Professor Richard Baxstrom Inaugural Lecture

Thanks very much, John. Before I get started, while I have a whole section of thanks, that will come a little bit later in the talk, but I do want to thank you, John, for the wonderful introduction. I almost feel like I'd love to meet that person someday. But I guess.... No, seriously, thanks very much. Thanks for that. And I also want to thank Helene in the Communications crew in SPS, who have done an awful lot of work to not only make sure that everything was right for me to deliver this talk, but made sure that all of you knew about it. And so thanks very much for all of that help. And I do want to just before I start, I want to thank all of you. As John alluded to, there's been something of a distance, shall we say, between appointment and my talk here tonight, my inaugural lecture, well, six years. And so your patience is much appreciated. But we did have a pandemic and other things. So I'm just very happy to be here now, and I look forward to getting any feedback afterward. Like John said, we won't take questions, but you can always find me if you would like to say something about what I have to say tonight. So, you see the title of my talk here. I do have a plain English version of that, which is why I do anthropology, and why I have returned home to do it now. So if you would prefer that one, you can put that one in there. I am a creature of the 20th century. This is neither a confession nor an excuse. Rather, by offering the simple fact, this statement serves as a relatively straightforward way to embark on the task of situating myself and my intellectual work over the course of the first decades of the 21st century. As the record shows and continues to show, creatures of the 20th century tend to create and inhabit worlds that are simultaneously disastrous - that's not working, there we go - and redemptive. We lack any easy transparency to ourselves, of ourselves to ourselves, something which I am certain causes no end of grief to those generations who have come after. Beings of the 20th century simultaneously insist that the world is irredeemably damaged and resolutely, often violently, pursue the dream of a redeemed utopic future, no matter how dimly imagined. We smile in agreement, and yet cannot fully accept the fact that perhaps, paraphrasing Maurice Blanchot, there is no future remaining within which one would think, let alone pursue, such transformed worlds. This makes us somewhat strange and very often dangerous creatures. And the historical facts of the 20th century itself bear witness to this claim. And yet I am one of these creatures. I cannot help but think alongside the seemingly insignificant, strange or perverse elements of our world as a way of critically asserting that, in spite of all, the world can indeed be different. It only seems logical to me to resist positive singularities, certitudes, categorical imperatives and embrace silences, exclusions, and other negativities as a way of offering some small critical image of the world. This does not make sense. It is in a damaged world, however, one can only risk incoherency. Risk not making much sense, risk direct implication in the damage, to perhaps ever so slightly cause or expose a rift that allows for a critical speculative imagination of something else. I can give a very small example of what I mean by describing why a seemingly crude, seemingly insignificant image, first encountered over 40 years ago, has remained meaningful to me. In briefly engaging this image and why it matters to my purpose this evening, I can incompletely demonstrate what I mean by critique and what I mean by thinking. To a 14-year-old boy in 1983, you can do the math, at home in the rural southwest of the United States, staring at the walls of his bedroom, the world was experienced as a place out there. We had television, and we had the news. We could drive or fly to exotic cities like Denver or Phoenix. But the fever pitch of the Cold War, Hollywood films and pop tunes, the spectacle of sports, politics, war, and terrorism, all seemed like events that moved history in the world along out there. The world did not come to us easily. We had to actively try to get out into it and grasp it. This felt like a scary impossible prospect, but we still harboured our dreams. I cannot recall now the precise circumstances of how I came into possession of the album whose cover you see here. But I can say that it made a big impression on me. The music by the Minutemen. Any Minutemen fans? No. Absolutely, nobody knows who the Minutemen are. Neil knows. Neil knows. Okay. Okay. We have two in the back. There we go. So the music by the Minutemen - angular, intense, and intelligent - is music that I occasionally still listen to today. It is, however, the cover of the album that has haunted me in the decades since I first acquired it. That drawing - and that question. The image was drawn by Raymond Pettibon. At the time, Pettibon provided quite a lot of artworks for punk bands associated with the LA-based indie record label SST. His images are instantly recognisable to persons of a certain generation and taste - this is the art of American indie music, at least in the early 1980s, deeply alienated and incoherently aspirational. In this image, we see a contorted angry face of a child. He might be wearing pyjamas, implying that he's leapt from his bed, unable to remain still or quiet any longer, and has torn through the house looking for something that will enable him to burn it down. He holds the flaming torch he's found aloft as he runs from what appears to be a bedroom in a post-World War II ranch style suburban house. That's what I think anyway. Is he running from his parents' bedroom? The bed is on fire. There's nobody in the bed, although I always wondered if his parents were somewhere nearby, asleep, unaware, unconscious - the image leaves this an open question. I have always speculated that the kid leads a fairly comfortable life. He simply can't stand it anyway. He burns it down - anyway. A terrible, brutal representation, for sure, but one I have always taken to be a darkly hopeful image. The image of someone who will burn it all down in the dim amorphous hope for a different world than the one he inhabits. The truly brilliant, haunting element of this work, however, is the question scrawled at the top: 'What Makes a Man Start Fires?' Has a better question ever been posed? Perhaps, but not for me. Now, I think that we should update this a bit to 'What makes a person start fires?'