Spivak+(BB)


 * One bleeds into the other at all times. **

**"I would guess Gayatri Spivak does not ride a fixie....?" - Guy**

Le dispositif de sexualité

Il faut sans doute être nominaliste: le pouvoir, ce n'est pas une institution, et ce n'est pas une structure, ce n'est pas une certaine puissance dont certains seraient dotés: c'est le nom qu'on prête à une situation stratégique complexe dans une société donnée. (Foucault, p.123 in the French text, p. 93 in the English translation cited by Spivak)

Spivak's translation:

"One needs to be a nominalist, no doubt: power, it is not an institution, and it is not a structure; it is not a certain strength [puissance] that some are endowed with; it is the name that one lends [prêter] to a complex strategical situation in a particular society." (p. 26)

In another translation:

"One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society."

__Dispositif__: for Foucault: “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions …” (1980:194). Further, among these heterogeneous elements, there “is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function” (1980:195). The specific discourses “can figure at one time as the programme of an institution, and at another it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary re-interpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new field of rationality” (1980:194-5). It “has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic function” (1980:195).

__Apparatus__: in Agamben's discussion of the apparatus, or the popular English translation of Foucault's dispositif, he summarized


 * 1) It is a heterogeneous set that includes virtually anything, linguistic and non linguistic under the sam e h e a d ing : discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical p r o pos itions, and so on. The apparatus it se l f is the n e t work that is established between these e lem e nts.
 * 2) The apparatus a lway s has a concrete strate gic function and is always located in a pow er relation.
 * 3) As such, it appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge. (Agamben, What is an apparatus?, pp. 2-3)

Agamben traces this term, both through Foucault's earlier works, but also in his intellectual history, via Hippolite's dealing of Hegel, particularly because in the early Foucault there is an undefined use of "positivité" (translated as "positivity") that is etymologically kin to dispositif. Perhaps more interesting, however, is the more common use of "dispositif" in contemporary France. As Agamben wrote:


 * 1) If we now try to e x a m in e the definition of " a p p ara tus" that can be found in common French dict i on a r ies, w e see that they distinguish between three mean ings of the t erm:
 * 2) A strictly juridical sense: "Apparatus is the part of a judgment that contains the decision separate from the opinion." That is, the section of a sentence that decides, or the enacting clause of a l aw.
 * 3) A technological meaning: "The way in which th e parts of a machine or of a m ech a n i sm and, by exten sion, th e mechanism itself are arranged."
 * 4) A military use: "The set of means arranged in conformit y w i t h a pl a n ."

__Dispositive__: in US law, ' dealing with the disposition of property by deed or will.'

__Se prêter à__: "to lend itself to". (also, "to put up with something")

__Lend itself to__: idiom, to be suited to a specific use

In Spivak's translation //one lends//. In the other //one attributes.// Qu'on prête à. An appropriate translation. But that is a move from a think that lends itself to something, a thing that is intrinsically suited for some use. Something is //made useful////. Something// is //named// by some namer, and thereby the name is given the attribute of being suited to a complex //strategical// situation in some society. That name is power.

So let's step back to the very paragraph in which this citation appears. Just before the sentence Spivak selects for us:

'... the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowledge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power. But the word power is apt to lead to a number of misunderstandings -- misunderstandings with respect to its nature, its form, and its unity. By power, I do not mean "Power" as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects, through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The analysis, made in terms of power, must not assume that the sovereignty of the state, the form of the law, or the over-all unity of a domination are given at the outset; rather, these are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies. Power's condition of possibility, or in any case the viewpoint which permits one to understand its exercise, even in its more "peripheral" effects, and which also makes it possible to use its mechanisms as a grid of intelligibility of the social order, must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement.' (Foucault, p. 92-93, from the translation different from Spivak's)

Let's be clear, here. Foucault //attributes//. He finds "a complex strategic situation" and names it //power//. He takes the name of //something else// and deprives //us// of its prior home (//place//). Not that this //home// is razed, much to the dismay of many Foucauldians who would say he does this in the act of naming. There are indeed groups of institutions and mechanisms to ensure subservience. There are indeed modes of subjugation that may be violent or not, take the form of rules or laws. There are systems of domination of groups by other another. But these performances are not exhaustive nor necessarily indicative of //power// as he uses the word. He is a nominalist: he is the the namer. The name is power. The thing named is a dispositif, and thus is an ensemble of heterogeneous elements that function strategically. When he says there are //misunderstandings//, is Foucault lapsing into Platonism?

Spivak writes, "The nominalism is a methodological necessity. 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 called catachrestic.'

Catachresis: term in Greek (literally "misuse") rhetoric, indicating the use of a word in a context other than its common //place//.

On the unavoidable problematic of paleonymy: "Poststructuralist nominalism cannot afford to ignore the empirical implications of a particular name."

