Thursday, October 27, 2016

Birth Certs Map/Plot v1

Here is a start on our map/plot/timeline.


For v2 and beyond see the collaborative Prezi.


Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Research Questions for Birth Certs Project



Research questions we generated:


1. What are we trying to explain?
  A: The 'stabilization' of the birth certificate.

2a. What counts as stabilization or emergence for us?  What counts as novelty?

2b. What is our endpoint?  What is the historical moment at which something stabilized in a form that still resonates for us and/or is used or continues to function?
  Tentative Answer: 1936???

2c. What are the paradigmatic features of the birth certificate for us today?  Functional paradigms.  Design paradigms.

3. What categories of analysis do we want to bring to the project?  Pearson is focused on 'shift in epistemological authority'.  What is our focus?

4. What dimensions or aspects of birth certs. are we interested in?
  • Pragmatic functions in culture, society, law (Pearson)
  • Pragmatic functions in medicine
  • Materiality
  • Design and format
  • Moral authority
  • Administrative practice

5. What are vectors/factors for the stabilization of the birth certificate?

  • See Sarah's timeline (prezi collab) & descriptive doc of timeline (in g drive)

6. Other figures to track beyond 'reformers' and 'child laborers' ('the unregistered baby')?

7. What different justifications are being used by actors to argue for the birth certificate?  Do the arguments actually even matter?  Is that what makes a difference?  Who did they convince?

8. What accounts for the uptake or "conditions of acceptance of birth certs."?

9. What birth cert. form categories are "excessive" or beyond biopolitics?  What questions cannot be statisticalized?  (Name.)
  - There is a space between using birth certificates for public health or census purposes and the legal uses of birth certs..
  - What technologies preceded each of these uses?  What technologies preceded public health stats?  And what technologies preceded legal uses?

10. When do birth certs. become so stable (so 'sealed up') that people can begin to worry about their privacy/confidentiality?  What form does that worry/concern/problem take?  How specifically do birth certificates 'problematize' privacy historically?

  - See Model Law 1977 rev. (why did they wait almost 30 years from initial recognition of issues?)
  - See Children's Bureau 1949 pamphlet on the confidentiality of birth records
  - Howard and Hemenway 1931 article mentions privacy & confidentiality (but w/o the words)
  - Can we find anything prior to 1949 on confidentiality of birth records?

11. Issues of federal- versus state-level administration of birth certificates.  How did a state-run technology (or series of 48 state-level technologies) become a de facto national standard?

--

12. How do we distinguish between mediators or switch points and actors that just so happen to be participant in multiple networks or vectors?  Why is the model law a mediator, but the children's bureau is working in two networks? 

Monday, October 17, 2016

Working Docs for Birth Certs Project

Here we will keep a list of some of our working docs.

  • Bibliography of Original Sources and Commentaries (see the group's google drive)
  • Timeline (see Collaborative Prezi)
  • ???

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Initial Topic Surveys

We will post here 'points of entry' for the three topics listed below.

Each of us should post at least one contemporary source (preferably a history of some aspect of the topic published in the last two decades) and one original source (that is itself internal to the topic and preferably from the 1950s or earlier, ideally 1910s-1930s, but of course that depends on the topic -- this source can be as simple as an image as a document, or a statute, or an essay by a proponent, etc.).  Please post links to original articles.  If that's not easy to do (b/c the article is behind a paywall), post a citation, plus if you can save/make a PDF and send it around the email distribution list (though I realize this will create a chunk of clutter in each of our inboxes).


consumer credit reporting

birth certificates

travel visas

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

CGC Fall 2016 Schedule

Our plan for the Fall 2016 term is a collaborative workshop on documentary identification.

Thur Sept 29 - initial meeting, read "Introduction" to Breckenridge & Szreter (eds.), Registration and Recognition...

