … thus in making mind not conform to the object but causing the object to conform with the manner of its intuition by mind”. Viz. Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, 928–9; the reference, in this case, is to the French translation of Eisler’s work, being usefully abstracted from Eisler’s extensive entry on “Erkenntnis” in the original German edition. For the connection between Kantism and, on the one hand, an early phase of logical positivism (as in Hans Reichenbach’s The Theory of Relativity & A Priori Knowledge) and, on the other, Einstein’s formulation of relativity theory, see Friedman’s stimulating Foundations of Space-Time Theories. Galilei Galileo’s « Heisenbergism » is systematic—it is his very method of argumentation and exposition—in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Thus Feyerabend’s Against Method. See also Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 6–24, concerning Nicholas de Cusa.

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­positive instrument appropriate in kind for the kinds of question one would now seek to ask, language clearly also has its negative, less purposive, unintentionally distorting ideological aspect: that the words that we most like to use, those that seem most natural and reasonable, most habituated to common parlance, conform with given ideas of order, and in turn add to the volume of inherited cultural matter that acts to confirm those ideas, rather than allowing them to be questioned. In the present case, the mass of words inherited from libraries, collegial conversation and writings, newspapers, and even more casual sources, serve to confirm precisely those general ideas of societal and cultural order in the world which we must now attempt to fracture, not just piecemeal but radically: to complexify. Unfortunately, inherited styles of expression and description, usages that seem to mark our knowledge and dispositions, are utilised as if there were no problems of expression at all, as if one could shift from an aesthetic of simplicity (say, of manifold isolated cultures) to one of complexity—of intersecting cultural levels and structural linkages—by mere volition, thus without a reconsideration of the words one uses. The result is that these words and syntactical forms inhibit the discovery of means to recover different principles of societal order. The point is exemplified in certain recent writings on economic history to be examined below, in which legitimately radical questions and aims are brought to nothing, are even contradicted by unaltered empirical and linguistic usage. I thus disagree that language is a mere, if unavoidable utility, an instrument of habitual and unavoidable usages,—of a necessarily metaphorical means by which to approach reality as effectively as possible,—of habits of syntax that provide convenient means to think, argue and convince: thus, a mere instrument of proven utility.15 Such notions of convenience—ease and habit of expression, ease of communication—are, precisely speaking, the danger I seek to mark out and emphasise. The virtues (or truth-values) of such language-use seem demonstrated by past utility: the harvest of past works viewed as the progress of the science. However, when change relative to the organisational 15

Thus Donald McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, who does not effectively penetrate such difficulties; but also Rancière, Les Mots de L’Histoire, who after a genuinely devastating analysis of the scientism of the Annales e.s.c. historians, nonetheless qualifies that criticism owing to the proven utility of such method. Such questions of metaphysic and method, their mutual intrication give rise to serious problems of judgement, of making conscious to oneself the implications of what one ordinarily assumes legitimate. Thus, and much more interesting than McCloskey’s book, is Rancière’s critique of a veritable style of scientistic self-legitimation, characterising the historians that concern him. See also Uskali Mäki, “Diagnosing McCloskey”, & McCloskey’s reply “Modern Epistemology against Analytic Philosophy: A reply to Mäki”, J. Econ. Hist. (xxxiii, 1995), 1300–23.

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character of an empirical subject matter is considered necessary, one must reexamine the specific lexicons of meaning by which organisation and order have been indicated in the past, these constituting the very resources of a habitual language-use and a comprehensible use of terms. One must take the risk of being difficult, and even clumsy, of aggressing the expectations of the ­reader.16 Language would now be considered as involving necessary choices, choices that possess signal consequences for the forms given to description itself, whatever the degree to which ordinary usage is shared among a collectivity of recognised professionals and authorities. A reconsideration is called for concerning the implications, qua order, of using habitual words and syntactical commonplaces, thus concerning the basic conceptions of organisation ported unwittingly as common-sense, by the writer, into « science ».17 This becomes possible precisely when an agreed, « once-upon-a-time » epistemology is progressively and systematically brought into doubt, as has indeed happened in the social sciences since the 1960s, and it is in respect of this doubt, that ideas of complexity and entropy have a very significant role to play. In this sense, doubt and scepticism have a greater strategic, methodological and constitutive value than further production of yet more new theories; this is especially true where understanding of history and culture are concerned. I intend to illustrate these contentions by examining a small number of attempts to revise common approaches to major questions in economic history in terms of the manner in which empirical facts are typically organised. These will be shown to be compromised, even negated by habitual language-use, and the kinds of approach with which such consensual usages are traditionally associated. These studies will serve as scapegoats for the craft itself,—indeed, for the broader gamut of fields and disciplines which treat culture and society;— serious scapegoats because the historians concerned are well-known and taken seriously by the profession, thus bear authority. To my knowledge their work has not attracted controversy concerning the issues discussed in this essay, and this very absence of dispute is itself significant of the consensual, unreflected upon character of the problem. The authors—Rondo Cameron, Sidney Pollard and Nathan Rosenberg—are concerned with revising the manner in which industrial revolution is characteristically discussed; the concern is meritorious, but in each we shall ­encounter 16

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This is the quality that Amado Alonso describes concerning the poet Pablo Neruda’s consciously provocative use of language in his fine critical study of Residencia en la Tierra, i & ii (in Alonso’s Poesía y Estilo de Pablo Neruda. Interpretación de una Poesia hermetica, Chapter v). This is another book I cannot recommend too strongly to the interested reader. Viz. “Second Landscape”, in Unbroken Landscape.

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paradoxes and contradictions that subvert their aims.18 The problem is far more serious, much more destructive, than the kind of language problem marked by Darwin’s much criticised anthropomorphic armoury of metaphorical usages, applied to evolution and nature: Darwin who wished to oppose creationist ontology and yet who inherited and utilised its linguistic instrumentation, with consequences that continue to be controversial.19 The order of difficulty found among the economic historians points to assumptions about order in society and economy, to formulations of historical problems, which are precisely those from which we most need to obtain critical distance in order to situate industrialisation and complexify our knowledge of it, to understand its organisation and extensions.20 Following this critique of Cameron et al (Ch. 1, §§ 2 & 3), I shall turn to the question of defining what we mean by a societal « continuum », treating this notion as a polemical force driving us towards a thorough reconsideration of the kind of order implicated by the economic institutions and societal phenomena we confront in the historical archive (Ch. 1, §4), especially where ­production and marketing are concerned (Ch. 2). We shall see that such local considerations concerning one branch of historical fact, have extremely serious implications for ideas about society, culture and the historical process, in general (Part 1, Chapter 3). In the second major section of the essay, I turn to a series of historical examples of production and marketing that seem to me to encourage speculation

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Sidney Pollard, “Industrialisation and the European Economy”, Econ. Hist. Rev. (2nd ser., xxvi, 1973) 638–48; Rondo Cameron, “a New View of European Industrialisation”, Econ. Hist. Rev. (2nd ser., xxxviii, 1985), 1–23; Nathan Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box. Such language-use—thus conceptual dependence—is evident in his letters and notebooks, once the reader is appraised of the problem, but also because of the considerable experimental dependence, in stable, loft or laboratory, on organisms long domesticated by human creative work, such as his own pigeons, or with regard to dogs, horses or cattle and the like. Later, it would be Drosophila melanogaster that would exemplify the dependence of scientific work and definition on what for me are distinctly and by definition a work of culture, thus at once artifice and nature, fabricated by the human being from nature: I quote an on-line definition: “… a fly of the genus Drosophila, especially D. melanogaster, used in laboratory studies of genetics and development” (“Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, of 2019”.). It is with such a question that a phenomenological approach can especially show its necessity through focussing on how and from what the object of focus comes constituted. Their « difficulties » may arguably be the results of mere carelessness, but given the prominence and importance they have for the shape of description and finding, even « carelessness » points to a blindness concerning accepted language-uses that must be significant. After all, what is the function of language if not to signify?

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on the problems of complexity introduced in the first Chapter, and to validate our general approach to them. 2

Order, Unit & Convenience in Economic History. Language-use as Problem Schelling defined the relation between language and myth by calling language a « faded mythology ».21

The first pages of Nathan Rosenberg’s book, Inside the Black Box, are especially impressive for the manner in which the author seeks to decentralise notions of industrial and mechanical invention into a host of small acts dispersed among an extensive, essentially anonymous population of countless actors. Some of these acts can be connected to one another in sequence, as part of a continuous single current of invention, of chains of invention, and of sequences of repeated efforts and of scattered modifications, in which, only in hindsight, one such « act » is retrospectively seized upon as representative of the « invention » itself, the rest effaced from memory and history (or for which a composite representative event has been substituted); others acts among this population will be more dispersed, marking numerous different and separate motions in relatively similar directions, some possibly convergent, others giving rise to other sequences affecting the same industry; yet other acts, and other sequences of acts, leading nowhere, spluttering out into anonymity and local failure, and which may not be recorded in any source. They cover many different phases, parts and branches, connected services, and so forth; all, considered in synthesis, to mark the space of connectibility specifically requiring (or more generally involving) change in a given industry, yet one for which the machine—a machine—has been given iconic significance. Nonetheless, it is an accepted platitude that an invented piece of machinery may lie dormant for decades until the more contextual structures, through which it may eventually be enabled to function, have themselves so developed as to be able to make use of it; that is to say, even the machine requires a much more broadly based, more numerous context of micro-change, statistically leading in the same direction. All, then, forms part of a population of occurrences connected by formal and informal speech acts and written words, by a shared if highly variable field of observation (of observability), by a certain generalisation of pressures 21 Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, ii, 21 (citing F.W. Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie).

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(of needs) exerted from many directions, and a certain disposal (a disposability) of information.22 Rosenberg also adds to the idea of what constitutes invention and technical change by pointing to the role and contribution of administration and management, in the sense that « organisation » itself would be considered as forming an important aspect of the various empirical phenomena contributing to the instrumentality of technical power. The very notion of « invention », thereby, is seen socially to disperse, to augment very considerably its intersubjective distribution as both a drive and sense of need and possibility, thus to occupy a far more significant space, indeed become transformed in our own awareness of it from an apparently rare individual heroic occurrence into one ­socialised,—an intersubjective and event-dense context for machine-tool production itself, forming part of a scatter of events distributed through time and space, and their partial enchainment the one to the other being more significant than the final act itself. Certainly, this would provide a useful example of what we mean by « a shift towards complexity », an example of those changes of sensibility, little understood in themselves, leading us willy nilly towards positive reception of the very idea of « complexity » as an essential part of the empirical and as a fundamental problem in its own right for description and interpretation. It is here seen to constitute a critical aspect of the descriptive field itself,23 so that there must be an initial definition—thereafter to be progressively and ­repeatedly redefined—of what should minimally constitute a content of research sufficient to enable a given empirical field and problem to be minimally reconstituted and treated: observed at least fractionally.24 However, as we shall see, Rosenberg is inconsistent. « Technology », in order to become the comparative and conceptual instrument generally claimed of it, needs redefinition in terms independent of any particular historical or local experience: Rosenberg begins this task of redefinition but fails to apply it on the global comparative scale he then considers. For their part, Rondo Cameron and Sydney Pollard set out to r­ e-conceptualise … thus rephrase … current ideas about industrialisation in Europe, Cameron 22

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Philip Scranton participates in this « democratisation » of the very notion of invention in his statement: “Local firms either originated or adopted a welter of technical advances in machine work, veneering, and finishing while extending the range of woods used” (“Advances & Dilemmas: American Consumer Goods Industrial Districts (1880–1940)”, in Poni & Scazzieri, Production Networks, Market Rules & Social Norms, 40). In fact, his essay as a whole fits remarkably well into the approach which I suggest below. I seek to redefine « technology » and the « technical » in comparative and global terms in “Parts of the Machine”, in The Invisible City. Nathan Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box., Chapter 1.

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being ostensibly concerned with the character of its duration and Pollard with its more spatial character. Yet, both clearly meet around the problems of describing and characterising its spatial incidence—their common foe is its dissolution as a problem into a host of national historiographies, of separate ­national narratives which represent industrialisation as so many separate processes affecting each particular country or nation (or other populist ­identity)— thus as so many national industrialisations.25 Instead, we are told, Europe should be treated as a region of developments which cannot be understood either in national terms, nor as subdivided into so many artificially isolated fractionary events.26 Very good: such opinion sums up many years of argumentation which has not, however, led very far, and their own books—Pollard’s volumes on European Industrialisation, and Cameron’s edited collection on banking (with its ambitious title)—actually seem to exemplify the very kind of treatment they claim to attack: a sum of national chapters, of national narratives.27 Indeed, in the articles themselves—most notably in that of Pollard, who sets up the polemic—the text is rapidly redeployed as a stage upon which national actors, « economic athletes », as it were, are seen pitting their different competing strengths, thus as a vocabulary of national (or political-­ federative) persona (or political federations, such as Austria-Hungary): the text concerns national developments, deploys national statistics (data under national heads), and, what must be especially underlined, a syntax that systematically and repeatedly contrasts one nation with another, refers « success » 25

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As mentioned, Cameron intends to point to the continuities lying behind the apparent discontinuity involved in the word « revolution », but the essay is close to Pollard’s with respect to the problems I discuss; he cites Pollard in stating his own views concerning the latter’s positions (refs. n. 79). Pollard opens with (636): “Traditionally, the industrialization of Europe has been viewed as a series of separate « industrial revolutions ». Each country has been treated as an « economy » and its progress compared separately with some kind of implied model. There can, for example, be few universities in Britain in which the annual examination ritual does not include some questions about the retardation of the industrial revolution in « France » or its acceleration in « Germany » in the nineteenth century… This article will argue that the traditional view has reached its limit as a method both of exposition and of analysis, and that further advance must come from a new starting point… The industrialization of Europe did not proceed country by country…” The paragraph from which this quotation is drawn (636–7) should be read in its entirety for its focus upon industrializing regions with little relation to national boundaries; it points to a promise and to a programme entirely lost from sight thereafter, except as a « rhetorical » covering that remains unapplied to the detail of the discussion (e.g. 646–7). Sydney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest. The Industrialization of Europe, 1760–1790, & Rondo Cameron (ed.), Banking in the Early Stages of Industrialization. Cameron makes the same point concerning Pollard’s book which makes his own usages all the more significant.

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and « ­failure » to national entities. Thus, there is a remarkable absence of that different, more regionalist thinking, of an alternative use of words—of reflection upon the territorial, organisational and distributive problems entailed by industrialisation—for which Pollard had initially called.28 However, where « Europe » is itself referred to as an entity—the unit in terms of which, we are told, industrialisation should properly be conceived— little of substance, if anything, has been altered. In place of national persona, a regional actor now appears possessing exactly the same characteristics, as those for which it is supposed to substitute. The word « Europe » fulfils an identical syntactical function to words such as « France » or « Germany », but 28 Pollard, op. cit., a few examples from the swarm of cases which compose his text: “Belgium’s industrial revolution”, “Belgium was the territory”, “Belgian industrial history”, “­Belgium became a centre of diffusion” (640); “Belgium’s position”, “Belgium exported”, “foreign built”, “the French developed”, “the British lead”, “three times that of France”, “French fabrics”, “consumed by Britain”, “The British led … but the French exported” , “The French might have had”, “for Britain to fill by herself” (641); “with Britain”, “German wages as a whole … below British wages”, “German productivity”, “The ratios of comparative costs … favoured Britain”, “British labour”, “favoured Germany”, “her [Germany’s] lower wages”, “British iron”, “German growth”, “German necks”, “late starters”, “Britain was the first” (643); then: “European countries”, “early industrializers”, “advanced neighbours”, “where each country has to tackle when it arrives at its « take-off » point” (645–6). Cameron, op. cit., again just a few examples selected from the « molecular » composition of the text: after referring to Pollard’s essay (9, n.44, and also 10, n.46), we read of “the British pattern”, “The Belgian case”, “the British model”, “is the closest example of a country (region)” [sic.!], “other regions and nations” [twice, and illustrating his awareness of Pollard’s article noted at this point in n. 46], “in England”, “the French market”, “British technology” (10); “Germany appears to have followed” [although here in relation to a discussion of its regionalisation], “Belgium the first industrial nation”; two graphs contrast “per capita production of coal” & “per capita consumption of coal” [in] “Belgium”, “France”, “Germany” [&] “United Kingdom” (12); “the French situation … its unjustified reputation for retardation”, “lower output of the heavy industries … than in other large nations, such as Britain and Germany”, “other early industrializers”, “per capita in France was about one-third that of Belgium and Germany…”, “France imported”, “France relied on”, “French industrialization”, “the Habsburg monarchy lagged behind the others in industrialization”, “production in both countries was well below Germany”, “French consumption was somewhat higher” (14). Such language-use … a rhetoric … composed of evaluating words such as “ranking”, and contrasts composed of “successes” & “failures”, may be compared with Mark Elvin’s “Why China Failed to Create an Endogenous Industrial Capitalism…”.—Elvin also writes repeatedly of “the Chinese economy”. And, likewise, Cameron writes: “The remaining countries of Europe … failed to industrialize significantly before 1914” (21), “Sardinia would have ranked close to France and Switzerland” (22), “Italy, Spain and Russia ranked at the bottom … the Balkan nations ranked no higher … Rumania and Serbia were above Russia, but lower than Spain and Italy”, “The laggard countries”, “the successful industrializers” (22) (my emphases).

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set within a larger framework of contrasts between « success » and « failure », that is to say, « success » in contrast to the « non-industrialising » rest of the world (Asia, &c.). « Europe » appears as a positive space (a space of developments) contrasting with the category of absences, of negatives, which « nonEurope » represents for the historian.29 Yet, « Europe » is an entity whose frontiers and content are left undefined. Varieties of development, the possible existence of backward areas and major non-industrialising regions (most of both the Netherlands and France well into the 20th century, much of Great Britain, and so forth) or extensive groups of population (Europe’s numerous 19th and 20th century peasantries) are unmentioned, hidden beneath the homogeneity … call it stereotype … indicated by word and figure. The body of the essay is thus dominated by categories of national accounting (and possibly by what was then a new ideological category represented by the European political and economic community). Returning to Rosenberg, we have seen that he was fully capable of genuine radical revision of the customary categories inherited from the field, and to this extent his writing on invention is surely fully consonant with our concern to reconstruct complexity. Yet, once he comes to consider the contrasts between this general space, to which « invention » is classically attributed (­indeed, in terms of which « technology » has been classically defined), and the space beyond, we return to a very familiar type of vocabulary and syntactical form: to a Pollard-type cast of « stereotypical » actors: « West » & « nonWest »; thus, the category of the « positive » is once more juxtaposed against 29 Pollard, op. cit., and again mere examples of such concept-burdened language-use: “Here we shall try to make the case for a single European economy in the crucial years of industrialization” (637); “… by treating the whole of Europe as one single macro-developmental area” (639). But, one should ask, what might be deemed to constitute this unit of language he calls “Europe”; we are not told (neither its frontiers, geographical, social or conceptual, nor any other criteria of organisation or synthesis), whilst the justification—surely dubious—for describing it as “a single macro-developmental area” or as “a single … economy”, is never attempted. What status would « Jacques », a nineteenth-century French peasant possess in this conspectus? There might be many competing answers to such a question, but let’s be permitted to confront them; Zola would have regarded him, indeed, as a fully subjugated and impoverished participant of a financially determined, advanced capitalist economy (La Terre). « Jacques’ » very culture … his « mentality » … would have been seen to have been determined by such conditions. Modern historical sociologists, such as the late Henri Mendras, who argued for a very tardy disappearance of the French peasantry in the course of the later twentieth century, might have thought differently (eg. La Fin des Paysans [Paris, 1967]). What of the many extensive non-industrialising regions of Europe? What defines a unit of territorial development? … What constitutes it within the variegated spaces of what we call Europe?

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that of the purely « negative ». The empirical units themselves, are left undefined, unargued, yet virtually substantivised as homogenous persona of technological success or its absence (marked by active personal pronouns such as he, she, it).30 Old cultural stereotypes, collective symbolic actors, again lead the argument; the very idea of technology is filled up with a heroic content, defined by the alleged parameters of the industrialisation process embracing Europe and America, but again undefined in terms of content and boundary. However, if Rosenberg had extended his initial redefinition—that concerning the notions of technology and invention—to a more global field of problems, the very word « technology » might itself have been seen to require a further radical redefinition in terms of populations of events, acts and contexts, in which all individual events, however exceptional they may seem—and already deployed by him in the case of the United States—would be deemed to be possible and contextualised, and freed from the heroic and historicist ideology of exceptional agency seemingly characterising one major region of the world.31 Industrialisation still took place in some areas and not in others, but the results of such rethinking and redefinition should be surprising.32 Pollard et al might like to answer that such criticism merely confuses the utilities of language and of easy comprehension with the argumentation itself, and that their use of words, sentences and categories merely involves a use of language of justified utility or convenience (yet which, in practice, can be seen 30 Pollard, op. cit., 637: “between the industrialization of Europe and the rest of the world” (639), with a footnote reference to Woodruff, Impact of Western Man. The point is not the absence of the usa or of Japan from the first term of the contrast (remember that industrialization in parts of both the Netherlands and France is considered to have been very tardy, while that in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Montenegro or Norway was all but absent up to Pollard’s closing date of 1914); it concerns, instead, the validity of Pollard’s two ideocultural based categories. Rosenberg, op. cit., and again from a profuse use of such expressions that dominates the organisation of sentences and arguments (and he quotes many other interpreters in these same usages): citing A.R. Hall, “It may be argued that what Europe possessed was a different kind of rationality”, and citing Joseph Needham with reference “to the Chinese system” (12). Citing also David Landes concerning “European technological dynamism”, “Europe experienced”, “gave Europe an advantage”, European development“, European culture”, “this scientific revolution … was a uniquely European event” (11). Evidently, I am not arguing against contextualisation. 31 For examples of such a romanticist ideology of the past, generally focussed upon the elected heros of historical or national « progress », we may look to the emphasis still laid upon individual exceptions such as Byron, Napoleon, or, where technology is concerned, Stevenson or Marconi, at the expense of a reality consisting of populations of events, attempts, acts and actors, and a broad public consciousness of the problems at issue. 32 Cf. “Parts of the Machine”, in The Invisible City.

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to have defied that argument … turned it back upon itself!). However, my point is that such rhetoric directly expresses presumptions about order that lead the argument into false, although familiar, directions, and which thereby make the problems-really-at-issue (and initially posed as being so) untreatable. Convenience is culpable! 3

Production and Marketing as an Issue of Complexity

This sampling of the kinds of writing encountered in confronting such questions, serves also to introduce the next step: that which concerns the specific empirical material upon which this essay must focus: production and marketing networks and their relationship to society and territory. Normative approaches to such historical matter confronts us with very serious problems, in the sense that the fields of study most concerned with it ­appear, from the very first, to be tailored according to an idea of order and historical process that—as illustrated in the cases of Cameron and Pollard— runs entirely against … contradicts … any serious attempt to confront complexity as an empirical (thus interpretive) datum and issue: an issue that must, therefore, concern that question of the ordering and disposition of any object field. It is not just a question of a different direction of study, or even a different idea of what properly constitutes a science, or of alternative ways of characterising any given field; instead, it illuminates an intellectual obstacle of a particularly systematic and unquestioned kind, rooted in the epistemology of our thinking and use of language, and expressed prolifically in general assumptions about order—whether on a popular or intellectual level. It comes expressed in naturalist language use, as if such an order were not disputable but described the nature of things (« nature », yes, in its two prominent senses). In this sense, once more, we must again emphasise the severe danger of merely casual, convenience-justified approaches to such language use,—as if language were but a mere utility and meaning but of secondary importance. It is as if such presumptions concerning the order of things (whatever they may be) were but the necessary launching ground for any free approach to a subject: unfortunately the tail leads the brain; it is necessary to look deeper for such grounds, and make problem that question of order. Indeed, this is not a question concerning one or another choice among an armoury of different theories, each substitutable for the other, thus at a merely disputable level, important though this be; instead, it is foundational. It concerns the very possibility of the empirical phenomena under study, thence of what it takes to study them « adequately ». We question therefore that very

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word « order »: of what should it consist? Indeed, the problem concerns ­conceptions about order concerning which radically different, seemingly incompatible theoretical constructs unwittingly agree: they stand on the same ground, as Cassirer would have put it.33 In short, a concern for complexityas-issue should be approached at a level that generates a new foundational structure upon which factual interpretation and theory may thereafter be reconstructed. Of course, we are referring to a foundational structure that is essentially potential, in the sense that in having turned to complexity-as-issue, we have chosen to understand that, up to the present, an adequate conception of societal order has systematically eluded social « science ». The very concept and ideal of the « simple »—the aesthetic of order treated above—is the pied piper leading us into our current dilemmas; in this sense methodological convenience, of any given kind, is tolerated only because compatible with unspoken presumptions about order (this is clearly observable in Pollard’s case). The problem must therefore be one of generating a method that permits complexity to become itself an issue, brought to free observation, thus described and recorded, thence debated, become legitimate (rather than an encumbering nuisance through which to drive a bulldozer of convenience). When, however, we turn to the nature of the specific, and yet various, types of subject matter that concern this essay, thus to their structural linkage and to the non-reversible dynamic inter- and trans-territorial change necessarily affecting them (and, thus, what we designate as « boundary »-crossing relationships of all kinds, degrees and scales), we find that for the most part, in the early-modernist historiography, they have been fragmented into numerous different subregional and thematic compartments, and, correspondingly, are based upon apparently reasonable methodologies and interpretive strategies which follow, and then confirm, the given forms and frameworks of interpretive or methodological closure, such as already discussed above. An attempt to augment the scale of discussion of such subject matter to a more globalising 33

Thus, Ernst Cassirer, with regard to this same problem in another intellectual context, “often both thesis and antithesis stood on the same ground”, The Problem of Knowledge, 86–7. Here, then, I am not arguing about the virtues of particular theories in contrast to others, since to my mind Cassirer’s statement also characterises a fault characterising considerable, merely apparent debates in the social « sciences ». The real problem is that of questioning the common grounds upon which opposing positions are alike based: see also the characterisation of knowledge as necessarily conflictual, heterogenous and plural in form, … developing through contention … advanced in the “Preface” to my Invisible City. Vasily Grossman gives a very remarkable fictional rendering of this very notion of knowledge-formation, one founded necessarily upon debate and disagreement, in Life & Fate, chs. 63–64, in which an illicit conversation, a forbidden dialogue, acts to dissolve the psychological obstacle impeding formation of a new theory in nuclear physics.

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framework, must run up against common expectation, thus common-sense, and, worse, against inculcated habits of reading and expression. Everything seems to push the specialist towards fragmentation of the subject matter, towards enclosure, towards a kind of scientised particularism, both in method and result. Connection—especially that systematic, boundary-crossing connection I argue implicated in the very ordering of the subject matter itself— becomes very difficult to establish, being instead generally considered of marginal importance … « contingent », in systematic opposition to what is deemed « essential » and inherent … internal: the very notion of « frontier » becomes selectively crystallised as something absolute: as if concretely defining the very spaces within which system can be identified—political, national, geographic, ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural, thematic or sectoral: holist! The idea of « system » is shed of its levels, its pluralities, intermeshings, overlaps, its dissonances: it becomes « a system », « an economy », « a national industrialisation », « a national currency system », « a steel industry », and so forth—yes, those definite and indefinite articles;—it becomes « simple », … convenient but false. Trade between early-modern South Asia, or China, on the one hand, and Europe, on the other, is very close to the empirical questions discussed below concerning production and marketing of textiles, and yet it also provides a very characteristic example of such pressures, being dominated by frameworks, and a use of words (a referentiality), already exemplified in the styles of reference and denotation applied by Pollard et al., that is, by national, civi­ lisational and sectoral units set in syntactical competition and opposition to one another, together with theoretical constructs that actually support such ­language-use. « Stereotype », in the technical sense of a reduction of a potentially heterogenous and dissonant content—say a population—to the form of a homogenous persona or actor, is an appropriate term for such units of language and approach. Then, a further, surprisingly-relevant comparison may be made with nationalist and ethnicist stereotyping, with racial and linguistic ideologies, these being symptoms of a much larger epistemology of order from which assumptions come drawn. « Stereotype » simplifies the tasks of the speaker but, in generating representative fictions for the complex social objects so characterised (« races », national populations, immigrant groups, &c.), confirms a certain vision of truth held by the particular writer concerned, a false homogeneity within and a false fissuring with the beyond and between. What is less clear is that the habitual use of such language by historians generates similar collections of stereotypical actors, and then, through doing so, a variety of futile, time-wasting secondary problems that come to dominate debate, as those that concern commercial and monetary organisation. This is

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because such assumptions about order minimise the implications of those forms of connection actually admitted as having linked territories and social groupings in the past (horizontally or vertically); the latter seem to connect, merely subsequently and contingently, originally entirely separate, substantive identities (national, cultural, ethnic, and so forth). The result is that those very features that should constitute the primary problems of description and interpretation, in a context where complexity is at issue, are instead marginalised.34 We may now summarise the general forms of the model—unremarkable, ubiquitous—implied by such approach and assumption. It lies at the very foundations of choice and usage of vocabulary and syntax characterising ­social-« science », and popular and populist habit: (i) An atomisation into numerous paradigmatically separated cultures, nations, civilisations, ethnicities, and so forth, which, when seen to be connected in some way, are assumed to have been so a posteriori, subsequent to the formation of the entities themselves, and of their « identities », so characterised. Any connections identified as existing in the historical past then appear to us to represent a mere prehistory of the real connectedness to come in say the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. (ii) A process comes to characterise the course of history—one assumed by virtually all practitioners whether empiricist or theoretical— as a transition from a world composed of numerous closed (scale-­variable, and thus scale-insensitive) « local » orders (tribes, cultures, nations, civilisations, &c.,—virtual worlds of distinct order), on the one hand, into a single, still to be fully realised, homogeneous world order, on the other hand.35 Enlightenment, market forces, capitalism, imperialism, nineteenth century communications networks, twentieth-century informatisation and electronic finance, sixteenth-century extensions of the m ­ arket, the 34

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In “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”, pt. I, in Unbroken Landscape, I argue that treatments of intercontinental trades are generally dominated by supplycentric theories that, (i) avoid considering the problem of demand from importing regions; (ii) generate second-order theoretical positions that justify such avoidance (e.g. thesaurisation); in “Monetary Revolution & Societal Change”, in The Invisible City, I argue that bilateralism exaggerates the sense of separate trade-units or trading-trajectories, while a focus on multilateralism necessarily would generate much larger frameworks of interaction. E.g. monetary studies are compartmented into national, bilateral, and supply-­ centric frameworks, and decorated with dubious theoretical constructs that seem to lead explanation by the nose (bimetallic ratios, Gresham’s Law, &c.). These problems are discussed in detail elsewhere; the present summary is intended to allow the argument to develop.

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« cash-nexus » or a Europe-induced, metropolis-led capitalism, « modernisation », « rationalisation », « consumerisation », are all seen as rival world-actors generating this process. This model surfaces in approach and interpretation even when a researcher’s concerns are highly specific and local—say, in the village-study of the anthropologist, or in an economist’s characterisation of any particular occasion of division of labour, and, most especially, in fields notorious for their closure and their antipathy towards any attempt to provide a comparative dimension (as in certain forms of anthropology and orientalist history).36 For a Louis Dumont, it will be nineteenth century British colonial government that imports economy into the closed holism of the caste-ordered Indian village, or into India itself (evidence of marketisation encountered prior to it being considered peripheral … thus contingent); for an Immanuel Wallerstein it is post-sixteenth century metropolitan Europe that exports capitalism; for numerous economic historians concerned with China, it is an invasive process termed « modernisation » arbitrarily sub-dividing intrinsically interdependent institutions and sets of relational form into separate spheres of the traditional and modern, with all that these two terms thence imply.37 Given the dissonances and heterogenous character expected of any general field of collected evidence, such procedures of exclusion and representation are imported into the interpretation of any given moment and place that ­happens to be the focus of a given act of research—whether concerning ­sixteenth-century Yorkshire, a twentieth-century village in Fujian or K ­ arnataka, 36

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There comes especially to mind, in my personal experience, those often fiercely-defended closures affecting Indology and Sinology, or those that also sub-divide, into separate historiographies, the treatment of the histories of different parts of the sub-continent of India, and in which political and nationalist ideologies often take the lead, yet comparable with those of which Marc Bloch complained affecting European medieval history. Comparison seems always to throw a new and ultimately integrative illumination for comprehension of such societal complexes, rendering the necessary frameworks of territorial study larger and more open, more variational and in constant formation. An example concerns the forms of rights, of fiscal collectivities, ritual forms, notions of possession and legal right, and so forth, whose necessary frame of attention comes to reveal itself as running from, say, Rajasthan in northern India down to Karnataka in the south, in the centuries prior to colonial occupation. One is confronted by what is claimed as being the incomparable alterity of each selected field, without the fact of such alterity being itself subjected to interrogation, and an opinion depending upon exclusion of vast fields of inconvenient evidence, such as that considered in this essay. I give many examples in “Financial Institutions and Business Structures”, in The Invisible City, which seeks to compare the evidence for Europe, India and China.

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banking institutions in Guangzhou, or, say, eighth, sixteenth, eighteenth or twentieth-century India (examples of cases that I have encountered in the ­secondary literature). The particular and the general—not to speak of the disputable question of the universal—have thus appeared mutually and systematically exclusive of one another, as if, when fully developed, they would be situated at the beginnings and ends … two diametrically opposite poles … of some notion of possible development, thus of a universal stage-formed ladderlike historical continuum of transition, and yet always « shown » … claimed … to be implicated within any single observed selection of empirical facts (of whatever kind and scale), as if in conflict with one another, separating the status of one set of facts, comprising that focus, from another. Must one not, frankly, consider such procedures of thought and interpretation, that act to divide a single corpus of the real (consisting of intimately interdependent relationships between person and institutions), into two epochally distinct representations, apparently in conflict with one another, as being products of some metaphysic of history … a historicism, imposed on the facts, arranging them, yet not questioned in itself? Nonetheless, it has now become clear, at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, that globalisation of whatever kind has nothing to do with any necessary diminution of local particularism. Instead, the two terms may be found to be intimately connected, as if they were interdependent aspects of a single complex of structured connections. This, indeed, is the thesis that will be argued and explored below: namely, that globalisation and particularisation are features that could not subsist separately of one another, and, furthermore, that « globalising », or « synthesising », institutions and instruments actually serve to facilitate and stimulate further particularisation of all kinds and scales. In dealing with long-recognised general movements—long distance trade, the rise of capitalism, « the spread of the scientific mentality », and so forth—the idea of complexity provides an essential dimension missing from discussion: it generates the idea that there might have existed a dense structural and institutional content,—a thickly populated complex of « intermediary » relationship,—to problem fields ordinarily polarised by the scholar as general and l­ocal, and then as if such a difference must represent the co-­ incidence of two separate societal and evolutionary epochs.38 Modernisation 38

That very word “intermediary” is metaphorical, seeming to imply « what comes between »; however I mean, here, to refer to an unbroken field (or volume) of relationship connecting all scales, from the most general to the most particular. The problem is one of finding words that equate accurately with one’s conceptions, and without which habitual usages lead to systematic distortion, either of what one is attempting to say, or of what it

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theory is a case in point, applied systematically to recent Chinese economic history (for example, in monetary history), and thereby preventing a considerable range of evidence, in favour of systematic connectedness between different sectors of Chinese economic activity, from being observed or accorded significance:—they are, instead, classified as traditional or modern, and, if known to be connected, only contingently so.39 Complexity, therefore, is also a means of turning to a massive hidden content of movement, connectedness, … of interdependent structural and organised relationship, otherwise left unseen. In the final subsection of this first Chapter of the essay (thus of §4), I promulgate a series of propositions about societal order that, in spite of their substantive character, should be considered less as yet another attempt to theorise it, than as an attempt to determine minimal methodological parameters capable of opening up the fields of historical and social research to a much broader framework and foundation of approach, definition of problem, and discussion. The aim is to provide an approach to methodology that allows for far more to be read of a field than we initially think probable. And to make this question of method, one capable of exceeding our expectations, an ethical principle of the « good » approach. It would involve changes in orientation that run against the grain of modern research proposals, yet increase the complexity of what thereafter comes captured as an evidence. The consequence, in turn, would be to stimulate the researcher to develop more considered criteria for the selection of a material sufficient to counter normative expectations of complete, holistic, yet local coverage of any particular research focus. This subsection concludes, therefore, with further suggestions about appropriate method—especially favouring an approach I term « sampling ». I shall explain below what I mean in using this word. The potential of such « reform » becomes clear when turning to the possible complexities of societal organisation itself, this being directly implicated, below, through dealing with certain exemplary cases in economic history taken from my own past research (Pt. ii). At the least, this should enable us to reexamine the basic presuppositions embodied by customary approach and accepted opinion, and at best it might involve a corresponding transition to much more complex readings of societal organisation—economic, anthropological, historical and cultural. The sense

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might be possible to say in some future. Each such use of metaphor is necessarily ­provisional, and usually, as in this case, the fruit of many other attempts … and destined to give way before yet fresh attempts. Once more, “Financial Institutions & Business Practices”, in The Invisible City.

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of disorder, frequently judged by writers as affecting the past would instead give way to a more conscious awareness of the need to reconstitute order itself, … at least its possibility. Too many admitted paradoxes have come to sap social « science » of its earlier conviction,—of its earlier sense of even being « science ». Biology presents the useful example of a discipline that has been transformed precisely by such self-conscious innovation, whereby a space is opened up in which a new and rich domain and order of empirical reconstruction can be undertaken.40 Even if the results of methodological change led merely to confirmations of the old atomism, this would be on the basis of an entirely improved fabric of knowledge. However, Chapter 3 of this essay will suggest otherwise—I clearly have my own interpretive preferences, but the point, here, is to articulate the nature of a problem and obtain minimal agreement among colleagues, whatever their interpretive predispositions or particular fields. Even eventual « ­neo-atomists » (those who would continue to reject comparison and synthesis) would gain immeasurably in their understanding from the sheer ability to connect and relate what had earlier been cut away, neglected, stereotyped under false labels and spurious discussions.

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Without necessarily disagreeing with D.C. North’s similar wish to augment the scope of explanatory frameworks in economic history (in “Institutions & Productivity in History”, in Poni & Scazzieri (eds.), Production Networks, Market Rules & Social Norms), I try a very different, more polemical, approach to the significance of the words « demand » and « supply » in “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”, in Unbroken Landscape, suggesting that emphasis on the latter is closely associated with assumptions about closure, while the former opens economic phenomena to multiform, extra-economic contexts responsible for generating the forces that stimulate all-round increases in production and trade. Then the market—marketisation as institutional mediator for these different forces—is simultaneously generator of both demand and supply, simultaneously, because the problem concerns less one of chronology (“On the first day there was Demand, On the second Supply”, or vice versa)—than of a simultaneous development of interdependent, complementary aspects of a single question. However demand for commodities and payments media has a heuristic social and societal dimension that is allimportant with respect to the arguments of this book. Similarly, my use of the word « institution » is altogether more general than North’s strictly economic use of the term: I use it to refer to the pervasive institutionalisation of society in general, formal and informal, spontaneous and instituted, and as a question intimately concerning the very constitution of a societal complex: thus, e.g. administration, marketisation, &c.—and a major force behind what we call the demand for instruments of monetisation. It is an essential component of what I called “The Invisible City”: a city of language, reference, instrument and institution, of all that is not realised as physical object and thus ostensibly invisible, yet ubiquitously, densely present.

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Alternative Principles of Order & Method41

i

The Propositions

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The propositions, listed and discussed below, aim to define a minimal set of rules with which to approach the past; nonetheless, they also serve as substantive hypotheses concerning the shapes of the real—what we used to call theory (but, as said, my interest is not with theory). However, their virtue is essentially that of radically increasing the sense of the possible and, complementarily, that of considerably complexifying the sense of what would be required, as method and approach, to deal with what would then be seen to be possible: thus for empirical capture, because the very idea of what must constitute an empirical object-field would be altered. By so doing, these propositions generate (and only they can do so) means for, (i) testing the general credibility of inherited assumptions, models and approaches,—the latter having been oriented towards entities that, from the first, have been presumed constituted as really bounded systems, and that, subsequently, are validated as being so, as being socially or culturally true. But even when a certain reserve happens to be expressed when applying such thinking and practice, they are nonetheless ­expressly justified, above all, by methodological convenience, but also by methodological relativism, and, moreover, by a certain theoretical relativism. A certain unconsciousness concerning the seriousness of the issue continues to prevent rigorous interrogation of such problems deriving from our own cultural a-prioris … our own cultural inheritance. Therein lies the danger. Instead, however, these propositions—those that I have chosen to set out here—would enable every scholar, like it or not, to test such assumption because acting as a broader, more inclusive contextual frame of attention and capture, a contextualising frame of attention in which such assumption would be seen for what it is, rise to consciousness and be problematised, and either validated or rejected.—That frame would be defined by two vital procedural principles, an opening attention towards a broader content of possible complexity … of necessary relationship, because, potentially, opened to sight by the wider field of new findings consequent upon it,—those made available through such a more broad framework of attention and possibility.—Thereby, they would enable, (ii) the capture of complexity itself (organisational, relational, structuring …)! I mean of course, because at once capturing significant aspects of a complexity the full character of which is currently uncertain; this 41

The following sub-section is a slightly modified version of pt. A, § 3, of “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”, in Unbroken Landscape.

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clearly indicates the importance of procedural rules (the open, the plural) that allow ­societal order progressively to be revealed through method. Complexity, we shall see, concerns order and organisation with respect to both content, and also form, through redefining the very conception of the significance, function, status, and thus nature and origins, of « frontiers » of all kinds, and of the forms of communication traversing them. The problem of « frontier » is fundamental, and we shall show it to be so, both with respect of ideas of order in society itself, thus empirically, but also with respect of its central critical utilities … also its « abuse » … in intellectual thought itself. In short, we might ultimately need to reject criticism of such holism in particular cases, but not reject the principle, itself, guiding and constituting these rules of method and approach. We might wish to reject the possibility of any substantive hypothesis concerning the nature of societal organisation itself (say, its enclosed communal character or, obversely, its globalist contextualisation); yet the results … the consequences … nonetheless, would be a remarkable revitalisation of the social disciplines and fields, simply by virtue of having observed these rules, thereby broadening and opening the entire question of possibility concerning such organisation. Proposition 1. The interregional continuum of relationships (metaphorically, thus provisionally, distinguished in terms of overlaps, nestings, scales, levels, amplitudes, chains, branchings, &c.)—an intermeshed nexus of systematic linkage—running unbroken across the old worlds of Europe and Asia, down the east-coast littoral of Africa (as implied in Part 2), and, most probably (given evidence for the indigenous hinterland dispersion of multiple new plant types and associated, techniques of cultivation, again discussed in Part 2), extending throughout the very interior of the continent, thus into sub-Saharan West and Cental Africa, and, even prior to the late-15th century, increasingly absorbing the Americas into its net of possible systematic connection.42 This is to say that the continuum is (i) multi-aspectual (composed, for example, of interlocking types and scales of production and marketing; or of differing scales and types of social-administrative organisation or cultural form), and

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This thesis goes wholly against the grain of such modernisation theories as G. William Skinner, “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China”, Journal of Asian Studies (xxiv, 1964–1965), but also against the whole parasitical envelope of modernisation beliefs applied by social scientist and historian. Part 2 of this book seeks to address this question in proposing other forms of connectivity traversing the entire commodity continuum. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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(ii) it is also organised in terms of this same diversity of distinctive, o­ verlapping empirical levels and scales. The linguistic armoury used in order to refer to it—thus the kinds of word exemplified in the proposition itself (« overlaps », « levels », &c.)—is clearly and intentionally metaphorical, because they reflect the novel sense of a severe inadequacy concerning present-day knowledge, and thus language-use, when faced with questions of societal organisation. It indicates the need for a progressive « unpacking » of organisational complexity in space/time, but it also marks a preference for not saying too much at this early stage;—the task is one of framing questions. Thus the metaphors, … the need, in consequence, to discover a fresh manner of expressing such complexity, including a need to define a new gamut of rigorously interrogated, carefullydefined terms more appropriate for their object.—« Convenience », that devil in our woodwork, would become unacceptable as a criterion of judgement. Meanwhile, we may nuance our sense of the institutional and anthropological content of this continuum—in terms of what is already available as empirical research—by affirming that we might conceive of it in terms of a contoured «topography» (meaning like the contoured cartography of some upland region on a large-scale map), upon which both the density and intensity of what is mapped—relationships, linkages, institutional forms (say, market networks or payment relationships)—would vary considerably, thus in their density and depth, as detailed observation shifts across this vast continuum from one place, or part of society, to another. The major point, however, concerns its continuity, its primary connectedness in spite of all observed frontiers of whatever kind (cultural, political, economic, linguistic, legislative, &c.), and in spite of all « topographical » variation. Across this continuum, merchants, commodities, payment forms passed back and forth. So too a constant flow of messages passed back and forth concerning them, … messages that should be seen in their own right as dispersed but active forces constantly acting to form and reform the conditions within which they intervened. The implication is that there must have existed an infrastructure of institutional and instrumental connection—of and for such continuities—in which passage could take place, … that is to say, be conceived as being possible: the necessary condition for its very possibility! Then, given the current significance accorded to the translatability question, in the humanities,—its generally being read as a definitive obstacle to effective communication or comprehension, and thus as if coincident with the bounded character assumed of different substantive languages or cultural groups, we may pose this exchange-continuum as a prima facie site (the site in which such acts and events are seen to occur and considered possible) and also the medium (the very active relational character of what constitutes that continuum), for, … yes, the actuality of translatability, a field of translational act mediated by a variety of institutions designed precisely for that function, and Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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actually realised by means of yet another kind of highly varied, spontaneous empirical fact, this time of instrumentation and comportment:—markets, codes of behaviour, exchange forms, words—one whose precise, intended function had again been to mediate … influence … make possible … communication across factual barriers, thus the myriad acts of required translation constituted by all acts of exchange between persons, institutions and regions (and whether or not partners share formal languages).43 And, of course, by translation, I include not only passage of words, but of gestures and dress, visual symbols, and, above all, in the context of this essay, cultural goods … the commodity. The consequence might even be the need to reconsider societal organisation itself, whether, say, from a cultural or an economic point of view. Proposition 2. The proposition that difference (the local, the exotic, the apparently cultural-relative or incommensurable, the sheer heterogeneity of the observational field) is part and parcel of a larger integrational order. This proposition is clearly phrased with respect to the current dilemma, noted above: that while globalisation and particularisation are currently seen affecting the very same micro-societal contexts, and, what is more, seen developing simultaneously within them, the means for us to explain this apparent developmental dualism, seem entirely absent. This absence, however, is due precisely to the inherited corpus of assumption mentioned above,—through interference by an ensemble of assumed logical connections and, correspondingly, what seem entirely reasonable methods of approach;—the consequence is that their actual association as fact, within the very same empirical milieu of social relationship, is then rendered inexplicable except in terms of a supposedly schematic transition between one epochal state and stage of society and another, of entirely different kinds, and as exemplified by the afore-mentioned modernisation theory applied so frequently, for example, to China.—Thereby, a unified field of related and connected facticity becomes spuriously divided into two irreconcilable kinds of organised matter. Furthermore, this manner of opposing the one to the other, as if each such arbitrary division represented entirely different sets of societal condition, is encountered when confronting any one of the many disciplines and fields composing the humanities, even 43

And by « factual barrier », I imply the argument that any communication between two persons is an act of translation, of a consciously willed response to a resistant context composed of difference, thus assuming the intersubjective separation between any two communicating instances … say you, the reader, and I.

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though cast in a variety of apparently differentiated, often opposing kinds of theoretical language. Most notorious, perhaps, is that generalised, yet inconclusive panoply of different « theories of transition » between one state of society and another, so regarded, yet that subsequently appear inapt to confront their task once it is understood that social existence is in its very nature transitional, an observation that must lead, necessarily, to a more complex notion of what we would imply by this term « transition », one that seems ideologically loaded in favour of an old historicism. Furthermore, that word « arbitrary », applied above to the identification of such states, sets of condition, and stages of development, thus to the distinctions that are seen to define their identities, signifies, in turn, a question of where such boundaries, … those considered distinguishing one stage from another should be placed within what, when encountered in the records, is an entirely unified and continuous field of empirical facticity. Where lies the criteria within this mass of factual inter-­ relationship for distinguishing the traditional from the modern, or the feudal from the capitalist? Such debate is insoluble, for it is open to the susceptibilities of each and every individual author to decide, just as it is also that of deciding the very scale on which such distinction, and thus transition, is seen to occur. Instead, the thesis in this book concerns the proposition that difference and frontier, on the one hand, and general and universal … the translational, on the other hand, might instead be better understood as mere separate aspects … windows … of a single complex societal set of conditions; it is this very thesis that happens to be the purpose of the propositions listed above. If, in consequence, particular and general, frontier and translation, are considered parts of a single symbiosis, rather than as confronting and excluding one another, the implication must follow that a complex of hidden organisational and relational content necessarily « inter-mediates » such connectedness, … acts to translate the one into the other and vice versa. This whole intermediary content … what one might call, in the spirit of Geertz, the constitutive « thickness » of societal being … would otherwise be amputated from our attention, in a word left unproblematised, a veritable vacuum of connection enabling these very problems of explanation to arise. Instead, the relatively particular (say, the village) and the relatively general (say, global capitalism) would need to be seen as being intimately interrelated with one another, and this could only be seen to be possible if understood as but separate moments of a much larger and singular, « thick » organisation of the facticity beneath the eye. In sum, modernisation theory has traditionally distributed such empirical phenomena on opposite sides of a veritable conflict of survival, often presented as if conflict of a moral order, the good and the bad, the modern and

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t­ raditional, the universal and the particular, capitalist and feudal, strictly economic and strictly « anthropological ». However, our proposition contends that they should first be examined as possible aspects of a single societal fabric of relationship, thus as closely interrelated characters affecting every phenomenon of social reality, on whatever level happens most to concern us. They would, in any objective sense, be considered inseparable from one another, the one as unerasable as the other, because both would be recognised as forming part of a single constitutive ensemble of relationship. It remains to observe that, in consequence, they would do so complexly, that is to say, in terms of that labyrinth of levels and orders of empirically-increasing and decreasing generality to which I referred in the first proposition, and, at the least, no longer in terms of simple polarities between « most general » and « most particular » (the overriding assumption in « modernisation » theory and approaches to globalisation). The central purpose, here, is also to generalise this observation: to attach it to the kind of globalised context of conditions that directly concerns this essay. We would shift the question from mere momentary puzzlement before the apparent relative disorder of the past, to a more general statement concerning all societal conditions. As a corollary—and it is this that I argue—we would be enabled to propose a methodology capable of responding to the confusion and violence associated with nationalism and ethnicism.44 The economic phenomena treated below—those of manufacture, commerce and money—­ compose an especially well-documented and demonstrable example of such a facticity in which that very « thickness » (or density) of constitutive relationship, between particular and general, can be reconstructed. The link with « Proposition 1 » should be clear, for the idea of an unbroken continuum of interaction is not the contention that there exist no frontiers, but instead that the proper meaning of the notion of frontier can only be comprehended in terms of such a broad organisation of active communication behind which is the very drive to overcome factual separation; what comes seen to compose that continuum is indeed an elaborate organisation of distinctions and separations, of many kinds and forms, far from coincident with one another, and thus fostering the drive to establish or generate interdependent relationships that defy such separations, and such activity may be seen to arise spontaneously and anonymously, as an ongoing historical development of some relative duration 44

Prehistory implies a different order of reconstructive difficulty, although wide distributions of palaeolithic hand-tools in Europe, far from the sites of rocks from which they are manufactured (and identifiable by petrological analysis), also suggest the relevance of these ideas.

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(such as that treated by Rosenberg regarding the concept of « invention »), or, instead, through precise active, intentional events of institutional innovation. As said, in such contexts, different kinds of frontier would frequently be seen overlapping one another, and not coinciding. A symptomatic example would be the issue of weights and measures, of different metrologies affecting the very same locations, and seen to be characteristic of the past, prior to movements of « standardisation », such as were exemplified by the Napoleonic reforms and later by the centralising colonial drive that altered monetary conditions in, for example, India. The former are generally treated by historians as prima facie evidence of economic disorder, as obstacles to fiscality, to payment connections and circulation, and thus to trade, in short as being « non-rational », … effectively « anti-economic »… and destined for reduction to a single set of sovereign-ordained standard measures. Instead, prior to such reform, it was coincidence among many kinds of metrology that most essentially characterised the period of history that most concerns us here, and best understood in terms of a kind of economic and societal order, one incident throughout the exchange-continuum, structurally distinct from that which would follow, and if expressed in a multitude of particular, culturally local forms, … and that we might, in perfect seriousness, describe as « exotic » in relation to one another, … yet, as we shall see, constituted according to identical, what I shall define as universal, principles of object-formation: those underlying the possibility of commodification itself. Other criteria, differing from sovereignty, had previously operated to determine the functional purposes and distinctiveness of such orders, each possessing its own domain of purpose and application, and, where payments are concerned, its own « market », so to speak. The new orders of standardisation were, in turn, closely associated with the national centralisation of power and with an ever-more monopolistic concentration of such power under metropolitan finance capital and industrialisation, thus with an evolution of entirely new structural conditions. Yet, as encountered before industrialisation, they instead seem to the historian an eloquent evidence of the obstacles inhibiting rational order, and representative of particularist, egotistical drives and closures. Such evaluative presumptions, again often moralist in tone (as if a question of relative rationality), imply that earlier conditions in which different metrologies proliferated, do not require interrogation, thus intense study, in their own right. For instead of representing a problem of order—a problem for us to phrase as such and seek to resolve with invention of an appropriate method for investigating it—they appear to mark its apparent absence. As I point out elsewhere, the very persistence of such conditions through many centuries implies a need to research the kinds of possible order they might, alternatively, have embodied. For what,

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otherwise, might have sustained them as an evidence in the long duration, as a constantly evident facticity fed throughout the continuum by a populous motivated practise? Likewise, other similar cases of such coincidence in place of different forms of measure and practise are encountered throughout. There is constant administrative invention on all social levels of practice, from the «royal» courts themselves, which appear to monopolise attention in the historiography, to the more populous, yet neglected local levels among the petty nobilities and minor administrations, besides that multiplicity of types of moneys exchanging within the same particular markets, or the coincidence of a plurality of differing standard measures;—all may seem paradigmatic of the tendencies towards disorder deemed as characterising medieval and early-modern conditions.45 The problem instead is better considered as that of the need to investigate possible connections of a systematic kind between, say, metrological particularisation or administrative decentralisation, and the more general forces and movements observed affecting the same milieu, of recovering the kinds of societal relationship to which such evidence should be related as its purpose and ground, and thus explain them. Each different level of observation would be given equal empirical status as parts of a complex empirical ensemble (thus, not as a mere conflict between empirical fact and judgemental abstraction). The principle would be that each such aspect would be open to entire description and explication. In my own past work, I have argued that the very possibility of attributing monetary (thus quantitative) value to different « qualities » (thus, to objects of use, to different kinds of measure, to different kinds of payment form or category of good, or even to the diversity of moneys of account, and so forth), is the very means that permits their arithmetic reduction to a sum, to addition and subtraction, thus into something of infinite mobility, fluid and homogenous in kind; it is quantity that establishes the fluid-like conditions of exchange, permits elaboration of higher, more « synthesising » levels of accounting and ­administration, quantifies the astonishing differentiation of the kinds of fractional right incident on the fruits of the soil, and finally generating a sum for all the institutional phenomena we encounter as parts of social existence. The consequence, in turn, is that quantity—money, price, the account, the ­premium …—establishes the very conditions in which an ever-increasing diversity may continue to be generated, to proliferate and, as such, and yet be

45

I consider administrative, cultural and metrological evidence of this kind in “State-­ Formation Reconsidered”, in The Invisible City.

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tolerable, be parts of the very functioning of society, economy and political state, and part of an active, intentional social life. Quality remains quality (the irreducible difference of heterogenous things among themselves, of variouslystandardised measures operating in the same social space, of each good from another good, of administrative particularisms, … of use and function themselves, which in contrast to evolution of monopolistic power and centralising control, appear to have driven the more systematic aspect of the whole). But, then, by « turning the coin », so to speak, these same irreducible qualitative differences become signified as quantity, as something distinctly singular, part and parcel of an ultimately single homogenous, exchangeable, thus translatable something we call number! And, we shall suggest, institutions that generate shared instruments for quantitative evaluation (moneys of account, types of coin, &c.) indeed serve to facilitate, stimulate and generate increased local particularism, just as today we observe current nationalist movements making full use of global credit mechanisms, communications, and trades in armaments or drugs.46 As for the qualities themselves, say metrologies or moneys, they too become susceptible to functionally differentiated explanation, expressing a kind of order rather than being in conflict with the very idea of it. The notion of translation, of translatability, acts similarly; like quantity, perhaps by means of quantity, it is the condition that fosters the very production and expression of difference, articulating its range of differential use, with the result that difference would itself be seen as entirely constitutive.47

46

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The reference here—thus much more than mere analogy—is to Marx’s analysis of the complex relationships that mediate use-value (quality) with exchange value (quantity), local quality and general quantity, commodity and price, in Karl Marx, Capital. There are earlier parallels in Kant’s transcendental critical system, as in Hegel’s: cf. Philonenko, L’Oeuvre de Kant, i, 192–6 (it marks the movement between qualitative « phenomenon » and measurable « object »). Thus, in considering the notion of « trust » in commercial and financial exchange, we should think of it as a problem that arises only where there is potential difficulty, that is, heterogeneity between partners, thus an expected and manifest problem of distinction and recognition. The common view that trust concerns members of a same community (a closed social group of some kind) is false: where there is community, « trust » is not, or relatively less at issue. Thus, « trust » and « translation » must be closely related issues. This is what I argue below. Nor should one confuse « contract » and « trust »: « trust » is relevant where legal sanction is minimal but « contract » unnecessary; « contract » is introduced in conditions in which « trust » may be defined as relatively absent and difficult to establish. In order to turn such words as « trust » into a useful and precise terminology, they need to be cut apart from the popular milieu from which they were first appropriated; they require careful redefinition for the new tasks to which they will become applied.

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The corollary: Proposition 3. The claim that the history of the world should not be characterised as a process leading from locally constituted closures towards increasing world integration and homogenisation. Instead, by the time that historians take hold of an object field (thus, at least at the end of prehistory), this history should be seen as a long process of imminent transition affecting both the form and content of an always integrative, yet complex, particularistic order.48 The idea of a long-historical movement from atomised closure to a homogenised world society underlies, virtually as principle, the basic forms of social science knowledge and method, and, in turn, grounds much of its commonsensical stock of explanatory and interpretive answers to empirical problems. In contrast, this third proposition interrogates and then denies the validity of this collectively held, inherited assumption, so deeply rooted in our own culture. This denial follows from the considerations of the second proposition. If particularisation and generalisation are considered always as interdependent facets of a more extensive and complex organisation of social reality, then the basic presumption of modernisation theory (and of its many equivalents) is clearly false. It is not that there is no such thing as modernisation, changing forms of globalisation, or transition, but that their conventional characterisation has rested upon fictional sociological/historicist premises. We may take as symptom of this problem a single issue: that concerning the status of early agrarian society. From the very beginnings of settled agriculture in « complex society » (say, in fourteenth/fifteenth century Muscovy, fifteenthcentury Shandong, tenth-century England or sixteenth-century Gujarat), we find the monetisation of fractional rights incident on the harvest recorded in the very terminology of such rights (the names given to them), but also documented as actual finite payment-events, wherever such events happen to be

48

By « imminent transition » I mean inherent and ubiquitous, part and parcel of the very fact of social existence, that of one or a multitude of perfectly anonymous human beings acting upon their contexts, modifying the latter through doing so, even if, in each case, imperceptibly. This sense will become increasingly apparent and meaningful as we proceed in what follows. Obviously, the proposition raises many serious questions, given the traditional emphasis in historical and anthropological studies on static stages of development, « stone age economies », « primitive cultures »; and mere changes of name do not alter inherited points of view or hidden assumptions.

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recorded.49 This is to say, monetisation, and its organisational complements, is indeed implicated in the very form and invention of different kinds of local right as frequently indicated by their nominative designations. In many different locations in Europe and Asia, in respect of which there has been intensive agrarian study, the institutional fabric of agrarian rights, including varieties of surplus extraction (rents, taxes, and so forth), may be observed taking form, at the same time as rural habitation was itself being extended and land increasingly brought into cultivation. In short, these relationships cannot, where such evidence is evident, be separated into distinct chronological phases: first the habitation, and later some invasive connections with an otherwise « outside » world: the so-called « disenchantment » of some traditional holist customary existence. Instead, settlement of villages, marketisation, and a denser fabric of institutional relationships (lordships, impositions, administrations, payments, multiple forms of fractional right, complex agricultural practices and modes of sharing and measuring land), all develop in close, incestuous relationship to one another, thus knitting, from the very start, a close web of mutually interdependent, dynamic connections.50 For example, the dispersal of holders of local 49

50

E.g. R.E.F. Smith, Peasant Farming in Muscovy; Leif Littrup, Subbureaucratic Government in China in Ming Times. And see a justly famous article by Marc Bloch, “Natural Economy or Money Economy: A Pseudo-Dilemma”, in Land & Work in Mediæval Europe. I prefer to treat monetisation in terms (i) of the generalisation of a numerical, metrological and « monetary literacy » among a population dependent upon such knowledge, and (ii) of principles of monetary organisation, that generate the flexibilities in which exchange takes place. (iii) Monetisation is evidently also a key factor in underpinning the very possibility of societal complexity, and it is that we indeed observe on a global, dense and intensive scale throughout the centuries of our concern. That is to say, if we subtract money society and state themselves would unravel, localise, simplify. Marketisation in India and China is discussed in my “Financial Institutions & Business Practices”, in The Invisible City. Particular reference should be made to the mapping of marketisation in several provinces of China over the long period, which I consider exemplary of what occurred elsewhere, for example in South Asia. For example, see Leif Littrup for Shandong (Subbureaucratic Government in China in Ming Times, 21–2), Mark Elvin for the Shanghai hinterland in Zhezhiang (“Market Towns & Waterways: The County of Shang-hai from 1480–1910”), and Yoshinobu Shiba for that of Ningbo in Jiangsu (“Ningpo & its Hinterland”), 401; Robert Marks for Haifeng & Lufeng Counties in Guangdong (Rural Revolution in South China, 49, Table 1); Chin-Keong Ng for Taiwan, who also discusses development of market streets in Taipeh (Trade & Society, 108–11). It also departs radically from Skinner’s schematic and sociologistic arguments mentioned above, supra n. 89 (on hierarchic market structure in historical China), although these latter are, for Sinologists, an ubiquitously referenced authority. Valuable contributions to the larger complexity of closely interconnected developments in which marketisation occurs, are found in Akira Hayami & Yoshihiro Tsubouchi (ed), Economic and Demographic Development in Rice Producing Societies (see the essays by Furuta Kazuko, Ts’ui-jung Liu, &, in a forthcoming

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rights into distant towns and territories, or the holding of multiple rights scattered in different places, held by particular individuals, and especially characteristic of medieval and early modern society—central to the organisation of, say, Mughal or Norman rule—is made possible precisely by the various techniques of accounting and forms of communication (the latter in its widest possible sense) generated, … made possible, in short, … by monetisation, and in which, therefore, the quantification of value is applied to rights at the very moment of their creation,—thus to that extraordinarily heterogenous and fractionated field of qualitative social repartition of the fruits of the soil,—­ nature, form or level of such right not withstanding. Monetisation underlay the very possibility of subsequent exchange across distance of the produce grown upon lands covered by such rights; that is, such exchange is seen to occur because converted to value, distributed extensively in the form of payments rather than produce, but also enabling an extensive distribution of the product itself (to urban sites, remote courts, and so forth). In this sense money ubiquitously appears as a veritable accelerator of complexification, the condition and the medium of the latter, accelerating also general administrative developments, and their significance with regard to that of society itself. It becomes a veritable instigation of more complex organisational practice, and of an even higher order of complexity than its actual monetary functions might alone suggest, fundamental though these were. In short, the most intimate and local, in appearance exotic, of anthropological and historical foci of study are found to be consistent with monetary institutions and instruments, with flows of moneys or goods, and with the most sophisticated forms of interregional commercial organisation, with complex, fluid social orders, whose very raison d’être were precisely, so we should judge, communication and translatability (thus the will and intention to communicate and translate) across multiple frontiers of exchange implicating some social and cultural difference, and thus obstacle. Thus, trading networks and production linkages—the genesis of pluriform and plurifunctional markets for mediating payments and the passage of goods—would, from this perspective, need to be seen as necessarily, inherently « connective » from their very origins, connective in purpose and function like the parts of a machine, and, in this connection, closely linked up in turn with the institutional fabric of the society in which they took form as translational institutions and to which, in r­ epublication, by Shi Zhihong listed infra in the bibliography), and also in Littrup, op. cit., Chin-Keong Ng, op. cit., and Marc Bloch’s Les Caractères originaux de L’Histoire rurale française, as in my essay cited above. Less quantified but unambiguous discussion exists for South Asia, but these questions are much discussed in the European case.

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turn, they contributed as further inputs of organisational form.51 Certain supplementary facts confirm these claims: monetisation of fiscal and rent institution and implementation, in Muscovy, Gujarat or Shandong depended upon continuous flows of monetary media across territory, and of relatively stable long-distance maritime trades in vast quantities of copper, silver and gold, and the possibility of such monetisation and its implementation is hard to conceive without us assuming of those concerned a full contemporary expectation of the relative stability or duration of such importations, and thus, in turn, a certain stability in economic conditions capable of producing goods (say, textiles) for exchange at distance with these metals. The coin in the hand of the poorly endowed artisan in sixteenth-century Zhejiang or eighteenth-century Normandy is likely to be composed of Japanese or Swedish copper, Japanese or American silver, or, if cowry, of supplies from the Maldives;—that is to say, they imply a complex of relationships, production forms, marketing complexes, transportation networks, industries (shipbuilding, a constant supply of instruments for the mint…) across language zones and geographical barriers of relative significance, and thus a fundamental dynamism affecting the mobilisation of work and employment,—of things and persons,—all capable, therefore, of satisfying a certain level of expectation concerning supply, and in response to demand. To avoid misunderstanding, the words « continuum » and « continuity » must be clarified. They refer to a relative density of transitive linkages of all scales and kinds, linkages, so we have claimed, that cross all kinds of conventional «frontier», that are systemic in the sense that local facts, events and institutions cannot be comprehended apart from them (forms of right, local coins, market forms, micro-metrologies, words), but which nonetheless do not refer us to some closed and holistic kind of global « system ». We refer to a world that has developed historically, spontaneously, across extensive geographical 51

One thinks of Kant, who in his Critique of the Faculty of Judgement, establishes that the mere exchange of words between two persons—the communicative, intersubjective act—implies and is the condition of universality: the universal implies the particular, which, as Philonenko remarks in the introduction to his own translation of Kant’s work, ran against the radical separation of the noumenal and phenomenal in the old metaphysics (making individuality incomprehensible), but also against their separation in the sciences right up to the present (cf. ed.’s “Introduction” to Critique de la Faculté de Juger, tr. & intro. Alexis Philonenko, 20). Steiner, in After Babel, makes a similar claim for the ordinary speech act between any two persons as at once a problem of communication and, therefore, an act of translation, concluding that the untranslatability-thesis lacks foundation (cf. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, i, 286–7). Indeed, the proponents of anthropological relativism seem to have considerable difficulty in conceiving the role and significance of « the individual ».

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expanses, in which, therefore, closures must be considered rather as products of history than as prior conditions for it;—they are products that remain contingent to a larger fabric of connections that must be recovered from a documentation; closures are not, then, history’s first step. Wallerstein’s « capitalist world-system », or Lenin’s « imperialism », indeed refer to ideas of globalist « system », exported and organised from a handful of particular centres; but what I am referring to are spontaneous, multicentric, simultaneous developments in the institutions of production, trade and exchange, and among numerous other kinds of relationship—an infrastructure of « accidents », so to speak, in which even more globalist forms of connection might subsequently develop, although precisely because there was this prior, more spontaneous, receptive ground of connection in which further developments might subsequently root themselves. In the eleventh and fifteenth centuries we are concerned in Euro-Asia with the «systematic», not with « systems »—if, for example, we wish to speak of capitalism, we might say that its first scattered, multicentric appearances had occurred within a world already connected by trades and exchanges, thus spontaneously … and accidentally, as it were.—But what, indeed, should properly define what we even mean by capitalism in such early mercantile conditions? Is there trade before capitalism and if so what determines our identification of it? As I regard the question for myself, capitalism is present from the very moment when exchange is closely connected with accumulation of means to reinvest in that trade, and therefore based upon commodification, however incipient, of the kind to be defined below. In short, the conventional notion of a mass of diverse, externally heterogenous, individual « cultures », « penetrated » and integrated by latterly emergent universalist forces (be it termed the market, the cash nexus, colonialism, Reason, capitalism, modernisation, &c.), must be unfounded—judged a presumptuous and even false knowledge,—as also the expression of this movement in terms of transitions from relatively small, enclosed moral communities to a truly economic form of society, or from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft (qua-Polanyi and -Dumont, and symptomatically often termed as a « disenchantment of the world »). All such formulae spuriously imply the same late appearance of extensive networks of connection and integration at the expense of « prior » local difference (or « culture »)—such views also form the feeding ground of nationalist mythologies and this very fact should alert us to a problem.52 52

In “State-Formation Reconsidered”, in The Invisible City, I discuss and provide references for the organisational interdependence, or symbiosis, linking the appearance and further development of « village communities » in several parts of the world (once treated as

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A further, very important implication concerns assumptions about the character of the historical process itself: is it characterised by a unilinear evolutionary model, as used to be thought (and which underlies all stage-organised historicist schemas), or is it multilineal, as scholars are beginning to argue? The rediscovery of cultural and economic difference—and, yes, of continued and rampant differentiation, in the present—has stimulated ideas of multidirectional evolution (because such difference seems to contradict the homogenising tendencies assumed as having resulted from at least a century of rampantly internationalising capitalism). We are now told that all of the world’s « cultures »/« societies » imply so many different, essentially idiosyncratic directions and movements. However, let us be prudent before such attractive assertions, as if the world were what we would have liked it to be; we must take it for what it is and was, whether in 1100 or 2100.53 Indeed, in contrast, this is a point concerning which the literature on « world economic integration » proves especially significant, since demonstrating that, despite paradigmatic local contrasts between institutions of many kinds and levels, and between coinages and measurement systems well into the nineteenth century, such differences are inseparable from broader forces and processes of a global kind, and to which the very idea of « integration » points. Then, a different kind of regard is required in order to explain the very fact of such apparently radical diversity, not that which we ourselves have determined through our very modes of thinking and approach towards the social object, but instead that factual diversity actually confronted on the ground and in the record, that which represents the kinds of frontier that exchanges and markets intentionally confront and seek to traverse through acts that I have interpreted as acts of translation. Then, what is called for is what elsewhere I have come to call an « explanation of difference », precisely of that kind of difference seen effecting, say, culture or the commodity. Consequently, we need a full reassessment of what should be meant by words such as « evolution » or « development ». Here we may suggest, on the basis of our propositions, that interconnections between different levels of organisation (say, the synthesis of different overlapping levels in the circulation of goods and moneys seen to enter any particular market place or market network), implies that local developments

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r­ elics of tribal, ethnic, and egalitarian origins), with the rise of market capitalism, thus with marketisation, fiscalisation and, ineluctably, with class-formation, and thus with the very formation and structuration of states. The book I propose to complete in the near future concerning the class foundations of the development of complex society and the state, and thus, in turn, of settled agriculture and its early commodification and monetisation, confronts directly, indeed thematically, this question.

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of whatever scale cannot be merely random (blind to context, autonomous, self-acting, « egotistic ») even in, say, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, because, despite appearances and normative logic, their peculiarities—the features that make them appear so utterly local and « exotic »—do not arise because of such « separateness ». What we loosely designate as localities and regions, therefore, were not separate from the developments and contexts of a broader continuum of marketing relationships (they cannot be solipsist, in the predominant sense intended by habitual approach to the subject, by cadre of research, or, consequently, by generalisation and explanation). Thus the fourth component of the argument: Proposition 4. Historical change is neither predictable nor fully determined, but neither is it random, each case unconnected with the others. The cumulative, shifting, long-term, historical processes taking place throughout the extensive territories of the exchange-continuum and embodied by that continuum—and in which we now come to identify some entity (object of circulation … means of payment … or some cultural trait)—­establishes a nexus of institutional conditions that simultaneously inform, facilitate and constrain (sets direction to) ensuing local developments—a veritable momentum that also acts as an inertia, opening possibilities that simultaneously constitute limits.54 These problems of connection, determinism and direction, may be connected with Darwin’s very radical conception of « environment »: it is no « container » but constituted as much by the populations of organisms found in it as by physical and climatic conditions, or by micro-variation in the content of soils. The historical continuum (its space/time) is also no mere container, but instead constituted by the populations of acts and actors, institutional connections, flows of relationships, commodities, words, and so forth, found in each fragment of that continuum, and effecting or influencing every member of it, although—as we now see formulated in biology—mediated in terms of a diversity of mutually-implicated organisational levels and centres. 54

Pointing to such justly famous and magisterial studies as those of Evans Pritchard on the Nuer in an almost unmentioned context of colonial rule (these are studies that inaugurated my own adolescent fascination with anthropology), one should ask how much our knowledge of culture, as an anthropology, is determined by such exclusions and limits of attention. The question to be asked is the extent and manner in which such contexts constrain the relative freedom of intervention (of individual choice and decision) of particular participants in commodity-related activities. I discuss this question in Chapter 3, §iii.

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There is a further corollary, therefore: Proposition 5. The continuum of medieval and early-modern times has no single centre, not even a handful of particular centres conceived of as the unique, unidirectional source/s of the forces effecting integration. Instead, its character is one of prolific multicentredness. I mean to emphasise, here, that if the continuum has meaning, every subject (every person), every market, every administration (however local), and every institution, at whatever level and of whatever scale, is, in an essential sense, « a centre », members of an immense population of centres of reception, choice, decision and practice, all agents, and all, respectively, acting upon the societal « environment », constituting it, constituting such contexts, although obviously in different ways and to different degrees (the point however is that a population of individual actors, including those, relatively speaking, at the base of the social ladder, even impoverished—say, those who work at loom or in field—may be seen to possess a most significant constitutive effect).55 The metropolitan cities and dominant markets of nineteenth-century capitalism were previously but participant centres in a multicentred world, even given their ever-growing dominance and reach, and as witnessed, for example, in eighteenth-century Bohemia and Bengal. The overlap of different scales of market activity implies this judgement, the continuum being populated by an abundance of such « centres », each entrepôt being an organisational meetingpoint for the superabundance of commodities, traders, words and ideas passing into and through it, but also reorganised within it, and streaming from it. Each may be considered a centre of collective, institutional decision making, « reading » its contexts, composing, producing within an inter-subjective field of such markets, no matter their differences of scale. For example, past metrologies and monetary systems can only be understood in this light—as the generation of a multiplicity of inter-relatable standards intentionally organised both to differentiate and to relate … differentiate the one from the others yet in mutual relationship with those others, … and rather than being regarded as an evidence for their absence. A new metrology or measure, a new coin or commodity, the invention of a novel local standard, occurs as if a location among a 55

This assertion may seem provocative to those concerned with social differentiation, but there are generalised conditions concerning peasant agriculture where it is precisely those pushed to the margins of economic survival that are forced into most frequent market relationships and monetary exchanges, and as, for example, encountered in my own research on the pre-colonial Deccan.

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topography of locations, each with its particular purposes and characters, thus an environment consisting of potentially innumerable metrologies, measures, coins, commodities, standards, each invented ad hoc, in particular circumstances, and knowingly, thereby knowingly entering that « environment », and modifying it in doing so.56 This is not to say that there is not dominance or order among these different actors, but that every major source of particular forces has its context that can only be comprehended in terms of a larger frame of multicentred organisational order. Then, in a certain sense, a market is like a personage, neither fully determined nor fully autonomous, but a veritable micro-centre of organisation and purpose, constantly importing, recomposing and exporting the inputs derived from outside In short, whether in the ninth and tenth centuries, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the world has always been complex in its connectedness, complex in all of its dimensions of observation and discussion, and it is the nature and ordering of that complexity in space and over time that may be seen to change, and do so without arrest, and which now needs a clear and concerted programme of research and reflection. Finally, there are two methodological observations: Proposition 6. Academic specialisations, and a variety of particularist ideologies, popular and intellectual—plus their many institutional forms— constitute part of the reason for the fragmented perspectives characterising the present. It is by means of the reconstruction of broader contexts, and, where economic history is concerned, by shifting description and explanation beyond the merely monetary and economic, that we may begin to see the connectedness transcending the medieval and earlymodern « worlds ». It should be clear that even as a statement of mere possibility, these propositions would serve to generate an open universe of possible and reasonable research, that, in turn, provides the framework in terms of which the validity of traditional methodologies and approaches may a-posteriori be judged. And

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The making public of such local knowledge, for example in publishing standard lists of daily exchange rates, of listing the standard weights and sizes of cloths entering each market, or of attempts to stabilise them by published orders and declarations, points to fields of known relationship in which any measure, of whatever kind, was formed and judged, and in which certain measures such as price and costs of exchange may be seen to fluctuate according to both supply and demand, and social and political pressures and events; see. in the “Bibliography” the entry for the Ordonnances du Roy … of 1561 and 1563 published at Lyon. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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yet, it is the old aesthetic of closure that largely determines approaches and research strategies in all of the social sciences, including economic history, whether empirical, empiricist or theoretical. Thus: Proposition 7. The above propositions have very serious consequences concerning basic dispositions towards any field of research, and these dispositions should then be taken to imply radical reform of the content of university education itself. They would then constitute part of our own self-regarding professional ethic of approach to a matter of enquiry. I shall consider these final questions below. ii

Sampling as Method

The problem of complexity—its recovery and specification—should be approachable from many different directions irrespective of subject matter— even those subject matters in which, at present, it would seem most excluded by current opinion, by theoretical prescription, or through the very forms of knowledge in which a realm of study becomes conventionally accessible to us (as in cultural anthropology). However, certain types of historical evidence are especially susceptible to this task—that is, for the task of facilitating an approach to societal form open to extents of complexity hitherto unappreciated, and that would contribute to a sense of organisational possibility radically different from that generally assumed of the facts covered by such evidence. Even here, their utility for such purpose occurs in spite of the ways in which such fields are ordinarily organised or theorised, because the documentation itself is seen to be spread across a vast scatter of different scales and sites of passage and use, and that together link the most local of acts and institutions with those on the most general of transoceanic scales. In short, such research materials already guarantee a possibility of generating a field of observation reconstituable as complexity, given, however, that one has phrased one’s questioning in such open terms. The evidence concerns markets, commercial institutions, and exchanges, and so too productions of commodities and payment forms throughout the medieval and early-modern centuries in many scattered parts of the continuum. Not only are these subjects highly susceptible to treatments of connection and activity occurring upon a variety of different scales but they have already long been a traditional focus for various types of globalist theory (theories of the market, of imperialism, modernisation, and so forth), although these are generally limited to events taking place from the later nineteenth century (or, in the case of the theorists of dependencia, from the sixteenth century). The Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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problem is not only that such theory actually feeds off conventional ideas of economic and cultural closure, mentioned above (we have already seen that this indeed provides the traditional ground on which the possibility of universalisation is subsequently conceived and thus compromised), but, much worse, that it has hardly, if at all, had any substantial affect on the ordinary, taken-for-granted, compartmentalised conduct of the considerable army of studies concerning economic history. That is to say, its impact upon general knowledge has been minimal; the majority of historians ignore it. Nonetheless, it must be evident that the kinds of subject-matter concerned here (markets, &c.),—as consequence of the very considerable post-war growth in economichistory-related research around the world,—have produced a distribution and density of factual information that can neither be ordered nor explained by traditional knowledge forms. The problem was identified above as deriving from the manner in which a given subject is delimited for research, a process closely attached to the expectations the researcher possesses of a given field. The convenient, necessarily pragmatic, delineation of that field into studiable units, together with a rhetoric of terms and syntactical habitudes tailored to such normative expectations, becomes confused with reality itself, in the sense that, even if justified afterthe-fact as a mere convenience of method, we are given no idea of the kind of complexity (or « order » of complexity)—if such is indeed envisaged—for which such simplifications are supposed to stand as convenient substitutes: the « convenience » comes inevitably to stand for that « reality », as its factual order, its organisation, its limitations, its necessary and actual simplicity—its thematic closure. A sheer absence of expectation will thus forge a method consistent with that absence, while, in turn, a host of new and false claims and disputations will arise upon its basis (as with debates about incommensurability, untranslatability, and so forth). In short, production, commerce and exchange gain substantial illumination—sources of explanation otherwise missing—through systematic attempts to reconstruct the wider ranges of interdependent scale-variable relationships upon which any given act of, say, a production of cloth, or any given market activity rests. Contexts and linkages are established that begin to constitute a fresh kind of knowledge in its own right. Thus production and marketing can be contextualised, (i) in terms of the wider sets of dependencies and constitutive phases of production and marketing itself;57 (ii) in terms of 57

Much of the recent literature on protoindustrialisation was spectacularly concentrated upon weaving, neglecting other phases of production, discussed below, but also neglecting the sources of the tools used in manufacture and of other raw materials, such as dies

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« economy » in the larger sense: for example, finance networks and credit-­ dependencies, the production of exchange media for extensive advance payments to domestic outworkers, marketing structures, all of which need to be reconstituted not typologically or impressionistically, but as specific events and relationships connected in their detail with developments in production itself, as sequences, phasings, and branchings of a more elaborate process or set of processes;58 and (iii) in terms of sectors beyond economy, yet again which are

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and chemicals, which assemble together to complexify the kind of relational nexus involved, thus to go far beyond any mere linear sequence of connections. We may develop some perspective concerning the ongoing, developmental constitution in mind, thus imaginative complexification, of any realisable object or concept in reading Hegel’s brilliant use of his dialectic at the beginnings of the Jenaer Realphilosophie: from line, to area, and thence to volume, and yet further, in the imaginative complexification of what goes to constitute the objects of our attention. Even such metaphors for such complex relations, such as « network », come eventually to seem far too constraining in attempts to represent such complexity, understand its general character (see “Commercial Manufacture & the Protoindustrialisation Thesis”, in Unbroken Landscape). Similarly, the South Asian mint is generally presented as if a mere production-line of gold, silver or copper into coin, yet the raw materials for many of them included regular supplies, from distance, of tough steels for frequent manufacture and replacement of dies, of material for balances, of chemical reagents and alloys, … of personnel, and much else. Where the steel for dies is concerned, for example, the subject (where dies are concerned) is entirely unstudied, but the source is most likely to be what is known as the « Wootz-steel »-manufacturing complexes in southern India, and which supplied subcontinental, middle-eastern and European markets (the Andhra iron and steel manufacturing complex is being studied from an interdisciplinary perspective by the archaeologist Thelma Lowe, of University of California at Berkeley). Such important questions as the manufacture of dies and balances, used in considerable numbers in the mints of the period, are even more neglected. From this single case among the many varied constituents of the minting process, derives a multifactoral problem of conceiving the relationships constituting any particular glance at a production line, especially of those elements for which regularity in supply must constitute a reasonable contemporary assumption for any relatively regular production to be conceivable (a necessary expectation of its possibility in numerous scattered places in any given region). Each such raw material—a chemical reagent, a kind of fuel, a set of instruments (such as a balance, the metal for that balance, the standards of measure for its construction)—presents similar complexes and branchings, connections with other productions and markets, which together build up an architecture or fabric of physical complicity, as it were, and free, open « complexity ». Again, much of the protoindustrial literature had preferred to exclude from detailed attention, mercantile and monetary connections, and even problems of markets and distribution; thus, a whole web of interdependent institutional connections, without which the phenomena themselves can hardly be conceived of as having been possible. Arnost Klima’s studies of production in Bohemia are notable and enlightening exceptions; a useful summation of his positions is given in his “Foreign Trade of Bohemia from the 16th to the 18th Century”.

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bound to be constitutive of the empirical field itself (in particular, below, I have chosen to emphasise the imaginative and conceptual dimensions implicated in production and marketing activities).59 The point about this reconstruction of contexts is that in order to escape the habitual reduction of approach and method and, thereby, to render ourselves apt for acceding to forms in which a just measure of reconstruction becomes possible, the task requires a degree of specification as detailed and finite as the very domain of the phenomena themselves, and which indeed forms part of the life and content of that phenomenal reality. Thus, our object of research becomes decentred, losing one or another finite focus in order to become the context itself, … that context becomes object of a careful, yet ambitious project of full reconstructive attention guided now by a clear consciousness of our ignorance. It is that very consciousness of relative ignorance that hereafter guides approach and method, in this respect: the problem having become the content and organisation of what is now treated as such complexity. There is, first, the question of the kind of empirical order to which production and marketing, by themselves, would appear to refer: what we might expect of them and how far we should extend the net of connections and ramifications—of sheer unending dependence and linkage among the series of phenomena observed in habited, connected space—before deciding that « enough has to be enough ». Some method—some specific criteria—is clearly necessary for limiting a field of research. When we apply such a stop, how should we then protect ourselves—our reconstruction—from the excisions of subject matter, of form, thus their disappearance from the field to be interpreted, and from the distortions that seem inevitably to affect the interpretation itself, caused by such necessary acts of limitation and excision, such as already criticised above? The question of form—our metaphors of « level », « scale », « overlap », and so forth—are especially important in offering means, by generating distinctions and dissonances, to avoid the hierarchical encompassments entailed by closures of one scale or another. Setting the problem in these terms, a particular procedure of avoidance and approach needs to be proposed: 59

For example, I lay emphasis, below, on the view that for production or marketing (for any reasonable actions judged as such an activity) a contemporary would require a minimal degree of access to some measure and kind of detailed knowledge about context, and also a minimal flexibility of choice (thus an exercise of free thought and decision) with respect to the reading of that context, and that knowledge-form must itself be part of the phenomenal evidence and organisation of commoditisation itself. Thus, below, my emphasis on the contemporary publication of merchants’ aids, commercial lexicons, and implements such as portable balances.

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First, then, the rule: The task must be that of fabricating, essentially ad hoc, a method of reconstitutive sampling, and a strategy for such sampling—a sampling of what metaphorically I choose to distinguish and capture as « levels » and « scales », of « linkages », « sites » and « sectors »—in a manner capable of representing complexity of infrastructure and of linkage among organisational forms, although, obviously, in a fragmentary fashion that, whilst steadfastly avoiding a mere focus upon any singular territorial or sectoral space, nonetheless remains manageable in terms of research time and effort. This must lead to a rejection of the traditional value placed upon exhaustive or comprehensive treatments of any particular spatial or sectoral focus, whether in terms of exhaustive datacapture, in those of attempts to encompass all available documentation, or in terms of an entire secondary literature, relative to a given research locus or sector. Complexity certainly seems to impose too heavy a burden upon our physical means to conduct research, let alone to conceptualise and synthesise; but we may answer that the sheer volume and density of current research and publication is also making comprehensive cover equally impossible in many areas, as indeed has long been the case in the natural and physical sciences. Besides, it is essential to reiterate that convenience is no argument. The problem is that of developing a satisfactory method of sampling the multiplicity of connectional and organisational form potentially affecting any selection of « local » events and institutions, of whatever scale of incidence that happens to concern us or be implicated by that concern. Might we not select a whole series of dispersed kinds and scales of focus, each one, as when brought together, possessing fresh heuristic value? Second, however, the fields themselves—economics, economic history, as self-constituted, collectively-recognised frames constituting what we conceive to be « the economic »—also mark serious problems of false limitation, thus of significant loss of explanational resources. Yet, it is not difficult to show that neither social, nor administrative, nor « cultural » factors can necessarily be excluded from the central characteristics of commercial exchange and production (of goods and payment forms). It may indeed need to be explained why such factors are not merely marginal to the concerns of economist or economic historian,—why, for example, cultural questions should be abandoned to the anthropologist … the « veritable specialist », or plant speciation to the « botanist »! The imaginative dimension, if treated as an essential aspect of the constitution of institutional forms and activities, and of their continuous existence, thus of the agency that generates the very « accident » we call history (of all of that which constitutes its potential subject matter), may be shown to play a central role in, for example, production and marketing decisions. We have

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already seen that monetisation facilitated communicational, institutional and administrative reorganisation on a pervasive and generally complexifying scale (the ramifications of which concern the most intimate detail of societal order itself);—a set of monetary reforms might indeed be instituted precisely with such « non-economic » ends in view, although, in turn, such extensions and changes in monetary life will clearly have immense « economic » and cultural consequences.60 The question, once more, is that of generating a method of sampling that, on the one hand, seeks out the flows of connection running back and forth across all conventional closures, whilst, on the other hand, enabling selection according to properly worked out criteria that have nothing to do with professional ideas about propriety or convenience.61 A certain change in the idea of what constitutes a subject matter—an object for research—is apparently involved. Third,—and this again concerns the question of limits and of their unfortunate consequences,—I shall exemplify these first two points concerning this rule of sampling and method by showing that production already takes us beyond urban, or even rural manufacture, into the very heart of the vast populous realm of what traditionally has been treated as a separate, often pre- or noneconomic zone: peasant agriculture (together with the assumed mental conditions associated with it). The point concerns less that of part-time employments (weaving, &c.), than agriculture itself: that vast reservoir of production by country people who across vast, more or less densely habited territories on all continents, sowed marketable crops such as millets, rices, cottons, mulberries or teas.62 In integrating the production line of commodities with this 60 61

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Monetisation processes and major monetary reforms accompanying large scale conquest, and thus active processes of administrative integration and extension, can be pointed to, for example, in both South Asia and China. “…and that false prudence that complements this evil in leaving it be, and in the hypocrisy of the error and of such scepticism”. From le Moniteur (13 Nivose an iv [1796]), being a review in praise of Kant’s opuscule, Projet de Paix perpétuelle, quoted by Alexis Philonenko, L’Oeuvre de Kant, ii, 264–5. It is still common to treat peasant agriculture as a vast residual sector beyond that narrower realm in which major economic currents of manufacture and trade are supposedly confined, and in respect of which such currents may be considered « external », and, correspondingly, assumed and theorised as invisible, unread and unreadable, to its inhabitants (thus without implications for the sociology and culture of the peasant). In relation to this past, the protoindustrialists subsequently conceived of domestic manufacture in the peasant household as a transitional form, a kind of breakaway stage from « traditional » production forms, a separate sector of the contemporary landscape seen to ­encompass a protoform of industrialisation. This is a good example of how method, approach and theory (limiting the field of specific research to a single sector, in this case to handloom weaving) unite in mutual self-confirmation and self-justification.

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s­ ector, the task of explanation necessarily confronts radical implications concerning the very manner in which we would read the entire empirical world (as a kind of order), and raises fresh problems for explanation and description whose individual solution must thence illuminate … clarify … the formal character or nature of the wider nexus. Fourth, there is the problem of style and vocabulary, and it must not be underestimated. The reconstruction of complexity escapes the ordinary narrative forms and means applied naturalistically, as it were, by the historian. The sequential, descriptive mode is indeed essential to the unfolding of molecular biological and genetic sequences, as also to the phrasing of micro-evolutionary events, but it is also—as inherited rather than reconstructed—a severe obstacle to the need to express and describe the very complexity of structural levels, of their interconnectedness with one another, and of their multicentredness. Every level is as specific and empirical as the other, every scale of organisation has its existential presence as a positive facticity. But in these respects, as fields especially concerned with the essentially accidental character of its organic and human material and evidence, both biology and history seem heuristically equivalent to one another, both constituted in time, and temporally. I address this question of the « accident » and the « contingent » in “More than a Preface”, the essay that inaugurates this volume and I refer the reader to that chapter. The consequences, however, resulting from stepping outside habitual cadres and modes of expression, however, are new demands concerning choice of language and its syntactical organisation, and even concerning the choice of a narrative style.63

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However, once agriculture itself—including the most generalised day to day pursuits of that agriculture—is seen as a necessary phase in the production and marketing of the commodity, questions of general organisation, encompassing different contemporaneous and evidently interdependent sectors, must come to the fore, thus displacing approaches based upon parcelisation until otherwise proven relevant. Linearity might seem simply a fact of nature, but as we reconstruct societal linkage, it can be seen to take on an increasingly stark profile as an accessible and convenient means of reconstitution and expression. I have frequently cited a non-Cartesian approach to time as temps vécu (time as constituted in being lived) and for which Ilya Prigogine applies the metaphor of the city (its « chronotopography », as he puts it): that of Rome, characterised (i) by its heterogeneous temporal architectural topography, accumulation of buildings and parts of buildings dating from different moments in time and different epochs, and subjected to numerous successive modifications, &c., and yet, (ii) the simultaneity and connectivity between all its fragments, its history and interdependence as if in cross-­ section ;── a metaphor obviously relevant to the historian’s task (“Probing into Time”, The A. Katzir-Katchalsky Lecture.). However, there are other ways of understanding time: Kant’s version is equally seductive and, in the present situation, where the turn to « complexity » seems to outrun our imaginative faculties and yet constitute the very problem

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Thus, once we step over the threshold and confront complexity as a value of the real in its own right, there enters a serious problem about how to use before us, it might even seem more potentially open, and less virtual: “Time is nothing other than the form of inner sense, meaning that it is the form of our intuitions and of our inner condition, since it cannot be determined by external appearances, not can it belong to some form (einer Gestalt) or state of things, and such like, but instead acts to determine the relationship among representations in our own inner state (or being / Zustande)…;— as if Rome were but a condition of mind in the representation of what is before us. And because this inner intuition generates no configurative form (of its own / Gestalt), so we seek to compensate this complex (Mangel) by means of analogies, and posit the sequence of time in terms of an unending continuous line in which a multitude becomes arranged as a series, as if possessed but of a single dimension, and projecting all the properties of that line as if those of time, yet excepting one: that the parts of the first, [which visually appear as] simultaneous, become, [in our experience of the latter], sequential to one another. This indicates that the representation of time is itself intuition, because all its relational forms become posited as external intuition”. Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 76–7 [Ak. iii.60, A33/B49–50] (Oeuvres Philosophiques, i, 794–5 & Kemp-Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 77). Then, Rome once more—indeed, any old city—becomes an appropriate metaphor for this view of time: a means of expression of complex relationship, even though an evident simplification of the complexity of what really exists, as in our case. In short, he would have agreed with Prigogine that time has no separate existence from the things represented as if located in it—it is no containing envelope (a mere external scale of seconds or years);—but whereas for Prigogine it would be an aspect of the things themselves in their dynamic existential being (and thus posited, inclusive in the constitution of the new mechanics), for Kant it is merely a necessary condition of mind by means of which things can and must be thought:—means and constraint! It is a « Heisenbergian » solution, that establishes a distance between the forms of reality and our attempts to represent them, necessarily limited, thus say between the common-sensical Newtonian and Euclidian form of such constituted objects and their reality, the latter seen as subject, say, to the laws of relativism and the new mechanics. The question of the legitimacy of Kant’s Newtonian and Euclidian interpretation of the constraints affecting perception, say of common sense, and human practice, will be discussed in Ch. 3. Hegel’s view of time is equally important: that it is never given but instead made, made through the act of being, thinking and acting, and through which we compose time, being always actively engaged on the very cliff-edge of time, constituting it; but also as a method of construction in thought, a dialectic of time, because, once achieved, thus « ­realised », it—time as passage, time as history—disappears into the eternal truth of an eternal present, his « Itzt ». It becomes the utopian Rome, say Campanella’s city. Krzysztof Pomian, in L’Ordre du Temps, like Prigogine, refers to “time intrinsic to the processes studied…” (94), and he also demonstrates the complexity of represented time even as represented in the various forms of human expression (say, in its numerous overlapping cultural representations), and for which see my “Interpreted Time & Interpreter’s Time”, in Unbroken Landscape. An eighteenth century Marathi document of the Western Deccan, say administrative or concerning some popular right, may cite up to three different conventional contemporary reference cadres for time, one after the other. This allowed contemporaries to possess a distanced perspective on such usage, a distance lacking today among populations that utilise only a single method of reference.

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language in order to represent the complexities of connection whereby the real comes to appear to us under such new scrutiny, since, by choice, we are stepping outside the habitual norms of expression—what we regard as an elegant and normative use of language—walking into an unknown sphere for which both the thought is both unprepared, even incomplete, yet to develop in face of the evidence, and language itself become awkward … yes, rigorously inconvenient, yet necessarily so, because in a certain manner experimental!— For the text itself must present to the author’s mind and that of the reader … thus represent as best as best can, an image of that dawning new reality as close to the latter as possible. As close to a something to which we are as yet still attempting to give satisfactory form in mind, and by doing so improve, even alter method and approach.—And, yes, in spite of the deliberations of a Richard Rorty, et al. Nature may indeed continue to elude us, but that artificial reality of culture is of our own making and must be accessible to us with such effort. Language must come despite such difficulty to correspond with the facticity of the latter, in so far as we have come to grasp its complexity, thus avoiding all the temptations of convenience: thus turning aside from accepted « rhetoric » of the social sciences grounded in the common sensical, such as laid out before us by Kant in the First Critique: Newtonian classical mechanics, a Euclidian sense of space, their styles of giving form to things and thus their accompanying phraseology, metaphorical devices and syntactical commonplaces, as they have come to be entirely internalised in social-science: uninterrogated!64 The latter are as unsuited to this task of representing … phrasing complex relationships, as was that inheritance by Darwin of an expressive means inherited directly from the creationist biology of his past and still active among colleagues: a language drawn from habits of artificial selection, that artifice acting as the great metaphor that continues to cause severe

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I also refer the reader to Fink, vi. Cartesianische Meditation, §10, and especially 145, where it is language indeed—the invention of an apt language of conscious phenome­ nological knowing and expression (such as I associate with the dialectic of the young ­Hegel)—that is brought into question. This is again one of the more obvious corollaries of the insufficiencies of Pollard and Cameron’s prose; the « conveniences » of their particular use of language mark an absence of sufficient reflection on the problems at issue, and that come generated by such usage. Referring to Heinrich Herz’s view of symbolic language (“inner fictions”) expressed in Die Prinzipien der Mechanik (Leipzig, 1894), 1ff, Ernst Cassirer remarks that with it “In place of the vague demand for a similarity of content between image and thing, we now find expressed a highly complex logical relation…”, an inner change in the concept of the image, even though still couched in the language of the copy theory of knowledge: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, I, 75.

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theoretical difficulties in biology to this very day.65 Thus, I insist: this is no trivial question that can be set aside for the « specialists », or for some « tomorrow »: it concerns how we take our next steps into our own future, and engages our responsibility. Vocabulary is the most insidious of our difficulties: take the notion of « system » pervading the language utilised by many writers concerned with entropy (in economics, for example), but also the language of the historian and anthropologist. We use words that directly play onto paper a certain vision of the structure of the world, and thus of its content, drawn from the countless conversations and texts in which we have been engaged during a lifetime, and that insidiously have given form to our habitual ways of thinking, cutting tracks into mind that seem thereafter natural and proper as ways of expressing and referring to things,—a veritable library of communicative resources, of classificational and perceptual markers and givers of form,—and that constitutes a massive inertia inhibiting any spirit of reform and critique, … blocking … making absurd … the very possibility of reading a different order. For example, the words—« cultures » (plural, thus substantive), or « the society » or « a people » (also substantivised by use of the definite and indefinite articles), « the Chinese Economy », « economies », thus that same use of the definite and indefinite articles, or their expression in the plural (these seem to be 20th-­century usages par excellence)—presuppose a specific reading of social and geographical order that we have already observed as being an obstacle to the kinds of societal extension and complexification that are here at issue; already the world has been carved up into its games and players: the regions, nations, continents and systems, which, as if of origin, are an assumed ground for the ­conflictual play of a drama that has no issue except in the myth and violence of the present (as in « ethnic purification »).66 The words of the sentence, the contrasted figures of a statistical table, as in Pollard’s prose and tables, are an example of a style of thinking that prevents us even approaching our chosen objects. « System » (« a » system or « the » system »), and its euphemisms, represent a certain way of viewing reality of which complexity forms no part, or is considerably reduced. Of course, there is a heavy price to pay in seeking to forge a less compromising vocabulary and syntax. It will depart from the elegance, brevity and figurations of common sense and common parlance. This price is a loss in the

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Cf. “The Other Species World”, in Unbroken Landscape. I discuss this aspect in the inaugural essay of this book, “More than a Preface”, but intend to treat it in more appropriate detail in what I intend as my next book, one that concentrates more on the phenomenology of our practises and forms of expression. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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­ aturalness of familiar locution, a consuming awkwardness of expression, and n as result a loss in that quality of conviction born by normative words and usages. A divorce, a necessary and even wanted distance comes, and must come, to be generated between writer and reader, the cost of which is likely to be a loss in the ordinary empathy engaged by a reader when entering a text, yet who, in such a case, is asked to work with the author in spite of such obstacles. The reader will discover a degree of disorder, even of uncertainty, in the text that must be directly proportional to the incompleteness of current ideas and thoughts—to their experimental status—and that cuts a pale figure before customary certainties. One must assume that risk, avoid the convenience of an easy accord between expectation and word. Fifth, « sampling » refers to a method that only takes detailed shape as one comes to accumulate a sense of the range of connections, their distribution and scales, covered by the problem with which one is concerned. Thus, we would sample levels, directions, and institutional linkages, and, then, as further problems of order and organisation open up to view, make further moves into exemplar areas associated with such problems, and for which documentation exists; yet every sample must be treated as specific: as a specific this-orthat kind of case, this-or-that kind of institution, this-or-that kind of trade and production linkage—none, therefore, to be treated as typological, thus stereotypical—but all hinting at a larger fabric of structures which surpasses them, and towards which they point as a suspected architecture of the societal. Such sampling, like description and interpretation, must be built up gradually, a posteriori, as one accumulates results, discovers indications, constructs temporary paths, and thus accumulates the heterogenous architectures of the connected « city ». Sampling must also be complex. iii

Resources for Sampling, and a Hypothesis

The examples listed below are not samples in the sense discussed above. Instead, they merely represent the kinds of resource that enable the constitution of such a methodology based upon sampling. The divisibility and scattering of textile production across territory and through society; its ubiquitous world-wide role as the leading industrial pursuit before industrialisation, probably on all continents; its employment of large populations of domestic and artisan labour in town and country; and its massive variegated consumer-base; all make the production and marketing of textiles a fertile base for unpackaging complexity. Similarly, moneys, in these same centuries, those preceding industrialisation,—and likewise differentiated, that very differentiation closely related to a huge, variegated commercial infrastructure of distribution, by pervasive, function-targeted market Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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s­ pecification, and by a massive consumer base—constitute far more than just another useful example for exploring our points. We must focus our attention upon these two domains, before—in the following chapter, Chapter 2— ­exploring textile manufacture and marketing in much greater detail. We assume, however, that complexity is demonstrable in terms of any empirical material, even in turning back to the classical materials generally utilised to justify extreme empirical closure and reduction, and methodological compartmentalisation (the divisions of the fields of study, and the emphasis on the empirical basis of cultural incommensurability, &c.), but textiles and payment forms prove especially apposite for our purpose;—and once the argument has been presented their should be little reason to resist further discussion of the issue. A

Textile Market-censuses67

We start with an impressionistic evocation of a kind of document—a listing, or tabulation—that implicates a serious problem concerning the ordering of economic space. As with the lists recording the different types of coin imported into any particular market (see below), those that list the names of textiles and the markets from which they had been dispatched, and possibly their price and volume, impart a clear view of the manner in which such market places act as spaces for synthesis of a more or less variable range of highly s­ pecialised, 67

The two documents referred to here are: (i) “Account of the Several Kinds of Cloths that are Imported to this Shaher [sāhar = town] from Different Countries”, in: “Particular Account of the … Tallook of Ahmednuggur”, 13–14, in: Mackenzie Collection General (vol. xiv [1806]) [India Office Library], & (ii) “Account of Cloths Imported into City of Pune in 1819/20 on 9500–10000 Bullock Loads”, in: Revenue Department Volumes (vol. xvii, 1823), 523–43 [Maharashtra State Archives at Bombay]. In the latter ninety-three manufacturing places are listed for these different importations, often together with the major entrepôt centres through which they are later marketed on their way to Pune. Most of the former are specified by town name, or, presumably, by first collecting centre (for rural manufactures), but in one case we have a general designation, Bengal, that was itself a major region of production of exported variety within the subcontinent and overseas. Concerning the dates and contingent circumstances of the censuses, 1806 was twelve years before final conquest of this part of South Asia by the East India Company, and 1819/20 one year after the event. Throughout these years, the regional economy had entered a period of terminal depression, although Pune continued its old role as administrative and garrison town. More surprising still, is that major manufacturing centres such as Gujarat and Bengal (represented in these censuses), and inter-Asian and subcontinental, commercial activity, more generally, had been systematically depleted by earlier colonial activity since the 1760s. The long quotation from Foster, The English Factories in India, considered below, for the 17th-century indicates a completely different, much higher and more complex level of activity in the subcontinent. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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differentiated goods, a crowd, so to speak, of different kinds of textiles and part-textiles, each dispatched from a different centre of craft and manufacture, another entrepôt, and along some specific geo-commercial trajectory among the many of all those that come together in that particular market-place. Such trajectories operate across widely different scales of distance and distribution, and thus of differential commercial significance. It would be fruitful to map a collection of such neighbouring markets in terms of this data: generate a pictorial view of those patterns of shipment across topographical space and of the manner in which they come together for further efforts of transformation in various neighbouring points of demand and supply. The emphasis is indeed upon synthesis, upon the intermeshing of such variable commercial trajectories in all such market places, their conversions, their collection together and their new joint-reclassification and nomination, and also their transformation into values exchangeable for one another, and much else (variable as type, distance of shipment, scale of systematic linkage, &c.). Then, if we examine a larger fraction of territory in which many local and supra-local market-places are situated, this notion of momentary, channelled, place- and time-located, intensive syntheses of a dense trans-territorial nexus of differentiated production and marketing trajectories, scales and levels, must demand a much more careful analysis of precisely how such differentiated market networks operate in both societal and territorial space: we have a nexus of such points at which an uninterrupted flow and occasion of such events in which synthesis takes place, can be observed, and, as we shall see, where institutions and instrumentation are organised to prepare such possibility, and to make of them the expected, taken-for-granted properties of what the word « market » should signify to us everywhere it is encountered in the continuum. That is to say, that such listings must imply important problems of interpretation: we can no longer accept the conventional sociologistic view of past economy as being adequately characterised by the notion of closed, geographically separated economic regions, nor, indeed, accept any closed view of local market operations. Much of the text below will explore such critical points. The lists themselves concern two small upland market towns in a region of South Asia that, in contrast to others such as Gujarat and Bengal, was relatively poorly developed where commercial manufacture, market agriculture, and level of urbanisation were concerned. Furthermore, these particular lists focus merely upon one part process of what, effectively, is generally—as we shall discover—dispersed through territory and workshop into several part processes all of which go to compose, market after market, a single line of production whereby a series of commodity objects lead from one to the other to become finished cloth. In this sense, it is as if we were reading a phenomenological Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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description of how mind itself constitutes its object, a page of Hegel, and yet in such cases crystallised as a concrete distribution of material facts: yarn, mixture of yarns, undyed cloth, dyed cloth, and so forth. In both cases, however, it is indeed mind that guides the process, decision, choice of type, a planned procedure, intention and will, externalisation into one perfectly tangible phase after another, thus moments of collection and classification, reclassification, naming and renaming at each stage, evaluation, dispute about quality and value, acts of exchange and a final reduction to quality in the hands of the consumer. Mind, speaking abstractly and generally, must have the larger process in mind when constituting any particular local decision concerning it. A very large number of different types of named and priced cloth arrive in these small towns from different points of the compass, some after passing across many hundreds of kilometres and through different entrepôts. Thus, such documents permit observation of the multidirectional traffics affecting specialised cloths and that traverse any particular large region, finding selling points in numerous relatively small centres, whether for consumption or further ongoing process and passage. We may add that this sublevel of distributional « synthesis » integrates intimately with a context constituted by many other scales and levels of textile distribution; Indian finished cloths are wellknown as having formed part of global trades in textiles, involving markets in West Africa, the Americas, other parts of Asia, and Europe, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.68

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E.g. Jacques Peuchet, Dictionnaire universel de la Géographie commerçante, ii, 797: a list headed “Rates concerning an assortment [in exchange for] 450 blacks [slaves] and 30000 pounds of morphil to be traded in the river of Benin (Tarif contenant un état d’assortiment pour une cargaison de 450 noirs et 30000 livres de morphil, à traiter dans la rivière de Benin)…”, includes among, presumably-French “…camelots, perpétuanes, petit satins, 60 pièces mouchoirs Bengale & 60 dites Indienne en Mozaïque [explicitly engaged in the slave trade]…”, all being kinds and conditions of cloth, but all of which I have chosen to translate. By the 18th century, the typological category called « Indiennes », which in turn consisted of several sub-varieties, were manufactured in the Near East and in France; see e.g. Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie et Commerce de Levant d’Alep à Marseille; but the commercial dictionaries are full of such information of typological « imitation ». In the text, however, Peuchet refers to cloths, used in this same trade, derived from other sources: “red cloths and scarlets … all kinds of fine cottons, woolens, linens … red velvets … Harlem cloths…”. Seen from the perspective of Benin, and merely from the perspective of cloth, we are dealing with a near global market, and it becomes global when we refer to, say, the Atlantic trades in all their various forms and kinds of inter-dependence, and in which Indian cloths flowed into the Spanish-American colonies, and the colonies of North America. Here, I am using the word « global » as reference to a space of conjuncture of differing levels and scales, and that thereby marks out for the researcher a problem of organisation and relationship. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Raw Cottons

We now engage with a documentation that, simply as text, is complex. It is complex in terms of its particular origins and composition, its subjective grounds, and also in terms of an object-field of concern possessing unexpected properties. It is itself comprised of a series of more local sub-reports concerning the marketing of « raw cottons » in the larger region of Bengal, one of the great textile production centres in the early modern world. These sub-reports and the main report itself date from the end of the eighteenth century, as also do the market censuses discussed above.69 Raw cotton, wools and silks—the materials for manufacture that precede the preparation of spun yarns—present a picture closely complementary to that observed above in the case of finished cloths: thus, of highly dispersed and specialised local productions of specific differentiated varieties, each of which, like the cloth itself, is produced for particular market needs … responding to a specific demand … and, thus, for particular production and market trajectories. « Bengal » is a fragment of a much more extensive entirety of textile specialisation, circulation and distribution, cut off by the political setting of the report from that greater context. In this fraction, Bengal, all of the different phases in the growing, manufacturing, marketing and consumption of cotton are found in close but differentiated contiguity, all intermeshed in an elaborate nexus of discrete and interconnected interaction. Yet, « Bengal » is not sufficient as a frame for considering any of these particular phases in a systematic manner. The scope and field of interaction is far greater—we must say that its definition as a space is one of the principal objects of the research (and the answer itself will be « complex »)—and also, simultaneously, remarkably parcelised into microphases and levels, each of which has a significant role in the preparation of a given « good » through space and time. But raw-cotton production itself, when encountered empirically, also shows a remarkable degree of specialised differentiation in its own right— that is, apart from all other phases of textile making—a specialisation directed, from the start, towards market destinations, places, often places of passage rather than of a new phase of manufacture, to which particular varieties of « raw ­cotton » were destined (and, thus, such variety is not reducible to the sceptic’s dogma: an evidence of mere economic isolation and of local, exotic 69

Appendix to Consultation 20 August 1790, “Cotton from this District”, in Bengal Commercial & Shipping Consultations 6 August to 29th September, 1790, 145–269 [iol: P.155.81] [hereafter Bengal Cottons Report (1790)]. The report is accurately and sensitively paraphrased by Sinha, Economic History of Bengal, i, Chapter vii. The original manuscript was located for me by dr. Nico den Tuinder during his own research at the India Office Library (British Library); I examined it in detail thereafter. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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­ articularism). The report reveals this specificity, declares the sources and p trajectories of the goods concerned, as a useful commercial information. However, the very phrase « raw cotton » reveals problems untreated in the secondary literature; they seem to be unexpected and to implicate further problems of interpreting the larger set of connections, that we shall wish to examine in particular detail in Chapter 2: Many of these so-called « raw cottons » derive from other, often very distant parts of the set of neighbouring, political, state-forming entities then constituting South Asia (in this respect, equivalent to Europe); they are imported by land and sea along numerous trade routes, past political frontiers (they may briefly pass one another moving in opposite directions along the same routes), into and through a variety of subsidiary markets and phases of collection, each with its specific tasks that affect the content and form of the product; while other varieties, grown in the region, are consumed both in Bengal and beyond, exported elsewhere. Thus, what passes for « raw cotton » in the report turns out to be a schematic designation for many specific varieties « manufactured », or otherwise prepared, as members of a typology (often a typology of a typology, and so forth)— each with its public designation and each such designation associated with a corpus of select properties, also discussed in the report, and also publicly brought to mind or assumed whenever that name is mentioned; this is true not only in the field but through its whole course through time and space as it comes to be processed, repeatedly marketed, reclassified with other « like » kinds from elsewhere, and transported again and again, until the moment when they reach markets in which they are distributed to spinners. It is indeed as if in analogy with the veritable phenomenology of an object, a phenomenology on a cultural, conscious and intentional level. Many such types, after various stages of marketing and processing (that is, prior to spinning), would be shipped overseas to China or to different parts of Europe. Exactly the same sense of a complex, multi-directional, typologically diverse, craft-­microspecialised, nexus of difference and relationship, and of a connectibility from one phase of constitution to another, is conjured up before our imagination as we read of, or seek to re­ construct such sequences, and just as we have already found in the lists of finished cloths, although one that this time also evokes the problem of what we should mean and understand by the word « variety » when applied to the crop itself:—the problem of precisely to what this idea of « variety », mentioned in such reports, actually refers,—and an independent question of considerable importance that we must later investigate in detail. The typology of raw cotton, as destination-defined—defined by demand— must, in turn, refer us forwards to the question of the properties required of kinds of cotton in order to « compose » the different kinds of yarn to be spun Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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from them (and in their turn for manufacturing different typologies of cloth, which are often described as a combination of different varieties of yarn to compose a composite yarn). We thus encounter type itself, the production of type in markets and manufacture, as a difficulty in its own right, for here, we find ourselves confronted by a series of taxonomies, a set of different but obviously intermeshed taxonomical grids, between which, however, there is no simple one-to-one connection; instead, there is a set of relationships that has now to be reconstructed. For, if the document provides the evidence, it takes this difficulty for granted as its own shared and assumed knowledge-base (and that, therefore, requires no interrogation, let alone mention, discussion or explanation, because «understood» by the writers of the report). It implies, as corollary, that multiplicity, diversity, scattering of « agencies » (of agent-participants)—distributed through territorial, habitational and societal space—are keys to understanding the extraordinary fragmentation and extension that characterises production and marketing of « textiles ». Below, we shall see that so called « raw cottons » require a further interpretive exercise in order to determine where, in field or market, or at which phase of marketing, any particular typological denomination derives: the names we pick up for this stuff called « raw », in a contemporary letter or price list, need to be decoded. Note, that the point here is not that of refuting the possibility of generalising and interpreting, but instead of suggesting that generalisation must comprehend this complexity of organisation if it is to explain anything— that without such a concern, far from reducing things to a convenient order, we in fact falsify that order. Taxonomy itself, the successive acts of designation, becomes the focus of study and interest in its own right, part of the anthropology of the question. C

Pre-spun Wools & Woollen Yarns

We turn to a more composite type of source focussed upon the same problem field: these are the commercial dictionaries and commercial memoirs and reports, in which information concerning a very large numbers of different commodities and payment forms were collected, synthesised, even tabulated; they were published in increasing numbers from the earliest days of the printed book.70 In the case of Jacques Peuchet’s Dictionnaire universel … commerçante,

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Early examples being Luca Pacioli, Sūma de Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni & Proportianatita Continentia de Tutta Lopera (1494, Venice), which is the source for the better known but undated [Luca Pacioli attr.], Questo e ellibbro che Tracta di Mercatātie & Usanze Dep[aesi] (Firenze); [Anon.], Tariffa del Pagamento di Tutti docii di Venezia ([15]25, Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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compiled towards the end of the eighteenth century, thus contemporaneous with our two previous cases, such information, collected from many different kinds of source, takes on a particularly organised and worked form. For wools and woollen cloths, frequently tabulated for each of several French departments, such synthesis reflects the pluri-compositional, multidirectional character of the specialised trades dealing in particular varieties, as wool and yarn are conveyed on different trajectories across Europe, from the near-east (the Black Sea littoral, Syria, Anatolia, Saffavid and other Farsi-speaking territories), and north-eastern Mediterranean (Macedonia, Albania, Salonika), from different towns in, say, the Low Countries, and also on smaller scales within France itself. In short, wools traded prior to spinning in different parts of Europe or the « Near East » (like silks for manufacture in Nanjing or Lyon) show similar characteristics to the trades in « raw cottons » in Bengal: indeed, all stages of preparation and processing are seen to involve both particular specialisations and particular phases and foci of taxonomic work. A place of marketing must group varieties from many different sources and then regroup them in terms of a further span of freshly designated marketable varieties. Thus the question again arises concerning the differentiation in « type » involved when cotton or wool is relayed from one market to another—say from a local place of first collection to one far on in the chain of transformations that makes it available to spinners in a distant territory,—in which, in short, type is progressively forged in different places. Differential, market-aesthetic criteria of demand must be evident at each stage, and indeed are essential in the gradual, step-by-step process of forging a commodity type, as it takes on renewed taxonomic forms in its numerous trajectories and sub-trajectories across space/time. But a further question of considerable importance must also be asked concerning the difference « in typological form » and content that might be involved between those types representing specific, market-specialised field-cultivars of cotton, or breeds of sheep (of which there were also a large number, although not comparable in number to grains), and those types discovered in the market itself.71 Astonishing typological diversity is registered for both cloths and « wools », while the fact that spun yarn itself intervenes between these two « phases » (in practice, these again being also further subdivided) merits at best, as with

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[Venezia]); Oliviero de Fonduli, Pratiche de Fioretti Merchantili, utilissime a ciascheduna persona, di mandare a memoria … (1560, Bologna); Lewes Roberts, The Marchants Mapp of Commerce (1638, London). Cf. M.L. Ryder, “British Sheep & their Wool Types”, in D.W. Crossley (ed)., Medieval Industry (Council for British Archaeology Research Report, no. 40, 1981, London), 16–28, and his bibliography. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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c­ otton yarns in Bengal or Gujarat, but an occasional entry, or mere remark. However, as in the former case, these occasional references to yarn types, plus certain details about the actual manufacture of yarns in Bengal, imply more generalised stage-autonomous concerns with variation. Where wools are concerned, we are able to reconstruct, once more, a meshing of multidirectional trade-routes linking different places of craft-specialisation in the production of different varieties. Peuchet’s numerous entries for particular wool types in the body of the text of the dictionary supports this perspective: specialised wools, destined for particular craft centres, circulating in one or another French department, are brought from Spain, the Low Countries, Macedonia, Syria, and so forth—from particular places in these regions.72 Other commercial dictionaries and memoirs present comparable information. For example, Peuchet’s own monographs on French commerce with Greece deals in detail with differently named and priced wools grown through the larger region (Macedonia, Albania, &c.), served by the port of [Thes]Salonika. De Peysonnel’s descriptions of wool production in the countries bordering the Black Sea is also exemplary in illustrating such points.73 My intention in referring to this material is merely to confirm the sense of a complexity of commercial connections that are not so much opposed to one another in terms of scale, import versus export, mass consumption versus luxury, and so forth, as intermeshed with one another. D

The Knowledge Problem

But the production of commercial manuals, memoirs and dictionaries continued in increasing numbers in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and these are evidence of the growing demand and corresponding market for such means of rapid access to large amounts of highly disparate information. They may be highly general or more specialised, devoted to particular « regional » trading sectors, such as in the East-India or China trades, in respect of which language, measure, and type itself could present fundamental difficulties for a novice. Such compilations deal with the sheer profusion of the varied information required by a producer or trader, and were in turn dependent upon many other first and second hand sources, and correspondents. They not 72 73

Cf. J. Peuchet’s small format, very useful Vocabulaire des Termes de Commerce, Banque, Manufactures, Navigation marchande, Finance mercantile & statistique ([Paris], an ix [1801]). [Ch.] de Peyssonnel, Traité sur le Commerce de la Mer Noire (Paris, 1787, 2 vols.), & J. Peuchet, “Du Commerce françois en Grèce”, pt. I, Bibliotheque commerciale (séconde souscription, ii, Thermidor an xi [July 1803], Paris), 193–240. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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only imply the problem of dealing on any supra-local scale, but reflect the continuous attempt to improve access to long established trades in other parts of the world. Jacques Savary sought to instruct merchants about cloth and monetary typologies, and rules of manufacture concerning them, in Europe and the near-east, whilst J.R. Morrison and S. Wells Williams were both concerned with China.74 Recent monographs, such as those by Chin-Keong Ng, on the « Amoy [or Xiamen] trades », and by Katsumi Fukasawa, on cottons in the Near East, make use of such materials.75 This is to say, that these contemporary, commercial manuals and dictionaries are prima facie evidence of complexity itself—complexity of commodity production and marketing, and complexity in the knowledge required for their practice. Participants would need to access complexity in terms of its different levels, their interdependence, and also with respect to its different exotic, regionalised forms, aspects, functions and « departments », so to speak. In short, subtleties of phase, complexities of territorial distribution, their varied cultural forms of expression, the common taxonomic character regarding each of these (as we shall see), and the lack of any direct one-to-one fit among such taxonomic grids (and the fact of this indirect fit must be emphasised, for it 74

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For Savary, see infra. John Robert Morrison’s manuals are typical of many produced at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th, and are invaluable, often astute sources of significant information on commodities, payment forms, &c.: A Chinese Commercial Guide … (1st edn. Canton, 1834; 2nd edn. 1844; 3rd. edn., Canton, 1848), & A Companion to the Anglo Chinese Kalendar for 1832 (Macao, 1832). S. Wells Williams took over Morrison’s work with the Chinese Commercial Guide (e.g. 5th edn. 1863, Hong Kong). Williams was also the anonymous author of a remarkable and revealing essay on the speciation (diversification) and commoditisation of tea through all its phases of cultivation, marketing and production, in: “A Description of the Tea Plant; its Name; Cultivation; Mode of Curing the Leaves; Transportation to Canton [Guangzhou]; Sale and Foreign Consumption…”, Chinese Repository (viii, July 1839, no. 3, Art. v), 132–64 (Williams’ authorship is mentioned by N. Rondot, et al., Étude pratique du Commerce d’Exportation de la Chine (1849, Paris), 232–56). Equally remarkable of this type of manual is Robert Stevens, Merchant in Bombay, The Complete Guide to the East-India Trade (1st edn. 1766; 2nd edn. 1775 […New & Complete Guide…], London), providing invaluable commodity and monetary information for ports throughout the Indian Ocean littoral. Chin-Keong Ng, Trade & Society, esp. the lists of ladings in App. B: “Fukienese Ships in Tientsin Trade 1717–1732”, 241–64, & App. C. “Native Products of Fukien in the Tientsin Trade”, 265–7 (Fukien = mod. Fujian; Amoy = mod. Xiamen); & Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie & Commerce du Levant, esp. Ch. iii, which deals with diversification of production and marketing across the whole great region between India, Persia, the near East and the Eastern Mediterranean, and provides remarkable information on the speciation question, esp. on creeping « imitation » of Indian cloth types in manufacturies across the entire region (« imitation » = production according to the rules of recognition and acceptation concerning the type).

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e­ stablishes fundamental principles concerning the nature of participation itself and that should be considered below), must imply, for us a remarkable problem of the kind of knowledge which contemporaries would, themselves, have been required to possess, or obtain access, in order to be minimally capable of participation. It is a knowledge-form that is obviously classificational in its own right, and that must be thought of as being mastered, from its beginnings, by countless individual actors … by populations of such actors. Put another way, certain kinds of market institution—market-exchange regulation, and so forth—were necessarily designed to deal precisely with the prolific differentiation of commodities and payment forms that entered markets—that is, they are consciously-invented crystallisations of this knowledge form, and responses to its difficulties, means of synthesis and added order: in short, typological profusion and appropriate institutions, corresponding to it, must have arisen simultaneously, as mutual responses to one another,—two faces of a single process of historical development,—and as part of a larger net of interaction during the long period,—produced, that is, by knowing participants. For example, Jacques Savary’s, Le Parfait Negoçiant, first produced in 1675, and immediately translated into several other languages, was carefully designed to provide such complex access.76 Its organisation thus represents the complexity of the necessary knowledge field involved, submitting it to a relative order. Long apprenticeship was one of the means by which a novice would access the commodity world—create a complex knowledge—along a particular, individual, experiential path that would lead the person concerned from region to region, level to level, experience to experience. In short, different stages of the textile « production »-line, and different typologies of textiles, at each particular phase of their production and marketing, display a formal complexity synthesised at various organisational levels of trading and market. They all occupy a single commodity and business continuum, they meet in the same markets, enter the same texts, as a field of common shareable knowledge, become named in the same lists of goods laded by particular merchants, sent together on particular trajectories, to particular places, thence to be dispersed once again along new trajectories. We might then say, with Kant, that «accident» is the basic historical datum on which one can, alone, construct an accurate perspective of part and whole. Field variety, market variety, yarn type, cloth typology—each of which is less a real phase than a 76

Jacques Savary, Le Parfait Negociant ou Instruction generale pour ce qui regarde le Commerce (1st edn. 1675, Paris); 2nd augmented edn. 1679; 4th edn. 1697; 7th edn. 1713; 8th edn. 1721; a bilingual edn. in German and French was publ. 1676, Geneva; a Dutch edn. in 1683, Amsterdam (De Volmaakte Koopman); and Italian and English edns. also appeared.

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historian’s schematic categorisation for a much more fractional structure of phasing—have to be carefully distinguished from one another before, thereupon, we attempt to reconstruct the manner in which each, as a field of activity and domain of classificational knowledge, gears with another field of ac­ tivity along a production trajectory, and through a synthesising sequence of market praxes. E

Lists of Coinages Brought to Particular Markets

It is important to refer to payment instruments because they provide a further case of complex organisation in space/time, identical in its principles of organisation and production to those concerning textiles, and operating on many different connected levels that nonetheless are also intimately bound up with commodity and commoditisation themselves; this is true whether we consider such instruments of payment as commodity in their own right, thus, as said, obeying the very same rules of organisation and of conceptual and productive form, or, of course, as a multiple instrumental means—a particular kind of commodity—for dealing in and with those we call goods, such as cloths and grains. Since textile marketing and textile production are dispersed and fractionated throughout the continuum, we meet payment forms—moneys— in equally dispersed events and differentiated forms. As such, and again like textiles, payments forms were also factored according to highly specific rules and expectations; that is to say, their differentiation—their multiple, variable, exotic appearances on different empirical levels and in different regions of the continuum—can be shown to be governed by generally consistent, everywhere evident, organisational principles. Object in their own right of dense networks of trade—regional and global—over centuries, and thus « commodity » in the full sense of the term, and an ubiquitous, necessary, conditional support for commerce everywhere—for its possibility—their multiplicity as type has seemed to later economic historians, nonetheless, as a clear evidence of the economic disorder and atomistic ego-driven autarchy of the epoch. I shall do no more than refer the reader to this domain—to its significance as a vast, well-documented window onto the question of empirical order in commerce and production—since I have devoted many studies to reinterpreting and giving systematic form to the evidence,—to its anthropology, properly speaking.77 However, it may be pointed out that market lists, 77

Viz. the various monetary studies in The Invisible City & Unbroken Landscape—an attempt to comprehend diversity as taxonomy and artifice, its organisation and practice, and as a spontaneous but rational collective response played out over the long historical period to the diversification of kinds of need for payment. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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providing­publicly­accessible daily exchange rates among the different coinages entering any particular market town, … or among note issues, ingots, or other instruments of payment—in West and East Europe, China, South Asia, or, say, the Near East, in huge entrepôts such as Surat, Casa, Venice, Guangzhou, Antwerp or Basra, but also, in precisely the same manner, in minor upland towns such as Ahmednagar, Kolhapur or Dharwar in the Indian Deccan—directly reflect the complexity of levels on which money operates, as well as its multiple points of synthesis in each particular market place, large or small, right across the continuum. Coins produced for purely local or regional circulation are listed with ducats, rupees and koban factored for oceanic­ voyages to those same places, and it is only by synthesis, by uniting phenomena normally separated as not belonging to one another, that the true organisational connections can begin to be interpreted. Diversity, presented above as a question of « knowingness », of knowledge and text, would thus appear as a question of relationships in which typology performs macro- as well as multiple societal (thus economical) functions. Thus, a table of market rates, or a list of moneys found in one or another international port, and representing … depicting … before the imagination of one who reads it a virtual mapping of the different exchange connections and circulation scales implied by such specific lists (and as suggested above), … a kind of contoured landscape, as it were, mapping the dynamism of fluctuating value distributions and of differential exchange rates in space—would have provided contemporaries, firstly, with a necessary « kit » of referential information for conducting day-to-day business, a reference-kit made readable in terms of each individual’s hard-won stock of knowledge. In short, so we may suggest, it depicts a kind of barometric map of fluctuating trading conditions affecting the larger region. To treat such lists, with their names and fluctuating exchange-rates as an evidence of disorder—as an absence of s­ tandardisation— loses the point of their institutional location and intention, and thereby denies us an access to the minimal means for reconstructing this architectonic, and for answering our first basic question: its empirical possibility … its necessity! Here, we encounter diversity as a kind of rule, a principle of order and organisation, the latter predictable, definable, and informing the practice of production and marketing, throughout the continuum. Yet, even currently, modern works in economic history read this diversity as confusion, absence of economic rationality, and absence of standardisation. However, if such were the case, no durable payments relationships across space or through time, and in terms of which different local types are seen to have circulated, would have been possible; standards of some kind or other are a sine qua non of commercial exchange involving distance in space and time. Thus the relevant question Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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would concern the kinds of standard operating in conditions of multiple, differential types. The answer is that there is a high probability that the metrology of money, weight, area, &c., was purposively geared, in concert with various kinds of complementary institution taking form simultaneously, into a context characterised by a population of other spontaneous cases, thus acts and instruments, of standardisation (« acts » in Rosenberg’s fertile sense), carried out extensively and over time. Given such a perspective, such a population of acts concerning metrologies would have been seen to occur in contexts already replete with such differential standards, thus in fields of functional, thus purposive metrological interaction and combination, at once economic and social, and even political. They would register the generalised intentional character of each such act, each read, by those concerned with instituting it, in terms of that larger complex. Moreover, such choice, pluralism and exactitude would be entirely complementary, indeed in large part closely related to those likewise characterising the commodity itself. This would be what I mean by another kind of order, spontaneous, diverse, pluralistic, and contrasting with our own so familiar authority-centred obsession with sovereignty … so familiar that it seems to us « natural » and the only right way! A travelling merchant, carrying a trading coin or a certain commodity, would judge every local standard and measure in each market along a given trajectory, (i) in terms of the others of his experience, and (ii) in relationship with one another—thus as relationship—both vertically within the same market, in which many cointypes came together, and horizontally, between markets. All may be conceived of, in this sense, as geared to the problem of organising complex production and marketing linkages across territory. No master standard would be necessary in such conditions, but instead a pocket manual or pocket box of weights, a personal note book, or, simply, a complex stock of personal experience and precise knowledge, in terms of which comparison and adjustment between standards would be fundamental, and yet banal, popular skills. Indeed, the numerous Dutch, French, Italian, English and German 16th/17th century «pocket»-sized boxes of coin-weights, each containing a miniature balance, and carried by contemporary merchants, shopkeepers, money changers, and the like, strongly confirm this thesis. Far from consisting of some standard denominational counting-unit, so to speak (although these certainly existed, especially in the 18th century), such boxes, (i) consisted of stamped weightreplicas of specific, different coinage types, and, (ii) of types representing not a set of different general varieties that might be found in any given region— say, the major denominational types—but instead, and much more cogently (and, for us, far more intriguingly) the distinctive micro-types of a particular denominational form: say, a series of ducats: Hungarian, Venetian, Turkish and

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Polish, the differences between which are fractional, yet stable, and densely referred to in the various contemporary forms of communicating information, thus in commercial discourse, and represented by particular common names and signs.78 Similarly, contemporary coin manuals—those, for example, produced in 16th-century Gent, Antwerp, Leipzig, Venice, The Hague, or Lyon— list and identify, with designs and metrological information, the numerous ­local microtypes of different generic kinds of money, such as rijders, ducats, ducaton, &c.79 These also are generally pocket-sized and show heavy wear, and 78

I briefly worked on these boxes—produced in different parts of Europe—in the British Museum Department of Coins & Medals, and very briefly in Het Koninklijk Penningkabinet in Leiden, both in 1992. The Paul Dupuy Museum in Toulouse has an excellent French collection, which I have studied closely, while others can be seen in city museums in Bologna and elsewhere in Italy, as well as in Holland and Belgium. Joe Cribb illustrates Chinese micro-balances for weighing sycee in his A Catalogue of Sycee in the British Museum. Chinese Silver Currency Ingots c. 1750–1933, 33–4. Coin boxes and balances are illustrated in many contemporary paintings, for example in Marinus van Roymerswæle’s (1493–1567) “tax collector and his wife”, in the Bayerische Staatsgemälde-sammlungen Alte Pinakotchek, München; in an anonymous 17th-century Netherlandish painting of “La Vocation de St. Mathieu” (museum title, no. D.1952) in the museum of Les Augustins, Toulouse. A small number of poorly circulated monographs exist with excellent illustrations: for example, Arent Pol’s recent systematic numismatical study, Noord-Nederlandse Muntgewichten, with a small bibliography (37), and works in English and Dutch by G.M.M. Houben. A descriptive manuscript catalogue written by Vernon Bryan Crowther-Beynon (ex-owner of a collection purchased by the Museum), [Coin Weight Boxes Foreign] (1940), is held by the coin cabinet of the British Museum. They seem to me to be direct, unequivocal and remarkable evidence—but remarkably neglected by monetary historians—of several of the claims made in the above paragraphs. Those who have studied them are largely numismatists, not concerned with the infrastructural and monetary questions underlying their production and use. Furthermore, I have encountered individual examples of minted coin, thus of the square Mughal Akbar silver rupee, but minted in a series of differentiated, reduced sizes, that can only be interpreted as standard weights for use by traders and money dealers. In Luang Prabang I saw (and photographed) a collection of some fifty or so portable Chinese-type syceebalances of different size and sophistication, pointing to a use of them far more generalised and profuse than one merely confined to the proverbial « dealer » or « banker » (­ordinarily mentioned by historians, numismatists and museums). Such general usage is precisely what one should expect, being necessitated by the complexity of such an organisation of payment forms characterising all levels and scales of marketisation, and that practical need for immediate knowledge in confronting such diversity required by any participant. 79 E.g. D’Ōgheualué’er de Gauden ende Zelueren Munte / van Diuerschē Congrijckē / Hertooghdōm’n / Graafschappē / Heerlickheden / Landē / ende Steden (1548, Ghend [Gent]); De Figueren van alle Goude ende Siluere Penninghen die van nu voortaen ­achtervolghende … (1580, Thantwerpen [Antwerp]); a German language decree concerning metrologies of different coin types, Ordnung … (1535, n.p.); a Dutch language decree:

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thus, as with coins themselves, such cases, because worn, constitute an important historical evidence of their frequent use and hand-to-hand circulation.80 I mentioned the « stability » of such organisation, of its expectation and of the fact of cognition and recognition, that are its « mechanic », so to speak. This means that the differences between type form an intrinsic part of that notion of stability, of what is sought and expected, met with and recognised as such. But this does not mean that their relationships in exchange, the one with the other, should be thought of as stable, thus static: the very functional differentiation that defined and distinguished the identities of all, that stimulated each to be produced, gave each a particular choice of form and measure— such as an expected pure-metal content—leading, however, to their being highly sensitive to those same constantly varying forces of supply and demand that affected the prices of cloths, grains and other commodities. In turn, this meant that their values relative to one another were conditional on the vicissitudes of local and more general contextual conditions, and upon which, therefore, all eyes would be closely attuned. It is for this reason, especially, that lists were compiled, values recorded or dictated, often by the day, in small

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Ordonnantie (1618, Antwerp); Placcaet van de Hooge ende Mogende Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenighde Provincien … het inbrengen van alle uytheemsche Goudt-guldens ende Schellingen / als oock vande Silvere Embder Florijnen / of 28 stuyvers Penningen … (1630, ’s Graven-haghe [The Hague]); a coin manual or Münzbuch (1572, Leipzig [title page lost]); all in the British Museum; and [Victor le Dayn], Le Manuel des Marchans moult utile a trestous (1545, Gand [Gent]), which contains a large illustrated section on coin identification and evaluation; Ordonnances du Roy, contenant le poix et pris des especes d’Or & l’Argent, ausquelles Ledict Seigneur a permis avoir cours & mises en Son Royaume, Pais, terres & seigneuries de son obeisāce … (1565, Lyon), both examples of merchant manuals and decrees in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna [Tab.I.J.I. 63.43 & 1, resp.]. Such books are « pocket »-sized, often (significantly) in poor condition through heavy use, and they repay very careful comparative study. The very fact that such manuals could be thought possible and relevant … would find a market … indicates the relative stability of typological diversification, and contemporary expectations concerning it, where contemporary moneys were concerned, and, besides, the desire for, and role of a detailed yet generalised and accessible knowledge and know-how. Heavy use and wear should be seen as a positive value in the hands of historian and anthropologist, whilst crispness of form and mint condition, to the contrary, would indicate money destined for transport and not for circulation. Are museum curators aware of this reversal of values with regard to what they select for their collections? The corollary is that museum curators and librarians should prize rather than scorn the evidence of wear, thus circulation and use, shown by the specimens they confront. Relative use has social and societal significance.

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­ arket-towns. Likewise, the portable boxes of typological coin weights, just m ­mentioned, could indeed record expected standard weights (on printed lists often attached to the insides of the lids), but not values, the latter being entirely dependent upon short-term circumstance. The conclusion must be that contemporaries both possessed and produced « a means of knowing »—a complex practice—for which the physical forms of goods and moneys themselves, like the manuals, measures, listings, weight boxes, and balances, are prima facie evidence in their own right, and also evidence of the manner in which markets themselves functioned, together with their instruments and subordinate institutions (various regulatory devices, and so forth); thus organisational loci concerning that same complexity of praxis.81 Late-medieval, and especially early-modern money-forms, in all their functional and heterogenous variety, thus constitute a further complexity of frequently manufactured objects, re-manufactured time and again, in their course through time and space, but always corresponding to the local requirements of what usually is an astonishing typological diversity encountered on that course, and that, therefore, requires decoding … comprehending … as taxonomy. Dispersal and specialisation of functions, of work-loci, of economic groups of various kinds, and thus of varying (variable) kinds of payment instance, form a nexus of complex relationships for which a metrology of value differentiation comes to act in its own right as a lexicon and accounting medium ­enabling choice and action by participants, and as such a constant means for regulating (or acting upon) movements of goods and moneys, and their production and passage, at every exchange-point in the continuum. We may thus go further in claiming that monetary diversity operates as a remarkable societal instrument of complex linkage, in its own right, and as a singular means to regulate such connection, at once designed for synthesising and sustaining the distinct organisational, functional, locational and scale-­ related niches for which moneys were designed as particular identities among other identities. To phrase monetary diversity in this way implies not only that it can be ­interpreted as an order, as a kind of order, but that it must also be seen to 81

Concerning the more closure-based interpretations of the monetary life of the past, one must emphasise the many parallel problems affecting several other fields and which are by now increasingly well-studied. I list several such studies in Unbroken Landscape, e.g. in “Interpreted Time & Interpreter’s Time”, but see esp. Adam Łomnicki, “Individual Heterogeneity & Population Regulation”, in Current Problems in Sociobiology, 53–67, in which he demonstrates how specific mathematical usages closely reflect a particular subjective and cultural approach and image of the world held by the socio-biologist.

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c­ orrespond as an order—in a manner that stands before us as a central problem of reconstruction and definition for future research—with the larger cadre of taxonomic diversity previously observed in the case of, say, textile-­ production, metrologies, or commodities more generally, and necessarily to the general range of specific kinds of payment need which, in the first place, determined such an order. In addition, however, it is not just a question of the connection between different, separate taxonomies but also of the fact that moneys form part and parcel of this same commodity world, that at some level, all these differences (and multiple grids) unify to constitute a single domain of tradable, exchangeable, qualities,—a veritable culture once translated into the domains of thought, practice, discussion, choice and expected constraint. For, the question must arise concerning who it is among us who would ultimately decide what should be strictly termed « means of payment » and what « commodity », or, to express the question more exactly, where the commodity form of money should retreat before its pure function as quantifier? Neither are absolutes but rather indissolubly complementary ways of examining the ­conceptual principles, embodied by produced things, characterising the kind of ordering we now see of it. A money of a certain type, manufactured to a measure and a content fitted for a demand stemming from a particular distant ­overseas mart, and only manufactured for that destination, and, then, encom­ passing, in its design and preparation, a whole range of different technical considerations, comparable to those involved in textile production—even when indirectly—is obviously made for payment in its strictly token sense; it attributes measure, can be used as an accounting base, and yet is fabricated according to strictly commodity-type principles: it has price, it competes for markets with other payments forms of the same type manufactured elsewhere; it is manufactured according to « use » and to the transitory needs of having to pass through difficult exchange frontiers (thus difficult points of recognition by relative strangers); and it is produced as one category of identical items among an open, potentially illimitable accumulation of such identities and members of each identity. Each such category, money or good, coin or cloth, is doted with its measurable, if conventional, stereotype identity.82 One might argue that it operates according to an intended language of trust, reduced by habit and custom to signs … gestures … conventions of recognition, thus a kind of clothing of communicative acts, recognised across every frontier of passage,

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Again, evidence for each of these points is presented in detail in my two books, The Invisible City, & Unbroken Landscape, most particularly and extensively in “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”.

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and that enables its translational passage.83 In this sense, the signs inscribed on its surfaces act in the same manner as the forms of packaging, and the signs inscribed on such packaging, within which a standard collection of such likeitems may be conveyed. It corresponds closely (or my description of it corresponds closely) with the sense given to the description of the communicative act by Husserl (at least in the sense in which it is interpreted and so-well described by Derrida, in his book on this question84). Thus at each frontier of passage (whatever its kind) we encounter what, through act and intention, corresponds to the need to effectuate that passage: a language of intention and expectation, and of translation and recognition … a reading, thus a literacy of reception, so to speak, made possible by an appropriately experiential accumulation of apposite knowledge by each partner to the negotiation. In their concrete form, as principles of commodity manufacture, already seen at work in the fabrication of textiles, such acts and signs intended to facilitate the act of exchange, to pass the encountered barrier, runs through the whole set of variable production « linkages » characterising the transmission of moneys, that is to say, throughout the extensions of manufacture into separate workplaces, or phases of production and marketing, each such phase possessing its distinct contextual referents, and influenced … indeed strongly and narrowly determined … by subsequent, known trajectories to other places (or sequences of places). In this way, we define moneys as a particular case (huge in its extents and dimensions and massively variable) for the whole general « logic » of this praxis of differentiation of things encountered in commercial culture, and for enabling the fundamental, yet intended connectibility of such « differentiation-for-exchange » that guides production and enables the traversing of all those « frontiers » at which passages of made-and-valued objects takes place between heterogenous actors. Money seems a particularly useful case exemplifying the more general questions raised above, and being so we may add to the above considerations a complex of other problems bound up with supplies of raw-materials such as for instrumentation and the chemical reagents required in refinement and 83

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In the frontispiece of Savary’s Volmaakte Koopman, the Dutch translation of Le Parfait Negociant, it is notable that all of the merchants are depicted in vigorous argument among themselves, thus in what evidently is made to represent a difficult negotiation that will end ultimately in accord; furthermore, they are also dressed identically. The dress too may, therefore, be regarded as part of an intended, advised or actually practised « language of trust ». One argues and comes to accord, and one does so in porting an artificial mark of common identity with the person who in fact is on the opposite side of the line of exchange. Cf. Aron Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, 155.

