Amy Allen, “Dripping with Blood and Dirt from Head to Toe: Marx’s Genealogy of Capitalism in Capital, Volume 1”

We began, as is our custom, with questions:

1.        Is there a role for nature (metabolic shift, environmental consequences) as an object of inquiry in the genealogy that Amy Allen is developing?  If so, would this impinge the vindicatory aspects of genealogy?

2.        Why is there not an aspect of subjectivation in Allen’s account of Marx’s genealogy?  What would adding it bring in or offer?

3.        How does a genealogical account of Marxism square with a historically materialist methodology?  Is Allen’s account able to understand social relations in terms of historically-specific material relations (yet not posited as transhistorical laws)?

4.        What work is done by the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘historical’ in this analysis (cf. 484)?  Can we read this in terms of the distinction between ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’?

5.        Marx’s genealogy is presented as explaining capitalism as a bundle of practices—this appears to be subversive.  How do we get from an explanation of an object (capitalism) to a justification of a process (historical process)?

6.        Is the empirical style of genealogy compatible with a more teleological (though not ‘crude teleology’) account focused on ‘historical necessity’?

7.        What is the object of analysis for Marx in his genealogy?  A series of distinctions operative here includes unilinear-v-multilinear and necessary-v-contingent.  Is a mode of analysis that begins with an economic/materialist starting point consistent with multilinearity and contingency?

8.        How can we best make sense of the idea of genealogical necessity?

9.        What does genealogy get from a presentation of Marx as a genealogist that genealogy does not already have?  What does Marxism get from a presentation of Marx as a genealogy that Marxism does not already have?

 

We then turned to discussion:

Let’s begin by focusing on the object of inquiry.  Allen writes, “genealogical argument that takes capitalism as its object” (471).  We tend to see Marx’s analysis as taking capitalism not so much as the object of inquiry but as the concept that Marx’s analysis produces.

What kind of analysis does Allen present Marx as offering?  “This line of argument tends to conflate multilinearity with necessity” (483).  On Allen’s line multilinearity does not entail contingency, but is consistent with an “internal logic of necessity.”

This involves “a conception of necessity more restricted in scope” (483), one involving “multiple historical trajectories, [and that] nonetheless claims historical inevitability for the specific historical trajectory” (483).

§1: Allen reads Marx as saying that primitive accumulation is linked to the theory of surplus labor.  (Is this link one of necessity or of sufficiency?)

               Is this a Foucauldian emergence analysis?  Or an origins story?

 

We see two key moments/concepts:

Necessity:

“His ambivalent genealogy is embedded in a vindicatory historical arc.  In the arc, however, what is vindicated is not capitalism per se, but rather the historical process in which capitalism is embedded” (481).

               It’s not a universal historical trajectory, but

               the historical inevitability of a specific historical trajectory (483).

“Quoting Marx: Capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a natural process, its own negation” (483).

How does necessity or historical inevitability get established?

               Empirically?

               Functionally, as in practical necessity?

               Logically, or Metaphysically?

The answer to this question remains opaque to us.

 

Vindication:

The necessity itself is what vindicates, as a kind of redemption.

On Empirical Genealogy

Questions: (1) What is the index for tracking power? How do you track power within archival material? (2) How capable is genealogy in tracking in the beneficiaries of power? (3) How does genealogy exercise caution? (4) How does genealogy perform a “transformative enactment”? How does empirical work enable/facilitate “transformative enactment?” If in the false starts, how do we recognize a false start, etc.? (5) (p. 9) How does the experimental aspect of genealogy relate to possibilizing and/or to reconstruction? (6) How does a genealogical reliance on (or work on) public archives constitute the work? Does this change in the face of digitalization? (7) Are there norms for genealogy’s empirical inquiry? Discussion ensued: We began with question 2 (beneficiaries of power): —The concern is that we don’t have an answer to this, then we might fall into an uncritical framework. —Does it need to be localized? But what if it is global? —How are we thinking about power? How do you think of power for it to make sense in terms of beneficiaries? —Power is the conduct of conduct (though Foucault moved to talking about power to talking about government; also political rationalities). —To what extent do we think about power through the lens of subjectivation? Seems the subject is key as a way of getting into the inquiry. Power/knowledge can only get a grip when its presumed to be mapped onto someone/something. —What about thinking in terms of experience (M.F. “focal points of experience")? —What about subjectivity in terms of action? Shape what we can do as knowers and political actors in the world. —Seems intuitive that archivally and empirically it is easier to get a hold on how knowledge is operating rather than power, though when we think of savoir it is not easy to track knowledge. Cherry-picking: —Questions about how to periodize a project and the interests that drive you to do a project. —Omissions vs. selection questions —Foucault is doing something different from philosophers on the one hand, and historians on the other hand. He is trying to develop a politics of method that historians are ill-equipped to handle. He had a critical view of the human sciences (as techniques of biopower/normalizing discourse). Trying to do oppositional work as a humanist and social scientist. He is doing something that is different from historians. How does archival work change in the face of digitalization? Privatization of archives? —How does an archive get constructed and how do we construct an archive while keeping in mind the gaps? —Archive in a Foucauldian sense are the rules of intelligibility that makes statements intelligible. How is empirical genealogy a transformative enactment? Relation to transformation to experimentation? —The object of transformation is Kantian critique —Empiricism is not a clean process viz. empiricism (necessity of failure). —How do we acknowledge the transformative dimension of genealogy (i.e., that it changes us) dimension without falling into a “deconstructive vortex”. Does Genealogy falsify? —Falsifies narratives and real effects we take to be obvious. —There is a reality that Foucault is tracking that is the present effect of its own history (and we can trace that archive in a way that challenges interpretations/configurations, etc.,). —Not falsifying the documents though.

On Daniele Lorenzini’s “Critique and Possibilizing Genealogy,” chapter 5 of The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault

Questions

1. (p. 109ff) Genealogy’s normative force: in its framework for action, in its we-make, how does genealogy commit us (normatively)?

2. (p. 109) Game of Truth (genealogy) – Regime of truth (commitment to form)

3. (p. 38) What does genealogy possibilize that was not previously possible?

4. (p. 110) Where should we read counter-conduct exemplars (textual and philosophical status)?

5. Parrhesia – speaking truth to power and its perlocutionary power as ethico-political force. What about instances in genealogy where there is no speech (or silence), non-linguistic forms that also operate as a force of resistance? Also: what about non-disclosive force (disclosive authenticity)?

6. (p. 118) A “we” without a “they” – can Lorenzini speak about “a counter-hegemonic we” without naming a “hegemonic they”? How are we to understand this commitment which nonetheless remains indeterminate (or, in some structural way, open)?

7. (p. 112) Insofar as they are normative, the possibilities that genealogy excavates: either no determinacy or they do, but then there is a need to establish continuity between past and present (continuity objection – Smyth) – it is not clear that you can get sufficient continuity out of possibility. 

8. (p. 114ff) Generates, constitutes, incites a “we” – how?

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Lorenzini ends by claiming that Wendy Brown’s objection to Foucault regarding his tacit assumption of the givenness of the desire for freedom can be answered by his account (p. 124). But does it? Can it explain why people are attached to their own subjection?

What is possibilizing? – It involves looking at legacies of resistance or counter-conducts but it is strong: it involves identification and commitment (it commits us to action). It sounds like ethos, like character. It has to do with a practical possibility and not necessarily a metaphysical one.

Parrhesia is a concept specific to the category of pastoral power specifically but Lorenzini uses it to describe aspects or elements that may not be part of that specifically. 

Two readings of the commitment and continuity – “they did, we can do it” or “we are them, therefore it's a possibility”. 

How is the binding to the commitment or we take place? It seems that it is not psychological but practical. How does action come into play? And are readers committed already and come for guidance or is the commitment produced as one reads?

What could be the mechanism? – People read books and sometimes they supply them with reasons for acting in a certain way. We get a formal identification with the “we” of resistors and we struggle with that “we”. Is it like this? Two further questions: (1) does genealogy do that particularly well or does e.g. literature do it better? And (2) is that the thing that genealogy does well? 

Lorenzini has a strong view that genealogy produces the normative force: it “derives its capacity to constitute a concrete framework for action (a transhistorical “we”) allowing genealogy itself to answer the question “Why resist” by generating a sense of ethico-political commitment in its audience” (p. 117).