Lives of Infamous Men

CGC Notes (3/8/18)

Lives of Infamous Men Publication info (Stuart Elden's blog): 

https://foucault.info/pst/az-cf-72882-901027421

Need for a collaborative volume on Foucault?

1) Where is the effect the texts that Foucault notes located? Is it his effect, the text as a whole, or the people?

These documents are doing something to people in the past (performative utterances) and they are effective in the present, which is presented very subjectively as they are effective on Foucault. Is the subjective feeling another side of the non-discursive?

What is his theory of textual effect?

The category of beauty is interesting. In what degree is this the subjective reading of the texts (affective beauty mixed with dread - the sublime)? A mood-based and subjective book or a rule and game-based book? The book of a little obsession (his obsession with the archives and these poem-lives) and then finding a system for organizing the obsession.  

2) What is the relations among the methodological imperative set up on 160 (texts should be set in as many relations as possible with reality) and a representational methodology (like hermeneutics?)?

3) What do we make of the emphasis on the subjective tone of the first few pages of the text (is it a polemical move) and the purpose of the text which seems to emerge in the final pages? Can we better parse the paragraph on 158 and the clear analysis that appears at the end of the text?

The meaning of this subjective polemics can be read as pointing out that Foucault is simultaneously talking about both a system and his own obsession, which is true of most philosophical texts. This beginning brings these two perspectives into contact (which accounts for the piece's movement?). In a way, the paper brings these two things perfectly together— the kind of selective function was based on seemingly arbitrary affects and resonances with Foucault and then what you get at the end if a certain confrontation between the quotidian and the discourse of power. At some point, there is a limit to the justification of the selection. There is a continuity with story of power that he has already presented, but the text isn't necessarily just serving that analytical purpose - rather the resonant effect works to justify the choice of texts.

When in his career these projects are being undertaken, there is a perhaps problematic (but ultimately right) distinction between being outside the order of justification (reason), where he is positioning himself outside this order of reason, convention-based to line his current projects on the other side of the analytical divide of his previous work (which within the order of justification). Did he suddenly, self-consciously decide to present himself outside the order of reason? Does this help account for a shift between 1977-1980? Is this piece and the stuff with Farge one mark of this shift?

It is interesting the phrases this affective dimension as something lacking in previous work ("lacking the necessary talent"). Its as if the affective dimension were still part of his early work, but weren't able to be justify (stuck brooding over the analysis alone). What is important about the affect and emotion of the historian archive? Rather, it is productive of the archive. Recapturing existence or poem-lives? Goes beyond affective resonance?

The texts are the action of power on lives. His earlier work was more interested in the power, this stuff is more interested in the lives. In his ethical work (and this piece), he is more interested in existences. His earlier work cannot capture these dimensions. Having the text in this collection offers the poem-lives. Determined by archive?

4) What's the context for him to present this parallel lives project within this "gamelike" or "playful sense"? See rules of inclusion.

5) How does he use life? What is the difference between the way Farge and Foucault in the way they use life? Does Farge see their briefs lives as an effect of the archive? Does Foucault see briefness as an effect of power?

Is there an analytics of power here wherein lives are what are produced? It is difficult to get out of the trap that since he is looking through power, he is going to find power. Power illuminates X, but that presumes there is a power there to be illuminated. He calls it life, but he could call them poem-lives. Poem-Events could function in a similar way? Poem-Intensities? Deleuze's last essay on the pure-immanence of life.

Why does the term subject not appear here? Another way to read this as it is positioned before the ethical shift. Does it reflect the need for Foucault to address the thing that power reflects off of? There is an inwardness or reflexivity that is presumed, but it is not methodologically worked out here (he develops it during his ethical turn). This inwardness gives power surfaces to bounce off so it is not simply power for powers sake. This essay could be read as a failed experiment in thinking about modes of subjectivization. He is here pointing to something for which he doesn't have the philosophical and methodological resources that he would have 4-5 years later. The piece is tentative. This text needs the people to be subjects in Foucault's sense (inwardness). He grants modes of subjectivization, but doesn't really theorize it. The material in the last two volumes of the History of Sexuality does necessarily intersect with this work in which being taken seriously by historians of antiquity.

He would come to call lives/existences modes of subjectivization.

He almost upsets his own claim about lives because power snatches them out of darkness. But he still frames the confrontation of lives and power as an encounter between forces. The condition of possibility for the lives survivability in the texts is the effects of the texts of themselves. These are not necessarily the same conditions of possibility responsible for the production of the texts in the first place.

He is clearly granting an affective thing to move the read and achieve something. But does it work because he takes for granted that we care about the lives as a group of subjects? Can we take this group of subjects for granted? He is counting on us having some affective resonance with the people in this text. But you need to theorize this affective resonance? Otherwise he is smuggling an affective appeal. What is the effect that Foucault talks about? Do we have to theorize that their lives matter in a certain way? Is an effect something he consciously trying to produce? He can't control the effects of the text. Perhaps this effect (ethical and subjective) is beside the point? Does he really need to theorize it? Theorizes this and places himself back in the order of reason, which doesn't have to be justified in later work?

