Designs on the Contemporary

Anthropological Tests

Paul Rabinow, Anthony Stavrianakis

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226138503
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Designs on the Contemporary pursues the challenge of how to design and put into practice strategies for inquiring into the intersections of philosophy and anthropology. Drawing on the conceptual repertoires of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and John Dewey, among others, Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis reflect on and experiment with how to give form to anthropological inquiry and its aftermath, with special attention to the ethical formation and ramifications of this mode of engagement.The authors continue their prior explorations of the contemporary in past works: How to conceptualize, test, and give form to breakdowns of truth and conduct, as well as how to open up possibilities for the remediation of such breakdowns. They offer a surprising and contrasting pair of case studies of two figures who engaged with contemporary breakdowns: Salman Rushdie and Gerhard Richter. Approaching Richter's artistic struggles with form and technique in the long wake of modernism and Rushdie's struggles to find a narrative form—as well as a form for living—to respond to the Iranian fatwa issued against him, they show how both men formulated different new approaches to anthropology for the twenty-first century.

PART ONE

After the Actual

INTRODUCTION

The only possible anthropology is that where, rather than being tied to the passivity of phenomenal determinations, the Gemüt is instead animated by the work of ideas on the level of the field of experience.

—Michel Foucault, 1961¹

Immanuel Kant taught his course on anthropology before, during, and after the publication of his critical philosophy.² Although it was a source of pleasure and income for the austere Kant, he considered the gathering up of customs and manners of the world’s people of great significance in delimiting the practices and hopes of this distinctive creature. As is well known, during the 1980s Michel Foucault, toward the end of his life, took up Kant’s punctual interventions as the site in which it seemed fruitful to reproblematize modernity, the Enlightenment, and their relations and interferences.³ As is equally well known by now, in 1961 Foucault submitted his secondary doctoral thesis on Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, translating it into French as well as providing a commentary.⁴ Today, it is arguably the case that Kant’s punctual writings never were nor are they now so minor after all.⁵

One could argue that Kant’s insistence at the dawn of philosophic modernity that what others considered to be the banally empirical, the domain of the multiple and the heterogeneous, nonetheless constituted the site where indispensable curiosity could be satiated and surprising insights could be garnered concerning the contours of this peculiar being’s habits and manners. Foucault, arguably at the waning of modernity’s hegemony, or at least the nadir of its ascendency, returned to Kant in the hope of finding a form of and for Enlightenment in what he referred to as the actual (l’actualité).⁶ This site of truth and conduct held uncanny echoes but also bitter reminders from Kant’s reflections at the dawn of modernity on philosophy’s tasks and obligations within the historical and political situation of the day.⁷ Today, the challenge for us is how, once again, to inquire into, conceptualize, and give form to possible solutions to the contemporary reproblematization of truth and conduct.

The Problem of Modern Anthrōpos

In his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, Foucault rethought Kant’s text, investigating the relations of psychology (dispositional investigations of customs and manners of the savages) and anthropology to Kant’s critical philosophy. The question Foucault began to articulate in 1961 was how it became not only possible but mandatory to engage in empirical analysis of the multiple practices of human beings, on the basis of an object of knowledge—“man”—simultaneously a natural creature conditioned by physical forces and a subject capable of freedom and intervention in the lived conditions of its own being.

Kant, in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, distinguished between two forms of anthropological investigation (Erforschung), physiological and pragmatic:

Physiological knowledge (connaissance / kenntnis) of the human being concerns the investigation of what nature makes of the human being; pragmatic, the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself. . . . Such an anthropology, considered as knowledge of the world, which must come after our schooling, is actually not yet called pragmatic, when it contains an extensive knowledge of things in the world . . . but only when it contains knowledge of the human being as a citizen of the world.⁸

Foucault articulates precisely the significance and signification of anthropology as Erforschung:

The initial objective of Anthropology is to be an Erforschung: an exploration of an ensemble never graspable in its totality, never at rest, because always taken up in a movement where nature and freedom are bound up in the Gebrauch—one of the meanings of which is given in the word “usage” (practices).⁹

The problem Kant articulated—the relation of “can” and “should” in the self-understanding of anthrōpos—is, we argue, being refigured today perhaps in diverse ways as possible solutions to a more general problematization.

Foucault underscored, however, that in Kant’s Anthropology, the majority of the first part of the analysis does not in fact treat this object, the world citizen (der Weltbürger), in its cosmopolitical dimension, but rather, man as object “from the interior point of view of the Gemüt.” It is by turning to Gemüt and not the world citizen, as telos of anthropological investigation, that we might be able to reproblematize Kant’s anthropological problem. Gemüt

includes the capacity to effect the unity of empirical apperception (animus) but not its substance (anima). Gemüt does not designate a substance (whether material or ideal) but is the position or place of the Gemütskräfte (the Gemüt’s powers) of sensibility, imagination, understanding and reason.¹⁰

The Gemüt is the crucial topic because it is the site of self-affectation and the threshold of freedom. Kant tells us that “Spirit is the animating principle in the human being.”¹¹ This animation is neither regulative nor determinative. It is of course not the motion or animation to be described by Hegel of Geist enveloping man and the world and then regulating the empirical diversity of the Gemüt in its historical determination and specificity.

