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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 2012by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

How to Submit to Inquiry: Dewey and Foucault

paul rabinowUniversity of CaliforniaBerkeley

The problem reduced to its lowest terms is whether inquiry candevelop in its own ongoing course the logical standards and formsto which further inquiry shall submit.

John Dewey, Logic13

gilles deleuze, in his bookWhat Is Philosophy?asks: What is the bestway to follow the great philosophers? Is it to repeat what they said or to dowhat they did, that is, create concepts for problems that necessarily change?(Deleuze and Guattari 28). I imagine few in this audience would disagreewith that claim. The changing, historically situated, interplay of conceptsand problems is a register that those inspired by the work of John Deweycan readily acknowledge as pertinent even if what Dewey meant by each ofthe 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 fieldwork in philosophyor more recently designing human practices. In each case I was drawn toinquiring into situations of ethical, religious, and/or scientific problems asthe object of my inquiry as well as attempting to formulate my own practiceas itself having the objective of being ethically or scientifically remediative.Said another way, in each of my inquiries, what was at stake was understand-ing the human thinganthroposto quote Thucydides, the logosthat was

at issue for those under studythe objects of inquiryas well as my ownpractice as inquirer. In a word, for me, anthropology has always been, liter-ally but problematically, anthropos+ logosas both object and objective of thepractice of inquiry. The work of John Dewey was significant from the outset, albeit medi-ated by the presentation of my teacher at the University of Chicago, RichardMcKeon. Dewey was equally a touchstone for my doctoral advisor CliffordGeertz, who paid homage to Dewey even if he did not use his concepts ex-plicitly. After a long encounter, both personal and conceptual, with MichelFoucault, the work of Dewey unexpectedly came to the fore for me. It was

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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 Deweysworks. 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 usinga mode of approach he called problematic, although problem-centeredor even problematizing might be more apt. The problematic methodproceeds through inquiry as opposed to dialogue, debate, and proof (Plo-chmann 87). The small set of thinkers who have motivated me to a life ofinquiry and to whose work I continually return, each in their own way fitsthe problem-centered mode of pursuing thinking through inquiry. Thus, Max

Weber, John Dewey, Richard McKeon, and Michel Foucault all advocatedthe practice of an engaged inquiry rather than forms of deductive proof ordeterminative negation. Furthermore, with the exception of McKeon, eachone also eschewed much hope in the variants of communicative rationalityso pervasive in our times.

For all four of these thinkers, reason was both an object of inquiry as wellas a touchstone for guiding inquiry. Each problematized reason as both hisobject and his objectiveto use Deweys termsin his own distinctive, andat times, unsettling, manner. Ultimately all four, I believe, came to understandreason as a problem, perhaps the quintessential problem for philosophers:a problem, they all concurred, that should not afford a single or universalsolution. Rather, as Dewey advocates in countless places, reason is a practice,through which the thinker attempts to establish what might well be called

a curationalrelationship attuned to specific situations, one adjusted to thespecific problem at hand, one that had to be taken up in a manner that con-sequently required it to be flexible in the standards and forms appropriateto the challenge to which the philosopher was challenged to respond. One might say that understood in this manner, reason as a practice, assimultaneously both a means and an end, directed the thinker to search for amode of logic. Logic, one might say, is the commitment to inhabiting inquiryin its particularity, uncertainty, and rigor. It follows that logic not only canbe but must be practiced in diverse manners. Consequently, ascertaining theright manner and mode for this practice is inherently both a problem as wellas a hinge of inquiry.

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McKeon: Semantics and Inquiry

My formal philosophical Bildungbegan during my junior year at the Uni-versity of Chicago in 1963when I decided to drop a course in introductory

Tamil (there were two instructors, one Brahmin and one low caste, one maleand one female, and two students, myself and a missionary who had livedin South India for years and was brushing up on the language skills) and toenroll instead in Richard McKeons class, Ideas and Methods of the PhysicalSciences, the first of a three-part sequence that was followed by Ideas and

