January 30, 2008
Two By Two: Migrating ARC
You may notice some changes here at ARC. At a recent meeting in Berkeley, we decided to end the phase of our little experiment that began roughly a year ago. When we created a new website for ARC in December of 2006, the initial plan was to divide up conversations among several blogs, each with a different focus. That experiment had some success–especially at the Vital Systems Security Blog and the Biopower and the Contemporary blog, both of which have attracted a lot of discussion.
The other blogs (Concept Work, UC Berkeley Lab Notes, ARC News, and On The Assembly of Things), have all served different purposes, but we decided that in the interests of creating as much virtual coherence and focus as possible that we should flow all these turbulent streams into a few large tributaries. To wit, I have just merged all of the postings from these other blogs into Biopower and the Contemporary (all but the last, On the Assembly of Things, for which there are New Big Plans), which will serve henceforth as The Voice Of ARC–insofar as it has a voice, multiple, creative, and hopefully expanding.
As might be expected, any blog with the word “biopower” in it is likely to attract some attention, and it seemed to those of us (Paul, Stephen, Anthony, Andrew, Gaymon, Colin, and others) that we should take advantage of this. Hence, the discussions that Stephen, Tobias and Colin so helpfully initiated under the title of “Concept Work” will hopefully continue here, along side the more ephemeral updates and asides.
One housekeeping issue: I want to encourage everyone to use this forum to post things related to ARC and its many and various instantiations. For those of you who were posting at one of these various blogs, and want to continue to do so, contact me (ckelty@rice.edu) to update your account.
January 18, 2008
Nano is officially not organic
“Following the precautionary approach, in line with organic principles, the Soil Association has banned manufactured nanoparticles as ingredients under our organic standards. We are the first organisation in the world to take regulatory action against the use of nanoparticles to safeguard the public. This initiative goes to the core of the organic movement’s values of protecting human health.”
The Guardian: Soil Association bans nanomaterials from organic products
Google.org Announces Core Initiatives to Combat Climate Change, Poverty and Emerging Threats
Google Offers a Map for Its Philanthropy
See Google.org for all project areas
One of the 5 areas is named Predict and Prevent:
“Google.org supports efforts to empower communities to predict and prevent events before they become local, regional, or global crises, by identifying “hot spots” and enabling a rapid response.”
The three most interesting grants within the Predict and Prevent project area:
$5,000,000 multi-year grant to establish this nonprofit organization focused on improving early detection, preparedness, and response capabilities for global health threats and humanitarian crises
Global Health and Security Initiative:
$2,500,000 multi-year grant to strengthen national and sub-regional disease surveillance systems in the Mekong Basin area (Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and China-Yunnan province)
$450,000 multi-year grant to conduct in-depth research into the use of online data sources for disease surveillance
January 16, 2008
History of Present and Anthropology of Contemporary
Following up from many recent discussions I was hoping to take up again the relation between a history of the present and an anthropology of the contemporary. Let’s begin with a few recent texts from amongst ARC participants:
“In this position [of an anthropology of contemporary] the challenge is not to make the present seem contingent, but situating ourselves among contemporary blockages and opportunities the challenge is to reformulate these blockages and opportunities as problems so as to make available a range of possible solutions” (Rabinow/Bennett, “Diagnostic”, p.8).
“In a contemporary situation where so much is already identified as contingent, there may not necessarily be a problem- space static enough to render contingent through, for instance, genealogical work… In a history of the present, something became a problem and through contestation eventually a stable response was formed. The stabilization can be reworked and inquired into in order to find those problematic sites prior to the stabilized response and how those particular responses were possible and under what conditions. In a contemporary mode the aim is to render a space of practices into a problem-space.” (Stavrianakis, “Paraskeue”, pp. 1-2).
I would like to dig a little bit further into the differentiation being proposed here in order to better discern its precise value and relevance, because I am still not entirely clear as to what the import of the distinction is myself. My concern stems from the thought that a history of the present can usefully function to do the kind of work that an anthropology of the contemporary is being taken up for.
Let’s begin with the point about contingency. I regard genealogy, perhaps somewhat against the grain of the best current scholarship, as an attempt not only to show that certain present practices are contingent, but more primarily as an attempt to describe how our present practices have contingently developed. There is at least one crucial difference between demonstrating that x is contingent and inquiring into how x has contingently formed. The latter inquiry can provide amongst its yield the conceptual and practical materials which we would need to transform present situations. Proving that the present is contingent implies that the present can be changed. Showing how the present has been contingently formed gives us materials for reworking the present. I understand Foucault to have been working on the latter (how) more than on the former (that).
If this is a useful way of understanding genealogy (and if we take genealogy to be a paradigm of the history of the present), then I think genealogy indeed offers resources for an anthropology of the contemporary, and is perhaps even an exeemplification of it. Or perhaps not. If not, the question is why not? If the mode of the contemporary concerns the emergence in the present of the practices providing the objects and problematizations we are inquiring into, then perhaps the history of the present does concern the emergence over the course of the past of these practices. But it seems to me that as Foucault took up, for instance, prisons his inquiry was also in part an attempt to specify the contemporary blockages and difficulties which are rendering prisons problematic in the present. A problematization for Foucault faced two ways: it functioned as a clarification of certain historical problematics that had stabilized in the past but it also function as an intensification of these problematics insofar as they continue to be sites of contestation and elaboration in the present.
So a few questions: Is genealogy as I am reading it indeed useful for an inquiry into the contemporary? Is there something that genealogy forces which the mode of the contemporary need avoid? One important remaining difference which I can discern is this: a genealogy is oriented toward taking up present problematizations in terms of their temporal velocity and historical directionality whilst an anthropology of the contemporary can be satisfied to inquire into problematizations without concern for the historical terms of their emergence. The present is a temporal notion whilst, perhaps, the contemporary is not. What is at stake in this distinction, though? And is it a distinction which ought to be pressed very far? If so, what are the advantages of taking it seriously? And what do we lose by taking it too seriously?
January 15, 2008
“The smoking [aerosol] gun” at Ft. Detrick?
A comment from the Sunshine Project biodefense listserve:
“…and there are so many dual-use, offensive-defense projects in the April 2007 CBDP (Department of Defense Chemical and Biological Defense Program) Report that it would take me an entire chapter of another book to go through them all, including aerosolization projects. One even calls for the aerial delivery of an alleged GM vaccine for nerve gas. a sick joke and a fraud. all US armed forces have injectors for nerve gas. you have to inject yourself within about 10 seconds after exposure or you are dead about a minute later. no way you could wait for some alleged vaccine to be delivered by air. you would have died a hideous death by then. no it is clear they are developing a system for the aerial delivery of nerve agents in combat as a weapon. remember: offense (agent) plus defense (vaccine) plus delivery system (aerosolization) equals a weapon.”
sunshine project: biodefense
link to 2007 CBDP report
Europe equivocates on biofuels
New York Times: Europe May Ban Imports Of Some Biofuels Crops
BBC: Europe rethinks Biofuels Guidelines