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?
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