March 1, 2007
Getting Rose Discussion Started
The following comes from an email exchange between myself and Micheal Watts and is intended to touch off some discussion here (Watts is always a good interlocutor because he has a pretty well defended position from a particular perspective at all times which is a good challenge for us when it comes to articulating what we are trying to do):
Watts: what ya think of Rose?
Amelia: Well, I also had the good fortune to hear him speak the day before in Rabinow’s office, and that influenced me as much as the talk today. But and so, he is very clear, very modest (as is often noted), and very smart. I like the way he takes up governmentality and does his own thing with it. If I have any complaints, if I am even allowed to have any considering my own work has yet to get anyplace, it would be that his concepts are a bit overdetermined. or maybe just that they are too general and he means for them to be very specific. This may have not come out in the lecture, but when he talks about the molecularization of thought and the neuro “style” of thought and action, he is only talking about specific practices relating to human life in the fields of human health and psychiatry. I for one feel like these moves go on to varying degrees and with varying effects all over the place, in ecological settings as well, to name just one area, and that this also has a profound effect on what happens with contests over the conduct of conduct and articulations of self-conduct. I find myself comparing Rose’s work with Agrawal’s on environmentality. Both these guys take up Foucault in strong ways, but they go different places with it. Environmentality and The Politics of Life Itself would be good to read together for the contrasts. so what did you think?
Watts: well to be honest I thought it was curiously predictable; alot of the ground he covered has been covered by others in a more critical way I think (viz the success of the RD Laing anti-institutionalism movement and what it implies for the treatment and diagnosis of sanity/normality); and I found some of his comments (about Pharma) sort of odd if not breathtaking. He is of course brilliant and erudite and all that but the interesting stuff (not the aanalysis of DSM etc. which is surely a bit old hat) was where he should have started. Seems to me compared with his ideology and conscoiusness days its become a bit less edgy and dull- in fact the shopping list of hypotheses left me cold. Why after all (pace Joey Ramone) wouldn’t 20% of the US- facing the terror of neoliberalism american style- want to be sedated? But there again I think that RD Laing could do no wrong and that Marxism has something to offer which, well, puts me on another planet.
Beyond the talk, I would be interested in considering some of Rose’s statements about his project in The Politics of Life Itself. First, he has been desribed as doing the “history of the present” in contrast to an anthropology of the contemporary. But in the new book he refers to his project specifically not as history of the present but as a “cartography of our present” meant to “destabilize the future by recognizing its openness”; “as a “history of potential futures”; as emphasizing “continuty alongside change”; as anti-epochal; as a “preliminary cartography of an emergent form of life and the possible futures it embodies.” How would this contrast or align with an anthropology of the contemporary?
Also, in our discussion in Pauls’ office on Wednesday, Rose eschewed biopower as a concept but as a “sensitizing” that helps us to see if there is a connection between different conceptualizations. What do we think of this? He stressed that for him concepts are a way to understand questions and problems, that he has no interest in fixing definitions. And he disavowed his former use of concepts (like biopower) because they aren’t useful to him now. But what does this mean then about those concepts? What is a concept anyway if it can become inconvenient and morph into something entirely other than what it was? If it can in fact morph into a non-concept?
shall we agree that “the terror of neoliberalism” is not actually a good answer to the kinds of question Rose is asking? I thought the careful analysis of the DSM I-IV was a very practical way of highlighting what it means to talk about the “co-production” of symptoms, disease categories and therapies (usually drugs).
My view on ‘concepts’ is mixed. As Amelia suggested it is clear he is very specific as to what kinds of life he is dealing with. I don’t have a problem with this as it is fine to say that the ‘biopolitical’ refers to very distinct sets of practices, which he takes up with an interest in a new kind of pastoral ethic (here i locate his terms ‘etho-politics’ and ’somatic individuality’). ‘Mapping’ rather than concept work is crucial for Rose, i take ‘mapping’ here to do a kind of orientation. It is not the only kind. I take the key distinction between Rose’s work and what we did for example last semester (and for others in previous years) to be not one of concepts vs non-concepts. Rather i see the distinction as shared vocabulary vs individualized vocabulary - it is a distinction of collaboration. We worked on a shared language (last semester and in previous years) because developing a shared set of concepts might make problems appear in a new light and shed critical insight onto specific projects. This was something I wanted to push Rose on, but i stepped back as he was already too uncomfortable with the pressing he got in our small discussion.
I do however take Mary’s question seriously, ‘what is a concept?’ (given that it is a key term for us). However, as it is a hugely difficult question i would shoot lower and suggest that ‘concepts’ and concept work are only ever useful insofar as they can offer us a shared analytic. Whether an analytic is totally distinct from what Rose means by ’sensitizing’ i think we could argue. I would suggest that they are not different in kind, merely in precision.
What is “individualized vocabulary”?
i meant it as short hand for vocabulary generated by a single person (albeit not in isolation)
Does Rose’s “cartography of the present” also work in a situation in which the openness of the future is the starting point and not the end point of inquiry? I mean, the anthropologist of the contemporary is often confronted with situations in which there is already a lot of contingency present. If the future is already being destabilized, what then could become the aim of anthropological inquiry?
i would say cartography allows that which you already know to be contingent to be made available for intervention, to frame that which you already know to be a problem in such a way that it can be worked on. just 2 proverbial cents.
Although Rose uses the term cartography of the present which sounds like the anthropology of the contemporary, I think he still works with the same ethos of the history of the present. In his lecture he ends the presentation by pointing that Psychiatry is moving into “preventing of potential futures.” So cartography of the present has two dimensions: mapping and increasing multiplicities, and contingency to future events. I don’t think that the idea of contingency is the problem, the future, to my understanding, always has a kind of past lines. The question is whether this contingency is existed in the domain of the actual or in the domain of the virtual. I can explain it by trying to elaborate on the difference between “preventing” and “preparedness”. Whereas Rose uses the term contingency in relation to preventing known defined diseases, identifying specific syndromes as earlier as possible, which is the act of narrowing possible futures towards known and defied problems. For preparedness, contingency is created by increasing potential futures at the present and by that increasing possible connection between future events and present potentials. In other words, the practice of preparedness is to increase virtual potential futures now, so that a possible actual future event will have traces to this multiplicity. The practice of preventing is reducing potential futures (which I think they are not potentials but possibilities) by specifying the actual syndromes of an actual possible disease. In that sense preventing still works in a linear time, whereas preparedness is a concept that emerges in a contemporary mode.