Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Stoler, Duress, Introduction

 

Stoler, Duress “Critical Incisions”

The meeting began with questions.

[1] (pp. 21) occlusions are productive (rather than obstacles). Doesn’t that reproduce the violence that she is trying to unearth? Seeing the spaces of traumatized memory as productive could be seen as reproducing the violence she is trying to unearth.

[2] What does she mean by ‘occlusions’, ‘disregard’? Can we situate this within a Foucauldian framework?

[3] What does she mean when she says that ‘duress’ is a “relation to a condition”? How does this relate to power?

[4] What is the relationship between three kinds of ‘work’ (concept labor, archival labor, genealogy as a working strategy)? How are these ideas related? (esp. in relation to their affective dimensions)?

[5] Ineffability and rupture/continuity seem related, but it is not clear how, exactly.

[6] Concept work seems to have a privileged status. Why is there an emphasis on the conceptual as the space of intervention? What must the conceptual be (such that it can be a site for political intervention)? What must political intervention be (such that the conceptual is the site for it)?

[7] What does she mean by recursion? Why is it important to genealogy and history?

[Is she channeling Proust?]

[8] What is Stoler’s method in this book? Who is she drawing from to come up with this approach (Heidegger, Foucault)?

[9] There seem to be different kinds of occlusion. How are these related?

 

Discussion ensued.

Occlusion as an inability to express things or have access to information. What is the difference between this an ideology? It is more than ignorance.

She is resisting the categories of haunting, silence, trace—the histories are there, and are needed for certain projects. Instead of calling them missing—there are specific reasons that they are there. The background involves thinking about archives. It has an important proactive aspect.

Is this related to Foucault’s notion of subjugated knowledges (or histories). These are narratives that are marginalized, but Foucault does not really ask why they are marginalized.

Is this close to the idea that knowledges get produced as occluded; versus certain knowledge exist (but they happen to be included). i.e., there are practices that produces aspects of the dispositif.

There is a distinction between that which occludes and that which is occluded.

(occlusions as lines internal to somethings)

Exercise in attention or vigilance. This is what allows one to see the occluded.

pp. 12: Stoler talks about the “capacity to know and not to know simultaneously”.

Aphasia: you try to say something and something else comes out. There is not a lot of knowledge involved. This seems like misassociation.

pp. 17 the affective relations—relations of force. Concept work as breaking links between concepts, but also breaking through the force. The capacity to never think about the same things differently—this chimes with the ethos of genealogy.

Political lexicon: network of people rethinking political concepts. Could creating new concepts have a role here?

Poetics of thought is already central to concept formation.

Is concept work only destabilizing? How is it connected with genealogy? Is it that genealogies study concepts? Genealogical method for intervening in the persistent taken-ness as stable. This opens up questions about the archive as the medium of genealogical interventions. Why the archive rather than something else?

The work of genealogy as revealing techniques of governing that have been sedimented.

For Said: The intervention is into representations (discourse representing the Orient). For Stoler: a similar orientation lies being the focus on concepts. There is an important resonance between the two.

Compare with Agamben’s view of testimony: the work is to make intelligible (not to rest content with the silence or impossibility).

Recursion: the history problem. How can we not go on full continuity and full discontinuity? How can we keep track of things that come back (but in different forms)? Recursion is a function that recalls itself but produces something different. This could be seen as part of a critique of the idea of continuity viz coloniality. As well as a critique of radical discontinuity.

Involuntary memory in Proust: we can never re-experience the past, but we can access it again involuntarily when we are reminded of it. Volition gets in the way. The inadequacy of memory; the instability of the past.

pp. 34: memory is not the direction in which she wants to go (she is not just interested in the subjective aspect of the past).

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Said, Orientalism, Introduction

 

We began, as per usual, with questions:

1)      Can we further specify the relation of orientalism to originality, continuity, and individuality (pg 15)?

2)      What does Said mean by authority vis-à-vis his two methodological devices of strategic location and strategic formation (pg 20)?

3)      How would we compare/contrast Said’s methodological approach with that of subaltern studies, esp. with Spivak?

4)      How would we compare/contrast Said’s methodological approach with that of Foucauldian genealogy and/or discourse analysis?  How does Said’s focus on Foucauldian discourse line up with Foucault’s own category of discourse?

5)      What is Said’s idea of “internal consistency” as an object of study (pg 5) and how does he situate it in relation to “redoubtable durability” as a companion object of study (pg 6)?

