September 28, 2009
Novelty, part deux
[I'm posting this anew, but it is in part a response to questions from Tobias and Anthony on the previous post.]
No sooner did I abandon this topic than I picked up Arendt’s The Human Condition, wherein there is, in chapter 6, an all too brief reflection on novelty (of precisely that form of philosophy of modernity that Tobias articulates as the main domain of this activity). The chapter announces that the three great events that define the character of the modern world are America (its discovery), the Reformation (and counter-reformation) and the telescope of Galileo. At this point Arendt says:
“The names we connect with them, Galileo Galilei and Martin Luther and the great seafarers, explorers and adventurers in the age of discovery, still belong to the premodern world. Moreover, the strange pathos of novelty, the almost violent insistence of nearly all the great authors, scientists and philosophers since the seventeenth century that they saw things never seen before, thought thoughts never thought before, can be found in none of them, not even in Galileo.”
There follows a footnote on novelty, the emergence of the term scienza nuova, a reference to Alexandre Koyre and a bit on the work of Karl Jaspers (from whom Arendt borrows the term “pathos of novelty”), specifically Japers’ essay on Descartes. Her basic point seems to be that these great events that characterize modernity are not continuous with the past, but nor is it possible to say that they occurred because Luther or Galileo or the seafarers were seeking something new. Rather they were ensconced in their own conceptual scheme (to foreshadow the likes of Kuhn and Davidson) in which novelty was not so important, but out of which emerged a new scheme with novelty as its key value. Nothing new about this, as we say.
Now, on the one hand, this is undoubtedly reassuring, to see novelty explicitly marked out as a value which radically increased in stature with the rise of modernity, modern philosophy and science, and around which we all turn with a faithfulness that we rarely question. On the other hand, it is a version of things that re-introduces an epochal break (a form of novelty about which we have been taught to be suspicious around here), and which Tobias very nicely articulated in his comment. Surely novelty is not itself new, and from here we can have a rich, but ultimately fruitless discussion about modernity and the philosophy of history.
So at this point I would echo Anthony’s comment on the previous post that there is reason to be careful about the referent of novelty–no novelty as such, but always the novelty of some thing. Novelty always modifies a claim. However, this requires more clarification, so let me propose this distinction:
1) the question of novelty as a claim about something: is it new or not? Can one define a set of parameters (a mode of veridiction, even) that allow novelty to be claimed convincingly in some cases and not others. Does this claim vary with the kinds of objects in play: art, scientific ‘discoveries’, corporate product design, fashion, political causes, etc.
2) the question of novelty as one value among others, and often the most important one: it is more important to be new than certain, true, effective, flourishy, just, human etc. Or to refine this, all other values are subordinated to novelty: it may be more effective, more just, more certain than something else, but we should value it because this makes it new. It strikes me that classical conservatism is the only stance that actively resists this version of novelty (i.e. “Just because something is new, doesn’t mean it is better.” See for example, “The Relentless Cult of Novelty” by Solzhenitsyn).
and related to this,
2a) the question of novelty as marker of priority, and a kind of bureacratic mechanism for managing the distribution of credit, resources and accolades or in the case of fraud, accusations. Novelty-as-firstness.
It strikes me that we anthropologists of the contemporary can safely hold hands, sing “If I Had a Hammer” and reject (1), in favor of emergence, or non-epochal thinking, or of difference and motion. I think there is a path out of that kind of obsessive concern with the new (and I do think assemblage-apparatus-problematization a useful starting place for that).
However, I think it is extremely difficult to reject (2) or (2a). We can be cynical about them; we can see them as a problem of “some kind of rhetoric of authority as well as entrepreneurship” (Paul’s comment); we can probably tie it to the economic and financial imperatives that drive knowledge production today; we can tie (2a) to the “university-ification” of culture (not the corporatization of the university), or perhaps to the “responsibilization” of individuals who must now all represent themselves as entrepreneurs, scientists, each with something new to offer. In any case, I would argue that (2) and (2a) are forms of novelty-as-experience which are central to self-fashioning in the contemporary. When there are perfectly recognizable reasons to do something–something that will enhance flourishing or justice or even certainty–and yet it is impossible to do so unless it can also be made new, preferably cutting edge, then this form of novelty (or whatever it is) is at work.
