Limits of Critique, Chapter 4

 

Summary of Chapter 4: Crrritique

I came to this chapter with great expectations that Felski would finally address the political side of critique, particularly the non-academic “vernacular” critique, which had been given short shrift throughout the book. She does address these to some extent, with many great asides and insights. However, the overall framing of the book – the emphasis on “critique” as a deeply suspicious and arrogant activity, and the definition of “critique” into a corner of what it is more typically taken to mean – is simply getting tiresome. In this chapter, as in others, Felski addresses a range of important and interesting issues relative to the practice and imaginary of “critique,” in particular authors who emphasize the ambiguous or complex character or situation of critique as a practice; but having adopted her framing of critique as a limiting practice that has to be gotten beyond, she is then forced to dampen down all these other perspectives, flattening them into the opposition between “critique” and “post-critique,” and just watching this happen again and again becomes a bit dull and disappointing. Felski, Sedgwick, Latour, and others have argued that critique has lost its revolutionary “steam” and become predictable and obligatory in recent decades; it seems “post-critique” achieves the same effect in record time. [“First as tragedy, then as farce?”]. Opportunities to get beyond the traditional idea of critique are repeatedly dismissed, in the interest of keeping “critique” in a box, in which it can be assailed in the name of an as-yet-nebulously defined “post-critique.”

Felski begins the chapter by imagining her readers growing impatient or having even thrown down the book in exasperation; Professor Challenger’s puzzled, dwindling audience comes to mind, but unlike Challenger, Felski is not going through some process of dissolution: she is holding firm to her argument and its rhetorical framing, come what may. She reiterates the point that much of the effect and prestige of critique is achieved through rhetorical stances and ploys, “invoked rather than examined” (117), but then, without any apparent sense of irony, uses her own rhetorical framing to fight and “puncture” the rhetoric of critique. She raises what is one of the most important points in her book, what might be called the paradox of academic critique: critique is framed as inherently oppositional if not revolutionary, but in some parts of academia it has become the establishment. Unfortunately the “postcritique” stance seems to evade this paradox rather than resolve or transcend it: the answer seems to be to give up on the idea of being oppositional or revolutionary as academics. [The fact that “critique” is a much more marginalized practice in the most influential and well-funded parts of academia is ignored.]

Felski iterates the important [critique] of critique, also made by Latour, as idealist/utopian, relying on some ideal society that remains “elsewhere” in time and space; this emphasis on an ideal means that practitioners of critique can always be suspicious of, or even dismissive of, any partial or moderate coming-to-terms within the present system – advances such as the legalization of gay marriage are shown to be partial and ultimately superficial gains which maintain the current system rather than allowing for true progress. This also leads to the paradox that critique, as a dominant academic practice, cannot be conscious of or accept its own dominance as part of the system that it is inherently suspicious of.

Nietzsche’s maxim comes to mind: “All ideals are dangerous: because they debase and brand the actual; all are poisons, but indispensable as temporary cures” (Will to Power, #223). By invoking the ambiguity of the pharmakon Nietzsche has actually out-Latoured Latour on this point – ideals such as the “elsewhere” supporting critique are not inherently or always poisons, they may be cures depending on how and where they are deployed [within what assemblage, how, etc.]. With critique-as-pharmakon we are back to the “how much?” question that seems to be much more fundamental (and continuously re-raised by successive generations of critics) – like all those before, the “post-critique” critics are playing this game with their own re-articulation, but have not developed a critique that captures this aspect of the game they are playing. Citing Vattimo, she notes the ties of critique to “a progressive philosophy of history” (119), and indeed the values and rhetoric she is identifying as at the heart of “critique” seems largely to be traits shared by modernity itself (including “post-modern” variants). With such a large, backgrounded formation as the ultimate source of what you are criticizing, the point of singling out “critique” to target by itself becomes unclear – perhaps a sort of argument-by-synecdoche [could “critique” be seen as that one vent which, if destroyed, takes out the entire Death Star of the modern?] or could “critique” simply be a scapegoat, taking on all the sins of the academic complex, so we can get on with business as usual?

Felski notes, but does not pursue very far, the “mystique of critique” (120), along with the question of just why the nicely exotic word “critique” was incorporated wholesale into the English language when “criticism” had already been around for some time [William’s Keywords entry on “Criticism” unfortunately fails to mention “critique” at all]. It seems that a good way to puncture this mystique would be to tear down the distinctions between “critique” and “criticism;” however, Felski’s response is the opposite: she seeks to strengthen and reinforce the distinction, in order to trap “critique” in a small corner of the (previously) overlapping semantic space. Setting up the rest of the chapter, she proposes to discuss five qualities of “the current rhetoric of critique” (121): it is secondary, negative, intellectual, “from below,” and “does not tolerate rivals.”

By “secondary” she means that critique never stands on its own: “a critique is always a critique of something” (121). Her argument here involves demarcating a clear boundary between “critique” and the broader, less suspicious practices of “criticism” which critique targets [though ironically, criticism in any use of the word is also a secondary discourse]. One of the better parts of this insight involves critique becoming a moving target a la the avant garde: each generation of critics critiques the previous generation, using critique better and more rigorously and showing all the hidden assumptions and layers of meaning which the earlier critics missed. She notes the spatiotemporal framing: critique looks backward at a past which it understands better than those in the past ever could have; not unlike the native subjects of early anthropology, the critics of the past are trapped, “contained within a historical moment” (123); the current wave of practitioners of critique, in contrast, stand outside of time, and are thus able to see more clearly [but cf the later discussion of “transcendent” vs. “imminent” critique]. My passing objections here are that critique is not only backward-looking but Janus-faced (toward that future “elsewhere” which she had previously criticized, but here forgets about), and that the critical stance of critique toward established truths, tastes, etc. is not simply about some will to denial or negativity, but about a contest between differing values and standards of valuation.

The “secondary” aspect of critique means that critique is always “ventriloquating” past texts and past critics, taking their words into its own mouth and delivering out of them new, previously hidden or unsuspected meanings. This important, Bakhtinian insight, unfortunately, seems to Felski to be a failing of critique rather than a key to its importance: “Critique, in short, cannot entirely protect itself from the possibility of being undone by its own object” (125). To insist that this is a fatal blow, Felski has to dismiss the arguments made by many thinkers who would see this as a central aspect of what critique is all about in the first place.

She raises and then somewhat weakly dismisses Adorno’s distinction between “transcendent” and “imminent” critique [though her brevity here can be perhaps excused, seeing as a similar distinction, and Felski’s collapsing of said distinction into one, was the subject of Chapter 2]. She notes that critique “opens up a gap” between itself and its object, in a way that is not merely suspicious or denigrating, but productive, allowing for “thinking otherwise;” but then follows this with what feels like an intentionally reductionist misreading of Foucault’s “injunction that we should challenge what exists rather than provide alternatives” (126). Felski argues that critique following this immanentist programme, somehow [stunted or perverted] due to its lack of a clear goal or outcome, finds its “impulse toward transcendence” manifested in other ways, primarily in the ethical/moral stance of the critic as outsider, rebel, etc.: “an attitude of restless skepticism, irony, or estrangement – rather than a systematically grounded framework” (127). What Felski seems to have intentionally missed is that Foucault’s injunction was a practical and political one, intended to use that very opening-up and open-ended power of critique as part of its praxis to create change.

Turning to her second aspect, Felski argues that critique is inherently negative, even if it sometimes has a “affirmative residue” (127). She notes Marx’s definition of critique as an “inversion of an inversion,” an act of setting aright that which mainstream ideology has obscured [of course, from Marx’s perspective, this would make critique a positive/corrective response to a negative situation]. Her primary target once again, however, is the rhetorical and affective stance of the critic, as having a privileged perspective “as if the negativity of critique were somehow beyond rhetoric or misinterpretation or prejudice or narrative, a nose-to-nose encounter with the gritty textures of truth” (129). Nevertheless, it is Felski herself who insists most strongly on seeing critique in this way. She notes the critique of such negativity offered by “post-modernists,” “Foucauldians” and so on, who prefer a language of “troubling” or “problematizing” to outright condemnation; but quickly dismisses these, flattening all variants into a “common ethos” of “sharply honed suspicion” (131). Here is one of the points where Felski’s argument simply becomes boring and predictable. The best arguments of post-critique, imho, are the opening up kind, not trying to shut down critique but arguing for a diverse range of approaches, in which suspicion is but one of several hermeneutics. But here, Felski is faced with a diversity, an opening up of multiple approaches, and her response is to shut them down, by arguing that they are all, in essence, the same. It’s like the promise of “post-critique” is hampered by its need to fight off and put down “critique.”

