November 9, 2018

After reading the fourth lecture of Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, we posed and discussed the following questions:

-      Why did the virtues of humilitas, patientia and subditio (p.138-139) require necessary verbalization in monastic institutions? (p.140)

-      What is the difference between indefinite obedience and definite state of obedience that Foucault is suggesting as part of the monastic culture? (p.140)

-      The verbalization of avowal played a central role in monastic institutions. What is the relation of the one who is listening and who is speaking in this context? Is this an ethical or linear relationship? 

-      The contrast that Foucault emphasizes between the notion of self-mastery in antiquity and the constant obedience in monastic institutions seems similar to the distinction between enlightenment as maturity and immaturity that Kant made in What is enlightenment. Can we find here a parallel between Foucault’s work on antiquity and enlightenment and maybe discover one of the reasons of his engagement with antiquity?

-      What is the connection between art of living or aesthetics of existence that Foucault talks about and the relationship between master and student in antiquity? Does this relationship constitute a technology of the self?

-      It seems to be a paradox in monastic culture:  On the one hand, everybody is condemned to constant obedience and nobody is perfect. On the other hand, avowal needs to be directed to another subject. But is anybody the highest in this hierarchy or are the subjects in a circular relationship?

-      Foucault mentions technology and “technical problems” couple of times in this lecture. Why is it in this lecture that this notion is repeated? Is there anything in the monastic institutions that necessary includes or requires technology?

Beside discussing the above questions and completing and discussing the table, we also discussed the following points:

The role of God seems to have a marginal role in Foucault’s discussion. We can conclude that avowal isn’t in the first place directed to God.

Avowal needs to be free and that is true for avowal in monastic institutions as well. Although there is subjection and obedience involved, we know from Foucault’s work on the concept of freedom that freedom is not necessarily in contrast to power but is the very condition of it. Thus the subject is free despite being subjected to power relations and constant obedience. Free here is not meant in a metaphysical sense but what is “considered” free. An example of lack of freedom in the medieval context might be a demonized and deceived subject.

Socrates constitutes a figure who is on the edge of antiquity and Christianity. The techniques that are used in the student-master relationship in Socratic context are similar to Christianity: You have to discover the truth in yourself and that says something about who you are. The codes are here different, but the techniques are similar.

The distinction between moral code and technique that Foucault makes in the second volume of The history of sexuality is helpful here. It is the latter that is the central aspect of Foucault’s analysis.

The relation to the other is constitutive for the role of the master and for the student to become the master of himself. This is important because it shows the constitutive role of the other for gaining something that we might call autonomy or mastery over oneself.

October 26, 2018

Questions posed by the group on Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling second lecture of April 28, 1981

1 - Can we map Foucault's discussion of avowal in Oedipus Rex to the four-part analysis of speech acts of avowal from the inaugural lecture (pp. 15-17)?

2a - Does the slave have to avow and is this inconsistent with MF's earlier description of avowal as necessarily free?

2b - Does the obligation on the slave to avow come from outside the subject or within the subject

3 - With respect to Foucault's categories (or are these concepts?), do the terms "mani9festiation of truth," "production of truth," "alethurgy," "veridiction" all map to one another?

4 - Corrrespondence between the avowal by the other and my own recognition.

5 - Why is art a representation of social practice in these two lectures?  What is the relationship between art and social practice?  Why isn't art a social practice?  See p. 58, 81 for the language of "representation".

6 -  Question of the relationship between reconignition and excess. On p.81 Foucault writes that "Oedipus was necessary for the truth to appear. He was necessary for the creation of this well-regulated form of the judicial machine that is capable of producing the truth. But he was eliminated, as a kind of 'excess', now, by the very judicial machine he brought forth". I wonder here what is this excess and in what ways can it be characterized? Is it the result of a recognition that can never be fully completed?

Summary of discussion by the group.

See notes on table below, which we began during this session.

MF offering an analysis of avowal as one possible mode of veridiction (p. 19).

October 19, 2018

Questions: 

Pg 30 Foucault’s method: is it archaeological or genealogical? (Three moments, Greek, Christian, modern). 

