Thursday, December 5, 2013

Foucault, "N,G,H" (1971)

CGC's final meeting of Fall term began, as per usual, with questions...

* What is the value or gain of the focus on discontinuity?  Why is discontinuity important?  Why does Foucault want a history "without constants" (p. 380)?  Why does it matter?  Foucault throughout this piece writes in favor of breaking up continuities.  Why?

* If we read this work as a critique of history as a colonial science (narrative of progress, etc.), can we read Foucault's project as a decolonial project?

* Foucault writes of the body (p. 375) and health and physiology and of genealogy as a "curative science" (p. 382).

* For MF, genealogy seeks "not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardous play of dominations" (p. 376).

* MF writes of interpretation and violence (p. 378), and this raises the question of the status of the idea of interpretation in MF's genealogy.

* Related to the last two, is the emphasis on dominations, conflicts, and subjugations a way of seeking an analytics of power that would not be entirely restricted to an analytics of discourse?

* What is MF's relation to FN here?

Discussion then ensued...

Foucault develops a contrast between "sens l'histoire" (history as an object of sense; distanced) and "sens historique" (sense as historically arising, variable, etc.).

Foucault's conception of history seems anti-essentialist throughout (cf. p. 371 on metaphysics and essence). But what is the justification for this?  Is this because essentialism is 'known to be false'?  Or is its motivation ethical and political?  If the latter, is Foucault "anti-essentialist" or is he just "non-essentialist"?  If he is "non-essentialist" how is this politically relevant?  Is the view that once power gets its grip on (and through the support of) constants, invariants, and universals it 'metaphysicalizes' itself and makes itself dogmatic?

Even if Foucault is not a decolonizing thinker explicitly, he develops a historical sense that works against the colonialist impulse.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Foucault/Derrida Exchange Continued

The reading for this week was Foucault's reply to Derrida, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire.” We begin by revisiting the basics of Derrida's critique, framed as a few key questions: Can one do a history of madness, using the discourse of reason? How can one hope to speak for madness? We also returned to some lingering questions from our discussion of Derrida's piece: What would it mean for Foucault if Derrida were right? What are the motivations or stakes for Derrida? Is his concern largely philosophical, political, historical? We answered tentatively that the stakes of Derrida's critique are primarily philosophical.


We then raised a general question about Foucault's response. Derrida accuses Foucault of misreading Descartes, and, through this, of a broader mistake in attempting a historical philosophy of madness. We notice that Foucault's piece focuses on the interpretation of Descartes, and wonder if, in doing this, he misses the second, broader point. In addressing this question, we ask if there is for Foucault a connection between the two aspects. We then point to a question Foucault poses near the end of the essay where he seems to address Derrida's larger point: “Could there be anything anterior or exterior to philosophical discourse?” (pg. 395). For him, the answer is yes. And the job of archeology/genealogy is to “get at the discursive determination” of such discourse.


The discussion keeps returning to the possibility that Foucault may have missed the force of Derrida's critique, and we make various attempts at formulating the latter's point in a succinct way. This was one attempt: We cannot speak about the “other” of philosophical discourse except by means of philosophical discourse. It would seem as though Foucault takes himself to be outside of the discourse of philosophy/reason—“pointing at things,” as we put it. For Derrida, there is no “getting outside” of such discourse. We venture this as one interpretation of Derrida's quotable “there is nothing outside of the text.”


Trying to understand what Foucault might say to all of this, we invoke the system/exercise distinction (i.e., “systematics” and “ascetics”) made by Foucault. He thinks that Derrida reads Descartes on the level of “system”—the reduction of discursive practices to textual traces is reading the Meditations as a set of propositions. Foucault sees Derrida as perpetuating a traditional, ahistorical model of philosophy. At this point, we hone in on what might be the key sticking point of the debate: the status of philosophical discourse. How can we keep doing this thing called philosophy, after it has been “historicized”? This seems to be more of a question for Foucault than it is for Derrida.


The group concludes with two questions, one concerning the debate between Foucault and Derrida and one concerning the trajectory of the former's work;
  1. Is there an impasse between Foucault and Derrida on the question of textual analysis? With the rest of his work in mind, Derrida seems intent on “unreading,” while Foucault accuses him of a “misreading.”
  2. Are Derrida's critique and the subsequent response instrumental in Foucault's shift from analyzing discourse to analyzing practices?

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Foucault/Derrida exchange

The group begins with the context of Derrida’s paper and the break between the two philosophers. The discussion proceeds with (I) the analysis of Descartes’ passages quoted in Foucault, (II) Foucault’s reading of these passages, and (III) Derrida’s critique of Foucault.

