How to Submit to lnquiry: Dewey and Foucault

Paul Rabinow
The Pluralist, Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2012, pp. 25-37 (Article)
Published by University of Illinois Press
DOI: 10.1353/plu.2012.0034
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the pluralist Volume 7, Number 3 Fall 2012 : pp. 2537 25
2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
How to Submit to Inquiry: Dewey and Foucault
paul rabinow
University of CaliforniaBerkeley
The problem reduced to its lowest terms is whether inquiry can
develop in its own ongoing course the logical standards and forms
to which further inquiry shall submit.
John Dewey, Logic 13
gilles deleuze, in his book What Is Philosophy? asks: What is the best
way to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to do
what they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?
(Deleuze and Guattari 28). I imagine few in this audience would disagree
with that claim. The changing, historically situated, interplay of concepts
and problems is a register that those inspired by the work of John Dewey
can readily acknowledge as pertinent even if what Dewey meant by each of
the terms and what Deleuze meant by them is clearly not the same thing.
1
Over the years, I have given my own mode of inquiry a number of differ-
ent names including the anthropology of reason or eldwork in philosophy
or more recently designing human practices. In each case I was drawn to
inquiring into situations of ethical, religious, and/or scientic problems as
the object of my inquiry as well as attempting to formulate my own practice
as itself having the objective of being ethically or scientically remediative.
Said another way, in each of my inquiries, what was at stake was understand-
ing the human thinganthroposto quote Thucydides, the logos that was
at issue for those under studythe objects of inquiryas well as my own
practice as inquirer. In a word, for me, anthropology has always been, liter-
ally but problematically, anthropos + logos as both object and objective of the
practice of inquiry.
The work of John Dewey was signicant from the outset, albeit medi-
ated by the presentation of my teacher at the University of Chicago, Richard
McKeon. Dewey was equally a touchstone for my doctoral advisor Clifford
Geertz, who paid homage to Dewey even if he did not use his concepts ex-
plicitly. After a long encounter, both personal and conceptual, with Michel
Foucault, the work of Dewey unexpectedly came to the fore for me. It was
26 the pluralist 7 : 3 2012
only recently as I tried to clarify my thoughts and orient to major new inqui-
ries concerning the life sciences that I began to read extensively in Deweys
works. I have found them to be concise, conceptually rich, and providing an
unexpected resonance with many aspects of the inquiries I had been conduct-
ing and continue to conduct today. Let me explain.
I. The Recent and Not So Recent Past
The American philosopher Richard McKeon characterized Dewey as using
a mode of approach he called problematic, although problem-centered
or even problematizing might be more apt. The problematic method
proceeds through inquiry as opposed to dialogue, debate, and proof (Plo-
chmann 87). The small set of thinkers who have motivated me to a life of
inquiry and to whose work I continually return, each in their own way ts
the problem-centered mode of pursuing thinking through inquiry. Thus, Max
Weber, John Dewey, Richard McKeon, and Michel Foucault all advocated
the practice of an engaged inquiry rather than forms of deductive proof or
determinative negation. Furthermore, with the exception of McKeon, each
one also eschewed much hope in the variants of communicative rationality
so pervasive in our times.
For all four of these thinkers, reason was both an object of inquiry as well
as a touchstone for guiding inquiry. Each problematized reason as both his
object and his objectiveto use Deweys termsin his own distinctive, and
at times, unsettling, manner. Ultimately all four, I believe, came to understand
reason as a problem, perhaps the quintessential problem for philosophers:
a problem, they all concurred, that should not afford a single or universal
solution. Rather, as Dewey advocates in countless places, reason is a practice,
through which the thinker attempts to establish what might well be called
a curational relationship attuned to specic situations, one adjusted to the
specic problem at hand, one that had to be taken up in a manner that con-
sequently required it to be exible in the standards and forms appropriate
to the challenge to which the philosopher was challenged to respond.