Methods of the Social Sciencesand Ideas and Methods of the Humanities. Thecourse was the most disorientingand ultimately re-orientingexperienceof my entire education. McKeon had developed an extravagant matrix that

provided a systematic philosophical underpinning for any text: from Galileothrough Newton and Maxwell. Having come to the University of Chicagofrom a science and math high school in New York, Stuyvesant, I was readyto appreciate Maxwell and his equations but had never suspected that thoseequations embodied a systematic philosophy that differed from somebodyelses 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 fifty years later, I still recall with a vivid shiver staring out through thepseudo-Gothic windows at a Chicago-land brittle blue sky framing frozenbranches and thinking to myself that although I had never failed any coursebefore, even failure could be a pedagogical experience; regardless of what gradeI was assigned, I had learned a lot. As it turned out, I did not fail this courseand went on to take four or five more courses from the daunting Great Man.The culmination of my personal encounters with McKeon was his course onFacts and Categories, in which it became clear to me that I was not going tocontinue 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 aswell as to shut down others. No one could doubt that McKeon was aMagister Ludiat semantics butwhere exactly, I wondered, was the inquiry? What about inquiry? McKeon had asserted many times that one of hismentors had been John Deweythe main philosopher aside from Aristotlewhose 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 themthrough inquiry. That being said, it was never completely apparent what

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McKeon meant by inquiry since it is difficult to find examples in his volu-minous writings or those of his small group of disciples that would satisfy ananthropologist as qualifying as inquiry. McKeons inquiryalways seemed to

remain on the discursive plane although he insisted that semantic ground-clearing was only a preliminary ordering of terms propaedeutic to a subsequentpractice of discovery and ultimately of coordinated action. Since by 1965I was clear that the next step in my Bildungwould be ananthropological one, inquiry seemed to require a further active and reflectiveengagement in worldly affairs. The commitment to inquiry in troubled and/orchallenging situations, in an engaged and embodied way, was consonant withand welcomed by the discipline of anthropology (at least at the Universityof Chicago). Not coincidentally, my advisor Clifford Geertz had majored inphilosophy 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 ErnstCassirer, as combining philosophic rigor and an active practice of inquiry intosymbolic forms. In retrospect, it is puzzling that I do not remember actuallyreading Deweys texts extensively with either McKeon or Geertz.

Dewey: Essays in Experimental Logic

It was decades laterat the turn of the twenty-first centurywhen I actuallystarted reading Dewey in a more orderly fashion and with specific problemsin mind. As chance would have it, if such a thing exists, I noticed a used copyof Deweys Essays in Experimental Logicin Moes Books in Berkeley. Eachterm in the title of this collection assembled by Dewey from his work in thedecade preceding and following the turn of the twentieth century suddenlyappeared 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 thehuman genome sequencing project in a number of countries (United States,France, and Iceland), a project I had come to through the French traditionof the history of science and epistemology, specifically Michel Foucault andespecially Georges Canguilhem. During the 1990s, as my work on the na-scent biotech industry in the San Francisco Bay area as well as the molecularsequencing projects proceeded, I came in contact with a burgeoning fieldcalled science studies. I was not very taken with its debates and its vedettesbut it was part of the environment where I lived and worked. I recall a cordialdiscussion with Bruno Latour in Paris, who, when I asked him why he didnot refer in his writings to Canguilhem, Bachelard, and others in the history

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and philosophy of science in France, said they were too epistemologicaland, after my defense of their relevance, Bruno said archly that I was on theway 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 illicitand dangerous. Reading Deweys essays (written a century earlier) was an illumination asit suddenly became clearer that the issues that the science studies people werebattling over might have been clearer and more insightful had they been moreinterested in inquiry and less in method. Demonstrating a pathway betweenand beyond subjectivism and objectivism, realism and idealism, theory andpractice, etc., Dewey lucidly showed in his Essays where the philosophicchallenges lay and where the dead-end metaphysical distinctions led, andwhat practices should be undertaken in inquiry that qualified as experimental;he charted for his readers and for himself which forms of verification werevalidthose that led to enriched and refined inquiryand which stymiedsuch motion. Deweys orientation to inquiry, his attention to problems, his commit-ment to discovery and validation leading to more experimental discovery andvalidation were incandescent, and in their own way, liberating (with a smalll). Stated abstractly, these terms were all familiar from the long-distant

McKeonite past, but more precisely and trenchantly, they resonated with theanthropological research I had been carrying out during the previous decade.How to give form to inquiry? What forms are best suited to the practice andexperimental results of a practice of logic? These interrelated questions haveintrigued me throughout my career. According to Dewey, the goal of logic and thus of inquiry is reconstruc-tion. In 1948he 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 intellectualinstrumentalities which will progressively direct inquiry into the deeplyand inclusively humanthat is to say, moralfacts of the present sceneand situation. (Reconstructionxxvii)

The claims are moving in their pathos. As this audience will know, the quoteis taken from the 1948revised edition of Reconstruction in Philosophy, whosenew Introduction expresses a pervasive sense of frustration and even ir-ritation at the direction things had taken over the course of the twenty-five

years since the publication of the first edition of the book with its confidentlybuoyant tone.


