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Concept Work, A Response documents



James Faubion

I’ve finally got around to reading your exchanges on concept work and fieldwork and offer a few reactions and reflections that might keep the conversation going. The first is that “concept” strikes me as being too far-reaching a category to be of the best use, since it tends to encompass (in your exchanges, but also elsewhere) and so to suggest the effective sameness of such essentially general notions as that of “organization” or “assemblage” and such essentially non-generalizable notions as that of “vital systems security” or “risk society.” This confuses or at least makes more difficult to articulate the distinction that ARC is pressing between their intellectual labor and that of the production of theory  la Giddens.

Actually, I think it presses that distinction toward somewhat misleading and unhappy dichotomizations–but more on this slightly later. The appeal to “concept” as a blanket category also tends to encourage posing the question of the difference between “concept work” as ARC is putting forward and other modes of scientific-intellectual labor as the difference between particularization (or nominalism) and generalization (or universalism), which is logically too strong a way of formulating what is at issue–i.e., it is a formulation that entails more in the way of further commitments than it needs to or probably should entail. I think that it can appropriately be said as much of Giddens as of ARC that “concept work” consists in the fashioning of intellectual tools that serve a diacritical purpose. Giddens’ notion of the post-traditional serves just this purpose. Its difference from your own notions has to do with a second characteristic: it’s referential function. Like Dewey, you want to evade the referential determination of the truth-functionality of the claims you make with the notions you fashion, but you definitely seem to me to want to preserve the referential functionality of those same notions. That is to say, one of the criteria of the adequacy of notion-formation that guides you is the criterion of referential precision. Ideally, you want notions that correspond to or are as isomorphic as possible with the actual assemblages you’re encountering.

Perhaps your notions don’t stand or fall solely on the basis of whether or not they have this functionality, but they come fairly close to doing so if I’m not mistaken. This isn’t so with Giddens’ intellectual apparatus any more than it is so of Weber’s apparatus of ideal types or Bourdieu’s apparatus of such model-operators as “class.” I happen to think better of all these latter apparatus than Arc or George apparently does, but that’s not the point. The point is that none of the latter have been fashioned to have referential functionality as one of their primary criteria of adequacy. The function of the latter is “tendential,” not referential; they are pointers to trends–like the statistician’s line of best fit–rather than pointers to the actualities themselves. The issue is thus not–though at certain moments in your exchange, it sounds as if it is–that your “critical rectification” is not to be confused with mere “corroboration” or “verification” and so is not to be confused with what the (natural-)scientific theorist would be pursuing in testing his or her hypotheses. In fact, your concern with referential functionality allies you more with the natural scientist that you let on. The issue is rather that you depart from the (proper) theorist of any sort–natural- or social-scientific–in your secondary interest or even positive disinterest in the tendential, notionally or analytically. Yet this does not make you “particularists” as opposed to “generalists” (or universalists, better put).

Some of the notions you come up with–such as that of the assemblage–are in fact perfectly general. The scope and degree of the generalizability of some of the others you use is itself quite variable. “Concepts” come in all different sorts of shapes and sizes and your “concept work” is in fact exemplary of that diversity. You thus neither need nor would do altogether well to insist–as your rhetoric often suggests you’re doing–upon your “particularism” as against the “universalism” of “social theory.”

As I have tried to suggest above, the real distinction you’re seeking is a slightly different one. Your Aristotelian urge to “hold onto the phenomena,” your loyalty to the empirical realm, also suggests that you think that the various techniques of that method-that-is-not-one called fieldwork are a far more intrinsic dimension of critical rectification than your tone of resistance to fieldwork-as-method suggests. I’m inclined to agree with you that fieldwork should not be thought of as a method. Yet, I have to join George in pressing you on the distinctiveness of anthropological vs. other disciplinary modalities of fieldwork. I detect in your exchange less than ardor and perhaps some disagreement on whether or not the “concept work” that ARC does and the role of the techniques of empirical collection that are typically thought to be part of fieldwork merits consecration (or condemnation?) as anthropological. Yet, as what I’ve already said hints, I don’t think it’s enough simply to say, well, you’re not doing social theory, but if sociologists and political scientists of various sorts adopt precisely the same processes of critical rectification that you do–share your toolkit–then they’re as much anthropologists as you’re political scientists or sociologists and let that be an end to it. This seems to me to be a bit evasive, and what it evades is what makes critical rectificatrion and the techniques of fieldwork to which it has resort distinctively anthropological even when it is being done by someone in another discipline? (And conversely, what makes it distinctively unanthropological even when being done by an anthropologist?) I think you point to the outline of an answer to this question even if you avoid drawing the outline.

The first has to do with the temporality of research and its relation to the historicity of its primary object of study–the contemporary, and within it the assemblage. I recall in this vein Foucault’s argument in The Order of Things that the proliferation of the human disciplines in the nineteenth century hinges on the revelation of the multiplicity of historicity and that each discipline owes its distinctiveness as a discipline first and foremost to the distinctiveness of the historicity of its primary object/subject of investigation. The temporality proper to the anthropology of the primitive (and of the ethnographic “present” as its mode of expression) is in fact that of the infinitive; it is timeless. The anthropology of the contemporary is that of the (highly ungeneralizable) recent past-near future: the temporality not of the primitive nor of the modern and certainly not of the tendential system, nor for that matter of avant-guardist novelty, nor of journalistic newsworthiness, but still proximate (if you will) to that of the infinitive in its relative indefiniteness, for that is what the range between the recent past and the near future definitely is. So a good bit of what makes critical rectification anthropological is that it attends to a temporality distinctive of particular phenomena.

You suggest a further refinement of just this point when you’re characterizing something quite different–namely what separates assurantial reason from that of the scenarist of disaster. The latter has a must have an attachment to “real time.” The former is content–and must be–to be “archival.” I think the scenarist has his fellow traveler not in the insurance actuary but in the scenarist instead, precisely in his or her real-time attachment to and engagement with the phenomena under investigation, in the “being-there” of what is still the most obdurate dimension of anthropological-qua-”ethnographic” authority, even if there are no ethn ª left to graph. This is central to what continues, then, to make anthropology a discipline for which fieldwork–as real-time engagement–is of the essence. I don’t think this is the whole account of the anthropology-fieldwork relation. I think the rest has to come through a further development of the issue of what constitutes a significant problem of investigation, for surely what does so varies among the disciplines and not only for the reason that their temporal interface with the world is itself various. It also varies, I think, due to the inescapable connectedness of the determination of the (anthropological) significance of a problem in any time t with determinations of the (anthropological) significance of problems at times t-n. This is a matter not of the temporality of anthropological things but of the connection between the present of anthropology as a discipline with its past. This is a matter that you all–ARC and George included–seem to want to cast far, far more in terms of rupture than in terms of continuity–and in some, perhaps even many respects, that’s right. But it can also be misleading, at least to someone as inclined toward the tendential as I am myself. I throw the ball back into your courts.


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