Limits that allow for the production of a case
What is the threshold that the litigator needs to reach in order to move from a precedent to a case? How is it that a case either surpasses and encompasses, or is encompassed by, a precedent? i.e. the limit can either be pre-given to establish a case or the limit/exclusion which produces a case is established through the making of the case.
[In the Rabinow interview, this question is most evidently addressed with reference to Clifford's essay in Writing Culture. If a case in traditional U.S.-American anthropology was once supposed to be 'the exemplification of a culture' (Rabinow), then Why, we can ask with Jim Clifford, has the coke can been expunged from the ethnographic film? In our terms, why has a limit been drawn around the the case such that, as an exemplification of a culture, it can include the huts of the Tikopia but not their coke cans?
An easy, and certainly correct, answer is that American Anthropology carries certain background expectations about what other cultures are-- other-- and what they contain-- culture. Partly this is a result of Anthropology's own disciplinary tradition and partly a result of its more general social and cultural contexts. At any rate, it is a precedent which allows only certain cases to be heard. This precedent basically says that Anthropology is supposed to tell us about difference, and anything that might resemble difference differently is disallowed. More specifically, other cultures are supposed to have different culture. 'Culture' , in the 'coke can' vs. 'hut' case, means primarily material culture, inherited forms of collective expression. Seeing a coke can might make us anxious that something other than otherness, or different than difference, is expressed by the Tikopia's use of 'our' culture.
A more difficult question might be the precise dynamics of the relationship between Anthropological tradition (precedent) and Clifford's case. Certainly, Writing Culture marked a break in the discipline by suggesting that these dynamics have never been so straightforwardly binary, and thus that they can be more reflectively engaged. But as Rabinow asks in the interview, where do we go from here? 'We haven't got any great traction about what replaces that [precedent].’ Rabinow suggests that we move to ‘problematization’, rather than ‘theory-example’. Within this idea of problematization, perhaps we could include a reflexive relation to disciplinary tradition/precedent. We could look at the complexities of the relation between Anthropologist and other cultures which were shown by Writing Culture. Steve Tyler’s essay on Postmodern Ethnography is a good place to start. Rather than belabor the political culpability of the difference between precedent and the present, Tyler suggests, we could practice a ‘realist’ ethnography which understands this difference to be constitutive of the present. We can talk about coke cans, huts, and coke cans within huts, as a history of the present, working through an already susbtantial anthropological precedent on cultural exchange to include the question of what occurs when you don’t draw firm boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’.]
One feature of Zen that distinguishes it from other Buddhist schools is the koan (‘kong-an’) practice tradition, comprised of about 1,750 short, apparently paradoxical or illogical riddles and stories. Koan are not freestanding narratives but tools for teaching and meditation training; they began accumulating anecdotally within Zen communities since at least the Golden Age of Zen in 6th–9th century China and were gradually compiled and canonized beginning in the early 12th century. In contemporary American and European Zen communities, koan are used to varying degrees depending on the lineage and founding teacher; the Korean Chogye Zen school of Seung Sahn emphasizes regular koan practice, whereas the Japanese Soto Zen school of Shunryu Suzuki uses them more incidentally as a teacher finds them relevant. These koan are used in two principal kinds of pedagogical technique, both known as ‘dharma [teaching] combat’: (1) one-on-one private or public interviews between teacher and student, designed to test and expand the student’s understanding; (2) public interviews of teachers conducted by whole communities, designed to allow teachers and students to witness, challenge and (in principle, not fact) deny the wisdom of a teacher recently nominated for teaching authority or enlightenment (two separate and not necessarily linked states of mind).
An exemplary interchange between teacher and a student for a ‘like-this’ koan of the ‘just-like-this’ subtype in Seung Sahn’s school might proceed as follows:
Teacher (holding up a stick): What is this? If you say ‘this is a stick’, I will hit you twenty times. If you say, ‘this is not a stick’, I will hit you twenty times.
Student (hits floor with palm of hand).
Teacher: Is that all?
Student: Go drink tea!
Teacher: Very good.
(Incorrect answers that James has collected include: “This is a stick”, “This is not a stick”, This is neither a stick nor not a stick”, “This is both a stick and not a stick”, and, last but not least, hitting the teacher with the stick.)
The koan form thus simultaneously contains both a case and an interview; a case of a particular kind of understanding, codified as such by the long history of a given koan’s use in pedagogical interactions, yet an interview insofar as each koan has a different mode of expression, function and significance, based not only on its traditional content but also on its situational use. Koan thus have the status of ‘cases’ insofar as they are used to check the realizations of students and teachers that they have purportedly attained through other forms of practice.
Yet whether they ratify kensho or satori, the koan can only function adequately as cases if they are correctly practiced through interviews, which have their own traditional forms of dialogic interaction. These interview forms are entirely autonomous from the content of the koan and are usually determined by the teacher’s intuition, honed through continuous practice and contact with other teachers. Other than the general rule that there is a wrong answer or kind of answer, i.e. that a koan cannot be answered by thinking, and thus requires practitioners to suspend the critical faculty, there are no explicit right answers. Of course, this has not stopped anxious Zen students from circulating successful answers for centuries; it would need to be studied empirically, but the lore is that these answers always fail the second time around, either because the teacher notices, or because the answer lies as much in how it is said as in what is said.
