Dispatches from IMEC

Foucault fo sho has been providing amusing dispatches about her trip to IMEC to study Foucault for her thesis.

At last I found myself at my destination, the beautiful Abbey. Pictures will come tomorrow, as I am exhausted. Fortunately, the one woman who speaks english at the Abbey was working today and was very helpful. She also gave me a much needed cup of coffee, breaking my two week long detox from any caffinated product (which is quite the accomplishment given I was having a huge thermos of coffee, a soda, and a double shot of expresso to get me through my work day and dancing habit). She introduced me to the Directer of the archives who greeted me with a long and warm welcome of which I understood nothing. The woman explained that I could read but not speak french and the woman said “You do know that Foucault writes in French?” Ouch. That was some colder than ice stuff there. I nodded my head and said “oui.” (for the record, the abbey has stuff in both french and english)

Demoralized, I was ready to give up on the day, so exhausted I was sure the whole day had to be a dream. But it turns out dinner isn’t served monday nights so I needed to bike to the grocery store. Well it turns out that I haven’t biked since I was, oh about 6. The fact that the bike was made for a 6′ 10” man and they couldn’t lower the seat didn’t help either. I had to stand on my tippy toes with one foot and quickly swing the other leg over before I fell. I almost ate it every time I stopped because I would have to let the bike fall a bit before my feet could touch the ground. After traveling on streets with no names, making my map useless, and realizing that I had foolishly set out looking for a grocery store without knowing what grocery store was in french I contemplated how long I could go with out food, and if the answer was not very, which cow would go first :p. Then, miraculously, I found it. I picked up a scrumptious dinner of fresh french bread, brie, grapes, and the biggest bottle of syrah I could find and suddenly the grocery store was my new favorite place. All I needed to know was “pardon” and “merci” to make my way in and out.

When popular culture confirms anthropology!

I haven’t said anything about the case of Senator Larry Craig, but I think this Salon article has it right concerning sexual orientation. You can be MSM without being “gay.” I’m not an anthropologist but surely they have right: the binary categories of sexuality are inadequate.

I used to live in Midtown Atlanta, which had been known since the 1960s for prostitution and gay prostitution, since much in decline. Yet you could still see cars pulling up, driven by men, probably from the suburbs, many I’m sure with families. And the men would pick up male prostitutes for sex, returning some time later. But hey, they weren’t gay:

When Idaho Sen. Larry Craig says, “I’m not gay,” I believe him. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t cruising for sex last June when he was arrested in a bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport on charges of disorderly conduct. Surely any homosexual worth his capri pants saw the loopholes in Craig’s televised declaration of non-gayness, amplified by the presence of his wife. Even some straight folks, wised up after the scandals of Ted Haggard and Mark Foley, must have noted that Craig did not add a qualifying phrase like, “Nor am I bisexual,” “I’ve never had sex with a man” or even one of those oldies but goodies like, “Doing what I did doesn’t make you gay,” “I was so drunk!” or “I’m only queer for some guys.”

Intersex case studies

Interesting discussion of intersex with case studies (including Herculine Barbin).

The Western world defines gender in two distinct categories. But in reality, gender is a spectrum. Why does society, and even science, struggle to understand and accept those who are somewhere between male and female?

What did Foucault mean when he said “race”?

Wildly Parenthetical blog presents some extracts from a forthcoming paper which among other things addresses the meaning of “race” in Foucault’s work (presumably Society Must be Defended).

Foucault positions racism as a technique for fragmenting the population into superrace and subrace, and thus as not simply attaching to what we might otherwise, in more everyday use, call ‘race’ but I think to a range of other ‘attributes’ including homosexuality and disability

Foucault’s use of the word race in his lectures and HoS is certainly worth looking into as it is not the usual one. I don’t recall use of the terms superrace and subrace in his work, although they are perhaps suggested. I sometimes think it would be better if he had said “blood” or heritage because the word race can be used as a foundation for all sorts of interpretations.

