Summer is coming! New papers and work till fall

After a little break, we are here again in order to expose some points about the work and the research lines we will deploy this summer:

In the first place, we have planned to write three new drafts in order to be sent this fall. Although the three ones have a "central core" around biosecurity, biorrisk and ebola, we have stablished three different topics:

• For the first one, we want to wide the idea we sent to Nómadas Journal, where we talked about State of Emergency, Scenarios, and a new kind of bio-injuction (in contrast to Agamben and his Homo Sacer). The main idea is to affirm we are in a new time where Scenarios in biosecurity (as a new step in the preparedness logic of government) are the place where bios is defined, neither by politics neither law; but by techno-scientific knowledge.
• In the second one, we want to make a deep study about some "apps" like HealthMap in order to gather information about a new kind of "Early Warning Systems 2.0". The main feature of this new technologies, is the possibility of reporting and alerting by a layperson when he or she watches a strange person bleeding in the street, or if a friend has odds symptoms after a trip around Africa. We also want to make an ethnography with this app and finally, to extract the main conclussions about how a new kind of biosurveillance is being shaped.
• About the third one, we want to explain the "acceleration operators" idea once and for all. This last paper is the less-consolidated, but we have wrote a scheme with the key hypothesis that ebola is a path to create/articulate different scales (it is multiscalar). Speed is the characteristic of this path, but not from the biological component but a semiotic-component material.

In the other hand, we are pending about the achievement of a FPU grant by the Spanish Government for one of our students, and we want to collaborate in the next year congress about Social Studies of the Science and Technology, that will be held in Barcelona. Furthermore, we the new fund about our project, we want to make some new interviews with epidemiologist and other experts in the bios. Finally, we also want to make some "gatherings" with experts and lay people in order to close the expert knowledge to the society.

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Steve Hanna

Last 2014-2015 POBICS seminary: "La Subjetivación", Gilles Deleuze, course about Michel Foucault

Today, we have finished our calendary of seminaries with the last Deleuze's book about Foucault: "La Subjetivación". Undoubtedly, this course has been very important to us due to the great set of concepts, arguments and claims given by Deleuze to understand Foucault's work, but also in order to think about some key concepts in Social Critical Psychology like Power, Subjectivity or another importants philosophic concepts from Kant or Heidegger. 

The two axes around we have talked has been these two-ones:

- What is the subjectivity? It is more than a fold, but what?

- If between power and knowledge there is a actual-virtual relationship, and the subjectivity is a third axis, which is not actual or virtual; then, what is it and what kind of relationship has with the other two ones?

So, we will present as normally we do, the main ideas we have pointed out:

What is properly Foucault, is the answer to the emptiness that causes questions about: what lies beyond the power? What is characteristic of Deleuze would be the explanation about the outside points and its origin in line outside.

Deleuze breaks with the widespread conception of what Foucault calls subjectivity: subjectivity is not knowing, nor is power; It comes from the diagram (power relations), but is independent of them: they are three different ontologies (Knowledge, Power and Subjectivity). But, what is subjectivity then? "The art of itself". Subjectivity comes from the Greek diagram, and then the fold occurs. But within the fold there are not things, no content: there is memory, the absolute memory. Greeks created the possibility that  individuals could be a totality in itself (absolute memory, Bergson's memory concept).

History is a succession of events, but the memory are the conditions to establish relationships between those events. We can have the whole data at the time, but we have all the conditions to establish relationships between these events, i.e, a logic that allows you to understand the History in a particular way, like the rest of the people of your age, you understand the things one way (for instance. 2 + 2 may be 4, and nothing else). This is the absolute memory Bergson.

Westerners have added to the memory of our times the truth (the truth of sexuality, the truth of knowledge ...). In our time we can not think without truth. Subjectivity therefore is not a set of content.

The time that Foucault gives tosubjectivity is much larger than the that one given to power or knowledge. This, restructure Power and Knowledge regarding Subjectivity: the outside line is here, do not look away because in the distance there is only diagrams: subjectivity is more basic than Knowledge and Power (subjectivity becomes autonomous from these two, and them try to catch subjectivity changing more often than this last one, and therefore , being subordinated to subjectivity, it is becomes central (although it not borns before the others one).

So, in this sense...

Knowledge: actual

Power: virtual

Subjectivity: memory

If the resistance points  are singularities or subjectivities, we can talk about micro-practices of subjectivity with the equipment-concept given by Foucault. It is the way given by Foucault in order to convert logos in ethos, as the ethos would be an individual micro-subjectivity.

To govern itself is disengaging from Power and from Knowledge: you become you in your own world.

In the fold the is the unthinkable of thinking: the unthinking are the conditions to think (the absolute memory, conditions, logic); not only the thought (that would be the contents).

Photo Credit: Flickr, user Brande Jackson.

