Responses to Gail’s and Sabina’s comments: Questions of value, and registers of the
emergent
Kaushik Sunder Rajan (in conversation with Gail Davies and Sabina Leonelli)
It seems like “knowledge” was much easier to pin down than “value”. This is something
that Sabina brings up, and also something that I have been ruminating upon in my own
reflections. Sabina says:
I have certainly come back inspired and full of new puzzlement about the
question of value – I actually do think that all participants shared
‘knowledge’ as an entry point to these discussions, value in its multiple
meanings is just so hard to pin down.
And me:
In the seminar, at least in terms of the question of Fact / Value, we have
approached the former question with much greater clarity than the latter.
This is because we have had, in a sense, a key empirical handle on how we
might approach fact. (This is quite likely a function of my own
background, and of how I approach these questions through considerations
of epistemology, and through work in STS, history of science or the
history of ideas). One way in which fact has been approached has been
through questions of particular kinds of representational modality, and
here the historical and conceptual unpacking of the notion of objectivity
has been critical. We have read works that have explored objectivity both
in the domain of visual representation (Daston and Galison) and numerical
representation (Porter, but also Mary Poovey’s history of the fact as being,
in part, a history of the development of various kinds of accounting). A
second way in which we have approached this is in terms of the
production of experimental fact (Shapin and Schaffer especially). And a
third modality, perhaps less explored but crucially on the table, concerns
the relationship of the factual to material cultures of knowledge production
(Fleck’s account of the Wasserman Reaction, which will become
particularly important in the second Knowledge / Value meeting on
experimental biologies).
What we have not done, with any degree of clarity, is address the question
of value. This is partly because I suspect that in much history of science /
STS, value has either emerged as an implicit and assumed category, or has
been subsumed under considerations of power or other registers of the
social. Hence, while the question of fact often opens itself as the empirical
ground upon which analysis operates, the question of value is often a more
difficult one to access.
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I want to think much more seriously about this, and about the reasons for it. on the one
hand, I think, indeed, that this differential clarity between fact and value is a function of
the fact that we are all approaching this problem from a broadly “STS” perspective, and
thinking through fact has been our stock in trade. But on the other hand, it is also not the
case, simply, that value is unclear or undefined. Rather, it operates with a rather clear
sense of definition in the case of each of the authors. So rather than being undefined, it
seems to me that value is, instead, one of these concepts that are often assumed, and
hence not subject to serious critical unpacking the way fact is. In that sense, I think that
value seemed to operate for us in exactly the same way that “translational research”
operates as a category for the actors that a number of us study – as a term that is of great
importance, but whose meaning is both entirely assumed by individual actors, and also
extremely variable amongst different actors. And often, as a term that is not in itself at
stake when used, but which rather serves as a proxy for other kinds of investments.
How to respond to this, in terms of our own collective efforts to further conceptualize
Knowledge / Value going forward? Sabina:
One of my temptations at this kind of interdisciplinary discussions is to try
to taxonomise meanings and their use, and I was indeed tempted at the
start of the meeting to start categorising the ways in which people were
using the notion of value. But then, one of the insights I bring home from
this is that a quick taxonomy won’t do, freezing meaning at this point is
the last thing we should do.
This opens up the question of both the need for, and the insufficiency of, classifying the
ways in which value has been conceptualized by the various papers in this collection.
Crudely speaking, perhaps the ways value can be classified include –
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
Value in its ethical-moral dimensions (both as an actors’ category, but also as
an analysts’ category, especially in moral philosophy and philosophy of
science) – Barbara Smith, Jim Griesemer
Value as epistemic virtue – didn’t really appear much in these papers in so
many words, but is central to a rendering of value in history of science
(appears as central in the works of people like Shapin and Schaffer, Daston
and Galison). But in some ways this was playing out in Natasha Myers’ paper,
in terms at least of value as something that is individualized and embodied.
Value as “epistemic value” – not the same as epistemic virtue (which is
embodied, individualized), but as something that reflects the value of fact
itself. Most explicit in Nadia Abu el-Haj’s piece, but also operates, in a more
subtle vein, in Mary Morgan’s and George Marcus’s.
Value in its political economic registers – as a term that is important (if
sometimes implicit) for governance, biopolitics, commercialization –
especially Abu el-Haj, Ted Porter, Sheila Jasanoff, but also Myers in terms of
the film that is the object of her critique.
Value in a political economic register that is more explicitly concerned with
surplus / abstraction / futurity / speculation (and hence more akin to a Marxian
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vi.
notion of value) – in quite different ways, Kevin Brine / Mary Poovey and
Tim Choy
Value as “something else” – as something whose conceptualization is itself as
stake through a reconceptualization of method – here, explicitly, Marcus,
Griesemer and Choy, but also, more implicitly, Morgan, and Jasanoff (through
co-production and comparative method).
It is this last “something else” that needs to be unpacked further, to go beyond taxonomy
to conceptualization. Sabina:
This meeting was successful at mobilising sites of and concerns about
fact/value --- I see the remaining meetings as attempts to exploit this
momentary explosion of categories, and explore the in-between spaces
that we opened up here.
This is the point at which Sabina moves in to discussing the philosophers of science who
presented at the conference (Griesemer and Morgan). Gail meanwhile has things to say
about the ways in which concerns of geography emerged in the discussion. And all of
these, of course, are haunted quite explicitly by the concerns of / for ethnography that
George Marcus elucidated, which are also going to keep recurring given the primarily
anthropological locations within which these workshops will be held. More and more
specifically about each of these in a minute; the fundamental point that emerges, I think,
is: it is clear that the question “what is value?” cannot be asked, indeed should not be
asked, without asking the question of “how do we conceptualize value?” This latter
question is in fact a particularly difficult question to answer in an interdisciplinary
conversation: for all the nods that people keep making to interdisciplinarity, the fact
remains that we all come to questions very much from the perspectives of where and how
we were trained. There is some ability, now, to talk between Anthropology and STS (but
there too, not completely). But talking between anthropology and philosophy of science,
for instance, will be much more difficult. We need to figure out a way to continue this
question of how to conceptualize value without having it break down into disciplinary
conversations that are hard to translate. This is where the question of clearly documenting
“stakes” becomes important.
Even without thinking too closely in terms of disciplines, there is a broader question of
framing here that is at stake. And this does have to do with the more empirical entry
points versus the more philosophical ones. Sabina, for instance, developed at
considerable length her ability to think through (especially Griesemer’s and Morgan’s)
papers in relation to existing debates in philosophy of science. Contrast that to what Gail
said, which is much closer to my own sensibilities and points of entry:
This is in part about disciplinary stakes, partly styles of thinking, and
partly the framing of the event around facts/values I think. Basically, as
you probably know, I tend to think with and in response to things in the
world. I found the discussion very difficult to open up in that way. We
seemed to keep returning to questions of epistemic and other virtues,
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without much consideration of their ontological consequence. This was
not ruled out through the papers, and for me the most evocative papers did
raise profound questions of ontology (Tim’s breathers, Jim’s tracking
processes to name two examples).
[KSR: Here, Gail, it would be very useful for me if you could unpack what you mean by
“ontological”. I think I know what you mean by it – but it seems to me similar to what I
have often called, in different registers, the “stuff of the world”, or the political. In other
words, what does the “ontological” that you are calling for have to do with the empirical,
which you articulated, initially, as a point of entry? And what does it have to do with a
conceptual project that is not simply about describing the world or creating new
conceptual terminology, but is actually about elucidating stakes, investments,
commitments? Both Choy’s breathers and Griesemer’s tracking processes are two
examples indeed of concepts that go beyond the simply epistemological to open new
dimensions of something else. Is that something else “ontology”? what is this other thing
that we are grappling for here? It seems to approach more closely what I would call a
praxiology].
