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Reparative Critique in Jamesian Pragmatism REPARATIVE CRITIQUE IN JAMESIAN PRAGMATISM, FOUCAULDIAN GENEALOGY, AND CONTEMPORAY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY by BONNIE SHEEHEY A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Philosophy and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2019 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Bonnie Sheehey Title: Reparative Critique in Jamesian Pragmatism, Foucauldian Genealogy, and Contemporary Political Philosophy This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Philosophy by: Colin Koopman Chair Mark Johnson Core Member Nicolae Morar Core Member Michael Allan Institutional Representative and Janet Woodruff-Borden Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree aWarded June 2019. ii © 2019 Bonnie Sheehey This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (United States) License. iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Bonnie Sheehey Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy June 2019 Title: Reparative Critique in Jamesian Pragmatism, Foucauldian Genealogy, and Contemporary Political Philosophy My dissertation develops and defends a concept of reparative critique that presses critical philosophy beyond its affinities with negative judgment. In the wake of Post- Kantian philosophy, critique has become associated with the work of negative judgment that aims to denounce or condemn some object or position. Unlike forms of negative critique, which are guided by affects of suspicion and paranoia, reparative critique is informed by a range of affects like hope, care, and concern that highlight the transformative dimension of critical inquiry. I advance the argument of the dissertation toward tWo main aims. In Part One, I defend and flesh out the practice of reparative critique by turning to the work of tWo figures from the history of philosophy: William James and Michel Foucault. These figures are exemplary, I argue, for the way they engage critique as a reparative exercise. In the introduction I situate these thinkers’ contributions to critique by way of the signal and originating work on philosophical critique by Immanuel Kant. In spite of their differing philosophical backgrounds and concerns, James and Foucault offer varieties of reparative critique that cohere along the conceptual lines of action, affect, and transformation. I reinterpret Foucault’s genealogy and James’s pragmatism in tWo separate chapters to develop the agential, affective, and transformative dimensions of reparative critique. iv In Part TWo of the dissertation, I draW on the historical precedents supplied by James and Foucault to put reparative critique to work for contemporary political philosophy. In the first of these chapters, I use the frame of recent debates over the status of ideal theory in political philosophy and argue that reparative political critique must be realist, rather than idealist, in orientation. I then deploy this realist method of reparative critique in the chapters that follow to analyze the problem of racial bias and discrimination posed by the operation of power in digital technologies like predictive policing algorithms. After clarifying how these algorithms exercise power through a racialized and paranoid temporality, I then outline a set of ethical strategies for transforming the practice of predictive policing. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Bonnie Sheehey GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon University of HaWaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HaWaii DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy, 2019, University of Oregon Certificate in NeW Media and Culture, 2019, University of Oregon Master of Arts in Philosophy, 2014, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, 2011, Philosophy, University of HaWaii at Mano AREAS OF INTEREST: AOS: Philosophy of Technology, Ethics, and Social and Political Philosophy AOC: Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Race, 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, and Pragmatism PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Employee, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, 2014-2019 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Oregon Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship, Spring 2018 Special “OPPS” Travel & Research Award, Spring 2018 William James Society Young Scholar Prize, 2016 Travel Award, University of Oregon, Department of Philosophy, 2015 Travel Award, Uehiro Graduate Philosophy Conference, 2013 vi PUBLICATIONS: Sheehey, Bonnie. “Methodologies of Travel: William James and the Ambulatory Pragmatism of Bruno Latour.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, forthcoming (2019). Sheehey, Bonnie. “Pragmatism without Progress: Affect and Temporality in William James’s Philosophy of Hope.” Contemporary Pragmatism 16 (2019): 40-64. Sheehey, Bonnie. “Algorithmic Paranoia: The Temporal Governmentality of Predictive Policing.” Ethics and Information Technology (November 2018): 1-10 (currently in ‘online first’ form). Sheehey, Bonnie. “Standard Forms of Power: Biopower and Sovereign Power in the Technology of the U.S. Birth Certificate, 1903-1935,” (co-auth. with C. Koopman, S. Hamid, P. Jones, C. Pickard, and L. Smithers). Constellations (July 2018): 1-16 (currently in ‘online first’ form). Sheehey, Bonnie. “The Physis of Language: A Perspective on Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Expression and Nature.” In A World in Discourse: Converging and Diverging Expressions of Value, edited by Sydney Morrow and MattheW Izor, 115-126. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Sheehey, Bonnie. “Art as an Ode to Experience.” Agnitio Duke Undergraduate Philosophy Journal, Spring (2011): 29-42. http://issuu.com/dphs/docs/duke_agnitio_spring_2011. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Throughout this writing process, I have become increasingly attentive to a humble, yet powerful affect – gratitude. In many ways this affect has enabled me to establish a reparative relation to philosophical work that I once regarded as a solitary practice. Gratitude highlights the extent to which my thought depends on the care, tenderness, and sustenance provided by others. I am grateful for the rich relations and activities that have nourished and supported me throughout the dissertation process. First, I am incredibly grateful to my advisor, Colin Koopman, whose guidance, feedback, care, and support have enriched my own thinking and serves as a model for the kind of advisor I would like to become. This work would not be possible without our many conversations, walks, and exchanges. Your encouragement to test and push the limits of my thought have made me a better scholar and writer. I would also like to thank the members of my committee – Mark Johnson, Nicolae Morar, and Michael Allan – for their generous support of my project. This work has been impacted by the classes I have taken with each of you and I am very humbled to have had the opportunity to learn from you. I am grateful for the Critical Genealogies Collaboratory for providing an open space for the testing out of ideas and creating an interdisciplinary community. My work has been significantly enhanced by our collective readings, conversations, and collaborations. I am especially thankful for Sarah Hamid, Patrick Jones, Laura Smithers, Tariq Rahman, Claire Pickard, Rebekah Sinclair, Zeinab Nobowati, Valérie Simon, Paul Showler, and Rosa O’Connor Acevedo. I would like to thank the Oregon Humanities Center, which provided me with financial support and a term off from teaching in Spring 2018 so I could work full time on my dissertation. I am also grateful to the University of Oregon Graduate School for offering financial assistance in the form of a travel aWard so I could conduct research on my James chapter at the William James Archives at Harvard University in Spring 2018. I could not have completed this dissertation without the support of my close friends – Shannon Hayes, Anna Cook, Sarah McLay, Rebekah Sinclair, Angie Rovak, and Sarah Hamid. Your thinking, understanding, and passion have inspired and sustained viii me. I have learned of the difficult, exhausting, yet joyful work of reparation from each of you. This dissertation bears the traces of you as much as it does of me. I also thank Kim Donahey and Kari Primo-Levi for providing emotional and physical support, on which my thinking depends. My family is the source of the hope and care that motivates this work. To my mother, Patricia, I thank you for giving me a model of unfailing love, perseverance, and strength. I am so grateful for the values of persistence, joy, and faith you have instilled in me. To my father, Patrick, I thank you for your endless sense of humor and openness of thought. You have served as an example of the kind of lightness one should bear toward life and one’s work. To my brothers, Brendan, Rory, Michael, Sean, and Chris, and sisters, Katie, Tashia, Kahiau, and Scarlett, thank you for your encouragement, support, and care. To my brother, Tommy, I am grateful for your enduring presence in my thinking and living even in the midst of your absence. Finally, I could not have finished this project without my partner, Tony Clement, whose passion and love have allowed me to live out what I express in writing here – about the importance of finding joy and pleasure in what surrounds us in spite of the fear and anxiety that disturbs us. ix For my brother, Tom, who taught me how to hope. x TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter
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