Paul Rabinow - Case Work

Case Work

Case work functions as an exercise in framing problems so as to identify potentially significant elements, relations, and interfaces. Case work underscores questions of how such material should be presented. Case work can indicate strengths and weaknesses in the venues in which inquiry is initiated and formed. Casework, therefore, is an essential aspect of inquiry neither reducible to theory nor an end-in-itself.

(a) Constructing Equipment, Can the Human and Life Science Collaborate? (SynBERC 2006–).

Rabinow is the PI of the Human Practices Thrust of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center. http://synberc.org/thrusts.html. With Gaymon Bennett, he has been part of a collaborative effort to re-think the relationship between ethics and science within this NSF funded Engineering Research Center. In SynBERC, the mandate from the NSF was to invent a collaborative mode of engagement such that the relationship between ethics and science might be reconceived and reworked. As of 2008, this undertaking is in its early stages.

(b) Chronicling Emergent Organizations(Celera Diagnostics 2003).

Rabinow, working with Talia Dan-Cohen, then an undergraduate at Berkeley, took up the challenge of chronicling Celera Diagnostic’s efforts to turn the complete sequence of the human genome into tools for diagnosing molecular predispositions for pathological developments in health. The anthropological work was an experiment in thought and production, given a self-imposed one year time limit for both research and writing. It was an experiment in collaboration involving first and second order modes of observation. The product is Rabinow and Dan-Cohen’s A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles.

(c) New Venues: Problematizing Knowledge, Care and Ethics, (Centre d'Études du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH) 1994).

The fieldwork leading up to French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory focused on a multidimensional crisis revolving around a proposal for commercial collaboration between an American biotechnology start-up company and the French laboratory that led the genome sequencing effort in France, the CEPH. As opposed to his earlier book, French Modern, French DNA is not a history of the present but an initial case study in the anthropology of the contemporary. Rabinow accepted the challenge from the Center’s scientific director to be a 'philosophic observer.’ His task was to identify the formation of constellations of value judgments around new forms of scientific knowledge, and to make that process available for further debate and modification, not to adjudicate disputes. The text is in part a meditation on committed ‘disinterestedness:’ “a certain vocational integrity, an asceticism in Weber and Foucault's senses, a certain rigor and patience that could, lead us somewhere beyond what we already believe and know.” This work still emphasizes the observation in “participant-observation” and can be contrasted to latter work at SynBERC in which both poles are put into play.

(d) New Venues of Knowledge and Commerce: The Rise of Biotech Start-up Companies, (Cetus Corporation 1980s).

Cetus Corporation (later, Roche Molecular Systems) figured as both a scientific and anthropological milieu within which to explore a set of a highly specific set of political, economic, scientific and legal vectors that generated a new industry as well as a major technological development, the polymerase chain reaction. Contrary to narratives of invention and discovery as the work of individual geniuses, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology highlights the assembling and governing of scientific and technical prowess, sustained team work, management skills, legal input and material resources, all of which were necessary for this fundamental molecular biological tool to emerge, be stabilized, commercialized and to become rapidly a tool fundamental for all biological research.

(e) The Invention of Modern Equipment: (France and its Colonies 1830-1930).

French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment is a fine-grained genealogical account on the rise of the French “social” moving conceptually through domains as diverse as nineteenth century epidemiology, sociology, the Beaux Arts, colonial administration, Lamarckian biology, statistics, etc. French Modern demonstrates the century long process of bringing these domains of knowledge and practices of power slowly into a common frame of rationality and eventually into an operative apparatus characteristic of the welfare state.

(f) Philosophy as Inquiry: Fieldwork in Philosophy (Encountering Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Bellah and Michel Foucault, 1976-84).

Trained at the University of Chicago in the history of philosophy under the tutelage of Richard McKeon, where McKeon emphasized the rhetorical and pragmatic functions of philosophy (Dewey), Rabinow renewed this activity and moved beyond the work of his advisor, Clifford Geertz. Encounters with Robert Bellah and Hubert Dreyfus at UC Berkeley in the context of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship year (1976–77) led to a focus on interpretive social science and ethical practice on the one hand, and an education in Heidegger and the question of technology and modern philosophy on the other. The work with Dreyfus led to a fortuitous encounter with Michel Foucault in 1979, the development of an intense dialogic working relationship, and a joint book with Dreyfus, Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, as well as an anthology of Foucault’s works (in consultation with Foucault), The Foucault Reader, published shortly before his untimely death.

(g) Anthropology as Inquiry: Inheriting the Modern(Morocco, Middle Atlas Mountains 1968-1970).

The importance of colonial history, the self-understanding of descendents of an Islamic saint, the dilemma of tradition and modernity as well as fieldwork itself, as a practice, rite and site of self-formation, became case material for reflection. The major themes that Rabinow will consistently pursue for the next decades are all incipiently present in these untimely reflections; ethics as form giving, motion and care. Symbolic Domination: Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco.