I heart complexity

In 2016, the United States election delivered what seemed like a rebuke of technocracy. At every turn, experts, often to no avail, denounced the logics and arguments by which politicians paired simple solutions with misguidedly simple renderings of complex problems. Complexity has thus become the object of intense rhetoric and strong affective responses. Within this polarized domain, anthropologists can be counted among the lovers of complexity. Yet the self-perception of much of the discipline as primarily committed to complexity requires a fairly blinkered view. In the first half of the commentary, I suggest that we are blinded by our love of complexity to other dimensions of anthropological work. In the second half of the commentary, I develop some tools for thinking about the relationship between forms and affect, building on the writing of the early 20th century historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy. More specifically, I discuss Lovejoy’s notion of metaphysical pathos: the affective response conjured by the formal properties of the representations and character-ization of the world one inhabits. I close this article by turning to a mo-dality of response. If complexity is under attack today, one response is to dig in heels and insist on more complexity. Instead, I frame the aban-donment of the a priori allegiance to complexity as an act of resistance.