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In the new Introduction, events of the preceding years had eroded Dew-eys assuredness, manifesting itself in what Dewey himself quotes one revieweras referring to as a sour feelingsomething Dewey grumpily rejects. Not

retreating from the overall project, Dewey observes that [t]he events of theintervening years have created a situation in which the need for reconstruc-tion is vastly more urgent than when the book was composed (Reconstruc-tionvi). More than six decades later, my experiments and inquires supportthe claim that scientifically and ethically, relations among and between thelife sciences, human sciences, and ethics require sustained rethinking andreworking. Whether that rethinking and reworking will arrive at a form ofreconstruction, remains simultaneously an open question, a pressing problemas well as a site of discordancy and indeterminacy.

II. The Contemporary Scene and Situation

The name objectswill be reserved for subject-matter so far as ithas been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inqui-ry; proleptically, objects are the objectiveof inquiry.John Dewey, Logic118, 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 theremediation of a variant of the reconstructive problem. In order to establishthe logical standards and forms to which further inquiry should submit, Ihave found it advances and facilitates inquiry if one introduces several fur-ther distinctions. I shall describe three. The first is the distinction betweenFoucaults history of the presentand my anthropology of the contemporary. Thesecond is between the troubles or discordances of a situation and that moregeneral topology that Michel Foucault has named a problematization. The

third concerns a specification of Deweys intellectual instrumentalities, which,again in the wake of Foucault, I call equipment. The status of the presentplays a contrastive role among and between thehistory of the present and the anthropology of the contemporary. Within thepractice of inquiry in a mode of the history of the present, the present appearsas a continually deferred horizon. Strictly speaking, the history of the presentnever addresses the present directly but only at most in a glancing fashion.Contrastively, one can say that the anthropology of the contemporary beginsin the present so as to reconfigure it through the practice of inquiry, experi-

mentation, curation, and further inquiry. Hence, if the present is absent inthe former mode, while marking a limit and silently offering a touchstone

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to guide inquiry, in the latter mode one immerses oneself in the present soas 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 objectsthat are

produced through the process of inquiry. What is the contemporary? The ordinary English language meaning ofthe term the contemporary is: existing or occurring at, or dating from,the same period of time as something or somebody else. There is a secondmeaning of distinctively modern in style as in a variety of favorite con-temporary styles (Windows. Dictionary). The first use has no historical con-notations, only temporal ones; Cicero was the contemporary of Caesar justas Thelonious Monk was the contemporary of John Coltrane, or GerhardRichter is the contemporary of Gerhard Schroeder. The second meaning,however, does carry a historical connotation and a curious one that can beused 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 thetroubled and inchoate present, the contemporary is the space in which thoseobjects are curated into objectives for further inquiry.2

ProblematizationAproblematization, 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 ensembleof discursive and non-discursive practices that make something enterinto the play of true and false and constitute it as an object of thought(whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, politicalanalysis, etc.). (as cited in Rabinow,Anthropos18)

The reason that problematizations are problematic is that, something priormust have happened to introduce uncertainty, a loss of familiarity; that loss,that uncertainty is the result of difficulties in our previous way of understand-ing, acting, relating (Rabinow,Anthropos18). The primary task of the analyst is not to proceed directly toward interven-tion and repair of the situations discordancy, but rather to pause, reflect, andput forth a diagnosis of what makes these responses simultaneously possible(Rabinow,Anthropos18). 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


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form (an increasingly significant) aspect of the problematization. Foucaultis characterizing a historical space of conditioned contingency that emergesin relation to (and then forms a feedback situation with) a more general

state of affairsone that is real enough, but neither fixed nor static. Thus,the domain of problematization is constituted by and through economicconditions, scientific knowledge, political actors, and other related vectors.

What is distinctive is Foucaults identification of the problematic state of af-fairs (the dynamic of the process of a specific type of problem description,characterization, and reworking) as simultaneously the object, the site, andultimately the substance, of thinking. For a diagnostic oriented to the near future, the challenge is to reformulateblockages and opportunities as problems so as to make available a range ofpossible solutions. I distinguish this from an approach that takes discordan-cies as given and immediately seeks to repair them. In an anthropology of thecontemporary, the question of what is being problematized is approached byidentifying the ways in which formerly stable figures and their elements arebecoming recombined and reconfigured such that a present challenge is todiagnose nascent figures, equipment, and assemblages. In sum, problema-tization taken up as a task of an anthropology of the contemporary ratherthan a history of the present, is not to trace current figures back to prior

problematizations, but to remediate current blockages and opportunitiesby conceptualizing the near future as a series of problems in relationship towhich possible solutions become available to thought.

Intellectual Instrumentalities: Equipment

What I call equipment, though conceptual in design and formulation, ispragmatic in use. Defined abstractly, equipmentis a set of truth claims, affects,and ethical orientationsdesigned and combined into a practice.3Equipment,

which has historically taken different forms, enables practical responses tochanging conditions brought about by specific problems, events, and generalreconfigurations (Rabinow and Bennett). The challenge of constructing an anthropological diagnostic of con-temporary equipment is threefold: (a) to provide a tool-kit of concepts thatenable one to conduct inquiries into the contemporary world in its actual-ity; (b) to conduct those inquiries in a manner such that those concepts andthose inquiries function so as to make the relations (connections and dis-

junctions) between logosand ethosapparent, and available, to oneself and toothers, that is to say, to make those relations part of the inquiry itself as wellas part of a way of life; and (c) to take into account thepathosencountered

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and engendered by such an undertaking, and to find a place for it withinthe form under construction. In my technical vocabulary, these challengesconsist in designing and synthesizing a form that can maintain a constantly

available level of generality. Such forms must be able to function effectivelyto reconstruct specific problems while being plausibly applicable to a rangeof analogous problems.

Antique Equipment

The guiding hypothesis of Foucaults lectures during 19811982at the Collgede France, LHermneutique du sujet, was that in antiquity, the challenge toknow thyself had been inextricably coupled with another Delphic com-mand to take care of the self (Gros 312). The twinned imperatives had madesense for as long as the goal of thinking had been linked to a good life, ora flourishing 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, norwas it disconnected from ethical work of the subject on himself and others.Rather the purpose of equipment and its pre-condition was to contributeto a thriving existence both individual and communal. It was within thatcontext that the problem of how to transform logosinto ethosmade 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 thecare of the self. Much of Foucaults inquiry in the 19811982lectures focusedon this corpus, these practices, these exercises, constituent of, and essentialto, 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 suchthat 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 wasto connect thought to ethos.5

In the late antique world there existed a range of equipment developedin order to aid those engaged in these exercises. The key equipment thatwas required to take care of the self, to aid it in its confrontations with theexternal world, or most generally to accomplish the complex task of facingthe future, was un quipement de discours vraies (Foucault 479). An arsenal,if you will, of logoi. The Greek word for these discours vraies, isparaskeu,

which the French translate as quipement.As the name suggests, this equip-ment was designed to achieve a practical end. These true discourses, these


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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 meansof assimilating these true discourses as aids in confronting and coping withexternal events and internal passions. The challenge was not just to learn thesemaxims, often banal in themselves, but to make them an embodied dimen-sion of ones existence. The purpose of equipment was to have them ready athand when they were needed. True discourses were equipment to the extentthey had been assimilated thoroughly, made to function as rational principlesof action: fait du logos enseign, appris, rpt, assimil, la forms pontane dusujet agissant (Gros 510). Learning these maxims was not hard; accomplish-ing the goal of making these logoia principle of action, of self-mastery, of aflourishing existence, was a lifelong task and obligation.

Modern Equipment

Many other forms of equipment were no doubt developed in the ensuingcenturies, especially in the Christian monasteries. It was at the dawn of whatis 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 famouslyby Michel Foucault as the regime of bio-power. In French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, I tracedsome 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 graduallyincluded 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 planningthat included all those elements (spatial, social, psychological, architectural,hygienic, etc.,) that contributed to shaping an individual lifeun plan devie. 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 dquipementNational, defined quipementas everything that was not a don gratuit (agratuitous gift) of the soil, subsoil, or climate. It is the work of each day andthe country as a whole (Rabinow, French Modern2). A tool chest of logoihad 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

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ready at hand on all occasions; or, failing that, at least to have social specialistsnearby who could bring the corrective benefits of these technologies (andtheir 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 projectsas the Tuskegee experiment), and an ethical mode(human subjects must beprotected from such abuse in future through the guarantee of their free andinformed consent) (Jonsen).

