February 25, 2007
What we do, how we think; reflections on the Dewey and Latour exchange
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 “yes”; 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.”
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, “fieldwork”, 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 21st 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 19th 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 19th century invention, is an odd transitional figure mixing up the Leviathan of the 18th century and the collective of the 21st” (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.
I agree that it is worthwhile to pause and reflect on what is distinctive about the kind of work we have been doing. A couple of thoughts and questions for further clarification.
(1) The role of “specificity” and “significance” as norms of anthropological inquiry. Why is specificity so important to the above account, and what does it contrast with? Generality, universality? As for significance: how do we know when we are engaged (or not) with an anthropologically significant problem? The work on security expertise does not - so far - seem to focus on “the logoi that contribute to a particular form of anthropos” (to quote Paul). And yet we think it’s significant… Further, what constitutes a satisfactory claim about a significant problem? When do we know we’ve “found” something?
(2) The impetus behind ARC: I would add that the reason why it seemed important to come up with some collective tools for collaborative inquiry had to do with the kind of object we were interested in: in deciding to work on the global biopolitics of security, we had taken up a problem-space that was too heterogeneous, extensive, and complex for a single scholar working according to the model of individual fieldwork to deal with (this is addressed in more detail in our exchange with George Marcus).
(3) On Latour. Another approach would be to ask: is there any sense in which the work of the CSI folks is useful for the project of the anthropology of the contemporary? I think we do not have to go along with the metaphysics project to take advantage of some of the tools they have developed. For example, one question they have repeatedly addressed is: given the contingency and locality of the production of scientific knowledge, how does it achieve its ostensible universality? Here they provide specific and detailed ways of studying the stabilization of apparatuses for truth production. We have some similar questions about dispositifs of expertise – under what circumstance does a specific response to a problem stabilize and extend itself beyond its initial application? When does it fail to do so? Once one has decided, for example, that the development of a humanitarian intervention dispositif is significant, how does one track its extension or dissolution?
As to the question of significance, one interesting thing that has occurred in my fieldwork is that a key function of experts is precisely to determine significance. So the question of significance can itself become an object of anthropological inquiry. Therefore: How do experts evaluate the significance of specific things? What kind of techniques are being used? And how are other actors persuaded? Now from a second order observation point of view, the significance is that there is frequently no consensus regarding significance. And quite often this turns out to be a valuable entry point for anthropological inquiry. This is also the main reason why experts are sometimes willing to spend their precious time with anthropologists. In this context, the anthropologist can function as a hermeneut in the ancient sense of the term.
The specificity of technical-scientific detail has turned out to be more interesting for me. Partly because after reading the same story about avian influenza over and over again I grew tired of the eternal repetition of the same. The massive discourse production around avian influenza is also not the place where things are emergent. My interest has accordingly shifted to specific techniques and problems, such as differences in receptor binding specificity in the hemaglutinin of H1N1 and H5N1 viral strains. For some experts this is a matter that matters indeed.
Okay, let me play the devil’s advocate. I am interested in “anthropological significance.” I have some vague thoughts on what this could mean but would like to challenge our group to reflect some more on this. The questions are perhaps unfair but helpful (or so I believe).
Steve seems has to have some vague thoughts about what he means by “anthropological significance.” Perhaps you could say more, Steve?
Carlo, you write that “the specificity of technical-scientific detail has turned out to be more interesting for” you. That’s great though — what should be “anthropologically significant” about the “differences in receptor binding specificity in the hemaglutinin of H1N1 and H5N1 viral strains?” Why do you assume, to use Andy’s terms, that you “found” something here? Something beyond mere clarification about what avian flue is about (when all the apocalyptic fantasizing is gone)? What does your research offer that is different from, say, Latour’s approach and work? And why is it different from good, investigative journalism? Or from the work of scientific consultants?
The same I could ask Steve and Andy, of course. Andy, you wrote that the “work on security expertise does not - so far - seem to focus on “the logoi that contribute to a particular form of Anthropos.” One could put the question more provocatively: Why is a focus on administrative rationalities of any anthropological significance? Why should it be interesting? And to whom? And the same questions could be addressed to Lyle and his work on syndromic surveillance.
I take it for granted — as we all do, I guess — that what “we” do is different from what journalists and consultants do. To be where the action is, is not necessarily “significant.” (Often times anthropology works better in stable settings with little turbulence). Though what then constitutes anthropological significance? What constitutes significance beyond the mere fact that some of us study small lines of mutation in some of the form giving logoi of anthropos?
Perhaps the actually philosophical difference that separates what “we” do from what “Latourians” do could offer help (even if, as Andy rightly emphasizes, Latour’s work might be of help to our collective or individual projects).
As I said, I do not mean to “criticize” anyone. I merely try to provoke response.
Friends,
This should be an exciting and enriching discussion. So, let’s do it in a non-polemic manner which does not, of course, exclude thumos.
Among the many quite awe inspiring claims made above, I was struck by Lakoff’s claim that the research “so far” has not turned on logoi and anthropos. This claim is surprising. One might have thought that what was at stake in Katrina had something to do with the question. Or that the entire Weber/Foucault apparatus of concepts had something to do with framing the questions of security. As I have to run right now, let me just underline that “Security,population, territory” has some of the most illuminating pages on a changing configuration of anthropos ever written.
More soon and onward
One of the last times I saw Pierre Bourdieu he delivered a blistering attack on Latour calling him a nihilist. It was ugly and his hatred blinded him to any nuance whatsoever. One can find parts of this attack in Bourdieu’s course on science that was published as his last book.
Talking to Latour about this, he was much more civil but basically returned the compliment to Bourdieu.
There are epistemological issues at stake between them; the are ontological issues and political ones. But seen from an adjacent position I found myself happy to be adjacent to these over-arching and comprehensive systems and intellects.
It occurs to me that there are “Regimes of living” involved here. There are forms of polemic that both Latour and Bourdieu engaged in albeit differently. But what was never missing from either Bourdieu or Latour was an extraordinary deep commitment to a way of thinking and the worth of that ‘regime’. Dewey, Foucault had quite different variants but …
So let’s try to sort out some of the concepts, the ethos, the affect, and the regimes. And all of these people certainly would agree in one way or another — and there in lies the rub and the interest — anthropos is at stake.
