Friday, January 23, 2015

Amoore, "Politics of Possibility," Ch.1

<b>Questions:</b>
- Near the end of the ch (pg 54): What is the “shift in the epistemic status”?
- What is the justification for the “move to the intuitive”? p. 44, 45 ...
          - Relation between intuitive and speculative and algorithms p.44
- Relation between the sovereign and the subject in this “shift”? (specifically, what is the relationship between the democratic political apparatus and the type of sovereignty being described)?
- Relationship btwn sovereign exception and lineage of probabilistic and possibilistic analysis (two lines - one of exception and one about probability/possibility) p.52  —> how is this trad sovereign power rather than a politics of possibility that has colonized sovereignty; how is this soveirgn in line with Agamben, Schmidtt, etc.
- What does Amoore think of 9/11 - “dispel the myths of a post-9/11 radical break” (31) and "the
- What is missing: cf. BM’s book on sovereign masculinity… where is gender in the analysis, or is it hiding behind some fate ithings she is describing… the forms of calculations and logics that are coming into play here are masculinely coded activities… how does entering gender in to the analysis reveal more depth into her analysis.
                    Discussion drew us to p. 51: “A ‘new person’” - isn’t this good old fashioned biopower?
                    - Project of categorization: race and gender might be produced slightly differently than what categories do for themselves

<b>Discussion:</b>
- Intuition/speculation:  “a piece o f the translation from probability to possibility"
               - race conditions are going to shape the way calculations assert risk
               - “X” can signify anything - within what X can be, race and gender have more than fashion, action, etc.
               - Does race carry an inherently higher “risk value"
                   - But does Amoore need this?
- in the question of race and gender —> VISIBLE … p. 47
and point to the limits of such technology - camouflage so that you don’t present those threatening marks.
     - Charlie Hebdo Terrorists were using “spam format” for their emails.
     - She does not even broach the subject of race enough to even dismiss it, when one would expect her to justify it at least (esp. given she is discussing the aspects of the war on terror).
- What are you missing by not regarding race and gender?
- Race seems to be relevant enough to regard - wether the algorithms build in race into their calculations.   If she did look - what did she find?
- Other ways race can travel though this : patterns of interaction, coded as dangerous from the beginning they would carry more risk, higher probability that the “new person” coming in to the system will not be a stranger because they are already more likely to be picked up. They have associations
- Gender: may be that males are more heavily coded as females
          - BM's book: all of the people in a room discussion the effects of dropping nuclear warheads in certain places… outburst re: 30,0000 people. Impact: side of decision making. Like a new kind of “man of reason” - man understood in terms of technical calculations.
(I would have liked an example of such an algorithm)
- Racist state plays a key role in F’s account of biopower.
               - when F talks about race, he has a problem to solve to understand biopolitical society can still kill. Hey, here is race, that’s how you kill.
- what plays, what makes the algorithm run, we can continue inventing ways to keep killing ourselves
- but her example is war on terror, is it possible to avoid race?

Why is she doing this (this=not discussing race, etc.)
- Strategic avoidance b/c
          - Questions is not wether or not you can look into the past and see how race produces this and try to infer… then you are limiting the extent of the unexpected
          - Statistical extrapolation from past events to make the best inference  is missing the point… When looking at the data, you look at more than just race.
          - “Judgment by Computation” : the “veneer of objectivity”; “techno-scientific gleam” p.51-52 —> can the lack of discussion of race reflect the operation of the form of power that she is discussing in that data-mining, etc. replace, stand-in for other kinds of decision making. Then it makes sense (Ex: bottom of page 51)
- The desired result of these comp. logics would be to hide these other considerations. What goes into the algorithm? —> she doesn’t say exactly how they run
                    * Analogy to a project on aspects of the politics of information: re: Galton - struggling with how to treat eugenics in… it would overrun the project. ∆ "infopolitics is dangerous is because it’s racist” —> But there are other injustices in addition to racial injustice.
- “intuititve and imaginative inference”: is this a way to
               - Does this distract us from other ways that intuition works? If the kinds of persons that these calculations get a grip on don’t conform to our traditional categorizations ...
               - There are different logics of justice at work :
                              - Her argument assumes "Not all systems of oppression interlock” or demand/produce each other. Though it would have helped her argument in a way that it is not reducible to race.
                                - to p. 18: “must produce a particular economy of decision” - dig in to the politics that is concealed by this technoscientific apparatus, then raising the questions of other forms of power that we are used to dealing with would be one way of asking after what those politics are. To avoid them is to risk missing the ways in which this particular, if not new, the way this form of power takes shape.
                              - Is it the case that, historically speaking, forms of oppression feeds on each other; still does answer the other question that one form of oppression cannot exist without. Not how, but ?necessarily so?
                              - Can it be the case that we can have a space of possibility separate from the space of historicity?
                              - She is desiring this different politics that is present, which is differ than what happens in practice. This politics operates on radicalized, gendered lines but it is not necessarily so —> p.51 ∆ She seems to be describing what is happening on the theoretical level. Can she make this without assuming that race operates on the theoretical level?
                    - What is the role of race in the formation of these algorithms?
                    - But, if race has a historical function within this society. She looks at the function and sees what is the function and she feeds the function with different variables. “Yes, I can see the logic behind race”
- Charles Mills “The Racial Contract”: original production conceals a racial operation
                    - is this a diff btwn british academic left and american academic left?
Question: What is the picture of authority that she is giving us? She really believes Connolly’s thesis (and Schmitt) - if you start assuming that the sovereign is not just one but is multiple
                                   - For Schmitt, the sovereign decision is VERY time sensitive. ∆ you can get a decision fast within a sense of emergency, but when you pluralize how do you deal with the time issues
the assumption is there is an integration between the plurality of forces, they always output decision X.   Are all those tiny forces working together?
- It would be very sensible if the sovereign is masculine, it would be very sensible to adopt this system.
- but any project puts limits on how it’s fulfilled.
- But the objectivity that is produced ultimately reifies the notion of sovereign, reinscribes what it means to be a sovereign.
- Asking about the processes or asking about the justification?
               - Some scholars are concerned with the way that this gets justified while this project may be more concerned with the functioning —> might be a way of disting. the intents and understand Amoore’s decision to not address race.
- Foucauldian and Deleuzian pluralism: “there is no locus of great refusal” but a strategic fight on multiple fronts.

- Her argument seems to enact the logic that she is tracking.

- We wish she had devoted an entire chapter on ONE instantiation of a particular algorithm (some would critique her work as not 'anthropological' enough)

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