I think for my first post, I would like to share a thought I had as a student of the state and ethnic identity. I argued in my previous MA program that how the state incorporated various peoples through its bureaucratic machinery had a real impact on how these peoples thought about themselves historically. Mongols, for instance, who were incorporated into the Ming state were labelled as “Ming Mongols”, distinct from fellow Mongols who remained on the other side of Chinese control. Indeed, they seem to accept and act as loyal servitors, especially in a military capacity (at least in the extant records). However, this book in question de-centers and challenges this somewhat too neatly packaged analysis. Men whose ways of knowing and interpreting history, the grand narrative of politics and men, were distinctly different from females in the Mugade. As we talked about in class, women clearly had a epistemological and historical geography that defied, even rejected clear chronology or linear political events. Instead family, relationships and nomenclature seemed to be essential in retelling and even mythologizing the past. Therein how women interpreted historical ethnic identity is also very interesting. In the chapter “Locating a Woman’s Life” (paragraphs 18-19)the author explains how women conflated ethnic identity with their clan. Some linked it to “Shangaan-ness”, while others linked it to the place where they were living. The state, whether colonial or other, seems completely absent from these women’s ethnic identity. That is incredibly interesting to me, because not only are neat ethno-linguistic categories smashed, but it seems to indicate that even within a relatively small area ways of understanding ethnic identity are incredibly gendered and even defiant of the state’s attempts to claim a taxonomizing right or power over its citizens. I am still somewhat pessimistic in being able to recover similar contrasting ways of identity in medieval/early modern China, especially in the case of women.
In her discussion on “Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System” Gitelman shows the tensions that can sometimes exist between a document and the thing that it documents. She sets up a sort of dialectic between an operating system and its manual in which “the manual and the operating system were each the mutual result of inertial and accelerative pressures” (Gitelman 100). In order to understand how to write programs for an operating system, you have to read the manual, but at the same time, whenever you create a new program, you are building a new undocumented piece onto the existing operating system, which makes the documentation you used to create it obsolete and in need of new revision. This example struck me because in modern computer programming, the tensions between documentation and the programs they show us how to create, at least in the web programming world in which I have been working in for the past four years, often times does not exist. Instead, we encounter code which programmers say “documents itself,” meaning the form it takes and the way that it is executed demonstrates how it should be used.
If you choose to learn Python, one of the most popular programming languages today, one of the first documents you will likely encounter is “The Zen of Python” by Tim Peters (accessible at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/). “The Zen of Python” is probably not what you would expect to see when you look at a manual for a programming language. Instead of outlining how functions work or the language’s class system, “The Zen of Python” is a sort of philosophical text that suggests how one should approach programming in Python, a sort of guideline for the practice of programming. This idea of proper practice—particularly the idea that there is one “pythonic” way to write code—has had an interesting effect on the code written by most Pythonistas, which is the name members of the Python programming community call themselves.
Since there is only one “right way” to write the basic building blocks that make up most Python programs, if you look at well written code, you can quickly figure out what that code is intended to do, and how you can use and build upon it. In effect, the object being documented (the code) also fits Gitelman’s definition of a document, since it has both the know-show function of a document (Gitelman 1)—it conveys information, and it has been “mobilized” (Gitelman 2)—designated by some agent as having a particular know-show function, demonstrated by how its author purposely wrote it using the self-documenting practices of the Python community. An additional interesting facet of this is that in order to understand how the “building blocks” of the language work, instead of starting out by reading documents that seek to outline what constitutes pythonic coding practices, new Phythonistas often look through the source code of well-known libraries and replicate the processes they find there in their own code until they get a feel for what works well and is deemed pythonic by other programmers.
My question for this week is this: how does the idea of a self-documenting object which is intelligible via shared practices within a particular community confirm or challenge Gitelman’s conception of what a document is and does?
Thank you for introducing us to the term ‘Pythonistas’! Your question is also very interesting–and I think some of the themes I raised in my comment could potentially speak to it, and vice versa.
I would like to respond to Paper Knowledge in light of what historian Ernst A. Breisach identifies as a perennial competition in history: that between the demands of erudition (history as presenting the truth), and those of composition (history as a persuasive narrative). Gitelman’s work responds to the demands of erudition. She uses extensive footnotes and in-text references to primary and secondary source documents to both situate her ideas in relation to those of other scholars and to discuss “the recent history of documents and the means, meanings, and methods of their production in necessary detail” (11). Even when justified, extensive referencing runs the risk of interrupting the composition’s flow and, in the case of numerous references to unfamiliar to the reader (e.g. “As Johanna Drucker, Matthew Kircschenbaum, and Katherine Hayles have explained…” (69), they ultimately limit the book’s readership (to the erudite). But it is more than this that causes me to see Paper Knowledge as honouring erudition; it is the absence of a cohesive overarching narrative.
Gitelman approaches historical writing in an original (though perhaps increasingly common?) way: with four chapters that can standalone and an afterward, in lieu of a conclusion (“rather than to conclude too neatly,” 137). She presents through the chapters a series of elaborated points (though would Gitelman prefer a less reifying word than “points” – “representations” perhaps?) that contribute to her broader interest in challenging the use of the classification “print culture” (7-9) and in providing “a more detailed account of documents in the past [that] will without question facilitate more nuanced accounts of documents in and for the future” (6-7). Detail is key, while rendering “the past narrowly in terms of or service to the present” is carefully avoided (7). I wonder if she would think that by presenting a more explicit and persuasive historical narrative she would be doing the latter. Interestingly, she notes in the afterward that although the chapters “gestured toward a media history of documents,” they did not complete one (137) – perhaps she just wasn’t trying to write a history.
My response this week is structured in a way that mirrors how I went about reading this book–that is, by jumping back and forth between the book’s varied topics that happened to catch my interest. The first topic I’d like to discuss is rooted in Chapter One, “A Short History of _______”. Gitelman’s analysis of blanks and fillable forms had me considering when and how I encounter blanks and forms throughout my everyday life, and I thought this was particularly apposite because much of her early thoughts in the book are influenced by Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life.
My list of blanks and forms started with those digital experiences that are commonplace in my everyday life, and that are also considered throughout Paper Knowledge. These include filling in the blank forms to access my e-mail and social media accounts, and unlocking my iPhone with my password. Then I thought of the more physical ‘forms’ that I am required to fill out every day in order to get access to what it is that I want/need. I lock and unlock keys for my front door, my garage, and my bicycle. I encounter blanks daily when I write on paper while reading or discussing texts for class, or for more mundane things like to-do and grocery lists. And now, once a week for the next few months, I’m going to fill in the blank forms on our course’s website, including my name, e-mail address, and a text box that includes my blog post, that Prof. Bronfman then has to authorize for publication on the site. This last set of blanks and forms actually speaks directly to what all the other blanks and forms in my life revolve around, that is, questions of permission/access and authority.
I don’t log into my e-mail and social media accounts only because I want to stay connected with people I’m communicating with (of course, this is the main reason I do so), I also log into these accounts precisely because they are mine, and not somebody else’s. It’s true, I lock and unlock the keys to my front door, my garage, and my bicycle because I want to do something on the other side of that door, or I want to get into that garage, or I want to ride that bicycle. But I also lock and unlock these things because they are mine. Running parallel to this concept is the fact that I don’t lock and unlock other people’s doors, garages, and bicycles because they are theirs, and not mine. I think these parallel concepts speak more broadly to what Gitelman discusses (with the help of Max Weber) on page 31. These processes, although ‘everyday’ and mundane in a way, are actually inherently bureaucratic because of the structure we give to them. We have structured our ideas of property, permission, and authority in bureaucratic ways. Although the subversion of these ideas of property, permission, and authority is fairly commonplace (houses and garages are broken into, bicycles are stolen, etc.), such subversion is still considered to be abnormal or deviant because it is anti-bureaucratic (we use the bureaucratic concept of (il)legality to denote, regulate, and/or punish this abnormality/deviance).
And yet, there is something about our fascination with figures like Daniel Ellsberg of Chapter Three, “Xerographers of the Mind,” or Julian Assange and Edward Snowden from the more recent past, that, I think, tells us that we have an affinity for people or behaviours that subvert this bureaucracy—at least to a certain degree, and so long as it doesn’t affect us directly (i.e. we’re okay with the performance as long as we are spectators and not embroiled participants). We rave about these vigilantes’ ability to “stick it to the man” or to “stand up to the establishment” until we collectively decide that they have crossed a line we are unwilling to define. This line is, of course, subjective and completely dependent on our role in the performance and preconceptions of what’s right and wrong, what’s too far and not far enough. The victims of the recent Ashley Madison hacking debacle, for example, are likely fairly homogeneous in feeling that the hackers crossed a line. So too are those observers who worry about their safety online, or about the immorality of the hackers’ exposing the personal lives of so many people for so many others to see. But then there are those who respond by saying the cheaters and affair-seekers on Ashley Madison “deserve what they got” or “got the least of what they deserved”, seeing as they were all adulterers anyway. (Never mind the enormous amount of fake accounts that could result in mistaken identity/culpability in this scenario).
Essentially what I’m trying to suggest here is that these themes speak to some insecurities (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) that we likely all experience in this digital age. We’ve probably all experienced that routinizing/dehumanizing quality of bureaucracy that Weber talks about, whether it’s at one of the venues Gitelman describes (like the DMV in the U.S. or the doctor’s office) or elsewhere. I think that, because of this general awareness of this routinizing (even if we don’t always know how to articulate it), we take some joy in acts that ‘de-routinize’ or ‘re-humanize’ aspects of our lives. Yet there are clearly limits to how de-routinized we want our lives to become. The hacker group Anonymous (and to some extent WikiLeaks) protests and exposes a lot of the faults that appear to be intrinsic to modern corporations and institutions by releasing confidential and sensitive files, but a lot of people, once they become familiarized with Anonymous, would balk at the idea that ‘they’ represent ‘us’ or ‘our’ interests very well. This is an online community, after all, composed variously (though not entirely) of people espousing misogyny, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and conspiratorial paranoia—ironically, these are identifying traits of people that largely go unidentified and that place primacy on protecting their own individual identities for fear of the bureaucratic repercussions of their acts, none of which stops them from exposing the identities of other people that they feel deserve to be exposed.
I just wanted to offer a couple more quick thoughts/questions that I had while reading:
– What ‘form’ does Gitelman’s ‘book’ take? By this I mean: since I downloaded each section of Gitelman’s book as its own .pdf, and then combined those separate .pdfs into a single Paper_Knowledge.pdf for easier viewing, while keeping a separate Notes.pdf file open on another screen for reference, am I still reading a book? Or am I reading a document? Clearly not every book is a document, and not every document is a book, but in this case the categories do not appear to be mutually exclusive. Is that problematic as far as how we construct definitions of and barriers between books, documents, and other forms of text? Is this reading too much into it (pun intended)? Also, at what point do these barriers get crossed (that is, if we believe that there are barriers between the forms of text, and that they matter)? For instance, if I use an application on my iPhone called Scanner Pro to ‘scan’ (i.e. take a picture of) every page of a physical book in front of me, and then I combine those scans into a single .pdf file, is that file a document and/or a book? Is it a document so long as it remains unopened, sitting in a file folder on my device, or in the cloud? Does it become a book as soon as I start reading it, i.e. using it as/like a book? I realize questions like these are, at some point, bound to become circular and less and less useful, but I do think giving them some thought is a good exercise—in fact, I think that might be the main attraction of Gitelman’s work, in that it does not claim to have all that many answers to these questions, or to have asked all the relevant/necessary questions, but it does nonetheless pose some very interesting questions that we ought to see if they can be answered, at least in part.
I should also hasten to mention that there’s no proof Anonymous is specifically behind this attack, but I do think it’s reasonable to assert that like-minded individuals were involved.
I have to admit that I didn’t like Gitelmans book very much, aside from the chapter 2 which I found quite interesting. It is just that I didn’t get the point what she wants to tell – if there is any. Maybe the reason for my discontent is that a) she gets too often distracted from her red line (Kate has already pointed out this, but I want to add one example) and b) there were some interpretations which I just could not follow. Two examples for each points:
a) On two pages (131-133) she refers to criticism on PDF, first by comic-pirates and second by some web usability “experts”. There complaints may be justified (especially the critique on pdf-based websites is something I can totally understand) but for me this has nothing to do with the PDF as documents. Or did Gitelman want to stress that Websites are not documents? At least she does not write this. For me it seems like she just wanted to criticise PDF. But this criticism is somehow misrouted because it claims a failure on tasks the developers of PDF never wanted to fulfil: If one criticises PDF for not being a good format for websites one could also criticise HTML for not providing proper documents. This is just unnecessary because that is not what these formats are meant for. Even more weird is the final part of her PDF-critique where she idolises the good old times when one could love their fax machines.
b) In chapter 3 she claims that “Anything Xeroxed—like anything scanned—is a document” (103). Not only that she contradicts her separation of Xerographers from Scanner (“Xeroxing is reading not in the sense that machines such as scanners are said to read” S. 102) but also I disagree with her about the reasons why it is funny to xerox your buttocks. In my opinion this is funny because afterwards you have a picture of your buttocks and this is always kind of funny (to take a picture with your camera is quite the same in this case). Maybe it would be even more fun to sneak the xeroxed buttocks in some serious files a colleague has to deliver to the boss – and if we follow this thought I can understand the connections to documents again.
I read this work as an e-book, which was accessed through Duke University Press. This is the type of e-book format which makes me nervous for e-books. Not only did I have to scroll on every page, but I then had to turn the page with a click of the mouse. I tried just giving in and printing the whole thing, but it would only let me print a page at a time (which would have occupied two sheets of paper). So I gave in and accepted my fate only to have every twenty pages or so redirect me to another page where I was told I had to log in to Duke’s website to proceed. Out of stubbornness I refused to register an account and would go back through the library’s website to re-access the book. As my frustration grew I was reminded of why I avoid e-books at all costs. I actually think that I need to give more credit to Gengenback, who actually experimented with the form so that it would match a new medium. I do not want to fault Gitelman for these problems because this book was published in print, but I do think that with the increase in e-books there should be a larger debate on how to format and develop the narrative to better suite internet navigation. I find that it is easier for me to engage in physical books, and I wonder if it is my training and education that have facilitated this or if e-books need reconceptualization to a more user-friendly form.
I do not want to devalue this work by criticizing the medium which was most immediately accessible to me, but I do want to find a fulfillment with web mediums that I have yet to find, though I came close with Gengenback’s work. Perhaps this debate should not be settled here or with this book, but it is something that is present in my mind every time I read a source on the internet that is not in a pdf format. Gitelman discusses the PDF in Chapter 4 as a sort of bridge between old form print media/culture and new online accessibilities. I find myself drawn to the ideas brought up about the PDF. While the PDF is easily “searchable,” I find that I rarely use that function, instead opting to print it out and read it as though I had access to the printed document, engaging with pencil, which Gitelman notes is how many engage with the PDF. Does the PDF hinder the potential for the digital age’s reformatting of information? Should we be trying to find a way to publish academic work online which satisfies the technological age we live in while not relying on paper “tropes” like the PDF does?
Chapter one struck more of a chord with me than I had originally expected. Historicizing printed (yet blank) sheets was something that had not really occurred to me. I actually ran into a problem that this chapter has just helped me through. I was trying to research silk trains, and wanted to start where silk was imported into Canada and where and how it was transferred from steamship to steam train. This led me to try to find ship manifests in archives and as I was hunting I stumbled across one for CPR. To my disappointment (at the time), it was blank and was stored in the archive as an example of what would have been used. I dropped that source and that topic due to a frustration of sources even though that document told me more that I realized. I didn’t get a copy of it so I am working from memory, but one thing that is particularly striking is the fact that the cargo manifest was independent from the list of passengers, even though silk was imported on passenger ships. The separation of passengers and cargo in the manifests may reveal more than I had thought about the value of space occupied on a ship, and how commodities were treated differently than passengers. I think I would like to revisit that piece of paper after reading Gitelman.
Gitelman’s book is thought-provoking on a number of levels so picking one element from it is tricky, but here goes:
In a nutshell, Gitelman’s argument against the concept of print culture is that the “know-show” function of documents is “context-dependent” (4), while the idea of print culture is not. The latter thus serves as a kind of “gaping catch-all” (8) unsuited, on its own, for a properly historical analysis of communication/media (9). Implicit in this is the assumption that history is about grasping the specifics of a given circumstance/period/situation.
I have two questions following from the above, and my feeling is that how we answer the first will have some bearing on how we answer the second. First, is Gitelman’s assumption correct? Second, do we lose anything in abandoning an abstract notion of print culture? (I’m also thinking of the latter question in relation to Stein—does his paper, and the linguistic turn more generally, rely on this kind of an idea as a basic assumption?).
Paper Knowledge – Gitelman frames her discussion of documents with this idea of the “know-show function” (p.1) that defines them, underscoring that documents are part of an epistemic practice. Once any object is framed – or mobilized – it becomes a document (p.3) This process mirrors the semiotic processes – hinted at in the discussion of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” – in that an image is given form and becomes an idea. However, I guess my big question that arises from this closely written history of documents is what is it that documents know that they are able to show? As a filmmaker, my mind often defaults to photographic images, so I was thinking about photographic prints as documents while reading this book, and how they perform the know-show function, and the processes of printers and ‘blanks’ and copies. The film negative itself is of course the blank, which once processed, is able to be copied and printed. But unlike the written word or graphic on paper, the photographic print as document seems to make a claim to directly represent the ‘real world out there’. What are the implications of a photographic document in terms of how we can know objects?
Fillable blanks: As noted by Connor, this blog thread represents another contemporary fillable blank document fulfilling the know-show function. But like many of its digital document counterparts, this fillable blank has an instability – a lack of ‘fixity’ in that at any moment our elaborate network that enables this form-filling could be severed and all that I know and hope to show could be lost, and be required to be re-drafted and surely could never be exactly the same. This lack of fixity is, however, critically important to understanding digital documents (and quite possibly the most prevalent interaction with digital blanks: copy and paste), yet Gitelman downplays the anachronism between ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ prints in the chapter on PDFs in order to argue for continuity between paper and digital prints. While the connection is well taken, however ‘fixed’ a PDF or other digitally printed document is, its existence is still fundamentally insecure. While she briefly touches on the fact that all digital documents have the same physical attributes or architecture, there is little attention paid to the fleeting nature of digital documents. While signing a contract with a pen is colloquially considered “signing your life away,” there seems to be no equivalent expression for a digital signature. This focus on impermanence is not just to create an anachronistic relation between analog and digital, as Gitelman suggests, but is to suggest that digital documents – while being born of a tradition based on ‘fixity’ and originals and copies – are fundamentally different in how they are used. So how does a digital document – which is supposed to perform the know-show function – preserve knowledge? Especially when that knowledge is so often evanescent?
I have to admit that I’m with Max on Gitelman’s book – I don’t like it. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why, though. I think it’s because I find her language opaque, and her logic even more so. I think also that her project here occasionally suffers from a flaw which is rather common these days – she takes one small thing and attempts to invest it with far more significance than I think it warrants.
Take Xeroxing and Daniel Ellsberg: Gitelman makes a variety of claims that strike me as bizarre and highly strained. On page 92, Gitelman claims that Ellsberg’s copying had come close to an addiction, as he, (unconsciously, apparently) sought to elevate his copies in importance above the originals. That somehow sets aside the more prosaic explanation; Ellsberg was doing something profoundly risky which required, for multiple reasons, multiple sets of copies of the documents. I’m really not sure there is something egoistic at the root of that behavior.
Gitelman also dwells on Ellsberg’s attempts to remove “Top Secret – Sensitive” from the copies, noting his “editorial” interest in Xeroxing (89). Again, he had practical reasons for doing so which I’m pretty sure counted for more than whatever obsession-with-the-medium-of-copying type of argument she is getting at. Finally, she tells us that Ellsberg had other “nebulous ego investments” intrinsic to his copying – by the way, I imagine “nebulous” is the exact right adjective here because I’m sure all these supposed “investments” he had would strike him as absurd (93). Gitelman tells us that Ellsberg involved his children in his copying, which his ex-wife found irresponsible (I agree [93]. However, she goes on to tell us that Ellsberg was “performing masculinity” in Xeroxing, which strikes me as patently ridiculous given that interpretation does not even fit her own attempt to gender the act of Xeroxing (93). How, I ask, if it was the case that Xerox operators were “almost invariably female”, was it possible for Ellsberg to express masculinity through Xeroxing (93)? Because he wanted his kids to see that his Xeroxing was “normal and calm” and therefore not a feminine use of Xeroxing (93)? Did women Xerox in hysterics? Did anyone in the 1970’s see Xeroxing as a gendered pursuit (does anyone now …) ? To be kind, the logic here is cloudy. To be unkind, it is preposterous.
I think it’s a shame that Gitelman drifts down some dead-ends with her attempt to sell the importance of Xeroxing. She does make some good points in that chapter; I can easily see how the advent of copying changed bureaucratic norms, and also served to subvert bureaucratic secrecy (92-93, and 95, respectively). It’s just a shame that the chapter is polluted by what are, in my eyes, some highly overstretched claims about the meaning of Xeroxing.
This is from Tryggvi:
Lisa Gitelman’s Paper knowledge handles episodes in the expansion of what Michael de Certeau once coined the “scriptural economy”. Gitelman does not directly state why she finds “economy” to be the most appropriate concept for her intentions – more appropriate than “culture”, for instance – but I imagine that it has something to do with the usefulness of thinking about media as organized, comprehensive systems. I also think the choice of “economy” is intended to stress that Gitelman is out to contemplate the space (whether physical or virtual) where media has intersected with and influenced the general social order – business, labor and state; in other words, capitalism – and vice versa. Gitelman has other aims, to be sure, but this is the one I tried to keep track of above others as I clicked my way through the book.
Some of Gitelman’s underlying questions are interesting, and she certainly does not shy away from analogies to the present: how, for starters, are we to make sense of a society in which “”undocumented” human beings” exist on its margins and “errors and malfeasance in “document execution” have helped exacerbate and extend a housing foreclosure crisis” (5)? Is this the natural consequence, we could ask, of an ever-expanding scriptural economy, from the late 19th century job printer to the tyrannical PDF file of the early 21st century? (She does not provide an answer.) We quickly learn, however, that Gitelman’s history is a lot more complicated than that, and bureaucracy/paperwork represents only one of many parts in a highly diversified scriptural economy.
Not all of the scriptural economy’s develop¬ments, as she sees it, extend or enhance corporate and/or state power. In fact, some of those developments are said to have opened up new avenues to act in politically subversive ways, and to do so for a wide variety of people. The Great Depression, for example, witnessed a “democratization” of “cultural production” with the spread of new media (77), which, as the great German cultural critic Walter Benjamin saw it, “might allow new actors” – the “amateur” proleteriat – “to exact revenge on the dehumanizing apparatus of modern life” (78); in other words, to get back on the corporate-bureaucratic entities that had gained force from an earlier expansion of the scriptural economy.
The history of the scriptural economy actually seems to be wrought with such contradictions and paradoxes. This is probably primarily because of its vastness, which in turn underlies its complexity. Gitelman’s book is not written to gloss over such untidy inconsistencies; its stated purpose is to unsettle and destabilize certain assumptions we may have given ourselves about the development of media through history, with the purpose of making it better. To achieve this desired destabilization, Gitelman employs a cast of “charmingly eccentric” characters who represent a “lode of smaller bones to help enrich this tale, and not a little gristle to complicate its tenor” (20).
In this week’s reading, one thing inspires me is in the first Chapter, the author talked about printing technology such as books, newspapers, articles, as well as theater tickets, government job printings etc. It makes me think about Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Community, where Anderson argues that people formed their identity through imagination with the aid of printing press. With printing press, they became able to have information about others who they entirely do not know; therefore, with that information, they can imagine their commonalities with those strangers(in the same nation). When reading that book, I thought printing press such as book and newspapers(especially newspapers) primarily shaped the imagined identity of a nation. However, this book on media gives me a new perspective in the sense that I realized even movie tickets, shop receipts and all the minor printing stuff in our life can be viewed as a method to form our imagination(or served as historical evidence). I think this part particularly interests me. (I posted late because I just figured out where to post)
This is a phenomenal book, an example of the kind of scholarship to which all transnational historians, I am sure, must aspire. I am particularly struck by Zahra’s ability to move (seemingly) effortlessly from the nation-state to the international organization to the foster parent’s home, and to concurrently consider the psychological framework operating in each of these spaces. That she can do so while demonstrating proficiency in multiple languages and across various regions and times is all the more impressive. I really had to take a moment to consider this book as a whole—to appreciate Zahra’s cohesiveness and clarity that shine through despite the book’s unassuming complexity. It asks us several questions, and provides a number of convincing answers, about how we should conceptualize the nation-state, nationalism and nationalities, the post-war era, and humanitarianism.
I must admit that I had to remind myself to remain critical while reading this book, which is a testament to Zahra’s writing style. Yet one critique did come out of my reading, and it related, again, to the book as a whole. There are several instances in which the actions and likely thoughts of individual children are considered, but my impression throughout the book was that children were never really the subjects of Zahra’s study. Granted, I don’t think they were supposed to be the subjects, as she was more immediately concerned with the ways that various (adult) institutions and communities imagined, created, and manipulated childhood for sociopolitical purposes. Yet these lost children also underwent this process in Zahra’s book, didn’t they? She treats children more as objects than as subjects, as material things or texts that might be handled or read in certain ways to reveal or modify grander conclusions about Europe and the West in the post-war period. It is a brilliant tactic that Zahra skilfully executes, but it does, in itself, raise a few important questions: At what point do we rob human subjects of their humanness when we use them as objects of study? Should they be used as sources in the way Zahra uses them? (My answer is, I think, yes, but I’m not sure how to resolve these reservations I’m holding.) Are the lost children in this book being doubly robbed of their agency—in the historical sense and in the Historical sense? Should children in their own right be considered legitimate historical subjects, and can this (or should this) be done without having to resort to child psychology?
Hello all, FYI for this week’s reading: I’m using a program called Adobe Digital Editions to read the book in e-format. If you license your version of the software you can read it on your computer, phone, tablet, etc. Otherwise you’re limited to just reading it on your computer. The program has difficulty converting the e-book format to PDF (it shifts the image to the far right of the screen for some reason and I haven’t been able to sort out the bug yet), but if you’re okay with reading on your screen, it works really well.
The Order of Things I still find quite a stimulating work. This might betray my rather rudimentary knowledge of the large-scale philosophical changes/challenges which have occurred post-WWII. In particular, this idea of the episteme is something I find quite fascinating, especially since I am trying to excavate how people thought of their own identities in the premodern period. Axioms which have a consensus and form the basis of an episteme are quite intriguing and I do think that attempting to get at the unconscious level of knowledge production is exciting, but I have might doubts about its feasibility.
I wonder how we, if we are to look at and unpack a particular episteme, which is what premodernists do all the time, how we are supposed to excuse ourselves from our current episteme, in order to look back at a previous one. Does not the modern one bleed into and characterize on an unconscious level our conscious attempt to look at the previous episteme? I have not read a great deal of Foucault, so he might have very well addressed this in other works, or possibly some of his critics or apologists have. A recent essay I read comes to mind where a prominent Yale scholar of the Qing dynasty makes an attempt to reorient what could be an episteme in the political culture of premodern Asian. He argues that in order for us to understand frontier policy and foreign policy in general in East Asia, we need a new language that isn’t anchored to the epistemological hegemony of the West. In particular he points to the fact that foreign policy debates analyzed by political scientists like Wang Yuankang and others use a universal language of foreign relations which they believe is applicable to East Asia as well. He takes issue with dividing policy matters between realism versus idealism. (Idealism generally referring a Confucian view that barbarians and Han were mutually incompatible and should be separated at all costs, while realism states that there is violence and accommodation given the circumstances). However, as Perdue argues, this dichotomy isn’t able to explain and unpack behavior of premodern Chinese ministers. A minister could make an argument for separation or war that was practical in certain circumstances, while a realist might come up with a plan for accommodation that was completely unrealistic and based on the position détente was always possible. They simply would not have understood how they understood the world that way. He proposes that a “logic of practice” as opposed to a “logic of theory” is more applicable to how contemporaries would have understood policy debates with the Mongols. In this case, he is trying to excavate part of ane episteme of a political culture we no longer have ready access to. Although Perdue is trying to be truer to how pre-moderns thought, this simple dichotomy seems to suffer from the same issue we set out with: we are projecting labels informed by our own episteme (in a language with its own textual burdens at that!). By that I mean the field of political science.
A further point I would like to make is that his definition of culture seems a bit too neat. There is an oft quoted section of his which goes: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” (Foucault 1970: 178). I take issue with this. This seems to be an overly homogenizing claim that doesn’t quite fit the historical record. For instance, in heterogamous states there is not simply one culture at any real level. Nor is the one overarching culture that everyone can agree on. Timothy Brook in his Confusions of Pleasure states that “Culture is what people do, not what they think they should do.”(128) Often what people do does no equate to a neat culture with defined boundaries. If that is the case, then there should be competing epistemes that seek to inform action and knowledge. For instance, Pamela Crossley wrote a very fine book entitled A Translucent Mirror on the ideology and culture of rulership in the Qing dynasty. In that work she argues that Qing rulership exhibited simultaneous yet separate Tibetan, Han Chinese, Mongol and Uyghur strategies that were not mutually intelligible. They were employed separately when dealing with each of the large ethnic constituencies of the empire. If Foucault is correct and each of these separate political cultures has its own episteme, then what is left to theorize and interpret Qing political culture? Some sort of macro-episteme? It seems a bit too messy and contested to fit the theory.
Last I’d like to comment on periodization in the work. Reading up on this work I was intrigued by a problem: how are we able to define when an episteme changes to another. Foucault seem to think that between the Classical, Renaissance and Modern periods there were clean breaks. However, that seems rather difficult to defend. It makes it difficult to explain how Robert Boyle and Issac Newton were often more interested in alchemy or other interests which would be termed as “magic” today. There doesn’t seem to be a neat break between empirical reasoning and the explanation of the world through arcane powers and concepts. To them it was all natural science. Breaks are interesting, but it might have been more useful to map transitions.
I read The History of Sexuality Volumes 1 and 2 for my “official” Foucault reasons.
Oh, Foucault! I both love him and hate him. I struggle with so many of his ideas, yet want to know more. He’s like the cool kid whom I wish to befriend but he’s far too cool for me.
I am actually so surprised that so few people talk about Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure. Like Stoler (which I will get to later), there is a surprisingly large amount which needs to be unpacked in regards to Foucault. This study goes back in time from Volume 1 (which threw off my love of basic conceptions of linear time), all the way back to Ancient Greece. The notion of “having” a sexuality can trace back to Ancient Greece, and the concept of “active” and “passive” sexual players developed into “male” and “female” players. The former category, however, was not defined based on gendered lines like the latter. This is largely an exploration of male-male love in Ancient Greece. There was something weirdly charming and cute (if I can say that) about this analysis. On the one hand, it explores the predicament the younger males were in, where they negotiated between shifting from passive to active players. On the other, there is a complication of this picture by showing how the older men would try to pick their mates. They would go to the gyms and work alongside the younger men, trying to keep up, and the young men had a degree of power in choosing partners. The image of old fat (naked) white men sweating horribly while they try to keep up to the younger, fit (but also naked) men makes me laugh. While I appreciate this complication, I find it kind of charming. So while “homosexuality” existed, there were anxieties surrounding it, making it more complicated than was previously focused. I loved this work, and I think we should talk about it more!
This work deals with both the past and the present. So can we call this a “history”? Are the discussions in this (and more of Foucault’s works) more important for history, or for the present (perhaps Sociology)? I think I would argue that they are both (and more), and that this is what makes Foucault so broadly loved (well, at least if not loved, cited).
Foucault also makes it very clear in this that he is not a classicist. I thought that was interesting, because that almost seems to devalue his authority. I do not want to imply that you can’t break your areas for focus, but I think it is weird that he almost sets this work in opposition to the authority of historians of the time period. Can historians write work which ignores the historiographical literature? I am pretty sure anyone who wasn’t Foucault would be laughed out of the room if they did what he did.
After reading Stoler, discussions of race were so glaringly absent.
Finally, I think a topic I would like to see explored more is Foucault’s is his importance in understanding the history of AIDS. This is not just because his life was taken by it, but also that his writings could profoundly shape a non-scientific understanding of AIDS. Paula A. Treicher’s How to Have Theory in an Epidemic explores Foucault’s connection and says that “for Michel Foucault, the ‘tragedy’ of AIDS was not intrinsically its lethal character but that a group that has risked so much–gays–is looking to standard authorities–doctors, the church–for guidance.” I think this is an underrepresented field which needs unpacking by historians soon. Perhaps an oral history. This is a side rant which I should save for another battle, however.
I was glad to see Discipline & Punish on the list because it’s one of my favorite books ever. I apologize in advance for the length of this post. One of the difficulties of posting like this, however, is that a certain amount of summary needs to be done before reflections make any sense. So here’s my 10-second summary. Like other stuff of his that I’ve read, Discipline & Punish makes both a historical point and a conceptual point. The historical point is about the extensive and intensive growth of power over the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. The conceptual point is about understanding what he calls “micro-power,” which is expressed through the many subtle (or seemingly invisible) means of supervising, correcting, forming, disciplining and ordering individuals and their behaviour rather than through the executive impositions of traditionally-conceived sovereign power.
Foucault has sometimes been characterized as a “Post-Anarchist,” and I think that one of the main reasons for that is that he adopts an approach of putting power first in his analysis, or to paraphrase his terms, he constitutes power in its various forms as a problem. What I find interesting is how this approach represents a kind of anarchist history, not in the sense of studying the history of anarchism as a political movement, but rather as a history that foregrounds an anarchist perspective as a tool of analysis. That said, there are a few ideas that I think Foucault needs to be supplemented with.
One of the things that Foucault lacks from this perspective, is an analysis of not only how power is all around us and operating in ways we perhaps don’t realize, but also of how power is organized hierarchically. This gets at some of the points that Foucault raises in his chapter on Bentham’s Panopticon, about how power is structural, but also goes further in questioning what those structures actually look like. My sense is that had Foucault pursued this kind of work, it may have shed light on how sovereign power and executive imposition didn’t collapse, and how it actually lends “micro-power” much of its force. If I think of leading tutorials, for example, I get to exercise power in lots of ways: from expecting students to raise their hands before speaking to influencing their academic destiny through grading. Under unusual circumstances, however, like if a student decides to be a total delinquent, then the power to deal with that would be largely over my head. So although power is usually delegated and functions smoothly under ordinary circumstances, it also is usually backed up by power higher up on the hierarchy for when things go sour. In other words, don’t blame the TAs.
The second is that although Foucault discusses micro-power, he doesn’t really discuss micro-resistance in any depth. Other scholars—James C. Scott for one—have taken this question up, and I think it’s one that is often implicitly involved in studies of “subaltern” people and their historical agency. One of the things I wonder, however, is how historical examples of micro-resistance might shed light on micro-power for historians. If micro-power operates in subtle ways for contemporary actors, then perhaps we need sources that show the cracks in the system to see it for what it is. To return to the question of hierarchy as well, perhaps micro-resistance is methodologically useful for understanding the lower rungs of a structure. One of the examples I think of from this course is Tara Zahra’s book where she talks about humanitarian workers and others as agents of nationalism. Perhaps examples like the Spanish kid who was told he couldn’t be a Mountie are particularly useful in showing us how school discipline works at a grassroots level. This is another aspect of Foucault’s wider legacy that I think deserves more thought.
By reading Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, I was inspired and surprised in many ways. Foucault’s object of this book is to “define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world” (11). So this book is not a book about sex itself, it is more about how sex has been put into discourse. He first talks about the “repressive theory” which argues that from the 18th century, sex was gradually being repressed and was dominated by the ruling class of bourgeoisie; being able to talk about sex openly and enjoy it is a way to revolt against this domination and to librate ourselves. Foucault, while agrees with some basic facts underlying this repressive hypothesis, he argues that it is on the contrary of that. Even though after the 18th century, discourse on sex was repressed on the surface, but this trend also intensified discourses on sex: “what is peculiar to modern society, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret” (35). I think this argument is bold but on the same time very reasonable. He argues that due to combination of confession and science, the discourse on sex actually was proliferated since it gradually became part of the public interest.
He also argues that the motivations behind this increasing discourses on sex is the will of knowledge. He denies the repressive hypothesis’ argument that because of economic concerns of the bourgeoisie(enjoying sex is not productive), sex was repressed. And he argues that the motivations should not solely be economic.
Moreover, he argues from a constructionist’s point of view that the discourse of sex is never fixed but was contingent and constructed by the government over time. He argues that because of the government’s emphasis on confession in many different areas(such as demand by doctors, government officials and teachers, parents, etcs), we tend to see such confessions as liberating and therapeutic. Foucault argues that confession is not inherently liberating, but we have been pushing to believe that by the powers.
One thing that confuses me is Foucault’s argument on power. He denies the repressive hypothesis and the “juridico-discursive” conception of power that power is domination, subjugation and characterized by repressiveness. Rather, he argues that power is everywhere, it existed in knowledge, words, etcs, everywhere. Everybody and everything is a source of power. And subjection does not signify a lack of power but in many respects a different manifestation of power. I am a little bit confused at what he really means by “power” since it seems very vague and abstract. It feels like I can grasp the concept but simultaneously I feel like I do not really know what it is. Moreover, I sometimes feel that his analysis is a little bit too general and abstract. But I guess this is the first volume and maybe he explains things more concretely in the following volumes.
My comments will be on Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume 1:
First of all, what David said about how to use Foucault to understand the AIDS epidemic is fascinating. I also wonder what Foucault would have made of it if he were alive today and had some historical perspective on the first decades of it.
Anyway, I really like the way Foucault uses sources which do not explicitly say what he asserts they are *really* saying. Witness page 28, note 12: Here, Foucault explores the rules of an eighteenth-century secondary school, contending that they were all about the prohibition of children’s sex, though of course they never say that! Foucault recognizes that since sex was translated into an increasingly oblique discourse by the seventeenth century (20, one has to look for its presence indirectly. Natalie Zemon Davis does a similar thing in her Martin Guerre re-reading; hence Robert Finlay’s traditionalist rebuttal. I think the perils of reading texts for their implied content are self-evident. That said, reading sources “against the grain” is the only way of getting at topics which have been submerged from polite and appropriate speech.
Near the end of the book, Foucault makes some interesting statements which I am still wrestling with a bit. He says that the centrality of sex as a political concern is because it lies “at the pivot of two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life (145).” These axes are the disciplining of the body and the regulation of populations. I think, although I might be giving a crude rendering of what Foucault is trying to get across, what he is saying here is that the state impulse to control sexuality, which leads to the methods of control based upon the two axes above, is a facet of the state’s ultimate modern raison d’etre: the “management of life” (147). As long as the state’s goal is the management of life of the entire population, it has a vested interest in controlling the “bio-power” of its people. Or so I saw it. Perhaps we can discuss this passage in class. I thought it was important because of what appears to be at stake: that is, an explanation for WHY Western states were so actively policing, managing, transferring, and containing sexuality for centuries. That, to me, is a larger question than Foucault’s mere contention, which I think is correct, that far from a repressive silence enveloping sexuality in these centuries, these centuries were obsessed with sex.
Lastly, this book is explicitly about sex in the West. Did anyone else wonder how the contours of a similar project based around the history of sexuality in other cultures might look?
I think for my first post, I would like to share a thought I had as a student of the state and ethnic identity. I argued in my previous MA program that how the state incorporated various peoples through its bureaucratic machinery had a real impact on how these peoples thought about themselves historically. Mongols, for instance, who were incorporated into the Ming state were labelled as “Ming Mongols”, distinct from fellow Mongols who remained on the other side of Chinese control. Indeed, they seem to accept and act as loyal servitors, especially in a military capacity (at least in the extant records). However, this book in question de-centers and challenges this somewhat too neatly packaged analysis. Men whose ways of knowing and interpreting history, the grand narrative of politics and men, were distinctly different from females in the Mugade. As we talked about in class, women clearly had a epistemological and historical geography that defied, even rejected clear chronology or linear political events. Instead family, relationships and nomenclature seemed to be essential in retelling and even mythologizing the past. Therein how women interpreted historical ethnic identity is also very interesting. In the chapter “Locating a Woman’s Life” (paragraphs 18-19)the author explains how women conflated ethnic identity with their clan. Some linked it to “Shangaan-ness”, while others linked it to the place where they were living. The state, whether colonial or other, seems completely absent from these women’s ethnic identity. That is incredibly interesting to me, because not only are neat ethno-linguistic categories smashed, but it seems to indicate that even within a relatively small area ways of understanding ethnic identity are incredibly gendered and even defiant of the state’s attempts to claim a taxonomizing right or power over its citizens. I am still somewhat pessimistic in being able to recover similar contrasting ways of identity in medieval/early modern China, especially in the case of women.
In her discussion on “Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System” Gitelman shows the tensions that can sometimes exist between a document and the thing that it documents. She sets up a sort of dialectic between an operating system and its manual in which “the manual and the operating system were each the mutual result of inertial and accelerative pressures” (Gitelman 100). In order to understand how to write programs for an operating system, you have to read the manual, but at the same time, whenever you create a new program, you are building a new undocumented piece onto the existing operating system, which makes the documentation you used to create it obsolete and in need of new revision. This example struck me because in modern computer programming, the tensions between documentation and the programs they show us how to create, at least in the web programming world in which I have been working in for the past four years, often times does not exist. Instead, we encounter code which programmers say “documents itself,” meaning the form it takes and the way that it is executed demonstrates how it should be used.
If you choose to learn Python, one of the most popular programming languages today, one of the first documents you will likely encounter is “The Zen of Python” by Tim Peters (accessible at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/). “The Zen of Python” is probably not what you would expect to see when you look at a manual for a programming language. Instead of outlining how functions work or the language’s class system, “The Zen of Python” is a sort of philosophical text that suggests how one should approach programming in Python, a sort of guideline for the practice of programming. This idea of proper practice—particularly the idea that there is one “pythonic” way to write code—has had an interesting effect on the code written by most Pythonistas, which is the name members of the Python programming community call themselves.
Since there is only one “right way” to write the basic building blocks that make up most Python programs, if you look at well written code, you can quickly figure out what that code is intended to do, and how you can use and build upon it. In effect, the object being documented (the code) also fits Gitelman’s definition of a document, since it has both the know-show function of a document (Gitelman 1)—it conveys information, and it has been “mobilized” (Gitelman 2)—designated by some agent as having a particular know-show function, demonstrated by how its author purposely wrote it using the self-documenting practices of the Python community. An additional interesting facet of this is that in order to understand how the “building blocks” of the language work, instead of starting out by reading documents that seek to outline what constitutes pythonic coding practices, new Phythonistas often look through the source code of well-known libraries and replicate the processes they find there in their own code until they get a feel for what works well and is deemed pythonic by other programmers.
My question for this week is this: how does the idea of a self-documenting object which is intelligible via shared practices within a particular community confirm or challenge Gitelman’s conception of what a document is and does?
Thank you for introducing us to the term ‘Pythonistas’! Your question is also very interesting–and I think some of the themes I raised in my comment could potentially speak to it, and vice versa.
I would like to respond to Paper Knowledge in light of what historian Ernst A. Breisach identifies as a perennial competition in history: that between the demands of erudition (history as presenting the truth), and those of composition (history as a persuasive narrative). Gitelman’s work responds to the demands of erudition. She uses extensive footnotes and in-text references to primary and secondary source documents to both situate her ideas in relation to those of other scholars and to discuss “the recent history of documents and the means, meanings, and methods of their production in necessary detail” (11). Even when justified, extensive referencing runs the risk of interrupting the composition’s flow and, in the case of numerous references to unfamiliar to the reader (e.g. “As Johanna Drucker, Matthew Kircschenbaum, and Katherine Hayles have explained…” (69), they ultimately limit the book’s readership (to the erudite). But it is more than this that causes me to see Paper Knowledge as honouring erudition; it is the absence of a cohesive overarching narrative.
Gitelman approaches historical writing in an original (though perhaps increasingly common?) way: with four chapters that can standalone and an afterward, in lieu of a conclusion (“rather than to conclude too neatly,” 137). She presents through the chapters a series of elaborated points (though would Gitelman prefer a less reifying word than “points” – “representations” perhaps?) that contribute to her broader interest in challenging the use of the classification “print culture” (7-9) and in providing “a more detailed account of documents in the past [that] will without question facilitate more nuanced accounts of documents in and for the future” (6-7). Detail is key, while rendering “the past narrowly in terms of or service to the present” is carefully avoided (7). I wonder if she would think that by presenting a more explicit and persuasive historical narrative she would be doing the latter. Interestingly, she notes in the afterward that although the chapters “gestured toward a media history of documents,” they did not complete one (137) – perhaps she just wasn’t trying to write a history.
My response this week is structured in a way that mirrors how I went about reading this book–that is, by jumping back and forth between the book’s varied topics that happened to catch my interest. The first topic I’d like to discuss is rooted in Chapter One, “A Short History of _______”. Gitelman’s analysis of blanks and fillable forms had me considering when and how I encounter blanks and forms throughout my everyday life, and I thought this was particularly apposite because much of her early thoughts in the book are influenced by Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life.
My list of blanks and forms started with those digital experiences that are commonplace in my everyday life, and that are also considered throughout Paper Knowledge. These include filling in the blank forms to access my e-mail and social media accounts, and unlocking my iPhone with my password. Then I thought of the more physical ‘forms’ that I am required to fill out every day in order to get access to what it is that I want/need. I lock and unlock keys for my front door, my garage, and my bicycle. I encounter blanks daily when I write on paper while reading or discussing texts for class, or for more mundane things like to-do and grocery lists. And now, once a week for the next few months, I’m going to fill in the blank forms on our course’s website, including my name, e-mail address, and a text box that includes my blog post, that Prof. Bronfman then has to authorize for publication on the site. This last set of blanks and forms actually speaks directly to what all the other blanks and forms in my life revolve around, that is, questions of permission/access and authority.
I don’t log into my e-mail and social media accounts only because I want to stay connected with people I’m communicating with (of course, this is the main reason I do so), I also log into these accounts precisely because they are mine, and not somebody else’s. It’s true, I lock and unlock the keys to my front door, my garage, and my bicycle because I want to do something on the other side of that door, or I want to get into that garage, or I want to ride that bicycle. But I also lock and unlock these things because they are mine. Running parallel to this concept is the fact that I don’t lock and unlock other people’s doors, garages, and bicycles because they are theirs, and not mine. I think these parallel concepts speak more broadly to what Gitelman discusses (with the help of Max Weber) on page 31. These processes, although ‘everyday’ and mundane in a way, are actually inherently bureaucratic because of the structure we give to them. We have structured our ideas of property, permission, and authority in bureaucratic ways. Although the subversion of these ideas of property, permission, and authority is fairly commonplace (houses and garages are broken into, bicycles are stolen, etc.), such subversion is still considered to be abnormal or deviant because it is anti-bureaucratic (we use the bureaucratic concept of (il)legality to denote, regulate, and/or punish this abnormality/deviance).
And yet, there is something about our fascination with figures like Daniel Ellsberg of Chapter Three, “Xerographers of the Mind,” or Julian Assange and Edward Snowden from the more recent past, that, I think, tells us that we have an affinity for people or behaviours that subvert this bureaucracy—at least to a certain degree, and so long as it doesn’t affect us directly (i.e. we’re okay with the performance as long as we are spectators and not embroiled participants). We rave about these vigilantes’ ability to “stick it to the man” or to “stand up to the establishment” until we collectively decide that they have crossed a line we are unwilling to define. This line is, of course, subjective and completely dependent on our role in the performance and preconceptions of what’s right and wrong, what’s too far and not far enough. The victims of the recent Ashley Madison hacking debacle, for example, are likely fairly homogeneous in feeling that the hackers crossed a line. So too are those observers who worry about their safety online, or about the immorality of the hackers’ exposing the personal lives of so many people for so many others to see. But then there are those who respond by saying the cheaters and affair-seekers on Ashley Madison “deserve what they got” or “got the least of what they deserved”, seeing as they were all adulterers anyway. (Never mind the enormous amount of fake accounts that could result in mistaken identity/culpability in this scenario).
Essentially what I’m trying to suggest here is that these themes speak to some insecurities (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) that we likely all experience in this digital age. We’ve probably all experienced that routinizing/dehumanizing quality of bureaucracy that Weber talks about, whether it’s at one of the venues Gitelman describes (like the DMV in the U.S. or the doctor’s office) or elsewhere. I think that, because of this general awareness of this routinizing (even if we don’t always know how to articulate it), we take some joy in acts that ‘de-routinize’ or ‘re-humanize’ aspects of our lives. Yet there are clearly limits to how de-routinized we want our lives to become. The hacker group Anonymous (and to some extent WikiLeaks) protests and exposes a lot of the faults that appear to be intrinsic to modern corporations and institutions by releasing confidential and sensitive files, but a lot of people, once they become familiarized with Anonymous, would balk at the idea that ‘they’ represent ‘us’ or ‘our’ interests very well. This is an online community, after all, composed variously (though not entirely) of people espousing misogyny, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and conspiratorial paranoia—ironically, these are identifying traits of people that largely go unidentified and that place primacy on protecting their own individual identities for fear of the bureaucratic repercussions of their acts, none of which stops them from exposing the identities of other people that they feel deserve to be exposed.
