Foucault News

Irmgard Emmelhainz, Authoritarianism and the Cybernetic Episteme, or the Progressive Disappearance of Everything on Earth, e-flux journal, Issue #122, November 2021
Open access

Life and society worldwide have been transformed by digital technology, including the fabrics of emotional relationships. Many believed the internet would be the largest ungoverned space in the world with unlimited emancipatory potential, and trusted Big Tech to make the world a better place. Yet power and capitalism filled that space with surveillance systems, the production of private capital, the monetization of data, and the control of human lives. Social media now shape daily life and many have lost faith in the possibility of a shared consensus reality. We are living in a scenario similar to one imagined by Black Mirror: our belief in digital communication and social media creates narcissistic personalities, selves dissociated and dislocated from their reflections online. Digital communication offers an opaque mirror that delivers egos without bodies, eliding alterity.
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According to its Greek etymology, an “episteme” is a system of understanding. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault uses the term “épistemè” to mean the nontemporal or a priori knowledge that grounds what is taken as truth in a given moment. Several epistemes coexist at a given time, as they constitute parts of various systems of power and knowledge. The cybernetic episteme, as defined by the collective Tiqqun some twenty years ago, describes our relationship to technology and machines (which are inseparable from the workings of capitalism). The cybernetic episteme is based on the modern tenet of progress and human-led transcendence achieved through science and technology.

Lennard Davis, In the Time of Pandemic, the Deep Structure of Biopower Is Laid Bare, Critical Inquiry, Volume 47, Number S2, 26 June 2020
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/711458
Open access

In regard to disability, the ableism that puts on a compassionate mask in milder times now reveals its brutal face. While laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act acknowledge human rights and subjectivities involved in disabled identity, a pandemic brings into play a war of survival whose rules are simpler and deadlier. Limited resources and pressured levels of triage create a situation in which medical decisions have to be made quickly and almost reflexively. When those kinds of pressured judgments occur, health practitioners must rely on a wartime gut reaction as well as a combination of health ethics templates and cost-benefit analyses assessing whose life is worth saving and whose is less so.

Any metric used for determining who should get limited resources will inevitably be drawn into a eugenics sinkhole. It is here that biopolitics and thanatopolitics display a unity that might have seemed to have been in opposition. The urge to let live and the urge to let die morph nicely into each other. In order to let live, doctors must let die. An unenviable choice arises at every tension point in every hospital in every country. This proliferation of life/death decisions blunts the emotional response to what might be seen as programmed executions or even annihilations. While biopolitics and thanatopolitics have been drawn to dramatic personae like the comatose patient and the concentration camp prisoner, the more mundane bit players—the person with mobility impairments or the cognitively disabled person—barely get attention. Those in disability studies are well aware of this minor role assigned by the majority to the minority. Yet the actuality is that the disabled or Deaf person experiences the effects of communitas and immunity on a rather consistent and, to others, undetectable basis.

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In some sense, the discussion over the healthy person is a discussion about the formation of the modern citizen. As Michel Foucault and others have noted, the development of a medical system is of course also a system of control. If it works well, it is hidden and undetectable—powered by self will rather than heavy-handed regulation. And the system has worked very well, until now when the evolution of the word health suddenly becomes more clearly a way of talking about power and setting one group over another.
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Renata Cavalcanti Muniz,Fiorella Macchiavello Ferradas,Georgina M. Gomez,Lee J. Pegler, Covid-19 in Brazil in an era of necropolitics: resistance in the face of disaster, Disasters, 07 December 2021
https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12528
Open access

Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a massive disaster in Brazil, causing more than 350,000 deaths as of April 2021. Moreover, President Jair Bolsonaro suggested that already marginalised groups should take what came to them, as if they were an expendable surplus in his necropolitical perspective. However, civil society initiatives are emerging to tackle the impacts of this crisis. This paper adds to current literature on the forms and levels of resistance to disasters, using primary and secondary data pertaining to three key Brazilian groups: domestic workers; the urban poor in favelas; and indigenous Amazonians. The analysis indicates that their historical, political resistance has been a foundation upon which to develop disaster mitigation and their actions have built on and gone beyond previous modes of organising. More specifically, their responses have replaced a ‘present–absent’ federal government, entailed local, innovative adaptations, led to new public–private sector relations, and may offer the prospect of consolidation.