Alexander Stingl

Alexander Stingl, (born November 10, 1976) is a German science author, researcher, and translator in the field of Science Studies. Born in Nuremberg, Germany. He received his Magister Artium in 2005 and his PhD in scoiology in 2008 at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Alexander Stingl studied sociology, philosophy, American studies, empirical social research, and economics, before he eventually turned to the interdisciplinary field of science studies.
His research interests are the history of the life and cognitive sciences since Kant, the history and complementary treatments of ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity-disorder), and discourses of biomedical ethics and justice in modern democracies.
His scholarly work includes some 30 scholarly articles, two books, and several conference papers.
He is the co-founder of brain@culture.mind, a forum for discussion and informnation surrounding the bio-civics debate, he is also co-founder and current editor of Pompeii, a journal dedicated to the publication of junior scholars.
Bio-Civics Debate
The bio-civics debate is a discourse that spans various disciplines and subjects. According to Stingl, who coined the term biocivics in an essay titled "The ADHD-regime and neurochemical selves in a whole system perspective", it aims at the reconciliation of two levels of Lebensfuehrung (a term used prominently in the work of Max Weber to describe the way life can and should be lead) or active and voluntary control of one's life-course: bios and ethos, or the autonomous control over the development of one's biological organism and the autonomous decisions in regard to one's moral and social values.
Following Michel Foucault, Stingl argues that this can be achieved by creating an attitude of critical participation in the moral and knowledge economies in modern societies, as discussed by Paul Rabinow, Nikolas Rose, Susan Pickering and others, and summarized under Focuault's concepts of governmentality, biopolitics, and biopower, and Focuault's understanding of enlightenment, critique and parrhesia.
Stingl makes the case that the key to creating bio-civics as a positive aspect of our societies lies in reforming the system of education, from kindergarten to university. The future of higher education and the humanities and liberal arts in particular, he says, lies in producing active information brokers who have learned tools to facilitate a translation and mediation between expert discourses in science, legislators and the concerned public. In his perspective, the trend towards hyperspecialization has only produced experts but not mediators. The bio-civics debate, which is Stingl's name for the debate that arose implicitly between various disciplines and scholars, because of this apparent lack of mediation and translation on the one hand, and on the other hand the debate is a result of several unresolved conceptual issues, left over from several glosses and theory-political exclusions in the history of Western life sciences from 1800 to 1950. As a result, modern health discourses are stuck between a physical reductionist perspective, including the current school of "operational diagnostics", and a wild bunch of "alternative medicine"-visions. Neither satisfies the necessary complementary perspective that allows for an integration of diagnostic-therapeutic practices and individual life-course. The resolution of the bio-civics debate will eventually lead to the complementary re-integration of social/political, medical/scientific and environmental perspectives in the discourse of the general public. Enlightenment, Stingl argues with Kant, will not become a reality but in one form or the other a regulative ideal in modern society.

Interpretative Analytics of Knowledge Regimes and Micro-Climatology of Truths
Integrating the methodological lessons of Foucault's discourse analysis, Rabinows anthropology, Henrich's constellation research, Habermas' discourse theory, Oevermann's objective hermeneutics, and Latour's actor-network-theory, Alex Stingl has created a sophisticated model of an analytical toolbox that allows the reconstruction of regimes of knowledge production on a spatial/temporal macro-level on the one hand and local micro-climates of truth on the other. His most important conceptual resource seems to be Foucault's distinction in discourse analysis and discursive analysis, while the the main separation of factors that he hopes to isolate in his work are positive and creative factors of knowledge/truth production, which he sums up under the term enablements that are comprised of conceptual relations and epistemological vernaculars, on the side the negative factors or exclusions, he names constraints, are facilitated by individuals, bureaucracies and organisations.
Works
The Biological Vernacular from Kant to James, Weber, and Parsons (2009)
The book is an account of the genealogy of the scientific dialect that is the biological vernacular. It is using a combination of methods from discourse analysis, constellation research and latent meaning structure analysis to analyze a specific truth regime or assembly of knowledge production.
In the 18th century the physiological sciences entered a time of crisis. New developments and discoveries had rendered the existing theoretical language inefficient to cope with experimental progress. In the epistemology of Immanuel Kant, biology found a theoretical language that could help overcome these boundaries. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, psychology and physiology began to drift apart and it was in this critical phase that the language of the “social” emerged between Ralph W. Emerson, Rudolf Hermann Lotze, William James, Alexander Meiklejohn and others. They spoke a scientific dialect or epistemological vernacular that emerged from Kantianism in the form of a teleomechanist program in biology, experimental psychology and industrial physiology . In Germany and France in the late 19th and early 20th century Max Weber, Georg Simmel and Emile Durkheim worked within an equivalent vernacular and their theory-building was a productive result of the semantic perquisites it offered. In the 1930s, the social sciences entered into a crisis with as many sociologies and as many theoretical languages as there were individual sociologists. Talcott Parsons became the most prominent of a group of scholars who made the effort of working on a common language.
In the conclusion, Stingl shows that as an enunciation system Talcott Parsons’ theoretical language continually reflects its origin in the biological vernacular. Parsons, in this account, was not a creative genius behind a grand theory, instead he was enabled by the discourse towards enunciating ideas that were supposed to be translatable, for they were formed in the same vernacular, while this discourse was at the same time constrained by the politics of networks and institutions.
Aufklaerung als Flaschenpost oder Anthropologie und Geschichte der Gegenwart.
Horkheimers und Adornos Immanente Kritik und Foucaults Interpretative Analytik. (2009)
(The Enlightenment as a Message in a Bottle or an Anthropology of the Present. Immanent Critics versus Interpretative Analytics in Adorno, Horkheimer and Foucault.)
This comparative study investigates the genealogy and structure of the concept of enlightenment in the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer as exponents of the Frankfurt School in comparison with the concept in the work of Michel Foucault. It applies a unique interpretation matrix and a combination of discourse-analysis with latent meaning structure analysis. According to this account, Adorno and Horkheimer continually mixed three different concepts of enlightenment in their publications and lectures. Michel Foucault, on the other hand, applied a coherent programmatic concept of enlightenment that he had found in between Kant, Nietzsche, Karl Jaspers and Rene Char.
It is concluded that the inconsistencies of the enlightenment concept in the Frankfurt School’s program render their critical method of immanent criticism impractical in the face of their claim of exposing total ideologies. While Foucault’s claim of “merely correcting existing views” is a pragmatic application of his interpretation of Kant’s concept of enlightenment as an attitude and gesture.
Bibliography
Stingl, Alexander (2009 forthcoming)
The Biological Vernacular in Kant, James, Weber and Parsons
Lampeter, Mellen Press
Stingl, Alexander (2009 forthcoming)
"The ADHD Regime and neurochemicals in a whole systems perspective"
Kopnina H, Keune H (editors) Health and Environment Nova Science Publishers, New York
Stingl, Alexander (2009)
Aufklaerung als Flaschenpost oder Anthropologie und Geschichte der Gegenwart.
Horkheimers und Adornos Immanente Kritik und Foucaults Interpretative Analytik
Saarbruecken, VDM Verlag

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