Movement Space

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431
FORUM
Movement space
Putting anthropological theory, concepts,
and cases to the test
Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley

Anthony Stavrianakis, Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique
Response to Hau Forum, “On the anthropology of the contemporary:

Addressing concepts, designs, and practices,” edited by James D. Faubion,
Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Volume 6, Issue 1, Summer 2016.
There was a guiding principle for Dewey throughout his career—

the principle, namely, that equally viable but mutually incom-
patible views (including, for instance, “Continental philosophy”
versus “British analytic philosophy,” or “holism” versus “atom-
ism,” or “existentialism” versus “essentialism”) call for finding a
perspective from which the given dichotomy is only apparent or
is otherwise resolvable. (Burke 1994: 21; cf. Dewey 1926: 40–48)
Gratitude (Paul Rabinow)

It is gratifying to have been invited to have my work entertained in such an inno-
vative and conscientious venue.1 The initial gratification came from the hope that
some things would be learned that would remediate and stimulate further thought.
This hope has been met.
1. Publication made possible in part by support from the Berkeley Research Impact Ini-
tiative (BRII) sponsored by the UC Berkeley Library.
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Paul Rabinow

T
and Anthony Stavrianakis.
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.021
This content downloaded from 179.253.057.035 on March 27, 2020 18:06:52 PM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis404
What is striking in the generous commentaries in this forum is a shared concern

for a set of common anthropological topoi: questions of inquiry, such as how to
participate and observe in heterogeneous and changing domains of life and work;
a focus on experimentation; a concern for questions of the objects and objectives
for anthropology today.
Before opening onto a broader reflection on the challenges of anthropological
inquiry, of theory, concept work, and casuistry today, I should address a specific se-
ries of themes that the texts of this forum raise. Jane Guyer’s focus on “emergence,”
contrasted with the concept of “possibility,” is an occasion for the clarification of
the endeavor of an anthropology of the contemporary. In a series of recent works,
I have sought to conceptualize the parameters of anthropological inquiry into the
“present” in terms of a movement-space (Bewegungsraum—I take the term from
Hans Blumenberg), in which both the subject conducting inquiry and the objects
and objectives of inquiry are in motion. What I have endeavored to prime is the
problem of adopting a posture and relation to a moving present, a present one
endeavors to both be part of and to observe, and yet relative to which one is often
slightly too early or too late, slightly too close or slightly too far.
Implicit in Guyer’s three modes of participation—learning from others, collabo-
rating, actively intervening—is a question of the subject and her relative disposi-
tion. Implicit in her generative distinctions are Immanuel Kant’s three auto-critical
questions: What can I know (with and from others)? What should I do (how to
collaborate)? What can I hope for (if I attempt to reconstruct situations)? She pro-
vides an enlivening juxtaposition of vernacular maxims regarding the status of the
objects and objectives of inquiry in a present in which an anthropologist could
pose these questions: instead of an inquiry into the “possible”—of just “going for
it,” that is to say, for a possibility known in advance—the objective she names for
an anthropology of “the emergent” is learning to become familiar with the objects
that result from inquiry, not least in order to be able to live with them. There is pa-
thos in this maxim, which well captures the mood and mode of the anthropology
I have sought to develop over the years. Nevertheless, once having raised the ethi-
cal, affective, and veridictional stakes of an anthropology of the emergent, Guyer
brackets the question of ends: “there appears to be no vision of an ultimate goal.”
By contrast, over the last decade, with a series of collaborators, I have precisely
endeavored to raise the question of the ends of anthropology, the ethical work of
collaboration and the ethical stakes of inquiry. This question draws on prior work,
of course. The response to the problem of subjectivity, ethical life, inquiry, and
knowledge in Reflections on fieldwork in Morocco (1977) is different from that pro-
posed in Demands of the day: On the logic of anthropological inquiry (2013), or
again in Designs on the contemporary: Anthropological tests (2014)—different not
only because the inquiries were different, taking place in heterogeneous “presents,”
but also because the configurations of inquiry differed; the postures and ways into
the work differed. In that sense, adjacency or, more generally, the question of the
position and posture of the anthropologist is not a basic presumption. It is rather a
problem that requires conceptualization.
In the collaborative participant-observation that I have designed and con-
ducted with Gaymon Bennett and Anthony Stavrianakis, my anthropological ex-
perimentation was oriented to an ethical end, which we named from the start as

405 Movement space
“flourishing,” a translation of the Greek term eudaemōnia. 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 of the instrumental rationality of the sciences
could be reactivated and reconnected to new practices of scientific inquiry. This is
not to say that flourishing is per se opposed to instrumental goals. Rather, we used
the term to ask how modes of judgment distinct from those of instrumentality
could be introduced into seemingly emergent spaces of work in the biosciences.
Relative to our interconnected projects, flourishing was an end toward which we
were trying to work, through the activity of anthropological and ethical inquiry
into the ramifications of bioscience and engineering.
Our initial conception of flourishing was stymied in our relations with the bio-
scientists and other social scientists (more on this below). This indifference led us
to develop a conceptual repertoire of what we termed “minor vices,” embedded in
the micro-practices of knowledge production during the course of inquiry and re-
search. Attention has been paid, of course, to the macro-scalar conditions of fund-
ing, institutional and bureaucratic inertia, the corporate shaping of agendas, as well
to as our ever-increasing audit culture. How these macro-forces became anchored
in practice, often tacitly, has been less explored.
These breakdowns and blockages reveal conceptual and ethical topoi that we
are convinced demand more attention and a change in practices. Our experiment
left us convinced that flourishing is an essential metric of science as a vocation. In
terms of our own collaboration as well as the conceptual and narrative work that
nourished it we remain convinced and indeed experienced among ourselves the
joys and solace of a scientific practice guided by a metric of eudaemōnia.
It is thus with the question of position, mode, and mood that we enter the stakes
of the contemporary as an anthropological problem space and the core of the tem-
poral stakes raised by Tom Boellstorff. The present and the contemporary are not
isomorphic categories. “The contemporary” was initially a response to a problem
of the temporality, historicity, and observer-position of anthropological inquiry.
The contemporary is a complex category on the verge between the experiential
vector of the observation of practice—whether that be the practice of biologists in
their labs, engineers with their PowerPoints, or an artist with his squeegee—and
the historical vector of gauging the transformation of the forms through which
these practices are enacted. We’re asking what is at stake in the crossing of the
vectors in the remediation of past forms and practices, particularly modern and
modernist forms. Thus, in the conceptual development of the term “contempo-
rary,” it is crucial to underscore that although we index the historicity of forms and
practices, the contemporary is not a historical category per se. It is rather a precise
counterpoint to the conception of modernity as an ethos, indexing the search for
an ethos through which to observe and gauge breakdowns and remediations of the
modern ethos.
There is an intermediate step on which it is important to insist: between inqui-
ries in the present and the effort to forge a contrapuntal, distinctively contempo-
rary ethos that can engage the breakdowns and remediations of modernity and
the modern ethos. Together with Stavrianakis, I have called this intermediate step
the “actual”: objects that could be seized from an inquiry in the present, worked
through as phenomena and taken up in their relation to the inquirer at a second

order of observation. Such a step is crucial in challenging the commonplace of the

“ethnographic present” and the emphasis some anthropologists still place on the
self-evident worth of ethnography as a manner of grasping the present.
It is precisely here that Boellstorff ’s insightful insistence on the open question
of how to discern the significance of the “recent” and “near” in the temporality of
inquiry comes to the fore. In arguing for the invention of a contemporary ethos—
which can gauge transformations in modernity’s ethē through inquiry in the pres-
ent, with specific attention to which of those transformations renders an ethos “ac-
tual”—it is important to note that we are not dealing with historical consciousness,
nor an ontology of things waiting to be represented. Within a pragmatic logic of
anthropology, the near future is constituted from determinations of the objects of
the recent past. These determinations are rendered visible through the motion of
inquiry that works through a movement-space of the present, rendering objects of
inquiry actual. There is no object existing in the recent past by itself; technically
speaking, there is no recent past by itself.
Marilyn Strathern’s discerning and perceptive commentary is of great aid in
clarifying the stakes of the movement and motion of such a conceptual sequence:
from inquiry in the present, to a contemporary ethos capable of seizing its signifi-
cance, by way of its actual determinations. As she well indicates, “it is anthropol-
ogy that needs to conceptualize the contemporary if it is to do its analytical work.
Anthropologists do not have to suppose that synthetic biologists have a counter-
part contemporary of their own”: neither allochronism nor isochronism, then, but
rather a search for contemporaries with whom to share a search for multiple re-
sponses to a shared problem of forging an ethos to work through and live with the
breakdowns of the guiding ethē of modernity.
Strathern is insightful in her treatment of what she calls the work of “con-fig-
uring and re-figuring the elements of figures already worked upon.” She names
the affective and veridictional stakes of the work of turning and returning to the
objects and objectives of inquiry as “calming” and “incontrovertible.” Such a gener-
ous judgment resonates with what (with Stavrianakis) I have called vindication as
the mode of subjectivation of an anthropology of the contemporary. Such a judg-
ment is all the more appreciated given her fine-grained understanding of the work
that was entailed in working through the double binds of collaborative participant-
observation in the field of synthetic biology—double binds that provided the kairos
for pushing our inquiry further into the practice of anthropology as she and we
understand it to be. Strathern’s accompaniment throughout these conceptual turns
and travails has been of great solace. There are few others who have demonstrated
with such joy the power and pleasure of forging a conceptual anthropology that
recognizes its ethical stakes.
An anthropology of the contemporary, it should be noted, is not only about sci-
ence and technology. As Frédéric Keck and Clémentine Deliss demonstrate, ques-
tions of the remediation of practice, remediations which take up parameters of
ethos and veridiction, pertain to a wide set of domains. Their generative collabora-
tion in thinking about the remediation of museum practice is a case in point and
demonstrative of the significant challenge of the invention of “post-ethnographic”
venues. In their cases the challenge is how curation and inquiry can be given a form
in the contemporary anthropological museum.

407 Movement space
Taken as an ensemble, these rich reflections index a plurality of modes in which

to undertake the challenge of anthropological inquiry, of concept work, and the
delineation of a shared problem space in which one could hope to engage in col-
laborative work. Over the last five years, Hau has provided just such a venue. More-
over, in terms of the intellectual conjoining of anthropology and philosophy, these
reflections index precisely one of the themes that will be taken up again in the text
that follows: that the fundamental question of the being and becoming of anthrōpos
is best served by not imposing boundary conditions, conceptual or empirical. In a
mode of inquiry that draws on the pragmatism of John Dewey, the question of the
being of anthrōpos is and must be an open-ended question, and one that on philo-
sophical grounds should ignore calls for foundations or arguments as to ontologi-
cal or epistemological first principles.
I will admit, however, that I have not been a regular reader of Hau. Two terms
I have eschewed in recent years have been theory and ethnography, preferring, for
a range of reasons that I have sought to articulate, concept work and anthropology.
Preparing to respond to my readers, I thought it only prudent to look more closely
at the content, form and ethos of Hau. Much to my delight, I have been treated to
a challenging range of concept work, if in a different vein than my own, as well as
substantial quantities of anthropological reflection. There is, to be sure, a bounty of
ethnographic description, as well there should be if the term is understood broadly
enough to provide fertile terrain for anthropological reflection.
What exactly is meant by theory still escapes me. At least, it remains contestable
to me whether or not the category is helpful or obfuscatory. Thus, for example, I
was struck by the invocation of Foucault’s term “biopower” in the inaugural edito-
rial (da Col and Graber 2011: x). I wholeheartedly concur that the term (as with al-
most all of the terms of Foucault’s work) in the secondary and tertiary literature has
long since lost its conceptual precision and its strength as a tool of inquiry. On the
one hand, the vast fast-food diet of what Graeber nicely calls “vulgar Foucauldian-
ism” is itself in need of diagnosis; so much of what I know of it could not be farther
from what rigorous thinking and inquiry should consist in (see Graeber 2014). On
the other hand, Foucault forged the term “biopower” to do conceptual and research
work about specific problems. There is nothing inherently wrong about using it in
a common-sense manner to cover anything vital. Presumably, however, such infla-
tionism is not theory.
Excursus
This raises the question of debt and citation. Terry Smith is astute in singling out
my citation practices. He is generous in giving me the benefit of the doubt that in
fact I have read and considered many sources that I don’t cite. I am contrite for the
oversight since I too have felt slighted when work of mine that seems relevant is
not cited. My only self-justification is that my disposition is to keep separate the
flow of writing (and thinking) during the drafting of my texts from an obligation to
acknowledge more recent predecessors working on somewhat different problems
and concepts. Anecdotally, having been turned down multiple times on grant pro-
posals where I attempted to play by the rules of the game, no doubt I have (over)
reacted to the strictures of citation and audit culture. Certain forms seem to block
thinking for me, instead authorizing practices and norms which one might well not

affirm. Want a grant on neoliberalism? Be sure to cite many sources, since some of
those reviewing your proposal may well be adjudicating your desire for funds. But
by doing so, aren’t you contributing to the field of constraints one wants to evade?
Perhaps more vindicatory is my incessant return to key texts and thinkers that
were part of my philosophical training at the University of Chicago. It has been my
experience (ever renewed) that one cannot read Max Weber (and the ever expand-
ing voluminous commentary on his work) and then cite him as if the statements he
gives us were straightforward and directly addressing our present situations. A pet-
ty instance: Smith says I deploy Weber as a critical sociologist. In fact, I do nothing
of the sort. Weber was not a sociologist and I quote him elsewhere as saying that he
wasn’t. The question that intrigues me about Weber or Foucault or Dewey is that,
given the generations of serious scholars who have demonstrated time and time
again such scholars’ inadequacies and mistakes, why do we (or some of us) still
read them, refreshed and challenged? The answer lies for me in their multiple state-
ments of problem-formation (Weber’s Anti-critical reflections as responses to his
critics are one example), their repeated attempts to develop conceptual equipment
(in Weber’s case, the ideal type or Gedankenbild) and their impatience with the
necessity for experimentation with form (Weber wrote no books; he wrote works
constantly in progress that were codified as proper books only after his death).2
Keying in on the enduring relevance of these authors eventually makes it pos-
sible to understand a central aspect of their work and why our situation—our
space—as thinkers, as citizens in the state-system, and as a particular kind of civil
servant (I have taught in public university systems my whole career) are neither
the same nor radically different. That space, Blumenberg’s Bewegungsraum, is one I
have sought to operate in. Life is short: this writing, thinking, and citation practice
can justifiably be seen as arrogant or a necessary evil. Regardless, as I have learned,
there is a price to be paid either way.
The same criteria and the same disposition apply to my work on Gerhard Rich-
ter. I am neither an art historian nor a credentialed art critic or curator. I rely on
these specialists, some wonderful and perceptive, others less so. Familiarity with
the ever-growing body of scholarship on Richter protects one against simple fac-
tual mistakes as well as ignoring a growing number of diverse perspectives and
interpretations that demand recognition of their plausibility if not their mutual
compatibility. My role is not to adjudicate these conflicting positions but to learn
from them.
Precisely why I have centered on Gerhard Richter is hard to say; at first I neither
admired nor understood his work. My engagement with him was peripheral to
the main work on synthetic biology that I was undertaking at the same time—but
just so, there was time for curiosity and admiration to begin to take root. Smith is
2. Weber’s two “anti-critical” essays were written in 1909–10: “Anti-critical remarks [An-
tikritisches] regarding the ‘Spirit’ of capitalism” was published in January 1910; the
“Anti-critical last word regarding the ‘Spirit’ of capitalism” was published the following
September. These essays were vigorous responses to attacks on Weber’s work by the
historian Felix Rachfahl. See “Rebuttal of the critique of the ‘spirit’ of capitalism” (1910)
(Weber’s first rejoinder to Felix Rachfal)” and “A final rebuttal of Rachfal’s critique of
the ‘spirit’ of capitalism” (1910), in Weber 2002: 244–340.

409 Movement space
correct in his authorial position as wide-ranging specialist that other choices could
well have been made, or, at least that my field of vision could have widened. In fact,
I have a completed manuscript on Richter that touches on such artists as Sigmar
Polke, Joseph Beuys, Blinky Palermo, and others. For the art historian, that is an
insufficient answer and in no way meets Smith’s challenge to broaden the scope
of my attention to art practice. A similar criticism could well be made of my work
on post-genomics; but I never intended to be a specialist on post-genomics. The
gamble in both cases was whether there was a payoff to this professionally reckless,
anti-disciplinary, ultimately amateur path; a mode of inquiry and reflection, one
might argue, that has characterized a great deal of anthropology.
Richter’s corpus provided me with a terrain in which to think at once about
the relations that hold among the traditional, the modern, and the contemporary.
Richter can’t be read as avowing any essential relation among any of these relations,
or these ratios. Instead, he’s exemplary in continually experimenting with giving
a form to these ratios, forms that are consequent both to the kairoi of his practice
and the historical turning points and configurations that he seeks to shape. He’s a
second-order observer of the very history of art in which he’s already established
himself (or has been established) as a major figure. His practices are manifesta-
tions of just this. In short, they are practices of adjacency. In his practices, Richter
makes very clear what an engagement with heterogeneous historical and aesthetic
elements of the present consists in, when taken up with an ethos distinct from that
which reigned under past modernisms.
I am beginning work again on Paul Klee, an artist whose work has caught me for
decades (Rabinow 2003). The art historical literature on Klee is equally voluminous
and a new wave of art historical and art critical writing of a new generation is taking
shape. There is a stunningly smart and deeply appreciative book on Klee—Annie
Bourneuf ’s Paul Klee (2015)—that demonstrates a deep scholarly command of the
secondary and primary literature both of the time and more recently. As it happens,
Pierre Boulez published a number of essays and a small book on Klee. Naturally,
the theme of this work is the compositional strategies of Klee as an adjacent reflec-
tive device to Boulez’s own meditations and practices of composing. This exercise
is fascinating and for me opens up many problems and pathways. How might one
take up the challenge of composition in a rigorous fashion in anthropology given
Boulez’s analysis of Klee? Regardless of the answer—and the website Stavrianakis
and I are building (http://contemporary.lacunastories.com/) is in part an initial at-
tempt to confront this challenge—it is striking that Bourneuf does not take up the
fact that Klee was a musician (son of two musicians) who played at a high level his
whole life. Bourneuf documents in fascinating detail the art criticism of the 1910s
and 1920s in Germany, but does not touch the revolution in music and theory tak-
ing place at the same time. Her book is magnificent but perhaps it will suffice to
say that no single book, tethered to the inevitable scholarly practices of a specific
discipline, can do everything.
***
What I would reject in Hau’s inspiring inaugural editorial statement is not mere-
ly what seems to be shaky concept work in the name of theory. That being said,
the re-introduction of a historical corpus of anthropology into current trends

is most welcome indeed. In fact, I would see this assemblage as holding great
potential for a contemporary anthropology; one in which there is a moving ratio
of past work and current problems, as well as a call for collaboration between
anthropologists in addressing interconnected problems. Accordingly, I invited
Stavrianakis, with whom I have engaged in a series of (ongoing) works, to think
together about the mode in which we could take up and work over a contempo-
rary anthropology.
Mode (Rabinow and Stavrianakis, here and following)

