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As if “theory” is the only form of thinking, and “social theory” the only form of critique: thoughts on an anthropology BST (beyond society and theory)

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Notes

  1. What does Boyer mean by the “social?” The “intersubjective and relational features of human experience.” And by “theory?” In the narrow sense, a causal, explanatory schema; in the broader sense a set of highly specific analytical attentions. And by “social theory?” That is actually less clear. It could mean (1) that all theory is socially grounded. It could as well mean (2) the theorization of the social (which could still be socially grounded). Furthermore, it could refer (3) to theories of the social in the narrow sense, i.e., a more or less causal schema reducing the social to a particular set of principles (and usually these principles are themselves social). Or it could, finally, mean (4) a set of analytical—theoretical—attentions that are supposed to illuminate the social (while they are, of course, socially grounded). In Boyer’s essay, social theory potentially means all of this. He does not (always) differentiate. But there is one thing that all four meanings share—they are socially grounded. The intersubjective and relation features of “human experience” are the (apparent?) ground of human action. Or at least of theory.

  2. To merely list a few authors: Important philosophical (yet empirical) alternatives to “social theory” have been advanced by Michel Foucault (see especially his elaborations in Foucault 1972 and his late reflections in 1984a, b, c) and Deleuze and Guattari (specifically their 1994 elaboration of philosophy). Today’s perhaps most prominent critique of social theory was articulated within science studies, specifically in the work of Callon (e.g., 2004) and Latour (e.g., 1993). Haraway (1991, 2008) has likewise offered a powerful critique of social theory. See also the work of Mol (2002), and Keating and Cambrosio (2006). Daston (1994), Davidson (2004), and Rheinberger (2010a, b) have offered different versions of a historical epistemology that understands itself as a departure from theory, social or otherwise. Ian Hacking’s historical ontology (2002) is likewise presented as an alternative to theory. Rabinow (1989, 2003, 2008) is arguably the most well-known anthropologist among those who have critiqued both society and theory.

  3. While there is quite a bit of critical thought when it comes to “society”—theory has rarely been criticized. See the brilliant reflections of Foucault (1982, 1984b, 1991). See also Deleuze and Guattari (1994). For a good overview on how literary critics and historians have criticized theory see Martin (1996) and the essays in Herron et al. (1996).

  4. See footnote 3.

  5. I am not sure about a link that, for Boyer, must be self-evident—the link between ethnography and the practice of social–theoretical knowledge making. Ethnography is, or so it seems to me, a method. Is this method always concerned with the social (the way Boyer defines it)? Is it always—in necessary or at least evident ways—linked to social theory? Both seem questionable to me.

  6. Boyer further notes that some anthropologists (the reference here is largely to Rabinow 1999, 2003) have suggested that the way forward is to abandon theory and to replace it by the invention of concepts that help us understand the new fields in which we move; concepts that have themselves the capacity to “make something new happen” in our knowledge practices. Boyer finds this unfortunate. “The problem,” he writes, “is that conceptual innovation is more likely to reproduce a sense of alienation from theory than to alleviate it.” Of course, this “alienation” is exactly what Rabinow—silently gesturing to Foucault—is looking forward to.

  7. For a helpful analysis on the anthropology/ethnography of the emergent cf. Maurer (2004) and Fischer (2003). Rabinow (2008) has actually critiqued the current use of the term emergence and has moved away from it.

  8. For an exceptionally brilliant stroke of insight on neoliberalism I refer to the work of Collier (2011) and Ferguson (2010). The work of both has been considerably informed by Foucault (2008).

  9. My reference here is, on the one hand, to the work of authors like Latour (1988, 1993, 1999, 2004) and Haraway (1989, 1991, 1997, 2003, 2008), who problematized the anthropocentrism built-into the nature-culture or nature-society divide and, on the other hand, to those who have pushed this early work into what is currently referred to as multispecies ethnography: Helmreich (2009, 2011), Helmreich and Kirksey (2010), Kohn (2007), Paxson (2008, 2010), Raffles (2007, 2010), Tsing (2011).

  10. Wilhelm Dilthey’s Einleitung was first published in Berlin in 1883. The following quotations are from a later edition: Dilthey (1914). The English translation is Dilthey (1988).

  11. Hence das Volk der Dichter und Denker.

  12. This is not only true for the Weimarer Klassik, for German Idealism or the Jenaer and Heidelberger Romantik. It is as well true for the Prussian Staatswissenschaften, who have famously rejected the concept of society, see Wagner (2000).

  13. In fact, one could almost speak of Wilhelm Dilthey’s antipathy towards the social. It could be said that Dilthey (like many German intellectuals before and after him) has actually written against the idea that humans are essentially societal beings, that the human sciences are essentially social sciences (just think of Hegel, Heidegger or Arendt, to name merely a few). When Dilthey used the phrase geschichtlich-gesellschaftliche Welt, then the geschichtlich-gesellschaftliche Welt is for him a geistige Tatsache. And a geistige Tatsache was neither a social nor a societal fact that could be measured by statistics or decoded by a sociological inquiry or administered by a national, society forming apparatus.