The point there was to ask about the scope of “significance,” as Tobias suggests. As for whether VSS experts are focused on “the human”: I guess it depends on how one defines the scope of the human sciences. I was thinking in terms of biology, economics, linguistics and their relatives concerned with life, labor and language. These three domains do not seemn to be central to the field of vital systems security. The latter seems rather to develop expertise in things like: operations research, decision analysis, scenario planning, and communications interoperability. Indeed, the point of the paper that referred to Katrina was that population security was not what was mainly at stake for administrative thinkers. An interesting question would then be - and is one we are pursuing - how do forms of knowledge about the human enter in to such practices (if they do)?
The treason of the Clerks
Benda’s famous polemic was in the lineage of Bourdieu in that the calling of intellectuals had to be critical in the sense of denunciatory. And in Bourdieu’s sense a complete commitment to the ethics of the epistemological break.
But I have been struck over the years that while the epistemological break played an important role in French thought, there was always a current of steadfastness and quiet loyalty that marked, at the end of the day, the figures who the French really admired, whether in the resistance or the academy.
Loyalty is linked to philia but not identical. And it seems to come into play at surprising moments of attack or breakdown. Once betrayed it can no doubt be remediated but never fully repaired. No doubt this process is a dimension of maturity.
The large and rich vocabulary in French for aspects of betrayal is an anthropologist’s dream, an old style anthropologist, and it seems to me an anthropologist of the contemporary as well.
A dream that is for orienting in the moral topography of the actual. And for those attempting to awake from certain nightmares.
Prof. Rabinow’s point is — and I full agree — anthropos + logos. Concerning VSS: One could at least argue that the development of the administrative developments you trace have a profound impact on anthropos, on the way we think about the world and on the way we (or some of us) lead our (professional) lives.
But I do think — and this is where the difference to Bourdieu and Latour comes in — that there is a second anthropological dimension, one that arguably constitutes specificity: fieldwork.
What do I mean by this? I mean a “logic of discovery.” I mean that we discover the phenomena that we try to capture in our “ethnographies” in the field. This requires suspensions of judgment; this requires immersing oneself in a foreign (or well known?) milieu; to stay alert to what happens; to an unfolding story; and to then try to coin concepts (while doing research!) that allow to capture what captures the fieldworker — the emergent.
I call this analysis of/in terms of movement. To try to capture that which moves in terms which are adequate (and capable to capture) this movement (and hence have to grow out of the study of this movement).
I do think that this aspect of movement constitutes a certain kind of anthropological specificity — one that Latour and Bourdieu lack, as valuable and helpful and orienting there work is. Why are there, aside from a few remarkable exceptions (notably Rabinow and Strathern) no reflections on this “specific” quality of anthropological research?
I welcome the heat. If the discussion gets a bit more controversial that’s fine with me as long as it doesn’t slip into a polemic. So here are a few thoughts:
I am thinking very much in terms of fieldwork right now, so that may account for a somewhat limited perspective. Of course, the problem of anthropos is the question that motivates my research on pandemic influenza. That’s the point of doing this. And the heterogeneity of logoi is very much part of the problem. But as soon as one starts with fieldwork, one gets involved in all kinds of minute details of which one at times immediately knows that they matter and how they matter. This can, but doesn’t necessarily have to do, with the extremely superficial and extremely repetitive discourse that circulates in the media today. Clearly, depth of understanding and precision in description have a value that is well established in anthropology (see Making PCR or Culturing Life – two books that are essential for my work). Of course, detail shouldn’t become a fetish, but linked to the problems and concepts that give value to the objects of one’s inquiry, I think that the specific has some anthropological significance in itself. If you want to talk about avian influenza it is good to know something about receptor binding preferences and why shifts occur.
There is another issue related to the question of “significance” that occurred to me while doing fieldwork: Very often one collects information of which one doesn’t really know what its significance might be. I think it is extremely important to follow things intuitively or simply because one’s informants think they matter.
Finally, there are these moments in fieldwork where informants tell me that I am asking the wrong questions. Or one gets an answer that one didn’t expect at all. These moments of surprise, confusion, and disorientation are important experiences. One realizes, among other things, that it is not always obvious what is significant and what is not.
This problem can itself become a problem of anthropological inqury. Ultimately, it goes back to the heterogeneity of logoi that marks the contemporary, and the question of emergence.
Again, for me these questions are extremely practical at the moment. They are related to things like shifts in receptor binding specificity, etc. And they are part of a process that keeps oscillating between observation and analysis.
I think that what Carlo describes as “thinking in terms of fieldwork” exemplifies one version of what I called “analysis of (in terms of) movement.”
As an example of the insufficiency of the logic of technological optimization for the anthropology of the contemporary, below I have copied the text of Paul and my response to the NSF review of the SynBERC initiative, of which we are an integral part (www.sybberc.org):
We thought it would be appropriate to write you a memo outlining our thoughts on the site visit and subsequent SynBERC retreat.
We were overjoyed by the NSF’s affirmation of the constitutive role of Human Practices in SynBERC. Obviously we do not have to point out to you that at this early stage NSF’s perspective is not widely appreciated and understood among the participants. We want to underscore, however, that Jay Keasling is enthusiastic and supportive of our full participation in the SynBERC initiative.
With regard to the site review:
• The most significant thing for us about the site visit was the NSF’s affirmation that the Human Practices component is integral to SynBERC’s constitution.
• The disposition and training of the majority of the SynBERC scientists, however, leads them to assume that Human Practices should consist of instrumental optimization and public relations.
• We know you agree that downstream and technocratic considerations, while sometimes useful and important, certainly cannot provide the goal and substance for an analytically adequate and ethically defensible approach to science and the human good.
• The active initiation and implementation of Human Practices cannot be left to Thrust IV alone. Hence, at this preliminary stage, there is considerable design work that can only happen collaboratively and effectively with strong ongoing encouragement from both the SynBERC Director and the NSF.
• Although advancing this exciting experiment does not require anything like the financial resources devoted to the engineering components of SynBERC, young (and not so young) scientists often equate the scale of material support with significance. Consequently, it is clear that Human Practices will become an integral part of SynBERC only with NSF’s vigilant and pastoral support.
The idea that anthropos equals population security is truly bizarre. Please clarify.
That certain technocrats do not talk about the human significance of their work is not exactly a breakthrough.
The Weberian question, of course, is what the significance of these technical developments is for a form of life? and how to turn from one’s initial formulation of significance to method. Read Collier on technical criticism. And Langlitz’ report on Luhmann.