“Things in the world” is the starting point that Gail is calling for. Yet Sabina’s immediate
entry point seems to be the insufficiency of current concepts, and she points to how this is
what the philosophers of science were grappling with (Griesemer and Morgan, but also, I
would suggest, Barbara Smith). Sabina:
In that sense Jim Griesemer’s and Mary Morgan’s papers resonated deeply
with me – these were the two papers we had by philosophers of science,
and they expressed very clearly the current unease within this discipline
with the terminology we have hitherto used to discuss
knowledge/value. As Jim was pointing out, our terminology is failing
us [emphasis mine].
What is at stake here, I would suggest, are not incompatible projects, but different entry
points into the projects – Gail’s desire to start with “things in the world” and then try and
puzzle through them, next to Sabina’s recognition of the insufficiency of current concepts
and terminology because of the way in which the excesses of the world bleed into these
pre-existing conceptual frameworks. [In that regard, Gail, it seems like the philosophers
of science are wrestling with a similar kind of problem that your mouse researchers often
face?!]. This perhaps, quite simply, reflects the ethnographer’s primary engagement with
the “field” (however messy and undefined) as the object to work through and analyze, as
opposed to the philosopher’s primary engagement with concepts as their “stuff of the
world”. Allusions to this difference came out quite clearly in the commentaries – Judy
Farquhar’s push to Barbara Smith regarding comparison; Joe Dumit asking Jim
Griesemer questions regarding whose attentiveness; and so on.
In this regard, it is interesting to me that both Gail and Sabina identify Griesemer’s paper
as something that worked well for them. We would perhaps do well to think more about
why – there is something generative about Griesemer’s notion of “marks” as things in the
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world to be attentive to, and “tracking” as a processual, and methodological, way of
working through the question of marks. Tracking calls into focus the question of
attentiveness, as a (political / ethical / value-laden) modality of conceptualization.
Conceptualization and method become inseparable. [I think that similar kinds of moves
are made in Choy’s paper, where atmosphere, as a thing in the world, is imploded deeply
into atmospherics, as both a problem-space and a modality of conceptualization. It is not
surprising that Choy and Griesemer are thinking with each other, and also, in this case,
across the disciplinary gap between philosophy of science and anthropology].
But even Griesemer’s and Choy’s papers, for all their provocation, are ultimately
diagnostic probes – they alert us to modalities of being and tracking, to things that we
might have otherwise taken for granted, and in that sense wonderfully serve the functions
of critique. What happens next remains an open question, as Sabina points out in relation
to Griesemer:
Jim’s insight of challenging the contextual/constitutive distinction that we
always seem to fall into, especially following Helen Longino’s great work,
and doing so through a processual approach to the knowledge we are
considering, is an important starting point – and I thought it wonderfully
telling that Jim could not say how to proceed from there. Even less clear,
how to translate insights coming from specific situations and motivations
(imbued with ‘valuing’) into more general lessons.
This last question really is the question of theory, isn’t it? And relates directly, in fact, to
Gail’s questions of how one might start with “things in the world” and work out from
there to conceptualization.
This is where, I think, George Marcus’s paper is particularly resonant, and perhaps
demonstrates the potential of an ethnographic imagination to go beyond the limits of
philosophy as the basis for the construction of theory. The work of the “collage”, in
George’s paper, is in some sense analogous to the critical work that Griesemer is doing,
though it is a critique that is quite different in style to Griesemer’s. And the work of the
“installation” is an attempt to come up with tools of conceptualization that goes beyond
critique as we often recognize it. Developing a conversation between Griesemer and
Marcus, and further developing the conversation between Griesemer and Choy, might be
one site at which to unpack what it is we are interested in doing, especially as it relates to
bridging the gaps between the concerns of philosophy and those of ethnography. Sabina:
It was wonderful to watch your anthropological discussions around
positioning, care and the meaning and practice of theorising, as well as
pedagogy.
