CGC 2016-17 Plan

A quick update with more details to follow later...

We'll begin next year in Fall & Winter term by undertaking a collaboratory project on the genealogy of 'documentary identification,' 'identification technologies,' and related practices.  The range of objects of inquiry include vital registration (birth certificates),

state identification (social security cards and numbers), technologies of identification (the legal name), and other aspects of individual informational accoutrement (medical dossiers, education transcripts, curricula vitae, perhaps even more recent technologies like social media profiles).

We'll meet in week 1 of Fall term to decide on one of the following plans of inquiry:

• Pick a single technology as a collaboratory that we all focus on as a group (with readings each week on that technology) -- maybe even try to co-author something in Winter term on this
• Each pick individual technologies of interest to us and create different individual reading plans so that each week we come to the collaboratory ready to share insights and findings on the genealogy of that technology (this could also be done in small groups)
• Some other plan?

In the meantime, enjoy summer, and may it be productive.

Veyne, "Foucault Revolutionizes History"

Today’s piece from Foucault and his Interlocutors - highly recommended

Also recommended: Paul Veyne, Foucault: His Thought, His Character

Questions:

•         What type of relationship does the present have to the bringing to light of crooked historical contours?

•         p. 147 Does Veyne make Foucault’s arguments more objective/positivist than he should?

•         What does Veyne mean in calling Foucault a positivist?

◦          What does it mean such that it isn’t an insult?

◦          Does it follow that Latour is a positivist?

•         p. 165: Tease out differences between two definitions of ideologies, how they function for Veyne

•         p. 181: Histories in terms of practices vs. peoples, centuries, civilizations, governor/governed - revolution of Foucault is in turn to practice. What distinguishes a practice as a unit of history in relation to other units of history?

◦          Why say that practice is the only unit of analysis of history rather than one of many?

•         Formalisms in Foucault, e.g. subjectivity - what is the status of those in relation to Veyne’s discussion of practices, etc.?

•         pp. 179, 181 What is the motivation for attributing materialism to Foucault? Is this ontological? Related to method? Metaphysics?

•         p. 151 Welfare state - is there a better term for the arrangement of things in which people desire what their rulers do? Is this neoliberalism?

•         p. 157 Preconceptual - reason why were are unconscious of submerged grammar - why preconceptual rather than conceptual? Why aren’t there concepts submerged in the iceberg?

◦          Why is it pre- rather than non-? Why is the submerge stuff not able to become conceptual?

◦          Foucault’s use of grammar - does he use it in this way? (He uses it in AK - but not to this extent.) Grammar doesn’t seem to relate to DP/HoS

•         p. 147 What does Veyne mean by exceptionality? Usually comes up in claim about emptiness.

Discussion:

•         Positivism

◦          Is contrast class rationalism or idealism? And positivism then empiricism (rather than logical positivism)?

◦          Some relationship between positivism and historicism. p. 181 Calls naturalized or taken for granted objects into question.

◦          In sum, Veyne says it’s positivism all the way down, therefore look at practices gives one a look at the really real. Is this in tension with other commitments in article/for MF?

▪          This method is useful for finding what really happened. MF wouldn’t describe his work like this...

▪          …but Veyne isn’t interested in what’s really happening, maybe - interested in developing historical methodology separate from perspectivalism.

▪          …but Veyne is centering this on his new feelings about his old work - he did it wrong because he studied people, not practices. Was working with an old historical method, having read MF I now realize it was a method, I now have a better/the right method. Now sees more clearly. MFs method set as better, ‘right’? p. 154

▪          Veyne's MF: explaining practices not on the basis of other folks, societies, etc. but other practices. Don’t have to transcend practices to explain them.

▪          It need not be that practices are the only way to the real - maybe he’s making a local claim, that practices are positive (indexical? attached to a date?)

▪          pp. 169-170 w/Duns Scotus footnote. Why bring him in and then talk about MF believing that matter exists in act?

◦          What’s the purpose of discussing historical contours - is it to describe things better or to disrupt the naturalness of the appearance?

◦          p. 170 quote from MF - 'Madness does not exist, but doesn’t mean it’s not real' -does this edge into metaphysics? 

▪          Way of thinking through the conditions of possibility - history as a site of the Deleuzean virtual. This read undoes some of the other claims made today.