An interesting outcome of this distinction is that (2) and (2a) becomes a problem for (1). As novelty-as-value and the need for widespread priority-ranking comes to dominate the scale of values, when they become the primary route to advancement, funding, access to power especially in knowledge-production, but beyond it is well, then this means people begin to propose, and to accept, ever more claims and things as novel in the sense of (1).
Think, for instance, of the proliferation of journals in academia. Combine a publish-or-perish imperative with a novelty-as-key-value, and the system will burst if people cannot find outlets which both allow them to publish and stamp it with a seal of approval (“Now with more novelty!”), and so the number of journals is growing at an exponential rate today. Obviously, a great deal that is published today (that vast sea of ignorance) is not new in absolute terms, but only new to some community of scholars that read that journal (Or in the worst case, only new in order to promote careers). Differentiation of knowledge production between a high-culture of novelty and a low-culture of novelty (or perhaps a Royal and a Minor domain of novelty) thus seems possible, so long as the two don’t mingle. No longer does it seem so easy to denounce “pseudo-science” “bad science” or “alternative science” simply because there is an exponentially growing sea of grey areas between the royal science and the many minor sciences all around it.
So the claim that everything must be new is true only in the sense of (2) and (2a), not (1). It is clear, I think that everything cannot be new in the sense of (1), for whatever value of new. Novelty presumes ranking and priority. But that doesn’t stop everyone from claiming novelty, regardless of the absolute truth of the matter. It is a bit of a Monadology: everything is new to some person or group, from some perspective, each living in different logoi, or within various, partially overlapping modernities. Obviously the differentiating, de-massifying power of the internet is crucial to this dynamic. At the same time that a thousand journals flourish, the top 10 most-read and most cited journals begin to matter more than ever before.
Anthony asked: is it not possible to be attentive to changes in degree and changes in kind? To which I would say with respect to (1), it is absolutely possible. This is afterall, bread and butter to scientists who read only Kuhn: puzzle solving is new in degree, paradigms are new in kind. However, with respect to (2) or (2a), I think it much harder. Every infinitesimal change in degree is accorded the status of novelty, because that is so much more important than other values. Or at least, one can increase funding, prestige, attention only be claiming that a change is new, to which all other values are subordinated. It is new because it is better, it is new because it is greener, it is new because it is more responsible, etc. What would a change in kind look like in terms of (2) or (2a)?
Consider what Jaspers says of novelty:
In the days when philosophy was metaphysics, a thinker lived in an enduring whole. Content with the philosophia perrenis in which he believed, he did not distinguish between the old and the new in his thoughts, for all of them were rooted in the whole. He judged ideas not by their novelty but by their authenticity. (Essay on Descartes, p. 132)
The characteristic feature of modern science therefore (and Jaspers excludes philosophy from this search for novelty, Descartes’ New Method notwithstanding) is the image of rungs in an endless ladder. But what I think we see today is the endless proliferation of ladders, many of which cannot identify the ground they stand on, much less what they climb towards. Novelty, and the progress that is its justification, looks more like book-keeping from this perspective.
One last thing, Tobias’ example of plasticity of the brain and its neurons is a lively one. In that same last section of the Human Condition, Arendt goes on at length (in unashamedly epochal terms) about the way Descartes’ philosophy moved the Archimedean point from a place outside ourselves, even outside the earth, to the inside of our heads: “What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds, and this they cannot have in common strictly speaking (283)” Neuroscience would be the apotheosis of this movement, and plasticity the introduction of doubt into the very claim that we have in minds in common…. all we have now are computers in common, and just barely that.