Perhaps one of the things at stake here is figuring out a way to unpack these discussions
of the ethnographic further and more slowly, so that it doesn’t just come from the place
of anthropology, as a discipline or pedagogical site, and instead becomes more explicitly
the location from which conceptualization could occur? Partly, this is a question of stakes
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– especially, in this case, the stakes involved in intervening in philosophy of science
(Griesemer) next to the stakes involved in intervening in ethnographic method in
anthropology (Marcus). Sabina:
You mentioned the difficulties in connecting philosophy of science with
anthropology, and I see that not many are attempting it, but I also see the
concerns in the two subjects as deeply intertwined, especially when
epistemology is conceived of as tracking human practices. [emphasis
mine]
This directly leads back to the question of the empirical, and things in the world, in ways
that are perhaps more resonant with Gail’s disconcertments. Gail:
I wanted to talk about what ‘in the world’ we want/need to constitute a
discussion of knowledge/value in order to respond to today, and found this
just very difficult to say without sounding like I was offering empirical
anecdotes or coming across as a naïve empiricist. As I hope you know, I
am absolutely not trying to be anti-theoretical, but my sense it is precisely
interesting to open up questions between knowledge/value now as things
in the world are changing, it ways that potentially exceed the theoretical
purchase of the individual social scientific/humanities disciplines in the
room. And I would liked to have had a conversation about what we might
name in the world that provoked this thought for me, whether others felt it
too, and what collectively we might have that is not there in our existing
disciplinary thinking, but need to learn from others, or what we might
usefully bring to collective examination.
In my mind, this is really important, and also really difficult. It speaks to at least two
things, I think. First, this refers to the question of “critical sites” at which Knowledge /
Value emerges as a problematic to be explored, which was the focus of much of our
discussions in the May 2010 meeting. In this sense, at least part of this disconcertment
regarding empiricism ought to be addressed automatically by the more topical frames of
subsequent workshops: things like experimental biology, translational research, property,
information and databases and so on immediately orient around things in the world in a
way that fact / value doesn’t. (Or, in some cases, fact / value, as a distinction, itself
becomes the thing in the world that is reflected upon and critiqued, as in Smith’s paper –
but it is a thing that is very much constituted by, and within, the world of moral
philosophy, and therefore not, perhaps, empirical in an immediately recognizable sense
for those of us who don’t inhabit that world).
But second, it speaks to the question of conjuncture – the “why Knowledge / Value, why
now?” question that Jean Comaroff posed to us last year. This was a question that I tried
to ask in the grad seminar, and it led to an interesting series of reflections by students
around neo-liberalism. This is not to suggest that neo-liberalism is the conjuncture around
which Knowledge / Value makes sense, much less to suggest that we even know what
neo-liberalism means. But it was a useful conversation, in part because it was attempting
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some form of historical contextualization, attempting to make sense of what it is we are
responding to with concerns like Knowledge / Value. Figuring out how to develop that
thread of questioning – which was central to the way in which the students shaped the
seminar, but not at all central to the conversations that emerged in the workshop – is in
my mind very important.
But this is too quick a response, and too presumptuous a reading, Gail, of what you are
calling for here. Is what you are calling for an elucidation of critical sites, or of the
conjuncture within which we are situated? Or is it the working through of something else
/ something more than that? This might, perhaps, involve a return to questions of method.
As, indeed, does Sabina’s redefinition of epistemology as not Knowledge as an
abstraction in itself, but rather as a “tracking of human practices”, invites us to do.
Things in the world changing
For me, perhaps the most foundational concern is the question of “things in the world
changing”, which Gail is concerned with. This is, in part, the question of how one uses
the empirical as a starting point for conceptualization. But it is also, I suspect, an explicit
question of the emergent. When we think about conjuncture, we are not just thinking
about history, or about identifying a particular historical moment. We are also interested
in tracking moments of change, of shifts, of transitions. (A wonderful problematization of
emergence is to be found in Joe Masco’s commentary on Abu el-Haj’s paper; and, in a
quite different vein but with perhaps similar stakes, in Mike Fischer’s commentaries of
George’s collage and installation). Gail elucidates at least four registers at which the
emergent is operational. But before I work through those, I want to hold this question of
emergence in tension with another concern, which Sheila Jasanoff explicitly talked about
in our small group discussions and which I think is absolutely vital: why, in spite of the
explicit and obviously emergent nature of our worlds, some things hold still. Too much
discussion of emergence tends to focus, too quickly, on the novel and the changing – part
of the task of a historicized conceptualization of emergence, I would insist, lies in making
the concept be as much about continuities and sedimentation as it is about novelty and
change.