Foucault writes of the function of Geist that it

does not organize the Gemüt in such a way that it is made into a living being, or into the analogon of organic life, or indeed into the life of the Absolute itself; rather its function is to visualize, to engender, in the passivity of the Gemüt, which is that of empirical determination, a teeming mass of ideas—the multiple structures of a totality in the process of becoming that make and unmake themselves like so many of the half-lives that live and die in the mind. Thus the Gemüt is not simply “what it is,” but “what it makes of itself.” And is this not precisely the area that the Anthropology defines as its field of investigation?¹²

If in Foucault’s reading, the Geist is the animating principle of the work of ideas on the field of experience and self-affectation—the field of investigation for anthropology—two core ideas (in Kant’s sense, concepts that go beyond experience and have their source in reason), which were animated with respect to what man can and should make of himself, and which became normative in anthropology as a twentieth-century discipline, were nature and culture.¹³ In Kant’s pragmatic sense, man is conditioned by both ideas. Kant states that

all cultural progress, by means of which the human being advances his education, has the goal of applying this acquired knowledge and skill for the world’s use. But the most important object in the world to which he can apply them is the human being: because the human being is his own final end.¹⁴

The pragmatic problem of anthrōpos, as a problem of natural law and cultural custom, is conceived by Kant in two steps. One way was in terms of the separation of knowledge of man as a natural thing, from man as a moral being. A second way was in terms of the problematic interdependence of knowledge of man and knowledge of nature, since man was considered to have a nature.¹⁵

The articulation of this problem was a development in how Kant conceived of anthropology relative to physical geography. He had been teaching physical geography from 1756 and anthropology from 1772 in Königsberg—the anthropology course became his most popular course and required a subscription fee, unlike the lectures on his Critiques, which were free and ill-attended. In 1797, with the French Revolution underway and conceding that he would not be able to teach his anthropology course again, because of his declining health, Kant agreed to have the anthropology lectures published; he clearly considered them to be an essential part of his overall corpus.

Foucault states that it was at this time that a shift can be seen in how Kant understood anthropological knowledge with respect to other kinds of knowledge of the world. As Foucault observes, what can be legitimately described as the dawn of a modern problem is as follows:

Physical geography and anthropology are no longer set alongside one another as the two symmetrical halves of the knowledge of the world articulated on the basis of an opposition between man and nature. The task of directing us toward a Weltkenntnis is now the sole responsibility of an anthropology which encounters nature in no other form than that of an already habitable Earth (Erde).¹⁶

We accept the formulation that two separate forms of knowledge, one of bios and one of anthrōpos, is a problem. Today, however, the problem is compounded by a reversal of the hierarchy of knowledge from Kant’s time: those claiming to produce knowledge of bios have gained political, financial, and institutional ascendency driven by the promise of health, prosperity, and comprehensive remediation. That this vision of a providential future comes equipped with an ever-receding horizon and with only man’s insights and passions as its regulative idea is hard to contest. Although its actuality is available as knowledge to those practicing a pragmatic anthropology such knowledge does not overcome the disparateness and discordancy of the situation.

Furthermore, we hold that today the idea of a “habitable Earth” would have to be understood more in terms of a universal history and physical geography of an uninhabitable earth. Currently, the proposed form of Weltkenntnis is largely figural and falls, therefore, more in the realm of fiction, understood as operating on the register of the imaginary constructed with veridictional narratives, rather than the sovereign understanding of a totality that Kant hoped to see.

This state of affairs, this diagnosis in any case of our state of affairs, must confront what Foucault identifies as the “programmatic value” that Kant substituted for the cosmological:

As a result, the notion of a cosmological perspective that would organize geography and anthropology in advance and by rights, serving as a single reference for both the knowledge of nature and of the knowledge of man, would have to be put to one side to make room for a cosmopolitical perspective with a programmatic value, in which the world is envisaged more as a republic to be built than a cosmos given in advance.¹⁷

We maintain that Kant’s proposed horizons have not proven to be sustainable. The hope Kant held out for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent guided by providence and leading to Perpetual Peace is barely intelligible today.¹⁸

How then to produce pragmatic anthropological knowledge? We hold that the pillars of the modern problem of pragmatic anthropological knowledge have been undone over the course of the last two centuries. Today we have serious doubts about the plausibility of a cosmopolitical horizon although we concur that it would be comforting to have available some general term to provide a unifying horizon beyond the particular and the singular.¹⁹

ONE

Problematization of the Modern: Bios

The only true anthropology is a pragmatic anthropology, where each fact is placed within the open system of können and sollen.

—Michel Foucault¹

I continue to think that [we] require work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.

—Michel Foucault²

During 2006–2011 we undertook a series of experiments in collaboration among and between the biological and human sciences to see not only what we could (können) achieve by working together, but more importantly by seeking to ascertain what we should (sollen) achieve if things went as we hoped they would. That is to say, we wanted to see what would happen if a form of mutually enriching and synergistic practice could be imagined, invented, and experimented with, and its results analyzed. It is fair to say that when we began this project in 2006 we were working at the limits of what had been attempted previously by others within the prior jurisdictional forms to bring the biosciences and human sciences into a common frame in which actors contracted to a minimal equality, in the name of a vocational science worthy of the name.

We undertook these experiments as a task and an obligation. Consequently, as long as the work and its conclusions were rigorously and honestly carried out and iteratively evaluated, we would be satisfied that veridictionally our results, whatever they might be, would be warrantable and assertible.³ At the end point of a five-year multisited and multi-investigator experiment, as well as concurrent sets of experiments in web-design and pedagogical innovation, we felt sure that the determinations produced within the experimental systems were pragmatically warrantable in the sense John Dewey has given to the term.⁴ We had worked patiently attempting to invent forms and to occupy them; as we have documented, we encountered many obstacles in giving form to our impatience for a different practice of liberty, although we did succeed in practicing a form of libertas.⁵

Given the determinations we have established in, and from, our prior experimental situation, we were now in a position legitimately to put forth judgme...