Amy Allen, POS, Ch. 7

1. With respect to the account of gender vis-à-vis Benhabib here, the interpretation was that Benhabib’s view takes there to be an unengendered core self that precedes the self, whereas Allen’s view is that the self is always already constituted as gendered (at least in modernity, &c., &c.). There was a worry that gender here is monolithic, rather than hegemonic. Do you (could you?) accept that gender is inherently multiple? Is it multiple as personal identity (identification)? Is it multiple as social identity (ascription)?

2. There were questions about the status of normativity in the book, and the concerns driving the questions about normativity that are emphasized. We cobbled together a rough and working typology of questions about normativity (noting that not everyone agreed on this):
1. Meta-theoretical account of normativity. An account of the structure and status of normativity. This is going to be a philosophical or meta-theoretical or methodological account. Within the frame of an account or conception of ‘what normativity is’ (in a largely formal sense) we can then ask questions about the norms (in a largely contentful or substantive sense) themselves…
2. Normative Big Questions.
i. Questions about, say, Freedom and Equality. These questions about which it’s not useful to engage in rational debate. These are (per definition) always intertheoretic or intervocabulary or inter-episteme.
3. Normative little questions.
i. Questions of this or that harm, or this or that oppression. Questions about norms that are zones of conflict in our contemporary cultural configuration.
ii. Genealogy is useful here, Pragmatism is useful here, Critical Theory is useful here, Analytic Naturalism is useful here, Anthropology is useful here, and so are other styles of inquiry.

Amy Allen, POS, Chs. 5 &6, Questions

1. Why does Allen need Foucault to be offering a determinate negation of the subject? Is this requisite for the project of integrating Foucaultian genealogy and Habermasian critical theory? If Foucault is not offering a determinate (rather than abstract) negation of the philosophy of the subject, then is there sufficient shared philosophical space between Foucault and Habermas to effect the sort of philosophical integration that Allen is working for? (Thus, we wondered, is there an implicit reliance in the text on the idea that the motor of critical theory is the determinate negation of philosophical conceptions.)

Is this account of Foucault as determinate negator sufficiently in touch with the Foucaultian-Deleuzian attempt to get out from under the logic of contradiction. See, for instance, Foucault’s review of Deleuze’s 1968 and 1969 books, or Foucault’s “What Is Critique?” where he does not negate phenomenology and analytic philosophy so much as just claim that he’s doing something else.

2. There were questions about how to navigate between Maeve Cooke’s work (on Amy Allen’s account) on radical contextualism (position #2) versus context-transcending theory (position #3) (138ff.). How does Cooke’s position in defense of #3 not collapse that view back into #3?

One view is that #3 inevitably collapses back into #2, and that this would be problematic except for the ability to orient #2 in terms of the temporal projection of norms. Norms are produced in context and, as norms, are inherently projectible (promisable) to other contexts which are relevant in the right respects. Metaphor not of posit and apply, but of production and reproduction.

Chapter 4

1. The Psyche. Butler worries that Foucault “does not address the issue of ‘the psychic form that power takes’” (73). What is the philosophical status of the concept of the psychic? Is this a thoroughly historicizable concept, such that ‘the psychic’ is a feature of some group of people like ‘We Victorians’ or ‘we moderns’ or some such? Or is this a philosophically heavy concept, perhaps a structuralist concept, such that ‘the psychic’ is a category or container that takes historically variable forms?

2. Normative distinctions. It is suggested that “what is required is a distinction between subordination as a normatively problematic relationship and dependency as a normatively neutral one” (84; cf. 78 top). There was a question about the political (and, more broadly, normative?) implications and ramifications of the appeal to the psychic in Butler? If we want to move toward a psychoanalytic conception of psychic capacities (e.g., capacity of vulnerability), then how do we cash that conception out in terms of a project engaging normative critique?

Amy Allen, POS, Ch. 3

1. Why is the structure versus agency debate framed through Foucault and Habermas? Given that this involves a contextualization of Habermas’s project, how can this avoid returning us in the end to a prior iteration of Habermasian critical theory?

2. What is at stake in conceptualizing autonomy as a capacity rather than as a practice, or as a pure correlate of practices? There was a worry that there was a remnant of transcendentalizing or substantivizing the subject in construing autonomy as a capacity. What is the relation between the idea of ‘capacities’ of autonomy and the idea of ‘practices’ or ‘acts’ of autonomy’? Do ‘practices’ express, or manifest, or [??], ‘capacities’ for critical reflection and self transformation? How should we conceptualize that relation? (This has been much-discussed but will be of benefit to the group.)

Amy Allen, POS, Ch. 2

1. Allen writes of Foucault: “These histories of the present are designed to lay out the contingent conditions of possibility of our modern selves” (2008, 39). Our question: do the conditions that bind us bind us with the force of necessity or with the constraint of contingency? If the latter, as the quote suggests, then in what sense can we talk of contingent conditioning? Can there be contingent conditioners? To put this question quite technically: What is the modal status of conditioners on Allen’s account of Foucault?

In our discussions we distinguished ‘modality in history’ from ‘modality in practice’. The former refers to whether or not historical conditions emerged contingently or necessarily. Clearly Foucault held that disciplinary power emerged contingently in the Classical Age. The latter (modality in practice) refers to whether or not the conditions that constrain act as constraints with the force of necessity or with the force of contingency. Our group was split on this, as an account of Foucault. The philosophical problem for those who think that conditions constrain necessarily is to explicate this ‘necessity’ without being foundationalist or metaphysical. The philosophical problem for those who think that conditions constraint contingently is to give an account of contingent conditioners.

2. To what extent is Allen’s project framed by the classical task of critical theory as responding to a normative deficit? To what extent does this classical task continue to be historically valid given changing historical circumstances (e.g., neoliberalism as our problem rather than fascism as our problem)?

Why start with Foucault and work toward Habermas, rather than start with Habermas and work toward Foucault, or start with something else? Why start with a normative deficit in order to work toward building in a contextualist account of normativity? Why not start instead with an attempt to account for the possibility of critical theory itself? Why not try to explicate the conditions of possibility of critique? A reflection point in the text for this: the understanding of the two tasks of critical theory as discussed on page 3.

Amy Allen, POS, Ch. 1 Questions & Comments

1. What is at stake in shifting the project of immanent critique (and the critical theory tradition) from the historically more prominent frame of society to the frame of the self?

Some of us thought that there was behind this an idea that political and ethical transformation takes place on the site of the self, rather than the site of ‘society’ or ‘culture’. There was, however, a worry that this makes the project too micro- and particular, because it is not clear that we can get to broad-scale political transformation if we focus on the self. Others of us thought that there was behind this an idea that to address the politics of distribution and the politics of recognition we need to resituate politics itself around the self, and perhaps also the self construed in terms of experience. There was, however, a worry that experience is too philosophically loaded a concept to be workable here.

2. What is at stake in “integrating” (p. 7) Foucaultian genealogy and Habermasian critical theory? How are these two being brought together? And why?

We discussed the potential utility (or lack thereof) of other metaphors for relating these two traditions. Why not “delegate”? What, in other words, is “integration”? How does integration work as a theoretical project? As an interpretive project? How does it work as a historically emergent phenomenon? How should we understand this term? How does this term help us make sense of this general philosophical interpretive strategy: “Some modifications in each of these perspectives will be necessary…” (p. 8)? On what register does integration occur? Is it at the level of base philosophical assumptions or commitments?

Winter Term Reading Schedule

We are reading Amy Allen's The Politics of Our Selves

Reading schedule as follows (meetings Thurs 1.30p in PLC 314):

Jan 12 - Ch 1
Jan 19 - Ch 2
Jan 26 - Ch 3
Feb 2 - Ch 4
Feb 9 - Chs 5 & 6
Feb 16 - Ch 7
Feb 23 - discussion with Amy Allen
Mar 1 - read Concluding Reflections of 'POS'
Mar 8 - tbd