SECCIÓN 645. EQUIPOS INFORMATICOS

Construction of Anthropological Subject Positions

Marianne W. Jørgensen

Scientific knowledge is situated, it has been argued in recent decades, and in debates on scientific knowledge, whether natural, social or human scientific, reflexive writers¹have focused their attention on the social and cultural con-text of knowledge production. The common argument is that knowledge is not just a passive reflection of an object ‘out there’ but also a projection of forces working from ‘within’ the author, the academy or Western culture at large. Knowledge is seen as shaped, or even as exclusively determined, by shared conventions for knowledge production, and ‘truth’ is understood to be more a matter of providing a culturally recognizable representation of real-ity than a direct correspondence with realreal-ity. This constructivist epistemol-ogy has prompted a large amount of reflexive research into the conditions of possibility of traditional scientific knowledge and extensive discussions of what scientific knowledge is and should be.

The debate on reflexivity has revolved around the core question of how to understand and evaluate our own knowledge. If all knowledge is socially sit-uated, what claims can we then make for the knowledge we produce our-selves as scientific knowledge producers? I share this concern as well as the constructivist epistemology of reflexive research, and I suggest that a dis-course analytical approach can give new input to the discussion – though not so much by providing an answer as by reformulating the question.

Discourse analysis is characterized by an interdisciplinary integration of perspectives from the human and the social sciences, whereby represen-tations of the world are seen as related to a social context (for example, Fairclough, 1992). Thus, knowledge is understood as knowledge production, that is, as a socially situated discursive practice with its own regulative mech-anisms and with social consequences. Similar understandings of knowledge are also forwarded in the debate on reflexivity, but, as I shall later demon-strate, they often seem to be forgotten when it comes to the understanding of the knowledge presented in the reflexive texts themselves. Thus, discourse

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analysis does not provide an ‘outside’ view of reflexivity. Rather it offers a perspective and a vocabulary with which to map out the discursive processes within reflexive research whereby the debate on reflexivity is ‘turned back on itself’. A discourse analytical investigation of reflexivity involves ques-tions such as, ‘What makes the debate on reflexivity make sense?’, ‘What are its conditions of possibility?’, ‘Which view of the world is constructed?’,

‘How are the relations between knowledge, the object of knowledge and the knowledge producer constituted in reflexive texts?’, and ‘Which subject positions are thus created: from which discursively constituted positions do knowledge producers claim validity and legitimacy for their knowledge?’

Such investigations into the reflexivity debate itself, I believe, will renew the discussion of what claims we (can) make for our own knowledge within a constructivist epistemology.

This chapter proposes a discourse analytical framework for the investiga-tion of scientific subject posiinvestiga-tions. With a starting point in Michel Foucault’s diagnosis of ‘modern man’ I argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the question of reflexivity provides us with a common denominator for the dis-cussions of scientific knowledge in a number of disciplines, enabling us to analyse a range of contributions as different solutions to the same problem concerning the status of knowledge. I then turn to the discipline of anthro-pology, first sketching different anthropological negotiations of the prob-lem, and, finally, putting the developed tools at work in a closer analysis of one example, namely Talal Asad’s article ‘The concept of cultural translation in British social anthropology’ (Asad, 1986).

Modern man

Michel Foucault’s book The Order of Things is probably best known for its prophecy that man, as we know him, is perhaps about to disappear, ‘erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (1966 [1974], p. 387). Here, I shall not be concerned with the possible disappearance of man and the ques-tion of what might follow as it seems to me that the man Foucault detected in the modern era still lives on as our predominant matrix for understand-ing human beunderstand-ings and their knowledge.² Instead, I want to suggest that Foucault’s conceptualization of this modern man can, first, illuminate one set of conditions of possibility for the debates on reflexivity, and, second, when operationalized, provide discourse analytical tools with which to inves-tigate the various subject positions assigned to human beings as knowledge producers.