Thur Oct 6 - Initial exploration of three possible topic areas: consumer credit reporting, birth certificates, travel visas, read James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, section on legal names


Thur Oct 13 - Attend Mark Kelly talk at 4:00 (note time) in Deady Hall (see Philosophy Dept events page for details) and/or additional seminar on Wed Oct 12 at 5:30 in SCH 250C

Tues Oct 18 - Three tasks each:

  1. read a contemporary source (Pearson, "Age Ought to be a Fact"

  2. follow a contemporary resource's footnotes 2 hops deep (and add it to the biblio doc)

  3. one of the following (and if you start one of these post a link to the blog):
  •   find original resources (esp. periodicals from groups driving birth cert. stdndztn., or groups resisting)
  •   find first-generation (or early years) birth certificate images (either state docs, or national docs)
  •   timelines (use a prezi, include footnotes; zotero; Sarah will start this)
  •   make a compendium of terms that would guide or research



Thur Oct 27 - Four tasks each...
 

  1. Each of us will familiarize ourselves with Sarah's initial prezi timeline (see the F16 Compendium doc in the G Drive)

  2. Keep maintaining bibliography -- upload docs you have and mark uploaded docs with a * (see bibliography doc for notes)

  3. Read 1 or 2 original sources each and add abstracts (two sentences or so) to the bibliography doc. See the Plecker entry for a sample abstract by Colin. We self-assigned the following to ourselves.
  • Colin: Child Health Bulletin survey (or other)
  • Bonnie: Cressy Wilbur
  • Patrick: Grace Ward 
  • Claire: R. Lenhart, "Completeness..."
  • Paul: Manger, "Cooperation of State and Fed'l..."
  • Sarah: Hemenway (or other)
  • Laura: xxx 
  4. Read Dominique Marshall 2012 piece: "Birth Registration and the Promotion of Children’s Rights in the Interwar Years" (from the Breckenridge/Szreter volume from which we read the "Introduction")


Thur Nov 3 - [Meet 7:00 at Colin's House]

Read work and begin research on the following...
  • Laura: Laws (fed'l statutes; and also state statutes for
  • Bonnie: Census Bureau Model Law
  • Colin: Census Bureau Birth Registration Area
  • Paul: Rockefeller Foundation, ancillary agencies (cf. Marshall, p. 460)
  • Sarah: Children's Bureau v. Farming and Agriculture (to have control over resources)
  • Sarah: Am Med Association v. Children's Bureau (w/ regards to preventive healthcare vs. state medicine)
  • Claire: ?Children's Bureau, 1912-1918 Birth Reg Campaign (cf. Marshall, p. 460)
  • Patrick: ?Children's Bureau, 1924-? Committee for Completion of Birth Regst'n Area by 1930 (cf. Marshall, p. 460)

Thur Nov 10 - We will each conduct/continue research into the following areas for the next 3 meetings, and we will do so with an eye to two categories of analysis:

  [1] Stabilization - when do birth certs. stabilize?, e.g., when do they become easily usable by other technologies, forms,, practices?
  [2] Justifications or rationales given for birth registration (i.e., the '3 justifications' of demographic, sanitary, and legal reasons laid out in the Census 1908 pamphlet on "Legal Importance", p. 7) - which of these reasons takes priority and how? how are they separate/separable in the practices we are studying? do some map to biopolitics and others not?




Topic areas will be the following:

  • Claire: Immunization, follow the trail of the American Medical Association
  • Paul: The transition from the Children's Bureau to Census Bureau as spearheading the birth registration campaign.
  • Patrick: private actor involvement in birth registration (e.g., insurance companies like Metropolitan Life and 'ngo'-style actors).
  • Colin: continued research on Census Bureau actors (esp. Wm. H Davis) + additional research on American Public Health Association
  • Bonnie: Track development of model law (legal dimension), esp. state statutes and regulations.
  • Laura: (?) case law and court decisions (coordinate with Bonnie on state statutes)
  • Sarah: (?) controversies such as Children's Bureau v. Farming and Agriculture (to have control over resources) or Am Med Association v. Children's Bureau (w/ regards to preventive healthcare vs. state medicine)

Thur Nov 17 -
continue research from last wee

Thur Nov 24 - [Thanksgiving Holiday - reschedule for Tuesday? - or take a by week?]
[no meeting]

