Foucault News

Collier, Stephen J, and Andrew Lakoff. “Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency.” (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

18 March 2022

Collier, Stephen J, and Andrew Lakoff. “Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency.” Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 2 (March 2015): 19–51.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413510050.

Abstract
This article describes the historical emergence of vital systems security, analyzing it as a significant mutation in biopolitical modernity. The story begins in the early 20th century, when planners and policy-makers recognized the increasing dependence of collective life on interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. Over the following decades, new security mechanisms were invented to mitigate the vulnerability of these vital systems. While these techniques were initially developed as part of Cold War preparedness for nuclear war, they eventually migrated to domains beyond national security to address a range of anticipated emergencies, such as large-scale natural disasters, pandemic disease outbreaks, and disruptions of critical infrastructure. In these various contexts, vital systems security operates as a form of reflexive biopolitics, managing risks that have arisen as the result of modernization processes. This analysis sheds new light on current discussions of the government of emergency and ‘states of exception’. Vital systems security does not require recourse to extraordinary executive powers. Rather, as an anticipatory technology for mitigating vulnerabilities and closing gaps in preparedness, it provides a ready-to-hand toolkit for administering emergencies as a normal part of constitutional government.

Keywords
beck, biopolitics, disaster, emergency, Foucault, risk, security

Saunders, N., Al-Om, T. Slow Resistance: Resisting the Slow Violence of Asylum (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 March 2022

Saunders, N., Al-Om, T.
Slow Resistance: Resisting the Slow Violence of Asylum
(2022) Millennium: Journal of International Studies

DOI: 10.1177/03058298211066339

Abstract
In this article we seek to expand on the developing interest in Slow Violence and how it relates to immigration and asylum, by exploring how such violence is resisted. Following Foucault’s insight that in order to better understand power, it helps to study resistance to it, we draw on original research into acts of protest by refugees and asylum seekers in Scotland, and connect this to existing research on experiences of and resistance to the UK asylum system. In so doing we offer ‘Slow Resistance’ as a potentially useful concept with which to understand resistance not just to a particular configuration of power relations, but to a particular form of violence. The conceptual utility of Slow Resistance lies in its ability to illuminate: the particular operations of power/violence in the UK asylum system; the multiple forms of resistance to this violence/power; how these forms of resistance may be connected (thus discouraging the ‘silo-ing’ of analysing different forms of resistance); and how time is creatively engaged with by such forms of resistance. If, as has been argued, a particular challenge of slow violence is representational – how to devise arresting images and stories adequate to this form of violence – then resistance has the potential to focus our attention on it, and to gradually prepare the ground for meaningful change. While developed here in relation to the UK asylum system, slow resistance is a concept that we think can be useful in a wide range of contexts in which slow violence operates. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
asylum; protest; refugees; resistance; slow violence; UK

Jesse Swann-Quinn, More-than-human government and the Tbilisi zoo flood (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 March 2022

Jesse Swann-Quinn, More-than-human government and the Tbilisi zoo flood Geoforum, Volume 102, 2019,Pages 167-181,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.03.007.

Abstract:
On 17 June 2015, an unprecedented series of rain events caused a wall of water to tear through an affluent urban neighborhood in the Georgian capital Tbilisi. The flood damaged 700 homes, displaced 67 families, killed 19 people, left 3 more unaccounted for – while also leaving nearly 300 animals either drowned or killed as the flood destroyed the Soviet-era Tbilisi Zoo. Deadly and headline grabbing interactions among humans and non-humans continued surprising those in Tbilisi as diverse actors tried to control the precarious situation unfolding in this post-Soviet urban landscape, and survivors of all sorts roamed the streets. I illustrate these relationships by analyzing news coverage, government statements, technical reports, archival resources, and my own experiences as a participant observer within the events surrounding the flood. In doing so I extend arguments by Foucault and his interlocuters to present a case of more-than-human government, requiring the arrangement of non-human elements to maintain the life of a political population such as the Tbilisi citizenry. As I demonstrate, such governmental practices require not only calculations of what life to protect and what to destroy via sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics, but also a constellation of other powers, including historically embedded regimes of truth and authority. From this perspective, the security of a human population may at times rely on its imbrication with the government of animals and infrastructure alike, and vice versa – by securing, disciplining, knowing, and at times destroying our material environments and companion species, however we may be related.

