Techniques of Reality: finding reality without real & worldmaking for otherwise

Chasing reality is the pursuit of locating reality through techniques that produce it. These techniques produce the world experienced, the world perceived, and the world lived. For instance, kissing is a bodily technique that produces an emotional reality that links those who kiss each other. It also manifests their sensuous vibration to the world beyond their links. This bodily technique produces different emotional realities and provokes different sensations according to the body location that is kissed. Therefore, kissing is more than a collaboration of 22 to 34 facial muscles. The collaboration muscles, meanings, cultures, religions, customs, and all those elements turn kissing into an experience and social interaction. Kissing produces an emotional reality from a conglomeration of body, mind and society. In other words, kissing is a technique that produces a positive and formal reality. A positive reality suggests an existing and explicit reality that has a formal structure around contents. A positive reality is linked to the material and materiality of everyday life, and it cannot exist independent of material and tangible elements. For instance, kissing operates through materiality and performance of bodies which shape the positive side of emotional reality. An anthropologist would observe kissing through its positive reality. She determines parameters of emotional realities by noticing passion, the intensity of kissing, the body location, the details of the performance, reactions and actions, which kind of bodies kissed each other, what were the social labels of the bodies and also which other bodies were affected by the kiss. The kissing as a technique of reality that makes the emotional world through bodies, embodiments and intimacy would allow an anthropologist to chase emotional reality via these questions. 

The Kiss of Judas by Giotto, 1304-06 GETTY IMAGES

In contrast, some techniques produce a negative reality. For instance, calling on ghosts, gods, god, ancestors, spirit animals, religious rituals and remembering the past are techniques that produce negative reality. The act of calling, rituals and remembering produce the negative reality of things that hold no material presence. A negative reality like god does not have any material bearing by itself, but it manifests materiality through individuals’ perception. National pride is another example of the negative reality produced through various acts such as singing the anthem, getting together in a national holiday, looking at the national flag, or admiring a king, a queen, or any head of state.  Another prominent example of the negative reality is the so-called Western world or the West, which does not have any corresponding reality. It is not valid to presume countries such as the Netherlands, New Zealand, United States, France, or any other so-called Western country are Western in themselves because they are often East of somewhere else. The Netherlands is to the East of Germany, so does it mean Germany is a Western country for the Dutch, but the Netherlands is an Eastern country for Germans? The so-called Western countries are not collected in one location called the West because the West is a geographical direction relative to where one stands. In other words, the negative reality called West comes from early colonial explorers who imagined themselves as the centre of the world and designated the direction of East toward Asia or the label of the new continent to America. Gammel (2002, p 271) writes, ‘in the 17th century Europeans invariably assumed that Europe was the centre of the world and of civilization’.  The very idea of imagining oneself as the political centre of the world is a state of unreal (not only an arrogant illusion) which produces a negative reality called East or new continent or savages. 

Acts of unreal, like phantom pain, imagined geographies, calling gods and ancestors or remembering false memories are techniques of reality and produce negative reality. However, the distinctive difference between techniques that produce positive reality and negative is what feeds them. Techniques that produce positive reality are dependent on material entities like the body and other nonhuman components. However, techniques that produce negative reality are dependent on illusions. Lisa Messeri (2021) explains illusions through the attention that illusions draw ‘to the discrepancy between externally measurable and subjectively perceived qualities.’ For instance, there is a discrepancy between presuming one to be the centre of the world (subjectively perceived quality) and the planetary shape as well as its history (externally measurable/identifiable directions). The illusion feeds acts of unreal and produces negative reality. Fear and anxiety that may disturb and prevent sleep after watching a horror movie is another simple example of negative reality based on an individual viewing experience. The horror movie is a mediated illusion that induces an emotional and negative reality in a viewer, impacting their sleep. Lisa Messeri (2021) explains ‘illusion has a reality that elevates an embodied perceptual experience as the real’, and this really could be extracted from activities of game designers in a digital lab or performance of actors under the guidance of directors in a movie. Basically, illusion as the discrepancy between what-is and perceptions of what-is feeds unreal as a technique that produces the world. This is the point where anthropology/anthropologists/ethnographers find themselves at risk because their ethnography may well be a technique of unreal. Their observations and interpretations could be illusions based on their positionalities and dispositions rather than what locals perceive about the world which locals inhabit. Pursuing reality through the technique of unreal exposes the risk embedded in ethnography and anthropology. However, this risk invites caution rather than dismissal of anthropological practices because neither illusion is a trick (Messeri 2021) nor unreal is a nonexistent fantasy. Messeri well explains illusion is a way toward understanding which invites contemplation on the plurality of perpetual worlds like the world for an anthropologist who faces a new world and sees differently from locals. Illusion is a way of knowing that feeds unreal as a technique of reality/worldmaking. Subsequently, unreal teaches how differences are produced and how individuals conjure the world from their perception.

I highlight the differences between negative reality and positive reality through an example from anthropologists who encountered reindeers. They both write their impressions of reindeers and explain the illusionary nature of their encounter. Piers Vitebsky, an anthropologist who has written much on Siberians, explains:

Ingold, whose edited volume What is an animal? (1994) partly inspired the title of the present article, has encountered many [reindeers]. He writes that its ‘large eyes confront the observer with an expression of vacant melancholy’ (1980: 19). One of the authors of the present article writes that its eyes are ‘compelling . . . huge, soulful, and capable of engaging one with an intense gaze’ (Vitebsky 2005: 58). As modern British anthropologists we have humanised, even psychologised, the animal in front of us. Yet our interpretations of its ‘personality’ already vary between ‘vacant’ and ‘intense.’ What more does a reindeer become if you depend on it for your living, and even your life?

Vitebsky compares his perception with Ingold’s perception to show how ethnographic illusion produces a negative reality rather than a positive reality around reindeer, similar to how Santa’s reindeer is based on fantasy. A negative reality is produced from the anthropological encounter, but Vitebsky tackles the risk of negative reality produced by him by following the techniques that produce reindeer locally. For example, he combines the unreal/illusions around the sacrality of reindeers for locals beside the positive reality that comes about from the social processes of reindeer-meat consumption and its materiality. Vitebsky’s anthropology becomes effective and communicative by placing positive and negative reality along each other to show the sociality of the animal. He teaches anthropological risks could be taken by following the techniques of reality in the form of trajectories that complete each other and constantly stimulate new becomings.   

Pursuing techniques of reality by engaging materiality, materials, illusions, and unreal examines how the world otherwise is enacted, and plurality is unleashed or restrained. It is the anthropological risk that researchers must take in order to find how to form solidarity along with interlocutors and interweave their dreams with locals in order to live in plurality and encourage reality otherwise. 

 Here, you can listen to my podcast series Hopeless World of Reality , the third episode discuses techniques of reality.