One might say that understood in this manner, reason as a practice, as
simultaneously both a means and an end, directed the thinker to search for a
mode of logic. Logic, one might say, is the commitment to inhabiting inquiry
in its particularity, uncertainty, and rigor. It follows that logic not only can
be but must be practiced in diverse manners. Consequently, ascertaining the
right manner and mode for this practice is inherently both a problem as well
as a hinge of inquiry.
McKeon: Semantics and Inquiry
My formal philosophical Bildung began during my junior year at the Uni-
versity of Chicago in 1963 when I decided to drop a course in introductory
Tamil (there were two instructors, one Brahmin and one low caste, one male
and one female, and two students, myself and a missionary who had lived
in South India for years and was brushing up on the language skills) and to
enroll instead in Richard McKeons class, Ideas and Methods of the Physical
Sciences, the rst of a three-part sequence that was followed by Ideas and
Methods of the Social Sciences and Ideas and Methods of the Humanities. The
course was the most disorientingand ultimately re-orientingexperience
of my entire education. McKeon had developed an extravagant matrix that
provided a systematic philosophical underpinning for any text: from Galileo
through Newton and Maxwell. Having come to the University of Chicago
from a science and math high school in New York, Stuyvesant, I was ready
to appreciate Maxwell and his equations but had never suspected that those
equations embodied a systematic philosophy that differed from somebody
elses equations (McKeon). And who knew that all philosophy could be cap-
tured, as McKeon conceived it, as a form of semantics and inquiry? Today,
almost fty years later, I still recall with a vivid shiver staring out through the
pseudo-Gothic windows at a Chicago-land brittle blue sky framing frozen
branches and thinking to myself that although I had never failed any course
before, even failure could be a pedagogical experience; regardless of what grade
I was assigned, I had learned a lot. As it turned out, I did not fail this course
and went on to take four or ve more courses from the daunting Great Man.
The culmination of my personal encounters with McKeon was his course on
Facts and Categories, in which it became clear to me that I was not going to
continue to pursue McKeons approach to philosophy. As has been observed,
McKeons awesome synthetic powers and his utterly authoritative tone and
demeanor served in principle to open up new horizons and experiences as
well as to shut down others.
No one could doubt that McKeon was a Magister Ludi at semantics but
where exactly, I wondered, was the inquiry?
What about inquiry? McKeon had asserted many times that one of his
mentors had been John Deweythe main philosopher aside from Aristotle
whose mention seemed to radiate a respectful, if muted, affect from McKeon.
What McKeon took as Deweys core directive was the centrality and necessity
for a philosopher of identifying encountered problems and addressing them
through inquiry. That being said, it was never completely apparent what
rabinow : How to Submit to Inquiry 27
28 the pluralist 7 : 3 2012
McKeon meant by inquiry since it is difcult to nd examples in his volu-
minous writings or those of his small group of disciples that would satisfy an
anthropologist as qualifying as inquiry. McKeons inquiry always seemed to
remain on the discursive plane although he insisted that semantic ground-
clearing was only a preliminary ordering of terms propaedeutic to a subsequent
practice of discovery and ultimately of coordinated action.
Since by 1965 I was clear that the next step in my Bildung would be an
anthropological one, inquiry seemed to require a further active and reective
engagement in worldly affairs. The commitment to inquiry in troubled and/or
challenging situations, in an engaged and embodied way, was consonant with
and welcomed by the discipline of anthropology (at least at the University
of Chicago). Not coincidentally, my advisor Clifford Geertz had majored in
philosophy as an undergraduate at Oberlin College where Dewey was held,
Geertz told us, in high esteem. When it came to anthropological research,
however, Geertz often cited neo-Kantians such as Suzanne Langer or Ernst
Cassirer, as combining philosophic rigor and an active practice of inquiry into
symbolic forms. In retrospect, it is puzzling that I do not remember actually
reading Deweys texts extensively with either McKeon or Geertz.
