Dissertation - Abstract and Introduction

THE POWER OF GENEALOGY Torsten Menge, M.A. Dissertation Advisor: Rebecca Kukla, Ph.D. ABSTRACT What is the normative import of telling genealogies? Genealogies are historical accounts of our present reason-giving practices. They purport to show how certain reasons, forms of reasoning, norms, and concepts came to be authoritative for us, by looking at how these practices developed in concrete social and material settings. I argue in this dissertation that telling genealogies can challenge the legitimacy of found norms and thereby open up a space for normative transformation. To understand the central role that the concept of power plays in genealogies, I develop a novel account of the ontology of power and the pragmatic effects of power attributions. I argue that power cannot play a useful role in social explanations; I show that a number of common strategies to account for power as an explanatorily useful social capacity fail. As an alternative, I develop a fictionalist account of power: When we attribute power to agents, we treat them as if they had social capacities, even if we are not strictly speaking entitled to do so. The resulting fiction of power is not simply an illusion, but is built into the structure of our material practices. Power attributions can play a constitutive role in the creation and maintenance of social order. iii On the basis of this view, I argue that power talk has an expressive function: Power attributions can make explicit the norms that are embodied in the social and material settings in which we act. I show that pragmatist accounts of reason-giving need such an expressive concept of power, because it allows us to raise questions about the default authority of found, embodied norms. This, I argue, is also the role that the concept plays in genealogies. For the genealogist, power is not a merely causal factor that distorts or undermines rational practices from the outside. Instead, she uses the concept to disrupt our familiarity with the everyday world by making explicit the embodied norms that structure it. As a result, a genealogy calls on us to take responsibility for these norms and practically transform the space in which we act. iv 1 Introduction This dissertation explores the role that the concept of power plays in the telling of genealogies. To that end, I develop a novel account of the ontology of power and the pragmatic character of power attributions. I argue that power talk has an expressive function that allows the genealogist to make explicit the authority of found, embodied norms. I am interested in genealogies as historical accounts of our present reasongiving practices. As such, they purport to give an account of how certain kinds of reasons, forms of reasoning, concepts, and norms came to be authoritative for us. I will argue that telling genealogies can challenge the default authority of embodied norms and thereby open up a space for normative transformation. The concept of power plays a central role in the telling of materialist genealogies. However, we should not understand power as a brute causal capacity or force that is imposed on rational practices from the outside. Rather, power is used as an expressive concept that allows genealogists to make explicit the found norms that are embodied in the social-material settings in which we find ourselves acting. Paradigm examples of the kind of genealogies that I will be concerned with are to be found in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and History of 1 Sexuality, Vol. 1. His genealogy of sexuality, for example, is a historical account that shows how questions of sexuality came to be central to a broad set of private and public concerns. It purports to show that our self-understanding as sexual beings is not simply the recognition of brute facts about ourselves, but is responsive to norms that are embodied in a complex set of material practices. Other authors in philosophy (such as Ian Hacking, Arnold Davidson, Ladelle McWhorter), as well as authors in the humanities and the social sciences, have quite explicitly followed in Foucault’s footsteps, and I see their work as further examples of the kind of genealogy I will be concerned with in this dissertation. The question that motivates the discussion in this dissertation is how such genealogies can have normative import. In order to understand the bite of the question, it will be helpful to distinguish two kinds of genealogies. Intellectualist genealogies attend to the history of concepts and forms of reasoning only. They trace the development of our discursive commitments and entitlements, and look at how we worked out previous incompatibilities and irrationalities, in order to reconstruct how we came to be committed to our present practices. A genealogy of this kind is akin to following out the implications of an argument in a dialectical fashion, and this arguably explains its normative import. However, the examples that I have mentioned are materialist genealogies. They attend not just to concepts and argument forms, but to the broader social and material settings in which we act and give and ask for reasons. It is with 2 respect to this form of genealogy that the question I ask has a particular bite: How can an account of the social-material settings in which our reasongiving practices are embedded account for the authority of those practices, let alone challenge that authority? Indeed, materialist genealogies are often interpreted as merely causal explanations of our practices that explain only why we take certain reasons to be authoritative. The causal genesis of our practices, it seems, is irrelevant to the authority of the norms that structure them. Questions about the normative import of telling materialist genealogies have been discussed at length in response to Foucault’s studies. However, this debate has failed to produce clarity about the issue. One major obstacle is a problematic dualism between power and rational authority that underlies much of the debate. A dualism is a distinction that is drawn in a way that renders the relation between the distinguished items unintelligible.1 Many of the debate’s participants assume a fundamental difference between reason-giving practices and the social-material settings in which they take place.2 While the former are structured normatively, the latter have a merely causal structure. As a result, there is a fundamental gap between the two, such that any “crossover between 1. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy, 98. 2. In chapter eight, I will discuss a number of prominent criticisms of Foucault’s genealogical project to show that they exhibit this dualism. In chapter seven, I argue that Robert Brandom’s criticism of genealogies is based on a similar assumption. 3 causal interaction and rational justification” is blocked.3 In this context, power is often conceptualized as a brute causal capacity or force, though one that might come in sophisticated guises. As such, power is taken to play a central role in explaining the structure of the social and material settings in which we act and, possibly, the shape of our reason-giving practices. This dualism between power and rational authority leaves us with only two equally unattractive options: On the first option, materialist genealogies debunk our reason-giving practices. If our material practices are structured by merely causal, a-rational forces, and if reason-giving practices are always embedded in concrete material settings, then (the debunker infers) our normative attitudes can be explained in terms of merely causal factors that lack any normative import. In other words, seemingly rational practices turn out to be merely a form of power, which leaves us with an implausible irrationalism. The second option, a hyper-rationalist view, resists the debunking move by blocking any theoretical crossover between causal interaction and rational justification. Such a view might acknowledge that concrete reason-giving practices always take place in the context of power relations, and urge us to be vigilant about cases in which the exercise of power distorts our reason-giving from the outside. Nonetheless, this view retains a strict distinction between 3. This phrase is from Rouse, “Practice Theory,” 511 (fn. 7). 4 rational authority and power, the latter understood as a brute causal force that is properly external to reason-giving practices. The hyper-rationalist view retains a problematic dualism between norms and causal interaction. It is problematic because engaging with others discursively already requires a skillful practical engagement with the world and others. It also requires the ability to navigate relations of social power, since power differences and our concrete location within a material-social space make a difference to our standing in reason-giving practices. If we understand the practical engagement with our social-material environment as merely causal, that makes it hard to see what is at stake in isolated reason-giving practices and how discursive norms could come to have a grip on us.4 In addition, there are considerations concerning power that make a dualist contrast between it and rational authority problematic. When we talk about power in a social context, we are usually talking about how actions affect other actions. This, I will argue, cannot be analyzed in terms of brute causal relations, because we always act in a normatively contoured space. In chapter five, I will argue that manifestations of power always make normative claims and thereby shape the normatively governed space in which we act. For example, I will show that violent torture can be understood as making a normative claim on its victim 4. I will discuss this criticism in more detail in chapters six and seven. 5 and its audience. I will also show that disciplinary practices, which play an important role in Foucault’s genealogies, constitute normative spaces in which new kinds of assessment of individuals and their actions are possible. Only insofar as power makes normative claims on agents can it be rejected or challenged as illegitimate. Mere physical force can be avoided, counteracted, or endured, but not rejected. But to consider the legitimacy of a claim is already to engage in the practice of giving and asking for reasons. Therefore we should not completely exile power from the space of reasons. This does not mean that we should never distinguish between rational authority and power; the distinction is clearly important. But conceiving of power as external to reasongiving practices is the wrong way to make the distinction. My goal will be to show that the distinction emerges from within reason-giving practices when we consider the legitimacy of the norms that are embodied in the social-material settings in which we find ourselves. By now, the strategy for answering the question about the normative import of materialist genealogies should be clear. We will have to develop a view of power that avoids a dualist contrast between rational authority and power that would make relations between them unintelligible. We will have to dispel an understanding of power that takes it to be brute causal capacity or force that is imposed on reason-giving practices from the outside. To this end, I will develop a novel account of the ontology of power and the pragmatic effects of power 6 attributions. I will then use this account to develop an account of the normative import of telling genealogies. In the remainder of this introduction, I will briefly outline the chapters to come. A Novel View of Power In the first part of this work, I develop a novel account of the ontology of power and the pragmatic character of power attributions. My goal is to show that power should not be understood as causal capacity that can play a useful role in social explanation and that can be imposed on reason-giving practices from the outside. Instead, I will argue, we can use the concept of power to make explicit the norms embodied in the social-material settings in which we find ourselves acting. I start by discussing, in chapter two, the relatively straightforward idea that power is an ability attributed to agents. I argue that we should understand power more specifically as an agent’s ability to have an effect on the actions of other agents or on their dispositions to act. In contrast to other dispositional features of an agent, we do not attribute power to an agent in virtue of her individual physiological and psychological properties, but in virtue of the social position that she is in. For an agent to have power, other agents, actions, and things need to be suitably aligned with her. Abilities of this kind are intricately 7 connected to attributions of responsibility for the actions of others and for social mediated outcomes. Social and political scientists are interested in the causal bases of this ability. What does a social structure have to look like so that an agent can have a robust effect on the actions of other agents? What kinds of social structures make it the case that some people have lots of power while others have little? If power is to play the central role in social explanations that it is often taken to play, we need to be able to identify robust social capacities that exert their characteristic influences in a wide range of contexts and that do not depend on specific background conditions. In chapter three, I consider whether there are any satisfying accounts of such capacities. I review four promising strategies: strategies that ground power in the use of physical force, in access to material resources, in patterns of regular interaction between agents, and in collective acceptance. I argue that these strategies fail because they are either incomplete or because they do not account for the necessary robustness that explanatorily useful power attributions require. I conclude that the concept of power lacks explanatory unity; there is no stable thing “power” that can do explanatory work in wide range of cases. If the concept does not primarily play an explanatory role, then what is its role? What is it that we are doing when we attribute power to agents? To answer this question, I develop a fictionalist account of power in chapter four. 8 Attributing power, I argue, involves treating agents as if they had a robust social capacity, whether such an attribution is warranted or not. I use Hobbes’s account of the institution of power to argue for this view: In the state of nature, individuals empower the sovereign by misrecognizing her as already having a robust capacity to enforce commands. Everyday attributions of power also involve pretense, which allows us to abstract from the complexities of socialmaterial alignments. The fiction of power is not a mere illusion, a false representation of social reality. Rather, the pretense of power plays a constitutive role in the establishment and maintenance of social order. The fiction of power, I argue, is built into our material practices. In chapter five, I explain how power can be manifest in material structures and bodies. The fictionalist account of power does not deny that we always act in the context of material constraints imposed by the actions of other agents, by material configurations and things, and by impersonal social structures. Indeed, the pretense of power plays an important role in aligning material and social forces and thereby helps to constitute social order. In this chapter, I discuss how the fiction of power can become manifest and how it can have material effects. I also show that the material practices in which power is made manifest are never merely brute forms of violence or force. Looking at the examples of torture and disciplinary practices, I show that they are normatively contoured and that they constitute normative spaces in which agents act. To talk about these practices 9 in terms of power is, therefore, to make explicit the normative implications of social-material configurations. I expand my account of this expressive role of power talk in chapters six and seven. I argue that ‘power’, like logical, semantic, and normative vocabulary, allows us to say something that is otherwise only implicit in what we are doing. While normative vocabulary allows us to make explicit the endorsement of material proprieties of practical reasoning, power talk allow us to identify such proprieties without thereby endorsing them. When we use power vocabulary, we situate particular actions or normative practices in the broader social-material context that accounts for their significance and default authority. Because power attributions withhold endorsement of the identified norms, they can be used to raise the question whether those norms have legitimate authority. The Normative Import of Telling Genealogies In the second part of the dissertation, I use this view of power to better understand the relationship between power and reason-giving, to provide an account of the role that the concept plays in genealogies, and, finally, to analyze the normative effect of telling genealogies. In chapters six and seven, I explore what role the concept of power can and should play in our understanding of reason-giving practices. I will discuss this 10 question by looking at Robert Brandom’s pragmatist account of discursive practices. An adequate understanding of the relationship between power and reason is particularly important for pragmatist accounts of reason-giving, since pragmatists are committed to the claim that reason-giving occurs in concrete, embodied, and historically contingent social practices. It would therefore be inadequate for them to characterize power as a material force that distorts reason-giving from the outside, simply in virtue of its materiality. I argue that the distinction between power and rational authority arises from within reasongiving practices. Once we understand the expressive function of power talk (which I discuss in chapter seven), we can see that talking about a practice in terms of power allows us to raise the question whether the norms that govern the practice with default authority are legitimate. I focus on Brandom’s account of reason-giving because it is one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated attempts to redeem the pragmatist claim that language and thought should be understood primarily in terms of concrete social practices of giving and asking for reasons. However, Brandom’s own account is remarkably disembodied. Moreover, Brandom seems to conceive of power as a brute causal factor that is external to the space of reasons. This, I argue, is symptomatic for a vestigial dualism in Brandom’s account. This dualist remainder makes it difficult for Brandom to explain what is at stake in reason-giving practices, to properly account for the authority of 11 conceptual norms, and to identify potential power differentials in reason-giving practices. It also explains, I will argue, why Brandom interprets materialist genealogies as attempts to debunk reason-giving practices. In chapter eight, I finally develop an account of the normative effect of telling a genealogy. I argue that telling a genealogy can have an uncanny effect: It disrupts our familiarity with our everyday world by making explicit some of the embodied norms that structure our everyday activities. Once we recognize that our situation is structured by normative demands, we have to take responsibility for the legitimacy of these norms. Genealogies thus call for a practical transformation of the space in which we act. The genealogist does not use the concept of power to refer to merely causal factors that distort our rational practices from the outside, or to explain away the normative force of reasons. Rather, she uses power as an expressive concept that allows her to make explicit the default authority of the norms that are embodied in the materialsocial alignments in which act. Making explicit these norms raises the question of their legitimacy and thereby forces us to decide whether or not we should follow them. It is this function of power talk that makes it central to the telling of a genealogy. 12