On Daniele Lorenzini’s “Critique and Possibilizing Genealogy,” chapter 5 of The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault

Questions

1. (p. 109ff) Genealogy’s normative force: in its framework for action, in its we-make, how does genealogy commit us (normatively)?

2. (p. 109) Game of Truth (genealogy) – Regime of truth (commitment to form)

3. (p. 38) What does genealogy possibilize that was not previously possible?

4. (p. 110) Where should we read counter-conduct exemplars (textual and philosophical status)?

5. Parrhesia – speaking truth to power and its perlocutionary power as ethico-political force. What about instances in genealogy where there is no speech (or silence), non-linguistic forms that also operate as a force of resistance? Also: what about non-disclosive force (disclosive authenticity)?

6. (p. 118) A “we” without a “they” – can Lorenzini speak about “a counter-hegemonic we” without naming a “hegemonic they”? How are we to understand this commitment which nonetheless remains indeterminate (or, in some structural way, open)?

7. (p. 112) Insofar as they are normative, the possibilities that genealogy excavates: either no determinacy or they do, but then there is a need to establish continuity between past and present (continuity objection – Smyth) – it is not clear that you can get sufficient continuity out of possibility. 

8. (p. 114ff) Generates, constitutes, incites a “we” – how?

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Lorenzini ends by claiming that Wendy Brown’s objection to Foucault regarding his tacit assumption of the givenness of the desire for freedom can be answered by his account (p. 124). But does it? Can it explain why people are attached to their own subjection?

What is possibilizing? – It involves looking at legacies of resistance or counter-conducts but it is strong: it involves identification and commitment (it commits us to action). It sounds like ethos, like character. It has to do with a practical possibility and not necessarily a metaphysical one.

Parrhesia is a concept specific to the category of pastoral power specifically but Lorenzini uses it to describe aspects or elements that may not be part of that specifically. 

Two readings of the commitment and continuity – “they did, we can do it” or “we are them, therefore it's a possibility”. 

How is the binding to the commitment or we take place? It seems that it is not psychological but practical. How does action come into play? And are readers committed already and come for guidance or is the commitment produced as one reads?

What could be the mechanism? – People read books and sometimes they supply them with reasons for acting in a certain way. We get a formal identification with the “we” of resistors and we struggle with that “we”. Is it like this? Two further questions: (1) does genealogy do that particularly well or does e.g. literature do it better? And (2) is that the thing that genealogy does well? 

Lorenzini has a strong view that genealogy produces the normative force: it “derives its capacity to constitute a concrete framework for action (a transhistorical “we”) allowing genealogy itself to answer the question “Why resist” by generating a sense of ethico-political commitment in its audience” (p. 117).

Genealogy and Political Philosophy

Prinz, Janosch, and Paul Raekstad. 2020. "The value of genealogies for political philosophy." Inquiry 67, no. 7, 2084-2103.

Discussion Questions:

1. What are the differences between genealogy and ideology critique?

2. What's the difference between Williams's "imaginary" genealogy and ideal theory?

3. How does Geuss's method differ from Foucault's? (Causality: many -> one).

4. Do genealogy's presuppositions reproduce colonial reasoning? Is genealogy only possible within a Western/colonial ontology?

5. Is Geuss conducting a paradigm study? If so, how is this genealogy?

6. Can explanations provide justifications? When and where is normativity?

How do we understand "ideology?" Well, people have critiqued the Marxian theory of ideology because it already has normative content. For Marxists, ideology is not just a system of coherent views that induce certain kinds of conduct, but conduct that works against interest of the agent holding said ideology and serving the interests of a ruling stratum/class. Classical ideology critique also makes a claim to reality, which is distorted by ideological beliefs. Genealogy makes no claim to a reality it attempts to disambiguate in the classic sense. 

In many ways, ideology becomes an artifice which must be subjected to analysis. 

Ideal theory as ideology? Idealizations not only abstract important factors, but adds too much unrealistic capabilities (O'Neill and Mills). Williams isn't doing ideal theory in his imaginary genealogy because he's committed to philosophical naturalism. Rawls and Cohen are offering a "structural model." For the latter, they rely on "noumenal selves" which are stripped down to have a strict sense of justice at the expense of other motivations. 

What's the point of Williams's imaginary genealogy as far as its practical value? Williams wants to consider how and why people would come to value truth and truthfulness, regardless of what that concept of truth looks like.

Geuss is more concerned with tracking the contingency of concepts, but is he actually doing "genealogy"? Geuss wants us to see how political concepts actually play out in the real world. Rawls formulates political concepts without power, where Geuss and Foucault are always attentive to the relationship between political concepts and power. 

