Paparazzi Ethnography

Met with German philosopher Dirk Brantl, visiting here from the University of Tubingen. We met last week at the ERG picnic, when I asked him to discuss his research on 17th century author of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbs, for which Dirk has completed a doctoral dissertation and is in the process of writing a book on the topic.

Dirk had fascinating insights about Hobbs. One of the things Dirk pointed out is that, while graduating from Oxford, Hobbs never became a university professor. Instead, he was tutor to certain large families in England. Much of the material he based his writings upon was available to him in the libraries of these estates. And of course, Dirk walked through the logics of Hobbs’ critique of Aristotelian philosophy of virtuousness, suggesting that man by nature can only act according to his interests, and to be virtuous requires a strong sovereign force.

Dirk and I then discussed the possibility of meeting for a coffee and he requested that I send him something I was recently working on – which I was happy to do. I emailed my recent paper on Corporeality of Consultant Expertise, the talk I gave this past Wednesday previously.

Here’s a sense of the conversation I had with Dirk, because I wrote a few points down:

• My book is essentially about the fleeting phenomena surrounding how agendas are set through expertise. Here what I am referring to is not political institutions or history of the industry, but instead, the all facets (through ethnography) of what happens when consultants engage with politicians. And this is captured from handshakes to the kinds of images used to influence politicians about decision-making.

• In an earlier post, for example, and in the corporeality piece, I refer to a Heidegger-ean distinction of tradition versus modernity – primarily through the way humanness is represented on things- such as leather and wood that were close to our bodies and which we utilized over a long period of time, versus its absence on modern products, such as computers, car door handles, which do not carry a trace of the human heart and are disposed of readily. And in this case, my argument was that things that carry a Human Trace, are not necessarily carrying them in a deliberative manner. There is no virtue in leaving a human trace of the human hand on a wooden door post that has been opened for umpteen years. But the fact is, that once that door post, now 2 decades old, is encumbered with the trackings of the human hand, this non-agentive object takes on agency, because it represents the accumulation of time, subjected to it, of course, without intention. And in this manner, I refer to the hands of experts, which are like putty, because they never do any manual labor, but when shaken, demonstrate and take on agentive quality. That is, when you shake their hands, you are confronting a particular type of humanness, characterized by a certain corporeality in relation to a specific type of labor.

• Take another example, in my book, government is not interested in economic training, but in how to channel the complexity of facts into the kinds of simplicity that can form the basis of political decision making. And through this we can see the intersection of scientific facts, interests of government interests of experts. Take for example, the importance that graphics play in demonstrating what the future of what shall be. This is an important point. When I first started working in energy politics, I used to see graphic designs that I could not understand. Nevertheless, much like a business awning with Chinese lettering, I could acknowledge meaning without registering understanding. And this distance between registration and legibility created a tension between what I did know and what I wanted to discover. This was particularly the case in certain graphics that depicted natural gas formations in the United States, which at first, I did not quite understand. But here again, in these images, which I was just coming to know, there were only a handful of ways of reading the message. I could acknowledge that the United States was being referred to, and that there were some “blue bubbles” that I could not yet register their meaning (they were supply areas). So what I could say is that in this image there was already a pre-judgment of things before I was even told by the consultants what the images meant. That is, the uncertainties themselves are bounded.

• Another issue we talked about, from the importance of examining the fleeting phenomena of decision making, was that in such instances, you can actually examine how decisions are made, instead of simply state that institutions make decisions. And for this, one needs to recognize that the bodies I am examining are not subject to institutions of knowledge, but instead, are representatives of these institutions. They speak on behalf. In this sense, my informants represent two faces of sovereign body, in that they had properties by which institutions can take form. They were totally replaceable, because it was their position that remained, and yet, because they stood in those positions, they in effect, made decisions.

• Again, one of the problems of my piece was moving from the historical to the empirical, which I never wanted to do. Capturing fleeting phenonena was always about the actual ritual context of the moment, despite whether or not, certain forms could be historicized. And so here, the idea was to understand, in a complex setting – how fleeting moments register events.

• “Knowledge-Events”. In my corporeal piece, I refer to Eureka Moments. These are moments of inspiration in which what occurs is an idea that can change the reality of the world. In my conversation with the philosopher Dirk Brantl, he pointed out that in my work I refer to Eureka Moments as a type of Knowledge-Event Product created by experts for their clients. Dirk suggested that my use of the word product limited the possibility of the claim behind a Eureka moment (knowledge-event). So for example, once you share a Eureka moment, the question then arises, what is your responsibility to carry out the project? Are you at liberty to discard your pathway? Or with are you obligated to set an agenda? Would I need to remind you that we had that moment if you moved away from the agenda set by that Eureka Moment. In essence, How do Eureka moments create sociality and responsibility.

The Eureka moments I refer to are not the eureka of Archimedes but characterized by sociality.