First of all: Sorry for the delay, which has been due to the simple fact that SJ Collier and I were too busy with our everyday jobs. Colin Koopmnan has joined our little committee on concept work and hence in future the three of us will try to coordinate the blog.

In our last exchange we discussed how to best depict our kind of inquiry (I am still somehow inclined to say ethnography or fieldwork). My initial effort to do so was to distinguish our kind of inquiry from theory driven kinds of research. One marker I used was "singularity." The term is intriguing – I guess – for many of us. It promises to capture an ethos of relating to things – of taking them up – that is constitutive of our kind of research in its focus on the concrete, on the particular story or phenomenon that is emerging.

And yet, what "singularity" actually means, what its connotations and implications are is not quite clear. One way to approach the problem is to ask how others – who are somehow associated with it – use the term, e.g., Foucault.

The surprise was considerable: It appears that Foucault almost never uses the term singularity (at least not in French). The index of Dits et Écrits lists the term twenty-three times. In addition I found it a couple of times in The Archeology of Knowledge, in The Order of Things, and in History of Sexuality I and II (evidently I read very fast and no doubt oversaw some places).

But although – and this may be another surprise – Foucault uses the term rarely he uses it with remarkable, indeed astonishing continuity. Over a period of almost twenty years its usage hardly varies. The methodological – philosophical – reflections that inform it remain almost unaltered.

What follows is a series of quotes. They are meant to met en scene the continuity. But they are also presented as kind of raw material for a discussion about what Foucault may have meant when speaking or writing about "singularity." What are the methodological – philosophical – implications? Can we spell out the conceptual assumptions that inform his usage of "singularity?" May we use the term in order to distinguish our inquiry from theory driven research? Is his concept of singularity helpful for our effort to find adequate terms to think through and name the kind of inquiry – the kind of ethnography/fieldwork – we're engaged in (the kind of inquiry ethnographic inquiry is)?

The first quote is from 1968 (taken from "Sur l'archéologie des sciences. Réponse au Cercle d'épistémologie;" the text was first published in summer 1968. DE I: 706). First the French, then the translation (which is a nightmare):

"En fait l'effacement systématique des unités toutes données permet d'abord de restituer à l'énoncé sa singularité d'événement : il n'est plus simplement considéré comme la mise en jeu d'une structure linguistique, ni comme la manifestation épisodique d'une signification plus profonde que lui; on le traite dans son irruption historique ; ce qu'on essaie de mettre sous le regard, c'est cette incision qu'il constitue, cette irréductible – et bien souvent minuscule – émergence."

"In fact, the systematic erasure of all the given unities allows to give back to the utterance (énonce) its singularity of an event: it is no longer simply viewed as the mise en jeu of a linguistic structure; nor is it viewed as the episodal manifestation of a signification deeper than it; one treats it in its historical irruption; that which one tries to make visible is the incision which is constitutive of it, this irreducible – and often actually miniscule – emergence."

In almost the same way Foucault wrote in 1972, in his response to Derrida (my translation):

"But how could a philosopher of the trace possibly be sensitive for an analysis of an event? How could such a philosophy […] think the singularity of an event?"

The next quote is from 1978, taken from "What is Critique?" In this text Foucault offers no doubt the most explicit – but still somewhat cryptic – explanation of how he uses the term singularity – therefore the long quote. Thinking about his historicophilosophical practice Foucault says that the positivities he is analyzing are ensembles which are not evident. We need to study the ruptures of their emergence. Thinking about what this means he writes:

"These ensembles are not analyzed as universals to which history, with its particular circumstances, would bring a certain number of modifications. Of course, many accepted elements, many conditions of acceptability, can have a long career behind them; but what is a matter of grasping in the analysis of these positivities is that they are in some way pure singularities, not the incarnation of an essence, not the individualization of a species: singularity as madness in the modern Western world, singularity absolute as sexuality, singularity absolute as the juridic-moral system of our punishments.”

