Farge, Fragile Lives, Ch.8

Feb.22, 2018

Questions

·      What is ‘history’ for Farge? (pp.179, 180-84) How is Farge using history? How is she conducting a history?

·      Why is Farge calling that which “must be denied & forbidden” ‘history’? What does ‘history’ mean such that it is the right term? (180, 179)

·      Definition of study of crowds (172) – representation politics changing affective relationships?

·      Explore tension between sociological tone & the historical nature of the project – is historiography necessarily sociology for Farge?

·      Compare Farge’s account of Damiens & reformers (Beccaria) Foucault’s account in DP (179-181)

·      How does Farge account for the shift in sensibilities concerning public executions vis-à-vis Elias and Foucault? (p.181-2)

·      Impossibility of critiquing one’s own contemporary situation/historical milieu? (p.182)

Discussion

·      History – as context? (179) – as contingent reality? – as personalization of the event – What are the senses in which she is practicing history? What are we to make of her use of ‘history’ in scare quotes (179)? Writing history of crowds involved in practices in which they are encouraged to not have a history. She can’t give them a history which they lack. Writing the history of ritual (180) – ‘ritual’ as different from ‘history’. Ritual = repeatable vs. history = contingent

·      Evidence she’s bringing to bear to her claims? Claims as partly conceptual and partly empirical. Evidence being used to indicate how one should read the text in general. Giving dominant narrative and another way of reading the history. (see p.185)

·      Tension between the mundanity of the ritual and the – mainstream historians are ritualizing the history that in fact had a history – explicit narrative of historians that present the history as ahistorical – Farge taking issue with these standard histories (179) – or positing against that something that is implicit – or positing against that something that is explicit that is not part of the ritual itself (187)? Crowd running against the ritual and asserting something, the history that interrupts and is different from the ritual? Is it explicit, implicit, or both? Rituals which present themselves as being without history – excavating/ explicitating the implicit material that the ritual couldn’t countenance – historians just rehearsing the ritual – habit role metaphor vs. in the weeds -

·      Taking crowd as object à sociological project? (172) – begins with the crowd (le foule), rather than tracks its emergence – sociology of the social (?) – description of social life – attention to social relationships – sources? – what authority is she appealing to in her claims?

·      Farge using affect as grid through which to provide different account of history/historical shifts– analogous with the way Foucault uses practice/techniques to provide account of history/historical shifts

·      Farge’s categorization of part I? Maybe domesticity?

Farge, Fragiles Lives, Ch. 4

The meeting began, as per usual, perhaps after a joke or two, with our questions:

* Is Farge's notion of "modes of rationality" (p. 50) related to Foucault's conception of the same?

* Farge speaks of "those extra qualifies of life and thought that come through in each document" (p. 50).  How would we characterize those?  How do those come through given that "no amount of analysis" can yield them?

* The first pages (pp. 44-45) describe a form of gender "equality" and "equality in terms of personal worth" in the 18th c..  What do we make of this?  How do we assess this?  How would we go about assessing it?

* Separation of affect & emotion from childhood (pp. 47-48, and again p. 68, p. 71).

* Framing an analysis in terms of "home" (near the beginning of the chapter) and then moving on from this (later on in the chapter)?  How is "home" functioning in the chapter?  How is "place" functioning?

We then moved to discussion:

We began with discussion of the particular mode of justificatory apparatus that Farge, the historian, is here offering.  When we meet moments in the text that we are skeptical about (e.g., the insistence on "equality" [p. 44]), what do we do with this skepticism?  What do we do particularly in light of skepticism around normative categories?
   - One approach is to ask what "equality" would have to mean such that "there existed a kind of equality" between men and women.
   - Another approach would be to give additional weight to the ways in which she qualifies it (e.g., "... in their relationship to the outside world"; or a mutuality of sharing responsibility).  It's interesting that here she doesn't offer a contrast case of a later (or earlier?) situation characterized by greater inequality.  It's also interesting that she doesn't qualify this point through class as explicitly as one might expect (but see p. 45).
   - Another would be to try to develop a criticism, or a skepticism around the claim.

We then discussed Farge's wariness of presenting "the nakedness of the document" (49) and "let[ting] the documents from the police archives speak for themselves"; very interesting in light of the Disorderly Families project.

