April 29 Session Notes

4/29/16 CGC: Notes:

Board Questions:

1) Can we blv F’s sovereignty w/ Latour’s concept of power?

2) Discourse or non-social – integrate L & F?

3) Objects have agency? (for L, and more generally, need new term?)

4) sociology of associations and social/nonsocial – what is the register on which he is making this claim that we need to flatten the social/nonsocial? Ontological claim? Methodology?

5) p. 276  social = configuration of elements in duration; or do they have something in excess, i.e. dispostifs, episteme?

6) p. 277 what is meant by techniques, objects, durability?

7) 274-77: How reconcile modification w/ duration // F’s // “rule of continual variation” à ‘closet libertarian’?

8) 268: transformation // stuart hall encoding/decoding à but is there a first cause, what precipitates the cycle?  //

9) agency? As object and method? Consent?

10) implications for sociological methodology: can we keep the Latourian insight which inverts the order of explanation in terms of where power comes from and also keep a concept of the real?

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So, p. 270 à debates about the origin of society and the number of terms/items,

Status of categories – as abstractions

Power can’t be used as an explainer, it has to be explained.

Society can’t be used as an explainer, it has to be explained.

What does shift around? (271) mean, “sources of pwer in the hands of those who are able to shift around the answers to the questionnaire”

Question: sovereign power as top-down, in Foucault? In Latour à does this make sense.

Sovereign power and biopower as two kinds of power in Foucault à

Latour: here is a methodology for studying power. V. Foucault: I studied power and look what I found.

Do techniques become problematic for Latour because he wants to maintain an agnosticism about pre-formed relations?

What has agency?: either agency is attributed to:

a) the entire network / b) each element within the network / c) conception dissolved altogether, talk just about analysis of actions of network.

Agency -->

Inner inertia -->

Concept of agency: pursuing ends that you want to pursue? --> some connection to ‘Freedom’

Agency requires an agent.-->

--> Roman Jakobson  -- > Aristotle --> agency , praxis, -- anything that does anything

Action in terms of that which glues, --

Failure as important to study in addition to success,

Duration and transformation

Deleuze - Logic of Sense (selections)

Questions: 

Destiny? (4,6)

Difference between event and Event? (54)

Freedom?  How it functions? (6)

How non-corporeal concepts fit in relation to objects don’t accept them?  Race—person conceptualizing it v. person subjected to it? (6)

Relation between ideal event, singularity, history? (52-3)

Is history/genealogy corporeal? (53)

Singularity? (52)

Deleuze v. Foucault on “present” and “problem?” (55)

Relations between quasi-causes, effects and events? (2-7)

Notes:

Trace “tree greens” through various concepts

Discussion of Meinong on “subsistence”

Denotation, manifestation, signification re: race (3rd series)

GD adds “sense”

James Williams on “singularity,” connection to “intensity,” “all points are potentially singularities”

“paradox” from first paragraph

Mapping bodies/states of affairs and incorporeal identities

Is the distinction mobile across domains (metaphysics, particular instance, etc.)?

Bodies/SoA: living present, causes, predicates/substantives, common sense, existence, problems/solutions

Incorporeal Entities: unlimited Aion, effects, infinitives, subsistence/inherence, problematic

Paradox?

Relation b/w: “expression” (8)

Def of sense (19)

“being is problematic”—relation to Foucault on problematization and practices?

Footnote on Deleuze and Foucault

A question to keep on the table:

Is the discourse-statement relation in Foucault functionally analogous to the sense-(denotation-signification-manifestation) relation in Deleuze?

Is the problematization-practice relation in Foucault funcationally analogous to the problem-solution relation in Deleuze?

This is a question.

Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus

Questions

1) What is meant by ‘deterritorialization’?

2) In what sense is the text anti-fascist? -  viz. Foucault/preface

3) What is “production”-à how it ‘works’? of what, etc.? – p.148

4) What does ‘decoding’ mean? – p.166 – relationship between ‘overcoding’ and Foucault’s ‘figure'

5) Primitive territorial machine; socius; social machine – p.140

6) “Universal history is a history of contingencies” – How exactly? Aren’t these antithetical to one another? p.140

Discussion

Fascism – desiring our own oppression; desiring being led; love of power (xiii)

Deterritorialization – transformation of a meaning & territory

Territorialization - setting up a territory/ region – building a space & meaning

Capitalism as decoding machine à transforms codes

Universal in negative sense?  – potential of capitalism is universal in all social forms

p.150 – history – dynamic & open social reality 

dysfunctions/ crises of the social/desiring-machine - -- how to get out of this? Can’t just oppose negatively.

Text is not anti-Marxist – p.151 – against certain Marxist readings or tendencies 

Assumed ideal model & actual institutions 

Overcode – surplus value of code – p.150 – in excess/escapes the code 

Coding = territorial machine

Overcoding = despotic machine – chief makes meal – prestige - way of introducing transcendence in social figures – appropriated

Capitalism = decoding

Earth = source of the territorial machine – ground of territorial machine, which is the first form of sociality (socius) – primitive, savage unity of desire & production (140) 

Social machine – has men for its parts; fashions a memory; condition & organize – society - socius of inscription – essential thing is to mark and to be marked – about inscribing (142) 

Megamachine – social machine as a collective entity 

Deleuze on Foucault two essays

The group began, as per usual, by sharing questions:

1) Can we diagram GD's various lists of different elements of MF's thoguht?  E.g., strata, strategy, sub-stratum (242)

2) Role of the subject in subjectivation (341-2)?  How does subjetiation oppose codification (257)?

3) Diff b/w a theory of descriptions and a theory of utterances (252)?

4) GD notes the relation between 'reason' and 'subject' in MF (p. 343 "What is a Dispositif?").  Can we discuss?

5) What does GD mean in calling MF "a pragmatist"?

6) Curves - temporal or conceptual? (354)

7) Strata - are historical formation both empirical and positive.  What are their temporalitiy? (242)

8) What is the temporality of a history of apparatuses? (339)


Then we turned to discussion:

Foucault's strata - archaeology - Savoir - or historical formations made of facts.  They are made up of words and things.

Foucault's strategy - outside - Pouvoir - social fields strategize and never get structured, as it were, from the outside (249)

Foucault's substratum - genealogy - inside - subjectivation
 
Foucault's Kantianism

Deleuze's spinozism (contra hegelianism) - nothing is hidden (245).