TELEMATCH

Hall, Stuart

I do think Gramsci's notions of politics are a starting point, maybe not a place to stay forever but he helps to think. Hall's notions had deep implication, especially in the contexts in which ethnicity and race were considered as false consciousness by more rigid marxists. One of the problems is that is difficult to evaluate which type of ideological struggles are in fact transformative, and of course the critique to ideology would be then important. It is a very tempting way of organizing the social world, but then there are all this movements that do not match. So if Foucault in a way would problematize what do we mean by consent and what is the work done for-by it, we would then have the post - colonial critiques, and still I do find Gramcsi important and in other level Hall proposing complex notions on identity which cannot be easily discharged. Even I get less interest in focusing only to the making of identities by looking to the processes of becoming and this semiological models of positioning, I do not think that only "undoing" identities is enough and productive and it have proven to be almost a cliche' (even if important)exercise. In other article Hall addresses the critiques to the notion of identity and he clarifies that what he proposes is to think about identity but form a and through its deconstructive and de-totalizing variants, form the gaps of meaning opened in it that allow the inversion of terms and the emergent of newness. He also proposes to think identity not form the point of agency as rational choice, but form the perspective of subject And of course i do think this is the way to go if we think of identities. Probably the question on whether there is a subject without identity does not make a lot of sense since Althusser's hey (or maybe yes). However to delimit the field of sociality and power as the articulation between processes of subjectification and discursive practices (and vice versa), is something that leaves a lot of opened questions especially in regards to practice and the body.

Hall, Stuart. 1996. "Gramsci's relevance for the study of race and ethnicity." Journal of Communication Inquiry 10: 5-27.
Hall argues that Gramsci makes very important contributions to thinking the field of the political as not just a superstructure of economical relations. Hall thus recognizes economy as a “horizon of possibilities” (13) rather than a field of determination. It is the domain of the state civil society which is central for understanding social reproduction. In this process hegemony is a central process involving not only economic dominance but mostly a cultural direction in all social fields. Hegemony is the direction of the general interest of a social formation with those of a dominant group, in a way in which the “collective will” but also the unspoken and taken for granted regulations of social interactions. Hegemony defines what is worth fighting for and also how in which terms that should be done. Its is the play of hegemony what defines the historical unfold of social relations rather than any deterministic line towards communism set by the development of forces of production. In sum for Hall following Gramsci there is no just a one way causality of change form economy to the social, political and ideological, but rather multiple reciprocal multiple causalities [what Althusser would call overdetermination]. Hall points to the fact that capitalism was not just developed equally but rather the way racism played a central role in the establishment of inequalities. Racisms as a practice and as a classificatory system are no just a reflection of the structure, but have to be understood as the particular historical process resulting form particular social configurations [conjunctures]. The question is not then what is preventing political articulation of a certain type or veiling a class consciousness but rather how politics are actually articulated in terms of class, race ethnicity. It is the type of alliances rather than the position in the economic structure what define the political field, in this racial and ethnic alliances are as significant as could be a class, however neither class nor race or ethnicity are given categories that should be made conscious, rather they are (conjunctural) possibilities of creating collective movement. The state power is then operating by the dual movements of coercion and consent, where the former is mostly only operated in the times of crisis, and is exercised more as a positive type of power (through for example education, communication) which shapes civil society. Coersion is thus reserved as an “armour” to shield hegemony bringing together state and civil society. Racist ideologies may be activated within institutional and civil society’s hegemonic struggles, it is not rare then to see that subordinated groups and ideologies define in terms of race after being subjected by racism. It is form this position that ideological struggles can be meaningful for certain groups and be articulated. These struggles can generate important transformations in the terms of hegemony, and thus reshape commonsensical ideas about race and ethnicity.

Kuper

) Kuper, Adam. (2003) “The Return of the Native.” Current Anthropology 44(3):389-402.
The author claims the dangers of the discourses of the indigenous movement as long as it reinforces notions of essentialism, primordiality and belonging that can exacerbate interethnic conflicts rather than fostering solidarity. He points to the fact that indigenous is articulated with meanings of primitivism, race and culture as correspondent terms, along with ideas of a belonging to a particular location, having a harmonic relation to their environments as a fundamental cultural value. He also points to the problem of showing the correspondence of indigenous populations with their pre-colonial ancestors and the ambiguity of making land claims on this basis. Primordiality or an essential belonging to land is an argument widely rejected by progressive academics when it is made by conservative groups rejecting in the face if immigration. He claims that either primordiality is an argument that should be criticized in all cases (and thus accepted as valid when conservatives use it) or either is a problematic political statement in any case. The same type of critique is applicable to the notion of biological continuity of indigenous people as pre-existing groups and the notions of racial purity and their consequent processes of discrimination, classification and event violent attempt of extermination what threaten a racial purity. Likewise the claims for collective and special rights both discriminate among individuals of different social groups as well as homogenise people within such group. In any case in postcolonial contexts marked by processes of interconnections between settlers and colonized, to support the distinction of natives and “new comers” and attributing the need of special rights to the former, especially when a particular relation to land as part of a hunter gather system is claimed, is problematic as long as it can only contribute to generating rivalries and inequalities between interdependent groups. Ultimately to think of social groups as indigenous is problematic as it can only stress political divisions among equally marginalized groups, and the establishment of even greater inequalities between ethnically different groups.

