Foucault, in What is Enlightenment?, works to connect critical knowledge production with reflections on history. In the “attitude of modernity” that accepts the constant remaking of the self there is a difference between today and the past, and this difference is justification in itself to pursue knowledge. He finds that critique is necessary because “its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped.”(4) But how is this critical practice related to what we call “Theory” today?
In the same way that Foucault seeks a genealogy of history, one could attempt a genealogy of theory that traces its assumptions and its relationship to the subject-scholar, and to the relationship between its practice and the production of knowledge. As with critiques of history, critique of theory typically included the certain points:
(1) Theory is ahistorical and cannot account for, and in fact hides, fundamental change over time.
(2) Theory works on the assumption that a universal or system-wide means of explanation is possible.
(3) Theory is reductionist, reducing the specificity of things to generalities (see the general v. the universal) and representing as equal things that are not similar in type or existing in the same “space.”
(4) Theory confuses the “the object that is to be explained with the concept that is providing the explanation”(Rees).
(5) Theory is subjective, in the sense that it relies too heavily on individuals’ “value judgments.”
In a 2011 debate between the anthropologists Tobias Rees and Dominic Boyer played out in Dialectical Anthropology, Rees accuses Boyer of being a “theory lover,” accusing him of the above sins after Boyer’s impassioned call to revive theory in anthropology. Rees sets up an opposition between those who pursue resolution (harmony) and those who pursue/are comfortable with the unresolved, discordant. According to him, fieldwork, not theory or history, is the key knowledge producing practice that “leads beyond the horizon of the known.”
Rees’ prescription for action in the present is just one alternative to theory, since the critique of theory disrupts existing means of structuring knowledge without a clear indication of a single new direction. Foucault’s take is that “criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves as subject of what we are doing, thinking, saying.” (What is Enlightenment? p8)
Questioning the making history in a traditional sense requires examining several qualities of historic work.
(1) The “sacred origins” fetishized by historians must be uprooted since any search for authentic beginnings its flawed due to the privileging of one instance as having more explanatory power and in that way resorts to a metaphysical process. Foucault points to the fact that in place of origin, one will find always complexity and contradiction (79).
(2) One must question the teleological progress most history makes as it plots its way towards an assumed-understood culmination point, what Foucault calls a “monotonous finality”(Nietzsche, Genealogy, History).
(3) First is the idea that history is written from the “outside” and its authors are not subjects to the forces that they describe.
According to Foucault in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, the purpose of the study of the past is to introduce discordance into the present and into our present selves. “This,” he says, “is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting”(88).
He defines three Modalities of History corresponding loosely to the above critiques in an attempt to diagnose the direction relations between past and present must take.
(1) Parodic/Farcical – against history as reality, history is not recognition
(2) Dissociative – against identity (singular and with origin), against history as continuity, history is not representation of tradition
(3) Sacrificial (of the Subject of Knowledge), against history as truth, history is not knowledge (which rests upon injustice)
These lead to the next section on Theory and its limits in that theory is normally seen as relating reality, subjects and knowledge production in some kind of systematic way.
“Whereas examples function to illustrate theory, cases are specific while also having ramifying analogical relations to other cases. The significance of a case turns neither on its singularity nor on its universality. Rather, it turns on a productive relation between the necessity of taking into account the particularity of a given case as well as the relevant metric that specified that case and directs inquiry to pursue a series of analogical cases.”
A case is not a specification of a norm, hence it is not an example. A case is deictic, it is the specificity of this case. However, a case is not a “singularity”. The interest and force of case is never due to its completely exceptional source or circumstances. As such the case cannot be the norm of its own truth, it must produce a relation.
The measure of a case will be a path of generalization whereby the truth of a case can be measured against another case. But how? What is the measure of a relation where the relation is analogical rather than formal logic?
“The name objects will be reserved for subject-matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry; proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry.” — John Dewey, Logic: A Theory of Inquiry
We paused on the question of “who” and the problematization of subjectivity and truth, or the relation between an ethical relation of a subject to itself, the governance of others and truth-knowledge. This was supposed to be propaedeutic to the question of what the object of knowledge is, and after our detour via this problematization, we can ask, what is an object of such a problematization; how can fieldwork produce knowledge of such an object? What is the relation to anthropology?
Much (if not all?) anthropological inquiry, even historical anthropology, begins in the medium and experience of the present. Many of the problems of this present concern things which are inchoate, in formation, in media res. Whilst rendering an inchoate present contingent is tautological (and one might add not inquiry), certain characterstics of genealogy are of aide to the one who seeks to give some determined outline to the form of the problems which are in formation.
Rabinow and Bennett have written of “pathways” that, operating under a genealogical metric of veridiction, a pathway functions to orient inquiry. It picks out and connects elements in a heterogeneous and dynamic contemporary problem space.It consists of parameters whose function is focus attention on problems, indeterminacy, discordancy, events (episodes) and ramifications. Unlike a recursive series of categories in a diagnostic whose logic and form is analytic, a pathway genealogically reduces historical complexity to a path-connected set of nodes.
Pathways are thus a minor innovation designed to work backwards so as to prepare an intervention in and observation of (Betrachtung) the near future. The backwards motion consists in having the equipment to see how an object was given a particular form as a response to a particular problem. The forward motion is to be able to curate this knowledge and determination into narratives and assemblages which are capable of opening up significant new points of view.
“Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary.” –Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History
What does it document? “invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys” and with this records the “singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality.”
So, what does genealogy do? It destroys the primacy of origins and of unchanging truths. In a genealogy, there is also no “subject” moving history. There is however a ‘space’ constituted by interrelations of knowledge, power, techniques in which subjects and objects occur. This space is constituted by particular sites where rituals of power take place.
For example, what is Discipline and Punish a genealogy of? It involves institutions but is not reducible to institutions: Institutions operate through mechanisms which instantiate a physics of power. Foucault is showing these mechanisms and is describing these relations of power.
To be a subject of knowledge is also to be an object of knowledge, meaning that all efforts to know are enmeshed in relations of domination. Power requires a field of knowledge in which to operate. Knowledge, requires a subject and object of knowledge, which involves a relation of power. One cannot analyze these relations relative to a subject who is either free or not free: relative to power, the subject who knows, the object that is known and the way of knowing are the effects of historical changes in the relations of power and knowledge. Why study psychiatry or the prisons? Because their status as knowledge is less secure and their effects on subjects more visible (Cf. Truth and Power.)
“Writing the history of the present”, begins with a diagnosis, how did we get to this situation where a specific mechanism of power functions the way it does?
History of the Present works by isolating the central components of political technologies and traces them back in time, but does not get “back to the Present”, or the Future.
Limits: Assemblage as Philosophy
As an equipment of social science, the assemblage has clearly been useful to locate, situate, and determine the domain of phenomena that gives rise to objects in the contemporary. However, the John Phillips notes a problem of translation: assemblage in English is a poor approximation of the French agencement in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. He shows thatassemblage has a similar meaning in both French and English vernacular: “a collection of things,” for example, in art theory, the collage or pastiche of avant-garde or postmodern.Agencement in French is closer to “‘arrangement,’ ‘fitting’ or ‘fixing’” and implies a “specific connection” of concepts, where the “arrangement of these connections that gives the concepts their sense” (108). What is missed, then, is the coming-to-being, or state-of-becoming, that brings forth a concept (or “object”). The object is hereby elusive, continuously reconfigured. There is no inquirer who can know an object, only arrangements and connections. The notion of assemblage could be useful, says Phillips, “were it not for the tendency of discourses of knowledge to operate as statements about states of affairs” (109).
In my work, which examines contemporary architectural practice the discourses surrounding architects own thinking on why and how they should work, questioning the object(s) and modes of inquiry is useful.
I recently read, Magali Sarfatti Larson’s book Behind the Postmodern Facade, which uses anthropological and literary methods to explain change in the profession of architecture in the late 20th-Century, with particular focus on “post-modernism,” its protagonist and its justifications. Larson, makes a distinction between the discursive work of architects and the practice of building, being careful to articulate the ideological link between the two, in that “real” architects must build buildings. In this distinction she poses the tension between architectures discursive autonomy (those outside the profession rarely understand its logics) and the fundamental heterogeneity that results from a reliance on clients, institutions and economic conditions to realize the “real” architecture. She goes on to highlight how, like all professions, architects work to justify their existence through claims of special expertise and to guard this domain of knowledge carefully.