September 3, 2009
Novelty as a problem and/or concept?
This is a not-completely-thought-through attempt to provoke continued conversation here. I’m in the middle of trying to finish a manuscript on Nanotechnology and Responsibility based on the work i’ve pursued amongst this group over the last few years. Among the concepts that has emerged for me that I cannot get rid of, but cannot think without is novelty–including all its variations such as innovation, creativity, the new and the fashionable. My attempt at reasoning through why this is important in my case is the following tagline/aphorism: “Making things new, making things safe, making a career.” Unraveled, the phrase is intended to capture the way that my subjects transformed the problem of environmental and biological properties of nanomaterials (e.g. their “safety”) into a kind of problem which other scientists and engineers experienced as novel. Novel enough to merit the kinds of accolades and approbation that supposedly drive scientists–it was an attempt not just to solve a problem, but to “make” their careers (at all levels, the grad students excitement about partcipation, the interdisciplinary invention of a new thing, and the classic senior scientists struggling for power and recognition for what they did).
But I am no longer sure what I mean by novelty. At one level, this is not just about conventional novelty in science, which is often treated as an unproblematic feature of scientific research–rather, it is about the effort necessary to make something unrecognizable into something novel. It’s not just one set of scientists that needs to see something as new, but an intersection or union of multiple sets. Safety was seen by most chemists, physicists, engineers in nano as something downstream, an uninteresting test after the real action is over. The story I tell is about making safety into something “novel” enough to transcend that image.
At another level, however, novelty is so pervasive and so important today that nearly everything counts as something new. I’ve started to wonder whether it would be possible to find anyone in science who was in fact not interested in making something new, and if such a creature could ever survive? This rise to prominence of novelty as the supervalue of values renders it unstable, both as a feature of working science, and as a concept for understanding what is happening. Is novelty being decoupled from power? Is it proliferating into a bureaucratic value like cleanliness or accuracy?
Finally, there is a philosophical angle to this concern. Concerning the cultural significance of nanotechnology (those conceptual interconnection of problems of Weberian fame), the question of novelty is in the background all the time. Weber’s Tolstoyish question “how shall we live” is rendered problematic today because the way we live is changing, and quickly by most accounts, with the knowledge and things we create. Old answers don’t apply, new double binds arise, paradoxes and dangers and uncertainties which, even in the best of cases, seem unanswerable in classic philosophical terms. The twist is the contemporary concern (obsession even) with novelty: both within science and engineering and outside of it, novelty has become the single most important cultural feature of knowledge production in our world. More important than lastingness, more important than certainty, more important than utility even, the race for novelty absolutely structures and determines the lives of scientists and engineers, as well as those who observe them (journalists, funders, regulators, anthropologists and philosophers). If novelty has become so important, then it gives a twist to that classic philosophical question: how should we live now? And now? And…. now? Like that annoying mobile phone salesperson who says “Can you hear me now?” the question can be asked over and over again. How should we answer this question when things seem to be changing so fast and so constantly? According to what temporality should the problem of novelty be rendered conceptually solid?
So two questions: 1) what is the conceptual locus of this problem? Are there other concepts (and/or texts) which form the horizon of the problem? 2) Is novelty as I’ve described it above, a problem that relates science and politics (or rationality and governmentality) in ways that need to be explored? Does novelty play as central a role in the security of vital systems or in the formation of police power as it does in the generation of scientific and engineering objects?
Update:: Okay maybe three, since I forgot to include the equally problematic concept of “emergence” and “emergent forms” which I do not think helps matters all that much. It shifts the problem away from the de novo creation of things to their recombination. This is useful as a first step, but I also think there is as much “emergence” out there (and as valued) as there is novelty.
