Presence and Social Obligation: An Essay on the Share

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Presence and Social Obligation:

An Essay on the Share

James Ferguson

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESS

CHICAGO

© 2021 James Ferguson.

All rights reserved.

Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC

5629 South University Avenue

Chicago, IL 60637

www.prickly-paradigm.com

ISBN: 9781734643510

LCCN: 2021930244

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

ISBN-13: 978-1-958846-99-5 (electronic)

Contents

Preface: On Rethinking the Social in a Pandemic

1. Introduction: Why Social Obligation? Why Now?

2. Presence and Social Obligation: An Essay on the Share

3. Addendum: Some Theoretical Contrasts and Clarifications

Endnotes

Preface:

On Rethinking the Social in a Pandemic

This essay is not about COVID-19. It is about social obligation, including the social obligation to share, and where such obligation comes from. It argues that what I call presence—the condition of being in physical proximity to others—brings with it a shared vulnerability and a kind of involuntary commonality that undergirds such social obligation.

Contagious disease is a vivid illustration of the link between presence and vulnerability. In the original talk from which this essay emerged, I used a cholera epidemic as an illustration of this link. COVID would serve just as well. But the vulnerability of presence is not, in my view, fundamentally a matter of biology. It is not a matter of bare life—a nonsocial, merely biological relation. On the contrary, in my account here, the fact of being alongside another is a fundamentally social fact. Nonetheless, perhaps we are learning something about the power of presence as we live through a pandemic that so often deprives us of it.

In recent months, public-health officials have accustomed us to the phrase social distancing. Some (including many anthropologists) have objected to the usage, observing that the physical distance of concern to epidemiologists is not the same thing as what social scientists mean by social distance. At my university, a well-meaning administrator wrote to students, correcting public-health usage (actually, social distance is not the right term: we are talking about physical distance), while assuring the students that mere physical distance need not endanger the university’s warm community.

But it was not lost on the recipients of this message that the assurance of an uninterrupted warm and intimate experience of community came in the form of a mass e-mail—and that it was followed only hours later by news of the indefinite postponement of the 2020 commencement ceremony. Perhaps spatial distance is not as distinct from social distance as we may have thought. Certainly, the conjuring of social solidarity (or community) that such a ceremony requires is severely compromised—as Émile Durkheim would have immediately recognized—without the embodied physical presence and sensory experiences that come with it. The patent inadequacy of the online Zoom celebration that was offered as a substitute for the commencement only seemed to underline the fact that sociality (and especially the sociality of ritual solidarity) is not fundamentally a matter of transmitting information, but of sharing a distinctive kind of experience.

If welcoming new initiates into a social collective requires a certain kind of presence, so, it seems, does the violent expulsion from the same. Or so I thought in reading a COVID-related story in today’s newspaper.¹ The facts of the story are on the face of it perhaps not so extraordinary: the story reports that a convicted drug dealer in Singapore has just been sentenced to death. But the scandal of the story (and what makes it COVID-related) is that the criminal was, in a historic first, sentenced to death over Zoom. The shocking thing here—the real moral affront—is neither the drug dealing nor even the execution but the obscenity of sentencing a man to death without looking him in the eye, without sharing a human presence with him.

Social obligation, I argue in this essay, is obligatory. It rests not just on empathy and warm sentiments but on certain vulnerabilities that are linked to physical presence. That shared vulnerability is always with us, in some sense. But there are specific circumstances that sometimes render it especially visible. The COVID pandemic has brought us such circumstances, and may in this way do us the intellectual service of bringing a kind of mournful clarity to things. If so, the least we can do is to try to put that clarity to good use.

1

Introduction:

Why Social Obligation? Why Now?

There is today an urgent need for new thinking about social obligation. I have come to this conclusion through my work over the last decade on what I call the politics of distribution, by which I mean simply the political questions of who gets what, and why. In answering such basic