Tuomo Tiisala’s Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons: Elaborating Foucault’s Pragmatism – Introduction and Chapter 1

Questions

1. P. 8, s. 1 – What does it mean to assert autonomy as an ethical autonomy in a Sellarsian-Brandomian framework? Why is it ethical?

2. Why is structural heteronomy a problem?

3. P. 8, s. 1.1. – Autonomy = rational control over implicit norms? If that is the case, what are the implications of that for Foucault?

4. P. 20ff. – Semantic self-consciousness as an ideal – what does this account presuppose about what/who can achieve it (issue of ableism)? Is this view implicitly hierarchical?

5. P. 19, s. 1.4 – Is there a commitment to a transcendental minimum that is actualizable through training? Transcendental anthropology?

6. P. 16, s. 1.1 – Conceptual coordination vs. non-conceptual coordination (language – conceptual – nonconceptual)

7. Possibilities for autonomy – do they entail inherent privilege?

8. P. 8, s. 1 – Autonomy/Rationality <–> Bedrock of a discursive practice

                   Individuality (I-Thou)                    Sociality (I-We)

Discussion

P. 2 – Tiisala’s discussion of archaeology vs. genealogy: does it imply archaeology as a non-historical methodology? For example, is his view of archaeology close to Agamben’s ontologizing reading of archaeology in The Signature of All Things: On Method? 

Historical A priori – it is formal but, doesn’t Foucault creates it as an explanatory element or methodological invention? Nonetheless, it seems Tiisala reads it in a more robust way (non-formal), especially considering the setting limits of intelligibility. 

Important: “The pivotal idea at the heart of this book is that discourse is a social practice whose conceptual rules are by default implicit and therefore unknown to the participating subjects whose discursive possibilities they nonetheless shape.” Role for philosophy: disclose rules to attain conceptual mastery (or, a weaker claim: reflexive rationality).

Rational self-control (epistemic) vs autonomy (ethical) – how are these related? 

Argument 1 – Autonomy is the ideal we want.

Argument 2 – This autonomy needs to be understood as an ethical ideal and not an epistemic one.

Tiisala – he claims that he wants to bring out the ethical (political?) underpinnings or entailments of an account of conceptual mastery and self-consciousness à la Sellars-Brandom. But if this is the case, then he would have to respond to political objections regarding what is is presupposed by this view (for example: ableism, colonialism and other supremacies).

Is critique itself expressive of rational self-control/autonomy or preparatory (does it help us to get there)? In this view it would have to be the first because autonomy is being defined as rational self-control but this is a good philosophical question…

Tiisala has limited his account to discursive practical autonomy but it appears that there is a more fundamental practical autonomy that is not being discussed. 

Is Foucault only interested in making explicit the discursive rules of statements? What about the non-discursive elements? Is Foucault going to map conceptual—non-conceptual distinctions in the same way?

Normativity                                                                                         Non-normative

Practical                                                                                               Non-practical

Conceptual                                  Conceptual/Nonconceptual??        Non-conceptual

(1) Speaking/Language   |      (2) Gesturing/Dancing/Throwing     |   (3) Breathing

                                                     Imprisonment/Dressage

For Brandom (and presumably Tiisala), (2) is not conceptual, but what about Foucault? Is it the case that (2) are also conceptual, even if not linguistic/semantic? Is there a form of self-consciousness that is not linguistic/semantic but conceptual/normative and, therefore, is not collapsed onto (3)?

