September 28, 2009
Novelty, part deux
[I'm posting this anew, but it is in part a response to questions from Tobias and Anthony on the previous post.]
No sooner did I abandon this topic than I picked up Arendt’s The Human Condition, wherein there is, in chapter 6, an all too brief reflection on novelty (of precisely that form of philosophy of modernity that Tobias articulates as the main domain of this activity). The chapter announces that the three great events that define the character of the modern world are America (its discovery), the Reformation (and counter-reformation) and the telescope of Galileo. At this point Arendt says:
“The names we connect with them, Galileo Galilei and Martin Luther and the great seafarers, explorers and adventurers in the age of discovery, still belong to the premodern world. Moreover, the strange pathos of novelty, the almost violent insistence of nearly all the great authors, scientists and philosophers since the seventeenth century that they saw things never seen before, thought thoughts never thought before, can be found in none of them, not even in Galileo.”
There follows a footnote on novelty, the emergence of the term scienza nuova, a reference to Alexandre Koyre and a bit on the work of Karl Jaspers (from whom Arendt borrows the term “pathos of novelty”), specifically Japers’ essay on Descartes. Her basic point seems to be that these great events that characterize modernity are not continuous with the past, but nor is it possible to say that they occurred because Luther or Galileo or the seafarers were seeking something new. Rather they were ensconced in their own conceptual scheme (to foreshadow the likes of Kuhn and Davidson) in which novelty was not so important, but out of which emerged a new scheme with novelty as its key value. Nothing new about this, as we say.
Now, on the one hand, this is undoubtedly reassuring, to see novelty explicitly marked out as a value which radically increased in stature with the rise of modernity, modern philosophy and science, and around which we all turn with a faithfulness that we rarely question. On the other hand, it is a version of things that re-introduces an epochal break (a form of novelty about which we have been taught to be suspicious around here), and which Tobias very nicely articulated in his comment. Surely novelty is not itself new, and from here we can have a rich, but ultimately fruitless discussion about modernity and the philosophy of history.
So at this point I would echo Anthony’s comment on the previous post that there is reason to be careful about the referent of novelty–no novelty as such, but always the novelty of some thing. Novelty always modifies a claim. However, this requires more clarification, so let me propose this distinction:
1) the question of novelty as a claim about something: is it new or not? Can one define a set of parameters (a mode of veridiction, even) that allow novelty to be claimed convincingly in some cases and not others. Does this claim vary with the kinds of objects in play: art, scientific ‘discoveries’, corporate product design, fashion, political causes, etc.
2) the question of novelty as one value among others, and often the most important one: it is more important to be new than certain, true, effective, flourishy, just, human etc. Or to refine this, all other values are subordinated to novelty: it may be more effective, more just, more certain than something else, but we should value it because this makes it new. It strikes me that classical conservatism is the only stance that actively resists this version of novelty (i.e. “Just because something is new, doesn’t mean it is better.” See for example, “The Relentless Cult of Novelty” by Solzhenitsyn).
and related to this,
2a) the question of novelty as marker of priority, and a kind of bureacratic mechanism for managing the distribution of credit, resources and accolades or in the case of fraud, accusations. Novelty-as-firstness.
It strikes me that we anthropologists of the contemporary can safely hold hands, sing “If I Had a Hammer” and reject (1), in favor of emergence, or non-epochal thinking, or of difference and motion. I think there is a path out of that kind of obsessive concern with the new (and I do think assemblage-apparatus-problematization a useful starting place for that).
However, I think it is extremely difficult to reject (2) or (2a). We can be cynical about them; we can see them as a problem of “some kind of rhetoric of authority as well as entrepreneurship” (Paul’s comment); we can probably tie it to the economic and financial imperatives that drive knowledge production today; we can tie (2a) to the “university-ification” of culture (not the corporatization of the university), or perhaps to the “responsibilization” of individuals who must now all represent themselves as entrepreneurs, scientists, each with something new to offer. In any case, I would argue that (2) and (2a) are forms of novelty-as-experience which are central to self-fashioning in the contemporary. When there are perfectly recognizable reasons to do something–something that will enhance flourishing or justice or even certainty–and yet it is impossible to do so unless it can also be made new, preferably cutting edge, then this form of novelty (or whatever it is) is at work.