“No founding recourse, no escape into a pure form—that is no doubt one of the most important and most contestable points of this historicophilosophical approach: if it does not want to fall either into a philosophy of history or into a historical analysis, it ought to maintain itself in the field of immanence of pure singularities. What then? Rupture, discontinuity, singularity, pure description, immobile tableau, no explanation, no passage, you know all that. It will be said that the analysis of these positivities is not elevated to those procedures called explanatory to which one ascribes a causal value on three conditions: (1) one only grants causal value to the explanations that aim at a last instance valued as profound and unique, economy for some, demography for others; (2) one only grants as having causal value that which obeys a principle of pyramidization pointing toward the cause or the causal source, the unitary origin; and finally (3) one only grants causal value to that which establishes a certain inevitability or at least that which approaches necessity.”

“The analysis of positivities, to the extent that it has to do with pure singularities related not to a species or an essence but to simple conditions of acceptability…”

“…nothing is more foreign to such an analysis than the rejection of causality. But what is important is that it is not a matter in such analyses of reducing an ensemble of derived phenomena to one cause, but of making intelligible a singular positivity in that which is precisely singular.”

“Let us say roughly that in opposition to a genesis that orients itself toward the unity of a weighty principal cause of a multiple descent, we are concerned here with a genealogy, that is, of something that tries to restore the conditions of appearance of a singularity from multiple determining elements, of which it would appear, not as the product, but as the effect. Thus this singularity is made intelligible, but it is not seen as functioning according to a principle of closure.”

The same year Foucault gave an interview in which the term singularity is as well used in an illuminating way (DE IV: 23, Table Ronde du 20 Mai 1978). First the French original and then my terrible, terrible translation:

"J'essaie de travailler dans le sens d'une événementalisation. (…) Que faut-il entendre par événementalisation? Une rupture d'évidence, d'abord. Là ou on serait assez tenté de se référer à une constante historique ou à un trait anthropologique immédiat, ou encore a une évidence s'imposant de la même façon à tous, il s'agit de faire surgir une singularité (…) Rupture des évidences (…) Telle est la première fonction theorico-politique de ce que j'appellerais l'événementalisation. En outre, l'événementalisation consiste a retrouver les connexions, les rencontres, les appuis, les blocages, les jeux de force, les stratégies, etc., qui ont, a un moment donné, ce qui ensuite va fonctionner comme évidence, universalité, nécessité. Prendre les choses de cette manière, on procède bien à une sorte de démultiplication causale. Qu'est-ce que cela veut dire? (…) La démultiplication causale consiste à analyser l'évènement selon les processus multiples qui les constituent. (…) Ces processus massifs doivent être eux-mêmes décomposés (…). L'allègement de la pesanteur causale consistera donc a bâtir, autour de l'événement singulier analysé comme processus, un polygone ou plutôt polyèdre d'intelligibilité dont le nombre de faces n'est pas défini à l'avance et ne peut jamais être considérer comme fini de plein droit."

"I try to work towards an eventalization. (…) What does that mean, eventalization? First of all, a rupture of the evident. Where one is tempted to speak of a historical constant or an immediate anthropological feature, or where everyone is compelled to see an apparent evidence, one has to make to make visible a singularity (…). Rupture of the evident (…) this is the first theoretical/political function of what I call eventalization. Furthermore, eventalization means to find the connections, the encounters, the supports [appuis], the blockages, the games of force, the strategies etc., which have, at a given moment, established that which functions today as the evident, the universal, the necessary. (…) To take things up in this manner means to work towards a causal demultiplication. What does that mean? (…) Demultiplication, that means to analyze an event by way of focusing on the multiple processes which are constitutive of it. (…) And these massive processes must themselves be decomposed (…) The effort to de-center the causal hence consists in building – by way of analyzing a singular event as a process – a polygonous or better: a polyedrous intelligibility the many possible faces of which cannot be defined in advance and can never be said o be fully exhausted [or known].

If I see correctly, these are the major places where he speaks about singularity (of course it appears elsewhere though most often in the way I explained here, cf. e.g. the preface to History of Sexuality II, where he speaks about "sexuality as a historically singular experience").

I leave these passages un-interpreted here, inviting you guys to post your ideas. The question is: What to do with this? What does Foucault actually mean by singularity? Can we usefully abstract from his writing for our own purposes, i.e., for the effort to describe our kind of inquiry?