Matthieu Queloz, "Revealing Social Functions through Pragmatic Genealogies"

Questions: 

1. How is pragmatic genealogy related to ideal theory? (p. 202)
2. How is pragmatic genealogy related to metaphysics? – Is it an anti-realist or realist project about the concepts under analysis? 
3. Deidealization of needs – how do we do this? (p. 202)
4. Pragmatic genealogies as the fulfillment of needs or self-preservation – Is this fulfilment adequately understood as problem solving? Is survival a problem to be solved? (p. 208)
5. Are pragmatic genealogies a fictional genealogy? 
6. What is pragmatic genealogy for? (p. 210) What is the point? To appreciate the function vis-à-vis self-effacing functionality? What’s the role of self-effacing functionality?
7. Is this the best use of genealogy? What do we gain? 
8. What conception of normativity is operating here? 
9. Worries about the eclecticism 
10. Needs as a route to packing necessity into genealogy (?)
11. What’s the concept of a function? 

Discussion: 

• Functionalist philosophy of social science – “functional approaches in the social sciences” (p. 206) [Q11]
• A function satisfies a problem: “creatures in the state of nature would need to solve a certain problem” (p. 207) [Q4]
• “[pragmatic genealogy] shows how this array of needs issues in the need to solve a particular practical problem” (p. 201)
•   Problems in pragmatism (logical – indeterminacy, semantic – vagueness) 
• Is problem the right way to articulate basic survival or fulfilment of needs? [Q4]
• Highly-inflated conception of need
• What about the non-fulfilment of needs? – suicide, dying for a cause, etc. 
• Rationality assumed in needs/function
• “It presents a particular bundle of dispositions, concepts, institutions, or conventions as a solution to this practical problem, thus indicating that given their needs, it would be rational for these creatures to move into a state in which this particular bundle was operative.” (p. 201)
• Instrumental rationality – means-ends (?)
• Do practical needs necessarily involve instrumental rationality?
• What is “particular sociohistorical configurations of society” (p. 201) 
• Inferring de-idealized needs that follow from initial starting assumption 
• De-idealization (p. 202) 
• “The model is then de-idealized towards our actual situation by successively factoring in further needs: needs entailed by the initial needs the model started out with, but also, as in Williams’s case, needs factored into the model based on what we know about the actual history, sociology, and psychology of human beings.” (p. 202)
• Williams' de-idealization involves taking-up historical cases (p. 204) 
• Unlike Foucault, Queloz is generating a transcendental ontology with certain essentialist components 
• Basic needs – move up to localities
• Why is the movement from an idealized model to deidealized rather than generalizing deidealized to find the model?
• Formulation of ideal a priori (?) 
• Why is pragmatic genealogy the better methodology for articulating needs?
• At least for concepts – such as Truthfulness, Accuracy, Sincerity
• Metaphysics – [Q3]
•   Transcendental function – a priori needs
• Have we used a modal metaphysics to generate the essential needs? – Yes
• Where can we fault this on pragmatic terms?
• Internal criticism of Queloz – does it do everything we would want? 
• Normative limits 
• This is an example of vindicatory genealogy (?) – how does pragmatic genealogy subvert?

What’s outside of Pragmatic Genealogy? 

• Non-needs (contingencies)

• Non-functional explanations

• Contingent psychological features of persons

• Subjective purposes

• Methodologically – how do we

Can he address the “further needs” and the contingencies within a pragmatic genealogy? 

Amy Allen, “Dripping with Blood and Dirt from Head to Toe: Marx’s Genealogy of Capitalism in Capital, Volume 1”

We began, as is our custom, with questions:

1.        Is there a role for nature (metabolic shift, environmental consequences) as an object of inquiry in the genealogy that Amy Allen is developing?  If so, would this impinge the vindicatory aspects of genealogy?

2.        Why is there not an aspect of subjectivation in Allen’s account of Marx’s genealogy?  What would adding it bring in or offer?

3.        How does a genealogical account of Marxism square with a historically materialist methodology?  Is Allen’s account able to understand social relations in terms of historically-specific material relations (yet not posited as transhistorical laws)?

4.        What work is done by the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘historical’ in this analysis (cf. 484)?  Can we read this in terms of the distinction between ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’?

5.        Marx’s genealogy is presented as explaining capitalism as a bundle of practices—this appears to be subversive.  How do we get from an explanation of an object (capitalism) to a justification of a process (historical process)?

