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Over the past couple weeks I have felt that a pressing task in ARC is to spend more time making clear statements about what we do, and how we think. This does not mean that we will come up with common answers, but that we should have more clear and explicit talk about what the range of answers is among the growing universe of people who are now involved. In some cases, this is not in order to cover new ground, but to rehearse how we got here, or at least how some of us think about our own points of entry.
Various pressures have turned my mind in this direction, including the continuing difficulty those in the Vital Systems collaboration have in explaining to some audiences what we are up to, particularly when those audiences are not particularly inclined to find the subject matter intrinsically of interest.
Two more specific “events†– in whatever sense we have events in our funny corner of the academic world – have triggered this turn of mind as well. The first is a
review of
Anthropos Today by Vincent Crapanzano in
AE. I have read it, and will say only that it seems to me damning with faint praise, and singularly uninterested in the intellectual project that Paul is laying out in the book. I very much hope that someone among us takes this opportunity to say a few things about what he gets right and gets wrong, and what a different kind reader of
Anthropos Today might say about its attempt to define a certain approach to thinking in a contemporary and anthropological mode.
The second event is Chris’ recent posts on Latour’s visit to Rice, and the subsequent discussions both
here and on
Savage Minds. Chris’ post is a useful instigation for collective discussion and clarification. It brought into view at least two important figures: Dewey and Latour (I would welcome Lippman in as a new character in our motley ecology of thinkers; goodness knows he had some things to say about security). Dewey has been a central figure in some of Paul’s writing, particularly in
Anthropos Today, where he is discussed mostly with great fondness, although with some concern about how he comes out as an anthropologist of the contemporary (answer: not too anthropologist; not too contemporary). Latour has not been discussed or written about as much in our circle, although there is hallway chatter, not all of which is very nice. So it seemed like review and reflection would be helpful. I have not read either very deeply (unlike Dr. Rees, who has offered more responsible reflections than I can). And I don’t mean the following to be anything like an official ARC position statement, but, rather, a reflection on how I see these two fitting in, and a rehearsal, again, of some of the ground already covered.
Dewey
Quite a bit of water has passed under the bridge about Dewey. First and foremost, Rabinow has discussed Dewey’s concept of inquiry at some length in
Anthropos Today (including in the chapter that was republished in
Global Assemblages and elsewhere). And various pairs or groups of us have had subsequent discussions of Dewey over a long period of time that have made their way into various programmatic statements. The “inquiry schema†that Paul, Andy, and I
presented at Irvine last year (on which something below) was directly indebted to Dewey. Also, Paul and I wrote, and posted, but never widely circulated, something on Dewey and Weber called “On Technical Criticism†which received a healthy and critical batting about from some of our more philosophically inclined friends.
So just a couple notes on how, as I see it, Dewey’s has been taken up in this context. For Rabinow in
Anthropos Today, it is Dewey’s concept of inquiry that is appealing. So the answer to Chris’ question – “Is ‘inquiry’ a better term for what ties these collaborations together than ‘research’ or ‘fieldwork’ or ‘ethnography’†– is “yesâ€; or, rather, that was the proposal in
Anthropos Today. Paul can tell us how many people have actually taken that proposition up and discussed it with him. God knows we have been trying to stop having to use the word “ethnography†for a long time. “Fieldwork†still seems like a useful term, given all that has been said about what the “field†could possibly mean for anthropologists of the contemporary. But inquiry, in my view, seems like the most general methodological concept.
The key feature of Dewey’s conception of inquiry, for Rabinow, concerns its relationship to a problematic situation. Inquiry – or inquiring thinking – is not an abstract or isolated process of working through logical or theoretical postulates. It is, rather, always a response to a specific situation, and specifically a problematic situation, one that demands some kind of “resolution.†Rabinow writes on p. 16 that “For Dewey, then, thinking is not only a practice set in a dynamic milieu, it is an action called forth and set into motion by a discordancy. The function of thinking is to rectify – in the sense of ‘realign’ – the factors that have been produced, and/or been altered by, a disruption. In order to fulfill its function, thinking must take up an active relationship to the milieu in which it finds itself.†So yes, there is, as Chris says, the idea that thinking produces tools that grow – indeed, are only formed in relationship to – “actual use.†In thinking or inquiry there is a relation to a situation, there is motion, and there is reflection on the demands of a present in relationship to which thinking always situates itself.
