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