Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History

Paul Rabinow

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400851799
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of essays explains and encourages new reflection on Paul Rabinow's pioneering project to anthropologize the West. His goal is to exoticize the Western constitution of reality, emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal, and show how their claims to truth are linked to particular social practices, hence becoming effective social forces. He has recently begun to focus on the core of Western rationality, in particular the practices of molecular biology as they apply to our understanding of human nature. This book moves in new directions by posing questions about how scientific practice can be understood in terms of ethics as well as in terms of power.The topics include how French socialist urban planning in the 1930s engineered the transition from city planning to life planning; how the discursive and nondiscursive practices of the Human Genome Project and biotechnology have refigured life, labor, and language; and how a debate over patenting cell lines and over the dignity of life required secular courts to invoke medieval notions of the sacred. Building on an ethnographic study of the invention of the polymerase chain reaction--which enables the rapid production of specific sequences of DNA in millions of copies Rabinow, in the final essay, reflects in dialogue with biochemist Tom White on the place of science in modernity, on science as a vocation, and on the differences between the human and natural sciences.

CHAPTER 1

Science as a Practice:
Ethos, Logos, Pathos

The moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: that of the value of truth . . . the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.”

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals)

SITE 1: A SELECT FEW

In the mid-1990s, I attended an international conference on a cutting-edge topic, assembling leading figures from several disciplines and two continents, held in a basement room at La Villette, a massive high-modern complex comprising offices, a science museum, and a postmodern park in northeastern Paris. La Villette was one of the anchors of President Mitterand’s project to renew eastern Paris, in effect to leave a monumental heritage to his fourteen-year reign as well as to establish a new axis of speculative development anchored by an opera house at the Bastille, the biggest library in Europe across the Seine, and La Villette in the north.¹ Outside lay a rectangular reflecting pond and a giant, silver-coated globe with interior planetarium. Inside, down an escalator, through a library, lay our designated room, well below ground, shaped as a modified surgical theater, providing an ambience of artificial light.

We began the conference, starting late, with the usual perfunctory greetings. Each presenter was allotted the standard thirty minutes; this guideline, it was immediately established, was to be honored in the breach. One way to pass the time was to ponder whether successive speakers, as they surpassed their allotted time, were (a) displaying run-of-the mill arrogance, (b) straightforwardly unprepared and disorganized, or (c) enacting a postmodern performance (it doesn’t matter where I start this paper or end it or how long it goes on, I will keep reading until someone stops me, or when I grow weary or simply lose interest). Although the afternoon session began with a reminder that the morning’s time schedule had not been respected, the afternoon was much the same. I was told at dinner that the French moderators would never intervene to cut someone off, and that in Italy it was not uncommon for people to mill around and converse among themselves during such events. Finally, one distinguished commentator, who had not attended the first two days of the conference because he had had more pressing business at a government commission and his country house, arrived late, took a seat, and looking harried, began writing out his comments.² When the time for his commentary arrived belatedly, he strode to the platform and talked on and on and on—about his own work, not the paper at hand.

The core group at the conference constituted a “network,” and in fact networks were one of its main areas of inquiry and discussion. During the breaks a good deal of talk centered around planning the next conference in Berlin. Clearly, the actual event itself was of little or no importance except that it had taken place and could consequently form the basis of a paragraph for a funding proposal submitted to finance the next event. The network had excellent connections to funding commissions, and one could therefore assume that the chances of a positive response were high. The turf was being occupied.