I. Madness in Descartes:

The group has difficulty in dealing with Descartes, having not read him recently. The members identify, however, that the discussion of madness (in relation to doubt) precede cogito.

II. Foucault’s reading of Descartes

Foucault’s argument: the exclusion of madness from the discourse of reason – an act of silencing. This happens with the distinct way in which Descartes overcomes errors such as dreams. What differentiates madness from, say, dreams?
           
1. Body: in dreams I have a sense of body and a control of my body, albeit deranged or distended, whereas in madness the body doesn’t belong to me.
2. Recoverability: Dreams are subject to errors that can be corrected (confusion, illusion, etc.). When I wake up my deranged and distended body is corrected, whereas madness remains uncorrected. Errors outside reason can’t be corrected; therefore, madness is external to reason.

Then, one cannot suppose one is mad, for the condition of possibility of having the thought of madness is reason.

The group thinks that Foucault might be reading back cogito these passages, while Descartes is still developing the concept of doubt.

III. Derrida’s critique of Foucault

Derrida’s argument: one can’t do a historical/social analysis of madness as a concept or idea.
Madness as an absent present drives philosophical discourse. It is a motivating principle of the philosophical project as the essential other of discourse. It is in opposition to speech (65). It is before language and discourse; it is that which we do violence.

Thus, when we talk about it we’re putting the straightjacket to madness, incorporating it into discourse. This is what Foucault does, as he is speaking within discourse and thus reason. Therefore, by bracketing madness Descartes is more sincere than Foucault who takes it up, assuming that you can talk about it. Descartes in fact performs the reality of madness in the philosophical discourse.


The group acknowledges the deconstructionist tendencies that Derrida would later develop, agreeing with certain aspects of his critique. And yet, how Derrida’s intervention contributes to (or even relates to) the general discussion of the containment of the mad man or Foucault’s larger project is undetermined.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Foucault, "Discourse on Language" (1971)

We began the session with several questions, many of them relating to the concept of truth:
1.     Would it be useful to map out the text, basically?
2.     Foucault suggests that “it is always possible one could speak the truth in a void” (224).  Is this possible and/or consistent with his philosophical project?
3.     Does Foucault understand himself to be a “monster on the prowl,” in the sense that he is speaking the truth, but not within the discursive framework of his time (223-224)?
4.     How does Foucault himself fit within his own definition of “the author”?  Is he an author, or fictional, as he suggests “authors” in fact are?
5.     What is the relationship between the author-function and spoken language?  Is there a difference between the truth that can be found in written narratives, and truth that is spoken?
6.     What does it mean to say that “the theme of the founding subject permits us to elide the reality of discourse” (227)?
7.     Foucault talks about logophobia and logophilia (228-229), which is strange since he rarely speaks of affect.  How is this significant?

We then outlined a sketchy framework of Foucault’s method in the lecture:
1.     Three sets of procedures to regulate/control discourse:
a.     External Exclusions
                                               i.     Prohibitions:
1.     Objects
2.     Rituals
3.     Expertise
                                             ii.     Divisions/rejections
1.     Oppositions btw. reason/madness, e.g.
                                            iii.     Will to Truth
b.     Internal Rules
                                               i.     Commentary
                                             ii.     Author
                                            iii.     Disciplines
c.     Rarefaction among speaking subjects
                                               i.     Ritual
                                             ii.     Fellowships of discourse
                                            iii.     Doctrine
                                            iv.     Social appropriation of discourse
2.     Several reinforcements of these regulations within modern philosophy
a.     Indicts Cartesians, phenomenologists, and Hegelianism
3.     Methodological principles to counter discursive regulations:
a.     Eventually yields two analytic methods: critical and genealogical (critical here seems to mean archaeological)
4.     Ends with hagiography of Hyppolite.

We then opened up into a broader discussion of Foucault’s aims, especially concerning the phrase Will to Truth:
1.     What does Will to Truth mean?  Why is it a will to truth, not the production of truth?
a.     We then debated whether Foucault is lamenting the production of truth in our modern discourse, and nostalgic for its production in, for instance, ancient Greece.
2.     We asked, finally, what the “goal” is in unearthing and explaining our modern Will to Truth.
a.     Two central themes emerged: Foucault’s project could be seen as descriptive, but also (or either) as an act.  That is, he could be read as describing the rules and regulations of discourse, but also of trying to modify that discourse insofar as he describes it in his archaeological manner.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, selections

We began, as per the usual custom of our little group, with questions:
 * Can Foucault escape the subject and subjectivity, as he seems to want?  Is this attempt at getting out from under the shadow of the subject (the transc. subject) compromised if we put archaeology into reflexive relation with itself?
 * What is a 'system of disperson' (p. 37)?  How does it differ from other conceptions, e.g., from 'difference'?
 * Why abandon the term 'archaeology'?  What is at stake in an 'archaeology of sexuality' (192)?
 * Why the need for an account of unity?
 * What is at stake in the conception of 'practice' in AK that we don't find in OT?  (see p. 49)
 * Four thresholds of positivity, epistemologization, scientization, and formalization.  Is this itself a formalization?  Are these useful?  What is the value or gain of a use of a 'scientific' language in the context of a critique of science?