Keywords: More-than-human; Zoos; Flood; Post-Soviet; Government; Georgia

Bronwyn Fredericks, Abraham Bradfield Signifying Aboriginal Identity, Culture and Country in Central Queensland Through a Public Art Project (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 March 2022

Bronwyn Fredericks, Abraham Bradfield Signifying Aboriginal Identity, Culture and Country in Central Queensland Through a Public Art Project, Borderlands journal. Volume 20, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 89-115,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2021-004

ABSTRACT
Alongside Toonooba (the Fitzroy River) in central Queensland, a series of Aboriginal flood markers are embedded within the earth, commanding attention to the river that flows on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton that lies on the other. The flood markers are part of an arts project commissioned by the Queensland Government in 2013 to mark Rockhampton’s history and its relationship to the river. The flood markers, named Honouring Land Connections, assert Indigenous voices into discourses of place, particularly discourses about the significance of rivers on Country. This article explores how art represents wider socio-cultural and politicised contexts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous discourse. The authors discuss the artworks as a form of social action that signifies Rockhampton as an Indigenous space with a history that cannot be neatly divided into three time periods. Any suggestion that Honouring Land Connections represents Rockhampton’s precolonial period disregards Indigenous people’s ongoing connections with and responsibilities for Country. The artworks signify contested spaces, places and knowledge of Country, culture, and waterways. Honouring Land Connections maintains cultural connections and speaks back to White preconceptions of Indigeneity. The artists wage war on the selective readings and colonial amnesia in Australia to directly challenge notions of terra nullius and intellectual nullius. This article shows how art can facilitate interaction through which Aboriginal artists can affirm, negotiate, share, and explore their identities while challenging dominant Eurocentric preconceptions of place and identity.

Keywords : identity, Aboriginal, Indigenous Australia, art, public art

Graphical ABSTRACT

Becker, Per. “Fragmentation, Commodification and Responsibilisation in the Governing of Flood Risk Mitigation in Sweden.” (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 March 2022

Becker, Per. “Fragmentation, Commodification and Responsibilisation in the Governing of Flood Risk Mitigation in Sweden.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 39, no. 2 (March 2021): 393–413.
https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420940727.

Open access

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to increase our understanding of the governing of flood risk mitigation in advanced liberal society, through an in-depth Swedish case study. By combining social network analysis and genealogy, this paper investigates who is involved, how they organise, their modes of thinking, how they mitigate flood risk, as well as how such regime of practises have come into being. The findings suggest dominant rationalities that reduce the actual complexity of flood risk in spatial and temporal terms to fit the legal and institutional environment. The resulting fragmentation is associated with a commodification of flood risk mitigation, in which actors expect to be able to procure modules of safety and sustainability on the market. This commodification materialises in a vacuum of responsibilisation, when obligations are imposed without commensurate guidelines. These processes of fragmentation, commodification, and responsibilisation are core constituents of neoliberalisation, which is clearly shaping the governing of flood risk mitigation even in Sweden; a bastion of the strong welfare state. Regardless of the notable individual capacities of the involved actors, systemic constraints in the governmentality have generated these detrimental processes in the face of overwhelming complexity. These systemic constraints must be removed or overcome for the governing of flood risk mitigation to match the complexity of flood risk in the catchment area. This paper thus provides input that can inform policy changes for a more sustainable future in the face of unprecedented change.

Keywords
Governmentality, governing, flood risk, fragmentation, commodification

Archive: Cantrell, Sarah K. “I solemnly swear I am up to no good”: Foucault’s Heterotopias and Deleuze’s Any-Spaces-Whatever in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 March 2022

Cantrell, Sarah K. “”I solemnly swear I am up to no good”: Foucault’s Heterotopias and Deleuze’s Any-Spaces-Whatever in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series.” Children’s Literature 39 (2011): 195-212.

doi:10.1353/chl.2011.0012.

Abstract
It is no secret that we live on an endangered planet. In the past year, we have witnessed catastrophic earthquakes, oil spills, floods, and mine collapses, all of which lend urgency to calls for greater care of our environment. As the spaces we inhabit become more endangered, it is not surprising that fictional spaces are also increasingly imperiled. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is not an ecology oriented fantasy, but it does dramatize the tenuous existence of space and place that we confront in our world. From the bridge collapse, crime wave, and hurricane that threaten Muggle London in the opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, to the devolution of Hogwarts into a dystopic battleground, I argue that the movement from stable, fixed places to ambiguous ones teaches protagonists and readers how to cope with the demands and difficulties of a wider, more complex world.

I contend that reading the spaces in the Harry Potter books in light of Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias or “other spaces,” and Gilles Deleuze’s espace quelconque or any-space-whatever, highlights the ways in which ambiguous spaces in our world require the same mental agility and critical flexibility that Harry, Hermione, and Ron learn throughout the series. In this article, I argue that Hogwarts functions as a heterotopia, a space at once other and separate but also intimately connected to the world beyond its walls. Still more ambiguous spaces like 12 Grimmauld Place, the tent that Harry, Ron, and Hermione share in volume seven, and most notably, the Room of Requirement—a space within the place of the school proper—occupy positions similar to Deleuzian any-spaces-whatever.

Because these spaces exist at the margins of safety and danger, their liminality requires Harry and his friends to be “up to no good”: to resist and subvert adult authority, but also to confront the limits of agency. These shifts from order to disorder and from safety to danger suggest that participation and activism—particularly on the part of young adults—can be powerful means of opposing the abuses that permeate the spaces in our own world.