The archive of the ancestors haunts the present as Nachleben [afterlife, survival],
to use a key conceptual term of Aby Warburg (Didi-Huberman 2002; Rabinow
and Stavrianakis 2014). To learn how to be attentive to such a lingering repertoire
can only be enriching, although it does demand an art of discernment as well as
diagnosis. One way to approach this archive is to cast our situation as tragic: the
greats of an older anthropological discipline tower above us. Another is ironic: we
had interesting work some time ago and let’s use it today and see where that gets
us. The latter stance can derive from simple insouciance or from a theory that says
things might look different, but as we have never been modern, they’re not and
haven’t been so different once we understand what is going on. A method of this
sort arises from and leads to irony and, it should be added, the embrace of irony
leads to a distinctive method.
The giants never did roam the earth, although much monumental work of its
time and place can be challenging and instructive. It is not tragic that we can’t be
Evans-Pritchard or Kroeber. Insisting on ironic distance and self-protection in all
things may lead to theory and the ever growing massing of resources, but its con-
ceptual thinness and general implausibility is tiresome.
A better alternative, it seems to us, is a form of pathos as well a form of the
comedic. We are using comedy in the older sense of “temporary resolution.” The
comic mood recognizes that things break down all the time, but equally that there
are momentary or short-lived reconciliations. There is, however, in this mood a
constant emphasis on self-affectation, often delusional, as in Shakespeare’s com-
edies; nonetheless, even delusional action may lead to temporary reconciliation
and repair. The comedic, one could hold, never loses sight of the need for and avail-
ability of practices of care up and down the scale from love to the law. The trope of
repair is prominent. That being said, these repairs are always vulnerable to larger
forces and need to be rebuilt.
Why pathos? Pathos has a long tradition of twin settings: the theatrical and the
medical (Canguilhem 1966; Rabinow 1989). The mood of pathos turns on break-
down and repair, leading to more breakdown and repair. The mood of pathos,
however—and this is what gives it its specificity—requires self-affectation, which
is not delusional, but at least in its more accomplished forms recognizes both the
necessity and finitude of taking up and testing whatever margins of freedom exist
under particular conditions. This is not reconciliation, but rather a mode of testing
limits, resisting resignation, and seeking maturity. The mood of pathos, as with the
comedic, seeks motion toward a near future. This orientation is unlike the mood of

411 Movement space
the tragic, which seeks a far future, or a distant past, and unlike the ironic (at least
in its current STS form), whose future and past are always the same. The mood
of pathos requires a veridictional practice and, as we will explain, a form of an-
thropological testing of diagnoses and working hypotheses addressing parameters,
contours, and uncertainties of the near future and recent past.
Indifference versus complicity

Our books (Rabinow and Bennett 2012; Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2013) have been
misleading. In the occasional print review and in the more common corridor gos-
sip, the story line is that our experiment with synthetic biology and synthetic biolo-
gists was a failure. This story line is false for two reasons: an experiment that pro-
duces definitive results—even or especially if they were not the ones proposed in
the grant proposal—is not a failure. There will be more on this below. The second
reason concerns the quality and scope of the human interactions. Our relations
with the bio-scientists were cordial. We were afforded access to almost everything
we wanted to observe or question. The tone from the leaders of the project was
supportive in an abstract manner. Jay Keasling, head of the Synthetic Biology Engi-
neering Research Center (SynBERC), told me on a number of occasions that he did
not intend to interfere in the autonomous research projects of any of the principal
investigators—and that included our project, headed by Rabinow. He stuck to his
word. The ethos of the institutional situation we were operating within was some
wavering zone of respect and indifference. The latter was the blockage point. After
all, the contractual terms of the project were collaborative. Little if any motion was
accomplished on that front. In sum, the kind of mutual understanding and accom-
modation of ideas and practices that were unfamiliar was not forthcoming. One
might attribute this shortcoming to inadequacies on our part and no doubt there
were some. However, we have observed other “social and ethical” teams operating
within other venues for synthetic biology and other techno-science projects, and
there is scant evidence that the form of collaboration we were attempting to bring
into motion took place anywhere else.
If the measure of success is to have brought about flourishing collaboration then
ours was not the only “failure” (See Marris 2013; Aguiton 2014). In our view, the
measure of success is the capacity to learn from the experience and to reflect on
what can be warranted from the situation of inquiry; in that, we were successful,
and others less so.
All things considered, it seems clear that the power differentials were large. In
any case, our goal was not to play power games but to inflect them, so as to yield
a different ethos of research into and understanding of living beings. This did not
happen. Furthermore there were several “ethical issues” that arose (turning on
plagiarism and the status and credibility of research results). These were handled
behind the scenes through the old boys and girls networks of the elite universi-
ty world. Not only were we not consulted, we were excluded: reputations were at
stake. Again, the moving line between indifference and exclusion can be seen to be
at play. We learned a great deal about how such affairs are handled and in that sense
the experiment yielded positive results. Why haven’t we written more about these
breakdowns? Perhaps because we initially had other narratives to construct, the
material for which (textual, observational, interactive) we had access to.

Social science
The arena in which there was actual conflict, breakdown and intimidation was the
arena of relations among and between the social scientists.
Initially the person who was slated to fill the ELSI (“ethical, legal, social implica-
tions”) slot was a lawyer with an interest in regulatory and governance matters. He
took this role seriously and from the outset produced proposals and talking points.
His efforts were not well received. Apparently, the leadership of SynBERC wanted
to proceed slowly and was adamantly opposed to governance proposals that they
did not completely control. This situation led to a blowout argument at a dinner
between the lawyer and the chief PR propagandist for the consortium. It was in that
context that an alternative was proposed—a social scientist on the East Coast (MIT)
and one on the West Coast (Berkeley). The East coast political scientist was to be
in charge of regulatory and governmental issues and the West coast anthropologist
was to explore ethics and collaboration. The underlying proviso was that we did
not interfere. This was the ELSI model—although the contractual agreement with
the National Science Foundation funders was that we would invent new modes of
interaction. Efforts to do so were blocked throughout. Ultimately, the demand for
non-action and soothing public relations prose was echoed in Washington.
The blockage came not only through the indifference of the bio-scientists but
also through the lack of coordination among the social sciences. Stavrianakis has
written of his parallel experiment in participant-observation, conducted as part of
the Socio-Technical Integration Research project (STIR) (Stavrianakis 2015). The
endeavor was based at Arizona State University and aimed to use social science
participant-observation and exchange between natural scientists and social scien-
tists to increase the “reflexivity” of the lab workers about social considerations in
their technical practice. What was striking about this experiment was not the limits
to a project aimed at increasing scientists’ reflexivity, but rather the limits to the
capacity of the social scientists in the project to adequately reflect on how their
method was bound to the dominant instrumental norms and values of contempo-
rary techno-science.
Indifference and the incapacity to recompose such instrumental norms is a so-
cial fact on the side of the natural scientists. Indifference and the incapacity to re-
compose such instrumental norms is a deficiency of intellectual instrumentalities
and a matter of complicity on the side of the human scientists (Stavrianakis and
Bennett 2014: 219–23).
It turned out to be clear that there was neither the interest nor the capacity
to engage in collaborative work and reflection on the part of the high-flying bio-
scientists and engineers. It also turned out to be clear that the bio-scientists and
engineers were indifferent to the actuality of their indifference and its function
and place within larger apparatuses. By contrast, the social scientists in STIR, in
SynBERC and in other parallel institutional setups with which we’re familiar were
not indifferent either to the issues of collaboration or to our challenges that they
were not living up to the norms of collaboration. Rather, they were acquiescing to
the institutional deficiencies put in place by the indifference of the bio-scientists.
For some of the social scientists, this contradiction was not acute because their
careers and disciplines, for example in political science, were more easily adaptable
to these demands. For others—for example, in philosophy, ethics, anthropology,

