Perhaps there is something like an historical ontology of novelty to be done… perhaps it is worth trying to articulate how that would differ from what Heidegger, Arendt, Jaspers, Habermas, Blumenberg and others already seem to have been engaged in under the label of a philosophy (historical ontology perhaps?) of modernity? Or more directly, can one disentangle novelty from modernity. Clearly an ontology of becoming is interested in how newness happens across all time and space… but a historical ontology of novelty might be interested only in how novelty emerged in the last 400 years as both a particular species of newness, and a chief value (verdiction/jurisdiction)… does that sound like what you are getting at? (And if it does, might it be a variant of modernity/alternative modernities/counter-modernities debate in anthropology and social theory?)

Kevin’s comment complicates this by introducing novelization as a process, such that whatever novelty-as-modernity is (in those german philosophers), it doesn’t really capture the ethical space of self-reflection, a space opened up by the contemporary diversity of ways in which things can be made new, and thus valuable to someone somewhere.

My Summary. There are at least two questions. There are veridictional questions about ‘novelty’ as an object in a field of practice or as a term in a discourse (How does novelty function as a truth claim?). There are jurisdicational questions about ‘novelty’ as a value in a field of practice, etc. (Is novelty a value? How is it taken as a value? Who takes it as such?).

My Question. Is there not still over and above this another family of questions (well, of course, there are many questions we can always ask, but a particularly important family of questions, let’s say)? Are there not also questions concerning what I want to call the “historical ontology”* of novelty? These questions concern how novelty comes into being, i.e. how novelty emerges, how it gets composed. This is, as I am thinking of it, a set of meta-questions which helps to coordinate veridicational, jurisdicational, etc. inquiries with one another. Analytics of veridiction and jurisdiction are two vectors along which novelty travels. It is in the intersection of these vectors (I am mixing metaphors) that novelty gains reality, solidity, being, etc..

*Note. “Historical ontology” seems worth keeping for me if only because “ontology of becoming” sounds obtuse and in any event I am not sure there is a big difference between Foucault and Deleuze on this point. Keeping “ontology” alone without a modifier is going to invite unnecessary confusion as well as unhelpful criticism from the people who really own that word.

on the subject of novelization… that’s a great way of making a connection I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate. Not just the novel as a book, which I’m certain one could develop a subterranean Serres-like set of connections to novelty in science, but also the idea of it being a process in which one opens up different spaces of ethical investigation. To claim novelty for something, like nanotechnology, is also to claim that it is good, in some vague jurisdictional sense. So there is the veridictional aspect (is it novel and by what criteria) and there is also the jursidicational aspect (by calling it new, we move it into the center of attention of what we should be doing).

There is another subterranean aspect to this, for me, which is the similarity to responsibility. Responsibility, like novelty, takes different forms. There is the Kantian form in which it is something categorical and universal, a kind of asymptote to which everyone must yearn and a standard against which we all compare ourselves. Then there is the crypto-utilitarian version (which I associate with Hume and Mill), in which responsibility is all and only about praise and blame. Praise and blame are empirical indicators of responsibility or its lapses. In the same way, novelty seems to have these two aspects: on the one hand a kantian version in which there is a concern with absolute novelty and emergence, and on the other a version in which novelty is about novelization–people engaging in work and rhetoric to raise something into a position of novelty vs. demoting it to something non-novel.

thanks so much for thinking through this.

ACT I

1) Not all of the terms/concepts Chris starts out with–novelty, innovation, new, creativity, fashion– are the same. I can but a kind of etymological link between new-novelty-innovation, but the others are most definitely not the same thing. Having said that, I find it important (and just) that the discussion quickly narrowed down to “novelty”.

2)I think the key moment for this narrowing was early in the first post: “Safety was seen by most chemists, physicists, engineers in nano as something downstream, an uninteresting test after the real action is over. The story I tell is about making safety into something “novel” enough to transcend that image.”

3) Most of the discussion from there has revolved around how to think about novelty as an object. But this framing suggests novelty is a process… novelization. it is a story to be told, a narrative formulated so as to illicit (emotional, financial, intellectual) investment.

4) This would suggest another, concurrent, intellectual geneaology to the one we’ve focused on so far: that dealing with the emergence of “the novel”–and here I’m talking about the book– as a historically situated narrative form which has served as the focal device for emotional and intellectual attention.

4b) Now this literature is huge, more than anyone can probably handle comprehensively, ranging from various “histories of the novel” through theories of dramatological social action through Writing Culture. One book that I’ve found helpful for my own work is “The Transfiguration of the Novel,” written by a student of Lukacs, which argues that Flaubert opened up a previously unavailable space of ethical exploration in L’education sentimentale by reconfiguring some of the classical elements of the heroic narrative.

