Srinivasan, "Genealogy, Epistemology and Worldmaking"

The CGC reconvened on 9/29/21 in Susan Campbell Hall -- we were very happy to be back in person after a long hiatus living a virtual existence as a collaboratory.

 

We began as usual with questions:

• What is the connection between (genealogical) luck and (genealogical) contingency?  How are contingency and luck connected?  Does a genealogical specification of one or the other alter this/these connections?
• What is the relationship between the prophets and the  critical theorists discussed toward the end of the piece (see p. 150)?
• Why is the  focus throughout on "representations"?  Is this concept meant in a philosophically significant way?
  
• In what sense is genealogical  investigation a causal explanation?  The latter is often reductive,  so how is it here understood such that the relationship between genealogy and causal explanation does not make the former reductive (i.e., turn genealogy into mechanical historical explanation).
• Let's discuss the various examples she has of 'genealogy'.  Does this help us parse the possible difference between reason-centered and cause-centered genealogies?  Put as a worry, is there sometimes a conflation of reasons and causes here?  What makes the various examples hang together?  In other words, what is a genealogy for Srinivasan?
  
• How do we understand her framing of  feminism?  Why is she positioning the 'worldmaking' work of feminism as  something yet to achieve, rather  than something that has been underway and is ongoing?  (See, for example, p.  149.)
  

We then turned to discussion:

The piece  begins with an account of genealogy as epistemic,  such that  resisting a genealogy's epistemic critique requires seeing oneself as a beneficiary or historical luck.

AS then turns (in section  V) to an alternative discussion of non-epistemic (political) genealogy, to a genealogy concerned not with the "truth" of "representations" but with the function of "representations".

AS operates with a distinction (that remains implicit) between tinkerers/reformists and worldmakers/revolutionaries.

Why the return to truth and and the "genealogical luck" of epistemic genealogy  at the end? (p. 150). This  seems inconsistent with the move from  epistemic to functional genealogy.

List of genealogists: what is genealogy such that MacKinnon is doing genaelogy (but not everybody critical is doing  genealogy)?

Is there too much of a presumption of individualism? Or  given that she does  not want this presumption, what would the paper look like if Pt VI and VII if the focus were not an individual theorist but a social movement?

Why does genealogy lead to worldmaking rather than to something else?  Why not see the two as separate tasks?  Clearly genealogy can be useful for worldmaking, but AS asserts a more internal (or at least close) connection between the two.