Dobbie, Meredith, Ruth Morgan, and Lionel Frost. “Overcoming Abundance: Social Capital and Managing Floods in Inner Melbourne during the Nineteenth Century.” (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 March 2022

Dobbie, Meredith, Ruth Morgan, and Lionel Frost. “Overcoming Abundance: Social Capital and Managing Floods in Inner Melbourne during the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Urban History 46, no. 1 (January 2020): 33–49.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217692984.

Abstract
Before effective drainage and flood protection systems were built in the early twentieth century, areas of inner Melbourne close to the Yarra River were prone to flooding. An overabundance of water and a need to limit its impact on lives, livelihoods, and the built environment drove changes in the engineered structure of a rapidly growing city. Through a case study of a working-class district, we consider how private citizens, drawing on stocks of social capital, responded to major floods in 1863 and 1891. In addition to the process of “top-down” governing, as revealed in public documents, less visible “bottom-up” pressure from local communities played an important role in influencing improvements in water-related infrastructure, such as flood mitigation works. By the turn of the twentieth century, this local pressure increasingly manifested in a centralist approach to water management, whereby metropolitan-wide public authorities took greater charge of local environmental problems.

Keywords
floods, water management, social capital, governance, housing, Melbourne, urban history

Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 March 2022

Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security, Princeton University Press, 2022.

From pandemic disease, to the disasters associated with global warming, to cyberattacks, today we face an increasing array of catastrophic threats. It is striking that, despite the diversity of these threats, experts and officials approach them in common terms: as future events that threaten to disrupt the vital, vulnerable systems upon which modern life depends.

The Government of Emergency tells the story of how this now taken-for-granted way of understanding and managing emergencies arose. Amid the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of experts and officials working in obscure government offices developed a new understanding of the nation as a complex of vital, vulnerable systems. They invented technical and administrative devices to mitigate the nation’s vulnerability, and organized a distinctive form of emergency government that would make it possible to prepare for and manage potentially catastrophic events.

Through these conceptual and technical inventions, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff argue, vulnerability was defined as a particular kind of problem, one that continues to structure the approach of experts, officials, and policymakers to future emergencies.

Victor Marchezini, The Biopolitics of Disaster: Power, Discourses, and Practices (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

4 comments

10 March 2022

Victor Marchezini, The Biopolitics of Disaster: Power, Discourses, and Practices, Human Organization, Vol. 74, Iss. 4, (Winter 2015): 362-371.
https://doi.org/10.17730/0018-7259-74.4.362

Abstract
With the increase in frequency and visibility of disasters in contemporary state societies, national governments have developed a collection of agencies to manage catastrophic events. These institutions invariably deal with human populations as a political, scientific, and biological problem, an approach Michel Foucault described as biopolitical. In this article, I discuss some aspects of disaster governance, focusing on the long-term recovery process. Specifically, I analyze the fundamental biopolitical assumptions of the discourses and practices on the part of governmental disaster response agencies in Sào Luiz do Paraitinga, Brazil. In this case of biopolitical response to disaster, the discourses and practices implemented by governmental agencies created the illusion that state agencies successfully responded to the disaster by saving biological lives. This article shows how these biopolitcal discourses and practices also had the unintended and unacknowledged effects of devaluing social lives and abandoning disaster-affected populations. By calling attention to the unintended and unacknowledged effects of biopolitical governance, this article demonstrates how disaster anthropology can document and address the shortcomings of governmental disaster recovery policy and practice.

Ritter, S. Fat bodies, intimate relationships and the self in finnish and American weight-loss TV shows (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 March 2022

Ritter, S.
Fat bodies, intimate relationships and the self in finnish and American weight-loss TV shows
(2022) Fat Studies

DOI: 10.1080/21604851.2022.2031579

Abstract
As sites where the construction of identity and selfhood take place, relationship-focused weight-loss TV shows reproduce the notion of a correlation between a woman’s body size, her ‘success’ in romantic relationships, and the appropriate self. I analyze the weight-loss shows Revenge Body with Khloé Kardashian from the US, and Rakas, Sinusta on Tullut Pullukka (Honey, You’ve Become Chubby) from Finland, investigating how relationship and body size norms, gender, and the self intertwine. I examine the shows in light of Foucault’s theory of normalization. Here, normalization not only refers to the normalization of the body but also of the relationship(s) required to achieve a valid self. I suggest that the shows express a parallel between being single and on the verge of society and being fat and being on the verge of society; through solving one of the deviations (in this case, becoming thin) the other deviation (being single) can be changed and thus a “normal” life can be achieved. People learn how to normalize their bodies and their relationships, which in the end paves the way for the idea that a good body/dieting is the precondition for a relationship and an acceptable self. The shows thus reinforce that a thin body is the basis for an appropriate self and fulfilling life. © 2022 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
fat; Foucault; Makeover; normalization; relationships