Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary available in Paperback, eBook
Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary
- ISBN-10:
- 0691133638
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691133638
- Pub. Date:
- 11/18/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691133638
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691133638
- Pub. Date:
- 11/18/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691133638 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/18/2007 |
| Pages: | 168 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
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Marking Time On the Anthropology of the Contemporary
By Paul Rabinow Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2007 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13363-8
Introduction The anthropology of the contemporary has seemed to me best done by doing it, that is to say, by laying out examples and reflections on those examples. As will be apparent in this book, my inclination is more to show than to tell, in Wittgenstein's sense. At the same time, frequent well-meaning interlocutors, including reviewers of this book in manuscript form, have asked me to explain what I mean by the notion. As a means of acknowledging these requests, while at almost the same time refusing to honor them fully, I offer the following introductory thoughts.
On the Anthropology of the Contemporary
What is the contemporary? The ordinary English-language meaning of the term "the contemporary" is: "existing or occurring at, or dating from, the same period of time as something or somebody else." But there is the second meaning of "distinctively modern in style," as in "a variety of favorite contemporary styles." The first use has no historical connotations, only temporal ones: Cicero was the contemporary of Caesar just as Thelonious Monk was the contemporary of John Coltrane or Gerhard Richter is the contemporary of Gerhard Schroeder. The second meaning, however, does carry a historical connotation and a curious one that can be used to both equate and differentiate the contemporaryfrom the modern. It is that marking that is pertinent to the project at hand. Just as one can take up the "modern" as an ethos and not a period, one can take it up as a moving ratio. In that perspective, tradition and modernity are not opposed but paired: "tradition is a moving image of the past, opposed not to modernity but to alienation." The contemporary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (nonlinear) space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical.
There are three guiding ideas here. First, the contemporary is not an epochal term. For much of the twentieth century various movements that labeled themselves modernist were fixated on "the new." And the identification of the new was frequently tied to a more or less explicit philosophy of history in which the new was usually better or at least the result of an inevitable motion. In parallel with the culture concept, it was held that eras or epochs had a unity that tied diverse domains of practice and experience together into a whole that was, if not seamless, at least coherent. But as the faith and belief in such ontological entities (culture, epochs, progress) has been challenged, it has become apparent to some that understanding modernism and "the modern" required some critical distance from its own assumptions. This distance could be achieved through historical work that showed the contingency, inconsistencies, differential strata underlying the surface unity, and the like. Or it could be achieved through a conscious abandonment of epochal thinking, including as many of its presuppositions as could plausibly be reexamined. In this light, it is clear that in many domains old and new elements do coexist in multiple configurations and variations. Thus, if one no longer assumes that the new is what is dominant, to use Raymond Williams's distinction, and that the old is somehow essentially residual, then the question of how older and newer elements are given form and worked together, either well or poorly, becomes a significant site of inquiry. I call that site the contemporary.
For example, the fact that the human genome has been mapped, and population differences at the molecular level identified, does not mean that older understandings of race disappear in the light of this new knowledge. But neither does it not mean that all of the older understandings of what constitutes difference undergo a total transformation. Rather, the problem for an anthropology of the contemporary is to inquire into what is taking place without deducing it beforehand. And that requires sustained research, patience, and new concepts, or modified old ones. The purpose is not destruction or deconstruction but a reevaluation; its goal is not reform or revolution but rather a type of remediation.
Once again, observers as well as the practitioners of the contemporary are not principally concerned with "the new" or with distinguishing themselves from tradition. Rather, they are intrigued by the operations of the distinction modern/contemporary as the clustered elements and stylized configurations of the modern are observed in the process of declusterings, reconfigurations, and different stylizations or made to do so. As I have argued in Anthropos Today, this mode of observation and practice is one of secession rather than of the avant-garde or its presumed opposite, the neoconservative. Secession marks, observes, and stylizes in a recursive manner.
