September 23, 2007
Foucault’s Concept of Singularity
First of all: Sorry for the delay, which has been due to the simple fact that SJ Collier and I were too busy with our everyday jobs. Colin Koopmnan has joined our little committee on concept work and hence in future the three of us will try to coordinate the blog.
In our last exchange we discussed how to best depict our kind of inquiry (I am still somehow inclined to say ethnography or fieldwork). My initial effort to do so was to distinguish our kind of inquiry from theory driven kinds of research. One marker I used was “singularity.” The term is intriguing – I guess – for many of us. It promises to capture an ethos of relating to things – of taking them up – that is constitutive of our kind of research in its focus on the concrete, on the particular story or phenomenon that is emerging.
And yet, what “singularity” actually means, what its connotations and implications are is not quite clear. One way to approach the problem is to ask how others – who are somehow associated with it – use the term, e.g., Foucault.
The surprise was considerable: It appears that Foucault almost never uses the term singularity (at least not in French). The index of Dits et Écrits lists the term twenty-three times. In addition I found it a couple of times in The Archeology of Knowledge, in The Order of Things, and in History of Sexuality I and II (evidently I read very fast and no doubt oversaw some places).
But although – and this may be another surprise – Foucault uses the term rarely he uses it with remarkable, indeed astonishing continuity. Over a period of almost twenty years its usage hardly varies. The methodological – philosophical – reflections that inform it remain almost unaltered.
What follows is a series of quotes. They are meant to met en scene the continuity. But they are also presented as kind of raw material for a discussion about what Foucault may have meant when speaking or writing about “singularity.” What are the methodological – philosophical – implications? Can we spell out the conceptual assumptions that inform his usage of “singularity?” May we use the term in order to distinguish our inquiry from theory driven research? Is his concept of singularity helpful for our effort to find adequate terms to think through and name the kind of inquiry – the kind of ethnography/fieldwork – we’re engaged in (the kind of inquiry ethnographic inquiry is)?
The first quote is from 1968 (taken from “Sur l’archéologie des sciences. Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie;” the text was first published in summer 1968. DE I: 706). First the French, then the translation (which is a nightmare):
“En fait l’effacement systématique des unités toutes données permet d’abord de restituer à l’énoncé sa singularité d’événement : il n’est plus simplement considéré comme la mise en jeu d’une structure linguistique, ni comme la manifestation épisodique d’une signification plus profonde que lui; on le traite dans son irruption historique ; ce qu’on essaie de mettre sous le regard, c’est cette incision qu’il constitue, cette irréductible – et bien souvent minuscule – émergence.”
“In fact, the systematic erasure of all the given unities allows to give back to the utterance (énonce) its singularity of an event: it is no longer simply viewed as the mise en jeu of a linguistic structure; nor is it viewed as the episodal manifestation of a signification deeper than it; one treats it in its historical irruption; that which one tries to make visible is the incision which is constitutive of it, this irreducible – and often actually miniscule – emergence.”
In almost the same way Foucault wrote in 1972, in his response to Derrida (my translation):
“But how could a philosopher of the trace possibly be sensitive for an analysis of an event? How could such a philosophy […] think the singularity of an event?”
The next quote is from 1978, taken from “What is Critique?” In this text Foucault offers no doubt the most explicit – but still somewhat cryptic – explanation of how he uses the term singularity – therefore the long quote. Thinking about his historicophilosophical practice Foucault says that the positivities he is analyzing are ensembles which are not evident. We need to study the ruptures of their emergence. Thinking about what this means he writes:
“These ensembles are not analyzed as universals to which history, with its particular circumstances, would bring a certain number of modifications. Of course, many accepted elements, many conditions of acceptability, can have a long career behind them; but what is a matter of grasping in the analysis of these positivities is that they are in some way pure singularities, not the incarnation of an essence, not the individualization of a species: singularity as madness in the modern Western world, singularity absolute as sexuality, singularity absolute as the juridic-moral system of our punishments.”
