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This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison. We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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How many times have we started a show with a quote from Comrade Nietzsche?
Not nearly enough, so here you go.
Only an untimely thinker who thinks through the past can become a philosopher of the future.
Those are my words actually, but Nietzsche did say this.
He said that thinking the thought of the past is a way of, I quote,
"acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and let us hope for the benefit of a time to come."
That's one way of conceiving of our vocation on this radio program as a kind of counteraction.
If only because what we try to do here, a week in and week out is to think.
To think without banisters as Hana Arant put it, or to heed the call of thinking, if you prefer high degrees.
In our time, to be untimely, all you have to do is think,
to think the thought of the past so as to think your way out of the present.
Only by thinking our way out of the present can we counteract our time and think our way back into the present,
with a broader understanding of its limitations as well as its potential openings.
Stay tuned everyone, we have a show for you on the contemporary and what it means to think through our time,
coming up here on entitled opinions.
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We shall Foucault write somewhere that critical thinking must direct itself towards the contemporary limits of the necessary.
I'm not sure exactly what he meant by that, I'll be asking my guest about it shortly.
But here's another quote from the same context.
"The claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society,
of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions."
A little overstatement there may be, in the flashy French style, the kind of style we approve of on this show,
as it cautions us against profits, ideologues, or discourses who propose overall programs that would catapult us out of the contemporary reality into some other imagined or theoretical reality.
As Jean-Paul Sath said, "We have the world we deserve. We have the world we deserve, and the question is to figure out how and why we deserve it, how and why so much of what seems necessary is actually optional, self-chosen, revizable."
We may not be able to escape from our contemporary reality, but that doesn't mean we are trapped in it.
Reality is a nexus of facts and possibilities that can be acted upon, counteracted, reconfigured, repossessed.
One way of doing so is by thinking critically, untimely, about the contemporary limits of the necessary.
The guest who joins me in the studio today has done a great deal of critical thinking about such limits and about the contemporary in general.
Indeed, Professor Paul Rabanau is here from Berkeley to deliver a keynote address at a conference that's taking place here at Stanford on the topic of the contemporary.
It's a special pleasure to welcome him to entitled opinions. Paul Rabanau is one of the major intellectuals and anthropologists of our time.
The author of many groundbreaking books, including most recently, The Accompanement, Assembly, the Contemporary.
Also, making time on the anthropology of the contemporary, and many other fundamental, often cross-disciplinary contributions.
Paul Rabanau is also the editor of the Foucault Reader and the Essential Foucault, and he was a close friend and collaborator of Foucault himself.
We'll be posting his full profile on our website, but meanwhile, let me welcome him to the program.
Paul, I'm happy you could join us today.
Well, it's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me.
So later today, you're going to give a keynote talk, the title of which is contemporary inquiry, ecologies of assemblages.
That's an intriguing title and we'll talk about what you mean by ecologies of assemblages later in this show.
But first, I'd like to begin with Misha Foucault, if you don't mind.
You had some decisive interactions and collaborations with Foucault before he died in 1984.
Would you mind sharing with us some reflections on his importance as a thinker, not only for your own work, but for our understanding of the contemporary?
He did die 30 years ago, but I take it that like me, you believe there's a great deal in this thought and corpus that continues to be directly pertinent and relevant to our contemporary reality, both inside and outside of academia.
Okay, one step back, your rewriting of nature was terrific. I really enjoyed that.
I think generally the word that in French for contemporary that Foucault was using was the actual lecturel or lecturelite, and we can come back to that, but that is slightly different than with the way I'm using the contemporary.
Foucault is one of the, I think one of the great thinkers at the 20th century for a number of reasons, not least of which his incredible restlessness, and he's one of the very few major thinkers who's changed this mind a number of times.
If Wittgenstein did, Härgert of did, Särter did from time to time, but it's amazingly rare that his reality changes and the life of thinking, engage thinking, is undertaken for people to actually change their mind, which is cause of consternation for academics, writing books about these people, but it's actually to me exactly what deep thinking or real thing is.
I think thinking or real thinking or thinking of the actual consistent.
And I think one of, who goes great is Strand's, and I think this is differentiates him from Härger and Wittgenstein, was that he was out in the world closely connected to a range of different realities.
And many of them archival and historical, but many of them in the lived experience of the world as it was going on, political, sexual, ethical, philosophical, etc.
And it's this incredibly powerful combination of reflection on experience, and then as you said, showing the critical limitations of the form of that experience without only other than thinking or arguing that you can just think your way out of the world.
So it's real practice, it's real work on the self and others, or the government of self and others.
And I think that's why he's still relevant, and from sexuality to governmentality to a range of different topics we can talk about.
How would you characterize the major change in his thinking from what to what?
Well, I think he went through a number of different changes, but maybe we can start with the biggest ones, which I think goes something like the following.
The bulk of his work from when he was very young, up through the history of sexuality, was a very sophisticated and original set of attempts to combine the detailed historical and empirical knowledge of how certain universals, like reason, or the kind of
and unreasonable and unreasonable and insanity, all the terms around sexuality, their genealogy, how they came to be so embedded in the way we understand ourselves and the way we treat each other.
That was a very long period of his life.
Then, starting in 1976, and actually a little bit earlier for a long period of time, he stopped writing, although he did give interviews.
And he thought what we might say was the position of the external critical intellectual who was showing how dominated and exploitative practices and understanding had taken hold.
And he made a turn towards thinking, actually, having decided that power was productive and not just negative, he then turned that on philosophy and on his own work.
And began to pose the question for himself of, okay, well, then what is a productive practice of thinking in the world, always?
And he took a long detour back to the Greeks and the Romans, particularly the Stoics, and was working through in these incredible last three years of lectures at the College of France.
Basically, what is a philosophic life and what is a life worth living?
Which, he believed, had been basically eliminated from philosophic practice as a central concern, first by method in Descartes and forward, and by Christianity earlier on.
So I think his courage to shift so radically and to pose new questions for himself, because I think the stakes for him were very existential.
I think that's what was most deeply impressive to me.
I agree definitely existential because his primary concern there and those lectures about La Cucur de Sua, the self cultivation, seems very unlike the earlier Foucault for whom the self is just a secondary phenomenon, not a primary.
Would you say that the genealogical method that you referred to where you come to understand how things came to be embedded in the reality that it's necessary to understand the actual, the present, let's say, the kind of very, from a genealogical point of view so that we can actually discern what is not necessary in its standard.
In its structure and therefore what can be submitted not only to critique but to transformation and revision.
Yes, Foucault practices what I call, he's used the phrase only a few times, but the history of the present.
The history of the present in Foucault always stops usually around 1840.
Hence the genealogical method goes very far back and usually stops at the beginning of what we might call modernity.
So there are two points about that. Why did he do that? He did that because he made a sharp distinction between the role of philosophy and the role of citizenship.
He was very allergic to the idea that philosophers ought to tell people what their democratic or republican views or practices were were.
So he tried to show that much of what we take for granted as you've described it is contingent. What to do about it was not up to the philosopher. He was not Heidegger, he's certainly not Plato or Habermas or many others.
And he was very ascetic in resisting the temptation to tell people what to do.
I agree. What I've tried to do and the people I work with is what we call the anthropology of the contemporary, which is to say to proceed from what Foucault did and try to do work on what's going on now.
And I think the key, excuse me, text for that is the what is enlightenment text.
Yes, when I think I was quoting a little bit from that. Right. And there's a terrific phrase in there where he talks about Budlau and the ethos of the modern.
And the phrase is you have no right to despise the present, which that's right.
To which I add even if it's despicable. And I think in Budlau, but also for the rest of us, denying in any way how many real problems and there are in the world it would be silly.
But the question is then what? And so it's a dual challenge and demand to both rigorously know things and then to see their contingency to proceed towards something that's more worthwhile.
And in his last few years of his life before he tragically died at a young age, he was beginning that process of, well, what is thinking, but not in Heidegger's way.
But in a way of the real work and not just on the self, which Habermas and others accuse him of, but this the book is called the second book is is called the government of self and others and the argument is you're always with others.
And on the one hand and then the last set of lectures is called the College of Truth, which again goes through historical dimensions of situated practice in the world political, ethical, epistemological, etc.
Great. Well, I will look forward just in a moment to discussing with you why you think anthropology, the way you practice it is fulfilling the recommendation or let's say the opening that Foucault's thinking provides for us.