With this caution, Gail’s first register of the emergent, with my responses interspersed in
between:
The first is a change in scale of the practice of knowledge (or more
particularly data) production. [KSR: the slippage between “knowledge”
and “data” is interesting here] This is probably easiest to illustrate with
a few ill remembered statistics. There are figures that now suggest
globally we are producing as much data (digitally defined) every two days,
as we produced in the whole of human history up to the early 2000s. [This
is more generally a direct provocation / opening into the
“Information, Databases and Archives” conference]. Much of this is
words/texts/images etc that we wouldn’t recognise as having epistemic
value as such, it is people’s emails, tweets, images, blog postings, but it is
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also satellite data, monitoring stations, immigration data, swipe card
details, health data, genomic data, and stock market data etc. [All of this
for me is opening up the question: what is the “Knowledge” of
Knowledge / Value? Perhaps that is not as settled a category as I
initially assumed!] Much of this is spatial data (of which more below).
Much of it is being produced outside of the academy, through individuals,
think tanks, monitoring bodies, commercial companies, etc, etc. I
increasingly wonder if we have to suggest such a quantitative shift in
data is demanding a qualitative shift in how we apprehend and think
about knowledge itself. (Physicists have started to try and use
tones/music to listen for data spikes, as you can hear a change in tone
much more quickly than you can visually scan for information on a page
or screen). It is also changing authority of the academy, and also the role
of the state as a knowledge provider. (There are already arguments in the
UK to suggest that we might have had our last ever census as these are
expensive for the state and this data already exists in the world, so it could
be collated for governments. Whether it would then be accessible for
academics is moot.) So, this is then not just an argument about data
overload, it is also a question about the textural qualities and patterning
of emerging data landscapes. [and the relationship of “data
landscape” – a wonderfully figurative, yet deeply empirical, term – to
questions of what constitutes “knowledge” at all] There are some huge
and growing gaps. Again, a slightly dubious statistic, but the estimates are
that the inaccessible internet exceeds the readily searchable by a
magnitude of 10. There is a data overload, but also the existence of huge
data gaps for many people and places.
[KSR: Gail, your first register of the emergent, in terms of scale, is in fact not about scale
alone but gets to the heart of questions of knowledge – what, in fact, constitutes
knowledge? When we think about knowledge as a problematic for Knowledge / Value,
what are we thinking about? What is the relationship of knowledge to “epistemology”, as
a convenient and comfortable philosophical category that we often think of as
representative of knowledge? Here, I think of Sabina’s definition of the epistemic not as a
thing / category / abstraction, but rather as a process of tracking practices. I also think of
something my mother pushed me on while discussing the conference, which is how, in
India, something like “learning” is often more important than knowledge. (Learning as
something that is integral both to certain ideologies of spirituality and propriety, but also
to hierarchy, especially to Brahminical caste hierarchy, which cannot be understood
simply in terms of knowledge-as-epistemic. There is a question of virtue that is at stake
here, but it is of a quite different kind from the epistemic virtue described in relation to
Enlightenment England / Europe by Shapin, or Daston and Galison. In other words, the
question of scale-as-data, for me, forces us to consider all the ways in which we must
uncouple knowledge from epistemology. This is a question of emergence, but also a
question of comparison)].
Gail’s second register of the emergent:
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So, this then links to another issue I think that Tim does pick up which is
around political atmospheres. It is in someway related to the above.
