Paul Rabinow, Berkeley

View video interview here: http://www.collaborativesociety.org/2016/04/05/paul-rabinow/

What would it take to make a kind of serious collaboration between synthetic biology, social scientists and, you know, people from humanities and what, and maybe who, what will have to change?

That's the big question. Let's see. One step back. Gaymon Bennett has just gotten a job at Arizona State in Tempe and Arizona State you may know is a very big tech place run by a man named Michael Crow. That would be a place to keep an eye on as we go along. Because I think, I don't think, I know Gaymon is going to be, in our group, the person who's going to continue the synthetic biology as the central part of his work.

As you know, Anthony is, we're all still interested in thinking about it, but Anthony is working on euthanasia in Switzerland. That's his next project and he's gotten some funding and he's doing well.

I'm writing a small book on Gerhard Richter, the painter, but not as an art historian or an art critic, but as somebody looking at one of the few examples of what an ethos of the contemporary is and then Richter, over the course of his life, has engaged in a number of different collaborations and that interests me as well. So, we're all doing somewhat different things, but the challenge right now, and then I'll get back to your question, the challenge right now is what we're calling casuistry, that is to say if we multiply cases which are different, the other person is Joshua Crays, who's working on South Sudan, who's now in Chicago. Finished his thesis just now here with me.

We know the world is diverse. And we think there's no way of approaching it that we know that doesn't totalize too quickly. So if you talk about neo-liberalism or globalization or post-modernism or whatever comes next, some trope that comes next. You're not going to get to the level of mediation between what's going on in specific places, which of course are permeated by global trends and what have you, and some more generality. Because what's missing is, I think you would agree, concept work. So people jump to neo-liberalism, everything's neo.

Oh, the other one is bio-power. I've been invited to these conferences. I don't go because it makes me nauseous. Everything's bio-power. Anything to do with biology or the body or health is bio-power. No. Fine. But that's certainly not what Foucault was talking about. And it seems kind of like necrophilia to me, you have all these people feeding on the...

So the question is, though, the challenge, and this could be a kind of pedagogic challenge too, is that what do you do with multiplicity? How do you assemble multiplicity into an assemblage that's dynamic, preserves the heterogeneous character of the parts, but brings them into some relationship with each other that's unexpected and good for everybody. For as long as it lasts. And we're not building the institutions, we're building an assemblage.

So that's what we're doing on this website. And we're off to a good start. So the answer back is the university project with some kind of open and visionary leadership, they can't just come from leadership, I think has real potential. I was just talking with Gayman this morning about, there was just a conference in Arizona about synthetic biology, and we know that the English group is not succeeding at this either, to say the least. But they're so dependent on the money from the, the biologists and the engineers, that they're completely finding ways to not be critical about it, or even truthful.

So right now I'd say the idea of how that would work is unknown to me. And that maybe what one needs to do is build micro-collaboratories which are adjacent to some of these other formations because the power relations are so totally unequal that they pay some lip service because they get the money then wait because, in America anyway, the government says 'Oh, they're being ethical.' They could care less. And the commercial interests and fantasy careers... I don't see any opening there. And we don't any opening in England either. Although some of the younger English people involved in Nik Rose and... They'll say in the corridor that they're unhappy, but they won't put it into print because they'll be punished.

So this concept of adjacency, I think, is really important to think about given situations of really unequal resources and power. And discursively saying we're all doing this together, is not true. You have to be either very young or old because the middle-aged people making their careers, many of them are doing very interesting things, but you can't expect this from them. So it's got to be the real young, who aren't completely socialized yet and still can have fresh vision, and then some of us old dogs who have been around for a while and stopped buying into the bullshit anymore so, I mean I never was.

The claim is this new kind of collaboration will come from universities and come within research. And then you have a different article from Harvard and this more focused on businesses. Which kind of collaboration is right for you? Proposing the argument for companies to be strategic about collaboration. And then you have the political framework going all over the place. So the new space for collaboration they're talking about isn't the same as coming from scientists new networks around there or companies that are evolving into more open space or the political leadership that can empower this sort of collaboration. So from your perspective, and your work and experience, where is the space that collaboration possibly can happen?

Well, again I would say it has to be adjacent. And adjacent means close, but not touching. And our strategy, but I think this is more general, has got to be that we're surrounded by institutions and apparatuses of people who are going to do all of the politics and raise all the money and buy into the game, including all these European Union grants, which take years to do and I know lots of people who that's what they do, because that's survival. But that's deadly also. It kills your mind. So the question is how to stay close to that without being taken in by it.

