Nealon on Plants and Animals

This was a fantastic article, say we (or at least some of we).  Some thoughts…

If we operate with a distinction between concept & method (as discussed in the group before, namely ‘biopower’ is a concept and ‘genealogy’ is a method) it is clear that the entirety of Nealon’s argument is on the side of concept.  In other words, Nealon doesn’t address the question/issue of method, which is to say he doesn’t ask about how we might genealogically interrogate new or emergent biopolitical formulations.  So, the argument addresses concepts (C) of biopower but doesn’t address methods (M) of genealogy or archaeology.  This is not a criticism of Nealon (as if all that matters is (M)) but just an observation about where the argument is best located.

Within (C), Nealon asks about the extent to which biopower in Foucault already comprehends animality within its conceptual bounds.  The critique of Haraway’s argument against Foucault operates entirely on the conceptual level (this is not a criticism but an observation).  The debate is a debate between: ‘Foucault in his talk of biopower ignores biopower’ versus ‘Foucault in his talk of biopower does in fact discuss biopower’.  This is a debate, then, about the conceptual boundaries (and referents) of biopower as Foucault used the term.  This particular debate, then, shoves to the side a further methodological question about ‘how might we genealogically study emergent practices of animality?’

Within the frames of the conceptual debate, then, we have two positions: C1 (Haraway) and C2 (Nealon).  Again, leaving the methodology debate to the side, there is a further option for the debate located solely within the conceptual debate, namely option C3.  This option would split the diff between Haraway and Nealon, and suggest that Foucault’s discussions of biopower anticipate animality (with Nealon) but do not yet sufficiently comperehend it (with Nealon).

Does Foucault’s later disavowal of The Order of Things trouble this argument?

Does Nealon’s distinction between discipline as institutional and biopower as scattered beyond ‘institutional sites’ (and ‘virtually everywhere’) ? (p. 3) 

How does biopolitics incorporate animality itself?  This is addressed in the first half of the argument.  Animality is part of the story of the emergence of the concept of “life” or that which is the object of study of biology.  Biopolitical management of wolves as an examples.

Jemima Repo, on Barbin, Foucault, Butler

This week we discussed Jemima Repo’s excellent (truly excellent!) forthcoming essay “Herculine Barbin and the Omission of Biopolitics from Judith Butler’s Gender Genealogy” (to be published in the journal of Feminist Theory).

The discussion began, as per usual, with questions:

1) The discussion on pages 5 & 6 of the nature/culture distinction was interesting, but there is a question about the scope of the claims.  Is it the case that “the biopolitical… control over sex” holds always?  Or just sometimes?

2) On page 13 there is a claim that, “For Foucault, pleasure is a capacity.”  What might this mean?  Is this accurate?  What’s at stake here?

3) On page 14 (also again around 18) there is a claim that there is an “organic yet non-discursive body”?  What’s at stake here?  Why claim this?  A little before there is an accusation that Butler confuses “the non-discursive with pre-discursive” (13).  Why does Repo need to claim this?  What does that idea do that Butler can’t do?  What’s at stake in Repo such that she has to argue this?

4) On page 18, there is a contrast between “the organization of desires” and “their [desires] unhappy, compulsory self-destruction” (18).  This is very helpful.  It registers a connection between what some in our group like about the connection between Foucault and Deleuze—order is a positive productive effusive activity (not necessarily ‘good’)—in contrast to French Hegelian arguments about order as resting on contradiction.

5) Is the paper operating with a dichotomy between two kinds of explanations?  What is the difference between “genealogy of gender ontology” and “genealogy of gender”?

6) A few background questions on Butler for the group:

What is the equivalent in Butler of Foucault’s dispositif?  (For if we don’t have one, then performance seems over-individualized, rather than an acting-out of a set of social conditions.)

What is the status of Repo’s claims (throughout) that Butler seems to assume an invariant subject, in the form of a Hegelian subject of desire that is bound to recognition?  Is there a politics for Butler beyond the politics of recognition?

Discussion proper proceeded.