Analogical reasoning between cases
Monica said a good litigator thinks of a case as a precedent setting opportunity. A bad litigator is stuck in the previous precedents. Why? What is bad and good in this distinction? Notoriety? Justice? What’s the mode of veridction here? The veridictional mode is only ratifiable relative to the tradition of precedent. The jurisdictional mode is only valid insofar as it allows the veridictional case to have a determining effect. A case is no good if it can’t change precedent.
At the most general level a case poses a problem for acting (medical case, legal case) or for training thinking to act (as in case-study methods of Langdell in law and the “HBS case method” http://www.hbs.edu/learning/case.html the video is pankration meets j. crew ) ;
A case is not a specification of a norm, hence it is not an example. A case is deictic, it is the specificity of this case. Does the case become the norm of its own truth? If it did would that make it a “singularity”? However, a case is not a “singularity”. The interest and force of case is never due to its completely exceptional source or circumstances. As such the case cannot be the norm of its own truth, it must produce a relation.
The measure of a case will be a path of generalization whereby the truth of a case can be measured against another case. But how? What is the measure of a relation where the relation is analogical rather than formal logic?
[Is problematization in Rabinow's interview a more analogical term, whereas theory-example is more deductive? What is the difference between analogical and inductive reasoning? Induction has been a central method of Anthropology since Durkheim-- attempting to discover and describe a latent level of invariance, the social, which is detectable through how it determines fluctuations in observable variables. Yet the Anthropology of the Contemporary cannot be inductive, because unlike Social Anthropology, it studies not a level of invariance but a space which is, by definition, in transition, between recent past and near future.
How does this space affect the changes in observable variables, if not deterministically? Or is the relationship between contemporary and emergent objects fundamentally different than the relation between the social and social facts as things? Is there more of a reciprocal relation now in play, as a result of fast communications, fluid borders and markets, etcetera, whereby emergent objects quickly re-determine whatever has determined them? The global economic crisis would be a good case of this.
In short: what kind of causality is at work in relations between 1. the contemporary as a space of factual interpretation and the elaboration of problems from/by these interpretations; 2. facts which exist within this problem- space, and 3. 'the conceptual interconnections of problems that make up the scope of the human sciences' today? If we recall that the social for Durkheim was effectively equivalent to God, perhaps contemporary relations (less deterministic, less agentive, less absolute, less veiled and more reciprocal) operate more on the principle of karma: 'When it rains, the ground gets wet. When the water evaporates, it rains'. At least I hope so!]
Medieval theories of analogy were a response to problems in three areas: logic, theology, and metaphysics. Logicians were concerned with the use of words having more than one sense, Theologians were concerned with language about God, Metaphysicians were concerned with talk about reality.
If following McKeon a term is a word + concept + referent, anthropologically or social scientifically perhaps we can say that the measure of an analogical relation is a) conceptual and b) historical.
On this basis for any proposed analogical relation one can ask, is there continuity of the concept in the language and reasoning of the cases? How can the historical stuff the cases refer to be compared?
Within a tradition? As in James’ interest in Buddhist case law. Across contemporary domains? As in the informal ARC network ranging from nano, to computer science to syn bio.
Tradition, Modernity, Contemporary
If the tradition of the contemporary is modernity, what is the place of tradition?
The question being asked as I arrived was: What is a case in the Anthropology of the Contemporary? To answer this question, we began to discuss a case in relation to the terms modernity and tradition. If the contemporary is ‘a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future…’, and modernity/tradition are co-configured as ‘images’ of each other, then what is the (1) status and (2) function of a case in relation to these three terms?
Trying to get specific, Boas was mentioned. What about the question of race and modernity for Boas? If (as Charles Briggs said last term in 240) ‘race was the problem for Boas’ (i.e. we shouldn’t think he was determinist, reductivist or even ‘believed’ in race as an essential category), then how does the case of race in his work clarify the status and function of a case in the Anthropology of tradition/modernity?
A preliminary stab at this question:
(Disclaimer: what follows about Boas may not be actually accurate).
Let’s say Boas’ problematization of race was his way of using specific cases of the (scientific, social-scientific) definitions and political-discursive uses of the term ‘race’. Let’s say he did this in order to define modern anthropos as a being in a differential, even a conflictual, relation to traditional ‘Man’, and to critique the ground of this relation. Boas shows that how that the primitive is often identified with tradition by powerful moderns actually says something significant about modernity. Its use shows how a particular use of it belongs to a self-definition of modern subjects, nations, discourses, and power/knowledge. So Boas uses a given case of race to differentiate, not races from one another, and not tradition from modernity, but rather to expose the actual continuity as opposed to the putative discontinuity of those two terms. Rather than essentializing the differences between races, as moderns have done, Boas uses the term race to unify them, perhaps within an implicit figure of ‘the human’. ‘The human’ drives a wedge between different cultural definitions of the human. (We may see this as a personal ethical issue as well, for he explicitly states that his concern for race is related to his identification with German Jewry).
Here, then, the function of a case of race would be ethical and instrumental to achieve a particular critical effect, to problematize within and against a modern field of distinction. The status would be instrumental and teleological; most importantly, it would be situated in a relation between the two terms tradition and modernity.
Perhaps in a similar way, then, a case in the Anthropology of the Contemporary could be used to differentiate and reunify its sub-terms (tradition and modernity) without, however, necessarily restoring the kind of unity offered by ‘the human’. What would be the ethics of this nonteleological instrumentality? Also, what would be the relation of a case to the concept of the contemporary and the problemspace of power/knowledge that contemporary actors such as genomic scientists inhabit? Contestatory without a telos?
