August 9, 2009
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.
November 7, 2007
diagnostic of biopolitics note 2 – a collaborative note from Lyle and Anthony
So Lyle had a great insight relative to our conversation yesterday regarding the diagnostic and our argument relative to the reworking of the biopolitical. In October 2007, the Berkeley Human Practices Lab had a meeting at LBNL with scientists from the Keasling Lab and teleconferenced with the Endy Lab at MIT and the MIT Human Practices policy representative. In this discussion PR made a tripartite distinction between safety, security and preparedness. Some way through the presentation a certain nervousness (bizarrely) with precision in concepts was made apparent as one of the MIT folks, rehearsing a point made by a Swiss Science and Society policy wonk, suggested that there is no need to be precise about the distinction as in German safety and security are subsumed under the same term. This was echoed by others in the room wanting to know how these distinctions could be operationalized into first order deliverables. After the session, one of the postdocs came up to me and suggested that in biology, “precise†has technical meaning that is different from “accurateâ€. Precise means using the same method of measurement in all your experiments His point was to suggest that we need to be accurate, and not precise per se. I reply that statements about the world may turn out not to be accurate, but if your measurement methods (distinctions / metrics) are appropriate then you can remediate your statements about the world. By having an appropriate metric, you can mark distinctiveness as well as mark patterns.
The distinction between precision and accuracy can be usefully mapped onto our discussion about biopolitical equipment and the utility of the diagnostic. As we noted, the figure of biopolitical equipment in the diagnostic is not meant to be a claim about any actual object in the world. Rather, it is an ideal-type that enables the user to make distinctions and discover patterns with precision. By making this distinction, we can avoid the trap of endless debate about what biopolitics “really is†(and the proliferation of claims about this). Rather than arguing about whether the diagnostic represents biopolitics “in truth†or accurately, we can discuss whether it is appropriate to our materials. In this sense then we return to Jerome’s conundrum, how does one choose who gets put through the diagnostic machine? As he suggests, hopefully it is not just so as to make the diagnostic work, but rather that you can use the precision in distinctions in order to work over relations. The relations you are trying to describe do not exist within the diagnostic, as such this points us to the “outside†of the diagnsitic, where the distinctions made through the diagnostic can orient inquiry but cannot describe these relations as they exist outside of it.
April 14, 2007
Report on Syllabus Project Meeting 2
Amelia, Limor, Mattias, Alfred, and I met on April 11 to go over the original suggestions for the Anthropology of the Contemporary syllabus. I’ve summarized our discussion in the form of a skeletal syllabus. It was agreed that the syllabus shouldn’t focus on the conceptual issues of the anthropology of the contemporary as a mode of inquiry because that would be more of a graduate level undertaking. Rather, we felt it should focus on “problems.” Part One of the course would introduce the problem as a new approach with more theoretical readings, setting conceptual foundations. Part Two (Contemporary Problems) would focus on specific contemporary problems. Read more »
April 1, 2007
Syllabus Project Meeting
I’m proposing that we meet Wednesday, April 11, from 10 to 12, to discuss the selections that we’ve been compiling on the wiki. Can everyone come then?
Also, a reminder to add by Friday two potential readings for the syllabus on the syllabus project wiki page. Say why, and provide bibliographic information. Also, please add your schedule restrictions to the group calendar page on the wiki, if you have not already.
March 20, 2007
Syllabus Project — Steps 1 and 2
Further to my earlier post: a group of us met yesterday (those who could make the very short-notice meeting). Because we could decide only so much with a minority of us there and with limited time, it was decided that we would begin with readings and try to work then toward a structure, rather than begin with a structure and work toward the readings. Mattias has begun a wiki page on the ARC wiki, to which each of us need add two readings, with an explanation of why you think it should be included. Please include bibliographical information, and page numbers for your selections. Comments should be added through the “discussion” function of the wiki. You all might want to click “watch this page” on the syllabus project page so that you know when someone has added something. We already have three or four people’s suggestions (thanks to those folks).