The economy does not have to do with anthropos? What does it have to do with?
The vital? Please explain.
And isn’t it about time that someone explain what the vital in vital systems security is supposed to mean.
If it does not mean essential infrastructure and it does not refer to anthropos, I am even more bewildered. And if “essential” or “critical” will do then why introduce the other term?
Is one of Latour’s valuable contributions that we have never been modern? That anthropos has always been the vital?
Please explain, someone throw us a life raft.
I am catching up here…there are multiple threads, but just a few thoughts – apologies for being longwinded again.
First, the premise of my post was, at its most basic, to take up the claim that Tobias had made that Latour’s approach is entirely different from “our” approach. I don’t know how big “our” is, but I assume that there is no one among us who seriously doubts that this is true, or that terms like “significance” and “contemporary” mark where this distinction lies. Whether or not Latour offers useful tools or concepts is not the point. Everyone who has posted thus far, myself included, thinks that he does (I say this in the original post). So that is not seriously in dispute. The issue is that he has a different conception of the aims of inquiry, and the purpose of thinking, which is also to say, a different conception of the norms and forms of living a life like the one we have chosen to live. This is what I take Paul’s comments on ethics above to be about. So I think there are big stakes in this. If we say that we want to take Latour as just offering tools and not as a competing view of what inquiry and thinking are all about then we are not, in my view, taking him very seriously. If we do take him as presenting a competing view of inquiry and the ethics of a life devoted (at least in part) to thinking, then we are obliged to articulate clearly why what he is doing is different, and why we prefer a different approach.
Second, the question of identifying significance is, certainly, a vexing one that is constantly in motion. But we share it; in other words, it is a common project (I think). I am thus a little puzzled by the phrasing of Lakoff and Rees’ questions in that they seem to indicate that we are at level 1 of this conversation. We have discussed these things for years. Perhaps I just misunderstand? I would say the same thing about the comment on “specificity.” Is this seriously something that is in question? That we are interested in specific formations rather than universal generalizations? I think I made clear enough that this was the contrast in question in the original post, given that the entire discussion hinged around a contrast between Latour’s quasi-metaphysics, which is unhistorical, and an approach that seeks anthropological significance in specific formations.
Third, as for the “anthropos” part, I am again with Paul on this. Of course vital systems is about an articulation of modern anthropos (anthropos as defined in relation to the finitudes?). It isn’t population security, but neither is genomics. Indeed, I thought one big point of Paul’s thinking in recent years has been about the challenge of thinking about anthropological problems in domains that are beyond the horizon of those Foucault initially analyzed. There is a discussion of anthropological significance in Global Assemblages that is much broader than life/labor/language as well, and deals with the triad of ethics, technology, politics as different domains in which this anthropos defined in relationship to the finitudes can gain significance. Isn’t preparedness of interest because it is one form through which the life of citizens came to have political meaning and weight in the wake of Katrina? Doesn’t it define a key technical domain through which that life – both individual and collective – was made an object of a certain form of knowledge-power? Just because some specific techniques don’t concern life, labor and language it does not mean that we are not dealing with a formation of modern anthropos. I totally agree with Paul’s point about Foucault and security: he clearly recognized a “modern” articulation of security, one that related to human beings in their existing as living creatures. Certainly vital systems security is about that as well.
Fourth, as to the specifics of the “anthropological significance” of security…I have a story on this, and I have rehearsed it to various people over a period of time. It involves going back to Hobbes and classical liberalism, something that not everyone sees as relevance. But it is, at this point, my broad framing. Here it goes: Security assumed a certain centrality in liberal thought in relationship to questions such as: what are the institutions that regulate collective life? what are the conditions for autonomy (and, probably, what are the conditions for the good life, in the particular way that was thought by late Enlightenment liberals)? what are the mutual obligations between the state and its citizens? These questions are with us, and security remains a central domain in which they are worked out. But today they have to be answered in different terms – i.e. they can no longer be exclusively questions of political philosophy – because, among other things: biotechnical power or sociotechnical power is a significant vector for the government of collectivities and individuals. So we need a conception of modern anthropos, both individual and collective, and we need some understanding of technical rationality in its relationship to modern anthropos (how is it that individual and collective life becomes an object of knowledge/power? and how does this happen in the specific context of state administration?). Therefore one invents analytics that capture how individuals and collectivities become the object of government through certain practices of instrumental rationality that relate this problem of governing to the questions of security. One does research in the contemporary because these relationships change. Vital systems security is one frame through which these questions can be taken up today. It involves: technical reason and sanctioned (although contested) expertise; a certain constitution of anthropos (both individual and collective) in terms of the finitudes (dependent on vital systems, whose “vitality” is defined precisely in terms of their centrality to the functioning of economic life, with some question about the scope of “economic” here); and a certain constitution of the state and political in relation to these things. We are interested in specific answers to these things (ie vital systems security) because we are interested in inquiry and not in political philosophy. One could argue about details, no doubt, but this hardly seems difficult to comprehend in a broadly Foucaultian framework.
I will try to be a little more long-winded this time since it seems my initial queries were misconstrued. First of all, I should say that they were questions intended to push Collier toward further clarification, rather than attacks on the idea that “significance” or “specificity” are the right terms. While we obviously agree that we are interested in specific historical formations, I understood the gist of Collier’s post to be that we should be more explicit in saying why we think these are the right things to study.
I thought it might be useful to try to define more precisely how one recognizes what is and is not a significant insight into a historical formation. As for “generality” or “universality,” these terms have also been under discussion – for example in the recent post under “methodology” in which Collier (approvingly, I think) cited Giovanni Sartori saying “[Our] universals must be empirical universal, that is, categories which somehow are amenable, in spite of their all-embracing very abstract nature, to empirical testing.” To which Rabinow responded, “Why do we need universals?” So again, the effort of the question was both to note the centrality of specificity to Collier’s account and to push for further clarification.
On vital systems security and anthropos. My point was by no means that the human is not at stake in current security practices. Rather, it was to ask how one might specify what is distinctive about the form of knowledge that is predominant in a certain sub-set of governmental practices – those oriented toward preparedness for uncertain threats. I was asking a fairly precise question: are these actors interested in “knowledge about the human”? If so, what kind of humans are generated as objects of knowledge and intervention? An observation so far has been that the forms of knowledge are mostly about things like “critical infrastructures” rather than about the regularities of living beings. Obviously critical infrastructures concern collective life (thus the word “vital”), but I never said that anthropos was not at stake – rather, I asked about how to characterize this type of knowledge that is not directly about “the living.” This is where the distinction between the knowledge forms used in population security (epidemiology, demography) and those at stake in vital systems security (operations research, decision analysis) seems interesting.