I was irritated and bored. First: bored. In his montage-parody of an autobiography, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes includes a photo of himself and three other men sitting at a table each staring off into space while (presumably) another speaks.³ They are bored. The caption of the photo is “Ennui: La Table Ronde.” Boredom, daydreaming, restlessness are common at academic events. Yet the consistent presence of these moods suggests that they are not merely accidental accompaniments to the occasional bad panel, otherwise the speakers would exit in droves and not attend the encore performance of the same script and players (including themselves). As this rarely happens, I take these moods as constitutive elements of such events. They are a significant aspect of what Pierre Bourdieu has named the habitus of academic life in the late twentieth century, a tacit but important dimension of that life form’s emotional tone, power relations, subjectivations, kinesthetics. As a transdisciplinary form, these occasions might be called the antisymposium, except that such a formulation is too negative; modern forms of power, Michel Foucault taught us, are productive. Modes of interaction, ways of talking, bodily praxis are simultaneously inscribed through institutional custom and enforced through long-term civilizational practices of autopolicing and self-fashioning. To invoke the name of Norbert Elias is to indicate that manners are not marginal to cultural formations. It takes a lot of cultural work to produce a pervasive boredom and inner drift in a filled auditorium of researchers. Even Roland Barthes was disposed to play by the rules.

Then: irritated. The experience at La Villette led me to reflections on some of the constitutive elements of such events, their moods, my reactions. In order to organize these reflections, I use the device of constructing—and thereby contrasting—two “types” (in the Nietzschean-Weberian sense) of science as a practice: (1) the vigilant virtuoso (mood = pathos or failed indifference), and (2) the attentive amateur (mood = attentiveness or reserved curiosity). These two types are not exhaustive; they do not map the field of contemporary practice. To produce such a map would entail occupying a position I refuse to occupy.

I take the work of Pierre Bourdieu as the most accomplished and successful example of the first type. Bourdieu has carried through not only an organized corpus of monographic investigations, he has achieved a powerful theoretical reflection on his own work. He believes the two to be inextricably bound, a belief that is contestable. I use the conference experience as a takeoff point for these thoughts and not as a metaphor for Bourdieu (although some of his disciples did play a role in the conference). I refract my boredom and irritation into an agonistic relation to Bourdieu’s work. My aim is to learn from this exercise, to weigh the effects, the affects, the consequences of such a logically and teleologically consistent attitude. The aim of this engagement is not victory (we are not engaged in sports or war) or revenge (for what?) or refutation (there is much to learn from him, although that is not foregrounded here). Rather, reflecting on my own ethnographic practice, with the help of a set of distinctions developed by Michel Foucault, I assemble the elements of a second and alternate type, one embodying a different practice. My goal is the clarification and cultivation of that practice.

Practice

Although the theme of “practice” has been central to American cultural anthropology for almost a decade now, it is rarely defined with any rigor.⁴ Sherry Ortner, in. her classic article “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” makes this point: “What is a practice? In principle, the answer to this question is almost unlimited: anything people do. Given the centrality of domination in the model, however, the most significant forms of practice are those with intentional or unintentional political implications. Then again, almost anything people do has such implications. So the study of practice is after all the study of all forms of human action, but from a particular—political—angle.”⁵ Here I take a different approach, one that is less general and one that takes up practices from a different angle—the ethical rather than the political. How does such a shift reconfigure the practice of knowledge?

Alasdair MacIntyre provides a cogent definition of a practice in his book, After Virtue, as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.”⁶ The language of the definition is full of terms one rarely, if ever, finds in the social sciences today (form, coherence, excellence, etc.). The reason for this unfamiliarity is that MacIntyre draws these terms from an older vocabulary and tradition, one that exists today as a minor current in moral philosophy, that of the virtues. A virtue, for MacIntyre, is

an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively presents us from achieving any such goods. The exercise of the virtues is not . . . a means to the end of the good for man. For what constitutes the good for man is a complete human life lived at its best, and the exercise of the virtues is a necessary and central part of such a life, not a mere preparatory exercise to secure such a life. The immediate outcome of the exercise of a virtue is a choice which issues in right action. . . . Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. Moral education is an “education sentimentale. ”⁷

My wager is that returning to this vocabulary will prove to be especially fruitful (to continue the agricultural metaphor) for understanding science as a practice. Although practices and virtues continue to exist, the discourse about them was marginalized by the rise of modern moral philosophy (Kantian, utilitarian, etc.). My advocacy of practice and virtue is an ethnographic and anthropological call to be attentive to existing “minor” practices that escape the dominant discursive trends of theorists of modernity and postmodernity alike.⁸ Therefore, somewhat unexpectedly to me at least, it can be taken as yet another critique of modernity. However, my intent is to contribute to what Hans Blumenberg has called “the legitimacy of the modern age,” by making some already existing practices and virtues more visible, more available, thereby contributing to their reinvention.

