EQUIPMENT: CONCEPT WORK

Recently, avian influenza has returned to public attention, by coincidence appearing at the same time in three different settings: a Hong Kong poultry market; a Shenzhen bus driver; and laboratories in the Wisconsin and the Netherlands. Though the timing of the events was coincidental, it made clear that 'avian influenza' is a viral object literally cultured by human labors, in the market or the petri dish. It also raised important questions about how these human labors contribute to increasing danger, security or preparedness. On December 21, the New York Times reported that the National Security Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) had asked the journals Science and Nature to redact certain portions of journal articles that reported the findings of experiments conducted in Wisconsin and the Netherlands. These experiments “evolved” the H5N1 influenza virus in the laboratory, then injected them into ferret assays and measured the rates of transmission between the ferrets (see Carlo Caduff's dissertation for detailed anthropological critique of the ferret assay). They claimed to succeed in developing laboratory strains that were far more transmissible than the H5N1 currently 'at large'. This is significant because human-to-human transmissible--while perhaps occurring in isolated cases--remains low for H5N1, which thus far prevents the virus from becoming a pandemic. A number of scientists subsequently complained about the NSABB's “request”, describing it as censorship. Yet it would be wrong to reduce their argument to a simple defense of “freedom” and the citadel of scientific inquiry. Rather, their questions cut to the core of the kinds of governance that are legitimate and effective for dealing with complex biological threats like avian influenza and advanced molecular biology. Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University, argued: "The proposed redactions are nothing more than a public relations measure – window dressing – intended to convey the impression that the issue is being addressed and thereby to minimize negative public reaction and deflect calls for effective regulation," Wendy Barclay, of Imperial College London, pointed to the difficulty of calculating the costs and benefits of preventing publication of the research. "I am not convinced that withholding scientific know-how will prevent the highly unlikely scenario of misuse of information, but I am worried that it may stunt our progress towards the improved control of this infectious disease," she said. ARC has previously written about the NSABB and its governance of biological research in this green paper. In this paper, we argued that the NSABB accurately identified contemporary biological research as posing problems of “low probability, high consequence”-- for example, the risk of a bioterrorist attack cannot be easily calculated in probabilistic terms, yet the occurrence of even a single one would carry high political, vital and economic consequences. Paradoxically, NSABB operates in a mode that attempts to minimize risks, a strategy of regulation we argued is intrinsically ineffective for governing the kinds of situations NSABB tasks itself with. We argued that NSABB employs a strategy of security or regulation for a situation that demands a strategy of preparedness. A particularly ridiculous clause of the NSABB's request involved negotiating with the journals "to agree on a procedure whereby edited versions of the papers are published, but bona fide researchers can gain access to the crucial methods and other details that have been removed."  Bone fide researchers?  Doesn't anybody remember that the anthrax mailings were most likely done by a top-level security clearance insider? It is frightening to me the way that evil is consistently pushed to the outsider: it is always the imagined guy with a makeshift lab in some foreign mountain cave, not the white-collar American Nobel prize winner. And because of this, I am not willing to let the scientists completely off the hook, either. The scientists describe this research as necessary for improving our ability to control the virus. But precisely a major difficulty--that should not be glossed over-- is the disconnect between making knowledge and the actual control of the virus. As Anthony S. wrote to me in an e-mail, does it make sense to talk about “control” when we are talking about influenza? A lot of scientists mentioned the need to develop a vaccine for the virus. But vaccines for a specific virus can be easily produced; the problem has always been knowing which viral strain is going to cause the pandemic. What the scientists are talking about, actually, is ongoing research on a 'universal' influenza vaccine. Such a vaccine may indeed be one element of a preparedness strategy. But there remain few ideas about how one would actually undertake a program to control the spread of influenza even with such a vaccine, as production, distribution and implementation are difficulties that cannot be solved through work in the laboratory.