. It was the 1980s. I can say without a doubt that this simple aggressive open question is the question that has driven a career in anthropology. Hardly a day has gone by over the past 40 years that I haven't at some point thought about that question. This desire to grasp and inhabit a damaged world in order to ever so slightly form a picture of a different, indeed better, one constitutes an overarching method. Now, following theorists much more adept than I, such as Stanley Cavell or Theodor Adorno, and yes, Cavell and Adorno can be put together, I guarantee it. I think of this as a form of immanent critique. The action of the critique emerges as a performative. In deploying this form of thinking, writing, and acting, I presume several things: the social world is characterised by multiplicity, not wholeness; this world is therefore fragmented, contradictory, and observably broken - this is a judgement rooted in a kind of moral perfectionism - that's the Cavell; these observable contradictions are normative and expectant and that they anticipate a world beyond this one that is more than merely 'a life lived less wrongly' - that's Adorno; and finally, the task of thinking alongside such a world is a negative one in that it seeks out the rifts, fissures, and aporias that are entangled within the positive facts of our knowledge, laws, ideologies, and politics. Seeking out the silent, the insignificant, the violent, indeed, the nonsense of our world breaks up the illusion of anything held to be normative or a uniform whole. Such are the fires, small though they may be, that I have sought to notice, to document, to think alongside, and yes, occasionally, even to start. This obviously requires one to proceed negatively, at least psychologically or philosophically, negatively. This procedure mediates in an uncomfortable way between the desire to possess something and an equally strong compulsion to push it away. This is akin to the powerful contradiction of making the mute eloquent - an impossible relation. Most methods recognise this impossibility and come down on one side of the other. To possess is to enact what science has traditionally desired. To remain silent is to concede that the object simply does not comport with one's identity. You're not one who might authentically represent that object or that person. Both might be said to be responsible positions - what I describe here is both responsible and irresponsible, an outcome of my training, my disposition, and the company I keep. Adorno reminds us that absolute responsibility results in sterility. while the outcome of absolute irresponsibility is simply an administered form of 'fun' and nothing more. So I'm groping, likely unsuccessfully, for an indeterminate zone elsewhere - a constellation (to stay with Adorno's language) rather than simply progressing on a line or to a point. Who has been with me during what has now become an extended pursuit of these rifts and these fires? Who has, through their wisdom, their patience, their commitment, their kindness, their sympathy (in the Humean sense), made it possible for me to build a career and a life out of what by any standard is a somewhat weird set of aspirations and preoccupations? Who has, in other words, made me possible? And so I'm going to take just a little bit of time at this stage - I know that this interrupts the talk just a little bit. And I know that there have been a lot of really clever ways I've seen colleagues and I see some colleagues here who have really worked the thanks and the acknowledgments in in very clever ways, and I'm just not that clever, I guess, but I also feel like it's actually really important to say the names. Because without these names, I actually wouldn't be standing here. I wouldn't be in Edinburgh. None of this would be happening. And so I'm just going to, it's a kind of acknowledgment. It doesn't go on for too long, but I really want to say the names of those who have helped me come here. And so to my PhD supervisor - these are the thanks - my thanks to, my PhD supervisor and mentor Veena Das, who believed in me and taught me simple essential things: how to read, how to write, how to see, how to hear, how to think, and how to be. To Pamela Reynolds, Deborah Poole, Paola Marratti, Hent de Vries, Michael Peletz, Jane Guyer, Steve Caton, and Talal Asad - my teachers, my mentors, my models and sometimes even my friends. - they taught me this fairly unique discipline anthropology. Mm. But they also taught me a lot about life, challenging me to take the tiger's leap and try to think the world. To Michael Taussig, Gannath Obeyesekere, Alan Klima, and Kaushik Ghosh, who before it had even occurred to me, showed me what an engaged, creative anthropology truly could look like, and by their examples and their generosity to a greenhorn kid, convinced me I could actually do it. I want to say a big thanks to my fellow students and postdocs at Johns Hopkins University, who created a truly unique and special community to be a part of, and I'll specifically mention Stuart McLean, Sylvain Perdigon, Semeena Mulla, Naveeda Khan, and Aaron Goodfellow, all of whom I was a PhD student with and around. We were a unique and challenging bunch there. I would like to say thanks to the late Barney Rosset, who gave me a job and welcomed me into his mad, New York literary and cultural milia. Barney showed me what creativity and courage look like and he is missed. To Dimitri Tsintjilonis, whose absence from SPS is something I still mourn, even as I still see him more than ever around town. He couldn't be here tonight, but he did call me. Now, really to everyone here in SPS, and Social Anthropology, in particular at Edinburgh, particularly, a lot of my long-time colleagues, you know, John did make a point that I've been here a long time. I'm not the only one. I'd specifically like to mention Toby Kelly, Ian Harper, Francesca Bray, Sandy Robertson, Janet Carsten, Becky Marsland, John Harries, and the very -much-missed Alan Barnard, Casey High and Naomi Haynes, too. To friends past and present at ECA and at Talbot Rice Gallery, who have always kept me on my toes, especially Neil Mulholland, Angela McClanahan, Jonny Murray, and James Clegg. I'd like to thank Dorothy Miell. Tony Good, Charlie Jeffery, Fiona Mackay, Jonathan Spencer, Linda McKie, and John, you get another thanks because these are the Heads of School, the Deans of the College, who, you know, maybe they seem like they're quite far away from us all, but I've always really benefited from your leadership, your friendship, and just your examples. And so thanks to everyone who's here, who was able to hear that. To Meryl Kenny, Lawrence Dritsas, John Harries, and many, many others, I've had the pleasure to serve alongside in SPS leadership roles. Good friends who have always come together to make it happen, and I think that's an understatement, really. To