the post-structuralist project of describing, analyzing, and problematizing, focusing almost exclusively on the particular. How are you able to pursue a revolutionary universal project?
The particular is the obsession of post-structuralism and I am in a very post-structuralist department. I find this approach methodologically useful as an anthropologist and ethnographer. If you want to go into a molecular biology lab in Paris, for instance (that’s what I’ve been studying), you want to understand the local site-specific culture of that lab and practices of those scientists. It is very useful to be attentive to the multi-layered relationships between the people and the instruments that constitute those science institutions. Ethnography is a meditation on the particular, a phenomenological approach that asks you to walk into a situation and, as best you can, get inside the heads of the people you are trying to understand.
Where post-structuralism is extremely un-useful is its inability and disinterest in bringing some sort of universal or, dare I say, objective set of criteria to bear upon judging the ethics of the practices in those institutions. I find this highly problematic because, for example, when I go into the molecular biology lab and talk to people who are doing fundamental research for agricultural biotechnology. I need to be able to understand the particular nature of their work and thinking and I also need to make some judgements about that and I feel responsible as a radical theorist to say “this is the stable, universal, and very general set of ethical criteria I now appeal to when I’m going to make judgements about these practices.” So, I make a judgement about the fact that private corporations are increasingly taking over public research institutions, that capital driven institutions are now increasingly taking over public science research institutions. I also make a judgement about the implications of this for agricultural economy and for science practice in general. I’m now moving from the particular to some wider, more general or universal analysis and judgement of these events. This is where I feel the academy is currently falling very short.
People are not encouraged to take that next step. People are, in a certain, very quiet way, discouraged from making those judgments (for example, by simply not seeing any articles that voice those concerns published in the recognized academic journals). It’s made very clear to people in the academy - particularly within the post-Marxist, post-structural left - that you’re not supposed to draw revolutionary implications (or even general ones of any type?)from the judgements that you make about the particular events you study. I find this to be highly problematic but not at all surprising.
eg I’m interested in why it is that people can only talk about agricultural biotechnology in terms of risk, environmental health risk; intimate discourse of consumption, like labeling. I’m interested in how and why people are able to expand the perimeters of that debate and discussion. I’m looking at the ways that local institutional practices, like farmer unions, cellular biology labs in the French equivalent of USDA, consumers’ associations, and ecology groups can address this issue. How and why do these institutions shape and limit what people can think, say, and do about questions of biotechnology. I think this is enormously important because we need to know what is keeping people from thinking along revolutionary lines.
Dewitt interviewing Chaia Heller
Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature
The particular is the obsession of post-structuralism and I am in a very post-structuralist department. I find this approach methodologically useful as an anthropologist and ethnographer. If you want to go into a molecular biology lab in Paris, for instance (that’s what I’ve been studying), you want to understand the local site-specific culture of that lab and practices of those scientists. It is very useful to be attentive to the multi-layered relationships between the people and the instruments that constitute those science institutions. Ethnography is a meditation on the particular, a phenomenological approach that asks you to walk into a situation and, as best you can, get inside the heads of the people you are trying to understand.
Where post-structuralism is extremely un-useful is its inability and disinterest in bringing some sort of universal or, dare I say, objective set of criteria to bear upon judging the ethics of the practices in those institutions. I find this highly problematic because, for example, when I go into the molecular biology lab and talk to people who are doing fundamental research for agricultural biotechnology. I need to be able to understand the particular nature of their work and thinking and I also need to make some judgements about that and I feel responsible as a radical theorist to say “this is the stable, universal, and very general set of ethical criteria I now appeal to when I’m going to make judgements about these practices.” So, I make a judgement about the fact that private corporations are increasingly taking over public research institutions, that capital driven institutions are now increasingly taking over public science research institutions. I also make a judgement about the implications of this for agricultural economy and for science practice in general. I’m now moving from the particular to some wider, more general or universal analysis and judgement of these events. This is where I feel the academy is currently falling very short.
People are not encouraged to take that next step. People are, in a certain, very quiet way, discouraged from making those judgments (for example, by simply not seeing any articles that voice those concerns published in the recognized academic journals). It’s made very clear to people in the academy - particularly within the post-Marxist, post-structural left - that you’re not supposed to draw revolutionary implications (or even general ones of any type?)from the judgements that you make about the particular events you study. I find this to be highly problematic but not at all surprising.
eg I’m interested in why it is that people can only talk about agricultural biotechnology in terms of risk, environmental health risk; intimate discourse of consumption, like labeling. I’m interested in how and why people are able to expand the perimeters of that debate and discussion. I’m looking at the ways that local institutional practices, like farmer unions, cellular biology labs in the French equivalent of USDA, consumers’ associations, and ecology groups can address this issue. How and why do these institutions shape and limit what people can think, say, and do about questions of biotechnology. I think this is enormously important because we need to know what is keeping people from thinking along revolutionary lines.
Dewitt interviewing Chaia Heller
Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature
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