Foucault News

Danielle J. Lindemann, True Story. What Reality TV Says About Us, 2022

Clare O'Farrell

3 April 2022

Danielle J. Lindemann, True Story. What Reality TV Says About Us, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Macmillan) 2022

A sociological study of reality TV that explores its rise as a culture-dominating medium—and what the genre reveals about our attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality

What do we see when we watch reality television?

In True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the sociologist and TV-lover Danielle J. Lindemann takes a long, hard look in the “funhouse mirror” of this genre. From the first episodes of The Real World to countless rose ceremonies to the White House, reality TV has not just remade our entertainment and cultural landscape (which it undeniably has). Reality TV, Lindemann argues, uniquely reflects our everyday experiences and social topography back to us. Applying scholarly research—including studies of inequality, culture, and deviance—to specific shows, Lindemann layers sharp insights with social theory, humor, pop cultural references, and anecdotes from her own life to show us who we really are.

By taking reality TV seriously, True Story argues, we can better understand key institutions (like families, schools, and prisons) and broad social constructs (such as gender, race, class, and sexuality). From The Bachelor to Real Housewives to COPS and more (so much more!), reality programming unveils the major circuits of power that organize our lives—and the extent to which our own realities are, in fact, socially constructed.

Whether we’re watching conniving Survivor contestants or three-year-old beauty queens, these “guilty pleasures” underscore how conservative our society remains, and how steadfastly we cling to our notions about who or what counts as legitimate or “real.” At once an entertaining chronicle of reality TV obsession and a pioneering work of sociology, True Story holds up a mirror to our society: the reflection may not always be pretty—but we can’t look away.

Podcast discussion with author. Los Angeles Review of Books.

Danielle Lindemann joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to talk about her latest book, True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us. Drawing on the ideas of major thinkers in modern sociology, including Emile Durkheim, Michel Foucault, and others, the book explores how reality TV both reflects and reproduces real-world social tensions, inequities, and slippages around class, race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of being. Rather than merely trash TV — or perhaps in addition to being trash TV — Lindemann argues that our favorite shows are lenses through which we can better understand our world, our social lives, and the powerful forces that shape them and us.

Brara, Rita. “Introduction: What Might We Mean by the Anthropocene?” (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 April 2022

Brara, Rita. “Introduction: What Might We Mean by the Anthropocene?” Contributions to Indian Sociology 55, no. 3 (October 2021): 307–23.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00699667211073723.

Abstract
‘[T]here is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.’
(Michel Foucault 1977: 27)

Introduction
How do we interpret the Anthropocene,1 the current umbrella term for the ravaging displacements human beings have wrought on Earth, having cracked it out of shape, if not out of orbit, and driven other species away from hearth and home and increasingly out of existence? Is the Anthropocene what we notice and apprehend when the Earth malfunctions, as emanations from its brokenness in a manner that Heidegger’s (1971) thinking might suggest? Or as Bill Brown puts it, do we, ‘begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us…how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation’ (Brown 2001: 4)? Does the Anthropocene, then, signpost a seismic shift in the relationship of human beings both to the Earth and indeed to non-human and non-living nature—a change marked by indicators from the earth system sciences on the planet’s tipping points and reflected in our contemporary, lived experience?

van Wijk, Berend. “Beyond the Entrepreneur Society: Foucault, Neoliberalism and the Critical Attitude.” (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 April 2022

van Wijk, Berend. “Beyond the Entrepreneur Society: Foucault, Neoliberalism and the Critical Attitude.” Philosophy & Social Criticism, June 2021,
doi:10.1177/01914537211017589.

Abstract
Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics is generally acknowledged as a pioneering study of neoliberalism, presenting it not merely as an economic theory but also as a mode of government. There is much debate, however, on Foucault’s intentions in analysing neoliberalism and the place of the genealogy in his broader critical project. The Birth of Biopolitics itself lacks both an explicit judgement of neoliberalism and an explicit ethical program. In this article, I maintain that Foucault’s genealogical work on neoliberalism is complementary to his notions of agency. From this perspective, Foucault’s genealogy is not a judgement of neoliberalism in terms of right or wrong but rather serves as a breeding ground for ethical conduct. The notion of the critical attitude in particular shows that Foucault’s genealogical work stands in the service of the subject’s autonomy. However, Foucault is reluctant to fill in his ethical program too much because it should gain substance only in local struggles and through the subject’s own considerations.