“No founding recourse, no escape into a pure form—that is no doubt one of the most important and most contestable points of this historicophilosophical approach: if it does not want to fall either into a philosophy of history or into a historical analysis, it ought to maintain itself in the field of immanence of pure singularities. What then? Rupture, discontinuity, singularity, pure description, immobile tableau, no explanation, no passage, you know all that. It will be said that the analysis of these positivities is not elevated to those procedures called explanatory to which one ascribes a causal value on three conditions: (1) one only grants causal value to the explanations that aim at a last instance valued as profound and unique, economy for some, demography for others; (2) one only grants as having causal value that which obeys a principle of pyramidization pointing toward the cause or the causal source, the unitary origin; and finally (3) one only grants causal value to that which establishes a certain inevitability or at least that which approaches necessity.”
“The analysis of positivities, to the extent that it has to do with pure singularities related not to a species or an essence but to simple conditions of acceptability…”
“…nothing is more foreign to such an analysis than the rejection of causality. But what is important is that it is not a matter in such analyses of reducing an ensemble of derived phenomena to one cause, but of making intelligible a singular positivity in that which is precisely singular.”
“Let us say roughly that in opposition to a genesis that orients itself toward the unity of a weighty principal cause of a multiple descent, we are concerned here with a genealogy, that is, of something that tries to restore the conditions of appearance of a singularity from multiple determining elements, of which it would appear, not as the product, but as the effect. Thus this singularity is made intelligible, but it is not seen as functioning according to a principle of closure.”
The same year Foucault gave an interview in which the term singularity is as well used in an illuminating way (DE IV: 23, Table Ronde du 20 Mai 1978). First the French original and then my terrible, terrible translation:
“J’essaie de travailler dans le sens d’une événementalisation. (…) Que faut-il entendre par événementalisation? Une rupture d’évidence, d’abord. Là ou on serait assez tenté de se référer à une constante historique ou à un trait anthropologique immédiat, ou encore a une évidence s’imposant de la même façon à tous, il s’agit de faire surgir une singularité (…) Rupture des évidences (…) Telle est la première fonction theorico-politique de ce que j’appellerais l’événementalisation. En outre, l’événementalisation consiste a retrouver les connexions, les rencontres, les appuis, les blocages, les jeux de force, les stratégies, etc., qui ont, a un moment donné, ce qui ensuite va fonctionner comme évidence, universalité, nécessité. Prendre les choses de cette manière, on procède bien à une sorte de démultiplication causale. Qu’est-ce que cela veut dire? (…) La démultiplication causale consiste à analyser l’évènement selon les processus multiples qui les constituent. (…) Ces processus massifs doivent être eux-mêmes décomposés (…). L’allègement de la pesanteur causale consistera donc a bâtir, autour de l’événement singulier analysé comme processus, un polygone ou plutôt polyèdre d’intelligibilité dont le nombre de faces n’est pas défini à l’avance et ne peut jamais être considérer comme fini de plein droit.”
“I try to work towards an eventalization. (…) What does that mean, eventalization? First of all, a rupture of the evident. Where one is tempted to speak of a historical constant or an immediate anthropological feature, or where everyone is compelled to see an apparent evidence, one has to make to make visible a singularity (…). Rupture of the evident (…) this is the first theoretical/political function of what I call eventalization. Furthermore, eventalization means to find the connections, the encounters, the supports [appuis], the blockages, the games of force, the strategies etc., which have, at a given moment, established that which functions today as the evident, the universal, the necessary. (…) To take things up in this manner means to work towards a causal demultiplication. What does that mean? (…) Demultiplication, that means to analyze an event by way of focusing on the multiple processes which are constitutive of it. (…) And these massive processes must themselves be decomposed (…) The effort to de-center the causal hence consists in building – by way of analyzing a singular event as a process – a polygonous or better: a polyedrous intelligibility the many possible faces of which cannot be defined in advance and can never be said o be fully exhausted [or known].
If I see correctly, these are the major places where he speaks about singularity (of course it appears elsewhere though most often in the way I explained here, cf. e.g. the preface to History of Sexuality II, where he speaks about “sexuality as a historically singular experience”).
