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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?.

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.