Delaporte, Dis & Civ, Intro & Ch. 3

 

We began, as per usual, with questions:

1)      Let’s discuss methodological remarks in the introduction.  “What does exist is not disease but practices” (6).  What does FD mean here?  How does it fit in with the three planks of the standard view that he rejects?

2)      Related methodological questions about whether his account of what might be called “the social construction of disease” and any potential idealism.  Relatedly what is the relation between power and knowledge in Delaporte, especially in comparison to his remarks about ideology (8-9)?

3)      How is he classifying certain kinds of beliefs, statements?  Especially when he uses terms like “myth” and “ideology” and “values” and “fantasy”?

4)      FD discusses in ch. 3 surveillance.  He discusses “the opposition opposition degredation/surveillance” (62).

5)      How is FD mapping what we might call “false beliefs” to “class antagonism”?  How does it map to “rural” versus “urban” divides?  (How does this relate to his nervousness about “class antagonism” as a category in the intro?)

6)      How does FD use “fear” as a category of analysis such that fear can be shown to be productive in these settings? (60-61).

7)      Relatedly, how do these fears (& other kinds of beliefs and epistemic statuses) play out as meaningful, or be meaningful, in social contexts, and in classed ways?

 

We turned first to issues in methodology:

We first considered some of the background of contagionist theory (1700s-1800s) versus infectionist theory (1800s), both of which were elaborated prior to the concept of the germ.  See p. 14 for one reference.

To understand “disease” we need to situate it in practices.

o   FD rejects a three-prong medical philosophy articulated on p. 6 (cf. MF on “sex itself” in HSv1)

o   FD endorses then three methodological precepts: 1) social factors appear in contexts of study, 2) different underlying “styles of medical reasoning”, 3) there are different theories of disease (infection v. contagion)

·        We then ran through pp. 6-8 to discuss how FD rejects principles #2 and #3, and how he would endorse a more moderated version of each if it were emptied of the presuppositions embedded into them by principle #1.

 

Discussing, then, chapter 3:

·        Is the treating “beliefs” symmetrically with the way he thinks about “disease”?  He places a good amount of weight on whether the beliefs are true or false, rather than just taking the positivity of their appearance as a datum for analysis.

o   For Foucault (as a positivist) what matters is not the truth-value of the belief, but rather the fact of their appearance.

o   Is Delaporte following Foucault here?  Or is his argument resting on the falseness of the belief as somehow explanatory?

o   (Cf. Arendt on truth versus the lie)

Hamid, "Stopping the Virus or Expanding the PIC?" (2020) and Benjamin, "Informed Refusal" (2016)

The group began with questions.

[1] In the Benjamin piece there is a description of “technologies of humility”—what do we make use of these technologies? How can a technology compel some sort of reflection or response? Might these technologies provide an alternative to “carceral technologies”? What might non-carceral technologies of contact tracing look like? Are these possible?

 [2] The example of the sp0n: how is it possible for the company to switch between these two domains and to commodify their product in different ways?

[3] pp. 12 (Benjamin) the technologies of humility—humility isn’t typically something we regard in terms of techniques/technology/technicity. In Sarah’s piece, the domains of health and incarceration are linked through technology. How do we think about studying “cross domain phenomena” through technology? Is there something specific of “technicity” that makes it ripe for studying across domains?

[4] pp. 7-8 Benjamin. “It is important to distinguish the use of religion here: not necessarily to contradict scientific claims (as in climate denial discourse) but to question the authority and power that inheres in the figure of ‘‘the scientist’’ as the only one who can purportedly produce legitimate knowledge” (7-8). How can this also relate to Sarah’s work?

[5] If techniques such as contact tracing confer moral/legal responsibility, does opting-out of these techniques also confer responsibility?

[6] Sarah’s last paragraph: technologies and techniques in one domain inform another. This seems to complicate forms of resistance. How does one get this point across (esp. to different groups)? History might be one route. What do we make of this point that technologies and techniques form each other, and the ways in which this complicates resistance?

 Discussion followed.

What are some of the cross-domain analyses that we couldn’t do? The question of which technologies mediate between domains is an empirical/historical question. To assume that they are distinct domains (in advance) of the history of computation is to make some optional assumptions.

There are certain domains in history which we could see as just a single domain. Early in the pandemic, the problem of contact tracing was tethered to the concept of freedom. Is there a way of justifying any analytic distinction between domains? Or is this always, in some sense, negligent? Where does this leave the project of describing differences within the same plane? There is a popular narrative that computation is “colonizing” knowledges. If that were true, then that might be one way of looking at two domains: one mode of knowledge is antagonistic to another. When one wants to identify antagonisms, distinguishing between domains becomes useful.

In North America, contract tracing was seen as an infringement on personal freedom (anti-democratic).

How does one do inter-domain analysis, methodologically? It always begins when one encounters a weird relationship or entanglement. Confront some relationship that seems commonsensically related together—then ask why. Who are the actors? What are the different factors supporting the entanglement? Map these relationships. Get as much documentation as possible. Then a story starts to unravel very quickly. Often the history will be very recent and local. Once you have that story and understand the relationship, that mapping gives one a sense of strategies of resistance.

For folks on the inside, the connection between public health and policing is immediate. What are some of the key political education aims? Organizing for early release encounters many unexpected obstacles.

What would resistance in terms of “technologies of humility” look like? Especially for something like contact tracing/some alternative? There is an important distinction between contract tracing and proximate tracing. The former is not necessarily carceral. It’s the carceral entanglement that matters. The individualistic nature of health culture in the US is another factor.

  

Hacking, "Kind-Making: The Case Of Child Abuse" (1999)

The group began with questions.

[1] What is the history about? Concepts or practices?

[2] What is at stake in the connection between self-knowledge and concept making?

[3] Could we talk about whether this account provides the possibility for evaluation of these changes? It seems like this mostly a relativistic framework. Can introducing new concepts be understood as progress?

[4] How can we understand Hacking’s notion of medicalization (pp. 135)? What does he take medicalization to involve? Hacking’s prose is incredible. What are the elements of his writing (at the literary level)?

[5] What is the relationship between looping effects and the “motley” rebellion of the sorted?

 

Discussion ensued.

What is Hacking saying/not saying about construction?  Child abuse is real in the sense that one can track a time and place that it arose. Hacking’s account seems close to an STS conception of the real. To say that child abuse is socially constructed is not to deny its reality, but to affirm its reality as a concept.

How do we understand the child abuse/ SRA distinction? Is it that the conceptualization provides the conditions for something to be real?

Maybe the distinction is about whether we think there is an excess of experience or not? Is all experience shaped by discourse. Doesn’t this reduction of everything to discourse preclude the possibility of evaluation?

pp. 29: there Hacking thinks there is an important difference between interactive kinds and indifferent kinds. Humans are interactive whereas rocks are indifferent. There is a tendency in humans to redescribe and reshape their experiences through a conceptual apparatus. Then the relativism question turns on whether there is an pre-conceptual experience independent of our epistemic access to it? How could that kind of experience be relevant to questions of harm or justice?

There seem to be some pretty big social and ethical questions raised by interactive kinds. Could keeping secret the results of social sciences be a plausible way of avoiding them?

pp. 131. Hacking claims to be doing the history of concepts. Is this accurate? How would this approach compare with BOC (which seems more like a history of practices)?

A focus on practice is less easily accused of being linguistically idealistic than a conceptual history be. Could a focus on practices, institutions, give us a more plausible basis for something like political theory (that an account of experience might have been taken to give us)? A good contrast might be Miranda Fricker’s work.