Thursday, February 26, 2015

Foucault, 'On the Government of the Living,' Chapter 1

We began, as per usual, with questions:

- The discussion of the shepherd and the Emporer (top of p. 4) may point us toward something like a genealogy of sovereign power.

- Shift to a notion of government by truth from a notion of knowledge-power.  Foucault says that the notion of government is "much more operational" than the notion of power (12).  Is that connected with the art of government being connected to, or operated on, conduct ("to conduct their conduct") (12)?

- In Foucault's discussions of 16c. witch hunts (10), he doesn't discuss the colonial aspects of this set of practices and the way the state sought to exercise a power over it.  In decolonial thought, these practices can be read as a social force by which women passed on indigenous knowledge.  But why is this set to the side by Foucault?  Why doesn't he attend to these dynamics?  What's lost here?

- Foucault's discussion of "terror" as the fifth of five 'principles' of truth (bottom p. 15) is of interest.  How does truth function in a way where everyone can be "actually aware" of what is happening but noentheless allow it to happen?

- Foucault describes truth in terms of excessiveness (17), expenditure (9), and more than useful (6).  In what ways is this contrary to Foucault's supposed 'pragmatism'?  In what ways is this also counter to any and all economistic conceptions of knowledge, truth, rationality, &c.?

- How would an inquiry into gov-truth relations be distinct from an inquiry into 'Society'?  Why make this distinction?  What is at stake in it, for Foucault?  See Foucault's discussion on the bottom of page 16.

The group, then, began its discussions:

The general problematic for the lectures, as established in Chapter 1, is to think about the relation between the epistemological and the political (page 4), but without explicating this relationship according to a logic of "economic need" that would be "utilitarian" (page 5), or "reduced to pure and simple utility" (6).

So the core problem is how to explicate and analyze epistemic-political relations without reducing them to utility (be it economic utility, biological utility, class utility, &c.)?

The first shift (p. 11) was ideology to power-knowledge.

The second analytical shift (p. 12ff) was from power-knowledge to government-truth.  The latter "involves giving a positive and differentiated content to" the epistemic and the political.  Does he mean by "positive" something like "empirical" so that "positive and differentiated" is something like "empirical and analytical"?

In terms of one half of the second shift, MF discusses his analytical shift from "power" to "government".  In terms of the positive and differentiated conduct, MF says that the focus of government is to analyze "mechanisms and procedures intended to conduct men, to direct their conduct, to conduct their conduct" (12).  And why is this "positive and differentiated"?  

In terms of the second half of the second shift, this is what MF proposes to study in these lectures.  After addressing five notions of the gov-truth relation that are all to "narrow" (16), he comes to his view.  His view is that the work of government "entails" or "requires" the manifestation of truth (17) and in a way that "goes beyond the aim of government" (17) and so is not purely useful in the way of governing.

Chapter Four for next time....

Weheliye, Alexander G. "Introduction" to _Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human_

Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human Alexander G Weheliye
(Northwestern University, pub. book on politics of music)

Questions:
* Given whatever shortcomings/lacks we see in Foucault, what is our view of taking those up in our own work?
     * Uber-philosophical mode tends to be adversarial
     * What would it mean to productively engage Agamben
     * Call at the end of the chapter would be to apply Agamben on the plantation > this seems like the way to do this work, “without linking with the demon of comparison to discuss other instances of these racializing assemblages
* What does the Agamben and Foucault criticism have to do with the discussion beginning on p.65 the Born Free music video?
     - Why 
     - Why that example?
     - Why one privileged example? rather than historical examples
* What is ethnic racism and biopolitical racism? 
* What is the status of the critique of the Foucault?
* What is the explicit intervention (p. 56 and 57)
* What do we learn about biopolitics that we don’t already know after this critique?
* What is Ws own view of the relationship between ethnic and biopolitical racism?
     It is fair to say that F should have looked, thought, etc. but at least a sense in which biopolitics emerge as a way of thinking about where the  other sites of power that are not as visible because power makes them invisible.
     Race comes in not as exactly the place where race is the only place that 
how within a political space that is supposed to foster life, it can still justify death > the whole point is not to highlight that function and to assume that what biopolitics is 
     the death function is a sort of challenge to what F wants to do (he introduces the genocide as a counter argument then he needs an explanation. If the assumption is that the form of politics .. then genocide  then biopolitical racism
     But if you replace biopilitlcs with genocide, you lose explanatory power
     The subtle thing was to say why we dont look at other sites where the question of normalization is much more subtle. (healthcare, sexuality)

