The+Eighth+Week

Spivak

Critical philosophy of action: “a philosophy that is aware of the limits of knowing.” Dogmatic philosophy of action: “a philosophy that advances coherent general principles without sufficient interest in empirical details.”

The misadventures of international communism might teach us something about the violent consequences of imposing the most fragile part of Marx, the predictive Eurocentric scenario, upon large parts of the globe not historically centered in Europe.

It is to ignore the role of capitalism in these scripts to read them simply as various triumphs of liberal democracy.

One needs a name for this thing whose “mechanism [can be used] as a grid of intelligibility of the social order.” It is called “power” because that is the closest one can get to it. This sort of proximate naming can be catachrestic.

Yet even in this sympathetic account a general, naturalized referent for the word “power” is tacitly presupposed, and, indeed, attributed to Foucault.

It is as if, although Foucault’s interests are not realist, he has an ontological commitment to a thing named “power.”

Poststructuralist nominalism cannot afford to ignore the empirical implications of a particular name.

Writing, trace, difference, woman, origin, parergon, gift – and now, in Derrida’s latest phase – such more resonant words such as justice, democracy, friendship are cracked and barred in their operation by this two-sense divide.

The relationship is certainly not that between potential and actual.

Practice //norms// theory.

“Power” in the general sense is therefore not only a name, but a catachresis.

Whatever the generalizing presuppositions necessary for a systematic statement or knowledge of ethics, these are the conditions within which ethics are //performed//, by subjects constituted in different ways.

“The condition of possibility of power, at least of the point of view that allows its exercise to be made intelligible…is the //moving base// of force relations that, by their inequality, incessantly //induce// states of power” – Foucault

“Force” is the subindividual name of “power,” not the place where the “idea” of power becomes “hollow” or “ambiguous.”

Resistance can indeed be powerfully and persuasively coded in the form of the manifestation of freedom.

By privileging that particular coding, we are isolating a crucial narrow sense and cutting off the tremendous, unmotivated monitory force of the general.

“A relationship of confrontation reaches its term, its final moment…when stable mechanisms replace the free play of antagonistic reactions” – Foucault

//Reading// (rather than merely quoting).

The electrical metaphor [of Foucault].
 * Power and resistance. I didn’t really notice such an extensive electrical metaphor before.

The force field cannot be naturalized and constituted as an object of investigation. One must start from the “local foci” of power/knowledge.

To quote Marx where on shouldn’t, Foucault always remains within the realm of necessity (even in the clinamen to his last phase) whereas Derrida makes for the realm of freedom, only to fall on his face. I would not choose between the two.

Derrida’s initial critique had been in terms of Foucault’s ignoring of the violence that founds philosophy.

What Foucault is thought to overlook is madness as radical alterity, which must be “extinguished” after the necessary invocation of an undivided origin where madness and the cogito are indistinguishable.

//Pouvoir-savoir// – being able to do something – only as you are able to make sense of it.
 * After the first part of the paper, Spivak uses this instead of power/knowledge exclusively. Notably, pouvoir refers to authoritative power, while puissance is power like strength, or more of a coercive power. Savoir is a word for knowledge associated with science or learned knowledge. Connaissance is knowledge like familiarity or knowing of something, or being cognoscente of it. A lesser used phrase is savoir-faire which is like know-how. Further, it is interesting that know-how (tacit knowledge) is based off of learned or scientific knowledge.

Power as productive rather than merely repressive resolves itself in a certain way if you don’t forget the ordinary sense of //pouvoir/savoir//. Repression is then seen as a species of production. There is no need to valorize repression as negative and production as positive.

If this seems a little opaque, let me invite you to think of the terminals of resistance as possibilities for reflexes of mind and activity, as an athlete has reflexes of the body to call upon.

The differential substance of //savoir// is discourse, with is irreducible connections to language.

Writing its archaeology would entail a first step: writing //pouvoir// in terms of //savoir//. Foucault himself sometimes put this entailment somewhat more polemically, especially in his later interviews – as a turning away from mere language.

Lines of knowing constituting ways of doing and not doing, the lines themselves irregular clinamens from subindividual atomic systems – fields of force, archives of utterance.

This is how theory brings practice to crisis, and practice norms theory, and deviations constitute a forever precarious norms; everything opened and menaced by the risk of paleonymy.

Here is Foucault, writing on “mental illness” in 1954: “Illness is the //psychological truth// of health, to the very extent that it is its //human contradiction//.” Now consider this “//Pouvoir-savoir// is the onto-phenomenological truth of ethics, to the very extent that it is its contradiction in subjecting.”

Focused on the spectacular account of the definition and exclusion of madness rather than its definitive, intimate, inaccessible, ontic place.