6)      Said is explicit that his methodology relies ion a set of historical generalizations (pg 4).  Are these generalizations reliant upon his methodology or do they serve to set up the deployment of it by functioning as a kind of starting point for analysis?

 

We then moved to discussion:

Relation of Orientalism to Orient is “a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture” (19).  Strategy, authority, hegemony.  “Authority can, indeed must be analyzed” (20).

Is Said descriptive of authority?  Is he unmasking authority?  What is Said’s analytical-philosopihcal relationship to the authority he is studying?

Orientalism as an authority (12).  What Orientalism is has to do with how Orientalism is situated with respect to subjects.  Said offers a notion of strategic configuration.  There is a contrast here between two forms of strategic location:

Strategic location #1: I am person of identity x, vis-à-vis

Strategic location #2 (Said): a granular analysis of what form Orientalism has taken from/within specific trajectories.

Study of how the West has conceived of the Orient.  The focus is on representations (21), moreso than truth.

This leads to analysis of “formidable structure of cultural domination” (25) and the dangers of this.

This is clearly not Freudo-Marxism.  Is it closer to cultural studies?

Looking at this as a book from the 1970s, it makes some initiating moves in terms of its ethics and its politics.  Said establishes much of what we today often take for granted.

What for Said is the scope of Orientalist discourse?

A study of consistency in relation to durability/stability.  There is a connection between consistency, stability, and power that Said (similar to Foucault) is here studying.

 

 

In terms of comparison

 … with Foucault….

Like Foucault, Said is interested in the productive rather than “unilaterally inhibiting” role of discourse and hegemonic systems (14).

Said is more explicitly focused on the “imprint of individual writers” (23).  This imprint gets studied through the “strategic location” of individual authors (20).  We can distinguish…

                Discourse/author [but without an overemphasis on hermeneutic analysis (e.g., 14)]

                Practice/document

Said seems to be both descriptive and normative, in contrast to Foucault’s more straightforwardly descriptive approach.

 

 

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (sectns. 1-3)

Introduction to the piece (from our curator)


Early work of Nietzsche. 12 years before Genealogy. Thoughts about history as a
discipline in 19th century Europe still apply?
 

Main interest: value of history for life. Genealogical critique as also pursuing that, starts
from the present and seeks transformation. Poscolonial history and genealogy and their
value for transforming the present.
 

We began with questions:
● Why can’t history become a pure science? (61)
● How do we think about the relation between knowledge, history and life?
(64)
Analogies/universals in historical explanation?
● What does life designate in this essay? Dark power, health and human
action.
● How can history endanger life? Genealogy? (76).
● What does it look like for life to sit in judgment? (76)
Is forgetfulness really the right term?
● Is Nietzsche committed to an external perspective by which to evaluate
these histories? (76)

 

Do we need a history of forgetting?
 

 

 We then moved to discussion:
 

Our first theme was life vis-a-vis the present. Possible meanings of life?
Contemporary problems tied to living.
Life in relation to the development of a habit: prudence vs excess/lack (Aristotle).
Prereflexive character of life.
Biological life: instinct, becoming more powerful. Also ethical, not solely biological, in
relation to virtue as a habit.
 

Plastic power: capacity to develop out of oneself…healing wounds (62).
Collective trauma, collective memory.
Question of the animal (62): animal life seems to be relevant or tied to the unhistorical,
to the now, lack of knowledge.
Is life as a goal justifiable? What does this furthering of life look like?
History is something salutary only “as the attendant of a mighty new current of life” (67).


Excess of history = degeneration of life and degeneration of history (67).

vs objective history (the facts), but making the past suffer (74). Debates on genealogy
vs archaeology: to what extent is our inquiry objective? Genealogy as a method
challenges the objectivity of history as such.
 

Healthy thing: only when bounded by a horizon that has been self-determined (63).
 

Instinct of when to feel historically or unhistorically (63): objectivism and subjectivism.
 

“Subjective life” = possible category mistake. Subjectivity related to experience.
 

Life in a more cosmic sense, not subjectivity; therefore, not necessarily political.
 

Degeneration = “the critic without need/urgency, the antiquary without piety, the man
who recognizes greatness but cannot himself do great things” (72).
 

Connection to Spengler: cultural decay, degeneration.
 

Deleuze vs Foucault: schizoanalysis. Deleuze wasn’t historical enough because there is
too much focus on the intensive, forces.
 

What relation to the past is exposed in critical history in contrast to monumental and
antiquarian?