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Anthony — This is terrific. A great topic to get us going again. Actually Andy and I just had a long conversation about the role of comparison.
Just a couple quick comments to amplify your initial framing rather than provide any “answers.”
First, the contrast you draw between Radcliffe-Brown’s comparison and the kind of analytical work that goes on in the “chart” exercises is very helpful. Of course, the point is that categories like “vital systems security” or “synthetic anthropos” do not correspond to “cases” in the sense that R-B (or most other social scientists) would talk about them. Your suggestion — which I agree with totally — is that we need to do more work in defining what they are, and how they relate to sites of inquiry.
Second, it might be helpful to think of how comparison does function in the kind of work we do. Thus, we might think of Foucault’s description of the torture and execution of a regicide versus the prison schedule, or the contrasts at the beginning of STP. These are, certainly, comparisons of a certain kind, meant to do a certain kind of work. But obviously the aim is not to reveal social structures of two “cases.” I like your proposal that it is part of a work of object-definition; or, part of a recursive process of inquiry that moves from site-specific work to concept-formation to reorientation to more site-specific work.
Part of the reason for writing about comparison is because it seems to be a basic component of the thesis I’m writing at the moment; I have been working in SynBERC and then did fieldwork in Switzerland through the Arizona CNS – STIR folks (http://cns.asu.edu/stir/), for those not familiar with it, it is a different effort at inquiry into the ‘social consequences’ of science, focused on changing habits of thought of those in the ‘midstream’ of work, i.e. Ph. D students and post-docs. Occasionally when I have spoken to other students about my work they assume that I am either comparing “Swiss” and “American” influences on science, or they think the comparison, given that I did work in two places, is between how one lab differs to another in terms of the techniques and goals. Now, it is certainly the case that place matters, and it is also the case that whatever else synthetic biology is, it is not ‘the same’ in all labs around the world. But the thing I am comparing is neither the lab nor the country as the object. Rather, to me, Berkeley and Basel and the science that occurred in these sites is a common pool of experiences to draw on relative to the comparison of two modes of taking up the problem of science and ethics. The problem, not surprisingly, determined what object is being compared, insofar as the problem produced the object formed by the inquiry, i.e. multiple (in this case two) possible responses to the breakdown or difficulty around the relation of science and ethics. But the issue regarding comparison becomes the following; If previously the purpose of comparison was knowledge of kinds, then, as I asked in the first post, what is the purpose of comparing objects which are not necessarily ‘kinds’? To put it another way, what is comparison when it is comparison of the multiple possible responses to a breakdown, i.e. a problem for thought and action. Relative to Stephen’s post, I think there are a number of terms which could help clarify the question of how comparison can function in anthropologies where forming, or figuring , the object is a recursive process in distinction to those in which generalized classifications is the goal: So relative to the latter aim, one term would be juxtaposition. This I think, and no doubt this is too superficial but for the purpose of a blog post should suffice, is something like what happens in the Order of Things where the ‘classical’ age, rendered as a striation of thought, is juxtaposed with the ‘modern’. This seems quite different to the ‘contrasts’ Stephen mentions in Security, Territory, Population, where elements are recombined in different arrangements producing a different way of thinking and governing bodies and populations. I have not spent enough time with the text, but if memory serves, these arrangements are less juxtaposed ‘kinds’ but rather contrasted as to how they operate differently in ‘situations’ where different configurations pertain. I know that PR and Lyle began speaking about this last week, where a contrast can be understood as something like a ratio, or a variation. What then a case is relative to this work of recombination or of juxtaposition is of course an interesting question; A first thought would be that there are not cases in juxtaposed objects, because what is juxtaposed, in OOT for example, is a norm, such that the materials serve to function as examples of the norms juxtaposed. A second, that there seems to be something deictic both about the activity of recombining elements, of pointing to ‘this’ object under ‘these’ conditions. Thirdly that given there are conceptual and historical/empirical poles to these objects, is the object itself the case or is the case the establishment of relations between objects? (I don’t necessarily want to open the ‘singularity’ can of worms, but it seems relevant).
Very interesting posts! I am back in Byfield, but I fear my head may still be in exam world, so excuse the references to anthropology’s history.
Weber argues that in order to investigate a research object, a ‘historical individual’ like the spirit of capitalism, it is necessary to employ heuristic comparisons. Only with comparison can one determine significance (both ‘adequate causality’ and meaningful value). But not everything can be a historical individual: for example, in the World Religions Project, China is a heuristic ideal-type that helps us to understand the singularity of modern capitalism, but doesn’t help us understand much about China. A misreading of Religion of China, I believe, is to treat as an autonomous work, one which could ground an area-studies type knowledge of China (or to critique it for its ‘mistakes’ in these terms). The question for us today I think is: Can we employ heuristic comparison in order to recognize significance while also treating each of the compared elements as individuals? And without letting the relation of difference overdetermine the content of each element (as in much work on ‘China’ and ‘the West’, e.g. Francis Hsu)?
One way to address the different modes of comparison (classification, variation) is to think of them as different responses to a ‘synoptic’ problem. As we discussed in seminar this spring, Canguilhem describes his essay “The living and its mileu” as a synoptic investigation into the meaning and value of the concept ‘mileu’. Synoptics basically means ‘seeing together’, and the synoptic question is, how can we see things that have both similarities and differences ‘together’? We found that ‘synoptics’ developed in 18th and 19th century biblical studies concerned with identifying the relationship between the three canonical gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Because of apparent similarities in the texts, but obvious differences as well, the synoptic problem was concerned with identifying the form of this interrelationship and how this interrelationship came to be. In biblical studies, this has largely focused on a question of historical development: who came first, what developed out of what, etc. In the nineteenth century, this approach played a significant role in the foundations of British evolutionary anthropology, either through the medium of Darwin or, I suspect, directly (as there were many close relationships between religious scholars and anthropologists at the time, cf. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger). So we can develop a brief geneaology of approaches to the synoptic problem in anthropology.
1) evolution: Apparent differences in ‘man’ can be understood as stages in a single evolutionary process. Much like the biblical scholarship (or Darwin) that moves from an analysis of similarity and difference of existing texts (fossils, organisms) toward a postulation of developmental relation.
2) comparison: By the turn of the twentieth century, evolutionary anthropology was under deep attack for its presumtion that ‘primitives’ were somehow earlier in developmental time. One response was a functionalist one, which basically separated out the idea of function from evolutionary explanation (although in biology, the two were closely tied together, cf. Anthony Giddens “functionalism apres la lutte” for discussion of this separation). The result was the creation of cultural wholes in which institutions were analyzed for their internal function. A second mode of comparison at this time would be Boasian, which presumed a common human condition with diverse solutions; often this was taken as a common biological substrate with historically particular cultural solutions.
3) classification: Radcliffe-Brown’s project of classifying cultures into ‘kinds’ based on abstractable cultural elements (kinship, etc.) seems one step beyond the kind of simple comparison of two cultural wholes or two functions described in (2).
3) variation: With the word variation, Levi-Strauss is the first thing that comes to mind. As he discusses at the beginning of the book Totemism, his project involves moving from a comparison of genetic differences to an analysis of logical variations. “Totemism does not constitute a phenomenon sui generis but a specific instance in the general field of relations between man and the objects of his natural environment” (29). As he writes elsewhere, the goal of anthropology is to assemble these variations into a system of differences that will enable the discovery of general invariant properties. But the discovered universal invariants “will bear no relation to any idea of general humanity one may have formed in advance” (247). Moreover, if we think of variation in the musical sense (for example, Mozart’s ‘Twelve Variations on ‘Ah vous dirai-je, Maman’”: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/K265_%28Ah_vous_dirai-je%2C_Maman%29.mid) then it is clear that the significance of the work is not in any particular variation, or the difference between two variations, but comes from the whole of the variations together. Levi-Strauss was not interested in the content of any particular cultural code, but in the “message” communicated by all of the variations together. In addition, each variation is characterized not by its singular content but by the ‘transformation’ that it effects on the theme or on other variations.
I am not sure where to take this in terms of an anthropology of the contemporary. I detected a hinted reference to Weber’s definition of a science in Anthony’s selected quote from Radcliffe-Brown. R-B believes that anthropology’s purpose is to classify, and significance derives from the “mathematical’ properties of a class which is made up of the “actual interconnections of spatio-temporal elements” in social systems”. For an anthropology of the contemporary, perhaps we can say it is not the comparison of actual things but the conceptual comparison of problems that is the task. The synoptic problem then is not to understand the interrelationship of actual differences internal to the ‘unity’ of man, as it was for most anthropology, but, as Anthony put it, “the multiple possible responses to a breakdown”. But if the analysis of this variation is to be more than a description of differences, we must be able to turn differences into what Weber called a conceptual whole, to see them synoptically. The work of reconstruction?
The issues here can also be thought about in terms of experiment design, which might be a useful thought game, even if it breaks down part of the way in. The Swiss lab and the US lab are two populations in your experiment, and you’re not trying to describe those populations, although of course their characteristics are relevant and you’ll want to see if your findings do or don’t map onto each. (The way biology deals with the fact they will be different, but those differences are not the point of a given experiment, is by using the same lines of cells, or yeast or mice. So much is known already that the scientist can focus on testing specific things. So in anthropology you are not going to know those differences, and you’re hypothesizing that they are not the interesting ones, not for your questions, but you have to pick up some notion of them along the way). As I understand it, you are looking at how modes of taking up science and ethics are responses to breakdown, but these modes don’t map onto the two populations, rather they both exhibit the “behaviors” (thought and action) under study and happen to be the two you choose. So you can convincingly argue that in fact you need both for your experiment.