The third aspect is “critique is intellectual,” which is mostly about the use of language. Should practitioners of “critique” use common-sense, broadly understandable language, or obscure, difficult terminology? Arguments on both sides are marshalled: Minh-Ha weighs in on the perils of clarity, and Butler on the value of difficulty; Bové and Dutton, on the other side, weight in against “intellectual kitsch.” However, as Felski points out, “the quality of being either pedestrian or perplexing is embedded not in the words themselves but in how readers perceive and respond to these words” (137); in other words, what matters is the audience and the pragmatic aspect of communicating with them; “difficulty” and “clarity” are mere surface effects here, relative to context. Instead of fully embracing the implications of this insight, however (which imho lead to an opening-up critique of critique), she shifts gears and starts emphasizing the semantic distinction between “critique” and “criticism” in which (per her usage) “critique” is something academics and intellectuals engage in, and “criticism” is a more general activity of evaluation and discussion which anyone can engage in. She cites Latour’s complaint about overbearing academics who assume they have special insight which everyday people lack; Latour of course uses straw men for this but we can quite fairly insert Bourdieu’s concept of “misrecognition” through which everyone except Bourdieuian sociologists are persistently duped. Responding to this phenomenon she brings in the very promising argument by Boltanski and Thévenot about the “ordinariness of critique” out in the everyday world. But of course – to maintain the overall polemic framing – Felski cannot accept this as an insight or as a precursor to her own argument, but instead folds this kind of thinking about “critique” back into the elitist form. She insists that it is wrong for academics to refer to any such extra-intellectual criticism as “critique” because “‘critique’ is not a term of everyday language” (139) to which the first two responses that spring to mind are 1) sorry about that, Gramsci and 2) but “criticism” is? I feel this need to shut down the use of the word “critique” [uncritically, I would add: not as in “not negatively” (because negativity is not the productive core of critique anyway) but “without sufficient self-evaluation or questioning”] misses an opportunity to undermine the assumptions and privilege of academic critique [but then again, it is only critique that is being targetted here; academia and its privileges are not, and criticisms thereof are only invoked strategically]. For a more promising, open-ended critique of academic critique, we have only to look back at Sedgwick’s embrace of the term “theory” in a similar vein to Boltanski and Thévenot’s “ordinary critique.”

Of course, Felski – to maintain consistency – needs to deny the primacy or even the existence of critique as an extra-academic phenomenon for the sake of her next argument, which will be against the claim that critique is “from below.” Here, she finally references Foucault’s “What is Critique,” but only for the idea of critique as “the desire not to be governed” (140), which allows her to conflate this sort of “second-order” critique (per her use of this term in earlier chapters) represented by Foucault, Butler, etc., with critique that opposes itself to ideology, a la Horkheimer, Debord, etc. (141). She mocks critique’s self-image as “a blow against authority rather than the exercise of authority” that fancies itself as “allied, in some way, with the interests of traditionally subordinate groups” (140) on the premise that “those at odds with the status quo see better and farther than others” (141). “Critique is authorized by being rooted in the experiences of those who have been traditionally deprived of authority: the traditions of vernacular suspicion” (142).

The ability of academia to justly claim such a heritage or alliance is of course wide open to challenging; however, Felski perhaps considers this too easy and well-trodden a path (she would see it as a “critique of critique” in any case). For all that, imho it would have been the more productive and interesting path to take. Missing from any of this discussion is any concept of an experience of contradictions or a break, or the very possibility of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals. Felski has already insisted, and here continues to do so, that “critique” does not exist outside the ivory tower, so she cannot now take it away from the academics and award it to the plebs. In any event her agenda is solely to attack the concept, or rather the word “critique,” and the particular rhetorical-affective formation she associates with it; like Latour, she seems to have no interest in deflating the power or prestige of academia per se. She does give some ink to those critics who complain of the “domestication of critique” by the university, which she dismisses with reference to the problematic “domestication-domus” metaphor (145), instead of treating the larger issue of critique as a phenomenon recuperated (we might say) by the university, and the class positions and power relations that shape it. But again, this would be a “critique of critique” and is thus off the table; and after all it is not the university that is the target, but “critique” alone. For all the many great arguments and insights that Felski has made in this book, it seems we reach here one of the significant limits of post-critique.

There are several of these good insights in this chapter, but they are either posed as minor caveats to her over-arching argument, or kept safely on the “post-critique” side of the critique/post-critique distinction. She notes that “critique not only ‘detaches from,’ but ‘connects to’” (144), that is, is involved in the formation of networks, alliances, even that romantic sense a practitioner can have of taking part in a grand historical tradition of intellectual opposition, a conversation with “Kant, Marx, and Foucault” (135); she lists the spatial metaphors involved in the positioning of critique, “inside and outside, center and margin” (146). Echoing Latour, she makes a profoundly sensible call for a “politics of relation, not of negation” (147), without any admission of irony whatsoever, or of the idea that critique could also be more about relation than negation (despite having talked about critique-as-relation three pages earlier). It seems that there is much potential for opening-up and rearticulating or contestation of “critique” here, but that would of course be “critique of critique” – preserving something that needs to be destroyed while possibly imperiling some things which need to be preserved – [and an admission, furthermore, that critique is actually also productive rather than merely negative.] Critique is to be defined merely as negation, and that negation is to be negated. All the old attachments and chronotopes of “critique” must be smashed and replaced: I want to congratulate Felski and Latour for how well they philosophize with a hammer, but I fear they would insist, “no, no, this is not a hammer, it’s a post-hammer.”

The chapter concludes with a discussion of the final aspect of critique, that it “does not tolerate rivals” (147). There is a very valid point at the heart of this, regarding the use of the suspicious attitude to shut down and/or silence alternative approaches. However, Felski herself here is intent on shutting down those critiques of critique which she refers to as “critique of critique,” (in contrast to her own, “post-critique” critique of critique). This is all dependent on her purification of the word “critique” into the corner of incessant suspicion and negativity; the “critique of critique” must always result in an intensification of suspicion: “the problem with critique, it turns out, is that it is not yet critical enough” (148: emphases original). My growing sense, from reading this and other discussions, is that that is only a part of what critiques of critique typically involve – instead, there is a contestation over the character of the gap that practices of critique establish in relation to their object; and there is also a “how much” or a “how far” question, of taking critique/suspicion further, or pulling it back. Felski, for instance, is in fact saying that “critique” is not yet critical enough, because it fails to consider the downsides of its own excessive suspicion, and should retreat back to a more productive point. This sort of recalibration or rebalancing of critique seems to be a big part of what is in fact contested over time in debates over critique, and the reason why I would include Felski, Latour, etc. as participating in such a critique of critique, pace their objections. And there is a lot more room for nuance and productive ambiguity in this space than Felski seems to admit. And it is really this shutting down or closing off of that productive space which is disappointing about this book, and runs counter to its stated promise. In the last paragraph, Felski cites Rorty to the effect that “the best way of redirecting an established line of thought is not to take up arms against it … but to come up with inspiring alternatives and new vocabularies” (150). Why wasn’t this the starting point of this book (as it was in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter) instead of the end point? Why are we reading this on page 150? In any event, Felski is not yet ready to lay down her arms, but will continue battling on for two more chapters.

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 3

 

Summary of Chapter 3: 10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)

This chapter is famously intimidating both for the number of concepts that it throws out, and for the incredibly nuanced and complicated relationships established between these concepts – a reader might justifiably worry not only how to learn and keep track of all the relationships between kinds of strata, machines, and so on, but how much of this detailed understanding will remain important in future chapters – how much of Challenger’s lecture will “be on the test,” you might say. But this close interrelation between building and tearing down is in fact a key aspect of what D&G mean by double articulation, in the first place.

