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.