Plenary Opening Panel: 4S & EASST Meetings, 2000, Vienna
I was going to start, and I will, by saying “l’shannah tova!” (“happy new year!”). We meet on the eve of the first new year (rosh ha-shannah) of a new century by the Common Era count, the 21st century, (the year 5761 by the Jewish count). What happens in a few days according to Jewish liturgy is a very old ritual of social responsibility. We ask forgiveness from those we have wronged. For wrongs we have done to others, God cannot forgive us; only those we have wronged can do so. We perform this act of sociality, of mutual recognition, before the book is closed inscribing who shall live and who shall die.
L’shannah tova! May all of you and your loved ones be inscribed in the book of life.
Now I was telling a member of the Jewish community of Vienna that in addition to the politics of coming to this conference in Vienna after the inclusion of the right-wing FPOe (Freiheits Partei Oesterreich, the Freedom Party of Austria) in the government, coming in order to express solidarity with the University of Vienna (which has issued fine statements on tolerance and minority rights, and on freedom of research and expression), with the many demonstrators against the FPOe (who have continued their demonstrations every Thursday evening now for eight months), and with the many Austrian intellectuals who have spoken and written against the FPOe; that in addition to that politics, I also wanted, underscoring the Rosh ha-Shannah scheduling of a conference whose theme is social reponsibility and whose venue, of all places, is Vienna, to take my grandfather’s seat in the synagogue in which my parents were married, the only synagogue the Nazis did not destroy. He laughed and said that the scheduling of conferences on the high holidays has become not so unusual, the last was the dentists, that it is like a business: the Jewish community gets to sell a few tickets. A reminder perhaps that even memories, not to mention sentimentalities, can be commodified; and that life goes on and did not stop in 1939 even for the Jewish community in Vienna. But history is important, and experiences do affect subsequent choices.
I understand the rationale and goal of this plenary to be to take note of our venue, of where and when we are meeting, and to underscore the themes of the conference: the role of technosciences in transnational social change, issues of equity and distribution regarding the knowledge and power that science and technology provide, the building of new social institutions for the more complex civil society of the twenty-first century, the ethics and politics of research, and who are the audiences for our research?
I savor the opportunity, and I thank Sheila Jasanoff and the other organizers, to speak in these halls [of the University of Vienna] where my father listened to Max Weber when he visited here for a term, where my mother studied with Moritz Schlick and Hans Hahn and others of the Vienna Circle, where an important foundation of socially-committed ethnography began with the Marienthal study [by Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda, and Ernst Zeisel]. All of these remain touchstones in my own intellectual formation.
In my few remaining minutes I want to evoke three sites of “deep play” or what I have also come to call “ethical plateaux”. “Deep play”, of course, is a nod to the essay by Clifford Geertz and to Jeremy Bentham; ethical plateaux is what I’ve come to call the terrain in which multiple technologies interact creating a complex topology for perception and decision-making. The three “deep plays” are first that of the politics of the FPOe in Austria and more broadly in Europe which was the original reason for this panel, and that poses questions of the building of transnational institutions for civil society, a first experimental effort for a Europe-wide construction consensus on rights for minorities, refugees and immigrants. The second deep play is that of the biosciences that so many of the papers at this conference are about, and that directly pose questions of who shall live and who shall die; that implicate both of the other two deep plays; and that exert pressure towards new institutions of reflexive modernization or deliberative democracy in some of the most difficult areas of human experimental trials, informed consent, privacy and surveillance, patents and ownership of biological information, and the power of huge amounts of investments of not just money and power but also ideology and fantasy. The third deep play is a very brief acknowledgement or alert — acknowledgement for many of you who have been part of its dissemination across the Internet, and alert for others — about the furor over new allegations about the studies of the Yanamamo by the American geneticist James Neel and the American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, a furor breaking over my own discipline of anthroplogy, but that will include other fields, that threatens to reopen the science wars and the sociobiology debates, but that potentially also may affect the oversight demanded by IRBs and other oversight bodies on the research that we all do.
“Deep play” refers to cultural sites where multiple levels of structure, explanation, or meaning intersect and condense, including the cultural phantasmorgia that ground and structure the terrain on which reason, will, and language operate but which they cannot contain.