6.        Is the empirical style of genealogy compatible with a more teleological (though not ‘crude teleology’) account focused on ‘historical necessity’?

7.        What is the object of analysis for Marx in his genealogy?  A series of distinctions operative here includes unilinear-v-multilinear and necessary-v-contingent.  Is a mode of analysis that begins with an economic/materialist starting point consistent with multilinearity and contingency?

8.        How can we best make sense of the idea of genealogical necessity?

9.        What does genealogy get from a presentation of Marx as a genealogist that genealogy does not already have?  What does Marxism get from a presentation of Marx as a genealogy that Marxism does not already have?

 

We then turned to discussion:

Let’s begin by focusing on the object of inquiry.  Allen writes, “genealogical argument that takes capitalism as its object” (471).  We tend to see Marx’s analysis as taking capitalism not so much as the object of inquiry but as the concept that Marx’s analysis produces.

What kind of analysis does Allen present Marx as offering?  “This line of argument tends to conflate multilinearity with necessity” (483).  On Allen’s line multilinearity does not entail contingency, but is consistent with an “internal logic of necessity.”

This involves “a conception of necessity more restricted in scope” (483), one involving “multiple historical trajectories, [and that] nonetheless claims historical inevitability for the specific historical trajectory” (483).

§1: Allen reads Marx as saying that primitive accumulation is linked to the theory of surplus labor.  (Is this link one of necessity or of sufficiency?)

               Is this a Foucauldian emergence analysis?  Or an origins story?

 

We see two key moments/concepts:

Necessity:

“His ambivalent genealogy is embedded in a vindicatory historical arc.  In the arc, however, what is vindicated is not capitalism per se, but rather the historical process in which capitalism is embedded” (481).

               It’s not a universal historical trajectory, but

               the historical inevitability of a specific historical trajectory (483).

“Quoting Marx: Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation” (483).

How does necessity or historical inevitability get established?

               Empirically?

               Functionally, as in practical necessity?

               Logically, or Metaphysically?

The answer to this question remains opaque to us.

 

Vindication:

The necessity itself is what vindicates, as a kind of redemption.

Erlenbusch-Anderson and Koopman, On Empirical Genealogy

Questions: (1) What is the index for tracking power? How do you track power within archival material? (2) How capable is genealogy in tracking in the beneficiaries of power? (3) How does genealogy exercise caution? (4) How does genealogy perform a “transformative enactment”? How does empirical work enable/facilitate “transformative enactment?” If in the false starts, how do we recognize a false start, etc.? (5) (p. 9) How does the experimental aspect of genealogy relate to possibilizing and/or to reconstruction? (6) How does a genealogical reliance on (or work on) public archives constitute the work? Does this change in the face of digitalization? (7) Are there norms for genealogy’s empirical inquiry? Discussion ensued: We began with question 2 (beneficiaries of power): —The concern is that we don’t have an answer to this, then we might fall into an uncritical framework. —Does it need to be localized? But what if it is global? —How are we thinking about power? How do you think of power for it to make sense in terms of beneficiaries? —Power is the conduct of conduct (though Foucault moved to talking about power to talking about government; also political rationalities). —To what extent do we think about power through the lens of subjectivation? Seems the subject is key as a way of getting into the inquiry. Power/knowledge can only get a grip when its presumed to be mapped onto someone/something. —What about thinking in terms of experience (M.F. “focal points of experience")? —What about subjectivity in terms of action? Shape what we can do as knowers and political actors in the world. —Seems intuitive that archivally and empirically it is easier to get a hold on how knowledge is operating rather than power, though when we think of savoir it is not easy to track knowledge. Cherry-picking: —Questions about how to periodize a project and the interests that drive you to do a project. —Omissions vs. selection questions —Foucault is doing something different from philosophers on the one hand, and historians on the other hand. He is trying to develop a politics of method that historians are ill-equipped to handle. He had a critical view of the human sciences (as techniques of biopower/normalizing discourse). Trying to do oppositional work as a humanist and social scientist. He is doing something that is different from historians. How does archival work change in the face of digitalization? Privatization of archives? —How does an archive get constructed and how do we construct an archive while keeping in mind the gaps? —Archive in a Foucauldian sense are the rules of intelligibility that makes statements intelligible. How is empirical genealogy a transformative enactment? Relation to transformation to experimentation? —The object of transformation is Kantian critique —Empiricism is not a clean process viz. empiricism (necessity of failure). —How do we acknowledge the transformative dimension of genealogy (i.e., that it changes us) dimension without falling into a “deconstructive vortex”. Does Genealogy falsify? —Falsifies narratives and real effects we take to be obvious. —There is a reality that Foucault is tracking that is the present effect of its own history (and we can trace that archive in a way that challenges interpretations/configurations, etc.,). —Not falsifying the documents though.

