And so a question; when you entered the field was it a concern as to who would be willing to listening, in addition to finding those whom you wanted to listen to? Perhaps this question is a little obvious. If it was a concern, or is a concern, in what did it consist as activity?

No sooner did I abandon this topic than I picked up Arendt’s The Human Condition, wherein there is, in chapter 6, an all too brief reflection on novelty (of precisely that form of philosophy of modernity that Tobias articulates as the main domain of this activity). The chapter announces that the three great events that define the character of the modern world are America (its discovery), the Reformation (and counter-reformation) and the telescope of Galileo. At this point Arendt says:

“The names we connect with them, Galileo Galilei and Martin Luther and the great seafarers, explorers and adventurers in the age of discovery, still belong to the premodern world. Moreover, the strange pathos of novelty, the almost violent insistence of nearly all the great authors, scientists and philosophers since the seventeenth century that they saw things never seen before, thought thoughts never thought before, can be found in none of them, not even in Galileo.”

There follows a footnote on novelty, the emergence of the term scienza nuova, a reference to Alexandre Koyre and a bit on the work of Karl Jaspers (from whom Arendt borrows the term “pathos of novelty”), specifically Japers’ essay on Descartes. Her basic point seems to be that these great events that characterize modernity are not continuous with the past, but nor is it possible to say that they occurred because Luther or Galileo or the seafarers were seeking something new. Rather they were ensconced in their own conceptual scheme (to foreshadow the likes of Kuhn and Davidson) in which novelty was not so important, but out of which emerged a new scheme with novelty as its key value. Nothing new about this, as we say.

Now, on the one hand, this is undoubtedly reassuring, to see novelty explicitly marked out as a value which radically increased in stature with the rise of modernity, modern philosophy and science, and around which we all turn with a faithfulness that we rarely question. On the other hand, it is a version of things that re-introduces an epochal break (a form of novelty about which we have been taught to be suspicious around here), and which Tobias very nicely articulated in his comment. Surely novelty is not itself new, and from here we can have a rich, but ultimately fruitless discussion about modernity and the philosophy of history.

So at this point I would echo Anthony’s comment on the previous post that there is reason to be careful about the referent of novelty–no novelty as such, but always the novelty of some thing. Novelty always modifies a claim. However, this requires more clarification, so let me propose this distinction:

1) the question of novelty as a claim about something: is it new or not? Can one define a set of parameters (a mode of veridiction, even) that allow novelty to be claimed convincingly in some cases and not others. Does this claim vary with the kinds of objects in play: art, scientific ‘discoveries’, corporate product design, fashion, political causes, etc.

2) the question of novelty as one value among others, and often the most important one: it is more important to be new than certain, true, effective, flourishy, just, human etc. Or to refine this, all other values are subordinated to novelty: it may be more effective, more just, more certain than something else, but we should value it because this makes it new. It strikes me that classical conservatism is the only stance that actively resists this version of novelty (i.e. “Just because something is new, doesn’t mean it is better.” See for example, “The Relentless Cult of Novelty” by Solzhenitsyn).

and related to this,

2a) the question of novelty as marker of priority, and a kind of bureacratic mechanism for managing the distribution of credit, resources and accolades or in the case of fraud, accusations. Novelty-as-firstness.

It strikes me that we anthropologists of the contemporary can safely hold hands, sing “If I Had a Hammer” and reject (1), in favor of emergence, or non-epochal thinking, or of difference and motion. I think there is a path out of that kind of obsessive concern with the new (and I do think assemblage-apparatus-problematization a useful starting place for that).

However, I think it is extremely difficult to reject (2) or (2a). We can be cynical about them; we can see them as a problem of “some kind of rhetoric of authority as well as entrepreneurship” (Paul’s comment); we can probably tie it to the economic and financial imperatives that drive knowledge production today; we can tie (2a) to the “university-ification” of culture (not the corporatization of the university), or perhaps to the “responsibilization” of individuals who must now all represent themselves as entrepreneurs, scientists, each with something new to offer. In any case, I would argue that (2) and (2a) are forms of novelty-as-experience which are central to self-fashioning in the contemporary. When there are perfectly recognizable reasons to do something–something that will enhance flourishing or justice or even certainty–and yet it is impossible to do so unless it can also be made new, preferably cutting edge, then this form of novelty (or whatever it is) is at work.

An interesting outcome of this distinction is that (2) and (2a) becomes a problem for (1). As novelty-as-value and the need for widespread priority-ranking comes to dominate the scale of values, when they become the primary route to advancement, funding, access to power especially in knowledge-production, but beyond it is well, then this means people begin to propose, and to accept, ever more claims and things as novel in the sense of (1).

Think, for instance, of the proliferation of journals in academia. Combine a publish-or-perish imperative with a novelty-as-key-value, and the system will burst if people cannot find outlets which both allow them to publish and stamp it with a seal of approval (“Now with more novelty!”), and so the number of journals is growing at an exponential rate today. Obviously, a great deal that is published today (that vast sea of ignorance) is not new in absolute terms, but only new to some community of scholars that read that journal (Or in the worst case, only new in order to promote careers). Differentiation of knowledge production between a high-culture of novelty and a low-culture of novelty (or perhaps a Royal and a Minor domain of novelty) thus seems possible, so long as the two don’t mingle. No longer does it seem so easy to denounce “pseudo-science” “bad science” or “alternative science” simply because there is an exponentially growing sea of grey areas between the royal science and the many minor sciences all around it.

So the claim that everything must be new is true only in the sense of (2) and (2a), not (1). It is clear, I think that everything cannot be new in the sense of (1), for whatever value of new. Novelty presumes ranking and priority. But that doesn’t stop everyone from claiming novelty, regardless of the absolute truth of the matter. It is a bit of a Monadology: everything is new to some person or group, from some perspective, each living in different logoi, or within various, partially overlapping modernities. Obviously the differentiating, de-massifying power of the internet is crucial to this dynamic. At the same time that a thousand journals flourish, the top 10 most-read and most cited journals begin to matter more than ever before.

Anthony asked: is it not possible to be attentive to changes in degree and changes in kind? To which I would say with respect to (1), it is absolutely possible. This is afterall, bread and butter to scientists who read only Kuhn: puzzle solving is new in degree, paradigms are new in kind. However, with respect to (2) or (2a), I think it much harder. Every infinitesimal change in degree is accorded the status of novelty, because that is so much more important than other values. Or at least, one can increase funding, prestige, attention only be claiming that a change is new, to which all other values are subordinated. It is new because it is better, it is new because it is greener, it is new because it is more responsible, etc. What would a change in kind look like in terms of (2) or (2a)?

Consider what Jaspers says of novelty:

In the days when philosophy was metaphysics, a thinker lived in an enduring whole. Content with the philosophia perrenis in which he believed, he did not distinguish between the old and the new in his thoughts, for all of them were rooted in the whole. He judged ideas not by their novelty but by their authenticity. (Essay on Descartes, p. 132)

The characteristic feature of modern science therefore (and Jaspers excludes philosophy from this search for novelty, Descartes’ New Method notwithstanding) is the image of rungs in an endless ladder. But what I think we see today is the endless proliferation of ladders, many of which cannot identify the ground they stand on, much less what they climb towards. Novelty, and the progress that is its justification, looks more like book-keeping from this perspective.

One last thing, Tobias’ example of plasticity of the brain and its neurons is a lively one. In that same last section of the Human Condition, Arendt goes on at length (in unashamedly epochal terms) about the way Descartes’ philosophy moved the Archimedean point from a place outside ourselves, even outside the earth, to the inside of our heads: “What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds, and this they cannot have in common strictly speaking (283)” Neuroscience would be the apotheosis of this movement, and plasticity the introduction of doubt into the very claim that we have in minds in common…. all we have now are computers in common, and just barely that.

But I am no longer sure what I mean by novelty. At one level, this is not just about conventional novelty in science, which is often treated as an unproblematic feature of scientific research–rather, it is about the effort necessary to make something unrecognizable into something novel. It’s not just one set of scientists that needs to see something as new, but an intersection or union of multiple sets. Safety was seen by most chemists, physicists, engineers in nano as something downstream, an uninteresting test after the real action is over. The story I tell is about making safety into something “novel” enough to transcend that image.

At another level, however, novelty is so pervasive and so important today that nearly everything counts as something new. I’ve started to wonder whether it would be possible to find anyone in science who was in fact not interested in making something new, and if such a creature could ever survive? This rise to prominence of novelty as the supervalue of values renders it unstable, both as a feature of working science, and as a concept for understanding what is happening. Is novelty being decoupled from power? Is it proliferating into a bureaucratic value like cleanliness or accuracy?

Finally, there is a philosophical angle to this concern. Concerning the cultural significance of nanotechnology (those conceptual interconnection of problems of Weberian fame), the question of novelty is in the background all the time. Weber’s Tolstoyish question “how shall we live” is rendered problematic today because the way we live is changing, and quickly by most accounts, with the knowledge and things we create. Old answers don’t apply, new double binds arise, paradoxes and dangers and uncertainties which, even in the best of cases, seem unanswerable in classic philosophical terms. The twist is the contemporary concern (obsession even) with novelty: both within science and engineering and outside of it, novelty has become the single most important cultural feature of knowledge production in our world. More important than lastingness, more important than certainty, more important than utility even, the race for novelty absolutely structures and determines the lives of scientists and engineers, as well as those who observe them (journalists, funders, regulators, anthropologists and philosophers). If novelty has become so important, then it gives a twist to that classic philosophical question: how should we live now? And now? And…. now? Like that annoying mobile phone salesperson who says “Can you hear me now?” the question can be asked over and over again. How should we answer this question when things seem to be changing so fast and so constantly? According to what temporality should the problem of novelty be rendered conceptually solid?

So two questions: 1) what is the conceptual locus of this problem? Are there other concepts (and/or texts) which form the horizon of the problem? 2) Is novelty as I’ve described it above, a problem that relates science and politics (or rationality and governmentality) in ways that need to be explored? Does novelty play as central a role in the security of vital systems or in the formation of police power as it does in the generation of scientific and engineering objects?

Update:: Okay maybe three, since I forgot to include the equally problematic concept of “emergence” and “emergent forms” which I do not think helps matters all that much. It shifts the problem away from the de novo creation of things to their recombination. This is useful as a first step, but I also think there is as much “emergence” out there (and as valued) as there is novelty.

Read more after the jump.

What is the “vital” in “vital systems”?

The reference to collections of heterogeneous elements such as webs of industrial production and transport and information infrastructures as “vital systems” can be traced back to the rise of total war, and specifically to the articulation of strategic bombing theory by military planners during and then after World War I. In strategic bombing theory, we see a new understanding of economic and social life: as a collection of vulnerable “vital” systems that could be made the target of attack. The Italian air war theorist Douhet, thus, argued that air war should no longer focus on military equipment or the bodies of soldiers. Instead, it should focus on “the most vital, most vulnerable, and least protected points of the enemy’s territory” – systems of industrial production, food supply, and so on, upon which all aspects of a war effort depended. Strategic bombing was elaborated in the U.S. during the interwar period. Key figures in the U.S. Air Corps Tactical School sought to identify the targets that were crucial to a war effort, in particular through the theory of the “industrial web.” Air force officer Donald Wilson, a key proponent of this theory, wrote in 1938 that the modern economy was composed of “interrelated and entirely interdependent elements,” and that by attacking these “essential arteries,” or “organic essentials” of a society and economy it would be possible for a strategic bombing campaign to paralyze an enemy war effort (quoted in Faber 1997: 218, 219). It is evident – and I will return to this point – that Wilson was drawing on a prevalent contemporary understanding of the collectivity as a kind of organism, referring to infrastructures as the key elements that made the polity’s “life” possible. Industrial web theorists also articulated a new understanding of the United States as a collection of such vulnerable systems, noting that an enemy could easily attack “any targets of their choice in the vital industrial heart of our country (ibid: 194).

In the ensuing years, the term “vital” continues to appear in a diversity of contexts that Andy and I have described in our article on “The Vulnerability of Vital Systems.” From civil defense and mobilization planning in the 1950s, to articulations of “total preparedness” in the 1960 and 1970s, to more recent discussions of concepts such as critical infrastructure protection, the “vital” designates infrastructures, production systems, and so on, that are critical to collective security and wellbeing. A 1973 review of the work of the Office of Emergency Preparedness during the Nixon administration, thus, argued that “Along with readiness to meet any external threats to our national security, we must be continuously prepared to deal with internal problems that vitally affect our welfare and strength as a nation – natural disasters, fuel and energy shortages, spiraling inflation of wages and prices, and disruptions of transportation and other vital public services” (New Dimensions of Civil Emergency Preparedness: 1969 – 1973). In 1985, James Woolsey and Robert Kupperman wrote of events that could disable “networks crucial to life support, economic stability, and national defense.” (Woolsey and Kupperman 1985) And Critical Foundations, a 1997 Presidential report that laid out the basic principles of critical infrastructure protection argued that “Reliable and secure infrastructures are … the foundation for creating the wealth of our nation and our quality of life as a people,” noting that “certain of our infrastructures are so vital that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on our defense and economic security” (Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection 1997: 3).

Hesitations

Thus, we see that reference to the “vital” can be found in a range of texts and contexts that we have been examining to indicate certain systems of production, communication, transportation, and so on, and a certain set of problems that have emerged historically in relation to these objects, concerning their vulnerability to catastrophic disruption, their criticality, etc. A question that immediately emerges is: how does this usage relate to other and perhaps more familiar reference domains of the word “vital”? What parts of those other meanings does it carry along with it? Etymologically, “vital” obviously relates to that which is connected to life. The word generally refers to that which is essential to life. In many early usages (in the 15^th or 16^th centuries) “vital” is not associated with what we now understand as the biological; indeed, it often refers to the spirit and is specifically opposed to mortal flesh. It was then attached to biological life, although with some variation of meaning and reference (thus the somewhat contrasting implications of, on the one hand, “vital organs” or “vital statistics,” referring, respectively, to the individual body and the population as biological entities, and, on the other hand, “vitalism” – which retains some of the spiritual reference of earlier usage).

So how was this word that first referred to the animating spirit and then came to refer to biology and to biological organisms subsequently used to describe electricity grids, industrial enterprises, or road networks? An obvious answer has to do with the 19^th and early 20^th century extension of organismic metaphors to new understandings of “society” as a single totality that was like an organism in that it had certain vital functions, susceptibility to disease, certain predictable norms and patterns of pathology, and so on. As is well known, this metaphor was widespread in projects ranging from social welfare to nationalism to eugenics to economic development. When we find reference to the “vital” in the theorists of strategic bombing, it is, in part, such organismic metaphors that they have in mind – thus Donald Wilson’s reference to “essential arteries” and “organic essentials.” So here would seem to be arguments against using the word “vital” to describe what we are trying to designate: it is associated with a now-discredited extension of organismic metaphors to describe collective life, one that was often linked to rather nefarious projects; it is primarily associated with first spiritual and then biological definitions of life.

That said, I continue to find reference to the word vital quite rich and suggestive, and to suggest a set of connections – both conceptual and genealogical – that are not suggested by other obvious terms that also show up in first-order discourse such as “critical” or “essential.” Here, very briefly, are a few reasons why.

• First, the organismic reference is not the only one relevant to our first-order actors. There has been and continues to be a very widespread use of the “vital” in military contexts, which simply refers to issues that are strategically as opposed to tactically important, and it was this military usage that, from strategic bombing to civil defense, was transferred to the description of the domestic economy in the context of total war. I wrote a blog post about this a couple years back when reading Churchill on civil defense during the Battle of Britain. There, he wrote of the “many thousands of ‘vulnerable points’ — bridges, power-stations, depots, vital factories, and the like” that “had to be guarded day and night from sabotage or sudden onset.” For many of our “first order actors” this military reference domain is of central importance. Given the role of military developments in our story, “vital” nicely points to a crucial line of genealogical development.

• Second, if organismic metaphors are explicit in the early theorists of strategic bombing, then they are markedly absent in more recent discussions. Thus, the clear implication of the Presidential report on critical infrastructures, cited above, is that these infrastructures are essential to life, but there is no hint of concern with the idea that the totality they comprise is “like” an organism in any way. In this sense, if it is still “life” that is in question, it is individual life, a collection of living individuals, not the “life” of a collective in some mystical sense. In this sense, rather than muddying our account by reference to an unacknowledged organicism, tracing the treatment of “vital systems” might show us how a problematic initially understood in terms of organismic metaphors was loosed from these metaphors and from the political projects with which they were associated. Certainly, as Andy and I showed in our article on “Distributed Preparedness,” this is crucial to the American story, where the emergence of a concern with the vulnerability of vital systems after World War II was linked to efforts to construct a model of the modern state that did not involve the “collectivism” of European or Soviet socialist variants. The problematic was: how could one protect the vital systems upon which life depends while preserving the traditions of individualism, local autonomy, and free enterprises that, for contemporaries, were key to the American political system?
• That said – and this is a third point – despite discomfort with an organismic metaphor for describing the totality of collective life, it seems that there is something valuable about this reference to the historical scene in which these metaphors emerged. Organismic metaphors were, again, linked to a whole series of projects – social welfare, eugenics, and total war – in which “life” came to be understood not only in relationship to individual biology but to the entire series of relationships that constitute the social milieu, and that themselves became the objects of new kinds of knowledge and intervention. In this sense, the “vital” here indicates a more general relationship of our story to the history of biopolitics, through which, following Foucault, life and population became problems of government. Thus, in tracing out the changing reference of this term – from strategic bombing to civil defense and domestic preparedness for nuclear attack to a broader concern with preparedness for various kinds of future catastrophe – we might also be tracing a modulation of the vital, from something conceived as a biological organism in a natural environment to something that is necessarily linked to the socio-technical milieu of modern life.

Mutations of “Vital” – A Note on Sloterdijk

This modulation might be suggested in a very preliminary way by reading our claims about vital systems in relationship to Sloterdijk’s observations about the vital in Terror from the Air. Very briefly, Sloterdijk locates a critical moment of contemporary history in the emergence of chemical war during World War I. The distinctive feature of chemical war, he observes, is the “displacement of destructive action from the ‘system’ (here: the enemy’s body) onto his ‘environment’” (22). In attacking the environment, chemical war aims to disrupt “the enemy’s primary, ecologically dependent vital functions” by which he means the strictly biological problems of “respiration, central nervous regulation, and sustainable temperature and radiation conditions” (16). He is thus tracing the emergence of an “expanded zone of warfare” in which “the enemy became an object in the environment whose removal was vital to the system’s survival” (27).

Here we find a number of intriguing convergences as well as some striking distinctions with our work. The most obvious convergence is Sloterdijk’s observation concerning a shift from attack on the enemy’s body – the “system” – to the “environment” that is “vital” to life. As noted above, we have observed a parallel shift in strategic bombing theory from attacks on troops and military equipment to the “vital systems” of food supply, industrial production, and infrastructures that are essential to a total military effort, not least because the lives of troops depend on them. The striking difference is in how this “environment” is conceptualized in each case. Sloterdijk, it seems, has a naturalistic conception of the environment. It is the previously un-reflected upon (and, he seems to imply, rather implausibly, previously pure) air that surrounds us. But in our genealogical work, we have found that the environment that is increasingly “explicated” – and that becomes the target of military attack – during the 20^th century is comprised of a vast array of other systems: that is, self-consciously constituted, interdependent infrastructures and production facilities upon which life, in modern societies, depends. In this sense, it might be possible to write Sloterkijk’s history into the more general history of forms of knowledge and modalities of intervention concerned with the vulnerability of vital systems – both as objects of attack and as objects of protection or security.

Questions on Concept Work

In light of all this, here are a few questions that might be valuable to discuss: Are these associations of the vital with an organismic metaphor for collective life disqualifying? Or are they valuable in pointing to important lines of genealogical development and mutations of the vital? How does the identification of first-order concepts in a genealogical series relate to their use in an anthropology of the contemporary? How does this use of “vital” or “vital systems” compare to familiar concepts such as Foucault’s “population,” which was the object of apparatuses of “security”?

We will proceed by choosing selected concepts that have emerged out of our current projects on topics such as domestic preparedness in the United States, synthetic biology, ethics, and so on. We are particularly interested in the way that concepts emerge from a certain field of inquiry, in the work that is done to formulate them, and in the way that they are then extended to have more general meaning and use. We will try to maintain a regular schedule of posting – about one per month – that we hope will spur serious exchange and critical discussion, and that will aim to improve our collective work on and use of concepts. Each post will be associated with a text that is of general interest (in other words, one that is not necessarily tied to a given topic of inquiry). If the exchanges prove fruitful, we will turn them into more stable documents that can be transferred to the appropriate area of the web site.

The initial post will be on a concept that Andy and I have been thinking about in our work on domestic preparedness in the United States: the “vital” in “vital systems.” In about a month Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett will post on “political spirituality.” Although we have ideas for a number of posts after that, we invite your suggestions on future directions.

We thank you, in advance, for your participation in this new initiative.

CFP: Securing the future: the role of space in impending crises

AAG Las Vegas, March 22-7, 2009

Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)

There has been a noticeable shift in public policy across a range of sectors
from policy focussed on individual (or corporate) responsibility to a focus
on the ‘environment’ (imagined in various guises) as the cause of, and
potential solution to a range of social ills (e.g. obesity, drinking, crime,
terrorism, climate change, etc). Often focussed on (though not restricted
to) the ‘urban’, such policy uses a range of terms (space, environment,
context, etc.) to refer to the combination of spatial relations (social,
cultural, physical, political, economic etc.) deemed responsible for
impending crises. Similar to Foucault’s (2007) use of the term ‘Milieu’,
such ‘environments’ are seen as spaces of intervention and hence as spaces
of security as environments and populations are seen as mutually
constitutive (population understood as a multiplicity bound to the material
relations within which they live).

Thus, according to Foucault, using the example of the construction or
planning of towns as a form of social control, security can be
differentiated from discipline through its particular relationship with both
space and time: “Security will rely on a number of material givens. It
will, of course, work on site with the flows of water, islands, air and so
forth. Thus it works on a given…[which] will not be reconstructed to arrive
at a point of perfection, as in a disciplinary town. … The town will not
be conceived or planned according to a static perception, but will open onto
a future that is not exactly controllable. … The specific space of security
refers then to a series of possible events; it refers to the temporal and
the uncertain, which have to be inserted into a given space” (2007 p.19-20).

Across the social sciences a range of work has also noted a fundamental
shift in the orientation to the future within recent policy (to pre-emption
and anticipatory governance) and accordingly the adoption of a broad range
of techniques (futures methodologies, multi-level modelling, scenario
planning, etc.) to capture and control future spaces. Such policies and
subsequent interventions (e.g. healthy / green towns) involve a range of
assumptions about the relationships between bodies, spaces, technologies,
natures, etc. which require further investigation. This call is therefore
for papers which explore the spatial and temporal relationships of policies
which claim the ability to secure the future.

Reference: Foucault M (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at
the College de France 1977-78. Translated by Graham Burchell. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmilan

Papers may address (but are not limited to) the following issues in relation
to such policy:

The temporalities (habit, predictions, everydaylife) and spatialities of security;
The relationship between bodies and spaces;
Methodologies for capturing future spaces;
The role of different populations in securing the future (age, gender, ethnicity, etc);
The construction of urban natures/cultures;
Sites of impending crisis / intervention (city centres, towns, suburbs, etc);
The role of the environment / urban as an ameliorative device;
The construction of impending crises as a result of ‘urban’ spaces / environments;
The role of technologies;
Temporal and spatial aspects of mobilities;
Situating policy within place and time – attempts to apply models of success
from other places;
The conflation of different ‘crises’;

Please send abstracts to Bethan Evans (b.evans@mmu.ac.uk) by Friday 10th
October (deadline for registration with the AAG is 16th October)

As those who have read the book know, Reassembling is a very formal and methodological book. The key idea is that many social scientific concepts posit a reality behind and beyond observed phenomena; that they enable an unwarranted “acceleration” in analysis that does not, therefore, “pay the full price” for tracing associations. I thought, at the time of reading, that this was a pretty good phrase — “pay the full price.”

So lookie here in Birth of Biopolitics: In a discussion of “inflationary” critiques of the state (which he is criticizing), Foucault says the following: “The third factor, the third inflationary mechanism which seems to be characteristic of this type of analysis, is that it enables one to avoid paying the full price of reality and actuality inasmuch as, in the name of this dynamism of the state, something like a kinship or danger, something like the great fantasy of the paranoic and devouring state can always be found. To that extent, ultimately it hardly matters what one’s grasp of reality is or what profile of actuality reality presents. It is enough, through suspicion and, as Francois Ewald would say, ‘denunciation,’ to find something like the fantastical profile of the state and there is no longer any need to analyze actuality. The elision of actuality seems to me [to be] the third inflationary mechanism we find in this critique.”

I highly recommend this entire passage, which is found around pp. 187-189. It is a rippingly satisfying critique of much of what passes for critical theory today. Among other things, I would argue (and am trying to argue in something I am writing at the moment) that it is an implicit critique of Foucault’s own position at the end of Society Must Be Defended when he links biopolitics to the totalitarian experiences of the early 20th century. More on that soon, I hope.

“If we want to analyze this absolutely fundamental phenomenon in the history of Western governmentality, this irruption of the market as a principle of veridication, we should simply establish the intelligibility of this process by describing some of the connections between the different phenomena I have just referred to. This would involve showing how it became possible – that is to say, not showing that it was necessary, which is a futile task anyway, nor showing that it is a possibility, one possibility in a determinate field of possibilities….Let’s say that what enables us to make reality intelligible is simply showing that it was possible; establishing the intelligibility of reality consists in showing its possibility. Speaking in general terms, let’s say that in this history of a jurisdictional and then veridictional market we have one of those innumerable intersections between jurisdiction and veridication that is undoubtedly a fundamental phenomenon in the history of the modern west.”

If anyone is still out there, let me herewith announce another ARC Working Paper: no 12, “Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur” which is by me, and is part of the project on nanotechnology. I’m keen to have any comments, suggestions, critiques etc… which can be posted here. please.

The initial animus for this paper was that I had written two long papers (soon to be published, I hope) detailing the work of the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology, and in particular the ways in which it sought to make itself more “responsible” (sometimes, more “ethical”) by making responsibility more doable (Added July 6: And in this project, I was accompanied with inestimable help by Elise McCarthy). There was a lot of vague talk about responsibility, and I don’t think anyone involved (except maybe me) has any stake in being philosophically precise about the term. However, it’s clear that whatever they mean when they talk about responsibility it is not the same thing as what we generally mean by “moral responsibility” today, and hence there is a kind of conceptual reconstruction underway here, mediated by the tools and technologies through which CBEN and others in nanotechnology are becoming more and more concerned with safety, and especially what CBEN scientists call “safety by design.” (If you want to read these papers, email me)

McKeon and Ricoeur are the only two 20th century philosophers I have found that have taken seriously an historical approach to the concept, locating its emergence in the late 18th c. and tracking the transformations in the debates about it. Thus, this paper is a reading of these two pieces with an eye towards reconstructing responsibility in the wake of contemporary “emerging sciences and technologies” and the ways in which they, so to speak, live in the ruins of the fact/value distinction. There are potential overlaps here with thinking about Ewald, Beck and and Stephen’s recent Economy and Society article, as well as on obvious opening to revisit our discussions about concept work, Dewey and Foucault…