It is my argument here that social networks are organized on the basis of exchanges structures by the logic of 'games' in the GH Mead sense. While modern political organization (examined in detail in the second blog in this series) is made on the basis of platonic virtues like equality which are applicable only to the radical who's political subjectivity divorces him from immediate sociality and normalcy.
Moreover, sociological analysis is contingent on a discursive form of social analysis that is contained within society itself. It is close to a reflexive function of society as a whole. Such analysis speculates on cultural and linguistic capital, but treats of capital as a larger and considerably differentiated form of accumulation and exchange: as the exchange and speculation on the value of values. Indeed value can be seen as a concenpt native to sociology and social anthropology, defining the limits of the speculation these disciplines can pursue, but also the limits of other disciplines in relation to the concept of value itself. In this way the concept of value forms a kind of historical or immanent universal, to speculation and knowledge itself. In fact the very limits of human knowledge are social, what we collectively labour to produce through various scientific and speculative endeavours as collective human knowledge, itself is the limit of the extended universe. However the exact boundary of this limit is porous and forms a part of sociological speculation within society itself. The limits of the infinte in this sense are a perpetually shifting terrain, and a zone that is treated within the framework of a game, even a card game, speculated on. Such speculation takes on various disciplinary and societal forms. The rules of this game work homologously to language, that is, it has the structure of a language, a kind of probabilistic net that separates us from chaos, the symbolic dimension. I consider human language as conceived by Beneveniste, as being differentiated from animal semiotics by the function of reported speech, however as still participating in a variety of animate and inanimate semiotic practices. Here we question ascribed social hierarchies and systems of value, however always tied to a certain set of limitations, described by language itself. In fact participation in a practice or a social practice of re-evluation of value, as ethnography has demonstrated endlessly, is itself a kind of limitation.
Take the term ‘honour’ as an object of social speculation. Honour is a generalized form of a series of practices involved with various strategies involving a heterogeneity of variables: language, time and the form of exchange itself. Bourdieu demonstrates this for Kabyle social practices. These practices are stipulated as being based on a series of ‘moves’ and ‘counter-moves’, as in the moves used in ‘dog fights’, ‘the fighting of children’ or ‘boxers’. This is not based particularly on rules, but on improvisation. In a section in the Outline of a theory of Practice entiled ‘From the ‘rules’ of honour to the sense of honour’ he describes how such social practices are intutional, and based only from an alien perspective on rules. From a participative perspective however, we observe a series of transactions of small packets of social capital: ‘To make someone a challenge is to credit him with the dignity of a man of honour…’. His consideration of value however is not binaristic, humiliation for example would be encoded by a completely different set of practices. These are also enregistered and reflexively coded through proverbs for example: “The man who has no enemies is a donkey”.
A similar consideration is repeatedly made by Asif Agha in describing his theory of enregisteration. Agha of course produces a kind of sociolinguistics of ethnography. In his explication of reflexive modes of organization of language, he consistently returns to this kind of terrain of social-sociological speculation. Various systems of value: politeness-impoliteness are described as being exchanged through a heterogeneity of lingsuitic and non-linguistic signs. The sign itself however is not merely a part of a larger linguistic system, as in langue- a series of differential organization of social signifiers. In fact ‘the macro level is part of the micro-level’. However in order to be studied these systems of value have to already be ‘valorized’, that is in a certain sense enregistered. Agha’s ontological ground however is purely ethnographic:
‘Social relations are mediated by signs that connect them in a semiotic encounter, allowing persons to engage with each other by engaging with signs that connect them in a semiotic encounter. What makes something a semiotic encounter in my sense is not that people meet each other or come together in face to face settings. (Sometimes they do of course and when they do we have the special case of face to face encounters.But this is just one possibility among many. What makes something a semiotic encounter is that a particular sign-phenomenon or communicative process connects persons to each other’.
There is a constant influx and afflux between sign and discourse, the micro influencing the macro as well. This movement is described by Agha as a reflexive activity: ‘activities in which communicative signs are used to typify other perceivable signs’. There is a kind of semi-chaotic heterogeneity of linguistic and non-linguistic signs, which we pattern in various ways. The patterning is described as a register. The Kabyle practices of honour are thus enregistered practices, because they reflexively speculate on the value of social values through various encoded strategies of speech and gesture.
Value systems and practices themselves intermingle, and cross-pollinate. This interaction itself produces onto-political friction.