And also basically everything I need is in this room. It took a certain amount of money and a certain amount of fighting and a certain amount of obstinacy to protect this and I don't want more. Because if you get bigger, you become a bureaucrat and you spend your time writing grant proposals and you spend your time with people you don't want to be spending your time with. Some of who are perfectly descent, well-meaning people, but they're doing something else. So the question is "what's the scale and the positionality in this?" and, in addition to a number of things, we're trying to develop a design kit for topological design on the web which would be able to make visible some of these questions that are no longer just metaphors of scale, or distance, or intensity, or range of affect relations.

But the bottom line is I think that we don't actually want to be completely involved with the macro players. I don't think that... They're in a ferociously competitive environment. There's a shortage of money in their eyes. They're under lots of pressure for publication and other things. And, the deepest reason is that their mode of subjectivation, they've been formed, at least in the United States, now increasingly from when they were in Kindergarten, to be entrepreneurial specialists.

And those are the ones who get ahead. Those are the ones who get into the elite schools. Those are the ones who do well. Those are the ones who get the right advisor in graduate school. Those are the ones who have maybe founded companies. But those are precisely the people who have worked on themselves for their whole life and, in a way, what's the outside of that? The outside of that is they really, like anyone is limited, but this model of the entrepreneurial self has got some very substantial blindspots.

It's interesting to talk about postman(?) as well. Because new ties is issuing this pretty clearly. Saying that we have to distinguish between the performative and paralogical approach to science. And it seems that the performative, the way we run our university, the way we run science, the way we think about entrepreneurship is very much on the performative side. I met a professor at the university, we had a presentation, something called "A Shock Outside Delhi" and he was a Mexican professor but he was working with this para model approach, with the technology and the network and stuff like that. We're trying to connect all the dots. But it's weird, it's a typical approach, the people and everything, like resources, like bringing in and getting something out like a machine. And we have to understand what is between the dots, what is outside the dots.

There's a price to be paid for that in that sense of there's a price to be paid for access to the truth. But there's also a price to be paid for access to the good. Or the beautiful. And people think they can, particularly in California but I guess elsewhere too, that you can do all of it. But you can't actually. And therefore we're parasitical in that Michel Serres sense. And then, you know, Foucault in the later lectures makes his very interesting, short, he doesn't develop it very much, but he's trying to develop a space of thinking which is neither rhetoric nor performative. So, I think that's the space we're trying to operate in. But you can't do that and expect to be rewarded by all the big political apparatuses. It doesn't mean one doesn't have some desire to be recognized and rewarded and what have you, and I have nothing to complain about, but I'm concerned about my students and younger people. But that's where the energy that we're all interested in has got to be. And protecting that, because this is the other idea of care, souzine(?) to use Foucault's word, is really important. Because all of the major forces of, not just Western capitalism, China is worse, and the Middle East, forget.

But this care of the self and others is extremely central, the synthetic biologists thinks that means being nice or a little bit of ethical concern and let's not be sexist and all of that, that's not what we're talking about. But we need ways and practices and tools to develop this such that also all this activity around the world gets a little more visible. I don't have any of these skills, but my hope is that Stanford people do have these skills because that's what Stanford's about and they have money from Google and they have all kinds of stuff. But they're also rather smart, interesting people. So that's the gamble for us right now is to make alliances with people who are also dissatisfied with what's going on.

The MOOCs took over Stanford. It was going to solve all known problems. Jerry Brown, our Governor, was completely "this is great," but now two years later, whatever, four years later, they know that it's something, but it's not a global answer. So we're not looking for global answers. So how do we stay close, but adjacent and make sure there's care involved.

And it's a question about size. The scale is really important. Don't get too big. But you have to be very vigilant about what any of that means and we don't basically know before we start very well what that means. But you have to be willing to say as you go along, "this is wrong" or "let's try it one more time." So this is the language we're taking from John Dewey in making our own... Dewey talks about discordancy, types of breakdowns. Dewey says "thinking happens when there's breakdown." So there's discordancy, there's indetermination, which is more of a conceptual or cognitive breakdown and we're adding to that uncertainty, because there are a whole range of situations which are uncertain, which that's when we need to be thinking, rather than knowing already what's going on.

