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?
Thanks to Colin for starting this discussion.
In his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Foucault argues that there are two moments of genealogical work: provenance and emergence. Showing how both are contingent and heterogenous is the work of genealogy at that point.
So, Colin’s distinction, while valid, does not meet the distinction that we are trying to get clearer about.
I might add that one of the reverse sides of the coin is that a task today is not only to show how things are contingent but how they have been made or are in the process of being made less contingent. Working in SynBERC and in the academy in general, the play of petty malice is a starting point. Foucault again argues that the site —or venues– of such disputes is a likely place to pay attention to.
On the Morals Of Genealogy. Political Theory, 31 (2003): 558-588. (JSTOR Link) by Jacqueline Stevens (huzzah!), suggests that the general meaning of genealogy employed by, if not Foucault himself, then his interpreters, is a misreading of Nietzche’s distinction between history and genealogy. Do I buy it? Only if gets my colleagues here exercised!
Bad genealogy is like bad darwinism. But who would want to do that? Marc Hauser maybe. Good geneaology is all about showing how contingent the present is, how it could have been otherwise and therefore is part of the expansive domain of the political. But who would want to do that? Everyone left of center, it seems. What would genealogy beyond good and bad look like though?
I think we also need to have the other two terms in play:
history of present | anthropology of contemporary
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historical anthropology | history of the contemporary
whatever an anthropology of the contemporary is, I think it can be pursued with any historical period as its object (emergence and provenance are universals, perhaps), but with the crucial difference that with distance from the contemporary of the anthropologist/historian it loses (some of) the force of being an investigation into alternatives and contingencies *right now*). Insofar as narratives of history (usable pasts) are an essential component of contemporary debates, this kind of “historical anthropology” can nonetheless intervene in the present. As for history of the contemporary… what’s the distinction between the present and the contemporary again? My Diagnostic is broken…
Diagnostic refills are by prescription only and your new HMO does not cover them.
The present is different from the actual and both from the contemporary. Different subject position, type of object, and phenemenological standing. (advanced course).
I thought you were a Derridean at one point.
I don’t see history of the present and anthropology of the contemporary as opposed methods, but a difference is the temporality of the work on the object(oriented to the near future.)
Perhaps extension is the wrong word, but working on the contemporary is certainly a reworking of Foucault’s method. One example would be in the Diagnostic (one year warranty?) where Foucault’s work on regimes of veridiction / jurisdiction is re-worked as modes of veridiction / jurisdiction (Diagnostic p21/22). I don’t think that an anthropology of the contemporary must be interventionist to be contemporary (??), the invention of equipment for intervention is one example of work in a contemporary mode. Other ways of re-working elements of the recent past / near future need to be invented to give form to that future. As Chris says, this will include historical work. If someone gets onto the course on phenomenological standing they can give us the low-down on contemporary subject positions.
I like the idea that h of p and a of c need not be opposed but could be taken as two complementary approaches. Would they be complementary in that they would be two different analytics (diagnostics?) of the same object? Or is the complementarity two different analytics of two related objects? Are there some objects which a h of p cannot be used to inquiry into? What sorts of objects?
I guess I am still trying to press us to be precise about the status of the differences separating these two analytics. So one pointed question would be: what do we take genealogy to be such that a genealogy of the present cannot do at least some of the work that we take an anthropology of the contemporary to be doing? And what is that work which the one can do and the other cannot? Why can’t (not doesn’t) genealogy do that? Is there a difference between these two in terms of the way in which they appropriate the ‘present’ and the ‘contemporary’ as significant, fraught, or meaningful (and hence in need of inquiry) for us? (This last is an attempt to retrive some of the questions that circulated in the ARC workshop.)
An aside: I don’t buy the Stevens article at all. There are lots of smart people out there who publish on Foucault but who have absolutely no idea what genealogy is. How do I know this? I ask them. Try it sometime, it can be fun. Just ask “Hey, what is genealogy, anyway?” You’ll get some of the dumbest answers from some of the smartest people. It’s really quite extraordinary. “Genealogy well it’s um kind of like history…”
Colin:
I wonder if we could work with a concrete example–self-interestedly, my project. I’m working with an instability, the book. (I’m calling it the “contemporary book” to suggest this instability.) From my “pre-research” so far, I believe I have identified, among a variety of disparate practices (all in one way or another “reworking” the book), a shared problem: put crudely, that the traditional book is closed and needs to be opened. Vague terms, perhaps, but the latter part–the stabilization of the book as an enclosure, which occurred over a couple centuries–has been well demonstrated by a generation or two of scholars, from Walter Ong in the 50s to Adrian Johns in the 90s.
So, how, in this case, where contingency is no way lacking and we are far from a stabilization, would might you see genealogy or a history of the present as useful in such a way that it would be privileged over another analytic?
Good. Specific examples help. You know more of this than I do. So tell me if the following seems broadly intelligible.
It seems to me that it could be very useful to trace the contingent and complex emergence of certain forms of cultural practice which helped condense or crystallize the book as a privileged form of cultural communication, information, and knowledge production. I take it this is what Ong et. al. have done. The important point is that this story of crystallization, to the extent that it is genealogical, will describe this process of emergence in a ‘many-vectored’ (cf. Hacking) way such that it can be recognized as a complex assemblage of a contingent intersection of different elements. (Not only Gutenberg, but also cheap paper and deforestation, and also the Protestant revolution, and also industrialization and urbanization and increasing rates of literacy, oh and also…, and so on.)
It seems to me that such a genealogy would produce among its yield a selective inventory of the various vectors of cultural practice which enabled the crystallization of the form of the book. If we turn our attention from the ‘present’ to the ‘contemporary’ so as to consider now the destabilization of the book, it seems as if genealogies of the aforementioned type (the genealogies themselves not my glib caricatures of them!) could helpfully provide many of the materials which we need to make sense of how a contingently formed construction is now undergoing a certain kind of reconstruction or destabilization plus restabilization.
This is just a sketch. Does it seem at all viable to you? I don’t know the specifics of this field enough to have much confidence, but I can say that this general procedure has proven useful (though surely this is self-congratulatory and so empty) in my own research on liberalism and the crystallization and unraveling of the public/private distinction. For me, however, it is not a matter of genealogy being “privileged over” another analytic but of genealogy being “useful alongside” other approaches.
This is what leads to my more general theme: are h of p and a of c necessarily opposed or can they be complementary? If opposed, in virtue of what? If complementary, in virtue of what? It seems to me that any complements that could be worked out should be situated vis-a-vis the ever-important questions of ’selectiveness’ and ’significance’: i.e., in virtue of what are certain elements in an inquiry selected as significant? This remains a question for me because I truly have no answer. But I would like to hear others’ answers.