Discussion then ensued...

How is archaeology able to account for itself?  What is archaeology trying to account for?  What is the status of archaeology as a critique?  What is archaeology's relationship to its object of critique?

How does archaeology express a principle of constraint/selection?  MF starts (in Ch. 2) with four hypotheses: object, style, concept, theme.  Explanation rather happens by way of "forms of division" and "systems of dispersion" (37)?  How do "forms of division" and "dispersions" at the level of savoir give rise to stability or unity of connaissance?  One key to the depth savoir is that it itself is not unified (as object, style, concept, theme).  Rather, "dispersion" (38) is c-o-p of "regularity".

Questions to track as we move forward:
 * Move from archaeology to knowledge.
 * Account of unity without appeal to transcendental subject without dialectical teleology

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Foucault, The Order of Things, Preface + Selections


We began with Foucault's use of the term "historical a priori" in the Preface by asking how such a thing might be uncovered/unearthed (to use the language of "archaeology") and how Foucault sets himself to account for its genesis in a particular historical period (xxii). This raised the question of where Foucault is locating the forces or discursive practices associated with its constitution. Are we to imagine that this historical a priori hovers over the realm of concrete discursive practices in a particular historical moment but appears in them and shapes them as rules or norms? Or does it rather emerge piecemeal out of practices, some of them as yet inarticulate, and only achieves the status of a norm once it is articulated in scientific discourse in one of these moments quick and profound re-ordering which are the subject of this work? 

Further we wondered how, if it is Foucault's project in The Order of Things to construct the "middle region" between, as he says, the use of "the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself" is to be imagined as a space (on an analogy with other spaces) and whether such a space is to be identified with Foucault's own discourse. This raised the question of where the subject of this order is located within it as something articulated by the order, alongside it, within it, or in a relationship to these process which is as unstable and open to discontinuity as the order which articulates it. 

We found Foucault's use of the term "archeology" to characterize his own project curious given that archeology brings with it both the methods and historical baggage of the science it functions on an analogy with and furthermore wondered to what extent his own work at this stage (given its preoccupation with the "pure experience of order and of its modes of being"(xxi) ) might not operating within the very horizon of scientific inquiry he is trying (re)construct using a new (but not fundamentally different) concept of genesis.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

2013-14 Research Plan and Fall 2013 Kickoff

CGC will be meeting again this year with a focus on questions of "Methods" and "Historiographies".  Our plan, roughly, is as follows:

* Fall 2013 -- readings from the late 60s and early 70s on method; meetings Thursdays at 2p
* Winter 2014 -- Foucault's 1971 CdF lectures, "Lectures on the Will to Know" (in its entirety)
* Spring 2014 -- workshop on shared problems in collaborators' own research projects

We will have a kickoff meeting on Wed Oct 2nd at 3:30p in SCH 250A (Colin's office); meetings thereafter will be every Thursday at 2:00p in SCH 211B.  We will not meet on Thurs Oct 24th (due to the SPEP conference).

Tenative reading schedule for the Fall term:
Wk 2 - Oct 10 - The Order of Things (1966), pp. ix-xxiv, 17-25, 50-58
Wk 3 - Oct 17 - The Order of Things (1966), pp. 71-78, 217-221, 236-250 (tough going, just slog through it), 303-312, 344-348, 386-7
Wk 4 - Oct 24 - no meeting - go to Foucault panels at SPEP
Wk 5 - Oct 31 - The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), selections tbd, ?pp. 31-39, 178-195
Wk 6 - "The Discourse on Language" (i.e., "The Order of Discourse") (1970)
Wk 7 - Foucault/Derrida debates
Wk 8 - Foucault/Derrida debates
Wk 9 - Nov 28 - Thanksgiving
Wk 10 - "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" (1971)? CdF 71 lectures?