I just wanted to offer a couple more quick thoughts/questions that I had while reading:
– What ‘form’ does Gitelman’s ‘book’ take? By this I mean: since I downloaded each section of Gitelman’s book as its own .pdf, and then combined those separate .pdfs into a single Paper_Knowledge.pdf for easier viewing, while keeping a separate Notes.pdf file open on another screen for reference, am I still reading a book? Or am I reading a document? Clearly not every book is a document, and not every document is a book, but in this case the categories do not appear to be mutually exclusive. Is that problematic as far as how we construct definitions of and barriers between books, documents, and other forms of text? Is this reading too much into it (pun intended)? Also, at what point do these barriers get crossed (that is, if we believe that there are barriers between the forms of text, and that they matter)? For instance, if I use an application on my iPhone called Scanner Pro to ‘scan’ (i.e. take a picture of) every page of a physical book in front of me, and then I combine those scans into a single .pdf file, is that file a document and/or a book? Is it a document so long as it remains unopened, sitting in a file folder on my device, or in the cloud? Does it become a book as soon as I start reading it, i.e. using it as/like a book? I realize questions like these are, at some point, bound to become circular and less and less useful, but I do think giving them some thought is a good exercise—in fact, I think that might be the main attraction of Gitelman’s work, in that it does not claim to have all that many answers to these questions, or to have asked all the relevant/necessary questions, but it does nonetheless pose some very interesting questions that we ought to see if they can be answered, at least in part.
Somewhat awkwardly, this particular blog post did not require Prof. Bronfman’s permission to be published… that being said, I don’t think it detracts too much from what I had to say, and I think there’s something also to be gleaned from the fact that we have to fill out a blank CAPTCHA form to post on here.
Also, Wikipedia is quite handy if you’re not overly familiar with Anonymous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group). As you’ll see in the opening section, Anonymous isn’t a centralized group, but more of a unique community in that many members will never know each other, especially their real-life identities.
And for more information on Ashley Madison, here’s a link to a CBC article from July: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ashley-madison-infamous-infidelity-website-target-of-data-hack-1.3159643 and another one that demonstrates the bureaucratic tie-in with these themes: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ashley-madison-hack-2-unconfirmed-suicides-linked-to-breach-toronto-police-say-1.3201432.
I should also hasten to mention that there’s no proof Anonymous is specifically behind this attack, but I do think it’s reasonable to assert that like-minded individuals were involved.
I have to admit that I didn’t like Gitelmans book very much, aside from the chapter 2 which I found quite interesting. It is just that I didn’t get the point what she wants to tell – if there is any. Maybe the reason for my discontent is that a) she gets too often distracted from her red line (Kate has already pointed out this, but I want to add one example) and b) there were some interpretations which I just could not follow. Two examples for each points:
a) On two pages (131-133) she refers to criticism on PDF, first by comic-pirates and second by some web usability “experts”. There complaints may be justified (especially the critique on pdf-based websites is something I can totally understand) but for me this has nothing to do with the PDF as documents. Or did Gitelman want to stress that Websites are not documents? At least she does not write this. For me it seems like she just wanted to criticise PDF. But this criticism is somehow misrouted because it claims a failure on tasks the developers of PDF never wanted to fulfil: If one criticises PDF for not being a good format for websites one could also criticise HTML for not providing proper documents. This is just unnecessary because that is not what these formats are meant for. Even more weird is the final part of her PDF-critique where she idolises the good old times when one could love their fax machines.
b) In chapter 3 she claims that “Anything Xeroxed—like anything scanned—is a document” (103). Not only that she contradicts her separation of Xerographers from Scanner (“Xeroxing is reading not in the sense that machines such as scanners are said to read” S. 102) but also I disagree with her about the reasons why it is funny to xerox your buttocks. In my opinion this is funny because afterwards you have a picture of your buttocks and this is always kind of funny (to take a picture with your camera is quite the same in this case). Maybe it would be even more fun to sneak the xeroxed buttocks in some serious files a colleague has to deliver to the boss – and if we follow this thought I can understand the connections to documents again.
I read this work as an e-book, which was accessed through Duke University Press. This is the type of e-book format which makes me nervous for e-books. Not only did I have to scroll on every page, but I then had to turn the page with a click of the mouse. I tried just giving in and printing the whole thing, but it would only let me print a page at a time (which would have occupied two sheets of paper). So I gave in and accepted my fate only to have every twenty pages or so redirect me to another page where I was told I had to log in to Duke’s website to proceed. Out of stubbornness I refused to register an account and would go back through the library’s website to re-access the book. As my frustration grew I was reminded of why I avoid e-books at all costs. I actually think that I need to give more credit to Gengenback, who actually experimented with the form so that it would match a new medium. I do not want to fault Gitelman for these problems because this book was published in print, but I do think that with the increase in e-books there should be a larger debate on how to format and develop the narrative to better suite internet navigation. I find that it is easier for me to engage in physical books, and I wonder if it is my training and education that have facilitated this or if e-books need reconceptualization to a more user-friendly form.
I do not want to devalue this work by criticizing the medium which was most immediately accessible to me, but I do want to find a fulfillment with web mediums that I have yet to find, though I came close with Gengenback’s work. Perhaps this debate should not be settled here or with this book, but it is something that is present in my mind every time I read a source on the internet that is not in a pdf format. Gitelman discusses the PDF in Chapter 4 as a sort of bridge between old form print media/culture and new online accessibilities. I find myself drawn to the ideas brought up about the PDF. While the PDF is easily “searchable,” I find that I rarely use that function, instead opting to print it out and read it as though I had access to the printed document, engaging with pencil, which Gitelman notes is how many engage with the PDF. Does the PDF hinder the potential for the digital age’s reformatting of information? Should we be trying to find a way to publish academic work online which satisfies the technological age we live in while not relying on paper “tropes” like the PDF does?
Chapter one struck more of a chord with me than I had originally expected. Historicizing printed (yet blank) sheets was something that had not really occurred to me. I actually ran into a problem that this chapter has just helped me through. I was trying to research silk trains, and wanted to start where silk was imported into Canada and where and how it was transferred from steamship to steam train. This led me to try to find ship manifests in archives and as I was hunting I stumbled across one for CPR. To my disappointment (at the time), it was blank and was stored in the archive as an example of what would have been used. I dropped that source and that topic due to a frustration of sources even though that document told me more that I realized. I didn’t get a copy of it so I am working from memory, but one thing that is particularly striking is the fact that the cargo manifest was independent from the list of passengers, even though silk was imported on passenger ships. The separation of passengers and cargo in the manifests may reveal more than I had thought about the value of space occupied on a ship, and how commodities were treated differently than passengers. I think I would like to revisit that piece of paper after reading Gitelman.
Gitelman’s book is thought-provoking on a number of levels so picking one element from it is tricky, but here goes:
In a nutshell, Gitelman’s argument against the concept of print culture is that the “know-show” function of documents is “context-dependent” (4), while the idea of print culture is not. The latter thus serves as a kind of “gaping catch-all” (8) unsuited, on its own, for a properly historical analysis of communication/media (9). Implicit in this is the assumption that history is about grasping the specifics of a given circumstance/period/situation.
I have two questions following from the above, and my feeling is that how we answer the first will have some bearing on how we answer the second. First, is Gitelman’s assumption correct? Second, do we lose anything in abandoning an abstract notion of print culture? (I’m also thinking of the latter question in relation to Stein—does his paper, and the linguistic turn more generally, rely on this kind of an idea as a basic assumption?).
Paper Knowledge – Gitelman frames her discussion of documents with this idea of the “know-show function” (p.1) that defines them, underscoring that documents are part of an epistemic practice. Once any object is framed – or mobilized – it becomes a document (p.3) This process mirrors the semiotic processes – hinted at in the discussion of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” – in that an image is given form and becomes an idea. However, I guess my big question that arises from this closely written history of documents is what is it that documents know that they are able to show? As a filmmaker, my mind often defaults to photographic images, so I was thinking about photographic prints as documents while reading this book, and how they perform the know-show function, and the processes of printers and ‘blanks’ and copies. The film negative itself is of course the blank, which once processed, is able to be copied and printed. But unlike the written word or graphic on paper, the photographic print as document seems to make a claim to directly represent the ‘real world out there’. What are the implications of a photographic document in terms of how we can know objects?
Fillable blanks: As noted by Connor, this blog thread represents another contemporary fillable blank document fulfilling the know-show function. But like many of its digital document counterparts, this fillable blank has an instability – a lack of ‘fixity’ in that at any moment our elaborate network that enables this form-filling could be severed and all that I know and hope to show could be lost, and be required to be re-drafted and surely could never be exactly the same. This lack of fixity is, however, critically important to understanding digital documents (and quite possibly the most prevalent interaction with digital blanks: copy and paste), yet Gitelman downplays the anachronism between ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ prints in the chapter on PDFs in order to argue for continuity between paper and digital prints. While the connection is well taken, however ‘fixed’ a PDF or other digitally printed document is, its existence is still fundamentally insecure. While she briefly touches on the fact that all digital documents have the same physical attributes or architecture, there is little attention paid to the fleeting nature of digital documents. While signing a contract with a pen is colloquially considered “signing your life away,” there seems to be no equivalent expression for a digital signature. This focus on impermanence is not just to create an anachronistic relation between analog and digital, as Gitelman suggests, but is to suggest that digital documents – while being born of a tradition based on ‘fixity’ and originals and copies – are fundamentally different in how they are used. So how does a digital document – which is supposed to perform the know-show function – preserve knowledge? Especially when that knowledge is so often evanescent?
I have to admit that I’m with Max on Gitelman’s book – I don’t like it. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why, though. I think it’s because I find her language opaque, and her logic even more so. I think also that her project here occasionally suffers from a flaw which is rather common these days – she takes one small thing and attempts to invest it with far more significance than I think it warrants.
Take Xeroxing and Daniel Ellsberg: Gitelman makes a variety of claims that strike me as bizarre and highly strained. On page 92, Gitelman claims that Ellsberg’s copying had come close to an addiction, as he, (unconsciously, apparently) sought to elevate his copies in importance above the originals. That somehow sets aside the more prosaic explanation; Ellsberg was doing something profoundly risky which required, for multiple reasons, multiple sets of copies of the documents. I’m really not sure there is something egoistic at the root of that behavior.