Both Derrida and Foucault are interested in the production of “truth.” Deconstruction is not exposure of error. Deconstruction is “justice,” says Derrida. And Foucault: “My objective…has been to create a history of the different modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.”

The next step, since the unquestioned transparent ethical subject – the white male heterosexual Christian man of property – has now been questioned into specificity and visibility, is to measure the pluralit of ethics by researching the ways in which the subject “subjects” itself through “ability to know” (//pouvoir-savoir//).

His ethical concerns tend more towards a responsibility to the trace of the other than a consideration of the care of the self.

Derrida watches out for the one who justifies practice by theory or theory by practice, compromised by both.

Foucault’s final focusing on the relationship to the self in the experience of the flesh is a practical ontology. Transformed into reflex, such a practical ontology comes to contaminate the ontic but, kept as code, it straddles the ontico-ontological difference in a way that full-dress moral philosophies will, indeed can, never do.

In embracing this concequence, Foucalt does indeed move away from the //mode// of the critique of humanism that Derrida inhabits, even as, in renouncing mere chronological inquiry and only the particular forms of the technologies of power and strategies fo knowledge, he comes closer to the younger philosopher.

It is as if, assembled at a race where the point is to stay on a bicycle at as slow a speed as possible – see how close you can get to //pouvoir-savoir// degree zero in order to think ethics in its “real” problems – these colleagues would murmur, you can use these machines to get places fast too, you know!

In order to answer the question “do his writings, beneath all the fireworks and attendant billows of smoke, in fact express a position of sufficient clarity, plausibility, and interest to merit sustained attention?” every challenging thought must be made blunt by Gutting so that influences can be charted, continuities established, exam questions answered.
 * Reminds me a little bit of Lacan’s argument that learning must be a struggle.

The critical exit is //in// liberal individualism, if that is our dominant historical moment, even as //we// are in it, by reading and writing this book.

It is hard to acknowledge that liberal individualism is a violating enablement. It is in postcoloniality and the hope for development that this acknowledgment is daily extracted; although postcoloniality – a wrenching coupling of epistemes – should not be taken as its only example.

It is customary to stage epistemes as national inclinations: France and the Anglo-U.S. Epistemes are of course not nationally determined. Or, to put it another way, they are as historically determined (or determining of history) as is “national character.”

On the other side, I have read a proposal where an effort is being made to put her within the pantheon of great Bengali woman writers in the bourgeois tradition, merely as a “complementary voice.” Once again, that conflation of episteme with nation! At this moment, to slash her with an “ism,” even //feminism//, puts her singularity at risk.

It goes without saying that the real difference between Mahasweta and the two French philosophers I by way of the place of woman in her texts. In terms of the narrow sense/general sense or theory/practice argument, however, a related difference is also significant. Unlike Foucault and Derrida, Mahasweta was only incidentally an academic.

It is Mahasweta’s subject-position as the “citizen” of a recently decolonized “nation” that puts her in a different relationship of the inheritance of 1789 from Foucault and Derrida.

The subject-position of the citizen of a recently decolonized “nation” is epistemically fractured. The so-called private individual and the public citizen in a decolonized nation can inhabit widely different epistemes, violently at odds with each other yet yoked together by way of the many everyday ruses of //pouvoir-savoir//.

The political claims that are most urgent in decolonized space are tacitly recognized as coded within the legacy of imperialism: nationhood, constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, socialism, even culturalism. In the historical frame of exploration, colonization, decolonization – what is being //effectively// reclaimed is a series of regulative political concepts, the supposedly authoritative narrative of the production of which was written elsewhere, in the social formations of Western Europe.

At the bottom/end of this entry, I am going to put some of my thoughts that were inspired by last weeks discussion. It is related to my own research and inspired by our reading of Mbemebe. It is at the end because it is mostly stream of consciousness and absolutely embarrassing to make public, so maybe if it is at the end then people won’t read it.

The colonization of low Earth orbit (LEO) is part of the scientific effort to discover the “truth” of God’s creation, which simultaneously supplants authoritative religion, replacing religion’s authority with the authority of science. This is an extension of the scientific exploitation and extraction of colonialism. This mechanism was abducted by neoliberalism with the privatization of satellites. Globalization, though not caused by this privatization, would have been impossible in its current form without it. It created a global communication and monitoring system that enables real time global markets, cable news, cell phones, the internet (importantly termed the world-wide-web), etc. Ironically, the scientific turn to undermine and abduct religious authority for rationality was, in turn, abducted for the power (or perhaps worship?) of capital. The material artifacts of neoliberal capitalism (the church of capitalism?) literally surrounds the entire planet. It literally resides in the heavens and is just as omnipotent and omnipresent as God in a very material sense. Another way to say this is that we, in the west, have literally penetrated the heavens. God is dead and we’ve raped the corpse. The pregnancy went to full term and the child is neoliberalism.