Why do we need to show the historical development of concepts/practices? What does the "development" do in uprooting the necessity of such concepts/practices. Development could mean simply succession of events, or things "evolving" in a unitary trajectory. 

"Cartesian coordinate metaphor." Geuss seems to see how concepts (e.g., public/private) have appeared and been invoked throughout Western history.

Geuss seems to be an "idealist," because he's concerned with concepts, and not necessarily how they're tied to practices. Does Geuss begin from a problem or from a certainty? Geuss's method seems to be deflationary, because he's trying to displace the importance of established political concepts. Geuss doesn't have a methodologically specified "genealogy." He's more doing a history of ideas. 

Amy Allen's decolonial/postcolonial critique of critical theory. Does genealogy recapitulate colonial epistemologies? Doesn't that presuppose that concepts/ideas were motives for colonization?

Can we do genealogy critically? Particularly in the context of racial and gendered domination? 

Santiago Castro-Gómez at the Critical Genealogies Collaboratory

We were honored to be joined by Santiago Castro-Gómez, who was invited to give a Philosophy Colloquium address (where he discussed his account of "transmodern republicanism") and to have a public discussion with undergraduate students. This also took place in the context of the symposium Decolonial Perspectives on the Becoming of Our Present, organized in his honor by Cintia Martínez Velasco, Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez, and Alejandro Vallega at the University of Oregon.

The CGC read “Latin American Philosophy as Critical Ontology of the Present: Themes and Motifs for a 'Critique of Latin American Reason'” and the interview that was published as an appendix to Critique of Latin American Reason, where Castro-Gómez revises his philosophical journey.

QUESTIONS

1. If critique is not being governed in this way, by these people; does a critical ontology of the present involve/presuppose a normative commitment that is implicit in the non-normative ontology?

2. Technologies of social control to create the Latin American intellectual (p. 72). What is the relation between opacity and a critical ontology of the present?

3. Critical ontology of the present involves a detachment from the sovereign model of power. However, SCG uses it in relation to processes of nationalization. How do we understand the relation of subjectivation and the nation today?

4. How does the “nation” operate as a concept?

5. Peripheral modernity (p. 69) – what is its relation to  “imagined communities” and technologies of writing? How do we understand it?

6. Considering Castro-Gómez’s move from “history of ideas” to “genealogy of practices," how do we define “practice”? How do we conduct inquiry into practices? 

1. Exemplar for us? Or in SCG’s work?

2. Research strategies? – Building an archive?

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Nation as a concept. In Latin America (19th century) building a nation was a task of the State (Spanish speakers; property-owners, who behaved like “civilized people”). Produce a community of people around language as a language of the nation and who could read and write in the proper was (“citizens”) who could obey the law and norms. 

Today: multinational/plurinational states – ex. Bolivia, Spain. Much more difficult task.

Arendt – nation vs State: in every location there are multiple identities (nations) vs legal regimes (State). Even in a multinational context, does the State overrule. Problem of the stateless: not part of the nation and not captured by the State.

There are other conceptions; for example, the State is expressing the values of the nation (volk) in Germany. 

Community of identity = expression of belonging, destiny? And in that sense, construction of modernity. Contrary to Asian culture where belonging is linked, eg, to dynasties. 

What about nations without States? For example, the Kurds.

Processes of nationalization

Processes of citizen-cifiation?

Both processes of inclusion and exclusion – Writing, and also administration. 

Oppressed people sometimes explain their commonality in terms of “nation” (and a reclaiming of that) but as a counter-conduct, resistance to the State.

Issue of translation: nations cannot be translated into another. This connects to the issue of opacity: what if we think of translation and the right to opacity (for example, the deaf community refusing technologies of legibility). Resistance to “full legibility” or “transparency”.

Do we see counter-conducts as sufficient for normativity? – Resisting power in this way is/is not a positive articulation or a new vision or a new practice. 

Counter-conduct presupposes some kind of normativity? – There has to be a positive notion of what you want to be (not only what you do not want). Counter-conducts presuppose normativity. Decolonial theory or Foucault do not give us a positive view of how to live without dispositifs. 

Can we think of a positive in terms of symmetry? – If genealogy of power = genealogy of practices, then do we need the same for normative: practices of a normative vision?

Ethical vs political normativity – ethical view is incapable for providing something beyond an ethical duty and participating in the political struggle and the building of power. Does there need to be, in some way, a grasp of power? How not to fall in the vices of previous forms of power?

Could we find minimal values shared by everyone? Values that do not depend on cultures or nations for the sake of fighting power. There is something that we all share (humans and non-humans) – vulnerability; not death. We can have a positive view of politics in this way by looking at the past and finding it. 