The Order of Things is, as the subtitle states, ‘an archaeology of the human sciences’. Among the human sciences Foucault includes, for instance, soci-ology, ethnsoci-ology, history and psychology. These sciences emerged in their modern form during the nineteenth century simultaneously with their object of knowledge, man. According to Foucault, it would be a mistake to

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think that, first, man existed, and then gradually developed the human sci-ences that could make him understandable to himself. Rather, the modern episteme³ gave rise to both a specific constitution of the human being, man, and to the human sciences that through their knowledge production canvassed this new creature.

Before proceeding with the description of man in Foucault’s rather con-voluted terminology, a more impressionistic rendering might be helpful. In the modern age, man emerged as a mystery to himself. On the one hand, man sees himself as producing knowledge about the world and about him-self, and as such he is the master of the world: able to see it, to describe it, to understand it and explain it. On the other hand, modern man is always suspicious as to the status of the knowledge he obtains, because he conceives of himself as a historical, cultural and biological being. His thoughts and ideas are governed by laws he is only dimly aware of. This means that a piece of knowledge supposed to grasp a certain object might be distorted by the knowledge producer’s particular worldview, and, hence, behind his back yield as much information of himself as a particularly situated subject, as of the object he intended to produce knowledge about. How is he to separate the two, the valid knowledge of the object, and the bias – beyond his reach – that his contingency upon time and space induce? He never fully can; he becomes an epistemological problem to himself, and the question of the conditions of knowledge production becomes a major concomitant to all knowledge production.

Let me now try to outline the contours of modern man in a terminology closer to Foucault’s. To get to know himself, modern man needs to make a detour. He understands himself as a living, working and speaking being – and life, work and language are in turn understood as domains governed by their own interior laws that extend themselves into all human beings.

Biology is concerned with the laws governing man as a living organism, eco-nomics looks for the rules that determine his needs and desires, his produc-tion of goods, and his exchange with others, and philology maps the words he speaks onto long histories of languages (Foucault, 1966 [1974], p. 313).

These laws are determining man as if from the outside, but at the same time their contents define the inner depth of empirical living men.

In one sense, man is governed by labour, life, and language: his concrete existence finds its determinations in them; it is possible to have access to him only through his words, his organism, the objects he makes – as though it is they who possess the truth in the first place (and they alone perhaps);

and he, as soon as he thinks, merely unveils himself to his own eyes in the form of a being who is already, in a necessarily subjacent density, in an irre-ducible anteriority, a living being, an instrument of production, a vehicle for words which exist before him (ibid.).

This means, first, that man is exterior to himself, governed by laws that exist outside and before him, of which he only holds a vague awareness.

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Second, it means that to gain access to these laws he has to turn to his own empirical being as a specific example of the general laws. As an empirical being, man understands himself as finite: he is a specific historical particu-larity, representing a possible instance of the general laws. The finitude is seen as the very condition for gaining knowledge at all: man can only expe-rience things because he has a particular body, he can only bestow things with a value because he has particular desires, and he can only speak of things because he masters a particular language. Thus, man’s access to the world, and to knowledge of the world, is dependent upon his particularity, his finitude (ibid., p. 314). At the same time the finitude makes it difficult for modern man to establish the general laws of human existence. The general laws he seeks to reveal are always only available through specific empirical manifestations, and he can never be certain of what, in the specific empiri-cal instance, represents the particularity of just that instance, and what represents the general rule.

According to Foucault, this general matrix of modern man’s self-understanding can be specified as three interrelated doubles characterizing and constituting man’s knowledge production about himself: man is an empirico-transcendental double, man is a double of the cogito and the unthought, and man is caught between the retreat and return of the origin. In the form of these three doubles man has sought knowledge about his thought, his being and about the meaning of life. But, as Foucault argues, modern man’s self-understanding prevents him from ever producing final answers. As such, the three doubles constitute paradoxes that cannot be dissolved within the modern episteme.