5) If anyone is like me and feels like they have a less-than-masterful command of Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” I found a neat little resource at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~zuern/demo/heidegger/

ACT II

1) Having pointed towards where else the conversation *could* go, where the conversation *has* gone seems to me to have circled around two issues: First, novelty, as an object, is always also a relation–or better yet a set of relations. Having said that, novelty seems to be problematically–and here i mean that it causing us (and others) conceptual and practical problems in the Foucaultian sense–related to both modes of veridiction *and* modes of juridiction.

1b) I think Chris’ scientists, as well as the ready responses to which we are, in Colin’s awesome phrase “invited” as critics, illustrates the former set of relations pretty well. I think Chris, Colin, Paul & Anthony’s cautions that novelty–beyond its claims to truth, beyond whether or not such claims to novelty are truthful–functions as an arbiter of authority (of who gets grants and tenure) speaks to the latter.

1c) I think we’ve developed a rather sophisticated and powerful apparatus, thanks largely to Paul, to deal with novelty as veridiction. What’s been troubling us–and where we feel recourse only to snarkiness, I think–is thinking about juridiction… especially if, in doing so, we don’t want to lose sight of novelty as veridiction.

1d) But here where back to the Foucaultian conundrum of the problematic relationship between Truth and Power, albeit in a novel form (sorry, i couldn’t resist the pun).

2) Having said all that, in my own research on police reform in France, although there was plenty of change going on and plenty of argument about how to evaluate it, neither novelty nor innovation were the key terms. The question was whether Sarkozy was “moving things” and, if so, whether or not it was “too much,” “too fast” or “too far”. Difference in a field, a la Marking Time (as Tobias shows us).

2b) That is not to say that the question of novelty was not a powerful one in France at the time–I remember several arguments, in particular, about whether certain bands were doing anything “new” or “just re-doing [insert band name]“. And a lot depended on the answers there.

2c) the point is, however, that it was not operational within the field of police reform, as far as I can tell. Which probably should tell me something, but i’m not sure what.

1. yes, i start with novelty as it pertains to my nano researchers. I wouldn’t really be interested in it as a problem if it weren’t the case that I witnessed a set of questions and practices (the “safety” of nanomaterials) be transformed from uninteresting and non-scientific into interesting and scientific questions and practices. The shorthand for this is that they weren’t perceived as “new” before, but now they are.

2. What this reveals is that novelty-as-value is powerful. It says nothing about what makes something novel or not (it was a question of perception primarily). In fact, there are a bunch of people in my fieldwork who insist that the questions and practices I describe are not new, but have been dealt with by toxicologists, pharmaceutical companies and others long ago. This amounts to the same thing in reverse… these are not new questions and practices and so they are not interesting, they are no longer cutting edge science.

3. The result of this, I think, is that novelty-as-value is common across all of these groups (and many more). And in this respect, it seems to be primarily rhetorical. But it is not, since multiple definitions of what counts as new seem to coexist, and even proliferate. There is no single arbiter of the new, but this does not mean that anything goes. Newness is a common value, but the defining metrics (or modes of veridiction perhaps) of novelty are not common, but jarringly heterogenous. The lack of a common standard of novelty seems to introduce the possibility for innovation–novelty in the modes of verification of novelty.

4. I would not be surprised if I am coming at this the wrong way. Novelty as a term probably gets in the way of clear thinking. So I’m trying to keep the empirical origin in view here: the idea that what makes things in science interesting or significant is inextricably linked to those things being new. I reiterate what I said before, it seems impossible to imagine a creature who insists that something old and well-studied is nonetheless an interesting and significant scientific problem worthy of study (or funding). That seems impossible to me.

some other thoughts:

5. the “whole world” vs. “the world”. I think that what troubles me here is the confusion of “world” with “whole world”. Arendt’s book is very clearly focused, in chapter 6, on the alienation of this concept: we no longer have a world in common. So to say that “we” are (or could be) focused on looking at “the whole world” is pretty much meaningless. The alternative is not some specific “thing over here”. the alternative is asking what constitutes generality after the alienation of “the world” as horizon and background. In terms of novelty, this is what “endless ladders” is meant to provoke: a concern with the disappearance of a common world. That disappearance does not necessarily mean endless specificity; rather it simply opens the question of what a deeper commonality (a deeper universality?) consists in.