Given patchy knowledge and data quantities how do you rethink the
subject of politics and the politics of subjectivity? [For me, this is a
critical question, and one that we didn’t take up or address
adequately in our discussions. I think there is a direct link to be made
here between Tim’s paper and Ted Porter’s. Porter’s work
historicizes this whole question of data and situates it in relation to the
authority of the numerical form. In that sense, Porter brings in the
formal substance of data (at least in relation to the numerical, the
tabular and so on) in addition to scale / quantity, which is what we
seem to be immediately confronted with today). A conversation that I
would love to have developed – how might we think about Ted’s
category of the insane, as it emerges in relation to practices and
rationalities of the eugenic, next to Tim’s of the breather, which
emerges in relation to what he calls “ecopolitics”? this might, in a
historicizing sense that allows us to take two “things in the world” as
reference points, allow us to think about biopolitics next to
ecopolitics] I think affect and speculation (and the relations between the
two) comes to be important in this (I guess this is Massumi’s point here
really). There is the growth, in the UK of nudge politics, seeking to
influence behaviour through affect. Of course, advertising has always
done this, but perhaps more interesting for us is a growth of these in
critical academic practice - in practices of experimental design but this is
also part of what I am trying to do in working with artists. [this is central
to the framing of the proposed workshop on mediation. Also, this
really is the direction that a group of people I have thought closely
with, the “speculative globalities” group who came together around a
UC Humanities Research Institute seminar at Irvine a few years ago,
are going in. Massumi is someone who is important to them. And to
Melinda Cooper, who takes discussions on biocapital in this direction]
There is the shift in other areas of knowledge production too. City
planning practices, where the aspiration to build a world city, starts with
the aesthetics of the global architects, rather than the detailed negotiation
of planning information, which I was trying to talk about to you and
Brenna in the work of Asher Ghertner. Even in my work, the aesthetics of
animal euthanasia is recognised in European guidelines as a legitimate
criterion for judging whether methods are acceptable or not. The affective
opens up as a place of traction when knowledge is both overwhelming
and patchy.
[KSR: Gail, this is incredibly useful for me, though your last turn here, of linking the
affective to the aesthetic, is something that would need more explanation for me. The
earlier moves you make, of first bringing in the question of political subjectivity, and then
of linking that to the affective and the speculative, is more familiar ground for me.
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Indeed, this for me is resolutely Marxian – it is where we would have to think with a
Marxian sensibility around questions of value. (But I don’t know how to bring that up in
any kind of public gathering without someone immediately developing a reaction to the
“Marx” as some sort of label to repudiate. This is why, for years, I have been reading Tim
through Marx – a reading that he himself continues to resist, at least rhetorically!). But
one case here of bringing in the affective and the speculative as explicit dimensions that
immediately springs to mind is what the Comaroffs do with crime statistics – it is
precisely the explicit consideration of the affective and the speculative (and indeed, of the
fetishistic that animates the implosion of the two) that takes their analysis beyond a
standard Foucauldian one. There is a case, here, of reading Tim’s ecopolitics against the
way in which biopolitics emerges in their work].
Gail’s third point:
A third relates to the growth of these knowledges in terms of their
spatiality (of course, what did you expect!). Nigel Thrift has argued (and
it is a provocative argument) that we are experiencing something profound
in relation to our changing ability to monitor things across space that has a
corollary in the development and extension of clock time through the
C17th to C19 century. He points to the growing use of GPS data – in cars,
phones, cameras, military, etc; the growing use of RFID in managing
stock, in tracking animals, people, even money etc. etc to argue that are
now able to think about tracking and articulating things through space in
the same way we were able to track and articulate things over time
through the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This of course relates to
Jim’s paper on tracking as a way of considering an ethical practice. And I
think Jim is right there is something very interesting in the use of markers
to track changing spatial-temporal patterns in biology, and it may be
related to an ethics of attention, but the polarity of that ethics is I think for
me very uncertain given the other scales at which such practices might
now be operating. This is in part an argument about the technological and
its links to politics too. (It is also possible to evoke this when reflecting on
the ability of things like twitter to articulate people in space that I think
makes it so politically interesting. You look at your smart phone not your
watch to work out how to organise.) So we arguably have the spatial
opening up as a space of active and iterative contestation. This is not quite
the same contestation of space as politics that Foucault had in mind. It is
sometimes rendered as symbolic, but is often more akin to what Thrift
calls a changing technological unconscious.
