Heyes on Foucault and Somaesthetics

For our last week of the academic year, the final reading on the topic of "the self" was chapter 5, "Somaesthetics for the Normalized Body," from Cressida Heyes' Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics and Normalized Bodies (2007). We began with questions related to the text, then questions directed at thinking about the year of inquiry as a whole, and then moved on to discussion, where questions continued to arise.

Questions:

-are Heyes' normative criteria too broadly figured (e.g., last sentence of p112)? Can't they be specified on a case-by-case basis; the importance of the case study (116)

-what are we asking of Foucault when we're asking him for normative criteria; hearkening back to reading Allen's book, the problem of normativity is implicit in afoucault, so is Heyes successful at what she says she aims to do? How do the ascts of her account fit together to do what she wants?

-the role of pleasure and experience in a somaesthetic ethics: how does she square the relatively mild suggestions for "care for self" with the limit experiences that Foucault discusses? Do we lose the transformative potential of pleasure if focusing on middle-range pleasures?

-is somaesthetics a replacement for a more straightforward kind of normative ethics; doesn't this already assume a set of substantive normative commitments?

-how is yoga a good example of self-care when, as a response to biopower, it seems a response that isn’t sufficiently critical of economic conditions? Yoga is either co-optable or already totally co-opted; would have been nice to have more attention to Marxist work that addresses these features of any context for self-care.

To wrap up the year:

-why are self-transformation and freedom positive rather than deeply normatively ambivalent? Practices may be both sources of un-freedom and freedom; how is he not just a straightforward inheritor of the Enlightenment?

-might we distinguish the scope of normativity as applied to judgements and, then, how does a judgement function with respect to its object

-crypto-normativity is ubiquitous to any claim, i.e., why is Foucault being criticized for doing what anyone who inquires into a normative claim; if so, can we not avoid the further claim that every inquiry is determinate with respect to its object? Why expect Foucault to give a normative account? Why the turn to normative somaesthetics? Aren't there better resources for positive normative projects?

Discussion:

-this move to develop from Foucault renders Foucault in the first-person; the benefit of Foucaultian analysis is the third-person; this project seems anachronistic with respect to Foucault, seeing as Foucault is operating distinctly outside the subjective frame; even in  HSv2 (intro) experience is rendered in third-personal terms

-do we need to ask Foucault to account for the normative presuppositions of his objects of inquiry

-the bigger problem is that we would be disappointed if we look to Foucault for normative criteria

-if we read Foucault as primarily giving a genealogical account as to how various claims determine normativity; do we then have license to form some sort of positive project out of these genealogical projects?

-is it appropriate to ask Foucault to give a judgement about self-transformative practices, i.e., to say that they are freeing, i.e., good?

-the genealogical account does not provide for us the normative criteria for the amelioration of the problems that are specified therein

-what is a good response, then, for first-order practitioners to normalization under disciplinary power? It seems that, to the extent that disciplinary power acts at the level of the individual body, the yoga practice as described might enable the individual to become more resistant to domination, when this domination is enacted through disciplinary practices.

-Yet, these first-order concerns probably need to be held distinct from the philosopher’s (second-order?) account. Here Heyes is acting as parrhesiast, in describing yoga practice, in addition to offering a general philosophical account; yet there is a slippage between second- and first-order modalities of thought

Hacking on Foucault and Goffman

Partial transcript of the conversation...

There are at least two interpretations of Hacking's work here...

1) Agent <-> Structure loops * Goffman helps us study agents (a 'bottom-up' approach) * Foucault helps us study structures (a 'top-down' approach)

2) Agent <-> Structure loops * Goffman helps us study 'actual conditions' of agent-structure loops (via ethnography) * Foucault helps us study 'conditions of possibility' of agent-structure-loop ensembles (via gnlgy)

There are multiple distinctions at work here...
Bottom-up v. Top-down
Face-to-face v. Abstract (Goffman looking from within the loop, but Foucault looking at the loop)
Agent-centric v. Structure-centric (this is not helpful)

There was discussion and disagreement about the following assertion: the second distinction does not lead us to the third automatically -- we don't need to set up a methodological distinction between 'starting with agent' v. 'starting with structure' in order to make the crucial distinction between 'studying up' (Goffman, ethnography) and 'studying toward' (Foucault, abstract).