Marie Kraft and Neil Willett, who are truly amongst the sharpest, smartest, funniest people I know and who I'm happy to say have shaped my working life and my thinking as much, if not more, than anyone else on this list. And there is this small matter of the fact that they keep this place running. Sorry, John, but that's true. So really to everyone on the teams that support Learning and Teaching and just the running of SPS, all of you are fantastic, and you've always made me look much better than I suspect I am. There's a few more, the especially thankful, right? The students that I've taught. I suspect that they have taught me more than I ever taught them. Way too many to really mention. I could mention so many, but I won't here. To my friends, academic, but more than that. Siddharthan Maunaguru, Anojaa Karunananthan, Sorry, Tamil name, it really twists my tongue. Karen Schistek and Michael Edwards - better friends and companions cannot be found anywhere. And especially to Todd Myers and Stefanos Geroulanos. We were so close at Hopkins, people made up a collective name for us, which I will not reveal here. You are the ones who get it, and still get me. And especially to my family. My mother, Elizabeth McCabe; my fathers (yes, there are multiple fathers!) - you can ask me about this afterward if you wish - William Matlock, the late Kenny Baxstrom, and the late Jay McCabe. I'd like to thank my extended family with a particular thanks to my sadly late cousin Preston Scott, who did not seem to matter at all in his short life, but who mattered to me. And especially, and with the strongest possible love, my wonderful Edinburgh family. I would be nothing at all, nothing at all, without my exquisite partner, Julia Lungu, who's already been introduced. Her mother, Alla Norrie and her her grandmother, Nadezhda Illina, who is alive and well and also lives with us, 89 almost years old, and my quite busy, bossy, and wonderful daughters, Veronika and Isadora. You are love and hope personified. So thank you. And just a little aside, I actually wouldn't allow my daughters to come to this. They're a little young for this, but they would also heckle me mercilessly. And I didn't need that. I have enough problems as it is, but they will appear at the reception afterwards. So if you want to stick around and see who they're becoming, then, please do. So without all of you and the many, many that I've missed, I would simply be nothing. Thank you. I want to now move to talking about my ongoing current project, the complexity of returning home to do it, and the necessary confrontation with memories, experiences, and relationships that I was actively oblivious to, despite their intimacy and despite my belonging to them, avowed or not. Now, the title of the overall project, not the talk tonight, but the overall project, is 'Entrepreneurial Life and the Artifice of Freedom in the American Southwest'. This project is ongoing, so I can really only draw some fairly preliminary conclusions, but I'll do my best anyway. So is it possible to respond to a form of life born from a marriage of principle and nightmare? By 'respond', I mean, 'answer', at a distance, the vehement demand to avow an inheritance that saturates one's very being-there, that aspires to give life and meaning to one's otherwise inexplicable presence, that insists that it is constitutive of 'my world'. Durkheim gives an unequivocal answer to this question; the answer being 'no'. We are born into worlds that anticipate our arrival that constitute 'us' even before there are bodies/objects to attach to such subjectivities. And yet there's a rift in our consciousness that short-circuits the smooth functionalism of Durkheim's answer. Aren't we all jolted by this short-circuit? Perhaps... This rift, this alienation, was the avenue by which I am now answering the question of responding to a form of ethics or an ethical life that I understand as everyday entrepreneurship and that silently dominated my earliest years growing up as a form of moral common sense. It is my wager that this was, and is, an unsustainable form of life, rooted in contradictions, double-binds, and ultimately violence, at times, violence, both physical and psychological. Yes, I discovered, it is possible to respond, but taking distance from this form of living required a psychically violent act, the act of distancing. Not quite an unconscious act of repression, I, for a long time, sought to sever and bury the ties that bound me. In short, I sought to become oblivious. This act has ultimately provided neither the answer nor finished the job of detaching me from the echoes of my early life. What remains, in spite of all, is the kind of classic Freudian 'foreign body', albeit not precisely conforming to the definition he and Breuer outlined and where this figure appears. The analogy is close - I'll quote them briefly - 'We must presume rather that the psychical trauma - or more precisely the memory of the trauma - acts like a foreign body, which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work'. In short, matter out of psychic place, present but not known directly, generating symptoms. But what's the symptom here? How does it fold out onto a sober, measured project of social scientific significance? And why undertake such an ambiguous, hazardous return as a project in the first place? Now, if we read on in Freud and Breuer, we come to the famous claim that 'hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences'. Now, this is again, close to some of what I'm talking about, but perhaps it's more precise to indicate that in this case, it is a problem of spectres and hauntings more than that of simple recall or recourse to the past. Live figures of the present haunt this incomplete disavowal. These haunting figures are well known to me, probably well known to a lot of you as well? The populist, precarious American middle class. The MAGA American. The white supremacist 'All Lives Matter' crowd. The libertarians. The sovereign citizens, and so on. These are people that I basically grew up with, who I related to, who I'm not sure I used to be, but perhaps in part. Scholars and analysts of late have been trying to answer the question 'who are they?', trying to piece together the state of the United States and the character and contours of a population that seems increasingly mad. To the rest of the world, even a world living under the threat of broadly adjacent forms of madness, these are people who sometimes seem exotic.  