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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?