Foucault News

Mark Coeckelbergh, Self-Improvement. Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

29 June 2022

Mark Coeckelbergh, Self-Improvement. Technologies of the Soul in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Columbia University Press, 2022

We are obsessed with self-improvement; it’s a billion-dollar industry. But apps, workshops, speakers, retreats, and life hacks have not made us happier. Obsessed with the endless task of perfecting ourselves, we have become restless, anxious, and desperate. We are improving ourselves to death. The culture of self-improvement stems from philosophical classics, perfectionist religions, and a ruthless strain of capitalism—but today, new technologies shape what it means to improve the self. The old humanist culture has given way to artificial intelligence, social media, and big data: powerful tools that do not only inform us but also measure, compare, and perhaps change us forever.

This book shows how self-improvement culture became so toxic—and why we need both a new concept of the self and a mission of social change in order to escape it. Mark Coeckelbergh delves into the history of the ideas that shaped this culture, critically analyzes the role of technology, and explores surprising paths out of the self-improvement trap. Digital detox is no longer a viable option and advice based on ancient wisdom sounds like yet more self-help memes: The only way out is to transform our social and technological environment. Coeckelbergh advocates new “narrative technologies” that help us tell different and better stories about ourselves. However, he cautions, there is no shortcut that avoids the ancient philosophical quest to know yourself, or the obligation to cultivate the good life and the good society.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Coeckelbergh is professor of philosophy of media and technology at the University of Vienna. His many books include AI Ethics (2020) and Introduction to Philosophy of Technology (2019).

Twyford, E.J. Crisis accountability and aged “care” during COVID-19 (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 June 2022

Twyford, E.J.
Crisis accountability and aged “care” during COVID-19
(2022) Meditari Accountancy Research

DOI: 10.1108/MEDAR-05-2021-1296

Abstract
Purpose: This study aims to fill the gaps in mandated reports with social accounts to provide more inclusive accountability during a crisis using the illustrative example of Anglicare’s Newmarch House during a deadly COVID-19 outbreak.

Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a close-reading method to analyse Anglicare’s annual review, reports, board meeting minutes and Royal Commission into Aged Care submissions. Informed by Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, the study collocates alternate “social accounts” in the form of investigative journalism, newspaper articles and media commentary on the events that transpired at Newmarch House to unveil a more nuanced and human-centric rendering of the ramifications of a public health/aged care crisis.

Findings: COVID-19 exacerbated pre-existing issues within the aged care sector, exemplified by Newmarch House. The privileging of financial concerns and lack of care, leadership and accountability contributed to residents’ physical, emotional and psychological distress. The biopolitical policy pursued by powerful actors let die vulnerable individuals while simultaneously making live more productive citizens and “the economy”.

Research limitations/implications: Organisations express their accountability by using financial information provided by accounting, even during circumstances with more prevailing humanistic concerns. A transformational shift in how we define, view and teach accounting is required to recognise accounting as a social and moral practice that should instead prioritise human dignity and care for the betterment of our world.

Originality/value: This paper contributes to the limited literature on aged care, extending particularly into the impact of COVID-19 while contributing to the literature concerned with crisis accountability. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is also the first to examine a form of biopolitics centred on making live something other than persons – the economy. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Author Keywords
Aged care; Biopolitics; COVID-19; Crisis accountability; Death; Social accounts

Barnett, C.R. The key of knowledge (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 June 2022

Barnett, C.R.
The key of knowledge
(2021) Text (Australia), 25 (Special Issue 61)

DOI: 10.52086/001C.23497

Abstract
Keys are used to gain access, knowledge, and power but what happens when these everyday items are transformed into supernatural objects? Do they, in turn, become a source of knowledge and power? Charles Perrault played with this concept by portraying a key as a magical lie detector in his infamous ‘Bluebeard’ fairy tale (1695). In this story, the husband is portrayed as a serial killer who uses the lure of forbidden knowledge to manipulate his wife and instigate a series of events to justify her murder. This structuring of crime and punishment within the framework of marriage makes this fairy tale unique. The scholarship attached to Bluebeard’s key includes an examination of this object as a metaphor for female sexual curiosity and infidelity (Bettelheim, 1991, p. 301), and a means of accessing feminine consciousness (Estes, 2017, p. 40).