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Hacking, Chs. 20-22

The best idea in chapter 20 is... that Durkheim's conservative sociology (169, ch. 19) is essentially one that celebrates the norm, the average, the mean -- "the normal is what is right" (168).  This is encapsulated in Durkheim's shifting views about crime from 1893 to 1894.  This was a conceptual not an empirical shift (173).  What Durkheim shifted to was a functional explanation of social forms, such as crime or suicide, according to which these forms serve some social function.  This functional explanation makes sense only under the auspices of normality.  The best idea is: "two ideas were intertwined in Durkheim's early work: normality and functionalism" (171).

The best idea in chapter 21 is... statistical laws became autonomous (laws) when they could be used as explananations.  Is autonomy here a synonym for stability?  Statististics becomes a stable style of reasoning, stable in both the immense body of data produced but also in terms of the techniques (and practices).

The best idea in chapter 22 is... TBD.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Hacking, Chs. 17-19

The best idea in Chapter 17 is... that Nietzsche did not infer (or argue for) chance (148), but rather "he experienced it".  This suggests that chance, and the taming of it, has less to do with an argument against determinism, and more to do with a new positive and productive way of experiencing, seeing, &c..  But the chapter remained difficult for us at the end of discussion... What could it mean to say that "Necessity and chance are twinned" (148)?

The best idea in Chapter 18 is... that determinism of the twentieth-century micro-physics stripe is an invention of the 1870s (Cassirer)... but that there is another (older) kind of determinism that "excluded statistical law" (152).  It is this kind of determinism that the book tracks in its story of "the erosion of determinism".

[There was discussion, albeit tentative, about the taming of chance as emerging positively in its own right producing only as an after-effect the erosion of determinism, rather than the taming of chance as attempting to negate determinism.  Rather, statistics leaves the metaphysics of determinism-voluntarism (the question of free will) "outside our province" (Durkheim, quoted on p. 159).]

The best idea in Chapter 19 is... "Nothing is more commonplace than the distinction between fact and value. From the beginning of our language the word 'normal' has been dancing and prancing all over it" (163). The idea of the normal is both descriptive and prescriptive.

[And thus the normal, perhaps, is beyond the debate, or problematic, of determinism and voluntarism.]

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Hacking, chs 14-16

The best idea in chapter 14 is... an explanation of the distinction between penchant (propensity, disposition) and determining cause (fatalism) (cf. 123).  This distinction helps resolve a worry about statistical fatalism. The worry arises because of a tension between a 'metaphysical' and a 'political issue (cf. 121).  The tension is that on the one side we have an enormous political success in altering social conditions to improve various aspects of life, health, crime, etc., and then on the other side this political success seems to undermine our standard sense of moral (or metaphysical) agency.  The distinction between propensity and determination helps resolve this tension as follows.  The political success of social reform operates on propensities of actors; it does not compel actors or necessitate anything; it is probabilistic.  This can be construed as leaving intact a metaphysics and morality of freedom; this is because social reform posits propensities not necessities.

The best idea in chapters 15 and 16 are... tbd.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Hacking, Taming, chs. 11-13

The most important idea in chs. 11 and 12 has to do with... the distinction between objective (frequency) probability and subjective (degree of belief) probability, as one entree to the gradual erosion of determinism.  See the chart below:





A second important idea in the discussion, though not necessarily in the chapters themseslves, concerns the erosion across the 19th century of, perhaps, determinism (represented by idealism) and essentialism (represented by persisting classical empiricisms).  Is the 'natural kinds' project then a companion to the 'probability and chance' project?

The most important idea in ch. 13 is ... the story of how Quetelet takes the idea of statistical mean and transforms it into a real quantity.  "This is a crucial step in the taming of chance. It began to turn statistical laws that were merely descriptive of large-scale regularities into laws of nature and society that dealt in underlying truths and causes."

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Hacking, 'Taming', chs. 9-10

The best idea in Chapter 9 is... that, "A category of problems--pretty much what we now call 'social problems'--was created to be shared by joint experts, medical and legal" (76).


The best idea in Chapter 10 is... the idea of a distinction between statistics, statistical law, and statistical inference (10).  There is a rough chronology that first come statistics, then come laws of statistics, then come statistical inferences.  Is there also a conceptual/rational connection here?  Or is there a 'statistical style of reasoning' involving statistical inference that would not necessarily take the form of law?  Is the conclusion of every inductive inference necessarily a conclusion in the form of a law?





Thursday, April 18, 2013

Hacking, 'Taming', chs. 6-8

The best idea in chapter 6 is... that of a methodological focus on practical problems: "This was not an abstract, intellectual event, but, as always in the taming of chance, a practical attack on an immediate and material problem" (p. 48).