Politeness and impoliteness for examples, as prescribed by cultural manuals and instructional texts on appropriate cultural practice, are themselves dependant on other formations. Consider the general assumption of progressiveness and its various antagonists, described within political jargon, repeatedly and over generations as fascism, or religious fanaticism or nostalgia for an origin of a cultural history. Progressiveness does not only set up certain barriers to seemingly backward social practices it also prescribes a particular worldview, literally a life-world. The political in this sense is not merely, a question of choosing a side, but rather involved in a variety of social exchanges; even ‘pure reciprocity and generosity without return’, the macro-level, a part of the micro-level, the whole a part of a fragment.
Social value systems also cross polinate with and are quite obviously indistinguishable from political systems. However at an analytical level it becomes useful to come to distinguish social organization from political organization at least with the thought that social organization is meant to be homeostatic while politics is precisely the gap that prevents the system from being so. It is only in the figure of the radical that social moraes, like polieteness or honour get questioned through a literal interpretation of value. The radical takes the idea that conquers his social belief system to be literal fact. In this way there is also a tie between radicalism and fanaticism, although the difference between a militant politics and a vigilante politics is more easy to separate.
The question is what do we do in the face of a system which thrives on crises, and co-opts political actors to produce totalitarian regimes that thrive on capital. No better fascist than Cottard when the plague hits town. In the face of increasing economic crises that perpetuate political crises it becomes necessary to ask, are there political systems that are better adapted to dealing with crisies and if so why?
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Social Anthropology and Sociology are nothing if not grand archives of unsual political systems. Consider the volume 'African Political Systems' edted by E.Evans Pritchard and Meyer Fortes. Even here some of the basic co-ordinates of pre-writing culture anthropology are present: an obsession with self-governing political systems. The structure of segmentarity and the feud that Pritchar describes is already a superb example of ephemeral and at the same time volatile political ties construct even vast political organizations. However in this final post in this series I want to approach segmentarity not through Pritchard's own work but through an article written by Marshal Sahlins entited: 'The Segmnetary lineage: an order of predatory organization'.
WHile conventionally our understanding of segmentarity focusses on the structure of the segment, which relationally unites as it move upwards: for example the players who are enemies in an inter house cricket match become team mates in an interschool cricket match.
However Sahlins argues that rather than think about segmentarity as being sustained by political structure itself one should see it as a predatory political organization looking to maximize political gains and territory. This is enabled primarily by the structure of the feud or what Sahlins describes as 'complementary opposition'. It is not just that minimal segments are organized in opposition to each other and unite moving upwards but that this this upward reification is accompanied and instantiated through the feud. At the lowest level of the minial segment we find agnatic kinship links and here feud's and the enacted violence and formal, ritualistic and given to joking relations. The violence scales upwards towards the maximal lineage until finally at the level of the tribe what is experienced is war.
Really segmentarity is a way of organizing crises and retaining mobility in relation to crisis. Sahlins aptly compares segmentarity to the structure of a nomadic horde. As Gellner comments in a foreward to the work of the noted Nomadic scholar Khasanov, the unique feature about nomadic organization that distinguishes it from any form of Marxist social evolution like primitive communism, through the fact that the same basic structure can be a lose set of bands without any central governance and can at the same time in a very short period expand to a full blown army capable of establishing empire. Gellner provocatively quotes Ibin Khaldoun on the notion that the state is a gift from the nomads to the Greek cities.
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Heinrich von Kleist's " Michael Kohlhaas " narrates the story of a horse dealer whose commitment to justice transforms a minor legal dispute into a spiral of violence that engulfs social, political, and moral orders. The novella follows Kohlhaas, described as “one of the most upright and at the same time most terrible of men of his age,” whose sense of justice is so absolute that it ultimately leads him to wage war against the institutions meant to uphold law. What begins as a small conflict over two confiscated horses develops into a full-scale social rupture. The story traces how an ordinary grievance gradually expands into rebellion, vengeance, and execution, revealing how violence grows through successive escalations rather than emerging suddenly.
The narrative begins when Kohlhaas, traveling through Saxony, is stopped by the Junker Wenzel von Tronka, who unlawfully demands a travel permit and seizes two of Kohlhaas’s black horses as collateral. Kohlhaas leaves his servant behind with the animals and continues his journey, assuming the matter will be resolved through proper legal channels. When he later returns, he discovers the horses emaciated from forced labor and his servant brutally beaten. Outraged, Kohlhaas seeks redress through the courts, confident that the legal system will restore justice. However, the Junker’s aristocratic connections prevent the case from proceeding. His petitions are dismissed, his claims ignored, and legal institutions close ranks around the noble offender. What initially appears to be a legal conflict becomes a confrontation between social strata, between bourgeois right and feudal privilege.
