Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary

166 Pages·2007·0.75 MB·English

by  Paul Rabinow

MARKING TIME
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MARKING TIME
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ON THE ANTHROPOLOGY
OF THE CONTEMPORARY
PAUL RABINOW
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
COPYRIGHT© 2008 BYPRINCETON UNIVERSITYPRESS
PUBLISHED BYPRINCETON UNIVERSITYPRESS,
41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEWJERSEY08540
IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITYPRESS,
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ALLRIGHTS RESERVED
LIBRARYOFCONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
RABINOW, PAUL.
MARKING TIME : ON THE ANTHROPOLOGYOFTHE CONTEMPORARY/
PAULRABINOW.
P. CM.
INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICALREFERENCES AND INDEX.
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13362-1 (HARDCOVER: ALK. PAPER)
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13363-8 (PBK. : ALK. PAPER)
1. ANTHROPOLOGY—PHILOSOPHY. 2. CONTEMPORARY, THE. I. TITLE.
GN33.R26 2008
301.01—DC22
2007008388
BRITISH LIBRARYCATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATAIS AVAILABLE
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction
On the Anthropology of the Contemporary 1
Inquiry 6
Elements 7
The Legitimacy of the Contemporary
2000: Drosophila Lessons 14
The Future of Human Nature 20
Bio-ethics: The Question Concerning Humanism 22
Nature 25
Security, Danger, Risk 26
Contemporary Formations 28
Conclusion 29
Adjacency
Timing 35
Situating: Tolerance and Benevolence 36
Telos: AZone of Discomfort 44
Untimely Work 48
Observation
Bildung 54
Observing the Future 57
Responsibility to Ignorance 60
Observing Observers Observing 62
Observing First-order Observers 64
Chronicling Observation 66
CONTENTS
Original History 67
Writing Things: Deictic Not Epideictic 69
Vehement Contemporaries
Rugged Terrain 78
Elements of a Contemporary Moral Landscape 80
Genomics as Ethical Terrain 81
Agonin the Genomic Terrain 84
Thumós: Appropriate Anger 90
Vehement Contemporaries 98
Marking Time: Gerhard Richter
Contemporary Modern 101
Biotechnical Forms 103
Richter: Double Negations 106
Art Critics and Others 106
Our Contemporary 108
Nature 109
Photography 112
Marking Time 116
Abstract Images 119
Remediation 122
Objects 124
Remedation 127
Notes 129
Bibliography 141
Index 147
vi
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PREFACE
The phrase “marking time”is a term with several clusters
of meaning surrounding it. Among these clusters three
in particular are especially pertinent to the mode, tone,
and project of this book. (1) The first grouping forms around
pauses: a treading between goal-directed actions. This gathering
of energy expended in one task and soon to be directed to an-
other after a pause is of course itself an activity. And given the
function of treading—catching one’s breath, keeping one’s head
above water—the modality of this first sense of marking time is
frequently a reflective one: where should I go next? And how
should I get there? (2) Asecond semantic cluster forms around
meanings that are more performative: for example, a keeping of
time as a conductor or musician might be expected to do; or an
ordering of temporal sequence that a historian might undertake;
or the naming of temporal qualities a philosopher might wish to
distinguish. Such timely ordering of things is often followed or
accompanied by “composing.”(3) Athird, at present largely vir-
tual cluster, that of an anthropologist of the contemporary, at-
tempts to take elements from the first two, gather them together,
while adding an active practice of inquiry of a distinctive sort.
Marking Time explores some of the dimensions of what that
practice entails. This book continues work already accomplished
in Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipmentdevoted to
the formation of concepts useful for an anthropology of the
contemporary.1
The book is itself a punctual intervention marked, as it were,
by a particular set of circumstances although its ambitions are of
a more general kind. Marking Timetook shape during a period
P R E FA C E
of research and reflection in the years 2003–2006. There were
three distinct, if interconnected, substantive areas of research
that occupied and preoccupied me as well as those with whom
I was working, thinking, and composing at the time. First and
foremost was a continuing engagement with the changing ter-
rain of biotechnology and “postgenomics.”An initial challenge
was presented by an invitation to conduct anthropological re-
search at Celera Diagnostics in 2003. It seemed to me that if an-
thropology was going to thrive in the twenty-first century, then
it needed to modify its methods of inquiry and its modes of pro-
duction. The temporality of both, but especially the leisurely,
if stressful, duration of the latter, was such that given the pace
of change of so many things going on in the contemporary
world—from hip hop, to wars, to epidemics, to single nucleo-
tide polymorphism mapping—it would inevitably relegate the
discipline to a historical one. Hence the challenge, and thus the
exercise, was to conduct a solid research project and to write a
book within a year. To do so, certain preliminary and atypical
conditions had to be met: it was clear that access, technical fa-
miliarity, and a certain type of organization at a specific stage of
its enterprise were preconditions. It was also clear that if such
work was to succeed it would have to become more collabora-
tive than was traditionally the case in anthropology. This meant
not just the ethical collaboration with one’s informants and ex-
V
plicit acknowledgment of their contributions, but a di erent
mode of collaboration among the anthropological researchers.
While the changes of collaboration in research and publication
that had taken place in biology over the previous decades
showed that such transformation of scholarly disciplines was
possible, it was clear that direct imitation of that model would
be misleading. What collaboration might look like in the quali-
tative human sciences would have to become itself a subject of
experimentation. The first exercise designed to meet this chal-
viii
P R E FA C E
lenge, the proof of principle as it were, yielded the book A Ma-
chine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles, co-authored with Talia
Dan-Cohen, then an undergraduate at UC Berkeley.2
The second project involved what turned out to be a reward-
ing, multifaceted, and changeable relationship with Roger
Brent, director of the Molecular Sciences Institute (MSI), a Na-
tional Genome Center of Excellence in Computational Biology
located in the city of Berkeley (although independent of the uni-
versity). I had originally intended to conduct research on the
MSI’s Alpha project, as a timely comparative counterpart and
contrast case to that of Celera Diagnostics. Whereas the scien-
tists and business people at Celera Diagnostics were confident
in 2003 that the sequencing of the human genome (done in part
by their parent company Celera Genomics) opened the door to
immediate benefits in terms of identifying major markers for
pathological conditions, the Alpha project was based on the
premise that biology was not yet a full-fledged science since the
field was neither quantitative nor predictive. The intellectually
voracious and vivacious Brent and I engaged in many discus-
sions, from which emerged a common agreement that I would
not directly carry out research at MSI. Instead we concurred that
our energies would be best spent elsewhere: Roger and I should
develop a course together that would bring issues of genomics
and citizenship into a common frame (we cotaught for three
consecutive years from 2003 to 2005). Our free-wheeling and
untrammeled discussions led to yet another unexpected swerve
in my research interests. Brent convinced me that there was a real
and growing danger of new biological threats, and that no even
minimally protective bio-defense system existed in the United
States (or elsewhere). His insistence on the pressing importance
of the threat, and the connections to those working on the
problem that he made available, led, with several more twists
and turns, to an ongoing research project on the “Global Bio-
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