EQUIPMENT: CONCEPT WORK
Equipment (paraskeuē), though conceptual in design and formulation, is pragmatic in use. Equipment composed of truth claims, affects and ethical orientations has historically taken different forms. It enables practical responses to changing conditions brought about by specific problems, events and general reconfigurations. For an anthropology of the contemporary a key equipmental challenge consists in fashioning repertoires of concepts that facilitate the practice of inquiry.
Re-problematization: Reconstruction
“Reconstruction can be nothing less than the work of developing, of forming, of producing (in the literal sense of that word) the intellectual instrumentalities which will progressively direct inquiry into the deeply and inclusively human – that is to say moral – facts of the present scene and situation.” -- John Dewey
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1. Whatever else Dewey means by “the deeply and inclusively human” it needs to be problematized.
2. “the work of developing, of forming, of producing (in the literal sense of that word) the intellectual instrumentalities”
We have been doing the work of designing, of developing, of forming, of producing conceptual tools and equipment here in ARC.
3. In order to be made active as a practice, this work needs to be produced and cared for collaboratively.
4. “progressively direct inquiry”
Inquiry is an ergon within a kairos characterized by discordancy aided by parakeue.
5. Dewey does not give any indication as to the subjectivation or subject position of the one capable of doing “nothing less than” reconstruction.
6. “facts of the present scene and situation”
For Dewey, a situation in the full sense does not exist independently of the need for inquiry. We translate that as determinations of the actual.
We argued previously that the capacity to contribute collaboratively to a reconstructed situation constituted a basic parameter of flourishing, which was the metric of our ethical engagement.
Today it seems clear that for anthropological about the actual flourishing is just as troubled as the deeply and inclusively human and perhaps for similar reasons.
Developing “intellectual instrumentalities”, tools derived from reflection designed to go about the analysis and synthesis of objects of thought and practice, is certainly what we have been committed to.
Initially, for Rabinow and Bennett, this involved the work of figuration, which had been a response to the initial demands from our nominal collaborators in the biosciences to justify our participation and collaboration along the lines of old divisions of labor.
The work of figuration itself did not resolve anything. Nor was it meant to. Rather, figuration took up the discursive claims of the biosciences today and proposed, on the basis of those claims, a figure that could orient inquiry. Inquiry then showed that this figure was not actual.
Actual figuration works for us at the object level not at the objective level: every milieu has figuration efforts, but it’s not one of our goals. Figures enter into our objective insofar as the efforts to produce them are discordant and so are available for inquiry as objects of anthropology.
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