Tuomo Tiisala’s Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons – Chapter 4

Is there a difference between critique (methodological reflexiveness, form of explicitation – project of semantic self-consciousness) and the object of critique (savoir as thing submitted for critique).

How can one be against power without providing a justification with respect to its legitimate/illegitimate uses of power? (p. 80)

Does his account of power bring us back to a repressive and/or unitary model of power? (p. 81)

Is Tiisala’s account of critique a depoliticization of critique? (p. 86)

Are there analytic-objective truths and, if so, how are they related to savoir? (p. 93)

How is truth different for Brandom vis-à-vis Tiisala’s Foucault? (p. 93)

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There is a question of how to understand the function of being against power if there is not possibility of questioning the legitimacy in some way of power (which Tiisala seems committed to).

Tiisala has the idea that power operates by masking itself but that the diagnostic act is an unmasking of power that tends to destabilize its stability that relies on its regular unmasked operation.

His argument is dependent on the idea of freedom that is non-political. A freedom that is structurally necessary. It is functionally “against” power, not normatively.

There seems to be an implication that power always constrains freedom, which seems plausible for sovereign power and potentially for discipline but… for governmentality or biopolitics? Or any other modality of power we want to study? 

A constraint on existential freedom, in that sense, is not bad (only on ethical/political freedom).

Important passage: “What makes this passage particularly interesting is the functional definition of power as anything that makes the scope of human freedom seem narrower than it really is.” (p. 81). This highlights the notion of freedom as something that is there and then constrained by power. Power is in that sense anything that makes freedom “seem” or “appear” narrower. There seems to be an “unbounded freedom” presupposed – but, if so, how can it be narrow or not? How could it be measured?

Ch. 3 (cont.)

We began with questions from last week as well as some additional questions: 1. TT p. 67: Discursive/non-discursive 2. D/R p. 82: D/R on Heidegger/Wittgenstein 3. D/R p. 83/83/84: On phenomenology (why parallel to Husserl); is MF bracketing? 4. D/R p. 79: How does being inside the discursive practices give D/R the grounding they want vs. being outside the discursive practices? [Hermeneutics and being inside discursive practice.] 5. TT p. 58: Can we break savoir into different components? 6. TT p. 55: Is it the case that we can only fully understand power and practices of the self against the background savoir? Conversation ensued… Q2/Q3: —Recognition of TT need to respond to D/R critique of Foucault. D/R’s reading of Wittgenstein is informed by Kripke (skeptical relativist reading of LW). Still holds a distinction between semantic and pragmatic. —Regulaism: Chomsky/Levi-Strauss —Regularist: Wittgenstein {Regulism/Regularism—Structuralism/Hermeneutics} —Do nondiscursive practices do more than explain discursive practices? —Foucault is committed to nondiscursive conceptual practices—is Foucault interested in this beyond the explanatory power it offers? —Do discursive practices vs. nondiscursive practices take explanatory priority for Foucault? Or for Foucault? Does Tiisala read the nondiscursive practices as savoir? Is this how Foucault reads it?

Power and Freedom in the Space of Reasons – Ch. 3 Keeping it Implicit

Questions

1. What does Tiisala mean by “discursive”? (p. 66) What is the Kantian aspect of the discursive, especially in relation to Dreyfus vs. McDowell? (p. 66)

2. Are there subjects in Foucault’s archeology? (see p. 62)

3. Why does Tiisala’s account rely on normative forces being operative in a normative statement? What do we lose in claiming that discursive practices can only be understood as descriptions of the regularities? Is there a difference between the normatively ambitious and the descriptively normative? (p. 62) 

4. How are nondiscursive concepts compatible with inferentialism? (Can Brandom and McDowell be brought together?) (p. 66)

5. Why is the “ethical function” tied to autonomy as a Kantian notion? (p. 69)

6. Does Tiisala’s vindication of Foucault actually capture Foucault, the man? Can we unify Foucault’s intellectual development in this way?

