Paul Rabinow Research Articles

French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory by Paul Rabinow

French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory by Paul Rabinow

Book Review French DNA: Trouble in purgatory By Paul Rabinow. 201 pp. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999. $25. 0-226-70150-6

Book Review French DNA: Trouble in purgatory By Paul Rabinow. 201 pp. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999. $25. 0-226-70150-6

A Genetic Code Napoléon?

French DNA Trouble in Purgatory. Paul Rabinow. University of Chicago, Chicago, 1999. 209 pp. $25, £17.50. ISBN 0-226-70150-6. Rabinow provides an anthropologist's account of the complex interactions among genomics, bioethics, patients groups, venture capital, nationalism, and governments that doomed a proposed Franco-American collaboration to identify diabetes genes.

Book ReviewsUrban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule. By Zeynep Çmelik. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xiv+236. $40.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule. By Zeynep Çmelik. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xiv+236. $40.00.Paul Rabinow Paul RabinowUniversity of California at Berkeley Search for more articles by this author University of California at BerkeleyPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 71, Number 3September 1999 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/235323 Views: 11Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Angela Stienen Urban Technology, Conflict Education, and Disputed Space, Journal of Urban Technology 16, no.2-32-3 (Nov 2009): 109–142.https://doi.org/10.1080/10630730903278603

Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (review)

Reviewed by: Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology * Hugh Gusterson (bio) Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology. By Paul Rabinow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. viii+190; notes, bibliography. $22.50. PCR (the polymerase chain reaction), invented in the mid-1980s, harnesses the biological process of polymerization to rapidly multiply tiny samples of [End Page 792] DNA in the laboratory. It has revolutionized genetic testing. Calling PCR “arguably the exemplary biotechnological invention to date” (p. 1), Paul Rabinow sets out in this ethnographic account to tell the story of its invention and, at the same time, to document the vocational culture of the biologists at Cetus Corporation, the California biotech company that developed PCR. Although Rabinow’s narrative is deliberately understated, the story has all the elements of high drama. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, is a larger-than-life figure who is partial to LSD and brawls with his colleagues. Robert Fildes, the CEO of Cetus, almost perpetually battles with his scientists, who eventually engineer his ouster. Finally, the climactic birth of PCR continually threatens to miscarry, thanks to Mullis’s erratic behavior, shortages of capital, infighting among the scientists, and the inability of many at Cetus to see the potential of PCR until quite late. Rabinow’s absorbing account does not dumb down the biology, nor does it—unlike much contemporary anthropology of science—trowel on the theory. It will interest a broad audience in science and technology studies for a number of reasons. First, it is an exemplary analysis of the new biotech private sector as a milieu for the practice of science. Rabinow sketches the legal and financial developments that catalyzed the biotech industry. He examines ways in which research agendas are affected (though not entirely determined) by company patent lawyers and market analysts, and he captures the mix of defensiveness and pleasure that first-rate scientists feel in working for private industry rather than, as their mentors often expected, universities. Rabinow argues that Cetus provided these scientists a “fortuitous space of experimentation” (p. 159), where they had the improvisational flexibility they needed to do cutting-edge science. Second, Rabinow’s account destabilizes its own object in interesting, complicated ways. Rather than weaving the voices of his interviewees into a seamless account unified at the level of an omniscient narrator, he juxtaposes contradictory accounts and intermittently inserts long passages from his transcribed interviews so that the reader can absorb the different voices and perceptions of his informants. In other words, Rabinow injects an element of collage into his writing. Breaking with classic history textbook models for narrating invention, this gently deconstructive writing strategy also destabilizes PCR itself. Rabinow shows that our view of the dates of invention and the inventors depends on whether we think of PCR as a concept or a technique. Was the inventor the inspired scientist who first glimpsed the possibility or the technician who made PCR work when this scientist could not? Or was it the group that made PCR a refined, commercially viable technology two years later? Nor are these questions innocent, since Nobel Prizes, company bonuses, and self-regard hang in the balance. [End Page 793] Finally, in view of Rabinow’s observation that “a significant omission from the by now classic laboratory studies has been the representation of science as a . . . vocation” (p. 17), the entire book can be read as a sub rosa conversation with Max Weber and Robert Merton over what it means to take science as a vocation. Attacking the recent literature in science studies for its ungenerous impulse always to unmask or defrock scientists, Rabinow attempts a subtle rehabilitation of Weber and Merton—and of scientists themselves. Pointing out that norms are ideals that many may not live up to, in the last pages he casts Paul White, a senior scientist at Cetus, as the modest Weberian hero who quietly pursues a disciplined dedication to science while others feud over Nobel Prizes and stock options. Implicitly casting Mullis as the charismatic false prophet and criticizing the “increased tabloidization of science in its leading journals or the extravagant claims of the spokesmen for its megaprojects” (p. 165), Rabinow characterizes...