Keywords
counter-conduct, critique, governmentality, Michel Foucault, neoliberalism, pastoral power

Updated: Chronological Bibliography of the written and spoken texts of Michel Foucault by Machiel Karskens (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

31 March 2022

Editor: Machiel Karskens has updated his major Chronological Bibliography of the written and spoken texts of Michel Foucault. This bibliography is held on the Foucault info site and also linked to on the Bibliographies page of this site, Foucault News.

Chronological Bibliography of the written and spoken texts of MICHEL FOUCAULT

Bibliography established by Machiel Karskens
Radboud University Nijmegen, Department of Philosophy
phone:+31243551687 / email: machiel.karskens@ru.nl
Please, send me corrections and/or additions?

This bibliography lists all published written or spoken texts of Michel Foucault in a CHRONOLOGICAL order, which is as strict as possible. All items are listed according to their first known date of coming into being or first known date of publication.

In addition, also chronologically listed, the box files (boîtes) with Foucault’s notes, cards, fiches, reading notes, notebooks (Cahiers), drafts, lecture papers (manuscrits acroamatiques), typoscripts and manuscripts, stored at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (NAF28730. Fonds Michel Foucault (http://archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cc98634s)

20th Annual Meeting of the Foucault Circle (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 March 2022

20th Annual Meeting of the Foucault Circle
Emory University Atlanta, GA
May 13-15, 2022

Foucault Circle 2022 Program PDF

All sessions will be held in the Jones Room, Robert W. Woodruff Library

Friday, May 13th
3-5pm
Session 1: Affect and Materialism
Moderator: Samantha Wrisley, Emory University

Selin Islekel, Fordham University
“’Fables that Stir the Mind’: Autopoeisis and Heterotopias of Death”

Daniel Perlman, DePaul University
“Posthuman Power and the Historicity of Matter: Developing Han’s Critique of Foucault Through Barad”

Lauren Guilmette, Elon University
“The Weight of Papier Mâché: Affect and Emotion in the Archives of Infamy”

5:15pm
Reception, Jones Room, Robert W. Woodruff Library

Saturday, May 14th
9-11am
Session 2: Biopower Today
Moderator: Dian Dian, Emory University

Eyo Ewara, Loyola University Chicago
“Flattening the Racial Curve: Foucault, Anti-Racism, and Inoculation”

Patrick Gamez, Missouri University of Science and Technology “Reading Biopolitics Through Big Data”

Stephen Seely, Newcastle University
“Locating the Question Concerning Technology in the History of Sexuality”

11:15am-1:15pm
Session 3: Foucault and Race
Moderator: Shelley Feller, Emory University

Taryn Jordan, Colgate University
“Du Bois, Foucault, and Soul: The Shadow of the Color Line and the Production of Soul through Modern Power”

Daniel Schultz, Whitman College
“Foucault and the Theo-Political Technologies of Race”

Sabeen Ahmed, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “Law and the Imperial Genealogy of Modern Power”

1:15-2:45pm
Lunch (not provided; please see information for options)
Business Meeting (box lunch provided for participants)

3-5pm
Session 4: Care of the Self and the Speaking Subject
Moderator: Aobo Dong, Emory University

Vilde Lid Aavitsland, DePaul University
“Foucault’s Politics of Conditions: On the Political Aspect of Transforming Ourselves”

Richard DeSantis, Fordham University
“Whither the Speaking Subject? Behaviorism, Biologism, and the Biopolitics of the Psyche”

Robert Leib, Elon University
“The Importance of Legopolitics Today”

5:15-6:30pm
Round Table Discussion: Foucault in Fragments
Moderator: Lauren Guilmette, Elon University

Speakers: Michael Eng, Appalachian State University Lynne Huffer, Emory University
Nicole Ridgway, The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

7pm
Dinner and S’mores, Emory Campus Life Pavilion
All conference participants are invited to dinner at our lovely outdoor pavilion. After dinner, grab a marshmallow and make your s’mores in the pavilion fireplace.