As for Latour. I do think that recognizing both the differences in positions and the complementaries is taking him seriously. Here I agree with what Paul said at the end of French DNA:
“Other forms of inquiry are under way. Science studies, for example, have been instrumental in inventing and testing new analytic categories that have proved to be powerful in the sense of extending and enlivening our capacity to understand things. Burno Latour’s articulations of ‘actor-networks’ or ‘immobilized mobiles’ and Hans-Jorg Rheinbergers’s explorations of ‘experimental systems’ are unquestionably examples of conceptual advances. In part, they are advances because they pick out things we did not have adequate means of naming before. In part, they are advances because they have found a means to avoid focusing on pseudoentities like ‘culture’ or, for that matter, ‘science.’ I am advocating the pursuit of a larger series of limited concepts. Why? Because if, as philosophically oriented anthropologists, the goal of our labor is understanding, then our concepts and our modes of work must themselves be capable of making something new happen in a field of knowledge.”
Given that I challenged everybody to say what “anthropological significance” could mean (with impressive success, I must say), I think I should make clear why I think a discussion on “anthropological significance” could be valuable.
The question of significance is most often answered by explaining that we analyze emergent logoi of anthropos. And, of course, that’s what we do.
AND YET: This answer is not satisfying to most people beyond our close circle (or so I came to experience). Either people don’t understand (Crapanzano in his review of AT evidently did not even understand the title of the book) or they tell me that they also analyze the logoi of anthropos (while in fact using psychoanalysis or any other normative understanding of the human to decode this and that part of “culture”).
Therefore I wondered if one could elucidate our approach further? Beyond anthropos + logos? I do think so and I do think that this is necessary. Therefore I asked:
“Though what then constitutes anthropological significance? What constitutes significance BEYOND the mere fact that some of us study small lines of mutation in some of the form giving logoi of anthropos?”
What is specific about our approach? Aside from or in addition to the focus of anthropoi formation?
Because significance/specificity can best be articulated with a contrasting background in mind I referred to Latour: “Perhaps the actually philosophical difference that separates what “we” do from what “Latourians” do could offer help.”
It could offer help because Latour is doing metaphysics (cf. Steve’s original post) and we do – a kind of historical ontology. What does historical ontology actually mean? It does mean — and this is merely a first approach — that what the world “is” cannot be separated from the way it is known.
Hence, there is a certain kind of historical ontology that informs our focus on anthropos + logos. This focus on “actualizations” (what Prof. Rabinow has aptly called anthropology of the actual) is, I think, the philosophical attitude that informs (indeed is constitutive of) the interest in anthropos + logos: A focus on what man is becoming, the terms and concepts she has available to think about the particular formation of the world that surrounds her, etc.
I fully agree with Steve and Prof. Rabinow and Carlo that this involves — in particular — realms that are usually thought of as beyond the classical anthropological discourse (like “vital” systems security of the receptor sites of a virus or the drosophila genome or proteins that slide between neurons).
To me the “dynamic” of “our” approach, its very focus on movement, has something quite enchanting. In fact, it has an aesthetic quality (therefore my emphasis on movement and my use of aesthetic terms). I think that this particular dynamic is quite unique and forms part of significance/specificity.
In the discussion on the blog I wanted us to get to arrive at a discussion of the three parts of anthropological significance that stand beyond the focus on anthropos + logos.
(1) “our” form of research/fieldwork (as inquiry, as an open process of which we don’t know where it will lead us to)
(2) our interest in the contemporary (which is always an interest in the historical ontology of a given, particular site or theme, among them administrative and technical rationalities)
(3) our interest in coining particular concepts (concepts that are capable to capture the specific changes and transformations — hence, movement — of what we analyze).
I hope this is clarifying. Any thoughts?
I apologize for my terrible English. It’s already late here and I have been working too much!
more long wind…
this is wonderfully clarifying rehearsal, especially for someone who isn’t always sure whether he is included in the frequent use of the first person plural…but I also find it valuable for a specific reason– the one that has drawn me into the ARC orbit, which is the task of making these kinds of rehearsals and collaborative investigations into more than “hallway chatter” “discussed for years” in “our circle”. The great virtue of having this kind of discussion online, and not by the water cooler, is that it is archived and hopefully a point of reference for the future… that’s the “experimental” component of the lab, as I understand it… So this just a backhanded way of saying that I don’t know whether I was or am in “our circle” but I’m trying to help “us” find ways to turn it away from discussion of what “we” mean, to something that is more collaboratively conducted, and in which credit for misunderstanding is equally distributed to everyone {grin}.
Re: Dewey, I find soothing confirmation in Stephen’s characterization of Dewey and his role in Rabinow’s book, as well as the potential for using him as a kind of fore-bearer of an anthropology of the contemporary. Anthropos Today has the virtue in being short–but in being so, lends itself to the oracular, the “definitive” statement on the subject, so it is nice to have it spelled out again in this way–perhaps even reopened as a part of this ongoing discussion. The concept of “inquiry” seems to me not so much a substitute for fieldwork/research/ethnography as a term that can capture all of these as but tools or techniques, and insofar as it does, the tools and techniques of actor-network theory or science studies might also be included without harm to the project, as I think Collier has suggested (and yes, our discussion of Latour should encompass more than just these tools).
The distinction bewteen Dewey and Foucault is much clearer too me after reading Stephen’s post and the question of the role of historical specificity as central to inquiry in a Foucaultian mode is –while not quite clear as Andy suggests– essentially different from Dewey’s version in which all experience is of the same form–amenable to both discordancy and reconstruction, whether now or in the distant past. I’m always wary of this call for specificity though. Indeed, the reason historians seem to dislike Foucault is that he was not specific enough and so simply suggesting that things be historically specific is only half the battle. The other half, I think, is how Foucault identifies, as Rabinow puts it “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).” So specificity is as specificity does: thinking is determined in as much specificity as actors allow it to be by any given historical situation. Yes?