But one last topic about Foucault, I find that for someone who died in 1984 before the explosion of the technologies of surveillance that now has become such a huge dominant reality of our own present, our own actual be it exercised by the government or be it from the amount of obscene amount of surveillance cameras in every public sphere.
Or through the internet technologies and the tracking devices and the cell phones and so forth.
This is something that arose largely in the wake of Foucault and yet he I don't want to use the word prophetic because that could lead to misunderstandings, but his analysis of what a society of surveillance is all about seems to me extremely pertinent to our present moment.
Well, it's a very complicated question. The person who's usually cited is the laws who wrote this little piece on the society of control, which was also in that sense very far side it although it's a short piece and academics over interpreted massively.
I think why Foucault's relevant is to surveillance questions today operates on it for a number of points first that there are technologies of discipline and control.
And he showed us that these are not just a reducible to capital or the state and therefore the idea that that's the kind of object one could understand even if the media or the technologies, the media technologies themselves are so different.
is important. Secondly, particularly in the work on the history of sexuality although it's also surprisingly in the work on disciplinary technologies is a sense of how these technologies form the kind of subjects who then continue to form themselves.
And I think Foucault actually similar to Max Weber had made a very sharp distinction between power and force and he talks about force being very uneconomical.
Very closely to have a police force or an army constantly watching people or keep controlling their behavior what they think and say.
The art of power is an economy of means in which the more you can create conditions and practices under which people rule themselves towards strategic ends which other parties may be in direction of then power is truly operative and power is a relationship between subjects and ruled and rule and those who are ruled.
And I think if you look at the internet and the NSA and recent issues that we're all facing, you can see very much this latter question of the fact that so many there are so many willing subjects who while they're complaining about surveillance are themselves deeply participatory in the conditions under which surveillance takes place.
Oh yeah absolutely they've handed over all this information.
Well and while they're all on the internet on their max cell phones, cell phones etc those are the conditions under which that's what's being surveilled.
And by the way you didn't mention the main surveillance technologies which are the commercial ones because it's scandalous when the NSA stuff comes out although in detail.
Well we could talk about that but the main surveillance technologies are the ones that operate via the internet on your personal information your credit cards are spending amazon and google on the rest.
And whereas it were willing subjects in a lot of that.
Well in fact this book that came out recently called Drag the Dragnet Nation by Julia Angwin which is really about the internet and she went to study the archives of the East German police forces and spying agents and the amount that they were able to, the amount of information they were able to gather about their citizenry through intensive investment and labor and so forth.
Was just a small proportion of what we, the citizens in America and the western world willingly hand over to these venues that then it would be like the wet dream of any totalitarian state that's trying to get the thing of a citizen.
So yes the willing surrender on the part of the citizen is and I think Foucault speaks in a different context about I think you mentioned that there's a normalizing force but then you incorporate it and you become self normalizing and that you become a docile body does he speaks about the docile body and this is not so much of the docile body but it's a new docile citizen or something.
Yeah that's terrific. I think that's right and the other variable the difference with the stasi of course is we live in consumers capitalism and that vast amounts of the technology and the media are involved in consumerism and where consumers subjects and subjects of the training of the body in not just in a disciplinary way but look at the Stanford Berkeley campus and early in the morning there are people jogging all the time etc.
That's not that that's good or bad but it's no one's forcing them in an overt way to do it how it comes to be that people voluntarily do these things or believe it's voluntarily is a question of norms and norms are of course often connected to course of dimensions and cultural hierarchies and the rest so I certainly agree with the direction you're taking that in.
I guess that was part of the subtext of we have the world that we deserve and although there are power mechanisms that cause us to self normalize there's always a certain element of consent that not always but in many cases there's an element I sent that then we're very happy to always almost that we certainly in any ceremony there was that element not for everybody but it.
This is the well to go back to the distinction of force and power Mike example I use when I teach is the following the French because I worked in French colonies and ex colonies Morocco but in Vietnam the French ruled Vietnam.
As a colony in the early 20th century with a few warships some muskets and cannons and African soldiers and to a significant degree exercise control over Vietnam.
The Americans at the height of the American war in Vietnam had 500,000 troops there were a million troops in the South Vietnamese Army the firepower was easily a trillion times what the French had but the power was very weak.
The force was infinite the power was very weak so I think that's not what do you think power is Paul because here Hannah aren't also makes a distinction between power and force and strength and for her power is something that she can see that's as having a legitimacy because it's based on I don't know if you it's not popular will I don't know don't remember exactly now the terms but it's not the power that hides and it's not a.
It's not a for cold.
Well there's some degree of complicity and there's some degree of can of some form or other in their different forms of consensus and involved and that's also what is worth examining empirically and in terms of of inquiry about about how that operates.
I say one other I very important phrase in what is enlightenment essay was he says in passing that what he calls the paradox of modernity is the question of how to increase capacities without intensifying negative power relations and I think these questions of the Internet and of consumer society and of physical well being and what have you really turn on that because it's not a question that once again.
I think it's a question that once against being healthy in or not being you know obese or something.
It's a question of what is the proportionality between the increase of capacities and then where one is then buying into and self imposing on a normative system which is excessive.
And that's very that's very hard to judge and we don't have very good concepts or political theory to talk about that.
Well here you brought up just now two words that are really fundamental to your work as in anthropology one is inquiry and the other is concepts.
So if we could transition a little where it's I think you're as an anthropologist what's original about your work is that you do find that Foucault although he was not an anthropologist in a disciplinary way that he could he could serve to open up realms of anthropological inquiry.
And so could you talk a little bit about how well what your view of an anthropology of the contemporary is and what it has to do with this key word of inquiry.
Okay so what is anthropology anthropology for me is at one level in a tricky way very simple it's anthropos plus logos.
Okay so anthropos the Greek word which we call man or mankind or humanity or a range of other terms.
One of the great things that Foucault did particularly in the order of things Lemorely shows was to show that the figure of anthropos differed from in different historical periods.
So what the cities understood by anthropos and what darkheim understood by anthropos were really not the same thing.
So let's say is not that there's absolute unbridgeable difference involved but there's a malleability which is partially discursive and partially not discursive between how we understand what we think is the same being anthropos.
And that one of the ways that those understandings and practices are normed and formed to use a phrase I use is through science or logos and logos of course what we understand by science has changed frequently and that's one of the things that I study.
So the combination of anthropos and logos or logoing seems to me the condition of anthropology and I think that particularly today we have too many logoing to have a simple unified view of anthropos and therefore what we need to do is both genealogical work but also then inquiry.
And inquiry as a term I take mainly from John Dewey which I would oppose to both theory and research and that's a longer discussion but what Dewey meant by inquiry was, excuse me.
Thinking starts Dewey says when something breaks down and in the world in your experience of the world.
The thing is not something you theorize about away from the world it's something that's a practice in the world and they're perhaps two basic things that can break down discord which is a kind of ethical political breakdown or in determinacy which is a kind of.
Scientific philosophical breakdown and when you when one encounters breakdowns that's when thinking starts and then Dewey has a lot to say in a number of places from the beginning of his career on through this great book on logic.
About how inquiry works as a practice which is to say it constantly engages with the real and changes its norms and its standards as it proceeds from problem to solution to new problem.
So this is an old tradition but not one that is the card or how to go or any number of other people it's problem oriented.
It's partial solution oriented and in this sense good science is like this there aren't any final solutions there are better problems there better experiments there are more refined questions which enable you to encounter problems in a different way.
And it seems to me that inquiry is a term which better suits at least the form of anthropological practice but I think the kind of philosophic practice that Foucault was advocating as well so I think it's a combination of American pragmatism.
Although American pragmatism has gone back into the academy and become professors who profess about Dewey or James or somebody rather than a practice in the world and that seems to me what I'm trying to do and what I think others should be trying to do as well.
You're doing it as an anthropologist and I think you would assume that anthropology is not the only way of doing that, of being engaged in the world and not in an empirical way but an inquiry oriented way.
I'm certainly not first of all I'm very clear that what I call anthropology is hardly representative of the discipline of anthropology as many of my colleagues would be very eager to tell you.
So I'm using it in a kind of a broad sense of the term.
But of course there are many other forms of this and I'm not the last thing I'd be interested in is a single form but in various of the arts as I think you know I've been doing a lot of work on the German painter Gerhard Richter or I'm interested in Pierre Beles among other people but I think there are many modes of practicing inquiry in the sciences and the tech world.
In other disciplines in literary criticism and the rest but I think inquiry is a broad term and if the stakes are anthropos then I'm going to lump a lot of different activities under that term.
Another term is bios, life and that's another branch of major forms of inquiry today and the logo that are being produced in the biosciences are claimed to be extremely important in understanding who we are as anthropos.
I think that's open to more pause.
Right, yeah.
Because as you said if anthropos is conceived differently in different historical eras we might be in a regime where our humanity is being conceived of primarily biologically.
Biotechnically, biotechnically, biotechnically.
I would say and I'd like to talk about that but first the other word which is so important for your work is out of concepts.
And I know that you believe that many of the concepts that we employ in academia especially come from a historical present, an actrélieté which is no longer ours at all and therefore they are in need of a concept.
So I would say that the kind of anthropology I'm advocating is also nominalist that is to take universals or what's taken to be universals like society or culture or life or man or sex or power and to nominalize them.
That is to say to do genealogical work on when they arose in something like the way that they became dominant under what conditions, how many different shifts that they undertook and I've done this work on society in my book French modern and shown that what we understand the society arose in the 19th century and took more than a century to become fully articulate.
And integrated into a large range of other power relations and conceptual relations and another term as life.
It's important to remember that the term biology that was coined twice in Europe in the early 19th century, there was no biology before then.
There were natural sciences, there were various other things but which isn't to say there's nothing the same. It's just to say that what we take as given needs to be understood in a broader context to also be able to question and what's taken today to be biotechnology, whether it's really biology and I think the answer is not yet.
Well I like the fact that you have to go that next step as you said because one of my frustrations in academia in the humanities is that the majority of my colleagues, not the majority, let me say that many, many of my colleagues feel that once they've historicized a phenomenon their work is done.
That for me is frustrating because I think the historicization is a first step to then do the actual thinking of lecture and of course Nietzsche and on timely meditations says precisely that he said the disease of Europe is historicizing and I was 1870s early the 1870s and by the way the second German word in Nietzsche's title is
but Tachtong which is a word that I've taken up and used via Nicklaus Lumont and it's both means participation and observation at the same time.
So just historicizing is the sickness of Europe and so genealogy and historicizing are not actually at all the same practice but I completely agree with you that that's what's become dominant as a mode of
criticism in many parts of the academy but that's also why the waning of those parts of the academy is so significant today and a real crisis and sense of the need for reinvention is going on.
I agree with you entirely that the crisis of the humanities you hear so much about is always looking for the causes of it in larger social trends etc.
They're all very important but as we were saying earlier we have the world we deserve and sometimes I think the humanists could do more to revitalize their own discourses approaches and so forth and make
a stronger case for the
It takes a lot of courage. I mean you must remember that the academy, particularly in the United States, is a vast enterprise with tens and tens and tens of thousands of professors
and changing and in the humanities many of them were formed under the period of the great theory generations of the 60s and 70s and we're still living with that and that's how they made their careers they've made many contributions but it's also what I'm going to talk about later today and what our group is working on is what we call the withering of critique.
That's so when Duluz or Borgia used certain concepts in certain tropes in 1975 it was one thing but 30 or 40 years later they've withered they don't have much punch anymore.
So how that changes is it takes a lot of courage to change what you're doing and that goes back to where I started with Foucault.
I think he's one of the thinkers who had the courage to rethink what he was doing.
It's not only Duluz, there's Walter Benjamin who I always read him with a great deal of interest and pleasure but the idea that you keep on going back to Benjamin's concepts is if we're talking almost 100 years later there's something a little paralyzing about not being able to take that step from
a story of actualization, I don't know what the proper concept is a good deal of self domination involved in that as if anything important had to come from
or Germany, basically.
Whereas these are important people.
Benjamin was a complicated brilliant but extremely marginal character.
And the industries that have grown up and continued to grow up around these people, including
Foucault, it's very depressing.
Because it's, in many ways, stands exactly against what their own lives were about.
So let's remember that Walter Benjamin's doctoral thesis was trashed by his committee,
and he left the academy forever.
And Foucault's thesis was rejected.
And Derryduck couldn't form a doctoral committee in France for a long time until he became
a star in America.
So the fact that this has now become an industry of professors, there's something drastically
insufficient to be kind about that.