Dewey: Essays in Experimental Logic
It was decades laterat the turn of the twenty-rst centurywhen I actually
started reading Dewey in a more orderly fashion and with specic problems
in mind. As chance would have it, if such a thing exists, I noticed a used copy
of Deweys Essays in Experimental Logic in Moes Books in Berkeley. Each
term in the title of this collection assembled by Dewey from his work in the
decade preceding and following the turn of the twentieth century suddenly
appeared timely and resonant.
Reading through these essays was startling and invigorating on a number
of registers. First, I had been carrying out anthropological inquiry into the
human genome sequencing project in a number of countries (United States,
France, and Iceland), a project I had come to through the French tradition
of the history of science and epistemology, specically Michel Foucault and
especially Georges Canguilhem. During the 1990s, as my work on the na-
scent biotech industry in the San Francisco Bay area as well as the molecular
sequencing projects proceeded, I came in contact with a burgeoning eld
called science studies. I was not very taken with its debates and its vedettes
but it was part of the environment where I lived and worked. I recall a cordial
discussion with Bruno Latour in Paris, who, when I asked him why he did
not refer in his writings to Canguilhem, Bachelard, and others in the history
and philosophy of science in France, said they were too epistemological
and, after my defense of their relevance, Bruno said archly that I was on the
way to making Canguilhem appear to be reasonable for the Americans just
as I had done for Foucault. Such an effort, his tone made clear, was illicit
and dangerous.
Reading Deweys essays (written a century earlier) was an illumination as
it suddenly became clearer that the issues that the science studies people were
battling over might have been clearer and more insightful had they been more
interested in inquiry and less in method. Demonstrating a pathway between
and beyond subjectivism and objectivism, realism and idealism, theory and
practice, etc., Dewey lucidly showed in his Essays where the philosophic
challenges lay and where the dead-end metaphysical distinctions led, and
what practices should be undertaken in inquiry that qualied as experimental;
he charted for his readers and for himself which forms of verication were
validthose that led to enriched and rened inquiryand which stymied
such motion.
Deweys orientation to inquiry, his attention to problems, his commit-
ment to discovery and validation leading to more experimental discovery and
validation were incandescent, and in their own way, liberating (with a small
l). Stated abstractly, these terms were all familiar from the long-distant
McKeonite past, but more precisely and trenchantly, they resonated with the
anthropological research I had been carrying out during the previous decade.
How to give form to inquiry? What forms are best suited to the practice and
experimental results of a practice of logic? These interrelated questions have
intrigued me throughout my career.
According to Dewey, the goal of logic and thus of inquiry is reconstruc-
tion. In 1948 he put it this way:
Reconstruction can be nothing less than the work of developing, of
forming, of producing (in the literal sense of the word) the intellectual
instrumentalities which will progressively direct inquiry into the deeply
and inclusively humanthat is to say, moralfacts of the present scene
and situation. (Reconstruction xxvii)
The claims are moving in their pathos. As this audience will know, the quote
is taken from the 1948 revised edition of Reconstruction in Philosophy, whose
new Introduction expresses a pervasive sense of frustration and even ir-
ritation at the direction things had taken over the course of the twenty-ve
years since the publication of the rst edition of the book with its condently
buoyant tone.
rabinow : How to Submit to Inquiry 29
30 the pluralist 7 : 3 2012
In the new Introduction, events of the preceding years had eroded Dew-
eys assuredness, manifesting itself in what Dewey himself quotes one reviewer
as referring to as a sour feelingsomething Dewey grumpily rejects. Not
retreating from the overall project, Dewey observes that [t]he events of the
intervening years have created a situation in which the need for reconstruc-
tion is vastly more urgent than when the book was composed (Reconstruc-
tion vi). More than six decades later, my experiments and inquires support
the claim that scientically and ethically, relations among and between the
life sciences, human sciences, and ethics require sustained rethinking and
reworking. Whether that rethinking and reworking will arrive at a form of
reconstruction, remains simultaneously an open question, a pressing problem
as well as a site of discordancy and indeterminacy.