I dissent slightly however in that The Public and its Problems and other works like Liberalism and Social Action are not just examples of Dewey’s theory of thinking and experience–i.e. they are not the identification of “significant problems” to which his logic of inquiry will be applied, but I think (and this is mostly intuition based on reading around in the Later Works when I should be grading papers), extensions of his approach that move beyond the “thinking about thinking” of individuals to the problem of the fixing of thinking in social forms and institutions. Despite its title, The Public and its Problems is not about a specific significant problem (although it is that too: the problem of the public in democracy in the west), but also an attempt to find ways to make social inquiry function vis-a-vis any particular kind of collective problem involving the consequences of action, and the problem of knowledge in identifying those consequences. That being said, he book doesn’t satisfyingly achieve this goal, but I have nonetheless learned as much from this work as I have from the experimental logic.
I also think this is why Latour has shown an interest: the method by which knowledge and scientific work circulates, grows, gets fixed in institutions and technologies, and the modes of inquiry that are useful for understanding this. That is, not so much thinking about thinking, but thinking about how thinking spreads and reproduces in collective forms. Re-reading this, it sounds like ARC to me, so I’m not sure whether the stark difference with Latour is getting clearer… in the same sense, for instance that Shapin and Schaffer’s characterization of the Royal Society is an attempt to track the same collective institutions of knowledge circulation and legitinmation–and here there is most definitely a “significant problem,” namely the proper form in which to use knowledge to achieve stability and prevent civil war in a society.
Nonetheless, and with all due respect of course, I simply don’t buy CollieRees’ characterization of Latour. I think it’s too easy to dismiss him has a metaphysician (or that this is irreconcilable with empirical fieldwork !?!). Not that I don’t think it is a fair stab, a first cut, because I admit to finding him frustrating for the same reason: namely that *everything* seems to come back to the same conclusion over and over again, lending credence to the suspicion that Latour has a metaphysics that he just keeps finding over and over again. But I will say again that I think this is primarily a rhetorical effect. And it is a rhetorical effect, because it is not always clear who Latour is arguing with, but its clear that it probably isn’t the people he should be arguing with (i.e. the people like Rabinow, Rose, Ewald and so on who are trying to go beyond the “deconstitutive” move). The people that Latour argues with over and over again, are bad social scientists and bad epistemologists. They rarely have names, but the implication is that their influence and corruptive power is massive and continuing. The salient point here, though, is whether those bad sociologists and bad epistemologists should be treated as objects of observation in a characterization of society or modernity, or whether they are interlocutors against which we measure our own claims. Such, I think, is a good place for the concept of “adjacency.” No?
I certainly don’t think Latour’s contribution is that “We have never been modern.” That wouldn’t amount to much if it were. The sense that he lacks a concept of history or historical specificity is a bit unfair. If anything, the problem is the opposite: he has a far too highly developed a sense that the narrative of the scientific revolution, progress and positivism are in fact the only significant historical problem out there, and that thus the “situation” that demands thinking and reconstruction is this very fact and no other. Perhaps he started thinking, and has stopped… I find myself frustrated because I think his “deconstitution” (and that of science studies generally) has been successful, and it points a way out of the narrative of scientific modernity and progress towards a very rich field of possible studies– but Latour keeps coming back to this point as if he won’t rest until his very last skeptic is definitively silenced. Obviously the bathos of the Sokal affair did not help in this respect. He isn’t doing research on emergent problematizations, to be sure, but I think his work points towards that, rather than away from it. If “characterizing the everyday metaphysics” (RS, 50ff) is at all a meaningful endeavor, it is one that I actually associate with the kind of fieldwork being discussed in this thread…
Chris’ comments are helpful and I 90% agree with them — and appreciate the opening comments on doing this in some kind of semi-public forum.
But one point: Latour calls *himself* a metaphysician. And — is there one place you can point to in his work in which there is some positive content to the category of history (as opposed to a negative, deconstitutive use, which is how I see your reference to his relationship to the scientific revolution?)? Really, I am ready to believe it. But where? Can we have line and verse?
The “we” that is at stake here, as the discussion itself reveals, is very much a future “we,” I think.
As to vital systems security, my view at this point is the following: I still think it should be called critical infrastructure security since that seems to be the term that is usually being used. If first order observers refer to “vital systems” they mean by “vital” mainly “critical” or “essential” for collective life (whatever is meant by “collective life”). However, that doesn’t mean that the “vital” could not be a key concept in our future tool kit. But I think at this point we still haven’t really figured out what exactly we would like the concept of the vital to do.
Additionally, I have never really understood why vital systems should be the overarching term of the project. Vital systems primarily refers to an object, but not to a problem. In my view, preparedness should be the overarching term. Preparedness refers to a historically and geographically located problem space in which objects like vital systems acquire significance.
I think we also know right now quite a lot about preparedness as a response to a certain problematization. See the papers by Collier/Lakoff, Rose, Fearnley, and myself.
The question regarding the significance of contemporary logoi for a form of life that Rabinow raises is key. It is also one that Latour is not able to pose. He still plays the God-trick and claims to see everything from nowhere. Again, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be learned from Latour. But his project is set up in a different way.
line and verse… hmmm? I’m not sure what would satisfy you here, but i’ll give it the college de France try. Latour’s works fall into a couple of different categories. Laboratory Life and Aramis, I would characterize as “microsociological” or “ethnomethodological” form, and as such historical in the sense that they provide “constructivist” accounts of science or engineering meant to counter the reigning logical positivist epistemology of scientific progress. Science in Action is a handbook, and the historical passages in that book are examples similarly used to understand how science has proceeded in various times and places between the Age of Discovery and the 1980s (and there is not a lot of careful distinction between eras, but there is a sensitivity to the development of tools, machines, experimental setups, technologies of calculation, circulation and so forth). We Have Never been Modern is a bizarre book, as I said before, completely constituted by negativity; Pandora’s Box is just a reaction-formation to the Science Wars, and Politics of Nature is an account of contemporary environmental Politics in France without any examples.
So I guess you’re right, no history.
Kidding. One good place to look is the article “Drawing Things Together” which takes as its point of departure the historical problem of the relationship of the development of tools of inscription (printing, lithography, etc.) to the development of science. Here I would say that there is at least a wisp of a recognition that there is a historical process at work–one that is about the progressive unfolding of different techniques which are in turn mobilized by science to construct new objects in the world. Another, more problematic, place is Pasteurization of France. Latour was subject to a wide array of attacks by historians (also of the form “Not Specific Enough!”) of Pasteur, mostly because he worked primarily from published sources and Pasteur’s notebooks and nothing else. But what went unquestioned was that the issue at stake was the relevance of Pasteur for Modern France (and btw, what of Latour’s erstwhile devotion to Serres, another non/historian. relevant?). I might also point to the recent work on “making things public” for which the salient historically significant problem is the problem of a democratic public’s relationship to the legitimation of scientific knowledge.