Radically, attractively, repellently, other, even if it is seldom expressed via such a loaded and unequivocal term. If JG Ballard was right to claim that the only alien world is Earth, then it follows, for me, at least, that the only truly foreign country is America. [Sorry, there's a long one from Ballard.] It should be explicit by now that I'm not interested in any simple way of getting to 'the' truth of the form of living that made me and that I have manoeuvred to maintain a distance from ever since. Nor am I in any simple way returning 'home', as warm and reassuring as that fantasy might be. No, I am interested in the rift. Retaining the perspicuity of Freud's famous claim, we can update it to say that it is the 'anthropologist of home' that suffers from reminiscences - if we can seek to pin down the 'positionality' of ethnographers returning from whence they came, then this is it. It is in the embracing of this rift that one might yet conceptualise an operative anthropology of our time, at least when we return home to do it. I offer this broader commentary to outline the wider stakes associated with this ongoing ethnographic project that has required the reviving of links to a past and a 'home' that I had previously sought to cut-off snuff out and forget. The general project to which this specific relation refers entails the consideration of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial subjects in this rural area, Montezuma County, in the southwestern part of Colorado, in the United States. It considers the contradictions, dilemmas, double-binds, and forms of violence that inevitably emerge from such forms of living. Now, starting from the observation that many Americans take up entrepreneurial life as a form of seeking freedom, rather than simply doing business or acquiring wealth, this overall project aims to accurately and sympathetically grasp these lives. Lives and people who are seeking emancipation from collective rules and obligations, and they find themselves faced with the impossibility of achieving the individual freedom that popular entrepreneurialism promises. So the genesis for the project, of course, is in the memories of having grown up there. And I grew up in a community of frustrated entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, people who were ensnared in lives that really, from my perspective, they were not particularly free, but they vociferously defended and despised them simultaneously. And so that's why it's interesting to me. Contrary to approaches to doing ethnography at home that seek to emphasise hitherto ignored or misunderstood 'positive' aspects of the locale or one's community, my approach seeks to resurrect the past that I mentioned that I've sought to repress. It is clearly unusual and more than a little risky to disturb the spirits of one's past in this way, but it is my wager that drawing on such forms of negativity allow for a unique engagement. The risk might seem obvious, but I don't think that that's really the point. Rather, what is more legitimately at stake is how it's possible to transform one's memories, experiences, and situatedness into a legitimate 'project' and what are the stakes, conceptual and disciplinary, of a project metamorphosed out of the facts and experiences of, in essence, my own personal history? [Ooh, too far. There we go.] Now, it is not only in witchcraft... [Oh, there we go.] where simply talking or or acting positions one as a belligerent. I would say that an anthropologist talking about home as an ethnographic object does the same. This might seem like an aggressive and counter-intuitive claim to make - after all, is it not the case that doing 'anthropology- at-home' is intended as a way of reducing or eliminating the belligerence of objectifying, othering and hierarchizing that marred traditional forms of fieldwork undertaken elsewhere. Perhaps this is the aspiration, but it is my intuition that we should not at all accept that this is simply the case. Return (and I take for granted that anthropology-at-home involves a return) return should not be confused for repair. It is much harder to shift away from the belligerence of ethnographic work than it would seem, even doing it at home. Now, anthropologists today, I think, somewhat nervously, sometimes, assure themselves and others that our discipline is no longer 'a science of the exotic', of the exotic other. And I think that this is undoubtedly true, particularly, if we properly note the inevitably racialized gesture that the word exotic performs in its common contemporary usage in our quite plain obligation to confront and transform the racism of our disciplinary inheritance. Still, it's not at all clear why simply skipping away from the exotic, as such, would give us the placid reassurance that the observation seems intended to impart. While it seems completely counter- intuitive at first glance, in my reckoning it appears that one form of anthropological engagement that's still, above all others, 'needs' a concept of radical difference and alienation, even like 'the exotic', is precisely the approach of returning home to undertake ethnographic work. Now, I realise I'm taking a risk here of appearing hopelessly anachronistic, and even invoking this term, insensitive or even worse. Perhaps we should, however, take the risk to reinvent this concept or one like it. After all, such an act constitutes the creativity that is proper to us as thinkers and as intellectuals. This does, however, beg the question of why this concept, particularly given the state of disrepute the notion finds itself in when it comes to measured and proper social scientific discourse. Now, there is a method to what I'm thinking about this when I think about the exotic. In certain respects, much of what we need to frame and clarify the quality of the engagement that an anthropology of home requires is actually already attached to this very problematic idea - a source and symbol of hope, of fear, of possibility regarding a diverse social life. Something that enfolds difference into itself, of reconstruction and understanding, and, if need be, escape. So this figure, this repressed, disavowed figure of the exotic, it possesses an atmosphere of violence as well. That's kind of critical, as I mentioned earlier. It's critical to avow and retain if it's going to be operable in the manner that I'm outlining here. So I don't want to mislead anyone here. Make no mistake, formulating an anthropological object of study, particularly one that we would find at home, particularly one at home, entails no small measure of epistemic violence. Pamela Reynolds has observed that we incur a certain violence in the simple act of making anthropology out of what people say. Veena Das has drawn our attention to the same risk and tendency in noticing and observing silences, aporias and the turning away that we see in ethnographic situations. So