I leave these passages un-interpreted here, inviting you guys to post your ideas. The question is: What to do with this? What does Foucault actually mean by singularity? Can we usefully abstract from his writing for our own purposes, i.e., for the effort to describe our kind of inquiry?
[...] ‘Singularity’ Posted on September 24, 2007 by Jeremy A guy called Tobias Reed is posting some stuff over at a blog called anthropos.net (linked I believe to the slumbering ‘Biopower and the Contemporary’ project at Berkeley) and yesterday he wrote about the notion of the singularity: [...]
From the previous thread I seem to recall that the thought may have been that ’singularity’ is a candidate for specifying the object of inquiry. Was that correct? Such that an anthropology of the contemporary, say, could be described as an inquiry into a singularity?
Two things stand out in the quotes you’ve assembled.
1. One is the connection between singularity and event. It might be useful for someone to riff a paragraph or two on their understanding of ‘event’ in Foucault, Deleuze, or Peguy. I have to admit that I’m not entirely taken by the idea as I understand it, but this may only indicate that I don’t understand it. I think Foucault was more sensible when he started talking about problematization rather than eventalization. Historiographically I find it quite difficult to make sense of concepts that name an absent place of irruption. But, as said, somebody else probably has a better and more charitable impression. The historiography of ‘problematization versus eventalization’ may be a useful further topic.
2. Another thing that stands out is Foucault’s usage of ’singularity’ to call attention to a multiplicity. One obvious worry about the term singularity would be that on first impact it does not convey plurality and complexity so much as unity. I don’t think that this is what Foucault was aiming at. The last quote given was particularly helpful in this regards: “Demultiplication, that means to analyze an event by way of focusing on the multiple processes which are constitutive of it. (…) The effort to de-center the causal hence consists in building – by way of analyzing a singular event as a process – a polygonous or better, a polyedrous, intelligibility the many possible faces of which cannot be defined in advance and can never be said o be fully exhausted.”
So this suggests that in this passage at least Foucault is using singularity (”singular event”) as his object of inquiry such that inquiry would decompose/recompose this object into the multiplicity of processes constitutive of it. For example, disciplinary power is not a singular force that traveled through the 19c. but was rather constituted by a conjunction of a multiplicity of processes: new factory work conditions, anxiety over punitive practices, widespread adoption of monastic rituals, etc., etc.. (There were, to my mind, many nice examples of these ‘conjunctions of the contingent’ discussed a few weeks ago in PR’s Anthro Labinar when we read through French Modern: e.g., the bringing together of probability sciences (which PR pointed out Ian Hacking showed, in Emergence of Probability were getting along very well on their own) with certain requirements of techno-social-scientific expertise such as normalization of objects and exigences of verification practices such that this conjunction could then congeal into the ’singular’ (?) object of populations-bodies as worked on by biopolitical equipment.)
As I’m here interpreting it, perhaps Foucault’s object of inquiry does not so much seem to be the singular as it is the multiple-within-the-singular or perhaps better yet the multiple-as-singular. Perhaps it would be useful to consider the extent to which Foucault can consistently maintain or uphold such an object as the focal point of his inquiries? Skeptics will push: so is it really singular or is it really multiple? The question may be unfair but how should one react to it? If we are searching for a concept adequate to the sorts of inquiry we/you are performing, then it seems to me that it may be useful to test these concepts by submitting them to hypothetical challenges by those who would be ill-disposed to them. Do the concepts help us answer these challenges? If so, then that might show that they are really doing the work we want them to do.
A modest proposal: could we get an example from Foucault’s work of what we think a singularity is? For example: Is biopoiltics a “singularity” — a distinctive set of mutual interferences between juridico-legal power and biopower? Or is it something on a much more specific level than that? Let’s say: early liberal apparatuses of security? Or discipline as it emerged in the circumscribed spaces of classical power?
I tend to think that the tension is precisely as Colin portrays it: On the one hand, it refers to something distinct (precisely in the sense of marking the distinction of a certain present, a certain problem). On the other hand, Foucault clearly does not mean anything like the anthropological meaning of specificity — ie, something that can only be understood on its own terms, that you must “enter into” in the manner of a kind of hermeneutics.