[KSR: Again, this is very compelling for me, but I would like to think about spatiality in
at least two registers here. The first, which you seem to be pointing to, is one where the
notion of spatiality itself gets reconfigured, in part through technological mediation.
Hence, by being able to monitor or track space differently, we are changing our own
knowledge of, and affective / sub-conscious relation to, space. And at some level, this is a
“global” transformation – things like twitter are used as much in organizing in Iran or
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Egypt as they are “First World” technologies. What this leaves out is I think what
Jasanoff (along with others) pulls in – which is an if you like more old-fashioned sense of
space in terms of territorial, national-state forms, but also, I would suggest more
generally, space as the terrain of comparison and difference. So when you talk about “an”
ethics of attention in relation to Griesemer’s tracking practices, I am immediately forced
to ask again Joe Dumit’s question to Jim: whose attention are we talking about? When
you say “you” look at your smart-phone, not your watch, you know that in fact I don’t
look at my smart phone, and that I don’t even own one! And when I joke that I am
probably the only person in this day and age who doesn’t have a smart phone, I am
moving seamlessly into a realm that assumes a certain kind of elite subject-position as
normative. This is not an attempt to make a have / have-not argument, but is precisely an
attempt to cast the problematic of emergence in certain I think necessarily comparative
terms – how might we think about space as a changing conceptual category while
retaining the spatial as one of the grounds upon which one sees difference (between here
and there)? I do not want to risk a re-conceptualization of space that suggests a certain
kind of temporal shift (from clock-time to GPS-time, for instance) without asking the
equally empirical question of what holds still in the midst of these transformations. There
are different questions of power which sediment both in the conceptual transformation of
the spatial and in the ways in which that transformation is in fact uneven and differential
across space. The former register of the spatial is abstract / conceptual / speculative, the
latter is materially tied into place. I know that you have concerns with both – the organs
work in London, or the comparison in mouse worlds in the US, UK and Singapore – all
speak to registers of the spatial that suggest, even in your work, that a Jasanoff-like
thinking about space is hardly redundant, indeed is essential. I guess one way to sum this
up might be through pushing a reading of Jasanoff against Griesemer, in order to ask –
how might we think about space in relation to tracking practices next to space in relation
to place?
And Gail’s final point:
And a fourth and final one (though I could probably go on) is something
which I find slightly problematic, but think it might be important to
consider. It is perhaps something to do with learning to live with finitude.
It is perhaps the lack of recourse to externalize the contradictions of
capital onto other spaces or other natures. It is perhaps also related to the
western nostalgia about declining colonial hegemonies. I find these things
tricky to articulate. Even if you look at food prices today the high prices
result from speculative activities rather than underproduction, but this is
the point, that food security has emerged as a site of speculation suggests
that a notion of finitude is beginning to enter consciousness (or
unconsciousness) on a number of levels. [A notion of finitude, perhaps.
But perhaps also logics of capital, which are able to operationalize
certain notions of finitude for its human / trans-species subjects
precisely because, for capital itself, there can by definition be no
finitude? This is where again I think it is impossible to talk about
value without thinking through Marx. Apropos your earlier point
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about political subjectivity: it is utterly crucial. But one of the things
that Marx says in Vol. 1 of Capital is that for capital, value itself
becomes the subject (Vol. 1, p. 250-6 of the Penguin edition). Much of
the point of Volume 1, indeed, involves circling around to this
assertion; I see it as one of the central fulcrum points around which
his entire critique revolves. Indeed, for Marx, there can be no notion
of surplus value without understanding how value itself possesses
subjectivity under logics of capital – the first introduction of the
notion of surplus value in the text comes immediately after Marx
makes this assertion. In other words, if we think about value as
necessarily coupled to some kind of human (or canine, or murine)
subjectivity, then there is a danger of implicitly externalizing value
from subjectivity. (I think that this is the trap that a certain
Foucauldian analytic falls into, for instance Nik Rose’s ability to make
biovalue one of the subsets of a politics of life itself). So I am willing to
believe that food security emerges as a site of speculation because a
notion of finitude has begun to enter consciousness, if one assumes
that human consciousness is the agent and speculation is the action of
that agent; if however, value is the agent, and value is inherently
speculative, and if value is able to realize its speculative impulse
through capital (and the various apparatuses of capital), and if capital
(in Marx’s evocative phrase) “possesses” the capitalist, then in fact we
might argue that it is precisely because of the infinitude that must lie
at the heart of the speculative logics of capital that things which were
previously deemed to be outside the realm of speculative
appropriability come to now be within it].
