Feb 5. Book Launch, Frank Perlin, City Intelligible

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Book Launch/Discussion

Frank Perlin, City Intelligible: A Philosophical and Historical Anthropology of Global Commoditisation before Industrialisation  (BRILL, 2020,  Studies in Global Social History, Volume: 38) (discount order form)

The book is available online in PDF: here and here, and the Webinar recording is available for viewing online here. 
  February 5, 2021, 9:00-10:30 (EST)
The recording of panel presentations for the January 22 Webinar discussion at the Center for Modern Indian Studies, Gottingen is available at https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/podcasts+and+webinars/637208.html.

Discussants: Ravi Ahuja (Göttingen), Tania Bhattacharya (Harvard), Anirban Karak (NYU), Andy Liu (Villanova),  and Anna Sailer (Göttingen), with introductions by Manu Goswami, David Ludden, and Andrew Sartori (NYU), and response from Frank Perlin.

Frank Perlin is also the author of The invisible city : monetary, administrative, and popular infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500-1900 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993) and Unbroken landscape: commodity, category, sign and identity : their production as myth and knowledge from 1500 (Aldershot : Variorum, 1994)

City Intelligible seeks to integrate a transcendental philosophical anthropology of commoditisation before industrialisation with a social and cultural, thus empirical anthropology of commodity production and exchange that is global, thus inter-cultural. It treats commodification as a singular and privileged evidence of the universal status of human reasoning, and one that grounds the translational character of human exchange throughout the early centuries, and yet that simultaneously founds ubiquitous cultural differentiation. The book constitutes, therefore, a refutation of the predominant tendency in the humanities to represent cultural difference as inhibiting the very possibility of effective intercultural translation.

City Intelligible treats the factors of economic history as forms of cultural expression, but determined, in their turn, by a continuum of complex societal formation from the very beginnings of intensive agricultural and social settlement. It seeks to derive evidence for the universal foundations of human reasoning through analysis of the culture of commoditisation in marrying a thoroughgoing Kantian analysis of what constitutes a commodity with the historical evidence, an approach aspiring to ground the very concept and possibility of a universal human cultural nature underlying all human differentiation. First there is that question of how such translational exchanges of what are local cultural products even possible; thus the question; what is a commodity.
 
The empirical side of this work is especially concerned with differentiating a human generated nature … a second nature … distinct in form and kind from the contextual and englobing Darwinian-type nature with which are conceptually familiar and that englobes all reality; it is that second cultural nature that forms the specific human context of all historical experience and agency, and I seek, therefore, to determine its form and content. This empirical part undertakes a detailed consideration of the extended lines of production and of circulation especially characterising cloth manufacture in the sub-continental South Asia, thus from the cotton in the field to its final products, and including the phases of marketing and composition of type that connect each step of such production and circulation the one to the others, and thereby transiting territory indifferent to frontiers of whatever kind as also to scale, and necessarily entailing in its turn a density of marketisation both local and global in extents, — enabling commodity-exchange and what, therefore, one may judge as intercultural translatability. It is this sequential entirety of steps that goes to constitute what we call the commodity. For this reason the book is much focussed on describing the individual anonymous agency underlying such historical process. Clearly, production and circulation, labour in the field and exchange in the market place, are regarded as entirely interdependent. The second aspect with which I am concerned is intercultural exchange itself.
 
 A new book, The Missing Discipline, is now in composition constituting what virtually is a second volume to City Intelligible, and concerning the commodity. It seeks to expose Adam Smith’s (and later Marx’s) contention concerning the structural foundations generated by the huge transfer of a «surplus» of value from agriculturalist to a dominating class that underlies the possibility of any complex agriculturally-based society prior to industrialisation, and that in turn grounds … makes possible … the complexity of any such society itself (manufactures, institutions, social strata). This implies, as I read it, that all kinds of such society are also commercial capitalist. Its second concern is with  the intercultural character of such a translational nexus.
 

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