In his 1796 English translation of the French text, R.S. Gent writes that the ‘key was a Fairy’ (p. 28). Gent’s words stirred my imagination; What if the key had been a woman, magically entrapped as a key? Would she tell a different story? This creative interrogation explores the gendered violence and power structures in Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ narrative. ‘The key of knowledge’ uses a socio-historical, Foucauldian framework and creative writing research methodology to examine Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ as a discourse of disciplinary punishment. Due to her curiosity and disobedience to patriarchal law, Bluebeard’s wife has been linked to Eve and Pandora (Tatar, 2004, p. 3). This creative interrogation explores the personal cost of female autonomy in relation to the accruement of knowledge in ‘The Fall’ (the biblical story of Adam and Eve), and Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’. It does this by using creative fiction to deconstruct Eve’s story in relation to the ‘Bluebeard’ narrative and subvert the constructions of negative femininity portrayed in these pre-existing stories.

The comparative narrative structuring invites readers to question the dominant gender ideologies that have evolved over time in relation to Eve and Bluebeard’s wife. Through the writing process, Eve’s voice emerged and she became the key of knowledge. A literary/poetic-prose style is used throughout the Eve narrative. The use of first-person narration creates a strong, mature feminine voice. This styling creates a foil for Bluebeard’s young wife, Genevieve, and the historical romance conventions embedded in the Bluebeard scenes. These sections were written using a hybrid literary/historical romance/fairy tale writing style. Genevieve is portrayed as a victim of domestic abuse through third person, multi-character focalisation. Her vulnerability, and transition from besotted bride to disillusioned wife, challenges the ‘happily ever after’ fairy tale trope traditionally constructed in historical romance fiction and fairy tale retellings.

Collectively, these narrative techniques highlight the fragility of feminine power and autonomy within patriarchal societies. ‘The key of knowledge’ offers an alternative socio-historical, Foucauldian interpretation of the ‘Bluebeard’ fairy tale. This story adds to ‘Bluebeard’ scholarship and to our understanding of how creative writing facilitates the research process. It further contributes to feminist scholarship related to fairy tale revisioning. ‘The key of knowledge’ is an extract from Silence the Key, the creative component of my Creative Writing PhD thesis. This greater body of work uses a socio-historical, Foucauldian lens to examine Perrault’s 1695 fairy tales as discourses of disciplinary punishment and adds to the emerging genre of Australian literary fairy tales. © 2021, Australasian Association of Writing Programs. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Bluebeard; disciplinary punishment; fairy tale reversions; Foucault; Perrault

de Andrade, H.S., Carvalho, S.R., de Oliveira, C.F. Leituras do governo neoliberal do Estado e da saúde (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

26 June 2022

de Andrade, H.S., Carvalho, S.R., de Oliveira, C.F.
Leituras do governo neoliberal do Estado e da saúde
(2022) Physis, 32 (1), art. no. e320116

DOI: 10.1590/S0103-73312022320116

Abstract
Brazilian Public Health has often analyzed neoliberalism as a phenomenon of emptying the role of the State and a threat to public and universal health. Taking Foucault’s governmental thought as a subsidy, we discuss neoliberalism as a profound metamorphosis, not only of the State, but of health production. As a permanent update of liberalism, the neoliberal government changes the boundaries between public and private and produces new forms of normality, risk and subjectivity, progressively subordinate to the truth of the logic of the economy and the market. This economic rationality creates new ideals of health, inspired by management techniques of corporations, and produces new biological, sanitary, psychological truths. Restricted to “successful self-entrepreneurs”, health may become a moral and economic choice in relation to individual behavior and risk, making the State not responsible and creating a type of economic citizenship devoid of solidarity. However, the game around non-corporate health institutions and practices remains open. It is up to us to question the “responsible” and “safe” life forms that were invented for us and to develop other governmentalities that are less excluding and unequal compared to those that we have naturalized and practiced. © 2022, Institute de Medicina Social da UERJ. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Government; Neoliberalism; Public Health

