COPYRIGHT NOTICE:

Paul Rabinow: bookjacket Marking Time

is published by Princeton University Press and copyrighted, 2007, by Princeton
University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading
and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any
network servers.
Follow links for Class Use and other Permissions. For more information send email to:
[email protected]

INTRODUCTION
T
he anthropology of the contemporary has seemed to me
best done by doing it, that is to say, by laying out exam-
ples and reections on those examples. As will be ap-
parent in this book, my inclination is more to show than to
tell, in Wittgensteins sense. At the same time, frequent well-
meaning interlocutors, including reviewers of this book in
manuscript form, have asked me to explain what I mean by the
notion. As a means of acknowledging these requests, while at al-
most the same time refusing to honor them fully, I offer the fol-
lowing introductory thoughts.
On the Anthropology of the Contemporary
What is the contemporary? The ordinary English-language
meaning of the term the contemporary is: existing or occur-
ring at, or dating from, the same period of time as something or
somebody else. But there is the second meaning of distinc-
tively modern in style, as in a variety of favorite contemporary
styles.
1
The rst use has no historical connotations, only tem-
poral ones: Cicero was the contemporary of Caesar just as
Thelonious Monk was the contemporary of John Coltrane or
Gerhard Richter is the contemporary of Gerhard Schroeder. The
second meaning, however, does carry a historical connotation
I N T R O D U C T I O N
and a curious one that can be used to both equate and differ-
entiate the contemporary from the modern. It is that marking
that is pertinent to the project at hand. Just as one can take up
the modern as an ethos and not a period, one can take it up as
a moving ratio. In that perspective, tradition and modernity are
not opposed but paired: tradition is a moving image of the
past, opposed not to modernity but to alienation.
2
The contem-
porary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past
and near future in a (nonlinear) space that gauges modernity as an
ethos already becoming historical.
There are three guiding ideas here. First, the contemporary is
not an epochal term. For much of the twentieth century various
movements that labeled themselves modernist were xated on
the new. And the identication of the new was frequently tied
to a more or less explicit philosophy of history in which the new
was usually better or at least the result of an inevitable motion.
In parallel with the culture concept, it was held that eras or
epochs had a unity that tied diverse domains of practice and ex-
perience together into a whole that was, if not seamless, at least
coherent. But as the faith and belief in such ontological entities
(culture, epochs, progress) has been challenged, it has become
apparent to some that understanding modernism and the mod-
ern required some critical distance from its own assumptions.
This distance could be achieved through historical work that
showed the contingency, inconsistencies, differential strata un-
derlying the surface unity, and the like. Or it could be achieved
through a conscious abandonment of epochal thinking, includ-
ing as many of its presuppositions as could plausibly be reex-
amined. In this light, it is clear that in many domains old and
new elements do coexist in multiple congurations and varia-
tions. Thus, if one no longer assumes that the new is what is
dominant, to use Raymond Williamss distinction, and that the
old is somehow essentially residual, then the question of how
2
I N T R O D U C T I O N
older and newer elements are given form and worked together,
either well or poorly, becomes a signicant site of inquiry.
3
I call
that site the contemporary.
For example, the fact that the human genome has been
mapped, and population differences at the molecular level
identied, does not mean that older understandings of race dis-
appear in the light of this new knowledge. But neither does it
not mean that all of the older understandings of what constitutes
difference undergo a total transformation. Rather, the problem
for an anthropology of the contemporary is to inquire into what
is taking place without deducing it beforehand. And that re-
quires sustained research, patience, and new concepts, or
modied old ones. The purpose is not destruction or decon-
struction but a reevaluation; its goal is not reform or revolution
but rather a type of remediation.
Once again, observers as well as the practitioners of the con-
temporary are not principally concerned with the new or with
distinguishing themselves from tradition. Rather, they are in-
trigued by the operations of the distinction modern/contempo-
rary as the clustered elements and stylized congurations of the
modern are observed in the process of declusterings, recongu-
rations, and different stylizations or made to do so. As I have ar-
gued in Anthropos Today, this mode of observation and practice
is one of secession rather than of the avant-garde or its presumed
opposite, the neoconservative.