That was actually what was interesting in making the documentary because mostly when you do a documentary, you have a script, you know what pieces you'll need to tell the story. (To get the funding to tell the story. Yes.) And we didn't have either, we just had a lot of curiosity. We met with people like you and people told "no, you're wrong" and we had to rethink it and ask again, you know, to figure out okay then if our idea of this is wrong, what is right then? So it wasn't until we actually made the documentary we found our answers. But this is a very odd way of making a documentary and people we talk to find it interesting because we very much tried practicing the philosophy that these people we met preach in order to also test it throughout the documentary, so it's been an experiment space, sort of like you say an adjacent space that allowed for us to create a sort of settings that made things possible, made meetings between people possible, that could not have been possible without it but that also had its own kind of game rules or its own kind of incentive structures that we could put around it so we could challenge the normal settings of the university, the company or the hacker spaces.

This is another one of the things that interests me about Gerhard Richter is that he's developed many, many, many things, but of late he's doing two things that are of interest on this scale. He now paints on four canvases at the same time because instead of doing a series of paintings, he works on one problem which he doesn't know what it is until he sets out to work, almost quote word for word what you just said. And by not closing off any of the canvases and not knowing ahead of time when it will be done, a whole new way of artistic practice opens up. I'm very clear, that I'm not saying imitate Gerhard Richter, that would make no sense. But there are practices of technique and technology which we can learn from those domains which are less under control than some other domains.

So, dance companies for instance, modern dance companies and some things in the art world, though there's an extraordinary amount of bullshit in the art world too.

I'd be interested in that skill, because opening up new worlds, whatever, and organizations: the university, the company, whatever. They talk about collaboration, the fact is that maybe a few percent of the people who are employed at the university are able to be in that space. It's not that I'm making a critique of it, it's just a lot of people like the certainty of going to work or go to the same thing. So that's why we feel...

They've been trained their whole life to do that. You know one of the... One step back. The other thing that Richter is doing that I'm finding interesting, this is an adjacency, I'm not trying to imitate him. I'm trying to think through what he's doing. Something different. So in recent years, he's 83 now, and he and do you know Alexander Kluge by any chance? The German writer. Who 30 years ago was a pre-Habermas Marxist for the public sphere, but he's also written hundreds of books and he has television programs and makes movies and is a real complicated, interesting character. He and Richter have done two books together in the last few years and this idea of what you can see and what you can say as being different. But finding ways that put them into adjacency with each other is something that we're experimenting with. And another member of our group who you haven't met is Tariq El Hyke(?) who's originally Moroccan but he's now in America, but he's a curator and so this question of what curatorial practices are in all of this is also something as a subject position is also something we're interested in.

Going back to when you started this, just to be right, the ausburchict(?) contemporary research collaboratorium in 2006. And to understand the new production of knowledge creation and the condition of collaboration, what did you find out? Of course you cannot tell the whole story but tell us what I'm working with actually you can try to back to early scientist or whatever. There are kind of three ages where the thing this idea of collaboration came out in the last 100 years. And the late 20s, early 30s, taking some from Piaget and Dewey but actually creating into them something else as well. Talking about solidarity and condition for working together. I'll send you an article, but this woman distinguished between three different phases and she's saying that normal relationships have the dominant structure and then you have like the corporation where you have to compromise, so the solidarity is based in compromises. And then she's saying there's a third level and it's extremely seldom to come there and she's calling that "creative integration." And so, you know...

The only thing I would say is today the corporate world is much more creative and dynamic than the university. That's not praise, per se, but it's a simple fact that the university structures are almost entirely 19th century structures with certain modifications. Whereas, at least in California, Google is not a 19th century corporation. And so the dynamism and the creativity, but also the new modes of control and surveillance that are present are way ahead of the university. Now, the university advantage is that it's backward so certain kinds of things are still protected and still acceptable when the entrepreneurial model doesn't permeate everything to the same degree, although in England it does, whereas here it still doesn't. So it's tricky because none of those terms are static. One of the things I've been interested in for a long time is the Bauhaus, which went through at least three major stages. Which was one of the major attempts in Europe in the 20th century to put together art, design and industry, and teaching. So one could look back at that. And they were destroyed. They were destroyed both certainly by the Nazis, but also their left hated them also. So to me that's a good thing: if both the Nazis and the Stalinists hate you, it's not all bad.

But this question then of the terms not staying the same, so what is 'industry' now? Which industries? We're not talking about a factory in China, you know, we're talking about Google and much smaller places of that sort. And then, to a degree, which university? Because I think the major American universities have understood that global capitalism requires a different kind of production than previous periods did. So Stanford, or in a different way Harvard, they're the leaders in this. Now that also means they have blind spots. Berkeley used to be a public university. Its funding has been severely cut so it's trying to be more of a kind of Stanfordy kind of place, etc. There's somewhere in between.