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a­ lloying of metals, thus concerning their sources and extraction, and especially, in consequence, access to means to convey orders, and, correspondingly, a reasonable expectation regarding the regularity of supply permitting institutional continuity throughout a broad region encompassing different marketing regions, within which were scattered places of manufacture. In respect of each such instance or kind of manufacture—of the coin itself, but also of dies, balances and much else—quality-controls would equally be frequently at issue, constantly disputed. It is necessary to become conscious of the role of such side industries connected with the activity of the mint, thus with the production of that commodity we call coin, the quantifier enabling the whole system of exchange, but as we have seen an essential article of inter-regional and inter-continental trade. A considerable number of balances and coin-dies were utilised per annum in each mint, and clearly, these too called for certain levels of expected quality, regularity of supply to the mint and of supply of raw materials for such instruments in their own right. In short, we find ourselves confronted with a remarkably complex, yet dynamic infrastructure comprised of multiple open linkages (« open » signifying both extendable and augmentable) binding different primary production-sets and separate overlapping domains of marketing into a single complex of interdependencies sufficiently efficient to foster such expectation. An eloquent example is the highly specialised production of so-called wootz steel scattered in production-centres in southern India, in order to produce the toughened steel required for manufacturing the coin-dies used in the mint, but that, in its turn, implied the existence of numerous other ancillary branches. It is in this respect, that we may at last fully realise what is at stake concerning both the matter for interpretation and the problem of approaching it, thus of method. The sequences that comprise such ongoing constitution of the commodity object appear linear in the sense in which we see sequence after sequence the commodity-object augmenting in content and form in its passage from stage of manufacture to stage of manufacture and market to market. That is to say, what we observe is not merely a pattern of events and conditions but an ongoing constitutive direction affecting all such incidents, and yet a direction embodied by the entire inter-territorial totality of confluence and dispersion, as we take into consideration more and more of what makes possible each stage, the entirety of a whole sequence of stages, or all parts that comrpise the possibility of any such sequence: bit by bit that direction is linear, is two dimensional and then seems three dimensional in its complexity, as far as we are able to grasp it in mind, whence that very complexity seems to escape such capacities, driving us too fowards in the effort of construction and comprehension. Yet, despite this difficulty, all should be seen to be guided, levered into operation by the « intention » of populations of anonymous actors … and Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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this time I think again of that lesson gained from the introductory passages of Rosenberg’s Inside the Black Box! Every market small or large must participate and rely upon such constant synthesis of such multiplicities of connection, of such « directioned » and « ­intentioned » decisions, acts and procedures. Such directioned intention … thus drive … may be considered the essential creative dynamic force generating what, objectively in spirit, we have termed commodification. All that comprises the fabrication of such a cultural domain of concept and practice, and that we distinguish as a distinct mind-infused historically constituted artificial «nature», entirely separate from its « raw material », nature itself, although, in practise all is understood as englobed by nature in its other more ultimate sense. Names and forms of « packaging »—means of identity, of rendering goods recognisable—most commonly observed in the literatures on cottons, wools, teas or moneys—become critical contributory parts of the analysis. Sign and its recognition become fundamental aspects of a satisfactory comprehension of commodification, and of the kind of ordering principles we have seen embodied by it.85 We seem to have entered a labyrinth of connectivity, an open volume and circuit of such connectivity, rather than just one line of production, or another, « thick », in that same sense as applied above, but all pressing its very passage at the very cliff-edge of time, constituting time by its overall general movement, thus, necessarily, possessing direction; … yet, without entirely excluding it, let us be prudent, that is to say selective, if applying that word « progress ». We have already argued in the initial section that all depends upon the position of the observer: one observer at A desires (= demands) a large number of factored piasters or ducats, and is willing to pay relative to that desire; another at B seeks (= demands) a quantity of Venetian damasquettes, or Yorkshire nankins, and is willing to purchase them with piasters, ducats, rupees, sycee or koban, to exchange commodity for commodity, type for type, or means of payment for means of payment, exchange value for exchange value. Use-value, to pursue the analogy, is always determinant in particular decisions concerning the 85

“The Parts of the Machine”, in Invisible City, points to some of these questions; e.g., where instrumentation is concerned, we find in one small region in which production is distributed among many dispersed mints, that in one of them, for which documentation is available, some 450 copper balances were distributed among the workforce. This implies another important but unstudied industry of precision instruments (its raw materials, its lines of supply, of interacting quality-control criteria applied to their manufacture) and in this case, balances, a speciality with its own marketing universe: say, the mint, say, shopkeeper, trader, tax collector, and dealer in coins, say any market goer, including the consumer.

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f­abrication of such « types »: this is not merely a question of final consumption, since payments also concern use-functions that set their mark upon the particular good used as payments. Medieval Venetian silver bar, sommi, was made to closely specified micro-numerical criteria, comparable yet distinguishable from those used to make sommi elsewhere in the Near East; they were thus adjusted to the needs of exchange and refabrication in mints much further afield; Dutch East India silver bar, in the 17th century, was likewise fabricated to the specifications of the Bengal rupee into which it would finally be reminted across a particularly difficult set of political and exchange frontiers. These are cases which may be seen to stand for a principle of interpretation underlying the whole monetary and commodity-related order of the medieval and early-modern past. Behind textiles and moneys are persons and structures, consumers, shopkeepers, warehousemen, merchants of many kinds, stages and scales of operation, means and facilities of transportation, craftsmen (makers of nankins in Nanjing, Yorkshire or Basra, makers of ducats in Venice, Istanbul, Budapest, Bijapur or Seville), sharecroppers, debt-laden renters and proprietors of cultivated lands, and an open, « context » of structural dependencies and relationships: shipbuilding in Hamburg and Gujarat; iron extraction and processing into hardened steel for coin dies, or its fabrication into nails for ships, and so forth; a production line of dies for striking coins; extraction of lead and mercury for silver refining; the trades in all these objects and their own financial and supply dependencies. All stretch across numerous interfaces along many branches of transport and marketing, acts of translation and passage across frontiers, only some of which involve radical changes in language and term, but all of which involve « translation », problems of measure and assessment of value, of recognition of signs fabricated to be recognised at the frontiers of exchange, of comparison and adjustment of multiple standards, of regulational institutions on all levels, all stretched across time and space and instrumentalised in certain words of description, calculation, disagreement:—fertile words!86

…

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Cf. Fukasawa, Toilerie et Commerce du Levant, for suggestive discussion, especially where this issue of « translation » is concerned (given types being relayed for manufacture from one manufacturing place to another, from one linguistic region to other linguistic regions, across the spaces of the vast extended trading network running between India and the eastern Mediterranean, with typological-names closely following the migration of forms). Also de Peyssonnel, Traité sur le Commerce de la Mer Noire, among many contemporary works, and my “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation” for a close study of such connections. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

Illustrations Section 2: « Knowledge Wells » and « Knowledge Towers »

Figure 8

The anatomy theatre, University of Leiden, executed in 1650 by Willem van Swanenburg. One may take note of the tight mixture of metaphysic and science, one that appears to compose a state of argumentation: the anatomy table at the centre of the seventh ring; a skeletal Adam and Eve at the forefront of the rings, although in this case installed on the most mortal, phenomenal and outside of the rings; the serpent wound around the tree; and the spectators pointing to and debating the spectacle itself, especially that curtain being removed to reveal the new knowledge. Observe also the elaborate upper class clothing of those watching and the unclothed loss of social identity of the animality of what comes revealed, whether it be intestinal or skeletal, the animal without (thus the dog) or that within. It is as if Sacrabosco and Galileo ... Simplicio and Saviati ... had been caught together in dispute. However, what instead is presented is the coherence of a framework considered appropriate for the new knowledge.

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Figure 9

Illustrations Section 2: « Knowledge Wells »

The anatomy theatre of Andrea Vesalio, frontispiece/titlepage of Andreae Vesalii Brvxellensis,… Libri de Humani corporis fabrica septem … (2nd edn. of Basel, 1555), book vii., frontispiece said to have been executed by the school of Titian

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Figure 10 Infinite rectangular tower of Babel. Artist unknown

Illustrations Section 2: « Knowledge Wells »

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Figure 11 Circular helical tower of Babel. Artist unknown

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Figure 12 Square « helical » tower of Babel by Gheerært Harenbout, Breviarum Grimani, c. 1508–1519

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Figure 13 Christ Disputing with the Doctors, by Bernardino Butinone (1487–1507)

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Figure 14 Medical gardens, circular and square, modelled on the helical tower of knowledge, from Olivier de Serres, Théatre de L’Agriculture (Paris, 1600)

Figure 15 “Le Jardin du Roi in 1636 for the culture of medicinal plants”. Engraving of 1636 by Frédéric Scalberge

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Chapter 2

Unpacking, Disengaging and Linking Thus the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture … For the content of the concept of culture cannot be detached from the fundamental forms and directions of human activity: here «  being  » can be ­apprehended only in « action » … by which a definite universe of objects takes on form.1 1

The Production and Marketing of Type: Phases, Extensions, Disengagements and Articulations

The liaison between monetary relationships—extremely varied, and functioning on many levels, and at countless points—and a complex « sector » of commoditisation, such as textiles, raises very serious difficulties of interpretation in its own right. The liaison runs through the whole fabric of the distributive net in which textiles take form, exercised at multiple points through that net; textiles, let us remember, constitutes the major pre-industrial « industry », the domain of manufacturing or craft activity most extended through territory, through different types of habitational form (town and countryside) and through various kinds of work organisation (domestic, rural, artisan workshop and manufactory), and also the most mass-participatory, apart from agriculture, which provides it its raw material. And this distributive variety gives us a sense of what we should mean by such liaison, by its multiplicity. When we also emphasise the fact that there were no direct, one-to-one relationships linking their different organisational forms, stages, structures and reference grids (a problem to be explored below), liaison becomes less a fact to be recorded than a Pandora’s box of multiple dynamic connections to be progressively unpacked. Furthermore, we should keep in mind that the reference, here, is to mere fragments of the « economic », … to those of the culture of what we deem as economic, albeit important ones. However, an important task of this essay is indeed to emphasise the need to develop a viable method 1 Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, i, 80 (in Ralph Manheim’s translation). These might also be the words of Cassirer’s contemporary, Husserl, but also of the whole domain of thinking and practice associated with the commodity, in each case concerned with the “constitution of the object” of perception, … of thought, and practice … a shared thus necessarily cultural constitutive practice. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004414921_004

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for sampling complexity that makes use of selected but fragmentary windows capable of opening up observation to different organisational aspects, locations, levels and scales of the empirical complex associated with industry and marketing. What follows is a restricted examination of textiles in terms of such considerations; it is intended to give body to the arguments of Chapter 1, and also to prepare for a brief introduction to the idea of a philosophical anthropology of the  phenomenal characteristics of the commodity world, and that will occupy C ­ hapter 3, especially §3. I shall argue that order, in commodity production, can only be recovered and properly understood through considering « difference » in its own right, as a principal key to the organisation of production and marketing in these centuries, and even to the genesis of particular kinds of market institution and instrument (their purpose and modes of functioning): put differently, production and marketing of diversity is the key for understanding the social production of a commodity world of a given form. The allusion here is to diversity as the central enigma that has seemed to underlie speculation in the study of botany and zoology from their origins, and in which theories of both diversity as such—the very possibility of organic diversity—and of diversification, as a causal process, thus as generator of a kind of order, has always constituted the critical problem. It is foundational in Darwin’s work (his theory of evolution might, as in Kant and Marx, be called a theory of accident), and it is most clearly so in current molecular and genetic biology. Commodity diversity, in this sense—that is to say, cultural, artificially produced diversity,—should be treated as a problem of research and interpretation in its own right, just as natural diversity is treated in biology, and that, thereby, makes it potentially possible to view production and commerce as embodying facets of organisation generally lost to sight under the weight of conventional, reductionist and « convenientalist » approaches to study, that take such difference as a ground that is foundational, thus as an evidence for an absence of order, but which, in itself, because assumed absent, has been left uninterrogated.2

2 I have already mentioned in passing the matter known as Gresham’s Law, an example taken as a rule of explanation by historians but to which contemporaries actively responded in developing the kind of monetary and payments order we actually encounter in the records (the law, simply put, is the truism that “bad money drives out good” … to which I add “were it allowed to do so”!). It marked a general characteristic of monetary life if left to itself, but that formed a basic principle of common contemporary awareness and knowledge, a negative in terms of which monetary life and its payments forms were, in contrast, consciously con­stituted, and in terms of which production of payment forms—the distribution and choice of the weight and pure-metal content characterising each type relative to the others—were selected and judged, and a variety of institutional regulative responses generated Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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But it is precisely that state of enquiry that must be questioned below; in doing so, one penetrates further through phrasing explicitly the question of what kind of a ground might underlie what we perceive so naturally as if pure fact. There is what is taken for granted as ground and what a further interrogation might discover as a more profound grounding for our opinions and ways of discerning things. We ask what in the first place has allowed such assumptions that one now considers insufficient. First and foremost, what makes such diversity—that seeming disorder, say of nature, say of the commodity or medley of payment forms and metrologies—even possible … yes, our old question! For the reasons argued above (for its duration and so forth), we would wish to make it comprehensible, thus indeed as an order, and necessarily so, and yet a comprehension that seems initially defied by that very appearance of difference, its random appearance! We need to proceed beyond mere appearance and not react to it as if in despair. What is unique to the problem of commodity-speciation is its clear artifice (thus contrasting with the modern view of nature, although not with that of the past3), and, then, the difficulties of perceiving any general principles of order in an empirical field, which, as displayed before us, seems so ineluct­ ably fragmented … spontaneously fragmentable … as to defy reason and any ­possibility of an economically « rational » order. At the same time, we can hardly doubt—because of the mass participatory character of textile-related ­activities—that we engage here with questions about the role of human agency, on a massive populational scale, in generating complex historical-­economic infrastructures,—an agency at once anonymous, micro-fractional, thoroughly and radically decentred (that is to say, that encompasses entire populations and yet that is individualist in performance and in character), and that appears at every instance and point at which work is exerted on processing, marketing and transporting textiles. Unfortunately, this question of human agency, and that of the historical artifice constituted by the whole grand ensemble of s­ pontaneously throughout the continuum. It is to say that Gresham’s Law was utilised by participants in full knowledge of what it implied, underlying as that negative the entire organisation of payment forms as we observe it in the records, and also in determining means to regulate it. It is by no means an explanation of such monetary organisation, ie. of its apparent disorganisation! And yet, it is frequently cited by historians as an evidence of disorder and unreason, of the self-interest of the unwitting individual acting blindly for self, thus as if an active corollary of an assumed popular behaviour uncontrolled by authority, waiting for Hobbes’ Leviathan, and rather than, as I propose, a common-place ground of collective comprehension in terms of which an intelligent form of spontaneous populational order was established and that persisted. 3 On this question, viz .“The Other Species World”, in Unbroken Landscape.

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c­ ommodity forms (including means of payment)—in short, the fact that, here, we are concerned with culture and not with « a first » nature—has seemed to point to a fundamental disorder underlying such phenomena (naturally localist, exotic in character, random, arbitrary and irrational, because seemingly blind to the constraints imposed by more general forces or broader contexts of relationship), and thus seeming to imply that questions concerning order seem entirely irrelevant. That this all might constitute a necessary face of culture, a culture of being and performance, seems to defy notice. We start with the question of « raw cottons », then of « yarns » and, in turn, « finished cloths », as mentioned in the previous subsection. Each concerns a specific general phase (often, as already seen, sub-divided in practise into subphases), in fact they constitute types of phase—what, schematically, we group together as a broad category of different activities all representing such a stage. This is what we have already observed in Chapter 1, in describing the kinds of particular sequence of production affecting the transformation of materials from cultivated cottons to the finished consumable good, that is, by way of a highly variable number of distinct, separable operations scattered across distance and distributed among successive work sites, distinct from one another, and thus also separated by successive phases of marketing.4 They involve, once again, a selection of certain documented cases from among the various processes and kinds of labour to which cotton is subjected in its passage into cloths: cleaning, bleaching, dyeing, various stages or forms of finishing, and so forth. 4 Each time I wish to use a familiar word, I am stopped by its insufficiency, by the need to be fully conscious of this insufficiency, but, if one uses it, to do so in not falling under the sway of a merely convenient limitation affected by the context of a habit of usage and unquestioned sense. That ordinary, customary words, words for the « real », reveal their metaphorical character: a merely metaphorical character that, when recognised as such, becomes an opportunity, because establishing a distance between the thing described and the image we give to it. Eventually, this distance allows reformulation of meaning, or replacement by more apposite words. This time, it is the word « line » in the phrase « production line », important in order to trace a context of relationships that extends through a heterogenous physical, social, institutional and linguistic space constituted by innumerable inter-relationships: we can certainly trace such « lines » through the nexus of connections, and there is a certain validity in doing so, but the point in this essay is that every self-imposed convenience of this kind must, as interpretation, as an approach to a complex empirical field, be treated only as mere convenience, consciously and explicitly so, as indications, signs for something whose real ordering and shapes are currently beyond focus and more complex than initially understood: and that it is that greater complexity, not the «  line  » itself, that is the true concern of the inter­ pretation for which that thing, covered by this word «  line  », has been brought into consideration.

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The « Raw Materials » of Production Empirical Linkage

We begin with the question of marketing prior to what is ordinarily considered cotton’s first subjection to manufacture, thus prior to the spinning of cotton into yarn. I wish to show that the so-called « raw » material of production, what is described as « raw cotton », is not the crop from the field but, instead, had already been subjected to a sequence of transformational processes long before spinning could take place, thus long before it had entered what is conventionally portrayed as the initial step in the manufacturing process (apart from ginning, &c.).5 Such a sequence occurs between the field and the spinner: just like the word « bullion », « raw cotton », when such words are used by contemporaries, already indicates a cultural product: a product of mind and practice. I shall suggest, (i) that this particular sequence of phases and transformations is a full part of the larger series of processes involved in commodification itself, part of « the speciation of commodity forms » and, as such, part of the fabrication of veritable taxonomies of commodity types; (ii) that the processes of commodification are fully in evidence from the stage of cultivation itself, and thus implicit in the practices of peasant cultivators; and (iii) that « the market », as a general organisational phenomenon—itself complex, comprising many different, functional tasks dispersed among different kinds of market site—is fully implicated in the whole train of activities constituting these processes of commodification, thus as « producer » or agency in its very own right, among the other, more conventionally-defined production activities such as spinning and weaving. That is to say, that we can discern activities, through a whole sequence of phases prior to « manufacture », that are intrinsic parts of the more extended nexus of linkages leading to a finished good, although these « earlier » phases are generally lost to sight beneath the apparently self-evident and « naturalist » label, « raw cotton ». The essentially technical character and function of this phrase, in its use by contemporaries (or in their use of comparable euphemisms) needs to be recovered and substituted 5 It is not that shorter, less indirect flows of raw cotton from grower to spinner did not take place but that all mark choices feasible in a context of a much larger cosmogony of possible choice involving various degrees of market-intermediation and distance between phases;— that is to say, some form of market involvement, between any two phases should be considered essential in a commercial context. The problem is that direct, unmediated flows are assumed by the historian to have dominated in some parts of the world, and the wider dimensions of necessary relationship left largely unresearched, yet it is the latter that serve to open out the whole perspective in which we comprehend such economy, redefine it from an entirely altered point of view compared with that of the past. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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for our own unmediated literal readings (the case is similar with respect to other conventional vocabularies used in economic history).6 The fruit of these considerations will be a historical interpretation of what, seen in this larger frame, are the general implications, cultural and structural, of the rise of the commodity world; what production and trade—seen in this light—must imply for a conception of the organisational « architecture » so to speak, seen in its duration, concerning the character and transitions affecting commercial society and economy across the whole continuum of « old » and « new worlds ». The task is that of developing, for ourselves, a more « global » imaginative dimension encompassing such « architectural » difference, at once ­organisational and structural, thus of reaching a level that we call both « an architecture » of the ensemble, thus singular, a universal where the culture of the human being is concerned, and, therefore, a credible ultimate grounding for such difference, and for its continued differentiation,—one, indeed, that explains the latter. More specific questions will then be possible (including old questions open to improved kinds of answer), especially the central problem concerning complex organisation: from where, and from which kinds of specific societal source do such extended, processual, marketing and production linkages receive their necessity within an historically accumulating nexus of innumerable individual relationships? We shall start with certain entries of a diary, written in 1787/88 during an inspection of an important cotton-producing region, Gujarat, in South Asia, and concerned specifically with cotton-cropping. Then, let us note that the entries with which I am particularly concerned deal with a subsequent marketing of the crop, thus after it had left the field, when it initially gains the attention of the observer as a “raw” cotton. I shall quote from the diary and then briefly interpret such entries (the passage rewards close reading):7 6 Thus the initial arguments of my “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”. In Unbroken Landscape. 7 Anton Pantaleon Hove, in Gibson: Tours for Scientific and Economical Research, made in Guzerat, Kattiawar, and the Conkuns, in 1787–88, by Dr. Hove, pubd. from the ms. in the Banksian Library, British Museum (Bombay, 1855; ed. Alexander Gibson), 132–3 [hereafter Gujarat Cottons Report (1787–8)]. Gibson considered a central interest of the manuscript to be the fact that much of the cotton commodity-determined agriculture and industry described by Hove had disappeared with later colonial rule, and only partly replaced by cultivation of low-quality cottons intended for Lancashire. The Banks manuscript was checked for me by dr. Nico den Tuinder during his own research in the British Museum. Hove was said to be a Polish doctor of medicine whose expertise concerned medical botany, and not industrial cottons; this is likely to have affected both vocabulary and observational powers, in the quoted passages. As far as this source may be considered part of what eventually led to colonial intervention, I emphasise that what especially concerns me here is the meaning of terms, such as, in this case, « raw », picked up by the historian from the records and transferred as such to his Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Thursday 24th. The machine by which they clear the seeds of cotton … A great part of this cotton is manufactured here [in the country town of Limbdi], with which they supply both foreign and the inland markets … The rest is either exported in thread [thus, spun] or in bales [as unspun « raw cotton »] to Broach [Bharuch], Ahmedabad [Ahmadabad], Surat, and Cambay [Khambat], of which they make their fine cloths [all large towns of varied importance, whether as entrepot or for their industry]. The [cotton-] wool is generally exported from Broach to Bombay and I am credibly informed sold there for Ahmood [Amod] cotton. During my last stay at Bombay all the English imperial ships took for their cargo cotton which was sold to them as Ahmood produce; I therefore may give credit to the above intelligence when I reflect how such a small Purganah [a subdistrict], even taking it with Jumboseer [Jambusar] and Broach, can supply their own demand, and answer the immense call there is for it … for the India, China, English, and French markets. I observed to-day, when they were embaleing cotton, if they adulterate it with any ingredient, as it is reported in Bombay; but in justice to the inhabitants, I must say that they paid a particular attention that nothing impure was communicated; in which state they deliver it to Broach, where the cotton is adulterated [this word will be seen to need its own interpretation] with their own inferior sorts, and that of Baonegar [Bhavnagar], Brodra [Baroda, or Vadodara], and Dolca [Dholka], to make it resemble that of Ahmood, which is first mixed together, as I am informed, and then passed again through the cylinders, by means of which it is so intermixed that the ablest connoisseurs mistake it for the original. To this adulteration the merchant has nothing to say, and is very glad to obtain it in that manner. But the same on coming to Surat, is adulterated by Europeans in such a manner that all this which was sent from here of late on our [English East India] Company’s account to China lies unsold, and for which they paid the [European] contractor a most exorbitant price… As the method of adulterating was not secretly enough performed, it was of course immediately communicated by the agents to their ­correspondents here [in Limbdi], that they might likewise adulterate it, and send it in that manner to Broach. or her own account: I wish to show that it already concerns a fully material, post-agricultural moment among a sequence of moments comprising the ongoing production of a yarn. The places mentioned in the passage are scattered within the territories surrounding the Gulf of Khambat, in Gujarat.

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There follows a description of methods used in « adulteration » at another intermediary marketing town, Surat, where old cotton seeds, ordinarily sold as cattle feed, were fed into the cotton bales, which then were delivered closed to the China-bound ships.8 The Chinese, who opened and examined every bale [itself a mark of the loss of that « trust » necessary to the normal functioning of such exchange frontiers], found the imposition, that cheated both them and the owners, and left it on the factors’ hands, in which state it lies, I believe, to this day. These passages are packed with a detail that repays very careful dissection, a wealth of apparently circumstantial information from which certain basic structural principles underlying market functioning may be abstracted, and important where our consideration of the constitution of the commodity is concerned, … constitution as a material object, both by means of thought and as a cultural object. It is true that much other information is missing, information that might have enabled us to flesh out a fuller, less speculative reconstruction of linkages and procedures affecting goods; however, the one provided will nonetheless prove decisive for our present task. The most significant observation is surely that the transformation of field cottons into their processed « raw-cotton » avatars on the quay-sides of Guangzhou (Canton), had involved a pilgrimage through a series of visibly discrete marketing stages at each of which a different set of autonomous activities were involved. Each was concerned with a further moment in the constitution of the intended product, and in the determination of its identity, thus of its constituent properties; and in each case, thereafter, we observe it projected further onwards on its social and topographical trajectory of ongoing transformation and formation as a commodity-object. Largely, this is for the good, since, at each 8 Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the novelist mentioned above, but who, one senses, was an excellent anthropologist and historian, at least in the manner in which he thought and constituted his objects of discussion, thus Java in the epochs of late colonial and post-colonial rule. This is clearly the case in all his novels, as, for example, in the Buru Quartet composed in prison during the Suharto dictatorship. Viz. Gadis Pantai, 190–1, where we meet an example that goes to the core of what is read in reports in the form of complaint and conflict: “Our shrimp and tuna paste sells poorly;—in town, people prefer the paste from Lasem, but it’s not our fault. It seems that once in town ours gets adulterated with clay. It’s not we who mix it. No, we are not a race of tricksters. But we are told in town that the one responsible is a merchant.” (I have amalgamated the separate parts of what actually reads as dialogue in the novel).

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phase, we see its passage accords with rules of trust expected by participants, and thus left unremarked; yet sometimes it is « for the bad », so to speak; at the expense of those rules, abusing that trust, and thus encountering explicit, thus written complaint and an evident fracture of the connections of exchange, and that, as a consequence, receive undue emphasis in the records, but before which « noise » we historians needs react with prudence, since when, in contrast, goods have passed on trust such passage required no mention, being no more than expected as the normal run of such trade. At Limbdi, we are presented with an initial phase concerned with the collection of field-varieties from different locations in a country market (after the cleaning of the harvested crop). This phase—connecting field and first market—will itself bear closer observation below, because it may again be shown to mask a complexity in the taxonomy of the production process that is fully at issue in this discussion, and fundamental for adequate description of the commodification process. Hove’s diary entry deals with the subsequent movement of one such variety of « raw-cotton », one that happens to be of particular interest, for its commercial potential, to a correspondent of the English East India Company, and thus selected for discussion from a range of different cotton types entering and exiting this particular market; furthermore, particular trajectories of the type concerned are isolated from a wider range of possible passages that might have been followed by that same selected type, after leaving the market at Limbdi. As such, its track is followed through a sequence of further marketing phases, at which different activities of grouping and regrouping—of selecting and classifying—are applied to the incoming cottons. These successive activities are partly associated with refining and cleaning, but these may in some sense be considered subordinate to the main task of typological separation (a definition and isolation of possible type), or mixing (as the case may be) of preceding variety (the variety imported into each such market place and phase), into a series of newly marketable « raw cotton » types relevant to that given market stage, and to their subsequent trajectories towards places of demand (the varieties that exit). That is to say, at each site, the cotton dealer would be faced with a collectivity of distinct varieties approaching from different locations; in the initial case, this would be a variable number of field varieties (speaking schematically; but, in practice, an array of both primary field varieties and other varieties produced at various stages of marketing and that might enter such markets); all, we can anticipate, would be seen to be subject—as if a « raw material » for continued work—to a fresh labour of classification, judged according to ideas of type specific to (and imposed by) subsequent marketing needs, yet all falling within the more inclusive category of possibilities characterising more generally the commodity as it

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proceeds on its ongoing constitution towards a distant final market. Clearly (and again considered schematically), as one moves from smaller to larger marketing centres, more regionally-based supply of variety occur, a more general set of criteria of choice for the new collective type comes to be imposed, cottons coming from a greater diversity and larger range of places near and far, and each likely to be derived from an earlier set of marketing phases, so that the tasks of regrouping must have concerned an increasingly generalised, yet nonetheless (however paradoxical this might seem), always specifically attuned product, a product for « public » recognition and passage. We can observe this process simply by looking at the names used to designate cottons on their various passages—by the time they reach London or Guangzhou denomination is of an exceedingly general kind; yet, when they begin their trajectory in some cotton-growing hinterland, they are possessed with more local names—Ahmud (Ahmood, Amod), the name referred to in the account, is an intermediate designation, the designation of a type possessing characteristics concerning which the makers of innumerable varieties elsewhere aspired, at Limbdi, to represent (to « imitate » in the jargon). This clearly implies a set of determining constraints, a set of possibilities, to which cultivators had needs respond if they were to market their own cotton produce (that is to say, when sowing their seed, expecting to be able to market it, and that thus guided by their reading of the marketing context, become the purpose of that agricultural investment and effort, thus the invention of that variety and the labour expended in sustaining it … stabilising its properties). Typology, then, is the language of the market place—it begins as the language of the village, caught up, from the start, within webs of circulation and expectation we call « ­market » and that have no beginning, instead acting forth in a continual spiral of return and response;—this being true even when pathological adulteration takes place: for the attempt to defraud necessarily acts directly upon, thus purposively on the rules of expectations governing market activity. Adulteration? The word is applied twice to different sets of activities that need to be distinguished from one another. One case, concerns what takes place in the intermediary town of Bharuch (Broach): and it is clear that from our point of view, what is actually observed and called « adulteration » is a public procedure in the factoring of type, by way of quality-imitation (a focus on generating certain required properties seen to characterise cotton of Amod type and that constitutes its identity). That procedure includes grouping certain particular varieties of cotton—agricultural varieties but thereafter marketed, regrouped and renamed—imported from diverse places in the hinterlands of the larger region surrounding the Gulf of Khambat (Bhavnagar, &c.). Hove qualifies the resulting « cotton » as « inferior », but he then emphasises

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the complicity of the merchant in accepting what takes place. The more one reads about such admixture, the less certain one can be about the criteria being operated: « inferior » by whose definition and in what sense (« strength » and « fineness », for example, might be found mutually contradictory)? If « inferior », are they added in order to reduce price, rendering them more likely to gain access in the competitive markets for which they had been designated? Or might they not instead be added to serve the spinning or weaving process— say, to make the yarn stronger?9 What is clear is that fraud was not involved, since merchant-purchasers—aware of such procedures of grouping and mixing variety in order to constitute what properly could be called, say, an Amod cotton—expected to sell their purchases, and to do so in spite of the considerable expense in shipping them to China. Such expectation as seen expressed on the part of a merchant-purchaser when accepting a good concerns the whole course of movement from one act of « trust » at a point of exchange to another, in the conveying of the cotton to their overseas purchasers: that the goods could be seen to conform to expected standards. « Trust » effectively points to a field of notorious and expected disputation and negotiation, but conducted voluntarily in order to arrive at eventual acts of effected exchange … what I have chosen to term an efficacious act of « translation » … the target of the desire expressed in such negotiation between the partners concerned … and where a good is enabled to pass from « hand to hand ». It is that which has clearly been depicted in certain frontispieces of the successive editions of Jacques Savary’s Le Parfait Negociant: fierce negotiation resulting in a successful exchange, … like a mathematical formula: a versus b = c. For, by the late 18th century, we have good evidence of the sophistication of Chinese merchants in discerning breaches of trust with respect of both goods and moneys: they had become so expert in gaining and utilising the finely detailed knowledge required enabling them to decide whether to accept or reject overseas goods, that they were able to refuse silver ducaton stamped with certain mint- or year-marks, and with very good reason: at this time, workshops in Birmingham were producing huge numbers of low-grade « Mexican rials » for profitable export to, among others, the Chinese market. Particular die patterns had become stamped into the memory and knowhow of dealers in Guangzhou, some acceptable and some not. 9 Hove’s choice of words may merely reflect his own lack of expertise in commercial, cottonrelated matters. His personal concern and expertise lay in identification and collection of medical herbs. His ignorance about field-speciation, even at this date, is manifest in the diary and relieved only by his assiduous curiosity.

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What we are undoubtedly observing at Bharuch, therefore, is a stage in the manufacture of type, … not its weakening, but instead its market specification, in terms of an eventual consumption, thus demand, expressed in terms of narrow price rigidities, and also in terms of the whole chain of unfolding, mutually determining stages of production and marketing, and at which the properties known to characterise the type, thus composing an-every-merchant’s expectations of it, are knowable and known at each such successive stage. And an essential part of this process concern the particular features of the constitution of the object itself, a particular kind of variety of cotton or yarn, thus too the precise properties required in order to compose those threads towards which a given cotton was destined in its trajectory and at a later phase of manufacture: their identities would form part of a body of knowledge of which those concerned would have been conscious throughout the whole sequential longitude of its « journey »,—yes, the properties required to constitute it as an object and to which they are known to contribute. Adulteration? We now encounter the second case in which the term was used in Hove’s account. For, the same word is applied to a very different operation that takes place in a subsequent (or parallel) marketing phase, in this case at Surat, the old great « Antwerp » of western India. The process of mixing is this time fraudulent and hidden, but clearly with a view to the goods passing as if of the type. It takes a certain systematic application of mistrust—the necessary generator of the conditions of trust—to interrupt this flow, but it also indicates precisely what was to be expected at each successive phase. Once the Limbdi merchants had learned of what was happening to their carefully processed cotton on its arrival in Surat, they themselves had little other incentive than to preempt the fraud themselves. Thus, we see market dealers, warehousemen and merchant purchasers actively involved—actively fishing for relevant information as it flows back and forth through the nexus—in taking decisions in the factoring of type. However, note again that the case documented in the diary concerned merely a single end-product, off-loaded onto the quayside at Guangzhou, and then subject to serious dispute concerning its quality. That is to say, it merely hints at the real complexity of the marketing nexus, posited above, thus, in short, at the mediating function of utilising a language of recognition, and, then, of judgement concerning the authenticity of such signs. Disputes concerning qualities of textiles and moneys lard the commercial documentation throughout. In part they concern the dynamic of the total market itself: as consumer expectations alter and other producers elsewhere try their hand at manufacturing a certain type, words flow down the succession of markets to their

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beginnings in the fields;—a constant tension adjusts typology, modifies quality, affects measure in all its dimensions, forces response or resistance.10 Moreover, note that Amod cotton was but one of a galaxy of many differing types, each with its name, its identifier, and was itself more generally dispersed along different marketing trajectories: Hove tells us of only one such ­trajectory—the simple linear form of these transformations is purely illusory. Rather we are touching upon fragments of a whole delta-like dispersion of that type, thus a field of demand. Yet we learn nothing of the manufacture of thread in Limbdi except the mention of its destinations and its general use for « fine cloths » (plural, because, once again, the effectual result will be that of a subtypology of varied kinds of cloth). The additional mention of cloth-manufacture at Limbdi is devoid of any specification, but it is not unlikely that it would have attracted the importation of other threads and « raw-cottons » from other places into Limbdi for reclassification prior to distribution to spinners or cloth workers. At any one of the destinations, at say Bharuch, Ahmadabad or Khambat (major historical marketing places, in their own right), a range of other imported cottons and threads would have been imported from elsewhere, while each of these places was also known for its specialised manufactures, say of what we now understand as « raw-cotton », more expectedly of thread and cloth; some of these products would then be exported to … Surat, &c., for new phases of work. Thus, Amod cotton, exported through Bombay to China, represents but a single isolated trajectory torn from the web of a multiplicity of connections characterising the manufacture of type in western India. A narrative 10

Witold Kula’s treats measure as a focus for conflict between the different social forces and classes directly concerned (Measures & Men), as, say, between growers and fiscal and rent-collecting agents; this kind of disputation concerning measure and standards of measure, directly affecting the quantities levied from the cultivator’s production and thus a matter of livelihood; not least it concerns the means and manner of paying such levies, often listed in « species » of money difficult of access and on which, therefore, additional charges could be made in case of payment by other coin. This may also stand for a more general interpretation of market-induced micro-modifications affecting conventions concerning measure and quality. It may also be treated as a sociology concerned with the establishment and definition of type, one constantly under pressure of the social and state forces directly concerned, and varying in time under the historical dynamic affecting such social relationship; modification under such conditions is thus far from being an evidence of disorder. Kula considers it in terms of the measures applied to rents and other prestations, thus in terms of social dominance. But, more generally, we are simply recording the banal reality of Wittgenstein’s dictum, in his Philosophical Investigations, concerning the relativity of measure and accuracy, and of its entirely human judgemental dimension (33e, full reference and quotation in Part 2). Here, equally, we are speaking of the signs of trust necessary, expected and actuated whenever persons of unlike origin met in order to exchange.

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abstraction drawn for attention from the greater complexity of the reality, so to speak.11

11 Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, 193, in paraphrasing Husserl’s Ideen, i, §97, and his Cartesian Meditations (Cartesianische Meditationen), §§17–18, refers to the various separate acts of perception of an object that all together go to constitute it in synthesis as a consistent and coherent object of thought and consciousness, and “brought about by means of temporal phases and extents”,—what I might, in our own context, describe as a production-line in the processes of mind that leads to such constitution of any object as a distinctive, recognisable identity, but, yes, realised entirely in consciousness as that distinctive and identifiable object. Note also, moreover, that what concerns Husserl are the universal conditions in which any individual mind can constitute that object of thought and perception. But what I am attempting, here, is to project that very sense of a constitution of an entire object-world into the cultural domain external to mind, for Husserl as language, for Cassirer as an anthropology of meaning, and for us as that world of transmitted objects called commodities. It is a practice following what has been conceived by mind, but that consequently comes to surround the human being as the contexts of experience, action and response, and in which object-constitution continues to be enacted (my evidence continuing to be the commodity). The narrative-form of this abstraction treats such production of the cultural object as a linear sequence of production externalised by mind, and thence physically confronting mind at a « distance », as it were. Thus there is a true relationship of conformity between thought and physical object, but that should not be considered direct and unmediated, but equally processed by a procedural dialectic of constitution. We can describe that cultural object, say a camelot or mahmudi, as but an abstraction, a conscious synthesis of qualities and properties, a « type » purposely constituted as such, among a constellation of types distinct from the natural continuities of the various materials from which it is artificed. Any such commodity emerges as a thread of abstract construction from the complexes of relationship that actually compose production relationships in general. Thus, we speak of « raw cottons », such as those traded in Bengal, and referring us to a complexity of interdependence and connectivity observable on an entirely different level of appreciation from that on which we consider nature to lie. It is but a window, a choice, selected from the nexus of different productive forms that all go to compose cloths. The most important thing for me, however, is the attempt in this book to depict the externalisation of such constitutive acts of mind, as being equally the constitution of the cultural domain beyond mind, the constitution of a really physical, albeit artificial domain of being, and universal as such. It comes to seem like the beginnings of that « missing discipline » I hope to consider in the future. Kant, Hegel and Husserl seem all to have had this external dimension as their own proper concern and target: namely, the conditions of its possibility. And to add to Gurwitsch’s remark, occurs the sentence following that quoted above, and equally fundamental, since distinguishing the reality constituted in thought from the reality with which thought itself must first react: “Now, the object is entirely independent of these temporal structures as well as indifferent to the places which particular acts relating to it occupy in phenomenal time”.—Nature and artifice?

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If we now return to our definition of every « exchange » as constituting a « frontier » and every so-defined « exchange frontier » as a problem requiring response and resolution, and thus as a moment involving a mutually desired translational act, … and, in the particular case of Guangzhou, at an interregional maritime frontier of peculiar tension, of a heightened need for mutual « trust » concerning the identity of the articles of transaction, engaging instruments and institutions that can, indeed must, be available in order to facilitate that trust (because this is a kind of exchange-frontier at which legal sanctions were relatively inapplicable), we can see how type needs to be made recognisable as such—rendered recognisable across such a frontier—thus possessed of visible marks, labels and perhaps shapes—say of the object itself, say of its packaging—and that conduce to recognition, make detailed unpacking of whole shiploads of, say, bales of cotton and boxes of bar or coin, unnecessary. The very mention, in this entry, of the opening of every bale, indicates the pathology of this particular event, for it should be unnecessary. We are here learning in negative about the normative activities and comportments expected at all stages of « raw cotton » marketing. The appearance is one thing, the content quite another. Each marketing phase involves an application of specific procedures that, in each such case, are closely related to the given commodity in question. At a given market, there would be a conjugation of quality-controls concerning the just selection of properties that rightly constitute that commodity, thus adjusted to the fabrication of a particular type. Relative to such features of recognition and necessary judgement at the points of exchange, a whole set of decisions would be necessary concerning what—when seen relative to the variety of cottons experienced as entering the markets in question—might feasibly go to constitute … be included in … the composition of an individual type, what in short should and would compose its « difference » … its identity … from all the others, and thus its visibility, as such,—what makes it a choice among a panoply of choice. Complementarily, and well before we reach this first market phase, the grower too is already concerned that a given field-produce should possess the characteristics enabling it to pass that barrier of critical judgement when taken to market. There are no absolute certainties in this—the market is constantly dynamic; complex readings of the larger environmental marketingcontext are required at every stage; risks are faced in terms of that reading, decisions must be taken (possibly numerous decisions concerning the content of each type at each particular point)—some of which might lead to local catastrophe with serious ripple affects beyond. New combinations, concerning a fresh range of different cotton categories, fresh identities, were expected to take place in Bharuch—this would not be controversial; controversy, however,

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might focus upon the micro-criteria (qualitative and quantitative) used in such selection, or else they might concern genuine counterfeit: the counterfeiting of Amod cotton at Surat, or of the Birmingham- and Guangdong-made « Mexican ducatons » intended for circulation in Zhejiang and Jiangsu. In turn, this judgement might be matter for further dispute. The phases referred to clearly concern participants distributed in different places, each of whom would have had their own classificational concerns, their own imaginative needs and choices, and who thus acted upon the commodity process in specific and different ways;—that is to say, in Hove’s account, they acted upon the part-formation of a single commodity-in-the-making: a « raw-cotton » of « Amod » type. And, when seen more broadly, they contributed to the formation of a range of differentiated marketable commodities drawn from a given stock of possible imported « raw materials » (i.e. types defined as such at previous stages). At every stage names are given to the objects of work, names for a category of worked and processed matter, names that become badge and symbol for a set of expectations among later purchasers, and which are selected from among numerous other names given to different market-grouped cottons: thus a differentiated cosmos of current and subsequent expectations,—a kind of concertina in which each … thus all … of the subsequent stages of manufacture and marketing would add its relative participative contribution. Participants thus read their marketing environment— this nexus of linkages and of points of decision, change and evaluation—as if a text to be interpreted, and as experts in such interpretation. This, then, is a « production line » abstracted from the broader nexus of production, marketing and payments linkages—that is, selected in mind, both by the actively engaged participant and that by ourselves as distanced interpreters. It has been selected according to the specific interests of a contemporary observer, and linked, in turn, to specific institutional interests; it is selected also by the enquirer according to a different set of concerns, but whom, we argue, should become fully aware of what is done when isolating this phasing of productions as a « line of production » from its more complex mix of dispersion and conjuncture. I express it in this way because I want to emphasise that it is not our task simply to repeat the linear paths and typological selections encountered in the documents, although most of the secondary literature does in fact pursue this approach; we know a relatively great deal about European linkages, but the fact is that they participated and intervened within a much more populated field of mass participation and intervention, in which merchants of very diverse origins accumulated from near and far, moved from entrepot to entrepot, collecting together, and communicating, sometimes sharing information and even a transaction, and thus part and parcel of what went,

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through their agency and voluntarism, to establish the very means for translational communication: a net of significational, terminological, symbolic usages, founded upon a necessary instrumentality of shared language use, a kind of « esperanto »-like invention of means and knowhow in favour of commodification. It may be all but invisible since taken for granted by contemporaries, part of what I have called elsewhere an invisible city of institution and forms of knowledge. and yet fundamental—indeed part of what we may consider foundational concerning the possibility of the material facts we encounter concerning commodification. We talk in terms of the obvious geometry of a production line, but what should actually be at issue—once the historian is emancipated from the partial interests of a research concern tied to a Company, a country or a community—is the historical genesis and structural constitution of nexuses of production, composed of multiple interdependencies at all scales, the order of which—its geometry and its motion—is entirely unclear.12 Yet, we can be clear that, even at the initial country market, several cotton types, all in the making, would be at issue, each with its subsequent route and set of destinations, and already marked out in the generation of adequate market-designated typological criteria, as we shall see, at every prior stage in the formation of that type. Thus, several convergent/divergent « linear » branchings and confluences, mediate the passage of « raw materials »— the substance encountered called « cottons »—along flows from one related « category » definition to another, through a flow of different taxonomical identities, or commodity typifications. « Raw cotton », left to itself, is but a mask … a conventional abbreviation covering a hidden sequence of actions, firstly those concerned with taxonomy, secondly, those concerned with processing and preparation, but, at all events, concerning, in the first place, the « products of agriculture » long after they have lost their field characteristics and field identities. They have entered a different domain of taxonomy, subject to different kinds of criteria determining identity, yet, considered more generally, of an identical stereotypical kind to be discussed below. For contemporaries, the phrase « raw cotton » is indeed used to refer to any matter prior to a given focus of production, thus potentially  in different possible states: this becomes abundantly clear in relation to the mint: what was called « bullion », the raw stuff entering the coin-manufactory, ­generally consisted of other coin or bar (sometimes coin of a single type, 12

Of the very few writers to focus on this complexity, cf. N.K. Sinha, An Economic History of Bengal, i, Arnost Klima, “English Merchant Capital in Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century”, and Michel Morineau, “Naissance d’une Domination. Marchands européens, Marchands & Marchés du Levant aux xviiie et xix siècles”. Viz. my “Financial Institutions & Business Practices” in The Invisible City, for discussion and evidence.

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s­ ometimes diverse coinages, some old and worn, some relatively new), or it might consist of silver plate or copper canon, thus objects that in their own right had once been manufactured according to precise specifications, typologised in their own right, and in many cases precisely for that passage as partproduct (as « bullion ») into that particular mint. Thus, the word « bullion » assigns not some primitive metallic substance but, instead, an already manufactured … thus cultural matter, even an accumulation of objects, but withdrawn from use and utilised anew as if a « raw material » in a fresh procedure of production.13 The same is true of « raw cottons »; it is indeed this process of transformation, of the scatterings and distributions of the phases and moments of such transformation through territorial and societal space, that gives a fresh character and content to the idea of societal connection. B

Initial Implications

The implications to be drawn from the above subsection already appear surprising. Taxonomy—a classificational praxis—is seen to control and condition … determine … the succession of individual events comprising textile speciation, to do so at each separate phase and microphase of marketing and manufacture, that together go to compose the ongoing constitution of a particular commodity. They add one to the other as they succeed one another, reorganising a preceding organisation of typification, re-grouping at each such successive step a host of varieties entering a given market from near and far, classifying some as if identical in kind, thus under a single denomination, while others are grouped likewise under other new collective denominations. Identity, in such cases, is judged according to the demands of the market, of distant groups of real or potential consumers, not according to the criteria of the agriculturalists who had grown these cottons as micro-varieties, the latter already involving the translation of such demands of the market place into strictly botanical, micro-specific forms. Once entering a first market they become reorganised according to different sets of criteria, and reorganised again and again, ever more generalised as type, grouped with ever more varieties imported into a given market, perhaps given a new designation to cover that new more i­ nclusive category, and, yet in doing so, parts of a continuity of intention and will that runs unbroken through all the convergences and branchings

13

I discuss this in detail in “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”, pt. 2, in Unbroken Landscape, where a redefinition of such terms is attempted, plus an investigation and characterisation of the extensions and phasings involved in production of payment-forms.

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that ­characterise a landscape criss-crossed by such trajectories, as was seventeenth and eighteenth-century Bengal. Yet, take note, what we have here described in such schematic terms has only concerned the paths of a single micro-variety of a general kind of commodity, thus abstracted « for convenience », from the complexities of the larger nexus. We may put it in another way, that seems equally surprising. When a collection of such time- and space-separated phases is schematised as a « stage » (a unity of necessary operations, however dispersed in practice), and then conceptualised in the form of a singular combination of different functional parts, as occurs in the workings of a machine, or of a group of machines set together upon a single workshop floor, a factory, as occurred with industrialisation, we shall surely be able to agree that there is an obvious, even necessary—that is to say, historical and genetic—analogy between these two different organisational forms characteristic of the pre-industrial and industrial eras, respectively. There is an obvious coincidence in structure and function:—that is to say, between the geographical and social extension of connections concerning a particular sequence of production, as preceded mechanical invention, and the physiological-like unity of a single complex machine. Using our imagination, we discover several phases of market activity eventually displaced by a single production moment, but one corresponding to a virtual revolution in the social organisation of work and capital investment and that really constitutes the process of industrialisation. The latter reflects, in its mechanical concentration, the original abstraction of work and production comprising the constitution of that phenomenological object we call a commodity (in this case, a cotton, a yarn or a cloth,) into a series of separate and specialised human-led part-actions. It takes place as much as an ontology of mind as in the historical development of a material culture, with all that both must assume. Yet, I should then emphasise, but as an aside which the reader may ignore, that whilst this analogy appear to point to a true phenomenology of an object in the philosophical sense, it cannot be more than in analogy with the latter. In moving from history and material culture to the procedures of mind itself, we seem to cross an invisible frontier of revolutionary import, entering thereby, what for us historians and anthropologists, is a generally neglected and unknown realm of analysis requiring its own method and approach (and such as engaged in by Kant and Hegel). It is this radical difference that has justified the focus of interest in the present work, and that must justify a second volume focussed upon this imaginative problem. Yet I persist: the two anthropologies must eventually be brought together:—as far as we are capable, thus in Kant’s sense rather than Husserl’s or Fink’s, we must teach Daphnis and Chloe to conceive.

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Even on the material level, however, the comparison between the two states, and the sense deriving from it of a historical continuity between such conditions, has very significant limits. It breaks down when this contrast is seen in terms of a radical change of states, each of which has entirely different structural grounds concerning the societal environment to which it is related, and, in particular, for the character of economic connections, market structures, and for the distribution and character of social participation among the populations concerned. A process of radical atrophy and simplification is involved in this transition (which is not to say also that other, very different structures do not take form), which over time and in aggregate must lead to changes in the very fabric and form of societal connection.14 That is to say, a structure of linkage characterised by phasing into a series of discrete work tasks, separated by territorial, temporal and societal distance, implies a similar distribution of scattered points at which decisions are taken among equally numerous separate groups of participant, all acting sequentially upon the gradual putting together and passage of the commodity-product. But such participation implies an institutional cadre through which such acts must and can be expressed, and thus, in turn, a similar scattering—a distribution through space—of varied, particular local institutional forms and frameworks through which action in each case could be and was exerted on the different phases of production concerning that commodity in its passage from place to place on its trajectory. A market is precisely such an institution, but it is also an umbrella in which other more specific institutions can operate—regulating prices, exchange rates, measuring standards, trust-related behaviours, and so forth. Each such point, however—and this is equally clear from our reading of the events 14

Care must be taken to avoid dogmatic formulations of this change;—it might be useful to qualify its historicity, and, instead, treat it in terms of sets of logical contrasts and continuities which enable us to observe our materials more effectively. During the 1980s, diamond cutting was similarly fragmented into different production tasks involving three continents: Africa (recovery of the diamonds from soil or rock), Asia (cutting in small urban workshops in Gujarat), and Europe (points of auction). Each such phase implied a complex distribution of tasks in its own right, and a distinctive institutional and relational context. Thus, one remembers an epoch when diamond recovery in Africa had been closely linked to contemporary civil and internationally-waged and -financed wars for and against independence, thus involving both savage recovery, itself in diverse conditions and forms of labour, and industrial mining by migrant labour from Mozambique under apartheid in South Africa. Some production activities, such as in Gujarat, where highly skilled, yet cheap, hand-labour continued to be used, may have mimicked the old extended production forms. It is a point that Marx, in Capital, shows with particular skill based on his own detailed empirical research.

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a­ ffecting « raw cotton »—is specific in the sense of the manner in which « the text » of the larger marketing nexus must impinge upon a local context, local craft or local marketing functions.—We return again to the question of kinds of variable skill required by contemporaries in reading such contexts, of their access to such skills, that is to say of its public prescience, and thence of the literal existence of such contextual aptitudes exercised skilfully and imaginatively by such contemporaries. We have already noted that the early-modern centuries were characterised by a long and dense topographical spread of marketing structures and institutions throughout Asia and Europe, generating precisely the frameworks of experience in which such spreads of skills could be established, enabling the multiplicity of the innumerable, anonymous micro-decisions and acts that had given rise to what now we encounter before us in the records. It is precisely this kind of structure that must atrophy in favour of the « single event », or planning occasion, which guides an entrance of supplies into and out of a fully industrialised factory work-floor.15 This is true whether such a locus of concentration is mechanised, partly mechanised or not mechanised at all … the factory itself coming to represent, in its own right, a human « machine » of combined tasks that once had been dispersed through a more or less vast territory. « Machinisation », so to speak, might thus lead, in aggregate, to local cultural, institutional and socio-economic atrophy, in favour of more acentric relationships in which decision-making, access to and use of necessary knowledge become managerially and geographically concentrated in a small number of dominant places and cadres, and where extensive territories and populations would thus become progressively « ruralised » (underdeveloped, as Gunder Frank would have put it). Ruralisation (atrophy of small market centres, but also of money-use, craft activity, numerical literacy, among many

15

I use the term, « machinisation », to refer to technical transformations associated with processes of industrialisation, as opposed to mere « mechanisation », identifying the latter with, for example, the replacement of certain hand functions by « a machine », say, by a rotary hand- or horse-turned press. In “Parts of the Machine”, in The Invisible City, i suggest (with tabulation) that the major events that, in the nineteenth century, led to radical atrophy of a monetary organisation previously based upon scattered and differentiated coin manufacturing, were not merely the consequence of institutions of a state monetary system of a modern, monopsonistic kind, but, rather, the setting up of a fully industrialised mint at Calcutta, capable of a volume of production on a vastly increased scale. By itself, mere « mechanisation » can be seen to have had little necessary consequence on capacity of production until such further developments, and thus none on the social distribution of production. But the clumsy word « machinisation » can also, and instead, refer to the concentration of different hand-tasks within a single building, mechanised or not, and as indicated above. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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o­ ther phenomena) is indeed observed in many parts of the world during the nineteenth century. It is what took place in many regions newly conquered by the colonial powers—regions converted to a colonial-type, interventionist economy—such as Java, and in the area of my own initial research, Bengal and Gujarat in the late eighteenth century, and Western India, in the early nineteenth century.16 It was then that such regions became open to report in the European languages, and a terrain constituted for an early anthropology seeking its grasp and concept: it grasped its object during a phase of withdrawal and crisis, and yet conceived of as if an original condition, anterior to the market. Correspondingly, however, production forms, prior to concentration and « machinisation », would have had the basically decentralised, extended and distributional, thus dispersed, character we have suggested above (even if marked by numerous inequalities of power and choice), and in which knowledge itself, of a dense, intimate and specific kind, would need to be freely dispersed and accessible. It is this dispersion, this multi-centred character, where participation and access to knowledge were concerned, that must be led to enter any attempt to reconstruct the rational and imaginative dimensions of the praxis of decision and act constituting such networks of production. ii

Cloth Typologies

After generalising in this manner, we find that each, schematically considered production « stage » may be subjected to a similar breakdown of acts, decisions and procedures: yarns, although we read much less about them in the documentation, were also treated to detailed labour-intensive quality-­controls, and to a differential specification of particular desirable micro-properties, thus to what is described above as planned, thus intended procedures of speciation  (the very word used knowingly and properly by contemporaries). Once more it is demand, in the « market », that sets up the constraints and aims determining the complexes of decision and action that make up the activity itself. A single « market species » of yarn might be composed of a combination of different cotton-types, or else a single cotton fruit might be made divisible into a range of distinguished yarn qualities, with the manufacture of a range of different cloths in different places as a further stage in view.17 European, Near 16

17

For Java, see Geertz’ admirable Agricultural Involution, and several of Pramoedja Ananta Toer’s splendid novels concerning the colonial experience, most notably the remarkable Buru Quartet (largely composed in the different colonial and post-colonial prisons and camps in which Pram had been incarcerated). Both cases are particular instances described in the Bengal Cottons Report (1790), mentioned above. The whole report contains much detailed evidence of this kind: e.g. 258, in Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Eastern, South Asian and Chinese sources all provide similar fractionary evidence concerning typification of cotton, wool and silk yarns, and for a marketing of yarns as specialised and multidirectional as were those of the products of other phases.18 In the case of cloth, our current concern, the evidence is much better known, although generally cited without further analysis: the old world is generally characterised by profuse production of very numerous, differentiated and, as such, specialised cloth types, listed in orders, cited in commercial letters, in ships’ ladings, and in other types of document concerning marketed cloths throughout Europe and Asia, forming elements of very elaborate, seemingly « fragmented » multi-directional production and trading networks.19 The phrase « cloth production » merely schematises what was generally distributed among a series of distinct operations (weaving, bleaching, finishing, painting, &c.) that may be more or less extended and scattered in space/time, linked by transportation and markets, divided between town and country, between regions, and even between separate continents. Eight bales of “chints” forwarded; and in addition “some of those made in Serongee and Brampore [Burhānpur] of thinner cloth. In Tuttha cloth is

18

19

referring to one of the named market-« raw cottons » grown in the Tippera district of Bengal, called « letci » (such designation indicating that it is already as type, a marketsynthesis of many field varieties), we read: “Of the fine thread of Letchie Cotton are made Tanjibs and other Muslins; and of the Coarser wound Thread are made Baftas of divers denominations and qualities”. Bafta and muslin are both generic names, the first as recorded in the passage to be quoted below; it is characteristic that yarn production is itself unmentioned. As noted, Fukasawa, Toilerie & Commerce du Levant, is especially rich concerning speciation of cotton cloths in the Near East. Woollen yarn typologies are evident in the entries and tables of Peuchet’s Dictionnaire universel. The contributions by Natalie Fryde von Stromer, “Stamford Cloth and its Imitations in the Low Countries and Northern France during the Thirteenth Century”, 8–13, & Patrick Chorley, “The Shift from Spanish to Central-European Merino Wools in the Verviers-Aachen Cloth Industry (1560–1815)”, 96–104, provide useful information on differentiation of woollen textiles and « raw-wools », for the periods concerned. Hove, Gujarat Cottons Report (1787–8), gives some rare, but decisive information on cotton-yarn typification. The Bengal Cottons Report (1790), treated below, contains abundant, although partial, information, usefully complemented by Hove. For specialised breeding of sheep for production of different wool-types, viz. Ryder, “British Sheep & their Wool Types”. These are mere examples, but the problem is one of synthesis, interpretation and comprehension. Alfons K.L. Thijs, “Les Textiles au Marche Anversois au xvie Siècle”, 76–86, documents lists of many different kinds of named woollen, silk, linen and other cloths, marketed at Antwerp, c. 1575, a profusion closely resembling the lists of cotton cloths mentioned below for market places of a more modest kind, at Pune and Ahmednagar.

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well painted, but generally upon narrow guzzees; nor doe those weavers make broader, unlesse they are purposely bespoake; and they are such as the broad bastaes are, which have bin soe much disliked by you”. Of “merhcools” 117 bales are sent; but these started so late from Agra that only part of them could be bleached at Broach, the rest being “cured” at Baroda and Ahmadābād… Have ordered 10,000 pieces of these calicoes from Agra for the next consignment; together with some “eckbaries” and “guzzees”, “which wee intend to transforme into cannekins, ardeas, byrams, selaes, and other speties20 of dyed cloathing for supply of Bantam, Mocho, Persia, and Bussora [Basrā]”. Have also sent home 100 bales of “Derebads” from Agra, and have ordered 10,000 pieces for next season. No “Kerebauds” are forwarded; and only two bales of “eckbarees”. “Semana cloth was bespoake, but its excessive dearnes hath almost lost both the use and makeing of them”, so that they have sent only twenty pieces “for a muster”. As regards “callicoe lawns, distinguished into gooldars, salloes, and furradckaumes” [sic], they dispatched one of their brokers to the towns where these sorts are made, but he has not yet returned; they have therefore bought a small quantity of each for England, and will send the others (when received) to Basrā. “Of other sorts of callicoe lawns, as cossadees, gooldars, humony, beetelas, &c., the Coast of Choromondell and Bengala will best furnish them; but for sheerisadfs they are extreordinary deare, almost out of use, and indeed not worth your owneing”. For three years past the dearness of cotton wool (owing to bad seasons) has raised the price of cotton yarn and cloth in these parts; and they have therefore only sent home this time a small quantity of Nosāri and Baroda baftas. They have bought more than 400 corge of Broach and Ankleswar cloth; but these are intended for Bantam and Basrā. Advise also the dispatch of narrow blue baftas, Guinea stuffs, quilts, and cardamoms.21 Once more, this is a passage packed with vital information, a play of detail ­expressive of a complex multicentric, fundamentally connected order of 20

21

Commercial uses of this key-word species (or its exact equivalents in other languages) are very significant; viz. the extensive discussion of its etymology and application to commodities and payment forms, and its interpretation, in my “The Other Species World”, in Unbroken Landscape. This is quoted from a much longer passage dealing with commodity purchase in a letter from Francis Breton, and other merchants of the East India Company in India, to the Company, 27 January 1644, in William Foster (ed.), The English Factories in India [vol. for] 1642–1645,137–8 (my italics). Foster’s habit is to paraphrase, with scattered quotation. The spelling and use of quotation marks are as encountered in Foster.

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s­pecialised production and marketing linkages, of an elaborate taxonomic praxis, and of an investment in a kind of knowledge founded upon the very idea of taxonomic diversity, and that repays very careful reading. That knowledge, as it is reflected in this passage, is composed of multiple reference ­sources—that is, taxonomy itself breaks down into a plurality of taxonomic grids, which, if obviously connected with one another, remain organisationally discrete, … independent of one another: a kind of unfolding series of grids, the unity of which can only be understood in terms of the larger flow of products through the markets in which they are identified. That is the first, and most important observation. Then, let us note that the particular concerns of an English East India Company intervene in (and depend upon) a very much larger production and marketing nexus, thus depending upon a reference frame—a library of accessible knowledge about textiles—that is also much larger than what is recorded in such letters, and visibly so. This is observable through the interaction of specific market-needs, mediated by the Company, with a broader production of specialised cloth forms destined for a wider range of purchasers, who turn out, from other contemporary sources, to be highly heterogenous in terms of ethnic, linguistic or communal background: they mark the focussing upon a particular extended market world in South Asia, of a variety of different frameworks and forces of market demand, which also act upon many different scales between the local and global.22 Price sensitivity is also unambiguous: producers need to be able to respond to the flow of data flooding down to them from different markets, words and numbers of different kinds and in different formats bearing essential information through the branches of trade eventually down to those who choose, select and plant the seed necessary to accommodate the distant forces of desire and of intention they express; both producers and traders must thus respond to the numerical indices represented by the price and cost information they accumulate on their passage, or their goods would fail to sell. This is an aspect of the context mentioned above generated by such activity and then returning back upon those same populations to limit their range of choice and decision. The international, intercontinental and maritime character of this production nexus is equally clear; among various references, the word Guinea stuffs 22

I give references to such multiethnic (or « ethnically indifferent ») participation in “Financial Institutions & Business Practices”, in The Invisible City. It characterised much of the trading continuum, including Near East, North and West Africa and Europe, and also China.

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refers to types of cloth specially manufactured in South Asia for consumption in West Africa and traded as part of the Atlantic slave trade; we also see brief references to inter-Asian maritime markets, to the entrepots of Bantam in the Indonesian archipelago and to Basra in the Near East. However, what is most significant for our own specific purposes is the typological evidence—the complexity and variety of the cadres of reference called up in this quotation, and that invite no particular expression of surprise or difficulty by the merchant concerned: they constitute an environment taken for granted by participants, and mirrored by the titles and contents of contemporary books of reference such as Roberts Marchants Mappe of Commerce or references to the « speties » of goods in those same titles. Cloth specification is typological (not random), thus a true « speciation », and revealed as such—as a possible and necessary knowledge—in the vocabulary and syntax of those concerned and characteristic of the epoch. Moreover, the empirical character of this typology reveals the close connection linking it, as typology, with the same kind of governing criteria, of market-defined function, and thus of constraints upon choice, already outlined above in the case of « raw-cottons », and, indeed, reaching down to the peasant producer. Geolocal discreteness characterises the distribution of craft and market specialisations, and this distribution is itself part of a larger order of possible circulation and delivery—a possible transportational and communicational nexus—in terms of which each particular production-phase and taxonomic activity is focussed upon the need to locate, and then maintain, a particular niche within the larger readable ensemble of types and functional, competitive, complementary niches, occupied by a whole range of such typologies.23 It is equally clear that such an act of specification, this process of successive, niche-seeking, transformational speciative acts affecting cloths on their various trajectories through space, is implicated at each fractional concrete (« realised ») moment (each place at which a decision must be taken, and an act performed), along the chains of linkage through which particular objects of passage are worked—combined and subdivided—as ends and part-products … as typologically worked and workable forms. If so, this framework of multiple, overlapping, intermeshed reference grids, implicated in the diversity of textual reference to type and ­nomenclature—and comprising the lexicon of reference accessible to the letter writer—may be seen to determine a certain approach to syntactical form, and, 23

This idea of an adaptive niche, is borrowed from Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, e.g. 274–5, and seems peculiarly apposite for would-be producers attempting to intervene in an environmental nexus constituted by such a multicomponential, typological, competitive market-framework.

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as such, must be seen to compose a very literal, physicalised kind of textuality mirroring the migrations and changes affecting what is actually described. This textuality is at once manifested in the physical forms of the manufactured objects themselves, and it is expressed as written and spoken words, and as mentalised, imaginable forms of organised relationships, called up whenever a range of supply-possibilities for commandable objects was to be considered; it is from this larger textuality that the writer freely selects useful information. It is because this textuality is intersubjective and susceptible to some kind of relevant, efficacious, representational imaginative and shared, accepted order, that such individual, local, circumstantial micro-selective-events are even possible. The text, as I have referred to it, read in mind by the contemporary in thinking that context, is a sort of topography of multiple possibilities constructed from a constantly fluctuating spatial distribution of types, prices, functions, trajectories, and marketing/production phases—above all, of names and numbers, if qualified in each case by personal access to a knowledge governed by experience.24 The contours of this topography would alter from season to season, year to year, and its readability must assume this dynamic character of the production/marketing nexus. We note that different genres of cloths are involved: baftas, akbaris, gazis, muslins (hamam, being one such muslin), calicoes, and so forth. Sometimes this genre name might, in turn, refer to a set of unfinished cloth types, this in turn being transported to other places for a variety of different finishing processes from which several newly named species of cloth would exit (« speties », in the quotation). Sometimes, instead, the genre name will refer to a class of finished or unfinished cloth, composed in its own right of many subvarieties, and even of sub-subvarieties. Muslins are a particularly interesting case. The numerous different, distinctly-named (sub & and sub-sub) varieties of muslin were destined for a diversity of markets in South Asia itself, in the wider framework of markets composing East and West Asia, in Europe, and also in Spanish 24

This kind of information is characteristic of such commercial letters; Foster’s published collection is especially useful (the volume cited is one of 16 vols.). It was followed up by another series of East India Company letters published by Charles Fawcett (ed.), The English Factories in India 1670–1684, and parallelled by other series in Dutch, German, and other languages. Hosea Ballou Morse’s The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China 1635–1834, five vols. has a similar value concerning differentiation of commodities and payments forms, and their markets; but Morse is also one of the very rare contemporaries who understood that such diversity possessed fundamental commercial and monetary market functions. He thus opposed and condemned the establishment of a monopsonist standardisation of value and payments media in early 20th century China as being but an expression of particular, foreign competitive interests (correctly, in my view).

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America, where Indian cloths and cloths from elsewhere helped draw forth increasing flows of the newly discovered silver towards north-west Europe, from where, in turn, it was relayed across land and sea towards Asia, responding to an evidently insatiable demand, in Europe and Asia, for means of circulation and payment, and concerning which the evidence is abundant and richly studied.25 Nonetheless, this highly diversified and globally-oriented manufacture was itself dependent upon highly specific local conditions, in which utilisable « raw materials »—high-quality field-cottons—were generated. Many others genres of cloth might instead be manufactured from cottons and yarns that had traversed hundreds, even thousands of kilometres through several entrepot, or had been gathered from locations widely distant from one another, and thus through different marketing networks, although finally graced with the same name—representing a single designated « species » of cotton or yarn—by the time they had reached Bengal. « Muslin » is thus a generic name applied to a particular kind of exceptionally fine-quality, thin cloth traded globally, but nonetheless dependent upon yarns made from field-varieties growable in only a micro-region of deltaic Bengal, typically irrigated by both saline (marine) and fresh-water (riverine) flooding. Attempts to extend cultivation into neighbouring villages and areas in the same delta had failed repeatedly, despite such places having seemed to observers to be characterised by all but identical ecological conditions. In fact, the term « muslin » covers a populous family of finished cloths all of which possessed the same general set of desired characteristics (cotton, ultra light, exceptionally thin, fine quality, and so forth), many subvarieties of which, however, from their own microperspective, might also be seen to break down into further subranges of qualities and functions—typologies. All the thin cloths such as Mulmulls, Allaballies, Dooreas, Terrindams, Tanjibs, Surbutties and Nyansooks should be made with [this high grade Dacca district cotton, known in the market as] Photee, except the stripes of the Dooreas which should be made from Seronge or Hindostan Cotton, 25

That force of demand exerted throughout Southern, South-East and East Asia—incontrovertible evidence of vigorous economic activity, exchange and circulation—has long been occulted by supply-centric economic theory, which in turn has thus proven entirely unable to explain such movements of value except in terms of a widespread and false myth of thesaurisation (thus of non-use). That myth has long dominated the historiography and historical anthropology of such regions, entirely complementary with the colonial ideologies in which these fields, when applied to Asia, had, from their origins, rooted themselves, and as if such extra-European regions had been waiting for the « West » to introduce market economy.

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it being of a coarser quality allowing the stripes to be distinct from the ground.26 When this information is associated with the censuses of recording the cloths imported into local upland market-towns mentioned above, differentiation is confirmed as less a matter of random, local and exotic whims of production, that eventually find their way to a market, than the differential product of numerous local readings of more generalised market-potentials covering a broad territory of concern and attention, thus of a veritable literacy concerning the typologies of demand and consumption that is, for itself, of considerable research interest, a literacy that is at once both an aptitude and a kind of knowledge, highly elaborate in its own right,—thus a technical skill distributed among large populations of different kinds and levels of active participant (kinds that we must understand as including broad classes of persons of relatively low social status). The European reporter quoted above clearly has this skill: he can read into fragments of the South-Asian set of taxonomical grids, read a complex of overlapping sets of such grids that embody trading possibilities to different parts of the old and new worlds; he possessed relative experiencebased knowledge of this local South-Asian set, and one may assume that he also operates with some knowledge of those involved in European textile production and marketing. One may think of this, once more, in exploiting Steward’s remark concerning cultural influences: that of universal conditions of mind shared throughout the exchange continuum and that enable … make possible … such shared aptitudes governing the very possibility of translating new exotic experience into one’s own reasoning and fields of expectation. Such universal conditions of mind proposed as being necessary for us to fully understand the content of that letter will be the central subject matter of the next chapter. We might say, in sum, that this reporter had learned through experience to read such South Asian taxonomical clusters of type, and which, in their own right, consisted of different linguistic and cultural elements. He comprehended the variation of form and content characterising the artificial nature of the commodity—this human-factored nature governed by specific principles of phenomenal organisation—and characterising cloth speciation, … that, imprudently, we might have wished to designate an ethno-taxonomy. Imprudently, because we should then ask on what social and topographical level and scale should one seek to attach such a term, « ethno-taxonomy », and then add a further question: would that risky word, “ethnic” be even a relatively correct 26

Bengal Cottons Report (1790), 238 (my italics).

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manner of describing what he and we encounter, when attached to such typification? What would be seen to constitute its difference from our criteria of forming a taxonomy? The point being that we find ourselves confronted wherever we choose to look (and especially evident in this particular report), with combinations of numerous overlapping taxonomies derived from many different local and distant sources, different in local scale and market level, in linguistic origin, yet each of which is intentionally geared to accord with the others, enabling the formative interactions necessitated by their passage. It is also to say that all in turn correspond not only to one another—even those of relatively local incidence—but to what must be understood as a globally incident taxonomical necessity, a necessity of kind, one that, finally, we come to define as a universal, again that cultural-universal, and in spite of all its different forms and modes of finite exotic expression, … or, better put, comprised of those differences: thus what we have already discerned as a symbiotic closelygeared interdependence of particular and general through a whole web of intermediary relationship and organisation. It is in such terms that we may properly understand the capacity of our reporter to learn and read that so-called « other », that particular phenomenal realm constituting South Asian textiles … that he could do so; it becomes an aptitude that needs no longer surprise us! … Why, you rightly persist? Because we now understand its ultimately global and singular nature—thus its identity, … identity-singular—running back and forth constantly between each particular expression and universal application. The term ethno-taxonomy is clearly mistaken in this respect; it falsifies the nature of the kinds of identity in which, even on a local level, such particular taxonomies of the commodity had originated, let alone the contextual conditions guiding such « local » origins. It obscures the overlap and clustering of different taxonomical orders, and their variation in societal scale, characterising such taxonomical application and practice. The latter is especially evident in the report on raw cottons, where the words for designation, often in the same sentence and syntactical arrangement, happen to combine representations at different stages of marketisation and of the speciation of type. The word « ethnic » is equally false in occulting the universal cultural grounding for such kinds of speciation, and what appear to be their transcendental source in particular form-giving properties and propensities of mind. But let’s go further: for we should not make the mistake of assuming that such a translational facility, the facility of reading « other » cultural forms, must derive from some peculiar supra-rational attribute possessed by Europeans. One may occasionally read, among certain anthropologists, that the a­ bility to read and understand the other is indeed a special aptitude of the « ­Western »

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mind (indeed, it is expressed in such terms in the otherwise excellent volume edited by Hollis and Lukes, on Rationality and Relativism). Our evidence surely proves the contrary: that the translational idiom and facility characterising thought and practice, where commodity-culture is concerned, is necessarily universal. That is to say that, in making this point, the global character of such access to the principles of such a kind of knowledge must itself be implied, being that ground of practical possibility enabling traders of many entirely different cultural and linguistic origins to mix together and exchange in the same exotic markets, interact with one another, and, furthermore, comprehend, as of principle, the local practices of naming and « speciating » goods and payment forms, … and, therefore, be capable of using their own very particular and individual accumulation of experience in order to do so: as ground for translation from one local idiom of practise to another. It assumes that such individual circumstance, constituting an each-persons’s singular track of accumulating experience, thus its very particularity, was itself entirely sufficient ground for entering and eventually comprehending the particularities of any « other » … It assumes that universal ground. It is thus that the Chinese dealers of Guangzhou were able to identify false coin and sub-standard cloth types shipped by European traders, yet accept other types of the same general kind of coin and cloth. The very long history of trade between China and the Indies, or of Chinese and Arab trading with the Malabar coast of Southern India, and contemporaneous with a very long phase of state development throughout this vast region—yet directly preceding the period with which this book is particularly concerned, and thus evident long before the arrival of the Portuguese in Asian waters—is itself an evidence of this universal facility for the human mind: to intervene, to think the cultural object, this or that commodity from afar, and having been generated on the other side of multiple frontiers of difference, … to be able to apply value to them, assume it reasonable to do so, thus understand knowingly or instinctively their constitutive properties, even « imitate » them, and make them one’s own, … must imply such a global, translational ground for ordinary knowledge and practise, … for such aptitudes. That ground is what I have chosen to call « universal » and not merely « general » or preponderant: it is universal by strict definition. Then, no: it is not an evidence of some superior « European », civilisational attribute of the kind that once had dominated the social « science » secondary literature, and that continues, if more rarely, to be encountered today, but, instead, an evidence of faculties common to the human species. As such, therefore, our reporter provides just one individual case of the kind of experiential possibility in terms of which such shared forms of knowledge

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could be and were historically, collectively generated, randomly as it were, circumstantially, and yet composing a dynamic inter-subjective culture of knowledge. In each case, such personal experience comprised an inter-relational accumulating stock of observation, practise and learning that proved readily applicable to new contexts and unfamiliar practices, and yet shared as such, collectively, among populations of unlike other individuals, unlike in their experience and cultural representation, yet like in that very capacity to share, absorb and pass on to others the detail and principles of such experience. Must we not conclude that it is precisely this extensive bed of individually-acquired, differential knowledge, constructed through experience, that was the basic ground that made possible those innumerable meeting grounds among participants, deriving from different origins, far and near … those places of meeting and exchange we call the market, take for granted and tend to partition in terms of discrete communities or concepts of the traditional and the modern, but without drawing on what seems, here, to be most important: the facts of that ­ultimate exchange of word and goods that motored the market-network? In fact, all participants, no matter their differences of social class or status, or ­institutional attachment, would have participated, to some degree, in this ­knowledge-landscape, given that the range and complexity of such participation depending upon the personal history comprising each individual’s sinuous trajectory through the forest of the real. It is an evidence for a sharing of the means to transcend cultural difference that requires equally to be explained and thus researched; researched in terms of its possibility, given dispositions currently predominant in the humanities. It is that very possibility that engages our attention, and that we must concede as pointing to hidden foundations of meaning and practise not merely transcending particular levels of activity and local language differences but, much more radically, must be considered embodied by such difference. It is precisely this problem, this abundantly proven possibility, that will concern the detail of the following chapter. Moreover, it is commodification itself that provides this abundant evidence of translational practice through the centuries and across vast regions of global exchange of cultural goods. Were we to hypothesise, counter-factually, a once original, inaugural moment, when production of local diversity had been blind to contextual constraints and forces, and thus random, holistic and particular in the Dumontian sense, thus ground for all our speculations in favour of relative untranslatability, the consequence would be the need to conclude that the cross regional and intercommunal marketisation of goods and payment forms would either have been impossible or would have instantaneously generated the kinds of shared order in which such exchange became possible, generating the social

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contacts, investment pressures, price lists, knowledge frameworks, institutional and instrumental resources, and so forth, in which production of type is seen as a direct response to particular conjunctions of local cum contextual problems. In this second case there would be no means to explain such a result. In short, the absurdity of this counter-factual suggestion generates the rule: that marketisation and differentiation are simultaneous interdependent developments, two faces of a single coin of societal development in history; they thus imply an institutional and instrumental content devised for … dedicated to … exchange and the communication of goods and information,—to the mobility of cultural things so characteristic of the continuum of global exchange. iii

Speciation in Field & Market (Autonomy for Connection)

The above given, we return to our initial problem, the problem indicated by the term « raw cotton », its typology, and the astonishingly discrete character concerning each specific, « phased » trajectory or « career »-path, followed by each type and sub-type, as recorded in the Bengal report, cited above.27 These “raw cottons” come to be seen not as agricultural « field »-varieties but instead as varieties only observed afterwards in the market place, where indeed they are seen to have been generated, thus intentionally « manufactured » as type,—and some, as argued above, after repeated events of typification at distance: thus sequences of event that constitute in each case an ongoing process of typification (but always relative to the others). Markets are places, then, where variety is (and can be) also factored:—warehousemen and traders, even cleaners and refiners, turn out, like those who work agricultural type in the fields, to be manufacturers of type in their very own right, praxologists of type, and not metaphorically but literally, and with the most urgent practical needs in mind; they are experts in those phases of necessary typification at which such people come into contact with the commodity: they read, select, decide and act, participate in the vast extended field of populational activity in generating, maintaining and modifying the taxonomical universe. A process of collection, a 27

We should reemphasise the fact that the report covers parts of the Bengal Presidency of the late-eighteenth century (which thus includes the modern states of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, aside from modern Bengal and Bangla Desh, themselves). The latter, « West » Bengal, as a cultural, linguistic and political region, however, generally refers to the much smaller precolonial and modern state of Bengal, now West Bengal and Bangla Desh. This distinction does not effect our discussion, except to say that it is the smaller Bengal that became famous for its textile production, while marts such as Mirzapur, in Uttar Pradesh, served other major cotton-growing regions, such as, for example, the northern Deccan and Avadh Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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process of definition, a process of naming, with reference to the possibilities represented by a library of types (stored in market lists, in notes and correspondence, stored up in minds) for which there is local, regional or international demand. Then, once more the question of field variety remains for us an unread enigma that we must now tackle. We need to try to understand the change of « key », as it were, that takes place between field activity and market activity with respect to typology. The number of cotton types in evidence in the market-place might seem large if one had not suspected a further problem, and it will be seen to be necessarily finite: in the Bengal district of Burdwan, according to the observer cited in the report (this qualification is important), seven named types of « raw cotton » are traded, three grown locally, three imported long-distance from central India, and one brought by ship from Bombay. The latter was termed « Bombay » and used in factoring fine muslins (thus specific in its properties, and yet at once highly generalised in its collection phase and in its designation); those from central India, termed Amravati, Nagpur, and “Pulpurreeah”, were brought in “very considerable” quantities for the local manufacture of coarse cloths— Amravati and Nagpur are both names of major cotton-growing territories in the northern Deccan; the three « local » cottons were termed nurma (a name applied to a marketed cotton-type grown alike in other localities of Bengal and in other parts of the subcontinent), muhri and bhoga (applied respectively to the “finest muslins”, “inferior muslins”, and “even coarser” types, … the latter also as “Company assortments”).28 In short, and as suggested above, we encounter a general distinction between, on the one hand, names applied to cottons collected at distance, and thus re-grouped together as a single identity after collection and selection, and after addition to like cottons from diverse other markets, doted with the names of major growing regions, or ports of export,

28

Bengal Cottons Report (1790), 194–8 (isolated phrases in raised quotation marks indicate direct quotations from the Report). Thus nurma (or caur) was used in manufacturing nansuks, malmals, sarbatis, durias, and several others; the “inferior” muhri for the finer dootis, gazis (gauzes in English), and garas (bhoga “[is] again coarser than muhri and is used for the Company’s Assortments of garas and other cloths of similar qualities”, &c.) We noted above that Dacca muslin production (“all thin cloths”) was highly dependent upon locally grown cultivars (collectively termed « photee » in the market place); this use of imported varieties for muslin production may concern combinations such as that mentioned directly above, in the production of stripes, or market driven substitutions, brought in to maintain or allow expansion of particular local manufactures. Moreover, muslin, we noted, is a name for a large family of high-grade thin cottons; this sub-differentiation of qualities among the Burdwan muslins seems a significant illustration of the propensity for commodity taxonomies of this type to be repeatedly extended into yet further, derivative micro-typologies. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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and, on the other hand, locally produced types, usually much more specific in their naming. As « raw cottons » become reclassified in an entrepot, grouped together with a fresh range of cottons, grown elsewhere, but possessing comparable properties, new decisions about naming need to be taken,—a confluence of names, a plethora of names at the agricultural level, far less at the first marketing level, are reclassified as a smaller number of names, thus identities, on their progression from entrepot to entrepot; yet at each more general stage, a fresh, narrower range of more general types exit from that same market, but which may need further redefinition, at yet other, later market confluences. On the other hand, a designation such as nurma—being name for a type repeatedly used of « cottons » grown both locally and at long-distance—must indicate particularly generalised and stable conditions of demand and decision affecting its passage over an extensive territory, and recognised as such in different places. Many of the other Bengal districts show a similar, but variable, range of imports and local productions.—This very abundance and diversity of location and of distributive trajectory is itself of considerable relevance.29—But without citing more of such evidence, it must be clear that there is no immediate one-to-one identity joining the two market-generated taxonomic patterns, the one marking finished and unfinished cloths, and the other « raw cottons ». Nonetheless, specific finite, channelled relationships do link the two typological grids in a web of definite functional concerns and intentions which themselves determine the set of new decisions that act to mediate change from one grid into others. Furthermore, the « kinds »—despite, where cloths are concerned, the profusion we have noted at both levels of individual kind and taxonomical cluster—can in each case be counted and identified, tracked, discussed in terms of functions, prices, properties, and so forth. In contrast, agricultural variety—that produced in the field—has an entirely different character which we shall now need to decipher. It is far more profuse and diffuse, so much so that differentiation in the market now seems modest by comparison, even though, so we shall argue, equally subject to 29 E.g. Bengal Cottons Report (1790): in Mirzapur district, 151–6 (in modern Uttar Pradesh), seven market types were observed, some imported hundreds of kilometres from central and northern India; in Malda, 173–9, three sorts were grown in the immediate district (one again called nurma), three sorts were imported from Mirzapur (a major cotton mart as well as a growing district), Surat cotton was imported by ship via Calcutta, and an eighth category refers to « hill cottons » grown in areas flanking Bengal;— all are distinguished by quality, grade and use. At Rangpur, 180–5, among the several types of imported and locally grown cottons, is a category of « hill cottons » divided into « four sorts ». And so forth.

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d­ ecision-making and intention, to a labour of differentiation. This is to say, such variation may be recognised as consequent not upon a rampant nature facing a helpless peasant labour force, but instead as the product of the labour and knowhow of the latter. What, then, may be seen to be rampant are the destabilising forces acted out by nature itself (not to speak of those caused by the dynamism of the market), upon agriculture, and against which labour must be frequent, intense and devoted, countering the constant genetic plasticity of the plant before natural circumstances, whether climatic, organic or otherwise. Profuseness in the field occurs to a degree that makes its recording, and worse, any attempt to understand it, both very difficult and, among the specialists, still (surely increasingly, as it confronts the limits of conventional neoDarwinist systematics), highly controversial with respect to natural classification and its significance. One should thus speak of a different order of profusion concerning cottons, and then go on to observe that this same order of profusion also characterises many other cultivated and intensely marketed crops especially grains such as rice and millets, but also tea, mulberry, bamboo, yam, and other widely grown commercial or garden crops. The « key » that translates field variety into the species world of the market seems to constitute a major, imaginative fault line, and since such a fault-line coincides with what has been a long established, apparently self-evident sociological dogma (various types of economic dualism, for example), we had better consider it in more depth, ask questions about it, since the answer will determine our larger views about the extent and nature of the commodity world, even of the character of rural society itself. How, then, should we read this line of fault and the translational/ transformative events that traverse it, acting to alter the one kind of typological perspective on the cultivated plant into the other? My emphasis—it will be obvious given the foregoing argument—is placed on the intimate, very tight degree of interdependence linking the two domains of market and field. The fault-line occurs between the different needs and practices concerning taxonomic activity characterising, respectively, the field and the market, even though, in principle, it is the same universal kind of classificational order that, in both cases, is in question (that which we have called essentialist and stereotypical). With respect to the target-intentions of fieldproducers, marketable/manufacturable function must be what continues to govern the highly specialised, intensive husbandries invested in determining the characters of any one of the wide range of local cultivars (field micro-­ varieties) grown in particular places. Yet such variety, its attainment and sustainment … stabilisation … are extremely vulnerable to micro-variation in soilcontent, levels of humidity, the presence of organic pests, and many other

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aspects of the immediate natural context of local cultivation, such as by genetic invasion from uncultivated flora. But they may also be affected by the content of surrounding crops, thus by combination in kinds in mixed husbandry, even though the latter may be adjusted as a means of mutual protection in face of such dangers. Thus, when seen in the large, we observe two distinctive domains of autonomous practice, widely divergent in kind, yet both taking form as particular sociological departments affecting a single set of production linkages. In that same area of deltaic Bengal in which « photee » cotton was grown for the manufacture of high-grade « muslins », one reads, in a report written a century-and-a-quarter later, that a thousand or more field cultivars of rice had been listed by name by a local agricultural officer, whilst a collection of some 4000 different field varieties of rice seed grown in Bengal, each again doted with a local name, had been constituted at the Economic ­Museum in Calcutta.30 The situation with cotton was identical.31 Such varie­ ty, however, is as little random in kind, or as little a matter of random local 30

F.D. Ascoli, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the District of Dacca, 1910–1917, 27; George Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, v, 498–654, entry for Oryza sativa, esp. 529–30: “[T]he writer … had the opportunity of examining a very extensive series of specimens of rice, numbering over 4,000. These were the rices of Bengal alone … It should not, however, be understood … that very large number were all forms which could be separately recognised by the uninitiated. They came from the various districts of Bengal and were readily distinguished by the local cultivators, with whom they bore distinctive names and were supposed to possess properties that rendered the one suitable for one class of soil, nay even for a particular field in the holding, while quite unsuited for another. An attempt to classify these forms of rice by any European standard would very naturally have rejected many as being identical, but experience has shown that such a reduction on the part of any person, save perhaps a rayat [cultivator], would very probably lead to serious consequences”. But the entire passage is astonishing, whilst in the following Watt percipiently recommends that an effective classification of rices must utilise the criteria applied by cultivators in their work of selection, a view which from the first was rejected as unscientific and that remains to this day controversial; after close study of an extensive literature on the systematics of grains, cottons, &c., and on the specifics of peasant selection and cultivation (historical and modern in both cases), I agree with Watt’s advice: that peasant-based classifications are objective and realist, based not only upon the eye but upon practise. Cf. the more comparative discussion and refs. in “The Other Species World”, in Unbroken Landscape, 205ff. I had intended to treat this whole issue in far greater detail in a book for which this essay had been intended as but an introduction (the project was bought to nill by the end of my career). 31 Watt, Dictionary of Economic Products, iv, esp. 1–174, entry for Gossypium: “…a degree of complexity that perhaps exists with no other agricultural crop… The transition from one extreme to the other is, however, so complete that it seems almost arbitrary to isolate botanically any form. In an agricultural point of view, the isolation is, however, of vital importance…” (1, 4).

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­ omenclature, and certainly not a mere random and « natural » consequence n of the genetic plasticity of the plants themselves, as what we have observed above. An observer claimed that although a specialist botanist had been unable to discern differences between such seeds, a Bengali peasant could use both touch and sight in order to distinguish them, and had been able to describe their different qualities. This judgement may (but equally may not) have been subject to some exaggeration, yet nonetheless it serves to indicate that the sheer profusion of different, knowable identities at this level of object formation and recognition—classes of object that could be recognisable as possessing particular sets of property and classified among other identifiable categories of similar named objects—needs to be clearly understood as a complex phenomenology of a particular kind generated by human purpose and work, thus as cultural in the full meaning of the word. As products of human artifice, such a phenomenology stands in diametrical contrast to the sheer fluid variation of, say, natural grasses (including wild grains) under varying natural conditions. The latter, indeed, have proven difficult to classify, the very issue subject to controversy; the question being whether at some level of genetic plasticity they become unclassifiable, a feature, whether confirmed or not, indicates why stabilisation of cultivated rices or millets have proven so demanding of planned and invented forms of work. For, both sides of this equation are based upon the natural genetic plasticity of the plant, the natural instability of its genetic content in contexts of multiple forces and influences, including transfer of genetic properties from plant to plant; to the side of micro-stability there must be added the additional, all-significant dimension of human ­labour,—acted out to maintain and preserve identities ultimately required by markets for the properties represented by such identities, faced by the threat of their natural plastic responsiveness and instability when left to themselves. It is, therefore, an agriculturally-disposed taxonomical praxis that is everywhere in question, and that could be expressed consciously in words by the practitioners concerned, and above all, as a factoring of type and its pigeon-holing, as it were,—fixing it in its selected niche.32 In truth, the operative word is better put as control: a control effectuated, once again, by intricate, patient labour, a fine labour on a level of micro-detail difficult for a botanical specialist to observe, its full botanical and cultural significance to seize:—that choice of identity and niche combines criteria from two radically different kinds of source: the complex fluid world of experience 32

The quotation from George Watt in the previous note assumes this difference. On modern discussion of the problem, viz. the special issue of Systematic Botany on “Species and Evolution” listed in the Bibliography.

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called nature, and that other purely artificial world that is commerce, and that in its artifice can perhaps be compared with geometry. Yet, what confines and determines any given choice must be an imperative discipline of sensitive response to the flood of signs, numbers and words passing down through networks of markets, perhaps finally registered as a dynamic topography of price variation whereby it must compete for sale among many like identities. The consequence is a more or less constant need to act purposively and plastically on that very same plastic genetic content, to work it, that word stabilisation even concerned with modifying a set of constituent properties in order to respond to the polemics in the market place concerning quality and acceptability. Under such dynamic, ongoing development of the sociology of market forces, their increasing concentration and monopsony, it is evident that identity itself, that so important notion consisting of fixing an identity through work, is itself dynamic. This fact, however, does not qualify our contention concerning the role of human work or the nature of that artifice called the cultivated plant and seed, but instead acts to place a particularly strong emphasis on the role of human mind and work even … no, especially … at the level of the field and peasant hut. Yes: control, intention, labour are the words required to describe this difference dividing nature from artifice in the very « heart » of the cultivated plant: the creative intelligence required not of some god such as infused the old botany but mundane, material human intelligence and art. In short, field variety is an intrinsic part of our problem:—its all important component of work, … its dependence upon a specialised constantly adjusted and applied technology that allowed husbandmen to modify at will the microgenetic content of particular plants (even if not using such vocabulary in order to describe such acts). In Part 2, “Taxonomy and Commodity”, I shall consider the surprising degree of connectivity between such a peasant-centred selectionist praxis and the more intellectual levels of an early botanical science developing simultaneously in Europe; both evidences of the universal culture of the commodity. But, here, it is this peasant practice that is in question, and the need to ask after the causes that drive such a laboured, highly technical industry concerned with variation. What motivated this kind of simulation of natural variation in terms of its very opposite: a diversity of discrete typological identities, and thus of representing the continuum of natural variation so characteristic of natural grasses in terms of a range of an opposed objectification of forced stabilised distinctions, thus a new object domain, artificial … cultural?33 33

A close comparison may be made with another « plastic medium » used as a medium of exchange: gold, once sold as « dust », and thus by quantity and weight, in West Africa— Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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It arises: (i) From the already mentioned, genetic plasticity of such plants (­cottons, rices, millets, teas, &c.)—leading to a fluidity of form across a range of possible variation, owing to their micro-susceptibility, their sensitivity, to microscopic variations in local conditions affecting the topographies of field and village, and acting continuously throughout the days of the year (soil, climate, temperature, humidity, and much else). In consequence—owing to that plasticity—the plant is likely to adapt its properties to each and every micro-circumstance affecting local ecology, and operating both through micro-space and time. Of the first, for example, soil variation within a single village may require typological response and variation. That is to say, it is true even on the scale of a single

thus, as a continuum of matter; but forged into discrete, recognisable, named micro-­ identities in coin-using Europe and Asia— an object domain. In West Africa, the work of diversity seems to have been invested in the weights used to measure the dust, rather than in the material of payment itself, as was mostly the case in Europe and Asia. It is also no mere analogy—given the formal role of designation itself, the manner in which the linguistic act of designation complements, participates in, the physical labours of genetic fixation—to quote Cassirer, once more, on linguistic designation, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, i, Language, 107: “Thus in every sphere, it is through the freedom of spiritual [i.e. consciously-chosen mental] action that the chaos of sensory impressions [read: the plasticity of the raw material of impression, the huge bank of already existing, natural, genetic variation, yet a matter for further labour] begins to clear and take on fixed form for us. The fluid impression assumes form and duration for us only when we mould it by symbolic action in one direction or another”. In the world of our text, the whole taxonomy of field and of market-fabricated variety constitutes this field, a language and form of symbolic usage and action,— a world of fixed durable signs, produced by intellectual (imaginative and reasoned) and physical labour, over and above, yet in terms of, the fluid, shifting world of nature. Similarly, “the product of their activity [of these different kinds of linguistic-usage,] in no way resembles the mere material with which they began”; speaking historically, this “mere matter” is equivalent to our « raw material »: already formed, but, as coming to be worked, reworked into new grids of meaning and of the organisation of meaning. “Myth and art, language and science [i.e. language in its varied differentiated forms] … represent … [the] process by which reality is constituted for us as one and many— as a diversity of forms which are ultimately held together by a unity of meaning”. And finally, i, 271: “The undifferentiated world [our « raw material », once more] contains within it all the potentialities of differentiation … [by procedures of labour, … of formation & formulation]”. These remarks and definitions accurately characterise our commodity world, not least what which takes form in the field of the real as a multitude of taxonomical designations, objects of technical work, objects of contemporary speech, comparison and use. I am also struck by the close proximity of Cassirer’s Kantian formulation with Husserl’s manner of expressing the « rules », so to speak, of his own phenomenology. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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village or hamlet (variations of soil, contour or natural irrigation, each acting upon identity and type).34 (ii) Correspondingly, work—exercised in the production of particular kinds of plant, the latter being vested … invested … intentionally with qualities specifically desired by local dealers (and communicated as such)—must be devoted to techniques for fixing type, of stabilising it, thus enabling it to resist the multiple natural forces constantly leading to genetic modification, to shifts across the micro-« boundary » that distinguishes each « type » from another, or that governs their identities and recognition. The work of fixing type must, thus, even seek to utilise ecological conditions, … do so by engineering new conditions into the cultivational environment, say in the form of irrigation channels,—and in order to generate microtypes that successfully replicate the properties required in the market. Already, then, we are again clearly involved with a knowledge field that minimally implicates two apparently autonomous taxonomic grids: first, the market grid as field of ultimate purpose, a domain to be accurately « read » by all concerned, the grower included; second, the eco-­variational grid as a discipline of constraints requiring the invention of a whole technology of means to that end. Both husbandmen and local merchants must be able, in some manner, to read this distinction, the disjunction that it involves, and the translatability that must nonetheless, as of origin, function between the grids. (iii) « Nature » (« first nature »)—by stimulating genetic modification—constitutes a multiple threat to the « integrity » of the identities of such laboured, selected microtypes (to their stable reproduction through the season and from one season to another). All of the specialist, agronomical literature emphasises the consequence: the culture of work and of typology is both product of, and means for, a war of domination … of dominion … waged against nature, of securing cultivated crops from variation due to natural forces.35 Type—its selection and protection … its 34

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The bank of millet-seed varieties stored by a Taiwanese upland community, investigated by Wayne Fogg, covered a range of conditions only some of which prevailed in a given year, and thus for which only some seeds were selected for the season’s cropping (“Swidden Cultivation of Foxtail Millet by Taiwan Aborigines”). For the influence of price movements on such micro-decisional acts concerning cultivated grains, see Harold Mann’s two village studies, Land & Labour in a Deccan Village. The point is also polemical, for there is a long tradition of interpretation that tells us that peasants are close to and part of nature: that there is a harmonious intercourse between peasant and soil, an organic unity. The truth is otherwise: technically speaking, in this

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integrity—becomes a rigorous, continual, intensive labour, a labour of Sisyphus applied, in the case of rices, to each distinct, individual plant. Peasant farming characteristically involves dense calendars of highly varied tasks, in this case allotted to the tasks of « inventing » or « discovering », and then protecting and maintaining, a profusion of micro-­identities from unwanted genetic responses to the environmental milieu. Each ­micro-variety, we would say, was factored/selected for designer ends, and each therefore had its given selection of chosen, desired characters, its properties, in addition to those desired of them in the « market ».36

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respect, the peasant (using hand tools applied to the individual plant) is closer in cultural spirit to ourselves, with our machines, factories and cities, than to nature. Nostalgia for nature is the luxury of the student and the urbanite. Thus not the combine harvester, but the hand implement (Francesca Bray, Science & Civilisation in China, vi, Biology & Biological Technology, ii, Agriculture. A remarkable study, deeply evocative of this detail-labour and micro-inventive technology, is T. Gilbert & S.S. Salimath, “The Cultivation of Drilled Paddy in South Bombay Presidency”, in Bombay Agricultural Department Bulletin [1917], no. 82), emphasising the cultivator’s attention to the individual plant, use of nurseries in selection, rotations, and systematic selection of ­micro-varieties in order to check unwanted cross-breeding, and a selected tabulation of the annual calendar of tasks &c. Most remarkable, in their report, is the development of other particular cultivars the only function of which was to aid in the management of a rotation. Obviously, there is a polemical drive to this presentation of evidence concerning agricultural practice, and including peasant communities practising swidden cultivation;— it seeks to present views of conscious, that is to say intentional, mental activity of a technical and procedural kind not normally attributed to such populations, and yet there are fundamental implications to be drawn from such evidence of an intensive daily activity that links them, despite appearances, with our own conceptual aptitudes and attributes (implying that the distinctiveness of the more exotic forms of local expression should not be read too literally, since underlying them—this being the thesis of this book—is a common ground of principles of thought that govern perception and act); and that enables one, also, to link such activities in the field as part and parcel of the production/marketing/ communications nexus. Contrary to the historicist (psycho- and bio-evolutionist) and culturalist gist of Cassirer’s discussion of the mental and linguistic representation of time in the present (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, i, 215 ff. [esp. 218]), this varied body of interlocked selection-techniques, all focussed together in a single calendar of work invested in fixing plant-characters, must imply a very sophisticated and interventionary notion of cause and effect, indeed of a praxis that assumes time’s conceptual, componential complexity—at once irreversible, yet engaging many different cyclical aspects that nonetheless are manipulable, … « fixable » in terms of a given content of properties (annual, rotational, &c.). If one is to benefit from Cassirer’s often very rich exposition, it must be treated as metaphor for a more classically Kantian unpacking of the logical, processual phases

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Now let us consider the field/market interface. We do this by way of a report on local rices grown for sale in a small market town in Sind, called Larkana.37 The report makes it clear that what is collected from the field is much more varied typologically than the list of named types worked up by the market itself. Rice traders collect this profuse variety and group it into a much smaller number of named market types, each being characterised by different consumer needs. A certain range of different rice-cultivars are suitable for composing one clearly identifiable, homogenous market type, a different range of distinctive cultivars for another market type. We encounter this evidence of close interdependent relationship linking field and market in the ongoing constitution of a commodity-object, be it a rice variety, a millet or a yam, yet expressed in clearly distinct kinds of constitutive practice: that specific to an efficacious agricultural practice pointed towards the market and that specific to the market itself. Yet these two different practises can be thought of as unified when considered as steps in a more processual and ongoing purpose of gradual phase by phase definition of the commodity that will ultimately come to be consumed by its final purchasers, thus, as if parts, indeed, of a production line. Those purchasers might be dispersed in space or highly concentrated and specific, say sold for consumption in a variety of different markets in different parts of the world, or sold to the monks of a local temple, but in both cases we are dealing with the same phenomenon: the physical time and space, social generation of the commodity-object. —Then, there should be no reason to read into this relationship some process of dissolution of peasant autonomy, of the forces of the market penetrating and destroying some version of a moral subsistence economy; the different

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i­nvolved in thinking the « object » (and, thus, in defining the « self »). There is indeed a historical/evolutionary/biogenetic difficulty with his typically late nineteenth/earlytwentieth-century manner of foreshortening the long process of human and societal development and reading the cultural diversity of the present as an evidence of such evolutionary development, and as expressed in the sections devoted to linguistic form and the expression of space/time. However, later in the same chapter, Cassirer’s historicity is far more solidly rooted, 266 ff. (Chapter 3, §4, §§3): less « as if » a mere evidence for the existence or not of the transcendental a priori (the concepts of space/time), so much as of language-formation as a transcendental process itself, and rooted in process,—in which the « I » and « the world » mutually take form and posit one-another as history and in history. With this, the historian of contexts can then refer such formation of language and concept to the variabilities of concrete material experience: say, with those societal conditions in which different metrologies take form, … all those forms in which taxonomical considerations are concerned. A.N. Ishaq, “Rice Cultivation in the Larkana District”, Bombay Agricultural Department Bulletin, no. 99, e.g. tabulation 13–14.

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aspects of this world have developed together in a functional symbiosis of differentiated roles (grower, artisan, trader) and acts of participation (cultivation and trading), and have done so from the very inauguration of settled life and social dominance and control of labour in vast extensive regions of the continents.38 That is to say, there is no question in this respect of a dual economy. Husbandry had, from the start, and necessarily, owing to its constructional location within a complex societal and class-structured set of relationships and forces of social domination, been market-oriented, … driven by demand on labour, thus by demand for the products of that labour, and, in turn, therefore, by precocious monetisation. Denomination … typology … are thus specific to these two interdependent levels, and, again, necessarily so; but the latter are disengaged from one another, arising in relation to one another and yet according to distinctive, autonomous, circumstantial criteria. The merchant classifies according to the needs of other later marketing phases, possibly also influenced by certain problems of transportation, and with the demand exerted by certain groups of intermediate or final consumer.—A finite range of different needs are reflected locally in a small number of market-named varieties that appear as such in price lists:—ten or eleven, in this case. The farmer is indeed concerned to produce cultivars that correspond to one or more of these ten or eleven marketable types, and knows about the latter, seeks to know the properties expected of each one of them. Yet this market typology must essentially act as a cadre of reference (a target cadre, as it were) for a finer, differently oriented micro-work on variety that focuses upon the need to fix type as a technical response to a very complex range of more or less variable fluid environmental phenomena. For genetic and ecological reasons, field typologies—as we have said—are far more profuse in typological variety, far more micro-specific, far less controllable and yet, in practice, far more controlled. And such variety of the field is entirely different, in the nature of the work invested in it, from the kind of moremarket-pure typology fabricated in the market, into which however it eventually flows: insect scavengers, fungi, humidity levels, a variable invasive gene bank existing beyond the field (and carried by wind, bird and insects), natural and artificial irrigation, all act to influence micro-choice. Natural 38

It is important to note that Watt, in Dictionary of Economic Products, iv, appears to take the disjunction between market cottons and field cottons for granted: on 3, two references to commercial cottons; 102, “several commercial forms”; 118, “included commercially in the group of « Bengals »”; 121 & 129. But given the spirited discussion of the problem of the botany of field variety, repeated references to gross commercial categories, and then to problems of botanical identification of commercially designated varieties (e.g. 102), Watt’s awareness and interest concerning the difference can hardly be doubted.

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­ lasticity, we have seen, is forced into a kind of « periodic table » of artificiallyp determined difference. It might be the case that radically different adaptations from different regions—different plant forms, one adapted against low rainfall and another against an insect predator—would eventually become constituents, with many others, of a single market type, because, as a consumption end, they possess comparable (or else complementary) properties.39 Type, then, represents a known body of properties mediated by all those involved in its passage towards the consumer, and who, in turn, were equally particular in their expression of a demand for what was desired. We may speak metaphorically of the noise of the market place, a noise comprised of elements of language flowing along the trade routes and acting as a kind flow of information funnelling downwards phase by phase into the upturned ears of those below, as it were, and towards those very first steps in constituting the commodityobject in the field, mint, mine, shipyard or, say, spinning wheel or loom. What I am alluding to here is the imaginative and task-oriented interdependence that links dynamically each phase the one to the other, thus to what precedes and follows it, and was expected to do so, thus their fundamental, intentional jointure, and thus dependence upon imagination, … on plan and decision, … and, in turn, an accessible field of knowledge, and thus a literacy of some sophistication concerning quality and measure: First in principle: the fact that cultivation, together with the various subsequent, successive sites of warehousing and perhaps processing, and, where, for example, cloth-making was concerned, the spinning of the actual yarn or the weaving of the cloth, besides other possible procedures such as dying or painting, all went to constitute the serial and narrativelike form and extendability of production of a fully factored, constituted commodity: a virtual production line scattered across territory; Second in fact: in the sense that the production and marketing n ­ exus—all along the « lines » of connection linking successive transportation phases of marketing and procedures of factoring—is populated by spoken and written words, by messages, by gossip, judgements and orders, by 39

This is clearly the case with the raw-cotton type nurma, mentioned above, a name given in the market for cottons coming from different parts of Bengal itself and for others imported from elsewhere in the subcontinent, and that are also mentioned as having been collected and marketed elsewhere in other contemporary reports. It is a market name covering groups of different field cultivar grown in widely differing climatic and other ecological conditions, but that possess identical properties, relative to those desired in the market, and identified as such; thus, such time- and space-separated acts of designating such cultivars as nurma. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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i­ nformation and criticism. Such messages might be relayed all the way between, say, the Chinese purchaser of cotton at Guangzhou and the country dealer in Amod, in Gujarat, or between that same Chinese purchaser of « Hispano-American rials » and the mints in Lima, Birmingham or southern Guangdong, where so-called « Mexican » rials were manufactured; but such examples are mere occasions in a dense exchange of words throughout the continuum. We might say, then, that the nexus is supercharged with flows of heterogenous, often dissonant information, communication, multifarious acts of translation, as merchants meet in small towns, or as dealers collecting produce in the village, or as peasants exchange words and seed in a Bengali hat or Russian peasant market, or as auctioneers gather in London or Hamburg,—modifying behaviour, and thus influencing the « metrologies » and content of properties concerning the typologies themselves—modifying them both materially and imaginatively in a constant ferment of changing micro-detail, … affecting the composition of the very object world thereby constituted, thus the contexts themselves. In the final analysis, it is a single complex nexus of commodification, say concerned with the full sequential production of a Venetian damsaquette fabricated from certain Syrian, Turkish or Indian « raw-cottons ». Such a commodity may be seen to have been the product of numerous events of fission and juncture, and involving a multitude of differing « lines » of production and affected by many disparate flows of communicative expression, … thus of a rich field of language-use that everywhere acts as an accessible information to be read and act as the context of further decision and choice. A segment of such linkages, a certain ensemble of such « disengaged connections », would always be experienced by participants as a set of overlapping, inter-active, thus meshed reference grids.40 In order for the husbandman to model an environmentallyadapted field cultivar—unstable, extremely artificial—there must be some knowing access … some reading … albeit relative … concerning the e­ xpectations 40

Ultimately—this is important as we try to determine the character or properties of this « second nature »—the referential grids of contextual knowledge available to any particular person, must differ per individual, based upon the « hazards » of any particular individual’s own biographical course through life, thus experience and career, and the sequential accumulation of that person’s working locations and trajectories through social, institutional and topographical space,—an accumulation of countless experiences of meetings and conversations, of listening, interrogating, and thus which, in sum, will be different to that detail of such a grid of particularised knowledge possessed even by a close neighbour or kin. One may continue to add fresh criteria as components of such differentiation: individual, professional, locational, the moment of observation, &c. One would add and add, giving more and more body, density, to the sense of what goes to make up this individualised, particularised culturally-« creationist » milieu. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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of the subsequent phase or phases, and thus concerning the different cadres of typological reference composing such subsequent phases;—this «  library of reference  », so to speak, must itself be complex and differentiated, a linked series of interdependent, semi-independent, different phasings, and observable as such, readable as a dense many-levelled text possessed of patterns of meaning, filled with words, terms, class-names, syntactical forms and number suitable for expressing the economic connections involved.41 41

This is clearly an example of the « paperasse » delegitimised by the historians discussed by Rancière in Les Mots de L’Histoire, yet central to the construction and conveyance of meaning in this, my own interpretation. Instead of seeing disorder in profuseness and heterogeneity, it becomes a means of reading complex society (Viz. Mikhaïl Bakhtin, Rabelais & his World , e.g. 41, referring to Schlegel’s view of the « grotesque », but virtually summing up his own evaluation of the general character of language-use, as against its theoretical characterisation: “…the fantastic combination of heterogenous elements of reality…”). As for the multiplicity of grids, their functional and processual interdependence, and my insistence throughout this text on the absence of unmediated, one-to-one relationships between them, and the structural and dynamic significance of this lack of reducibility, one may turn to the formulation in Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind, 57, where he comments that Kant “is properly suspicious about believing [that] a « unity in synthesis » must entail a « unity in subject »”, the view that « x » cannot be mapped numerically onto « y »; yes, but I prefer here to substitute « taxonomically » (and algebraically) for « numerically ». In fact, while all the phases of the cognitive process, their different structural characteristics, are necessarily analogical with one another (this is in the essence of Kant’s theory of knowledge and of the cosmos, and seems repeated by Husserl), they are, as such, irreducible to one another; this analogy between Kant’s cognitional theories and the actually materialised grids of our commodity domain is not adventitious, as we shall see in Chapter 3, below: indeed, Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, “Introduction & Presentation of the Problem”, 73ff., carries over Kant’s transcendental critical idealism into the forms and formation of the physical facticity of a materialised culture and relates it to an intersubjective praxology: esp. language. Philonenko, in L’Oeuvre de Kant, and in his L’Ecole de Marbourg. Cohen—Natorp—Cassirer, who is strongly and explicitly influenced, in his own right, by Marburgist interpretations, emphasises this combination of necessary analogy between, and yet irreducibility, among the different levels, structures, domains and reference cadres of Kant’s world of expression (cf. the image of the tower, below). It is a particular theory of mind and of the formation of knowledge which, in its reliance upon complexity, and as a principle of method and organisational complex, seems peculiarly apt for my own attempt to substitute an unpacking of organisational complexity to replace the reductive frameworks of knowledge given to us by the social « sciences ». For the term « analogy », as used by Kant,—for there is presumed in his « system » a law of complete compatibility (yet not reducibility) between all the contents and aspects of the universe, including mind,—viz. the remarkable work by Jean-François Lyotard, L’Enthousiasme. La Critique kantienne de l’Histoire, and the relevant entries in Eisler, Kant-Lexikon. Viz. also, a remarkable passage: “…and discovers that this unison can only derive from this very distinction…”, from Kant, Critique de la Raison pure, “Vorrede” to the 2nd edn., 742, n., in Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 22n [Ak. iii.14, B.xxi] (Oeuvres

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We attain a more adequate level of argument in adding to it the problem of monetisation and the range of institutional and instrumental phenomena characterising payment forms across the whole of the Euro-Asian continuum, treating that continuum as ever as a connectivity of effective exchange in spite of all its obvious regional and local differentiation, and, as I argue, indeed embodied by those differences: thus, by the changes of denomination and the numerous frontiers encountered between different metallic bases, differing metrologies and organisations of value, that seem, in contrast, to have made of medieval and early-modern payments a byword among historians for an absence of order and standards, thus for a fundamental disorganisation sapping the means to trade across « frontiers », … a judgement asserted whatever the scale of attention. It is this very observation—that it is precisely such empirical differentiation of local expression concerning the monetary evidence that alone can be judged as embodying the principles necessary for translational exchange—that has, in my view, necessitated a phenomenological (or Kantian-type) justification and comprehension. Instead, as with textiles—in which case, however, the issue seems more straightforward and clear—the problem of money will come to be recognised as offering us an especially lucid demonstration of those universal principles of commodity formation that I claim extends likewise to the mass of heterogenous evidence constituting payments … the act as much as the object! The precondition, of course, is that it is indeed problematised and that appropriate questions are posed prior to judgement, … that it comes to be treated as a problem requiring systematic interrogation and explanation. Such a study would ultimately recognise that it is that remarkable variety of form and kind so characteristic of monetary phenomena—and confusing our judgement—that happens to embody universal principles of institutional form identical in kind with those already observed of cloths and grains, and indeed based upon the very same constitutive drives. As with cloths the evidence for such principles are not hermetic but instead often laid out before the contemporary eye in documented sets of detailed rules and regulations, or of exact descriptions and definitions in public works of reference such as Savary’s Parfait Negotiant, and many other kinds of communicative act intended for public circulation. They Philosophiques, i, 742n., and Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 24). I cite him simply as an evidence for a way of thinking the relationship between synthesis and difference, accord and dissonance, for which there are few current parallels. There is also a more direct relevance, but this would need an extended argumentation.

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are of course strictly empirical and specific in the kind of information they seek to provide, but they provide a gate of entry leading us into the more philosophical and essential grounds enabling global commodification to be discussed in the next chapter. We saw that where textiles or grains were concerned, it was precisely an organisation of the commodity in terms of typologies of differences—as an artificial and ordered nature,—thus in terms of sequences of transit ultimately determined by a vast open range of potentially different knowable targets of consumption, that opens a window through which an appropriate explanation can be envisaged; in short, that it is precisely what has long confused the eye that offers the « explanation »: the « explanation of difference ». The explanation centres upon the complexities of societal organisation in its own right, and I mean by this remark that purpose and difference of monetary form is intentionally focussed towards the different kinds of social and institutional relationship comprising society at large, but observed on a correspondingly detailed level. Clearly, a strictly economic, let alone monetary focus is insufficient: the monetary historian is called upon to become both a historian and an anthropologist of the larger societal complex in which monetary relationships are embedded and generated. As consequence, such study would embody a strongly-felt need to redefine afresh much of the essentially casual terminology generally used to treat the monetary phenomena of the past, and, in turn, a resolutely detailed, microempirical research into payment forms that never loses sight of the multiplicity of interacting levels and scales of circulation upon which all local and particular evidence of circulation should be seen to depend, and for which monetary institutions will be found to be purposively designed as means to provide order and regulation.42 The point would be less to show the manner in which payments mirrored the organisational characteristics of textiles, even though, in an important, even fundamental sense they did so, constituting an especially remarkable and rich resource for studying all aspects of commodity typification. That point would instead be that of exposing such a unity of principle underlying production and regulation wherever encountered in the continuum, thus whether in China, India, Persia, the German Empire, Low Countries, or Mediterranean 42

With respect to terminology, ordinary words like coin, bullion, commercial trust, bank, pawnbroker, bullion, technology, &c., have been taken up from local vernacular usages, and, because left as such, have become unsuited to comparative use, and to the advance of knowledge. They pre-read the answer before it has been investigated. In contrast to some, therefore, I consider problems of terminology to be central to the issues discussed in this essay.

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l­ittoral. Nonetheless, they are obviously different from what are considered « goods », and owing to their central, complementary role in providing a quantitative means for reducing qualities of kind to measure and number, thus enabling the absolute reduction of commodities to such number, an absolute means of comparison of each to each for « evaluation » and purposes of exchange, causing commodities, whatever their forms and origins, to be rendered as measure,—infinitely translatable across the many different parameters of order and frontier, characterising their transit across space, thereby conjoining them into a universal organisation of recognisable differentiation that allows for their prolific exchange.—The corollary is that a thoroughgoing study of such spontaneously-generated, artificial micro-taxonomies as characterises that quantificative yet highly differentiated medium must prove especially fruitful for laying bare these principles. The role of exact measure in monetary life adds to the means of studying taxonomy, but it also is the vehicle and function that makes those taxonomies different to all others, and possible as such. By this function, moneys are much more than commodities, much more than just taxonomy (although this is also all that they are—the problem is in defining this « all »).43 Monetary instruments, in this sense must be thought of as veritable means consciously worked up, designed, precisely in order to serve and manage the spatial organisation of such pancentric (or pluricentric), multitype payments orders; that is, they are designed, like markets themselves (and in close conjunction with them), to organise complexity, to regulate and mediate it. By late-medieval times, we are once again confronted by a continuum composed of many interacting levels and scales of circulation, on which payments forms operated, and, indeed, were factored in order to do so. Some payments forms were specifically designed to traverse oceans and continents (ducats, sommi, rials, ducatons, bar); many others were intentionally designed to circulate within small localities. This might be accomplished through metrological weighting, as it were; for example, the mahmudi of Surat had been intentionally designed to act as counterpart to the more extensive, extra-regionally circulating Mughal rupee, and surely as means to hold a sufficiency of money supply within the more local region.44 Thus diversity of form, level and scale is closely associated with the complexity of markets, and serves to manage and 43 44

For a wide ranging analysis of monetary differentiation and its contexts see, among other essays devoted to monetisation, “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”. In Unbroken Landscape. It is part of the abundance of evidence showing that the type of destabilising phenomena described under the name of « Gresham’s Law » had formed a full part of public consciousness and common knowledge, and for this very reason had engaged systematic and

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organise that complexity, but also—and this point cannot be overemphasised—makes not only payments possible but, correspondingly, makes that very complexity possible, grounding its multifunctional and extensional character through different local and supra-local orders and across multiple frontiers of different kinds. To take up an argument mentioned earlier, multiplicity of frontiers, thus exotic « internal » cultural form—of moneys, metrologies, symbols, shapes, words, administrations, denominations, a multiplicity of local and regional standards—are possible only because they take form in a context in which instruments and institutions are also geared to the powers and facilities of « translation » across such frontiers, … in which, therefore, the latter take form simultaneously as parts of a complex of closely inter-related societal developments. Market lists of coins, note issues, and commodities, lists of moneys depicting their changing daily values relative to one another, whether in some small local market town or concerning the entrepot-ports scattered throughout the continuum—for example, in those lists recording the twicedaily meetings of the Chinese qian-zhuang banking guilds in order to regulate fresh exchange values between a variety of different local and regional note issues—treat items brought from numerous different loci, far and near, and thus circulating on varying overlapping circulation-scales, organised in terms of the complexity of market-typologies already discussed. In turn, because providing a universal measure of « accountive » comparability, they are the very means for generating complexity, even leading it to proliferate and augment. Like the producer of a field-cultivar, a « raw-cotton », a yarn or cloth, the manufacturer of coins would need to fashion objects in a manner appropriate for certain specific kinds of payment functions, or capable of « translating » articles across a certain well-defined exchange-frontier. The consequence would be a search, once more, for an appropriate typological niche to be occupied by a coin possessed of an appropriate synthesis of both qualitative and quantitative properties, for serving those functions. Given available component materials, this typological niche must take the form of a finite selection of such desirable quantitative and qualitative properties, which, together, will constitute the very identity of the coin: a bundle of metrological, material and symbolic properties that may hopefully be operative to serve the work required of that niche.45

detailed individual response and adjustment, often of a very delicate metrological kind, as shown by this example. 45 Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, i, 89: “The sign … persists as the representative of a totality, as an aggregate of potential contents, beside which it stands as a «  first

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Difference is not, then, an original datum in terms of which a subsequent process of integration ab nihilo might be thematised and studied, but, in contrast, is what comes observed by us as the factual appearance of an extremely complex, spontaneously-generated order of inherently « translational forms » extended, and designed to be extended, through social depth and across territory, past one kind of frontier after another, and encompassing the entire global continuum of exchange of commodities, thus of circulation. They comprise forms purposively intended to be translational … ie. exchangeable and re­ cognisably so, accessible to that shared experiential knowledge of an « every-­ person » emphasised above. In such territories, markets appear as institutions for managing translatability across social and societal space. The many studies of marketisation mentioned in Chapter 1 (especially those concerning China), support this reading: the early-modern centuries mark a long period in which markets of variable size and range appear in increasing density in India, Western Europe, Western Russia, and China, besides West Africa, at the very same time that agriculture itself was extended through vast hinterland territories. Finally, there are other issues central to this treatment of order-as-complexity, that can only be mentioned here in order to pose the problem. The administration of fiscality and rents, thus the multidirectional conveyance through societal and territorial space of very large numbers of fractional payments of different kinds, surpasses the mere problem of the monetary functions of money: indeed, the significance of monetisation can then be seen to extend much further precisely because of its general purpose in providing means to generate numerical measure of value for what otherwise seems to us irreducibly qualitative.46 Remember that a commodity is both an object ultimately

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­ niversal »”; and, complementarily, he remarks, 95: “each particular relation belongs—­ u regardless of its particularity—to a totality of meanings … a formal context” (in Ralph Manheim’s translation). An obvious example: village metrologies, in the old world, are, on their own level irreducible to one another, and this is often emphasised in the secondary literature as evidence and source of an irreducible localism and, more generally, of an absence of rational order. However, we could ask how, in such conditions, could any regionally-extended fiscal organisation function if, say, lacking the basic means for accounting the detail of local quantities and levies, as locally expressed, thus their difference, and lacking means of comparing measure, reducing such differences to an addable and subtractable medium. In “State-Formation Reconsidered”, in The Invisible City, I analyse this problem, show how regional-scales of administration of fiscality could function, seeking to demonstrate that what on their own level of detail and « quality » appear irreducible metrologically, are made possible by the very existence of such synthesising forms of quantitative evaluation operating more generally on local difference (thus, and this point is important, not by imposition of one monoposonist standard, as would eventually occur, but by the existence of whole differential fields composed of multiple standards).

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destined for qualitative use and a repository of transitional fluctuating values; that it is the latter that makes one use-quality equitable with other dissimilar use-qualities. With respect to fiscality and rent, one may pose the problem in terms of the inveterate diversity of local administrative forms and measures, even of local values of account, which nonetheless provide a resource for an administrative accounting mode that runs right through the levels and spaces of society to the remotest, most local possessor of a distant peasant plot, measured and registered in terms existing nowhere else. Money, in this sense—at its different levels—fastens upon, replicates, abstracts from, and then resolves this hierarchy of societal structures and differences; it serves to generate the flexibilities and complexity of governmental and state-level organisation itself, permits extents of social mobility that must lend their character to the forms of social life (by techniques of accounting and conveyance of account, by the conveying of value across distances and apparent frontiers), and thus providing society with a « complexifier », so to speak, because acting as « synthesiser » of varied kinds of social and political relationship, … of different levels and kinds of social and cultural space, thus as a re-organiser of societal form into fresh architectonic arrangements. A signal example is the remarkable fractional differentiation and dispersal of rights in the product of agricultural labour, yet that was only possible in a fully monetised, even commercialised environment. With money, in short we jump into a wholly other order of possible societal organisation.47 It is to say that these are not merely signs used to register the different items composing complexity but constitute essential means of managing complexity itself, and, furthermore, of providing principles of order in terms of which yet further, fresh inputs of complex organisation (and further differentiation) may subsequently be generated.

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Money, through its astonishing taxonomical flexibility, and in its monetary and extramonetary functions, can be thought of as a further development of language in its own right. Language acts on matter to create an extra significative web of meanings that rises above pure matter, mere sensation. It diversifies, generates an object world that can be manipulated, reconstructed in speech and text. Whole cities of words are constructed intersubjectively by the ordinary use of language, that bear no resemblance to primal matter, so to speak (i.e. in terms of an ontological fiction). And then money, with its manifold use of comparative, contrastive measure, its infinite divisibility and re-arrangeability (the rearrangement it effects on its field of applicative reference), becomes an extra means of building form, a means of constructing a new stage of « the tower » (on which, see Chapter 3) incomparable in form and complexity with the previous stage.

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Figure 16 Medieval relief sculpture in stone. Rodez Cathedral

Illustrations Section 3: Flora & Fauna (Depiction of Seamless Corporal Continuity between Animaland Plant-form)

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Figure 17 Relief carving in wood. Imperial Academy and Confucian Temple of Literature, Hanoi

Figure 18 Illuminated capital « L ». Olivier de Serres, Théâtre de L'Agriculture, edn. of 1600

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Figure 19 Vignette heading chapter of Olivier de Serres, Théâtre de L'Agriculture, edn. of 1600

Figure 20 Vignette ending letter “A” in Diccionario de Autoridades, Book i (of 1726), 524

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Figure 21a Carved wood shutter of temple Wat Khokkhormingmoungkhoun in Pakbeng, Oudomxay Province, Laos

Figure 21b Carved « decoration » in temple Wat Khokkhormingmoungkhoun in Pakbeng, Oudomxay Province, Laos

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Figure 21c A kinnara from the ruins of Vijayanagar in Karnataka, Southern India

Figure 22 Modern Thai domestic ware

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Chapter 3

A Second Object World …rather than an opposition that certain moments might attenuate, it is a rupture that defines this task…1 1

The Continuum

The general issue of ultimate concern to us is that of how this complex ­cumulative process of differentiation and construction, of « differentiation-in-­ construction  », should be understood and represented. It clearly concerns ­culture, a sense of it as an edifice in which mind and matter are both present together and distinctly, both active, and yet whose structural relationships are possibly more controversial than any other issue in the humanities. Classical anthropology, through all its movements, thus in spite of a long series of apparent revolutions affecting concept and approach since the late nineteenth ­century, has seized such relationship as if it were immediate and direct, unmediated by individual reflection and choice: somehow the structure of a « caste system », or that of kinship, seems to move back and forth between mind and matter without transformations, dissonances, or obstacles … thus without an intervening constitutive distance; it is seen to move from the matter of the social into mind, and vice versa, as if the structure of the one and that of the other were but a single structure entirely and uniquely embracing them both. Moreover, the pluralism of cultural forms and of societal organisation—taken as a given and as an incontrovertible datum—thereby gives rise to all kinds of subsequent « frontier » problems, the consequence especially being that problems of relationship between such entities, thus any factual evidence concerning such relationship, appears as if but secondary, … secondary in both its significance for description and as a source of explanation concerning the essential character of the entities themselves. But it also appears secondary, historically speaking, thus in contrast to the empirical primacy given, as if from its origin (and concerning that origin), to what is conceived as being entirely 1 Alexis Philonenko, L’École de Marbourg, 65. The task, here, is Cassirer’s, contrasting the transcendental critical method to the Aristotelian ontology of substance; but there is an intimate connection between the kinds of problem addressed by Kant and Cassirer, on the one hand, and those argued in this essay, on the other hand, as must now be clear.

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internal and inherent of each such different society, … what is seen to dote it with its particular ­character or identity. In short, in being formulated in this fallacious a-prioristic manner, such numerous, different, discrete cultural closures appear prior to all significant evidence of association and connection found to occur among them, … thus prior to such relationship! Thus, relationship is reduced to questions of internal form, while relationship between different « cultures » or « societies » becomes a source of secondary disputation that can achieve neither resolution nor agreement. There thus arises the sense—extremely widespread, and against which any opposition seems contrary to common sense—of a conception of difference between « societal entities » (conceived as such) that is not merely relative (as often claimed in defence of it when criticised), but decisive, with the consequence that those who would treat societal difference in an evolutionist manner, whether for example anthropologists or linguists, may represent different so-designated «  societies » and « cultures », besides languages, religions, and so forth, as if standing for isolated, holistic historical cases representing in each case a step on a ladder of developmental steps … an evolutionary ladder leading of course to a summit constituted by ourselves; they have become Wolf’s billiard balls, their order juggled at will by the author. In response, the anti-evolutionist cultural relativists of today raise the spectre of untranslatability between such entities (between « cultures », between world views, between stages of thought, between forms of social organisation, moral and economic development, each such entity being characterised by its unique cultural identity, of which all its members are representative). Then in spite of well-meaning qualification, such closure is definitive in its consequences for description and approach, and most notably for method and even choice of subject matters of research. And this is true in spite of all possible and known empirical connections that might also be found to have existed between place and region, and thus of a cultural-relativism from which value-relativism is but a small step. The huge secondary literature on interoceanic trades and market development prior to industrialisation has no apparent effect on such reasoning. Connection beyond the frontiers of such state or cultural entities, at whatever stage in time it is observed, is thus always considered both contingent and a-posteriori to sociological or cultural form, to linguistic essence (and within which—in the interiority of each such entity—full translation is assumed).2 This word « essence », 2 Among many influential examples, “…a primitiveness … which, according to Lévi-Bruhl, characterizes the mentality of lower societies …” (Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, 171–2); Husserl embodies such thinking in his Crisis of European Sciences, the difference in this case being between the Western mind and the Asiatic. Cassirer, in the second

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therefore, is no mere conceit but literal: we seem to be faced with a generalised essentialism pervading the academic disciplines. On the one hand, there is no prima facie reason to assume such complete social translatability within, nor its contingency or absence without: language itself, and linguistic knowledge and communication—as I suggest above in “More than a Preface”—cannot be considered in such an over-simplified, homogenous and absolute manner. However, I take anthropology merely as an example, a case of a wider problem characterising the humanities more generally, for we can follow the same problem—the same « geometry » of order, so to speak—into many other social disciplines, into linguistics, into philosophy, and so forth. The difference with anthropology is that, for all of us, it has come to stand as both a source possessing particular authority concerning human type and societal form, and as possessed of a stock of uncontroversial, factual knowledge properly organised for illustrating and underpinning such fallacious dogmas of order and relationship, a situation which seems to result in its escaping a normal ethic of critical reflection when approached from outside. Even critical philosophy, as in the person of Ernst Cassirer, seems to drop the critical principles on which it ordinarily bases its approach to the entire problem of knowledge and its study: that all knowledge is constituted by the influence of the subject in giving form to what we call objective knowledge. When Cassirer enthusiastically takes up the large stock of new ethnological evidence for mythical thought and language, collected in the later nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, he perceives a positive facticity, claims about fact which he accepts as fact, thus uncritically, as they are presented by their authors: thus he accepts the presentation of each case as an evidence of a local closure, the closure, however, assumed by the author concerned and determining approach and method, and thence description and interpretation. The latter is the cadre with which a difficult selection of a mass of facts were collected and then put to order, but in a manner ineluctably confirming the order already assumed by assumption and approach: a « vicious circle », as it were! As remarked, such closure of a chosen social or cultural field of study arbitrarily volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, expresses it in terms of language forms, as we shall see. However, it is generally ubiquitous before the end of colonial and imperial ­domination, taken for granted, as it were, and inherited as such by our own generations. For example, it surely came to underlie the post-second-world-war historiography of « mentalities », thus the notion that the populations of the past were enclosed within given, constraining patterns of thought and use of critical reason, and the claim that disbelief and dissent were absent from such ascriptive patterning of mind (say, with respect of belief in a God), indeed possible for medieval populations. Many important treatments of Indian caste, ancient and modern, presume likewise.

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bounds whatever scale of social/cultural « unit » selected for study (« band », « tribe », « people », « culture », « nation », « civilisation »), a form of holism which, despite all the major changes affecting anthropological thought in the course of its history remains its classical basic datum of discussion and comparison, determining vocabulary and syntax; it is the datum from which discussion begins and thereafter is renewed again and again. It is the problem and the enigma interminably turned over on the treadmill of interpretation, but offering no outlet to a different or broader perspective. I mention the case of Cassirer, because his uncritical acceptance of ethnographical writings surely controverts his rigorously critical approach to his own discipline, and indeed to the principles he accepts as grounding the universal constitution of any possible knowledge. And it is a paradox we find repeated in the case of another phenomenologist, Husserl.3 Yet, is it not also ­expected, because these persons were writing and developing their thought in an epoch of global colonial and imperial domination, and, indeed, when many, otherwise estimable thinkers (and many less estimable) appear in retrospect as inheriting authoritative patterns of common-sensical thinking from the past, « naturally » as it were, concerning global societal order and the historical processes teleologically accepted as affecting that order? They adapted such assumption to their own varied and disputative theoretical agendas, and yet in perfect accordance with a general political and intellectual environment that actively justified such thinking, in accordance, therefore, with what indeed passed for ordinary common sense, yet subject to Cassirer’s own withering criticism of dispute affecting a different discipline: all standing upon the same ground. Thus, when Cassirer turns to biology or physics we encounter what legitimately should interest us: that any particular formulation of knowledge about nature, individual or collective, is mediated by the mind of the thinker, possessing forms, therefore, invested a priori and necessarily by the investigator. This means that what exists in nature is never precisely that which is represented in mind concerning it: the description always differs from what is described, and this difference constitutes the ground of Cassirer’s problem field concerning the sciences. However, the question then arises of how any substantially critical approach to such a-priorism is even possible, … how a different perspective can 3 In Husserl’s case, in his Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology (Die Krisis der Europaischen Wissenschaften …) of 1954, and on which see an excellent essay by Paul Ricoeur, reprinted in a collection of essays on Husserl as Ch. 6 of Husserl. An Analysis of his Phenomenology.

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be ­considered possible, … disputation be possible? How is the approach opened up by my own book even possible? That this question of a-priorism (of limits and forms of mind that determine how the world can be read) can be subject to critical and varied developments becomes credible when we consider the level and kind of anthropological thinking with which these particular paragraphs are concerned. It is on this level that Cassirer and many other of his contemporaries, such as Koyré and Duhem, make a serious contribution. Because, in this case, we are dealing not with that transcendental invariable of mind that constitutes and concerns Kantism but instead the treatment of a secondary and empirical level of cultural a-priorism and that, in principle, is open to critique. In contrast, returning to the problem that principally concerns us at this point, ethnology is taken up as such, as if mere positive fact, given in nature, and merely transmitted by the ethnologist, observed in the very forms described and transmitted to us, disputative within its own terms of discussion but all indeed « standing on the same ground ».4 It is as if such facts were entirely free of the subject responsible for selecting and accumulating them and, therefore, for interpreting their meaning … giving to them their description! The mind/matter relationship in non-Western contexts thus seems to the ethnologist to be characterised by an unmediated unity, … an unbroken directness of connection, such as mentioned above, so that, for the participant, individual judgement or scepticism is seen by ethnologist, and thereafter by Cassirer, to be entirely out of the question (he states this opinion), at least for certain kinds of « simple » society in which symmetry seems the rule, mind reduced to ­matter. As we know, this question continues to be a very severe difficulty in ­anthropology,—both dogma and problem.5 And it has been absorbed as such, free of significant criticism, into historical anthropology. Much of my argument, in the above sections as below, has had to be constituted against this apparent « common sense », and thus against comparable approaches affecting, even, the economic history of the kinds of evidence considered in this book, for these also seriously interfere with any attempt to constitute a different kind of reading. For most, the Cassirean reading may seem uncontroversial when applied to «  tribes  » or isolated groups of hunter-gatherers or swidden cultivators 4 The problems involved in such reception are considered in “Languages of Separation & Closure”, in Unbroken Landscape, where other references to modern works of criticism are also given. 5 Maurice Bloch also raises this problem in a commentary on an essay by Maurice Godelier, “Infrastructures, Societies and History”, Current Anthropology (xix, 1978), 768–9; Maurice Bloch, “Comment”, op cit, 768–9.

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(­although many questions have indeed been raised in recent years), but when we see it applied to vast, heterogenous complex regions such as « India » or « ­China » (and even to « Asia »), it must be clear that even apart from the arguments in the previous sections, the postwar period has not only thrown up a very vast amount of new, incompletely digested research, but also an increasingly more-nuanced, less ideological conception of history and society, in terms of which the classical anthropological view is increasingly unconvincing, although such change seems slow in taking form. This « more nuanced view » is essentially a question of throwing previous assumptions into doubt, rather than one of developing positive new ideas: that is, doubt concerns the very assumptions on which, say, the notion of inevitable civilisational « progress » is built, both in its evaluative and in its semantic sense. The very idea of the unilinear form to historical change is now questioned, as are many other once-normative schematic conceptions of historical change; what currently we suspect as being but historicist, thus teleological (rather than properly historical), has lost unquestioned credence. Yet might not this loss be the best of all positive developments, one that leaves options open for fresh work, thus much preferable to a mere displacement to new certitudes? Moreover, rather than new theories, new subject matters (or, rather, a new sense of what they should be seen to constitute and represent as an empirical object-field) are beginning to assume a significant presence in respect of any larger idea of societal form and process; especially, where literacy and text is concerned, the sheer movement and mobilities of words, the traffic of phrases, through one text after another, thus a set of empirical possibilities which I exploit in this essay as one of the conditions of the continuum: say, a kind of literate aptitude for reading and comprehending the real that we shall see to be the necessary condition for the very possibility of this active global translational field constituted by the commodity continuum. However, the humanities seem at short measure concerning exactly how to go beyond the negative aspects of this condition of doubt. The textual traffic mentioned above has not entered any general discussion about societal form. Worse, cultural relativism has come to be extended to current views of the sciences and humanities themselves, to our own language-use, … that is to say, affecting and even constituting what we ourselves bring forward as basic means for treating the question of knowledge. It often appears as if we have come to doubt our own capacities for treating such a kind and level of questioning, rather than taking a necessary distance from what has been inherited, constituting common sense … and thus see represented before us as if the latter were the very nature of the social universe … and, in contrast, seek to reconstitute it. Pervasive semantic scepticism is the result—a seeming impossibility of even

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constituting a s­ cience … And, certainly, an impossibility of finding the means to controvert the languages of ethnicism and nationalism of the day, since the grounds of both the predominant thought of the discipline and such ethnicism rest upon an identical epistemology … one founded upon definitive closures. The linguistic traffic in concepts and ideas between the disciplines thus seems to have an essentially negative role by rendering too dense and familiar, thus too common-sensical and « natural », the popular vocabularies and syntax of epistemological closure. From an overall view of the humanities, we come to see that such assumption—this epistemological conditioning grounding the relative cultural and social closure of our objects of study—is, paradoxically, trafficked from one field and discipline to another, left largely unquestioned because rooted within our own cultural backgrounds, learned and interiorised from the rhetoric of libraries, newspapers, conversation, education, and so forth, and constituting a virtual aesthetic of simplicity and closure, of organicism, mechanicism, and so forth, seemingly impervious to solution.6 When, therefore, I point again to the discussion undertaken in the previous section, it is on this level that I wish to raise the question of understanding, and of what, so I argue, we need to do concerning it. There is indeed a problem concerning our collective and specialist comprehension of culture: its location in historical conditions and, therefore, as being purely historical, thus accidental, constituting the problem of the forms of intersub­jective relationship among highly differentiated, consciously thinking and intentionally acting, working populations that ultimately must be judged responsible for generating the societal realities, which should thus be understood in terms of complex, but constitutive subject/object relationships: that is, that the relationship between mentality and cultural facticity should constitute the problem at issue, not least where economic history is concerned, but in cultural studies more generally. Towards the end of this section, I raise the name of Kant in a much more significant sense, and do so because it was he, above all, who raised the problem of subject/object relationships to their most strictly materialist level of interrogation, unpacked for themselves and shed of their metaphysical wrapping in their search for an explanatory ground. 6 This paragraph, first written in the 1990s, reflects especially the influential trends towards cultural relativism and debates with regard to translatability characterising those years, but which, nonetheless, were based upon much longer-term, persistent modes of reading the social and cultural universe, especially those accompanying the colonialism and imperialism of the nineteenth century. However, it was such a focus, and the disputation arising from it, that gave rise to two excellent edited collections of essays, Rationality, edited by Bryan Wilson, and especially Rationality and Relativism, edited by Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, and in which are found contributions by both philosophers and anthropologists. For the most part, in these two volumes, « Daphnis » and « Chloe » remain back to back! Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Currently, I prefer to regard this question from a more general perspective that includes as principle a Kantian approach, but in doing so chooses to ­embrace the whole plural and disputative domain of phenomenological enquiry, thus including Hegel and Husserl’s attempts to implicate the subject in mind’s conception of an object world, and expressed theoretically in modern science by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, relativity and so forth, all of which draw on phenomenological principles. Such a domain of approach, one necessarily disputational, allows us to regard culture as itself a product constituted by the collective human subject (thus not attributable to some deus externa) and thereby gain awareness of the full measure of the kind of problem … the extent and kind of interrogation … opened before us by so regarding it. By phrasing that question in such philosophical terms, we become constrained to seeking an explanation that is strictly empirical and historical. Chapter 3 is devoted to this approach and its achievement enables me to draw Part 1 to a close and turn thereafter to the exploration of an exemplary set of problems in Part 2. The relatively considerable volume and variety of evidence available concerning production of textiles and moneys allows us to capture the dense web of inter-connected micro-relationship traversing the vast heterogenous cultural landscape of the continuum; this is true both of a long duration of several centuries, and when we confine attention to a focus of but a few years, say the 1790s, or even to an essentially local and even more momentary perspective. The documentation concerned constitutes what we might regard justly as a micro-perspective allowing a more just comprehension of the whole matter constituting commodification and the global continuum of exchange: the kind of facticity that made it even possible, so to speak. The case in question might be the diary of Anton Hove, written in Gujarat, in Western India, and extending in fascinating detail concerning our subject matter over but a few months, or it might consist of the content of a single seventeenth-century letter advising about cloth purchases in contexts strange, even exotic, for the writer; we seem to gain thereby a privileged access, where culture is concerned, to a complexity of connection requiring not yet-more sophisticated and inventive theories but, instead, a different kind or order of approach and question, such as argued above, and that thus implies a radical, self-conscious rupture with past habits of approach and interpretation.7 When the French commission for human rights

7 In mentioning theory in this sense, it is not to attack theory as such but instead to point to the fact that such kinds of theoretical engagement, endlessly activated without possible issue concern what may essentially be judged false problems, such as the various « transition » debates. They rest upon the same false ground of assumption inherited from the past, judged Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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observes the perfect harmony between racist rhetoric and the language of ­anthropology—that the latter has been a veritable resource of information consciously taken over by far-right organisation, thinking and propaganda,— one need not stop in surprise as if faced by an impasse consequent upon the nature of the facts themselves … a realm of truth concerning human organisation … and about which we can but merely disagree in evaluation and moral judgement. Instead, this “identity of grounds” indicates a problem, one to be opened up as a domain of fresh interrogation. This essay—Part 1 of the book— is a step towards posing and answering that problem, that of translatability in a world of a heterogenous facticity; translatability in spite of the plural, differentiated forms of organisation traversing social space on all scales:—then the evidence of textiles and money-use—of marketisation and production—of commoditisation and monetisation—presents this very possibility as an actualised, constantly practised facticity, and it is this realm of facticity, once accepted as such, that must be explained in terms of its material and human possibility. I believe that the above discussion already implies the elements of an interpretation of society in history from which we can move towards a satisfactory answer, albeit inaugural. This given, I shall turn first of all to the question of method: what must be implied for method when complexity is viewed as a central (neglected, avoided, bypassed) empirical problem in terms of which organisation, institution, production, marketing, even agriculture, must be considered, if we are to be able to characterise them in a relatively adequate way (thus not as something to be avoided by convenient simplification for purposes of a framework of possible research, but to the contrary). Thereafter, we shall turn to the elements of the economic continuum itself, before considering the problem of the cultural, cognitive frame that seems to be implied by such specific, yet varied, and global events. i

A Problem of Method

Alexis Philonenko gives a description of the state of philosophy that could, by substituting only a few words, be transferred directly to our own subject matters: anthropology, history, economic history, the study of world trade, or of the many separate departments that currently hide under the heading of even such a sub-sub-subject as « monetary studies ». false because—as a common sense concerning societal order—they remain uninterrogated, whilst society itself may instead be regarded as inherently transitional. Whilst such debate may often seem fascinating, it must finally be judged inappropriate and trivial until those common grounds become themselves problematised and subjected to research. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Equally, the exact sense of philosophy is lost: it becomes as diverse as the objects towards which it is turned; and, as all know, since diversity is source of confusion, philosophy itself becomes confused. The ­multiplicity of orientations … the heterogeneity of the objects of reflexion … make of it a tissue of coloured patches, in which each person finds some element that pleases him or her more than the others. Philosophy, in being so diversified, has made itself contingent, its targets generated by the hazard affecting human contemplation, so that one ceases to speak of philosophy but instead of philosophies, so that the very question, ‘What is Philosophy?’, appears strange, without an object, and without contact with reality.8 Each field listed above—trade and monetary history being mere examples of the general problem—is fragmented not merely in terms of numerous, specialist subdivisions, specialisations that approach their tasks with little heed to one another;9—far worse than this, they each act to justify and confirm such closure, by particular methodological and theoretical dispositions that, in their turn, have been erected upon the same web of assumptions that had, in the first place, determined their apparent closure. Furthermore, in each given craft, such problems are presented in terms of a certain idealisation of itself as « science », and proper to the ambitions of the social disciplines in the early and mid-twentieth century.10 This « science », needless to say, is of a specific kind, characterised by certain aims, doted with particular duties, but that now seem anachronistic when set before the actual dispositions and concerns of

8 9

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Alexis Philonenko, Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? Kant & Fichte (Paris, 1991), 8. Cf. “Monetary Revolution & Societal Change”, in The Invisible City, in which I have characterised the state of monetary studies in this manner; “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”, in Unbroken Landscape, where I discuss the various theoretical strategies that confirm atomisation in trade and monetary histories; “Disarticulation of the World”, Comparative Studies in Society & History (xxx, 1988), 379–87, in which I treat regional studies in this manner. I think especially of Freud whose aspiration was to make psychoanalysis a science equivalent to the medical practises of his education and early beginnings. But the very strength of psychoanalysis arose from its necessarily interpretive character, and that led Ricoeur, great admirer of Freud, to treat it as a hermeneutic in his brilliant book on Freud, De L’Interprétation. I begin to understand Freud’s psychoanalysis as a fully fledged transcendental phenomenology in its own right; not just the creator of a new object world but of the manner whereby that world unfolds procedurally and conceptually in mind, with regard to the pathologies that were his concern. However, the same scientism strongly ­affected anthropology, sociology, and the like, and through them, perhaps, most ambitiously and perversely, post-war structuralism. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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modern natural science.11 In short, what some now refer to, critically (or simply as observation), as the « incommensurability » of the different languages making up current science and social science, hides a problem similar, if not ­identical, to that characterised above as the most ordinary manner of perceiving the global distribution of society and culture, whether evolutionist or relativist. For this reason, the task of countering these tendencies is itself extremely arduous and problematic: how should it be approached and by what means? No mere exercise or example would, by itself, succeed in performing this task (it would merely become one of a cadre of « laudable exceptions » in a general ocean of work entirely directed towards the ends which the exception had been designed to criticise). When posed thus, as a problem of knowledge integral to the humanities, the need for rupture—no longer for mere reform or for continued debate around the same persistent bases of assumption concerning societal order—must come to seem imperative. We must be clear, then, about what we should mean by « rupture »: it is an idea of rupture, in the sense of a taking of distance from all that we have learned to expect when turned towards the empirical, thus a distance that makes it possible to interrogate such expectation, quest­ioning what habitually we have taken for granted when approaching questions of organisation and order. We learn to pose fresh questions where none previously had seemed necessary. And that word « distance » is the very first step necessary in engaging in any kind of phenomenological approach. In doing so, one assumes that progress—one aimed towards improvement in methodology, towards a radical broadening by means of which we approach a subject, allowing for different kinds and conceptions of approach, and, complementarily, and leading towards fresh kinds of representation concerning the reality of the empirical; … all this can be but piecemeal and only gradually accomplishable: progressively re-constructed as one looks again from that distance and reorganises the knowledge-base of the past: yes, works that past.12 At each stage of advance towards this end, questions of appropriate approach and method must arise again and again, be continuously and progressively posed, leading to a constant process of renewal and broadening of consequent interpretation. That is to say, that word «  rupture  » must concern a trio of

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Cf. My “Space & Order Looked at Critically”, in Unbroken Landscape. Thus dialectically. I imitate the poet Paul Celan’s dialectical formulation of the problem of knowledge and opinion in the address he gave, on receipt of a prize, to the City of Bremen (“Ansprache anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen”).

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c­ oncerns: those of attitude, approach and strategy, whilst the results themselves must always remain partial, debatable and in construction.13 A systematic, never-relaxed scepticism will be an indispensable weapon. To return to an example from the past, already cited in the introduction to this section, Cassirer’s most enviable characteristic was precisely an unrelaxed scepticism before the objects of knowledge. Such scepticism stemmed from the Kantian view that « facts » were not things given to mind from outside, but instead had been constituted through mind’s complex relationship with the world. His book on The Problem of Knowledge, is a notable example of this as practice. Yet, when he turned, as a philosopher, to the use of the ethnological materials, we saw that he had put aside this distanciation, taking them up as mere positive fact, uninfluenced, as such, by the minds and culture of researchers themselves. In reading volume two of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, one becomes immediately conscious of a body of assumptions that seriously interfere with answers to genuine and important questions (those of the histori­ city and evolution lying behind the possible existence of the construction of mind and the constitution of reality, as posited and interpreted by Kant). Yet, modern historians, philosophers and linguists take up a later anthropology in a similarly uncritical spirit.14 13

14

That word « distance » … thus « distanciation » points to Brecht’s usage of the word (Verfremdungseffekt) as a rigorous objectification of our attention on our own performance and means of performance; and it is as if he too had been influenced by Husserl’ contemporary phenomenology and Cassirer’s equally contemporary and comparable, critical neo-Kantism, perhaps by a generalised intellectual atmosphere pervaded by such ideas. Thus the study of what were called the « mentalities » of the past, and especially a generation of new historians seeking to renew historical study through a focus on the sociological and anthropological dimensions of the society of the past, thus a comparative and inter-disciplinary approach, and developed especially by those who first founded and contributed to Annales E.S.C.; they were justly fascinated … and profoundly influenced … by their reading of social and cultural anthropology, but, so one may judge, as a field of discovery, a chest of treasure, and not as a field of knowledge towards which they should show the same ethos of critical distanciation as they manifested towards their own. This uncritical stance resulted in a reproduction of those troubling conceptions of absolute difference between « societies » (in this case, between epochs), thus of « peoples » radically different and less developed than ourselves, with regard to mental aptitudes, having assumed the relative closure of each such group entity. That this dramatically foreshortens the scale on which process of evolution are ordinarily considered possible is especially notable, as if the human being of the past was incapable of critical distance or of differences of opinion. Thus a general scepticism concerning whether the medieval and early modern peasant was capable of religious disbelief, the notion that s/he was locked into a closed mental world entirely different from the urbanite and educated. Thus too an integration of many principles of cultural expression and representation characterising the anthropology of the past which I have sought to criticise in this book in order to allow

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In short, a methodology is required, constructed upon the principle of a systematic, methodological distanciation. It is a distanciation one should assume of all those we study, thus of all those encountered as actors of the history we study, the faculty that allows them decision and choice within a constraint of contextual possibility; but is it not also a primordial principle to be integrated, as a veritable ethic of approach, into our own practice with regard to the treatment of history and society: that we look at ourselves in order to become able  to look at the other (objectifying our own thinking and practises)? As methodology, such an ethic would entail as principle taking a critical distance before the instruments of our own research (and, above all, including natural ­language-use, that which seems to escape the necessities of interrogation). For example, we shall see that such banal, inescapable metaphors as « level » and « scale », are utilised as metaphor for a complexity that tends otherwise to defy description; such metaphor might allow us to grasp an empirical framework much more complex than the metaphor itself would indicate, but not if taken too literally and factually (as is commonly the case with such metaphors as « particular » and « general », utilised as virtual poles into which reality is seen divided). Yet if utilised consciously as but verbal means to open a door towards empirical complexity, it becomes means enabling an assumption of a distance and a dissonance between the actors of history and the contexts that they generate and live, besides between we interpreters and the objects of our study.15 That is to say, that such linguistic devices, conceived as such, serve a legitimate heuristic purpose, permitting that ethic of approach and method termed distanciation to be imposed between ourselves and our object, as between contemporaries and their objects, yet a distance in which we are made conscious of the inescapably formative presence of the subject in the object, in g­ enerating

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space for alternatives. The notion of distance between the individual and his or her cultural environment was entirely absent, even denied, thus the possibility of individual choice and decision, and the idea of a space in which such Darwinist kinds of individualist difference could occur and be measured; the consequence was an entirely stereotypical view of social orders, … that dangerous manner of conceiving others in terms of stereotypical group identities. A most notable example of that historiography of mentalities is the much-acclaimed A.J. Gurevich’s Categories of Medieval Culture, already cited above. Husserl had argued that such self-conscious rigour of enquiry was the concern of the philosopher, practitioners of the sciences left to carry on « naively » as if such rigour and concern for self-enquiry were unnecessary for the formulation of their own fields of knowledge. But, personally, I entirely disagree, and for the reasons stated above. I side, instead, with Cassirer: that to be scientist (thus, too, a practitioner of the humanities, of a hermeneutic), must entail an identical responsibility for a constant work upon the bases of one’s own knowledge. One may note the dialectical form in which one finds it necessary to express this methodology and ethos of approach.

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that very object of perception in mind. Yet, true, that they may also act to confound method, to close that open door of possibility, to become dogmatics of perception and approach, because if left unqualified as such, they become allowed to be taken literally by the reader, as if society had been concretely composed of such discrete vertical levels and scales, and giving rise, once more, to yet more « frontier » problems, this time of a vertical kind, such as those theses of a dual economy already set aside above. Is this not what I have argued concerning the use of definite and indefinite articles before words for collective identities, or in referring to them in the plural (without further ado), such as when utilising such convenient devices of reference as « cultures » and « peoples »? This is to say that distanciation should act as a permanent cause for personal disquiet, a generator of difficulty that makes one hesitate before the act (thus a kind of Hegelian visceral self-defining disquiet before what one enacts in the cause of knowledge … before one’s responsibility for the latter)! This given, the constitution of a method should be followed up in a teaching programme designed to communicate, within the human sciences, the possibility and necessity of procedural rules that would neither conceive nor tolerate exception. That would reject all justification concerning the conveniences, for communication, for expression, of inadequate linguistic and conceptual practices against which I have argued above. It would become, in short, a basis for a gradual reconstruction of the empirical universe, and thence for asking questions that cease to be short-circuited when confronted by the massive inertial weight of current knowledge (thus, of libraries, texts, habitual vocabularies, phrases and syntactical conveniences). In particular, there is need to reconsider how specialisation is to be reconciled with the turn to complexity. What must complexity imply with respect to the framing of any minimally adequate approach towards merely local or sectorial questions? And what should it imply with respect to method and content in education, and with regard to educational organisation in the large (both school and university)? For complexity must demand that an equal value or equal weight be attached to the different organisational « levels » and «  scales  » postulated above as meeting in any particular empirical research material, and that are found upon study not just entirely interdependent on one another, but intricated within one another by countless forms of necessary connection, and separable only as abstraction, or as concept. Then, for example, a full respect for the heuristic implications of such complexity should nece­ssitate … implicate itself in … fresh kinds of approach to any local problem, such as the activity of a mint or workshop, or of some sector of manufacture, … of any point of confluence where people come together in say manufacture, warehousing or transport concerning a particular commodity. It is this

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turn that has so effected attention in biology with the development of molecular biology and genetics: the idea of organisation and its agency itself pluralises … « complexifies »! Especially important is the full and equal attention to be given to the different kinds of factor, or different kinds of subject matter—conceptual, cultural, economic, and so forth—that are seen to come together in constituting what we observe as a particular object-field of concern. Method, we have noted, would itself have to be thoroughly reconsidered … reconstructed upon the basis of such a complex conception of the empirical. In consequence, the idea that the correct approach is one in which the questioner attempts to exhaust all possible secondary reading or documentation available for a chosen local or sectoral subject matter (before, turning, if there is time, to wider contexts or associated fields), is wholly unsuited to satisfying the methodological requirements entailed by this regard for complexity. Chapters 1 & 2, have instead maintained that methods for sampling complexity need to be discovered which would diversify attention (and thus the gathering of data) with respect of place, problem, level, scale and qualitative aspect, seeking to combine elements representing organisational difference and dissonance—thus illuminating problems of organisation—and making the forms of their articulation and combination the veritable problem at issue. Where order appears absent, we posit order as the problem (in understanding that nothing persists in time without some ground of effective ordering), and we seek out the principles of such order once discerned, research the very ground of its necessity and possibility. Then, a sufficiently subtle method would seek to capture a causal field whose intricate pluri-directional character is implied by the multitude of different, discrete trajectories of things, people and words, of different grids of action and thought, conjugating together within particular markets and productions. This description of the task may seem utopian, yet biologists, among other specialists, have successfully subjected their discipline to a radical transformation and rupture of precisely the kind envisaged here for social studies, a rupture visible in the nature of the debates concerning method currently in vogue. These have systematically altered the sense of what a methodology should consist, in order to be appropriate for approaching an organisational complexity that has now come to appear as the central question to be understood. The very idea of cause—what can constitute cause in a complex developmental continuum—has been complexified, offering a hope for adequate description where none had seemed possible before. This, of course, in close simultaneous connection with a transformation in the very idea of what should actually constitute the object of biology.

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In short, what kind of empirical reality must correspond to such a need for rupture where historical and social studies are concerned? ii A

Commodity Nature An Artificial Object World, & Its Taxonomy

All that has been mentioned above, including the attention given to husbandry and to agricultural botany, points to this constitution of a novel, artificial object world, « a second nature » as it were, whose forms and densities seem to mirror those of organic and physical nature itself, mirror its diversities and ordering, and yet that we discover was constituted according to entirely different, even opposed taxonomic principles, a city thrown up, as it were, over and above nature itself (an artifice, stereotypical in kind), … above « first nature » (that instead is Darwinian in type), but upon the ground of the latter, with its materials; the image of the « tower », that famous Tower of Babel, with its architects and its decision makers, is apposite. This « new » object world—an entirely cultural nature—had been composed over many centuries, in field and workshop, market place and shop counter, a world that seems at once spontaneous in its adventitious, yet generalised, unplanned character, and yet at one and the same time, from another angle, was the vast accumulated product of countless planned, serious and knowing acts, generated at every point at which practices concerning the production of goods or of payment-forms had occurred, but in which, in addition, marketing itself, dealing and selling, must also be conceived of as a very part of that same category of productive activity that serves to generate the formal constitution of the object-world. They establish the conditions of translational possibility that acts as a principle of such constitution. The implications are various: a

Continuity & Lexicality

This second nature takes form in all inhabited territories, thus extensively,— everywhere where crops are grown, rents paid, markets constructed, institutions established, words spoken, class relationships generated. The ability of its innumerable anonymous agents, acting as conscious participants in and upon the commodity world, must imply a corresponding capacity to read it, to read it literally, thus intelligently, lexically and with comprehension, thus as a text replete with dense referential signification constituted by numerous classificational grids (both material and linguistic), by diverse terminologies, functional linkages and dependencies, and rules—abundant rules—concerned

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with market-recognition and mobility of persons and things. Taxonomy; a ­multiplicity of nameable, recognisable typologies of this artificial domain of ­culturally-constituted objects; textuality, imaginative and physical; thus order of a specific yet generalised, and researchable kind that goes to define this second nature (and one that in fact we have already promoted in status from « general » to « universal »!). Then, participation of any sort … any kind of intervention within this order … must be carefully judged as being subject to relatively efficacious reading of such a lexically-accessible, thus essentially knowable domain of possibility and necessity; but the reading and the act must, however, be specific in its relative capacity for focussing upon the particular detail of any context of incoming information (that flood of words and signs flowing along the channels of relationship, spoken of above); in being capable of doing so it is above all capable of « knowing » it, of understanding and ordering it, of seeking out the relevant amongst its rich sensory invasion of mere perception; … it would do so, for example, in order to seek out and establish some new, carefully defined … carefully prepared … micro-specific niche among the labyrinth of commodity forms represented within marketing contexts dominated by many micro-differential continua of commodity-­ typologies coexisting in every particular location of social interaction. Thus a corollary: that accident and necessity are as if as one, as if singular: at once spontaneous and yet organisationally imposed! b Artifice Because artificial, the speciation of commodities—thus the principles according to which classes of identical objects can be fabricated, in field, market and workshop (the members of such a class being considered identical to one another, from a contemporary, market-oriented conventionalist point of view)— is equally artificialist, generating an edifice that stands, as it were, in opp­osition to organic nature, and differently organised, organised according to different principles of order. As argued above, it is one that in all its expressive variation we have chosen to define as being stereotypical in kind: no difference is discerned between members or items, none recognised as such, and this also through convention; the other kind of taxonomy we have termed, if enigmatically and with difficulty, as « natural », Darwinist in kind since formed constitutively upon a principle of radical individual differentiation, being composed of and by such radical individualism and thus difference, to the extent that it is such difference that theoretically is understood as permitting both the formation of class in nature and its dissolution. Yes, our stereotypical domain of commodification is formed from a nature different in kind, and thereafter as if facing it, the latter being typological in the Darwinist manner, thus according Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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to the particular manner in which Darwin argued out this question of typology with himself and with his colleagues in notes and letters, and in which the ­formation of class among fauna and flora was often the principal issue concerned. His question in this respect: is such class—that category of organic, natural being, whether plant or animal—formed naturally or is it just a conceptual imposition levelled upon nature by mind in order that we may thence order and understand it? This question, become a major theme of collective disputation, is already phenomenological, consciously so! And, either way, he then asks how they come to be so formed, whether either by the hand of the human being, or, most difficult, by nature? Or a subtle, almost indeterminate blending of both? In the first case, artifice, it is the human « hand »—mind and hand—that invents, factors, guides, … as if substituting for … the roles of natural procreation and genetic inheritance active in organic nature (what we designate as such). Or should we say that it conjoins with natural forces, guides and redirects them, but only thereafter, in the arduous work of stabilisation carried out in the field, to contest them? It is the mind, reading the texts presented by the contextual intermeshings of multiple commodity grids incident within a given context, that guides the production of that good, … yes, an « external hand », … that defines its necessary content and form, its defining set of qualitative and quantitative properties, its metrology, its exact appearance, and that must administer a set of taskrelated activities concerned to reproduce a potentially infinite number of members of that single identity: say, of a Venetian ducat, a cultivar of field cotton, a named market category of vendable rice, a specific yarn-type intended for particular varieties of cloth. That is to say, the generation of a « species », in this cultural case, derives not from internal generative processes, as among «  ­freely  » growing organisms, but from an external source, that metaphorical «  Hand  »—once attributed to a deus ex machina in the old knowledge, but for this reason, even when brought down to earth as the human hand, is un­ ambiguously «  creationist  » in the anti-darwinian sense. But, here, it is re-­ appropriated in order to provide a useful characterisation of a human-made culture, and thus to differentiate it from the spontaneous, self-generating nature studied by the biologist.16 Humanity produces identities, invests them with readable signs—labels, forms of packaging, shapes—to render them instantly recognisable across the many frontiers of exchange through which particular goods are made to pass. 16

I use such terms and oppositions in an entirely materialist and scientific spirit, thus without any religious inference to be drawn from them. It is not at all relevant to the argument itself that I happen to be atheist, but it is useful to make that case, given recent anti-­ scientific movements and controversy. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Recognition becomes a central and debated issue right through all the lines of passage along which commodities journey in their many directions and many phases of making and marketing; commodities or payment-forms are factored with signs; they are found not merely vested with recognisable « signatures »— to use an ancient, significant terminology—but, virtually speaking, are produced as « signatures ».17 In short, the « medium » itself is factored as a strictly determined and translational, thus translatable, « message », as if the form given to the commodity were itself its packaging (which must remind one of Husserl’s metaphor of the « clothing » in which thought is led to appear as language), the object as if its address, and among a whole lexical order composed of such signs of recognition. It is this that goes to establish the precise textual and taxonomic place (the « niche »), to be occupied in the larger c­ ommodity world by a certain complexly constructed and continuously ­reconstructable micro-­content, represented by the name of, say, a textile or coin-type. I deal with the epistemological aspects of these taxonomical principles below, but here I wish to refer to that ancient essentialism—to the assumption by premodern naturalists that « first nature » had been « artificially » created by a God, and had then been maintained as such, as a created durable, unalterable typology,—and to argue that this might be interpretable as an unwitting yet accurate derivative of the actual characteristics of this real, everywhere-­ constituted (human constituted), and thus dominant, experiential artificiality, a domain involving a constant, banal praxis of mass popular observation, thinking and activity. c

Artificial & Natural Botanies

There is a further implication that is particularly serious, but that should aid us in determining the very limits of the extension of that marketing and production nexus:—for, the question inevitably arises concerning how one should distinguish a line of separation between the culture of the commodity nexus from what we define as strictly organic and natural, … thus, artifice from first nature itself. One might further ask if such a precise distinction is even possible, whilst affirming, nonetheless, its central importance. This implication seems at first sight astonishing, and it generates, in its own right, a range of further theoretical, epistemological problems which cannot, however, be dealt with here, but to which I shall return in part below, and especially in Pt. ii of the book (“Taxonomy and Commodity”). 17

The terminology referred to is that of the « signatures » of stars or virtues read from the appearances of plants and once characterising the essentialist medical botany of the past (and that also forms part of the ancient poesis of the Sacroboscan Sphere). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Field variety among grains, teas, tobaccoes, cottons or millets; garden varieties of roses, tulips, chrysanthemums or bamboos; orchard varieties of apple, medlar or olive; or pastoral and domestic variety among sheep, horses, domestic pigeons, pedigree dogs or cattle … all are equally artificialist in their taxonomic principles, fabricated—bred, cultivated, selected, channelled, and laboured … laboured in order to be maintained as such—by human work (mental and physical). This component of work would be evident to the casual reader with regard to domestic animals, high prices paid for proven « purity » of breed, for typological precision, for pedigree. Darwin was especially troubled by this question where his pigeons were concerned, but it is precisely this kind of experience with domestic organisms that, speaking generally, has caused the question of taxonomy, even now, to be a serious problem of dispute among specialists. The comprehension of natural type is impregnated with observations drawn from domestication, natural type «  compromised  », as it were, by observations drawn from the artificial. But, where the cultivated crop is concerned, the survival of type, as a domain of differentiated context-relevant identities, is entirely dependent upon a constant calendar of human work invested throughout the year, and year after year. It is also sensitive to short-term variations in market demand, seasonal cycles of growth, and medium term climatic and other vicissitudes. Mind and knowledge, choice and decision, form necessary ingredients of such an equation. When labour ceases, as has often happened on a vast scale in recent history, such collective knowledge-clusters, practices and object-domains disappear.18 The culture attached to such an agriculture—the knowledge and literacy discussed above—atrophies … underdevelops, and eventually disappears from memory and record. Thus, we may contrast the speciation of rice cultivars with spontaneous variation among natural grasses. We remarked that grasses present particularly serious difficulties for the species-concept, and that this issue continues to be debated among botanists. There is, here, a strong sense that increase in the volume of knowledge, concerning this question of diversity (for this problem

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I give examples in the “Other Species World”; for example, the conversion of land previously used for fine cotton cultivation (used in the manufacture of muslins) to jute in Bengal, of fine cotton cultivation to that of coarser varieties in Gujarat, or the abandonment of cotton cultivation to waste in both regions, all in the nineteenth century; or collectivisation in Russia in the twentieth century, all involve a massive obliteration of arduously constituted stocks of shared knowledge and of technologies of work. Obviously, all change, say with regard to the dynamic, market-oriented character of such taxonomical orders, must also involve loss, but of a less visible and more pervasive kind, and complemented by addition or modification. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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also affects consideration of insects and bacteria), has served to increase such difficulties, as is also now the case with respect of human evolution. The problem arises from the extraordinarily spontaneous genetic plasticity of grasses, thus their capacity to interbreed, and which gives one the sense of standing before a «  great chain of such botanical variation  »—a continuum of fluid, unfixable variance—rather than before a true taxonomy.19 Rices and millets obviously remain rices and millets, but, within such very broad categories, plastic variation seems the rule. However, we have seen that the farmer of rice (or millet) invested a complex and arduous labour of densely regulated activities into the production of a true, locally recognised taxonomy, consisting, say, of a dozen to twenty rices or millets grown in the fields of a single village, each such variety attributed its fixed micro-identity, a selection of properties that go to define the micro-­ differences constituting its identity, its difference from others, and geared by intimate judgement based upon experience to the micro-variations in soil, levels of humidity, and so forth, known to characterise that village. The question, then, of taxonomical discontinuity between the different cultivars is central to the characterisation of both this human work, its nature and purpose, and to the status of the objects thereby produced—what is manufactured in the field is, as such, typification, « typology ». Furthermore, it is not simply a question of keeping such a typology in existence, … of composing, in short, a range of diverse phenotypes whose actual genetical and physical differences may be undetectable to a non-farmer (as we have seen George Watt maintain). That labour invested in producing and maintaining such a phenotype is focussed upon holding at bay the genetic war of attrition fought (as it were) by nature, in the form of invasions from the immediate environment of undesirable characters, thus of a more than tolerable variability that seriously threatens the « identities » involved in selected field variety. Natural genetic transfer is at 19

I use the phrase « great chain of being » in the sense of the old notion analysed in Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. A Study of the History of an Idea. It seems to me that in certain natural domains we are unavoidably returning to this concept;—it clearly tempted Darwin, and was actually argued in c. 1809 by Lamarck in his Philosophie zoologique (cf. J.-B. Lamarck, Oeuvres Choisies, 134–57 [esp. 136–9, 200 & 204]). Cf. also Systematic Botany (xv, 1990) which was devoted to the symposium on “Species & Evolution in Clonal Organisms”, including Ann F. Budd & Brent D. Mishler’s “Summary & ­Discussion”, 166–171, and Elizabeth A. Kellogg, “Variation & Species Limits in Agamospermous Grasses”, 112–123 (I mention here—in order to emphasise the seriousness of this issue—that the symposium was sponsored by the American Society of Zoologists, the Society of Systematic Zoology, & the California Academy of Sciences, in 1988). Systematic Botany is the journal of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists.

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odds with such labour, with artifice. As specialists have long recorded, ­weeding, and many other more subtle procedures, invented in order to control and regulate variations, thus micro-phenotypical change, must occupy the minds and labours of the peasant, engaging what seems to the reader a sometimes remarkably imaginative technology of knowledgeable ad hoc invention. Yet, we have seen that this variety, the targets that act to define the frames within which work in the field upon environmental and botanical type must be managed, are themselves constituted by market forces. In short, this labour internalises and brings to botanical fruition, in terms of a different autonomous range of specialised activities determined by the specificities of the agrarian work-site, all the complexities of the marketing linkages along which messages, concerning demand-expectation, flow. Spontaneous, biological nature, therefore—that biology with which neoDarwinian or « punctuated evolutionary » theories are concerned—is empirically distinct from the artificial variety of the plant organism produced in the field, even though, finally, we observe the two meeting together within that same reality, in those very same plants, and acting reciprocally, but unobserved upon one another. But one needs to pose the question in order for it to be seen that such a method of observation is even required. Natural grasses and rices (also a «  grass) belong to two different object worlds. One is defined as spontaneous and self-generational, composed of all that we choose to call nature; while the other, in contrast, is best defined as a human-led, cultural, or even « creationist » kind of « nature »; indeed, it is « essentialist » in kind, radically dissimilar to what we have defined as Darwinist, as spontaneous and individualist, and characterised by its plasticity. It is an «  other  » nature, its identities, its existence as a typology, manufactured according to market-stimulated « blueprints » of desire and demand.20 Clearly, therefore, peasant production—the frequently impoverished domain of intense labour, of extremely tight and elaborate tenurial exploitation, besides other forms of surplus-extraction—is part and parcel of the structures and continua of the early-modern commodity world.21

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The term « essentialist » is fully to the point: the classical relationship between essence and appearance (accident, phenomenon) is identical. It is an essentialist taxonomy, a creationist botany, except that the « creator » happens to be the human being, thus part and parcel of the experienced phenomenal world. It can justly be described as having been transformed from a metaphysic into a human-led materialised phenomenology of being! Cf. “The Other Species World”, in Unbroken Landscape, was intended as a summary presentation of a major study then in process. All the problems discussed in this paragraph are

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Furthermore, this cultural status of the cultivated plant—its very identity as type, … its possibility as a constituted object of both thought and work—needs to be taken, in full seriousness, as having determined both its form and content, leading us to the problem of how to define its true biological identity. In this manner, we cross quite naturally, as it were, from considerations concerning peasant economy and agriculture and of the commodification of the cultivated plant, into problems that seem to be confined to botany itself, notably to the status of the cultivated plant, to that of the huge number of provisionally fixed cultivated identities. What kind of reality-status can we allow of peasantled micro-taxonomies … at once both cultural and botanical? B

Marketisation as Communication22

Given this interpretation of the artificial commodity landscape in terms of a specific kind of taxonomical production and lexical order, we need to reexamine it as characterised by certain correspondingly specific organisational principles, principles that made it possible—as a nexus of communicability running across diverse territories and manifold frontiers.

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analysed in depth in that essay. I have written elsewhere about the intimate ­connections between village corporation and market production but it is worth emphasising that ­corporate sociologies developed not in marginal agricultural regions, resisting commercialisation, but, to the contrary, in the most fertile, marketised agricultural regions, such as the black-earth regions of western Russia, cotton growing villages of Gujarat, the rich grain-growing valley of the Zurich countryside, or the « common fields » of Midland England. Far from being displaced by commercial capitalism they were in fact contemporaneous with its rise, part and parcel of its systematic institutional organisation for the regulation and collection of the intensive forms of rent, taxation exercised on such peasantries. That is such corporation … the famous Russian mir for example … is part and parcel of a larger context of sociological and administrative relationships and structure. The present emphasis on communication is not intended to imply that markets were not also fundamental structural instruments for the transfer of wealth between social classes, thus for appropriation and expropriation, for example of the product of agricultural wealth, thus commoditising the latter through and through, determining its forms, &c. The more unequal the relationships involved, the more that force and power are seen combined in their exercise, and the less likely that market institutions need intervene, at least at the lower levels where force is exercised: translation becomes less and less necessary: where class and ethnicity combine as in the nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian empire, say in Ukrainian Polish territory, on the Baltic littoral, in plantation agriculture in colonial Africa, in use of cooly and slave labour, power and latent physical force replace communication. I have written about this, but my emphasis here is on this other central, yet neglected dimension of translatability, fundamental to the forms and practices of early marketisation and of its purposes.

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Markets & Complexity

Markets should be conceived in their own right as organisers of complexity, together with the many sub-institutions that are found at work under the ­cover-name of market and that indeed define its activities. We may point, for example, to such regulatory procedures as making available and public periodic, often daily lists of exchanges and prices, of premiums and discounts, concerning the import and export of commodities into a given market. What we call the market regulates such complexity—organising it institutionally and instrumentally—rendering the multiplicity of levels and scales of circulation of goods and payment forms possible and visible, and also making it possible as fields of purposive inventive individual activity, including in the physical movements of goods. That is to say, it diversifies the points at which occasions for marketing and production can occur, multiplying the points at which social and institutional concentration may occur, making more dense the places of meeting at which different acts of exchange are provisionally localised. As local nodes of material, decisional and cultural event in their own right, markets permit that complexity to diversify yet further, to become more complex, thus, in turn, for the diversity of products, rules and standards to increase, rather than diminish. Markets also permit the different types of functional relationship covered by their activities, concentrated within them, to further develop, to diversify and become more elaborate and extended in space. They make such relationships possible, and in turn foster the complementary elaboration of new kinds of payment and thus exchange. Such development in payments fosters, in turn, more extensive conveyance of goods and payments to be organised, and also allows a further complexification of social and societal relationships in their own right. We may speak, where the question of the significance of the market is concerned, of a differentiated cartography of functional purposes and needs … functional in various senses, say economic, say administrative, or habitational and political. In turn, therefore, markets increase the ­possible combination of social relationships, provide society with means to organise social differentiation itself in terms of multiple combinational possibilities (thus, mobilities) among different social groups.23 23

For example, the ability of large numbers of individuals to live at distance from the lands from which their wealth ultimately derives, dispersed in towns near and far and in other regions of, say, continent or sub-continent; such individuals may thus enjoy, through possession of fractional rights, the fruit of lands scattered among dispersed territories, even among different political entities. The complexities of sixteenth century social organisation in northern and southern India, China or Normandy would be inconceivable without such possibilities. Combination, then, refers to the facility for such right possessing classes

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A representative example: the manner in which rights to the product of agricultural labour became micro-fractionated in form, a potentially considerable number of often different types focussing down upon the very same portion of land or crop, the harvest itself thus dispersed over a potentially vast territory possibly traversing political frontiers. Correspondingly, holders of rights might possess such fractions dispersed equally over such a vast territory, transcending linguistic and political frontiers, and affecting a vast tract of continental India between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries.24 It was the relative sophistication of payments forms and financial services in the sub-continent, thus too of administrative institutions capable of centralising such collection, transforming the material product into quantitative values and conveying far or near such value at will, that enabled such dispersal and, yes, led to their further potential fractionation and social concentration: to a complexification of such rights, means of payment and of society itself. Thus markets become places in which empirical synthesis of organisational diversity can be carefully elaborated, increasingly consciously worked for. It follows that the empirical market, whatever its particular level, or whatever its general or merely local importance, can never be understood in isolation from a landscape of markets: any particular market would be seen to depend upon and to organise itself in terms of a whole field of other markets distributed through space and levels. This is not to claim that they were identical, but that their particularity was drawn from such careful comparative and structural reference. For example, the passage of many diverse coins flowing into any one place such as Rouen, Bruges, Basra, Surat, Guangzhou, or, say, little Ahmednagar and Junnar, can only be understood in terms of similar flows passing through a broad landscape of markets, thus, in turn, a landscape of differing, over-layering metrological and qualitative standards and distinctions which had each been instituted in order to correspond to this need to flow translationally from market to market, at the same time as means to stabilise goods, services and payments media required instead for local circulation (as we witnessed the case with the Surat mahmudi, but which stands for a veritable principle concerning regulation of such payment-environments). At the same time, these are trajectories through a field of difference—of differentiation— that are necessarily recognitional, designed to be so, part of the translational

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to reorganise their social and topographical distribution, and by constant invention of novel payments and marketing institutions. Lull’s « combinatoire » is an apt metaphor. It was a point that especially struck the eye while scrutinising Marathi-language administrative accounts concerning fields, persons or villages affecting those centuries in Western India. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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web of communications operative between different markets, thus equally a field of public sign and symbol. A given market place then may itself be readable as a point of meeting for such heterogenous trajectories of multiple origin, one that synthesises and transforms what enters for response to demand elsewhere, and thus a centre of autonomous decision making, that can thereafter generate further combinations and relationships elsewhere. Note, however, that I am attempting, here, to generate an explanation for the relationship between these two terms, « market » and « complexity », one that is primarily logical in form, one might best say ontological and thus necessary; that is, they exist in terms of one another, the market in terms of an already existing complexity in which it necessarily participates, and, conversely, complexity because of the existence of these markets, what the market makes possible;—it is a complexity not merely conceptual but real, empirical, what we actually may observe and deduce as being so. That is to say, the relationship between them is not primarily ontogenetic, as if one were the mere later consequence or follow-up of the other, and played out in historical time; it is instead ontological, a relationship of true mutual inter-dependence. The problem for the reader is to be fully conscious of the ambiguities of syntax, and thus to understand that there is initially a problem of « possibility » concerning what we observe but fragmentarily in the records (thus of a set of logical possibility and implication: what is asked of us researchers in order fully to comprehend the possibility of that piece of Peruvian silver being in the hand of some « remote » Deccan highlander?), before, secondly, we pose questions that are historical, thus empirical, in order to compose that possibility as a real construction of events consisting of fully consequential and causal developments traversing the globe. b

The Issue of Translatability—Markets & Frontiers

Markets may also be conceived of as fabricated (of course, historically—as a cumulation of institutional additions and organisational solutions in places and along channels between places) in order to interiorise the rules and institutions that make regular exchange feasible and expected. We can describe such exchange in terms of innumerable, diversified acts of translation; the problem here is to emphasise that the circumstantial hazard we associate with particular events of exchange takes place in contexts that reduce chance to a minimum, constraining the form and content of such activity to accord with convention and rule, and thus contribute to the latter.—Is this not what is, or ought to be understood by the word « trust » when applied to such exchanges?  The in-market-site, in which institutional and instrumental forms are ­concentrated, enables a diversity of heterogeneous commodities and moneys Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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to be passed from hand to hand, at will, across the invisible, yet tangible frontiers that separate every seller from every purchaser, creditor from debtor. At every marketing point, a dense concentration of such translational-acts might be seen to have occurred, and the very idea of frontier—now highly relativised and highly diversified both in kind and in forms of incidence—becomes central to our understanding of the responsive institutional and behavioural character of the continuum … of what appears as such. That is to say, the continuum does not primarily exist in spite of frontiers (as if frontiers came first and connections thereafter, or as if frontiers were but a detritus to be set aside); nor am I arguing that frontiers are insignificant. Instead, the point concerns their general nature and « contingency », the fact that of whatever they consist they constitute a relative facticity that invites response and passage. For the most part, economic frontiers, especially, can be seen to act as places of passage, as necessary points at which differences between scales, levels and types of person and kind, become focussed or constituted, and translational solutions developed, even ritualised. Above all, they are points at which differences between individuals, collectivities or institutions are made visible, so that passage can be optimally legitimised, subject to regulation, and thus organised,— facilitated by means of constraints serving to make « all » aspects of the act public and visible (cognisable and recognisable). This is true at all degrees of difference between exchange partners, between one peasant and another in some rural market, or between English Company « factor » (or agent) and Chinese tea dealer. It is least true where gross social and political inequalities and coercion cause any engagement in the regulated forms of trust to become improbable, thus imposing a need for a more institutional kind of ­intervention,— for a more serious and conscious attempt at market-translation. Continental and political frontiers, or those separating different official national languages, need, in turn, to be looked at from a perspective in which the idea of frontier is extended to diverse other kinds of institutional relationship. Monetary historians are as accustomed as national historians to conceiving of national payments orders within a purely national cadre of research and information; different metallic bases are seen to constitute separate payments worlds; bimetallic ratios and Gresham’s Law are seen as natural pressure channels in terms of which separately constituted separately organised systems of economic regulation and payment are led to equilibrate with one another through the directions taken up by trade and payment. In contrast, however, what we in fact encounter is not such neighbourly two-dimensional sets of frontier-like contrasts between holistic separately-organised entities but instead an overlap of differing scales of circulation. This is what generally is encountered in reading the information generated by almost any market-listing

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of goods and moneys, and no matter whether the markets concerned are small or great, local or regional. We observe the production of cognisable difference, of interiorities in which certain classes of factored objects are allowed a certain specific socio-economic-territorial currency and circulation, often prescribed in words, and organised by the very form and content given to the type itself, as also by institutional and instrumental regulation governing circumstantial oscillations of value among the types. This may turn out to seem incomprehensible to us when isolated for attention from the broader contexts in which other interiorised fields of circulation occurred and overlapped. In consequence, what had appeared to us as an evidence of contemporary disorder, may now, instead, be understood as parts of a public knowledge stimulating a range of regulatory practices that formed certain of the most important criteria determining the production of difference and also regulating it thereafter. c

Markets & Information

Finally, markets should be considered as literal conveyors of real ­information— as communicational conduits—in a radical and fundamental sense. Flows of texts, reported words and numerical signals are necessary forces both generating movement and constituting it, but also regulating how goods and payment forms should be produced at distance in the first place. Words, as with commodities and moneys, must also be chosen, even « factored », as it were, for particular kinds of act of passage, thus for « translation ». This constant flow of information—of desire and discord concerning goods and moneys—generates (again, logically) an extraordinary structural and historical dynamism in parts and whole.

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Kant’s Tower of Babel & the Cultural Universal

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Metaphor & Construction

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes his « Copernican Revolution » in terms of the construction of a tower that might have reached the heavens, were it not for the fact that it had been built with merely human materials.25 This extraordinary image of the city of Babel (unnamed, but the reference is unambiguous), thereby equates two poeses, that of science revolutionary and that of the ancient utopia and system of knowledge, ordinarily associated with Ptolemy’s cosmology & Sacrobosco’s Sphere (their representation of the universe of meaning and being in cosmic form), and, by reference thereafter, with the imagery of the « tower », « ladder », « city », « theatre » and « sphere » used by Lull, Ficino, Fludd, Bruno, Comenius, Camillo, Dee, Campanella, and many others.26 25 Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 19–20 [Ak. B xvi–xvi] (Oeuvres Philosophiques, 739–40, and Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 21–22) for his Copernican Revolution, and Kritik, 653 [Ak. A707/B735]. See Oeuvres Phil., 1293–1294, & Kemp Smith, 573), for the tower. See also Kritik, 677 [Ak. A738/B766]. See Oeuvres Phil., 1316, and Kemp Smith, 592–3; Ferdinand Alquié’s note to text, in Oeuvres Phil., 1722–1723, n. 1, is important in pointing to Kant’s emphasis of the process of construction as method. See also Philonenko, L’Oeuvre de Kant, i, 330–2, where he refers to Kant’s system in nicely Lullian terms as a marvellous « combinatoire »; this simile is not extravagant: both Philonenko and Cassirer frequently emphasise the manner in which each superior stage, or further phase, in, say, the sequence of cognitive procedures involved in forming an «  object  » (and, significantly, termed «  concept  », … being composed … constituted …—as with ­Husserl—by a multiplicity of experience of what is specifically covered by any particular « object »,—and a veritable set of production linkages), or (as in Cassirer’s application) as a development in language, is marked by a notable mobility and manipulability relative to what we thereafter conceive to be the relative rigidity of a lower or previous stage or phase of it. Language, then, as means for constructing novel artificial realities, like the commodity world itself, like the knowledge domain of the cultivar, is instrument for generating and regenerating new « natures », new organisations of objects and their relationships. In this sense, the Kantian tower is indeed a marvellous « combinatoire » qua-Lull, or a « Babel » to those who have not decoded its organisational complexity. 26 A large number of treatises in Latin and several vernaculars, reproducing and disputing Sacrobosco’s Sphere, were published in the early years of printing, during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as shown by catalogues of numerous European libraries (e.g. Bibliothèque municipale in Toulouse, British Library in London, Rijksuniversiteits Bibliotheek te Leiden, and the University of Cambridge Library, by way of example and personal experience). Cf. Lynn Thorndike, The Sphere of Sacrobosco & Its Commentaries, containing a long introduction, together with Sacrobosco’s treatise, and several commentaries concerning

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The point, here, concerns this use of the image of the city as a particularly fertile representation for what we intend by « complexity »: « complexity » as used to characterise the organisational dynamic of societal form and ­connectivity, its ordering and organisation:—and in these respects, considered as a complexity ordinary to all « societal » organisation. The metaphor is perfectly literal, in that the city is itself an actual concrete example of such ­complexity, empirically complex, and as such is frequently seen to stand as metaphor for human artifice, … it refers us to what « humanity » constructs, subsequently lives, inhabits, and continues to enact, both conceptually and materially. It is also literal in that the city is complexity’s own product, product of a much broader context of organisational complexity, and, indeed, inconceivable as being possible outside of such a broader sense of context. It represents, so to speak, a concentrated fragment of a larger more intricate complexity, just as has been mentioned concerning the market, discussed above (a market being incomprehensible outside of a context of a more complex organisation of markets extended through territorial space). For us, in turn, the idea of the city is eminently historical, the heterogenous product of many ages, each such successive contribution neighbouring the others, one age often penetrating the other, and indeed each superimposed upon one another. It may be justly described as an overall product of countless scattered, inter-related, individual acts and events, all caught together in intricate webs of mutually influencing and determining connection, and, indeed, that accumulate and ramify, building up what, from another angle, we might come to recognise as the organisational and structuring complexity of every societal form. As such, we observe the city in a process of continuous dynamic renewal, reorganising itself, recreating itself, adapting and readapting itself to the dynamic conditions which it itself implies, and yet leaving and absorbing its traces of the past as part of its current being.27 Such ongoing, processual,

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the latter. See for discussion Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno & the Hermetic Tradition, eg. 197, and her Theatre of the World. Examples of such commentary, apparently widely distributed (encountered, for example, in the libraries at Toulouse, Paris, London and Cambridge), are Mauro Fiorentino’s copiously diagrammed Annotationi sopra la Lettione della Spera del Sacro Bosco (1549, Fiorenza); E.W. Schreckenfuschius, Commentarium in Sphæram (1569, Basle); & G. de Rocamura y Torrano, Sphæra del Universo (1599, Madrid). It is the sense gained from perambulating in any ancient city such as Calcutta or London. Nikolaus Pevsner excelled in stripping buildings into their distinctive historical layers, in the entries contained in his multi volume series The Buildings of England; I am also reminded of how Hegel constitutes Mind (or Spirit) procedurally, in a long series of methodologically dialectical processes, and how he depicts mind similarly constructing its concepts, only to negate the element of time, or even history, in the finally realised and

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constructional artifice might poetically recall to mind, perhaps paradoxically, the ancient primaeval forests of Neruda’s early poetic and prose, a sense of natural growth that gives rise to the arbitrary appearances of the ancient city and yet that become subsumed within thoroughgoing forms of closely knit ­organisational relationship, just as Marx had magisterially described of contemporary industrial capitalism.28 But more than this, the city implies another very fundamental property, that which itself seems surprising and which bears further reflexion: abstraction. In both ancient and current uses as metaphor, the city is at once abstraction and real: real in that, as metaphor, it gives to the object or theme under attention the sense of being a dense and intricately interlaced concentration of abstract components, in our case those constituting the various interdependent aspects of reality of which the commodity-continuum is comprised. It should cause us, on encountering any fragment of its evidence, to conceptualise its societal connections as part of a more complex space/time set of constructional arrangements, Babel-like: a unified edifice composed of difference, dissension, negotiation, attempts at jointure … a metaphor! So that, indeed, it is the real and historical city that springs initially to mind (a Rome, Bologna or Calcutta …). In this sense, the architectural, measured, fabricated, thoroughlyreferential character of a long-surviving, dynamic urban complex, implies that it can also act for us as a composite representation of any other referent to which we seek to give the sense of its being constituted of innumerable abstract referential components, like a rich and dense text, ready to be read for interpretation. Then, complexity is indeed simultaneously abstraction and concretion, the first crystallising as the second in continuous space/time, crystallising as a lived and concrete abstraction amongst whose innumerable referential components we locate ourselves and move. Thinking it thus should aid us in considering the implications of this image of the complex metropolis for our own societal materials concerning the

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constituted edifice. But nothing is lost; all becomes structure, as Marx also showed in the empirical aspect of his treatment of Capital. Koyré quotes Hegel in this sense in his essay “Note sur la Langue et la Terminologie hégéliennnes”, in Études d’Histoire de la Pensée philosophique. One may thus be surprised by the close analogy Neruda makes of the ancient Chilean forest with his early experience of Calcutta; not so ancient but certainly a complex layering of differentiated yet accumulating « temporal » additions, demolitions and restorations. Perhaps one needs to experience Calcutta for oneself, take the tram or bus, tramp it like a Baudelaire (as « flâneur ») , speak with its inhabitants, see Sealdah railway station at rush-hour. Once more, see also, for this metaphor, Nikolaus Pevsner’s architectural guides to The Buildings of England, and most notably London, i, in which, again, we discover layers and instances of building superimposed the one upon the other.

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c­ ontinuum; even in its most microscopic detail we are confronted by the presence and need for abstraction by participants, by adapted reference and selection of items of the complex of continuities composing the immediate context of any individual concerned, say, the choice and active insertion of a nicheadaptive commodity type, in acting upon the real to force apart a space for fresh action … to create an interval within it that can be treated as a niche in which to constitute a new textile, a rice or a coin, or a different route between places, a new market destination, a fresh manner of composing a relationship of trust. In short, for that intentioned act that an individual or group of individuals adds to the forest of types characterising the immediate environment of activity; thus to generate a new identity that accords with that local accumulation of surrounding identities, and among which it would be but a fresh, intended c­ omponent: say, a new micro-differential muslin or some local subspecies of ducat in Bijapur or Zeeland. Each such individual intervention is planned in terms of measure and quality, an assemblage of associated properties, designed for a procedure of production that can be infinitely repeated either at one point of manufacture or at an open number of such points, thus properties that can be set on paper or memorised and communicated from place to place, but that must each be selected relative to the properties composing the variety required of its immediate market-related and typological context. I think also, in this respect, of a problem that will especially concern us in Part 2, that of the transmission of new kinds of seed through vast continental hinterlands, say by word of mouth, or by exchange, but as an information, and that in each case, in being faithful to what has been so acquired as a kind for trial must be re-adapted to each new micro-specific location: the evidence is eloquent in the case of eighteenthcentury Western India, where native American plants invaded gardens and markets. I would argue that the process of transmission, learning and free ­adaptation of types of cloth, coin, or even forms of ritual, would be little different in character. The implication is the presence of a technical, practically-­ applicable bed of common knowledge, accessible to an entire population, irrespective of social class and formal education. The teacher in such a case is experience itself, the context lived as a field of encountered and necessary information, perhaps through apprenticeship, but also through free movement. The idea of the « city » asks us to unpack this complexity, this habited city, seek it in the form of its detail, of both its historical construction, and that of its constitutive possibility. The history of the metaphor is also important to us. Kant used his biblical, utopian image not in the conventional sense as a reference to human vanity and human-led disorder, but, instead, in order to describe an actual ordering of

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things that is indeed both composite and complex: that appears disordered and arbitrary until explained: until unfolded as complexity constituted by relationship. Without going into a detail that would be inappropriate here, we can summarise his purpose as one of providing a referential metaphor for his own abstract unfolding of the processes, levels and stages constituting cognition and perception of an object world … of the principles of such constitution in consciousness that would allow that world beyond to become constituted, thus represented, in mind, and, therefore, that goes to compose Kant’s view of mind as exposed in the first of his transcendental critiques (and as I shall seek to expose hereafter). He took many hundreds pages of concentrated, finelyformed, closely-argued prose, often moving from one clause to another, turning back upon itself, qualifying and advancing step by step, attempting an ever greater penetration and precision, and yet the sheer difficulties of which have generated an enormous international library of disputation. However, the principles embodied by the basic architecture of the cognitive process are clear, opening a door wide to later investigators of the problems of a conscious constitution of the lived world, and taken up by Hegel, the neo-Kantians such as Cassirer, and Husserl.29 Other, closely related images are also brought to mind by both Kant and his commentators: the notion of « pilgrimage », or journey, a phased Dantesque journey through the succession of « frontiers » that divide up the « progression of understanding towards empirical knowledge »;30 typically, Kant uses 29 30

I remind the reader that I am fully conscious of Hegel’s efforts to negate Kant’s influence on his thought, but I agree with Stirling in this respect, as set out in the first volume of the latter’s The Secret of Hegel. Opus Postumum, eg. Ak. xxii, 445, quoted in reverse order (Förster & Rosen, OP, 165): “… and understanding makes possible the transition to experience. Experience … an unconditioned unity [Einheit]”; “Not progressus in infinitum, as a unitary whole, but in indefinitum, unconstrained by limits, but that controls [contains] itself [ein Unbegrenztes sich selbst zu beschranken]”; Ak. xxii, 451, again quoted in reverse order (Förster & Rosen, OP, 168): “… but a system known as experience, become one [die nur Eine ist ausmacht], and into which understanding has devolved [ûbergeht]”.; “… likewise, a progression into endlessness [Unendliche], and in which conscious perceptions of empirical representation form a unity of experience, and become system, although thought rather than given [mit Bewußtsein (Wahrnehmungen) Einheit der möglichen Erfahrung zu einem System ….]”; Ak. xxii, 452 (Förster & Rosen, O.P. 169): “… but becomes constituted only for itself, and within [mithin], leading only towards knowledge from experience, not, properly speaking, a doctrine of experience in physics”. On the one hand, how Hegelian this all reads, as if as a process of dialectical realisation; and, on the other hand, that important difference between the natural forms of a-priori thinking, that of common-sense so to speak, and that correctable by science, by a Galileo, and so forth, a point I make with insistence justifying Kant’s Newtonian and Euclidian conditioning of thought; this

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an ancient language and armoury of metaphor to forge an entirely modern ­conception. In our own mind, however, lies the continuation of such processes and procedures of construction external to mind, what we call culture, but concerning which the commodity continuum appears to provide a particularly privileged and rich access. But, returning to Kant and to his questions concerning mind and the constitution of a possible knowledge of the world, we might agree with him that his « systematic » exposition in the First Critique merits being described as Co­ pernican, thus as a revolution of a properly Copernican status, because, as ­Gottfried Martin rightly argues, an old ontological metaphysic is utilised to ­produce—be transformed into—an entirely « in-the-world », materialist explanation of the possibility, procedure and construction of knowledge.31 The explanation must now exclude any possible deus ex machina, or other ultimate grounding for what exists—exists as such and in mind,—thus of any given,

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d­ ifference is also one of which Husserl writes eloquently in the Ideen, pointing to the error of those who confuse the a-priori with the facts themselves (then I needs ask myself whether I commit precisely this « error » in turning the phenomenological principle and procedure towards the factual, towards the empirical and historical domain of commoditisation. But no, these are two distinct issues: first that danger of a confusion; secondly that the matter of a cultural anthropology does not cease to require a phenomenological dimension as discussed in this chapter. Later, we shall see that the latter will be characterised by Husserl and Fink as a “missing discipline” towards which all knowledge must eventually and n ­ ecessarily be subjected, and which is to be considered in the further study proposed above concerning the commodity). Alquié’s note, Oeuvres Philosophiques, 1722–1723, n. 1, mentioned above,—regarding the sense of such Kantian construction as a « methodology », not as « thing » (not substantive),—is especially apposite. Then, consider the extendable, fractionable production line of the commodity, the cultural object, ever further fractionable and extendable, through space and time, thus an empirically constituted processual development in which the commodity-object takes progressive form. The suggestion, at least « as if » (Kant’s als ob), is that of making physical … external to mind … this « progression-towards », and that is constituted by production of the artificial object-domain. As I emphasise below, Kant’s « tower » is far more than mere metaphor. Gottfried Martin, Kant’s Metaphysics and Theory of Science (the precise page reference lost). In preparing the present version of the book, I have suppressed an Appendix, that I had prepared on this very issue: “Kant’s essentialist language”. But one can make the same point concerning Hegel. They may be observed using a language that, in this respect, appears to delude the reader about meaning, appearing essentialist in its choice of word but in contrast directed towards the empirical and experiential. An example is Husserl’s use of « Wesen », reasonably translated as « essence », for example by Ricoeur, but that might better often be translated as « possibility », a reading that transforms an apparent mystification concerning ultimate sense into a focus concerning what comes constituted as sense.

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a-priori substantive cause for things. Then, this process too—its architectonic—the manner in which stage is built upon stage, as the mind transforms the external world into consciously accessible knowledge, that of the order and diversity we ordinarily call « nature »—and then, in a further set of procedural movements, into what he will define as « object », as the ultimate stage of cognition (and in terms of which «  a science  » becomes conceivable32) … this must also mark the structure(s) of that famous tower: its spiral path up the rings of the Ptolemaic/Sacroboscan Sphere to its summit, past one gate after another, to the summit of knowledge itself, symbolised in turn as a source: a « fountain » or « well » from which knowledge was said, in the old language, to be drawn.33 That world external to mind but that is processed by mind in order to become conscious thought …. it is what Kant names as noumenal: as undivided, unbounded, world matter, inexhaustible moving force, and so forth;—all are, take note, the traditional biblical « names » applied to a god, but now applied to the material cosmos « faced » by the mind that grasps its appearances, divides and orders it into cognisable thought. It is this conception of a world inaccessible to human intelligence unless reduced (Husserl’s word), to human dimensions, that sets up Kant’s problem: that of distinguishing a true and valid knowledge possible with regard to the constraints of mind. 32 Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 1786. See Friedman’s exposition in Kant & The Exact Sciences. 33 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, also characterises this sense of a circular but nonreversible, ongoing spiral ascent towards a possible knowledge as characteristic of the romantic movement in late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century Britain (esp. Wordsworth and Coleridge), and on the Continent (e.g. Goethe). The stubborn survival of the poesis, long after the sixteenth century, is explained by its ubiquitous presence in every domain of thought,—cosmology being but one example. Where Kant uses the image Styx interfusa coërcit (as reference to a prohibited frontier), Förster notes that the “Styx is the principal river of the underworld, flowing nine times around its perimeter” (Opus Postumum, 138 [Ak. xxii.489] & 273, n. 78, quoting Virgil, The Æneid, 6, 439): i.e. the nine-fold spiral, the nine stages of Babel, the nine steps in the ladder, the nine stopping points, or periods of the pilgrimage, &c. The pilgrimage and the passage are pictured in Orpheus’ descent/ascent into and out of the u ­ nderworld— Orpheus with lyre who sings the poetry of knowledge. For Giordano Bruno love (in a non-corporeal sense) and knowledge were coordinates; cf. Yates, Giordano Bruno & The Hermetic Tradition, e.g. 275–87. Concerning Plato’s use of the image of the underworld and the journey up to knowledge, see Eric Voegelin, Order and History, iii, Plato & Aristotle, 52–62, “The Way up and The Way Down”. The twentieth-century essentialist poet René Char often used words for « ascent » concerning his aspiration to drive towards essence, and for which, as he puts it in the poem “Nous Avons …”, “poetry is the only means”. In Kant’s case, however, it is but metaphor for the rational procedures of his argument, deceptive and not to be confused with the latter.

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The image of the city recurs; and Kant knows what he is about, for this is neither a slip nor a mere nicety of metaphor, but, instead, a consciously literal metaphor used to indicate the constructional … thus methodological … status of the thematic subject-matter of his work: thus, as method, and as such as « like » an architecture, … a procedure for construction of an « edifice » that once constructed is no more than that edifice (and just as Hegel came later to conceive the very same task), this other recurrent metaphor.34 In this sense, it is a device identical to that used by other « logical-constructionalists », such as Locke and Rousseau, and later both Hegel and Marx, who can take history in its own right as seriously constructional. First, the mechanism is taken to pieces, the figure of the subject that concerns us, stripped of its clothing; then « Robinson » is put back together again, rebuilt or re-clothed, thus as the world we know. With Kant, then, we finally reach « the scientific object » of our own knowledge field, of its possibility, reached at the summit of the tower,—­ measurable, mathematisable (but, that we prefer here to translate into what properly concerns us, as the equivalent of our cultural object, the manufactured object, … say, a textile or money), and that we now recognise as component of an entirely artificial, human-led nature. In climbing to a summit of knowledge concerning that external world, to a summit of increasing specification and precision, it is as if we have never, in fact, even approached it: its closest resemblance—its firmest, most accurate possible representation—is the most mind-processed and abstract.35 Or, let’s ask, is there another manner 34

Where Hegel is concerned, I refer once more to the quotations concerning the relationship between time and structure reproduced in Koyré’s important article, “Note sur la Langue et la Terminologie hégéliennnes”. 35 Philonenko, L’Oeuvre de Kant, i, 330, 332; ii, 47–9, 208–20, & Friedman, Kant & The Exact Sciences. Cf. supra, my note where I refer to Kant’s assumptions about the full compatibility of the entire content of the universe as underlying his use of words such as « as if » (als ob) and « analogy ». This also belongs to the ancient poesis: every stage of the tower of knowledge (or every ring of the sphere) is a literal (i.e. realist) analogy of what is proposed on the other stages, a particular kind of plant regarded as a matter of fact as displaying a sign of its medical healing virtues, that in turn have been derived from its necessary relationship with a zodiacal astrology. Thus Kant deduces that the nature of external ­reality— entirely unknowable—must be compatible, « as if » designed to be so, with the merely human equipment of mind for generating the formal structure of the object in thought, so that he can then say that the very idea of God functions (not the reality of such a God) « as if » in enabling mechanical nature to be depicted and described by human consciousness. In Kant, this is a kind of « mechanics » for making it cognizable, but accurately descriptive of the built-in assumptions that permitted Newton to formulate his mechanical view of nature and laws of motion, and, in turn, for these laws to be transposed to human consciousness. This literalist grounding of the possibility of « analogy » implies, in my view, that merely « regulative » principles of thought—fictions that enable thought to

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of looking at this: for, in the old ontology, nature had also seemed to be the most perfect of all artificialities, the most properly and perfectly created artifice, the divine product: product of Newton’s mathematician God, of the God who was geometer, architect and word-spinner, founder of a geometry and mathematics through which alone, as Galileo explained, « the book of nature » could be deciphered; or product too of Erasmus Darwin’s pantheistic creator (Charles Darwin’s grandfather and who happens to be referred to by his contemporary Kant).36 This is merely one kind of use among many that continues to be made of the image of the city.37 In general, it is used to represent the complexities of culture, together with its imaginative offspins, such as heaven or hell.38 The proceed, such as « the idea of God »—are only possible for Kant, because, in fact, they refer (« refer » in a formal, if implicit, sense) back to and depend upon that judgement concerning the mutually compatible character of every aspect of real and possible thought and universe. See the essays by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Reinhard Brandt, Eckart Förster & Jules Vuillemin in E. Förster (ed), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions. The Three Critiques & the Opus Postumum, who debate the terms regulative and constitutive, while Philonenko’s commentary in L’Oeuvre de Kant, i, 322–8, is also invaluable. 36 For a God characterised as the mathematician, the « author » and « artificer », or « architect » of the universe, by Newton, Bentley and Raphson, and other contemporaries, see Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Chs. vii & viii; and, for the famous passage about « the book of nature » (a commonly used and literal metaphor for the textual character of an assumed created nature), see Galilei Galileo, Il Saggiatore ,tr. as The Assayer, in The Controversy of the Comets of 1618 (eds. Drake & O’Malley), 183–4. For Erasmus Darwin, cf. Kant, Opus Postumum, Ak. xxii, 407 (Förster & Rosen, O.P., 122). Like Goethe and others of the day, Erasmus Darwin was prone to compose his theory in poetical form, as in The Botanic Garden. A poem in two Parts, i, The Economy of Vegetation; ii) The Loves of the Plants, with Philosophical Notes, of 1791, and Zoonomia. Or the Laws of Organic Life, of 1794. The latter work is described significantly as medical, concerned with pathology, anatomy, psychology, and the functioning of the body, and containing a form of evolutionary theory. In 1803, he published The Temple of Nature. Or the Origin of Society. A Poem, with Philosophical Notes (London, 1801). Poetical form, like dialogue, had then been a legitimate form of expressing scientific ideas; I quote: “Woo’d with long care, CURCUMA cold and shy / Meets her fond husband with averted eye: / Four beardless youths the obdurate beauty move / With soft attentions of Platonic love”. This use of the word « read » is identical to that above concerning the facility of participants of the commodity-continuum to « read » their contexts and with precision. 37 Compare Le Monde (18 November 1994): “Right from the start, the author proposes a secret geography of power in Moscow embracing the Kremlin, a forbidden city befogged in mystery (nimbée de mystère)”; and in the same number of Le Monde, we also encounter the phrase: “a religious combat at the heart of the solar citadel”. 38 I give references in “Traces of the Ancient City”, in The Invisible City. For the architectures of heaven & hell, and also for the images of well and fountain, mentioned above, see (among abundant other possible references) Cosma Rossellio, Thesaurus Artificiosæ memoriæ (1579, Venice), 12r., with respect of hell, and 51r for the stages leading to « God »; both are again constructed in terms of concentric rings, typical of the poesis; the ­planetary Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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­ auline version is especially apposite due to its unbending realism: it is that of P Augustine’s earthly city: city of contemporary earthly institutions, of order, repression, duties (rather than rights), of stern authority and hierarchy, and here communicated as the only frame in which a personal salvation might be reached. One moves through the facts of earth in order to reach the unearthly, but the city itself is phenomenal and realist. Then, Utopia, say Campanella’s Città del Sole, the Utopian city, also with its spiral or concentric rings, stages, single path, thus appears not as the raw, naive, literalist construction ab nihilo of the metaphor, but instead as a counter to the official city. Thus its contemporary perception as a threat to an official order and earthly authorities.39 In both the official and the unofficial, the idea of the city becomes central as a metaphor for human complexity, and thus for the kinds of order that must be seen potentially embodied by it. It is thus a metaphor for both civilisation and society, and for abstract materiality,—for « art’s imitation of nature ».40 St. Petronius, the patron saint of Bologna, is depicted with a compacted model of the walled, towered city of Bologna in his hand,41 while Barbara also holds up a tower, which is its representation as church—the church that is « city », yet earthly … held up in its purely phenomenal representation (vision of the true city being considered inaccessible to a Fallen humanity);42 Peter, in his turn, holds the key that opens the gate to the « heavenly city », but this « key » also

rings are represented 27v. The use of well and fountain is also found in Hölderlin’s profoundly essentialist yet dialectical poetic, for example in “Der Rhein”, and most notably in his essay Die Tragische Ode …, both in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, i. Thus one ascends the tower to knowledge, symbolised by a tower of church or temple; but one descends to it in the anatomy lesson conducted in a circular well-like lecture hall as at Padua and Leiden. 39 Tommaso Campanella, Città del Sole (Milan, 1962, ed. Adriano Seroni; composed in prison in 1602, pubd. in Latin in 1623); Yates, Giordano Bruno & The Hermetic Tradition, 367ff & 385ff, describes and discusses Campanella’s utopian ideas and project. 40 See “Second Landscape”, in Unbroken Landscape, for discussion, references and quotations concerning this idea of art’s imitation of nature. 41 There are many examples of this convention, e.g. La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. Catalogo Generale delle Opere Eposte, 59, no. 90; 66, no. 98; & 73, n. 106, resp.: Petro di Giovanni Lianori, “La Madonna col Bambino in Trono e i Santo Girolamo e Petronio” (1443); Francesco del Cossa, “Madonna col Bambino tra i Santi Petronio e Giovanni Evangelista …” (1474); and Lorenzo Costa, “Madonna col Bambino in Trono fra i Santi Petronio e Tecla” (1496). 42 E.g. Brevario Grimani (repr. 1904, Leiden & Paris), v, pl. 87—Barbara, with the tower in her hand, being one of a group of figures; cf. Catalogus Schilderkunst 14e-15e eeuw. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, 170–3, afb. 84: Jan van Eyck, “Heilige Barbara” (1437), in which the tower rises behind the seated Barbara. The hat worn by Pope Paul V (1552–1621), in the contemporary engraving by Crispyn de Passe, in the Archiv für Kunst & Geschichte, Berlin, also seems to represent the stages of the tower. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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stands for the «  earthly city  » that is the very means of entry,43 thus in its ­Augustinian-Pauline version—say that of Bologna or Ferrara of the day, or, say, as city-generalised. It is Barbara’s « tower », « church »-as-such (individual and collective); it is « utopia », say the circular, concentric and hill-like city that Campanella tried to institute in Calabria, a city in which, as in Giulio Camillo’s « theatre », all earthly knowledge had to be contained, and, as it were, represented, this then also constituting both a path and a method, a pilgrimage of knowledge, with its precise stages or phases.44 It is thus « the way », the necessary and only possible method—tramped by Bunyan’s pilgrim—and yet forged out of social relationships and institutions, real or idealised, and then fought over, maintained or violently repressed, representing both the actual world of institutional realities and its hierarchies (Paul, Augustine, or a Stalin) and that other social world, wished-for, city-ethical (that of the anarchist c.n.t. movement that became prominent in the Spanish Civil War, or Campanella’s ­sixteenth-century « city », or António Conseilheiro’s shanty peasant Jerusalem in the Sertaõ.45—Canudos, briefly constructed in the margins of the impoverished north-east of Brazil at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then brutally crushed by military force,—an earthly representation of the utopian city).46 Kant’s metaphor, for his Copernican Revolution, applies this imagery, returns to it, that of the old city in order to represent the modern constructed in his First Critique. Then, we come to other, more current usages, more clearly related to our own usages and ground of reference: Ilja Prigogine has used the image of the complex city in order to generate descriptive inferences concerning the problem of time for current thermodynamics (but also used in order to generate a 43 In La Pinocoteca Nazionale di Bologna, 61–2, no. 94: Antonio & Bartolomeo Vivarini, “Polittico”, late fifteenth century, we see among many insets, St. Peter holding the key, and below S. Marco holding the church. Cf. an illustration of the “Apocalypse” in a Bible of c. 1478, from Cologne (H. Quentel [publisher] [Inv. no. ambi1], Rijksmuseum Het Catharijne Convent, Utrecht), in which the key held by the angel seems to concern the anticity (compare Brecht’s dystopia of Mahagonny). 44 Giulio Camillo, L’Idea del Theatro (1550, Florence) 45 Another memorable version of this metaphor is in a mural of the “Last Judgement” by Vitale di Bologna, in the Basilica. Parr. S. Martino, in Bologna (1330–1359): An august figure with a forked beard (God?), holds the apostles or faithful in a fold of his cloak, above the scene of hell into which the sinners are being cast. The image is strikingly analogous to the verbal image used in seventeenth century Maharashtra of a « lord » possessing his followers in his padar, his “lap” or “handkerchief”, and one also strikingly illustrated (represented) in a Rajasthani print in my possession. 46 Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (available translated into French with a useful introduction by Jorge Coli & Antoine Seel, Hautes Terres).

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« post »-Newtonian philosophy of nature): his Rome is also a composite city made up of contributions built up over many different centuries, and yet it is a city-interdependent, a unified synthetic structure of sociality, administration and communication, thus possessed of a certain relative yet real autonomy of being, composed, however, of innumerable connective relationships, in which each component, despite the accidental and fractional, historical character of all the events and additions that went to constitute its momentary being, were intricately connected together as « parts », so to speak.47 This representation of Rome might stand for the historicity and organisation of our own city-­invisible, our city infrastructural and referential, taxonomical and textual, abstractional, the city that rises, « as if » (in Kant’s terminology), high above the vast, rural and « rurban » landscapes of the continuum,—and constructed from those « merely human materials » from which Kant also chose to construct his tower: institutions, instruments, terminologies, techniques, metrologies, frontiers, language forms, diverse overlapping fields of knowledge, and acts of communication and synthesis. This is the city introduced at the beginning of the section. My point, then, is that this metaphorical city has a referent in the complex fields of abstraction that constitute the empiricity of the cultural continuum, sketched above, abstract yet real—material, textual and imaginative at once (without, however, reducing the different aspects to one another). It formed every person’s implicit experiential cadre of reference and motion, a meeting point of institutional structures and grids of knowledge, out of which that ­person could extract a selection of possible mental, linguistic and physical paths: of references, choices, mobilities.48 However partial and particular may 47 48

I refer here to Prigogine’s essay “Probing into Time”, he also being concerned with the turn to complexity. This accidentalist and experientialist conception of individual career and thus of access to knowledge through experiential accumulation, is basic to my interpretation of history and society, but see also Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense, 104–5, where it is rightly seen as an aspect of Kant’s “complex notion of identity” of the individual, “a distinction between the different possible subjective route[s] of [a person’s] experiences and the objective world through which it is a route” (two remarkable pages in Strawson’s book). At the crossing points of this abstract architectural complex of images with the empirical continuum of typologies, terms, cases and referents, is the idea of the architecture of an artificial memory system, presented as a location in which images can be stored and connected, thus in the form of a city, a theatre, a palace, church or furnished room. It is likely that such invented and particular architectures—memory systems, utopias—were parasitical upon the kind of generally accessible taken-for-granted corpus of knowledge that we have seen characterising our continuum, the invisible empirical city, but whose very augmenting detail and complexity would have encouraged such invention. I give references in “Second Landscape”, in Unbroken Landscape, but note that Campanella’s città was both a practical utopian social project inaugurated in Calabria, in which memory and learning had a vital

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­ appen to have been an individual’s experiential path through the extensions h of the abstract city, that track would take on the sense and characteristics of the larger abstract continuum; we should then represent it as noted above:— as an individualised stock of knowledge, that has taken form, accumulated, within a larger globally-distributed knowledge continuum, constructed on universal principles of individual participation. Seen in individual, Darwinist terms it would be as if it constituted a continuum, structural and organised, built out of a mass of particular perspectives, each composed according to such universal criteria of possibility, and confirmed as such, sustained in being as such and further generated as an always dynamically modifying whole by each momentary, place and time located position. Again, from an individual and Darwinist perspective, each such experiential biography would comprise a time-path through that order, an individual’s constructional accumulation of sequences of variable perspectives, generating thereby, owing to its diversity, that possibility of sceptical distanciation by an individual from any particular component with which he or she happens to be involved, an interval for « uncertainty » and thus that possibility of choice that so marks the remarkable variation observed in place and time affecting such features as administrative form or ritual; we would be just in regarding such conditions as the product of a true agency and not that of a mere mechanical determination (and that I shall return to below). Put thus, I have no wish to deny the constraints imposed by social inequality, but instead give a name to how we come to understand the universal place of an individual relative to any historical and empirical reality. The enigma for us and for that individual is how that relative and limited, yet fundamental possibility might be exercised: that of stretching the bonds constraining choice and decision in any real sociological context, thus with respect to participation in the commodity-continuum. Our discussion in §2 of this chapter, thus concerning the dispersal of decision through space among countless participants—a decisional micro-praxis that acts at innumerable points all through the nexus, contributing to its overall functioning and to its construction, and that must assume such complex structuration. Each individual would read into circumstantial instances of such an intricate web of mutually implicating and determining reference cadres, a plurality of grids in which factuality takes form and in which any personal identity can be said to constitute itself: say that of the author of Le Parfait Negoçiant or that of a Bengali village weaver or grower of rice, or a Fujian tea function as both content and method, and also as an abstract memory system which itself could function as an individual’s path to knowledge. Cf. the references to Yates and Rossi in n. 54 to this chapter, below. One sees the same kinds of illustrative procedure practised in the Buddhist temple ruins of Bagan and Mrauk U in Myanmar: the Buddhist pilgrim treads a path of memory, a cultural environment replete with such stimuli to memory. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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planter or labourer. In this sense, we may again follow Kant, where he makes an astonishing extension of his metaphor in referring to the builders of the tower dispersing separately into the different parts of the world, there each to build a separate tower,49 in order to argue that each such separate tower might be said to ­represent each person’s individualised, cumulative access to a certain circumstantial stock of knowledge within the larger complex city ». We might add that such development of the metaphor might also be extended to cultural differentiation, just as I have sought to suggest above. In both kinds of extension, individual and collective, we come through in such a fictional representation of the historical process, to confront a population of towers, constructed of « merely human materials », yet city-like in its inter-subjective character and general complexity, a participational architecture of a larger metropolis.50 It is this sense of an organisational complexity—interpretable as an ordering of things material, and at the same time as composed of multiple kinds of 49

50

“…we would discover that if we had possessed in mind a real tower [zwar einen Turm im Sinne hatten] that would reach the heavens [der bis an den Himmel reichen sollte], our supply of materials would but suffice for a domestic house, sufficient and high enough to equip [no more than] our own level of experience; that, in short, our audacious undertaking must fail due to lack of materials, and without even having taken account of the sheer confusion of languages [Sprachverwirrung zu rechnen], and owing to which those at work would inevitably come into conflict [entzweien] about the plan [to be followed] … and thus disperse over the whole world in order that all might engage in their own individual projects according to their own individual designs [nach seinem Entwurfe, besonders anzubauen].” In Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 653 [Ak. iii 465, A707/B735] (Oeuvres Philosophiques, 1293–4, and Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 573 [my emphasis]). The question is as much one of method as capacities and possibilities: Kant begins this paragraph as follows: “If I take into consideration the entire body of knowledge concerning pure and speculative reason, as if it were the building of an edifice [wie ein Gebaude], for which, at least, we possess an idea within ourselves, then I can say that we possess, in the fundamental doctrine of transcendental constituents, an initial conception of the materials required for construction …”(ibid.). Strawson, in representing Kant’s « metaphysics of experience » in The Bounds of Sense, 104–5, refers appositely in this respect to: “the series of experiences which belong to a unitary consciousness … But it is a shining fact about such a series of experiences … that its members [i.e. the experiences] collectively build up or yield … a picture of a unified objective world through which the experiences themselves collectively constitute a single, subjective experiential route, one among other possible subjective routes through the same objective world”. He refers to the “identity of the subject of such a series of experiences [as] dependent upon the complex notion of the identity of [such an individual]. The more fundamental point of the Kantian provisions is that the experiences of such a subject must themselves be so conceptualised as to determine a distinction between the subjective route of his experiences and the objective world through which it is a route. The history of a [human being], we might say, is—among much else—an embodiment of a temporarily extended point of view on the world”. Cf. 121, 124–5, 163. Cf. “The Other Species World”, in Unbroken Landscape. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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diversification—that we can now come to the ultimate argument of the essay: that is, to treat this complexity in terms of a generation, in history, of a certain cultural universality, that evidently transcends all cultural differences. This is one of the major arguments of the essay, but also that which has the most ­serious and controversial ramifications, and it must now be considered in its own right, first by way of justifying a Kantian way of looking at a historical subject matter, and secondly in terms of universality as a possible historical development. ii

A Kantian Approach to Commoditisation & Translatability

The reference to Kant goes far beyond mere illustration and metaphor. It actually permits us to reconsider more accurately the specific character of the tasks set up in this essay, in fact, to generate in greater depth and fullness a framework for comprehending the findings discussed above. The various allusions already made to Cassirer’s work on language should serve to indicate that the commodity world might bear a cultural signification of exactly this Kantian, transcendental-critical cum empirical kind. This is precisely what Cassirer argued for the special domains of art, science, myth, language, and so forth: that these were actual cases, externalised outside of mind, of a freshly generated and observable object domain, thus of the very processes that Kant had argued were necessary for thought to be even possible. Commodities and payment-forms … their very remarkable, identical, and yes, … and let’s repeat it … the universal character of the criteria determining their constitutive form, and that founds their equally universal possibility of infinite quantification and exchange, and that we have come to term translational, in spite of the visible diversity in which those universal constitutive principles come expressed, surely constitute more than just another department of cultural activity, more than the kind of status we allow for « myth » or « art », more than just an interpretation we choose to give to things (as in structuralism). The institutional and sub-institutional dimension of commodification, especially as witnessed in the development of countless markets geared to movement of things and persons, to their apparently infinite transferability in time and place, and thus their taken-for-granted convertibility from one field of cultural difference to another, seems to accord it a special significance as an anthropology, a privileged window through which we may reconsider the significance and grounds of cultural difference in their own right. The dense « microscopic » character of the processes and connections comprising much of what we call commoditisation, the infinitely detailed and circumstantial character of what comes under such categories as monetisation or marketisation—and drawn out over many centuries, perhaps all that we would call post Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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archaeological, thus historical—seems to found a cultural and connectional landscape, linguistic and material at once, involving shared principles of signification and taxonomic form among populations extending throughout the continuum, yet sufficiently specific as to enable us to focus a close attention upon these aspects and attempt to define their culture. The basic artificialist concepts underpinning commodity taxonomies everywhere were necessarily shared in order for exotic goods, persons and measures to translate repeatedly through space and time. The very praxis consciously carried out concerning production and marketisation is itself taxonomic in this specific, yet universal sense. It is a world not only of signs and syntactical forms, but of substantive physical things, a material culture, imaginable as such, a real object world consisting of classes of things produced and exchanged precisely as classes, classes of identities, and which, as it were, « then » faced humanity as an object world into which new imaginative and physical acts were subsequently injected. Thus the phrases: “The influence of the subject on the outer object, and the latter’s reaction on the subject …”;51 this phrase, when envisioned in terms of a complexity of contexts, and vast numbers of individually different interacting participants, takes on a particularly powerful meaning. “To save the soul of the rice”, a phrase used by swidden agriculturalists in upland Taiwan to describe a particular annual ritual, is a very precise conceptual expression for our own abstract notion of identity, the idea of an identity that must be sustained through the thick and thin of all natural and market vicissitude and circumstance, even in being constantly modified in regard to the latter; it is a sense of identity rather like that of the person in a Kwakiutl or Tsimshian myth in which, as it were, a young brave alters material form, changing to that of red salmon, and later still to that of birch or « house post » (totem pole), or field rat; in spite of such a transitional notion of being and kind, identity itself is seen to persist and give form to the thread of the narrative, as if offering us a secret key to an understanding of our own world of discordance and difference.52 From this, we may then go on to say that this shared, dense landscape of work, thought and production-form, both exotic and universal, might be considered as an ever-present ground influencing the formal character of other kinds of significant cultural reference, feeding into other more formalised and intellectualised domains such as horticultural breeding and their dispersed differential local taxonomic developments whether in, say, China, Turkey or 51 Kant, Opus Postumum, 141 [Ak. xxii.494]. 52 Fogg, “Swidden Cultivation of Foxtail Millet by Taiwan Aborigines”, and Boas, Tsimshian Mythology and Kwakiutl Ethnography. My « example » is but a composite I have imagined from the kind of material with which one finds oneself confronted in reading renderings of North-West-Coast mythology. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Europe; One may further extend this influence into the forms given to latemedieval and renaissance memory systems, both intellectual and popular, such as described by Yates and Spence, and in which architectural classificational metaphor and imagery were again prominent as conceptual formative principles for the stocking and recapture of an ever increasing abundance of fragmentary information.53 All this, it seems to me, is found accurately and fruitfully described in Kantian/neo-Kantian terms: thus, in the First Critique, it is the very possibility of thinking « object » that is at issue. And later, it is the notion of freedom that is brought into question, and in spite of the constraints seeming to determine reason and negate that second possibility. “It is only when a content is determined in space, when it is distinguished by fixed boundaries from the undifferentiated totality of space, that it gains its own real form: the act of « setting out » and differentiating, of existere first gives it the form of independent « existence ».” Cassirer thus summarises Kant’s careful distinction of the phases and procedures required for thought to be possible. But Cassirer then goes on, in the next sentence, to externalise the imagined tower: “And this logical fact is marked out in the construction of language, where the concrete designation of situation and space also serves as an instrument for defining the category of the « object »”.54 This paraphrases Kant but also seems to sum up the central 53

Among many, Belot, Que c’est que la Memoire Artificielle (1647); Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci; Yates, The Art of Memory. According to Yates, Theatre of the World, 11, John Dee, magus and mathematician of the sixteenth century, “had five books on memory” in his library. 54 Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, i, 204. I consider the secondary character of memory systems—their likely grounding in the taxonomies of society itself, in “Second Landscape”, and of a similar grounding for essentialist, creationist kinds of thought in “The Other Species World”, both in Unbroken Landscape. With regard to these « memory systems », three works give a sense of their intellectual and taxonomic character: ­Frances Yates, The Art of Memory; Paolo Rossi, Clavis Universalis. Arts de la Memoire, Logique combinatoire et Langue universelle de Lulle à Leibniz;—these two works are complementary rather than repetitive; third, Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (but without Spence treating the question itself). His book usefully implies difficulties of grounding cross-cultural transmission of complex taxonomic forms similar to those concerning this book, and which directly concern Part 2, below. There is a very considerable and useful specialist, contemporary and scientific-historical literature on horticultural activities and systematics in Europe and Asia, perhaps because of the abundance of ­contemporary texts concerning them; I limit myself to two references: an extraordinarily suggestive volume, referred to by Darwin in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (iv, 1847–50, 505), is John [= Johannes] Beckmann [1739–1811], A History of Inventions, Discoveries and Origins, trans. from the German by William Johnston (4th edn., i, 1846 [1st Engl. edn. 1797], London), 512–8 (“Garden Flowers”), and on a further spin-off, the famous  Amsterdam tulip-variety, speculation bubble of the early seventeenth-century, 22–31 (“Tulips”); secondly, Joseph Needham, Science & Civilisation in China, vi, Biology & Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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principles of commodification that I have considered above; where the latter are concerned, thus in creating and marketing commodities, but also in « reading » them and grasping their form and difference, vast human populations are seen acting out Kant’s procedure, … not just thinking and naming « objects », but in externalising them … yet still as forms and contents of reason, giving physical giving form and content to them according to all the rules of possibility in doing so,—manufacturing them, generating them as taxonomy. They are “realised” outside of the human body in the full Hegelian and Husserlian sense of that word. And, we should add, they are so realised according to a set of decisions and intentions that may be more or less efficacious … matters of individual judgement … thus according to freedom, besides according with these universal Kantian-type criteria of possible thought! “Thus for language as for cognition, the precise differentiation of spatial situations and distances represents a point of departure from which it proceeds to build objective reality, to define objects. The differentiation of places serves as a basis for the differentiation of a content, of the I, Thou and He on the one hand, and of physical objects on the other … [subject/object]. The general [Kantian] critique of knowledge teaches us that the act of spatial position and differentiation is the indispensable condition for the act of objectification in ­general, for « relating the representation to the object »”, or, as Husserl would describe it, relating the « tree » in thought to the « tree » in the garden!55 « Space » possesses several senses in our usage as a means to refer to a kind of generalised societal question of proximity and distance within this cadre of complexity concerning the commodity domain; that is, it signifies rather more, in our case, than a mere concern with cosmic or topographical measurable space: it concerns meanings (or dimensions of sense) additional to its « pure » ­Newtonian/Kantian cosmic/transcendental mechanical sense. It might indeed ­Biological Technology, pt. i, Botany. The tulip question—an “investment bubble” properly ­speaking—again evokes this sense of a « combinatoire », suggested above, of successive quasi-autonomous phases and levels of systematic abstraction, each constructed upon the other. In a seventeenth-century painting of “la vente des oignons de tulipe” (“the sale of tulip bulbs”), we see Mephistopheles’ coin being weighed by the seller using one of the most common instruments of the old monetary world, the portable balance (anonymous, Flemish School, Rennes Musée des Beaux Arts). 55 Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, i, 203 (my emphasis). In reading Cassirer here, one should abstract carefully from his late nineteenth-century/early-twentieth-century ­historicism. With this in mind, Cassirer’s discussion of the function of the definite article as objectifier is important: in our own world, the definite article and use of the plural have a fundamental role in objectifying ethnic, cultural, national and racial stereotype, characterising the specific stereotypical forms in which we perceive human geography and the historical evolution of society in terms of « cultures », « races », or stages of development … e.g. of « mentalités »! Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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concern space in the more conventional sense of the intricately continuous, yet closely inter-related sequences of difference constituting empirical change of position, but also more conceptually and abstractly of level and scale, whether physical or conceptual, of whatever we are considering. However, and especially, it must be viewed by us in terms of the subjective space of intention and need, of the need to act, within the object world confronted by the particular contexts of that individual, and in this respect that of commodification, and the need, say, to determine an adaptational niche for a new commodity-identity, such as suggested above, within a contextual ensemble comprised of such numerous adaptive niches. This brings into focus the difficulties of designating space where taxonomies are concerned, the work of the manuals and dictionaries, or that ordinary constantly adaptive work of the individual producers and transporters … the participant populations … just mentioned. This becomes a syntactical and classificational issue of linguistic designation, thus that question of taxonomical order, in and for thought and practice, and that is so disputed among contemporary specialists. Often we are reduced to metaphor, whilst for the contemporary such a sense of proximity and distance must constitute accessible and manipulable domains, each in its own right, that can be ordered and re-ordered, always with that attribute of sense and an efficacious reasoning. Sociological differentiation also involves a strong sense of judgemental, spatial distance, of relationship: that question of class and the many forms of the exploitation of labour that produce flows of commodities and payments. This is a societal space concerning the whole v­ olume, so to speak, of possible relationship … institutional, subject/subject, subject/object, thus the whole question and culture of class, … all that we a­ ssociate with that last word, and that I intend to treat in a later book concerning its axial role in commodification (and mentioned in “More than a Preface”). All must be apprehended—and capable of being apprehended—as constituting a single experiential ordered sense of objective dynamic space, ­unenclosed, whether topographically or conceptually, but always specific in kind, subject to action, but always implicating definite choices by each subjectactor within narrow contexts of constraint, free indeed but free to make error and suffer for it, thus making decisions more or less hazardous and dangerous in kind and impact. Together, then, with the commercial space (the spaces of marketing and production), and thus «  geo-habitational  » space, each such sense affects the manner in which « a matter or nature » (say, the bank of botanical variation available to a peasant, or the plasticity of «  silver  » to the maker of silver coins) is transformed into a diversity of discrete and measurable fixed «  identities  », plasticity into a field of objects. «  Space  » in these ­different senses, provides the dimensional conditions whereby separate acts of artificial objectification are possible: possible in the collective, but difficult Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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interactive extensions of both mind and matter. In turn, the latter takes on the role of a « raw material » (as defined above, a cultural raw material for active, repetitive, making and remaking), one constituted by an already existing universe of society and of objects in terms of which all fresh choices, acts and movements, are alone become possible: the material universe of possibility. Throughout a vast continuum of cultural and linguistic diversity, this interaction produced and reproduced a domain of physical and linguistic objects that could be shared across such variation, and thus communicable, even when expressed in exotic terms: moveable, manipulable, representable.56 Babel was built, whether we like the conditions that had led to it and that sustained it in existence or not! Summing up the principal points of this argument: The « Critical » Kant had formulated the complexity and phrasing of « thinking the object », of « making nature », in terms of a procedural methodology by means of which mind, so he reasoned, manages to think the world—to labour it through a series of cognitively productive endeavours into significant intellectual, cultural entities and structures. Newton’s laws were the necessary cognitive means by which a mathematisable object-world could be realised out of pure, unknowable world matter: a domain of « natural diversity » comes into existence through cognition in which a « science » becomes possible, subject/ object come to be opposed to one another, but as formative and relational. Once Kant turns to the second and third critiques, this intellectual domain of creativity—pure reason—takes on a new dimension: thought—as ethic, as « practical reason »—can actually act on the given world, intervene, invest itself creatively, to generate a new moral, intersocial, that is material, nature, the physical and textual structures of which represent the pursuit and fixing of teleological or purposive imaginative intentions. In this sense, Kant had joined a long development in utopian thought, from Beccaria to Hobbes, to Adam Smith, and, after Kant, to Marx; for Kant, the explicit model was provided by Rousseau’s « regulative » idea of the social contract and his « utopian » concept of the « general will », but developed much further, taking on a new meaning and form, a new level of abstraction.57 56 57

The suggestion is that these conditions are Kantian a priori’s, and I take this suggestion much further in what follows. Ernst Cassirer, Kants’ Life & Thought, & Le Problème Jean Jacques Rousseau,; Philonenko, L’Oeuvre de Kant. Kant’s thoroughgoing « materialism » (in our own sense of this word) is manifested in the Opus Postumum, where he attempts to incorporate all aspects of « ­inner » « spirituality » of mind (thus feeling, purpose, the drive to intervene), as aspects of the moving forces:—moving forces both surround and penetrate the existential human being (e.g. Ak. xxii. 481, 494–5, 499, 501, 505–6, 514, resp. [Förster & Rosen, O.P., 136–7, 142,, 144, 146, 148, 152]). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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The neo-Kantians, and especially Cassirer, radically extended the Kantian conception of what mind must « manufacture » in order to externalise (or existentialise) itself (what it must do, owing to its natural, formal constraints) by treating the cultural matter of language itself as also part and parcel of this transcendental production of a new (or « second »), this time cultural, « nature », and constituting mind’s difficult, complex relation to matter. With this new phase, we be­comeproperlyengagedwiththematterthatalsoconcernsthemost­recentlyformed fields of the humanities: an actually materialised domain of empirical evidence characterised by libraries, texts, uses of words, ritual forms, works of art, scientific ideas and language, and so forth. In some manner, without obliterating the distinctions between mind and what is generated as culture (the matter in and through which individuals are wholly posited, and behind which, at an infinite distance, lurks an invisible first nature—biology’s difficulty), there is found a web of to-and-fro constitutive connections to be defined, a complex of mediations by means of which a historical material (natural, cultural—« raw material » in the very unexpected sense defined above) is constantly worked upon by mind, reconstructed day by day in social intercourse and work, and laboured back on mind, reconstituting it at each moment in each place, socialising it into its forms, generating a field of knowledge and praxis such as presented above. In this sense, it is clear that an investigation of commodities (and payment forms) in terms of « another » species world, one entirely artificial yet vast and extensive—the «  object  » we confront, «  read  » and address—and one entirely different in both kind and order from what we choose to consider a « first nature » (Cassirer expresses this point concerning his own exemplars), a world that equally is language in its own right, linguistic form and content, … whole means of giving the « means of meaning » to this universe, … all this … . constitutes an elaborate organisation of created things that in turn must concern a vast complex subjective reponse in terms of forms of action and kinds of thinking that continue to act upon and thus compose the culture of commodification throughout the continuum. Furthermore, it seems to me that this historical and anthropological field of a long- even ­densely studied empirical subject matter enables us to extend much further and decisively the significance of the Kantian conception and task. The Kantian critique is carried into the vast anonymous domains of material culture itself, in its astonishing variety, but on a universal scale, and according to universal criteria of possibility, and in which all populations, every member of such ­populations, could actively participate as makers, users, readers and consumers, … implying a universal literacy in the matter. This formulation of the problem may aid us in understanding the generation of what must be judged as veritable languages of translation—both physical and imaginative—and as parts of a real and possible historical Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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d­ evelopment of kinds of comportment that come to be expected and actualised at each event of exchange. As an artifice of translatability—an artifice that constitutes itself in terms of that very diversification that appears to defy the very idea of it—Kant’s « tower », the physical image of the complex but intelligible city of the continuum, now appears much more than mere metaphor, more than a « mere » Babel, … the one alleged by its opponents as if unable to succeed. This brings us to the final issue: the possibility of that single « tower » of shared universal principles, of making and communication, founded upon an empirical ground of linguistic multiplicity. iii A

The Universal and Cultural Difference The Very Idea of a Universal Culture and Mind Posed as Problem

The emphases laid on taxonomy and translation may, in both cases, be thought to raise more problems than are solved: do they not imply some kind of shared—thus shareable—universal principles in terms of which things can be made, thought about, transported, and communicated, from place to place, from one language domain to other language domains as if, therefore, there existed some inherent foundational esperanto-like universal language inherent in, and expressed through, all such linguistic diversity? Thus, seeming to imply a single domain of language-use inherent in the culturally exotic ­conditions of thought and its expression that appear to us as such? Differences, that, before the eye, appear radically incompatible and incomparable?58 Moreover, these shared principles cannot be considered shared in merely relative or approximate terms: terms which continue to assume that the fundamental ground on which all the rest is founded is and can only be difference. These taxonomic forms, running through vast countrysides, appearing in textiles fabricated everywhere, in curious sorts of money used in different places but which can be traded for one another, quantified in relation to one another, listed together as if the same kinds of thing, even converted (alchemised, as it were) the one into the other (rial into rupee, gold sycee of trade into pagoda and fanum) … all of this implies a true universality, and that is universal, strictly so, in spite of the accidental character of the human events and acts that had composed it and had generated it. A careful explanation is called for: yet, in the humanities, the universal, its possibility, seems refuted in all fields and among almost all 58

As a graduate student, I was frequently told by senior historians to allow India (or China) to speak for itself, … and not compare the incomparable. One reads similar points of view expressed by anthropologists and by Indologists and Sinologists concerned with art and metaphysics. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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t­ endencies, and not least—so it seems—on the grounds of that very evidence of an empirical differentiation that, however, is left uninterrogated for itself. There are two kinds of explanation for such a possible universal that I shall initially show should be rejected, before turning to what appears a more adequately valid basis on which to justify it: B

First Invalid—The Biological A-Priori

The first invalid is the idea that the human mind, in all its possible empirical variety, must be conceived as per se structured naturally everywhere to think according to such universal criteria, thus as if an organic and incontrovertible given. Here we would be thinking of a biologically universal condition that is prior to everything we identify as humanity’s products—say commodities, say language, or, more generally, culture. We would say that mind is biologically structured for such thinking, as if by definition; … so that whatever the cultural or expressive forms in which we come to confront the human presence, it would, at base, all display this common and necessary set of taxonomic ­structure and possibility. This may indeed be what we have ourselves seized as being so—as ­underling the very possibility of commodification—at a certain late phase of human history; yet, in the case that confronts us here, what happens to have been assumed is an original, already-constituted cognitive fa­culty, necessarily seen to lie as the origin of all cultural form, thus behind the construction of any kind of societal and cognitive order, say that of the commodity. It is a kind of « Cartesian » solution that initially accepts certain ­given grounds in order, secondly, to begin the explanation of the material at hand. One has only to turn this causal question, in its turn, into one that, in its own right, is treated as archaeological and historical, thus entirely empirical, to be confronted by its absurdity. For, it implies problems of origins and courses of continuity that run against any material capacity to explain them, not least in the modern terms of what we now understand of the paleontology and a­ rchaeology of human origins, of their diversity and variation, and that must escape any Adamic kind of conception of a single dispersive source. Instead, we must conceive this problem in a thoroughly post-Adamic framework. This is aside from the fact that such bio-universals are entirely unprovable,—unarguable, as the relativists would say, and open to dispute by those who think differently. Origins? For, one asks, when in Darwinian conception of materialist, organic evolution of the human species, could this universal biological trait or structure be thought of as having appeared as such (an appearance, as if by miracle, of a stable unison amongst all the circumstantial complexity of evolving cognitive possibility traversing the long process of geological and palæontological time). How would we even demonstrate such a proposition? Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Boundary? Can we conceive spatial boundaries distinguishing different kinds of social form, among which one could justify the kind of proposition it entails, say one distinguishing « primitives » from members of complex societies (as had dominated opinion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and found invading the intimate thinking of serious writers we would otherwise consider universalists, such as Russell and Cassirer, and that continued to influence anthropological thought late in the twentieth century)? Is it sufficient to distinguish so-called « scientific » from « non-scientific » populations (such as often alleged in the past of India and China). The humanist Cassirer (like the Husserl of the Crisis) leant towards this dangerous edge.59 One of Cassirer’s fundamental insights also proves to be a source of very serious error, precisely in these particular respects. Kant had essentially been concerned with the possibility of cognition as a synchronic question. He set out to reconstruct («  construct  » qua Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Defoe, Hegel or Marx), as it were, the full complexity of the possibility of knowledge, unpacked as a set of ordering processes and mediating structures. Cassirer’s insight is to see that this, in its turn, must also raise serious evolutionary and historical questions in their own right. Modern theories of evolution of organic forms would seem to imply that we are also speaking of a capacity to think and work that forms part of the evolving and differential conditions and consequences of evolution (thus in certain ways and by certain means), thus evolving in time, thus scattered in space and gradually, but above all subject to the kind of ­circumstantial influence and event that needs characterise the Darwinian explanation. How can we conceive of this evolution of a universal condition, given the scattered character of human society and the variability of its local histories? To phrase the question in this manner allows us to confront the singular dimensions of it as our problem. Cassirer turns Kant’s synchronic universal—the transcendental cognitive process—into a set of diachronic problems concerning the conditions of its possibility in time. These are genuine, very important questions, but the « slip » involved in transforming the status of the question from one phenomenological into one historical and empirical leads him to answer it badly, for he does so in terms of an early ethnology and of anachronistic assumptions characterising social science and popular thinking in the early years of the twentieth century. However, we may also conceive this question in purely historical terms. Instead of trying to imagine a history for such an evolutionary process, and thus trying to explain the coincidence that a highly specific evolution of this universal bio-type would imply as having necessarily occurred everywhere, as if a 59

Earlier in the nineteenth century, it was women, children and criminals, and most obviously slaves, who were placed on that other, more animal side of such a boundary! Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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stage in the linear progress of humanity towards scientific thinking, we try instead to identify a cultural form in terms of general historical conditions within which all thought, work and concourse take place, thus as consequence of such real conditions. Cassirer argued that the variation between different « kinds » of society represent the different phases of such an evolution, atomised as the steps of a ladder representing a process of teleological societal evolution, thus of progressive development and complexification; each « society  », so-designated, separated from its neighbours, placed upon its step, would be conceived as a type, and, in turn, thus conceived as entirely distinct the one from the other, each considered as representing a particular epoch of societal development; they are as if but checker pieces, that the player, the interpreter, might move at will into one or another notional, epochal category, and as consequence disputing such an order with his or her colleagues. The evidence of a relationship between two such items can only reveal itself as a problem of interpretation, such as has given rise to the idea of a definitional obstacle to translation between languages, equally conceived as entire holistic entities, thus identities, giving rise to the generalised assumption that market life had invaded a once pristine moral world of stable ordered closed local exchange (called by some the « disenchantment of the world »). In simple Darwinian terms the proposition is an absurdity: distribution in space subject to unique sets of empirical condition in each and every case would imply paths of divergence—instead of a linear universal process one would have to posit a process of development at the end of which would lie different « varieties » of bio-cognitive form, and ultimately, different species. It is this kind of spetial difference—a biological dispersion into differences of kind—that our evidence concerning commodification definitively refutes. But, furthermore, we have already pointed out above that such a conception of societal and linguistic wholes—of distinct organism-like entities—equally falsifies the circumstantial and variational forms in which language and social/ cultural organisation are actually encountered in time and space. Yes, we already know that the historical problem, as implied by this essay is entirely opposite: it concerns the emergence of a universal across both time and space; how can we conceive the possibility of this convergence of processes scattered over the face of the globe, and uniting heterogenous actors speaking different languages, living in different social conditions, &c., as a production of a common world of thought and object? This is the facticity to which an adequate explanation must be seen credibly to apply. Has not Cassirer, the universalist, caught himself in an inescapable contradiction by positing this once shared manner of comprehending societal divergence: as representing separate stages on a ladder of increasing developmental complexity, and, let’s note pointing so conveniently in that epoch of colonial and imperial conquest Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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t­owards ourselves as the very highest rung? The problem, as said, lies in his slide from the Kantian conditions of rational possibility into the empirical and historical treatment of that same question as fact; the latter, almost inescapably, came to be represented by contemporary intellectuals according to the dominant ideas of order and process characterising his times and that so influenced the veritable epistemology of the social disciplines during their own period of development and formation. C

Second Invalid—Plurality of Societies as A-Priori

The second error focusses on the sociological aspect of such pluralism and is more modern: it rests once more upon the historicist assumption (for which see. Ch. 1) that what may be regarded today as universal had derived historically from what previously had consisted of an atomistic first ground of ­different, non-communicating thought worlds (different cultures, societies, languages, &c.). This historicist version also contains a germ of truth, namely in that notion of the universal as consequence rather than as origin. But we have already considered the failings of such a conception of world history— very widely accepted in both the humanities and on a more popular level (when not frankly refusing such universalism)—elsewhere in the essay, besides in treating the « first biological invalid » immediately above. Pari passu, anthropologists, in confrontation with the modern world have tended to treat societal diversity in terms of equally holistic kinds of entity and frontier, thus of incommensurabilities that act by definition to hinder the very possibilities of effective translation and thus of mutual comprehension. That is to say, radical cultural difference, as the most obvious visible feature of humanity’s organisation in space, is for some an original ground on which to think about a possible universalisation, and, simultaneously, as a current state of things that continues to refute any such possibility: it is a position that fuels current populist politics and that finds confirmation for populist opinions in serious works of anthropological study. D

An Answer—Historical Generation of the Universal as Empirical Possibility

The answer will begin as follows. The commodity domain is at once a transcendental/critical problem in the Kantian sense (that is, we do need to consider its possibility, and its production as a complex of subject/object relationships) and also a historical, developmental problem, in the classical empirical sense of something formed by individual acts and events in historical time, and documented as such. In this latter Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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sense, then, it can actually be researched and reconstituted in the classical archival manner, but given first that the dimensions of the problems at issue, as problems of complexity and connection, have been properly phrased and become the object of investigation for themselves. It is not to be explained as a consequence of some natural law of cognition or structure,—thus, as a biological characteristic of the species (the « first invalid »), nor as an historicist stage leading teleologically towards an advanced developmental representation of that species (the « second invalid »). Instead, it may be minimally regarded as having been consequent upon a generalised historical process in which the different traits of what we have identified as universal, and as explained above, have been seen to develop interdependently and simultaneously through a long time period of pre-historical relationship and interchange, and that we may consider an evolution in Darwinian terms. Difference, in this sense, may then be considered as part and parcel of a process of development in which difference … active differentiation … itself is made possible: such difference being inherent in the commoditisation of textiles and teas, of rices, or among markets, as well as ideologically coming to characterise a constantly generated and regenerated universal culture of ­national and ethnic identities.60 In this sense, we are returning to a classical Kantian formula: that subject/object, as an opposition between observer and observed, between maker and made, between thinker and thought, scientist and the scientific object, participant and culture, mentality and product, user of words and what we call a « language », is itself a complex product, but here a production that is historical, as well as being cognitive; it is the product of a « progression » which can be phrased in both transcendental and historical terms, in which both terms, subject and object, are seen to condition one another’s existential separation, and also their further separation and common development. In our own terms, commoditisation, marketisation and monetisation occur as part and parcel of a much broader process which we might label as the ­global formation of complex society itself in all its economic necessity, cultural expression and mental abstraction. They are not so much the mere results of a process as the process itself, whereby an artificialist taxonomy could develop and spread through a mass of interactional events, in space and time, at the very same time that the other aspects of complex society came dependently into being (supra, esp. §i.4). Demographic increase, state-formation, ­expansion 60

Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.

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of settled agriculture, markets, trade, commoditisation, are parts of a single complex structure of developmental forms and processes, processes that, furthermore, we might judge as irrevocably transitional, irreversible in the forms of their construction … constructivist, so to speak. This is not to say that decline, and thus simplification of societal structure and composition, are not possible, but instead that such reversion and « development of underdevelopment » also takes novel forms, and are part and parcel of this onwards historical movement through time. In this sense, integrational tendencies and particularisation are concurrent rather than successional. Cultural diversity is possible because translatability is pari passu grounded in the larger complex of developments encompassing production and marketing of goods across the continuum. In the terms explained above, a universal culture of making objects, of positing their possibility, then entering this object world with one’s own objects, and transporting them across frontiers, involved a constant, complex, dynamic, productive relationship between subjects—intersubjective,— and between subject and object: between imagination and the two natures.61 The Kantian argument for the universal of human mind and culture may in such terms be seen to become credible, both historically and culturally.

61 Kant, Opus Postumum, Ak. xxii, 440 (Förster & Rosen, O.P., 161–2): “The movable in space, matter as a continuum not dispersed [interspersum] through a vacuum, nor atomistically aggregated, but dynamic (since it posits no atoms), compressed into body-like masses [durch Korperbildungen] in empty space through attraction and repulsion, yet whilst drawn together at the behoof of a full and tangible distribution in completely extended space [Mittheilung der Kräfte als im Vollen und sensibelen Raum durchgängig Verbreitet]; these are mere entities of thought [Gedanken/Dinge (sic.)] which, like caloric [Wärmestoff], are not so much hypothetical entities as principles of the understanding, without which experience itself would be impossible”. Hegel, in his youthful manuscripts of the Jenaer Realphilosphie, also regards Wärme­ stoff (caloric) as the basic dynamic matter of being, but which he frequently hints as being in its own turn but pure wave-motion, wave motion as the primordial constituent of the universe. There is an especially clear representation of such a notion in one of Edvard Munch’s versions of “The Cry”, and also in “The Waves of Love”, of 1895–1896, and in which the forms of being seem to arise from an indifferent matter of pure wave. A later, especially remarkable painting, “Galloping Horse” of 1910–1912, appears to mark a refinement of this aesthetic: all portrayed … street, buildings, persons, cart and horse, snow … are as if consumed … deformed by motion. (Works kept in the Munch-Museet, Oslo. One might ask if Munch’s concern with the wave had been a response to the seeming atomism of contemporary pointilism.)

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Cultural and Natural Space/Times62

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Introduction. For an Explanation of Difference

This final section of Part 1 of City Intelligible recapitulates many of the general points argued in the previous pages, but now resets them within a perspective more directly connected with questions about order devolving from the very idea of Kant’s transcendental « form-giving » a-priorist treatment of time and space. Above all, it is concerned with the extensions of the latter into an unambiguously cultural, and «  physical  », thus material facticity, one providing a more socialised, material context for mentality itself. We need focus especially, therefore, on the central principles—that of the a-priori and of its component constitutive forms—that enable us to treat Kant’s exposition not only as one grounding the very possibility of cognising exteriority but, in doing so, in rendering it a fruit of cognition expressed and realised external to mind … thus as a material and cultural object capable thereby of confronting that mind as its context and field of constraint. In short, these principles are shifted from perspectives «  merely  » concerned with production of determinable objects in thought, or, at best, in intellectual culture (law, morality, science), to their production throughout the different facets of the material world in which humanity is located and participates, and that world now present as if its raw material, 62

The entry on « reality [realität, sachheit] » in Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, 450–3 [and French augmented and re-ordered edition, 895–900], is an excellent and highly concentrated introduction to the problems encompassed in Kant’s conception of space/time, and concerning its consequences for questions about objectivity and subjectivity (raised below). The treatment of the “Antinomies of Pure Reason” in the First Critique is also incisive for this discussion; and esp. the subsections in Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 510–548 [Ak. A.515– 567/B.543–595] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, included in §9, 454–484); see. most esp. the remarkable preparatory passages on the « possibility of freedom », Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 519–29 Ak. A.528–41/B.556–69] (Kemp Smith, 461–9); these are a miracle of clarity: they show that by having relocated Newton, thus Newtonian nature, and the necessity which it entails, into mind as its means of ordering sense impression, it loses its status as a complete description of pure reality, from which, indeed, no exception would be possible. Newton’s law, we remember, are laws of pure a-priori formation of an order to the material that becomes object of thought; they provide form and consistence to a content received by the senses. The corollary? That, “In this way, freedom and nature, in the full sense of these terms, can exist together, without any conflict, in the same actions, according to whether action is referred to its intelligible or sensible cause” (Kritik, 529 & Kemp Smith, 469 [Ak. A.541/B.569]). Here, the First Critique comes to seem but a « mere », if necessary, prolegomena to the second, The Critique of Practical Reason. It is as if the First Critique intentionally comprehends the plan of a whole oeuvre that, yet, remains, at that stage, to be fully confronted and continued.

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matter for the constant refounding of an ever new material world. Commodification is a process that is seen to be « culture-forming » both in mind and externally, beyond mind, produced by it and confronting it. Thus, we are now concerned with the whole procedural domain of thinking the object and thereafter of making it, sculpturing it, so to speak, out of that « raw material », constructing it in both domains, inner and outer and, in consequence, resulting in a need for the contemporary—at this cultural level susceptible to consciousness and active will—to be able to determine and calculate its forms, plan its composition, define the traits and constituents necessary for it to fit a particular adaptive niche in order that it integrate with its associative context. In addition, therefore, our attention must be concerned with that question of «  making the object  », thus with a veritably kaleidoscopic propensity of ­historically-observed forms of production at diverse levels of activity, and by means of varied procedures, whether concentrated in a single workplace or dispersed along sequences of such places of work. Varied kinds of institution and instrument must equally engage attention (not least those operating by language-use, thus as gesture, sign, symbol, words and number), and that serve to mediate between mind and matter, transforming one facet of making and expression into the other, or the act of exchange itself, sufficiently efficaciously to lead such a constancy and density of transformative practice to appear to participant and observer as if unproblematic … «  natural  », as it were (yet which, as we have seen is far from the case). Such events are seen not as obvious once such transformations of being and kind are recognised as being necessarily indirect, and as indeed suggested above.—Thought, text and the physical solidity of a factored object cannot simply be reduced to one another, as if no change of state were involved, thus no mediating procedure enabling such a transformation to occur.63 We repeat Husserl’s dictum that the « tree in the 63

It is a theme also constantly emphasised by Husserl, repeating again and again that what constitutes the object is constituted through a sequential procedure of thought, the noese, being not identical to that from which it is so constituted, the noem. The former needs to be understood as such and analysed for itself. The noem is already an object of attention upon which the procedure of constitution is enacted, but which itself must be distinguished from the totality of the world, aside from humanity, as ground,—what Kant terms noumenal and prior to mind, and that cannot be known for itself. Yet, each phase and step must be considered in mutual conformity, the one with the others, each phase different yet in strict formative, constructive genetic relationship with the others, thus as products of an ongoing procedure of strictly self-determining transformation; … yes, it is strictly dialectical as procedure, even if Husserl would not name it so. Thus, to re-capture Husserl’s own reasoning, the tree itself does not enter mind but instead a representation of that tree reconstituted, refabricated, by means of the form-giving procedures of thought, and with a content of thought, and, in truth, forged as a unity through a

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garden is not the « tree in throught »! And, where marketing and production are concerned, such mediating procedures—the processual intervals between different states of a commodity in formation (say between yarn and cloth), come also, equally importantly, to constitute the veritable material of study itself. In characterising our problem in this manner, I am literally attempting, even in spite of myself, to demonstrate a certain clear, unqualified validity to what is generally conceived to be Kant’s most vulnerable point. Since the beginning of this century, the idea of positing Newtonian time/space as transcendental apriori conditions for thought itself has been seriously discountenanced by a long series of fundamental changes affecting theoretical physics, instituting quantum mechanics, and radically altering notions about motion and location, as also concerning the very composition and nature of matter. In particular, the second law of relativity is frequently cited as having invalidated Kant’s radical Newtonianism, and even the very principle of interiorising ostensible laws of physics as subjective conditions for the possibility of thought.64

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c­ omposite of experiences both of that tree and of trees in general. But what I am seeking to add … and desire to add … is that such procedure also concerns every factual (thus empirical) transition effected on « matter », thus on a previous condition, and along a whole sequence of phasing both conceptual and material, concerning to make evolve in thought piece by piece, « moment by moment » (through space and time, and, for us, from one work-site to another) the constitution of the commodity, thus cumulatively and transformationally. Then even material reality seems to appear, in such a light, as dynamic and inherently dialectical in its ongoing constitution and reconstitution: to be pervaded by the phenomenology of the fact. In addition to my lengthy reference and comment regarding Friedman’s critique of Kant, compare Pomian, also with regard to Kant’s Euclidianism and his view of “mathematical objects”, in L’Ordre de Temps, 167: “Kant … had accorded [time with] a privileged status, and had proposed an explanation; but many philosophers contested this privilege assimilating it with the fictions of the human imagination. Such opinion became virtually general after discovery of non-Euclidian geometries, and which, so it was believed, decisively de-legitimised the very foundations of Kant’s doctrine”. However, there is as serious an absurdity in dismissing such questions as mere fiction as there is in treating them as but « real », thus real in a merely positivist, naively objectivist sense ; Pomian’s more general discussion, concerning the question of the reality status of structuralist « theory », op. cit., 166–7, 215–8, is equally entirely relevant to a consideration of Kant, and can be followed further in the very direction I take up below in arguing for the legitimacy of Kant’s position; for Kant is dealing with mind—and I with mind and mind’s product, culture—and not with the in-itself of an object-world, distinct from or including the subject; it is what we might dispute about the scientist’s idea of « ­nature », and just as had Einstein, thus be sceptical about the objective existence of time, when considered independent of the subject. Pomian also cites, 216, N.S. Troubetzkoy (his Grundzüge der Phonologie [available to me in French translation as Principes de

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Personally, I believe that the question of the transcendental a-priori is far more problematic, and, where Kant is concerned, in a more positive, thus more favourable sense, than that which can be judged by mere superficial comparisons with certain phases and aspects of modern science.65 The very fact that both Einstein and the logical positivists had framed, at least initially, their respective (and closely related) positions from a Kantian transcendentalist point of view (whatever readjustments were made to it), supports a more nuanced approach to the question. For example, the sheer fertility of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (a virtual poesis of sensory perception in its own right), of Hegel and Marx’s very particular and thoroughgoing extensions of Kant’s sceptical materialism, and, furthermore, the very long tradition of utilising observational uncertainty in scientific argument as a basic method of exposition and style—most famously in Galileo’s Dialogues, but, in fact, far more generally applied in scientific argumentation in the later-medieval and early-­modern centuries—strongly underlines the validity of some kind of Kantian approach to mind and thought.66

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Phonologie, 104]), who remarks: “Just as the phoneme forms part of language and language is a social institution , the phoneme, properly speaking, is a value and possesses the same status of existence as any other value. The value of a monetary unit (for example of a dollar), nonetheless, is neither a physical reality nor a psychic reality, but an abstract and fictive measure [une grandeur abstraite et fictive]. But without that fiction no state can exist [Mais sans cette fiction, un état ne peut exister.]”. I would judge, however, that such value is no less real for being abstract: but, then, it is a culturally formed reality, an artifice. Strawson is particularly apposite in The Bounds of Sense, 118–21, to whom the question of Newton and Euclid—again as below—is closely bound up with an order constituted in and by subjective consciousness (in the processing, so to speak, of experience), and not with the « world », as such or necessarily.—Thus, in accord with my argument. Some like to treat Kant, in this respect, as rigid and closed concerning this status given to Newton and Euclid as conditions of perception. One must avoid the kind of literalist reading typified by Friedman and by many others, and as described by Pomian, besides criticising Kant for not having foreseen twentieth-century developments in the sciences. Moreover, even if he had done so, he would—as I have insisted and explained above— justly have regarded such developments as perfectly irrelevant to his own concerns with mind. The relationship between the humanities and the « exact sciences » is briefly discussed in the introductory essay, above, concerning, especially, the drive to make a mathematics of the humanities, so dear to the structuralists, but also exemplified by certain associated developments in economic history and sociology of the time, as if, say, statistics or computer computation could be considered free of mind and the number be considered a neutral datum! Where Galileo is concerned, I refer especially to Paul Feyerabend’s commendable, idiosyncratic book Against Method, although I have read many works on the subject.

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But, this problem concerning the forms of a critical transcendentalism cannot be resolved—thus wished away—by merely transforming it into a historicism of one kind or another, as if Kant’s thesis had been washed away by the floods of new events concerning the advance of knowledge, neither partly nor wholly, because this entirely misses the point he was attempting to make. That is to say, his arguments are not vulnerable, as such, to arguments about later developments affecting the evolution of knowledge, through which one kind of knowledge had been superceded by another more-advanced kind, one we would wish to substitute for Kant’s severely logical-constructionalist approach to thought (as in the manner of, say, Cassirer, or the logical positivists); such a response would quickly lead to fresh disappointment, and yet even more dismissive reaction. His application of Newton and Euclid are not to be dismissed quite so easily: they concern mind, not matter. Let me explain. As argued above, the logical-constructional approach has very special virtues in its own right, virtues that make of it a particularly important means for regenerating social studies. In particular—and especially given Kant’s con­ ception of the thoroughgoing unity of knowledge and cosmos—the flurry of current interest in political thought, and in the philosophy of law, for Kant’s ­method—for example, by Amyarta Sen, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin or Jürgen Habermas—suggests that scientists, on the one hand, and historians and anthropologists, on the other, might also look, and with advantage, more carefully at the kinds of question asked by Kant of the real.67 Not being equipped with the scientific skills required to deal with the larger scientific aspects of this question (but which need not—except, perhaps, where the matter of consciousness is concerned—be considered relevant to the specific issues confronted in this book), I shall try to argue that even Kant’s «  merely  » Newtonian version of a-priori «  intuitional form  »—that which gives time/space « form » (or dimensional form) to the content of e­ xperience— can be shown to have a very definite sphere of real applicability, one that may be accepted as valid and truthful in its own right, but which, however, must be demarcated as a special and distinctive domain of material organisation apart from what we otherwise designate as the physical composition of cosmos and nature, and to which latter modern scientific principles must indeed refer. These 67 Friedman, as noted (and by way of example), in his otherwise excellently argued Kant & The Exact Sciences, qualifies Kant’s philosophy, much too easily, as passé for the very reason of the changes affecting modern scientific thought concerning time/space; but this is the one part of the book that fails to discuss issues in their necessary detail. Compare Otfried Höffe, who applies the same criticism, without discussion, in an otherwise compact and excellent article: “Eine Republikanische Vernunft. Zur Kritiek des SolipsismusVorwurfs”, 406.

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two domains, both real, must not be confused with one another. And this distinguished, demarcated domain concerning thought is, where we are concerned, also what we may legitimately call culture: it is that « second nature » produced humble-tumble upon, within and out of a first physical and organic nature, a nature fabricated by humanity’s own mere puny artifice. It is here above all, and especially with respect to a concern with commodification, that Euclidian and Newtonian principles can be seen to possess effective fiat and relevance.68 The qualifications which I shall apply to this statement are not concerned with the question of the relative scale or measure of ordinary possible human apprehension, thus of what is feasible for an ordinary unaided use of our senses (the usual qualification made to justify the relative applicability of Newtonian measure to modern life:—that, if seen with a microscope or telescope, other, more complex scientific principles of observation and measure, and other means of analysis, would be required). They instead concern the much more problematic question of the relationships between artifice and nature, humanity and cosmos, the human made world of culture and matter and what we conceive of as nature itself. Obviously, priority must ultimately be given—in a purely material philosophy—to the latter: that the principles of cosmos (what we call nature and the laws of nature) must be assumed, ultimately, to embrace every possible content and every possibility, without exception, deemed as composing the universe. Yet, on the other hand, the specific kind of formgiving that concerns us in respect of Kant’s a-priori, refers to highly s­ pecific rules of category construction—of form and dimension—that enable the object to be constituted in mind and perceived as object, thence for reading and manipulating the resultant material taxonomies affecting objects that constitute artifice. Thus, this is no mere question of human-convenience—Newton 68

Kant himself makes perfectly clear, in the First Critique, the transcendental status of space/time as a-priori, structuring components of perception, but I also strongly recommend §ii. “The Critique as Envisagement of Limits”, in the article “Kant and Husserl”, included in Ricoeur’s Husserl, in which Ricoeur explains this pre-eminent aspect of Kant’s thought and its absence from Husserl’s phenomenology: “This is why phenomenology is not a « critique », that is to say, an envisagement of the limits of its own field of experience”. (190). It is also fascinating to see that Hegel too—whilst seeming to write about space and time, about history itself, and also about matters of science, in their own right, was really concerned to describe how they come formed in mind, given form and thus « reality » … thus « realisable » … in mind; and thus, his unceasing and demonstrative use of the dialectic that so characterises his youthful Jenaer Realphilosophie. It is another indication of Hegel’s inherent ground of Kantism, in this respect (despite his frequent refutations and denials)!

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as being sufficient for the layman (as is argued by scientists with respect of measure)—but of real differences and problems concerning the character of order itself: thus of the kind or kinds of order that actually constitute artifice: artifice in mind, artifice as culture, and both as questions of possibility. One side of that question of order, in dealing with things human and cultural, is « Newtonian » and « Euclidian », so to speak, whilst another side, concerned with nature, and even the ultimately natural context of even artifice itself, thus these very same cultural materials (seen from a distance, as it were), needs instead be to be seen in a very different, non-common-sensical light that equates with modern science, and including the laws of relativity.—Nature in such an argument may have two referents: that we call so external to human culture; that which must ultimately be designated as natural from an ultimately cosmic perspective. Naturally, this is not a claim about how Newton or Kant themselves had read nature or culture. With Kant, however, the issue, once more, is much more difficult than at first appears, because it is clear that he also attributed distinctive designations and properties to what we separate as culture and nature. Most important is the fact that the frontier is now observed to be «  implanted  » within mind itself (not just between mind and what is external to it, say as the relationship subject/object): a vital difference is recognised distinguishing theoretical and practical reason, and which indicates a contrast of this kind at a rather high conceptual level.69 Here, such a « frontier » of difference is seen 69 Viz. Kritik der reinen Vernunft: i) 533 [Ak. A.546–7/B.574–5] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 472): “Human beings [Der Mensch] … are, at once, for themselves, phenomenal and … entirely intelligible …”; ii) Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 536 [Ak. A.551/B.579] (Kemp Smith, 475): “Given that one can consider reason as possessed of causality in respect of appearances, can one also consider the acts themselves as being free, even though, in their empirical character, they are entirely, and specifically determined and necessitated? …Yet, this indeed is what is determined intelligibly,—as mode of thought [Denkungsart]”.; iii) Kritik der Reinen Vernunft , [Ak. A.552/B.580] (Kemp Smith, 476): “The same cause, even in another relationship, belongs to the series of appearances …”; and: iv) Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 543–4 [Ak. A.561/B.589] (Kemp Smith, 480–1): “Treating an unconditioned existing something [ein unbedingtes Dasein] as ground of appearances, differs from what we distinguished, in the previous section, as an unde­termined cause (thus as Freedom) [der empirisch-unbedingten Kausalität (der Freiheit)], and, yet, which as cause (Substantia phaenomenon) was seen to belong to the series of conditions [Reihe der Bedingungen gehörte], only its causality being considered ­intelligible. Yet, here, as an undeniable ground of possibility [notwendig Wesen], we now consider it wholly external to the series composing the world of sense [Reihe der Sinnenwelt] (als ens extramundanum), thus barely (bloß) intelligible, thereby avoiding that it be taken for itself as if the law of accident and of dependent relationships among appearances”.

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to distinguish the enchainment of the phenomenal characterising or representing nature, even when fabricated in mind, and distinguishing it from the free spontaneity marking the possibility and facts of a willed and intentional human intervention in nature (a possibility of intervention strongly emphasised by Kant). For Kant, there is the question of an ethics, of the possibility of a utopia, or, for us, of describing correctly that huge prison of reality within which liberty constructs itself, and built up in history and space/time, and that we name culture, and which I have already sought to characterise in the previous section. Culture may be seen as a realm in which participants find themselves almost entirely submerged by the necessity imposed by what such freedom has actively served to produce. Yet, lower down, a kind of ultimate ground, is that substratum of nature, which is itself seen prescient both in and beyond mind: both “external to us and within us”.70 This recognition of the manner in which mind itself represents a combinative architecture of nature and invention and in terms of which, therefore, the matter itself comes to be invented, posited, constructed, we shall see to be very important, below. However, my point about this, as one of not assuming Newton’s (or Kant’s Newton’s) own reading of nature and culture, is different: instead, many strands of intellectual thought may be seen to have arisen in the course of history, as workings of ordering principles that happen to be rooted in ordinary lived material culture, but which as such are taken for granted, hidden as formative and grounding aspects of our ordinary practical and mental activities, thus hardly perceived as definite mental or intellectual processes, as cultural acquisitions in their own right (often unseen beyond the practices that constitute them71). This is most obviously the case where social studies are weak, for example in the unquestioned, direct vernacular roots of much of an ostensibly technical vocabulary imported unconsciently from popular usage into our fields.72 But the connection may also be considered in a much more complex, See also the rich treatment in Eckart Förster, “Kant’s Selbstsetzungslehre”, in Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 217–38 (and which essentially concerns the Opus Postumum). 70 Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, 576 (889 in the French edn.): “the intelligible substratum of nature external to us and within us”. 71 Several examples are given in “The Other Species World”, Unbroken Landscape, 205, n. 25, with respect to the artificial speciation of plants, where the focus of the specialists almost entirely neglects peasant agriculture. For example, Charles Darwin, highly attuned to artificial selection though he was, seems to imply that varieties in peasant agriculture are accidental products of nature (as in many passages of Variations of Animals & Plants under Domestication). 72 Where economic history is concerned, I have questioned several such basic terms in §B of my “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation …”, in Unbroken Landscape. But

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systematic and interesting light, one that gives to lived culture a visibility and primacy generally denied to it. For example, given the dense and generalised role, claimed above for the artificialist species-concept in commodification throughout the continuum, various kinds of creationist thinking—say, those encountered in theology, thus too in the metaphysics of the ancient Sphere, and implicated in the old medical botany—might be worth investigating in terms of such human-led origins and familiarities, as having been rooted in, and drawn from, a life-time’s unconscious observation, activity, and representation: thus as myth and metaphor standing as such for something real, and much more extensive and popular, … human (and as addressed directly below in Pt. ii). Similarly, the conceptualisation of « natural selection » is rooted within a mass of conscious observations taken in laboratory, garden, field and farm; as such, it is founded upon artificial-selectionist practices—upon breeding and plant selection, both learned and popular, on the very factoring of type … of taxonomy. Yet, this grounding, when not raised to consciousness as a problem for clarification, is tolerated precisely because unquestioned … no essential formal distinction has been seen to distinguish (or been allowed to distinguish) artificial from natural speciation. Early-modern Chinese or European horticulture—both highly intellectualised and textualised—may also be recognised as possessed of a huge natural resource base of taxonomical practices among purely agrarian populations and their selectionist activities (so-called « ethnobotanies »).73 We have already suggested that late medieval and renaissance «  memory systems  » (the memory-instruments of the past, such as ­studied by Yates, Spence and others, and to which I add the increasing-prolix publication of merchant’s aids such as manuals, dictionaries and lexicons), ­together with other taxonomic, architecture-simulating devices, might have drawn nourishment from the sheer taxonomical density characterising society at large, and lived by all persons, and I mean here kinds of taxonomy which, we have seen, are specific both in form and content. Early science might also be seen in terms of such tacit familiarities with ordinary activities that, in

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it is not only terms that are concerned but also the basic concepts themselves used habitually by historians as a criticism of the past, and yet that, with attention, can be observed as having been an integral part of contemporary popular awareness, thus of conscious knowledge concerning their own contexts, and to which, therefore, they systematically responded (an example being the systematic regulative response throughout the continuum to the so-called Gresham’s Law, but also concerning the question of trust, and much else). It is that very response, historical and collective, that gives form to the complexity of such monetary order. Considered in Part 2 of this book.

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t­ hemselves, happen to be extremely complex and, yet, never raised to the status of a science in their own right. ii

Newtonian Space/Time & Practical Knowledge

The final step is to consider the internal characteristics of this cultural universal as possibility, that of something, a kind of order, posited as thought, for comprehension and practice in real time/space, and, as such, as being possessed of an internal possibility of constant, piecemeal, ongoing construction,—open as a field of facticity for individual, particularising intervention, and thus for making … for constituting idea and object … and, consequently, as a use of language for description and reference corresponding efficaciously to that idea or object of thought. To many—especially to those most versed in current thinking in the natural and physical sciences—this final section must seem to make claims that are absurd, but it does so entirely on the grounds of a need to render unambiguous the distinction between artifice and « nature ». By unambiguous, I refer only to the conceptual definition I have chosen to make of this difference, not to the much more difficult question of determining that difference within the complexities of the objective material world itself. I put it in this manner because the enigma represented by the distinction lies in the fact that the two « natures » are conceived according to entirely differing principles of constructional order and yet cover, or entirely overlap an identical object field: our lived world. Obviously, all that constitutes the human species must from one angle be admitted as partly artificialist, created by human mind and hand—precisely what we assign as history and culture, intellectual in form and material in fact—intentionally constituted as an object world capable of withstanding the destabilising forces of nature, whilst at the very same time being wholly part and parcel of a first and ultimate conception of nature, cosmic in status, thus aspects of matter, and thus ultimately also susceptible to being understood according to principles that differ in no manner from those adduced for physical and biological nature.74 It is not my intention to address this latter more properly scientific question. In short, the absurdity must then seem to stem from the claim, made in what follows, that a certain sphere of actual material being is sufficiently characterised by Newtonian time/space … that it is artifice and different in that 74

Kant distinguishes this as the relationship between nature (necessity) and freedom. Thus, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 524–6 & 703–4 [Ak. A535–7/B563–5, & Ak. A.772/B.800] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 466–7 & 614), some wonderful passages. We might call it a principle for the conservation of explanation.

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respect from nature. This claim appears entirely disqualified by modern relativity physics, or by more recent developments in the science of physical nature. Yet, no matter how microscopic or macroscopic the penetration of our gaze into its content and extension, this sphere—cultural nature—is, so I contend, satisfactorily described according to Newtonian principles, necessarily and entirely so. However, at the same time, it is also affected by that broader context of equally necessary characterisation common to the nature of the whole universe; the two principles meet within the same matter, the matter of artifice, that different order, embraced and penetrated by an ultimate idea of what nature constitutes. In short, it is from within, instead, that we constitute the peculiar characteristics of that “artificial nature”. What thereby is built up, accumulated in our minds, seems perfect paradox. Obviously, the paradox is not resolved in these pages; instead, my purpose is to establish a possible route and mark out its beginnings, thus to validate the claim at least as a useful hypothesis. In this respect, all the characteristic qualifications of Kant’s transcendental method as having been too tied to Newton’s mechanics, and thus invalidated by relativity, the new thermodynamics, and so forth, now fall away. The problem treated by such objections—by Friedman, for example—is certainly genuine and important, but it needs to be reconsidered, rephrased, as a problem of contexts and containments, thus of the very possibility of an artificial, second nature in the midst of the idea of an untrammelled plastic first nature, and in which Darwin’s individualist and eventbased theory of evolution—a Darwinist constitution of the factual—possesses its proper cadre of reference; this dualism concerning order needs to be considered in terms of its logical-constructional possibility (that we can even think them separately). Given this formulation of the problem, it is particularly important to recognise … understand … that Kant had been unconcerned, in the First Critique, with the nature of physical matter, thus with the true physical nature of what we call the object, but instead with mind and how it ordinarily conceives … thus thinks and apperceives … such an object. He was thus concerned with human thought and action—their possibility—in and on the world and therefore drew a fundamental distinction between the true aspect of the world, inaccessible and unknowable, and how any human, whatsoever, could sensually ­depict of that world, and, when acting upon it, do so according to the natural limits of human perception. It is in this sense that Newtonian and Euclidian conceptions of space and time are seen to correspond with the natural functioning and limits of mind, and we can draw, with Kant, a legitimate distinction (or else deny it) between what he called the “thing-in-itself”, of which we can know nothing (except what the mind gives of it to us), and the thing as formed

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in ordinary human consciousness. It is only through the corrective of books, learning, equation and mathematic that we can conceive a correction to sensory perception, such as the laws of relativity, and not by the ordinary use of our senses. As I have expressed it in the introductory chapter, “More than a Preface”, it is reasonable and natural that we perceive the sun turning around the earth, and not vice versa, whilst we also know from what we have learned in books or at school that it is the earth that turns around the sun. This difference between ordinary perception and its correction is fundamental and justifies our rejection of modern criticisms of Kant’s Newtonianism. For, it is ­precisely Newton and Euclid that is seen here to correspond globally with the thought and act concerned with the commodity, and with all the aspects ­concerning its constitution and institutionalisation, such as the market, the ledger, the price, transportation, and the marks of recognition: thus thing, word and task. There is first, therefore, this claim for a space in which Newton’s laws actually give true and precise form to a significant part of reality, that is to say, to certain principal aspects of consciously-factored intellectual and physical matter, but which, from a more inclusive angle, would be characterised in terms of modern scientific knowledge (obviously in the provisional sense we accord to all scientific knowledge) … as, for example, constituted by waves and/or particles.75 Second, however, and closely tied to the question of Kant’s Newton, we return to the problem of the artificial, thus to the essentialism of the species category seen to characterise culture. It is precisely as an essentialism that we have defined commodity manufacture and which we have distinguished absolutely from biological species formation; the latter, we know, is understood in that Darwinist sense of the individualist, particularist, accidental character attributed to the formation of the biological category (placing us, once more, before the difference between the two forms of constructional order, essentialist and Darwinist). This is in order to consider in more detail the question of how an artificialist taxonomy should be seen to differ from what are deemed truely natural classes, … from classes of a Darwinist kind, … or rather from the problematic domain constituted by the very idea of natural species forms, … produced in and as nature.76 75

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I refer, here, to Niels Bohr’s theory of « complementarity », intended to be provisional, because both particle and wave theory appeared to satisfy, respectively, certain complementary aspects involved in contemporary observation of the real, but which could not be brought into final satisfactory synthesis as a theory of matter. See also my reference above to Munch’s wave-based works as if an artist’s response to pointilism. I am reminded, much influenced by W.G. Hoskins’ notion (expressed in The Making of the English Landscape), that everything one is likely to confront in field and forest has been

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We have argued in the previous subsection that the commodity object can be conceived as fabricated according to transcendental time/space conceptions, and that correspond to the sense intended of mind by Kant. Whilst this did not necessarily imply an acceptance of Kant’s Newtonian version of space/ time, it is now my intention to argue the truth of Kant’s claims. Thus, I now mean that this is literally correct—as a problem of formal constructional ­principles—and not merely as a vague allusion to such a question. It is at least correct in principal, in the form argued above: Newton and Euclid-like and not to be understood in terms of modern science, say according to the laws of relativity. The physical commodity is three-dimensional; it is « substantial » in the traditional sense (as an object imaginatively separated by the rules of its formation, by a void, from any other object); it thus has a determinate content and dimensions in the pure common-sensical meaning of those two words; indeed, it must be conceived as such in order to be fabricated as a physical object outside of mind, yet by hand and mind, and then to be used effectively, as if an extension of mind within the outer world, again and again, and once more by hand and mind: its constitution as object is treated as such in contemporary letters, in ledgers and manuals, listed labouriously in dictionaries, and mentioned in conversation, negotiation and dispute, whilst also forming part of what enters teleologically the « plan » of any « finished » object preceding its actual putting together as a production line necessary for factoring it, whether all such process happens to be in situ, or else dispersed in space among several part-production centres (as typified by cloth-manufacture and that of certain kinds of payments medium). In this sense, there must be some correspondence of form between mind, word and object (although obviously not as a real content, except by way of literalist analogy): a blueprint on a flat piece of paper should be seen to represent a three dimensional objectification; the tree in mind is not the tree in the field, yet a necessary correspondence between the two is certain.77 And « correspondence » means some kind of translative, mediated relationship leading from the one to the other, and not, to repeat, an identity between them. It is in this sense that the artificial species concept may be considered as a fundamental constituent principle of a Newtonian version of nature. This can be seen to be true when we recognise that Newton, like most of his

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long constituted and reconstituted by humanity, and thus that there is no « original » virgin nature left for us to observe: all is historical. Husserl constantly emphasised this banal point, and was right to do so: it points us to the necessity of defining precisely in what manner the mind comes to abstract the object from that out-there material thing-in-itself (Ideen, i, §§97–8 seem decisive). Then, what is that cultural object we call the commodity?