Pg 28 What really constitutes the difference between formal-emp analysis and ethnological analysis?

General question regarding why Foucault’s readings of the Greeks always seem to look differently: is it a close reading? Different method of surveying? 

Pg 34: translation of dike —why can’t Mnls deliver a sentence? 

Pg 31: “kind of” or “equivalent to” juridical avowal? What’s the taxonomy of avowals?

Related:

Pg 32/28  : why is this structure of avowal only human? What about talking to the horses? 

Pg 28: ho power is functioning between veridiction and jurisdiction?

Pg 49: explanation of juridical changes—close to Econ analysis, but without reductive analysis—what are the relations? 

Pg 41: avowal not admission of fault, but youth leading astray

Pg 43: what is relation between truth and memory? 

Pg 43- reputations of truth and a Oakway

Pg 39- alethurgy 

Discussion: 

Starting with first question (archaeology and genealogy). 

- if he sets up these three moments distinctly, but not their connections, or the relations between these moments, that’s very archaeological. 

- plucking things across a vast historical expanse, is archaeological

- it’s in contrast to a genealogical movement, where one starts with two moments, and then tries to understand the continuity and difference between them, how we get from one to the other. 

But then in the content of the chapter, he seems to treat this genealogical suggestion that there’s a shift this moment. It’s a shift contained within a time slice. 

But he is really interested in power here. But it is clear that it’s genealogical in the sense that he is interested in the way that truthtelling is a technique of power. 

Why go back to the ancients? Maybe its practical, insofar as we need to go back to the Greeks because it’s only that far back that we get a sense of this relation between truth and justice being otherwise.

The introduction of a judge changes the type of judgement (pg 47). 

This emergence of an autonomous judicial system institutes new kinds of relations of power. 

Going back to the Greeks is one way of denaturalizing western philosophy. 

But is there some resonance with Heidegger—especially regarding truth as a disclosing—vs. how he ends, when he seems to say that truth is something fundamentally different. So is he agreeing or disagreeing with Heidegger? 

Moving from agonistic structure to something like rational judgement, being accepted by those who are being judged, etc. 

The shift: there used to be these relations of force mitigating these proceedings, but then a new sense of the judicial emerged that needed to present themselves as not permitted by force, so they need to present new relations of truth. 

- this is very Nietzschian, or also Hume arguing against Locke. 

Is the move—agonistic struggle to the rational account of justice— tied to the move to ground rationality in the world, rather than just seeing it as a human movement? (Or, what’s the relation between this shift to make the proceedings seem absent of power and based on truth, related to Foucault’s claim in subjectivity in truth that rationality was situated in the world in order to justify human use of it). 

What you’re looking for in Foucault are paradigmatic expressions of wider sets of practices (or this is what Foucault is often attending to). 

And these are just literature, not descriptions of practices. Which is also very different than most of his work. 

Horses—they talk to the horses, threatens them, and the oath he is supposed to take is directed at the horses. Maybe they were stand-ins for the gods? 

But at any rate, it’s strange he says truth-telling is all about humans. But that seems like it maybe undermines his position, insofar as he wants to say that truth-telling is not a pure transference of meaning/truth from one speaking subject to another. And it’s also strange because he then the very first story he tells includes horses as knowers, as hearers, and as subjects in the oath ritual. Plus, he talks about the race being itself a kind of truth-telling, one way of establishing the truth. Which is precisely not speech. 

Week 3 (10/12/18) Notes

CGC Week 3 (10/12/18)

Wrong-doing Truth-Telling - Inaugural Lecture

Questions

   1)   2 Forms of critical philosophy – compare with 3 questions about truth on p.10 from Subjectivity & Truth.

   2)  What is “counter-positivism”? (p.21)

   3) Avowal to whom? Master-discipline relation.

   4)  Status of speech with relation to avowal? Is avowal always verbal? Avowal as written?

   5)  What kinds of subjects/agents can avow?

   6)  Language games – Wittgenstein? (p.18) – games of truth/falsehood (p.20)

   7)  Avowal/power/subjectivity – truth playing role of knowledge (as in knw/pwr/sbjctvty) - (pp.16-17)?