Onde está a antropologia?

Este artigo examina o cenário da antropologia contemporânea mediante o contraste entre quatro livros publicados nos últimos anos, dois nos Estados Unidos (After the Fact, de Clifford Geertz, e Making PCR, de Paul Rabinow) e dois na Índia (Pathways, de T. N. Madan, e Critical Events, de Veena Das). A comparação é realizada no contexto de uma breve etnografia das livrarias norte-americanas, na qual se avaliam algumas publicações recentes, assim como a reclassificação de disciplinas tradicionais. O papel indispensável dos autores e obras considerados clássicos é examinado no contexto atual, finalizando com uma agenda para reflexão sobre as possibilidades de comunicação entre antropólogos de várias origens e vertentes.

A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem (review)

Reviewed by: A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem Evelyn Fox Keller François Delaporte, ed. A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, introduction by Paul Rabinow, critical bibliography by Camille Limoges. New York: Zone Books, 1994. 481 pp. $27.95. One of the questions that most preoccupied Georges Canguilhem was that of the nature of the history of science. What, he asked, is the history of science a history of? Given the current state of my discipline, I can scarcely imagine a question more urgently in need of asking, or one more difficult to answer. But to Canguilhem, it seemed clear: The object of the history of science, he argued, is “the historicity of scientific discourse” (p. 14)—that is, of the concepts and internal norms that were historically deployed in the building of any given science. By definition, the history of science is, for Canguilhem, intellectual history, for “without concepts, there is no science” (p. 30). By the same token, it is necessarily also a philosophical project, for only the analysis and criticism of these concepts “confers the dignity of history of science” on the historian’s efforts (p. 30). [End Page 740] Clearly, this work is from another era—a time, for example, when it could be taken as a matter of course that it is not only possible but necessary to distinguish science from other aspects of culture; when it seemed radical to insist on the historicity of science’s relation to “fields of validity,” yet unthinkable to question the fact of that relation. The publication of Canguilhem’s selected writings (many appearing in English translation for the first time) provides a sharp reminder of just how far the history of science has come over the last few decades, and for many it will seem like a breath of fresh air. Certainly, not much in the current literature can rival it for erudition, imagination, or provocation. Georges Canguilhem is concerned with large questions—many of them about the nature of life, of biology, and the relations between these two apparently different kinds of phenomena. While he is duly respectful of the enormous advances of molecular biology, it is thinkers like Aristotle and Claude Bernard who remain his heroes; indeed, he is persuaded of a thematic continuity to this very day—for example, in the notion of heredity as “the communication of a certain kind of information” (p. 316), or in “the concept of the organism as a regulative totality” (p. 302) (for Canguilhem, the most crucial concept of biology). The distinctive capacity for self-regulation is, finally, what binds the science of living things to medical science, and forestalls its collapse into physics: “Even within the terms of a . . . materialist epistemology, physics remains radically different from biology. Physics was produced, sometimes at risk of life and limb, by living things subject to sickness and death, but sickness and death are not problems of physics. They are problems of biology” (p. 215). Canguilhem, like Aristotle, would go further yet: The science of life is to the science of inanimate things as life itself is to the inanimate. Both are the products of conservation and innovation, living histories of error and triumph over error. Like life itself, “knowledge is an anxious quest for the greatest possible quantity and variety of information” (p. 319). Georges Canguilhem is not easy to read, but with only a few exceptions, François Delaporte’s skillful editing has succeeded in making his writings both accessible and intelligible to English-speaking readers. Evelyn Fox Keller California Institute of Technology Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Toward a Genealogy of 'Deontology'

