• Anthropos is that being who suffers from too many logoi; anthropos is equally that being who is affected by multiple ethoi.What is the relation between prior artifacts of discordancy, re-problematization and the curation of actual configurations of discordancies?
Now, we’ve left the fieldwork behind and we’ve retained the difficulty of the relation between our initial orientation to problematization (figures) and the artifacts of discordancy from fieldwork (double-binds). The proposal is that this relation –once curated another time –will make visible an “actual configurations of discordancy.”
What this means is that having made determinations about an experimentally observable setting in which a specific set of discordancies were encountered and conceptualized, one is then in a position to make these determinations into objects and subsequently into artifacts (further removing them from both the experiences and experiments of fieldwork.)
Facing the artifacts which have been presented, looking at them, it is now possible to intervene on them discursively. What is the mode of that intervention? We are narrating them into a configuration and distinguishing different planes of configuration, so as to anticipate the next stage of inquiry. This differentiation, we think, is preparatory to the identification and diagnosis, at least in terms of configuration, of actual and significant domains of anthropos undergoing re-problematization.
Since the mode of intervention we wanted to practice was collaboration and the only terms under which STIR and SynBERC would play the game was under the metrics of amelioration and prosperity, there was no way for us to collaborate. The aim of collaboration for us was to do inquiry into a problem of discordancy and discordancy necessarily poses the question of the good. So either we give up collaboration or we give up the metric of flourishing and the question of the human good: that was the double-bind. Hence, turning this double-bind into an artifact, we decided to give up collaboration in that venue and to proceed to inquire into the problem of metric in the broader situation.
We want to preserve our mode of inquiry as Bildung, that is to say, the search for knowledge requires self-formative processes. In our inquiries we discovered that in these venues the unquestioned supremacy of method blocked these processes of Bildung and inquiry. The choice was, to abandon Bildung or method. That’s the artifact. Just as we knew that collaboration was the right way to go, we know Bildung is the way to go so the only way to move forward is to refuse method and find a different venue.
Given that collaboration is blocked by the dominant metrics and Bildung by the dominance of method it follows that reconstruction cannot take place within venues where these first pairs are dominant, although remediation is still possible. These artifacts of the double-binds in field situations are what makes visible the need for and the apparent impossibility of reconstruction. Put simply, one can see the discordancies of the situation which need to be reconstructed, but the remediative mode of intervention under these conditions is not adequate to the task of reconstruction. Hence we retain the work of remediation that was part of fieldwork and Ausgang, but now realize that reconstruction is external to these remediative processes.
We are moving away from the artifacts – double-binds – produced through curation after the exit from fieldwork. These artifacts will need to be curated a second time to prepare them for the next stage of inquiry.
The first step will be to break the double-binds and leave one part of the pair behind. The demand to take with us one side rather than another of the bind into further inquiry was determined by the knowledge we had of both what we could not and what we thought needed to be worked on further.