We left the organization in June of this year, deciding that for ethical, political and scientific reasons it was time to leave the field. Not least in our decision was the fact that our collaborative mandate from the NSF was entirely ignored by the biologists with whom we were supposed to work. For the duration of our tenure we were on the receiving end of what amounted to domination as to what were legitimate and illegitimate ethical and political problems which deserve scientist’s time (not surprisingly patent law is high on the list and security problems low). We had tried to introduce a different relation of knowledge and care: We needed to make objects, through pathways and equipment and to observe our mode of inquiry .
Deployed in social science, there is a particular intentionality ascribed to the enquirer, as if the researcher may herself “construct/assemble” the domain of the object and the knowledge of it, as a collage of concepts that constitutes a field. As such, an assemblage problematically seems to re-fix an object within a phenomenological field, as a knowable and stable, even though this field may be distinct from traditional social science disciplines and frameworks. Perhaps, then, the reference to the agencement of Deleuze and Guattari, rather than a close application of their philosophy, is more indicative of changing fields of knowledge in the contemporary, and suggests methodological approaches that are appropriately open, adaptive, and self-aware. Seen as such, assemblage may be appropriately distinguished from a closer translation of agencement. The assemblage can then be reclaimed as equipment of social science, as a set of guidelines, that are currently emerging as norms for a social science of the contemporary.
I became interested in the structured decision-making forms of North American social movements–the alter-globalization movement and the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)–after witnessing a series of frustrated meetings in a South African social movement. In its annual General Assembly, the South African movement for land and housing had a rare moment to make decisions, in which delegates from most of its diffuse shack settlements from several cities were all in the same room. However, many of the meetings in the weekend were spent discussing how decisions could be made, specifically, whether delegates from In an era during which buzzwords like “democratic,” “horizontal,” and “leaderless” described the ethos of social movements in much of the world, the South African case clearly demonstrated a discordancy: democratic spaces require structures and ritualized practices, not just a generalized ethics. As I looked towards other movements that had structured their decision-making processes around maximizing democracy or participation, I found that the geometric metaphor of “horizontalism” obscured concrete practices. The maximizing structures, always seeking some ideal-type of Rousseauldian participation, required perpetual revision of forms and the norms of practice within those forms. Further, the ethos of democratic purism that guided the movement tended always to cover up the inequalities and power relations that arose in practice. In essence, democracy is always a constructed practice, both ethical and political, a response to power relations within and outside the movement.
Whereas risk technologies (e.g., as expressed in the logic of insurance, statistics, and psychiatry) have dealt with possible uncertainty or with transforming future uncertainty into possibilities (through information, calculation, and assessment)- thus expressing the mode of “representation” and using the past (knowledge) in order to control the future, preparedness technologies are posited in relation topotential uncertainty, which cannot be transformed in this way.
The notion of future and the creative projection of what this can be like has motivated artistic practice for decades. After the recent boost of biotechnosciences, the wonder on how new modes of biological production may restructure our lives have occupied all sorts of minds, including artists’. While imagining these virtual futures – whether through fabulation or utopia, practically and discursively -, some of them have strongly problematized the relationship between humans and other living beings. BioArt practices, by virtue of using living matter as a medium, constitute a rich ground concerning this problematization of epimeletic futures in the age of biotechnology.
In the game to pursue justification of knowledge through utility, the UK has been an advanced party. In the 1980s, Thatcher saw “state-funded intellectuals” as an interest group whose practices required scrutiny. In a long line of technocratic and industrial critique of thinking, she saw this interest group as taking state resources without producing anything. She took a small government office, the audit commission, and expanded its scope and scale. The commission is an independent watchdog “driving economy, efficiency and effectiveness in local public services to deliver better outcomes for everyone”. This audit commission began as an exercise in financial control, but by 1986 was connected to a research assessment exercise to connect financial control of the universities to the production of ‘value’ by the universities.
Briefly stated, the RAE is a process that assesses the quality of research to enable the higher education funding bodies to distribute public funds on the basis of research quality ratings. A panel of subject experts for each “unit of assessment”, that is a block of submissions in a field by a university, assessed submissions during 2008 and awarded a quality profile to each: this profiled the proportions of research activity in the submission that was judged by the panel to meet each of five quality levels from unclassified, through to world-leading. The funding bodies use the quality profiles as the basis for awarding research funding to universities.
This “logic” has been recently extended as the audit commission has been disbanded and privatized and the Arts and Humanities Research Council has agreed to undermine the principle of self-governance and accept a government directive to distribute funds to research projects which take up the problem of the “Big Society”, the Conservative party’s policy idea for the 2010 election.
A 200-page Powerpoint presentation by OE of its findings on how UC Berkeley can be improved is immediately nauseating. Corporate consulting firm Bain & Company was paid three million dollars for this slick slideshow, which on the pretense of improving Berkeley’s “administrative environment” tells us to “consider resizing” the Arts because they are only 40% important to students and 5% aligned with UCB’s mission and priorities (98). The hundreds of graphs and diagrams that lead up to this and similar prescriptions reek of post-facto justifications for decisions already made. A “Disclaimer” is made on slide four, for example, that because it is difficult to gather “high-quality data” about Berkeley, this report contains “decisionable data” (4) instead. On Slide 10, a graph then shows that OE “engaged 700+ people across campus,” without mentioning that with about 40,000 students and 18,000 employees on campus, that is equivalent to 1.2% of the people involved. Inside the graph the exact number of people interviewed is cited at 702, but nowhere is it addressed that the “+” in the title evidently stands for exactly two. Inventing a word (“decisionable”) and using an approximation where the exact number is known (“+” for two), are two instances of the way that OE’s use of language leaves us feeling queasy.
But we do not want to be blocked in our inquiry by these tired barriers of political suspicion and aesthetic distaste, which seem powerless to effect change. Through concept work, we thus seek a more technical and less burdened language, to give a more useful form to our nausea.
Our aim was to build a pedagogical case. The case is to be pedagogical in two senses: First, the object of the case is the threat to the humanities in the 21st Century University and second, it is hoped that our effort to make a case regarding this threat will be formative of an intellectual defense. Today it seems as though ‘economistic logics’ are untouchable. The university is to be treated as any other institution requiring management in terms of its financial sustainability. We recognize that as a public institution the public research university needs to have a sustainable future. What we decided to inquire into is the way in which the assessment of the sustainability of the operations of the university has effects on how the university – in its capacity to fulfil the idea of a university and not in its capacity as a general site of management – is spoken about.
The central claim of OE is that their assessment does not touch the assessment of research and teaching. However, we will argue that this separation of the purpose of the university, education, from its operational mode already presupposes an organizational form and mode contrary to the kind we would like to work in.
“as for the matter of fiction, it is very important to me. i am quite aware that i have never written anything but fictions. i’m not saying for all that that this is outside truth. it seems to me the possibility exists to make fiction work in truth, to induce effects of truth with a discourse of a fiction, and to make it so that the discourse of truth creates, ‘fabricates’ something that does not yet exist, therefore, ‘fictionalizes’ a political outlook that does not yet exist starting from a historical truth” (Foucault, “Power Affects the Body”, 1977)
How a nation’s history is written relative to this violent past informs the way that it views its present and future, and what kind of possibilities are open to it. Israeli historiography provides a fertile ground to question the second half of Renan’s formulation, that “the advance of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.” Certainly, developments in Israeli historiography over the last 30 years have splintered the nation in debate. And yet, one may argue that the nation has never been so strong, and as I contend, the production of a national historiography that is more honest about its violent past has equally produced the possibilities of a more violent future in its defense. Continue Reading →
In thinking about imagination, we entered a discussion on our privileging of fabulation as a mode of thought and our possible designation of fabulation as possessing a “progressive” political valence. One can see this in some of Deleuze’s work on minority literature as he considers fabulation a mode of this genre of work.