when we turn our attention to ourselves or our memories, our own inheritances, reconfigured, alienated, and estranged, this difference performs an important function and that it brings these memories and all of this inheritance within the grasp of our knowing, it makes it something different. So the pejorative aspect of this notion, it always lurks, but if we reclaim the exotic, and jettison, the overtly vulgar, frankly discriminatory aspects of the concept, and render it operable in the present, but that would require radical transmutation of the time of the exotic or of the radically different. So there are classic accounts of the exotic and the affective power of the narrative inevitability that depends upon a framing that places the quasi-spiritual moment in classic understandings of the exotic, which is the first encounter. This is a trope of discovery. It's suffused with wonder and terror, and you're confronted really with alien beings, and this confrontation, this first encounter, provides its own motivation to know and inevitably to act. That's what the exotic at least used to do and what we still sometimes need to do, I think often need to do. We still today make much of first encounters in our confrontation with difference. This very clearly obscures the time that matters in these zones of encounter and perverts our ability to grasp the forms of variation, disruption, and deviance that throw us away from ourselves, that undo and threaten to ruin us. Blaming first encounters for what follows only disables those forms of partial understanding we might aspire to attain through careful, systematic work and analysis. It would also seem to exempt anthropology at home from this moment, as we are presumed to always already 'be there' and thus to some degree safe from the hazards of making something or someone 'other'. This does not strike me as realistic or valuable to the work of being ready to take up an anthropological engagement. Rather, we should face up to the retrospective nature of any inaugural claim of 'firstness', and to what in the present allowed the figuration of such an encounter as being a cause or an agent. This includes a kind of first encounter that happens when we refigure home as an object. So for me, this requires us to very systematically think, not just first encounters, but to think afterwardness. And again, this is also something of a Freudian kind of inspired concept, right? Freudian afterwardness, which is signalled in Tylorian, you know, survivals or Warburgian Nachleben. There's a consistent thread in this thinking, which thinks difference in a very particular way. And it asserts that the origin is established only through the delay of its manifestation. This is George Didi-Huberman, who actually tells us this in his book about Warburg and about Tylor. The fact that Freud articulated the arc of traumatic time in this fashion, does not then mean that the logic of this arc cannot be applied elsewhere. It is to this elsewhere that I'm more interested in. To simply stay with trauma would limit the effectiveness of this analysis to identifying meaningful objects of a personal and psychological nature. So clearly, the problem of doing anthropology at home begins not with the kind of object, but rather consists of bringing into view a properly anthropological object. The danger is that therapy or redemption takes over. And I don't think that we should be content to remain in such zones, as safe as they might feel. So afterwardness in Freud's theory of trauma, deceptively resembles what we would today call a trigger. Triggers are events that come from the outside. They're serendipitous acts of God or nature or somebody else, and it leaves the subject at hand blameless. Afterwardness as a factor within ethnography must originate from the ethnographer as a drive to make the subsequentness of the afterward happen. In the words of the consultants, of the managers of people advising you how to write a grant, it happens in the research design itself, and in the cultivated and systematic strategy of remembering where the bodies are buried and hatching a plan to unbury them. Contemporary common sense demands that we regard the individual who is triggered as blameless, a victim of circumstance or someone else's carelessness, suffering from their own memories and experiences, because they did not know or expect that these things would be forced out into the open. By contrast, the ethnographer should, in my reckoning, do this on purpose, as what emerges is not the wild return of a traumatic object, but our intentional return to the locality from which we have come to actively re-form it as an object of inquiry. This can justify and sustain our thinking, and we can therefore answer the question, at least a little bit better, of what motivated us to do this, which is a big part of what I have had to think through before even embarking on the project in the Southwest. So one clear motivation would appear to be the fact that in seeking to return home and to actively alienate ourselves from it, transforming the pastness of our experience and exotifying home in this process. So in that, we have some hope of averting a double bind that often inadvertently and silently marks efforts to do ethnography at home and autoethnography more generally. A passive, unmarked familiarity with ourselves and our home in this context is often a trap, a zone where the ethnographer and interlocutor become indistinct or collapse into one another. And this makes indexing one's own position or triangulating that position relative to who and what one is, exceedingly difficult or perhaps even impossible. So Gregory Bateson associated the ambiguous statements and expressions that emerge in such contexts as being a characteristic sign of the double bind - a formal definition of the double bind - noting that such signals could not avoid being indistinct and contradictory as a result, regardless of actual content. So the easy authenticity conveyed by what seems to be the obvious effortless transparency assumed of natives 'speaking the truth of home' is the articulated substance of the double bind in this sense. So it's my claim that this obviates the value of the endeavour from the start and should be actively avoided. Be inauthentic by design, as this conscious act makes the very thinking of the object possible. So that's a long sort of prelude, but I'll say that what this does is it allows us to enter the zone that Jenn Ashworth... Jenn Ashworth is an essayist and a novelist, not an anthropologist, but she thinks very clearly about some of these issues based on her own writing. And Jenn Ashworth, slightly modifying Leslie Jamison's original