Foucault News

Friedrich, J. Settling Accounts at the End of History: A Nonideal Approach to State Apologies (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

23 May 2022

Friedrich, J.
Settling Accounts at the End of History: A Nonideal Approach to State Apologies
(2022) Political Theory

Abstract
What are we to make of the fact that world leaders, such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau, have, within the last few decades, offered official apologies for a whole host of past injustices? Scholars have largely dealt with this phenomenon as a moral question, seeing in these expressions of contrition a radical disruption of contemporary neoliberal individualism, a promise of a more humane world. Focusing on Canadian apology politics, this essay instead proposes a nonideal approach to state apologies, sidestepping questions of what they ought to do and focusing instead on their actual functioning as political acts. Through a sociologically informed speech act theory and Foucault’s work on power, apology is conceptualized as a speech act with an essentially relational nature. The state, through apologizing, reaffirms the norms governing its relationship to its subjects at a moment when a past transgression threatens to destabilize this relation. From a Foucauldian point of view, the state’s power inheres in the very stability of the state–citizen relation, and we should therefore see apologies as defensive moves to protect state hegemony. In the context of Western liberal democracies, such as Canada, apologies embody, rather than challenge, the logic of neoliberal governmentality by suggesting that everything, including resentment against the state, can be managed within the current status quo. Nevertheless, total cynicism about apology politics is not warranted. In many indigenous apology campaigners’ demands for contrition we see another side of apologies: their potential to bring about change by enacting counterhegemonic relations to the state. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
Canada; governmentality; historical injustice; reconciliation; state apologies

Woo, E. What is the problem represented to be in China’s world-class university policy? A poststructural analysis (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 May 2022

Woo, E.
What is the problem represented to be in China’s world-class university policy? A poststructural analysis
(2022) Journal of Education Policy

DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2022.2045038

Abstract
Underlying current research on China’s world-class university (WCU) policy approaches are analytical foci that privilege the agency of social actors and the problem-solving approach to policy analysis. Foucauldian poststructuralists draw our attention to policy document, which is seen as a discourse that organizes and administers society. Inspired by Foucault, Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ approach (WPR) views policy document as a technology of governmentality. As proposed solutions to a problem, policy text produces the very problem that it seeks to address. Carol Bacchi draws our analytical attention to the rationalities, technologies of governing and subjectification effects created by particular problem representations in the WCU policy. Using WPR, this paper shows that WCU is represented as merely a technical, managerial and organizational problem. Such representations naturally reify WCU in material terms, such as research output, and in a temporal form of state planning. Genealogically, the root of WCU can be traced to the neoliberal movement of knowledge economy. However, Shanghai Ranking overturned this center-periphery landscape in disseminating the concept of WCU. China’s one-party state means that WCU is pursued at the expense of sacrificing social sciences and subjecting academics and students to become ‘red experts.’. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Chinese higher education; Chinese world-class universities; poststructural discourse analysis; WPR approach

Archive: Han-yu Huang, Risk, Fear and Immunity: Reinventing the Political in the Age of Biopolitics (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 May 2022

Han-yu Huang
Risk, Fear and Immunity: Reinventing the Political in the Age of Biopolitics, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37.1
March 2011: 43-71

Abstract
As an update of his continual concern for contemporary risk society since the 1980s, Ulrich Beck’s latest work World at Risk (2009) alerts us to the deterritorializing effects of global risk on national, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries. On an increasingly global scale, risk mixes up natives and foreigners, while risk calculus connects natural, technical and social sciences, and incorporates almost all aspects of everyday life. Fear, accordingly, spreads out as a kind of carrier that binds so-called global, multicultural civil society; it even prospers as a lucrative risky business. Such an era has witnessed a structural transformation of the roles of the state and various biopolitical institutions, of life itself, of subjectivity and agency.

Drawing on Žižek’s theory of ideology critique and radical ethics and politics, this paper firstly presents a critical survey of contemporary biopolitics, focusing on how health needs contagion as its uncanny double to define and immunize itself, and on how new forms of biomedical experts and knowledge of life flourish with uncertainty and administer our body and life. All of these will be discussed in relation to theoretical accounts of the contemporary risk society and culture of fear to critically look at how risk and fear function as depoliticizing biopolitical instruments for disavowing social antagonism. Theorists such as Judith Butler and Roberto Esposito caution us against the (auto)immunitary biopolitical logic and call for vulnerability, precariousness and finitude to be adopted as the ethical principles for a “positive” biopolitics, while this paper will query whether human subjects are victimized and depoliticized in their discourses. The final part of this paper will turn to Žižek’s recent formulation of radical ethics and politics to address the possibility of reinventing the political in contemporary biopolitics.

Keywords
biopolitics, contagion, fear, health, immunity, monster, Neighbor, risk

Sabot, Philippe. “Michel Foucault in the 1950s: Beyond Psychology towards Radical Ontology.” (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 May 2022

Sabot, Philippe. “Michel Foucault in the 1950s: Beyond Psychology towards Radical Ontology.” Theory, Culture & Society, (May 2022). https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764221092312.

Abstract
This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on a complete manuscript, until now totally unknown and entitled ‘Phénoménologie et psychologie’ (‘Phenomenology and Psychology’). This manuscript could be the first project for a thesis devoted to ‘The Notion of the “World” in Phenomenology’, written around 1953–4, at the same time as a manuscript on Binswanger and existential psychiatry and as a manuscript on philosophical anthropology. We aim to show the importance that phenomenology seems to have held for Foucault at the beginning of the 1950s and in particular the role that it could have played in Foucault’s distancing himself from a naturalist psychology and a philosophy of consciousness to which he opposes a philosophy of the world, of being and of language. Foucault thus discovers a truth of the phenomenology which rests on the radicality of the transcendental gesture and on the access to an ontology gathering the being, the meaning and the language.