I doubt much of this will satisfy you…. For it’s worth, I’m happy to be the resident fool on the Pyrrhic quest to Have his Latour and ARC it Too. Bring it On.
Latour has worked on different things but there is a general presumption that there is something like SCIENCE. I think that’s one reason why Bachelard, Canguilhem, Koyre, Foucault, Rabinow, Hacking, Rheinberger, etc. are more helpful. Their work starts with the idea that there are different epistemologies. There is no SCIENCE in general as Latour keeps arguing.
Another issue that seems key to me: Latour has no place for such a simple experience like “error”. He seems to have no sense for the fallibility of human knowledge (a French problem more generally, see Bourdieu). More broadly, his books are devoid of any kind of ethical vocabulary. The recovery and refunctioning of some of the ancient ethical terms seems central to me.
As to Latour’s work on making things public, I think he is part of a larger power regime that Strathern has analyzed and criticized adroitly. Taking Latour as our data seems to be a promising enterprise.
carlo, I don’t understand that last part, but am intrigued: what “larger power regime” exactly? Audit culture?
Bachelard in particular, but Koyre and Canguilhem as well, are I think precisely the kind of epistemologists that Latour thinks he is arguing with… I also don’t think that Latour is any more committed to the idea that there is a SCIENCE than his informants are… which is to say, to the extent that people in the world proceed as if there is SCIENCE, Latour thinks we should follow them. I certainly know plenty such people, but I can’t say I want to follow them anywhere…
(i) A thought on the specific/universal contrast and the necessity of it : Thinking about a specific situation itself is not specific but a conceptual general (e.g.,Evans-Pritchard’s Azande witchcraft is a general logic that explains particular misfortunes to particular people at particular times and particular places or Leibniz’s proposition about contingency, and all that can be said about possible contingents, is itself held to be a necessary proposition.)
(ii) I agree with Stephen that the recognition on the specific or the actual is not new. In fact, I thought all empirical-minded anthropologists were interested in the empirical-actual (and historians on the historical-actual).
(iii) A clarification from Tobias, please : Why is it necessary to conflate ontology with epistemology, or the existence of the world with what we know about it, for what you call “historical ontology that informs our focus on anthropos + logos” ?? If some of ARC’s focus is on contingency then by definition it opens up the realm of possibilities, where things could be otherwise, which could sometimes involve not-knowing what those are. In that case how would you explain the way the world “is” with our “knowledge or non-knowledge” of it ??
(iii) A (rhetorical) question to Andy : What is the greatness of the answer that Latour proposes in answer to the question “given the contingency and locality of the production of scientific knowledge, how does it achieve its ostensible universality” ? Latour responds that it is replication : transformation of scales, from the inside, the micro, the laboratory to the outside, the macro, the farm in Pasteur’s microbiology or in Einstein’s relativity, from the clock to the train to the light signals. Obviously he doesn’t comprehend mathematics otherwise he would have seen it is mathematical or numerical values which ensures some of the universality of scientific knowledge. In fact Prof Rabinow has a more novel answer : it is “form” itself which allows concepts or tools to take shape in newer milieus. In Anthropos Today on page 77, he writes that the challenge of form is to bring diverse aspects together. And I think the reference to form there is not in the sense of “pattern” but as “emergent” and, at least, conceptually deals with stabilization AND innovations in thoughts and practices.
On the question of history in Latour’s work. — A couple of years ago the École Normale Supérieure (in 2002) hosted a discussion between Hacking and Latour. The debate was slightly awkward for they tried to show whey the other is wrong. At one point I dared to raise my finger and say: Couldn’t we say that Hacking offers a genuinely historical argument and Latour a cosmological one? Hacking immediately nodded. Latour was furious. After the podium came to an end he walked straight to my table and said: Just so that you know: I am the real historian! What else am I doing? I write the history of things!
About a month later we continued this discussion. I recall that he made three points.
First, he is doing history — not the history of epistemologies or classifications but the history of things. We all know this: He shows the “composition” of certain things and the ways they actually transcend the epistemologies used to think them. That’s crucial for his own argument simply because epistemological approaches always imply breaks and ruptures where he does try to articulate a continuity: a continuity between the premodern and the modern (namely the hybridity of things). That’s an important distinction and evidently the argument takes places on a purely philosophical level.
Second, he explained that (a) he is doing history and (b) that he is doing a kind of ontology for he writes the history of things. In “Pandora’s Box,” e.g., he asks: Where were microbes before Pasteur invented them? He made things appear as if he is the real historical ontologist for he is working about things and not about epistemologies, concepts, classifications, etc. (which fore him would anyway be a “modern” focus).
Third, he tried to convince me that the approach we chose, namely the kind of historical ontology we practice, is necessarily assuming a great divide — a great divide between those who have history (the moderns) and those who haven’t (the premoderns). You are probably all familiar with this: Before modernity man lived in an eternal cosmos. People had histories but no history. Modernity is constituted by overturning the cosmos and by the becoming historical — and hence anthropological in the sense of man-made — of all things (the entrance of being into history).
When Latour says we have never been modern then he tries to invent a realm beyond any great divides. That project is valuable and — to me — quite fascinating. However, his approach necessarily led him to a certain normative understanding of how things are constituted (and also, I think, of what the human is). The consequence is that — once you understood his approach — there are no longer (philosophical) surprises, discoveries, movements in his writings. But then, that’s perhaps not what he aims at.
Just a quick note: Yes, the reference was to Strathern’s work on Audit Regimes. In particular her piece on the “Tyranny of Transparency”, her piece in the Collier/Ong volume, and her piece on “Re-Describing Society”. I think they offer a way to situate the transcendental historian of things in a particular regime of power/knowledge.
