To continue articulating in a more thorough way the transitions from ritual, to juridical, to scientific scenes, and to do so without forgetting the reciprocal imbrications of them all (we’re never and will never be done with the ritual, as attempts to transcend it only install particularly dysfunctional and vicious versions of it), I will now look at the transition from the juridical to the scientific and technological scenes, to which pretty much all of our contemporary struggles over the center can be traced. In many ways, we already have a society of the disciplines, and the juridical has been significantly displaced (just think of how much scientific evidence, including social scientific evidence, much of its nonsensical, has come to shape juridical proceedings and their mediatic representations.) We couldn’t turn back from this even if we wanted, because the juridical form, with its standards of proof and always problematic notions of intentionality, invites from the beginning these extra-juridical interventions—a large part of the development of the juridical has been “baptizing” and regulating these interventions in a way that makes them consistent with its own operations which, I will remind you, are aimed at representing and resolving conflicts through the use of centralized and measured force that would have otherwise led to vendettas and blood feuds that would make it impossible for social exchanges of all kinds to develop beyond the bounds allowed for by local patriarchs. Technology, as scenic design, is already a mode of governance insofar as it generates new forms of surveillance, record-keeping and constraints on and constitutive infiltrations into social interaction, while more literal innovations in governance always become expanded intelligence operations drawing upon and calling for the creation of new technological forms (an obvious example is taxes, since, just in order for the government to get the money it wants from each of us it must be able to detect and archive all manner of transaction and accumulation).
It's very interesting how you are able to talk about the future of disciplines/infrastructures without grinding any axe and hence trying to prefigure in any concrete way what, maybe, things might look like. We can't know until we try things out. Yet I am not so disciplined and can't read this without asking, e.g., well, what does this suggest for peer review? At the end of this piece you are trying to imagine if the juridical could be "triangulated" or transcended by the disciplinary (how much of each is in PR?); but generally you are arguing that science will always need to be realigned with ritual and the juridical.
Yet the idea of singular succession seems to me to fit more the pre-peer review model of science, the trial by fire where one presented to the fellows of one's scientific society in real time and had it out on the floor of the lecture hall, one's success or failure being determined by how or if that scene was much remembered. As of late, peer review seems to be often associated with backroom power, with those less interested in uncovering truths than in keeping the lines of power/grant money in current order. I am thinking of course of the Covid fiascos where inquiries into possible therapeutics were sidelined by vaccine fundamentalists.
I am also wondering if the Gansian assumption, widely shared, that liberal democracy, free and open debate can be revelatory, is indebted to the model of scientific "lecture hall" debate in pre-peer review times.
In my school days I joined debating clubs and there the rule is (was?) that one must argue the side of a debate one is arbitrarily given, regardless of any personal feelings or loyalties. Now while I remember cleverness in presenting possibilities being less rewarded by judges than aggressive rhetorical skill in playing an established role, I think the rule came from an assumption that arguing from unexpected positions could be revelatory to the student. That's not what goes on in real political "debates", but maybe this youthful-fanciful idea of how parliaments might work explains Gans' belief?
There would be the equivalent of peer review, i.e, members of the discipline assessing and taking up one another's work. This kind of practice must have various roots--the kind of debating club you describe is a closed space, focused on a single question, predicated upon the exclusion of digressions. Participating in such a space involves practice or "rehearsal," and a culture that nourishes it. And idealized model of parliament corresponds to this model, but in a genuine discipline the thinking and theorizing is directly bound up with some kind of practice--you would always be asking, for example, what is the quickest, surest and least costly way to get as much information about the effects of a particular treatment as possible; and then to refine the inquiry after that information was received. And then health care practitioners would take up the recommendations and provide real life feedback, etc. Thresholds of useful data would be different in different cases and always subject to adjustment, etc. No doubt things work like this now sometimes, in some places. The most important and hardest political question is how to shift power to those who want this model to be employed more often, in more places.