On Daniele Lorenzini’s “Critique and Possibilizing Genealogy,” chapter 5 of The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault

Questions

1. (p. 109ff) Genealogy’s normative force: in its framework for action, in its we-make, how does genealogy commit us (normatively)?

2. (p. 109) Game of Truth (genealogy) – Regime of truth (commitment to form)

3. (p. 38) What does genealogy possibilize that was not previously possible?

4. (p. 110) Where should we read counter-conduct exemplars (textual and philosophical status)?

5. Parrhesia – speaking truth to power and its perlocutionary power as ethico-political force. What about instances in genealogy where there is no speech (or silence), non-linguistic forms that also operate as a force of resistance? Also: what about non-disclosive force (disclosive authenticity)?

6. (p. 118) A “we” without a “they” – can Lorenzini speak about “a counter-hegemonic we” without naming a “hegemonic they”? How are we to understand this commitment which nonetheless remains indeterminate (or, in some structural way, open)?

7. (p. 112) Insofar as they are normative, the possibilities that genealogy excavates: either no determinacy or they do, but then there is a need to establish continuity between past and present (continuity objection – Smyth) – it is not clear that you can get sufficient continuity out of possibility. 

8. (p. 114ff) Generates, constitutes, incites a “we” – how?

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Lorenzini ends by claiming that Wendy Brown’s objection to Foucault regarding his tacit assumption of the givenness of the desire for freedom can be answered by his account (p. 124). But does it? Can it explain why people are attached to their own subjection?

What is possibilizing? – It involves looking at legacies of resistance or counter-conducts but it is strong: it involves identification and commitment (it commits us to action). It sounds like ethos, like character. It has to do with a practical possibility and not necessarily a metaphysical one.

Parrhesia is a concept specific to the category of pastoral power specifically but Lorenzini uses it to describe aspects or elements that may not be part of that specifically. 

Two readings of the commitment and continuity – “they did, we can do it” or “we are them, therefore it's a possibility”. 

How is the binding to the commitment or we take place? It seems that it is not psychological but practical. How does action come into play? And are readers committed already and come for guidance or is the commitment produced as one reads?

What could be the mechanism? – People read books and sometimes they supply them with reasons for acting in a certain way. We get a formal identification with the “we” of resistors and we struggle with that “we”. Is it like this? Two further questions: (1) does genealogy do that particularly well or does e.g. literature do it better? And (2) is that the thing that genealogy does well? 

Lorenzini has a strong view that genealogy produces the normative force: it “derives its capacity to constitute a concrete framework for action (a transhistorical “we”) allowing genealogy itself to answer the question “Why resist” by generating a sense of ethico-political commitment in its audience” (p. 117).

Prinze and Raekstad, Genealogy and Political Philosophy

Prinz, Janosch, and Paul Raekstad. 2020. "The value of genealogies for political philosophy." Inquiry 67, no. 7, 2084-2103.

Discussion Questions:

1. What are the differences between genealogy and ideology critique?

2. What's the difference between Williams's "imaginary" genealogy and ideal theory?

3. How does Geuss's method differ from Foucault's? (Causality: many -> one).

4. Do genealogy's presuppositions reproduce colonial reasoning? Is genealogy only possible within a Western/colonial ontology?

5. Is Geuss conducting a paradigm study? If so, how is this genealogy?

6. Can explanations provide justifications? When and where is normativity?

How do we understand "ideology?" Well, people have critiqued the Marxian theory of ideology because it already has normative content. For Marxists, ideology is not just a system of coherent views that induce certain kinds of conduct, but conduct that works against interest of the agent holding said ideology and serving the interests of a ruling stratum/class. Classical ideology critique also makes a claim to reality, which is distorted by ideological beliefs. Genealogy makes no claim to a reality it attempts to disambiguate in the classic sense. 

In many ways, ideology becomes an artifice which must be subjected to analysis. 

Ideal theory as ideology? Idealizations not only abstract important factors, but adds too much unrealistic capabilities (O'Neill and Mills). Williams isn't doing ideal theory in his imaginary genealogy because he's committed to philosophical naturalism. Rawls and Cohen are offering a "structural model." For the latter, they rely on "noumenal selves" which are stripped down to have a strict sense of justice at the expense of other motivations. 

What's the point of Williams's imaginary genealogy as far as its practical value? Williams wants to consider how and why people would come to value truth and truthfulness, regardless of what that concept of truth looks like.

Geuss is more concerned with tracking the contingency of concepts, but is he actually doing "genealogy"? Geuss wants us to see how political concepts actually play out in the real world. Rawls formulates political concepts without power, where Geuss and Foucault are always attentive to the relationship between political concepts and power. 

Why do we need to show the historical development of concepts/practices? What does the "development" do in uprooting the necessity of such concepts/practices. Development could mean simply succession of events, or things "evolving" in a unitary trajectory. 

"Cartesian coordinate metaphor." Geuss seems to see how concepts (e.g., public/private) have appeared and been invoked throughout Western history.

Geuss seems to be an "idealist," because he's concerned with concepts, and not necessarily how they're tied to practices. Does Geuss begin from a problem or from a certainty? Geuss's method seems to be deflationary, because he's trying to displace the importance of established political concepts. Geuss doesn't have a methodologically specified "genealogy." He's more doing a history of ideas. 

Amy Allen's decolonial/postcolonial critique of critical theory. Does genealogy recapitulate colonial epistemologies? Doesn't that presuppose that concepts/ideas were motives for colonization?

Can we do genealogy critically? Particularly in the context of racial and gendered domination? 

Santiago Castro-Gómez at the Critical Genealogies Collaboratory

We were honored to be joined by Santiago Castro-Gómez, who was invited to give a Philosophy Colloquium address (where he discussed his account of "transmodern republicanism") and to have a public discussion with undergraduate students. This also took place in the context of the symposium Decolonial Perspectives on the Becoming of Our Present, organized in his honor by Cintia Martínez Velasco, Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez, and Alejandro Vallega at the University of Oregon.

The CGC read “Latin American Philosophy as Critical Ontology of the Present: Themes and Motifs for a 'Critique of Latin American Reason'” and the interview that was published as an appendix to Critique of Latin American Reason, where Castro-Gómez revises his philosophical journey.

QUESTIONS

1. If critique is not being governed in this way, by these people; does a critical ontology of the present involve/presuppose a normative commitment that is implicit in the non-normative ontology?

2. Technologies of social control to create the Latin American intellectual (p. 72). What is the relation between opacity and a critical ontology of the present?

3. Critical ontology of the present involves a detachment from the sovereign model of power. However, SCG uses it in relation to processes of nationalization. How do we understand the relation of subjectivation and the nation today?

4. How does the “nation” operate as a concept?

5. Peripheral modernity (p. 69) – what is its relation to  “imagined communities” and technologies of writing? How do we understand it?

