Paul M. Rabinow (June 21, 1944 – April 6, 2021) was a professor of anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley), director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), and former director of human practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC). He worked with, and wrote extensively about, the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Biographical details Rabinow was born in Florida but raised in New York City from a young age. His grandparents were all Russian Jewish immigrants. He lived in Sunnyside, Queens. He stated that at the time, the neighborhood was a garden city and a socialist and communist 'zone'. He attended Stuyvesant High School. Rabinow received his B.A. (1965), M.A. (1967), and Ph.D. (1970) in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He studied at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (1965–66). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro (1987), taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (1986) as well as the École Normale Supérieure (1997), and was a visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of Iceland (1999). He held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation Professional Development Fellowships (for training in molecular biology). He was co-founder of the Berkeley Program in French Cultural Studies. He was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1998. He received the University of Chicago Alumni Association Professional Achievement Award in 2000. He was awarded the visiting Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the École Normale Supérieure for 2001–2002. STICERD Distinguished Visiting Professor – BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, London School of Economics (2004). Rabinow died on April 6, 2021.
Overview
Rabinow is known for his development of an "anthropology of reason". If anthropology is understood as being composed of anthropos + logos, then anthropology can be taken up as a practice of studying how the mutually productive relations of knowledge, thought, and care are given form within shifting relations of power. More recently, Rabinow developed a distinctive approach to what he called an "anthropology of the contemporary" that moves methodologically beyond modernity as an object of study or as a metric to order all inquiries.
Rabinow is well known for conceptual work drawing on French, German, and American traditions. He was a close interlocutor of Michel Foucault and edited and interpreted Foucault's work as well as ramifying it in new directions.
Rabinow's work consistently confronted the challenge of inventing and practicing new forms of inquiry, writing, and ethics for the human sciences. He argued that, currently, the dominant knowledge production practices, institutions, and venues for understanding human things in the 21st century are inadequate institutionally and epistemologically. In response, he designed modes of experimentation and collaboration consisting of focused concept work and the explorations of new forms of case-based inquiry.
Rabinow also devoted a great deal of energy to the invention of new venues adjacent to the existing university structures, diagnosing the university's disciplinary organization and career patterns as among the major impediments to 21st century thought. Since the organization and practices of the social sciences and humanities in the U.S. university system have changed little in recent decades, they are unlikely to facilitate the composition of contemporary equipment. Rabinow called for the creation of venues that are adjacent to, but more flexible than, the university and the existing disciplinary structure. He played leading roles in the design of two such organizations, the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC) and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC).
The Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory was founded by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff as part of an effort to create new forms of inquiry in the human sciences. Its aspiration is to create models for new infrastructures, tools of collaboration, and practices of inquiry. The core of the ARC collaboratory is ongoing reflection and communication in a now broadening network of scholars about concept formation and collaboratory work in the human sciences. ARC is a collaboratory for inquiry into contemporary forms of life, labor, and language. ARC engages in empirical study and conceptual work with global reach and long-term perspective. ARC creates contemporary equipment for collaborative work adequate to emergent challenges in the 21st century. ARC's current concerns focus on interconnections among security, ethics, and the sciences.
Concept work The relation of concepts and cases in Rabinow's work distinguishes itself from the more common mode of social science work predicated on using examples to test general theories or philosophical practice that seeks analytic clarity about universals or general (often highly abstract) cases. In contrast, Rabinow argues that work on concepts opens up and orients inquiry into the concrete features of distinctive cases, whereas the use of ostensibly timeless theory or universal concepts is unlikely to be very helpful in drawing attention to particularities and singularities. Given this goal, such traditional approaches can function as a real impediment to inquiry. Rabinow defines concept work as “constructing, elaborating and testing a conceptual inventory as well as specifying and experimenting with multi-dimensional diagnostic and analytic frames.”Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, “Toward Synthetic Anthropos: Remediating Concepts” online at www.anthropos-lab.net/documents In that sense, Rabinow's work continues with appropriate modifications a social scientific tradition stretching from Max Weber through Clifford Geertz.