formulation, has designated this the present tense of aftermath. Ashworth's own discussion is squarely one of trauma, and that's not quite what I'm talking about. The zone is not, however, and nor is it required to be, exclusive to the arc of traumatic experience. I would argue that this is a zone that contemporary ethnography, particularly those engagements deemed to be with home, must not only inhabit, but actually bring into being. This sharpens the Freudian framing by clarifying the temporality of what Freud is trying to get at, and that afterwardness materially exists as the present tense of aftermath. And that is the prelude to the whole project that I'm now trying to do in the Southwest, in my hometown, living with my mother. There we go. [So and there's Jenn Ashworth there as well.] So I'll sketch out this present tense of aftermath as I am finding it in my engagement with entrepreneurs and enterprise in the American Southwest. And as I said, this is fairly preliminary. This is fairly speculative. There's still a lot more work ethno primary ethnographic work to do in this project. But I've done enough to say a few words here this evening. And I start with my memory. One can only really sense a desire in others. Someone might say, I want this or that, but the force of what is said depends strongly on the spirit of what one senses in such utterances. Often what is truly desired, the motivation for a claim or an action, does not easily come into speech, if it comes into speech at all. My memory of precisely the area I'm currently working in, an increasingly distant late 20th century version of this place, is of people desiring to be free from something. Freedom from authorities, from institutions, from bosses, from teachers, from spouses, from children, from parents, especially from the government, from Denver, and Washington, from the county and the city, from representatives that were not perceived to represent, from taxes, from politics, from politics itself, from the social itself, sometimes. This is what could be said, and complaints that amounted to protests over being entangled in collective worlds we did not perceive as being of our own making, served as a kind of conversational currency amongst us all. It was assumed we all roughly like the same things - the fact that this assumption was almost always wrong was largely repressed face-to-face in the name of convivial, small-town, American values and friendliness, which is what was understood, and again, I would say wrongly, to be lacking in others. I don't know. For those of you who grew up in a small town, you either love this or you really won't. But what was important for a lot of us growing up was that we hated the same things. We felt the same injustices and we shared the same grievances, and that was the currency that bound us together. That's what we could actually say to one other. To say that this is a familiar refrain in America today, I think is stating the obvious. It is equally apparent how enterprise, the one avenue of positive liberty that we came to understand is legitimately available to us to ameliorate our unfreedom, has simultaneously held fast over time as the core value for self-making and has been utterly transformed in terms of its material content, at least in the area I'm working in. Looking at the terrain from this vantage point, we can meaningfully address Pankaj Mishra's pertinent question, 'How did wish fulfilment become a mode of common sense?' While acknowledging the obvious risk of oversimplification in offering this preliminary judgement, the material transformation of what constitutes labour and life, and what this labour and such lives are aimed at producing is really where I've been working and what I'll summarise briefly here. So the enterprise that my kin and neighbours engaged in years ago aimed to reclaim time, money, and obligation back for the individual entrepreneur via more traditional forms of labour and hard work that one offered, but on one's own time and in one's own way. So becoming wealthy was certainly nice, but making a living on one's own was good enough. Most often, this meant deploying more locally appropriate tactics to offer already available consumer goods. So selling used cars, agricultural products, these are common market sectors, and I'm drawing those directly from family examples. Basic labour and services ranging from landscaping, oil and gas drilling, that sort of thing. That was also very typical that you would go into business and you would go out into the oil fields and drill. That's what you would do. Now, we also had, you know, if somebody was really eccentric and ambitious, then they would style themselves as an inventor. They would use their spare cash and time to develop the perfect mouse trap that would sell like crazy once perfected. And I'll just note one notable local success story from the 1980s, which involved what was essentially a giant hoover that you would place on the entrances to prairie dog warrens, and nests. Prairie dogs are like, does everyone know what a prairie dog is? Yeah, it's like a meerkat. And this thing would basically, violently suck them out. And this was a problem in the Southwest, right? I mean, you could turn an ankle. You'd lose a baseball. I mean, there was a lot of problems with these animals. And so he built this giant hoover. It wasn't a catch and release. But he was locally famous. This was probably one of the most successful people in my town that I grew up with. His children were celebrities. And they were celebrities, not because their father got rich, because I don't think he ever really got rich, but he was written up in Readers Digest There was a Readers Digest story about this prairie dog killing machine, and he invented it and it was in Cortez, and this was huge. He'd worked on his own, he was recognised, he made a decent living, and he helped us get rid of prairie dogs, which actually didn't work because they're still all over the place. But that's just an example, I mean, if you were really far out, that's the kind of thing that you would offer. You were inventing, but mostly you were working hard, but you worked hard for yourself. You claimed back your time. It was yours. So late 20th century enterprise in Montezuma County was not expected to produce actualised selves. We already ostensibly knew who we were - ostensibly, I'll emphasise that. We knew what traditional hard work for oneself afforded and that was economic independence and the distance to mind one's own business, which was really an important thing to do or to at least appear to be doing. Problems of the collective - political and social problems like racism, discrimination or distribution of