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c­ ontemporaries and colleagues, had believed in a created natural world,—an act of creation, or first-cause, as if that of a God or the unfolding of an Idea (even if we cannot speculate about it or investigate such a fact or ultimate reality), and not, therefore, according to our modernist conception of a nature as spontaneously constructing itself. It is that creationist belief that operated as the context within which a Newtonian mechanics had, in turn, been conceived. This understanding might aid us in comprehending an equivalent « creationist » relationship between a human-led creationism and Newtonianism itself, thus the Newtonian/Euclidian-like forms we have here attributed to the objects of the commodity-continuum. In writing of a human-led creationism one implies an agency entirely freed of all hint of a metaphysic, thus entirely human. In the light of this, and we insist on this, Kant had indeed been concerned but with mind, the human mind, and not with body, nor with matter itself (that which he called noumenal and that he considered equally inaccessible to human mind). But likewise, and most important, he thereby excluded from attention any other possible source of causation for experienced reality, natural or artificial, thus that would lie beyond materialism, say in some God. His Newtonianism might then be considered as a prolegomena to a subsequent Newtonian definition of the internal characteristics of a phenomenal culture generated by human effort and human possibility, and such as that investigated by the economic historian or anthropologist, or by a Cassirer with respect of language. For, I use the word « externalised » in the sense of a created phenomenal world outside of mind yet bearing mind’s natural sense-based characteristics of perception and act. Again, my use of words, no doubt clumsy in appearance and reception, have been carefully selected. In spite of such appearance, I seek constantly to correct this use and choice of words, the problem being, as mentioned above, that to avoid usages seen to compromise one’s intended meaning, one takes steps with language-use beyond normal habit and expectation. But, I mean to say that when perceived from a hypothetically external point of view, thus perceived as as if from outside the world, say by an extra-terrestrial (and to whom I shall return), our « Newton », and I mean Kant’s Newton, might be unseen … invisible. That extra terrestrial being would certainly see those natural principles of order we call Darwinist, but not perhaps the artifice within. This indeed is our problem—what we ourselves cannot see in the looked-at other; what the other cannot see in ourselves; it has to be posited as a question … made possible … in order to become reconstituted and made observable, as if at once as two orders, nature and artifice, that permeate one-another, while at the very same time one

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(nature) is seen to comprehend, englobe and even generate the other (artifice), … act as the very ultimate possibility of that other (again Kant’s noumenal). The notion of nature itself becomes ambiguous and questionable in such a light: not that it invokes a question of what we mean by the word, but of what precisely it can designate. In the previous paragraph we see it splitting necessarily into two very different perspectives, one particular and one an ultimate universal. The first, I claim is objective, and the second intensely subjective. But where the first is concerned, that notion of a nature that dominates science and to which we oppose culture and artifice, there comes imposed a yet further question that remains unexplored in this book: what can we even manage to designate by this word, even if we judge its meaning sufficiently clear. The answer must be complex and must surely be a matter of cultural definition: not free of our phenomenological considerations. Here, I merely take the notion on board, define it according to Darwinian principles of empirical observation and possibility, and thus permit myself to oppose to it the very criteria by means of which artifice is constituted. My concern in this book is with artifice; nature concerns us only as its contrary, perhaps most closely defined in terms of what science explores as the material universe: relativity, quantum mechanics, those Darwinian principles constantly emphasised, but which reduce it to sheer abstract conception and principle. This is to give a philosophical turn to what metaphysically comes represented, for example, by the mythology of the dragon, that dragon we see fought by Rostom in Safavid illumination, fought by the Saint George or the Archangel, accompanying the Buddha as he approaches the ultimate, and yet was depicted by Utagawa Kunisada as emerging from the very interior of the Japanese Samurai, also concerned desperately with its slaying. Is it then also matter for the psychoanalyst?78 We turn back to our commodity : The commodity belongs to a sphere of intentional practical knowledge, in terms of which it is fabricated, read, used, measured and communicated,— communicated both as physical « object » and in terms of description, designation, requirement and desire, textualised and uttered thoughts and disputations. It is real both as word and as physical object; as a finished object and as an object in the making, or subject to constant adjustments under the pressures of an always changing market-constellation of forces and communications. Market-institutional methods of applying reference to them represent just so many systems of regulating, re-mobilising and reorganising such ­commodity-nature, say in terms of circumstantial tabulations and lists making 78

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public the exchange rates of the day in some market or other, also in terms of durable institutional forms, such as those concerned with the rules of market practice. The latter, for example, might concern the rules of practice of the twice daily meetings of the qian-zhuang banking institutions mentioned above, or listing their deliberations on exchange rates and costs; or they might concern rules of practice left implicit in such market listings as found in a small town such as Ahmednagar in the Deccan, but that we from outside, nonetheless, are able to determine and read; they may be expressed explicitly the Ordonnances du Roy of 1563, that I list in the bibliography, rare records for what must have been a general and ubiquitous practice of the market life of the day throughout the continuum, even though often consisting of mere wishful thinking given the huge insatiable market for all manner of means of payment characterising the early-modern centuries. These are but examples of what we have characterised metaphorically as like a «  Lullian / Leibnizian / Kantian combinatoire »: thus for a dense practical methodology in « making » the continuum function, in reference to the complexity of which much of our descriptive terminology is indeed but metaphor.79 This is also to say that this realm of knowledge-cum-practice is constituted and located according to conventional space/time-coordinates, coordinates that are common-sensically intuitional … accessible to the senses;—textual and numerical reference treat it entirely in such conventional locational terms. A potential user—say, merchant or ­artisan—must be able to « locate » what is desired in an entirely imaginable and mobilisable space/time form. The problem of space is not obvious, because it is far more than mere geography: upon « geography » is constituted a massive complex of fractional classificational forms, of which the commoditycontinuum and commodity-culture constitute merely one component, one kind of such complex form, and already highly complex in its own right. Mind, in order to be active (not passive like the readers of a book), must work its way in and through this mass, locating the category it needs, finding its way to it, so to speak, combining it with others in entirely different « locations » in a kind of « grid of space », representatively topographic, social, societal; … it must locate a « niche » (that « niche » borrowed from the biologists and defined and discussed above) within which a new commodity can be located, the criteria according to which a commodity should be produced being conceived as needing to pass through a subsequent trajectory of m ­ arket-acceptances and 79

In “Space & Order looked at Critically”, in Unbroken Landscape, I consider such taxonomical-complexes in terms of circumstantial needs of information retrieval, in this case with respect to rights. I have already referred to Mayr’s use of the phrase «  information retrieval » with respect to biological taxonomies (The Growth of Biological Thought). As for the metaphor, see Ramón Llull (1232–1316) concerning the ars combinatoria of 1305–1308, and Leibniz’ Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria of 1666. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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recognitions of identity; … even at this initial stage of con­stituting the object, such criteria act like a passport establishing an identity that permits subsequent entry into the public sphere of negotiation and e­ xchange,—thus already a language gauged for its translability. Ease of use, ease of movement, ease of imagination and of lexicality, are conditions of such efficient and efficacious action throughout. It is to say that such choice of a niche, in which to insert some new commodity,—a cloth, a new ducat or rupee, a forged ducaton,— must seek to be accurate in its choice of what will be combined together in the process of production to fill that niche: thus in the definition of the properties of measure and quality combined together to constitute the object. Such accuracy is only possible in a context of knowledge and a capacity to read such a complex context of marketable identities. In addition, conscious desire, intention, as a principle of possible action, is inescapably linked with assumptions about the relative general effectiveness of such serial, generative cause-andeffect activities and procedures; the event of a particular personal act must be assumed by those concerned as being minimally possible and effective, even if an element of doubt may always be present concerning the circumstantial efficiency and subsequent effectiveness of any particular own personal action. For after all, the daily forces acting to affect, say, local or major markets alike, must, to some extent, be unpredictable, even though prediction would be relatively possible, and a necessity as such, within certain knowable limits. Every act occurs in time and implicates risk and, thus, a gamble on what one decides and chooses. This general assumption—a certain relative optimism concerning existential action—precedes the possibility of conceiving a particular plan of practical activity, whether as producer or merchant: one orders what one hopes to receive, one selects a seed one expects to grow, be controllable in the field, and sell in the market. These very banal remarks underline the point that the idea of cause must run right through the whole modality of the continuum: one commands a textile from afar, knowing that there is a good chance that such a command, after numerous points of arrest and passage on its journey to its intended destination, will result in goods received at some later time, even many months later: goods are received according to earlier specifications that might already be inapplicable in current conditions. Consequentiality, a series of sequential actions that cumulate each in turn within the next, and towards a given result (whether or not it is the one expected), moving through space/ time, must be the assumed rules of any imaginative participation. A production line is assembled with a fair certainty that a certain type of commodity will result from it, yet that production line involves the synthesis of many decisions and many constituents. In short, neither philosophical scepticism nor time/space relativity have any relevance to this internal world of making, reading, sending, combining and responding. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Yet, here again is the paradox: if seen by an « extra-terrestrial », without any internal experience of human material culture and its particular principles of organisation, and yet graced with a human-type cognitive equipment, that same Newtonian space/time world of cognition, including all that we correctly describe as human-formed and « artificial », say commodity nature, this same field of empirical facticity would, nonetheless, be viewed, also correctly, as part of a first nature, one entirely characterised by modern scientific principles;— we humans would rightly be identified as parts of that first nature, of the natural universe and cosmos, and subject to all its rules and ordering principles, as conceived by us in science by means of mathematic equation and ingenious intellect, thus not matters of common sense, and neither Newtonian nor essentialist from this perspective, but instead, say, Darwinian, Mendelian, and certainly non-essentialist. (Perhaps we should envisage such a being as possessed with powers of perception superior to our own, able naturally to conceive, perceive, the real in terms, for example, of the laws of relativity). By « Darwinian », I refer to its intended meaning (its « ideal », so to speak), its thoroughly individualised epistemology, rather than to its actual character, caught up in the knots of a tautology (its own essentialisms … the essentialism of the “artificial” matter to which it gives predominant attention), that have made the taxonomy of botany a field of seemingly unresolvable past and current dispute.80 Thus, the conceptual boundary distinguishing the two species concepts is extremely sharp;—it is, so to speak, absolute, based upon contrasting

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Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot & Nineteenthcentury Fiction, 23, justly defines Darwin’s intentions as anti-essentialist (“Darwin’s thinking was anti-Platonic, was anti-essentialist …”)—his stress on the irreducible status of the individual and his understanding of environment indeed satisfies such intentions. My scepticism relates to the problem of « natural selection » and to the species concept itself, briefly treated in “The Other Species World”, in Unbroken Landscape; and to be discussed further in the “Appendix” to Part 2; for, so it seems to me, the actually category-form defined as if of « natural selection » should be treated as the « artificial » category, or at least as being inescapably confused with it. One must distinguish the naturalistic intentions of the concept from the artificiality of its observational base in laboratory garden and field, in which speciation is induced by the care of the external hand. The source of the problem, here, is simply the assumption that there is no distinction of species form or of principle of speciation, and it is this absence, or better, failure (even denial), at the least, to pose seriously a question concerning a possible distinction, thus to problematise the issue, and thereby compose an approach and method that might interrogate it, or define an adequate resource base with which to approach it by means of such a method, that continues to render the biological species problematic, and as if insoluble. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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o­ rganisational first principles;—yet it covers the same object world, the same thinking people and thoughts, the same texts and objects, and even classes, or taxonomies. It is a « boundary » that must remind one of Nicolas de Cusa’s famous conundrum concerning the so-called boundary of the cosmos—that boundary is at once nowhere and everywhere.81 So, how can this double-sided nature of things human even be possible? At least, as our expert—that “extra-terrestrial”—begins to gain experience in earthly market principles s/he will observe this « Newtonian » edifice being consciously built up in and out of « non-Newtonian » means and matter, one order being constructed from and with, yet within, the materiality of another and yet without for a moment replacing that « other ». That « other » is at once the raw material for artifice and its vast embracing, permeating context. That is, a non-essentialist, such as myself, would necessarily wish to characterise this edifice as through and through essentialist in its ordering, and yet, simultaneously, and as we shall come later to see, in the manner of its composition … its circumstantial engagement in terms of method and as a detailed practice, 81 Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe: “… and wherever the observer be he will believe himself to be in the center [sic.]. Combine thus these diverse imaginations, making the center into the zenith and vice versa, and then, with the intellect, which alone can practice learned ignorance, you will see that the world and its motion cannot be represented by a figure, because it will appear almost as a wheel within a wheel, and a sphere within a sphere, having nowhere, as we have seen, either a center or a circumference” (17). In Koyré’s paraphrase: “Thus, for instance, nothing is more opposed in geometry than « straightness » and « curvilinearity »; and yet in the infinitely great circle [of the cosmos] the circumference coincides with the tangent, and in the infinitely small one, in the diameter. In both cases, moreover, the center loses its unique, determinate position; it coincides with the circumference; it is nowhere or everywhere” (9). Cf. Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Drake edn.), 319: “Salviati: I might very reasonably dispute whether there is in nature such a center, seeing that neither you nor anyone else has so far proved whether the universe is finite and has a shape, or whether it is infinite and unbounded” (my emphasis). The problem, for de Cusa, lies partly in the paradox of the idea of infinity, but it nonetheless bears close if careful analogy with the very concrete organisational difficulties involved in conceptualising the real forms and dynamic informing the purely finite continuum (the centre is nowhere and everywhere), and then of its place in first nature, and as part of it. That is, finitude can also be conceived—the finity of societal extension—as we have done, as necessarily involving problems of order whose actual resolution will be in terms of such « centrality »’s (the notion of centredness) illimitable multiplicity and dispersion (centre conceived of as points of spontaneous consequential action at innumerable dispersed levels of collective and individual semi-autonomous synthesis and decision), and thus of the absence of any truly absolute (i.e. consequential, thus closed and complete) boundary;—in the finite commodity continuum, boundaries are everywhere; but, the centre is nowhere and we must be careful not to conceive of one, as, unfortunately, has become normative in the humanities.

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thus a scattered complex of events leading to its construction, … is equally non-essentialist, founded, that is, upon the existential difference and irreducible individuation characterising all subjects relative to one another, and which itself constitutes the intersubjective foundations of the very possibility and historical construction of the continuum, thus of that « translational » field of communicative possibility that constitutes it. If this description is true, then the commodity-continuum appears to be a privileged kind of evidence, a royal road, enabling us to approach that « indiscernible » boundary question concerning the two taxonomies. We see actors performing individually and differentially relative to one another and to the context; we also see that what they compose is intentionally stereotypical, knowledgeably so, being a species-type entirely different to that of a Darwinian nature. From the «  internalist  » perspective of what is actually fabricated and of how—of what users, themselves, must assume as the implicit rules of fabrication—culture would be seen to be ordered by conscious principles that we must (and have … and shall) define as essentialist. Whether it could have been anything else is a different question, because what we are actually ex­ amining is the pure accident of humanity’s actual practice of construction, thus its formation as a particular kind of culture, that we describe as its history, even though upon a global scale. In a world of essentialist or «  Newtonian-­ dimensional  » commodity types, it would surely have been a fatal stupidity were it possible to create commodity forms corresponding to other principles: they would not have been marketable, the language of their possible recognition would not have coincided with the lexical realm proper to the entirety of our continuum, indeed to the necessities of mobility within such continuities serving to constitute the continuum, and that must determine whatever must happen at every particular local place, … determine, that is to say, the limits of the free and spontaneous acts thought possible within such a field of determinants. A production of some commodity identity according to non-essentialist principles of type would have failed to provide a recognitional niche within the larger contextual ensemble of such classificational niches, and thus give to it what we might describe as an epistemological form that would link it to the general language of usages characterising commodities at large.82 Our 82

From the point of view of Kant’s formulation of the laws said to underlie the constitution of appearance in cognition and as an order of nature: any attempt to exempt an appearance from the laws of ceaseless, ubiquitous cause/effect (there is no possible moment of arrest in the regression from cause to cause: every cause is the effect of its own causation), from time/space locational enchainment, is “a mere invention of thought spun by the brain” (“und sie zum bloßen Gedankendinge und einem Hirngespinst machen würde”.);

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« ­Martian », in order to trade on earth, would have needed to go to « school », not only in order even to be able to see and then describe the internal forms of order characterising the continuum, but, equally, in order to act within it as participant, if only as participant-observer. The confidence trickster must also know the rules of truth which s/he intends to simulate. In short, the very accident which we describe as the history of commoditisation—of production and marketing—generates an inter-social necessity that permits no obvious, at least no sudden, possibility of any divergence from the formal « Newtonian/Euclidian principles » embodied in making the commodity … in constituting it as an object in thought or as a shared culture of commodification itself. It is true that on a cultural level of form and content accessible as a knowledge to participants and set out in rules or discussed in letter or conversation,, we are concerned with a secondary realm, of constitution, as mentioned above, where choice and error are possible and indeed executed or disputed. But what I point to here is that primary Kantian dimension of possibility governing the possibility of constituting in mind and practice any concept or object, and that must be assumed universal and invariable, unless on a geological and palaeontological time scale, but which is outside our ambit. In this latter respect, therefore, one could indeed conceptualise the possibility of a slow evolution towards another and different set of transcendental commodity-forming principles (evolution in both a Darwinist and a Hegelian sense); it might be conceived as being bound up together with such an evolution of the species … with an evolution of its mental faculties.—But this again is a different question to that being asked here, and surely a matter for science fiction. However, I wish, before proceeding, to take this particular discussion a step further in order to run us up against the very frontiers of a possible answer to Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 530 [Ak. A.542–3/B.570–1] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 470). But, I have already pointed out that this very qualification indicates a limit to pure reason, one that enables Kant frame the possibility of freedom; that an act is at once mere phenomenon and also, at the same time, intelligible, governable by will and drive. These two sides of human culture, of the human thought and act, govern my entire understanding of the content of commodification treated in this book. I have. of course, personally preferred to emphasise the historically determinant factors of this enchainment as a problem of exteriorisation, but the principle of this “constitution of nature”, and what it implies for all manufactured facticity (by mind [Kant], or by mind/hand/society [self]), is identical in both cases: freedom, and the possibility of spontaneous creative action locates itself in a deterministic order, invests itself within that nature (« nature » for Kant, « social » nature for self), ineluctably modifying it as a nature, natural and artificial at once; and it is this seeming paradox that is to be explained: the very possibility of spontaneity within contextual limits and despite transcendental limitations. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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such interrogation. I want to consider briefly the questions opened up by this cultural level of secondary difference between artifice and nature where all comes together in the appearances of whatever we confront as reality. This book is concerned with only that cultural aspect, but we must be properly aware of its larger context. What is nature? What is nature for a materialist such as myself, who would exclude both metaphysic and religion from any reasonable explanation. I cannot answer this question but I can suggest why it is so elusive to an answer. But I invite the knowing reader to advance to the next sub-section, since in addressing this aside I must recapitulate several points already treated in the foregoing argumentation. For an external perspective, but one more proximate and familiar than our hypothetical extra-terrestrial, we may cite the case of a numismatist faced with a tray of old coins, say a tray of old rupees, even rupees of a certain kind, say of some local and specialised coinage such as of Ankusi rupees. Like ourselves, that numismatist would look at that tray as from an objectifying distance, yet possessed of very different criteria of interest and observation from those held by we others! S/he would be; as it were, free of the particular kinds of concern and assumption brought to that tray by a monetary historian or an anthropologist, yet would possess another corpus of assumption founded upon a different experience regarding coinage, a different library of representation, discussion and interest, and that would guide and focus mind and eye. For example, the numismatist would be especially attentive to their individual differences: they may indeed be of one local and specialised type yet each one is evidently different in appearance from the others: an individual specimen might be more or less worn, idiosyncratic in shape, even with slight differences of weight and pure-metal content, or in those parts of the die impressed upon the coin. Such a numismatist would be likely to select for keeping in collection and for future study those least worn, with impressions most complete and distinct, the state of conservation least compromised by use and circulation.83 The historian and anthropologist, to the contrary would, ideally speaking, be strongly focussed on that question of the wear of a coin, since it measures the extent of its past circulation and usage, and also indicates the kind of market for which it was manufactured. The one would select certain items, if recording the features of the whole and the other would be interested in the whole collection: its very variations providing a glimpse of what defines that type, what had been 83

I am fictionalising a numismatist such as a private collector, one unlikely to be versed in  social and monetary history or in the anthropology of payments systems. Many ­numismatists are perfectly versed in such comparative knowledge and would be concerned to record all relevant information concerning a find of such coin. But I need to imagine face to face two persons representing the two contrary kinds of typology as defined above Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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tolerated in exchange, as difference, without the coin becoming an individual and thus unacceptable. These two kinds of observation operate under opposed principles of interest, according to the two kinds of typology defined above: the first in accord with the natural Darwinist constitution of circumstantial difference characterising all factual reality, seed and oak leaf, and the second according to the stereotypical rules accepted by convention as constituting the type, and for which it is the identity of the type that prevails over any apparent individual idiosyncrasy. It is to day that the second would, again ideally speaking, be aware of those cultural rules determining collective identity and know that they had guided contemporary monetary organisation and practise, in spite of the Darwinist context of circumstantial activity and event in which such stereotypical concerns, and rules of production and marketing are generated. We might say that the two typologies meet together in the concerns of the historian and anthropologist: that circumstantially-constituted context of use, on the one hand; the internal characteristics of production, recognition and market exchange, on the other. Wear is a matter of circumstance, … Darwinist so to speak; the rules informing its identity stereotypical, perfectly artificial although set within a bed of nature, as if the latter were its raw material. Allowing this difference, enables us to conceive of the very possibility of such an external perspective (and then, in turn, to take up this external condition as our very own problem when faced with that ostensibly transparent evidence concerning some distant past, … that « other »: it confronts us with the need to seek an order and a purpose where none had seemed at first sight to exist … where therefore disorder had seemed to reign). Forgeries might be considered a veritable contribution to the vitality of circulation and exchange activities, or be regarded as its foe … a source of disorder. From that external perspective, every object, every « singular », like every organism, appears utterly, and irremediably individual. This is the banal point that everything is different, every example of a type, at whatever level, can at some ultimate measure of judgement, be seen to be distinct, but a point that Darwin himself had needed to argue before his comparably knowledgeable colleagues. It is this difference that had amazed Robert Hooke in looking at several seeds collected from the very same plant, or that continues to astonish me when looking at a pile of oak leaves. The facticity of this observation is subject to two taxonomical perspectives: they are all samples of nurma and priced the same; they are all Ankusi rupee, each one exchanging for the same value of goods or other coin in some market. They are products of culture, conventionally accepted as if materially identical because indeed culturally identical, and exchangeable as such. Or else, and to the contrary, we are students of nature and observe the Darwinist character of

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any reality: Jack, Jill and George (or Jack, Saïd and Soulabha, to vary the scale of observation and difference) are not regarded by convention as identical to one another but accepted for what they are in all their distinctiveness as individual beings, and seeking to live and survive on their own conditions and in their own manner according to their particular location in place and time; in this second case such individualism is not reduced by convention (by that implicit social contract that allows the market to function) to a stereotypical indifference to such difference but instead taken as the veritable ground of any possible natural formation of group identity, and equally universal (a universal of mind to consider nature so). And yet all three named individuals are considered homo sapiens. We have already seen that each and every participant of this culture of commoditisation traces a distinctive path through the forest of the real, and for this reason accumulates, in each and every case, a unique collection of possible experience and acquired knowledge. Moreover, every such person must possess a constantly unique location within any context, must follow a unique movement of circumstance through a topography of such continuous location throughout a lifetime, and yet all this difference—this difference as such—is also constitutive of what effectively we have defined as universal: that framework of mind through which any cultural object, and namely the commo­dity,  is constituted. The person observed in Darwinist terms, thus as subject to circumstance, acts upon nature to generate the stereotypical manifold of like objects that constitutes commodification. This non-essentialist view of the constitution of the essentialist category will be seen to have special relevance for an adequate description of the intersubjective character of the commodity continuum, and thus of its foundationally accidentalist character. Every i­ndividually-constituted personal pool of experiential knowledge has been d­ escribed above precisely in this manner: as being unique and different to all other personal pools of such experience and knowledge, even if only « ­relatively » so, even microscopically when comparing close neighbours, difference in a relative sense of hardly visible detail, and, yet, different,—­ necessarily so, accidentally so, absolutely so! Yet, it is precisely such a basis of micro-differential doing and intention that is empirically and historically constitutive of the shared and universal culture of the commodity. Consequently, this « relational » character of inveterate difference between all such knowledge pools refers us to a principle of organisation and order which, simply « as difference », must also be seen to be absolute; it has an absolute significance for understanding both the genesis of the commodity realm, and its usage as a field of mobilities. It is fundamental even for our ability to read and comprehend it.—That is to say, it is in « difference », in what

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difference constitutes, and, in turn, constitutes as difference, thus inveterately as the underlying principle of the kind and mode of facticity that we ultimately confront, that the commodity realm (possessed, however, of its entirely different organisational, regulative, socially-accepted taxonomic principles) also holds its existential possibility, is given form through practice and can maintain that form, although stereotypical in internal cultural principle, and remaining so in spite of its constantly transitional, changing and thus dynamic, formative historical content. Might this not remind us of our young Tlingit brave, now beaver and tomorrow north-wind or red salmon, and yet retaining his identity and name, … remaining what most essentially he is through all the transitions of a provisional state of appearance and being, that so much ­concerns the myth? It is as if our two players on the opposite sides of the board, possessed of their different principles of choice and observation, were but one. Difference, in the Darwinist sense, absolute and thoroughgoing, must be conceived of as a fundamental constructional condition of expression and realisation for any possibility of a cultural fabric wherever it is encountered and on whatever scale or magnitude. On a purely factual level of appearance (prior to any attempt to interrogate and analyse its interior possibility), such difference is evidently irreducible, and yet it is so according to the universal rules imposed by its anthropological possibility. That is to say, difference is a feature of the kind of intersociality capable of constituting and imposing, making conventional, the indifference to difference that defines the stereotypical principle and makes commodity artifice possible. It acts as a condition necessitating and stimulating the translational communication that we have seen to be the very property of what motors the entire continuum, and that makes of commodification a collective teleology of expectation and desire. It is the time/space uniqueness of every participant-subject, as a movement of the experiencing subject tracing a path through time/space, that gives form to this intersubjective culture.84 Translation itself acts under circumstantial conditions of desire and deed and yet according to the stereotypical rules true of the interior status of the genre. By implicit convention—by an implicit social contract among all participants, actual or potential—the culture of the commodity permits no individualist singularity to affect the exchange or to be recognized among the individual items comprising the types produced and thence mobilised under market 84

Strawson argues likewise; for his version, see The Bounds of Reason, referred to above. It is also a position concerning popular access to knowledge developed in my Unbroken Landscape, as in this book.

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conditions. For, as argued above, when a sample of a good or of a piece of money comes to be picked out from the rest, … accorded traits that serve to distinguish it materially … individualise it … from the other members of the type … it is in order to refuse it as an acceptable means of exchange, equivalent to the other members of that group. It is no longer commodity or means of payment, recognised as such, but picked out with a negative intention, perhaps object of dispute. In this respect, a coin, once recognised as « individually » distinct from others of its type (owing, say, to heavy wear, thus loss of weight or absence of its signs and symbols of identity), would be returned to a mint, melted down and refabricated according to the rules of convention that allow new coin to be equal in value to all other accepted representatives of that given type of coin, this being true in spite of perfectly visible and observable, yet tolerated marks of difference. « Toleration », as I term it, operates within a field of convention that I have described as an « indifference to difference », and the measure of such toleration becomes in each case a criterion of manufacture, and a principle of typological differentiation in the sociology of the market.85 That is to say, there is a certain permitted range of measure within which typological identity is acceptable and that indeed can be seen to act generally as a calculational device enabling the coexistence of many types of coin within some local marketing region, and yet remain different to one another whilst pursuing the differential teleologies of their varied intended purposes. Dispute would concern the boundaries prescriptive of what should be accepted as tolerable and what, by convention, would not be seen to distinguish its content of items. Since demand in the market place comes from distance, from locations often scattered in place and subject to differing and fluctuating conditions, dispute concerning the limits of the tolerable are a common place, for those very limits are themselves subject to the changing forces and energies that affect, in their turn, the conditions of exchange. This need not lead the historian to judge the rights and wrong of a partner in such a dispute but simply to recognise the inherent dynamism affecting both convention and expectation. Evidently, therefore, there is a clear distinction between, on the one hand, our perception of the circumstantial character affecting the multitude of 85

One needs to see a tray filled with old coins of the same kind, say of Venetian ducats or Ankusi rupees, or especially of trading reals, to become aware of the range of tolerance within which exact value-identity was recognised: the placing and part of the stamp registered on each coin, their pure-metal content, their weight, and amount of wear, and much else, makes each coin seem an individual to a numismatical eye, whilst to the users of the day they would all be stereotypically, that is conventionally recognised as identical, even though such users could see the differences for themselves.

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events constituting the practice of what goes to construct what collectively appears to us, simultaneously, as structured and organised, and, on the other hand, the organisation and expression of regulations, laws and rules governing what we discover as necessarily determining, and thence governing, the internal constitution of the commodity-object, of its typological constitution and differential character, and, therefore, governing its socially-accepted institutions and instruments that regulate that typology of difference as it passes through the chains and networks of exchange. It is that constitution according to rule that makes possible the intentionally « translational » behaviour of all participants, and justly characterised as such contrary to what a modern student of the humanities would be most likely to expect. It governs the very practice and, yes, even the possibility of such exchange, and as such may indeed be susceptible, following effort and research, to detection as such, but where participants were concerned were part and parcel of common-sensical acquired experiential and shared knowledge set out as rules of production and part and parcel of the activity, conversation, accounting procedures, and reading of concerned contemporaries, posted in public places by diverse kinds of regulative authority. The resulting paradox, that of an ordering and a structuring observed generated in an entirely Darwinian, naturalistic ground of creative activity, must be further described and the beginnings, at least, of an explanation attempted,—and seen to be attempted if only to establish its necessity and possibility: that there must indeed be a common ground in terms of which these two seemingly contrary orders of being constitute the totality of societal being that confronts the eye, and in terms of which both can be discovered entirely related to one another as two descriptive facets of a single facticity; … because this contrast between ordering principles is not just an unwanted consequence of arguments applied adventitiously from outside to the evidence, such as the sophisticated kinds of scientific proposition applied by the structuralists. Instead, it constitutes the initial and central observation directly concerning the facts themselves, and part and parcel of a field of awareness and knowledge accessible or freely practised by (or potentially by) all contemporaries. It is this status as a documented observable facticity of the past that in part motivates this whole essay, and that, above, has allowed me to distinguish its epistemological basis from those of the structuralist (whether I am justified in doing so or not). Essentialism and non-essentialism are the two orders that constitute current being, mixed together in everything that composes that being, and yet, momentarily, in this or that particular instance, happen to be distinguishable from one another, become part of a conscious contemporary knowledge and practice; and commodification happens to be a particularly richly documented and well studied example of such an instance, privileged and analysable as such. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Then, let us return to our fictive numismatist, private collector or curator of some department of coins or textiles in a museum. Attention, once more, would most likely concern the individual features distinguishing each coin from the others, and not the collectivity of examples of that type actually circulating and likely to face any person actively engaged in some exchange. Yet it is the latter that must engage the attempts of the historian to reconstruct the social conditions of exchange, their vigour, or the very meaning of type when attached to commodities, and so forth. The faulty stamp would be an object of desire among collectors but uninformative concerning, say, the kinds of social reality underlying monetary payment and circulation, let alone the kind of phenomenological conditions underlying their possibility engaged in the present study. iii

Species Construction and Its Transcendental Space/Time

In the Transcendental Doctrine of Method, Kant makes an intriguing and significant distinction between discursive knowledge, or «  philosophy  », and mathematical knowledge: they constitute two different uses of reason that must not be confounded with one another. The latter, the mathematical, is capable of defining its concepts because it constructs them itself, in pure reason, before giving them possible objective form; in contrast, philosophy works with concepts which are already given to it; thus: …whereas philosophical definition provides only an exposition of its concepts, mathematical definition constructs them from their origins [mathematische aber als Konstruktionen ursprünglich gemachter Begriffe]; the former can only be derived by analytic deconstruction, their completeness never apodictically certain, whilst the latter are synthetically constructed ; that is to say, mathematics creates its concepts through definition, whilst, in the philosophical case, definition only clarifies its concepts.86

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Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 671 (& Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 587–8). The passages that concern us are Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 668–71 [Ak. A727/ B755–A730/B758] (& Kemp Smith, 586–8), which occurs within the larger subsection opened and closed by the different references to the Tower of Babel (Kemp Smith, 573 & 593), cited & properly referenced above. The word « concept », as encountered in my own passages below, is used in the Kantian sense, as an object constituted through the multiplicity of many experiences and perceptions of what comes covered by the name designating such an object (and as Husserl also phrases it). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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This difference has numerous ramifications and justifications. Vico had also held that mind could properly comprehend only what it had itself g­ enerated— thus mathematics, law, and even the matter of history, thereby giving to Kant’s specific demarcation of mathematics, a more obviously cultural/material extension, which we shall see to be of clear importance below. For, Kant’s distinction turns out to be directly pertinent with respect to the formative principles underlying the idea of a continuum of commoditisation. These formative principles, in order to be considered as such, must be seen to be possible. They must be seen to be possible in the sense that they constitute, as form and plan, the profile of any conscious, thinkable action everywhere that the construction of the continuum is held to have taken place; and, moreover, they must also be readable—accessible as a kind of text—precisely in these very same terms, never mind the distances traversed and the frontiers that intervene in the conveyance of words concerning such commodity-­ objects, or the objects themselves,—thus in spite of all the particularities of local expression characterising the stages of its passage through time and space. The distinction between culture and nature—that they are organised according to different, even opposing principles of order—is fundamental in this respect. Human-factored nature must be seen to be constitutable as an « edifice » within and in terms of « first » nature, and yet, be so through converting natural «  raw materials  » to artifice … to something ordered … and constituted differently.—This is also to repeat that human-factored nature— what I call a second nature—must also be seen inevitably to contain, or be informed by, these two different kinds of ordering principle, as argued in the preceding sub-section.87 Where mathematics, geometry or algebra are concerned, concepts are first constructed as such—say, that three points always occupy a plane, that the concept of triangle occupies such a plain—before being objectified as a design on paper or as words in thought.88 I can always define my own concept, one that I have myself invented, since, at the least, I must know what I had wanted to think and had myself posited, one that neither derives from the nature of the understanding nor given me through experience. 87 88

Viz. “The Material & the Cultural”, in Unbroken Landscape, in which I generate a theory of such combination within a much more general framework. Husserl also gave detailed attention to these very same ideas, but I was ignorant of the Husserlian phenomenology when composing the initial drafts of this essay in the mid90s. See Derrida, La Voix et le Phénomène.

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There follows, immediately, a passage which may be ignored for the moment, but to which we must very soon return: Yet, I cannot say that by this means I have defined a true object.89 In contrast, philosophy begins with its concepts already given to it; it reasons from concepts. No amount of speculation would make them definable, because being given empirically or by the understanding, they can never, as posited, ever be considered either complete or certain (“the completeness of which is never apodictically certain”). The experience of gold as an empirical object may differ between observers: one may define it in terms of its weight, colour and malleability, while another may wish to add to this definition the fact that it does not rust, a point which might not even have occurred to the first observer;—it is to say that the concept of gold (the adequacy of our concept of it) is restrained by experience of it, is thus extendable, even subject to error, cannot be completed, for there is always something to add to our concept of the thing.90 In order for that concept to be adequate it would not only have to sum up all given intersocial experience of it—had we access to such an inventory—but all possible experience of it (now and in the future). Thus, for this kind of thinking, Kant prefers the word « exposition » (“nur als ­Expositionen gegebener”) to that of, say, « explanation » (“Explikation”).91 But, note that in this case, reason is here concerned with « exposing » the character of what are evidently « true objects », thought in mind on the basis, say, of the understanding’s processing of stimuli received from an already existing reality, and that stands prior to the process of thought. It is this « priority », this « naturalness » 89 90

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“… einen wahren Gegenstand”.; Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 670 [Ak. A.729/B.757] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 587). I use the term « concept », here, in Kant’s sense: the synthesis in thought of all that goes, on the basis of manifold successive experience in perceiving a « something » to which one accords a common identity, say a tree, to constitute a constructive consciousness of that object, its ongoing formation as an identity as such; Husserl develops exactly the same notion of the constitution of the « object » as a composite of experiences. Clearly, the more we see a tree, or trees in general, the more we come to « know » that object, and so on ad infinitum. “Tree” is Husserl’s own frequently used example in the Ideen, i. He seeks to distinguish a difference covered in the German language, as he puts it, by only one word: “Erklarung”, clarification: “The German tongue possesses only that one word Erklarung … in order to express [Ausdrücke] Expose, Explain, Present, and Define [Exposition, Explikation, Deklaration und Definition] … Rather than use the term definition, I prefer to use that of exposition, a more prudent term, and that possesses a certain validity for the critic …” , Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 670–1[Ak. 729–30/757–B758] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 587).

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so to speak, of the pre-thought, that makes a completely efficient « definition » (certainty) inconceivable in discursive thought. Indeed, the word « exposition » would do very well for our own reading or interpretation of the domain of otherness constituted by the commodity ­continuum,—of its sheer empirical character and for the task we have set ourselves in trying to comprehend it. In this sense, as Kant suggests, if one decides, nonetheless, to apply the word « definition » in and for a work of philosophy— even given such qualifications—it must arise from the process of the work of investigation and exposition itself, and by means of it; it can thus properly be framed as a definition (but « as if ») … the work itself as the procedure of definition … but, therefore, at the termination of the work, not at its beginning; and even then that definition is provisional, for it can never be anything more,—we might even add that it remains debatable. Thus, we too might call the present essay an attempt to reach a provisional definition, one that is composed of many sub-definitions (of « market », of « exchange », of « money », and of a large number of other ordinary words, apparently terminological, yet drawn unquestioned by intellectual and academic from the popular repertoire of our own milieux, and all assessed and redefined in the process of exposition).92 However, in mathematics, we are told, the definition virtually precedes the concept, generates it, defines the terms in which it can be constructed. The idea of the triangle precedes its notation or figuration on paper or in words, and the latter should correspond exactly to the idea of it that preceded its « figuration ». We may also add that in the sense that such mathematical conceptual constructions are shared and shareable, communicated and communicable, as complete concept and as satisfactory definition—as a plenitude of thinking—they satisfy Kant’s requirement of a universal knowledge; the facility of being shared, capable of being shared, being fundamental to this idea of something as « universal », thus also to the idea of effective communication, of its translatability while traversing all difference. Yet, the commodity-world, for its participants,—as that which we, in turn, seek to understand,—is also a domain of « concepts », concepts that one encounters materialised in some form, and equally constructed by human beings: concepts of objects, words, rules, institutions, methods, instruments, which despite all their local and individual, say cultural, particularity are and must be shareable as such—as a form of knowledge—among all those 92

This is indeed the course for which I argued, and indeed attempted, in my “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”, in Unbroken Landscape, concerning words such as « coin » and « bullion ».

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individual participants we emphasised above; yes, that « capacity for being shared » is of the essence of the whole possibility and raison d’être of commodification as a historical and social phenomenon;—translatability underlies it, and must do so between any two given points in the « geography » of social distance and social relationship characterising the commodity continuum, and however far apart such distance topographically or culturally, or per social and institutional level; it necessarily underlies its very possibility, as a logical necessity, but seen empirically expressed as individual and social intention and drive and no matter the possible sequence of exotic steps of expression through which a commodity must pass, one phase or step after another, in being conveyed between those two points. One comes to ask how possibly it could be otherwise: translation … the fact and the drive … equally necessary! It is constructed in mind, and constructed socially for communication, its paths of communication consciously in view at every point of its trajectory (to state the obvious: an object not made for trade cannot be a commodity; thus, conversely, it is made indeed to be traded, … to be tradable, to be recognisable across all points of exchange in spite of such apparent « exotic » incompatibilities of local transition and expressive form); and thus its concepts are also generated according to social rules: rules for social mobility, for social recognition, and communicability, and, above all, for being evaluated in some quantitative form, by measure, and in relation to one another: yes, perhaps exotic in local expression and yet intrinsically, inherently translatable according to the formal rules of the constitution of the commodity. In each practical case, the commodity-type (say bafta, micro-variety of rice or Ankusi rupee) must be defined before being fabricated into material objects, and in turn must be fabricated according to precise definition, made ultimately for use by others. We remember that such « use », that seemingly ultimate determining and defining target, and those « others », not only include consumption and the consumer, but exchange itself and those who exchange; that the commodity is made in order to be moved and exchanged through the spaces of the habited institutionalised world of the commodity, a rice for exchange besides for eating, although it is the last that most obviously brings it necessarily into the market and that determines its inner core of determining properties.—All users, all marketeers and part-­producers, must agree (or, where there is doubt, choose to agree on this ­definition … and if necessary choose to do so only after a process of bitter theatrically embodied negotiation, yet driven by that will to arrive at a successful conclusion). For the object has been manufactured in terms of the « concept » and recognised in the sociality, and the inter-subjectivity of the market place, precisely as representative of that concept: thus as satisfying the

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required c­ onventions of the definition.93 As we have pointed out, much of the movement of words (as letters, orders, complaints, conversations, negotiations, and so forth) through the exchange nexus directly concerns such definition, disagreements about it, especially concerning measure or a variable content, attempts to make it more or less rigorous or advantageous, the range of tolerance within which an identity may be recognised, … from one or another participant’s point of view.94 Such conflict expressed the actual dynamism of the historical process with respect of commodities;—in no sense are we attempting to define something persistent and unchanging, durable, at the expense of the contingent and accidental, as once had indeed characterised the theoretical priority of cultural anthropology. However, what is purchased has by that very fact been translated… effecting its passage … because indeed recognised as fitting the definition of the type, and in spite of possible personal doubt concerning measure, or a sense of injustice affecting one side or the other. The condition is the need to jump across a course of hurdles, like a steeple chase … to jump meaning the requisite of an effort in order to translate across all real barriers (« translate » here meaning to effect an exchange of pre-eminently cultural goods); but the act is indeed to effect that translation and to do so efficaciously, assuming its possibility and proving it by the deed. We may emphasise, once more,—and this will aid us in locating the level on which such cultural products need to be apprehended—that this is a world of unambiguous abstraction, in which physical object and textual representation are present in mind in that sense of abstraction, as alternative sensible descriptions of the one commodity-concept. Quantified valuation, price and cost, proves that very equivalence, that singularity.

93 94

Perhaps this serves to define what Kant meant by using the term « concept » when applied to the objects of perception. I mention again Witold Kula’s Measures and Men, which emphasises this social-­conflictual face of measure, and that frequently interrupts exchange in contexts where the participants are unequal in social status and market power, but that surely also characterises the very interface of exchange, more generally. I give examples of such events and conflict elsewhere in the book; they are also prominent in relationships between state and peasants, and between powerful right holders and peasants. I quote Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s splendid novel, Gadis Pantai, 165–6: “We know perfectly in the village that the flour [ground from] shrimps is paid two and half centimes while it’s worth is four. This is not honest … it’s unjust. And I: look at me. I am not the flour of shrimps but a human being. One cannot behave towards me as if I were but a merchandise in order to enclose me in some palace. You, yes, you, urban-dweller, what do you know about villagers?”

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Now, let us consider Kant’s significant qualification: as we saw, he claimed, with respect to the mathematical definition, that “I cannot … say that I have thereby defined a true object”, by which he might be seen to have meant an object possessing an empirical, and thus materialized form. Because, as I have suggested, commodification should be accorded the very same formal status … as a kind of process of reason … as that which Kant grants to mathematisation. But, if so, then either Kant’s qualification is not what it seems to us, or, frankly, it is wrong, unless, that is, my own suggestion is entirely unfounded. Then, I must presume that the problem lies with Kant. In fact, his remark, in basic assumption and distinction, resembles very closely an argument published in 1870 under the name of Pierre Larousse, in his Grand Dictionnaire universel. In the entry for « espèce » (species), there is a concern to clarify a distinction of central pertinence to us here: that between the artificial and natural species concepts. It is hardly necessary to insist on taxonomical reasons in order to understand that the species [espèces], genres, families, orders, classes, &c., of an artificial classification possess only a subjective validity, being arbitrary creations of mind [l’esprit], whilst the species, genres, families &c., of a natural classification are results of real and objective relationships [rapports] that mind [l’esprit] has discovered and endeavoured to recognise, yet which it has not itself created. It is the labours of the naturalists that have taught us to distinguish these two universal categories, ordinarily confused (confondues) by the logicians of antiquity and of the Middle Ages.95 To refer to something as purely subjective—as product of thought, yet not ­objectified—is equivalent to Kant’s denial of a « truth » status to a possible object of mathematics. Here, « truth » and « objectivity » refer to what must be given to mind by what is already existent outside of it, even if it is mind that eventually must give it space/time phenomenal form in order for it to be actually thinkable.96 The contributor to the Grand Dictionnaire complained about past failure to distinguish the two species concepts. And the very existence of 95 96

Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du xixe Siècle (vii, 1870, Paris), 903r, c.iii. This criticism actually registers the importance of his treatment, for the problem of a distinction is hardly, if at all, discussed in major currently-published dictionaries. Cf. Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, 450 (French augmented edn., 895), & “The Transcendental Æsthetic” in Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 63–93 [Ak. A.19–49/B.33–73] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 65–91).

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such a problem must in turn imply yet further difficulties, concerning the definition we should give to the two uses of espèce. In this respect, the writer was aware of contemporary developments in biological thinking, and gave a lengthy description of different theories of organic species, including the classical creationist theory of the permanence of species differences, besides Agassiz’ theory of «  successive acts of creation  », … the latter allowing for some notion of organic change in time. It terminates, however, with “MM. Lamarck and Darwin’s transformational theory, which today has gained considerable success” (“la théorie transformiste, qui obtient aujourd’hui un grand succès, par M. Lamarck et M. Darwin”), and refers the reader to other entries on « Darwinism » and on the “Origine des Espèces”.97 The first edition of On the Origin of Species had appeared only eleven years previously in 1859, yet the writer is aware that Darwin’s conception of the « species » … …is not … it becomes, having resulted from the progressive accumulation of variations by the individual [de l’individu]; it is, so to speak, a moment in the evolution of life [l’évolution vitale] that acts to differentiate living beings through increasingly distanciating them the ones from the others… … a description which already seems to distinguish it from creationist definitions, … to define it as I have sought to define it above. That this is the writer’s reading is confirmed below, when he comments, like Darwin himself, on the unsatisfactory lack of agreement affecting systematics, for example concerning the separation of varieties from one another, or of deciding to what kind of class—variety, species, genre—one might assign an individual or group: … I was quite startled by the vagueness and arbitrariness affecting all distinctions [drawn] between species and varieties [les espèces et les variétés].98 —a sentiment and a hesitancy frequently expressed by Darwin himself. Artificialist and naturalist conceptions of « species » had begun to separate.

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By “transformiste”, the author evidently meant historical and evolutionary where changes of form and constitution were concerned; we might also identify him as being possibly or derivatively Kantian. Quoting Darwin directly.—Darwin makes such points liberally in his drafts for the Origin of Species, published as Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection.

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If there is uncertainty concerning class and assignation, the corollary must be a context of continuous variation, of a reading of nature in terms of an individualism which actually restrains the possibilities of classification, clouding the frontiers of what is and what empirically means type both temporally and spatially, and which thus concerns the fundamental principles of the organisation of nature,—at least in those areas of organic nature in which such difficulties are registered. Whatever the validity of the particular reading of Darwin’s position in the Larousse, there is an attempt to mark out a clear point of difference between logical (or artificial) and natural-species types, while Darwin himself, as, for example, Gillian Beer has noted, was consciously concerned to forge a departure from the old essentialist notions of the species form.99 Thus, we are clearly involved with a kind of distinction in both Kant and the Larousse analogous to that considered above with respect to artifice and cosmos, rice cultivar and wild grasses, cultivated field and sea-shore or “jungle” (at least our notion of nature). Or, put more simply, this distinction acts to differentiate those two forces governing human labour and nature that integrate together within the field of agriculture, and that thus concern the manner in which those same two forces, human labour and nature, must differentially affect the constitution of the organism subject to human work,—affect the very composition … the biology … of each cultivated plant, say, of a rice or millet. The notion that a logical construct or mathematical concept has no objective reality or true object (respectively) can not be acceptable, from our point of view. Once formulated as but word, diagram, or model, … as the matter of a shared text, … it must, at least in our terms, possess a clear objectivity,—it has become object in the true Kantian sense of that difficult word: it exists, is made to exist, and, as an existent, has consequences that concern even the context in which it is constituted. This is what Cassirer deduced for language, and for the various different kinds of thought itself: mythical, religious or scientific. They implicate the transition of transcendental principles of thought (conditional structures of thinking which make empirical perception possible), and precisely as forms of thought, into the constitution of a real object, externalised as culture, say as text, say materialised as thing. The tool, designated as such, and described in syntactical form, made to an idea of need and measure, is certainly also « object », although blueprinted from the start. In the context of Kant’s logical-constructional way of thinking, this blueprint precedes an object, precedes its material facticity … precedes its being constituted as such, but determining the latter’s possibility, defining its actual existence as form. 99 Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel, vii, 906–7. For Darwin’s anti-essentialism, see the reference to Beer, supra n. 80 of this same Ch. 3.

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When transferred to the matter of the present essay, the point is even more obvious: we have a whole world of mobilisable objects, produced, « created », by elaborate production and marketing networks, classified and knit together in language, and all, we have shown, involving certain principles of thought— certain a-priori principles of marketable, contextual necessity, of general form-giving (characterised by our definition of the artificial species concept). The commodity has no proper (that is social) existence outside of this specific manner of rendering it as matter. Like the mathematical concept, it is constructed as concept, blueprinted, and made as an object that corresponds to that concept. We could say, that its purely logical, formal status lies in its marketable, numerical, characterisation as a value for movement (between levels, grids, scales, places, regions, &c.), as an object that can achieve such quantified evaluation precisely because its concept is properly judged according to context, and so that it can be moved against other goods, other payment forms. The artificial species category is fundamental in this respect: it marks the rule of conventional form-giving that allows it to act as the formative principle underlying all commoditisation everywhere, whether, say, in 16th century Shandong or in 18th century Normandy. It may be the work of mathematics, or it may be the « thing » factored according to measure; but in both cases it can be, and is, defined precisely in Kant’s terms of the definability of what is inventable, and indeed « invented ». As made to the measure of mind’s particular plan, it is itself also « measurable » in intersocial terms, thus communicable as measure; it is entirely definable in terms of a process of fabrication and the targets with which that process is ostensibly concerned. It is re-factorable, again and again, as such, and as a measured and measurable, recognisable and cognisable object, and, thus that is the « same » object—by which I mean regarded as the same (by convention, by an implicit social contract)—whether made « here » in Venice, or made « there » in Basra or Surat, or, say, « there » in family workshops in Birmingham, even in the small provincial towns of Guangdong, and repeated and repeatable to infinity, each one, in short, a concept in the Kantian sense, and summed up collectively by a single name: ducat, pagoda, bafta, indienne, ducaton: a seriality of repeatable production unlimited in principle, limited only by circumstance, and in which the individual item possesses no status as individual. We are thus entering an object world so fully knowable—because it has been mind- and hand-factored from the start—that it stands virtually at the summit of Kant’s procedural tower (so well described by both Friedman and Philonenko). Moreover, when I refer to the repeatable, knowable object, I am not (as is already clear) indicating nature as such, first nature; this object of our concern

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is indeed an « artifice ». And the something that is the knowable object, is far more « modest », in terms of knowledge requirements, than is the « natural object »;—at least, from the angle of its purposive constitution, it is far more simply organised, and as such it is accessible to mind and work and intended to be so. It may, however, be properly considered, under study, to be complex in its own right—as an assemblage of constituents and measures, of qualities and quantities—yet in comparison with the natural object it is inescapably less complex and it is accessible to mind. This is precisely Kant’s point in distinguishing philosophy and mathematics as two dissimilar kinds of reason: philosophy cannot do as much as mathematics because it has to accomplish far more. The tower marked by mathematics does not climb very high; that is, it does not stretch—as a problem and procedure of making knowledge—any further than human materials would allow it to climb. It does not, by definition, reach the skies! Yet, these human materials—this use of them to construct that tower, as it were—cannot end in uncertainty, with incomplete definition, as is definitely involved in the great utopian tower of construction erected in order to characterise the relative knowability / unknowability of cosmos itself (of natural externality). More than this, it certainly cannot end in the confusion of minds and languages normally attributed to the vanity of Babel. What is built, this edifice we call the commodity, or a mathematical proposition, must be « perfectly  », transparently, communicable … all its languages must be perfectly translatable the one into the other: the construction must in this respect be successful and thus complete, whatever role and density we allow for local and occasional « mortality » in the process of its construction and duration in history … for those crumbling windows and falling brick depicted in so many contemporary versions of the tower of Babel; commodities also fall away, new one erected on their ruin … for that constant transitional change that affects the commodity domain: it must attain its intersubjective, intersocial « object », its part and its totality, as a commodity and as a world of commodities, and as a realm of relatively successful, sufficient language-use. Unlike philosophy (Kant’s point that philosophy cannot do as much as mathematics because it has to accomplish far more), and unlike the metaphysic (the polemic of the biblical version), it attains its object, reaches the goal and summit, which is the perfectly definable and shareable object; and as such, this tower is indeed a modest one, and must be so, when compared with the immensity, vanity and very necessity of philosophy’s task, which, as set up by Kant himself,—that of the «  attainability  » of the accomplished, measurable, scientific object—is something ever to be attained and ever unattainable as a finished goal. As Philonenko suggests, the actual « attainment » of this goal is best considered

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merely as process itself, as the method of that process, which is … « natural science ».100 But, what is more, the human intentional « edifice » of the production and marketing continuum, constructed in the process of commodification, is made, as in mathematics, not merely with human materials alone, but with materials that are poured out to the precise measure of humanity’s possibility of operating rationally with, and in context of, them. It is made according to measure, not by accident or fatality, but wilfully: those two principles of its possibility, recognition and readability, in the volition to factor a good (say, a cloth, part or finished; a local variety of rice; or a money, some variety of pagoda or ducat), so that it passes frontiers, is « translatable », must act as the fundamental, continuously-worked, principles of the fabrication process, as we have indeed observed in the case of textiles in Ch. 2 of this essay. The task is to attempt to reduce the uncertainty of such events of translation to a minimum, to make them, like the various kinds of procedure we call « trust » in the market place, as transparent as possible. To repeat, in this interiorist cultural domain, word, number and object must actually be held to coincide with one another, in contrast to linguistic reference in general, in which case, the distance between word and what that word designates is massive since the latter is unknowable, thus uncertain, its nature and status properly disputed by us all (to speak like a Kantian). If we look at the commodity itself (whether good or money) in terms of the production of type, we shall see what the preceding statements and distinctions imply with respect to the whole problem of knowability and factorability, opened up in this essay. We distinguished the speciation of a commodity type from that of a natural organic class or community (i.e. a collectivity of organisms of similar kind, a type in the natural sense, that has not, therefore, been subjected to human-led breeding or husbandry) in the following manner. The organic species is seen to be incontrovertibly made up of individuals, and one of the most serious difficulties affecting the current status and consistency of the natural-species concept lies precisely in this unavoidable existential ­individuality supposed as composing a category and which itself is also thought of as existential: not just a class applied to nature but actually existing as such in and as nature. But their identification as type might lead to endless ­dispute, as Darwin himself observed. This problem seems to make every « definition » ad hoc, one among other possibles, and incomplete, most probably erroneous,—uncertain, and in the very sense that Kant applies to discursive 100 Friedman, Kant & the Exact Sciences, gives a remarkably clear, and to my mind convincing, interpretation of Kant’s conception of the scientific object, as developed in the latter’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science of 1786. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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thinking, and, in principle, in regard to the to the “thing-in-itself”, the latter a world whose true character is inaccessible to human mind.101 For example, the definition of homo sapiens, dear to Cassirer as to almost every other 20th-century sage, centres upon a use of reason, memory and sign, denied to all other animals: the use of language, the internal accumulation of a durable bank of usable memory, decisions of choice reached as products of reasoning, were thus seen as exclusive, defining-characters of humanity. Of course, it is also possible to define the human kind in purely physiological terms, or genetically, or as a creature who applies the language of reason in contrast to what is deemed “mere” instinctual or animal behaviour (the « naked ape » version). Yet, today, such a hard and fixed frontier, between the human use of mind and that of the animal, is no longer credible; it is not that difference is denied but that it has become relativised, become even a fact of public consternation where the treatment of animals is concerned. It is now reasonable to be entirely convinced that cats, bees and birds also make and read signs, act not always instinctively but according to choice and, yes, reason,—that they lead not only a life of mere affectivity and emotion, but also of abstraction and use of language.102 One can see how ambiguous … relative … is all such natural definition, by noting that Lévi-Bruhl’s and Cassirer’s « primitive » were equally considered affective, dominated by nature and moment, and by extremes of emotion, by pleasure and terror;—and then, criminals, children and women have also been viewed, in the full and orthodox social-science tradition, in the same manner, thus as lacking a full use of human reason, positions that, at least ostensibly, appear today derived from prejudice as much as from ignorance, and as intolerable.103 Partly, this problem arises from the sheer ambiguity of what a sign should be seen to imply—from Rousseau to Kant, Kant to Cassirer, Cassirer to Steiner or

101 Thus, this is hardly, in itself, a criticism of biological theory, but instead a reference to its current limitations. 102 Given the conventional opinion affirming the absurdity of such a view, I should confirm that I hold to it, and do so on a basis of much observation and of an attempt to comprehend what is observed. 103 Such views—need I insist?—I repudiate. Stuart Clark, in “French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture”, Past & Present (1983), c, 62–99, has shown the extent to which such views of primitive affectivity have been taken up in interpretations of popular ­mentalities among pre- and post-war French historians, strongly influenced by the anthropological tradition, and by Lévi-Bruhl among others. See also Lester Embree, “Introduction”, in Gurwitsch, Esquisse de la Phénmenologie Constitutive, 20, for the confutations of animal and sub-normal human mentality by Lévi-Bruhl with that of « mentalité primitive », and Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and The Theory of Science, 171–2, n. 23: “the mentality of lower societies”. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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to Rorty one transfers from one kind of conceived mind/matter, sign/matter relationship to another. The point of the example of homo sapiens, is to emphasise this difference between, on the one hand, a use of reason for analysing the world as one confronts it—as an externality that has to be rendered thinkable by hidden processes for producing the thinkable (that “hidden art” of mind, mentioned by Kant himself), and, on the other hand, that use of it in which one consciously, thus intentionally, fabricates the type with regard to its communication, thus for ease of transmission, and which has to be « read » as and for what it is; … this distinction, affecting the mind of the species itself, seems indisputable as such. Clearly, Kant’s distinction, like that of Larousse, takes account of a real and essential distinction affecting the real world, even though they have mistakenly chosen to characterise the artifice as a fiction restricted to the interiority of mind.104 In these senses, the biological species problem concerns a matter that is confronted as something external to mind and prior to it,—as an « in-­itself »,— and thus accessible only via the transcendental processes required for forging 104 Speaking generally, Kant would seem to have modified this judgement, especially with respect to the development of the positions taken up in the Critique of Practical Reason, 1788; « invention », so to speak, clearly has many true objects, the « lie » being one of them, moral action another; moreover, the second edition of the First Critique belongs to 1787, so this question of what Kant intends by the phrase « true object » (einen wahren Gegenstand), is not altogether clear to me. Thus a choice between the two alternatives suggested above—either that he is wrong, or that his meaning is (or has become) ­unclear—becomes less relevant than the need to state, in our own terms, especially those of the present essay, why even mathematics must be conceived of as generating true ­objects—as having ontological significance. With respect to « the lie », Kant refers, in the Metaphysik der Sitten … ser Tugendlehre (Foundations for a Doctrine of Virtue) of 1797, 564–5 [Ak. vi, 431] (Metaphysics of Morals, 183–4), to its practical ramifications: “It is remarkable that the Bible dated the first crime [Verbrechen] through which evil [das Böse] had entered the world, not with fratricide (Cain’s), but with the first lie [Lüge] … , and calling it [nennt] the authority [Urheber] inaugurating [von Anfang] all evil [Bösen] and the father of lies”. In Philonenko’s strong but significant reading of the passage, quoted more fully elsewhere, “The lie is ontological”. (“Le mensonge est un acte ontologique”) (Archipel de la Conscience européene, 88). This expresses the subjective capacity of human volition to invest itself by means of a free act, as if from outside, in the unbroken and illimitable seriality of the phenomenal (but, of course, stimulated in turn by seriality itself), and for which no foundation can be found in pure reason; thus Kant’s passage continues: “… yet, reason can find no further grounds for this human propensity to be dishonest (esprit fourbe [sic.], [or deceitful mentality]) … A free act [Akt der Freiheit] cannot be decuced and clarified, as if a physical act, from the natural laws of relationships between results and causes”. Take note how this final sentence of 1797 assumes the lie as being an evidence of a freedom to act external to the ­Kantian-Newtonian conception of natural cause and effect … of natural laws … of the transcendental a-prioris. The remark may be incidental but none the less of considerable significance. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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sense impressions into empirical or phenomenal matter; it belongs to that category named in our quotation as « discursive knowledge »,—to the interpretive domain of systematics in biology, to philosophy, to that Babel-like tower of an ever-unfinishable project of continued comprehension and of « representing » the object. In contrast, the commodity species is a type constructed publicly and inter-subjectively according to certain very clear, universal taxonomic principles, and, second, according to highly specific, context-related determinations of relevant typological micro-content and form subordinate to such principles. It is, therefore, equivalent to that other category of matter called «  mathematical  », being entirely conceptualised and defined by the human being, even though worked from external materials and projected, in its turn, back into space. Each member of such a species-type—say, a Chandore rupee or one of the types of niansuk muslin—should be seen to be identical to all other members of the same type, possessing the same name (a « niansuk muslin » ... a « Hungarian ducat » …), and this without qualification.105 In popular language, it is a kind of « regimental principle » whereby traits of « individuality » are forcibly removed from the new recruit in the course of his or her initial training, group-membership being factored by means of that very training; … of making learn those concerned to disregard the individual and, more, of learning to behave as type, as stereotype … thus according to essentialist principles. In this process of factoring the soldier, one species-form, natural, as it were—that member of the regiment previously considered as an individual person, as citizen in the full sense, and who may choose and decide for him/ herself, and thus appearing different from others, as individuals legitimately regarded as distinctive, potentially disputing decision-makers and choosers, becomes transformed into an entirely different kind of member of a group, the

105 “… in a large number of primitive societies, proper names are formed [attributed] exactly in the manner in which we form species-names. Thus, they point to classes that are singular [sic]” (“Ils designent donc des classes d’un seul, …”) (Jakobson & Lévi-Strauss, Correspondance, 227, letter of 10th July 1961). The word “seul” for “only”, and which I translate as “singular”, say a singular identity, is itself noun, in this case, and without further qualification, and thus refers to a single identity composed of many items or members: it is « concept » in Kant’s sense. Its relevance for the naming of clans and, therefore, for a totemic nomenclature—treated at length by Lévi-Strauss in Totemism—is clear; and from our point of view, it concerns that same stereotypical kind of class, and thus one not at all Darwinian in kind (each of whose divisions or classes would, to the contrary, consist of panoplies of different names, of names composed of names), and that we now encounter as characterising the commodity-species category that happens here to be implicated. All Hungarian ducats are but Hungarian ducats, each ducat a Hungarian ducat … not Jack or Jill, this coin and that coin! Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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type itself being regarded as entirely different. It is now an identity born by the group, not by the individual, That member is no longer citizen but subject, a mere representative, an item of a merely collective identity (dependent, obedient), and what we deem objectively as stereotype. And all by convention! What goes into the factoring process of the coin or textile are a set of rules of an exactly similar kind and that thus fulfil a similar principle of “stereotypical” identity: a certain set of symbols and words stamped upon it and designating its group identity (that language of recognition enabling it to pass manifold frontiers), a certain generic shape, a certain sub-generic shaping of the given coin type, a certain ascribed weight and ascribed pure-metal content consonant with those expected of the given species-type, and what I have called a tolerance of permitted variation of measure within which an identity is accepted as such and conventionally recognised.106 As such, a bag filled with Hungarian ducats that fulfils these expectations are indeed just Hungarian ducats and not one individual ducat and another; there would be no reason to chose one single individual item rather than another in an event of payment, even if a discerning eye—that alien—easily perceives the differences between each and every coin: they are micro-differences, indeed, of shape, of stamp, of weight, of pure-metal content, but within the range of what is accepted, if by convention (by that fiction of a social contract), … cognised and thus recognised … as « identical », yes, « true » to type? For, is not measure, taken for itself, and also as subjective means and ends, necessarily relative, by which I refer to judgements concerning accuracy or exactitude, thus open to dispute, necessarily open to negotiation and thus accord?107 The bag remains closed and passes 106 What, here, I call « tolerance » concerns the conventional range of individual difference among the members of a type that is allowed to vary, where weight, pure-metal content, cut or wear are concerned, whilst maintaining an accepted identity. Such ranges of tolerance vary intentionally per type, and do so as part of the instrumental, systematically applied means of distinguishing each type from the others, with an eye to costs of production, and so forth, thus both to maintain their stability and persistence and to regulate their interaction; thus with a full intelligence of what we call “Gresham’s Law”. But the same rule of tolerance applies to the production and recognition of all commodities of whatever kind. They underlie the coherence and functioning of the whole « system », so to speak. This last point is especially important to our understanding of such plural payments orders, since the conscious manipulation of the range of tolerance, its particular definition for each species of coin, thus its choice and precise determination by some minter of new coin, permits species-variations to be regulated and stabilised among themselves, in short for the so-called forces unleashed by such difference, according to Gresham’s Law, to be systematically and intentionally pacified. 107 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 33e, with respect of exactness (full reference in Part 2).

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from hand to hand: one knows its content. Correspondingly, each soldier wears a uniform and has a « short back and sides »: indistinguishability belongs to the very definition of the kind (and in spite of physiognomy, experience and so forth, objectively distinguishing each individual member from the others). Here, it is artifice and convention that are together determinant, that essentialism defining the stereotypical content of this kind of category, and that is the rule: rule of observation, perception, recognition and practice, despite nature’s observable and measurable differences. Then, let us return to the important point mentioned above. That in contrast to such rule, the collector or fictive numismatist, our token outsider, when faced by a tray of ankusi rupees or Bijapuri larin, might well consider each example as significantly different from the others: the particular shape of each hand-struck ducat or rupee or larin would be seen to differ to an observable degree; their weights would also differ within a finely calculated set of limits particular to the type itself (our range of what I have termed « tolerance »); some are more worn than others and show that wear, yet remain « tolerable »; while the inscription, hammered upon the blancs with extreme rapidity, sits differently, and is more or less incomplete on each item.108 Our numismatist is interested in those differences. Yet, for the maker, the shopkeeper, purchaser, merchant or banker, these differences are wholly irrelevant, so long as typeidentification is unambiguous in each case, and all differences sit within the tolerance range of the type. A box or bag of standard size containing such coins (thus containing a known total weight or number of coins) may be weighed as such and exchanged without more than one or two such bags being unpacked for a check of the content and of its identity (this would be an exchange marked by signs and gestures of « trust »). A numismatist, however, might distinguish them very carefully: s/he is most likely to want an example that is as little worn as possible, holding a maximum of inscription, and if possible with a mint

108 In the South Asian case, this is to such a degree—the die being so much larger than the stamped coin—that it must be considered systematic and intentional, probably as means to prevent die-copying, or else simply to enable rapid sequential hammering of coins on the « production line ». Die production itself comprised a considerable manufacturing industry, dies rapidly worn, thus used in relatively considerable numbers in each mint, and requiring frequent replacement; … it is but one of the many neglected aspects of mint production, in this case of the supply and production of the instrumentation necessary for the productive process, and, furthermore, of regular predictable access to resources such as alloys, equally neglected in the secondary historiography. A mint is merely a single, if focal part of a complex of related production relations, supply lines, and inter-­ dependencies, each of which required to be calculable in advance, thus predictable and sure.

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mark and year of issue; idiosyncrasies may even be an advantage to the numismatist, increasing the value of the item in the collector’s market, while detracting completely from its validity as an object possessing exchange value during the period of its circulation. Yet, for the economic historian—another ­outsider—it might be the marks of severe wear that has positive significance, as evidence of the vigour of hand-to-hand circulation, thus of the velocity and density of monetary circulation in some particular location, an important evidence, therefore, for social historian and anthropologist; however, a slight degree of further wear might render that same coin valueless as money, having caused it to pass outside the frontiers of tolerance. A bag of severely worn Bahmani coppers, or of forged coppers manufactured in domestic households or artisan workshops in Rouen or Manchester, should especially excite an economic historian interested in the general circulation of moneys, and in the popular need for such moneys, whilst the collector, instead, would most likely prefer the rarer gold and silver coins, especially those that have escaped any evidence of use. For the contemporary, it is the typology that is self-evident: the textile and money is read, listed, compared as a completely measured and measurable object, according to the limits of the public purpose for which it was factored. It is « mathematical » knowledge in Kant’s sense, perfectly knowable as a token of value, because defined and made to be known as such. Thus, the textile and  money moves through a serial sequence of processing and transitions, and is transmitted in this sense from hand to hand, level to level, being re-­ manufactured on its journey from place to place, and, in each case, guided by awareness of the need for it to be recognisable at each step or stage, to be readable for its species-characteristics. It is a knowledge of type within a generallyaccessible broader knowledge of this kind of typology, or complex of comparable typologies, constituted, in turn, in a cultural domain entirely formed in terms of such a knowledge form … and, moreover, throughout the continuum. It would be a complex task to unpack all of its exact factual combinations, institutional forms, modes of regulation, and content, and especially the problem of its exact mind/material relationship, and yet as a knowledge-form, and constituted everywhere for contemporary praxis, it is surely extremely simple in its ­principles,—accessible as such to peasant, artisan, trader or merchant, thus at every level of the « system ». This makes of commodity nature a species-world very different in kind to that of organic nature, and the astonishing corollary of this difference is to reaffirm our observation that it is unclear where precisely the boundary between them should be drawn. Very clearly, cultivars of rice are accepted according to the same identity-principle as varieties of money or textile; in this case, the

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labour process invested in « producing » the type is drawn out over a calendar of months and years, involving many locally invented techniques, special rotations, weeding implements, very fine selections of what fits within the identity, and, that, in order to be held to that identity, must be subjected to continuous labours, especially to « weeding », in order to maintain typological purity, … to exclude genetic variation outside of the «  limits of accepted tolerance  ».109 Here, the boundary between artifice and nature is clearly confronted as a kind of broad dispersed front of mutual, detailed warfare, one side (the human) concerned with constituting, perpetuating, while the other (the forces of nature) concerned with undoing, dissolving, bending and varying; it need not surprise us, therefore, that the labour of maintenance is arduous and intensive, involving constant watchfulness, and hedged about with numerous protective devices, both botanical and ritual.110 A range of distinctive identities concerns the work of the field: on the one hand, that large range of varieties selected for cultivation among a familiar circle of villages or fields; on the other that much narrower range ordered and made available in a local market place, drawn from many such villages and fields, but regrouped in the market as a smaller, more concentrated number of market forms.111 The corollary is that the cultivar, the coin or textile, compose a world of objects in which the real genetic instigator of reproduction is human mind and 109 Once translated into the realms of popular thought concerned with the attributes of human grouping, « weeding » becomes « ethnic cleansing », becomes exclusion and finally genocide. Yet the principle is identical. I need to emphasise such lessons for our own times and that I wish drawn from this research. 110 For example, Fogg, in “Swidden Cultivation of Foxtail Millet by Taiwanese Aborigines”, refers to a ritual in upland Taiwan called « saving the soul of the rice ». But, most probably, a botanist would seek to distinguish between such natural forces and other sets of forces, such as genetic, leading to speciation itself,—a serious question I am unequipped to confront. This would be to say that the principles of speciation would need to be differentiated in these two cases, but which is neglected. 111 On the one hand, idiosyncratic individuals may be held back for further selection, if depicting evidence of useful characters (Fogg, “Swidden Cultivation of Foxtail Millet by Taiwanese Aborigines”); on the other hand, for problems involved in identifying and distinguishing cultivars, remember George Watt’s comments in his entry on rice in his Dictionary of Economic Products (that the peasant can identify what the specialist can not, … rather like the nuances of words for snow among the Inuit), and also Robert Hooke, Micrographia or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses … (1961 reprint of 1st edn. of 1665, New York), 152–3, Observ. xxviii. “Of the seeds of Venus’ looking glass, or Corn Violet”, & 153–4, Observ. xxix. “Of the Seeds of Tyme”: both are faced by plates (“schem”.) xvii & xviii, and of the first, Hooke remarks, “… there being a great variety both in the bulk and figure of each seed”. This problem or trait is constantly emphasised by Darwin with regard to the species question.

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hand, thought and act, even where crops are concerned, at least for the domain of production, exchange and marketing for which their fabrication as identities is intended. The criteria of commercial taxonomy thus appear to be keys, in their own right, for any efficient and true taxonomy of agricultural crops, and it is around this issue that much dispute in the science of systematics has centred from the nineteenth-century right into the present day. Given this central role of an external hand, it is plain that we are involved in the transcendental process, and one of a surprisingly traditional kind: it is a formation of objects according to the dimensionality we associate with Euclidian geometry and Newtonian space/time, and which, like mathematical concepts, must be accepted publicly as such by all producers, buyers, users or consumers,—that is, by all who participate as readers and knowers. It is a world of transcendental intersubjectivity and intersociality that is pari passu characterised as a possible, certain, ascertainable knowledge, and it functions as a frontier-crossing commodity continuum because that knowledge is also pan-continuum, insensitive to frontiers, or, rather, it is expressed and read in terms of all possible and future particulars, wherever produced, at whatever level, and it is thus « universal ».112—In this universal Babel-like tower we are indeed faced with the prolix crowded presence of numerous different languages but that all are rendered translatable the one into the other by the drive to exchange. iv

Extension in Space/Time Since this kind of [concern] has never been clearly elaborated, nor determined terminologically in any scientific manner …, whilst even in common speech one lacks a clear and precise term for it, we shall find it necessary to advance by circumnavigating our path towards it, proceeding by successive approximations, and by a series of eliminations. Indeed, all the expressions one encounters used to point towards it, contain a certain surplus of sense … and that must be eliminated [in order to reach our desired target].113

112 The actual use of such particularism in and for communication and exchange is followed particularly carefully in the second part of my “World Economic Integration before ­Industrialisation”, in Unbroken Landscape. “Financial Institutions & Business Practices” in The Invisible City also interprets diversity as a veritable means of expression in communication. 113 Husserl, Ideen, i, 248 (222–3); I have altered the word « Modifikation » (thus « alteration » affecting a particular sequential pathway of constituting sense) to that more general word « concern »; I have also added a few words where necessary in order to make more clear

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Rephrasing the Coordinates of Choice & Limit with Respect to Reason

First, therefore we construct a « Euclidian/Newtonian » sense of the manner in which the continuum was built up as a second artificial nature in space/time. Here, « Euclid » and « Newton » refer us to the manner in which commodity objects were given a dimensional and solid form, while being imagined, planned, and factored in social space. They refer also to the manner in which this object-world could be «  read  » by participants as a comprehensible «  text  »,—and using forms of language (syntax, signs, words and numbers) that could give sensible expression to it in term of its ordering principles, allowing commodities to be conveyed across distance and frontier and that object-world comprehended inter-subjectively according to what we conceive of having been, in principle, a common knowledge, universal in kind and status. They refer, then, to certain limits, certain uniformities and rules, kinds of possibility, in terms of which commodity-related activities were intuited, objects given form in mind, realised on paper, although best understood as abstraction, as representations of possible commodity forms first and foremost imagined and constructed in thought … and yet intended to be rendered tangible, physical … rendered so: the material object that is commodity itself. They refer to that possibility of a calculated and planned synthesis of a complex of constituents, variable and assembled in their own right at some or other production site for fabricating that abstract thing, the commodity. They refer us to a naturally-disposed universal common sense in terms of which an object of thought becomes possible, artifice generated, … indeed artifice of a certain kind. The corollary is as follows. Given a need to guard against insinuating that such objectifying conditions pointed to immediate biological limits, thus natural and physical determinants of human reasoning,—these physical « limits » being read, in their turn, as if the cause of such cultural conditioning and as if directly responsible for the form of the cultural object—I shall phrase the implications of the above paragraph as follows: as giving rise to the need for a the meaning of the quotation, since separated from its context.—But I quote it because it accurately characterises the sinuous strategy I find myself required to follow below in order to move towards my goal. Yet, it also serves to describe the kinds of difficulty met with more generally, in seeking to avoid those commonly accepted uses of language, criticised above, … usages that directly contradict the purposes of my own argumentation (and which, as we have seen, had scuppered the just argumentation of my two scapegoats, Pollard and Cameron, where plurals or definite and indefinite articles were systematically applied to human cultural- and ethnic-group identities, national, and so forth).

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certain kind of approach and method that differs from what is ordinarily expected and required.114 That one needs approach the difficulties of confronting cultural expression, and in any milieu (Nuer or Bororo, but also that of a great intercontinental market such as seventeenth-century Basra), in a manner in which one becomes able to conceive cultural decision not as determined, but as products of choice in contexts of constraint, constraints that thereby require choice to be made through judgement and decision. This indeed is what one encounters in contemporary letters and reports concerning the movement and production of goods and moneys: judgement, disputation, a balance among choices, final decisions, and so forth. The consequence is the need for an approach fully open to the possibilities of interpretation opened up by such materials, possibilities that might at first be unsuspected by the researcher, but that in turn, once considered, must serve to broaden the entire range and extent of concern required of a field of study. This question of seeking an appropriate kind of approach, one proportionate to the kinds of demand arising from such questions of location and relationship, such as confronted in this book, was treated in detail, under the term sampling, in Chapter 1: it has to be both practicable and yet appropriate, avoiding all compromise justified by mere convenience. In passing, we might note, once again, that it is Kant himself who qualified negatively a strictly biological reading of such conditions, and went on to treat negatively the apparently determinist, naturalistic forms given to human reasoning by his definition of their Newtonian and Euclidian a-priori conditions for constituting the world in consciousness. Once he had introduced the very possibility of freedom into his considerations, going on to argue its critical necessity, the whole question concerning such limit is transformed: it becomes societal and historical, even if, stubbornly, our knowledge of natural science insists, at some ultimate level, on biological limits to human reasoning. Moreover, our strong emphasis upon the Darwinist view of nature as itself ­constituted 114 The context for this concern is the current disposition to place limits everywhere where « otherness », whether in the past or in the modern world, is encountered, and to whatever degree happens to be concerned (between, say, Nuer and Parisian, Bosnian and Serb, … you and I … « the enemy in our midst » as much as that without!), and of course, vice versa, not to imagine any limits at all. With respect to the anthropology of reason, we shall need to tread very carefully in order to redefine the problem in terms of a disposition of individual reason caught within a new set of determinations that are nonetheless, as interpreted above, complex, and in that complexity pluralistic. I wish, in formulating the problem in this manner, to hold to a conception of thought and objectification still conceived in terms of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Thereafter, we may begin to work out fresh solutions.

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through accident, and composed of irreducible individual variation, at every scale of attention, must act equally, when translated into human cultural terms, as a serious restraint upon any too-strictly applied biological determinism. This is not, then, to deny the biology of the human mind, but instead to be prudent in too easily assuming its immediate and direct cause-and-effect presence, and, instead, to provide a sufficient latitude for ranges of empirical possibility that allows for what we encounter in the real, and for our needs of comprehending it: say, in order to judge the import of those words of complaint and decision encountered in our commercial correspondence; dissonance forms part of such conditions and of the constitution of such contexts. The consequence is the need for an approach to questions of culture that, in principle, is inclusive and plural, that seeks to be so, consistently asking questions at points at which they seem most resistant to answers, thus to proceed in a manner exactly contrary to that which seems to have guided Clifford Geertz in writing his Negara, in which a whole series of self-imposed limitations of research, restraints on questioning and presentation, are seen enacted that serve only to justify a generalised weakness of approach and method now more generally recognised as having characterised mainstream tendencies in his discipline after the Second-World War.115 What instead is required is an approach that consciously, intentionally, generates a framework open to possibility, thus to the unexpected, and, especially capable of incorporating evidence for the kinds of individualist choice and decision that now appear both characteristic and necessary of the kinds of context and organisation of things encountered in our evidence. It would be a method that acts critically and systematically on its own foundations, refounding them at each stage of advance, redefining what would be necessary to reach one’s object: comprehension. In conditions in which commodity production and marketing were at issue, for example, the active participant had to make firm decisions as far as possible in conformity with the kinds of « rule » affecting commodity production, as set out above, and not to other kinds of criteria that would interfere with them; such decision would necessarily be guided by prudence, thus judgement (this is especially clear in the micro-world of seed selection and of the kinds of technological accompaniment invested in survival of plant varieties where agriculture was concerned). It is to say that error, dissent and bad judgement were also possible. This point is so banal and yet so important for an adequate understanding … a full comprehension … of what precisely is at issue. This active individual must needs decide to make or otherwise treat a commodity-object, 115 I refer to comments made in the “Notice to the Reader”, but that a more full critique would be able considerably to supplement.

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a payments-form or a variety of textile, in ways that would allow that object to enter and move through the marketing channels of the continuum, local, intermediary and general (in fact, to follow an eventual sequence of such likely channels, and thus of passages through a succession of possible exchangefrontiers, concerning the ongoing factoring and marketing of any particular finally-destined good, or payments-form). This too may seem obvious when barely stated in this manner, but in so doing, there opens up to view those rarely considered aspects of the question that lie at the centre of this book. It is to insist that each individual participant faces the need to endow choice with a content relatively effective … efficacious, and that therefore seeks to conform with the known rules of the medium of action, thus the known rules of commodity-formation and designation, … of judging and calculating value, and so forth. Such practice must seek to conform with the rules of such ­commodity-formation and of typological-character, but without those choices and decisions necessarily succeeding in engaging a designated niche, nor even, if doing so, encountering a durable and sufficient demand in the market. And, perhaps more important, divergence from those rules of constitution is possible, both witting and unwitting; it may be rash, but must be considered pos­ sible: the person concerned may even believe a choice consistent with such rules, yet without it, in the event, being so. It is this notion of contexts that offers ranges of possibility in terms of which choice must and can be made, constraint and freedom meeting at the same point of activity,—a context that imposes a certain necessity and direction of action, yet within such limits a space within which range judgement and decision remain evident, thus offering a freedom to act and choose within such contexts of necessity (say, the measure of «tolerance» concerning the constitution of the object) and constraint (say the precise forms taken by the messages that constitute momentary, place/ time dependent demand). And it is this, in turn, that demands serious attention to the question of kind, and of complexity, implicating a corpus of shared experiential knowledge that enabled entire populations to engage in the work of the continuum … to engage in commodity exchange and production … and, in short, justify all those aspects of the empirical field that lead us to regard it as culture, a culture that acts through economic and social means. Biology must enter the field at some ultimate limit when treating the transcendental conditions of object-­constitution, but, take note, what we have before us is a global evidence for the operations and practices that define the continuum, for the forms of knowledge necessary for its existence, for a universal use of language underlying all its exotic forms of local expression, and thus indifferent to differences in social class and status, wealth, or cultural difference; it is this

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that we have beneath the eye, and it is the global dimension of such constraint that is at issue.116 Yet, this reference to transcendentally necessary principles for commodity formation, that present themselves as having, equally necessarily, confronted the participant as an opening before a certain range of possible empirical choice, thus a space of relative, yet possible and true freedom of mind and decision, more or less broad or limited, is plainly insufficient as a characterisation of marketing and production activities, for something clearly escapes such a formulation. Note that in emphasising capacities for each individual to read contexts in which decisions must be taken, those contexts present themselves as problematic, enigmatic and ambiguous, necessitating some degree or 116 Roman Jakobson succinctly expressed the risks of a biological determinism concerning differences of language and culture, where current and historical scales of attention are in question. There may indeed be a long-term issue concerning an evolution of aptitudes over millions of years, perhaps tens of millions of years, but not in the short term. Even, when innocently seeking a biological ground for the universalism of, say, commodityculture, one enters a field of relativism—that is covered by that dangerously relative and manipulable term « toleration »—in which an ethnically-determined racism, hidden beneath scientific terms and justifications, is too easily implied since part of that single ground of relative opinionation called «  tolerance  » (in contrast to the recognition of ­difference as our common, universal foundation of cultural wealth and being). Jakobson points to the Nazi classification of « languages »—but which was also true concerning the differences alleged between «  peoples  » and between «  cultures  »—into evolutionary stages, exactly that same kind of propensity that has pervaded the post-war humanities, including practitioners of cultural anthropology. One encounters such forms of languageuse expressed in Heidegger’s writing, but which seemingly passes unnoticed, as if, indeed, « tolerable » among the admirers of his thought. Secondly, these were scientifically studied and presented results, that given a certain cultural orbit (our own anthropology) were found credible among contemporaries, and yet that we now think of as an entirely false knowledge. If we consider our world as translational and connected, such radical and holistic separations of present day cultural ensembles (including usages such as, say, Husserl’s category-words, « Europeans » and « Asians »), appear for what they are: arbitrary (attachable to any scale and kind of possible observation: Nuer, criminal, woman, worker … « civilisation », genre, class, or race), and thus false. For Jakobson’s opinion, viz. Jakobson & Lévi-Strauss, Correspondance, Annexe 3, 365. Note also, that what such a biology of the question proposes are absolute differences, real conditions of untranslatability, notions of a-postieriori invasion and pollution, of a world of representation criticised by Eric Wolf as if constituted by societal or cultural “billiard balls”-like entities, all movable against one another, as if re-classifiable at will (Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History, “Introduction”). We then see how intimate is the connection between a liberal « social science » and its illiberal usages, each founded, as Cassirer might have put it, upon an identical epistemological ground.

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other of participant interpretation. Such a view both confirms alike that space of free choice and the necessity that surrounds and contains such choice, defining its limits.117 Necessity and freedom are very tightly integrated in considering the acts that constitute practice at any level and of any kind: say to determine what measure of a mixing of different kinds of yarn might be considered efficacious to compose a certain cloth that would fill a possible market-niche responding exactly to demand within a local market-context, or what properties to encourage in the practice of seed selection, and others to suppress, when constituting a new variety of rice. What equally escapes the statement of principles of commodity-formation concerns the variation of context in which each and every individual participant is found circumstantially located, thus the perspectives through which that context may be viewed, and that, observed collectively, serve to differentiate each and every individual participant from every other, ad infinitum;—as, for example, in the sense, argued above, of 117 I assume this difficulty also for the reader, as for myself. In defining the concept (Begriff), Hegel puts it thus: “the concept is the truth of manifestation and freedom the truth of necessity”, which in our case might be translated as the tolerance for the free act and decision that reveals itself along any path along which proceeds an individual in the course of living and having constantly to adapt to reality, an individual conceived as subject, and with respect to any set of empirical conditions demanding some kind of specific creative move. To what extent is it permissible for me to drive such analogy between a distinctively phenomenological question of method and one’s full appreciation of the conditions and movement effecting an empirical reality? I translate the quoted phrase from Hegel, Die Lehre vom Begriff of 1816, 8 (see also Bernard Bourgeois’ excellent French translation of Hegel, Science de la Logique, iii, Le Concept, 18). Hegel is writing of the dialectical movement of realisation of a concept of the objectworld in and by mind, and his description corresponds with what in practice he depicts constantly and devotedly in the early Jenaer Realphilosophie, thus as if he is justifying why it is the dialectic itself that appears to a reader to be the real matter in question rather than the succession of specific scientific concepts treated one after the other by its means and that one might justly take for the theme. A philosopher would surely tell me that I am wrong, but I proceed: the philosopher’s problem is conceptual engagement with the factual, and the conviction of the philosopher and the social anthropologist that a line of definitive separation distinguishes study of the two kinds of field. But Hegel adds a little later that “The reign of freedom opens up within the concept” (11, and Bourgeois 21). Is this not precisely what I too am saying? Hegel is a realist, seeking to determine the place of human freedom within the constraining limits of a perception of the real (the object or concept). I extend those constraints from mind into the very order of the facts themselves, but the analogy seems reasonable. Is it analogy, als ob (as if), in the realist and effective sense intended by Kant, and as I now believe it to be? If so, then it is indeed valid. The seventeenth-century peasant, Ramaji Talegaonkar, in going to market, and G.W. Hegel, in thinking the universalist conditions of possible thought of any object world, are both trying to conceive and then live their object. For according to my thesis, Ramaji too is governed by the same universalist a-prioris, primary and secondary, in every particular circumstance in which he finds himself. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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a­cquisition of a sufficiently informative and skilled corpus of knowledge ­enabling participation. It is such a notion of a precise and individuated corpus of experientially developing knowledge, thus of individuated access and ­acquisition—always relative to every person’s discrete and distinct locational, experiential, ongoing life-long path through the facticity of successive contextual conditions (that particular journey made by each individual through the fine detail of the fabric of the continuum during the course of life’s experience)—that springs here to mind, this entirely accidental dimension, so to speak, that must be seen to constitute the web of constraints that we call necessity, but likewise that institute that range of conditions that both tolerate and necessitate making a choice among possibles.118 What then is implied are conditions for action that cannot themselves be adequately described in the merely essentialist terms we have characterised of commodity formation: that stereotypical form given to identity that determines production and marketing of what we call the commodity. It is to say that Newton- and Euclid-type space/time allow for more than such stereotypical considerations of identity, and, furthermore possess that broader natural context we now, since Kant, associate with Darwin’s theories about natural change, or with relativity and quantum mechanics. Diversity and individuation: this means, for example, that individuation observable of the seeds of a single plant, upon which the eye of the grower must focus and choose, and upon which Robert Hooke (1635–1703) had also gazed with surprise and commented and illustrated. It also means the diversity and individuation of the individual human subject among a population of subjects, and as diversity. This too must be considered but one side of a « coin » upon whose other side, however, we have seen « stamped » the singular uniformity of rule necessary for artificial speciation, and in all places, including those rules concerned with typological essentialism. It is that these two contraries must be seen to form integral parts of the very same reality … any reality, this old cardboard box of “Asbjørnsens Eventyr Blanding” on my table, or that variety of rice in the field! Let us take note of the extent of its generalisation: the banal, seemingly unexceptional and ordinary, common-sensical popular essentialism, and from the influence of which we, both you and I, can likewise not escape, unless it be through a supreme act of conscious critical reconsideration, purpose and awareness, such as we associate with a Galileo. Thence, commoditisation, stereotypical in principle, and vast in the entirety of the space and order that it

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had come to compose, occupy and dominate long before industrialisation, but equally the forms given to human identity, thus to popular conceptions governed by the same stereotypical criteria of group identity (and yet which, as we have seen, have also come to be absorbed unconsciously into the very conception and approach to group identity characterising the social disciplines). Furthermore, this other question that now interests us, concerning directly the relationships between nature and artifice, remains unanswered: it implies, that nature appears as if itself divided, appearing before us as if in the manner in which we have come to constitute this problem, thus as if affected by each of these two distinctive, irreconcilable forms: first, as revealed in that constant war witnessed in agriculture, a battle between artifice and nature, of giving form to classes of thing, items of an identity, against their dissolution by natural forces of genetic plasticity, or another and different natural order of things, the two, therefore, as if sharing the same space within the plant itself. Yet nature entirely and necessarily englobes every possible material content and aspect of the universe, the human and artificial being unexcepted, and thus englobing that fierce hard-laboured opponent, mastering the opponent that seeks in return to master it, and for which, for the forms of such stereotype … for those very same principles of human reasoning … we cannot but ulti­ mately  consider nature as entirely responsible, thus both ontologically and ontogenetically. Current scientific knowledge may exclude the validity of the results of ordinary, unaided, intuitive perception, thus as truth, and we generally know, from learning, that we are ultimately involved in a non-Euclidian, non-Newtonian cosmos of far greater complexity (and operating according to contrasting aesthetic principles) than the classical physics and geometry, which, however, we have applied as the truth of the composition of the commodity-world, giving a field of incontrovertible empirical validity to ordinary human common-sense, and thus to a domain in which we can consider as true the old superceded classical mechanics. We then ask the question, perhaps without hope of a solution, of what kind of « interval », of space, within nature (yet of nature) can classical physics and geometry possess whilst retaining their validity? As consequence, we confront a singular question: That concerning the extents and nature of the reality, both tacit and explicit, in which decisions to act according to rules (in whatever form these reach the participant) are universally necessary for local, individual maintenance and survival;—with the corollary that one might have acted differently, whether reasonably, erroneously or absurdly. If so, there must be seen to exist a space for choice, for the exercise of individual freedom in making both judgement and decision judged relative to the circumstances that mark any context

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of judgement and action. This would imply, in turn, that such contexts offer more varied and open possibilities, and among which essentialist rules of constituting type are but learned,—learned, that is, as particular, but useful ways of acting in those circumstances constituted by production and marketing, necessitated by them, whilst nonetheless conforming to naturally-endowed ­common-sense, thus a common-sense we have accepted as Newtonian– and Euclidian in type. At the same time we needs consider the possibility of the existence of other kinds of taxonomic rule for the constitution of a class of objects (in particular Darwinist rules), and known to those concerned. Those participants may behave dissonantly, and not according to rule. Once more this level of constraint can not be considered as being biological, that is to say, biologically determinant. Then the question concerns that of how we, « outsiders » and interpreters of such conditions, yet no less subject to the same kind of rules today, should ascertain the broader set of conditions in which conscious rule-following action was itself historically constituted. Obviously, we return to those questions concerning approach and method treated in detail in Chapter 1: their concern was that of constituting an open and interrogative, self-constituting and selfcorrecting approach to the field of enquiry, and intended to contrast to those more habitual approaches narrowly focussed on the particular or local content of the theme itself, thus contained within the apparent sufficiency of its boundaries and prone to self-confirmation (say an «  India  », a «  village  », « jajmani », and so forth). Such a renovated sense of approach and method should bear within itself the very means for regulating critically its initial procedures, of working back again and again upon its assumptions and assumed coordinates, concerning what had seemed sufficient to make a local study or treat a particular question, thus of constructing and reconstructing piece by piece an improved edifice of method that reveals more and more of any such local object or theme.119 Moreover, in developing a response, two kinds of context come also into view: (i) Production and marketing constitute a much broader set of contexts in which those same specific kinds of rule were operable and ­effectuated,—those rules by means of which commodity ­fabrication 119 By expressing in this manner the solution to the question concerning approach and method, thus in terms of what also happens to define a dialectical approach, such as conceived and practised by Hegel, that solution oughts appear as no more than reasonable, and indeed as desirable from an empirical historian’s or anthropologist’s point of view.

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itself, together with the semantic aspects of reference to them and their description, and actual forms of exchange, recognition and typology, thus institution and instrument, were possible; (ii) Society and culture also involve a more massive ensemble of expressive means, taxonomies and organisational possibilities, and of which, again, production and marketing must be considered but part. State- and class-formation, briefly hinted at above, briefly discussed in the introductory chapter, ‘More than a Preface’, are ­especially significant as formative and interdependent aspects of commoditisation. —Such contexts must be held in mind as potential complexifiers of the more limited issues that interest this book … especially where approach and method are concerned. That larger question phrased immediately above is, indeed, entirely necessary in indicating the provisional character of any kind of generalisation risked in the book; it remains as a residue of questioning that must provisionally be left unsolved. However, this concern with context points to an ongoing procedure of historical research, also not addressed in the present book, but that can be addressed thereafter.120 In the rest of the present section (Ch. 3, §iii), I shall make an attempt to characterise the nature of the societal and historical « space » occupied by the artificialism of the commodity continuum. Thereafter, in the following, and final section, I shall consider more intimately the possible agency behind artifice, and thus the subjective conditions permitting the generation of the continuum as an intersocietal, inter-« translational » fabric of shared thought and practice. Once we consider this second order of problem, we also become involved in a necessarily non-essentialist, individualist reading of the historical formation of commodity culture, closer to Darwin’s conception of species formation in any natural environment, and also to Marx’s conception of historical process and structuration. B

Neither Closed nor Infinite, but Finite & Illimitable

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A Unity of Formative and Constructional Principle of the Exotic

In the foregoing pages, we have been concerned especially with the internal character of the kinds of thought and practice responsible for the forms of the 120 Thus my proposal above, in “More than a Preface”, concerning further projects: one on the sociological class-ordered conditions, evident world-wide, necessitating commoditisation; the second on a more thoroughgoing study of the phenomenological dimension introduced in the present study and represented in terms of contemporary forms of technical instrumentation. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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commodity-continuum encountered in the records of the past, and expressed in the words and measures actually utilised by contemporaries, thus by those participants who had thought the commodity and were engaged in all the different kinds of the practice that we have seen associated with it. We have also been concerned with the specific characters (or kinds of property) constituting the phenomena composing that culture of the commodity, whether observed as real physical objects made, say, of cotton or copper, or as objects in the sense of the various kinds of communication, and thus language concerning commodities, thus written words, numbers, signs, symbols, forms of measure, but also behavioural gestures and expected ritual, and so forth, applied in discoursing about them and enabling their ultimate exchange at different points of the global continuum. We were concerned with how to conceptualise their constitution, first in phenomenological terms, secondly in those of contemporaries actually engaged in manufacturing a commodity, say as intention or as a plan comprised of sequential sets of action and procedure, and of calculating the properties that must be brought together in order to constitute it. This is what I have chosen to consider an anthropology of an all-embracing commodity-culture, but in which both a cultural and a philosophical anthropology are seen equally necessary in combination for a complete understanding of commoditisation, necessary both as method and as an actual means for giving adequate definition of its specific internal and inherent characteristics. It is such concerns that provide a kind of precision to what we may conceive as a sufficient, substantial description of this anthropology, thus of a real empirical substantiality concerning a kind of « other » nature that needs to be defined as such, as a distinctive kind of nature, and what I call a second nature, an « anthropological island », so to speak, within what we would otherwise contemplate as nature, yet which itself is extremely difficult to seize and isolate. In those previous pages we have been concerned to establish all that makes of the commodity, not least of its astonishing vectorial and translational qualities, something definable, identifiable, to all inhabitants of the continuum, … possible and actual … no matter their social level, instruction or cultural location. And we have defined this sense of active constitution of the object and of its practical utilisation and instrumentalisation in two senses, once more. First, those primary Kantian principles that determine most universally the constitution in mind of any object perceived in the world in which individuals were engaged, and that we justify by saying with Husserl that “the tree in thought is not the tree in the garden”, whilst nonetheless necessarily to it. Second, those secondary cultural principles of an active practise, expressed diversely and circumstantially in the different languages, material forms and behavioural customs characterising this global extension, with the purpose of demonstrating that such diversity can be reduced also to universal principles Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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of constitution, without the slightest distortion or falsification. Instead, the consequence is our recovery of a common, universal epistemology in terms of which both differentiation of all kinds, and of translation across such difference, can be seen interdependent of one another, both understood and possible. And, furthermore, what has been so established concerns something wholly discernible and thus observable … constantly confirmable … in historical records derived from all regions of the continuum, never mind differences in language of expression or in the exotic form given to the objects we identify as commodity. Contemporary manuals and an ever more abundant production of commercial dictionaries, and other aids for memory and for identification, such as the « pocket » coin boxes with their samples of coin and their minibalances, many manuals offering special means enabling the conservation and stocking in memory of the super abundance of facts concerning exchange, are an indisputable evidence in their own right. The words the manuals and dictionaries use, their vocabularies and syntax, the manner in which their entries come replete with concerns of measure and quality, are equally an evidence. Particularly astonishing is our growing, ever-more evident conviction, confirmed time and time again of the various principles mentioned in the previous paragraph; thus of the unity of formative and constructional criteria underlying all the kinds of exotic differentiation and expression (say, of word, image, form, sign and symbol), encountered when traversing the extents of the exchange-continuum. Moneys are a fine example of this unity of rampant differentiation and of universal principle: that the Chinese sycee, the Indian Ocean larin, the South Indian pagoda, The North Indian square rupee, the sommi mini-bar of South Europe and the Caucasus, the rough cut trading réal d’ocho, the many different local forms of the ducat produced throughout an extensive vast region of Europe, the near east, and beyond, the Europe-wide production of the ducaton, the « forged » coinages increasingly produced in vast numbers in workshop and cottage throughout the continuum (known types remanufactured according to accepted typological principles and that contributed positively and considerably to the volume of public circulative means), … can all be observed trading against one another, exchanging for one another, even transformed into one another is, again, an incontrovertible evidence; indeed, we have seen that they had been frequently designed intentionally for such distant exchange across a frontier of kind and be so transformed in the mint. We seen this in the precise correspondence of measure, quality and form between one « exotic » payments form and another, designed from the start for this transformation in some distant mint, thus as part and parcel of a known continuity of active translational activity.

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In short, these traits comprise the conditions necessarily informing and grounding this completely translational character we observe operating, in density and frequence, between one distant cultural location and another, and intended consciently in each separate case to act to do so.121 We also witnessed this in Dr. Hove’s conveyance of plant forms, defined and named in local peasant communities in Gujarat, to the learned intellectual savants of early botany in Europe (the subject-matter considered in Pt. ii, below), or the publication, in the pages of the early botanies, of plant-forms illustrated and described together with their various nomenclatures in the different parts of the world, as if each such nomenclature—whether justifiably or not, scientifically ­considered,—were translations of one another, mere sets of euphemism, the one for the other …. in short, as if they could be assumed as being so, justly or not. For it is the thought and the belief of the participant, the manner in which he or she read that universe, that counts in this respect, and not our judgement of some objective scientific (thus debatable) knowledge concerning it, that would correct their observations. Because, one has to ask « what? » … « who? » … « how? » … Who are the agents responsible for this constitution of a second nature, and how did they practice it, according to what principles of construction: then it is what they thought of it, believed actual and possible that counts, and that we must identify: … that possibility, for example, of translating a ducat into a pagoda, a ducaton into a Bengal rupee, a plant-type identified and named in a Gujarati village into a vernacular or Latin-named type in a learned Dutch or Italian botanical treatise, each name placed alongside one another as if equivalents for the identity of that plant. Yes, one may be astonished, ­discover in oneself that astonishment, awaken onself to its possibility, of ­halting before the banal facts of a simple sentence that expresses such acts of transition and translation between different locally determined taxonomical ­identities (matters of culture), or conversely, that seem to contradict what traditionally have been conceived by the specialists as foundationally untranslatable, or at least requiring a resistant procedure of translational practice, more or less complex, but ordinarily conceived of as affecting any kind of interaction between one form of collective cultural being and another. It is in establishing this form-giving character of the « edifice » of a veritably universalising commodity-culture that the preceding paragraphs have been concerned. And in so doing there have been constant hints and pointers towards the forms of extension in space taken by this continuum, leading to

121 I enumerate some of these instances in my article “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”, in Unbroken Landscape.

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d­ efinition of the form required by such extension and notably by its entirely communicative, transportational, and intersubjective purpose and functioning, and the grounds upon which it could be so: … that we find commodities (cultural objects) conveyable across all kinds of frontier, and recognisable as such wherever commodities were encountered. However, these very remarks serve, in turn, to indicate a fresh problem and a new set of questions concerning the kind of space thus « occupied », its definition as a kind of spatial occupation embodied and generated by the commodity, by its connectivity, through what—it must also be emphasised—had constituted an entire global societal and cultural continuum, despite all conflicts and barriers, the very facticity of exchange being our privileged evidence for viewing the past in this manner.122 It is composed of difference? Then should one consider that embodiment of continuous social and empirical space, that extension of a culture we define as universal, and possessed by all inhabitants, as being infinite in character or else as finite? And if we conclude that it is finite, should one think it as bounded, in its very own right, or instead as illimitable, like number and word themselves, ever extendable, arithmetic, and in that latter case, without any conceivable material limit except, say, the measure of the globe itself? Both aspects of the question must be considered.—It is a serious question since many of those interested in the growth of early capitalism conceive of it as a bounded organisational system of power gradually penetrating and invading other neighbouring entities differently and independently organised. We might judge that the forms of imperium and colonial invasion characterising the nineteenth century are read as if characterising the forms of history itself. The themes of evolution and of modernisation, we have seen, may further act to differentiate this 122 It is curious and significant to note that it is in resistence to this universal many-centurieslong facticity, this truth of human culture, that the many nationalisms concerned with roots, identities, race and ethnicity, … and with a so-called « cultural degeneration » … have developed, resting as they do on the mythology of the intrinsic, closed moral community in process of disenchantment by trade, cash, exchange and so forth at any point in time the enquirer chooses to observe the societal complex. Indeed, during the early phases of the Green Revolution, one read articles, by those specialised in the economics of agricultural developmental, favouring the necessity of breaking apart such communities in order to favour market penetration, as if such penetration were novel even in the twentieth century. Such penetration, however, is claimed for any epoch with which a specialist might be occupied for the simple reason that it is always observable as a structural part of what comes under observation. The records show rural society as thoroughly and invariably marketised, and for structural reasons, also discussed and emphasised in this book … except that is in times of severe crisis and severe population decline, caused by famine, warfare or disease.

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conception of a globe composed of foundational differences. Human beings then appear, we have seen, as if divided from one another by different stages of development, all awaiting the painful gift of a conquest and of an enforced modernisation. Racial politics would then intervene by claiming species-­ differences between such human identities, innate degrees of inferiority and superiority. Closure and a kind of holistic internal organisation, « totalitarian » in character, since affecting relationally all constituents, would be conceived of as having characterised this form of capitalism, as also that of its allegedly ­differently-organised neighbours. It is the kind of vision we have constantly criticised in this book, and systematically in Chapter 1. The exchange continuum and its universal constitutive cultural principles imply an entirely different, more open, indeed more complex, organisation of global empirical reality, even in the earliest phases of capitalist development.123 I approach this question by forging a brief comparison between one version of infinity and the kind of spatial embodiment constantly identified and confirmed in the case of our commodity-world. A first observation is that the very idea of the « infinite » is metaphysical, marking a concept completely at odds with what we define as being finite, whether the latter is judged as limited or illimitable, thus empirical. In short, infinitude is entirely at odds with Newtonian and Euclidian measure and form, with the finite they act to divide and measure, never mind the metaphysical presuppositions held by either a 123 Once more, I recommend Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet of novels, and which he composed during his long years of imprisonment in Suharto’s goals, as providing a rich contextualisation within which such opinion was expressed, both in the forms of official policy and « naturally », as it were, in interpersonal relationships. I had turned to Geertz’ study, Negara, in order to encounter further illumination on the historical and anthropological facts of what I had encountered in those novels. In vain. Toer’s books act as the force of such illumination: as a kind of explosive breaking apart from within the tight holistic web of interdependent forms of relationships emphasised in a Geertzian anthropology, and notably in its inheritance of a complete ideology of colonial perception and self-justification, re-clothed in a fresh vocabulary and sauced with humanist pretensions. Notably, it is the notion of consent inherent in what is seen as the perennial relationships of exchange, supposed as articulating radical social inequalities, thus of the circulation of wealth and services, such as alleged of societies composed of castes or social orders, that falls apart under Toer’s frankly open, evoluative approach to the consciousness of an individual living and learning under such conditions. One must remember that Negara is concerned with conditions incident mainly in the nineteenth century, yet conducted almost without attention to detailed historical records, nor with a method that justifies that absence. The book written in the late twentieth century concerns a societal domain already profoundly affected by European invasion and conquest, and that had begun to ­affect the whole larger region of South East Asia centuries before. In contrast, for an example of Toer’s approach, see Child of All Nations, Ch. 7 (Buru Quartet, ii).

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­ ewton or a Euclid in their own right. It is the paradox of this metaphysical N notion of infinitude that it contradicts finitude and yet, simultaneously, grounds it, is even conceived in order to do so, thus serving to ground in the indiscernible what is to us « merely » discernible. For, in contrast, what concerns our ­commodity-continuum is entirely empirical, entirely material, a conception of the universe from which all metaphysic and teleology have indeed been (or should be) entirely excluded. Our universal brooks no such metaphysical contribution or reference.124 But the question of finitude and limit must be addressed in their own right. Thus, as just mentioned, some now argue that the kind of merchant capitalism taking form in the early modern centuries was itself closed, a system in its own right (that grammatical use of the yet-so-meaningful definite or indefinite article), and centred as such in the large metropoli of the early-modern world in London, Amsterdam, and so forth. But we already know that this book disagrees with such constatation: for, the facts and relationships concerned may certainly be systematic in their organisational principles and universal implications but they do not constitute «  a system  », are not at all holistic, and ­certainly not bounded, let alone bounded by mere definitional criteria. This is not to say that there were no centres but rather that there were many centres, that many-centred hydra of the market, that of growing urban conurbations, of i­nstitutions, where in all cases diverse inputs were received, organised, re-­ organised, and exported, multiple; thus dispersed centres, the word « centre » associated with every quasi-autonomous point of collective organisation and decision, centres from which further trajectories dispersed towards other such points of organisation. The notion of « centre » in this sense would attach itself to every level or scale of market organisation. Or as Giordano Bruno had said of the cosmos, « the centre is everywhere ». Moreover, as many economic historians have shown and as I also argue elsewhere, there are indeed dominant centralising forces that come with time to affect the trades, productions and, most notably, the social forms of labour characterising the continuum: these 124 Lévi-Strauss complained, in a letter to Roman Jacobson of 18th February 1966, about what he considered an unprincipled attack by the linguist André Martinet on both himself and Jakobson (in fact, seen as having been directed against himself, although in the name of Jakobson). The editors remark that Martinet had come to oppose Jacobson’s universalism from an empiricist standpoint (Jacobson & Lévi-Strauss, Correspondance, 270, n. 1). However, in the present case, the universalism that I seek to establish is entirely empirical,— not just supposed of empirical fact, but seen to be so, and argued as being so, constituted as such, thus constituted historically, and an integral part of the present stage of my argument.

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indeed form an aspect of the uninterrupted transitional character that I a­ scribe to the continuum, … part of the transitional transformation continuously affecting the global continuum and to which, furthermore, we may ascribe the character of a multi-headed early capitalism.125 Yet, let’s first address this question through that which the continuum is not: that initial question of infinitude! I do so by a consideration of the very metaphysic that modern materialism has, with such difficulty, come to displace, but which, in the early modern centuries, long after Copernicus’ and Galileo’s attacks upon it, continued to underlie much of the thinking embodied by early scientific thought. I refer to the metaphysic of The Sphere intimately associated with Ptolemy and Sacrobosco, but subscribed to by the Church in its opposition to Galileo. As we all know, it concerns a metaphysic that placed the human being at the very centre of the teleology of the universe, a singular One (Idea of a god) as its absolute horizon and explanation. This persistence is most obviously true of early botany, a subject that I shall treat for itself in Pt. ii, below. Such persistence can be seen in the poesis of relationship represented

125 Such an inherently transitional character for the facticity and history of the continuum is clearly implied by the very character of the evidence encountered concerning individual participation, both in thought and act, and that gives constant constitutive form to the contexts of such human thought and action,—and just as I have sought to present above. In spite of the many theories that represent states of society and culture as subject to durably static conditions, and characteristic of past writing in the humanities, much currently influential philosophy has long affirmed the contrary. Thus we read in Husserl’s Ideen, i, 67 (58) and 70 (61)]: “… acts of consciousness [Bewußtseinsakte] that belong to this particular subject, constitute events in a natural reality. The flow of specific, always different acts of the « I » [deren verandlichem Strom, die specifischen Ichakte], each being particular in its essential character [so eigenartig aufleuchten], act the one upon the other, and unify in syntheses that alter without arrest”. And: “Let’s consider the various acts of conscious experience [Bewußtseinserlebenisse] in their full concrete entirety, as they go to integrate, as a flow of experience [Erlebenisstrom], into the inter-­connectedness of their context, and in terms of the specific individual character of each of them”. Sartre, likewise, in Search for a Method [Question de Méthode ], 90 and 98–9, n. 4: who remarks upon the unexpected consequences of any purposive individual act in and upon its context: in Hazel Barnes’ translation: “Each day with our own hands we make History something other than what we believe we are making it, and History, backfiring, makes us other than we believe ourselves to be or to become. (90)” My comments on increasingly distanciated and metropole-centred, class-organised working relationships affecting production of textiles in eighteenth century Europe and India occur in “Commercial Manufacture and the « Proto-Industrialisation » Thesis”, in Unbroken Landscape (a revised version of an article first published in Past and Present, xcviii, 1983, 30–95).

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by The Sphere drawn as if in evident reason between what, today, we are instead habituated to consider entirely discrete and logically unrelatable, ­incomparable kinds of subject matter. In the poesis of sense characteristic of this early metaphysic, however, they seem best described as occupying distinct dimensions of a single poetic of reality or being, in which each such dimension explains the other, or corresponds exactly with it. It is such a poesis that drew together in relationship botany, medicine, together with alchemy and astrology in a kind of mutually informing language of signs (known as the « signature » of the one dimension in the other, say the « virtue » in some physical facet of the plant), and all perceived, from the standpoint of that poesis, as intimately informing one another, the astral star marking the plant with its virtues (the star representing some supra-sensible ultimate essence prior to the phenomenal), those virtues inscribed within the plant as enabling treatments of illnesses in the human subject, and even related to the anatomical or physiological detail of the human body. Thereby we descend from an indivisible One to the detail of existence, just as in a completely material and empirical sense quantity of value is related ontically, and as a universal medium of equivalence, to the qualitative difference among commodities. It is this conception of possible relationship that lies behind an earlier observation pointing to the combination of interests in the science of the time: the author of a botanical treatise described as concerned alike with medicine or pharmacy and writing a treatise on The Sphere or on alchemy, a combination giving active material expression to broadly held conceptions and ways of comprehending the form and character of ultimate cause giving rise to existence,—both a metaphysic and a theology. For us, it resembles a phenomenology historically prior to the material philosophy familiarly attached to that term. Then, to recapitulate, such metaphysic, as mentioned, founds the material and phenomenal world in some original, but indiscernible element, thus, as described, in some original unformed Idea of something ontically prior to matter (both logically and genetically). It is this poesis of intimate explicative and causal relationship that so frequently occupied a very large proportion of the descriptions of plants in the botanies published during the centuries of the commodity-continuum, and even, as we shall see in Pt. ii, remaining operative into the late eighteenth century and, even, into the early nineteenth century, in spite of what we are accustomed to know as real advances in material science. The Copernican/Galilean dissolution of that poesis of « truth », so feared by the Church, seemed to have realised itself no more rapidly in Europe than ­elsewhere in the world, and, conversely, the history of materialistic thought, thus the gradual development of Kantian and phenomenological kinds of

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i­nterrogation of possibility, surely confirms this view.126 Husserl’s phenomenology is developed in the early twentieth century, he c­ onstantly warns of essentialist confusion, whilst even in 1950, Ricoeur continues to give an essentialist bent to his translation of the vocabulary of that philosopher. Speaking in very general and comparative terms, one may add that such kinds of poesis can be seen at work in local plant lore and medicine, informing the so-called « ethno- » local-botanies current here and there across the continuum, and concerning which local investigators, such as Dr. Hove, corresponded, conveying plants from different parts of Europe and Asia alike: collecting, discussing and naming them with local peasantries and distant intellectuals. There are even residues of such a poesis to be encountered in the more traditional parts of the current countryside, evident in gardening and medical practices much attached to astrological considerations, still evident, for example, when the French poet René Char had been active in twentieth century France, but which I have also encountered in that part of rural France which I now inhabit. This is to say that the Galilean revolution may now seem immense and premonitional to us, but in practice and in a full historical retrospect it appears but a first pin-prick in re-thinking the universe, perhaps, in Nathan Rosenberg’s sense, part of a whole population of previous and on-going dissonance. And Bertolt Brecht’s remarkable play, The Life of Galileo, correctly seized this very essence of the obstacles confronted by his propositions; for that which the church had most essentially opposed, so Brecht seems to argue, was the threat to the very coherence of the architecture of that poesis as a realm of total p ­ ossible translation between all kinds, levels and dimensions of thinking, s­ omething accessible to an « every-person », and in which theology and doctrine could find their place and reason. Most essentially, where we are concerned, that poesis proposed a relationship between the infinitude of what was considered to be ground and source of all being, and the finitude inhabited by the human being, … thus perceived by the human only as finitude. What is then at issue is the speculative relationship between the indiscernible and discernible (remember Moses’ muteness before the question that runs like a cord of sense through Schoenberg’s opera 126 I intend to focus on such questions more closely and globally, thus comparatively, at a later date. In anticipation, the task may be described as a kind of archaeology on a global scale of phenomenological concerns in a context in which new phenomenal domains were simultaneously being generated in thought, practice and as culture, such as commoditisation, thus, in turn, together with an instrumental and institutional support invented by participants as necessary aspects of its adequate and possible functioning.

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Moses and Aron127). It is in such a context that European treatises and dictionaries defined their God as a « simple », as undivided and unformed, entirely singular, yet, necessarily, escaping all possible description or design, both because of its own nature (if we can even use that term), and because of the limits of the human imagination. The very use of a word or the drawing of a line must contradict what was considered the undifferentiated « simplicity » of its nature. It is in this context that infinitude is conceived, and has entered into all the great philosophies of the past: thus Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind/ Spirit uses time and history as its method for re-constructing the entirety of the workings of the human mind, but, in accomplishing that task, and at the end, in its fulfilment, both time and history, thus finitude, entirely disappear, dissolving into the infinitude of a final constructed edifice. Then, let’s again emphasise, infinitude defines a state beyond the limit of anything humanly discernible. One would not be able to speak of an accessible and practical knowledge of such a state, let alone of an active and conscious constitution of a thought or making of an object regarding that beyond. The phenomenal would not enter in any form or sense into considerations of infinitude. The question, then, seems—as if the answer had been determined by the definition given to the two terms, the discernible and the indiscernible—­ necessarily answered only by the negative: thus, by the complete exclusion of any possible notion of infinitude. But, as consequence, one then asks whether it is reasonable to conceive of a universal, strictly conceived as such, in terms of mere finitude, thus as a finite ground containing a merely empirical, particular content; what should that word « universal » imply in its own right? Is it not a strictly metaphysical term closely connected with what is beyond measure, whereas the word « general » would be more apposite where any finite ­empirical reality is concerned? Do we not go too far in arguing that, even empirically, there is no exception, whereas that other word, « general » concerns preponderance rather than a strict rule admitting no exception? Then, I must be clear about the manner in which I choose to use these terms, a choice that may not please the philosopher but which, for a practising researcher of empirical facticity, satisfies a real practical and serious need in constructing here a credible argument. « Universal » can be attached to what Darwin sees as the defining principles governing natural-species formation and the species 127 “Einziger, ewiger, allgegenwärtiger, unsichtbarer …” (“Singular, eternal, ubiquitous, indiscernible, unrepresentable …”), the first words of the opera. We might replace Schoenberg’s « God » by « Quantity » with respect to the commodity and capital, that of value, and which if representable in a multitude of particularised expressive forms, such as price and coin, seems itself, as a universal at-once real and abstract, to evade representation.

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c­ategory: that fundamental individualism and accidental character of act, change, thought and event that determines the radical individualism underlying the very possibility of evolutionary change, as defined by him. Artifice and stereotype may fall outside such a conception but, where Darwin is concerned, nature, whether seen as limited to what is opposed by artifice or ultimately englobing the latter, both ways (both being a version of the truth of what we mean by the term), is a true universal that admits of no exception. Equally, stereotype is universal—not merely general—with regard to what comes within the category constituted by artificial nature; no commodity, for example, can exist that is not a stereotype of its group-identity; any single item possesses its identity uniquely from that of the group of which it is member: it is ducat, not this ducat or that, a Venetian ducat, nor one factored in Bijapur, and, again, not « this » Venetian ducat as opposed to « that » Venetian « ducat »! We might even judge that these two so-different universals come into conflict within the plant: within that plant one or the other may have a « general » preponderance over the other: neither universal is true of the plant except when seen as that part constituted by natural forces or that by human labour, thus that part characterised by the principles informing the constitution of cultural artifice. This certainly means that they are not « topographically » distinct but can meet as distinctive parts of the very same field of attention, and as we have seen causing us a serious difficulty of comprehension concerning agricultural kind, or of discerning how they meet or can be distinguished from one another in that field. Yet I feel justified in reaffirming what I deduced above: the historical empirical human being behaves in each case circumstantially, true to Darwin’s notion of radical individualism, and yet constitutes a true biological group, say a species, formed empirically though such individualism; but the system of categories generated by human consciousness and labour is itself, within that system, entirely stereotypical: both universal within their own confines and distribution. And, to be further clear, it is the preceding arguments that enable me to make such a declaration concerning definition. Yes, the word «  universal is both apposite and necessary to describe what concerns us, the strictly e­ mpirical commodity, and required for my description of commoditisation and by the ongoing development of my argument, just as the Darwinian concept is required by attention to the conditions in which the other is formed. If there be a globally incident cultural universal traversing and common to all cultural difference, we can not be speaking at the same time of different natural species of human being among which translation and comprehension would be assumed necessarily limited and conditional. Julian Steward’s rule of compatibility concerning cultural influence is the historian’s and anthropologist’s

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e­ quivalent of the biological rule that a species is defined as that which may fertilise one another and reproduce. Yet, we can also make of that rule a question, since it is now argued that the Neanderthal and other precocious forms of human being procreated together, interacted behaviourally and culturally, in order for Homo Sapiens eventually to appear as a distinctive species of organic being in nature, the « figure » we call human, through which our field of study, commoditisation, appeared. For what then is implied of this latter—of this very figure we hold as true—is the historic empirical appearance of such common, universal characters, physical and mental, phenomenological and ­cultural, that we can call « universal », thus a process through time of prehistorical and historical becoming. There is no reason to exclude the concept of the universal from empirical facticity. Let’s then summarise our answer in the following manner: first, the artifice of commoditisation can be judged universal within the globally extensive domain occupied by it as a category of being (rather than as a topography of being); second, Darwin’s notion of group formation and content is equally universal when observed within its own strictly defined extensive natural bounds, thus in its difference and opposition to cultural artifice. That they meet together within the very same objects and fields of objects, as in the plant, as with regard to the internal character of culture and to the external conditions of its formation, may present severe problems of further comprehension, but, so I would argue, because all these considerations, terms and definitions derive from strictly constitutive phenomenological sources: as conceptual attempts we ourselves must develop in order to grasp the realities of the noumenal object-world beyond us but which we live. But second, Darwin’s conception may be claimed true in a more absolute sense: that of governing all possible cosmic, material being, and beyond which there can exist nothing. In each case, however, we deal with an empirical focus for which the use of the term « universal » is entirely valid, most obviously in the latter case, but also in those more limited cases that most concern us: those different categories of being we call nature and artifice. If the answer might continue to seem paradoxical, there remains little choice in the matter: we have encountered in culture a field of reality, commoditisation, that admits of no exception, and, indeed, none has been encountered. Wherever one casts attention on the facts of production and exchange, of marketing and its different institutions, on production of the particular and on the application of value, no exception has been observed nor seems possible, say concerning the constitution of commodities, nor concerning the entirety of what concerns it: the order it constitutes and its inner functioning. In terms of its possibility and, indeed, as empirically encountered, the judgement

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that the criteria permitting constitution of the cultural object are universals seems incontrovertible. It may still puzzle the observer, may seem to say too much, and yet only such a definition seems to suffice. And having said it, the implications are extraordinary and important: that Nuer shopkeeper, Gujerati peasant farmer and Dutch medical-botanist share the same principles of mind for constituting their object-worlds and that are common to all, in spite of radical difference in local forms of expression, in levels of education, in societalinstitutional location. And such a conclusion appears already to contribute to our understanding of the subject. It is especially important with regard to intellectual and popular judgements about identity and human grouping. However, eventually, we shall encounter a form of justification that succeeds provisionally in bridging this gap preventing a complete understanding of the relationship of the universal to factual matter. It would remain controversial, but would bridge that interval in reasoning that otherwise denies us complete comprehension, offering scope for further advance. For, the present, let us agree that such a conclusion must be seen to have been drawn from the circumstantial, accidental character of history itself, thus from an entirely empirical formative ground, however absurd such a statement may at first seem. Remember the enigma with which writers such as Dumont or Geertz leave us before regarding the caste system or Negara: the question of how such a regime of alleged consent came factually into being, in the first place; once one imposes the need for a detailed historical explanation, in principle, researchable in an archive, whether that archive exists or not, that regime of consent becomes a problem. Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s fictions (mentioned above) advance schemes of reality that break apart any reasonable assumption of a passive acceptance of such states of being: they expose the relationships of social class, force and a systematic framework of repression, in which such « consent » can come to constitute a necessity of being and survival. It is in terms of such long-term generation of a sufficient regime of possible and necessary facticity that any justification for human cultural universals must be founded: founded in the real, and not in some ideological prescription.128 This further 128 Toer’s method throughout the Buru Quartet is particularly brilliantly conceived and apposite for the central task he had set himself: it is through a framework of biographically individualised action and encounter, experience and response, that the individual breaks successively out of the shells of acceptance and conviction that act as constraints to distance and dissidence and that permeated his (Toer’s) surroundings, colonial and familial, forming his origins. The result is a successive series of ever more critical informative, previously unquestioned contexts of that reality—the colonial conditions of the Indies,— revealing itself in the detail to consciousness and that thereby becomes subject to radical interrogation. However, it is through a particularly extensive, persistently engaged

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step makes its appearance only as the final step of my argumentation, thus only at the end of the book. Yet the problem before us remains; it is that all kinds of both metaphysical and lay thought concerning the primary origins of matter, whether mythological, religious, philosophical or scientific, continue to be conceived in the form of an entire and undifferentiated, « simple » (that is undifferentiated) origin and source of being, one that primordially unifies and explains what we human beings live and see only as phenomenal difference and heterogeneity between particulars. Whether it is the « simple » of a god, or that of wave and motion, of that of particle-physics and wave-theory, or, in our case, quantity, an initially undivided content of mind, or Kant’s noumenal and Hegel’s « Geist », the implications are identical, and I shall need to speculate further below concerning this question in order to reach a satisfactory, if provisional conclusion. b

But What Kind of Unity?

Thus, before abandoning the question of infinity, we need to look more closely at its nature and foundations. I take the version of it introduced in the form of The Sphere as my matter for doing so; it concerns a metaphysic that once dominated European thinking, popular and scientific, and that posses many close analogies with metaphysical developments observed elsewhere in the world. Moreover, if The Sphere happens to be just one among numerous other versions and kinds of metaphysic in which the very idea of infinity had a preponderant role, it also possesses the particular merit of being unlikely to form part of any reader’s current personal beliefs, so that I can treat it objectively in terms of my own personal research and interest in the question. i­nter-disciplinary reading that Toer was able to open out such contexts, cause them to reveal their true nature, freed of the ideologies of justification (such as racial superiority) that had closed them to conscious interrogation. On the one hand, one senses that his alleged « hero », an admired Indonesian journalist of the immediate past, is, in truth, recast in terms of his own personal biographical experience; on the other hand, and in the spirit of my own search for a method (as set out above), seeking to open himself out spontaneously through the paths opened up, to a personal ethic of self-interrogation of a Cassirian kind and inspiration, and thereby to a procedure of constant conscious renewal,—a course that appears perfectly dialectical (in the Hegelian sense) in form, spirit and ­method;—one comes to understand that his fiction has much to teach us practitioners of the social disciplines, especially those of us, like myself, unsettled by tendencies to enclose the fields of study and fix the limits within which they are allowed to be conceptualised and constructed as a knowledge, tendencies that seems invariably to lead to auto-self-confirmation (as in Negara).—Toer was an intentionally pedagogical writer, his novels originating in a context where he had been forbidden to write, but in which he learned to narrate to fellow prisoners, seeking thereby to develop a method of continued imaginative invention and retention. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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The question of infinitude has already been evoked above with respect of Nicolas de Cusa, who suggested, so we saw, that it entailed the entire dissolution of any fixed sense of form when applied to the nature of the cosmic universe; we cannot even use words like « cosmos », let alone for cloths or concepts in a context without measure. What any metaphysic of infinitude concerns is a primordial state of being prior even to form and division, a condition for the being of our own lived world found repeated time and again in both mythology and religion, and that requires some notion of creation intervening between that primordial state and what we live. It obviously generates an ideal to which one may aspire, as we encounter throughout much of the poetic of the twentieth-century poet René Char, and which helps to explain what otherwise has seemed so impenetrable in the language of the poems. Likewise, the Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha expresses it in terms of what came to be the Buddhist turn he developed towards the world of his anticolonialist convictions.129 It generates an ideal to extend in both depth and penetration into one’s comprehension of being, but that modern physicists concerned with the nature of matter have translated into a purified lay and scientific language conventionally accepted in describing the ontology of the real. This is not to say that the latter are necessarily free of metaphysical beliefs but that they have learned to describe and use language in a form shorn of any such visible metaphysical presence. Where myth is concerned, ideas of centre, boundary and, most obviously, of location (coordinates of time and place), lose reference, or become relativised to such an extent that we might imagine conditions of primordial being within which form itself appears entirely unstable, crystallising and dissolving, appearing as one thing and then another, arising and then retreating, thus entirely provisional as fact and in status. The myths of the native Indians of the North-West Coast of North America all seem to evoke such an unstable primordial phase in the creation of the world (Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Kwakiutl, and others): the identity of what thereby is transformed from one shape to 129 Camilo Pessanha may be compared with Conrad, Gauguin, Orwell and others, repelled by the colonial comportment and pretensions they encountered in Asia,—by the false ­contrasts—a false knowledge—between coloniser and colonised systematically projected under such conditions, that same contexts of ideologies of which Toer himself was subject and victim. For this reason, Pessanha was increasingly led to engage intellectually with Chinese language and culture, thus on a course comparable to that of Gauguin who became engaged with the social and cultural life of the Pacific islands, or Conrad that of the Indies (I think especially of some remarkable sequences in The Rescue, that remind one of the matter of Geertz’ Theatre State). A very good introduction to Pessanha’s poetic is Tereza Coelho Lopes’ Clepsidra de Camilo Pessanha, which contains excellent notes and interpretation, and Barbara Spaggiari’s O Simbolismo na obra de Camilo Pessanha. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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another (thus the name attached to that identity and the various properties associated with that identity), are themselves stable in concept but not in appearance. Is this only an ontogenetic condition or is it also ontological, as happens to be true of the old essentialist metaphysic of The Sphere? Often it can be seen to be ontological in the poetry of Char and Pessanha, as also in various religious metaphysics of a possible knowledge, whilst read as ontogenetic—as literal acts of creation—in the vulgar creationism of a fundamentalist Christianity! François Jullien has argued that much the same kind of metaphysic underlies ideals of representation in a very long tradition of Chinese painting, and expressed explicitly so time and again in treatise and pedagogy. In landscape painting, especially, form is seen at once both to appear and disappear, to be on the verges of being and unbeing, stepping into it and retreating almost at once.130 130 Where the mythology of the North West Coast pre-conquest inhabitants of America is concerned, there is a considerable literature, primary and secondary, and most obviously, the many original studies and collections by Franz Boas (e.g. Tsimshian Mythology, of 1909–1910; Kwakiutl Ethnography of the 1940s, among many others); an excellent catalogue of an exhibition attended at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, Crossroads of Continents. Cultures of Siberia and Alaska, concerning the cultural continuum embracing arctic and sub-arctic populations of Siberia and North America; and much secondary discussion such as that encountered in Lévi-Strauss’ essays of Structural Anthropology and in his Mythologies; eg. “La Geste d’Asdiwal” concerning Tsimshian myth (Les Temps Modernes, clxxix, 1961, and in Structural Anthropology, ii). What is notable is the stability of identity embodied through all transformations of phenomenal form, human, organic or inanimate, and often in conjugation with a seeming absence of boundary setting apart the two dimensions of earth and « heavens », and marked by the manner in which different forms of organic identity communicate and collaborate with one another: nominally human, bird, mouse; identities of heavens, underworld and earth: evening star, walrus and human, respectively; a bird being father to a human son, that human marrying a figure of the heavens; the human freely journeying between heavens and underworld, between the source of life and issue of death, while the bird also journeys to the sun and to evening star, the daughter of the sun; while the bird is conceived as embodying the role of « messenger » between such levels (Boas and Lévi-Strauss). —Why not, then, define that bird as « translator » between levels and dimensions, just as described above of that poesis of transformation and transition between different levels of figurative representation that characterises the Sacroboscan Sphere (and that Yates depicts in her treatment of Giulio Camillo’s L’Idea del Theatro in The Art of Memory), and as we may also see represented in late Medieval and Renaissance depictions of, say, The Annunciation, … the bird shown bearing the message from the supernatural; or, even in texts of our own times, as depicted in René Char’s poetic where birds are seen capable of what humans cannot do, of broaching the skies, … of approaching if not reaching essence? But the final issue of the myth of Asdiwal is especially remarkable and significant: the death of this intermediary or primordial status in crystallisation and fixation,—what we

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Then, let us ask once more whether or not such infinitude might still be held to apply to the commodity-continuum, at least in the quantitative form of its reduction to number, thus applicable to the whole complex of factors and relationships that comprise the commodity domain, and especially with respect to its absence of closed frontiers separating it from other kinds of societal organisation. All, once closely scrutinised, appears to concord with those universal criteria we have found underlying its possibility. The absorption of a very large number of native-American plants, especially from Central and South America, from at least the fifteenth century into Africa and Asia, is especially suggestive, even provocative concerning this question of extent. For as I have sought frequently to emphasise, if commodity is our central focus of analysis and deduction, it is really the translational facility of the cultural object that should afterwards come to constitute that focus; for what is finally concerned is the extent and thus empirical condition of those universal criteria, Newtonian and Euclidian, that give form in mind to the object world of experience and perception, thus received by intuition and sensation, and converted by the understanding into a knowledge form. I lack data sufficient to describe those native American plant forms as commodities, although given the size of the kinds of state and society concerned and evidence of trade and market exchanges before Portuguese and Hispanic intervention, we should hold that hypothesis in mind. However, they regard what I believe must be regarded as cultural ­objects  … that cultural status to what is absorbed and extensively spread through vast continents, converted whilst being so, passing from soil to soil, village to village, into countless new adaptive varieties … that argues in favour of projecting that universal onto the entire human species. Of course, there is might choose to identify as the final transformation of primordial and unstable form into the permanent phenomenal state of our own world (Asdiwal becomes stone). All, then, points to a stage of matter preceding, both ontologically and ontogenetically, the entirely fixed and phenomenal world in which we and the Tsimshians « now » find ourselves. Much of the content of such mythology—narrative itself being a semantic and syntactic form characterised by such transformation and conversion—seems to concern that initial intermediary state conceived as preceding our own state of fixed (or realised) being. (The sources are Boas and Lévi-Strauss, but this reading, based on theirs, is also my own). But how we should finally interpret such myth is a different question: eg. Does it express a primordial form of original belief or, in contrast, the new and unstable conditions of nineteenth and twentieth-century history? Where, the constant emergence and retreat of form in Chinese painting is concerned, see François Jullien, La Grande Image n’a pas de Forme. His claims, in this respect, are convincing because of the evidence, but not the arguments and false comparisons (« China » and the « West », &c.) that accompany it. See also François Cheng’s Souffle-Esprit. Textes Théoriques Chinois sur l’Art Pictural, with texts that treat yin-yang in these same terms.

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much more considerable circumstantial evidence in favour of the same conclusion, as for example in the swift cultural interaction between the Iberian invaders and native inhabitants. Steward’s principle of cultural compatibility for influence to become absorbed, one way or another, should be regarded as definitive in this respect. Then let us ask our question again and seek to obtain a just answer. Quantity is the aspect of commoditisation into which all qualitative difference dissolves as form, and from which such form equally incessantly reappears, yet two aspects of an empirically verifiable reality. In terms of exchange-value commodities are quantity, while where use-value is concerned they are qualities, distinctive identities, whether for the consumer or for those who process its passage through some market. It is always possessed with teleological value and meaning, each such commodity with its own teleological purpose and destiny (or set of varying purposes and destinies) that have determined its coming into being and subsequent passage through a topography of possible experience. These two aspects are not just genetic but instead simultaneous, ontic and thus entirely, perceptively interdependent, the two faces of a playing card that flips back and forth in mind between that plastic singularity we call quantity and that seemingly irrepressible fact and drive of differentiation that so characterises phenomenal identity.131 One is reminded of the heavily-stylised patch of blue ocean-like waves so frequently depicted in an Ukiyo-e illustration, otherwise concerned to depict incidents that seem banal yet that instead may be understood as illustrative of a metaphysic governing the choice and unity of all that appears in the work, and just as our commodities—table and 131 Hegel puts it thus, in his Die Lehre vom Begriff, 28: “… so that each appears not just in its singularity (Einheit), … but rather as an infinite [successive and dialectical] mediation (Vermittlung) of the one into the other”. I want to suggest, however, that where our own particular focus on the whole domain of commoditisation is concerned, that these are not alternatives but equally true: i) as a constant sense of the presence of the one in the other, thus of the presence of exchange-value whenever there is mention of use-value, of quantity in quality, and vice versa (« that cloth is of good quality, thus expensive »; « at such a price that cloth must be of excellent quality »), and ii) as a constant instrumental translation and transition of the one into the other through the practices and operations that characterise production and exchange (« what is the price of that cloth? » … « what can I get if I pay such a price? »). But the remarkable passage from which I draw this ­quotation deserves to be read closely and entirely; it clarifies Hegel’s just sense of his ­difference from Kant, and it serves also to give a very clear definition of his terms Sein, Wesen and Begriff. The result also is that inevitably I come to ask myself about the status of my own generalisations: are they mere versions or abstract representations that mind manages to compose in order to capture the complexity of the real, or successful descriptions of the real itself? A transcendental phenomenology of what comes described or real description, « science », a hermeneutic?

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book, rupee and ducat—depend upon that universal quantitative medium for their very possibility, and general and specific sense; what is at issue, then, is a structured, structuring order permitting society to reproduce itself and to convey necessities of use across distance and difference to consumers.132 Quantity appears both as a solid physically-tangible entity and as a conceptually plastic medium of positive and negative extension by means of which we can apply the « technology » required of the translational functions of market exchange, that technology consisting of exchange value and its subordinates, cost and price. Quantity appears as if occupying the role of that « simple » of the past since the conditional foundation of what we encounter as qualitative phenomenal object and name, thus of the formation of identities: those of different kinds of sycee, tael, pagoda or ducat, yet that might then appear in a list of current prices or costs of exchange just as a comparative set of numbers, thus as 33, 45, 17 or 66, tomorrow as 32, 46, 24 or 71 (expressed in some money of account or some other value form), yet a plastic medium that allows the one to translate into the other and that we can consider as the virtual condition of the global indifference to cultural, linguistic and political barriers so characteristic of the continuum. One can posit the problem in this manner: infinitude allows us to posit the continuum as an extension that knows no limit, and in which form provisionally appears, only to re-dissolve once more into quantity. How useful it then seems! … As an instrument of true comprehension in its own right! Being more rigorous, we then ask whether such a concept of things can even be properly defined as an infinitude; even that quantitative « simple », exchange value, is as said entirely empirical and is seized upon knowingly as a comparative and translational medium of value, thus as a plastic medium of conceptual judgement that serves to differentiate identities from one another, as, say, in a market-place listing of the day’s exchange rates. For after all, one 132 George Di Giovanni explains Hegel’s word « Ideelle » as follows: “Hegel’s typical example of an Ideelles is « the finite ». Something finite is a reality whose whole truth lies in the « infinite » that transcends it—a transcendental « infinite » which is nevertheless present in it, inherent in its very structure as finite”. (“Translator’s Note”, in Hegel, The Science of Logic, lxxi). This is the principle I find in all such expression, whether in Ukiyo-e prints or in René Char’s poetry, or in Munch’s painted and graphical work mentioned above. It is most obviously true in the case of the commodity world, ostensibly limited and empirical that it is. Value is “present in” the identity of the commodity, “inherent in its very structure as finite”. But in our case, and surely in Hegel’s, those transcendents are but empirical, one concerning the possibility and presence of the commodity the other the workings of mind and the possibility of representing the world as thought. As for the depiction of waves mentioned above, I refer the reader, once more, to Munch’s wave-constituted paintings, such as the notorious Cry, and The Waves of Love. These paintings were contemporaneous with new scientific theories concerning the nature of matter. I shall return to Munch below.

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item is indeed marked 17 and not 45, the other 45 and not 17, and that difference is full of a rich corpus of significance, available there on the page of the market place to be read by the participant as an information on general conditions! One moves back and forth constantly between the highest abstraction or universal and the phenomenal differentiation of the field of fact occupied by the particular, and without leaving the empirical for some reference in a metaphysical beyond. « Does not that low value indicate war in the Gulf of Aden, and that high value a sheer need for objects of circulation and payment in Thana? » Then quantity is not only to be seen as primordial, prior to the very possibility of the phenomenal difference among commodities, but as part of an interdependent embrace of inter-relationship on which all depends, each aspect necessary for the other, like the wheels, gears and pistons of some machine in Eisenstein’s Strike. Those numbers condense and permit the imagination to depict qualitative reconstructions of local and distant conditions, but which must there be figured upon the page in order for the numbers themselves to be differentiated from one another and become that imaginative and speculative topography of conditions. 17 and 45 are at once equivalent to that state of formlessness from which solid form may arise, like the identity of our Kwakiutl, now salmon, tomorrow raven, and later old clan-head, yet persistent as an identity. To observe how objects … qualities … inter-exchange and are managed instrumentally as quantums of value by the participants themselves, thus as tools of a real concrete practice, inscribed in ledgers and accounts, or in the words and figures of the market place, is to be made fully conscious of this logically-operative transition in status. Price and exchange value are only expressions of such a moment or state, and comparable to that status of matter expressed as particles or waves, but in a subordinate sense, there being higher levels of such unison and universal incorporating it, say that allusive thing: quantity itself! The quantitative face of commodity culture (theorised intellectually by, say, an Adam Smith and actually practised by countless ordinary purchasers and sellers, share croppers or money lenders), can be accurately discerned at least in the detail of its utility; it can be manipulated, broken down into measures of difference by ordinary common-sensical thought, thereby entering as measure into the task of fabricating an object, millet, cloth or coin, and those concerned with exchanging it, and above all subject to subtle dispute and discourse, and thus, in sum, be accurately made a specific « raw material » of mind,—yet which could not be true of that indiscernible something we have been defining as infinitude. The one is accessible to thought, the other entirely inaccessible. Then the question of infinitude appears to be yet another rhetorical pro­ position with its rejection embedded securely within. In these terms, the

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c­ ommodity-world cannot be considered an infinitude of extension, but, to the contrary, always finite, always accessible to mind, part and parcel of the facticity of the world as it is lived, seen, written about, quantified; our description of the Newton- and Euclid-like Kantian constitution of the commodity-object in the previous section confirms this judgement. When the participants of Galileo’s dialogue speak of plunging a sword through the boundary of the universe, it is precisely this sense of absurdity, of conceiving of the infinite in terms of the finite, thus the irresolvable conflict between finitude and infinitude, that is brought to issue, and that is here shown to be a true problem,—an insoluble conundrum that requires a metaphysic to render the transition or exchange between the two terms and what they define relatively imaginable; indeed, the infinite may come characterised by adventitious helpful words, by a poetic— say as the sun or as waves of an ocean—and yet for-itself must remain indefinable, without identity: those words are but adventitious metaphor, but not even an aspect of the thing itself. And thus the fundamentalist would destroy the image, refuse the word, because they violate his or her conception of possible truth by rendering the inconceivable conceivable. c

A Poesis of the Incomparable

A metaphysic seeks to give to this confrontation between the discernability of appearance and what is deemed indiscernible yet true—thus between what are ordinarily considered entirely incomparable in kind—some form of imaginative representative possibility: it is thus that the poesis of The Sphere makes comprehensible relationship between stars, plants, cures and signs. Thereby, one can say that phenomenal being, its prolix differential character, can represent the end term of a chain of relationship connecting dissimilar dimensions of representation, and do so not only in translating meaning from one to the other, but real flows of cause and effect, described as influences of the one upon the other, as, indeed, is generally supposed of medical botany (connecting parts of what we see of reality), and more systematically through the poesis of The Sphere (connecting the entirety of the content of the universe, i­ ncluding what we cannot see but which guides the whole):—one cannot say that the relationship is explained but instead that it is exposed, drawn together as a chain of determining hierarchic connections, each concentric ring of representation composing The Sphere englobing those closer to the phenomenal, and vise versa; indeed, it is precisely the absence of any possible comparison between such levels or dimensions of meaning, thus of what comes connected in this manner (say, star and plant), in terms of which this form of knowledge, its poesis, is organised and represented by The Sphere … indeed, by any

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e­ ssentialism. It is thus that essence, represented by the sun, is observed in one of René Char’s poems as metaphor for the essence-source of a dotation of rational and imaginative faculties to the otherwise merely phenomenal human being, giving to mind powers of judgement and creativity, and represented as the true agency for birth of any human being (thus as a veritable source of all organic vitality). Yet it is also represented phenomenally in the same poem in its carnal form as the consequence of the coupling of two human beings (and all worked through in Char’s “Les Trois Soeurs”). Carnal « love » similarly is but the phenomenal form of love-spiritual, but which in its turn is, in its turn, a higher phenomenal form for expressing what comes designated as indiscernible essence and for which there are no names or words,—thus for a primordial state prior to phenomenal being … prior to comprehension (eg. “Jacquemard et Julia” and “Pénombre”), in that same poetic.133 Such a « logic » of cause and effect, if one wants to call it thus, is what constitutes that whole poesis of understanding that marks an essentialism in all its various versions, and in this case in Char’s version. Newton’s science concerns the construction of finitude, the unlimited succession, seriality and consequence of finite relational circumstance that constitutes time and space, at once causal and expressed as such arithmetically. Yet his strong metaphysical convictions also embodied conception of the infinite, and causal in that other sense! It is this issue that is raised in the Galilean dialogue: the absurdity exposed by that question asked of Simplicio concerning an effort to plunge his sword through the rim of the ­universe,—through the rim of possibility! Was this not an intentional and meaningful focus on the consequences of confusing infinitude with finitude?134 It assumes form for a something that in The Sphere is represented as entirely and properly without form:—to use a memorable and just expression applied to myth by Lévi-Strauss, such expression is but « a manner of speaking » … of representing! Char’s and Zola’s «  sun  » and their common emphasis on the ­fertilising agency of the heat and illumination cast by the sun are but 133 It is also a particular theme often encountered in Ukiyo-e pictorial art, for example in depicting a courtesan disappointed in discovering the base reality informing a relationship in which she had become involved and infatuated. 134 Henry More mentioned this example of the sword in his correspondence with Descartes, paraphrased by Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, 120–1: “Could Descartes not tell what would happen, in this case, if somebody sitting at the extremity of the world pushed his sword through the limiting wall? On the one hand, indeed, this seems easy, as there would be nothing to resist it; on the other, impossible, as there would be no place where it could be pushed” (“Second Letter of Henry More to Descartes”, 5 March 1649, 312; the bibl. sources for the correspondence are given in Koyré, op. cit., 289– 90, n.2, and the dispute—with its dialogical form—occupies Chs. v & vi).