The best idea in chapter 7 is... that sometimes we travel 'the road from scientific law to scientific measurement' (Kuhn) in the opposite direction, moving from numbers to law, which is heroized less by the grand theoretical scientist and more by the armies of counting bureaucrats (see p. 62).  The numbers give us a wealth of data for making "more inductions".  The 19th century search for constants in the numerical data, and found there 'laws' (which today we might call 'regularities' looking forward to p. 128).  The search for constants is epitomized in Babbage (cf. 58-9).  The years in which this searching stabilized was 1820 to 1840.  This was (for us) a platform leveraging the previously stabilized platform of bureaux of enumeration which had stabilized a little earlier, 1800s and 1810s.

The best idea in chapter 8 is... that, for Esquirol, "Madess... was English."  This is part of an account of how the very first self-consciously statistical laws were conceived in explanatory terms (p. 71); this was (as later chapters argue) not an easy combination.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Hacking, 'Taming', chs. 3-5

The best idea in chapter 3 is... that statistics was a chance encounter, namely that the solidification of statistical institutions was the process of a contingent intersection between 'public amateurs' and 'secret bureaucrats'.  Statistical bureaux later emerged when there came to be 'public bureaucrats', professionalization of amateur knowledge who were no longer doing their thing in secret.

The best idea in chapter 4 is... "We do not here want a history of institutions" (29).  But what is the difference between an institutional history and a historical epistemology (or conceptual history [not Koselleck])?  "Concepts are words in their sites. Their sites are sentences and institutions" (7).  The history of concepts involves the history of institutions, but the institutions are of interest as sites for the emergence of concepts.  Thus, "such an institution presupposes that there is a special type of knowledge" (29).

The best idea in chapter 5 is... the contrast between a deterministic conception of social law (in Prussia) versus a probabilistic conception of social law (in France and England).  One can have a deterministic or a probabilistic view of statistics (37).  One is apriori and the other is empirical -- one is deductive and the other inductive.  The stabilization of the latter, we suspect, is crucial to the history of how chance came to be taken quite seriously.  But more on this in later chapters...


Thursday, April 4, 2013

Hacking, 'Taming' chs. 1 & 2

This term we are playing the game of "the best idea in this chapter is..."

The best idea in chapter 1 is ..."a seeming paradox: the more the indeterminism, the more the control".  The chapter sets up a story about how two processes proceed hand in hand: the erosion of determinism and the avalanche of printed numbers.  The printed numbers are an information that is a key vector in new techniques of control.  These printed numbers, this information and control, could be potent and valuable just insofar as determinism was eroded (or eroding).  An interesting aspect of this story, for us, is that the social sciences pave the way here, and the natural sciences almost seem to follow the avalanche enacted by the social -- this is interesting because it runs cross to a usual story in the history of science that natural science presses forward first.

In addition, a question that arose here concerned the methodological focus on "sentences" moreo than "institutions" (Hacking notes that he regrets this, 7) which perhaps goes hand in hand with a methodological interest in "styles of reasoning" rather than something that more explicitly invokes actions alongside reasons such as "dispositifs".  Perhaps this sort of methodological shift would enable a kind of inquiry that sees probability along a fifth dimension of politics (in addition to the dimensions of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and ethics named on page 4).

The best idea in chapter 2 is that the erosion of determinism did not have to lead to the taming of chance.  Laplace (and even Hume) assumes a metaphysical necessity (Hume is just an epistemological skeptic about this, whereas Laplace an epistemological optimist).  Bichat (p. 14) denies necessity but preserves causality (via vitalism).  It was a further move to not only deny necessity but also strive to understand chance, and Charles Santiago Peirce (p. 11) is the figure or emblem for this.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Hacking, 'The Taming of Chance'

Spring 2013 reading schedule

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance

All meetings are Thursdays 2p-4p.

Week 1 - chs. 1 & 2
Wk 2 - chs. 3-5
Wk 3 - chs. 6-8
Wk 4 - no meeting (Thur Apr 25)
Wk 5 - chs. 9-10
Wk 6 - chs. 11-13
Wk 7 - chs. 14-16
Wk 8 - no meeting (Thur May 23)
Wk 9 - chs. 17-19
Wk 10 - ch. 20-22
Wk 11 - ch. 23 + drinks?