Sunday, May 15th
9-11am
Session 5: Rethinking Genealogy
Moderator: Shiv Datt Sharma, Emory University

Kevin Thompson, DePaul University “Genealogy: Object, Causality, Purpose”

Zeinab Nobowati, University of Oregon
“Foucauldian Genealogy and the Ambivalence of Subjectivation: Towards a Postcolonial Genealogical Critique”

Haylee Harrell, Rutgers University
“From Juridico-Biological to Juridico-Political: The Emergence of the Mulatta as a Racial and Sexual Monster in the United States”

11:15am-12:35pm
Session 6: Askesis Today
Moderator: Edward McGushin, Stonehill College

Stéphanie Martens, York University
“’Politics of Discomfort’ against ‘Neo-Liberalism of Enjoyment’: Foucault’s Nietzschean Politics Today”

Strand Sheldahl-Thomason, Purdue University Fort Wayne “Toward a Foucaultian Environmentalism”

*******

Foucault Circle 2022 Program Committee:
Sam Binkley, Emerson College
Lynne Huffer, Emory University (Conference host) Edward McGushin (Foucault Circle Director)
Dayne Alexander, Emory University, conference assistant dayne.brenna.alexander@emory.edu

The Foucault Circle would like to thank the following departments at Emory University for their generous support of the 2022 conference: Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy, History, Religion, French & Italian, and Comparative Literature.

Hotel Information:
Emory Conference Center Hotel 1615 Clifton Rd, Atlanta, GA 30329
(800) 933-6679

The Emory Conference Center Hotel is located across from the Emory campus and is walkable. We have a courtesy rate of $152 per night for Foucault Circle participants, anytime between the evening of Thursday, 5/12 and the morning of Sunday, 5/15. The rooms and rate are available on a first-come, first-served basis, so please secure your accommodations ASAP.

Reservation link for Foucault Circle:

Other nearby accommodations options include Airbnb and hotels in Druid Hills and Decatur.

Transportation Information:
Flights can be booked to the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Ground transportation is available via Lyft and Uber. Atlanta’s lightrail system, MARTA, does not have stops near the Emory campus and is therefore not a good option.

The Emory Conference Center Hotel is within walking distance (15 minutes) of the conference venue at the center of Emory University’s campus. Lyft and Uber are readily available for transportation from the hotel and from other locations in Atlanta.

For those traveling to campus by car, paid visitor parking is available in the Fishburne deck (see #3260 on the interactive map below).

Dining Information:
We will serve hors d’oeuvres for Friday’s reception and provide dinner and dessert at Saturday’s party. Light refreshments will be provided throughout the conference. Participants in Saturday’s business meeting will be provided box lunches.

For other meals, we will provide information on campus dining locations/hours and nearby restaurants.

Campus Map:
An interactive campus map is available at this link.

The conference venue is inside the main library (#1980 on the map). You will need to sign in at the front desk to be given access to the library. Once inside, go up one flight and to the back for the Jones Room on your right.

The Saturday night dinner will be held at the Emory Campus Life Pavilion on Peavine Creek Drive (off of Eagle Row), across the baseball field (#7470 on the interactive map.)

The Emory Conference Center Hotel is just off Clifton Road (#8760 on the map).

Jessica Whyte, Neoliberal Freedom as Stoic Resignation (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 March 2022

Jessica Whyte, Neoliberal Freedom as Stoic Resignation, LSE Events, podcast, 10 Feb 2022

In this talk, Jessica Whyte will trace the development of neoliberal attitudes to the subjective comportment required for a functioning competitive market. Her focus is on the irony by which a neoliberal movement that emerged as a critique of the stoic resignation of previous liberals in the face of poverty, mass unemployment and economic misery, ultimately came to counsel what Friedrich Hayek termed “submission” to our market-dispensed fates.

Neoliberalism is commonly understood as a philosophy embracing free trade or laissez-faire. And yet, a key impetus for its development was the rejection of the earlier liberal idea that markets operated in a realm of natural freedom. Walter Lippman, the American journalist who inspired the early neoliberals, believed that liberals had become simple apologists for the miseries of the existing legal order because they neglected the role of law and the state in consolidating the liberal capitalist order. By doing so, he argued, they were reduced to preaching “stoic resignation” in the face of the human suffering that resulted from the market.