Gitelman also dwells on Ellsberg’s attempts to remove “Top Secret – Sensitive” from the copies, noting his “editorial” interest in Xeroxing (89). Again, he had practical reasons for doing so which I’m pretty sure counted for more than whatever obsession-with-the-medium-of-copying type of argument she is getting at. Finally, she tells us that Ellsberg had other “nebulous ego investments” intrinsic to his copying – by the way, I imagine “nebulous” is the exact right adjective here because I’m sure all these supposed “investments” he had would strike him as absurd (93). Gitelman tells us that Ellsberg involved his children in his copying, which his ex-wife found irresponsible (I agree [93]. However, she goes on to tell us that Ellsberg was “performing masculinity” in Xeroxing, which strikes me as patently ridiculous given that interpretation does not even fit her own attempt to gender the act of Xeroxing (93). How, I ask, if it was the case that Xerox operators were “almost invariably female”, was it possible for Ellsberg to express masculinity through Xeroxing (93)? Because he wanted his kids to see that his Xeroxing was “normal and calm” and therefore not a feminine use of Xeroxing (93)? Did women Xerox in hysterics? Did anyone in the 1970’s see Xeroxing as a gendered pursuit (does anyone now …) ? To be kind, the logic here is cloudy. To be unkind, it is preposterous.
I think it’s a shame that Gitelman drifts down some dead-ends with her attempt to sell the importance of Xeroxing. She does make some good points in that chapter; I can easily see how the advent of copying changed bureaucratic norms, and also served to subvert bureaucratic secrecy (92-93, and 95, respectively). It’s just a shame that the chapter is polluted by what are, in my eyes, some highly overstretched claims about the meaning of Xeroxing.
This is from Tryggvi:
Lisa Gitelman’s Paper knowledge handles episodes in the expansion of what Michael de Certeau once coined the “scriptural economy”. Gitelman does not directly state why she finds “economy” to be the most appropriate concept for her intentions – more appropriate than “culture”, for instance – but I imagine that it has something to do with the usefulness of thinking about media as organized, comprehensive systems. I also think the choice of “economy” is intended to stress that Gitelman is out to contemplate the space (whether physical or virtual) where media has intersected with and influenced the general social order – business, labor and state; in other words, capitalism – and vice versa. Gitelman has other aims, to be sure, but this is the one I tried to keep track of above others as I clicked my way through the book.
Some of Gitelman’s underlying questions are interesting, and she certainly does not shy away from analogies to the present: how, for starters, are we to make sense of a society in which “”undocumented” human beings” exist on its margins and “errors and malfeasance in “document execution” have helped exacerbate and extend a housing foreclosure crisis” (5)? Is this the natural consequence, we could ask, of an ever-expanding scriptural economy, from the late 19th century job printer to the tyrannical PDF file of the early 21st century? (She does not provide an answer.) We quickly learn, however, that Gitelman’s history is a lot more complicated than that, and bureaucracy/paperwork represents only one of many parts in a highly diversified scriptural economy.
Not all of the scriptural economy’s develop¬ments, as she sees it, extend or enhance corporate and/or state power. In fact, some of those developments are said to have opened up new avenues to act in politically subversive ways, and to do so for a wide variety of people. The Great Depression, for example, witnessed a “democratization” of “cultural production” with the spread of new media (77), which, as the great German cultural critic Walter Benjamin saw it, “might allow new actors” – the “amateur” proleteriat – “to exact revenge on the dehumanizing apparatus of modern life” (78); in other words, to get back on the corporate-bureaucratic entities that had gained force from an earlier expansion of the scriptural economy.
The history of the scriptural economy actually seems to be wrought with such contradictions and paradoxes. This is probably primarily because of its vastness, which in turn underlies its complexity. Gitelman’s book is not written to gloss over such untidy inconsistencies; its stated purpose is to unsettle and destabilize certain assumptions we may have given ourselves about the development of media through history, with the purpose of making it better. To achieve this desired destabilization, Gitelman employs a cast of “charmingly eccentric” characters who represent a “lode of smaller bones to help enrich this tale, and not a little gristle to complicate its tenor” (20).
In this week’s reading, one thing inspires me is in the first Chapter, the author talked about printing technology such as books, newspapers, articles, as well as theater tickets, government job printings etc. It makes me think about Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Community, where Anderson argues that people formed their identity through imagination with the aid of printing press. With printing press, they became able to have information about others who they entirely do not know; therefore, with that information, they can imagine their commonalities with those strangers(in the same nation). When reading that book, I thought printing press such as book and newspapers(especially newspapers) primarily shaped the imagined identity of a nation. However, this book on media gives me a new perspective in the sense that I realized even movie tickets, shop receipts and all the minor printing stuff in our life can be viewed as a method to form our imagination(or served as historical evidence). I think this part particularly interests me. (I posted late because I just figured out where to post)
This is a phenomenal book, an example of the kind of scholarship to which all transnational historians, I am sure, must aspire. I am particularly struck by Zahra’s ability to move (seemingly) effortlessly from the nation-state to the international organization to the foster parent’s home, and to concurrently consider the psychological framework operating in each of these spaces. That she can do so while demonstrating proficiency in multiple languages and across various regions and times is all the more impressive. I really had to take a moment to consider this book as a whole—to appreciate Zahra’s cohesiveness and clarity that shine through despite the book’s unassuming complexity. It asks us several questions, and provides a number of convincing answers, about how we should conceptualize the nation-state, nationalism and nationalities, the post-war era, and humanitarianism.
I must admit that I had to remind myself to remain critical while reading this book, which is a testament to Zahra’s writing style. Yet one critique did come out of my reading, and it related, again, to the book as a whole. There are several instances in which the actions and likely thoughts of individual children are considered, but my impression throughout the book was that children were never really the subjects of Zahra’s study. Granted, I don’t think they were supposed to be the subjects, as she was more immediately concerned with the ways that various (adult) institutions and communities imagined, created, and manipulated childhood for sociopolitical purposes. Yet these lost children also underwent this process in Zahra’s book, didn’t they? She treats children more as objects than as subjects, as material things or texts that might be handled or read in certain ways to reveal or modify grander conclusions about Europe and the West in the post-war period. It is a brilliant tactic that Zahra skilfully executes, but it does, in itself, raise a few important questions: At what point do we rob human subjects of their humanness when we use them as objects of study? Should they be used as sources in the way Zahra uses them? (My answer is, I think, yes, but I’m not sure how to resolve these reservations I’m holding.) Are the lost children in this book being doubly robbed of their agency—in the historical sense and in the Historical sense? Should children in their own right be considered legitimate historical subjects, and can this (or should this) be done without having to resort to child psychology?
Hello all, FYI for this week’s reading: I’m using a program called Adobe Digital Editions to read the book in e-format. If you license your version of the software you can read it on your computer, phone, tablet, etc. Otherwise you’re limited to just reading it on your computer. The program has difficulty converting the e-book format to PDF (it shifts the image to the far right of the screen for some reason and I haven’t been able to sort out the bug yet), but if you’re okay with reading on your screen, it works really well.
The Order of Things I still find quite a stimulating work. This might betray my rather rudimentary knowledge of the large-scale philosophical changes/challenges which have occurred post-WWII. In particular, this idea of the episteme is something I find quite fascinating, especially since I am trying to excavate how people thought of their own identities in the premodern period. Axioms which have a consensus and form the basis of an episteme are quite intriguing and I do think that attempting to get at the unconscious level of knowledge production is exciting, but I have might doubts about its feasibility.
I wonder how we, if we are to look at and unpack a particular episteme, which is what premodernists do all the time, how we are supposed to excuse ourselves from our current episteme, in order to look back at a previous one. Does not the modern one bleed into and characterize on an unconscious level our conscious attempt to look at the previous episteme? I have not read a great deal of Foucault, so he might have very well addressed this in other works, or possibly some of his critics or apologists have. A recent essay I read comes to mind where a prominent Yale scholar of the Qing dynasty makes an attempt to reorient what could be an episteme in the political culture of premodern Asian. He argues that in order for us to understand frontier policy and foreign policy in general in East Asia, we need a new language that isn’t anchored to the epistemological hegemony of the West. In particular he points to the fact that foreign policy debates analyzed by political scientists like Wang Yuankang and others use a universal language of foreign relations which they believe is applicable to East Asia as well. He takes issue with dividing policy matters between realism versus idealism. (Idealism generally referring a Confucian view that barbarians and Han were mutually incompatible and should be separated at all costs, while realism states that there is violence and accommodation given the circumstances). However, as Perdue argues, this dichotomy isn’t able to explain and unpack behavior of premodern Chinese ministers. A minister could make an argument for separation or war that was practical in certain circumstances, while a realist might come up with a plan for accommodation that was completely unrealistic and based on the position détente was always possible. They simply would not have understood how they understood the world that way. He proposes that a “logic of practice” as opposed to a “logic of theory” is more applicable to how contemporaries would have understood policy debates with the Mongols. In this case, he is trying to excavate part of ane episteme of a political culture we no longer have ready access to. Although Perdue is trying to be truer to how pre-moderns thought, this simple dichotomy seems to suffer from the same issue we set out with: we are projecting labels informed by our own episteme (in a language with its own textual burdens at that!). By that I mean the field of political science.
A further point I would like to make is that his definition of culture seems a bit too neat. There is an oft quoted section of his which goes: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” (Foucault 1970: 178). I take issue with this. This seems to be an overly homogenizing claim that doesn’t quite fit the historical record. For instance, in heterogamous states there is not simply one culture at any real level. Nor is the one overarching culture that everyone can agree on. Timothy Brook in his Confusions of Pleasure states that “Culture is what people do, not what they think they should do.”(128) Often what people do does no equate to a neat culture with defined boundaries. If that is the case, then there should be competing epistemes that seek to inform action and knowledge. For instance, Pamela Crossley wrote a very fine book entitled A Translucent Mirror on the ideology and culture of rulership in the Qing dynasty. In that work she argues that Qing rulership exhibited simultaneous yet separate Tibetan, Han Chinese, Mongol and Uyghur strategies that were not mutually intelligible. They were employed separately when dealing with each of the large ethnic constituencies of the empire. If Foucault is correct and each of these separate political cultures has its own episteme, then what is left to theorize and interpret Qing political culture? Some sort of macro-episteme? It seems a bit too messy and contested to fit the theory.