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Nealon on Plants and Animals


This was a fantastic article, say we (or at least some of we).  Some thoughts…

If we operate with a distinction between concept & method (as discussed in the group before, namely ‘biopower’ is a concept and ‘genealogy’ is a method) it is clear that the entirety of Nealon’s argument is on the side of concept.  In other words, Nealon doesn’t address the question/issue of method, which is to say he doesn’t ask about how we might genealogically interrogate new or emergent biopolitical formulations.  So, the argument addresses concepts (C) of biopower but doesn’t address methods (M) of genealogy or archaeology.  This is not a criticism of Nealon (as if all that matters is (M)) but just an observation about where the argument is best located.

Within (C), Nealon asks about the extent to which biopower in Foucault already comprehends animality within its conceptual bounds.  The critique of Haraway’s argument against Foucault operates entirely on the conceptual level (this is not a criticism but an observation).  The debate is a debate between: ‘Foucault in his talk of biopower ignores biopower’ versus ‘Foucault in his talk of biopower does in fact discuss biopower’.  This is a debate, then, about the conceptual boundaries (and referents) of biopower as Foucault used the term.  This particular debate, then, shoves to the side a further methodological question about ‘how might we genealogically study emergent practices of animality?’

Within the frames of the conceptual debate, then, we have two positions: C1 (Haraway) and C2 (Nealon).  Again, leaving the methodology debate to the side, there is a further option for the debate located solely within the conceptual debate, namely option C3.  This option would split the diff between Haraway and Nealon, and suggest that Foucault’s discussions of biopower anticipate animality (with Nealon) but do not yet sufficiently comperehend it (with Nealon).

Does Foucault’s later disavowal of The Order of Things trouble this argument?

Does Nealon’s distinction between discipline as institutional and biopower as scattered beyond ‘institutional sites’ (and ‘virtually everywhere’) ? (p. 3) 

How does biopolitics incorporate animality itself?  This is addressed in the first half of the argument.  Animality is part of the story of the emergence of the concept of “life” or that which is the object of study of biology.  Biopolitical management of wolves as an examples.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Jemima Repo, on Barbin, Foucault, Butler


This week we discussed Jemima Repo’s excellent (truly excellent!) forthcoming essay “Herculine Barbin and the Omission of Biopolitics from Judith Butler’s Gender Genealogy” (to be published in the journal of Feminist Theory).

The discussion began, as per usual, with questions:

1) The discussion on pages 5 & 6 of the nature/culture distinction was interesting, but there is a question about the scope of the claims.  Is it the case that “the biopolitical… control over sex” holds always?  Or just sometimes?

2) On page 13 there is a claim that, “For Foucault, pleasure is a capacity.”  What might this mean?  Is this accurate?  What’s at stake here?

3) On page 14 (also again around 18) there is a claim that there is an “organic yet non-discursive body”?  What’s at stake here?  Why claim this?  A little before there is an accusation that Butler confuses “the non-discursive with pre-discursive” (13).  Why does Repo need to claim this?  What does that idea do that Butler can’t do?  What’s at stake in Repo such that she has to argue this?

4) On page 18, there is a contrast between “the organization of desires” and “their [desires] unhappy, compulsory self-destruction” (18).  This is very helpful.  It registers a connection between what some in our group like about the connection between Foucault and Deleuze—order is a positive productive effusive activity (not necessarily ‘good’)—in contrast to French Hegelian arguments about order as resting on contradiction.

5) Is the paper operating with a dichotomy between two kinds of explanations?  What is the difference between “genealogy of gender ontology” and “genealogy of gender”?

6) A few background questions on Butler for the group:

What is the equivalent in Butler of Foucault’s dispositif?  (For if we don’t have one, then performance seems over-individualized, rather than an acting-out of a set of social conditions.)

What is the status of Repo’s claims (throughout) that Butler seems to assume an invariant subject, in the form of a Hegelian subject of desire that is bound to recognition?  Is there a politics for Butler beyond the politics of recognition?

Discussion proper proceeded.

Concerning (1), we discussed whether or not Foucault collapsed (or avoided, or did not even acknowledge) the distinction between nature and culture.  If Foucault avoided the nature/culture distinction did he avoid it in such a way that he has to hold that nature and culture are always imbricated?  Or just sometimes?
            The key thing, presumably, is the distinction between being “an effect of a cultural system, but an apparatus of biopower”.  So there is a claim that “control over sex is… biopoltical” (6, 20).  Is this always the case?  Or just sometimes?  Presumably it is always the case for us (we who live within a biopolitical dispositif) but it need not always be the case for all places and all times.  So even practices of gender reperformance and gender resistance (e.g., drag) are instances of a utilization and deployment of biopolitics.  Resistance is always internal to the form of power that takes.

We then shifted to question (5) and the erst of the discussion remained there.  To recapitulate the question: What is at stake in the distinction between a genealogy of X’s ontology and a genealogy of X itself?  (In this case X=gender (though presumably it matters what the content of the X is).)