[In any event I have relied heavily on Bonta and Protevi’s Deleuzoguattionary.]

My approach to grasping double articulation is to do the opposite of what D&G are trying to do in this chapter – namely, to root it in linguistics, where the concept originated (with Martinet). In this chapter D&G are tilting strenuously against several of their favorite windmills – hylomorphism, structuralism, and most importantly for this point, the “tyranny of the signifier” and the “linguistic turn” whereby, under the influence of structuralism, linguistics becomes the model for understanding everything else. So when D&G borrow the concept of double articulation from linguistics, they want to resist this pattern of the linguistic turn, and show instead that double articulation is a broader phenomenon, of which the linguistic version is merely an example, rather than the model; thus they start with geology, go through biology, etc. before they even come to double articulation in language.

However, the concept of double articulation in language is much simpler, so it forms an easier starting point than D&G’s approach (imho). The two articulations in this case are phonemes (sounds recognizably distinguished from each other, like the sounds for D, O, G) and morphemes (meaningful units of language, like “dog”). The sounds are combined to make words, and the words are combined to make sentences in an open-ended process. Phonemic articulation selects and differentiates a set of sounds out of all those possible, serving as the basis for morphemic articulation; only the second, morphemic articulation expresses meaning. Leaving the proper Deleuzian terminology aside for a moment, we could say that the first articulation draws on the vast outer world of sounds, to create something like a kit of building blocks for language; the second articulation turns those building blocks into meaningful expressions. D&G will massively complicate this scenario, but I think it serves as a useful (and might I say, anexact?) starting point.

With D&G the two articulations become coding (per B&P, “the process of ordering matter as it is drawn into a body”), and territorialization (“the ordering of those bodies in assemblages”).

Professor Challenger starts his lecture with an opposition between the Earth as a Body without Organs, or originary Chaos, and the processes of coding and territorialization that draw matter from the BwO to form strata. He infamously and cryptically announces that strata are “judgments of God,” which is reminiscent of the opposition/interrelationship of Sky (God) and Earth (Mother) in ancient mythology (40).

This opposition is immediately complicated by noting that strata in fact decode and de/reterritorialize each other – each stratum gets its matter from a substratum that it feeds off of or draws from. To stray again from the proper terminology, the Earth does not exist as a BwO in reality so much as in potential, because it is already completely stratified, but these strata continue to feed off and re-stratify each other, thus recreating the BwO as a “plane of consistency” that forms the permeable borders of the strata. D&G distinguish between, and give provisional [and anti-Aristotelian] definitions for matter, substance, form, and content and expression (40-1, 43). Challenger attributes these to the “Spinozist geologist” Hjelmslev, who was in fact a linguist (whose ideas were the foundation of the linguistic concept of double articulation). The point being that this way of speaking about substance/form and content/expression has “the advantage of breaking with the form-content duality” (43). Matter (plane of consistency, BwO) is unformed, unorganized, unstratified; content is matter that has been formed through the first articulation, having both substance and form particular to content; expression (the second articulation) means “functional structures” which also have both substance and form. In other words the old Aristotelian distinction between substance and form has been turned into a movement from matter → content → expression (though this movement in turn will be further complicated and even reversed; the main point is to make the old substance/form dichotomy unworkable).

As a first indication of what the “function” of expressions are, they discuss the “relative invariance” of a stratum which these “expressions” create. In note 5 on page 43, they reference the “linguistic model of biology” of François Jacob, who aligns the reproduction of genetic material with the first step of articulation, and its expression as it shapes the actual form and function of the organism, with the second. “To express is always to sing the glory of God. Every stratum is a judgment of God” (43-4). The concept “God” is annoyingly absent from the deleuzoguattionary but seems to mean some overarching unity, in this case of the stratum, which the expressions function to maintain. Of course, this is the ancient Sky God of myth, separated from and opposed to the Earth, and involved with the Earth in an eternal and unending solve et coagula.

In a discussion of the simultaneous unity and diversity of any given stratum, Challenger introduces another round of terminology [which proliferation of terms appears to be part of his role: note how he had given his new invented discipline “various names: rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities” (43). At several points D&G indicate the anexact character of Challenger’s lecture: the point is to avoid positing some single signifier which can claim to be the exact or precise truth or name.] The simultaneous unity and diversity of composition starts with the fact that matter is drawn in from elsewhere (from a substratum); as material it retains aspects of this previous territorialization/organization (which affect/channel the ways in which it can be coded, or rather the form its coding takes), and is thus an exterior milieu, external not to the stratum which it has been drawn into, but to the form of organization (second articulation) of that stratum [what we might simplistically think of as the “outside” will be called the associated milieu]. The interior milieu, in turn, refers to the substance that matter/material has become when organized by the abstract machine at the core of the strata and its unity/organization, which Challenger now terms the Ecumenon, distinguished from the Planomenon of the plane of consistency/BwO (49-50).

More concepts are introduced in order to further complicate and problematize such concepts as center and periphery, interior and exterior, etc., and to show that these can be used only in a relative [and anexact] sense. Epistrata are intermediary layers or forms between the center and periphery, that take different forms in the different kinds of strata; the annexed or associated milieu is basically the Umwelt, with which the stratum is involved in a give and take or mutual reshaping/affecting; the parastrata are the means by which the stratum interacts with the associated milieu (and acc B&P, forms assemblages with other strata). “A stratum exists only in its epistrata and parastrata, so that in the final instance these must be considered strata in their own right” (52), setting up an infinite regress which means that we can only take the concept of stratum itself as anexact or relative.

They embark on their description of three distinct groups of strata: molecular-molar (of which crystalline formations are used as the key exemplar) (57-8), organic (i.e., living organisms) (58-60) and a third, which they are at some pains not to call “language,” “symbolization,” “technology,” or even [culture], though it pertains closely to all of these. [The resistance to allowing this strata group a name of course counters the “tyranny” by which language seeks to name everything]. There is a growing degree of deterrioralization along the course of this list, which allows for an increasing freedom in the shaping of strata: the crystalline strata can only grow outward from their surfaces, while the independent linearity of dna allows organisms to be reshaped in their interiors, as well as to reproduce themselves.

The “third major grouping of strata” they insist is not really about humans so much as about a “new distribution of content and expression” impacting or shaping the outside world/Umwelt (hence “alloplastic”). “What some call the properties of human beings—technology and language, tool and symbol, free hand and supple larynx, “gesture and speech”—are in fact properties of this new distribution” (60). [“gesture and speech” being a reference to Leroi-Gourhan, one of their primary sources here.] They discuss the hand’s manipulation of content, and expression via the face, and by language; the “temporal linearity” of vocal signs; the difference between language (third strata group) and genetic code (second strata group). The “superlinearity” of language, or overcoding, opens up “certain imperialist pretentions on behalf of language” via the power of translation: translation is more than just the power of language to represent [aka symbolization] but “the ability of language, with its own givens in its own stratum, to represent all the other strata and thus achieve a scientific conception of the world” (62) aka the scientific Welt, a translation of the Umwelt into a ”sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs.” This subordination of everything to representation by one imperial stratum is “the illusion constitutive of man,” (63) but the new forms of content and expression produced by the abstract machine of this stratum are not illusory. There is a link to the Foucault book with discussion of technology as a “technical social machine,” language as a “semiotic collective machine” and “regime of signs,” and “formations of power.”

Challenger then states that there are three problems he wants to discuss in the remaining time: through these D&G will dispose of linguistic imperialism, Marxist assumptions about economic determinism (and psychoanalytic variants, as an aside), and evolutionary ideas about mind and matter.