In the first double man constitutes himself as a simultaneously empirical and transcendental being (ibid., p. 318ff.). The question modern man asks himself here is, ‘What makes knowledge possible at all?’ He seeks the tran-scendental forms of all knowledge production, but, according to Foucault, the knowledge he produces about such forms will remain unstable. Since the tran-scendental forms only can be extracted through particular empirical contents, and since knowledge about the forms always is produced by particular empir-ical individuals, modern man can never be certain that a specific account of the transcendental actually is of universal validity, that is, that the account is not itself determined by other transcendental forms. Instead, the final capture of the transcendental forms is continuously displaced in an endless regress.

The second double, of the cogito and the unthought, frames modern man’s investigation into his own being and consciousness (ibid., p. 322ff.).

Modern man’s thought is always haunted by a suspicion of an unthought remainder yet to be discovered – the conditions that render a thought pos-sible and, hence, the criterion on which to evaluate this specific thought escapes him. Thus, ‘the whole modern thought is imbued with the neces-sity of thinking the unthought’, Foucault says, ‘straining to catch its endless murmur’ (ibid., p. 327).

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The third double is the retreat and return of the origin (ibid., p. 328ff.). In this double questions are asked about man’s history and origin, and, in turn, about the meaning of life and history. Again, modern man cannot establish stable knowledge about these issues, as the origin continuously retreats into a more and more distant past. On the other hand, the origin returns as a promise that some near future investigation will make it possible finally to fathom the mystery of origin. However, the retreat of the origin is twofold; it also ‘retreats’

into the future as the promise of final knowledge remains unfulfilled.

Reflexivity

With his diagnosis of modern man, Foucault characterizes a certain under-standing of man and his knowledge, common to the constitution of all the modern human sciences. His interdisciplinary discourse analysis, reworking disciplines such as history, philosophy and the history of ideas, allows him to take a step back from the individual human scientific disciplines in order to excavate a common epistemological denominator. As I shall argue below, this denominator is also constitutive of reflexive research. Therefore, with Foucault we might bring together different claims to knowledge often kept apart in reflexive research. Whereas reflexive research often reproduces the disciplinary division of knowledge production, Foucault points to the com-mon conditions of possibility, and whereas reflexive research often repre-sents itself as a radical break with modern epistemology, Foucault allows us to see lines of continuity between now and then.

Reflexive research often establishes the individual scientific discipline as its horizon of investigation. Through reflexivity, researchers explore the context of scientific knowledge production, asking how the context has shaped the scientific representation of the world. In some cases this results in an inves-tigation of the personal context of the individual researcher, in others, Western science or Western culture at large is made the appropriate object of investigation. But a widespread tendency has been to focus on the indi-vidual scientific discipline whereby reflexivity has been carried out as genealogies of specific disciplines in order to expose their worldviews, their taken-for-granted assumptions and their specific procedures for knowledge production. Thus, anthropologists have reflected on anthropology (for exam-ple, Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Weston, 1997), social psychologists on social psychology (for example, Parker, 1989), and science studies researchers have reflected on science studies (for example, Ashmore, 1989). Although illumi-nating, such studies have reproduced the division of scientific knowledge into individual disciplines within reflexive research. Later on, I shall also sin-gle out one such discipline for further investigation, namely anthropology, but I suggest that formulating the problem of reflexivity as a problem common to all of the human sciences enables us to compare and discuss different contributions to the debate – within and across disciplines.

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My argument is, thus, that Foucault’s diagnosis of the modern human sci-ences and their constitution of man and knowledge provides a neat framework for recent debates about reflexivity in a range of disciplines. This implies a con-tinuity between modern science and reflexive research that counters a wide-spread self-representation in reflexive writing. Here, the reflexive concern is often articulated as a better alternative to a previous human scientific practice which supposedly favoured a paradigm of naive representation, and thus achieved the appearance of objectivity by ignoring the epistemological com-plication of the knowledge producer (for example, Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1996; Denzin, 1997; Haraway, 1996). Reflexive writers have deconstructed pre-vious scholars ad lib in order to expose the discrepancy between their claims to objective knowledge and their situatedness as knowledge producers (for example, White, 1978; Clifford and Marcus, 1986). A few exceptions apart, we are presented with an image of a modernist era, by now antedated, suppress-ing the bearsuppress-ing on knowledge of the social and cultural context of knowledge production.

