Amy Allen, “Dripping with Blood and Dirt from Head to Toe: Marx’s Genealogy of Capitalism in Capital, Volume 1”

We began, as is our custom, with questions:

1.        Is there a role for nature (metabolic shift, environmental consequences) as an object of inquiry in the genealogy that Amy Allen is developing?  If so, would this impinge the vindicatory aspects of genealogy?

2.        Why is there not an aspect of subjectivation in Allen’s account of Marx’s genealogy?  What would adding it bring in or offer?

3.        How does a genealogical account of Marxism square with a historically materialist methodology?  Is Allen’s account able to understand social relations in terms of historically-specific material relations (yet not posited as transhistorical laws)?

4.        What work is done by the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘historical’ in this analysis (cf. 484)?  Can we read this in terms of the distinction between ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’?

5.        Marx’s genealogy is presented as explaining capitalism as a bundle of practices—this appears to be subversive.  How do we get from an explanation of an object (capitalism) to a justification of a process (historical process)?

6.        Is the empirical style of genealogy compatible with a more teleological (though not ‘crude teleology’) account focused on ‘historical necessity’?

7.        What is the object of analysis for Marx in his genealogy?  A series of distinctions operative here includes unilinear-v-multilinear and necessary-v-contingent.  Is a mode of analysis that begins with an economic/materialist starting point consistent with multilinearity and contingency?

8.        How can we best make sense of the idea of genealogical necessity?

9.        What does genealogy get from a presentation of Marx as a genealogist that genealogy does not already have?  What does Marxism get from a presentation of Marx as a genealogy that Marxism does not already have?

 

We then turned to discussion:

Let’s begin by focusing on the object of inquiry.  Allen writes, “genealogical argument that takes capitalism as its object” (471).  We tend to see Marx’s analysis as taking capitalism not so much as the object of inquiry but as the concept that Marx’s analysis produces.

What kind of analysis does Allen present Marx as offering?  “This line of argument tends to conflate multilinearity with necessity” (483).  On Allen’s line multilinearity does not entail contingency, but is consistent with an “internal logic of necessity.”

This involves “a conception of necessity more restricted in scope” (483), one involving “multiple historical trajectories, [and that] nonetheless claims historical inevitability for the specific historical trajectory” (483).

§1: Allen reads Marx as saying that primitive accumulation is linked to the theory of surplus labor.  (Is this link one of necessity or of sufficiency?)

               Is this a Foucauldian emergence analysis?  Or an origins story?

 

We see two key moments/concepts:

Necessity:

“His ambivalent genealogy is embedded in a vindicatory historical arc.  In the arc, however, what is vindicated is not capitalism per se, but rather the historical process in which capitalism is embedded” (481).

               It’s not a universal historical trajectory, but

               the historical inevitability of a specific historical trajectory (483).

“Quoting Marx: Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation” (483).

How does necessity or historical inevitability get established?

               Empirically?

               Functionally, as in practical necessity?

               Logically, or Metaphysically?

The answer to this question remains opaque to us.

 

Vindication:

The necessity itself is what vindicates, as a kind of redemption.

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.

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.