However, we wanted to be weary of thinking of these modes of imagination in relationship to certain political valences. Thus, in doing so, the law seems like an appropriate site to complicate these discourses.
for further discussion concerning the fabulation of futures: authorship and authority over meaning, artworks’ agency, and reception theory
thinking series : on the contiguities between fabulation, utopia and representation
Tetrahymena is a peculiar microorganism apparently with up to seven sexes and an uncommonly variable behavior. By 2009, IGC, a research lab in biosciences, had a culture of them for a long time then, waiting for someone to study it. When the bioartist Marta de Menezes arrived at the IGC to do an artistic residency, she got to know about Tetrahymena through one of the scientists working there. She asked the administration to use it as a medium. IGC agreed on the condition of having Marta’s detailed weekly reports on “findings”. For two months, Marta played around with these bacteria. She starved and stuffed them, heated them up and cooled them down, mixed and matched them. The process went more or less randomly; she was experimenting without protocols. At the end of the day, she would take pictures and notes.
imagining future through practice and discourse
Anyone who spends dozens of hours watching webcasts and reading newstories about the problem of producing clean energy will note the recurrence of a phrase made trite through repetition: “predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.” To this aphorism, Steven Chu adds: “so you warm up by predicting the past,” that is, by testing predictions of the past against extant and verified historical data. In biofuels research, there seems to be a third dimension of ‘warming up on the present.’ First-generation biofuels, which in the US are primarily corn-based, are filling people’s tanks, and simultaneously proving to be part of an assemblage whose elements include the global food supply, global food prices, biotechnology and public opinion. The entry of first-generation biofuels into the energy market had a devastating effect on food prices, to the point where, at the moment, it is seen as a test that must be retracted, a warm-up that went awry, that showed the urgent need for a recalibration between research and more thorough and complex imaginings of the future.
Future relates to time in complex ways. Because it is the time yet to come, the notion of future is impregnated by potentiality, and so its contents are necessarily plural, as there is no single solution to it, not until it turns present. Of course, not all events are determined in the same way, and some futures are more likely than others. It follows that some futures are also more conceivable, or more easily imaginable than others.
Representation aims to depict the world presuming its transparency, knowabilty and/or legibility.
Utopia points to a sense in which past-making is also future-making. Utopia may be “no-place,” but it is also the not-now: whether past or present, our utopian imaginings are decidedly removed from the present.
Affect characterizes the way in which a relational field is structured such that a specific type of disposition is likely to be generated. Of all the possible dispositions generated in a relational field only those that can be made to cohere with a given figure’s mode of veridiction can be made to function within a given form of equipment. (biostechnika)
“Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually, existing, particular things that embody them.” (Massumi, Parables of the Virtual, 35)
“It is certain that the affect implies an image or idea, and follows from the latter as from its cause. But it is not confined to the image or idea; it is of another nature, being purely transitive, and not indicative or representative, since it is experienced in a lived duration that involves the difference between two states. This is why Spinoza shows that the affect is not a comparison of idea, and thereby rejects any intellectualist interpretation.” (Deleuze, 1988: p.49)
Affect v. Emotion: “But one of the clearest lessons of this first story is that emotion and affect – if affect is intensity – follow different logics and pertain to different orders. [...] An emotion is a subjective content … Emotion is qualified intensity.” (Massumi, 27-28)
Fabulation is a mode of thought that enables one to think things otherwise- to fabulate.
“Otherwise” than the majority, dominant narrative (the “common sense” and the “good sense”). It is a form of imagination that anticipates and creates the future rather than having a pre-known image of it (collective/social imaginary).
A Symptom in modern use, is a subjective indication – perceptible to the patient, as opposed to an objective one or sign – of a (bodily or mental) phenomenon, circumstance, or change of condition arising from and accompanying a disease or affection, and constituting and indication or evidence of it; a characteristic sign of some particular disease”#. Symptoms in this case are empirically identifiable changes in the conception of the public research university. In the US and the UK, universities are increasingly being viewed as a business operation or at least some similar organizational form amenable to being metricized. This involves imagining the standard Others of the business operation – customers (students in this case) and employees (having a “career path”).
While the leaders managing OE are adamant about the clean separation of University operations from the core University mission, and of a subservient relationship of the operations to this mission, this focus on operational ‘efficiency’ (which is measured through a specific metricization of the “operation” – a metricization which necessarily includes some non-marketable commodities and some intangible or long term benefits and costs which the method is unable to account for), OE is effectively producing a new mode of considering the operations of the university. The impact of this mode on the pedagogical and research purposes of the university are not being currently considered. In fact, it is assumed to be generally beneficial to these purposes.
The rhetoric and practice of Operational Excellence and comparable programs that address the budgetary difficulties of the 21st century university are marked by an obsession with metrics, rankings and an assessment of costs that remains unquestioned. If the basic problem is that “the state is withdrawing its support from the public university, hence, operational restructuring is necessary to realize the future sustainability of the public research university”, then the OE approach is possibly the only available one. Every aspect of the university must be measured in terms of money and any problem associated with the university must be of a budgetary nature. The specific cases – Nevada, Michigan and the UK suggest that OE at UC Berkeley should be seen as a symptom of the increasing pervasiveness of an economistic logic in the way the contemporary public research university is considered.
On the 17th May 2010, the Guardian reported the decision by Middlesex university to close its philosophy department. By the metrics imposed on UK universities, student recruitment, quality of research and funding records, philosophy at Middlesex was on the up.
“It is not hard to understand”, however, a leading British philosopoher wrote in the paper, “why a university might consider axing provision in any subject area.” If a department is losing key staff, if it is failing to recruit students or attract research funding, or if it does poorly in the Research Assessment Exercise, then it will be vulnerable. The surprise at Middlesex is that by all of these standards the department is in robust health. It’s worth pointing out first of all that the philosopher has already capitulated by acknowledging the validity of the logic. all Middlesex did then was to extend the logic pre-empting a future extension of it by not pretending that there are differences between ‘public’ and ‘private’ criteria of assessment. Philosophy was closed, quite simply, because it is a poor return on investment.
The financial reasoning is fairly simple: the income from student fees remains basically the same as university costs increase. The amount of money the state is willing to give to a department is based on how valuable the state considers the subject; for example, in a situation in which the state wants to protects laboratory sciences it provides less funding for arts and humanities. As a consequence, the university struggles to make up the difference between the cost of educating student and the amount of money such a student can bring in. Middlesex was one of the few places in the UK that specialized in non-Anglo-American philosophy. Although recognized for its high-quality research, the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex does not receive any funding from external research bodies and earns only 5% of the university’s total Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) quality-related grant, which does not cover the research costs incurred by philosophy staff.
How can we say what the consequences will be of neglecting a perspective which we feel is important? Although section 3 shows that the material is not lacking, the case remains difficult to make because it is not merely empirical facts but an entire perspective which is at issue. It is especially difficult to make when this perspective is not accidentally neglected, but willfully eclipsed by an instrumental rather than critical use of language.
Attempting to translate a perspectival difference into the level of empirical fact tends to lead to doomsday prophesying. “Childcare goes first, but next go the teachers!” “If you treat the university like a profit-making algorithm, we will soon have a hoard of barbarians employed by mercenary, humanity-plundering leaders who wage wars against the innocent, exploit the downtrodden, and are definitely unfriendly to the environment!” Such shrill warnings are the Ramification counterpart to the Object of immediate nausea, which it has been our attempt to think ourselves away from.
But the difficulty remains in our way is that while we advocate a humanistic perspective, wealth, power and hence agency are in the hands of those who practice an economistic perspective. They are the ones with the capacity for actually doing things. Thus while we can articulate our unease, OE is both a discursive and practical re-writing of what we hold to be a qualitative problem, in the form of a quantitative solution.
At this point, we can still only either secede to the level of doomsday cries or join them, at the level of their quantifying practice, like the leading British philosopher did (3.1.1). However, this studio on OE has shown us that a new form is needed to make our sense of the ramifications of OE operable. Maybe this new form involves showing up to every OE meeting and restating their statements in our language.
(Jodi) Our group is concerned with how the act of inquiry can either produce or limit transformation.
As with Middlesex, administrators at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas dealt with their budgetary crisis by imposing a particular mode of parameterizing the operation of higher education, which notably resulted in the decision to entirely disband the departments of philosophy and women’s studies. In announcing the cuts, the Dean of Liberal Arts wrote that “we were mandated to propose ‘vertical cuts’ so as not to impact each and all of our programs,” which stands in stark contrast to the horizontal or ‘across-the-board’ cuts (e.g. salary reductions for all faculty or staff) which have become the norm. Other colleges at UNLV made similar decisions: Fine Arts eliminated Photography, while Health Sciences eliminated Nuclear Medicine.
