In his recent books, Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms (University of California Press, 2016) and After Ethnos (Duke University Press, 2018), the anthropologist Tobias Rees explores the curiosity required to escape established ways of knowing, and to open up what he calls “new spaces for thinking + doing.” Rees argues that acknowledging – and even embracing – the ignorance and uncertainty that underpin all forms of knowledge production is a crucial methodological part of that process of escape. In his account, doubt and instability are bound up with a radical openness that is necessary for breaking apart existing gaps and allowing the new/different to emerge – in the natural but also in the human sciences. But are there limits to such an embrace of epistemic uncertainty? How does this particular uncertainty interact with other forms of uncertainty, including existential uncertainties that we experience as vulnerable human beings? And how does irreducible epistemic uncertainty relate to ethical claims about how to live a good life? What is the relation of a radical political practice of freedom with art? After a workshop on his work at the Zurich Center for the History of Knowledge in 2017, Vanessa Rampton, Branco Weiss Fellow at the Chair of Practical Philosophy, ETH Zurich, explored these themes with Rees.
1. The Human
Vanessa Rampton (VR): Tobias, your recent work aims to destabilize and question common understandings of the human. I wonder how you would place your work in relation to other engagements with ‘selfhood’ within the history of philosophy, and the history of the human sciences more widely. Because there are so many ways of thinking of the self – for example the empirical, bodily self, or the rational self, or the self as relational, a social construct – that you could presumably draw on. But I also know that you want to move beyond previous attempts to capture the nature and meaning of ‘the human self’. What are the stakes of this destabilization of the human? What do you hope to achieve with it?
Tobias Rees (TR): In a way, it isn’t me who destabilizes the human. It is events in the world. As far as I can tell, we find ourselves living in a world that has outgrown the human, that fails it. If I am interested in the historicity of the figure of the human –– a figure that has been institutionalized in the human sciences –– then insofar as I am interested in rendering visible the stakes of this failure. And in exploring possibilities of being human after the human. Even of a human science after the human.
VR: When you say the human, what do you mean?
TR: I mean at least three different things. First, I mean a concept. We moderns usually take the human for granted. We take it for granted, that is, that there is something like the human. That there is something that we –– we humans –– all share. Something that is independent from where we are born. Or when. Independent of whether we are rich or poor, old or young, woman or man. Independent of the color of our skin. Something that constitutes our humanity. In short, something that is truly universal: the human. However, such a universal of the human is of rather recent origin. This is to say, someone had to have the idea to begin articulating an abstract, in its validity universal and thus time and place independent, concept of the human. And it turns out that this wasn’t something people wondered about or aspired to formulate before the 17th century.
Second, I mean a whole ontology – that the invention of the human between the 17th and the 19th century amounted to the invention of a whole understanding of how the real is organized. The easiest way to make this more concrete is to point out that almost all authors of the human, from Descartes to Kant, stabilized this new figure by way of two differentiations. On the one hand, humans were said to be more than mere nature; on the other hand, it was claimed that humans are qualitatively different from mere machines. Here the human, thinking thing in a world of mere things, subject in a world of objects, endowed with reason, and there the vast and multitudinous field of nature and machines, reducible –– in sharp contrast to humans –– to math and mechanics. The whole vocabulary we have available to describe ourselves as human silently implies that the truly human opens up beyond the merely nature. And whenever we use the term ‘human,’ we ultimately rely on and reproduce this ontology.
Third, I mean a whole infrastructure. The easiest way to explain what I mean by this is to gesture to the university: the distinction between humans on the one hand and nature and machines on the other quite simply mirrors the concept of the human, insofar as it implies two different kinds of realities, as it emerged between the 17th and 19th century. Now, it may sound odd, even provocative, but I think there can be little doubt that today the two differentiations that stabilized the human –– more than mere nature, other than mere machines ––fail. From research in artificial intelligence to research in animal intelligence, en passant microbiome research or climate change. One consequence of these failures is that the vocabulary we have available to think of ourselves as human fails us. And I am curious about the effects of these failures: what are their effects on what it means to be human? What are their effects on the human sciences –– insofar as those sciences are contingent on the idea that there is a separate, set apart human reality and insofar as their explanations, their sense making concepts are somewhat contingent on the idea of a universal figure of the human, that is, on the ‘the’ in ‘the human’? Can the human sciences, given that they are the institutionalized version of the figure of the human, even be the venue through which we can understand the failures of the human? Let me add that I am much less interested in answering these questions than in producing them: making visible the uncertainty of the human is one way of explaining what I think of as the philosophical stakes of the present. And I think these stakes are huge: for each one of us qua human, for the humanities and human sciences, for the universities. The department I am building at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles revolves around just these questions.