The situation intensifies when Kohlhaas’s wife Lisbeth attempts to deliver a petition to the Elector and is fatally wounded by guards. Her death transforms Kohlhaas’s legal grievance into a moral crusade. He gathers followers, attacks the Junker’s estate, and initiates a campaign of destruction that spreads across Saxony. Towns burn, authorities mobilize, and Kohlhaas becomes both criminal and political threat. Eventually Martin Luther intervenes, urging Kohlhaas to abandon violence and trust in lawful authority. Kohlhaas temporarily submits, yet legal maneuvering again frustrates justice. Though the horses are eventually restored to health and the Junker punished, Kohlhaas himself is executed for disturbing public order. The narrative thus stages a paradox: the man who demands justice most absolutely becomes the greatest threat to the social order founded upon it.
Von Kleist himself was contemporaneous with and associated with the outskirts of German Romanticism. But Kleist's work never really appealed to Goethe and Hegel because of the great amount of violence that it portrayed and the sense of the rupture of the self as an irremediable wound, that is historically created.
The novel takes the notion of the self as a rupture to its very limit. THe violence escalates along the archival grain, moving form a small dispute between a lord and a band of militia to that band becoming a threat to the state. This form of 'complementary opposition' to state clearly shows that in conditions of extimacy when the self is produced as a result of the exposure to the full apparatus and edifice of the state, it still has the possiblity of scaling up this entire edifice. Eventuly however the band itself splits into another that is far more mercenary and opportunisitc and Kohlhaas' crimes seem unjustifiable in the face of the horrors he himself faced. It becomes terror for the sake of terror.
My point here is hardy that escalating violence is the only reprieve is a world built on the marginalization and alienation of individuals but rather even in the case of exposure to the whole edifice of state forms of political organization remain open and available to us.
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The anthropological problem that preoccupied Victor Turner in Schism and Continuity in an African Society was how a society that appears constantly threatened by conflict, dispute, rivalry, and fragmentation nevertheless persists through time, reproducing its institutions, meanings, and social relations with remarkable stability. His ethnography demonstrates that what might ordinarily be called breakdown or disorder is in fact a regularized and patterned process internal to social structure itself. What he calls “schism” is not a pathological interruption of order but the very mechanism through which continuity is generated, and the argument emerges not as abstract theory but from meticulous observation of political struggles, village fission, kinship disputes, leadership contests, accusations of sorcery, and ritual interventions among the Ndembu. Turner’s central insight is that social structure contains contradictions that generate tensions, these tensions produce conflicts, conflicts lead to factional divisions or spatial separations, and these divisions reorganize social relations in such a way that the broader cultural order remains intact.
The structural contradiction at the heart of the system concerns the tension between matrilineal descent and virilocal residence. Authority, inheritance, and succession follow the maternal line, yet everyday life unfolds within the domestic sphere of marriage, where a man resides with his wife and children rather than with the lineage through which political authority passes. A man’s political obligations point toward his mother’s kin, while his emotional and economic investments are directed toward his conjugal household. These two organizing principles create incompatible demands that continually generate strain. Turner demonstrates that this tension is not accidental but constitutive, ensuring the regular production of disputes over authority, loyalty, and succession.
This structural opposition shapes the everyday experience of social actors. A man seeking to consolidate authority must rely upon matrilineal relations that may be geographically dispersed or socially distant, while the individuals with whom he shares residence and productive labor may have no legitimate claim to political authority within his lineage. The result is a constant negotiation between competing obligations, a tension that periodically erupts into overt conflict. Turner’s ethnography documents how these tensions manifest in disputes over village leadership, rights to land, and ritual authority, and how such disputes frequently culminate in the physical separation of groups.
Village fission represents the most visible expression of schism. A community may begin as a unified settlement under a recognized headman, but as disputes emerge over succession or authority, kin groups gradually align themselves into opposing factions. What begins as disagreement intensifies into accusations, moral judgments, and ritualized expressions of hostility. When reconciliation fails, one faction withdraws and establishes a new settlement nearby. This spatial separation does not destroy social relations but reorganizes them, producing a new configuration of alliances while preserving broader cultural norms.
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