Freie Universität Berlin

Peer review is at the heart of science, even social science, these days. It is also highly contested. However, the basic sentiment is noble and ingenious. By letting other knowledgeable people read and critique a text, the author gets a genuine chance at making it better. And any text can get better. Beyond that, by reading other texts with a critical perspective on the argument, the writing, the structure and the language, many people actually learn something about their own writing as well. Sometimes, the mistakes are either to pinpoint, when others make them.

I would like you all to use the opportunity of having texts available during the semester to engage in this activity. Therefore, all texts are available and I ask you to read them all. Please be prepared to give oral comments on at least three of them on Friday. If you have not written an essay, please register here. If you have written one of the papers, please feel free to pick three essays. Your oral comments should be about 2-3 minutes per paper and answer the following questions:

• Does the text address the hypothesis?
• Does the author make a convincing argument?
• Does the text give adequate support/sources/evidence?

You may also, of course, add any other things, that you believe would help improve the text. Keep in mind, that this is a professional courtesy – and I ask you to be both generous and critical.

We will work for about 30-35 Minutes in small groups to get the feedback to the authors. We will then spend the rest of the class discussing the two essay questions in more detail. This will serve as  a preliminary conclusion to the first phase of the course.

Political theory comes in many forms and variations. Currently it follows academic modes of speech, which focus on the analytical distinctions and a language which connects to academic discourses. But we don’t have to go far to see how it could be different. The writings of Foucault would hardly pass the hard muster of academic peer review as they often lack the clarity and structure expected of academic papers. So would Hannah Arendt’s and those of many others, who reference discourses with great knowledge yet not necessarily systematically. Political theory comes in many shapes and forms and always has.

Le Soldat en Semestre, by Sigmund Freudenberger, Public Domain

Story telling has been one of the more prominent modes in which political theory was presented. It is easy to think of obvious examples such as Thomas More’s Utopia – which lead to the naming of a whole genre of political theory. At the juncture of theory and literature a number of author’s have used stories to reflect upon societal and political conditions. Remember Lilliput? Gulliver’s Travels may well be read as critique his contemporary society.

But fictional accounts are not the only way in which story telling matters in political theory. Drawing historical analogies may also be understood as a form of story telling. Machiavelli uses history in his arguments on good governing quite excessively. He tells stories of failed wars and titles won, of great strategies and bad luck. I believe, anyone who argues from historical experience in political theory, in a way, chooses to tell a certain story.

A third way of using stories turns out to be common: that of allegory or parable. This is a technique that tells neither a fictional story nor refers to historical arguments in a strict sense. Instead it constructs an artificial setting in order to make a certain point. Plato’s Cave Allegory is an example. But one could think of the use of parables in the bible in a similar manner. By telling a story such as that of the Good Samaritan certain moral and ethical values are illustrated and put in an easy to understand context (admittedly, doesn’t seem to have worked too well, but that’s true for Machiavelli too…).

In so far as political theory analyses and criticizes existing conditions and suggests how thinks might be differently, story telling can be a central tool. And there is some very obvious reasons why:

• stories are easy to understand and to remember
• good stories are interesting – people want to hear them
• complex problems, when explained in form of a story, may be more easily seen in their complexity, because the also communicate an affective, emotional dimension that academic papers do not/ should not

Of course, there are also limitations – stories lack conceptual clarity and leave much to interpretation. But when it comes to political theory problems that are close to people identities, fears, hopes or values, a good story may well help to navigate the complexities of the issue. That is one of the reasons why story telling of sorts has some repute even in contemporary academia. In particular sociology has recovered the art of story telling to play out the future effects of contemporary trends. Anthropology uses it to describe complex social interactions for example when retelling the way rituals are lived. In political science scenario development is used to explain how various changes today may impact the future.  All these attempts may be pursued as a subversive activity of developing a new narrative, a new way to see that which is there. When Foucault talks about the ways in which discourse may be subverted, he remains vague. I believe, that story telling – which allows the breaking of certain rules of truth and adequacy – may work as one way of subverting dominant discourse. This happens – for example  in this video, which most of you have probably seen.

Clearly, story telling is no cure all. But if it helped Thomas More condemn land crabbing and displacement of the poor as thievery, maybe it is a good tool today, too.

In our next session, I would like you to come up with short stories illustrating what Judith Butler argues in her text. Find a story that illustrates/explains/clarifies what she means by performance, how that could work or why it may be important. It may be just the description of a character, a historical or fictional situation, something real or imagined. The stories will be up on this blog after for you to read.

Clearly Foucault’s later writings, such as “The subject and power” and the “Technologies of the self” lend themselves more easily to an interpretation of Foucault as by no means opposed to the idea of an acting subject.* His earlier writings, which focused more on language and discourse, at first glance seem to negate such acting capacity for subjects. This aspect of Foucault’s thought may well be the most contested and has been the origin of such vibrant debate**, that it cannot be repeated here. I would like, however, to point out some of the elements of Foucault’s understanding of discourse which fuel, I believe, his later focus on the technologies of the subjects.