7. Can we go more into the Dreyfus-Rabinow critique? (pp. 61-62)

        Discussion 

• Ethical reading of Kant in archeology in Foucault – working on oneself, finding oneself in history, and gaining autonomy through the recognition of the historical conditions of the making of the self 

    o Disagreement with Dreyfus and Rabinow involves this

    o Tiisala is developing a pragmatic ethical register 

• [Q7] D&R – There regularities which regulate themselves (p. 57)

    o “Causal power of the discursive” (p. 58)

    o The charge of structuralism 

    o Foucault claims the regularities are both efficacious and implicit – pragmatism helps this 

    o D&R Critique: Foucault wants both normative and descriptive – he’s a structuralist where they are           heavily divided 

         Efficacious = rules as representations which provide normative checks

         BUT Implicit = they are not represented/accessible within the mind 

    o D&R Critique: Foucault cannot provide efficacious account of rules since Chomsky and Levi-Strauss     have rendered it ahistorical 

    o Response by Foucault/Tiisala – practice and language already entangled in pragmatism 

         Brandom – neither intellectualist regulism nor nonnormative regularism 

    o Issue is now why does Foucault turn to genealogy?

    o Causal efficacy = normative force (prescriptive operative forces) rather than regularist description (see         D-R p. 81)

    o Idealist regulism vs. descriptive regularism – D-R say Foucault falls into descriptivist regularism and         then needs genealogy to accomodate

    o Dreyfus and Rabinow overlook pragmatist conception of rules 

    o Tiisala agrees with D-R but doesn’t think it’s a problem in Foucault 

    o Implicit + Efficacious Rules = Solution

• [Q1] 

    o Broad sense of discursive – conceptual vs. nonconceptual; 

    o Narrow sense of discursive – theoretical vs. practical

    o Conceptual vs. Nonconceptual 

         In Conceptual – linguistic vs. nonlinguistic conceptual action

         Ex. of nonlinguistic conceptual – foxtrot steps, pitcher strike, left-handed writing punished (?)

         Job of archeology is to make explicit nonlinguistic conceptual action

Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, Part II, Ch. 2 and 5.

Questions:

1. P. 34: “I have been careful...” --> What are the unities being disposed with and why?

2. P. 41: If F refuses inferences as an axis, but Tiisala uses Foucault to endorse inferentialism, how do we make sense of them?

3. P. 42: Foucault says that he does not know where his inquiry will take us. How do we make sense of this? Does he write as he goes along the inquiry? What does it say about the way he writes his books?

4. P. 68, 69: What is normativity for itself? What does F mean when he claims that rules of discursive formations don’t happen in individual consciousness but in discourse itself, anonymously?

5. P. 69: Are there different understandings of unity that Focault is deploying?

6. P. .34: What is the concealment of unity?

7. P. 38: Third hypothesis: “Might it not be possible to establish groups of statements.” How does F’s conclusion diverge from the 3rd hypothesis on transcendental grammar?

8. How do these terms work together? Concepts, enunciative function, discursive formation, and statement?

9. Are discursive statements necessarily hegemonic for Foucault? And given that they operate under a priori rule, how are we do deal with the critically

10. The relationship between discourse/archaeology, practice/genealogy in F and discursive practice in Tiisala; what is it? F sometimes also uses discursive practice.

Discussion:

1. F argues against historians presupposing a transcendental historical consciousness. The unity is also the story that we are telling. Both the unity of the subject and the unity of the object is presupposed.

2. In chapter 2, he talks about four different kinds of unities: objects, enunciative modalities, form/concepts, strategies. According to F, you cannot do history based on the idea of the unity of a concept. Enunciations are the particulars of which discursive formation would be the general system (meta-level).

3. Does F’s ‘enunciative affect’ relate to Brandom’s (or any other form) of inferentialism? It does not seem to so clear, although there is some reason to believe that they are not.

4. Systems of dispersions are related to field of strategic possibilites. But what gets dispersed? Unclear. But note that what gets dispersed also has some regularity.