Given this development, I’d like to suggest a new plan from the one above:
1. Everyone post his or her suggestions within the next few days.
2. Second face-to-face meeting will be the week after spring break (not the week of April 15). During this meeting, we will discuss structure again and then decide on our next step. For this meeting everyone should review everyone else’s suggestions and comment on them. We need to find a time when as many of us can come as possible. To that end, I’m proposing that we meet at my house for an “anthropological salon,” Friday, April 6, at 5:30. I live straight down College Avenue in Rockridge.
3. But, if that isn’t convenient, I’ve also made a “shared calendar” page on the wiki, which is no calendar but just a list of days of the week next to which I ask that everyone write the times they are always unavailable. From that we can determine in fact if there is any time when we are all free. I’m not sure there is!
Onward.
March 17, 2007
Syllabus Project
I think we need a project that will get us working together this term in a more formal way, since little energy is being generated on the blog (no blame intended). I propose that we begin to work on a syllabus for an upper-level undergraduate class on the anthropology of the contemporary—as has been discussed before. Paul intends to teach such a class in the spring of 2008. I see us proceeding as follows:
1. Have a face-to-face brainstorming meeting—preferably, before spring break—to discuss how we want to proceed, setting up a schedule, proposing (perhaps) an early structure, and (perhaps) assigning particular parts to particular people.
2. Proceed from there using the wiki both to work on the document, using the discussion function to go back and forth.
3. Have another face-to-face meeting during the week of April 15 in which we review our work.
4. Make a final draft by April 24.
5. Have a final meeting where we present the product of our labor to Paul and have a full meeting discussing it. Paul won’t participate until the final meeting.
A few things to keep in mind:
1. This isn’t Paul’s project, it’s ours. It’s an experiment in collaboration around something that we all have in common: thinking about what an anthropology of the contemporary might look like. We all have something unique to contribute based on our own projects conceived as anthropology of the contemporary, and we all have something to gain from it. Whether Paul uses the syllabus or not is not the point. It’s for us all to work together to confront an “anthropology of the contemporary.†How are we doing it? How would we teach it?–as if we were just told by Rosemary Joyce that there were a departmental crisis and we’d been called upon to put a class together, quick. Simply posting the syllabus on the ARC website could be another foreseeable final purpose of the project.
2. It will be very hard for anyone who doesn’t attend the initial face-to-face meeting to participate on the subsequent work, so we need to find a time when everyone can come. I know this is hard. I propose the following dates/times: tomorrow after Mattias’s brown bag (1:30); or Thursday at 4 p.m. If these times don’t work, suggest others. We may have to wait until after spring break, but let’s see what might be possible this week.
3. Finally, I know everyone’s busy but I also know that everyone’s busy with things that are directly relevant to this very subject. To that end, I think we could use Amelia’s field statement (which she posted last week) as a starting point. It contains a section on “the anthropology of the contemporary.†Let’s have it be our “starter.â€
Please reply with comments, confirmations, time suggestions, etc. I’ll take silence to mean you’re not interested in being involved.
February 14, 2007
A 290 Lecture Worth the Catering
The 290 series earned back a bit of respect this week with the lecture on Monday by Julian Richards, who is a specialist on digital archaeology (the subject of his talk) at Archaeology Data Service (ADS). ADS is a service in the UK that makes available, in various forms and via various portals, archaeological data on the Web. OK, it might sound boring, but the guy struck me as exceptionally knowledgeable, and he’s thoughtfully engaged in one aspect of what I would call the institutionalization of digital knowledge production. A specific intellectual. So I asked him if he thought these new digitial resources and capabilities were doing more than making life easier for archaeological researchers: Were they also allowing them to ask different questions? He gave me his “short answer”: Yes, because graduate students would save so much time being able to reuse previous data, and wouldn’t have to spend so much time laboriously amassing new data, they would be freed up to take on different questions. Now, Richards didn’t give me the long answer, but this much made me reflect back on fieldwork in socio-cultural. If we could reuse earlier researchers fieldnotes, where would that get us? If our time were freed up–whether the time we’d spend getting access or learning a language, what would that free us to do? Could we even imagine anthropologists sharing fieldnotes? Digital technology invites collaborations but, again, does contemporary knowledge production invite collaboration? Read more »