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)