Index Keywords
article, citizenship, government, morality, public health, solidarity

Document Type: Article
Publication Stage: Final
Source: Scopus

Samuel Talcott, “Vectors of Thought: François Delaporte, the Cholera of 1832 and the Problem of Error” (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 June 2022

Talcott, Samuel. 2022. “Vectors of Thought: François Delaporte, the Cholera of 1832 and the Problem of Error” Philosophies 7, no. 3: 56.
https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7030056

Abstract
This paper resists the virality of contemporary paranoia by turning to “French epistemology”, a philosophical ethos that embraces uncertainty and complexity by registering the transformative impact of scientific knowledge on thought. Despite its popular uses describing phenomena of communication today, the idea of virality comes from biomedicine. This paper, therefore, investigates the extent to which an epidemiological concept of viral transmission—the disease vector—can comprehend and encourage new possibilities of thought beyond paranoia. Briefly, I attempt to analyze thought as a vector. I pursue this by examining Delaporte’s important, but neglected, study of the 1832 Parisian cholera epidemic. First elucidating his reconstruction of the ways tentative epistemological progress intertwined with and supported projects of working-class and colonial control. My vectorial analysis then considers how his argument infects contemporary readers with doubts that undo the bases of paranoia. I pursue this analysis further via a methodological examination of Delaporte’s study as both carrier of predecessors’ methods and host in which they alter, becoming newly infectious. I conclude by reflecting on this formulation of thought as disease vector and what Delaporte’s singular treatment of the problem of error reveals about an ethos committed to registering the impact of knowledge on thought.

Keywords: paranoia; knowledge; health; Canguilhem; Foucault

Problematization of Complaint

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 June 2022

affecognitive

In an interview conducted a month or so before his death, Foucault took up the notion of problématisation that had structured The Use of Pleasure. This time the context is not Foucault’s scholarly attention to “the conditions in which human beings ‘problematize’ what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live” (Use of Pleasure, tr. Robert Hurley, Vintage, 1990, 10), but the person of Foucault himself. He had been discussing his refusal to engage in polemics, and he tells Paul Rabinow (in words that ring with utopian fervor today), that his disdain for polemic is related to his way of “approaching political questions”:

It is true that my attitude isn’t a result of the form of critique that claims to be a methodical examination in order to reject all possible solutions except for the one valid one. It is…

View original post 1,312 more words

Romanowski, M.H. Controlling higher education from a distance: using Foucault’s governmentality to better understand accreditation (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 June 2022

Romanowski, M.H.
Controlling higher education from a distance: using Foucault’s governmentality to better understand accreditation
(2022) Cogent Education, 9 (1), art. no. 2073631

DOI: 10.1080/2331186X.2022.2073631

Abstract
The Internationalization of Higher Education (IHE) has expanded significantly in quantity, scope, and complexity over the past two decades, advancing into a complex system able to influence and control numerous aspects of higher education. IHE has led to international ranking and university reputation concerns, increasing interest in accreditation among non-US universities. For many non-US universities, acquiring academic accreditation for programs is a top priority. However, accreditation as a top-down mandate creates close supervision from outside higher education. This non-empirical essay draws upon Foucault’s concept of governmentality to identify the mechanisms used by accreditation to control higher education institutions and programs and explains how these mechanisms monitor, influence, and maintain control of academic programs. The discussion illustrates how accreditation under the facade of quality assurance and improvement uses standardization and accountability coupled with various mechanisms to wield control over higher education institutions and programs. © 2022 The Author(s). This open access article is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Author Keywords
accountability; accreditation; Foucault; governmentality; higher education; quality assurance; standardization

Dominique Lecourt (1944 – 2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

23 June 2022

Dominique Lecourt, author of the classics of Marxist philosophy of science Marxism and Epistemology Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault and Proletarian Science?, among many others, died in Paris on 1 May 2022. Here, Roger-Pol Droit remembers his life and work. Also included [on the Verso page] is a newly translated essay of Lecourt’s on Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Obituary for Dominique Lecourt by Roger-Pol Droit
Translated by David Fernbach. Originally published in Le Monde, Verso Books site, 1 June 2022.