What is at stake in the distinction between sex as “mechanisms of intelligibility and performativity” (20) attributed to Butler and an “apparatus of biopower in the administration of life” (20) attributed to Foucault?  What would the scene of politics in each look like?  What forms of resistance are possible?  In the former politics is parody (of identity, discourse, etc.).  In the latter (i.e., Repo’s Foucault) resistance would have to look quite different.  It would have to be a (biopolitical? right?) resistance against biopolitics?  But is this how Repo in the piece envisions and figures resistance?  Is this how the discussion of Barbin functions?  It seems like it is meant to function that way insofar as this section of this essay is titled “Rereading Herculine Barbin Biopolitically”.  We turned to that section in fine…

Barbin’s “body” and “pleasure” became “ordered by power”.  So biopolitics is a type or mode of ordering?  That sounds right.  Then there are two moves that get made here, and we worried that they are being run together.  The first move is that a biopolitical ordering is beyond (or need not lie on) the nature|culture distinction.  The second move is that a biopolitical ordering is beyond (or displaces) Butler’s analytic category of identity.  Let’s take each in turn.

First, Biopolitics is a type of ordering (a “biopolitical territorialisation”; Deleuze (for better or worse!)) that doesn’t analytically draw on, or require, the nature|culture distinction.  Barbin was inscribed by (drawn up by?) biopolitics and we can analyze that without reference to the nature|culture binary.  The best way to put this point: sex is an effect of a process involving the workings of biopower.  And we can make this point without getting embroiled in debates about whether sex is “cultural” or “natural”, which are debates that Repo seems to want to avoid.  In other words, this is what is involved in avoiding the “genealogy of gender ontology”.  Is the point of this paper, then, a deflationism about the nature versus culture wars?

Second, does this first move warrant a displacement of identity as a category of analysis?  The paper opens with a critique of Butler’s identity-analysis.  But is it sufficient to move beyond an analytics of identity to methodologically dispense with the nature|culture binary?  Is there something at stake in that binary that supports or furthers identity-analysis?

The move from the first to the second seems to be wrapped up already in phrases like “the cultural construction of identity”.  But is getting beyond “cultural constructionism” to already move beyond “identity”?  Why?

(CK, NM, ER, HL, KL)

Thursday, February 21, 2013

2/21/13 - Davidson's "Closing Up the Corpses"

We began, as usual, with questions on the chalkboard:

1) How is the concept of sexual instinct being deployed?  Is the concept itself sufficiently interrogated in this piece?  What enables the conjunction of "sexual" + "instinct"?  (Cf. Judith Halberstam's book on Gothic Horror and other work on 19th c. instincts)

2) Where does emerging psychiatry locate 'the sexual instinct'?  What replaces the brain in its anatomical functions?  Is there a vacant place here?

3) What is the treatment here of the relation between criminality and sexual perversion?  What is the relation between these two?  Why, for instance, is there not a "criminal instinct"?  Or is there?  If not, why can't we do with criminality what we have done with sexuality?  Why doesn't the same explanatory framework apply?  What holds apart the legal and the psychic?

4) How do the claims here differ from MF in HSv1?  Where do they differ?  Are the claims substantively different?  Is the method substantively different?  Is there more empirical richness?  If so, where?  Is the thrust of the thesis here different?  Where are the differences?  (And what reading(s) of HSv1 are presupposed when we consider these questions?)

5) The crux of the piece seems to be about the emergence of a new style of reasoning.  What is the methodological status of SoR?  How does it methodologically function?  How does one show that a new SoR is what emerges, rather than just the emergence of a new concept or a new technique?  

Discussion amongst the group then began:

(5) Method
A provisional thought about how the method works to get us going.  The method might works as follows.  First you identify a new concept (e.g., 'perversion').  Then you identify a new 'framework' (i.e., an SoR) that makes that concept possible (e.g., 'psychiatric SoR').  The goal is to figure out 'what makes conceptual emergence possible'.  This is a concern about conditions of possibility, the conditions that make something, namely a set of possibilities.
  ----But in what sense does the SoR make a new concept or claim possible?
  --It makes it possible in the sense of mode of veridiction, in the sense of being truth-apt, that is in the play of the true-or-false.  So SoR is a name for that which makes claims possible as true-or-false claims.  These are 'rules of the true-or-false'.  These 'rules' do not have their own agency but are expressions of and in practice.  So an SoR is the name for the ensemble or assemblage of practices in which these rules come to expression.
  ----Good, I am with you.  But in that case why do we need the methodoloical category of SoR?  Is it doing more than just providing a shorthand for 'the rules in practice'?  What is it doing?
  --It's a way of getting grip on certain conceptual transformations and their conditions that we can't gain grip on if we only write a history of institutions, or a history of culture, or a history of 'mentalities', &c..  It's an explanatory concept that provides a window onto certain kinds of transformations that we otherwise couldn't see.
  ----It's the same matter in Foucault (and Kant) that is such a long-running issue of concern (for our group). In what sense do 'conditions of possibility' condition?  What is it to condition granted the assumption that conditioning is not just causing?  How do 'dispositifs' condition?  How do 'styles of reasoning' condition?  How do 'problematizations' condition, motivate, constrain, produce?