▪          'Claim that madness doesn’t exist is positivist’ - practices are the best way in terms of the order of operations to do history - start w practices so as to avoid concepts that are bogged down in metaphysics. Won’t get as good an explanation - will get one that’s more accurate, more real. Again, does this align w MF? Is method of practices meant to get closer and closer to the real, or destabilize the present?

▪          Passage from The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 4

▪          Verne’s positivism is in these concrete practices - taking the concrete practices and passing universals through those, rather than starting with universals to organize practices.

▪          p. 176 Veyne cite of MF’s AK - positivities are the fields in which objects are the outputs

◦          If we’re going to say that some explanations are better than others, then what are the criteria?

▪          Veyne: Need to uncover practices for the sake of uncovering practices (this is the real) vs. MF uncovering practices to get to power relations. These are different.

▪          Reading Veyne through Latour: to explicate broader structures of power through practices is to take the shortcut, not pay the price oneself/see the practitioners paying the price.

▪          Question is in the purpose of history - to describe the real of the past or to get at power relations in the present

▪          Is history directed temporally towards the present or the past? If present, criteria aren’t related to accurately representing the real, criteria is on what it does. If past, emphasis is on the accuracy of descriptions against the real.

▪          Latour, from Whitehead - propositional, ideal that centers practices.

▪          Does Veyne avoid reifying the method, or metaphysizing the method? p. 173 - So keen to counter Marxism that he swings to the other pole and misses a middle that Latour is more inclined to recognize.

▪          This is the interest in preconceptual - it would be that middle. It’s important that he says it’s nonconceptual. He seems to try and address above problem through preconceptual.

▪          Does same work as implicit/explicit in Brandom.

◦          Feels like the practice is the agent in this - the practice objectivizes. Doesn’t feel like practice coalesces the doings.

▪          Maybe makes more sense if with respect to range of possible actions - critique of MF is that he evacuates agency from persons to structures. MF does say there’s a range of actions we take that we’re not willful about. One step down from big critique is to say that practices move us. Empty space around our practices in which we can’t move.

▪          Practices are conditions of possibility of what we can say. Still agency within the practices, but all options are not available. Agency exist, but bounded by practices.

▪          Point of history for MF - make possible a reflexive critique of those practices, which we can only do if we free ourselves from the notion that these practices are natural. Freeing ourselves from the naturalness of sex, e.g., makes possible a critique of the role of sexuality

Latour, "Historicity of Things"

Questions with which we began:

p. 150 - Once something gains substance, does it modify the network?
p. 151 - What can constitute the archive for BL?
p. 162 - BL describes "document[ation of] the modifications of the ingredients that compose an articulation of entities".  How is this an account of history?  How an account of historicity?  Cf. "differences are all that we require, at first, to set a lively historicity into motion" (150).
p. 164 - BL uses "artificial" but what could this mean here?
p. 168 - Why is action in unkeep important? 
p. 170-2 - Two practical definitions of substance. Which dimension of time to retrofitting and institution map onto?

p. xxx - Relationship between reference and substance.


Discussions:

Methodology -- history 

How to do a history of that which is not networked?  Of that which is disconnected?

Attributes - Substances.  From attribute to substance, not from substance to attribute.

p. 162 - How is history being defined/conceptualized?
  - C's question: Is it the case that for Foucault history pushes the present from behind, and for Latour history is pulled out of (or spun out of) the present from in front?
  - Temporality and historicity is a function of differentiation
     - So temporality is made, not given
  - For BL, the past gets retroactively remade in the period following it.  (For BL, time is reversible.)
     - But is that the case for MF?  (Is time irreversible for Foucault?)
  - BL is interested in that which must be kept up.
     - MF is interested in that which keeps itself up.  But without appealing to 'context'.

Discussion of Latour and Foucault -- are they compatible?  are they incompatible?  This resulted in the above diagram, based on Latour's diagram in the text.  The x-axis is chronological time (e.g., in years).  The y-axis measures the layering (and thus the reversibility???) of time.  The blue arrow traveling toward the bottom right represents time.  The blue arrows traveling diagonally back into the past represent Latour's focus.  The green arrows traveling horizontally represent Foucault's focus.

Latour, “On technical Mediation — Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy” (1994)

Latour, “On technical Mediation — Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy” (1994):

Questions:

35: symmetry (what does this mean?)

42: Materialism and antihumanism relation (lateral v vertical symmetry in the graph)

50: History and mediation

39: What stakes in discourse (“cement” of the engineers) / ~ nondiscourse

62: “not dialectics” to crossover and genealogy (but how not dialectic)

46: Parallel concept to dispositif

51/61: What motivates the enrollment of nonhuman in the making of collectives? (what are the conditions such that enrollment of nonhumans takes place?) nonhuman as durable and negotiable?