Rabinow raises a couple salient critical questions related to Dewey’s description of inquiry. One concerns Dewey’s conception of the aims or movements of thinking. Rabinow writes (p. 17) that “Intervention is judged successful [by Dewey] when it yields a reconstructive change through meeting the needs of the situation. Intervention and inquiry are …. essentially practical – Dewey, after all, was a pragmatist, an optimist, and an American.†Rabinow makes clear, at the bottom of 18, that this happy, practical orientation is not one he shares. Rather, with Foucault, he would “stop short, in a rigorously self-limiting manner, of proposing means of rectification. The extent to which Foucault’s practice could be assimilated to a reconstruction (in Dewey’s sense) is therefore complicated. He would seem to be constructing something like an ideal type.†Here I might note that I have always taken this last statement to propose, in part, that concept-work, for Foucault, is one important aim and result of “successful†inquiry. (Crapanzano totally misreads
Anthropos Today on this point of the success of inquiry: inquiry can indeed be successful, it just can’t come to a definitive end point.) This point – concerning conceptualization as a major product of successful inquiry – is something Andy and I discussed extensively in the exchange with George Marcus on
concept work and collaboration.
The second critical question – which is closer to the heart of what I want to discuss here – is whether Dewey offers us any way of diagnosing the contours of a “situation.†Although Dewey’s account of inquiry is most compelling, he does not offer any guidance as to how, concretely, significant problems orient inquiry, or how these problems that constitute a situation would themselves become the object of inquiry. Rabinow addresses this problem in particular on the bottom of p. 17 and the top of p. 18 when he notes that Dewey’s conception of the “needs†of a situation is underspecified. Rabinow points out, thus, the need to move from “Dewey’s approach to situations in general to a historically more specific subset of discordant dynamism†(18).
It is with this second question in mind, I believe, that Rabinow titles the section on Dewey that begins on p. 15 “Inquiry: From Reconstruction to Problematization.†For Rabinow, Foucault’s “problematization†marks out a conception of thinking that is quite close to what Dewey calls inquiry. It is crucial, though, that for Rabinow “problematization†is a more specified term than “discordance†or “problematic situation†is for Dewey. Rabinow writes that “Foucault’s concept of problematization is broad but not unlimited in scope. It is surely not as general as Dewey’s ‘discordance.’ Rather, Foucault requires that the situation in question contain institutionally legitimated claims to truth or one or another type of sanctioned seriousness†(20). So something like the category of legitimate expertise in a Weberian sense has to be present in the universe of cases of “problematizations.â€
But there is more to the difference than that. It is not only that Foucault is interested in a subset of “discordant†situations. It is, moreover, that the
entire weight of the Foucaultian project lies in specifying problematizations, in arriving at a toolkit of concepts that examines them historically, and seeks to understand what is significant – in an anthropological sense – about
specific problematizations. In other words, if, for Dewey, discordant situations retain a kind of abstract character in a series of reflections largely confined to understanding the formal structure of thinking then in Foucault the project is to make specific, significant problematizations an object of inquiry. It is this double character of problematization – as both the situation or condition of thought and the object of thought – that distinguishes the Foucaultian position from the Deweyan. As Chris says, there are moments when Dewey takes up the problems of a present situation, in
The Public and its Problems and in
Reconstruction in Philosophy. But I do not agree that in these books he gives this dimension of inquiry anything like the centrality it has for Foucault.
I number Rabinow’s lines on this point among the most important orienting statements in my own intellectual formation, so indulge me in a long quote from Rabinow:
What Foucault is attempting to conceptualize is a situation that is neither simply the product of a process of social and historical construction nor the target of a deconstruction. Rather, he is indicating a historical space of conditioned contingency that emerges in relation to (and then forms a feedback situation with) a more general situation, one that is real enough in standard terms but not fixed or static. Thus the domain of problematization is constituted by and through economic conditions, scientific knowledges, political actors, and other related vectors. What is distinctive is Foucault’s identification of the problematic situation, the situation of the process of a specific type of problem making, as simultaneously the object, the site, and ultimately the substance of thinking (19).