Born in Paris on 5 February 1944, the philosopher Dominique Lecourt died at Lariboisière Hospital in Paris on 1 May 2022. He was the author of a copious body of work, with some forty volumes mainly centred on the relationship between philosophy and scientific or medical thought, but also a figure in publishing and cultural institutions who has left his mark on recent decades.

Lecourt studied under three major philosophers. Louis Althusser was his teacher at the École Normale Supérieure, leading him first to become involved in the Maoist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and later to be Louis Althusser’s legal representative after the murder of his wife in 1980. Georges Canguilhem, doctor and philosopher, supervised his dissertation on Gaston Bachelard’s L’Epistémologie historique and presented this first book, published by Vrin in 1969. Finally, François Dagognet, also a doctor and philosopher, directed his thesis, L’Ordre et les Jeux, published by Grasset in 1981.
[…]

See also Obituary: Dominique Lecourt (February 5th, 1944 – May 1st, 2022)
Tiago Santos Almeida
Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science 2022 (12): 1-3

Special Issue: Michel Foucault and the Historiography of Science (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

22 June 2022

Special Issue: Michel Foucault and the Historiography of Science, Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science, No. 12 (2022)

From the Editors
Michel Foucault and the Historiography of Science
Marlon Salomon

Dossiers (Issue-specific topics)
Number and Things
Foucauldian Contributions to the Work of Ian Hacking
María Laura Martínez

Heterotopia as a Reconstruction of the History of Ideas
Michel Foucault’s Archeology and its Appropriation by Ian Hacking
Débora Bráulio Santos

L’État, C’est Moi?
Towards an Archaeology of Sovereignty in the Western Episteme(s)
Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín

Foucault and the “Noble Sciences”
From Aufklärung to “Dignity” in Philosophy
Jorge Alberto Rocha

“The Use of Pleasure” of learning
A Foucauldian Perspective on the Role of Scientific Pedagogy in the Historiography of Science
André Fantin, Ivã Gurgel

Foucault and Starobinski
A Critical Relationship or The Living Eye vs. “Gazing at Death”
Malika Sager

Michel Foucault as a Forerunner of the 20th Century Sociology of Knowledge
Tanzilia A. Burganova, Rinat M. Nugayev

Meredith TenHoor, Care Beyond Biopolitics (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 June 2022

Meredith TenHoor, Care Beyond Biopolitics, e-flux Architecture, May 2022

Nicole Sonolet, Plan of the grounds and buildings of l’Eau Vive hospital, Soisy-sur-Seine, France, 1960s. Source: Archives of Nicole Sonolet, collection of Christine de Bremond d’Ars.

What would it mean to design buildings that exceed the economic accountings of liberal biopolitics, that instead offer an entirely different rationale for supporting health? In the years that Michel Foucault conceptualized the term biopolitics, he was part of a constellation of researchers and architects who developed care praxes that defined the value of life and its maintenance through a desire-based calculus. The welfare state institutions of architect Nicole Sonolet in particular—mental hospitals, public housing complexes, and new village typologies built mainly in postwar France and postcolonial Algeria from the 1950s to the 1980s—were designed not only to support, but to center the needs of people often excluded from design processes. Sonolet’s mental health centers for residents of Paris’s 13th arrondissement in particular were key projects for discovering a design practice tied to the provision of care for its own sake.
[…]

Some of CERFI’s funding was also funneled to Michel Foucault. His 1973–1974 research seminar “Recherche sur l’institution hospitalière à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, généalogie des équipements collectifs” (“Research on the Institution of the Hospital at the End of the Eighteenth Century: Genealogy of Public Amenities”), was partially funded by the group, and it was in the course of this seminar—and conversations with architects and architectural historians (though not Sonolet)—that he developed the term biopolitics. Seminar participants—Blandine Barret-Kriegel, the architects Bruno Fortier and François Béguin, and Foucault’s niece Anne Thalamy—analyzed architectural plans, medical proclamations, and state records in order to elaborate a history of the belief that architecture was one of several dispositifs or apparatuses capable of producing health-effects in the body of the population.
[…]