Thursday, January 26, 2012

Amy Allen, POS, Ch. 3

1. Why is the structure versus agency debate framed through Foucault and Habermas? Given that this involves a contextualization of Habermas’s project, how can this avoid returning us in the end to a prior iteration of Habermasian critical theory?

2. What is at stake in conceptualizing autonomy as a capacity rather than as a practice, or as a pure correlate of practices? There was a worry that there was a remnant of transcendentalizing or substantivizing the subject in construing autonomy as a capacity. What is the relation between the idea of ‘capacities’ of autonomy and the idea of ‘practices’ or ‘acts’ of autonomy’? Do ‘practices’ express, or manifest, or [??], ‘capacities’ for critical reflection and self transformation? How should we conceptualize that relation? (This has been much-discussed but will be of benefit to the group.)

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Amy Allen, POS, Ch. 2

1. Allen writes of Foucault: “These histories of the present are designed to lay out the contingent conditions of possibility of our modern selves” (2008, 39). Our question: do the conditions that bind us bind us with the force of necessity or with the constraint of contingency? If the latter, as the quote suggests, then in what sense can we talk of contingent conditioning? Can there be contingent conditioners? To put this question quite technically: What is the modal status of conditioners on Allen’s account of Foucault?

In our discussions we distinguished ‘modality in history’ from ‘modality in practice’. The former refers to whether or not historical conditions emerged contingently or necessarily. Clearly Foucault held that disciplinary power emerged contingently in the Classical Age. The latter (modality in practice) refers to whether or not the conditions that constrain act as constraints with the force of necessity or with the force of contingency. Our group was split on this, as an account of Foucault. The philosophical problem for those who think that conditions constrain necessarily is to explicate this ‘necessity’ without being foundationalist or metaphysical. The philosophical problem for those who think that conditions constraint contingently is to give an account of contingent conditioners.

2. To what extent is Allen’s project framed by the classical task of critical theory as responding to a normative deficit? To what extent does this classical task continue to be historically valid given changing historical circumstances (e.g., neoliberalism as our problem rather than fascism as our problem)?

Why start with Foucault and work toward Habermas, rather than start with Habermas and work toward Foucault, or start with something else? Why start with a normative deficit in order to work toward building in a contextualist account of normativity? Why not start instead with an attempt to account for the possibility of critical theory itself? Why not try to explicate the conditions of possibility of critique? A reflection point in the text for this: the understanding of the two tasks of critical theory as discussed on page 3.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Amy Allen, POS, Ch. 1 Questions & Comments

1. What is at stake in shifting the project of immanent critique (and the critical theory tradition) from the historically more prominent frame of society to the frame of the self?

Some of us thought that there was behind this an idea that political and ethical transformation takes place on the site of the self, rather than the site of ‘society’ or ‘culture’. There was, however, a worry that this makes the project too micro- and particular, because it is not clear that we can get to broad-scale political transformation if we focus on the self. Others of us thought that there was behind this an idea that to address the politics of distribution and the politics of recognition we need to resituate politics itself around the self, and perhaps also the self construed in terms of experience. There was, however, a worry that experience is too philosophically loaded a concept to be workable here.

2. What is at stake in “integrating” (p. 7) Foucaultian genealogy and Habermasian critical theory? How are these two being brought together? And why?

We discussed the potential utility (or lack thereof) of other metaphors for relating these two traditions. Why not “delegate”? What, in other words, is “integration”? How does integration work as a theoretical project? As an interpretive project? How does it work as a historically emergent phenomenon? How should we understand this term? How does this term help us make sense of this general philosophical interpretive strategy: “Some modifications in each of these perspectives will be necessary…” (p. 8)? On what register does integration occur? Is it at the level of base philosophical assumptions or commitments?