4
Secession marks, observes, and
stylizes in a recursive manner.
Second, there is a difference between emphasizing reproduc-
tion and emphasizing emergence. This difference holds for the
subjects in the world as much as for analysts. Most of anthro-
pology and signicant portions of the other social sciences con-
centrate on how society or culture reproduces itself (and this
includes many models of change) through institutions, sym-
bolic work, power relations, or the cunning of reason. And there
3
I N T R O D U C T I O N
is much to be said in favor of this mode of analysis. But it has
become apparent that there are other phenomena present today,
as no doubt there have been at other times in other places, that
are emergent. That is to say, phenomena that can only be par-
tially explained or comprehended by previous modes of analysis
or existing practices. Such phenomena, it follows, require a dis-
tinctive mode of approach, an array of appropriate concepts, and
almost certainly different modes of presentation.
Third, by anthropology I do not mean ethnography under-
stood as a practice developed to analyze a specic type of ob-
jectthe culture and/or society of ethnoiso as to contribute to
a specic genre, the monograph (or journal article). Nor do I
mean philosophic anthropology in the nineteenth-century Eu-
ropean sense, whether materialist or idealist, whose object was
the nature or essence of Mankind and whose genre was the trea-
tise. Nor do I intend the mixed forms of research and writing
that proliferated around this unstable object, lhomme, which at-
tempted, while continually failing, to bring the transcendental
and the empirical into a stable relationship, so powerfully de-
scribed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, even if Fou-
cault himself was tempted for a time to overcome and stabilize
things, an attempt he eventually abandoned. Rather, I take the
object of anthropological science (Wissenschaft) to be the dy-
namic and mutually constitutive, if partial and dynamic, con-
nections between gures of anthropos and the diverse, and at
times inconsistent, branches of knowledge available during a pe-
riod of time; that claim authority about the truth of the matter;
and whose legitimacy to make such claims is accepted as plausi-
ble by other such claimants; as well as the power relations within
which and through which those claims are produced, estab-
lished, contested, defeated, afrmed, and disseminated.
Thus, taken as an object domain, contemporary anthropology
is neither as broad as traditional ethnography nor as grand as
4
I N T R O D U C T I O N
classic philosophic anthropology nor as ambitious as the human
sciences. This narrowing of scope has some advantages: there
are good reasons to accept the claim (sic) that a restricted form
of anthropology refers to an actual object domain in the present
whose recent past, near future, and emergent forms can be ob-
served. Of course, one can observe and analyze that object do-
main in diverse manners. One challenge, the one at hand in this
book, is to contribute to orientations that would mark a means
of producing anthropological knowledge anthropologically.
5
Marking Time is neither a standard monograph nor a tradi-
tional collection of essays. It is not a monograph in that it does
not have a single guiding argument, clearly stated at the outset,
and rigorously held to task in the ensuing chapters. Neither is it
simply a book of essays in that the chapters that follow are not
previously published pieces grouped together and unied by
having the same author. Rather, there are connections between
the chapters; these connections have a pliable logic that readers
may discern could have been assembled differently, producing a
different ow and effect. One might say that the mode of as-
semblage is a contemporary one. Finally, and to the point, the
books chapters share both a temporality and a historicity; they
were written during a period of labor, work, and exploration
within a particular problem space. The contours and dynamics
of that (nonmetric) space became clearer during the course of a
series of orienting experiments in form.
6
Those experiments
were all calibrated, with varying degrees of precision and suc-
cess, toward designing inquiry. Design is a dynamic and collab-
orative practice about which there is more to be said and which
currently forms a topic of intense collaboration and future
work.
7
For the present, however, the rst question at hand is:
what is inquiry? And thus readers eager for denitions and
guidelines will now receive some, with at least a preliminary ra-
tionale for why they are being presented in their current form.
5
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Inquiry
Following John Dewey and Richard McKeon, we can dene a
term as a word a concept a referent. Thus the same word,
for example, philosophy or anthropology, can take its place
in different terms. There is a frequent confusion between a word
and a term. At the outset, therefore, it is appropriate to highlight
some of the key concepts at work in the terms used in this work.