Type I. The Virtuoso of the Rational Will

Pierre Bourdieu chose the following quotation to open his own primer on his own work, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, tailored to charm and conquer—that is, to civilize—the American social scientific audience/market: “If I had to ‘summarize’ Wittgenstein, I would say: He made changing the self the prerequisite of all changes.”⁹ Although it is not evident why Wittgenstein needs to be mentioned at all except as a mark of distinction, the quote draws our attention to the question: What kind of self is it Bourdieu seeks to change? What subject does he want to produce?¹⁰ It also draws our attention to another question: What does he produce?

A. ILLUSIO

Despite the immense complexity and analytic power of Bourdieu’s sociological oeuvre, the answer to this question is relatively straightforward. Fundamentally there are only two types of subjects for Bourdieu: those who act in the social world and those who don’t. Those who do, do so on condition that fundamentally they are blind to what they are doing, they live in a state of illusio, to introduce a fundamental concept in Bourdieu’s system. The other possible subject position is the sociologist who studies those who act, those beings who take their lives seriously, those who have “interests.” The scientist, through the application of a rigorous method preceded and made possible through the techniques of asceticism applied to the self, frees himself from the embodied practices and organized spaces that produce the illusio and sees without illusion what everyone else is doing (they are maximizing their symbolic capital, while mistakenly believing they are leading meaningful lives).¹¹

Bourdieu puts it this way: “What I have called participant objectivation (and which is not to be mistaken for participant observation) is no doubt the most difficult exercise of all because it requires a break with the deepest and most unconscious adherences and adhesions, those that quite often give the object its very ‘interest’ for those who study it.” Or: “The sociologist unveils the self-deception [English in the text], the lies one gives to oneself, collectively kept up and encouraged, which, in every society is at the base of the most sacred values, and for that reason, at the basis of social existence in its entirety.”¹² There is one sacrifice required by the sociologist in order to achieve the clarity occasioned by his radical change of consciousness and of ontology: to refuse all social action, all ‘interest’ in the meaning and/ or stakes of social life. Bourdieu, again: “One must in a sense renounce the use of science to intervene in the object which is no doubt at the root of her ‘interest’ in the object. One must. . . carry out an objectivation which is not merely the partial and reductionist view that one can acquire from within the game, . . . but rather the allencompassing view that one acquires of a game that can be grasped as such because one has retired from it.”¹³ For Bourdieu, all social actors are (always) self-interested insofar as they act. However, Bourdieu goes beyond rational actor theory, economism, and sociobiology because he takes great pains to show that self-interest is not a presociological given (he shares the critique of individualism with Louis Dumont and the classic tradition of French sociology); self-interest is defined by the complex structure of overlapping sociological fields to which the actors must be blind in order to act.¹⁴ Bourdieu is absolutely unequivocal that social actors, while acting in terms of their sociologically structured self-interest, can never kn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Science as a Practice: Ethos, Logos, Pathos
• Chapter 2: presentations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology
• Chapter 3: On the Archaeology of Late Modernity
• Chapter 4: Georges Canguilhem: A Vital Rationalist
• Chapter 5: Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality
• Chapter 6: Galton’s Regret: Of Types and Individuals
• Chapter 7: Severing the Ties: Fragmentation and Dignity in Late Modernity
• Chapter 8: Steps toward a Third Culture
• Chapter 9: American Moderns: On Sciences and Scientists
• Index
• Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History