The Body Multiple

“Texts are active. And they do so much.” (Mol, subtext 160).

Lucid, deliberative, thoughtful, and restrained, Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple is a welcome contrast to Helmreich’s Alien Ocean. I found Mol’s self-described “ethnographic” and “praxiographic” approach toward the different ways that atherosclerosis is enacted in Hospital Z to resonate powerfully with phenomenological and pragmatist philosophical traditions, which dispense with epistemological skepticism in favor of descriptive engagements with experienced existence. It is no wonder Mol refers to Merleau-Ponty in her preface (x); his phenomenological work on embodiment and especially on “the phantom limb” was never far from my mind while reading Mol’s descriptions of atherosclerosis as “pain,” as “interview,” and as “evidence,” not least when the “phantom limb” appeared here as a real leg, amputated, refrigerated, and dissected (37-38).

I appreciate very much Mol’s restraint and self-awareness. In her written practice, atherosclerosis is “enacted” as a subject of meditation and an object through which she can “enact” theoretical questions, and by keeping a tight focus on Hospital Z and atherosclerosis of the legs, Mol is able to address her concerns with depth and care (subtext 181). Her subtext offers a curious counterpoint to her “ethnography” that neither undermines nor properly contextualizes the main text, but rather adds another frame of questions about practice and enactment, this time about writing itself.

It is on this self-reflective note that I will finish. Coming from outside the discipline of anthropology, I find myself struggling with the notion of “ethnography,” particularly in Mol’s text. On the one hand fighting naïve notions of Margaret Mead among the Samoans, on the other I’m perplexed as to how Mol can write an “ethnography” that is explicitly without an “ethnos”—unless, that is, atherosclerosis is a “people.” Perhaps she means the people affected by or dealing with atherosclerosis, but this doesn’t seem to quite be her topic; her own “praxiography,” or even the wider term “phenomenology,” seems more apt. This is a question I have about the text that I cannot answer. I would like to pose more questions, especially about some of Mol’s “gestures” (which while well-performed are still troublesome) insofar as they are typical of what I think of as “theory,” gestures such as the refusal to provide answers in favor of opening “the space in which [questions] may be posed,” the overt but necessarily limited interdisciplinarity, and the suggestion that critical strategies of reframing and problematization might be in themselves emancipatory, not because I think they can be dispensed with but because these practices are practices, themselves open to examination (see, for example, Ian Hunter’s “The History of Theory” in Critical Inquiry). This post is too long already, tho, and all I can do is suggest the space in which these questions might be posed…

Alien Ocean

I should preface my comments by saying that I don’t have any training in Anthropology, I don’t know anything about the status of current debates within the field, and it is well beyond my capabilities to be able to position Stefan Helmreich’s ambitious and often interesting Alien Ocean within the discipline. As a generally-informed layperson, however, with some interest in philosophy and literature, I feel quite capable of evaluating the merits and arguments of the text.

Helmreich is essentially arguing that we are in the midst of a change in what it means to be “human,” and that this change can be shown by examining changing conceptions of what constitutes a “life” and an “organism,” specifically the conceptions of scientists, namely microbial oceanographers. His investigations into contemporary microbial oceanography are fascinating, from his descriptions of methanotrophes to his discussion of how the question of how to define a biosignature affects astrobiology, from his limited but provocative overview of lateral gene transfer to his nuanced questioning of when species introduced to the isolated Hawaiian islands become “native.” As well, Helmreich clearly establishes his methodological or thematic tropes and uses them throughout, often perspicuously: the use of “space” discourses in reference to the ocean, the vexed question of nature and culture, the contrast of figure and ground, and the rather interesting movement of identity across scales are all established and familiar by the time we come to the end of the book. This last question, which is, it seems to me, the most important for his argument, is the most interesting, and I wish there was a deeper discussion of it. I am very interested in the idea of the “ocean” or the planet as an identifiable organism (genotype?), and even more interested in the idea that “life” may be definable not as any specific organism, but rather as their collocation in ecosystems. I suppose I should reread Lovelock—it’s been a few years.