Definition of Infamous - the affect of things remembered? What we remember is horrible? It isn't so much as creating feelings, but agreeing that things being described are terrible. This assumption reoccurs throughout the work. Why make a distinction between two kinds of infamy? It is not just that people are infamous, but that infamy makes something memorable.

We do not have access to lives in a "free state"?

6) What constitutes an existence for Foucault? A life composed discourse coming into contact with text — how is an anthology of existence different from a work of history? Can we think of this an historical work? How does he become the author of these works? Why does the publication of these text allow him to be come an author?

Is he talking about life? We can only see them in the sense that the come into contact with power. You can only get at the lives through their contact with power. What kind of life do you get? It is not only life, but it is the life that becomes visible through power. The way he describes the life is through its juncture with power.

7) What is the status of discursivity for Foucault? Is discursivity fundamental to Foucault's method in these sense that provides the basis for analyzing regimes of power knowledge? The excess of discursive practices requires the empirical excess of that discursivity.

There is a shift in Foucault's methodology from archaeology where everything is discourse (discourse analysis). By the late 60s, discourse clearly refers to much much more than language. There is an explicit recognition of this. His categories have shifted to include things like the architectural format of the panopticon and the things said about it.

One way to think about it is that political mechanisms or technologies of power are not reducible to the utterances. Instead there is irreducibility. Dispositifs can draw them up about what they can do, but that is not reducible merely to what is said about them. Then it is important that the architectural diagram gets included in D&P and that he says things about it that Bentham doesn't. In Disorderly Families, what is the form of the letters? Their substance is excess of their discursive content. Formalistic mechanistic option of texts which is not reducible to their content.

We can read these texts as so many short stories. No, we aren't going to read them as short stories or even literature. The texts are the "action in disorder…." Reading these texts as performance, actions, doings, signaling. They are signaling a relation between power discourse. It is as much a question of how you read texts.  

Farge, Fragile Lives, Ch. 8.2 - end

Today's session started with the looming question of 'why?'-conversation/more questions followed in several directions after.

p. 248: Why? 'Madeline's story allows the historian…' a little tidbit of why this is important to the historian, and then the narrative continues. This happens several other times

p. 229: Before introducing the case, she says there's a complexity in the way actors interact… credulity… 'it is possible to gain some idea of this complexity from…' Introduces this as a means by which we can understand the complexity of the rationalities of the crowd.

Is this sufficient? Are we reading generously enough? Are we missing something? She gives us stories to understand the complexity but leaves things at the level of the story. What is her goal? If her goal is to give a thread…

Intro, p. 6: "In this study of popular Parisian behavior…" giving us forgotten events to provide a different account of the history from dominant historical narratives. 'Reconstituting shapes and forms' to grapple with whole of social scene. This section relates to this goal - she's sketching the forms/rationalities through these stories. Historical project that's different than what we're used to reading. History as sketching forms/outlines.

If this is her project, what can we (as a group) get from this? Being unfamiliar in the first place with 18th century French history, it all seems new - the counterhistory written here doesn't pop as some other counterhistory might. So - method of archival work/historiography - how does that compare with Foucault?

Two places where she used the same argument from before:

• p. 251, women knew in their bodies that Madeline wasn't pregnant, similar to p. 189 discussing women's flesh knew more intimately
• p. 227, "What better way to… the spectacle of seeing oneself…" similar to p. 49, almost impossible quest to understand the intimate space the historian places between himself and the work (?)

What's the dis/agreement between Farge and Foucault?

• Farge seems more human-oriented - in D&P, you get practices, technologies, the panopticon… this is all about people and social interactions as interactions between humans.
• Farge assumes power without trying to account for power. The police/the sovereign can be understood as institutions of power, and goes no further (instead of those being an object of inquiry)
• Foucault seems to be interested in her skills as an archivist, the ability and skill required to sift through massive amounts of data and do something with it.
• Discussion of what is history, what is philosophy, what is analytic history, what do we look for in each…
• Foucault, What is Critique - I'm not a philosopher, I'm a critic. This could be the basic characteristic that distinguishes genealogy from history.
• Difference between being empirically responsible and doing philosophy. How to separate the empirical work of history from the analytic work of philosophy.
• Analytic history seems to blur these boundaries - a critical form of history.
• Is it critical like from a Kantian heritage, conditions of possibility, to history? Or something else, like an inquiry into a normatively/politically fraught practice (e.g. abortion)?
• History of the present - connections between these histories and now. Here, not sure if that's her project/if so, where it is.
• It's hard to see what constellation of present practices she would be referencing.
• Hint of this from Disorderly Families chapter on marriages when men become the authority within the family. This seems like description for description's sake, not description in service of a problematization. How is this a story of how we are made possible as contemporary subjects?

Next week: Foucault, The Lives of Infamous Men
Week 10: Foucault, Introduction to Herculine Barbine

Farge, Fragile Lives, Ch.8

Feb.22, 2018

Questions

·      What is ‘history’ for Farge? (pp.179, 180-84) How is Farge using history? How is she conducting a history?