An interesting outcome of this distinction is that (2) and (2a) becomes a problem for (1). As novelty-as-value and the need for widespread priority-ranking comes to dominate the scale of values, when they become the primary route to advancement, funding, access to power especially in knowledge-production, but beyond it is well, then this means people begin to propose, and to accept, ever more claims and things as novel in the sense of (1).
Think, for instance, of the proliferation of journals in academia. Combine a publish-or-perish imperative with a novelty-as-key-value, and the system will burst if people cannot find outlets which both allow them to publish and stamp it with a seal of approval (“Now with more novelty!”), and so the number of journals is growing at an exponential rate today. Obviously, a great deal that is published today (that vast sea of ignorance) is not new in absolute terms, but only new to some community of scholars that read that journal (Or in the worst case, only new in order to promote careers). Differentiation of knowledge production between a high-culture of novelty and a low-culture of novelty (or perhaps a Royal and a Minor domain of novelty) thus seems possible, so long as the two don’t mingle. No longer does it seem so easy to denounce “pseudo-science” “bad science” or “alternative science” simply because there is an exponentially growing sea of grey areas between the royal science and the many minor sciences all around it.
So the claim that everything must be new is true only in the sense of (2) and (2a), not (1). It is clear, I think that everything cannot be new in the sense of (1), for whatever value of new. Novelty presumes ranking and priority. But that doesn’t stop everyone from claiming novelty, regardless of the absolute truth of the matter. It is a bit of a Monadology: everything is new to some person or group, from some perspective, each living in different logoi, or within various, partially overlapping modernities. Obviously the differentiating, de-massifying power of the internet is crucial to this dynamic. At the same time that a thousand journals flourish, the top 10 most-read and most cited journals begin to matter more than ever before.
Anthony asked: is it not possible to be attentive to changes in degree and changes in kind? To which I would say with respect to (1), it is absolutely possible. This is afterall, bread and butter to scientists who read only Kuhn: puzzle solving is new in degree, paradigms are new in kind. However, with respect to (2) or (2a), I think it much harder. Every infinitesimal change in degree is accorded the status of novelty, because that is so much more important than other values. Or at least, one can increase funding, prestige, attention only be claiming that a change is new, to which all other values are subordinated. It is new because it is better, it is new because it is greener, it is new because it is more responsible, etc. What would a change in kind look like in terms of (2) or (2a)?
Consider what Jaspers says of novelty:
In the days when philosophy was metaphysics, a thinker lived in an enduring whole. Content with the philosophia perrenis in which he believed, he did not distinguish between the old and the new in his thoughts, for all of them were rooted in the whole. He judged ideas not by their novelty but by their authenticity. (Essay on Descartes, p. 132)
The characteristic feature of modern science therefore (and Jaspers excludes philosophy from this search for novelty, Descartes’ New Method notwithstanding) is the image of rungs in an endless ladder. But what I think we see today is the endless proliferation of ladders, many of which cannot identify the ground they stand on, much less what they climb towards. Novelty, and the progress that is its justification, looks more like book-keeping from this perspective.
One last thing, Tobias’ example of plasticity of the brain and its neurons is a lively one. In that same last section of the Human Condition, Arendt goes on at length (in unashamedly epochal terms) about the way Descartes’ philosophy moved the Archimedean point from a place outside ourselves, even outside the earth, to the inside of our heads: “What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds, and this they cannot have in common strictly speaking (283)” Neuroscience would be the apotheosis of this movement, and plasticity the introduction of doubt into the very claim that we have in minds in common…. all we have now are computers in common, and just barely that.
September 3, 2009
Novelty as a problem and/or concept?
This is a not-completely-thought-through attempt to provoke continued conversation here. I’m in the middle of trying to finish a manuscript on Nanotechnology and Responsibility based on the work i’ve pursued amongst this group over the last few years. Among the concepts that has emerged for me that I cannot get rid of, but cannot think without is novelty–including all its variations such as innovation, creativity, the new and the fashionable. My attempt at reasoning through why this is important in my case is the following tagline/aphorism: “Making things new, making things safe, making a career.” Unraveled, the phrase is intended to capture the way that my subjects transformed the problem of environmental and biological properties of nanomaterials (e.g. their “safety”) into a kind of problem which other scientists and engineers experienced as novel. Novel enough to merit the kinds of accolades and approbation that supposedly drive scientists–it was an attempt not just to solve a problem, but to “make” their careers (at all levels, the grad students excitement about partcipation, the interdisciplinary invention of a new thing, and the classic senior scientists struggling for power and recognition for what they did).
