The December 2018 issue of The History of the Human Sciences presents a collection of essays dedicated to understanding the historical, political, moral and aesthetic issues in totalizing projects of late modernity - ‘The Total Archive: Data, Identity, Universality.’ Here the issue’s editors, Boris Jardine and Matthew Drage, discuss the origins of the project and some of their ideas about the image and pragmatics of universal knowledge. Matthew Drage (MD): Boris, tell me a bit about how the idea for this special issue came about? Boris Jardine (BJ): I was visiting the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the History of Science (Berlin) in 2014, as part of the working group ‘Historicizing Big Data’ – but I was only at the MPI briefly, and when I was back in Cambridge I wanted to do something that drew on what I’d learnt there, involving some of the fantastic scholars I’d met. It seemed to me that the idea/reality of ‘The Archive/archives’ supervened

on notions of ‘data’, and that there were philosophical, ethical and historical issues around classification, privacy and knowledge that became pressing when the concept of ‘totality’ came into play. I was also talking to historians in different fields – economic history, history of bio-medicine, art history/aesthetics – and wanted to do something that connected those. With some colleagues I proposed a conference at CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) in Cambridge, which happened in March 2015. So this has been a while germinating! MD: I know might be is a slightly strange side of the story , but my recollection is that it was also connected to an art project that we were both involved in. BJ: Yes, ‘UA’, or ‘Elements of Religion’ as it was originally known. That was how I/we got to the idea of the aesthetics of totality, as a (quasi) religious idea. I wrote about that in the special issue of LIMN…

Matthew Drage is an artist, writer and postdoctoral researcher. He lately completed his PhD at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, and is now Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the History of Art, Science and Folk Practice, at the Warburg Institue, in the School of Advanced study, University of London. His first article from his PhD, Of mountains, lakes and essences: John Teasdale and the transmission of mindfulness, appeared in December 2018, as part of the HHS special issue, 'Psychotherapy in Europe,' edited by Sarah Marks. Here Matthew talks to Steven Stanley - Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, and Director of the Leverhulme-funded project, Beyond Personal Wellbeing: Mapping the Social Production of Mindfulness in England and Wales - about the article, and his wider research agenda on mindfulness in Britain and America.   Steven Stanley (SS): This article is your first publication based on your PhD research project, which you recently

completed. Congratulations! Can you tell us a bit about your PhD project? Matthew Drage (MD): Thank you! So yes, my PhD project was a combined historical and ethnographic project which focused on the emergence of “mindfulness” as a healthcare intervention in Britain and America since the 1970s. My main question was: why was mindfulness seen by its proponents as such an important thing to do? Why did they seek to promote it so actively and vigorously? I focused on a key centre for the propagation of mindfulness-based healthcare approaches in the West: the Center for Mindfulness in Health, Care and Society at the University of Massachuestts Medical Center. I also looked at the transmission of mindfulness from Massachusetts to Britain in the 1990s - this is an episode I narrate in the article. I had a real sense, when I did my fieldwork, archival research and oral history interviews, that for people who practice and teach it as their main…

This is the second part of a two-part interview, between Vanessa Rampton, Branco Weiss Fellow at the Chair of Practical Philosophy, ETH Zurich, and the anthropologist Tobias Rees, Director of the 'Transformations of the Human Program' at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, and author of the new monograph, After Ethnos (Duke). The discussion took place following a workshop on Rees's work at the Zurich Center for the History of Knowledge in 2017. You can read the first part of the interview here. 4. Uncertainty and/as Political Practice Vanessa Rampton (VR): I want to continue our conversation by asking you about the implications of foregrounding uncertainty and the ‘radical openness’ you mentioned earlier for aspects of life that are explicitly normative. Take politics, for example. Have you thought about the political implications of embracing uncertainty, and what could be necessary to facilitate communication, or participation, or what it is you think is important? Tobias Rees (TR): For me, the reconstitution

of uncertainty or ignorance is principally a philosophical and poetic practice. These concepts are not reducible to the political. But they can assume the form of a radical politics of freedom. VR: How so? TR: For a long time, in my thinking, I observed the classical distinction between the political as the sphere of values and the intellectual as the sphere of reason. And as such I could find politics important, a matter of passion, but I also found it difficult to relate my interest in philosophical and anthropological questions to politics. And I still think the effort to subsume all Wissenschaft, all philosophy, all art under the political is vulgar and destructive. However, over the years, largely through conversations with the anthropologist, Miriam Ticktin, I have learned to distinguish between a concept of politics rooted in values and a concept of politics rooted in the primacy of the intellectual or the artistic. I think that today we often encounter…

In his recent books, Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms (University of California Press, 2016) and After Ethnos (Duke University Press, 2018), the anthropologist Tobias Rees explores the curiosity required to escape established ways of knowing, and to open up what he calls “new spaces for thinking + doing.” Rees argues that acknowledging – and even embracing – the ignorance and uncertainty that underpin all forms of knowledge production is a crucial methodological part of that process of escape. In his account, doubt and instability are bound up with a radical openness that is necessary for breaking apart existing gaps and allowing the new/different to emerge - in the natural but also in the human sciences. But are there limits to such an embrace of epistemic uncertainty? How does this particular uncertainty interact with other forms of uncertainty, including existential uncertainties that we experience as vulnerable human beings? And how does irreducible epistemic uncertainty

relate to ethical claims about how to live a good life? What is the relation of a radical political practice of freedom with art? After a workshop on his work at the Zurich Center for the History of Knowledge in 2017, Vanessa Rampton, Branco Weiss Fellow at the Chair of Practical Philosophy, ETH Zurich, explored these themes with Rees.   1. The Human Vanessa Rampton (VR): Tobias, your recent work aims to destabilize and question common understandings of the human. I wonder how you would place your work in relation to other engagements with ‘selfhood’ within the history of philosophy, and the history of the human sciences more widely. Because there are so many ways of thinking of the self – for example the empirical, bodily self, or the rational self, or the self as relational, a social construct – that you could presumably draw on. But I also know that you want to move beyond previous attempts to capture the nature and meaning…