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Jan 27

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Day 27: Foucault at the Doctor’s Office

I just got back from the doctor.  Every time I go to the doctor I am amazed at how right Foucault is about the disciplinary power of the medical establishment.  Foucault explains that a number of institutions are put to work beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries to take control over–to discipline–bodies.  Sovereign power forms in order to protect life, and this protection of life, and this right to take it, becomes integral to the work of the sovereign.  In the 17th and 18th centuries, Foucault argues in the last lecture of Society Must be Defended, “techniques of power”… “were essentially centered on the body, on the individual body.”  These techniques organized, arranged and surveilled bodies in an effort to increase their (re)productivity.  Foucault writes:

They were also techniques for rationalizing and strictly economizing on a power that had to be used in the least costly way possible, thanks to a whole system of surveillance, hierarchies, inspections, bookkeeping, and reports–all the technology that can be described as the disciplinary technology of labor.

This is how going to the doctor feels to me.  Tests are done, questions are asked, personal histories are taken.  I have had this same conversation with my doctor about my personal history over and over again.  But she still asks the same things.  Apparently nonjudgmental questions that are loaded with judgment are asked: questions about your sex life, your alcohol consumption, drug use, cigarette use, whatever.  It doesn’t matter if you are doing something wrong or not, you feel like you are.  In fact, the being in the doctor’s office, like being stopped by a police officer, creates the feeling that you are somehow in violation, you need to be better disciplined.  They don’t even have to say it.  You feel it.   Read more

Jan 26

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Day 26: Quacks: Doctors and Philosophers

In the first book of Plato’s Republic, Plato has Socrates turn to the medical art in order to argue that justice like other technai, or knowledges that serve some practical purpose, benefit those they serve rather than those who have the knowledge.  Socrates is responding to Thrasymachus who thinks justice is a purely conventional effort to use one’s power to serve themselves.  Socrates, as is his wont in Platonic dialogues, introduces the question of knowledge–how can we serve ourselves if we do not know what would serve us well?  Having Thrasymachus agree that we expect the ruled to obey, and that if they were to obey when the ruler was wrong about what serves him well, Socrates also gets Thrasymachus to agree that this view would have justice be both serving the rulers’ end and not.  Thrasymachus explains himself by saying the ruler is only the ruler when the ruler is right about what his advantage is. Read more

Jan 25

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Day 25: Ancient Medical Art and the Distinction Between Humans and Animals

In my book on Aristotle’s Politics, I argue that Aristotle’s definition of the human being as political on the basis of having logos, by which we organize pleasures and pains and determine what is beneficial and harmful, good and bad, just and unjust, functions to show that anyone making a claim to belong exemplifies their having of logos and thus belongs.  Interestingly, I think this view might actually lead to showing, contra Aristotle’s argument that logos distinguishes humans from animals, that animals too might make claims and thus belong.  I take Bruno Latour’s work on the politics of nature to show as much.

I’m currently working on a project on Aristotle’s biology, which has led me into some background research on ancient Greek medicine that has further complicated the question of how and whether we can use logos and phônê to distinguish humans from animals. Read more

Jan 24

Day 24: Against Efficiency

This month I have found myself thinking about the ways that concepts from commercial life have come to pervade our thinking about ethical and political life to our detriment.  Debt economics was one way.  Efficiency is another.

In Republic II, Plato has Socrates justify having each person in the city do one task with recourse to efficiency.  What would be more efficient?  Accepting this point and the notion that each person has a nature suited to only one particular task leads to the city where each person is assigned a place.  Multiple machinations and myths are required to keep things in that order.  I believe that Plato is showcasing to us a political order based on a series of assumptions that he does not defend in order to challenge those assumptions.  One of those assumptions is that efficiency is good for human beings. Read more

Jan 23

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Day 23: Elizabeth Costello

I just finished reading Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee.  The novel–is it really a novel?–is a series of addresses by a fictitious Australian author, Elizabeth Costello, framed by her interactions with her son, fellow authors, her sister and finally, a Benjaminian before-the-law type last chapter, and a prologue with a possibly fictitious letter.  I’m writing this without reading anything else about the book because I want to keep working on my own sense of what the novel is about.  I am not yet sure.  But I think it is about something important, maybe about something only a novel can say, or rather, something a novel can best trouble. Read more

Jan 22

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Day 22: On Running and Being a Runner, Pt. 3

At a certain point in my running life, maybe in my second year living in Texas, when I was running 5-7 days a week, I began to experience running as a demand.  I was unhappy with myself if I didn’t get a run in.  I’d make sure to run in the morning if I had an event in the evening or I’d go home and run between work and evening activities.  If I didn’t, I felt guilty.  Often, when I was visiting family or at a conference, I wouldn’t have the time or the wherewithal to run and then I’d feel like I was not really a runner.  People would ask at these times how my running was going and I, knowing that I hadn’t run in three days, would feel like an imposter of a runner when I said, really well, thanks.  Then I’d acknowledge sheepishly that I hadn’t run in three days.  I don’t think I realized that people were giving me odd looks because that did not seem to them to have any bearing on whether I was really a runner or not.