Li, Tania

4) Li Tania 2000 “Articulating Indigenous Identity in Indonesia: Resource Politics and the Tribal Slot” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42(1):149-179.
She wants to set an alternative approach on the understanding of indigenous identity articulation which does not collapse it in either a strategic esencialization and inventing a tradition in response to specific situations, or a type of false consciousness in which both indigenous identification and non identification represent a failure in recognizing a class condition. If indigeneity is nor an inevitable condition, not just an invention, but rather a positioning based on practices meanings and landscapes that arise as particular forms of struggle and engagement. “The conjunctures at which (some) people come to identify themselves as indigenous, realigning the ways they connect to the nation, the government, and their own, unique tribal place, are the contingent products of agency and the cultural and political work of articulation.”(4). She describes two cases in terms o “risks and opportunities each present, one in which people with worse economic conditions and less integrated to the nation so not weave any type of identity, while other group of peasant communities which are better off economically, with higher levels of education articulate an indigenous identity in particular in the context of fighting against the construction of a damn. While the “Lauje have not been provoked into articulating collective identities and associator defend their territory”, .
She takes Halls notion of double articulation o understand: how ideological elements come (or not come) together as a coherent unity in particular contexts, under certain conditions, to particular subjects. Articulation is never fixed and it permits to see both the internal processes of bringing together and the delimitation with other as arbitrary and contingent definition. How “ideology finds its subjects”, rather than how a subject thinks inevitably as a result of their class location or social position, and how this enables subjects to make sense of their historical experience and thus think ideology as empowerment. She takes Hall to address both the political and empirical dimensions of identity. The fixity of position is what makes meaning possible, at the same time they are limited to the socially available places of recognition socially provided. Identities are always about becoming, and not just invented, they are part of flows of meaning and power that transcends the temporary fixation, it transcends too the experience of individuals to focus constellations of shared or compatible interests, that mobilize collectives. The populations and landscapes are classified by the state (Indonesian) by simplifying and stereotyping frames, one of which she calls the “tribal slot” (taking Truillot’s savage slot), and are made available at a particular time-space not because of the qualities of a place-population, but following the negotiated regimes of representation. If the Indonesian state has no category to draw “ethnic” disctinctions, buts rather general “villagers” and “isolated people” which is the majority of rural landless population, the environmentalist NGO’s working in the forests, have instated in the category of indigenousness as a group with a particular and unique knowledge over the environment, and use the term masyarkat adat (isolated populations). In the history of Inedonesia it was the Dutch who played an important role in differentiating from loosely differentiated group.

mientras tanto

Manuel es un bonbon y Brenda lomas. Camila bella bella. Entrada para ellos.

Ramos

This is a good book which reflects a very close relation with the indigienist movement in Brasil in which the author does not loose her critical position. She is not hesitant to show multiple contradictions in the 20 years of indigenous politics, even though the case she is analysing makes it difficult to not consider the expansion of capitalists corporations as uncontrollable forces depredating resources and populations. If we contrast her work with Tsing we can criticize her homogenization of power which appears as a totally exterior, absolute and negative force. Her notion of the real and the imaginary or ideological (even though she does not use this concept) echoes a perspective which has been fairly criticized, as long as it sustains a notion of the reality and truth as an absolute domain separated and untouched by the "representations" of it. Among others constructivism has showed how much al versions of reality are socially constituted and are part of the real as are the "material" practices. Anyhow the last readings I done and commented are of course complicating this even further.

Ramos proposes to follow indigenism in Brasil as the complex process and ideas conveying the incorporation of indigenous people to the state and as citizens but also to the domain constituted in the multiple popular and dominant ways in which indigenous are imagined as a mirror projection of the “normal” non indigenous population. If indigenism has a commonality with the term “Orientalism” as a site of construction of a national, civilized western identity which only defines its others in negative terms in respect to the ideal civilized nationhood, it differs in that indigenous people coexist temporally and spatially within the nation state which defines them as an inferior other. Indigenism is also framed in the concrete interethnic political field: the conflicts with state administration, tensions between indigenous and settlers, and indigenous activism in itself. Her starting point are the main ways in which hegemonic notions have shaped the indigenous as different and inferior, by defining natives as children, heathen, nomads, savage, primitives which justified and legitimised state (and church) violent interventions, exclusionary practices, and land expropriation, even under the name of their own development. Her final chapter is of particular interest as she presents the way not only the state but also indigenist NGO’s have shaped a domain of indigenous politics dominated by western bureaucratic procedures which demand professionalization of activist groups and a predominance of managerial employees. The bureaucratization of politics has effected the constitution of an image of an “hyperreal” Indian, which under the demands of effective management of projects, have replaced the real people which these NGO’s represent. In this movement the complexities and contradictions of dealing with real people are displaced in a increasing separation of the field of indigenous politics form indigenous communities in themselves. If in the course of her work she points to the ways brasialian state has attempted to both incorporate indigenous population and lands to their sovereignty (especially the advancement of economic exploitation of the Amazon) her works show how this attempts constantly failed in recognizing indigenous people capacities in shaping their incorporation to the state, the complexities and contradictory positions of each group. However this failure was also in the possibility to erase their cultural systems

indigeneity

just a small entry to comment how hard i am finding to get the readings of indigeneity to be of interest. as I have done, i do think that using stuart halls ideas to think about indigenous difference is interesting, as do for example tania li. i am finding hard to follow in any case the debates that either reify indigenous identity politics as an example of resistance or on the contrary point to the problems and risks of making specific articulations that do not succeed in connecting beyond local - specific conjunctures. of course both positions have a point, but i do think they are both intellectually and politically problematic. i think in any case, the celebration or the critique is hard to make a judgement of the mechanisms and effects of those articulations, and get beyond the conjunctures that provoke a particular configurations. politically it is both problematic to engage in celebration without critique and as it is to propose that a particular engagement and connectivity is not enough. i guess is not enough for our desires of indigenous transforming the world? i do think, (as holoway said recently) that opening cracks is always a start and always necessary and of course to keep being critical about what is done with that. i find the indigeneity-anthropology relation so entangled is hard to get out.
a much more interesting debate is worked in the Geaprona building on the concept of aboriginality and connected to Gorssberg, but i only now realize this (and of course i access to the sources) by seing the context of the debate. so the notes on ethnicity and indigeneity are getting to be drawn in a regular notebook.

Tsing, Friction

Here an annotation form last year, I am going back to one of my favorite the books. It is still intriguing to me how to become Ana Tsing and write like her. Probably there is no way, as she seems to be exploring all the time and letting herself be taken by surprise in order to make connections. Maybe the only problem is exactly this, that she sometimes diverges from one topic to other and it is not so clear how she connects them and brings them back, there is no a "conclusion". This can be a actual contribution, but it also makes it difficult to work with this messiness she brilliantly presents.