Tobias Rees has published (TRees, As if ) a response to Dominic Boyer in which he contests Boyer’s 2010 (Boyer social theory)diagnosis of the crisis of theoretical modes of knowledge, the referent “society” and Boyer’s prescription for a remedy through rejuvenated social theory. The “crisis” of anthropological theory in Rees’ account of Boyer’s diagnosis, comes from the ranks of those anthropologists who in one form or another are dealing with scientific, political, economic, legal, media and ethical expertise, to name a few contemporary domains in which significant knowledge is being produced. The claim from Boyer is that if anthropologists such as Doug Holmes and George Marcus are right (Marcus and Homes 2006), that experts are actually doing the work of anthropologists insofar as they are observing ‘how they do what they do’ and therefore rendering their practices contingent and producing knowledge from this rendering, then what is the role, purpose and status of the knowledge produced by anthropologists? Of course, then comes the debate: is this what anthropologists do? What is the work of anthropology? Much turns on the question whether the work of anthropology is in fact to render that which is understood as stable, contingent. In one form or another, this is what has been understood as the diagnostic modality of Foucault’s history of the present. This is a point of entry for Rees to debate Boyer on the question of why “theory” may no longer be a worthwhile form in which to emplace, present and give the significance of anthropological knowledge. Rees makes a compelling case for why anthropological attention to the “difference today makes”  would be limited by “society” and “theory” as the form of explanatory knowledge for the problem of the shifting referents ‘anthropos’ and ‘logos’ along with their changing concepts . Rees is however clear that Boyer gives up a ‘reductionist’ conception of theory as singular explanatory schema and yet wishes to retain a plurality of such schemas each recognizing the limits of the other: “another theory heard from.” What is the difference between this view of theory and what has been called a tool chest of logoi [Rabinow 2003]? Rees’ answer is that theory is still more or less a causal schema. The problem is that the thing to be explained is ‘the human’ and that ‘social’- as an adjective - is the distinguishing mark of such an object to be explained. Since ‘the social’ and ‘Society’ are historically contingent objects and analytic terms [Rabinow 1989], [Strathern 1988] – and indeed since they are not the same, differentiating ‘the social’, “Society” and the manner in which Boyer uses the term “social” becomes a task for Rees. Rather than summarize any more, let me end with a question; Rees proposes the anthropology of the actual as one response to the poverty of theory. How can one situate such knowledge of the actual within the contemporary, in the sense used here in ARC? I.e. How to situate observations of the actual within the problematic relation of the “resent past and near future”, problematic precisely because the significance of knowledge produced about the actual cannot be judged by theory, by reference to ‘society’ or an understanding of the human as ‘social’ (which even if true, seems not to tell us very much if we already know that it is true.’

"It is not the 'actual' interconnections of 'things' but the conceptual interconnection of problems that defines the scope of the various sciences." -- Max Weber

Knowledge of the actual interconnection of things is necessary. Can one give a different form to that knowledge so as to render those objects of knowledge as problems and can those problems be interconnected conceptually, so as to make those interconnections actual.

Elements Seven Worlds

I have been working through Boltanski et al with a friend at Beijing University sociology department.  I very much enjoy the elegance with which they approach the disciplinary laws of sociology and economics, not in order to denounce them as "reductive abstractions" but to show how they are themselves "worlds" whose contents are used in critique and justification, to order people and things and to construct agreement.  In other words, these representations are social facts.  Some concerns that have come up for us that I want to raise for possible discussion. 1) The universality of the "six worlds".  Certainly they are not arguing that these five worlds are all that there are?  I understand that their motivation is to go beyond classic sociological or economic theory (which reduced everything to a single law, either "society" or "rational economic man") but also to go beyond postmodern criticism (which claimed some kind of irreducible complexity or multiplicity).  So six is a good number: more than one or two, but not infinite.  However, reading the text and thinking about China, I certainly don't think that these six worlds are necessarily the six (?) worlds here. So I am curious to think how to take up some of the elements of their approach without necessarily taking on the content of the worlds. To what extent would this be possible? 2) More fundamentally, the foundation of their argument is a political theory which they call the "polity model".  What is the domain or extension in which this polity model is supposed to exist?  If there are social actions that explicitly cannot be encompassed within the polity model (they use the example of eugenics), what are we to do with these non-justifiable worlds?  Can they not even be described? 3) Which leads me to wonder, what to do with situations in which agreement (in both senses of "identity between things" and "concord between persons") is not the primary objective?  In a review article, Peter Wagner briefly mentions that Boltanski has written about situations in which, rather than "peaceful ways of determining equivalences", "there are also other regimes, which are not peaceful (such as violence) or are not based on explicated forms of equivalence (such as love)".  A phenomenon that I am particularly interested in is the role of the fake or falsehood (e.g. the use of melamine to raise nitrogen counts in dairy products, thereby mimicking high protein counts in simple protein tests) and how this inflects a situation of dispute or agreement. 4) Which world are Boltanski et al and their text within, if they are able to map all of the worlds?