6. Considering Castro-Gómez’s move from “history of ideas” to “genealogy of practices," how do we define “practice”? How do we conduct inquiry into practices? 

1. Exemplar for us? Or in SCG’s work?

2. Research strategies? – Building an archive?

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-

Nation as a concept. In Latin America (19th century) building a nation was a task of the State (Spanish speakers; property-owners, who behaved like “civilized people”). Produce a community of people around language as a language of the nation and who could read and write in the proper was (“citizens”) who could obey the law and norms. 

Today: multinational/plurinational states – ex. Bolivia, Spain. Much more difficult task.

Arendt – nation vs State: in every location there are multiple identities (nations) vs legal regimes (State). Even in a multinational context, does the State overrule. Problem of the stateless: not part of the nation and not captured by the State.

There are other conceptions; for example, the State is expressing the values of the nation (volk) in Germany. 

Community of identity = expression of belonging, destiny? And in that sense, construction of modernity. Contrary to Asian culture where belonging is linked, eg, to dynasties. 

What about nations without States? For example, the Kurds.

Processes of nationalization

Processes of citizen-cifiation?

Both processes of inclusion and exclusion – Writing, and also administration. 

Oppressed people sometimes explain their commonality in terms of “nation” (and a reclaiming of that) but as a counter-conduct, resistance to the State.

Issue of translation: nations cannot be translated into another. This connects to the issue of opacity: what if we think of translation and the right to opacity (for example, the deaf community refusing technologies of legibility). Resistance to “full legibility” or “transparency”.

Do we see counter-conducts as sufficient for normativity? – Resisting power in this way is/is not a positive articulation or a new vision or a new practice. 

Counter-conduct presupposes some kind of normativity? – There has to be a positive notion of what you want to be (not only what you do not want). Counter-conducts presuppose normativity. Decolonial theory or Foucault do not give us a positive view of how to live without dispositifs. 

Can we think of a positive in terms of symmetry? – If genealogy of power = genealogy of practices, then do we need the same for normative: practices of a normative vision?

Ethical vs political normativity – ethical view is incapable for providing something beyond an ethical duty and participating in the political struggle and the building of power. Does there need to be, in some way, a grasp of power? How not to fall in the vices of previous forms of power?

Could we find minimal values shared by everyone? Values that do not depend on cultures or nations for the sake of fighting power. There is something that we all share (humans and non-humans) – vulnerability; not death. We can have a positive view of politics in this way by looking at the past and finding it. 

Maybe this could be thought of through the idea of ability/disability and how that is not ontological but produced and within political frameworks.

A possibility would be expanding the view of counter-conduct: what if practices of resistance (negative) are also simultaneously a practice that bring for a (positive) form of life. This could relate Foucault to a vision of “concrete utopianism” (Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz). 

How do we seek compliance with others that will not accept the new vision or the new form of life that is imagined? – How to seek compliance to the goals we have designed?

We fave forgotten to consider “universalizability” as a commitment we accept even if it is not exhaustible. We could, in this context, adopt different values like equality or vulnerability. There is this loss in Foucault: it is not the universal as such (Habermas, transcendental) but a commitment to it. 

We should remember that normativity has to do with the body (Foucault in volumes 2 and 3 of History of Sexuality) – for example, dietetics. But he still thinks of individual bodies with special characteristics. Could we think of this in more universal terms? The body itself without the particularity of the self; could we universalize something shared by any living thing and that is not anthropocentric? Maybe: care; is this an ethics of care? Could this be “love”? “Interdependence of the living”?

How to study practices? – Action that is governed by rules. Breathing vs yoga (in the latter you have norms and this may be unconscious). 

How to do a genealogy of practices? – Past practices: resources of a historian. However there is an opacity: you do not know if people actually behaved like the manuals enforced. Role of testimony?

To study practices of the present: resources of the anthropologists/ethnographer. It is necessary to build an archive from many sources (newspapers, magazines).