Second, there is a difference between emphasizing reproduction and emphasizing emergence. This difference holds for the subjects in the world as much as for analysts. Most of anthropology and significant portions of the other social sciences concentrate on how society or culture reproduces itself (and this includes many models of "change") through institutions, symbolic work, power relations, or the cunning of reason. And there is much to be said in favor of this mode of analysis. But it has become apparent that there are other phenomena present today, as no doubt there have been at other times in other places, that are emergent. That is to say, phenomena that can only be partially explained or comprehended by previous modes of analysis or existing practices. Such phenomena, it follows, require a distinctive mode of approach, an array of appropriate concepts, and almost certainly different modes of presentation.
Third, by "anthropology" I do not mean ethnography understood as a practice developed to analyze a specific type of [R]AS-object-the culture and/or society of ethnoi-so as to contribute to a specific genre, the monograph (or journal article). Nor do I mean philosophic anthropology in the nineteenth-century European sense, whether materialist or idealist, whose object was the nature or essence of Mankind and whose genre was the treatise. Nor do I intend the mixed forms of research and writing that proliferated around this unstable object, l'homme, which attempted, while continually failing, to bring the transcendental and the empirical into a stable relationship, so powerfully described by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, even if Foucault himself was tempted for a time to overcome and stabilize things, an attempt he eventually abandoned. Rather, I take the object of anthropological science (Wissenschaft) to be the dynamic and mutually constitutive, if partial and dynamic, connections between figures of anthropos and the diverse, and at times inconsistent, branches of knowledge available during a period of time; that claim authority about the truth of the matter; and whose legitimacy to make such claims is accepted as plausible by other such claimants; as well as the power relations within which and through which those claims are produced, established, contested, defeated, affirmed, and disseminated.
Thus, taken as an object domain, contemporary anthropology is neither as broad as traditional ethnography nor as grand as classic philosophic anthropology nor as ambitious as the human sciences. This narrowing of scope has some advantages: there are good reasons to accept the claim (sic) that a restricted form of anthropology refers to an actual object domain in the present whose recent past, near future, and emergent forms can be observed. Of course, one can observe and analyze that object domain in diverse manners. One challenge, the one at hand in this book, is to contribute to orientations that would mark a means of producing anthropological knowledge anthropologically.
Marking Time is neither a standard monograph nor a traditional collection of essays. It is not a monograph in that it does not have a single guiding argument, clearly stated at the outset, and rigorously held to task in the ensuing chapters. Neither is it simply a book of essays in that the chapters that follow are not previously published pieces grouped together and unified by having the same author. Rather, there are connections between the chapters; these connections have a pliable logic that readers may discern could have been assembled differently, producing a different flow and effect. One might say that the mode of assemblage is a contemporary one. Finally, and to the point, the book's chapters share both a temporality and a historicity; they were written during a period of labor, work, and exploration within a particular problem space. The contours and dynamics of that (nonmetric) space became clearer during the course of a series of orienting experiments in form. Those experiments were all calibrated, with varying degrees of precision and success, toward designing inquiry. Design is a dynamic and collaborative practice about which there is more to be said and which currently forms a topic of intense collaboration and future work. For the present, however, the first question at hand is: what is inquiry? And thus readers eager for definitions and guidelines will now receive some, with at least a preliminary rationale for why they are being presented in their current form.
Inquiry
Following John Dewey and Richard McKeon, we can define a term as a word + a concept + a referent. Thus the same word, for example, "philosophy" or "anthropology," can take its place in different terms. There is a frequent confusion between a word and a term. At the outset, therefore, it is appropriate to highlight some of the key concepts at work in the terms used in this work.
The general issue of how to characterize anthropological inquiry has been a surprisingly underexplored subject. Given this gap and given my formation and inclinations, the tradition of pragmatic and nominalist thinking was the place I was likely to find conceptual help. John Dewey's 1938 magnum opus (written at age eighty), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, proved invaluable in providing a general orientation as well as specific concepts albeit with certain critical limitations. The concept and practice of inquiry were central to John Dewey's life work. He published a large number of studies on the topic, both highly technical and more popular, spanning a period from his collected Essays in Experimental Logic (1903, 1916) to the 1940s. The pertinent conceptual orientation of Dewey's term inquiry is taken up in the subsequent section.