Since Foucault was a historian, the “needs†of his own situation were sometimes not entirely explicit in his work – although the moments when he says something about them are among the most revealing in his writing. I would say that it was left for an anthropology of the contemporary – that is, for Rabinow – to figure out what inquiry into emergent problematizations might look like.
All of this – both the Deweyan concept of thinking and the shift from reconstruction to problematization – has been central to our work on concept formation. Inspired by Dewey’s general framework, but wanting very much to move beyond it, Andy, Paul, and I came up with a schema for different “moments†of inquiry: orientation, fieldwork, diagnosis. The first – “orientation†– is the moment of inquiry for which Dewey does not offer a very good account – although he signals the need for it. How are significant problems posed? How does one diagnose the contours of the problematic situation that orients inquiry? What is at stake or in motion in an anthropologically significant way? The second, “fieldworkâ€, suggests an engagement with some material, although what that material is seems very much open to question; the category of “empirical†is not adequate here. The third moment of inquiry, diagnosis, suggests some kind of intermediate assessment of a situation, one that points to new problems – a reorientation that directs future inquiry.
We – Paul, Andy, and I – imagined that this movement was Deweyan. The difference, one supposes, is that there is much more attention to characterizing what is significant, vexing, discordant in the present – that elusive “situation†and its “needs†that is so central for Dewey, and yet so frustratingly underspecified. Thus, in my current work with Andy, “orientation†involved arriving at a specific analytics of security that would guide inquiry into the significant motion in this indisputably dynamic field. For Rabinow’s genealogical work on social modernity, the significant and discordant present was the crisis of the welfare state and of post-War models of planning. The Foucaultian approach is rich because of its extraordinary capacity to specify these problematizations in terms that mark their significance: discipline, vital systems, social modernity, biopolitics, biosociality. You cannot find equivalent concepts in Dewey. I have never found one in Latour (although I would be pleased if someone would point one out to me – but more on that in a moment).
But first, a final comment on Dewey, inquiry, and ARC. I have always thought that some of the impetus behind ARC was to try to systematize the processes through which the “significance†of a field is defined, and “orientation†is arrived at. One of our contentions – or so I thought – was that this is not a process that can happen through the work of an isolated scholar. A situation is by definition collective – although the bounds of that collective are an interesting and underdetermined question – and the complexities of the situations in which contemporary
anthropos must be studied mean that multiple kinds of collectivities are necessarily involved in specifying them. Thus, while philosophy might be productively advanced in the Black Forest, an Anthropology of the Contemporary could not be. So this conception of inquiry that Rabinow advances is, I would say, very much at the core of the broad set of questions about concept work we have been developing in recent years – at least as I have understood them, and I don’t pretend to speak for others. No doubt these points – and potential disagreements on them – could be made more explicit.
Latour
So this brings us, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, to Latour. My impression – particularly in some recent trips to Europe, and consistent with what Chris says – is that Latour is
the thinker at the moment. Beck is exhausted in Europe; or people are exhausted of Beck. There are whispers of Foucault being rediscovered, although, god knows, that might bring more pain than pleasure. In the U.S. Latour is not so central, although the exchange on Savage Minds in response to Chris’ post suggests that there is some irritation at Latour’s status as an “obligatory point of passage†for legitimizing work in some sub-fields.
I have been arguing that more systematic engagement with Latour would be useful for some time. I haven’t done it – and won’t here – because my time for and patience with this stuff is limited, and a responsible engagement would take more of each than I am willing to invest. The fact is that I don’t think I have read Latour very carefully. About two years ago I was invited to St. Petersburg to give a talk and to interact with a group working on Latour. In that context I read quite a bit, including
Reassembling the Social. My assessment, with Tobias, is that his project is totally different from the one in which I think I am engaged, and in which – I cautiously submit – at least a few others in ARC are also engaged. So, having owned up to a rather superficial familiarity with Latour, and a total incapacity to enter this debate on the level of philosophical sophistication that Kelty, Rees, and Roy are sustaining, let me offer a couple fairly plain reactions to the question of Latour, Dewey, and ARC.