Anna Tsing presents us a challenging picture: how to understand globalization through the tradition of ethnographic work, which has traditionally been local? And the answer is not by just connecting the global and the local as oppositional forces, as the current tendency on anthropological research on globalization tends to claim. The local is not just the site of the particular, opposing a universal force of expanding capital, which abstracts resources, social relations and culture under the homogenizing force. Capitalism and the global are the particular, conjunctural articulations of different, contradictory interest that meet: the Suharto family governing Indonesia and Canadian and American capitals.
Articulation, we also have this concept coming into play again. One which first appeared as operational to talk mainly about the power of subaltern is now brought to think about the power of capital. This Power -with capital letters- seemed not to need any type articulation because it was presented as absolute and universal. Here “articulating capitalism” is pointing to take a new direction. Capitalist power is also conjunctural, as Mitchell had shown, it takes different form in different social formations, it crates differential effects. Capital does not just flow it needs but crates friction.
Friction refers not only to the oppositional forces of domination and contestation, but the condition (and the limits) of possibility of production of power. Friction makes it possible for capital to expand: the particular grip that makes it possible for a particular corporation to get its way with a particular government that creates the conditions to make resources, new types of labor relations and concentrate value through exploitation in Indonesian forests a particular location in which people do not just “receive” globalizing forces but also shapes the conditions of their participation of forest exploitation.
Yet her focus is not only capital but rather the environmental movement. She explores the way a environmentalist discourse, identity and practice is built as a political force in Indonesia as one capable of overthroughing a government. Far form constituting an unique articulate (in the double sense of a chain of meaning made part of the same logic in contingency, and a a way of presentation of this –conjuncturaly- constituted group ) identification of political interest and positioning, the environmental movement is made in the tension between a specific local and a particular global, that works through the bringing together diverse perspectives. What does bring this people together? Multiple and particular historical conditions that make the production of care for the environment (nature that has to be protected) as a position of allowing people do differential things as they shape themselves as political subjects, and creates affect.
Why is affect, feeling and sensorial experience important? I think this is one of the most interesting dimensions of the book. It helps to understand the anesthetics making possible for people to immerse in relations of exploitation and violence. It is at the same time effected and a mean of creation of power, it permits to understand the acceptance of the creation of the social space of the frontier. Affect is also the way environmentalism as a discourse and practice “finds its subjects” (In Stuart Hall’s terms). Ana Tsing show us that affect and power are not abstract vectors of energy, but they, (as physical forces do) have to deal with the stickiness of the surface they encounter. This stickiness creates a friction that can divert the directionality and even light a fire.

que bueno el carnaval

mas toba, me cuantan que es furor en la dispora boliviana tambien, pablo hoy intentaba explicarme y nos preguntabamos si hay alguna relacion con los tobas en si o no.

en fin

documental tobas rosario

Un contraste campo-ciudad.

danza tobas bolivia

Proposal

Still some way to go with mobilities, but I sense I got somewhere. So back to the dilemma: identities - articulation- positionings - alterities - hierarchical systems of difference - subalternity - marginality - the trajectory from which positioning emerges. I've been stuck with probably the first line of my proposal: "The research examines three major theoretical issues: 1) the way systems of difference create and even constitute social inequalities by defining “normal citizens” and the “others”; 2) how places are the concrete sphere in which social tensions are produced and negotiated; and 3) how spatial mobility challenges state discipline and social control."

Maybe:
1) What if I dont look at the systems so much? I know we've been examining the conformation of the grids and the making of trajectories circulating the grids (geaprona), so it was not just about how to locate people in the grid but how both were produced. Massumi then is not totaly "discovering" sth none , but still we have a point it would be trajectories that lead to subject positions and the re-creation of the grid -the matrix-, but how see this trajectories? "other" forms of politics?
2) mmm probably i should say: how are places produced (lefebvre) as unstable detentions of movement, the location of temporary an "accidental" encounters, that produce an "through-together-ness", contemporaneous coexistence of difference (massey)
3) how is movement unfold, is there transformation during the translations inbetween places? what does happen to people when - while they move? what effects do trips have in the configurations of space? in which way are movements part of the spatiality of capitalism and how much do they exceed the capitals flow (people, money, commodities)?

Control

Bueno si, hay que leer mas alla de dsicipline, y "Postscript on the Societies of Control", ayuda a pensar un poder aun mas difuso, que controla sin encarcerar, divide al individuo (aca las ideas obas de los limites difusos del cuerpo pueden darnos ideas de que hacer con cuerpos que se fragmentan y extienden), es flexible y se transforma a si mismo (como el codigo de esto habla Bauman con su series liquidas calculo). mmmm si lo cruzo con nomadology el poder de este etsado como aparato que captura al enegia del nomade, la captura aca no fija. Bssssss entonces tendría que pensar los movimientos como productores de espacios heterogeneos y lisos, pero tambien dentro de un control que los sigue. El tema aca es que este control que permite accesos con contraseñas no necesariamente da contraseñas a los tobas, aunque no este nunca por fuera del control tendria que ver etnograficamente donde aparece en el movimiento.

Basta, a otros textos ahora.

hal

9:23:56 PM Ana: pero es un sistema cerrado que muta
9:24:05 PM Ana: o muta en otras cosas con la gente que se mete
9:24:07 PM Ana: ?
9:24:23 PM X: depende de que consideres mutar
9:24:31 PM X.: el codigo se reescribe a si mismo
9:24:38 PM X.: para no ser detactado por virus
9:24:42 PM X.: en los clientes
9:24:49 PM X.: la idea es que siemrpe hace copias exactas de si mismo
9:25:08 PM X.: pero si hubiera errores de copiado (una modificacion mas o menos facil de hacer)
9:25:23 PM X.: no hay ningun motivo por el cual el software no empesara a evolucojnar solo
9:25:34 PM X.: todas sus interfaces con el mundo son programables
9:25:52 PM x.: mientras el software sepa que hacer ante cualquier posible estado del mundo en sus sensores de input
9:26:09 PM X.: los outputs siempre tienen una respuesta optima para que se esparsa...
9:26:27 PM X.: asi que si, si no estabas ya en el optimo puede que mutes y divergas
9:26:33 PM Ana: guau
9:26:43 PM Ana: o sea que open the door please hall
9:26:51 PM X.: claro
9:26:56 PM Ana: es posta
9:27:02 PM X.: es peor
9:27:07 PM Ana: guau me moto lo del codigo
9:27:08 PM X: por que no fue que vos creaste un hal
9:27:16 PM X.: vos creaste cualquier otra cosa
9:27:21 PM X.: seguramente cuando ocurra
9:27:42 PM X: se que creaste una forma de distrbuir videos de chicas
9:37:40 PM X: pero tambien hay unso teoremas basntate interesantes de los 30
9:37:54 PM X: que nos demuestran que muchos sistemas pueden eejcutar codigos como si fueran una computadora
9:38:07 PM X.: de echo todo lo que una computadora puede decicdir estos sistemas tambien lo pueden hacer
9:38:33 PM X.: el codigo es la ejecucion
9:38:39 PM X.: de un set de reglas a un swt de inputs
9:38:44 PM X.: para obtener algun set de outputs
9:38:57 PM X.: rezar de distinta manera segun que es lo que ocurre en el mundo
9:39:11 PM X.: y tomar distantas deicciones en base a lo que nos parece escuchar en esos rezos
9:39:40 PM X.: si mutamo que rezamos y dejamos que los que mejor son en esparsir sus resos los demas tambien lso adopten
9:40:59 PM X.: podrias tener el mismo tipo de effecto "habre la puerta Hal" pero con una religion (o alguna otra instituticion humana)
9:41:17 PM X.: el sistema postal ingles por ejemplo
9:41:28 PM X.: tiene esa propiedad que te contaba antes de turing completeness
9:42:08 PM Ana: bss pero entnces cual es el trabajo que hace eso mutacion?
9:43:05 PM X.: que omo rezamos cambia
9:43:26 PM X.: localmente y despues hay reglas dentro de la iglesia para decidir si tomar o no la mutacion
9:43:34 PM X.: en el caso del programa en internet
9:43:50 PM X: cambia todo el tiempo el contenido de los mensajes para poder pasar las barreras de spam de google y compania
9:44:05 PM X.: muta su propio codigo en los clientes que son pcs hackeadas (que son miles y miles)
9:44:10 PM X: (actuando como una)
9:44:17 PM X.: practicamente todo lo que hace muta
9:44:47 PM X: menos el negocio en el que esta (vender spam, comprar el tiempo de tipos acambio de porno)
9:45:44 PM Ana : si en las maquinas lo veo
9:46:08 PM Ana : en los rezos
9:46:11 PM Ana : no tanto
9:46:19 PM X: imaginate a la biblia como el codigo fuente
9:46:28 PM X: el programa ejecutando toma la forma de la iglesia
9:46:46 PM X.: pero a medida que el mundo cambia alrededor de la misma
9:46:55 PM X.: el libro especifica como hacer la reinterpretasion
9:47:20 PM X.: pero aun en ritos mucho mas minimos del la religion
9:47:32 PM X.: un proceso evolucionario parecido podria ocurrir
9:47:40 PM X.: no?
9:47:56 PM Ana: m
9:48:04 PM Ana: si ahora si creo que lo entiendo

Massumi, Introduction

Massumi, Brian. 2002 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. (Selections)

This is an atempt to follow Massumi by making detailed notes, just the introduction here. It seems now that he is not so so arrogant, (or maybe yes, but at least the intro is no so bad and he is making an effort to communicate with mortals other than his 6 friends who made the same studying he did). Anyhow I do like the text and it is very helpful, both his critique to the notion of positioning, the construction of the subject and the girds which I used a lot, for my work so far. sometimes he seems to be talking directly with Grossberg even he doesn't mention him. He talks about dimensions, especially body and movement that seem relevant but I can't think so clearly through other authors, here as in nomad which I am reading in parallel, movement is not only structured mobilities across a grid in with subjects become more or less empowered. Following Lefebvre simplistic reading here mobility o not only a social production of a grid, but is what comes before that. I guess I am geting to my initial question on wether I am studying mobility because the toba move, and that is just a consequence of something else (poverty, violence, etc etc) or is it that toba movements are interesting as a form of non so structured mobilities and non so "invested" movements of affects in a "temporary home" - place. So Grossberg is important for me still but considering this too i guess.
So cirtiques to this introduction (and goes fo rthe rest of the book) is that the "examples" Massumi analyses seem to be falling into very individual - neurological processes. So even I agree neurofisiology puts some philosofical questions back into consideration (specially if we are interested in a material analysis), Massumi seems to be ably to think only in "his" experience of self perception of his body moving in buildings and the physiological movements before thought. i wonder how can we make an analysis of movement- body affect in a way that can bring more the collectivity than the exploration of inner individual phenomenon. He does not seem to be interested in analysing political social problems, even he does not say he will, he could consider more interpersonal and contradictory events, and put into play his idea that categorizations emerge form process of becoming. I would be very interested in for example an analysis of the emergence of race as a marker as defining a "field" of potentialities the intensities that race unfolds in the body of the "colonized", just to mentio.n

Introduction
The two central attributes of the body are movement and feeling as interconnected matters. Feeling and movement as interconnected matters imply constant qualitative differences, as any displacement will generate a new sensation. Sensations fold into one another generating qualitative shifts and unolding into action sometimes. All this having unpredictable outcomes. He states his whole purpose is to understande the implications of body (sensation-movement)-change.

