the relationship between indeterminacy and classification also provides a means to engage with intellectual traditions that have respectively valorized, critiqued, and rejected the teleological, determining project of modernity in which indeterminacy, for good or ill, plays a central role as the dark (or joyful) other. Waste matter often appears as indeterminacy, a form that can be terrifying because it suggests dissolution and indecipherability, something that is either unknowable or uncanny in its hints at previous forms. In some cases, but not all, the seeds of value transformation can lie in that very indeterminacy.
Indeterminacy therefore appears in the following modes: lack of recognition or incorporation in a given classification system; undetermined futures or directions; and a resistance to totalizing systems.
But first, it is perhaps as well to get cognate terms out of the way before proceeding further. Here we therefore outline why our take on indeterminacy is different from or where it may include but is not synonymous with uncertainty, ambiguity, and liminality. In short, these terms are not just reducible to each other but have specific meanings and consequences.
Recent ideas on uncertainty fall roughly into four camps: the inability to read other people’s intentions, the unknowability of the future, risk management as a response to those unknowns, and finally, the collapse or withdrawal of totalizing modernist systems. Thus, as an example of the first group of approaches, François Berthomé, Julien Bonhomme, and Gregory Delaplace (2012) approach uncertainty through linguistic anthropology and interactional sociology considering the social problem of being unable to understand the meaning of other people’s intentions (see also Alan Rumsey and Joel Robbins’ special issue on the opacity of other people’s minds 2008). While not using these approaches, we share their assumption that uncertain conditions are common, not incidental, experiences (Berthomé, Bonhomme, and Delaplace 2012: 130). In the second group, engagements with doubt, such as Jennifer Hecht’s (2003) panoramic discussion of the skeptical tradition, can be allied to uncertainty as broad questions of how we know and, more specifically, how to gauge and act on unknown futures (Pelkmans 2013a, 2013b; Carey and Pedersen 2017). These latter questions are at the heart of analyses of late capitalism since both its mechanisms and consequences are uncertainty.
Thus, in the third set of approaches are analyses of how actors in financial capitalism achieve profits by negotiating risk as a means of managing uncertainty (Appadurai 2011; Miyazaki 2013; Ortiz 2014; Riles 2013; Tuckett 2011; Zaloom 2004). One flip side of the profit to be gained from the calculability of risk, and the readiness to adapt a workforce to demand, is the erosion of labor security. This precarity is experienced in a variety of forms that rehearse Marx’s insight stating capitalist profit requires a reserve army of insecurely or unemployed people. While precarity in itself is an uncertain and not an indeterminate condition, it can lead to a crumbling of previously clear identities in terms of class and gender. Further, where the worth of different kinds of work (e.g., manual labor or waste picking) is not formally recognized, this can engender a sense that distinct identities, status, and human value are being eroded. Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow’s edited book, Modes of Uncertainty (2015) centers on ethnographies of attempts to know the unknown and thus identify danger and mitigate risk. Their emphasis is not on uncertainty as something “out there” but on how it is deployed as a concept: a new form of governmentality via the management of risk.
The fourth topos of engagement with uncertainty is how people negotiate the political and epistemological insecurities accompanying collapses of ideology and empire. Many of these chronicle the dereliction of lives in former state socialist regimes (e.g., Alexander 2009; Rofel 1999; Verdery and Burawoy 1999; Yurchak 2005) as well as those who embrace new economic opportunities. The complex phenomenon of everyday nostalgias for socialism (e.g., Stenning 2005) finds unexpected echoes in some postsocialist state nationalist projects. As Esra Özyürek (2006) reminds us in her study of Turkey, nostalgia for the modern state in the wake of anxieties accompanying neoliberalism is not confined to the former Eastern Bloc. In part, these anxieties may be ascribed to a loss of a sense of clear direction and of one’s place in the world as part of a larger whole, even if in retrospect the wholes turned out to be rather fragmented. As discussed in the third section below, the collapse of old regimes and the emergence of new ones can generate not only people who no longer fit, but also newly redundant material remains of earlier hopes and quite different regimes (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Yarrow 2017).
Uncertainty therefore chimes with our discussion of indeterminacy, but only insofar as it reflects conditions of dissolution or category loss produced by economic and political exclusion; the material infrastructure of previous times that has yet to find its place; and, finally, a sense that future pathways are rarely as determined as grand narratives suggest but emerge as a dialogue between people’s attempts to plan and shape futures and contingent events beyond their control.
Ambiguity is frequently used as though it were just another term for indeterminacy. Thus ambiguity refers to the precise meaning of something being unclear or obscure; this might be seen as the recognition failure of indeterminate conditions. However, the potential confusions that arise from ambiguity are because there is a multiplicity of possible meanings at any one given time. These multiple readings may be contradictory (Widger and Russell 2018), creatively play off each other, or depend on context.3 In other words, ambiguity is about a superfluity of possibilities, each one a legitimate reading of a meaningful category. In contrast, the condition of indeterminacy suggests the lack of such categories. There are instances, however, when the terms merge. For example, Jacques Derrida was specifically concerned with indeterminacy-as-ambiguity, multiple meaning, as in the pharmakon that is both poison and medicine at the same time (Rinella 2010); that is, the pharmakon is not either/or but both and hence essentially indeterminate (Derrida 1981: 63–171). Precisely because it holds both these meanings at once, it also speaks to the idea of the “scapegoat” (ibid).4 These ideas remain salient in the chapters in this book that consider the expulsion or social rejection of people.
Finally, while liminality may seem to mean the same as indeterminacy at times, a clear distinction between the terms is useful. In the anthropological tradition, following Arnold van Gennep ([1909] 1960) and his “recuperation” by Victor Turner (1967), liminality is not only a condition between two fixed states but, crucially, also has the characteristics of transformation and transition. These are not qualities that fit our definition of indeterminacy as something that remains between or has an undetermined future. Recently, the term has been widely adopted elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, particularly political science, to refer to a general condition of being betwixt and between, which can be the locus of emergent political orders (e.g., Horvath, Thomassen, and Wydra 2015; Thomassen 2014). From literary studies, Arpad Szakolczai (2016) adds the oxymoronic notion of “permanent liminality.” These more capacious understandings of the term partly chime with our discussions, but also attenuate the charge of the original narrower anthropological use.
These are our working definitions for the book, but are far from the last word on how these terms are understood either in everyday speech or in different disciplines. Carla Namwali Serpell, for instance, reminds us that in literary and scientific theory these terms have become heavy with particular meanings: the New Criticism has appropriated ambiguity, indeterminacy is the driving force of Derridean deconstruction, while uncertainty reflects scientific theories roughly contemporaneous with James Joyce (Serpell 2014: 308n41).
There are three more parts to this introduction. The following section provides a grounding for our chapters via a brief genealogy of how indeterminacy has been theorized in philosophy and social theory vis-à-vis questions of order, recognition, and progress, which partly hinge on whether or not the infinite variety of the world can or should be caught in categories. From this, we move in the next section to the growth of invisible, unregistered, stateless people in the contemporary world alongside tightening systems of classification and control and the material byproducts of intensified political and economic production/wasting processes: uncontainable contamination. Here we also consider four areas where social scientists have engaged recently with indeterminacy: statelessness, economic precarity,