In the Work that she presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 7 March 2013, in Galloway, New Jersey, Sassen most tellingly began her keynote with a reflection on method. She spoke of “Before Method.” She spoke of the need to step back, and suspend our extant methods. Emergent social orders, or what she called, in her massive and transformational text Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, the emergence of new (...) assemblages, requires that we rethink our old categories, or that we try to assess their usefulness or allow ourselves to countenance their obsolescence. The “before method,” and the invitation to step back, to bracket, or to .. (shrink)

A Dialogue between American pragmatists in the Deweyan tradition and Saskia Sassen is profitable in at least two ways. First, Sassen’s call for “analytic tactics” might be understood in terms of Dewey’s understanding of “soft method.” Second, Sassen is a model of the publicly engaged scholar, not only because she lives the work but also because she connects theory and empirical research in ways that are necessary if we are to follow the Deweyan call to philosophers to address social problems (...) rather than problems internal to philosophy. In her Coss Dialogue Lecture, Saskia Sassen argues for “analytic tactics,” tactics that work while we temporarily suspend method so that we might destabilize stable meanings. We .. (shrink)

Sassen is Interested in what she terms “conceptually subterranean trends” that are for the most part invisible to current analytical methods but visible, or in her words, “legible,” to other, newer sorts of analytical tools that she herself is developing. She thus emphasizes suspension of accepted methods and development of certain “analytic tactics” that function, as she puts it, “before method.” What this means more specifically is that she is not so much analyzing the structures of existing institutions but instead (...) pursuing a more functional approach, that is, seeking to determine how they are assembled, dis-assembled, and re-assembled. Her focus is thus on the making of non-material conditions, that is, their .. (shrink)

Hickman situates Dewey’s critique of technological culture within the debates of 20th-century Western philosophy by engaging the work of Richard Rorty, Albert Borgmann, Jacques Ellul, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Martin ...

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