Empiricist conception, I like that term. A sort of working hypothesis, no? Which one does not take, as you put it, as absolute or axiomatic but rather as propositions.

I don’t mean to posit some new world-historical method to be found here. I just found the distinction you suggested helped me start to put some words to some things I’d been having trouble articulating. Like the example of Guantanamo and Auschwitz that you mentioned at mine – I can see a reason, a rhetorical and political use, for positing their identity in the way Agamben’s work suggests. And I think the theoretical work there is, or can be interesting (particularly in the case of Agamben on camps, in part for the provocative conclusion – camps can be hotels and airport terminals, any physical site), and really interesting is in the eye of the beholder right? I can also see reasons for wanting to ask after differences between Auschwitz and Guantanamo, particularly if they’re differences in the sense of differentiating two different cases of the same kind. What I was trying to say at mine was that while I’m not compelled by Ideology Critique, which seems something like theory in the sense you’re using, a pretty uncontroversial family-resemblance term in circles like ours, but I do of course see places for ideology critique in which the operation is, I think, less a matter of theory and more a matter of I don’t know what, whatever it is one calls inquiry into differences between two cases of the same kind a la Auschwitz and Guantanomo. I hope that makes some sense.

Take care,
Nate

So, first, the title of his Chair at the College de France was “History of Systems of Thought”. This is, I think, to be understood both genealogically and archeaologically. (Anglo-Americans, in general, leave out the earlier archaeological phase. Possibly because his works of this phase are far more complex and seemingly less relevant…)

Now, getting to the analytics/theory distinction. Largely this distinction has been used as a way to avoid theorizing and rigorous thought — Nik Rose’s Powers of Freedom, for instance, doesn’t have to be coherent because it isn’t ‘theory’, it’s ‘analytics’. This misses the point. The relation between the two is mildly paradoxical because analytics is already a theoretical object! The way we are to understand the distinction, for Foucault, is to recognize what he’s attempting to do with power at this point: it is to distinguish power from the form in which it is coded, hence any particular means of coding a power relation — discipline, sovereign, biopolitical, class war, commodity, etc — is secondary to the relation itself. The result of this, or, perhaps, the point of this, is to ‘desubstantialize’ power and transform it into a relation between forces.

Separating ‘power’ from its ‘code’ is, I think, an attempt on his part to reject a priori conceptions of power and, thus, an attempt to move towards an empiricist conception of power that doesn’t take absolutes or axioms as the point of departure, but ’suggestions’ and ‘propositions’; the most famous of which is the priority of resistance over power.  This, of course, is a moderately confusing way of presenting the suggestion, but it likely has more to do with the limits of language than a geneal incoherence — it might be better said that resistance constitutes a relation of power.  A further part of his point is to resist attempts to define an ‘essence’ to power: this is power.  This, also, is another way of saying that the local and the surface is privileged over the abstract and ‘theoretical’.

Thanks very much for this. I found this bit here really helpful:

“One could hardly claim that Buchenwald and Guantanamo Bay are camps of a different sort. Giorgio Agamben has more than adequately demonstrated that they are nearly one and the same. The problem, then, isn’t one of structure or form — that is, it isn’t a theoretical problem — the problem, rather, is one of technologies and practices.”

This sounds like a flippant or sarcastic question in my head but I don’t mean it that way. The former, structure and form are of theory, thought and writing that addresses/analyzes them is theoretical. What’s a term for (in noun and adjectival form) for thought that takes on the latter, technologies and practices? Is it something like intellectual history, history of thought (or whatever Foucault’s chair was)? Maybe analytics? (Didn’t Foucault say once that he wasn’t working on a theory of power so much as an analytics of power?) I mean this really seriously, because I think this difference you hit on here describes what is for me a pretty big divide in my own interests at least recently – I’m excited about the stuff in the latter category way more than stuff in the former category – and I’d like a term for it. By the way, have you ever had a chance to read the essay on technology by Raniero Panzieri? (The name escapes me, I think it might be “Marx vs the objectivists.)

Best wishes,
Nate

First, the Europeans weren’t ignorant of non-Europeans insofar as ethnographical accounts were widely read. Pierre Clastres does a lot of work with the more or less standard European horror at the South American tribes: a people without god, king or law. To an extent, then, race isn’t entirely separable from the rest of the world; albeit the rest of the world from a European perspective.

Second, there’s a sense in which race-thinking of the early modern sort might be more cognizant of difference than the modern people. The people erases internlal differences while race is a proliferation of difference. (Franks, Gauls, Angles, Saxons, Goths, Visogoths, Romans, Trojans, etc, etc.)

Third, might we not want to consider putting race into the genealogy of the multitude? There is reason to do so: Boulainvilliers introduced Spinoza into France and wrote extensive commentaries on Spinoza — including the political works. (He also wrote a book on Mohammed.)

Fourth, might we not consider a parallel between, say, the Rwandan genocide and European race thinking?

Fifth, I know next to nothing about non-North America, non-Europe and likely shouldn’t say much more less I make a fool of myself!