Thur Dec  1 -
Four tasks each between Nov 17 and Dec 1:

* Continue to read from our own respective cases
* Read notes on Foucault's category of 'the switch point' from Wtr 2016 (sent around by Colin via email)
* Read selections from Foucault's 'Punitive Society' and 'Abnormal' referenced in the notes -- there aren't many pages actually referenced here so just read around.
* Experimentally write 300-500 words on how some aspect of the birth registration system (std form, model law, b.r.a. or something else) functions as a switch point in each of our cases* Continue to think about the way to frame this as an article in a current debate


Thur Dec 8 -
plan tbd

Saturday, June 4, 2016

CGC 2016-17 Plan

A quick update with more details to follow later...

We'll begin next year in Fall & Winter term by undertaking a collaboratory project on the genealogy of 'documentary identification,' 'identification technologies,' and related practices.  The range of objects of inquiry include vital registration (birth certificates),
state identification (social security cards and numbers), technologies of identification (the legal name), and other aspects of individual informational accoutrement (medical dossiers, education transcripts, curricula vitae, perhaps even more recent technologies like social media profiles).

We'll meet in week 1 of Fall term to decide on one of the following plans of inquiry:
  • Pick a single technology as a collaboratory that we all focus on as a group (with readings each week on that technology) -- maybe even try to co-author something in Winter term on this
  • Each pick individual technologies of interest to us and create different individual reading plans so that each week we come to the collaboratory ready to share insights and findings on the genealogy of that technology (this could also be done in small groups)
  • Some other plan?
In the meantime, enjoy summer, and may it be productive.

Friday, June 3, 2016

Veyne, "Foucault Revolutionizes History"

Today’s piece from Foucault and his Interlocutors - highly recommended
Also recommended: Paul Veyne, Foucault: His Thought, His Character

Questions:
         What type of relationship does the present have to the bringing to light of crooked historical contours?
         p. 147 Does Veyne make Foucault’s arguments more objective/positivist than he should?
         What does Veyne mean in calling Foucault a positivist?
          What does it mean such that it isn’t an insult?
          Does it follow that Latour is a positivist?
         p. 165: Tease out differences between two definitions of ideologies, how they function for Veyne
         p. 181: Histories in terms of practices vs. peoples, centuries, civilizations, governor/governed - revolution of Foucault is in turn to practice. What distinguishes a practice as a unit of history in relation to other units of history?
          Why say that practice is the only unit of analysis of history rather than one of many?
         Formalisms in Foucault, e.g. subjectivity - what is the status of those in relation to Veyne’s discussion of practices, etc.?
         pp. 179, 181 What is the motivation for attributing materialism to Foucault? Is this ontological? Related to method? Metaphysics?
         p. 151 Welfare state - is there a better term for the arrangement of things in which people desire what their rulers do? Is this neoliberalism?
         p. 157 Preconceptual - reason why were are unconscious of submerged grammar - why preconceptual rather than conceptual? Why aren’t there concepts submerged in the iceberg?
          Why is it pre- rather than non-? Why is the submerge stuff not able to become conceptual?
          Foucault’s use of grammar - does he use it in this way? (He uses it in AK - but not to this extent.) Grammar doesn’t seem to relate to DP/HoS
         p. 147 What does Veyne mean by exceptionality? Usually comes up in claim about emptiness.