Unlike in the Middlesex case, there were no publicized economic metrics for determining that these programs were the least profitable or productive programs in their respective colleges. However, the importation of a managerial logic which frames the university as a business operation like any other is clearly evident: the vertical cut is completely rational for a corporation that produces similar yet independent products, as shutting down a widget factory has no effect on the quality of the sprocket factory next door. Such a logic of cost-cutting may be for a institution in which pupils receive training in one set of skills to the exclusion of all others, but it certainly is opposed to a conception of the university as a site for holistically educating and enriching students.
In addition, the university regents deployed a rhetoric of decentralization in their demands for the Dean of each college to choose which programs would be cut. This tactic, which we have seen in Berkeley’s Operational Excellence, is a way of disavowing responsibility for evaluating the relative worth of each disciplinary field — which administrators and consultants are often (but not always) loath to do. By producing a coherent set of activities and entities that fall under the scope of “operations,” this logic maintains the fiction that the administrators or consultants are not encroaching on academic freedom.
The deployment of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is one of OE’s core recommendations, which will allegedly shave millions of dollars from the operations of the university. These massive, standardized software suites aim to centralize as many organizational activities as possible into a single networked database, from human resources and student housing to procurement and long-term budgeting. Such systems are built with a particular understanding of how a billion-dollar multinational corporation operates — from rather mundane activities like bookkeeping practices or inventory management to a more fundamental understanding of what organizations as operationally constituted by monetary flows between ‘cost centers’ and ‘profit centers’. The decision to deploy ERP systems is an excellent case of OE’s continued insistence that the operations of the university can be separated from its educational mission and optimized according to business logics.
How the deployment of a system is incompatible with a conception of the university as a site of education can be best in OE’s proposal to purchase Oracle’s Hyperion budgeting and financial planning system. They argue that the current system is difficult to use and has many “historical artifacts,” but the only case-specific claim they make against the current system is that budgeting for “Temporary Academic Professionals” (e.g. adjunct professors) is “complex, laborious and not tied directly to strategic initiatives in teaching.” The staggering rise of temporary and adjunct faculty, one of the symptoms we have identified, are a direct result of a parameterization of the university as an operation which seeks to minimize costs and maximize revenue. Temporary workers have become quite routine in corporate organizations, and obviously software like Hyperion is built to privilege the “strategic initiative in teaching” which favors hiring of many transient, part-time academics on a semester-by-semester basis. In contrast, it would seem that the current system is built to support the academic model of tenure in which faculty are hired for long periods of time so that they can build longstanding research projects and collaborative partnerships. Is this the “historical artifact” which OE has identified?
In the case of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a new method of accounting for resources was adopted as part of a comprehensive re-structuring of the way the University generated and spent resources as the state appropriation steadily declined. Instead of the traditional method of incremental budgeting (each fiscal years budget based on the previous years budget plus adjustments for inflation, new needs and aspirations), the University of Michigan adopted an approach called “responsibility center management”. This approach is a modification of a fully decentralized approach where each unit (say a department) is responsible for generating its own revenues and managing its own expenditures. In this way, each unit gets to keep the revenues it generates. The approach used at University of Michigan was an effort to redistribute some of the revenues from units with greater capacity to generate revenues to units less capable of generating them, and also to fund centralized units (like libraries). While such an approach subsidized units which did not generate revenue (an example could be that a Computer Sciences department might have an easier time generating revenue than a Philosophy department), by pricing and setting up a comparison between them, it inevitably positions some units and donors and other units as recipients. The economistic logic at work in this budgeting method seems to have accepted the premise of an emerging social contract between the public and the public university that a university education is not a public good, but a private individual benefit and thus should be supported not through government appropriations, but through the market. This must implicitly set up a hierarchy of donor and recipient departments#.
“OE” has undertaken to improve the efficiency of UC Berkeley’s administration, so as to save our money for what really matters at the university, namely “our core mission of teaching, research and public service” (http://oe.berkeley.edu). In its report, we discern three distinct logics put to work in confused and conflated ways: (a) the logic of cost-savings, (b) the university’s pursuit of excellence, and (c) the logic of OE.
Cost-savings is an objective we can support under the circumstances of a budgetary shortfall. The university’s pursuit of excellence is what we as graduate students are most aligned with. It is also what OE claims to be merely facilitating. However, we find that OE itself is a third, distinct and autonomous logic at work in their Report. If the university’s excellence was the objective of OE, OE would recognize that the cost-saving changes it makes to Berkeley’s administration will inevitably affect teaching, research and public service in some cases and some ways. However, OE’s entire use of language is designed to avoid precisely that. For example, on the issue of “space management,” OE finds an “opportunity” to improve OE by “Creating incentives for departments to reduce space use” (slide 109). In the logic of OE, this is a perfectly constructive move – because OE does not recognize that “space use” can mean using space for teaching or research, and that “reducing space use” can mean making it more difficult to teach, learn or do research.
In the name of the university’s excellence, OE creates a second language into whose terms it attempts to suck the entire issue. By capitalizing their two first letters, OE expropriates the words “operational” and “excellence” from the English language. It thereby removes the issue of the university’s operation and excellence from the domain of ordinary peoples’ reasoning, and relocates it fully within the domain of experts’ – that is, within the OE team’s – reasoning. This is what gives OE the liberty to invent words and equivocate with impunity.
Faced with the fact of a budgetary cut, it is not eliminating childcare or firing the staff per se that we can immediately take a principled stance against. This would fall into the already economistic logic of consumer preference, in which arena one outraged customer is equivalent to another, and all are ultimately at the mercy of the purveyor. Bain & Company’s intervention works precisely at this level: they tell us what the majority of customers want, and what the purveyor has to do.
The budgetary shortage that UC Berkeley is facing should not be seen in this light, as an unexpected cash flow problem which we will solve by ranking our priorities and spending our money more efficiently. Instead, it should be seen as one in a history of moments at which the much deeper problem of education and the social good has surfaced. An adequate response must reach behind the false image of America nothing but democracy, to engage the difficult question of what kind of education should be provided to whom? From this perspective, the problem is not ‘How should we weather this shortage?’ but ‘What should we do with our wealth?’
Timoteo Rodriguez, University of California, Berkeley
Madina Regnault, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France
Carolyn Sufrin, University of California, San Francisco
Liliana Gil Sousa, Universidade de Coimbra. Portugal
Carmen Doncel Sánchez Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Edoardo Zavarella, University of California, Berkeley
Panel Abstract
How are anthropologists working with notions of tradition, modernity, coloniality, and contemporary? This panel blurs parameters of these categories to forefront “contemporary” as an analytical tool. We examine privileged milieux –along with ethos of trust, certitude and truth-telling that shape them. What are the conceptual mediations and ethical implications anthropologists use in those milieux? As “tradition” is “a moving image of the past, opposed not to modernity but to alienation” (Rabinow 1975), the notion of tradition has been caught in a false binary to the modern, in part as consequence of colonialism. Following Rabinow & Bennett (2007) we define the “contemporary” as a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past toward a near future. We take up the “contemporary” not as an epochal category, but as an open question. The panel papers center around a theme of “openings and constraints” that structure individuals’ experiences of social milieux, and organize forms of agency available in cultural singularities. The “contemporary” challenges psychological anthropology to reformulate conceptual blockages and pragmatic opportunities of Late Modernity. Our cases explore interplays of subjective experiences and institutional milieux through: (i) competing truth claims; (ii) intersecting modes of subjectification; (iii) strategies of intervention upon collective existence. This panel’s sites are County Jail Medical Clinic, ecomuseum on Mayotte Island, Italian video-journalists, evangelism among Spanish gypsies, fusions of art and science–bioart, and heroin addiction. At stake are possible pragmatic and moral solutions, not solely for interlocutors, but for anthropologists and their capacity to transform social institutions and themselves.
In 2008, the Tourism Committee of the Mayotte Island (a French island in the Indian Ocean) initiated its flagship project of the Ecomuseum of Hamourou. One of the main stakes of this government project is to promote the history of the housing on Mayotte. The intent is to honor the roots of this French territory by featuring homesteads of East African, Malgashy, Arabic, and Comorosians. By celebrating a utopian image of multicultural communities, the Ecomuseum project continues to negate a traumatizing event of the recent past. On October 27, 2003, a Mayotte mayor ordered the burning down of all the traditional houses located on the border of Hamourou’s beach. This brutal event apparently occurred because Comorosians were living there illegally. Ironically the morning following this tragic event, a local daily newspaper announced that the “arson” made way for the construction of a ‘traditional’ village for the tourists. This site of Hamourou is marked by the violent expulsion of squatters in their traditional houses, even as the Ecomuseum aims to present a peaceful image of ideal communities in order to suit tourists’ expectations for a utopian and traditional Mayotte. My research illustrates how this Ecomuseum renders a political conception of what is traditional in Mayotte and how it is related to the issues of truth-telling, memory and power. I highlight alienation of tradition in Mayotte as a moral constrain in late modernity. Further, I demonstrate how the “contemporary,” as analytical tool, works to problematize constructions of utopia and notions of nostalgia.