The main limitations of his approach for anthropological inquiry, it seems to me, are found in his inability to leave the practices, skills, and narrative forms of traditional philosophy behind, even though time and time again he explicitly advocated doing so. Dewey's practice remains abstract even though his rhetorical aim was to move the reader away from such a traditional mode of thinking and writing. One might well expect that a thinker who insisted with force and conviction that the task and challenge of contemporary philosophy was to overcome traditional philosophy's insistence on certainty, abstraction, and timelessness would himself seek to integrate the analysis of substantive topics-specific problem situations-into the very warp and woof of his practice. But in Dewey's case one would be disappointed. He remains a traditional philosopher malgré lui. Dewey (1859-1952), like Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), simply did not concern himself with the genealogical details of the "merely ontic," any more than did Dewey's contemporary analytic philosophers (Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and others), who perfected the technique of using thin, school-masterly examples to draw large philosophic conclusions. In sum, Dewey's treatise lacks any sustained attempt to instantiate the analytic process he advocated.
Fundamentally, Dewey is not nominalist enough. He writes despite himself as if his objects were atemporal. He does not provide any historical contextualization to locate and delimit his key terms, such as "breakdown," "situation," and "reconstruction." The danger in this practice is that one risks ontologizing these categories. Various other thinkers, such as Reinhart Koselleck with his "history of concepts," developed a form of inquiry that would have been consistent with the overall project of Dewey's logic but would have entailed a different set of intellectual skills. Although it would be of interest to explore the historical conditions in which Dewey's terms, practices, and modes were formed, such an undertaking obviously is neither my intent nor my interest here. Rather, I am trying to appropriate conceptual tools that had been forged for certain problems, and to refashion them in the hope that they will provide analytic purchase for different problems.
Elements
Despite the limitations of Dewey's approach, his claims about the nature of inquiry provide helpful orientation points for a renewed practice of inquiry. As an introductory device, I propose a series of Deweyian claims about the nature of inquiry.
1. "Inquiry begins in an indeterminate situation," Dewey argues that inquiry is a continuous, reiterative process. Inquiry is not restricted to scientific or traditional philosophic questions per se but is involved with ordinary life as well as larger political and cultural issues. Hence inquiry begins midstream, always already embedded in a situation, one both settled and unsettled. Inquiry moves through the process of inquiry itself to other situations and other problems, themselves both stabilized and troubled. Thus, it is perfectly appropriate to begin with tentative parameters of a situation to be inquired into and tentative understandings of what is at stake.
2. "and not only begins in it but is controlled by its specific qualitative nature." There are situations that may reach a determined state rapidly and others where it is not possible to tell before the inquiry is well under way whether, and in what manner, and for how long, it will take to move beyond a first loose state to one in which both the situation and its determinants become clearer, more determinate. Thus, to claim to know beforehand precisely what one is going to do, or to find, as grant proposals demand, would constitute bad method, poor logic, and falsely disciplined inquiry. Or, more accurately, it seems to me, run the risk of not doing inquiry at all.
3. "Inquiry, as the set of operations by which the situation is resolved (settled or rendered determinate): Inquiry is not an empiricism in the sense of discovering what is out there as if it were transparent and passive, simply waiting to be represented. Nor is inquiry theory driven in the sense that a situation can be reduced to a particular case of a more general theory (this is in part because one cannot know beforehand what the status of one's concepts are or whether the initial situation has any unity). Inquiry is a form of constructivism or operationalism: Dewey means this in a common-sense way (problems and thought require action to exist) and in a more technical sense (since inquiry arises within a problematic and indeterminate situation, the inquirer is not outside the situation, nor is she in a position such that she could construct something that was not to a degree present already). Hence, operations are necessarily part of the indeterminate situation once it is taken up by an inquiry.