Discussion:
         Positivism
          Is contrast class rationalism or idealism? And positivism then empiricism (rather than logical positivism)?
          Some relationship between positivism and historicism. p. 181 Calls naturalized or taken for granted objects into question.
          In sum, Veyne says it’s positivism all the way down, therefore look at practices gives one a look at the really real. Is this in tension with other commitments in article/for MF?
          This method is useful for finding what really happened. MF wouldn’t describe his work like this...
          …but Veyne isn’t interested in what’s really happening, maybe - interested in developing historical methodology separate from perspectivalism.
          …but Veyne is centering this on his new feelings about his old work - he did it wrong because he studied people, not practices. Was working with an old historical method, having read MF I now realize it was a method, I now have a better/the right method. Now sees more clearly. MFs method set as better, ‘right’? p. 154
          Veyne's MF: explaining practices not on the basis of other folks, societies, etc. but other practices. Don’t have to transcend practices to explain them.
          It need not be that practices are the only way to the real - maybe he’s making a local claim, that practices are positive (indexical? attached to a date?)
          pp. 169-170 w/Duns Scotus footnote. Why bring him in and then talk about MF believing that matter exists in act?
          What’s the purpose of discussing historical contours - is it to describe things better or to disrupt the naturalness of the appearance?
          p. 170 quote from MF - 'Madness does not exist, but doesn’t mean it’s not real' -does this edge into metaphysics? 
          Way of thinking through the conditions of possibility - history as a site of the Deleuzean virtual. This read undoes some of the other claims made today.
          'Claim that madness doesn’t exist is positivist’ - practices are the best way in terms of the order of operations to do history - start w practices so as to avoid concepts that are bogged down in metaphysics. Won’t get as good an explanation - will get one that’s more accurate, more real. Again, does this align w MF? Is method of practices meant to get closer and closer to the real, or destabilize the present?
          Passage from The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 4
          Verne’s positivism is in these concrete practices - taking the concrete practices and passing universals through those, rather than starting with universals to organize practices.
          p. 176 Veyne cite of MF’s AK - positivities are the fields in which objects are the outputs
          If we’re going to say that some explanations are better than others, then what are the criteria?
          Veyne: Need to uncover practices for the sake of uncovering practices (this is the real) vs. MF uncovering practices to get to power relations. These are different.
          Reading Veyne through Latour: to explicate broader structures of power through practices is to take the shortcut, not pay the price oneself/see the practitioners paying the price.
          Question is in the purpose of history - to describe the real of the past or to get at power relations in the present
          Is history directed temporally towards the present or the past? If present, criteria aren’t related to accurately representing the real, criteria is on what it does. If past, emphasis is on the accuracy of descriptions against the real.
          Latour, from Whitehead - propositional, ideal that centers practices.
          Does Veyne avoid reifying the method, or metaphysizing the method? p. 173 - So keen to counter Marxism that he swings to the other pole and misses a middle that Latour is more inclined to recognize.
          This is the interest in preconceptual - it would be that middle. It’s important that he says it’s nonconceptual. He seems to try and address above problem through preconceptual.
          Does same work as implicit/explicit in Brandom.
          Feels like the practice is the agent in this - the practice objectivizes. Doesn’t feel like practice coalesces the doings.
          Maybe makes more sense if with respect to range of possible actions - critique of MF is that he evacuates agency from persons to structures. MF does say there’s a range of actions we take that we’re not willful about. One step down from big critique is to say that practices move us. Empty space around our practices in which we can’t move.
          Practices are conditions of possibility of what we can say. Still agency within the practices, but all options are not available. Agency exist, but bounded by practices.
          Point of history for MF - make possible a reflexive critique of those practices, which we can only do if we free ourselves from the notion that these practices are natural. Freeing ourselves from the naturalness of sex, e.g., makes possible a critique of the role of sexuality

Friday, May 20, 2016

Latour, "Historicity of Things"

Questions with which we began:

p. 150 - Once something gains substance, does it modify the network?
p. 151 - What can constitute the archive for BL?
p. 162 - BL describes "document[ation of] the modifications of the ingredients that compose an articulation of entities".  How is this an account of history?  How an account of historicity?  Cf. "differences are all that we require, at first, to set a lively historicity into motion" (150).
p. 164 - BL uses "artificial" but what could this mean here?
p. 168 - Why is action in unkeep important? 
p. 170-2 - Two practical definitions of substance. Which dimension of time to retrofitting and institution map onto?

p. xxx - Relationship between reference and substance.


Discussions:

Methodology -- history 

How to do a history of that which is not networked?  Of that which is disconnected?