wealth - these were not owned up to as the problems of hard-working entrepreneurs and free men and women who aspired to that freedom. Part of claiming to be your own boss and to be free, was not having to worry about racism and things like that, even though it was rife in the area. The brute fact that nearly all of these efforts ultimately failed to achieve this level of freedom from obligation was almost always interpreted as proof that you simply didn't quite do it right, or you didn't work hard enough. The even harder fact that even the most successful enterprise never materially emancipated the freedom- seeking entrepreneur at all, brought an unbearable aporia into the open and it left even the most admired local entrepreneurs vulnerable to the question, 'So what?' So these figures that live in my memory, and this memory is only partially and fairly, to be honest, ambiguously confirmed by the objective record - these figures never expected their considerable efforts to come to rest on precisely the kind of unanswerable, existential question that they've been unconsciously seeking to dodge in the first place, like 'so what?'. The situation today appears very different, as the entrepreneurs I'm engaging presently consciously begin with the question, 'so what?'. So that's the first thing they ask. Explicitly. Turning what was in the past, what was in past generations an unintended and often tragic outcome on its head, they're now in turn today, utterly transforming local notions of what enterprise does and how one does it. What I've provisionally found in the present strongly resembles what Maurizio Lazzarato has described as 'immaterial labour'. So Lazzarato theorises a dramatic transformation of corporate and industrial work in the present. He notes that there are a lot of - I found some differences between what he talks about as immaterial labour and what entrepreneurs are doing. But there's an echo that allows for a comparison. In particular, the demands that one must invest in subjectivity itself. This is what Lazzarato talks about and what I have also found. You must invest in subjectivity itself. The demand that one must truthfully express oneself as part of one's enterprise or business, and that one must authentically stand in a close one-to-one relationship with one's 'self' when articulating and trying to enact these enterprises. These kinds of things drive the actions and frames the experience of the contemporary corporate worker and the entrepreneur, at least the entrepreneurs that I've engaged with, many of them, most of them. In the context I've engaged in Southwest Colorado, the very meaning of work has shifted, extending a bit beyond what Lazzarato has argued. So indeed, my interlocutors expend a great deal of time and effort in pursuing their enterprises, but they made it very clear to me in interviews so far that they did not 'work'. Rather, they sought to pursue enterprises that made themselves and their lives work. Making oneself a work through enterprise was very often undertaken in reaction to being forced to engage in the kind of immaterial labour that Lazzarato describes. If one must perform the self as part of a job, if one must exercise decision and command as if the business were their own - so they're saying to themselves, if I'm forced to sell my time and my personality - then it might as well really be my enterprise. And that was how it was explicitly framed. You know, I might as well, if it's me that's on the block here, then it might as well really be my enterprise. The creative sensibility driving many such enterprises is reflected in the character of what they offer, which is very often the immateriality of an experience. The thrill of a whitewater rafting trip; the joy of interacting with exotic animals; the ersatz cultural enrichment of witnessing a Dine artist throw a pot or demonstrate a dance; the nostalgia of staying in a carefully restored 1970s-era roadside motel. That's a good one. It still has Wi FI. The pain relief or party high that now-legal cannabis sales can bring. It's a bonus. The variety of things that people were doing is really, it's genuinely impressive. It's impressive, particularly given the quite small population of towns like Cortez, Mancos and Dolores. These are the small towns. Cortez is probably about 8,000 people. Dolores and Mancos are at best 1,500 to 2,000 people. Cortez is by far the largest town in the county, by the way. Right. It's the county seat. So this is the sort of scale we're talking about. This relative smallness is often seen as an advantage - the market is small, but often wide-open. Everyone needs to find their niche - everyone just needs to find the best way to express themselves, which will (one hopes) be unique in relation to others. Competition in this environment takes the form of an assertion of identity, not necessarily as an economic, market activity strictly speaking. As I just said, the small-scale of Southwestern Colorado is often core to its attractiveness to the many entrepreneurs I've engaged who have moved into the area from elsewhere, and that's quite a few of them. I would say the majority. Very often, these relative newcomers have moved in from places like Denver, Dallas, Phoenix, or LA. They've sold everything off to make the move to get set up, to make their dream a reality. Many came in the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic, an event which is repeatedly invoked as a personal reckoning in my interviews. How does one stand out in a place like LA? That's hard to solve. But a person moving in from LA, by definition, stands out in Montezuma County. You better believe they do. This does, of course, bestow an ambiguous sort of distinction. And so the main drawback for these new entrepreneurs is that in their uniqueness, their enterprises are right, by definition, very hard to sustain. How can something so rooted in one's own subjectivity appeal as a product to others? The fact that the area attracts substantial tourist traffic is one element that redeems some of these efforts, but tourism only sustains some kinds of enterprises and often only for a limited period. This dependence on the visitor also undercuts what is, after self-making, cited as another primary motivation that people talk about in taking up an enterprise, which is the desire for community, which surprised me a lot. I'm working through this consistent desire for community through business and enterprise. But in every sustained engagement I've had to date on this project, the idea that one's enterprise serves as a vehicle for making and sustaining community has explicitly come up as an aspiration, and it's come up almost every single time. Now, for some, starting