Enclosure and Disclosure
In certain historical and ethnographic contexts, scholars such as Marx and Evans-Pritchard have been able to disclose relatively coherent ensembles of meaningful practices from what at first appear to be simple objects — the commodity in modern capitalist society, or cattle among the Nuer. Around such “objects” — viewed as bundles of social, semiotic, and material relations — are unfolded group-relative modes of experiencing and behaving, thinking and acting, categorizing and evaluating. Indeed, so extensive is the reach of such objects that the ensembles of practices they disclose constitute the figure and ground of social life: space and time, substance and form, quality and quantity, ontology and cosmology. Moreover, in the hands of these devoted theorists, such ensembles of meaningful practices are epistemologically immanent: simultaneously the object interpreted and the method of interpretation. Finally, at least in the work of Marx, disclosure is situated at the intersection of knowledge and power. To paraphrase Francis Bacon — and taking the term nature to include “second nature” — if the task of knowledge is to find for a given nature the source of its coming-to-be, the task of power is to superinduce on a given body a new nature (Bacon 2000 [1620]: 102).
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Notes
Many thanks to Julia Elyachar and Elizabeth Povinelli.