6. Finally, I guess I don’t yet get what adding “historical” to ontology buys anyone. One can be committed to an ontology of becoming, a la Deleuze, without needing the modifier “historical” but retaining the problematic of things coming into being. The philosophical tradition seems rich with debates about just this kind of question, so I don’t know (yet) what “historical” adds here. If it just refers to the marshalling of historical evidence in addition to argumentative reasoning, then I can go there, but if it means something more than that, I don’t get it.

The question (i.e., (#2)) about ‘values’ is obviously important. I just want to urge that there is another important question about ‘ontology’ for lack of a better word. This is a version of question (#1) which is meant to help us ask about how something comes into being (this is historical ontology). Maybe asking question (#1) presupposes some sort of confidence in novelty as a value (of the sort that question (#2) might interrogate). But is that a problem? Couldn’t these two sorts of inquiry inform one another? (My hunch is that you can’t ask one question without asking the other.)

You are right that Arendt & Heidegger were interested in the way in which, say, novelty or ‘technology’ or ‘standing reserve’ had become a condition of possibility for “the new modern world”. But is that what we (you? me? ARC? Foucault?) are inquiring into? Are we looking at “the world” (i.e., “the whole world”)? Or are we all looking at “this thing over here”? Anything we look at is in the world (tautologically). But the difference is between trying to see it all and just trying to see some selected portion thereof.

I guess in retrospect I’m not clear now if you want to interrogate ‘novelty’ as it pertains to your nano-researchers or if you want to understand ‘novelty’ as it pertains to we moderns. Or do you want to put the former in service of the latter? Or move from the latter to the former? Or…? (Maybe I’m missing the drift of the Arendt reference.)

The distinction between “is the world changing?” and “is this thing changing?” doesn’t makes sense if “the world” is objectified as a thing that can change… which is precisely what Arendt, Jaspers, Heidegger et. al. are after, a world-as-object which changes epochally–from an ancient one to a modern one… my reference to endless ladders is meant only to gesture towards something like the “logoi” that Paul opens Anthropos Today with… the diversity of rationalities governing life today.. Perhaps only some of those logoi are obsessed with novelty… perhaps only the snarky among us

As to Tobias’s provocation: I don’t see why “historical ontology” is an unfortunate phrase. The phrase calls forth an analytic whereby we grasp the objects of our reality as concretized stopping points caught up in and formed by a broader historical flow in which they are situated, from which they came together, and into which they will dissipate again one day. But the question “is the world really changing?” is a misleading one and one that no historical ontologist ought to take seriously (fortunately, no self-described historical ontologist I know of, e.g. neither Foucault nor Hacking, like to ask these sorts of questions). A better question would be “is this thing in the world really changing? how?” because that gives us a rather more precise object to focus our inquiry upon. Are punitive practices changing? Are psychiatric practices concerning certain forms of mental illness changing? Sometimes the answer will be “yes” and sometimes it will be “no”. As I see it, “the world itself is changing” is something of an empty metaphysical claim: it’s the sort of thing you can imagine arguments for on either side (I have heard plenty!) but it remains entirely unclear how one would ever broker such a perplexing ultra-philosophical debate.

I am of course just reiterating others’ claims that “no novelty as such, but only the novelty of some thing.”

I think Chris is right to suggest that we not ask question (1). But I worry that you move a little too quick here. Because there is something of interest to us (me?) that is close to question (1) and this is the question “how is it new?” which is related to the question of “how does it introduce different conditions of possibility for doing and thinking into the present?” It seems to me that this is a question we are all very much interested in.

Posing our inquiries in this way also helps us orient ourselves to the specific critical modality we might wish to assume. Chris, I am worried about your “endless proliferation of ladders” sentence (and a few others written in similar tone). I would be very cautious about taking any sort of anti-novelty stance (or even anything that sounds like it). It is too easy to quip about this sort of thing especially when our cases are drawn from the professional universe in which we all travel (we all know how silly academic publishing can be at times).

I say this because it seems like “novelty” as you are describing it might be so tightly wound up in the conditions of possibility structuring the contemporary (and the present) that it is something rather inescapable at the moment. So what critical function can we serve? Not denunciation of course! (Nor its contemporary twin, snarkiness!) We can seek to understand where these conditions came from, of what elements they are composed, and to what stresses they are susceptible. To denounce is beside the point and nobody is listening anyway. We might take as our example Foucault, who never said that ‘discipline’ was a bad thing even if this was the takeaway message for almost everyone who read him too quickly: discipline is a condition of who we are and so we would do well to understand the broader problematization by which it conditions us.