Concerning (1), we discussed whether or not Foucault collapsed (or avoided, or did not even acknowledge) the distinction between nature and culture.  If Foucault avoided the nature/culture distinction did he avoid it in such a way that he has to hold that nature and culture are always imbricated?  Or just sometimes?

            The key thing, presumably, is the distinction between being “an effect of a cultural system, but an apparatus of biopower”.  So there is a claim that “control over sex is… biopoltical” (6, 20).  Is this always the case?  Or just sometimes?  Presumably it is always the case for us (we who live within a biopolitical dispositif) but it need not always be the case for all places and all times.  So even practices of gender reperformance and gender resistance (e.g., drag) are instances of a utilization and deployment of biopolitics.  Resistance is always internal to the form of power that takes.

We then shifted to question (5) and the erst of the discussion remained there.  To recapitulate the question: What is at stake in the distinction between a genealogy of X’s ontology and a genealogy of X itself?  (In this case X=gender (though presumably it matters what the content of the X is).)

What is at stake in the distinction between sex as “mechanisms of intelligibility and performativity” (20) attributed to Butler and an “apparatus of biopower in the administration of life” (20) attributed to Foucault?  What would the scene of politics in each look like?  What forms of resistance are possible?  In the former politics is parody (of identity, discourse, etc.).  In the latter (i.e., Repo’s Foucault) resistance would have to look quite different.  It would have to be a (biopolitical? right?) resistance against biopolitics?  But is this how Repo in the piece envisions and figures resistance?  Is this how the discussion of Barbin functions?  It seems like it is meant to function that way insofar as this section of this essay is titled “Rereading Herculine Barbin Biopolitically”.  We turned to that section in fine…

Barbin’s “body” and “pleasure” became “ordered by power”.  So biopolitics is a type or mode of ordering?  That sounds right.  Then there are two moves that get made here, and we worried that they are being run together.  The first move is that a biopolitical ordering is beyond (or need not lie on) the nature|culture distinction.  The second move is that a biopolitical ordering is beyond (or displaces) Butler’s analytic category of identity.  Let’s take each in turn.

First, Biopolitics is a type of ordering (a “biopolitical territorialisation”; Deleuze (for better or worse!)) that doesn’t analytically draw on, or require, the nature|culture distinction.  Barbin was inscribed by (drawn up by?) biopolitics and we can analyze that without reference to the nature|culture binary.  The best way to put this point: sex is an effect of a process involving the workings of biopower.  And we can make this point without getting embroiled in debates about whether sex is “cultural” or “natural”, which are debates that Repo seems to want to avoid.  In other words, this is what is involved in avoiding the “genealogy of gender ontology”.  Is the point of this paper, then, a deflationism about the nature versus culture wars?

Second, does this first move warrant a displacement of identity as a category of analysis?  The paper opens with a critique of Butler’s identity-analysis.  But is it sufficient to move beyond an analytics of identity to methodologically dispense with the nature|culture binary?  Is there something at stake in that binary that supports or furthers identity-analysis?

The move from the first to the second seems to be wrapped up already in phrases like “the cultural construction of identity”.  But is getting beyond “cultural constructionism” to already move beyond “identity”?  Why?

(CK, NM, ER, HL, KL)

2/21/13 - Davidson's "Closing Up the Corpses"

We began, as usual, with questions on the chalkboard:

1) How is the concept of sexual instinct being deployed?  Is the concept itself sufficiently interrogated in this piece?  What enables the conjunction of "sexual" + "instinct"?  (Cf. Judith Halberstam's book on Gothic Horror and other work on 19th c. instincts)

2) Where does emerging psychiatry locate 'the sexual instinct'?  What replaces the brain in its anatomical functions?  Is there a vacant place here?

3) What is the treatment here of the relation between criminality and sexual perversion?  What is the relation between these two?  Why, for instance, is there not a "criminal instinct"?  Or is there?  If not, why can't we do with criminality what we have done with sexuality?  Why doesn't the same explanatory framework apply?  What holds apart the legal and the psychic?

