Paper short abstract:

This presentation will examine what kinds of arguments we can make from a present divested of anything other than itself.

Paper long abstract:

As the call for papers argues, abstractions remove us from the immediacy of here-and-now and insert experiences in broader patterns, schemas, sequences that make sense of those experiences in light of something other, something more, than their immediate selves. What would a present without abstraction look like? This presentation offers a possible answer to this experiment in the work of neoliberal philosopher Friedrich Hayek, who encouraged scientists of all ilks to renounce “the will to intelligibility” and let data be data. Through James Carrier’s work I will consider how this drive towards the present has played out in anthropology, particularly in its postmodern, post-structural and ontological garbs, and ask what can of arguments we can actually make from within a present taken in its immediacy, as raw and concrete as an experience can be – if any at all.