This post begins from a persistent feeling of insincerity that has accompanied many of my fieldwork interactions. When I first started noticing the feeling, I attributed it to a particular aspect of the setting where I am doing fieldwork. Working among scientists involved in epidemic control in China, there are simply a lot of things that cannot be directly stated in a straightforward fashion. As another foreign expert working in the area of epidemic disease told me, when he tried to ask permission to do a research investigation in a straightforward manner, he would simply be told: that is impossible. But perhaps strangely, this did not necessarily mean that it was impossible. It just meant for the most part that asking permission, stating one's intentions in a sincere manner, led to inevitable difficulties. Again and again I have found myself stating my intentions in vague or obfuscated ways, often playing the role of someone researching 'society' or 'cultural practices', as a way to keep a conversation going, to avoid a reaction of surprise, confusion, anger, suspicion, etc. I have, to adopt the analytic distinction in the Studio #2, employed performative speech. Again and again I have felt myself to lack courage and sincerity. In a way this insincerity, it seems to me, exemplifies an ethical dilemma within the classical fieldwork interaction. Participant-observation is a practice which, by its very nature, involves performing the semblance of participation while at the same time placing that interaction in a context external to the situation itself, changing its meaning.  There is something about the practice of understanding an other way of thinking that, at least apparently, requires--not a relativist suspension of judgment exactly--but rather a suspension of the expression of judgment. Now, the goal of Prof. Rabinow's anthropology of the contemporary and experiments with new ethical approaches to anthropology, has been to challenge the poverty of the classical participant-observer position. Adjacency requires more than moving between the poles of participation and observation; it demands the practice of frank-speech within the local world and dialect of the fieldwork setting. As the Studio # 3 describes, “Second-order practices are disruptive in that (at a minimum) they make visible existing habits and dispositions; this visibility often leads to the recognition or demand that such dispositions and habits are insufficient and inadequate on one or another register. It frequently produces responses characterized by irritation, indifference, and the assertion of power to block or silence second-order observations.” If second-order practices are to be disruptive, however, the term 'observation' must include an aspect in which observations are spoken. [Perhaps this is internal to Luhmann's idea of second-order observation. Nicholas Langlitz, in his response to Stefan Helmreich's critique of Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow “Anthropology of biosecurity”) suggests as much, writing that second-order observation, as reflexivity, inherently alters the system.] If it is likely that frank-speech will lead to the blockage or silencing of second-order observations, it seems we must develop a tactics of frank-speech. Blurting out one's heart-felt belief can lead to a silencing of access by the informant, or equally a blocking of one's own mind to an understanding of the other's world and way of thinking. Parresia is not appropriate to every situation. The moment in which to speak frankly must be carefully prepared and earned.  However, the feeling of insincerity persists, which indicates to me that I don't have things quite right.  I'd be very interested to hear comments from others regarding if or how they employed this kind of tactics during fieldwork interactions.

OED INSTANCE eagerness, anxiety, solicitation, a judicial process, a new argument rebutting the reply to a former argument, formerly also an instant of time, < Latin instāntia (1) a being present, presence, (2) urgency, earnestness in supplication, (3) a pleading or process in a court of justice (Ulpian), (4) in med. Schol. Latin an objection to a general statement, an instance to the contrary, transl. Greekἔνστασις (Buridan, c1350, In Metaphysicen Aristotelis Quæstiones: see Prantl): < instānt-eminstant adj. Liddell & Scott ἔν-στᾰσις, εως, ἡ, (ἐνίσταμαι) origin, beginning, τῶν ὅλων πραγμάτων Aeschin.2.20; τοῦ πολέμου Plb.4.62.3; πραγμάτων Ph.2.75; institution of legal proceedings, τὴν ὅλην ἔ. τοῦ ἀγῶνοςAeschin.1.132. 2 ἔ. βίου a way of life, D.L.6.103, cf. Jul.Or.6.201a. 3 institution of an heir, Cod.Just.1.2.25 Intr., PMasp.151.274 (vi A. D.); inheritance, ib.312.55 (vi A. D.). II in Medic., lodgement, λίθων Aret.CD2.3. 2 impaction, obstruction, ὄγκων Asclep. ap. Gal.10.101, Herod.Med. ap. Orib.5.30.5, etc.: generally, interference, ὀνύχων Iamb.Protr.21.ιθ’. III in Logic, objection to an argument, ἔ. πρότασις προτάσει ἐναντία Arist.APr.69a37, cf. Top.157a35, Rh.1402a31, Hermog.Inv.3.6, etc. 2 generally, opposition, Plb.6.17.8 (pl.), Ph.2.60. 3 prosecution, ἐν μολποῖς SIG 633.66 (Milet., ii B. C.). 4 χαλεπὴ ἔ. difficult situation, IG12(5).509.4 (Seriphos, iii/ii B. C.). (ἐνίστημι) winding up an engine, Ph.Bel.61.21, 57.41 (nisi leg. ἔντασις). impact, interference of an object of vision,Placit.4.13.2, Plot.4.5.2.