Toward a Genealogy of 'Deontology' ROBERT B. LOUDEN [A]ny choiceof a conceptual scheme presupposes values. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History tN Va'HICSAS ELS~.WHEI~,the basic categories used by writers to mark the conceptual terrain of their field profoundly affect readers' understanding of what is important within the field. And in ethics (as elsewhere), most writers who habitually employ the currently accepted categories of their discipline have no knowledge of the particular history of these categories--of who first coined them, of the purposes for which they were originally intended, of how their meanings have shifted over the years, of how ascending categories have displaced descending ones, of who is primarily responsible for their current meanings, etc. As an illustration of this claim, I propose to examine the history of'deontology' in ethics, with an aim to making the recent topographical shifts within the field less "unknown to ourselves.''~ Who was the first author to employ "the general, ugly, and familiar head1Cf . Nietzsche's opening remark in The Genealogy of Morals: "We are unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge [w/r Erkennendon]" (Pref., l). It is perhaps worth noting at the outset that the following exercise in moral genealogy is not terribly Nietzschean--I myself accept very little of the specifics of his attack on morality. However, I do concur with Nietzsche's general convictionthat moral philosophers have paid insufficientattention to the origin and development of moral concepts (including technical concepts within their own discipline). The following moral genealogy is also decidedly un-Foucaultian,for, unlike Foucauh, I do not contrast genealogy with history, but hold rather that (as Alexander Nehamas puts it) "genealogy simply/s history, correctly practiced" (Nietzsche: Life as Literature [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985], ~46, n.l.). I wish to establish the origins and development of 'deontology' in modern ethics. Foucault, on the other hand, daims that a "genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse itself with a quest for their 'origins' " CNietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader [New York: Pantheon Books, 1984], 80). For further discussion of the senses of'genealogy' in Nietzsche, see the essays in Part II of Richard Schacht, ed., Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). [571 ] 57~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER 1996 ing of deontology TMwithin ethics, and how was the term first used? How have the term's primary meanings within ethics changed over the years, and who is responsible for these changes? How did 'deontology' come to be viewed as one of the "two main concepts of ethics,"s and what categories did it replace during its ascendancy? Although one writer has recently reminded us that "the canon that sorts all moral theories as deontological or teleological" has, like all other canons, "a history,"4 I believe that the details of this particular history have still not been accurately traced. 1. ETYMOLOGY The English word 'deontology' is a neologism coined from the Greek deon, deont-: that which is binding, needful, right, proper (neuter of the present participle of dei: it is binding on one, it behooves one to do, one must, one ought) + logia: discourse. Although many ancient Greek authors frequently used the word dei in contexts which arguably express (some) sense of a moral 'ought',5 it should be kept in mind throughout our discussion that 'deontology' tThomas Nagel, The Viewfrom Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 165. In recent discussions the language of deontology is sometimes replaced with that of 'agent-relative values' (in the case of Nagel) or 'agent-centered restrictions' (Samuel Schemer, The Rejection of Consequentialism [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 198~]). Though the latter terms are not yet quite as familiar as 'deontology',they are probably about as ugly. They are also not fullyco-extensivewith previous applicationsof 'deontology',and thus (insofar as they succeed in replacing the language of deontology) represent yet another conceptual shift in our basic moral categories. sJohn Rawls, in a frequently-citedpassage, writes: "The two main concepts of ethics are those of the right and the good .... The structure of an ethical theory is... largelydetermined...

French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment

Paul Rabinow's study of space and society, power and knowledge in France from the 1830s through the 1930s uses tools from anthropology, philosophy, and cultural criticism to make fascinating connections between diverse protagonists and domains. In each of these domains - ranging from medicine to the layout of colonial cities - Rabin ow describes the creation of norms and the search for forms adequate for understanding and regulating what became known as modern society. He also focuses on an unexplored middle ground between the masters of high culture and the experiences of ordinary life, which he calls middling modernism.Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent books include Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (with Hubert Dreyfus) and The Foucault Reader.