Well Paul, would you say that pragmatism, because you have an avowed debt to pragmatism
or an allegiance to it, that this is always there in your mind to compel you to go beyond
just the historicization, because it has to translate into not practice in a programmatic
way, but in something that has consequence.
Absolutely.
And remember very vividly, about 20 years ago or so, I was at the humanities, the UC
Humanities Center in Irvine, and I was just, the human genome sequencing project was
underway, and I said I was going to work on this and was interested in it for a range of
reasons.
And one of the distinguished professors there looked at me and said, it sounds like you
actually believe that they're going to discover something.
And I said, well, of course I do.
There's no question that they're going to discover something.
And that's very exciting.
I mean, totally in favor of knowledge.
The question then is what they're going to discover and what it actually means scientifically
and humanly.
And the idea that immediately one's ready to denounce and distance is a self-defeating
formula.
So as an anthropologist, when I was in Morocco and I was a young man, I learned enough
in Arabic to at least follow what was going on with the Moroccans in rural Morocco.
I was trying to understand when I engaged with the human genome sequencing projects,
I learned enough molecular biology, which is a lot easier than Arabic, to know, to be
able to sit in lab meetings and to be able to discuss with people what they were actually
saying.
And I think that's an ethical criteria to understand what's going on in the world is
to respect the knowledge and then to reflect on its strengths and weaknesses.
But if you know beforehand, then you're not thinking.
But in retrospect, now, the comment made to you that you think they're going to discover
something.
What do you stand on that now when you look at what has gone on in the world?
Yeah, they discovered immense amount of stuff.
So the simplest example of that is in 2000, just before the final sequencing of the
human genome, so-called human genome, was announced as a compromise between the American
project, the government project, the British project and Craig Venter in a private company,
but they made a peace treaty together.
There was a pool among the world's molecular biologists about how many genes there were.
And the figures varied between 80 and 120,000 genes, with the exception of one French
geneticist.
And the answer turned out to be the low 20s.
So the entire establishment of molecular biology was wrong by a magnitude of four.
Now to the credit of the way, at least some science works, is, okay, we were wrong.
There are now 120,000 genes.
There are only 20,000 genes.
So that raises the question of A, what's a gene, which we need to rethink?
And B, if the genes alone are not what's going on, then what is going on?
And suddenly they discover all kinds of species of RNA and RNA interference mechanisms and
lots of other things.
That's very exciting.
I mean, how could you be against that?
It's incomprehensible to me.
What I am against is the claims that alone went along with it, that this was the secret
of life and, furthermore, that they were about to cure all kinds of diseases, which
so far they've cured no diseases.
This is the best example of that, but cancer and autism and diabetes and many others, billions
and billions and billions of dollars have gone into this work and a great deal has been
learned.
But I'd say foremost of what we learned is how little we understand biology.
For sure, I've done shows on this radio program on biology, also what is life speaking
to geneticists and so forth.
It's just the more you learn and the more you learn about what is not known, the more fascinating
it becomes.
And that's the excitement of knowing, isn't it?
What's not exciting is the claim that raises illusory hopes and capital for secrets and
cures which are so far have not been produced.
Now I would be overjoyed if they made more progress on any of these pathological conditions,
starting with cancer.
But it's been a long time and they're a long way from it.
The other thing that frustrates me is the genetic reductionism that you find in certain evolutionary
biologists or other geneticists who then presume to migrate into the field of the human
sciences or to say the arts and give genetic explanations or highly reductive biological
or evolutionary explanations of cultural phenomena that are so infinitely more complex
and can be accounted for.
Well those explanations are false scientifically and they're scientific ideology.
And I think this is partially one of the ways I got into this end of the work.
Instead of just calling them races or capitalists or whatever, it's important to know
enough genetics and enough molecular biology to be able to ask them what they're talking
about.
And since they can't tell you whether there's a gene from homosexuality because there isn't
one or even what a gene is, then the discussion shifts registers.
Now that's certainly not to say that molecular mechanisms are not extremely important
because we're living beings.
So of course everything we do is molecular.
The question is not simply to explain anything by a series of base pairs which Chloe has
failed.
Can you say something about your work in synthetic biology which is related to this obviously?
Well for a number of years I myself had a group of graduate students and others were engaged
in synthetic biology which was a project which claimed that now that we have the sequence
of the human other genomes we ought to be able to engineer many fundamental mechanisms
of life.
And furthermore, engineer it without understanding the biology.
They could black box the biology.
And the two main areas that these claims seemed somewhat plausible were malaria and biofuels.
The malaria still were waiting for.
They have made some hard of a mizinin but it's not been delivered in a massive way yet
and furthermore resistance to it is developing.
And biofuels which billions of dollars have gone into and it is the case that they can
re-engineer sugars to produce fuels.
But the question is what's the cost in the environment, what's the nature of the infrastructures
of roads and stations etc.
And the general claim that the genome can be re-engineered without understanding biology
really has not worked.
Well, I've taken you away from this conference on the contemporary kind of stole you
away for an hour and later in the day you're going to give this talk about the ecologies
of assemblages.
Now assemblage is another hugely important concept for you.
So can you give us a little preview of what the ecologies of assembly?
It seems to me two things fundamentally that the units of comparison that are dominant
in the human sciences and the literature and humanities need to be changed.
So there are politics, culture, literature, psychology etc.
These are all at best 19th century identification of how the world is constituted.
I think most of them have fallen to pieces in various ways.
Frank O'Moretti here has shown that just looking at the major novels doesn't tell you
what the novel was.
And so we need new ways of approaching these objects which is in line with the genealogical
work that we talked about earlier.
So I'm interested as an anthropologist of the contemporary in working on things that
are emergent and developing now.
And they're not the only things in the world.
They're not the only kinds of objects in the world.
But there are many of them and applying these older fixed concepts to where capitalism
is going, where various wars and strife situations which are everywhere in the world is going,
where art is going, painting in particular, obscures more than it clarifies.
So that's step one.
So I'm using a concept of assemblage as a heterogeneous, bringing together heterogeneous
elements into some form of proximity.
That's technical, but that's basically the idea which endures or a certain amount of time
and then either stabilizes or flies apart.
Then the question is how do you compare things in the world?
So if the comparison is whether or not there are terrorists, we've seen that doesn't
get you very far, or if the comparison is whether it's left-wing or right-wing or what
have you, that's been rather worn out.
So the question is how could we compare emergent situations of assemblages in quite different
situations with different elements in the heterogeneity in such a way that we could have
an understanding of the world we're living in, that's a more emergent and that we could develop
modes of inquiry which are more rapid than academic modes are today because the world's
very changeable today.
And so the idea is that myself and the group people are working with are trying to develop
those concepts and those modes of inquiry to move ahead in our understanding of the world.
And as it's functioning today.
Well, in fact, I was tempted in my opening introduction to connect assemblages with the notion
of the conditions, the limitation, the contemporary limitations of the necessary to say that
the necessary is not the necessary but there's an assembled in such a way not through
laws of necessity but through contingent and provisional and that therefore they can also
maybe be disassembled, reassembled and so forth.
And it sounds like what you just said, it's not that far away from a kind of genealogy
of the present that would see what's in place as having been assembled over time through
this set of circumstances.
And in part of how that works is there's almost always in at least in the conditions where
it interested in truth claims involved.
So Joshua Crayes, one of the graduate students at Berkeley, he's finishing a thesis on
Satsudhan, went there to study the border conflict but found out that the understanding
of what's going on of the UN organizations, of the NGOs, of the anthropologists, of the
George Clooney, who has a satellite monitoring the situation of the various actors involved
who we still call the Dinka or the newer, which are older tribal names, which are not
irrelevant but they don't refer to anything that formerly anthropologists refer to are
all in playing and these competing knowledge claims in a situation of extreme strife are
part of what that assemblage is about. How to think about it while it's happening is the
challenge.
Well, Paul, can I ask you about philosophers that you still read profitably if I can use
that term or who's thinking still has power for us?
Right now for me, Dewey, and Seneca, and Aristotle.
Is that right?