II. The Contemporary Scene and Situation
The name objects will be reserved for subject-matter so far as it
has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inqui-
ry; proleptically, objects are the objective of inquiry.
John Dewey, Logic 118, as cited in Burke 152
Over the course of the last decade, I have been attempting to invent a form of
participant-observation that would take as its object as well as its objective the
remediation of a variant of the reconstructive problem. In order to establish
the logical standards and forms to which further inquiry should submit, I
have found it advances and facilitates inquiry if one introduces several fur-
ther distinctions. I shall describe three. The rst is the distinction between
Foucaults history of the present and my anthropology of the contemporary. The
second is between the troubles or discordances of a situation and that more
general topology that Michel Foucault has named a problematization. The
third concerns a specication of Deweys intellectual instrumentalities, which,
again in the wake of Foucault, I call equipment.
The status of the present plays a contrastive role among and between the
history of the present and the anthropology of the contemporary. Within the
practice of inquiry in a mode of the history of the present, the present appears
as a continually deferred horizon. Strictly speaking, the history of the present
never addresses the present directly but only at most in a glancing fashion.
Contrastively, one can say that the anthropology of the contemporary begins
in the present so as to recongure it through the practice of inquiry, experi-
mentation, curation, and further inquiry. Hence, if the present is absent in
the former mode, while marking a limit and silently offering a touchstone
to guide inquiry, in the latter mode one immerses oneself in the present so
as to leave it to integrate into the actual. The actual as opposed to the pres-
ent may sound obscure, but it is the equivalent of Deweys objects that are
produced through the process of inquiry.
What is the contemporary? The ordinary English language meaning of
the term the contemporary is: existing or occurring at, or dating from,
the same period of time as something or somebody else. There is a second
meaning of distinctively modern in style as in a variety of favorite con-
temporary styles (Windows. Dictionary). The rst use has no historical con-
notations, only temporal ones; Cicero was the contemporary of Caesar just
as Thelonious Monk was the contemporary of John Coltrane, or Gerhard
Richter is the contemporary of Gerhard Schroeder. The second meaning,
however, does carry a historical connotation and a curious one that can be
used to both equate and differentiate the contemporary from the modern.
It is that marking that is pertinent to the project at hand.
Perhaps one could say, to combine Deweys terms with my own, that
just as the actual is the space of the objects produced by inquiry from the
troubled and inchoate present, the contemporary is the space in which those
objects are curated into objectives for further inquiry.
2
Problematization
A problematization, Michel Foucault writes,
[d]oes not mean the representation of a pre-existent object nor the cre-
ation through discourse of an object that did not exist. It is the ensemble
of discursive and non-discursive practices that make something enter
into the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought
(whether in the form of moral reection, scientic knowledge, political
analysis, etc.). (as cited in Rabinow, Anthropos 18)
The reason that problematizations are problematic is that, something prior
must have happened to introduce uncertainty, a loss of familiarity; that loss,
that uncertainty is the result of difculties in our previous way of understand-
ing, acting, relating (Rabinow, Anthropos 18).
The primary task of the analyst is not to proceed directly toward interven-
tion and repair of the situations discordancy, but rather to pause, reect, and
put forth a diagnosis of what makes these responses simultaneously possible
(Rabinow, Anthropos 18). A problematization then refers to both a kind of
general historical formation as well as a nexus of responses to that forma-
tion. The diverse but not entirely disparate responses, it follows, eventually
rabinow : How to Submit to Inquiry 31
32 the pluralist 7 : 3 2012
form (an increasingly signicant) aspect of the problematization. Foucault
is characterizing a historical space of conditioned contingency that emerges
in relation to (and then forms a feedback situation with) a more general
state of affairsone that is real enough, but neither xed nor static. Thus,
the domain of problematization is constituted by and through economic
conditions, scientic knowledge, political actors, and other related vectors.
What is distinctive is Foucaults identication of the problematic state of af-
fairs (the dynamic of the process of a specic type of problem description,
characterization, and reworking) as simultaneously the object, the site, and
ultimately the substance, of thinking.
For a diagnostic oriented to the near future, the challenge is to reformulate
blockages and opportunities as problems so as to make available a range of
possible solutions. I distinguish this from an approach that takes discordan-
cies as given and immediately seeks to repair them. In an anthropology of the
contemporary, the question of what is being problematized is approached by
identifying the ways in which formerly stable gures and their elements are
becoming recombined and recongured such that a present challenge is to
diagnose nascent gures, equipment, and assemblages. In sum, problema-
tization taken up as a task of an anthropology of the contemporary rather
than a history of the present, is not to trace current gures back to prior
problematizations, but to remediate current blockages and opportunities
by conceptualizing the near future as a series of problems in relationship to
which possible solutions become available to thought.
Intellectual Instrumentalities: Equipment
What I call equipment, though conceptual in design and formulation, is
pragmatic in use. Dened abstractly, equipment is a set of truth claims, affects,
and ethical orientations designed and combined into a practice.
3
Equipment,
which has historically taken different forms, enables practical responses to
changing conditions brought about by specic problems, events, and general
recongurations (Rabinow and Bennett).
The challenge of constructing an anthropological diagnostic of con-
temporary equipment is threefold: (a) to provide a tool-kit of concepts that
enable one to conduct inquiries into the contemporary world in its actual-
ity; (b) to conduct those inquiries in a manner such that those concepts and
those inquiries function so as to make the relations (connections and dis-
junctions) between logos and ethos apparent, and available, to oneself and to
others, that is to say, to make those relations part of the inquiry itself as well
as part of a way of life; and (c) to take into account the pathos encountered
and engendered by such an undertaking, and to nd a place for it within
the form under construction. In my technical vocabulary, these challenges
consist in designing and synthesizing a form that can maintain a constantly
available level of generality. Such forms must be able to function effectively
to reconstruct specic problems while being plausibly applicable to a range
of analogous problems.
Antique Equipment
The guiding hypothesis of Foucaults lectures during 19811982 at the Collge
de France, LHermneutique du sujet, was that in antiquity, the challenge to
know thyself had been inextricably coupled with another Delphic com-
mand to take care of the self (Gros 312). The twinned imperatives had made
sense for as long as the goal of thinking had been linked to a good life, or
a ourishing existence. Thus, for millennia, while truth-seeking was an es-
sential part of a life well-led, it was not an autonomous goal or practice, nor
was it disconnected from ethical work of the subject on himself and others.
Rather the purpose of equipment and its pre-condition was to contribute
to a thriving existence both individual and communal. It was within that
context that the problem of how to transform logos into ethos made sense.
Today, I argue, the relations of science, ethics, and a thriving existence seem
once again to be undergoing a process of a re-problematization.
There existed in antiquity a corpus of arts and techniques essential to the
care of the self. Much of Foucaults inquiry in the 19811982 lectures focused
on this corpus, these practices, these exercises, constituent of, and essential
to, self-formation and care.
The test of oneself as a thinking subject, who acts and thinks accord-
ingly, who has as his goal, a certain transformation of the subject such
that there is a self-constitution as an ethical subject of truth.
4
(Foucault)
The challenge was to develop forms of exercises of thought whose goal was
to connect thought to ethos.
