Forum entries from the Seminar: Critical Philosophy of Subjectivity 1: Michel Foucault

On Butler: Constituting norms =/= carrying normative responsibilities for their existence

Note

Source Text: Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203499627 Publication

Citation from Butler, Page 51, citing Ewald, which is, in turn, interpreting Foucault:

The norm integrates anything which might attempt to go beyond it—nothing, nobody, whatever difference it might display, can ever claim to be exterior, or claim to possess an otherness which would actually make it other” (Norms, Discipline, and the Law, P.173)

Such a view suggests that any opposition to the norm is already contained within the norm, and is crucial to its functioning.

Here, for me, the entire futility of the approach later identified and described is condensed into a few sentences.

Hence, regulations that seek merely to curb certain specified activities (sexual harassment, welfare fraud, sexual speech) perform another activity that, for the most part, remains unmarked: the production of the parameters of personhood, that is, making persons according to abstract norms that at once condition and exceed the lives they make—and break. Page 56, final sentence

The idea that it is impossible to legislatively regulate norms without propelling, propagating, and carving them out deeper resonates with me, but at the same time, it has left me undecided on how to proceed. I understand the first citation to clearly be Ewald's interpretation of things and am not sure whether Foucault's careful circumvention of the term "Norms" is related to anticipation of this argument.

Further, I am not sure I share Ewald's interpretation; I see that the object "othered" by a norm is a constituent and necessary object for the norm, simply due to its "comparative" nature (p. 51, citation from Ewald). The oppressed may well be as constituting of norms as the privileged, but this does not translate to a normative responsibility nor a pang of guilt in my opinion. The dangerous argument that the oppressed bear responsibility for their situation is too close for my taste. I would like to emphasize a clear cut between constituting and reinforcing a norm and thriving on it. Yes, maybe that is a good location to make the cut: The normative and ethical pressure, or better, the guilt of complicity lies with the ones thriving BECAUSE of a norm and clearly not with those thriving DESPITE OF a norm. I would think that Butler makes a similar argument elsewhere, but as such, I was missing it here, resulting in a very bleak and hopeless situation where any struggle to change the status quo through legislation is doomed and inevitably propagates and reinvents stable unfair relations of power.

Note

created by Aron Petau on Sunday 23. January 2022, 14:23

On Ewald: What, then, is a norm?

Note

Source Text: François Ewald; Norms, Discipline, and the Law. Representations 1 April 1990; 30 138–161. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2928449 Publication

Some tiny details about norms that stuck out to me about the norm were that: 1: they are fictional and thus, an object conforming to a norm is not more meaningful than an object not conforming to a norm. 2: the entire given set comprises the norm, the deviations play a defining role in the formation of the norm itself (or an average). p. 152: Under norm, 3 phenomena are subsumed: Discipline, less as a constraint, but more as a regulatory mechanism insurance, Reducing objects to their relative occurrence, distributing risk. and standardization. The norm has three defining features:

What, then, is a norm?

It is a way for a group to provide itself with a common denominator in accordance with a rigorous principle of self-referentiality, with no recourse to any kind of external reference point, either in the form of an idea or an object. The normative process can obey a variety of different logics: the panoptical logic of discipline, the probabilistic schema of insurance, or the communicative logic of the technical norm. These three logics have the same form: in each case, the rule which serves as a norm, by virtue of which everyone can measure, evaluate, and identify himself or herself, will be derived from those for whom it will serve as a standard. A strange logic, this, which forces the group to turn back in upon itself and which, from the moment it establishes itself, will let no one escape its purview. p. 154

Note

created by Aron Petau on Sunday 16. January 2022, 18:48

On Foucault: The effects without effector

Note

Source Text: Michael Foucault. Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. Pantheon, New York, 1980. Publication

one finds all sorts of support mechanisms [...] which invent, modify and re-adjust, according to the circumstances of the moment and the place- so that you get a coherent, rational strategy, but one for which it is no longer possible to identify a person who conceived it. p. 203

In this passage, and the one following it, I think Foucault pinpoints as one of the central attributes of the apparatus (or dispositif) the arbitrariness of the order of power relations. There is no identity having to undergo some sort of inventive process to start off a collective change, a "strategy" just happens to meet the criteria for deployment.

But between the strategy which fixes, reproduces, multiplies and accentuates existing relations of forces, and the class which thereby finds itself in a ruling position, there is a reciprocal relation of production. Thus one can say that the strategy of moralising the working class is that of the bourgeoisie. One can even say that it's the strategy which allows the bourgeois class to be the bourgeois class and to exercise its domination. But what I don't think one can say is that it's the bourgeois class on the level of its ideology or its economic project which, as a sort of at once real and fictive subject, invented and forcibly imposed this strategy on the working class.

This was for me the most powerful grasp of what an apparatus is. A complicated removal of the effector from the effect. I struggle to continue to find any substance to the relations of the classes. Does reciprocal mean anything more than both are constitutive of each other? One produces the means of reproduction of the other, but where exactly can I apply moral judgements? This whole ordeal and now I lack subjects to blame. How can this theory possibly bring about change in society? Is that even its goal? Do we undergo this analysis in order to make society better in the end?

Note

created by Aron Petau on Sunday 12. December 2021, 22:01