I just read recently DeAnima, which is translated on the soul, but Aristotle's understanding
of the soul in DeAnima is radically opposed to a lot of the neuroscience understanding
on the one hand, but also attempts to show that as living organisms, we have some kind
of coherent functional structure which can't be reduced to material conditions but it's
not spiritual either. So this is a pre-Christian understanding of the soul, it's not Plato,
where there's a trans migration of souls. It's very biological, as a word, it's
Bios. So there's a lot to learn still from Aristotle, not to say he was right, but
saying that maybe some ways opposing the problem might help us to understand better, to
oppose the problem, that's not a problem better today. Seneca, we've spent partially the
of Foucault, but also partially going back and reading Seneca. Seneca's first letter to
his friend, Lucilius, is something I give to all graduate students and colleagues who are
willing to read it, but only the graduate students read it. It's a short one-page letter
to his friend about how not waste your time, and because life is short and precious, and
how being confused and stultified and diverted and stressed is going to confuse you and
how to govern yourself such that you can stay directed to what's important. And so, I
mean, there's a certain amount of humor in that, but it's also completely actually relevant.
And also Seneca's experimentation with forms, he wrote a lot of letters, he wrote some
treatises, but he also wrote tragedies. It's, I think, at least a provocation about the fact
that we need to be more experimental in the forms we use. One philosopher that I would add to
that is Epicurus, and to me, it was a big disappointment that Foucault's volumes on the
Sussi, the Swa, the self, I don't know how they translate and care to the self.
I was really quite astonished that Epicurus doesn't figure in that, because his school,
I've done shows I've written about it. It was all about this kind of care of the self.
This cultivation of a state of mind, you could call it a state of soul of the Animah or the
Psiikah, we know the Atatek Sea and so forth, but there was a much more elaborate sort of
comprehensive understanding of what it takes to be a self that is at ease with itself in a world
where it might be at odds with the political reality, with the actuality, the present time.
And so much of what was taking place in the Garden School of Epicurus was about this
self-cultivation that seemed to be completely confirmed, confirming many things at Foucault
himself was speculating about, but he was particularly drawn to the Stoics rather than the
Epicurus. Of course, the Stoics had a lot of animosity towards the Epicurus.
They did, and your point is well taken. I think that's partially an accident of where
what was going on in France. Foucault's roommate for a while was Paul Venn, who was a
professor at college, the philosopher who lived in Povallsson when he'd come up to Paris.
He stayed with Foucault and then had written a major book on Seneca and others as well.
So the corpus was there. One of the things that I and Anthony, Stavrianakis, a young
man, I've written two books with, discovered was that Seneca was actually very eclectic.
So he's cast as a Stoic, but he actually quotes Epicurus all over the place. So we've
constructed these absolute oppositions, but I think a little bit more fine-grained,
particularly for people like Seneca who was engaged with Nero and high political activity
and finance and was a complicated, very flawed person. He drew from people who he found helpful
in Epicurus, some of his work appears in Seneca as well.
Well, finally, in the 20th century, apart from Dewey, you have done some thinking along with
Heidegger earlier with the colleague, Bert Dreyfus and so forth. Do you think there's something
in his thought that I think this advanced negative example in Heidegger's thought of how not
to do things and of the risks of a certain kind of philosophy, which of course has been well
documented and the despising the present and seeing the present as fallen and it's a deeply,
troubling approach to things. So no, I don't look to Heidegger. In my own experience,
from Pozalta with someone I was quite taken with early on when I was a young man and I still
think actually there's much more there than people that people know. And so his book on
Flobao, the three volume book on Flobao is a very, very rich book for an very anthropological
book for me. Well, that's great. I also think that there's a lot more there in Satthe, who
was such a dominant figure in the post-war period that of course you couldn't but want
to distance yourself from him as the French philosophers and intellectuals did. Fu co included,
if you go was kind of nervous about Jean-Paul Satthe, Wendy.
Although when Satthe died, I happened to be in Paris and Fu co was in a quandary about whether
you should go to the funeral because this was a betrayal of his anti-Satthe feelings. And
so he worried about that. I'm not going to tell you whether he went to the quandary.
Well, I think we'll let you get back to the conference on the contemporary Paul. I want
to remind our listeners we've been speaking with Professor Paul Rabinow from Berkeley
and these anthropologists and as I mentioned in the opening major intellectual of our time
of our actual Etheas, and we hope that you'll come back and visit us here and we can
continue our conversation on entitled opinions.
Well, Robert, what a pleasure to be here and thank you so much for that. Actually,
actually very rich, thoughtful questions.
Oh, you're welcome and thanks for coming on. Again, I'm Robert Harrison for entitled
opinions. Thanks for tuning in. Bye bye.
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