He is proposing this against the notion of everyday as a site of reproduction, culture as a mediation between matter and systemic change, revolt is what matters. But then this proposed mediation, and the absence of revolt take us to the everyday as a site of resistance and subversion, reading against ideology. Here the body is central but is a discursive Body (cfr Butler): going away form the naivity of phenomenology it presents a subject without a subject, constructed by external mechanisms. To explain the local cultural differences within a social structure, the concept of positionality is developed, and coding as a positioning on a grid (Ok here is where I am with Grossberg). Then the body is defined by overlapping codified terms (female, black, straight, etc) and is thus mapped into a cultural geography, that texturizes the homgeneizing implications of thinking in terms of “ideology”. He critiques whether if the coding itself isn’t in constant change, how can the body get out of the definitional framework, that structures is subjectivity and the field of possibilities (Foucault, Grossberg). “The idea of possitionality begins by substracting movement out f the picture. This catches the body in a cultural freeze – frame…. When positioning of any kind come determining first, movement come problematic second….a body occupying a position in the grid can succed in making a move to occupy another position. But this doesn’t change the fact that what defines the body is not the movement itself, only its beginning and end points. Movement is subordinated to the positions it connects. The very notion of movement as qualitative transformation is lacking. There is displacement but not transformation. The gaps between positions on the grid, falls into a theoretical nobodies land” (3,4). If there is qualitative movement there is sensing as much as there is signification. In this materialist approaches matter can only be mediated He aims has been: “to put back matter unmediately into cultural materialism”.

Movement “When a body is in motion it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its transtion: its own variation. In motion a boy is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own transition: its own variation. The range of variation it can be implicated in not present in any given movement, much less in any position it passes through. In motion a body is in a immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary.” (4) This is at the same time real and abstract. This is abstract but unmediated and doesn’t preexist, means: “never present in position only ever in passing” (5). There are then non ideological mechanisms of power. The body is always indeterminate. To think the body in movement means to accept that there is something incorporeal about it, this is concrete and real, but in a different way: it is real, material but incorporeal. So this is part of a same problem, the bodies capacity to vary is implicated in the body as variable (as different as a positioned subject). The problem of theory then is that ·is not abstract enough to grasp the real incorporeality of the concrete.” The paradox of Zeno can be understood as the arrow is never in one point of the infinite points separating departure from destiny, but the arrow is in passage through all infinite points. The arrow – body is only positioned when it stops. When we think of space as extensive (measurable, composed of points) we are stoping it, we are only thinking of one dimension of it. A thing is only stable when it isn’t “doing” anything, when it is stoped. All things are then only in state of becoming, even nature.
Following Bergson, then postion comes only after movement, it is an effect of it, derivated. If position is emergent form movement, this displaces the binary between metaphore (figurative) and metonime (linear). Then the concept of field is useful to think fo continuity and heterogeneity. Is not enough for process concepts to be ontological but they have to be ontogenetic. The social implications are that processual indeterminancy come before the andy social contruction. But then grids become part of the process from which they arose. But following Simondon, there is no presocial field that culture then shapes, but rather it is priroly social, “pure” sociality without boundaries.
Possibility is back fold of potential’s unfolding. Possibilities “delineate a region of nominally defining variation –regulated variation-. Potential is the immanence of a thing to is still indetermined variation, under way. Once the grid and the position have emerged form the process they refide the process by re-conditioning, they define norms and parameters o history. The path is only in retrospection, if a movement recurs it can be captured. “Retroduction” is the capture of a dynamic unity, is a feedback, and a production of a process of new quality. Space is a retroduction [is he talking of abstract- geometric space?]. Habit is an interesting point as it is both regulated and learned as it is inscribed automatised in the body. Gender, race, orientation are logical categories that feed back ino and transform the reality they describe. He proposes a productionism as a method to give account of the emergence, to invent as adding to reality as a method. Concepts of the indeterminancy of becoming have an important role to play, paradoxes are good tools.
Sensation is always doubling, a feeling of feeling. Is and echo that needs distance for multiplying itself but never becomes discontinuous. Is a complex self continuity. He uses intensity to describe this, a qualitative self transfomation of distance into an immediacy of self relation. Intensity is experience , is the in-betweenes of distance to self relation, is the incorporeal dimension of the body. In this moment the materiality of the body becomes an event, this is not a subject yet is a self- relating. Then sensation, perception and memory are part of a same circle, [he will bring to this the half – second between the body sensing sth and the brain receiving the notice of it, thus perception as a memory]. Sensation of sensation has not a form but has a direction, a tendency. Thus to describe the body is to think its relations of movement and rest, its capacity to affect and be affected (Spinoza).
Affect is what comes after sensation, perception and memory. A relation between movement and rest is transition, can weave together movement, tendency and intensity.
He proposes as a method a radical empirism, what connects experiences has to be a experienced relations, has to connect a infra-empirical of the non conscious perception and the supraempirical given by the multiplicity of potential variations. He proposes the use of “exemplary” method, one in which a case stands for all of its type but as a singularity is included in them. An example as a singularity that stands for all. [this sounds a lot like Durkheim, indepth case study stands for understanding others more than inductive addition]. Every detail is relevant.

A More relaxed Massumi

More Foucault

I am posting some notes form last year. I find these texts as more subtle than discipline and punish, they "complete" his ideas and in a way they are more useful to think my interests.

