ANONYMITY
Animism and Capitalism
During the further course of the twentieth
century animism ceased to function as
modernity’s excluded counter-image. In
the middle of the twentieth century Claude
Lévi-Strauss declared the ‘archaic illusion’
to be over (Lévi-Strauss 1949), and this
end was associated with the dissolution of
substance-based thinking and its dualistic
oppositions of man and nature, body and
soul, even life and non-life. On the basis of
information technologies, cybernetics and
system theories, the former oppositions
became increasingly obsolete. The entire
second half of the twentieth century bears
witness to an ontological transformation, in
which the categories, the representational,
substantial and transcendental thought of
Western modernity are gradually replaced
by the paradigm of communication, culminating in a relational reformulation of
reality.
To this day we still occupy the framework
of this new discourse: the previously
excluded (banished to the abyss of the
‘archaic’) middle now shifts to the centre:
‘Everything takes place in the centre’, through
‘mediation, translation and networks’
(Latour 1993: 76). In the world of distributed
consciousness, with the power of agency
allotted to human and non-human protagonists, it is no longer the shaping of the
world of objects through human labour that
constitutes the core of production, but the
modulation of milieus, and within them, the
‘transindividual’ dimension of the production of subjectivity (cf. Aspe 2013). The
‘return’ of animism to the centre of modernity essentially proves to be a result of computerization and the experience of medial
environments and their feedback loops.
The horizon of neoliberal ideological
mobilisation is, as Achille Mbembe recently
proposed, an identity of capital and
animism (Mbembe 2015: 17). It delineates
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the horizon of de-objectification, the
horizon of a relational subject within the
field of an expanded mediality. The animism
of capital is a resource which grants the
neoliberal subject access to (self)transformability and perhaps even more importantly,
following the imperative of flexibility and
ecological behaviour, with the means to
adapt. In a certain sense, the mechanisms
described by Freud, according to which the
animist projects his consciousness into the
world, are becoming increasingly realized
in the algorithmicized world of digital
tracing and tracking, at least to the extent
that the difference between consciousness
and world is annulled when we inhabit the
feedback loops, continually encountering
the preferences and projections of our own
digital profiles.
See also Animism (Limulus); Anthrōpos;
Non-human
Agency;
Anthropism/
Immanent Humanism.
Note
1. See, for example, Viveiros de Castro
(2004), Bird-David (1999), Descola (1992)
and Holbraad and Willerslev (2007).
Anselm Franke
ANONYMITY
‘I mourn the loss of my anonymity every
day.’
Writing from prison to supporters, an
anarchist activist who is inside for placing
a home-made ‘stinger’, a plank with an
array of upturned nails, outside the car exit
of a police station in Bristol one night,
grieves for her change in status from an
unnameable force to that of a known
quantity (Shepherd 2015). This loss of
anonymity, of turning a pluripotent person
42
into something with a record, a name,
address and date of birth, with biometric
measurements, known associates and affiliations is a point of anguish. Anonymity
for her is a space of freedom, a chance to
move in the city without being logged,
without being anticipated, without bringing the plague to others who might lose
their anonymity by becoming persons of
interest to the police by observable contact
with her. The loss of anonymity in this case
is tragedy, losing itself to identifiability as a
force that negates anonymity, shapes and
disembowels its constituent capacities and
its spaces of feeling and action.
Anonymity has its structural conditions
and its histories, its contours changing over
time in relation to the techniques of the
state, of science and of media. Anonymity,
more broadly, is not only the welcome dark
cloak of the revolutionary, but also the
space in which much of life takes place and
which, historically speaking, it has unfolded. Anonymity is the space of evolution
and the coming into being of life amidst
the interactions of millions of unnamed
entities. The way in which different historical moments articulate the tension
between processes of naming, describing
and knowing, and anonymity as a primal
condition constitutes a submerged strata of
the condition of knowledge.
The literature of the nineteenth century
made a virtue and a problem of the city as
the engine and the theatre of anonymity.
