Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul Rabinow is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author, most recently, of A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles (Princeton).

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"Paul Rabinow has proved again that he is one of our most incisive commentators on the vital question of our time-what it means to be human today. The reflections gathered in this book engage with the question from a remarkable array of starting points-from speculative philosophical histories through the artisanship of painting to the creative labor that sequenced the genome of the fruit fly. In the process, he delineates a methodology for the anthropology of the contemporary that is productive and provocative in equal measure."--Nikolas Rose, London School of Economics and Political Science

"Marking Time is a gem of insight and a journey of learning. These essays offer an intellectual adventure to be enjoyed by a broad range of readers."--George Marcus, University of California, Irvine

"Paul Rabinow offers us a sustained piece of thought on the meaning of the contemporary for anthropology, with the goal of discovering 'new problems and new truths that open up points of view and new sciences.' Boldly eschewing use of the 'ethnographic record' to address major philosophical questions, Rabinow instead detours through ancient Greece, Rome in late antiquity, his own research with various genome mapping projects, and a dialogue with many German philosophers, to arrive at concepts that help us write in a mediated mode, where one's insights come from finding modes of observing in close proximity that are appropriate to the objects and events to be explained."--John Borneman, Princeton University

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Marking Time

Princeton University Press

Introduction

On the Anthropology of the Contemporary

What is the contemporary? The ordinary English-language meaning of the term "the contemporary" is: "existing or occurring at, or dating from, the same period of time as something or somebody else." But there is the second meaning of "distinctively modern in style," as in "a variety of favorite contemporary styles." The first use has no historical connotations, only temporal 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 and a curious one that can be used to both equate and differentiate 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." The contemporary 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 fixated on "the new." And the identification 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 experience 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 modern" required some critical distance from its own assumptions. This distance could be achieved through historical work that showed the contingency, inconsistencies, differential strata underlying the surface unity, and the like. Or it could be achieved through a conscious abandonment of epochal thinking, including as many of its presuppositions as could plausibly be reexamined. In this light, it is clear that in many domains old and new elements do coexist in multiple configurations and variations. Thus, if one no longer assumes that the new is what is dominant, to use Raymond Williams's distinction, and that the old is somehow essentially residual, then the question of how older and newer elements are given form and worked together, either well or poorly, becomes a significant site of inquiry. I call that site the contemporary.

For example, the fact that the human genome has been mapped, and population differences at the molecular level identified, does not mean that older understandings of race disappear 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 requires sustained research, patience, and new concepts, or modified old ones. The purpose is not destruction or deconstruction 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 contemporary are not principally concerned with "the new" or with distinguishing themselves from tradition. Rather, they are intrigued by the operations of the distinction modern/contemporary as the clustered elements and stylized configurations of the modern are observed in the process of declusterings, reconfigurations, and different stylizations or made to do so. As I have argued 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. Secession marks, observes, and stylizes in a recursive manner.

Second, there is a difference between emphasizing reproduction and emphasizing emergence. This difference holds for the subjects in the world as much as for analysts. Most of anthropology and significant portions of the other social sciences concentrate on how society or culture reproduces itself (and this includes many models of "change") through institutions, symbolic work, power relations, or the cunning of reason. And there 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 partially explained or comprehended by previous modes of analysis or existing practices. Such phenomena, it follows, require a distinctive mode of approach, an array of appropriate concepts, and almost certainly different modes of presentation.

Third, by "anthropology" I do not mean ethnography understood as a practice developed to analyze a specific type of [R]AS-object-the culture and/or society of ethnoi-so as to contribute to a specific genre, the monograph (or journal article). Nor do I mean philosophic anthropology in the nineteenth-century European sense, whether materialist or idealist, whose object was the nature or essence of Mankind and whose genre was the treatise. Nor do I intend the mixed forms of research and writing that proliferated around this unstable object, l'homme, which attempted, while continually failing, to bring the transcendental and the empirical into a stable relationship, so powerfully described by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, even if Foucault 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 dynamic and mutually constitutive, if partial and dynamic, connections between figures of anthropos and the diverse, and at times inconsistent, branches of knowledge available during a period of time; that claim authority about the truth of the matter; and whose legitimacy to make such claims is accepted as plausible by other such claimants; as well as the power relations within which and through which those claims are produced, established, contested, defeated, affirmed, and disseminated.

Thus, taken as an object domain, contemporary anthropology is neither as broad as traditional ethnography nor as grand as classic philosophic anthropology nor as ambitious as the human sciences. This narrowing of scope has some advantages: there are good...