But I am no longer sure what I mean by novelty. At one level, this is not just about conventional novelty in science, which is often treated as an unproblematic feature of scientific research–rather, it is about the effort necessary to make something unrecognizable into something novel. It’s not just one set of scientists that needs to see something as new, but an intersection or union of multiple sets. Safety was seen by most chemists, physicists, engineers in nano as something downstream, an uninteresting test after the real action is over. The story I tell is about making safety into something “novel” enough to transcend that image.
At another level, however, novelty is so pervasive and so important today that nearly everything counts as something new. I’ve started to wonder whether it would be possible to find anyone in science who was in fact not interested in making something new, and if such a creature could ever survive? This rise to prominence of novelty as the supervalue of values renders it unstable, both as a feature of working science, and as a concept for understanding what is happening. Is novelty being decoupled from power? Is it proliferating into a bureaucratic value like cleanliness or accuracy?
Finally, there is a philosophical angle to this concern. Concerning the cultural significance of nanotechnology (those conceptual interconnection of problems of Weberian fame), the question of novelty is in the background all the time. Weber’s Tolstoyish question “how shall we live” is rendered problematic today because the way we live is changing, and quickly by most accounts, with the knowledge and things we create. Old answers don’t apply, new double binds arise, paradoxes and dangers and uncertainties which, even in the best of cases, seem unanswerable in classic philosophical terms. The twist is the contemporary concern (obsession even) with novelty: both within science and engineering and outside of it, novelty has become the single most important cultural feature of knowledge production in our world. More important than lastingness, more important than certainty, more important than utility even, the race for novelty absolutely structures and determines the lives of scientists and engineers, as well as those who observe them (journalists, funders, regulators, anthropologists and philosophers). If novelty has become so important, then it gives a twist to that classic philosophical question: how should we live now? And now? And…. now? Like that annoying mobile phone salesperson who says “Can you hear me now?” the question can be asked over and over again. How should we answer this question when things seem to be changing so fast and so constantly? According to what temporality should the problem of novelty be rendered conceptually solid?
So two questions: 1) what is the conceptual locus of this problem? Are there other concepts (and/or texts) which form the horizon of the problem? 2) Is novelty as I’ve described it above, a problem that relates science and politics (or rationality and governmentality) in ways that need to be explored? Does novelty play as central a role in the security of vital systems or in the formation of police power as it does in the generation of scientific and engineering objects?
Update:: Okay maybe three, since I forgot to include the equally problematic concept of “emergence” and “emergent forms” which I do not think helps matters all that much. It shifts the problem away from the de novo creation of things to their recombination. This is useful as a first step, but I also think there is as much “emergence” out there (and as valued) as there is novelty.
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.
September 23, 2008
CFP for AAG: ‘Securing the Future’
n.b. this probably is more of interest to readers of VSS but I seem to not have post privileges over there.
CFP: Securing the future: the role of space in impending crises
AAG Las Vegas, March 22-7, 2009
Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)
There has been a noticeable shift in public policy across a range of sectors
from policy focussed on individual (or corporate) responsibility to a focus
on the ‘environment’ (imagined in various guises) as the cause of, and
potential solution to a range of social ills (e.g. obesity, drinking, crime,
terrorism, climate change, etc). Often focussed on (though not restricted
to) the ‘urban’, such policy uses a range of terms (space, environment,
context, etc.) to refer to the combination of spatial relations (social,
cultural, physical, political, economic etc.) deemed responsible for
impending crises. Similar to Foucault’s (2007) use of the term ‘Milieu’,
such ‘environments’ are seen as spaces of intervention and hence as spaces
of security as environments and populations are seen as mutually
constitutive (population understood as a multiplicity bound to the material
relations within which they live).
Thus, according to Foucault, using the example of the construction or
planning of towns as a form of social control, security can be
differentiated from discipline through its particular relationship with both
space and time: “Security will rely on a number of material givens. It
will, of course, work on site with the flows of water, islands, air and so
forth. Thus it works on a given…[which] will not be reconstructed to arrive
at a point of perfection, as in a disciplinary town. … The town will not
be conceived or planned according to a static perception, but will open onto
a future that is not exactly controllable. … The specific space of security
refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and
the uncertain, which have to be inserted into a given space†(2007 p.19-20).