VR: What led you to doubt the concept of the human and the human sciences?
TR: My first book, Plastic Reason, was concerned with a rather sweeping event that occurred around the late 1990s: the chance discovery that some basic embryonic processes continue in adult brains. Let me put this discovery in perspective: it had been known since the 1880s that humans are born with a definite number of nerve cells, and it was common wisdom since the 1890s that the connections between neurons are fully developed by age twenty or so. The big question everyone was asking at the beginning of the twentieth century was: how does a fixed and immutable brain allow for memory, for learning, for behavioral changes? And the answer that eventually emerged was the changing intensity of synaptic communication. Consequently, most of twentieth-century neuroscience was focused on understanding the molecular basis of how synapses communicate with one another –– first in electrophysiological and then in genetic terms.
When adult cerebral plasticity was discovered in the late 1990s the focus on the synapse –– which had basically organized scientific attention for a century –– was suddenly called into question. The discovery that new neurons continue to be born in the adult human brain, that these new neurons migrate and differentiate, that axons continue to sprout, that dendritic spines continuously appear and disappear not only suggested that the brain was perhaps not the fixed and immutable machine previously imagined; it also suggested that synaptic communication was hardly the only dynamic element of the brain and hence not the only possible way to understand how we form memory or learn. What is more, it suggested that chemistry was not the only language for understanding the brain.
The effect was enormous. Within a rather short period of time, less than ten years, the brain ceased to be the neurochemical machine it had been for most of the twentieth century, but without – and this I found so intriguing – without immediately becoming something else. The beauty of the situation was that no one knew yet how to think the brain. It was a wild, an untamed, an in-between state, a no longer not-yet, a moment of incredibly intense, unruly openness that no one could tame. The whole goal of my research was to capture something of this irreducible openness and its intensity.
Anyway, when trying to capture something of the radical openness in which my fieldwork was unfolding, I began to wonder about my own field of research: if the taken for granted key concepts of brain science, that is, the concepts that constituted and stabilized the brain as an object, could become historical in a rather short period of time, then what about the terms and concepts of the human sciences? Which terms might constitute the human in such a situation? These questions led me to the obsession of trying to write brief, historicizing accounts of the key terms of the human sciences, first and foremost the human itself: when did the time and place independent concept of the human, of the human sciences we operate with emerge? And this then led me to the terms that stabilize the human: culture, society, politics, civilization, history, etc. When were these concepts invented –– concepts that silently transport definitions of who and what we are and of how the real is organized? When were they first used to describe and define humans, to set them apart as something in themselves? Where? Who articulated them? What concepts –– or ways of thinking –– existed before they emerged? And are there instances in the here and now that escape the human?
Somewhere along the way, while doing fieldwork at the Gates Foundation actually, I recognized that the vocabulary the human sciences operate with didn’t really exist before the time around 1800, plus or minus a few decades, and that their sense-making, explanatory quality relies on a figure of the human –– on an understanding of the real –– that has become untenable. I began to think that the human, just like the brain, had begun to outgrow the histories that had framed it. You said earlier, Vanessa, that I am interested in destabilizing common understandings of the human. Another way of describing my work, one I would perhaps prefer, would be to say that through the chance combination of fieldwork and historical research I discovered the instability –– and the insufficiency –– of the concept of the human we moderns take for granted and rely on. I want to make this insufficiency visible and available. The human is perhaps more uncertain than it has ever been.
