Ars Ethica: Political Quadrants and Ethics of Superiority

    There is an old joke among research psychologists, that the discipline suffers from "physics envy".  Alluding to a pronouncement of Freudian analysis, and thereby casting research psychologists in the position of emasculation, the assessment is marshaled to account for the recourse research psychologists often make to numbers to bolster the validity of their claim to psychology as a "science" on par with the "hard" sciences (the "hard" and "soft" distinction between disciplines already conveying a gendered discursive assessment that the "physics envy" quip exploits).  Reading Rabinow and Bennett's Ars Synthetica, I found myself wondering if we were not here presented with a case of computer science envy, or more specifically, invoking the connection with MIT, artificial intelligence envy.  Indeed, the extensive formulaic tables given in this text are reminiscent of the knowledge structures conceived of by A.I. researchers intent on representing (and implementing) in computer code the representation of real world knowledge in human minds.  As with such A.I. research, which seeks to represent a Cartesian mind apart from a body, and which has proven less successful than building "artificial life" from basic embodied (albeit robotic and/or virtual) components (perhaps an inspiration for the MIT "parts" initiative), one is left to wonder just what all this abstraction accomplishes or can accomplish.

    Yet, just when all hope of Rabinow and Bennett's project uncovering anything interesting is nearly lost, they enter into a trial run of their "diagnostic".  Here we are presented with three primary figures in relation to embryonic stem cell research:  embryo defense, human protection, and future abundance.  The description and analysis of each of the three would seem to map (using Mary Douglas's and Paul Rubin's respective nomenclatures as projective reference points) to the Hierarchist/Efficiency, Egalitarian/Insurance, Individualist/Efficient-Flattening quadrants of ideocosmological phase-space.  Further, insofar as the authors' invocation of a conception of in vitro stem cell remediation as an expression of "capacities [that] do not violate living systems" appears to represent their own views, and not necessarily the figure of future abundance, we would have the fourth, Fatalist/Insured-Flattening quadrant.  (Interestingly, where the other three quadrants are well represented in anthropological encounter, and in other analyses--of data from Pew Center for the People and the Press--appear each to account evenly for a third of U.S. voters, this last quadrant is dismissed by Douglas as a potential not realized in actual cultures, and likewise shows in said data analyses as a largely unpopulated portion of the map.)  The figural analysis offers additional material, however, as the discussions of variant figures reveals how political-discursive strategies aligned in their conclusions may nonetheless emerge of or straddle neighboring quadrants.  The figural variation of "duty to heal" from Jewish tradition, for instance, while aligned with a future abundance figure, would seem to be situated more in the Egalitarian/Insurance than the Individualist/Efficient-Flattening quadrant.  This speaks to the importance of identifying underlying heuristics determinative of an ideocosmological topology, as different ecologically rational needs/drives often articulate through strategies that appear, at the level of ontology, superficially similar.

    This all said, it is unclear how much the diagnostic tables actually contributed to the uncovering of these figural variations, or if the same variants might have been revealed without recourse to such diagrammatic abstractions.  Nonetheless, I found myself eagerly plunging into the text further, hoping to find the same figural analysis applied within the space of synthetic biology, only to be disappointed when none appeared.

    Instead, we are treated to repeated complaints about the unwillingness of life scientists to "collaborate" with the authors' project.  The authors' learned the language and the science of the life scientists, but lament that the life scientists are uninterested in doing the same.  Implicit here is an appeal to mutuality and equity, reminiscent, if I may be a bit judgmental, of playground politics:  having made an effort on their part, they are expecting to be met halfway by the other children--despite the fact that the other children never asked to play.  Here, one wants to take the authors aside and suggest, drawing on the most basic insights of nonviolent communication, that in a situation where one does not like the strategies being actualized by another party, it is perhaps not the most effective approach to demand of that party that they use your preferred strategies instead, simply because you would have them do so.  Where the authors do approach an understanding of the feelings and needs that might contribute to the attachment, on the part of life scientists, to certain strategies (as investment in career paths, for instance), there seems to be no willingness to go deeper, let alone to hold and honor the needs apparent in those commitments as real and valid for those life scientists.  (Although the discussion of trust and confidence, in the context of familiarity, is promising, it seems isolated in a text otherwise inattentive to such needs.)  Instead, we get the sense that Rabinow and Bennett would prefer that life scientists just transcend such petty concerns as an economically and intellectually fulfilling life-path out of a recognition of the overriding importance of conformance to strategies of "ethics" deemed essential to a 21st century science for all concerned.  Somehow, an ethics that relegates the needs of others to "blockages" hardly seems to be one conducive to "flourishing".