At one point in 2011, I think it was, I ran a hundred days in a row or so.  I can’t remember how many days it was, which I consider to be a sign of my mental health regarding running, because there was a time when I was pretty obsessive about knowing how many days in a row it had been on any given day.

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Jan 21

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Day 21: On Running and Being a Runner, Pt. 2

I just got back from a run outside.  It’s 25 degrees.  I would so much rather run outside, if it’s say, over 20 degrees, than run on a treadmill.  Last winter was the first winter I got serious about running outside and it was awesome-sauce, as the Greeks say.  There’s just something about being outside that spurs me on, while to be honest, it’s easier for me to give up on a treadmill.  And even though I’ve been running 3-7 days a week for about twenty years (which you can read about in Pt. 1 of this series), I still give up sometimes.  Especially on treadmills.  There’s two things I don’t like about treadmills.  The first is associated with one of the greatest fears every runner has: forgive me for being graphic, the treadmill makes my bowels seem looser and the possibility losing control of them more looming than running outside.  I can’t really explain why this is the case, but it does make me feel like that.  I speculate that it’s something about the way the belt gives in, nah, ok, I really don’t know.  But anyway, that happens.  I don’t like it.

The other thing about treadmills is that I don’t feel like I can adapt my pace and my stride to whatever is happening with my body in the moment on a treadmill.  That work of adapting my body and paying attention to my body to make microadjustments as I run became important to me after reading two books, Chris McDougall’s Born to Run and Matt Fitzgerald’s Brain Training for Runners. While McDougall’s book gives the larger anthropological and evolutionary account of why that’s important, Fitzgerald’s gives the specific advice about how to do it well. Read more

Jan 20

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Day 20: On Running and Being a Runner, Pt. 1

I have yet to blog about running.  Once I talked about what I saw and thought on a run, but it wasn’t blogging about running.  The next couple days I’m going to make up for that because it turns out I have a lot to say about running.  I am a runner.  In this post, I’m going to tell you my personal running story.

I wasn’t always an athlete.  I remember one day sitting on the bleachers at my older sister’s indoor soccer game and my friend’s mom asked me if I played any sports.  My friend, a guy who was a little older than my sister, said, “She doesn’t play sports.  She flirts.”  I think I was 12.  Maybe 13.  I think I’m still probably running out of rage about that comment. Read more

Jan 19

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Day 19: Tenure for Life

I was recently tenured.

A friend of mine told me a story about when he was interviewing and one of the people who interviewed him asked him what he would do differently when he got tenure.  He couldn’t think of an answer.  She said, that’s the right answer.  You shouldn’t do anything differently.

I tried to be a pre-tenure faculty member for whom that could be true not because I was living out of fear of who I was upsetting, but because I was doing what I thought was right in teaching, research and service situations regardless of what people thought.  I think my friend’s interviewer’s comment can sometimes imply that faculty are so beaten down, well-disciplined in the  Foucaultian sense, that they will continue to feel sheepish as they did before they were tenured.

Soon after I learned of my tenure decision, I was back home in Philadelphia visiting my family, and it struck me how freeing it would be if you could address your personal life as if you had tenure–tenure for life, I like to call it.   Read more

Jan 18

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Day 18: Grace without Debt

Grace: it’s not about life after death, it’s life after debt.

By some lucky happenstance (grace?) I finished reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel Lila in the same week.  In his book, which is discussed at length in this seminar at Crooked Timber, Graeber attempts to establish that human relationships are not reducible to and do not originate in economies of credit and debt.  Graeber argues, as I have long thought, that Nietzsche’s exercise in taking the calculability of all human relations to its logical conclusions in his Second Essay in On the Genealogy of Morals is not meant to defend but to mock such a schema.  Graeber points out that there is something insulting about considering your relationships with others in terms of debt.  To consider a relationship one of debt suggests a calculability to it, a way of measuring what is owed, a way of holding one another responsible because of the IOU between you.  When I was in junior high and high school, my mother did not like us getting rides from our friends’ parents because she felt like that obligated her to give rides to our friends.  She didn’t like giving rides.  Fine.*  I think about Aristotle talking about how friendship is the opportunity to exhibit virtue to others, to have someone to be generous to.  But still, human relationships are always in excess of debt, irreducible to what is owed, made obscene by the sense that it is merely the keeping of obligations and demanding that they be met (this is likely why I’m not a Kantian).**  It is this element of human relationships that Graeber calls communistic. Read more

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