Farge and Foucault, Disorderly Families, II. Parents and Children

Overview of the letters in Section 2 (each of us volunteered to summarize one subsection):

Disruption of Affairs - questions of chronology arose in this section because some letters were not dated

Shameful Concubinage - focus on daughters in this section; interesting references to conception of children as significant; often those making the petition were fathers

Dishonor of Waywardness - tbd

Domestic Violence section - focused on theft; few cases of parents complaining against daughter (so case on p. 205 of suicidal daughter stands out)

Bad Apprentices - similar theme of sons being sent to apprenticeships and becoming drunks and libertines

Exiles - the punishment does not seem proportional to the behavior

Fam Honor - this section is mostly women; direct appeals to honor

Parental Ethos I - all arrestees in this section were male; the direction of the appeals is not always clear.

Parental Ethos II - tbd

Throughout sections, the theme presented in the section headings didn't seem to differentiate these letters from those in other sections. Also striking was the ages of the children (early to late 20s), which raises questions of dividing line between adulthood and childhood.


Discussion of Letters and Foucault's Introductory Texts:

Questions:

Why do they organize the archival material into subsections?

How does one tease out the prevalence of a certain style of justification in these letters, given that others exist?  Why do some of these become organizing principles for compiling and organizing the letters?

Discussion:

Foucault's discussion of the shift from 1728 to 1758 (135ff.) is interesting (from affection to education); very Foucauldian attention to shifts (did not appear in previous section).

The two introductions are clearly written by two different people.  Are the two introductions reflective of two different historiographical approaches?  "Tableaus of conjugal life" (29) v. "existence of a model, a framework" (135) in a process of "evolution".  Social groups v. historical differentiation (135).

What is at stake in organizing concepts like "threshold"?  How does one locate a distinction in an archive? Why not theorize those "thresholds" as proper places in their own right?

How is Fouc's introduction functioning?

Foucault & Farge, Disorderly Families, I. Marital Discord

Thursday Jan.18, 2018

Questions

·      * Emergence of terms (e.g. ‘madness,’ ‘debauchery,’ etc.) – relation between scribes & formalities of language of the lettres de cachet – who is determining the language used in letters?

·      * Do scribes literally transcribe what the subjects are saying, or are they just compiled from notes?

·      * How might we categorize medium in a Foucauldian vocabulary? Is strategizing coupled with classification in a Foucauldian vocab? (p.43)

·      * Unpack the method of reading deployed here (e.g. “surface of the couple” p.32-3)

·      * Theme of repentance and relation of theme through history of punitive practice (p.47) How clearly do these claims connect to MF’s narrative histories of punishment? Emergence of the social attitude of repentance – as cause for disciplinary punishment? (p.48)

·     *  How does gender map onto the organization of the letters?

Responses

Method of reading – how are they describing the reading on p.32? – What emerges from the reading of these petitions? – interlaced systems of values? Surface – why use this language? Is there a depth? Does the order of importance come from untangling this system of values? Is it found within the genre of the writing?

What is the difference between the visible & the surface that comes into view from the gaze of the others? (see also p.42) – Surfaces & visibilities à bringing a positivity into view

Reading method à collecting letters; historiographical question of how one assembles the visbilities/positivities – what is the empirical status of MF’s work? Positivities as facts. MF’s positivism

Positivities taking on different significance than those in D&P, where they have an added layer of interpretation/analysis?  

Reading for themes? Are they reading for the themes?

Reading as a question of seeing/visibility*

Documents that make visibilities sayable 

Is this function of archival material or function of private/public distinction or function of both?

Private life enigmatic to neighbors/to public.

Letters – mechanism by which their private life gets made public – obscure lives make public this otherwise private concern

What is meant by public & private here? Public – known by authorities (police)? Because they were known by others?

Public/Private – public determined by the limits of the sovereign – private, what is lost

Private – what gets lost, what is obscure? Public – what becomes visible? What is visible?

Politics of the family – gendering of public/private (p.48-9) letters prior to reified gendering of the split between the private/public * (Both husband/wife make these petitions)

What belongs to genre of letter-writing – where the discourse comes from that is used in the letters? Categories belonging to the genre? Do they correspond with categories used by different genres (e.g. court proceedings, letters written by neighbors)

Imprecision as the medium through which the 18^th century police worked (p.43) – Why is imprecision a medium rather than a strategy or a technique? Notion of the imprecise police à imprecision = substance in which the police works because sovereign power is also imprecise

Police not generating the stakes (or the categories) of the practice, but are reactive.

Farge & Foucault, Disorderly Families, Introduction and Afterword

Introduction and Afterword: Disorderly Families

1.  Can we discuss the representativeness of the sample? (pg. 27). Found it surprising that they picked two years. Interesting archival choice. Why did they pick the two years?