It seems to me that Rabinow’s critique of Dewey is, in fact, quite apropos of what an anthropologist of the contemporary might identify as the “problem†with Latour: the lack of any analytical tools for understanding the specificity of situations and their needs. I would actually go one step further, to say that Latour’s work from top to bottom betrays an active will to deconstitute the specificity of situations or problematizations and to define, in the first and last instance, a project that has more in common with philosophy than with an anthropology of the contemporary. In this sense, I am totally in accord with Rees that Latour, to me, feels like old anthropology rather than 21
st century social science.
We have somewhat contradictory images of Latour running around this conversation. One, which Chris presents, and which I have heard before, is Latour as the consummate fieldworker, with his eyes wide open, interested in new things, new entanglements, and so on. On the other hand, we have Latour as interested increasingly, as Chris says, in metaphysics. I have seen Latour say the same of himself: that he often doesn’t know whether he is doing sociology or metaphysics. There is a question about what Latour means by metaphysics here. He writes in
Reassembling the Social (RS, p. 117) that he regards metaphysics and ontology as the same thing. From my perspective – with a nod to Rabinow and Rees – this is strange, since the distinction between metaphysics and ontology seems fundamental. One can imagine a Deweyan mode of inquiry dealing with ontology; but metaphysics seems almost definitionally opposed to inquiry – otherwise it wouldn’t be “meta.†But in any case, there are two very different images here that initially seem difficult to reconcile: Latour as the consummate fieldworker, and Latour as metaphysician.
This apparent contradiction seems to me resolved, in part, by what I perceive to be the absence of any concept of history or historical specificity in Latour’s work. If you lack a concept of history, then there is no reason why an interest in new “facts,†new details, new entanglements, new collectivities, should be inconsistent with a project of metaphysics: each new observation will confirm what you already know. Here I think Latour shares something with Bourdieu. The critical weight of his project lies more in deconstituting historical distinctions than it does in positively identifying them. For Bourdieu the games of status and power are still about cultural distinction – just like our discredited aristocratic forebears. And for Latour, there are collectivities, contests of strength, the extension of networks, and it doesn’t matter whether you are civilized or barbaric, traditional or modern, their dynamics, and the tools for unpacking them will be just about the same. If we have never been modern then the problem of identifying the specificity of modern problematizations is not exactly a pressing problem. Here is where, again, I think that Rees is right. Latour feels like nothing more than a clever old anthropologist when he concludes that the natives, ultimately, are just like us, or we are just like the natives. And if you want to demonstrate it is so, in case after case, no doubt you can. (To refer back to an earlier exchange with Kevin Karpiak, these seem to be concepts in the category of “non-empirical universals†– that is, they apply to all cases, and do not serve any diacritical purpose.) What seems to be missing, in any case, is precisely the specified concept of a problematic situation, of orientation, that was – narrowly speaking – the subject of Rabinow’s critique of Dewey in
Anthropos Today, but that was also at the center of his reading of Foucault, of Weber, of Blumenberg, and the rest. And this, ultimately, is where I think the great chasm does in fact lie. The similarities between Latour and what I think ARC might be up to – acknowledging, for the fourth or fifth time, that I have no monopoly on opinions in this matter – are there. But I would argue that they are largely formal. What is missing, in fact, is everything that Crapanzano failed to see in
Anthropos Today, which, to summarize in a couple terms, might be labeled anthropological significance and the problem of investigating it in a contemporary mode.
Let me try to illustrate what I mean by an example of the work by Latour I know best –
Reassembling the Social. Latour begins this book with a claim that is both familiar and sympathetic for readers of Foucault, Weber, Rabinow, Rose, Ewald, Donzelot, (Peter) Wagner, and any number of others: namely, that the concept of “society†or “the social†is radically underspecified, and gets in the way of thinking about the forms of collective life. Indeed, Latour argues, society tends to obscure the processes through which “collectivities†are constituted. An example of a rousing quote:
“[I]t does not require much effort to see that a virtual and always present entity is exactly the opposite of what is needed for the collective to be assembled: if it’s already there, the practical means to
compose it are no longer traceable; if it’s total, the practical means to
totalize it are no longer visible; if it’s virtual, the practical means to
realize, visualize, and collect it have disappeared from view. As long as we detect behind the collective the shadow of society and behind society the shadow of the Leviathan, no science of the social can proceed forward. To put it even more bluntly:
either there is society or there is sociology. You can’t have both at once as Gabriel Tarde warned his readers when he saw the discipline taking such a wrong turn,†(RS p. 163).