First then, regarding the Austrian deep play, I want mainly to reaffirm our purpose in this panel, still now, even in the aftermath of the Report of the “three Wise Men” (led by the former president of Finland, Marti Antisaari; with Jochen Fowein and Marcelina Oreja) which ended the mild sanctions on Austria of the member states of the European Union. I wish that I had thought enough ahead to be able to show slides of the wicked cartoons of the Austrian artist Manfred Deix, which are still on display at the Wiener Kunst Haus, on Oberer Weisgerberstrasse, across the street from my grandfather’s house. In several of the cartoons, he takes on election slogans of the FPOe such as “Uberfremdung” (overrun by foreigners) and exaggerates the anxieties. In one cartoon, he depicts an American Indian in warpaint, an African, and a Chinese person in Lederhosen. In another he draws a Turk in red fez and harem pants skiing down the Alps, running a skiing school while unemployed Austrians hold up signs asking for jobs. The best perhaps is a cartoon of a “Right Wing Extremist Opinion Poll” which has a series of questions and boxes to check asking about one’s attitudes towards Jews, the Kriegesgeneration (the generation of World War II, “ordinary folks who did nothing wrong”), immigrants, and patriotism. The cartoons are an effective format for getting at displacements, denials, and the behind the scenes anxieties, complex psychological and ethical plateaux. I want here to pay tribute to the many Austrian analysts who have done superb dissections of the rhetoric and tactics of the FPOe and of J–rg Haider: the linguist Ruth Wodak and her colleagues, the political scientist Johnny Bunzl, the anthropologist Andre Gingrich, the political theorist Hakkan Gurses, the social psychologist Klaus Ottomeyer, and many others. The tactics of the FPOe, even after the dropping of the sanctions, remain a serious issue, and even more a fascinating cultural site of deep play not only for Austria but for Europe and the global stage.
The report of the “three wise ones” [the ironic New Testament resonance unfortunately in English is gendered, while the pluralized German avoids this] says that the Austrian government has lived up to its legal commitments to protect the rights of minorities, refugees and immigrants. Indeed, as it acknowledges, Austria has accepted more immigrants than most European countries. But the report also takes as its mandate to evaluate the political evolution of the FPOe, and here it says that while the FPOe may yet evolve into a responsible democratic party, to date it remains in the words of the report “a right wing populist party with radical elements” that requires monitoring. It cites the language of Haider calling extermination camps Straflager, punishment camps, as if those condemned were being punished for things they had done; and his tactics such as using libel actions to silence opponents including the case of Prof. Anton Pelinka, about which the protest letter to the President of Austria, being passed around to members of this meeting for signatures, appeals.1 (The E.U. office for monitoring the rights of immigrants, refugees, and minorities is in fact located in Vienna.)
It is a “deep play” because it is at the same time a psychodrama, a politics, and also it is about the neo-liberal or neo-conservative restructuring of the economy that is happening not only in Austria, but Europe-wide, and also globally, that involves real dislocations. Indeed upon hearing of the Report of the Three Wise Ones and the dropping of sanctions, members of the FPOe renewed their call for the launching of a Europe-wide Freedom Party. The Hungarian philosopher G.M. Tamas has described the FPOe as part of a much wider movement of post-fascism, a series of policies, practices, and ideologies that have little to do, except in Central Europe, with the legacies of Nazism. In Central Europe, he says, familiar phrases have different echoes, and vigilance is needed, “since, historically speaking, innocence cannot be presumed.”
The Report of the Three Wise Ones, and the long series of treaties and legal conventions and commitments cited in it to which Austria continues to adhere, are part of an effort to build transnational codes, and institutions. And in this case, at least for now, it is working.
The second deep play, regarding biotechnologies, has to do with fantasies of abolishing disease and immortalizing life, sometimes at the expense of human rights, informed consent, equity and access. The American physicists went ahead with the hydrogen bomb, as Oppenheimer memorably put it, because it was “technically sweet.” So too today physicians and patients often go ahead with heroic experimental trials because they are caught up in what Prof. Mary-Jo Good calls the biotechnical embrace, doing what technically can be done under the Hippocratic formulation of preserving and extending life, because it can be done, sometimes at the expense of the good death. Again Manfred Deix captures some of the fantasies, as in his cartoon of a genetically engineered pig, altered to be already a huge sausage, or his cartoons of various monsters — think post-Chernobyl fantasies of mutatants — but monsters who have voting rights.