So that combination of those terms needs to be looked at in terms of inquiry today, as to what we're actually talking about. Have you read a book called "The Circle" David Eggers? It's an extraordinary novel about Google which you might want to read. It's very smart. It's a kind of Orwell novel about Google. In any case, there's a lot of that. So we need to keep mobile and we need to keep curious. But we also need support. We need some stability otherwise you spend all your time trying to get grants and all. So my mode is parasitic in the sense that I'm a tenured professor at a major university. Basically they can't do anything to me. And they're not trying. So it's up to me to take risks and chances and try to create something different. But I'm an anthropologist, so I operate at a small scale. Now, I would admire people who try to do more, but I haven't seen that work very well. Nikolas Rose or Bruno Latour or Luc Boltanski, they're very, very smart, thoughtful, wonderful guys, but their institutions haven't worked. So building the scale or what a network of small heterogeneous nodes would be is something you'll have to tell me about because I can't do it.

I have the same feeling in Etsy Essen. The field where I come from a lot of people talk about Latour and something like that. And they're putting some of the right words, but when it comes to the practice of it, it's just that I can't follow it.

Because it's not there. I mean, first if you look at Bruno's website and it's, by their own admission, it's a failure. And so why? I mean everyone agrees the web is a major change of the last decades. Everybody agrees with that. Try to find me sites on the web in which inquiry and collaboration actually take place. Boltanski tried it with Philippe Escolar. But they're all superstars and they're not young and certainly that's the way France works. France is a very hierarchical place.

But it's also a flattened place when you try to create these collaborative spaces. And, you know, if you look through a list of interesting thinkers, there's also like the mention of in order to create these collaborative spaces, we need some kind of connectors, or brokers or something like that. And who should that be?

You tell me man. We miss it. I know we need it. I'm hoping these Stanford people will do some of that for us. I hope so.

To put too much agency in technology seems also to be a...

Well, you get to be a precious little sect. Which we know from the history of Marxism and leftism that's not the way to go for any number of reasons. So you do need connectors and intercessors and, I mean, de Lusse's language really makes some sense here. Not that de Lusse did that but the language seems right to me. So we're trying to do that.

Let me just mention briefly, you can have this if you want, but these are two recent studios and what we're trying to do for ourselves, but with Stanford, is to develop an order, a conceptual vocabulary, which can then be rendered visible in a topological space on the web. So the series and the ratios are really important. We think we've done a certain amount here. This is next. We're working on this now, today. And this, we're making real progress here.

Then the question is the next stage, which is here. We're working as hard as we can, but it takes a little while. But I don't know anyone else who's doing that. And we're open to all the help we can get. So if you guys want to help us or think alongside or whatever, it's fine with us.

We're working with some philosophers that are really professional, much more than me in the academic setting, to build this kind of collaboratorium and we're also creating a network, bringing the right people together. A small network. People really trust because they have too much experience and following up too much.

Sounds tempting to get a lot of money but be careful. Make sure you think about how much money you actually need. Nothing is free. There's a price tag on everything when it comes to money. So be careful. But it sounds like you are.

The interesting thing is when you can't offer people money because we didn't have a huge budget for this documentary. We didn't have any budget. We just sort of crowdfunded and we got a little bit here and there. So we really couldn't offer people this kind of money. So the people who helped out were people who had a genuine interest in getting this message out. And that became a good filter, I think, for sort of seeing what people to work with.

And they're there. I mean one of the things I would... You know, people are very pessimistic and I can understand that, but there are a lot of dissatisfied creative people and thoughtful people around who if you tell them they're dissatisfied, they would agree. But they don't know what to do. So we need to multiply ways of things for people to do.

We have to harvest this dissatisfaction and incompleteness. And a thing that a lot of people are having this sense in this dominate paradigm, but to build upon that because as soon when you go outside the system, I think it's wonderful.

I agree. So you know this, again Foucault, "Paradox of Modernity". How to increase capacities without intensification of bad power relations. And that's kind of the game, right? We want to increase the capacities both of individuals and the collaborative, but you need some power relations because power relations are everywhere. So the question is "what form of power?" What's the government of self and others? You'll see that in there. That's the question.

I was onto the panel discussion after the premiere of the film last Friday, but you were. What they really felt was missing was the incentive structure for collaboration. And the note that you talked about theme and art are resources very much built in the individual, performative ways. You know, writing articles and getting grants and stuff like that.