5
In the late antique world there existed a range of equipment developed
in order to aid those engaged in these exercises. The key equipment that
was required to take care of the self, to aid it in its confrontations with the
external world, or most generally to accomplish the complex task of facing
the future, was un quipement de discours vraies (Foucault 479). An arsenal,
if you will, of logoi. The Greek word for these discours vraies, is paraskeu,
which the French translate as quipement. As the name suggests, this equip-
ment was designed to achieve a practical end. These true discourses, these
rabinow : How to Submit to Inquiry 33
34 the pluralist 7 : 3 2012
logoi, were neither abstractions nor, as we say today, merely discursive.
They had their own materiality, their own concreteness, and consistency.
What was at stake in the use of this equipment was not primarily a quest
for truth about the world or the self. Rather, the practice consisted in means
of assimilating these true discourses as aids in confronting and coping with
external events and internal passions. The challenge was not just to learn these
maxims, often banal in themselves, but to make them an embodied dimen-
sion of ones existence. The purpose of equipment was to have them ready at
hand when they were needed. True discourses were equipment to the extent
they had been assimilated thoroughly, made to function as rational principles
of action: fait du logos enseign, appris, rpt, assimil, la forms pontane du
sujet agissant (Gros 510). Learning these maxims was not hard; accomplish-
ing the goal of making these logoi a principle of action, of self-mastery, of a
ourishing existence, was a lifelong task and obligation.
Modern Equipment
Many other forms of equipment were no doubt developed in the ensuing
centuries, especially in the Christian monasteries. It was at the dawn of what
is referred to as modern times, however, that a vastly powerful and compre-
hensive set of power relations, truth claims, modes of life, and their interfaces
began to be given shape. That formation has been referred to most famously
by Michel Foucault as the regime of bio-power.
In French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, I traced
some of the dimensions of how modern urban planning had gradually devel-
oped over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Urban plan-
ning had started with the rational reform of physical space but had gradually
included more and more elements into its purview. By the time such plan-
ning had become a socialist project during the 1930s, it was proud of hav-
ing expanded its scope from city planningun plan de villeto planning
that included all those elements (spatial, social, psychological, architectural,
hygienic, etc.,) that contributed to shaping an individual lifeun plan de
vie. The goal of planning was social and individual health as well as a well-
policed order, as the expression goes. By 1942, the French Plan dquipement
National, dened quipement as everything that was not a don gratuit (a
gratuitous gift) of the soil, subsoil, or climate. It is the work of each day and
the country as a whole (Rabinow, French Modern 2).
A tool chest of logoi had been assembled gradually, and eventually (par-
tially) put into practice by the State and other actors. Further, social tech-
nologies had been invented to oblige individuals to have these rational aids
ready at hand on all occasions; or, failing that, at least to have social specialists
nearby who could bring the corrective benets of these technologies (and
their discours vraies) to bear with the shortest possible delay.
6
The form these practices took was guided by the following considerations:
a serious speech act (human beings are subjects whose autonomy must be re-
spected), an affect (outrage at the abuse of such infamous research projects
as the Tuskegee experiment), and an ethical mode (human subjects must be
protected from such abuse in future through the guarantee of their free and
informed consent) (Jonsen).
Contemporary Equipment
These bioethical objects appeared to function well as regulatory guardians
of the objects of bio-power: the population (taken up as the community)
and the body (taken up as the person). However, in the 1990s, this set of
arrangements became increasingly problematic. Advances in molecular and
developmental genetics (viz. the Human Genome Project, somatic cell nuclear
transfer, and human embryonic stem cell research) excited the fear that the
life sciences not only put bodies and populations at risk, but human nature
and even humanity itself. The human had been introduced as a solution;
but now it has become a problem. In a discursive and regulatory ood, bio-
ethicists advanced the concept of human dignity as a bulwark against the
danger of dehumanization. The attempt to reform the bio-ethical by bring-
ing a humanitarian equipmental apparatus into this problem-space began to
produce a new gure.