The general issue of how to characterize anthropological in-
quiry has been a surprisingly underexplored subject. Given this
gap and given my formation and inclinations, the tradition of
pragmatic and nominalist thinking was the place I was likely to
nd conceptual help. John Deweys 1938 magnum opus (writ-
ten at age eighty), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, proved invaluable
in providing a general orientation as well as specic concepts al-
beit with certain critical limitations.
8
The concept and practice
of inquiry were central to John Deweys life work. He published
a large number of studies on the topic, both highly technical and
more popular, spanning a period from his collected Essays in Ex-
perimental Logic (1903, 1916) to the 1940s. The pertinent con-
ceptual orientation of Deweys term inquiry is taken up in the
subsequent section.
The main limitations of his approach for anthropological in-
quiry, it seems to me, are found in his inability to leave the prac-
tices, skills, and narrative forms of traditional philosophy be-
hind, even though time and time again he explicitly advocated
doing so.
9
Deweys practice remains abstract even though his
rhetorical aim was to move the reader away from such a tradi-
tional mode of thinking and writing. One might well expect that
a thinker who insisted with force and conviction that the task
and challenge of contemporary philosophy was to overcome tra-
ditional philosophys insistence on certainty, abstraction, and
timelessness would himself seek to integrate the analysis of sub-
stantive topicsspecic problem situationsinto the very warp
6
I N T R O D U C T I O N
and woof of his practice. But in Deweys case one would be dis-
appointed. He remains a traditional philosopher malgr lui.
Dewey (18591952), like Martin Heidegger (18891976),
simply did not concern himself with the genealogical details of
the merely ontic, any more than did Deweys contemporary
analytic philosophers (Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and oth-
ers), who perfected the technique of using thin, school-masterly
examples to draw large philosophic conclusions. In sum, Dew-
eys treatise lacks any sustained attempt to instantiate the ana-
lytic process he advocated.
10
Fundamentally, Dewey is not nominalist enough. He writes
despite himself as if his objects were atemporal. He does not
provide any historical contextualization to locate and delimit his
key terms, such as breakdown, situation, and reconstruc-
tion. The danger in this practice is that one risks ontologizing
these categories.
11
Various other thinkers, such as Reinhart
Koselleck with his history of concepts, developed a form of in-
quiry that would have been consistent with the overall project
of Deweys logic but would have entailed a different set of in-
tellectual skills. Although it would be of interest to explore the
historical conditions in which Deweys terms, practices, and
modes were formed, such an undertaking obviously is neither
my intent nor my interest here. Rather, I am trying to appro-
priate conceptual tools that had been forged for certain prob-
lems, and to refashion them in the hope that they will provide
analytic purchase for different problems.
Elements
Despite the limitations of Deweys approach, his claims about
the nature of inquiry provide helpful orientation points for a re-
newed practice of inquiry. As an introductory device, I propose
a series of Deweyian claims about the nature of inquiry.
12
7
I N T R O D U C T I O N
1. Inquiry begins in an indeterminate situation, Dewey argues
that inquiry is a continuous, reiterative process. Inquiry is not
restricted to scientic or traditional philosophic questions per se
but is involved with ordinary life as well as larger political and
cultural issues. Hence inquiry begins midstream, always already
embedded in a situation, one both settled and unsettled. Inquiry
moves through the process of inquiry itself to other situations
and other problems, themselves both stabilized and troubled.
Thus, it is perfectly appropriate to begin with tentative parame-
ters of a situation to be inquired into and tentative understand-
ings of what is at stake.
2. and not only begins in it but is controlled by its specic quali-
tative nature. There are situations that may reach a determined
state rapidly and others where it is not possible to tell before the
inquiry is well under way whether, and in what manner, and for
how long, it will take to move beyond a rst loose state to one
in which both the situation and its determinants become clearer,
more determinate. Thus, to claim to know beforehand precisely
what one is going to do, or to nd, as grant proposals demand,
would constitute bad method, poor logic, and falsely disciplined
inquiry. Or, more accurately, it seems to me, run the risk of not
doing inquiry at all.
