Paul Rabinow - Anthropology of The Contemporary

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.” 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 defines 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 identifies “the contemporary” as a temporal and ontological problem space. In Marking Time (2007) he distinguishes 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 takes up the contemporary as a “moving ratio.” Just as “the modern” can be thought of as a moving ratio of tradition and modernity, so 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.