Across the social sciences a range of work has also noted a fundamental
shift in the orientation to the future within recent policy (to pre-emption
and anticipatory governance) and accordingly the adoption of a broad range
of techniques (futures methodologies, multi-level modelling, scenario
planning, etc.) to capture and control future spaces. Such policies and
subsequent interventions (e.g. healthy / green towns) involve a range of
assumptions about the relationships between bodies, spaces, technologies,
natures, etc. which require further investigation. This call is therefore
for papers which explore the spatial and temporal relationships of policies
which claim the ability to secure the future.
Reference: Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at
the College de France 1977-78. Translated by Graham Burchell. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmilan
Papers may address (but are not limited to) the following issues in relation
to such policy:
The temporalities (habit, predictions, everydaylife) and spatialities of security;
The relationship between bodies and spaces;
Methodologies for capturing future spaces;
The role of different populations in securing the future (age, gender, ethnicity, etc);
The construction of urban natures/cultures;
Sites of impending crisis / intervention (city centres, towns, suburbs, etc);
The role of the environment / urban as an ameliorative device;
The construction of impending crises as a result of ‘urban’ spaces / environments;
The role of technologies;
Temporal and spatial aspects of mobilities;
Situating policy within place and time – attempts to apply models of success
from other places;
The conflation of different ‘crises’;
Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)
August 29, 2008
Latour and Foucault
We have been through this before, and I won’t open it up again. But having just written a review of Reassembling the Social – hopefully out soon in Contemporary Sociology – I thought the following was of interest.
As those who have read the book know, Reassembling is a very formal and methodological book. The key idea is that many social scientific concepts posit a reality behind and beyond observed phenomena; that they enable an unwarranted “acceleration” in analysis that does not, therefore, “pay the full price” for tracing associations. I thought, at the time of reading, that this was a pretty good phrase — “pay the full price.”
So lookie here in Birth of Biopolitics: In a discussion of “inflationary” critiques of the state (which he is criticizing), Foucault says the following: “The third factor, the third inflationary mechanism which seems to be characteristic of this type of analysis, is that it enables one to avoid paying the full price of reality and actuality inasmuch as, in the name of this dynamism of the state, something like a kinship or danger, something like the great fantasy of the paranoic and devouring state can always be found. To that extent, ultimately it hardly matters what one’s grasp of reality is or what profile of actuality reality presents. It is enough, through suspicion and, as Francois Ewald would say, ‘denunciation,’ to find something like the fantastical profile of the state and there is no longer any need to analyze actuality. The elision of actuality seems to me [to be] the third inflationary mechanism we find in this critique.”
I highly recommend this entire passage, which is found around pp. 187-189. It is a rippingly satisfying critique of much of what passes for critical theory today. Among other things, I would argue (and am trying to argue in something I am writing at the moment) that it is an implicit critique of Foucault’s own position at the end of Society Must Be Defended when he links biopolitics to the totalitarian experiences of the early 20th century. More on that soon, I hope.
June 1, 2008
Your Sunday Morning Foucault
I know, I’m a total sucker for this stuff, but just a few soaring lines (of both methodological and conceptual interest) from the newly released (in English) Birth of Biopolitics to remind ourselves (at least some of us) why we do this:
“If we want to analyze this absolutely fundamental phenomenon in the history of Western governmentality, this irruption of the market as a principle of veridication, we should simply establish the intelligibility of this process by describing some of the connections between the different phenomena I have just referred to. This would involve showing how it became possible – that is to say, not showing that it was necessary, which is a futile task anyway, nor showing that it is a possibility, one possibility in a determinate field of possibilities….Let’s say that what enables us to make reality intelligible is simply showing that it was possible; establishing the intelligibility of reality consists in showing its possibility. Speaking in general terms, let’s say that in this history of a jurisdictional and then veridictional market we have one of those innumerable intersections between jurisdiction and veridication that is undoubtedly a fundamental phenomenon in the history of the modern west.â€
January 18, 2008
Nano is officially not organic
“Following the precautionary approach, in line with organic principles, the Soil Association has banned manufactured nanoparticles as ingredients under our organic standards. We are the first organisation in the world to take regulatory action against the use of nanoparticles to safeguard the public. This initiative goes to the core of the organic movement’s values of protecting human health.”Â
The Guardian: Soil Association bans nanomaterials from organic products
January 16, 2008
History of Present and Anthropology of Contemporary
Following up from many recent discussions I was hoping to take up again the relation between a history of the present and an anthropology of the contemporary. Let’s begin with a few recent texts from amongst ARC participants:
“In this position [of an anthropology of contemporary] the challenge is not to make the present seem contingent, but situating ourselves among contemporary blockages and opportunities the challenge is to reformulate these blockages and opportunities as problems so as to make available a range of possible solutions” (Rabinow/Bennett, “Diagnostic”, p.8).
“In a contemporary situation where so much is already identified as contingent, there may not necessarily be a problem- space static enough to render contingent through, for instance, genealogical work… In a history of the present, something became a problem and through contestation eventually a stable response was formed. The stabilization can be reworked and inquired into in order to find those problematic sites prior to the stabilized response and how those particular responses were possible and under what conditions. In a contemporary mode the aim is to render a space of practices into a problem-space.” (Stavrianakis, “Paraskeue”, pp. 1-2).
I would like to dig a little bit further into the differentiation being proposed here in order to better discern its precise value and relevance, because I am still not entirely clear as to what the import of the distinction is myself. My concern stems from the thought that a history of the present can usefully function to do the kind of work that an anthropology of the contemporary is being taken up for.
Let’s begin with the point about contingency. I regard genealogy, perhaps somewhat against the grain of the best current scholarship, as an attempt not only to show that certain present practices are contingent, but more primarily as an attempt to describe how our present practices have contingently developed. There is at least one crucial difference between demonstrating that x is contingent and inquiring into how x has contingently formed. The latter inquiry can provide amongst its yield the conceptual and practical materials which we would need to transform present situations. Proving that the present is contingent implies that the present can be changed. Showing how the present has been contingently formed gives us materials for reworking the present. I understand Foucault to have been working on the latter (how) more than on the former (that).
If this is a useful way of understanding genealogy (and if we take genealogy to be a paradigm of the history of the present), then I think genealogy indeed offers resources for an anthropology of the contemporary, and is perhaps even an exeemplification of it. Or perhaps not. If not, the question is why not? If the mode of the contemporary concerns the emergence in the present of the practices providing the objects and problematizations we are inquiring into, then perhaps the history of the present does concern the emergence over the course of the past of these practices. But it seems to me that as Foucault took up, for instance, prisons his inquiry was also in part an attempt to specify the contemporary blockages and difficulties which are rendering prisons problematic in the present. A problematization for Foucault faced two ways: it functioned as a clarification of certain historical problematics that had stabilized in the past but it also function as an intensification of these problematics insofar as they continue to be sites of contestation and elaboration in the present.
So a few questions: Is genealogy as I am reading it indeed useful for an inquiry into the contemporary? Is there something that genealogy forces which the mode of the contemporary need avoid? One important remaining difference which I can discern is this: a genealogy is oriented toward taking up present problematizations in terms of their temporal velocity and historical directionality whilst an anthropology of the contemporary can be satisfied to inquire into problematizations without concern for the historical terms of their emergence. The present is a temporal notion whilst, perhaps, the contemporary is not. What is at stake in this distinction, though? And is it a distinction which ought to be pressed very far? If so, what are the advantages of taking it seriously? And what do we lose by taking it too seriously?
October 12, 2007
Emergence, Problematization, Reconstruction
Friends, I am posting a very inspiring and thought provoking text Colin Koopman has generously provided. As I mentioned last time, he has joined our little concept work committe and I hope that he will contribute many more texts!
I’ve been tossing around a few questions about the concept of emergence as a name for objects of a form of inquiry that locates itself through problematization (Foucault) and reconstruction (Dewey). I’ll first stake a claim (which is entirely debatable in my opinion) in order to be able to put these questions more directly. I’m hoping the questions are relevant to some of the inquiries taking place under the banner of ARC, but I suppose part of the motivation behind my asking them is to find out if these are the right kinds of questions which you all think need answering just now.
Emergence as Problematization and Reconstruction. Inquiries into emergence are best formulated not as theories of why the phenomena under scrutiny had to happen, but rather as concepts or conceptualizations which enable us to grasp the theoretical and practical forms (equipment?) that have contingently emerged. Emergence, that is, is best grasped through inquiries which demonstrate not the necessity of that which emerges but inquiries which grasp both the contingency of the emergent and the particular contingent forms emerging as complex assemblages.
One way of inquiring into emergence in this register of contingency is by way of a form of inquiry which conceptualizes the problematizations and reconstructions (colloq., the problems and solutions) which together enable the temporal-historical emergence of practices (complexes? singularities? sites? hybrids? assemblages? objects? x?). According to this form of inquiry (which could be genealogical, anthropological, or otherwise in its general orientation), complexes of practices are grasped as emergent responses to problems. (This emergence is best grasped as spiral rather than linear in nature: problems give rise to solutions which in turn fuel larger problems which in turn motivate larger solutions, and so on: complexes emerge in the form of reciprocally-developing structures of problematization and reconstruction.)
The Questions:
1. In what ways is inquiry into the emergent (as it is specified above) dependent on whether or not the inquiry concerns complexes which have emerged in the distant past or recent past versus those which are only just beginning to emerge in the near future? Does problematization and reconstruction take on a different character or quality if the emergent object of inquiry has already taken shape, has only recently taken shape, or is only just beginning to shape up?
One preliminary shot at this question is that it does make a difference insofar as two slightly different forms of inquiry, and attendant concepts employed in the inquiries, are likely to be relevant. In the case of objects of inquiry which have already emerged, one is more likely to track problematizations and reconstructions which have already congealed, however contingently. But in the case of objects of inquiry which are only just now emerging or have only very recently assumed any sort of solidity, it seems that problematization and reconstruction could in principle make some definite contribution to the final shape of the emergent object under scrutiny. It is in this sense that to problematize or reconstruct a practice that is only just now under way is not to leave the practice as it is (i.e., to practice positivist philosophy in the sense still urged by the later Wittgenstein) but is rather to change that practice in the very process of grasping it. My sense is that both Dewey and Foucault (my theoretical sources for reconstruction and problematization respectively) liked to think that their own work was of this latter sort in making a definite contribution to the objects of their inquiry—whether or not this is in fact the case can be debated.
2. Is the relation between problematization and reconstruction adequately and correctly elaborated? Is the relation between these two conceptions of inquiry best formulated as two phases of the work of thought? Or would it be better instead to insist that problematization and reconstruction are two very similar conceptions of the same broad practice of inquiry, though articulated in different theoretical registers? I am inclined to think that problematization leads into reconstruction which in turn leads into further problematization, namely the view that these are best viewed as two different phases of inquiry which we can piece together if we wish. I am led to this view largely by the observation that in the theoretical sources for each of these concepts it is difficult to find a usable specification of the form of inquiry elaborated by the other concept—that is to say, it is difficult to find a usable elaboration of reconstruction in Foucault (helpful remarks in some late interviews and in “What is Enlightenment?” notwithstanding) just as it is difficult to find any sophisticated conception of problematization in Dewey (though he is clear that reconstructive inquiry always begins with an indeterminate and problematic situation).<>
3. If conceptions of problematization and reconstruction enable us to grasp emergence, then how should we understand these conceptions as functioning? Are they to be put forward as characterizations for the way that thought always works (a theory of inquiry, as it were)? Or should they rather be postulated as concepts which help us grasp emergence from some particular perspective which we have chosen to assume? If the latter, that is if problematization and reconstruction are conceptual tools, then it may help to specify what purpose these tools are being fashioned for and to specify what other sorts of intellectual tools these contrast to. What other forms of inquiry are possible? What do these other forms hope to achieve? What do problematization and reconstruction hope to achieve, particularly as concerns emergence, that other forms of inquiry are not suited for?
September 23, 2007
Foucault’s Concept of Singularity
First of all: Sorry for the delay, which has been due to the simple fact that SJ Collier and I were too busy with our everyday jobs. Colin Koopmnan has joined our little committee on concept work and hence in future the three of us will try to coordinate the blog.
In our last exchange we discussed how to best depict our kind of inquiry (I am still somehow inclined to say ethnography or fieldwork). My initial effort to do so was to distinguish our kind of inquiry from theory driven kinds of research. One marker I used was “singularity.” The term is intriguing – I guess – for many of us. It promises to capture an ethos of relating to things – of taking them up – that is constitutive of our kind of research in its focus on the concrete, on the particular story or phenomenon that is emerging.
And yet, what “singularity” actually means, what its connotations and implications are is not quite clear. One way to approach the problem is to ask how others – who are somehow associated with it – use the term, e.g., Foucault. Read more »