Erlenbusch-Anderson and Koopman, On Empirical Genealogy

Questions: (1) What is the index for tracking power? How do you track power within archival material? (2) How capable is genealogy in tracking in the beneficiaries of power? (3) How does genealogy exercise caution? (4) How does genealogy perform a “transformative enactment”? How does empirical work enable/facilitate “transformative enactment?” If in the false starts, how do we recognize a false start, etc.? (5) (p. 9) How does the experimental aspect of genealogy relate to possibilizing and/or to reconstruction? (6) How does a genealogical reliance on (or work on) public archives constitute the work? Does this change in the face of digitalization? (7) Are there norms for genealogy’s empirical inquiry? Discussion ensued: We began with question 2 (beneficiaries of power): —The concern is that we don’t have an answer to this, then we might fall into an uncritical framework. —Does it need to be localized? But what if it is global? —How are we thinking about power? How do you think of power for it to make sense in terms of beneficiaries? —Power is the conduct of conduct (though Foucault moved to talking about power to talking about government; also political rationalities). —To what extent do we think about power through the lens of subjectivation? Seems the subject is key as a way of getting into the inquiry. Power/knowledge can only get a grip when its presumed to be mapped onto someone/something. —What about thinking in terms of experience (M.F. “focal points of experience")? —What about subjectivity in terms of action? Shape what we can do as knowers and political actors in the world. —Seems intuitive that archivally and empirically it is easier to get a hold on how knowledge is operating rather than power, though when we think of savoir it is not easy to track knowledge. Cherry-picking: —Questions about how to periodize a project and the interests that drive you to do a project. —Omissions vs. selection questions —Foucault is doing something different from philosophers on the one hand, and historians on the other hand. He is trying to develop a politics of method that historians are ill-equipped to handle. He had a critical view of the human sciences (as techniques of biopower/normalizing discourse). Trying to do oppositional work as a humanist and social scientist. He is doing something that is different from historians. How does archival work change in the face of digitalization? Privatization of archives? —How does an archive get constructed and how do we construct an archive while keeping in mind the gaps? —Archive in a Foucauldian sense are the rules of intelligibility that makes statements intelligible. How is empirical genealogy a transformative enactment? Relation to transformation to experimentation? —The object of transformation is Kantian critique —Empiricism is not a clean process viz. empiricism (necessity of failure). —How do we acknowledge the transformative dimension of genealogy (i.e., that it changes us) dimension without falling into a “deconstructive vortex”. Does Genealogy falsify? —Falsifies narratives and real effects we take to be obvious. —There is a reality that Foucault is tracking that is the present effect of its own history (and we can trace that archive in a way that challenges interpretations/configurations, etc.,). —Not falsifying the documents though.