The concept of humanitarian space comes from the battlefield. To offer assistance to soldiers on all sides of a conflict, the Red Cross had to be recognized as independent and impartial. It had to follow principles and pursue goals that all sides might agree to. The Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations (HOs) aided bodies, not soldiers; humans, not citizens.
Humanitarianism expanded in the twentieth century, following the maxim that, as one practitioner puts it, “People should not die of stupid things”—like treatable diseases, needless suffering in war, and brute natural disasters.
While humanitarian aid has expanded significantly in recent decades, humanitarian space is contracting. Humanitarian workers have been targeted in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Somalia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.
Why? States have tried to benefit from the legitimacy of being humanitarian aid providers. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, referred to NGOs as “force multipliers” in US military aims. And some insurgent groups believe that the performance of violence against HOs will further their own objectives.
There is another way in which humanitarian space can be seen as threatened. As Steven Hopgood and others have shown, humanitarian aid is increasingly a “market.” Organizations compete for funding from states, foundations, and individual donors. To compete in this market, traditional HOs like Oxfam and Save the Children have adopted many of the practices and logics of private business—branding, fundraising, merchandizing, management styles, etc. HOs have come to resemble private firms, and private firms are increasingly paid to deliver aid.
Under these conditions, humanitarianism increasingly resembles a for-profit sector of service delivery. Hopgood provocatively asks, “Can Wal-Mart be a humanitarian actor?”
How might we conceptualize “humanitarian space” under these changing conditions? I argue that we need to understand this space as constructed by three relationships of the humanitarian actor:
The measure of the productivity of a case is its generalizability. We believe that the next step in testing the productivity of “humanitarian space” as a concept applicable in many global health and humanitarian cases is to begin a conversation with humanitarian practitioners, many of whom already understand their position as problematic. What kind of opportunities would humanitarian practitioners find in thinking about these concepts? How would we engage with them?
“. . . For the function of that reflection is to draw into the interior of the picture what is intimately foreign to it: the gaze which has organized it and the gaze for which it is displayed. But because they are present within the picture, to the right and to the left, the artist and the visitor cannot be given a place in the mirror: just as the king appears in the depths of the looking-glass precisely because he does not belong to the picture.”
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things p.15
I have never felt as free as when I volunteered with Burmese refugees at the Thai-Burma border. I mean “free” in two ways. First, in a Kantian sense, I felt that aiding these people in their struggle against oppression was what one ought to do if one were freed from self-interest. (This feeling of selflessness was naïve but not wholly inaccurate.)
Second, I felt free from many of the institutions that had dominated my life—college, family, and work, as well as the isolating design of my home and neighbourhood, or the paralyzing abundance of commodities where I shopped.
Along with my freedom came almost total impotence. I made friends with Burmese refugees and aid workers, I taught English to some children, but I was pretty much useless.
I later returned to the region as a journalist and then as an NGO employee. I now had organizational and financial resources and some ‘expert’ knowledge. North American institutions underwrote these capabilities. I could get stories into the newspaper, but the stories had to follow a particular form; I could help train and fund journalists, but the knowledge and resources had to fit USAID priorities and American practices.
I had returned to the geographical location of my former freedom, but I was now caught in filaments of these institutions which extended back to North America. The exchange seemed clear: more institutional power came at a cost of my former freedom.
Humanitarian space in this reflection is the freedom to have particular relations to the self and to individuals/groups in jeopardy. This freedom is in tension with the institutional power that facilitates humanitarian action.
Come Rain Come Shine is produced through Coopa-Roca, a women’s cooperative based in Rio de Janeiro’s largest shantytown, employing humanitarian values and artisan production methods consistent with Artecnica’s Design With Conscience campaign. By using their homes as workshops, cooperative members earn a living while tending to their children and other domestic responsibilities. In addition to extending livelihood opportunities, Coopa-Roca’s commitment to world-class craftwork has enhanced the self-esteem of women in this impoverished neighborhood.
What is an exemplary case and how do you construct one? We turned to Anthropos Today to get a working understanding of an “exemplary case”:
The practice of casuistry consisted essentially in the examination of particular cases of moral dispute – hence, “casuistry” – through their juxtaposition to similar paradigm examples. These paradigm examples… were case examples whose resolution focused substantial agreement among those qualified to judge such issues. (Rabinow 131)
[Casuistry] thereby builds an increasingly complex web of cases, arguments, and distinctions. This web serves as a flexible “moral taxonomy,” a tool to guide practitioners until they arrive at a convincing resolution. (132)
Above all, casuistry is a set of techniques oriented to defining and resolving problems. (132)
After and alongside concept work on “humanitarian space,” we began thinking and rethinking the problem of the exemplary case.
We are interested in the tension between forms of philanthropic or humanitarian expertise and the relationships forged between “experts” and themselves, their organizations, and their objects of concern, questions which arose in regards to our case work with Coopa Roca and Gates Foundation. Following moments of irritation—such as the use of “humanitarian values” in marketing a chandelier made by Coopa Roca or the Gates Foundation’s increased funding of a global health project because the science did not scale the way they had anticipated—we became more and more invested in the tensions between humanitarianism and the market. From there, we decided to attempt to construct an exemplary case out of the Gates Foundation and their role in global health.
Following the concept work for humanitarian space, the Gates Foundation appears to be an exemplary case to test its usefulness, with the goal of mapping out and understanding the practices and the ethical stances of contemporary humanitarian organizations and experts.
We looked at how other social scientists have looked at the tensions between humanitarianism and the market, including Steven Hopgood (2008) and Bryn Jones (2007). While Hopgood appears to segment off corporations from humanitarian space (as Chris describes in our “Concept Work”), Jones approaches the problem differently. He aims to resolve contradictions in social science literature between the interpretations of business’ role as either “benefactor” or “behemoth,” as well as develop “a clearer assessment of expanding corporate roles by clarifying the mooted discussion of the institutionalization of relationships between business and [civil society organizations] and their activities” (Jones 160). First and foremost, he is interested in whether “new institutions are emerging and if so, does it involve cooperation and inclusion or discrimination and domination?” (160). He believes that “patron-client paradigm supersedes both benefactor and behemoth characterizations by reconciling power inequalities with some reciprocity of exchange and with socio-cultural norms and values” (161).
The goal here (for Jones and for our project in the Labinar) appears to be a reworking the concept of humanitarian space to provide useful commentary—rather than outright denunciation—on humanitarian expertise and organizations that are actively engaged with the global market. How can we understand the way the market is portrayed as a usable and malleable tool by philanthropic organizations and others to help “the poor” of the world—which is itself a legacy of structural adjustment development programs influenced by Milton Friedman and other free market economists in the 1970s in the United States? How do we approach the problem of the creation of the ethical self for those involved in global health philanthropy and partnerships?
During this step in our process, we collected quotations about humanitarianism and cosmopolitanism. We intended this to be an entire studio devoted to quotations from various sources, juxtaposed against each other without context (but providing for the viewer to link out to this larger context). Our goal was to tack between “near” and “far” concepts, putting into adjacency the ideas of contemporary humanitarian practitioners – like spokespeople in the Gates Foundation – and theorists – like the Stoics. Further down the line, we hoped to engage humanitarian practitioners in finding and thinking about the constitution of an ethical self, and we hoped this feature would be a tool for such an engagement.
Here is a sample of these quotations:
Trust should follow friendship, judgment precede it. What a reversal and confusion of duties they make who, rejecting Theophrastus’ advice, proceed from affection to judgment, and upon judgment withdraw affection. (Seneca, Letter III)
Franz had the sudden feeling that the Grand March was coming to an end. Europe was surrounded by borders of silence, and the space where the Grand March was occurring was now no more than a small platform in the middle of the planet. The crowds that had once pressed eagerly up to the platform had long since departed, and the Grand March went on in solitude, without spectators. (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being).