   8) “Binding/tying” pp.17-20

   9)  Lecture series between 1970s and mid 1980s

   10) What is the relation between avowal and techniques?

Discussion

Editors claim this lecture series (and others during this period) provides element for seamlessly explaining connection between F’s genealogical inquires in 70s & his ethical inquires in mid 80s

Always power dynamics and others to whom you are confessing/avowing (p.17)

Power through avowal produces forms of subjectivity – productive capacity of power/institutions that creates a subjectivity that then has place for agency

Not always have mediation of institutions?

What is going on in avowal? One’s relationship to oneself – accept that truth, produce the truth, or submit to it (from Subj. & Truth) – avowal has all three of those elements

Avowal – has to be something that was not known in an obvious or clear way – distinction between the untold and the told? Untold not necessarily unknowable? Seeking a confirmation?

How does the idea that there’s a costliness in avowal make it different from other types of statements? If anything about truth involves a system of obligations, what’s so unique about avowal?

Relationship between obligation & avowal? Subject submits to avow? Desires to avow? Blurring of force & desire

Truth as veridiction (p.20) – versus truth as conditions under which there can be true statements – subject not just asserting a truth or taking on a commitment, but avowal transforms the subject – transformation of the subject from the unspoken to the spoken – are you conscious of this true realm when you say it?

Person who is avowing also has power over the person to whom they are avowing

4 features of avowal on pp.15-17 –

p.20 – two types of critical philosophy – 1) Kant/Plato way – asks under what conditions (formal or transcendental) there can be true statements. 2) investigates the forms of veridiction, the different forms of truth-telling

-       #2 as F’s method for investigating the historical problem

Distinction between truth and avowal? – truth as system of obligations – avowal – saying what is true – classifying different types of truth-telling. Maybe some bear different kinds of obligations – what’s so special about avowal in the context of truth-telling?

Avowal = one mode of veridiction among many – cost of enunciation (patient, criminal, confessor) – there’s a cost in avowing. Where is the cost coming from? Preceding the contract of the avowal? Is the cost the same for the criminal as it is for the patient?

Foucault familiar with Searle and Austin (“speech act”) – p.14

Counter-positivism – not the opposite of positivism but its counterpoint (21) – see also Subj. & Truth – p. 237 (ontological wonder vs. epistemological astonishment/surprise)

  

CGC Notes Week 2 (10/05/2018)

Questions: 

1.) How should we understand the master/disciple relationship vis a vis power relations, autonomy? Pg.32 

2.) Modality of experience definition? Phenomenological? Hegelian? Pg.31 

3.) What does it mean to acquire different ontological statuses? Pg. 31 

4.) Truth, true discourses, obligations? Knowledge and truth? Are they different? 

5.) His use of knowledge and truth dont seem to be consistent (savoir vs. connaissance?) 

6.) Disappearance of arts of living? Did arts of living literature really not exist at Foucault’s time or have they all just transitioned from concerns with ‘being’ to concerns with ‘doing’? What constitutes ‘autonomy’ with regard to the arts of living literature? (pg.27) 

7.) What can we learn about genealogy from statement about this being a program of possible research? Hypothesis? Pg.29

8.) Relation between modalities of experience and the limit experience?  

You cannot change conduct unless you change yourself, constant process of self-transformation 

Non-autonomous arts of living literature= aimed at achievement of certain specific goals, ways of doing?

 Current incarnations of arts of living literature= non-autonomous institutionally or is autonomy via externality to specific goals? 

Did literature exist, and he didn’t know about it? (Look into Self-Help (1859) by Samuel Smiles, and Self-Help Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (2005) by Micki McGee, relation to Conduct Book genre of the Middle Ages?, Mirrors for Princes?, literature review of self-help material published in French, English, or German prior to 1981?)

Did literature go underground? Not that nobody cares anymore but transition from being to doing forced the literature into various places? Current self-help literature/arts of living literature part of new form of disciplinary activity imbedded in institutions?

Autonomy in master/disciple relation (directed toward the development of the autonomy of the disciple? How the disciple becomes autonomous?)  vs autonomy in literature? 

