Delaporte, Dis & Civ, Intro & Ch. 3

 

We began, as per usual, with questions:

1)      Let’s discuss methodological remarks in the introduction.  “What does exist is not disease but practices” (6).  What does FD mean here?  How does it fit in with the three planks of the standard view that he rejects?

2)      Related methodological questions about whether his account of what might be called “the social construction of disease” and any potential idealism.  Relatedly what is the relation between power and knowledge in Delaporte, especially in comparison to his remarks about ideology (8-9)?

3)      How is he classifying certain kinds of beliefs, statements?  Especially when he uses terms like “myth” and “ideology” and “values” and “fantasy”?

4)      FD discusses in ch. 3 surveillance.  He discusses “the opposition opposition degredation/surveillance” (62).

5)      How is FD mapping what we might call “false beliefs” to “class antagonism”?  How does it map to “rural” versus “urban” divides?  (How does this relate to his nervousness about “class antagonism” as a category in the intro?)

6)      How does FD use “fear” as a category of analysis such that fear can be shown to be productive in these settings? (60-61).

7)      Relatedly, how do these fears (& other kinds of beliefs and epistemic statuses) play out as meaningful, or be meaningful, in social contexts, and in classed ways?

 

We turned first to issues in methodology:

We first considered some of the background of contagionist theory (1700s-1800s) versus infectionist theory (1800s), both of which were elaborated prior to the concept of the germ.  See p. 14 for one reference.

To understand “disease” we need to situate it in practices.

o   FD rejects a three-prong medical philosophy articulated on p. 6 (cf. MF on “sex itself” in HSv1)

o   FD endorses then three methodological precepts: 1) social factors appear in contexts of study, 2) different underlying “styles of medical reasoning”, 3) there are different theories of disease (infection v. contagion)

·        We then ran through pp. 6-8 to discuss how FD rejects principles #2 and #3, and how he would endorse a more moderated version of each if it were emptied of the presuppositions embedded into them by principle #1.

 

Discussing, then, chapter 3:

·        Is the treating “beliefs” symmetrically with the way he thinks about “disease”?  He places a good amount of weight on whether the beliefs are true or false, rather than just taking the positivity of their appearance as a datum for analysis.

o   For Foucault (as a positivist) what matters is not the truth-value of the belief, but rather the fact of their appearance.

o   Is Delaporte following Foucault here?  Or is his argument resting on the falseness of the belief as somehow explanatory?

o   (Cf. Arendt on truth versus the lie)