Rees’ object lesson (thing lesson ?) makes a lot of sense to me. The word ontology is so troubling in Latour, and actor network theory generally (like Law or Mol) precisely because they do not seem to mean it in the classical greek philosophical sense of a theory of the fundamental constitution of being/s–instead it seems to refer to something more like a constructivist (and hence “historical”) account of becoming-things. Now, the salient question seems to be: do all things become in the same way, or are there different “regimes” of becoming (i.e. does it matter to Latour how things “become” in the times of Galileo, Pasteur or contemporary nanotechnology)? In this, it seems the answer CollieRees are giving is no–he has only one constructivist ontology of becoming, and everything modern/premodern can be described the same way… fair enough… this is something to search for in Latour and his consociates’ work…
However, the alternative seems to be that (if one is to stick with ontology-cum-constructivist history of things) that each age/period/epoch/week determines that ontology differently, and to me this sounds much more like contemporary history of science–namely, the prolific production of historical accounts that insist on the specificity of their situation to the particular thing in question, and resist any effort to place it into a grander narrative, especially those of the scientific revolution or modernity, to say nothing of cultural evolution or technological determinist accounts, however subtle.
So: baby or bathwater? Is the basic constructivst urge to account for the becoming of things incompatible with a “historical” account the way it would proceed in ARC? Can we have universal becoming-cake and eat it in specific regimes too?
I would prefer a constructivism that doesn’t reduce everything to a question of extension. Even the notion of force becomes in Latour a question of extension.
Also, and I may be old fashioned, but I think we should hold on to the question of what constitutes a good life. It might be more important to raise the question than to answer it. But I can’t see how Latour is able to even pose it in some meaningful way.
Finally, I think Tobias’ point regarding the experience of surprise, discovery, and disorientation is key. I think that Latour’s approach doesn’t allow enough space for such experiences to take any meaning in fieldwork observation and anthropological anaylsis.
On Chris’ question concerning the baby and the bathwater: in my view, all of these concepts that were laid out in anthropos today and are kicking around our discussions (or at least some of them) — apparatus, assemblage, problematization, ideal type, etc. — were meant to deal with precisely this problem. How to think about the specificity of things without terms like age, epoch, culture, society and so on. To me this just gets back to why the Rabinowian approach sometimes feels similar to that of Latour in its initial critical move, but ends up somewhere totally different.
On another note: It seems to me that we now have a large number of topics kicking around here. Methodologically speaking, I think it would be good to think about how to handle them, and order them in an accessible way, as the stream here is becoming unweildy, even for its participants. But it has clearly sparked discussion on important issues that should continue to be advanced. Thoughts?
I take Steve’s advice and try to articulate a summa.
Steve is quite right, I think, that Prof. Rabinow and Latour shared an initial motivation. Rabinow wrote in 1986, ” We need to anthropologize the West: To show how exotic its constitution of reality has been: emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal (this includes epistemology and economics); make them seem as historically peculiar as possible; show how their claims to truth are linked to social practices and have hence become effective forces in the social world.” Said in other terms: Instead of continuing to show that the primitive is not primitive we could as well go ahead and study the modern and see where this leads us to.
Latour, in 1991, published “Nous n’avons jamais été modernes.” — If I understand Chris correctly, then this conjuncture between Rabinow and Latour led him to say that today science studies “is” anthropology and that R & L lead social theory into the 21st century.
So Rabinow and Latour had something in common, something like a problematization of the great divide. Evidently this has led both in different directions.
Prof. Rabinow has actually moved beyond great divides (in contrast to Latour he has even given up the reference): He has turned away from any epochal understanding of the present, has even stopped using the term modern in an ethical sense, and has turned towards an interest in the contemporary (in a way a substitute term), which is focused on the singular and specific, beyond any kind of philosophy of history (by the way, Hacking has made a big point of this, that he never uses the term modern or modernity).
So Prof. Rabinow has turned to the singular, the specific, the individual (I would say that this is a classical anthropological move!). Of course, he is interested in general questions and problems. But the sine qua non for the anthropologist is to approach the general through the particular.
Latour, who can doubt this?, chose the opposite approach: He begins with the universal and then, almost as if to find a theory-affirming case, approaches the particular. And he is doing metaphysics, I think, because he searches a kind of universal that allows to include all possible singularities.
Because anthropologists lack a detailed discussion (aside from Anthropos Today and our blog!) of the problem I try to lay out here I refer to Auerbach (my favorite hero in things methodological):
“I would be very happy if in your working method you began not with a general problem but with a singular phenomenon, carefully and decisively chosen, something like the history of a word or the interpretation of a passage. This singular phenomenon could never be too small or too concrete and should never be a concept introduced by us or by other scholars, but rather something suggested by the object itself.”
My response to Chris concerning the difference between anthropology and Latour: See, the anthropologist — here I feel very close to classical conceptions of ethnography — does research and discovers something while doing research, what Auerbach calls a singular phenomenon — a phenomenon she did not know about before, a real discovery, something that captures her, something almost enchanting. There is, in the course of fieldwork, suddenly this moment when a theme arises, when dispersed and seemingly unrelated events suddenly appear to be related. The task then is to submit to this emergent theme and to capture it. Auerbach, in his methodological writings, calls this “Ansatzpunkt” (”Ansatz” meaning literally “approach”). Furthermore, the task is to find (invent?) a language that is uniquely suited to capture the dynamic of this story, its motion. This almost necessarily implies that one has to withdraw from pre- given conceptions, questions, in favor of the theme one has discovered and that kind of dictates the question and problems to the researcher (of course the old questions return but they return in a different form — and through the particular theme one has discovered).
This approach — classical anthropologist would call it a focus on the natives’ point of view — requires the anthropologist to submit to the outside, to listen to the others. Anthropology, one once said, is about the other. But Latour’s work is not about the other. He is not even interested in others or in difference, in different conceptions of the world. His work does not tolerate difference. He is searching — and continuously constructing — a universal schema that stands beyond all possible singularities. So he is interested in “his” problems and in “his” philosophy.”
This is fairly different from what “we” (I explicitly include Chris here!!!) do. No? The difference is one of “approach.”
Going all the way back to the first post on by S. Collier, and perhaps at the risk of trying to revive a thread now declared as ’summarized’, I offer here a few thoughts from the perspective of, more or less, an interloper who is currently working on a (political philosophy) project involving Dewey and Foucault. For I think there are a few relevant thoughts on Dewey here which were not taken up quite as much as were the relevant thoughts on Latour.
Collier: “I – imagined that this movement [orientation - fieldwork - diagnosis] 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.”