With advances in molecular and developmental genetics, the gure of
the dignied human began to displace and recongure the social. Thus, a
number of specic events originally anchored in the apparatus of bio-ethics
functioned as vectors to bring elements of the gure of human dignity into
shared spaces with the gure of bio-power. This meant, among other things,
that assemblages of power relations, truth claims, ethical issues, and affec-
tive zones were partially recomposed. This process of recomposition resulted
in modulation, disarticulation, and reconguration of previously stabilized
interfaces and connections, ethical issues, and zones of affect.
In short, the gure of human dignity gradually became a trading zone
within which discourses and practices associated with the development of
medical and biological sciences began to be reassembled such that the objects,
discourses, and practices of bio-power were connected to and put in tension
with the objects, discourses, and practices of human dignity. Heterogeneous
truth claims were being made about what gure of anthropos was at stake,
rabinow : How to Submit to Inquiry 35
36 the pluralist 7 : 3 2012
which specialists were authorized to distinguish true and false, and what
might be the art of governance appropriate to the situation. Unwittingly,
within this zone of turbulence, other problem-spaces that would prove to
be beyond the metrics of bio-power or human dignity both veridictionally
and jurisdictionally began to be given form.
Anthropologys Contemporary Problem
Today, which truth claims, ethical modes, and affects are appropriate for
equipping inquiry to such a turbulent zone is far from clear. However, given
that the contemporary is neither a unied epoch nor a culture, new forms
of equipment will likely be variable and exible. Thus, the standards and
forms to which inquiry should submit must be established anew. We return
once again to Deweys maxim: The problem reduced to its lowest terms is
whether inquiry can develop in its own ongoing course the logical standards
and forms to which further inquiry shall submit (Dewey, Logic 13). It seems
fair to say that McKeon provided the semantic schemas to orient inquiry as
well as the imperative to conduct it; Foucault provided multiple examples of
inquiry in his distinctive genealogical form; Dewey provided the arguments to
justify a logic of inquiry, and in diverse spheres, initiated experimentssuch
as the lab school in Chicagoand learned from others such as those carried
out by Jane Addams at Hull House and other venues.
The challenge of the contemporary today, it seems to me, is to invent
and practice inquiry into our problems following a logic in which philosophy
and anthropology collaborate and, who knows, even ourish.
notes
1. I owe a debt to Colin Koopman for his initiative in this specic event as well as his
general openness, curiosity, and critical intellect. Repaying such a debt is a part of the
good life and consists in what Pierre Bourdieu has called delayed exchange.
2. On the anthropology of the contemporary, see Rabinow, Anthropos Today, Marking
Time, and Accompaniment.
3. On practice, see MacIntyre.
4. [L]preuve de soi-mme comme sujet qui pense effectivement ce quil pense et
qui agit comme il pense, avec comme objectif, une certaine transformation du sujet qui
doit le constituer comme, disons : sujet thique de la vrit (Foucault 442).
5. An example of meditation understood as a practice and a test of the state of a sub-
ject seeking an thos is found in pictte (Epictetus, Book 1, chaps. 16, 94). pictte
speaks of a distinctive faculty we have that functions differently than other faculties. We
have other faculties such as those that enable us to play a musical instrument or to use
language. These faculties, however, cannot tell us whether or not we should be playing
an instrument or speaking. If one wants to know whether it is good or bad to play an
instrument, it is necessary to turn elsewhere. And the place one must turn is to that
other faculty, a faculty that is given the name of reason. Reason therefore is assigned
a kind of regulatory position, one whose function turns on taking care of the souci de
soi (Foucault 438).
6. It has been plausibly argued, and empirically demonstrated in various instances,
that the regime of governmentality to which the state equipment form of political ratio-
nality was indebted has undergone a fundamental transformation in recent decades. For
example, see Rose.
references
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? 1991. New York: Columbia UP,
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Dewey, John. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. 1938. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
. Reconstruction in Philosophy. Boston: Beacon, 1948.
Epictetus. Discourses. Trans. P. E. Matheson. Mineola, NY: Dover Philosophical Clas-
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