Paul Rabinow,The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary

Reviewed by: Michael Lambek, University of Toronto, Canada

Hannah Arendt once defined a cultivated person as, ‘one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.’ ¹ In this book, Paul Rabinow addresses the question of company with respect to his own self-cultivation and the assembling of colleagues with whom to engage in a critical practice of thought and research.

Rabinow makes his arguments by invoking specific intellectual figures, contemporary company from the past. In the first section of the book, he hails various German thinkers (Brecht, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger) and interrogates Geertz and Foucault. In the second section, he reflects on his recent work in light of Dewey and Deleuze. Weber’s magnificent essay on ‘Science as a Vocation’ accompanies author and reader throughout the text. The first section is composed largely of previously published essays while the second is original. The title is a direct translation of a novel in French by Renéde Ceccatty, a friend of Foucault’s.

To choose ones company is to be selective. Rabinow was closely associated with two of the 20th century’s great and influential thinkers. If he was unfortunate in being mismatched with Geertz as a supervisor, he had the good fortune, ability, and sense to work for several years alongside Foucault. Rabinow has been one of the foremost interpreters and editors of Foucault’s work in English. Drawing from his personal relations as well as their published work, he pitches Foucault’s companionship against Geertz’s aloofness. Rabinow intends this as a kind of moral lesson (though he also says that ‘moralism will get us nowhere’ [p. 15]), and a critique, in the Kantian sense, of anthropological reason (p. 42). The section on Geertz is unpleasant; one of Rabinow’s current companions should have advised him to let it go. By contrast, Rabinow has pertinent things to say about Foucault’s final courses of lectures. If I understand correctly, Rabinow supports Foucault’s critique of moral reproaches couched as intellectual arguments, e.g. calling someone a nihilist. Yet this is exactly what Rabinow calls humanists, albeit as the outcome of an interesting discussion, via Foucault, of the relationship of truth to seriousness.

The second part of the book sets a quite different tone, a more straightforward account of active collaborations. Here Rabinow describes what he calls ‘experiments’ in teaching and research. Of his seminar he says, ‘We defined our project in anthropology as an attempt to understand the following: under what conditions is thinking possible now?’ (p. 132) and developed means to produce an egalitarian setting where contributions would not be directed at impressing the professor. Cynics might see this as an invitation to graduate students to indulge their sense of self-importance. Is it any wonder he complains that, ‘not a single colleague has approached me for more details on the experiment’ (p. 141)?

More interesting is the discussion of new forms of fieldwork seeking, ‘a different assemblage of anthropology, ethics, and the life sciences’ (p. 176), one he discovers at the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center. Rabinow’s job at SynBERC was, ‘to invent, design, and implement an appropriately innovative and responsible form of ethical and human scientific practice’ (p. 163). He thus engages himself not merely as an ethnographer of the ethics of and at the Center, but as responsible for the ethical component within it. This generates dilemmas of confidence and trust and ever more complicated questions about the ethical role and strategies of the anthropologist. There are many insights on ethical complexity where social scientific, biomedical, commercial, and security interests assemble together.

A central task for anthropological fieldworkers is finding the right distance from ones subjects, close enough to understand them, far enough to be able to recontextualize what they say. When anthropologists went overseas, getting close was the more difficult part. But how do you establish the right distance, when what you want to study is adjacent and contemporary? And how do you get inside when your subject is an elitist, secretive community? Questioning the seriousness of simply staying outside the object being studied (‘observation’), Rabinow raises the stakes and increases the difficulty of exercising judgment when different degrees of distance are required from the different subject positions the anthropologist tries to hold simultaneously (including ‘participation’).

This section reads like a journal reflecting on the problems of the agenda Rabinow has set and what he calls reconfiguration, remediation, and reconstruction. Here the text in a sense accompanies itself (Rabinow accompanies himself). This is also the methodological accompaniment to the substantive ethnography, much as he paired his original books on Morocco. Yet what Rabinow’s careful account calls for to this reader is another anthropologist, a meta-ethnographer, to shadow the first and report on the production of ethical programs and rationalizations. To follow Rabinow’s own arguments here, surely the question of whether (how, to what degree, in what respects) to trust the scientists leads inevitably to the same questions on the part of the reader as to whether to trust the anthropologist. The latter’s complaints about being misunderstood by his colleagues need to be subjected to the same kind of analysis as those of the scientists. This could occur at an infinite number of regressions (inspection of the practical ethics of the book reviewer, and so on).

Rabinow’s exploration is original and his voice important. But he exaggerates if he implies that collaboration has not been significant to earlier anthropology. He was himself associated, if unsatisfyingly, with a kind of team in Morocco, as was Geertz before him in Indonesia. One thinks also of Gluckman and the Rhodes-Livingstone or Steward’s Puerto Rico project, to mention two of the most obvious. Or the way in which contemporary ethnographies of Melanesia are in such fervent conversation with one another. In Canada the research culture of Quebec has long been more collaborative than individual, in a mode characteristic also of Scandinavian and Dutch universities. The feature of collaboration that Rabinow does not fully face up to is hierarchy. It is one thing to accompany past figures like Weber, quite another to accompany students or living colleagues. Teams are not just assemblages of individuals.

Central to this book are metaphors of temporality as the author invokes both ‘the contemporary’ and ‘the untimely’. The contemporary is a configuration distinct both from ‘the present’ and from the modern or postmodern. It is historically informed but neither linear nor progressive. It is a kind of remedy for the untimely; the deceased whom one selects to accompany become contemporaries whereas those many living colleagues with whom one is out of step are not. Accompaniment begs the questions, accompany how far, and how do you reach a parting?

Rabinow says justifiably that, ‘the search for companions is itself both an end and a means of an ethical science’ (p. 143).Yet it seems to emerge from a kind of loneliness. Unnamed followers of Foucault are dismissed for their ‘habitual lack of acuity’ (p. 65). And of a talk he gave, ‘because there were few social scientists or humanists present, I was spared either their approval or opprobrium’ (p. 157). Could it be that he is more similar to his former supervisor than he would care to admit?

In sum, this is a challenging book, one that successfully prods its readers to think but also forces readers to ask themselves how far they accompany (or could be selected to accompany) the author.