French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Paul Rabinow

<i>French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment</i>. Paul Rabinow

Equipment for the social sciences: Paul Rabinow's French Modern

Visual Anthropology ReviewVolume 7, Issue 1 p. 161-168 Equipment for the social sciences: Paul Rabinow's French Modern Professor Marc E. Blanchard, Professor Marc E. Blanchard The Critical Theory Program at University of California, Davis.Search for more papers by this author Professor Marc E. Blanchard, Professor Marc E. Blanchard The Critical Theory Program at University of California, Davis.Search for more papers by this author First published: March 1991 https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1991.7.1.161AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume7, Issue1March 1991Pages 161-168 RelatedInformation

French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment by Paul Rabinow

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 137 French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. By Paul Rabinow. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Pp. x + 447; notes, bibliography, index. $35.00. Technology and Culture reviewers are instructed to recapitulate a book’s thesis. Unfortunately, there is none here. Which is not to say that French Modern is neither informative nor interesting. It is rather like New Age music; pleasant and even interest piquing—but it never really goes anywhere. It says on the dust jacket that the book’s form is experimental and that “events such as epidemics, wars, strikes, and invasions are . . . used as narrative devices.” I think it came out the way it did because that is how the author had arranged his note cards. The book is stocked with obscure events and people such as the French-Malgache War and Joseph Gallieni, while there is not one mention of the two most important people of French urban design in the 19th century, Baron Haussmann and his client Napoleon III. I find that, well, queer in a book on 19th-century urban and social planning in France. At the same time, reading the book has the warm effect of visiting a village museum; it may be hard to tell what significance there might be in the false teeth of the town founder’s cousin, but the fact that someone has collected and displayed them for your delectation is not without charm. I did, however, enjoy the frequent use of isomorphism (a word I first saw in Abraham Maslow’s “Isomorphic Interrelationships be­ tween Knower and Known,” in Gyorgy Kepes’s Sign Image Symbol [New York, 1966]). Here is an example, and it is illustrative as well of how the text in general flows: “The use of statistical approaches to social problems posed the problem of finding forms through which to present this understanding, just as the century-long search for new architectural forms was perplexed about the norms of modern society that these forms were supposed to embody and represent.” Now it must also be said that all the above may well be like the tip of the iceberg and that the real, crucial substance here may be hidden, coded, or subcutaneous in some way that I am unable to understand. Paul Rabinow, everyone tells me, is an icon of Foucault, hermeneutics, and all the “structivisms” of recent times. He has written or edited numerous books in this area. The problem is that when I first began hearing about these schools of thought, around 1980, I found them morally repugnant and have avoided every opportunity for further initiation since. I simply advise you that this might be what this book is all about, really. David Clarke Dr. Clarke teaches technical management and design history at Southern Illinois University. His most recent book is Arguments in Favor ofSharpshooling (Portland, Oreg. : Timber Press). ...

French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. PAUL RABINOW

<i>French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment.</i> PAUL RABINOW

Reviews of Books

Journal Article Reviews of Books Get access French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. By Paul Rabinow. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1989. x + 447 pp. £31.50. ISBN 0-262-18134-7. ANTHONY SUTCLIFFE ANTHONY SUTCLIFFE University of Leicester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 4, Issue 3, September 1990, Pages 417-b–419, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/4.3.417-b Published: 01 September 1990

Governing Morocco: modernity and difference

International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchVolume 13, Issue 1 p. 32-46 Governing Morocco: modernity and difference Paul Rabinow, Paul RabinowSearch for more papers by this author Paul Rabinow, Paul RabinowSearch for more papers by this author First published: March 1989 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1989.tb00107.xCitations: 15AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume13, Issue1March 1989Pages 32-46 RelatedInformation

Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care

The research for this paper was conducted with support from a Scholar's Incentive Award from the City University of New York and with the aid of the research facilities office of the Library of Congress. I am grateful to these institutions for their support. Earlier drafts of this paper were read at the University of Minnesota in May 1985, at Hunter College in October 1985, and at the seminar on Feminist Ways of Knowing held at Douglass College in October 1985. I wish to thank the many listeners who raised questions on these occasions. Special thanks are due Mary Dietz and Annmarie Levins, who commented on earlier drafts of this paper. See Carol Gilligan, a Different Voice: Women's Conceptions of Self and of Morality, Harvard Educational Review 47, no. 4 (November 1977): 481-517, Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle, Harvard Educational Review 49, no. 4 (November 1979): 431-46, Justice and Responsibility: Thinking about Real Dilemmas of Moral Conflict and Choice, in Toward Moral and Religious Maturity: The First International Conference on Moral and Religious Development (Morristown, N.J.: Silver Burdett Co., 1980), In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), Do the Social Sciences Have an Adequate Theory of Moral Development? in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. Norma Haan, Robert N. Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William M. Sullivan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 33-51, and Reply in On In a Different Voice: An Interdisciplinary Forum, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and

“Then What Have I to do with Thee?”: On Identity, Fieldwork, and Ethnographic Knowledge

Though I moved outside the system to a large extent, I was no less social a creature than any one of them, depending on the day-to-day gratifications of human interchange for my own emotional sustenance. I directly experienced the contagion of belief and feeling, since for me, to understand means to feel with, and in so doing to temporarily take inside a new set of reactions. To know the depth of someone's fear makes it impossible not to behave in terms of that fear; to know the people's definition of betrayal is to suffer in imagination their reaction to being betrayed. -Peggy Golde Women in the Field

Social Science as Moral Inquiry. Norma Haan , Robert N. Bellah , Paul Rabinow , William Sullivan

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsSocial Science as Moral Inquiry. Norma Haan , Robert N. Bellah , Paul Rabinow , William Sullivan Carolyn Moore NewbergerCarolyn Moore Newberger Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Social Service Review Volume 59, Number 3Sep., 1985 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/644319 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1985 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Discourse and power: On the limits of ethnographic texts

"language is . .. the institutionalization of subjectivity" An interest in the making of ethnographic texts the rhetorical conventions of how anthropologists convey their material and establish their authority ? has become a thriving cottage industry in certain quarters of anthropology in recent years [1]. These attempts have varied from unpretentious and highly successful attempts at integrating other voices, photographs and a certain ethnographic humility into a basically stan? dard ethnographic presentation [2], to more ambitious programmatic calls, heavily influ? enced by deconstructive practices, which seek (or so they proclaim) truly radical recasting of ethnographic writing. We already have several influential overviews of this material [3]. What I intend to do here, is to begin from the given (although hardly widely recognized) that ethnographic texts are in? deed texts, and to question some of the critical claims made for this insight. Barthes asks: Who speaks? Who writes? To answer this question adequately we would need a sociology of language. Barthes gives us only a semiotics. But semiotics provides us with commonplaces and commonplaces, as any student of rhetoric who has read her Cicerco knows, are necessary to advance any and all arguments. During the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Barthes calls this the "entire classical, capitalist period", dem? onstrating his disinterest in sociology) the person who wrote was the author. The liter? ary profession (with its rigid rules of use, genre and composition) sanctioned, protected and surveilled by state institutions, was charg? ed with the production of language. The writer, Barthes tells us, emerged during the time of the Revolution, when language was seized, and used for political ends. Barthes should have added that the Academie Fran caise has always used language for political ends [4]. Perhaps Barthes means by polit? ical the self-conscious use of language in ex? plicitly instrumental ways. The replacement of the "author" by the "writer" was a slow process. Although the revolutionaries began the process of turning language into a trans? parent instrumentality, revolutionary orators still employed the Classical rhetorical embel? lishments and perorations. Only with the emergence of modern intellectuals, during the Zola affair, did this historical transition finally establish a new place and a new use for language. "The writer ... is a transitive man, he posits a goal (to give evidence, to explain, to instruct), of which language is only a means; for him language supports a praxis, it does not constitute one. Thus lan? guage is restored to the nature of an instru? ment .of communication, a vehicle of "thought." Even if the writer pays some at Paul Rabinow is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow

Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow