science – Page 2 – The Duke Reader

Portrait of the Anthropologist a an Art Curator

1 Feb 20196 Mar 2019 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century, Michael M. J. Fischer, Duke University Press, 2018.

Anthropology in the Meantime is a collection of essays by Michael Fischer that have been previously published in scholarly journals, edited volumes, or art catalogues. They have been substantially revised and rewritten for this edition in a book series, Experimental Futures, that the author curates at Duke University Press. Indeed, “curating” is the right word for describing Michael Fischer’s work: he fancies himself as an art specialist, using books as his personal gallery, and conceives of anthropology as akin to art critique or even as artistic performance, as evidenced by his circumlocutory writing style and his conception of fieldwork. In the art world, the title of “curator” identifies a person who selects and often interprets different works of art. In contemporary art, curators can make or break an artist’s career by their choice of works to display and of words to accompany them. In some cases, their celebrity can even eclipse that of the artists they work with. By donning the mantle of the art curator, the anthropologist attempts to weigh on what counts as (to quote the book’s subtitle) “ethnography, theory, and method for the twenty-first century.” Michael Fischer presents the work of his students and close associates, pays tribute to some of the big names in the discipline that he was privileged to work with, and recounts his own random walk through the past fifty years of anthropological research. Throughout this volume, he emphasizes the commonalities between anthropology and art. He claims in the introductory chapter that “ethnographers as literary forms are like novels, except they have to stick to reality”; “like anthropologists, artists have feet in several worlds” and the work of art “is often itself an ethnographic register of contemporary matters of concern.” Many readers will have first noticed Anthropology in the Meantime by its book cover, a striking Japanese woodblock print which represents a samurai about to commit seppuku. There is no connection between this artwork and the book content (nobody is going to commit suicide here, and references to Japan are sparse), except from the fact that this ukiyo-e comes from the personal collection of the author. Several other artistic belongings of the author are reproduced or referred to in the volume; and Michael Fischer claims that he chose the artwork cover of a recent bestseller in the same book series, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, from a solo exhibition by Filipino artist Geraldine Javier, whose Chthulu-like creature was not inconsequential in the success of Haraway’s book.

Twice present at the creation

The curator or the art critic often claim for themselves a special relation with regard to art history. They were present at critical junctures, rubbed shoulders with time-defining artists before they became famous, and contributed to the build-up of their fame or the make-up of their value through critical interventions. They were the first to put names and labels on emerging trends and styles, thereby contributing to the creation of the various schools and artistic currents that are later remembered and celebrated in art history. Michael Fischer inserts in his chapters some biographical vignettes or snippets that attest his special position in anthropology’s recent history. He was twice present at the creation: he attended as an undergraduate the famous John Hopkins University’s conference in 1966 during which the word ‘poststructuralism’ was coined, and he was one of the contributing authors of the 1986 volume Writing Culture. This seminal book grew out of a week-long seminar at the School for American Research at Santa Fe, and in a fun piece Michael Fischer retranscripts the imaginary interventions of the book contributors, designated simply by their initials but early recognizable. But these were not the only times when Michael Fischer stood among giants and witnessed major turning points in the discipline. He wrote his PhD at the University of Chicago when Hannah Arendt and Clifford Geertz were on the faculty and Paul Rabinow was a fellow graduate student, and then moved to Harvard during the controversy over sociobiology and recombinant DNA. He was then recruited by George Marcus (the editor of Writing Culture) to join the Anthropology Department at Rice University, where he chaired the Rice Center for Cultural Study that became a hotbed for cross-disciplinary studies. An important turning point in his career, and for the discipline as a whole, coincided with his move to MIT, where he became Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society. STS became the new frontier in anthropology and Michael Fischer was in the thick of it, teaching with Arthur Kleinman at the Harvard Medical School and becoming the coeditor of the book series Experimental Futures at Duke University Press. At the time this book was assembled, Michael Fischer was sharing his time between MIT and the National University of Singapore, where he was invited as Visiting Research Professor by some of his former students.

Like currency, the monetary value of art is based on convention: price is determined by an artist’s exhibition and sales record, importance and standing in art history, and ability to seize a certain Zeitgeist. Michael Fischer participates in the construction of disciplinary value in anthropology. He highlights the relevance of his book series by referring to previously published volumes and providing short summaries of their content. He advances the careers of his graduate students by emphasizing their contribution to anthropological knowledge. He caters to his own interest and reputation by detailing his own career path, which made him cross the way of, and rub shoulders with, giants in the field of academia. He uses the homage and the laudatory essay addressed to former colleagues and professors to praise and to aggrandize, but also to sideline and to bury, sometimes even to mock and to revile. He defines what’s hot and what’s not in modern anthropology, which happens to be the area in which he put his most recent investments. Constantly on the lookout for emerging trends and new currents, he uses the three C’s performed by art critics: commentary, criticism, critique. An artist’s inclusion in an important gallery and museum show can boost price and reputation: the same is true for edited volumes, which have a higher reputational impact than articles published in refereed journals (although the selection process is sometimes less rigorous and based on personal connections.) Michael Fischer is forever graced with the privilege of having written an essay for the 1986 book Writing Culture. He revels in that memory, bathes in the glow produced by this epoch-making volume, and keeps the fire alive by participating in anniversary essays and commemorations. He tries to recoup his erstwhile performance by proposing entries in edited volumes that hold the potential to redefine the parameters of the discipline: such is, in my opinion, the book The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, which was published in 2014 by the same Duke University Press and which I reviewed here. Needless to say, Michael Fischer’s contribution didn’t appear to me as the most memorable chapter in this volume.

Experimental ethnography

There were days when anthropologists were experimenting with various forms of writing and expressing while breaking scholarly traditions of orderly debates and publications. Fischer is proud to belong to that cohort of experimental authors who attempted to rewrite culture, and he himself experimented with various forms of writing tactics and media interventions. In a chapter titled “Experimental ethnography in ink, light, sound, and performance”, he lists the various attempts at creative ethnography-making that have characterized the recent decades, including filmmaking, photography, sound recording, fiction writing, theater and performance, and digital media. Research methods and what counts as fieldwork have also changed tremendously over the course of Fischer’s career. Today’s ethnographies are often multilocale and multiscale, moving from ground to theory and from micro to macro to address global processes of distributed value chains or flexible citizenship. They explore written archives and textual evidence, not just dialogic face-to-face contexts of human interaction. They also cater to nonhuman species and other nonhuman actors, living or artifacts, in a general theory that grants political agency and constitutive power to things. According to Fischer, the most exciting modern ethnographies address “the peopling of technologies”, the grounding of theory (“ground-truthing”) and the humanizing of science through digital humanities and science and technology studies. His career illustrates the shift in the focus of the discipline from a literary approach of cultural matters (“writing culture”) to a more recent involvement with scientific and technological assemblages. But he remained true to his former creed of avant-garde experimentalism: he sees himself and his cohort of graduate students as being at the cutting-edge of the discipline, and is forever willing to experiment and to innovate. He is also anxious not to miss the next new thing or not to mistake a passing fad or a false lead with an epistemological breakthrough. Remembering the seminal symposium at John Hopkins where Derrida, Barthes and Lacan had discussed structuralism, he casts Bruno Latour, Viveiro de Castro and Philippe Descola in the role of these old French luminaries and dedicates one chapter to “the so-called ontological turn”, which “became a hot topic at the American Anthropological Association meeting in 2013” (he concludes these discussions were just “fables and language games”).