413 Movement space
sociology, and the like—the contradiction between critical discourse with which
they would identify in a public arena and their actual practices of complicity with
instrumental apparatuses haunted them. We can affirm this claim because discus-
sion of the issues was possible and took place between them and us. Various de-
fenses of such positionality were offered at various times: to wit, being threatened
with funding cuts, scarcity of jobs, and other understandable reality conditions.
However, defensiveness and reluctance to conceptualize the situation amounted to
complicity with norms and practices that these social scientists would not wish to
be identified with, at least discursively. Moreover, reluctance to conceptualize the
situation amounted to a bracketing of norms of veridiction and ethics. This took
different forms, from a simple refusal to discuss the issue any further, to attempts to
justify technical criticism as an end in itself, to a straightforward nihilism in which
truth counted for nothing.3
We have attempted to turn these blockages into anthropological topics of inqui-
ry and reflection (Stavrianakis, Bennett, Fearnley, and Rabinow 2014). For exam-
ple, we have pursued a catalogue of minor vices, that is to say, micro-practices that
block ethical and veridictional pursuits without refuting or directly challenging
them. Or else, the double binds that ensnare situations of unequal power relations,
such as those we have been engaged in (Rabinow and Stavrianakis 2013: 58–60).
We came to the conclusion that the only way to escape such double binds was to
exit from them with a self-conscious acceptance that there was a price to be paid for
doing so, including knowing that we would be accused of failure by those invested
in maintaining the configuration of indifference and complicity.
We conceptualized this dimension of our experiment as an anthropological test
quite different from traditional ethnographic description and theory. The asym-
metric power relations of the latter are quite different from the asymmetric power
relations in techno-institutions. Consequently, the ethical and veridictional chal-
lenges for the anthropologist are configured differently. Just as the previously tacit
topics of the colonial and postcolonial situation have now become thematized as
part of the history of anthropology, we argue that it is time to thematize the new
configurations of power relations in which anthropologists are working today. Cri-
tique as denunciation, still the dominant mode in anti-colonial narratives, is no
longer sufficient for the complexities of contemporary inquiry. We are arguing for
a more fine-grained acceptance of the fact that by refusing the binaries of inside
and outside, one’s responsibility for one’s position in the field is made available for
reflection and invention.
Anthropological tests
Anthropology in Kant’s view takes up the question: what is the human being? Kant
claims that this question cannot be answered metaphysically. It must be answered
in the first place through local observation and in the second place requires abstrac-
tion from local inquiries in order to attain a more general level of understanding.
3. For an alarmingly clear refusal of the stakes of truth and ethics in collaborations between
social and natural sciences see Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, “Entangled in the
collaborative turn: Observations from the field,” Somatosphere, http://somatosphere.
net/2014/11/entangled.html.

Such an understanding is not timeless or universal, but is rather historical—guided

by changing historical distance—and experiential, with the assumption of a unity
of apperception as well as an implied regulatory coherence. As he wrote already in
“Universal natural history and theory of the heavens” (1755):
It is not even properly known to us what the human being truly is now,
although consciousness [Bewusstsein] and the senses [Sinn]) ought
to instruct us of this; how much less will we be able to guess what he
one day ought to become! Nevertheless, the inquisitive human soul [die
Wissbegierdeder menschlichen Seele] snaps very desirously [begierig]
at this object [Gegenstand] that lies so far from it and strives, in such
obscure knowledge, to shed some light. (Kant 2015: 307)
We accept Kant’s challenge to ask how to abstract from the heterogeneous results of
local inquiries, to compose and give form to the determinations arising from those
inquiries in order to respond to the anthropological problem of what the human
being is today, and human beings’ inquisitiveness about their becoming.
Significantly, we can draw on Kant in order to underscore that a single answer
betrays the anthropological demonstration of the empirical heterogeneity of re-
sponses to such a core problem. The task, for us, is therefore to determine what
form, what anthropological form, one can give to such heterogeneity given atten-
tion to generality and given that anthrōpos is that kind of being with the capacity to
reason about the heterogeneity of its being and its reasoned discourses about being.
Anthropology, perhaps particularly American anthropology, has taken as its
task to give form to human beings’ cultural heterogeneity while maintaining an
underlying generality. Anthropology, perhaps particularly British anthropology,
has taken as its task to document heterogeneity within common institutional the-
matics such as, for example, kinship and law. Anthropology, perhaps particularly
French anthropology, has taken as its task to demonstrate variations in structural
patterns of society and the mind. Today, the general problem of heterogeneity re-
mains pertinent, but these three solutions seem dated. The objects and objectives
of anthropology have been once again problematized to such an extent that these
three responses to the problem of heterogeneity and unity have withered and lost
their veridictional and animating force.
Nevertheless, we want to insist that embedded in these previous responses were
forms of the validation of what counted as an anthropological object and fact. The
criteria of validity and the forms and venues in which they were put to the test were
largely tacit. Hence qualifying exams, peer review for grants, publishing and hiring
arose out of and reinforced community norms. These too have been under pressure
and stress for some time.
It follows that in the present, given the increasing self-evidence of the contin-
gency of the standards of inquiry, it is now appropriate to conceptualize the tests
and measures of validity, both of facts and of what constitutes an anthropologi-
cal object. Parallel changes in concerns apply to the qualifying characteristics that
authorize the claims and practices of the researcher. The dismissive claim that
these concerns are “subjective” or “objective” qualifies in our view as a minor vice
that blocks thinking about how previously tacit norms are being challenged and
rethought.

415 Movement space
Given this situation, putting previously tacit criteria of worth and validity un-
der critical examination would seem to be one of the demands of the day. Such an
examination, we wholeheartedly agree, must include a broader and deeper under-
standing of the anthropological traditions to which we have alluded. Such an exami-
nation, we hold—and which Hau seeks to pursue—cannot mean resting in the past.
Épreuve
A key concept that facilitates motion, which has been previously largely under-
played in American anthropology and has been tacit in British anthropology, is
that of an épreuve or “test” developed by a range of French sociologists during the
1980s and 90s.4 The concept of tests constituted a significant contribution to the
tool kit of sociological inquiry. At least in retrospect, it opened the way to finer-
grained ethnographic understandings that culture, society, and institutions were
not simply thoroughly determining forces, but that, as Kant would have wanted to
remind us, there was always some degree of latitude or freedom in human practice.
A further step in the development of this tool kit was forged in the French so-
ciological context. It was shown that épreuves, if structural, were best studied in the
course of action. For example, the sociology of tests, in Michael Pollack’s genera-
tive use of the concept, was mobilized in order to adequately grasp the narratives
of Nazi camp survivors about the manner in which they maintained their identity
during and after their years of internment (Pollack 1990). Without denying the
pertinence of the sociological concept of habitus, Pollack argued that his inquiry
revealed the need for a broader and more flexible repertoire to understand how
persons lived through life in the camps. Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus issues
from analyses of phenomena that have a high degree of institutional stabilization,
in which persons are trying to gain or maintain capital in social games, or partici-
pate strategically in high-stakes fields (Lemieux 2008). Pollack observed that in an
extreme situation such as the Nazi concentration and death camps, the assump-
tions embedded within concepts of habitus and field led away from rather than
toward comprehension of what was going on experientially and practically.
The concept of test, in Pollack’s usage, was thus designed to offer a better grasp
of the ethical and veridictional stakes of the object of research and the practice of
the research itself. That is to say, the stakes did not turn per se on contesting Bour-
dieu’s theory, but rather stemmed from a finer-grained attention to the veridic-
tional and ethical requirements of the object and objective of the inquiry. Although
not thematized in these terms, this amounted to the inclusion of an additional op-
erational perspective for inquiry, whose goal was not denunciatory but rather to
contribute to the adequacy and enrichment of the inquiry itself.
Anthropological testing
Nevertheless, the work in France is a sociology of tests. The putting to the test
of the sociologist herself in conducting an inquiry adequate to the object of in-
quiry is implicit, but is never part of the actual analysis. In line with Hau’s edi-
torial call to draw on past repertoires of distinctive conceptual contributions, we
propose that putting to the test be reintroduced beyond France and in a modified
4. For a recent overview, see Barthe et al. 2013.

