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).
