Foucault News

Hentyle Yapp, “Not To Be Governed Like This”: Ai Weiwei, Foucault, and Illiberal Representation, Public Culture, 11 February 2026.
https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12175774

Abstract
In expressing critique, the main model for understanding the merits of such expressions is through a liberal democratic tradition with its ideas of free speech. Regardless of whether discontent is expressed through aesthetic or political means, it is primarily framed through a logic of representation and the presumption that the means of expression directly mediate and thus properly represent one’s perspective. Under the governance structure of liberalism and its domination as a global logic, most expressions of discontent, from aesthetic to political, become equivalent and primarily legible through a democratic aesthetics. Within the provincial logics of Western democracies that saturate our understandings of the transnational, those nations without proper individualized voting rights or space to perform and enact frank speech are seen as illiberal and unmodern. This is because the tacit benchmark for our ideas of governance and law come to be inherited from a liberal formula that relies on democratic representation as the mode for political representation.

This essay examines other ways to understand governance and law beyond liberalism. The author uses the aesthetic to not only trace the dominance of democratic logics but also reconsider them through the illiberal. The author turns to the work of Ai Weiwei, engaging his 2019 sculpture Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen Cut in Nine Pieces. Ai’s work allows us to understand how our fields often approach the aesthetic as a proxy form of free speech and how we might expand what the aesthetic can do in relation to governance.

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)
[…]