Stoler, Duress, Introduction

 

Stoler, Duress “Critical Incisions”

The meeting began with questions.

[1] (pp. 21) occlusions are productive (rather than obstacles). Doesn’t that reproduce the violence that she is trying to unearth? Seeing the spaces of traumatized memory as productive could be seen as reproducing the violence she is trying to unearth.

[2] What does she mean by ‘occlusions’, ‘disregard’? Can we situate this within a Foucauldian framework?

[3] What does she mean when she says that ‘duress’ is a “relation to a condition”? How does this relate to power?

[4] What is the relationship between three kinds of ‘work’ (concept labor, archival labor, genealogy as a working strategy)? How are these ideas related? (esp. in relation to their affective dimensions)?

[5] Ineffability and rupture/continuity seem related, but it is not clear how, exactly.

[6] Concept work seems to have a privileged status. Why is there an emphasis on the conceptual as the space of intervention? What must the conceptual be (such that it can be a site for political intervention)? What must political intervention be (such that the conceptual is the site for it)?

[7] What does she mean by recursion? Why is it important to genealogy and history?

[Is she channeling Proust?]

[8] What is Stoler’s method in this book? Who is she drawing from to come up with this approach (Heidegger, Foucault)?

[9] There seem to be different kinds of occlusion. How are these related?

 

Discussion ensued.

Occlusion as an inability to express things or have access to information. What is the difference between this an ideology? It is more than ignorance.

She is resisting the categories of haunting, silence, trace—the histories are there, and are needed for certain projects. Instead of calling them missing—there are specific reasons that they are there. The background involves thinking about archives. It has an important proactive aspect.

Is this related to Foucault’s notion of subjugated knowledges (or histories). These are narratives that are marginalized, but Foucault does not really ask why they are marginalized.

Is this close to the idea that knowledges get produced as occluded; versus certain knowledge exist (but they happen to be included). i.e., there are practices that produces aspects of the dispositif.

There is a distinction between that which occludes and that which is occluded.

(occlusions as lines internal to somethings)

Exercise in attention or vigilance. This is what allows one to see the occluded.

pp. 12: Stoler talks about the “capacity to know and not to know simultaneously”.

Aphasia: you try to say something and something else comes out. There is not a lot of knowledge involved. This seems like misassociation.

pp. 17 the affective relations—relations of force. Concept work as breaking links between concepts, but also breaking through the force. The capacity to never think about the same things differently—this chimes with the ethos of genealogy.

Political lexicon: network of people rethinking political concepts. Could creating new concepts have a role here?

Poetics of thought is already central to concept formation.

Is concept work only destabilizing? How is it connected with genealogy? Is it that genealogies study concepts? Genealogical method for intervening in the persistent taken-ness as stable. This opens up questions about the archive as the medium of genealogical interventions. Why the archive rather than something else?

The work of genealogy as revealing techniques of governing that have been sedimented.

For Said: The intervention is into representations (discourse representing the Orient). For Stoler: a similar orientation lies being the focus on concepts. There is an important resonance between the two.

Compare with Agamben’s view of testimony: the work is to make intelligible (not to rest content with the silence or impossibility).

Recursion: the history problem. How can we not go on full continuity and full discontinuity? How can we keep track of things that come back (but in different forms)? Recursion is a function that recalls itself but produces something different. This could be seen as part of a critique of the idea of continuity viz coloniality. As well as a critique of radical discontinuity.

Involuntary memory in Proust: we can never re-experience the past, but we can access it again involuntarily when we are reminded of it. Volition gets in the way. The inadequacy of memory; the instability of the past.

pp. 34: memory is not the direction in which she wants to go (she is not just interested in the subjective aspect of the past).