On Regimes of Living

Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 22-39

  Collier, Stephen J ^a   Lakoff, Andrew ^b  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Biopolitics; Life sciences; Living; Social administration; Urban planning

Indexed keywords

EID: 84889292391     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9780470696569.ch2     Document Type: Chapter

References (48)

1. We acknowledge the helpful comments of Mireille Abelin, Talia Dan-Cohen, Rebecca Herzig, Frederic Keck, Paul Rabinow, Tobias Rees, Aihwa Ong, and Natasha Schull.
2. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985).
3. Oxford English Dictionary Online; http://www.oed.com, 2003.
4. The regime of living is, thus, a tool for investigating what Paul Rabinow has called a "problem-space." Paul Rabinow, "On Anthropological Work: Or an Untimely Adjacency," Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, unpublished MS, 2003.
5. Marilyn Strathern, "Robust Knowledge and Fragile Futures," Chapter 24, this volume, p. 470.
6. Strathern does not specify these conflicts, but we might surmise that an example would be the sacrality of life at conception versus the health of the mother and the right of individuals to regulate their reproductive behavior.
7. For a discussion of the formation of assemblages that bring together ethics and technologies, see Paul Rabinow, French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
8. A number of medical anthropologists, for example, have critically analyzed the rise of bioethics in clinical and research contexts. See the contributions to Daedalus 128: 4, 1999, entitled "Bioethics and Beyond," coedited by Arthur Kleinman, Renee Fox, and Allan Brandt.
9. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 110.
10. MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 110-111, p. 10.
11. Charles Taylor, "Justice after Virtue," in After MacIntyre: A Critical Perspective on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
12. As Michel Foucault's work on the human sciences would seem to suggest, this use of "anthropology" is clearly anachronistic: see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973).
13. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 148.
14. As John Horton and Susan Mendus summarize MacIntyre's position: "For Aristotle, the good life is the life lived in accordance with virtue (arete), where virtue is to be understood against the background of a teleological conception of man-a conception according to which human beings have a specific nature which determines their proper aims and goals. On his account, the virtues are excellences of character which enable people to move toward their goal (telos), and are an essential part of the attainment of that goal." See John Horton and Susan Mendus, "Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue and After," in After MacIntyre, p. 6.
15. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 150.
16. Taylor, "Justice after Virtue," p. 28.
17. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 162.
18. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 150. MacIntyre claims that the centrality of the polis as the proper milieu of ethics was common beyond the Aristotelian tradition. Of the four Athenian views of ethics he describes, "all do take it for granted that the milieu in which the virtues are to be exercised and in terms of which they are to be defined is the polis." (After Virtue, p. 135.)
19. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
20. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 36-37.
21. Taylor, "Justice after Virtue," p. 31.
22. See Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
23. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 133.
24. MacIntyre's emphasis on the ability of Aristotelian ethics to accommodate itself to a more modern understanding of an ethics embedded in a cultural tradition is a distinctive feature of his reading of Aristotle. This emphasis is not to be found in other important readings of Aristotelian ethics.
25. Charles Taylor, "Justice after Virtue," p. 19.
26. For a similar argument, see Anthony Giddens' article in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
27. That is, technological reason has a certain "global" character in the sense defined in Chapter 1 of this volume, "Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems."
28. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 155.
29. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 155
30. Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics.".
31. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 67.
32. As a large body of work in the social studies of science has shown, modern technical communities are also moral communities See, for example, Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
33. See also Taylor, "Justice after Virtue," p. 31.
34. See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998).
35. For more detail on this argument in Arendt, see Hannah Pitkin, Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
36. Counter-politics is a Foucaultian term that Colin Gordon analyzes in "Governmental Rationality: An Introduction," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 5.
37. Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, in "Biological Citizenship" (Chapter 13, this volume) offer a more general term for such situations.
38. Janet Roitman, "The Garrison-Entrepôt: A Mode of Governing in the Chad Basin," Chapter 22, this volume, p. 418.
39. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 14-15; italics original.
40. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 75.
41. Lawrence Cohen, "Operability, Bioavailability, and Exception," Chapter 5, this volume, p. 83.
42. Taylor, "Justice after Virtue."
43. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949).
44. For a description of the extension of audit regimes among different forms of social organization in Britain, see Michael Power, The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
45. Marilyn Strathern, ed., Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy (New York: Routledge, 2000).
46. Nancy Scheper-Hughes makes a similar point in "The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics and the Global Traffic in 'Fresh' Organs," Chapter 9, this volume.
47. Caroline Humphrey, "Russian Protection Rackets and the Appropriation of Law and Order," in The Unmaking of Soviet Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
48. Gordon, "Governmental Rationality."