August 9, 2009
Concept Work: “Vital”
Over the past few years Andy and I have been trying to find appropriate terms to describe a distinctive diagram of power that is concerned with the vulnerability of transportation and energy infrastructures, public health apparatuses, and webs of industrial production, to unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events. The diagram draws together diverse techniques and practices, such as vulnerability assessment, simulation, cataloguing of resources, enactment, and preparedness planning, according to a normative rationality or strategic logic. We have provisionally used the term “vital systems” to refer to the central object of knowledge and target of intervention of this diagram of power. We see this diagram as distinct from – but related to – the problematic of the “population” central to apparatuses of security that Foucault described in Security, Territory, Population. The term “vital” is valuable in pointing to this relation, but our use needs further elaboration. It is frequently used by first-order observers in the domains we are examining, but is slippery: laden with associations both wanted and unwanted. So, in the interest of advancing conceptual work on the vital I wanted to open a discussion by: first, indicating how the observers in the fields we have been examining use it; second, outlining potential problems it raises; third, through reference to Sloterdijk’s use of the concept of “the vital” in Terror from the Air on which Paul has posted recently (here, here, and here), pointing to a possible “mutation of the vital” that accompanies the emergence of the diagram of power we are describing.
Read more after the jump.
Concept Work
After some discussions in Berkeley, Paul, Gaymon and I have agreed that the time is right to try to reinvigorate concept work on this blog (whose named has been changed accordingly). Those who have been associated with ARC for some time know that it has long been our goal to make more explicit and assign credit for kinds of intellectual work that do not fall into the usual genres of production for journal articles and books. Among these, work on concepts is crucial, since concept development is both the precondition and the outcome of successful inquiry.
We will proceed by choosing selected concepts that have emerged out of our current projects on topics such as domestic preparedness in the United States, synthetic biology, ethics, and so on. We are particularly interested in the way that concepts emerge from a certain field of inquiry, in the work that is done to formulate them, and in the way that they are then extended to have more general meaning and use. We will try to maintain a regular schedule of posting – about one per month – that we hope will spur serious exchange and critical discussion, and that will aim to improve our collective work on and use of concepts. Each post will be associated with a text that is of general interest (in other words, one that is not necessarily tied to a given topic of inquiry). If the exchanges prove fruitful, we will turn them into more stable documents that can be transferred to the appropriate area of the web site.
The initial post will be on a concept that Andy and I have been thinking about in our work on domestic preparedness in the United States: the “vital” in “vital systems.” In about a month Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett will post on “political spirituality.” Although we have ideas for a number of posts after that, we invite your suggestions on future directions.
We thank you, in advance, for your participation in this new initiative.