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?