Attributes - Substances.  From attribute to substance, not from substance to attribute.

p. 162 - How is history being defined/conceptualized?
  - C's question: Is it the case that for Foucault history pushes the present from behind, and for Latour history is pulled out of (or spun out of) the present from in front?
  - Temporality and historicity is a function of differentiation
     - So temporality is made, not given
  - For BL, the past gets retroactively remade in the period following it.  (For BL, time is reversible.)
     - But is that the case for MF?  (Is time irreversible for Foucault?)
  - BL is interested in that which must be kept up.
     - MF is interested in that which keeps itself up.  But without appealing to 'context'.

Discussion of Latour and Foucault -- are they compatible?  are they incompatible?  This resulted in the above diagram, based on Latour's diagram in the text.  The x-axis is chronological time (e.g., in years).  The y-axis measures the layering (and thus the reversibility???) of time.  The blue arrow traveling toward the bottom right represents time.  The blue arrows traveling diagonally back into the past represent Latour's focus.  The green arrows traveling horizontally represent Foucault's focus.

Friday, May 6, 2016

Latour, “On technical Mediation — Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy” (1994)

Latour, “On technical Mediation — Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy” (1994):
Questions:
35: symmetry (what does this mean?)
42: Materialism and antihumanism relation (lateral v vertical symmetry in the graph)
50: History and mediation
39: What stakes in discourse (“cement” of the engineers) / ~ nondiscourse
62: “not dialectics” to crossover and genealogy (but how not dialectic)
46: Parallel concept to dispositif
51/61: What motivates the enrollment of nonhuman in the making of collectives? (what are the conditions such that enrollment of nonhumans takes place?) nonhuman as durable and negotiable?

