Lives of Infamous Men

CGC Notes (3/8/18)

Lives of Infamous Men Publication info (Stuart Elden's blog): 

https://foucault.info/pst/az-cf-72882-901027421

Need for a collaborative volume on Foucault?

1) Where is the effect the texts that Foucault notes located? Is it his effect, the text as a whole, or the people?

These documents are doing something to people in the past (performative utterances) and they are effective in the present, which is presented very subjectively as they are effective on Foucault. Is the subjective feeling another side of the non-discursive?

What is his theory of textual effect?

The category of beauty is interesting. In what degree is this the subjective reading of the texts (affective beauty mixed with dread - the sublime)? A mood-based and subjective book or a rule and game-based book? The book of a little obsession (his obsession with the archives and these poem-lives) and then finding a system for organizing the obsession.  

2) What is the relations among the methodological imperative set up on 160 (texts should be set in as many relations as possible with reality) and a representational methodology (like hermeneutics?)?

3) What do we make of the emphasis on the subjective tone of the first few pages of the text (is it a polemical move) and the purpose of the text which seems to emerge in the final pages? Can we better parse the paragraph on 158 and the clear analysis that appears at the end of the text?

The meaning of this subjective polemics can be read as pointing out that Foucault is simultaneously talking about both a system and his own obsession, which is true of most philosophical texts. This beginning brings these two perspectives into contact (which accounts for the piece's movement?). In a way, the paper brings these two things perfectly together— the kind of selective function was based on seemingly arbitrary affects and resonances with Foucault and then what you get at the end if a certain confrontation between the quotidian and the discourse of power. At some point, there is a limit to the justification of the selection. There is a continuity with story of power that he has already presented, but the text isn't necessarily just serving that analytical purpose - rather the resonant effect works to justify the choice of texts.

When in his career these projects are being undertaken, there is a perhaps problematic (but ultimately right) distinction between being outside the order of justification (reason), where he is positioning himself outside this order of reason, convention-based to line his current projects on the other side of the analytical divide of his previous work (which within the order of justification). Did he suddenly, self-consciously decide to present himself outside the order of reason? Does this help account for a shift between 1977-1980? Is this piece and the stuff with Farge one mark of this shift?

It is interesting the phrases this affective dimension as something lacking in previous work ("lacking the necessary talent"). Its as if the affective dimension were still part of his early work, but weren't able to be justify (stuck brooding over the analysis alone). What is important about the affect and emotion of the historian archive? Rather, it is productive of the archive. Recapturing existence or poem-lives? Goes beyond affective resonance?

The texts are the action of power on lives. His earlier work was more interested in the power, this stuff is more interested in the lives. In his ethical work (and this piece), he is more interested in existences. His earlier work cannot capture these dimensions. Having the text in this collection offers the poem-lives. Determined by archive?

4) What's the context for him to present this parallel lives project within this "gamelike" or "playful sense"? See rules of inclusion.

5) How does he use life? What is the difference between the way Farge and Foucault in the way they use life? Does Farge see their briefs lives as an effect of the archive? Does Foucault see briefness as an effect of power?

Is there an analytics of power here wherein lives are what are produced? It is difficult to get out of the trap that since he is looking through power, he is going to find power. Power illuminates X, but that presumes there is a power there to be illuminated. He calls it life, but he could call them poem-lives. Poem-Events could function in a similar way? Poem-Intensities? Deleuze's last essay on the pure-immanence of life.

Why does the term subject not appear here? Another way to read this as it is positioned before the ethical shift. Does it reflect the need for Foucault to address the thing that power reflects off of? There is an inwardness or reflexivity that is presumed, but it is not methodologically worked out here (he develops it during his ethical turn). This inwardness gives power surfaces to bounce off so it is not simply power for powers sake. This essay could be read as a failed experiment in thinking about modes of subjectivization. He is here pointing to something for which he doesn't have the philosophical and methodological resources that he would have 4-5 years later. The piece is tentative. This text needs the people to be subjects in Foucault's sense (inwardness). He grants modes of subjectivization, but doesn't really theorize it. The material in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality does necessarily intersect with this work in which being taken seriously by historians of antiquity.

He would come to call lives/existences modes of subjectivization.

He almost upsets his own claim about lives because power snatches them out of darkness. But he still frames the confrontation of lives and power as an encounter between forces. The condition of possibility for the lives survivability in the texts is the effects of the texts of themselves. These are not necessarily the same conditions of possibility responsible for the production of the texts in the first place.

He is clearly granting an affective thing to move the read and achieve something. But does it work because he takes for granted that we care about the lives as a group of subjects? Can we take this group of subjects for granted? He is counting on us having some affective resonance with the people in this text. But you need to theorize this affective resonance? Otherwise he is smuggling an affective appeal. What is the effect that Foucault talks about? Do we have to theorize that their lives matter in a certain way? Is an effect something he consciously trying to produce? He can't control the effects of the text. Perhaps this effect (ethical and subjective) is beside the point? Does he really need to theorize it? Theorizes this and places himself back in the order of reason, which doesn't have to be justified in later work?

Definition of Infamous - the affect of things remembered? What we remember is horrible? It isn't so much as creating feelings, but agreeing that things being described are terrible. This assumption reoccurs throughout the work. Why make a distinction between two kinds of infamy? It is not just that people are infamous, but that infamy makes something memorable.

We do not have access to lives in a "free state"?

6) What constitutes an existence for Foucault? A life composed discourse coming into contact with text — how is an anthology of existence different from a work of history? Can we think of this an historical work? How does he become the author of these works? Why does the publication of these text allow him to be come an author?

Is he talking about life? We can only see them in the sense that the come into contact with power. You can only get at the lives through their contact with power. What kind of life do you get? It is not only life, but it is the life that becomes visible through power. The way he describes the life is through its juncture with power.

7) What is the status of discursivity for Foucault? Is discursivity fundamental to Foucault's method in these sense that provides the basis for analyzing regimes of power knowledge? The excess of discursive practices requires the empirical excess of that discursivity.

There is a shift in Foucault's methodology from archaeology where everything is discourse (discourse analysis). By the late 60s, discourse clearly refers to much much more than language. There is an explicit recognition of this. His categories have shifted to include things like the architectural format of the panopticon and the things said about it.

One way to think about it is that political mechanisms or technologies of power are not reducible to the utterances. Instead there is irreducibility. Dispositifs can draw them up about what they can do, but that is not reducible merely to what is said about them. Then it is important that the architectural diagram gets included in D&P and that he says things about it that Bentham doesn't. In Disorderly Families, what is the form of the letters? Their substance is excess of their discursive content. Formalistic mechanistic option of texts which is not reducible to their content.

We can read these texts as so many short stories. No, we aren't going to read them as short stories or even literature. The texts are the "action in disorder…." Reading these texts as performance, actions, doings, signaling. They are signaling a relation between power discourse. It is as much a question of how you read texts.