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« ­manners » … means for … referring to that supreme and original essence that otherwise escapes all possibility of direct reference or description. The animal forms of the Tsimshian brave might also be just a “manner of speaking”, say for clan names, for rules of marriage and incest, or for some other field of intended yet assumed reference, such as to what here we term indiscernible. Then what had seemed, at first sight, but naive and child-like must be reconsidered as being a sophisticated, knowing use of language. Where the indiscernible and discernible are concerned, the differences between what come here associated, the one but a means for referring to the other, are absolute: we would not wish to compare together Idea and wood, say with the wood of tables; … they hold not the same status as meaning! But this poesis of an essentialism performs exactly such a task and does so on both an intellectual and a popular level … yes: star, virtue, plant, human organ, cure  … in that order of reasoning and reading! One member of the pair is absolutely beyond figure or word; it can only be alluded to indirectly, not directly designated; any language of reference to it operates in a closed phenomenal circuit that cannot include what is expressly designated by it; thus, René Char’s essentialist twentieth-century poetic had used words in order to represent what is without any possible direct description or name. The words of the poet must constitute an entirely closed domain of metaphor composed out of the lived words of any discernible experience: thus sun for essence or divinity (and a figure common, for example, to Hegel, Hölderlin, Zola, Char, and even to Neruda, and to many Asian metaphysics of expression for that original source of being). Such metaphors circle from the one to the other in a realm of literal allusion that never actually unites with the ultimate object concerned. They are intended to bring to mind, no more, the existence of that other « really real », yet indiscernible and unknowable, realm of truth,—what is imagined to be truth,—but outside of any possible access to a language that could name and refer directly to it.135 It is according to such a manner of constructing meaning, and of operating within that realm, living it, that Leonhardt Thurneisser could at once be a learned, experimental alchemist and a manufacturer of amulets intended to ward off ill health: the amulets were composed according to his specialised approach to knowledge and need not be judged as trickery, say as a cynical exploitation of popular susceptibilities. Likewise, it is this poesis that explains the conventional and intimate association (in a syntax of cause and effect), of an early botany with astrology and medicine, sign, virtue and cure, the forces of the heavens from which phenomenal being was thought derived, and, as already mentioned, we 135 In Neruda’s case, I am referring to the poetic encountered in his Cien Sonetos de Amor of 1965.

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find that the entries for plants in the published « botanies »—those of such wellknown contemporary « botanists » as Abraham Munting, Hendrik van Rheede, or Caspar Bauhin—include considerable information concerning virtues and cure. Munting was named professor of both the herbal and medical arts (“Hoogleraar der Genees- en Kruydkunde in der vermaarde Akademie te Groningen”). For both the intellectual and ordinary person the poesis served such functions because of its efficacious capacity to cause thought to transit and translate between differing domains and levels of abstract knowledge. Borges’ famous fiction of a Chinese encyclopaedia … consisting of items that no modern mind would regard as compatible with one another … corresponds to such a poesis of the real. Then Borges’ invention is no falsehood: it successfully characterises capacities for drawing relationships active in that past, but that differ from our own. Manuscripts reproducing or concerning The Sphere, or concerned with alchemy circulated throughout Europe, formed items of the learned private libraries of the day, even those of reputed scientists such as Newton. It is these very kinds of principle of connection and of translation of meaning between discrete aspects of being, as we have also seen characteristic of The Sphere, that the figure of the tower as a possible ascent to higher truth and true meaning could be imagined: it obviously underlies the idea of an ascent of a tower of knowledge, thus of a Tower of Babel, equally represented by the towers and spires of Christian churches or Buddhist temples, or by the steps of a Jacob’s ladder, and seen constructed in many very different, sometimes surprising kinds of Renaissance and later enterprise. One may cite, for example, Giulio Camillo’s famous « Theatre » of knowledge, discussed in detail by Yates, Tomasso Campanella’s utopian « city of the sun » (its author who defended Galileo), but also the anatomical theatres of dissection at Leiden and Padua, veritable « wells of knowledge », in which students are depicted looking downwards at the practise of the dissection … the laying out of the phenomena below constituting a corpus of being, the human body as if a microcosm of the supra-cosmic truth (which was also a truism of that past).136 The tower is one of an ultimate climb to synthesis, a throwing aside of materiality, and the well a descent into its analysis, thus an investigation of that same materiality, and they may be described together as a combination of a poesis of possible knowledge with a rationally conceived analytical practise. The painted representation of a child Christ, sitting at the summit of a small spiral tower in a small room, teaching the doctors of knowledge sitting below, is similarly conceived: 136 Many Safavid paintings also depict spectators looking down at the events narrated by the painter below and especially prominent in what is known as The Eckstein Shahnama. They remind one of the watching, discursive spectators ritually depicted on the frontispieces of many contemporary anatomy lessons, such as that of the Basel edition of Vesalio’s De humani corporis fabrica, and the Venice edn of his Anatomia. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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being this time a « tower of knowledge » revealed from its summit with the spectators below. What is represented is the flow downwards or an ascent upwards through the steps of knowledge, up or down a series of spiral levels treating the very same corpus of meaning at different levels of understanding: say, at the base the phenomenon, thence the concept, virtue, and finally, still in a phenomenal representation, their « ultimate » astral source, all of course metaphor for a passage and translation between levels of meaning. What is more, that very poesis can come combined with a post-Copernican standpoint, whatever appearances or statements appear to contradict such a possibility. Thus, as mentioned above, The Sphere continued to dominate practical imagination long after Copernicus and Galileo, and this is not because of delusion and error, but because of this constant contemporary sense, even force, of apparent relevance, thus of allusion and inference … of possibilities of connection between different imaginative levels that made of the poesis a veritable means and force of conceptual movement and reference. It is in this manner that this poesis became a practice of thought that allowed the Sphere to continue as a reference cadre for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century astral and alchemical medical botany, or for eighteenth-century Portuguese manuals of marine navigation and use of the astrolabe, or for peasant agricultural practice and herbal medicine closer to our own epoch, at the very same time as modern science, as we conceive it now, has taken form.137 And, perhaps, what 137 Botany was closely dependent upon the practice of medicine well into the nineteenthcentury, whether in Europe, China or elsewhere. Much of the information concerning plants provided by what we now choose to regard as a botany of the sixteenth-century, such as that of Leonardt Fuchs, concerns precise medical information for each of the plants listed, in his case in his Commentaires tres Excellens de l’Hystoire des Plantes … par Leonarth Fousch, an anonymous French translation of the original Latin work, and equally in an edn. of Histoire generalle des Plantes et Herbes avec leurs Proprietéz published in 1729. In fact, one moves, in full use of reason—in contemplating the universe of cause— through a series of ontological stages from the particularity of the stars, possessed of particular forces, to particular plants or parts of plants, and that, in turn, possess corresponding « virtues » doted by that astrological source of meaning (often visible upon their surfaces by some character of their appearance); and, thence, to the particular and corresponding maladies. The logic—or taxonomical principle—that binds all together is perfectly essentialist, and common to that encountered in Camillo’s Theatro, or in the stages of ascent of Campanella’s Città, thus in terms of the successively encompassing spheres of sense of The Sphere (and, indeed, the critical terms used for this logic of correspondences are found to be equally central in Kant). It is a poesis of knowledge. For an excellent exposition, centred upon one of the most well-known of astral botanists, viz. Alexandre Koyré’s “Paracelse (1493–1541)”, in his Mystiques, Spirituels, Alchimistes du xvie Siècle Allemand, 75–129. Another such astral botanist, among those mentioned above, was the alchemist Leonhard Thurneisser “zum Thurn, Medico ordinario Electoris Brandeburgici conscripta”, whose Historia sive descriptio Plantarum omnium tam Domesticarum quam Exoticorum (Berlin, 1578), is particularly well-illustrated Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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might most surprise us in encountering such evidence is its continued practical application, or, better put, its evident applicability in such a practical field as medicine and seafaring. d

Not an Infinity but Finitude

The consequence of the above discussion is the finitude or otherwise of what particularly concerns us in this book: the finitude of the commodity continuum and of what is claimed to be its universal cultural property, and how the latter should affect a judgement concerning the kind of spatial form covered and embodied by commodity-exchange, thus by a continuum of dense and active practise traversing the continents, and that, for this very reason, must be seen to embody all the « cultural » difference observed composing it and constituting its very condition of being and possibility. It constitutes a kind of space seen to have been developed with the very extension, through individual practise, of the forms of production and exchange we have come so to associate with the commodity. And we have had to insist on its capacity to traverse all the forms of cultural, linguistic and political difference encountered throughout that field of exchange, and, furthermore, to insist that such difference, superficially exotic and incomparable in appearance, actually embodies that singular synthesis of constitutive form judged as universal. Such differences express themselves not in contradiction with one another but in unison, that very universal continuing to augment in density and extension through proliferation of further differentiation, cultural, economic, expressive, and so with diagrams. Viz. Włodzimierz Hubicki’s useful article on Thurneisser, in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (xiii, 1976), 396–8. The important point here is that, aside from such notorious names, the general principles of connection and influence encountered in their works are widely accepted and common to them all. An example is Abraham Munting, university “professor of Medical & Herbal Arts at the Academy of Groningen” (“Hoogleraar der Genees- en Kruydkunde in der vermaarde Akademie te Groningen”), registered like Fuchs, the « virtues » of the plants in his Naauwkeurige Beschrijving der Aardgewassen (opus postumum, Leiden & Utrecht, 1696), and, like another naturalist of the epoch, Olivier de Serres, cultivated his own medical garden. Concerning navigational theory and praxis, see the diagrams and explanations in Manuel Pimentel, Arte de Navegar (Lisbon, 1712); the full title suggests the practical purposes of the work. It is one of several contemporary navigational manuals reprinted by the Portuguese Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, in this case together with a contemporary Portuguese translation of Sacrobosco’s Sphere, with commentary and annotations by Armando Cortesão, Fernanda Aleixo & Luís de Albuquerque, cf. e.g. 50–51, nn. and Os Guias Náuticos de Munique e Évora, and containing earlier 16th century texts (these themselves being new edns. of earlier works), but following a period of great importance for Portuguese navigation.

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forth, whilst always identifiable, even recognisable and singular in its general character, a space traversed … journeyed as such, its matter learned and practised. If such reasoning remains but interpretation, its truth is difficult to resist, and, most important, it is seen to concern a really empirical facticity, and not just some underlying kind of conceptual comprehension of our own. Furthermore, it constitutes a facticity concerning which countless ordinary anonymous individuals could learn its properties, composing a knowledge for thought and practice, and in whatever local and circumstantial forms it might  come expressed, thus empirically accessible to conscious mind, and not just to a distant interpreter or learned scientist (an exclusivity that, however, is true of structuralism). The kind of evidence encountered time and again, scattered amongst a vast secondary literature concerned with intercontinental and regional trades, merely confirms and conforms to such observations: this work may not be concerned to propose the cultural universalism that is my own concern, but they treat a kind of fact that, when interrogated from the perspective of trade and payment, thus from those of the economic historian, can not be seen to disqualify my reading of it nor counter the implications I draw from that reading. To speak of contemporary practice, say the particular marks and signs, or calligraphic characters inscribed on a Chinese sycee, confirms a kind of recognition identical with what we see stamped or cut upon the visible surfaces of other « exotic » money forms throughout the continuum (what I bring under the notion of a packaging » of the commodity designed to render them recognizable … readable at each point of exchange, like a text), forming part of the instrumental context in which market exchange composed an actively translational and communicational medium of practice in which one exotic item can be exchanged for another, and expressed as doing so, by its actors, in thought, act and written word and, most crucially, number. It forms part of the calculable, instrumental and conscious anthropology of all participants, including those who merely purchased goods for their own personal use in a shop or from a market stall, or from a roving pedlar; in every case, that act of purchase implies a knowledge and a full knowing and intentional participation that if looked at in the detail could be analysed as a procedure of thoughts and acts, that seen for itself is already a synthesis of a diversity of experience and drawn from the passage of any person through the topography of the real. The pedlar too is a full part of this singular anthropology of a kind of knowledge and aptitude that have to be acquired, learned, composed of the micro-detail informing the local and exotic means prevalent of any particular contextual cadre of operation, and who decides, chooses and acts in terms of that knowledge and by means of such aptitude. That aptitude we have wished to characterise as a

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true literacy, if not a literacy in a familiar and conventional sense. Secondary work on early-modern intercontinental and regional trade may not examine their fields of study in precisely such terms; it is what it inevitably implies and what the earlier chapters have depicted above. In short, when reading such secondary works, those porting some merely local attention on some trade, a firm, a port, or marketing region, an instrument or an institution, we find ourselves before an evidence that in no way contradicts my treatment, and when reflected upon must be recognised as confirming it, both in terms of the nature of the individual commodity or instrument of payment, and in terms of the universal status of the transcendental constitution of the commodity object that penetrates every feature through and through concerning commoditisation. The universal informs and transcends all difference, founds the very possibility of an entirely translational, communicational practice throughout, no matter what one author or another might claim that would contrast with such a view. And, although obviously and incontrovertibly empirical, it is, yes, universal in its constitutive principles, and thus in the comportments that constitute it, and, yet, without a hint of any metaphysical ground or reference, this being the necessary conclusion of our entire argument up to the present. In working ourselves into the kinds of varied sense invested, in the past, into that other word « infinite », we have had to conclude that the kind of space composed by those rules of transcendental constitution of the commodity object presented above, and through which the commodity is given sequential productive form, repeated as such in potentially multiple different production lines, and organised in always different empirical conditions (because located in history, in time and place, and thus always contingent in the fabric of their detail), must all be judged finite.138 A yarn, a cloth, a named market variety of rice or millet, is itself, in its turn, likely to be composed—made a single identity—from a plurality of numerous different prior identities all prepared under different conditions, and brought 138 Since I have been presenting this problem of the constitution of the culture of commoditisation according to a Kantian transcendentalist and phenomenological interrogation, in dual methodological combination with its empirical and historical constitution (and insisting on the necessity of this dualism of approach, thus of pursuing both currents in interrogative parallel with one another), I mention the excellent formulations concerning the relationship between multiplicity and identity in Gurwitsch’s, Equisse de la Phénomenologie Constitutive, 159–60: his remarks concern the Husserlian use of the terms noem, noese and of perception (“this trichotomy”, the object prior to attention, thus in-itself, being the ground on which these other three stages and states are constituted), but can legitimately be extended to all scales of attention, thus to the inter-subjectivity of culture itself, … legitimate precisely because concerned with a universal conceived as such.

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from near and far. This proved true, for example, of the cottons exported from localities in Gujarat through a sequence of markets and group transformations to China. The more we look at the whole field of the commodity or attend to any particular detail concerning it, and the more we reflect on the very character of its constitution as object and act—and whether considered positively, say in scientific or technical terms, or else in those of a Kantian/Husserliantype transcendental phenomenology—all appear irreducibly finite, since empirical, a matter experienced, drawn into consciousness, and composing the raw materials of an instrumental practice. It is also true to conclude that it is finitude that characterises the individual when seized in the space and time coordinates of any encounter of that person in an archival reference, thus in Hegel’s sense of a human being seen as being materially determined, so to speak, by such location, and seized in the very act of advancing at time’s edge, stepping forth into a nothingness of what is « notyet », what has not come about but that is coming to be, and thereby generating, at each moment of his or her being, what comes to constitute time/space. It is a finitude wholly estranged from any notion of metaphysical necessity, say from the need for some further grounding of causation.139 Thus, we have seen that, even seized in its quantitative dimension—thus according to that which defines unity to its scattered and dispersed differential distribution, and to its application as a quantitative language of active 139 I may now note Husserl’s marvellous expression for this frontier concerning the human being and time/space: it is one before which, in continuing to be, to think, to stand still or advance, the individual happens indeed to proceed … to advance composing time/space in doing so. It is a frontier, that, obviously when thought of as such, can never be transgressed but instead only advanced, as through being, thinking, let alone doing and acting: Husserl describes it as a zone of inactuality constantly prone to conversion into actuality through the constant uninterruptible stream of an individual’s consciousness. One may indeed ask, like Kant, about its reality beyond mere human imagination. While, indeed, he was concerned here with consciousness, I have chosen to appropriate his conception for the more general relationship of culture to finitude in its own right. In Husserl’s own words: “… the uninterrupted chain of cogitations is constantly confronted by a zone of inactuality, always ready, itself, to be converted into actuality, as reciprocally actuality becomes inactuality”. (Ideen, i, 73 [64]: “… die kontinuierlich fortlaufende Kette von cogitationes beständig von einem Medium der Inaktualität umgeben ist, diese immer bereit, in den Modus der Aktualität überzugehen, wie umgekehrt die Aktualität in die Inaktualität”.). But it seems to me that this manner of conceptualising time is very close to, perhaps inherited … imbibed … from Hegel’s arguments about time, history and temporal being ultimately dissolved into the re-constructed concept of the « Now » [his Itzt] of the present instant, the past absenting itself, the future inexistent, but both, finally, considered as constituent parts of that Now: thus diachrony (method) becomes synchrony (truth).

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e­ valuation applied to commodity-difference—that there are no grounds for qualifying our conviction of its entire finitude. The notion of the universal as a truly empirical ground for the phenomenological character of the commodity world, paradoxical though it may sound, cannot disqualify this judgement of its being entirely without hint of an essentialist reference, thus hint of infinitude. This does not mean that the participants themselves were free of beliefs, but that, just like the new laws of relativity, it could be expressed and conceived independently of them, in wholly materialist terms.140 The consequence of this conclusion is a whole fresh domain of further questioning that continues to be of some importance, entailing a need for further explanation: for, we repeat, how can such a universal, justly deemed as such, come to assume a real and empirical, phenomenal and lived, presence in an entirely finite world? How can it be conceived as universal and yet equally as historical and cultural, incarnated in accident and event, and generated intersubjectively by an ocean of individual human acts? This question is all the more patent when we understand this universal as having been lived and expressed through concrete individual circumstantial career, thought and act, all as if conforming to it, not more or less but absolutely, without degree or exception. It is acted out, given form, by all of the inhabitants of the continuum, a universal of becoming and fact. It must be conceived universal it terms of a geological and historical course of evolutionary development, revealed perhaps though a future palaeontology, as already suggested. We have already hinted at some kind of answer to these questions, but will return to it only towards the end of the book. e

A Finitude Closed and Bounded? Or Open and Illimitable? Our Return to Kant!

In consequence of this affirmation of its finitude, an entirely fresh but necessary question opens before us, one properly controversial and raised by current debate concerning globalisation, the answers to which have serious further consequences for the kind of inherent order to be understood as characterising the continuum of commoditisation, thus of the kinds of space generated by, thus consequent upon, the growth of early capitalism,—of its global and globalising forms. Like many answers to serious and difficult questions, this one also points back at our question concerning its finitude or infinitude. That

140 I refer to the combination of metaphysical belief, those held by early twentieth century scientists, with a capacity to advance scientific explanation.

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is to say, our preference for the finitude of the commodity continuum opens but a fresh door to a further problematic concerning order and organisational form. The question has now become whether such finitude—its organisational and systematic character embodied by the entire continuum of exchange (the domain of the commodity, and a continuum progressively occupied by the extensions of its universal culture)—should be conceived of as being closed or open, the latter meaning, in principle, without ostensible limit (except that, so relevant today, of the limits of the material universe). I have repeatedly added the word « open » when writing of that domain yet without interrogating the justice or grounds for such a judgement. This question is intimately connected with our previous interrogation concerning use of the definite and indefinite articles to the various forms of human identity, thus to assumptions concerning how to accord collective identities to human populations; when forms of reference embodying such assumptions become entirely generalised, as is true in this particular case, their avoidance brings with it the inconvenience (yes, that word, once more) of the apparent inelegance of any alternative, since breaking with the rules of habit and the aesthetic that habit institutes. Nonetheless we must assume that risk, and ask whether it is just to describe that continuum as «  a system  », or does it instead distort our perspective on its forms and global significance? Can that article be permitted when the commodity continuum is regarded in its abstract entirety, … but in turn leading to it being inevitably regarded as a closed and holist entity with distinctive boundary problems with its potential neighbours, just like those « languages » and « ­cultures » that similarly trouble us. Once one takes that other Darwinist kind of epistemology of the real seriously, that so well represented by von Wartburg’s dictionary, differential and circumstantial by definition, yet understood as constitutive, the implication can only be that such a manner of characterising societal and economic organisation leads understanding by the nose in its violence to the facts of the historical constitution of the real. And, take note, once such boundary defined societal and social entities are assumed, those assumed boundaries become the very object itself, … object of discussion and intense, even theoretical dispute, yet without their reality being itself interrogated, let alone researched. Then, let us ask, is it, instead, systematic, no more than systematic … yet even systematic? To ask this question is to imply the possibility of a radically different conception of the nature of that reality, inherently dynamic and without engaging an assumption concerning whether it is bounded or not, and that conforms consistently with all that we have argued above concerning the commodity continuum, thus of that merchant capitalism of the past. It then

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opens its presence to the possibility of being everywhere characterised by systematic continuities of relationship and even form with what lies beyond it, capitalistic or not, and thus by piece-meal penetrative extension into any possible neighbouring beyond, and organised in terms of that dynamic inter-­ subjective, participative constitution of any possible human reality.141 In short, if judged finite, should it also be regarded without interrogation as bounded, as « a system », and thus as if located adjacent to other different organisational orders that can be contrasted and ordered against one another, as it has indeed been the fashion of the social disciplines of the twentieth century? That automatic application of the definite and indefinite article to groups of language speaker, or differing in, say, culture or economy—as, for example,  in Wallerstein’s manner of conceiving his «  capitalist world system  »—­ possesses precisely such ramifications and tends also to be drawn from a long pervasive collective inheritance of the same auto-practice. In Wallerstein’s case, we confront but an idea of « system »—attached to the very same historical subject-matter and run of history with which this book has been concerned,—and in which, so we read, notions of centre, geographical asymmetry and boundary, and, above all, of massive geographical exclusions, are central priorities of judgement. They are determined by an internal self-ordering conception of interior organisation conceived as having driven the entirety of « the system », and that bear in turn serious further interpretive consequences. On what other basis does a frontier of difference appear between Asia and Capitalistic Europe: the first where vast continuous imports of silver are alleged excluded from active monetary circulation, the second capitalistic, mod­ ernistic, centralising and metropolitan? In such a perspective the use of a definite or indefinite article seems apposite; but does it not also blind attention to the possibility of some other form of intercontinental and societal organisation, such as expounded here, one that takes the accent off bounded kingdoms and autonomous cultural continents and places it on that Darwinian constitutive base of constitutive circumstance and accident? Are not such linguistic usages just a fresh version of the anthropologist’s model of relatively closed and holistic cultures, but transferred, in this case, to a global scale of economical interaction and observation?—And, to repeat Cassirer’s dictum, sharing the very same grounds?

141 See “State-Formation Reconsidered” in The Invisible City, for a systematic exploration of such an approach to late-precolonial Western India. Note too that it is here that all the difference in terms of method and approach characterised by Toer and Geertz, raised above, must again confront us.

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This should remind the reader of the discussion in Chapter 1 of the nation state treated by economic historians as representative statistical entities competing with one another, … contrasted with other like entities, as if runners in some Olympic competition. What has happened in the present case is the common-sensical cloning of such an epistemology onto organisational identities on the scale of civilisations and continents, « Wests » and « Easts », vast types of culture assumed as identities, thus cultural stereotypes in their own right, successful “Europes” and failed “Chinas”, or, say, an “India”, that for the Indologists is disconnected from any broader context of systematic relat­ ionship. We then may read of one «  system  » invading and undoing other ­similarly-conceived, holistic, societal « systems »: the Asian Mode of Production, a cyclic civilisation, or a still-feudal order, and so forth, each adjacent to the other, thus another, essentially identical version of Eric Wolf’s nice metaphor of « billiard balls ». This is to say that the problem of an assumed, a-prioristic closure persists even when an author seeks to controvert the endemic presence of closure in the languages and epistemology of social « science », as we have seen with the economic historians.142 Convenience has its inevitable cost. One must fight against such habit in one’s own use of language, risk inconvenience and inelegance. How, then, should we seek to read the order of the commodity world with which this book is concerned? Is it indeed ordered, and if so, must it then, necessarily, be regarded as «  an  » order, a bounded order, thus “enclosed”,—a bounding defined by the apparent geographical limits of what we treat as an evidence of commodification in socio-geographic space? And since we consider it a veritable culture of the commodity, must we, therefore, accept it in that relativist and culturalist sense as a closed cultural entity from which, by definition, problems of «  translation  » must arise with regard to whatever kinds of societal organisation that lay outside of it? Inevitably, in such a closure, the internalised notion of totality would come to possess more sense than any of its parts or aspects.143 It is this which gives full meaning and ­consequence 142 Eric Wolf, Europe & the People without History, “Introduction”. It must be emphasised that the whole dependencia tradition, beginning with André Gunder Frank’s Capitalism & Underdevelopment in Latin America (Harmondsworth, 1967, revised. edn.), and including Immanuel Wallerstein’s several historical works, had conceived itself as an attempt to frame an effective response to social-science closures, and has been widely misunderstood and criticised precisely because of this disposition. 143 Kant asks the question in the following manner: “… the solution … needs be sought no further than that of deciding whether, in regressing towards the unconditioned magnitude of the world-whole ([but] according to time and space), this illimitable ascent [niemals begrenzte Aufsteigen] implies a return to what can be called the infinite [­unendliche

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to the Dumontian idea of a « caste system », and that Geertz adopted for his Negara. But can one even ask historical questions of such an already fullyformed entity: for example, of how any alleged regime of consensual circular redistribution of wealth, services and status, founded upon a harmonious regime of social inequality and circular redistribution, could possibly have come into being? That such historical records do not exist? That history and change are but contingency and do not interest the social « scientist »? Or is such response and method but, once more, a convenience, since, upon reflexion, the distribution of wealth, subject to seasonal and annual vicissitudes of climate and conflict, and other frequent contingencies affecting the harvest, requires writing and record, number and the written word, thus accounting and a specialist cadre of accountants, yes, an entire and active administration. One must seek and search for whatever hints of such materials might have survived, or accept such closure of attention and method, accepting the exclusion of all those kinds of evidence that would, necessarily, demand a complex conception and approach. A domestic woollen cloth industry stretching across several European boundaries in the early middle ages, and financed by capital stemming from scattered European sources even more broadly distributed, comes to constitute a serious problem for description, and not solved simply by increasing the scale of the unit concerned: to make of that unit a « Europe » or « world system ». The consequence is an inevitable closure of the interpreter’s thinking,— « inevitable », because, as argued both above and in Ch. 1, any assumed or applied closure may be seen to generate systematic epistemological consequences that determine, limit and organise both the form and the disposition of the explanation itself. Consequently, and obviously, given my stated purposes, my choice of an answer must follow an entirely different track, and once again it is Kant who helps us to understand what this track might be.— « Systematic » need not—does not, so I argue—necessarily mean « a system » with its definite or indefinite article, any more than « organised » needs imply « an organisation »! Before, therefore, turning back to Kant, I want to return to a previous point closely concerned with this focus on system, on Wallerstein’s use of it and on the broad inheritance of historical and anthropological assumption from

heißen könne], or only towards an indeterminable, illimitable regression indefinitum”.: Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 512 [Ak. A.518/B.546] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 455); but, as remarked below, it is both a condition for the distinction between the in-itself and experience, that marks the First Critique, and that is repeated time and again in the Opus Postumum, as Kant attempts to come to an adequate statement.

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which such views of his are drawn. For, clearly, it is but part of a much more generalised model concerning possible cross-frontier contact and change with widespread ramifications for our approach to our subject and discipline introduced earlier in this same chapter but which I wish to take up in more detail. It concerns that very notion that the history of capitalism is marked by a progressive invasion from outside of an old world conceived of as fragmented into a collection of different organised non- or pre- capitalist societal forms. This teleology is expressed in many different ways but all resting upon the same bed of assumption, that Daphnis finally rapes Chloe for the good or the bad and produces its faithful offspring, class society, competition and the cash nexus. The use of that phrase « cash nexus » is characteristic of tendencies affecting the historiography of South Asia: invading from outside in penetrating and thus dissolving … « disenchanting » … what is habitually conceived as an originally cohesive and integrated moral order, say that of caste, the ritual exchange world of jajmani, as if sufficient to describe a complete economy, and observed acting upon the scale of a village, or say that of the ideological world of the medieval orders alleged to have once characterised a whole national society. It may be favoured or attacked, but in being so is generally adventitiously attached to some political teleology of change: that of progress for the economic historian and developmental economist, of long-term civilisational degeneration for certain kinds of conservative philosopher, or frequently associated in a kind of utopian politics with the destruction of a falsely conceived egalitarian community such as the Russian mir or Maharashtran bhavband (brotherhood). The consequence described or desired would be social differentiation, thus a class society driven by competition and exploitational work forms, and which happens to coincide with what is actually observed at the moment of research by historian or anthropologist, since, so I have alleged—in anticipation of a future, largely-researched study which I hope to publish—markets, moneys and commodity-exchange had existed from the very beginnings of extensive settled agriculture. The consequence is that this fictive model of change may be applied in pre-historic, medieval and modern epochs alike (in the South Asian case, by a Kosambi, a Habib or a modern-day development economist), the calendar of this process of rape depending entirely upon the research focus of the author. Development economists even sought to stimulate  such events, as if ab ovo, in the early phases of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, influenced strongly by then current economic theory. But we see it equally in operation in the late twentieth century literature concerning f­inancial ­organisation in nineteenth century China, differentiating say the operations and status as forms of knowledge, of native banking institutions and Western banks, as if, respectively, traditional and modern, retarded and progressive, but

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which instead can with research be shown to be parts of closely integrated, interdependent sets of institutional connectivity.144 What if, instead, we find and posit that money and markets, thus traders and exchanges, the production by work of commodities, thus that whole order in which quantification of value finds its proper location, were entirely coincident with the highly differentiated societal orders settling vast territories, at least from the late-fifteenth century, and probably long before, from the eighth, even the fourth, thus coincident with the times when extensive and intensive inter-regional exchanges are first encountered in the records? It is what I have argued programmatically in anticipating an intended further publication, necessary to render more complete this study of the commodity. One might extend such a hypothesis—proposing the intimate interdependence of commodity formation with the very beginnings of extensive societal and class development—into a remote past such as we encounter when reading of phases of vigorous intersocietal and state-institutional growth, together with interregional commercial exchange, and the spread of religious and aesthetic ideas covering much of South East, East and Southern Asia: the wrecks of ships from that remote period reveal vigorous trades in porcelains and spices (« spice » the very source of the later commercial term « species »), and in the metals necessary to mint the monetary forms that paid for them. That « first » surge of commoditisation extends into the fifteenth century, encountering a new phase of vigorous continental settlement, as in the black-earth regions south of Muscovy and on the Chinese river plains where rice agriculture would be practised. It is at then at this moment of a fresh phase of expansion and extension of society, economy and commoditisation that we encounter the commodity in the present book, take it up as a phenomenal world already formed and in operation and movement.—In such a case, there would have been no « original » society to be undone: class differentiation and exploitation in the form of work would simultaneously accompany the evidences of ritual « moral » forms of redistributional exchange characterising caste, which cannot be identified with the economic necessity of any social forms to reproduce themselves in duration. Our apparently egalitarian peasant-formed institutions as, say, the mir and bhavband, would reveal themselves as having been institutional administrative facets of the very functioning of extractive and distributive mechanisms concerning the agricultural product of labour, thus forged from the start within the very eye of class difference. A very large and extensive historiography now exists supporting such a view. 144 My “Financial Institutions and Business Structures … 1500 to 1900”, in The Invisible City.

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This is what many past and recent studies show: Shandong and Muscovy, the black-earth regions of central Russia, my own regions of research in Central and Western India. I shall turn to this theme, as said, in a later publication, where it can be explained why at this stage it should be addressed in its own right. Its importance and difficulty, the complexity and scale required for an adequate treatment cannot be denied but require a further, and different kind of study, devoted entirely to the empirical and historical recovery of that past, the present study devoted instead to exposing the singular heuristic urgence and importance of applying a Kantian-type phenomenology to the empirical. Yet, indeed, it is with such a history of class and state formation that the very subject of commoditisation must eventually become entirely conjugated and integrated. Such hypothesis coincides closely with the extensive ground of connective relationship uniting society and culture on a global scale that underlies ­dependencia-type historical and sociological interpretation, that which I especially associate with the name of Gunder Frank and others concerned with agricultural development in Latin America. The latter has also sought to criticise and replace prevalent notions of closure that had long justified twentiethcentury policies of development, underlay their relative failure, having been based upon that veritable ideology of penetration. As in my own case in the present study, dependencia had founded such substantial and impressive critique upon a radical and systematic enlargening of the very cadre in which a sufficient field of research should be constituted in order to satisfy fully the needs of explanation for any local and particular field of enquiry. But a further problem ensues. It is the tendency for dependencia-type interpretation to constitute its field of attention and passage between cause and effect to merely two levels of an empirical reality: the « general » and the « particular », as if these sufficed to describe the full complexity and density of social and economic organisation, thus the level of global forms of power, trade and exchange, in their connections to the most particular seeming level of social and economic organisation in each particular territory of choice: such opposition of extreme levels forms a basis for theories of economic dualism, which dependencia opposes. Once more the opponents share the same insufficient grounds of assumption concerning the constitution of the real! And one knows full well what « general » means in a cadre of dependencia: it is radical and totalising; however who is to say what is « particular » unless properly defined as a problem in its own right engaging the very question of identity and order? The biologist would ask whether it is the corpus of the individual, the object of the anatomy lesson, or the molecules, the gene; whilst a historical demographer might ask whether it

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is the individual person or the social unit of successful reproduction, which latter may include a very high level of mortality? It is to say that hidden within such a pairing is already implicated a more complex ordering and field of causation, of complexes of both relationship and multiple autonomies, such as we have encountered above where marketisation is concerned, or where the Darwinian sense of the accidental yet constitutive role of the individual is at issue. Instead we would propose a method of study that would better focus— bring to attention, … problematise—a whole complex of inter-working and overlapping levels and scales of organisation and communication, all involving relationships of cause-and-effect, and thus that act to interpose between the extremes, indeed to articulate as if a «  volume filled  » organisation of « scales » and « levels » distinguished metaphorically within a whole field of relational interdependence. In such terms, economic or other kinds of dualism, together with their spurious ramifications, would become inconceivable. Then it is precisely this field of relative particularism that becomes the issue of enquiry with all of its interrogative implications concerning the sufficiency of the contexts necessary for explaining what we encounter within that local field. Finally a whole set of different «  particularisms  » disengages itself. To simplify, that coin held tightly in the peasant Ramaji Talegaonkar’s hand brings into view the intercontinental trades in precious and base metals, questions of industry and markets ordinarily left unseen and ignored in conventional approaches, the very basis in forms of local social relationship that underlie the presence of that coin in his hand.145 Inevitably, we are forced to seek a sufficient and appropriate methodology for confronting this complexity concerning any field of adequate explanation: that, for example, I have proposed as a sampling of the different fields and levels of the complex, but which in turn must constantly be re-adjusted through what is revealed unexpectedly in the ongoing progress of a programme of research, … as suggested in Ch. 1. For anyone unsure of her- or himself, concerning such an approach, P.A. Toer’s Buru Quartet might operate as a fascinating guide and as inspiration: fiction, but yes, yet embodying a many-sided truthfulness garnered from experience, … and, yes, a good example of any individual’s accumulation of a body of knowledge through personal experience that has formed an important part of my discussion above. This change of approach would be means to entirely transform the conditions of debate, but that now seems without possible i­ ssue, yet that we might associate with Gunder Frank’s original and so significant 145 For my fictional peasant Ramaji Talegaonkar, see note 117 of this same chapter, above.

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i­nitial formulations of a « dependencia »-approach to the same forms of globalisation that concern us.146 But, whereas his approach has been historical and general, mine is constitutive, anthropological and particular. It is he, after all, who, like Lévi-Strauss, had undermined predominant convention concerning the role of archaism and underdevelopment in comparative studies. Then we may return to the question of what more Kant has to offer us. The forms of intuition, thus space and time, provide the means to compose that divisibility of things that go to constitute the perception of objects, thus to compose the phenomenal character of experience. Preceding perception, however, it would be reasonable to imagine—as condition for such phenomenal definition—a unity of primary being that is without division, without limit, thus infinite.147 Once any limitation, any act of definition of any kind, acting on part or aspect of it, has been conceived—say that notion of a boundary to the universe through which Simplicio had in splendid irony been advised to try plunging his sword—this world would no longer be undivided and infinite (if indeed this were the case, which, since inaccessible, may not be so), but instead phenomenalised in some manner and form; that is, through the very act of gaining access to it … of rendering it accessible to mind … one has already limited … qualified it … in some manner. It is to say that the very application of mind to any subject matter constitutes its limitation in consciousness as possible form and kind. What we see, by implication, is reduced to quality and kind. The implication is that something is left behind unthought, even altered in kind, left « outside » and « other », as it were, but that goes to constitute what Kant had deemed inaccessible to mind.148 Nonetheless, what had previously seemed infinite, to belong to another world or dimension of being, had become, through this thought, finite and matter. 146 André Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, and The Development of Underdevelopment. 147 We have seen that this idea of « undivided world matter », of « the moving forces of matter », is discussed repeatedly in the Opus Postumum, but even in its earlier formulations, for example in the First Critique, it is conceived in similar terms. See, once more, the entry in Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, for «  Réalität  », 450–3, which explores the evolution of Kant’s thought on this matter. Note, however, that the word « limitation » signifies « finite », and « original », and yet used to refer to the « true » reality, inaccessible to human perception and reason, the ding-an-sich. What thereby is rendered finite and limited, is not necessarily limited as extension. His very manner of expressing himself suggests the converse, as we shall see confirmed below. 148 In a final revision of this text, I also note Rudolf Lotze’s thoroughly Kantian affirmation concerning the inaccessibility to thought of the relationship between representation and the facts so represented, that is between thought and reality (Lotze, Logik, iii, 1, §309, 498–9, quoted and commented by Morel, “Lotze: Platoniser Kant?”, 5–6).

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When we think of this in terms of a world of objects, and of words—of designations for those objects (and objects for those words)—then it is clear that we are here involved in a world equally constituted in mind, or let us say, with respect of our own case, constituted by mind and hand, thus a praxis, externalised into the surrounding world as a physical reality which then confronts us, and in terms of which alone, in consequence, we act and relate. Most obviously, this artifice of human action and culture is finite. The diversity of things [Dinge] is but a limitation of an « undifferentiated substratum » [gemeinschaftliches substratum] … That « original [state of] being » [Urwesen] must be considered simple [Einfach], thus indivisible. It cannot consist of things nor be an aggregate of the same…. ‘The matter for objects of sense [Gegenstände der Sinne], thus for the possibility of empirical objects [Gegenstände], their differentiation from one another, and their thoroughgoing determination, can be conceived only as based entirely upon such limitation’.149 149 Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, 452; from the entry on “Realität”, combining paraphrase and quotation. Note how the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit might have used comparable words in his own formulations of an exhaustive determination of an empirical entity in thought. The affinity is striking, although expressed by Hegel in a relentless and decisive use of the dialectic, step by step, laying out for himself the whole process of thought mediating between the two conditions; yet Hegel has come to treat that « highest reality » as a matter of mind, rather than that of an inaccessible universal reality. His « substratum  » would be like the pieces of a whole assembled by the proverbial philosopher’s « watchmaker » at the start of a procedure of re-constituting the phenomenal world from its component elements and, then, differentiated dialectically as realised parts. The dialectic thus gives a different style to the form of his argument, when compared with Kant’s, and yet one senses a closely similar procedural concern with determining how thought of the world is possible and comes about, … what changes occur to what is sensed in making the world object of thought. Rather than « limitation » (negative), he would surely have preferred that so-Hegelian term « realisation » (positive), thus the complete step by step, moment by moment, « realisation », … what Husserl describes at once as « reduction » (negative) and « constitution » (positive). The formal differences distinguishing the three philosophers become plain in such passages, but equally the presence of a fundamental and thoroughgoing transcendentalist Kantism inherited by both of those who followed, and upon which I have commented above. Each would « remove the father » whilst nonetheless working within the particular channel of his concerns, further developing those ideas of procedure and constitution, and that have also proven so important in this book. « Urwesens » might here be better translated as « essence », and Kant’s equally enigmatic « Wesens aller Wesen » as the « essence of all essence », and what the religious regard as divinity, &c. « Gemeinschaftliches » might here better be translated as « harmonious » or « singular », but not common or associative: the ideal of the Russian mir or of Roussseau’s General Will is not an accumulation or sum but, instead, a complete and

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Of course, in appropriating this Kantian view of phenomenalisation, my i­ntention is not to ask whether his view of the conceptual pair, a priori-cuminfinity / a posteriori- cum-illimitability, possesses actual scientific validity, but instead to adapt it, as a realistic and adequate description to that of the production of the commodity, both as thought and act, thus as a condition whereby any already-existing matter may enter such a procedure of thought and productive intention and act; for this already-existing matter is clearly what we have also defined above as the « raw-material » of the production process and plastic in that sense of being matter for a fresh process of production, both in thought and practice, never mind that it might time and again have entered previous acts of production (such as when we read in European and Asian documentation of the reminting of old coin, plate or canon for coin, and so forth). It is in this sense that I choose to transfer Kant’s notion of how things become formed in mind, thus to how an already-empirical matter becomes commodity, … becomes rendered commodity by means of the specific forms and kinds of thought and work required by definition to constitute that objectform as discussed in the previous sections (Ch. 3, §§ ii and iii). In taking full cognisance of this procedure of limitation and definition—these acts of separation and constitution, … of giving identity to what comes to be made, thus as syntheses of qualities and quantities (what Husserl call « unities of sense » and Kant « concept » of the object150), and thus as part of a « new » experiential or second nature composed entirely by human work and consisting of commodities and of commodity-related institutions and instruments (how this all comes to take form as a vast and dense constructional edifice)—we become pressed to conclude that this empirical domain of the commodity is best perfect synthesis of the all difference: that word « gemeinschaftlich » takes on a very particular kind of sense in such different contexts, and, as in these expressions of Kant, seem two sides of a single face, in his case the universe knowable and that which is inaccessible. Surely, it is the ideal too of the « Tower » of knowledge, say the Tower of Babel, where, in reaching the skies, all differences have ceased to be difference. 150 « Unity of sense », « Sinneseinheiten », Ricoeur’s « unités de sense » in his translation of Husserl’s description of the constitution of the perceived object in mind: a unity of all the different experiences of encountering that object; thus Husserl himself, in Ideen zu einen Reinen Phänomenologie, 120: “Alle realen Einheiten sind « Einheiten des sinnes ». Sinneseinheiten setzen …”. (“All real unities are « unities of sense ». To posit such unities of sense …”.) By unity of sense, we may say « identity », the identity of an object, « table » or « chair », designated by some definable name:—but that, in reality, is a provisional, ongoing constant process of synthesis and modification, seized at some moment of such experience; that of all one’s past and present experiences of a so-designated object or identity, and that unites together to constitute the « concept » of such an object, as Kant would put it: « a unity of sense »!—A bafta or Hungarian ducat.

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c­ onceived as a massive realm of open possibility … and necessarily based upon the drive and will to intervene in and on what already exists.151 We see no reason at any stage of such a process to instigate a definitive interruption to it, to see an obstacle to its indefinite extension within and without, even though temporary intervals, breakdowns in communications and momentary arrests are frequently encountered in the evidence. That is to say, openness and possibility are defining characteristics of commodification: in generating new identities, one divides within or adds without, dividing further what already exists within and adding to what already exists without. Again, therefore, the contrast here is between first and second natures, between the fluid and the fixed. For example, the contrast would be that between so-called “raw” gold and coin (say, gold plate or old gold coin entering as a “raw material” for the minting of new gold coin), thus in order to produce fresh identities that are at once commodities and instruments of payment. It might be between the many varieties of «  raw  »-cotton, yet imported into a market place, or even already-collected and transformed, called « raw » in such ­markets,—new groupings and denominations being successively applied to them as they are repeatedly collected along their extended trajectories, and each time according to a fresh typological consideration determined by the demand expressed beyond for that object, thus before being sent on elsewhere on its trajectory. It is to say, therefore, that constantly and ubiquitously these two natures—the natural and the artificial, nature and culture—meet together within our evidence in both accord and conflict, and do so complexly in a variety of ways.152 Then, even here, it is hardly possible to talk of a frontier, 151 Now rereading these lines, thus in 2018, I may quote de Saussure, who, in turn, was quoted by Roman Jacobson in a letter to Lévi-Strauss of 25th February 1966 (Jacobson— Lévi-Strauss Correspondance, 271–2): “It’s true that in returning to the grounds of these things, one apperceives, in this domain, as in the related domain [domaine parent] of linguistics, that all incongruities in our thinking derive from an insufficient reflexion on what constitutes identity, and where the properties [charactères] of identity are concerned, when pointing to an inexistent being, like the word, a person of a mythology, or a letter of an alphabet, and which are but different forms of the sign, in its philosophical meaning” (Jacobson’s emphasis). But it is precisely this question of a reflexion on what constitutes an identity—­ whether existing or inexistent (say planned)—that has concerned so much of my own study of the anthropology of the commodity. An identity as commodity, thus as an artifice, as stereotype, is not identical to a natural or Darwinist identity. 152 It will be remembered that « raw material » represents what becomes regarded as the undifferentiated resource entering a production line, and seen as such, in spite of the ­actual, and obviously visible, cultural heterogeneity of the individual objects that are brought to compose it. I defined this idea above in terms of mint production: that « raw material » might, where silver is concerned, consist of different kinds of old coin, plate,

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unless it be of a frontier « that is everywhere », thus like Bruno and de Cusa’s notions of a « centre that is everywhere ». f

Thinking the Object into Being and the Reality-Status of that Thought

The consequence of the above arguments is not only that the creation of difference in and by mind, remains the issue before us, thus that sequence of moments that goes in each case to compose different stereotypical object-­ identities … acts of mind that themselves constitute no more than particular moments in a complex sequence of variable procedures leading to their eventual fabrication as a final material object of consumption characteristic of the incessant teleology of the commodity world. It is also that the very material status of what is so constituted must equally concern us, and, furthermore, not only that of the object so constituted, but also the material status that we must accord even to the very rules of possible constitution, to those very processes of constituting that thought of the object, transcendental and phenomenological, Kantian and Husserlian, and as worked through above as being the very principles of possible constitution. It concerns us also because those rules must be faithfully conformed with in being crystallised in terms of real physical production lines or sequences of production, whether in field, household, workshop or mint. What we have described as procedure in the composition of an identity, repeated successively in market after market, thus in warehouse after warehouse—say, in adding imported varieties of grains or yarns to local varieties in order to redefine a category exported onwards to other larger markets, … this also conforms empirically with the rules. It is such « realisation » as the real, to use Hegel’s term, that enables us to designate such conditions of possibility as a justly universal culture of the commodity. And by material, we obviously simply mean real, thus of this world, that which we live and experience, indeed compose, and thus empirical,—without the slightest external reference to a something else that might ground its truth more evidently or truly. What had been once conceived, by, say, the early botanists, as an originally infinite prior condition and source … an « undivided and « simple » world matter » preceding the phenomenal and speciation—has become something entirely material and cultural, the subject and object of the work of mind and hand, thus entirely part of the material world. It is certainly analogous to that and other silver objects. It is always important to see production as dealing with something essentially plastic in its identity, on the one hand fixing new identities, on the other withdrawing identity from them for a fresh process of production. Plasticity, like quantity, is the other face of the fixed and qualitative.

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metaphysical projection to some primordial essence that forms the truth of an essentialism, but it is no longer strictly or directly comparable with the latter, for, as we have argued, the material world is not infinite, but, in contrast, illimitable,—illimitable in an arithmetic sense, extended in a sequential sense without conceivable closure or end, and yet fully accessible, as such, to human thought and planned work.153 The two «  forms of intuition  »—Newtonian space/time and its Euclidian basis—turn the infinite cosmos (or the idea of it) into the finitude of an object world that one can know and intuit, subordinate as instrument, indeed instrumentalise. It is the participants themselves who conceive and create, think and act (as if having seized back those powers once alienated to the gods). And in doing so, the practical instrument in generating the identity is the universal concern for value, thus the field of expressive action consisting of quantitative measure and evaluation, and in terms of which the qualitative determination of different identities constitutes its universal manner of expression.—We can imagine extension in the material terms of space/time, but not imagine infinitude, at least as a domain of real practical action, thought or text. Infinity is not phenomenal in kind, cannot even be imagined, whilst number is obviously so, can be thought and worked. The title of Koyré’s famous book refers to the movement in thought from the figuration of the « closed world » that characterises the Sphere, to that of a science of a possibly « infinite universe ». Yet, if it remains possible to imagine a cosmos without limit (that is unlimited by limits conceivable by us), infinitude remains itself, as said, unimaginable, it is that from which all notion of time and space has been evacuated. The former, finitude, bounded or not, is imaginable, whether to us or to the actors of any given history brought to our attention, and because, once again, finite, a domain of particular definitions, things, words, images. But in becoming so, becoming accessible to word and figure, it has, by that very fact, left behind something of itself, something of the real that 153 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 511–412 [Ak. A.543/B.571] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 470): “Whether this might lead us to conceive of a chain of causation [kette von Ursachen] that, in regression towards their conditions, nonetheless, could not confirm something as absolute and entire, is of little matter …”.; this formula is repeated several times Kritik, 530–42 [Ak. A.542–58/B.570–86] (Kemp Smith, 469–79), as elsewhere. It leads him to a revealing formula for illimitability strikingly similar to Henry More’s rhetorical question about the sword with respect of infinity (supra, n. 241): “The ground of the regulative principle of reason can be put as follows: that, through empirical regression, no experience of an absolute limit, one conditioned as such, yet empirically unconditioned, could be attained. The reason for this is because such an experience of limitation [Begrenzung] would have to be encountered as nothing, or a void, and necessarily perceived as such [Wahrnehmung], but which is impossible”. Kritik, 511–2 [Ak. A.517/B.545] (Kemp Smith., 455).

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has not entered mind, a something prior to thought and inaccessible to the latter, part and parcel of what might be considered the truth of the world but to which we cannot attach words since, indeed, beyond possible knowledge. Is it that obstacle to knowledge and designation that had caused essentialist writers to seek « words for », … for what, effectively, had seemed beyond sensibility? In a comparative treatment of the « names for God » (not « of » God), or names for an unknowable dimension of the reality of the cosmos, every appellation tends to become an indirect reference to something which, if, designated directly, would become by that very event denatured, as it were, limited, and thus less than, less than that unimaginable « really-real » otherness, thus rendered phenomenal; the latter may be accessible, but not part of what can be called that real from which the matter-become-thought has been subtracted. It is figured analogically, but not in kind, as the infinitude of an essentialism such as assumed in any religion or metaphysic (infinitude itself being inaccessible; even to give the notion of it a form in mind without a content would render it finite).—Such analogy would become a reference without an object, a pointing to that otherness and not to an identity, … as we have pointed out to be the case with the vocabulary of René Char. Then one understands why every fundamentalist popular religious rebellion seeks to destroy images, images that serve only to represent formless abstractions for what definitively can not be figured. For example, one may think, by way of example, of illustrations of the dragon-like creatures, so commonly and diversely observed throughout South East and East Asia, say in China, Laos and Vietnam, both in religious expression, in temples, but also on banal articles of ordinary common domestic use, such as cups, bowls, plates, tea pots and so forth, as also on ordinary furniture of every-day use. That dragon is seen depicted, in sacred text and popular illustration alike, as if breathing floral foliage from its mouth or whose limbs and other organic projections … its tongue … are seen to branch without break into foliage, as if that dragon were itself a representation of the very principle of life … a sort of a-priori phenomenal preparation or step before the differentiation and definition of the phenomenal of our everyday experience. Beneath that dragon is often depicted a thick foundation of ocean-like waves representing something even less imaginable, given the least form of form, so to speak, less definitively formed than the dragon, and as if pointing to a primordial immateriality from which, logically and genetically, precedes a first idea of form, that in turn would embody all possibility of the kind of form and definition, good and bad, characteristic of the lived world. From that wave, then, the dragon arises, as it were, and flows of vegetation, leafy fronds, curling stems, are seen to emerge from and as its body, even as extensions of its body. Within the fronds are seen lodged sub-deities whose hands might themselves pass d­ irectly,

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without suture or break into the environing foliage. All seems a movement back and forth between that primordial formless state and our own fixed phenomenal world, and as if the latter were entirely derivative; much more, not just movement but motility, that motility of self-movement that Hegel makes the inherent engine of his dialectic. And indeed, shed of all its religious, metaphysical or narrative trappings, its clothing as Husserl might have called it, is it not also a veritable phenomenology? Then movement is motility, inherent of the thing itself as process or procedure of which each phase or instant is but a moment. This sequence of moments illustrated, for example, on the window panels of a temple at Houay Xai, in northern Laos, might also remind us, in turn, of Asdiwal’s fate in the Tsimshian myth recounted above, and who eventually crystallises as a stone « visible to this very day »; it is as if what is depicted by the narrative of the myth is but a final issue, or « realisation », of Asdiwal’s identity, first observed in its provisional condition of being (equivalent to our dragon), now this and now that, and finally as « solid », possessing the true phenomenal status of the fixed forms of being so familiar to us. Moreover, in continuing such comparison, it is especially notable that all this specific detail of a phenomenological figuration—dragon, frond and leaf, fire, and so forth—comes accurately represented in Safavid art and culture, whether religious and metaphysical, as in a Shahnama, or on domestic wear such as jugs, bowls, plates, and so forth. Moreover, such illustrative works need not be mere representations of some instant of contemplation or observation, but, instead, like their Laotian cousins, contain whole sequences of events, whether narrative or as the moments of some unfolding dialectic of meaning represented by the narrative, … a virtual pedagogy.154 I point finally to medieval illumination in which much of the same figuration appears to « decorate » the manuscripts but which, I am convinced, should be regarded as meaning. The question is also that of whether we would choose to illustrate a work in a 154 I point the reader to texts by Assadullah Souren Melikan-Chirvani in the Catalogue of an exhibition held in 2008 at the Louvre, Paris, entitled Le Chant du Monde. L’Art de l’Iran Safavide 1501–1736. The author’s central concern is to focus on the corpus of significance … of meaning … intended and expressed in Safavid art, and in explicit criticism of the concentration on aesthetics characterising the approach of many other specialists. Such ­concentration on mere aesthetics, at the expense of significance and content is rightly regarded as trivialising such art, a source of frustration for the interested reader. MelikanChirvani also points to the remote Buddhist sources of such Safavid use of metaphor, symbol and sign. I am responsible here for stripping off this last onion-layer of meaning to reveal what I allege to be an intentional phenomenology equivalent, in this respect, to that pointed out in the 1473 edition of a work by Boccaccio, discussed above and forming the frontispiece.

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c­ omparable manner or whether instead we would judge those forms and continuities absurd or irrelevant. Edvard Munch’s paintings and graphics, those of The Cry, like the painting known as the Waves of Love, depict much the same thing, and later, to an even more refined state, his “Galloping Horse”. In the first, familiar forms, a village, a church, hills, even the figure of the person who appears to scream, seem all to emerge from a state of pure wave; the whole landscape seeming—together with its «  furniture  » of buildings, personages, and so forth—depicted as if constituted by waves, arising temporally from them. In the latter painting of a few years later, all has become refined to a state of pure motion: street, persons, horse, carriage, houses, all themselves infused with vibration, as if composed of movement itself. Yet, in this case a question indeed arises: does that aesthetic concern a spiritual dimension and metaphysical reference, or is it a strict reference to the new science of the day. Or could it be both at once, the one a vehicle or an equivalence for the other. For was this not also the decades when relativity and quantum mechanics were born, and when Bohr gave form to his « theory of complementarity » concerning the constitution of matter by particle and/or wave? Might not Munch’s gesture have been an argumentative sally against the atomist particle theory seemingly embodied by his contemporary pointilist colleagues?155 Science was a live interest among artists of the day: especially of Breton, Leger and Kupka, but equally, in fact, of many of their contemporaries … Kupka who also interested himself in depicting the wave constitution of sound. But the question can be reversed, as indeed we have sought to do above, in asking whether there were not some metaphysical intentions in those very quests for the «  simple  », so characteristic of early ­twentieth-century science? Then, this is to say that both religion and science—­ metaphysic and materialism—seem drawn from the very same kind of conceptual edifice and ground: Kant’s noumenal giving materialist expression to that other quest for essence and spirit. Indeed, it is to say that both paths appear “to share the same ground”, to repeat once more that now familiar but important comment of Cassirer. The singular concern was one of seeking the means to represent such a primary, primordial sense of the origins of the universe and of matter. And even that essentialism, or that metaphysic hidden within the vocabulary and syntax of an ostensibly entirely scientific quest and form of expression, can do so only with phenomenological means. Often we may judge this kinship-like identity not as if early-twentieth century science should be judged deficient as science, but instead as a kind of mask of expressive possibility for a truth inspired by such metaphysical leanings, even 155 Concerning these works of Munch, see the references given at the end of Ch. 3, §2, above.

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e­ mbodying them. Or should we perhaps lay such a view entirely aside in favour of another perspective that points to the cultural anthropology of the times:— that scientific expression had inherited forms of thought and language-use from a metaphysical past, and by means of which it could continue to explore and represent its own different materialist focus and subject matter. This latter alternative is indeed how one may regard Kant or Husserl, but in practice it is very difficult to see where the one begins and the other ends, especially when we read the use of language by both Hegel and Hölderlin in their youth. Better that we judge that what at least we are instead witnessing is the gradual birth of a truly materialist science and philosophy, and actually aided instrumentally, we might say, by such metaphysical thinking as seems evidently and sometimes explicitly to affect an Einstein or a Heisenberg.156 Is it not remarkable that both Hegel and Freud had routed the bases for the exposition of their thought, respectively, in such a primordial undifferentiated conditional foundation? Freud is explicit: he represents such a ground as being necessitated in providing a precondition from which thereafter he could develop his own phenomenology of psychic processes and transitions.157 In Hegel, it is what truly can be seen to differentiate him from Kant: his dialectic is such a phenomenology of becoming in which every stage is true, even that first undifferentiated condition; for Kant, the real is inaccessible in the form that I have represented it above: what is true and can be judged is but the thought of the real.158 It is 156 In the Jakobson & Lévi-Strauss, Correspondance, eg. 257–8 (letter of 27th June 1962), we find Jakobson berating his friend for his obsessional criticism of contemporary philosophy, especially that of Sartre, arguing that such « baggage »—justified or not—had served to aid scientific practice and thinking. He, himself, was closely sympathetic to dialectical thinking and phenomenalism, there being a « thick » basis for his structuralism;—what instead he vigorously opposed was the influential positivism of the same epoch. In a letter of 22nd November 1971 (297), Jacobson returned to the question: “Like Koyré, I think that philosophical presuppositions give support to, and accompany scientific discoveries, whether we like it or not—yours as much as the others”, … an admirably frank and just response to Lévi-Strauss’ ill-considered sallies (“boutades”) against such metaphysical baggage. 157 In introducing The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es). 158 See the remarkable passage where Hegel himself, with simplicity and clarity, draws this distinction in the introductory chapter to his Die Lehre vom Begriff, 22 (in Bourgeois’ French translation, Le Concept, 31): “The lack of a complete [knowledge of reality] is not due to some supposed lack of what comes given to sensation and perception, but because the concept (Begriff) has not yet itself unfolded its reality from within itself”, ie. has not yet fully realised itself. (“Aber ihre Unvollständigkeit liegt nicht darin, daß sie jener vermeintlichen Realität, die im Gefühl und Anschauung gegeben sei, entbehre, sondern daß der Begriff noch nicht seine eigene aus ihm selbst erzeugte Realität sich gegeben hat”.). In short, Hegel is distinguishing Kant’s view of the inability of the conceptual apparatus to

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also as if there was continuity between the kinds of myth of primordial being encountered, say, among the Kwakiutl and Tsimshian, with Kant’s materialist concern with the truths of mind and concerning the response of mind to the true objective nature of the world: both sought to translate an inaccessible «  thing-in-itself  » into the phenomenal condition of a truly experienced object-world.159 But, the point I seek to make here is radical. All that takes place where the commodity is concerned is « matter », physical or conceptual, part and parcel of material reality … there is no other dimension, a metaphysic, supporting and explaining experience for none is required, either to understand or live it. My hypotheses may be wrong, may be guided by certain values as opposed to others, thus in no way superior, in this respect, to others, but they are entirely rooted in the empirical, and are so without qualification: the practice of creativity happens to be entirely human, acting upon matter in order to produce other matter, and, therefore, ontologically, and necessarily ontogenetically, entirely cultural, necessarily finite, even if, thereafter, we come to argue that such finitude must be conceived illimitable, … unless it be in terms of the rules of possible thought and practice considered above:—what I define as justly Newtonian and Euclidian in type, thus Kantian and Husserlian. Once that question of commodity culture is rendered entirely societal, it must be conceived in terms of finitude, but one that, for empirical reasons must, as already discussed, reject the very notions of closure and boundedness, as represented, for example, by Wallerstein’s world-system, or by any other notion of closed cultural forms of organisation, conceived of as such, or, even in such statistically defined economic entities we see identified as « nations » or « civilisations ». fully access the real from his own dialectical unfolding of it by mind. My own preference in the present book has followed Kant’s exposition, but in a future book, such as I propose to write on this phenomenological aspect, I shall most probably seek a synthesis of these  two very distinctive viewpoints that should accord with the arguments of City Intelligible. 159 I especially appreciate a very important passage in Hegel’s Jenaer Rechtsphilosophie, 89, where he distinguishes the unity of the concept from the unity of the matter eventually realised from it by means of the procedure of the dialectic, and as distinctive moments of that process; … he is speaking of the concept and realisation of an atmosphere (Luft) in thought, thus of a something, an object of thought, that is entirely undifferentiated (Gleichgültig): “This unity concerns the universal (allgemeine) materialisation of the thing (für jenes), the unfolded material simple (aufgehobene einfache Materie), its chemical moment, and physically considered realised as an atmosphere. It is no longer its prior possibility (oberflächliche Möglichkeit), which possibility remains the process itself, but instead this now distinguished yet still undivided [matter]. It is a really-existing process (daseiender Prozeß)…”. The process is, of course, the dialectic, and his commentary a valuable clarification of its content and his meaning.

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It is world in the sense of Kant’s distinction of the illimitable,—and not of infinity. In this completely material and cultural sense—that of mind and object (strongly influenced by transcendental philosophy and more lately, by its further development as Husserlian phenomenology, and moreover by an increasing familiarity with both Hegel and Marx)—the emphasis must be entirely placed upon the unenclosed finitude of commodity exchange. It can be seen, throughout the brief period of the early-modern centuries, constantly extending and intensifying, diversifying in depth within the matter of society itself, and extensively impatient of frontier and conventional limit, no obstacles to such serial addition or internal fractionation required to be conceived by us: it is « open » in principle, … potentially extendable and, even in the detail of what already exists of it, what we might term potentially « intended », thus as constantly encountered in the very historical details of commodification. The history of publication and the content of commercial manuals and commercial dictionaries, already mentioned, demonstrates this point. The range and content of the commodity world—its everywhere so exotic expressive face— had become too large and complex to be contained within the lesser finitude of the memory of any single travelling merchant. If true of our focus on global commoditisation, the argument also implies a much broader, societal, cultural and natural context, and it is for this reason we discover ourselves so frequently confronted with the anthropologists’ difficulties with comparison and translation where « culture » is concerned, and, likewise, with the politics of nationalism and of ethnic-cum-racial definition of the world’s populations. One might, for example, imagine—on the basis of what one has read in the specialist literature—that native Australians had not formed part of this global domain of the commodity, or, at least, we might justifiably debate the proposition. But could one, therefore, also imagine them as not participant in the same natural conditions and principles of cultural thinking and practice which have here been defined in terms of artifice, and of which commodification must be seen as but a particular case? Are not, for example, both clan and kinship among native Australians not equally subject to stereotypical kinds of classificational order, thought and practice seen defining commodity formation and manufacture? Yes, the anthropology of commodification can indeed be conceived as universal—as an evidence for a universalist anthropology, one based not on origins but formed instead in or by history itself, … a direct accumulative result of the historical interaction and participation characterising increasingly vast and contiguous, much-differentiated populations, but, thereby, presuming a certain necessary foundational global compatibility of mind that would permit such sharing of

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cultural traits and products, and thus the development of such unison of the species, thus wherever such populations are seen to participate in the various aspects of the culture of the commodity.160 That there are paradoxes implied by such a formulation cannot be doubted: it is intended to be so in order to contain the two necessary aspects that most need interrogation: the historical process leading to such unison and the conditions that a-priori must at the least ground the possibility of that process. Such hypothesis is required to justify the view that all humanity had, of origins, developed empirically and historically (thus palaeontologically and pre-historically) as a single kind, even though the foundations for such a viewpoint remain entirely obscure and, in truth, inaccessible, unless one assumes a unique Adamic process of dispersive evolution from a single origin for the human species, and one which from various angles seems to flirt with the absurd, as if with some primordial ontological source, … absurd when regarded from a strictly materialist standpoint, and in terms of that rule of possibility: for even if it continued to be accepted such dispersion would guaranty no more than progressive differentiation. Instead, I favour this alternative notion of a process of evolutionary convergence, rejecting speculation about origins. Besides, the latter would fall entirely outside the reach of my personal competence,—outside the kinds of knowledge into which I may legitimately venture (entailing instead specialised access to genetics, and to the increasingly complex and rich pre-historical archaeology of human origins). Recent archaeological thinking has come to support such a likelihood, in which diverse origins and kinds of being are seen to converge as a common culture of sharing, evolving through a sharing of environments, through the act of exchange itself, through cross-fertilisation, and thus as a shared construction of the world of common artifice that we now experience, 160 I think again of Julian Steward’s Theory of Culture Change, in which, and rightly in my opinion, he proposes that for an influence to occur, that so influenced must be in and of a condition compatible in kind and development with that which influences. Cultural forms so influenced from beyond, say by a coloniser or neighbour, must at least be considered possessing the material and conceptual prerequisites for that influence to be possible. Once more it is a question of translation, of possibility! This is a point I shall take up in Pt. ii of this book. Steward was pointing, thereby, to the collectivity of influences passing between « peoples » or « cultures », so called, and to levels of conceptual development. But one may also point this principle to the possibility … the necessity no less … of such compatibility running right across the whole continuum of commodity exchange. In Steward’s terms, it would, thereby, constitute an entire open field of mutual translational and transformative influence. It is Kant and Husserl who, then, provide the universal criteria on which such structural cultural connectivity can be judged, and deemed possible. And it is precisely such conditions that the evidence for the culture of the commodity reveals.

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generating a result that by the time we come to seize hold of it in the historical record, objectively justifies use of that term « homo sapiens ». Otherwise, that very word “kind”, used in this respect, becomes dangerous, a tool for exclusions, and debatable for what it might be used to mean. For one inevitably asks what traits, indeed what kind of trait, and how, observed of that human being before the untrusting and uncertain eye of the observer ... and by what manner … should constitute justifiable points of enquiry for answering such questioning? It is for this reason that I limit my attention to the domains covered by evidence for commoditisation, as treated above, and thus to a notion of the universal as entirely formed by human participation in history. In this respect, such universalism of the commodity realm is entirely cultural, its conditions founded in and through innumerable acts of individual mind, judgement, communication and creative performance, accessible by means of a considerable body of varied and scattered evidence available to both historian and anthropologist, and not upon vague propositions concerning remote biological considerations and the scattered and circumstantial, thus inescapably debatable evidence of processes of evolution necessarily geological in scale of duration. g

An Edifice Built Only with Matter Accessible to Human Kind

Kant’s second reference to the tower of Babel provides a useful commentary on how mind might be seen to make objective a continuum of experience: Of the method proper to a transcendental philosophy, nothing needs be said here, given that we are only concerned with a critique of the condition of our faculties [Vermögenumstände], and whether we can succeed in building our edifice [unser Gebäude], wherever we would do so, to whatever height, with the materials available to us (pure a-priori concepts).161 This statement contains certain remarkable, even astonishing elements that coincide intimately with central aspects of the argument, as developed to this point. The «  edifice  » that he sets before us, however, is not Radcliffe Brown’s ­organism-like physiology of « a » cultural nature, or « the » system of some internally self-organising and expanding capitalist snowball of autonomous 161 Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 677 [A738/B766] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 592–3).

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d­ evelopment, but instead that strange multicellular and many-levelled architecture, « imagined » and represented by many artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: there is Bruegel’s « Vienna » painting with its open, unfinished walls and rooms, in process of construction; there is also the version held in Rotterdam which seems to depict it partially abandoned, yet, at the same time, unfinished, its cells open, its upper stages exposed, yet a construction, therefore, that might be continued without conceivable end, caught in time’s destruction of what is made whilst continuing to be constructed; a signal evidence of the mortal status of the phenomenal. How astonishing it is to compare this portrayal with Hegel’s considerably later description of the relationship of being to time in some of his more youthful writings; but, in both cases the central concern is with the opposition of finity to infinitude, and with that sense of limitation and determination we attach to the notion of finitude.162 Then, what the artist had sought to measure is that very dimension of difference that separates desire from possibility, to represent its veritable status, knowingly confronted, as it were:—the impossibility of finitude becoming infinite. However, in graphical and painterly works by other artists during the same long epoch of religious conflict and controversy that so marks the rich historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one encounters depictions possibly more optimistic, more utopian in their intentions (for was this not, indeed, an age of radical and varied religious eschatological sectarianism and individualism?); in these latter cases the edifice—call it Babel, or human culture, or the world as constituted in consciousness—seems to come intentionally posited by the artist as illimitable (in our own sense of an unqualifiable finitude), or, if truly radical and heretical—given its religious dimension,— as if proposing, by the finitude of its representation, the possibility of infinitude,  … as if the unending process of building is intended to depict a possible attainment of infinity, breaking through the barrier that distinguishes finitude from the infinitude of a heavenly utopia. Then, it is as if the illimitable (of those merely human means of depiction) were meant to « stand for » … 162 Where Hegel is concerned, I recommend Alexandre Koyré’s excellent “Hegel à Iéna”, esp. 165ff and the important collection of quotations and notes therein, especially drawn from the Jenenser Logik, and where the problem of relationship between the two dimensions of thought is very finely drawn. Time reveals itself as a central axis of a method that comes to annihilate itself—both time and the method—in «  realising  » the utopian edifice thereby constructed, and yet intended to characterise the world as thought and lived according to possibility. There is, however, an ultimately untraversed, unexplained void between the two states, … no sentence or logic seems to traverse that void … lead the one state into the other (by a procedure, by cause and effect, a rational argument, &c.), yet a lack that in his view might be considered intentional and necessary.

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infinitude, as in the words of some poetic such as that of Hölderlin or Char. The serial, c­ onsequential nature of « mere » human action would serve to point to an imaginative translation of state and kind, from earth/society to cosmos/ paradise.163 Yet, what strikes me with regard to such representations remains the serial character of what is depicted, thus the builders with their stone work, their columns and arches, their plans, and their styles, all entirely phenomenal, and directed to adding yet more cells and floors, an edifice strewn with scaffolding, ladders, with masons and carpenters busy at work, even gracing the tower with secondary buildings seen lining its spiral-upwards path, and also at its base a « king » and architect, the philosopher himself, that collection of minds who plan and give form to the tower and direct operations.—Thence a domain of measure and proportion entirely compatible with Kant’s a-priori conditions of mind (Newtonian and Euclidian in kind). The tendency is to interpret the architectural pluralism of Bruegel’s Babel as itself an evidence of an intention to depict the conventional view of Babel as having been brought to nothing by linguistic and particularistic confusion. The reference is to the conventional view of phenomenal appearance as confusion and conflict, so characteristic of an essentialist metaphysic concerning the status of the things of the world which we inhabit, and as precisely expressed by the essentialist Char. This is even given a quasi-scientific and positivist status by mainstream developments in twentieth-century social « science », seeking to exclude the contingent and accidental in order to draw forth the enduring forms of collective belief and habit. Yet, it might likewise be considered as a representation of the sheer variability that can occupy each specific creative instance of a process of ongoing construction, thus serial and sequential in character, … corresponding with the capacities for organisation possible of any such architectural project and its organisation, thus perfectly realistic, in our sense of the term.164 Particularism, in this respect, becomes the ubiquitous means to express a universal feature in a phenomenal world, always ­determined 163 Bruegel’s two known versions of Babel are respectively in the Kunsthistorisch Museum, Vienna, and in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, in Rotterdam. The « infinite » version … a rectangular Babel … is by the 16th-century Marten van Valckenborch, but which is very similar to a finite Babel by his almost exact contemporary Tobias Verhaecht. Cf. Helmut Minkowski, Aus dem Nebel Der Vergangenheit steigt der Turm zu Babel. Bilder aus 1000 Jahren (Berlin, 1960), 72 & 75. Minkowski’s book contains many illustrations of the different versions of Babel portrayed in this divisive, eschatological period of religious conflict in Europe 164 Cf. Juan Benet, La Contrucción de la Torre de Babel (1990, Madrid), who draws attention to this architectural pluralism.

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by the precise coordinates of any presence in that empirical world. Then, we may seek out the principles that define and determine any such organisational project, that, for example, which I have sought to accomplish above. Take the continuous processes of fractionation of one typology into other more subordinate typologies, ever more fractional and sub-divisional in their turn, as one comes to succeed and subdivide the other, thus, say, of a single named type into a plurality of equally named sub-varieties, as encountered in the cases of textiles and teas observed in their passage through complexes of connection and process, all that constitutes the ongoing constitution of the commodity through the stages and phases of their production and marketing. Such subdivision appears to be an inevitable consequence of a force and passage of demand through the market that requires an ever increasing attention to the finer detail of difference and of identity, to ever more precise concerns with measure. How close seems this realisation of the final commodity through the productive process to Hegel’s working through of the dialectical production of concepts in thought.165 We see it then as a history of continued additive, self-transformational production-events and production-processes, and through all the social moments that go to constitute the sequence of acts and decisions that go into the making of any particular commodity,—and sometimes, as with cottons, spread out socially and geographically across more or less considerable spaces, crossing all kinds of political, cultural and linguistic boundaries. Moreover, in each case there is a focussing of several distinct production processes likely to come together in the constitution of a given commodity, or, conversely, of a flow of events of differentiation exiting from such a common market-point focus, as in the dispersal of a cultivated cotton variety among different manufacturies, dispersed among a typology of different varieties of cloth; we might also point, say, to the distinctive production process involved in the supply of die stuffs for cottons; similarly, to the complexity of peasant husbandry, concerned to preserve particular varieties of crops from the instabilities resulting from natural vicissitude, and thus to counter the menace of their naturally plastic susceptibility to genetic variation. We might look behind the fact of the mint and of its particular site-concentrated line of production, to other combinations of procedures of production required for, say, its supplies of « raw » materials, thus of the very constituents upon which it itself acts to transform. We might point to the independent manufacture of 165 I am referring, once more, to his constant, uninterrupted use of the dialectic as encountered in the Jenaer Realphilosophie. One may gain the impression that, wittingly or not, he gives a veritably concrete form to the Kantian a-priori conditions for the constitution of knowledge.

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the dies used in the mint, to the refinement of the toughened steel used to make such dies, to that of the alloys wed together with the primary metals of different coinages; or the production at a sufficient rate of the numerous balances utilised in each busy mint; … workbenches and standard-weights … in short, all that is required to make possible the very work of the mint, thus the mass production of different ducat-, rupee-, pagoda- and sycee-moneys, and in order that each could be produced according to rule, and in turn enabling them to fulfil their varied and distinctive payments functions within the marketplace. The complexity of complexity so to speak! Yet, one hardly needs to cite examples of the character assumed by such conditions, because the very problem of understanding the early-modern world is precisely that of a comprehension of the kinds of order underlying those forces leading to finite, seemingly illimitable particularism in the production of goods and payments forms (and made evident in the different kinds of metrology that also proliferated side by side, or in combination, enabling that complexity to function and reproduce itself). It is to reassert the conviction, based upon continued scrutiny of the evidence, that difference and complexity are necessary correlates of particular kinds of multicentric kinds of organisation that would later become increasingly undermined in favour of more distanced forms of finance and use of labour—greater metropolitan control and concentration of decision concerning distant heartlands of domestic and workshop industry—characterising the later phases of globalisation during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finite and yet illimitable seem, therefore, the correct descriptions for the kinds of order we see constituted that made possible commodification, together with the complex of institutional forms and instruments required for regulating it. Then, if so, it implies an idea of a universal different to that characterising the infinitudes of any essentialist metaphysic: for, in our case, this finitude is tangible, the inner forms and workings defining commodities and necessary for their manufacture and conveyance, thus their acceptation, written down in the words and numbers of contemporaries as rules of constitution, and, moreover, accessible to interpretation and judgement by the actors themselves, the participants in the historical process of its development. There are the rules themselves set out in orders and regulations governing each market of activity and that we can, thereafter analyse in terms of Kantian principles, and there is that intellectual level of appreciation in which contemporaries such as Adam Smith were concerned. What, then, of Kant’s phrase, in the previous quotation concerning the building of his edifice, and phrased in such Babel-like terms, referring to the “material at our disposal”? It refers both strictly to the a-priori principles underlying any understanding of that labour of constitutive work, and also to the

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sheer individualism of its practical conditions of construction and the manner in which such efforts came expressed, and that underlay the phenomenal status of all experience. We may describe that experiential ground in terms of the unqualified material status of any context surrounding any particular individual and that the historian encounters a-posteriori as context, … as collectivelysynthesised results of such scattered individualistic activity. Then, what are concerned are the forms of time/space intuition that limit and determine the constitution of that phenomenal world of work: what Hegel had termed the « realisation » of the object (its making real) and both he and Marx defined as the commoditisation of work, its translation into value, quantity, thus « alienated » as such by the working individual, become embodied by the commodity as pure value, thus once more quality and quantity at once.166 As such, Kant makes frequent allusions to the finitude of what thereby is constituted, and he continues to do so whilst concerned with the question of the constitution in thought and as thought of an object, its meaning and composition as concept and entity, and especially in his last manuscripts now published as an Opus Postumum. More generally, such thought underpins the very idea of how an empirical nature can be constituted as experience.167 When one again considers the sheer additive and subtractive character affecting the categories of commodity formation: their divisibility, extendability, and thus the possibility of adding without limit yet more and more subdivisions and sub-classes, and ever more objects to each such class, whether with regard to production itself, or to that of its extension, procedural, and sequential, affecting its trajectories through the marketing nexus towards final consumption, the task of synthesis appears to become ever more subject to imaginative metaphor, say as a kind dynamic architectural task of imaginative reconstruction. One concludes that what confronts one is a kind of historical ordering of things that initially and

166 « Material », as used in this sentence, should not be confused with the difference between form and content basic to Kant’s idea of objectification: it is through mind’s form-giving properties that a sensible content can be rendered phenomenon. In this instance, therefore, « material » refers to « form ». 167 Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, 452: “All true negations [wahren Verneinungen] are but limits [Schranken], but which could not be identified as such were not their ground something entirely unlimited”. (quoting Kant). By negation, Kant means limitation in the sense of separation of a content for particularisation: because what is involved is a real diminution in both quality and quantity of such a conceived primary matter. In defining, particularising, determining, one already has compromised that sense of an undifferentiated « ­simple » constituting that all. Thus the positive activity of forming object is a process and procedure of « negation ». Or as Husserl puts it, in Ricoeur’s words, “Reduction is the negative face [l’envers] of constitution” (Husserl, Idées Directrices, 183, tr’s n. 1).

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during several centuries lacks any substantial, absolute centre or closure, and that must, in these early centuries, be judged multi-centric. Where Kant talks of quantity and number, we instead (or also) talk of translation and translatability, in pointing towards the technical means through which unity was possible in a world ordinarily characterised as entirely differential and subject to rampant particularism. Those two sides of the question of the commodity come together as a single and vast organisational energy and motor governing the life of society. And in that case, the principle of the universal must underlie, and in turn favour, all further possibility of ongoing particularisation affecting the contents of commodification, and even stimulating the proliferation of frontiers of different kinds proper to such differentiation. The commodity domain is unfinished and unfinishable, just like any tower of ­Babel—it could be destroyed here and there, through crisis, and warfare, or through time itself, running constantly to ruin at the very same time as other aspects are developing and being created. Then, we may consider it « unfinished » in every instance of a local place, a plot or field, every corpus of local variety of rice, cotton or tea, in every systematic development of the differences represented by the functional distinctions characterising coinages encountered in one or another region. And, then, that further point made in Kant’s remark, quoted at the start of the section, and that has also proven so axiomatic in our regard concerning the historical process … its inherent and necessary Darwin-like individualist and accidental constitution:—that every individual, given a minimal sufficiency of material means and social conditions, might conceivably add to it, do so in any finite locus, and do so in the use of his or her reason, in reading the contexts of forces and presences, thus in acting rationally according to that reading, say when taking goods to market, in making a cloth, and so forth, … Thus in all those acts that go to constitute that vast structuring of exchanges and of culture. To repeat, it is intensively and extensively incomplete and unending, yet its make-up is one of perfect accessibility: it can be read by an « any-person » possessed of sufficient local experience; it is a space of reference, of mobilisation of language and instrument, thus of a knowledge, and, in turn, of transparency, description, ascription, calculation. Then the « materials » of our Babel … of Kant’s Babel—“the pure a priori concepts” with which he would build—refer to the limited means enabling human reason to give form to, construct and constitute, and be applied to the content received by the senses, cognitive and experiential. Transferred to external commodity culture, seriality and possibility refer us to a world that has contexts and yet has no perceivable, unbroachable frontier, no external frontier, that is no more and no less than its very own content and context, or ­rather

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that, if thought of in terms of a Hegelian-type negation, constitutes its own plastic raw material of reproduction and continuation. In the context of Kant’s science we are indeed confined to Newtonian-type seriality; yet, it appears adequate and true of the historical serial content of what we describe as commodity, and, indeed, confirmed as adequate throughout the continuum. In short, Newton’s mechanics, like Euclid’s geometry, can be assumed to be true for the interior order and extensions of commodity culture, besides mind, although they cannot, thereby, be assumed true of first nature within which, however, they in turn are constituted. Commodification renders as forms of finitude that cultural universal, freeing that very concept of the universal from the metaphysical infinitudes of the past, freeing the acts underlying it from such surplus anchoring. In what follows I shall try to represent these non-essentialist aspects of commodification. C

Further Thoughts about the Meaning of a « Universal » Culture of Practice and Mind The critique of pure reason brings to an end metaphysical dogmatism …168

The question is this: is this universal—one that we attach to an anthropology of commoditisation on a global scale—equivalent to that discussed above with respect to a metaphysic, say an essentialist conception of reality? We have seen that the latter concerns a level and content of abstraction inaccessible to human knowledge, and so complete and absolute, nonetheless, as to be understood as comprehending and determining all that is accessible to us, thus phenomenal and finite. Is our empirical universal a materialist’s equivalent to what in religion is covered by such words as “God”, “divine” or « essence »? In terms of intellectual inheritance, there may be truth to that argument; we can even trace a kind of hereditary evolution of that essentialist conception of the universal leading gradually and incompletely towards the other, one 168 The source and context for this quotation concerning Kant’s thought, are given at the start of the following sub-section. This remark is very similar in kind to Adorno’s remark concerning the liberation by his own time of Hegel’s dialectic from its past metaphysical anchors. See the opening sentence of the section of his Negative Dialektik concerning “Meditations on Metaphysics”, 354 (in Negative Dialectics, 361), and Husserl’s distinction of the realism of both phenomenology and the transcendental critique in contrast to the «  poetic  » attribution of sense characterising essentialism (Husserl, Ideen, 173–4, described above).

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e­ ntirely finite and empirical: Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and all those later writers of the twentieth century who considered themselves strictly materialist and divorced from the metaphysical anchorings of the past … Adorno (in his optimistic affirmation of the completeness of this transition from a metaphysical conception of the dialectic to one that is strictly material), but also many others of the same generations, Husserl, Cassirer, Scheler et al.169 But, the question remains: is there a real and absolute distinction between the two that would allow us to affirm, unambiguously, that the universal of the culture of the commodity-continuum—that universal of mind and its conditions of thought—is truly of a different order from the essentialisms of the past … divorced from any hint of metaphysic or teleology? I have already made some comment concerning the question in the forgoing discussion, and also in “More than a Preface”, where, more specifically, I return to it in the form of a discussion concerning an emancipation of empirical, material history from all sense of metaphysical and teleological conditioning. Nonetheless, there is more to say of it. Of course, the answer is no: hereditary forms of argumentation and conceptualisation are to be expected, but these do not entail what is patently apparent today: a real emancipation of the social and the historical from some otherworldly kind of conditioning and ultimate meaning. That emancipation may be far from complete, even reversible, but its possibility and partial fulfilment is at least what I claim, and indeed claim for myself. This is not to replace the past with a kind of « vulgar positivism »,170 but instead, and in addition to a properly empirical kind of reflexion, to invite the need and possibility of a kind of transcendental and phenomenological position, such as, indeed, that embodied in my treatment of the culture of the commodity. This answer is especially important for justifying my request … indeed an urgent insistence … for a return to a universalist conception of an anthropology of human culture. It rests upon an unqualified empirical recovery of a praxis that everywhere was coordinated, necessarily and closely, thus endeavouring to be accurately coordinated with the principles and rules, freedoms and determinations (thus « tolerances »), revealed above concerning commoditisation, and, yes, in spite of, … or, better put, … in close formative relationship with … all exotic and local appearance that seem to the eye to counter it. It concerns an understanding of the entirely phenomenal character of commoditisation that everywhere must

169 Adorno’s affirmation opens Part iii, §iii. Meditationen zur Metaphysik, of his Negative Dialektik, 354. 170 “Vulgar” in the sense that one speaks of a “vulgar Marxism”.

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be of a character that would allow efficacious participation by the ­populations of the past, and, moreover, for a participation governed by individualised ­reflection, choice and decision: thus, the freedom of an individual to act as s/he can be seen to have done, but that in turn, as encountered in the records, must imply such choice and decision … of judgement, no less. This concatenation with what we have identified as universal principles of order, an order become also a universal practical knowledge, is true in whatever form it is encountered, thus according to any particular complex of local, cultural formalisation; in this sense it comprehends cultural difference, permits it, and, in doing so, even fosters its further proliferation, just as it also fosters an endless and repeated process of micro-differentiation among commodities themselves,—of further sub-division into discrete identities. And, furthermore, we have seen that such radical, seemingly unlimited differentiation, thus particularisation, corresponds to the systematic organisation of forces constituting global commoditisation, an organisation of energies, forces and drives which we should even consider institutional and, indeed, regulated by institutions, habits, rituals of comportment, word, sign and symbol;—“institution” is here understood in its broadest possible sense, thus corresponding to the spontaneous activity of market forces, of constant spontaneous adjustments of price and demand that mediate those forces, and also of particular kinds of formally-organised collective body, such as the qianzhuang banking guilds, designed to regulate exchanges and payments in different places. It also concerns an individuation of comportment and participation that can be seen to articulate very closely with the limits and directions imposed by the various contexts in which participation takes place, whether strictly economic or, more generally speaking, societal and cultural. What this implies is that no single variety of a commodity, say a sub-type of cloth, a bafta or a muslin, or of a coin, such as a Caucasian ducat or some locally minted rupee, such as the Ankusi and Chandore rupees, can exist either arbitrarily or as if other categories were absent. Such singular or arbitrary existence would constitute neither an identity nor a category! Instead—if it is to be means of payment, to be produced as commodity, thus given, in its very own right, a value and price, and to endure as such in time, thus successfully adaptational to varying conditions and contexts—it must be conceived and fabricated according to that larger typological, taxonomical order composed of many like category-identities of the same general definitional kind, and, therefore, having established itself in some available micro-niche relative to all other such varieties and types occupying neighbouring niches within the same contexts of exchange, both immediate and prospective, and to which, in turn, each would correspond because according to some definite, discrete, narrowly

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channelled, communicated force of demand acting down locally, conveyed from relative distance. Then, this is also to say that the confusion and disorder ordinarily judged by the historian as characterising such evidence—that, say, depicting the multiplicity of different coins and goods, metrologies or moneys of account, operative within any particular local field of common interaction, all meeting, say, in some particular small market place, and all possessing different designations, and clearly concerning differing standards of quality and content, must be radically corrected, and replaced by a questioning that can reveal the kinds of intended order that they must have embodied in order to adapt and persist through the centuries, and still perform their essential, differential societal functions. Were it not so, society would undo, reverting to the primitive, thus decline in all its aspects, and not only in complexity but with respect of size of population, wealth, levels of conceptual aptitude and skill, and much else. Then, those judgements would come revealed as being no more than consequences of our own limited conceptions of the past, of their anthropological foundations and propensities, thus of our failure to even question what increasingly becomes apparent as a bed of false simplifying assumption concerning the « other ». Such illusion is the inevitable price to be paid for an incomplete knowledge, … an approach to the matter inadequate to respond creatively to the implications of the evidence, not least to those Kantian questions concerning the very possibility of what we encounter. Instead, such evidence has been shown above to be fully consonant with generalised « rules » of practice that on a local level act necessarily on personal choice and decision; they correspond to general organisational principles that impose, in their turn, a particular participational attention everywhere towards the « niche » necessary for some commercial micro-category of a kind of good or coinage to satisfy with relative efficacity a specific need and demand, and discern it, open out that typological space among all those composing the overall range of market forces and productions. Such concern for precision alone would allow each such identity to insert itself into that larger field comprised of the broad range of differential kinds of demand and exchange-­ functions we find, in practice, transmitted, in their turn, by market forces, and which express both the complexity of social demand and of its global extents. Such acts of difference, then, mark intentions, rationally conceived, and worked into the detail of plans and projects, as interventions into the c­ ontext.— They are far from arbitrary, disorderly or self-destructing. Our universal must thus comprehend every local cultural manifestation of such practice, however exotic its manifest expression and its appearance; each, we might say, corresponds locally to the overall rules of a universal kind of

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knowledge and of possibility. And this assertion, indeed, is the justification for having introduced Kant into this discussion. His presence has enabled us to identify its entirely empirical (but empirical in the transcendental sense) and accessible nature, whether conceived on the level of its universal principles or, instead, on that of the evidence concerning the particular acts and ­productions—individual or collective—that have constituted, and true wherever commodification has been seen to have existed, whether as a swidden field in upland Taiwan, as domestic production of forged Chinese coin in Birmingham, as the varieties of sycee characterising exchange in any Chinese market place, or as the hidden articulation of different metrologies in some Polish or Deccan market village. Therefore, once more, this universal is universal in a precisely empirical sense, not just « generally » so or predominantly so; it brooks no possible exception within the framework within which it is held to act. The participant has a full freedom of choice to be right and no more than that, acts creatively and takes personal decisions precisely within the range of possible action tolerated by the determinating forces and ordering of what already exists; yes, yet there remains that range of « tolerance » (as I have come to use this word), that we may call the freedom to commit error, thus to be wrong and to act mistakenly;—so that, when speaking of the limits of the range within which acts are likely to occur and be judged, I am introducing, once more, now in respect of practice, that same technical notion of a « tolerance » as that applied to the conventions of recognition and acceptance concerning the identities of commodities and payments forms—that which I first introduced with reference to the measures defined as constituting recognition of particular coins, thus conceived intentionally as part of the sum of criteria judged necessary for their production to allow them to circulate. For, if passing beyond that tolerable range of acceptance, a money is returned to the mint, rejected because no longer acceptable as means for a possible payment. It is that very latitude, the relative possibility within ascertainable limits for autonomous decision and free, individuated acts, that should justify this request for a return to a universalist anthropology that would comprehend within its orb the full complex of cultural difference encountered in record and field. v

Intersubjectivity and Non-essentialist Construction Pure reason can gain no objective content of a material kind. All rational knowledge, including pure reason, concerns possible experience, if left without intuition [Anschauung], … and thus empty of a phenomenal ­content [« leer », gegenstandlos]. Pure reason consists of no more than

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the formal conditions of a possible experience [Urbedingung der Erfahrung (ihrer Form nach)]…. Practical reason possesses primacy over theoretical reason. The critique of pure reason brings to an end metaphysical dogmatism, while providing grounds for a scientific knowledge, and allowing place for « rational belief » [Vernunftglauben] …171 In what must seem an astonishing statement, Eisler paraphrases Kant as giving “practical reason … « primacy » over theoretical reason”. It is that which provides content to the formal possibilities allowed to the understanding by pure reason, and that goes on to give precise physical and external form to its inner content of thought … to that kind of content explored above with respect of the possibilities and actualisation of commoditisation. But, in addition, it is also an evidence of the human individual’s fundamental liberty when faced by the manifold of serial and successional enchainments which comprise objective experience … objective experience in that Newtonian sense treated above: it refers to a freedom to intervene, to dispose of one’s thought, choose, and act, generate new content within cultural nature according to those possibilities of form. Note also that it provides the power for the individual to generate readings and ends that are teleological, say the possibility of a new object-type, a commodity, search for a receptive niche, composing an object corresponding, ideally speaking, exactly to that teleological end. Such an individual would endeavour to bring that intention to complete fruition as a physical end, thus apt for a line of possibly further and sequential productive acts, and for sets of equally-sequential and particular marketing trajectories. But, likewise, it may concern ends that may not be actual (thus, not to be discovered in any empirical reading of the content of a manifold of experience, but, instead, that exceed

171 Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, 572–3 (my emphasis) (in French edn., 883–4). Eisler’s arresting first paragraph is a synthesis of Kant’s views, followed by quotations and references. It is, thus, an interpretation, but as such, wholly credible and one that gives sense to my own arguments concerning commodity culture in so far as they are true to Kant. But there is a boundary that I seem continuously and necessarily to cross, concerning the limits of form possible of human reason, and that seems represented by that illusive combination of artificial (stereotypical) and Darwinist (individualist)forms of classification. It is a question that I too have yet to address! Moreover, Eisler’s discussion focusses on the status of the supersensible, whilst I am directly concerned with the possibilities and forms of practical, popular intervention and experience concerning the strictly phenomenal, thus, perhaps best put as a practical and universal popular knowledge-form accessible and practised by all.

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it), but similarly actualisable according to these readings and ends, thus to generate a moral code of judgement, and out of it to generate a better … yes, « the good society ». The First Critique generates, is father to Kant’s two succeeding critiques, that of Practical Reason and Judgement.—This is why, the idea of the « lie » (its ontological status), remarked upon above, is so important to Kant: it is an evidence of this liberty and spontaneity, this ability to break out of the necessity of natural enchainments, or to initiate a new series of events within it, and as we have seen actually practised as forgery or « imitation » (so-called) throughout the continuum.172 It intervenes, from outside, as it were, into this natural enchainment, and modifies it, possessing real practical consequences, and thus possessing ontological implications: it produces new matter from the « raw », so to speak.173 In several highly significant passages of the Opus Postumum, Kant is concerned to reconsider the possibility of such spontaneity: not to cast doubt upon its possibility but instead to explain that possibility, in so far as an explanation is even possible in this respect (because mind’s very limitations obviously impose corresponding limitations upon such explanation).174 172 As mentioned above, Alexis Philonenko, in L’Archipel de la Conscience Européene, 88, makes this observation concerning Kant’s thought: “In his Doctrine of Virtue, Kant justly observes that it is not through crime … that evil has entered the world: it is through mendacity [le mensonge]. The lie is an ontological act …”. The point is of obvious significance when I speak here and there of the guiding threads of my study, those of seeking a corrective to false assumptions concerning human difference. 173 An historical example consists of the effects of the colonial classification of colonised peoples into tribes, castes, &c.; its effects on administration, for example in recruitment, and ethnic division of tasks; and its becoming a necessary focus of identity for those so classified thereafter. I discuss this at length with reference to work on the United States, South Asia and especially Africa, in “Languages of Separation & Closure”, in Unbroken Landscape. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is an inexhaustible source of such observation, surely gained through personal experience. 174 In reading such passages in the First Critique (e.g. Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 530–42; Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 469–79, [Ak. A.542–58/B.570–86]), it seems to me that no explanation of « freedom » itself, as such, is attempted, nor, according to Kant, could be, since noumenal, « in-itself ». Instead, in a series of very remarkable pages, already alluded to above, Kritik, 519–29; Kemp Smith, 461–9 [Ak. A.528–41/B.556–69], he points out that freedom is only inconceivable according to an empiricist view of Newtonian nature, conflated as if reality itself, thus as if the in-itself, and as if the in-itself were actually intuitable; in such a case, indeed, necessity, and the enchainment of cause and effect in indefinitum, must reign without possible qualification. Once, Newton (or whatever we would wish to substitute for the Newtonian view of nature) is relocated as mind’s form-giving means of thinking the object, thus transcendentalised, its reality-status is qualified (« modified », as Husserl puts it), and the problem of freedom may be reconsidered without contradicting natural necessity. Kant withdraws it from its traditional dogmatic role as the creative power of a supreme being, and relocates it in human ­subjectivity

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Then, it is the double sidedness of empirical facticity (its presence as both artifice and nature), and thence of human nature, that must be emphasised,—at once in-itself, existent, as thinking … as thinking in a cultural sense,—but also as part and parcel of existence itself and posited in thought according to certain laws, necessities, cause-and-effect continuities, and so forth. It is cultural … artifice … and also part and parcel of that all-englobing nature, that, therefore, must both comprehend it, and, in its turn, have given rise to its ostensibly « unnatural » character founded on contrary principles.175 In particular, Kant is seen attempting to reconcile all aspects of subjectivity, both pure (a priorism) and practical (teleological, interventional), as internal applications alike of the “uniquely possible forms of motion”—of the moving forces of matter— thus of primary matter, or « caloric » (« Wärmestoff », as Kant had called it and as later Hegel would come also to call it), and as can be considered as being prior, logically and genetically, to cognitive subdivision and to the generation of the matter of empirical thought.176 Thus, he speaks of reason’s “moving forces”, and of the problematic relationship between technical reason, on the one hand, and practical moral reason, on the other: for this latter involves teleology and volition. Concept of freedom.—Moral, practical reason is one of the moving forces of nature …177 itself. Then, “freedom and nature … can exist together, without any conflict” Kritik, 529 [Ak. A.541/B.569] (Kemp Smith, 469). However, the Opus Postumum shows Kant still concerned with the ultimate realitystatus of freedom, and attempting explanation « in so far as this is possible »; thus, the references, infra n. 212, 260: at best, it can be described in terms of the constituents of matter previously posited by Kant, and in terms of the possibility of its consequences: the unity of the self, the source of intelligibility, which stands outside of time—because « in itself »—cannot be experienced, or known. 175 Viz. the quotations from the First Critique, supra. 176 Kant, Opus Postumum e.g. Ak. xxii. 481 (“… als absolute Einheit des Subjects der primitiv bewegenden Kraft … Der Bregriff eines unmittelbar und primitiv bewegenden Stoffs [Wärmestoff]”), 494, 499, 502, 505, 514, 104–5, 115–8 (Förster & Rosen, O.P., 136–7, 141–2, 144, 146, 148, 152, & 198–202). In fact, there are two issues, here: (i) the place of perception of « nature », and (ii) that of freedom where all matter is conceived of as being in-itself: as one, homogenous, and continuous. Moving forces play a role in both cases, and must do so. 177 Kant, Opus Postumum, Ak. xxii, 105 (Förster & Rosen, O.P., 199). It is not that Kant should be thought of as having got very far with this question, but instead that the very attempt to give attention to it, and the various attempts virtually to render banal its possibility as

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Without engaging further in Kant’s treatment of this problem in the detail properly required of it, I want to show how important this whole question concerning the freedom of individual thought and act must be to any general ­conception of the historicity of the continuum, namely to the question of its formation as a product of countless subjectivities, which in turn are located in a complex of conditioned and conditioning contexts. It is not only important in so far as its possibility can be affirmed, but equally in its status as a necessary part of the empirical itself. It must now be affirmed as present and necessary among the principle conditions founding and constituting the empirical character of the world encountered piece-meal in the records, and necessary  indeed for its adequate reconstruction by the interpreter and its comprehension. This would be to treat it as a signal necessity concerning the agency of the historical … of the very possibility of constituting that massive taxonomical artifice encountered by us. For what, from the interior, we have defined as stereotypical and essentialist, and yet from its exterior as what, nonetheless, must simultaneously be regarded, in terms of its agency and drives, as non-­essentialist and Darwinist in its radically individualised basis in human action. In a purely descriptive sense, therefore, I shall turn to the constructional, metaphorical significance of Kant’s third, if more covert reference to the tower of Babel. This comes in a section of the First Critique concerned with the “Discipline of Pure Reason”, which argues in favour of something we need to identify as intimately close to Rousseau’s thought itself,—thus to a libertarian application of pure reason. Kant attacks authoritarian attempts to control access to knowledge, even in the name of the public good; he condemns censorship as

moving force, seems very significant. These pages talk much of the role of God as thoughtentity. This is the key: « God » may be a useful « word-for » what is considered primary, primordial, given, however, that such a « god » can no longer be considered as a proper source of causation in the world, and especially of that characterising the human being, who instead is the creative subject and fabricant of artifice. Where Kant was concerned, human mind could no longer be considered the imperfect mirror-reflection, thus translator, of a God’s aptitudes into phenomenal form, as if the latter were the supreme reasoner, but vice versa: that God is human creativity in its alienated form, and he said so (thus prior to Hegel and Marx)! Yet that idea of a god might have given contemporaries a sense of the universal scope of what we have defined as their very own fabricated culture,—their artifice!

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destructive of the kind of libertarian critical exchange necessary for advance in knowledge.178 Knowledge, both practical and theoretical, requires freedom:179 Freedom is the ground [beruht] for the very existence of reason, which possesses no dictatorial prerogative, yet whose claim is always an accord [Einstimmung] among free citizens [freier Bürger], all of whom must be able to express their thoughts [Bedenklichkeiten] without restriction [ohne Zurückhalten], even in exercising a veto.180 This point even seems to concern intersubjective relationships in a political state, and, thus, it is in no mere analogical sense that Kant refers to Hobbes’ conception of the state; and whilst he does so with evident approval, it is because Kant has managed to bend Hobbes’ arguments into a virtual affirmation of his own libertarian principles.181 178 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 677–701 [Ak. A.738–69/B.766–97] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 593–612): “The Discipline of Pure Reason in Respect of its Polemical Employment” (ch. 1, §2, of the “Transcendental Doctrine of Method”). Concerning justification for censorship in terms of claims for “the common good” (“dem gemeinen Besten”); see Kritik, 683 [Ak. A.746/B.774] (Kemp Smith, 598). 179 It is worth reminding the reader of an especially remarkable expression of this Kantian principle mentioned above (one that has always been very much my own principle and ethic of knowledge), and encountered in Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate (London, 1985), Pt. 1, Chs. 63–4. In the climate of repression and, thus, of fear of expressing oneself, that characterised the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the nuclear scientist, Viktor Shtrum, finds his thought blocked; but hazard introduces him, whilst in exile, into a free and ­uninhibited conversation with a group of previously unknown people, engaging in a brisk conflictual, constructive argumentation concerning the issues of the time; immediately afterwards Grossman depicts Shtrum’s mind as having been freed from its shackles and developing a new theoretical contribution to his science. 180 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 677 [Ak. A.738–9/B.766–7] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 593). If one holds closely to the words Kant had used in this and the following passage, one seems—as indeed I have argued—to find oneself in the full utopian atmosphere of Rousseau’s Social Contract and Discourses. That choice of the term « Einstimmung »—etymologically = « single-voiced »—should not be taken lightly, as if just one possible word among others. It expresses the very status of that accord, its precise and special quality (and Kant was not only an admirer of Rousseau’s writings but meticulous in his use of words);—the word is also redolent of the kind of utopian idealism once attached to the Russian mir: a cacophony of voices become singular, a perfect synthesis: then, call it a « simple »! It is as if Kant’s Tower of Babel had reached the heavens … but one of an ideal civil society [dem gemeinen Besten]! 181 In dealing in particular with Hume’s scepticism, and scepticism in general, he turns the problem more specifically to the question of the fabric of knowledge, and how it is constituted: e.g. “… there, where censoring certain grounds of understanding [Grundsätze des Verstandes], [Hume] does so without bringing into perspective before the judgement

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Just as Hobbes had maintained, the state of nature [der Stand der Natur] would have been a state of injustice [Unrechts] and violence, humanity impelled to endeavour to leave that condition behind them by submitting to the constraints of law [um sich dem gesetzlichen Zwange zu unterwerfen]. This would only limit that freedom [unserer Freiheit] in order to allow it to persist in company with the freedom of others, and even be in concord with the common good [mit dem gemeinen Besten zusammen bestehen könne]. This freedom will also comprise the submitting to judgement of one’s opinions and doubts, of which [however] no one should be deprived and thereby decried as an unruly or dangerous citizen [Bürger]. This is a prior right of human reason [dem ursprünglichen Rechte der menschlichen Vernunft], which recognises no other judge [Richter] than that of universal human reason [die allgemeine Menschenvernunft] in which every individual has voice [ein jeder seine Stimme hat].182 The phrase “constraints of law” actually means, in this context, the voluntary subjection to reason—and, thus, of all agents doted with reason … all human beings,—meaning their « subjection » to free, uncensored, unconstrained critique, self critique or the critique of others. There can be no valid use of unregulated authority in this domain, of justifying even a consensually agreed authoritarian rule, such as we would ordinarily associate with Hobbes’ doctrine: Leviathan’s function, in this so-unexpected Kantian reading, is to generate conditions in which such pure freedom can have fiat. A more Rousseauan (and astonishing) reading of Hobbes’ thesis could hardly be imagined, and this can be said in spite of the truly Hobbsian form of an individual’s submission to reason; … for it is one’s own reason to which one voluntarily subjects oneself, to that authority alone:—ordinarily Rousseau and Hobbes have represented the two extreme and opposite poles of social-contractualist thought, the one that puts all emphasis on duties and obedience to a sovereign without effective limits (Hobbes), and the other for whom the sovereign, or the General Will, represents a kind of intellectualised version of the famous Russian mir, as it of that criticism [Probierwage der Kritik] the entire capacities [Vermogen] of that understanding … For while subjecting to censorship certain principles of the understanding, [Hume] makes no attempt to assess the understanding itself”. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 700 [Ak. A.767/B.795] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 611). 182 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 688 [Ak. A.752/B.780] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 601–2). The analogy with Hobbes continues; as in Kritik, 690–1 [Ak. A.756/B.784] (Kemp Smith, 604), where the new reference to Babel occurs. It is Kant’s principles of discursive equality that are applied in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice.

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had been idealised in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in which agreement is supposed to have resulted from perfectly anarchic and consensual conditions of collective argumentation (Rousseau). In Rousseau’s proposition for the General Will, agreement would also be the product of all voices, a kind of concentrated unified distillation of a collectivity of radical individualism, and reached not through compromise but, instead, because all manage through free brute discussion to arrive at an accord with respect to the truth of any claim.183 Now, it is important that as Kant comes to consider the conditions necessary for such free use of reason, he turns to the education of children,—an issue that had obviously obsessed Rousseau. It is an education that cannot be put off to some period of imagined maturity, but must begin from the very start. Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile found the process of education upon a tabula rasa represented by the newly born, unformed mind: a virtual attempt to simulate in life the logical-constructivist fiction of his version of the state of nature, thus prior to corruption by civilisation. Subjection to conventional forms of education for any duration, however short, would indeed corrupt (thus disable) the future possibility of a free use of critical reason, leaving the student defenceless against one or another dogmatism. Instead, The prerequisite for the teaching I here advise is that it should be grounded in the critique of pure reason, the principles of which must be brought as soon as possible into active use (Ausübung)…184

183 Kant is also seen as having himself combined these two different positions, represented here by Hobbes and Rousseau: passive towards the authority of the state; active in expressing the necessity for liberty of mind and speech. Cf. Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, for an example of this interpretation. Michael Wilks (see the Index of Authors for acknowledgement) had a nice formula for this, often repeated with a laugh in his lectures: that one was “free to obey” in such contexts of political thought; but in this case it is obedience to the imperative of one’s own moral reason. Moreover, the « general will » is in no way contradictory of an own personal will: the synthesis of wills makes the « general » « my » own, makes of mine a « universal » will! 184 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 690 [Ak. A.755/B.783] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 603–4). Once again, one should pay attention to the exact choice of words, for example « errichten » for erect, « festeren Boden » for firm ground, « System », for an edifice conceived as complete, like Campanella’s complete tower, his Città. We witness through the metaphorical application of a known and shared inherited vocabulary and syntactical form of meaning, a language, its transition into that of a modern philosophy of thought and reason, and with the good society as its target,—once conceived of as in the « skies », but, in the present case, Kant’s, on earth. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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As the student begins to learn to test arguments “one by one, by reference to the critical principles”, s/he begins to develop sufficient self-confidence to withstand attacks destructive even of “any speculative structure which [s/he] may … wish to erect”. Then, this would hardly trouble that student since unobliged to hide therein and, possessing some prospects in the practical domain, … able with justice [mit Grund] to erect [zu errichten] a rational and healthy system upon a more firm ground [einen festeren Boden].185 This is the third covert reference to Babel, but now in an astonishingly liber­ tarian, Rousseau-like version in which the builders of the original tower are pictured as having dispersed all over the earth, there to build their own individual towers (as expressed in the initial quote concerning Babel).186 Kant is seen presenting a conception of society in which a new system of education, based upon critical thought, would produce individuals capable of reasoning together without constraint of censorship or repression: thus by « constraint of law ». That is to say, that a universal society, based upon an agreed moral code and use of discursive reason, is erected upon the indissoluble existence of many particulars—of freely opinionating agents … a heterogenous collection of agents each possessing an own individualised opinion.—Yet agents who as individuals have learned how to reason, and who reason in the same manner according to the same a-priori criteria of form-giving thought and reason.187 185 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 691 [Ak. A.756/B.784] (Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 604). 186 This marks Kant’s adherence to an Adamic origin of the human species-identity, expected of his epoch (and still persistent), and which remains current and dominant, but which, so I suggest needs—given our current state of ignorance—interrogation, perhaps reversal, thus product of processes of convergence occurring on a geological or palaeonto­ logical scale, yet social, cultural, historical and evolutionary, thus genetic in their consequences. 187 Note that we have already raised such a notion of a fictive social contract where the conventions of market-behaviour are concerned: that expected by participants and ensuring mutual recognition and trust across the frontiers of difference marked by exchange. That convention may cover forms of expected comportment, or use of a knowledge ground of reference called to attention by the « packaging » of commodities, thus by inscription and stamped signs and symbols, ensure recognition of an identity to be passed across that frontier of exchange. The notion of social contract is drawn from the unquestioned common accord that has evolved in history permitting such events to occur. In this case, however, it is Rousseau’s fiction—that Rousseau plainly states as being a fiction—that is in question, and that equally infused many idealist descriptions of the meetings of the village mir in pre-Revolutionary Russia. John Rawls draws upon its Kantian version for his A Theory of Justice. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Now the point of raising these questions is that they concern a strictly empirical and historical problem, and not only that of the Kantian universals of possible reason. For what concerns us here are populations which have learned willy-nilly, as it were—in spite of an absence of any generally available public system of formal education, or of any other kinds of commonly accepted public institutions of authority—to agree together about certain principles of ­language-use, about closely related conventions of production, and about marketing codes of behaviour, say trust, comportments of exchange, methods of fabrication, or styles of communication, the expression and recognition of signs and symbols across all differences of ostensible linguistic reference, and all coming together in the form of that complexity we call the commodity continuum. All this has happened slowly and cumulatively in the course of history, and, whilst local, particularistic, culturally specific institutions for payments and trade, institutions of regulation, are also developing, they are so in the light of the necessities of the wider contexts of exchange networks and forces of demand through and because of which moneys and commodities are likely to pass, and thus in the often local terms of what turn out to be universal (and universalist) language forms (forged, that is to say, for communication across frontiers). We may remember that the point at which we first discussed Kant’s image of the dispersal of the population of Babel, occurred when dealing with an access to knowledge concerning marketing and production among participants. We described this as always experiential, always particular, always closely connected to time/space locational trajectories through the « forest » of the real engaged in by the continuity of an ongoing experience, thus an « any-­ individual’s » particular and personal accumulation of a corpus of ramifying knowledge,—of the particular path cut through the wider continuum by any such particular individual. Consequently, such a knowledge may be described justly as an intimate, non-conflictual combination (or connectivity) of universal principles and corresponding « local » facts. Moreover, these universals were those we have connected with a transcendental status for such a knowledge, and its influence upon the production, transmission and reading of such corresponding object-domains. The many « towers » of reason and knowledge, each built up by one or another reasoning individual—as expressed in this passage of the First Critique—thus seem to bear close analogy with the intersociality and intersubjectivity of participation characterising the commodity world, but in this case it seems also to characterise the continuum in its real historicity and circumstantial character, thus as « event » and accident, … as contingency.

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As for Rousseau and Kant, the heterogenous character of phenomenal ­ ature, thus too of all actors relative to one another, becomes a veritable n ontological principle for the formation of this world. It is difference between actors, that we also see as a necessary empirical condition for stimulating, and enabling, exchanges and communications. Difference—a fundamental ground of contingent, locational and expressive diversity—pervades societal extension: it is a principle for relationship, for unity, for taxonomy, for designation and for transformation. It affects culture, language and measure, and forms and ideologies of rights as found scattered throughout different territories, and thus even the conception of the person.188 In addition, however, it demonstrates something that might be unexpected: that those who fabricate the stereotypical essentialist category (those who fabricate commodities)—manufacture a whole dense complex domain of essentialist commodity-related concepts, categories, objects, and of means for regulating them—cannot themselves be described from outside, from our own distanciation from them, in essentialist terms. Just as with the problem of the modern biological species concept, we have group identities composed upon a foundation of utter differentiation between all individuals, and which in turn is founded upon utter, thoroughgoing particularism. The stereotypical category is generated in and through an entirely Darwinist context of intersubjective interaction. Accident becomes necessity; contingency is essence.189 This does not solve our initial problem: it merely describes the fact that an essentialist fabric is put together in an utterly non-essentialist milieu, and that things and relationships that must be essentialist in one perspective, are nonessentialist in another, yet more incorporative perspective. We shall find similar problems in extending our analysis to nationalism, racism and ethnicism, in which essentialist stereotyping is equally fundamental, or to modern problems of knowledge itself, in which, once more, essentialism has been seen to be very deeply rooted (especially in the humanities … in the « social sciences »). For, we have not yet learned even to explain these questions to ourselves, … to explain ourselves!

188 In “State Formation Reconsidered”, in The Invisible City, I argued in favour of the quasiRousseauan character of the ideologies and legal codes of many property and share-hold brotherhoods in early modern South Asia and Europe. Of course, they were also penetrated by the significant macro-social and economic inequalities characterising the larger societal context, besides being a central part of the institutional sociology put in place for the appropriation of agricultural wealth. 189 This is also one of the interpretive points raised by Philonenko in his L’Oeuvre de Kant.

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4 Postface Returning to the person of Sidney Pollard, let us imagine that he had indeed managed to reconstitute his industrial regions, not, therefore, under the heads of nations and political federations (such as a « Europe »), but instead according to the actual densities and intensities in the distribution of industrial locations and relationships—distributions and densities which often crossed political frontiers, and at the same time occupied only parts of any given national entity. The industrial space covered by Northern France, Southern Belgium and neighbouring Germany, in the mid- and later 19th century, is a case in point; the great textile area comprising the Low Countries, Eastern England and Northern France in the medieval and early modern centuries, and wholly  dependent upon Italian city finance—parts of an actual distribution of ­manufacturing specialisations and markets—and notably traversing the geographical « barrier » of the English Channel. These examples point to the kinds of order that Pollard might have used to allow himself the luxury of displacing and replacing the inherited forms of the very rhetoric he had set out by criticising, but that continued thereafter to dominate his vocabulary and syntax and determine the orthodox, inherited national-competitive forms of his ensuing argument. And, in doing so, he would have enabled himself to reconstitute his thematic interpretation of industrialisation according to the very approach he had initially proposed, … giving the latter the fresh impulse he had indeed sought. But, in addition, there would also be a need to reconstitute a larger nexus of interdependencies including supply of raw materials and credits, thus including often distant urban places, from which merchant and banking functions operated, but which had provided the very means for trade and exchange even to take place, as also to finance production itself.190 Transport would be less seen as an export/import link between separate units of independent economy places (we note the syntactical form of such usages) as part and parcel of the necessary connections constituting a single, complex, multilocational and multilevel framework of production and marketing activity. Once we look in detail at any production unit and production line we discover them as venues 190 Franklin Mendels published important studies of the interdependence of rural manufacturing areas with rural production and supply of grain; esp. “Agriculture & Peasant Industry in Eighteenth-Century Flanders”, in Parker & Jones (eds.), European Peasants & Their Markets, 179–204. Klima’s discussion of merchant, credit and bill networks, underpinning rural textile production are especially significant in this respect.

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of numerous diverse inputs from near and far. Take, for example, the sources of just the paper utilised for daily accounting.191 The problem concerns not the absence of frontiers but their multiplicity: the need to unpack their differential and mutual ramifications. As we extend scales and distances through such a reconstruction of necessary relationships (finance, markets, equipment, a ­necessary chemical reagent, …)—as we add on new circuits and scales of ­interaction—only then do we reach scales that match that of Pollard’s « Europe » (but for which the name « Europe » is surely a very poor, and indeed ill-considered, merely ideological designation, one that has little to do with the actual shapes and kinds of space occupied by industrialisation). Say, then, that Pollard’s figures were redistributed to refer not to nations but to this different kind of mapping of significances: the nation as a political and fiscal unit would obviously keep a place, but not as the universal spatial organiser, the empty master-category for statistical comparison and contrast and thus for economic or organisational identity, significance and language-use. Syntax and vocabulary would also require radical rethinking—a rupture. The assumed value of drawing contrasts between the performances of actors called « Germany », « Belgium », « Austria-Hungary », and so forth, for a discussion of the units of scale and content to be accorded to processes of industrialisation (and, to repeat, leaving aside the fact that Pollard had begun his article by rejecting this rhetoric), would lose utility, its apparent convenience would pass 191 “The paper [of The Eckstein Shahnama] … is one of the many indications of [its] Ottoman provenance … Though there was no home-based paper industry in the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans preferred an almost white paper with small brown flecks … probably manufactured for them according to specification from other paper-making centres in Iran and Syria”. (Will Kwiatowski, The Eckstein Shahnama, 11). Paper is just an unexpected example. For this question is not only one of elite production of costly manuscripts, but one that may also concerns the kinds of paper utilised in huge quantities, even at the level of the village, for the accounting of local households and village administrations in the Western Deccan of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thus for would-be state administrations and relatively large right-holding households: a fine white paper produced by the paper- making industries of the small local market town of Junnar, an excellent paper with Portuguese water marks, and, thirdly, paper of remarkably gimcrack quality utilised by the English East India Company colonial conquerors in 1818, this last an acid paper that has yellowed, become brittle and often crumbles to pieces in the researcher’s hands. The point however concerns the trades and sources of such necessary inputs and that go to constitute the true combinations of relationships that compose any notional unity comprising such different industries. Of course, many other aspects and features of local economy lead to a considerable magnification of supposed organisational scales, even of what we might consider a marginal peasant household, and as mentioned above.

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outside of the credible. Convenience would come to seem a mask behind which knowledge is falsified,—effectively rendered inaccessible, dangerously so if we consider its current political ramifications. Nor would «  Europe  », properly considered, constitute a useful unit of organisation. A text book on « European industrialisation »—and this phrase and title is certainly valid, being merely attributive—would come to seem an absurdity when seen to be divided into a mere series of national chapters, unrelated to a treatment of a method enabling such units to be made use of in an understanding of events that, in reality, are known to take place on many levels, and according to different geospatial forms of organisation. However, in practice, the topic becomes completely flattened, two-dimensionalised, reordered into a series of national fictions when abandoned to the rhetorics embodied by speech and habitual textual reference: that is, left to the ways in which, prior to applying conscious critical creative reflection, we have learned willy-nilly to think and give expression to … and thus approach the societal and populational. A conscious turn towards the complex liberates historian and economist from the imperatives of the f­ able—makes a « science » (the particular hermeneutic kind of knowledge corresponding to the sorts of facticity concerning historian and cultural anthropologist) potentially possible. Absurdity would have changed its sign.

…

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Figure 23 The « species garden » as introductory vignette in the Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1737), heading each of the six volumes of the dictionary

Illustrations Section 4: Typological Representation, the « Species Garden » and the Palace of Memory (Representation of the Phenomenal World)

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Figure 24 « Species gardens » portrayed on title pages of the first two editions of Olivier de Serres, Théatre de L’Agriculture (Paris, 1600 & Basel, 1651)

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Figure 25 « Species gardens » portrayed on title pages of the first two editions of Olivier de Serres, Théatre de L’Agriculture (Paris, 1600 & Basel, 1651)

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Figure 26 « Species gardens » portrayed on title pages of the first two editions of Olivier de Serres, Théatre de L’Agriculture (Paris, 1600 & Basel, 1651)

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Figure 27 Popular and chiromantic version of a memory palace intended for diverse kinds of ordinary user such as shop keepers, merchants and other market-users. Foldout in Jean Belot, Oeuvres (Rouen, 1647)

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Figure 28 Division of chapter into categories and sub-categories in De Serres, Théâtre de L’Agriculture, edn. of 1600 (Paris, 1600) , p. 441, list of content of the Sixième Lieu (or section)

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Part 2 Taxonomy & Commodity in Global Transfers of Plant Forms and Plant Products into Early-Modern Europe (the Cultural Production of Nature, or the Foundations of Early Botany)

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Das … ist nichts Geringeres, als die große Künstlerin Natur … aus deren mechanischem Laufe sichtbarlich Zweckmäßigkeit hervorleuchtet … 1 In der Tat billigt Kant der « großen Künstlerin »—gemeint ist die Natur des Menschen …2

1 I. Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (W. Weischedel edn., ix, p. 217 [Ak. viii, BA47 (360, 23–7)]): “This is nothing less that the great artist Nature … in whose mechanical course there comes illuminated in full clarity its ultimate purpose …”. 2 O. Höffe, “Kant als Theoretiker der internationalen Rechtsgemeinschaft”, in G. Schönrich & Y. Kato (eds.), Kant in der Diskussion der Moderne (1996, Frankfurt am Main), 500: “In truth, Kant was pointing to « the great artist »—and what he had meant were the natural faculties of the human being.” In the eighteenth century, thus in Kant’s time, the phrase, « great artist », was habitually used to point to a creator, God, his own use of the phrase thus significantly ironic and critical. I have avoided the phrase « human nature, » which, in English, possesses its own distinctive meaning different from what Kant means by these words). It is important to pay strict attention to Kant’s use and choice of words.

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Introduction to Part 2 Plant Artifice / Plant Nature

This divorce of science regarding its attachments to the lifeworld, and to that of the subjective action founding that lifeworld, may indeed have been necessary for its conquests; but it also bears the danger of an objectivist alienation, one which dissimulates those foundational origins, rendering the latter strange and inaccessible.1 In Part 1, I sought to present and explain an anthropology of the commodity continuum, and, at the same time, to justify that anthropology in terms of the need for an addition to current knowledge—a necessary component—the absence of which has seriously debilitated both the quality and the credibility of the latter. As for that anthropology, it is one thing to describe things economic in properly economic and objective terms, but quite another to treat them as functions and products of the human mind and thus as products of individual and collective practice. This is true in the two different senses of that word « anthropology », the social and cultural, on the one hand, and the philosophical or phenomenological, on the other. We might think the word as covering what ideally should be considered entirely singular: a unified field of method 1 One may add to the quotation the phrase “ … inaccessible,—« other »”. The quote drawn from Jacques Derrida’s “Introduction”, to Edmund Husserl, L’Origine de la Géométrie ([1936] 1962, Paris; translated by Jacques Derrida), especially 10–1. In order to make clear the sense conveyed by Derrida’s words I have transposed the surrounding words from his argument into this quotation; for example, the word « divorce » comes a few lines above; in this instance, he uses “liberation”, but with an entirely negative intention: it is this precisely negative intention that has caused me, in my own translation, to replace his word for « liberation » with that of « divorce ». Moreover, what lies in square brackets are also his own words, but drawn also from a few lines preceding the quotation, and that also serve to clarify the broader sense born by the words. The close relationship of that sense to my own argumentation will become evident below. Note that this is Derrida as the young and enthusiastic phenomenologist. Like many such youthful commentators and enthusiasts of Husserl of the 50s and early ‘60s, including Derrida himself, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Gurwitsch, and many others—even Paul Celan in his poetic—he appears but to paraphrase Husserl’s own already clear prose (indeed, often more clear than the commentaries), at least as each had understood it; but Derrida does a very good job, and especially in his La Voix et le Phénomène, adding significantly to our understanding where the needs of my own essay, concerning the issue of translation and translatability, are concerned.

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and synthesis, but which in practice we encounter divided into two distinctive enclaves of method, two kinds of purpose and conclusion and destined as such for separate publication and separate sets of readers. In the one, it concerns what is possible for the human mind, considered universally as applying to the capacities and limits affecting mind common to the whole of homo sapiens, without possible exception or qualification. In the other, it concerns its historical and empirical facticity as generated throughout the globe, and made evident in archive and document; in that respect it is what divides and differs, particularises, that engages study and interest. I have talked much about these two different attitudes to the human possibility of thought, communication and translation on an intersubjective level, and in Part 1 have sought to demonstrate that these two positions concern what, in reality, are two ontologically and ontogenetically interdependent aspects of a single, if particular universal conception of the real.2 2 Di Giovanni expresses this relationship as follows (encountered as I close the revision of the entire manuscript of the book before sending it to the publisher): “The Logic is absolute science only in the sense that it is capable of recognising itself (and thus containing its limitation even as logic) as an analog of rationality as such—a rationality of which there can be other analogs, all of them capable of communicating across cultures and across times precisely because they are the analogs of one rationality—but at a distance as it were, with something always being lost in translation”. (Translator’s introduction to Hegel, The Science of Logic, lxii). It is an excellent statement of meaning in conformity with what I have sought to express above, namely with respect of a universal that grounds all difference;—but with one qualification. Aside from a desire to see this statement spelled out at length rather than as the conclusion of his very brief discussion of interpretations of the Logic, there is that question concerning loss in translation. Once one treats his notion of « cultures in translation », thus between different analogs of rationality, to use Di Giovanni’s own terms, the entirely empirical question of the incidence and possibility of these different analogs, and their possibility as part of a Darwinist-type evolution, demands that this part of his description be recast using a different less holistic seeming vocabulary, one that permits juncture and identity within or as the universal. I also prefer to place the emphasis, controversially, not on loss of meaning in translation but on its relative efficacity in passing meaning from person to person, instance to instance, even in unfavourable factual circumstances thus limiting the holist implications of an implicit or explicit treatment of language in terms of language identities and separate wholes. One continues, as of principle, to differentiate, with persistence, between the responsive solution-seeking agency of the participants faced by factual constraints, and that characterise any context of such participation: the dialectic proceeding from its matter of conversion, so to speak! The question is more significant than a mere matter of emphasis, and especially so in the present-day negative context of comprehending relationships among what Di Giovanni terms « cultures » and rational « analogs », but to which choices of word I prefer « variations of cultural form and expression ». The phrase “analogs of rationality” also requires concrete description and explanation. One cannot escape from the vital need for philosopher,

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However, it is also a genuinely distinctive and serious problem to demonstrate the universal application of such an evidence, that it is indeed strictly « universal », and not merely « general », … two positions with radically different implications. To call it universal means to say that it is shown to be true in spite of all local, circumstantial and qualitative differences encountered in the field, say through direct observation. A cultural anthropologist is seemingly habituated to consider such difference as typifying human culture and as grounding irrecusible problems of intercultural communication and translation. In short, I have not proposed that such a universal should be considered so in spite of, or in contradiction with, cultural variation, but that such principles of mind—considered as the primary criteria through which a world of experience can alone enter the thought of the individual or collective ­subject— must be understood as governing the very fact and possibility of such cultural difference. In short, this is to say that all those differences we observe between Nuer and Dinka, Nuer and Kwakiutl, Nuer and Frenchman, embody those ­universal principles, such as those formulated in Chapter 3, §3, above. This is not to limit and weaken our conception of what should define such a universal but instead to point to it as the ground, in all its own specific character, of such difference. It continues to act as the condition informing, permitting, even fostering the ongoing process of human differentiation evident even today, so that we may rightly judge that first philosophical anthropology as the very foundation of the matter that engages cultural anthropology with the exotic and different. Like it or not! First, therefore, we explain difference—and are able to do so—in terms of those universal criteria, the variable appearance of things in terms of their common grounds; and, second, we research that difference in all its circumstantial historicity, found different, take note, on all its scales of apprehension and according to circumstance: beginning, say by considering the distinction between a « you » and an « I ». Evidently, such a claim is not mere conceit, nor a provocative impertinence; is it not what happens, as consequence, to make possible … ground and explain … that astonishing transmissional facticity and facility that marks the global exchange of the commodity, … of the cultural objects we designate as commodity, yet a facility of passage generally taken for granted as possibility not only by the contemporary participant of those times and places, but also by our would-be learned selves, … as if requiring no interrogation? ­ istorian and cultural anthropologist to collaborate sufficiently intimately and sympathetih cally to develop such a unified and credible description and explanation: « the missing discipline »!

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What, then, I choose to describe as its active translational character, thus the possibility of its transitional passage from place to place, person to person, can operate across all kinds of conceivable and actual frontier or barrier, and precisely as a matter of individual intention, decision and as an actively desired and willed practice, everywhere that we encounter it. It is this subjective complicity in the reality we confront before us, that I sought, in the inaugural essay of the book (“More than a Preface”), to show necessitating … indeed implying … a radically different kind of particularist and individualist method, even a different manner of conceiving the kind of populational agency that goes to constitute the matter of history and counter to what has long characterised the scientistic spirit so evident in the social disciplines just before and after the Second World War, and most notably the structuralism of the post-war decades of the twentieth century. Remember that the latter reveals its heuristic properties and justification by means of an esoteric knowledge inaccessible to ordinary reasoning and common sense. Instead of using terms such as « accident », « individual » or « contingency », as criteria for exclusion from any adequate form of explanation, I have found it necessary to regard each of them as covering kinds of event and agency constitutive of necessity, of what is discerned as organisational and structural, and integral to any consideration of the freedom of individual decision and act. This would imply that such ­latitude of choice among agents would be closely related to the genesis of those conditions that collectively appear determined and dependent.3 Once more, an unlikely circle of causal interdependence binds together seemingly, mutually-­ excluding opposites, such as accident and necessity. In turn, such a passage of a commodity from hand to hand, instance to instance, in some form of market-exchange, flows, as we have seen, between spaces of different cultural order because of subjectively-willed, intentioned and acted-out events distinctly translational in kind. They are acts consciously seeking to « translate » (pass through difference) into equivalence all the obstacles to transmission that marketable objects of exchange encounter at barriers of whatever kind, all that in a given context of passage would naturally, as it were, inhibit such passage. Clearly, thus, a formulation of the agency informing market exchanges implies certain specific kinds of universally incident culturally determinable thinking (yes, that apparent paradox: universal in kind 3 Hegel put it thus: “Appearance is not untrue but is truth itself …” (Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie, 81: „Die Erscheinung ist nicht das Unwahre, sondern eben die Wahrheit selbst, die Wahrheit im Gegensatze der bloßen Gewißheit, [der] innern Meinung und ebenso des Fremden, den Andern, als dieses ist.“, concluding an astonishing and remarkable paragraph in which his poetic, on the one hand, meets his rational exposition of the dialectical realisation of physical material being, on the other.)

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and everywhere specific in form!), a location and expression in thought and practice that it has been my task above to describe and define. That definition has centred upon a labour of mind that seeks and must seek to render the « raw » matter introduced into any production line typological—into a choice among types—types that in turn I have described as stereotypical: every item of a line of production of any type of commodity possessing exactly the same identity, seen to possess identical properties, a single collective name , thus one governing price at any point and moment of exchange, and thereby wholly indifferent to any real differences observable among such items. The identity of this item and that is alike, say, a Hungarian ducat, a Bengal bafta, and so forth, thus a group-identity, without any addition that would indicate differences among the items of such a group.4 Thus the publicly cognisable character of such an identity—its reputation—on both sides of each frontier at which translation is sought—its potentially global recognisable character (some ­micro type known for the properties that distinguish it from other micro types)—concerns a free selection of choices taken at the very point of conceiving its production and generating all that will go to compose what necessarily is a complex and composite site for its production, one most probably requiring many inputs from different sources and quantitative calculations for their combination in order to found the synthesis of particular properties that define all items as that micro type. Those « pieces of eight » of the pirate tales of my childhood (rials d’ocho)—rough-cut in form and in their appearance, known in the markets for their precision of weight and of pure-metal content, yet intended like bar only for transport and reminting—being just such an example, but like every other payment form, typologically distinct, its market-­ destination known from the start and determining that choice of properties, rices for popular consumption or, say, temple consumption, in fact a host of different kinds of demand for the host of rice-varieties entering some rural market. Every member of a « species » must be knowable as that species, rigorously considered identical, and thus infinitely replaceable by other individual items manufactured according to the same criteria. It is this that allows a sack of ducats or baftas to pass through the points of exchange without being opened, weighed or otherwise measured. The identity would be established by any single item drawn from a bag filled with items of such a type, all satisfying 4 “Indifference”: Hegel’s « gleichgültig », the unqualified or undivided simplicity (« Einfach ») and perfect homogeneity of the content of the concept (Begriff) prior to its further phenomenal realisation (aufgehoben) as a plurality of different items (whether Darwinist or stereotypical), thus a universal (unqualifiable) in respect of what it comprises as a category of things.

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the public criteria of necessary recognition, thus by convention, occupying what I have defined as a « species » niche within a profligate « landscape » of species categories / identities / niches.5 Yes, but for these very reasons, it is an anti-Darwinist conception of group identity given form within contexts of agency we have described as Darwinist in type. A necessary choice of type in circumstantial and accidental conditions. The free behaviour of individuals subject to collective contextual necessity! But it is only thus that we are able to understand that the same object could be « recognised » across vast separated distances, geographic or cultural, political or linguistic, thus, indeed, as « commodity », factored to be exchangeable between one place and the other, as part and parcel of a fully engaged and conscious public will that it be so. Its instant recognition, thus passage, is supported by the supplementary use of signs and symbols, mint-marks and the year of minting on coins (that might be known to be fictions but that indicate the exact micro type concerned), images or words on sacks and bales—what we may call the packaging that characterises such given identities, and forming part and parcel of that accessible field of common knowledge and known practices, without which the commodity and its exchange would not have ­existed.—This, here, is a commodity, it is a form of payment, say a ducaton … say a ducaton produced by a certain mint … even one produced by that particular mint in a certain notorious year (known for its good or bad qualities) … a Mexican ducaton refused by merchants in Guangzhou, or one accepted by those same merchants, although a « Mexican ducaton » manufactured in ­Birmingham … but in each case potentially knowable as such, in this case on a global scale, and whether encountered in Guangzhou, Murshidabad, Basra or Birmingham. Then, what of that word « value »? Besides its quantitative meaning as evaluation, it is at once also value in a qualitative and cultural sense: it possesses meaning in terms of what defines it as an identity. It is valued as an identity, both generally speaking and with regard to all its particular manifestations, its functions, uses, and so forth. Each « commodity » possesses a set of qualities regarded as common to every individual of the group and that define its identity. And on such a ground it can thus enter a complementary quantitative field of 5 Of course, I use « social contract » in Hobbes’ sense. It is not that one assumes some vast assembly of a population in which decisions are made, but that history and facticity implies such public accordance. But this is precisely my point. I say accepted by convention in order to characterise this general historical feature, but it is not to say that identities were not necessarily controversial and disputed.

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value-­judgement called price and cost, the « indifferent » terms of exchange that allow all exchange, render all equivalent and comparable,—the veritable axis around which the sphere of the commodity continuously revolves: such quantification permits an analysis into its compositional parts, its anatomy so to speak, and thence its synthesis with all other « like »-values; that as qualities are incomparable among one another and that in being quantified are rendered infinitely comparable with one another, exchangeable as such, and thus substituting the one for the other in the hands of seller and purchaser … that translational act. Nonetheless, they also embody not only such universally accepted characteristics, but do so in forms determined by local circumstantial expressive choices that also go to comprise the selection of form and kind composing their manufacture, and characteristic of local cultural usages. As an example, we may point, here, to that « strange » complex of monetary objects circulating at all levels of exchange in China, called the sycee, while there—and what for those accustomed to the sycee, would seem equally particular, exotic and thus strange—it is the Dordrecht ducaton or the Ankusi rupee that circulates; and yet each is exchangeable for the others, the sycee for the ducaton or for the rupee and vice versa,—exchangeable, that is to say, at certain daily-adjudged quantitative ratios (moreover often fabricated to the precise measurements of pure metal re-applied at distance during reminting). It is thus that gold sycee were made for export to south Indian ports where they would be reminted as South Indian pagoda or fanum (whilst in China itself, the sycee was a silver medium of circulation); likewise that Mexican ducaton with its fictional mint mark and fictional year of minting stamped on its face, and made privately in several parts of the globe for circulation in the markets of Southern China. They were acceptable at distance because true to the known and accepted criteria that defined a gold export sycee or silver Mexican ducaton stamped with a given mint and year. They fed an insatiable, generalised desire for means of circulation that led such payments media eastwards, just as a muslin or ekbari made in Bengal flowed westwards in order to feed the desire for quality cloths in say Dokkum or Bridgeport. But traversing all such circumstance of local expressiveness—the domain of local cultural expression, as it were—one may also study the commodity object as concept—in terms of the universal rules of necessity governing apriori its constitution as commodity—although realised in material terms by the sheer diversity of its being and appearance; those a-priori criteria of constitution must be singular, unvarying, to allow for the absolute unity of the whole organisation that allows it to circulate between places, permitting it ­everywhere

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to enter a numerical value system of equivalence that permits the absolute translational facticity of the market described, above, thus indifferent to all circumstantial and contingent difference (of whatever sort). The implication is that these common principles of constitution are not just generally true, allowing an exception here and there, but are universal, meaning without possible exception. It is this astonishing characteristic, a kind of « first » empirical signal that the human being, wherever encountered and in spite of all differences of appearance and comportment, should also be judged absolutely and fundamentally singular in kind, in mental attributes and fundamental cultural propensities, and that I have sought—behind the scenes, as it were—to demonstrate through this work on the commodity. But, this is not to imply an identical, single « paternal » origin as once seemed to dominate the archaeology and palaeontology of human skeletal remains right through the twentieth century (and, as suggested, an inheritance of the Biblical model as if pure material fact), a view of origins and cause that must leave us await for the revelation of its final and ultimate location in some East African cave or Javanese strata of sedimentary rock:—a kind of fossil Adam, to be studied and identified by some palaeontologist. Instead, it is to argue that such an identity of kind can be thought only to be true at the time we encounter it, thus when we encounter the historical records of a ­settled agriculture and of the various forms of imposition on agriculture ­characteristic of the evidence for the initial emergence and formation of states.6 For, it is from such moments that we also read of monetary evaluation applied to labour, to rights of access to the soil, and upon the harvests of crops sold in the market place, or otherwise appropriated as payment for access to cultivable land. It is when monetary terms, names for particular kinds of local money, or for the moneys of imposition, first enter the nomenclatures of fields, cultivable units and fractional rights of land, such as in fifteenth century Muscovy or Maharashtra. The human being, by the time of the commodity, has, at least, become singular, singular in the criteria that constitute its manner of reasoning and judgement, and of generating and judging the cultural object, and that above all is expressed and visible as that sphere of complex institutions 6 It is to register our continuing ignorance of that past, but also the increasing sense of specialists that the human species should be considered constituted by continuous cross fertilisation, communication and exchange. Yet, in saying this, and, therefore, in assuming the likely possibility of several scattered origins, one remains with Julian Steward’s point about the structural or organic compatibility necessary, in the first place, for such acts of fusion themselves to have been possible and a single line of evolutionary development to have constituted itself.

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and artifice we know of as commodification. This can be considered true in spite of the multiplicity of now recognised, possible human origins and of an initial variety of human kind, and that comes verified in confirming this proposition of an object-world characterised by a global translational practice accessible as a knowledge, in the perceptible detail of experience and comportment among all populations and all members of such populations. Then, Part 2 is proposed as an exemplification of the thesis advanced in Part 1 and resumed in the preceding paragraphs.—It is important, whilst reading what follows, to keep in mind the principles of the interpretation summarised above, together with its attendant reasoning. There are many conceivable ways of so testing and exemplifying the thesis of a universal dimension to human culture: the study of class, expected to be accomplished in a later publication, would also enable such testing, equally seeking to establish the grounds of its possibility and its empirical actuality. Instead, I have chosen a case that has long faced me as especially provocative, particularly difficult to develop, argue and sustain, and likely to meet frank opposition,—thus one that has long attracted me but which a sufficient and credible evidence seemed unavailable until I first began to compose the present book. One is only too aware of the proximity of the rocks against which one may found, yet the sirens that draw me thence continue to impress me, for it concerns a theme that continues to convulse our own epoch and requires discussion and clarification. It thus treats the plentiful circumstantial evidence we possess for the passage and sharing, the cultural spread and geographic extension of an agricultural knowledge, practised and popular, concerning the cultivation of innumerable varieties of locally exotic plant-species, vegetables, tobaccoes, fruits, and their modes of cultivation, that spread, say, from the pre-Columbian interiors of the South and Cental Americas through the vast hinterlands of pre-colonial Africa and Asia, passed from village to village, one rural market to another, until, for example, in the eighteenth century I find myself reading detailed field accounts in relatively remote districts of Western India in which numerous such varieties of vegetable and fruit, kinds that had once originated in the Americas, were gardened. They are seen grown in the form of numerous local varieties, each adapted to local circumstances of soil, climate, pests and market demand, among several other factors, and marketed by local peasant growers long before European penetration of such hinterlands. How, one asks, was this even possible, given the weight of specialist opinion concerning the relative untranslatability between one local « culture » and another;—for, and this is my argument throughout, these plants were as much cultural objects as they were organic. It assumes sharing from hand to hand, by conversation, across micro distance, and eventually covering vast habited spaces of c­ ultivation.

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Such a sharing of knowledge most probably occurred at different levels of society, both at the level of peasant discourse but also through reputation in the activation of a more generalised public demand for such produce, acting thence upon retail purchasers of crops at the level of the rural market that in turn would have stimulated peasant growers to experiment with their local adaptation. Tobacco and the potato are merely high profile examples among a prolix number of such kinds of plant. This proposition, as said, runs contrary to all normative argumentation concerning possible cultural exchange and interlinguistic communication.7 It is from this resistant matter, in this case lacking that dense matter of evidence we possess for trades and markets themselves, that I would draw further evidence for the empirical facticity of our universal! It is with such questions in mind that below, in Part 2, I associate the cultural botany of the rural inhabitants of a distant locality, by way of example, in Gujarat, South Asia, with the urban and intellectual development of an early scientific botany in Western Europe. Of course, it is presumptuous, even anachronistic to speak specifically of a botany in these preindustrial centuries; the old poesis of knowledge associated the plant inseparably with a rich cosmology of other different kinds of knowledge and reference, thus especially with the astrology of the stars and constellations from which they were considered individually to draw their qualities, qualities that in turn pointed to fully developed forms of medicine and pharmacology based upon plants, plant-parts and plant-extracts, and thus, in turn, with the detailed anatomy and physiology of the human body, its parts and disorders equally objectified and named, each such compartment of knowledge, so to speak, in intimate relationship with the other sources of reference, and even with the alchemical transformations of the noble elements from one into the other, another aspect of that ancient poesis in terms of which reasoning could run, like the commodity, intentionally and naturally from one compartment to the other, indifferent to what today we consider important frontiers rendering each incomparable with the others. The number of published « anatomy lessons » in this same period also deserves remark in this connection. Each such compartment of reference 7 We have seen above, that the philosopher George Di Giovanni reformulates Hegel’s universal reason in terms of current assumptions about cultural variance and the difficulties of translation (Hegel, The Science of Logic, lix & lxii). On the one hand, his sentences completely conform with mine in their structure with regard to what I have called the universal conditions of “an explanation of difference”; on the other the vocabulary chosen for doing so conforms with current views on the limitations of translatability between « cultures ». The thesis I propose, drawn from this study of the commodity, emphasises a more pliable, « softer » vocabulary, one that would allow the two poles, the universal and cultural differentiation to meet without conflict or contradiction.

