Comments for Biopower and the Contemporary

Comment on Latour and Foucault by Chathan Vemuri

Chathan Vemuri — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:22:53 +0000

Michel Foucault was without a doubt one of the greatest political philosophers of the 20th century, along the ranks of Arendt and perhaps Jurgen Habermas (though I like him better than both).

That passage you just posted was a direct slap in the face to hacks like Chomsky who are all about critiquing the government and its illegitimate use of power on a constant basis. I wish Foucault had that debate with Chomsky around this time he gave the “Birth of Biopolitics” lectures. I wonder what old Noam would have to say to that.
Regardless, Foucault won that debate.

Comment on Latour and Foucault by Chathan Vemuri

Chathan Vemuri — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 02:18:39 +0000

So does this mean we have to reject Society Must Be Defended?
Or is there a way to defend both or must we just choose between identifying with one or the other?

Btw, you really seem to be an ardent fan of The Birth of Biopolitics. I just purchased it and it didn’t actually seem partial or tentative, though perhaps I could say it was a little incomplete, not in the deficiency sens but rather in the sense that Heidegger left his work incomplete focusing on questions he thought were more important towards the end.
In fact, I found The Birth of Biopolitics to be as good if not better than Security, Territory, Population.

What’s your take on all this?

And if anyone wants to understand Foucault’s concept of biopower or governmentality well, a good introduction would be his short pamphlet or introduction to his originally planned tome on sexuality, The History of Sexuality Volume 1. For me, it summed up biopower and queer theory and remains probably my favorite Foucault book, along with Discipline and Punish and The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Comment on Foucault’s Concept of Singularity by Chathan Vemuri

Chathan Vemuri — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:43:39 +0000

To those concerned with a lack of “fieldwork” in exchange for “theory” in an “anthropology of the contemporary”, why not both?
Foucault advocated this approach all his life. It was an essential part of his ethic. He used field and political research as well as his activism and mixed it with his own philosophical insights. Thus why I find his work empowering.

No doubt he would approve of my suggestion I would think.

Inquiry has an essential place in anthropology and need not be seen as opposed to “fieldwork”.

I’m an Anthropology minor and this is my feeling, but I could be wrong.

Comment on Your Sunday Morning Foucault by Chathan Vemuri

Chathan Vemuri — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:37:25 +0000

Hi
I love the quote from the “Birth of Biopolitics”
I just came into possession of it a couple days ago. It looks really good.

Does anyone else here recommend it?

Also, does anyone else know when “The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the College de France 1984″ will be released? I’m really REALLY wanting to read that, considering my interest in Foucault’s ideas on Parrhesia and the practices of truth-telling.

Comment on Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur by Christopher Kelty

Christopher Kelty — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 21:29:09 +0000

thanks adam… not sure I plan to try engaging with philosophers again anytime soon given the hate, but thanks for offering to read this. I’d love to hear more about responsible forestry at some point… i think it will probably overlap with the kinds of thinking going on amongst environmental engineers in nanotechnology in interesting ways.

Comment on Foucault’s Concept of Singularity by Paul Rabinow

Paul Rabinow — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:31:32 +0000

Friends,
I find this discussion to have strayed off into well-trodden fields.
Fieldwork is a method that contributes or blocks inquiry. There is nothing special or magical about it. No one in this group is doing ethnography. Do we have to rehearse this all again, even here?
The concept of “singularity” is a part of the tool kit of the History of the Present and certain types strands of genealogy.
Carlo’s suggestion that we retain Bourdieu points, I believe in the direction that the over-emphasis on uniqueness or simple empirical claims is unearned or dangerous. That being said, Bourdieu’s hyper-controlled constructivism is very limiting. And is itself geared to revealing symbolic domination and related topics. It is not viable for a range of other issues. I assume Carlo agrees?
The hope of concept work is that we will rigorously explore the concepts and something like their range of applicability. In their relation to diverse forms of inquiry (and there are diverse forms). And to the forms of conclusions and insights from the inquiry.
I agree with Chris K that someone like DeLanda who does at times brilliant conceptual clarification but almost no inquiry can result in the most amazing trajectory or re-inscribing “society” in an almost Durkheimian manner. Let’s get out of the academy from time to time, my friends.

Comment on Foucault’s Concept of Singularity by Colin Koopman

Colin Koopman — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:51:17 +0000

That makes much sense to me. It also confirms my hunch that Dewey really is relevant to what is going on here. (While for me this is still a hunch I am happily aware that for others (e.g., PR) it is more than a hunch and is positively known.) My hunch inclines me to suggest: what you have just described is better positioned under the banner of ‘pragmatism’ than ‘positivism’: for what you have just described is in many ways a ‘reconstruction’ in Dewey’s sense. There’s lots of philosophical nitpicking in differentiating pragmatism from positivism: but it’s nitpicking that has real effects further on down the stream of inquiry.

This is perhaps better taken up a little later on in our (already-proposed) next thread about the relationship between problematization and reconstruction in the study of the emergent. It may also be useful (it will certainly be useful for me) to try to keep this in mind: when we inquire into emerging singularities are there a handful of certain general methodological focal points which will apply across nearly every interesting case (e.g., are problematizations and reconstructions (etc.) useful focal points in every single case?) or is there a near infinity of focal points? That we are inquiring into emergence already limits the list of possible focal points in some ways (so it can’t be infinite [i.e., different in every field site]), but it is certainly still an open question whether emergent forms have to be studied by way of focus on problems and reconstructions.