I can’t finish without remarking, however, on some of the books notable drawbacks. The generally over-written and sometimes quite awful quality of Helmreich’s prose, the way his associative and metaphoric form of argumentation often spun out into absurdity and incoherence (“If, as [Neil] Young once sang, ‘rust never sleeps,’ iron fertilization promises to put heavy metal to work getting Gaia’s garden into balance” is a great example of the stupid things the seemingly otherwise intelligent Helmreich sometimes tosses off (133)), his chronic self-indulgence, and the loose, wandering structure of his ethnography all made what should have been a thrilling account into a torturous slog that was thankfully brightened by moments of real interest. Having read more Kant and Nietzsche than I have microbial oceanography, I found Helmreich’s “theory” far less engaging than his evidence.

Courses Spring 2009

This semester I'm taking three awesome courses: a philosophy seminar on Marx, taught by Ross Poole, "Methods of Cultural Criticism," a class on close reading, argumentation, and the use of rhetoric in the public sphere, taught by Melissa Monroe (with guest visits from my favorite wrong-headed liberal hawk, Christopher Hitchens), and "Posthuman/Ethnographic," an anthropology seminar taught by Hugh Raffles.

The last course will no doubt be the most challenging, for three main reasons: I'm completely out of my depth, the anthro dept. at the New School seems very tight, and I'm not entirely sure what "posthuman" means. That's part of why I'm taking the course, however. I'm hoping it blows my mind--it may not quite do that, but already it's challenging me in unexpected ways. The reading list looks fascinating, the students seem smart, the prof seems brilliant, and I really have to think about what I'm reading, so I'm happy.

Also, part of the requirement of the course is that we have to post each week on what we read. So, since it's all about responding to a book I read, I'm going to repost my responses here, with perhaps some clarification or extra comments as necessary/warranted/desired.

The last item: I read a bunch of Marx, "On the Jewish Question," etc. That dude hates religion even more than Nietzsche. It's sort of amazing.

And a movie...

I forgot I'm all pan-cultural now. I also saw Entre les murs, or, as it's known in France, The Class. This was a good film, European social realism at its subtle, pointed, critical best: the straight story on a class in the Parisian banlieus, The Class investigates issues of, well, class, ethnicity, race, language, authority, and education. The students were great, the teacher was great, I found it funny and moving and smart. My friend complained because he wasn't sure what the point was that the filmmakers were making; for me this was a virtue. I dug it.

Some Books

In addition to Rousseau's Confessions, I also recently finished another French masterpiece, Flaubert's A Sentimental Education. It was the sort of book which, the moment you turn the last page and close the covers, makes you want to begin all over again. It was great, though Flaubert is a pitiless bastard and a cool customer. I had a hard time with parts of the book, frankly, because they made me despair so much of humanity's stupidity.

I also finished rereading Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, which is still great but which I find chafing at times, especially in its almost monotonous insistence on "simple, clear, direct," which while salutary is also problematic, in ways that I am too tired to discuss here. Suffice it to say, that sometimes things are more complicated than "simple, clear, direct" can handle, and sometimes the passive voice is necessary. Let's have three cheers for honest equivocation and dithering.

The last book I finished lately was Marc Bousquet's How the University Works. This was a fairly straightforward critique of trends in the academic workplace over the last thirty years, especially the casualization of University teaching, the adoption of cheap graduate student labor as a way to keep teaching costs down, and the increasing corporatization of adminstrative management. Almost every page has something to infuriate anyone who cares about education or labor. It suffers from the typical activist flaw of sometimes overstating the case, of reaching for excessive language when plain language will do, and is at times a bit tedious, but it is overall a good and very necessary book.

That's all for now, and probably the last of the non-coursework-related reading I'll do for a few months...