51/61: one example/employment of technical mediation is the enrollment of nonhumans
- v. sociology inertia giving causative force to rather than the change that happens between two things.  Is there a durability of the nonhuman that allows them to hold the transformation
39: Can we shift on behalf of a nonhuman/object
- objects have capabilities (like monkey getting banana) but the object always does what the object does consistently
- Two things at stake - how empirical can we / do we want to be? How does this cache out in terms of collectives.
50: history and mediation (“An action in the distant past…”) - insufficient to account for temporal distance because there is soooooo much work to account for all these? (flippant about history); 
- How much of the network do we have to trace? Seems like too much
- silver lining of storm cloud is that his point is precisely that to give a good explanation we have to do much more work than we are accustomed to doing. we can no longer make big promises.
- How much does the black box help? the process by which you just bracket some questions (partially bracket of some things while others you bring to the fore); a black box is always there to be opened.
          —> does this allow for us to jump process scales so how do we hold ourselves to some consistency?
          - one justification that’s used is to admit the project isn’t objective but interested
          —> or are we bracketing TOO much? what is obligating you to unpack? 
          - can’t we account for the relations and the transformations of the relations in presence/absence, past/present in a way that is not reducible to flattened mediators of (rather than saying they are just structures of the present, look at how these forms endure)
- Can this method help us ask: “what would a technical mediation of race look like?"
          - racial history in texas textbooks then structure students’ later lives.. mediated by, understood through, the benign stories in these past books
          - but what about the “no longer in discourse” (39)
          - the Latourian story would account for the teacher, the book, etc… such that the student knows, prior to reading the text, that they “believe the text/teacher” (rather than an ideational account that just says the idea goes from the book to the students’ head); his view is contentious then because that he is committed to the idea tha tit is not the case in advance that every association is that which every single classical sociological category is operational - Latour would say those are not given, you would have to show that. There are NO givens. 
- No social structures are for him operative (bad theory of race that sociologists gave us, or bad theory of capital accumulation that marxists give us). But we can give a technical account of race, or of capital accumulation
- Caution against taking a certain feature of the network and using that to describe the whole network.
- Can you say intentionality? Can that be part of this?
               - 46: purposeful actions as properties of institutions, dispositions. Collectives can have intentions - 
               - attitudinal racism can only exist through technical mediation. Intentionality is moralizing (like the NRA has); we are trying to describe intentional action, it is just there are techniques that are able to get going according to these maps…you need the maps (ostensibly there were people who were way more racist than the real estate agents, but the real estate agents enrolled the maps and thus were able to shape the future of racism in Chicago)
- // historical methods compared to Foucault who, for part of the mapping is tracing the relations/transformations from one to another. 
- Can you see patterns in collectives? 
- Mapping the network is contingent on the 
          - what are the boundaries of a network? even when necessarily vague
- less interested in characterizing network and rather in how the networks are working, what are some actants within
- Identifying the patterns is not a disinterest practice - the boundaries of relevance have to do with why you are trying to figure out the patterns (but Latour is not interested in this - partly why people critique/describe him as apolitical)
               - he is interested in Foucault’s  how things Foucault calls disciplinarily actually functions but not interested in political functioning of power. How are these functioning hierarchically…  
- not interested in institutional racism - though he talks about institutions 
39: “No longer in discourse” - we have meanings not only located in linguistics - he means this simply, in the sense that “speed bump means ‘slow down’ but it doesn’t say that"
- // Foucault wanting to move away from discourses 
     - if you want to move away from the sociology of the social then it makes sense to move away from something that is easily construed as ideational (like discourse) and instead can use something like cement
- Why isn’t the speed bump just a tool? one of the central claims of the text seem to be what we consider to be actants/agents are symmetrical 
- Don’t we lose an ability to account for WHY, node of action or interests that motivates the use of that technology
- See Government of Paper 
- Ambiguity in the text - the action is a property of the association of chancellor and speed bump. There are certain actions that are not possible without associations. In order for traffic to stop, you need the whole imbroglio, the whole network… is there room for the unique human contributions (beliefs, etc.), the special things that humans bring (but not special things that make humans the only actors)
- The concept and the doctor are a corporate body… 
33: ‘Subindividual” // Deleuizian ‘dividual  (????)
- can you remain faithfully Latourian while doing something more than that, like something other than negation while also avoiding saying this is what is produced, or is producing?
- If all a pattern did was act as a hunch to direct you to another site of empirical controversy maybe that is not a problem … willing to allow that concept to be informed, moving (not sedimented)
          - not interested in the nation state and seeing the nation state configuration everywhere. More interested in the how the nationstate functions in a network ∆ the one-ups-manship sociology disappears
- What the Latorian has to show is why what they’re doing matters
- social structures have to be actual structure - things that come into being, degrade, and have to be repaired, buttressed… that is out in favor of the particular structures. there is not a DEEP social structure but a really long network where things are maintained 
(// “There is no single locus of great refusal” - Foucault) —> makes things harder and emphasizes that we need to work on the technical level

Friday, April 29, 2016

April 29 Session Notes



4/29/16 CGC: Notes:
Board Questions:
1) Can we blv F’s sovereignty w/ Latour’s concept of power?
2) Discourse or non-social – integrate L & F?
3) Objects have agency? (for L, and more generally, need new term?)
4) sociology of associations and social/nonsocial – what is the register on which he is making this claim that we need to flatten the social/nonsocial? Ontological claim? Methodology?
5) p. 276  social = configuration of elements in duration; or do they have something in excess, i.e. dispostifs, episteme?
6) p. 277 what is meant by techniques, objects, durability?
7) 274-77: How reconcile modification w/ duration // F’s // “rule of continual variation” à ‘closet libertarian’?
8) 268: transformation // stuart hall encoding/decoding à but is there a first cause, what precipitates the cycle?  //
9) agency? As object and method? Consent?
10) implications for sociological methodology: can we keep the Latourian insight which inverts the order of explanation in terms of where power comes from and also keep a concept of the real?