August 9, 2009
Concept Work: “Vital”
Over the past few years Andy and I have been trying to find appropriate terms to describe a distinctive diagram of power that is concerned with the vulnerability of transportation and energy infrastructures, public health apparatuses, and webs of industrial production, to unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events. The diagram draws together diverse techniques and practices, such as vulnerability assessment, simulation, cataloguing of resources, enactment, and preparedness planning, according to a normative rationality or strategic logic. We have provisionally used the term “vital systems” to refer to the central object of knowledge and target of intervention of this diagram of power. We see this diagram as distinct from – but related to – the problematic of the “population” central to apparatuses of security that Foucault described in Security, Territory, Population. The term “vital” is valuable in pointing to this relation, but our use needs further elaboration. It is frequently used by first-order observers in the domains we are examining, but is slippery: laden with associations both wanted and unwanted. So, in the interest of advancing conceptual work on the vital I wanted to open a discussion by: first, indicating how the observers in the fields we have been examining use it; second, outlining potential problems it raises; third, through reference to Sloterdijk’s use of the concept of “the vital” in Terror from the Air on which Paul has posted recently (here, here, and here), pointing to a possible “mutation of the vital” that accompanies the emergence of the diagram of power we are describing.
Read more after the jump.
Concept Work
After some discussions in Berkeley, Paul, Gaymon and I have agreed that the time is right to try to reinvigorate concept work on this blog (whose named has been changed accordingly). Those who have been associated with ARC for some time know that it has long been our goal to make more explicit and assign credit for kinds of intellectual work that do not fall into the usual genres of production for journal articles and books. Among these, work on concepts is crucial, since concept development is both the precondition and the outcome of successful inquiry.
We will proceed by choosing selected concepts that have emerged out of our current projects on topics such as domestic preparedness in the United States, synthetic biology, ethics, and so on. We are particularly interested in the way that concepts emerge from a certain field of inquiry, in the work that is done to formulate them, and in the way that they are then extended to have more general meaning and use. We will try to maintain a regular schedule of posting – about one per month – that we hope will spur serious exchange and critical discussion, and that will aim to improve our collective work on and use of concepts. Each post will be associated with a text that is of general interest (in other words, one that is not necessarily tied to a given topic of inquiry). If the exchanges prove fruitful, we will turn them into more stable documents that can be transferred to the appropriate area of the web site.
The initial post will be on a concept that Andy and I have been thinking about in our work on domestic preparedness in the United States: the “vital” in “vital systems.” In about a month Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett will post on “political spirituality.” Although we have ideas for a number of posts after that, we invite your suggestions on future directions.
We thank you, in advance, for your participation in this new initiative.
September 23, 2008
CFP for AAG: ‘Securing the Future’
n.b. this probably is more of interest to readers of VSS but I seem to not have post privileges over there.
CFP: Securing the future: the role of space in impending crises
AAG Las Vegas, March 22-7, 2009
Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)
There has been a noticeable shift in public policy across a range of sectors
from policy focussed on individual (or corporate) responsibility to a focus
on the ‘environment’ (imagined in various guises) as the cause of, and
potential solution to a range of social ills (e.g. obesity, drinking, crime,
terrorism, climate change, etc). Often focussed on (though not restricted
to) the ‘urban’, such policy uses a range of terms (space, environment,
context, etc.) to refer to the combination of spatial relations (social,
cultural, physical, political, economic etc.) deemed responsible for
impending crises. Similar to Foucault’s (2007) use of the term ‘Milieu’,
such ‘environments’ are seen as spaces of intervention and hence as spaces
of security as environments and populations are seen as mutually
constitutive (population understood as a multiplicity bound to the material
relations within which they live).
Thus, according to Foucault, using the example of the construction or
planning of towns as a form of social control, security can be
differentiated from discipline through its particular relationship with both
space and time: “Security will rely on a number of material givens. It
will, of course, work on site with the flows of water, islands, air and so
forth. Thus it works on a given…[which] will not be reconstructed to arrive
at a point of perfection, as in a disciplinary town. … The town will not
be conceived or planned according to a static perception, but will open onto
a future that is not exactly controllable. … The specific space of security
refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and
the uncertain, which have to be inserted into a given space†(2007 p.19-20).