Does common understanding of good life disable autonomy? Cant have ‘books for princes’ when we are all trying to be like princes. 

Arts of living broken up into different areas?

Backhanded/indirect comment/reference to psychotherapy, psychiatry, medicine, pedagogy? (see beginning of Berkeley lecture for more explicit connection) 

Are comments on paganism (pg.39) his own or historical views? Likely historical. 

Uncovering the self? 

All activity directed toward transformation of self? (happiness as instrumental as opposed to intrinsic?)

Aristotelian ethics as an ethics of being. 

Breakdown/disintegration/lack of autonomy occurs because different specific actions are being considered (and so need to be addressed in different areas) whereas arts of living (as concerned with ‘being’) deal with wholesale combination of every part of being.  

Connection with Buddhism/Hinduism concern for self? Indian relations with Ancient Greece? Questions of existence in Indian philosophies. 

Is he right? Did we lose a concern with being? 

What’s the difference between changing ‘being’ and changing ‘habits’ or ‘practices’ (hard to understand difference, maybe that’s exactly proof! We can’t even understand what ontology or being is separate from doing/actions. We see the world differently from the Greeks/ancients)  

Microeconomic accounts of human decision making? Based around Subjective truth of desires. From last week: we cant be wrong about our desires? 

CGC Week 1 notes (9/28)

CGC week 1 (9/28):

Questions

1)    Page 12: “With regard to madness, illness, and crime…” Other in as much as they are  also ourselves?

2)    Page 12 – 2^nd full paragraph – doesn’t want to conceive of subjectivity in terms of a single unifying experience or anthropological definition, but subjectivity can only be understood in terms of its relationship to its own truth. Is there any subjectivity outside of this relationship to this truth?

3)    Pg. 12 -Truth is essentially conceived as system of obligation – what does that mean (how does it relate to question 2)?

Obligations is not something we might necessarily associate with truth. Are they voluntary or forced? Or both? Truth as those things that are consciously or not agreed to – I submit to the fact the murder is bad. Truth is taken out of an ethereal structure and embeds it in a serious of power relationships.  We is unpacking different aspects of a third mode of inquiry into the subjectivity/truth relationships. He repackages the relationship between subjectivity and truth as a historical problem – historical formulation as opposed to a positivist formulation? Truth as bond, obligation, and politics and not truth as content or formal structure of knowledge. If you assert things as true, it requires that you act in certain ways. Its more about meaning than truth – brandom relationship. Obligation of being a certain subject – truth is not only concept of knowledge – you can’t choose or simply change the content. Truth in some way produces the subject. Truth is no longer something that is contained within the value of certain statement (true/untrue). He is adding an additional angle of analysis (we can still analyze statements epistemologically in terms of their truth value), but there is also a whole other layer of analysis in which what we take to be true transforms us into a certain kind of subject with a certain set of obligations. “I love you example.” What obligations does this statement establish? It’s not that the knowledge-part (truth-value) is irrelevant but the statement has other effects in terms of the obligations that it establishes. Does the truth value bare on the bond or obligations itself? What makes it meaningful in terms of these obligations?

4)    Pg. 12 -Why is it immaterial that truth is variable? Is truth not embodied in institutions., ect?

5)    Can we distinguish the domain of sexuality from other domains such as madness in terms of how each domain produces its own notion of truth - In these other domains, truth about the subject is produced from outside whereas in sexuality is produce through confession?  Is domain of sexuality uniquely  (pg. 13)

Is this form of truth as obligation unique to sexuality? Or does this concept of truth work in other domains? Is this a departure from his notion of regimes of truth? Is he trying to work out a concept of truth particular to sexuality?  It can’t be just sexuality – he uses the example of psychiatry as a system of obligation, thus psychiatry as true (pg 11-12). This historicized notion of truth runs throughout. What’s different about the relationship between sexuality and other domains of discourse? 1) The domain of sexuality is ambiguous – we don’t just have a repressive relationship to sexuality. We have a productive relationship with sexuality, not a negative one (like we do with madness, ect). Sexuality is ambiguous in terms of refusal and acceptance. Is this ambiguity really absent in other domains? It is difficult to differentiate productive sexuality when sexuality is always embedded in a field of power relationships. Do particular historical relationships render sexuality particularly ambiguous? Ambiguity is historically contingent. Is he willing to recognize sexuality as ambiguous because in the case of the other domains there are distinct domains of expertise that we have assigned responsibility for determining subjectivity/truth? Whereas in terms of sexuality, we are experts – there is no outside expert. Inside/outside flip – is there a tension here? Is that flip clean with respect to sexuality and the other domains?

6)    18-19 – any reflection on morality is associated with the historical claim about the turn from Pagan to Christian ethics – what is the quality of the relationship between the 2? Why inquire into morality in this way (historically)?

What is the relationship between ethics and sexuality for Foucault? Ethically there is a special quality of the domain of sexuality that allows him to ask questions about ethics as the relationship between self and self? Anytime, we are thinking about moral questions, we are asking questions about the shift from Pagan morality to Christian ethics – why? Any moral question is associated with the French revolution? Why does the ethical turn necessarily come in terms of sexuality? Assuming that he wrong in terms that they are massive overs statements, what is it about sexuality that makes him think these statements are plausible?  There is a shift in thinking that things that are natural superseded governmentality (but then takes on this same logic itself). Does sexuality provide the venue that for mapping human morals onto the natural world (or vice versa?) He builds up a contrast between early and late Hellenic periods, but doesn’t really connect to anything at the end. Prerequisite that nature has to be conceived in rational terms (where does this rationality come from?), and then humans can follow the laws of their city…Vernant – changing social and political structure gave birth to the rationality of the city that was then mapped onto nature and now the process is going in the other direction.

Pachydermic subjectivity.

7)    Pg. 11 – “When in a culture….” How does Foucault imagine subjects are equipped to ask ourselves about our experience of ourselves?

8)    Pg. 10 – three different inquiries into the subjectivity/truth relationship – can we unpack those for the purposes of tracking them in other lectures? Can we especially clarify the second one? 1981 Berkeley lectures (youtube) two poles – historical ontology of ourselves or critical history of thought and formal ontology of truth and a critical analysis of knowledge?

9)    Pg. 18 – Experience of ourselves – what is the relationships between desire, institutions, individuals, ect…What does the statement “yes, I desire” mean if we conceive of sexuality as desire?

The idea of confession is interesting because there is a sense in which sexuality is a confessional act that does things in the world. Confession is directly linked to morality – sexuality is tied with morality – what you confess is that I desire…why conceived of sexuality as desire? There is a lot at stake for this question when Foucault is writing. The wait of the confession, I desire, seems self-evident to Foucault. He initially frames it as though there are these two opposites positions – diagnose/diagnosed – but in terms of desire, there is an almost implicit accusation. You are called upon to confess by something external. Maybe one difference is that you can’t resist certain forms of subjectivity? But nothing can override your claims about sexuality? But there is also a problem of incitement. It’s not clear how one could recognize its own madness. Is he ignoring the historical relationship between mental illness and sexuality?

In part he is interested in giving an analysis of how truly being able to state one’s desires in the domain of sexuality distinguishes it from other domains. However, is it really that different? We may have experts who determine whether or not someone is mentally ill, but we are also incited to confess that we desire (we don’t get to choose whether we confess or not). There is a demand from the subject – history of sexuality, proliferation of sexuality discourses as a mechanism of power dynamics. Is their a methodological difference here in his analysis? In History of Sexuality vol. 1 he is interested in power relationships/dynamics, but here he is interested in the relationship between subject/truth. There is definitely a historical context in which Foucault is writing (his own life history)

Fall Quarter Schedule

This quarter we are focused on Foucault and genealogies and truth.

Week 1 - Subjectivity and Truth (CdF lectures), Lecture 1
Week 2 - Subjectivity and Truth (CdF lectuers), Lecture 2
Weeks 3-9 - Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling (Louvain Lectures), one per week
Week 10 - TBD

Next quarter we will be focused on Williams and genealogies and truth.