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Chapter 6. Exteriority/Interiority

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An Anthropological Trompe L'Oeil for a Common World
This chapter is in the book An Anthropological Trompe L'Oeil for a Common World
6Exteriority/InteriorityWalter Lippmann’s famous critique of ‘the public’ as a proxy for demo-cratic accountability (Lippmann 1993 [1925]) makes for uncanny read-ing in these times of overabundant knowledge. Lippmann’s uneasiness with the public derived from his view that democratic robustness was ultimately an ‘unattainable ideal’, especially if constructed around the ‘ideal of the sovereign and omnipotent citizen’ (11). For Lippmann, the idea of democracy could not be made to stand on the notion of an ab-solute and transparent command of all possible knowledge on the part of the citizenry. Therein lay the ‘mystical fallacy of democracy’, because an average citizen ‘cannot know all about everything all the time, and while he is watching one thing a thousand others undergo great changes’ (28, 15). In fact, what Lippmann insinuated was that it remains doubt-ful whether knowledge, politics and the social are indeed correlates or commensurate with each other, for ‘the problems of the modern world appear and change faster than any set of teachers can grasp them’. Thus, any attempt at making knowledge into a politically relevant object is ‘bound always to be in arrears’ (17). The political hopefulness that in-forms the notion of public knowledge is thus understood as the malaise lying behind all theories of democracy.Over eighty years have passed since Lippmann published his text, yet it remains intriguing how the terms of his analysis – knowledge, the public and the critical analysis of society – continue to underpin the anthropology of our political imagination. Today, as we have seen in Chap ters 4 and 5, the relationship between knowledge and the public
© 2022, Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford

6Exteriority/InteriorityWalter Lippmann’s famous critique of ‘the public’ as a proxy for demo-cratic accountability (Lippmann 1993 [1925]) makes for uncanny read-ing in these times of overabundant knowledge. Lippmann’s uneasiness with the public derived from his view that democratic robustness was ultimately an ‘unattainable ideal’, especially if constructed around the ‘ideal of the sovereign and omnipotent citizen’ (11). For Lippmann, the idea of democracy could not be made to stand on the notion of an ab-solute and transparent command of all possible knowledge on the part of the citizenry. Therein lay the ‘mystical fallacy of democracy’, because an average citizen ‘cannot know all about everything all the time, and while he is watching one thing a thousand others undergo great changes’ (28, 15). In fact, what Lippmann insinuated was that it remains doubt-ful whether knowledge, politics and the social are indeed correlates or commensurate with each other, for ‘the problems of the modern world appear and change faster than any set of teachers can grasp them’. Thus, any attempt at making knowledge into a politically relevant object is ‘bound always to be in arrears’ (17). The political hopefulness that in-forms the notion of public knowledge is thus understood as the malaise lying behind all theories of democracy.Over eighty years have passed since Lippmann published his text, yet it remains intriguing how the terms of his analysis – knowledge, the public and the critical analysis of society – continue to underpin the anthropology of our political imagination. Today, as we have seen in Chap ters 4 and 5, the relationship between knowledge and the public
© 2022, Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. CONTENTS vii
  3. List of Illustrations viii
  4. Preface ix
  5. Zoom In 1
  6. Introduction 3
  7. Part I. Trompe l’Oeil
  8. Chapter 1. Surviving Comparison 33
  9. Chapter 2. The Strabismic Eye 49
  10. Chapter 3. Reversibility/Proportionality 66
  11. Zoom Out 82
  12. Part II. Common World
  13. Chapter 4. The Political/Phantasmagoria 87
  14. Chapter 5. Predation/Production 107
  15. Chapter 6. Exteriority/Interiority 127
  16. Conclusion: At Perpendicular Angles 149
  17. References 155
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780857459121-011

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. CONTENTS vii
  3. List of Illustrations viii
  4. Preface ix
  5. Zoom In 1
  6. Introduction 3
  7. Part I. Trompe l’Oeil
  8. Chapter 1. Surviving Comparison 33
  9. Chapter 2. The Strabismic Eye 49
  10. Chapter 3. Reversibility/Proportionality 66
  11. Zoom Out 82
  12. Part II. Common World
  13. Chapter 4. The Political/Phantasmagoria 87
  14. Chapter 5. Predation/Production 107
  15. Chapter 6. Exteriority/Interiority 127
  16. Conclusion: At Perpendicular Angles 149
  17. References 155
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