4) How do the claims here differ from MF in HSv1?  Where do they differ?  Are the claims substantively different?  Is the method substantively different?  Is there more empirical richness?  If so, where?  Is the thrust of the thesis here different?  Where are the differences?  (And what reading(s) of HSv1 are presupposed when we consider these questions?)

5) The crux of the piece seems to be about the emergence of a new style of reasoning.  What is the methodological status of SoR?  How does it methodologically function?  How does one show that a new SoR is what emerges, rather than just the emergence of a new concept or a new technique?  

Discussion amongst the group then began:

(5) Method

A provisional thought about how the method works to get us going.  The method might works as follows.  First you identify a new concept (e.g., 'perversion').  Then you identify a new 'framework' (i.e., an SoR) that makes that concept possible (e.g., 'psychiatric SoR').  The goal is to figure out 'what makes conceptual emergence possible'.  This is a concern about conditions of possibility, the conditions that make something, namely a set of possibilities.

  ----But in what sense does the SoR make a new concept or claim possible?

  --It makes it possible in the sense of mode of veridiction, in the sense of being truth-apt, that is in the play of the true-or-false.  So SoR is a name for that which makes claims possible as true-or-false claims.  These are 'rules of the true-or-false'.  These 'rules' do not have their own agency but are expressions of and in practice.  So an SoR is the name for the ensemble or assemblage of practices in which these rules come to expression.

  ----Good, I am with you.  But in that case why do we need the methodoloical category of SoR?  Is it doing more than just providing a shorthand for 'the rules in practice'?  What is it doing?

  --It's a way of getting grip on certain conceptual transformations and their conditions that we can't gain grip on if we only write a history of institutions, or a history of culture, or a history of 'mentalities', &c..  It's an explanatory concept that provides a window onto certain kinds of transformations that we otherwise couldn't see.

  ----It's the same matter in Foucault (and Kant) that is such a long-running issue of concern (for our group). In what sense do 'conditions of possibility' condition?  What is it to condition granted the assumption that conditioning is not just causing?  How do 'dispositifs' condition?  How do 'styles of reasoning' condition?  How do 'problematizations' condition, motivate, constrain, produce?

(1), (2), (3) -- Instinct and Sexuality

How is the idea of instinct functioning in Davidson's account?  Is 'instinct' taken by the 19c. psychiatrists as basal, or as grounding?  Or is it 'just' explanatory?  If explanatory, is it essentialist?  Is the essentialism key to the concept being explanatory?  If so, the essence of 'instinct' appears to be 'propogation' or 'sexual procreation' (15)?  The essence of instinct as procreation allows us to treat a variety of otherwise seemingly-different sexual categories within a unity, namely a unity of abnormality and straying from 'propogation'.

Interestingly, then, the category of instinct eliminates the need for a conceptual focus on genitals or brain or other anatomy.  This opens up a whole 'normativization' of sexuality.  Because it's hard to create a normativity around just the genital organs or the organ of the brain.

Does the instinct account also help us understand why (not covered in AD's piece, but discussed by Deleuze (& others)) sadism and masochism were theorized by both Krafft-Ebbing and Freud as both 'opposed' to one another and 'fundamental' to all other perversions?

What is the history of the concept of instinct?  What was instinct doing before it got enrolled in this explanatory account?  Was it doing anything?  Yes (but we aren't clear what).  Or is this the scene of emergence of instinct?  Instinct is "everywhere and nowhere" (Legrain, 1896) and so it covers "personality" (12).  How can anything, instinct itself, be everywhere and nowhere?  Key to the idea is that it is "natural" and "determinate" (15).

A final question.  If sexual instinct is a 'norm' that unifies perversions, then how do we square this with Deleuze's observation (in 'Coldness & Cruelty') that Krafft-Ebbing and Freud both described, or drew up, sadism and masochism as opposites?  How can two 'deviations from a norm' be related as 'oppositional' or 'opposites'?

---

Present at the meeting: CK, NM, GL, SB, ER, CE

2/14/13 - Oksala on Biopolitics & Violence

2/7/13: Galloway and Thacker

1/24/13 & 1/31/13: Esposito & Hacking

Esposito: Totalitarianism or Biopolitics