VR: Listening to you, I cannot help but think that there are strong parallels between your work and the history of concepts as formulated by, say, Reinhart Koselleck or Raymond Williams. I can nevertheless sense that there is a difference –– and I wonder how you would articulate this difference?
TR: First, I am not a historian of concepts. I am primarily a fieldworker and hence operate in the here and now. What arouses my curiosity is when, in the course of my field research a ‘given,’ something we simply take for granted, is suddenly transformed into a question: an instance in which something that was obvious becomes insufficient, in which the world or some part thereof escapes it and thereby renders it visible as what it is, a mere concept. From the perspective of this insufficiency I then turn to its historicity: I show where this concept came from, when it was articulated, why, under what circumstances, and also how it never stood still and constantly mutated. But in my work this history of a concept, if one wants to call it that, is not end in itself. It is a tool to make visible some openness in the present that my fieldwork has alerted me to. In other words, the historicity is specific: the specific product of an event in the here and now, a specificity produced by way of fieldwork.
Second, my interest in the historicity –– rather than the history –– of concepts runs somewhat diagonal to presuppositions on which the history of concepts has been built. Koselleck, for example, was concerned with meaning or semantics and with society as the context in which changes in meaning occur. That is to say, Koselleck –– and as much is true for Williams –– operated entirely within the formation of the human. They both took it for granted that there is a distinctive human reality that is ultimately constituted by the meaning humans produce and that unfolds in society. Arguably, the human marked the condition of the possibility of their work. It is interesting to note that neither Koselleck nor Williams, nor even Quentin Skinner, ever sought to write the history of the condition of possibility of their work: they never historicized the figure of the human on which they relied. On the contrary, they simply took it for granted as the breakthrough to the truth. If I am interested in concepts and their historicity, then it is only because I am interested in the historicity of the concept of the human as a condition of possibility. How to invent the possibility of a human science beyond this condition of possibility is a question I find as intriguing as it is urgent: how to break with the ontology implied by the human? How to depart from the infrastructure of the human, while not giving up a curiosity about things human, whatever human then actually means?
2. Epistemic Uncertainty
VR: I am wondering if all concepts can outgrow their histories. Isn’t this more difficult in the case of, say, ‘the body’ or ‘language,’ than for our more doctrinal concepts – liberalism and socialism, for example?
TR: Your question implies, I think, a shift in register. Up until now we talked about the human and its concepts and institutions but now we are moving to a more general epistemic question: are all concepts subject to their historicity? And if so, what does this imply? Seeing as you mentioned the body, let’s take the idea –– so obvious to us today –– that we are bodies, that it is through our warm, sentient, haptic bodies that we are at home in the world. Over the last fifty years or so, really since the 1970s, a large social science literature has emerged around the body and around how we embody certain practices and so on. Much of this literature, of course, relies on Mauss on the one hand and on Merleau-Ponty on the other. And if one works through the anthropology or history of the body, one notes that most authors take the body simply as a given. It is as if they were saying, ‘Of course humans are, were, and always will be bodies.’
But were humans always bodies? At the very least one could ask when, historically speaking, did the concept of the body first emerge? When did humans first come up with a concept of the body and thus experience themselves as bodies? What work was necessary –– from physiology to philosophy –– for this emergence? To ask this question requires the readiness to expose oneself to the possibility that the category of the body and the analytical vocabulary that is contingent on this category is not obvious. There might have been times before the body –– and there might be times after it. For example, if one reads books about ancient Greece, say Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind, one learns that archaic Greek didn’t have a word for what we call the body. The Greeks had a word for torso. They had two words for skin, the skin that protects and the skin that is injured. They had terms for limbs. But the body, understood as a thing in itself, as having a logic of its own, as an integrated unit, didn’t exist.