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c­ onstituted a phenomenology led to correspond intimately with the others, whilst specialists, the authors of the books cited and quoted below might call themselves at once pharmacists, doctors of medicine, cosmologists, astrologists and alchemists, and do so indifferently, without a sense of controversy in this respect. They might write several treatises focussing on two, three or more such domains, « expert » in each, their reasoning, as said, running systematically from one compartment into the other in the syntax of their sentences.8 Thus treatises on the classification of plants were likely to contain more information on medical remedies and preparations for ailments of the body, than on traits we would today consider as strictly botanical. The pharmacists might write about the cosmology of The Sphere—the earth-centred conception of the order of the universe, whether described in terms of the heavenly bodies or in terms of reason and the exposition of knowledge—or publish a treatise on alchemical experimentation. For example, like most of his colleagues, Newton took alchemy seriously, conducted experiments, possessed manuscripts circulated by others, and contributed himself to such later circulating knowledge, and constituting an important part of the private libraries of the time. It is from that complex and common « poetic » ground of reasonable knowledge and inference that botany became gradually separated. What perhaps is more surprising, where the following study is concerned, is the translational connectivity that allowed what ordinarily is treated as an « ethno-botany » (a term, that I find dangerously overburdened with unwanted meaning, even counter-factual, and that, generally, I prefer not to use) to pass without apparent cultural or conceptual resistance not just from village to village, market to market, or one continent to another, but equally from those peasant sources of knowledge directly into the intellectual spheres of discussion and conceptual development in Western Europe considered part of the early history of botany. And, let’s be clear, such early intellectual botanical discussion, correspondence and treatises arose equally and relatively abundantly in, for example, China and the Ottoman Empire, where we appear to see the same kinds of passage, communication and development. The proposition I present is that what we come to observe in such instances are plant nomenclatures and typologies, plants described in terms of their identities and varieties, transiting from one part of the global sphere of exchange to another, and that do so as if commodity:—« commodity », that is to say, as carefully defined in Part 1. They transit between such regions of e­ xchange 8 I refer again to Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory and her exposition and illustration of Giulio Camillo’s L’Idea del Theatro, where such a composite and interrelated organisation of knowledge is clearly shown.

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but also, and more remarkably, between social and cultural locations radically different in kind. These early scientists in Groningen, Antwerp, Bologna or Marseille obtained their specimens from correspondents dispersed in different parts of the globe, specimens that passed as type from the Gujarati or Fujian peasant to a Bohemian or Italian savant, their passage described in letter or book without questions raised concerning such typological identity. The very form and criteria upon which were based the categories mentioned respectively by say a Gujerati or Javanese peasant and those composing the nomenclatures of plants encountered in a book written by a Dutch or English professor seemed to pass from region to region without apparent need for any act of translation—simple or complex—between typological systems. When illustrated and named on the page of the treatise, and thence described, their different local nomenclatures may be seen listed side by side together with their new Latin designations as if such indications of identity were perfectly equivalent. The point is not whether this translation of type can be justified as being scientifically correct, at least in modern terms, but, to the contrary, that it is true of contemporary facts, thus what we encounter in correspondence, treatise and other documentation. Correlation of form and identity are assumed in the passage of such plants; the possibility of such correlation seems part of the assumptions of the time, thus uninterrogated, and, in being assumed to be equivalents have consequently embodied developments of knowledge elsewhere. It is such assumption that should now surprise the reader, invite interrogation: it is as if such plants were regarded in the same manner as commodities, part and parcel of the same global dimension of identity and practice, and, moreover, a strong evidence concerning that shared assumption concerning the translatability across inter-cultural space of both idea and type. We might even say, that it is because it may indeed controvert the truth—the validity of such an assumption of exact correspondence—that it marks an evidence of our cultural universal: that field of shared expectation, recognition and transmission of a given identity. Say, that they can be shown not to have been scientific equivalent, not parts of the same kind of a systematics, Kant’s dictum that mendacity has ontogenetic consequences, would remain correct: the lie modifies the reality in which we find ourselves. And it is precisely the same principle seen justifying Kant’s assertion of the Newtonian and Euclidian principles embodied by object formation: no, he was not concerned with the truths of physics but instead with the cognitive truths of the human mind, with that same realm of common sense that Galileo had once combatted. Below, therefore, I seek to ground early botany in that very culture of the commodity, especially in the Kantian sense of the constitution in thought of plants

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as a field of phenomenal objects with distinctive, definable properties and morphological forms that occupied a typology and that later would become matters of intensive disputation. We therefore discuss the influence of distant agricultures and movements of types across vast rural hinterlands, such as the very early and precocious movement of food-plants,—derived as of origin from the very sophisticated garden agricultures of the pre-Columbian Americas—through the hinterlands of the African continent long before European penetration of its interiors, and likewise into the village landscapes of vast areas of India, China and elsewhere in Asia, types, therefore, being passed among ordinary people from one to the other through exchange, casual contact and conversation, by a shaking of hands across some social or cultural difference, and thereby converted from one micro-local typology into others in such passage. It is thus that tobacco, chiles, potatoes and mangoes spread across the globe, multiplying into diverse locally adapted, bred and named cultivated varieties, and which, as consequence, ought, so I argue, to be regarded as the artifice of a human-constructed nature with typological characteristics seen to differ more or less radically from those kinds that we accept as Darwinian in type. I argue that attempts by early European botanists to assemble together all possible kinds of plant in their own gardens—to reconstruct a kind of Paradise on earth, as one enthusiastic contemporary described it—was grounded on the commodity, its form and conveyance, its translational character acting upon what already was considered unified as a field consisting of a plenitude of kind and difference, of identities defined and recognised by their qualities, and yet that could and were judged according to a single unifying principle: the commodity alchemised into a quantitative value, thus price. The artifice of the cultivated plant— maintained in being often through arduous efforts of frequent labour, exerted against the dissolving forces of nature,—founded upon universal, yet stereotypical principles of type and category, and that we have also seen to be conditions for the culture of the commodity. It is type determined by market constraints, thus forces already operating at distance and by nature driven and formed by intention,—translational in character. It becomes necessary, therefore, to take another, perhaps even more provocative and dangerous risk: to attempt to enter and influence the fiercely argued disputes amongst specialists that concern what is known as the systematics of plants and concerning the typology of botanical diversity; for, is it not necessary for the botanist, as much as for the cultural and historical anthropologist, to make a distinction between a natural sphere of plant growth in which Darwinian principles of understanding are relevant, and another, purely artificial, characterising the relationship between agriculture and market f­orces, and

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held in being as a dynamic system of discrete identities, stereotypical in principle, worked arduously as identities, and maintained in being precisely through that arduous labour intended to hold nature in check? Is it not necessary for the botanist, in treating cultivated plants, to seek a credible synthesis of both kinds of typology, thus giving peasant systematics the serious recognition it deserves? Neo-Darwinists appear fierce in their hostility and rejection of this possibility (as if Darwinism were some new religious faith, but which Darwin himself would surely have opposed). It becomes necessary to conclude, so it appears to me, that once placed under close scrutiny it is theoretically and empirically unacceptable to reject out of hand this proposition without first submitting it to serious methodological consideration and interrogation: the division between nature and culture cuts right through the very midsts of organic life in a manner that the specialist in plant genetics appears alone equipped to analyse and understand. This is true even though, given the larger more absolute and universal definition of nature, we must also recognise culture as ­subject to it. In this second part, therefore, I seek to unite these extremes, geographical, social and cultural, in a common web of dependent relational description. The famous « Human Tower » of Babel, that of an antipathetic Bible, is, indeed, composed of differences, seen to be irreconcilable the one with the other, but these same differences happen to have been founded without exception on universal and human constitutive principles. Then, to what should we attach that word difference?—To what kind, scale and definition of entity? This question too has required much critical concern in Part 1: it is the question that finally is posed to historians, ethno-botanists and cultural anthropologists. The Kantian, on the one side, and the historical and cultural, on the other, thus the two anthropologies, should flow together as a united current of coherent exposition and explanation. The forms, organisation, sense of structure and necessity, seen forming reality are but products of circumstance, accident and contingency, a view of contingency considered constitutive of reality as argued in “More than a Preface”. All seems to compose a circle of ongoing interdependence between principles that conventionally and normatively have in the past been stubbornly opposed to one another, the one excluding the other and vice versa.

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Chapter 1

A General Framework 1 Introduction This second part of the book is founded upon the basic thesis argued in Part 1, and analysed, there, in terms of historical, anthropological and botanical materials; however, what strictly governs that treatment of materials is a primordial concern with « possibility », thus a philosophical interrogation of what had been necessary for that commodity continuum to become constituted as matter for thought and practice, to become culture in the strict sense of that word, and thus a culture corresponding in its dimensions with that very space and time occupied by commoditisation in its own right. It is to say, that if we have come to identify a globalising economy concerning the commodity— thus an early englobing commercial capitalism before industrialisation—then our concept of the culture of that commodity must be equally globalising, and that, indeed, I describe and then define as strictly universal in kind. I shall outline, once more, the nature of this proposition in this introduction, and thereafter, in Part 2, attempt to exemplify its validity and fertility for addressing a particular range of problems set out below, and that aid me in interrogating yet further the very questions arising from commodity production and its intimate connection with agriculture and horticulture. Thereafter I shall turn to the larger, relatively global context, in which, I believe, the more specific, «  Europe »-related subject matter of the present part of the book, the development of an early science, needs to be placed (and, I emphasise, the example chosen might instead, with a sufficient expertise, have concerned other regions of the world, such as China and Ottoman Turkey). It is not simply that this context of the commodity provides contemporary and researcher with a vast bank of « primordial » resources—raw materials, plant species, and so forth—which would become appropriated and then utilised within certain sectors of activity and idea within the compass of « Europe » itself, but, and much more to the point, and possibly more controversially, that this context also provides and continues to generate the fundamental formative foundations, as much conceptual as material and institutional, within which much of what I discuss needs—at least in principal—to be understood. This statement even … perhaps aboveall…concerns the subtitle of this essay, « early botany », and indeed its later popular « quasi-Darwinian » styles, which I take up especially in the “Postface” that concludes the essay. Thus an argument representing this notion of passage

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and translation between such different aspects of contemporary culture and idea—their plasticity, so to speak, and bringing to view their common traits— is now required. That very word « Europe », as we have seen, is itself a problematic notion, one already regarded critically and constructively in the first chapter of Part 1; it is a term requiring careful limits applied to its definition.1 The initial proposition (one that I shall soon qualify) continues to be that human-factored nature—thus, everything factored as language and idea, commodity and symbol, by the productive skills and mind of Homo sapiens—falls on one side of a radical taxonomic divide on the other side of which lies spontaneous, organic nature. On the near side of this line, therefore, are all things conventionally considered « cultural » and « economic »—production and marketing, commodities (i.e. goods produced in quantity for markets against payments) and payment forms themselves, but, furthermore, all the institutional, linguistic and other cultural paraphernalia, connected with these same so-called «  economic  » phenomena. Most obviously, it includes the subject matter of the anthropologist: beliefs and social forms also fall on this side of the line. The anthropology of modern society would find much to add to this list: nationalisms and ethnicities, so deeply rooted in modern thinking and related kinds of language that seem mere common-sense, « natural », although, in truth, entirely cultural, and whatever the particular positions of the persons concerned. On the far side of the line are the fauna and flora composing the major subject matter of all general enquiry into order and process in organic nature, thus as found on grassland, moorland, forest, lake, soil or on mountain side. Yet, missing from this division, somehow caught between the two classes— and this is indeed the major point—is a critical empirical part of material facticity, at once social and cultural, and simultaneously organic, biological: the 1 I must be clear: this criticism of concepts of identity is not an attack on the political constitution of a united « Europe » in the present, nor is it concerned with such an attack. To the contrary! Instead and first, that a dissolution of separate nationalisms in order to construct a political entity to which we may attach called Europe is one I consider urgent and desirable, but a wholly different issue from the general corpus of unquestioned assumption ordinarily born by the word « Europe » in its generally arbitrary use in the humanities (and that we have seen demonstrated by the economic historians). My present critique concerns the misuses that such holistic and exclusionary identities assume beneath the pens of the specialist, whether historian, anthropologist or otherwise, let alone in their widespread popular usage from which, indeed, our own seems drawn, as if neutral of meaning. Today’s political « Europe » is specific in kind and content, with many juridical exclusions and factual limits that in turn become open to discussion; in contrast, the one criticised is an absolute, ideological holistic entity, never defined for what materially it is assumed to comprise, and that corresponds, as I see it, to no reality of the past.

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plants and animals in field and garden, pigeon loft and stable, orchard, experimental farm and laboratory, and so forth, in which fauna and flora are artificially selected and maintained. It would be reasonable to consider these as parts of nature, of a first nature since organic, and thence to place them on the far side of the line of my distinction. This indeed is how generally they have been treated in all branches of knowledge, including systematic and evolutionary biology: as entirely continuous (without discernible frontier) with what we conceive of as spontaneous organic nature itself; it thus presents itself as a major source of knowledge about the latter (a convenient focus for experiment and scientific discourse). Yet, as socio-cultural objects, as products of art, craft, calculation and intention—of motivation and purpose—should they not, even as organisms, be pulled back onto the near and cultural side of the line?2 The problems with this distinction are two-fold: (i) The radical implications of this formative and constitutive distinction seem never to have been completely or consistently represented, at least within the public frameworks in which problems in theoretical biology are ordinarily discussed. Indeed, a good deal of modern polemic is even geared towards the rejection of any possibility of such a contrast. Thus it has also not been analysed as a potential difference concerning organic form and order. (ii) Perhaps most immediately surprising and controversial, the dividing line is posited here as cutting not so much between things strictly organic and things strictly cultural, but as passing through nature itself. This is to say that a significant part of organic nature—and most obviously that part of nature of most concern to the ­historian— is itself cultural, by which I refer to all fauna and flora which are bred or cultivated, thus to all agricultures and ­horti­cultures, ­domestic 2 A mark of the entirely different position on this question of indifference or difference between natural species form and cultivated species form that can be taken by the phenomenologically oriented philosopher—driven to emphasise the radical and constitutive, indeed definitive difference resulting from human agency and consciousness—is described by George Di Giovanni in Hegel, The Science of Logic, eg. xxi: for Kant and Hegel, nature itself becomes transformed by and for consciousness into a realm of constituted meaning, a characterisation that must be transferred, in the light of this study, to cover the consciousness of all participants of any given cultural milieu, say of commoditisation. The market is a place of gathered meaning, in this sense, of constantly transforming and translated meaning. The concept of type becomes invested with the kinds of meaning that drive both intention and design invested by the cultivator in the selection of cultivated varieties, thus in giving distinctive and precise form to them as sub-types, even whilst preserving their biological identity. In short, a biologist concerned with such typology would only benefit by becoming familiar with such phenomenological procedures involved in the agricultures of the past.

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and experimental breeding, wherever in the world these are found, thus whether generated for recreation, science, or subsistence, or, ­instead, for commercial reasons of exchange, thus as commodities, in the strict sense of that word, certainly including, without qualification, that world-extensive domain of peasant cultures, which, in the medieval and early modern centuries, and thereafter, developed and stretched across the continents. 2

Contexts, Empirical & Intellectual

The context is one of a movement of plants across territories and oceans, migrating from hand to hand, one distant port to another, field to laboratory, and from one linguistic domain and place-specific classificational order and selection into another, and yet another—thus traversing a continuum composed of differing specific contextual and culture-forming conditions and kinds of content, whether considered botanically or culturally. Always, there is also a basic context fundamental to this movement, that of trades, markets, a sociology of both market and transport, and the trade routes themselves, all of which form aspects of specific organisational conjunctions of sense in particular conditions of culture and society, and that can therefore be recounted in an equivalently specific descriptive language in fields of other possibility. The context is at once biological but it is also economic and social: the production and marketing of commodities, their social organisation, and, in particular, what we call commoditisation itself, and that begin their productive cycle and their movement through territory and time, as a conscious and decisive selection of the seed to be sewn in the soil, thus as parts of a local organisation of time and space, of soil and weather, botany and craft: yes, a complex knowledge that must be always sufficiently flexible for rapid choices and changes according to the dynamism of the markets of demand, the character of which I still like to think of as captured most elegantly in Marc Bloch’s Charactères originaux.3 Quite clearly, we shall need to be very careful in defining what we actually mean by context: if we conceive of it merely as a plurality of different « cultures » and « societies », « each » such culture/society differing from the « others » we would come to very different results to those obtained if instead we considered context, at least at some level, as continuous across frontiers, and, in this respect, at least, as singular: a singularity that nonetheless is highly variable in its cultural expression as a continuum. In short, this problem of context must be a matter of interpretation that arises within the argument itself: it 3 M. Bloch, Les Caractères originaux de l’Histoire rurale française. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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cannot be left as a given, as an assumption, however generally accepted such assumption might be. A suitable comprehension of what we thus consider as context should permit a minimal understanding of how such transfers of plant-products could even be possible, given the particular kinds of emphasis concerning inter-cultural relationships, communication and translatability expressed in prevailing anthropological knowledge. But if this is so, then the transfer—say, that of an object, say that of an item of knowledge—itself must be correctly and sufficiently described: we must ask what it is, precisely, that happens to be transferred across cultural and economic space: only by defining and describing specifically what this transfer ­involves—thus what, precisely, thus conceptually and constitutively, is a seed or a tuber packed in a trunk for shipment from Asuncion to Lisbon, or Surat to London—can we begin to understand what we even mean by the word « context », and, therefore, what we need to know in order to define it. We ask what elements should be put together in order to reconstruct and interpret a sufficient idea of a necessary context that would permit such plant-transfer? For, that term, « seed », is far more than mere botany. Is it not also something of mind, of meaning, a veritable meeting place of meanings derived from subjective need and objective conditions, thus in its own right a veritable abstraction as such, a composition of desired properties and characters that also are seen to transmit across social and cultural space? In some sense however, there are problems that cannot be completely resolved; this is because certain aspects of what we call context, that in which the transfer of the seed or the plant takes place, are extremely allusive: here I refer to transfers from the Amer-Indian horticultures of central and south America into the continental hinterlands and, thus, horticultures of Africa, Asia and also Europe, and their extensive absorption and subsequent variation throughout vast extensive countryside, where, indeed, we discover them spontaneously and purposively taken up as cultivable, useful and adaptable by vast numbers of scattered rural producers. Notice that in the 20th century, such producers would prove remarkably suspicious of the new seeds and techniques of developmental agriculture recommended in the initial post-war wave of agricultural development in the 1950s and early’ 60s. This very suspicion helps us to understand that transfers of plants and seeds across space and frontier, from one cultural and agricultural/horticultural context to another, are strictly problematic, cannot be taken for granted, are resistant to facile explanation. They involve questions at once organisational, technical and also conceptual, and that refer us to the interdependence of numerous combined factors organisationally synthesised within any particular complex agriculture. If plants can be seen to have spread from one field and village to another through extensive rural hinterlands within the different continents, we have a Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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serious task, perhaps unexpected in its level of difficulty, of explanation, and that must be solved if we are not to construe such movements in overly simplistic and reductive terms. The task is partly derived from the peculiar character and authority of current normative knowledge concerning ethnic, cultural specificity—what I have necessarily, consistently criticised above as spurious assumptions concerning the inherent obstacles to « translation » caused by cultural breaks, frontiers and distances, and that derive as a secondary consequence of, what I have judged, an a-prioristic uninterrogated false knowledge and use of language. Then, the task is also a question of logic, that of observing very high degrees of local differentiation of plant varieties and agricultural regime, whilst, nonetheless, plant forms happened continually to traverse the matter of local, technical boundaries … being cultural matter, no less.4 However, it is also clearly botanical, and yet that concerns the very nature of what must be described as artificial botanical variety. 3

Foundational Difficulties

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Problem Domains

The corollary of the foregoing remarks is that there are a number of essential problem-domains, that define the particular tasks of the essay. 4 I prefer to avoid the official word « ethnobotany », for the simple reason that we are not always concerned with particular ethnical clusters where cultivation is concerned, even less so where markets are at issue, and that the term itself marks a deflection from the complexity of the context in which artificial botanies are given form, leading back to those essentially uninterrogated and inherited forms of description contested systematically in this book. I found myself confronted by such market-oriented horticultures in the scattered villages of the pre-colonial uplands of Western India, and in which several plant types—known to have been developed in the pre-Columbian garden agriculture of the Americas—were encountered frequently listed, costed and priced in individual cultivation accounts, and where we see them, even in such distinctly rural conditions, exchanged for specified named types of coin in markets to which growers carried them. The cultivator, proprietor, renter, share-­ cropper, labourer, must be understood to be subject to a regime of diverse and frequent impositions for which market sales, thus the specific set of market-oriented decisions guiding cultivation determined the specific criteria according to which selection was performed. I took up Richard Fox’s useful composite term « rurban » to describe such conditions, in contrast to which the thoroughly « ruralised » economy and society often mentioned in secondary works would, where true, have been consequent upon processes of underdevelopment subsequent to colonial occupation (destruction of the conditions of market demand and thus decline of markets, and thus of that « rurban » character of village life and cultivation). It is in such a context of underdevelopment that the kinds of « literacy » I equate with the populations of the pre-colonial past would also have been lost. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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A Botany My firm proposition (based upon what has been considered in Part 1 as decisive evidence and supported by the justice of an argument of which I am equally firmly convinced) is that the practical botany of cultivated plants and botanical systematics concerns a relatively distinct category that must be conceived as different in kind from the more general environing realm of typological form and constitution that we accord as defining nature, and the evolution of natural specie-forms in nature when unaffected by human intervention. This is to emphasise the specific and distinctive character of what we denote as artificial, since consisting of a flora consciously driven, given form and determined by human art. It concerns a content desired and differentiated by relatively distant consumer demand, but its formal constitution are determined by the field of market contexts and market forces that also form part of this world of the commodity; it is this distinction and this domain of artifice that is of intimate concern in the present instance: how to bring it to attention and insist on its difference from our Darwinist conception of nature and of those contexts of human agency in which this difference is actively and consciently created. As a principle of « scientific » method, an ethic we apply to ourselves concerning such method, it should be considered distinct, interrogated as such, before coming, in reason, to be judged as presenting or lacking—if indeed this is the consequence of such enquiry—discernible significant distinctions. That such a position presents manifold severe problems both of conception and understanding, thus of how even to proceed with such an interrogation, I do not doubt. But, as I repeatedly have said, convenience is not an acceptable reason for bypassing the issue. Perhaps it is of particular consequence that Darwin himself had sought to locate a nature, the Galapagos, where he could feel himself free of the dominating surrounding influence of the human and cultivated. The task, therefore, is to distinguish the properties of this artificial systematics, one generated in history and through human work and social relationship, if only provisionally, from the botany and systematics of plants in what we agree to describe as nature (thus as if untouched by human influence). We have seen how these two apparently distinct spheres of being meet within the very fields of cultivation, within the plant itself, influencing its forms and its comportment, so to speak. Unfortunately, the consequence is that this task evokes questions of general theory that are either fiercely debated among opposing schools (and concerning many aspects of evolutionary biology in its own right), or are deeply problematic for all participants in debate, whether natural scientist or historian, anthropologist or development-economist (the very idea of a systematics of cultivated plants being controversial). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Equally unfortunately, there is no avoiding these problems if one wishes to confront the historical and cultural questions posed in this essay: one must ultimately acquire a sufficient minimal knowledge in the areas concerned, even concerning the criteria on which a strictly natural-science systematics of, respectively, the cultivated and the reared, should be based, upon which to take up a stance, and in my case risk interpretation. B

Field Production as Commodity Production

The proposition that informs the argument and structure of the essay is that the larger «  culture  » of commodity production and marketing extending through vast extents of varied, differentiated territorial and social space, provides both a long-term and global set of institutional and conceptual contexts within which human-led agricultural plant production may also be understood. That is to say, that commodity production is interpreted as an essential part of an effective potential answer to questions concerning the character of a systematics of cultivated plants, thus to questions about cultivated plant-form and concerning the botanical category we denote by cultivation,—that which comes immediately before the human eye and from which it proves difficult, if not impossible—speaking of any possible empirical experience — to escape (other than conceptually and imaginatively). This is not to cast doubt on the veracity of a Darwinist type theory of that nature but to see more clearly how nature and artifice can both come together within the cultivated plant. It is also to confirm it as a credible means of describing historical reality itself, as the very context within which artifice is generated and separates itself, also as argued above. C

« Esoteric » Transfer and Its Institutional Context

In turn, and on a different level of effect, general commodity production, and commodity-influenced agricultural production, will also be seen to have provided a more direct institutional and instrumental context for commercial and private transmissions of new plant forms from different parts of the globe to and among amateur and specialist horticulturalists, botanists and museums, apothecaries, and so forth. The basic and initial point is that, relative to commodity production and marketing, such specialised, esoteric or medical transmissions of plants and plant parts, were themselves feasible because fastening upon that experience and density of communicational networks and expressive form characterising commodity transmission, and already long in existence and in continuous

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d­ evelopment, and, as we have seen, extraordinarily extensive in their global range.5 Commoditisation had already long influenced the global cultural and imaginative context within which such transmissions of plant specimens came to pass, and in particular influencing their constitutive form. D

Commodity Form & Botanical Knowledge (a Conceptual Context)

More controversially, I shall also argue that commodity production and marketing, and the communicational forms connected with them, provided a less obvious foundational grid for the conceptual development itself of early bo­ tany and zoology, one that profoundly affected the directions and forms of ­specialist botanical naming and classification, and that, in turn, may be seen to have generated, in botanical description, a particular kind of narrative form and structure. In this respect, it is not that, say, Chinese or Dutch botanists simply acquire materials from afar, and thereafter convert them into objects of conceptual introspection, but instead that the taxonomies (irrespective of level and place) of both cultivated plants and commodities in general, contain a hidden conceptual content—spatial and temporal—affecting assumptions about identity and classification, and that enter, willy-nilly, the mainstream of this novel and accumulating corpus of biological knowledge. E

Artificial Botany as Culture (Unity and Diversity)

A different kind of difficulty concerns the cultural significance of plant transfer: how should we define and understand the « cultural » content of the botanical object of transfer? It must be emphasised that this is a problem only for us: a problem of the kind of knowledge seen to characterise the social disciplines, and that conceive of culture … make of it … an obstacle to communication across spaces separated by language, ethnicity, and so forth. Nonetheless, it implies a reconsideration of culture, in its own right, as a possible context for such transmission, thus as a space of expected and intended transmission and translation, implying the necessity of a reconsideration of received knowledge.

5 The density of correspondence between botanists in 16th–17th century Europe is astonishing; viz., for example, P.G. Conti (ed. & intro.), Lettere inedite di Charles de L’Escluse (Carolus Clusius) a Matteo Caccini Floricultore fiorentino. Contributo alla Storia della Botanica, “Introduzione”, for correspondence between Clusio, Caccini and Colonna (among many others): e.g. 24.

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In this respect, Part 2 follows closely upon the content and argumentation worked through in detail in Part 1. This problem of culture applies to plant-form as commodity. Cottons are a particularly interesting example because of the complexity of organisation in which successive marketing and production points and phases, often separated by considerable distance from one another, go piecemeal to compose a final end product, whilst, however, beginning life as plant variety in the field. From the first, formed consciously in the cultivator’s mind and determining practice in giving identity and form to plant variety, there is the determining presence of its possible marketisation, of a play of demand for specific kinds to which practice must respond. That is to say that the plant variety is from the first marked by and for the market. But as plants, plant extracts and plant-parts, they also enter the apothecarial market, and as apothecarial specimens we find them in turn transferred from more or less distant cultural locations in the countrysides of Asia, Africa or the Americas to those multi-disciplinarian specialists in Europe who possessed interest in botany. On the one hand, plants are transferred to the apothecary or botanist in Groningen or Florence; on the other, a Portuguese or Polish « botanist » has incorporated them as plant-identities, already formed as kind and identified by name, in, say, « Cochin China » or Peru. Subsequently, the botanist may record a variety of different nomenclatures under which that plant is ostensibly identified in different places and social levels of observation and then renames them for European consumption, but without considering it necessary to reconsider their already given classificational status. This problem must initially be identified and then contextualised as a problem of knowledge, especially anthropological. This will then permit a universalist hypothesis concerning the unity of the praxis underlying all differences among local plant taxonomies in different continents, and that makes transmission of cultural products—cultivated plants—seem entirely explicable in terms of specific institutional, economic and conceptual procedures and principles of order. Such hypothesis will not seek to reduce cultural difference but instead to explain it, comprehend difference as part and parcel, and necessarily so, of a historical and universal human culture that expresses itself in terms of locally conditioned circumstance. Each of these questions will be discussed below, first as context in the rest of  Chapter 1, and thereafter as particular problems of content and theory in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively. Further clarification of the distinction between artificial (thus cultural) and spontaneous organic natural orders and plant botanies is provided in a brief “Appendix”.

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ii A

Substantive Discussion The Continuum of Culture, Language, Systematics: Translatability

Systematics, language and culture each occupy many levels and scales of social reality and cultural organisation. This notion should lead to circumspection concerning the significance of all frontiers and territorial unities in a discussion such as the present one: these frontiers and unities are obviously part and parcel of the empirical landscape of study, yet not much should be assumed of them a priori, nor transferred to the past from modern experience (one as yet to be digested and interpreted). The unities involved often lack substantive definition in terms of real cultural and territorial space, the term « Europe » being itself an especially notorious example. They frequently involve contrasts deriving from other domains of definition, say legal and political, not necessarily comparable or reducible to those concerning, say, an economic or cultural subject matter. We are all supposed to know this, it being a much repeated platitude, yet involving a logic of language and identity from which it is extremely difficult to escape. My point, therefore, is that linguistic and taxonomic variation concerns less an empirical aggregate of different neighbouring systems of language or classification, which in mind and text are seen to confront one another, as it were—as if, therefore, constituting obstacles to intercultural mobility and comprehension—than instead as a problem of interpretation and reconstruction requiring an entirely different manner of conceiving such difference. The initial problem, then, is to consider what kind of empirical space and order such distinctions imply, and in particular with reference to those economic and plant-related phenomena that compose the present subject matter. My aim is to confirm the idea, presented in Part 1, of a continuum of infrastructural connections in terms of which difference itself should be interpreted and understood. In all parts of the world China, India, Ottoman Turkey, western Europe plant cultivation, and botanical knowledge are closely linked together with larger complexes of specific belief about nature and the universe, beliefs existing on different social levels, and which if we followed the anthropologists would, when examined separately, that is when isolated from one another (descriptively or as interpretation), be treated as closed conceptual wholes, come to be regarded erroneously in terms of mutually exclusive cultural boundaries, a world, in short, divided into an aggregate of particular civilisational or ethnical systems. Yet, when considered as complexes of finitely altering relationships

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and associations running across territorial and social space can be seen to concern a degree of interdependent continuity that might when studied come to appear as if as primordial in significance as otherwise seem those differences of culture, of mind-set (those «  mentalities  » of a recent historiographical past), or of different intellectual level distinguished and characterised holistically, and separately from one another. It might be better to argue that such contrasts indicate a problem that in more detail appears of a different and more complex constitutive kind, and that at least ground and permit the translational practises we observe in the form of marketisation, comportments of trust, thus human intention when faced with factual obstacles of mutual comprehension: this again is to oppose « nature » as it were, be it that of society and economy, with consciousness and will. If so, these two viewpoints would need to be integrated into a single hypothesis, in spite of what appears their mutual contradiction of one another. Botany and taxonomy, in this sense, would necessarily have to be set within a wider set of contexts and connectivities, and, consequently, would come to be seen as transcending territorially differentiated cultural/linguistic forms of expression. For, in practice, we see plant types transferred between different regions, and also taken up throughout extensive continental territories by large populations of peasant cultivators among which various languages and local dialects were spoken, and displaying different local cultural orientations and forms of organisation. This transfer occurs at the micro-level of exchanges between neighbours and among neighbouring villages, and also at the level of interoceanic exchanges. There are hidden continuities of numerous kinds, yet also huge gulfs in modern knowledge, concerning such continuities … concerning what must again be emphasised as their very possibility; in particular, there is a masked continuity of shared mental precept transcending the apparently radical distinction between pre-Columbian society and culture from its global neighbours, and thus separating what generally are recognised as the highly developed forms of pre-Columbian horticulture from the market continua of the old world. How do we explain the very large variety of different pre-­ Columbian plant types that came so early in history to be transmitted across oceans, and dispersed upon a vast scale through extensive continental hinterlands, absorbed, in short, into numerous local agricultural technologies, calendars of intricate practice and forms of typology, and thereby, as we shall see, converted into market-oriented and market-determinable «  commodityforms » for transmission on all levels of communication?6 This point … this 6 Preparation of this essay was intended to be followed by research on this very question, but such plans were interrupted by later circumstances. I provisionally used brief introductory

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question … is emphasised because it suggests the anonymous and spontaneous level at which plant-related learning and selectionist practices had to take place if such transfer were to be efficacious and durable in time, whatever external forces and stimuli might also have existed (oceanic transportation of plant varieties by European ships is frequently mentioned, but to the exclusion of all other ­factors, not least those of the means of such social dispersion and of the skills required for such adaptation of botanical type).7 It is notable, in contrast, how difficult were attempts in the first phases of the Green ­Revolution of the mid-twentieth century to persuade peasant cultivators to take on the new seed, not owing to an unadaptive conservatism before innovation but instead because of a real conflict between the new seed and such intricate local calendars and typological choices, of which the specialists were at first largely ignorant.8 What is more, when we refer to the adoption of pre-Columbian American plant types on other continents, or to other transfers between continents, we are dealing more often than not with major changes of plant type—the displacement of maize by taro in West Africa being a remarkable example of major changes induced by such spontaneous adaptation. But, the piecemeal ­micro-selection and adaptation of novel varieties of already cultivated plant types in a given territory is surely the major learning context in which such more dramatic transfers of plant type would have been possible and taken place: say, the day-to-day experiment among extensive peasant populations in plant selection and micro-technological adaptation, where rice-, millet-, yam-, or cotton-planting were concerned. This is obvious from any monograph concerning the systematics of such plant forms: the problems associated with developing a theoretical systematics of cultivated plants arise precisely from this extraordinarily prolific foundation of constant experimental praxis among vast populations, and from the proverbial reluctance of mainstream botany to confront this praxis as theoretically significant, let alone constitutive. When considered in this manner, are we not entering the kind of broadly socialised

statements in P. Curtin, et al, African History; A.G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa; & R.J. Harrison Church, West Africa. 7 For example, oceanic transportation in say Portuguese bottoms, may be mentioned in isolation, as if sufficient for intra-continental dispersion to have taken place, and as if further questions about the « how » of such dispersion, social or institutional, were unnecessary. However, the latter is an entirely different, more complex and problematic issue. 8 We must also mention that such a radically distinctive perspective of pre-Columbian culture must be relativised in terms of what we know of the supposed Asian origins of the populations concerned and their pre-historic migration into the Americas.

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and anonymous differential development of innovation proposed by Nathan Rosenberg, and reviewed in the first chapter of Part 1? It is notorious that major markets and administrative centres stimulated particular kinds of intensive market-related crop developments, but I shall want to argue that these are merely special cases among a much more generalized range of detailed agricultural response affecting cultivational practices on a much more dense and extensive scale among the populations involved.9 In short, we are not only concerned with languages, as classically conceived (as if fixed differential identities, rather than ranges of variation such as marked out by von Wartburg), but instead with language as such, with language for communication, thus language as practice and as an empirical continuity of transmissional means in constant and dense use —as a veritably translational nexus—through which goods, persons and words, cultural objects and symbols, could pass in density and were expected to do so, despite all variations, all degrees of relative incomprehension. We need to conceive of this empirical domain not just as a condition, but as contexts of conditions to which reason invites itself to respond; the difficulty is the condition and translation of reason’s active desire and response. So we also speak not simply of cultural difference but of a cultural continuity, coincident with the market and production continuum which traversed such differences of cultural expression and thus economic organisation, and on whatever level we happen to encounter such phenomena. The institution and the instrument is part and parcel of that active response of the reasoning subjects of history to the environments and conditions in which they find themselves constantly circumstantially located, constantly working those conditions, recreating them. In this sense, then, we speak necessarily of a universal medium of transmission activated by means of the various forms of such language-use and market practice, and in precise historical market-extensive conditions, institutional and instrumental, that permitted transmission across « frontiers » of different kinds: the word «universal», then, is used, once more, in an entirely material and historical, yet strict sense. To take further the linguistic analogy, since language is a fundamental medium of transmission of plant types in its own right, we should choose to see language less as a problem generated by difference among languages—as that 9 In this respect, it is worth repeating a point, footnoted in “More than a Preface”, that the term « remote » is an essentially post-19th century value-judgement, consequent upon the invention of tarmacked roads, steam ships and focalising cities. Cf. my “Financial Institutions & Business Practices”, in The Invisible City.

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obstacle for which the word « translation » implies something negative, thus imperfect—but instead, once more, in terms of Walther von Wartburg’s famous and remarkable Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, in which words are traced in their countless local micro-variants across a continuum of « cultural » territory and time between Portugal and Rumania.10 That is to say that at this level—on which anonymous migrations and exchanges exist … on which texts, seeds and persons seemed to move with ease—we are concerned with a scale of differentiation that is circumstantial and minute as we move from instance to instance, thus as a continuity of constant, empirical change, that, then, provides the experiential conditions for the learning and « lexical » context in which more conspicuous transmissions of plants-types sponsored by specialist botanists, literate horticulturalists and apothecaries of the day in turn took place. At the more microscopic, strictly agricultural and botanical levels, we may look to George Watt’s entries for Gossypium (cotton) and Oryza sativa, (rice) in his vast Dictionary of Economic Products. Variation of rice or cotton, for example, are traced through a vast range of changing linguistic contexts in the Indian sub-continent similar to those underlying the transformations of word-form and accompanying meaning recorded in Wartburg’s dictionary in Europe, minute in their representation when we move attention between each neighbouring local instance, but more obviously major when such instances are separated by considerable distances.11 The reason in this particular case is that the major influences on such variation are themselves multiple and effected by minute continuities and discontinuities across space and in time, say by soil or climate within a single village or else as distributed across a major sub-region. The fine muslin-destined cottons of deltaic Bengal are an example, varieties that feed in turn, both separately and in combination, a multiplicity of micro-differences among types of factored muslin yarn and cloth. Thus, in a similar manner to agricultural variety, we should also be able to trace processed commodity forms, such as cotton cloths, or Chinese teas and silks, as they pass from one place and level of marketing to another; this, indeed, is what Fukasawa has done with respect to the spread of specific varieties of cotton cloth-manufacture from South Asia into the Near East,— the cloth-type and the name, the designation, thus the taxonomic form and its 10 11

W. von Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. For Gossypium, Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India, iv, 1ff. See also Burkill, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula, & his “A List of Oriental Vernacular Names of the genus Dioscorea”, in The Garden Bulletin, Straits Settlements (iii, 1924, nos. 4–6), 120–244.

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denominational identity migrating, and in so doing, modifying alike.12 In this sense, we should surely suppose—and then reconstruct—a prima facie foundation of communicative and institutional possibilities underlying all such mobilities, and in particular the movements of plant variety on all scales or levels. I shall need to return to this because the latter example raises yet further problems. B

The Cultural Specificity of Any Grown Plant. Selection in Artificial Botanies

For the moment, the point to be emphasised is this at first sight surprising sense that human-managed plant variety, as cultural objects, are—at least for certain kinds of concern—indifferent to differences between cultural regions, thus between different local developments in artificial botanical culture. Yet we also know full well that many such varieties—say, rice, cotton, millet, yams, mulberry—were botanically extremely sensitive to minute variations in ­ecology: a mere displacement between neighbouring fields, let alone between villages, might result in modifications seen a posteriori by those concerned as decisive. Indeed, it is useful to take such modification as a general, if relative, rule, and then to point out that extremely small adaptations of this kind may have decisive affects on commercial marketability and value. The failure of many experiments to spread cultivation of certain micro-cultivars of Gossypium, fundamental for production of fine yarns used in the manufacture of a large range of high-value, eminently exportable muslin cloths, to neighbouring places in certain deltaic localities of southern Bengal, and that appeared to contemporaries as possessing identical ecological conditions, exemplifies this conjunction between botanical sensitivity and the rigid micro-limits set by global commercial demand patterns for particular sets of work-fixed plantcharacters (i.e. the typological properties of the commodity-product). We find, therefore, a need to correlate three apparent variables: (i) a surprising cultural 12

Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie & Commerce du Levant d’Alep à Marseille, chs. i & ii. Such transmission of identity is fact, true as fact, whether or not a modern botanist would verify it as a scientific apt characterisation of the correctness of such transfers;—the important point I am seeking to make is the general acceptance of its heuristic truth by the populations concerned, thus the bed of shared assumption upon which transmission is based. It is that field of universal assumption that underlies the very existence of the fields of translational migration identified by those such as Fukasawa concerning the finished commodity, but that also enable transmissions of named plant forms from peasant to botanical specialist in Groningen or Lisbon, without the latter even questioning the virtues of a fresh typological scrutiny and reclassification.

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mobility based upon the transferability of a certain general cadre or level (to be determined by research and argument) of required characters; (ii) botanical instability (or sensitivity) concerning desired micro-characters; and (iii) relative commercial inflexibility concerning desirable characters in both cases. A preliminary judgement would be that the first operates on a different level and according to a larger range of possible qualitative criteria, than the second and third. Moreover, cultural indifference not only characterises merely basic questions of utility (food consumption, manufacturing demand), but issues that seem to be much more problematic and interesting: on the one hand, the idea of a cultivated plant as being a highly specific product of culture (of mind and work) is significant and important, where the question of such transfer is concerned; but on the other hand, we have definite evidence of transfers of plant-related knowledge—in particular, for medicinal usages— that involved direct communication of much highly specific plant-lore across what, ordinarily and correctly we would consider major cultural frontiers. The observer « a », from Riga or Nanjing, communicates in words—thus in concepts and other a­ bstractions—about such plant varieties, their parts and extracts, their a­ ssumed properties and manners of working—with a person « b » in Amod, in South Gujarat, or Xiamen, and relays those abstractions in a text that recipients take for granted as being comprehensible:—this is not just a question of linguistic translation but of semantic and concept, that concerning differences in local classificational criteria for defining identity and designation, and that become assumed for example in the very concept (which I prefer to resist) of an identifiable ethno-botany. Again, as with plant mobility itself, the phenomenon may be observed on different levels, but the question always remains the same: faced with standard anthropological knowledge, how is it even possible (that momentous Kantian question,) that isolatable micro-items of esoteric local taxonomies, place- and language-specific, are transferable across vast cultural distances and also across considerable contrasts of social status and of educational aptitude (from, say, villager to educated medic), and assumed to be so? How is it that such knowledge is transformed into useful medical knowledge that will find its way into the market place for medicines in London or Naples? Admittedly, these are questions not ordinarily posed; they concern aspects of our fields of evidence seemingly not assumed as being problematic, and, yet, which undoubtedly must be so where contrasts of culture, thus of expressive form, of the exotic character in which we perceive such expression and local difference, and, most notably, in a context in which relative untranslatability between « cultures »has become assumed in the humanities.

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But, as said, the question applies both to interchanges between persons separated both by what awkwardly is named « civilisation » (thus across what, for us, are considerable gulfs of cultural separation and difference), and to the much less dramatic exchanges that take place across continuous space, say between persons separated by village, or neighbouring dialect, but meeting in a peasant market, or transferred, as Vansina suggests across an ethnic boundary by marriage.13 However, if the transfer of knowledge seems a more convincing marker of a difficulty of explanation, I would nonetheless argue that the cultivated, named, and « banked » seed is no less one: it is equally a product, if a physical one, of cultural abstraction in its own right (equivalent in this sense to the elements of a ritual, or parts of an instrument)—produced in terms of an abstract knowledge, from a synthesis of different kinds of knowledge—and raising identical problems to that of the transfer of a plant description, or of designations for categories, in a letter or treatise concerning that same seed: so that plant mobility and knowledge mobility can be regarded as merely different material aspects of a single phenomenon and question. Moreover, on the formal level of contemporary observation across such « cultural frontiers », the evidence for direct taxonomic assimilation and transfer of learning is even more precise. How was it even possible for botanists such as Hendric van Rheede in the seventeenth century and Joannis de Loureiro in the eighteenth century to be able to render the numerous highly specific entries for particular plant-identities into several different Asian languages: that is, into different, specific correlatable identifications originally observed and identified in different parts of south-east and east Asia; and how were they able to « jump the cultural gap », so to speak, and accord them Latin designations (whether Linnean or other), seemingly violating what should be a systematic incompatibility affecting cultural category-boundaries, between systems of nomenclature, between the larger bodies of cultural belief that separate human beings inhabiting different territories, between, say, « Hindu » notions of the curative virtues of plants and plant parts, and those characterising the creationist logic proper to a seventeenth century Dutch medical botanist?14 13 14

Cf. n. 8. Vansina, in Curtin et al, African History, 274, concerning « inter-ethnic » migration and knowledge transfer. H. van Rheede van Draakestein, Malabaarse Kruidhof … (augm. edn. 2 vols., 1689, Amsteldam), and Hortus Indicus Malabaricus . . (12 vols., 1678–1703, Amstelodami); João de Loureiro, Flora Cochinchinensis … (1790, Lisboa [& 1793, Paris]). Cf. E. Kæmpfer, Amoenitates Exoticæ Fasciculi v … (1712, Lemgoviæ); & G. da Orta, Coloquios dos Simples e Drogas he Cousas Mediçinais da India … (1563, Goa), among many such works. The full descriptive titles of such works fully exemplify points argued in the text, but can not be included here.

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Where the botany of cultivated plants is concerned, however, it is necessary also to emphasise the domain of practice and necessity that underlies all such conceptual activity in all places, and that it is this domain of practical adaptational need that lends to it an apparently universal empirical character. In general, this would not only need to be true of such connected activities as marketing and production of commodities, but of crop and garden agriculture per se, whatever esoteric beliefs and symbolic forms happen here and there to be attached to them. I shall discuss each of these aspects below, but for the present it must be emphasised that it is only with respect to marketisation and ­production, that we can rise above the level of mere hypothesis and propose that it is the actual character of the evidence itself:—that of the whole variable mass of such evidence implicating practice and providing its context, and that it brings constantly into being, and its connectivity through both time & space, and ­affecting differing organisational levels.—It is that actively experiential context that underlies the generation in history of what are virtually to be understood as the universal properties grounding plant production in the field. Efficacious communicability of both data and object, words and numbers concerning plants and the plants themselves (or parts and extracts of plants) must be a fundamental expression and case of such an evidence for the underlying unity of formative principle that transcends—and is « known » by contemporaries as doing so—local forms of cultural expression. That ­communicability—the taking for granted of its possibility—would include, for example, transfers of information among specialists in Leiden, Vienna, Groningen, London or Florence, or between horticulturalists in different parts of China, reflected in the private accumulation of libraries of such manuscripts drawn from sources dispersed across these different sites of spoken language, because composed in a language utilised for such shared communication such as Latin or French.15 It certainly includes the narrative form of personal experience concerning the «  discovery  » and identification of plants as expressed through both letter and treatise and crystallised in designation, whether in China, Europe or in the Ottoman Empire, but it also brings together similar materials from even wider fields of capture, joining, as a single narrative, diverse place-separated experiences of observation and classification into one or another text of descriptive synthesis, and, furthermore, as I shall point

15

For an anthropological exercise, cf. F. Zimmermann, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats, & my review in Medical History (xxxiv, 1990), 216–8. J. Needham et al., Science & Civilisation in China, vi, Biology & Biological Technology, pt. I, Botany, §d, sub-§4, on “Botanical Monographs and Tractates”, 355–440, provides abundant information.

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out below, in Chapter 3, lending a highly specific stylistic form to developments in early botany in different parts of the world, including Europe. But, the fundamental point concerns a much more basic level of activity: local practice must constantly and everywhere work in terms of a dense, microscopic accentuation of a «technology», as it were, founded upon difference, contrast, boundary, name and identity, and one that uses these criteria as veritable principles of insertion of particular products of work into niches within the larger social networks of demand and transport. The complete logic of practice and language connected with the development of particular field taxonomies would then be seen as intrinsic to the most systematic aspects of an integrated form of economic life embracing vast territories. Field-studies of practical agriculture are especially useful in this regard. Those on rice, millet, tea, cotton, and many other widely cultivated field-products, most especially so. Every peasant grower is then seen to be actively involved in an intense personal and cooperative, technical, creative practice directly concerning both botanical systematics and speciation: the development in time of typologies of plants.16 A treatise on rice culture in a village of Karnataka describes cultivation in terms of a remarkable complex of village practices focussed most especially upon the arduous selection and fixation of rice varieties suitable for a wider range of different consumption targets, most of which were defined a priori, as it were, in the market place. First there would be this «  market typology  » which imposes itself upon the peasant as a system of well-defined general requirements which must be kept to if sales are to be realised (and rents, taxes and other impositions met). Second, there is selection of a range of botanical types in the fields of a given village designed to match these general marketrequirements, and that must do so. Rice is extremely fluid, its genetic content mobile, so that it exists in many thousands of typologically identifiable and designatable forms within any given region, such as in the Dacca district of Bengal or in those parts of Jiangsu and Zhejiang for which data is available. It is inherently susceptible to variation, responding to circumstantial variation of environing natural and other conditions, so that the peasant’s difficulty, once the body of characters required of any particular variety have been identified (actually, a micro-historical process of progressive selection of different characters), is that of fixing that type, stabilising it, of shaping a microfield-ecology in which that type, as defined by the peasant, will maximise both quality and

16

By « speciation » I refer to all degrees of typological differentiation (thus including mere variety). I define this term in Part 1, but with more particular attention—historical, definitional and etymological—in “World Economic Integration before Industrialisation”.

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quantity, producing multiple seeds that reproduce that variety, or even that improve on it. In fact, the development of a complex local technology is concurrent with the existence of an equally elaborate referential « library »,17 so to speak, of shared botanical knowledge, allowing for all those tasks concerned with selecting and fixing a microtype, and of reproducing it as type (that is, as repetitive production, in the cultivated field, of a collectivity of similar individual items considered as being of that type, … as possessing that identity), to be accomplished in practice, and expressed as numerous decisions about rotations, mixed cropping, weeding, irrigation, and much else. The type so fixed, therefore, is a cultural, technological product everywhere where such agriculture takes place, although highly specific, in its particular fixed identity, to ­micro-place and micro-work, and as such—as culture and as technology—it depends for its continued existence upon a constant input of human labour … upon a constant input of energy. It is hardly an irony to compare this dependence of the typological identity of the plant on inputs of human energy—its botanical fragility as type—with the neoclassical economist’s concept of « equilibrium »: that concept is difficult to define, to establish, to work with, to be retained in face of the criticism versed by critics of neoclassicism, just as the identity and coherence of such human made types will be seen to be threatened by changing market conditions. A variety of a cultivated plant is thus cultural, (a) in being a particular human response, in form and content, to communicational and « lexical » necessities (consumers necessarily and literally « reading » their contexts, interpreting them) occurring on a potentially global scale, and, (b) more conventionally, in being products of diverse local and regional forms of particular intellection and expression, that appear, on the face of things, to be incomparable with one another, as if potentially untranslatable. Putting together these points, we might say that culture is singular—a continuum—and that it is precisely that singularity that makes constant variation, even today, reasonable and feasible, of whatever kind. I shall consider later the intended paradox contained in this formula, concerning the difference among types entering a market place from near and far as a collectivity of distinctive forms of local cultural expression,

17

This use of the word « library » is intended to refer to the profuse ritual and linguistic institutional development of such habited territory and experienced by any such population, and thus the context for new acts of ritual and public language use. This question is considered in detail in my “State Formation Reconsidered”. It refers to the whole institutional, instrumental and linguistic cadre of terms and reference that I catch under the euphemism and book title, « The Invisible City », and discussed in detail in the introductory essay to that volume: “Traces of the Ancient City”.

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and the sense of « function » that binds them together as parts of a continuum, and on which there is clearly much to be said central to the theme discussed in the essay. However, the universal criteria operating through local difference are precisely those developed and discussed above in Part 1. Yet, there also remains an equally central and significant distinction that must be clarified beforehand, distinguishing « type » as a cultural production of plant form, from « type » defined in strictly botanical terms, and not least at this level of application of work to cultivable plants in the field. Here, I too am faced with difficulties concerning this distinction, the difficulties being symptomatic, however, of the general state of modern knowledge concerning the distinction between nature and artifice in botany; nonetheless, I shall try to represent the nature of the problem, since even this modest task of setting it out clearly before us should help us advance the necessary steps required by a further development of the argument. Meanwhile, I shall need to repeat certain observations already made in Part 1. If we look at a handful of Polish ducats, Milanese ducatons or Surat rupees— all particular varieties of much larger families of coin-types—of ducats, ­ducatons or rupees, wherever minted—we shall see that each single coin of such a group (say of Polish ducats), is visibly different from the others in numerous very small respects (say, each Polish ducat compared with the other Polish ducats in the hand or balance), rather as Robert Hooke’s seeds of thyme appeared different to one another. Some differences stem from the process of production: they concern, say, the amount of the inscription die-stamped on each coin, the size and thickness connected with the dimensions of the raw material cut at a given moment, besides other such accepted variables. There will also be tiny measurable quantitative differences between each newly minted coin, say concerning weight, or gold/silver content, or alloy. In these latter respects, we recognise that all measure is relative, and not only from a scientific standpoint but also from that of the ordinary contemporaries involved in using such moneys: even a contemporary would easily have observed such small distinctions and have considered them banal. If, moreover, we measure and list such differences, we see that there are continuities of variation along several different axes of measure affecting the same conventional « coin » object (weight, pure-metal content, &c.). To this we add the affects of wear on each coin, for wear obviously affects weight, size, appearance, and total content of metals and alloys. We know that at a certain point of wear, the coin would no longer be acceptable as currency in the market; it would then be melted down as a raw material for production of a new coin. It is not then, the fact of physical difference but its relative extent that is at issue: there are limits of measure within which the full identity of a group of objects is conventionally accepted, despite the

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­ hysical variability easily observable between them.18 Pass beyond those limp its, relatively or absolutely, and we say that the coin has passed beyond the « limits of tolerance » within which such variation between individual coins, in a given context of use, is permitted,—permitted, that is to say, for them to be recognized as currency.19 But this criterion affects all measure. « Exactness » (« accuracy »), as Wittgenstein remarks, is a value judgement,20 and such value judgements are the constant of the market where all commodities are concerned, including coins; the conventional idea of « exactness » is part of the controversy centring on commodities in the market place. Thus, weight and pure-metal content may vary within conventionally accepted limits, but beyond those limits it is no longer « coin »: no longer type.21 In the field, human-selected (or « cultural ») rices, cottons or teas are subject to exactly similar criteria of collective, subjective judgement and measure. The work of selection, growth and weeding is especially concerned with this same question of « tolerance » within which an identity is accepted. Weeding, then, is not only a question of foreign types, of odd plants—not even, where a rice is concerned, of other varieties of rice;—it is more pertinently the question of maintaining the limits of variation within conventionally defined (time and place dependent) limits of «typological tolerance», of subjective judgements concerning the maintenance of the type, the cultural type, allowed in each case and at each moment and place. In the market, we know indeed that tolerancelimits were constantly disputed for all kinds of commodities and moneys, and that these disputes constantly worked back upon the definitions of quality and measure determining tolerance in a given case (modifying practice at other 18 We may note again Robert Hooke’s illustration of a group of seeds of the same plant, thyme, each with physical characters recognisably distinct from those of the others, and yet from a scientific, botanical point of view possessing a common identity and designation: “…nor are they all of them exactly of the same shape, there being a great variety both in the bulk and figure of each seed…”, in Micrographia, or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries (1665, London), Observ. xxix, Of the seeds of Thyme, Schem. 18. This association of difference and type becomes comprehensible from a Darwinist perspective, both individualist and essentially dynamic. 19 « Tolerance » as defined in Part 1. 20 Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 33e: “though you still owe me a definition of exactness”; 41e-42e: “…there you see what « exactness » means … « Inexact » is really a reproach, and « exact » is praise … Thus the point here is what we call « the goal »”, or criterion of measure, according to which a relative standard is thought sufficient. (In both this and the following note, I quote Anscombe’s translations of Wittgenstein’s text). 21 No longer « coin »?— “I mean that this piece is called the « king », not this particular bit of wood I am pointing to” (Wittgenstein, op. cit., 18e).

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levels of making and marketing)—and that allowed a given set of goods to be called Venetian damasquettes or Mexican rials. Forgery, the production of such « Mexican » rials in Birmingham or in south Guangdong, is a precise business, that takes these conventional limits extremely seriously in order to produce a product that passes for the thing itself (and that for users was indeed that thing, say a Guangdong-minted Mexican rial, acceptable and current as such).22 Thus weeding, once more, is also a vital (often labour intensive) micro-labour; in which many plants, apparently indifferent botanically from those retained, would be discarded from the field. The corollary is that definition of the cultural type must involve procedures of selection that are narrower and more subjective (but none the less real) than whatever criteria might be used to define the botanical identity of the crops in the field before weeding. Putting this question into the context of a whole village or region in which many varieties are grown, we now see what fixing the type involves. We have seen that the difference between types may even be unobservable to botanists in the field, but clear to the growers. They are micro-differences equivalent to those distinguishing different kinds of ducat or rupee. Users and makers know these differences. We thus have a local systematics of well-defined, wellworked, differences—of types. If we return to botany, however, would we or would we not include those plants weeded from the field, and those left growing, as parts of a single botanically-defined type? What is the relationship between cultural speciation and botanical speciation, in the designations of such real, indisputable typologies of market-oriented field-products, … between the artificial and the natural or spontaneous? The fact is that botanists have disputed this problem late into the present century and continue to do so.23 The contexts of «  anthropology  », therefore, are marketing networks and production systems, on the one hand, and botany on the other, botany in the sense of « nature at large ». And where biology is concerned, there is an interesting problem: the major source for understanding natural processes of speciation derives from the garden, the field, the pigeon loft and stable, the laboratory, but well-known representatives concerned with evolutionary biology, such as Daniel Dennett and Maynard Smith, indeed argue that there is no ­difference to be discovered between the two domains, the artificial and the natural. I disagree. 22

23

I.e. Eventually, even with knowledge of where it had been minted, the “forgery”, so called, might come to be considered as that thing, and thus legitimate, a connivance between producer, merchant-transporter (say an East India Company) and user across all the phases of marketing and distribution involved. Or, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, once again, “this piece is called the king”! Thus the symposium published as a special issue, “Species and Evolution”, in Systematic Botany, xv, 1990. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Market Determination of « Artificial » Plant Variation

The point is already clear. Growers select what is vendible or communicable in market networks. They select due to the same imperatives as do any other makers of commodities for market sales, targeting their crops for particular kinds of demand, and always under pressure, in the early modern age, to modify both the qualitative and quantificative criteria that determine decision in the selection of « type ». Market networks in this sense are massive exchangers of information and, likewise, transmitters of pressures, commands, orders, requests, advice, lists, prices, and so forth, conveyers, nodal synthesisers and, then again, distributors in extensive space, of a vast volume of forces which influence the content and form of commodities up and down the linkages connecting marketing and production relationships. In this clear sense, the rice, cotton or millet variety grown by small peasants on mean plots (just to take the worst scenario) is a full commodity, not preceding the market process but instead fully part of the circuit constituting that process: of the nexus of connections and functions in time/space that together generate and provide goods for « distant » places. Moreover, it is not even the beginning of a succession of events all of which we include as phases of marketing and production, but instead, once more, of an ongoing constantly enacted and reenacted (renewed and modified) circuit of exchanges, which at the level of the countryside itself responds to the umbrella of requests and commands for specific things focussing down upon it (whether transmitted by landlord, merchant, fiscal settlement, or through « reading » the texts of words, numbers and taxonomical grids composing any general market context).24 D

A Partial Explanation in Terms of Transmission of Cultural Universals in the Kantian Sense

My concern here must be limited to demonstrating the necessity of such a « universal » for understanding the very possibility of the evidence itself: marketability, transmission across distance, necessitates common cultural principles affecting the production of things, both as physical objects and as objects of language and imagination: of both design and meaning. This is not to deny the obvious: the rampant cultural difference existing on all social levels, from the local to the civilisational, but instead to suggest that such differentiation is itself only conceivable—given what we know of the historical past—­ because their exist necessities of practice and communication that are common to all conditions and situations, and that express themselves as common 24

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principles behind all production of esoteric commodity forms and imaginative differences. Here, then, my purpose is merely to observe the necessity for « universal » principles (i.e. principles of production and properties of production-form, indifferent to cultural, geographical or linguistic distinctions or, put differently, yet more accurately, expressed through … in terms of … the latter) that underlie the transmission of plant products in and through space, and their sequential reception at numerous points of marketing, part-production and processing, before final « recognition » and consumption, as a given, de­sired commodity. To go beyond this—to analyse the nature of this universal ­itself—is precisely what has been the concern of Part 1: the demonstration that throughout the medieval and early-modern « old world » of continuous exchanges, all exotic cultural productions— including the artificial speciation of fauna and flora— must observe certain rules and principles of form and taxonomy in order that they be inherently translatable, thus identifiable and ­recognisable at distance, be processable and transformable into new identities, find markets thousands of kilometres distant from the points of production and manufacture. Rice varieties or teas, whether the plant itself, or the processed product in Fuzhou or Guangzhou, are, in this particular sense, identical in general principles—in a necessary submission to identical formal principles—those that equally constitute cloths, ducats, apothecarial products, Clusius’ tulips, or the tulip-­ identities subject to investment options during the Dutch tulip bubble of the early 17th century. This is not to argue that taxonomy itself is indifferent to the particular needs of manufactured cloth and cultivated millet, but instead simply to point to a level of unity that must be presupposed if we are to understand the basic possibility of the economic history before us, and of the human culture that underlies it. On the other hand, the full dimension of the problem identified here, clearly extends beyond the programme of City Intelligible; a conception of cultural universality must extend beyond the « mere » idea of a marketing-continuum and its communicational requirements, for example to such questions as raised below concerning early botany. Once again, practical necessity must be seen to impose definite, definable constraints on the nature of what is and can be produced in field and garden, in say Pre-Columbian America—deliverer of numerous plant forms to the rest of the world even before the end of the 15th century—and common to the market continuum of the « old world » (Europe, Asia, West and East Africa), alike.

…

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Illustrations Section 5: Principles of Exchange, Trust and Accord. The Act of Translation

Figure 29

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Figure 31a Three vignettes from Savary’s Le Parfait Negoçiant (Paris, 1749), vol. i., & (Paris, 1763)

Figure 31b

Three vignettes from Savary’s Le Parfait Negoçiant (Paris, 1749), vol. i., & (Paris, 1763)

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Three vignettes from Savary’s Le Parfait Negoçiant (Paris, 1749), vol. i., & (Paris, 1763)

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FIGURE 31c

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Chapter 2

Foundations of Botany in Western Europe 1

Europe & the World: Phases & Aspects of Botanical Abstraction

The preceding part of this paper (Chaper 1) establishes the material, social and conceptual ground within which the more particular, private and articulate events that concern this chapter may now be considered. Extensive, ongoing plant-selection among peasant populations constitutes a vast experiential ground of anonymous conceptual and technical knowledge lying behind the more articulate levels of horticultural activity, and intellectual exercises in systematics and medicine, and that act as a kind of contextual and constitutive background, observable in the texts of contemporary medical botanists in, say, China or Europe. That, at the least, is the hypothesis advanced in this and the following chapter. The manner in which different vegetative parts come to be identified and individuated for « pharmaceutical » purposes, thus for transmission in relative quantity from place to place, through a series of markets, is itself parasitic, so to speak, on this larger background of intensely used and institutionalised practice. This could be interpreted in terms of the broader knowledge-ground of medical, herbal practice developed continuously through space wherever there are such agrarian populations, or instead in the broader and cogent sense of a dense and extensive experience in commodification processes themselves, whereby a certain manner of generating new object forms suitable for communication across distance (regulated and facilitated by institution and instrument) and suitable for recognition, become graced with certain kinds of reference, description and speech, quantification, thus for fitting into a universally necessary, yet particular kind of knowledge enabling repeated passage between distant places. Furthermore, commodity production and marketing, together with the modes and means of « abstract » payment, obviously entail everywhere the development of a general cadre of facilitating reference, capable of specifying and channelling orders, shipments and descriptions, by name, number, value, place and date, by property, or in terms of constituents and substitutes, by transformative process, in combination or in reduction to « parts ».1 The point 1 « Property » as used in the scientific sense of “an attribute or quality belonging to a thing or person” (oed, viii, 1471 iii—first edn.).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004414921_008

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concerns a complex of taken-for-granted reference modalities that will become part and parcel of the more articulate, esoteric and particular movement of seeds and bulbs, plant illustration, description of plants in letters, methods of cultivation, or speciation and designation, all that characterise botanical text and correspondence in these centuries. Communication becomes itself a particular concern of textual reference, so that a letter or plant entry may refer back to a wider network of previous contacts and events, in the same manner as would the letters of a merchant or East India Company agent. Information is given concerning the sites in which certain new bulbs have been seen, by whom grown, and reference may be made to particular orders or packages of plants listing names and quantities, while priority claims interrupt such treatment.2 Then, in a more physical sense, it is the institutional organisation of services for conveyance of goods and letters (commercial orders, part products, admonitions concerning quality, price information, and so forth) that must also provide the dense, daily, repetitive frameworks in which those concerned with botany and educated amateurs could correspond more occasionally among themselves about botanical and other plant-related matters. A physical praxis develops in which techniques of textual reference become familiarised.3 Plant varieties are sent by package from one « botanist » to another, say from Dodonæus in Mechlin to Clusius in Vienna, or from Clusius, now in Leiden, to Caccini in Florence, or from Ulisse Aldrovandi in Bologna to Clusius, rather in the way that astronomical manuscripts were also conveyed and exchanged across Europe, found their way into the libraries of those such as Leibniz, Newton, da Vinci and Kepler, and formed part of a similar complex reference cadre with specific stylistic characteristics.4 There is this background in which established, anonymous modes of conveyance take place. Abraham Munting, like da Orta or Clusius, is praised for obtaining specimens from the known parts of the world, for recreating the variety of that world in the microcosm of his own garden. Such transmissions occur by private hand, agent or 2 Cf. W. van Dijk, A Treatise on Tulips by Carolus Clusius of Arras, 69–70, n. 3. 3 Cf. van Dijk’s English translation of extracts from Clusius, Rariorum Plantarum Historia (1601) and the « relevant » parts of the latter’s Curæ posteriores (1611), 137–52, in A Treatise. 4 On Clusius’ contacts by letter and package, see Conti, Lettere inedite, 14, for his correspondence with specialists concerned with botany (& G.B. de Toni, Il Carteggio degli Italiani col Botanico Carlo Clusio nella Biblioteca leidense, for transcription of letters). The Library of Leiden University holds, according to Conti, op cit, 11, “935 lettere di eruditi olandesi, francesi, inglesi, italiani, lettere privatedi personaggi più o meno illustre, lettere di parenti e di ­amici…”. Dodonæus’ correspondence is mentioned by P.J. van Meerbeeck, Recherches historiques et critiques sur la Vie & les Ouvrages de Rembert Dodoens (Dodonæus), “Revue de la Correspondance botanique de Rembert Dodoens”, 131–8.

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friend, but in addition, it is evident that even by the sixteenth century, transmission of esoteric horticultural and medical specimens from, say, the Levant to ­Europe, had become commercial business, conducted in relative quantity and bulk, by price and market distribution. In the seventeenth century, horticultural activities in Holland, for example, are especially commercialised. Munting’s father sold tulip bulbs during the tulip investment-bubble of the late 1630s, while Munting himself was active as a medical botanist precisely within this larger framework of common knowledge and expectation.5 Plants, illustrations, texts, diagrams with individuation and discussion of parts, plus the cadre of written reference previously mentioned, become parts of a larger grid of possible transformations between different kinds of cadre, text, object and activity, rather in the same way that certain functional rituals in seventeenth-century western India are composed of varying combinations of physical act and word, where the physical act or its mere representation in words are alike abstractions, modes of expression combining abstract units of content, each with its own burden of discrete and recognised sense, subject to individual, circumstantial decisions concerning their combination for some legal or ritual procedure. Each forms part of a composite event possessing legal significance taken up again and again in later jurisprudence, and that leads to such detail being recounted again and again as an evidence to be cited in a later documentation. Both the object and the word, the bulb and the name, the illustration and the quantity are such abstraction within such a cadre of existential reference. In short, we may treat the flower as also an artifact, a representation of purposes, plans, significations, teleological, … an abstraction in its own right and thoroughly cultural. Such movement and transformation utilises, replicates and builds upon the denser movements of part-commodities across extended lines of production and marketing, into and out of one market node after another. This is not to deny the particularity of botanical communications but instead to emphasise their much more generalised facilitating context, those grids of commercial, institutionalised linkages, of lines of passage and nodes of exchange, modes of transport, and hidden contexts of learning.

5 A. Munting, Naauwkeurige Beschryving der Aardgewassen (Leyden & Utrecht, posth. 1696), ch. ccccl, 904–11; & his Waare Oeffening der Planten (Leeuwarden, 2nd edn. 1682 [1st edn. 1672]), ch. ccccxxx, 633–41, & cf. Beckmann’s use of Munting’s treatment of the Tulip bubble, in J. Beckmann [1739–1811], A History of Inventions, Discoveries, & Origins (tr. W. Johnston, 4th revsd. edn. I, 1846), “Tulips”, 22–31. J.W. Weinmann, Duidelyke Vertoning Eeniger Duizend in alle Vier Wærelds Deelen … Uitwassen (Amsterdam, 1748; tr. J. Burmannus), ix, 536–7, also makes use of Munting with respect of the tulip.

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What should be emphasised here is this sense of numerous serially linked, linear sequences of events through particular places at particular times, selected for their significance, and reenacted as a veritable system of notation among intellectual and esoteric circles, and as a discipline to which all who wish to be taken seriously would need to submit themselves and be expected to do so, embodied in their own activities and writings. Underneath is the anonymous, constant movement of types and varieties from field to field, through continental hinterlands, and of which little is known. i

Medical Botany, Horta Botanica, Taxonomies & Pharmacopoeia

We could say that our initial guiding question concerns the sources and constitution of order in artificial botanies, and how, and by what conceptual, linguistic and physical means, such order was transmitted across territory, and then recreated, re-artificiated, as it were, in new sites: in our case, in different parts of western Europe. The most articulate source of information concerning the transfer of botanical things, exists in the treatises, memoirs and letters of those concerned with collecting, identifying and classifying botanical specimens themselves, professors of medicine and apothecarial medicine such as Abraham Munting, or else known for their alchemical experimentation such as L­ eonhardt Thurneysser, all those to whom we apply the anachronistic term « botanist », but in quotation marks in order to emphasise that it is just a manner of speaking. I shall take Olivier de Serres and Abraham Munting as examples: both created medical gardens, the first in Provence at the beginning of the 17th century, and the second at Groningen towards the end of the same century. In the early-modern centuries, no department or kind of knowledge could be isolated from the others. The context for this constant sense of a mutual exchange of meaning, and of forms of representation of meaning, is the « essentialist » poesis underlying the general disputational range of contemporary knowledge, and that has already been discussed above. Botany is for the most part «  medical botany  », and the medical properties of plants and parts of plants may be closely connected—debated as such—with astrology/astronomy, with alchemy/chemistry, and in the light of a particular conception of meaning and signification that makes passage from one domain to another reasonable and logical, although, to us, apparently unrelated to one another. A « botanical » treatise, say a compendium of plants with their medical characteristics and attempts at a systematics, like those of Leonhardt Fuchs or the two Bauhins, or that of the learned alchemist, Thurneysser, and also of Dodonæus (Dodoens), Rheede, Munting, Loureiro, da Orta and Geoffroy, and many others (German, Flemish, Dutch, Portuguese and French, but communicating with one another in Latin), would necessarily contain considerable Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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r­ eference to one or several of these « other » domains (what to us are other, but to them, as explained above, integral parts of a continuity of cause and effect), and that frequently occupy a large proportion of the descriptive entries concerning each given plant, compartments of concern that might each be given separate indexes at the end of such works.6 Speaking generally, we could say that a concern of several contemporary botanists was not just to access information about little known or unknown plants but, furthermore, to acquire and grow … and be seen to grow … all known and knowable specimens of plants gathered from all parts of the world. The very idea of such completitude is itself significant in this case, … the notion that it was possible and desirable! Munting, like the colleagues with whom he corresponded elsewhere in Europe, also has correspondents, thus sources for specimens, posted in distant regions and continents. Munting is not only praised for his global contacts and sources, but for his garden itself, it being likened by colleagues to a « Paradise on earth ». The metaphor is itself significant. Use of this word « Paradise » is at once the rhetoric of friendly complement, but it is also one that embodies a significant choice of meaning, marking too, perhaps, the intent of the gardener himself! Then, let us briefly explore this sense. The finite number of known types of plant was relatively small in this epoch, and the attempt to reconstitute the species world in a single place would not have seemed as absurd as it does now. It is a pity that we have no pictorial representation of Munting’s garden, for in the case of de Serres such pictorial and verbal representations are significant. In his Théâtre d’Agriculture of 1600, de Serres proposes two types of medical garden: one is a tower with a circular path mounting to its summit: the plants are distributed in beds along this climbing path. The other is a rectangular mound, yet described as like the Roman [amphi-] theatre at Nîmes. The form of the first seems another version of the tower and figure of an ultimate knowledge, as variously represented by Giordano Bruno and Robert Fludd, among many others. A late fifteenth-century painting, now in Edinburgh, portrays the child Christ standing on the top of such a tower debating with the « wise » men at its foot: the symbolism is clear, the Christ who does «  know  »—who does access that ultimate knowledge form—the wise men who are by definition ignorant because lost among the lower phenomena of the world.7 Church and temple towers clearly represent the same sense of an access to knowledge … like René Char in composing his 6 This « poesis » is considered above in Part 1, and also, in more detail, in the essay, “Second Landscape” that introduces Unbroken Landscape. 7 B. Butinone, Christ Child Disputing with the Doctors (“According to Salmi … c. 1480”), cat. no. 1746, National Gallery of Scotland. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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poems! A knowledge, as represented in Butinone’s painting, inaccessible as such to the ordinary person.8 It is the poesis, in short, of Sacrobosco’s famous Sphere, and one which penetrates, in one way or another, into every expression and form of thought, even into that of the infinitist Bruno, into those of Copernicus and Galileo, and which, much later, in the First Critique, is reactivated by Kant as an extraordinary metaphor for summing up the achievements of his own … « Copernican Revolution », that treated above in Part 1, Chapter 3, §3.9 As represented by Tommaso Campanella in his Città del Sole,—memory system, a utopian project and an image of the world, all at once (image of the relationship between essence and the phenomenal),—it is supposed to contain all possible and actual knowledge: to be a means of learning, an application of that learning, and a progressive pilgrimage to the fount of all knowledge where all would be united, singular … a « simple » in the meritorious and idealised meaning of that word (thus, indeed, akin to that pyramid of all actual and possible knowledge that terminates Leibniz’ Théodicée). We know this tower most obviously as the Tower of Babel, and as such, we have two general kinds of representation; although mentioned above, I now return to them in order to advance the argument: there is the famous circular tower, painted, for example, by the elder Pieter Bruegel, and a rectangular one, painted, say, by Tobias Verhæcht, and occasionally, yet significantly, represented as infinite,10 ­combining the different aspects that, for example, characterised the thought of Giordano Bruno. This is the sense in which I read the reference to Munting’s garden as being like « a Paradise on earth »: we can take the word not just as mere praise and rhetoric but as a praise that carries a full and intended meaning, a choice among a whole field of possible rhetoric: it is a meaning that emphasises, as elsewhere it would, the quality and kind of Munting’s knowledge, what, indeed, he invests in his constitution of a medical botany, a metaphysical reading of the facticity he works. Medical botany, in this respect, unites cosmological and phenomenal levels: both Idea and Appearance; the latter as representing the former: stars, plants, the human body, itself, the very focus and centre of 8

9 10

It is by magic that a human being is allowed to be guided through the pyramid of all possible and actual knowledge that terminates Leibniz’ Théodicée. Otherwise, so it is said, that person would die or go mad from excessive exposure, were s/he even capable of regarding it. Discussed and interpreted supra. Chapter 3.3. One such drawing of an infinite Babel (unattributed) is held by the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, in Rotterdam; for a second attributed to Marten van Valckenborch; illustrated in H. Minkowski, Aus dem Nebel der Vergangenheit steigt der Turm zu Babel, 72, no. 240. See also Part 1 for discussion.

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that knowledge, and through the relationship of macrocosm and microcosm, and through the forces or virtues that transits and transmits a matter of essence between such levels of meaning and representation, focussing down upon a range of curative properties or forces attributed to plant types and parts. The notion of a plant’s « signature » is very similar to Kant’s idea of analogy: it represents one level of reality in a form corresponding to another, an idea worked through systematically in Giulio Camillo’s treatise L’Idea del Theatro.11 The « knowledge » garden of de Serres would thus imitate the form of the universe in its metaphorical, representable sense: it represents and contains knowledge in the same way as had Campanella’s Città. A further idea of what is involved may be seen in the frontispieces to two editions of de Serres’ book. These show actual representations of botanical gardens, one enclosed and accessed by a long passage-way and gate, and the other set upon a high platform above the characteristic arched gateway that graces many a frontispiece of the period.12 The gardens consist of a series of rectangular plots within which the different kinds of plant are signalled by geometrical figures, circles, crosses, diamonds, and so forth, referring the contemporary reader to the differential « species » content of fact and knowledge composing the world, and ordered within the text of the book, as if itself were a hortus botanicus, the book itself as an ordered garden of knowledge. We could say that the rectangles are the Ideas, or species: at least, that the geometrical figures contained therein were as if intended to represent the Ideas; they would then render the Ideas in visual form for what properly was considered inaccessible to the human senses, thus as sign or symbol, but, indeed, representing in such tangible form the different Ideas or species of such appearances: in this case, the plants. In the early eighteenth-century Diccionario de Autoridades, for example, each section of the work is headed by an illustration of a landscape ending in a horizon of mountains: the landscape itself is subdivided into a checker board of light and dark squares, surely representing the Ideas for the phenomenal identities of the dictionary-entries themselves. Likewise, the theatre represented by Comenius, in an edition of his Orbis Sensualium, shows a set composed of rectangles containing representations of plants, whilst that built by Molière or portrayed in sixteenth century London have ceilings similarly shown as being painted with squares, often containing symbols or 11 12

G. Camillo, L’Idea del Theatro dell’Eccelen. M. Givlio Camillo (Fiorenza, 1550). O. de Serres, Le Théâtre d’Agriculture & Mesnage des Champs (edns. of Paris, 1600, & Geneva, 1619). Cf. frontispieces in R. Dodonæus, Cruydt-Boeck (Leyden, 1608); J. Sadler, Sicke Womans Private Lookinge-Glasse (London, 1636); & A. Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis (Rome, 1646).

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f­igures, and which may be interpreted as the microcosmic representation of the ­species-constitution of knowledge, giving strong credence to the arguments contained in Francis Yates’ Theatre of the World.13 The teatro anatomico of the Archiginnasio in Bologna portrays mythical and zodiacal figures within the inset rectangular framework of the ceiling, while that in Leiden, illustrated by Swannenberg, in 1610, is an inverted knowledge tower, or «  Babel  »—a knowledge « well ».14 The tower locates the final synthesis of all knowledge; the well its analysis, its division into parts. To this view of a certain idea of what, as knowledge, is seen to be constituted and represented by the botanical garden, we may add the catalogues of plants and plant-related knowledge. The frontispiece of de Serres’ book marks the entrance to a world of knowledge contained within the pages of the book. Such a book may be termed a « theatre » (as in Camillo’s Theatre), a space of representation, or, as suggested above, a « garden » of ordered knowledge in its very own right; its organisation, its use of words and choice of metaphor, repays very careful study. The medical concern seems fundamental because it provides a guiding system of connections between the different levels and scales of reality considered relevant by any given author, and it is notable that a university chair, a book of plants, a pharmacopoeia, a hortus botanicus, or the theoretical and experimental work of many botanists, zoologists, anatomists and physiologists, right into the 19th century, were closely linked with such a framework of medical knowledge, whether institutional or merely conceptual. The manner in which medical interests might determine the constitution of knowledge, is also illustrated by the contents of the pharmacopoeia, and then by Geoffroy’s plant systematics, which include both whole plants and plant parts. Dodonæus, famous botanist, also « medicum et mathematicum », contributed his own «  astronomical  » treatise to the debate on De Sphæra.15 From the stars, representing the unattainable, inaccessible, knowledge of the

13

J.A. Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus … (London, 1659; tr. C. Hoole), 264, cxxx, “Ludas Scenicus”; M. Carlson, Places of Performance. The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture, 43: contemporary illustration of performance before Henri iii of France and his court, 1581, reproduced from A. Pougin, Dictionnaire Historique et Pïttoresque du Théâtre (Paris, 1885). F. Yates, Theatre of the World. See also an identical representation of the species garden illustrating the start of the entries in each of the three volumes of the Diccionario de Autoridades (Madrid, 1726–39). 14 The teatro anatomico of the Università degli Studi di Padova being similarly constructed. 15 R. Dodonæus, Cosmographica in Astronomiam et Geographiam Isagoge “per Rembertum Dodonæum Malinatem, medicum et mathematicum” (Antwerp, 1548), with a 2nd edn. entitled De Sphæra sive de Astronomiæ et Geographiæ Principiis Cosmographica Isagoge (Antwerp & Leiden, 1584). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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­ eavens, of essence, derive particular virtues invested in the plants that may h serve to cure human illnesses. This is to say that we move through a series of different kinds of abstract representation for a particular and veritable organisation of knowledge, in terms of which numerous debates and developments would then take place. The botanical garden—this material, architectural construction figured by a garden—is no less an abstract representation of such a knowledge than is the book, the frontispiece, or the tower of knowledge, the tower as utopian project, as a memory palace, a system, a cosmological idea, … a subordinate image of the « true »: say, that according to which exotic plants were used to recapture, as an ordered microcosmic reconstruction of the universe, the forces and powers necessary to medical cure. ii

The Concept of Type, Agricultural Part-products & Market Continua

I shall now argue that the idea of a plant as type—thus the very relevance for a contemporary of conveying « type » elsewhere (even the possibility of doing so)—thus as representable by one or more individuals (the word, «  specimen », is significant both logically and etymologically), and secondly, of endeavouring to rear it anew as « type »—is thoroughly parasitic upon, and intimately connected with, the whole «  typological praxis  » of the commodity continuum. To describe it as « another species world » serves to emphasise its essential comparability, besides its distinctiveness, as an object domain, with spontaneous organic nature itself, but also its differentiation from the latter, to which, however, the modern « species » concept is entirely devoted. This also implies that the old concept of organic type was once considered continuous with that of all possible matter (all assumed as being the product of the same creationist or essentialist ontological process), while in practical life there was a real conflation, in taxonomical form, between commodity typology in general, and that botanical part of it generated in the field. In turn, this implies a further fundamental point: a certain uniformity affects field production everywhere, despite all obvious differences, and it does so apart from any questions concerning spontaneous organic nature itself.16 16

I repeat my disclaimer concerning the use of the term “creationism” and its derivatives; such a disclaimer has become necessary owing to the current pressure on science, thus on the theory of evolution, exerted by religious fundamentalists, together with its political support. In this essay, the term is applied entirely to human-led activities (corresponding to the quotations that head this Part 2), thus to culture. It bears no relation whatsoever to the religious “creationism” currently fashionable in the United States, although the idea of a divine creationism was once inherent in the very formation of the early sciences, Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Speaking generally, and thus schematically, what seems to have surprised contemporaries was not the idea of plant type as such, but of its variability through time and place, and thus a certain instability affecting it, say that of the tulip, observed by Clusius and Munting, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or of millets, rices or Dioscorea, in the nineteenth century, discussed by Watt, Dudgeon or Burkill, just as it is genetic and organic-molecular variation that has become a central focus of fascination today, whether pathological, as in the study of carcinogens, or, say, in the study of the genetic inheritance of characters and forms. In current systematics, it still seems to be the sheer plasticity of, say, grasses and insects, that causes a difficulty of comprehension and fosters continued dispute:17 the concept of type may be highly controversial in its detail, but that types exist and possess some-or-other kind and degree of reality status—that they are not just imaginations or utilities of our mind—comes naturally to us. For the past, this is perfectly understandable in a context of ideas about nature wholly informed by one or another variety of essentialist preformationism or creationism. In this sense, the metaphor of human craft and guidance hidden within creationist (that is, essentialist) theory and language, is crucial for this idea of type and it provides a « natural », as it were, vehicle for its application to plants. In this respect, we may see very early « biology » as being too incipient—too caught up in other domains of reasonable thinking and association—not to be parasitic and continuous with such other areas of actual knowledge, and with broader, less-expected domains of extensive daily practice and judgement. This less expected continuity of thought and practice, traversing all conventional boundaries, and that today seems to separate learned from popular discourse, and, furthermore, to divide into notoriously quasi-autonomous parts learned discourse itself,—is briefly explored below. The critical domain of general praxis is commodity formation, its deep, determining links with extensive peasant crop production in the field, and then its vast, and dense, multiple extensions through space in the form of marketing and production linkages, together with a host of institutional and instrumental phenomena intimately associated with them, and, moreover, forms of communication and expression: payment forms, price information, besides the i­ ncluding botany, up to and including Darwin’s father, Erasmus, as mentioned in the next paragraph. It is perhaps useful to insist—but only to make clear my intention in using the word—that I am and have always been atheist, although this fact has no relevance whatsoever for the argumentation of the essay. 17 Cf. The issue on “Species & Evolution”, Systematic Botany (xv, 1990), on grasses, and A. Rosenberg, The Structure of Biological Science, more generally, on the status of the species problem at the time of writing this essay.

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typologies of kinds of commodity themselves, and related aspects of the ­question, had all come to constitute a specific lexical domain of shared knowledge accessible to participants at all levels, places, and situations, relative to the economic context. This is true in spite of its relative complexity, its variations in space, and its multiple forms of internal reference. The point, here, of course, is the role of market generated criteria in affecting selection and variation of type in the field. It is a market- and production-connected sense of typological identity, and of distinction between identities, that also governs the idea and separation of types at the botanical level: of cultivars from one another across a relatively huge continuum of possible plastic variation. Identity forms the central concern of nomenclature and typology, the possibility of recognition in field and market, of the communicability of orders, advice, desires and criticisms, of quantification by means of numerical evaluation, of nicheadaptation of production choices in innumerable sites scattered over the vast continuum in which market linkages connect with one another (as pricing, &c.), and then too, as if in imitation, in the production of payment forms themselves, equally typological in their precise distinctions from one another of kind and purpose: distinctions of kind, take note, wrought upon the continuities of variation possible in use of the « raw » materials utilised for their manufacture (metals, reagents, alloys, and so forth). Thus, even though differences among a range of, say, certain types of « raw » field cotton may be extremely minute, hand and mind have come to guide and determine their actual existence: to define them, as distinct, recognisable and designatable identities. Fixing identity is the great craft and « creational » work in botany performed by vast numbers of « merely » human producers. We may think of such producers as uneducated in any conventional sense of the term, but use of such words here concerns populations possessing extents of decisional autonomy and a necessary access to funds of knowledge governing ordinary practice that may properly be described as experiential, thus a learning that takes account of the fund of experience encountered upon an any-person’s personal and individual track through the contexts of a life. It is a view of a proficiency—a capacity to read and comprehend the contexts of price and demand, and of commodity ­constitution—that entails a kind of literacy that, with the further development of capitalism and colonial conquest and dominance in the later ­eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, would be progressively usurped, centralised and monopolised, and leading to the degrees of public ignorance we now take for granted as virtually defining such populations.18 However, In returning 18

This viewpoint is developed in earlier publications, for example in my critical article concerning the concept of “protoindustrialisation”.

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to this past, such tasks of agricultural work, of invention of novel practices and of sophisticated procedures of seed-selection, can now be seen to refer us to such unsuspected levels of skill in the past and which were closely associated with commoditisation, as with the institutional complexity of the past. One would think, in sum, that if grasses present us with counter-teleological evidence for dispute in theoretical systematics, that a « creationist » idea of type would nonetheless be true to the production realities generating artificial botanies themselves, and that were characteristic of the global commodity continuum. In this respect, the energy for separation and fixing of variety, lies external to the plant, and is imposed upon plant and environment alike by a « deus ex machina », so to speak: « der große Kunstlerin … die Natur des Menschen » (see the quotations on the title page of Part 2). Kant’s regulative idea of teleological necessity, in thinking nature, meets here an object domain that actually conforms as real order with that teleology. The idea of type, of constant « stereotypical » replication of that type along one or more production lines, of constant adjustments to that type introduced from outside in order to relate it better or differently to the train of cultural linkages that transfer it through space/time to markets and consumers, all enter early botany as the botanical idea of the plant type, characterising the forms of reference encountered in the communications and packaging of specimens between specialists in the centuries concerned, or, with respect to their context, characterising the practices accompanying their carriage as seed or root from one village to another in, say, Upland Taiwan or Norfolk, among swidden cultivators or gentlemen farmers, in both cases eager to share their knowledge, treat it discursively, and add to it. As said, artificial plants are inherently unstable; rather than a spontaneously arising organisational-cum-relational connection among potentials and forces, between the organism and the environment (discussed in the “Appendix” below), the human hand has instead guided into precarious but definite cultural existence types (and I also mean by this a kind of type) out of gear with the natural environment, and which could not exist without constant, externally applied human work devoted to its « shaping » and preservation. The second principle of thermodynamics is entirely relevant in this case. This is not, of course, to say that commodity-botany and commodity-­ manufactures (or products that have already passed through the market) can be reduced to one another: rice or cotton cultivars go through further ­transformations—potentially numerous phases of fresh post-harvest classificational acts—in order, eventually, to become visible to us as names in a market place or shop. However, it is market designations, as a cosmology of « readable » influences and desires, that in turn act upon selection in the field, define the limits of the latter, the constraints in terms of which a sixteenth century

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cotton grower in Shandong or Gujarat can select plant-variety according to eco­logi­cal constraints, or take up many new kinds of plant first cultivated in pre-­Columbian America, such as tobacco and peppers. In this respect, the very word « species » was once applied to all commodities—to goods and moneyforms—and in turn the etymology of the word is identical with that of another word, « spice », the one indeed derived from the other, « spice » being a word that eventually came in time to refer to a specific kind of commodity but which once had meant mere « type » in its own right, used therefore to denote the types of commodities, yet commodities that had once formed a major early constituent of high-value interregional trades throughout Asia and in the trades to Europe.19 Treating artificial botany in this manner, and emphasising a certain necessary dependence between early plant botany and a host of different aspects affecting commodity culture, conceptual and praxological, and then noting that both botany and zoology were predominantly medical disciplines in the early modern centuries, connects the former closely with the pharmacy of fauna and flora, whether in Europe or elsewhere, and thus to the refinement and processing of plants into extracts or parts, recombined as compounds and mixtures, thence to the very close connection linking the private and public horta botanica with medicine and prescription, with division and subdivision, and of course with price-evaluations, comparisons and summations, or the classifications, analyses or « recipes » of the pharmacopoeia. A late article of 1834, in the Penny Cyclopædia, on the « Company of Apothecaries », is especially revealing: the Company still cultivated its own garden in Holborn, possessed its own shop for dispensing medicines extracted and prepared as compounds from its plants and plant parts, while it continued to organise botanical expeditions into the countryside for its students and apprentices.20 In this ­context, it is not sur­ prising, as mentioned above, that early botanies, such as L­ eonardo Fuchs’ Commentaire, Caspar Bauhin’s Theatri Botanici, then later, Abraham Munting’s Waare Oeffening and Naauwkeurige Beschrijving, Johann Weinmann’s Duidelyke Vertoning (a Dutch translation of 1748), or, say, Joannis de Loureiro’s Flora Cochinchinensis of 1793, should provide regular information concerning plant remedies, together with often shorter botanical descriptions of the plants themselves: words such as « virtues », or references to planetary associations, 19 20

Cf. F. Sabban, “Court Cuisine in Fourteenth-Century Imperial China. Some Culinary Aspects of Hu Sihui’s Yinshan Zhengyao”, Food & Foodways (i, 1986), esp. 177–82, and my “The Other Species World”, in Unbroken Landscape, 200. Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, ii, (London, 1834), 175–7.

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typify such texts.21 Much the largest and most detailed of the several indices, provided by Munting for his books, is that concerned with remedies: the main headings concern states of health and illness, while the subheadings in each case are likely to refer the reader to several different plants scattered through the work, thus to many page references, as useful sources from which different medicaments, or constituents of constituents, might be prepared. Both indices and the systematic main text itself, seem primarily concerned with the medicine of the human body, thus with questions concerning the possible range of influences affecting the powers (« krachten ») mediated by the specific plants and plant parts. The frontispieces of both of Munting’s books include planetary or zodiacal rings, while in the Waare Oeffening he provides a detailed table of the “Regeeringe der Zeven Planeeten”, followed by a chapter on the “Kracht, Natuur en Eigenschap der Zeven Planeeten”, thus more pointers to the speciesreference cadre of the poesis of The Sphere, to the old idea of the globe as representing universal micro/macrocosmic relationships and influences surviving long after the foundations of astronomical thinking had itself been transformed.22 Earlier, Bauhin had catalogued his De Remediarum by type of illness, while as we shall see directly below, Geoffroy divided his work by both plant and plant-part used in medicine.23 21

Caspar Bauhinus, Pinax. Theatri Botanici (Basle, 1623). He also published a Theatrum Anatomicum of (1605), the frontispiece of which depicts male and female bodies, the first depicting circulation of the blood, the second the uterus and intestines. This combination of what today are for us entirely distinct specialisations, is characteristic of many of those I mention here: of Munting, de Serres, Rheede, Comenius, Dodoens, Weinmann, and many others. They combine alchemy and botany, astrology and botany, medicine and botany, anatomy and astrology, and with which, in a certain important sense (that of the entire inherent relevance of connexion concerning the poesis of which I write), all may be seen to be combined. “Theatre”, a word for the content of a book, used alike by Camillo, Bauhin and Comenius to describe their different concerns, may now seem very apt, not least if we take the representational character of what for them is the singular reference of such a poetic of knowledge, the essentialism of the Sphere implying the representational character of all finite, phenomenal figuration. 22 Munting, Naauwkeurige Beschrijving & Waare Oeffening. See also the frontispiece of Weinmann, Duidelyke Vertoning (1748). A Phytanthoza Iconographia … in 1735–1745, published under the name of Weinmann, the frontispiece describing treatment of “denominations, characters, genera and species” of “plants, trees, fruits, flowers … fungae &c.”; on this same frontispiece, that of the 1737 edn. of the first volume, he describes himself significantly as “tam Indigenarum quam Exoticarum, ex quatuor mundi partibus, longa annorum serie indesesoque studio”! The whole text of this frontispiece deserves careful attention. 23 Similarly, a more unusual example, the famous alchemist Leonardt Thurneysser, wrote a Historia sive Descriptio Plantarum of 1578, and a Reise und Kriegs Apotecken of 1602, and operated a manufactory “that employed 300 persons in the production of saltpetre, ­mineral acids, … drugs, essences, [medical] amulets”, and a “printing house, which Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Indeed, the very word “botany” seems inapposite for such treatises and compendiums; « medical botanies » might suffice, but even then the range of connection and foci of interest concerned by such work seems sufficiently variable and inclusive to require some other more apt word of description, more related to the contexts of knowledge true of the times; it is their correspondence, their libraries of books and manuscripts, thus their reading and references, and the coincidences of their concerns with our own later distinctions and concerns, that appear best to define the kind of unity in which it is now possible to see them. Thus, pharmacy is itself concerned with divisions and productions, thus of parts and compounds, which in turn might become the major criteria determining the organisation of treatises of systematics itself. François Étienne Geoffroy’s Traité de la Matière Médicale ou de l’Histoire, des Vertus, du Choix et de l’Usage des Remèdes Simples, of 1741 & 1743, includes as its sixth volume his Traité des Vegetaux, the second section of which was separately published as Des Plantes de Notre Pays.24 The entry for « Ceterach » lists its names, a description of the roots, a brief reference to where it is found, a chemical analysis, its medical virtues, and finally what other authorities say of its medical uses. The first part of the Traité however, is devoted to fossils (« Mineralogue »), but the organisation of the botanical part is itself significant. It is divided into sections on indigenous plants and on exotic plants, concerning which, Since entire plants from foreign parts are not delivered to us, but only the parts that serve medicine, we shall pursue the organisation of such parts and make of them several classes, of which the first would treat the roots, the second barks, … the seventh both solid and liquid saps, the eighth

24

­ ublished … alchemical and medical tracts …”, in W. Hubicki, Dictionary of Scientific Biogp raphy (xiii, 1976), 396–8. I examined some of Thurneysser and Paracelsus’s astonishing works in the Bibliothèque nationale in 1990; & see A. Koyré, “Paracelse (1493–1541)”, in his Mystiques, Spirituels, Alchimistes du xvie siècle allemand. On amulets or talismans, see F. Yates, Giordano Bruno & The Hermetic Tradition, 47, 62, 69–73. In 1745, A. von Haller of Göttingen described Thurneysser as “Mynen wonderlyken landgenoet” (Weinmann, Duidelyke Vertoning, n.p. [“my extraordinary countryman” in Dutch translation]). [F.É.] Geoffroy, Traité de la Matière Médicale ou de l’Histoire, des Vertus, du Choix et de l’Usage des Remèdes Simples (Paris, 1743), vi, Traité des Vegetaux, §1, “Des Medicamens exotiques”, 1–2 (for the quotation in the text, infra), & §2, “Des Plantes de Notre Pays”, 13– 15 (for treatment of « Ceterach »). My translation concerns the following passage: “Comme on ne nous apporte pas les plantes étrangeres tout entieres [sic.], mais seulement les parties qui servent à la Médicine, nous suivrons l’ordre de ces parties & nous en serons plusieurs classes, don’t le première traitera des racines; la seconde, des écorces; … la septième, des sucs liquides & concrets; la huitième, de quelques medicamens étrangers tirés par l’art des plantes … & des insectes qui naissent sur les plantes”. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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certain foreign medicines drawn by skill from the plants … and insects whose birth occurs on such plants.25 There is a strong sense for us of Borges’ famous passage concerning the entry in the « Chinese encyclopædia », which in turn is used by Foucault, to ask a question about the very idea of an order linking phenomena that in hindsight seem to us at best inconsistent, at worst heterogenous—not connected at all.26 But the linkages are completely reasonable from three angles: (i) from that of the old frame of knowledge—the old poesis; (ii) from that of the commodity world by means of which medical plants from far and near were generally conveyed to botanist, gardener or apothecary; (iii) from the general contexts in which the concept of type developed in all inhabited regions, thus subject to the mental and practical life responsible for constituting the social environments of work and production in these centuries throughout the globe, and especially with respect to commodification. A Chinese apothecary’s shop, like a French or Dutch one, is itself a veritable systematics, its drawers and jars representing the divisions of that systematics into parts and wholes, « simples » and compounds, classes and species, roots and flowers and extracts—a veritable system of knowledge—that might otherwise be spelled out in the collection of a museum, or as the organisation of a book … or a garden. Geoffroy was both “Docteur en Médicine de la Faculté de Paris … [and] Professeur de Chymie au Jardin du Roi”.27 Botany and pharmacy, pharmacy and commodity, taxonomy and commerce, are linked together not only in a physical, institutional complex of closely interdependent linkages, but in a more difficult and intricate conceptual sense. We only have to reflect upon the character of what botanists and apothecaries, throughout these centuries, actually acquire at the various points of reception: where the latter are concerned, I prefer to say, at Groningen, Guangzhou, Leipzig, Fuzhou, Holborn or Surat, thus at a host of nodes of reception and reorganisation in one or another city or region, and nodes which then become constituted as parts of a regulative, communicational network of rethinking and debate,—of regeneration of botanical forms and ideas. Where the question of what is acquired … the object-form … is concerned, Geoffroy exemplifies this point of connectivity: it is commodity forms, precisely so— thus, part products, super-refined extracts and compounds, plant parts—that arrive at the Jardin du Roi, and they do so from often distant locations, from 25 Geoffroy, supra n. 38. I may also quote the Oxford English Dictionary, i, 393 ii, in its entry for “Apothecary”: “1635 N. CARPENTER Geog. Delin. ii, iii, 53: «Our Physicians and Apothecaries … owe most of the medicinable drugges to India»”. 26 M. Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, “Preface”, xv ff. 27 Recited on the title page of the Traité. Cf. W.A. Smeatons’ entry in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (v, 1972), 352–4. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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market places in culturally « remote » places, in which they have already been produced as parts, as bits of taxonomy, as items of culture and craft, of mind, by sequences of peasant producers, traders, refiners, possessing their own ideas of plant-related relevance,—thus, leaving aside the question of the first sources, whether « natural » or cultivated, of what since had been subjected to such commodity-related procedures before reaching our « botanists ». It is precisely in terms of such typological reception that Geoffroy has organised his own book: induced by necessity, yes, but one to which, nonetheless, he was willing to succumb. Thus, in China we also en­counter a « thick » discursive context of horticultural treatises, pharmaceutical chemistry and classificational experiment. So my point remains: it is items of culture—of extended cultural processing—that are transmitted from place to place, even when it is seeds and tubers, flower-parts and leaves, that are packaged for shipment from Ningbo, Casa or Surat for London and Amsterdam. My point here is also the super-riding influence of centuries of commodity production itself, as means of experiencing and of generating taxonomy, designation, and progressive sequences of division and refining, of parts and substances, of describing and organising, of progressively developing a product in one work-site after another, adding to its characteristics or regrouping it with others for a new phase of market « consumption », classification and designation. The extensions affecting textile production are particularly characteristic, but we could go back to the medieval spice-trades—to products of trade that once more were also products of processes of refining and market collection affecting once botanic plants (thus products alike of language and culture)— in order to ground ourselves in the truly pan-cultural and transcontinental, yet dense and daily, dimensions of this universal anthropology of the commodity. This is where we meet the Kantian dimensions of the problem: the production of a universal framework of mind through practices which, whatever their local forms of exotic expression, are necessarily based on common principles of constitution, and thus comprehensible across all boundaries. Just as a clothtype can be assessed in a « remote » Bengali market by an Armenian or Dutch trader, recognised and transmitted as being adaptable to other markets and consumption patterns, or a silver rupee be « recognised » and « trusted » (and so much of structure resides in those two words) in Basra by traders coming from numerous points of Asia, East Africa and Europe, or that a Polish doctor share medical information about plants with Gujarati villagers, and local medical practitioners, and Dutch or English correspondents.28 28

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A reference to tea confirms these propositions. In the 19th century, their botanical identity was disputed in the same manner as were cottons, millets and rices, in terms of whether one, two or more species-designations sufficed to characterise the merely botanical (and « original ») characters of the plant.29 However, as variety produced in field and workshop, it is equally comparable: there are « countless » selected, cultivated and maintained varieties of teas at the level of the field and plantation, but, in this respect, again entirely like cottons or rices, there is a prima facie problem of identification to which the level and phase of production, encountered in some documented and observed designation, are both concerned: the names we read of in commercial dictionaries or price lists have little to do with the plethora of field variety or its equally plethoric local-specific designations. A complex of market groupings and refining processes takes place, and at each stage a fresh name is given for price listing and merchant recognition, with the most generalised kinds of redesignation taking place for the « shop-shelf », now entirely reclassified in terms of retailing requirements and consumption expectations, but in reality composites formed of a whole succession of earlier market and processing classifications, themselves composed from an initial place-diverse botanical diversity. The homogenous appearing substance in the packet (visible leaf size, colour and quality) is in fact a « final » product of sequences of transmission and selection, of blending or differentiation, operated between Xiamen and, say, Toulouse or New York, all contingent upon particular complexes of choice, decision and desire, but all oriented nonetheless to the flow of operations necessary in terms of a continuum of structural possibilities.30

…

29

30

i­nformation is scattered through Hove’s notes in the form of diary entries. Cf. The Sykes Collection, “Series Agriculture”, notebooks and papers of W.H. Sykes, held by the British Museum (Natural History), espec. Book ii (1825), which illustrates plants and includes both Latin and local nomenclatures. As Te-tzu Chang, “The Origin, Evolution, Cultivation, Dissemination, and Diversification of Asian and African Rices”, Euphytica (xxv, 1976), 427, remarks, of rice, so-called “ancestral species [of Oryza sativa] … are essentially conceptual taxa”, i.e. speculative inventions, which are easily seen to be dependent upon particular conceptions of historical possibility. Cf. H.T. Huang, Science and Civilization in China, vi, Biology and Biological Technology, pt. v, Fermentations and Food Science, §f, “Tea Processing and Utilisation”, esp. sub-§1 & 2; and [S. Wells Williams], “Description of the Tea Plant in China”, Chinese Repository (viii, art. v, 1839), 132–64.

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Chapter 3

A Postface

Narrative Style, Evolutionary Form, and the Shaping of an Early Science: Botany

I wish to suggest that modern botany, indeed biology—and especially the rise of evolutionism as a natural (diachronic) manner of thinking about natural (synchronic) diversity—is grounded in practices closely connected with the historical phenomena discussed above: the sequence of material acts involved in the transmission of specimens, use of language concerning commodities and spilling over into correspondence concerning plants, imparting a specific cultural and stylistic form to our subject matter that becomes part and parcel of the natural object field of biological science itself. This is easier to see today, because recent developments in biology make these older styles appear less than natural: they seem selective, that is a choice, one among many possible choices, and too simplistic in kind to correspond with the complexity of either nature or culture as today we are coming to understand them. The corollary of this type of transmission among literate, even learned persons, is that each exotic plant—transmitted as word and plant—accumulates as knowledge in the form of a history, a narrative, considered central by contemporaries, recorded therefore as a knowledge-form at once historical and genealogical: a blended history combining persons and plant-types, and individualist in form, as I shall explain, in both cases (and as if that Darwinist context of pure agency responsible for generating the stereotypical typologies of culture had indeed invaded the stereotypical! Yet, if we look closely, we see that the boundary distinguishing the two is not traversed). Thus, we might construct « family trees » of such developmental sequences and accretions, and involving a specific set of formal developments including styles of reference and action, conception and practice, that actually return upon the objects of description to shape the very form of the physical (plant-concerned) events themselves. Such a « cumulativist » narrative and anthropic constitutive form is common to the long tradition of textual and horticultural botany in both China and western Europe, and most probably so elsewhere. Needham details such communications of things and words across distance, and the melange of references to written sources and sequences of personal contact that go to compose the strictly genealogical, thoroughly « historicist » blending of person and plant

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composing Chinese botanical texts.1 Personal names accumulate as part of the inventory of the « evolution » of the characters and variants of the plant. Johannes Beckmann’s accounts of plants transmitted from Asia Minor to Europe has an identical character:2 in short, such plant-related developments, treated as a form of textual expression, in widely separate parts of the world, involve the question of a narrativist historical consciousness affecting both mind and practice, person and collectivity, as a single stylistic form. The individual monographs of the early botanists mentioned above tell a similar story.3 In the European case, personal names become fully identified with the Latin plant-designations themselves (as also in zoology, and comparative anatomy).4 The remarkable density of communications in which Charles Darwin was ­involved—with peers or professional and gentlemen farmers—is itself grafted upon practices of communication developed over three or so centuries: with a praxis that becomes a style of doing, recording and thinking science: of thinking plant in time/space.5 All coalesces as a single production of knowledge. The idea of the selection and accumulation of characters comes to form an integral aspect of nature itself: as an actual qualitative aspect of « nature », and, yet, as a form embodying its collective, social manufacture through human culture itself, and intellectually so through the constitution of a veritable object field for a science: an object field that can be described in specific terms for what it really is, let alone for what it happens to be assumed to be.6 But, it becomes transferred willy nilly—because no problem, no boundary, has been identified, let alone elevated as a difficulty, a problem for interrogation—to the whole field of nature: it becomes, as it were, the biological object field, a learned scientific version neutralised of personified human interventionism, and yet which behind appearances is actually—as such—a translation of human 1 Needham, Botany, §d, sub-§4, on “Botanical Monographs and Tractates”, 355–440 (cf. 313, for tabulation of the increase in time of botanical entries in “Chinese pharmaceutical natural histories”). Cf. for pharmacy, E. Bretschneider, Botanicon Sinicum. Notes on Chinese Botany from Native & Western Sources (London & Shanghai, 1882, 1893 & 1895, 3 vols), & P.U. Unschuld, Medicine in China. A History of Pharmaceutics. 2 Beckmann (1739–1811), History of Inventions, I, chs. “Tulips”, & “Garden Flowers”, e.g. 512. 3 Viz. Munting (who, as we have seen, held the chair of botany & medicine at Groningen), Naauwkeurige Beschryving, prefatory remarks, e.g. “Bericht aan den Leezer”, & his Waare Oeffening; Conti, Lettere inedite, “Introduzione”, & 38–40, for Letter no. 2 & 2-bis, which includes a list of 37–40 types of “Piante mandate da Carlo Clusio al Ill.re Matteo Caccini [in Fiorenza] 1607”, & likewise 68–71, for Letter no 11 & 11-bis. 4 T. Lenoir, The Strategy of Life. Teleology & Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology, for nineteenth century comparative anatomy. 5 Cf. C. Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ii, 1837–43, & iv, 1847–50, equipped with excellent apparatus and indices. 6 This sentence intentionally expresses my Kantian, and, in this case, Husserlian intentions in using words in such a manner. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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i­nterventionism into the object field of a different idiom and kind of nature, and, as such, metaphorical, since an amalgamation of different domains is presumed that have never been shown to belong to one another. Intervention in plant selection is at one with the idea of experiment: this too is personal, cooperative, sequential and accumulative, and, above all, narrative, thus to be described as a narrative ordering of procedures, of additions and amendments by later individuals, as the production of a method (or body of methods) currently in existence. Thus, the absence of any clear boundary between an artificially-formed nature, a cultural nature, from what is presumed as being spontaneous nature, results in a confusion of language-use among modern evolutionary biologists. Darwin, Goethe, Huxley, the teleomechanicists discussed by Lenoir, besides Kauffman, Maynard Smith and Dennett today, apply a dense complex of cultural metaphor to the description of natural processes, that make any separation of culture from nature extremely problematic, and in the case of the neo-Darwinists is advanced as method and model (games theory, mathematical models drawn from engineering and economics, &c.), thereby effacing the linguistic, thus conceptual, means that, otherwise, would enable such questioning concerning their alleged indifference from one another.7 To express this hypothesis in a more general and abstract formula: imports of plant specimens between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries are activities connected with several interdependent yet quasi-autonomous concerns: botany itself as an interest in the variety of nature; pharmacy as a medical (or body-oriented) classification of plants (simples), parts of plants, and plant extracts, and combinations of these (compounds), together with other selected natural materials; astrology, as an explanational source for the curative powers of plants on the body, thus uniting what then were conceived as being different levels and kinds of human knowledge in an actual description of cause and effect, deducted from the wider conceptual frame of the old poesis of the Ptolemean/Sacroboscan Sphere. But, in hindsight, from a viewpoint constructed in terms of a problematising of the form of modern science, this can also be seen as containing a protohistory of the development of modern biology itself, as also a poesis: a seemingly 7 D.C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Evolution & the Meanings of Life; J. Maynard Smith, “Optimization Theory in Evolution”, Annual Review of Ecology & Systematics (ix, 1978), 31–56, reprinted in E. Sober (ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, 91–118; & J. Maynard Smith, “Genes, Memes & Minds”, New York Review of Books (xlii, no. 19, 30 November 1995), 46–8 (a review of Dennett’s book). Thus, my paper “Nature, Mind & Artifice” (read Cambridge, 1986), which treats this question at length, and, for an admirable insider’s critique, G.F. Oster & E.O. Wilson, “A Critique of Optimization Theory in Evolutionary Biology”, in Oster & Wilson, Caste & Ecology in the Social Insects, reprinted in Sober (ed.), op. cit., 271–88. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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natural, reasonable way of reading nature, of visualising its differences, phrasing questions and approaching experiment. Darwin’s famous, Adamic genealogical-tree- representing the evolution of variation in organic nature (in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection), can thus be understood as cultural history in its own right.8 It is not at all clear that the approach to time, adopted by Kant, Blumenthal, the « Naturphilosophen », or the later mechanical teleologists of the early 19th century, can be submitted to such a specific « history by hindsight » (in short, set aside), thus from the vantage of the modern shapes of acceptable knowledge (and thus dismissed as history!). In any historical period a complex of various, alternative, often contradictory, disputative, or mutually exclusive directions in knowledge-formation occur. Kant’s particular version is regaining interest for the reason that it involves a knowing and distanced abstraction from any purely literal reading of natural historical evolution; such distance from the object seems regrettably absent from much mainstream, present-day neo-Darwinism.9 Late 18th- and early 19th-century morphological structuralism stimulated major thinking in biological research affecting the forms of explanation; leading to a complexification of the biological object field that is, once more, of considerable interest today; and also stimulating experimentation in instrument making (for example microscopy), and museology and taxonomy. In 1836, a leading botanist, John Lindley, Professor of Botany at London University, author of several standard botanical works, and Darwin’s correspondent, described Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis as: this beautiful theory, which is the very cornerstone of structural botany, and which is now on all hands admitted to be unassailable … has wrought a change in the ideas of mankind regarding the nature of plants which has already produced … most important results … by fixing the manifold 8 The very form of a genealogical tree is a cultural choice. One notes that it gives expression (and generally assumed as being objective and true) to the very converse of a process of convergence and constitution, such as I advance prudently in Part 1 and in “More than a Preface”, concerning the historical incidence of what I have identified as universal principles of mind and constitution of an object world in human culture, and what certain archaeologists now propose as the origins of homo sapiens. Edmund Leach, in a lecture I attended, most probably in the early 1970s, pointed to the careful selection—the inclusions and exclusions, thus the construction of a form—given to the content that enters the construction of a family genealogy (it follows a course of selection, of choice and rejection, both cultural and personal). This remark, however, is not a judgement concerning the superiority of one form over the other, but intended to point to the interpretive status of both. Where I am concerned, I give form only to what stands within my relative competence. 9 Cf. esp. Kant, Erste Fassung, §§ ix & x (Ak. edn., xx, 241), & Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 23 (Ak. edn. v, 244–6).

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combinations of the organs of plants at their true value, and by introducing more just ideas of vegetable physiology.10 The entry for “Zoology” in the same work is equally arresting, with its enthusiasm for developments in contemporary morphology, mentioning Blumenbach, Geoffroy and the Naturphilosoph, Oken, and once again Goethe, “the founder of morphology, or the doctrine of organic analogies in plants … [and] animals”, and expatiating particularly on the role of the “doctrine” of analogies in generating an adequate overall theory of nature, and also on that of “the circular progression of a series of affinity”.11 There were clearly many theories of this kind current in these decades, but by the 1830s and ’40s, their scientific quality had in fact become transformed far beyond the antiquated sources evidently influencing circles in contemporary England: von Baer’s typological theory—that gives rise to a diagram of a wholly different kind to Darwin’s— actually repudiated linear developmental series of animal and plant forms.12 My point, however, is not to justify one or another general set of theoretical positions, certainly not those of the early 19th century, but instead to emphasise the sheer plurality of possible options, and in particular that order itself, order in and of nature, could be conceived in ways radically different to those that were gradually « selected » and « fixed » after 1859, under the name of « evolution ». Evolution itself, has turned out to be an umbrella concept co­ vering many styles of thinking, both scientific and merely scientistic, and it is the use itself, not the word, that should be questioned, here, and, where botany is concerned, connected with a certain history such as that discussed and ­proposed above. New historical interest in early 19th century theory, has been stimulated precisely due to the profound complexification of the biological

10

From the entry for “Botany”, The Penny Cyclopædia (London, 1836, v), 243–54, Lindley’s authorship being anonymous. Lindley published An Introduction to Botany (London, 1st. edn. 1832, 2nd. edn. 1835, 3rd. edn. 1839 & 4th. edn. 1848), and The Elements of Botany … and a Glossary of Technical Terms (London, 1848). W.T. Stearn’s application of Lindley’s “Survey of Descriptive Terminology”, occurs in Botanical Latin. History, Grammar, Syntax, Terminology & Vocabulary, 313 ff. For Lindley’s contacts with Darwin, viz., for example, Darwin, Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ii, including the useful appendices. 11 Entry for “Zoology”, The Penny Cyclopædia (London, 1843, xxvii), 808–9. 12 Lenoir, Strategy of Life, 90–2. For the chronology of Darwin’s theoretical development, viz. Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection. Being the Second Part of his Big Species Book Written from 1856 to 1858; Stauffer’s “General Introduction”, 4, makes clear that the prehistory of Darwin’s evolutionary theory goes back to notes and drafts written in the late 1830s and early 1840s.

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object field caused by developments in molecular biology and genetics, for which given forms of explanation now seem entirely unsatisfactory.13 None the less, there are other constituents within this « science », and the « science » itself has a particular direction, a direction into particular modes and concerns, which later come to be considered as problems in their own right, especially to the extent that these refer us to areas and levels of thinking, that have been relatively resistant to methodical thought concerning scientific activity: these are the cultural aspects of science, and it is arguable that the seeming naturalness of the modern manner of reading « evolution » (and I merely mean by the word a particular way of connecting events and objects in space/time—of using the word) into virtually all domains of study, as certain well-defined styles of writing and speaking, thus as « language », then transferred to the evolution of mind, knowledge or civilisation, is also the affect of a general social-historical production of a specific culture of common sense and natural logic, and of closely related life-activities, thus the production of a generalised « praxis » that influences other areas of life and thought. Then, it is both poesis—of an ostensible adequacy of explanatory resources—and a normative domain of « rightful » behaviour for the « good » biologist. So one feels a kind of clearing of the air—the dissipation of a fog of numerous unintended associations, justifications and beliefs, all caught up in the argument and practice of esoteric science—as one shifts perspective and penetrates instead, down and beyond to that almost invisible, anonymous peasant-level of selection of plants, a level from which no high-sounding claims will be heard, where personal career drops out of sight, where battles of personality and politics are not waged, while instead an astonishingly complex technological culture, not yet adequately described, comes into sight, beyond and below, our various « Europes », massive, ubiquitous, « natural », thus hidden, global.

…

13

Concerning recent interest in morphological structuralism in theoretical biology, cf. M. Grene’s “Introduction”, & R. Riedl, “The Role of Morphology in the Theory of Evolution”, in M. Grene (ed.), Dimensions of Darwinism; S.A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order. Self-Organization & Selection in Evolution; & Lenoir, Strategy of Life, 306, n. 33, for H. ­Kühlenbeck’s published remarks in The Central Nervous System of Vertebrates.

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Illustrations Section 6: Moneys and Portable Instruments

Figure 32 Dutch portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance, with paste-on portrait of two Virtues and Death, [place unreadable] n.d.

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Figure 33a Dutch portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance, with paste-on portrait of Death accompanying two persons weighing coin, Rotterdam 1625.

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Figure 33b Dutch portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance, with paste-on portrait of Death accompanying two persons weighing coin. Rotterdam 1625

Figure 34 Dutch portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance, with paste-on portrait of Death accompanying the Two Virtues. Amsterdam Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Figure 35 French portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance. Lyon 1677

Figure 36a Simplified English instrument for weighing coin

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I llustrations Section 6: Moneys and Portable Instruments

Figure 36b Simplified French instrument for weighing coin

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Figure 36c Lid of French instrument with printed selection of standard European coin weights

Figure 37 Lid of English box of standard weights intended for overseas trade

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Figure 38 French and English box, each containing a particular kind of standard weight

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Figure 39 Wood-encased portable balances, part of a collection of such Chinese-type instruments for weighing different kinds of sycee

Figure 40 Chinese silver sycee of Yunnan-type encountered in Huay Xai, Northern Laos, and stamped with contemporary attestations of their value and authenticity Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Figure 41 Cover page of a Chinese manual of 1800 concerning recognition of European and Hispanic-American coinages entering Chinese circulation and markets

Figure 42 Two rough-cut réals d'ocho, rough in cut, pure in content and accurate in weight. produced as trade currency and shipped in barrels or sacks

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Figure 43 Verso side of a half-penny stamped with the figure of death (skeleton holding spear and hour glass) minted by John Morse of Watford, with date 1600

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Appendix 1

Order in Artificial and Spontaneous Natures I have argued that the difference between artificial and spontaneous fauna and flora is fundamental, both generally and also for properly understanding the specific kinds of subject matter discussed in both Parts 1 and 2 of this essay. Such a position enables us to identify a series of problems at the heart of modern theoretical biology. Thus, the difference between the two natural domains is neither relative nor contingent to an understanding of the subject matters of either biology or culture. I claim this in spite of the current views of neo-Darwinists, expressed by those such as Dennett and Maynard Smith, that no such systematic difference can be substantiated; this claim both confirms the whole history of the subject, which has always been parasitic upon observations made within human-led cultivation and breeding, and it justifies and supports the application of cultural organisational principles and various methods derived from fields that apply themselves to human activities and organisation. We mentioned Dennett and Maynard Smith concerning the current utility of models borrowed from engineering and mathematics, or derived from economics. The point is not that metaphor and method derived from such sources may not be useful but that it is applied together with an argument that the subject matters of artifice and nature are in this sense identical, and thus inhibiting the prudence and judgement that should guide use of such metaphor and method. That is to say, there is no regulative check on the consequences of applying such methods, because, at the most fundamental level of defining a subject matter, that unity of form is assumed, and even imposed.1 I wish to point here to a further manner of conceiving this difference between the two « natures » that goes right to the heart of the difference between « artificial selection », as practised by humanity (peasant, wealthy farmer or scientist), and the conditions that stimulate variation in spontaneous nature. We may start with the second principle (or law) of thermodynamics, that without continuous work the internal disorder of « a system » always increases. The idea of internal order is immediately applicable to natural organisms, conceived of as organised wholes in relation with a complex environment. In fact, all parts of that sentence 1 A further quotation from Maynard Smith, “Optimization”, 100: “Natural selection can optimize only if there is appropriate genetic variance. What justification is there for assuming the existence of such variance? The main justification is that, with rare exceptions, artificial selection has always proved effective, whatever the organism or the selected character”. The reference for this statement is to R.C. Lewontin’s criticism in, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change; Lewontin is one of the more well-known critics of the neo-Darwinist synthesis, and Maynard Smith is a central protagonist in the cited essay.

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concern questions of complexity: organism, environment, and a relationship between them, while, furthermore, each is the object of serious problems and disputes of both definition and characterisation,—those, for example, concerning the very locus of organisation itself in nature, in the natural organism itself, and that we then extend to our own societal and cultural « nature »: that of dispersed markets, and individual and collective organisational reception and decision, as mentioned above with respect of the commodity continuum. Thus, it is in a regulative and constitutive, thus Kantian, sense that I formulate this foundation for difference. Given the principle, we deduce that work is essential for the continued existence of an organism as such through time: or, to put it in useful « economic » terms, for that complex organisation to be constantly reproduced through time, in constant receptive and contributive interaction with the real environment. The sources of this work may be two fold: internal and/or external. Putting strictly aside any source of explanation beyond nature itself—nature in this case taken as the entire matter of the universe (thus excluding any essentialism or theology), the source of this work lies either within the organism itself, or is applied—at least in part—from outside by human input. In the mid-19th century, two teleomechanicists, Bergmann and Leuckart, formulated a set of theories concerning the means by which natural organisms could maintain themselves in time, and secondly concerning why and how organisms had the particular morphological characteristics observed of them. The organism, to cite Lenoir’s words, is a particular solution to a problem of order: that of the conservation of its form, internal and external, over time, by means of its own means of formal adjustment with the environment. Since the environment is subject to some degree or other of constant flux, the constancy of the organism is then conceived of as being a problem of equally constant auto-regulation. I must immediately add that although all such theories may indeed be dated by subsequent developments, the particular course of modern biology has not ceased to be punctuated, as emphasised above, by continued reformulation of the problems invoked by the nineteenth century morphologists.2 2 The passages of most concern here occur in Lenoir, Strategy of Life, 180–1, but see also 165, 185–9, 228, & 270–5. This whole section of the book is of interest, and although Lenoir speaks of a victory of reductionism over any residue of teleomechanism (with Helmholz, his contemporaries and successors), we have seen already that morphological concerns have at most remained dormant and are now coming to reappear in the guise of new questions concerning order in palæontology, and especially in molecular and genetic biology. The main work to which Lenoir makes reference for these ideas, is C. Bergmann & R. Leuckart, ­Anatomisch-physiologische Uebersicht des Thierreichs. Vergleichende Anatomie und Physiologie. Ein Lehrbuch für den Unterricht und zum Selbststudium (Stuttgart, 1852). The intellectual aspect of the conflict between the teleomechanicists and the absolute reductionists, in the period when Bergmann & Leuckart were active, on the one hand, and Hermann Helmholz, on the other, was epitomised from the beginning by Kant himself, in Erste Fassung, § x, and for which the note of A.J.-L. Delamarre to his translation is e­ mblematic

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This is partly because several of the basic orientations, developed by the teleomechanicists, towards nature, either signposted the continuation of later concerns in modern biology (e.g. interaction between organism and environment), or have prefigured developments that would reemerge as paramount in very recent decades (in genetic and molecular biology, cytogenetics, and so forth, as prefigured by the idea of a preformative plan or «  programme  » relayed between generations by heredity and followed by ontogenetic growth; the dispersal of explanation and description among different levels of natural ordering or organisation, and so forth). It is also partly due to the merely « regulative » character of all teleomechanical theories (the word « regulative » being used in a Kantian sense,—what Husserl seemed to mean by his own term « reduction »): Bergmann & Leuckart thus understand, and indeed apply, such concepts as « Wärmeökonomie », as merely provisional means to order and direct research towards real characteristics and problems of empirical nature, just as Bohr would later propose concerning particle and wave in his complementarity thesis; and, secondly, therefore, in ordering for theory the complexities of available biological data; as such, (Première Introduction de la Critique de la Faculté de Juger, in Oeuvres philosophiques, ii, 1529 n. for p. 893 [endnotes to the volume]): “Connection between purpose [la fin] and the idea of a whole [un tout]. In effect, this purpose implicates competition [concours] among causes, considered as phenomena in material nature. Thus, such conflict [conspiration] among independent causes, cannot be laid as a charge against [être mis au compte de] the causes themselves; one must instead conceive [of the presence of] a cause capable of efficaciously organising and totalising [totaliser] the dispersed parts [parties]. A whole that would only result from a blind convergence of elementary actions must not be regarded as a true whole, as a system, but, only as addition, an aggregate”. As Lenoir himself repeatedly emphasises, in Strategy of Life, Kant’s influence is decisive in all these developments. (The difference, once more, being made between a Rousseauan conception of a whole, as mentioned above in Pt. 1, Ch. 3, and one that is Hobbsian, a kind of « vulgar-Darwinism », composed of irreducible individuals. With regard to this translation of Delamarre’s note, some interpretation has been required, assuming some error, perhaps of typing, in the original; for example, to speak of parts—“a cause capable of totalising the parts”—[parties] is already to assume, much too hastily, the existence of that whole, whilst the very concern of the note is to mark out that difference and show that what seems but independent and disconnected are instead, indeed, parts!). Among the several translations of this “First Introduction” to the Third Critique, note also L. Guillemit’s (1975, Paris) in French and W. Pluhar’s in English, all of which I have used in conjunction with K. Vorländer’s edn. of the original text (of 1927); Delamarre’s version is especially recommended for its clarity, elegance and cogence of the notes. For the Third Critique (Kritik der Urteilskraft) itself, I have used Kant Werke, viii (Darmstadt, 1957, ed. W. Weischedel). Pluhar’s thoughtful English translation, whilst in French, those of A. Philonenko (Paris, 1993, 2nd edn), and J.-R. Ladmiral, et al. (in Oeuvres Philosphiques), are alike recommended. Each translator has particular solutions to difficult problems, and it is useful to be able to chose between them. Secondly, the overlay of different texts one upon the other, proves to be a powerful stimulus to interpretation.

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they were expected to be replaced in time through extensions of the theoretical and instrumental bases of the disciplines of nature.3 At the centre of their position, then, lies the question of the constant regulation and production of heat in order to maintain the temperature required by the survival of the organism (Wärmeökonomie).4 All processes are reduced to material exchanges (Stoffwechsel) between different physical forces: chemical, electrical, and mechanical, and namely for the binding of oxygen at a particular required and regulatable rate. 3 Despite the oppositions between the different actors, the issues are far from clear. Lenoir, Strategy of Life, has pointed out Helmholz’s expositional difficulties in face of subsequent teleomechanical criticism of his particular brand of reductionism (in fact, all were reductionists in their own lights, and not even Helmholz escaped teleology), but we may also take up statements by Maynard Smith which also seem to me teleologically determined and oriented, but now without the safeguard and modesty of the « regulative » Kantian critical approach. We noted that Maynard Smith, in “Optimization”, had referred to the “growing attempt to use mathematical methods borrowed from engineering and economics”, with specific reference to “control theory, dynamic programming, and the theory of games” (91, & cf. 107 & 114). In considering the problems arising from “applying these methods in biology”, teleology—the difference in the fields of application—is not mentioned (114). We also saw that in “Genes, Memes & Minds”, 46–8, he cites Dennett with respect to the « conviction » that there is “no way of telling the difference between an evolved organism and an artifact designed by an intelligent being”. For these reasons, the following sentence seems to me characteristic evidence of the syntactical confusions of the field: “If, as Wright suggested, there are different « adaptive peaks » in the genetic landscape, then depending on initial conditions, different populations faced with identical « problems », may finish up in different stable states” (“Optimisation”, 102). Oster & Wilson, Critique of Optimization Theory, 272, 278 & espec. 284, also point out the teleological drives affecting optimisation research; as critical and careful « insider »-users, their article is especially valuable for understanding the limits affecting understanding of natural selection, and especially of mathematical approaches in evolutionary biology. They virtually demote mathematical optimisation approaches to the status of a heuristic, regulative device for directing research (284–5), emphasising its inevitably teleological aspects (284), and framing a modest (but again, insider selectionist’s) view of the current state of achievement of evolutionary biology (284–6). 4 In noting the date of Bergmann and Leuckart’s work, 1852, it is not surprising to find many such terms and concepts already present in Hegel’s youthful Jenaer Realphilosophie of 1805– 1806; we may then, in turn, mention once more James Stirling’s convincing argument, in The Secret of Hegel, of 1865, concerning Hegel’s own foundational Kantism. Indeed, the sentiment of a continuous thread of enquiry concerning the constitution in mind of an external world of facticity imposes itself in reading Kant, Hegel, Husserl and Cassirer side by side (as has been necessary in preparing this book)—since one may suggest that they are individual expressions of a more anthropological scale of concern and development. Kant and Hegel, the transcendental critique and the Hegelian dialectic, have come to assume the precise form of Husserl’s own seemingly autonomous forms of enquiry, each opening a door inherited from the past, but building further, until coming to arrive at another door, that of a « missing discipline », mentioned above, and to which all are required to contribute,—that in which a phenomenological concern will be tightly co-joined to whatever field of knowledge happens otherwise to be in question.

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Respiration and nourishment are thus both general means for the intake of energy and a morphological problem for conceiving the manner in which particular organic forms are actually organised to enable this auto-regulation to take place with efficiency (thus with economy). We see then that the morphologists combine here a sense of teleology as a guiding principle before the problem of order in organic nature, with a thoroughly mechanistic reduction of the forces guiding natural organisation to “the most universal form of the laws of motion as such”.5 The organism, as solution to such problems of order, and its relative stability, is thus conceived of as a design for autoregulatable exchanges of matter/energy with an environment with which it is in constant necessary relationship: a sense of very fine balance between order and disorder, internal and external, autoregulation and destabilising forces, thus results. According to Bergmann and Leuckart, “different forms of animals could be viewed as the stable solutions to the problem of fitting a plan of material exchange to the environment”, and thus as particular solutions to the provision of appropriate body parts, of locomotive, sensory or, say, digestive organs. While warm blooded animals present a particularly complex problem in this respect, it must be obvious that all organic forms, plants as well, represent similar problems for the teleomechanical morphologist: the second principle of thermodynamics neatly defines the difficulty: the question of work, and its source. Grasses can be conceived, in Bergmann and Leuckart’s terms, as particular solutions to this question of self organisation and form; but when we turn to artificial flora and fauna, say to grains, we find that varieties are unstable once an external application of human work to plants and to their immediate environment has ceased. That is, they are unstable by virtual definition, so that it is only by virtue of human work that their different identities can be maintained, if at all. Obviously, rices and sheep are autoregulative, in the sense that they take in oxygen and convert food to energy and matter. However, they are also inherently unstable: equally, the individual identities of cultivated rice or cotton varieties are soon lost through exchanges with a complex environment. Left to itself, the variety either becomes extinct or its «  identity  »—its ­characters—alter in intimate adaptation to the vicissitudes of its surroundings. That is to say, spontaneous auto-regulative interaction with the environment acts to undo the fixing of the identity sought by cultivator and market; it is the cultivator who must apply a fresh regulative input in order to hold fixed that identity or to point it, modify it, in some desired direction. Not surprisingly then, what defines artificial fauna and flora, what brings them into existence and maintains them, is labour: on rices, sugars, cottons, tulips or chrysanthemums it is seen constantly applied; the environment itself may be altered, say by irrigation; the mineral constitution of the soil may alter through additions, substitutions or leakages of compounds and elements; a constant process of 5 The two translations quoted here from Lenoir’s book, since I have been unable to locate the them in the 1852 edition of Bergmann and Leuckart’s book.

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« selecting out » takes place through work in order both to limit the « tolerance » (as defined above) within which the identity itself is allowed to vary, and also to limit genetic exchanges among what are extremely close yet, for the grower, different plants. The cultivator thereby becomes, for the organism, an essential part of both the « environment » and an exogenous source of conversionary, transformational work. Thus, it is the hand and mind of human technology that constantly keeps that ­micro-identity reproducing itself in spite of everything: its autoregulative means are insufficient for this purpose, its internal organisation, so to speak, forced « out of balance » with spontaneous nature when regarded in terms of human need, and which in turn will soon reimpose itself when work is neglected. Moreover, it is work, therefore, that creates and maintains complex taxonomies of «  artificial plants  », say the five thousand kinds of tulip cultivated in the “Tuin te Pappenheim” at the end of the seventeenth century, mentioned by Weinmann, or the several thousand rices or cottons mentioned by George Watt as being cultivated in Bengal at the end of the nineteenth century.6 Such collectivities of selected, fixed micro-forms contrast, therefore, with the spontaneous exchanges of plants « in the wild », which are more constantly adaptive, more evidently « plastic » in content and form, therefore, with regard to their circumstantial, space/time-related interaction with one another and with their environment; the first becomes subject to certain well-defined limits set by human concentration upon the maximising of desired, yet botanically unstable characters: those characters desired by the grower responding in turn to the whole field of desire imposed locally by the market. Thus, we may contrast the desired varieties of the field with the undesired plant types and variations that are weeded out. An agricultural report on rice cultivation in Karnataka in the early twentieth century, shows that peasant selection of type acted upon a greater continuity of botanical variations among individual plants, thus seeking to shrink the limits within which given types were allowed to vary. Much of the technology of peasant farming is precisely concerned with this question of artificial maintenance and regulation of selected plants, subject to conditions, (i) of deep instability, and, consequently (ii) requiring the setting in of artificial limits to botanical variation. Like words themselves, language, or the acts of designation concerning development of any open practical domain, must engage in several different directions, but each stimulated by particular interest, perception and concept, isolating one typological « class » from other like-« classes », and, indeed, from the continuities of the matter from which their objects are constituted, … thus from the « natural » environment. Thus the Karnataka villagers also evolved a remarkable technology of selection and rotation, of special varieties of rice whose visible characters facilitated weeding, and much else, in order to turn natural botany towards the production of 6 Weinmann, Duidelyke Vertoning, ix, 530. Watt, Dictionary of Economic Products.

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kinds of rice destined for highly specific clusters of demand in the market place. However, when we turn to the systematics of natural grasses, or to study of genetic exchange among artificial and non-artificial grasses, or look to the manner in which, if relatively neglected, the individual plants of a field of rice will come to vary within increasingly large limits, then the distinctions between the cultural and the spontaneous seem decisive and systematic.7 Thus, where spontaneous nature is concerned, I am in accord with the anti-­ essentialism of Darwin, in terms of which the production of diversity in nature can be understood in quantum terms. This is expressed in the individualist and accidentalist perception I have given to the very constitution of history, thus in the fabrication of those very contexts of constraint that act to limit the fields within which the individual is deemed free to choose and decide, select, act competently or incompetently, with regard to what, therefore, must be conceived of as an entirely dynamic and transitional context. In contrast, I wish to separate out the botanical and zoological work of human culture as fundamentally teleological in nature. The old creationists may have misplaced the source of the external manipulator, but they were not completely in error. In the artificial nature of the stereotypical category of the commodity and of its constitution, it is teleology and essentialism that, so we see, must prevail. Of course, from a more complete standpoint, artificial plant, like humanity itself, is at once both nature and culture, natural and artifice: … nature! 7 On designation, e.g. H. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, pt 1, and, of course, Kant’s whole critical philosophy, but esp. the First Critique, and Opus Postumum; ed. & intro. E. Förster, tr. E. Förster & M. Rosen. For natural grasses, see the special number of Systematic Botany (xv, 1990), on “Species & Evolution”. For discussion and dispute about genetic interchange in rice cultivation, F. Bray, Science & Civilisation in China, vi, Biology & Biological Technology, ii, Agriculture, 489, n. c, & Te-tzu Chang’s astonishing, “Origin … and Diversification of Asian & African Rices”, 425–41: “the varied and complex cross-fertility and chromosome pairing among the wild, weed, and cultivated races…” (428); “that considerable introgressive hybridisation has taken place and that gene flow has been largely from the cultivated rices to the wild forms” (428); “… still undergoing incessant and dynamic changes by the hybridization-differentiation cycles” (437). Concerning current difficulty in the systematics of rices, both Bray and Te-Tzu Chang refer to recent congresses and publications. For a case study referring to the differentiation between field and market typologies of rices, A.S. Ishaq, Rice Cultivation in the Larkana District, “Bombay Agricultural Department Bulletin” (no. 99, 1921), esp. 12–3. For the study of rice selection and technology in a Karnataka village, T. Gilbert & S.S. Salimath’s remarkable, The Cultivation of Drilled Paddy in South Bombay Presidency, “Bombay Agricultural Department Bulletin” (no. 82, 1917).

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Illustrations Section 7: Sherds of the Inter-Asian Trades in Ceramics

Figure 44a Chinese Ming blue-and-white sherds from the fields and path banks of Cheul and Revadanda (south of Mumbai, India). Personally collected in the mid 1970s and in 1981

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Figure 44b

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Chinese Ming blue-and-white, and Thai celadon Sawankhalok sherds from Si Satchanalai, Thailand, from site 1

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Chinese Ming blue-and-white, and Thai celadon Sawankhalok sherds from Si Satchanalai, Thailand, from site 2

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Figure 44c

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Figure 44d

Chinese Ming blue-and-white sherds from Mrauk U, Myanmar

Illustrations Section 7: Sherds of the Inter-Asian Trades

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Appendix 2

«The Phenomenology Lesson». A Commentary on the Illustrations

Phenomenology has existed as a movement before becoming the matter of an entire philosophical consciousness.1 However, if this year 2012 of the Dragon had finally marked the consecration of Xi Jinping, that year also presaged all the uncertainties associated with it in the Chinese cosmology: above all, it was a year of danger …2

Introduction These illustrations represent a taste of what I wish to present in more elaborate detail and reasoned argumentation in a later work concerning the history of the phenomenological consciousness and philosophy long before the development and long-term context in which Kant and Hegel’s purely philosophical, « Self »-regarding phenomenological exercises came to be formulated. These historical contexts, often concerning a distant past, but that I choose to consider phenomenological «before the letter», as it were, were clearly contemporary with the events and structures concerning commodification explicated throughout City Intelligible, possessed in mind as a knowledge, whether believed in or not by those same actors at the roots of commodification, … and, I wish to emphasise, structurally similar in general form. My chosen frontispiece for this volume represents such a conscious application of a phenomenology, and moreover possesses a structural character again similar to that uniting universal and particular with regard to the commodity, … at least as I have 1 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception, 8. 2 Brice Pedroletti, “La Route Sinueuse jusqu’au Sommet”, Le Monde (3 August 2019). Just like the sacrament the dragon represents a moment both of fundamental ontic and once-only ontogenetic transition, and an event constantly repeated in the banality of human existence, yet with the same values: that of a start and a new start. Thus the dragon not only forms an essential part of the Buddhist phenomenology of being (like Angel of Death in the Christian iconology) but also as symbol of the new year throughout South East and East Asia, opening before the individual the spectre of the new year as a new beginning, re-opening the present as if a field of re-opened possibility, positive or negative. Visual indiscernibility, notable of much representation of the very form of the dragon, signifies uncertainty of form, or an «allness» of possibility with respect of form.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004414921_011

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come to regard it. For the « evidence » I present is purely circumstantial. It is not an evidence of evident cause and effect, of evident credibility, but something that through argument and demonstration may or may not convince. But my purpose in this book is to do no more, above all, than lay bare certain presuppositions with which I have long worked in order to focus on, identify as such, and study intensively the phenomenological aspects of commoditisation itself. Argument must await a later work and be engaged in and for itself, exhaustively and at length. In the present case, I come to utilise materials that in some cases date from years of seemingly fruitless archival and library research carried out long ago, isolated instances interrupted by events, but that in sum mark out a long-term broadly comparative approach to my central concern with a specific subject matter, societal development and its intimate connections with commoditisation and communication. I have especially wished to bring to view the conscious dimensions of that history,—of what past populations must have known in order to lead their lives,—in order the better to illuminate and properly comprehend what I have called the evidence that confronts one in the archives: a global anthropology in which diverse populations once participated and communicated, dedicated to the tasks of communication, thus to what, broadly seen, may be termed the tasks of translation, a domain therefore that allowed such translational practice. It is for the reader to reflect upon this illustrative matter, to consider the circumstantial nature of the commentary below, regard critically what I seek to show in considering, together with me, the connections I wish to draw, and either work them further or signal their doubts, even repugnance before them. But, yes, I also intend to illustrate this argument, in full, in the future work mentioned above, utilising the image as the main medium of expression, even though drawn together by the threads of an explanatory text and commentary that enchains them into some continuity of general idea. Here, instead, they are intended merely as a documentary evidence for perhaps controversial claims made in various parts of this book or as visual support for various abstractions and thematic relationships marking contemporary expression of the metaphysical context of commoditisation, especially in Part 1, Chapter 3, § iii, and in Part 2. It is for these reasons that these claims, together with this visual support, remain largely impressionistic and, seemingly, without further ambition. For example, where I speak in the text of a «species garden» or « specieslandscape », or, say, of a «knowledge-well» and « knowledge tower », the reader may be enabled by what I illustrate to see exactly to what I (or others, such as Kant himself) have been referring when inventing such arbitrary descriptive metaphor: their purposes is merely to possess some terms of reference to facilitate discussion, and I might have chosen other words. Thus, where I speak of wave theory in connection with contemporary art, I illustrate the case with certain works selected from the oeuvre of Edvard Munch. Yet, that same

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reader will be at pains to discover any further argumentation, justifying or grounding the hypotheses set out in the text.3 No study of Munch’s writings lies behind such inferences, yet in order to be shown to be true that study is clearly required. Even then, one must also ask the unconscious effects of observed events in the context of one’s life and that secretly, as it were, become embodied unwittingly as concern and interest in one’s own actions and motivations, although without visible connexion. However, where this particular example is concerned, my claim extends to Munch’s conscious motivation, and it is to the conscious domain of knowledge and intention that I have sought to focus much discussion above as being necessary for the existence of the commodity. Yet this historical past does not concern a philosophical phenomenology in the sense that Kant and Hegel made of it: it is phenomenological in what it pretends to explain, the ground of the kind of phenomenal world that we really experience, its meaning and its status, but not yet newly located as the gounds of our own possibility of thinking the world. Instead, it seems to me already remarkable as contemporary recognition of the need to describe the grounds of experience, the possibility of doing so, and, moreover, that behind some metaphysical or religious representation lies precisely such a description. In its turn, the meeting of quantity with quality—that with makes possible the entire anthropology of the commodity—already seems, in, for example, the pages of Hegel, to have picked up and materialised this singular historical representation and concern. I shall return to this question further below.