4. "has to discover and formulate the conditions which describe the problem at hand." By "discover the conditions" Dewey "indicates" that inquiry is situated and its goal is to isolate something in the world that is causing or occasioning effects. By "formulate," Dewey is making a strong claim, one that runs throughout his work, that the giving of form (whether discursive, logical, artistic, scientific, political, and the like) is a primary task in living in general as well as in specific practices themselves conditioned by traditions and habits. Form giving is thus an essential goal of "describing" a problem and of shaping an inquiry. Description rather than explanation is the goal, but description is not a naïve act but one that can arise only within a process of inquiry that is engaged in one or another type of form making.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Marking Time by Paul Rabinow
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Table of Contents
Preface viiAcknowledgments xiii
Introduction
On the Anthropology of the Contemporary 1
Inquiry 6
Elements 7
The Legitimacy of the Contemporary
2000: Drosophila Lessons 14
The Future of Human Nature 20
Bio-ethics: The Question Concerning Humanism 22
Nature 25
Security, Danger, Risk 26
Contemporary Formations 28
Conclusion 29
Adjacency
Timing 35
Situating: Tolerance and Benevolence 36
Telos: A Zone of Discomfort 44
Untimely Work 48
Observation
Bildung 54
Observing the Future 57
Responsibility to Ignorance 60
Observing Observers Observing 62
Observing First-order Observers 64
Chronicling Observation 66
Original History 67
Writing Things: Deictic Not Epideictic 69
Vehement Contemporaries
Rugged Terrain 78
Elements of a Contemporary Moral Landscape 80
Genomics as Ethical Terrain 81
Agon in the Genomic Terrain 84
Thumos: Appropriate Anger 90
Vehement Contemporaries 98
Marking Time: Gerhard Richter
Contemporary Modern 101
Biotechnical Forms 103
Richter: Double Negations 106
Art Critics and Others 106
Our Contemporary 108
Nature 109
Photography 112
Marking Time 116
Abstract Images 119
Remediation 122
Objects 124
Remedation 127
Notes 129
Bibliography 141
Index 147
What People are Saying About This
Marking Time is a gem of insight and a journey of learning. These essays offer an intellectual adventure to be enjoyed by a broad range of readers.
— George Marcus, University of California, Irvine
Paul Rabinow offers us a sustained piece of thought on the meaning of the contemporary for anthropology, with the goal of discovering 'new problems and new truths that open up points of view and new sciences.' Boldly eschewing use of the 'ethnographic record' to address major philosophical questions, Rabinow instead detours through ancient Greece, Rome in late antiquity, his own research with various genome mapping projects, and a dialogue with many German philosophers, to arrive at concepts that help us write in a mediated mode, where one's insights come from finding modes of observing in close proximity that are appropriate to the objects and events to be explained.
— John Borneman, Princeton University
"Paul Rabinow has proved again that he is one of our most incisive commentators on the vital question of our time-what it means to be human today. The reflections gathered in this book engage with the question from a remarkable array of starting points-from speculative philosophical histories through the artisanship of painting to the creative labor that sequenced the genome of the fruit fly. In the process, he delineates a methodology for the anthropology of the contemporary that is productive and provocative in equal measure."—Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics and Political Science"Marking Time is a gem of insight and a journey of learning. These essays offer an intellectual adventure to be enjoyed by a broad range of readers."—George Marcus, University of California, Irvine"Paul Rabinow offers us a sustained piece of thought on the meaning of the contemporary for anthropology, with the goal of discovering 'new problems and new truths that open up points of view and new sciences.' Boldly eschewing use of the 'ethnographic record' to address major philosophical questions, Rabinow instead detours through ancient Greece, Rome in late antiquity, his own research with various genome mapping projects, and a dialogue with many German philosophers, to arrive at concepts that help us write in a mediated mode, where one's insights come from finding modes of observing in close proximity that are appropriate to the objects and events to be explained."—John Borneman, Princeton University
Paul Rabinow has proved again that he is one of our most incisive commentators on the vital question of our time-what it means to be human today. The reflections gathered in this book engage with the question from a remarkable array of starting points-from speculative philosophical histories through the artisanship of painting to the creative labor that sequenced the genome of the fruit fly. In the process, he delineates a methodology for the anthropology of the contemporary that is productive and provocative in equal measure.
— Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics and Political Science