Across the social sciences a range of work has also noted a fundamental
shift in the orientation to the future within recent policy (to pre-emption
and anticipatory governance) and accordingly the adoption of a broad range
of techniques (futures methodologies, multi-level modelling, scenario
planning, etc.) to capture and control future spaces. Such policies and
subsequent interventions (e.g. healthy / green towns) involve a range of
assumptions about the relationships between bodies, spaces, technologies,
natures, etc. which require further investigation. This call is therefore
for papers which explore the spatial and temporal relationships of policies
which claim the ability to secure the future.
Reference: Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at
the College de France 1977-78. Translated by Graham Burchell. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmilan
Papers may address (but are not limited to) the following issues in relation
to such policy:
The temporalities (habit, predictions, everydaylife) and spatialities of security;
The relationship between bodies and spaces;
Methodologies for capturing future spaces;
The role of different populations in securing the future (age, gender, ethnicity, etc);
The construction of urban natures/cultures;
Sites of impending crisis / intervention (city centres, towns, suburbs, etc);
The role of the environment / urban as an ameliorative device;
The construction of impending crises as a result of ‘urban’ spaces / environments;
The role of technologies;
Temporal and spatial aspects of mobilities;
Situating policy within place and time – attempts to apply models of success
from other places;
The conflation of different ‘crises’;
Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)
August 29, 2008
Latour and Foucault
We have been through this before, and I won’t open it up again. But having just written a review of Reassembling the Social – hopefully out soon in Contemporary Sociology – I thought the following was of interest.
As those who have read the book know, Reassembling is a very formal and methodological book. The key idea is that many social scientific concepts posit a reality behind and beyond observed phenomena; that they enable an unwarranted “acceleration” in analysis that does not, therefore, “pay the full price” for tracing associations. I thought, at the time of reading, that this was a pretty good phrase — “pay the full price.”
So lookie here in Birth of Biopolitics: In a discussion of “inflationary” critiques of the state (which he is criticizing), Foucault says the following: “The third factor, the third inflationary mechanism which seems to be characteristic of this type of analysis, is that it enables one to avoid paying the full price of reality and actuality inasmuch as, in the name of this dynamism of the state, something like a kinship or danger, something like the great fantasy of the paranoic and devouring state can always be found. To that extent, ultimately it hardly matters what one’s grasp of reality is or what profile of actuality reality presents. It is enough, through suspicion and, as Francois Ewald would say, ‘denunciation,’ to find something like the fantastical profile of the state and there is no longer any need to analyze actuality. The elision of actuality seems to me [to be] the third inflationary mechanism we find in this critique.”
I highly recommend this entire passage, which is found around pp. 187-189. It is a rippingly satisfying critique of much of what passes for critical theory today. Among other things, I would argue (and am trying to argue in something I am writing at the moment) that it is an implicit critique of Foucault’s own position at the end of Society Must Be Defended when he links biopolitics to the totalitarian experiences of the early 20th century. More on that soon, I hope.
June 1, 2008
Your Sunday Morning Foucault
I know, I’m a total sucker for this stuff, but just a few soaring lines (of both methodological and conceptual interest) from the newly released (in English) Birth of Biopolitics to remind ourselves (at least some of us) why we do this:
“If we want to analyze this absolutely fundamental phenomenon in the history of Western governmentality, this irruption of the market as a principle of veridication, we should simply establish the intelligibility of this process by describing some of the connections between the different phenomena I have just referred to. This would involve showing how it became possible – that is to say, not showing that it was necessary, which is a futile task anyway, nor showing that it is a possibility, one possibility in a determinate field of possibilities….Let’s say that what enables us to make reality intelligible is simply showing that it was possible; establishing the intelligibility of reality consists in showing its possibility. Speaking in general terms, let’s say that in this history of a jurisdictional and then veridictional market we have one of those innumerable intersections between jurisdiction and veridication that is undoubtedly a fundamental phenomenon in the history of the modern west.â€
May 29, 2008
Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur
Whew. Pardon me while I blow the dust off this blog.