We then discussed Farge's emphasis on "meaning" and "interpretation" (49); and the extent to which this fits with her idea of "modes of rationality".
   - There is an emphasis on the meaning that is in excess of the historian's work.  This is an emphasis on what is being left out.   "Those extra qualities of life and thought" (50).  These will not be accounted for by "the modes of rationality" (50).  But she doesn't want to sentimentalize, or over-sentimentalize, them (50).
   - So it sounds like "mode of rationality" is a contrast category to the "small strands of meaning" and the "unpronounceable" that the historian must leave out.  The historian always leaves behind something.  What motivates the idea that some of what gets left behind is important, and ought to be remarked as being left behind?

How does this fit with Farge's explicit separation of childhood from emotions, love, affect (p. 50, p. 71).  This is a separation of the mode of rationality from specific emotions (esp. love and affection; such positive emotions), but not from emotion as such, b/c emotions are part of rationality for Farge (cf. p. 285).

Is Farge here more doing archaeology (analysis of strata) or genealogy (analysis of strategies)?  Is she exploring what lies beneath or within the line of a form of rationality (archlgy)?  Or is she exploring how the line gets formed (gnlgy)?

Farge, Fragile Lives, pp. 1-42

Questions & Discussion:

1. If we don’t get our globalizing theories from the archives, where are we getting them from?

2. Are we reading this to get a sense of Farge? Or a background on Foucault?
- Perhaps more of the former, but Foucault’s knowledge presumes a lot of knowledge of
the history of France, which can be disorienting, so this might help flesh that out.

3. Can we pair the discussion of emotion with the discussion of order, etc. within the districts?

4. (p. 28) What are Farge’s theoretical commitments such that it wouldn’t matter to distinguish
between things as imagined versus things as they were?

5. is it possible to map her analytical categories? We’ve done this for Foucault, but might be
helpful for Farge.

-Categories are concepts that the inquirer brings to bear on their objects of inquiry.
Lenses through which the historians look at things. Emotion would be one example
-Is she reading through emotion to make a claim about the archive? Farge describes
emotion as something that brings you into a certain relation with the archives
-Maybe more like an analytical standpoint than a category?
-(p. 27)- “not our purpose here to sort out the true from the false” but about to think about
attitude, anticipation, hopes. In doing so, “the declaration [the woman] makes is a
testament to her social and emotional existence”
-Is she talking about emotion as a methodological connection or something else?
-Farge says there are limits if you try to be objective
She perceives her ability to see the emotion of others
-This is because of the kinds of documents she is looking at. It’s impossible (she says) to
interact with these kinds of documents without bringing emotion into it
-In the introduction, her own objection is that it’s perceived that emotion can lead to
personal projection. Unclear what the limits are of this emotional attitude
-Also draws on limits of aestheticizing the archive
-Impossible to avoid some kind of anachronism just because of the difference in eras
between written and when it’s read. So there’s a serious tension
-Is the “emotion that requires our acknowledgement” the historian’s emotion, the emotion
in the archives, or both? It’s not obvious that you need to be in touch with certain
faculties in order to engage with documents using those faculties. Not getting the
register on which emotion is primarily operating for her.
-She says that it’s both. It’s not a fusion between historian and archives— it’s the
creation of a reciprocity.
-You can have an emotional relationship with something that itself bears no emotional
content.
-In the discipline of history, you're usually not even focusing on affect. So she’s saying
that in order to engage with certain things, the historian has to be able to attend to affect.

-How does this map on to foucault’s claims that certain kinds of power creates certain
kinds of subjectivity? She’s saying that affect gives you certain access to something, but
that shared emotion might diminish the subjectivity of people in the past.
-We need to draw a distinction between identifying with the contents of the emotions of
the ppl in the archives, she’s bringing emotion to mind in order to access. But they don’t
have to be feeling the same thing.
-So why call it emotion? Because of how she distinguishes between the archives and the
objects? She goes through the categories through the fragments
-might be interesting to reframe the question as “what do you get out of this?” Her
advisor invented history of mentalities. These histories still reached back for the
formalism and structuralism that they were intending to break from. The reaction was a
micro-history approach that overly dramatized or to veer back (now) toward structuralist
history. Emotion might help us maintain the ability to reach farther while still keeping a
structure. It has to be a balance between poor people and Louis XIV.
-You’re adjusting constantly to the text, constantly in reciprocity with it
-So the capacity of the historian for emotion allows them to place certain weight on
emotions in history
-Allows you to start generalizing emotions in text. Often think of foucault as doing “mid-
range theory”— reaching just enough past what is found to give you something, but not
reaching too far
-Can’t ignore anachronisms

-Category of adjustment:
-Is this providing for a certain need for public order?
-Adjustment between institutions? Modes of power?
-Adjustment between personal and collective behavior and the authorities
-When we talk about adjustment to norms, are we talking about a category of power? Is
this coming into a certain subjectivity?
-(p. 36) how does that category enable her to describe events as she is here describing
them? If she weren’t using that category [adjustment], so what kinds of descriptions
would she be limited?
-Convincing because she’s clearly reading between the lines, reading something in
between the testimonies.
-Different stories of the woman who slept with the guy right before marriage, and we
don’t get a master narrative, but we get some kind of relation that allows us to sit on
them without a master narrative
-Are we seeing adjustment between the men and women within the narrative or
adjustment between the stories (leading to the disjointed nature of the chapter itself?)
-(p 28) encounters as they actually happened vs encounters as they are dreamt to be
-It doesn’t matter if it’s true or false; it matters if it’s a candidate for possible truth. -
reading through foucault, if it’s a part of a discursive formation.
-It isn’t an exact science, but she’s hinting that you can add things up and get to an
outline of something. Through an aggregation, you can get a hint of something

-It’s also interesting that there’s this movement (also in Disorderly Families) that this
seemingly-difficult to know chaotic space is made known both to representatives of the
space (enough that authorities can try to formalize and control) and to the historian.
-We’re always looking at things obliquely, especially when it comes to private life
-that makes sense for private lives, but for disorderly families it seems like the opposite
because it’s about the lives of families coming into contact with the state apparatus
-At the beginning of chapter 3, she draws a different conclusion about the place of the
judicial system than she does in Disorderly Families. She says through the courts,
people’s honor could be preserved. In Disorderly Families, it seems that shame would
be brought through the judicial system, so try to subvert with lettres
- In this chapter, honor can be preserved judicially, etc. because women can adjust their
testimony. But the sleeping beauty example, that adjustment would not preserve honor.
Her honor isn’t tied up with his, whereas if she accused her husband of something, then
it would be.

6. would love to get clearer on concept of emotion, especially the subject that’s presupposed. -
What kinds of subjectivity are being assumed?

7. not clear how chapters are formed. How would we describe her writing style? What are the
advantages of how she’s written these archives up?
-This is not “mid-range theory,” perhaps. It felt like a series of episodes. This was mostly
details and not many generalizations.
-“honor” could be a mid-range concept that’s tying things like speech and the district
together
-So then the question is, “does the category of emotion play a role in that mid-ranging, or
that generalization?

Foucault & Farge, Disorderly Families, III. When Addressing the King

We began with questions

1. p. 254 - social history disrupts the linearity of history.  What is the temporality of the history of social practices?  How does it differ from the temporality of discourses?  What are the implications of these temporalities for periodization?

2. What is at stake in these different metaphors?  How do they produce different readings?
  - testify (p. 252) -- the letters test
  - illustrate (p. 253)
  - living site / space (p. 259)

3. p. 255 - the randomization of police procedures is brought into view; but what is evidence for this randomness.

4. Why don't they attend to the formatting of the letters?

5. Why do they see the letters, and their writers, as "insignificant" (p. 257)?  Or as "trivial" (p. 256)?  Or as small?  Why focus on what is scaled-down?

6. Why did they print the letters themselves?  Why print them alongside the analysis and the aggregation and sorting?  Why do we need the letters for the argument to work?
    -- What do they give us that we wouldn't otherwise have?

7. They claim the documents are not "raw" utterances (p. 256).

8. The question of the secret (p. 257).

---


The history of social practices never as linear as the documents would have us believe (p. 254) - the documents seem to belie a linearity - but how? - by way of the contents of the documents themselves, or by way of a quantitative count?

Practices v. discourses (p. 254)
  - Distinguishing:
    - Practices as producing texts, lettres, discourses
    - Practices

Formats - what the format of the letters can't speak to, e.g. popular criticism of the king.

Question of the relationship between the letters and the introductory material. How would we reread this book as itself an archival document, a record of Foucault's-Farge's historiographical procedure?  How would one reread these original archival documents as a record of how Foucault & Farge worked and wrote?

The letters as excessive to their use value.  The aesthetic-experimental dimension of the book.

Why the focus on the insignificant and the trivial?  The history of what seems trivial.