2. What do we make of the attention to affect in the afterword - specifically, how is affect influencing how they read the archive and how they interpret it (especially the technique of copying as creating a kind of intimacy between Farge, Foucault, and the lives they are reading about) (pg. 269-270)?

3. Why did they write a book that is largely just the reproduction of archival material?

4. Can we discuss these sense of construction implied in the "greats" constructing systems designed to dismiss common people? (pg. 268)

5. Is the function of the text as a presentation of archives different from the function of a text like Discipline and Punish?

"This is where this register's paradox lies: it freezes the lives of people quite suddenly, yet at the same time a feeling of incessant movement, of constant circulation, escapes from it" (pg. 22).

There is a freezing of the fugitive world - one of incessant movement. The archive doubles this freezing/movement.

What is modest means? What does it mean that families were paying to have family members imprisoned? What are these letters really for? What function do they serve? The aristocracy did not write these kinds of letters. These letters fly in the face of common interpretations of French history in terms of the relation between the sovereign and the people.

These letters reveal previously unknown lives — rendering singular lives part of history. But how do we connect this with Foucault's other projects?  An ethical gesture - a way of presenting the archives in a way that leaves the archives open. This might be why the periodization matters - a way of tending to the shift from sovereign to disciplinary power without specifically referencing it (he does end up making it explicit in some other passages - 130 and 260). Repentance emerges as a theme that marks the shift from sovereignty to discipline (technique of correction). On 24, the family ends up reflecting the relationships of sovereign power while being embedded in a host of other relationships.

Is there a lack of periodization in the piece overall? What would a history have looked like? Why didn't they pick middle dates? Why not 1743? Self-evident affect positioned against quantitative representativeness - how is the archivist implicated in such a project? How is the archivist implicated in the reproduction of archival material? The practice of writing history seems like an important theme of the text - experiment with different ways of writing history. These different practices of writing performs different kind work. There is a spirit of experimentation at work. If we think of the archives as the writing of history and the uncovered lives coming into contact with power as the writing of history, this another way of performing that very writing (in the style of the original). D&P does not perform the writing of the panopticon, but this piece does perform the writing of the dossiers - an artistic style. Is it artistic or is it an aesthetic positivity? What does the experiment consist of? It is an interesting experiment to just reproduce it. "Drawing an intricate portrait" (268) as an aesthetic that differs from a more theoretical-historical account - (271) "Foucault saw a tableau where misery would challenge glory."

Some of the archival documents where difficult to read and there is an interpretative element involved in puzzling them together. Does the archive speak for itself? Can we make a distinction between the archive speaking for itself and it doing something on its own? For Foucault, the archive doesn't speak for itself in the sense that it tells us how it should be read. But there are facts that do things for themselves within the world of the archive (there is a positivity to them). There is an interesting tension between the sublime nature of the lives (a politics from below) and the positivity of documenting a form of power. There is affective tension in the text that has an impact on how they present the material (suffering-tragedy-intimacy).

Is the practice of reading, assembling, writing the archive here the same as that in D&P - He seems to reverse engineer the practice of reading in the Lives of Dangerous Men. The texts make an ethical claim on him that he doesn't talk about in terms of his earlier texts based on archives - from the same archive, he is excavating different projects and the writing is very different. How do we treat these letters differently from how they were treated when they were written? Emotion informs from the practice reading the archives for Farge.

A List of Foucault's Collaborations

Stuart Elden (one of the most diligent and insightful Foucault scholars working today) has a useful overview of some of Foucault's collaborative projects that may be of use to us this term and next.  (Thanks to Nicolae for the link.)

https://progressivegeographies.com/resources/foucault-resources/foucaults-collaborative-projects/

Winter Term 2018 Schedule

Continuing our theme for the year, on collaboration, we'll be reading the Disorderly Families project produced together by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault.  All meetings in Leona Tyler Conference Room off of the Graduate Student Lounge unless otherwise marked.

Thur 1/11 - Introduction (AF/MF), and Afterword (AF)
Thur 1/18 - Introduction to "Husbands and Wives" (AF), plus everyone read one section of letters
Thur 1/25 - Introduction to "Parents and Childrens" (MF), plus everyone read one section of letters
Thur 2/1 (location: Allen 332) - "When Adressing the King" (AF/MF)
Thur 2/8 (location: Allen 332)- Farge, Fragile Lives, pp 1-42
Thur 2/15 - Farge, Fragile Lives, pp 42-72
Thur 2/22 - Farge, Fragile Lives, pp. 169-204
Thur 3/1 (location tbd) - Farge, Fragile Lives, pp. 204-256
Thur 3/9 - Farge, Fragile Lives, pp. 256-287 (Ch. 10 and Conclusion)
Thur 3/15 - TBD, perhaps Foucault's "Lives of Infamous Men"?