If anyone is still out there, let me herewith announce another ARC Working Paper: no 12, “Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur” which is by me, and is part of the project on nanotechnology. I’m keen to have any comments, suggestions, critiques etc… which can be posted here. please.
The initial animus for this paper was that I had written two long papers (soon to be published, I hope) detailing the work of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, and in particular the ways in which it sought to make itself more “responsible” (sometimes, more “ethical”) by making responsibility more doable (Added July 6: And in this project, I was accompanied with inestimable help by Elise McCarthy). There was a lot of vague talk about responsibility, and I don’t think anyone involved (except maybe me) has any stake in being philosophically precise about the term. However, it’s clear that whatever they mean when they talk about responsibility it is not the same thing as what we generally mean by “moral responsibility” today, and hence there is a kind of conceptual reconstruction underway here, mediated by the tools and technologies through which CBEN and others in nanotechnology are becoming more and more concerned with safety, and especially what CBEN scientists call “safety by design.” (If you want to read these papers, email me)
McKeon and Ricoeur are the only two 20th century philosophers I have found that have taken seriously an historical approach to the concept, locating its emergence in the late 18th c. and tracking the transformations in the debates about it. Thus, this paper is a reading of these two pieces with an eye towards reconstructing responsibility in the wake of contemporary “emerging sciences and technologies” and the ways in which they, so to speak, live in the ruins of the fact/value distinction. There are potential overlaps here with thinking about Ewald, Beck and and Stephen’s recent Economy and Society article, as well as on obvious opening to revisit our discussions about concept work, Dewey and Foucault…
January 30, 2008
Two By Two: Migrating ARC
You may notice some changes here at ARC. At a recent meeting in Berkeley, we decided to end the phase of our little experiment that began roughly a year ago. When we created a new website for ARC in December of 2006, the initial plan was to divide up conversations among several blogs, each with a different focus. That experiment had some success–especially at the Vital Systems Security Blog and the Biopower and the Contemporary blog, both of which have attracted a lot of discussion.
The other blogs (Concept Work, UC Berkeley Lab Notes, ARC News, and On The Assembly of Things), have all served different purposes, but we decided that in the interests of creating as much virtual coherence and focus as possible that we should flow all these turbulent streams into a few large tributaries. To wit, I have just merged all of the postings from these other blogs into Biopower and the Contemporary (all but the last, On the Assembly of Things, for which there are New Big Plans), which will serve henceforth as The Voice Of ARC–insofar as it has a voice, multiple, creative, and hopefully expanding.
As might be expected, any blog with the word “biopower” in it is likely to attract some attention, and it seemed to those of us (Paul, Stephen, Anthony, Andrew, Gaymon, Colin, and others) that we should take advantage of this. Hence, the discussions that Stephen, Tobias and Colin so helpfully initiated under the title of “Concept Work” will hopefully continue here, along side the more ephemeral updates and asides.
One housekeeping issue: I want to encourage everyone to use this forum to post things related to ARC and its many and various instantiations. For those of you who were posting at one of these various blogs, and want to continue to do so, contact me (ckelty@rice.edu) to update your account.
January 18, 2008
Nano is officially not organic
“Following the precautionary approach, in line with organic principles, the Soil Association has banned manufactured nanoparticles as ingredients under our organic standards. We are the first organisation in the world to take regulatory action against the use of nanoparticles to safeguard the public. This initiative goes to the core of the organic movement’s values of protecting human health.”Â
The Guardian: Soil Association bans nanomaterials from organic products