Keywords
Michel Foucault, Edmund Husserl, ontology, phenomenology, psychology, world

Archive: J Denison & J P. Mills, Planning for distance running: coaching with Foucault (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 May 2022

Jim Denison & Joseph P. Mills (2014) Planning for distance running: coaching with Foucault, Sports Coaching Review, 3:1, 1-16,
DOI: 10.1080/21640629.2014.953005

Abstract
Coaching and sport scholars working from a Foucauldian perspective (e.g. Barker-Ruchti & Tinning, 2010; Denison, 2007; Heikkala, 1993; Johns & Johns, 2000) have demonstrated how overly controlling and disciplining training practices can objectify athletes’ bodies and, as a result, limit and constrain their development. In this paper, we draw on Michel Foucault’s (1995) analysis of anatomo-political power, or disciplinary power, to illustrate how distance running coaches could begin to problematize the effects that the use of various disciplinary techniques and instruments can have on athletes’ bodies through their everyday planning practices.

Keywords
coaching, planning, Foucault, discipline, docility

Romanowski, M.H., Alkhateeb, H. Problematizing Accreditation for Teacher Education (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 May 2022

Romanowski, M.H., Alkhateeb, H.
Problematizing Accreditation for Teacher Education
(2022) Higher Education Policy

DOI: 10.1057/s41307-022-00264-2

Abstract
This essay aims to problematize US accreditation of teacher education. Foucault’s notion of problematization is used as a theoretical framework to explain how accreditation emerged in the past as a solution to perceived educational problems and how and why the accreditation process has evolved into a problem today. The discussion centers on four main themes: (1) teachers as technicians; (2) academic freedom; (3) distrusting teacher educators; and (4) an emphasis on outcomes. The essay concludes with a suggestion that accreditation has failed to ensure teachers’ readiness for the classroom, arguing that the accreditation process is based on accountability and the promise of performance while being unable to allow for new understandings and possibilities for teacher education. © 2022, International Association of Universities.

Author Keywords
Accreditation; Foucault; Problematization; Teacher education

Archive: Denison, Jim. “Social Theory for Coaches: A Foucauldian Reading of One Athlete’s Poor Performance.” (2007)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 May 2022

Denison, Jim. “Social Theory for Coaches: A Foucauldian Reading of One Athlete’s Poor Performance.” International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching 2, no. 4 (December 2007): 369–83.
https://doi.org/10.1260/174795407783359777.

Abstract
This paper explores my “sense making” when a male cross-country runner was coaching performed below expectation. My initial understanding of his poor performance was to blame him for “lacking” the appropriate mental toughness. As a result, I located the “problem” within him and subsequently ignored many of my own taken-for-granted coaching practices as perhaps contributing to his poor performance. In this paper, provide an alternative reading of my judgement of this athlete’s poor performance through Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power. conclude by suggesting that many everyday coaching practices may have a number of “hidden” or problematic consequences attached to them that coaches should consider in an effort to evaluate the effectiveness of their coaching and to enhance their athletes’ performances.

Keywords
Disciplinary Power, Distance Running, Foucault

Meloni, M. An unproblematized truth: Foucault, biopolitics, and the making of a sociological canon (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 May 2022

Meloni, M.
An unproblematized truth: Foucault, biopolitics, and the making of a sociological canon
(2022) Social Theory and Health

DOI: 10.1057/s41285-022-00177-5

Abstract
Foucault’s argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century—an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics—has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault’s periodization about the politics of health and the way its story has been solidified into an uncritical account. Building on novel historiographic work, it challenges the modernist bias of histories of biopolitics and public health and considers an earlier and more plural history of collective practices of health of which the story told by Foucault is just one important episode. Finally, it discusses the implications of this revised model for wider sociological debates on the link between modernity, health and the body. © 2022, The Author(s).

Author Keywords
Biopolitics; Foucault; History; Medicalization; Premodern/modern; Public health

Indo-European Thought project update 3: Paris – Foucault, Canguilhem, Dumézil

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 May 2022

Progressive Geographies

I had a good two-week visit to Paris, where I worked at both the Mitterand and Richelieu sites of the Bibliothèque nationale, the Collège de France and the École normale supérieure. It was something of a transitional trip, doing a little with some loose ends on the Foucault work, an article, the Mitra-Varuna editing, and beginning to think more seriously about the wider Indo-European project.

The Richelieu site of the BnF is in the final stages of a massive renovation. It’s been a building site for all the years I’ve been working there. The manuscripts room was closed for a period earlier this year, which meant I wasn’t able to do a final visit when finishing The Archaeology of Foucault. While I’d done all the key work on the 1960s, there were a couple of small things I wanted to check, and there is lot more…

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Patrão, A. Foucault’s Relation With Architecture: The Interest of His Disinterest (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 May 2022

Patrão, A.
Foucault’s Relation With Architecture: The Interest of His Disinterest
(2022) Architecture and Culture

DOI: 10.1080/20507828.2022.2046395

Abstract
For over half a century, the works of Michel Foucault have famously exerted tremendous influence upon practicing architects and theoreticians alike. But what of the role architecture played for the French philosopher, who rarely addressed architecture exclusively or primarily as a topic in itself? The following pages assemble a coherent outline of Foucault’s understanding and utilization of architecture, based on his fragmented dealings with and remarks on the subject in what may be considered his three most well-known writings among architectural audiences: a lecture to architects, “Of Other Spaces” (1967); an interview for an architecture magazine, “Space, Knowledge, and Power” (1982); and a book that rendered an old architectural typology famous, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975).

Author Keywords
architecture; heterotopias; Michel Foucault; panopticon; philosophy; philosophy of architecture; power; space