I would also like to hold open the possibility, at least for the purposes of discussion, that even if the statements about singularity have striking continuity that the possible reference for the term changed as Foucault’s analytical tools changed.
Friends,
I don’t want Tobias’ aside that he prefers ‘ethnography’ or ‘fieldwork’ to inquiry to go unnoticed. Since Foucault did neither ethnography or fieldwork one wonders what the relation to the discussion of singularity could possibly be.
I am ever more enthusiastic — that you Lord Shaftesbury — about inquiry.
The best examples of what this mysterious multiplicity and the like mean are found in DeLanda who explains quite lucidly in Intensive Science what this move is about. i find it convincing.
i have to agree with Lord Rabinow, in fact I, for one, welcome our new Inquiring Synthetic Anthropos Overlords and you know how I love to argue about words, so don’t get me started. But seriously, I actually agree that DeLanda has this pegged, and in fact would go so far to say that there isn’t anyone else who has done the work of re-constructing Deleuze’s philosophy, even if that means that it ends up sounding considerably less radical than it does in some of his more fanatical and enthusiastic adorers. Intensive Science is perhaps the most detailed attempt at a reconstruction of the role of multiplicity (and by extension singularity) in Deleuze, but his recent short book A New Philosophy of Society does a better job of it making it accessible I think (and I should say that while it is a great reconstruction of Deleuze’s thought, it is not actually a new philosophy of society; it sounds more than a little bit like Durkheim, actually, but that is another issue). Pages 27ff esp.
The short version is this: the move to privilege singularities in Deleuze (and by extension Foucault? I don’t know…) is to counteract the classic emphasis on natural kinds, so that, for instance, when one speaks of animals and their species in an Aristotelian frame, a singular animal is one expression of a natural kind (a species). Evolutionary theory obviously rejects this in showing how species themselves have something like a lifetime– from emergence to stabilization to reproductive isolation to extinction–thus both the animal and the species are singularities. DeLanda expands this point to social theory, less convincingly I think, but it still makes some sense: individuals form into groups that are not natural kinds (nations, communities, states, etc) but also have their lifetimes. The key point is that this directs one towards developing a “structure of the space of possibilities” of an otherwise flat ontological world. Body plans in evolutionary theory and phase space in physics are two examples: what would the equivalent be in social theory? I don’t know, but as I say, I don’t think DeLanda is the first to try– can anyone say sociobiology and evolutionary psychology?
Now, just to be slightly more provocative, I would contrast this focus on singularities with the common refrain in anthropology that a given situation is “complex” or “particular” or “historically specific”– from the perspective of DeLanda, this is obviously the case: the world consists of “differently scaled individual singularities.” Of course everything is specific, because all is flux. But to say that something is specific in this sense is to abandon abstraction and conceptual work in favor of radical historical relativism and argument by sorites. I for one have certainly see plenty of classes and colloquia descend into such bathos.
However, to actually adopt the approach advocated by DeLanda goes far in the other direction, towards a submission to a kind of reductionism, or at least to a faith in the sciences as they have organized themselves. We have to commit to evolutionary theory (but which one?) and to thermodynamics (but which version?) in order for the arguments about indivdiual singularities to develop into arguments about universal singularities (i.e. structures of the space of possibility that are invariant across organisms and species, atoms chemical species, and individuals and social forms). Something about this is both exciting (let’s re-build Science!) and depressing (more Science? Haven’t we had that already?).
One of the critical questions seems to be this: Is the aim of our inquiry to capture the singularity of one’s site? Or is the driving force of inquiry to pay attention to one’s site in order to be capable to name some of the elements (and the relations between them) that are constitutive of a singularity (which is made up of a multiplicity)? I think we agree that the first question would be sort of classical ethnography and the second closer to what we do. Right?