Well, the career structures in the academy are so very rigid and so very old-fashioned. It is true that in the bio-sciences and, before that, in physics they developed from an artisanal model to an industrial model where you can have 50 authors on a paper and also have careers. The human sciences haven't even posed the problem. So one of the things I've been very attuned to because I care about the people who work with me and I tell them all they're going to get my enemies and very few friends and I have to find ways of making sure they have their own career. And their own ideas and the rest. But the institutions of the university system don't understand that. The danger is all of a sudden it will flip over into an industrial model like in England. I mean, David Cameron is the most revolutionary leader on the earth. I mean, I hate everything he's doing, but he's changing everything.

Even Leonardo Targ his conclusion in 1790 is that philosophy cannot stick to the grand story. so that reconsiders the relationship to the institutional organization, like university. But he's not talking about where should it then find a place? Seems that if you have to consider the relationship to the institution/university it should also consider the connections to society as a whole, but he's not writing about that.

Keep in mind, I don't believe there is anything called "society as a whole." Okay? That's another 19th century idea, so be careful about that. Larger scales. Society assumes that the nation-state is the society, which it isn't. But that's a longer discussion.

I understand your point. And as biology is also moving into that space. I talked to this guy I can't remember, he wrote, he was chief of this The Handbook of Interdisciplinary from Oxford. what was his name? Anyway, but he's saying that it's a failure that philosophy has seen itself as a discipline in the last 100 years.

Yeah. I agree. It's a disaster.

So how to reinvent that with the progress in mind and the connectors in mind. And how can anthropologists and philosophers work together?

Well, keep in mind, like with the corporation, what it meant to be a philosopher or an anthropologist in 1920, 1950, in today, are quite different. So, are there philosophers around who one might work with? Up to a point. Not most of them, but there are some. So there's a young man named Colin Copeman who's a specialist on Dewey and James, but also knows Continental philosophy. He's at the University of Oregon. You might want to be in touch with him. And he came to our labinar for a while and he's trying to do his own version of some of this stuff, genealogy, on his turf. The problem is that, I mean he's very good, but he's not 100 of them. There are few like that.

On the bulletin board outside are the courses that are being given at the College International de Flore Sophie in Paris. There are 50 of them there where you would find young philosophers who you could talk to. What they're not doing, however, is inquiry. And anthropologists have the advantage that they have to do some kind of research. Out of themselves in the world, learn something different, get out of the academy, it's not all in the library, etc. Very few of them, however in America, have much of a philosophic background because there's no curriculum in American universities, it's all how to be an entrepreneur, be successful and publish articles. Graduate students are told they have to publish articles in the professional journals. I think you should be punished every time you publish in one of the professional journals. So you must really want to do it, otherwise I would hold it against anyone who arrives here with publications when they were 22 years old. I think I don't even look at them.

So, there's a lot to overcome. In my experience here, the pool of dissatisfaction is there. So you have to somehow create some turbulence and see who's attracted to that.

So is this humble attitude toward philosophies and practical knowledge?

Not humble, it's humility. Humbleness is more of a class or a... I'm not humble. But the humility about how little we know and how much has come before and how much is going on elsewhere.

But that's also what keeps the not knowing in a second-order way. And being comfortable in not knowing is a very important part of this. And most people are not comfortable with that because that's not how you do well in school, etc.

What do you mean by "not knowing in a second-order way"?

I don't know anything. I don't know Greek, I don't have Latin, I'm not a Christian. I suppose I've read the bible, but that's about it. My relation to Matthew is Bach and Pirian(?)

The life of schole, of leisure in the Greek sense, is delicate and it's on its way out, perhaps. But it's still here. But what to do with that. How to navigate it and how to introduce other people to the life of thinking. Tricky business, right?

It's like the leader of R&D, always saying something, the company, it looks at 1200 people in R&D and they're all really bright. They're also kind of clones of each other. So how to bring this diversity into play?

Not be threatened by it, but in fact take it as an opportunity to learn and enrich what you're doing. Now that sounds like platitudes, but it's amazing how few people actually want to do that. One of the books that was a big success this year was called "Excellent Sheep," do you know this book? It's a book about a guy attacking Harvard and Stanford and the rest of them about the fact that what they're producing are excellent sheep to go into the corporate world and hospitals and, you know...

But that's a tricky thing because that's also what would be the leftovers from charmed post-modern that we live in all our small stories, our own little worlds. So how to make the others visible?