One version of taking up Snell’s observation is to say: the Greeks maybe did not have a word for body –– but of course they were bodies and therefor the social or cultural study of the body is valid even for archaic Greece. What I find problematic about such a position is that it implies that the Greeks were ignorant and that our concepts –– the body –– mark a breakthrough to the truth: we have universalized the body, even though it is a highly contingent category. Perhaps a better alternative is to systematically study how the ‘realism of the body’ on which the social and cultural study of the body is contingent became possible. A history of this possibility would have to point out that the concept of a universal body –– understood as an integrated system or organism that has a dynamic and logic of its own and that is the same all over the world –– is of rather recent origin. It doesn’t really exist before the 19th century. In any case, there are no accounts of the body –– or the experience of the body –– before that time and philosophies of the body seem to be almost exclusively a thing of the first half, plus or minus, of the twentieth century. Sure, anatomy is much older, and there were corpses, but a corpse is not a body. The alternative to the realism of the body that I briefly sketched here would imply that one can no longer naively –– by which I mean in an unexamined way –– subscribe to the body as a given. The body then has become uncertain. I am interested in fostering precisely this kind of epistemic uncertainty. To me, epistemic uncertainty is an escape from truth and thus a matter of freedom.
VR: Perhaps a kind of taken-for-granted approach to the body is so bound up with what you call ‘the human’ that questioning it is necessary for your work.
TR: Indeed, although my work led me to assume that what is true for the human or the body is true for all concepts. Every concept we have is time and place specific and thus irreducible, instable and uncertain. But to return to the human: we live in a moment in time that produces the uncertainty of the human all by itself. I render this uncertainty visible by evoking the historicity of the human, and this in turn leads me to wonder if one could say that the human was a kind of intermezzo – a transient figure that was stable for a good 350 years but that can no longer be maintained.
VR: I wonder what you would reply if I were to say: but isn’t that obvious? Concepts are historically contingent, so what else is new?
TR: In my experience, most people grant contingency within a broader framework that they silently exempt from contingency itself. For example, if contingency means that different societies have different kinds of concepts, then society is the framework within which contingency is allowed: but society itself is exempt from contingency. One could make similar arguments with respect to culture. If we say that things are culturally specific, that some cultures have meanings that others don’t have, or entirely different ways of ordering the world, then we exempt culture from contingency.
All of this is to say, sure, you are right, social and cultural contingency are obviously not new. But what if you would venture to be a bit more radical. What if you would not exempt society and culture from contingency? Talk to a social scientist about society being contingent, and they become uncomfortable. Or they reply that maybe the concept of society didn’t exist but that people were of course always social beings, living in social relations. This is a half movement in thought. It assumes that the word has merely captured the real as it is –– but misses that the configuration of the real they refer to has been contingent on the epistemic configuration on which the concept of society has depended. We could say that the one thing a social scientist cannot afford is the contingency of the category of the social.
What I am interested in is the contingency of the very categories that make knowledge production possible. To some degree, I am conducting fieldwork to discover such contingencies, to generate an irreducible uncertainty: as an end in itself and also as a tool to bring into view in which precise sense the present is outgrowing –– escaping –– our understanding and experience of the world.
3. Knowledge Production Under Conditions of Uncertainty/Ignorance
VR: I imagine there is a kind of parallel here with how natural scientists would react to the fact that their concepts no longer fit, for example by developing a more up-to-date way of thinking the brain to replace the synaptic model. But it strikes me that, if done properly, this task is much more radical for practitioners of the human sciences. This is because all of our concepts – including such fundamental ones as the human and the body – are historically contingent, that we have to do away with universal categories. Our task is to fundamentally destabilize ourselves as historical subjects, as academics, as knowers. And I guess a key question is how this destabilization, this rendering visible of uncertainties, can nevertheless be linked to the kinds of knowledge production we have come to expect from the human sciences.
TR: The question, perhaps, is what one means by knowledge production in the human sciences. I think that the human sciences have been primarily practiced as a decoding sciences. That is to say, researchers in the human sciences usually don’t ask ‘What is the human?’ No, they already knew what the human is: a social and cultural being, endowed with language. Equipped with this knowledge they then make visible all kinds of things in terms of society and culture. In addition, perhaps, one could argue that the human sciences have established themselves as guardians of the human – that is, they have been practiced in defensive terms. For example, whenever an engineer argues that machines can think and that humans are just another kind of machine, the human sciences react by defending the human against the machine. The most famous example here would maybe be Hubert Dreyfus against Seymour Papert. A similar argument though could be made with respect to genetics and genetic reductionism.