Xenotransplantation is one site among the new biotechnologies, where because the science is so hard, there is some time to experiment with some creative thinking towards new institutions and new ways of bringing into being an informed citizenry on a global scale that can provide civil society oversight, accountability, and decision-making. I’ve been watching in particular the efforts of Dr. Fritz Bach, the Lewis Thomas Professor of Medicine at Harvard, who incidentally is also Viennese born — his grandfather and mine, both well known Viennese rabbis, I’m sure knew each other — and who has directed genetics and immunology research labs in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Boston, but also for five years here in Vienna, and who has called for a moratorium on clinical trials in xenotransplanation. Xenotransplantation, like toxics, is a transnational issue. Old institutions of medical ethics are insufficient. The threat of xenosis that could unlease a pandemic like HIV-AIDS, however small the risk, is not someting that can be dealt with in medical ethics models of doctor-patient relations, or hospital ethics committees, or even national level regulatory institutions. Older methods of self-regulation by scientists in the Asilomar style of dealing with the fears about recombinant DNA in the 1970s seem no longer possible or adequate, and the recent experience of Monsanto with the Terminator Seed in the controversies over genetically engineered crops show that the refusal to engage in public consultation can lead at minimum to a public relations fiasco. Dr. Bach has been experimenting not only with education modules at the high school, church and grassroots level; and with national committee structures at the political level in several countries both first and third world; but also with new modes of global web-based public consultation seeded with a network of opinion leaders in various countries. It will be interesting to watch this and other experiments in new institution and public critical knowledge building. And finally a very brief word about the Yanamamo, and the forthcoming publication of Darkness in El Dorado by the investigative journalist Patrick Tierney. We have known for a long time that Napoleon Chagnon’s accounts of warfare and its sociobiological basis in the linkage of male agression to reproductive success was contested by many other ethnographers of the Yanamamo. As to how much ethnographic films should be just film verite documentary and how much setting up and editing for didadactic purposes, this was a debate of the 1970s in which Tim Asch was a central figure: Tierney makes a little too much of Asch and Chagnon staging films; but Chagnonís defenders go way overboard in asserting that there is nothing at all of film-making tactics in, or of finding venues for, Aschís important films. And we have known for a long time that James Neel’s work with the Yanamamo was funded by the American Atomic Energy Commission, as was much biological research after the War. It does not seem far fetched that populations in South America could have been control groups for work investigating the effect of radiation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in relation to studies on low level radiation accumulation in human populations in the Marshall and Aleutian islands, the radiation experimental releases over Midwestern populations, and other radiation experiments. The Yanamamo in any case provided a well known and much contested model for population genetics and sociobiology. The new allegations are first that the Yanamamo may have been used as a natural experimental population in ways reminiscent of the Tuskeegee syphilis experiment, that it might have been ill considered to have used live attenuated Edmonton B measles vaccine with a population that had no previous exposure to measles. A further attentuated vaccine (the Schwartz vaccine) was being phased in the U.S. and Venezuela. Neel got his Edmonton B vaccine donated by two pharmaceutical companies — an issue still very much alive today of pharmaceutical companies taking philanthropic tax benefits for donations of medicines being phased out or near expiry to third world populations, in this case said by many at the time to be dangerous and counter-indicated for previously unexposed populations — and that whether or not the innoculations unintentionally helped trigger a measles outbreak into the 1968 epidemic, the medical care he and his team provided may have been too little and even perhaps was interested not only to observe the natural course of an epidemic among a previously unexposed population but also to test hypotheses about the immunological superiority of headmen over others in small populations again leading to their reproductive success. Secondly, in more sustained fashion, the allegations are that Chagnon’s intervention into the local political dynamics with trade goods, and with bringing together feuding groups for purposes of filming rituals, lead to incidents of the violence that he portrayed as natural or primordial, and which had unintended but further political fall-out including helping mining interests and the military interests in Brazil resist giving to the Yanamamo constitutionally promised land rights and territorial demarcation.
It is too early to make any judgments on these allegations, but in the end they may not only in the end turn on intent — charges that Neel’s crew caused or exacerbated the 1968 measles epidemic seem overdrawn and they are not the center of Tierney’s book — but on the interactive effects of what one might call the hidden machineries of technologies of large scale multi-disciplinary research projects with cargo planes bringing crates of medical, trade and film equipment, and descending upon small populations, recruiting large numbers of them as porters and stage crews, as well as medical subjects, usually without concern for the the pathogens that the outsiders might be carrying with their bodies. This should give us pause and cause for reflection upon not only how we deploy research projects but also how we represent them, that is, the relation between research results and how we collect information, and the conventions of erasing the apparatus of the scientific collection process in order to present descriptions of societies and data sets as primordial or natural. Tierney’s book, even if flawed, is a fascinating account of such a large scale research project combining genetics, filming and ethnography, using many personnel, both outsiders and natives. Tierney’s book is also an advocacy effort to intervene in a media war on behalf of Yanamamo beleaguered by miners, disease, and unfulfilled land rights commitments and social benefits. It has been at least one of the fastest ever disseminations of a call for reflection upon science and ethics across the Internet, and one that many of you have already participated in. The passion, and name calling, that the American and international press has delighted in fanning, signals that like the Austrian deep play, and those surrounding new biomedical technologies and agrobiotechnologies there is deep play here: psychodrama of antagonisms among scientists, deep passion, fantasy, status, and monetary investments beyond merely rational arguments and differences of perspective.