----

So, p. 270 à debates about the origin of society and the number of terms/items,

Status of categories – as abstractions
Power can’t be used as an explainer, it has to be explained.
Society can’t be used as an explainer, it has to be explained.
What does shift around? (271) mean, “sources of pwer in the hands of those who are able to shift around the answers to the questionnaire”
Question: sovereign power as top-down, in Foucault? In Latour à does this make sense.
Sovereign power and biopower as two kinds of power in Foucault à
Latour: here is a methodology for studying power. V. Foucault: I studied power and look what I found.
Do techniques become problematic for Latour because he wants to maintain an agnosticism about pre-formed relations?
What has agency?: either agency is attributed to:
a) the entire network / b) each element within the network / c) conception dissolved altogether, talk just about analysis of actions of network.
Agency -->
Inner inertia -->
Concept of agency: pursuing ends that you want to pursue? --> some connection to ‘Freedom’
Agency requires an agent.-->
--> Roman Jakobson  -- > Aristotle --> agency , praxis, -- anything that does anything
Action in terms of that which glues, --
Failure as important to study in addition to success,
Duration and transformation



Friday, April 22, 2016

Deleuze - Logic of Sense (selections)

Questions: 
Destiny? (4,6)
Difference between event and Event? (54)
Freedom?  How it functions? (6)
How non-corporeal concepts fit in relation to objects don’t accept them?  Race—person conceptualizing it v. person subjected to it? (6)
Relation between ideal event, singularity, history? (52-3)
Is history/genealogy corporeal? (53)
Singularity? (52)
Deleuze v. Foucault on “present” and “problem?” (55)
Relations between quasi-causes, effects and events? (2-7)

Notes:
Trace “tree greens” through various concepts
Discussion of Meinong on “subsistence”
Denotation, manifestation, signification re: race (3rd series)
GD adds “sense”
James Williams on “singularity,” connection to “intensity,” “all points are potentially singularities”
“paradox” from first paragraph
Mapping bodies/states of affairs and incorporeal identities
Is the distinction mobile across domains (metaphysics, particular instance, etc.)?
Bodies/SoA: living present, causes, predicates/substantives, common sense, existence, problems/solutions
Incorporeal Entities: unlimited Aion, effects, infinitives, subsistence/inherence, problematic
Paradox?
Relation b/w: “expression” (8)
Def of sense (19)

“being is problematic”—relation to Foucault on problematization and practices?

Footnote on Deleuze and Foucault

A question to keep on the table:

Is the discourse-statement relation in Foucault functionally analogous to the sense-(denotation-signification-manifestation) relation in Deleuze?

Is the problematization-practice relation in Foucault funcationally analogous to the problem-solution relation in Deleuze?

This is a question.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus

Questions
1) What is meant by ‘deterritorialization’?
2) In what sense is the text anti-fascist? -  viz. Foucault/preface
3) What is “production”-à how it ‘works’? of what, etc.? – p.148
4) What does ‘decoding’ mean? – p.166 – relationship between ‘overcoding’ and Foucault’s ‘figure'
5) Primitive territorial machine; socius; social machine – p.140
6) “Universal history is a history of contingencies” – How exactly? Aren’t these antithetical to one another? p.140

Discussion
Fascism – desiring our own oppression; desiring being led; love of power (xiii)

Deterritorialization – transformation of a meaning & territory
Territorialization - setting up a territory/ region – building a space & meaning

Capitalism as decoding machine à transforms codes

Universal in negative sense?  – potential of capitalism is universal in all social forms

p.150 – history – dynamic & open social reality 

dysfunctions/ crises of the social/desiring-machine - -- how to get out of this? Can’t just oppose negatively.

Text is not anti-Marxist – p.151 – against certain Marxist readings or tendencies 

Assumed ideal model & actual institutions 

Overcode – surplus value of code – p.150 – in excess/escapes the code 

Coding = territorial machine

Overcoding = despotic machine – chief makes meal – prestige - way of introducing transcendence in social figures – appropriated

Capitalism = decoding

Earth = source of the territorial machine – ground of territorial machine, which is the first form of sociality (socius) – primitive, savage unity of desire & production (140) 

Social machine – has men for its parts; fashions a memory; condition & organize – society - socius of inscription – essential thing is to mark and to be marked – about inscribing (142) 


Megamachine – social machine as a collective entity