It does to a point, thanks. Still, I'm wondering what, if anything, does "peerage" mean in a world practising singular succession. Will we become so tied up in pedagogical relationships, taking turns as teacher and student, while respecting the institutional hierarchy and its need for the "quickest, surest and least costly way" that our current worship of "peer review" is made irrelevant, i.e. it becomes much more tacit? Is it simply the case that the more we today openly worship peerage we are only "revealing" how much we are tied up in the juridical language of shared citizenship (we are not all experts but is it the case that groups of experts today rely on sharing in the mythos of citizens in parliament/court working together?) and our PR is necessarily tied up in the tendency of liberal democracy to obscure sovereignty and install hidden oligarchies?
I appreciate your differentiation of the closed club and the discipline open to historical unfolding; still it's hard to imagine a discipline that forever avoids falling back into a closed club in order to protect members' positions in face of ongoing uncertainty. (Where is personal loyalty in all of this, beyond allegiance to the sovereign?) Is the oscillation you speak of in your conclusion a way of overcoming such tendencies? But then, what is the "retrieval of lineages"?
"There is a kind of oscillation involved in the disciplinary stance, one between the continuing search for models behind models, simultaneously an unpeeling of anachronistic labels pasted on things by the disciplines, an ongoing dispossession of assumptions, on the one hand, and a retrieval of lineages made up of intentional inscriptions, on the other hand. We can’t help but construct a hypothetical history of our own emergence, even while not only acknowledging but drawing intellectual sustenance from the fact that the hypothesis will only be tested in the long run. It’s not so much a “belief” in the originary hypothesis that is to displace all previous faiths and re-embed them in the infrastructure as its operationalization as an idiosyncratic universal translator. The disciplinary stance as an attractor is the operationalization and retrieval of the hypothesis, the revelatory apocalypse of which is all of us still being on the originary scene itself—it has never closed. I think this is a stronger and more operationalizable claim than any faith could make.
[...]
something like “operator of device X in group Y within system Z” would so completely articulate your relation to broader distributions of positions and access that it would render categories surrounding “citizenship” obsolete. Maybe we can assume a kind of triangulation of the juridical leading to its displacement—it would be precisely those involved in advanced disciplinary activities who could set aside humanistic sentimentality and simultaneously monitor themselves as a biochemical community hosting and transmitting various viruses, germs, etc. and having specific effects on enabling environments. This is likely and desirable to the extent that the equivalences constitutive of the juridical (humans as bearers of rights, as citizens, and so on) are no longer given priority over other representing exchanges with the center. And this will be the case insofar as those equivalences no longer seem real because they interfere with more urgent ways of handling “hand-offs” of power. This would be total data exchange with the center and the actualization of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
So if "citizenship" and "rights" are to become obsolete why not also "peer review"? If so, any further insights into how a new myth of Operator X (y) (z) will become articulated?
And why, after beginning by arguing that we always need to realign science with ritual (and myth) and the juridical do you conclude by suggesting the displacement of the juridical? (yes, everything is always being displaced, but not eliminated, yet you do not say 'displace "some" aspects of the juridical'. It sounds like you want to do away with much of it, leaving a mere trace in the institutions of science. Hence no peer review anything like we know it now...)
Ritual and the juridical are very deeply embedded forms, so much so that we can't, at present, think outside of them--no canon or common sense could be intelligible with presupposing them. A direct assault on either would therefore be destructive. But ritual and the juridical are themselves informed by the disciplinary--what counts as evidence, as relevance, as proof, as reasonable, as doubt, etc., are always areas of inquiry; as are the implications of the performance of a ritual or the recitation of a prayer. Such inquiries have been underway since antiquity, and can operate to strengthen or undermine ritual or the juridical, or a particular iteration of either. It's possible to imagine directly addressing our relation to the center without mediating that relation through some specific ritual tradition (if a particular ritual "really means" X, maybe we can mean X in some more direct or fulfilling way, including some form of praxis); or to imagine regulating relations without the juridical form (if we can think in terms of a justice system in terms of replacing the vendetta, perhaps we could think of other, more certain, ways of replacing the vendetta or preventing its resurgence). It's not that we could directly "implement" such approaches but that we need not exclude inquiries that might make them more imaginable.