The first is the question, “Under what circumstances may we speak of signs?” (64) Are signs something that is found in all strata, or are they specific to the third group of strata? Making an interesting link between symbol, icon, index and deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and territory, D&G then resist an expansionist usage of “sign” and relegate the term only to the third group of strata. The question shifts to “are all signs signifiers?” by which they mean, are all sign-relations locked into a “globalized” signifier-signified couplet, in which the signified is dependent on the existence of the signifier. Put crudely, such a relationship poses an assumed essential quality of the sign/ifier, which would give it the sort of eternal or universal character that could be applied to all strata. D&G instead draw in terminology from Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge to argue (again in my crude simplification) that sign relationships are always-already caught up in specific relationships of power and regimes of signs, and so never really have this universally applicable essence. They advance their transformed and malleable concepts of content and expression as more apt for describing the different strata and their differential actions of de/re/te.

The second “problem” is the idea of reducing content-expression to the base-superstructure relationship of classical Marxism, according to which the economic activity of the base determines the whole, with the superstructure playing a secondary role; D&G have been at pains to demonstrate that their content-expression relationship does not have this simplistic one-way determinism, so they dismiss such thinking quite quickly, with a few pointed remarks on the concept of ideology, e.g., “ideology is a most execrable concept obscuring all of the effectively operating social machines” (68), a criticism that both Foucault and Latour would each agree with strongly in their own ways.

The final problem is that of the presumption of evolution or increasing order or complexity: the impression they want to avoid, that these three kinds of strata are an evolutionary model, from matter, to life, to mind. To the contrary, no group of strata is more complex or advanced than any other, and after all the influence and interaction works in all directions, not in a unidirectional flow. They spend the last several pages summarizing and recapitulating several of the key concepts, including the plane of consistency, abstract machines, and the three different forms that the distinction between content and expression takes in the different strata.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 3

 

Summary of Chapter 3: Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior

 

In this chapter Wiener's point is to delineate two kinds of learning: one, with the example of ants, is rigid (instinctual or pre-programmed); the other, with the example of humans, is adaptive and capable of learning. He demonstrates with biology and actual bodily structures how and why the ant cannot develop the kind of memory and process of learning that a human can. Part of the point shows how human learning [and culture, though this is not raised] are made possible by our biology. There is a reversal going on in the language of this chapter: whereas in the previous chapter machines are being described as like living animals, now living animals are being described as like machines. Wiener talks about the importance of feedback, and that communication be a two-way phenomenon.

He briefly ventures into social organization with a simplistic typology from the Eskimo who are leaderless and apparently seen as living in a state of nature (though this is cooperative, not Hobbesian); through to the Indian caste system, and “oriental despots” (as the extreme example on the other end); to the US as a "moderately loose" structure somewhere in the middle. The US fails to achieve its potential because some people are psychologically attracted to fascism and "white supremacy.” In Wiener's account these seem to be individual psychological flaws, or errors in ways of thinking, rather than actually part of how US society works when it's at home.  Anyway these "worshippers of efficiency" want a society based on that of the ant, and fail to see that humans are distinct from ants.  Wiener details the differences between humans and ants, sticking in cybernetic pronouncements and lessons, such as “Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be ex­pected from it” (57). He talks about the wastefulness of telephone exchanges which take the same amount of time and technology to connect you with anyone on the network, instead of remembering who you call most frequently and connecting you more rapidly with them (60-1) [and from such thinking has been born so much that is crappy and manipulative about current internet design].

He talks about the difference between analogue machines that operate by analogy, and digital machines which work on a “yes-no scale;” the analogue are limited by their use of analogy while the more abstract and numerical operation of the digital frees it for more uses; however, pace Wiener this limitation seems to have more to do with the process of translating from the analogue into the digital. As an example of an analogue device he gives a slide rule; a slide rule is ultimately limited in precision because the numbers on it need to be large enough to read. However, this seems incorrect: the numbers on the slide rule are themselves digital, and so are in fact a translation from the analogic relationship into the digital language of numbers. So what is happening here is not in fact a demonstration of the limitation of analogue measurement per se (given for instance a more precise technology for reading it, than the human eye); but rather, a demonstration that translating from analogue into digital is inherently lossy.

Wiener provides a brief scheme of history, particularly the break between the old Aristotelian view in which the goal of science was to determine categories into which to put things, to the modern view that science conducts experiments and in fact breaks down old categories or invents new ones. Newton is the big figure of the change here. Wiener puts forward, then walks back, suggestions that the human brain could be seen as digital, or that emotions are similar to the responses also in machines (and thus may actually serve a purpose). One goal of what he is working towards: "I wish to give a method of constructing learn­ing machines, a method which will not only enable me to build certain special machines of this type, but will give me a general engineering technique for construct­ing a very large class of such machines" (66).

 

 

Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Summary of Chapter 4: Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About Yo

This chapter is inspired by the reply of a friend back in the 1980s, when she and Sedgwick were discussing conspiracy theories about the origin of AIDS. The friend stated, "if we knew all that were true, what would we know that we don't know now?" (123) From this Sedgwick derives an argument about the limits of the significance of knowledge: "for someone to have an unmystified, angry view of large and genuinely systemic oppressions does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences"  (124) [i.e., you can't derive an ought from an is?] This leads her to think about how knowledge or truth is fetishized as having some power in its own sake, when the real question is how is knowledge performative. She admits this is an "unremarkable epiphany" and has in fact become a bit of a commonplace, but she asserts that the insight has nevertheless been "blunted" by certain habits of critical theorists – namely, paranoid reading, or the "hermeneutics of suspicion."

She discusses Ricoeur and the origins of the term. She mocks Jameson's "always historicize" command with being an atemporal "tablet of the Law." She discusses Freud's theory of paranoia. She quotes a long bit from Ricoeur on the HoS, ending with a great line: "The two go together, since the man of suspicion carries out in reverse the work of falsification of the man of guile."  Here we see a fascinating link to metis – the "man of suspicion" here being like Menelaus mimicking and outsmarting the Old Man of the Sea. According to Sedgwick, "paranoia" has become not only accepted but is the preferred and required stance among critical theorists, especially in queer theory:

"The man of suspicion double-bluffing the man of guile: in the hands of thinkers after Freud, paranoia has by now candidly become less a diagnosis than a prescription."

[Obviously, if this were literally true, it would be no kind of charge or revelation.  So it is of course a reversal of terms, a diagnosis itself. And following the metis link, why should use of wit be seen as a form of "paranoia?"]

A reader may be tempted to respond with the famous phrase, "Just because you're paranoid..." Sedgwick forestalls this with a brilliant discussion of this very phrase as itself implying the necessity of being paranoid. Yet she then complicates this with an alternative reading: perhaps it means there is no point to being paranoid.

She draws on the concept of "position" from Melanie Kiein, and sets up the opposition, or rather "oscillatory" relationship between paranoia and "reparation.” She lists five aspects of paranoia which she will discuss each in turn: 1 anticipatory, 2. reflexive and mimetic 3. a strong theory 4. negative affect. 5. "places its faith in exposure." The first two again have interesting links to metis, which opens up an alternative, more playful or witty reading of what she calls "paranoia." She makes a statement that one must be paranoid, or practice paranoia, to understand paranoia (131) – fitting because frankly this whole discussion of the dominance and pervasiveness of paranoia seems paranoid. 

The subject of "strong theory" is borrowed from Silvan Tomkins' theory of affect, and provides a very good link between academic "theory" and everyday theory existing in the form of affects, etc. The strong theory is one that has wide application and economy but is reductive and perhaps non-falsifiable; the weak theory is localized and limited, perhaps to description (she doesn't give as specific a definition so far as I can see). She notes that in the New Historicist book The Novel and the Police the strong theory (paranoia: everything is carceral) takes the form of overarching narrative, within which and along with shelter numerous weak theories which are part of what makes the book enjoyable to read (and perhaps to write). 

In the section on "Paranoia places its Faith in Exposure" she opens with the stereotype of a crazy street person:

"Like the deinstitutionalized person on the street who, betrayed and plotted against by everyone else in the city, still urges on you the finger-worn dossier bristling with his precious correspondence, paranoia for all its vaunted suspicion acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known. That a fully initiated listener could still remain indifferent or inimical, or might have no help to offer, is hardly treated as a possibility." (138)

[Clearly there are bigger fish being fried here than "paranoia:” an entire belief in the power of truth, the value of knowledge, and the democracy of reason.]

"It's strange that a hermeneutics of suspicion would appear so trusting about the effects of exposure, but Nietzsche (through the genealogy of morals), Marx, (through the theory of ideology), and Freud (through the theory of ideals and illusions) already represent, in Ricoeur's phrase, 'convergent procedures of demystification" .. and therefore a seeming faith, inexplicable in their own terms, in the effects of such a proceeding." (139)

[I'm not sure if this is true, for any of them, when you get down to it. Nkee believes in the will to power, and his appeal to exposure (in the genealogy of morals) is really about asserting, and making another "truth" than the one that was handed down: he is after all the one who asks, "Why Truth?" Maybe for Marx it makes more sense (he opposes the truth of science to the illusion of ideology) and probably Freud (I don't really know much about Freud); but from the vantage of a theory of articulation, what the first two are trying to do is articulate a truth that has some articulatory and convincing power against other "truths" [in Foucault’s terminology, their critique is in the service of constitution]; certainly in the Nkeean version "truth" is a weapon and a product of discourse and articulation. Now, there is a sense in which Stirner (standing in for Nkee here) can be accused of this strange faith: after all, he rants that everyone is always an egoist, and is at pains to show them this, but what is the purpose or presumed result of them learning this? Perhaps they are to become better or more consistent egoists: but iirc this is not clearly reasoned out by Stirner. And perhaps that line of criticism could be carried over to Nkee.]

She then criticizes all this language of revealing from the end of Gender Trouble, about the importance of revealing gender as performative [AND HERE we come upon an important historical question about how gender norms in this society (and others on the world stage) have come to be effectively problematized: to the extent that an idealist explanation could be acceptable, or shown to play a part, could not Butler (and the broader discourse on gender as culturally variable and thus not eternal or natural in anthropology) have in fact played an important role? Thus, not only is gender performative but the critique of gender as performativity has itself been performative – and this makes scoffing at it as "paranoid" (and thus presumably unproductive and unrealistic) a pretty silly reaction!]

She turns again to Miller's Novel and the Police which wants to "expose" and "problematize" the "modern liberal subject" (139). Sedgwick questions this because she has grad students who are good at "unveiling the hidden historical violences that underlie a secular, universalist liberal humanism" yet they grew up in Xenophobic Reagan etc. America where "liberal" is a bad word and "secular humanism" is even worse, and people believe in God, Angels, etc. (139-40).

[This objection seems intentionally deaf to the broader meaning of "modern liberal subject", methinks. Or maybe it is prescient of today (moreso than the time this was written, because Bush, Reagan, etc. fall under the classic "liberal" terminology moreso than Trump]. But if it is a fair argument that the "modern liberal subject" is unravelling and being replaced by something else, where is she going with this?]

She says that Foucault's early works depend on a cultural context in which violence would be "deprecated and hence hidden in the first place" (140) [she perhaps means Madness and Civilization and Birth of the Clinic, but it doesn't seem violence is particularly "hidden" there; in Discipline and Punish after all, it is front and center.].

"Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enmeshed in the penal system?" 

[This is not a hard question to answer, and I'm surprised she seems to think that it is.  Naturally, the "hidden ruses of power" of the modern liberal state depend on these more blatant uses of violence for their own legitimation and the continuing fuel of the “blackmail of the enlightenment.” And a conspiracy theory is not needed for this: it is the simple fact that the enlightenment project never succeeds, and yet is always the presumed cure for its own failures. Now, the anarchist, or at least anti-authoritarian side of the Foucauldian approach takes this corrosive/unending critique (itself implicated in Enlightenment thinking) and turns it against the state and against mainstream liberalism – liberals might be allied with strategically and in a Machiavellian manner, but are not to be trusted, and ultimately the freedoms of the liberal subject are not to be trusted. Intentionally or not, it is precisely this kind of suspicion that Sedgwick is targetting here. A possibility is opened for a critique that stops short of suspecting liberalism?]

 She talks about violence in Bosnia and its uncovering, etc. when it was not meant to be hidden (it was "exemplary and spectacular", the "uncovering" is just moving it to a different stage, of world news [but this also enables the western liberal state to legitimize itself by difference]. She goes on to talk about this politics of the visibility of violence: an example is the chain gang being reintroduced in the South, and advocates of the death penalty wanting it to be on TV (when it was once the opponents of the death penalty who wanted such exposure). "What price now the cultural critics' hard-won skill at making visible, behind permissive appearances, the hidden traces of oppression and persecution?"(141)

 [Again, we seem to be straying from the question of "paranoia" to the much broader cultural assumptions regarding truth and openness, aletheia writ large. It seems like the historical changes she talks about demand some reference to changing media ecology, which she does not mention. She could have a point, that the interiority of the modern disciplinary subject, is being replaced by an exteriority, and such chain gangs etc. could indeed be more fitting for the society of control (which is all about exteriority). Nevertheless the different “stages” of Foucault's model (from exemplary to disciplinary to control) actually layer over each other and interact rather than supplanting each other. So the presence of either exemplary or control aspects in contemporary discourse and practice do not demonstrate that the disciplinary mode does not remain (as I see it) dominant even today.]

In discussing "the paranoid trust in exposure" there is sort of a slippage or leap of faith across what she identified as a paradox, in this "paranoid trust". Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this paranoid model itself stops short (as all projects of critique seem to do somewhere), at this all-encompassing and backgrounded modern Enlightenment value. After all the reactionaries in favor of the death penalty, above, were also in favor of such "exposure.”

Anyway, she argues that these paranoid academic unveilers are naive about who their audience is: the audience is actually far more sophisticated and cynical than they think [i.e., they are not ideological dupes] but watchers of television and thus on to the spectacle/postmodern/simulacra. "My own guess is that such popular cynicism, though undoubtedly widespread, is only one among the heterogeneous, competing theories that constitute the mental ecology of most people."  [This idea of multiple competing theories [tacit or otherwise] is a very useful corrective to the belief in the ideological. However, if the move to critique is seen in this broader field of articulation, then it is a faith in articulation [aka De/Re/Te], rather than "unveiling," which is the foundation].

At this point I'm increasingly just copying and pasting quotes and comments from my notes, instead of summarizing. To summarize, as I am supposed to be doing, she raises an interesting historical argument, that the "modern liberal subject" (which is one of the key targets of "paranoia") is no longer so big and bad, because we are in a post-liberal situation that has skewed to the right, there is a new politics of visibility and thus of truth. The interesting thing here, along with in Felski’s and Latour’s critiques of critique, is to what extent some new articulation is coming along to replace this old specifically academic idea of "critique" which (as she traces it, and as the others do as well) arose in the 60s and 70s in academia; along with a certain radicalization of part of the faculty or certain disciplines (not most!). So, by disarticulating from "paranoia,” what new connections or alliances, and practices are being made possible? Her main point is not to disable "paranoid" reading, but to enable alternative forms and modes which the dominance of paranoia has suppressed (even as it relies on them, as they often rely on it). Thus, her [post-critique] is an opening rather than a closing. From the re-articulation perspective, maybe this could simply be said to reference a new confidence or openness, no longer a need to be as suspicious...  nevertheless a class element seems worth inquiring into (she notes the need to get beyond humiliation, which she links to queer theory; (and which paranoia is a defense against); the class analysis of humiliation, for instance in Vaneigem, would be interesting to look at here as well. The biggest question is how useful the whole phrasing of "paranoia" is here: Felski rightly moves beyond this (though "critique" is not really any better; the old "HoS" was perhaps best all along). She has also over-theorized or laid out the elements of "paranoia" with all these five parts. This allows her to claim that her own writing in this chapter is only similar to paranoia, but is not actually paranoia (because it is missing some of the five parts). Ultimately I think that some of what she has called "paranoia" could be considered as witty or playful, which is ultimately not the biggest problem because that is part of what she is calling for anyway.

Foucault's "What is Critique?"

 

Foucault, Michel. “What Is Critique?” In What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Questions and Twentieth-Century Answers, edited by James Schmidt, 23–61. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.

