Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment

Introduction
MODERN EQUIPMENT
Paraskeue [equipment], [ . . . ] is the medium through which logos is transformed into ethos.
--Michel Foucault

This book is proposed as a meditation on Michel Foucault's claim that "equipment is the medium of transformation of logos into ethos." A good deal of work is required, however, to grasp what such a claim might mean. The difficulty in part lies in the fact that the terms "equipment" and "meditation" are used in a distinctive technical sense. Furthermore, why one would want to transform "logos" into "ethos" equally requires explanation. Hence the reader is alerted that reading this book will require a certain patience. Additionally, and unexpectedly, the book addresses the reader as a friend. Initially this appellation too is opaque. However, using as a guide Jean Paul's wonderful claim that "Philosophy is the ability to make friends through the medium of a written text," we at least have some sense of the territory to be visited in the following chapters, as well as the manner in which that territory is to be traversed.1
A central purpose of the book is to assemble a toolkit of concepts. The goal of such a toolkit is to advance inquiry. The currently reigning modes of research in the human sciences are, it seems to me, deficient in vital respects. Those deficiencies are especially marked in the strained relations between an ever-accumulating body of information, the ways that information is given narrative and conceptual form, and how this knowledge fits into a conduct of life. No doubt all of this demands further elaboration, and this book attempts to respond to that demand.

The term "interpretive analytics" was coined by Hubert Dreyfus and myself and put to use in our book Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics.2 Although the term cannot be said to have gained any special currency in the human sciences, I still find it useful. We arrived at the term while attempting to make Foucault's method more precise and explicit. Our claim was that Foucault was trying to move beyond the two methodological poles then dominant in the human sciences: a version of structuralism in which human signifying practice is seen as generating object-like, rule-governed semiotic systems that produce subjects as a function of discourse; and various versions of hermeneutics that found subjects and cultures infused with deep meaning they themselves had spun, webs of signification requiring interpretation. Foucault, we wrote,
sought to avoid the structuralist analysis which eliminates notions of meaning altogether and substitutes a formal model of human behavior as rule-governed transformations of meaningless elements; to avoid the phenomenological project of tracing all elements back to the meaning-giving activity of an autonomous, transcendental subject; and finally, to avoid the attempt of commentary to read off the implicit meanings of social practices as well as the hermeneutic unearthing of a different and deeper meaning of which social actors are only dimly aware.3
Foucault had pieced together an innovative method through his tacking between so-called archaeological and genealogical emphases. Foucault, we argued, had gotten beyond structuralism and hermeneutics by showing how the historical relations of knowledge and power had produced an object of knowledge that was also the subject of knowledge: Man. Further, we concluded that the strengths and weaknesses of Foucault's writings could not be evaluated or appreciated adequately in terms of a correspondence theory of truth any more than through a deconstructive dissipation of the real. Rather, it seemed clear that the power of his work rested on its heuristic value.
There is a lineage of major work in the twentieth-century human sciences that has succeeded in bringing philosophical learning, diagnostic rigor, and a practice of inquiry that operates in proximity to concrete situations into a productive relationship. Such inquiry proceeds through mediated experience. It contributes to what used to be called a Bildung, a process of self-formation, that today might be called an attitude or an ethos. The proximity to concreteness is both the goal and the means through which inquiry operates when it works well. Understanding is a conceptual, political, and ethical practice. It is conceptual because without concepts one would not know what to think about or where to look in the world. It is political because reflection is made possible by the social conditions that enable this practice (thought may be singular, but it is not individual). It is ethical because the question of why and how to think are questions of what is good in life. Finally, all action is stylized; hence it is aesthetic, insofar as it is shaped and presented to others.