This is a particularly clear if not particularly novel version of a claim that can be traced back at least to Weber’s writing in the
Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft. And it is a topic that a few smart people have thought about just a bit in the intervening years: how was collective life collected in that peculiar way that came to be called “society†or “the social� How was knowledge about it produced? How was it made to behave as a whole? But the obvious suspects are not cited. No Rabinow or Rose. No Ewald or Donzelot. No Polanyi, who may have been the first to write of the “invention of society†by the liberals of the early 19
th century in Britain. No Wagner, and only a backhand slap at Weber, who is compared unfavorably to Whitehead: “For [Whitehead] societies are not assemblages of social ties—in the way Durkheim or Weber could have imagined them—but are all the bundles of composite entities that endure in time and space†[p. 218]. Foucault, for his part, comes off the best, rating a couple approving references in footnotes, to which I return in a moment.
Now all this would be fine if it were just a matter of citational courtesy (or lack thereof). But it isn’t. The reason Latour doesn’t cite any of these scholars is that his project is entirely different from theirs. Let’s take another familiar sounding line from Latour to indicate what I mean. “I will argue that what has rendered the social untraceable is the very existence of society or, more generally, of a social realm. This time the problem doesn’t come from the ambiguity of the word social, but from a confusion, entertained early on in the history of sociology, between assembling the body politic and assembling the collective. Even though both operations have a lot in common, the two should be kept apart if they are to succeed at all. To put it broadly, society, this 19
th century invention, is an odd transitional figure mixing up the Leviathan of the 18
th century and the collective of the 21
st†(RS 161). Then a footnote, to Foucault…sounds like biopolitics, must be biopolitics – juridico-legal subjects and modern collective life…. “On the invention of the very notion of society, see Bruno Karsenti…and Michel Foucault (2003), ‘society must be defended.’†What, in other words, Latour finds of interest in Foucault – or thinks that he finds in Foucault – is the idea that society was invented, and thus, presumably, vulnerable to a deconstitution of precisely the type that Latour is interested in. The only history of interest for Latour, we might say, is the history of an intellectual error. This, of course, is exactly the opposite direction from the one Foucault would take.
To put the distinction schematically: The move of the Foucaultian camp has been from a critique of society as an always-already of inquiry in the human sciences to an analysis of the apparatuses that constituted something like the “social†as a key dimension of collective life in “modernity.†However one wants to qualify the last term, it at least marks out a distinction from other forms of organizing collective life in which “society†or “the social†was not an important figure. The Foucaultian approach (and it is not the only one) wants to ask how it is that “the social†or “society†was constituted as a
specific reality that was important
specifically in certain historical situations. Thus Ewald on insurance; Rabinow on social modernity; Rose on “the social†and so on. Latour, in what I take to be a diametrically opposed contrast to this Foucaultian move, criticizes the concept of the social or society so that he can replace it with a
better totalizing concept – or a metaphysics, or method, or whatever. An interest in resuming the task of “tracing connections†does not offer any specific orientation to a present predicament, any specific understanding of the significance of a contemporary situation, or any specific approach to thinking about the problem of thinking in the present. So what we get, as a result, is a long book that is fundamentally deconstitutive in character, and whose positive project is of a purely formal nature. (Again: invitations are hereby sent out to anyone who can point to the passage that proves me wrong.) There is none of the extraordinary rich conceptualization that jumps out of every page in Foucault’s work; no historically specified concepts that one can walk away with and make work elsewhere. This is not to say that there is nothing productive about Latour’s project. Indeed, there are many things that are productive, and, as Chris says, we
may want to emphasize commonalities with Latour against the vast sea of social science (although, having a bit more familiarity with the vast sea of social science than most of those in ARC I would at least hesitate before agreeing). But the differences are, I want to insist, stark. In a Deweyan sense, without a reflection on how his method relates to present problems, without those present problems being made the object of reflection and thought, Latour’s method does not count as inquiry. Indeed, in that rather specific Deweyan sense discussed above, Latour’s method does not count as thinking.