Thinking a bit about the anthorpology of the moderns that Latour proposes in AIME. Such anthropology would be very wary of the Moderns' self-description in terms of domains (science, politics, religion, economy...) and would rather look for something else that underlies both their practices and the way they describe them. Been yesterday at the premises of the Intercultural University of Veracruz (UVI) here in Xalapa to attend to the launching of the La Comunidad Transgredida by Fortino Domingues Rueda. His work looks at a hybrid: urban Zoques, a population of native people who have become citizens of big towns. Fortino is himself a Zoque. The UVI is full of anthropologists of all non-white groups (to some extent, non-Modern). Maybe they are the ones who could carry out an endeavor such as an anthropology of the moderns. And I recalled the work of José Maria Arguedas (who killed himself in 1969) in Spain. He went to a traditional (i.e. non-modern) rural community to study Spanish peasants in order to understand the hybrid which is the peasant culture in the Andes. In a world of hybrids, the natives of hybridism have the experience of becoming modern. Arguedas talks about this (it was something that drove his suicide, as he hints in "The fox of up above and the fox of down below"). Hybrids are in a position to reckon the pains of becoming modern with the accompanying relativism that, as Latour writes also in AIME, "never traffics in hard cash".
It is perhaps just wishful thinking that the alt-right seemingly innovative and intrepid ideas will disappear from the scene as Trump's reign comes to an end. They have their own dynamics, but certainly the experiences of the last years, including those in the pandemics, do help to wear off their bright and attractiveness. Neocameralism, what Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land with him ushered in as a model of post-democracy that relinquish important ingredients of the human security system, is one of these projects that is proving to be too grounded in the past to have any capacity to foretell anything bright beyond the democratic rusting institutions. It is little more than necropolitics - which is itself a current post-democratic alternative. Achile Mbembe finds necropolitics in the regimes were warlords take over the state-like institutions (or mimick them) to rule on the grounds of local security having no troubles killing or letting die whoever is in their path. Neocameralism pos...
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