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.
May 29, 2008
Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur
Whew. Pardon me while I blow the dust off this blog.
If anyone is still out there, let me herewith announce another ARC Working Paper: no 12, “Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur” which is by me, and is part of the project on nanotechnology. I’m keen to have any comments, suggestions, critiques etc… which can be posted here. please.
The initial animus for this paper was that I had written two long papers (soon to be published, I hope) detailing the work of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, and in particular the ways in which it sought to make itself more “responsible” (sometimes, more “ethical”) by making responsibility more doable (Added July 6: And in this project, I was accompanied with inestimable help by Elise McCarthy). There was a lot of vague talk about responsibility, and I don’t think anyone involved (except maybe me) has any stake in being philosophically precise about the term. However, it’s clear that whatever they mean when they talk about responsibility it is not the same thing as what we generally mean by “moral responsibility” today, and hence there is a kind of conceptual reconstruction underway here, mediated by the tools and technologies through which CBEN and others in nanotechnology are becoming more and more concerned with safety, and especially what CBEN scientists call “safety by design.” (If you want to read these papers, email me)
McKeon and Ricoeur are the only two 20th century philosophers I have found that have taken seriously an historical approach to the concept, locating its emergence in the late 18th c. and tracking the transformations in the debates about it. Thus, this paper is a reading of these two pieces with an eye towards reconstructing responsibility in the wake of contemporary “emerging sciences and technologies” and the ways in which they, so to speak, live in the ruins of the fact/value distinction. There are potential overlaps here with thinking about Ewald, Beck and and Stephen’s recent Economy and Society article, as well as on obvious opening to revisit our discussions about concept work, Dewey and Foucault…
January 30, 2008
Two By Two: Migrating ARC
You may notice some changes here at ARC. At a recent meeting in Berkeley, we decided to end the phase of our little experiment that began roughly a year ago. When we created a new website for ARC in December of 2006, the initial plan was to divide up conversations among several blogs, each with a different focus. That experiment had some success–especially at the Vital Systems Security Blog and the Biopower and the Contemporary blog, both of which have attracted a lot of discussion.
The other blogs (Concept Work, UC Berkeley Lab Notes, ARC News, and On The Assembly of Things), have all served different purposes, but we decided that in the interests of creating as much virtual coherence and focus as possible that we should flow all these turbulent streams into a few large tributaries. To wit, I have just merged all of the postings from these other blogs into Biopower and the Contemporary (all but the last, On the Assembly of Things, for which there are New Big Plans), which will serve henceforth as The Voice Of ARC–insofar as it has a voice, multiple, creative, and hopefully expanding.
As might be expected, any blog with the word “biopower” in it is likely to attract some attention, and it seemed to those of us (Paul, Stephen, Anthony, Andrew, Gaymon, Colin, and others) that we should take advantage of this. Hence, the discussions that Stephen, Tobias and Colin so helpfully initiated under the title of “Concept Work” will hopefully continue here, along side the more ephemeral updates and asides.
One housekeeping issue: I want to encourage everyone to use this forum to post things related to ARC and its many and various instantiations. For those of you who were posting at one of these various blogs, and want to continue to do so, contact me (ckelty@rice.edu) to update your account.
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.
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.