With the message that effective aid in global health and development is working, the campaign will share the proof that smart aid is having a lasting impact on people’s lives and livelihoods and advancing real progress in developing countries. (Bill Gates, “Real Lives. Real Progress”)
“What? Shall we do as others do? Is there to be no distinction between us and them?” The greatest possible. The closer observer should know that we’re unlike the common run of men. (Seneca, Letter V)
A common humanity is imagined most prominently in discourses of human rights. And in fact the most powerful postnational or cosmopolitan social imaginary is that of the market. Affirmation of global society comes less from the expression of some positive value than from the notion that the market demands it. (Craig Calhoun, Imagining Solidarity: Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Sphere)
“Have you effected a cure? Is that why you have time for reforming other people?” No, I have sufficient conscience to refrain from treating others when I am ill myself: I am talking to you as to a fellow patient in the same ward, about the malady from which we both suffer, and giving you my ideas about remedies. (Seneca, Letter XVII)
The essential point is not so much where you get to as the character you bring there, and thus we oughtn’t to bind the soul’s allegiance to any one place. (Seneca, Letter XXVIII)
Kant contributes conceptual materials with his articulation of a cosmopolitan morality (based on our shared humanity) and the moral-legal notion of the cosmopolitan right. Kant also helps us conceptualize “humanitarian space,” through his discussion of public reason. In “What is Enlightenment?” he argues that when working for an organization, one is “part of the machine” and must follow that organizations dictates. But when thinking and speaking as “a member of a complete commonwealth or even of cosmopolitan society,” one may use one’s reason publicly and freely, criticizing one’s state or one’s organization as truth demands. (Chris on Kant, What is Enlightenment?)
And he [man] remembers also that every rational animal is his kinsman, and that to care for all men is according to man’s nature; and a man should hold on to the opinion not of all, but of those only who confessedly live according to nature. But as to those who live not so, he always bears in mind what kind of men they are both at home and from home, both by night and by day, and what they are, and with what men they live an impure life. Accordingly, he does not value at all the praise which comes from such men, since they are not even satisfied with themselves. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)
From my brother Severus I received the idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)
Although peach and plum blossoms do not speak
A path will naturally appear underneath them.
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affect, episode02, form-giving, presentation, process, representation
A “Vital” congregation is defined according to three criteria:
1) Average attendance – Average worship attendance as a percentage of membership
2) Growth – Change in average attendance as a percentage of worship, change in annual giving per attendee, change in annual giving of the congregation to the conference as a percentage of budget
3) Engagement – Professions of faith per member, annual giving per attendee
Deleuze and Guattari on the collective character of Kafka’s enunciations, and from there to assemblage:
In what sense is the statement always collective event when it seems to be emitted by a solitary singularity like that of the artist? The answer is that the statement never refers back to a subject. (…) There isn’t a subject who emits the statement or a subject about which the statement would be emitted. (…) When a statement is produced by a bachelor or an artistic singularity, it occurs necessarily as a function of national, political, and social community, even if the objective conditions of this community are not yet given to the moment except in literary enunciation. (…)
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Diagnosis has two functions. The first is analytic. It functions to lay out tables of categories. That is to say, a diagnosis serves a critical function; it facilitates the work of decomposition of complex wholes in order to test the logic on the basis of which composition has taken place. In diagnosis, the analytic work cannot be an end-in-itself. Rather, analysis must be followed by recomposition. This synthetic work is the second function of a diagnosis. (Bios Technika)
After several weeks of conceptual work, we decided to try an empirical appreciation of the apparatus we have developed. Of course, one cannot argue that the empirical wasn’t there before. Our ad hoc positions and reasonings on presentation were obviously informed by our prior experience with it. Additionally, taking advantage of the convergences between our works and interests was always an underlying strategy. Despite this, we came to be pleasantly surprised.
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Pace CP Snow, there are sets of people in the world who have the future in their bones. They are contemporary constructors, makers of things, knowledge and figures in which to give them significance. Some build buildings, some build communities, some technologies, others make diagnoses. Crucial to their making and the speaking about their making is a trope, that is to say, a manner of assembling elements of speech to make a figure in which the knowledge and things made can take on and produce their desired effects. This trope is metaleptic (μεταληπτικός) what Bloom has called a “trope of a trope” and it is metaleptic in a specified manner, what James Faubion pace Bloom calls ‘projective’ (Faubion, J D, 1995; 85)
A professor of urban design has worked in a specific area of St Louis county made up of 24 tiny municipalities for many years. This area falls into Hirsh’s definition of the ‘second ghetto’ in that is was originally built for white suburban residents, but is now an African-American enclave representing the real and perceived ills of urban poverty. Creating a discursive and vulnerable space within a physical place in order to confront the discordant perceptions of students and residents alike, has been the basis of a critical pedagogy developed by this professor. As a result, a common assumption regarding this area—that it is a chaotic and disorganized assembly of disparate fiefdoms that lack an efficient means of governance that perpetuates social pathologies—has been problematized.
Our group has identified that all practices, in order to lead to flourishing on all sides, must be critical. Using Kenneth Frampton’s six points ‘case’ for an architecture of resistance, the parameters for a critical practice of architecture may emerge:
“The other precisely reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness.” (Levinas, 1970). Alterity requires adjacency and encounter (intimacy) and is not possible from a distance. Alterity makes vulnerability possible in that it creates an awareness (revealing) of our relational subjectivity between oneself and the one in front of us. Such proximity demands action (freedom to affirm or deny)—we either project our subject position onto the other (remain unchanged), or we recognize the possibilities for love and care to orient and direct our own subjectivity (requires transformation). Alterity creates a problem space where truth claims are challenged and the metrics and parameters surrounding modes of inquiry into flourishing must be reconsidered relative to that which has been revealed; resulting in the practice of care.
Vulnerability is an affect which can only be experienced in relation to others. It requires openness to the potential for love and care in human connection, but this outward positioning also necessarily entails risk to oneself—risk of being loved, or of not being loved. Vulnerability as a relation with risk is constitutive of trust among humans, as they interact with each other and their complex milieu. Because it is tied to our ability to care for others, and thus to care about dignity, vulnerability makes flourishing possible.
For the “human practices” folks the breakdown came because the focus of work was collaboration on inquiry, that was both the ‘problem’ and the ‘activity’. As such, flourishing was not on the ‘object’ side alone but was constituted precisely by the mode of inquiry. We have talked for some time about this relation; each of us in series of positions where intervention and observation are needed. What are the parameters of this relation? Of this relation as a relation of inquiry?
Flourishing as a question and mode of inquiry has, we suggested, three elements which can be put into relation: pedagogy, inquiry and critique. Inquiry by itself privatizes the question of character or relegates ‘other’ metrics. Pedagogy, or ‘willful self-formation’ to use a pejorative inflection, by itself, is precisely the condition under which those we seek to intervene with can look back at us, the inquirer and say, “what’s the problem?”, “I’m flourishing, get on with whatever it is that you do”. To put self-formation (and the question of disposition, character and practice) into relation with inquiry needs one further variable: Earned and warranted critique. Why? Without it, one could not form a subject position within which the mode of inquiry can pose the question of flourishing, to ask about the parameters of such a mode of inquiry and then have “warranted” statements about the object.
Rather than consider these activities as isolated, we understand them in relation to each other. As virtuous practices, they all rely on making oneself vulnerable, that is, to opening oneself to potential critique in the very act of critical pedagogical inquiry. It is only through this stance of risk—be willing to be made uncomfortable, to be willing to see conflict as generative– that pedagogy (leading another and reflexively oneself to self-formation) can make visible breakdowns in ways of living. Such discordancies form the basis of new fields of inquiry which, in turn, generate further pedagogical relations.
Normalization is a type of rationality that emerged in the natural sciences and statistics between the mid 18th and 19th Centuries and was mobilized in education, medicine and public health. Normalization orders aspects of people and things according to a dynamic standard of regular distributions for a homeostatic purpose.
Values are associative and semiotic. Values formerly were confined to the sphere of economics until the 19th Century. Values, in contrast to norms are subjective. Value is a moral attribution (predicate), attributed through a mode of estimation, attributable to persons and things in a common discursive frame. They are necessarily attributed by a subject, a characteristic of their mode of estimation, even though they can be made operate inter-subjectively.