Summary:

Foucault begins the talk in his usual indirect manner:

For the issue about which I would like to speak today, I have no title. (24)

Right after which he says that the question he wants to discuss is "what is critique?” but it seems this title "would have been indecent" so he is resisting it (actually it turns out to be “What is Enlightenment” that would have been indecent). He gives a first description of critique, as something that is "on the outer limits of," close to, and up against philosophy and even "in lieu of all possible philosophy.” He establishes two boundaries: "the high Kantian enterprise and the little polemical professional activities that are called critique." This is what the two have in common:

it seems to me that there has been in the modern Western world (dating, more or less, empirically from the 15th to the 16th centuries) a certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relationship to society, to culture and also a relationship to others that we could call, let's say, the critical attitude.

[And this set of relations to self, others, and world is what makes critique an act or practice of articulation, and a technology of the self.] Critique is a practice of [deterritorialization], yet it remains subordinate to a different move, that of "constituting" stuff:

After all, critique only exists in relation to something other than itself: it is an instrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not know nor happen to be, it oversees a domain it would want to police and is unable to regulate. All this means that it is a function which is subordinated in relation to what philosophy, science, politics, ethics, law, literature, etc., positively constitute.

He contrasts the pleasure of critique with its utility, and then says it is supported by a "general imperative" which ties it to virtue. Foucault elaborates his historical framing of critique as "one possible route" to discuss this history: presaging aspects of his later History of Sexuality series, he finds critique growing out of the Christian pastoral, which focused on this idea of allowing yourself to be governed, of submission to the church, authority, God, etc., for the purpose of being directed towards your salvation. This subjectifying relationship of obedience has a "triple relationship to the truth:"

1 "truth understood as dogma"

2. "a special and individualizing knowledge of individuals"

3. "this direction is deployed like a reflective technique comprising general rules, particular knowledge, precepts, methods of examination, confessions, interviews, etc.” (26)

 [In other words 1) an unquestionable and set Truth that can be known; 2) a secondary, perhaps variable truth about individuals (presumably, their extent of obedience  and their fitting into the system; where they stood, how "good" they were (and presumably they or their shepherds also "know" this or seek to); and finally 3) a collection of techniques for improving oneself in this system)].

This led to the explosion of the question from the 15th century on, how to govern? Which question "cannot apparently be dissociated from the question "how not to be governed?"" (28). This itself does not necessarily mean not being governed at all, but rather:

how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them. (28)

This is the critical attitude; this challenge, distrust, etc. seeking to limit, transform or displace government is both a response to, and a [product] of, the project of the arts of governing. He thus offers a first definition of critique: “the art of not being governed quite so much.” (29) [Here in the "not so much" is the phenomenon once again of critique or suspicion, etc. taken up to a point but not farther, a point that is itself up for debate or argumentation, and is ultimately pragmatic]. This "vague or fluid" definition allows him to elucidate three historical "anchoring points" for the critical attitude:

1. Ecclesiastical resistance; the Protestant Reformation, with a return to scriptures and textual critique. The idea of who can speak or know the truth, through the application of reason, spreads to the laity, who have the same authority as the church hierarchy of reading and interpreting the scriptures; this spreads as far as the ability to question the scriptures themselves, and their truth or authority.

2. The concept of natural law and rights are put forward as brakes on, and limits to, the ability of the powerful to govern, placing limits on existing law, which is now revealed to be [arbitrary] and historical in nature; a setting up of some concept of law which is distinct from that of authority, and problematizing existing laws in relation.

3. Finally, a confrontation with authority: nothing that an authority tells you is true is to be accepted simply for this fact, but only “if one considers valid the reasons for doing so.” Certainty, the ability to trust or believe, is here distinguished from authority.

[So essentially 1) a right to reason, spread to everyone; 2) a concept of reason or truth or “law,” separated from authority and might; and 3) a separation of “certainty” or the [compellingness] of truth and logic, from authority.] The triad of religion, law, and knowledge is derived from Kant in “Was Ist Aufklärung” where these are ways that subjects are kept in a minority condition.

[I have at hand James Miller’s summary of this article in his biography of Foucault; he finds it “remarkable” and “idiosyncratic” that Foucault derives the critical tradition from “the heretical practices of dissenting religious sects” rather than from German theorists (Miller, 302). To the contrary, I find it reminiscent of Bookchin’s description of the Enlightenment as a bottom-up affair, originating with widespread disaffection among the peasantry, and moving into the academy. Numerous parallels with Bookchin and other anarchist thinkers make this text a key one for the interpretation of Foucault as an anarchist or fellow traveller. Arguably Foucault’s openness to seeing other, non-philosophical, etc. movements and sources as revolutionary – including religious ones – was behind his controversial endorsement of the Iranian Revolution in the year following this lecture.]

The "core of critique" is a “bundle of relationships” set up between power, truth, and the subject. A relationship is set up between governmentalization and critique:

And if govemmentalization is indeed this movement through which individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth, well, then! I will say that critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth. Well, then!: critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth. (32)

[But does the subject really "give themself" the "right" to question? Or is there some imperative, or even interpellation in the Enlightenment subject involved? Is not the imperative for critique, or the critical attitude, tied to the Blackmail of the Enlightenment, the call for continuous improvement and reform? It seems that critique, or the “critical attitude” is demanded of the Enlightenment subject, as part of the way the subject and truth are related, one should not be capable of taking truths on faith, or rather, it is the believer on the basis of faith who must defend their choice to do so, in the context of the Enlightenment.]

Reason and Critique, for Kant, require courage, but are also about knowing one’s own limits, and possibly even about knowing when to stop questioning: Kant asks:

do you know up to what point you can know? Reason as much as you want, but do you really know up to what point you can reason without it becoming dangerous? (34)

Foucault explains: "...once one has gotten an adequate idea of one's own knowledge and its limits, ... the principle of autonomy can be discovered." We then no longer obey because we are told to, but because we choose to: “the obey will be founded on autonomy itself.” But in turn, this rationalization of the relation of authority results, in turn, in such reason becoming the basis for authority: critique as a practice of autonomy is [recuperated]. Foucault details the emergence of the suspicion that "reason itself is responsible for excesses of power" (38), particularly in Germany.

He seems to suggest that the lack of a real [Protestant] Reformation in France, as opposed to Germany, as well as the close ties of the Revolution to the valuation of reason (and the Enlightenment), made France, or the French Left anyway, less open to the critique of reason, which was thus left to the French Right to voice. In Germany, in contrast, it was the Left which voiced this suspicion. This means the concept of critique or the link between "ratio and power" is not inevitable, but has to be established, [articulated], and this happened differently and earlier in Germany as opposed to in France. It is the growth of phenomenology, and the importation of the Frankfurt school, that lead to this critique in France, and the connections between reason and power start to be investigated and questioned. The 20^th Century experiences of Fascism and Stalinism, and more generally of the overall rise of scientific authority and state power, also drive the growth of this questioning of reason’s role in upholding domination, and the question, “What is Aufklärung?” returns.

Foucault asserts that his goal in discussing this is not "to be critical or polemical", but rather "to point out differences and somehow see up to what point we can multiply them, disseminate them, and distinguish them in terms of each other, displacing, if you will, the forms of analyses of this Aufklärung problem, which is perhaps, after all, the problem of modern philosophy."  (44) He notes that he is trodding the boundaries between philosophy and history. He says you have to

fabricate history, as if through fiction, in terms of how it would be traversed by the ques­tion of the relationships between structures of rationality which articulate true discourse and the mechanisms of subjugation which are linked to it... (45)

 A long, dense, two-page paragraph begins with a subject asking, "What, therefore, am I?" (46): [so the critical subject is moved, from its questioning of power and reason, etc., to question itself as well, to interrogate what it is. This would be like Gramsci's call for an "inventory of traces"]. However, Foucault's “historical-philosophical” method will move away from this:

 The first characteristic of this historical-philosophical practice, if you will, is to desubjectify the philosophical question by way of historical contents, to liberate historical contents by examining the effects of power whose truth affects them and from which they supposedly derive.

[This sounds like his archaeological approach; actually I might be misreading a tension between the question "what therefore am I" and the "historical-philosophical practice" which "desubjectifies"; maybe this is just the way to go through answering or asking the question. By “liberate historical contents,” I think he means he is taking apart the elements (earlier he had described a power-truth-subject triad as the “core of critique”), taking them apart to disable their assumed relationships; this is the first characteristic of the historical-philosophical practice.

