EMERGENT FORMS of LIFE: Anthropologies of Late Or Postmodernities

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1999. 28:455–78 Copyright © 1999 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved EMERGENT FORMS OF LIFE: Anthropologies of Late or Postmodernities Michael M.J. Fischer Science, Technology and Society Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139; e-mail: [email protected] Key Words: social theory and ethnography, science institutions, film and cyberspace, reconstruction after social trauma n Abstract Anthropologies of late modernity (also called postmodernity, postindustrial society, knowledge society, or information society) provide a number of stimulating challenges for all levels of social, cultural, and psychological theory, as well as for ethnographic and other genres of anthropological writing. Three key overlapping arenas of attention are the centrality of science and technology; decolonization, postcolonialism, and the reconstruction of societies after social trauma; and the role of the new electronic and visual media. The most important challenges of contemporary ethnographic practice include more than merely (a) the techniques of multilocale or multisited ethnography for strategically accessing different points in broadly spread processes, (b) the techniques of multivocal or multiaudience-addressed texts for mapping and acknowledging with greater precision the situatedness of knowledge, (c) the re- working of traditional notions of comparative work for a world that is increas- ingly aware of difference, and (d) acknowledging that anthropological representations are interventions within a stream of representations, mediations, and unequally inflected discourses competing for hegemonic control. Of equal im- by HARVARD UNIVERSITY on 09/21/10. For personal use only. portance are the challenges of juxtaposing, complementing, or supplementing other genres of writing, working with historians, literary theorists, media critics, novelists, investigative or in-depth journalists, writers of insider accounts (e.g. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1999.28:455-478. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org autobiographers, scientists writing for the public), photographers and film mak- ers, and others. CONTENTS Introduction: Challenges for Theory and Practice ..................... 456 Three Arenas of Focus in Late or Post-Modern Socio-Cultural Formations .... 457 Ethnographic Challenges Posed by These Three Arenas ................... 458 Metanarratives: Social Theory for Late or Postmodernities................. 458 Three Arenas in Late or Postmodern Socio-Cultural Formations ......... 459 0084-6570/99/1015-0455$12.00 455 456 FISCHER Working in Technoscientific Infrastructures and Imaginaries ............... 459 Beyond Perception, Filmic Judgment, and Worlding Cyberspace ............ 468 Starting Over: Beyond Social Control and Social Conflict.................. 470 Conclusions................................................... 472 INTRODUCTION: CHALLENGES FOR THEORY AND PRACTICE “Emergent forms of life” acknowledges an ethnographic datum, a social theoretic heuristic, and a philosophical stance regarding ethics. The ethnographic datum is the pervasive claim (or native model) by practitioners in many contemporary arenas of life (law, the sciences, political economy, computer technologies, etc) that traditional concepts and ways of doing things no longer work, that life is outrun- ning the pedagogies in which we have been trained. The social theoretic heuristic is that complex societies, including the globalized regimes under which late and post-modernities operate, are always compromise formations among—in Ray- mond Williams’ salutary formulation—emergent, dominant, and fading histori- cal horizons. The philosophical stance toward ethics is that “giving grounds” for belief comes to an end somewhere and that “the end is not an ungrounded pre- supposition; it is an ungrounded way of acting” (Wittgenstein 1969:17e) or a “form of life,” a sociality of action, that always contains within it ethical dilem- mas or, in the idiom of Emmanuel Levinas, the face of the other. Take, for example, the university. Universities—where much, if neither all nor even most, anthropology is written and debated—are being set adrift from their past modernist moorings in cultural projects of maintaining their respective nation-states. Instead, it is argued they are becoming transnational bureaucratic corporations regulated under administrative metrics of “excellence” and produc- tivity (Readings 1996). The late Bill Readings argues further that feminism and race/ethnic scholarship, symptomatically, are targets of so much rancor and moral fervor precisely because they remind so forcefully, through the fact that bodies by HARVARD UNIVERSITY on 09/21/10. For personal use only. are differentially marked, that it is no longer possible for universities to create unmarked, universalistic, subjects of reason, culture, and republican politics in the metonymic way envisioned by JG Fichte and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1999.28:455-478. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org architects of the modern university in Berlin. Similarly, Readings argues, teaching attracts much current rancor because of the “simple contradiction between the time it takes to teach and an administrative logic that privileges the efficient [measurable] transmission of information.... The transgressive force of teaching doesn’t lie so much in matters of content as in the way pedagogy can hold open the temporality of questioning” (Readings 1996:19). Readings argues that although the modernist ideal of the university as a model rational community, a pure public sphere, still exerts power on the imagination, the university is becoming, and should be celebrated as, “rather a place where the impossibility of such models can be thought—practically thought, rather than thought under ideal con- ditions...one site among others where the question of being-together is raised, raised with an urgency...” (Readings 1996:20). EMERGENT FORMS OF LIFE 457 Certainly many anthropologists are being challenged to teach outside anthropology, social science, or humanities departments, to situate our pedagogies within other worlds of students we seek to engage, not simply to teach them “where they live” but to puzzle out together with them, with their often sophisti- cated and engaged professional experiences, the new indeterminate emergent worlds within which we all now live. This is particularly true for anthropologists who teach in engineering and medical schools, who attempt to forge the emergent field of science studies in conversation and mutual evaluation with practitioners, scientists, engineers, or clinicians, and who wish to raise human rights issues in ways other than as distant objects of contemplation (Downey 1998; Fischer 1999a,b; Yoe 1998; Fortun 1999; Fortun & Bernstein 1998). These are spaces in which disciplinary assumptions are always subject to question, where tools of analysis from different disciplines are brought together, sometimes smoothly, more often, in a kind of practical, creolized urgency to solve real world problems. For example, in a course—taught in cooperation between MIT and the Harvard Law School—Law and Ethics on the Electronic Frontier, lawyers and engineers are facilitated to teach each other ways to think about alternatives through design- ing differently organized legal, technical, social-normative, and market “architec- tures” (http://swiss-ai. mit.edu/6905). If universities are undergoing structural change of the sort Readings suggests, so too are almost every other social institution and cultural form. With its empiri- cal ethnographic methods, anthropology remains, arguably, among the most use- ful of checks on theorizing becoming parochial, ethnocentric, generally uncomparative, uncosmopolitan, and sociologically ungrounded. Three Arenas of Focus in Late or Post-Modern Socio- Cultural Formations Anthropologies of late modernity (also called postmodernity, postindustrial society, knowledge society, or information society) provide challenges for all levels of social, cultural, and psychological theory, as well as for ethnographic field meth- by HARVARD UNIVERSITY on 09/21/10. For personal use only. ods and genres of writing. There are three key overlapping arenas of attention. 1. The continuing transformation of modernities by science and technology, Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 1999.28:455-478. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org themselves understood to be mutating social and cultural institutions rather than eternal Platonic “invisible colleges” of reason (Galison 1997; Haraway 1997; Marcus 1995; Martin 1987, 1994; Rabinow 1995; Traweek 1988). 2. The reconfiguration of perception and understanding, of the human and social sensorium, by computer-mediated and visual technologies and prosthe- ses. This is often called the third industrial revolution, with implications as profound as those of the first two industrial revolutions for interaction at all levels, from the personal-psychological to the global political economy, ecology, and human rights (Dumit 1995; Fischer 1995b, 1998; Marcus 1996, 1997; Turkle 1995; Turner 1992). 3. The reconstruction of society in the wake of social trauma caused by world war and civil and ethnic wars; collapse of command economies; massive 458 FISCHER demographic migrations and diasporas; and postcolonial and globalizing re- structurings of the world economy, including the production of toxics and new modalities of long-term risk. All of these call into question the premises

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