Some thoughts at In the Middle. A couple of excerpts
Sometimes when I have a lecture or essay to compose I sit at my computer, open a word processing program, and write. The words flow because I’ve done enough thinking in advance that I’m ready to go. More typically, though, I open multiple windows of electronic notes on the e-desktop while surrounding my laptop with a collection of printed outlines and drafts (usually blue with my inked annotations) as well as physical notebook thick with ideas, odd sentences, and even full paragraphs…
Although a technophile, I’ve never found a satisfying electronic platform for capturing thoughts and keeping notes. I’ve tried everything from simple and easily searchable text documents to various programs that look and feel like physical notebooks to workflow software (most recently, this one — but, meh).
As I’ve said before, I increasingly use Evernote as my main notebook. This is on my desktop, laptop, Blackberry and iPad, so I can access things wherever I am. I like the way I can email stuff to this – so I forward a lot of stuff there as a way of filing it; you can clip a webpage directly to it; and I have ‘to do’ lists; lists of books I want; lists of books I’ve ordered so I can make sure I actually get them – especially useful when I order books in recompense for review work that haven’t been published, and I order a lot of books; lists of books I’ve read; things to get from the library; etc. You can set up ‘notebooks’ and drop individual notes into them, or even automate this when you email stuff. I have notebooks for most papers or books I’m working on, and other things. I keep working notes for Society and Space in here, instead of the old paper notebook – as we have a collaborative working practice, I need to keep a note of which co-editors have commented on a new paper, or one back from referees, or something else, and it’s really handy for this. I’m sure there is loads more you can do with it.
I do take notes on paper, but usually type them up fairly soon afterwards. And I have notebooks that I take to conferences, workshops or meetings where typing looks like you are doing something else… But eventually most things find their way into an electronic file. Of course, if Dropbox or Evernote went bust, I might be in trouble…
The result of a twenty five years inquiry, it offers a positive version to the question raised, only negatively, with the publication, in 1991, of ”We have never been modern”: if ”we” have never been modern, then what have ”we” been? From what sort of values should ”we” inherit? In order to answer this question, a research protocol has been developed that is very different from the actor-network theory. The question is no longer only to define ”associations” and to follow networks in order to redefine the notion of ”society” and ”social” (as in ”Reassembling the Social”) but to follow the different types of connectors that provide those networks with their specific tonalities. Those modes of extension, or modes of existence, account for the many differences between law, science, politics, and so on. This systematic effort for building a new philosophical anthropology offers a completely different view of what the ”Moderns” have been and thus a very different basis for opening a comparative anthropology with the other collectives – at the time when they all have to cope with ecological crisis. Thanks to a European research council grant (2011-2014) the printed book will be associated with a very original purpose built digital platform allowing for the inquiry summed up in the book to be pursued and modified by interested readers who will act as co-inquirers and co-authors of the final results. With this major book, readers will finally understand what has led to so many apparently disconnected topics and see how the symmetric anthropology begun forty years ago can come to fruition.