There's a kind of personal loyalty to a fellow inquirer that is hard to sustain and therefore a sign of an accomplished mode of deferral (even if this "solidarity" might eventually become something other than "personal loyalty")--to put it simply, its the "generous reading" we give to anyone we see genuinely trying to understand things, taking up their language and recirculating it within the disciplinary space so as to help that person engage it. Pedagogical relations involve something like personal loyalty--you invest in someone, you study them, you set expectations for them, you may come to know them in ways they can't know themselves and you will be ready to protect their project even when it interferes with your own (while maybe revising your own so as to provide for mutual "interference"). It's not so much peer review as building and sustaining teams.
Hi, Chère Bouvard
It's very interesting how you are able to talk about the future of disciplines/infrastructures without grinding any axe and hence trying to prefigure in any concrete way what, maybe, things might look like. We can't know until we try things out. Yet I am not so disciplined and can't read this without asking, e.g., well, what does this suggest for peer review? At the end of this piece you are trying to imagine if the juridical could be "triangulated" or transcended by the disciplinary (how much of each is in PR?); but generally you are arguing that science will always need to be realigned with ritual and the juridical.
Yet the idea of singular succession seems to me to fit more the pre-peer review model of science, the trial by fire where one presented to the fellows of one's scientific society in real time and had it out on the floor of the lecture hall, one's success or failure being determined by how or if that scene was much remembered. As of late, peer review seems to be often associated with backroom power, with those less interested in uncovering truths than in keeping the lines of power/grant money in current order. I am thinking of course of the Covid fiascos where inquiries into possible therapeutics were sidelined by vaccine fundamentalists.
I am also wondering if the Gansian assumption, widely shared, that liberal democracy, free and open debate can be revelatory, is indebted to the model of scientific "lecture hall" debate in pre-peer review times.
In my school days I joined debating clubs and there the rule is (was?) that one must argue the side of a debate one is arbitrarily given, regardless of any personal feelings or loyalties. Now while I remember cleverness in presenting possibilities being less rewarded by judges than aggressive rhetorical skill in playing an established role, I think the rule came from an assumption that arguing from unexpected positions could be revelatory to the student. That's not what goes on in real political "debates", but maybe this youthful-fanciful idea of how parliaments might work explains Gans' belief?
There would be the equivalent of peer review, i.e, members of the discipline assessing and taking up one another's work. This kind of practice must have various roots--the kind of debating club you describe is a closed space, focused on a single question, predicated upon the exclusion of digressions. Participating in such a space involves practice or "rehearsal," and a culture that nourishes it. And idealized model of parliament corresponds to this model, but in a genuine discipline the thinking and theorizing is directly bound up with some kind of practice--you would always be asking, for example, what is the quickest, surest and least costly way to get as much information about the effects of a particular treatment as possible; and then to refine the inquiry after that information was received. And then health care practitioners would take up the recommendations and provide real life feedback, etc. Thresholds of useful data would be different in different cases and always subject to adjustment, etc. No doubt things work like this now sometimes, in some places. The most important and hardest political question is how to shift power to those who want this model to be employed more often, in more places.
I'm not sure if this answers your questions,
It does to a point, thanks. Still, I'm wondering what, if anything, does "peerage" mean in a world practising singular succession. Will we become so tied up in pedagogical relationships, taking turns as teacher and student, while respecting the institutional hierarchy and its need for the "quickest, surest and least costly way" that our current worship of "peer review" is made irrelevant, i.e. it becomes much more tacit? Is it simply the case that the more we today openly worship peerage we are only "revealing" how much we are tied up in the juridical language of shared citizenship (we are not all experts but is it the case that groups of experts today rely on sharing in the mythos of citizens in parliament/court working together?) and our PR is necessarily tied up in the tendency of liberal democracy to obscure sovereignty and install hidden oligarchies?
