The Tendential, qu’est-ce que c’est? 
“The Tendential: Qu’est-ce que c’est? A response to JDF”
Paul Rabinow
Many thanks to Jim for his thoughtful opening and extension of this on-going discussion of anthropology.
Here are some initial responses.
1. What is the tendential?
2. What is fieldwork?
3. What is the distinctiveness of fieldwork-based, tendentially oriented, anthropology?
While waiting for Jim’s answers, here are a few more off the cuff responses.
(1)
* Observation: The use of concept is too broad and covers diverse things that should be specified and distinguished.
* Response: Yes. Beginning the work of specification should have a high priority.
(2)
* Observation: We want to refuse referential determination while maintaining referential functionality.
* Response: We are with Dewey on this one. We want our concepts to contribute to orientation, inquiry, and diagnosis (or assessment). Hence our use of concepts is ex-static = outward bound and in motion and eminently contestable. In some emergent cases, the concepts may not be determinative (either in a constructivist or realist sense) but may well be productive.
(3)
* Observation: The referential function aspires to realism as opposed to the statistician’s “best fit.” Or Giddens’ and Bourdieu’s truth functions which are tendential.
* Response: I don’t understand this. Bourdieu was adamant that he was referring to the way things are — his statistics corrected all the false determinism and abstraction of earlier Durkheimians. From Quetelet to Galton, the statistical is referential and captures things (objects of a specific sort). So, please explain this more. Jim’s disagreement with Collier over ideal types is relevant here. Weber’s repeated attempts to respond to his critics (available in translation) point to the difficulty about making stable and clear claims about the status of ideal types and “empirical reality.” Once we have more clarification on the tendential then perhaps we can engage further on this point.
(4)
* Observation: We confuse the distinctions between the general and the universal (and their pairs).
* Response: We are with Foucault on this (What is Enlightenment?) that the general is not the universal. On the other hand, Jim is absolutely helpful in calling for more specification of the seemingly disparate and diverse things whose functionality our concepts seek to orient us toward. So, let’s try Hacking’s very down to earth preface to his Historical Ontology. There he says “call me a historical ontologist or a dialectical realist” the labels don’t matter much as long as one is not a universalist.
(5)
* Observation: There is affect, polemic, and confusion about the distinctiveness of fieldwork. And its relation to the discipline of anthropology.
* Response: OK. Et-tu James?
(6)
* Observation: The key shift is in temporality. From the ethnographic present to the recent-past and near-future.
* Response: Yes. And hence from Geertz back is both set in motion as historical and diminishing in his pertinence today. And Malinowski-Maurer?
(7)
* Observation: What is distinctively anthropological is “real-time observation” and narration of that temporality.
* Response: That is part of the story. The problem is how much of that real time narration is about anthropos. Anthropos as that figure caught in its doubles or an anthropos emerging from those doubles and taking a different shape. This issue is unresolved. And while it requires real-time observation or at least close and adjacent observation and engagement - it can not be reduced to that.
(8)
* Observation: Too much rupture.
* Response: Not convinced that the discipline is the concept we need.
Topoi.
* If one is taking as one’s object “anthropos + logoi” then the place of serious speech acts to sanctioned speech acts needs more exploration. This refers to George’s theme that Rabinow’s work method can’t be applied to ordinary people.
* What is fieldwork? What was fieldwork? What should fieldwork be within the new temporality, positionality, and orientation?
* What is there in the discipline that is not residual or becoming so? And what use and abuse could one make of that residual-ness? Does it have a critical function? If so, please discuss?
* What is the tendential? What is its temporality? How do we know it? What is its relation to the ideal type? Or the Gedanken Bild?