“Blühende Landschaften” by Thomas Kohler on Flickr (CC-BY)

“The Order of Discourse” is the title of his inaugural lecture at the College de France held in December 1970.  In it he lays out concisely (for a postmodernist, that is) the concept of discourse, which is derived from his works on the order of things and the archeaology of knowledge.  Discourse therein is language, struggle and sometimes even equated to power itself. I find it easiest to imagine this discourse as a fragile network of related (speech) acts which follow and transgress rules and restrictions, somethings which changes slowly, sometimes catastrophically but never entirely. Subjects participate in discourse, reproduce it and are produced by it.

You are wondering how a discourse can even do that? Create a real living breathing thing? Aren’t we there, even if we have no name, no colour, no shape? Maybe. But we can only be who we are – living, breathing, things – in relation and through discourse. There is an episode of Star Trek, in which the Picard’s Enterprise encounters an strange alien species (ok, that’s all of them but wait for it!). This species apparently has no concept of “living” and “breathing” so that the universal translator translates their understanding of human beings as “bulky bags mostly filled with water”. While this description is technically correct, it defies the way we see ourselves. It references an entirely different discourse, hence causing irritation.

Discourse (or power) can only be noticed as the restraining, limiting and enabling phenomenon as which Foucault describes it when such irritation occurs. As discourse works through the creation of truth, which relies on differentiations, exclusions and the permanent reproduction of its own rules. Discourse hence implies an outside, a wild external to the truth discourse. This external wild side is at the same time the greatest danger to discourse. Its mere existence is proof, that the truth of the discourse is fragile. Exclusion and differentiation are the origin of dissonances. Or, as I think of it, reality is always messier than any of the ways in which we make sense of it. At the same time, if we do not make sense of it, reality has no inherent structure of its own, it cannot be perceived as reality.

What we have here, is a circular argument: Discourse produces reality (and in it subjects) and those are the source of discourse itself. None exist without the other. Many people struggle with the idea, that everything should be so fragile, preliminary and most importantly without inherent meaning or value. It is, for example, diametrically opposed to a simplified reading of Marx’s concept of history where material (!) changes and conditions drive historical change.

Even more pertinent to the question of the subject is the resulting question of how – if discourse really simply reproduces its distinctions and rules, which produce subjects which are conditioned by these restrictions and rules – discourse could ever change. Wouldn’t everything converge and remain bound by its discourse for all time, only reproducing the ever same patterns? Clearly, even this ‘early’ Foucault does not believe so. In fact, he describes the “proliferation of discourse” (in German usually translated as the ‘mushrooming’ of discourse) as a wild and chaotic process (p. 66). Yes, discourse seeks to eliminate that which does not fit, to bring order and clarity, but it fails to ever achieve this. There is an undeniable wildness about discourse over time which continuously threatens its stable continuation. And then, there is the outside, which stabilizes and threatens truth claimed by discourse.

It amazes me time and time again, how similar Arendt and Foucault argue, albeit coming from such very different places. But that is another story and must remain for another time.

*Mark Bevir has written a very thoughtful essay on the subject of agency and autonomy in Foucault’s thought.

** For first insights into the Foucault Habermas debate consider Nancy Love (1989)

As you know, this week’s session has been postponed and will take place on June 3rd. However, you may want to use the time to get started on the first writing assignment. So here it is:

With reference to the first texts discussed in the first three sessions, discuss ONE of the following statements.

Resistance is not just possible but unavoidable.

OR

The concept of the subject precludes the idea of a “human nature”.

Your answer should be between 1000 and 1500 words in length. You may use further sources if you wish. Make sure ALL ideas that are not your own are properly referenced and a complete and formally correct list of references is included. Send your paper as a PDF file to me by Friday, May 20th, before our session.

You are unsure what DISCUSS means? This phrase is used in the British/American academic system for the task of finding arguments and counterarguments to the formulated statement and conclude from there to the appropriateness of the statement. Essentially, DISCUSS asks you to critically consider the statement and form your own opinion, express it and support it with relevant arguments.
As academic exercise this can only be done through the use of concrete references to the arguments brought forward in the texts (reference correctly!) and counterarguments, may they be from the text, from you, or from other sources.

If you have any questions regarding this assignment, feel free to contact me!

Last Friday was our first real session and I greatly enjoyed the debate. Many questions remain open – and I will pose some of them next Monday in preparation of our next session. However, I did not want you to wait that long for a short recap of our session in the form of the mindmaps:

Freedom

Power

Subject

As we did not get around to giving them a workover as planned, this is how we will begin the next session. However, one of your feedback cards suggested to think all three together. I have therefore prepared a little map of all three, in which I have already entered some of the map on power. You are welcome to use this site for a preliminary rework of “your map”.