Biopower and the Contemporary

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 “accurate”. 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.

November 6, 2007

Use of the Diagnostic as Contemporary Equipment (or not)

I decided to move a conversation a couple of us have been having in casual interactions (cafes, hallways, shared google documents) to a forum where more people might be able to participate.

To recap, basically we have been trying to think about two things: 1) we’ve been trying to think through the utility–literally, is it useful?  for what?– of the diagnostic of equipmental platforms offered to us by Rabinow & Bennet; 2) I’ve been going around asserting that a) contemporary figures need to exist in relation to at least two other figures in order to combine its elements in a way appropriately called “contemporary” b) that third (contemporary) figure is more or less emergent–that is, in the process of formation– in many of our projects.

Specifically, Jerome has been concerned with the fact that it seems that, within the diagnostic, only certain kinds of things get taken up as important or as worthy of being used in the analysis (for example, it seems to be a requirement at least there there be some kind of problem to which somebody is trying to develop a more or less rational-in the sense of consistent–equipental response).  Additionally, he’s been wondering (please excuse by liberty in offering such a limited characterization, Jerome) how to account for the very selection process that occurs–how does he, or anyone, make judgements about what to talk about, what to group together, what to see as having affinities, etc.

At the same time as Jerome has been doing this questioning, Anthony has been provoking me with the assertion that, among his Eurocrats, there is neither an emergent third figure nor even any sense of a problem .

I’ll offer my response to the latter (Anthony) first, in that it leads back to the former (Jerome):  I would argue that Anthony’s Eurocrats aren’t operating in a contemporary mode (there’s not much contemporary about trench warfare, after all), so there should be no surprise that there’s no emergent third figure which is attempting to remediate a percieved problem.

To Jerome: Are only certain kinds of things taken up as interesting by the diagnostic out of the endless infinity of human possibility?  yes.  How is the decision as to which elements made?  I would argue that this is the question of “mode of ontology” (how are things taken up so as that they are able to be worked on?).  Inasmuch as the Diagnostic is itself an element of contemporary equipment, its proper mode of ontology–what it’s geared towards seeing and taking up as interesting–is the emergent.  Quite literally it is for seeing emergence.

These means, among other things, that it is not for everything or everybody.  There are modes of ontology for whih it would be inappropriate or useless.  For example, if one were some kind of monk living in a mountain valley in search of eternal or transcendental truths, the examples of (what we’ve decided to call) destinctiveness and patterning that the diagnostic allows us to see what be utterly meaningless.

So we’re moving towards some kind of answer to some of our general questions: Is the diagnostic usefull?  Only if what one is doing is some form of the anthropology of the contemporary.  What is it useful for? Among other things (yet to be named) identifying elements of destinctiveness and patterning between projects.

But Both Jerome and Anthon’y questions have led me to another question: (How) can one take up decidedly non-contemporary objects in the contemporary mode?

One could, for example, should that our ideal typical monks are in fact engaged in developing a sort of emergent equipmental platform that allows them to beter pursue their transcendental truths.  This fact would be of no concern to them.  Would such an analysis still be collaboration (the mode of composition appropriate to the contemporary)?  If so, we must refine what we mean by “collaboration”.  If not, can we say that the anthropology of the contemporary can only be used to understand itself?

May 4, 2007

Anthropological Collaboration & Writing Form

Just came across a new feature of the journal Ethnos, called “Anthropologists Are Talking” which has the following mission statement:

The aim of the series is to provide an alternative to the standard, single-authorarticle that academic journals generally publish in order to give spaceto a more dialogic kind of reflection. When they do not write, anthropologistsarguably spend much of their professional time (though perhaps not as muchas they might like) engaged in informal academic conversations, corridor talk,and debates with colleagues at seminars and conferences. ‘AnthropologistsAre Talking’ seeks to emulate these kinds of informal conversations in theconviction that they often turn out to be formative for the ideas that laterbecome the basis of our publications. The series is intended to explore theseinformal kinds of inspiration and knowledge production that otherwise rarelymake it into academic journals. The series does so by bringing together agroup of anthropologists and inviting them to talk candidly and spontaneouslyabout a contemporary issue of common concern to them.

Sounds quite similar to what we’ve been trying to do in our best moments in the Labinar.  This installment of AAT is a discussion about “anthropology after globalization” between Eric Hirsch, Bruce Kapferer, Emily Martin, and Anna Tsing

Read more »