It is also something I
thought of during Tim’s paper. The exemplary (for Shapin and Shaffer)
Seventeenth century experimental apparatus was of course the air pump,
with the witnesses arranged around an apparatus where knowledge was
generated by removing things from the world through a vacuum. Tim’s
experimental apparatus, the rat and the asthma test, is a possibly reversal
of this, an exploration of what it means to live when we can no longer
remove the matter from the world in order to understand it. It is the ecobio-political perhaps. You cannot throw things away anymore. There is no
longer an away. Even if I find this somewhat problematic I think this has
to be a point of contestation and practice important to the
conceptualization of the relations between knowledge/value today. [KSR:
So I guess I’d like to spend more time thinking about this last point of
yours, in relation to some kind of notion of finitude, by thinking more
about what the “eco-bio-political” might have to do with speculative
regimes of value. This might, at least initially, involve thinking more
carefully through the moment in Tim’s paper where he discusses the
rat and the asthma test (a moment of thinking about experimental
apparatus and the conditions of possibility for that to “work”) next to
where he discusses the breather (a moment of thinking about political
subjectivity, drawing upon my analysis of the experimental subject of
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clinical trials, which is precisely a notion of subjectivity that is derived
from a Marxian analysis of value). More generally, perhaps, this calls
for thinking closely of the relationship of the experimental to the
subjective, and of the place of the speculative in that relationship?]
[All of this] does return me to the question of, is knowledge/value the right
starting place? For me knowledge/value/power are the critical terms of
analysis, but the terrain of my thinking has to start with the material– of
technologies, natures, objects and aesthetics/affects (which to me are
always material too).
[KSR: I would agree almost entirely with this, my only quibble would be that for me the
thinking would have to start with the dialectic between materiality and abstraction –
precisely because the abstract (as you suggest) materializes as well (just as the material
abstracts. The question I would have then is – what does “critical terms of analysis” mean
in relation to knowledge / value? What kinds of empirical and conceptual work are each
of these terms doing, especially given how hard value is to pin down and given that we
seem to agree that even “knowledge” is a term that has to operate under erasure, to some
extent? I don’t want to give up Knowledge / Value as a problematic, as I’m sure you
don’t. But how might we, consequent to these conversations, figure out a better way of
framing and thinking through knowledge and value as categories, and knowledge as a
framing problematic?
This again gets us back to the question of method. Sabina has suggested (albeit
hesitantly) taxonomy as one way to go. A second is through a focus on the processual
(Jim’s notion of tracking, which allies closely with George’s location of the
“alongside…”; but also, critically, something that Brenna mentioned to me in
conversation, which is about how central to knowledge, value and Knowledge / Value is
the question of the measure, and hence measuring (here, especially, Porter’s paper comes
to mind again). Gail, you’ve worked through emergence as a third. I think the fourth
thing that is on the table is comparison, and that is a conversation we haven’t yet had
properly. In part, I don’t think that is a conversation we can adequately have until and
unless we port the broader conversation to other contexts and locales – that conversation
needs a more serious engagement with the postcolonial, and with other parts of the world,
including scholars who are more globally dispersed than we are. Being able to do that
successfully will be essential I think to realizing some of the potential value of these
conversations, otherwise we risk parochialism in our own conceptualizations].
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