Last I’d like to comment on periodization in the work. Reading up on this work I was intrigued by a problem: how are we able to define when an episteme changes to another. Foucault seem to think that between the Classical, Renaissance and Modern periods there were clean breaks. However, that seems rather difficult to defend. It makes it difficult to explain how Robert Boyle and Issac Newton were often more interested in alchemy or other interests which would be termed as “magic” today. There doesn’t seem to be a neat break between empirical reasoning and the explanation of the world through arcane powers and concepts. To them it was all natural science. Breaks are interesting, but it might have been more useful to map transitions.
I read The History of Sexuality Volumes 1 and 2 for my “official” Foucault reasons.
Oh, Foucault! I both love him and hate him. I struggle with so many of his ideas, yet want to know more. He’s like the cool kid whom I wish to befriend but he’s far too cool for me.
I am actually so surprised that so few people talk about Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure. Like Stoler (which I will get to later), there is a surprisingly large amount which needs to be unpacked in regards to Foucault. This study goes back in time from Volume 1 (which threw off my love of basic conceptions of linear time), all the way back to Ancient Greece. The notion of “having” a sexuality can trace back to Ancient Greece, and the concept of “active” and “passive” sexual players developed into “male” and “female” players. The former category, however, was not defined based on gendered lines like the latter. This is largely an exploration of male-male love in Ancient Greece. There was something weirdly charming and cute (if I can say that) about this analysis. On the one hand, it explores the predicament the younger males were in, where they negotiated between shifting from passive to active players. On the other, there is a complication of this picture by showing how the older men would try to pick their mates. They would go to the gyms and work alongside the younger men, trying to keep up, and the young men had a degree of power in choosing partners. The image of old fat (naked) white men sweating horribly while they try to keep up to the younger, fit (but also naked) men makes me laugh. While I appreciate this complication, I find it kind of charming. So while “homosexuality” existed, there were anxieties surrounding it, making it more complicated than was previously focused. I loved this work, and I think we should talk about it more!
This work deals with both the past and the present. So can we call this a “history”? Are the discussions in this (and more of Foucault’s works) more important for history, or for the present (perhaps Sociology)? I think I would argue that they are both (and more), and that this is what makes Foucault so broadly loved (well, at least if not loved, cited).
Foucault also makes it very clear in this that he is not a classicist. I thought that was interesting, because that almost seems to devalue his authority. I do not want to imply that you can’t break your areas for focus, but I think it is weird that he almost sets this work in opposition to the authority of historians of the time period. Can historians write work which ignores the historiographical literature? I am pretty sure anyone who wasn’t Foucault would be laughed out of the room if they did what he did.
After reading Stoler, discussions of race were so glaringly absent.
Finally, I think a topic I would like to see explored more is Foucault’s is his importance in understanding the history of AIDS. This is not just because his life was taken by it, but also that his writings could profoundly shape a non-scientific understanding of AIDS. Paula A. Treicher’s How to Have Theory in an Epidemic explores Foucault’s connection and says that “for Michel Foucault, the ‘tragedy’ of AIDS was not intrinsically its lethal character but that a group that has risked so much–gays–is looking to standard authorities–doctors, the church–for guidance.” I think this is an underrepresented field which needs unpacking by historians soon. Perhaps an oral history. This is a side rant which I should save for another battle, however.
I was glad to see Discipline & Punish on the list because it’s one of my favorite books ever. I apologize in advance for the length of this post. One of the difficulties of posting like this, however, is that a certain amount of summary needs to be done before reflections make any sense. So here’s my 10-second summary. Like other stuff of his that I’ve read, Discipline & Punish makes both a historical point and a conceptual point. The historical point is about the extensive and intensive growth of power over the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. The conceptual point is about understanding what he calls “micro-power,” which is expressed through the many subtle (or seemingly invisible) means of supervising, correcting, forming, disciplining and ordering individuals and their behaviour rather than through the executive impositions of traditionally-conceived sovereign power.
Foucault has sometimes been characterized as a “Post-Anarchist,” and I think that one of the main reasons for that is that he adopts an approach of putting power first in his analysis, or to paraphrase his terms, he constitutes power in its various forms as a problem. What I find interesting is how this approach represents a kind of anarchist history, not in the sense of studying the history of anarchism as a political movement, but rather as a history that foregrounds an anarchist perspective as a tool of analysis. That said, there are a few ideas that I think Foucault needs to be supplemented with.
One of the things that Foucault lacks from this perspective, is an analysis of not only how power is all around us and operating in ways we perhaps don’t realize, but also of how power is organized hierarchically. This gets at some of the points that Foucault raises in his chapter on Bentham’s Panopticon, about how power is structural, but also goes further in questioning what those structures actually look like. My sense is that had Foucault pursued this kind of work, it may have shed light on how sovereign power and executive imposition didn’t collapse, and how it actually lends “micro-power” much of its force. If I think of leading tutorials, for example, I get to exercise power in lots of ways: from expecting students to raise their hands before speaking to influencing their academic destiny through grading. Under unusual circumstances, however, like if a student decides to be a total delinquent, then the power to deal with that would be largely over my head. So although power is usually delegated and functions smoothly under ordinary circumstances, it also is usually backed up by power higher up on the hierarchy for when things go sour. In other words, don’t blame the TAs.
The second is that although Foucault discusses micro-power, he doesn’t really discuss micro-resistance in any depth. Other scholars—James C. Scott for one—have taken this question up, and I think it’s one that is often implicitly involved in studies of “subaltern” people and their historical agency. One of the things I wonder, however, is how historical examples of micro-resistance might shed light on micro-power for historians. If micro-power operates in subtle ways for contemporary actors, then perhaps we need sources that show the cracks in the system to see it for what it is. To return to the question of hierarchy as well, perhaps micro-resistance is methodologically useful for understanding the lower rungs of a structure. One of the examples I think of from this course is Tara Zahra’s book where she talks about humanitarian workers and others as agents of nationalism. Perhaps examples like the Spanish kid who was told he couldn’t be a Mountie are particularly useful in showing us how school discipline works at a grassroots level. This is another aspect of Foucault’s wider legacy that I think deserves more thought.
By reading Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, I was inspired and surprised in many ways. Foucault’s object of this book is to “define the regime of power-knowledge-pleasure that sustains the discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world” (11). So this book is not a book about sex itself, it is more about how sex has been put into discourse. He first talks about the “repressive theory” which argues that from the 18th century, sex was gradually being repressed and was dominated by the ruling class of bourgeoisie; being able to talk about sex openly and enjoy it is a way to revolt against this domination and to librate ourselves. Foucault, while agrees with some basic facts underlying this repressive hypothesis, he argues that it is on the contrary of that. Even though after the 18th century, discourse on sex was repressed on the surface, but this trend also intensified discourses on sex: “what is peculiar to modern society, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret” (35). I think this argument is bold but on the same time very reasonable. He argues that due to combination of confession and science, the discourse on sex actually was proliferated since it gradually became part of the public interest.
He also argues that the motivations behind this increasing discourses on sex is the will of knowledge. He denies the repressive hypothesis’ argument that because of economic concerns of the bourgeoisie(enjoying sex is not productive), sex was repressed. And he argues that the motivations should not solely be economic.
Moreover, he argues from a constructionist’s point of view that the discourse of sex is never fixed but was contingent and constructed by the government over time. He argues that because of the government’s emphasis on confession in many different areas(such as demand by doctors, government officials and teachers, parents, etcs), we tend to see such confessions as liberating and therapeutic. Foucault argues that confession is not inherently liberating, but we have been pushing to believe that by the powers.
One thing that confuses me is Foucault’s argument on power. He denies the repressive hypothesis and the “juridico-discursive” conception of power that power is domination, subjugation and characterized by repressiveness. Rather, he argues that power is everywhere, it existed in knowledge, words, etcs, everywhere. Everybody and everything is a source of power. And subjection does not signify a lack of power but in many respects a different manifestation of power. I am a little bit confused at what he really means by “power” since it seems very vague and abstract. It feels like I can grasp the concept but simultaneously I feel like I do not really know what it is. Moreover, I sometimes feel that his analysis is a little bit too general and abstract. But I guess this is the first volume and maybe he explains things more concretely in the following volumes.
My comments will be on Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume 1:
First of all, what David said about how to use Foucault to understand the AIDS epidemic is fascinating. I also wonder what Foucault would have made of it if he were alive today and had some historical perspective on the first decades of it.
Anyway, I really like the way Foucault uses sources which do not explicitly say what he asserts they are *really* saying. Witness page 28, note 12: Here, Foucault explores the rules of an eighteenth-century secondary school, contending that they were all about the prohibition of children’s sex, though of course they never say that! Foucault recognizes that since sex was translated into an increasingly oblique discourse by the seventeenth century (20, one has to look for its presence indirectly. Natalie Zemon Davis does a similar thing in her Martin Guerre re-reading; hence Robert Finlay’s traditionalist rebuttal. I think the perils of reading texts for their implied content are self-evident. That said, reading sources “against the grain” is the only way of getting at topics which have been submerged from polite and appropriate speech.
Near the end of the book, Foucault makes some interesting statements which I am still wrestling with a bit. He says that the centrality of sex as a political concern is because it lies “at the pivot of two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life (145).” These axes are the disciplining of the body and the regulation of populations. I think, although I might be giving a crude rendering of what Foucault is trying to get across, what he is saying here is that the state impulse to control sexuality, which leads to the methods of control based upon the two axes above, is a facet of the state’s ultimate modern raison d’etre: the “management of life” (147). As long as the state’s goal is the management of life of the entire population, it has a vested interest in controlling the “bio-power” of its people. Or so I saw it. Perhaps we can discuss this passage in class. I thought it was important because of what appears to be at stake: that is, an explanation for WHY Western states were so actively policing, managing, transferring, and containing sexuality for centuries. That, to me, is a larger question than Foucault’s mere contention, which I think is correct, that far from a repressive silence enveloping sexuality in these centuries, these centuries were obsessed with sex.
Lastly, this book is explicitly about sex in the West. Did anyone else wonder how the contours of a similar project based around the history of sexuality in other cultures might look?