In Sloterdijk’s controversial lecture on “Rules of the Human Park” all the attention went to an imagined controversy about cloning and the like. The more interesting part of the lecture was about the future of the humanities. Without an exchange of letters among friends (past, present, future) there are no humanities. Letters of course is not taken literally. As the pressure to blog becomes the pressure to tweet becomes the pressures to emote is enabled by more and more devices and opinion makers, the space for more sustained thought and discussion is not eliminated but marginalized. Combine this with the expected virulent American anti-intellectualism and we all know what you get. In fact we don’t all know as historical memory is short and thin.

The habitual trope of my so-called lack of the empirical is amusing. Please consult either my last few books (often accused of being too empirical and technical e.g. “A Machine to make a future”) or any of the websites for scores of contributions based in inquiry and current problems.
Gaymon Bennett and I have a book online at Rice University Press on Ars Synthetica.
In any case, happy you are reading or at least scavenging as Jim Clifford used to say.

The first concerns temporality. I’m reminded of Robyn Wiegman’s work on a feminism “in the meantime” – Paul’s comments very much resist closure in term of a temporal endpoint. That’s one way I can read the emphasis on “composition,” and it is one way he makes use of the notion of the virtual.

The second point I find fascinating is that I think what Paul is pushing toward here is the question of a methodology for theorization, not data-gathering (the typical object towards which the concept of methodology is oriented).

I look forward to learning more about this interesting work!

Bio-ethics concern issues for everyone (anyone) to engage with, and the further we develop the capacity to intervene in the human body — altering our own lives and the lives of others — or create new, “designed” living things, the more complicated these issues will seem.

Developing a capacity through clear thinking and unadorned language to engage a broader spectrum of the public truly will be a public service.

I am totally sympathetic with Paul’s methodological or metamethodological innovations. He is working from inside a sometimes very formal remaking of modes of inquiry that he has forged over the last decade through his researches in science studies. In his current work within the space provided for ethics/social effects discussion by ‘big’ science projects in synthetic biology, Paul is trying to define the terms for a more critical and open kind of social inquiry against the perceived or expected limits of this function within these projects. Leaving the terms of classic ethnography behind, but continuing on fully in its spirit, Paul has forged an analytic apparatus to encourage critical thinking within domains where the terms of discourse about the social are constrained. His derivations from Foucualt, Dewey, and others can read like code in the effort to define his own analytics. An access to how his efforts at concept work engages with the more recognizable anthropological tradition of critical ethnography can be had in conversations between Paul, myself, James Faubion, and Tobias Rees, published as Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, Duke University Press.

– George Marcus, University of California, Irvine