Title: black feminism doesnt seem to be anywhere in this?: pg 65 and MIA in lineage of “women of color”
- when you tell someone that you missed this amazing site where political power gets to be expressed. 
- W even locates influence on F as Angela Davis, black panther movement (60, 62) 
          Denial of a certain presence (but it is known that F never quotes anything; how do you measure - esp. in the lectures - that he wasnt giving proper credit)
          - This was about colonial expropriation without mentioning the person and thus exploits that person without
          - Similar things have been said about Derrida
> What do we do with people we agree with?!?: is this a plausible mode of philosophical and theoretical precedents  (F not quoting Marx or Nietszche to avoid being read solely for their quotes, mentions); is this different than when you are appropriating from the black panthers? is that different? why’?
          - different because people are already familiar with Marx, etc. but when you appropriating from a less well known, or disavowed, it is a different; his audience can more easily detect the Marx, etc than the black panther party

Is this the way of saving Foucault: the lacunae (63) but here is a way that Foucault is connected with postcolonial thinking as well. The point isnt to get rid of F, but to show Fs limits and the points in his thinking that have much more significant and radical ties.

Minolo as indicated for stealing from Peruvian thinkers; but this is a different critique because Minolo is already a decolonial thinker.
- Conflates the politics of scholarship with the potential politics of the influence of scholarship what should be two separate questions.
- He could be a good progressive about punishment and be on the wrong side with respect to who to cite and when.
- "I have this idea about political something” vs. if the idea should have political weight, doesn’t that depend on the purchase of that idea, the take up by others, the making it their own?
- The scholarship question: F got his ideas about discipline and punishment and state racism from the black panthers and the act of universalizing those ideas erased those bodies from the ideas.
- Is it the real thing that F ignores where he got the ideas, or 
     (F’s book was not initially about prisons in the 18th/19th century but would he not have written that book without people saying that prisons work in a certain way in the 1970s; even though he doesn’t quote them doesn’t mean that he doesn’t register that their thought is not thought)
     ( and more undergrads would know Davis than Foucault)

- So Foucault is missing ethnic racism (59): what is the “ontological differentiation” or a paradigmatic form that we get with biopower? Fouclat is making a historical point, not an ontological point about these two different forms of racism.
- what lis the order of operation with ethnic, biological, modern racism (most of modern forms of racism looks to the biological for epistemic authority). The ethnic and national are synonyms (ideology(. His claim is that F separates this from the biological and ∆ introduces the ontological and ∆ F leaves the door open for biological racism. W wants to 
          - Do you need that kind of order?
          - F is more about how does biopolitical discourse get going —> it draws on race war discourse and biological/evolutionary
- But this was a guy who was TALKING here, giving a lecture, but then to make a big deal from a recording
- Then his claim that F elides ethnic racism as doesn’t attend that form of productive power (like nazism and the atomic bomb) but that argument only works if ethnic racism only works by way of oppression. But F tries to see oppressions as productive, yes-saying, that leads to it. (it is not English hatred of the Irish, but English love of self; and  fear that the self that is so awesome is threatened // move about the Bourgie and sexuality) Fear in service of “let’s make them more like us” which F says this is NOT oppression but injustice of ego/normalization
- Is it problematic that the ways these things get classified as poor, indigent, etc. —> F reads a logic of the normal/pathological and certain logic underlies the ways that certain discriminations begin that will probably function in racism as well to a certain extent
(race is just a technology but W takes race to be the dominant term that produces the dichotomy, where for F race is a form by which differences are produced; “reason” and “unreason” is one dichotomy that produced the madman)