After the turn of anthropology toward science and technology that he helped bring forward from his perch at MIT, Michael Fischer detects another shift, evidenced both in his career and in the broader discipline: the turn toward Asia. He notes that his own fieldwork and ethnographic work “has slowly shifted eastward from once upon a time in Jamaica to Iran, India, and now Southeast Asia.” He claims he was present at critical junctures in the history of these countries: he was doing fieldwork in Iran shortly before the Islamic revolution, and he was in India the year Indira Gandhi was assassinated and the Bhopal disaster took place. Unlike Clifford Geertz, who was accused of political blindness in the face of the 1965 massacres that tore Indonesia apart, Fischer claims he saw it coming, and that he was in a special position to interpret events as they unfolded. He underscores that “much of the future imaginary is located in Asia,” from current disasters such as avian influenza and other pandemics to intensifying threats of extreme climatic events and rising sea levels, not to mention industrial catastrophes such as Bhopal and Fukushima or geopolitical faultiness that are bringing the region to the brink of nuclear war. In the art world too, Asia is the place where things are happening. Art follows the money: there is an economic law enunciating that financial marketplaces, and these places only, can become global hubs for contemporary art. Fischer’s vocation as an art critic seems to have arisen from his contacts with Asian artists and performers. What began as a habit of illustrating powerpoint presentations with artworks (his contribution to a Clifford Geertz’s festschrift had illustrations “from cockfight to buzkashi”) evolved into a form of art criticism that he describes as “anthropological readings of novels, paintings, and films.” Fischer wrote a book on Iranian cinema at the time when a new generation of filmmakers (Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi…) started to emerge from that country, and he provided entries into exhibition catalogues of Asian artists during his residence in Singapore. He claims that literature, films, and arts can provide ethnographic registers: “My own sense is that there is more to be learned here about playing the scales of culture than from flat-footed talk of global assemblages, neoliberalisms, hybridities, and the like.”

Humanity’s futures

Beyond the name-dropping and memorabilia, art curators must also be able to read through the fog of information and images in order to form an appropriate picture of the times in which we are living. In order to define what is contemporary art and what isn’t, critics must first understand what “the contemporary” is. For Michael Fischer, writing around 2017, we live in a time warp akin to 1633, the year Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition for affirming that the earth wasn’t at the center of the solar system, a theory first advanced by Copernicus. According to Freud, humanity’s narcissism received three blows in the course of modern history, associated with the names of Copernicus (the earth is not at the center of the universe), Darwin (man descents from the animal), and himself (the ego is not even master in his own house). We are witnessing the times in which the fourth blow is delivered, bearing the name of the Anthropocene: considering the rate of natural resources depletion and the alteration of earth system processes, we may not inhabit this planet for long. This realization may have triggered Fischer’s latest interest, at the crossroad between his previous involvements with science and technology studies and with literature criticism: reading Sci-Fi novels from Asian authors. As he notes, “science fiction stories from Asia merge in and out of our contemporary dreaming, nightmares, and experiential emotions, along with current industrial and nuclear age disasters and toxicities.” Asian sci-fi novels often stage an exit from humanity: when humans start to colonize space or learn to live underwater to escape a toxic earthly environment, they cease to be humans. Fischer sees that evolution underway: Singapore is testing and prototyping buildings from the seabed upward to expand its living spaces, while China is studying the genetic mutations that allow Tibetans to live at high altitudes, supposedly to prepare to a world with much higher sea levels in which lowlanders would migrate to the deserted highlands of Xinjiang and Tibet. Humanity would thus escape the problems of the Anthropocene by returning life to the oceans from which it came, or by colonizing the regions that were once deemed inhospitable to life. Meanwhile, the Pacific island nations where Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and other founders of anthropology first did their fieldwork would have long disappeared from the surface of the earth.

Fischer’s conception of anthropology is attuned to the future (remember the title of his book series, Experimental Futures), not to the past. Echoing Immanuel Kant, he defines the task of anthropology from a pragmatic point of view as: “Ask not what the human being or the world is but what we may expect of them—and of them in the plural.” Anthropology in the Meantime is the study of the emergent forms of life coming “out of the chrysalis of the twentieth century”: it is “the ethnography of how the pieces of the world interact, fit together or clash, generating complex unforeseen consequences, reinforcing cultural resonances, and causing social ruptures.” His interest in the arts also covers only the contemporary and the cutting edge, not the classical forms or the artworks bequeathed by history. But through the ethnographies of the world’s pieces, we fail to see the big picture, and our vision of the locale seems to disintegrate into the shattered surfaces of a kaleidoscope. Fischer claims to have done fieldwork in Asia over the last decade “from a perch in Singapore with forays elsewhere.” But the only empirical material he offers are accounts of his visits to art centers or “small ethnographic notes” taken from the classroom at Tembusu college (where Singapore students are “holding textbooks open with one hand, and with the other checking their teacher’s archived video lectures on their smartphones”). He only offers vignettes or personal anecdotes by way of firsthand observations. The rest is composed of lengthy discussions of other people’s ethnographies or references to his previous fieldworks in various terrains. He lists his own past publications as if they addressed empirical issues thoroughly and offered “concept-work” that allowed the “ground-truthing” of his current forays. But a quick look at some of his articles listed in the bibliography shows that the empirical content of his field-based ethnographies were always rather thin, and that the concepts he lists profusely at the beginning of each chapter or in the body of the text are never defined or clarified. While I first thought he made his career out of previously accumulated capital, making good use of previous fieldwork observations and theory building, I get the impression that his references are just that: self-references. His “zen exercises in theory making” might be evocative or even illuminating for some, but they didn’t led me to enlightenment. In this respect, reading Akashi Gidayu’s death poem on the book cover (“As I am about to enter the ranks of those who disobey/ ever more brightly shines/ the moon of the summer night”) was more fulfilling.

Wanted: proof-reader with a command of French and Japanese

As a last remark, I couldn’t get used to Michael Fischer’s writing style. He retained from his entry into the volume Writing Culture (“a trio of essays on ethnicity, torn religions, and science articulated through monologic, double-voiced, and triangulated autobiographic genre perspectives”) a peculiar and idiosyncratic rhetoric, with turgid and verbose expressions that require close attention but yield little intellectual payoff. He was right to note that Clifford Geertz, his former mentor at Chicago, was “one of the great stylists writing in anthropology, and [that he] achieved global recognition by way of it.” The same certainly cannot be said of Michael Fischer. He borrows from literary criticism the mania to split words with hyphens to point toward etymology and emphasize multiple meanings: ‘con-fusion’, ‘con-texts’. He also repeats the curious habit (or is it a typographical error?) of separating hyphenated expressions or compound words into two distinct words: ‘front line’, ‘key words’, ’policy making’, ‘science fiction’. I didn’t detect many typos or misspelled words in English due to the power of modern editing softwares; but spellcheckers do not detect errors in foreign languages, which are numerous in the two chapters that were specifically drafted for this volume. In the introductory chapter, Fischer states (and repeats twice, no doubt to emphasize his German language skills) that “nothing is worse than a period film about Vienna where the actors speak with Berlin or Hannover accents and idioms—hard to take it seriously.” But what is one to say about his repeated misspelling of French words or distorting of Japanese expressions—like his breaches of proper writing style, I tend to take it personally. In the prologue, l’homme total is feminized as l’homme totale, hara-kiri becomes hari-kari, and a parergon is misspelled as paregon. In the epilogue, which includes discussions on art and ethnographies originating from Japan, manga becomes magna, furusato is mistyped as furusatu, hikikomori are rendered as hikkihomori, and proper nouns like Ishiguro or Bakabon become Ishiguru and bakagon. These are errors that simple proof-reading would have detected; their presence in an ethnography or a scholarly book makes it hard to take it seriously.

Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson.

7 Oct 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Elizabeth Grosz, Duke University Press, 2004.

In The Nick of Time, Elizabeth Grosz wants to make Darwinism relevant for feminism, and for critical studies in general. This is a challenging task: social Darwinism has often been associated with a conservative or reactionary agenda. Darwin’s epigones, from Herbert Spencer to Francis Galton, who applied his theories to society and to culture, posited the hierarchy of races and the survival of the fittest. They in turn influenced Nietzsche and his theory of the overman, who was picked up by Nazis and by white supremacists for their nihilistic agenda. There seems to be an inherent contradiction between Darwin’s idea of natural determinism and a progressive agenda that emphasizes equal rights and opportunities. This contradiction is based, according to Elizabeth Grosz, on misreadings of Darwin and a deformation of Nietzsche’s thought. Darwin and Nietzsche never said what some people made them to say. The solution, for her, is to go back to the original texts and to read them in the light of recent advances in the biological sciences and in social theory. In doing so, one not only lays the foundation of a progressive social agenda; reconciling biology and culture, nature and society, is also a way to put back the body, and the corporeal, back at the center of political theory and feminist struggle. As Grosz argues, “the exploration of life—traditionally the purview of the biological sciences—is a fundamental feminist political concern.”

Variation, selection, and retention

Darwin’s ideas are very familiar to those working in the biological sciences, and have even given rise to whole disciplines such as evolutionary biology and genetics. Yet it is important to introduce to readers from the humanities the intricacies and details of Darwin’s own writings which, though popularized, are rarely read or referred to. They demonstrate that Darwin remains, in spite of feminists’ resistance to his work, one of the few thinkers of the nineteenth century to prefigure, not only an equalitarian feminism, but an ontology of sexual difference that has come to occupy a key position in contemporary feminist debates. Universalism, the claim that men and women are the same, always measures women in terms of how they conform to the characteristics and values of men. Darwin posits difference—between species, between the sexes—, rather than equality, as the criterion of social and biological value. Whereas sexual difference is often associated with patriarchal privilege, Darwin develops an account of evolution that is an open and generative force of self-organization and growing complexity. Elizabeth Grosz thus offers a primer in Darwinian studies, including a discussion of recent evolutionary scientists, such as Ernst Mayr, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould, that she laces with her own comments on Darwin’s philosophical conception of time.

She shows that Darwin’s model, based on the three principles of individual variation, retention of inherited traits, and natural selection, may provide an explanation for economic and cultural history as readily as for natural history. There are, for example, close resemblances between Darwin’s understanding of individual variation and Marx’s understanding of labor. Through their embodiment as use-value and then as exchange-value, differences in labor are ordered into systems of hierarchical structures that Marx explicitly models on biological categories. Similarly, by characterizing technological innovation as the result of a process of variation, selection, and retention, management scholars use the same model in business schools without even mentioning Darwin’s name. We see the same principles at work in the evolution of languages: here, less than the abstract discussions on the origin of language that were popular in his time, Darwin’s work find echoes in the modern theories of structural linguistics, from Saussure to Jakobson and to Chomsky. Human production, manifested most directly in the history of language or in the operations of economies, must submit itself to the same temporal exigencies as nature itself.

Darwin’s sexual selection and feminist theory

One thing is to posit Darwin’s influence over many scientific disciplines; another is to claim his relevance for radical politics and feminist thought. Darwin is not only the first theoretician of natural selection: he also introduced the difference between the sexes, and its effect on variation and selection of life forms, at the core of his theory of the origin and evolution of species. Sexual selection entails that the human exists in only two nondeductible forms: male and female. Two forms which not only divide most of life into divergent categories, but also produce two types of bodily relations with the world, and two types (at least) of knowing. The Darwinian model of sexual selection comes to a strange anticipation of the resonances of sexual difference in the terms of contemporary feminist theory. For Luce Irigaray, sexual bifurcation—the biological difference between male and female—introduces irreducible difference. She rejects the false universalism of the abstraction of the individual, emphasizing that individuals always come in two sexes. The idea that there can be no human substance without sexual identity implies that democracies ca not legitimately define human rights, which are attributes of this substance, otherwise than as the rights of man and woman. In political terms, this line of thought led in particular to the parité movement, which aimed to achieve full equality between male and female representatives in elected bodies. It should be noted that sexual bifurcation is not the same as the sex/gender argument that American feminists first used and then deconstructed. Gender is a social and cultural construct, while the duality of human (and other) species is a condition for the evolution of life and natural selection as understood by Darwin.

Emphasizing a politics affirmative of sexual difference can also benefit from a rereading of Nietzsche. Nietzsche enables us to consider the most abstract elements of Darwinism, Darwin at his most philosophical and political, even if Nietzsche does not provide a reading of Darwin himself and apparently learned about the author of On the Origins of Species only from secondary sources. His conceptualization of Darwinism is based on several misunderstandings. He sees in Darwin “a respectable but mediocre Englishman,” and detects in him “a certain narrowness, aridity and industrious diligence, something English in short, that may not be a bad disposition.” Darwinism, Nietzsche argues, is a discourse of the triumph of the weak over the strong, the herd over the individual, the servile over the noble, the mediocre and the average over the exceptional and the strong. What Nietzsche admires is not so much the survival of the fittest, which in his society takes the form of the bourgeois individual, as the survival of the noblest, the exceptional, even the abnormal and the monstrous. Only the human who joyously seeks beyond the human is worthy of consideration. Whereas the Darwinian model is based on lack and scarcity, Nietzsche emphasizes excess, a superabundance of energy and power. The struggle for more—that is, the will to power—is greater than the struggle for existence. Life is not about mere survival, but about profusion and proliferation, not existence, but excess, not being but being-more, that is, becoming. It tends towards a future that cannot be predicted but is yet to come. Humanity-to-come, or the overman, cannot be the product of natural selection but is the consequence of artificial selection, the breeding of the superior by means of the eternal return. Evolution, for Nietzsche, designates the precedence of a future that always overwrites and transforms the present, that directs the present to what is beyond its containment.

Moral Darwinism

For Elizabeth Grosz, it is ironic that much of what Nietzsche proclaims as part of his critique of Darwin and Darwinism is consonant with Darwin’s own position. In particular, Darwin provided a model of time and development that refuses any pre given aim, goal, or direction for natural selection. Evolution produces variation for no reason; it values change for no particular outcome; it experiments, but with no particular result in mind. Beings are impelled forward to a future that is unknowable, unconfined by the past, and forever new. Like Nietzsche, Darwin saw morality, reason, and other higher faculties in mankind, as resources that aid or hinder group and individual survival. His relativism provides a strange anticipation of Nietzsche’s own genealogy of morality. Moral Darwinism as seen by Nietzsche privileges the values of life at its highest, its most active and intense. The will to power is the concept that Nietzsche offers to replace Darwin’s account of natural selection. It is a force directed only to its own expansion, without regard for the perspectives of the multiplicity of other forces. The will to power may prove to be another name for the principles of emergence, of the chaotic, competing distribution of forces in systems as they reach a point beyond equilibrium to destabilize and convert themselves to a different mode of organization. It is the principle that underlies the world itself, the most fundamental principle of ontology, the single principle, for Nietzsche, governing all of existence. For Grosz, Nietzsche may help provide a way of understanding politics, subjectivity, and the social as the consequence of the play of the multiplicity of impersonal active forces that have no agency. His postulate of the eternal return, the culmination of Nietzsche’s understanding of a world populated by proliferating and competing wills to power, is a cosmological principle that strangely echoes recent advances in theoretical physics and contemporary philosophy. In modern cosmology, the time of the universe is seen as unlimited in both directions. But the matter of the universe, or equally its energy, is limited, finite, and is blighted by the prospect of the gradual winding down and dissipation predicted by the second law of thermodynamics. It follows that in the infinity of time past and time future, every conceivable combination of matter has already occurred, and will occur again, an infinite number of times. Even the Big Bang is not an origin, the birth of the universe, but a transition, a kind of quantum leap between one universe at its death and the birth of another.

Henri Bergson is another thinker whose fecundity for contemporary science and social theory has yet to be reassessed. Bergson’s writings demonstrate no evidence of having read Nietzsche, as Nietzsche himself never read Darwin; nevertheless, his understanding of duration and creative evolution brings together the key insights of Darwin, modulated by a Nietzschean understanding of the internal force of the will to power and the external force of the external return. The will to power is transformed in Bergson, not into a will to command or obey, but a will, a force, or élan vital, which propels life forward in its self-proliferation. Bergson must also be regarded as the philosopher most oriented to the primacy of time, time as becoming, as open duration. Like Nietzsche, Bergson wishes to elaborate a theory of time in which the past is not the overriding factor, and in which the tendencies of becoming that mark the present also characterize the future. Insofar as the future functions as a mode of unpredictable continuity with the past, the future springs from a past not through inevitability and necessity but through elaboration and invention. Bergsonism has often been equated with dualism, and the French philosopher is indeed best remembered for his couples of oppositions between mind and matter, space and duration, the virtual and the actual, habit-memory and memory-image, differences in kind and differences of degree. Yet Elizabeth Grosz shows that these oppositions are more complex than they first appear: at some point, couples of opposites can no longer be binarized, for they form a continuum and merge into each other, or coalesce into a new whole. The difference between differences in kind and differences of degree is itself a difference of degree. There is a fundamental similarity between mind and matter, between the object of perception and the images formed or memorized. The past does not come after the present has ceased to be, nor does the present become the past: rather, the whole of the past is contained, in contracted form, in each moment of the present. In the end, for Grosz, it all comes down to politics, which she defines as “this untimely activation of the virtuality of the past as challenge to the actuality of the present.”

Reading critical theory with practical concerns in mind

Elizabeth Grosz is concerned with advancing social theory and feminist thought, and sees in the works of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson a source of inspiration for scholars engaged in challenging the present. I come to the study of philosophy and critical theory with more practical concerns in mind. My modest ambition is to contribute to the understanding of business organizations in the context of globalization and social change. I am looking for ideas, concepts, and metaphors that I may use in my research, while being cognizant that reality has to be observed first at ground level and by using the domestic categories of social actors. There is a risk in the flight to abstraction that characterizes the discussion of general notions such as mind and matter, time and space, power and servitude. And yet I see value in rubbing shoulders and stretching minds with the great thinkers who have marked the history of the twentieth century. The three authors discussed in this book are indeed towering figures that dominate the way we approach notions such as evolution, power, and duration. One may think that the gist of these three thinkers’ work has already been extracted by successive disciples and commentators, and that they can now quietly rest on the dusty shelves of intellectual history. And yet, as Elizabeth Grosz successfully argues, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson cannot be reduced to Darwinism, Nietzscheanism, and Bergsonism. Going back to their original work, and attending to their texts through close readings, allows the social scientist to extract more juice from their pulp. To come back to this book’s title, it appears that the expression “the nick of time” comes from an old custom of recording time as it passed by making a notch or a nick on a tally stick. Ordering my reading notes by writing this review was my way to carve a nick in the (b)log of my reading habits.

Dance Your PhD

29 Mar 201729 Mar 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter, Natasha Myers, Duke University Press, 2015.

Natasha Myers There is an annual competition that allows PhD students to dance their research. The contestants, individually or in groups, present their research results in a choreography that gets evaluated by a jury. The first “Dance Your PhD Contest,” held in 2008, attracted significant interest from the media and on Youtube, and the number of applicants has been increasing ever since. Other Youtube videos extend a second lease of life to students’ dancing performances and staged choreographies inspired by scientific discoveries. In 1971, a football field at Stanford University became the scene of a large-scale “molecular happening,” in which more than one hundred performers staged the intricate molecular interactions involved in protein synthesis.

These performances, of course, do not count as research, and they will not feature in a scientist’s resumé. But anthropologist Natasha Myers takes them very seriously. In Rendering Life Molecular, she wants to expand what counts as science and science-making to include what she refers to as “body-work” or, in more technical terms, “kinesthetic animations”, “haptic vision”, “molecular calisthenics”, “mimetic modeling”, and other body experiments. She does so by paying attention to what otherwise may go unnoticed in scientific work: gestures and mimics, emotions and affects, metaphors and values, and other forms of life in the laboratory that are muted in other accounts of science-in-the-making.

Body work doesn’t count as research

Bodies, play, and emotions have no proper place in a scientific lab. And yet, as one of Natasha Myers’ informants remarks, “you can’t learn something if you don’t get your body involved.” Touching, sensing, feeling, and knowing are entangled in laboratory research. Life science research is a full-bodied practice. The researchers’ moving bodies and their moving stories are integral to scientific enquiry. Lecturers encourage students in molecular biology to learn the fold of their molecule by heart, to trace the direction of each component by hand, and to be able to render it with their entire body. Researchers’ bodies become effective proxies for their molecules. Indeed, a cartoon reproduced by the author in her book opening features a male scientist twisting his body into the shape of a double helix, while his colleague sitting at his bench chides him: “Very good, Michaels—you’re a DNA molecule. Now, get back to work.”

The most obvious sense that connects us to reality is seeing. And yet, “seeing” a molecule is not at all obvious. Protein molecules are so tiny that long waves of visible light pass right by them without registering their presence. The only way researchers can get a glimpse of their molecule is by transforming it into a crystal, collecting data on the position of each atom through a process known as X-ray diffraction, and working on the data to generate a model of the atomic configuration of the protein. Every step in this process is fraught with difficulties. Crystallographic techniques are far from foolproof, and almost every project is plagued by setbacks, failures, and detours. Not any crystal will do: viable protein crystals must be well-ordered to diffract X-rays. Protein crystals are not only hard to grow; they are also quite unstable and can disintegrate easily. Once crystallized, a molecule has to stand still through a kind of freeze-frame technique so the data can be collected.

A happy and well-folded molecule

Once collected, the data has to fit into the model, which again involves many tweaking and adjusting. Molecule models are three-dimensional structures made up of thousands of atoms, and their configuration has to conform to the modeler’s intuition. Some models simply don’t look right: they seem distorted, misfolded, and “in pain”; others look “happy,” “relaxed,” and well-folded. It takes a long time to develop the skill set required to “feel the pain” of a misshapen protein model. Tacit knowledge can only be acquired and communicated “from body to body.” Modelers have to exercise their synesthetic reason in an open-ended, improvisational, and intuitive mode. This process cannot be automated: it demands “hands-on” practice. This is why the laboratory retains the structure of the master-disciple relationship, with senior researchers cast in the role of the charismatic magician and PhD students playing the sorcerer-apprentice.

Making crystallographic data visible in the form of electron density maps and molecular models allows the researcher to play with the data with the help of animated software. Three-dimensional models are essential visualization tools for teaching, learning, and research. But computers will never replace the “feel” for the molecule that patient work in the lab cultivates. While today almost all crystal structures are built on-screen, physical models like the ones used in high school chemistry do retain their pedagogical value. Researchers can easily get “lost in the map” and forget the assumptions on which computer software are built. Leaders in the field are prompt to qualify the limits of the data—these are just models, and modelers must keep their interpretations open. Students are taught to distrust computer algorithms and to exercise expert judgment at every step of the model-building process.

Playing techno music to a crystal

Protein crystallography is therefore more craft than science. The indirect nature of diffractive optics makes it necessary for modelers to get fully entangled with their instruments and materials as they rend imperceptible substances into visible and palpable forms. It is possible that a crystallographer will never find the perfect condition for a protein to crystallize; he or she may spend years in her PhD trying to set the conditions right. In one case, reported in a scientific paper, the researchers had to add one percent pickle juice “from the Sweetand Snappy Vlassic brand” to the crystallization mix. Experienced crystallographers regularly joke that protein crystallization requires “voodoo magic.” Some insist on playing techno music while they mix their biochemical media. Others have found that proteins will crystallize only if they are wearing their “special sweater.” Some even talk and sing to their crystal. As Natasha Myers remarks, ”it seems in these contexts that magic, ritual, and superstition are not a ‘threat’ to science; rather, they are integral to its practice.”

Laboratories are not just factories for the production of scientific facts; they are living spaces where practitioners engage the whole range of their human affects and senses. Myers focuses on one dimension of laboratory labor that is so often overlooked in accounts of the political economy of science. This is an attention to the affective labor involved in scientific research and training; a form of labor that is crucial to the work of producing and circulating valuable scientific facts. Affective labor is a concept developed by feminist scholars and political theorists to analyze forms of labor, such as nurture and care, which have historically been undervalued or otherwise made invisible. The laboratory researchers studied by Myers do not only take care of themselves and of others: they also cultivate a kind of “care of the molecule”. They go to extraordinary lengths to “keep their molecules happy” and to nurture the perfect conditions for their protein to crystallize. A crystallographic model is not just “matter of fact”; it is also a “matter of care.”

Affective labor

This image of the laboratory as a nurturing and caring environment stands in stark contrast with the dominant view that emphasizes disembodied reasoning, competitive spirit, and economic rationality. Natasha Myers gives the example of the documentary Naturally Obsessed that documents how graduate students cultivate the ethos and habits they need to succeed in science. The story focuses on only one class of affects: competition, and an exclusive focus on result delivery. Winning the game in this rendering requires graduate students to solve the structure of a prized protein molecule before others beat them to it. In this context, remarks one student, “one of the best thing that you can do as a scientist is suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. So that you become obsessed with a problem and can’t stop working on it until you get to your answer.” Indeed, as Myers notes, the figure of the obsessive-compulsive scientist is one whose ethos and habitus are perfectly tuned in to a neoliberal economy. As a recruitment tool for high school students, this documentary is itself a pedagogical device that can shape what its viewers come to think a life in science should be like.

Natasha Myers wants to give a different image of science. Her book stems from a strong belief that “there are other analytic frames and other ways of telling stories about the life sciences and lives in science.” To use a cliché, her depiction of science is more “feminine,” more attuned to sensations and affects, than the heroic masculine renderings of science-in-the-making. Her depiction of dancing molecules and epistemic choreographies is not fortuitous: she confesses that “as a life-long dancer, my attentions were especially attuned to the relationship between movement and forms of knowing in science.” She develops a new vocabulary to describe the role of the body in scientific work, turning tacit knowledge into explicit discourse. Rendering Life Molecular is also an epistemologically rich book, engaging in meaningful discussions with prominent authors in the field of science studies, such as Donna Haraway, Emily Martin, Lorraine Daston, and many others. Natasha Myers opens new venues for research: this is a book I will return to for close reading of chapters and added insights on what renders life molecular.

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

19 Mar 20171 Feb 2019 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Anthropological Futures, Michael M. J. Fischer, Duke University Press, 2009.

Michael Fischer Kant is seldom claimed as an ancestor by anthropologists. That he wrote an “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” is considered irrelevant for the history or epistemology of the discipline: the “study of man” that the philosopher from Königsberg had in mind was very different from the detailed ethnographic observations by the fieldworkers of the twentieth century. For modern scholars trained in the anthropology discipline, philosophy was considered a waste of time, mainly irrelevant and sometimes dangerous. Ethnography was about facts, not speculation.

Arguably, the main advances in the discipline are associated with anthropologists who were theoretically inclined, and philosophy formed the background of their intellectual constructions. But other philosophical references tended to outweigh Kant’s transcendental idealism. Hegel and Comte exerted a lasting influence on the social sciences, as well as Marx, Durkheim and Weber, whom sociology claims as founding fathers. More recently, anthropologists well versed in theory have turned to Heidegger as well as to French modern philosophers also popular in cultural studies departments: references to Foucault fill the pages of social science journals, and one also finds discussions on Derrida’s deconstructionism, Deleuze’s contribution to media studies, Levinas’ ethics of the Other, or Lacan’s brand of psychoanalysis. Most of the time, however, the philosophical underpinnings of ethnographic studies remain implicit, and social scientists who claim fieldwork as the foundational pillar of their discipline remain wary of theories that are not empirically grounded. Theoretical musings remain the preserve of elder scholars, who can claim the benefit of accumulated experience, have cultivated a taste for literary prowess, and are too old to go to the field anyway.

Claiming Kant as an ancestor of modern anthropology

The return to Kant proposed by Michael Fischer in Anthropological Futures is therefore intriguing. True, as he confesses, the author has always dabbled in philosophy. Along his training in anthropology, he kept philosophy as a minor in his curriculum, and he complemented his formal training with personal readings. His defining moment was when he attended a conference entitled The Structuralism Controversy held at John Hopkins University in 1966, with the cream of French theorists in attendance, from Lévi-Strauss to Derrida and Lacan: it was there that the word “poststructuralism” was apparently coined, and Fischer was, as he claims, present at the creation. Later at the University of Chicago, he was fortunate enough to attend lectures and seminars by Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, Mircea Eliade, and two former students of Ludwig Wittgenstein. But as his references show, he was always more inclined to pick ideas and metaphors from the latest postmodern critics and French luminaries than to meditate over the abstract metaphysics and stern moral imperatives of eighteenth century’s Immanuel Kant.

Returning to Kant is however justified on several grounds. First, as Fischer notes, particularly for French theory in the late twentieth century Kant remains an important intertext: for Bourdieu, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, and others. Second, although it is not clearly stated, one gets the feeling that our world requires a moral compass and a pragmatic agenda that postmodern critics have been unable to provide. Rereading Kant, along with Hannah Arendt and other moralists, provide our contemporaries with such perspective. It is highly revealing that when Iranian intellectuals connected to Fischer and opposed to the clerical regime want to find references in modern philosophy, they turn to Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and John Rawls, not Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and the like. The return to Kant is a return to the spirit of the Enlightenment. Countering interpretations by the Frankfurt School (who underscored the “dark side” of the Enlightenment) and by Lacan (who read Kant along with Sade), Fischer notes that “the Enlightenment was not so ethnocentric and parochial as some detractors suggest.”

In addition, one discovers in Kant an attention to detail, a recognition of the “plurality of the human condition” (to use Arendt’s words), and a focus on “the unsociable sociability of man” (Kant’s own expression) that prefigures modern anthropology. Kant apparently was an avid reader of travelers’ reports, explorers’ journals, and news from other countries. He considered his teaching of Anthropology as well as Geography as essential part in the upbringing of citizens of the world. While one should not expect from Kant’s writings anything approaching the thick description or comparative standards of modern ethnography, it nonetheless provides a logical prolegomenon to much of that project. As a last point, cosmopolitanism, conceived as not only knowing but participating in the world, again constitutes our political horizon. Despite its shortcomings, the European Union is the closest approximation to the federation of republics that Kant envisaged in his philosophical sketch for a perpetual peace.

Anthropology as a philosophical mode of enquiry

Fischer’s discussion on Kant is based on the premise that anthropology should return to fundamental moral and cultural issues and become what some precursors envisaged for it: a philosophical mode of enquiry, grounded in theory as well as observation, and bridging various disciplines into an integrated whole. Anthropology stands at the crossroad of the many academic disciplines that have developed over the years around literature departments and social science faculties. Indeed, just as Auguste Comte claimed sociology as the queen of all disciplines, Fischer envisages for anthropology a pivotal role, dethroning cultural studies in its ability to generate interdisciplinary work between the humanities and social sciences. In the end, such discipline should be capable of restoring the human being to a free condition. It should “not just ask what man is, but what one can expect of him.”

Fischer sees particular potential in his own branch of inquiry, the anthropology of science, whose ultimate objective is to reconnect the procedures of the natural sciences with the goals of the human sciences. In comparison with other social studies of science–the field seems to be replete with acronyms, from STS to SSK, SCOT and ANT–, anthropology can bring attention to other terrains beyond the traditional focus on Europe and America. This is what the author does, in short vignettes presenting research labs in emerging countries, with a focus that goes beyond the conventional claims of postcolonial studies or the center/periphery duality. As he notes in a short manifesto concluding a survey on the interface between nature and society, “An anthropology to come will need to be collaborative and intercultural, not only across traditional cultures, but across cultures of specialization, and it will need not only to incorporate the lively languages of the new technosciences, but also reread, decipher, and redeploy the palimpsests of traditional knowledges.”

Borrowing metaphors from the hard sciences

In his attempt to substitute anthropology to cultural studies at the pinnacle of the humanities, Fischer adopts many tics and proclivities of his colleagues in cultural studies departments. The book’s chapters are usually built around a basic notion (culture, science, nature, the body) that is “unpacked” into several loosely-connected dimensions, with various illustration from the arts and the social science literature. Bibliographical references are brought in more as a show of scholarship and for the halo of scientificity that they bring than for close readings or detailed criticism. Footnotes are prolific and develop a narrative of their own, sometimes orthogonal to the main body of the text. Like scholars in critical theory, Fischer likes to bring key words and metaphors from the hard sciences, often used out of context. Such categories include haplotype groups, experimental systems, recombinant science, graphemic spaces, object-oriented languages, emergent forms of life, and material-semiotic operators. Lastly, his writing lacks both the rigorous accuracy of science and the metaphorical literality of the humanities, leaving the reader with convoluted sentences that sometimes require second or third readings. These theoretical musings are far from the models of style and precision that authors such as Clifford Geertz have set forth for the discipline.

A Failed Anthropology Project

8 Mar 20178 Mar 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

Review of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Christopher M. Kelty, Duke University Press, 2008.

Two Bits is a failed anthropology project. It does not make it a bad book: it is well-written and informative, and I learned a lot about Free Software and Open Source by reading it. But it does not meet academic standards that one is to expect from a book published in an anthropology series. These standards, as I see them, pertain to the position of the anthropologist; the importance of fieldwork; the role of theory; the interpretation of facts; and the style of ethnographic writing. Let me elaborate on these five points.

Many definitions have been proposed of the “participant observer.” Anthropologists who claim this position for themselves see it as a way to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment, usually over an extended period of time. It is different from “going native”: the participant observer usually remains an outside figure, who can provide support and hold various functions in the group but who makes it clear, at least to himself, that the locus of his engagement lies in the rendition he will make from his experience, not in the services or tasks he will have completed for the group during fieldwork. A key element in this research strategy is therefore to gain access to the group but also, perhaps equally important, the exit strategy that will allow the ethnographer to leave the field and return to a more distant point of observation.

“I am a geek”

Christopher Kelty does not make explicit his own definition of participant observation, but he nonetheless fancies a self-image: “I am a geek.” Becoming a geek is an integral part of his research project, and most ethnographic notes or vignettes are devoted to that process. For him, understanding how Free Software works is not just an academic pursuit but an experience that transforms the lives and work of participants involved: “something like religion.” The stories he tells about geeks, stories that geeks tell about themselves, are meant to “evangelize and advocate,” and to convert people to the cause.

His engagement with and exploration of Free Software got him involved in another project called Connexions, an “open content repository of educational materials” or a provider of Open Source textbooks. Connexions textbooks look different from conventional textbooks in that they consist of digital documents or “modules” that are strung together and made available through the Web under a Creative Commons license that allows for free use, reuse, and modification. Kelty would like his role in the Connexions project to be akin to an academic consultant, an anthropologist-in-residence that could provide advice and guidance based on his “expertise in social theory, philosophy, history, and ethnographic research.” But that is not how it turns out: “The fiction that I had first adopted–that I was bringing scholarly knowledge to the table–became harder and harder to maintain the more I realized that it was my understanding of Free Software, gained through ongoing years of ethnographic apprenticeship, that was driving my involvement.” He cannot fit into the anthropologist’s shoes because there is no need for one at Connexions. And so he ends up providing legal advice (which, strictly speaking, he is not qualified to do) and doing intermediary work with Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that promotes copyright-free licenses.

Fieldwork is what anthropologists do. But what do anthropologists do when they do fieldwork? The definition has evolved over time. An anthropologist used to hang around in a remote place for a while, getting acquainted with the people, pressing informants with questions, and taking ethnographic notes. In our age of globalization, there is more emphasis on multiple sites, nomadic fieldwork, and de-centered ethnography. People move constantly from one location to the next, so why should the ethnographer be the only one to stay at the same place? Besides, in our interconnected world, something that happens in one place is often caused or explained by another phenomenon occurring in a distant place, and following the object under consideration is like pulling a thread from a ball of yarn. But fieldwork remains a central tenet of the anthropologist’s identity, what distinguishes him or her from scholars in other disciplines who “don’t do fieldwork.”

Hanging around with local hackers in Bangalore

Kelty insists that his account of the Free Software movement is based on ethnographic fieldwork. He gives a few vignettes of his engagement in the “field”: meeting two healthcare entrepreneurs at a Starbuck in Boston, cruising the night scene in Berlin, hanging around with local hackers in Bangalore, and, in the end, getting a position in the anthropology department at Rice University in Houston, where the Connexions project is based. But there is little purpose to these mentions of various locations, apart to demonstrate the coolness of the author and his persistence in becoming a geek akin to the ones he associates with. When it comes to substance, his real source of information is online. As he notes, nearly everything about the Internet’s history is archived. He is even able to track back newsgroup discussions dating back to the 1980s and chronicling the birth of open systems. As a result, the brunt of Kelty’s research presented in Two Bits is either archival work into the history of computer science or consulting work for the Connexions project, not ethnographic fieldwork in the strict sense of the word.

Anthropologists writing PhD dissertations are requested to demonstrate skills in manipulating theory. The canon of works to be mastered is rather limited: a grounding in Marx, a heavy dose of Foucault, some exposure to Freud or Lacan, add a pinch of feminist theory or media studies for those so inclined, and the PhD student is all set. Even by that light standard, Kelty must have flunked his theory exam. He introduces Foucault mainly for the record, but all he draws from the famous article “What Is Enlightenment?” is a quote stating that modernity should be seen as an attitude rather than a period of history. In other words, geeks are modern because they are cool. In another passage, he mentions that the notion of recursive public that he proposes should be understood from the perspective of works by Jürgen Habermas, Michael Warner, Charles Taylor, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt. Then he stops. Besides the obvious point that eighteenth century’s coffee shops are different from today’s Internet forums, there is no further elaboration on these authors.

GNU (“GNU is Not UNIX”)

Another aspect of theory is the elaboration of concepts. Here, Kelty fares better, but I would still give him only a passing grade. His notion of a “recursive public” is indeed a working concept, or a middle-range theory as social scientists are wont to propose. Kelty defines it as “a public that is constituted by a shared concern for maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a public.” Recursivity is to be understood in the way computer programmers define procedures or name applications in terms of themselves. Popular examples include GNU (“GNU is Not UNIX”), but also EINE (“EINE Is Not EMACS”) ou ZWEI (“ZWEI Was EINE Initially”). It is, to use another image, Escher’s hand drawing itself. But the author does not try to sell his concept too hard: as mentioned, he does not explore the interplay with Habermas’ notion of a public sphere, and he downplays its importance for future scholarship (“I intend neither for actors nor really for many scholars to find it generally applicable.”) One would be at a loss to find other original concepts in the book. The expression “usable pasts” he uses to introduce his geek stories is just another name for modern myths. The notion of “singularity,” a point in time when the speed of autonomous technological development outstrips the human capacity to control it, is only a piece of geek folklore. Visibly, Kelty is more interested in telling stories than building theory.

Some authors define anthropology as the interpretation of cultures. In his book’s title, Kelty insists on the cultural significance of Free Software. Yet interpretation is lacking. By this, I mean that the anthropologist should be in search of meaning, not just facts or fictions. Kelty presents an orderly narrative of the origins and development of Free Software, organized around five basic functions: sharing code source, conceptualizing open systems, writing licenses, coordinating collaborative projects, and fomenting movements. He illustrates each chronological step with various stories, evolving around the development of the UNIX operating system and the standardization of Internet communications through TCP/IP. The result is informative if somewhat lengthy, but the cultural significance of the whole is not really addressed. Instead of wrapping up the lessons of this history, the last part of the book moves to a completely different topic by asking what is happening to Free Software as it spreads beyond the word of hackers and software and into online textbook publishing.

“Berlin. November 1999. I am in a very hip club in Mitte”

Anthropologists are authors, and their writing skills matter enormously in the reception and impact of their works. The style of Two Bits is more attuned to a journalistic account than to a piece of scholarship. This shows especially in the vignettes placing the author in various situations and locations, which create a “reality effect” but do not really add anything to the comprehension of the subject. Lines like “Berlin. November 1999. I am in a very hip club in Mitte” or “Bangalore, March 2000. I am at another bar, this time on one of Bangalore’s trendiest street” may be proper for nonfiction travelogues or media coverage, but they should not find their ways into anthropology books.

Rewriting Marx’s Theory of Capital for the Twenty-First Century

5 Mar 20175 Mar 2017 Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Duke University Press, 2006

biocapital Biopolitics is a notion propounded by Michel Foucault whereby “life becomes the explicit center of political calculation.” The increasing use of this notion in the social sciences underscores a fundamental evolution. In the twenty-first century, as anticipated by Foucault, power over the biological lives of individuals and peoples has become a decisive component of political power, and control over one’s biology is becoming a central focus for political action. Used by the late Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France, biopolitics and its associated concept, governmentality (“the conduct of conducts”), are now in the phase of constituting a whole new paradigm, a way to define what we are and what we do. Biopolitics and governmentality are now declined by many scholars who have proposed associated notions: “bare life” and the “state of exception” (Giorgio Agamben), “multitude” and “empire” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), “biological citizenship” and “the politics of life itself” (Nikolas Rose), “biopolitical assemblages” and “graduated sovereignty” (Aihwa Ong), “cyborg” and “posthumanities” (Donna Haraway), etc. This flowering of conceptualizations is often associated with a critique of neoliberalism as the dominant form of globalized governmentality, and to a renewal of Marxist studies that revisit classical notions (surplus value, commodity fetishism, alienation of labor…) in light of new developments.

From Foucault to Marx

By adding the notions of “biocapital” and “postgenomic life” to the list of new concepts, Kaushik Sunder Rajan positions himself in this twin tradition of Marxist and Foucaultian studies. As he states in the introduction, “this book is an explicit attempt to bring together Foucault’s theorization of the political with a Marxian attention to political economy.” As mentioned, the paradigm of biopolitics and governmentality has changed the traditional ways of thinking about politics, and has led to a new understanding of basic notions such as sovereignty and citizenship. But Foucault was mostly interested in deconstructing political philosophy, and failed to acknowledge that biopolitics is essentially a political economy of life. This is where the reference to Marx comes handy. As Sunder Rajan underscores, one doesn’t need to adhere to Marx’s political agenda in order to interpret his writings (“I believe that Marx himself is often read too simply as heralding inevitable communist revolution”). Instead, he uses Marx as “a methodologist from whom one can learn to analyze rapidly emergent political economic and epistemic structures.” His ambition is to rewrite Marx’s theory of capital for the twenty-first century, and to situate in emergent political economic terrains by using the tools of the ethnographer.

For Sunder Rajan, biocapital is the result of the combination of capitalism and life sciences under conditions of globalization. The evolution from capital to biocapital is symptomatic of the turn from an industrial economy to a bioeconomy in which surplus value is directly extracted from human and nonhuman biological life rather than from labor power. The extraction of surplus value from biological life requires that life be turned into a commodity, tradable on a market and convertible into industrial patents and intellectual property rights. Life sciences transforms life into a commodity by turning the biological into bits of data and information that is then traded, patented, or stored in databases. Research in genomics and bioinformatics translates the DNA into a string of numbers, and develops methods for storing, retrieving, organizing and analyzing biological data. As a consequence, life sciences become undistinguishable from information sciences. Biocapital determines the conversion rate between biological molecules, biological information and, ultimately, money. It then organizes the circulation of these three forms of currencies–life, data, capital–along routes and circuits that are increasingly global.

Turning life itself into a business plan

But Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life is not only a theoretical intervention in the field of Marxian and Foucaultian studies. It is, as defined on the book cover, “a multi-sited ethnography of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India.” The constitution of new subjects of individualized therapy and the genetic mapping of populations are obvious terrains for the application of Foucault’s concepts of biopower and governmentally. Similarly, Marx’s analysis of surplus production and surplus value can be brought to bear in ethnographic descriptions of Silicon Valley start-ups living on vision and hype, and turning life into a business plan. As Sunder Rajan writes, “ethnography has always prided itself on deriving its analytic and empirical power from its ability to localize, and make specific, what might otherwise be left to the vague generalizations of theory.” In addition, multi-sited ethnography allows the anthropologist to follow the globalized routes of life resources, biological data, and monetary capital, that cannot be grasped and conceptualized in a single location.

The author’s initial ambition was to observe biotechnological research within laboratories and to put them in their larger social and cultural context. His interest in the relation between biotech companies and pharmaceutical corporations led him to approach various business ventures and present requests for interviews and participant observation. But as he recalls, “trying to get into the belly of the corporate beast” was a frustrating experience. Getting access to companies and laboratories was made difficult by the value associated with intellectual property rights in the biotech industry. As the author notes, “many of these people live in worlds where information is guarded with almost paranoid zeal.” The secretive aspect of corporate activity was compounded by the wish of corporations to strictly monitor what gets said about them. Research proposals for participant observation were vetted by teams of lawyers and were usually rejected. In India, corporations and research centers had a more open attitude to the ethnographer, who could fit into the more fluid environment and leverage his ethnic identity; but the bureaucratic state imposed additional hurdles through paperwork and red tape.

“We must get ourselves a bioethicist!”

Paradoxically, the fact that genome sequencing had already been the topic of a book by a famous anthropologist facilitated first contacts and self-presentations: “I’ve read Paul Rabinow, so I know exactly what you want to do,” was how the head of the GenBank database greeted the young PhD student sent to the field by his teacher adviser. Corporate executive and research managers tried to fit the ethnographer into known categories. “We must get ourselves a bioethicist!” concluded the CEO of an Iceland-based genome company after a short interview. A public relations official at Celera Genomics wondered whether his visitor needed to be offered the “investor tour” or the “media tour”, these being the only two categories of PR communication. The author finally gained access to GeneEd, an e-learning software company co-founded by two Indians in San Francisco that sells life science courses to corporate clients. During his job interview, he provided an overview of his own field of science studies and cultural anthropology, eliciting questions about marketing strategies and employee motivation. The two CEOs agreed to have an in-house anthropologist, and let him wander around while using his skills as a marketer.

Despite the obvious limitations of his terrain, being more than one step removed from the biotech startups and big pharma industries that are at the core of biocapital, the author was able to conduct an interesting case study of corporate life that is presented in the last chapter of the book. As GenEd’s client base shifted from small biotech to big pharmaceutical companies, the status of graphic designers declined to one of mere executioners, while software programmers became the key resource of the company. By participating in industry conferences, meeting with people, and simply being there, Sunder Rajan was also able to accumulate valuable observations on biotech startups and research labs in the Silicon Valley. In particular, conferences and business events are “key sites at which unfolding dynamics and emergent networks of technocapitalism can be traced.” They have their rituals, like speeches and parties, their messianic symbolism of “going for life,” and their underlying infrastructure of competition for capital and recognition.

The biocapital ethics and the spirit of start-up capitalism

High tech startups that depend on venture capital funding have developed what the author describes as the art of vision and hype: making investors and the public at large believe in unlimited growth and massive future profits, even they don’t have a product on the market. Hype and vision form the “discursive apparatus of biocapital”: this discourse declined in “promissory articulations”, “forward-looking statements”, and the initial public offerings of “story stocks”, as these ventures are known on Wall Street. The excitement generated by endeavors like the Human Genome Project has increased the enthusiasm of state funders and private investors for anything related to the genome, even as the pragmatic applications of genetics research seem distant if not unachievable. “At some fundamental level, it doesn’t matter whether the promissory visions of a biotech company are true or not, as long as they are credible,” notes the author. Promissory articulations are performative statements: they create the conditions of possibility for the existence of the company in the present. As a result, the spirit of start-up capitalism is very different from the protestant ethic as described by Max Weber. It is “an ethos marked by an apparent irrationality, excess, gambling.” It is also, at least in the US, a neo-evangelical ethics of born-again Protestantism that promises an afterlife in one’s own lifetime: a future of health and hope, of personalized medicine and vastly increased life prospects–at least, for those who can afford it.

This is where India comes as a useful counterpoint. India entertains different dreams and visions. In 1982, Indira Gandhi addressed the World Health Assembly with the following words: “The idea of a better-ordered world is one in which medical discoveries will be free of patents and there will be no profiteering from life and death.” Since then, the world has moved into the opposite direction, and India has positioned itself as a key player in the “business of life”. Medical records and DNA samples are collected in Indian public hospitals for commercial purposes, and the nation-state itself operates as a quasi-corporate entity. India in the 1990s has emerged as a major contract research site for Western corporations, which outsource medical trials at a significantly cheaper cost. The challenge for the young entrepreneurs and government officials interviewed by Sunder Rajan is to move beyond a dependence on contract work for revenue generation, and toward a culture of indigenous knowledge generation through patenting and intellectual property appropriation. It is also an ethical challenge: in the course of his research, Sunder Rajan visited a research hospital in Mumbai that recruits as experimental subjects former millworkers who have lost their jobs as a result of market reforms. The “human capital” that forms the basis of these clinical trials experiments is very different from the often vaunted software engineers and biotech specialists who have become the hallmark of “India Shining”: it is constituted of life itself, of life as surplus, and therefore blurs the classic division between capital and labor that Marx locates at the origin of surplus value.

Fieldwork in a multi-sited ethnography

Like many anthropologists, Sunder Rajan is at his best when he connects particular reporting on field sites and informants with theoretical discussions on Marx and Foucault. The objects of his study are inseparable from the larger epistemological and political economic contexts within which they are situated. In line with other scholars in the field of STS studies, he insists on the mutual constitution of the life sciences and the socio-economic regimes in which they are embedded. There is no neatly divided partitions or clear distinctions between “the scientific”, “the economic” and “the social”; rather, these categories enter in complex relationships of coproduction and coevolution. However, Sunder Rajan’s theoretical arguments do no always receive ethnographic support, and his empirical base is spread rather thin. Multi-sited ethnography as a different way of thinking about the field runs the risk of turning into reportage or graduate school’s tourism; and it is not sure that fieldwork, once defined as hanging around, can easily be substituted by wandering about.