Damasio 'Self Comes to Mind' Discussion

Preliminary discussion of Damasio's "Self Comes to Mind" on 4.24.2012 200: account of self involving unalterable aspects and unalienable; what are the social and political implications, possibilities for resistance? 182/204: the relationship between Damasio’s account and more particularist accounts, in terms of interpretation; what would the relation be between cog-sci emphasis on invariance and other accounts of the self in which there is more emphasis upon variance?; relation between different kinds/levels (methodologies) of accounts of self 190ff: relative asociality of protoself, esp. when considering processes of gestation (e.g., as in psychoanalysis; proprioception as it develops during gestation); is the protoself more structurally social than as it is described here?; return to atomistic view of selves? 185: what is the epistemological value/significance of feeling/primordial feeling? 209: core self linked to cognition/cognizing Status of this discourse and the type of material constraints that help us think about meta-ethical issues; what does this mean for these questions concerning, e.g., the asociality of the protoself; are social and political questions appropriate for this kind of account? -wants to give an emergentist account of self processes; eventually wants to get to the broadest categories of experience, i.e., society and culture, but wants to begin with the simplest considerations regarding consciousness -the protoself: the most basic thing an organism has to do is monitor its internal states, i.e., homeostasis/allostasis; there is no substantial self: the self is an ongoing process of maintaining dynamic equilibrium; this is the base for a unified sense of self, and it is something over which we have no control, this is an unalterable condition for selfhood -feelings related to protoself activity are those of which we are not conscious -but cannot define the protoself independent of an environment, so in this sense its not explicitly asocial; maps of internal states are the result of the organism’s ongoing interaction with its environment -so the real question is how we can get a moment of core consciousness out of the activity of the protoself? -core self is the awareness of the changes that objects effect in relation to the mapping of organism/environment relation -deep awareness of being a body placed somewhere: primordial feeling... coming to be aware of this is not independent of the protoself -185: primordial feeling resists the Foucaultian notion that resistance is immanent to power relations -how would Damasio respond to arguments regarding the expansive quality of human equilibrium, e.g., Dewey? -our expansiveness begins with biological needs of the organism; as in Claude Bernard: organism begins with a permeable boundary; orderliness arises out of organism’s need to maintain its boundary -why is ownership necessary as part of the description of the self? Because this is an aspect of self at the level of core consciousness; this is part of a process of individuation and singular propriety and this is liable to function to reify our atomistic conceptions of the self -but might these above concerns be external to this biological account that we’re considering? -this puts into question the possibility of collective experience; might this metaphor be as apt as it is because of the social/political/economic conditions under which we live? Here, for Damasio, collective experience must be an aggregate of singularities rather than a collective body -this is right; he can give an account of our collective experience in terms of mirror neurons and the like, but he would resist an account of embodied sameness with the other, e.g., I cannot feel someone else’s chronic pain, I can empathize; this is based upon claims regarding internal mapping at the level of the individual organism -given the kind of organism that we are, we cannot have an unlimited amount of possibilities for self; there are material constraints, e.g., What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (Nagel) -we must also recognize that we’re talking about a distribution curve, our bodies aren’t exactly the same -Damasio, re: politics: if homeostasis is the primary governance of the protoself, and then it carries up into the core self, and then it carries up into the autobiographical self, then our work at the cultural level is an extension of this process (e.g., Looking for Spinoza) -at this broader level, this extends well beyond so-called material constraints; this speaks to the level of “equilibrium” to which particular social constraints give rise -processes of maintenance are operative in each domain of human meaning; geistege; the political possibilities include the material conditions under which we live that constrain the possibilities for social practices -there are a range of constraints operative in any context, and different methodologies will be better at explaining different constraints; cog-sci will be best for explaining x type of constraints -but Damasio thinks that each increasing level of complexity is pervaded by the constraints generated at the lowest level of organism survival -so we ought to be concerned that we ought not name one account of any particular kind of constraint as the most fundamental; but this might not be right: actuality might very much be prior to possibility, i.e., material constraints are prior to constraints as described in genealogical accounts -is a Damasio-style account equally constrained by accounts as given in genealogy: the difference will be a matter of scope -are we trying to distinguish between hard and soft constraints? Genealogical accounts provide soft constraints? Genealogical accounts, after all, emphasize the fact that things could be otherwise -but material constraints are prior to and constrain these other type of constraints -Damasio is not reductive: at each level of organization, processes are added in to a new level of complexity -so is a society a bunch of individuals? no, there are complex practices operative at the level of society that cannot be reduced to an aggregation of individuals; but he will want to say that processes of allostasis are operative here -what about the fact that this process is directed at the maintenance of life? -at a certain level, it’s not about the maintenance of life, but rather about flourishing: the maintenance of a life that has quality and meaning -Damasio is not reflexive with respect to his own positioning -what about programmed obsolescence (and natality) at the level of the protoself? so the processes of dynamic equilibrium and flourishing seem to foreclose the fact that organisms “plan to die,” or rather that life is structured by its death -why does he have to have death structured into his account? this need not be part of the teleology of the organism; death is not the horizon of the organism, but is a limiting factor upon the -this is why “homeostasis” is not the best model; there isn’t enough possibility for interaction here, e.g., feedback processes, which are nonetheless held together by an organism in its environment -this account is not an account of life as in vitalist accounts; coming-to-be and passing away are immanent to this account -if life is a kind of “holding together,” ought we not to include these rupturing kind of events natality and death as a part of allostasis -no, death is something that happens to the organism; he’s not focused on the fact that we are “beings toward death”