The pleasure of writing

A reflection journal: I didn’t know people did this any more. I think this is delightful:

This blog is meant to be primarily a reading journal. I think of it in a pretty old-fashioned way, based on the “dialectical journal”s I had to write as a high school student, carefully drawing a line down the middle of the pages in spiral-bound notebooks and copying out short quotations from novels on the left hand side, then writing endlessly naive comments of my own on the right. Since I can’t figure out how the hell to make two columns in an online format without learning too much code, this blog will proceed in a more linear fashion: quotations and then my comments follow.

And this leads to:

‘Does there exist a pleasure in writing? I don’t know. One thing is certain, that there is, I think, a very strong obligation to write. I don’t really know where this obligation to write comes from … You are made aware of it in a number of different ways. For example, by the fact that you feel extremely anxious and tense when you haven’t done your daily page of writing. In writing this page you give yourself and your existence a kind of absolution. This absolution is indispensable for the happiness of the day… How is it that that this gesture which is so vain, so fictitious, so narcissistic, so turned in on itself and which consists of sitting down every morning at one’s desk and scrawling over a certain number of blank pages can have this effect of benediction on the rest of the day?’ Michel Foucault, (1969) ‘Interview with Claude Bonnefoy’, Unpublished typescript, IMEC B14, pp. 29-30.

Three new ground-breaking books on spatial reason

Three new books on spatial reason and politics have recently appeared. Remarkably, they all come from a single publisher, the University of Chicago Press in the last year or so.

The History of Cartography Vol III, Cartography in the European Renaissance (edited by David Woodward).

Abysmal, by Gunnar Olsson.

The Sovereign Map by Christian Jacob.

Gays, genes and politics

One of the most resonant developments of the Democratic primaries so far has been Bill Richardson’s blurted comment that homosexuality is a choice (see here).

Southern Voice, a gay newspaper, has some interesting contributions to the debate over whether being gay is a choice or biological (as the issue has been framed).

–they note a recent Gallup poll that found that 42% of adults believe homosexuality is “biologically determined,”

–4 out of 5 of those also believe that homosexuality is “acceptable,”

–only 30% of those who thought it a choice also thought it “acceptable.”

Commenting on this, Christopher Johnson, Human Rights Campaign director of public affairs says:

“Most people who are gay or lesbian can already tell you that sexual orientation is not a choice,” said Christopher Johnson, HRC director of public affairs. “Fortunately, a growing number of Americans believe that, too. Over the past couple of years, that has become a plurality. That’s important because support for GLBT Americans is much higher among those who believe we are born gay.”

This is an inadvertently revealing remark. For Johnson it’s important to believe the “born gay” argument because it leads to acceptance. This is it in a nutshell. What’s important politically is not what the science says (which cannot, or at least so far has not, offered an answer). Does anybody else detect an interesting slippage here that is being exploited? Also that there is a deep misunderstanding and proclivity on the part of people in general about biology (that it’s more “natural”)?

One can imagine a number of different ways of increasing acceptance, including the current one of biological reductionism. The trouble with this approach, I would argue, is that there is neither a guarantee it will work (the poll shows that the majority of adults still believe it’s a choice to be gay), and it comes at a high cost; not only the reductionism–we are nothing but our genes–but in fact that there is little scientific evidence that genes determine our preferences and behavior (though, like Richardson I am not a scientist and can only speak to what I’ve read, eg here and here).

In this light the SoVo article is interesting as it explores some alternative views in the gay community, showing that this issue is not settled there either.

At Queer by Choice for example, there is a whole gay community dedicated to exploring the choice aspect. Others assert the same thing:

Vera Whisman, author of “Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity,” watched the HRC/Logo debate and said while it was obvious Richardson was unprepared for the question, it was also obvious there was only one correct answer for Etheridge and the other panelists.

“The ally answer is to say, ‘Yes, people are born gay,’” she said. “If people say they choose or can choose to be gay, that’s anti-gay. This is the same conversation we’ve had since the 1990s and it seems we have not moved anywhere on this, at least in the mainstream movement.”

In fact, Whisman contends that insisting “I’m this way because I was born this way” is a weak, and possibly even homophobic, approach to the entire “nature versus nurture” debate.

“Identifying a gay gene is absolutely no guarantee we will have civil rights,” she said. Gay rights supporters can battle anti-gay rhetoric by asserting that “homosexuality is a perfectly reasonable choice to make,” she said.

It’s also worth pointing out that what the science does say is that the binary opposition gay-straight is false (the Kinsey Report), not to mention Foucault’s argument on the construction of homosexual identity by Westphal (see eg, Abnormal, p. 168 and fn. 7).

And it’s not as if the genetic argument is an inoculation against discrimination (genes can be altered or even “fixed”).

Jack Drescher, past chair of the APA’s committee on Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual issues makes a good point about all this:

Drescher said he also sees national gay organizations moving away from the biology argument by framing political issues, such as marriage equality, around basic fairness.

“If people are free to choose their religion and are protected I feel they can choose to be gay,” he said.

This was exactly the gist of my post a couple of weeks ago, linked above, about the politics of choice. The significance of this debate lies beyond its immediate context in its implications of the biological reductionist argument on other politico-genetic questions, especially race and racism (Nik Rose has a book on this, though it’s not that great).

I get nervous when we turn to biological arguments for the way we are, or that are used to explain and justify the way we are. Not only for the false naturalism of biology (nature-culture is surely another false dichotomy), but also for justification historically for racism. A intellectual history of race would shed light on this talk of genes and being and make sure we don’t endorse not just the gay gene but the race gene.

Thought of the outside

I’m sure this is right about the Cretan paradox, but I hate paradoxes.

Nevertheless, it usefully made me re-read The Thought of the Outside (DE 38).

Uh-oh, wingnut attack!!

David Frum, former speech writer for President Bush (and the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil”, not to mention ardent proponent of the Iraqi war) has been given a book by Foucault… and loves it!

The book he was given was as you might guess, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, which we have had cause to discuss on this blog already. And of course the reason he loves it is that he can use it to trash Foucault:

In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault succumbed to a bizarre infatuation with the Iranian Islamic revolution…

Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling…

…a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene…

For Foucault, sexual pleasure was intimately bound to rituals of domination and outright acts of brutality…

[Foucault] decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personal liberation…

The mistake Foucault made about Khomeini is integral to Foucault’s own thinking – and calls into question much about Foucault’s own work…

Foucault and bio-ethics

Philosopundit (ole perfessor eat your heart out) proposes a paper on Foucault that makes the following surprising claim:

This paper examines the resources of Michel Foucault’s philosophy for bio-ethics.  Given the unorthodox nature of Foucault’s philosophy and ethics compared to the more traditional approaches of deontology and consequentialism it may seem that Foucault’s thought has little to do with bio-ethics, which is primarily the domain of so-called “analytic” philosophy.

Having written a little bit on ethics myself I would have hazarded a guess that it was precisely the opposite: ethics is primarily the domain of non-analytical philosophy, but this just goes to show that we need something like this paper to engage the two domains. I would be very curious to see where he goes with this, not so much as it applies to Foucault, but how he proposes to apply Foucault to bio-ethics.

I can see this is useful as far as it goes:

Given the common place fear over the authoritarian tendencies perceived to come along with such technological advances and our desires to use them when we think it might benefit us debates between consequentialists and deontologists miss the fundamental issue of bio-ethics.  From Foucault’s perspective then the central bio-ethical issue is not so much an issue of the permissibility or impermissibility of such technologies, but how they shape our lives in ways that render us complaint and docile or whether they enhance our capacities to transform our existence.

…Since neither consequentialism nor deontology seem to be adequate in the first place, but it would be interesting to see if you could get to a politics of ethics through this route.