something in the rural Southwest is often a response to loneliness, to family breakups, to the loss of partners or other family members, and what is described as a kind of anonymity and alienation in their previous environments. And so this goes well beyond networking, like the sort of classic cliched networking to start and sort of sustain your business. It's well beyond that. So many of the people that I engaged with, they kind of describe their lives as lacking sort of family ties, civic ties, sort of social interaction. And so they came to start a business or found an organisation for the overt purpose of gaining a place in a community. For the newcomers in the area, this is a community that they intend to will into being and in my observation, this is what they've done, at least in part. So what I briefly described here is not radically different from what one finds in some other ethnographic accounts of similarly positioned entrepreneurs. And I'm thinking of Carla Freeman's work on entrepreneurs in Barbados. I'm thinking of the work of Siobhan Magee and Juli Huang, colleagues here in Edinburgh, who also do work on entrepreneurs and have really aided my thinking on this project. What might be quite different in my account is the fact that using enterprise as a vehicle for self-realisation is actually, this is actually established, it's a common-sense in the area. But if anything, what I observe now in the Four Corners is the aftermath of what I experienced decades ago as a young member of the community. Nearly every adult I knew, particularly, but not completely men, saw striking out on their own in business as the ticket to happiness, to freedom, respectability, and recognition. And the breakdowns that they inevitably encountered in doing this did little to dim the dream that one could not only be oneself, but be free. What's different today is the fluid mobility with which this now happens and the ephemeral and subjectivised character of what's on offer. For the old cowboys down at the Ute Truck Stop, and that's where everybody gathers and talks schemes, enterprise meant finding the right thing to sell and the means to be the one selling it. And so it was still that economy of things that I mentioned before. For these old cowboys, your subjectivity was a bit beside the point - you were a part of the community, you were an insider, or you weren't. And so for many, even those who are operating today, there are a lot of the old families still there today, and this is a clear division between how they feel about business and community and how the newcomers and the relatively large by local standards, community of new entrepreneurs, how they approach things. So the new entrepreneurs are smart, they're ambitious, they have very clear ideas about the community they aspire to create via their enterprises. They have relatively little time, actually, for the complexity of local history, the subtle and elaborated sociality that emerges amongst small groups of people living together in relatively isolated spaces. They have no use at all for exclusionary thinking. They reject forcefully, the blunt racism one unfortunately can still encounter in a place like Cortez or Montezuma County. They largely reject or are very sort of quiet or evasive about things like religion, God, and the family that for many of the older families, this is a moral form of living that's still quite explicit. And so the misunderstanding between these two kind of vaguely formed groups is they're both very close, and it's quite wide. I mean, each group seems to be the worst nightmare of the other in certain respects. And the irony of this is hard to ignore. Each seemingly pursues the same thing via the same means. But what's different seems to simply reduce to what's for sale. So, although almost always coded as personal liberty, evidence indicates that the demand that one display one's subjectivity and one's personality as an attractive, commodified thing, but this is actually alienating, precarious, and exhausting. The individual - even the fictive, modernist, bourgeois version of it - seems to disappear in the act of self-making that's intended to achieve a certain definition in freedom. Now, Frank Ruda rightly argues that this is precisely what happens when one regards freedom itself as a personal capacity and as property. Taking an anti- Aristotelian stance, Ruda forcefully argues that the classic Lockean framing of personal liberty and its link to economics, it's a fantasy, a deception that we come to desire. And my preliminary evidence gives at least some partial support to this claim. Freedom of choice and enterprise is largely the only clear positive freedom I hear about from my interlocutors - that was the same as when I was growing up. But varied experiential ingredients somehow always produces a strikingly monotonous meal. While Ruda simply rejects the concept of hope, which I do not fully follow, his conclusion that perhaps freedom would simply constitute the ability to form a different mode of desire seems to at least ring partially true here. Lacking the ability to transform the desire as it stands, it is the case that for many, these double binds eventually simply snap. Fires break out. So I just briefly conclude. Now, I would like to conclude by acknowledging that in the course of this talk, I haven't presented or really embodied in certain respects the standard image of a sober and sensible social scientist. I know that's true. Particularly one taking on the responsibility of returning home to work, the cliche that simply does not apply here is the presumption that we seek to work at home because we are somehow already expert, already morally insulated from charges of appropriation, and best positioned to inhabit and explain a world that we are presumed to already be interior to. I simply can't assume any of those things are true about myself in relation to this work. In this image, one clarifies what already exists, if the other image that I'm not. Contrary to this, I now, as I always have, seek to be attentive to what inexists, what is implied, what is not said, what is difficult to see or think or perceive without embracing the excess that it adheres to any object, concept, or memory. While it is a risk to aspire to agency and bringing something else into being, in materialising that subsequentnes that makes what came before real and for better or for worse, meaningful in an analytic sense. Faced with a damaged world, including the world of one's own memory and experience, why not take this risk? So that's the risk I am in the process of taking, I'm arguing. Or perhaps one could simply ask oneself, what makes a person start fires. Thank you.