The 2nd characteristic is temporal specificity: 

In addition, this historical-philosophical practice is clearly found in the privileged relationship to a certain period which can be determined empirically. (46)

This is the Enlightenment period. There is a bit of a "Kafka and his Precursors" discussion of how we can see Aufklärung in the ancient Greeks, etc., because we are looking for it, rather than because it was already there somehow. The question itself is not necessarily stuck in particular historical periods; however there is the pragmatic issue of

under what conditions, at the cost of which modifications or generalizations we can apply this question of the Aufklärung to any moment in history, that is, the question of the relationships between power, truth and the subject. (47)

Foucault describes his motivation [and arguably, his practice of critique] in an “opening up” motto for his critique of critique/Aufklärung:

I was saying before that I wanted in any case to very vaguely trace possible tracks other than those which seemed to have been up till now most willingly cleared. This in no way accuses the latter of leading nowhere or of not providing any valid results. (48)

Foucault crucially argues that Kant introduced a separation between Aufklärung and critique, by means of which Kant achieves critical distance and is able to critique the Enlightenment (and the role of power in relation to knowledge and the subject). Foucault lists the steps of Kant's "procedure of analysis":

1) "starting with the historical destiny of knowledge at the time of the constitution of modern science";

2) looking for the "indefinite effects of power" in this "destiny," which will be linked to "objectivism, positivism, technicism," etc.;

3) "connecting this knowledge with the conditions of the constitution and legitimacy of all possible knowledge," and

4) "seeing how the exit from legitimacy (illusion, error, forgetting, recovery, etc.) occured in history."

This "procedure of analysis is "deeply mobilized by the gap between critique and Aufklárung engineered by Kant" (48-9). [i.e. it is not so much that critique and Enlightenment are distinct, but that there is a gap opened between them, so there can be a critique of the enlightenment, even as the enlightenment demands critique. Is Felski doing a similar move -- establishing a gap between “critique” and “post-critique?”]

I believe that from this point on, we see a procedure of analysis which is basically the one most often followed, an analytical procedure which could be called an investigation into the legitimacy of historical modes of knowing (connaitre). (49)

 So this is the sort of truth-preserving critique of reason created by Kant, and maintained up through today by Habermas, etc., which asks:

 what false idea has knowledge gotten of itself and what excessive use has it exposed itself to, to what domination is it therefore linked? (49)

 Foucault will of course do something different: he is interested, not in the "problem of knowledge" (and how to free it from the distortions of power) but of power itself. He outlines a set of three “levels” or dimensions of analysis (archaeology, genealogy, strategy) that will allow him to investigate what he calls “événementialisation,” here translated as “eventualization,” though more commonly as “eventalization” (because the latter better preserves the weirdness of the French neologism, instead of flattening into a regular English word which does not have the same meaning as Foucault is intending). Eventalization essentially means how “ensembles” (from such cultural formations as sexuality, to medical discourses and institutions like the prison, asylum, etc.) come about, as events basically, without thinking of them as manifestations of something eternal or inevitable.

The first level, archaeology, seeks links between power and knowledge, without making judgments as to legitimization or truth/falsity (like the Kantian approach would). With this less judgmental approach, “connections between mechanisms of coercion and contents of knowledge can be identified” (49-50).

What we are trying to find out is what are the links, what are the connections that can be identified between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge, what is the interplay of relay and support developed between them, such that a given element of knowledge takes on the effects of power in a given system where it is allocated to a true, probable, uncertain or false element, such that a procedure of coercion acquires the very form and justifications of a rational, calculated, technically efficient element, etc. 

He describes the link between power/knowledge, also distinguishing “savoir” from “connaissance” in passing:

Hence, the use of the word knowledge (Savoir) that refers to all procedures and all effects of knowledge (connaissance) which are acceptable at a given point in time and in a specific domain; and secondly, the term power (pouvoir) which merely covers a whole series of particular mechanisms, definable and defined, which seem likely to induce behaviors or discourses.

 Power/Knowledge aren't fundamental realities, but are instead points chosen for the their analytical pertinence:

We see right away that these two terms only have a methodological function. It is not a matter of identifying general principles of reality through them, but of somehow pinpointing the analytical front, the type of element that must be pertinent for the analysis. It is furthermore a matter of preventing the perspective of legitimation from coming into play as it does when the terms knowledge (connaissance) or domination are used. (51)

Furthermore these should always be specified as to content, rather than speaking generally of "Power" or of "Knowledge" as if these were essences: they are an "analytical grid":

such and such an element of knowledge, such and such a mechanism of power. No one should ever think that there exists one knowledge or one power, or worse, knowledge or power which would operate in and of themselves. Knowledge and power are only an analytical grid. (52)

He provides an excellent and clear summation of the concept of power/knowledge, in the context of pointing out how they are not composed of distinct elements "external" to one another:

for nothing can exist as an element of knowledge if, on one hand, it is does not conform to a set of rules and constraints characteristic, for example, of a given type of scientific discourse in a given period, and if, on the other hand, it does not possess the effects of coercion or simply the incentives peculiar to what is scientifically validated or simply rational or simply generally accepted, etc. Conversely, nothing can function as a mechanism of power if it is not deployed according to procedures, instruments, means, and objectives which can be validated in more or less coherent systems of knowledge.

 Thus an "ensemble" such as the healthcare, or medical, or scientific system at a particular point in history, is supported by a "knowledge-power nexus" which the Foucauldian scholar studies (as opposed to evaluating its legitimacy, or seeing it as a manifestation of some natural or eternal truth). The point is rather to understand how these "positivities" became "acceptable.”  The fact that something now seems obvious in retrospect has to be gotten beyond, because it did not at the time seem obvious, and it is that lack of necessity or inevitability that has to be restored in the analysis. Two correlative operations to be performed: 1) "bring out the conditions of acceptability of a system" and 2) "follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence." (54) He refers to this level of power/knowledge excavation as "archaeological."

The identification of the acceptability of a system cannot be dissociated from identifying what made it difficult to accept: its arbitrary nature in terms of knowledge, its violence in terms of power, in short, its energy. (54)

Ensembles are not analyzed as instances of universals or "individualizations of a species" but as "pure singularities:" the singularity of madness [in its time as a construct of modern medicine], of sexuality, etc. (55). The approach "has to keep itself within the field of immanence of pure singularities.” 

Then what? Rupture, discontinuity, singularity, pure description, still tableau, no explanation, dead-end, you know all that. 

His "analysis of positivities" "does not partake" in three "so-called explicative procedures to which are attributed causal value according to three conditions" (55-6) (these are: final authority; unitary origin; and unavoidability/necessity: three causal frameworks which Foucault seeks to avoid by focusing on positivities/eventalisation). Instead he will see "singularities" [singular historical formations, such as sexuality, psychoanalysis, etc,]  as the effects of [power/knowledge] networks. There will be many kinds of relations and connections, and forms of necessity among these "heterogeneous processes" (57). The singularity itself is seen as singular [historically unique], rather than being reduced to some single cause (that would account for any number of such singularities, thus reducing them to the no longer singular).

 The second level of analysis is genealogy: a way of seeking to understand the "conditions for the appearance of a singularity born out of multiple determining elements" without appealing to a "principle of closure" (57). There is no closure for two reasons:

1) we are not looking outside of the network of relationships for a final cause in the nature of things, but in the network of power/knowledge relationships; we don't find causality in "the nature of things" but in the uncertain logic of interactions, decisions, actions, etc.; the contingent.

2)  with the second reason he jumps to the level of strategies: the analysis of the mobile, fragile, and complexly changing relationships and networks. There is a “perpetual slippage” between competing [articulations] and changing meanings, formations, etc. which could be called strategies (58).

 To rephrase this triad simplistically, archaeology opens up understanding of past moments independently, in a manner that does not subordinate them to the present or any other overarching unity; genealogy understands the process of change without imposing an origin or telos; and strategy seems to focus on the agonistic context of meaning etc. in the present. He insists that archaeology, strategy, and genealogy are simultaneous dimensions of analysis, not successive levels or steps. He discusses how power is to be seen "in relation to a field of interactions" and as possibly reversible: it is not merely a top-down phenomenon but a bottom-up one as well. In this much more complex view (than Kant’s etc.) there is an “indivisibility of knowledge and power in the context of interactions and multiple strategies;” so any power formation or form of domination becomes only a temporary, fragile “event;” there is no longer a question of legitimation, right vs. wrong forms of domination, but simply of power relations. [And here is where the importance of ritual comes in, as a necessary form of renewal, maintenance, and re-articulation]. [Contrary to a common misunderstanding, relations of domination and legitimation remain important within this Foucauldian world-view; they are simply understood as part of the field of power-relations, instead of being held apart as principles upon which to found a critique].

In what way can the effects of coercion characteristic of these positivities not be dissipated by a return to the legitimate destination of knowledge and by a reflection on the transcendental or semi-transcendental that fixes knowledge, but how can they instead be reversed or released from within a concrete strategic field, this concrete strategic field that induced them, starting with this decision not to be governed? (60)

[He's talking about how this will not to be governed has historically been recuperated by the return to authority, or greater authority, part of the movement of subjectification (induced, recuperated). In my earlier notes (from who knows when) I called this “very Master and Servant.” Is there not a further parallel with ressentiment? Isn't it funny though that he evokes a language of liberation here?]

Summarizing, he describes the history of Kantian, etc. critique as "this swinging movement, this slippage, this way of deporting the question of the Aufklärung into critique" (61), but Foucault wants to go the other way, back towards Aufklärung; or rather, he wants to close the gap between “critique” and “Aufklärung” [here standing in for the entire apparatus of modernity, reason, etc.] and understand them as one.

And if it is necessary to ask the question about knowledge in its relationship to domination, it would be, first and foremost, from a certain decision-making will not to be governed, the decision-making will, both an individual and collective attitude which meant, as Kant said, to get out of one's minority. (61)

[So the goal is still the same as Kant had indicated, but it will be without this gap between critique and Enlightenment/reason/apparatus (or between reason as pure practice of critique, and reason as complicated mangle).] In a concluding statement, the host Gouhier rightly chides Foucault for the pretense that he is "not a philosopher" and "barely a critic," lines which Foucault of course delivers in a way that is far more intolerable than if he had merely been bragging about what a great philosopher and critic he was.

The questions from the audience are not contained in this translation; fortunately Miller discusses some of them in the summary referenced above. Miller’s summary of the lecture is actually quite limited, focusing primarily on the definition of critique as the will not to be governed; he does not discuss the subjects of power/knowledge and eventalization at all, and seems in fact disinterested in these concepts, perhaps because they are difficult to subsume into the fascination with death, under which he attempts to subordinate all of Foucault’s thinking. Anyway: one questioner asks whether this whole agonistic field of power and knowledge could not in fact be called “the will to power;” Foucault concurs. Another questioner asks for an interrogation of the “will not to be governed,” to which Foucault responds with a discussion of the “practice of revolt” throughout history (Miller, 305). Here he again reiterates the need to look beyond philosophy for a broader spectrum of practices, and finds a commonality in the movements of the Protestant Reformation and 20^th Century Marxism, as forms of struggle against domination, and creators of hope, for a future and better world.

What Foucault has not really discussed here, though some aspects of his talk hint at it, is the extent to which critique, as an ethical imperative after all, is in fact mandated of the Enlightenment subject, in order to be considered enlightened, “awake,” etc. The figure of the uncritical ideological dupe is in this context an Other against which you are interpellated: you accuse others of being such dupes, while you yourself want to avoid being one, or being seen as one. [This is linked to the whole fear of automata]. And Kant’s form of critique, making use of the gap between the reason of the particularly awake and insightful individual, and the compromised reason of the society which that individual critiques, is the exemplary model of such a recuperated will-not-to-be-governed, which in fact functions as a drive or engine propelling governmentality forward into new and more complex, more subtle and effective forms. Foucault is attempting to hold on to the compelling hope that this will-not-to-be-governed helps create, while resisting, or at least attempting to resist, the ultimate recuperation and restoration of the “blackmail of the enlightenment.”

Foucault’s attempt to get beyond Kantian critique means taking critique a step further (by questioning and going beyond the principle of legitimation); and his second questioner asks him to go a step further than that (by questioning this will-not-to-be-governed). Foucault clearly acknowledges the desire but seems unable to formulate exactly how to do so. But again, Foucault’s agenda is not an endless corrosive critique, but critique-up-to-a-certain-point, in the service of constitution: as he has stated, the field of power/knowledge relations is not some fundamental reality, but a pragmatically chosen level of analysis, useful because it throws open a way to understand history, power relations, etc. as agonistic, open-ended, and ultimately creative and even revolutionary in potential.

Limits of Critique, Introduction

 

Rita Felski, (2015) The Limits of Critique. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Summary of Introduction

Felski announces that she will be taking on critique as both mood (rhetorically speaking, and perhaps also as a stance of the author) and method, and reiterates Ricoeur's term, the "hermeneutics of suspicion,” from which so much of the present critique of critique (or “postcritique” as Felski would prefer) is framed. She identifies four key elements of critique:

1) a "spirit of skeptical questioning or outright condemnation";

2. an "emphasis on its precarious position vis-à-vis overbearing and oppressive social forces;”

3) "the claim to be engaged in some kind of radical intellectual and/or political work" and

4) "the assumption that whatever is not critical must therefore be uncritical" (4). She will presumably be tackling each of these in turn throughout the book.

At several points she makes statements which place her project on the side of what I call "opening up" critiques of critique, that is, the emphasis is not on disabling critique as a term or a practice, but on opening up space for other approaches in an academic context in which "critique" has become dominant and even mandatory. [Note: by resisting "critique" as a dominant force, she is employing element 3 of "critique," above, even while resisting tactic 4 (she allows that non-post-critical critiques can be [critical].)]

 She jousts with invisible and unnamed interlocutors who sometimes take the form of straw men (e.g. on page 9). She launches into a criticism of what she identifies as the "critique of critique:" namely, the critique of critique as normally done, that is is not sufficiently critical (9). She points out that this can involve a certain posturing ("To be sure, critique has its problems, but only because it has strayed from its true path as I define it" (8)). [Debord's denouncements of "spectacular critique" come to mind]. And she points out that this “critique of critique” means that critique is the cure for critique, which leads to an endlessness of critique – which I hope she will later discuss in terms of Foucault's concept of the "Blackmail of the Enlightenment," and yet also of his sense of critique as an ethical imperative. She ends with a mention of "receptivity" as a position that is distinct from the shielded and wary practice of critique: this struck me as strange, because I had been thinking specifically of openness and receptivity as inherent aspects of critique (based on the practice at SUVA: to practice critique you need to be open to, receptive of the work of art while also keeping some distance (much like Lefebvre's in-out stance); and to be receptive to critique, you have to be open to criticism, while also keeping yourself separate enough from your artwork so as to not feel hurt, etc.]

In general this book looks quite exciting and promises to greatly expand my understanding of the nuance and breadth of "post-critique." Nevertheless I am also more and more convinced that this really could be called a "critique of critique." Felski (and others) are clearly delimiting "critique" into a particularly narrow category (just like Latour did) and then insisting that what is outside of that (namely, what they are doing) is not "critique." They thus are performing the very same definition-based move that they are criticizing. [And Foucault’s comments on how Kant opened up a “gap” between “critique” and Aufklärung seem immediately relevant]. This is all, also, situated within disciplines like literary criticism, which Felski identifies as overly saturated with critique. Much like with Latour, there is a presumption that "critique" is solely the practice of academics, and just how or why such a concept or term could be important outside of academia remains unaddressed and perhaps not even considered (but she promises to address the politics of critique in chapter four).

In passing, I noted a number of uses of enchanted language involving "spirit," or "demon," used negatively as something that possesses "critics." A promising aspect is the discussion of "mood" or rhetoric, and alternative hermeneutics beyond "suspicion."