Contemporary Equipment

These bioethical objects appeared to function well as regulatory guardiansof 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 ofarrangements became increasingly problematic. Advances in molecular anddevelopmental genetics (viz. the Human Genome Project, somatic cell nucleartransfer, and human embryonic stem cell research) excited the fear that thelife sciences not only put bodies and populations at risk, but human natureand even humanity itself. The human had been introduced as a solution;but now it has become a problem. In a discursive and regulatory flood, bio-

ethicists advanced the concept of human dignity as a bulwark against thedanger of dehumanization. The attempt to reform the bio-ethical by bring-ing a humanitarian equipmental apparatus into this problem-space began toproduce a new figure. With advances in molecular and developmental genetics, the figure ofthe dignified human began to displace and reconfigure the social. Thus, anumber of specific events originally anchored in the apparatus of bio-ethicsfunctioned as vectors to bring elements of the figure of human dignity into

shared spaces with the figure 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 resultedin modulation, disarticulation, and reconfiguration of previously stabilizedinterfaces and connections, ethical issues, and zones of affect. In short, the figure of human dignity gradually became a trading zonewithin which discourses and practices associated with the development ofmedical and biological sciences began to be reassembled such that the objects,discourses, and practices of bio-power were connected to and put in tensionwith the objects, discourses, and practices of human dignity. Heterogeneoustruth claims were being made about what figure of anthropos was at stake,


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which specialists were authorized to distinguish true and false, and whatmight 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 veridictionallyand jurisdictionally began to be given form.

Anthropologys Contemporary Problem

Today, which truth claims, ethical modes, and affects are appropriate forequipping inquiry to such a turbulent zone is far from clear. However, giventhat the contemporary is neither a unified epoch nor a culture, new formsof equipment will likely be variable and flexible. Thus, the standards andforms to which inquiry should submit must be established anew. We returnonce again to Deweys maxim: The problem reduced to its lowest terms iswhether inquiry can develop in its own ongoing course the logical standardsand forms to which further inquiry shall submit (Dewey, Logic13). It seemsfair to say that McKeon provided the semantic schemas to orient inquiry aswell as the imperative to conduct it; Foucault provided multiple examples ofinquiry in his distinctive genealogical form; Dewey provided the arguments to

justify a logic of inquiry, and in diverse spheres, initiated experimentssuchas 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 inventand practice inquiry into our problems following a logic in which philosophyand anthropology collaborate and, who knows, even flourish.

notes

1. I owe a debt to Colin Koopman for his initiative in this specific event as well as hisgeneral 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,MarkingTime, andAccompaniment. 3. On practice, see MacIntyre. 4. [L]preuve de soi-mme comme sujet qui pense effectivement ce quil pense etqui agit comme il pense, avec comme objectif, une certaine transformation du sujet quidoit 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). picttespeaks 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 uselanguage. These faculties, however, cannot tell us whether or not we should be playing

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an instrument or speaking. If one wants to know whether it is good or bad to play aninstrument, it is necessary to turn elsewhere. And the place one must turn is to thatother faculty, a faculty that is given the name of reason. Reason therefore is assigneda 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. Forexample, see Rose.

references

Burke, Tom. Deweys New Inquiry: A Reply to Russell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?1991. New York: Columbia UP,

1994.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-

sics, 2004.Foucault, Michel. LHermneutique du sujet, Cours au Collge de France, 19811982. Paris:

Hautes tudes/Gallimard/Seuil, 2001.Gros, Frdric. After-word to Michel Foucault, LHermneutique du sujet, Cours au Col-

lge de France, 19811982. Paris: Hautes tudes/Gallimard/Seuil, 2001.Jonsen, Albert. The Birth of Bioethics. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

MacIntyre, Alisdair.After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN: Uof Notre Dame P, 1984.McKeon, Richard. On Knowing: Natural Sciences. Ed. David B. Owens and Zahava K.

McKeon. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.Plochmann, George Kimball. Richard McKeon: A Study. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.Rabinow, Paul. The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago: U of Chi-

cago P, 2011..Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton: Princeton UP,

2005.. French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. 1989. Chicago: U

of Chicago P, 1995.-.Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton: Princeton

UP, 2007.Rabinow, Paul, and Gaymon Bennett. From Bio-Ethics to Human Practices or Assem-

bling Contemporary Equipment. Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience.Ed. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2008. 389400.

Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.


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