Summary from our Gabriel Tarde's seminary

Today, we have held the second to last seminary on this 2014/2015 course. We have red two books about Gabriel Tarde, titled "Beliefs, Desires, Societies" and "Social Laws"; two of the basic manuals in order to understand the Tarde's work. We have highlighted two main concepts in their books: the microsociology, and the "public" concept. We also have commented the "Desire" and "Belief" concepts on this author.

Here is the key points and the summary:

• What is Belief in Tarde?
• What is Desire in Tarde?
• The "public" concept vs "multitude"
• Microsociology and ANT

For him, both Belief and Desire can be quantified. In his theory of value, which is based on the belief and desire, he tries to make science of the "individual", categorizing and quantifying the two powers of individuality, although in themselves are more artistic than scientific.

Thanks to Tarde, we can say that in the Social Sciences, it emerged a thing called Psychology, which comes from it the other ones as sociology, anthropology, and so on.

Latour owes much to Tarde. Latour says that to start thinking, it must be placed "in the middle" or center of anything. " Tarde, in this same sense he says: "the only way to clear up some sources of any material, is placed in media res". As the same Latour points out in the preface of the book, ANT is greatly influenced by Tarde's work in its view of whatever kind of sociology (not only human sociologies) as an association of several "micro" elements which constitute the macro-structure or the macro-actant.

How is introduced the novelty in Tarde?: throughout the "personal genius". The personal battle each one: every new idea arises in a private individual mind before the public. Individual is personal, but not singular. How does that monadic individual produces the novelty?

The "minimum measure" on Afternoon is the brain. The novelty comes from the individual, from the small, but is there creation and adaptation at intermediate levels (eg. The level of discourse introduces novelty in the set of discourses that is the next level), or is there creation only in the small level?

Tarde dares to break the distance between the micro / meso / macro. Instead, Moscovici said psychosocial facts by psychosocial facts, maintaining the distances between levels (contrary to Tarde and later, to ANT).

Multitude concept in Tarde and Negri: multitude is an emerging potential of a group. In Tarde, creative uniqueness is in the individual. The forces of beliefs and desires do not exist in Negri (nor other concepts). In this sense, public creation also introduces novelty.

Tarde also does the first attention to technology (before  ANT) through the press, the newspaper ... when he says that through technology is the only way possible to create public.

Desire and belief are the "Konatus" and the "Apetitus" from Leibniz: Belief is the expression of a desire, if you have a desire, belief moves you to do something. Both are inseparable. They are the basic forces within the individual. As we all have beliefs and desires, it is something that goes beyond the individual:

"At the bottom of the internal phenomena," says Tarde, "[There are] three elements, belief, desire and its point of application, the pure feeling." "The first two terms," ​​he continues, "are the constitutive and innate forms or forces of a subject; the molds where it receives the raw material of sensation", Thus, the trials and human actions are rooted in the beliefs and desires that each individual owns in his conscience".

Photo Credit: Flickr, User Eduardo Fonseca Arraes

Some notes about the Foucaultian course by Deleuze and our research' topic

After a little break due to a big load of work at the queue (three papers, a project for a grant by the Spanish Government, the final course' evaluation of our PhD students...) we come back to our blog. Today, we only want to point out some ideas about our big and successful seminary on this year: the course taught by Deleuze about the Foucault' work. We also want to remember we have pending the last session about this course the 15th june (the third book about this course is called "La Subjetivación").

In this vein, we want to purpose a brief panorama about this course linking it to our current research:

a) There is a new subjectivation in the "bios era", that is, in the contemporary West societies where biotechnology and bio-medicine are conquering each square of our current life? How is the fold of the outside-line in this time?

b) As Deleuze says, subjectivation needs, firstly, the forms of knowledge and the forces relations. Can we "break" (in the Deleuzian vocabulary) sentences and images in order to extract statements and visibilities? What is that "illuminated" and "said" in our current time under the light and the statable of the bios?

c) We affirm that images has a forgotten role in the contemporary social research, but we foster the role of images in (for instance) ebola epidemics or protocols from other outbreaks. Is it possible that images have taken a new primacy over statements in this time? (next post will be about the role of images in the contemporary psychology, one of the last papers we have been working these days).

d) Are we in a new diagram beyond the third "super-man" diagram? and in this case, what are the features of this fourth diagram?

e) How are the "conquests" from knowledge and power over the subjectivation to shape this last one? Or, in the Felix Guattari comments' sense: If we can allocate an identity to this subjectivation, what it has been the role of power and knowledge?

f) From the Felix Guattari's observation form the Foucault work: how is the new field of perception in the bios era? 

g) Finally, what are the differences between "desire" and subjectivation? we think this difference is important in order to clearify the work by Deleuze from the work by Foucault.

We will try to answer this questions this summer with a new theoretical paper where we want to gather our the ideas emerged in our seminaries. We will keep informing about it soon.

Photo Credit: Flickr, User Jef Safi