Maybe this could be thought of through the idea of ability/disability and how that is not ontological but produced and within political frameworks.

A possibility would be expanding the view of counter-conduct: what if practices of resistance (negative) are also simultaneously a practice that bring for a (positive) form of life. This could relate Foucault to a vision of “concrete utopianism” (Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz). 

How do we seek compliance with others that will not accept the new vision or the new form of life that is imagined? – How to seek compliance to the goals we have designed?

We fave forgotten to consider “universalizability” as a commitment we accept even if it is not exhaustible. We could, in this context, adopt different values like equality or vulnerability. There is this loss in Foucault: it is not the universal as such (Habermas, transcendental) but a commitment to it. 

We should remember that normativity has to do with the body (Foucault in volumes 2 and 3 of History of Sexuality) – for example, dietetics. But he still thinks of individual bodies with special characteristics. Could we think of this in more universal terms? The body itself without the particularity of the self; could we universalize something shared by any living thing and that is not anthropocentric? Maybe: care; is this an ethics of care? Could this be “love”? “Interdependence of the living”?

How to study practices? – Action that is governed by rules. Breathing vs yoga (in the latter you have norms and this may be unconscious). 

How to do a genealogy of practices? – Past practices: resources of a historian. However there is an opacity: you do not know if people actually behaved like the manuals enforced. Role of testimony?

To study practices of the present: resources of the anthropologists/ethnographer. It is necessary to build an archive from many sources (newspapers, magazines).

"What is Critique?"

 

Discussion Questions:

(1) How do we reconcile Foucault’s “historico-philosophical” practice as fabrication/fiction vs. as empirical? (p. 36)

(2) Is critique productive or deconstructive?

(3) Could the critical attitude itself operate as a technique of power or domination?

(4) How do archaeology, genealogy, and strategy methodologically related? Are they simultaneous? Distinct? (p. 46)

(5) How does historico-philosophical practice treat causality? (p. 44)

(6) What happens to strategy? (p. 46)

(7) What is the shift between counter-government as “not like this, for this, by them” (specificity) and counter-government as “not quite so much” (extent)? (p. 24)

 

It makes sense to believe that historical accounts are, to various extents, constructed. But doesn’t Foucault’s use of the term “fabricating” and “fiction” undercut his genealogical project? Perhaps we’re too caught up with the negative connotations that accompany these terms? Perhaps we should understand fiction as a literary modality that says something about our world? Maybe this passage is sort of a claim to empirical nominalism? That is, we construct a conceptual product through observation of empirics. Does his concept of “fiction” have a criterion for realism? What is the standard we should hold genealogy between, on the one hand, brute positivism on the one hand, and radical constructionism on the other? Bringing in Sadiya Hartmann, what if there is an instance where there is no archive to relate to? Foucault seems to give equal weight to what’s not in the archive as much as he does to what’s in it -- positivity through absence if you will. Philosopher is one who produces concepts (a la Deleuze). A genealogy is supposed to capture some sense of the present in order to make some sort of political intervention in the future. Foucault wants to have a concept of effects that isn’t unilateral. What are the methodological benefits of genealogy’s concept of effects over “origin-based” histories? Well, the latter already has a set of answers worked out, whereas a genealogical method, as a form of inquiry, is seeking answers that can’t be countenanced by an originary method.

Fall 2024 Plan

In Fall Qtr 2024 we will discuss recent publications focused on themes of critique, power, and freedom:

 

• Week 1: [skip - Colin away at Memphis]
  
• Week 2: We will begin with Foucault's "What is Critique?" (new U Chicago critical edition)
• Week 3: Bernard Harcourt, "On Critical Genealogy," Contemporary Political Theory
• Week 4: Santiago Castro-Gomez, "TBD"
• Week 5: [TBD - Colin away at Irvine]
• Week 6-10: other readings TBD by Amy Allen, Daniele Lorenzini, Tuomo Tiisala, and others.