Commentary on Governmentality, Biopolitics, and Modern Power (week 2)
Student: Ana Vivaldi
In his work The Subject and Power Michelle Foucault (2000) states that the objective of his intellectual work has been to understand the way individual are made as subjects. His interest is to understand the emergence of modernity as a new type of power that makes subjects as we are - understand them today. He distinguishes different moments in his work (and this clarification was deeply useful for me to link the different ideas in the different works). One in which he concentrates in the type of knowledge that objectivizes the subjects as their object of inquiry. The other, deals with the making of systems of difference that separates the individual in itself and with others. A third focus in the way people shape themselves as subjects. He is interested in which ways of confrontation to this power exist today as well, even confrontation cannot be thought but inside power which creates the condition of the existence of resistance. Power is deeply linked to the making of subjects, yet as he emphatically clarifies, is not the focus of his analysis. His interest is to understand how, why and where does power (or powers) operate and how the modern subject is made through relations of power. Power for Foucault is a relation, it is how action that conducts action in a certain direction and with certain effects. What can be known about power is not just the effects of it but also where it is operating (which point, in Scott’s 1995 terms), and which space or field of it operation. Other fundamental concept in his work is that of the shaping of differential political rationalities, that shape the types of power relations of particular historical moments as they are the result of them. Modern power sets a new type of relations, a new type of subject, new techniques for the making of subject, new possibilities for those subjects. In the articles on Right of death and Power Over Life the author discusses the way the modern rationality arose as a specific way exercise of power, one which simultaneously disciplines the body through specific politics (body politics), and a biopolitics which is exercised over population (and the making of population as an object of politics is crucial for modernity). In both cases the point of operation of power is over life, in contrary to the power over death in feudal system. The way a collective and individual subject is simultaneously created is through the mechanisms of control divide him form others (individualization) and that are internalized. At the same time the collective body is the result of the making of a population conducted by new different type of knowledge that reaches every individual, this is the rol of medicine, demography among others. Then the key concept for understanding modernity comes into play, the concept of governmentality. I leave this concept (even central for the class) to the end of this commentary as Foucault does not write about it, but he presents it in a lecture. I understand it as outcome of his line of thinking. Governmentality appears in western thinking as the art of governing things, breaking previous notion that the sovereign is the one to govern, governmentality expand the domains of disposing thing in a way so as people behave in a certain way, by their own initiative, now including self and familiar government. Governmentality is putting and emphases on the organization and over the direction of free subjects (a condition for modern society and for governmentality to exist), rather than in the direct control of the people’s life and over territory (that constitute sovereignty). It implies the production of new type of knowledge saviors for governing population (that of political economy, for instance). Government (and the savoir which makes it possible) is extensive as it covers the totality of the population but is also deep as it reaches the individual in its peculiarities. Even the emphasis on different types of power: sovereign, disciplinarian and governmental prevail in different moments (form feudal society to modern one), they reorganize in modernity interacting together over population. The development of apparatuses (of security in a first place) for reaching the collective and individual subject is the result of this new power configuration (but not the opposite, power is not the result of apparatuses).

I have general thoughts on the readings. The notions developed by Foucault help us to understand us a general structure of how people we are working with are modern subjects, here the post colonial thinking will build by adding multiplicity, the many possible modernities and outside modernities that result form this. It helps us understand not only how power constrains us but also how it positively shapes our action, desire, thoughts and will. The body is thus a fundamental point of action of power. I cannot but start thinking how people in a “Toba” neighborhood Northern Argentina are obsessively shaped as subjects through multiple agencies. Just to mention the health agency that intends to direct their reproduction, sanitary habits, nutrition, illness. The neighborhood and its population is thought as an infectious focus. But going back to a general level I guess governmentality help us to understand why and how and where and the political rationality of what we call development. The question of course is if there is a "someone" benefiting form development, or are we just entangled in this net. If power is a relation it is more clear how the subject becomes subjectified - in its double meaning- , but then what is it exactly to be more in control of the disciplining and governmental process? Development is the word for this new type of power that disposes people and things in order that people want to do what power -others peoples’ actions direct them to. Desire your -and others- subjection!

Young, Iris Marion

Me quedo en las notas y no lo habia subido ....

Young, I.M. 1990 Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

She proposes that there is a particular modality in how women move and use space in contemporary western societies, even though there are many differences in practice. For this she takes both Merleau Ponty’s ideas on the importance of bodily motion as a way of enacting volition and in the perception of the world, and Simon De Bouvoir’s ideas on the way women become attached to the immanence in patriarchal systems which restricts their capability of acting as free subjects. She describes the women motility as exhibiting and ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality and a discontinuous unity with the environment. She points to the fact that women generally lack the self confidence needed to perform an activity, which generally results in having less practice and less ability than men. Women also are taught to be afraid of being hurt, or doing something shameful, and thus become defensive and self conscious. She sees the objectification of women’s bodies as a source of this insecurity, which is in tension with the self perception of her bodily capacities. Ambiguos transcendence because, following Merleau Ponty transcendence is located in the body’s interaction with the world “the lived body as a transcendence is pure fluid action the continuous calling forth of capacities that are applied to the world” (148), the active dimension of this transcendence is what in feminie motility becomes ambiguous as women is tied to the immanence of her body as object. Inhibited intentionality because rather than realizing intentionality through motility they predetermined as incapable (I cannot) “the body’s capacity and action structure its surroundings and project meaningful possibilities of movement and action which in turn call the body’s motion forth” (149) but in women when the whole body has to be involved there is a contradiction between the volition and a stiffness deriving from the inhibited intentionality. It has a discontinuous unity with the environment as long as it cannot totally succeed in projecting volition towards and end through her body, and thus unite herself with surrounding, rather that becoming a subject through body movement (and not in-itself) she is an object of the motion acted upon , is self-referred because of the doubt of her own capacities, and because she is self conscious of an external (masculine) gaze (which further enhances distance from the own body). If the lived space is a result o body motility and the interactions this motility makes possible, feminine experience space as enclosed, as having a dual structure (space continuity between the here and there or what can be reached is experienced partitioned, “there” is available to others but not to women), and in which women are positioned. “Feminine spatiality is contradictory insofar as feminine body existence is both spatially constituted and constituting spatial subject.” (152) As long as feminine motility is self refered and constrained, it thus exists in space (and not through). As she is constrained, loked and acted upon, her motility becomes defensive of her space. All this is thus related with the situation of women in a patriarchal system and to the way they become socialized in it.

butler

Bueno esta era una deuda tambien de comentarios que recibi a mi tesis y nunca abordé. Creo que podría pnsar en identidades en relacion a lo que plantea butler, se podría pnsar que tipor de repeticion esta operando en marcar y volver a marcar a los indigenas como indigenas, o incluso como indigenas a medias por estar traslocados, algo que tambien podrá pensarse en relacion al genero, y cruzando a massey, que plantea la migracion como forma de escape para as mujeres del poder patraircal. No abre muchas opsiones para pensar como es que lo abyecto puede irrumpir en discursos dominantes sin plantear una reclasificación una variacion en la norma. en un punto me parece bastante althseriana butler, aunque traiga variaciones al "hey you". Bueno en esto tambien todos los estudios de medios vienen a complicar bastante el espacio que media entre la repeticion de la norma y su recepcion, y como influencia el modo en que la norma se trasmite, si tiene fondo rosado o musica piola. Todo esto me parece bien interesante, pero seguramente lo que mas me preocupa es que la norma sea discursiva y en esto me parece que me sigo quedando con bourdieu y la practica. si me parece importante salirse del discurso, , quizas se puede introducir el tema de la repticion, que es algo que bourdieu menciona y lo ineaxacto de cada repeticion (que tambien lo plantea bourdieu, aunque muchas veces lo leen como esructuralista). Pienso: como funcionaria el tema de la citacion y el habitus mmm y no se si podemos compara la relacion habitus-practica con repeticion discursiva - citacionalidad de la norma ..... lo pienso un rato





Butler, Judith. 1993 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York & London: Routledge. (Selections: Introduction)
She wants to examine the construction of the gendered bodies in their materiality, yet this took constantly to spheres outside the body bodies are not simple objects of thought, and these “movements beyond themselves seemed to be kite central to what bodies ‘are’” If she has previously claimed that gender is produced in a performative this does not mean that the perfomativity is a free election of a rational subject, this is, an instrumentalist view. Such notion does not consider that a subject exists as a gendered one. If we propose that gender is constructed but not totally determined her question is: “ How are we going to understand the ritualized repetition by which such norms produce and stabilize not only the effects pf gender but the materiality of sex?” (x) To consider that sex its materiality is constructed through repetition of norms goes against the dominant notions of construction, that consider construction as something artificial, secondary, dispensable. If we consider this constituent constraint we can ask how much constraints produce intelligible bodies but also a domain of unthinkable abject bodies. “It is not enough to argue that there is no pre-discursive “sex” that acts as the stable point for the reference that on which or in relation to which the cultural construction of gender proceeds. ” To say that sexual difference is a material difference but that is always already marked by discourse. The category of sex is form the start regulatory, it both functions as a norm and produces the bodies it governs. Sex is an ideal concept that materializes through time by the reiteration of the norm. This materialization is never complete and the repetition is a sign of that
“bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled. It is in the instabilities, the possibilities of rematerialization, opened up by this process that mark the domain by which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question he hegemonic force of that very regulatory law… In these performativity must be understood not as a singular “act” but as a the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names… the regulatory norms of work in a performative fashion… to materialize the body’s sex… in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative…. Materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive effect. Sex will be one of the norms by which one becomes viable at all that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility. ” (2) The sexed subject constitutes itself by a repudiation that produce s a field of abjection, the outside of the subject and the body but that is always inside it [cfr Grosz]. This abjection is always threatening the construction of the sexed subject, however is not just threatening a norm which constantly fails, but rather remains as a “critical resource in the struggle to rearticulate the very terms of symbolic legitimacy and intelligibility.” (3) In this it is desidentification with political discourse on identities what can mobilize contestation and turn to reconceptualize which bodies matter and which are yet to emerge as matters of concern.

[I agree with this so far and I do think it is an important step to take, it is a way of approaching to construction, which refines our view. My critique may sound simplistic but the problem all this is the emphasis on discourse and my question here is how to approach this without restrincting the acts to discoursive practice. If we are going to consider that bodies in a way are kind of rebellious mediums for discourses to be actualized, then what about all other domains, what about the already there organization of the social world tat shape bodies and practice in a silent way, what about objects, ideas, images other people that shape us by pushing, intervening, making us connect or think in a certain way. What about the disoursive as a filed of contestation, in this perspectives it seems that the discourse is mostly the field of power and the outside of the discourse, the abject is always non discoursive, (maybe) closer to matter, and is what it escapes from discourse. The point is not so much about a discourse being more abstract than “matter” but rater how to consider discourse as a materiality but part of other materialities.]

foucault

Me quedé un poco atascada con los filosofos, pero me hicieron pensar bastante y me dieron ganas de quedarme aca atascada más tiempo. Tengo para fichar el texto de siempre de Foucault (que lei por primera vez en el 94, me partió la cabeza y me hizo decidir ir a las ciencias sociales), que releí con varias preguntas que todavía no resulevo. Todavía creoq ue no llego a entender todo lo que implica su trabajo, que tendría que leer en casi su totalidad por que en cada trabajo agrega dimensiones de comlejidad a lo anterior.

Bueno la pregunta basica es que es exactamente el poder para Foucault, algo se puede exlpicar describiendo como funciona pero se sigue escapando. Entiendo que hace criticas utiles al marxismo, entiendo tambienq que su conceptualizacion va variando y eque en definitiva le intereza mas la contruccion de sujetos que el poder en si. Poder es una relacion que solo por momentos es dominio (poder soverano), es controlar la conducta a traves de tecnologías especificas (disciplina, aunque esto pierde su centralidad despues), es tambien etrategias para influir la conducta de otros y es formas de administrar la relacion entre personas y objetos (governmentalidad). TAmbien entiendo que no son las instituciones las que necesariamente crean el poder sino que ellas mismas son efctos de nuevas formas de poder. En esto el estado es "govermentalizado" junto a otras instituciones que lo son tambien y no es tanto que el estado desarrolla una forma "govermental" de gobierno.

La relacion entre poder y valor es algo que no resuelvo, por que no habla de valor pero si esta ahi, en la busqueda de eficaia y sumatoria de fuerzas del poder disciplinario en un nivel y a la vez tambien en el cultivo del self hay una critica a la produccion de valor a partir de la ética. También diluye el tema poder - clase o grupo social, por que el poder ahora se reticula y disfunde, sin embargo el poder es efecto de formas de diferenciacion social como lo plantea en alguna parte de la historia de la sexualidad. si el poder no es (o no es tan solo) una relacion de apropiacion de formas de valor por parte de un grupo, aunque si es importante su eficacia para generar formas de valor. En esta linea al relacion poder estado se vuelve bastante mas compleja, si bien algunas lecturas de vigilar y castigar le critican borronear al estado, todo su trabajo posterior muestra que nunca dejo de interesarle.

Quizas lo que plantea no es tanto quien controla el estado, (aunque esta sería una pregunta que sigue siendo relevante -pienso yo) sino de que modo esta operando y cuales son los puntos de aplicacion de su poder: la vida -cuerpos y sus conductas-, una poblacion creada como tal bajo formas de normalizacion. De todas formas se me escapa muchas veces como seguir pensando en estos terminos cuando hay conflictos abiertos con "el estado" que a la vez parecieran reforzar su entidad y planetar que algunos de os mecanismos que propone todavia son objeto de disputa. Estoy pensando mas que nada en la presencia constante del estado para los tobas. Es decir que si bien la dimencion de estado como conjunto de maquinarias disciplinadoras y administradoras de la conducta esta bien presente, tambien hay un uso de lo legal como arena politica. Aca estoy pensando en la "juridizacion de lo indigena" pero tambien en las elcciones y el clientelismo como aparato montado sobre ese sistema , que no es algo que se pueda entender solamente en los terminos que plantea Foucault. Claro la llegada de la "gobernabilidad" si abre varios caminos para pensar en relacion a esto pero el modo en que "el estado" se concretiza en las disputas me parece algo dificil de conjugar con las ideas mas difusas. En mi trabajo me slata siempre la contradiccion entre dirigentes (tobas) interesados en controlar y llegar a acceder al estado, las fuertes criticas que le hacen y los modos mas difusos en los que se intentan escapar o aprovechan su posicion al "margen". Bueno me meti en un meollo aca y nunca se bien como salir.

En todo esto me parece que las criticas que se le hacen a foucault de no definir "quien controla el poder", apuntan justamente a simplificar al desafio que propone, si bien claro que F. marca jerarquias y desigualdades. Es decir que algunos estan en mayores condiciones de efectuar poder que otros, si bien ellos mismos no son soberanos absolutos de sus acciones (moore). La critica de que subjetiviza al poder como fuerza con casi una "vountad" propia tambien parece errada por que no es una fuerza "en si", sino que sus formas surgen de coyunturas sociales (esto creo hace eco de niezteche y la inversion de lo bueno en malo como nueva forma de poder) y sus puntos de aplicacion son sujetos, que realidad devienen sujetos como resultado de esta acción. Bueno creo que todo esto es una mezcla de cosas que trabaje el año pasado. Aca las notas.

Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Alan Sheridan trans. NY: Vintage Books. (Selections Chapter 2 and 3)

Foucault points to the fact that detention is not just fisical deprivation of libert but a technical project. This can be seen in the transition form public executions to imprisonment. If the type of punishment under the monarchy was that of the public torture, in which the iolence that a person was supposed to have created to the body of the sovereign was directed back to him in a theatre of torture (as law was considered an extension of the sovereign body the punishment was directing violence back to the body of the offender. However these displays provided public demonstrations of both rage and sympathy towards the convict, its body became an arena of contestation between sovereign and the masses.

Reformists proposed that the punishment of the sovereign was uncontrolled and uneven, thus they argued for a more evenly distributed and controlled power to punish within state administration. Foucault claims that it is less an equalitarian humanitarism, and more the development of a technological project related to the production of new forms of (modern bourgeois) power in which the control is made less visible and more effective “by bringing [punishment] under the veil of administrative decency.” (263) These changes are not made by a conscious desition form a position of centrality, but are rather how a new form is created form contingent and small shifts resulting form different purposes (a notion of transition implied in the genealogic model). The spectacle o public punishment is transformed into a disciplinatory glance. This shift is important because this new form of punishment is a model of control of society in general.

Discipline is a mechanism for altering individual behaviour and enhancing the possibilities of making a number of individuals act in a certain way, with less cost of energy and violence. It is based on a series of techniques of control which produces bodies as the object of knowledge. These techniques are hirarchical observation, evaluation and measurement, and normative judgement of conduct. These technologies make use of particular configuration of space as necessary element of their functioning. This new form of control punishes for the first time, the absence of action as well as deviant actions. Normalization thus does not point to an action as its point of operation but by classifying a person into normal or abnormal, subjecting the second to a series of normalyzing dispositives. Thus the excessive force of the sovereign is transformed into the technology of discipline that created individual docile bodies and enabled them to perform a series of duties required by the modern organizations. However discipline is not just functional to the economy but to a more effective and reticulated form of power, which has subjects as its effects. Modern subjects are made as individual cellular components under constant invigilation which do not have contact to the other, but whose forces are combined in an additive process, whose movements have been organically internalized and thus unmediated by reason, and whose processes of change are monitored. If the institutions claim to be egualitarian the discourses they deploy construct uneven power relations. Discipline is not just directed to “subordinate” subjects but applied as a positive constitution of upper classes that differentiates form others by enclosing and disciplining the body.

He understands then the deployment of the body as a way of controlling populations by creating a particular area of power-knowledge institutionalized in medicine, epidemics, pedagogy and psychiatry, among others. The theoretical ideas of Michael Foucault brought into discussion the way power is not only a series of constrictions and directions given to individuals to socialize them, but is also a creative energy which produces individuality, sexuality (a discourse and its effects), pleasure. Once this has been conceptualized, more subtle processes can be also considered. In this sense it can be considered that power acquires different intensities and forms in particular historical and social contexts.

Foucault considers the body as the main area of production of disciplined subjects as characteristic of modernity. He traces a positive aspect of power, one that not only constrains but also produces people by conducting procedures and thus shape themselves in particular ways. The internalization of certain forms of control is related to specific process undertaken in different social institutions. From the education system, o the prison the hospital or the factory, subjects are submitted to particular actions. One of them is fixing people to a delimited place. This disciplinary cell isolates the individuals into compartments, separate one person form the other limiting interactions but subjecting all of them, and is “transparent” to the vision of the invigilator, which is itself not visible, but could be watching at any time. The result is that interns behave as I they were seen continuously, they internalize the glance of the invigilator. The model of this type of interaction is the Panoptic, an architectural design developed by Jeremy Bentham thought for increasing the effectivity in the organization of people in different productive endeavorus, enhance the product of workers’ labour in a factory, normalize insane people and criminals, educate children. In other words, individual subjects are delimited through subjecting the body to certain norms through different techniques that are then incorporated. The machinery of the panopticon replaces as a form of power replaces the power relation residing in the body of the sovereign. Thus, in this way of understanding how modern subjects are produced, Foucault brings into play the shaping of bodies through a particular disposition of place.