Right. I couldn't agree more. And again, it's a longer story and we will have more of this soon, but I'll tell you the short version. Foucault has this concept of problematization. What is a problematization? A problematization, the man says, is not something you can represent, it's not representable and it's not a construction. It's something that disrupts the macro vectors that have been in place. It's not the object of inquiry. Once you start talking about neo-liberalism or bio-power, forget it. Okay? Because you're working on something that's not representable. The question then is, how to index the practices of inquiry to something that you're not going to represent? And that's then this scalar question of being ascetic and not talking about bio-power while understanding that, of course, the genome projects and the post-genome projects have radically inflected along with the Internet along with global finance capital, health care, what is a good life? Living beings, potatoes, etc.

But that's not the object. You have to earn a right to talk more about that. And you do that through cases and inquiry and concept work. So we need to help each other do more concept work and we need to do inquiry and produce cases in such a way that we can have "second order" observation of those cases.

And that's what this stuff is about. Because we hope that, well we don't hope, we fucking know that sometime fairly soon we're going to have some way of talking about generality that's not theory, that's not epical, that's not universal. And that's the game.

If it's not that, what is it then?

It's contemporary casuistry, if you want the fancy term. Casuistry is the old Jesuit art of comparing cases with moral intent. Now of course we're not Jesuits and we don't have the church, fortunately, and we don't have transcendental anchor points, but the art of casuistry is, it seems to me, what we need to reinvent. And you can only do that by passing through concrete materials, but the concrete materials themselves can't be the stopping point because they're infinite. I mean, every single thing is infinite, so how do you produce something finite in that process? And you need concepts, you need a problem, you need diagnosis, you need analytics... Fortunately, we're developing all this.

My last question will be, because one of the problems is that a phenomenological approach and is very inspired by Darwall and he's talking about this second-person perspective, a second-person order instead of the first thing that is normal in a phenomenological approach.

Yeah. The auto-poesis on the one hand and then we take second-order from Luhmann. But what Luhmann doesn't mean is outside. It means, the catch-phrase is "observing observers observing." But you can only do that by entering in. It's not outside, but it's multiple ways of entering in to people observing things and then pulling out and entering in again. And watching yourself do that. So, there's some of the auto-poetic, I mean Luhmann was friends with those guys. Who's the mathematician, Brownton is the set theory guy?

He started as a biologist by training and then he became a neuroscientist...

and most of all a thinker. But only because they were thinking through and about something. Not just being a philosopher who didn't know anything except what other philosopher's have said.

And to your question, there was a whole week last week on Franz Couteur(?) on the philosophy program on "obstinacy" The relation between obstinacy and perseverance. And the best program was on Spinoza. So what is it that you need to cultivate? You need to Spinoza calls it the "conatus," that is to say the drive to know and to be good. And in Spinoza there's no distinction between affect structures and knowing. And that's also what we're trying to do. Deleuze, similar, Foucault, more complicated.

And how do you combine Luhmann with those guys? Because Luhmann, in my reading of him, did not leave so much space for human interactions.

Luhmann's limitation is that he accepts the role of technical criticism. He always brackets whether or not these institutional arrangements in Germany that he's studying are good, bad or horrible or wonderful. He just says it's a means/ends distinction. So he produces this vast system by studying the means. And then he leaves it to the administrators to decide whether or not, how to do better.

But of course that could apply to the Nazis as well. "Listen Adolph, don't invade Russia. You're going to get screwed and looking at the whole damn thing. Just calm down, you know? Beat up some people. Stop.

So Luhmann is an advisor. That being said, a very, very brilliant guy with lots of concept work. There's a little book of his essays at Stanford called "Observations on Modernity." He's written 10,000 pages or more. Fortunately most of it's not translated. The little bits of it are very helpful. But what I do, I'm not a disciple. I take concepts from people and use them differently. And that's what I've taken from Luhmann. And then we'll use them. And then sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work. And, so what? That's the fun.

One last word on that. Gaymon Bennett and I are going to finish what will be about a 30 page piece on the difference between the contemporary ethos and a modern ethos. The larger framing is what we're kind of doing now while everyone's working on their own case. So we have five or six people working on their thesis or a book, including me.

CollaborativeSociety.org is a site which explores the thinking of researchers, academicians and thought-leaders on the topic of collaboration, among other things. Thanks to Alfred Birkegaard and Katja Carlsen for providing the video content. The contribution of The Collaboration Project is these transcripts.