Paul Rabinow on thinking through mood, metalepsis, and a practice of making things present:
Technically, metalepsis is achieved, Genette tells us, through: “the act that consists precisely of introducing into one situation, by means of a discourse, the knowledge of another situation.” [i] Its’ strength and its unsettling dynamics arise from its deployment of “a boundary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells.” Staying on the verge in a metaleptic narrative is extremely difficult. …
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Our experts’ forms of humanitarian interventions are, in various degrees, caught up in the classical dichotomy of humanitarianism, i.e.: treating targets of humanitarianism as “means for triggering pity” and/or as “recipients of unalienable human dignity.” Normally, arguments around humanitarian intervention ask the following question:
Is “ambivalence” intrinsic in humanitarian intervention, or is it just its degeneration?
We think more effective questions are the following:
After identifying adjacencies, we explored possible problem-spaces, and we came to the conclusion that “humanitarianism” was the most useful for us. Humanitarianism in fact allowed us to make adjacent the following concepts:
With “humanitarianism” we gained two insights:
Through our various projects, we are interested in identifying and exploring a problem-space around form-giving, expertise, and ethics. Experts situate themselves in a particular relationship with their subjects, and we are interested in how this relationship is incorporated into the “product” of expertise itself, be it an artisan labor cooperative in Rio de Janeiro or an anti-malarial drug. This product is then interpreted by a public, which often produces a kind of discordancy—such as when the images and stories of malarial patients or “made in a favela” product history is perceived as a marketing ploy. Gaps form between the experts’ intended effects and those perceived by the audience.
Objects of empathy —-> Experts/Mediators
—–> Product —–> Publics/Audience
We are not interested in denunciation or boiling the question down to one of exploitation, but rather we will perform a second order reflection on the experts’ ethical dilemmas in relation to their objects in the practice of making an ethical product. Some questions we hope to ask: How are experts constructing concepts of the ethical? If their expertise informs the ethical, how might the ethical inform the veridictional practices of their expertise? How, through the exercise of their expertise, are they creating “products” that incorporate or enact their ethical relationship to their subjects of concern? How, by doing so, do they address, implicate, shape, or respond to a larger public?
Researchers recently submitted another novel proposal to the World Health Organization (WHO) for a Health Impact Fund that would reward pharmaceutical companies if they developed inexpensive drugs for the neglected diseases afflicting people in low-income countries. “It’s a very different way of looking at the problem,” says co-developer Amitava Banerjee, a cardiologist at the University of Oxford, “but it would save lives and save money at the same time.” -Melinda Wenner Moyer, 2010
Continue reading “Innovation in the Face of Need” here –>
[Coca-Cola’s] success is relevant because if we can analyze it, learn from it—then we can save lives. -Melinda Gates, September 2010
Watch the September 2010 TEDxChange Talk here –>
People are getting sub-optimum doses of artemisinin, and this is just going to encourage resistance to grow. With this process, we can control who has access to the drug, so we can produce the cheapest drug, and we can say, ok, you can only get this inexpensive pharmaceutical ingredient if you deliver it in the right way, that is: as a combination therapy. We can put out of business all those manufacturers who are not producing the drug in a proper way. -Jay Keasling, October 2010
A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don’t get worked on naturally. That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to. -Bill Gates, February 2009
Provision of medical care for women in jail is simultaneously an opportunity for treatment and a confinement of trust. The spatial-temporal dimensions of the healthy female body circulate in a peculiar milieu at the medical-carceral interface, one which situates an incarcerated woman and her doctor in a field of possibilities and constraints. Based on fieldwork conducted while providing clinical care to women at an urban county jail in the US, this paper describes how techniques of processing patients within the jail medical system contribute to unique relationships with authority and to conditions of daily living for prisoners, clinicians, and prison guards. By way of an ethnographic episode, this paper asks two specific questions: (1) What are the ethical implications for the clinician negotiating a ‘prisoner/patient’s’ truth-telling, prison guards’ fidelity to bureaucratic rationality, and the standards of medical care? (2) In this medical-carceral milieu, how do strategies of intervention and competing truth claim alternately facilitate or inhabit the possibility of pragmatic and moral solutions? In this paper, the ethnographic narrative samples contingencies of care in a county jail medical clinic, and how they are played out on the female body through the institutional social forces not only of the prison system, but also of the medical establishment. Further, these institutional social milieux potentiate modes of subjectification, through which medical-carceral subjects are brought to work on themselves, under forms of authority in the name of life and health.
How has the possibility of manipulating ‘life’ creatively, for the sake of art itself, put into question objects of anthropological inquiry? The recursive and redundant paradox that culture shapes individuals that reproduce and shape culture has gain steady hesitation in current anthropological analysis. Consequently, many scholars have advocated the uselessness of the cultural concepts. The aim of my paper is problematizing the idea of moral judgment, so often equated as ultimately cultural. The ethnographic engagement of this work draws from shadowing a European Art & Science exhibition tour. I mapped the milieu between comforts and discomfort in the use of biotechnology to produce art from living beings. This form of art is known as “BioArt”. My findings suggests that public art viewers, artists and objects themselves all slip into contemporary moral uncertainties. This “dis/comfort’ milieu vacillates dreams of hybridism through the subjective forces of the arts and the scientific establishment. The moral frames of a ‘sacred’ nature life transfigures toward an uncertain object of trust. Bioart remediates ideas of culture as tradition of life by a moving through a recent past toward possibilities of a near future.
Spanish Gypsies perceive themselves as distinct from “payos” or non-gypsies on the basis of sharing a “way of being”, rather than from a common past or shared language. This “way of being” is understood in terms of personal righteousness and implies the adherence to a series of moral norms they call “Ley Gitana” or “Gypsy Law”. As a matter of performance, Gypsyness then depend on how each individual behaves and conducts themselves in every aspect of their daily life. Gender relationships occupy a prominent place of moral certitude. Both women and men are to control their bodies and sexual desire. Therefore, any sexual transgression or deviation cannot only seriously affect the personal reputation of transgressors but also put into question their legitimate belonging to the Gypsy community. For example, lying to cover up the honor of a woman is not only socially acceptable, but necessarily a moral bind to Ley Gitana. Telling the truth can cause feuds between families and put a deep identity’s crisis for a Gypsies community. Focusing on an episode of adultery occurring in a small town of Northern Spain, this paper illustrates how Gypsy’s construction of themselves as moral subjects is challenged by the recent conversions to the Evangelical Church. The Christian ethos of telling the truth grounded in practice of public confessions puts Ley Gitana into a contemporary problem-space of apertures and contrains.
How do last generation video-editing software influence visual narration? What possibilities do they offer to the video-makers to recognize themselves as subjects of ethical narration? Last generation editing software, such as Final Cut and Adobe Premiere, allow, for the first time in the history of video-making, to simultaneously edit the clips and record the author’s voiceover directly on the timeline. Editing thus takes the form of a “dialogue” in which a video-maker literally converse with images, going so far as to correct and adapt his/her commentary in real time to the “responses” of the clips. Two consequences follow: (1) authors are encouraged to adopt a more conversational and interactive style of narration; (2) in the very process of video-making the author’ s relation to the script is altered, as the script is no longer conceived of as a pre-set, rigid form, but rather as a pragmatically mediated “dialogue”. In this paper I will thus present some of the results of my 15 months fieldwork with freelance video-journalists in Italy, focusing in particular on (1) the ethical potential of forms of narration in which meanings emerge from pragmatic mediation between the author’s intentions and the interviewees’ points of view; and (2) the changing of the status of “the image” that new editing software trigger.
Is love an expansion of one’s self toward the self, or is it the love for an ‘other’ which transforms one’s self?
In recovery processes from heroin addiction, the transformation of one’s body and soul is the price paid–not only for sobriety, but also to access salvation and truth. Today’s social ills of substance abuse operate in a milieu of institutional sites and discursive practices ranging from carceral punishment, biomedical treatment, to faith healing. Focusing on California urban faith recovery programs, this paper explores relationships between faith conversion of heroin users and the indispensable mediators through pastoral power. These faith mediators have the purpose of a ministry that attempts to stop chronic drug relapse through piety and through salvational practices. In this paper I will make two points: (1) addiction recovery byway of Christian conversion appropriates two essential instruments, the guidance of conscience (through pastoral care) and self-examination (through faith practices). I use the technical term ‘Pistis’ to give more precision to the notion of faith, and to think through its complementary affects to pastoral power. (2) I will illustrate how salvational practices produce a “rebound effect” from the recovered addict to the recovering addict –a “rebound effect” from the preacher to the faithful –and from pastoral power to a pistis politics of life. Through case study analysis, the paper asks: What generates a transformation in the self? How is a relationship to the Divine established? What is the role of love as a transformative figure of the self and other?
a form-giving activity which connects the material, discursive and subjective conditions of production
before: aesthetics: the production specificities – form giving activity, how and why – and in the sense of Rancière’s Politics of Aesthetics on what is made present and absent
vectors of change: problems with the meaning of ‘aesthetic’ (an old charged and very disputed concept) + the dismiss of the signified and the move to presentation
The term veridiction distinguishes the ways in which the speech acts that are taken to be true and false are produced and authorized. The work of diagnosis entails determining the extent to which previous authorized speech acts are adequate to the contemporary problem.