I want to end with a reflexive thought. I have tried to suggest “deep play” as an analytic device to explore charged sites of multiple levels of causation, explanation, and meaning; and “ethical plateaux” as sites where multiple technologies intereact to create a complex terrain or topology of perception and decision making. I have also tried, albeit not enough and perhaps not successfully enough, to invoke humor via cartoons, paradoxes, ironies, ambivalences, and what the literary critic Homi Bhabha has called affiliative anecdotes as tools towards creating and sustaining a self-critical community. Bhabha comments on the rhetoric of these forms, saying “The uncertainty that the joke and affiliative anecdote casts on the production of knowledge goes beyond mimetic or epistemological paradoxes. It attaches to the very mode of address of modern thought in which the first person witness or teller feels uncertainty in judgment [that’s my position here], and the third person hearer has the freedom to speculate with what is only partial, piecemeal, and fragmented” [that is, the ethical moment]. This is he suggests an effort to renarrate the normative stories of modernity “from a position in which the very discourse of modernity is eviscerated and needs to be rewritten from a place other than its enlightened or civilizational origins.”
What better place than Vienna to initiate such a practice?
Note
Michael M.J. Fischer works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
References
Ahtisaari, Martti, Jochen Fowein, Marcelino Oreja. 2000, Sept. 8. Report to the President of the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of the European Union. Paris. 39pp.
Bach, Fritz, et al. 1998. “Uncertainty and Xenotransplantation: Individual Benefit versus Collective Risk.” Nature Medicine, 4(2):141-44.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1998. “Joking Aside: The Idea of a Self Critical Community.” in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, ed. Modernity, Culture, and ‘the Jew’. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
Bunzl, John. 1997. Between Vienna and Jerusalem: Reflections and Polemics on Austria, Israel, and Palestine. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Bunzl, John. 2000. “Who the Hell is Joerg Haidar?” ms.
Deix, Manfred. 2000. Deix: Good Vibrations, Eine Retrospective. Kunst Haus Wien. Wien: Museums Betriebsgesellschaft.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Deep Play.” in The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books.
Geertz, Clifford. 2001, Feb. 8. “Life Among the Anthros.” New York Review of Books, pp 18-22.
Gingrich, Andre. 2000. “A Man for All Seasons: An Anthropological Perspective on the Austrian Freedom Party’s Cultural Politics.” ms.
Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio. 1996. “L’Abbraccio biotechnico: Un invito al trattemento sperimentale” in Pino Donghi, ed. Itl sapere della quarigole. Spoleto: Laterza.
Guerses, Hakan. 2000. “Oesterreich, einmal anders: Ein Versuch, gemaess Kanzler Schuessels Vorschalg in abgeruesteter Sprache die ‘Strasse’ zu verteidigen.” ms.
Jahoda, Marie, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel. 1933 Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal. Leipzig: S. Hirzel.
(English translation: 1971 Marienthal: the Sociography of an Unemployed Community. Chicago: Aldine, Atheerton).
Mann, Charles. 2001, Jan 19. “Anthropological Warfare.” Science. Vol. 291: 416-21.
Ottomeyer, Klaus. 2000. Die Haider Show: Zur Psychopolitik der FPOe. Klagenfurt: Drava Verlag.
Tamas, G.M. 2000, Summer. “On Post Fascism: How Citizenship is Becoming an Exclusive Priviledge.” Boston Review, pp. 42-45.
Tierney, Patrick. 2000. Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. New York: Norton.
Wodak, Ruth et al. 1990. “Wir sind alle unschuldige Taeter!”: diskurshistorische Studien zum Nachkriegsantisemitismus. Frankfurt-am-Main: Surkamp.
Wodak, Ruth and Richard Mitten. 1993. On the Discourse of Prejudice and Racism: Two Examples from Austria. Center for Austrian Studies Working Paper 93-4. University of Vienna. April.
Wodak, Ruth and Rudolf de Cillia, hsg. 1995. Sprachenpolitik in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Wien: Passagen Verlag.