Veyne, "Foucault Revolutionizes History"

Today’s piece from Foucault and his Interlocutors - highly recommended

Also recommended: Paul Veyne, Foucault: His Thought, His Character

Questions:

•         What type of relationship does the present have to the bringing to light of crooked historical contours?

•         p. 147 Does Veyne make Foucault’s arguments more objective/positivist than he should?

•         What does Veyne mean in calling Foucault a positivist?

◦          What does it mean such that it isn’t an insult?

◦          Does it follow that Latour is a positivist?

•         p. 165: Tease out differences between two definitions of ideologies, how they function for Veyne

•         p. 181: Histories in terms of practices vs. peoples, centuries, civilizations, governor/governed - revolution of Foucault is in turn to practice. What distinguishes a practice as a unit of history in relation to other units of history?

◦          Why say that practice is the only unit of analysis of history rather than one of many?

•         Formalisms in Foucault, e.g. subjectivity - what is the status of those in relation to Veyne’s discussion of practices, etc.?

•         pp. 179, 181 What is the motivation for attributing materialism to Foucault? Is this ontological? Related to method? Metaphysics?

•         p. 151 Welfare state - is there a better term for the arrangement of things in which people desire what their rulers do? Is this neoliberalism?

•         p. 157 Preconceptual - reason why were are unconscious of submerged grammar - why preconceptual rather than conceptual? Why aren’t there concepts submerged in the iceberg?

◦          Why is it pre- rather than non-? Why is the submerge stuff not able to become conceptual?

◦          Foucault’s use of grammar - does he use it in this way? (He uses it in AK - but not to this extent.) Grammar doesn’t seem to relate to DP/HoS

•         p. 147 What does Veyne mean by exceptionality? Usually comes up in claim about emptiness.

Discussion:

•         Positivism

◦          Is contrast class rationalism or idealism? And positivism then empiricism (rather than logical positivism)?

◦          Some relationship between positivism and historicism. p. 181 Calls naturalized or taken for granted objects into question.

◦          In sum, Veyne says it’s positivism all the way down, therefore look at practices gives one a look at the really real. Is this in tension with other commitments in article/for MF?

▪          This method is useful for finding what really happened. MF wouldn’t describe his work like this...

▪          …but Veyne isn’t interested in what’s really happening, maybe - interested in developing historical methodology separate from perspectivalism.

▪          …but Veyne is centering this on his new feelings about his old work - he did it wrong because he studied people, not practices. Was working with an old historical method, having read MF I now realize it was a method, I now have a better/the right method. Now sees more clearly. MFs method set as better, ‘right’? p. 154

▪          Veyne's MF: explaining practices not on the basis of other folks, societies, etc. but other practices. Don’t have to transcend practices to explain them.

▪          It need not be that practices are the only way to the real - maybe he’s making a local claim, that practices are positive (indexical? attached to a date?)

▪          pp. 169-170 w/Duns Scotus footnote. Why bring him in and then talk about MF believing that matter exists in act?

◦          What’s the purpose of discussing historical contours - is it to describe things better or to disrupt the naturalness of the appearance?

◦          p. 170 quote from MF - 'Madness does not exist, but doesn’t mean it’s not real' -does this edge into metaphysics? 

▪          Way of thinking through the conditions of possibility - history as a site of the Deleuzean virtual. This read undoes some of the other claims made today.

▪          'Claim that madness doesn’t exist is positivist’ - practices are the best way in terms of the order of operations to do history - start w practices so as to avoid concepts that are bogged down in metaphysics. Won’t get as good an explanation - will get one that’s more accurate, more real. Again, does this align w MF? Is method of practices meant to get closer and closer to the real, or destabilize the present?

▪          Passage from The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 4

▪          Verne’s positivism is in these concrete practices - taking the concrete practices and passing universals through those, rather than starting with universals to organize practices.

▪          p. 176 Veyne cite of MF’s AK - positivities are the fields in which objects are the outputs

◦          If we’re going to say that some explanations are better than others, then what are the criteria?

▪          Veyne: Need to uncover practices for the sake of uncovering practices (this is the real) vs. MF uncovering practices to get to power relations. These are different.

▪          Reading Veyne through Latour: to explicate broader structures of power through practices is to take the shortcut, not pay the price oneself/see the practitioners paying the price.

▪          Question is in the purpose of history - to describe the real of the past or to get at power relations in the present

▪          Is history directed temporally towards the present or the past? If present, criteria aren’t related to accurately representing the real, criteria is on what it does. If past, emphasis is on the accuracy of descriptions against the real.

▪          Latour, from Whitehead - propositional, ideal that centers practices.

▪          Does Veyne avoid reifying the method, or metaphysizing the method? p. 173 - So keen to counter Marxism that he swings to the other pole and misses a middle that Latour is more inclined to recognize.

▪          This is the interest in preconceptual - it would be that middle. It’s important that he says it’s nonconceptual. He seems to try and address above problem through preconceptual.

▪          Does same work as implicit/explicit in Brandom.

◦          Feels like the practice is the agent in this - the practice objectivizes. Doesn’t feel like practice coalesces the doings.

▪          Maybe makes more sense if with respect to range of possible actions - critique of MF is that he evacuates agency from persons to structures. MF does say there’s a range of actions we take that we’re not willful about. One step down from big critique is to say that practices move us. Empty space around our practices in which we can’t move.

▪          Practices are conditions of possibility of what we can say. Still agency within the practices, but all options are not available. Agency exist, but bounded by practices.

▪          Point of history for MF - make possible a reflexive critique of those practices, which we can only do if we free ourselves from the notion that these practices are natural. Freeing ourselves from the naturalness of sex, e.g., makes possible a critique of the role of sexuality