...

Where the different categories of illustrations are concerned, there is an essential ­connection … a sense of connectivity … that runs among all the different topics or

3 I have strictly avoided images of instruments and exhibits, or from books, held by the British Library and British Museum, especially from the rich collection held by the Department of Coins and Medals of the BM. For an independent researcher of scarce means, the costs of reproduction are prohibitive whilst independent photography by the researcher (under scrutiny or not), even using a mobile telephone, is forbidden. This considerably increases not only costs but the amount of time required to take notes on each instrument considered significant, limiting very considerably one’s profitable use of the scarce time available for any visiting scholar to Britain. Yet, in the present case it is the need to compare as many material examples as can be assembled that counts for their careful analysis and differentiation, thus in order to comprehend the kinds of production and kinds of market for which such instrumentation was destined, in particular where are concerned the portable boxes of coin weights and balances. Where the library has been concerned, a sixteenth-century work on medicinal practice had been subtracted from the public domain in order to charge such costs (personal conversation with staff). Fortunately I received generous help elsewhere, as acknowledged in this book. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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a­ spects marked out by each example. This connectivity implies a true unity of the matter of the real that comprehends all the differences that, empirically speaking, they serve to represent. Obviously, I equate an aspect of this unity with that Sacroboscan-kind of poesis of complete and absolute universal knowledge and connectivity much discussed above, and that forms one metaphysical aspect of the whole unifying framework that I perceive as being wholly at issue in this book: thus, that connectivity that serves to bind as one the universal and the particular, synthesis and analysis, and that gives, on the one hand, metaphysical meaning to that empirical reality lived by all persons whether rich or poor, and seen, for example, in Buddhist, Hindu, Safavid, Christian or North-WestCoast Amerindian figuration alike. It is that between the tower’s summit—that of synthesis (of origins and grounds, a presumption that they are one and undivided)—and the earth at the bottom of the well, analysis (empiricity, difference); but that equally links, in my account, the Kantian noumenal and what mind makes of what it receives from it, converting it, by a chain of procedures and stages, into a completely fixed and realised empirical object world accessible, formed and possible to the mere human mind. Or, thirdly, it links what on a particularly practical and perceptible level, quantity with quality, exchange value and use value, universal concept and particular identity, thus between the valuation of commodities and their species formation, the indifferent conceptual material origin in «nature» of the production of the commodity and the eventually fully-produced object constituting the commodity itself. All are versions of this same propensity to seek a unified indifferent super-ground for what appears to us differentiated in experience (an origin and ground that must be, like Munch’s wave motion, “Einziger, ewiger, allgegenwärtiger, unsichtbarer und unvorstellbarer …”4). Thus, my inclusion of the helical tower-like medicinal gardens of an Olivier de Serres can be regarded as a metaphorical representation of this poesis (just as Kant had used it in his strictly materialist First Critique), and in turn with what I have termed the «species-garden», as depicted below, especially that drawn from the Diccionario de Autoridades, or portrayed on the frontispiece of a medical treatise: that species-garden as representing the experiential domain treated in a book concerned with kinds and types, identities, say words or say commodities, each of which is made to be clearly differentiated from one another, and that is the realised pole of that universal/phenomenal pair. It is thus that we encounter the same «species-garden» on the title pages of the two most early editions of de Serres’ book itself: less as if his reallife garden, since the book treats a much greater diversity of agricultural applications to the land, but instead engaging the poesis of kind in terms of which he sets his thesis, representing that very poesis elsewhere in the book in terms, indeed, of a knowledgetower, as if to build that helical tower—to make solid and physical that very 4 The opening words, once more, of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, but shorn of its substantive “… Gott”. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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metaphor—would act as an efficacious instrument for growing medical plants known to be influenced by the virtues derived from the stars. But, are these not, in their turn, further connectable with the equally typologicallyinspired memory palaces portrayed by Yates in her Art of Memory (thus my inclusion of a partitioned hand from Belot’s chiromantic book on memory of 1647, and that he suggests as being useful for the merchant or casual market-goer [Ill. 27])? The essential connection is with my own textual argumentation regarding the whole field of typological distinction with which the commodity was primarily concerned as a veritable field of common knowledge and practice dispersed among and acted out by whole populations. The moneys and sherds included below give examples of the kinds of specific ware and payments-form occupying such typologies and the type of typology concerned. Payments-forms must stand here for any kind of commodity-type, commodity-formation and commodity-exchange: the rules, we have said, are universal, intolerant of exception. However, let’s not neglect the metaphysical dimension of such contemporary representation—at once practical and metaphysical—and located in that same poesis of knowledge from which arose particular but different religious and mythological accounts of the creation of the phenomenal world, what, therefore, I regard as precocious «phenomenology lessons» such as we find portrayed as an entirely worked through step-like procedure among the initial group of illustrations (Ills. 1–4), and also represented by the stages of the helical tower, carefully worked through as a form of argumentation by a Hegel, and who returns again and again to his original theme yet, in doing so, each time on a higher level of explication and comprehension; or as represented by Butinone in the fifteenth century in seating the infant Christ at the top of a helical tower of knowledge … upon a metaphor, as it were, yet given real physical representation. This metaphysical dimension is constantly present: a skeleton holding the hour glass depicted on a coin, a weigher of coin shadowed by such a skeleton encountered upon an illustrated label pasted onto the inside lid of a much-used box of coin weights, a painting by some renowned seventeenth century artist of the Dutch-German protestant school, or, instead, that extraordinarily omnipresent dragon—so purposively indeterminate in form (so «all-form»)—encountered in domestic and religious life throughout South-East and East Asia, and from whose mouth, figured literally, our own familiar experiential and phenomenal reality is seen to derive. Like the serpent of some Adam and Eve, that dragon mediates a return of the phenomenal back into nonbeing or the universal (thus the transitional function agenced by portrayals of death, by Mortality, or also by the figure of fire), or vice versa, representing an early protostage of giving form to matter and thingedness, such as common to Kwakiutl, Haida or Tsimshian legend. When regarding such an Adam and Eve, and thereafter the most banal and expected of representations of that biblical event, one might eventually come to interrogate

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onself about what had been really intended by that figuration of a serpent, since obviously conceived of as an extension of that very same indifferent universal ground of all things (in this case divinity). We see that serpent often doted with a royal crown, thus with authority (as if representing that foe to the church constituted by kingly claims of divine right), and yet also portrayed in the semblance of a tree, of a human being growing like a tree, arms become branches leafing and flowering, thus very much alive, and thus representing something mediate between the universal (or divinity) and the phenomenal, and as if intending to represent the generation of all organic being itself, that same proto-condition when vegetal and animal were also undifferentiated. Rüff’s Adam and Eve exemplifies this point, but so does an illustration observed on a purely domestic Vietnamese rice or soup bowl, and which likewise can also be regarded as a «phenomenology lesson». Withdraw … abstract … from it the value judgements given to such depictions by one religious or mythological narrative or another, and they become a singular, diversely expressed, and universal philosophy, ontological as much as ontogenetic—yes: in each case a veritable «phenomenology-lesson», identical in form, yet various in the detail of its expression, differentiated in form according to place and time just as are differentiated in seeming continuities the entries for words in van Wartburg’s great etymological dictionary. And it is that very transition between states, between particular and universal, that Kant and Hegel so brilliantly withdrew from such metaphysical considerations by stripping off that metaphysical reference to some external causation … and thus transforming its status into a field of knowledge … to a focus on mere matter itself, and, above all, to one focussed upon mind and reason, upon the self …. and doing so by means of what Kant had termed his «Copernican Revolution», one altering the very nature of what we consider a poesis of knowledge, and to this very day incomplete … unfinished. That epithet «Copernican» is no exaggeration in describing the achievements of a Kant, Hegel, Husserl or Marx, and many others working in the same directions, and all of whom now serve to guide, «as best as best can», the progress of my own book.

1

The «Phenomenology-lessons» (Ills. 1–7)

Whereas Andrea Vesalio,—like de Ketham before him and countless other anatomy «teachers» of those centuries—had approached his phenomenology through analysis, through dividing a whole into its parts, thus performing his operation at the very centre of a «well» of knowledge, so religion and metaphysic had sought to approach the phenomenal by constructing a «knowledge-tower», an ascent to knowledge, and to explain the phenomenal state of the human being as an absence of such knowledge, or of access only to incomplete fragments and phenomenal representations of it. But if

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we strip such religious, metaphysical and also mythological description entirely of all its varied moral, evaluative and narrative content of expression, we discover emerging in all its simple nakedness—thus undressed of all such diversity and difference of expression and appearance—a single, simple philosophical phenomenology such as would later be traced (but, in this later case, reduced only to matter), as a phenomenology, by Kant, Hegel and Husserl: a form that has thus been reduced to a universal, and that has, at a certain stage of conceptual realisation, taken on what seems a virtually imperative a-priori form. This is what the Adam and Eve, illustrated by one Johannes Zainer and published as an illumination of a printed page in the 1473 edition of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus, seems so astonishingly to reveal in all its constitutive complexity. The artist has taken the basic elements of the narrative and knowingly redeployed them in using the representative tools of his time and thereby generating a remarkably Hegel-like dialectical procedure wherein we see moment by moment the very genesis of the phenomenal. It is this exceptional, what seems perfectly authorial, thus knowing character that has led me to use that illumination as the frontispiece of City Intelligible. Then it is also my thesis that such an observation—a veritably philosophic reduction to first principles—must have been perfectly intended by the artist, making of it more a conscious philosophical exercise than mere illustration of a given metaphysic or religious parable, let alone the customary moral judgement that invades such representations. But this seems equally true of the person who had once designed the particularly explicit and careful arrangement of an exchange between dragon and phoenix observed on the inside of a perfectly banal piece of cheap Vietnamese domestic ware … a common rice bowl (in fact a set of pieces). The image is itself completely banal, indivually painted on each and every vessel, but of a theme seen time and again on ordinary domestic ware as much as in temple art, and common both to the distant past that has so concerned us above, as to the present day. That is to say, like the Adam and Eve, the figure itself, and the elements necessarily composing its habitual and complete representation, occur time and again;—but not a certain knowing artistic sub­ tlety and freedom with which, in this case, they are brought into relationship with one another on this particular set of bowls, and especially, among them all, on the one chosen for my photograph. And, finally, it is true of Edvard Munch’s two extraordinary works, The Scream, especially in this its lithographic version, and The Waves of Love, in both of which we see the phenomenal matter of the world emerging from pure constitutive motion and wave, like a genie from its smoke, and as if illustrating some text authored by the young physical sciences of his own day. The figuration is astonishingly compact, the cause and effect relationship as if direct, thus without the step-like procedural movement of the others, but its very abbreviation appears like a provocative statement of what is deemed by the artist to be the «truth» of the matter. Two later successive paintings, both now known as Galloping Horse, one of 1910–1912 and the

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other of 1928, continue, so it seems to me, to seek to refine this vision of a world of material phenomena consisting entirely of pure wave motion. «The Waves of Love» is equally a clue: for what is this word «love» that we find in the second of Munch’s paintings mentioned above, if not the very expression, the active force, so to speak, of a universal and originary essence, such as imagined by a Giordano Bruno, or an Emile Zola (in La Faute de L’Abbé Mouret), a Pablo Neruda (in Cien Sonetos de Amor) or a René Char in several of his poems, and yet that comes expressed before us phenomenally in the perfectly carnal form of an act of copulation? That is to say, it is «spiritual love» that concerns us here, but of what does that consist? The very «scream» itself, that vision of a human being in pure emotive desperation, is seen as if itself, a mere human sentiment, at its most extreme, yet derived … arising from … a purely neutral material condition. A similarly acute philosophical insight seems equally exposed by Jacob Rüff, first in his own Adam and Eve, and second in his depiction of doctor and mid-wife, both hard at work in reading the stars at the very scene of human birth and that like René Char’s poem The Three Sisters depicts at once both the spiritual and carnal aspects of birth, of it as a phenomenal event, namely of a human being who, doted with reason, and yet composed of matter. The Adam and Eve depicts the tree of knowledge as equally a human skeleton, as Death, Mortality, and as an agency for a transformation of status. We see it rising from its roots within the soil to the «fruit» or condition that it would pass to human kind, and through which essence or Idea comes transformed step by step into mortal physical phenomenal, … into differentiated identities and form. In the scene of birth we see the full deployment of that poesis of knowledge deployed as a practice; that is to say, it is seen deployed in the forms in which knowledge was then conceived, the ontology and ontogenesis of the actuality of the phenomenon, of a new human birth as represented according to the old poesis: once more giving living embodiment to what seemed to us but metaphor, a turn of speech. The doctor and midwife trace that birth back to the stars, discuss and identify what they observe, trace a line of causation, at the same time as we see the birth taking place as a physical material event. Here, in this frontispiece, comes marked out an explicative processual procedure of steps and stages running inexorably between the Idea and its phenomenal materialisation or expression, its realisation as «hard» fact—yet that we may discern as being conceived of as such in mind,—and just as we see so carefully and remarkably explained in the first chapter of Hegel’s Die Lehre vom Begriff (The Doctrine of the Concept); … except that in the latter case there are no external referents or agencies, no stars or gods, external to matter itself. The telescope and gestures are pointed to what it is the observer perceived, not to an object disassociated from the observer.5 5 Hegel himself makes this point with utmost clarity in Die Lehre vom Begriff, 22 (12.24 [in di Giovanni’s translation The Science of Logic, 521–522]): being (Sein) and essence (Wesen), seen

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What I seek to show with such illustrative means is that a singular universal reading, comparative and entirely philosophical, can be deduced from the numerous forms of such narrative description and metaphorical representation, encountered in different religious, metaphysical and mythological forms that seek to «explain» the origin and meaning of our own phenomenal experiential being, thus common, say, to Christian, Buddhist, Safavid, Kwakiutl and essentialist traditions of representation:— a universal philosophical datum merely embodied by the varied and local religious folklore and image encountered circumstantially across the globe. It is not a phenomenology in the modern philosophical sense that has so dominated the concerns of this book, a knowing concern with the sources and production of knowledge itself, but phenomenology in a more basic sense: that of a clear account of the formation of the world of the senses, of meaning, and of experience that stands before the eye. That first philosophical sense is the all-important modern requirement that Husserl eventually recognised as the as yet «missing discipline». But the lesser sense of a consciously driven account of the derivation and grounds of our phenomenal experience is, so I argue, also significant as a historical datum of the past, firstly as a context for the later materialist philosophy of knowledge we first associate with Kantism, but secondly, for the historian, a pointer back to the necessary conditions of knowledge required by past populations as conditions for their existence, for the complex of practices required in living, and including all that constitutes the culture of the commodity, with which, indeed, it proves so similar in structural principle.

1 Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus (Ulm, 1473), fol. 3v: Pageillumination of Adam taking Apples from Eve ( Johannes Zainer). (Frontispiece of this book)

The detail of this illumination is remarkable in its redeployed completeness, and in unfolding by means of that deployment a phenomenological point of view; it is one



from other standpoints (thus from those essentialist standpoints of these illustrations and of the old poesis of knowledge), appear as the condition of the concept of the real, but now can be seen subordinated (unterworfen) to the concept itself (Begriff); it is the concept that is revealed as their unconditioned ground (sich als ihren unbedingten Grund erwiesen hat), and thus too of intuition, sensation, sense and representation; yes: it is just mind, no more, that now stands as the conceptual source of the universal. Secondly, however, he also differentiates himself from Kant’s notion of reality. That it is not incomplete because of the mind’s inability to discern its complete nature, but because of the incompleteness of the dialectical procedure to which we have now reached in establishing an absolute concept of reality. That dialectic has yet to pursue its development towards a complete realisation of reality, that reality from which mind proceeds to develop within itself (in und aus sich bildet [my emphasis]). What Hegel develops as Kant’s error is better seen, perhaps, as the sheer incompatibility of their different approaches to mind’s constitution of the real, and thus of its relation to what stands outside of it. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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that cannot have been but perfectly conscious to the artist concerned, say by his intelligence and his skill in philosophical deduction from the mere conventions and forms of the religious narrative current to his milieu and that remain so. Note that it is a succession of apples … of transitional worlds or phenomenological forms … shown passed from the hand to hand along that ladder-like progression between the two states, the foliate climber of stem and leaf like a ladder of ascent and descent between the two conditions of being, and that at once is also serpent, animal/vegetal, crowned with divine authority, and from which human beings are seen to flower, as if the generation of the full phenomenal variety of different, distinctive kinds of individual craft and person …. a phenomenology of the human. Beneath the contrasting negative and positive value-judgements applied by religion and mythology to the iconographies of such representation (negative according to that Christian regard of an «Adam and Eve», positive in that of the emergence into «light» [or nirvana] of a Buddha, and who is also frequently shown as the flower of a plant), resides an entirely universal conception, neutral of value judgement and concerning the ontological and ontogenetic relationship binding universal and phenomenal as aspects of a single perception of being and possibility.

2

Jacob Rüff, De Conceptu de Generatione Hominis (Frankfurt-amMain, 1580), Title Page of Book i, Chapter i: Adam taking Apples from Eve (artist unknown).

I include two of the title pages of his book on child birth. In spite of the considerable difference of what they illustrate, they both display an equally acute philosophical regard on the event of the realisation of a new phenomenological object, in this case the human being. The first is in principle: that cause-and-effect creative act through which the human being of mortal experience comes into being; the second concerns that ever repeated act of phenomenal realisation of human kind comprised by the banal act of child birth. The difference between them is, for example, like that between the original crucifixion and any banal individual act of grace, the latter an endlessly finite and repetitive reconstitution of the former. Once upon a time the world became phenomenon in being passed from phoenix to dragon; thereafter that event is endlessly repeated on rice bowl and tea pot, on temple carving or painting. Thus, the source of any and every child birth can be read in the stars, even that of a poet named René Char, derived from an essence, as if represented by the sun and stars. The first frontispiece, that of an «Adam and Eve», is especially arresting because of its conscious and complex artistry, whilst the second frontispiece, in illustrating the act of childbirth and the doctor’s reading of its meaning and of the precise astral derivation of the virtues inculcated into the new-born, proves equally so. But the identity of the father? No, that of the astral virtues that such a birth embodies. Both are «phenomenology lessons». In the first, the Adam and Eve, it is death or mortality shown as the agency or catalyst through which essence becomes phenomenalised (or that, in reverse, returns the Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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phenomenal to its original undifferentiated source: essence or non-being). Here, mortality is portrayed as a skeleton, yet simultaneously, as a tree, rooted in the soil (thus again indifferently as both fauna and flora: animal-vegetal). If regarded as the «tree of knowledge» it is knowledge in the same sense as that represented by the tower of knowledge, a Babel of descent, or becoming, or of return or sacrifice. It stands for the process or procedure, a word I chose to emphasise in this account, enabling the realisation of a phenomenal existence, that passage from an undifferentiated universal to the potential for differentiation implied within the concept as part of its very unfolding nature, thus of the appearance of experience and necessity (qua-Hegel). In contrast— say now in the form of fire, as in Mussorgsky’s opera The Khovantchina, it is a path back to the spiritual (or essence), the immortal: the Buddhist monk or nun who sets his or her body alight in a spirit of self-sacrifice does so in this positive spirit, whilst the church performs an «auto da fé» in a negative spirit, that of relinquishment and punishment, yet both stripped of their moral evaluations possessing the very same metaphysical and formal meaning and structural implication. Rüff’s two frontispieces, also, because of their particular application of the elements of a very familiar and much repeated pictorial vocabulary and composition, may, as said, be regarded as «phenomenology lessons». However, the apparent, and yet overtly manifested indifference between animal and plant form, in this case the personification of the tree as Mortality with a human skeletal form, also deserves mention and will be further illustrated below: it is obsessively encountered throughout the long period and in numerous guises, especially in the illumination of early printed European books and in what may seem merely decorative, as if without meaning. However, if the sceptic responds “but it is only decoration”, we may answer that even then it is a choice: one would not ordinarily, today, choose this figurative form, certainly not with the obsessive repetitive frequency with which it is encountered at an earlier epoch! Then the question must be that of its meaning. Why should the medieval artist portray a vine ending as a serpent’s head, or an animal whose tongue is leaf, or whose lower portions are stem and leaf? How can a young Tsimshian adult become salmon and then birch, as if there were no difference between the two states requiring some procedure of transition for converting the one state into the other? The two states seems either identified with one another, or, alternatively, may be seen to flow directly and naturally the one from and into the other: thus an all filling vine shown emanating from the hand of some Buddhist deity like a genie from its lamp! Yes, but why then emphasise the fact and do so obsessionally? As I have already argued, it should perhaps be interpreted as a stage of formation prior to any completely fixed moment of phenomenalisation of the experiential world, even preserving its links to what is conceived of as an originally universal prior condition: thus, Bertinone’s Christ deliberating with the doctors sits at the summit of a

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­ topian tower of knowledge, since the Christ is not considered truely phenomenal but u instead an extension to earth of the universal, and thus knowledgeable of what no real human being could ever know; Hegel’s mind cannot perceive that first universal state of itself and must negate, must begin the process of phenomenalisation.6 Animal-­ vegetal represents a similar initial stage of realisation or negation All these different forms of depiction take ostensibly that pathway between universal and object as its ground, but some artists stand out in their careful marking out of what is figured as parts of an actual procedure of becoming, like a Hegelian dialectic, each stage conceptually separated from the others and yet depicted together. It is what Hegel depicted with the dialectic in using a precise word “begriffene” (processual) in order to distinguish it … even argue it as being processual.7 Rüff was not alone in such audacity: Jacob Böhme, for instance, portrayed an even more complex figure of a tree in his «Adam and Eve». That animal/vegetal indifference (but depicted so) is, as remarked, perfectly banal, frequent encountered across the whole comparative perspective of religion and myth: European, Safavid, or South and South East Asian; Buddhist, Confucian, Shintoist, Hindu, Christian, and creeping into the more figurative instances of Islamic pictorial expression. The very title of Rüff’s book represents the audacity of Rüff’s phenomenologist conception.

3

Jacob Rüff, De Conceptu de Generatione Hominis (Frankfurtam-Main, 1580), Title Page of Book 4, Metaphysical and Carnal Representation of Birth.

This, once more, is equally a «phenomenology lesson». The scene is one of birth and of the doctor reading the stars, using geometrical aids, if not an astrolabe, in order to do so. In thus connecting such birth with the ancient poesis of knowledge of cause and effect, there comes entirely united the two manners of perceiving such events: first as part of a field of cosmological metaphysical possibility; second as a merely physical, phenomenal event. On the one hand, it might be a Caspar Bauhin describing the astrological origins of the virtues of a certain plant for curing a certain body-part of horse, dog or human, or it might instead be the twentieth-century poet, René Char, describing 6 Stirling, in the first volume of The Secret of Hegel provides an especially lucid description of this condition. 7 He does so in contrasting a positivist view of the concept with his own dialectical or «philosophical» (as he qualifies it) view of it; Hegel, Die Lehre vom Begriff, 18 (21). A dialectical view means that the process is internal—of itself, so to speak: “… durch sich selbst hervorgegangene Resultate sind”. (22 [24])—of what already constitutes it, and not introduced from outside. We may call Death’s role in these phenomenology lessons as one both of catalysis and as motor, introducing mortality and impermanency in the one case, and reversing the process if the other.

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in “Les Trois Soeurs” his own birth, verses that equally connect the poesis with its carnal or phenomenal expression. It is an essentialist conception of meaning, where the physical and carnal merely represent states and processes that cannot be explained or reasoned by the human mind except by suggestion, thus in metaphorical form. However, let’s say instead that what here concerns us is the birth of a commodity, of a type of commodity, and comprised of particular properties, conditions and definitions that go to compose its identity as object and as type of object. We would then seek the universal once more in the material domain, in that of value, and so forth, or in the notional continuity comprising all matter prior to production and artifice. Let us also remember that eighteenth-century Portuguese navigational almanachs had continued to utilise the Sacroboscan poesis as their practical cosmological reference guide. That is, this is indeed a metaphysic, yet applied as a pure and, presumably, efficacious practice! There is a certain stage of representation beyond which one must assume some philosophical sophistication and conscious reflexion by the artist, thus of an understanding of what precisely I mean in calling these illustrations «phenomenology lessons»: it is as if the artist had also intended to work this notion of procedural realisation onto paper, utilising the iconographic means at any contemporary local artist’s technical and conceptual disposal.

4a & b. Vietnamese domestic rice bowl (low-priced domestic ware). Late twentieth century, personal possession. 4c.

For comparison, an example of the innumerable representations of this theme met with in South-East Asia, but in this case in a Vietnamese restaurant in a small French town.

4a & b: This is a cheap, very crudely painted domestic rice bowl bought by the Author in a Vietnamese grocery store (the slapdash character of the representation probably because painted under conditions of rapidly executed domestic «outwork»), but of which the illustration on its interior can be seen to constitute a true phenomenology, and conceived as such during the process leading to the design of the bowl. The elements of which the composition is composed are found repeated time and again in obsessive abundance in South East Asian religious and domestic art, thus in temple, kitchen and street, and forming an intimate part of ordinary awareness and conscious expectation. But as with the «Adam and Eve» selected above the fact that those elements are combined in a processual or procedural relationship is made especially clear in this case? However, it is worth emphasising that this figuration forms as much a generalised metaphysical aspect of popular culture as any particular religious statement or sentiment.

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Yet, it is indeed a phenomenology equivalent to the Boccaccio and with some c­ ommon, thus comparable components that aid one in interpreting their c­ ommon ­meaning … of that customary «  Adam and Eve  », equally rooted in European ­consciousness, and the phoenix and serpent/dragon so characteristic of comparative iconography. There are four main elements: a dragon and a phoenix; a sphere often marked by a yin/yang division; and the lotus flower right in the centre of this vessel. In freeing these images of their purely religious representation, the passage of the world (that two aspectual often-yin/yang sphere) from beak to mouth, we see represented the passage from the oneness of a source (logically or genetically) into the phenomenal character of ordinary perception and experience, just as seen in Zainer’s illumination for Boccaccio. The yin/yang version of the sphere aids one in understanding the apple-form given to what is passed from Eve to Adam and vice versa. The events shown mark an intermediate state and phasing of phenomenal formation or representation, a condition expressed in the complex indeterminacy of the very form of the dragon. Thus in other depictions we may observe that same dragon returning to nonbeing and nonform (or to a status of undivided being and form), as if in an auto da fé, and exemplified by Hirifu Shoten in 1887 (Boston Museum of Fine Arts), the body of the dragon seen dissolving into cloud/water. In this case, the Lotus is the sun, representing the essence that is origin of being; dragon and phoenix are first ephemeral crystallisations of phenomenal form, impossible to seize adequately as precise form; the sphere is the world, sun as it were being reduced to the state of the separated identities of our phenomenal experience. If yin/ yang, it is precisely these two opposed conditional states of the world that are concerned in this transition. Looked at carefully, one sees the head or beak of the phoenix doubled, shadowed by its repetition closer to the «apple». It is if the phoenix were in full dynamic procedural motion, as if, too, it were the sun or a ray of the sun, a petal of that lotus flower that is also the sun, passing worldliness by means of its beak to the mouth of the dragon … a tongue we also see extended by the shadow-like doubling of the dragon’s mouth. This manner of doubling both beak and mouth of phoenix and dragon closely resembles Munch’s cinematic representation of motion in the “Galopperende Hest” of 1928 (Ill. 7b), in which we see two, even a vestige of three pairs of front legs. It is with the very same sense that Zola translates the «Adam and Eve» fable the paradise of an Abbé Mouret relieved of his civilised and repressive education, and in which thingedness and carnal love now become acceptable and possible, appear always in progress and as a progress that affects the full sexual maturation … realisation … of its two participants, and as if an expression of Rousseau’s utopian regard on a renewal of humanity (La Faute de L’Abbé Mouret). Yes, it is another «generatione hominis» (to quote Rüff), —a «phenomenology lesson»!

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Edvard Munch portrayals of motion and wave.

After long familiarity and fascination with Edvard Munch’s oeuvre, I am convinced that if we set aside the customary emphasis of contemporary commentary upon his subjection to emotion and sentiment, to illness both mental and physical, and to other such influences, we arrive at an individual intensely interested, for itself, in the very nature of matter and in the problem of its representation. He was clearly interested— if I read these paintings correctly—in contemporary science, just as were other artists of his epoch, say, Kupka, Breton and Leger. Bohr’s complementarity principle of particle and wave, both as possible grounds of matter, dates from 1928 after a long gestation of the two fundamental and controversial principles appearing, each in its own manner, and its own domain of application, to correctly underlie the nature of matter. Both are seen to be true in their respective domains of application and yet they are incompatible the one with the other in the quest for an ultimate synthesis. But the very same scientists responsible for the new science and rules of objectivity, Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, and so forth, were also subject to their own metaphysical convictions, much read in critical philosophy, in Kant and Hegel, and in the discussions of their day, whilst wave theory also formed a central part as ground for such metaphysical leanings. for a veritable poesy of language in the case of Hegel: as means of pictorially or phenomenally representing that indiscernible non-phenomenal and original undivided universal ground of matter, that which Kant designated as noumenal, seen expressed in several different European and Asiatic religions and metaphysical sources from ancient times. That is to say, the poesy of wave combines with its science in Hegel’s writings (and as two distinct separable idioms of expression), frequently so in, for example, the Jenaer Realphilosophie of his youth, but common to his young friend Hölderlin, and equally drawn from the sciences of their day. I am convinced, therefore, that these artistic works of Munch also represent that impersonal interest, turning to its representation by artistic means as if a perfectly scientific, research-oriented concern of his own, and tested again and again throughout his oeuvre. It must have been evident to him that the famous Skrik or Scream, inherently mobile in the nature of its theme, remained, as a composition, entirely static before the eye, as if marking a moment pinned to the board for display. Furthermore, the idea of wave and phenomenon remained separate moments even in such representations, as in the lithographs of 1895 and 1896, so integrated as they may seem; any intellectual of his day would have been aware of the complexity of the phenomenology in question: that it concerned a procedure and a transformative process composed of a complex of dynamic moments, whether located in mind or in material fact, and such an intellectual would most likely have been acquainted with Hegel’s much read and discussed dialectic, one that came again, in the early twentieth century, to be revived with the growth of the new phenomenology with which Husserl became so associated. “Galloping Horse” appears to me to be a fresh attempt to represent that theme

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of motion, wave and ground, to unify the composition, let the object itself be in motion (Ill. 7a). But there is another later painting, an even more fully-realised representation of pure constitutive motion, also known as “Galopperende Hest”, and dating from 1928, the very year given for Bohr’s Complementarity Principle (Ill. 7b). It depicts two horses in a snowy landscape, but to which he applies a remarkable simplicity of means: enveloping all contained within the canvas without exception. All is in motion, perhaps literally cinematically so given the development of cinema and of the movingimage enveloping these same years, and here marked by the doubling of legs and hooves (Ill. 7b). But my essential point is more general: that of an emphasis upon the generalised and impersonal aspects of such representation, aspects more pertinent than the personal circumstance and sentiment generally seen affecting an artist’s life (but with which one chooses not to concern oneself in the case of science). This concerns the objective interests of such artistic work, whether, say, metaphysical, scientific and/or phenomenological, or even anthropological, and that often served as a focus for radical experimentation by movement and personage. One thinks especially of cubism, but we might also ask if «pointilism» had not been another response, equivalent to that of Munch, to the scientific advances in particle and wave physics of that same epoch. Kupka and Klee were both clearly interested in the representation of sound waves. But that is also to say that there seems a general concern with working the particular kind of structural transitional movement that so concerns this book: that of an indiscernible yet universal condition of thought grounding the evident discernability of experience and thingedness, the first as “unconditioned condition” (Hegel’s “unbedingten Grund”) of the very possibility of the latter, and that I have generally termed essentialist before Kant and Hegel had reduced it to mere matter. But, we have seen that commoditisation itself repeats this very structure in its purely materialist, cultural and anthropological domain of mind and practice: quantity has been seen to be the universal ground conditioning the very possibility of qualitative variation and development: of all that we regard as different, thus exotic and incomparable, in culture, language, and so forth: the sphere of what is deemed the untranslatable, but that comes resolved through quantification in this case. Furthermore, and much more to our point, we have uncovered in commodification the universal undifferentiated ground in human thought that had come in history, thus empirically, to condition … give physical possibility and reality to … the very diversity of the commodity, its constant further differentiation, both extensively and in depth: the commodity as a field of production, exchange, communication, thought and practice … as culture: the sycee, the groat, the larin and the rupee all made according to single rule of a-priori formation and exchangeable for one another through the universal rules of market practice.

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2

«Knowledge Wells» and «Knowledge Towers» (Ills. 8–15)

8.

The anatomy theatre of the University of Leiden of 1593, illustrated by Willem van Swanenburg in 1650.

This portrays what I term a knowledge-well, a font within which, at its base, an exercise in analysis and detailed observation could take place, that of a separation of an entirety into its parts, and that appears as a direct reversal and complement of the Babellike tower of knowledge and synthesis that also proliferated in these same centuries, such as Campanella’s utopian Città del Sole or Olivier de Serres’ very real medical gardens, such as that illustrated in 1636 located in the botanical garden of the French king (Jardin du Roi, Ill. 15). In stead of gazing upwards towards the stars, the spectators look downwards at the analysis taking place. It is as if the tower had been pulled inside out and inverted: one descends to knowledge instead of mounting to its ultimate synthesis. Such anatomy wells were constructed in much of Europe, such as most famously at the University of Padua in 1594, besides the octagonal theatre designed by Olaus Rudbeck in 1655 at the University of Uppsala, and apart from the design for such a theatre drafted by Inigo Jones also in 1636: in Jones’ case an elevated well that falls within a tower! In this light, one may metaphorically describe Hegel’s phenomenology as a knowledge tower pulled inside out into a knowledge well, the two extreme moments of the dialectical procedure of self-revelation seen constantly at work in his writing! The metaphysical aspect is marked in the foreground by a skeletal «Adam and Eve standing at the tree», serving both to emphasise the phenomenal drive of this very idea of analysis, thus of the procedure that leads to its final result, a knowledge revealed, and of the original singularity from which it is deemed to derive. It is governed as process, revealed as a procedural moment of a transition, by the presence of the very agent for such a transition, if understood metaphysically, Mortality, the skeletal state that engulfs not the tree in this case but the two main protagonists themselves. Then, the illustration itself, our «Adam and Eve», and this particular depiction of it, is yet another «phenomenology lesson», like the anatomy lesson itself. These two contrasting, yet symmetrical and complementary representations, the tower and the well, refer us to a single undivided metaphysic, that of the supposed ontology of the material, perceptible world, of its ontic derivation from something indiscernible to the human senses yet described positively as «simple»: unified, indivisible and singular. The title page of Jacob Rüff’s section on child birth, so appropriately entitled De Conceptu de Generatione Hominis, illustrates this phenomenological poesis in practical application: the doctor and mid-wife are seen together in frank consultation concerning what they can read of the stars concerning the new born child (note the vigorous formal manual gesture of the midwife). The inanimate stars of the cosmos are connected with individual human identities, with distinctive parts of the body, with specific Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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kinds of illness and disorder, but also with particular plants themselves, with named plant parts and plant-derivatives (all those objects that commodity-like, in Part 2, we observed conveyed to Europe where all, plants, plant-parts and derivatives, would enter the medical botanies of the day). This current of connection is unbroken as if each kind of representation ran the one into the other, indeed were the other, and represented the very identical principles known to be native to the other (say the virtues of an essence represented by the star or plant part). Remember the Haida person, who in the myth may becomes, say, salmon, then beaver and afterwards human being, before becoming stone, alternating formal resemblance according to narrative circumstance whilst preserving identity. This may not be a scientific knowledge as we have come now to conceive the latter, but instead something entirely different in the manner through which relationships are adduced, likeness judged, and cause and effect seen to operate: a science of the day. Yet once stripped of its exotic antiquarian clothing—reduced to its essential principles—it becomes a poesis that could be converted into a modern instrument of Kantian and Hegelian, and, later, Hussserlian, philosophical thought. And often we find the two movements combined, ascent and descent, synthesis and analysis, as in the remarkable case of Inigo Jones’ design for the barber-surgeons of 1636, the well set within a tower and thereby combining the two contrary themes and drives: a towered knowledge-well. It is also to be remarked that one or several observers may be seen at or close to the top of the well looking downwards at the phenomena forming the central theme of the image: this is true of the Vesalius frontispiece but also true of many others, including Safavid illustrations encountered in different versions of the Shahnama, where we see spectators looking downwards at the detail of the narrative depicted below them, as if at a stage in a theatre. And it is also true of a representation below of what I call a «species garden», depicting someone outside the wall and gazing over that wall into that garden … Not as part of it but as if representing our own position as reader and observer before what is intentionally depicted taking place. Yet simultaneously, actual participants among the active audiences shown taking part in such anatomy lessons are seen in vigorous controversy, arguing about what they see revealed below … and as if constituting one of Brecht’s idealised audiences arguing and smoking before his theatre stage, … and just as we shall also see among the participants portrayed in Jacques Savary’s frontispieces: the merchants engaged in the vigorous dispute of a negotiation, in the controversy that constitutes the necessary path leading to common accord. In the case of the anatomy lesson, it is a declaration about knowledge, of the sociology informing its genesis, and, thus, behind its ­development and revelation, of the surprise it awakens among such audiences and disputants, and thus about its constantly provisional character. It reflects a certain common perception of how knowledge itself comes formed—how form is given to it by a meeting of different intentional and willed human agencies and differences … the Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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work towards synthesis—or how an accord comes reached through such frank argumentation. That of the market place, where our commodities are concerned. Then, it concerns not the content but indeed the form, that a-priori structure given universally to «the thing» although the disputants themselves are simultaneously concerned with that always exotic content. In the first case, dispute is constitutive, creative, while in the second, it is constitutive of that final accord that constitutes the act of intentional translation that enables passage of the cultural good: a social act of cultural significance. Both properties are also true of Safavid art: we passive observers of what has taken place in some constitutive moment, they actively forming part of what gives form to a revealed knowledge.

9.

Andrea Vesalio’s «anatomy theatre»; frontispiece of his Epitomae … de Humani corporis fabrica (2nd edn. of 1555 of a work first published in Basel, 1543).8

This superb depiction—perhaps the whole set of capital illuminations, vignettes and portraiture in the book—is said to have been realised by members of “the school of Titian”. Several important aspects of the argument are represented in this illustration. First and most obviously the analytical «knowledge-well» and the intense argument and discussion among the audience concerning what comes to be revealed before the eye and, thus, from which, so we may deduce, knowledge itself is seen taking veritable form. What should be seen characteristic of such representations is the well-like form given to the architecture of an anatomy room, focussed downwards upon the table, a perspective emphasised by the spectators seen on high, as previously mentioned, looking downwards at the analysis below, but as if but the audience. I remarked that what we are shown is separation of parts from a whole (“that of which the human body is fabricated”, like a machine (a word used in the jargon of the time), rather as the body-politic separated into its constitutive parts by a Hobbes or a Locke). Also emphasised is the fierce intellectual argumentation that seems to be generated by such “anatomy lessons”, controversy, and as if the very subject matter were itself controversial, but that gives form to a new and unexpected material knowledge. We find these very characteristics especially well-exemplified in this case, but they are equally illustrated in other «anatomy lessons», one after another, say from that of Iohannes de Ketham’s Fascicules Medicinæ (Venice, 1495). Such features seem complementary with many aspects of religious art, both earlier and contemporary. This is not all. It is Andrea Vesalio in person who is represented at the table and seen performing the anatomy … who gives the lesson: a young bearded man similar to his 8 I have chosen the second edn. for the superior clarity of the very same illustration composing the frontispiece. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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portrait inside the book. He might be some priest in a church teaching the new materialist-pointing philosophy of the day. But on high there is a significant vignette showing the sheer plasticity of the raw material from which fixed phenomenal form is produced. We see two lions at the sides of the vignette, animal, emerging in unbroken continuity from foliage, vegetable: animal/vegetal! And this is a characteristic of medieval and renaissance illumination, that I shall illustrate further below. It is also a characteristic of Buddhist iconography, the Buddha himself being shown as if occupying the very flower of the lotus whilst Hindu deities seem even to replace that flower, even to merge with the leaf or become indifferently foliage and leaf, just as we also have also seen of the serpent in Zainer’s Adam and Eve for Boccaccio, that forms the frontispiece above. That is to say it appears to represent a universally-conceived stage between an origin, a universal, and the full realisation of some fixed phenomenal particular (and what Hegel would call a moment). We remember that Haida, Tsimshian and Kwakiutl myth had also emphasised such plasticity of form in spite of the underlying stability of the identities concerned. Once more this may be understood as representing a certain stage in the crystallisation of a created world, a stage prior to the crystallisation of fixed and stable form: then, let’s call it a phenomenology … a stage observed in the very thinking of such a world! I insist, one should not take decoration lightly: it too represents a certain specific choice between what are thought possible or relevant by those conceiving it. What did the Church, Galileo’s church, think of such audacity and «imprudence» as exhibited by Vesalio … such impudence? For, what is the skeleton, that sign of death, sign of a return to the universal, standing there erect and proud before the analytical table? What is it intended to represent, if not that other side of analysis: the movement towards synthesis, the ascent of the tower in a return back to the heavens and «no-thing-ness»? The fires of the Counter Reformation return phenomenal being back to such nothingness. It is an entirely negative view of what in Buddhism and Hinduism seems regarded in an essentially positive light: the loss of earthly ties. Yet, in Mussorgsky’s brilliant libretto for his opera The Khovantchina we also see a remarkable anthropology of such a return to the simple, the universal One, expressed equally, like the auto da fé, in terms of fire, albeit as a positive and voluntary gesture of self-sacrifice.

Like the flames of candles burning before the benevolence of god, we too shall embrace one another in flame, whilst all about us our brothers (bratya) burn, smoke bearing away their mortal souls.9 9 From the fourth act, second scene, Marfa singing before the Old Believers, and fourth scene, before Dossifei. One may compare this verse with Hirifu Shoten’s painting of 1887, of the dragon returning to the «sky», to the universal, and represented by its fragmentation into what seems indifferently smoke and water. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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It is this movement we see repeated time and again in Hegel’s writings, divorced of its metaphysical dressing, entirely engaged in the material domain of thought and reason, of what he intentionally distinguishes as a dialectical logic.10 Kant’s metaphor of the Tower of Knowledge can now also be considered particularly aptly chosen: that tower, which, as Kant expressed it, finally, being individualised as one built by an everyperson, each human being building a separate tower. Finally, careful study of Safavid art displays the same propensity to represent not the instant of a single event, but instead a narrative or metaphysical collection of moments, virtually a succession of unfoldings or of instances of «aufhebung». For example, we might see that same corporal continuity between vegetal and animal mentioned with regard to South East Asian temple art and Medieval/Renaissance European illumination. Just as, in many Japanese and Chinese representations, the dragon appears continuous in style and form with portions of highly stylised cloud or foliage, as if about to emerge from them. See, for example, Melikian-Chirvani, Le Chant du Monde, cat. no. 139, from a Shahnama dated 1648. There is a constant procedural movement between the unity of sky and the manifold of earth, through the verticality of the tree, thence the dragon, as connection, also through water and irrigation (the dragon heads of irrigation taps), and leading to the phenomenal status of what is described, say to the plant-types, the flowers, of what has been irrigated. And once more, as in an «Adam and Eve», we see the tree from leaf to root performing its role as passage and mediator between the two extreme states. Yes, let’s withdraw the clothing of particular religious judgement in such representation and reveal the common philosophy that links them all. Like the raw material or exchange-value from which commodities appear and withdraw.

10.

Infinite rectangular tower of Babel. Artist unknown.

A large number of different depictions of the tower were carried out by artists of those «heretic» sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in the Low Countries.11 This particular version seems perfectly utopian in its visual infinitude. As edifice, it represents both the drive towards synthesis and yet consists of that very manifold of phenomenal difference necessarily used in «constructing» it (or, expressed logically, that comprises it as their universal concept), and as is led to be seen in the architectural variation characterising the detail, especially of its lower floors. We must not take for granted the expected biblical value-judgement when judging the intention of the artist in pursuing such a work but instead ask questions about 10 11

These are paragraphs where he actually mentions the word dialectic, describing again and again its form, when arguing his disagreement with Kant about “What is Truth?” (Die Lehre vom Begriff, 25–27 [12, 26–28]; di Giovanni, The Science of Logic, 523–527) Many such works are reproduced by Minkowski in Aus dem Nebel der Vergangenheit steigt der Turm zu Babel.

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what, in this period of unorthodox, heterodox, and conflictual religious movements, might really and individually have been intended by any particular artist, and who perhaps also had been participant in such eschatological conflict, or at the least assumed a particular opinion and sought to represent it. What is at issue is the human will to return to that state of non-being and simplicity, of dissolution into that original Oneness, a desire that comes expressed by an essentialist philosophy, and such as that manifested in the poetry of the twentieth-century poet René Char. When we also see a Japanese artist depicting the dragon crystallising from cloud or dissolving back into it, it is the very same positive metaphysic as that so finely expressed by Mussorgsky in the verse of his libretto for the Khovantchina, cited above. Commonly accepted Christian value-judgements must not govern our understanding of what comes to appear as a universal metaphysic, whether concerning the meaning of the dragon, an «Adam and Eve», or such a tower of Babel.

11.

Circular, helical tower of Babel. The artist again unknown.

12.

Square-based, «helical» tower of Babel painted by Gheerært Harenbout for the Breviarum Grimani at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

This circular and helical version of the tower is more characteristic of the age, yet in this particular case seeming entirely without negative value judgement. One of Bruegel’s versions displays it in ruin, or falling into ruin whilst in construction, but in this case we see but its builders hard at work. It might well be a reference to the biblical Babel, or, instead, more generally, to the tower of knowledge as utopian idea and hope.

What might have been the source, reference and intention of this artist when choosing this variant?

13.

Christ Disputing with the Doctors, by Bernardino Butinone (1487–1507).

This version portrays the generalised and abstract conception of the meaning of the tower, and of which Babel itself appears as no more than a version and an opinion. Then, it has been chosen because clearly presenting the tower as but a metaphor for the ascent to higher forms of knowledge: the «tower of knowledge», and on the summit of which Christ is then placed since it is he, not the doctors, who possesses access to the highest form of knowledge, that attributed to a deus. For it is both knowledge as such and a metaphor for its access, cyclical and ascending or descending in both quality and attributes, a model of pilgrimage, of a ladder of ascent, as it were, and the very form also taken by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Mind and expressed so eloquently in the first pages of his Science of Logic. It generates a contemporary sense of that architecture as one of truth, of the levels on which knowledge would become ever more

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truly and adequately expressed.12 It shows how the Babel of the untranslatable is merely but an incident or opinion drawn from that generally-accepted model of pure translation. This implies that the one at the summit speaks from a position of pure or true knowledge, from its perfect and pure status as a synthesis of all that is, thus in its singularity and oneness, that very form of pure assumption that Hegel would consider as preceding in mind the necessity of a dialectical procedure of negation and realisation achieved by the act of thought: the mind that cannot think such a synthesis but must instead proceed only by negating it. Like Rüff’s doctor it shows the poesis of the tower as instrument and in practical operation.

14.

Olivier de Serres, Le Théâtre de L’Agriculture, published first in Paris in 1600 and second in Geneva in 1651. His two versions of a medical garden.

His declared model, mentioned in his manual on agriculture, is that same Tower of Babel, whilst also referring to its more mystical sources of meaning. It is a further example of how metaphysical considerations appear again and again to accompany each kind of practice: here medical, there trade, and elsewhere the weighing of coin. The diagrams of such gardens contained in the two editions depict both circular-helical and square-based versions. It is the general reference-cadre of meaning for the tower as representive of a poesis of knowledge, as system, and as a means of access to knowledge, and thus as a practical path through simulation in practice of the metaphor for generating the required movement of cause and effect: that of doting plants with essential virtues. Plants, I have insisted, were connected consistently by authors with virtues attributed by astrology to stars and constellations, but which, like the sun itself, represented the indiscernible governing ontic power of essence. And it is this metaphysical complex of belief, of an at-once ontological and ontogenetic transition of form between particular and universal, that acts as a conceptual cadre governing de Serres’ choice of architectural form.

12

Where Hegel is concerned I point in particular to Die Lehre vom Begriff, 34–35 (12.27), also translated by Di Giovanni in The Science of Logic, 524–525, and concerning the complete adequacy of the absolute concept to its content of ultimately concrete determinations (he means dialectical determinations). Is this not what I have constantly argued with regard to commoditisation, in terms of which any exception would no longer be assimilable to, or function as commodity? It is what defines the contemporary culture of the commodity where such definition is a matter of an implicit social contract to produce and regard such content according to that rule, but that must be true to both its possibility and to its practice (price, exchange, &c.).

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15.

“Le Jardin du Roy en 1636 pour la culture des plantes médécinales” (“Garden of the [French] king in 1636 for growing medicinal plants”), in which is portrayed a Tower of Babel-shaped medical garden with an helical ascending path, such as illustrated by de Serres.

The general cultural awareness of such a sense of efficacy to be achieved by practical simulation of this metaphor concerning the metaphysic of knowledge and of cause and effect, is confirmed by this engraving of 1636. There is the general conceptual context of the tower of knowledge, exemplified by Butinone’s painting (Ill. 13) and that practical cadre of possible action that lends to such representation a kind of literal realism. In Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel sive Archontologia of 1679, we see a townscape resembling closely the use and division of space in Le Jardin du Roy of 1636—a large flat urban space divided into equal portions—amongst which arises, as in the French King’s garden, the tower.

3

Flora & Fauna (Depiction of Seamless Corporal Continuity between Animal- and Plant-form) (Ills. 16–22)

The convertibility of the two organic states, the one into the other—the depiction of that conversion as if in seamless continuity the one into the other (whether as such or as a procedure) and of a perfect indifference to any possible difficulty of translation,— is important in indicating the importance in culture and mind of what may be considered a proto-phenomenal moment upon which so many religions appear to concentrate an almost obsessive attention. It is both this sense of continuity, of indifference to any major difference between the two conditions, and the obsessive frequency with showing it that first strikes an observer alerted to the question, and does so whether looking at medieval European illumination or temple art throughout much of near, south and eastern Asia, in whatever religious idiom happens to be before the eye. There are several such proto-phenomenal representations in East and South-East Asian popular culture and religious art. The dragon is one of these, a kind of preparation for all the possibility, good and bad, which the phenomenal world promises the future of the human being, prelude to being as such and also to each new year. The kinnara appears to have the same property, together with several other mixed-form representations of animality, whether attached in continuity to leaf, flower and vine or not. We have seen how the narratives of the mythology of the native Americans of the North West Coast of North America (Haida, Kwakiutl, Tsimshian Tlingit, &c.) refer frequently to the very same mediate condition between origin of being and its final fixed phenomenal issue. When Hegel comes to seize the initial condition of mind as if in a perfectly virginal state prior to any first moment of possible thought, he must argue that the mind is unable to seize it for itself, but in seeking to do so must immediately

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convert it into its «negative», to use his own terminology, thus into a first moment of phenomenal formal possibility and in a process of realisation which he describes as “an endless procedure of mediation and negation of itself from itself”, and in which its unstable, yet part-phenomenal crystallisation in thought can first be seized by mind in reason.13 In short, such an image is not fixed, as in an instantaneous positive photoimage but instead thought of as part of a dynamic and complex movement of phenomenal self-formation in thought, whereby mind comes to create its own field of phenomenal perceptivity.14 It is this state that North West Coast native American art and legend also registers, besides Buddhist temple illustration, medieval and Renaissance European book illumination, and also Safavid art. One sees animal form become vegetal and vice versa, Part one and part the other, or in processual combinations of the two characters. A plant may be seen to flower in the form of a deity, say as the Buddha or Krishna, or as representatives of the crafts, as in the Boccaccio. One sees a human or animal tongue issue out as a plant stem terminating in a leaf, and the stem of a vine terminate as a human or animal head. And throughout South East Asia, one sees vegetation as if opening out from the very hands of a deity, like a genie from its lamp, and come to fill all space with leafy vine among whose branchings human beings and animals are seen represented, thus as if at last at the end of a procedure of creation, representing the freshly formed phenomenal status of being. The point I wish to emphasise is that of a state of representation that marks a procedural phase in a movement of phenomenalisation from an indifferent state of original raw material, whether conceptual and merely conventional or a genuinely philosophical or metaphysical represenation of an unconditioned ground of all being. These examples of connectivity between vegetal and animal, mark precisely such a phase, that will come to appear simulated wholly materialised as the rules and forms of commoditisation, of making object from what we agree to call, as if by some forgotten social contract, a «raw material state» indifferent to identity and difference, even though, objectively and visibly diverse in form and of many origins (say that «raw material» that enters the mint for fresh production). One could also follow such stages of 13

For the quotation from Hegel’s Die Lehre vom Begriff, 28 (12. 29): “als die unendliche Vermittlung und Negativität desselben in sich selbst” (and for di Giovanni’s translation see The Science of Logic, 526). 14 Hegel, Das Lehre vom Begriff , 16. “The pure determinations of being, the stage of first possibility, and concept (Sein, Wesen und Begriff) compose the very foundation [of thought or mind] and the inner tranquil simplicity (innere einfache Gerüst) of the forms of mind …”. Obviously, one also usually translates Wesen as essence, but I have difficulties with this essentially essentialist word. But Bourgeois has an interesting and credible different understanding of Hegel’s particular usage of this word translated as essence: “Entretien avec Bernard Bourgeois: Autour de la Science de la Logique de Hegel (partie I)”, Actu Philosophia (no part mentioned).

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being into the transcendental critique of a Kant or the phenomenology of conception of a Hegel.

16.

Late medieval relief sculpture in stone. Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rodez. A winged putti portrayed as half leaf and stem.

One of a group of such figurations all of which represent this state. We may be convinced by the bird visibly shown eating a fruit issuing from the putti’s plant-like portion.

17.

Relief carving in wood. Imperial Academy and Confucian Temple of Literature, Hanoi.

This leafy composite of dragon and foliage displays an equivalent indifference to what for us is a profound existential discontinuity between animal and vegetal status. The beast is leafy, and this connectivity between dragon and foliage is frequently represented, thus banal, in temple art throughout the greater region, even if we deem this particular example as exemplary,—as a remarkable product of an artistic imagination. This kind of connection is shown in a great variety of manners, the body often seen breaking out into leaf or issuing into vinery, as at Rodez. One encounters it in illuminated capitals and vignettes in early-modern European publication, and often in the very same format as in a temple at Huay Xai, Hanoi or Chiang Mai. In my opinion, the dragon represents an all form, the very possibility of form, possibility itself (thus used to represent the renewal of each celebrated new year), and from which an unpredictable phenomenal future will flow. Thus it may be seen to flow into vegetal form, as observed in a Lao temple: a vegetal form that fills the whole cadre of a painting or carved panel, as if it were the phenomenal world and among which, therefore, we see lodged another early phenomenal, relatively pure form: nature!—humans, animal and sub-deities. The resemblance of this particular example to the preceding Rodez example invites astonishment. The dragon, a kind of «all-form» or «not-yet-form», seems to appear constantly in south-east Asian life and in its arts and crafts, religious and secular, but also in domestic life, gracing packets of tea, packets of incense, cheap ceramic bowls, cups and plates, tea pots, and so forth.15 15

I return to that series of articles in Le Monde concerning Xi Jinping, cited above, who is quoted by the journalist Harold Thibault as having told Donald Trump: “We are the people of the origin, black haired, yellow skinned, an uninterrupted inheritance. We consider ourselves the «descendants of the dragon»” (Le Monde [4–5 August 2019]). Stripped of its nationalist dress, one may say that this not-quite-form or all-form represented by the dragon is the origin of all phenomenal being (and many artistic depictions are intent on displaying this difficulty of giving it a formal shape and definition). What it is important to note is this display of a perfect consciousness of its phenomenological meaning, and

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Illuminated capital «L» from the edition of 1600 of Olivier de Serres, Théâtre de L’Agriculture.

This capital portrays the thick leafy foliage growing without seam from the head of the serpent. The vine-like foliage dominates the space of the illumination, while the tongue of the serpent itself ends as leaf. Compare this, once more, with the illuminated «Adam and Eve» from Boccaccio’s book, used as my frontispiece, and in which, likewise, the serpent is seen in unbroken corporal continuity with the foliage of a vine from which, in turn, discrete kinds of human beings are seen to flower, as in a Laotian temple.

19.

Vignette from the edition of 1600 of Olivier de Serres, Théâtre de L’Agriculture.

This form of vignette is characteristic of the printing of the epoch, and found, like the illuminated capitals, in many other large format works covering diverse subject matters. The illuminations concerned, capital or vignette, and thus the subject matter composing them, may have been printed on the initiative of the publisher or printer or, instead, more intimately connected with the subject matter of the book itself, the latter being obviously the case with Vesalius’ treatise on anatomy, the capitals often filled with relevant matter and with a thoughtful, often knowing and malicious humour (thus, for example, those displaying the capture for anatomy of bodies drawn from the gallows). The kind shown here is more neutral of the content of a given work—perhaps, therefore, a choice of the printer;—and yet that content is none the less interesting for that content, as for its close, if superficial similarity with temple art in South East Asia: a space filled almost entirely with foliage, as if representing a context, similar to that seen in the illuminated capital «L» from the same work, preceding this case and yet in continuity with animal form. It is as if that leafy, vine-filled context represented the state of phenomenal nature, either equivalent to our present state of artifice or, as more likely, preceding it, but inhabited by human figures. In both cases, European illumination and South East Asian temple art, we encounter examples sufficiently legion for one to come to expect them whenever a relatively prestigious book of the late medieval and early-modern centuries is opened or a Buddhist or Hindu temple entered. It is not necessarily represented in such an encounter but likely to be so. And it is for us to interpret and comprehend the phenomenon, debate its meaning, as an evidence of a generalised, yet particular anthropology, rather than reduce it to impotence as mere aesthetic.

which is surely true of the metaphysical leanings of the larger public, whether believed in or not. I would say to sceptics that even if but decoration and pleasantry it remains a particular choice among possibles. I am not accustomed to consider myself, even in fun, as a «descendent of the dragon». Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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20.

Vignette from the early eighteenth-century Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739) that again displays an entire corporal generative continuity between vegetal and animal.

A different vignette but showing a similar corporal connectivity occurs in book i, 723, of the same dictionary, as elsewhere in it. These kinds of vignette, perfectly innocent in appearance and yet replete with a meaning that resists our comprehension, terminate each of the sections of the Diccionario devoted to the letters of the alphabet. But a similar feature also characterises many illuminations of capitals in the same work, and, indeed, is often encountered more generally in illuminated capitals or in the worked decorative frameworks of the topical scenes and pages of text displayed in medieval manuscripts and renaissance books. They are not «innocent» at all. For, as I have insisted throughout this work, let’s not confuse decoration with an absence of meaning. Every case concerns a choice, whether intended or not, and with reference to an anthropological and cultural cadre of expectation, possibility, preference and purpose: to kinds of meaning both tolerated and likely to have been understood by the reading publics of the day: they mark a field open to the relative freedom presented by any context to such choice, free yet constrained within the limits tolerated by what already exists, in the same manner as that notion of freedom drawn above with respect of activities relative to commoditisation, itself. The present vignette is probably a printer’s choice, whereas the vignette depicting what I have called a «species landscape» (Ill. 23, below), that heads each of the six volumes of this same work, is surely more intimately related to the content of this same dictionary: all the species of phenomenal meaning supposedly addressed by the Spanish language.

21a & b Vegetable/Animal from the Buddhist temple of Wat Khokkhormingmoungkhoun, in Pakbeng, a small town in Oudomxay Province bordering the Mekong River in Northern Laos.

These depictions of animal/vegetable organic unity were encountered at a small popular temple in Pakbeng. In the carved window shutters portrayed in «a», the body of a kinnara issues forth, in strict continuity, into the whole leafy, vine-like context composing the rest of the space occupied by the work; in the second, «b», we see a casual decorative flourish connecting animal and vegetal that gains its sense from the temple-context of metaphysical meaning.

21c

This Hindu sculpture derives from the ruins of Vijayanagar (1336–1565), at Hampi in Karnataka, Southern India (Author’s photograph of 1976).

There is evidence of considerable Hindu influence in South East Asia affecting religious iconography, a consequence of what is described as migrations of peoples and ideas in the first centuries ad (utilising routes forged by vigorous inter-Asian maritime Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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and overland commerce in ceramics, spices, textiles and metals), and visible in the widespread prominence given to H ­ indu deities even in Buddhist temples (such as Ganesha at the temple of Wat Ratchaburana, in the town of Phitsanulok in Thailand). But I must again emphasise that the theme itself depicted in each of these three images is again legion, likely to be encountered throughout the greater region of South-East Asia in temple painting and carving, or decorating domestic ware, both ancient and modern, besides South Asia.

22.

Modern Thai domestic ware.

4

Typological Representation, the « Species Garden » and the «Palace of Memory» (Representation of the Phenomenal World) (Ills. 23–28)

I photographed this bowl at a roadside café attached to a petrol station, it being what we can call cheap domestic ware. The leaf in the mouth resembles that leaf in the mouth of the serpent in the illuminated capital «L» encountered in de Serres, Théâtre de L’Agriculture (Ill. 18), but, once more, it marks a specific illustrative theme often met with in works of European illumination or Buddhist Temple art. It is not a leaf stem posed in the mouth but instead a tongue that issues as leaf stem, fauna become indifferently flora, just as the flowers or the vine-like creeper seen rising from the hands of a deity come to appear not so much as held by those hands but as extending from them, like a genie from its lamp. Much modern domestic pottery in Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere in the greater region recaptures diverse themes utilised in the pottery of old: in this case the stylistic form of the fish draws its design from the Sukhothai and Sawankhalok Thai pottery manufactured in Central Thailand and encountered in fourteenth and fifteenth century shipwrecks, even though the colouring and glaze of this vessel might represent quite other more diverse criteria and traditions.

The feature that I have designated as a «species garden» (or species-landscape») concerns a form of representation of the phenomenal domain of ordinary experience encountered frequently in the first centuries of the European printed book, and associated with diverse kinds of subject matter such as the theatre, medical botany, language dictionaries, and much else. It is its abstract, repetitive form in such diverse circumstances that calls attention to it and requires an explanation, thus interpretation. That interpretation regards this feature, illustrated here, as a representation in phenomenological terms of the experiential matter concerned by the work, say of words or kinds of medical plant, or of theatrical representation, thus not as single individual distinctive identities but as typologies of identities, such as the «speties» of commodities

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533

treated by Lewes Roberts in his The Marchants Mappe of Commerce of 1638. It is encountered in the eighteenth-century Diccionario de Autoridades in various illustrations of pre-modern theatre decor such as published by Comenius, in the frontispiece of John Sadler’s Sicke Womans Private Lookinge-Glasse (in this case showing the doctor tending his herbal garden), or as the two different frontispieces of the first and second editions of de Serres’ Théâtre de L’Agriculture: true that he treats gardening, the planting of herbs and flowers, but as an entry to the book it marks the full content, the entire variety of topics discussed within, including the typologies of medical flora planted in small plots upon his two recommended towers. In short, it introduces the reader to all the «species» of discussion treated in book or circumstance, each as if a gathering of all the different kinds of object within the pages of the book concerning the subject matter treated therein. In short, the figure is typological: that kind of typology that has so concerned this, my own book. It lays out as an order the seemingly disordered field encountered in experience by the reader, say in the market place, say where linguistic sense is concerned, and so forth. This at least is my interpretation of a frequently encountered choice of image traversing a diversity of subject matters, all concerned, however, with our possibilities of representing the phenomenal. Thus, in this same typological light, I illustrate the detailed contents list of one of de Serres’ chapters, and that subdivides its content into a series of enveloping categories and sub-categories; it is a method—distinctly typological, … a «systematics», as it is technically known—by no means unique to this work during this epoch of printing. The chapter is the synthesis; the divisions concern the parts analysed within. In the «species-garden» or «species landscape» a space is shown subdivided into square and rectangular portions, sometimes marked within by a geometrical sign, … and all contained by a wall (as in Sadler’s book), or by the features of the landscape itself, as in the Diccionario. In this case, the interpretation is circumstantial, but it forms an aspect intimately complementing what I have treated above as metaphysic and as reference to the experiential domain that marks the end of the phenomenological process: our encounter with the confusing accumulation of objects that it is the book’s task to order.

23.

Vignette in Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739) heading each of the six «books» (or volumes) constituting the dictionary.

In this case, it is a landscape shown divided into a pattern of small squares (or rectangles), as if representing the «cultivated» garden of human language and culture laid out item by item in the pages of the Diccionario itself. It provides a reference for the more specific and genre-related cases that follow. In this landscape of squares (or a typology) a pot is seen surrounded by rising flames, one also depicted on the frontispiece of the dictionary, a jar productive of possibility, from which the differentiated thingedness of the object world issues;—fire being one of the forms of agency

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returning the particular to the universal, as in the Khovanchina. In this respect, flames are also often observed accompanying the sphere passed between dragon and phoenix, and decorating East and South-East Asian domestic pottery, painting and carving.

24–26. The two different frontispieces of the two editions of 1600 and 1651 of de Serres’s Théâtre de L’Agriculture.

Both depict what I have come to designate as such a «species garden», and again representing typology itself, typology of the phenomenal as a generally assumed feature of any experienced reality, besides also of that content of matters that particularly concerns the book. The species—as in these two cases—may be represented by geometrical signs, but that same geometry may even be seen to govern the actual physical shapes recommended for the plots to be occupied by the types of plant. But let’s be clear, the whole world of social and practical experience among contemporaries was governed by this sense of pervasive typology. Consider how units of cultivable land were constituted in the old world, often out of many separate plots distributed at distance from one another throughout a village territory, but composing a synthesis, as it were, a unit of cultivation because satisfying a criterion of distribution of an exploitable territory, uniting different kinds of soil, access to irrigation, and so forth. In short, such a unit composed of kinds and fractions is not an unfortunate consequence of certain kinds of inheritance law but, to the contrary, a purposively organised composite facilitating social access to agricultural resources and to the appropriation from the producer of what the economists nicely call a «surplus». This is to say, a «species-garden» has both general and particular import. It is true of administrative categories, fiscal organisation, and most obviously true, as we have seen in Part 1, of the vast domain constituted by the «speties» of the commodity.

27.

Jean Belot’s Oeuvres (Rouen, 1688): chiromantic division of hand as a «memory palace» in the quasi-frontispiece of work on memory forming part of the oeuvres.

The hand, say that of a tradesman, is divided into places of uneven and different size and significance that can thence act as categories under which different items or categories of memory can be stored and recovered … say of local cloth typologies and their rules of manufacture or of the weights according to which different varieties of ducat or rupee differ from one another The interested reader may consult Francis Yates’ Art of Memory, with its copious scholarship and many illustrations. On 414 of her book, in note 17, Yates makes mention of Belot’s book. There were a considerable number of such kinds of memory palace advanced during these centuries, eventually issuing, we might suggest in the increasingly voluminous lexicons and dictionaries of the period. Once before the eye, one recognises Belot’s work as just such an example, but one cheaply produced, destined for market sales to a largely popular audience. It is the Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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author himself who mentions the benefits of such division of the hand for a merchant engaged in exchange and confronted by the prowess of memory required of access to contemporary markets.

28.

Olivier de Serres, Théâtre de L’Agriculture, edn. of 1600, p. 441, contents list of the chapter entitled the Sixième Lieu, or Sixth «Place».

This list depicts de Serres’ method of dividing his book into a series of encompassing categories and topics, at once synthesis and analysis into its parts. In French, such words as «place» or «field» indicate typological divisions, categories of treatment or discussion, besides being applied to agricultural units and in the countryside. One encounters many such usages in the countryside I inhabit. “The Place” or “Places” (“Les Places”) is a particularly common name for a farm, and indicating a division of fertile soil, variously constituted according to region and to ancient systems of identifying the units of rent and taxation.

5

Principles of Exchange, Trust and Accord. The Act of Translation (Ills. 29–31)16

At this point, I shift from an illustration of the metaphysic and metaphor of the procedure of creating a phenomenologised world, to this same structural procedure as simulated and revealed in commoditisation itself. Now, we become reduced to a purely material domain of unity and differentiation, but not for that freed from metaphysical considerations. Moreover, there are surprising convergences between this realm of a materialised anthropology of global dimensions, that we can judge to be universal in 16

I owe references for access to Dutch, English and French sources of illustrative materials to the following: the generous personal help in locating, sending and also editing photographic materials by post of Dr. Arent Pol, of the University of Leiden and ex-curator of the Leidse Penningkabinet; M. Serge Nicolo, apprentice curator, for his research, time and energy on behalf of the Musée Dupuy in Toulouse; Dr. Julian Baker, curator, for spending his time and guiding me at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University; Dr. Joe Cribb, retired curator, and Dr. Helen Wang, current curator, the first for providing me access to both European and Chinese instruments of exchange, and the second for providing me access to similar materials also at the Department of Coins and Medals of the British Museum London. Madame Palhana Boupha, contacted by her daughter, and owner of the Palhana Boupha Antique House, in Luang Prabang, Laos, showed me and allowed me to photograph three cabinets filled with portable balances, one of which is illustrated here. She had collected them some twenty years before and the rooms of the house itself resembled one of those idiosyncratic imaginative private museums that once delighted the fortunate traveller, and encountered unexpectedly when passing through quiet provincial towns in Britain, India or South East Asia. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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its principles of production, both conceptual and practical, and the kinds of procedure in mind and practice discussed in turn by Kant and Hegel. Moreover, if we find ourselves convinced by Hegel’s arguments against the Kant of the First Critique, it remains very difficult not to accept both, complementarily, as if both could be true—and fundamentally so—of what we come to observe concerning this culture of the commodity, if in their different ways.

29.

Jacques Savary, Le Parfait Negoçiant (Paris, 1763), frontispiece.

The frontispiece unites in one portrayal the series of acts comprising negotiation and exchange: a cyclical succession of necessary events dispersed in time and space but that together constitute the movement of the commodity through the market place to its eventual wholesale and distanced purchaser. In this sense, such illustration resembles better known, more familiar works of the epoch concerning a martyrdom, perhaps the crucifixion itself, and which collect into a single frame such successions of events. This frontispiece is almost identical to that printed in earlier and later editions of Savary’s much sought after book. It is remarkable in showing almost all the different steps constituting the translation of the commodity, (1) between one cultural domain and another after its arrival in a market: (2) through the succession of events constituting the negotiation and accord itself. We see seller and would-be merchant purchasers in vigorous negotiation, and then the accountant registering the accord and sum finally agreed to. Also portrayed is the packaging, lading and shipment of such goods, and finally their presentation before a possible purchaser, all within the one «canvas». It is a synthetic view of the acts constituting negotiation and exchange, but in which, empirically and historically, many discrete persons may be involved, several acts of successive marketing, and more or less greater distances separating the events concerned. If Savary had called his book a Theatre of Commerce or Theatre of the Market, we would have had no difficulty in understanding this frontispiece as precisely such a theatre, say as if a display on a stage, a mise en scène by the artist, of things otherwise dispersed in time, topography and function, just as in de Serres’ sense of his «Agricultural Theatre» or Caspar Bauhin’s Theatri Botanici. But, even in our more restricted modern sense it is a theatre: all concerned must fulfil their alotted role, act out the language of trust, become «other» than what they ordinarily are: meet, work for that translation! Most important, however, concerns the conceptual assumptions composing this portrayal of events constituting negotiation: we see the merchants engaged in argument, in discord, yet all are dressed alike, and finally arriving at an agreement permitting the exchange of the good. The factual obstacles to exchange … to translation … necessitate negotiation, and it is through such negotiation between different agents that differences are resolved and eventual accord reached. Moreover, one enters negotiation perfectly confident of the possibility, even likelihood of such accord. Yes: taking in the whole stage-scene at a glance, we may see that success of such negotiation is virtually assumed by the participants. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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The Dutch frontispiece of Savary’s book (Ill. 30) differs from the French in its emphasis on the degree of discord that may precede an accord. even though we assume it to be between like-minded merchants approaching one another in trust in order to agree and in full and reasonable confidence of being able to reach an agreement. Their being dressed alike is again significant in this respect. Some such aspect of common gesture or appearance will constitute part of the composition of that anthropology of trust that enables accord, enables the «translation», as I wish to call it, that it constitutes. Translation is known possible, is believed in, is intended, willed, and finally actuated! Translation and translatability are properties of such system. The point in both cases is first that accord will arise from dispute, in that order, the universal from the conflicting matter of the phenomenal, as if following that veritable theory of the genesis of knowledge, alluded to above, and true of both well and tower of knowledge. Then let’s also remember that very similar levels of fierce argumentation and discussion characterise the crowds depicted among those forming audiences on frontispieces of many an anatomy lesson or other public occasion, and not least in the Vesalio frontispiece. I have already remarked that such a notion of accord must imply a conviction that knowledge itself is constituted … realised … by and through controversy. Secondly, the language of trust is evident. One generates an occasion and context in which fierce dispute is both possible and legitimate, conducted according to rules, and thus expected as proper to behaviour, expected to issue in ultimate agreement. One constitutes that occasion as one would a mise en scène upon a stage. There is a touch of one of those utopian and romantic accounts of the functioning of the Russian mir. There is a touch of Rousseau and his General Will in such unfamiliar circumstances.

30.

Jacques Savary, De Volmaakte Koopman (Amsterdam, 1683), frontispiece.

The frontispiece of this Dutch translation of Savary’s book depicts, as just noted, the extent to which such negotiation oughts involve discord. To repeat the point: markets are like the stages of a theatre on which such dispute may be legitimately exercised according to rule, according to skill, roles assumed and the event acted out.

31a, b & c. [ Jacques] Savary de Bruslons, Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce Contenant Tout ce qui Concerne le Commerce dans les Quatres Parties du Monde (Amsterdam, 1726–1732; three vols.), vignettes of putti involved in the cycle of negotiation, purchasing, packing, shipping and sale of cloths.

A mid-eighteenth-century, much augmented edn of Savary’s Le Parfait Negoçiant has several vignettes of a metaphysical character and some with mythological content. The three shown represent key features in the marketing of goods. In this case, we see Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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winged putti engaged in such activities: weighing the goods, packing them into bales, drawing up an account of what is packed and shipped, and so forth. They are made ready for shipment, the putti are seen in dispute, and yet holding a balance for weighing the goods, as if ready for the final act of harmony that will constitutes the accord, while the ships are seen await at the quayside. In one case they group together like chamber musicians reaching such harmony with one another. These metaphysical/ mythological allusions must not be taken lightly. They are frequent whenever the signs of monetary exchange and value are at issue, as if seeking to intellectualise and sacralise what otherwise would be regarded as a banal and even morally contemptible activity. For example, the coin-weight boxes of the Protestant Netherlands often depict a figure of death on the inside lids, a skeleton who may itself be seen in vigorous discussion with the person weighing coins, or pointing an arrow at him or her (Pieter de Hooch, among others, painted a woman performing the act of weighing, and, it is worth adding, that women are frequently given a prominent place in such illustration, either as the person weighing the coin, or participating as member of a couple in that task). The Totentanz is a very common theme encountered in many different genres of expression in these times, including being a theme found stamped on coin. That is to say, I take such reference, as a cadre of contemporary metaphysical value judgement, of prime importance and that demands interpretation, for example of placing it within the kind of phenomenological context that has engaged this whole book.

6

Moneys and Portable Instruments (Ills. 32–43)

32.

Portable seventeenth-century Dutch made coin-weight box with balance (courtesy of the National Numismatic Collection, Amsterdam, the image provided by Dr. Arent Pol of the University of Leiden).

The first of several boxes of coin weights with portable balances manufactured throughout Europe for a diverse clientele of market users. Like many of those produced in Northern Europe, this example possesses a pasted on notice on the interior of its lid that includes an engraving containing a moral warning against fraudulent ­practice by the owner of the box. The present example portrays two virtues with balance and sword and Death as a skeleton shadowing one of them, one arm over her shoulder, the other porting a spear. Most such boxes include some form of miniature balance and a choice among various kinds of weight, whether standard or, instead, based upon actually circulating coinages. It must be emphasised that production of such boxes must represented a very considerable craft industry in its own right, centred in most, if not all, of the important

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market centres of contemporary Europe, and aimed at different kinds and classes of client, specialist or not, and both rich or more modest. In visiting the collections held in local town museums one begins to recognise the names of such craftsmen and even the styles and particular models given to such boxes. They are also portrayed in use by many of the North European artists of the period, in treatments that, like our towers of Babel accords to them a further gloss of evaluation and intended meaning, but not necessarily negative. The presence of a personified version of Death, however, is very clear moral accompaniment to use of such boxes in protestant North Europe. We see death as a kind of skeletal shadow of the virtue on the right and as complement of the sword in the hand of the virtue on the left. The balance seems ready in the hands of the virtues to weigh the comportment of its user, the spear of the skeleton equally ready to strike the one who disregards the rule of trust dominating access to the market and its functioning. There are several ways of depicting such a warning. Often the weigher of coin will be seen seated at table performing his or her task, just such a box open before him or her. Often it is a couple at work, shadowed however, as if unseen, by that same vigorous skeleton read to throw a spear at the person concerned. It is an image also seen on coins, for example on some of those of the Nuremberg private coin-minting industry, and on a half-penny minted in Watford (Ill. 43). Take note that while these boxes consist of weight standards that help identify the coin (or list such standards on their lids) … and that are part of its necessarily unvarying identity, and a principle means of recognition, the exchange value itself is not and cannot be mentioned, since it varies from day to day against other kinds of coin, and according to the daily contextual conditions affecting supply, circulation and the market. This box is inscribed “all these weights were factored and sold by Jan Schaak, balance-maker, on the Prinse … [most probably Prinsengracht, in Amsterdam]”.

33a & b. Dutch portable box of coin-weights and mini-balance of 1625 with paste-on portrait of a couple weighing coin (courtesy of R.J. Holtman, photo no. 10140, and passed to me by Dr. Arent Pol).

The illustration shows Death or Mortality as a skeleton and, as expected, pointing a spear at the couple, an hour-glass in its other hand, reminding users of the box of their mortal state and that a moment of judgement awaits them. Moreover, we are even shown the citation from the Bible so often quoted on such labels concerning this warning. It is also an image of this kind that is seen in many works of fine art of the period, and even found stamped on contemporary coin. In this case of an especially richly furnished and costly box, the image is close to fine art and signed. It is as if death were the authority to whose rules individual practice must adjust itself: clearly the ethic of behaving according to the rules of trust, with regard to the

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adequate functioning of the social sphere of trust that governs all exchange and makes its underlying ground of responsive translation (cultural, linguistic, instrumental) ­possible. Manufacturers of such instruments often used such pasted-on-labelling as visiting cards providing name, craft and address, in this case a manufacturer of goldweights, Daintßen Boudringeen (?) of Rotterdam.

34.

Dutch box of coin-weights and mini-balance, “Adolf de Backer at the Bourse of Amsterdam” (Musée Dupuy).

Two virtues are portrayed on the paste-on label, one that of justice, with blindfold and balance, the other with sword and accompanied … literally shadowed … by Death as skeleton.

35.

French portable box of standard weights of coin and mini-balance, crafted in Lyon in 1677.

This box forms part of a substantial collection held by the Musée Dupuy in Toulouse. Is the hand-writing that of the manufacturer or a utiliser? The fact that it is handwritten suggests the latter while the address itself suggests the former: it reads “Jean-Pierre Chaudet, rue Tupin à Lyon, 1677”, a street in which many specialist craftsmen had their premises. This is a relatively cheap box of common usage, and simply crafted. Some manufacturers made such boxes for a broad variety of social custom, a point that gives substance to my argument about their general distribution amongst many kinds of market-goer. The generalised character of the ink-written designations on this box—«ducat», «réal», names covering whole families of different sub-types of ducat and réal, and usually named for themselves in such boxes—suggests that this box was intended only as an instrument of relative guidance and precision.

36a, b & c. Simplified English and French portable coin weighing instruments, probably of late eighteenth century.

Considerably simplified and more sophisticated instruments for weighing coin, invented towards the end of the eighteenth century and of which I have seen several similar, yet clearly different inventions at the Musée Dupuy in Toulouse, the British Museum in London, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. They constitute what Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box, treats as a social collectivity or population of inventiveness that arises during certain periods of increasing need, and, in our case accompanying the increasing sophistication of dictionaries and manuals concerning commodities. The result is an instrumentation more mobile and adaptable than, say, the old boxes of weights of particular kinds of coin, this being a kind which, so I suspect, had been developed for specialists capable of working in the abstract. The paste-on label inside the cover of the French instrument gives an unusually full selection of standard European coin types, suggesting its intended use for travelling merchants. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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The French example is inscribed “At the Couronné Fourché of the Society of Inventionsand Discoveries, mechanician of balances, rue de la Ferronerie, Paris”. The name, street of iron-working, suggesting a concentration of specialists.

37.

The lid of an English box with an inscription mentioning its use for overseas trade.

This box and its inscription is of a kind encountered both at the Ashmolean Museum, as in this case, and also on the internet, and which, upon its paste-on label, makes reference to its utility in both the West Indies and East Indies trades. “All sorts of scales and weights for foreign plantations according to his Majesties Proclamation; Also scales and weights for assays, Diamond scales, scales for gold and silver weights of the right standard for Turkey or Spain, East or West Indies. & Stilliards of all sorts, by John Lind Scale Maker, Holborn Bridge London”. The mention of the West Indies evidently points to the slave trade while that regarding the East Indies concerns the many different kinds of market that might have been encountered when voyaging across land and by maritime routes to and within Asia. I have long sought, with difficulty, such examples referring to the wider global extents of trade, expecting, in vain, to encounter boxes with, say, rupee, pagoda or even sycee standard weights. The example illustrated is one of only two encountered that even refer to such distant markets, but they do so not in terms of named types of coin but, instead, of their simplest possible reduction to value, thus as measured in grains of gold. For this reason, this box may confirm another strong impression: that boxes of coin weights and mini-balances, in all their variety, were crafted for different kinds of market-goer, including the regular consumer. Pieter de Hooch’s painting, among others, seems to confirm such a view. Then a box such as this one, or the much simplified and more sophisticated instrument shown above, would have clearly been intended for specialists, those with a sufficient stock of skill and experience … of memory … to utilise such reduced and simplified means, whilst the more elaborate boxes, containing selections of named types of coin, were more likely socially dispersed among shopkeepers, craftsmen and even the consumer. The first would then be intended for those experienced traders travelling at great distance and encountering new and unfamiliar kinds of payments instrument, the second largely for non-specialists.

38.

Two portable boxes of coin weights and balance, one French and one English, courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum.

Both exhibit the traditional mini-balance yet applied to much simplified weight-standards, rather than to models of the coin-types themselves. The reader should now be aware of the variety of such boxes; of the frequency with which one encounters them in different local town and national museums, of the vigorous industry their crafting must have constituted, of the social variety of those using them, and thus of the variety in quality and complexity that affected their manufacture. Such crafting is an example Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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of all the secondary, tributary industries that surround any central process, such as coin-minting and textile manufacture. A third closed box can be seen above the two left open, and which would have contained one of the more specialised, simplified inventions just illustrated.

39.

Portable balances for weighing sycee moneys of Chinese type (author’s photograph, courtesy of Madame Palhana Boupha, Palhana Boupha Antique House, Luang Prabang, Laos).

The violin-shaped cases containing such balances are generally characteristic but, like our European coin-weight boxes, they also vary considerably in size and quality, and were thus destined for a varied social market user. This image is that of one of three cabinets filled with such instruments, encountered in a shop in Luang Prabang, Laos. Almost all such shops possessed examples, if in lesser quantity; being survivals of a level and kind of craft generally destroyed when no longer of use, the impression one gains is of their distribution in considerable quantity prior to the mid-nineteenth century.

40.

Two Chinese silver sycee of Yunnan-type, and stamped with an attestation of their value and authenticity (author’s photograph taken at a market stall in Huay Xai, Northern Laos; the inscription read for me by Dr. Joe Cribb).

Hosea Ballou Morse’ several publications prove especially comprehensive and lucid concerning the rules of production and circulation of such sycee. Sycee, like other Asian kinds of money, appear to us exotic, but in doing so they obeyed the very same typological rules of production, market exchange and quantitative valuation as their unlike circular and flat cousins, with which readers are more familiar. The heavier forms may be compared with standard bar, but like coin, varying typologically according to place and function; the lighter versions are comparable with coin. That is to say, speaking globally, all these distinctive spheres of circulation conform to a universal conception of type, like cloths, teas, grains or ceramics … like all commodity. It is this absolute and unqualified conformity to bare skeletal principles of form and operation that allows global market exchanges to occur on all social and territorial scales; a tea from Fujian to sell in Lima, or a Lima silver to be exchanged in some interior market in Guangdong.17 17

Another reference to Hegel must be pardoned, because his words, as I now come to discover and read them, express exactly the principle governing my universalist interpretation of the commodity: “its differentiation … constitutes the entire concept”. I refer the reader to the whole first paragraph of the sub-section “Einteilung” (“Division” of the concept), in Die Lehre vom Begriff, 28 (12. 29).

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Thus, whilst China had been, like North India, a zone of silver circulation, gold sycee were also fabricated for export to Southern Indian ports where gold-circulation was the rule. Exotic implies identifiable, identity being a property integral to the working of trust, and to the differentiation underlying coin production and use.

41.

Cover page of a Chinese manual of 1800 for market-users explaining recognition and conditions of exchange of European- and SpanishAmerican-type coin in Southern China.

The coin concerned would include those such as the silver ducaton and other coins of diverse mint and date discussed above in the body of City Intelligible. The evidence shows the necessity for the Chinese trader at Guangzhou to understand the fine detail of what was offered as payments form by the foreign trader, and show also that such traders proved capable of rejecting coins from certain mints and certain mint years, those declared on the coin itself. Yet a Mexican ducaton privately produced in, say, Rouen, might be perfectly acceptable, if true to type: true in weight and content of pure metal. Once more a question of trust, concerning which, with regard also to cloths and cotton, the Chinese trader had learned to be vigilant … learning from the hard experience of treating with East India Company merchants (whose fraudulent practices have also been noted above). This example is held by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, and inside the covers are found texts and illustrations showing the precise identity of the coins concerned. Several such manuals have recently been discovered, one, for example, described as a treatise of coin alloys and the falsification of moneys … They must once have been abundant in many South Chinese markets where such coins were encountered in circulation, and were thus frequently revised.

42. Two réals d’ocho or trade currency, generally shipped in bulk between ports or mints (courtesy of Dr. Arent Pol).

Such réals d’ocho were produced as trade currency, shipped in sacks, and not intended for hand to hand circulation but instead for trans-oceanic shipment. For this reason they are precise in pure metal content and weight, obeying what I call the publicly recognised (if always socially disputed) «tolerance» (as I choose to call it) within which typological precision is defined and expected for that particular kind of coin, and that indeed served to characterise it. Yet, because but a trading coin and not intended for free circulation, and although true in purity and weight, thus in kind, the production of that coin is entirely indifferent to its appearance, thus to shape and cut … it is rough cut, so to speak, favouring more rapid production! The Maritime Museum in Amsterdam has had excellent examples on display.

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43.

Both sides of a half-penny stamped with the figure of mortality (a skeleton holding spear and hour glass), minted privately by one John Morse of Watford in 1600 (Ashmolean Museum, courtesy of the curator Dr. Julian Baker).

This coin is an example of the enormous private production of coin that came to satisfy the massive social thirst for adequate supplies of circulating media during the earlymodern centuries. What we might call forgeries or regard as inauthentic from a modern point of view, are, instead, real circulating moneys that helped augment the volumes and extents of monetary payment and exchange, and that therefore were a veritable motor and, indeed, condition for the complexification of societal form in its own right. The second aspect of this coin is the Totentanz, that metaphysical counterpart so associated with commerce and money.

7

Sherds of the Inter-Asian Trade in Ceramics (Ills. 44a–44d)

The following four illustrations exemplify the argument that relates exotic local difference expressed in production of particular kinds of commodity to the translational, recognitional character of exchanges that enable them to transit cultural frontiers on a global scale, be recognised and yet appreciated for their differences by a relatively large public in far distant places, thus to develop kinds of relationship clearly governed by taste and aesthetic … a principle of capture of demand enabling the whole domain of commodification to function. The Vietnamese bowl illustrated above (Ill. 4) is just such an example, given the powerful metaphysical and cultural significance of both theme and style used in decorating its interior (dragon, phoenix, yin/yang sphere, lotus), widely appreciated by a vast public in South East Asia but also that engaged a voluminous overseas trade in such ceramics, that captured a taste attracted by such local aesthetics. The example may be modern, but in scrutinising catalogues of ancient trade-ware, especially materials from burial sites and shipwrecks, one encounters exactly the same kinds of obsessively repeated local themes and styles decorating the vessels concerned. Such trade ware is called minyao in the Chinese case:—a ware widely appreciated by the Chinese broad public yet equally engaged in the South East Asian ceramic trade; the term being used in order to distinguish such ware from that better known and made for ruling courts in China and yet, likewise, attractive to elite tastes elsewhere (termed guanyao), and which has appeared largely to monopolise scholarly attention until recently. Such vigorous trades (which, take note, implies articles of exchange, besides an accompaniment by the two other major pre-industrial commodity forms, metals and textiles) appear to have existed as early as the seventh century, where excavations of sites in the Sarawak delta are concerned, but to be of particular importance in the few c­ enturies Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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prior to those with which this study is largely concerned (thus the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), again evidence for the fact that the culture of the commodity with which this study is concerned, is already ready-formed and mature when taken up.18 One can hardly deny the immediately recognisable character of Ming blue and white, of the Chinese calligraphy on their base mentioning kiln and reign (and comparable therefore to marks and dates of minting stamped on coin), or of the pictorial style that so marks the Chinese art of this period, and yet one remains astonished at the evidence for its vigorous trade throughout the Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu worlds from late medieval times onwards, long before what are called the “European discoveries”! In the Safavid case, one enters a space, contemporary with the latter, of such surprisingly dense and profound Chinese cultural influence, that much of the very same thematic matter may be recognised (dragon, phoenix, &c.), yet entirely rethought and recreated in forms we recognise as distinctly Safavid and Persian; this is evident in the many Shahnama produced in this period, but also illustrating the pottery of the period.19 The same is true of Thai celadon ware from the kilns of Sukhothai and Sawankhalok, both as kinds in their own right, and also as a corpus of kinds of style, design and illustration, these too in response to a multilateral demand expressed far beyond the cultural sources and location of the kinds of expression invested in their unique appearance. It is in this sense that such trades exemplify the translational character of commodification and the intimate relationship we discover of its universal formal conditions of expressive being and their finite ever differentiated local forms of expression. It is the very same principle of identity, cognition and recognition—thus that same universal—that informs global exchange of a host of different payment forms, or of kinds of tea, rices or millets, or, say, of cottons, yarns and cloths.

44a.

Chinese Ming sherds from the ancient ports of Cheul and Revadanda (South of Mumbai, India).

Sherds of Chinese Ming porcelain, which I encountered in some abundance in the fields and path banks of Cheul and Revadanda, a few kms south of Mumbai, in the mid-1970s, and later in 1981 (referred to in, for example, 1989 and 1990 in my “Financial Institutions and Business Structures”). 18

19

I am especially indebted to an excellent work encountered after delivery of the main manuscript to the publisher, thus perhaps left unmentioned in the bibliography: Roxanna Maude Brown, The Ming Gap and Shipwreck Ceramics in Southeast Asia. Towards a Chronology of Thai Trade Ware (Bangkok, 2009), and that includes East and South East Asian ceramics in the long perspective in its compass of critical discussion. There are many works on Safavid art but I especially recommend for their thoughtfulness, where cultural content is concerned (thus in opposition to the more habitual emphasis on mere aesthetic) Melikian-Chirvani, Le Chant du Monde. L’Art de l’Iran Safavide 1501– 1736, and Kwiatowski, The Eckstein Shahnama (the latter, despite being concerned with an Ottoman production of the Shahnama, is thought to have been illustrated by Iranian artists). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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These two small fishing villages were once busy ports among long strings of small ports dispersed along the coasts of the old world and taking part in the vigorous interAsian trades in porcelains, spices and payments media characteristic of inter-Asian trading during several centuries preceding the first arrival of Europeans in the region, and to which we needs add the vast pre-industrial terrain of textiles. Porcelains and other ceramics were traded in considerable abundance to the ports of the Indonesian Archipelago, South and South East Asia, thus of the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and China Seas, responding equally to demand stemming from Farsi- (for example, Safavid), Turkic- and Urdu-speaking territories dominated by the forms of Islam. They are a singular example of long-term exchanges of distinctly cultural goods (cultural stylistically, aesthetically) throughout this vast area, and frequently seen expressed as a demand for particular types of crafted goods. Long known to trade historians, a long series of spectacular excavations of shipwrecks has recently confirmed these trades, altering considerably the character of our knowledge about them. Such small busy ports were also characteristic of the coasts of Guangdong, Fujian, and the Indonesian archipelago, running up the large rivers and river deltas of the region into their interiors, until such «micro-ports» were put out of business by the monopsonistic growth of the large nineteenth-century colonial and imperial metropoli, such as at Mumbai and Guangzhou.20 Part of a character of Chinese calligraphy can be read on the base of one of the illustrated fragments.21

20 Brown, The Ming Gap and Shipwreck Ceramics in Southeast Asia, provides considerable precise, often astonishing information on the extents and contents of this inter-Asian trade in ceramics. Her precisions were intended to enable a complete revision of what constituted these trades and of their chronology, trades observed already in full interAsian activity as early as the twelfth century, and concerning markets dispersed along the coasts and up the river valleys of, for example, the Indonesian archipelago, such as Sarawak and Borneo. That is to say, such marketisation was dense and well founded from the earliest moments of recorded history, just as I have argued in the introductory essay to the book. Her bibliography is especially valuable in indicating the extent and range of discussion concerned. Where India is concerned, a very clear sense of the vigour of trades already in place when encountered by the Portuguese, is given by Magalhaes Godinho, “L’Économie” de l’Empire Portugais aux xve–xvie siècles. 21 Since completing the revision of this book, and even since sending it to the publisher for first proofs, I have encountered both the work cited in the previous note (R.M. Brown’s The Ming Gap) and an article to which she refers containing fascinating (if provisional) precisions concerning the presence and dating of Chinese blue and white and also celadon sherds up and down the coasts of South peninsula India: Y. Subbarayalu, “Chinese Ceramics of Tamilnadu and Kerala Coasts”, in H.P. Ray & J.-F. Salles, eds., Tradition and Archaeology. Early Maritime Contacts in the Indian Ocean (New Delhi, 1996),109–114 (the volume concerning proceedings of a conference held in 1994).

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A COMMENTARY ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS

44b & c. Chinese Ming blue-and-white, and Thai green celadon Sawankhalok and Sukhothai sherds from Si Satchanalai, Thailand.

These sherds of blue and white Ming were encountered on surfaces of temple ruins in Si Satchanalai, in interior Thailand, and are evidence that these inter-Asian trades were not confined to maritime exchanges or coastal demand. The pale green celadon sherds derive from a ceramic made locally in what are known as the Sawankhalok kilns close to Si Satchanalai, and also in Sukhothai. Yet, they were also in demand overseas and encountered exported, often in very large quantities, in ships now excavated as wrecks (one comprehends such a demand on recognising the beauty of this particular kind of celadon ware). Vietnamese blue and white porcelains were also involved, and if Chinese in cultural inspiration are distinctive in the kinds of clay utilised and in the free stylistic detail of the figurative aesthetic displayed in their manufacture.

44d.

Chinese Ming blue-and-white sherds from Mrauk U, Myanmar.

Mrauk U is also a site of temple and other ruins in which such blue and white Ming sherds may be found on surfaces and in banks. Since located in the Rakhine State of Eastern Myanmar, this would most probably have involved maritime and river importation via the Bay of Bengal, say to a port such as Sittwe at the mouth of the delta. The dark green and brown celadon-like sherds seen in the photograph, may have been imported from Sawankhalok or Sukhothai (kilns close to Si Satchanalai) in Thailand. In contrast, the red earthenware fragments are local and show a very characteristically free kind of abstract, non-figurative patterning potted generally throughout the larger region of Myanmar and northern Thailand even today. On one of the two pieces of small white fragments adjacent to one another in the photograph occurs in shallow relief two impressed Chinese calligraphic characters, but invisible in the photograph.

...

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Bibliography 1

Introduction: Selection and Translation

Reference to publications in text or footnotes provides shortened titles and pagination. I list only the works and editions actually consulted in writing this book, those mentioned in the footnotes or that have contributed to the interpretation. Kant deserves special listing because of the role played throughout in giving form to my interpretation. I treat Hegel and Husserl likewise, the three given a separate section at the start of this list. Where Kant, Hegel and Husserl are concerned, I prefer to translate all passages myself, both those quoted and paraphrased, but in comparing such translation with those already published in both English and French, and for the reasons stated in the “Notice to the Reader”: I translate myself in order to engage personally with the question of meaning contained in these works, that generally is controversial, but that once interpreted has had such a signal effect on my own understanding underlying this work; I compare with other translators in order to solve such problems of meaning through comparison, choice and personal decision. Furthermore, my selection of translations mentions only those actually used and marks a choice above all personal, one of preference, and not necessarily the most recent or well-known. My concern throughout the bibliography is to enable the reader to enquire after my own traces in constructing this interpretation, both particular and general, thus allowing that reader to disagree in knowledge of cause, if needs be. The list is divided into three major sub-sections, which themselves may be subdivided: the first section concerns the three philosophers of transcendental criticism and phenomenology, in chronological order, mentioning original editions and translations of their works (where used), and then those secondary works that have contributed substantially in interpreting them. Many works consulted and that have not directly contributed, whether in agreement or opposition, are not mentioned below, but this is not to judge their quality. The second major sub-section lists compilations published and actually used by (thus ­accessible to) the populations of the commodity continuum, and concern the strong emphasis I place on construction and access to a specialised yet generalised knowledge of what constitutes commoditisation, both in thought and practice. Many are works of reference, pocket dictionaries and merchants’ manuals besides the great compilations of reference compiled towards the end of our period or just following it. Modern dictionaries of various kinds, linguistic or specialised in some matter connected with construction of the book are given their own sub-section: say, those

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concerned with botany or with the cultivated crops of one or another region, or major language dictionaries actually quoted in the text. The third sub-section is more vast and consists of all secondary works mentioned in notes and text. I have chosen not to compartmentalise this third most general list since I seek to provide the reader with the simplest manner of access to such reference, which is ­alphabetical. I follow my personal experience in choosing this alternative as consonant with what I, personally, have found most convenient in my own reading and research. However, I prefer a more complete cadre of reference to one abbreviated or absent. I have learned to abhor the practise of omitting footnotes, of evading full and detailed indexes, and full bibliographical lists since their absence prevents one from efficiently utilising the work concerned, … locating its content or following a route to its sources. Furthermore, in notes, text, and bibliography alike, I have sought, above all, clarity where listing full or short titles; the consequence is that all titles maximise the use of capitals and italics, in spite of national traditions of reference. Essentially this concerns the listing of German and French works, the latter conventionally capitalising only the first word of a title, whereas I capitalise the entire reference in the AngloSaxon manner. Secondly, where Chinese and other Asian names are listed, I indicate clearly in the “Index of Authors” which part of a name I have used for the alphabetical listing of a book or article, again for ease of reference and clarity; yet the reader should be alert to the fact that usually, in the countries concerned, it is the first part of a ­several-element East or South-East Asian name that acts as the family name of the individual concerned. To avoid confusion, therefore, and by way of example, I have chosen to list Chin-Keong Ng under Ng, Kazuko Furuta under Furuta, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer under Toer (whilst occasionally referring to him as Pram in the text, his popular name among Indonesians), even if finding myself unintentionally in contrast with national conventions or strict accuracy. Again my choice is directed to providing the simplest, most obvious modes of access. Finally, modern works, as already mentioned, are generally short-titled when referenced in notes; full titles, date and place of publication being available in the bibliography. However, works that prove historically important for this book, considered as possessing a documentary value and thus a value as evidence, are often mentioned in full, with edition, place and date of publication, since in these cases place and date may form a part of the evidence for the argument itself. In truth, because of the philosophical, constitutive emphasis informing the motivation guiding the study, even modern works possess a documentary status since directly concerned with the development and content of what has become a modern knowledge of the subject matter faced by the book, and thus that can also become matter for

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interpretation and critique (Darwin, Lamarck, Lindsey being examples). However, I compromise with regard to such modern references, leaving full information to the lists below.

2

Kant, Hegel and Husserl

The works cited in their original language are accompanied by the pagination of the editions of Kant’s Collected Works (Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften) published by the Prussian Academy of Sciences (Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften) and also provided in footnotes; this is especially necessary for the First Critique, where mention of their «A» (1st edition) & «B» (2nd edition) versions enables comparison among the several important editions and translations of each work into different languages. Where references to other of Kant’s works are concerned, I give the volume number of the Collected Works, and page. All preceded by «Ak», for Akademie. References to Hegel are few (except in “More than a Preface”), and yet he is present through much of the book, especially the young Hegel of Jena and the Phenomenology of Mind, so dominated by his dialectical method. He has been especially a victim of the personal positions of the translators, there being very notable differences of meaning and approach between a largely religious approach to the philosopher among several American translators and, say, the Marxist and other materialist French translators. The latter are specially important because of the extensive intellectual drive leading to a rich flow of translation of Hegel’s texts into French and a vigorous space for interpretation and dispute generated by the major pre-war and post war French intellectuals of the day. The problem of the dialectic is especially acute in English language translation and quotation (as also with his youthful friend Hölderlin), being frequently occulted, and leading therefore to the eviction of a major dimension of language expression characterising the central core of Hegel’s thread of argumentation: the sense of a constantly transcending sense of self-working movement effecting the very sense of what he attempts to argue, and that prevents a reader ever settling down on some fixed or static moment of such argument. Yes, one must necessarily depend on one’s own work of translation, experience for oneself the nature and the difficulty, and yet know of these differences of approach as they come to effect the meaning of what one reads and consults.1 One must, it seems to me, fight to express this dialectical dynamic, in 1 For example, whereas I often agree with much that George di Giovanni says concerning his understanding of Hegel mentioned in his “Introduction” and which I have quoted in occasional footnotes above, I would dispute his treatment of the dialectic: “I have been deliberately using « discourse » and « discursiveness instead of « dialectic » (a term … that Hegel

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order not to lose Hegel in the process of translating him. The extent to which he adapts ordinary words to his own purposes, builds a new complex of meaning upon often conventional usages, and turns ordinary words, such as those for the chemical elements, into rich metaphor for general states and processes, necessitates that personal engagement in translation. Thus, in sum, my list includes both works in the original German, a personal selection of translations into French and English, and those secondary works I found especially influential on my own interpretation. This results in more French secondary works listed than in English, and among the English some that might surprise the knowing reader (for example my unapologetic admiration for Stirling’s near contemporary and brilliant The Secret of Hegel). The German texts are largely those of the editions of the Philosophische Bibliothek published by Felix Meiner ­Verlag of Leipzig and later Hamburg, but in one or two cases refer instead to Wilhelm Weischedel’s edition of Kant’s works published by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft of Darmstadt. I have used, and thus refer to, editions available to me, and not necessarily those most recent and up to date. The exception concerns the very important, yet once ill-considered Opus Postumum, listed in its Prussian Academy edn., and to which my references attach, in addition to providing locations in Förster and Rosen’s English translation of their selection of texts, and also referring occasionally to François Marty’s different selection in French translation. However, correct reference to the Opus Postumum deserves further comment. The Opus Postumum revealed itself especially important for the ongoing development of the arguments constituting this book. Yet, my references to that work are made as brief as possible, although, so I judge, sufficient. I explain this question of reference as follows. : what are generally cited by translators as volumes xxi and xxii of the Prussian Academy’s Collected Works (Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften) are also volumes viii and ix of Kant’s Handwritten Unpublished Work (Handscrhiftlicher Nachlaß), and called the first and second halves of the Opus Postumum itself (Erste & Zweite Hälfte). There is a

uses sparsely in the Logic) in an attempt to demystify the latter term”. … pointing to the ­common etymology of the words (Hegel, Science of Logic, xxxix). But his treatment seems as if it were intended as a brail to enable British language philosophers to access this aspect of ­Hegel’s writing (xxiv-xxix), and, in so transposing it, seems to me to evacuate from his discussion that very sense of an inherent dynamic unrest and developmental content mentioned above. Hegel may seldom mention the word « dialectic » in the Logic, but its presence is manifest, for example, from the very first words of the beginning of the third part of the Logic: “Of the Concept in General” (508–527; and Die Lehre vom Begriff, 5–27);—the language constantly turns upon itself to produce the advances of what follows, and it is this self-­ producing quality that is so dialectical: that inherent and uninterrupted manner of expression that—difficult though it may be—must surely be fought with front-on if one is to gain a pathway into comprehension.

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third volume, thus, xxiii & x, respectively, consisting of pages missing from the initial attempts to publish this work, but to which I do not refer in this book. For myself, I restrict detail to the general volume number and page, thus, for example, xxii, 105, ignoring all further detail, for example ignoring the volume number of what is but a sub-category of the Collected Works, the Handscriftlicher Nachlaß, but, moreover, also making no reference to the parts of the handwritten manuscript designated as Opus Postumum. In contrast, the procedure followed by Förster, like Marty, is to give that additional detail to the parts of the manuscript concerned, not least because what they publish are but selections from the volumes published in the Collected Works. For example Förster, in giving AK: xxii, 105 for one of my quotations, also gives detail of the exact location in the manuscript (viith fascicle [Convolut], sheet viii [Bogen], page 4 [Seite]). Yet, for our purposes, the volume and page number certainly suffice as a precise reference, since giving the location of the quotation in the original Academy published edition. (—And, incidentally, were I to give that further information, which seems to me unnecessary, I would also need to change the page reference to 2, without knowing, however, whether Förster has made an error or is using a different standard of reference, and thus, for my own part, sowing confusion.) And neither Förster nor Marty, no more than I, give reference to the volume number of the subcategory, the Nachlaß, ie.: ix. I have explained this matter in such detail because my copy of the published reprint of the first half of the Opus Postumum (which is, otherwise, an excellent facsimile copy of the published work), has omitted the first title page of the original volume, that which alone furnishes the reference detail to the Collected Works. What I could see only as vol. ix could be read as xxii in both Förster and Marty’s translations, and I had no explanation for this discrepancy, … until, however, discovering notes I had made concerning this very issue when consulting the Collected Works twenty-three years ago in The Hague, and, secondly, in examining my old photocopies from the Collected Works, the latter, otherwise, far too heavily annotated to merit fresh work and attention. Husserl’s phenomenological writings present special problems in their own right, and again this is because of the implication of personal experience and of an inherited and participative cultural anthropology of reading and sense guiding assumptions concerning the meaning of certain words (most notably of Wesen), but not always to their benefit … to their clarification, indeed even to a certain confusion about such meaning. I regard Husserl as no essentialist, or at least, like the other phenomenologists, as having brought the old essentialism down to the matter of material earth, to human mind;—and yet the influence of that old essentialism has had a very powerful influence on translators’ choices, and, as I see it, befogging access to the intended sense of some words and phrases. Thus, once again, it is essential to perform

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the work oneself, take one’s own decisions, even whilst well aware that one lacks the skill and expertise of the other translators, whom, nevertheless, one has also chosen to consult. When mentioning page numbers of editions, actually-consulted (whether in German, French or English), these are followed by the bracketed pagination of the standard German original edition (thus, say, Idéen, i, 106 [93], referring from the Meiner ­edition of the German text to the corresponding page number of the critical edition known as the Husserliana regarding the Ideen; or Idées Directrices, 164–165 [93], referring from Ricoeur’s French translation [164–165] again to the critical edition in the Husserliana [93]). The German editions consulted are those once-more published in the Meiner-Hamburg series, but in such cases the editors themselves refer the identity of the bracketed page-reference to “the original [German] edition”. The point of using it in my case is again to allow the reader a direct means of locating the text of whatever edition I happen personally to have consulted. However, this is only possible where that bracketed reference is provided, as in the German edition of Husserl’s manuscripts on Self-Consciousness of Time (Zür Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins), but which are not provided in the standard publication of Dussort’s French translation of the work (the two editions happening also to differ considerably in their selection of Husserl’s original unpublished texts included for publication). However, once more, I confine mention to works directly utilised for the present study, and, even then, to those especially influential in the formation of my thinking and argumentation. This is the reason for listing translations in both French and English, rather than referring systematically to the English versions; it lists those actually utilised, say, where Kant is concerned, work available to me when first composing the matter of the book, or preferred as choice amongst those available. Where Husserl is concerned, I refer to Ricoeur’s justly famous, yet problematic French translations. And whilst basing myself on the original German texts. Then, take note, the fact that each translation may differ notably from the others, as I mention below; and also take note that this is not a fault of translation but, to the contrary, a question of understanding and interpretation, of personal intellectual position, and in saying this to argue that such difference and disagreement is part and parcel of the very search for knowledge, and in this case of considerable benefit to any person rigorously seeking meaning of an author’s choice of words: such differences act as different perspectives of understanding focussed upon identical problems of comprehension, and, by consulting them, they stimulate development of an own point of view. To sum up, I wish to avoid a situation where readers encounter the kinds of difficulty caused by insufficient reference or exactness;—those readers, inspired, so I hope, to consult Kant, Hegel and Husserl for themselves.

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Bibliography

i. Kant A

His Works

a

In German

b

In English Translation

Prologomena zu einer Jeden Künftigen Metaphysik (Hamburg, 1993; ed. Karl Vorländer; of 1783). Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Hamburg, 1997; ed. Konstantin Pollok; of 1786). Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Hamburg, 1971; 2nd edn. of 1926 by Raymund Schmidt), based upon edn. of 1899 by Karl Vorländer; 1st and 2nd edns. of 1781 & 1787 combined (and referenced in footnotes per convention as A & B edns., resp.) [frequently referred to in this study as the First Critique, and the two that follow as Second and Third Critiques]. Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft (Hamburg; 1990 edn. of 1929 by Karl Vorländer; pubd. 1787) Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg, 1990; edn. of 1924 by Karl Vorländer; pubd. 1790, 1793 & 1799). Erste Einleitung (=Erste Fassung), in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Hamburg, 1990; ed. Gerhard Lehmann; n.d.). Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Hamburg, 1994; ed. Karl Vorländer; pubd. of 1785). Zum ewigen Frieden (Darmstadt, 1968; ed. Wilhelm Weischedel; Ak. edn., viii; d. 2nd edn. of 1796). Die Metaphysik der Sitten (Immanuel Kant Werke, vii, Darmstadt, 1968; ed. Wilhelm Weischedel; of 1797). 1. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre. 2. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Tugendlehre. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (Immanuel Kant Werke, viii, Darmstadt, 1968; ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, 1786). Opus Postumum: Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, xxi & xxii (Kant’s Handschriftlicher Nachlaß, viii, erste hälfte, convolut I-vi; ix, zweite hâlfte, convolut vii-xiii) (Berlin & Leipzig, 1936 & 1938).

Paul Carus, tr., revised by James W. Ellington, Prologomena to any Future Metaphysics that will be able to come Forward as Science (1977, Indianopolis). Norman Kemp Smith, tr. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1929, London). Lewis White Beck, tr. Critique of Practical Reason (Upper Saddle River, 1993, 3rd edn.).

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Bibliography

Werner S. Pluhar, tr. Critique of Judgement. Including the First Introduction (1987, Indianopolis [recommended]). Lewis White Beck, tr. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, and What is Enlightenment (1st edn. Indianopolis &c., 1959; 2nd edn. New York &c., 1985). Mary Gregor, tr. The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge, 1996; ed. Mary Gregor, intro. Roger Sullivan). Eckart Förster & Michael Rosen, trs. Opus Postumum (Cambridge, 1993; intro. Eckart Förster).

c

In French Translation

B

Secondary Works Treating Kant’s Philosophy

Ferdinand Alquié ed., Oeuvres Philosophiques, i, Des Premiers Écrits à la Critique de la Raison Pure ([Paris], 1980) & ii, Des Prologomènes aux Écrits de 1791 ([Paris], 1981; collective translation, and including the three critiques). A.J.-L. Delamarre, tr. of Première Introduction de la Critique de la Faculté de Juger, in Alqiuié ed., Oeuvres Philosophiques. Louis Guillemit, tr. Première introduction à la critique de la faculté de juger … (Paris, 1968). Alexis Philonenko, tr., Première introduction à la critique de la faculté de juger … (Paris, 1968; and introduction). Alexis Philonenko, tr., Critique de la Faculté de Juger (Paris, 1993; edn. reviewed with new notes). Alain Renault tr., Metaphysique des Moeurs, ii, Doctrine du Droit, & Doctrine de la Vertu (Paris, 1994). François Marty, tr., Opus Postumum. Passage des Principes Métaphysiques de la Science de la Nature à la Physique (Paris, 1986; intro. & nn.) [a larger selection from Kant’s manuscripts than that of Förster and Rosen]. Correspondance par Immanuel Kant ([Paris], 1991) (collectivity of translators).

In addition to the works listed below, the above-listed translations of Kant’s texts frequently include important discussion of Kant’s thought in the translators’ introductions. Erich Adickes, Kant und der Als-Ob Philosophie (Stuttgart, 1927). Erich Adickes, Kant und das Ding an Sich (Berlin, 1924). Ferdinand Alquié, Leçons sur Kant. La Morale de Kant (Paris, 2005). Karl Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind. An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (­Oxford, 1982 [new edn. 2000]).

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Bibliography

Lewis White Beck, A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago, 1963). Reinhard Brandt, “The deductions in the Critique of Judgement: Comments on Hampshire and Horstmann”, in Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 177–190. Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought (New Haven, 1981, [1918], tr. James Haden). Eckart Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions. The Three Critiques and the Opus Posthumum (Stanford, Cal., 1989)—(viz. the essays by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Reinhard Brandt, Eckart Förster & Jules Vuillemin). Eckart Förster, “Kant’s Selbstsetzungslehre”, in Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 217–138. Eckart Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis. An Essay on the Opus Postumum (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). Michael Friedman, Kant and The Exact Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Michael Friedman, Foundations of Space Time Theory. Relativistic Physics and Philosophy of Science (Princeton, N.J., 1983). Stuart Hampshire, “The Social Spirit of Mankind”, in Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 145–156. Otfried Höffe, “Eine Republikanische Vernunft. Zur Kritik der Solipsismus-Vorwurfs”, in: Schönrich & Kato, eds., Kant in der Discussion der Moderne (1996). Rolf-Peter Horstmann, “Why must there be a Transcendental Deduction in Kant’s Critique of Judgement”, in Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 157–176. Otfried Höffe, Kant als Theoretiker der Internationalen Rechtsgemeinschaft, in: Schönrich & Kato, eds., Kant in der Discussion der Moderne (1996). Norman Kemp Smith, Commentary to Kant’s «Critique of Pure Reason» (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1984 [2nd. Edn. 1923]). Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Logik. Drittes Buch. Vom Erkennen (Leipzig, 1928 [1874 & 1880]). Jean-François Lyotard, L’Enthousiasme. La Critique kantienne de l’Histoire (Paris, 1986). Gottfried Martin, Kant’s Metaphysics and Theory of Science (Manchester, 1955). Charlotte Morel, “Lotze: Platoniser Kant?”, Philosophie (no. 141, 2019, 4–18). Audun Øfsti, “Strawson’s Paralogismus. Kant’s «Ich Denke» und die Kant-Rekonstruktion Strawsons im Lichte der «Doppelstruktur der Rede»”, in [Øfsti], Kant’s Transzendentale Deducktion, 232–279. [Audun Øfsti (ed?)], Kants Transzendentale Deduktion und die Möglichkeit von Transzendentalphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main, 1988; herausgeben vom Forum für Philosophie Bad Homburg). Alexis Philonenko, L’Oeuvre de Kant. La Philosophie Critique, i, La Philosophie PreCritique et La Critique de la Raison Pure (Paris, 1989, 4th edn.) [Philonenko’s commentaries are generally especially acute ]. Alexis Philonenko, L’Oeuvre de Kant. La Philosophie Critique, ii, Morale et Politique (Paris, 1988, 3rd edn.).

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557

Alexis Philonenko, L’Ecole de Marbourg. Cohen—Natorp—Cassirer (Paris, 1989). Alexis Philonenko, Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? Kant & Fichte (Paris, 1991). John Rawls, “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy”, in Förster ed., Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 81–113 (especially recommended). Gerhard Schönrich & Yasushi Kato, eds., Kant in der Discussion der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main, 1996). Norman Kemp Smith, Commentary to Kant’s «Critique of Pure Reason» (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1984; of 2nd revised and enlarged edn. of 1923). P.F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense. An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London, 1966). Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob. System der Theoretischen, Praktischen und Religiösen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines Idealistischen Positivismus … (Leipzig, 1918). Herman-J. de Vleeschauwer, L’Évolution de la Pensée Kantienne. L’Histoire d’une Doctrine (Paris, 1939). Jules Vuillemin, “Kant’s «Dynamics»: Comments on Tuschling and Förster”, in Förster (ed.), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 239–247. Eric Weil, Problèmes kantiens (Paris, 1970 [1963], 2nd edn.).

C

Dictionaries Concerning Kant

Rudolf Eisler, Kant-Lexikon. Nachschlagewerk zu Kants Sämtlichen Schriften, Briefen und Handschriften Nachlaß (Berlin, 1930, reprint of German original Hildesheim &c., 1994). Rudolf Eisler, Kant-Lexikon ([Paris], 1994; French augmented and partly reorganised translation by Anne-Dominique Balmès and Pierre Osmo) [no English translation of this seminal dictionary currently exists]. Heinrich Ratke, Systematische Handlexikon zu Kants Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Hamburg, 1991).

ii. Hegel A

His Works

a

In German

G.W.F. Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie. Vorlesungsmanuskripte zur Philosophie der Natur und des Geistes von 1805–1806 (Hamburg, 1931; ed. Johannes Hoffmeister) [despite

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Bibliography

the appearance of being concerned with the science of his day, this work proves an invaluable and continuous exposition of his dialectical method, of his personal use of language, and of his materialist reorientation of the phenomenology of the old essentialist metaphysic, and, finally, of his accompanying Hölderlinian poetic]. G.W.F. Hegel, Jenenser Logik. Metaphysik und Naturphilosophie (Berlin, 1923; ed. Georg Lasson). G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg, 1952, 6th edn.; ed. Johannes Hoffmeister). G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ii, die Subjektive Logik, oder die Lehre vom Begriff (Hamburg, 1994 [1816]).

b

In English

c

In French

B

Secondary Works Treating Hegel’s Philosophy

J.B. Baillie, tr., The Phenomenology of Mind (London and New York, 1931). A.V. Miller, tr, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford, 1977; with analysis of text and foreword by J.N. Findlay) [These two translations concern the same work, but with two significantly different translations of the word Geist. I recommend neither, especially Miller’s overtly religious interpretation, but instead, if accessible to turn to the French translations. Marcuse, German speaker and Hegel-expert, referred to Hyppolite’s version with good reason. It is especially important to pay very close attention to the fine detail of Hegel’s writing in order to gain comprehension, but which Findlay expressly stated as tiresome and unnecessary. These two works are useful pointers to the difficulty of accessing Hegel through translation.]. George Di Giovanni, tr., The Science of Logic (Cambridge, 2010, with Di Giovanni’s Introduction) [a volume consisting of all three books of Hegel’s Logic, which in turn consists of several texts of different date; Di Giovanni’s introduction is indispensable, first in his discussion of the relationship of the different texts constituting the Logic to one another; second in his treatment of the interpretational spectrum to which Hegel and the Logic have been subjected in time; third for the intelligence and insight of some of his judgements.].

Bernard Bourgeois, tr, Science de la Logique, iii, Le Concept (Paris, 2016 [1816]). Jean Hyppolite, tr, Préface à la Phénomènologie de L’Esprit (Paris, 1966; with commentary by the translator). Jean Hyppolite, La Phénomènologue de L’Esprit (Paris, 1941, two volumes).

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Bibliography

559

Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston, 1974). Alexandre Koyré, Études d’Histoire de la Pensée philosophique ([Paris], 1961) (notably the two brilliant essays “Hegel à Jena” of 1934, and “Note sur la Langue et la Terminologie hégéliennnes”, of 1931.). Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution. Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Oxford, 1941). James Hutchinson Stirling, The Secret of Hegel: being The Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter (London, 1865, two volumes) [I cannot recommend the first volume of this work too highly as an introduction to Hegel’s phenomenology and as an entry into Hegel’s mode of thinking. I have read many works on Hegel in German, French and English, but this study, published very soon after Hegel’s death, is especially brilliant in conveying to the reader the sense of Hegel’s method and thus the meaning of both syntax and vocabulary]. Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la Conscience dans La Philosophie de Hegel (Paris, 1929) [the early role of religion in Hegel’s developing metaphysic and its ultimate materialisation].

C Dictionaries Hermann Glockner, Hegel Lexikon (Stuttgart, 1935–1939, four volumes) [indispensable compilation].

iii.

Husserl & Phenomenology2

A

His Works

a

In German

Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Mediationonen (Hamburg, 1995; ed. Elizabeth Ströker).

2 Having become familiar with Husserl’s thought during the two years prior to the present publication, in order to interpret the poesy of Paul Celan (whose poetry displays an evident and knowledgeable application of Husserl’s phenomenology), it became natural, in reviewing and revising the present work to allow it to illustrate and clarify some of my own arguments, for the most part in footnotes, occasionally in passages in the text, and in “More than a Preface”. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

560

Bibliography

Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einen reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie, i, Allgemeine Einfühurung in die reine Phänomenologie… (Hamburg, 2009; ed. 1976 Karl Schuhmann & 1971 Marly Biemel, intro. Elizabeth Ströker) [I make particular reference to this important work, the first published volume of three, experimental, self-correcting, ongoing collections of Husserl’s manuscripts; the second volume now exists as a compilation in English translation, and comprises the third volume of Husserl’s Collected Works, “published under the auspices of the HusserlArchives (Leuven)”, and listed directly below; however, this first volume was prepared *for publication by Husserl and his assistants; I refer the reader to the fascinating “Translators’ Notes” to the second volume concerning the sources and fate and dating of the three posthumously published volumes, both in German and in translation]. Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893–1917), (Hamburg, 1985; ed. Rudolf Bernet). Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften… (Hamburg, 1996; ed. Elizabeth Ströker).

b

In English

c

In French

B

Eugen Fink (Husserl’ Assistant, Close Colleague and Critic)

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, ii, Studies in the Phenomenology of a Constitution (Dordrecht &c., 1989; tr. Richard Rojcewicz & André Schuwer).

Edmund Husserl, Méditations Cartésiennes et Les Conférences de Paris (Paris, 1991; ed. & intro. Marc de Launay) [the addition of the Paris Lectures to this edition is important]. Edmund Husserl, Idées Directrices pour une Phénomènologie, i, Introduction à la Phénomènologie pure ([Paris], 1950; tr. Paul Ricoeur) [being the tr. of Ideen, i]. Edmund Husserl, L’Origine de la Géométrie (Paris, 1962; tr. & intro. Jacques Derrida). Edmund Husserl, Leçons pour une Phénomènologie de la Conscience du Temps (Paris, 1964; tr. Henri Dussort). Edmund Husserl, La Crise des Sciences européennes et la Phénomènologie transcendentale ([Paris], 1962; tr. Gérard Granel). Edmund Husserl, “Avant Propos d’Edmund Husserl”, included in Fink, Le Philosophie Phénomènologique d’Edmund Husserl [important with regard to Fink’s critical judgement concerning Husserl’s achievement].

Eugen Fink, vi. Cartesianische Meditation. Die Idee Einer Transzendentalen Methodenlehre, i: Texte aus dem Nachlass Eugen Finks (1932) mit Anmerkungen und Beilagen Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

561

Bibliography

aus dem Nachlass Edmund Husserls (1933/34) (Dorddrecht, 1988; edited by Hand Ebeling, Jann Holl and Guy van Kerckhoven). Eugen Fink, Sixième Médistation cartésienne. L’Idée d’une Théorie transcendentale de la Méthode, i, (Grenoble, 1994; translated and introduced by Nathalie Depraz) [Depraz’ introduction is excellent and enlightening]. Eugen Fink, “Le Philosophie Phénomènologique d’Edmund Husserl face à la Critique Contemporaine”, in Fink, De la Phenomènologie. Avec un Avant-Propos d’Edmund Husserl (1974); tr. from Studien zur Phänomenologie [1966, Le Haye], by Didier Franck [the essay was originally published in 1933].

C

Secondary Works Treating Husserl’s Philosophy and Phenomenology (including Existentialism)

Philippe Cabestan, “Authenticité et Mauvaise Foi: que signifie ne pas être soi-même?”, in Notre Sartre, Les Temps Modernes, 2005, 604–625. Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le Phénomène. Introduction au Problème du Signe dans la phénomènologie de Husserl (Paris, 1967). [Derrida began with phenomenology and this work is an invaluable entry into Husserl’s distinction between inner thought and its exteriorised expression «clothed» in language]. Jean-Pierre Desanti, “Sartre et Husserl ou les trois cul-de-sac de la Phénoménologie transcendentale”, in Notre Sartre, Les Temps Modernes, 2005, 571–584. André Gorz, Authenticité et Valeur dans la Première Philosophie de Sartre, in Notre Sartre, Les Temps Modernes, 2005, 626–668. Aron Gurwitsch, Esquisse de la Phénomènologie constitutive (Paris, 2002; from mss. composed in French between 1933 and 1940; edited and corrected by José HuertasJourda, intro. Lester Embree). Aron Gurwitsch, Phenomenology and the Theory of Science (Evanston, 1974; ed. & tr. By Lester Embree). [an English-language selection of essays established with the author]. Notre Sartre, special triple number of Les Temps Modernes, 632–633–634 (Paris, 2005), essays by Jean-Pierre Desanti, Philippe Cabestan, André Gorz. Paul Ricoeur, Husserl. An Analysis of his Phenomenology (Evanston, 2007; tr. E.W. Ballard & L.E. Embree). Paul Ricoeur, À L’École de la Phénomènologie (Paris, 1986) [a slightly different, but equally important, selection of articles by the young Ricoeur on Husserl’s thought from those selected for the English translation, previously cited]. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York, 1963; intro. & tr. Hazel E. Barnes).

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562 D

Bibliography

Dictionaries Concerning Husserl’s Thought

Dermot Moran & Joseph Cohen, The Husserl Dictionary (London, 2012). Jacques English, Le Vocabulaire de Husserl (Paris, 2009). Lexique de phénoménologie, Wikipedia, on line.

3

General Bibliography

i.

Dictionaries and Other Reference Works Historical and Modern

I use a large number of dictionaries and other forms of compendia of different kinds, and concerning different languages, in the course of work. I mention no more than a handful of what have proven most important in providing access to problems of meaning governing my interpretation. Entries often overflow the boundaries loosely given and intended of the three subsections below, the essential criterion being function, and thus the manner in which I have myself utilised such works. For example, Crowther Beynon’s compilation of portable boxes of coin weights (and of which specimens exist in many town and city museums, and which were frequently illustrated by artists of the time). These portable boxes date from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth; Beynon’s compilation dates from the twentieth century but, nonetheless, is placed in sub-section «C» ­because concerning a particularly important part of the my argument concerning historical public access to a generalised practical knowledge of the commodity and payments domain.

A

Modern Dictionaries and Lexicons Works used as sources of information and reference.

Botanical Latin. History, Grammar, Syntax, Terminology & Vocabulary (Newton Abbot, 1983, 3rd revised edn.). I.H. Burkill, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula (London, 1935, 2 vols.). I.H. Burkill, “A List of Oriental Vernacular Names of the genus Dioscorea”, in The Garden Bulletin, Straits Settlements (iii, 1924, nos. 4–6), 120–244. Joe Cribb, A Catalogue of Sycee in the British Museum. Chinese Silver Currency Ingots c. 1750–1933 (London, 1992).

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Bibliography

Vernon Bryan Crowther-Beynon, [Coin Weight Boxes Foreign] (manuscript catalogue, c. 1940, [British Museum Dept. Coins & Medals, B.M. T4. Cro); this is a modern compilation but the boxes of coin-type weights, such as encountered in several local European museums, and that also contain portable « pocket » balances and printed lists of the weights of each type, are a very significant evidence of one of the central matter treated in this book, access to—and response to the need for—knowledge. I intend to illustrate and discuss such boxes in the volume proposed intending to complement the present work. H.C. Darby & Harold Fullard, The New Cambridge Modern History Atlas (Cambridge, corrected edn. 1978). Dictionary of Scientific Biography, v & xiii (New York, 16 vols.). van Draakestein—viz. van Rheede. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Berlin, Leipzig & München 1834– 1954, & 1971, thirty-three volumes) [like the OED, invaluable for its long series of quotations from the past]. J.R. McCulloch, A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, and Historical, of Commerce and Commercial Navigation: Illustrated with Maps (London, 1832, 1st edn.). Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, first edn. of 1933, 12 vols.; 1982–1986, 4 supple­ mentary vols.); [Important for quotation of contemporary usages, this edition being  ­referenced because that utilised, in spite of recent availability of a new edition]. La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. Catalogo Generale delle Opere Eposte (Bologna, 1987). Paul Vandenbroek, Catalogus Schilderkunst 14e-15e eeuw. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (Antwerpen, 1985). W. von Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des Galloromanischen Sprachschatzes (Bâle & Leipzig, 1940, successive volumes in continuation) [remarkable work, and surely an evidence of the translational cultural continuum proposed in this book].

B

Fifteenth- to Nineteenth-century Compilations This sub-section and the next includes works with entries utilised as direct evidence of contemporary thought and practice.

Jean Belot, Que c’est que la Memoire Artificielle, ou L’Art de Raymond Lvlle, in Les Oevvres [sic.] de M. Iean Belot (Rouen, 1647; corrected and augmented edn.), 415–432 [one of many contemporary works teaching the «arts» (i.e. techniques) of memorisation, and in this case a small-format work for what seems popular consumption,

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564

Bibliography

and basing its teaching of memory upon the zodiac and chiromancy; i.e. like all such treatises selecting some or other kind of distribution of space and place, of location, such as the lines of the hand, and in this case explicitly intended for use by shopkeepers, merchants, and such]. Diccionario de Autoridades (Madrid, 1990 reprint in 3 vols. of 6-vol. original: Madrid, 1726–1739). Charles Fawcett (ed.), The English Factories in India 1670–1684 (Oxford, 1936–55, 4 vols.). William Foster (ed.), The English Factories in India. A Calendar of Documents in the India Office, Westminster 1613–1660 (Oxford, 1897–1921, 16 vols.). Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire Universel, Contenant Generalement tous les Mots François tant vieux que modernes… (Paris, 1690). [Étienne-François]Geoffroy, Traité de la Matiere medicale, ou L’Histoire des Vertus, du Choix et de L’Usage des Remedes simples, vi, Traité des Vegetaux, book §1, Des Medicamens exotiques (Paris, 1743) book §2. Des Plantes de Notre Pays (Paris, 1750). Hermannus Goldhagen, Phraseologia Germanico-Latina (Mainz, 1766). Ben Jonson, The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson (London & Toronto, 1910, two vols.; introduced by Felix Schelling); and in the first volume: Every Man Out of his Humour, and Volpone; or, The Fox. Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du xixe Siècle (Paris, vii, 1870). Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, (Taipeh, 1971 [reprint of 1910 edn.], 3 vols). Hosea Ballou Morse, The Trade and Administration of the Chinese Empire (New York, nd.; reprint Shanghai &c., 1907). Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company trading to China 1635– 1834 (Oxford, 1926–1929, 5 vols.). Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (London, 1833–1843, 27 vols.) [indispensable, often well-written informative treasure of ideas and opinions representing both contemporary consciousness of early nineteenth century science, for example concerning botanical systematics before Darwin’s impact and the remarkable aesthetic impact of Goethe’s botanical theory. Entries were composed by experts in their fields]. Jacques Peuchet, Vocabulaire des Termes de Commerce, Banque, Manufactures, Navigation, Marchande, Finance mercantile & statistique ([Paris], an ix [1801]). Jacques Peuchet, “Du Commerce françois en Grèce”, pt. i, Bibliothèque commerciale (Paris, séconde souscription, ii, Thermidor an xi [July 1803], 193–240). [Ch.] de Peyssonnel, Traité sur le Commerce de la Mer Noire (Paris, 1787, 2 vols.). Arthur Pougin, Dictionnaire Historique et Pittoresque du Théâtre (Paris, 1885). Hendrik van Rheede van Draakestein, Malabaarse Kruidhof… (Amsteldam, 1689, augm. edn. 2 vols.). Hendrik van Rheede van Draakestein, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus… (Amstelodami, 1678–1703, 12 vols.). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

Bibliography

565

Jacques Savary, Le Parfait Negociant ou Instruction generale pour ce qui regarde le Commerce (1st edn. Paris, 1675; 2nd augmented edn., 1679; 4th edn. 1697; 7th edn., 1713; 8th edn., 1721; 1676, bilingual German and French edn.; 1883, Dutch edn. De Volmaakte Koopman; edns. also appeared in Italian and English). Jacques Savary, Pareres ou Avis ou Conseilles sur les Plus Importantes Matieres du Commerce (Paris, 1688). Savary de Bruslons, Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce Contenant Tout ce qui Concerne le Commerce dans les Quatres Parties du Monde (Amsterdam, 1726–1732; three vols.). Robert Stevens, The Complete Guide to the East-India Trade (London, 1766, 1st edn.). Robert Stevens, New and Complete Guide to the East-India Trade (London, 1775, 2nd edn.). Boris Torgasheff, China as a Tea Producer. Areas of Cultivation, Methods of Planting and Manufacture, Export Trade, Production and Consumption, both in China and Abroad (Shanghai, 1926). George Watt, A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1889–1893, London & Calcutta, 6 vols. in 9 books) [especially important with regard to cultivated variety and its confrontation with botanical systematics]. Johann Wilhelm Weinmann, Phytanthoza Iconographia sive Conspectus… (Regensberg, 1735–1745, four volumes). Johann Wilhelm Weinmann, Duidelyke Vertoning Eeniger Duizend in alle Vier Wærelds Deelen … Uitwassen (Amsterdam, 1748; tr. from the German by J. Burmannus). [S. Wells Williams], “A Description of the Tea Plant. Its Name; Cultivation; Mode of Curing the Leaves; Transportation to Canton; Sale and Foreign Consumption…”, Chinese Repository (viii, art. v, 1839). S. Wells Williams, Chinese Commercial Guide (Hong Kong, 1863, 5th edn.).

C

Manuals, Dictionaries and Other Forms of Written Information before the Invention of Movable Type, and in the First Centuries of Printing (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries), Including Aids for Merchants and Other Participants in the Life of the Continuum

This sub-section includes not only works providing direct evidence of contemporary usages and thinking, but also the kinds of work actually utilised by contemporaries, and intentionally produced in order to provide contemporaies with means to comprehend the increasing profusion and complexity of commodity and payment typologies confronted in the market place. What might properly be described as «memory palaces», combinations of both vital information and means of memorisation, and intended as aids for merchants and other participants in confronting the ever more complex conditions of the commodity-continuum, its extension and prolix, exotic and differential character (that I call Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Bibliography

“memory palace” in direct reference to the imaginative architectural constructions of mind studied by Francis Yates in her book on The Art of Memory)—is here used to point to the increasing abundance of means providing practical information to both public and specialist, and published throughout the epoch that directly concerns us. For those «memory palaces» include not only productions of high intellectual quality and careful elaboration but also descend to a much more popular level of local and perhaps mass production, say, as rough portable mass publications based upon more simple but practical mnemonic measures, such as Jean Belot’s little manual that utilises as places of memory the lines of the hand, but intended for those going to market. They are equivalent in this respect, and complementary, with such other instruments as pocket balances, portable balances or those boxes, mentioned above, containing samples of coin weights. Thus I refer equally to merchants’ manuals, commercial dictionaries, guides concerning kinds of money, market listings of coin-types, local guides pointing to their conventional weights, and to regular listings by market regulators, banks or public authorities of their changing and estimated values, lists of standard metrologies, of the correct content and weight of cloths, thus of weights and other measures, of municipal and other governmental kinds of act and ordinance concerning these same kinds of moneys, weights and measures, produced in ever increasing numbers and of broadening scope throughout these centuries, but also produced in copied manuscripts prior to the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century. Such information might detail conventional standards of length and weights of cloth, of grains, of the land itself, and of the multiple forms through which agricultural production was locally estimated and socially distributed amongst both potential growers and all those destined by right to received the fruits of such production. Such lists and compendiums were produced in the many separate markets populating and activating the continuum, and necessarily so, whether by market authorities of some collective kind, or by separate institutions acting within such markets, such as the Chinese banking guilds mentioned above, and also by centres of administrative government of all scales and kinds throughout the continuum. However, what particularly interests me are the numerous publications published on private initiative and encountered by chance in different local libraries and archives, varying from mere pocket handbooks characteristic especially of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the huge, immobile multi-volume, nineteenth century dictionaries, issued and re-issued in order to record and dispense such detailed information concerning commodities, payment forms, and conventions and regulations concerning them, thus facilitating their exchange and passage from place to place, and which are of pre-eminent importance in enabling us, in our turn, to draw an intimate comprehension concerning the very principles of the phenomenology, explicitly expressed in them, concerning the commodity domain, both in terms of their form as a

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567

particular language of thought and practice, and also, more obviously, from their detailed content as an information, say, concerning markets or conditions of circulation. Like our Boccaccio or a Laotian decorated rice bowl, they display, indeed a ­knowledge—a metaphysical, allegorical and metaphorical representation of such knowledge—the kind of phenomenological assemblage of rules enabling phenomenological constitution—the constitution of the cultural object—which we have studied in Kant’s company with regard to the real historical and empirical conditions ­occupying the present book. Such publication seem to have begun with the very invention of printing itself, and preceded by distribution of copied manuscript versions, or by more primitively printed versions. Their modern form of publication begins, therefore, in the course of the fifteenth century, and in order to meet a clearly already existing, obviously vigorous need and demand: a need to obtain information on the complexities of the marketing process and market phenomena. There was indeed a need to provide such information symmetrical with contemporary know-how and faculties, with the bare needs of any context of ordinary experience, and in order to enable the continued passage and exchange of commodities and payments forms, whether seen individually or collectively, synoptically. Gradually we see such publication concerned with all scales of local and general need and geared to a very wide range of literacy regarding the kinds of audience for which it was destined, varying from an uninterrupted production throughout our period (as with the more classical and varied kinds of «memory-­ palace» publication) of abundant local pocket manuals, such as produced in the cities of Italy and Northern Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, yet extending to the multi-volume dictionaries of the later colonial and imperial epoch, such as those also listed below, and directly comparable to other kinds of informational compendium such as those, but now more disputational, listing the «tribes», «castes» and «clans», or «nations», often arbitrarily identified among the subject populations of the later epoch. All, once again, present us with invaluable aids for gaining comprehension of that «phenomenology of the cultural object» we call the commodity, aside from its historical and social composition. Dictionaries of commodities refer us to the contemporary culture that is object of our study; dictionaries of tribes and castes cast an invaluable illumination on our own culture, both popular and academic, … and in both cases anthropology … access for the anthropology of both kinds! If I am concerned, especially, with the production of practical aids to contemporary travelling merchants, and if our evidence is largely European, it is hardly conceivable that they were not parallelled by equivalent kinds of aid to memory and to easy reference in territories where non-European languages were spoken, even though little seems known about the latter. It is not only a question of the books and pamphlets, public lists and laws, listed below, but also of such real objects as the «pocket»-sized

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Bibliography

boxes of model coin-type weights, apparently produced throughout Europe, as mentioned above, consisting also of miniature hand-balances, such as the portable balances also observed utilised by Indian and Chinese shopkeepers, traders and bankers when confronting such multiple payments markets; why do we not have evidence of instruments comparable to the standard collections of portable coin-weights so common of Europe; it is inconceivable that such practical instrumentation did not exist throughout the continuum. It is to say that a listing of such works constitutes not merely a bibliographical aid for the reader but also an important appendix-like body of evidence and indication (a tip of a vaster iceberg yet to be recovered, and largely lost) that directly supports my arguments above concerning the extents and forms of knowledge necessarily underlying that culture of the commodity, enabling its very practice, the articulation of intentional participational agency and contextual constraining facticity that mark the two aspects of commodification. For, let us remember, the very principle informing exchange, that argued above: translation: … the very will … intention … to translate and thus to find or invent means to do so!—a translational facility that efficaciously enabled exchange to take place and flourish, enabled communication across the many kinds of linguistic and cultural frontier ordinarily thought of in more absolute terms as severe obstacles to such passage of word or trait;—we may say that such knowledge, through publication or apprenticeship, or experience, or all three at once, necessarily permitted the very possibility of the commodity-continuum, and, in turn, facilitated, even fostered—because of its impact on mind and mind’s response to it—the profligate augmentation of production of exotic types, and, in turn, providing the means for the exchange of such difference, the one object for the other, and for their passage across whole sequences of different kinds of frontier, that ordinarily we consider decisive obstacles. Then, it is an evidence, no less, for that translatability we regard as inherent of this whole domain of lived, experienced and practised, inter-cultural, expressive form that affected whole populations: the global population of the early-modern centuries! Camarena viz Gual Benedetto Contrugli, Della Mercatvra et del Mercato Perfetto (Brescia, 1502). [a title that resembles Savary’s later publication and, likewise, repeatedly republished; ­Contrugli, take note, lived between 1416 and 1469; many similar titles for such works of practical use, learning and reference were published in these first years of printing]. Victor le Dayn, Le Manuel des Marchans moult utile a Trestous… (Gand [Gent], 1545). Distributio, item vocabula ac notae partium in rebus pecuniaris, pondere, numero, mensura (n.pl., 1531). D’Ōgheualué’er de Gauden ende Zelueren Munte / van Diuerschē Congrijckē / Herto­ oghdōm’n /Graafschapp/Heerlickheden/Land/endeSteden(Ghend[Gent], 1548).