"Psychiatric Power" Lecture 7 & 8

The group began with questions... (1) What is the relation between simulation and psychiatric power? (PP 136). (2) What is their simulation and how does that play in the struggle between patients and doctors? (PP 191-2). (3) Could we read the game of order and obedience (“forces every patient to react against the irregularity of his tendencies by submitting to the general law” – PP 152) described by Foucault as a genealogy of deontology (or a genealogy of Kantian morality)? (4) When Foucault speaks about “an imbalance of power” or an “asymmetry” (PP 146), doesn’t that map to sovereign power and not disciplinary power? (5) Is the asylum tautology the foundation of psychiatric power? Do all forms of power rely on (a) tautology? (PP 165-6; 175) (6) What does Foucault mean by “reality”? (Lectures 7 & 8) (7) What is the relation between language and truth? (PP 151) There is a realism in two senses: there is a reality of the content of the utterance of the mad person but also the reality of the utterance as an event that also has effects in others. We might see Foucault being a nominalist about the first sense of reality, while a full-fledged realist about the second one. Would it be useful to understand the relation of power and reality with Aristotle? Power as something that is actual (actuality), also has a non-actual (potentiality) which could be seen as counter-power. In this sense, madness (as potentiality) is a resistance to reality (as actuality). Although this would place Foucault in a metaphysical framework that he would resist. This relates to the issue of simulation. What is the patient simulating? Symptoms. As soon as the doctor catches on to the problem of simulation, disciplinary power comes in to eliminate the possibility of simulation and the imposition of reality by a surplus power. One of the forms of resisting psychiatric power is by simulating madness. It is a way to resist the enforcement of the real. What should we make of the example Foucault provide about the woman who refuses to have an identity? A scheme (Below) to try to explain the relation between reality (or, maybe, “the ordinary”) and the asylum as a simulation of that reality in which, through techniques and practices of discipline, reality is reinforced (surplus power). Explanation of the scheme: Reality 1 (The Ordinary) Madness/the mad person is the “will in revolt” that refuses to accept the normativity of the real. The mad says he is the king, Napoleon, the ultimate sovereign (“the omnipotence of madness”). By simulating Reality 1 in the asylum, psychiatric power tries to reintroduce the patient into the rules of reality, to come back into relation with others via language and practice, and into a relation to oneself via the acceptance of a biography that counters the narrative of madness. The “cure” would be a successful reinforcement of reality and incorporation by the patient, who can now return back to Reality 1 because he has accepted its normativity. One important aspect is that psychiatric power must eliminate the pleasure of madness, which might point into why Foucault identifies pleasure as resistance in The History of Sexuality.

Foucault mentions an “asymmetry of power” and he says that this is the logic of sovereign power (PP 42). Why does this asymmetry appear within a discussion of disciplinary power? Does this mean that what we have in the asylum is also a relation of domination? Or in relations of domination, you do have a side where a group or side has a greater ability to do, i.e. can “enact” more power than the other, and this is an imbalance. Can disciplinary power have an imbalance? Or is that something that only happens in sovereign power? This might be a way to understand the critiques of Angela Davis and Joy James to Foucualt: in some sense, there is a way in which the prison is disciplinary (or has disciplinary elements) but it is, pace Foucault, a primarily sovereign power apparatus. Amy Allen = when you have “enablement” you cannot unlink it from the network of oppression or domination. She assumes, as a Foucauldian, that disciplinary power has an asymmetry. We could say that sovereign power has an imbalance and disciplinary power also has an imbalance so that their difference is not about imbalance/asymmetry but about supremacy or totalization. Sovereign power holds supremacy or has total control, whereas disciplinary power is diffuse and therefore empowers/produces and not solely dominates. In that sense, both are imbalanced but the distinction relies on concentration/totalization/supremacy.

"Psychiatric Power" Lecture 5 & 6

The group began with questions… 1. What is the methodological significance of the Nietzschean question? (109) 2. Is there a difference between the power operations in the family vs. other sites? (110) 3. Why is the individual excluded/expelled from the family (96) but then subjected to the family model in the asylum? 4. Relationship between normalization/abnormalities/illegalisms/irregularities—how does this relate to what Foucault calls “homeostatic apparatuses” (106)? 5. Considering capitalist concepts such as “reserve army? (111) and surplus, should we read this account as a “infrastructural” (infra-power) genealogy of capital? Foucault is mapping all the spaces of power and the circuit of profit— (138) Explains an epistemological break How is Foucault understanding simulation? (135; 138) Here he is contrasting two different forms of inquiry— (1) Why did it take place? What happened in this period? What is the basis of all this? (2) Who is speaking? Who actually formulates this idea? Where do we find it? (“Nietzsche’s question”) —The questions in the first account are of a more traditional historical conception whereas the second more genealogical in method. —The second set of questions also provides us with two answers (for example, power and counter-power). Are we convinced by the distinction between sovereign power and disciplinary power (esp. as we see it in the family and in psychiatric power)? —It is useful for psychiatry to dissolve the sovereign power of the family (does this make psychiatric power between sovereign power?) Tracking some of the distinctions between sovereign power and disciplinary power in PP Sovereign Power —Vertical power (individualized only at the top) —Fragmented hold —Asymmetrical —Scandalous/Loud —Domination —Concrete Disciplinary Power —Discreet/Distributed (has a continual total hold) —Abstract (Intra-judicial) —Isotopic —Silent and anonymous (pale and colorless) —Regulative —Omnivisibility —Network —Individual as subject-function