Foucault News

Antoinette Rouvroy, Thomas Berns, Translated by Liz Carey-Libbrecht (2013). Algorithmic Governmentality and Prospects of Emancipation Disparateness as a Precondition for Individuation Through Relationships? Réseaux, No 177(1), 163-196.
https://doi.org/10.3917/res.177.0163.

Extract
The new opportunities for statistical aggregation, analysis and correlation afforded by big data are taking us away from traditional statistical perspectives focused on the average man to “capture” “social reality” as such, directly and immanently, from a perspective devoid of any relation to “the average” or “the norm” [1]. “A-normative objectivity”, or even “tele-objectivity” (Virilio, 2006: 4), the new regime of digital truth, is exemplified by multiple new automatic systems modelling “social reality” [2], both remotely and in real time, compounding the contextualization and automatic personalization of interactions surrounding security, health, administration, business, etc. [3] We here assess to what extent, and with what consequences, the “tele-objectivity” of these algorithmic uses of statistics allows those systems to become mirrors of the most immanent normativities [4] in society, informing all measurement or relation to the norm, all convention and evaluation, as well as allowing those system to contribute to (re)producing and multiplying this immanent normativity (immanent in life itself, Canguilhem would say), albeit by obscuring social normativities, silencing these as far as possible because they cannot be translated digitally.
[…]

Algorithmic governmentality is quite close to what Foucault already had in mind with his concept of security apparatuses:

“The regulator of a milieu, which involved not so much establishing limits and frontiers, or fixing locations, as, above all and essentially, making possible, guaranteeing, and ensuring circulations: the circulation of people, merchandise, and air, etcetera”.
(Foucault, 2009: 51)
[…]

Nele Jensen, Experiments in response-ability: Integrative medicine, rebel doctors and expanding repertoires of care, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 397, 2026
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2026.119127.

Abstract:
Recent years have seen the progressive expansion of Integrative Medicine (IM) as a self-proclaimed movement of medical professionals aiming to radically re-orient medicine’s reductionist focus on disease and treatment towards a new approach centred on health and healing. Despite its increasing mainstream visibility, IM remains under-theorised in the social sciences and is often dismissed as a repackaged version of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). As a result, little scholarly attention has been paid to the kinds of questions that IM poses to conventional medicine, or, indeed, why it appears to capture the imagination of an ever-growing number of medical practitioners discontent with the status quo.

Based on a pilot study with leading IM doctors in the UK conducted in 2023-24, this paper argues that their engagement with IM reflects a deep disconcertment with the conceptual and practical limitations of conventional medical practice. Rather than a coherent field of theory and practice, IM emerges as a heterogenous space for problematising medicine’s perceived limitations and for experimenting with new modes of ‘response-ability’; that is, new ways of engaging with the situated demands of therapeutic encounters. While questions remain about IM’s ability to unsettle some of the problematic conceptual assumptions that inform current medical orthodoxies, I argue that it offers not just a compelling object for social scientific inquiry but also a potential site from within which to reimagine what a different medicine might look like.