Comment on Foucault’s Concept of Singularity by trees

trees — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 06:07:31 +0000

What’s the difference between a “positivist” and a “happy positivist?” I don’t want to make general claims because I cannot possibly know in advance what I will find in the course of my inquiry. To push that a bit: I for sure go into a field with a sense of what it is I would like to study, etc. Doubtless, this is to say, I have a sense of what the problem is (and this sense is inflected by readings, idiosyncrasies, etc. and impacts my attention etc.). But: If I spend two years in Paris – or Buenos Aires or some cold places in Siberia or… – then my fieldwork may generate things I did not – could not – know before. Possibly the object of study will gain new contours or become an altogether different one. Perhaps my field site – let’s say the lab in which I did fieldwork in Paris – “resists” certain predetermined questions of mine and generates, as if by itself, new ones, questions I did not even think of before (notice that I say “as if”). Gradually, my fieldwork produces a theme. It is this process of emergence, of the emergence of a theme in the course of fieldwork (often this amounts to a surprise), which I would like to preserve (or capture). This is what characterizes (among other things) a field science. Finally, I believe that the way I analyze this emergent theme – this effect of my fieldwork – depends on the kind of theme that emerges. Why should I determine in advance if I work on problematizations or on something else? (Is A Machine to Make a Future concerned with a singularity? A problematization? An event?) Many things are possible. My aim here is only to capture the idea of a field science. And I think we already have come a long way down the road here (at lest I did, thanks to interventions like yours!). Does this make sense?

Comment on Foucault’s Concept of Singularity by Colin Koopman

Colin Koopman — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 02:43:58 +0000

Foucault: “of which it [the singularity] would appear, not as the product, but as the effect.” Does anyone have the French for this handy? “Effect” in English is a notoriously multivalent word and I think we are getting lost in its equivocations. I wasn’t reading “effect” as “appearance” but I concede that this is a possible reading. I was reading “effect” as “causal power” (or that which causes) since Foucault in the passage a) explicitly contrasts it to “product” (or that which gets caused) and b) is in the context of this passage discussing historiogprahical causation and clearly searching for an alternative to the old ‘underlying base’ sort of historical explanation. If my interpretation is correct, then the idea is that the singularity provides an anchor in which the multiplicity of elements cohere or gel in such a way as to function together alongside of one another. Singularities collect/order/align multiplicities. However, I’m not particularly committed to my interpretation being correct and so the French may help us. Regardless of what Foucault said, however, we now have two different interesting conceptions of singularity. It may be useful to weigh their relative pros and cons?

Something else keeps coming up. Maybe this isn’t worth discussion. If no, then just ignore. But I have a lingering concern though about the continued invocations of positivism (because for me it represents a certain methodological disposition to which I am personally quite hostile [with reasons of course]). Tobias, you seemed to want to invoke these when you said that we shouldn’t make general claims in advance of fieldwork about what we study when we go into “the field” be our objects of inquiry singularities or problematizations. The anti-positivist skeptic in me wants to ask you: Why are you unwilling to make general claims about fieldwork as employing, say, ‘the problematic method’ of Foucault and Dewey but yet are perfectly willing to make a general claim that you are “going into the field”? Isn’t “the field” a general concept laden with all sorts of heavy theory? What am I missing here? Surely you don’t want a positivism which says “I can go to the field as a perfectly neutral observer without a theory of what it means to go into the field”? The anti-positivist in me wants to issue the familiar refrain that inquiring anywhere always invokes quite a number of general theoretical assumptions, and we ought to wear these theories on our sleeves, not so that we can feign neutrality when the critics come, but so that we can be up front with ourselves about what it is (we think) we are doing. Perhaps I am misinterpreting you? So I want to ask for clarification, if anyone thinks it would be worthwhile, that is.

This, perhaps (?), brings us all the way back to the topic of the previous thread where I think there was a concern about how fieldwork might be pre-theoretical, though I’m not remembering the exact terms of that discussion presently.

Comment on Foucault’s Concept of Singularity by trees

trees — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 19:34:54 +0000

And here is my second comment: I think we’re confusing two different uses of the term singularity. This confusion is anything but helpful. Usage I: Sexuality is nothing universal, rather it is a singular appearance, an effect of multiple elements combined in a certain way (Foucault says so, e.g., in his preface to the second volume of HS). Usage II (closer to the anthropologist qua fieldworker): Each site is singular, has unique circumstances, dynamics, etc.

My initial claim was that the task of the anthropologist is to pay attention to the singularity of her site. Why? Because I assumed – and continue to do so – that if I seek to learn something I did not know before then this can only be done by paying attention to the concrete, “singular site” (notice: I use the term here in an everyday sense)

Apparently I am very far here from making a claim about the object of inquiry/fieldwork. I do not at all claim that the object of study is not the site or its singularity. But paying attention to it is a decisive step, something constitutive of fieldwork.

WHAT we (as fieldworkers) study is another question – and none one has to make general claims about. Why should we? If we study singularities (be it a universal singularities or whatever) or if we study “problematizations” (as Carlo and Colin seem to argue) is nothing I want to determine before I go into the field. Who knows what plops up while I am there? In other words: I think that this decision should largely be directed by fieldwork, by the process of inquiry. It should be a result, the product of work.

Hence I fully agree with Chris’ comment (even if he probably meant to say something else with it): “The commitment to realism, however, seems to be at the heart of the issue.” Appropriating Foucault to my own ends I might say: I am a happy positivist.

And as a final remark: If we would claim that each site possesses its own concept, then we would be almost close to the assumption of an episteme or an essentializing culture concept. But since we – I – do not claim that the actual object of study is a particular “site” we probably do not have to worry.