Lisa Adkins Reading Discussion

What’s the background debate? What is this a contribution to? What are the major theoretical assumptions?

Debates about workplace as performance, or performative theories of work/labor. Offering a specification about some of the ways in which gender figures in the workplace. Also offering a conceptual intervention concerning how we are going to map and describe these kinds of specificities. A critique of other forms of this work of specifying, in which identity is not recognized as the outcome of a process of labor.

Is this a descriptive or a normative project? Are they sketching a theoretical deficit in existing accounts of what we are calling ‘capitalist flexibilization’? Or are they also going one step further and offering a normative critique of ‘capitalist flexibilization’? The former is an attempt to be tidier and more rigorous about the concepts of ‘flexibilization’ (our language) or ‘identity performance’ (descriptive). The latter is a critique of what those concepts name (normative).

There is a normative ambivalence here.

Can we unpack the contrast (p. 604) between women works as gendered workers, versus individualizing and flexibilized workers?

What is at stake in the theoretical move that would give no precedence to either term in the relation between “gendered self-identity” and “gendering of the labour of division” (p. 599)? How does this differ from other theoretical accounts? Do other theoretical accounts give theoretical precedence to one term of this relation? Relation between identity and economy—not giving precedence of one over the other.

What is at stake in the treatment of stress (p. 610) as a privileged example or a key site for analysis, inquiry, and critique?

What is the scope of the argument?

How is self-formation linked to earning?

Spring Term 2012 Schedule (& Late Winter Schedule)

DRAFT Schedule for Late Winter and Spring Terms

Postcolonial Approaches to the Self
-----------------------------------
Wtr Qtr Wk 9 Mar 8 - Mahmood, Chap. 1 [Colin]
Wtr Qtr Wk 10 Mar 15 - Mahmood
Wk 1 - Talal Asad [Ira]
Wk 2 - Talal Asad
Wk 3 - Apr 17 - Lisa Adkins [Polina]

Cog Sci Approaches to the Self
------------------------------
Wk 4 Apr 24 - Damasio [Katherine]
Wk 5 May 1 - Ismael [Nicolae]

Neoliberal Approaches to the Self
---------------------------------
Wk 6 May 8 - Berardi, First Ch [Anita]
Wk 7 May 15 - Berardi, Last Ch [Rocio]

Genealogies of the Self
-----------------------
Wk 8 May 22 - Hacking, from 'Soc Construction of What?' [Colin]
Wk 9 May 29 - __?Heyes ?McWhorter _______ [Katherine]
Wk 10 Jun 5

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.