If, however, we apply Foucault’s conception of modern man, the reflexive turn can itself be understood as a truly modern enterprise. The lesson reflex-ive research teaches is that to assess knowledge and to qualify what it is knowledge about, we need to learn about its mode of production. In terms of the cogito and the unthought, an unthought situatedness has supposedly dominated knowledge production within the human sciences hitherto, but now it is being excavated in order to bring about either better knowledge, or a more adequate status claim for the knowledge produced. Also, the dou-ble of the empirical and the transcendental is being activated insofar as it is argued that all knowledge (a transcendental principle) is situated (is empir-ically contingent).

My aim here is not so much to enter into the general debate on ‘moder-nity’ and ‘postmoder‘moder-nity’ or to discuss if there has been a dramatic change or not. What I want to establish is merely that Foucault’s framework applies to the reflexive turn on important points and that applying this abstract framework can provide us with a common denominator for ‘modern’ and

‘reflexive’ work alike across the individual disciplines. Foucault’s diagnosis of modern man points to the modern episteme as a common condition of possibility for both the modern human sciences and the contemporary dis-cussions of reflexivity. Does this mean, then, that in terms of the concep-tion of knowledge producers and knowledge producconcep-tion reflexivity is old news? That we are still stuck with the same insoluble modern paradoxes?

The short answer is yes. But whereas Foucault tends to emphasize the apor-ies of the modern knowledge project, not without discontent, yearning for a different understanding of self and knowledge (for example, Foucault, 1966 [1974], p. 342ff.), I suggest a bit more sympathy with modern man.

Foucault demonstrates that modern man’s self-understanding provides for three doubles, and that these three doubles are insoluble paradoxes. In itself,

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this demonstration serves as his critique of the modern episteme. But if modern man is still with us, with no substitute in sight, what is interesting is not so much a repeated demonstration that the paradoxes are in princi-ple insoluble as an inquiry into the ways in which they are nonetheless tem-porarily settled in human scientific writing.

Although the sharp contrast established between now and then in reflex-ive writing probably partly serves as boundary work, opening space for a new generation of scholars (cf. Sangren, 1988, p. 414), the ardent deconstruction of canonical texts also suggests that a number of different positions are avail-able within the modern episteme. Foucault’s focus is not on such differences, but, as I shall now argue, a reworking of his framework can provide a scaf-folding within which to analyse the different positions and their struggles to settle the paradoxes in specific ways.

Dispersion

When assessing Foucault’s archaeological work, discourse analysts have often found his concept of practice wanting. His focus on the discursive structures underemphasizes the variation and possibilities for contestation inherent in concrete discursive practice (Fairclough, 1992), and the discourses he points to appear as abstract preformed and coherent entities (Potter, 1996; cf.

Wetherell, 1998). This criticism also applies here: in order to turn Foucault’s doubles into analytical tools enabling investigations of dispersed discursive practice we need to climb down one step of Foucault’s ladder of abstraction.

Foucault’s analysis of modern man and the human sciences aims to reveal the modern episteme, that is, the totality regulating the discursive practices and their dispersion at a given time (Foucault, 1997, p. 91). As such, his diag-nosis maps out the contradictory field in which specific statements about man and his knowledge make sense at all in modernity. In The Order of Things

Foucault’s analysis of modern man and the human sciences aims to reveal the modern episteme, that is, the totality regulating the discursive practices and their dispersion at a given time (Foucault, 1997, p. 91). As such, his diag-nosis maps out the contradictory field in which specific statements about man and his knowledge make sense at all in modernity. In The Order of Things