But that’s not the point of your experiment, which in trying to design, a difficult question must have been, how to choose the variables? ie what exactly do you look at in the multiple possible responses to breakdown, because how do you know what will be significant? Since there is no predetermined set, we want to somehow choose variables that are significant compiled instances of that which composes them, and which can be put together in such a way that we see relations between them. To be clear, if we think about this terms of a chart, I mean the categories in a chart; what Stephen mentions, “vital systems security” or “synthetic anthropos,” are to me the objects composed by the chart. (Are they cases? They can be but aren’t necessarily, other objects can be composed I think.) A question for Anthony, how did you decide upon two modes (how do you know two, how do you know modes)?
The conceptual interconnections of problems define the scope of the various sciences, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t interested in the actual connections between things. Isn’t the recursive movement more of a triangulation, between our observations of things (and their actual connections), others’ observations of things, and the conceptual categories we use to order them, analytically and synthetically?
If “juxtaposition operates like a single scale, where all otherness is understood as of the same order” (Rabinow and Dreyfus i think, but I don’t have the reference on hand), then the aim of the charts is to have analytical categories such that different “figures” (maybe sometimes modes, regimes, whatever the object) can be chopped up and like-pieces juxtaposed, and contrasted. I think that the categories themselves are designed to capture slices that are of the same order. The charts are meant to make it so that in a precisely limited way, we compare kinds. This is experimental design, trying to set it up so that variables can be specifically tested, the difference or sameness clearly pointed to. But we are contrasting across categories, and here I am unsure, if what is contrasted is best described as variations. I guess it depends on if the categories are tightly constructed. Then the compilation of the different categories and the relations between them (which could be understood to compose another category but seem more amenable to prose than additionally layered categorization) compose the object. In the comparison, two objects are created, three if you count the relation between them. I don’t think the objects have to be of the same order; I think we can’t very well tell in the act of composing them. I feel I am guessing when i start this kind of exercise, and sometimes half way through realize my “objects” are wrong.
If by juxtaposing enough contrastable elements, the figures that are generated are thereby comparable, does that tautology discredit the comparison? If they are to be compared to objects not composed this way, does the exercise need to be done again? With the set of comparisons done, the variations and the relations between them would form the conceptual whole–clearly not an actual whole–but maybe whole in the sense that additional comparisons, with their work of (re)composing the object could be done more easily, so that the other variations (other reponses to breakdown) could be related. Maybe we can propose shared distinctions for juxtapose, contrast, comparison, variation.
What are some of the categories we’ve been using? The ontological mode, the conditions of emergence, the tecnopolitical intervention, the institutions and actors, the mode of jurisdiction and veridiction, the ethical stance, the target of intervention? We are deciding what is significant already in choosing them. As Lyle wrote, “significance of the work is not in any particular variation, or the difference between two variations, but comes from the whole of the variations together.” So for Levi Strauss that significance was the revelation of general invariable properties, and that is not what we’re after, but still, he’s claiming it generally to be significant.
Additional notes: I keep meaning to read this essay of Luhmann’s on cases http://www.jstor.org/stable/201859. Marilyn Strathern also raises questions of juxtaposing and comparison in Partial Connections; she tries out fractals as a way to think about comparison, not for comparisons to reveal truths of ontological kinds, but to keep in check a tendency to correlate whole and complex, in contrast to partial and simple (which she points out is wrong since “complexity replicates itself in scale of detail”).
Many thanks Meg, I’ll try and respond directly to your question:
Instead of ’variables’ each mode has a different way of looking at the parameters and metrics of ‘thought and action’ in the relation of participants to observers. The question of significance was put into view by looking at how parameters and metrics can be inquired into given the suppositions of each mode. I think this is the main reason why experimental design in biology breaks down as an analogy, in biological experimentation the problem is ultimately gets rendered only on the object side of the relation with the corresponding epistemological confidence that experimentation is adequate as a means to know reality. Obviously, anthropology is an existential discipline, the problem is ‘felt’ to one degree or another, no big news there. But the point then is that that in my situation this ‘feeling’, which points to a breakdown, is about the ethical indetermination which accompanies this epistemological confidence. Now this is not only my ‘feeling’, but is also an ‘affect’, why else would there be so much institutional weight and funding around generating ethical speech acts in relation to emerging technologies. In this regard I was part of Human Practices, which Paul and Gaymon had been explicit from the outset in contrasting with “mode 2” science and society projects which sought to respond to this indetermination through ‘representation’ of ‘values’. I then had the opportunity to work with another group, similarly responding to this breakdown but with a very different understanding of how to pay attention to the parameters of this epistemological confidence in order to respond to this ethical indetermination. With some trepidation I think the ‘heresy’ here relative to anthropology lies in the effects of not only arraying these responses, but practicing them.