Demands of the Day: On the Logic of Anthropological Inquiry 9780226036885, 9780226036915, 9780226037073, 2012043366

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Demands of the Day

Demands of the Day: On the Logic of Anthropological Inquiry Paul Rabinow Anthony Stavrianakis The University of Chicago Press :: Chicago and London

Paul Rabinow is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author or coauthor of many books, most recently The Accompaniment and Designing Human Practices, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Anthony Stavrianakis received his PhD in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-03688-5 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-03691-5 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-03707-3 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226037073.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rabinow, Paul. Demands of the day : on the logic of anthropological inquiry / Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-226-03688-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-22603691-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-03707-3 (e-book) 1. Research. 2. Inquiry (Theory of knowledge) 3. Social sciences— Fieldwork. 4. Research—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Stavrianakis, Anthony. II. Title. Q180.A1R33 2013 001.4′33—dc23 2012043366 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

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Preface Acknowledgments Introduction

vii ix 1

Collaborative Fieldwork On Leaving the Field: Ausgangshaltung Recuperate and Curate On Publicity Configurations of Actual Discordancy

13 31 47 61 81

Conclusion: Demands of the Day Notes Bibliography

97 113 123

Preface This book is about the unfolding of one particular anthropological inquiry and the logical standards and forms that guided it. Although the experiment is a particular one, we are convinced that narrating its jagged unfolding highlights what should be a more general process of scientific experimentation in the human sciences in the twentyfirst century. How general, and precisely what that generality consists in, will only become clearer as others undertake similar experiments. Our hope and intention is that this case does provide conceptual and narrative standards and forms that further inquiry might well take up. These experiments might be called, following Niklas Luhmann, second-order participant-observation. It also might be understood, echoing John Dewey, as the invention and testing of a changing set of standards and forms developed in the course of further inquiry. In sum, our project has been experiential, conceptual, narrational, veridictional, and, at its core, ethical. One could argue that over the course of its modern history as a discipline, anthropology has (or should have) ascribed to the significance of these variables, combined together in diverse fashions. The research as described in this book derives from five years of fieldwork (2006–2011) in a series of linked sites, as well as two (partially overlapping) years (2009–2011) of experimentation with forms of participant-observation

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different from fieldwork. As the reader will see later, although Rabinow was the principal investigator in the larger of the linked sites, Stavrianakis had engaged in his initial graduate years with researchers in that site. His primary research and thesis work, however, were located elsewhere as part of a large project centered at the Arizona State University in which Stavrianakis’s core inquiry was based in Basel, although set in a larger context. That context was a comparative one, specifically in its relation to Rabinow’s Berkeley-centered project and, perhaps more importantly, conceptually within ongoing reflection and work on the anthropology of the contemporary. In that light, there was nothing untoward when Rabinow and Stavrianakis decided to write an article together (June 2011) on the conceptual and comparative dimensions of their overlapping projects. Once under way it became clear to Rabinow that what they were writing could well require a short book. With some trepidation, he proposed this book project to Stavrianakis with the sincere proviso that of course if Stavrianakis wanted to finish his doctoral thesis first, that would be fine. Stavrianakis responded that there were good scientific reasons to undertake this project first and he had no doubt that it would enrich his thesis. We set to work collaboratively to meet what we later called, following Max Weber, the demands of the day. In this case, this phrase meant that the process of bringing a complex experiment and experience to a close required more reflection as to exactly how to do that. We both knew that although the bulk of the traditional participant-observation had been completed, in order for this experiment to contribute fulsomely to an anthropology of science, further analysis and narration were demanded. Without much ado, we set out to explore this terrain jointly. Our capacity to set off into this domain was predicated on years of shared work with other researchers—above all Gaymon Bennett—nested experiences, and a slowly developing critique about the biosciences, the human sciences, and the place of knowledge and care in the university in the twenty-first century.1 In each of our participant-observation experiments, the question and the problem of how ethical practice and human and bioscientific knowledge practices could best be brought into an integral and mutually enriching relationship took center stage. This book is organized largely around our experiments and experiences in this uncertain domain, whose exploration we call the anthropology of the contemporary. Said another way, this whole project could be said to turn on the problem of ethics, truth, and subjectivity. How it turned out is for the reader to discern.

Acknowledgments Among the demands of the day some are arduous and some spring into presence accompanied by the joys of grateful acknowledgment for recognition more than amply earned and deserved. Among the latter is the simple naming of that core group of friends with whom we have engaged over the course of this work and its associated labor. As friendship is diverse, and as we eschew the lengthy and embarrassing rhetoric of confessional American discursive gratitude, we simply and straightforwardly acknowledge the stultitia-countering and soteriaencouraging relations we have been graced with from Gaymon Bennett, Limor Darash, James Faubion, Erik Fisher, Stan Herman, Colin Koopman, Marilyn SeidRabinow, and Laurence Tessier.

Introduction The problem reduced to its lowest terms is whether inquiry can develop in its own ongoing course the logical standards and forms to which further inquiry John Dewey1 shall submit.

During 2007–2011 we were engaged as participantobservers in two innovative enterprises in the contemporary sciences: one for synthetic biology, which included a program for a collaborative component dedicated to ethics and social ramifications; and one dedicated to the “real time assessment” of nanotechnology and its social consequences. Both were funded by the U.S. Congress, via the National Science Foundation (NSF), as improvements on previous efforts to bring “Big Science” into alignment with twenty-first-century ethical concerns. Both were conceived in the wake of the massive project to sequence the human genome and its associated ELSI (ethical, legal, social implications) component, “the biggest ethics project in human history,” which was cast as “downstream and external” to the science.2 Briefly stated, the critical limitation of ELSI was that the authority of the ethics and social science researchers was circumscribed by their position outside of the biological research.3 ELSI research was advisory and was limited to pointing out issues. These limitations produced several responses as to how social science researchers might bet-

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ter design upstream and midstream involvement with natural science and engineering research. “Upstream” means deliberation prior to the commencement of projects, and “midstream” refers to the effort to introduce questions during ongoing research. The projects we designed and participated in were responses to this challenge. Hence, these were not traditional fieldwork projects; rather, in the literal sense of the term they were experiments in participant-observation. At the outset of the experiments no one really knew with any precision what the standards and forms of such participant-observation should be, and therein lay the challenge of the experiment. The domain of bioengineering with which we were engaging was oriented to producing foundational technologies for the purpose of making biology easier to engineer. Rabinow was invited to participate in the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), a consortium of biologists and engineers from UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, Harvard, MIT, and eventually Stanford. This center was the first such center for synthetic biology in the United States. The NSF mandated that the center include a research component dedicated to the ethics, politics, and security aspects of this domain of bioengineering. For four years (2006–2010) Rabinow headed this research thrust. He asked a then Ph.D. student in the Graduate Theological Union, Gaymon Bennett, to join him in designing and executing anthropological and ethical research within the center. The project was in place a few months before Anthony Stavrianakis joined the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley. Shortly after arriving, in search of a project and funds, he was invited to participate in “Human Practices,” as the undertaking was being called. Bennett had been a staff researcher for the Geron Corporation on their ethics advisory board in the late 1990s. Geron was one of the companies funding much of the early research in embryonic stem cells. The company brought together ethicists and biologists to meet a year before they derived the cells, to think in advance about what some of the repercussions might be. As with the ELSI “social consequences” research in the Human Genome Project, the downside to the arrangement for the ethicists with regards to the scientific activity was that their capacity was purely advisory.4 Having experienced the limits of the institutionalized role of the bioethicist, Bennett sought out intellectual resources in theology to think through these limitations. In theology, one of the limitations was that reasoned discourses about the divine, in academic venues, was removed from an engagement with present situations in which one might want to think. Bennett sought out Rabinow with the

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aim of thinking through the relation of biology, ethics, and real world problems.5 Shortly after beginning the project, Rabinow was contacted by a group at Arizona State University (ASU) focused on nanotechnology and its social consequences. The ASU Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) was also funded by the NSF to deal with the social consequences of emerging technologies, especially nanotechnology. The group’s activities are most closely related to what in Europe is known as Mode 2 Science and Society.6 CNS coordinates many projects over six interconnected research arms.7 Stavrianakis was invited to participate in one of CNS’s projects, the Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR) project and to cast it as a comparison with Human Practices. The organizational structure of the STIR project was a network of social, cultural, and political scientists and philosophers using a core methodology in twenty sites across a number of different emerging sciences and technologies. This network seemed noteworthy since it offered an interesting comparison of the ways in which social scientists can interact with one another in such efforts to integrate social and ethical questions into laboratory research, as well as the opportunity to reflect on how such a project can be implemented within emerging scientific spaces. We have written about the details of these projects elsewhere.8 What is at stake in Demands of the Day is a conceptualization and analysis of collaboration during fieldwork in these sets of experiments, within SynBERC and STIR. Our interconnected projects and experiences were oriented to and to a significant extent designed as an investigation into problems: what are the ways of forming a practice of inquiry into the ethics of biology and emerging technologies? In what way can participant-observation be made ethical and anthropological? A starting point for our project in Human Practices was how to give form to a relation between those researchers developing a designed approach to making engineering use of cells and DNAs and ourselves, the human scientists, who were reflecting on the relationship between what is being made and the kind of ethical reflection appropriate to such knowing and making. Exploring this relation required recognition that the Human Practices project was part of traditions of thought including anthropology, ethics, philosophy, and theology. We posed the question of how these traditions, along with developments in the biosciences, were being reassembled into a common problem in the present, which we designated with the name Human Practices. As a term, Human Practices has multiple referents: organizationally,

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it referred to a division of SynBERC (Thrust 4 Human Practices), which included researchers from Berkeley and from MIT.9 It should be noted that the researchers from MIT expressed little interest in what the endeavor to think beyond ELSI signified. In addition to its organizational referent, the term Human Practices referred to what we were doing in our venue of thought and experience. Demands of the Day is not an ethnographic monograph nor a historical chronicle of people, places, and events; rather, it describes our attempts to conceptualize and narrate the diverse forms that were apposite to different stages of our experiments and experience. Readers interested in the details of SynBERC and STIR, and their human scientific engagements and disengagements, can consult a by now substantial scholarly literature as well as one that is awkwardly, if astutely, referred to as vulgarization.10 In this book our narration is retrospective. In this sense it has faint echoes of Hegel’s owl flapping its wings in flight, as it does as well in its attempt to understand the conceptual dynamics of the unfolding of the process of inquiry. Of course, like the young Dewey and so many others, we reject the telic and triumphant narrative of freedom in Hegel, and their traces are nowhere to be found here. Rather, we offer our analysis as a modest contribution to an understanding of the demands of our day. The Demands of the Day We shall set to work and meet the “demands of the day,” in human relations as well as in our vocation. This, however, is plain and simple, if each finds and Max Weber11 obeys the daemon who holds the fibers of his very life.

Rabinow and Bennett proceeded in SynBERC with an informed awareness that reconfiguring the relations between and among the life sciences and the human sciences would require a range of conceptual, pragmatic, and diagnostic activity.12 Such an interface of the human and biosciences aimed at transforming ethical and scientific blockages and breakdowns into more determined and concrete problems such that a range of possible solutions might be made available. Collaboration between anthropologists and bioscientists would require each side to take seriously the relations that their own activity has to the larger complex environment in which it is situated. Our primary orientation was to give form to problems so that they could be worked on jointly. Given our mandates in SynBERC and STIR, to collaborate with the bioscientists and engineers on the challenges of contemporary

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science and ethics, the question was how, and not whether, the biosciences could be obliged to engage this challenge. As Rabinow and Bennett wrote previously of the rationale for our engagement, the goal was to design new practices that bring the biosciences and the human sciences into a mutually collaborative and enriching relationship, a relationship designed to facilitate a remediation of the currently existing relations between knowledge and care in terms of mutual flourishing.13

We were experimenting with bioscientists as well as other human scientists to determine the forms and standards appropriate to the question, How is it that one does or does not flourish as a researcher, as a citizen, and as a human being? These experiments had their own contours and were driven in part by a particular set of field experiences, preconditions, opportunities, and, to coin a term to which we will return in the conclusion, “supportive but harsh task-masters” that is, our daemons. We take the term “daemon” from Max Weber, although it has a long, long genealogy behind it from at least the Platonic Socrates forward. We also take Weber’s associated term “the demands of the day” as a partner and couple to this seemingly puzzling daemon. This book is oriented to the demand to take flourishing seriously. As explained in previous writings, flourishing is the term often chosen to translate the ancient Greek term eudaemonia (literally, the good daemon). The term flourishing, or a well-lived life, involves more than success in achieving projects, technical optimization, or undirected maximization of capacities.14 The daemon who binds us to this demand is one with whom we searched, and search again, for a form and mode of such a flourishing practice, when such forms and modes adequate to this demand prove lacking. Progressively Directed Inquiry We initially understood this project as an attempt at Deweyan reconstruction. Dewey writes of reconstruction, Reconstruction can be nothing less than the work of developing, of forming, of producing (in the literal sense of that word) the intellectual instrumentalities which will progressively direct

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inquiry into the deeply and inclusively human—that is to say moral—facts of the present scene and situation.15

What is pertinent in Dewey’s formulation is that science and ethics are interfaced and assembled in accordance with the demands of “progressively directed inquiry.” Such a demand is directed at the possibility of the invention and implementation of intellectual instrumentalities that facilitate thinking and life. Following Michel Foucault, we use the term “equipment” as a rough equivalent to Dewey’s intellectual instrumentalities.16 Equipment, defined abstractly, is a set of truth claims, affects, and ethical orientations designed and combined into a practice. Our challenge was to design a mode of collaboration that contributes to flourishing, our own and others, and to produce the equipment needed to carry out such an undertaking. As we will narrate in the course of this book, our attempt to define problems, with respect to which we could develop collaborative responses, was consistently blocked. The motion we will follow is one away from a blocked “present scene and situation” characterized by cooperation but not collaboration. Cooperation consists in demarcated labor with regular exchange; cooperation does not entail common definitions of the situation or shared techniques of remediation, which are fundamental to collaboration. Once blockages in SynBERC and STIR were apparent, which stymied moving from cooperative to collaborative relations, we decided that we should continue our experiment in the spirit of anthropological science, carefully monitoring results and determinations that followed from our research. We also decided that flourishing could not be abandoned as a metric of science as a vocation if we were to attempt to meet the demands of the day and the call of our daemon.17 For a long time, we entertained the hope that the kind of remediative labor we had been undertaking, with SynBERC and STIR, at least opened up the possibility that one type or another of Deweyan reconstruction was imaginable. Only slowly, and in a stumbling and at times disheartening manner, did we come to acknowledge that reconstruction was not a path we were going to follow and give form to; the situation we were participating in was not at present open to such an intervention. We also came to realize that we needed to rethink and renovate Dewey’s conception of “the moral” and “the deeply human.” These conclusions left us searching for alternatives.

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Exit: Ausgang Demands of the Day started, in a formal fashion, after we began systematic efforts to think through our exit from “the field.” As we proceeded, reflecting on how best to exit from a blocked and discordant situation, we came to recognize that our inquiry had a logic to it, which we thought it ought to be guided by, if it and the logic were eventually to cohere and synergize one with the other. Both the activity of anthropological inquiry and the logic of coherence could be characterized as recursive. By this we mean the research had its starts and stops, moments of perplexity and clarification. At least in one sense, anthropology is experimental and in another sense it is experiential. The interplay of the two can be, or should be, recursive, that is to say, mutually corrective and reinforcing. We came to realize existentially that contemporary anthropology did not begin or end either with fieldwork or with anything resembling traditional ethnography. Rather, anthropology included the preparatory phase before the field, as well as the sometimes abrupt and complex motion of exiting or leaving. Such exiting was not only a process of leaving the field site (as this is more than a simple spatial location), but rather this leaving itself was, or at least could be, an aspect of participant-observation. Strangely enough, the immediate postfieldwork participant-observation, as well as that involved in “writing up,” have been glossed over and largely ignored in the disciplinary literature. We came to conceptualize our experiment as consisting of multiple forms of participant-observation, ones appropriate to different phases of anthropology. In that light, we provide a series of framings for reflecting on these phases, as well as the resultant production of knowledge, for both our subjects and objects. These framings were forged for their capacity to give form to the incessant mutual involvement of subjects and objects, as well as the milieus in which these living beings find themselves. These framings are theatrical, curatorial, and cinematographic. The theatrical frames the affective dimension of our participation. The curatorial frame enabled us to gather our observations in such a way that we could observe the observations we had made as participants in the situation. The cinematographic framing enabled us to track lines in the wider milieu in which we had been operating. In each phase (fieldwork, leaving, and the phases that opened up after leaving), our experience and experiments were framed in such a way that we could narratively move away from the experience of discor-

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dance and toward, minimally, a more determinate narrative rendering of the situation in which we had been involved. This required coupling our observation of the multiplicities of the process of “leaving the field” and entering further phases of anthropological research, with the requirement for a multiplicity of narrative modes. The production of such multiple narrative modes was oriented to opening up further paths to explore. The motion from field to text, the practices through which one can give a form to an experience such that it might produce movement toward that which one would like to know, as well as the form of life one is trying to cultivate, somewhat strangely has as yet been only cursorily explored within the anthropological literature.18 Present, Actual, Contemporary We understand the demands of the day in the frame of problematization, briefly sketched and unfortunately underdeveloped, by Michel Foucault. The problem space, within which our inquiry was initially located and then proceeded, was that of the internal and external indeterminations and discordancies of bios (life) and anthropos (the human thing), as well as the competing and interfering sciences—logoi—that accompany them. “Indeterminations” and “discordancies” are terms we take from Dewey; we have found Dewey’s claim that they are the site and object of thinking to be fruitful.19 We asked ourselves, In what way does our undertaking differ from what we understand to be Michel Foucault’s project of a history of the present?20 Our project operated from the outset from the premise that there is a distinction between the history of the present and the anthropology of the contemporary. Consequently, it is important to sketch the contours that separate them. One version of the history of the present is that it is a strategy to render the understanding of objects, apparatuses, and knowledge, taken to be stable, as contingent. Our fieldwork and our other engagement with participant-observation was located and conceptualized around organizations for the production of new forms of knowledge, which were understood at the time to be emergent. Hence, to render the emergent contingent would be tautological; to render it inevitable would be foolish. Furthermore, Foucault’s genealogical approach, whatever its other vagaries, consistently and rigorously maintained at least a century’s distance from the historical present it was seeking to render contingent. The reason for Foucault’s studied and targeted distanciation lies in his commitment to politics understood as a

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concern of citizens acting as citizens; his commitment was not one consistent with thinkers providing solutions for others or even guidelines for action in any direct sense. When Foucault deployed his genealogical narratives it was usually in order to make a problem visible. However, it is more accurate to say that Foucault sought to render a solution visible and articulable thus making it possible to see and understand that it had been only one of other possible solutions, long since obscured. A different and discontinuous, yet linked, version of the history of the present can be found in the last three years of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France. During this period of time (the early 1980s), Foucault was concerned not with rendering the present contingent, but rather with exploring the conceptual repertoire that might help in opening the present to a process of exploration whose most general object he called problematization. Although these lectures continue to adhere to his genealogical constraints of keeping historical distance from the present, that distance is much greater and operates within a quite different set of historical conditions and constraints. Nonetheless, Foucault’s explorations in what he nicely called “the work site [chantier] of history” can be understood as a history of problematizations.21 These explorations can be seen as an effort to proceed in an affirmative sense that would enable or motivate the critical thinker to undertake the hard labor of identifying and recasting the problematic relations of truth and subjectivity. In this version, Foucault’s central target was not to demonstrate the contingency or obsolescence of solutions to long obscured problems but rather to recover an extended series of transformations of the core problems of thinking in its troubled and frequently disorderly relationships with politics, science, and ethics. We took as one of our diagnostic starting points (elaborated and explored in different ways by social scientists, journalists, historians, and anthropologists) that macroforces were contributing to a reproblematization of the relations of truth and subjectivity, as well as those of science (inclusive of the human and physical sciences) and ethics. This orientation did not lead us down the path of genealogy as it did for Michel Foucault. Although we drew inspiration and obviously have learned a great deal from Foucault, we have become clearer about why and how an anthropological approach differs from that of Foucault’s history of the present. Our participant-observation and our conceptual efforts demonstrated not so much either the contingency or the necessity of the lack of engagement we encountered with the bioscientists and

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some of our social science colleagues but rather the trained incapacities, reward systems, power differentials, and the like that abound in the present. It led us to pose the question, given the determinations we had arrived at from our participant-observation—of the established externalities, the unexamined critical limitations, and the means available for arranging, interfacing, and/or blocking the present relations of science and ethics, truth and subjectivity—of what relation one could establish through inquiry to the discordancies and indeterminacies of the present day? We thus established an updated version of Weber’s diagnosis of the ingrained separation of scientific mastery of its material and cultural meaning in modernity. Toward an Anthropology of the Contemporary Work: “That which is susceptible of introducing a significant difference in the field of knowledge, at the price of a certain difficulty for the author and the reader, and with the eventual recompense of a certain pleasure, that is to say Michel Foucault22 an access to a different figure of truth.”

Although we had been intrigued by Foucault’s notion of work for some time, it was only once we began to run into and think about the discordancies and indeterminacies of reconstruction as a concept and a shared standard of judgment that we turned to the quotation from Foucault as formulating a possible way out from the enclosures of the present and perhaps even a byway toward that confounding topos both Foucault and Kant referred to as “Enlightenment.”23 The best way to determine whether heading off in the direction of further figures of truth, or at least making “a significant difference in the field of knowledge,” was possible, was simply to persevere in the direction in which we had taken but equally to accept the imperative that in order to further the inquiry we would have to shift the norms and forms that guided it. This meant continuing toward the contemporary but shifting the mode in which we had anticipated practicing it. Distinctions Rabinow had been exploring the term the contemporary for a number of years as a contrast term both to the present and to the modern. How had he formulated the term? The ordinary English language meaning of the term “the contemporary” is “existing or occurring at, or dating

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from, the same period of time as something or somebody else.” There is, however, a second meaning of “distinctively modern in style” as in “a variety of favorite contemporary styles.” The first use has no inherently interesting historical connotations, only temporal ones; Cicero was the contemporary of Caesar just as Thelonious Monk was the contemporary of John Coltrane or Gerhard Richter is the contemporary of Gerhard Schroeder. The second meaning, however, does carry a significant historical connotation and a curious one that can be used to both equate and differentiate the contemporary from the modern. It is that marking that is pertinent to the project at hand. Just as one can take up the modern as an ethos and not a period, one can take it up as a moving ratio. In that perspective, tradition and modernity are not opposed but paired: “tradition is a moving image of the past, opposed not to modernity but to alienation.”24 The contemporary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (nonlinear) space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical. The anthropology of the contemporary seeks to develop methods, practices, and forms of narration coherent and cooperable with understandings of the mode (or modes) taken by anthropos as figure and an assemblage. We had been using a contrastive pair of the contemporary and the present. As we began to write this book, using the equipment of our Studios (www.anthropos-lab.net) to explore preliminary formulations and connections, we began to think that something was missing conceptually. Having developed a mode of collaboration, we called up Professor James Faubion of Rice University, our go-to friend unparalleled in his ability to supply scholastic references drawn reliably from his vast erudition, his willingness to respond to our queries and requests for clarification thoughtfully and incisively in the style of analytic philosophy, as well as his unique ability to recontextualize such distinctions and precision making within an ethnographic and anthropological approach. Faubion suggested that we needed a third term. After some discussion together we arrived at the series: present, actual, contemporary. Our discussions produced insights concerning the difference between the present and the actual. The actual entails conceptual clarification and reduction into warrantable objects out of the swarming confusion of the present, which constitutes the background to experience and knowledge. We use this distinction, between the present and the actual to a degree in line with, but also as a departure from, Dewey’s approach to thinking and experience. For Dewey, thinking is an active response set within a situation in which the everyday and taken for granted—the present—is at times troubled, breaking down, and so on. As Rabinow

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has written previously, “Dewey’s attempt to make his logic applicable to any problem, anywhere, and anytime both gives it its power and constitutes its core blind spot. In parallel with what anthropologists used to call the ‘ethnographic present,’ one might say that Dewey wrote in the ‘philosophic present.’”25 The clarifications produced by thinking, while rooted in a present situation, are nonetheless a conceptual reduction of one or more of its aspects. We refer to the product of this identification, analysis, and reformulation as the actual as opposed to the present. The present and the actual therefore both refer as qualifiers to types of objects as well as modes of being. We use the distinction between the present, the actual, and the contemporary to designate modal states of research and the status of their determinations. Participant-observation as fieldwork has been taken to exemplify the process of anthropology but is itself neither primitive nor initiatory (in the Hegelian sense of logical precedence) as the observer enters into situations of the present already shaped by experiences, knowledge, disciplinary boundaries, modes of veridiction, subjectivation, dispositions of all sorts, and so on. Further, this logic of anthropological inquiry is not dialectical in a Hegelian sense, since the actual is not already present in and unfolding from that which is potential in the present. Given the conditions of existence for a scientific object and its warranted assertibility, these objects are neither Hegelian objects waiting to unfold nor modernist constructs built from the labor of the subject. In the present, breakdown and trouble signal that a situation exists that requires thinking. Identifying the interconnection of things is a first diagnostic step. The conceptualization of the things as elements and objects of knowledge makes them actual. But as Max Weber so astutely counseled, It is not the “actual” interconnections of “things” but the conceptual interconnection of problems that defines the scope of the various sciences.26

The conceptual interconnection of problems is the space in which further inquiry must proceed.

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Collaborative Fieldwork The goal was to see whether it was possible to demonstrate a different kind of Paul Rabinow1 relationship between knowing and caring.

In 2004, while a visiting professor at the then recently opened BIOS Center of the London School of Economics, Paul Rabinow gave a lecture titled “Genome, Risk, Care: On the Legitimacy of the Contemporary.” The lecture was a catalyst for Anthony Stavrianakis, then an undergraduate at the LSE, relative to two stultifying aspects of the research and study he had been pursuing in the UK: the seeming impossibility of posing questions of ethics within a social science institution, in anything more than the narrow sense of bioethics (focused on limits), and the lack of a space in which to do common conceptual work on the intensification of relations between science, ethics, and politics. Rabinow was addressing both problems. He had at that time recently begun an endeavor called the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) with several former graduate students. Their endeavor was in response to a timely challenge: how to study complexity in the human sciences with the assumptions that the significance of a problem exceeds any single project and that its significance cannot rest solely on the fetish and authority of field experience. The suggestion

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was that problems for anthropological participant-observation could be confronted better jointly even subsequent to fieldwork. The motivation for ARC was dissatisfaction with the individual project model in anthropology. As Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow wrote in 2006, The individual project model assumes that interpretive and authorial virtuosity is the mainspring of good work. At its best, it produces genuinely innovative and original scholarship. At its worst, it results in workshops, conference papers, collected volumes and monographs in which the emphasis is placed on individual performance, and in which there is not much discussion or debate about what the key problems for the field are, and how to best approach them, nor is there evidence of shared norms that lead to better understanding of significant phenomena.2

Otherwise said, it was a question of science, ethics, and the relation of these terms to anthropology as one among the human sciences. For Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow, as they framed it, the question to which the Collaboratory was a response was the postfieldwork question of what the relation is between individually produced knowledge and a broader set of problems pertinent to a more general field of knowledge. These are distinct from, although to a degree require, fieldwork. In anthropology, as in many other disciplines, scholars research and write together. The impetus for ARC, however, was an insight into the need for an organizational practice in which two things could be facilitated, which are not currently supported by the structure and experience of graduate student and professorial subject positions. First, there was a recognition of the need for collective concept formation for use in orientation to, and decomposition and recomposition of, data. Second, there was reflection on a need for the formation of shared standards of judgment. The central methodological drive behind this effort was to develop ways of submitting anthropological research (and the subjectivation of anthropologists) to minimal “tests” so as to be capable of discussing criteria of significance for knowledge sought or produced. What distinguishes this mode from a formal method is that the aim was not a fixed criterion relative to which the status of all knowledge produced by participant-observation could be judged. Rather the aim was to subject the form of life devoted to knowledge about anthropos and knowledge about this creature’s logoi to examination. The purpose

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of such examination was to connect thought, as a practice, to an ethos of thinking.3 Collaborative Fieldwork Rabinow and Bennett began with discussions over the limits of the concept of biopower relative to the emerging biosciences and what an outside to biopolitical approaches might be, if one were oriented to their ethical stakes. Given Bennett’s prior experience and their shared concerns, Rabinow invited him to be the associate director of Human Practices and to enroll in the graduate program in anthropology. It was an opportunity to try out a project both within the human sciences— since as a principal investigator (PI) Rabinow would have funds to support students—and between the human and biosciences. From Stavrianakis’s position, as novitiate participant and observer, there were two important aspects to this starting point between Rabinow and Bennett. The first was that the project was problem oriented and experimental. The second was that this experimentation was oriented to an ethical end, which Rabinow and Bennett had named from the start as flourishing. Flourishing was a term we used to posit the reason for our mode of participant-observation. We used the term to ask how the ethical outsides to the instrumental rationality of the sciences could be reactivated and reconnected to new types of scientific research. This is not to say that flourishing is per se opposed to instrumental goals; rather, we used the term to ask how metrics, or shared standards of judgment, broader than justifications by instrumentality could be introduced into seemingly emergent spaces in the biosciences. Relative to our interconnected projects, flourishing was an end toward which we were trying to move, through the activity of anthropological and ethical inquiry on the ramifications of bioscience and engineering. Moving toward this end required first a rethinking of the conditions under which we could take such an end as our own. All ancient Greek reflection on human goods were eudaemonistic, that is, concerned with what a good life is, however, it was Aristotle who gave the most thorough account and whose basic terms we used as our orientation.4 In Aristotle’s conception, eudaemonia is an objective state. This state is not only good for the particular person but is also reflective of what is good about humans understood as rational animals. In order for Aristotle to have such an account of ethics, he had to have an anthropology; his anthropology is structured through his understand-

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ing of the relation of the nature of the political community, the polis, to the nature of anthropos.5 If one takes up both the nature of the political community and the nature of anthropos as cultural-anthropological problems (from a pragmatic point of view) requiring inquiry, rather than a settled ontological claim about human beings, then there is a simultaneous inquiry into both what kind of objects of knowledge human beings are and what the goods for this creature can be. Collaborative Equipment From the start of our endeavor we posed the question of what concepts and pedagogical activity we would need. Cooperative fieldwork in our field sites would have meant from the beginning that we knew precisely what needed to be done and that all that was required was a division of labor in multiple sites to collect data, which would then rely on certain technologies of coordination. By contrast, we established an ongoing practice such that field experiences in connected but differentiated settings could contribute to a temporally shifting articulation of the challenge of participant-observation. The preparatory stage in which we asked how we would conduct our project in SynBERC was undertaken on the basis of an agreement with the NSF and the leadership of SynBERC, as well as with the intention that Human Practices would have ramifications for collaboration within ARC and perhaps on those adjacent groups engaging broadly with themes of the ethics and politics of science. What is the problem relative to which such initial preparations were oriented? A commonplace in 2006, articulated from funders as well as researchers, was that there was a need for new types of connection between science and ethics. This is true for all the projects we were involved in. In each project, the indetermination was how to collaborate productively between the human and natural sciences. We thought, in 2006, that our project would focus on indeterminations both ethical and scientific: how do you invent a post-ELSI ethical assemblage? What are the current unknowns? What is it that is being made? What is indeterminate about the ontology and the modality of such biological construction? We raised the challenge from the beginning of how to develop regular exchange on these questions within these institutions. Initially, as observer and neophyte, Stavrianakis was aware of the need to reflect on the relation of collaborative inquiry to the objects that it presupposed. This was not simply an awareness that inquiry is embodied or that the inquirer is always situated relative to the objects

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of study, lessons that have been taught and learned previously.6 Rather it was an observation that inquiry, relative to the object in question, requires reflection on the manner in which one does it, the problem relative to which one does it, and the question of which capacities and venues one would need in order to be capable of approaching the problem in the manner sought. Analytic reflection on these questions was aided through the use of a technical term, equipment, a translation from the Greek paraskeue¯, initially taken from Foucault’s 1981–82 lectures at the Collège de France. The term was honed as a concept that could assist us in reflecting on how we were conducting our research. Foucault’s discussion of paraskeue¯ in these lectures asks, “How can the subject act as he ought, not only inasmuch as he knows the truth, but inasmuch as he says it, practices it, exercises it?”7 Equipment is not merely a supply of true propositions, but in Foucault’s terms “statements with a material existence.”8 For the production of paraskeue¯, statements that have logos, which are justified by reason, must be turned into ethos.9 Rabinow and Bennett defined the concept as, a set of truth claims, affects and ethical orientations designed and composed into a practice. Equipment, which has historically taken different forms, enables practical responses to changing conditions brought about by specific problems, events and general reconfigurations. Today there is a rather inchoate, if insistent, demand for new equipment to reconfigure and reconstruct the relations between and among the life sciences, the human sciences, and diverse citizenries both national and global.10

Equipment is a practice in the moral philosopher Alisdair Macintyre’s sense of the term and not merely a technology. By practice I am going to mean . . . activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to reach those standards of excellence which are appropriate to and partially definitive of that form of activity with the result that human powers to achieve excellence and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved are systematically extended.11

A technology is a particular relation of means to ends, whereby means and ends can be adequately defined without reference to each other. A

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practice of inquiry is a means of acting in which the ends are internal to it and in which the standards and forms are generated internally. Thinking in Situations Thinking, following Dewey, occurs in a situation of trouble and situations of trouble are not individual. The “only way out” from a troubled situation, Dewey observes, is through careful inspection of the situation, involving resolution into elements, and a going out beyond what is found upon such inspection to be given, to something else to get a leverage for understanding it. That is we have (a) to locate the difficulty, and (b) to devise a method for coping with it. Any such way of looking at thinking demands moreover that the difficulty be located in the situation in question.12

The orientation in Human Practices was explicitly pragmatic in its approach in this Deweyan sense. This orientation took up Dewey’s demand to use “intellectual instrumentalities” in situations that had been diagnosed as problematic. One difficulty is that Dewey is vague on what he means when he says that inquiry takes place in “situations,” and another is how one would be able to diagnose that there is in fact a situation in need of reconstruction.13 Dewey is, however, clear on one indeterminate situation in particular, which he names in his 1948 introduction to Reconstruction in Philosophy: the entrance into the conduct of the everyday affairs of life of processes, materials and interests whose origin lies in the work done by physical inquirers in the relatively aloof and remote technical workshops known as laboratories.14

The indetermination, for Dewey, comes from the incapacity to inquire into and reflect on the effects of the increase in technical means. For Dewey the consequence of this incapacity to develop an adequate practice is “a compromise taking the form of a division of fields and jurisdictions.”15 This division is between the material and the ethical. The problem of those situations in which this division is instantiated is the failure to submit our common institutions, which involve ever more elaborate technical control of matter, and the habits and morals

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underlying them, to inquiry. If one were to do this, Dewey explains, one would see both logically and morally that the invention of new means does more than alter the ease of achieving the ends we think we know. What follows here is a series of temporally ordered objects arising during the process of experimentation, in which our experience could be raised to a level of conceptualization such that we could attempt to remediate our experiment within Human Practices and between these anthropologists and other groups with whom we were trying to engage. As Dewey instructs us, The name objects will be reserved for subject-matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry; proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry.16

Object 1: The Conceptualization of Power Relations Rabinow and Bennett developed a diagnostic engagement with SynBERC. The initial diagnostic objective was the observation and remediation of ethical problems. One of our starting points was that claims to expertise on what the ramifications of synthetic biology might be were premature, since it was unclear what the capabilities of the domain of practices were, or could be, relative to which problems and with which effects. Our engagement with the bioscientists was impeded owing to constant demands to justify our participation.17 This was particularly problematic relative to our stated goal. In these projects we observed these bioscientists’ appeals to the commercialization of science and the amelioration of health as the dominant justifications for the worth of scientific activity. This was problematic since while worthwhile and necessary goals to a degree, the bioscientists’ focus on commercialization as a goal and their inflated rhetoric around amelioration of health stymied adequate reflection on their activities. Their hyperbole blocked discussion of the positive and negative ramifications of the bioscientific research. Furthermore, it had as a consequence that our participation was evaluated by the institution relative to our capacity to contribute to first-order measures of prosperity and amelioration. This delimitation of the worth of science by these metrics was part of a broader incapacity to pose questions of how norms, excesses, and deficiencies functioned within these scientific institutions. Two key factors in this narrow delimitation of the worth of science are the subjectformation of bioscientists and institutional norms, including the train-

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ing, academic reward structures, and career trajectories, which shut out attention to ethical and political concerns when put in terms other than those of “opinion” and “values.” Soon after beginning these projects, we found ourselves subject to two of the three forms of power relations identified by Foucault: domination and subjectivation, but not exploitation.18 We were not exploited insofar as we were funded to proceed as long as we did not make any subjectivational demands on those with whom we were trying to engage. Subjectivation was in play, however, in that we took mutual pedagogy between scientists and their forms of knowledge to be a central part of our project. To the extent that we tried to fulfill our mandate, which demanded a change of habits on the part of the bioscientists, the technologies of domination were activated to silence us. Once the system and its environment were operative, to use Niklas Luhmann’s technical language, the response to our call for innovation and self-examination on the part of the scientific system, was irritation.19 This irritation could be explained away by a dismissal, “we don’t understand,” or claim of arrogance on our part (since “they did not understand”). To be arrogant is to “make or imply unwarrantable claims to authority, or knowledge.” Our reaction to this situation was to retreat to our observational post to continue our diagnosis. Since this retreat was combined with an insistence on the stakes and indeterminations of synthetic biology, specifically in the domain of security, it reinforced the label of arrogance in the second sense of the term, “to be aggressively conceited or haughty, presumptuous or overbearing.”20 This perceived arrogance was a consequence of our position, adjacent and dominated, and one might suggest is the outcome of the bioscientists’ desire for assurance and definitive policy talk that would close the discussion rapidly. Speaking up on these themes led to more charges of ethical, political, and intellectual arrogance. Who do they think they are? Well, we thought we were Thrust 4 Human Practices of the National Science Foundation Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center. Object 2: The Use of Concept Work: Preparedness and Equipment Once we acknowledged the role of power relations operating within the field, the next steps were to attempt to remediate our practices and assemblages. One area in which we sought different relations was in continuing our conceptual development and research on security and synthetic biology in the frame of preparedness. Preparedness is an ori-

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entation to low-probability high-consequence events, or events whose probability cannot be clearly calculated and whose specific form cannot be determined in advance. Emerging sciences such as synthetic biology are contributing to this preparedness challenge by way of vectors such as the development of new technologies, their place within changing security environments and the exponential access to such technologies within these changing security environments. Research into this topic had begun in 2006 within ARC among Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow, through an NSF grant on the Global Biopolitics of Security. This grant had as its background the endeavor to design a research project into the relations of biology, biopolitics, and security, which would require the development and refinement of shared concepts in order to produce an appropriate form of participant-observation.21 The research in ARC was connected to Rabinow’s ongoing experiment in graduate pedagogy, the Labinar, an experiment in which the key variables of individuality and performance within the humanities or social science seminar were challenged and new variables attempted to be introduced.22 As with the NSF-funded security project, but within the space of one semester, the aim of the Labinar was for graduate students to work on common problems, bracketing, although drawing on experience from their individual projects. The interconnected topics of preparedness, biology, and security were conceptualized often jointly by students within the frame of ARC. A range of security topics were taken up by doctoral students at Berkeley during this period, such as Carlo Caduff, Meg Stalcup, and Lyle Fearnley.23 Relative to SynBERC and ARC, Human Practices attempted to articulate the problem of preparedness through the connection of preparedness to an ethical discordance in reigning equipment, meaning, the affect structures, and modes of veridiction and jurisdiction with which actors were approaching the relation of security and synthetic biology. An indetermination over the preparedness of SynBERC was transformed into an incapacity to collaborate. This situation was then conceptualized and transformed into preliminary determinations that could stimulate further questioning into the relations of preparedness, science, and ethics. The outcomes of this shared conceptualization and reformulation of preparedness as an equipmental problem were a SynBERC Green Paper, an ARC Working Paper, and our reflections published in Nature Biotechnology.24 The Green Paper and the publication in Nature Biotechnology were distillations of our conceptualization of the topic of equipmental preparedness; this had both a first-order function to show

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the SynBERC organization that there was an issue they were not attending to and a second-order function to refine and test a set of conceptual distinctions. It became clear to us that within, among, and between ARC, the Labinar, and SynBERC it is very difficult to shift cooperative forms of academic research into collaborative ones. There are two reasons for this: one is the lack of a common object that could produce an articulation of a common problem. The second is that even if such an object and problem are articulated, which is a necessary condition of collaboration, there is a condition of insufficiency if relations of inquiry are established in which ongoing rethinking of the initial problem is not possible. Such recursivity requires some willingness to engage in shared experimentation or minimally a willingness to be affected by the experience and observations of others. Current academic disciplinary organization goes against moving from cooperation toward collaboration. Such potential was quickly foreclosed, however, within SynBERC. In the first years in the center, two key indeterminations that we named and thought worthy of co-labor were rejected; one was the preparedness issue and another was the ontological status of the biological objects being constructed in the labs. Initially a basic question we had was about the “parts-” based approach named in the synthetic biology manifestos. Such an approach to engineering biology aims at setting design standards for sequences of DNA with which standardized assembly methods could be used to construct synthetic biological systems. We asked, What is the meaning and function of the term “part” and what are the multiple ontologies of such parts, given that no stabilized standards had as yet been produced? As with preparedness, our observations and questions were not engaged with or followed up on. What was clear from our initial experience was that we did not have bioscientific partners with whom to engage on such indeterminations or a venue that would facilitate reflection and discussion. Object 3: Venue-Mode of Subjectivation We wagered in 2006 that SynBERC could be a significant venue, not only in itself, but that our participation in this particular venue could connect our experience to those others we were engaged in, ARC and STIR. What is a venue? The term venue characterizes the scene, site, or setting in which specialists design and synthesize activity. Such venues may have been already stabilized or institutionalized, they may coincide with the articulation of the practice itself, or they may emerge through

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the activity of equipmental composition. The venue is not a neutral scene, nor is it only the site within which composition is advanced. Rather, it is a facility. That is to say, when composition is successful, the venue facilitates rather than obstructs the design and synthesis of specific interfaces. In each of these venues, work was taking place on forms of possible knowledge about bios and anthropos; in each of these venues there were jurisdictional and subjectivational demands, which we in Human Practices were trying to render visible so as to intervene on them through participant-observation. One of the lessons learned from experimentation on the relation of science and ethics is the difficulty in shaping a topic across disciplinary lines. This was as true in SynBERC as it was in STIR and ARC. Prior to fieldwork, we had oriented ourselves to the goal of flourishing and its implementation in the relations between science and ethics. Our orientation in these projects was for collaboration to be the means for reconstruction, even if we left as an open question whether the “deeply and inclusively human” was an object that we could know anything about. We argued previously that the capacity to contribute to a reconstructed situation constituted a basic parameter of flourishing, which was the metric of our ethical engagement. Within ARC the subjectivational demands of the academy were a critical limitation to developing anything more than a cooperative mode. The same was true in SynBERC and STIR, and the experiences in all three venues brought our attention to the affective dimension of our incapacity to transform the subjectivational side of research in the human sciences. The STIR project, in addition to arranging for ten students to conduct individual projects with a shared methodology, had also built into the two-year project four workshops to share initial data and questions and to discuss the results of the project. The first three meetings involved only those graduate students and PIs who were direct participants in the project. The final workshop was a public event in Washington, in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson Center, which in addition to public keynote presentations included five student presentations. These presentations were arranged as dialogues between a social scientist and a natural scientist from the individual STIR projects. For Stavrianakis the ethical significance in the conceptual distinction between cooperation and collaboration came to a head at this workshop in February 2011. Since the STIR method for integrating social concerns into ongoing research was an explicitly formal tool, one of the recurring questions within our Human Practices group was how the ends toward which such a project tries to move could be articu-

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lated, debated, and tested. Furthermore, on the subjectivational side, for Stavrianakis the question was how and in what manner could we be capable of making participant-observations through the medium of a shared methodology? The researchers within STIR were not representatives of another function system and so were not bringing society, an identity, law, or anything else into the lab. As the PI and governor of the STIR project, Erik Fisher, described the role, researchers functioned to reflect back what is already there in this scientific system, to assist in the operation of self-observation of scientists by scientists. The role is one of a social technician, a mirror function rather than a different window onto the system’s environments. The question for a human scientist becomes, Why do this? The dominant justification in STIR was to modify behavior in some way, but relative to what purpose? And how could one make a judgment about this activity? Over the two years in the project, Stavrianakis posed this question in a number of ways, mainly concerned that an ameliorative justification is insufficient as an end if the purpose is to reflect on the cultural significance of the production of science. It was not a question anyone was initially willing to answer, but by the second year an answer emerged from Fisher in the willingness to name a criterion of judgment for the project: deliberative modulation. Deliberation within ongoing research (the midstream) and the capacity for it became the standard by which the efficacy of the method was to be taken seriously. After months of research in his STIR field site, Stavrianakis reviewed his attempts at co-labor with one of the molecular engineers with whom he had been using the STIR method. She narrated to him the following: At the beginning of their interaction she thought ethics meant only the question of what is right to do. As she said, “In this case it means limits for what is good. But, if ethics is also human interaction then it’s of course something different, opening a broad field. For example, collaboration, which is very very important. In that case the problem of collaboration is not a limitation but is bringing progress, or asking what can bring the most progress.” What we see here then is a communication having taken place. By the criterion of STIR this was successful labor. But this communication also leaves the parameters and metrics of the scientific system intact, while having made visible and having apparently produced reflection on how modes of research can inflect the pursuit of knowledge.

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The danger it seems is the reification of the supposedly self-governing effects of such a communication. That is to say, there is no shared problem relative to which this communication could take on significance. As such it remains at the level of a technical communication: ethics is not only limits and includes the self-formative and governance relations internal to the pursuit of knowledge. One might think that this is a deficient situation if one thought that a different kind of relationship between anthropological and scientific research could introduce a range of topics that are outside of science as it is currently structured and organized. If there is not a consequentialist justification, on the basis of the extant ends of scientific research, for what purpose does one engage in anthropological inquiry into the ethics of science? Otherwise said, what kind of problem has collaboration between cultural and natural scientists as a solution? One way to describe such possibly common problems would be to describe them as “collateral.” This image was presented to Stavrianakis by the director of the laboratory in his field site in Switzerland when the director was describing interactions he had had with proponents of a moratorium on new types of bioengineering. The director had suggested that while representatives of this group were knowledgeable, their arguments were made on “collateral grounds” and so by implication could be ignored. This image is evocative; there are a range of issues, in bioengineering as well as in other emerging and established sciences (bio, nano, nuclear), that are treated “collaterally” and appear outside of the bounds of science; these range from ecological to security concerns. To labor together on these issues would require bringing into a different relation scientific knowledge, observations of the political context of science, the technologies being produced, and the commitments of those producing this knowledge. We wish to refuse the positionality of human scientists as needing to justify themselves through either amelioration of research setups or the communication of values rendered as opinion. This refusal poses a challenge of how to be situated and in what mode, so as to enable the observation of the ethical challenges of the emerging sciences. When the goods of biology and the stakes of inquiry are framed solely in biopolitical terms, such framing produces an incapacity to pose ethical questions outside this rationality, and this it seems is a deficiency in human science research into the ethics of science. In the light of our conversations about this critical limitation, the PI of the STIR project asked, “So why then bother to do what we’ve been

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doing? Why collaborate? This is the tragedy; it may come back to this: that we’re just doing the modern project better.” Object 4: An Episode Becomes an Event By 2010, several things had changed. The NSF had asked Rabinow to step down as leader of Thrust 4 Human Practices because they claimed Thrust 4 had paid insufficient attention to “biorisks.” They emphasized their appreciation of Rabinow’s team’s research and advocated continued support within SynBERC. Strategically this was confusing. First, the Berkeley half of Thrust 4 was operating under a clear mandate that relative to topics of security our task was the ethical one of preparedness, understood as an outside to risk calculation. Second, the MIT side of Human Practices was charged with research on safety and risks, which they did not discharge in an adequate manner to satisfy either the industrial board or the NSF. Our concerted effort to diagnose an urgent and emergent issue was rejected in favor of exercises of assurance, which reinforced an old division of labor between technical prowess and public relations. Furthermore, the NSF wanted a new head appointed quickly; they specified that this person should be a social scientist with expertise in biorisk. Six months later no new head had been appointed. Finally, Drew Endy, formerly head of the “Devices” Thrust of SynBERC, was appointed head of Thrust 4. He accepted and recruited a recent bioengineering Ph.D., Megan Palmer, as deputy director, who had no credentials in social, ethical, and biorisk issues. The episode, which for us functioned as an event, took place in March 2011 at the annual SynBERC retreat. The retreat is a scientific meeting of all the institutions that make up SynBERC and precedes the annual site visit by the NSF. Having met with the new leader of Thrust 4 on several occasions, at his request, to discuss a synthetic overview of our past activities and future plans, we were startled when he responded to a question from a member of one of the advisory boards as to what “mind the gaps,” a category of activity in Thrust 4, consisted in? “Mind the gaps” was Drew Endy’s coverall term for what we had diagnosed as the challenge of preparedness in synthetic biology. He responded that “nothing comes to mind.” One could go on at length whether this was a lapse of memory, a simple lie, complete contempt, or overriding negligence.

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Autocritique 1: Neglect of Networks We entered the situation knowing that there would be existential ramifications with our engagement with institutional power. If the goal is making practical judgments, then this is the cost of entry into the game. The price to be paid for the participant-observation we were engaged in, we now see, turns out to be futility. The price to be paid for not participating in such an experiment in participant-observation would have been the bracketing of questions of virtue; ethnographic participantobservation excludes judgments of excesses and deficiencies. We are committed to a practice that requires self-criticism. By selfcriticism we mean something quite specific and somewhat different from the usual connotations of the term. For us, the aim of self-criticism is to contribute to further remediation of the situation or action in it. We note that friendly and not so friendly observers of our recent experiment in Human Practices also demanded this of us, regardless of their motivation; this request was perfectly valid, although what was meant by it requires specification. In 2007, the Human Practices experiment was designed to establish an innovative mode of engagement with the biosciences. Clearly this did not happen in the way it had been designed. In retrospect our exercise of self-criticism, after the fact, made us aware of how, despite our reflections on the power relations within these situations, we proceeded largely in terms of veridictional and ethical registers. Attention to power would have entailed much more extensive networking, travel, exchange of debt and credit, and extensive attention to simplification and vulgarization. Organizing this labor fell to Rabinow who sidestepped, with a certain degree of consciousness, these obligations. One could see this either as a simple characterological failing or a functional deficit in the organization. Minimally the network established through ARC and our nascent interactions with the ASU-CNS, was intended to perform some of these functions of communication, networking, critical feedback, and a broader scope of inquiries. We were insufficiently attentive to the fact that our colleagues were keenly aware of the need to do networking and publicity and to keep within the cycles of funding and credit. This was a minor problem to which we paid insufficient attention given the major ones that were directly blocking the kind of engagement we sought. If we had been capable of forming these alliances so that they had functioned as we had hoped, we might have been able to protect our anthropological endeavor better. We were not sufficiently attentive to the reality of the

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situation because we were busy with the original commitment; paradoxically, this commitment is what further isolated us, both from SynBERC and from others in the human sciences. Insufficient attention to cultivating exterior relations, combined with a blindness to the difficulty of collaboration internal to SynBERC, made us ultimately weaker and more vulnerable than we realized. What was the nature of the associational bond in this instance of participant-observation for which we were looking? The available positions were the classic critic (external, denunciatory, etc.), the classic sociologist (clear division of labor, metasuggestions), science policy analyst (proximate and dependent, first-order criticism plus metadiscourse to other audiences), and science studies (proximate but no identification, norms from within the subdiscipline, e.g., relativizing irony). As we were precisely seeking to invent and inhabit a new and different position and thereby both tacitly and overtly criticizing existing positions, it is not surprising that those being criticized were not that forthcoming in forming alliances. By critical here we do not mean destruction or denunciation but rather a Deweyan attempt to respond to a particular situation so as to increase the capacities of participant-observation. Autocritique 2: Neglect of Communication Another self-criticism is that on our part we proceeded as if innovative conceptual contributions would be welcomed. The response, however, was uniformly to reinscribe our efforts into existing ELSI-like language, which continued the separation of the human and biosciences. We thought the stakes were conceptual work and truth-speaking about the form of life being made through and within this developing bioscientific and bioethical (biosocial, biopolitical, biovalue) constellation. Our limitation was thinking that conceptual links could be the basis for association and coordinated political action between and among the existing players in the human sciences. Given that we were the novitiates, our failure was to neglect networking, accruing the relevant debts that could be called in when the intensification of power relations closed off our capacities to operate in close proximity to the biosciences. We refused two forms of communication, one philosophically based (Habermas) and the other much more corporate based (Public Relations), on ethical grounds. We did not communicate the philosophic reasons for refusing a communicative rationality approach to that small audience who might have appreciated such argumentation. As to the audience that was performing listening, their demands for communication

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were stereotypical. Our job in their assessment was to praise or defend their endeavor, depending on whether political or forensic rhetoric was at stake. We did not develop a rhetoric that would justify our refusal to accept communication as meaning either public relations in industry or for that matter a rhetoric of participation (as equal to democracy, focused on issues and values) or civic amelioration. Our self-criticism revealed retrospectively the importance of the fact that we were in a situation structured such that two types of rhetoric would have counted as valid: we refused them both tacitly and did not develop our own rhetorical means of moving audiences. Or, more accurately, during that stage we devoted insufficient attention to rhetoric, if by insufficient one means that it would have been worthwhile to curtail the inquiry so as to move audiences. The metric of this self-criticism cannot be “successful” intervention on the bioscientists with whom we participated and observed within the extant parameters of their field. Such a metric rests on a diagnosis that achieving this goal failed. It follows that with such a metric the parameters of the failure are personalistic and conjunctural. A self-criticism in such a mode turns on psychology or social psychology, and failure becomes a question of the dynamics of these fields. For example, using Bourdieu language, it has been proposed that the dispositional habitus of the bioscientist and the human scientist makes it impossible for a project like ours to have any hope of success.25 Hence, attempting such a project was naive, foolish, or simply masochistic. It follows that one should look therefore for the sadists around who are our potential partners. The antidote, it has been suggested, is to acquiesce to the dominant habitus and lexicon of the bioscientific field: let’s be realistic. We have a different diagnosis of our experiment, which from the start was conducted on different grounds. The purpose of the experiment was to find a collaborative and experimental mode of engagement for both the human and bioscientists. It seems to us that there must be examples of such relations leading to flourishing of a second order, that is, a form of life that is capable of making itself an object of reflection and work. For instance, joint endeavors between environmental activists and bioscientists and specific milieux that they care about and that can be brought into a flourishing relation. We conducted an experiment that produced results and to that degree was successful qua experiment. We have concluded that the fundamental dynamics were not psychologistic but ones in terms of macropower relations and their inscription at the microlevel. We believe it is more accurate to introduce the dispositional habitus at this level.

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Autocritique 3: Affirmation of the Diagnostic Mode The autocritique of our diagnostic approach is that while we talked about engaging problems, how we intended to engage with them was not very clear. This was in part because we were still developing a conceptual apparatus for orientation within the field. We were in part willing to remain on the conceptual and existential level, as it was gratifying in and of itself, and given the reception of our multiple forays in the first two years (2007–2008), which varied from indifference to hostility, we retreated from the abstract demand to turn our concepts and observations into collaborative practices. In so doing, we conformed to the norms of SynBERC: do whatever you are doing anyway, do it well, and stop complaining. One criticism that has been leveled at us is that we were too much on the participation/intervention side and not enough on the observation side of the dyad. One counterresponse may have been to say, quite the contrary, we were blocked precisely because we were unable to intensify the participation and intervention side of our engagement. Our self-critique, however, is that we continued to profess confidence in the possibility of participatory engagement, even when we began to have significant doubts about its plausibility. One of the core results of our experiment was that attempting both remediation and reconstruction during fieldwork was situationally limited. At the end of the experiment, it was clearer that reconstruction was simply not possible under these conditions. This result was not available to us until the experiment had been completed; consequently we experienced repeated moments of stultification arising from a desire to accomplish reconstruction through remediation, something, it later became clear, that could not be accomplished under these conditions. The event of the 2011 site visit, the culmination of the episodes of our engagement, was catalytic relative to the question of what range of virtues are required to engage recognizably dominant and residual forms of knowledge production, so as to facilitate the requisite capacities to engage emergent ones. In 2006 this was the premise of our engagement. In 2011 this was the premise of our exit.

2

On Leaving the Field: Ausgangshaltung We have to leave the field.

Anthony Stavrianakis

In any literal sense, none of the fieldwork was ethnographic as it dealt with a group of elite bioscientists and human scientists not an ethnic group or questions related to ethnicity in either a limited or extended sense of the term. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in recent years, Rabinow had become convinced that ethnography is too general a term to use with any specificity for contemporary fieldwork. Briefly stated, the ethnic or cultural group is only one class of objects among others. Furthermore, even if one has conducted ethnographic fieldwork, it is necessary to examine what one does afterward with the knowledge collected or built up in the field. It might be put to ethnological or ethnographic uses, or it might be used to contribute to anthropological theory, or it might be transformed so as to contribute to an anthropology of the contemporary. In each of these instances, the term ethnographic or ethnological should be problematized even if one retains it appropriately for only one mode. The exit from fieldwork, after all, is paired with an entrance into a range of other domains. In our case, we pair fieldwork with anthropology, without equating them and leaving open the question of which anthropological mode to adopt. We bring this quandary into the open now be-

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cause “leaving the field” has been part of our recent experience and we have asked ourselves the questions, What are we leaving? How are we leaving it? What are we hoping to enter? Certainly we are not the first to bring this dynamic to attention. This entrance may be an ethnographic eternal return (“Can’t leave the field, won’t leave the field,” field object becomes objective or paraethnography). Another modality accepts the validity of the knowledge produced by ethnography but insists that anthropology requires an emplacement of this knowledge within a form appropriate to the “human thing” (anthropos). This form takes up anthropos as the kind of thing capable of being rendered as a problematic object about which something general can be determined and that qua subject and object could be remediated.1 Two approaches stand out: exemplification, the placing of the example within a schema; and the case-based casuistry of an anthropology of the contemporary. The aim of the former approach could be best characterized as theoretical knowledge of the human thing and the latter as anthropology “from a pragmatic point of view.”2 We had undertaken fieldwork in the relatively traditional sense of participant-observation in so far as it was guided and ongoing, in close contact with the micro- and macropractices of an organizational formation and its leading actors. Although there are good conceptual and ethical reasons to distinguish analytically the current practices of participant-observation from traditional ethnography (and ethnology), it is actually the stage following the diagnostic orientation and fieldwork that we are in the process of experimenting with as well as attempting to conceptualize. Exiting Although there have been by now several decades of writing, reflection, observation, and polemic about the poetics and politics of ethnography, a number of relevant areas have been simply ignored or somewhat surprisingly remain underexamined.3 Among these are (1) the problem of the relations of fieldwork and the knowledge produced from it, with anthropology as a discipline and a science in the broad sense; (2) an important element in that problem and those relations is how one exits the field and what one engages in during the subsequent period. In this chapter we begin to address these areas through a set of analytic reflections on our passage from a distinctive form of participant-observation (nonethnographic and weighted toward participation) toward an anthropology of the contemporary.

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Our core claim is that there is an important transformative work necessary to bring into relation the orientation to fieldwork (which Rabinow and Bennett termed diagnostics), the experience and activity of fieldwork, and the phase that comes after it.4 Our challenge is to think precisely about each of these phases. We think there are several elements that need to be reflected on and transformed in the exit from the field: (1) the objects of knowledge produced by participant-observation, (2) the subject positions of the former participant-observer(s), (3) the affective dynamics of the field and the exit from it, which must be carried out reflectively, and (4) the narrative modality given to this process. Thus, we will first examine components of how to exit or, to use Immanuel Kant’s technical term from his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” to find an Ausgang from the field.5 The conceptualization and affective transformation begun during the exit phase continues through a subsequent moment that, tentatively, we call “gathering.” That term refers to the problem of how to carry out a process of recuperation of objects and equipment generated (or constructed) during fieldwork’s participant-observation, as well as a second stage of curation in which the objects and equipment thereby transformed in a preliminary fashion are worked over again so as to prepare them to function as terms in an anthropological inquiry. This is addressed through the construction and activation of an initial and partial narrative as well as a protoassemblage in which the elements of the candidate narratives can be given a preliminary testing so as to evaluate their basic coherence and pertinence. Only then, we argue, can the core work of anthropology per se begin. One might wonder whether that claim means that we had been doing anthropology before this point. In a full-fledged sense one must respond in the negative, while keeping in mind that traditional anthropological research and narration depended in part on passing through fieldwork. That being said, the logic—its warranted assertability in Dewey’s terms—of this claim remains underdetermined and underanalyzed. Disciplinary writing, which acknowledges Writing Culture in an explicit fashion as well as a great deal of the taken-for-granted beliefs of traditional practitioners of the discipline, turns on the transformative effect of fieldwork on the anthropologist as subject.6 Less effort has been devoted to a more precise attention to what kind of knowledge is produced through fieldwork and what happens to that knowledge once the fieldwork proper is over. We argue that the way to explore the latter topic depends on specifying what one intends to do with that knowledge. As a beginning, and as an opening to further discussion and

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analysis, we propose three distinct alternative directions or uses: ethnography, anthropological theory, and the anthropology of the contemporary.7 We will not schematize their differences here but rather attempt to narrate our process of moving toward the latter alternative. On Leaving the Field: Ausgangshaltung In our field situations, chiefly in SynBERC but also in the others, we found ourselves in (what we came to see as) a double bind.8 The double bind was produced by our simultaneous dependence on the organizations we were observing and participating in and our commitment to the original purpose of collaboration, which was an important initial premise and stake of involvement. By 2011 we knew that hopes were vain as engagement developed along lines explicitly at odds with our original intent laid out in the premise agreed upon with SynBERC and the contract with the NSF. A double bind, named as such only after the fact, then became operative: we were both given verbal approval to do what we wanted to do and denied the possibility of doing it. It was denied not in the sense that anyone said, “You can’t do that,” but rather that there was a simultaneous abstract and formal affirmation as well as a pragmatic and sustained indifference that constituted our experience of stasis, making it extremely opaque as to how to proceed with the affirmative project. Kant’s three critical questions—we can see with hindsight—were facing us and preparing our exit: What can we know (about the situation of biology and ethics)? What should we do (with that knowledge)? What can we hope for (once we have left the field)? These are three of Kant’s four questions, named in his Logic of 1800 with respect to what constitutes “philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense of the word” (as opposed to the transcendental sense). The fourth question, which encompasses the first three preparatory questions, is, What is a human being?9 While we are not preparing a way to return to this question in the sense Kant intended it, we are following the motion from knowledge produced by experience of things human to questions about how one might conceptualize a more general determination about anthropos and its difficulties. Double Game Some people in SynBERC had interpreted us on a register of the hermeneutics of suspicion: What were they really doing? The answer to some

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was that the claim to ethical engagement was simply a smoke screen for what anthropologists normally do: observe, describe, analyze, and publish. The answer to the first critical question, of knowledge, was clear for them: extrapolating from their own professional habits, they only took half of our stated aims to be participant-observers seriously. There was a certain validity to their observation as to our motives; pursuing academic research was certainly one reason why we continued to participate in SynBERC. It is true that Ph.D. theses were being written; websites were being designed, constructed, and used to further our endeavor; and sustained discussion of the biosciences and ethics was being made possible by our ongoing observations. Although the claim that we were engaged in a double game was cast as an accusation, actually it was a double practice, which we hoped would be synthesized into a form of knowing and doing that could contribute to a casuistic anthropology.10 As such, it was always true that even if collaboration with the scientific institutions were unsuccessful, as fieldworkers who would leave to return to anthropology, we would always be able to objectify and think about that experience in relation to our anthropological aims. On the one hand, this may sound standard: write a grant proposal; do fieldwork; leave the field; write up the thesis, book, or article. But that is not what we are describing. We are narrating an effort to pause at the moment of exit in order to reflect on what the purpose of the nontraditional attempt at fieldwork had been, what knowledge had been gained given that collaboration with the bioscientists had been extremely limited and between and among the human scientists at Berkeley had been highly generative. Relative to this nontraditional fieldwork, one of the claims that worried us and that we posed to ourselves amounted to the question of whether or not we had been acting in bad faith. This question turned on judging whether, despite what we said and believed, in fact we were only maximizing our material and symbolic capital. Since one of our early diagnoses was that on the bioscientific side, career structures and rewards disposed individuals not to take seriously issues of ethics and cultural significance (what is the worth of this activity? how do you know that this is good?) that we thought needed to be named and engaged, this questioning that we posed back to ourselves was a serious one. Since we had recognized the dominant career structures as part of the problem of working on ethics and cultural significance, we were not naive about this, and furthermore we were actively attempting to invent venues and practices, which were explicitly not part of the dominant career structures but that, we thought, were scientifically and ethically worthwhile.11

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We concluded: Double game? “To a degree.” Bad faith? “No.” It is not bad faith because we were posing the question to ourselves of our motives and our strategy as we proceeded. We tried to be conscious of the risk of self-deception or of Luhmannian blind spots. To answer this question in the affirmative, that is, for us to have been engaged in a bad faith effort, we think we would have had to know from the start that the premise of collaboration could never have been implemented. Since we did not know this and since we did our best to implement it, we conclude that we were not acting in bad faith. In February 2011, after a period of five years in SynBERC and over two years in the STIR project, it became clear that we had to leave the field. There are four terms here that are worth reflecting on: a collective subject position, a generated imperative and a motion away from and toward contrastive domains of experience and reflection (from the field toward something else, for example, anthropology, home, the office, the library, conferences, networking, mental breakdown, disillusion). A catalyst for the collective realization of the aptness of this fieldwork ending time was that, without then knowing the reasons, we found ourselves—in our daily routines and in our group meetings—concentrating and concentrated on the dynamics of affect in these interconnected but distinctive field situations. This attention, it gradually became clearer, was itself significant; it was in this crucible that we ultimately identified affect as a crucially problematic component of the dynamics of exiting. By paying careful attention, we came to see that more than suffering and complaining was going on in these parafieldwork situations. We began to think about naming the conditions of experience that seemed to be producing this affect, or at least within which this affect and its associated discordance were arising. While most if not all fieldwork may be characterized by some amount of frustrating experience, in our case it took on a particularly enervating, recurrent, and, as we began to see as we freed ourselves from it, entrapping character in our related projects. Since these projects were each premised on mutual interest and engagement both between the bio- and human sciences as well as within the human sciences, the stultification produced in these institutions and sites functioned as a blockage to our being able to proceed with our intended aim. We needed to name our experience, to see that it was not merely a question of individual feeling or emotion, consequently to locate it as an affect and to objectify it. By so doing we brought the subject position, the affect and an object of knowledge, from “mere experience” to determinate factors in the inquiry. This dynamic and the attention to

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affect within it was then the way by which knowledge and the subject position of fieldwork revealed themselves to be connected, although not identical. This process of identification and objectification of affect enabled us to see our situation (April 2011) as being at a point that might well provide an opening to resolve, or at least clarify, the blockages we were experiencing. The dynamics of affect, we had long since theoretically known from the academic literature, might well prove to be an important point of leverage.12 By finding the terms through which to diagnose the affect permeating our situation, we hoped to move our analysis to a second-order level in which individual temperaments, specific episodes, and debilitating passions could be identified and objectified as aspects of specific “structuring structures” and not mere epiphenomena or individual emotional reactions. We decided, not without a certain humor and relief, to name the affect stultitia. We have been studying Foucault’s 1981–82 lectures, The Hermeneutics of the Subject. There is a passage we found particularly striking where Foucault is discussing Seneca’s “On Tranquility.” What is stultitia? The stultus is someone who has not cared for himself. How is the stultus characterized? [. . .] The stultus is first of all someone blown by the wind and open to the external world, which is to say someone who lets in all the representations from the outside world into his mind. He accepts these representations without examining them, without knowing what they represent. The stultus is open to the outside world inasmuch as he allows these representations to get mixed up in his own mind with his passions, his desires, ambition, mental habits, illusions, etcetera, so that the stultus is someone prey to the winds of external representations and who, once they have entered his mind, cannot make the discriminatio, cannot separate the content of these representations from what we will call, if you like, the subjective elements, which are combined into him. [. . .] Willing freely, absolutely, and always characterizes the opposite condition to stultitia. And stultitia is that will that is, as it were, limited, relative, fragmentary, and unsettled.13

Given the limited, fragmentary, relative, and unsettled conditions of fieldwork, it is to be expected that recurrent bouts of stultitia will accompany the participant-observer. For the anthropologist, the goal,

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therefore, is not so much to avoid this state at all times but rather to recognize it when it takes over and to develop means to modify it, as well as ultimately to articulate a set of exercises and reflections to provide a means of leaving this affective state altogether.14 Phenomenology: A Crucible of Withering One of the key sites, which functioned to produce the stultification, was the difficulty that we had in our capacity as anthropologists oriented to science qua ethical activity to introduce an outside to the dominant orientations of the bioscientists. After extended participant-observation, we had decided that we could characterize the guiding orientations of the bioscientists as prosperity and amelioration. We had begun the project with a traditional philosophic term, eudaemonia. While the meaning of the term, associated as it is with Aristotle, is debated within philosophy, and has been for over two thousand years, there is nothing outlandish or exceptional about using it—quite the opposite. This contrastive series of terms proved fruitful in making a determination about the ethical heterogeneity in the experimental situations. We concluded that there were three metrics at play. Two of them were dominant (amelioration and prosperity) among the bioscientists, and one of them was a long-standing metric in Western philosophy. In this fieldwork setting, flourishing operated, for the most part, as an outside and contrast to the other two terms. Through our fieldwork we had established a rich observational base of examples at play in our experimental situation. As such, the term “flourishing” was introduced by us as the stakes of an ethical engagement in the situation. To the degree we attempted to participate in discussions, its introduction proved to be a source of blockage, expressed by the bioscientists alternately as irritation, sarcasm, or a polite lack of comprehension combined with a claim that they lacked the time necessary to engage with what we were saying. This pattern was a structural quality of our participant-observation. As one means of coping with this blocked situation we decided to look for a contrast term to flourishing. We employed a technique, which we had used successfully before, of using etymology as a means of understanding how large a semantic field the term had been made to function in previously. After some searching, we focused on one of the candidates we had been considering as a contrast term—“withering.” The Oxford English Dictionary revealed that like “flourishing,” “withering” too had a prior range of meanings that was not at its core connected to an organicist metaphorics, as it is today. For “withering,” these include

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the old usage from the thirteenth century: “hostile, adverse, fierce.”15 This early set of meanings turned on struggle and peace applied in the realm of the virtues. Hence exploring the philology of the term “withering” helped us to identify the significance of the hostility, adverse reaction, and at times stern resistance to our efforts to even introduce a discussion of long-standing ethical terms like eudaemonia. At least it now seemed imaginable that we could narrate this course of events as one of breakdown and tension. Whether or not this insight would enable us to eventually intervene pragmatically in a different manner, it at least made sense of the situation. Ultimately, the sense provided the possibility of narration. Thus, in sum, this philological exercise provided us a distance from what we had been experiencing, as well as the ability to name it and write about it. That being said, textual rendering of the experience, while important, did not fully neutralize the blockages we continued to encounter. Thus, the fieldwork each of us was undertaking in winter 2011, in the STIR project and within SynBERC, continued to stultify and to yield a condition of antiflourishing in our relations of participant-observation. Although the situation continued to be withering, we had achieved a second-order observation of this troubling experience and the situation that was generating it. Egression: Ausgang + Haltung While the STIR project was set to close at this point, it was clear to the anthropologist that participants’ claims of success were being made prematurely, before an adequate period of reflection and analysis had taken place, even if, as was soon to be the case, new funding would be sought on the basis of these claims. Likewise in SynBERC, the new fiscal year was around the corner, and even with our diminished stature in the organization, we were nonetheless being offered the opportunity to continue our engagements with only slightly reduced funding. This state of affairs was confusing to us because those offering these funds were precisely the people who we were increasingly identifying as the source of the discordance. In February 2011, Stavrianakis came back from the final STIR meeting in Washington, weary from the lack of engagement with the stakes that we had named in our Human Practices project, and with respect to the continued blockages in SynBERC, announced that he had had enough. He entered into our haven, Rabinow’s office, which over the last years has functioned as a venue to facilitate and protect our en-

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deavor, given the individualizing and atomizing alternatives of the library and the graduate seminar, and announced in a tone of emphatic parrhe¯sia, that for scientific and ethical reasons, “We have to leave the field.” The effect was electric, like a flash of lightning clearing the air of the accumulated static electricity: a new stage opened up before us. Writing to his friend Lucilius (Letter 52), Seneca observes that given the pervasiveness of stultitia that one will encounter in life, one is nonetheless not without resources. He directs Lucilius to keep ready at hand the insight that No man by himself has sufficient strength to rise above it; he needs a helping hand, and someone to extricate him [. . .] Nor need you despise a man who can gain salvation only with the assistance of another; the will to be saved means a great deal, too.16

In our case, Lucilius reminding Seneca that help could come from different quarters was trenchant. A different position produced a different insight into the stasis, the existence of the apparatus, and the necessity of an exit. What Seneca’s directive and Lucilius’s response clarifies is that mutual dependence can be capacity building and mutual precisely because of different positionalities. Stavrianakis’s stated concern was that continuing as we had been doing would tie us even tighter in a double bind such that we would not be able to get back to our task. Knowing that Bennett would soon be leaving for a position at a newly created institution devoted to the relations of ethics and biology in Seattle (thus remediating the experiment in his own manner), it seemed that we were confronting a turning point, through which the spirit-crushing situation could be left behind through an act of will and a resolution of purpose. We had to leave the fields. We had to reassemble. It is important to note that this speech act was performed by the more junior member of the group to the more senior members. We all recognized this striking reversal as both a confirmation of the importance of collaboration, of the ethical government and care of the self and others, and, somewhat cautiously we would like to suggest, an instance of the courage to speak the truth. Once said, the proclamation was a confirmation of something that we already felt but did not know. It proved collectively catalytic in overcoming a major obstacle in the path of leaving: the PI of the project had an ethical commitment to his junior partners to continue to provide financial support; it took a

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refusal of further participation by one of them to turn that bind into a process of egression and an opportunity to continue and reinvigorate our undertaking in a scientific and ethically robust fashion. Ausgang: Leaving Minority Status We soon jokingly began to identify Stavrianakis’s “we need to leave the field” as an instance of Kant’s use of the term Ausgang. In his essay on “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault had remarked that Kant defines Aufklärung [enlightenment] in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an “exit,” a “way out.” [ ] Kant is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?17

However, how to begin this leave-taking, perhaps an Ausgang, was not obvious. In this case, and others like it, it was not simply a question, as it has been stereotypically in anthropology, of buying a plane ticket and ceremonially saying goodbye to the natives. More and more fieldwork is being done in locations that are physically or geographically close to home; the vast spread of communication technologies renders distances proximate; the ethics of accountability with highly literate and often more powerful research subjects (with lawyers at their disposal), among other factors, will increasingly reshape the dynamics of participant-observation as an anthropological practice. Hence the goal to be achieved—exiting, finding both a way out and a way forward— turned first on the work on oneself required to make this desired activity a reality. Our hesitation over the modality of how to exit was clarified, again with a certain humor, through the device whereby a prior concept was displaced from its setting and made to function in a different one. At a certain point, Rabinow recalled Fred Jameson’s discussion of Bertold Brecht’s concept of Haltung, meaning a stance, attitude, or poise, which seemed to fit the theatrics of submission, humiliation, and double bind frustration in which we felt ourselves to be enmeshed.18 The fieldwork situation after all, seen from an adjacent position, had its theatrical qualities, its drama as well as its melodrama. Thus, it seemed possible to imagine that the challenge confronting us could be seen as a type of scene changing. Regardless of the analogies, Haltung, or stance, soon became the concept around which we developed our “way out,” our mode of Ausgang.

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The attitude or stance (Haltung) makes visible the significance of a specific occasion, or turning point, which is much more than mere timing. The recognition and capability of acting at the right moment, in the right manner, is what the ancient Greeks called the kairos.19 Such a stance, attentive to such turning points, might make a difference to tomorrow, one less deficient and stultified than the state from which we were attempting to escape. It was only by conceptualizing the exit through the medium of the stance that we were able to extricate ourselves from the situation. Why? Why did we need to conceptualize the mode of our way out in order to accomplish the perfectly ordinary task of leaving a troubling and uncomfortable situation? In part, we were after more than Albert Hirschmann’s trio of exit, voice, and loyalty.20 Furthermore, we needed to develop the means to figure out where we were heading. Both Ausgang and Haltung were concepts developed for situations of immaturity and domination. Both indicated, at a minimum, a horizon in which other figures of the purpose and worth of knowledge were at the very least lacking and perhaps even possible to imagine as things that could exist in the world. A consistent strain of criticism and mockery (especially from insecure elite graduate students) was that we deployed non-English words. Here we go again. Ausgangshaltung was a composite grouping of concepts, which we thought could intensify reflection on a process that many anthropologists had to one degree or another experienced but not thought about sufficiently: Ausgang: Conjunction, exit, egression. Haltung: Attitude, stance, poise, posture (according to Brecht, Haltung as an essentially theatrical concept is the physical signification of thought; it thus needs an audience to decipher it).21 Ausgangshaltung: The poise constitutive of an egression from a discordant situation.

Pathways to the Near Future How did we conceptualize this Ausgang and the corresponding Haltung? Shortly before this series of episodes, we had begun to experiment with an online tool we had invented for preliminary conceptualization and presentation, which we call the “Studio.”22 The following definition is found on the first studio, www.anthropos-lab.net/studio:

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The ARC Studio is a multimedia, web-based venue designed to facilitate rigorous, conceptual, experimental and pedagogical work. It proceeds from the experience of shared problems taken up as an exercise of inquiry within specified temporal and media parameters. It is designed to encourage diverse modes as well as testing and evaluation. The Studio is an attempt to create a venue which remediates current forms of studio and laboratory production and critique for the 21st Century human sciences.

The Studio serves to give initial shape to experiences and protonarratives and render them capable of being objectified and further developed as anthropological topics. We used this Studio equipment as an instantiation of Dewey’s intellectual instrumentalities with pragmatic intent.23 The activation of a Studio followed in the line of discussions that Rabinow had been having with George Marcus and James Faubion about the need in anthropology to invent a space with some of the qualities of the lab meeting in the biological sciences and the studio (or charette) in art and architecture. In these institutionalized spaces, at least in principle, work could be presented in a preliminary and inprogress manner; suggestions could be given as to how to improve it; and the weight of judgments about the producer would be eliminated or reduced and the focus would be on the object under consideration. In sum, what was imagined was a space in which work could be carried out to increase and enrich capacities without intensifying the usual relations of domination, exploitation, subordination, or humiliation. We knew that the concept of Ausgang from tutelage and immaturity was right, since that corresponded precisely with a part of the experience in the field, that is, that the ethical challenges and scientific indeterminations that are constitutive of emerging activities in the biosciences are not being treated in a sufficiently mature and appropriate manner. It was clear that we were not influencing our nominal partners, even that small subset that had the background and seriousness with respect to things human. As such, we were unable to introduce a different attitude to these actors. Hence Michel Foucault’s question “what difference does today make with respect to yesterday?” could not be given a satisfactory answer in this situation. It began to become a plausible alternative to pose Foucault’s question differently: what difference could we introduce today with respect to tomorrow? In order to explore this question we

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had to exit from the current situation and orient ourselves to the near future. If our purpose for the knowledge we wanted to produce had been an anthropology of the present, in either its theoretic or ethnological modalities, then our mode of participant-observation would have been different. An ethnographic account of the emergent biosciences would have been possible, and some colleagues urged us to do this, or complained that we weren’t doing it. For them, the anthropological modality that counts is the ethnological or theoretic leading to ethnography or more rarely the treatise. These forms might or might not be perfectly adequate given the purpose for which they were constructed. Since our purposes, however, were neither theoretical nor ethnological, we knew we would need eventually to invent/discover a different one. Intuitively we felt sure that the way we exited the field would establish our future directionality in thinking. This intuition has proved to be fruitful. At a minimum the purpose was to find a way to keep working collaboratively. Nietzsche and Foucault invented variants of genealogy to move backwards so as to render the present contingent. We have substituted the device of pathways as a minor innovation designed to move backwards only a short distance so as to prepare an intervention in and observation of the near future.24 The backwards motion consists in having the equipment to see how an object was given a particular form as a response to a particular problem. The forward motion is to be able to curate this knowledge and these determinations into narratives and assemblages that are capable of opening up significant new points of view. What had we done? We had picked out concepts from the past (Ausgang and Haltung) that had been deployed previously as responses to specific historical problems, in these cases philosophic and artistic, but for both Kant and Brecht the issue of unequal power relations and how to negotiate them was ever-present. We had been made aware of these minor concepts through the interpretations of Foucault and Jameson, who had used these concepts as a means of specifying questions present to them. We note the transformations that had been undertaken in recognition of the fact of different problems taking different forms at different historical conjunctures and the consequent need to hone concepts that had been forged for other purposes so as to make them equipmentally relevant to the situation at hand. For example, naming the activity we were engaged in as “leaving the field” was both broadly true but imprecise given the fact that “the field” meant something quite different in the twenty-first century than it did in the twentieth for those

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practicing an anthropology of the contemporary. Even more, “leaving,” it now became clear, constituted a problem and a site of discordancy for the type of anthropology we were engaged in. Furthermore, the mode with which we were experimenting enriched the sense of both “the field” and “leaving” it.

3

Recuperate and Curate It is not the “actual” interconnections of “things” but the conceptual interconnection of problems that defines the scope of the various sciences. A new “science” emerges where new problems are pursued by new methods and truths are thereby discovered which open up significant new points of view. Max Weber1

Having exited the field and started the concept work required to understand the way in which we exited the field, a pause of gathering resources seemed appropriate before setting out toward the problems of anthropology proper. We tested this intuition in our Studio and concluded that it was apposite. During the period subsequent to the heat of stultitia, a growing awareness and the beginning of a distancing from the conditions of withering, and finally exiting with a certain vigor and assuredness, we found ourselves welcoming a period of initial absorption of our experiences. We were getting prepared for the first evaluations of the overall experiment. In our Studio, we decided to call this stage “gathering.” Gathering is an active process of bringing into proximity a variety of things. These include people, objects, media, equipment, experiences, observations, and affects. This deceleration and sorting can be divided analytically and temporally into two stages: recuperation and curation. Gathering as a mode of action is guided neither by

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an immediate need for further remediation nor by reconstruction, which seemed premature at this recuperative phase. Discordance There were multiple challenges during the fieldwork stage.2 These challenges and our responses to them took different forms. For example, during the fieldwork, discordance was at its highest intensity on the affective level. That intensity was connected to, but not identical with, a primary conclusion of the first stage of our research: that there was a yawning and unbridgeable gap between our mandate from the NSF and the ever-reinforced limitations to our participation in the manner we desired: an experiment in participant-observation as equals. We found ourselves in a bind: since we did not see our role as contributing to the organization’s public relations, in the sense of boosterism, or as applauding increased contacts with industry for their own sake, or as simply observing in a traditional anthropological sense, we were at an impasse. We learned through monitored experimentation a great deal about the dynamics of the reasons why we had not been able to proceed as we had originally imagined. Those reasons helped us to understand the different registers of breakdown we encountered, to a degree contributed to, and above all, were enmeshed within. Said another way, although we did not find a solution to the impasse, we did understand it better than we had at the beginning of our engagement. Here let it be noted that a solution may also be constituted by a “successful breach, break or interruption” of the difficulty by way of reposing, formulating, and mediating a problem.3 We were able to fashion a solution in two steps. First, as we have explained, through the motion of Augangshaltung we forged concepts that have enabled us to disengage affect from the general lessons learned as the fieldwork stage was concluded. In a second phase, which followed the conceptualization and labor of affect disengagement, we were able to be assured that the time had indeed been the right one to close the stage of direct participation with the synthetic biologists. We thereby achieved some distance and conceptual clarity distinct from the particulars of episodes, persons, and organizational contingencies. Upon completing the exit, we felt justified that we had arrived at what Dewey named as warranted judgments. We use this term in the wake of Dewey’s Logic. As one of his astute commentators writes,

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In Dewey’s view, it is judgments, not propositions, that are warrantably assertable or not as judgments are essentially rooted in concrete actions in the world insofar as the consequences of such actions serve to decide their warrantability.4

Thus, after our exit and just before a new entry into a situation of participant-observation different from fieldwork, we could warrant the relevant elements of the situation. Recuperation In recuperation, the task for us has been to take up the objects from fieldwork and to work through them, to disarticulate them from the direct experiences of participant-observation and its various states of affect. For instance, and central to our whole undertaking, the topic of discordancy has appeared continuously. Upon closer inspection, however, and during this period of recuperation and the initial clarity it produced, it became clearer to us that this term contained a series of referents and had functioned differently at different points. Thus, technically, discordancy was a theme including and covering over a heterogeneous set of concepts and referents. For example, our first two uses of the Studio were to objectify troubled situations, first within SynBERC and second relative to an “event” in the field of synthetic biology and ethics5 that we wished to modify through that Studio into the elements for a case of ethics. In this light, we decided that a first task of recuperation was to disaggregate these diverse senses of the term “discordancy” in general, as well as the specific stance and attitude that had helped to embody our exit as an intellectual and affective intervention. Disaggregation consisted in disengaging the stance from the knowledge produced during both the fieldwork and the exit, which we now understand to be a crucial part of the experiment in participant-observation. This process of separation affirmed the essential function of taking a particular stance in this exit from a particular situation identified as withering, but not its mandatory presence in all exits, or in all inquiries into troubled situations. Recuperation: Pause and Reflect. In addition to a much needed restorative

pause, the recuperation activity consists in, at a minimum, the identification of equipment to help us pick out and order the objects that we intend to transform. We note that the activity of identifying and making

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use of equipment in the ancient world took place during a recuperative pause at the end of the day. It customarily consisted in fragments of a narration written down in a notebook. These jottings and maxims might well be shared with friends. Thus recuperation is both passive and purposeful. It is a time of gathering of one’s physical and spiritual forces as well as a moment in time for an assessment of one’s actions, an evaluation of the intent with which one had hoped to produce them as well as a judgment on how one had succeeded or failed. In our case, the recuperative activity was oriented in part by a reminder of the topics that we had posited as guides in the diagnostic stage. The topics were ethics, governance, and truth-knowledge. These topics were equally central in orienting our fieldwork and aided us in parameterizing the observations and experiences in the field. By the moment of our exit from the fieldwork these topics remained central to articulating the concepts and problems that had been resolved and those that needed a different mode of action to successfully complete. Parameters of Recuperation. What is the function of the topics in the recu-

perative moment? We were trying to sort out excesses and deficiencies, serious speech acts and speech acts, capabilities and incapacities. These functioned as the more specific parameters within the equipment for sorting out how we would fashion our observations such that the key terms could be disaggregated into their elements (Haltung, the way in which we exited, the objects that have been fashioned in the fieldwork, enduring blockages and their transformations), thereby making it possible to reaggregate these elements as objects relevant to another mode of action—curation. Objects and Equipment. The Studio equipment enabled the turning of Haltung into a term, and hence we could break it down into its constituent concepts and referents. Experientially, Stavrianakis’s speech act—“we have to leave the field”—came first, followed by a break in the affective conditions, and then the beginning of conceptual labor once we began to feel freed enough to think. How did we work on Haltung? Through the Studio equipment, which did what? It made it into an object and hence provided the possibility of making analytic determinations. For example, we identified the double binds that characterized the fieldwork engagement. Once we decided that this stage centered first on conceptualizing Haltung and centered subsequently on disaggregating it, we could proceed by turning the situation and the specific occasion for which Haltung

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provided the solution themselves into objects and assemblages. Through this displacement and disaggregation, we were able to recuperate the knowledge, the affect, and the objects, which we brought with us from the field as well as the conceptualization of our exit, now understood as the last phase of that participant-observation. Curation: Narrative and Assemblage At a certain point—arrived at conceptually in the Studios—we decided we had achieved a stage of recuperation. We had regathered some of our forces and energy. We had understood that we needed to disaggregate our stance from the matrix in which it had been created. At that point it became clearer that we had more to do before starting the next phase of the project. How did we come to this realization? Partially, we had been generating substitution terms in a somewhat mechanical manner. We were looking for the complement term to Haltung for this next phase, but nothing really clicked. We were looking for such a complement term because we knew we had achieved the exit and we realized that there was yet another stage before a reentry into anthropology; we thought we needed a subject or character term to orient us to this moment, which seemed to exist between leaving a determined phase and reentering another phase. One candidate was to look for a term to characterize a curatorial subject position. Curation: The Primacy of Narrative. What is curation? The activity of turn-

ing objects into artifacts (and artifacts into terms). We wondered about the mood or voice of the mode of subjectivation (which is curatorial). What are you like when you are doing this activity of curation? What does that become in a narrative? We knew that the curation process required assembling. How did we know this? We explored, in the abstract, the mode of action of the traditional curatorial activity as an exercise to see whether our intuitions about narrative and assemblage were proximate to this activity as we understood it. Satisfied that there were resonances with the mode of action we were also satisfied with the etymological resonance: the Curate, cura, curator. Curation of a Term: Discordancy. We decided that curation was character-

ized as preparatory for future inquiry. Here, as in the recuperative stage, there is a logic—in the Deweyan sense—that guides and describes the transformative crafting. Thus, in addition to analytic distinction making, there is a phenomenological description of logical practices. The

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latter became a topic of our conversation as we attempted to get clearer about what curating is and what its function should be given the challenges we were confronting—the motion from exiting fieldwork to an entry into an anthropological inquiry. The phenomenology we were adopting was closer to Hegel than to Husserl, in that our object and our activity consisted in the temporal development of a form through narration, rather than a pure observation of a transcendental subject. Thus, our phenomenology, as in Hegel but more pertinently in a modified fashion in Dewey’s understanding of inquiry, consisted in both the “hard work of the concept” and a description of the actuality of the experience of its development. So far, we had labored on and followed the motion of the term from a concept, to an experience, to an object, and presently to an artifact. After the participant-observation travails of fieldwork, we had conceptualized and assembled it through Ausgangshaltung and then disaggregated it during recuperation. Once the recuperation activity prepared the term for future transformations, the question became, What form would they take? We incautiously posited that the relevant term was “artifact.” It followed logically that transformation of the term into an artifact must mean something like reassembling it through narration to make it available for the next stage. Why is it that discordancy, which went from concept to experience to object, becomes a term available for narration once the objectness had been worked over? The key transformation required is that the referent was no longer our experience, but rather the experience taken up conceptually. That change was a process of freeing a term from the situation in which it had been embedded so that it can be initially assembled with a different mode of subjectivation. The telos here is to make the object available for narration (not ethnographic description), which will then make it into a term in the conduct of specifically anthropological inquiry. Narration is the starting point for this process because narration is the form through which temporal order is established discursively. Metaleptic Narrative: Artifacts. There is a transformative dimension in cu-

ration, whereby these objects have been modified by taking them out of previous settings, stripping them of the stance required to bring them out of the field, with its withering affect. We can see them as objects and concepts; narration is what can then prepare them to be turned into terms. We are preparing objects in such a manner that they become terms available for narration. The question then arises, What kind of

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narration? For a variety of reasons the candidate chosen in advance was metaleptic. Why? In part because in this mode of narration the narrator and the audience are implicated and interpolated in the narrative unfolding. In part because contingency and virtuality are provided with an order in a metaleptic narrative. In part because a thematic of discordancy entails loss and recuperation that can be narratively projected and can function so as to make audience and author come to a realization of their own engagement in the stakes of the narrative construction. Why is this mise-en-assemblage and mise-en-narrative form curation and not simply writing? Partly the reason is that curation is not a purely discursive action, as we are performing a series of operations on the artifacts produced, not just putting them into words. At a future point we will have to turn narrative artifacts into objects. However, before we get ahead of ourselves, it is logical, given our objectives, that this narrative be addressed, such that it can function equipmentally in an assemblage. From Narrative to Assemblage. During the initial narration of this exit and

entrance process, we remark that we had friends in a state of availability, already primed in a position and capable of providing the type of criticism solicited, that is, in sync with the overall project and willing to be part of the discussion: this means not only being capable of listening but allowing oneself to be moved by that which is heard. Of course, contrary to the stultus, one must not allow “any and all” representations to be capable of such movement. Hence the work on oneself to be part of a collaborative anthropological group is never finished and always puts in question oneself, relative to those others with whom one seeks to engage. Further discussion and reflection is predicated on this engagement continuing. The (pre)-assemblage is an essential part of the curation process. To assemble friends to listen to versions of the narrative was a preliminary testing as to whether the terms, their order, and their significance were plausible. That is to say, such testing is done through an initial curatorial presentation. Working equipmentally with our assemblage enabled us to objectify our preparatory objectifications and narrations and thereby to make informed judgments as to the pertinence, order, and significance of our preliminary narration. Such a practice enables discrimination; for example, in the initial narrative presented to our friends, the object of the narrative was a figure, provisionally called artifactual anthropos. A “figure” was a concept Rabinow and Bennett developed in their original diagnostic, so as to

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answer the question, What is being problematized today? A figure provides orienting analytic categories. The naming of a figure as a candidate for the anthropological destination, for which we were looking, initially seemed to be functioning at the right level. We decided, however, after this initial testing, that while artifactual anthropos might well prove to be pertinent at the figural level, that is, there might well be a broad problematization of the capacity of anthropos to produce artifacts, during curation it was premature to introduce a candidate figure. Rather, the term “artifact-making” seemed to orient us to an appropriate level: not to proceed too quickly to the figural level but to transform the objects of experience as artifacts and to find a narrative mode in which to do this. Figuration as orientation to a problematization might well be a task of the next stage. Curating Artifacts Our intuition at this point was that warranted judgments about the objects taken from fieldwork at this stage could only be completed by curating a list of artifacts. It seemed necessary to modify the objects one more time both to achieve a greater distance from the affect and experience of the fieldwork as well as to prepare those objects to play a role in the next phase. At first we thought that the term “curation” was the problematic term of the pair, but as we proceeded we came to see that in fact how to characterize artifacts was what required more reflection. Curation in the contemporary sense entailed informed strategic choices about thematics and modes of presentation.6 For us, the challenge was to conceptualize what it was that needed to be curated.7 We knew the answer was artifacts, but we didn’t know what artifacts were in this case. We knew this in the sense that we had conceptualized this phase as a distinct moment in the research process in which a distinct kind of thinking needed to be done on objects of knowledge produced in the field. We termed the process curation and the things curated, artifacts. Having disaggregated Ausgang and Haltung, the question presented itself as, What are the objects we should attempt to make into artifacts? Which referents of a concept are relevant at this point? What have we taken away from fieldwork? To answer this question we labored in the Studios. In fact, this turned out to be the right venue and equipment to isolate the objects from fieldwork that we intended to carry forward. These objects, however, were not yet artifacts.

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Nevertheless, these objects were part of a motion of inquiry. In 2009 Rabinow and Bennett wrote of this motion, The process of inquiry involves staying in the midst of things of the world but of transforming them in specific ways so as to give them the kind of form that is determinate. Therefore, our work in this category consists in identifying and formulating such determinations in their empirical specificity, i.e. their determinations. Hence the interest of an experiment is its ability not to represent a pre-existing situation, nor to construct an entirely new one but through reiterated and controlled adjustment to arrive at a determinate situation.8

At this stage of the experiment we saw that what was required was the identification of a list of artifacts to curate. Determinations We named a list of six terms that initially we thought were likely candidates for artifacts: Collaboration (our own and the failed examples of collaboration), metrics (and their existing incommensurability), Bildung (the self-formation necessary to be a scientist with its learned capacities and incapacities), method (as the existing problematic manner in which knowledge is produced), remediation (which is what we did through our efforts to renew collaboration via the web), and reconstruction (which remained as a goal). These terms, we came to realize, however, were not themselves the artifacts. This realization came to us once we started to order and establish relations among and between the items in the list, that is, curate them. The original list, we then recognized, was in fact not yet a list of artifacts but rather a list of determinations. From out of the experience of leaving the field, the experience was distilled down to terms that are specified from the situation in which they were rooted. We could see that these determinations from objectified field experience were temporally ordered. It then became clear that in fact there were functional relationships between these temporally ordered determinations. We wondered about the function of these determinations. The function of the relation was the product of our struggle to clarify and justify our intuition that there was an important distinction between the present and the actual. This distinction turns on the difference between

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the present as a medium for any field experience and observation and the actual as a figured and conceptualized domain in which an anthropological position for observation and intervention is possible.9 It is within this domain of the actual, as opposed to the encompassing and ill-defined present, that the identification and curation of objects taken to be significant can be asserted in a warranted fashion. After having arrayed the determinations in a list, we came to see that they had a temporal order and that they were paired. This pairing consisted in one term referring to a mode of observation and one term referring to a domain of problematization. In looking at the arrayed list it was clear that collaboration had been central to the design and equipmental orientation of the experiment from its inception. This recognition showed us that there was in fact a temporal unfolding in these determinations. We began with collaboration as our mode of participation and intervention, and this was followed by the attention to Bildung and to remediation. Pairs Each effort to bring these modes to bear on the experimental situation produced specific determinations. By so doing we opened up the possibility of inquiring into a reigning domain of problematization beyond the fieldwork situation. 1a. Mode of Intervention: Collaboration. We maintain and continue to

maintain that collaboration is essential to what we wanted to do. We recognize, however, that it is only possible under certain conditions and with a recognition of the price to be paid as well as the rewards for doing it. This commitment focused our attention on the goals of science and the question of the worth of a life devoted to such a practice. 1b. Problematization: Metric. During fieldwork we identified the presence of multiple metrics. In the field situations we named the dominant metrics as prosperity and amelioration. We knew that another metric, flourishing, had been central to Western philosophy for millennia and that in the present taken broadly and extending beyond our immediate fieldwork situations it was still part of the available ethical orientations. Our attempts to introduce flourishing into the fieldwork situation, through taking participant-observation as a serious challenge, proved to be a major site of breakdown. This trouble was, however, also revelatory. By identifying this determination of a specific set of instances, we opened

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the possibility of inquiring into its place in a broader problematization of the contemporary. 2a. Mode of Intervention: Bildung. In the present, all of the sciences re-

quire extensive work on the self (years of training, socialization, etc.), although such activity is taken for granted and held to be exterior to science per se. In Bildung such extensive work is explicitly thematized and is not held to be exterior to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. In the present, the available types of socialization for a scientific life are sharply delimited and methodologically constrained. As we are committed to the more expansive sense of Bildung, discordancy is inevitable. 2b. Problematization: Method. Experience in a comparable social science project, the ASU-STIR project (as well as within SynBERC), showed us that the separation of knowledge from care in the sense that Michel Foucault explored it produces discordancy.10 In sum, the dominance of method is easily identifiable and widespread in the present. However, given our commitment to our modes of observation as well as our commitment to addressing problematic domains through those modes of participant-observation, we could not simply acquiesce to method’s preeminence. Hence, the particular determinations in the various fieldwork situations indicated both the specific breakdowns we had encountered as well as opened up the possibility and need to question the place of method within a more general contemporary problematization. 3a. Mode of Intervention: Remediation. From the inception of the ex-

periment, remediation was a technique enabling our commitment to participant-observation. Had we thought the situation did not require remediation there would have been no point in undertaking the experiment in the first place. In the initial phase of our interventions we sought to remediate the situation directly. Such efforts were met with indifference and refusal. We then shifted to the web as the change of medium through which we could attempt to do remediation of what we were now clear was a deficient situation. After extensive labor and the production of multiple websites, we came to understand their strengths and their limits. Through the Studio we objectified our previous remediative efforts. This process of objectification made it clear that remediation as a discursive mode of intervention, while useful, was limited. One of those limits, we concluded after extensive experience in the field, was that remediation, while useful, was not reconstruction. It could not by itself force a change either in the practices of the bioscientists and

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the dominant manner of including the human sciences or in the overall situation. 3b. Problematization: Reconstruction. We encountered various efforts for

improvement of the organizations of the biosciences in the present. These efforts delimited the place of the biosciences in a broader contemporary space in a traditional fashion.11 Such delimitation accepts the reigning hierarchical and unequal relations of the bio- and human sciences. By so doing they delegitimate attempts to address what is problematic within this contemporary space. Hence we were prevented from making reconstruction actual. Artifacts At first we thought these pairs were the artifacts of curation. Upon reflection and discussion (using the prenarratives and preassemblages described above), we came to realize that there was one more stage of curation required to turn this series of paired objects into artifacts. We sought to find a term for these pairs and their series. Logically, that term was to be found in the Studio and in the domain of the actual. We saw that the requisite term was “double bind.” Since we had already conceptualized this term and identified its referents from our fieldwork, we were finally in a position to curate these pairs as artifacts. The pairs of problem-domain and mode-of-intervention were actual. What we knew needed to be curated was an artifact that was stripped of the dynamics of affect and experience. As such, while the double binds objectified in the Studio were a first objectification, it seemed to be logical that we now needed to reobjectify the double binds of the situations of fieldwork. Now we had the determinations to do so. As we had concluded from the Studios, naming the double binds was a significant act in and of itself. Overcoming the double binds, however, could only be achieved through a reversal of power relations or a change of scene. Given the circumstances, the latter was the only available option. In order to overcome the double binds of the field experience, it is necessary that they can be conceptualized as archaeological artifacts, that is to say, as the products of a process of “rarefication” that take the form of “inanimate” and mute discursive monuments. Such a transformation does not “overcome” or “resolve” or “sublate” the double binds, but it does provide the possibility of adjacency to them and thereby future motion away from them. Furthermore and most directly pertinent

59

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here, it opens the possibility that once transformed, they are available as the objects for the next phase. Double Bind: Collaboration and Metric Since the desired mode of intervention was collaboration and the only terms under which STIR and SynBERC would play the game was under the metrics of amelioration and prosperity, there was no way the project was going to succeed. The aim for us was to do inquiry into a problem of discordancy, which necessarily poses the question of the good. So either we give up collaboration or we give up the metric of flourishing and the question of the human good: that was the double bind. Hence, turning this double bind into an artifact, we decided to give up collaboration in that venue and to proceed toward the challenge of metrics in the broader situation. Double Bind: Bildung and Method We want to preserve our mode of inquiry as Bildung, that is to say, the search for knowledge requires self-formative processes. We discovered that in these venues the unquestioned supremacy of method blocked

Table 1 Curation of Determinations into Artifacts Determinations Collaboration Bildung Metric Method Remediation Reconstruction Mode of intervention

Problematization

Collaboration

Metric

Bildung

Method

Remediation

Reconstruction Double Binds

Collaboration and Metrics Bildung and Method Remediation and Reconstruction

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these processes of Bildung. The choice was to abandon Bildung or to abandon method. This is the artifact. Just as we knew that collaboration was the ethical form of science, we know that Bildung is an essential element of this practice such that the only way to move forward is to refuse method and find a different venue.12 Double Bind: Remediation and Reconstruction Given that collaboration is blocked by the dominant metrics and Bildung by the dominance of method, it follows that reconstruction cannot take place within venues where these first pairs are dominant, although remediation is still possible. These artifacts of the double binds in field situations are what makes visible the need for and the apparent impossibility of reconstruction. Put simply, one can see what needs to be reconstructed in the situation, but the remediative mode of intervention, under these conditions, is not adequate to the task of reconstruction, as schematized in the table below (table 1). Hence, we retain the phase of remediation that was part of fieldwork and our exit but now realize that reconstruction is external to these remediative processes. We could now proceed, with the aid of the warranted judgments drawn from the stage conducted as participant-observation, toward a different type of engagement. As situations change, so too do the problems to be confronted. It follows that the next task is to explore where to situate ourselves and how, so as to enable yet another stage, one concerned with the broader landscape of the bio- and human sciences and their more general contemporary ramifications. As we enter into the next stage we note that this phase will have its own ethical challenges: how to maintain our ethical and scientific commitments in a nonfieldwork manner? It will have its own affective challenges: how to sustain a pointed, disinterested, and vigilant mode of observation, while doing the work of transformation and observation of the formation of the relations between self and others? It will have its own scientific specificity: how to use our previous artifacts so as to take up the problem of the anthropology of the contemporary?

4

On Publicity Tracking shots are a question of ethics.

Jean-Luc Godard1

In the last chapter the mode of participant-observation was theatrical. Although we didn’t cast it that way initially, once we deployed the concept of Haltung as an essential element in our exiting and ending that phase of participant-observation, we realized that our gestures and personae were part of what was being narrated. Here in our encounters with those authorized to make things public, although these experiences were conflictual and troubling, their brevity and coarseness meant that there were no sustained double binds and our task was more in the direction of what double game we should be playing. An essential part of clarifying the game is to know how we would participate and observe and what it is we are participating in and observing. It was clear from the start in each of the scenes we will shortly present that our metrics were once again dominated; we were at this point already out of the fieldwork, which had only redoubled our commitment to inquiry and ethics, and consequently when we encountered blockages of different sorts in these scenes we experienced no stultitia, only sporadic irritation and thumos (anger, ire).2 It soon became apparent that whatever framing we chose to deploy from this point forward was not going

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to be dialogue as there was no inclination from either party to engage. Hence, a theatrical framing that privileges actors in a scene, discoursing and interacting, was inappropriate. It eventually became clearer to us, as we wrote up our experiences, that the fitting manner of providing distance as well as giving form appropriate to inquiry and ethics was cinematographic. We are referring here to a Godard-like optic in which the director allows the camera to track a fragmented episode, albeit guided by narrative intent of an ethical or political sort. In each phase, the challenge had been to engage in a type of participant-observation and then to invent a presentational form that would highlight a second-order positionality. Having exited from the field situation, the place we exited to was neither the neutral position of ethnographic description nor that of the theorist comprehensively viewing the action below, the surplomb of Bourdieu.3 Rather, we anticipated that we would require a series of participant-observation modes that, while taking different forms, were nonetheless thematically consistent. In each of these, the challenge was to identify and invent ways of occupying an observational position of adjacency while actively participating in its construction and activation. The cinematographic analogy provides a series of topics to aide us in identifying this position, what it is adjacent to and the appropriate mode of presentation. Rather than the Haltung of an actor, we concluded after some narrative and conceptual wandering that the appropriate positionality was analogous to a director, metteur-en-scène, of a minor (in Deleuze’s sense) anthropological documentary.4 Our goal, at least in part, was to present a series of scenes in a fashion in which we tracked episodes of publicity being staged. Observationally, these episodes revealed that they had been set up precisely to prevent civic publicity, in the full sense of the term, from taking place.5 For us, organizing this documentation as a series of episodes made it possible to track the series as an event. Said another way, our challenge was to achieve a mise-en-scene that was not ethnographic but might be called present scenes and situations made actual.6 An ethnographic mode hovers in and around the present; an anthropological mode is drawn to the significance of what it observes; the mode of the actual is between the two. The actual is not immediate experience but the product of a framing activity of choosing and sequencing. It is not yet the contemporary in that there is no overarching narrative to the sequences that remain open to expansion and rearrangement. Nevertheless, the mode of the actual at this juncture is specified by ethical parameters that guide the director’s tracking.

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Publics John Dewey in The Public and Its Problems argues that a public is only brought into existence in relation to a discordance that arises and troubles them.7 Although Dewey’s claim may seem straightforward, it is worth considering carefully. His first point is that publics do not preexist events and situations. Publics are not sitting out there waiting to be polled or mobilized. Thus, to assume, as organizations that devote themselves to public relations and image management do, that the public has an opinion on synthetic biology is, in the light of Dewey’s argument, not only a meaningless claim but actually a profoundly misleading one. One might say it is an ontological mystification. One cannot poll publics that do not exist. As concerns synthetic biology in the first decade of the twenty-first century, there have been no significant breakdowns, events, and troubles. Consequently, it is not surprising that there is no public opinion concerning the experiments and projects of synthetic biologists. This claim does not mean that there are no risks and dangers involved with synthetic biology, only that they have not been made into objects by media organizations in a way that publics have emerged in relation to them. The exception that proves the rule is J. Craig Venter and his artificial genomes. The threshold for the media demands a narrative of breakdown, danger, and larger-than-life actors. These genre constraints are discursive preconditions for journalism. As concerns synthetic biology, the print media has concentrated its attention on Venter, whose persona and accomplishments make him susceptible to being cast as the requisite larger-than-life actor, whose achievements in creating synthetic genomes is an easy target for tropes of danger. All that has been lacking, however, have been breakdown events that can be imagined by reporters and editors in search of such narratives. This is precisely what happened with the J. Craig Venter Institute’s announcement of having synthesized an artificial genome in May 2010. Of course, the number of people in the American public, or any public, who have the slightest idea of what a genome is, what an artificial one could be, not to mention what DNA synthesis consists in, is miniscule.8 Contestation: Opinion, Fact, Inquiry Having spent five years in participant-observation research, preceded by two years of research on security issues; having brought our ex-

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periment to a conclusion; having successfully exited from the fieldwork situation; having remediated the initial results of our experiments into demonstrable and defensible scientific conclusions; having advanced in the production of both narrative and assemblage to move our results into multiple milieus in the outside world, we knew that we would eventually have to confront the issue of publicity. We knew that this change of venue meant exploring, confronting, and interfacing with publics— existing, potential, and virtual as well as those claiming to speak for such publics. We knew that we had to build equipment appropriate to a site of publicity, in the sense of a venue for publics. As of 2011, as far as we knew, such a venue did not yet exist in anything like the way we envisioned it. On the basis of our experiences encountered and/or endured during our experiment, from the outset we were convinced that a website opened to an unspecified public and encouraging the expression of opinion for its own sake would not function to further our goals of the remediation and curation of scientific results into a narrative that opinion makers could access without too much difficulty. The challenge was to think through and design a site that came to terms with what “too much” meant in this instance. We had encountered such a consistent contestational resistance to anything (terms, concepts, mode of inquiry) from our human scientific practice and discipline; such demands to only speak in middlebrow English without any foreign or technical terms (a demand of course that never applied to the bioscientists themselves, for example, oligonucleotides, ribosome-binding sites) were so heavily policed and so deeply cathected that we concluded that this affect structure would have to be taken into account as a design parameter in our entry into a public sphere. The challenge consisted in experimenting with how to make actual a website in which a modified form of problematization could be rendered visible. If it were to succeed, this visibility would serve to clarify issues, propose concepts, identify affect structures, and suggest directions that would increase capacities for knowledge seekers without intensifying the debilitating power relations of the present. Assembling an Ecology of Websites In 2011 we began to reconceptualize, design, and remediate equipment and practices appropriate to these goals. The first step had been to articulate the concept of an ecology of websites and to begin to turn it into an assemblage. If articulated into a common ecology, such an assemblage

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would provide a base for inquiry (not just opinion) and clarification of objectives (not just exposition of facts). To the degree it could achieve its goals, such an articulated multifunctional use of the web might provide one prototype for richer and more incisive capacity building in the currently disarticulated domains of science and ethics. In 2006, the anthropos-lab at UC Berkeley had been funded by the NSF to experiment with different website strategies, functionalities, and designs for anthropological inquiry. By the second half of 2011, we were operating two websites, each with distinct design, programming, and conceptual parameters: (1) http://www.anthropos-lab.net/ and (2) www.bios-technika.net. We had conceived, designed, and implemented these websites in order to achieve certain specified functionalities. The concept of functionalities emerged to a degree over time as we came to see what succeeded and what did not given a particular design and those engaged in activating it. We have encountered and analyzed a range of conceptual blockages that justify this claim that, when combined with easily overlooked programming and design obstacles, yield seemingly irremediable short circuits. The first website (anthropos-lab.net) was a relatively standard site for discussion of issues, blogging, and active archiving of core materials. Its overarching goal at the outset had been collaboration between different groups of human scientists engaged with related concerns. The second website (bios-technika.net) was a vastly more elaborate and complex conceptual mapping of the terms and equipment (concepts, pathways, cases, determinations) necessary to carry out participantobservation. The website is the product of extensive conceptual labor as well as a challenging engagement with a world-class web designer and artist. Much was learned in the experiment, especially about the differences in design and functionality between tools for exhibits and tools for inquiry. It has become clear to us that a single website has proven inadequate to achieve the purposes of providing rigorous and capacity-building syntheses and focused debate on science and ethics demanded by our contemporary situation. After extensive experience and experiment, we concluded that what is required is not just individual websites designed for specific purposes but, rather, an ecology of websites within which specific functions can be designed and implemented in a separate but complementary fashion, thereby facilitating synergistic relations among and between them. In a word, we sought a collaborative relationship of functionalities and designs combined into an assemblage. In the present, our investigations revealed that the use of the Internet

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as a vehicle and venue for the interface of science and ethics has been restricted to strictly parameterized sites. These sites have as their primary function communication of their expertise (as well as self-promotion) while allowing one type or another of commentary and discussion. In sum, they deploy the two dominant functions to which the web has been put: blogging and exhibiting. One might say that the web has been developed and devoted to opinion and facts. We maintain that the current relationships and status of opinion, fact and inquiry is problematic. We think that current opinion and use of facts on the web in the domains we are concerned with have the status of being ontologically in the present, to use our technical vocabulary. The challenge, therefore, has been to remediate things in the present into a state of actuality and then to introduce modes of inquiry so as to remediate them one more time into objects of the contemporary. This second remediation has proved to be extremely challenging because it seems to entail interfacing with publics (existing, potential, and virtual). During 2006–2011, we refined our conceptual apparatus so as to be better equipped to connect three domains: governance, truth, and ethics. In order to further our project we chose to specify episodes symptomatic of these domains so as to bring such episodes from their status in the present into a mode of actuality. In order to produce this transformation we needed to tighten relationships with the curated artifacts from our fieldwork as well as our web-based venues. By so doing, we intended to include areas we had previously thought crucial to an understanding of the contemporary functioning of ethics, governance, and truth but did not have the time or resources to take up in a rigorous fashion. These areas include the Internet as a medium, mechanism, and mode contributing to the possible reproblematization of the human and biosciences. We observe that there was a striking concurrence in 2011 of preemptive attempts to create venues claiming to address publics and their concerns and to facilitate deliberation. As we were adjacent to the creation of these venues, we were and continue to be in a position to observe not just the proclaimed good intentions of the public relations apparatuses but of the actual functioning of these venues. We organize our observations as a series of scenes. Our documentary approach tracks the activation of these venues as designed to block rather than facilitate inquiry into (and critical discussion about) the emergence of publics. In that sense, these tracking shots are ethical.

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Scene 1: Interfacing: Experts of Opinion and Fact In the course of designing and implementing these websites, we had agreed on certain parameters: that blogging per se and wikis per se were not what we were after; the realm of unmediated opinion was too far from warranted assertibility. It also required too much labor to monitor and sift out the inflammatory, directly commercial, or merely aleatory comments. Whatever public we eventually hoped to shape, it would be a restricted one. The other design parameter we agreed on was that if we were to attempt to actualize such a virtual public, we needed professional guidance. Fortunately we had cordial and cooperative relations with specialists in such matters at a prestigious San Francisco high-tech advising firm staffed in part by former Berkeley Ph.D.s. The advice we received was concise, and its parameters crisp. After having listened to our presentation of goals, our expert friend said that we needed to focus on two things: first, a message that was succinct and pointed in the manner of a bumper sticker. As our discussions were taking place during the Japanese nuclear reactor crisis, the immediate candidates turned on comparisons with that event. The second parameter consisted in getting clear about which audiences we were targeting; this precision was important in and of itself but equally because it would help our friend pinpoint specific specialists in Washington and New York who would be receptive to the message and in a position to magnify it. Once we produced the bumper sticker litotes—“synthetic biology, everything is under control just like Fukushima,” or “if you liked the financial crisis you’ll love synthetic biology”—we would be underway in the zone of rhetoric and strategy. It did not take long for us to realize that we were neither gifted nor actually motivated to go in this direction. In June 2011, the major synthetic biology conference of the year, “SB5.0: the Fifth International Meeting on Synthetic Biology” (SB5) was held at Stanford University. The conference organizer and driving entrepreneur behind these international events was Drew Endy, not coincidentally the new head of Thrust 4 at SynBERC, renamed “Practices.” Given his new position as director of ethics and social concerns, one might well have expected that these topics would have, if not a central place, at least a visible one at the event. In that expectation, we submitted a panel proposal that included Rabinow as well as Roger Brent, unquestionably one of the leading experts in the United States on biorisk and biosecurity as well as being a well-known and respected molecular

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biologist. Our panel was neither rejected nor accepted; despite a number of requests as to its status, we never received a reply. As it turns out, other leading practitioners of the social and ethical side of synthetic biology were treated in the same manner. Further, we found out later that the only scientists who received no funding from the industry-sponsored event for their travel and lodging were the social scientists. The night preceding the event, Endy notified six of these social scientists that they were now scheduled to host a one-hour panel where they each were allotted ten minutes to speak. The audience was small. This display of power by Endy, it seemed to us, provided exactly the kind of episode of discordancy and power inequalities that we believed needed public visibility and critical discussion. A month later, Bennett volunteered to act as host for a web discussion concerning the event.9 He wrote those directly concerned inviting them to contribute to such a discussion. Although the responses that were received all concurred that something untoward and demeaning had taken place, none of the respondents provided text that they were willing to make public. Apparently asking people to bite the hand that fed them (in terms of grants and prestige if not air fare and lodging) was too risky given the perceived possibility of losing support for one’s projects on the ethics of synthetic biology! Our own reaction was unexpected to us. Fundamentally, we were not surprised at what we took to be the pragmatic pusillanimity displayed. Rather, we were surprised that, without much preliminary discussion or reflection or stultitia, we both arrived at the same conclusion: if our central metric for the web was reconstruction, then achieving it under reigning conditions seemed a distant possibility. This response was partially a product of the jaded fatigue that the previous experiments and experiences had produced in us as to what we could expect not only from the bioscientists but equally from the majority of social scientists. Having set out into the land of opinion and fact with a reconstructive project, we learned that we lacked the skills, capacities and passions required to achieve progress toward our goals, and we had warranted doubts as to anyone’s chance of succeeding reconstructively in the present scene and situation. Scene 2: The President’s Commission: Performativity In an era when government was broadly credible, official commissions in the United States have had a certain authority to at least open a dis-

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cussion and/or legitimate a topic. Thus, for example, the Kerner Commission on violence in the United States took the issue of violence, especially racially oriented violence, out of the byways of opinion and placed certain facts as starting points for further discussion. The socalled 9/11 commission was equally a bipartisan one and its conclusions were broadly accepted even if its specific recommendations were never implemented.10 Commissions are neither policy-making bodies nor scholarly reports, although their white papers are seriously researched by a large staff and are directed both at the citizenry broadly understood as well as those who are charged with making policy, both in the Congress as well as in the various bureaucracies charged with implementing and carrying out policy. The task of commissions is to take up a topic of broad concern, to provide basic and orienting factual guidelines, and to open a forum for informed opinion. Of course, they are rife with compromise, wooden language, broad encomiums, pious assertions, and an ample supply of rhetoric drawn from the national repertoire of tropes. Commissions are not supposed to produce scientific truth; they are supposed to establish a factual grounding and to indicate the parameters for civic pedagogy and debate. Today in the United States, it is uncontroversial to say that government is not broadly credible and that policy-making bodies are considered to be untrustworthy. Long established scientific positions such as evolution are held in discredit by large segments of the American population as a result in part from well-financed and passionately advocated campaigns to undermine them. Myriad think tanks, advertising agencies, bloggers, and their associates labor assiduously and lucratively to turn fact into opinion and opinion into personal views. Perhaps the simplest symptom of this state of affairs is the pervasive belief that President Obama was not born in the United States. Nothing could refute such beliefs as all counterclaims and evidence are held to be opinions, propaganda, or simply politically motivated lies. Commentators on the cable networks sneer at those who think truth has any claim on politics. The full background to the formation of President Obama’s President’s Commission on Synthetic Biology and Ethics is available elsewhere.11 Its composition and parameters, however, are directly relevant here. The Obama administration’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues held three hearings on synthetic biology from July to November 2010 culminating in a published report of recommendations.12 These hearings are the U.S. government’s second formal

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engagement with the ethics of synthetic biology. The first was the Human Practices Thrust of the NSF Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). The hearings were of particular concern and interest to those of us in Human Practices. Rabinow and Bennett communicated directly with the commission’s staff, encouraging them to include as part of the hearings human scientists who had participated directly with the activities of synthetic biology. These efforts were unsuccessful. Given that the Human Practices Thrust (both at MIT and Berkeley) was the only social science and ethics group actively involved with synthetic biologists; given that they were funded by the government; given that they had already published on the relevant topics, it would be logical to assume that they would have been included in some capacity— they were not. This exclusion was not a simple oversight. Senior staff members of the commission were communicated with and expressed interest and enthusiasm over the proposal to include Human Practices members. Apparently this idea was discussed and rejected. Additionally, Rabinow, through an active intermediary, proposed two leading social scientists affiliated with Harvard and the London School of Economics; both were rejected. It turns out (see below) that the one explicit criterion for inclusion that we could identify was not to have conducted research directly within synthetic biology venues. When it came to the biology and engineering, this principle of ignorance did not apply. Leaders in the field were invited, equipped themselves with power point presentations, filled their allotted time slots, were thanked with a distinct formality, and left. At least as concerns the biologists and engineers, the commission followed the ELSI model of keeping the biology and engineering separate from other concerns and prior to them in terms of importance and presentational hierarchy. We ask, What is the mode of veridiction in this venue and how is it given form? First, we present a pattern of speech acts normative for the event. Second, we analyze the way in which these speech acts are stylized and included in the commission’s report. The hearings were conducted in such a fashion that a specific mode of truth-telling was made to be normative. This effect was achieved and stabilized through an ethos that was established and maintained throughout the course of the hearings, employing an obligatory tone of high civility. Set in a prestigious if nonetheless bureaucratically furnished room with a mood of seriousness but not crisis, the President’s Commission was hastily assembled in reaction to press framing of the Venter team’s construction of a synthetic genome. Sitting around the table was a select audience,

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officially designated “to deliberate on the developing field of synthetic biology and identify appropriate ethical boundaries to maximize public benefits and minimize risks.”13 The proceedings were chaired by Professor Amy Guttman, President of the University of Pennsylvania and previously a professor of political theory at Princeton. The Commission had the symbolic capital requisite for the dignity of the situation and the topic. Each sequence is organized around one particular parameter of performance in a public venue. Of course, other parameters may appear in each of the sequences, but we background them so as to frame the overall scene. For example, a performative affect of civility is present from beginning to end of the commission’s activities but is most visible under certain circumstances, such as the introductions. We also take up two other parameters, status and the capacity for intervention, and give them priority in sequence. Sequence 1: Status Authorizes Legitimacy of the Speech Act. Status is a ques-

tion of privilege, it is double faced, and its privilege provides the speaker with the authority to intervene in these venues. Its privilege allows the speaker, authorized to speak the truth, to identify objects in the world as worthy of attention because of the prior status accrued. Consequently, the mode of veridiction is political, turning opinion into fact. Consequently, viewed from the outside, it warrants no serious attention as to its truth claims. Observed from a position of adjacency, however, status establishes the authority of the speaker. On July 9, 2010, during the first meeting of the President’s Commission, David Rejeski of the Woodrow Wilson Center, Markus Schmidt of the Organisation for International Dialogue and Cooperation, and Paul Wolpe, Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory, spoke in the sixth session on “Ethics.”14 The panel followed a prior session on the same theme with speakers from the Hastings Center and Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. The speakers in this session could be said to have had cooperative research experience within the domains that coalesce under the banner synthetic biology but had not attempted engaged co-labor on common problems. As such, within this venue devoted to the ethics of synthetic biology, the anthropological question is, How is knowledge authorized by networks rather than by inquiry? Here is a sample exchange typical of the commission’s proceedings. The interested reader can consult the full transcript (http://bioethics .gov/). Further documentation of some of our characterization of the

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commission’s ethos can be found in Studio 2 of anthropos-lab (http:// anthropos-lab.net). Question: I was quite surprised when you said there was no religious perspective, or difference at least, within the religious community. And I wonder if that was a representative population that you spoke to, because I would suspect there may be some differences, particularly around the questions of life, dualistic versus materialistic concerns about the creation of life. And so I wonder if the question of awareness, of the degree to which synthetic biology is being included under the sort of large umbrella, and whether or not you think that there may be concerns which develop. Let me ask you the second question. Your answer to incrementalism and to the rate of change was that we should create goals and incentives to keep in mind as a way to direct this. And I wonder if you have specific ideas as to what those goals and incentives are? Paul Wolpe: Thank you. I wasn’t trying to say there aren’t religious objections to synthetic biology. There are some religious groups that object to virtually the entire modern scientific enterprise. I spoke to mostly official or high-placed spokesmen for religion and these religious traditions asking them what their religious traditions say specifically about this particular case of the creation of the artificial cell. What I got in response from almost all of them was, at this point, the actual act of creating a synthetic genome and inserting into a cell that replicates is not one that we have any particular ideological or theological objection to. I asked a very narrow question. Question: It was not about synthetic biology generally or their views about it? Paul Wolpe: Right. And so far as the conversation as it went on as it invariably did as to where their problems lie, they tended to all be down the road or they tended to be in this more intrinsic issue of hubris or of proper limits of human intervention or of humility or issues like that. And I think part of the reason for that is that synthetic biology is a nascent enterprise and, like us, nobody really knows what the implications of it are, and so there’s a “let’s wait-and-see” attitude.

Sequence 2: (Their) Mode of Intervention. The interventions and status legitimated affect of those authorized to speak on the commission are

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brief, subjunctive, and vague enough so as to not offend like-minded auditors or else sufficiently plastic such that they can be applied to future events, whatever they might be. The ritual performance of ignorance about the topic on which they are authorized to speak and for which end they have been brought together, that is, synthetic biology, might well appear paradoxical. However, it fits perfectly well within the affect mode of performativity that reigns within these proceedings. After all, strong and warranted truth claims or ethical assertions would be inappropriate in this commission’s setting. This claim is supported by the occasional introduction of serious and substantive interventions, which are not directly followed up by the other commission members and a change of subject by the commission chair. Sondra Wheeler, speaking on September 13, 2010, during a session on philosophical and theological perspectives, introduced an intervention that was neither contested nor followed up on. The lack of response seems doubly strange insofar as, regardless of religious position, the specifically Protestant concerns Wheeler raises could be taken up in a casuistic sense by any person who has conducted relevant research and who thinks there are serious anthropological questions to be addressed on the relations among and between science and ethics. After all, Amy Guttman was sworn into the commission with her right hand on the Bible. Sondra Wheeler: Quickly, let me make a very Protestant comment about “playing God.” I don’t think that the people who throw that term around, at least—all right, there is the press, who will do anything to create a controversy because we have shown them that’s what sells papers or brings up TV ratings or whatever. So if we get stupid journalism, it’s because that’s what we buy. So your own doing. But apart from that, when people use that language, I don’t think they are thinking of something lighthearted at all. They are thinking of the absolute core of evil as Protestant Christianity has understood it, where the serpent, who is the wisest of all of the creatures, tempts the human couple. What he says is, “if you eat from this tree, you will be like gods” and, blimey, it’s the first thing they do. And so if you think of the sort of root of human evil is the striving to be your own god, that that is the nature of what is wrong with the—the chasm between us and goodness, then this language invokes the sort of just newest technological dress on the oldest problem in human existence. So that’s what’s being played with and that’s why it has the weight it does.

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So we have to, I think, both take the concern seriously and take the underlying recognition that we do overreach, we do overstep, and we are excessively optimistic about ourselves seriously at the same time that we say the response is to think well, not to stop thinking.

Wheeler’s ethical claim to not stop thinking about the ramifications of the technical capacities to make biology was not followed up on, and to the contrary, there was a change of topic by the chair away from this ethical-anthropological question of practice, toward the question of what religious traditions have to say about the status of “life” with respect to the endeavor to create a living system out of nonliving elements.15 Session Chair: I invite anyone from the audience who cares to come to the microphone, if you have a very specific— Amy Gutmann: (Interrupting) I have a specific question. We don’t know from a scientific perspective, if we do make life out of non-life, that nothing special happens. I want to ask the religious representatives, am I right about that? So from our commission’s perspective, I don’t see how we can claim that by virtue of what’s been done in synthetic biology or even what potentially might be done, we have put to death the view that life is special.

We see that serious issues were indeed publicly raised during the commission’s proceedings. Their seriousness, however, was diminished by the restricted time devoted to pursuing them as well as by the lack of previous research engagement on the part of panelists with the practices and practitioners of synthetic biology. Hence, the commission’s manner of operation ensured that serious claims remained at a level of generality. Given this enforced abstraction, serious claims remained at the level of the distinctly discursive, and it follows, whether intentionally or not, so too did any public that might have emerged.

Scene 3: Journalism—Narratives Limited© If the first scene in our forays into publicity terrain was SB5 and the second was the President’s Commission, a third was the sudden appearance of a journalist from the Bay Citizen, a largely web-based enterprise

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in San Francisco that had succeeded in garnering four weekly pages in the northern California edition of the New York Times. Rabinow was contacted by a reporter, who had gotten his name from a colleague at Berkeley. Initial contact revealed that she (or those who employed her) were looking for a story with impact and had several basic narratives ready at hand. These narratives turned on either corruption or danger. The corruption protonarrative concerned rumors that Jay Keasling, the Director of SynBERC, had been involved in conflict of interests issues. Such rumors had been circulating for some time, but Rabinow knew no facts and had no interest in exploring them. Keasling had told Rabinow himself that he had become a rich man from his stock options in Amyris, a biotech company devoted to using synthetic biology for developing biofuels, that was located in the same building as the synthetic biology labs of JBEI (the Joint Bio-Energy Institute), which Keasling directed, funded by the Department of Energy. Rabinow declined this narrative. The second protonarrative turned on danger. She wanted to know if there were adequate safety precautions as concerned synthetic biology in general and SynBERC in particular. As the set of issues around safety, security, and preparedness had been a central site and topic for us during the previous five years, we said that there were unresolved and unaddressed issues. The question of why this topic was of interest to the Bay Citizen/ New York Times briefly flitted across our consciousness, but since it had been so annoyingly central to the unfolding of our experiment, we paid it insufficient attention. Driven in part by a drive to get the facts out and driven in part by more subterranean passions, we agreed to proceed. In fact there does seem to have been a backstory: the following week the lead story and cover image of the New York Times Magazine Section was a ripping account of the lack of preparedness at the national level as concerns biorisk, biosecurity, and biopreparedness.16 Although the article was not centered on synthetic biology per se, it narrated a situation of massive amounts of money having been devoted to vaccine development without results, dysfunctional bureaucratic in-fighting, poor oversight, and a generally dismal picture of federal preparedness for what everyone involved concurred was a grave and existing threat. We mention this here because officials at SynBERC have all denied that there is more than a miniscule possibility of such a threat being actualized. We spent close to eight hours (and perhaps twenty phone calls) over two weeks with the reporter. Once the process was underway, it became increasingly troubling. As she admitted from the outset, she had

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the most limited background and understanding of relevant biology. This limitation became both a topic of nervous humor and a point of concern as much of what we had to say turned on understanding the basics. Central to the discussion was the distinction between sequencing DNA and synthesizing it. During the 1990s, the U.S. government had formed a grant coalition of government labs with those of other nations (especially the United Kingdom) in a massive technological project to produce the sequence of DNA that constituted the human genome. Although a great deal of hype concerning the “book of life” and the “Holy Grail” accompanied the project, this was a project with defined goals, specified means, and an endpoint. The challenges were met. The cost of sequencing was dramatically reduced by multiple magnitudes; speed was increased by multiple magnitudes as was accuracy. Multiple companies were formed to meet the need to sequence not only the human genome in general but individual genomes as well as the genomes of core plants and animals such as dogs and rice. These sequences were available on the Internet (even if patent fights swirled around those who owned or did not own them). DNA sequences of the most vital sort became public. Synthesizing DNA was a different matter: combining the molecules that had been sequenced into specified sequences was a more complicated task. It was, however, ultimately a central linchpin of both synthetic biology and synthetic genomics. If biology was ever to turn into an engineering discipline, through the use of parts, devices, and chasses, then industrial-level manufacturing of specific (ever-longer) sequences of DNA upon demand was a necessity. As progress was being made and being led by commercial companies, the possibility of the widespread dissemination of both DNA sequences and their functionality, as well as DNA synthesis of specific functionalities, formed a cornerstone of the future success or failure of the whole enterprise. That specific sequences of DNA can be synthesized had been known and the process had been performed for decades. Moving from small sequences to larger and larger and larger ones, however, was a challenge. Informed opinion wagered that it could and would be done, just as the technology for rapid, inexpensive, and accurate sequencing had expanded its scope and power dramatically. This fact was public, and its principles uncontestable. How to regulate DNA synthesis became an issue of concern. Opinion on the best approach varied. There were at least three main vectors that needed to be taken into account. First, the growth of the capacity to synthesize DNA lay in commercial enterprises: initially only a small

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number of companies, closely associated with synthetic biology engineers, formed the market for these synthesized sequences. The frontrunner in synthesizing large DNA sequences with known functionalities was Craig Venter, who operated a Janus-faced operation of a nonprofit institute in San Diego and a commercial company in Bethesda. His technology was either patented or operated as a trade secret. His main competitor was George Church, a Harvard medical school biologist and a PI in SynBERC. Church’s technology was patented and public. Church had founded a number of companies and was involved in others as a scientific advisor—a standard role for a leading scientist to play in the United States in the twenty-first century. Second, as the DNA sequences of the human and other genomes were available on the Internet, their understanding and potential use was not restricted to university labs and commercial enterprises. Specifically as concerns synthetic biology, a central invention and motor of its activities as well as its branding was the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition (IGEM). IGEM was an annual competition of undergraduates from around the world. The driving idea behind IGEM was twofold: synthetic biology was public, and competition was an invaluable accelerating force for development. Additionally, as the competition from the start was sponsored in part by industry, and as it was promoted as a stepping stone for ambitious and talented young biologists and engineers to enter the world of start-ups, the lines between public and private were being redrawn and renegotiated without much forethought, and what forethought or anticipation there was did not include enforceable regulation or even codes of ethical conduct. Third, in addition to massively increased and increasing technological capacities associated with a still limited but incrementally increasing biological understanding, as well as the global information base and technologies available to a widely distributed and diverse population of experimentalists who were no longer restricted to a small number of universities in the Western world but were now global, as was the minimal equipment required to carry out basic and not so basic experiments, the environment in which all of this bioengineering was taking shape was permeated and characterized by security concerns. Biorisks, bioweapons, and biosecurity had been on the Cold War agenda; they became a part of the post–Cold War agenda in a much more diffuse and nonlocalizable way. After all, while terrorism and security were made central to the United States after the attacks of 9/11, the possibility of weapons of mass destruction of a biological and/or chemical sort became the justification for the invasion of Iraq. As this is not the place to

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rehearse all of these developments, we refer the reader to the New York Times Magazine article of October 30, 2011, which does an adequate job of covering the issues. In a word, security dangers were factual. Regulatory concerns permeated the present; opinions varied. Media representations and readyat-hand narratives were becoming actual. Being present was the demand of the day for those attempting to be timely. For those of us rather habitually committed to being untimely, encounters with the media were structured by narrative disjunctions and both troubling and surprising indeterminacies. The latter were somewhat surprising in that a science reporter at a major publication such as the New York Times should, we thought, have been familiar with the basics of the case. What the reporter came equipped with was a narrative of conflict as the core of her article. The function of disputes is an interesting one. For example, in SB5, actions were taken to prevent the possibility of a theatrics of dispute. We had seen this previously at the Second International Meeting on Synthetic Biology (SB2) when a speaker was simply prevented from speaking. In sum, with our reporter a dispute narrative functioned to turn all factual claims into opinions. It could be argued that the SB5 episode, BayCitizen article, and the commission are simply examples of the banality and weakness of human character and that nothing original or majorly significant took place. Perhaps, but those are precisely the domains in which an anthropology of the contemporary should be conducting inquiry and constructing narrative, thereby turning the present into the actual and the actual into the anthropological. Conclusion Unwelcome opinion can be argued with, rejected, or compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move Hannah Arendt17 except plain lies.

Following Immanuel Kant’s diagnosis, the main impediments to setting off down the Ausgang to Enlightenment are ethical ones—cowardice and laziness.18 Our tracking of these deficiencies captures the ethical absences of SB5, the President’s Commission, and the New York Times. These absences can be conceptualized by following Hannah Arendt’s argument in her article “Truth and Politics,” from which we drew the quote above. Arendt was writing in response to the massive outpouring of reaction to her articles on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem

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(also published initially in the New Yorker and later as a book). She found many of these responses to be inaccurate and distortive of her basic argument. In “Truth and Politics,” Arendt does not directly refer to her New Yorker article or to the responses she was confronting, although a footnote in a version published later indicates the context. In the above quote, Arendt provides insights that we take up as a kind of equipment, in the sense Michel Foucault renovated this ancient practice of having ready-at-hand maxims and guides to rectify and orient one’s actions and reactions to events and episodes. Thus, Arendt’s telling claim that “opinion can be argued with, rejected, or compromised upon” gives us an initial standard to gauge what kind of debate or commentary one is encountering. Thus, for example, in the SB5 instance, no one whom Bennett contacted who had been directly involved in the proceedings contested, rejected, or suggested compromise wording to characterize the event. Hence, it seems plausible to conclude that the narrative provided is a factual chronicle. And, in a simple sense of the term, it is true.19 The reluctance of those solicited to respond therefore should be taken on a political register. Given the dispositions of those who organized the event, and given their influence in grant formulation and distribution (whether the capacity is true or false, this power is attributed to them), the lack of response falls within the Kantian topic of cowardice. This attribution is not intended per se as a moral judgment on our part but an observation given the facts of the situation. Such cowardice could, of course, be called prudence or Machiavellian or several other things, but until someone makes a convincing argument to do so it is best to leave it as political cowardice. As concerns the President’s Commission, the possibility of a theatrics of dispute or the introduction of strong research-based warranted assertions were eliminated before the event was underway. The commission’s organizational strategy differed from the improvisational character of the interventions in SB5 in that it was well thought through in advance and disputational or veridictional incivilities had been accounted for and regulated from the start. Finally, Arendt’s quote is helpful in situating, analyzing, and producing equipment in regard to the initial reactions to the BayCitizen/New York Times article. For example, in his response quoted in the article, the director of SynBERC, Jay Keasling, sought to downplay the import of a fact by turning it into an opinion: “Yes, there are going to be risks, but we are getting out in front of it.” The article continues with his claim that, “The notion of a terrorist using a company to acquire and customize genetic sequences is kind of far-fetched.” We note that he did

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not refute the actuality of the danger but rather simply sidestepped its seriousness in such a manner so as to inadvertently underline the possibility that such a danger was not science fiction. In this chapter, we presented three scenes of venues that present themselves as being concerned with the public and synthetic biology. We argue that as of 2011 there was no such public, only a phantom object of discourse. That being said, it is the case that venues have been created in which these phantom objects are brought together as if they were externally existent. A common function of the three venues we examined was either to block the overt presentation of research results by taking for granted that which needs to be inquired into or by simply excluding those who had experimental results to present. We have tracked here a contest of truth over the actual. We showed some of the dynamics of framing the actual by eliminating the veridictional stakes by priming opinion as well as the production of types of venues and discourses depending only on actor-networks. We think that the actuality of the publicity of synthetic biology can best be specified not through the mobilization of restrictive opinionbased actor-networks but through a mode of participant-observation— one devoted to further inquiry organized around the conceptual interconnection of problems. In order to do so, fact and opinion, narratives of dispute and performativity as an end in itself, must be backgrounded but not ignored. Therefore, devoting one’s energies to remediating these venues is a diversion. Attempting to reconstruct them will remain futile as long as the power relations that we have tracked remain as unequal as they are currently. In this light, we chose tracking shots as an ethical alternative.

5

Configurations of Actual Discordancy The problem reduced to its lowest terms is whether inquiry can develop in its own ongoing course the logical standards and forms to which further inquiry John Dewey1 shall submit.

After five years of fieldwork the core conclusions we arrived at during this process of leaving the field were that the objects of knowledge produced or arrived at during fieldwork required at least two further levels of what we call curation in order to achieve the status of warranted assertibility. Only once that had been accomplished would we be operating in a field of knowledge and experience whose metric was veridictional. This work included parallel changes on the fieldworker necessary for the person who had been the fieldworker to be able to occupy a subject position different from that of the participantobserver during fieldwork. The overall goal was to move toward the mode of subjectivity, veridiction, and governance appropriate to what we are naming as anthropology and the anthropologist. Subsequently, as we described in the previous chapter, having been engaged, not entirely by choice, in a series of episodes that required dealing with what has been called the “phantom public realm,” we were able to move away from these power-laden situations, affectively at least, by conceptualizing the gap between the implicit and adver-

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tised design of the venues involved.2 This objectification showed us that their design stood in a dissonant relationship with their stated aims, although not, as we discovered, with their actual workings. Although it was clear that the ramifications and rebounds of our contestatory encounters would continue, we did not lose sight of the need to pursue our own mode of thinking in a different register: that of the logic of anthropological inquiry. Toward the Actual Our work of examined exiting by moving through the experience embedded in these domains led us to the articulation of what we are naming after the three heterogeneous vectors assembled together, actual configurations of discordancy. Moving away logically (the experiences linger) from fieldwork and from publicity venues, identifying and curating the determinations of our experience and experiments between anthropology and the emergent biosciences, we identified these assemblages, their vectors, and functioning. The first question we came to pose about these configurations was, What is their ontological status? In order to answer this question, we concluded that we had to address our relationship to the diverse objects we had carried forward from fieldwork and curated as well as how to provide a narrative that would open the possibility of further participant-observation in a different mode. Initially we thought that these three configurations were themselves the starting point for further research. Several weeks of attempts to determine the appropriate form, however, were inconclusive. We then shifted strategies and asked ourselves whether one further preparatory transformation of these determined objects of knowledge was required. Posing the question in this fashion enabled us to begin conceptual motion again. It led us to ask what was the mode in which we should be working, what was the subject position we were attempting to occupy, and, if we could specify these conditions, what was the mode of veridiction appropriate to this stage? Our initial determination of the discordant configuration of modes of participation, metrics, and figures aimed at the status of the actual in the sense that they had been arrived at through experimental and conceptual labor on, and transformation of, the present. We then found ourselves stuck as we attempted to move from these determinations directly to a next stage of participant-observation: a type of observation and intervention undertaken in a different mode than that of fieldwork. Our efforts stalled. We then raised the question of

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critique as a way of clarifying our relation to the actual configurations of discordancy. We surveyed several of the available candidates who seemed to be engaged in at least a loosely similar manner, specifically Luc Boltanski and those in the sociology of critique.3 We were looking for others in the human and social sciences whose research was oriented by pragmatic intent, empirically anchored research, and a sophisticated understanding of critique as more than denunciation or the speaker’s benefit. As rich and interesting as Boltanski’s books are, ultimately their production was grounded in sociology and theory, traditions we did not fully share. During this period we felt confident that we had navigated a transition from fieldwork by conceptualizing and practicing the process of exiting toward an anthropology of the contemporary. We gradually realized that anthropology, as we understood it and as we hoped it would become, required several stages that we had not previously identified. That discovery, however, enabled us to set out to think through and if necessary design the practices that would lead us through the steps of this logic. Problematization Perhaps not surprisingly, we turned once again to Max Weber and Michel Foucault for an orientation to the challenge of identifying and inquiring into the forms of the actual taking shape within the current problematization. We agreed with Max Weber’s century-old diagnosis of the critical limitations of a life of science in modernity. We felt certain, however, that the problem space Weber had so rigorously identified needed to be revisited as a site of renewed reproblematization. We took up Weber’s passing challenge that science and meaning have been irrevocably separated under conditions of modernity within a reproblematization that would ask how inquiry could still contribute to a remediation, if not reconstruction, of their relation once one recognized its critical limitations. In his later writings Foucault argued that rather than truth the question was one of modes of veridiction and their relation to modes of governance and subjectivation. Furthermore, the challenge, Foucault argued thirty years ago, was whether and how frank speech (parrhe¯sia) functioned in relation to those holding and wielding superior power. He concluded that whatever figure of parrhe¯sia and the parrhe¯siast emerged, if any, it would include a position of adjacency for the truth speaker in relation to the institutions of power and would exclude rig-

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orously telling scientists what the truth of science was, telling politicians which policies to choose, and making universal claims as to the nature of subjectivity required for speaking the truth.4 For Foucault, the demands of the day consisted in reposing Kant’s question, “What is enlightenment?” given today’s changed conditions. It followed, we thought in 2006, that taking up the question “What is enlightenment?” a quarter century after Foucault posed it again required a diagnosis of the main figures of anthropos and how they were being configured, however tentatively, given the rise of the Internet, genomics, a security environment, and a call for post-ELSI ethics, which is to say in sum an anthropology adequate to the early twenty-first century. Whereas Foucault emphasized modal change as an essential characteristic of the current problematization and a way to respond to it, for a variety of reasons we decided that figuration in the plural needed more analytic attention. This decision was partially due to conjunctural considerations and partially due to a still inchoate sense that something new was beginning to take shape. In May 2007, Rabinow and Bennett paused from the initial fieldwork in SynBERC, retreated to their haven, and developed a powerful diagnostic of extant figures, their interfaces, and what was clearly unaccounted for in the contemporary world by these figures. Consequently, it was logical to begin listing the variables we had already identified at play in the present but that were not captured by the existing figures. We drew these variables in part from many years of intense engagement with Weber and Foucault. From Weber these include asceticism, work on the self, and rigorous experimentation as well as “demands of the day.” From Foucault, in addition to the concept of problematization, history of the present, and so on, these involved the modification of his analysis of regimes of veridiction and jurisdiction into modes of veridiction and jurisdiction, which would make available such a diagnosis of figures and their possible reconfiguration. The 2007 diagnostic is composed of three figures.5 Its purpose is to distinguish, designate, characterize, and fashion the first two figures so as to generate clarity about a potential third figure. The three figures are biopower, human dignity, and an emerging constellation of elements that are being brought into relation to one another and may well be coalescing into a third figure. Provisionally, Rabinow and Bennett named this third figure “Synthetic Anthropos.” The term Synthetic Anthropos was a placeholder that drew attention to the ways in which significant real world challenges were being taken up through the redesign and

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reconfiguration of pathways. Examples of such redesign and reconfiguration included synthetic biology, biocomplexity, and biosecurity.6 In retrospect, turning the complex and multifaceted diagnostic into equipment gave a certain privilege to the concept of reconstruction as a kind of regulative idea. Let us recapitulate Dewey’s definition of reconstruction: Reconstruction can be nothing less than the work of developing, of forming, of producing (in the literal sense of that word) the intellectual instrumentalities which will progressively direct inquiry into the deeply and inclusively human—that is to say moral—facts of the present scene and situation.

Having been guided by a reconstructive ethos throughout the fieldwork, while instructive and worthwhile, nonetheless, we later came to realize, played a central role in the production of a series of discordances. In this chapter, we seek to identify their elements by casting them in configurations that privilege specific variables (mode of intervention, metric, figuration). The presentation of these configurations of discordancy is not a direct representation of events but rather a means of making visible their actuality. Actual Configuration of Discordancy I: Mode of Intervention Question: What are the parameters—for an anthropologist—required in order to engage in an agonism of truth with those authorized to speak authoritatively about bios (life)? Answer: Crucial but not exclusive parameters include collaboration and Bildung. When there is no collaboration between the knowledge seekers of bios and those of anthropos, there is likely to be a withering of self-formative practices (remedied by distancing from the blocked site of agonism), and hence remediation (diagnosis of a deficiency and a mode of representing, presenting, or visualization) is the advisable vector in order to nourish capacity building for those aware of its existence without intensifying nefarious power relations. Question: Can you say that in simpler language? Answer: If the participant-observer continues to pursue the original goals, and if the biologists won’t meet the anthropologist even halfway in that pursuit, then polemics, application of unequal force relations, or proliferation of banalities will result. Under such conditions, the participant-observer is advised to move away and continue to work

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with colleagues of like ken, to identify and conceptualize the elements of blockage, and to present them in another medium to whomever might be interested in taking them up and willing to undertake the work required to do so. Knowledge seekers whose knowledge achieves any degree of authority do not work alone. Molecular biologists do not work alone, bioengineers do not work alone, and anthropologists do not work alone. This simple sociological fact has not been sufficiently taken into account by those concerned or by those that observe them. Just as most anthropology departments do not offer courses on how inquiry is coordinated and governed, even more so elite molecular biology departments do not offer courses or practica on bench manners, time management, hierarchy and protocol, advice seeking, governing competition, and the like. At most there are institutional review board or human subjects protocols for anthropologists and professions of earnest good faith and intent to improve humanity for the bioscientists studying nonhuman objects. By making these domains of interaction external to the methods of knowledge production and its legitimization, those authorized to make truth claims about anthropos or bios have not sought to know what they are actually doing. The ramifications of this will not to know are extravagant. If one looks at the situation there are in fact some curious reversals at play. No one could deny that experimentation, publication, peer review, and funding in the biosciences are activities that require the coordination and governance of significant numbers of people, machines, technologies, organizations, and norms. Yet one looks in vain for courses on these topics; there are now courses on patenting; there are occasional lectures on ethics, but little else. Of course, many of the issues that arise or fail to arise surrounding these topics are addressed via multiple types of tacit knowledge and embedded habits. In the social sciences many of the same limitations apply. Although there are an abundance of courses in economics, political science, psychology, and sociology on method, there are few if any on practice, its norms, and its modes of governance. In the qualitative human sciences, even among those that eschew the lures of positivist method, there is a paucity as to how to understand the fact that knowledge and its modes of representation and presentation are not uniquely individual. Dealing with such issues is relegated to questions of subjectivity, vagaries of power networks, and so on. It follows that we are not engaged in reinventing the old positivist debate. It follows that we are not engaged in revisiting the cultural sci-

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ences versus natural sciences division. As presently constituted, to our knowledge, none of the institutionalized modes of knowledge of the contemporary disciplines has come to terms adequately with its own conditions of production as essentially contributory to its knowledge claims. We are not implying that the substance of knowledge claims are reducible to their mode of production, but we are arguing that knowledge claims that systematically rule out reflection on their own modes of governance and habits are willfully blind to fundamental conditions that make their practice possible. Such willful incapacitation must ramify in multiple manners that deserve further attention. Modes Question: The topics of participant-observation and remediation have come up recurrently so far in your analysis, are these simple or complex modes? For example, what about reconstruction? Answer: Although we have been intrigued by the logic of Dewey’s declamation of reconstruction, so far it has remained as a shadowy, admirable, if ever-receding, aspiration. This state of affairs has been confusing and at times troubling as we have not found a way of bringing reconstruction into play in a direct, pragmatic, and explicit manner. The most we have been able to achieve is to discuss the topic among ourselves; when we have attempted to introduce it as a topic of discussion in the fieldwork situation, our preliminary efforts have been blocked, mocked, stymied, obstructed, and thwarted. Question: If not reconstruction, then what? Answer: In the strict sense of participant-observation, what has been possible has been one type or another of remediation. There are conditions limiting or enhancing diverse acts of remediation. One of those conditions is location: under certain conditions, of either a centrifugal—or more rarely and for that state, most intriguingly—centripetal adjacency. Once again, we have been able to take a step back, affirm the worth of a position of adjacency, and accept and strengthen the potential for second-order observation that such a positioning encourages. It is that motion of moving into the experimental situation, finding it blocked, recoiling, pulling ourselves together (often by returning to the protected venue we have invented), and, as it were, observing observers observing. This zigzag, jagged forward and back, motion—once one becomes accustomed to it—depends on the existence of a protected venue to which one can return.

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This haven depends on and is enriched by collaboration. We were able to actualize it, as should be crystal clear by now, only within our own team. We were, as we have said, eminently successful in establishing and observing cooperative relations with the other bio- and social scientists within SynBERC and related organizations. It is that uneasy, partially satisfactory and partially fraught, assemblage of cooperation and collaboration that shapes this specific configuration of actual discordance. It is discordant because (as we will describe below) we were attempting to operate in a different manner, with the hope of bringing into being a set of practices governed by a different metric. The impediment was that we were unable to continue in a manner such that inquiry could “follow its own course,” to return to Dewey’s quote, and therefore its appropriate logic. The logic is not metaphysical, transcendental, or uniquely discursive. The practice embodies a processual logic that arises from and seeks to understand troubles and breakdowns in diverse situations. It follows, we eventually came to understand, that once one realizes that if one is proceeding in a setting of asymmetrical and unequal power relations where one cannot direct the course of things, the available course of action and thought is to step back and to observe how things unfold. By this we mean that there are times when the recognition of a blockage, at least at a second-order level of participant-observation, is a signpost that if the inquiry is to follow its own course, it can only be focused on the blockage not at resolving it or overcoming it directly. This turn means that the very obstruction indicates something significant about the present; making that obstruction into an objective renders it as a discordancy. It also renders it actual. Identifying the vectors that contribute to this state of affairs makes it possible to make them visible as a configuration. That object can then become available, again following Dewey, as an objective of further thinking. Actual Configuration of Discordancy II: Metrics of Science Question: What do you mean by flourishing, and what does it have to do with science? Answer: The question of the place of making things, knowing, and a person’s endeavors within a meaningful life has been a long-standing component of reflection on such endeavors in any tradition one might wish to name. One way in which this life could be characterized is by way of the ancient Greek term eudaemonia. A disaggregation of the endeavor to know—and the capacities required to know—from reflec-

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tion on the practices and life of inquiry within a broader conception of a good life is a recent phenomenon from this long durational perspective. This is not to say that these recent changes have meant that there is no scientific self-formation (Bildung) today. There are a range of tacit practices of self-formation, however, they are no longer thematized or considered an essential component of the capacity to know of the subject formation of a scientist.7 Question: What happened when you thematized flourishing as a metric within a life of science within the venues in which you conducted participant-observation into the relation of science and ethics? Answer: In our experience of the relation between the human and biosciences, in SynBERC and in STIR, rearticulating this theme produced several reactions: hostility (“I don’t need any justification for what I do”), confusion (“Vocation? What do you mean?”), and indifference (“That’s interesting . . .”). Within STIR, however, it was the relation between Human Practices and the governor of the STIR project, Erik Fisher, that went at least some distance to producing a different reaction and relation to these questions. In the Berkeley project, we named three broad questions that we thought applied equally to the human and biosciences: Are there common problems for those inquiring into the sciences broadly conceived? How do we do inquiry given current incapacities to find an adequate mode of collaboration? And finally, if the demand to govern oneself and others is a specifically ethical demand, how can one inquire into the selfformative practices in science in the light of questions of a good life and the challenge of the governance of the self and others? These questions were articulated at a workshop in 2009 in Berkeley with a team from ASU including Fisher. Stavrianakis and Fisher subsequently discussed on many occasions the relation between the ASU’s approach to social and ethical questions of the sciences and our modality in Human Practices. After this particular workshop, Fisher posed the question whether the STIR project could take up the question of how and whether a self-transformative ethics is conceivable in a regime such as the modern laboratory. Question: What are the existing modes of subjectivation that parameterize this question? Answer: Fisher narrated the predicament in the following way: “the lab, like the polis, will not tolerate the Socratic torpedo fish.”8 As he narrated it—with over a decade of involvement in pedagogy for scientists, as well as of designing types of engagement between the sciences and humanities—there is an entire economy and culture that develops

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around ends-means displacements, in terms of resources, funding hierarchy, responsibility, and the public good. This had been Fisher’s initial diagnosis, which oriented him in designing the STIR project. The diagnosis was of goal displacement in which the scientific urge to conduct free, curiosity-driven research “in order to explain where I am not who I am” needs resources. As such, the means to conduct research becomes the goal. Since this is the de facto situation, the STIR project was a response to this diagnosis insofar as the project as a whole sought to open up and take more into account in the pursuit of such technical means. Since the laboratory as a venue, in its current organization, will not tolerate frank speech with regards to the question of ends, in Fisher’s own terms, STIR adapted in order to negotiate what he called “multiple firewalls.” Thus, even though Fisher wished to pose the question of existing modes of subjectivation within the laboratory, we were unable to actively remediate metrics broader than those that are currently operative. Question: Does that mean that in STIR as in SynBERC a metric of flourishing was ignored as simply unintelligible? Answer: No. Fisher was educated in the Great Books tradition of St. John’s College and is the son of a long-time teacher at St. John’s. As such, he saw the outside to the situation in which STIR (and the wider human and social sciences) operates and could take seriously the metric that Human Practices was attempting to make part of inquiry into the relation of the human and natural sciences. As he asked a number of times over our engagement, “Do we really want to spend our time building capacities for scientists? Why do what the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) and I have done?” His response was that on some level, these are different types of engagement and that for him the need for an approach such as the one of Human Practices, which he characterized as direct and agonistic, is because if the Center for Nanotechnology in Society and their adaptive approach monopolized this space of research, then, again in his terms, those engaged in rethinking the relation of science and ethics may not understand the motivation for such engagement. Venues and Metrics Within our own project, we continually returned to our metric as our orientation for asking ourselves how inquiry was going: Was there pedagogy? Were capacities being developed without the intensification of debilitating power relations? We carefully observed our practice to

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ensure that our venue was not deficient, or excessive, relative to these questions. During fieldwork, our venue functioned as a haven; a haven is “a place of shelter, safety, or retreat; a refuge.”9 We gradually developed increasing self-consciousness about what we were doing when we retreated to places that sheltered us from the numerous demons that populated our experiment. These demons, we came to realize eventually, were not epiphenomenal but rather were essential aspects in the tone and texture of our experience and ultimately even in the very form of the experiment that we had undertaken. We frequently felt the need to find a reliable means of recuperating from the frequent blockages to the progress of where we thought we wanted to go and the resultant discombobulations. Failing that motion of active and recurrent respite, we came to appreciate and eventually understand that without such a haven, we would have been nearly unremittingly in a stultified state. We had to learn to live with the aspectival negativity of the fieldwork situation and to develop means to observe it, to depsychologize it, to externalize it through concerted conceptual and curational endeavors. The identification of the need for and existence of a haven enabled us to represent these demons and what they stood for, or presaged, and thereby to begin the freeing process of conceptualization, working through, and so on, thereby allowing for renewed motion and energy. The venue-haven provided the milieu to understand, articulate, and progress through the first four phases (and their associated pathways) in the series that constituted the motion of our inquiry. Just as its standards and forms required transformations, so too, we came to realize, did the venues in which we labored. The challenge of designing a venue that would facilitate the transition from fieldwork to the actual configurations of discordancy could no longer be limited to providing shelter. Leaving the field constituted a quite different phase of participant-observation. For this new phase we required a venue-atelier, a type of workshop, in which concepts, narratives, and assemblages could be wrought, stylized, warranted, and put forth. Within SynBERC, by contrast, it had become clear that the organization was not an assemblage and that metrics of science were a problem, which we could not address with the other researchers in the organization. It turned out that the mechanisms of power in the organization were not open for reassemblage and that in fact the quandary was precisely that the heterogeneous set of institutions (five elite universities, the NSF, new research institutes), techniques (genome sequencing, gene

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synthesis, biological computer-aided design), and disciplines (chemical engineering, molecular biology, electrical engineering, protein engineering, political science, and anthropology) functioned together as an apparatus.10 We discovered this because the relations of power that we thought would be productive of new capacities to think about ethics and science turned out to be foreclosing strategic relations of power. The effort to produce a productively ramified relation of science and ethics had been the chief reason for our entering into this area of knowledge and these institutions. This observation is diagnostically significant, and the significance comes from the fact that it is part of a broader problematization. Our fieldwork focused with a certain regularity on the question of science as a vocation in the present. The bioscientists gave a range of responses to the worth and justification for synthetic biology and their participation in it. These converged often in justifications by pointing to projects designed to ameliorate the health of people and their environments. During fieldwork, such a justification was frequently invoked, although few such projects were brought to completion. We named a second justificatory metric, prosperity, which oriented research in the biosciences. This metric, we observed, operates both tacitly and explicitly. Explicitly, the organizational obligations of SynBERC from the NSF were to commercialize their research and to become entirely supported by industry within ten years. There was little if any controversy as to the worth of this mandate or the compromises in scientific integrity it might entail. Quite the opposite, we observed general enthusiasm about start-ups and venture capitalist funding, with its strictures. Tacitly, the metric functions to restrict what questions can be taken up as serious and worth the effort and time necessary to address them. Our incapacity to affect the organization in line with our mandate from the NSF and our eventual recognition of this situation produced our diagnosis of an institutionally fostered incapacity. This incapacity, in this diagnosis, was correlated to both the technical capacities fostered within the organization and the dominant justifications for the pursuit of utility by (bio) technical means: prosperity and amelioration. The combination of technical capacities and justifications functioned as parameters of how ethical questions could be formulated, heard, and engaged with. As described previously in our papers and Studios, both the technical capacities and the parameterization of the ethical field are fostered by a particular affect, as well as by institutional norms that transform ethical problems into either justifications by dominant met-

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rics or into values that can be collected and arrayed but that cannot affect the conduct of science.11 Our claim is not that amelioration and prosperity have no place as metrics within a scientific institution. Clearly two important “economies of worth” in the justification for the pursuit of new pathways in biological engineering involve industry and the capacity of these technologies to improve health and welfare.12 Our observation was rather that the manner in which these metrics, which are partly constitutive of the form of life one can practice as a scientist, produced an incapacity to hear ethical questions outside the parameters of these metrics. We observed, to take one exemplar, that justifications by prosperity and amelioration made it difficult to reflect on the security ecology of this research and events of low probability but high consequence. With regard to the actual security environments in which biological engineering is being developed, this refusal is not only naïve but dangerous.13 Actual Configuration of Discordancy III: Figurations After fieldwork and curation of the objects of fieldwork, we observed and demonstrated that the bioscientists in SynBERC were unable to bring their program to fruition in anything like the time frame or shape that they had been funded to do. And furthermore, since they were unwilling to acknowledge flourishing as a metric, our manifesto program was blocked; however, our mode of inquiry was supple enough to readjust its logic. As we have been showing, having experimented with and experienced the blockage of both sides of the manifesto stage, by rectifying our objectives, we have been able to produce experimental results to wit actual configurations of discordancy. In this third configuration we show that the original diagnostic orientation was plausible but that our experiment also shows how the present became actualized differently from the original intention of the bioscientific program. As we have shown, in the two previous configurations of discordancy, this does not mean that nothing was possible or salvageable from our original program. Just as we saw in the first configuration that reconstruction was not possible under these conditions, although collaboration was given a more restricted venue; and just as we saw in the second configuration that while it was not possible to introduce a metric of flourishing into other social scientists’ engagements with ethics and science, it functioned pedagogically within a more restricted venue. So too, but with a significant difference from the first two configurations,

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in the third actual configuration of discordancy the challenge of the original diagnostic orientation remained to be narrated in light of these two actual configurations of discordancy. We had said that our orientation in Human Practices had been tacitly, and at times explicitly, guided by a reconstructive ideal, in the sense Dewey proposed it. It is worth remembering that the formulation of reconstruction that we are using is drawn from Dewey’s 1948 revisiting of his book Reconstruction in Philosophy, originally published in the 1920s. There was a tone of frustration arising from Dewey’s acknowledgment that there was a difficulty in bringing science and ethics together for the general good and that his earlier hopes that reconstruction would guide those involved clearly had been frustrated. For Dewey, this frustration and lack of actualization did not mean that he had misidentified the problem but rather that the means of achieving solutions remained elusive. All proportions guarded, in many ways we had followed a similar trajectory. At the beginning of our fieldwork, given the contractual and consensual arrangements with the biologists and other social scientists, we were hopeful that some type of collaboration, flourishing, and reconstruction was imaginable. As we have just argued, after five years of participant-observation and reflection on that participant-observation, we no longer think that reconstruction can be the regulative ideal for our practice. This experimental result does not mean that reconstruction has no place or that under other circumstances it might be actualizable; science, however, deals with objective realities, and those future fortuitous circumstances, as of the present, remain to be brought into existence. Conclusion: The Problem with Reconstruction We have come to the conclusion that the challenge of reconstruction involves more than unequal power relations, trained incapacities, and limited talent of anthropologists. The concept of reconstruction itself, we believe, requires critical reexamination in light of our current conditions and experiences. This reexamination turns on the object and mode of reconstruction. First, whatever else Dewey means by “the deeply and inclusively human” as the object for the reconstruction, the concept needs to be problematized. For example, given that there are multiple figures of anthropos (biopower and human dignity) and furthermore since they do not capture the totality of anthropos, referring to the deeply human as though it were given, known, and regulative is today

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implausible and unwarrantable. Second, we know from our experience that even if one is capable of designing, of developing, of forming, and of producing conceptual tools and equipment—what Dewey terms “intellectual instrumentalities”—they are not by themselves sufficient for reconstruction. We have been guided by Dewey in our endeavor to “progressively direct inquiry” through our conceptual tools and equipment into significant episodes and events. Nevertheless, Dewey does not give any indication as to the subjectivation or subject position of the one capable of doing “nothing less than” reconstruction. The position of this subject relative to the “facts of the present scene and situation,” however, which require remediation, indicates that, minimally, without a significant transformation of the scene or situation, such reconstruction has not taken place. Since for Dewey a situation in the full sense does not exist independently, the most we have been able to accomplish is to determine configurations of actual discordancy but not their reconstruction. Today it seems clear that for anthropological inquiry into the actual, flourishing, understood as reconstruction, is just as troubled as the deeply and inclusively human and perhaps for similar reasons. In that light, identification of actual configurations of discordancy provides some distance from this blocked situation and opens a horizon of more thought and inquiry, not directly fettered by these actual power relations.

Conclusion: Demands of the Day By “thinking”, I mean an analysis of what one might call the intensifying venues of experience (des foyers d’expérience), where are articulated one with the others: first, forms of a possible knowledge; second, the normative matrices of comportment for individuals; and finally, third, modes of virtual existence for Michel Foucault1 possible subjects.

Max Weber closes his oration Wissenschaft als Beruf, a Mahler-like tone poem of the darkening days of Bildung, with a peroration that has been little remarked on in the secondary literature. He calls on his auditors to “set to work” but does so narratively such that the subject of the sentence is “we.” The site of this demand, notably, is both “human relations” as well as “our vocation.” By so doing one can meet, Weber asserts, clearly to himself as much as anyone else, the “demands of the day.” That challenge might seem daunting, but Weber assures his “we” that actually the requisite response is “plain and simple” on one condition: “if each finds and obeys the daemon [wrongly translated as demon] that holds the very fibers of one’s life.”2 In this chapter, we take up Weber’s century-old wakeup call in our own terms. We do so with the aid of our philosophic friends (as Gilles Deleuze would put it) as well as the lessons learned from our determinations and artifacts.3 John Dewey proved a trustworthy guide in

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this labor; Michel Foucault throughout provided a vigilant scrutiny of the problems and vocational limitations that confronted the untimely thinker. From there, the path forward is plain and simple, if one keeps one’s demons close enough to observe and one’s daemon closer still such that one can listen attentively to the guidance provided. Ontological Series: Recent Pasts and Near Futures Our conceptual narrative has taken us from the experiential labors of collaborative fieldwork into relations and nonrelations of the biosciences, bioengineering, the human sciences, the social sciences, biotechnology industries, public relations, bioethics, and ethics, which we began and located initially in the present, through the work necessary to exit such a field situation, to an exploration of the forms of participantobservation available once one leaves the field and its subject position behind, as well as the conceptual rendering of the actual determinations drawn and curated from this series of transformations of participantobservation. One result of our experiment is that the series—field, exit, publicity, actual—narrated from the mode of observation of the contemporary, constitutes a series of artifactual recent pasts. Before proceeding further, it is worth specifying a few of the parameters of what we intend by the term “the contemporary.” First, a clarification: the status of contemporary objects is not uniquely emergent. Within a pragmatic logic of anthropology, the near future is constituted from determinations of the objects of the recent past; it does not have the status of the emergent as an actualization of preexisting potential or a shift from quantitative to qualitative difference, although it may gather these determinations under some but not all conditions. Rather, the ontological status of objects is invented and determined by the specific process of inquiry as it moves through its various phases. Thus, it is fair to claim that to a degree something distinctive has been forged during these phases but that the objects that are forged were neither waiting to be represented nor wholly independent from the previous status as objects and/or artifacts they had held. This observation follows from Dewey’s logic: it is entirely appropriate, even mandatory, that distinct phases will require different standards. As we have noted before, in Demands of the Day we are presenting a kind of phenomenology of the logic of anthropological inquiry: if you arrive at the contemporary, it is the contemporary only insofar as it follows in a series of determinations, standards, and forms of the transformation of the recent past. The goal is to assemble and narrate this

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series of ontologically different but interdependent modes and objects. The motion is to arrive at the recent past by passing through the actual, toward the contemporary. The contemporary’s horizon is constituted by giving a narrative form to objects that have been curated so as to stylize the recent past and make possible a near future. It is important to understand that we are not dealing with a historical consciousness viewing the world, nor an ontology of beings waiting to be represented. There is no object existing in the recent past by itself; technically speaking, there is no recent past by itself, only as a part of a series. Thus, an object that was marketed two years ago in and of itself does not have the status of the recent past nor do one’s experiences or the weather. An object only attains the status of the recent past once it has been curated an appropriate number of times during this process. Thus we can assert that the logic of anthropological inquiry is not historical in the ordinary sense of the term; rather, an anthropological logic must build upon its repertoire of concepts and practices so as to enable the capacity to delineate the temporality of objects as they take shape, appear, and are made available an appropriate number of times for further modification. Just as with the recent past (as the term is being used here with a specific conceptual baggage), so too it is important to specify the conceptual and referential parameters of the term “the present.” The status of the present plays a contrastive role among and between the history of the present and the anthropology of the contemporary. Within the history of the present, the present appears as a continually deferred horizon. Strictly speaking, the history of the present never actually addresses the present directly or at most in a glancing fashion. Contrastively, one can say that the anthropology of the contemporary begins in the present so as to leave it behind through experimentation, curation, and narration. Hence, if the present is absent in the former mode while marking a limit and silently offering a touchstone to guide the inquiry, in the latter one immerses oneself in the present, so as to leave it behind, without a backward glance or a hint of regret, once one undertakes the often arduous labor of the concept. Historical work, specifically genealogy, is a defining characteristic of the history of the present. Historical consciousness has a place, albeit a minor one, in the anthropology of the contemporary. It precedes and contributes to orientation, diagnosis, and design of a research problem. Such problems never appear by themselves from the ether of the present—the interconnection of things is silent—rather, attention to the present as a possible site of problematization depends in varying de-

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grees, according to the situation, on a genealogical discernment of potential sites of discordance and indetermination. Scholarship, historical depth, and comparative sensibility all contribute to the initial exercise of the drive to inquiry. Dewey, as it were, helps us to make Foucault’s tools actual and Weber’s problems problematic. Inquiry proceeds through phases probing knowingly for standards and forms. How, one might wonder, does one move from one phase to another? Rather than provide a methodological answer that would be out of character given our anthropological modes, we searched instead for conceptual aide. We propose to call the progression or the directionality from phase to phase a pathway.4 Pathways are a distinct aspect and phase of the standards and forms of this type of inquiry. Pathways operate as connective devices: from fieldwork to exit, from exit to publicity, from publicity to configurations of the actual to and from there to the contemporary. Pathways can be thought of as a functional equivalent of the dialectic process of sublation, or aufheben, as long as one does not confuse their function with the necessity of the metaphysics of reason. Pathways are equipment useful for short spans of motion that are designed to function so as to leave behind (while linking) a series of recent pasts that have been given prior determination. This mode and its motion can be contrasted with the manner in which other modes establish connections through making them available for thinking. Contrastively, for example, we observe that the mode of Hegel’s logic is too overarching for our task at hand, while the mode of Foucault’s or Nietzsche’s genealogy is too fragmentary: the former moves too rapidly toward a foretold future, and the latter travels in the reverse direction to the one we pursue. One thing to underscore at this point is that the prior determinations invented and transformed during the process themselves provide resources. The logical standards relative to which such inquiry makes such determinations are plural ones; they themselves are in need of ongoing discernment. This remark suggests one way in which this logic of anthropology is not a method. A method, we may recall from Foucault’s discussion of types of reflexivity—by which he means the different ways in which thinkers have thought about thinking—is a form of thinking about how one thinks, which requires a fixed criterion of judgment.5 The necessity for such criteria is deeply influential in the forms of veridiction that can be developed. The refusal of such fixed criteria, the precise mobility of standards and forms, allows and encourages other modes of veridiction and other figures of truth.

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The Uses of Demons and Daemons In our use, equipment is composed of affects, truth claims, and ethical orientations. By this point we were clear about the design parameters of the ethical orientations and the affect requisite to the venue-atelier we were inventing. The challenge of specifying the mode of veridiction, however, was the remaining objective to parameterize, in order to enable the venue-atelier to function adequately. For us, at this stage, thinking consists in examining the ways in which logos and ethos might be compounded. We mean compounded quite literally in the sense of bringing together in a variety of combinations the objects, artifacts, and their elements that have been brought forward. The diverse phases of thinking and second-order participantobservation are enabled by being carried out in appropriately crafted venues with modes of subjectivation and veridiction modified to meet the task at hand. As we have previously discussed, those seeking to undertake reconstructive practice, at the stage following the actual configurations of discordancy, will undertake their own specific labor within the venue-atelier. Thus, if the objective is reconstruction, one might well take the actual configurations of discordancy as the objects to be worked on and worked over, so as to reconstruct them in such a manner that the “more deeply human” could be introduced into the actual. Even if this effort failed, or partially succeeded, it would be noble in and of itself. We observe that those undertaking reconstruction will carry out their activity subsequently in venues they may well make contributions to but that they are unlikely to control either in design or application. For example, if one’s goal was to reconstruct a bioethics commission by insisting on the inclusion of different actors and different topics, it is possible that one might achieve some inroads but extremely unlikely that the composition of such a venue would be handed over to the one aiming at reconstruction. For those who seek to move from actual configurations of discordancy toward an anthropology of the contemporary, they will need to identify, remediate, and inhabit a venue appropriate to the task. Surprisingly to us, we found ourselves perplexed at this juncture as to how to proceed toward the contemporary. After some puzzlement we looked at a chart we had intended as the beginning of the last chapter of this book. The chart had been produced while marking time hoping for the transformation of standards and forms to strike us in the forehead. The chart had been imagined early on as a way of returning to Max We-

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ber’s evocation of the need to listen to one’s daemon in order to meet the demands of the day, scientifically and ethically. We were by this point quite clear that this entire inquiry had been haunted by a range of blockages, indeterminacies, frustrations, irritations, and the like, which we had half-jokingly coined as having been produced by demons. We imagined that there was a relationship between demons and daemons but felt it prudent to leave the exploration of that relationship to the end of the inquiry. In that light and given the temporary blockage, we drew up a twocolumn chart in which we began to list the pairs of demons and daemons (table 2). This labor proved to be amusing and relatively easy to accomplish. Arraying these terms as topoi and feeling by this point that doing so was warranted, we experienced the feeling of a cleansing catharsis of previous experience through the simple practice of turning pathos into ethos into logos. It remained, however, unclear what we were to do with this double-columned chart. At this point we remembered that we had previously encountered a similar blockage, labor, and resolution when we had transformed the determinations from the Ausgang into artifacts. This memory encouraged us to explore further the distinct possibility that one more step was required before we could be clearer about how our demons and daemons were functioning.

Table 2 Demons and Daemons Demons

Daemons

Timeliness

Untimeliness

Morality, procedure

Paraskeue¯/Equipment

Networks

Venues

Trained incapacities

Vocational imperative

Projects

Shared problems

Passion/Affect

Affect/Passion

Method

Meditation (care)

Individualism

Collaboration

Ethnography

Second-Order Participant-Observation

Performative

Parrhe¯sia

Stultitia

Restive

Connected

Adjacent

Reconstruction

Narrative modes (Metale¯psis)

Research

Work

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At this point it became clear that our previous intuition that somehow the daemon side would simply triumph over the demons was simplistic and misleading; a more complex and dynamic relation between them needed to be invented. We now think we understand that a foyer d’expérience worthy of the name retains both demons and daemons. This minor cathartic experience reminded us of the original intention behind the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), of joint inquiry, and mutual flourishing, in a second-order manner. At the time, in 2005, those of us beginning the experiment in ARC believed that by attending only to what we would now call the daemon side that we would be able to transcend and leave behind what we now call the demon side. In retrospect, we were engaged in a naive attempt at reconstruction.6 Our experiment and our experiences definitively demonstrated the limitations of this naiveté. We now felt clear that neither a reconstructive endeavor nor an endeavor that seeks to produce pathways out of the actual toward a different figure of truth seeks to eliminate the demons of the actual uniquely in favor of the daemons. Rather, the pathway that a reconstructive endeavor would be likely to construct and follow would seek to make the demons less demonic, or at a minimum to neutralize their effects in future situations. By contrast, our efforts to remediate the actual configurations of discordancy accept the continued presence of these demons, by this time transformed through a series of curations, thereby opening up the possibility of practicing an anthropology, which, accompanied by demons, nonetheless is capable of listening to a (good) daemon (eu-daemonia). Since we are in a philosophic mood at this point in the narrative, it is appropriate to underline that we agree with Plutarch (Peri Akouein) that listening is the precondition for philosophy or thinking. His text “On Listening” is addressed to Nicander, who is leaving a state of minority and is receiving reflections from Plutarch on how to pay proper attention to those who would advise you. Foucault’s recurring interest in the text is not surprising given that the problem of the text is one of conduct, of “willing as one ought,” in distinction to “unconstrained appetites,” a subjectivational challenge linked to the exit from minority and its relation to reasoned discourses.7 Venue-Chantier: Assembling the Contemporary My books are not philosophical treatises or historical studies, but at most philoMichel Foucault8 sophic fragments in the work sites of history.

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Seeking help in how one might approach this retention and recombination, we turned to Gerard Genette’s foundational text on narrative, which provided us with the insight that the most basic function of narrative is to produce order.9 With this aide, therefore, we began to explore narrative possibilities that would lead us, accompanied by the demons and daemons we had arrayed, to a next phase and its appropriate standards and forms. Whereas many practicing anthropologists continue to identify with the ethnographic approach that we include in what James Faubion has called anthropology of the present, we are not tempted by that way of doing things, and hence there are no demons that appear when it is evoked, only perhaps a few ghosts.10 Having ourselves worked through to the anthropology of the actual and experienced a range of its affects and heterogeneous elements, we are familiar with its contours, standards, and forms. The challenge at this stage, however, is to move beyond an anthropology of the actual to an anthropology of the contemporary. We gradually came to understand that having arrived at the determinations and configurations of the anthropology of the actual we had reached the last phase of the inquiry qua inquiry. We eventually became clearer that the core question at this phase was, What comes next? The answer was, an anthropology of the contemporary. The contemporary is the stylization of old and new elements drawn from actual configurations. Hence, it is anthropological and not ethnographic in that it attends not directly to the present but rather only to the doubly curated objects and artifacts originally taken from the present. The question to be addressed is, How to proceed forward from the actual to the contemporary? The logic we have found ourselves following leads in an orthogonal direction to that of reconstruction. We take the actual configurations as our object but disaggregate them, we are now clear, not in the hope of eliminating specific elements, but with the goal of bringing some of them into a venue-chantier (work site) in which transformations can be catalyzed. That is to say, we needed to isolate disaggregated elements of the actual configurations as the mandatory next step before introducing these elements into our venue. Our previous workshop (venue-atelier), we recognized, required one further modification after the catharsis of disaggregation, such that we could work in a fashion to make these disaggregated elements contemporary. In order to continue the anthropological motion away from the actual, a change of mood is required: from a composed affect of the status of the one endowed with the warranted assertibility of the actual to a restive one.

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What is our venue-chantier designed to assemble? The challenge would be to stylize these disaggregated elements in such a way that they become contemporary objects, that is, a recombination of diverse elements, old and new, good and bad, and so on. This assembling is neither a return to the configurations nor a flight from the configurations but rather an attempt to turn the curated elements of the actual into a contemporary mode of being. The work to be done in our chantier is modal: turning the determinations of the actual (recent past) into elements of a near future. We should remember, just as with the series of recent pasts, that there is no near future per se. Such work introduces the need to provide a mode of order for the near future. The available mode of order is a narrative one; it requires parameterization such that the near future can be both observed and participated in, and perhaps for some, intervened on. The Uses of “No” The only question that remains is the sense in which science gives “no” answer, and whether or not science might yet be of some use to the one who puts the Max Weber11 question correctly.

We knew we needed to specify a mode of subjectivation for the next phase and decided, unreflectively, to pick out affect qualities in addition to direct subject terms. A principal reason for picking out such affect terms is that they are diagnostic of the demonic and daemonic state of the mode of subjectivation in this phase. For example, we know that the stultus is the one who lets any and all representations into their mind. The restive person is refractory precisely because he refuses to accept any and all representations. This refusal does not mean that the restive one is unaware of the existence of these proliferating representations, only that he understands that they must be filtered if a veridictional motion is to be sustained. The temperament of the stultified character might well seem to be healthy thanks to his “openness,” he is open to everything. This openness, however, is not a virtue because it is not a mean in Aristotle’s sense. Or rather, it is an excess, which diminishes the capacity for following a logic of inquiry on a path away from the present and the actual. And yet, since L (our fictional anthropologist of the present desiring the actual) is professionally committed to research, this very openness constantly seems to produce stultitia. By contrast the restive character begins with the appropriate mode

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of subjectivation. This mode of subjectivation has a degree of openness. During fieldwork and ordinary life some openness to the present is essential. However, observing her stultified colleagues and students, Z (the fictional anthropologist of the actual desiring the contemporary) understands the need for work on the self to limit openness both as to quantity and quality. Openness by itself is not a virtue, especially when the task at hand is focused attention or second-order participation and observation. Such asceticism is a prerequisite for entering and leaving the actual. The restive character knows that to proceed she must develop habits that distribute attention in an appropriate manner. The stultified and the restive characters will both experience discordance and indetermination. One response for the stultus to stultification is recourse to assurance. A different response experienced in a restive manner is inquiry. A further response, once the essential phases have been worked through, is to wonder what one should do next. Perhaps this is the end of the road? Or perhaps there needs to be further inquiry? Or perhaps one should return to the initial diagnostic questions with which one began, as well as their orientation. Such a return would ask—given the warranted determinations in the actual configurations of discordancy—how should one take up anthropos, bios, veridiction, and ethics today? We knew that our objective throughout the whole process had entailed the mandatory inclusion of veridictional elements and that these elements would eventually have to be integrated into a narrative. The first step was to keep Weber’s question in mind. We were moving away from the actual. As we had previously been conceiving it, our possible destinations away from the actual were two: reconstruction and a different figure of truth. Reconstruction, we had decided on the basis of our evaluation of the possibility of successful intervention into the configurations of discordancy, was not the direction in which we wanted to move as the price of engagement was too high in terms of time, quality of human interaction, likely affect fields, and shallow intellectual depth. The other alternative was the direction of a different figure of truth, a goal that had been sign-posted by Michel Foucault as his objective. We were not sufficiently convinced that he himself had ever produced such a figure. After careful consideration, we decided that we were not equipped to take up figuration, at least for the time being. Thus, the challenges we leave behind are how to reconstruct the actual and what a different figure of truth might be. The challenge that remains preserves the integrity of the determinations established and asks, Given what one knows about the actual, how do we approach the

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curated series of recent pasts with a horizon of a near future or futures? How, that is, do we turn the actual into the contemporary? Mood What are we attempting to understand? We are attempting to move beyond the initial Weberian diagnosis that science and significance cannot be reconciled in modernity. We accept the Weberian imperative to move from things to concepts and problems. We wonder what it might mean to “put the question correctly.” We don’t think it means that thinking alone can reconcile the core discordancies and indeterminacies of our day. To the extent that Dewey thought that reconstruction was the path to achieve this reconciliation, we balk. Following Weber once again, a question that remains is how knowledge of the actual may be of some use, if we pose “the” question correctly. What is this question? What is this use? From the start this book was our attempt to get back to anthropology. After being first-order participants and second-order participantobservers, we then sought to think our way out of a disturbing set of experiences by turning these experiences into a series of recent pasts. We realized that to make them anthropological meant to preserve their integrity but not to remain at the level of prior experience. The question might be, What is a contemporary ethos? How is a contemporary ethos practiced? The use might be, Wissenschaft sets the parameters of the actual both in its immediate relation to the recent present from which it was forged, and from a deeper and more nuanced and complicated temporal horizon within which recent presents exist. Of course, we had not the slightest intention in the world to make the contemporary into an epoch or a static state. Rather, like the manner in which Foucault takes up the topic of modernity, the way we decided to experiment with it was to approach the contemporary as an ethos. Given that hypothesis, and given that we knew already that the contemporary held a relationship of a moving ratio to modernity, we decided to turn to a linchpin of Foucault’s ethos of modernity, the imperative, “You have no right to despise the present.” We were intrigued by this performative but as we were operating neither in modernity nor in the present, we decided to see if we could make sense of another performative, “You have no right to despise the actual.” Taking up this performative as a paraskeue¯-like maxim meant that whatever one did next one had to find a place for the determinations of the actual established during the inquiry.

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We eventually realized that the next steps in the process of articulating an ethos of the contemporary would be narrative ones. The next phase of participant-observation, as it were, would be writing in such a way that an ethos would be established in the prose that would embody the stance of the authors’ attempt to follow Weber and Foucault’s forks in the road of knowledge while making it possible, if difficult, for the reader to follow along and, we hoped, eventually be implicated in the ethos we sought to establish. We set out, that is to say, to find a mode of writing that would engage both reader and authors in a motion from an ethos of modernity to one of the contemporary. Given that objective, it seemed plausible that one step towards articulating an ethos was to establish a mood. What is mood? The French scholar, Gérard Genette, in a long chapter on “mood” in his book Narrative Discourse, An Essay in Method, quotes the definition of “mood” from the authoritative French dictionary, Littré, Mood [mood in French as well]: Name given to different forms of the verb that are used to affirm more or less the same thing in question and to express . . . the different points of view from which the life or the action is looked at.12

The capacity to vary points of view is what narrative mood aims at achieving. In order to achieve that goal, Genette claims, the narrative must be devoted to designing and structuring the place and function of distance and perspective. The successful use of mood favors modal variations as its primary means for the regulation of narrative stylization. Which “modal variations” would be pertinent to the task at hand? Not surprisingly the twin pair of not despising the present or the actual enter as the most relevant candidates. Moving away from the actual to the contemporary does not reconfigure the configurations; the ontological transformation is not on the actual; that would be reconstruction or figuration. The ontological transformation of the contemporary focuses on an attitude toward the actual, which even while acknowledging the demonic saturation of the actual, can nevertheless find within it the daemonic. To “despise” the present might take one of two variants; either one knows already that the present is despicable, in which case, one is not engaged in thinking, or else, on the basis of thought, one despises the present, either in its own terms or once rendered actual. Even if the actual is arguably despicable, an affect of contempt or scorn eliminates

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the register of worth on the object side as well as the subject side. As Seneca shows us relative to anger, a range of passions can make one blind to what is, which minimally is what one needs to attend to, if one is engaged in thinking which takes place in situations.13 Furthermore, the elimination of the register of worth would imperil a commitment to anthropology as a vocation. Contemporary Work Giorgio Agamben characterized the challenge of the contemporary as one of “taking texts from long ago, relatively recently, and quite close to the present, and to read them as if we were their contemporary.”14 This textual ontological (and archaeological) motion is the opposite of our own. The motion we follow compounds the determinations of the actual curated as recent pasts with a series of affective, scientific, and ethical determinations that can bring into a further practice of anthropology both the warranted assertibility of inquiry and the seriousness of ethical reflection; we seek to make these past affective, scientific, and ethical determinations available to be worked over anthropologically as part of our contemporary. The final challenge confronting us can be described as, how do we put into practice via appropriate equipment yet another reentry? The initial step in building this equipment is to consider the essential design parameters required by a form of participant-observation that is appropriate to a contemporary anthropology. One parameterization of the contemporary allows for an expansion of the temporal scope of the repertoire of available terms and concepts from those available for the present or the actual. Although the critical limitations of the topology of the contemporary are as yet murky (because little explored), we can say with assurance that it must be able to accommodate genealogical elements, historical facts, recent pasts, and near futures as well as modal operators including future perfects, subjunctives, and performatives, among others. A core design challenge of an anthropology of the contemporary is to bring these heterogeneous temporal elements into a semblance of concordance. In order to approach this objective, monitored design and experimentation with parameters of diverse narrative forms is a necessity. So too, one would expect, would be the invention of standards and forms of evaluation of such narrative crafting. This temporal parameterization, this controlled expansion, affords the possibility of drawing on the insights, experiences, reflections, ex-

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periments, and blockages of others who have faced situations that can be imagined to be parallel to those one has been confronted with, at least in a casuistic sense. For this anthropological expansion to be fruitful and not idiosyncratic, more systematic thought on what constitutes a contemporary “casuistic sense” is a challenge of the first-order of relevance. We remark that such a casuistry only becomes consistent and rigorous if the price of entry is previous inquiry that has achieved the status of an actual and that actual’s specific determinations. At that point, the temporal alignment of such cases opens up the possibility of discernment and diagnostic pertinence to the problems of the day or a still somewhat inchoate problematization. We have drawn on such a repertoire of cases from Weber, Dewey, Foucault, Luhmann, Seneca, Aristotle, and others. One might say that we have a sense of what an anthropological exploration of what different foyers d’expérience might consist in, as well as the multiple cases that others have produced from them. This allowed us to pay attention to the problems and problematizations these thinkers had been addressing. This attention, hopefully, functions as a means of curbing an overly rapid assimilation of their terms, foyers d’expérience, and problems into our problems and problematizations. It thereby enables the labor of discerning which dimensions could warrantably be brought forward into our contemporary. As we have seen throughout this book, affect structures and flows played a constitutive role in the experiments. It follows that an affect parameter is an essential component in the design and practice of an anthropology of the contemporary. We have seen examples of the structuring dynamics of narrative genres that have been analyzed and catalogued as being infused (for lack of a more precise term) by tragedy, comedy, bathos, stultitia, ataraxia, pathos, and so on. Our inquiry demonstrated the existence and importance of certain of these affect flows both in the situations confronted, the venues inhabited, the narratives toned, and so on. Again, the act of producing once again, this time for the contemporary, a repertoire of such affects and their uses enables one to observe observers observing in at least one dimension that Luhmann’s felicitous and comic phrase did not apparently take into account. Its omission is comic, tragic, pathetic, etc. We have been pragmatic in our deployment of veridictional parameters. Pragmatic does not mean merely instrumental but rather discerning of the seemingly appropriate standards and forms. It is often difficult or impossible to establish what these standards and forms are in advance, hence there is no method to provide false comfort and hence

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the practice of inquiry is a process and an existential one at that. It is a process of trial and error, giving form and considering evaluations, in a word, a hovering demand for possible rectification. As so many others have done variants of rectifiable work, the anthropology of the contemporary would be willfully self-blinding and self-deafening not to pay careful attention to the efforts of our predecessors. Among the many things to have been learned from our predecessors is their modes of production of what we can call, lacking a better term, their mode of truth effects. The various modes of veridiction in the histories of the sciences (including philosophy) are large but not infinite. Their possible stylization and specification is larger still. Once again, since the problems and situations and available tools of these worthy ancestors are not precisely coincident with our own, an incessant process of veridictional navigation is something that must be incorporated into one’s mode of observation/intervention with its requisite modifications at each phase. By so doing, one stands a chance of identifying vectors pertinent to such an intervention. The chance one stands must be buttressed by prior inquiry, resultant determinations, and made configurations. These warranted assertions offer no guarantees of enduring veracity, but they do make it possible for dame fortune or a vigilant and observant daemon to intervene in a timely manner. Differences in available conceptual repertoires (as well as situations in Dewey’s sense) and problems do not prevent some degree of understanding that carries with it a certain generality. Furthermore, attentive deployment of the results of such prior labor makes possible a distinctive type of exchange. Although such exchange is obviously narratively unilateral by bringing it into a venue built for contemporary artifacts, reverse effects can be generated: new approaches to Seneca or Dewey become plausible. Such a practice should be qualified as anthropological. Where there is total opacity or total transparency we are not dealing with anthropological situations. There would have been no breakdown in the present, no need for thinking, no venue construction, no configurational labor, no pathway invention and testing, and nothing contemporary would have been crafted or observed. The owl sleeps. Yet, for all the aid and solace provided by parameterization, of rectifying the temporal, terminological, and affective and veridictional repertoires, it is finally only our anthropological practice that activates the chantier of the contemporary. The “our” is an ethical term. As we have shown, it is the means through which collaborative inquiry is facilitated and endured. It is also the means through which the recent past is crafted, and it becomes at least conceivable to participate in a near fu-

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ture worth observing. Such observation is more than scientific, although once again moving beyond the scientific has to be earned; it is not a step one can skip over. It is in this sense that “not despising the actual” indicates that the work one has carried out was worthwhile but that the hard-earned determinations do not tell the whole story. Perhaps it is in this sense that science giving “no” answer might be useful to one who poses the question correctly.

Notes Preface 1. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Introduction 1. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), 13. 2. Eric Juengst, personal communication. 3. Erik Fisher, “Lessons Learned from the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications Program (ELSI): Planning Societal Implications Research for the National Nanotechnology Program,” Technology in Society 27, no. 3 (2005): 321–28. 4. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, “From Bioethics to Human Practices, or Assembling Contemporary Equipment,” in Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philips (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 390. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, “Human Practices: Interfacing Three Modes of Collaboration,” in The Ethics of Protocells: Moral and Social Implications of Creating Life in the Laboratory, edited by Mark A. Bedau and Emily C. Parke (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). 5. Ted Peters and Gaymon Bennett, eds., Bridging Science and Religion (Minneapolis: First Fortress Press, 2003). Ted Peters, Karen Labacqs, and Gaymon Bennett, eds., Sacred Cells?: Why Christians Should Support Stem Cell Research (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).

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6. On the difference between Mode 1 and Mode 2, see, for example, Michael Gibbons, “Mode 2 Society and the Emergence of Context-Sensitive Science,” Science and Public Policy 27, no. 3 (2000): 159–63; “. . . in Mode 1, problems are set and solved in a context governed by the, largely academic, interests of a specific community. By contrast, in Mode 2, knowledge is produced in a context of application involving a much broader range of perspectives; Mode 2 is transdisciplinary, not only drawing on disciplinary contributions butcan set up new frameworks beyond them; it is characterized by heterogeneity of skills, by a preference for flatter hierarchies and organizational structures which are transient. It is more socially accountable and reflexive than Mode 1.” Cf. Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, and Michael. Gibbons, Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (London: Polity Press, 2001). 7. Erik Fisher, “Ethnographic Invention: Probing the Capacity of Laboratory Decisions,” NanoEthics 1, no. 2 (2007): 155–65. 8. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, “Synthetic Biology: Ethical Ramifications 2009,” Journal of Systems and Synthetic Biology 3, no. 1 (2009): 99–108. Paul Rabinow, “Prosperity, Amelioration, Flourishing: From a Logic of Practical Judgment to Reconstruction,” Journal of Law and Literature 21, no. 3 (2009): 301–320. Paul Rabinow, Gaymon Bennett, and Anthony Stavrianakis, “Reply to the Respondents,” Journal of Law and Literature 21, no. 3 (2009): 471–79. Anthony Stavrianakis, “Flourishing and Discordance: On Two Modes of Human Science Engagement with Synthetic Biology” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012). 9. All NSF Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) have to be divided into “thrusts,” a metaphor of long duration within the NSF. 10. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 11. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 156. 12. Rabinow and Bennett, “Three Modes of Collaboration,” 268. 13. Rabinow and Bennett, “Three Modes of Collaboration,” 278. 14. Rabinow, “Prosperity, Amelioration, Flourishing,” 301–20. 15. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, enlarged edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), xxvii. 16. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 318. 17. A metric is “the standard by which, within a figuration, aspects of things are selected and coordinated as elements about which true and false speech acts are made and taken seriously.” Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, “A Diagnostic of Equipmental Platforms,” ARC Working Paper no. 9 (2007): 22. 18. Marc Manganaro, ed., Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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19. For indetermination, see John Dewey, “Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth,” Journal of Philosophy 38, no. 7 (1941): 180. For discordance, see John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 7. 20. Michel, Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 31. 21. Michel Foucault, “Table Ronde du 20 Mai 1978, ” in Dits et Écrits, Vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2001), 840. 22. Michel Foucault et al., “Des Travaux,” in Dits et Écrits Vol. 4 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), 367. 23. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York, Pantheon Books, 1984), 48. 24. Paul Rabinow, Symbolic Domination: Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 1. 25. Paul Rabinow, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 7. 26. Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 62. Chapter 1 1. Paul Rabinow, The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 103. 2. Stephen Collier, Andrew Lakoff, and Paul Rabinow, “What Is a Laboratory in the Human Sciences?” ARC Working Paper no. 1 (2006): 1. 3. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 331–37. Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–12. 4. Robert C, Bartlett and Susan D. Collins, trans., Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 5. Aristotle, “Politics,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (Random House, 1941), 1127–24. 6. Pierre Bourdieu, “Participant Objectivation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 2 (2003): 281–94. 7. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 318. 8. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 322. 9. June Allison, Power and Preparedness in Thucydides (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988), 38. Allison in her work provides a philological exegesis of the term. Paraskeue¯ can be translated into English as either ‘equipment’ or preparedness.’ The fundamental ambiguity in the term is its use as both noun and verb. Paraskeue¯ is both a process and a product. Importantly, Allison distinguishes between equipment (paraskeue¯) and action (ergon). Just as every action must have a suitable logos (reason), so too must the process of equipping. 10. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, “A Diagnostic of Equipmental Platforms,” ARC Working Paper no. 9 (2007): 13.

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11. Alisdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), 175. 12. John Dewey, Essays on Experimental Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1916), 12. 13. Paul Rabinow, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 7. 14. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, enlarged edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), xxi. 15. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, xxi. 16. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), 119. 17. Rabinow and Bennett, Designing Human Practices. 18. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 771. 19. Niklas Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, translated by William Whobrey (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 62. 20. Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, s.v. “arrogance.” 21. Stephen Collier, Andrew Lakoff, and Paul Rabinow, “Biosecurity: Toward an Anthropology of the Contemporary,” Anthropology Today 20, no. 5 (October, 2005). 22. Rabinow, The Accompaniment, 133. 23. Lyle Fearnley, “Signals Come and Go: Syndromic Surveillance and Styles of Biosecurity,” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 1615–32. Meg Stalcup and Stéphane Verguet, “Global Health and the Demands of the Day,” Health, Culture and Society 1, no. 1 (2011): 29–44. Carlo Caduff, “The Semiotics of Security: Infectious Disease Research and the Biopolitics of Informational Bodies in the United States,” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 2 (2012): 333–57. 24. Anthony Stavrianakis et al., “Safety, Security, Preparedness: An Orientation to Biosecurity Today,” Human Practices Green Paper (2011). Gaymon Bennett et al., “From Synthetic Biology to Biohacking: Are We Prepared?” Nature Biotechnology 27 (2009): 1109–11. 25. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 52–65. Chapter 2 1. In addition to Dewey’s sense of the term reconstruction, it is worth noting that the German term for reconstruction is Umbildung, “Um-”, meaning “in another way,” “again,” “over,” and “Bildung,” a pedagogical term of cultural formation. 2. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008). Paul Rabinow, “Beyond Ethnography: Anthropology as Nominalism,” Cultural Anthropology vol. 3, no. 4 ( 1988): 355–64.

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3. The classic work is George Marcus and James Clifford, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). The twenty-fifth anniversary edition discusses some of the reactions and developments that followed in its wake. Further reflections can be found in Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, Tobias Rees, and James D. Faubion, Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 4. On the anthropological extension and reworking of Freud’s concept of durcharbeiten, see Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 120. 5. The term Ausgang from Kant’s essay, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” is translated by Mary J Gregor, as ‘exit,’ in Practical Philosophy, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). It has been alternately translated as ‘release,’ ‘emergence.’ and ‘way out.’ Cf. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–1983 (New York: Picador, 2010), 26. 6. Cf. James D. Faubion and George Marcus, Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 7. Recent examples of the first two modes include Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham and London: Duke University Press Books, 2009). David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). For the latter see, for example, Paul Rabinow, The Accompaniment. 8. Donald Winnicott, “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 30 (1949): 69–74. Gregory Bateson et al., “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behavioral Science 1, no. 4 (1956). 9. Immanuel Kant, Logic (New York: Dover 1988), 29. 10. Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen E. Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 11. Despite the fact that many of our colleagues talked a language of ethics and cultural significance, we saw little in the way of attempts to problematize and then invent venues, forms, and practices. Finally, some of the dismissive and derogatory comments we received from the biologists we also continued to receive from social scientists. 12. See Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 13. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 131–33. 14. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 318. 15. The Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, s.v. “withering.” 16. Seneca, “Letter 52, On Choosing Our Teachers,” Moral Letters to Lucilius by Seneca, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/ Letter_52, accessed December 9, 2011. 17. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”, 34. 18. Fredric Jameson, Brecht on Method (New York: Verso, 1998), 21–36.

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19. Cf. James, L. Kinneavy, “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning, edited by Jean Deitz Moss (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 79–105. 20. Albert O Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 21. Fredric Jameson, Brecht on Method (London: Verso, 1998), 21. 22. Thanks to Adrian Van Allen. 23. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, enlarged edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948). 24. http://bios-technika.net. Chapter 3 1. Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 67. 2. John Dewey, “Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth,” Journal of Philosophy 38, no. 7 (1941): 169–86, 181. “Inquiry begins in an indeterminate situation, and not only begins in it but is controlled by its specific qualitative nature. Inquiry, as the set of operations by which the situation is resolved (settled, or rendered determinate), has to discover and formulate the conditions which describe the problems in hand. For they are the conditions to be ‘satisfied’ and are the determinants of ‘success.’ Since these conditions are existential, they can be determined only by observational operations; the operational character of observation being clearly exhibited in the experimental character of all scientific determination of data.” 3. The Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, s.v. “solution.” “B. transf. and fig. A breach, break, or interruption.” 4. Tom Burke, Dewey’s New Logic: a Reply to Russell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 238. “One thing which recommends the notion of warranted assertability as a working concept in logic is that the warranted assertability of judgments is tangibly certifiable by means of one’s concrete actions in the world, whereas the truth of one’s assertions remains at bottom a metaphysical ideal.” 5. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, New Directions—The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies (December 2010). Cf. chapter 4. 6. Cf. Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010). 7. For a time we were struggling with the question of what the subject position and activity of curation might be, that is, how we might be capable of doing this activity of curation. We recognized that this was not the appropriate question at this point in time. 8. http://bios-technika.net. 9. For an analysis of how this field experience was figured, see Paul Rabi-

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now and Gaymon Bennett, Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 123. 10. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 14. 11. By traditional we mean ELSI or “post-ELSI” efforts that accepted the reigning relations. 12. The bind is, if you play this game and are committed to both inquiry and Bildung, the situation will force you into position where Bildung and its observation will be methodologically rendered as opinion or value. Hence, the substance of Bildung, oriented by the questions, Is this worthwhile and what do I need to do to make myself capable? for us are problems of inquiry for which the domination of method is discordant. Method that makes a separation between knowledge and Bildung sets up a discordancy that cannot be overcome. It is not that the question of the good life is opaque, it is within the present, but as long as it is not connected to inquiry and not made actual, then either Bildung or method needs to be abandoned. Chapter 4 1. Jean Domarchi et al., “Hiroshima Notre Amour, ” Cahiers du Cinema 97 (1959), 5. 2. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopé, trans. and eds., Seneca: Moral and Political Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2006). 3. Pierre Bourdieu, Meditations Pascaliennes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1998). 4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1986, orig. 1975). 5. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2002). 6. See also, George Marcus, “The Uses of Complicity in the Changing Mise-en-Scène of Anthropological Fieldwork,” Representations 59 (1997): 85–108. 7. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1927). 8. That being said, Venter’s own publicity apparatus and his past conflictual history with the government genome sequencing project all served to create a discursive event. 9. For Bennett’s request to participants in SB5 see http://anthropos-lab.net (see Ripostes). 10. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: Norton and Company, 2004). 11. http://bioethics.gov/cms/node/174. 12. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, New Directions—The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies (December 2010). 13. See the opening remarks of the commission’s meetings, http://bioethics .gov/cms/node/179.

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14. Dave Rejeski of the Woodrow Wilson became a consultant on the SynBERC Scientific Advisory Board after this event. 15. http://bioethics.gov/cms/node/174. 16. Will Hyton, “How We Are Still Not Prepared,” New York Times Magazine, October 30, 2011. 17. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), 236. 18. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Kant: Political Writings, edited by H.S. Reiss, translated by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 19. On the common sense Anglophone use of the term “true,” see Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Chapter 5 1. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), 13. 2. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1927). Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002). Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1993). 3. Luc Boltanski, L’Amour et la Justice Comme Compétences: Trois Essais de Sociologie de l’Action (Paris, Métaillé, 1990). Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la Justification: Les Économies de la Grandeur (Paris, Gallimard, 1991). Luc Boltanski, De la Critique: Précis de Sociologie de l’Émancipation (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 4. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, 289. 5. Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, “A Diagnostic of Equipmental Platforms,” ARC Working Paper no. 9 (2007). 6. It bears repeating that the figures, categories, and equipmental platforms presented in the diagnostic are in no way to be taken as epochal indicators. There have been other figures and other equipmental platforms in the past, there are others in the present, and without doubt there will be others in the future. The three figures, their equipmental correlates, and salient features have been selected from among other possible candidates. Moreover, other diagnostics of contemporary equipmental platforms could be designed and synthesized. 7. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 8. R.S. Bluck, ed., Plato’s Meno, translated by George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 165. “I consider that both in your appearance and in other respects you are extremely like the flat torpedo sea-fish; for it benumbs anyone who approaches and touches it.” 9. The Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, s.v. “haven.” 10. Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected

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Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordan (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 160. 11. Paul Rabinow, “Prosperity, Amelioration, Flourishing: From a Logic of Practical Judgment to Reconstruction,” Journal of Law and Literature 21, no. 3 (2009): 301–320. 12. On economies of worth see Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la Justification: Les Économies de la Grandeur (Paris, Gallimard, 1991). 13. Gaymon Bennett et al., “From Synthetic Biology to Biohacking: Are We Prepared?” Nature Biotechnology 27 (2009): 1109–11. conclusion 1. Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, Cours au Collège de France, 1982–83 (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 2008), 4–5: «Et par ‘pensée’, je voulais dire une analyse de ce qu’on pourrait appeler des foyers d’expérience, où s’articule les uns sur les autres: premièrement, les formes d’un savoir possible ; deuxièmement, les matrices normatives de comportement pour les individus ; et enfin des modes d’existence virtuels pour des sujets possible.» 2. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 156. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 3. 4. “In mathematics, a path in a topological space X is a continuous map f from the unit interval I = [0,1] to Xf:I→ X. The initial point of the path is f(0) and the terminal point is f(1). One often speaks of a “path from x to y” where x and y are the initial and terminal points of the path. Note that a path is not just a subset of X which ‘looks like’ a curve, it also includes a parameterization. For example, the maps f(x) = x and g(x) = x2 represent two different paths from 0 to 1 on the real line. A topological space for which there exists a path connecting any two points is said to be path-connected. Any space may be broken up into a set of path-connected components. The set of pathconnected components of a space X is often denoted π0(X)”; From, “Path (topology),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Path_(topology), accessed December 9, 2011. 5. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 460. 6. Paul Rabinow, The Accompaniment. 7. Plutarch, Moralia Volume 1, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Harvard: Loeb Classical Library, 1927), 201–62. 8. Michel Foucault, “Table Ronde du 20 Mai 1978,” 840. «Mes livres ne sont pas des traités de philosophie ni des études historiques; tout au plus des fragments philosophiques dans des chantiers historiques.» 9. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 33–85. 10. Personal communication, December 2, 2011. 11. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 131. “Under these internal presuppositions, what is the meaning of science as a vocation, now after all these

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former illusions, the ‘way to true being,’ the ‘way to true art,’ the ‘way to true nature,’ the ‘way to true God,’ the ‘way to true happiness,’ have been dispelled? Tolstoy has given the simplest answer, with the words: ‘Science is meaningless because it gives no answer, the only question important for us: “what shall we do and how shall we live?” That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable.’” 12. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 161. 13. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procopé, trans. and eds., Seneca: Moral and Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 14. Paul Rabinow, The Accompaniment, 109.

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