Rabinow held that concepts are tools designed to be used on specified problems and calibrated to the production of pragmatic outcomes, both analytic and ethical. As such, concepts must be adjusted to the changing topology of problem spaces. Concept work involves archaeological, genealogical, and diagnostic dimensions. Archaeologically, concept work involves investigating and characterizing concepts as part of a prior repertoire or structured conceptual ensemble.Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, New York: Harper & Row,1972, (orig. 1969). Genealogically, concept work frees concepts from their field of emergence by showing the contingent history of their selection, formation, and potential contemporary significance. Diagnostically, concept work involves a critical function: testing the adequacy and appropriateness of a given concept or repertoire of concepts to new problems and purposes.
Anthropology of the contemporary As a mode of inquiry, Rabinow distinguishes the Anthropology of the Contemporary from Michel Foucault's History of the Present. As Rabinow describes it, the History of the Present consists in formulating an understanding of the past as “a means of showing the contingency of the present and thereby contribute to making a more open future.”Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett, “Toward Synthetic Anthropos: Remediating Concept,” online at www.anthropos-lab.net/documents; cf. Rabinow, Paul, & Keller, Reiner (2016). What Kind of Being Is Anthrōpos? The Anthropology of the Contemporary. Paul Rabinow in Conversation With Reiner Keller [56 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 17(1), Art. 19. The current challenge is to be specific about which inquiries and what objects are best engaged with an approach that is drawn from a History of the Present orientation. Contrastingly, Rabinow defined the contemporary as a (re)assemblage of both old and new elements and their interactions and interfaces. This means, among other things, that contemporary problems and objects are emergent and consequently, by definition, contingent. Emergence refers to “a state in which multiple elements combine to produce an assemblage, whose significance cannot be reduced to prior elements and relations.” It follows that the History of the Present, while often helpful, is not fully adequate to work on the contemporary because by definition the contemporary is contingent.
Rabinow identified “the contemporary” as a temporal and ontological problem space. In Marking Time (2007) he distinguished two senses of the term contemporary. First, to be contemporary is to exist at the same time as something else. This meaning has temporal but no historical connotations. The second sense, however, carries both temporal and historical connotations, and it is this meaning that figures in Rabinow's work. Rabinow took up the contemporary as a “moving ratio.” Just as “the modern” can be thought of as a moving ratio of tradition and modernity, the contemporary “is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (non-linear) space.”
As such, the Anthropology of the Contemporary consists of analytic work that helps develop modes of inquiry into under-determined, emergent, and discordant relations. It seeks to develop methods, practices, and forms of inquiry and narration coherent and co-operable with understandings of the mode (or modes) taken by anthropos as figure and an assemblage today.
Inquiry into the contemporary is both analytic and synthetic. It is analytic in that sets of relations must be decomposed and specified, synthetic in that these relations must be recomposed and given new form. In this sense, work on the contemporary falls within a zone of analytic consideration in that it consists of linking the recent past to the near future and the near future to the recent past.
Anthropos as a problem Rabinow's work on the anthropology of the contemporary was formally initiated by his diagnosis of anthropos (Greek, “the human thing”) as a problem today for thought, equipment, and venues. This diagnosis is carried out most systematically in his works Anthropos Today (2003) and Marking Time (2007). Rabinow describes anthropos as a being that today is burdened with multiple and heterogeneous truths about itself, a being of hetero-logoi. Modes of inquiry, methods of narration, and principles of verification must be designed in view of the “apparently unavoidable fact that anthropos is that being who suffers from too many logoi.”
It follows that in order to pose and eventually answer the question “What is anthropos today?” modes of thought are needed which not only open up new possibilities, but also discriminate significance and form truth claims into practices for the ethical life. Using a classical formulation, Rabinow argues that anthropos today is in need of paraskeue, or equipment, for forming logos into ethos. In his 1981-82 lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault provided an extensive meditation on the classical notion of equipment.Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, lectures at the Collège de France, 1981-82. Trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave macmillan, 2005 (orig. 2001). In those lectures, Foucault shows that in antique thought the mandate to “know thyself” was connected and oriented to an imperative to “care for thyself.” Ramifying Foucault's insight in new directions, Rabinow has posed the challenge of inventing equipment adequate to ethical and scientific problems today—contemporary equipment.