51/61: one example/employment of technical mediation is the enrollment of nonhumans

- v. sociology inertia giving causative force to rather than the change that happens between two things.  Is there a durability of the nonhuman that allows them to hold the transformation

39: Can we shift on behalf of a nonhuman/object

- objects have capabilities (like monkey getting banana) but the object always does what the object does consistently

- Two things at stake - how empirical can we / do we want to be? How does this cache out in terms of collectives.

50: history and mediation (“An action in the distant past…”) - insufficient to account for temporal distance because there is soooooo much work to account for all these? (flippant about history); 

- How much of the network do we have to trace? Seems like too much

- silver lining of storm cloud is that his point is precisely that to give a good explanation we have to do much more work than we are accustomed to doing. we can no longer make big promises.

- How much does the black box help? the process by which you just bracket some questions (partially bracket of some things while others you bring to the fore); a black box is always there to be opened.

          —> does this allow for us to jump process scales so how do we hold ourselves to some consistency?

          - one justification that’s used is to admit the project isn’t objective but interested

          —> or are we bracketing TOO much? what is obligating you to unpack? 

          - can’t we account for the relations and the transformations of the relations in presence/absence, past/present in a way that is not reducible to flattened mediators of (rather than saying they are just structures of the present, look at how these forms endure)

- Can this method help us ask: “what would a technical mediation of race look like?"

          - racial history in texas textbooks then structure students’ later lives.. mediated by, understood through, the benign stories in these past books

          - but what about the “no longer in discourse” (39)

          - the Latourian story would account for the teacher, the book, etc… such that the student knows, prior to reading the text, that they “believe the text/teacher” (rather than an ideational account that just says the idea goes from the book to the students’ head); his view is contentious then because that he is committed to the idea tha tit is not the case in advance that every association is that which every single classical sociological category is operational - Latour would say those are not given, you would have to show that. There are NO givens. 

- No social structures are for him operative (bad theory of race that sociologists gave us, or bad theory of capital accumulation that marxists give us). But we can give a technical account of race, or of capital accumulation

- Caution against taking a certain feature of the network and using that to describe the whole network.

- Can you say intentionality? Can that be part of this?

               - 46: purposeful actions as properties of institutions, dispositions. Collectives can have intentions - 

               - attitudinal racism can only exist through technical mediation. Intentionality is moralizing (like the NRA has); we are trying to describe intentional action, it is just there are techniques that are able to get going according to these maps…you need the maps (ostensibly there were people who were way more racist than the real estate agents, but the real estate agents enrolled the maps and thus were able to shape the future of racism in Chicago)

- // historical methods compared to Foucault who, for part of the mapping is tracing the relations/transformations from one to another. 

- Can you see patterns in collectives? 

- Mapping the network is contingent on the 

          - what are the boundaries of a network? even when necessarily vague

- less interested in characterizing network and rather in how the networks are working, what are some actants within

- Identifying the patterns is not a disinterest practice - the boundaries of relevance have to do with why you are trying to figure out the patterns (but Latour is not interested in this - partly why people critique/describe him as apolitical)

               - he is interested in Foucault’s  how things Foucault calls disciplinarily actually functions but not interested in political functioning of power. How are these functioning hierarchically…  

- not interested in institutional racism - though he talks about institutions 

39: “No longer in discourse” - we have meanings not only located in linguistics - he means this simply, in the sense that “speed bump means ‘slow down’ but it doesn’t say that"

- // Foucault wanting to move away from discourses 

     - if you want to move away from the sociology of the social then it makes sense to move away from something that is easily construed as ideational (like discourse) and instead can use something like cement

- Why isn’t the speed bump just a tool? one of the central claims of the text seem to be what we consider to be actants/agents are symmetrical 

- Don’t we lose an ability to account for WHY, node of action or interests that motivates the use of that technology

- See Government of Paper 

- Ambiguity in the text - the action is a property of the association of chancellor and speed bump. There are certain actions that are not possible without associations. In order for traffic to stop, you need the whole imbroglio, the whole network… is there room for the unique human contributions (beliefs, etc.), the special things that humans bring (but not special things that make humans the only actors)

- The concept and the doctor are a corporate body… 

33: ‘Subindividual” // Deleuizian ‘dividual  (????)

