Projects

I am working on these things, and have been for years.

Like many writers, I somewhat superstitiously hesitate to talk about plans or work undone, at least talk too soon, lest the deer run away. But the following projects are far enough along to bear discussion, and besides, a public commitment can be a goad to completion.

After Globalization

After Globalization -- or as one of my editors calls it, "Westbrook Quintet" -- is a response to my first book, City of Gold, which argued that European integration and capitalism more generally should be understood as a kind of politics, rather than as economics somehow opposed to politics. I then wrote that we were postmodern not least in that we no longer looked to the republican nation state, founded on assumptions about the availability of Enlightened rationality or indeed feeling, to construct social life. Thus it was necessary to rethink globalization as a form, in many ways the currently dominant form, of politics in the broad sense of our lives together.

Right. In the ensuing years, however, it became clear to me that globalization means more -- has changed more -- than I had been able to think through or perhaps even suspected. Status seems to be replacing contract in credit markets, even as symbolic understandings of equality have come to dominate public discourse, largely structured by affinities in lieu of tribes. Ordinary politics, elections and the like, veer between carnival and submersion in bureaucracy. Institutions that did not seem to me directly dependent on the nation state, notably the university and international law understood as a progressive project, have been transformed in ways hard to love. Bureaucracy and, more surprisingly, capitalism, remain hard to think precisely insofar as they are omnipresent. Etc.

So we are still struggling to be modern, pinioned by Rousseau's Social Contract and Huxley's Brave New World, both digitized of course. What is to be hoped, beyond warmer weather and even more elaborate, superficially multicultural, dining experiences?

But it is also important to remember that we are struggling, and hope does drive everything. I think there are possibilities -- hence this project.

Constructed By Writing: A Discussion of Computing

My buddy Perry Alexander, author of the computer language Rosetta (and sometime teacher of one of my children), and I are trying to understand and articulate computing as an intellectual enterprise, and situate it within the ecology of knowledge and, institutionally, within the university.

We wish to distinguish "computing" from its usual referents (mathematics, engineering, and science), and link it, as a writing if not exactly literary practice, with the tradition of self-referential thought stretching back through Turing and Goedel to Hilbert and Frege, the non-Euclidean geometers, and I would argue, philosophically, to Kant. From that, just maybe, we might be able to suggest if not construct a notion of computing as constitutive of culture, i.e., as one of the humanities. At any rate, as important to the construction of contemporary culture. But we are in early innings.

This project is much like Navigators of the Contemporary, in that it attempts to articulate and come to grips with a set of very important (but how, and how should we think about?) intellectual practices.

The projects are also similar in that I approach the fields as a sympathetic and also critical outsider, unconvinced. Conversely, the adepts (who are my friends) are not entirely sure that what makes sense in their professional world makes sense in the larger world, either at present or against the horizon of thought, to be old fashioned, truth.

Most importantly, the projects are similar in proceeding on the basis of lengthy conversations among friends. And what might be the themes?

Global Foresight

This international collaboration among many researchers from various disciplines explores "anticipatory governance and the making of global scenarios." The project is led by Christina Garsten and based at Stockholm University's Department of Social Anthropology. "Global Foresight" is generously supported by the Jubileumsfond, the Swedish foundation for the humanities and the social sciences, itself established by the Riksbank (the Swedish central bank, oldest in the world).

I have been working to synthesize the various research efforts conducted under the Global Foresight umbrella, to take the strands and make a rope. We hope to express the project visually, in an effort to reach students and those outside the ethnographic academy.

My own work explores senses in which "the future" can stand in for teleology, thus filling oft remarked lacunae in liberalism. More darkly, I am also interested in how ostensibly participatory modes of projection can be used as techniques of management and even coercion, rule by ostensible consensus.

See Global Foresight

Global Cooling