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?