I’ve been relatively silent on SM recently partially because I’ve been hard at work on another project that involves far more intimate knowledge of WordPress than any mortal and fully employed academic should ever have, namely The ARC: The Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory. Some may recall previous mentions (1,2) on SM. ARC was started about two years ago by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff as an experiment on collaborative “concept work” in anthropology. This latest transformation represents not only significant progress in the work of the people involved, but a transformation of the infrastructure of collaboration and discussion, which will hopefully allow for a much wider array of people to participate.

Among the things that have been occurring in ARC are an ongoing discussion on “concept work” and the ideas of conceptual labor and a “laboratory” in the human science. George Marcus, James Faubion, and Rebecca Lemov have all contributed to this discussion as it has unfolded. In addition, the projects within the orbit of ARC have settled into a few different areas: a project on “Vital Systems Secuirty” looking at the genealogy of contemporary approaches to critical infrastructure protection, homeland security, syndromic surveillance and other such developments; a project comparing developments in synthetic biology and nanotechnology, primarily around ethics and ontology; and an ongoing discussion on biopower, biopolitics and their continued transformations in anthropology and elsewhere; and an experimental lab/seminar at UC Berkeley focused on concept work and graduate pedagogy.

As I’ve been working on the ARC site, over the past month or so, I’ve been concerned with rethinking the relationship between the available tools for collaboration (yet more web 2.0…) and the tricky problem of facilitating cross-talk, coordination and “co-labor” on “significant problems” and shared concepts, as they are theorized in the conversations amongst the members. In some ways, my solution is boring and simple: add blog, wiki, cms, social software and stir. But if this were the end of it, I wouldn’t have been needed at all. Anyone can set up a blog at this point, and apparently everyone has… no, the problem is far more about sociology than it is technology. Or rather, it is a problem that concerns the relationship between the technical possibilities provided by the tools, and the particular configuration of people, widely dispersed, strong of opinion, and possessing a very wide range of experience of things technical. Getting them to work together, in a coordinated fashion, is not a simple process. Just getting all the goals on one page is a challenge, much less getting people to share them.

Nonetheless, I see ARC as a great opportunity: I like the challenge that ARC poses–it is an immodest promise. It is the challenge of creating shared, valid, robust, testable and verifiable concepts that are relevant and productive across very diverse substantive domains, in an arena that for my recent memory has valued only the virtuoso work of individual geniuses, and not the sense of a collective academic contribution. Or to but it even more bluntly, a kind of scientific anthropological urge after the critiques of ethnographic writing and authority of the 1980s. The immodesty comes from the claim that this kind of collaboration is somehow new, or that what ARC does is somehow different from what other academics do all the time. In some ways it isn’t new, and the project will stand or fall based on how good the research that comes of it is. But in other ways, and perhaps as a result of the bizarre, ecumenical and unstructured status of anthropology as a “discipline,” the ARC is one of very few, perhaps only a handful, of projects that is willing to pursue collaboration outside of either departments or disciplinary organizations, and beyond the demands for “inter-disciplinarity” so frequently required in order to get funding. ARC is schizophrenic (at best) about its relationship to anthropology–at once rejecting it as an arid discipline devoid of conceptual rigor and embracing it as the only form of research and inquiry suited to understanding contemporary transformations. I happen to think this schizophrenia is a virtue–and I hope ARC is both rejected and embraced by anthropologists. That is, at least, embraced and rejected rather than ignored.