(1), (2), (3) -- Instinct and Sexuality
How is the idea of instinct functioning in Davidson's account?  Is 'instinct' taken by the 19c. psychiatrists as basal, or as grounding?  Or is it 'just' explanatory?  If explanatory, is it essentialist?  Is the essentialism key to the concept being explanatory?  If so, the essence of 'instinct' appears to be 'propogation' or 'sexual procreation' (15)?  The essence of instinct as procreation allows us to treat a variety of otherwise seemingly-different sexual categories within a unity, namely a unity of abnormality and straying from 'propogation'.

Interestingly, then, the category of instinct eliminates the need for a conceptual focus on genitals or brain or other anatomy.  This opens up a whole 'normativization' of sexuality.  Because it's hard to create a normativity around just the genital organs or the organ of the brain.

Does the instinct account also help us understand why (not covered in AD's piece, but discussed by Deleuze (& others)) sadism and masochism were theorized by both Krafft-Ebbing and Freud as both 'opposed' to one another and 'fundamental' to all other perversions?

What is the history of the concept of instinct?  What was instinct doing before it got enrolled in this explanatory account?  Was it doing anything?  Yes (but we aren't clear what).  Or is this the scene of emergence of instinct?  Instinct is "everywhere and nowhere" (Legrain, 1896) and so it covers "personality" (12).  How can anything, instinct itself, be everywhere and nowhere?  Key to the idea is that it is "natural" and "determinate" (15).

A final question.  If sexual instinct is a 'norm' that unifies perversions, then how do we square this with Deleuze's observation (in 'Coldness & Cruelty') that Krafft-Ebbing and Freud both described, or drew up, sadism and masochism as opposites?  How can two 'deviations from a norm' be related as 'oppositional' or 'opposites'?

---
Present at the meeting: CK, NM, GL, SB, ER, CE

2/14/13 - Oksala on Biopolitics & Violence


Friday, January 4, 2013

McWhorter: In Perpetual Disintegration

During week 1, we will meet Thursday at 12p in PLC 314 to discuss with Ladelle McWhorter her unpublished essay titled "In Perpetual Disintegration: Foucault’s Body".  This has been distributed to CGC participants.  An abstract of the paper follows here:

Foucault's descriptions of bodies as inscribed surfaces of events and volumes in perpetual
disintegration have led some critics to believe that he embraces a radical form of social
constructionism wherein even the material world is a product of discursive practices
and there is no such thing as nature. Some have contended that this position leaves us
with no viable account of subjectivity, freedom, or resistance and thus no basis for any
sort of reasoned political activism. This talk will explore the question of just what is at
stake in Foucault's radical rethinking of bodies with attention to the work of 18th century
physician Benjamin Rush, 19th century educator Edouard Seguin, and conceptions of
bodies in contemporary science and society.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

CGC Winter Term readings

Winter Term 2013 readings to be posted here (as we finalize a schedule).

All meetings 6p Thursdays in PLC 314

Week 1 (only!) we will meet Thursday at 12p in TBD for a special session with Ladelle McWhorter.

Wk 2 ... Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 1-12, 119-125
Wk 3 ... Esposito, "Totalitarianism or Biopolitics?..." from Critical Inquiry
Wk 4 ... Hacking, "Biopower and the Avalanche of Numbers"
Wk 5 ... Galloway & Thacker, selections from The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
Wk 6 ... Oksala, "Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity"
...
Wk 7 ... Davidson, chapter 1 from The Emergence of Sexuality
Wk 8 ... Hacking, "How 'Natural' are 'Kinds' of Sexual Orientation?"
Wk 9 ... Haraway, "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies"
Wk 10 ... Repo, "'Herculine Barbin' and the Omission of Biopolitics from Judith Butler's Gender Genealogy"
Wk 11 ... Nealon, "The Archaeology of Biopower"

Reply to this thread with suggested readings for subsequent weeks.