  14. More specifically, Dilthey’s search for an epistemological foundation for the Geisteswissenschaft must be seen as a reaction to the nineteenth century rise of Wissenschaftstheorie—an effort, largely by natural scientists, to articulate a solid epistemological foundation for the sciences. Dilthey argued that the Wissenschaftstheorien the natural scientists had come up with were, in so far as they were focused on “Kraft, Atom, Molekül” (“force, atom, molecule”), not suited to epistemologically ground the project that he had come to call Geisteswissenschaft. The Geisteswissenschaft, so Dilthey, is of an altogether different quality. Cf my history of “theory” below.

  15. If Hegel’s was a last attempt—at least in Germany—to order all knowledge in a ideal system then a considerable part of post-Hegelian nineteenth century Germany intellectual culture may be said to have celebrated “life” as a fragmentary totality that could not be reduced, ever, to an ideal system; in this respect Dilthey was an exemplary proponent of German Lebensphilosophie. On the intellectual milieu of post-Hegelian Germany in which Dilthey made his career see Schnädelbach (1984). On the distinction between life and science as a feature of German modernity cf. Rees (2010).

  16. “If an ethical postulate is to be found in Dilthey’s analysis of the state of social theory in his era,” Boyer writes, “it comes in the form of a recommendation that special scientists need to be more self-reflective as to the interdependency of their instruments, methods, and concepts of knowing historic-social reality.”

  17. That may sound easy, but requires, as Boyer emphasizes, profound technical and ethical work. It requires technical work because it demands “a conscientious and difficult commitment toward multiple analytical,” i.e., theoretical “specializations.” It requires ethical work because a multi-attentional “mode of analysis” demands “an ethical orientation toward not allowing one set of analytical concerns to harden into a conceptual dogma that overshadows (…) other analytical concerns.”

  18. Would one ignore, simply out of disinterest (or simply because one is rather interested in research than in theory), the causal schema, one would not have to worry about these ethical concerns at all (what would matter would be to be true to one’s research, not to a theory).

  19. Foucault has offered similar arguments, e.g., Foucault (1982, p. 34). For Foucault’s use of the term actualité see especially Foucault (1984a).

  20. Rabinow’s (2003) formulation of an anthropology of the actual has been largely based on Deleuze.

  21. Modal change, the reference here is to Foucault (1982, pp. 33/34).

  22. Depending on if one recounts it from a French or a Scottish perspective, depending on if one wants to highlight the significance of the French Revolution or of industrialization and urbanization.

  23. See Wagner (2000), Riedel (1970, 1975), Ritter (1969), Heilbron (1995).

  24. “Need and work had left the household,” Wagner (2000: 137) summarizes these developments, “to which they were formerly confined and had been exposed to the public light.” Wagner draws here on Arendt (1958).

  25. On the Begriffsgeschichte of plèbe and peuples see Conze (1954).

    On the rise of the state cf. the very helpful history of Reinhardt (1999). On how “society” became constitutive of the French state see Foucault (2003).

  26. My account is informed by Gadamer (1960), by the article Theorie in Ritters Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, by Horkheimer (1968 [1937]), and Ritter (1969).

  27. On the concept of the scientific revolution, and on the problems of this concept see Shapin (1996).

  28. Economists—because in Germany, largely due to Hegel’s conceptualization of the bürgerliche Gesellschaft in his Rechtsphilosophie, society was initially a topic of the economic sciences (Hennis 1999, 2000).

  29. It is interesting to note here that the British social anthropologists, insofar as they were studying societies without state, occupy a distinct post-French revolutionary space. The history of British anthropology and its interest in societies without state,—after Hobbes, after the French Revolution, and after Kropotkin—still needs to be written. Though see Stocking (1991, 1998) and Kucklick (1991).

  30. Horkheimer (1968 [1937], p. 18). There the reference is to Großmann (1935).

  31. While the “social” of social theory has become a rather outdated concept, the category of the “social” as such has flourished in fascinating ways, for example in the social neurosciences, in the neoliberal social, in animal sociology, etc.

  32. See footnotes 17 and 18.

  33. For a related assessment of fieldwork/the field cf. Strathern (1999).

    Fieldwork, from this derailment perspective, is a research ethics that requires of the researcher, as part of the knowledge production, to hand herself over to the many chance encounters and unforeseeable observations that make up “a field”; to be carried away by them, while staying alert to the unpredictable, unforeseeable discoveries they give gradually rise to; to learn how to bring these discoveries as such, in their singularity, into view; to explore if, and if then how, they escape the established ways of thinking and knowing.

  34. In addition to the works listed in footnote 3, I want to list at least some anthropology works that fall, in different ways and for different reasons, in this genre.

    Caduff (2010), Cohen (1998), Collier (2005), Collier (2011), Collier and Lakoff (2005), Kelty (2008), Lakoff (2007, 2008), Landecker (2007), Langlitz (2009), Rabinow (1999), Roitman (2004), Ticktin (2011), Young (1997).

  35. As, for example, DeLanda (2002, 2006) does very elegantly, thereby transforming Deleuze into a system.

  36. Foucault (1982).

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Correspondence to Tobias Rees.

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For Luap Lechim and Luap Leachim. And for Lawrence, Steve, Carlo, Nick, Janet, Miriam, Alberto, Irina, Allan, and Fiona. The below could not have been written without our exchanges.

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Rees, T. As if “theory” is the only form of thinking, and “social theory” the only form of critique: thoughts on an anthropology BST (beyond society and theory). Dialect Anthropol 35, 341–365 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-011-9248-4

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