4 - An ethics of composure

Summary

To reiterate: neither methodologically nor ontologically does an anthropology of ethics have its ground in the individual. The population of its interpretive universe is instead one of subjects in or passing through positions in environments. It is thus a population not of atomic units but of complex relata. Its subjects are for their part already highly complex. They may be individual human beings (though never human beings in their pure individuality). They may be the individualized subjects of the formally egalitarian society; Homines hierarchici, the holistic dividuals of the caste-structured social system (Daniel 1984; Dumont 1980, 1986); the relationalist subjects that Robbins and many others have encountered in Melanesia (Robbins 2004: 13). They may be human collectives, or even human and non-human collectives or assemblages of one or another kind. Nothing in principle precludes the possibility of a cyborgic ethics, an ethics of quasi-objects (Latour 1993), an ethics of corporations of an economic or of some other sort. The only proviso is that the subject occupying or passing through its position in an environment be at or beyond the threshold of the complexity requisite of any system capable of autopoiesis, though such a requirement is never the sufficient condition of an ethical subject position, even a potentially ethical one. Individual human beings typically display such complexity, yet do so only after a considerable course of socialization has taken place, only after a considerable dose of the intersubjective has already been incorporated, already become part of the self (and hence are never individuals in their pure individuality).