I appreciate your differentiation of the closed club and the discipline open to historical unfolding; still it's hard to imagine a discipline that forever avoids falling back into a closed club in order to protect members' positions in face of ongoing uncertainty. (Where is personal loyalty in all of this, beyond allegiance to the sovereign?) Is the oscillation you speak of in your conclusion a way of overcoming such tendencies? But then, what is the "retrieval of lineages"?
"There is a kind of oscillation involved in the disciplinary stance, one between the continuing search for models behind models, simultaneously an unpeeling of anachronistic labels pasted on things by the disciplines, an ongoing dispossession of assumptions, on the one hand, and a retrieval of lineages made up of intentional inscriptions, on the other hand. We can’t help but construct a hypothetical history of our own emergence, even while not only acknowledging but drawing intellectual sustenance from the fact that the hypothesis will only be tested in the long run. It’s not so much a “belief” in the originary hypothesis that is to displace all previous faiths and re-embed them in the infrastructure as its operationalization as an idiosyncratic universal translator. The disciplinary stance as an attractor is the operationalization and retrieval of the hypothesis, the revelatory apocalypse of which is all of us still being on the originary scene itself—it has never closed. I think this is a stronger and more operationalizable claim than any faith could make.
[...]
something like “operator of device X in group Y within system Z” would so completely articulate your relation to broader distributions of positions and access that it would render categories surrounding “citizenship” obsolete. Maybe we can assume a kind of triangulation of the juridical leading to its displacement—it would be precisely those involved in advanced disciplinary activities who could set aside humanistic sentimentality and simultaneously monitor themselves as a biochemical community hosting and transmitting various viruses, germs, etc. and having specific effects on enabling environments. This is likely and desirable to the extent that the equivalences constitutive of the juridical (humans as bearers of rights, as citizens, and so on) are no longer given priority over other representing exchanges with the center. And this will be the case insofar as those equivalences no longer seem real because they interfere with more urgent ways of handling “hand-offs” of power. This would be total data exchange with the center and the actualization of “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
So if "citizenship" and "rights" are to become obsolete why not also "peer review"? If so, any further insights into how a new myth of Operator X (y) (z) will become articulated?
And why, after beginning by arguing that we always need to realign science with ritual (and myth) and the juridical do you conclude by suggesting the displacement of the juridical? (yes, everything is always being displaced, but not eliminated, yet you do not say 'displace "some" aspects of the juridical'. It sounds like you want to do away with much of it, leaving a mere trace in the institutions of science. Hence no peer review anything like we know it now...)
Ritual and the juridical are very deeply embedded forms, so much so that we can't, at present, think outside of them--no canon or common sense could be intelligible with presupposing them. A direct assault on either would therefore be destructive. But ritual and the juridical are themselves informed by the disciplinary--what counts as evidence, as relevance, as proof, as reasonable, as doubt, etc., are always areas of inquiry; as are the implications of the performance of a ritual or the recitation of a prayer. Such inquiries have been underway since antiquity, and can operate to strengthen or undermine ritual or the juridical, or a particular iteration of either. It's possible to imagine directly addressing our relation to the center without mediating that relation through some specific ritual tradition (if a particular ritual "really means" X, maybe we can mean X in some more direct or fulfilling way, including some form of praxis); or to imagine regulating relations without the juridical form (if we can think in terms of a justice system in terms of replacing the vendetta, perhaps we could think of other, more certain, ways of replacing the vendetta or preventing its resurgence). It's not that we could directly "implement" such approaches but that we need not exclude inquiries that might make them more imaginable.
There's a kind of personal loyalty to a fellow inquirer that is hard to sustain and therefore a sign of an accomplished mode of deferral (even if this "solidarity" might eventually become something other than "personal loyalty")--to put it simply, its the "generous reading" we give to anyone we see genuinely trying to understand things, taking up their language and recirculating it within the disciplinary space so as to help that person engage it. Pedagogical relations involve something like personal loyalty--you invest in someone, you study them, you set expectations for them, you may come to know them in ways they can't know themselves and you will be ready to protect their project even when it interferes with your own (while maybe revising your own so as to provide for mutual "interference"). It's not so much peer review as building and sustaining teams.