·      Why is Farge calling that which “must be denied & forbidden” ‘history’? What does ‘history’ mean such that it is the right term? (180, 179)

·      Definition of study of crowds (172) – representation politics changing affective relationships?

·      Explore tension between sociological tone & the historical nature of the project – is historiography necessarily sociology for Farge?

·      Compare Farge’s account of Damiens & reformers (Beccaria) Foucault’s account in DP (179-181)

·      How does Farge account for the shift in sensibilities concerning public executions vis-à-vis Elias and Foucault? (p.181-2)

·      Impossibility of critiquing one’s own contemporary situation/historical milieu? (p.182)

Discussion

·      History – as context? (179) – as contingent reality? – as personalization of the event – What are the senses in which she is practicing history? What are we to make of her use of ‘history’ in scare quotes (179)? Writing history of crowds involved in practices in which they are encouraged to not have a history. She can’t give them a history which they lack. Writing the history of ritual (180) – ‘ritual’ as different from ‘history’. Ritual = repeatable vs. history = contingent

·      Evidence she’s bringing to bear to her claims? Claims as partly conceptual and partly empirical. Evidence being used to indicate how one should read the text in general. Giving dominant narrative and another way of reading the history. (see p.185)

·      Tension between the mundanity of the ritual and the – mainstream historians are ritualizing the history that in fact had a history – explicit narrative of historians that present the history as ahistorical – Farge taking issue with these standard histories (179) – or positing against that something that is implicit – or positing against that something that is explicit that is not part of the ritual itself (187)? Crowd running against the ritual and asserting something, the history that interrupts and is different from the ritual? Is it explicit, implicit, or both? Rituals which present themselves as being without history – excavating/ explicitating the implicit material that the ritual couldn’t countenance – historians just rehearsing the ritual – habit role metaphor vs. in the weeds -

·      Taking crowd as object à sociological project? (172) – begins with the crowd (le foule), rather than tracks its emergence – sociology of the social (?) – description of social life – attention to social relationships – sources? – what authority is she appealing to in her claims?

·      Farge using affect as grid through which to provide different account of history/historical shifts– analogous with the way Foucault uses practice/techniques to provide account of history/historical shifts

·      Farge’s categorization of part I? Maybe domesticity?

Farge, Fragiles Lives, Ch. 4

The meeting began, as per usual, perhaps after a joke or two, with our questions:

* Is Farge's notion of "modes of rationality" (p. 50) related to Foucault's conception of the same?

* Farge speaks of "those extra qualifies of life and thought that come through in each document" (p. 50).  How would we characterize those?  How do those come through given that "no amount of analysis" can yield them?

* The first pages (pp. 44-45) describe a form of gender "equality" and "equality in terms of personal worth" in the 18th c..  What do we make of this?  How do we assess this?  How would we go about assessing it?

* Separation of affect & emotion from childhood (pp. 47-48, and again p. 68, p. 71).

* Framing an analysis in terms of "home" (near the beginning of the chapter) and then moving on from this (later on in the chapter)?  How is "home" functioning in the chapter?  How is "place" functioning?

We then moved to discussion:

We began with discussion of the particular mode of justificatory apparatus that Farge, the historian, is here offering.  When we meet moments in the text that we are skeptical about (e.g., the insistence on "equality" [p. 44]), what do we do with this skepticism?  What do we do particularly in light of skepticism around normative categories?
   - One approach is to ask what "equality" would have to mean such that "there existed a kind of equality" between men and women.
   - Another approach would be to give additional weight to the ways in which she qualifies it (e.g., "... in their relationship to the outside world"; or a mutuality of sharing responsibility).  It's interesting that here she doesn't offer a contrast case of a later (or earlier?) situation characterized by greater inequality.  It's also interesting that she doesn't qualify this point through class as explicitly as one might expect (but see p. 45).
   - Another would be to try to develop a criticism, or a skepticism around the claim.

We then discussed Farge's wariness of presenting "the nakedness of the document" (49) and "let[ting] the documents from the police archives speak for themselves"; very interesting in light of the Disorderly Families project.

We then discussed Farge's emphasis on "meaning" and "interpretation" (49); and the extent to which this fits with her idea of "modes of rationality".
   - There is an emphasis on the meaning that is in excess of the historian's work.  This is an emphasis on what is being left out.   "Those extra qualities of life and thought" (50).  These will not be accounted for by "the modes of rationality" (50).  But she doesn't want to sentimentalize, or over-sentimentalize, them (50).
   - So it sounds like "mode of rationality" is a contrast category to the "small strands of meaning" and the "unpronounceable" that the historian must leave out.  The historian always leaves behind something.  What motivates the idea that some of what gets left behind is important, and ought to be remarked as being left behind?

How does this fit with Farge's explicit separation of childhood from emotions, love, affect (p. 50, p. 71).  This is a separation of the mode of rationality from specific emotions (esp. love and affection; such positive emotions), but not from emotion as such, b/c emotions are part of rationality for Farge (cf. p. 285).

Is Farge here more doing archaeology (analysis of strata) or genealogy (analysis of strategies)?  Is she exploring what lies beneath or within the line of a form of rationality (archlgy)?  Or is she exploring how the line gets formed (gnlgy)?