I would like to briefly return to the term fieldwork. I used the term deliberately because I tried to think anthropology as a field science. The point I tried to make – largely uncontroversial, I think – is that the aim of fieldwork is to find out something one did and indeed could not know before. I tried to push that a little by saying: If the theme of my research will only come up in the course of my research then the questions I can ask are a product of my fieldwork too. They must be found/invented (of course, they are always informed findings/inventions). And then I pushed that a little further: And if I am analyzing conceptual movements – for example the emergence of a new mode of reasoning – then the only possible way to understand this emergent mode of reasoning, to understand how it is emerging (in what form), is to focus on my particular field site. Here I used the term “singularity” – one has to pay attention to the singularity of one’s site (so singularity is here not the object of research but the attention to the concrete site in its specificity and this attention is the – only possible – way to produce knowledge about the emergent). Finally, sort of the final act, the aim is to invent concepts which are capable to adequately capture the discovery one has made in the field. That’s quite a challenge for where the aim is to discover something new, something emergent, no ready-made concepts are available.
The only thing that this conception of our inquiry as field science would add to the above is that the singularity one tried to capture by way of fieldwork cannot even be named without fieldwork. It cannot even be adequately named because the “assemblage” constitutive of it cannot be known without attention to the concrete. Would people agree with this? Yes? No?
The reference to Delanda I find problematic. I agree that he successfully distills a theory from Deleuze’s writings and that he makes him thereby accessible (and less powerful). BUT DeLanda – especially in his book on A New Philosophy of Science – is arguing exactly against the kind of field science I tried to depict here. Why? Because he explicitly said that one first needs a spelled out theory of assemblages in order to successfully conduct social analysis.
I agree. Both Delanda and Deleuze (as well as Latour) claim to know how the world is (”the world consists of differently scaled individual singularities”). If we want to avoid such rather fantastic claims we need to separate useful concepts such as “multiplicity” or “singularity” from their grander theoretical frameworks.
The question seems to be: What do we want our concepts to do? I guess we all agree that the goal cannot simply be to describe how the world is. I think the focus on “singularities” is useful when it is formulated in relation to a particular problem situation and as a particular kind of intervention into that situation.
In contrast to Tobias, however, I don’t think that every anthropological research project has to be concerned necessarily with “singularities”. It think that’s one option among many others. Given that the contemporary is also characteristic for the reproduction of certain power relations and all the rest, I think it would be quite limiting to focus exclusively on “singularities”. It’s probably to early to get rid of Bourdieu.
Foucault: “Let us say roughly that in opposition to a genesis that orients itself toward the unity of a weighty principal cause of a multiple descent, we are concerned here with a genealogy, that is, of something that tries to restore the conditions of appearance of a singularity from multiple determining elements, of which it would appear, not as the product, but as the effect” (’What is Critique?’).
Singularity is that which produces the coherence amongst the multiple determining elements which constitute it. These elements do not cause the singularity to emerge into being but rather are themselves connected intelligibly into a coherent network or assemblage(?) by being anchored in the singularity. Genealogy diagrams a singularity and in so doing explicates the multiple determining elements constitutive of a singularity. This all makes (fairly) decent sense to me.
All this also forces me (quite possibly idiosyncratically) back into problematization. Aren’t problematizations that which, for Foucault, are capable of being singularities? If so, then what the genealogist (and by extension the fieldworker?) studies when they study singularities are not so much ‘true answers’ as interesting questions/problems which constitute a space of possibility in which true or false answers might emerge. Cf. DeLanda on Deleuze’s “problematic epistemology” or cf. PR to me this past Thursday on McKeon (by way of Dewey) on “problematic method.” Cf. Disc & Pun as a diagram of discipline as a problem-space rather than a history of discipline as a true/false theory — discipline as constituting a specific problematic such that truth or falsity could emerge within it rather than discipline itself as true/false or good/bad (thus Foucault neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ discipline).
In light of this, a concern may be that singularity isn’t doing any of its own conceptual work. What does singularity uniquely add to problematicity? It can’t just be that it adds a way of counteracting essentialism and natural kinds (although maybe it is that for Deleuze and DeLanda as CKelty points out [cf. DeLanda 2006, p.28]), because you don’t need anything nearly as fancy as ’singularity’ to make that point which after all was a point made as long ago as Hume (and before him too). I like the notion of “the structure of a space of possibilities” (DeLanda 2006, p.29) and it interfaces well with what I’ve been reading by Ian Hacking lately. I’m not sure I have anything useful to say about it just now, but it sounds like a promising avenue for explicating what singularity uniquely adds such that problematization may not be enough by itself, or for explicating the relation between singularity and problematization.
If the goal is a critique of natural kinds, a focus on singularities is certainly a very valuable way to go. That kind of work is absolutely necessary. But as I keep arguing, ‘eventalization’ may not be the best strategy for a context in which contingency abounds. So what then? The answer cannot be let’s do some more genealogy. This is just to indicate some of the limits.
trees says:
Yes, agreed, it’s not new: however, there is an important thread to maintain here, which is that for Delanda, Deleuze’s philosophy is radically realist, and it may well be that this is a “Neo-Deluzian” approach, as he himself admits. If a field science as you would characterize sees theory as tool, then it cannot be that “assemblage” or any other concept is finished–they remain contingent ways of accounding for a continous unfolding, with the hope of transforming thought and action in the world– it would be committed to some kind of intervention.
One thing DeLanda has pointed out to me is that for Deleuze, concept=multiplicity. It is how he/they start “What is philosophy?” by essentially making them equivalent. If this is the case, then multiplicities (and perhaps singularities) are not concepts (in D&G) but part of what makes up concepts. In this sense, it might be that the usage of concepts in D&G (and especial in WiP?) is not really the same as the concept-as-tool of inquiry proposed here.
On the other hand, if what trees is suggesting is the goal of fieldwork “to capture the singularity of a site” is also the goal of constructing the concept appropriate to that site, then perhaps there is a similarity here– in that each site qua singularity, possesses its own concept– or more likely a kind of conceptual component of a larger concept/multiplicity. The commitment to realism, however, seems to be at the heart of the issue.
The other point I would re-iterate vis-a-vis deleuze and delanda, and perhaps this is just for my own thinking, is that there are not an infinite number of singularities, even if the world is made up of differently scaled individual singularities. Deleuze and DeLanda are interested in universal singularities, and they don’t just pop up anywhere. Nonetheless, they are historical (in the expanded sense of evolutionary and cosmological history), and hence possess as part of their concepts a temporality it is incumbent on the analyst to identify. I think this is where Foucault’s “problematization” is an attempt at trying to do just this: explore what a problem’s temporal structures of possiblity are… maybe?.
I have two comments to make. Here is my first one: I find Colin’s elaborations fascinating but am afraid that his conclusions are too fast for me. What does genealogy mean? Foucault: “Something that tries to restore the conditions of appearance of a singularity from multiple determining elements, of which it would appear, not as the product, but as the effect.” I conclude: A genealogy seeks to discover “a condition” in the interplay of multiple elements, in their arrangement one might say. And Foucault includes a warning: The multiple elements and their arrangement do not add up to a singularity, rather, the singularity is an effect of the particular form of their interplay, of their arrangement. He turns to an aesthetic vocabulary: effect, appearance.
Colin writes: “Singularity is that which produces the coherence amongst the multiple determining elements which constitute it. These elements do not cause the singularity to emerge into being but rather are themselves connected intelligibly into a coherent network or assemblage (?) by being anchored in the singularity.” I don’t understand that. That would mean the singularity is the condition of existence of the interplay of elements, no? Why is a singularity that which produces coherence? A singularity is described as an effect, an appearance.
But on another point I fully agree with Colin: The significance of the term singularity for Foucault was not just that it allowed counteracting essentialism. Rather, I would say, the significance of the term was technical. To view something as “singularity” was a principle of inquiry, a methodological device, a certain mode of relating to things – namely as constituted by the interplay of various elements. Clearly, or so I think, this is why Foucault called himself a nominalist. I do not think that this particular technical significance of the term “singularity” (which one finds in exactly the same sense in Weber) is something that runs counter to the idea of a problematization.