The night and the proximity of thousands
of unknown persons became the space in
which figures such as the ‘masses’ could be
conceived. The enormity of human force
driving industry, filling slums, devouring
resources, reproducing and doing unnameable things in anonymous rooms is a staple,
and imagined as a space of freedom, of
fascination and of disgust. Here history
becomes an immense black chamber at the
back of a pub, a space in which bodies
ANONYMITY
writhe together without name or obligation,
though variably riddled with the systems of
nomenclature given in the anthropic toolkit.
Becoming the agent of history, rather than
of the mere passage of time, in such a
context meant moving backwards and
forwards across the boundary of namelessness at different times and in different ways,
giving words to a process, uttering new
words, sometimes attaching them to something that became a subject.
The question of alienation, in which the
human became strange to itself, through
work, obligation, custom, and indeed experiment, sometimes as a release, sometimes as
anguish is core to this era, but it was also the
era in which anonymity to oneself, as Eduard
Glissant writes in terms of opacity, becomes
paradigmatic of the question of being a self
(Glissant 1997). Knowledge and anonymity
are not mutually exclusive, but intertwined.
For Foucault, these two tendencies were
negotiated by the ‘anonymous murmur’
(Foucault [1973] 1994) of discourse in
which the ideas of the time were developed
not in the decidedly named operations of
the world of philosophy, but in the complexes
of ideas and operations that formed ways of
knowing and doing in medicine, and the
human and natural sciences more broadly.
Probing the unspoken and explicit terms
of this process, from the formulations of
disciplines to the circulation of techniques
provides in turn an initial means of recognizing the way in which technologies take
part in the shaping and induction of knowledge. In such a condition for Foucault, a
problem was to find a means of erasing one’s
name, of gaining the succour of disappearance behind the cloak of anonymity
(Foucault 1996).
Such a position, within this tension
between anonymity and the mechanisms
of knowledge, forms the grounds for much
of the way in which modes of anonymity
are formed in contemporary politics, with
POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANONYMITY
the specific condition also that such politics is also partially prepared and embedded in technological forms. One can say
that there are broadly two tendencies here,
neither of which is immune from the
other: the discourse of human rights and
the related though partially contradictory
one of the tension between anonymity and
privacy in computational and networked
digital media.
In the contemporary era, human rights
has been formulated as against the
anonymizing functions of cells, torture,
mass graves and labour camps, which
themselves used mechanisms of identification and enumeration aimed at erasing the
singularity of a person (Wachsmann 2015).
Human rights discourse consists of identifying and raising to a level of attention
those who are effaced and dismembered. It
extols and defends people without the
papers that name, those without access to
anything but anonymity. It makes public
the means of erasure and provides a means
of reverse-engineering such processes to
name their mechanisms and their operators (Forensic Architecture 2014). In doing
so it must negotiate the difficulty of proposing a universalized version of humanity
that acts not as a condition of solidarity but
as an agent of differentiation of what falls
above and below such a standard and that
can thus, once codified and turned into a
legal operator in itself, be manipulated in
turn against the conditions that it aimed at
defending. Such, for instance, is the condition in Gaza where, as Eyal Weizman
describes it, the legal defences of human
rights are used by Israeli military lawyers
as a means to describe, and thus tighten,
the inside of a tourniquet (Weizman 2012).
Human rights thus becomes a paradoxical
yet universal foundation that is at once
both a Möbius strip, turning itself inside
out in grotesque convolutions, but also
essential, a barrier and a barricade, that
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may also invert and become a defining
contour of a literal concrete border wall.
Alongside this condition is that of the
relation between privacy and anonymity in
digital media. Whereas anonymity is to not
yet become named or to exist outside of
the condition of the registration of names,
privacy is to maintain identity as a
resource; to parcel it out, to operate with it
as it has already entered the economy of
identification but held in reserve as an
asset within possessive individualism. The
large-scale platforms that aim at producing and enforcing global monopolies in
particular varieties of digital information
services have the erasure of anonymity as a
core business aim. Subsequently, what
passes for privacy is also eroded by them.