anthropological manner.5 In recent years, we have been experimenting with a dif-

ferent manner in which this testing of concepts could be given an anthropological
form. In Designs on the contemporary we put it into practice without elaborating its
conceptual contours. At that juncture our inquiry had led us to two cases in which
authorial figures were confronted with a range of tests (political, artistic, ethical,
and social). Their responses were of interest given our endeavor to test our own
conceptual repertoire (ideal types) concerning the proposed existence of break-
downs of a “modern ethos” and the remediation of such breakdowns by bringing
them into a ratio with a “contemporary ethos.”
Case #1: Gerhard Richter. The ethos of modernist art practice has, in many do-
mains, broken down. Nevertheless, the ethos does not disappear. Rather, the chal-
lenge for some contemporary artists and for their anthropological observers is to
inhabit an ethos of art practice capable of taking up and remediating breakdowns
in that past ethos. The challenge for anthropology is to test a mode and form of
observation capable of grasping these ratios of ethos and practice. Not unlike Pol-
lack, the process of inquiry led us to the need for this concept of the test. We were
explicit, however, about the place of the analysis of the tests these “actors” were
going through, tests of the ethos through which they could weather and traverse
the challenges they faced, and the symmetrical need to account for the tests of the
anthropologist’s ethos and manner in which to observe, describe, and analyze the
indeterminate situations under scrutiny. The case of the image-making practices
of Richter, taken up in Designs on the contemporary, is a step toward articulating
an anthropology of tests as well as a test of anthropology and the anthropologists.
Case #2: Salman Rushdie. A second case, again taken up in Designs on the con-
temporary, is an analysis of the “affair” that emerged in the wake of the publication
of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic verses. The core problem we raise is
how observers of the affair, including anthropological observers such as Jeanne
Favret-Saada and Talal Asad, attempted to grasp what was going on. We position
ourselves at a second order of observation toward those second-order observers.
Asad denounces Rushdie and his liberal supporters for not understanding the
reception of the content of the novel as injurious to some Muslims. His mode of
observation relies on a critique of Rushdie as exemplifying a modern ethos of “self-
fashioning” and a critique of modernity as an ethos that demands indetermination.
In the textual field, this means that modernity as an ethos assumes “that the dis-
course called literature can fill the role previously performed by religious textuality”
(Asad 1993: 287). Asad thus argues for the legitimacy of the counter-modern, which
is his privilege, and also for the illegitimacy of the modern ethos, which is not.
Favret-Saada, by contrast, demonstrates an acute anthropological attention to
what actually happened, asking how the affair was constituted (Favret-Saada 1992).
She provides a powerful analysis of the social forms through which Rushdie’s novel
was rendered into a blasphemous object. She thus creates a mode and angle of ob-
servation through which to dissolve the pertinence of claims about the affair as
5. In her own inimitable manner, Jeanne Favret-Saada’s works on bewitching and un-
witching ([1977] 1980) indexes precisely the subjectivational and veridictional chal-
lenges for the anthropologist who integrates the testing of her self into the subject mat-
ter of the inquiry.

417 Movement space
turning on blasphemous content. She provides a warranted account of how the

accusation of blasphemy was an institutional product of, rather than cause of, the
affair. Thanks to her work, we were then in a position to ask how Rushdie’s own
narration of what he was up to—his modern and modernist effort to write about
religion as someone who does not believe in revealed truth—could be observed,
given how he was being observed through the affair and in its aftermath by his
denouncers and supporters. The test for the anthropologists was a test of an ethos
through which to grasp the relations of force between modern and counter-mod-
ern ethē. We sought to provide a contemporary mood and form for observing the
breakdowns in the affair and the failed attempts at repair and vindication.
The distinctiveness of an anthropological test (as opposed to a sociology or
ethnography of tests) is that it simultaneously analyzes the indetermination and
eventfulness of situations, practices, and forms of life under observation, as well
as the indetermination of the subject-position, practice, and form of life of the one
who observes that indetermination. Such an anthropology of tests and a test of an-
thropology is of necessity experiential and pragmatic, without being “phenomeno-
logical” or “subjective.” For Kant (see Wood 2003: 40) the “pragmatic” in pragmatic
anthropology has four meanings: (i) as being simultaneously “characteristic” in the
observing of how others act and “didactic” in being a self-forming inquiry; (ii) as
indexing participation in a world; (iii) as useful for action; (iv) as being “pruden-
tial.” An anthropology of tests and a test of anthropology as we conceive it is then
precisely “pragmatic” in Kant’s sense.
For Kant, the blockage to attaining a fully pragmatic ethical life turns on the
anthropological problem of “egoism.” The problem of overcoming egoism requires
three anthropological tests: the logical test of judgment against and with the under-
standing of others; the aesthetic test of whether taste is progressive, whether it mani-
fests an openness to put one’s Gemüt [disposition, self-affectation] as a passive and
active capacity of sensibility and imagination to the test with that of others; and a
moral test, in which egoism is cast against what one owes to others in sharing a com-
mon form of life. Such tests of Gemüt should make visible that, as the Dewey scholar
Tom Burke has it, “experience is necessarily perspectival relative to the operational
capabilities of an agent; but this is not to say that it is necessarily subjective.” Burke
(1994: 107) calls this “operational perspectivity.” Moreover, “as a matter of defini-
tion, experience is objective to the extent that any kind of agenda relative to peculiar
needs and desires of the individual inquirer are relegated to irrelevance and have no
functional role in that experience” (ibid.). Or at least this should be the case. The rise
of identity politics has, frankly, obscured the power of such a significant operational
principle. At its core, a pragmatic anthropology pertains to an object and situation
that calls for inquiry in which there are both veridictional and ethical stakes.
Situations, concepts, and operations

Situations are bounded by the reach, scope or content of a
living creature’s experience, where the problem in the end is
to explain “experience as situated” not “situations as experi-
enced.” (Burke 1994: 37)

To state that the philosophical problem—“in the end”—consists in attempting to

explain “experience as situated” makes the problem seem anthropological in the
most traditional as well as in contemporary registers. What Dewey’s approach to
philosophy, especially to logic, shares with anthropology understood in a pragmat-
ic sense is both commonsensical—contextualizing what the natives are thinking
and doing—and requires more sustained analysis than it has been given in recent
years. In what ways, for example, does the traditional understanding of contextual-
izing differ from Dewey’s understanding of experience as situated?
Both contextualizing and understanding “experience as situated” involve judg-
ment—judgment understood in Dewey’s sense as the attribution of a mode of be-
ing or action to a situation Up to this point, we have distinguished between three
modes of anthropological judgment: a contextualizing mode of judgment; an eval-
uative mode; and a mode of putting to the test. We will argue that it is only the last
of these, putting to the test, which enables judgments of experience as situated.
Contextualization typically involves the multiplication of variables (historical,
cultural, political) and factors or parameters (timing, personalities, etc.) that enable
the understanding or explanation of episodes and events. The inquirer in a contex-
tualizing mode, however, allows the natives’ point of view to preside. Some contex-
tualization is usually necessary in any inquiry. As a mode of judgment, however,
contextualization is frequently deficient, especially with respect to the question of
how and why the inquirer is the one doing the particular inquiry and of those op-
erational capacities that facilitate the particular inquiry in question.
A mode of judgment with excessive focus on subject position is found in evalua-
tion: It is excessive because the mode of judgment reduces the stakes of the inquiry
to the subject position of the inquirer, who bases evaluation on his or her capacity
to occupy a position in the discursive field. Evaluative modes of judgment are most
explicit when used to identify the operation of ideology.
Putting to the test, in contrast, is a mode of judgment that seeks a mean between
the effacement of the subject position of the inquirer and the excessive parameter-
ization of inquiry by the subject position of the inquirer in the inquiry and the de-
nunciation made possible because of the character of that subject position. Putting
to the test demands a movement, in situ, between the operational capacities of the
inquirer, the objects under inquiry and the objectives of inquiry.
Why are neither “from the native’s point of view” nor “the speaker’s benefit” the
same as “operational perspectivism”? Burke’s proviso—“not situations as experi-
enced”—orients us away from phenomenology and subjectivism towards at least
one particular form of pragmatism. That form of pragmatism becomes anthropo-
logical when it actually operates at the level of specifics, particulars, and singulari-
ties rather than merely advocating such an orientation without putting it to the test
of situations experienced.
The task, then, is to develop means to diagnose, analyze, and narrate experi-
ences of inquiry as situated. In order to do so, some preliminary discussion of situ-
ations is required.
Situations
Dewey developed a distinctive use of the term situation. Burke is helpful in provid-
ing succinct glosses on Dewey’s use of the term. He writes:

419 Movement space
Situations, occurring in the ongoing activities of some given organism/

environment system, are instances or episodes (or “fields”) of
disequilibrium, instability, imbalance, disintegration, disturbance,
dysfunction, breakdown, etc. (Burke 1994: 37)
Thus, for Dewey, situations are the site of thinking, since thinking is the activity
that is occasioned by such instances or episodes of what can be called discordance
or breakdown. Thus, situations are local in the sense of being circumscribed (spa-
tially and temporally). In this light, thinking can be understood as an active re-
sponse that seeks to rectify discordances or indeterminations within a situation.
Identifying that there is a situation and proceeding to parse its contours is an im-
portant initial step in forming a diagnosis of a problem.
Burke underscores Dewey’s understanding of this dynamic process by in-
sisting on the inescapability of experience in delimiting the nature of situations
and responses to them. Dewey argues for an approach to thinking (as well as to
logic) that is necessarily embedded in concrete practices and experiences. It is
empirical:
In claiming that a theory of situations is “genuinely empirical,” Dewey is
saying that situations are objective, concrete things. They are actual fields
of organism/environment activity, subsisting within the manifold of “life
functions” of some particular organism/environment system. (Burke
1994: 52)
Thus, situations are experiential and inquiry-based as their contours become iden-
tified, tested, rectified, and made available for more involvement. In that sense,
they are experimental. Not every encounter, however, can be called an occasion for
inquiry in the sense of a putting logic into action in a sustained and testable man-
ner. If one has momentarily misplaced one’s keys and then remembers where she
put them, there might well be a moment of thought or puzzlement involved, but
such a resolution is not, properly speaking, an instance of inquiry.
Concepts
Dewey’s attention to terms such as “situation,” “experience,” “concepts,” and “inqui-
ry” are focused on cases where controlled thinking, sustained inquiry and ordered
rectification come to the fore. Just as thinking is experiential and situated, so, too,
Dewey understands the tools or equipment of thinking and logic as well as their
objects as pragmatic practices, not abstract, context-free ideas or propositions. To
cite Burke again: “Insofar as Dewey is interested in logic and not metaphysics, he
talks about facts as elements of existence, not as elements of reality (as if that made
any sense), and not as primitive and absolutely unquestionable (‘stubborn’) ele-
ments of knowledge” (1994: 215).
For Dewey, facts and inquiry proceed together; they are mutually intertwined.
Dewey opposed other prominent schools of logic of his day, whose founders saw
their task as forging propositions that mirrored, or corresponded to, or captured
reality, a reality independent of and pre-existent to philosophic analysis. He was
engaged for many years in an extended debate with Bertrand Russell over the na-
ture of logic. For Dewey, contra Russell, logic was a practice of inquiry, not the
construction of formal symbolic systems.

Dewey defines concepts as habits. At first, this approach seems strange, even
counter-intuitive, but it becomes less so once one specifies what type of habit quali-
fies as conceptual. Conceptual habits are reflective or, perhaps more accurately,
second-order:
Concepts are more or less self-contained habits that have names or
otherwise are subject to representation within some symbolic medium
or other. As such, habits are representations of habits—or more precisely,
habits-at-a-distance, capable of being held at bay by virtue of some kind
of symbolic handle. (Burke 1994: 173)
Habits understood in this manner are both equipmental instruments for diagnosis
and inquiry as well as tools for providing the possibility of a logic that proceeds
from inquiry through the mediation of symbol systems at a second-order level.
This second-order level will itself facilitate the articulation of further steps in an
ongoing inquiry.
Habits and concepts both serve to sift and select possibilities in their own
peculiar ways, but plain non-conceptual habits play this role in perception
and in direct apprehension of things otherwise, while concepts function
as such in processes of reflection. (Burke 1994: 173)
This claim about perception opens up a wide range of issues that cannot be taken
up here.
Concepts function at a number of levels: one such level is guiding action, spe-
cifically action that is oriented towards carrying forward steps that clarify how in-
quiry in a situation should proceed.
Concepts are habits in a . . . straightforward sense—insofar as they are
mechanisms for directly guiding reflective processes by mapping out
ideas relevant in given situations. That is to say, insofar as at least some
perceivable affordances will have been named or otherwise can be handled
indirectly by some symbolic means, ideas represent affordances—in the
sense that ideas are suggestions and support specific proposals about
how to proceed in a given situation. (Burke 1994: 173)
What exactly Dewey means by affordances is not spelled out. It seems to be a tech-
nical term, but there is no gloss on it either by Dewey or his commentators:
In a different sense, ideas are affordances. Insofar as they pertain to the
systematic use of representations, ideas point to lines of development
by which reflective processes might work themselves out. In this sense,
ideas are the affordances of reflection. And in this same sense, concepts
are habits, but specifically with regard to agent/world interactions
constituting the use of symbols. (Burke 1994: 173)
As commentators have explored in some detail, Dewey’s understanding of inquiry
is both experiential and conceptual. The two terms are not identical, but they are
inevitably linked:
The heart of Dewey’s conception of judgment, is an assertible conclusion
of inquiry, whose subject is existential in content and whose predicate is
ideational in content (together asserting what the facts of the case are and

421 Movement space
if anything is to be done about them). Judgment should thus reflect an

integration of existential and ideational aspects of inquiry. (Burke 2002:
143; Dewey 1934: 263)
This claim is not oriented to ideological judgments about good or bad, right or
wrong, true or false, and the like. “What is to be done about them” means how to
continue to conduct inquiry within a situation.
Operational perspectivism: Putting to the test

Although Dewey’s approach to logic is experiential, rooted in inquiry and situ-
ational, it is not subjective in his sense of the term:
In contrast to Kant—we want to distinguish operational perspectivity
from subjectivity. Aprioristic perspectivism, especially in Dewey’s
naturalistic and ecological sense where habits and attunements play
more or less the same role in on-going experience as would Kant’s a
priori forms of intuition . . . is not the same as, and does not entail any
commitment to, subjectivism. Experience is necessarily perspectival,
relative to the operational capabilities of the given agent; but this is not to
say that it is necessarily subjective. (Burke 1994: 107; citing Dewey 1938:
13–14, 17, 102, 530–32)
Properly conducted inquiry is irreducible to subjectivity (distance had been built
in from a phenomenology understood as a subject’s attention to an object). It isn’t
based either in the proliferation of perspectives converging asymptotically at the
reality of a situation.
Such a position—often wrongly ascribed to Nietzsche—would seem to assume
that there is a matter of the case or situation that pre-exists breakdown and in-
quiry and consequently that multiplying perspectives would necessarily enrich
understanding.
Such a position is far removed from Dewey’s logic. The reason it is far removed
is that operational perspectivism is not a subjective positioning but the product
and process of a rolling progression of steps within a controlled inquiry arising
out of a breakdown. Such inquiry demands hypotheses as equipment in a process
constituted in such a manner that they can be put to appropriate testing and, as ap-
propriate, revised and reformulated. The goal of such hypothesis-driven inquiry is
warranted judgments. Dewey, Burke argues, does not say that
every proposition is hypothetical, but rather that every (scientific) inquiry,
and hence every judgment, involves the formulation and confirmation
of hypotheses. . . . Formulating and refining hypotheses is necessary as
part of reaching warranted judgment; but then, so is being clear about
particular matters of fact, both prior to and subsequent to altering the
dynamics of a given situation. If certain hypotheses, suggested by prior
facts, are further confirmed by subsequent results of actions performed in
accordance with the given hypotheses, and if this success remains stable
in the course of ongoing testing of these hypotheses, then it is warranted,
in asserting that those hypotheses are applicable to and descriptive of the
given situation. (Otherwise new hypotheses have to be considered, and
given facts need to be reviewed.) (Burke 1994: 214–15)

Hence, the perspectivism at issue in this logic of inquiry is operational. Other ob-
servers could well have diverse experiences of breakdown or indeterminacy. Such
observers would have a different understanding and a different experience of the
situation and its concordant problems. Such differences should lead to modified
hypotheses and progressions with a different process and directionality of inquiry.
This diversity might well enrich understandings of problems and judgments about
those problems that might well come to be seen as comparable. Such enrichment
can only come about, however, through rigorous inquiry, not expansive subjectiv-
ism (or objectivism).
Steps toward the composition of inquiry: Putting to the test

A central component of the composition of inquiry in the human sciences is thus
what we have been calling “putting to the test.” We identify three domains for op-
erations of intellectual instrumentalities during inquiry in which putting to the test
would be appropriate and would operate according to different criteria: (1) theo-
retical operations; (2) ideal-typical ones; and (3) casuistic ones. Presumably these
forms will differ in their goals and means. They might also entail different forms of
putting to the test, which could show excesses and deficiencies, as well as the pos-
sibility of a mean or virtuous form.
Theory
The challenge of how to understand and define “theory” is as old as Western phi-
losophy itself. From Plato forward through the logical positivists and many, many
others, debates have raged (and continue to simmer today) in the branches of the
human sciences to which we are closest, those represented in Hau included. For
our purposes here, let us simply follow a few broad guidelines, from a pragmatist
frame, derived and defended elsewhere. Here are a series of claims about the status
of theory within Dewey’s logic from Tom Burke, arguably the leading authority on
the matter.
A theory, then, will be a more or less coherent set of definitions, axioms,
or basic hypotheses and implications thereof, holding within a given
world-view, possibly shared by many worldviews. (Burke 2002: 137)
If we think of theories as systems of definitions and hypotheses and
everything that follows from them by given derivation rules, then many
of our ideas arise in “constellation”’ that could not properly be called
theories at all. (Burke 2002: 137)
With regard to inquiry more generally, scientific or otherwise, the notion
of a theory is not rich enough to characterize the ideational aspects of
inquiry. (Burke 2002: 136)
Theory then could serve as a tool for an initial orientation. It would draw on the
history of approaches to similar problems while being vigilantly attentive to the
historical changes in the form of such problems and such orientations. One might
say that theory in this restricted sense draws on prior configurations of the actual

423 Movement space
to provide an initial orientation to the present, rather than a ready-made frame of

parameters and objects to which examples can be adjusted.
Excess: When a theory becomes a worldview (or the age of the world picture) it
is no longer scientific, but is instead metaphysical.
Deficiency: A theory is deficient when it is so thin that it can apply with little
effort to a wide range of examples. At times this deficient form follows from the
excessive one: if everything happening during a period of time is “neoliberal,” for
example, then the theory has answered the question before it explores anything.
Mean: Theory would be operating according to its mean if the examples obliged
reflection on and at times corrections of the basic parameters. The point of the ex-
amples would be not only the demonstration of the power of the theory to diagnose
and analyze significance but to increase the specificity of diagnosis and analysis.
This movement would constitute a form of theoretical inquiry.
putting to the test—1

Theories are held to be true; or they can be said to correspond to the way things
are. Theories have propositions and methods as the basis of their truth claims. A
theory might well be improved by sharpening its parameters. If one were testing a
theory, one would look for examples. These examples would be part of a demonstra-
tion of the theory’s strength. It would be relatively easy (but also a requirement) to
multiply these examples. Such multiplications would not alter the basic structure of
the theory. They would serve as a kind of demonstration of its consistency across
seemingly different or disparate empirical materials. The goal of such multiplica-
tions is to test—or confirm—the range of the theory and to demonstrate its capaci-
ty to identify and delimit significant parameters. Theory here is thus understood as
a general explanation or account of a phenomenon. A theory of the state, for exam-
ple, would be a general explanation of the formation and characteristics of states.
Historical sociologists, among others, spend their time debating methodological
rules for establishing the warrantibility of such general accounts. Actor Network
Theory, as another example, is a general account (although not an explanation) of
the arrangements and outcomes of human and non-human actants in which ref-
erential classifications (binary distinctions) are demonstrated to be unstable or to
dissolve in practice. As James Faubion reminds us, in their hypothetico-deductive
modality, theorists model problems with axioms, infer hypotheses, and then test
them with data of various sorts (Faubion 2011: 274–75). Luc Boltanski and Laurent
Thevenot are exemplary in the use of such modelling in their theorization of mod-
els of justification (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991). Presumably, a theory of the sort
we have under consideration here cannot be refuted. In any case, the test would be
to demonstrate how an example that is claimed to refute or fall outside the range
of the theory actually could be accommodated (with or without modifications)
within the original structure.
Ideal types
As invented and practiced by Max Weber, ideal types are a form of equipment
designed to formulate hypotheses about reality and to put those hypotheses to
the test within empirical domains. Weber is adamant that the ideal type should

not be understood to be a claim about reality. It is a tool to improve and refine

diagnosis and further inquiry. It is a tool to hone concepts. Its objects can differ
widely, depending on the type of problem being addressed. The goal of ideal-
typification is to deploy concepts and to aim ultimately at the elaboration of
significant new points of view. Such points of view are operational perspectives,
not worldviews.
An ideal type, as the outcome of a disciplined inquiry using conceptual
constructs,
has the significance of a purely ideal limiting concept with which the
real situation or action is compared and surveyed for the explication
of certain of its significant components. Such concepts are constructs
in terms of which we formulate relationships by the application of the
category of objective possibility. By means of this category, the adequacy
of our imagination, oriented and disciplined by reality, is judged. (Weber
1949: 93).
Excess: Ideal-typical practices tend to be excessive when one loses sight of the start-
ing principle that ideal types are not meant to be real or the goal of inquiry. In such
situations ideal-typical equipment tends to blend into theory.
Deficiency: Ideal-typical practices are deficient when they become an end in
themselves. If the only point is simply to test out whether one can construct an
ideal type and apply it to empirical material, a reversal of priorities results whereby
the tool becomes the end rather than the means.
Mean: Ideal types function correctly when they are used as tools for conceptual
refinement.

Ideal types are put to the test via the examination of empirical materials so as to
identify at once the significance of those types and of the materials they formalize.
Ideal types are not the goal of such inquiry; they are expendable once they have
served their initial purposes. Ideal types per se are not meant to be true or war-
rantable in Dewey’s sense; they are not propositions. Judgments about significance
come at a later point in an inquiry and apply to different sorts of claims.
How then to put an ideal type to the test? As Weber points out, the anthropol-
ogist must confront the danger of using ideal types in making judgments of the
significance of human practices. “Ideal types” are often used not only “logically”
but also “practically” in grasping the significance of a given object of inquiry. The
motivation for honing concepts for work on a specific problem can result in the
concept containing “within it” the very idea of worth that prompted the search
for concepts to work on the problem in the first place (Weber 1949: 92–97). Such
self-containment was of great concern for Weber. The “ideas” in ideal types, in-
sofar as they contain evaluations of worth, “are naturally no longer purely logical
auxiliary devices, no longer concepts with which reality is compared, but ide-
als by which it is evaluatively judged.” Weber explicates the consequence of this
methodological point: “Here it is no longer a matter of the purely theoretical
procedure of treating empirical reality with respect to values but of judgments of
worth which are integrated into the concept . . .” (a concept supposed to assist in

425 Movement space
inquiry into phenomena) (Weber 1949: 98). Weber gives the example of his own
work on religion, and of the problem of honing ideal types of “Christianity.” The
concept risks containing “what, from the point of view of the expositor, should
be and what to him is ‘essential’ in Christianity because it is enduringly valuable”
(Weber 1949: 97).
In Weber’s view, two forms of an ideal type must be kept distinct: the form of the
analytic construct (logical validity) that is used to grasp (and thus compare) reality
and the form of the analytic construct that is used to judge and thus attribute a mode
of being to that situation that has been grasped analytically (evaluative interpreta-
tion/judgment). Weber demands that the inquirer attend to “the line where these
two ideal types diverge,” in order to afford both the discernment of judgments of
worth and to take responsibility for the logical procedures through which such judg-
ment is produced (Weber 1949: 98). (As we know, the basic premise of “scientific
self-control” for Weber was the rigorous distinction between ideal types and ideals. )
Putting ideal types to the test initially therefore takes the form of rectification
through logico-empirical exercises. Such exercises are tests of internal consistency
as well as exercises directed toward empirical domains held to be fields of potential
significance. The empirical, however, is not significant per se. Even so, it cannot be
underplayed in pursuing rectification.
For us, however, Weber’s ethical distinction between logical validity and judg-
ment does not entail their ethical separation. The significance of a “proposition,”
or a concept, is not merely its scientific validity; the significance of a proposition
about situations, or a concept that makes an observation possible, can only come
from the judgments or the discernment that they make possible.
Casuistry
Casuistry proceeds through cases. Its object is neither the multiplication of exam-
ples nor the goal of general claims of significance towards which ideal-typical work
tends, at least in Weber’s practice. Weber’s sociology of religions is not a theory that
rises and falls on its empirical validity in a strict sense, but on its ability to provide
a distinctive point of view that illuminates general significance.
Casuistry passes through particularity. Its goal in elaborating instances is to
turn them into cases whose singularity cannot be overlooked or subsumed. The
multiplication of cases would be a form of inquiry (at times collaborative) through
which a topological field could be constructed. Such inquiry is pluralistic and must
pass through the painstaking work of elaborating an operational perspectivity di-
rected at singularity. The casuist must carry out such work with awareness that
other cases might eventually be related through the contours of the operational
perspectivity at play.
Excess: Casuistry is excessive if it turns toward metaphysics, as it does in its Je-
suit form—that is to say, if and when its guiding principles are known in advance
and fixed. A modified form of such guiding principles, a reflection on how to move
from case to case, should be a goal and not a given.
Deficiency: Casuistry is deficient when the case becomes an end in itself. Singu-
larity becomes the goal and not the parameter through which enrichment of other
cases can be taken up and related.

Mean: Casuistry as a form of contemporary inquiry takes the form of detailed

exploration of cases undertaken with the full awareness that understanding has
passed through modernity. This claim means that resting with theory or ideal types
alone cannot offer a legitimate form of scientific consolation. If one rests with one
or the other, either one has lost one’s way or remains a modern.

The significance of a case turns on a productive relation between the necessity of
taking into account the particularity of a given case as well as the relevant metric
that specifies that case and directs inquiry to pursue a series of analogical cases.
A particular challenge for testing a case in anthropology is that, unlike in law and
medicine, there are relatively few settled and uncontested forms, venues, and stan-
dards of judgment by way of which and through which what counts as a case can
be taken for granted.
Contemporary casuistry requires a second-order—not merely reflective—form
of operational perspectivism. It demands a testing whose criteria depend on mak-
ing sure that one is not falling back into the modern ethos, an ethos of heroic irony
and self-assertion (or the imaginary that we have never been modern). The casuist
of the contemporary—the contemporary casuist—is aware that one is not seeking
to emulate the fixed guidelines or principles of other times. What the casuist in
question is attempting to discover are the parameters of a contemporary casuistry.
The challenge is how to proceed with an ethos restive toward the present, recalci-
trant toward its discordances, while seeking a form of generality.
Composition in anthropological inquiry: Toward a contemporary topology

How to think through integration and juxtaposition? More
generally, how to insert fragments into a form remains an es-
sential preoccupation for composition, even the essential preoc-
cupation. Without a justified insertion, the fragment remains
autonomous and the form does not really exist. (Boulez 2005:
705)6
Upon reflection, what is important to underscore about our diagnostic mode of
anthropological inquiry is that it takes aspects of each of the three types and as-
sembles them in different manners, given the problem or breakdown at hand. We
assemble these different operations given a space of problem-formation, given an
aim of the conceptual specification and interconnection of these problems, and
given the aim of specifying parameters of and interconnections among cases. The
challenge is thus to compose modes of putting to the test during inquiry, which in
our repertoire of theory, ideal-typical concept work and casuistry stand out as chief
intellectual instrumentalities. The challenge is also to invent composed forms for
6. In the original French: “Comment penser intégration et juxtaposition, comment, plus

généralement, insérer les fragments dans la forme, cela reste une préoccupation essentielle
de la composition, et même la préoccupation essentielle; sans une insertion justifiée, le
fragment reste à son autonomie, et la forme n’existe pas vraiment.”

427 Movement space
the interconnection of problems, concepts, and cases that pertain to these intel-
lectual instrumentalities.
Although we do not do theory in a strict sense, without some already estab-
lished broad sense of a problem and its diagnostic contours there would be no way
to proceed except on a purely local or particular level. We do not do this; the lure
of the ethnographic per se has for us had its day. We also have developed a good
deal of equipment that, while not directly in the mode of the ideal type, can at least
be used to bracket truth claims and to formulate a conceptual strategy (at times
post hoc) for inquiry. Perhaps one could say that we deploy ideal types as concepts
in hypotheses that both orient and guide inquiry towards making judgments. Al-
though we certainly are oriented to cases, at least in a common-sense use of the
term, we have not achieved either a strong sense of their parameters nor have we
been able to train others to produce cases that might be amenable to the type of
casuistic reflection we are imagining and attempting to practice. What a contem-
porary casuistic would look like remains a challenge.
We require more reflection on the interplay of objects and objectives in these
three domains of the operation of intellectual instrumentalities. Burke’s observa-
tion about Dewey’s understanding of objects is helpful in this regard: “The nature
of an object is not a ‘substance in which attributes adhere’ (as a subject of predi-
cates) but a ‘constant correlation of variations of qualities’” (2002: 146). That is to
say, the “object” of theory, an ideal type, or a case even, is not directly referential
(leading to classification of events and things as tokens of general types to which
they correspond) (see Faubion 2015).
Such a “constant correlation of variants of qualities” leads us in the direction
both of Boulez’s reflections on composition as more than structure as well as to-
ward a topological understanding of fields of objects.
As intellectual instrumentalities, theory, ideal-type work, and casuistry have
different kinds of “objects.” Perhaps theory can be best understood, in our use, as
an orienting device calibrated toward a problem space; ideal types might be better
understood as an equipmental action that initiates or advances an inquiry already
in process through the invention and refinement of concepts; they thereby facilitate
the initial identification and interconnection of problems as elements within the
inquiry process; casuistry aims toward the interconnection of cases relative to the
specification of a problem space and concepts.
What is important to insist on is that our manner of conducting anthropological
inquiry produces composed motion between these instrumentalities and objects:
a problem space, concepts, and the cases of inquiry. Such motion operates at two
levels, and therefore with dual objectives for working on the composition of these
objects: (1) at the level of the inquiry into a specific singular case, the objective is
to discern and gauge the significance and parameters of the specific case, with the
aid of concepts and the demarcation of a problem. Then there is a second level, or
second-order level, of inquiry whose objective is the composition of a “topology”
of concepts, problems, and cases composed by the inquirers. As such we insist that
such a mode of anthropology is produced through collaboration, permitting mo-
tion between individual inquiries and reflection between and among inquiries. On
the one hand, there is therefore the composition of concepts and a problem (within

a problem space) relative to a case one is inquiring into (first order); on the other
hand, there is second-order composition of problems, concepts, and cases.
The import of Dewey’s orientation to objects, and Boulez’s guidance in com-
position, can be underscored with respect to others who have recently revived an
interest in topology: Giovanni da Col approvingly cites Edmund Leach as a fore-
bear who had taken such topological thinking seriously. He cites the following: “A
society is not an assemblage of things but an assemblage of variables.” And further
on: “If I have a rubber sheet and draw a series of lines on it to symbolize the func-
tional interconnections of some set of social phenomena and I then start stretching
the rubber about, I can change the manifest shape of my original geometrical figure
out of all recognition and yet clearly there is a sense in which it is the same figure
all the time” (da Col 2013: xii). Leach, and da Col consequently, presuppose the na-
ture of the object that is to be treated topologically. The “variation of qualities” that
can be composed and arranged in an anthropological topology is vast and largely
unexplored. It is much vaster than the category “society” (or structural-functional
interconnections of social phenomena) would imply, or the use of “kinship” as the
regulatory model system of such structures.
Our own nascent foray into experimentation with anthropological topology as-
sembles variables that have been pertinent in our various inquiries, but which are
absolutely not variables of society, structures (social or mental) or “culture”: ges-
tures; power relations; affect-forms; modes of historicity; “survivals” (Nachleben) of
modernity. Our initial orientation to topology is thus parameterized with respect
to the historicity of its composition and the historicity of the objects composed
within it, understood as a correlation of variations of qualities grasped in ongo-
ing inquiry. These variables are thus identified with respect to the problems that
orient inquiry. The composition of variables across problems specified in inquiry
gives form to a problem space. We thus follow very precisely Weber’s injunction
that what is demanded of the human sciences is to open up new points of view
through the conceptual interconnection of problems. We further specify that this
problem space of conceptual interconnections must take into account the historic-
ity of the endeavor and the objects composed. We are thus pursuing something like
a historical topology of the contemporary. We consider this a counterpart to and
remediation of Foucault’s enlivening call many decades ago to undertake a histori-
cal ontology of “ourselves,” or else what he probably should have called a historical
ontology of the “modern ethos” of anthrōpos.
It would seem that we derive our material for making warrantable anthropo-
logical judgments from cases. These judgments, however, can pertain either to the
cases in their particularity or to the composition of relations between cases. If that
were to be so, then to the return up the ladder to pursue further inquiry would
operate at a second-order level. The hope was (is) that after a certain amount of
this work, this motion, one could have enough warrantable claims to begin the
process of making them variables in a topological space; hypothetically, cases,
concepts, and well specified problems would provide us with the subject matter
for judgments at this second-order, topological level. Once again, Dewey is a cru-
cial precedent:

429 Movement space
The heart of Dewey’s conception of judgment, is an assertible conclusion

of inquiry, whose subject is existential in content and whose predicate is
ideational in content (together asserting what the facts of the case are and
if anything is to be done about them). Judgment should thus reflect an
integration of existential and ideational aspects of inquiry. (Burke 2002:
143; cf. Dewey 1934, LW 10, 263–64)
These moves and their relations also and again call to mind many of the analyses
of Pierre Boulez on composition. At this juncture it is enough to say that we are
attempting to discover the parameters of a rigorous process that would enable us
to articulate second-order criteria for topological composition—a mode of form-
giving distinct from both curation and comparison.
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Paul Rabinow is is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,

Berkeley. Of his many publications, the most recent include Demands of the day: An
experiment with synthetic biology (with Gaymon Bennett, 2012), and Demands of
the day: On the logic of anthropological enquiry (with Anthony Stavrianakis, 2013).
A more complete list of his work can be found via anthropos-lab.net.
Paul Rabinow
Department of Anthropology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94705
USA
rabinow@berkeley.edu
Anthony Stavrianakis is a research fellow (Chargé de recherche) at the CNRS,

France. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2012. Broadly, his work focuses
on forms and practices of ethical judgment in science and medicine and, along with
Paul Rabinow, he helps to animate Anthropological Research on the Contemporary
(www.anthropos-lab.net), a collaborative virtual laboratory dedicated to anthropo-
logical inquiry into breakdowns in modern norms and forms, as well as their contem-
porary remediation. His current project is a historical and anthropological project on
assisted dying, which takes up changes in medical practices toward the ending of life
since the nineteenth century. He is particularly interested in the moral anthropolo-
gies at stake in medical practice especially during the late enlightenment (1790–1820)
and in the recent past (1975–present). As part of the contemporary inquiry into the
crossing of medical and moral anthropologies he is currently conducting fieldwork
on assisted suicide in Switzerland, supported by the Wenner Gren foundation.
Anthony Stavrianakis
CNRS
7, rue Guy Môquet
94801 Villejuif Cedex
France
stavrianakis@gmail.com


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2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley

Response to Hau Forum, “On the anthropology of the contemporary:

There was a guiding principle for Dewey throughout his career—

Gratitude (Paul Rabinow)

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Paul Rabinow

What is striking in the generous commentaries in this forum is a shared concern

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

“flourishing,” a translation of the Greek term eudaemōnia. Flourishing was a term

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

order of observation. Such a step is crucial in challenging the commonplace of the

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

Taken as an ensemble, these rich reflections index a plurality of modes in which

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

Mode (Rabinow and Stavrianakis, here and following)

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

Indifference versus complicity

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

Such an understanding is not timeless or universal, but is rather historical—guided

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

4. For a recent overview, see Barthe et al. 2013.

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

anthropological manner.5 In recent years, we have been experimenting with a dif-

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

turning on blasphemous content. She provides a warranted account of how the

Situations, concepts, and operations

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

To state that the philosophical problem—“in the end”—consists in attempting to

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

Situations, occurring in the ongoing activities of some given organism/

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

if anything is to be done about them). Judgment should thus reflect an

Operational perspectivism: Putting to the test

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

Steps toward the composition of inquiry: Putting to the test

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

to provide an initial orientation to the present, rather than a ready-made frame of

putting to the test—1

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

not be understood to be a claim about reality. It is a tool to improve and refine

putting to the test—2

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

Mean: Casuistry as a form of contemporary inquiry takes the form of detailed

putting to the test—3

Composition in anthropological inquiry: Toward a contemporary topology

6. In the original French: “Comment penser intégration et juxtaposition, comment, plus

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

The heart of Dewey’s conception of judgment, is an assertible conclusion

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

Paul Rabinow is is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,

Anthony Stavrianakis is a research fellow (Chargé de recherche) at the CNRS,

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 403–431

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his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Paul Rabinow