Tsing, Friction

Here an annotation form last year, I am going back to one of my favorite the books. It is still intriguing to me how to become Ana Tsing and write like her. Probably there is no way, as she seems to be exploring all the time and letting herself be taken by surprise in order to make connections. Maybe the only problem is exactly this, that she sometimes diverges from one topic to other and it is not so clear how she connects them and brings them back, there is no a "conclusion". This can be a actual contribution, but it also makes it difficult to work with this messiness she brilliantly presents.

Anna Tsing presents us a challenging picture: how to understand globalization through the tradition of ethnographic work, which has traditionally been local? And the answer is not by just connecting the global and the local as oppositional forces, as the current tendency on anthropological research on globalization tends to claim. The local is not just the site of the particular, opposing a universal force of expanding capital, which abstracts resources, social relations and culture under the homogenizing force. Capitalism and the global are the particular, conjunctural articulations of different, contradictory interest that meet: the Suharto family governing Indonesia and Canadian and American capitals.
Articulation, we also have this concept coming into play again. One which first appeared as operational to talk mainly about the power of subaltern is now brought to think about the power of capital. This Power -with capital letters- seemed not to need any type articulation because it was presented as absolute and universal. Here “articulating capitalism” is pointing to take a new direction. Capitalist power is also conjunctural, as Mitchell had shown, it takes different form in different social formations, it crates differential effects. Capital does not just flow it needs but crates friction.
Friction refers not only to the oppositional forces of domination and contestation, but the condition (and the limits) of possibility of production of power. Friction makes it possible for capital to expand: the particular grip that makes it possible for a particular corporation to get its way with a particular government that creates the conditions to make resources, new types of labor relations and concentrate value through exploitation in Indonesian forests a particular location in which people do not just “receive” globalizing forces but also shapes the conditions of their participation of forest exploitation.
Yet her focus is not only capital but rather the environmental movement. She explores the way a environmentalist discourse, identity and practice is built as a political force in Indonesia as one capable of overthroughing a government. Far form constituting an unique articulate (in the double sense of a chain of meaning made part of the same logic in contingency, and a a way of presentation of this –conjuncturaly- constituted group ) identification of political interest and positioning, the environmental movement is made in the tension between a specific local and a particular global, that works through the bringing together diverse perspectives. What does bring this people together? Multiple and particular historical conditions that make the production of care for the environment (nature that has to be protected) as a position of allowing people do differential things as they shape themselves as political subjects, and creates affect.
Why is affect, feeling and sensorial experience important? I think this is one of the most interesting dimensions of the book. It helps to understand the anesthetics making possible for people to immerse in relations of exploitation and violence. It is at the same time effected and a mean of creation of power, it permits to understand the acceptance of the creation of the social space of the frontier. Affect is also the way environmentalism as a discourse and practice “finds its subjects” (In Stuart Hall’s terms). Ana Tsing show us that affect and power are not abstract vectors of energy, but they, (as physical forces do) have to deal with the stickiness of the surface they encounter. This stickiness creates a friction that can divert the directionality and even light a fire.