Epilogue: A Vigorous Standard

    I end this second semester, and the last of course of our core curriculum with a petulant refrain:  I am so done with ethnography.  It is not that I do not enjoy reading ethnography as literature, but rather that my anthropology, my study of the human, is not one in which ethnography features as a prominent technology, or at least, not one in which ethnography as it is currently conceived so appears.  My critique of ethnography is something I am still working out, but it boils down to the productive temporality of ethnography, insofar as the hermeneutic work of the ethnographer is generative of histories, of stories.  This narrative productivity is a failing that redoubles upon itself in the "present" or the "contemporary" mode, for where, to invoke Ricoeur, the traditional historian may configure an interpretation of a prefigured archive to produce a refigured experience in a reader, the anthropologist treads the dangerous terrain of configuring the archive in media res, reversing the position of present and past, such that stories are not excavated so much as elicited, the archival material following on the heels of the archivist.  

    Further, the product of ethnographic work, the story, however far any particular ethnographic text may stray from classical narrative forms, obscures the embodied experience of the populations studied behind the genre embodiment of the storyteller.  The hermeneutic tradition of thick description, with its attention to the prefiguring situatedness of actors in a story, unfortunately, fails to account for the very real effects of our situatedness within a genre, both the configuring situatedness of the author and the refiguring situatedness of the reader.  Research conducted by Jerome Bruner and Carol Feldman at NYU, when I was a research assistant in their laboratory as an undergraduate, and subsequent work by others, including linguist George Lakoff, call into question the Geertzian paradigm.  When a mere variation in introductory label, "spy story" or "travelogue", for instance, can significantly transform not only the interpretation of events in a story, but produce markedly different recall of the sorts of details upon which an interpretation would presumably be based--including the recall of details entirely absent from the story, yet consistent with the label--ethnography is placed in the unenviable position of unanchored pliability.  In contrast with commonly held standards of "rigor", the issue here is not that ethnography lacks rigidity, but that the yielding plasticity of the ethnographic form lacks the firmness, the vigor, of secure fixity at a point of soundable depth.  Or, to use a different metaphor, pliability is at best complaisance, absent secured rootedness in firm ground (from which a range of flexion takes shape).  This standard of vigor affords a suppleness unattainable within a regime of rigor.

    It was from a more nascent form of this critique that I entered Sites of Contention in Contemporary Ethnography, and embarked upon the first of our readings, No Aging in India.  My response to that text might be summarized as an appeal for just such an anchoring, in the face of a genre-embodied account that was troubling not merely as an example of hermeneutic narrativity, but also on the basis of the neo-colonialist genre position adopted by the author, as tourist in a foreign land of the aged, told from the geography of a visitor to a historically colonized people.  My request was and is a simple one, root such an inquiry in the conditions by which age is encountered, as such.  Begin with the singular human encounter, and then perhaps particular human experiences might be articulated from that anchor point.  Tsing's Friction, the next text on our reading list, was all the more frustrating, so shrill was the superficial squealing about "the global" (demonstrating a conflation of scale and scope deserving a discussion well beyond the remit of this essay) that even an otherwise potentially deep insight, that of friction, dangles precariously from dirigible mooring lines trailing in a hyperbolic wind.

    With Farmer (Pathologies of Power) and Holmes (Integral Europe), however, a potential redemption of ethnography appears.  These two authors, in their own ways, map out ideological territories (for Farmer: neoliberalism vs. liberation theology; for Holmes: social modernism, Catholic social doctrine, neoliberal fast-capitalism, and right-wing integralism) that may provide cross-cultural verification of a vigorous theory of ideocosmological plasticity rooted in pliantly entwined fairness heuristics, deeply anchored in singular human needs. Unlike Tsing's freely traveling universals, here we make claim not for concepts that do work, but the conditions of fixity by which such work is articulated.  Here, it is not the temporality of situated narrative, but the situatedness of actors in conflict within the narrative, that tills the soil in which testable hypotheses may take root.  Would a post-Geertzian deep description of strategies of structural violence and liberation theological activism identify constellations of shared flattening fairness heuristics coupled with disparate heuristics of efficiency and insurance?  Can a nonviolent inquiry uncover the needs that commonly anchor situated ideologies ranging from Catholic social doctrine, to civil libertarianism, to Ghandian solidaritism, to Douglas's Fatalism?  Can Farmer's and Holmes's respective territorial maps be shown as cartographic projections of the same space as the Nolan chart, the Tripartisan Triangle, the New Political Compass, and the vulgar left-right spectrum?  Are the culturally articulated politics of international market interventions and nationalist resistance to post-national regimes of governance traceable to common anchors in the ground of mediated sociality by which animals cohere in stable groups?

    Unfortunately, after these promising (if troubling in other respects) texts, we find ourselves back in the realm of traveling universals, although without the same reflexivity as Tsing offers, as Das (Life and Words) imports a universal concept of "the state" no less pernicious than "the global".  Mired in the same conflation of scale and scope that troubles Tsing's work, Das provides a rigidly unanchored account of bodies animated as if by magic, a necromatic conjuring of marionette actors, strings pulled by apparatus of rumored "state" agency.  That in the course of this hand waiving, Das reproduces a post-Lockean misreading of Hobbes (who arguably offers a exemplary vigorous ontology of relation unrecognized in today's traffic of traveling universals), only compounds, upon an unmoored traveling universal, a genre embodiment in which gendered bodies are flourished in a slight of hand of theoretical misdirection. Clothing an essentialist hauntology (with all the convolutions of temporality Derrida sought to evoke with this term) in a feminist critique (let alone a critique that poorly represents feminism, so weakly anchored is it in the text that is its object), Das casts an illusion neither fixed nor pliant. 

    We do get another glimpse of ideological territories, with Rabinow and Bennett (Ars Synthetica), as figures of embryo defense, human protection, future abundance, and a fourth potential "non-violative capacities" figure, are offered up in a test run of a diagnostic that would seem at once unnecessarily abstract and ultimately underutilized (there being no similarly developed figural analysis of the primary subject of the text, synthetic biology).  Yet, insofar as it might have served to uncover figural variations, where the same discursive conclusions appear to be reached from different heuristic constellations, it might hold some promise worthy of further investigation (as does, for that matter, the resonances of "vigorous assurance" to a standard of vigour as anchored pliability).  Fortun (Promising Genomics) and Helmreich (Alien Ocean), meanwhile, thankfully rescue us from the epistemology of scale, offering new ways of articulating the indeterminate (χ) and of conceiving differently scoped bodies that operate across political, sovereign, somatic, and spatial territories.  Dealing not in universals (traveling or any other sort) so much as relationalities, Fortun and Helmreich prepare us for Langlitz's chapter on contextual mediation, as read through Latour, Gomart, and Wallace.  Indeed, it is with relationalities, both orthogonal relations and topological relations, that we find ourselves back at a critique of ethnography, both in its narrative involution of the temporal relations between pre-, con-, and re-figuration, and the second-order to first-order relation of different genre embodiments of interpreter and interpreted.  It is in just such circumstances that a vigorous anchoring, of methods that favor suppleness over rigidity, emerges as the defining characteristic of any meaningful study of the human.