Nominalism is expensive, indeed.

"...although there is a 'need' (Foucault's word) to be a nominalist, the nominalist still falls prey to the very problems that one seeks to avoid. This is marked by the 'power is not' statements in the Foucault passage I began with. But the nominalist falls prey to them only in a certain way. This is not to 'fail,' this is the new making-visible of a 'success' that does not conceal or bracket problems." (Spivak, p. 28)

So only expensive at certain market//places//?

The relationship between the narrow and the general is "never clear cut." "One bleeds into the other at all times."

The paleonymy we as readers should guard against by disallowing ourselves to usher: if we preserve the conventional use of power as an authority held which permits the compulsion of subservience through force and use this as a metaphor for how power functions where Foucault does identify it, we mistake the catachresis Foucault is performing. This is not metaphorical, allegorical, nor analogical. Not only is power found elsewhere, but power is something wholly different in is activities. (Agamben, for instance, permits such analogical use of power, and that's why I have tried to grapple with how Agamben could be used to address the destruction of acceptable knowledge claims as the practice of sovereign science. This is a departure from power/knowledge in Foucault; one I welcome, but certainly a departure.)

"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 (C3,959). I would not choose between the two." (Spivak, p. 33)

"...if the lines of making sense of something are laid down in a certain way, then you are able to do only those things with that something which are possible within and by the arrangement of those lines. Pouvoir-savoir -- being able to do something -- only as you are able to make sense of it. This everyday sense of that doublet seems to me indispensable to a crucial aspect of Foucault's work." (p. 34)

Repression as a species of production.

"the terminals of resistance as possibilities for reflexes of mind and activity" (Spivak p. 35)

Question/discussion for class:

As I hope I have made clear, [not precisely] there is in both writers a concern with the preontological ontic level of the everydayness of the being. It is at this level that Derrida brings differance into the self-proximity of the ontic everyday "identity" differed-deferred from itself by randomness and chance...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."

My translation: The ability to do something only so long as one is able to make sense of it is the bodily/sensate-(inter)experienced material of ethics, to the very extent that it is ....." what? What to make of "contradiction in subjecting"?

subjectivization or subjecting: "the procedure by which one obtains the constitution of a subject, or more precisely, of a subjectivity which is of course only one of the given possibilities of organization of a self-consciousness"

"the ability to do something only so long as one is able to make sense of it" is a contradiction in "the procedure by which one obtains the constitution of a subject"

So????

Also for discussion:

"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: 'the care of the flesh is ethically prior [ethiquement premier] in the measure that the relationship to the self is ontologically prior.' This is pouvoir-savoir at ground level, the working of thought upon itself ... as critical activity,' not at degree zero. This is 'the soil that can nourish,' this 'the general form of problemization.' (Spivak, p. 41)

I'm struggling with this because the first sentence quoted above is entirely unclear. I would like to reword it to improve its clarity, but it seems incoherent to me. Help? "In the late Foucault, he focused on experience as the self's relationship to the flesh. This is a practical ontology." ??? But Foucault wouldn't tolerate this self being separate from the flesh. The word "relationship" is transitive, so the sentence, to me, seems incoherent. What is the relationship to the self? The self's relationship to itself? I'm entirely confused by this sentence.

Thanks to Terence Blake for this clarification on Facebook:

" I think the sentence can be understood in terms of what Deleuze calls Foucault's three ontologies, which correspond to the three major phases of his work (diachronic pole) but also in his late work to three superposed levels of analysis (synchronic). The terms used by Deleuze are different, but we can see the first level, the archeological exploration of the archive as proposing a theoretical ontology, the second level of genealogical mapping of power as a relational ontology, and the third level of ethical self-sculpting as a practical ontology. This third stage is an ontology because it treats the "self" not as a given ontic existent but as composed of a fold of the outside.

So the two objects in "the relation to the self" are indistinguishably the self's relation to itself and the outside's relation to the self, i.e. to itself as folded into a self. "

What does it mean for something to be ethically prior as opposed to ontologically prior? In a practical ontology, how does this ordering function? Why can't (which?) moral philosophies do this? If this is pouvoir-savoir "at ground level", it would seem we need to be able to explain this. I'm not certain I can.

What is "ground level" and "degree zero"?

"If you are actually involved in changing state policy on the one hand, and earning the right to be heard and trusted by the subaltern on the other, on behalf of a change that is both medicine and poison, you cannot choose to choose the cut-off trail, declaring it as a hope when for some it has been turned into despair. And, if, like Derrida and Foucault, you are a scrupulous academic who is largely an academic, you stage the crisis relationship between theory and practice in the practice of your theoretical production in various ways instead of legitimizing the polarization between the academy and the real world by disavowing it, and then producing elegant solutions that will never be seriously tested either in large-scale decision-making or among the disenfranchised." (Spivak, p. 51)