Jeanne Morefield, Unsettling the World. Edward Said and Political Theory, (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 March 2022

Jeanne Morefield, Unsettling the World. Edward Said and Political Theory, Forthcoming 2022

Unsettling the World is the first book-length treatment of Edward Said’s influential cultural criticism from the perspective of a political theorist. Arguing that the generative power of Said’s thought extends well beyond Orientalism, the book explores Said’s writings on the experience of exile, the practice of “contrapuntal” criticism, and the illuminating potential of worldly humanism. Said’s critical vision, Morefield argues, provides a fresh perspective on debates in political theory about subjectivity, global justice, identity, and the history of political thought. Most importantly, she maintains, Said’s approach offers theorists a model of how to bring the insights developed through historical analyses of imperialism and anti-colonialism to bear on critiques of contemporary global crises and the politics of American foreign policy.

CFP: Foucault and the Study of Religion Seminar (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 March 2022

Foucault and the Study of Religion Seminar
Call for Proposals (2022)

We invite papers for the inaugural year of our seminar on Foucault and the Study of Religion. Following our exploratory session at the 2021 AAR on Michel Foucault’s posthumously published Confessions of the Flesh (2018), we seek to gather scholars engaging the work of Foucault and the study of religion from a number of approaches and traditions.

Methodologically, this can include critical analyses of Foucault’s use of religious sources, including his engagement (or lack thereof) with secondary literature in his published works. It may include analyses or approaches to particular forms of religious thought and practice from Foucault’s theoretical and philosophical perspectives, as well as research carried out in a critical-genealogical spirit in the same or adjacent religious sources that Foucault takes up.

We encourage submissions that raise questions around Foucault’s engagement with traditions beyond Catholic Christianity including: Jewish traditions, Foucault’s brief engagements with Islam in Iran, parallels and discontinuities between the “ethics of the care of the self” in western antiquity and South- and East-Asian traditions, among other possibilities. We are interested in exploring the ways that Foucault may help us challenge notions of “tradition” and “religion” that have been so central to both the study of religion and religious life more broadly. Over the five years of our seminar, we hope to co-sponsor panels with other AAR program units, starting this year with the Ethics Unit, on questions of “care of the self.”

● Foucault and methodology in the study of religion
● The unique role of Christian sources in Foucault’s œuvre, including prominent Christian traditions–especially Protestant, Orthodox, and others–which are at times absent from his work
● Foucault and Islam, including but not limited to Foucault’s engagements with Iran or questions opened up by ethics as care of the self
● Foucault and Asian religions, including but not limited to Buddhist and Hindu traditions
● Foucault’s engagement with the construction of “religion” in critical philosophy and theology from the modern period to the present
● Proposals which continue to engage Confessions of the Flesh through the framework of “sexuality” across the four extant volumes of the History of Sexuality, or further themes and sources in ancient Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Indian traditions (amongst others)
● Proposals for a possible co-sponsored session with the Ethics Unit, inviting individual proposals, pre-arranged paper sessions, and roundtables addressing what Foucault might mean by ethics and the ways that he connects or fails to connect ethics with religion. We are particularly interested in proposals examining how Foucault’s notion of “care of the self” may relate to, challenge, or enrich religious ethics

Statement of Purpose
The Foucault and the Study of Religion Seminar is dedicated to collaborative research in a public setting, gathering scholars of religion whose research engages theoretical and historical approaches to the work of Michel Foucault. During his lifetime, Foucault was a force in public discourse, and his works have been transformative for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences over the last fifty years. We aim to continue Foucault’s tradition of public intellectual discourse in a way that illuminates the importance of the study of religion for understanding and critiquing his work on questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class. We hope to convene scholars of various religious practices and traditions to expand Foucault’s critical approach and enliven the contributions of this research for the public domain.

We understand this work to be ongoing, developing the complex questions that emerge from Foucault’s analytics of power, knowledge, and subjectivity central to many disciplines. The 2018 posthumous publication of his History of Sexuality volume on early Christian sexual ethics (Confessions of the Flesh) foregrounds the need for such critical and constructive engagement by scholars with expertise across religious traditions and methodologies. We hope to bring together scholars within the AAR and SBL—particularly those in philosophy of religion, queer theory, black studies, feminist theory, religion and literature, Caribbean and diasporic studies, affect studies, African American religion, religion and ecology, and the history of Christianity (ancient and early modern)—in order to pursue work that is historically and theoretically rigorous, reflecting Foucault’s own interdisciplinarity and the relevance his work has had across fields.

Chairs
Niki Clements, Rice University
niki.clements@rice.edu
1/1/2022 – 12/31/2027

Daniel Wyche,
dwyche@albion.edu
1/1/2022 – 12/31/2027

Steering Committee Members
Brandy Daniels, University of Portland
brandydaniels@gmail.com
1/1/2022 – 12/31/2027

Biko Gray, Syracuse University
bmgray@syr.edu
1/1/2022 – 12/31/2027

Maureen Kelly, University of Chicago
makelly@uchicago.edu
1/1/2022 – 12/31/2027

David Maldonado-Rivera,
dvdmaldonado@gmail.com
1/1/2022 – 12/31/2027

Review Process
Proposer names are visible to chairs but anonymous to steering committee members

Daniel J. Schultz, Revolutionary Spectatorship and Subalternity: Foucault In Iran (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 March 2022

Schultz, D.J. (2022), Revolutionary Spectatorship and Subalternity: Foucault In Iran. History & Theory.
https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12249

ABSTRACT
In this article, I offer a novel reading of Michel Foucault’s Iranian writings and probe their unexplored linkages with longstanding historiographical debates. I argue that these writings run headlong into the conceptual aporias of political modernity by contesting the assumed parallelism between consciousness and history and between subjects of history and history as Subject. I take up this problem through the double frame of revolutionary spectatorship and subalternity. In the first instance, I analyze Kant’s contradictory reflections on the French Revolution and Marx and Engel’s response to the (failed) revolutions of 1848 to show how uprisings are made to conform to a theory of the subject. In the second instance, in conversation with subaltern studies (Guha, Chakrabarty, and Spivak), I focus on the problem of representing the revolutionary subject or insurgent consciousness. Foucault’s Iranian writings problematize the particular way the revolutionary subject (the person who rises up [se lève], in Foucault’s vocabulary) is represented, or historiographically phrased. I argue that the confounding factor in this phrasing, the hard object that resists integration, is religion. I build a set of relays between genres of writing—philosophical journalism, philosophy of history, and subaltern historiography—that are subtended by this problem of incommensurability in order to illustrate the double bind of phrasing a religious subject in revolt. Across these heterogeneous conceptual grammars of historical analysis, I track “religion” and the “colonial” as différends in relation to what counts as a subject of history or history as Subject, and I show how religious and colonial phrasings (of history and subjectivity) find themselves in a position that has lost the capacity to claim a position.

Carlos Palacios, Skeptically Self-governed Citizens: The ‘Volunteer!’ Injunction as a Predicament of Neoliberal Life (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 March 2022

Carlos Palacios,
Skeptically Self-governed Citizens: The ‘Volunteer!’ Injunction as a Predicament of Neoliberal Life
(2022) Citizenship Studies
DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2022.2053837

Abstract
The idea that anyone, with the right critical knowledge and a certain amount of spare time and resources, could become a globally responsible citizen has been skeptically questioned at least since the time of Rousseau. But, during the last two decades, the specific concern that has troubled critical qualitative researchers has been the possible complicity of the active citizen with a neoliberal regime of governmentality, a regime that often uses the injunction to volunteer as a political tactic of responsibilization. The article seeks to address this latent concern through the study of a particularly marketized act of global citizenship: the immersive experience of volunteer travel. Through an innovative Foucauldian analysis and original qualitative method, designed to excavate deeply seated skeptical insights among returned volunteers in Australia, this study elucidates, first, how a personal sense of complicity actually surfaces within the market-mediated volunteer experience, and, second, how the ensuing predicament can be tackled, both from the perspective of the critical academic and of the citizen on the ground.

Keywords
Foucault; neoliberalism; governmentality; volunteering; global citizenship; active citizenship