Hacking Flashcards
Only a fool …
would think it was enough to point to this misty mantle of illusion in order to destroy the world that counts as essential … ‘
Nietzsche - The gay science - quoted in Hacking p3 (great quote to point to final section’s conclusion - c conclusion of Gio)
‘Making up people’ referred to …
the ways in which a new scientific classification may bring into being a new kind of person, conceived of and experienced as a way to be a person.(5) The second, the ‘looping effect’, referred to the way in which a classification may interact with the people classified.(6)
HAC.2
We think of many kinds of people as objects of scientific inquiry. Sometimes to…
control them, as prostitutes, sometimes to help them, as potential suicides. Sometimes to organize and help, but at the same time to keep ourselves safe, as the poor, or the homeless. Sometimes to change for their own good and the good of the public, the obese. Sometimes just to admire, to understand, to encourage and perhaps even to emulate, as (sometimes) with genius. We think of these kinds of people as given, as definite classes defined by definite properties. As we get to know more about these properties, we will able to control, to help, to change, or to emulate them better. But it is not quite like that. They are moving targets because our investigations interact with the targets themselves, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before. The target has moved. That is the looping effect. Sometimes our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before. That is making up people.
H.2
The first dynamic nominalist may have been Friedrich Nietzsche. An aphorism in The Gay Science begins …
, ‘There is something that causes me the greatest difficulty, and continues to do so without relief: unspeakably more depends on what things are called than on what they are’. It ends, ‘… creating new names and assessments and apparent truths is enough to create new “things”.’(10) Making up people would be a special case of this phenomenon.
As Nietzsche well knew but did not bother saying, names are only one part of the dynamics. In the case of kinds of people, there are not only the names of the classifications, but also the people classified, the experts who classify, study and help them, the institutions within which the experts and their subjects interact, and through which authorities control.
Ian Hacking: ‘Kinds of People: Moving Targets’ 4 British Academy Lecture, 11 April 2006 (web version)
There is the evolving body of knowledge about the people in question – both expert knowledge and popular science.
H.3/4
Homosexuality …
, as understood by Foucault, is a way of being, of experiencing, a very specific way to be a person. ‘The homosexual’ is a kind of person that exists only in a particular historical and social setting, for example now, but not in ancient Athens
H.4
my first example of making up people and the looping effect…
, multiple personality. It is written up in Rewriting the Soul, published eleven years ago.(12)
It seemed misleadingly easy. Around 1970 there arose a few sensational paradigm cases of strange behaviour similar to phenomena discussed a century earlier and largely forgotten. A few psychiatrists began to diagnose multiple personality. It was rather sensational. More and more unhappy people started manifesting these symptoms.
At first they had the symptoms they were expected to have. But then they became more and more bizarre. First a person had two or three personalities. Within a decade the mean number was 17. This fed back into the diagnoses, and became part of the standard set of symptoms. It became part of the therapy to elicit more and more alters.
The psychiatrists cast around for causes, and created a primitive, easily understood pseudo-Freudian aetiology of early sexual abuse, coupled with repressed memories. Knowing this was the cause, the patients obligingly retrieved the memories. More than that: this became a way to be a person.
H.4
This story can be placed in a five-part framework …
We have
(a) a classification, multiple personality, associated with what at the time was called a ‘disorder’, Multiple Personality Disorder’. This is the kind of person that is a moving target.
(b) the people, those people I call unhappy, unable to cope, or whatever relatively non-judgemental term you might prefer.
(c) institutions, which include clinics, annual meetings of the InternationalSociety for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation. Afternoon talk shows on American television – Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivaldo made a big thing of multiples, once upon a time. Weekend training programmes for therapists, some of which I attended.
(d) the knowledge, by which I do not mean justified true belief, once the mantra of analytic philosophers. I mean it more in Popper’s sense of conjectural knowledge, but more specifically, the presumptions that are taught, disseminated, refined, within the context of the institutions. Especially the basic facts (and I won’t say so-called facts, or ‘facts’ in scare- quotes). For example that multiple personality is caused by early sexual abuse, that 5% of the population suffer from multiple personality, and the like.
Knowledge is of two kinds that shade into each other. There is expert knowledge, the knowledge of the professionals, and there is popular knowledge that is shared by a significant part of the interested population. There was a time, partly thanks to those talk shows and other media, when ‘everyone’ believed that multiple personality was caused by early child abuse.
Finally there are (e) the experts or professionals who generate the knowledge (d), judge its validity, and use it in their practice. They work within (c) institutions that guarantee their legitimacy, authenticity, and status as experts. They study, try to help, or advise on the control, of the (b) people who are (a) classified as of a given kind.
Making up people and the looping effect are not solely a matter of interactions between names and the thing named, between what people are called and what they are, between kinds of people and people of that kind. All five of the elements listed – and more – are players, usually key players, in the interactions.
H.5
Multiple personality was renamed …
Dissociative Identity Disorder. Even that was no mere change in name, no mere act of diagnostic house-cleaning. Symptoms evolve, patients are no longer expected to come with a roster of altogether distinct personalities, and they don’t. This disorder is an example of what in a second book, Mad Travelers, I called a transient mental illness. Transient not in the sense of affecting a single person for a while and then going away, but in the sense of existing only at a time and at a place.
We now read of an autism epidemic and an obesity epidemic, just as we used to read about the multiple personality epidemic, and an epidemic of child abuse.
H.7
How does making up people take place?
They are driven by several engines of discovery. These are thought of as finding out the facts, but they are also engines for making up people. The first seven engines in this list are for discovery, ordered roughly according to the times at which they became effective. The eighth is an engine of practice, the ninth of administration, and the tenth is resistance to the knowers.
- Count!
- Quantify!
- Create Norms!
- Correlate!
- Medicalise!
- Biologise!
- Geneticise!
- Normalise!
- Bureacratise!
- Reclaim our identity!
