The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary (review)

Abstract

Paul Rabinow, The Accompaniment: Assembling Contemporary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 248 pp. I. Anthropology is awash in novelty. New digital networks propagate and expand new political possibilities; synthetic biology creates new life-forms; new reproductive technologies require new legal recognitions of relationality; transnational connections produce new opportunities for engagements and encounters beyond boundaries. Emergence and possibility are very DNA of contemporary thinking. Meanwhile, of course, innovation in methods of anthropology-from multi-sited fieldwork to new forms of collaboration and communication through networks-is valued and celebrated precisely in order to capture and understand new ethnographic objects and contexts, and to form a new anthropology. Paul Rabinow has been one of most consistent chroniclers of biotechnical novelties and, reflexively, of anthropological response to what he calls the contemporary. He has produced pairs of books at regular intervals over past 15 years, one book reporting on his engagements with life sciences and then another reflecting on these engagements as a means to develop conceptual equipment adequate to this space of unexampled novelty. The part of latest entry in this intermittent series appears before research report. The latter, co-authored with Gaymon Bennett, comes out of their joint work as co- Principal Investigator and Director of ethical oversight, respectively, within a new institution for synthetic biology at Berkeley. They have chosen to call their thrust of NSF-funded center Practices and book, to be released later this year, is called Designing Human Practices. Alongside that book is aptly named The Accompaniment: Assembling Contemporary, a heterogeneous set of essays that together respond to challenge of remaking-remediating or reconstructing-the intellectual vocation as it is confronted by institutional and scientific novelties. In addition to providing his reflections on research in synthetic biology and parallel efforts he has made to reshape graduate teaching in anthropology, these essays together constitute an account of Rabinow's own long period of fieldwork in anthropology-his participation in universities, research teams, and philosophical pedagogy, and his various attempts to experiment with anthropological writing. What does it mean to think today, Rabinow asks, and how can we construct practices within universities that will foster thinking about contemporary problems? More crucially, what intellectual practices are most conducive to finding companions and contemporaries-inviting others to accompany us in responding to issues of day? Rabinow's technique of report and reflection in paired volumes, of course, was set with his first two books, an ethnographic monograph and recently-reissued Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (2007). Then, problem was less novelty of objects of knowledge than status of tradition and of culture as guides to understanding people's action and its forms, under changeful sign of modernization. Tradition, he wrote in 1975, in a phrase he has quoted in his recent attempts to define contemporary as a space of anthropological research, is a moving image of past, opposed not to modernity but to (2008:2). If life sciences are, as ethical thinkers fear, new space of alienation for and from humanity, then this is not, Rabinow tells us, something we can measure against any fixed background or measuring stick of the human or the social or even the modern. Rather this is a moving ratio that forms a problem-space for reflection, through engagement with practices that constitute this space of novelties. This engagement in a mobile problem-space, however, presents some perennial challenges for Rabinow anthropologist, such as institutional barriers to cooperation, blocked forms of collaboration, personal affinities, and potent misunderstandings. …