And here is my second comment: I think we’re confusing two different uses of the term singularity. This confusion is anything but helpful. Usage I: Sexuality is nothing universal, rather it is a singular appearance, an effect of multiple elements combined in a certain way (Foucault says so, e.g., in his preface to the second volume of HS). Usage II (closer to the anthropologist qua fieldworker): Each site is singular, has unique circumstances, dynamics, etc.
My initial claim was that the task of the anthropologist is to pay attention to the singularity of her site. Why? Because I assumed – and continue to do so – that if I seek to learn something I did not know before then this can only be done by paying attention to the concrete, “singular site” (notice: I use the term here in an everyday sense)
Apparently I am very far here from making a claim about the object of inquiry/fieldwork. I do not at all claim that the object of study is not the site or its singularity. But paying attention to it is a decisive step, something constitutive of fieldwork.
WHAT we (as fieldworkers) study is another question – and none one has to make general claims about. Why should we? If we study singularities (be it a universal singularities or whatever) or if we study “problematizations” (as Carlo and Colin seem to argue) is nothing I want to determine before I go into the field. Who knows what plops up while I am there? In other words: I think that this decision should largely be directed by fieldwork, by the process of inquiry. It should be a result, the product of work.
Hence I fully agree with Chris’ comment (even if he probably meant to say something else with it): “The commitment to realism, however, seems to be at the heart of the issue.” Appropriating Foucault to my own ends I might say: I am a happy positivist.
And as a final remark: If we would claim that each site possesses its own concept, then we would be almost close to the assumption of an episteme or an essentializing culture concept. But since we – I – do not claim that the actual object of study is a particular “site” we probably do not have to worry.
Foucault: “of which it [the singularity] would appear, not as the product, but as the effect.” Does anyone have the French for this handy? “Effect” in English is a notoriously multivalent word and I think we are getting lost in its equivocations. I wasn’t reading “effect” as “appearance” but I concede that this is a possible reading. I was reading “effect” as “causal power” (or that which causes) since Foucault in the passage a) explicitly contrasts it to “product” (or that which gets caused) and b) is in the context of this passage discussing historiogprahical causation and clearly searching for an alternative to the old ‘underlying base’ sort of historical explanation. If my interpretation is correct, then the idea is that the singularity provides an anchor in which the multiplicity of elements cohere or gel in such a way as to function together alongside of one another. Singularities collect/order/align multiplicities. However, I’m not particularly committed to my interpretation being correct and so the French may help us. Regardless of what Foucault said, however, we now have two different interesting conceptions of singularity. It may be useful to weigh their relative pros and cons?
Something else keeps coming up. Maybe this isn’t worth discussion. If no, then just ignore. But I have a lingering concern though about the continued invocations of positivism (because for me it represents a certain methodological disposition to which I am personally quite hostile [with reasons of course]). Tobias, you seemed to want to invoke these when you said that we shouldn’t make general claims in advance of fieldwork about what we study when we go into “the field” be our objects of inquiry singularities or problematizations. The anti-positivist skeptic in me wants to ask you: Why are you unwilling to make general claims about fieldwork as employing, say, ‘the problematic method’ of Foucault and Dewey but yet are perfectly willing to make a general claim that you are “going into the field”? Isn’t “the field” a general concept laden with all sorts of heavy theory? What am I missing here? Surely you don’t want a positivism which says “I can go to the field as a perfectly neutral observer without a theory of what it means to go into the field”? The anti-positivist in me wants to issue the familiar refrain that inquiring anywhere always invokes quite a number of general theoretical assumptions, and we ought to wear these theories on our sleeves, not so that we can feign neutrality when the critics come, but so that we can be up front with ourselves about what it is (we think) we are doing. Perhaps I am misinterpreting you? So I want to ask for clarification, if anyone thinks it would be worthwhile, that is.
This, perhaps (?), brings us all the way back to the topic of the previous thread where I think there was a concern about how fieldwork might be pre-theoretical, though I’m not remembering the exact terms of that discussion presently.
What’s the difference between a “positivist” and a “happy positivist?” I don’t want to make general claims because I cannot possibly know in advance what I will find in the course of my inquiry. To push that a bit: I for sure go into a field with a sense of what it is I would like to study, etc. Doubtless, this is to say, I have a sense of what the problem is (and this sense is inflected by readings, idiosyncrasies, etc. and impacts my attention etc.). But: If I spend two years in Paris – or Buenos Aires or some cold places in Siberia or… – then my fieldwork may generate things I did not – could not – know before. Possibly the object of study will gain new contours or become an altogether different one. Perhaps my field site – let’s say the lab in which I did fieldwork in Paris – “resists” certain predetermined questions of mine and generates, as if by itself, new ones, questions I did not even think of before (notice that I say “as if”). Gradually, my fieldwork produces a theme. It is this process of emergence, of the emergence of a theme in the course of fieldwork (often this amounts to a surprise), which I would like to preserve (or capture). This is what characterizes (among other things) a field science. Finally, I believe that the way I analyze this emergent theme – this effect of my fieldwork – depends on the kind of theme that emerges. Why should I determine in advance if I work on problematizations or on something else? (Is A Machine to Make a Future concerned with a singularity? A problematization? An event?) Many things are possible. My aim here is only to capture the idea of a field science. And I think we already have come a long way down the road here (at lest I did, thanks to interventions like yours!). Does this make sense?
That makes much sense to me. It also confirms my hunch that Dewey really is relevant to what is going on here. (While for me this is still a hunch I am happily aware that for others (e.g., PR) it is more than a hunch and is positively known.) My hunch inclines me to suggest: what you have just described is better positioned under the banner of ‘pragmatism’ than ‘positivism’: for what you have just described is in many ways a ‘reconstruction’ in Dewey’s sense. There’s lots of philosophical nitpicking in differentiating pragmatism from positivism: but it’s nitpicking that has real effects further on down the stream of inquiry.
This is perhaps better taken up a little later on in our (already-proposed) next thread about the relationship between problematization and reconstruction in the study of the emergent. It may also be useful (it will certainly be useful for me) to try to keep this in mind: when we inquire into emerging singularities are there a handful of certain general methodological focal points which will apply across nearly every interesting case (e.g., are problematizations and reconstructions (etc.) useful focal points in every single case?) or is there a near infinity of focal points? That we are inquiring into emergence already limits the list of possible focal points in some ways (so it can’t be infinite [i.e., different in every field site]), but it is certainly still an open question whether emergent forms have to be studied by way of focus on problems and reconstructions.
Friends,
I find this discussion to have strayed off into well-trodden fields.
Fieldwork is a method that contributes or blocks inquiry. There is nothing special or magical about it. No one in this group is doing ethnography. Do we have to rehearse this all again, even here?
The concept of “singularity” is a part of the tool kit of the History of the Present and certain types strands of genealogy.
Carlo’s suggestion that we retain Bourdieu points, I believe in the direction that the over-emphasis on uniqueness or simple empirical claims is unearned or dangerous. That being said, Bourdieu’s hyper-controlled constructivism is very limiting. And is itself geared to revealing symbolic domination and related topics. It is not viable for a range of other issues. I assume Carlo agrees?
The hope of concept work is that we will rigorously explore the concepts and something like their range of applicability. In their relation to diverse forms of inquiry (and there are diverse forms). And to the forms of conclusions and insights from the inquiry.
I agree with Chris K that someone like DeLanda who does at times brilliant conceptual clarification but almost no inquiry can result in the most amazing trajectory or re-inscribing “society” in an almost Durkheimian manner. Let’s get out of the academy from time to time, my friends.
To those concerned with a lack of “fieldwork” in exchange for “theory” in an “anthropology of the contemporary”, why not both?
Foucault advocated this approach all his life. It was an essential part of his ethic. He used field and political research as well as his activism and mixed it with his own philosophical insights. Thus why I find his work empowering.
No doubt he would approve of my suggestion I would think.
Inquiry has an essential place in anthropology and need not be seen as opposed to “fieldwork”.
I’m an Anthropology minor and this is my feeling, but I could be wrong.