Now, if one destabilizes the figure of the human neither one of these two forms of knowledge production can be maintained. I think that this is why many in the human sciences experience the destabilization of the human as outrageous provocation. If one gets over this provocation one is left with two questions. The first is: what modes of knowledge production become possible through this destabilization of the human? Especially when this destabilization means that the entire ontological setup of the human sciences fail. Can the human sciences entertain, let alone address this question, given that they are the material infrastructure of the figure of the human that fails? Or does one need new venues of research? I often think here of the relation between modern art and the nineteenth century academy.
VR: That reminds me of Foucault.
TR: Foucault was an anti-humanist –– but he remained uniquely concerned with human reality. I think the stakes here – I say this as an admirer of Foucault – are more radical. So my second question is: what happens to the human? I am acutely interested in maintaining the possibility of the universality of the human after the human. Letting go of the idea seems disastrous. So how can one think things human without relying on a substantive or positive concept of what the human is? My tentative answer is research in the form of exposure: the task is to expose the normative concept of the human in the present, by way of fieldwork, to identify instances that escape the human and break open new spaces of possibility, each time different ones, ones that presumably don’t add up. The goal of this kind of research-as-exposure is not to arrive at some other, better conception of the human, but to render uncertain established ways of thinking the human or of being human and to thereby render the human visible and available as a question.
VR: So if you don’t want to talk about what the human is, I’m wondering if the appropriate question would be about what the human is not.
TR: I think such an inversion doesn’t get us very far. I would rather say that I am interested in operating along two lines. One line revolves around the effort to produce ignorance. That is, I conduct research not so much in order to produce knowledge but the uncertainty of knowledge. The other line wonders how one could conduct research under conditions of irreducible ignorance or uncertainty, or how to begin one’s research without relying on universals. A comparative history of this or that always presupposes something stable. As does any social or cultural study. In both cases I am interested in a productive or restless uncertainty –– or second-order ignorance –– not only with respect to the human. In a way, what I am after is the reconstitution of uncertainty, of not knowing, by way of a concept of research that maintains throughout the possibility of truth.
If you were to press me to offer a systematic answer I would say, as a philosophically inclined anthropologist, that I conduct fieldwork/research because I am simultaneously interested in where our concepts of the human come from, in whether there are instances in the here and now that escape these concepts, and in rendering available the instability –– the restlessness –– of the category or the categories of the human, both as an end in itself and as a means to bring the specificity of the present into view. It strikes me as particularly important to note that what I am after is not post-humanism. As far as I can tell most post-humanists hold on to the 18th-century ontology produced by the human but then delete the human from this ontology. What interests me is to break with the whole ontology. Not once and for all but again and again. Nor am I interested in the correction of some error à la Bruno Latour – as if behind the human we can discover some essential truth –– call it Actor Network Theory –– that the moderns have forgotten and that the non-moderns have preserved and that we now all can re-instantiate to save the world.
I am not so much interested in a replacement approach –– what comes after the human? –– than in rendering visible a multiplicity of failures, each one of which opens up onto new spaces of possibility. After all, how Artificial Intelligence derails the human is rather different from how microbiome research derails it or climate change. These derailments don’t add up to something coherent. As I see it, it is precisely this not-adding-up –– this uncertainty –– that makes freedom possible. Perhaps this form of research is closer to contemporary art than to social science research, that could well be. Anyhow, the department I try to build at the Berggruen Institute revolves around the production of precisely such instances of failure and freedom.
Tobias Rees is Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School of Social Research in New York, Director of the Transformations of the Human Program at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, and Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His new book, After Ethnos is published by Duke in October 2018.
Vanessa Rampton is Branco Weiss Fellow at the Chair of Philosophy with Particular Emphasis on Practical Philosophy, ETH Zurich, and at the Institute for Health and Social Policy, McGill University. Her current research is on ideas of progress in contemporary medicine.