For our last week of the academic year, the final reading on the topic of "the self" was chapter 5, "Somaesthetics for the Normalized Body," from Cressida Heyes' Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics and Normalized Bodies (2007). We began with questions related to the text, then questions directed at thinking about the year of inquiry as a whole, and then moved on to discussion, where questions continued to arise.
Questions:
-are
Heyes' normative criteria too broadly figured (e.g., last sentence of p112)?
Can't they be specified on a case-by-case basis; the importance of the case
study (116)
-what are
we asking of Foucault when we're asking him for normative criteria; hearkening
back to reading Allen's book, the problem of normativity is implicit in
afoucault, so is Heyes successful at what she says she aims to do? How do the
ascts of her account fit together to do what she wants?
-the role
of pleasure and experience in a somaesthetic ethics: how does she square the
relatively mild suggestions for "care for self" with the limit
experiences that Foucault discusses? Do we lose the transformative potential of
pleasure if focusing on middle-range pleasures?
-is
somaesthetics a replacement for a more straightforward kind of normative
ethics; doesn't this already assume a set of substantive normative commitments?
-how is
yoga a good example of self-care when, as a response to biopower, it seems a
response that isn’t
sufficiently critical of economic conditions? Yoga is either co-optable or
already totally co-opted; would have been nice to have more attention to
Marxist work that addresses these features of any context for self-care.
To wrap
up the year:
-why are
self-transformation and freedom positive rather than deeply normatively
ambivalent? Practices may be both sources of un-freedom and freedom; how is he
not just a straightforward inheritor of the Enlightenment?
-might we
distinguish the scope of normativity as applied to judgements and, then, how
does a judgement function with respect to its object
-crypto-normativity
is ubiquitous to any claim, i.e., why is Foucault being criticized for doing
what anyone who inquires into a normative claim; if so, can we not avoid the
further claim that every inquiry is determinate with respect to its object? Why
expect Foucault to give a normative account? Why the turn to normative
somaesthetics? Aren't there better resources for positive normative projects?
Discussion:
-this
move to develop from Foucault renders Foucault in the first-person; the benefit
of Foucaultian analysis is the third-person; this project seems anachronistic
with respect to Foucault, seeing as Foucault is operating distinctly outside the
subjective frame; even in HSv2
(intro) experience is rendered in third-personal terms
-do we
need to ask Foucault to account for the normative presuppositions of his
objects of inquiry
-the
bigger problem is that we would be disappointed if we look to Foucault for
normative criteria
-if we
read Foucault as primarily giving a genealogical account as to how various
claims determine normativity; do we then have license to form some sort of
positive project out of these genealogical projects?
-is it appropriate
to ask Foucault to give a judgement about self-transformative practices, i.e.,
to say that they are freeing, i.e., good?
-the
genealogical account does not provide for us the normative criteria for the
amelioration of the problems that are specified therein
-what is
a good response, then, for first-order practitioners to normalization under
disciplinary power? It seems that, to the extent that disciplinary power acts
at the level of the individual body, the yoga practice as described might enable
the individual to become more resistant to domination, when this domination is
enacted through disciplinary practices.
-Yet,
these first-order concerns probably need to be held distinct from the
philosopher’s
(second-order?) account. Here Heyes is acting as parrhesiast, in describing
yoga practice, in addition to offering a general philosophical account; yet there
is a slippage between second- and first-order modalities of thought
One thread of discussion (per Colin's summary notes)...
ReplyDeleteDoes it help us to distinguish the scope of normativity (i.e., its universal scope) as applied to all judgments (or claims, or inquiries, or critiques) from the modal function of a judgment (or etc.) with respect to its object?
So, when critics (cf. Heyes 2005, 111, Allen 2008, 69, &c.) demand of Foucault a normative accounting, are they asking him to: a) account for the normative presuppositions of his normatively-laden inquiries and judgments, b) deliver an inquiry or judgment that offers normative guidance (usually in the form of criteria or principles) with respect to the object of judgment? To rephrase, are they asking: a) for an account of the normative status of terms like “prison” and “punishment” in D&P, or b) a judgment in D&P that normatively determines what we ought to do about prisons and punishment? Our sense is that it is often the latter (e.g., Heyes 2005, 111-112). If so, why this urge for Foucault to prescribe? Perhaps because it is thought by commentators that we can’t hold apart (a) and (b).
Here is why we might want to allow ourselves a distinction between (a) and (b). Given that all judgments make use of determinate (normative) content, this does not mean that every judgment is determining (normativizing) with respect to its object. The claim that “prisons are fraught” clearly makes use of normatively-laden concepts (like that of the prison) but that does not mean that this claim renders the prison determinate or gives it a particular normative valence—at least not in the way that, for example, the claim that “the prison system is unjust” is not only normatively-laden but also functions to specify a definite normative status. Foucault provides an account that leaves the prison deeply normatively ambivalent (i.e., thoroughly indeterminate).