- can you remain faithfully Latourian while doing something more than that, like something other than negation while also avoiding saying this is what is produced, or is producing?

- If all a pattern did was act as a hunch to direct you to another site of empirical controversy maybe that is not a problem … willing to allow that concept to be informed, moving (not sedimented)

          - not interested in the nation state and seeing the nation state configuration everywhere. More interested in the how the nationstate functions in a network ∆ the one-ups-manship sociology disappears

- What the Latorian has to show is why what they’re doing matters

- social structures have to be actual structure - things that come into being, degrade, and have to be repaired, buttressed… that is out in favor of the particular structures. there is not a DEEP social structure but a really long network where things are maintained 

(// “There is no single locus of great refusal” - Foucault) —> makes things harder and emphasizes that we need to work on the technical level

April 29 Session Notes

4/29/16 CGC: Notes:

Board Questions:

1) Can we blv F’s sovereignty w/ Latour’s concept of power?

2) Discourse or non-social – integrate L & F?

3) Objects have agency? (for L, and more generally, need new term?)

4) sociology of associations and social/nonsocial – what is the register on which he is making this claim that we need to flatten the social/nonsocial? Ontological claim? Methodology?

5) p. 276  social = configuration of elements in duration; or do they have something in excess, i.e. dispostifs, episteme?

6) p. 277 what is meant by techniques, objects, durability?

7) 274-77: How reconcile modification w/ duration // F’s // “rule of continual variation” à ‘closet libertarian’?

8) 268: transformation // stuart hall encoding/decoding à but is there a first cause, what precipitates the cycle?  //

9) agency? As object and method? Consent?

10) implications for sociological methodology: can we keep the Latourian insight which inverts the order of explanation in terms of where power comes from and also keep a concept of the real?

----

So, p. 270 à debates about the origin of society and the number of terms/items,

Status of categories – as abstractions

Power can’t be used as an explainer, it has to be explained.

Society can’t be used as an explainer, it has to be explained.

What does shift around? (271) mean, “sources of pwer in the hands of those who are able to shift around the answers to the questionnaire”

Question: sovereign power as top-down, in Foucault? In Latour à does this make sense.

Sovereign power and biopower as two kinds of power in Foucault à

Latour: here is a methodology for studying power. V. Foucault: I studied power and look what I found.

Do techniques become problematic for Latour because he wants to maintain an agnosticism about pre-formed relations?

What has agency?: either agency is attributed to:

a) the entire network / b) each element within the network / c) conception dissolved altogether, talk just about analysis of actions of network.

Agency -->

Inner inertia -->

Concept of agency: pursuing ends that you want to pursue? --> some connection to ‘Freedom’

Agency requires an agent.-->

--> Roman Jakobson  -- > Aristotle --> agency , praxis, -- anything that does anything

Action in terms of that which glues, --

Failure as important to study in addition to success,

Duration and transformation

Deleuze - Logic of Sense (selections)

Questions: 

Destiny? (4,6)

Difference between event and Event? (54)

Freedom?  How it functions? (6)

How non-corporeal concepts fit in relation to objects don’t accept them?  Race—person conceptualizing it v. person subjected to it? (6)

Relation between ideal event, singularity, history? (52-3)

Is history/genealogy corporeal? (53)

Singularity? (52)

Deleuze v. Foucault on “present” and “problem?” (55)

Relations between quasi-causes, effects and events? (2-7)

Notes:

Trace “tree greens” through various concepts

Discussion of Meinong on “subsistence”

Denotation, manifestation, signification re: race (3rd series)

GD adds “sense”

James Williams on “singularity,” connection to “intensity,” “all points are potentially singularities”

“paradox” from first paragraph

Mapping bodies/states of affairs and incorporeal identities

Is the distinction mobile across domains (metaphysics, particular instance, etc.)?

Bodies/SoA: living present, causes, predicates/substantives, common sense, existence, problems/solutions

Incorporeal Entities: unlimited Aion, effects, infinitives, subsistence/inherence, problematic

Paradox?

Relation b/w: “expression” (8)

Def of sense (19)

“being is problematic”—relation to Foucault on problematization and practices?

Footnote on Deleuze and Foucault

A question to keep on the table:

Is the discourse-statement relation in Foucault functionally analogous to the sense-(denotation-signification-manifestation) relation in Deleuze?

Is the problematization-practice relation in Foucault funcationally analogous to the problem-solution relation in Deleuze?

This is a question.