This points to a crucial problem in Dewey that very much interests me at present: namely, the problems in Dewey’s account of problems. The problem in short is that Dewey does not really have an account of problems. He just accepts that problems will show themselves to us. Accepting this, he orients himself (and his theory of inquiry) to the resolution of problems. This suggests that pragmatism is not sufficiently oriented to the way in which the work of thought or inquiry can be used to generate problems, to develop problems, to clarify problems. In other words, it suggests that Dewey’s pragmatism at least was not sufficiently ironist (in the sense of Rorty’s pragmatism), not sufficiently willing to throw its own most cherished values and beliefs into question. This suggests the relevance of Foucault vis-a-vis Dewey.
One way, at least, of seeing Foucault is as helping us to adopt the just-described ironical stance to some of our most cherished notions: ‘You think you are rational, and well-behaved, and sexually normal, and so on. Well, okay maybe you are, but still let us examine for a little while these notions of madness and criminality and sexuality which inform your cute little accounts of yourself. Let’s look at them and see how your self-congratulatory view of yourself stands up.’ In other words, one way of seeing Foucault is as having a very robust account of the work of problematization, understood as the work of formulating and generating problems for thought.
Collier: “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 agree with S.Collier that Foucault is rich precisely on this point of problematization where Dewey is fairly sparse. But I’m not sure that is rich because he is more specific and Dewey more general. I would be inclined to put the point differently. I guess I agree with C.Kelty that the strength of Foucault vis-a-vis Dewey should not be seen in terms of the former’s specificity and the latter’s generality: this severely underestimates such works (as Kelty points out) like Liberalism and Social Action and Freedom and Culture and The Public and Its Problems where Dewey’s topics are not merely the perennial topics of political philosophy but are also and perhaps more primarily the timely problems of how to adjust the idea of democracy to these bewildering new forms of culture which were springing up right under the feet of Dewey and his contemporaries (imagine Dewey as trying to do an anthropology of the contemporary in the 1920s and 1930s when the mass media is first coming into being and when the transition from proprietary to corporate capitalism has only just begun to set in). So I would argue that Foucault has advantages, but these advantage is not specificity so much as problematization.
We need to be careful here. Based on the point of Foucault’s superior account of problematization, one could infer either A) that Foucault’s work plausibly refutes Dewey’s account of problematization or B) that Foucault’s work is a useful supplement to Dewey’s insufficient account of problematization. Of course you can go either way as a mere scholar. The reason that, as a theorist and not just a scholar, I would choose the latter approach is because Dewey provides much that you simply cannot find in Foucault (and Latour for that matter): namely an account of inquiry as reconstructive in the familiar problem-solving sense normally claimed as the heart and soul of pragmatism. I think that Dewey here can supplement, rather than refute, Foucault and that there are points in Foucault which particularly invite the work of thought as a melioristic project. The point is simply that one finds this stuff readily available in Dewey while getting it out of Foucault requires tremendous theoretical gymnastics.
A secondary thought here and a possible further reason for wanting to retain Dewey along with Foucault rather than dumping Dewey in favor of Foucault: the position of ‘fieldwork’ in the model described by Collier in the first post (orientation - fieldwork - diagnosis) does not of course match Deweyan thought exactly, and perhaps this is to Dewey’s advantage. Try as a little game substituting ‘experimentation’ for ‘fieldwork’. Here we are already much much closer to Dewey (with the necessary caveats about Dewey’s account of the ‘orientation’ moment as I just described them). Further, if we stipulate that ‘fieldwork’ is one possible form of ‘experimentation’, then we can begin to discern ways in which there is not a conflict with Dewey here so much as a difference in breadth of perspective. Dewey’s model of inquiry is simply a little broader than any model which specifies fieldwork as the moment of ‘empirical investigation’ or what have you. By ‘experimentation’ Dewey generically meant ‘testing’ and ‘trials’ and ‘experience in the old early modern sense of that word of experience as experiment’. There are, obviously, multiple forms of experimentation in Dewey’s sense. Two obvious paradigms of experimentation relevant to concerns on this blog are: 1. a genealogy of modern practices and 2. an anthropology of the contemporary. As for Dewey, the scientist was his favorite model of the experimenter, but it also has to be admitted that Dewey was not thinking exclusively of guys in white lab coats: he was thinking of pretty much anybody engaged in the purposive transformation of ‘problematic’ into ‘resolved’ or ‘equilibriated’ situations and that includes artists and fieldworkers and genealogists as much as lab technicians. So Dewey’s account of ‘experimentation’ ought not be interpreted as narrowly ‘empiricist’ in orientation. It is in fact much broader. If there is any problem, it is likely that experimentation is too broad (and thus too vague) rather than too narrow.
Apologies for the long-windedness.
Colin: your comments all make a great deal of sense. I don’t think that the original intent was to suggest that we abandon Dewey in favor of Foucault, but, as you suggest, to see how they can inform each other. I will have to think a bit about the “specificity” discussion. It may be that I am using it in a somewhat different sense — that is, Foucault’s effort is directed primarily to conceptualizing what is distinctive about specific problematizations, rather than spending a tremendous amount of time on problematizations in general. But maybe there is a better vocabulary for that. I agree that “Experiment” indeed seems like exactly the right mode. Lakoff, Rabinow and I have written a bit about this in working papers posted on this site (”What is a Laboratory in the Human Sciences” for example), and elsewhere. I think you will find that we are in very substantial agreement with what you have to say. In any case, welcome to the discussion! I think everyone would like to hear more about your broader project on Dewey and Foucault.
Stephen: Thanks for the reply. I think I’m already on board with your sentiment that you think the aim would be to blend bits of Dewey into Foucault. I’m just curious exactly how that is to be done, but I definitely have the sense that the ARC group (to the extent that there is a collective consensus here) is not at all interested in simply raising questions about Dewey in order to largely dismiss him. The project of bringing two thinkers as theoretically heavy and practically engaged as Dewey and Foucault surely carries many risks and it’s a difficult task to integrate them in a way that leaves us with a sum that is greater than the parts. Obviously a further engagement with someone like Latour ups the stakes even more. Of course the difficulty of such a project is a sign of its enormous potentiality. So it’s good to see others very interested in these topics.
Thanks for the paper references. Btw, I left a comment on VSS about the “How Critical Infrastructure Became a Security Problem” paper. If you or anyone else has any thoughts on the questions I left there, I am very curious. The comments are here.
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