(Bios Technika – Concepts)
From Bios-Technika:
Affect characterizes the way in which a relational field is structured such that a specific type of disposition is likely to be generated. Of all the possible dispositions generated in a relational field only those that can be made to cohere with a given figure’s mode of veridiction can be made to function within a given form of equipment.
From Deleuze:
…..We should not be surprised by the double aspect of the will to power: from the standpoint of the genesis or production of forces it determines the relation between forces but, from the standpoint of its own manifestations, it is determined by relating forces. This is why the will to power is always determined at the same time as it determines, qualified at the same time as it qualifies. In the first place, therefore, the will to power is manifested as the capacity for being affected, as the determinate capacity of force for being affected. – It is difficult to deny a Spinozist inspiration here. Spinoza, is an extremely profound theory, wanted a capacity for being affected to correspond to every quantity of force. The more ways a body could be affected the more force it had. This capacity measures the force of a body or expresses its power. And, on the one hand, this power is not a simple logical possibility for it is actualized at every moment by the bodies to which a given body is related. On the other hand, this capacity is not a physical passivity, the only passive affects are those not adequately caused by the given body.
both state and practice related to the “making present”
before: representation: the process of representing and the entity that represents
vectors of change: the dismiss of the signified + the relevance of presentation as a contemporary problem + our own projects (see From Representation to Presentation) + presentation as an anthropological practice
Thus, presentation appears to be more than a relevant contemporary object of inquiry. It is also a reflexive and redundant concept in the sense that it refers to its own enactment. To clarify, presentation is not only an object of anthropological interest, it is also a practice of the anthropologist when he tries to light this up. Inescapable, this mise en abyme requires sophisticated ways to deal with the kind of inquiry we’re proposing, i.e. one that assumes the voluminous and integrative character of the assemblage that presentation is part of.
Virtues like values are predicable of subjects and like norms are distributable and have some ‘force’. They are subject oriented but not individualistic. Whilst practices can be normed (that is oriented towards and judged against a parameter selected in order to regulate a series of facts about a field of relations) they can also be taken up as activities dependent on the formation of a hexis or ‘disposition’: An arrangement of parts such that the arrangement might have excellence. That is to say, a virtue is predicable of a subject insofar as the practice in question meets both a collective standard of practice and an individual disposition to such a practice. Virtues in contrast to a norm, specify the character dimension through which the active condition is to be pursued.
A woman first learns she is pregnant when she is brought to jail. Surprised, she turns the moment into a theatrics involving strawberry jam on a menstrual pad to feign a miscarriage so that she might be transported to the hospital. Trust between her and deputies, between her and medical staff, is broken down in a series of veridictional acts—finding the jam evidence, testing the pad with pH paper. The doctor meets the patient amid this noise, and in the shared system of the doctor-patient relationship which demands trust in symptomatology and in expertise. The patient nonchalantly confirms the absence of blood and the presence of jam. They discuss her imaginations of motherhood and of pregnancy, with all their risks and vulnerabilities. The doctor discovers pain on her physical examination. With oscillating trust, she transports her to the emergency room for evaluation, where she is diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy– a medical emergency and non-viable pregnancy. Meanwhile, lieutenants scribe a report motivated by their lack of trust in their charge and in the doctor. Vulnerability—risk and openness– on the part of the patient-woman-prisoner and on the physician forms the basis of critical pedagogical inquiry in care.
Somewhat randomly assigned / volunteering to work together under the general heading “flourishing, or the well-lived life”, it turned out that a group of four, which became five, people had a number of things in common which tied together the questions they were engaging in:
Subject position, Forms of intervention, Modes of evaluation, Venues and Reconstruction
In 1875, Fukuzawa Yukichi fabricated a new narrative, for a new object – the Japanese – as a didactic moment: the ‘deficiencies’ of the ‘Japanese’ qua the ‘Europeans’ was marked, and a plan was laid out to rectify this state not in terms of material gains, but with the ‘spirit’ as the object of intervention. A ‘distinction between knowledge and virtue’ is articulated:
Morality cannot be taught by means of the external; its truth or falsity cannot be checked by means of the external; it can affect others only when it is not visible. Intelligence can be taught by means of the external; its truth or falsity can be checked by means of the external; it can affect others even when it is not visible (2008: 115).
For epistemological reasons, morality/virtue is demeaned, and a new ontology is produced in which they are relegated to the ‘interior’, while the goal of civilization is found in the exterior. “But virtue is a matter of an individual’s interior life, and it has no role to play in man’s dealing with external things” (2008: 72). The question of the good life, or right conduct according to the Confucian sages, is no longer to be the foundation of a nation – as antiquity argued in the wellbeing of a nation mirrored the inner morality of the sovereign. Instead, the good life will be found in the interiority of the subject; the good life of the nation – the purpose and metric of civilization – will be found through a methodology ‘called statistics in the West’ – but its evaluation will be impossible for a ‘thousand years’.
Fukuzawa writes the contemporary. A world of private, public, and progress, in which questions of flourishing are not in a field of knowledge production, but remote, within an unknowable interiority, or an equally opaque future.
In 2008, a pair of scientists – Japanese and American – spoke with me about a field of ‘good’ in scientific practice. Authority was fielded in unspoken measures of tenure and Nobel laurels. A world apart in research and practice, they both spoke of a good that was found in the personal; one was a practicing Mormon Bishop, this is where his satisfaction came from; the other a gardener. And when pressed with the ‘good’ of science, the metric continues to be the people of the future, the ‘distant beneficiaries’.
Who flourishes?
Artist Seth Wulsin's building cut of the former Caseros prison in Buenos Aires
In 1994, eleven years after the fall of military rule, Argentina adopted a new constitution. A single article of this constitution defines two rights: the long-extant (but violated) writ of Habeas Corpus, and a completely new right named Habeas Data. Much as Habeas Corpus means ‘you should have the body,’ Habeas Data means ‘you should have the data.’ It gives every individual the right to know what data about him or her is contained in both public, government databases and private, commercial databases, to know for what purpose this data is used, to correct it if it is erroneous, update it if outdated, and suppress it if harmful. While Habeas Data is touted as the right of the ‘information age’ (and of Argentina’s future), this analogy between personal bodies and personal information resonates strongly in a country whose recent history is marked by arbitrary detention and disappearance as the privileged method of state terror.
We spoke about moving closer to inquiry whilst still keeping our question of flourishing in focus. So what kind of questions about what material can we ask to get towards this architectonic question?
We began with a story of Fukuzawa Yukichi in the late 19th Century Japan and related his central concerns about modernity with a problematic of knowledge production and flourishing among scientists in the early 21st Century. The question of flourishing for these contemporaries is compartmentalized. The goods of work in life as scientist are justified on a set of criteria different from the ones used in ‘other’ aspects of life, e.g. as a priest (Cf. Bellah et al Habits of the Heart). Where is the ‘breakdown’, either discordancy or indeterminacy in this divide? In each of our work, is there something like this breakdown?
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episode02, form-giving, presentation, process, representation
The central work in the “Natural History of the Enigma” series is a plantimal, a new life form I created and that I call “Edunia”, a genetically-engineered flower that is a hybrid of myself and Petunia. The Edunia expresses my DNA exclusively in its red veins. (…) “Natural History of the Enigma” is a reflection on the contiguity of life between different species. It uses the redness of blood and the redness of the plant’s veins as a marker of our shared heritage in the wider spectrum of life. By combining human and plant DNA in a new flower, in a visually dramatic way (red expression of human DNA in the flower veins), I bring forth the realization of the contiguity of life between different species. (Eduardo Kac’s website)