- MIA example: shows point of intersection between biopolitical and ethnic racism? the positive part of the chapter: exemplary of the assemblages (what F and A kept apart) - the ethnic and biopolitical racism. 
        - if you don’t decouple these different forms of racisms; where is the force of the theoretical points —> we can imagine racial orders differently
          - the point is that biological is always articulated through the ethnic and warrants the treating the populations as such
          - the gingers are exemplar of a "future ethnicity” that is performed in the video


Half of the sentence about scholarship on biopolitics, “taken together”  ignores race, at least initially  is true (though Stohler, McWhorter, Bernasconi, and Ellen Fetterer, Huggen) 

Friday, February 13, 2015

Neocleous, Critique of Security (Ch.1)

Notes for 
12 February 2015
CGC
Critique of Security, Mark Neocleous (2008)

Questions

1)    What is Neocleous's working df of 'security'?  What are the merits of rejecting security rather than redefining?  (What is Neocleous's argument vis-à-vis Ken Booth, page 5?)

2)    What is his conception of critique (page 7) vis-à-vis Foucault?  Is this a critical project that is Foucaultian in orientation, or Marxist, or ... ?

3)    What is MN's argumentative relationship to 'liberalism'?  How is liberalism being envisioned, as an object of critique (is it a theory, an ideology, a set of techniques, a rationality, a practice?)?  And how does this enable MN to position liberalism as a project that contradicts itself?  What other alternatives are available?  Why not say that liberalism fails to live up to its own ideals?

4)    What was the pre-Lockean conception of prerogative?  What was the pre-sovereign conception of prerogative?

5)    Why is the rule of law not governed by necessity whereas the rule of prerogative is governed by necessity?  (pp. 21-23).

6)    MN reads liberalism less as an ideology, more as a "technique of security" in which "security is deployed as liberty" (pp. 31-32).

Discussion

2) Critique as preliminary to judgment? What’s the primary investment, critique or judgment? Security discourse that begins in liberalism. (7) – MN really at core a Marxist, but he likes Foucault’s concept of historical critique? Critique in the sense of unmasking contradictions?

à 3) liberalism as ideology – Is it okay to conflate liberalism with liberty? Liberalism as a technique of security (31) In actual fact, are liberals deploying security rather than liberty? Does that make it a technique? Related to not seeing critique in Foucault’s sense. MN wants both worlds, but without realizing he can’t have both worlds: C-O-P of theory, and the unintelligibility, and wants the historical component of C-O-P. Can you attempt to conditions on the theoretical level (what is liberalism, show a self-contradiction within the very theory of lib.), and attempt the conditions on the historical level (as in Foucault) – theoretical and historical critique potentially mutually exclusive. How these contradictions are grounded in a historical moment? Modes of thought – practices don’t have to function at the same level as that of thought?

(p.18) – sovereignty and prerogative – as a form power can take under specific conditions – prerogative as the instance of sovereign power within the liberalism tradition.  – sovereignty being subsumed under the prerogative , making Locke more Hobbesian (Lockean account not one of consent).  Locke à need a consent mechanism in order to bring about order (if we don’t consent, we’re in a state of war with the state). If prerogative is fundamental for Locke, perhaps he looks more Hobbesian. à How is prerogative fundamental for Locke?

5) States of emergency when action not according to the rule of law is necessary (21-23) – (17) – is the necessary justifiable without consent? Consenting to something that responds to the emergency situations. à Locke – consent as actual. Consent to the function of the prerogative power or to the ways in which the prerogative power obtains in a very specific emergency moment. Being in a state of rebellion. Negation of the possibility of the clause of exception? Limiting the instances or the places where the clauses of exception attain. (35-6) – Legitimacy of prerogative lies in its legality. Argument made for states of emergency for long periods of time, or no ends to the states of emergency? Prolonged states of emergency justified by liberal statecrafts. Arbitrary power of the prerogative is a trust (a consent).

– Whatever critique you give will have to cohere with what solution you give to the problem you’ve identified. Liberal theory inherently self-contradictory at the theoretical level à abandon security rather than redefine it – question of the strategy of the argument is that while both can show a failure or self-contradiction, none is giving us insights of how to move forward. 1) Conceptual project 2) Historical project (not functioning at the same level) à how do you put them into dialogue? MN wants both levels, but the question remains how do you move from one level the other?

à Contradiction applying to the level of theory, meeting contradictions within practice? (2 of intro) – contradictions found in practice. Why go all the way back to Locke for a contemporary project of security? à Looking for the conditions that created something like this (theoretical conditions) – MN blocking the desire to bring back liberal human rights protections.

What MN means by security? – uses social security, examples from introduction (6) False binary (security-liberty) – handing over liberties for our security-fetish.



Sunday, February 8, 2015

Amoore, 'Politics of Possibility', Chapter 6

Masked philosopher: Often Foucault’s interviews were done anonymously. If everything is predictable then there is no space for critique. If everything is predictable there is not space for anything new to emerge, no event. Foucault--if everything is predictable then there is no space for new thoughts. Space of critque within a politics of possibility as to take some of that novelty. Foucault felt when became know, the encounter with readers was predetermined.

It felt as though the space of critique was both internal and external to politics of possibility. Politics are only possible when you open a space of critique. Critique was construed negatively--critique is supposed to tell us how the world could be but doesn’t point us in the way it should be. Foucault says we need to bring critique in to create space for things to be otherwise, but there is no claim about the world should be. Art is sight of potentiality where alterity emerges. Are these politics realist enough?

She needs a space where the politics of possibility cannot contain the entire politics of potentiality. We could assume that we live in totalizing politics of possibility where potentiality is foreclosed. Why isn’t this is the case? Does possibility imply potentiality? You have to assume a difference between potentiality and possibility. If possibilities do not cover the space of potentiality, where can we see this? Her answer is art. The differnce between possibility and potentiality--something is possible when there is the probability that it could obtain. Potentiality remains the space where new things can emerge. As soon as in-betweenness emerge, isn’t it already there.  A life never becomes the life. A life is not actualized -- it exists in a different space that is not the same as the real life. Imminent life exists in a virtual space. If we make something legible isn’t it always already part of the politics of possibility?  Are possibilities limited to a certain space? What kind of spaces can the logic of the algorithm can be extended too? The space between the operating logic of possibility and its application into other spaces is the space of critique (I may have misunderstood). When we think terms of human potentiality, we can see uncertain futures.

If there is an ontology, the space of potentiality is one that contains smaller spaces of possibility. She posits this distinction because she has to have a space where critique is possible. Assumption--the space of potentiality is the sum of all the subsets of possibility. Her ontological assumptions is that this space of potentiality always exceeds these subsets of possibility. Amazon example about predictive preferences. In-betweeness is the actual body, the idea that the algorithm can’t attach predictions to certain bodies. Collaborative filtering solves this problem. Does the amazon example eliminate personal ruptures?

There is an ethical turn. The politics of possibility is indifference to whether or not a possibility comes to pass. So there is a problem decision, algorithm makes judgements not decisions. Politics emerges from decisions and responsibility. Politics of possibility lead to a politics of indifference. But are these decisions illusory? But are the stakes high in amazon purchases? They are high in drone attacks.

Are there differences between infopolitics and biopolitics? Is the goal of the algorithms to justify killing without responsibility? Is it more than that? You come to believe that is not a decision because the facts lead you to it. Is there space opened up by the act of decision.