3. Inquiry, as the set of operations by which the situation is resolved
(settled or rendered determinate): Inquiry is not an empiricism in
the sense of discovering what is out there as if it were transpar-
ent and passive, simply waiting to be represented. Nor is inquiry
theory driven in the sense that a situation can be reduced to a
particular case of a more general theory (this is in part because
one cannot know beforehand what the status of ones concepts
are or whether the initial situation has any unity). Inquiry is a
form of constructivism or operationalism: Dewey means this in
a common-sense way (problems and thought require action to
exist) and in a more technical sense (since inquiry arises within
8
I N T R O D U C T I O N
a problematic and indeterminate situation, the inquirer is not
outside the situation, nor is she in a position such that she could
construct something that was not to a degree present already).
Hence, operations are necessarily part of the indeterminate sit-
uation once it is taken up by an inquiry.
4. has to discover and formulate the conditions which describe the
problem at hand. By discover the conditions Dewey indi-
cates that inquiry is situated and its goal is to isolate something
in the world that is causing or occasioning effects. By formu-
late, Dewey is making a strong claim, one that runs throughout
his work, that the giving of form (whether discursive, logical,
artistic, scientic, political, and the like) is a primary task in liv-
ing in general as well as in specic practices themselves condi-
tioned by traditions and habits. Form giving is thus an essential
goal of describing a problem and of shaping an inquiry. De-
scription rather than explanation is the goal, but description is
not a nave act but one that can arise only within a process of in-
quiry that is engaged in one or another type of form making.
5. For they are the conditions to be satised and [are] the deter-
minants of success. Since the problem lies in the situation and
the situation is conditioned by various factors, it is only through
discovering and giving form to elements that are already present
that the inquiry can proceed. Hence the process involves staying
in the midst of the things of the world and transforming them
in specic ways so as to give them the kind of determinative form
that can be known.
6. Since these conditions are existential, they can be determined
only by observational operations; the operational character of observa-
tion being clearly exhibited in the experimental character of all sci-
entic determination of data. Inquiry is experimental in its form
giving. Hence the interest of an experiment is its ability not to
represent a preexisting situation nor to construct an entirely new
one but rather reiterated and controlled adjustment. There are
9
I N T R O D U C T I O N
no abstract criteria available that one could deploy beforehand
to judge whether the experiment has succeeded or not: the rea-
son for this is that the conditions are existential.
7. The conditions discovered, accordingly, in and by operational
observation, constitute the conditions of the problem with which fur-
ther inquiry is engaged; for the data, on this view, are always data of
some specic problem and hence are not given ready-made to an in-
quiry but are determined in and by it. That is to say, a successful
inquiry will arise in, work through, and seek form for concrete
contexts. Obviously this claim does not mean that there are no
generalities in the world or in knowledge, only that it is im-
proper to neglect the fact that they arose from a set of operations
and observations that were partially determined by and partially
determinative of a prior indeterminate situation.
8. As the problem progressively assumes denite shape by means
of repeated acts of observation, possible solutions suggest themselves.
These solutions may be practical solutions to a problem in or-
dinary life; they may be scientic solutions to a dened prob-
lem of an experimental form; they may be artistic solutions to a
given challenge of artistic practice, etc. Hence, problems and so-
lutions are terms that are joined in practice and in that sense
coproductive.
9. The process of reasoning is the elaboration of them. The solu-
tion to a particular problem consists in a series of steps whose
particularities are not known before those steps are undertaken.
The observation and reection on the process can be called rea-
son as long as one is clear that reason is neither a faculty of mind
nor a quality of the things themselves, but rather a distinctive
mode of taking up the practice of inquiry.
In retrospect, Deweys attempt to make his logic applicable to
any problem, anywhere, and anytime both gives it its power and
constitutes its core blind spot.
13
In parallel with what anthro-
pologists used to call the ethnographic present, one might say
that Dewey wrote in the philosophic present. Of course, situ-
10
I N T R O D U C T I O N
ating his thought historically does not discredit the insights and
analytic tools he forged; it only shows that the situations Dewey
analyzed were, at least in part, historically specic. Today we can
see that Deweys pragmatism was only partial and that his adja-
cency was insufciently conceptualized to serve the anthropolo-
gist of the contemporary without modication.
11