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569

De Figueren van alle Goude ende Siluere Penninghen die van nu voortaen achtervolghende… (Thantwerpen [Antwerp], 1580). Allan Evans (editor), Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, La Pratica della Mercatura (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). Oliviero de Fonduli, Pratiche de Fioretti Merchantili, utilissime a ciascheduna persona, di mandare a memoria… (Bononiae [Bologna], 1560). Miguel Gual Camarena, El Primer Manual Hispanico de Mercaderia (Siglo xiv) (Barcelona, 1981). Simon Grisogono, Il Mercante Arricchito del Perfetto Quaderniere (Venice, 1609; also later republished). Charles Lockyer, An account of the trade in India containing rules for good government in trade, price courants, and tables with descriptions of Fort St. George, Acheen, Malacca, Condore, Canton, Anjengo, Muskat, Gombroon, Surat, Goa, Carwar, Telichery, Panola, Calicut, the Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena… (London, 1711). Alessandro Moresini, Tariffa del Pagamento di Tutti docii di Venitia con molte altre case che sono al proposito a tutti mercadanti… (Venetia, 1524).[Item at the end of a collection of texts, Miscellanea de Monetis, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, of which the previous entry forms part, and including two other Tariffa, one dated 6 Februaro 1457, and the second 19 Aprile 1524, and mentioned here because of their early dates]. John Robert Morrison, A Chinese Commercial Guide, consisting of a collection of details respecting foreign trade in China (Canton, 1834, 1st edn.; & Canton, 1844, 2nd edn.; Canton, 1848, 3rd edn.). John Robert Morrison, A Companion to the Anglo Chinese Kalendar for 1832 (Macao, 1832). Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company trading to China 1635– 1834 (Oxford, 1926–1929, 5 vols.). Münzbuch (Leipzig, 1572 [title page lost]).[this and other German and Dutch sources mentioned in this list, unless otherwise stated, and including a German and Dutch “Ordnung” (1535) and “Ordonnantie” (1618), resp., not listed, were all encountered in the British Museum (B.M., Dept. Coins & Medals: Eu. Ant. ANO. nos. 2, 10, 1, 5, 7, & 1, resp.)]. Finetto Oberti, Aggiustamento universale, / Overo corrispondenza, che hanno / I Pesi, e le Misure / Di tutta le case l’una con l’altra / Le cittá d’Europa, Asia & Africa / Dilettevole a curiosi, e necessario à negotianti (Venice, n.d.). Ordonnances du Roy of 1561 & 1563, published in collection at Lyon in 1564/1565: Collection of 47 documents, including original «ordonnances» (governmental or administrative orders) and manuals of coin types. That of 1561 is especially compendious

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Bibliography

and gives clear and unambiguous confirmation of various aspects of my argument concerning circulation of means of payment, and also of the attempt to regulate control of such movements that elsewhere might be allowed to run freely. By way of example: the abundance of a kind of coin too often dismissed as «forgery», but better regarded as widespread manufacture of coin in «private» workshop, manufactury and household in response to powerful public forces of demand for means of payment throughout the continuum, one that significantly added to circulation and use of moneys, and encountered in various regions of Asia and Europe. Coin made of billon, copper and tin, and manufactured, perhaps, in the household (as, in handloom weaving), forms part of this production, just as did the substitution of metals by cowry shells, badam seed, and other non-metallic means, each medium, however, accorded properly standard values in strict relation to one another. This is not to say that «forgery» did not exist: complaints of simulacra, allegedly of low quality also lace these public documents. On the other side of the « coin » are the attempts by different authorities to maintain stabilities of exchange prices of different kinds of money, maintaining their standard weights, although, in exchange, inevitably subject to forces of daily fluctuation of value, through supply and demand,—those very forces that had in the first place led to private production and to its profitability,—but also, such as were registered in daily market listings recording exchange rates that altered by the day in markets throughout the continuum. We read also of the necessity of public display of the information with which such ordinances were concerned: thus that “lesdictz Maistres & Changeurs, tiendront un tableau (en lieu eminent de leurs boutiques) ou sera escrit ladicte supputation. … Orfeures & Ioyalliers” being enjoined also to “tenir en lieu eminent de leurs boutiques un autre tableau: auquel seront escrit les valeurs …” [sic.].3 Thus, for example: Ordonnāce du Roy, contenant le poix [poids] et pris des especes d’or & d’argent, ausquelles ledict Seigneur a permis avoir cours & mises en son royaume, pais, terres & Seigneuries de son obeisāce … (Lyon, [1564] 1565); the actual order that follows is dated 1561. 3 “That the said masters and changers [of moneys] should keep a table (in a prominent place of the shops) in which is inscribed this order «… Workers of precious metals and jewellers are requested also to fix in a prominent place in their shops another table on which would be written the values … »”. We have read above that the qian-zhuang banking guilds in China met twice daily to call values, and such lists mentioned above as produced in Indian market towns were clearly also for public information and produced sufficiently frequently to record rapidly altering market values of imported and local moneys.

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571

Ordonnance de la court des monnoyes d’argent et billon forgées soubz les coings & armes du Duc de Savoye (1563). [silver and billon moneys forged within domains subject to the authority of the Dukes of Savoy] (Evidently, «forgery», in this case, also signifies moneys minted by a rival authority, claimed to be sub-standard but whose real fault was such challenges to sovereignty characteristic of the political structures of the period; but what is significant for us is that such low value monies were in sufficient demand to have been considered profitable, on the one hand, and necessary for the continuity of economic activities, on the other). Luca Pacioli, Sūma de Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni & Proportianatita Continentia de Tutta Lopera (Venice, 1494). [Luca Pacioli attr.], Questo e ellibbro che Tracta di Mercatātie & Usanze Dep[aesi] (Firenze, n.d.). Os Guias Náuticos de Munique e Évora (Lisbon, 1965) [containing sixteenth-century texts]. Pegolotti—see Evans. Jacques Peuchet, Dictionnaire universel de la Géographie commerçante (Paris, an vii [1799]). Jacques Peuchet, Vocabulaire des Termes de Commerce, Banque, Manufactures, Navigation marchande, Finance mercantile & statistique (Paris, an ix [1801]). [Ch.] de Peyssonnel, Traite sur le Commerce de la Mer Noire (Paris, 1787, 2 vols.). Placcaet van de Hooge ende Mogende Heeren Staten Generael der Vereenighde Provincien … het inbrengen van alle uytheemsche Goudt-guldens ende Schellingen / als oock vande Silvere Embder Florijnen / of 28 stuyvers Penningen… (‘s Graven-haghe [The Hague], 1630). Prisciani Caesariensis … De nummis, ponderibus, mensuris, numeris, eorúmqz notis, et de vetere computandi per digitos ratione, ab Elia Vineta Santone emendati (Paris, 1565). [a manual containing rules of computation, &c.]. Lewes Roberts, The Marchants Mappe of Commerce (London, 1638). Antonio Maria Venusti, Compendio ultissimo di quella case, le quali a nobili e christiani mercante appartegano… (Milano, 1561). Many similar kinds of manual and lexicon devoted to dispensing both information and personal experience among participants travelling through the exchange-continuum, from market to market, providing «exotic» local information and as aids to memory may be added to this list. One is surprised by their abundance, even if prepared with a full understanding of the contemporary need for them and of the causes of such need. New cases frequently confront one when entering a new city library, exploring its catalogues, or when reading a modern handbook, museum or auction catalogue. For

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Bibliography

example, in looking, once again, at some works already mentioned above, I encounter illustrations of Chinese portable hand-balances and of kinds of entity that most probably are sycee-standard weights, while, for my own part, I remember a set of Mughal rupee-standard weights once in my possession. In Arent Pol’s useful handbook concerning such questions, we read the frontispiece of a Calculation of Values of Gold and Silver Moneys in terms of Size, Pure Metal Content and Weight … for Different Parts of the Indies (Uytrekening van de Goude en Silvere Munts Waardye, inhout der Maten en Swaarte de Gewigten, in de Respecieve Gewesten van Indiën [Middelburg, 1691], produced by the printer for the Dutch East India Company).4 That reference—in this case to the ­Indies—is especially significant, being precisely what one should seek, thus as reference to the very extensions of likely experience gained by any journeying trader in distant lands, and with which there was a vigorous well-established or newly opened commerce. It is such a provision of a practical instrumentation for dispensing and sharing information, or for gauging and measuring what one encounters, that one may hypothesise as a basic condition of continuous inter-regional exchange, wherever it is encountered, thus in the different languages of Asia, thus, for example, in Laotian, Malay, Chinese, Farsi or Urdu, and destined for the abundant market-goers professionally or casually involved in the markets of the inter-Asian and Indian Ocean trading networks, for those from Armenia or the Persian Gulf, or from the ports of the Indies, the Coromandel and China, and who, at least from the eighth century on, and perhaps long before, would earnestly have confronted such a need.

…

ii.

General List of Primary and Secondary Works

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism. Tradition & Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971). Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London, 1958). Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London, 1973; tr. E.B. Ashton); Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main, 1966). Erik Aerts & John H. Munro (eds.), Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History (Proceedings of Session B-15, Tenth International Economic History Congress, Leuven, 1990). Amado Alonso, Poesía y Estilo de Pablo Neruda. Interpretación de una Poesia hermetica (Buenos Aires, 1954).

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Marc Angenot, “Structuralism as Syncretism: Institutional Distortions of Saussure”, in John Fekete (ed.), The Structural Allegory (1984). F.D. Ascoli, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the District of Dacca, 1910–1917 (Calcutta, 1917). R.H. Baden Powell, The Indian Village Community… (London &c., 1896). Francis Lord Bacon, The Proficience and Advancement of Learning… (London, n.d. [1605]). Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays (Austin, Texas, 1981; ed. M ­ ichael Holquist, tr. Holquist & Caryl Emerson). Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington, Indiana, 1984; prologue Michael Holquist, tr. Helène Iswolsky). Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoievsky’s Poetics (Manchester, 1984; intro. Wayne Booth, tr. & ed. Carol Emerson) [once more, one cannot overestimate the importance of Bakhtin’s work]. Slicher van Bath, Spaans Amerika omstreeks 1600 (Utrecht and Antwerp, 1979). Caspar Bauhinus, Pinax. Theatri Botanici (Basle, 1623). John [Johannes] Beckmann, A History of Inventions, Discoveries, and Origins (London, 1846, 4th revised edn.; tr. William Johnston). Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot & Nineteenthcentury Fiction (London, 1983). Juan Benet, La Contrucción de la Torre de Babel (Madrid, 1990). C. Bergmann & R. Leuckart, Anatomisch-physiologische Uebersicht des Thierreichs. Vergleichende Anatomie und Physiologie. Ein Lehrbuch für den Unterricht und zum Selbststudium (Stuttgart, 1852). Marc Bloch, “Natural Economy or Money Economy: A Pseudo-Dilemma”, in Land & Work in Mediæval Europe. Selected Papers by Marc Bloch (London, 1967). Marc Bloch, Les Caractères originaux de l’Histoire rurale française (Paris, 1968 [1931], 2 vols.). Maurice Bloch, “Comment”, Current Anthropology (xix, 1978), 768–769 [response to Godelier, 1978]. Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth (Cambridge, Mass., 1985 [1979]; tr. Robert Wallace). Hans Blumenberg, Genesis of the Copernican World (Cambridge, Mass., 1987 [1975]; tr. Robert Wallace). Franz Boas, Tsimshian Mythology (Washington, 1909–1910; reprint in two volumes). Franz Boas, Kwakiutl Ethnography (Chicago, 1966; ed. & abridged Helen Codere; ms. of 1940s). [Giovanni] Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris (Ulm, 1473). Francesca Bray, Science & Civilisation in China, vi, Biology & Biological Technology, pt. ii, Agriculture (Cambridge & Taipei, 1986). Francesca Bray, The Rice Economies. Technology and development in Asian Societies (­Oxford, 1986). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Patrick Chorley, “The Shift from Spanish to Central-European Merino Wools in the Verviers-Aachen Cloth Industry (1560–1815)”, in Erik Aerts & John H. Munro (eds.), Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History, 96–104. T.H. Chu, Tea Trade in Central China (Shanghai &c., 1936). R.J. Harrison Church, West Africa. A Study of the Environment & Man’s Use of It (London, 1980, 8th edn.). Stuart Clark, in “French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture”, Past & Present (1983), c. 62–99. Carolus Clusius, Rariorum aliquot stirpium, per Pannoniam, Austriam, & vicinas quasdam provincias… (Antwerpen, 1583) [edn. referred Rariorum plantarum historia of 1601]. Carolus Clusius (attributed), Curae posteriores, sev plurimarum non antè cognitarum… ([Leiden], 1611). Tereza Coelho Lopez, Clepsidra de Camilo Pessanha (Lisboa, 2nd edn. of 1983; critical presentation by author). [Iohan Amos] Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus… (London, 1659; tr. English by C. Hoole). Michel Confino, Domaines et Seignures en Russie vers la Fin du xviiie Siècle (Paris, 1963). P.G. Conti (ed. & intro.), Lettere inedite di Charles de L’Escluse (Carolus Clusius) a Matteo Caccini Floricultore fiorentino. Contributo alla Storia della Botanica (Firenze, 1939). Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (Rio de Janeiro, 1902, 2 vols., & Portuguese reprint Porto, 1983) [tr. into French with useful intro. by Jorge Coli & Antoine Seel, Hautes Terres (La Guerre de Canudos) (Paris, 1993)]. Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman, Leonard Thompson & Jan Vansina, African History (Harlow, 1978). Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ii, 1837–43, & iv, 1847–50 (Cambridge, 1986 & 1988 resp.; eds. F. Burkhardt & S. Smith). Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Natural Selection. Being the Second Part of his Big Species Book Written from 1856 to 1858 (Cambridge, 1975; ed. R.C. Stauffer). Charles Darwin, Variations of Animals & Plants under Domestication (London, 1988 reprint, 2 vols.). Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden. A poem in two Parts, i, The Economy of Vegeta­ tion; (ii) The Loves of the Plants, with Philosophical Notes (London, 1791). Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia. Or the Laws of Organic Life (London, 1794). [Erasmus Darwin], The Temple of Nature. Or the Origin of Society. A Poem, with Philosophical Notes (London, 1803). D.C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Evolution & the Meanings of Life (Harmondsworth, 1995).

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Nathalie Depraz, “Le Sixième Méditation cartésienne: fécondité et tensions d’un dialogue philosophique”, the introduction by the translator, of Eugen Fink’s Sixième Méditation Cartésienne. W. van Dijk, A Treatise on Tulips by Carolus Clusius of Arras (Haarlem, 1951). Rembert Dodonæus, Cruydt-Boeck (Leiden, 1608). Rembert Dodonæus, Cosmographica in Astronomiam et Geographiam Isagoge “per Rembertum Dodonæum Malinatem, medicum et mathematicum” (Antwerp, 1548). Rembert Dodonæus, De Sphæra sive de Astronomiæ et Geographiæ Principiis Cosmographica Isagoge (Antwerp & Leiden, 1584) (qua 2nd edn. of previously listed work). Fyodor Dostoyesvky, The Brothers Karamazov (Harmondsworth, 1982 [1958]; tr. David Magarshack). Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and its Implications (London, 1970; introduced by Mary Douglas, tr. anon.). Mark Elvin, “Why China Failed to Create an Endogenous Industrial Capitalism…”, Theory & Society (xiii, 1984, 379–91). Mark Elvin, “Market Towns & Waterways: The County of Shang-hai from 1480–1910”, in G.W. Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China. E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer. A Description of The Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford, 1940). Lucien Febvre, Le Problème de L’Incroyance au xvie Siècle. La Religion de Rabelais (Paris, 1942). John Fekete (ed.), The Structural Allegory. Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought (Manchester, 1984). Paul Feyerabend, Against Method. Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London, 1975). Mauro Fiorentino, Annotationi sopra la Lettione della Spera del Sacro Bosco (Fiorenza, 1549). W. Fischer, R.M. McInnis & J. Schneider (eds.), The Emergence of a World Economy 1500– 1914 (1986, Wiesbaden). William Fitzhugh & Aron Crowell (eds.)—viz. Smithsonian Institute. Wayne Fogg, “Swidden Cultivation of Foxtail Millet by Taiwan Aborigines. A Cultural Analogue of Domestication of Setaria italica in China”, in D.N. Knightly, The Origins of Chinese Civilisation (Berkeley, Cal., 1983). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1974; tr. anon.). Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1978; tr. Alan Sheridan). André Gunder Frank, Development of Underdevelopment (New York, 1966). André Gunder Frank, Capitalism & Underdevelopment in Latin America (Harmondsworth, revisd edn. 1967).

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André Gunder Frank, ReOrient. Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley & New Delhi, 1998). Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id [Das Ich und das Es of 1923], in Freud, On Metapsychology: the Theory of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth, 1984; translated by James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards). Sigmund Freud, “Dostojewski und die Vaderörterung” (1928), in Freud, Studienausgabe. Bildende Kunst und Literatur, x, 271–286 (Frankfurt am Main, 1969). Fryde—viz. von Stromer. Leonardt Fuchs, Commentaires tres Excellens de l’Hystoire des Plantes … par Leonarth Fousch (Paris, 1549). Leonardt Fuchs, Histoire generalle des Plantes et Herbes avec leurs Proprietéz (Troyes, 1729) [Bibliothèque de L’Histoire Naturelle, Paris: Ch. 1149]. K. Fukasawa, Toilerie & Commerce du Levant d’Alep à Marseille (Paris, 1987). Kazuko Furuta, “Peasant, Market Town and Handicraft Technology. Nineteenth-­Century Huzhou”, in Hayami & Tsubouchi (eds.). John Gage, Colour and Culture. Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London, 1993). Galileo Galilei, Dialogo … Massimi Sistemi del Mondo Tolemaico, e Copernicano… (1632, Fiorenza). Galileo Galilei, The Systeme of the World. In Four Dialogues (1661, London; tr. Thomas Salusbury; I especially appreciate the elegance of this near-contemporary version of The Two Chief World Systems). Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Ptolemaic & Copernican (Berkeley, Cal., 1967, 2nd revised edn.; tr. by Stillman Drake). Galilei Galileo, Il Saggiatore, translated as “The Assayer”, in The Controversy of the Comets of 1618 (eds. Stillman Drake & C.D. O’Malley, 1960, Philadelphia). Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution. The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley, 1963). Clifford Geertz, Negara. The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, 1980). Clifford Geertz, “Anti Anti-Relativism”, American Anthropologist, 1984, lxxxvi, 263–278. Ernest Gellner, “Relativism and Universals”, in Hollis and Lukes, Rationality and Relativism, 181–200. A. Gibson (ed), Tours for Scientific & Economical Research, made in Guzerat, Kattiawar, and the Conkuns, in 1787–8 by Dr. Hove (pubd. from the ms. in the Banksian Library, British Museum), Selections from the Records of the Bombay Government (n.s., xvi, 1855). T. Gilbert & S.S. Salimath, “The Cultivation of Drilled Paddy in South Bombay Presidency”, Bombay Agricultural Department Bulletin (no. 82, 1917) [remarkable material and evidence!].

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Maurice Godelier, “Infrastructures, Societies and History”, Current Anthropology (xix, 1978), 763–768. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk and E.P. Thompson, Family and Inheritance. Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800 (London, 1976). Howard Levi Gray, English Field Systems (Cambridge, Mass., 1915). Marjorie Grene, “Introduction”, in Marjorie Grene, ed., Dimensions of Darwinism. Themes and Counterthemes in Twentieth Century Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, 1983). Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (Glasgow, 1985; tr. Robert Chandler). A.J. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture (London, 1985 [Moscow, 1972]; tr. G.L. Campbell) [there are two Russian authors with the same name and initial, but differently transcribed into Latin script, and who should not be confused with one another; both were philosophers, but whilst A.J. continued to work in Moscow, Aron, the phenomenologist, was one of the army of refugees fleeing events in late1930s Europe, migrating from country to country, settling briefly in France, writing manuscripts of importance on Husserl’s thought in French (listed in the section concerning Husserl), before settling in the United States and writing in English]. Gujarat Cottons Report (1787–8)—cf. supra: A. Gibson, Tours…. Oswald Hanfling, Logical Positivism (Oxford, 1981). Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan Or the Matter, Forme and Power of Commonwealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill (Oxford, 1960 [1651]). Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). Otfried Höffe, “Eine Republikanische Vernunft. Zur Kritiek des Solipsismus-Vorwurfs”, in Schönrich & Kato (eds.), Kant in der Diskussion der Moderne, 396–407. Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe (Regensburg, 1992–1993; ed. Michael Knappe, in three volumes). Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries (London, 1665 [reprint New York, 1961]). A.G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973). W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1955). Anton Pantaleon Hove, Dr.—cf. supra: A. Gibson, Tours…. Martin Hollis & Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationalism and Relativism (Oxford, 1982). H.T. Huang, in Huang & Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vi, Biology and Biological Technology, pt. v, Fermentations and Food Science, §f, “Tea Processing and Utilisation”. Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (Cambridge, 1974).

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Akira Hayami & Yoshihiro Tsubouchi (eds.), Economic and Demographic Development in Rice Producing Societies (Tokyo, 1989). Włodzimierz Hubicki, entry on «Thurneisser», in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (xiii, 1976), 396–398. A.S. Ishaq, “Rice Cultivation in the Larkana District”, Bombay Agricultural Department Bulletin (no. 99, 1921). Roman Jakobson & Claude Lévi-Strauss, Correspondance 1942–1982 ([Paris], 2018; ed. Emanuelle Loyer, ed. & largely tr’d. Patrice Maniglier). François Jullien, La Grande Image n’a pas de Forme. À Partir des Arts de Peindre de la Chine Ancienne ([Paris], 2003). E. Kæmpfer, Amoenitates Exoticæ Fasciculi, v… (Lemgoviæ, 1712). Stuart A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order. Self-Organization & Selection in Evolution (New York, 1993). Kazuko—viz Furuta. Elizabeth A. Kellogg, “Variation & Species Limits in Agamospermous Grasses”, 112–123 (Systematic Botany, xv, 1990). Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis (Rome, 1646). Athanasius Kircher, Turris Babel sive Archontologia (Amsterdam, 1679). Arnost Klima, “English Merchant Capital in Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century”, Econ. Hist. Rev. (2nd ser., xii, 1959). Arnost Klima, “Foreign Trade of Bohemia from the 16th to the 18th Century”, in W. Fischer, et al. (eds.), The Emergence of a World Economy, 191–198. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957). Alexandre Koyré, “Paracelse (1493–1541)”, in Koyré, Mystiques, Spirituels, Alchimistes du xvie Siècle Allemand (Paris, 1971), 75–129. H. Kühlenbeck, The Central Nervous System of Vertebrates (New York, 1967). Witold Kula, Measures and Men (Princeton, 1986). Will Kwiatowski, The Eckstein Shahnama. An Ottoman Book of Kings (London, 2005). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Family Structures and Inheritance Customs in SixteenthCentury France”, in Goody, Thirsk and Thompson (eds.), Family and Inheritance, 37–70. J.-B. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique ([Paris], 1809). J.-B. Lamarck, Oeuvres Choisies (Paris, [1913]). David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969). G.W. Leibniz, Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria, in qua, ex Arithmeticae Fundamentis (Leipzig, 1666) (Paris, 2012). T. Lenoir, The Strategy of Life. Teleology & Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago, 1982).

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Index of Names A small number of names lack page reference although directly implicit either in the matter of the book or in the interpretation that has led to the latter; in the first case I place the abbreviation «impl.» after the name (implied or implicated), and in the second case «bibl» (bibliography). In this sense too these page references may be a serious underestimation of the role of such persons in the formation of this book, most obviously where Kant and Hegel are concerned, but also in many other less obvious cases, for example that of the French Annalist school of French historians of the 1960s, and after whose work I conceived my own research in Western India (largely unpublished); also that, say, of James Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel, and of three otherwise unmentioned yet decisive teachers of my past, Eric Hobsbawm, Michael Wilks and the latter’s excellent friend and colleague G.C. Gibbs.

A. Abrams, M.H. romanticisism & helical concept of time 250n33. Adorno, Theodor dialectic xliii, 387–8, 387–8nn168–9. Ahuja, Ravi “Foreword”: xvii–xxiv “Acknowledgements”: xlvii. the question of class & my answer: 22n11. Aldrovandi, Ulisse (1522–1605) “Naturalist”, and founding spirit of Bologna’s botanical garden his correspondence 460 Alonso, Amado (unequalled interpreter of Neruda’s Residencias, i & ii). Neruda’s linguistic violence 85n16. Alquié, Ferdinand translating & interpreting Kant 244n25, 249n30.

Annales E.S.C. an inspiration! 79–80n8 viz. Rancière, for critique of their scientism xx, 79, 79–80n8, 81n11, 84n15. mentalités 227n14. Anonymous La Vocation de St. Mathieu (17th c.) portraying use of coin-weight box and mini-balance 143n78. Ascoli, F.D. survey and settlement of Dacca district 1910–18 194n30. B. Bacon, Francis (1605) 77, 77n3. Baehrel, René 79n8. (first generation of French Annalist historians) von Baer, Ernst 481. (his laws of embryological development)

Ameriks, Karl interpreting Kant 78n5, 204n41.

Bakhtin, Mikhaïl polyphonic textuality & dissonance 79n8, 204n41.

Angenot, Marc critique of structuralism 80n9.

van Bath, Bernard Slicher development sociologist 19n10, 34, 62n31.

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588 Bauhinus, Caspar (1560–1624) = Caspar Bauhin (anatomist & medical botanist) his frontispiece 352, 462, 471–2, 472n21, 515, 536. Beccaria, Cesare (1738–1794) social contractualist 263. Beckmann, John [= Johannes] (1739–1811) horticulture and systematics 260n54, 461n5 (tulips & tulip bubble), 478 & 478n2 (Ottoman horticulture) Beer, Gillian interpreting Darwin 289n80, 307, 307n99. Benet, Juan study of the Tower of Babel 382n164. Bentley, Richard (1662–1742) correspondence with Newton discussed by Koyré 252n36.

Index of Names iv (the illustration), vi, 61, 374n154. commentary 510, 512, 517, 523, 528, 530. constitution of the cultural object 567. Böhme, Jakob (1575–1624) his Adam & Eve 515. Bohr, Niels his complementarity principle (atom & wave) 283n75, 375, 495, 518–9. Blumenberg, Hans interpreting Kant 78n5, 499n7. Bourgeois, Bernard translating and interpreting Hegel’s logic 324n117, 376n158. Wesen 526n14. Brandt, Reinhard interpreting Kant 251–2n35.

Bergmann, C. & R. Leuckart(1852) teleomechanism in biology 494–7, 494n2, 496–7nn4–5.

Braudel, Fernand & the Annales e.s.c. «school» of social historians 81n11.

Besso, Michele Correspondence with Einstein (his Kantism concerning time) 274–5n64.

Bray, Francesca Chinese peasantry and agricultural science 199n36. speciation of rices 499n7.

Bloch, Marc 10–11n5, 97n36 (effective critic of compartmentalism), 111–2nn49 & 50, 432, 432n3 all on agricultural praxis and fractionated rights in medieval and early-modern history). Bloch, Maurice comment on Godelier 220n5. Boas, Franz cultural anthropology of North-West Coast native-American culture 259n52, 344–5n130. Boccaccio, Giovanni (for Zainer’s Adam & Eve frontispiece as «lesson» in phenomenology 1473)

Brecht Bertolt dystopia or anti-city of Mahagony 254n43. distanciation, concept of (Verfremdungseffekt) 227n13, 519. Galileo 38–9n20, 337. Breton, André his interest in contemporary science 375, 518. Breton, Francis East India Company merchant, his letter on cloths of 1644 utilised in book 181n21. Bretschneider, E. on Chinese teas, production and culture bibl. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

589

Index of Names Bruegel, Pieter, the elder “The Tower of Babel”, two paintings of c. 1563 xviii, 381–2, 382n163, 464, 525–6. “The Fall of Icarus” of c. 1555 impl. Bruno, Giordano the centre is everywhere 334–5, 370–1; essence 511; hermeticicm 253n39, 335; infinitist 460, 472–3n23; poesis of the sphere 244, 244–5n26; spiritual love 250n33; tower of knowledge 463–4. Budd, Ann F. systematics and speciation of grasses 236n19. Bunyan, John (1628–1688) pilgrimage towards knowledge 254. Burkill, I.H. plant systematics 443n11, 468. Butinone, Bernardino painting of Child Christ Disputing with Doctors (c. 1480) 156fig13 (his painting of Christ on the knowledge tower), 463n7, 463–4 (a knowledge inaccessible), 508 & 525–6 (commentary on painting). C. Caccini, Matteo (1573–1640) early science of plants, his correspondence with Clusius & Colonna 437n5, 460, 478n3. Cameron, Rondo forwords xxxiii, xl. language-use with regard to industrialisation in Europe: 37, 85–93, 86n18, 89nn25–8, 127n64, 319n113. Camillo, Giulio (1480–1540) poesis of the Sphere 244, 253–4, 254n44, 344–5n130, 352, 353n137, 421n8, 461–2, 461n11, 468n21.

Campanella, Tomasso La Città del Sole (composed c. 1602), utopian tower of knowledge 125–6n63, 244, 253–4, 253–5nn39 & 44, 344n130, 352, 352–3n137, 398n184, 424, 465–6, 465n11, 472n21. Apologia pro Galileo (1622) 352. Carlson, M. Theatre architecture semiotics 466n13. Carpenter, Nathaniel (1635) quoted oed: that most medicinal drugs came from India 474n25. Cassirer, Ernst (Kantian [rather than neo-Kantian] concerned directly with the problem of knowledge and cultural extensions of transcendental critique) on the accessibility of a phenomenology 14n6; on communication 113n51; on the dialectic 56, 388; his evolutionist historicism here criticised 199–200n36, 217–8n8, 217–20, 267–9, 311; his Kantism 216n1, 243–4n25, 260, 263n57, 398n183, 496n4; language-use 127n64, 196–7n33, 208n45, 261n55, 312; method xxxvii– xxxviii, on phenomenology of language and material culture 171n11, 196–7n33, 204n41, 258, 260n54, 264, 285, 307–8; on myth 79n8, 87, 87n21; his phenomenology 158n1, 219–20, 248, 311; positivism & structuralism 80n9; the problem of knowledge 1n1, 15, 36, 48, 56, 78n5, 94, 94n33, 127n64, 227, 227n13, 228n15, 276, 323n116, 360, 375. Celan, Paul (major German language poet of Rumanian Jewish origins exiled in Paris) his Husserlian phenomenology and his Freudism ; his intimate, purposive poetic use of the dialectic 414n1, 559n248, 48n24, 55–6, 226. my appropriation of his method 226n12.

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590 Chang See Te-tzu Char, René 337, 507. Major French language poet ascent towards essence 250n33, 344– 5n130, 525; concept of «love» spiritual and carnal 350; his essentialism (& languageuse) 343, 347n132, 351, 373, 463–4; the sun as representative of essence 57, 350; “Jacquemard et Julia” 350; “Nous Avons ...” 250n33; “Pénombre” 350; “Les Trois Soeurs” 350, 511, 513, 515; “Suzerain” 6n3. Chinua Achebe (major Biafran Nigerian novelist) Things Fall Apart bibl. Chin-Keong Ng inter-Asian trade 111–2n50, 138, 138n75. Chorley, Patrick wools 180n18. Church, R.J. Harrison West African geography 441n6. Clark, Stuart critique of concept of «mentalities» 311n103. Clarke, Samuel (1675–1729) his dispute with Leibniz 77n4. van Cleef, Hendrik (late 16th-c.) painting of Tower of Babel Clusius, Carolus (1526–1609) = Charles de L’Escluse, early science of plants 437, 437–8n5; his tulips 454, 468; correspondence with Caccini and Colonna, 460n, 2–4.

Index of Names helical concept of temporal progression 250n33. Colonna, Fabio (1567–1640) correspondence with Clusius and Caccini 436–7–3n5. Comenius, Iohan Amos (1592–1670) poesis of knowledge 244, 472n21; species concept (depiction of «species garden») 533; «species garden» 465, 466n13. Condillac, de (1798) (poesis of knowledge) cited by Cassirer 78n5. Confino, Michel land distribution in 18th century Russia and functions of the mir 10–11n5. Conrad, Joseph The Rescue (ethnographic representation and anti-colonial sensitivity) 343n129. Conseilheiro, António leader of shanty utopia of Canudos 254, 254n46. Conti, P.G. editor of correspondence among medical botanists 437n5, 460n4, 478n3. Copernicus, Nicolaus Kant’s metaphor of his «Copernican revolution» 244, 244n25, 249, 254, 464, 509; on observational subjectivity 83, 83n14; poesis of knowledge 78n5, 336–7, 353; scientism 78–9. Cossa, Francesco del painting of Madonna col Bambino (1474) 253n41.

Coelho Lopes, Tereza interpreting Pessanha Clepsidra de Camilo Pessanha, 343n149.

Costa, Lorenzo painting of Madonna col Bambino (1496) 253n41.

Coleridge, Samuel discussed by Abrams 250n33.

Cribb, Joe his catalogue of Chinese sycee bibl.

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Index of Names instrumentation of recognition and identification of sycee 143n78, 535n16. Crowther-Beynon, Vernon Bryan coin-weight boxes 143n78, 562. Crossley, D.W. (ed.) Medieval Industry 136n71. Cunha, Euclides da Os Sertões (chronicle of Canudos) 254n46. Curtin, Philip et al pre-colonial African crop selection 436n6, 446n13. Cusa, Nicolas de his cosmology 83, 83n14, 290, 290n81, 343, 370–1. D. Daphnis and Chloe That philosophical anthropology, on the one hand, and social and cultural anthropology, on the other, should integrate and conceive. xlix, 14, 16, 43–4, 176, 222n6, 363. Darwin, Charles Reference to him and to his individualist conception of the constitution of the real threads throughout the whole book. Most entries with regard to Darwinism, in all its varied historical, cultural, botanical and form-giving aspects, are located in the Subject Index under a variety of headings including, for example, «Darwinism», «speciation», «systematics», «taxonomy» and «universal». In this index, I seek to order and list, according to similar criteria, such cases, but the result is necessarily imperfect, even arbitrary, and certainly incomplete. His individualist theory of evolution has come to have a major influence on my conception of the formation of the real in history, and I needs argue this in the book in order to provide commoditisation its full

591 contextuality and make visible the main issues that it entails. anti-essentialist 289, 289n80, 307. his correspondence and mentions of doubts 20, 25–6, 33, 86n19 (expression of his doubts), 232–3, 235, 260n54, 310, 478n5, 481n10 (with Lindley). creationist language-use creationist metaphor and languageuse dominate discussion among Darwinists, by Darwin himself, and in biology, and is therefore treated at length in the book. 86, 127–8, 479. «Darwinism» and «anti-Darwinism» liv–lvi. environment & context 116, 435. evolutionary tree (see entry for «universal» in Subject Index; the question concerns the empirical possibility of any human universal) 51, 479–80. individualist conception of nature and taxonomy (this issue dominates both discussion and framework of interpretation of this book, acting as a veritable epistemology of the real) xx–xxii, xxix, xxxvii, xli, 18–38, 227–8n14, 231, 256, 295–7, 317n111, 401. ... thus a theory of accident as ground of societal formation (of class and category) 159, 282, 320–1, 325–6, 333–40, 366, 386, 395, 401, 418–9, 451n18. language-phenomenal 60. language-use 82 narrative form of the real 76, 429–30 his reception 306-7 (Larousse dictionary of 1870), 480-1, 481n10 (The Penny dictionary, vol. 1836). his sources 260n54. his systematics as fact and problem 193, 236n19, 237, 279, 392n171, 426–7, 477ff, 493ff (Part 2 Appendix 1) taxonomy (this question runs throughout the book: the contrast between cultural

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592 Darwin, Charles (cont.) and natural taxonomy, artifice and nature) 57, 62, 232, 235, 283, 286, 291–8, 426, 436. the universal and a Darwinist ontogenesis of society (this question governs the book) 266–9, 270–1, 360. Darwin, Erasmus (Charles’ grandfather, 1731–1802) poetising medical botanist 251–2, 252n36, 468–9n16. cited by Kant 252n36. le Dayn, Victor his merchant’s manual (1545) 143–4n79. Dee, John 16th-century magus and mathematician 244. five memory books in his library 260n53. Defoe, Daniel his logical constructionalism 267. Delamarre, J.-L. translator of Kant’s First Critique 494–5n2. Dennett, Daniel 452, 479, 479n7, 493, 496n3. Depraz, Nathalie trans. of Eugen Fink’s phenomenology 1, 1n1. Fink’s onto-theology 55, 55n26. van Dijk, W. re-Clusius 460nn2–3. Derrida, Jacques transl. of Husserl 62, 147, 300n88, 414n1. di Giovanni, George translator and interpeter of Hegel, and introduction to his Logic 30n15, 347n132, 415n2, 431n2, 511n5, 521n11, 526n12, 528n13, 550n1, 558. cultural analogs 412n2, 423n7. Hegel’s disagreement with Kant 524n10.

Index of Names Dodonæus (1517–1585) = Rembert Dodoens “Medicum et mathematicum” 460, 460n4, 462, 465n12, 466, 466n15. Dostoyesvky, Fyodor The Brothers Karamazov concerning intellectual patricide and Freud bibl. Drake, Stillman translator of Galileo’s Dialogues 59, 59n29, 252n36, 290n81. Duhem, Pierre 220. Dumont, Louis Homo Hierarchicus 24n13, 46–7, 97, 114, 189, 341, 362. Dworkin, Ronald 276. E. Einstein, Albert his negationist view of time 274–5n64; correctives to common sense 49, 54; his Kantism 83, 83n14, 275; his metaphysic 376, 518. Eisenstein, Serguei Strike 348. Eisler, Rudolf (his indispensable Kant dictionary) Kant’s tower: Pt.i, Ch.3, §3; Analogie 204–5n41; ding-an-sich 367n147; Einfach 77n4; Erkenntnis 83n14; experience and negation 385n167; Noumenon 77n4, 279n70; priority of practical reason 392ff., 392n171; Realität 272n62, 367–8n147 & 149; Sachheit 272n62; space/time 305n96; Verneinungen (negation) 385n167. Elvin, Mark China as unit of conception and language, thus as «an economy» 90n28; China’s «failure» [sic] 90n28; his study of marketisation in Zhezhiang 111n50.

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593

Index of Names Evans-Pritchard, E.E. anthropologist of Nuer, Dinka and Azande; the absent colonial presence 58, 116n54. van Eyck, Jan painting of Heilige Barbara (1437). 253n42. F. Fawcett, Charles (his compilation of East India Company correspondence) 184n24. Feuerbach, Ludwig 387–8. (his contribution to the materialisation of the dialectic and of phenomenology) Feyerabend, Paul (his incisive essay on Galileo) 83n14, 275n66. Fink, Eugen 1n1, 3, 42. phenomenologist and Husserl’s assistant language 126–7n63; «The Missing Discipline» 248–9n30; phenomenology as if it were inaccessible 14n6, 54–5 (as if a retreat from Hegel’s audacity), 176. Fiorentino, Mauro The Sphere (1549) 244–5n26. Fludd, Robert (1574–1637) 244, 463. Fogg, Wayne agriculturalist ritual 17n7, 259n52, 317n110; selection of seed 27–8, 198n34, 317n110–1; swidden cultivation in upland Taiwan 17n7. Fonduli, Oliviero de (1560) 135–6n70. monetary tract Förster, Eckart interpreter and translator of Kant 250n33, 251–2n35–36, 278–9n69, 499n7. Kant’s Opus Postumum 77n4, 248n30, 263–4n57, 271n61, 394–5n176–177, 551–2.

Foster, William 130n67, 181n21, 184n24. (his compilations of English East India Company correspondence) Foucault, Michel xxv, 474, 474n26. (for his focus upon Bentham’s panopticon as model for prisons and societal control) Fox, Richard rurban, his concept of 434n4. Frank, André Gunder (who thematised and interpreted globalism long before it became acceptable in the university) “Acknowledgements”: xlvii. “the development of underdevelopment”: 57, 178, 361n142, 366–367, 367n146. Freud, Sigmund Paul Celan’s fully studied, poetised and self-targeting freudism: impl.; Freud’s phenomenological exploration of mind and language-use & Ricoeur’s brilliant interpretation of it 36–7, 225n10; his methodological emphasis 376; his articulation of quantity with quality: impl. Friedman, Michael (interpreter of Kant) Kant’s Newtonian/Euclidian a-priori of time/space versus twentieth century relativity see Pt.1, Ch.3, §3 for extensive discussion and my justification of Kant’s position; & 75n1, 77n4, 250n33, 251n35, 274–5n64, 276n67, 282ff. Kant & metaphysic 80n10, 251n35. Kant & method 83n14, 249, 250n32. Fuchs, Leonardt (1501–1566) medical botany 353–4n137, 462–3, 471–2. Fukasawa, Katsumi on the reproduction of Indian cotton typologies in Safavid and Ottoman territories

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594

Index of Names

Fukasawa, Katsumi (cont.) 132n68, 138, 138n75, 150n86, 180n18, 443, 444n12. Furetière, Antoine his dictionary (1690) 77, 77n3. G. Gage, John impl. Galileo, Galilei (1564–1642) his stand against methodological convenience 38, 38–9n20, 59, 59n29; correcting common-sense 16, 32, 54, 83, 83n14, 248n30, 325, 425; his metaphysic (nature as divine artifice) 251–2, 252n36; his conflict with the predominant poetics of knowledge 38–9n20, 335–7, 349, 352–3, 464, 523; on subjective interference in observation 83, 83n14, 275, 275n66, 326; a universe without centre 290n81; Campanella’s defence of Galileo 352. See also Brecht’s Life of Galileo, Feyerabend’s Against Method, Salusbury’s near contemporary translation, and Drake’s modern translation.

Chemist, apothecary, naturalist, medicinist 462–3. his systematics 466, 472–3. Gibbs, G.C. (a teacher who taught rigour and method and conveyed inspiration) acknowledgement on first page of this Index. Gibson, Alexander (ed.) See Hove for his report on Indian «cottons» Gilbert, T. & S.S. Salimath study of peasant technology of seed selection 199n36, 499n7. Godelier, Maurice his view of culture 220n5. Goethe, J.W. von see also the entries for Abrams, Bergmann & Leuckart, Lenoir and Lindley his biology & morphology 252n36, 479–81; helical «romantic» concept of temporal progression 250n33. Goldhagen, Hermannus «simple» 77, 77n3.

Gauguin, Paul anti-colonialist. 343n129.

Goubert, Pierre 79n8. (first generation of French Annalist historians) impl.

Geertz, Clifford critique of his historical approach & method as exposed in Negara: 321, 333n123, 341, 360n141, 360–2; moral economy: 46; theatre state (Negara): 343n129. thick description 105; underdevelopment (Agricultural Involution) 179n16.

Grene, Marjorie 82n12, 482n13. historian of science Gresham, Thomas his law: «bad money drives out good» 96n34, 159–60n2, 207n44, 242, 279–80n72, 314n106.

Gellner, Ernest bibl. (for his intervention in the rationalism and relativism debate)

Grossman, Vasily his novel Life and Fate: dissonance as condition for the formation of knowledge 94n33, 396n179.

Geoffroy, Étienne-François (1672–1731)

Guillemit, L. translator of Kant’s First Critique 495n2.

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Index of Names Gunder Frank, André viz. Frank Gurwitsch, Aron Phenomenologist 147n84, 171n11, 217–8n2, 414n1. critique of evolutionist comparison of «societies» 311–2n103. Gurevich, A.J.1 his stereotypical conception of collective «mentalités» criticised 227–8n14. H. Habermas, Jürgen construction of a civil ethic 276. Hall, A.R. historian cited by Nathan Rosenberg 92n30. von Haller, Albrecht (1708–1777) anatomist & naturalist (botanist) 472–3n23. Hanfling, Oswald bibl. Hayek, F.A. his economic theory 80n10. Hegel, G.W.F. xx, xxvii, xl, 3, 42, 229, 324, 378, 498ff the phenomenological approach: 176, 223, 229, 248, 504–12 (introduction to “The Phenomenology Lesson”), 516-27 (as knowledge-tower & knowledge-well). accident, necessity, finitude: 325n118, 357; accessibility of his phenomenology: 55;

1 (Gurwitsch and Gurevich evidently transcribe the same name, yet are two different individuals, philosopher and cultural historian, respectively, roughly contemporaneous of one another. One exiled himself to the United States and the other remained in Moscow.)

595 “appearance is not untrue but is truth itself”: 79–80n8, 417n3; “I confess: both Kant and Hegel are true!”: 492n4, 530; concept of nature: 30n15, 271n61, 431n2; conditions of objectification of the cultural object: 131–2 (in analogy with the moments of commoditisation), 171n11, 176, 261, 346n131, 371, 383–7, 519n11, 535–6; dialectic, his use: 6, 30n15, 47–8, 55, 58, 120–1n57, 125–7n63, 245n27, 277n68, 292, 324n117, 327–8n119, 341–2n128, 346n131, 368n149, 371, 374–6, 376n158 (an important definition), 377n159, 383, 386–7 (negation), 387n168, 492n4, 511, 511n7, 518–24; as constructionalist: 267; evolution: exchange and use value: see quantity and quality 293; historical anticipations illustrated and discussed: 510, 514, 516; his Kantism 248nn29–30, 368n149, 376n158; “I confess to Hegel’s influence”: 5; infinitude: 338; later inherited in German culture: 518; his Kantism and distinction from Kant: eg. 248n29–30, 496n4; a just basis for his distinction from Kant: 492n4, 528; his use of language: 249n31; materialisation: xxi, 30n15, 55, 385, 387–8 (& alienation), 394n177; his metaphysic: 57 (the sun), 351, 376, 387–8, 387n168, 518–9 (& wave theory and the unbedingten Grund); myth and dialectic: eg. 523; the possibility of freedom: 323n117 (“freedom the truth of necessity”); quantity and quality 109n46, 342 («Geist»); an adamant realism: 79–80n8 (“appearance is the truth”); terminology 4; the subjective conditions of objectification: 4, 63, 223, 245n27, 248, 275, 377n159; time/space as concept, structure and method (& time as constitution of the timeless; «Itzt»): 24, 125–7n63, 245–6, 250–1, 251n34, 267, 338, 357, 357n139, 381, 381n162; translating him: lii–lv, 542ff, 548–56; universal / particular: 3–4, 394, 514–5, 542n17; universal conditions of mind (and intercultural translatability): 7, 423n7; «Wärmestoff» 271n61, 342, 394, 415n2, 496n4 (a terminology of the day).

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596 Hegel, G.W.F (cont.) Aufhebung: 524; Begriff: 324n117 (“the reign of freedom opens up within the concept”), & 325n118 (for my own «translation»), 346n131, 376n158, 418n4, 511–12n5, 526n12, 527–8, 542n17 (“its differentiation … constitutes the entire concept”); begriffene: 513, 513n7; Ideelle: 347n132; gleichgültig: 27n14, 377n159, 418n4; Itzt: 125–7n63; Verneinungen (negation): 385–7, 385n167, 515, 526–8. & Heisenberg 275; Ricoeur 61; Rousseau 55–6n27, 55n27. his translators and interpreters : Bourgeois, Bernard 324n117, 376n158, 528n14. di Giovanni, George30n15, 347n132, 415n2 (translatability), 423n7 (translatability), 431n2. Hyppolite, Jean liv. Koyré, Alexandre 6. Stirling, James 248n29, 496n4, 515n6, 549. Heidegger, Martin stereotypical treatment of nation, language and «racial» character 38, 323n116 Heisenberg, Werner his Uncertainty Principle 4–5, 25, 54, 56, 83, 83n14, 125–6n63, 223, 275, 376, 518.

Index of Names 263, 267, 522; his social contractualism 263, 419n5. Hobsbawm, Eric (a teacher for whom comparison, unification, and thus the interdisciplinary, composed the very soil of knowledge) acknowledgement on first page of this Index. with Terence Ranger (eds.) Invention of Tradition 60. Höffe, Otfried Kant interpreter 276n67 (time), 413n2 (Kant’s human being as creator of artifice). Hölderlin, Friedrich (major German language poet and philosopher, close intellectual friend of Hegel whilst students at Jena) dialectic applied in prose and poetry: 550; essentialist poetic: 57, 381–2; (metaphysic of sun as essence), 252–3n38: (well as source), 351 (sun as essence, 516 (poesis of wave); infinitude: 381–2; a common language-use with Kant with Hegel: 376; “Der Rhein”: impl. Hollis, Martin with Lukes ed. Rationality and Relativism, important collection of articles debating issue 187–8, 222n6.

von Helmholz, Hermann (1821–1894) & teleomechanism 494n2, 496n3.

Hooke, Robert (1635–1703) seed individualism 19, 29, 34, 294, 317n111, 325, 450, 450n18.

Herz, Heinrich Cassirer’s reference to symbolic language 127n64.

Horstmann, Rolf-Peter interpreter of Kant’s transcendental deductions 251–2n35.

Hielkema, Lien “Acknowledgements”: xlv, xlvii.

Houben, G.M.M. his writings on coin-weights 143n78.

Hobbes, Thomas 160n2. discussed by Kant 396–8, 396–7nn182–3; his logical- & social-constructionalism

Hove, Anton Pantaleon correspondent in Gujarat writing on cotton processing

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597

Index of Names Gujarat Cottons Report (1787–8) 163–73, 180n18, 223, 331, 337, 475–6n28.

Brecht: 227n13 (distanciation); Celan (a poesis thoroughly studied in Husserlianism) 225n10; Derrida: 62, 147, 411n1 (thought & language); Gurwitsch 171n11, 356n138; Ricoeur 60–1, 61n30, 249n31, 277n68, 337 (interpretation & translation).

H.T. Huang tea processing 476n30. Huang, Ray bibl. 16th century Ming taxation

Begriff 300n86; his concept: 299–301nn86, 88 & 90; Eidos 14n6; Modifikation: 318n113; Noem & Noese 356n138; Reduktion (Hegel’s negation and coupled with constitution): 250, 261, 368n149, 385n167, 495; Wesen 60–1, 249n31.

Hubicki, Włodzimierz dictionary entry for Thurneisser 353–4n137, 472–3n23. Hume, David Kant’s attitude to him 396–7n181. Husserl, Edmund 1, 1n1, 2–3, 14, 42, 176, 197, 228, 248–9n30, 335n125, 374, 478, 496, 505–6. an anti-essentialism: 336–7, 387n168; the communicative act: 62, 147; constitution of the cultural object 158, 171n11, 248, 261, 357, 371, 393n174; constitution of the object in thought and of objectivity: 34–5, 42, 54, 74, 83, 158n1, 171n11, n13, 204n41, 223, 244n25, 248, 273–4, 273–4n63, 285n77, 301n90, 319n113, 329, 356n138, 368–9, 368–9nn149–150, 371, 377–9, 399n160; his use of dialectic 388, 514; his evolutionist historicism criticised: 219, 217–9nn2–3, 267, 323n116; his unstated Hegelianism: 3, 492n4; his unstated Kantism: 196–7n33, 204n41, 277n68, 376, 492n4; individualist and inter-subjective: see “Subject Index”; on intention: see “Subject Index” language as means: 62, 147, 234, 335n125; languages &c. as units of contrast: 267, 323n116; a developing materialism: 376; «the missing discipline»: 248n30, 506; packaging: 234, 374; guilty of intellectual patricide: 42; scientific and phenomenological dimensions of thought: 176, 228n15, 284n77, 414, 414n1; phenomenological reduction of sense embodied in myth and religion: 509–12; time: 357n139; translating Husserl: lii–liii, 60–1, 61n30, 249n31, 546ff; an absent transcendentalism?: 277n68, 357, 357n139; vocabulary: 14n6, 77n4.

I. Illich, Ivan «remote», modernity of sense of concept 65n33. Ishaq, A.N. market determination of seed selection plant-selection practices 200n37, 499n7. J. Jakobson, Roman correspondence with Lévi-Strauss: 17n8; metaphysic and knowledge formation: 376n156; species identity: 313n105; his structuralism: 17, 334n124; versus biological determinism 323n116. Jonson, Ben (1572–1637) Every Man out of his Humour & Volpone: contemporary consciousness of «foreign» monetary typologies bibl. Jullien, Francois «Chinese» aesthetic and metaphysic 344, 344–5n130. K. Kant, Immanuel (The whole book may be said to embody Kantian principles and to work them

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598 Kant, Immanuel (cont.) through into the kinds of global empirical domain that most concerns me; the index references that follow constitute but sherds on the surface of this pile of what I inherit from him. It is the most unsatisfactory and incomplete entry in this index.) an accessible anthropology of mind: 176; a-priori conditions of thought: xv, xix, 1n1, 3, 14–5, 14n6 (Fink’s abyss), 39, 48–56, “More than a Preface” §6, 77n4, 101, 216–20, 248–9, 248–9n30, 263, 263n56, 272–7, 308, 312–3n104, 321, 324n117, 379 (the historical event of such an a-priori condition of human thought), 380–384, 399–400, 509–16; his distinction between discursive and mathematical knowledge 298–318; his essentialist language: 249n31; intersubjective exchange as the condition of the universal: 52, 113n51, 204n41, 309, 396; his logical-constructionalism: 250–1, 267, 276, 282, 284, 307–10 (the forms of reason), 395–6; the possibility of freedom: xix, xxi, 52, 260–1, 272n62, 278n69, 279, 281n74, 291– 2n82, 312n104, 321–2, 392–7, 393–4nn174 & 176–7; progressus indefinitum: 248n30; his Rousseau’ism: 55n27, 263n57, 398–9; his Rousseau’ist social contractualism: 263, 396n180, 395–400, 399n187, 494–5n2; his tower: Pt.1Ch3§2 (Kant’s Tower of Babel); Pt1Ch3§3§§iv§§§g (Kant’s second reference to the tower): 380ff; Pt1Ch3§3§§v (Kant’s third reference to the tower); lv & 257n49 (every individual to build his or her own tower); his transcendental Newtoniansm and Euclidism: Pt1Ch3§3§§2–3 (systematic exposition & defence), & xvii–xix, xxii–xxiv, 16, 49, 54, 75n2, 77–8, 77–78nn4–5, 80n10, 83n14, 125–6n63, 127, 248n30, 251–2, 251–2nn35– 36, 254, 261–3, 272n62, 274–81, 274–5n64, 281–292, 312n104, 318–27, 334, 345, 353, 368–9n149, 382, 386, 393–4n174, 395–400, 396n180, 427. his interpreters and translators: Alquié, Ferdinand: 243n25, 248n30; Ameriks, Karl: 78n5, 204n41; Blumenberg, Hans: 78n5, 495n7; Brandt, Reinhard:

Index of Names 251n35; Cassirer, Ernst: see under his name Einstein: see under his name Eisler, Rudolf: 77n4, 83n14, 204n41, 272n62, 279n70, 306n96, 367n147, 368n149, 385n167, 392, 392n171; Förster, Eckart: 250n33, 251n35, 278–9n69, 495n7, 543–4; Friedman, Michael: 75, 75n2, 77n4, 80n10, 83n14, 249n32, 251n35, 274–5n64, 309, and general discussion Pt. i, Ch. 3, §3; Höffe, Ottfried: 276n67, 409n2; Horstmann, Rolf-Peter: 251n35: Kemp Smith, Norman: impl. & bibl.; Lyotard, Jean-François: 204n41; Marburg School: 204n41, 216n1; Martin, Gottfried 249, 249n31; Marty, François: 545–6; Philonenko, Alexis: 109n46, 113n51, 124n61, 204n41, 216n1, 224, 225n8, 243–4n25, 251n35, 263n57, 309–10, 312n104, 393n172, 401n189, 491n2; Pomian, Krzysztof: xii, 17n8, 64, 125–6n63, 274–5n64; Rawls, John: 276, 397n182, 399n187; Reichenbach, Hans: 83, 83n14; Rosen, Michael: see Förster for co-translation Strawson, P.E.: 255n48, 257n50, 275n64, 297n84; Vuillemin, Jules: 251n35. Kauffman, Stuart 82n12, 479, 482n13. Kazuko, Furuta 111n50. Kellogg, Elizabeth A 236n19. Kemp Smith, Norman translator and interpreter of Kant’s First Critique impl. and bibl. Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630) his cosmologyimpl. his library 460. Kircher, Athanasius (1646) his frontispiece 465n12. Turris Babel and other temples 527. Klee, Paul 519. Klima, Arnost (his studies of Bohemia and market concentration) 121n58, 174n12, 402n190. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

599

Index of Names Koyré, Alexandre (interpreter of Hegel, historian and philosopher of science, and phenomenologist) cosmic universal: 75n1, 77n4, 252n36, 290n81 (“the centre is everywhere”), 350–1n134, 372; Hegel’s time as dialectic: 6, 245–6n27, 251n34, 381n162; cultural a-priorism: 220; Hegel’s vocabulary and use of words: impl & bibl. (but especially important); the role of metaphysics in discovery: 376n156. the young Hegel: 381n162; Kant: 83n14; Nicholas de Cusa: 83n14; Paracelsus: 353n137, 473n23.

Leibniz, G.W. xx; Ars combinatoria: 287, 287n79; his dispute and correspondence with Clarke about Newton’s theory: 77n4; essentialist metaphysic: 80n10; his «instant» with regard to time: impl.; his library: 460; the «pyramid» of all possible and actual knowledge in the Théodicée: 464, 464n8.

Kühlenbeck, H.. 482n13

Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien evolutionist anthropology of «primitive mentalities» 217n2, 311., 311–2n103.

Kula, Witold social conflictconcerning measure 170n10, 304n94. Kupka, František his interest in contemporary science 375, 518. L. Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy (first generation of French Annalist historians) 79n8, 81n11. Lamarck, J.-B. «great chain of being» 236n19. Lamarck & Darwin’s «transformational theory» 306. his systematics 549–50. Landes, David cited by Nathan Rosenberg 92n30.

Lenoir, Timothy 478n4, 475, 481n12. morphology: 482n13, 494, 494–5n2; teleomechanics: 496n3. Leontief, Wasily his economic theory 80n10

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 18n9, 351, 370n151, 376n156. Correspondance with Roman Jakobson: 17n8, 313n105, 323n116; re-biological determinism: 323n116; identity: 370n151; language-use: 350–1; myths of the North-West Coast native Americans: 344–5n130; the notion of archaism: 7, 366–7; re-Sartre: 376n156; structuralism: 17n8, 54; Totemism and naming: 313n105, 351; universalism: 334n124. Lewontin, R.C. critic of the neo-Darwinian thesis 493n1. Lianori, Petro di Giovanni painting of La Madonna col Bambino (1443). 253n41.

Leach, Edmund lecture on the genealogical tree 480n8.

Lindley, John (1799–1865) (botanist; anonymous entry on “Botany” in Penny Cyclopædia) anonymous entry on “Botany” in Penny Cyclopædia: 480; correspondence with Darwin: 481n10; Goethe’s “beautiful theory” of metamorphosis: 480–1.

Leger, Fernand his interest in contemporary science 375, 518.

Littrup, Leif study of Ming Shandong 10–11n5, 111–2nn49–50.

Larousse, Pierre (1870) Grand Dictionnaire universel entry on species concept and evolution 305–8, 312.

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Locke, John his logical-constructionalism: 251, 267, 522; his social contractualism: impl.

Mann, Harold peasant sensitivity to prices in annual seed-type selection 198n34.

Łomnicki, Adam 80n9, 145n81.

Marburg School influential group of early twentiethcentury neo-Kantians (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer, Hans Vaihinger, &c.). 204n41.

Lopes — see Coelho Lopes (interpreter of Camilo Pessanha) 343, 129. Loureiro, João de (1717–1791) Flora Cochinchinensis 446, 446n14, 462–3, 471. Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being 236n19. Lowe, Thelma her archaeology & study of «wootz» steel 120–1n57. Loyola, Hernán his editing and reading of Neruda’s Residencias i & ii bibl.

Marcuse, Herbert interpreter of the young Hegel liv. Marks, Robert study of Haifeng County 1570–1930 111–2n50. Martin, Gottfried interpreter of Kant 249, 249n31. Marty, François (translator and interpreter of Kant) 551–2.

Magalhães Godinho, Vitorino L’Économie de l’Empire Portugaise (evidence of the inter-Asian trades affecting India on the arrival of the Portuguese) 546n20.

Marx, Karl xx–xxii, xxv–xxvii; lv, 3; accidentalist epistemologist: 159; alienation corrected: xxi, 394–5n177; commoditisation of work: 385; class: 25–6; Copernican: 509; Hegelian & phenomenologist: 42, 387–8; historical development becomes structure: 245–6, 245–6n27, 328; history as construction: 250–1, 378; labour as quantitative value: 385; his logical constructionalism: 251, 267; method: 42, 76; production forms in combination (adaptation of Hegelian methodological principle): 177n14; his sceptical materialism: social contract: 263, 275; social class: 25–6; social foundations of the commodity: impl.; societal reproduction: 3; use-value and exchangevalue / his theory of value as cultural universal: 13, 109n46, 385; & utopianism: 263.

Mäki, Uskali critique of McCloskey 84n15.

Mayr, Ernst strict neo-Darwinist

Lukes, Steven with Hollis editor of Rationality & Relativism 187–8, 222n6. Lull, Ramon (1232–1316) his «combinatoire». 239–40n23, 244, 244n25, 287, 287n79. Lyotard, Jean François interpreter of Kant 204n41. M.

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Index of Names concept of the adaptive niche: 183n23; information retrieval: 287n79. McCloskey, Donald criticised by Uskali Mäki 84n15. McCulloch, J.R. (1789–1864) his commercial dictionary bibl. van Meerbeeck, P.J. & Dodonæus 460n4. Mendels, Franklin Agriculture & Peasant Industry 402n190. Mendras, Henri the decline of the French peasantry 91n29. Minkowski, Helmut (compilation of artistic works on the Tower of Babel) 382n163, 464n10, 524n11. Mishler, Brent D. speciation of grasses 236n19. More, Henry (1614–1687) (Correspondence with Descartes in 1649) the «sword» through the boundary of the universe: 350n134, 372n153. Morineau, Michel Incroyables Gazettes “Acknowledgements”: xlvi, 63–4. complexity: 174n12. Morrison, John Robert Chinese Commercial Guides (1834, 1844, 1848) 138, 138n74. Morse, Hosea Ballou excellent nineteenth-century observer of Chinese commercial and monetary institutions East India Company and China 184n24, 540.

Morse, John private minter of coins in 1600: 491, 544. Mousnier, Roland who like Louis Dumont , notably in the latter’s Homo Hierachichus interpreted past social order as composed of an equilibria of social orders, in the ranks of which an «everyperson» had a fixed and enduring position and weight of balance: Mousnier thus opposed a «société d’ordres» in contradistinction to the class analysis and class-ordered society, expunged simultaneously by the many Marxian-influenced currents then at work in French historiography concerning the distant past. Political preferences were evident in both cases. And in 1976, during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency dictatorship, one read on a street slogan in Pune the order that every person should remain in his or her pre-allotted social position. This is not to say that both — as pervasive historical and current ideology and as a real criterion of societal division and of distribution of wealth were not simultaneous factors both at once affecting and constituting society 47. Müller, Max his essentialism 79–80n8. Munch, Edvard his interest in contemporary science: 375, 375n155, 506–7, 513. metaphysic and the infinite: 347n132; wave theory: 271n61, 283n75, 347n132, 375, 505–11, 517, 518–9. “The Cry” (1895): 70 (Ill. 5); “The Waves of Love” (1896): 71 (Ill. 6); “Galloping Horse” of 1910–2: 71 (Ill. 7a); “Galloping Horse” of 1928: 72 (Ill. 7b). Munting, Abraham (1583–1658). 459 medical botanist apothecary: 462; his correspondence: 459, 478n3; his garden of plants (a «Paradise on

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Index of Names treated in this book. For this aspect, that runs through the entire book see the “Subject Index”. These central aspects are ignored in this personal index entry.) his alchemy: 352, 424; finitude: 350, 372, 387; his «God»: 77n4, 78–9, 78n5, 80n10, 83, 251, 252n36; his laws: 77; his library: 352; the question of objective experience: 392; discussed by Kemp Smith: 393–4n174; discussed by Koyré: impl.; Kantian role of Newtonian time/space, in “Forewords”: xx, xxxviii–xxxix, xl; in my interpretation: see “Subject Index”.

Munting, Abraham (cont.) Earth») : 460–4; multi-disciplinary in light of the ancient poesis of knowledge: 352, 353–4n137, 460–4, 461n5, 468, 472nn21–2; his tulips and the tulip bubble: 457, 461n5; typological instability 464; zodiac and planetary rings: 472. Mussorgsky, Modest poetic and imaginative brilliance and beauty of his opera the The Khovantchina 514, 523–5. the phenomenological and metaphysical significance of fire and of the ritual of collective suicide by fire: 514, 523–4.

North, Douglas 100n40.

N.

O.

Needham, Joseph his Science and Civilization in China cited by Nathan Rosenberg: 92n30; communications in China on botanical type: 447n15, 477–8; history of systematics in China: 260–1n54. Contributions by Francesca Bray on Agriculture (vi, 2), Dieter Kuhn on Textile Technology (v, 9), Lu Gwei-Djen & Huang Hsing-Tsung on Biology (vi, 1).

O’Malley, C.D. translator of Galileo’s Il Saggiatore 252n36. da Orta, Garcia (1563) medecinal «simples» of India 446n14, 460, 462. Orwell, George 343n129. P.

Neruda, Pablo (Neruda’s poesis & Amado Alonso’s remarkable precocious interpretation of 1954 of Residencia en la Tierra, i & ii) a rigour of language-use: 85n16, 351 (a closed domain of reference to meaning); forests ancient like cities: 245–6, 246n28; metaphysic of «love» as essence (Cien Sonetos de Amor): 351n135, 511.

Pacioli, Luca (1494) merchants’ manuals and market rules 135n70.

Newton, Isaac (1642–1727) (A central theme of the book concerns Kant’s controversial Newtonian and Euclidian science embodied by the a-priori conditions of possible thought, giving the latter its fundamental form and constituent character; such conditions concern not the science of matter but the possibility of thinking that matter, and thus also cultural matter including the commodity that is subject of concern

Pasinetti, Luigi his economic theory & theory of value 80n10.

Paracelsus (1493–1541) = Theophrastus von Hohenheim alchemist, astrologer, &c. 50, 472–3n23. see Koyré’s essay

Passe, Crispyn de painting of Pope Paul V (b. 1621). 253n42. Pessanha, Camilo (Portuguese poet 1867–1926) Clepsidra 343–4, 343n129. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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Index of Names Peuchet, Jacques (his commercial dictionary and vocabulary 1799 & 1801). 132n68, 135, 137, 137nn72–3, 180n18. Peyssonnel, Charles de (on Black Sea trades 1787 & 1803) 137, 137n73. Pevsner, Nikolaus architectural historian on historically composite building sites 245–6nn27–8. Philonenko, Alexis translator & interpreter of Kant. 109n46, 113n51, 124n61, 204n41, 216n1, 224, 225n8, 244n25, 251–2n35, 263n57, 308–9, 312n104, 393n172, 401n189, 494–5n2. Pimentel, Manuel Arte de Navegar (1712). 353–4n137 Platoimpl. (the ascent towards knowledge discussed by Eric Voegelin) Phædrus, cited by Cassirer 79n8. Pluhar, W. translator of Kant’s Third Critique 494–5n2.

the culture of time: 125–6n63, 274–5n64. Poni, Carlo “Acknowledgements”: xlvi–xlvii. production networks and market rules 88n22, 100n40. Pramoedya Ananta Toer viz. Toer Pram P.A. Toer’s popular name in Indonesia, and if used occasionally in my text, indexed under Toer Prigogine, Ilja city as metaphor for complex historical accumulations of time: 125–6n63, 254–5, 255n47. Ptolemy (d. c. 170 ad) (his astronomy, with which Sacrobosco’s Sphere is associated) 78–9, 244, 335–6. Q. Quentel, H. (?) illustration of Apocalypse (1478): key to the anti-city 254n43.

Pol, Arent source of illustrations & “Acknowledgements”: 530n15, 538–9. his work on coin metrology and instruments: 143–n78; 535n16, 538–9 Ills.), 572; trade coinages 486fig42, 543 (Ill.).

R.

Polanyi, Karl moral economy (gemeinschaft). 46, 114.

Rancière, Jacques critique of scientism of the genuinely innovative first generation of Annalist historians: xx, xxv,79, 79–80n8, 84n15 (despite agreement with his argument Rancière is here in his turn criticised); the «paperasse»: 79–80n8, 204n41.

Pollard, Sidney language-use with regard to industrialisation in Europe: xxxiii, xl, 37, 37n19, 85–92&nn, 93–95, 127n64, 128, 318–9n113, 401–3. Pomian, Krzysztof “Acknowledgements”: xlvi, 17, 63–4.

Radcliffe Brown, A.R. (his anthropology and structuralfunctionalist theoretician) 80n9, 380–1.

Raphson, Joseph (1648–1715) discussed by Koyré: mathematician, & translator of Newton 252n36. Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

604 Rawls, John (modern Kantian moral-constructivist philisopher of societal justice and civil ethics) 276, 397n182, 399n187. Reichenbach, Hans Theory of Relativity & A Priori Knowledge 83, 83n14. van Rheede van Draakestein, Hendrik (1636–1691) herbal plants of the Malabar 351–2, 446, 446n14, 462–3, 472n21. Ricoeur, Paul (phenomenologist, and translator of many of Husserl’s works, including the first volume of the Ideen and brilliant interpreter of Freud’s own phenomenological exegesis) xxv, 414n1, 551; Ideen, i: 36–9, 37n19, 61n30, 63n32, 249n31 (essentialist choices, eg. Wesen), 337, 552–3; Freud’s hermeneutic language use: 225n10; as Husserlian: 411n1; on Husserl: 219n3, 277n68 (on Husserl’s unmentioned Kantism); on Husserl’s concept of reduktion (reduction) = Hegel’s Verneinungen (negation): 385n167; languages as wholes: 39, 61–63 (such holism contrasted to von Wartburg accidentalist variationism); Husserl’s «Sinneseinheiten» (Ricoeur’s «unités de sense») in the constitution of the object in mind: 369n150. Riedl, R., morphology 482n13. Roberts, Lewes Marchants Mapp of Commerce (1638) 135–6n70, 183, 532–3. Robinet, André interpreter of Leibniz impl. and bibl.

Index of Names Rocamura y Torrano treatise on The Sphere of 1599 244–5n26. Rondot, N. On Chinese exportations (1849): 138n74. Rorty, Richard his view of representation 127, 311–2. Rosen, Michael (co- translator with Förster of Kant’s Opus Postumum) Rosenberg, Alexander on biological knowledge words as metaphor: 82n12; species problem: 468n17. Rosenberg, Nathan populationist & durational view of invention: xxxiii, xl, 58, 85–92, 106–7, 142, 148–9, 337, 442, 540; language-use: 85–86, 86n18, 88ff, 92–30. Rossellio, Cosma (1579) stages of ascent and descent 252n38. Rossi, Paolo on memory systems 260n54. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 400. Cassirer and Rousseau: 267; content of the sign: 312; General Will: 55, 397, 532; Kant’s Rousseauism: 55n27, 263, 263n57, 395–8 (his Rousseauan reading of Hobbes), 396n180, 398n183, 399–401, 399n187, 401n188, 495. his logicalconstructionalism: 251, 267, 398; phenomenology accessible; 55–6, 55n27; Rousseauan ideology of corporate brotherhoods: 400n188; his social contractualism: 263, 396n180, 397, 399n187; state and freedom: 397n183; utopianism: 395, 396n180, 398, 514–5; cf. Zola.

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Index of Names Roymerswæle, Marinus van painting of Tax-Collector & Wife (late 16th c.) with coin-weight box and/or balance 143n78.

Sartre, Jean-Paul attacked by Lévi-Strauss: 376n156; use of dialectic in correcting common sense: 54, 335n125.

Rüff, Jakob (1500–1558) Adam & Eve: xxiii, 66fig2 (Ill.), 507, 509–13; childbirth : xxiii, 67fig3 (Ill.), 513–5, 520–1, 526; «generatione hominis» 517, 520.

de Saussure, Ferdinand his linguistics discussed by Angenot: 80n9; on identity: 370n151.

Ryder, M.L. sheep and wools 136n71, 180n18. S. Sabban, Françoise “Court Cuisine in Fourteenth-Century Imperial China ...” 472n19. Sacrobosco, Iohannes de the sphere, poesis of (early 13th century?): 244, 244–5n26, 335–6, 353–4n137, 464; his commentators & interpreters: cf. Bruno; Fiorentino; Koyré; Yates. Sadler, John (1615–1674) Sicke Womans Private Lookinge-Glasse (1636) «species garden» on frontispiece: 465n12, 532–3. Sailer, Anna “Acknowledgements”: xlvii. Salimath, S.S. , with T. Gilbert on seed selection practice & rice speciation 199n36, 499n7. Salusbury, Thomas (1661–65) translation of Galileo’s Dialogue 59, 59n29. Sarkar, Aditya “Foreword”: xxv–xliv. “Acknowledgements”: xlvii.

Savary, Jacques Le Parfait Negoçiant (1675, & many later edns., & trans. into several languages [viz. Bibl.]): 138, 138–9nn74 & 76, 147n83, 168, 205, 517; Frontispieces, vignettes & “Commentaryé: 455–8figs29–31c (Ills.), 521–2, 536–8. Schelling, F.W. language as “a faded mythology”. 87, 87n21 materialising the essentialist phenomenology 30n15. Schlegel, F. his view of the «grotesque». 204n41 Schoenberg [Schönberg], Arnold his opera Moses & Aron 78, 337–8, 338n127, 507n40. Schreckenfuschius, E.W. Commentarium in Sphæram (1569) 244–5n26. Scranton, Philip U.S. consumer commodities 1880–1940: 88n22. Sen, Amyarta entitlement and ethics: 276. de Serres, Olivier (1539–1619):. 531 Théâtre de l’Agriculture (1600 & 1619) animal/vegetable vignettes and illuminated capitals: 212fig18–19 (Ills.), 526–7; classification of chapter content:

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606 de Serres, Olivier (cont.) 410fig28 (Ill.), 535; his «knowledgetower» medical plant gardens: xxiv–v, 157fig14 (Ill.), 462–5, 465n12, 504, 520; poesis of knowledge: 462–3, 466, 472n21; «species garden»: 353–4n137, 406– 8figs24–26 (Ills.), 521–2, 526–7, 532–4; “Commentary”: 507, 520, 526–7, 530, 532–6. Shi Zhihong marketisation in China 111–2n50. Shiba, Yoshinobu “Ningpo & its Hinterland” 111–2n50. Simplicio, Sagredo and Salviati (participants in Galileo’s Dialogues) the ancient poesis: 38n20; antipathy to methodological convenience 38; sword through the rim of the universe: 350, 350n134, 367. Sinha, N.K. An Economic History of Bengal, 133n69, 174n12. Skinner, G. William “Marketing & Social Structure in Rural China”. 102n42, 111n50. Smeaton, W.A. entry for Geoffroy in Dictionary of Scientific Biography 474n27. Smith, Adam commodity as quantity & labour theory of value 263, 348, 384. Smith, J. Maynard opponent of differentiating artificial from natural speciation: 452, 493, 493n1; creationist metaphor: 479, 479n7; neo-Darwinist method & teleology: 496n3. Smith, R.E.F. Peasant Farming in Muscovy (incl. 15th century): 111n49.

Index of Names Southall, Aidan “Nuer and Dinka are People”: impl. Spaggiari, Barbara O Simbolismo na Obra de Camilo Pessanha: 343n129. Spence, Jonathan memory palaces: 260, 260nn53–4, 280–1. Sraffa, Piero Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: 80, 80n10. Stauffer, W.C. “General Introduction”, to Darwin, Natural Selection: 481n12. Stearn, W.T. his dictionary of botanical latin 481n10. Steiner, George conflation of mind with language: 82n13; every reception of a speech act incurs translation: 113n51; ambiguity of meaning given to signs: 311–2. Stevens, Robert Complete Guide to the East-India Trade (1766): 138n74. Steward, Julian his rule of inter-cultural compatibility: 7, 7n4, 11, 51, 61, 186, 339–40, 345–6, 379n160, 421n6. Stirling, James (translator and brilliant interpreter of Hegel) Hegel’s unadmitted debt to Kant: 248n29, 496n4, 515n6, 551, 559. Stokes, Eric panopticon model of colonial authority: impl. & bibl. Strawson, P.F. (translator and interpreter of Kant) 255n48, 257n50, 274–5n64, 296n84.

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Index of Names Stromer, Natalie Fryde von typological «imitation»: 180n18.

Troubetzkoy, N.S. phoneme as value: 274–5n64.

Sykes, William (1790–1872) East India Company colonial administrator in Western India c.1818; his study of plants and their nomenclature (mss): 475–6n28.

Ts’ui-jung Liu “Rice Culture in South China”: 111n50.

T.

Tuinder, Nico den acknowledgements & research of South Asian historical demography: 133n69, 163n7.

Talegaonkar, Ramaji fictional representative for argumentation 324n117, 366, 366n145. Te-tzu Chang that ancestral species are conceptual taxa, speculative inventions: 476n29; cross fertility among rices: 499n7.

Tsubouchi, Yoshihiro rice producing societies 111n50.

V. van Valckenborch, Marten (1535–1612) painting of infinite Tower of Babel: 382n163, 464n10.

Thijs, Alfons K.L. textiles in sixteenth century Antwerp: 180n19.

Vansina, Jan inter-ethnic seed extension: 446, 446n13.

Thorndike, Lynn on Sacrobosco’s Sphere: 244–5n26

Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744) & Kant on discursive and mathematical knowledge: 300.

Thurneysser, Leonardt (1531–1596) = Thurneisser medical botanical alchemist: 458; his manufactory of medicines and amulets: 462, 472–3n23. See Hubicki & Yates. Toer, Pramoedya Ananta (major novelist writing in Javanese who spent many years imprisoned under both colonial and later army rule) his approach and method: 165n8, 179n16, 366; contrasted with Geertz’ Negara: 333n123, 341, 360n141; inhabitants classed and typed: 393n173; on colonial context: 179n16, 333n123, 341–3nn128–9, 393n173 (taxonomist ideology of colonialism); price and content as social conflict (Gadis Pantai): 304n94. de Toni, G.B. ed. of Clusius’ correspondence: 460n4.

Vesalius (Vésale, Vesalio), Andræa (1514–1564) his anatomy lesson: 59, 352n136, 509, 521. frontispiece illustration: 152fig9 (Ill.), commentary 518no9, 522–4. 59, 352–3n136, 537; illuminated capitals: 530. Vilar, Pierre (first generation of French Annalist historians specialising on exchange and production conditions in medieval and early-modern Catalonia): 79n8. Virgil The Æneid, quoted by Kant: 250n33. Vitale di Bologna painting of Last Judgement (mid-14th century): 254n45.

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Vivarini, Antonio & Bartolomeo painted altar piece (late 15th c): 253n43. Voegelin, Eric Plato: ascent to knowledge: 250n33. Vuillemin, Jules interpreter of Kant: 251–2n35. W. Wallerstein, Immanuel his «system»:. 97, 114, 360–3, 361n142, 377. von Wartburg, Walther methodological importance of his etymological dictionary / an ideal of accidentalist social variation: 37–8, 60–2, 359, 442–3, 443n10, 509. Watt, George crop speciation and selection 194–5nn30–2, 201n38, 236, 317n111, 443, 443n11, 468, 498, 498n6. Weinmann, J.W. (1683–1741) “apothecary and botanist”: 461n5, 471–8, 472–3nn21–3; speciation : 494; his systematics: 472n22; on Thurneysser: 468–9n23; tulip bubble: 461, 498, 498n6. Williams, S. Wells on commodities concerning China 138, 138n74, 476n30. Wilks, Michael. 398n183 (a teacher who conveyed «not mere thinking about philosophy but thinking philosophically» [pacé Nathalie Depraz]) acknowledgement on first page of this Index. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (his Philosophical Investigations) exactitude being relative and a matter of judgement: 314n107, 451, 451n20; “this

piece is called the king, not this ...”: 451–2nn21–22. Wolf, Eric critique of societal holism 37, 37n19, 61–2, 217, 323n116, 361, 361n142. Wordsworth, William Abrams on his helical concept of temporal progression. 250n33. Y. Yates, Frances memory architectures: 259–60, 260nn53– 4, 280–281, 508 (Belot and hand as memory palace), 531–2 (Belot ...), 563–4; poesis of The Sphere: 244–5n26, 250n33 (Bruno’s notion of love) 253n39 (Campanella & his utopia), 253n39 & 255–6n48 (Città del Sole as memory palace), 344n130 (Camillo’s L’Idea del Theatro), 352 (Camillo), 424n8 (Camillo), 465–6 (species-constitution of knowledge), 466n13, 472–3n23 (amulets and talismans). Z. Zainer, Johannes (d. 1523) his “Adam & Eve” illuminating a page of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus (Ulm, 1473) iv, fig. 1 (Ill.), 61, 374n154. commentary: 510, 512–3, 517, 523, 528, 530 constitution of the cultural object 567. Zimmermann, Francis Hindu (& ayurvedic) medicine 446–7n14. Zola, Émile subjection of peasantry to late capitalist financial capitalism: 91n29; his utopian essentialism: 57, 350–1 (metaphysic of the sun as essence), 509 («love» as essence), 517; closure of essentialist language-use: 351.

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Thematic Subject Index (& Glossary) Unless otherwise stated, references in Roman numbering concern the two authors of the forwards, Ravi Ahuja and Aditya Sarkar, respectively. Those in arabic numerals concern the author’s contribution. In contrast, the “Authors’ Index” includes, in roman numerals, both the authors of the two “Forewords” and myself since including some references to the “Notice to the Reader” and “Acknowledgements”. This Index is at best a compromise between subjective judgment and omission, thus its largely thematic character; many apparently significant themes run ostensibly throughout the whole book, mentioned almost on every page, and often several times on a single page. The words «universal», «market» and «exchange» are examples: they exemplify concepts that concern many readers but that, under different titles, derive from those different sets of nominal interest and specialisation that concern the matter and arguments of this book; it must be included? Yet, I have attempted to assume only what appears to me important concerning the argument of this book, and even then these words have come to compose huge and unwieldy thematic categories of reference rather than the usual entries one expects of an index. — Many readers will seek in vain for what concerns them: the economist or economic historian will especially sense the inadequacies of my venture, seeking terms he or she takes for granted but that do not interest my approach to the broad and interdisciplinary field indicated by categories such as «economy» or «economic history». It is the endemic frustration felt by readers before an unsatisfactory index and this one, owing to its interpretive nature, cannot be satisfied at once with a minimum of requisite economy and yet also meet all tastes. I advise the reader to consult carefully the Contents List for its use of words and for their advance through the text, and afterwards to study carefully the Index below in order to become familiarised with its form and content: often the Contents List it is more far indicative than the Index, which latter, instead, arbitrarily selects isolated pages from entries that compose a running developmental discussion of many of the same terms throughout whole sections and chapters, even the book. The philosophical aspect is especially difficult to register and is largely ignored below: once more it is the book itself, the entire book, its veritable polemic, and, where that aspect is concerned, it would be more just to consider the contents list as the proper index! Other words, such as «culture», an iconic focus of sense governing my entire position in the book, yet retrieved and transformed from the rejected detritus of a rebellious past, cannot be indexed: such words mark the entire subject matter, its very definition, govern use of each substantive word of the book. «Translation», also, itself, is a term especially at issue, equally thematic in the book: translation, that is to say, in full polemical contradistinction to the notion of the «untranslatable» that has come to predominate modern cultural studies ... the humanities as an entirety, at the futile cost of our present absence of an adequate understanding: below it has a restricted entry but is also found entering the matter of the index through the capillaries of other headings, none of which, however, give an adequate sense of the degree to which it has come to be the central argument and discovery of this «universal»-inspired book. Other words, distinctly factual, apparently, important to an anthropologist or historian of economic history, were I one of these, are little mentioned, even absent from the index: examples are the cloths and moneys themselves, the baftas, seronghis, ducats, sycee, larins and fanam, words that inspire me with excitement for the exotic yet which do not belong to this index. Because the essential problem concerns the status of the book as having been devoted entirely to a singular all-enveloping interpretation rather than to a re-constitution of facts, historical and anthropological. It is for this reason that certain «facts» — say, the Mexican Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

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ducaton current in Guangzhou — are mentioned again and again in the book but only because it has been selected as representative of the kinds of problem that form essential parts of the interpretation. Consequently, I can only justify the Index that follows as compromise, as if it had been constituted against the odds of its very possibility!) Reference in the index below to “von Wartburg” refers to the multi-volume dictionary listed as W. von Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Eine Darstellung des Galloromanischen Sprachschatzes (Bâle & Leipzig, 1940). A. Adam & Eve as a «phenomenology lesson» iv (Zainer’s of 1473; Ill. as frontispiece); 61 (Zainer’s), 66fig2 (Ill. Rüff’s of 1587); 505 (Rüff’s compared with the lesson of dragon and phoenix); 508 (that the Asian dragon and Adam and Eve’s serpent are comparable in phenomenological meaning); 510, 512–3 (Zainer’s); 513–5 (Rüff’s); 515 (Böhme’s version; the comparative context); 517 (Zainer’s, and Zola’s transposition); 520 (as portrayed in the anatomical theatre in Leiden); 522 (the serpent’s vegetal body status compared with identical features of Asian iconography); 523 (compared with the metaphysical agency of fire in Mussorgsky’s Khovantchina); 530 (serpent’s vegetal status compared with an illuminated capital in a book of 1600). adulteration 164–7 (East India Company merchants trading in Amod cotton); 167–75 (criteria of typological production: production, reproduction, imitation, adulteration?). Amoy = Xiamen amulets & talismans (production and sense): 351 (Thurneysser’s apothecarial manufactury of talismans and medicines); 472–3n23 (which employed c. 300 persons; he also ran a publishing house; See Yates on subject).

«anatomy lesson» See entries for “anatomy theatre”, “knowledge well” and “knowledge tower” Anatomy of the commodity: 419–20 (quantification permits anatomy of its constitutive parts), 423 (of field variety). this book an anatomy lesson upon the body of the commodity 2, 5, 59. anatomy theatre Bologna: 466; Leiden: xxiv, 151fig8 (Swanenburg’s depiction), 252–3n38, 520–22 (commentary); Padua: 252–3n38, 352, 520; Uppsala: 518; Vesalio frontispiece: xxiv, 152fig9 (reputed school of Titian), 522–4 (commentary); de Ketham frontispiece: 509–10; Inigo Jones: 520–21 (his tower-cum-well for the Company of Surgeon/Barbers, London, in 1636). B. Babel, tower of (as tower of knowledge) See infra for entries such as “anatomy theatre”, “dialectic”, “Knowledge tower” & “Knowledge well”, & “Poesis of the Sphere”, and, in Authors’ Index, the entries for “Benet”, “Campanella” (his Città del Sole), “Minkowski” (his compilation), “Olivier de Serres” (his medical gardens as knowledge towers). The reader may consider this past in comparison and aesthetic proportion with the helical ascents to knowledge imposed by Kant and Hegel’s

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Thematic Subject Index Babel, tower of (cont.) phenomenological, strictly materialist dialectics. Artistic representations: Tower of Babel (infinite, rectangular; artist unknown): 153fig.10; Tower of Babel: 154fig11 (helical, round; artist unknown); Tower of Babel by Gheerært Harenbout (square & helical): 155fig.12; Knowledge Tower in Bernardino Butinone’s “Christ Disputing with the Doctors” (helical and round) 156fig13; de Serres’ circular and square medical gardens 157fig.14; “Le Jardin du Roi” in 1636: 157fig.15. Bruegel the Elder’s Towers of Babel: 381 (comparing with Hegel’s treatment of time), 464; 382–3n163 (his two known versions); Juan Benet on the construction of the tower: 382n164; Minkowski’s compilation: 524n11; Marten van Valckenborch’s infinite Tower of Babel: 464n10; Tobias Verhaecht’s finite tower: 382n163, 464; Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel sive Archontologia of 1679: 527. The ascent and descent to knowledge: Kant’s metaphor, Char’s realism (and use of words for «ascent»), Hegel’s procedure of successive negation (and use of words for «ascent»): 250n33; Babel-like tower an unfinishable project in the constitution of comprehension: 313; The Sphere and its analogues: 352 (ascent to a higher truth) & 464–7; “Commentary on the Illustrations”, knowledge towers and knowledge wells: §ii, figs. 10–15, 524–7 and figs.8–9, 520–24, respectively; a knowledge inaccessible (Butinone’s “Christ Disputing with the Doctors”): 463–4; a Jacob’s ladder: 352. The commodity continuum & marketisation: Translatability of the commodity realm; translation as active intention and act of exchange: 16; 231 (an artificial tower of nature), 246 (Babel-like), 263 (“Babel was built”), 309, 318 (a universal composed of

611 difference), 385 (the commoditisation of work), 386 (in construction), 427 (a Babel founded on universal constitutive principles); a successful Babel ever in construction (a Babel of translation): 231, 263, 265, 309, 313, 318, 368–9, 386, 427; Kant’s human tower and Leibniz’ divine pyramid: 368–9, 460. Utopian uprisings and projects: (See also entries for “Campanella” and “da Cunha” in Authors’ Index) Campanella’s Città del Sole: 253, 253n39, 255n48, 353n137, 398n184, 464–5, 520; The shanty peasant Jerusalem of Canudos (north-east Brazil): 254; 381; eschatological motivations of the many portraitists of the Tower of Babel: 381–2, 464, 524–6, 539. Kant’s Tower of Babel (the three references to Babel in the First Critique): (A central part of the argument constituting this book) (See also the large entry under “Kant” in the “Authors’ Index”) Pt1CH3§2; 244ff (his first reference to the Tower: his own Copernican Revolution as tower); 256–8 (every person an own tower); 265 (“more than a «mere» Babel”); 299n86 (First Critique references to the Tower); 380ff (his second reference to the tower: each his/her own Tower, “with the materials at each person’s disposal”); 384–5 (an individualised ground); 386 (“our Babel ... Kant’s Babel”); 395ff (His third reference to the Tower: “freedom is the ground for the existence of reason”); 396n180 (Einstimmung), 397n182 (the sources for this third mention); 398n184 (erect upon “einen festeren Boden”); 399 (“dispersed overall to build their own individual towers”); 400 (each person an individual path “through the «forest» of the real”); 464 (& Giordano Bruno). Medical gardens and species gardens: Part 1, Illustrations, §2, 157, figs. 14 & 15; §4, 405–8, figs. 23–26; discussion of medical

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612 Babel, tower of (cont.) garden: de Serres’ recommended diagrams: 526; Le Jardin du Roi of 1636: 527; discussion of «species garden»: §4. “Typological Representation”, 532–4. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (metaphor for a botanical systematics); as garden architectures: 353–4n137; discussion of Babel-like medical gardens: 462–5; frontispieces and vignettes of medical gardens: 466nn12–13; abstract representation of poesis of cosmos: 467; Company of Apothecaries’ garden: 471; general discussion of metaphorical significance: 505, 507–8, 520–21. Rousseau’s General Will: 55, 263, 368– 9n149, 397–8, 398n183, 537. Biological theory See entries below for “Morphology” and “Speciation”, the latter that includes an extensive separate section on “Darwinism”. See also the Authors’ Index” for “Darwin”, “Goethe”, “Larousse”, “Lindley”, and others. Bombay = Mumbai botany See entries for “ethnobotany”, “speciation”, “systematics”, “tulip”, and follows refs for sub-entry “speciation” in entry for “markets and typology” Brampore = Burhanpur Bharuch = Broach Brodra & Vadodara = Baroda Bussora = Basra C. Cambay = Khambat Calcutta = Kolkata

Thematic Subject Index Canton = Guangzhou Canudos — utopian peasant shanty Jerusalem erected in the Brazilian Sertão in the early twentieth century and entirely destroyed with its inhabitants by the Brazilian army (See entry for “da Cunha” in “Authors’ Index”) Choromondell = Coromandel coin-weights See entry for «instrumentation» for portable boxes containing weights and balance for travelling merchants. Illustrations: §6, figs. 32–39, 483–489; Commentary concerning them: 538–542. corporate brotherhoods (examples of corporate village brotherhood composed of proprietors of rights that become a-posteriori ideologised as «original» egalitarian brotherhoods) Russian mir & Maharashtran bhavband: 523 (their extractive administrative function); 399n187 (their Rousseauan ideologies & legal codes); 523 (poesy of transcendental role of fire in the suicides of the Raskolnitsa-brotherhood [bratya] portrayed in Mussorgsky’s Khovantchina). correspondence by letter Caccini with Clusius & Colonna: 437n5, 460, 478n3; Darwin: 86n19 (expression of his doubts), 235, 260n54, 478n5, 481n10 (with Lindley); Dodonæus Rembert: 460n4; Einstein with Besso’s widow: impl.; Hegel with Hölderlin: 376 (impl.); Jakobson & Lévi-Strauss: 17n8, 313n105, 323n116, 334n124, 376n156; Leibniz/Clarke: 77–8n4 (impl.); Henry More to Descartes: 350–1n134. Commercial letters: See entries for “Foster”, “Fawcett” and

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Kant); 376–7nn156 & 158–9 (Jakobson); 383 & 383n165 (Hegel); 387n168 (Adorno), 388 (Husserl, Scheler, Adorno); 388n168 (Hegel, Kant, Husserl, Cassirer, Scheler, et al.); 415n2 (Hegel); 417n3 (Hegel); 496n4 (Hegel); 510 (Zainer’s Adam & Eve dialectic-like; Hegel); 512–1n5 (Kant, Hegel); 514–5 & 515n7 (metaphysical representation of phenomenalisation; Hegel’s term begriffene); 518–9 (Munch & Hegel), 520 (Hegel), 524 (stripped to the philosophical bone); 524–6 & 524n10 (Hegel’s assumption of the term dialectic); 550ff (its mention and translation: an acute problem of avoidance among commentators).

Commercial letters (cont.) “Morse” in “Authors’ Index” and “Bibliography”, §B, 564. language-use: 34–5, 135; cotton cloth orders in South Asia in 1644: 180–1; Bengal Cottons Report: 185–186; correspondence as laboratory for naming and classifying); 190–1; cloth purchases in Gujarat: 223; inter-market flow of active words: 303–4; dissent expressed in correspondence acting to affect price, measure and judgement: 320–1. Botanical-medical correspondence: designation: 447, 460; conveyors of information: 460; abundance in China, the Ottoman Empire and Europe: 424; astonishing volume of such correspondence: 437n5; a narrative form and structure: 437, 447–8, 477–82 (Ch. 3, “Postface”). cultivars = the micro-varieties of varieties of cultivated plant See entry for “speciation”. cultural compatibility as principle of inter-cultural influence: 7, 7n4, 11, 51, 61, 186, 339–40, 345–6, 379n160, 421n6 D. dialectic xxvii, xxxviii, xl–lv (Forewords); 6, 30, 47–8 (Hegel, Celan, Cassirer & self); 55 (Celan, & his generation); 58 (self); 120–1n57 (Hegel); 125–7n63 (Hegel); 171n11 (self); 226n12 (Celan & self); 228 (Husserl, Cassirer, self); 245–6n27 (Hegel); 248–9n30 (Kant); 252–3n38 (Hölderlin); 273–4n63 (Husserl and the constitution of the object); 277n68 (Hegel); 324n117 (Hegel); 327n119 (Hegel & self); 341–2n128 (P.A. Toer); 346n131 (Hegel); 368n149 (Hegel); 374 (Hegel); 376–7 (Hegel vs

E. economic theory disenchantment: xviii, 111, 114, 268, 332n122; economic and societal dualism: 104, 193, 365–6; moral economy (gemeinschaft): 2, 4n13, 46, 105, 114, 200–1, 268, 332n122, 363–4; «natural»- or money-economy?: 111n49; labour theory of value: 12, 49; use-value and exchangevalue: xxii, 13, 109n46, 149–50, 208, 316, 346–8, 346n1 (& Hegel), 507, 524, 539. essentialism 313–5, 325 (individualism of the act & person; stereotype of the cultural object and commodity); 467–75 (botany and agriculture); 499; & Pt1Ch3§3§§v: 391–401. The ancient poesis of knowledge: xii, 54–5 (Fink’s “onto-theological” return), 76, 234, 234n17, 252n38, 350–1, 337, 344, 353–4n137, 373, 375, 458, 468n21, 513; Artifice & nature: 284–91, 325–8 (field of action versus phenomenal field of the act); 430ff (cultivated and natural botanies); Commoditisation typologically essentialist (including the commoditised plant-variety): xxxix–xl, 193, 237, 237n20, 260–1, 283–4, 294–9 (taxonomical question); Darwin anti-essentialist:

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614

Thematic Subject Index (Darwinist); & 237n20 (definitional); 249 (Kant); 263n57 (Kant); 275 (Kant, Hegel and Marx); 285 (Kant); 293 (a materialist definition of nature?); 335–7 (as historical development); 357–8 (metaphysic and science); 371–2 (botany), 375–7 (Munch, figure, language-use, myth and science); 387–8 & 387n168 (our empirical universal; Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Husserl, Adorno); 391ff (each an own Babel, material, individual and particular), 506–7 (Kant & Hegel, quantity and quality); Appendix 2: “The Phenomenology Lesson”.

essentialism (cont.) 289n80, 307, 307n99, 499; Essentialist foundations & methodology of humanities (grounding units of identity and language-use): xxii–xxiii, xxvii, xxxi– xxxiv, xxxix, xlii–xliii; Language-use: 60, 61, 249n31, 373. Nationalist & ethnic stereotype: xlii, 2–3 (the problem of identity and translatability), 15 (human connectivity and ethnicity), 36 (stereotypical taxonomy and ethnicity), 40 (to locate knowledge-based arguments against stereotype), 75–6 et seq (the traditional representation of cultural difference leaves the interpeter unprepared before the integrative continuum), 95–6 (ethnic holism and the absolute frontier), 106 (the violence of present-day nationalism and ethnicism), 128 (societal holism), 182ff (a market world heterogenous in kind), 222 (current absence of means in reason to controvert ethnicist logic), 238 (class and ethnicity in the AustroHungarian Empire), 262 (objectification), 316–8 (crop and commodity); 317n109 («weeding» & «ethnic cleansing»); 319n113 (language-use); 320n114 (“the enemy in our midst”); 323n116 (evolutionist ladders of civilisational development; Jakobson’s warning against biological determinism), 378 (the obstacle to comparability and translation), 393n173 (colonial classificationism), 401 (essentialist stereotype in the humanities), 426 (our own anthropology), 430ff & 430n4 (to avoid the term ethnobotany). Its materialisation by the phenomenologists and transcendental critique (anti-essentialist intellectual developments by Kant, Hegel, Husserl and their many contemporaries) xlix & lv (mine); 27n14 (Hegel); 30n15 (Hegel); 43 (mine and Kant); 55 (Celan and contemporaries); 57 (Hegel; Zola’s realism essentialist); 78 &, 78n5 (Kant), 222 (Kant and the commodity); 237

Wesen: 249n31 (translation of Husserl by Ricoeur), 278n69 (my translation); 346 (Hegel’s clarification); 368–9n149 (Hegel’s Urwesen and Kant’s “Wesens aller Wesen”); 511–2n5 (translation of Hegel by di Giovanni), 528n14 (Bourgeois & self). René Char: 56–7, 250n33, 337, 343–4, 347n132, 349–51, 373, 381–2, 463–4, 511, 513, 516–7, 525; Eugen Fink: 54–5 (his “onto-theological” return); Friedrich Hölderlin: 56–7, 252–3n38, 351, 376, 381–2, 518, 557–8; Edmund Husserl: 502 (“Husserl is no essentialist”); Zola («realist» and essentialist): 56–7, 350–1, 511, 517. ethnicist classificationism (treated largely as part of the question of taxonomical stereotyping affecting both popular thinking and the humanities on a global scale, inherited unquestioned into the latter from colonial ideologies, and discussed at length in the book) 36, 95, 261–2n55, 393n173, 401. F. forgery See entries below for “«imitation» and “forgery”. Fukien = Fujian

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Thematic Subject Index G. Gresham’s Law «Bad money drives out good»; the internal metrological typological organisation of monetary differentiation was itself systematically geared in terms of its prevention, whilst the law itself, so-called, was part and parcel of ordinary contemporary consciousness. However, it remains frequently misused and misunderstood in historical writing, applied generally as if the historian’s wisdom to the monetary events of the past. 96n34, 159–60n2, 207n44, 242, 279–80n72, 314n106. H. hat = Bengali market I. «imitation» & «forgery» (typological) Types of commodity, say cloth types, and kinds of coin, in demand, were likely to be produced again and again in many places and on different continents, both under different political authorities and privately (these two terms having little real sense in such conditions), whilst kept true to the metrological characteristics to the known or learned rules of constitution of the type. Imitation in this sense is used innocently without perjorative inference, every instance being considered acceptable and authentic; the word is thus encountered, ordinarily in commercial reports and correspondence for such legitimate globally incident replication of kind and type. But when productions are found metrologically untrue to type, of baser metal, and so forth, yet masquerading as if true, then can we with justice apply to them the word «forgery». One must also distinguish fractional differences among families of kinds and intended to embody and represent such

615 difference, recognised and exchangeable as such, examples being the many kinds of muslin, bafta, or of ducat and pagoda, and so forth. Although frequently registered and discussed in the book I have not indexed these differences. A Mexican ducaton true to type minted in Guanzhou or Birmingham is market-acceptable, but considered a forgery when untrue (say, low in weight or base in pure metal content). As questions of sovereignty and rights also rose and fell to prominence throughout the long period, the term «forgery» was also encountered as a polemical weapon, possessing political and repressive intent in the records, but without necessary market impact on recognition and acceptance. 132n68, 138n75, 167, 180n18, 188, 330, 393, 452, 452n22, 469, 569–70 (with pertinent bibliographical reference). intersubjectivity and exchange condition of commodification & the commodity continuum: 7, 16, 24, 28, 184, 210n47, 271, 291, 295, 308–9, 313, 331–2; as condition of the universal: 113n51, 352; Darwinist individualism as ground of intersubjectivity: 295–7; Darwinist individualism as ground of the stereotypical commodity category: 401; inherently translational: 2, 16, 52, 104n43, 417; intersubjectively decision-making market-centres: 117; invention as intersubjective: 88 (Rosenberg); Kantism and intersubjectivity: 7, 204n41 (pacé Cassirer: “an intersubjective praxology”), Hobbes alchemised as libertarian: 396; intersubjectively phenomenalising: 34, 47, 59, 222, 189, 257 (metaphor of the city), 319, 359–60. invention 58 (that dense participative, populational view of technical invention); 59–60 (the variational, praxological evidence of von Wartburg’s dictionary); 87ff (Rosenberg’s populational view; effacement from historical memory of the mass of

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616 invention (cont.) contributive acts and events and factors that compose invention); 106–7 (continued); 108 (administrative invention on all scales); 167 («invention» of agricultural varieties); 174 (invention of means and knowhow in favour of commodification); 176 (structural coincidence between production sequences and those later concentrated on a workshop floor upon mechanical invention); 198 & 237 (the grower’s grask of technological ad-hoc means to invent solutions); 469–70 (invention of novel practices and of sophisticated procedures of seed-selection); 486–7 (figs.36a–c) simplified instruments for weighing coin); 540–1 (commentary on same). instrumentation merchants’ manuals, handbooks, dictionaries, glossaries: xxxv, xlv; 137ff (their augmenting rate of publication and increasing complexity of the knowledge they needs convey; cloth typologies); 138n74 (for China); 143–4 (coin manuals, pocket sized & much used); 194n30 (reports on Indian rice-varieties) & n31 (cotton-varieties); 201 (denomination); 201n38 (field versus market typologies); 262 (linguistic designation and taxonomical order); 280–1 (increasing publication); 284 (constitution of commodities recorded in letters and ledgers); 317 (field creation of micro-identities); 317–8n111 (selection of rices identifiable among growers but not botanists); 330 (dictionaries as means of memorisation); 438–9 (migration of plant identities; the field of praxis a continuum of constant Darwinist individuation and variation pacé the von Wartburg; a problem of knowledge); 443n11 (Dioscorea, rices, cottons; variation of designation like that of cross-territorial word-variation as recorded in the von Wartburg); 474

Thematic Subject Index (an apothecary a virtual systematics); 476 (discontinuity between customary dictionary entries and field realities concerning plant speciation), 490fig41 (Chinese manual for circulating coin); 543 (Commentary on the Chinese manual); 548–9 (as access to knowledge); 563–4 (the arts of memory for shop keepers and merchants); 565–6 (from pocket manuals to huge multi-volume dictionaries); 570n3 (public notification of prices and rates). Portuguese navigation manuals (based upon Sacrobosco’s Sphere): 353 & 353–4n137, 516. micro-balances & portable standard coin-weight boxes: Illustrations §6: 483–488, figs. 32–8; 485fig39 (collection of portable balances photographed in Luang Prabang, Laos) 5 & 5–6n2, (range of quality; Europe & Asia); 120–1n57 (used in the mint); 122n59 (a generalised need for market-goers); 142 (in boxes of standard coin weights in Europe); 143 (a collection photographed in Northern Laos); 143n78 (La Vocation de St. Mathieu [17th c.], and possible standard South Asian sets of coin weights and Chinese type portable balances for an «everyperson»); 148 (use of large numbers of balances in South Asian mints); 149n85 (unstudied industries in precision instruments for South Asian mints); 260–1 (anonymous painting of weighing coin by 17th century Flemish school); 330 (boxes of coin weights with mini-balances); 384 (production of dies, supply of alloys, manufacture of balances for large volumes of coin output); 450 (balances counted in use in one small Indian mint of base copper coin); 530n15 (sources of the European instruments and commentary on those photo’d in Luang Prabang); 532–6fig32–9 (Commentaries on

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617

Thematic Subject Index instrumentation (cont.) illustrations of portable coin-weight boxes); 566 (more on sources including Chinese micro-balances). J. Jumboseer = Jambusar K. kinnara a figure portrayed often possessing a human head but showing various other animal attributes, say wings and fish scales, and either two or four feet, like bird or mammal, and with tail, frequently found in the Buddhist and Hindu-influenced temple art of South East Asia, but that may be compared with similar multi-form creatures encountered in illumination in early European manuscripts (Books of Hours) and published works. It is said to embody love but such love must be regarded in a metaphysical sense, for example as the force of expression of a conception of essence evinced upon and within phenomenal materiality, thus as a concept of a strictly essentialist nature. More generally, it is a poetic representation of an early moment in the transcendental passage from formlessness to form, essence to the phenomenal, and thus  representative of a phenomenological onto-genetical point of view. See for example, Ills. Figs. 21a & c, 214–5, the first from a temple in Laos and the second from the ruins of Vijayanagar in Southern India. knowledge See for example, entries for “essentialism”, “knowledge access”, “literacy”, “market”.

L. literacy & numeracy 111n49 (a population’s metrological and monetary literacy); 147 (at each frontier of passage, a literacy of reception); 178 (atrophy of the numerical literacy of the past under colonial occupation); 186 (literacy concerning typologies of demand and consumption); 202 (literacy of quality and measure); 221 (aptitude for reading and comprehending the real); 235n18 (when labour ceases such knowledge and literature atrophies: eg. owing to the invasive economy of the colonisation of Bengal and Gujarat, and collectivisation in Russia and elsewhere); 265 (universal literacy); 355–6 (a true literacy, if not in a familiar and conventional sense); 434n4 (loss of such literacy and progressive ruralisation under early colonial conditioning in Western India); 469 (progressively lost with further development of capitalism and colonial dominance); 567 (published information for a wide range of formal literacy). logical-constructionism (the historical method of establishing grounds and consequences through deconstruction of a complex matter of concern, such as society or polity, to its most elementary constituents, and thence putting all the parts back together again, separately identified and discussed, a method commonly identified with Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and which I associate also with Kant, Hegel and most certainly Marx; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is often taken as an allegorical model of such a genre). 249–51 (method of reconstruction from first constituents: Kant’s city, like Locke, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx); 263 (Kant’s procedural methodology); 276 (Kant’s severely logical-constructionalist approach); 282 (to reconsider a Darwinist

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618 logical-constructionism (cont.) constitution of the factual in logical constructionist terms); 307–8 (Kant’s logical-constructional constitution of the material object). M. Madras = Chennai marketisation & exchange Markets are treated in this book as foci of attraction of material and immaterial things, such as cloths, coin types, banking institutions or ideas,and of their dispersion to like-market foci; they are places of gathering of goods from diverse sources and thus of their classification and reclassification, say of rices and cottons, say of «raw» cottons and yarns, and places of of add-on production moments in the sequence of commodityconstitution — constitution of the object we call a commodity — besides being centres where a multi-headed populational possibility of decisionmaking becomes concentrated. They should thus be considered as fundamental elements in the process of constituting a commodity continuum founded upon inter-cultural translational practices and will ... intension! 46 (my conventional reference to economy); 61 (criteria of demand); 96n34 & 100n40 (supply-centric theories mistakenly predominant); 107–8 (order and practice); 113 (cross territorial expectations of stable supply for demand); 118n56 (fluctuations); 130ff (Textile market censuses); 131 (to map the topographies of demand and supply); 133ff (each commodity for a specific demand); 136 (market-aesthetic criteria of demand); 144 (properties of measure and content sensitive to supply and demand); 164 (local satisfaction of globally dispersed demand); 169 (demand in terms of a chain of unfolding, mutually determining stages of production and marketing); 175–6 (market demand determined field speciation); 179

Thematic Subject Index (production detail and decisions determined by demand); 182 (frameworks and forces of demand focussed on localities of markets); 185 & 185n25 (silver drawn towards Europe and Asia by insatiable demand for payments media); 190–1 (market redefinition of field varieties); 201 (no question of a dual economy: peasants’ plots fully integrated into the global continuum of supply and demand); 235 (crops sensitive to short-term variations in demand); 240–1 (markets as centres of decision and regulation concerning focussed fields of demand); 297 & 304 (demand at distance disputing measure and judgement of the tolerable; the flow of words through the market place); 320 (methodological sampling in response to scale-differences in demand); 324 (to locate a niche that responds to demand); 369–70 & 370–1n152 (successive phases of formation and renewal of commodity identities); 383 (typological subdivision responding to demand); 389–90 (precise conditions for niche entry); 399–400 (historical cumulation and development; the ramifying corpus of an individual’s accumulating market-related knowledge); 418 (different kinds of demand for the rice varieties of village or region); 423 (selectionist experiment in response to demand); 430 (the rurban stimulus); 431n2 (qualitative precision of seed selection); 432 (selectionist experiment); 434n4 (rurban: marketised countrysides); 432 (Marc Bloch’s treatment of peasant agricultural calendars); 444ff (global demand for particular sets of work-fixed plant characters); 469 (the ability of participants to read and understand contexts of price and demand), 498–9 (the technological sophistication of the field); 544–7, figs. 44a–d (Commentary on the Illustrations”, §7, “Sherds derived from the Inter-Asian Trade in Ceramics”). interdependence of all scales or levels, including most global and most particular levels of marketing where the commodity continuum is concerned:

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Thematic Subject Index 24, 45, 116, 120, 366 (the copper coin in the peasant’s hand). knowledge access 5 (generalised accessible knowledge); 16 (local and global); 113, 118n56, 122, 122n59, 137ff (the knowledge problem: institutions, publications, experience, a publicly dispersed and accessible knowledge); 141 (lists of exchange rates as contoured topographies); 143–4n79 (manuals, & other public information); 168 (practice at Guangzhou); 181–2 (taxonomic diversity; flows of data concerning demand); 185–6 (a skill to enter and read exotic typological contexts); 202 (messages and word flows); 202–5 (a generalised literacy in quality and measure); 231–2 (lexicality); 238–9 (marketisation as communication);243 (conduits of information); 281ff (Newtonian and Euclidian grounds of possible knowledge, speciation & recognition); 320ff (decision-making necessitates market literacy); 400 (the experiential path of an «anyperson»’s augmenting know-how); 409fig27 (dividing mental space for memory stockage); 431n2 (as concentrations of meaning); 508 (memory palaces); 532–3 (Commentary on §4 of the Illustrations) memory system for a mass readership); 534–5 (Commentary on fig. 27, Jean Belot’s memory system); 536–7 (Commentary on fig. 41. Chinese market manual of coin-recognition). marketisation as history 10 (an ancient global history of marketisation ever more dense and extensive and contemporary with agricultural settlement of the same vast territories concerned); 21 (historicity of market-oriented commoditisation); 23 (false notion of thesaurisation); 96–7 (spurious transitions); 102n42 (Skinner’s theory); 111–2 (markets, settlement and institutionalisation simultaneous); 111–2nn49–50 (references to sources concerning Muscovy, China, South Asia and Europe and the intimate relationship

619 of marketisation with societal growth, class-formation, transfer of wealth and monetisation); 114 (to oppose spurious concepts of societal transition); 178–9 (ruralisation and atrophy of market relations with European intervention); 196 (historical trend towards market concentration and monopsony); 209 (markets as institutional organisers of exchange-translation); 224 (markets and translation); 238ff (Ch.3, §§§B. Markets as Communication); 258ff (Market and commodity: a Kantian approach); 259 (marketisation is taxonomic); 270–1 (part of global societal formation); 366 (evokes the question of the units of historical agency); 438 (marketisation of plant variety); 440 (market-translation and the anthropology of trust); 447 (universal grounding of plant production); and 546n20 (territorial dispersal of small markets for transAsiatic trades in Chinese ceramics along  coasts and up river valleys of Sarawak and Borneo). moral- (natural-) economy or market-economy? 24n13, 46–7, 97, 111n49, 189, 341, 361–2. markets as places for translational acts The role of the market as institution for dense and frequent transla­tional acts on a global scale is one of the central arguments of the book. 28; 31–2 (as fields of signs for recognition and passage); 104, 115–8 (a population of organisational centres; the role of intention and agency); 187–9 (traders of varied origin in each market); 209 (205ff: markets as institutions of translation); 233–4 (language-use for exchange); 241ff (exchange as acts of translation); 247 (translation of type through cultural and societal space); 344–5 (populations of agents); 355 (packaging as act of translation); 399n187 (packaging); of intercultural translation); 417–8 (through quantified

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620

Thematic Subject Index value); 439–40 (translational practices in the form of marketisation); 441ff (translation of plant identities by market institutions).

markets and typology: commodities and human types: xxxv–xxxvi & xli (type and commodity); 30 (typological identities of human populations and commodity forms compared); 34 (Darwinist versus artificial taxonomy); 35n18 (typologies of tribes); 124–5 (market-targeted crop varieties); 133ff & 135ff (cottons, wools, yarns); 140ff (monetary pluralism); 167 (construction of type); 162–175 (construction of type in successive production phases); 183, 183n23 (the adaptive niche); 184n24 (a diversity that is functional — Morse in China); 185–6 (typological diversity described); 190ff (field and market variety distinct); 196–7n33 (linguistic designation and genetic fixation); 190–205 (Pt1Ch2§i§§iii. “Speciation in field and market”); 200ff (field-market interface); 236–7 (blueprints of desire and demand); 287 (commodity formation); 314n106 (concept of species «tolerance»); 317 (speciation for the market); 322–4 (a typological niche); 370–1 (convergence of natural and artificial in the single organism; speciation through successive marketing phases; the successive constitution of type); 383ff (speciation & sub-speciation); 389 (speciation according to universal rules of constitution); 431 (nature and artifice meet within the horticultural organism); 435ff (botany as artifice); 438 (a manyphased speciation); 451 (accuracy and judgement); 451–2 (concept of «tolerance»); 453 market determination of « artificial » plant variation); 459ff (pharmaceutical & botanical speciation); 469 (niche adaptation); 477ff (speciation as narrative); 499 (field and market speciation distinguished); 499n7 (grass systematics in question; micro-varietal rice systematics and the market).

procedural constitution of the commodity: 103 (the global continuum of commodity connectivity a contoured topography); 130ff (processing of cloths); 133ff (the case of «raw cottons»); 135ff («wools» and yarns); 150 (extended trading networks); 158 (territorial extension of manufacture); 162ff («raw cottons»: extension of phases prior to manufacture); 164ff (Hove’s report on Amod «cottons»); 162–75 & 175–9 (multiple interdependency: fusion and dispersion); 177n14 (twentieth-century diamond cutting); 178–9 (extended production lines & topographical spread); 180 (phases of production more or less extended in space/time); 239 (markets fostering extsneion of relationships); 240 (as places of organisational synthesis); 242–3 (a dense concentration of translational acts); 370 («raw cotton» ‘s extended marketing trajectories); 461 (dispersed part-constitution of commodities). quantity and quality: 12–13 (reduction of quality to number); 108 (quantity establishing the fluid-like properties of exchange); 108–9 (quantity — money, price, account and premium — the condition of diversity); 149–50 (exemplified reduction of qualities to exchangeable quantities); 196n33 (Asante gold dust versus European and Asian gold coin); Pt1Ch2§2/205ff (Quality and Number); 148, 308 (valued for movement); 336 (ontic relation between quantitative value and commodity differentiation); 336n127 (the divine of religion and the materialist’s quantity being equivalent a-prioris); 342 (quantity an initially undivided condition of mind: Kant’s Noumenal and Hegel’s Geist); 346ff (quantity the condition of qualities); 347 (tangible entity and plastic variant); 348 (quantity primordial); 371 plasticity and fixity — quantity and quality — two faces of the same coin); 385 (Marx’ labour time as alienated value; Kant’s

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Thematic Subject Index negation [Verneinung], or Husserl’s “Reduction is the negative face of constitution” [Ricoeur]); 386 (“Where Kant writes of quantity and number, we add translation and translatability.”); 448–9 (seed selection maximising both quality and quantity); 459 (quantities of plant products for the pharmaceutical market); 506–7 (Hegel and Kant’s syntheses of quantity and quality); 519 (quantity the universal ground for the possibility of qualitative variation and development). measure See entries for “instrumentation”, “social contract”, “tolerance”, “method” for «Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle», and entries in “Authors’ Index” for “Kant” and “Friedman” concerning Newtonian and Euclidian measure, for “Wittgenstein” concerning the relativity of judgements concerning it; “Kula” and “Pramoedya Ananta Toer”, for the social conflict that focuses upon measure in the reality of price and exchange. xxxiv, xl, 9 (payment forms); 12 (quantitative translation through value and price); 23 (fractional rights often named by those of measure); 26 (an indifferent form of universal measure to the incomparable); 32 (socially accepted norms of measure); 35 (colonial craniometric typology); 53 (craniometric tribal identifiers); 107–9 (multiple metrological orders); 115 (behind multiplicity an integrated ordering); 117–8 (environments constituted by multiplicity); 120–1n57 (measure and instrument); 142 (experiential knowledge construction); 144 (each commodity identity its particular metrological identifiers); 150 (every exchange and passage a problem of translation and measure); 169–70 (the disputational context of measure); 196–7n33 (Asante weights for gold dust); 202 (a commonly accessible literacy of measure); 207

621 (reduction of qualities to quantitative measure), 208 (that favour complexity), 210 (local multiplicity); 247 (each event of commodification planned by measure); 259 (for measures to translate); 274–5n64 (Troubetzkoy’s «fictive» measure); 288 (combination of measures in order to fill a commodity-niche); 297 (measure of range of «tolerance » per commodity identity); 304 (the flows of words concerning measure); 309 (the commodity a synthesis of constituents and measures); 314 (the issue of «tolerance»); 330 (in the manuals and dictionaries); 331 (intentional correspondences); 372 (production of qualities possible in a context of quantity); 382 (measure and proportion of a Newtonian and Euclidian kind); 391 (the issue of «tolerance»); 415 (the knowledge that enables a sack of coin to pass without measure); 451 & 451n20 (all measure is relative, exactness a value judgement; the issue of «tolerance»); 541 (measured in grains of gold). social conflict over «standard» measures: 165n8 Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Gadis Pantai); 169–70, 170n10 (pacé Kula, 304n94. medicinal botany and plants Several entries in the “Authors’ Index” concern this question, “de Serres”, “Bauhin”, “Geoffroy”, “Rheede” ... too many to mention here. Illustrations, §4, figs. 23–8: Typological Representation, the « Species Garden » and the Palace of Memory: 405–10; “Commentary on the Illustrations”, §4: 532–5. 157fig14 (de Serres’ recommended medicinal gardens); 157fig15 (le jardin du roi of 1637); 163 (Hove a medical doctor and botanist); 168 (Hove’s collection of medical herbs in Amod); 234n17 (an essentialist medical botany); 251n35 (plants, virtues and medical cures:

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622 medicinal botany and plants (cont.) «signatures» of stars and virtues embodied by plants); 252n36 (Erasmus Darwin’s medical poems, the Botanic Garden and The Temple of Nature); 280 (creationist metaphysic of The Sphere implicated in medical botany); 337 (astrology, medicine and horticulture a single knowledge field: the creationist poesis still evident today; René Char’s poetic); 341 (the universally shared knowledge base); 349–50 (embodies the ancient poesis of The Sphere); 352 (Munting named “professor of herbal and medical arts”); 353 & 353–4n137 (astronomical and alchemical content of medical botany; the considerable medical content of Fuchs’ treatise on plants); 424 (works on plant taxonomy contained more medical information than botanical); 436–7 (transmission of medical specimens and information parasitic on the commodity); 445 (cross-cultural transfer of plant-related knowledge for medicinal usage; universal principles of medical and herbal knowledge); 446–7 (a field of translation: Hindu medicine and Dutch creationist botanical medicine); 459 (founded in the vast selectionist ground of peasant praxis); 461 (conveyance of medical specimens become commercial business); 462ff (medical botany and taxonomy: horta botanica); 462–3 (de Serres’ gardens); 464 (Munting’s metaphysical reading of worked facts); 466–7 (the commodity world of systematic connection); 471 (garden of the London Society of Apothecaries in the 1830s); 472–3n23 (Thurneysser’s medical amulets); 472–3 & 472n24 (Geoffroy’s medicinal commentary); 474 (conveyed as commodities); 475 (Polish doctor and Gujarati villager share botanical medical information); 479 (pharmacy as plant systematics); 507 («species garden» as frontispiece); 520, §2, figs. 8–15 (Commentary

Thematic Subject Index on Illustrations: metaphysical phenomenological significance of tower and well) memory palace & other aids I have in mind the imaginative architectures for stocking memory that characterised the centuries especially concerning this book, and much discussed by Frances Yates in her Art of Memory. Once aware of their prolixity at every literate, social and intellectual level, one becomes aware of how they also have come mark, as a practice, the architectures of some of the buildings one visits or territories one passes through, such as the interiors of medieval temples, whether these be Christian or Buddhist, or marking the trace of a pilgrimage sanctuary to sanctuary, places where narratives and signal happenings are played out as sequences of events to be stocked in memory (and that one may observe in a church in a French provincial town or a temple in the ruins of Mrauk U [255–6n48]). The shop keeper and merchant, or ordinary market-goer, also required such aids in order to deal with the increasing complexity of the knowledge required to buy or sell, to exchange and handle coin of the old kind, groat, ducat or sycee, all those kinds, say, named by Ben Jonson in his plays and with which his audiences must have been already familiar. None of this is mere decoration of the essentials discussed in this book, but instead an essential complement of the adequate active practice of an «everyperson», a population ... not just of specialists ... in facing, as ordinary fact, the phenomenal domain of the global commodity continuum. Among such contemporary memory aids, one should include not only such now-exotic-seeming imaginative devices, but the commercial dictionaries and glossaries listed in the bibliography,

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623

Thematic Subject Index together with the manuals of particular skills, such as Savary’s Le Parfait Negoçiant, the Chinese manuals on circulating coin, or de Personnel’s book on the Black Sea Trades, and adding to them the lists of rules affecting particular markets listing, say, the standard measures authorised for kinds of cloth or of coin, all finally issuing in the Gazetteers of territories under colonial rule in which populations came to be sub-divided and classified into potentially numerous stereotypical categories, such as of castes and tribes.

method, questions of See entries for «“dialectic» regarding method, and in the “Authors’ Index” under “Darwin” for his epistemologically individualistic and variational, agentcentred grounding of reality.

136 (the title of a merchants’ manual of 1560); 168 (practical memory of Guangzhou faced with fraud); 247 (typological properties that can be set on paper or memorised); 252–3 (Cosma Rossellio’s Thesaurus Artificiosæ memoriæ of 1579); 255–6n48 (artificialist memory systems; subjectivist and objectivist routes through memory and experience according to Strawson; the utopian tower as memory palace); 259–60 (late medieval and renaissance memory systems — Yates & Spence); 260n53 (Belot’s chiromantic division of the hand for market users; Dee’s five memory books); 260–1n54 (grounded in societal taxonomies — Rossi); 280–1 (manuals, glossaries and other mnemonic aids interacting with the taxonomic density of society at large); 330 (ever abundant production of printed memory aids); 378 (unaided memory insufficient); 409fig27 (Belot’s hand illustrated); 464 (Campanella’s utopian Città del Sole built as memory system); 467 (botanical garden as utopian project, memory palace and cosmological idea); 507–8 (the botanical garden as memory palace); 534–5 (Commentary on fig. 27, Belot’s chiromantic hand); 563–4 (& the zodiac and chiromancy).

xxxiii, xl, 37 (empirical continuities of variation vs radical contrasts of holistic kinds); 61–2 (national and ethnic units conceived like billiard balls;von Wartburg vs Ricoeur); 92–5 (units of academic discourse left assumed, unargued and unquestioned); 120 (justified as mere convenience of method but never rectified); 359, 442–3 & 509 (von Wartburg); 536 (complex content of units of cultivable land; 535 (local French words for agricultural units).

merchants’ manuals and other aids See entries for “instrumentation” and “memory palace and other aids”.

units of discourse — holistic or variational? Especially Ch1,§1, and most especially §§4. Alternative Principles of Order and Method: 101–128, and which attacks the question systematically.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle 4–5, 25, 54, 56, 83 & 83n14, 125–6n63, 223, 275, 376, 518. mint See «monetary». monetary See also the entry for “instrumentation”. mint (manufactury and domestic) xxxvi; coin wear: 143–4n79, 297, 315–6 (of dies & coins); concept of «tolerance» and speciation: 314n106, 391, 450–1; global contexts of local mints: 202; machinisation & mechanisation: 178n15; mint production dispersed: 149n85; «private» and «public»: 23, 533; production that embodies globalism: 24, 113; «raw material»: 174–5, 369–70,

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624 monetary (cont.) 370–1n152, 524; reminting and production sequences: 47, 150, 331, 371; signs endowed for recognition: 50, 416, 447; synthesis of other production forms such as for tools and instruments: 113, 120–1n57, 147–9, 149n85, 315, 383–4; trade coinages for reminting: 330–1, 418, 490fig42 (for illustration of the réal d’ocho), 543item42 (for Commentary on Illustration): «wootz» steel for coin dies: 120–1n57, 148. morphology (biological theorising and language-use) 20, 252 (poetry as method of exposition: Erasmus Darwin and Goethe); 271n61 (Kant & Hegel’s Wärmestoff), 422–3; 479 (a complex of cultural metaphor to describe natural issues, from Darwin and Lindley to Maynard Smith and Dennett, including Goethe on morphology); 480–1 (Lindley for Goethe’s “beautiful ... unassailable ... theory” of metamorphosis and morphology; Geoffroy, Oken and the Naturphilosophen); 481–2n13 (Darwin’s early drafts for his theory of evolution dating from 1830s & 1840s); 494–7 & 494–5n2 (Bergmann & Leuckart, teleomechanism & «Wärmeökonomie»). N. North-west coast native American culture (For expressions of an unstable moment in the creation of phenomenal being and which I treat as part of the pre-history of materialist transcendental critique and phenomenology) 259n52 (Boas’ writings on the Tsimshian and Kwakiutl); 343–4 (Haida and Tlingit myth); 344n130 (Siberian-Alaskan corridor of passage; “The Geste of Asdiwal”); 373 (to compare with the South-East Asian dragon); 507 (in global comparison); 523–4 (to compare with the dialectical moments of Hegel’s phenomenology).

Thematic Subject Index P. Pagan = Bagan (in Myanmar) Poesis of The Sphere Appendix 2, “Commentary on the Illustrations”, “The Phenomenology Lesson” (forging an analogy with the prolific «anatomy lessons» of the long period): 504ff, esp. §1. 252n36 (Erasmus Darwin’s poems, the Botanic Garden [1791] and Zoonomia [1794], described as a work of medicine and anatomy); 252n38 (the well as metaphor for the source of the phenomenal: eg. Hölderlin); 352–3 (human body as cosmic microcosm; the Safavid comparison); 423–4 (association of plant parts with human body parts and particular disorders; the profusion of «anatomy lessons); 460 (medical garden as microcosm); 467 (creationist conception of type); 467–8n16 (my disclaimer in writing of divine creationism, but once inherent in the formation of the early sciences); 472n21 (alchemy, botany, human anatomy, astrology, cosmology relationally combined for medical practice); 522 (the large number of illustrated «anatomy lessons»); 524 (a constant procedural iconographic continuity between essence and particular; eg Safavid art); 525 (use of illuminated capitals); 528 (vegetable animal corporal continuity). Spectators and participants portrayed in argumentative discussion: 151fig8 (Leiden anatomy theatre); 152fig9 (Vesalio’s anatomy lesson); 352n136 (Safavid and Vesalio’s frontispiece), 521 (Safavid Shahnamas, Brecht’s ideal audience & the frontispieces of merchants negotiating in Savary’s Le Parfait Negoçiant), 536–7, commentary on figs. 29 & 30 (Savary’s French and Dutch frontispieces). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

Thematic Subject Index polyphony Bakhtin’s writings on societal and textual polyphony and dissonance: 79n8. Q. qian-zhuang Urban guilds of Chinese bankers meeting twice daily to regulate exchange rates. 208, 287, 389, 568n3. R. remote (modern conditions for validity of concept — Ivan Ilich) 65 & 65n33 (the dispersed markets, strings of small ports and networks of pathways of the past); 241 (as if «remote»); 442n9. rurban, concept of (rural in a rich market context, — Richard Fox) xx, 255 (the rurban landscapes of the continuum); 434n4 (precolonial Western Indian Deccan). S. scientism See «structuralism» seed selection See «speciation» social contract(ualism) read as implicit in the practices of exchange & typological recognition (not as historical event) 27, 263, 295–7, 304, 308, 314–5, 397, 399n187, 419n5, 526n12, 528. Beccaria 263; Hobbes 416n5; Rousseau 263, 263n57, 396n180; Kant 263, 396n180, 397, 399n187; Marx 263; Adam Smith 263; Rawls 399n187. speciation epistemological and empirical 25–6 (Darwin’s individualist foundation of the real); 35 (stereotypical versus

625 individualist), 58 (colonial taxonomies of subject populations); 123 (plant speciation more than a question of botany); 138n74 (speciative commoditisation of tea); 138n75 (cloth speciation); 160–2 (artifice); 168n9 (Hove’s ignorance of field speciation); 175 (phases of cloth speciation); 179 (past usages of «species» and «speciation»); 180n18 (speciation of cloth-types, wools and sheep, and yarns); 183 (cloth typologies); 186 (phenomenological particularity of human factored speciation); 187 (ethnotaxonomies are false identities); 190ff (speciation in field for the market); 232ff (taxonomy of artifice); 235 (speciation of cultivars and natural variation); 279 (specialist neglect of peasant labour of intentional speciation; Darwin’s ignorance of problem); 280 (horticulture a huge global resource base of taxonomical practices); 289n80 (laboratory speciation as artifice), 293 (artifice); 296 (commodity artifice); 312 (Kant, Larousse and speciative artifice as «fiction» restricted to the interiority of mind); 317n110 (“saving the soul of the rice”); 325ff (a-priori rules underlying artificial speciation); 375 (conceptual grounds of metaphysic and materialism compared); 385n166 (for Kant, mind’s form-giving properties); 418 (the properties of speciation); 425–6 (constitution of property-embodying objects subject to typology); 433 (a composition of desired properties and characters); 435 (the task being to identify the properties of an historical and artificial systematics); 443–4 (all peasant growers creative plant-«speciatiors»); 452ff (relationship and confusion of cultural speciation with botanical speciation; micro-varieties attested identifiable to peasants but not to botanists); 459–60 (commodity-related reference for scientific systematics); 467 (stereotypical Creationist taxonomies of early botany); 474–5 (their cultural constitution; their inter-cultural translation); 476 (phases and disputations concerning identity formation). Frank Perlin - 978-90-04-41492-1 Downloaded from Brill.com12/18/2020 08:57:20PM via New York University

626 speciation (cont.) Darwinism (contrasting with creationist stereotype) xx–xxii (englobing Darwinism of human creationism, nature of artifice); 25 (Darwinist individualism); 26ff (Darwinist epistemology vs stereotypical); 31 (controversy concerning systematics); 38 (two approaches to identity); 57 (stereotype and method); 60ff (continuous variation or contrastive differences: society and language?); 227–8n14 (Darwinist individualism versus «mentalités»); 231ff (& versus commodity nature); 237 (the distinction between them); 255–6 (contemporary knowledge individualised & experiential); 266–7 (universalist Kantian a-prioris empirical & historical); 283–4ff (commodity and biological species forms); 295ff (individualist agency upon nature to create the stereotypical forms of culture); 305 (Larousse’ important discussion of 1870: Darwin, Lamarck, Goethe ... transformational & morphological advance); 313n105 (species identities); 321 (Darwinism being constitution by accident); 339–40 (Darwinism, Steward & the universal); 359 (rules of method and language-use; Darwinism and von Wartburg); 392ff & 392n171: Darwin’s formation of categories based upon individual difference; 395, 401 & 415: the Darwinist natural context for stereotypical artifice); 424ff (commodity foundations of early scientific species concept coincides with their creationist metaphysics); 435 (modern scientific systematics must integrate the distinction); 424, 429 & 439 (peasant foundations of Chinese, Ottoman and European horticultural naming and classifying); 477 (the boundary between the two taxonomic forces); 477ff (conceptualisation through correspondence); 479 & 493 (uses and misuses of cultural metaphor); 479–80 (Darwin’s Adamic genealogical tree of

Thematic Subject Index speciation); 481 (a diagram of a wholly different kind); 493–9 (Appendix 1: “Order in Artificial and Spontaneous Nature”). structuralism 17 (esoteric & inaccessible qua Mandelbrot & Lacan); 18–9 (inheriting post-war scientist ideology); 42 (irreconcilable with a phenomenology); 80n9 (Saussurian linguistics and structural functionalism); 225n10 (post-war scientism); 258 (inconciliable with universalist grounds for commoditisation); 355 (a knowledge accessible in contrast to structuralism); 376n156 (& Jakobson); 417 (post-war scientism). structural functionalism 40, 80n9, 380. systematics xxii (resistance of specialists to peasant selection and classification; Darwinist and cultural systematics must be made to meet); 31 (that I must dispute with the specialists); 193 (the limits of conventional neo-Darwinist systematics); 194n30 (Watt’s view that peasant-based classifications objective and realist); 238 (the frontier between peasant anthropology of the plant and botanical systematics); 260–1n54 (a considerable stock of horticultural knowledge on European and Asian systematics); 306–7 (Larousse’ discussion of 1870 of the difficulties of classifying variety); 313 (the biological species problem as Kant’s «discursive knowledge»); 318 (commodity taxonomy of agricultural crops and botanical systematics); 422 (plants and commodity type and as botanical type); 423–4 (the dangerous risk of entering dispute); 431–2 (that agricultural systematics must be distinguished from natural speciation); 437 (prolific foundation of experimental praxis among vast populations); 443–4 (every peasant

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Thematic Subject Index grower actively creating botanical variety); 448–52 (plant types equivalent to types of ducat or rupee); 455 (agricultural knowledge-forms founding early botanical science); 462–3 (Geoffroy’s systematics); 464 (the natural plasticity of grasses and insects that causes dispute and difficulties of comprehension); 467 (human creationism true of artifice); 471 (pharmacy as criterion for classification in early botany); 474 (a Chinese or Dutch apothecary displays a virtual systematics); 477 (“Postface”: formed by the linear, sequential, narrative and biographical style of text and discovery of plant identities); 479 (the resistance of modern evolutionists); 499 (decisive distinctions between cultural typification and natural). T. «tolerance» a metrological concept I have deduced from market practice and its typological content, in order to understand the operating of the use of measure in characterising identity in aan epoch of inexact methods of manufactured replication and measure contrasted with modern industry. Such principles of metrological «tolerance» within which a type, say, of cloth or coin, or a cultivar of rice, could be recognised as what it pretended to be underlay the very possibility of market exchanges. One may relate it to other questions of common practice regarded as resting upon an implicit social contract. 32 (the grounds for its application); 297n85 (range of tolerance per type); 304, 314–7 (tolerance of permitted variation per identity); 314n106, 316 (frontiers of tolerance); 322 (measure of tolerance); 391, 451 (beyond the limits of tolerance), 497–8, 543 (Commentary for fig. 42: “tolerance” concerning réals d’ocho).

627 translation — intentional drive effecting commoditisation Two issues concern translation in this book: first, my approach as a question of method and ethic, discussed within and not paginated in this index; second, the interpretation of the global commodityexchanging continuum as a field of translation, intended and willed, and encountered in the dense and evident practice of translational practice embodied by commodity exchange. Such description is in obvious controversial conflict with predominant opinion in the humanities, for which communication between what it terms «cultures» or «peoples» is at best limited, a difficulty grounded in the surfaces of empirical difference observed distinguishing them. Language itself, conceived and treated holistically rather than phenomeno­ logically (the latter, however, practised by the von Wartburg dictionary), is also assumed, as if we were all agreed, an obstacle to efficacious translation and its possibility. This issue, and the trans­ lational character of the commodity continuum, are what I have chosen to index. Ahuja & Sarkar: xviii, xxiii, xxvi–xxx, xxxvi–xxxviii, xl–xli, xliii, xlvi. Self: xlix, l–liv, 2 (commodification a culture intentionally and globally translational); 4ff (commodification evidence of omnipresent, intercultural translation); 7–12 (its universal status; quantity its medium); 15 (in controversion of learned opinion), 21 (the individualist agency of entire populations); 28 (a praxis devoted to the arts of passage); 36 (are languages holistic entities or continuities of practical variance?); 40ff (as drive); 52 (its universal a-priori grounds); 60ff (Ricoeur versus von Wartburg, the difference and the praxis); 103ff (manifold and dense field of evident translatable action); 105 & 109 (translation and the

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628 translation (cont.) production of difference); 109n47 (trust for translation); 112 (the role of monetary instruments); 115 (translational mechanisms); 146–7 et seq. (trust as a language devoted to passage and recognition); 168 (disputation for agreement); 172ff (distrust its interruption; markets inherently cross-cultural); 187ff (global ... universal); 193 (between field and market); 203 (supercharged with dissonance); 208 (instruments and institutions devoted to its possibility); 221 (global market literacy); 234 (the commodity formed in terms of its possibility); 240 (metrological and monetary difference devoted to it); 242–3 (role of markets); 258 (quantification); 264–5 (an artifice of translatability constituted of diversity); 265 (language constituted in terms of its possibility); 268 (identities holistic or accidentalist?); 296 (the indifference to difference); 303ff (as drive); 328 (an inter-translational fabric of shared knowledge); 331 (cross-cultural correspondence); 339 & 346 (Steward’s principle of cross-cultural compatibility); 347 & 355 (translational function of market exchange); 356 (the universal as foundation); 412 (a universal conception of the real); 414ff (willed and intentioned); 415–6n2 (translation not a loss of meaning but an efficacious transfer of meaning); 424 (not «ethno-botany»); 445 (reason’s response to the empirical); 441 (semantic and concept); 478–9 (“human intervention” & its field of action ... its context); 521–2 (dispute as constitutive of accord); 525–6 (Babel just an incident). intercultural communicational continuity 412n2: oppositions; 425n4: Hegel’s use of the term «gleichgültig». trust See Illustration, §4, Illustrations Section 5: Principles of Exchange, Trust and Accord. The Act of Translation: 455–8. 29–31c;

Thematic Subject Index Commentary on the Illustrations, §5: 535–8. 15–6 (the full and variable content covered by the term); 27 (stereotypical identity enabling passage on trust); 31 (comportment, forms of language, institutional arrangement); 109n47 (as problem solving); 146–7 (typology a language of definition and trust); 147n83 (Savary’s frontispieces: the necessity of argument in order to reach accord); 165–72 (an exemplary case of mistrust); 170n10 (mistrust underlying disputes about measure); 177–8 (markets facilitate trust); 206n42 (the question of terminology); 241–2 (conditions of trust: a secure institutional context); 247 (to compose a relationship of trust; typologyfocussed); 279–80n72 (to correct prevailing definitions and approaches); 310 (reduce the uncertainty of events of exchange); 315–6 (events marked by signs and gestures of trust ... language; the constitution of the commodity-object guided by the need for passage and recognition); 380 (untrusting and uncertain); 399–400 (the fictive social contract assumed by trust); 440 (contrasts in kind that are constitutive and that permit the act of translation); 399n187 (the fictive social contract); 455–8figs., 29–31c (Illustrations of frontispieces and vignettes of Savary’s Le Parfait Negoçiant); 475 (recognition that coin or good is true to the type and worthy of trust); 535–40 (Commentaries on Ilustrations); 539 (to provide conditions for trust being an ethic). typology and taxonomy See entries for «markets and typology» and speciation» tulip speciation: 235 (an artificialist culture and taxonomy); 460 (Clusius tulip treatise; Munting’s father a tulip trader); 461n5

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Thematic Subject Index (Munting’s treatment of the tulip); 468 (instability of plant-type); 478n2 (Beckmann’s chapter on tulips); 497–8 (labour preserves type). investment bubble: 260–1n54 (tulip bubble & weighing of Mephistopheles’ coin), 458, 461, 461n5. type & typology See entry for “speciation” U. universal strictly contrasted with the term «general» Ahuja’s Foreword: xvii–xix, xxii–xxiii; Sarkar’s Foreword: xxv–xxx, xxxiii, xxxvi–xl, xlii–xliv. Self: xlix, li, liv, lv; 3–4 (commodification as cultural and universal); 7 (universal as opposed to general; universal principles of mind); 13 (universal principles of constitution; differentiation founded upon universal formative principles; particular and universal); 14 (philosophical anthropology universalist, in contrast to social and cultural anthropology); 16–17 (two opposed universalisms: structuralist and that of the book); 26–30 (Darwin’s universalist theory of natural organic speciation); 33–6 (constitution of the commodity); 41–4 (universalist conditions of mind; is a universalism empirically possible?); 50–9 (Kant’s contribution); 60–3 (Ricoeur: «no universal ground for translation»); 61 (without exception); 65 (to identify a cultural universal); 107 (universal principles of object formation); 113n51 (communication as translation [Kant]; that the communicative act implies the universal); 114 (spurious historicism of the universal); 163 (an explanation of difference); 171 (materialised); 171n11

629 (Husserl’s universalism); 186 (Steward’s principle); 187ff (embodied by difference); 193 (as taxonomy); 205 (embodied by monetary phenomena); 208–9n45 (Cassirer& the sign); 231–2 (& taxonomy); 255–6 (& participative individualism); 258–9 (principles of constitution); 265–72 (& cultural difference); 270–2 (the historical and circumstantial evolution of the human universal); 292 (the primary Kantian dimension of possibility); 296 (constitutive role of accident and difference); 303 (shared universal knowledge); 318–9 (participants’ knowledge universal in kind); 324n117 (conditions of possible thought); 330 (embodied by contemporary monetary forms); 334 (without metaphysic); 338ff (& finitude?); 340 (Darwinism and the universal); 347 (the quantitative medium); 354 (its finitude); 368ff & 368n149 (Hegel: mind and not metaphysic); 372 (particulars subject to quantitative evaluation); 380 (historical and participative); 382 (the particular an expression of the universal); 387 (freed of metaphysic); 391 (an empirical universal); 399 (universal and societal); 416ff (universal and general radically different); 423 (the laboured plant founded upon universal principles of type and category); 434 (embodied by locally conditioned circumstance); 438 (by language-use & market practice; a universalist hypothesis of the praxis globally underlying differentiation among plant taxonomies); 447 (grounding field-plant production); 475 ( a universal framework of mind); 497 (& the laws of motion); 508 (rules intolerant of exception). Homo sapiens derived from dispersed origins rather than an Adamic genealogical tree xvii, 51, 266–7, 379, 399n186 (Kant’s Adamic assumption); 421 («as if to locate

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630 a fossil Adam»); 479–80 (Darwin’s Adamic tree of species evolution). W. Wesen as essence or transcendentalphenomenological possibility See entries in “Authors’ Index” under Hegel, Kant, Husserl and their translators, a central problem being the meaning given to it in translation (I frequently prefer «possibility» to «essence», for obvious anti-metaphysical reasons where these materialistic authors are concerned,

Thematic Subject Index but also in order to give full sense to what I read) 205n31 (translation of Husserl by Ricoeur); 511–12n5 (Hegel’s clarification and its translation by di Giovanni); 528n14 (Bourgeois & the author); 552 (Husserl). wootz steel produced in Southern India for coin-dies in Indian mints and for export (studied by Thelma Lowe and who introduced me to it): 120–1n57, 148.

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