Part of this condition is what makes for
new political movements: those that
embrace privacy as a form of human right;
and those that engender anonymity as a
form of conflict and refusal. Anonymity as
a condition, in the figure of the multiplename ‘Anonymous’ used by hackers, is also
a declaration of solidarity in this condition, a figure of the unknown as one of
generosity (Coleman 2014). Here, those
identified and isolated from this current
have often shown themselves to have an
astute political analysis of the present day.
One particular episode is perhaps
symptomatic of the interconnected fault
lines of this condition. In 2012, people
using the Anonymous name leaked the
email log of the consultancy group Stratfor
via WikiLeaks. Stratfor’s work involves
trading in political and economic information, often against political activists
and human rights movements, especially
those that may have some consequence for
the continued profitability of resourceextraction based industries. The information that led to the public release of this
data came from a hacker called Sabu,
an FBI -supported agent provocateur. The
ANTHROPISM/IMMANENT HUMANISM
44
data released revealed the list of Stratfor’s
subscribers and the hysterically sober tone
and content of their advice on acting
against emerging threats to the status quo.
Here, identity (of the informant), anonymity (of information sources and hackers)
and privacy (of the companies and others
subscribing, including of the judge who
decided the result of the consequent trial)
are tangled in a knot that reveals their
crucial role as parameters of contemporary forms of life. Crucially, all three are
involved with different modalities of
power that effect their capacities and their
unfolding in time. The rights to property
and privacy set protective boundaries
around the capacity to circulate anonymous murmurs that in turn propitiate the
easy facility of transgressing what might be
established as the human rights of workers
and those living in parts of the world
targeted for resource-depletion. The simple
facts of who goes to prison and who does
not, what information flows and what
must be leaked, who remains anonymous
and who does not in such a case, make
things remarkably easy to name.
See also Algorithm; Leaks and Stings;
Metadata Society.
Matthew Fuller
ANTHROPISM/IMMANENT
HUMANISM
I propose that we retool and repurpose
humanism to an anthropism, an immanent
humanism (in a Spinozian, Deleuzean,
Balibarian immanence). But first let us
think if there is anything to be salvaged
from the original concept of humanism
that would be useful not only in thinking
about, but also in acting as humans. Are
there any premises that can be retained
from a concept that seems to have been
evacuated of all its promises, having
traversed the space from project to an ideology that has supported both the most
horrific and the most sublime acts by
human beings? Humanism is a notoriously
slippery concept that, as Vito Giustiniani
(1985) points out, shifts meanings from
language to language even within the same
linguistic family (from German to French),
linguistic traditions (from continental
Europe to Britain) and political genealogies
(from Greek to Latin). Humanism writ
large is of course, an anthropocentric
praxis, a praxis that centres the world on
the human being as the human in its
Renaissance iteration, sourced from
humanus, who is always already a being
predicated upon that which it excludes, be
that woman, Black, First Nation, dark-anddarker, African, indigenous, resting on the
transcendence of its own meaning. It is a
concept and a praxis that was vacated in the
Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,
where the classical content of humanism
was replaced by the turn to science and
technology. As Giustiniani notes, in
Classical Latin humanus carried with it, in
addition to various determinants of the
human (speech being one of them) two
other attributions of the human, one being
‘benevolent’, the other being ‘learned’.
Giustiniani shows that while ‘learned’ was
the dominant determinant in classical times
it was lost during Middle Latin while ‘benevolent’ was retained. From there Giustiniani
argues that ‘in antiquity humanus defined
human nature downwards, towards the
animal, while in the Middle Ages it rather
mattered to define human nature upwards,
towards God’ (1985: 169). It is this humanism that seems to have produced what is
known as ‘colonial humanism’, a humanism
that rested and depended upon the benevolence and humanitarianism of the
POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY