Foucault News

Taşkale, Ali Rıza. Thanatopolitics and Colonial Logics in Blade Runner 2049 (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

25 November 2021

Taşkale, Ali Rıza. “Thanatopolitics and Colonial Logics in Blade Runner 2049.” Thesis Eleven 166, no. 1 (October 2021): 109–17.
https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136211043944.

Abstract
This article critically engages with Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, focusing on the relationship between colonial logics and biological engineering that understands the natural world as property. First, it discusses the connections between the film and the shifting status of biopolitics becoming thanatopolitics, prompted by advances in synthetic biology. It argues that the film’s preoccupation with the reproductive capacity of its replicants retraces a racialized (post) colonialism and reconfigured slavery, or the voluntary labour of the occupied – as normalized in synthetic biology and the ongoing processes of devaluing of some lives over others for socioeconomic reasons. Second, and relatedly, the film reveals how deeply the thanatopolitics of a biopolitical economy is rooted in an intensification of racialized and colonial logics. The film thus doubles as a medium in which to grasp the centrality of colonial and racial logics to the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital, and the ways in which it continues to shape the present.

Keywords
bioeconomy, biopolitics, Blade Runner 2049, synthetic biology, thanatopolitics
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Archive: Clements, Paul. “Highgate Cemetery Heterotopia: A Creative Counterpublic Space” (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 November 2021

Clements, Paul. “Highgate Cemetery Heterotopia: A Creative Counterpublic Space.” Space and Culture 20, no. 4 (November 2017): 470–84.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331217724976.

Open access

Abstract
Highgate Cemetery is nominally presented as a heterotopia, constructed, and theorized through the articulation of three “spaces.” First, it is configured as a public space which organizes the individual and the social, where the management of death creates a relationship between external space and its internal conceptualization. This reveals, enables, and disturbs the sociocultural and political imagination which helps order and disrupt thinking. Second, it is conceived as a creative space where cemetery texts emplace and materialize memory that mirrors the cultural capital of those interred, part of an urban aesthetic which articulates the distinction of the metropolitan elite. Last, it is a celebritized counterpublic space that expresses dissent, testimony to those who have actively imagined a better world, which is epitomized by the Marx Memorial. Representation of the cemetery is ambiguous as it is recuperated and framed by the living with the three different “spaces” offering heterotopic alliances.

Keywords
cemetery texts, counterpublic, cultural capital, heterotopia, recuperation

Guilel Treiber, From Monster to Child. Ariès, Foucault, and the Constitution of Normality (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 November 2021

Guilel Treiber, From Monster to Child. Ariès, Foucault, and the Constitution of Normality, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, issue 2, vol 83, 2021, 323-354

Abstract :
This paper aims to destabilize the obvious, intrinsic value of childhood as one of the most morally potent values of our times and to trace its historical rise to dominance. I argue that a clear path to such a problematization of the value of childhood should pass through Foucauldian genealogy. Though rarely considered, I show how Foucault has actually already laid the foundations, following Ariès’ work, for such a genealogy of childhood. I reject feminist critiques arguing that whatever Foucault has to say of children or sexual abuse is tainted by an unconfessed machismo. I trace a possible history of how childhood gained its current value through Ariès and Foucault’s works. Through Ariès, I highlight that childhood did not have such an important value until quite recently. His formulation of the process of infantilization, of turning children solely into objects of sentimental value, attaching inherent vulnerability and innocence to their condition is the tacit beginnings of a process Foucault will end tracing. I reconstruct Foucault’s arguments in his lectures during the early seventies and demonstrate that, according to him, the increase in the value of childhood is related to the child becoming the condition of the healthy normalized adult through the generalization of psychiatry and the constitution of normality.

Boulton, M., Garnett, A., & Webster, F., A Foucauldian discourse analysis of media reporting on the nurse-as-hero during COVID-19 (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 November 2021

Boulton, M., Garnett, A., & Webster, F. (2021). A Foucauldian discourse analysis of media reporting on the nurse-as-hero during COVID-19. Nursing Inquiry, e12471.
https://doi.org/10.1111/nin.12471

Abstract
This study uses a Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore media reporting on the role of nurses as being consistently positioned ‘heroes’ during COVID-19. In so doing, it highlights multiple intersecting discourses at play, with the caring discourse acting as a central one in negatively impacting nurses’ ability to advocate for safe working conditions during a public health emergency. Drawing on media reports during the outbreak of COVID-19 in Ontario, Canada in the spring of 2020 and on historical information from SARS, this study seeks to establish caring as a discourse and examine if the caring discourse impedes nurses’ ability to protect themselves from harm. The results of this analysis explicate how public media discourses that position nurses as caring, sacrificial and heroic may have impacted their ability to maintain their personal safety as a result of the expectations put upon the nursing profession.

Archive: A. Pitsikali & R. Parnell, The public playground paradox: ‘child’s joy’ or heterotopia of fear? (2019) 2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 November 2021

A. Pitsikali & R. Parnell (2019) The public playground paradox: ‘child’s joy’ or heterotopia of fear?, Children’s Geographies, 17:6, 719-731,

DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2019.1605046

ABSTRACT
Literature depicts children of the Global North withdrawing from public space to ‘acceptable islands’. Driven by fears both of and for children, the public playground – one such island – provides clear-cut distinctions between childhood and adulthood. Extending this argument, this paper takes the original approach of theoretically framing the playground as a heterotopia of deviance, examining – for the first time – three Greek public playground sites in relation to adjacent public space. Drawing on an ethnographic study in Athens, findings show fear to underpin surveillance, control and playground boundary porosity. Normative classification as ‘children’s space’ discourages adult engagement. However, in a novel and significant finding, a paradoxical phenomenon sees the playground’s presence simultaneously legitimizing playful behaviour in adjacent public space for children and adults. Extended playground play creates alternate orderings and negotiates norms and hierarchies, suggesting significant wider potential to reconceptualise playground-urban design for an intergenerational public realm.

Keywords: Playground paradox heterotopia fear Athens ethnography public realm

Daniel Verginelli Galantin, Experiencia e Politica no pensamento de Michel Foucault (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 November 2021

Daniel Verginelli Galantin, Experiencia e Politica no pensamento de Michel Foucault, Editora UFPR 2021.

SINOPSE
Certamente a noção de experiência que acompanhamos em diferentes momentos do pensamento foucaultiano não é um conceito diretamente reiterado e redefinido ao longo de todas as suas obras. Foucault nunca escreveu: eu disse que experiência era aquilo, mas na verdade queria dizer que é isso que digo agora. Logo, muito embora apresentemos algumas definições de experiência para Foucault, este livro não visa estabelecer semelhante mapa conceitual. Muito mais importante é acompanhar os tipos de questões em torno às quais a noção de experiência se organiza, o deslocamento dessas questões, e como podemos acompanhar certas facetas de toda a obra foucaultiana a partir dessas questões. Por conseguinte, percorreremos uma constelação de conceitos e reflexões foucaultianas que seriam como declinações da noção de experiência, a qual conduz nosso caminho. Investigar essas declinações passa por interrogar a apropriação de parte do pensamento de Georges Bataille e Maurice Blanchot por parte de Foucault.

English
“Certainly, the notion of experience that we follow in different moments of Foucault’s thought is not a concept directly reiterated and redefined throughout all of his works. Foucault never wrote: I said that experience was that, but I really wanted to say that it actually means what I saying now. So, even though we present some definitions of experience for Foucault, this book does not aim to establish such a conceptual map. Much more important is to follow the types of questions around which the notion of experience is organized, the displacement of these questions, and how we can follow certain facets of all Foucault’s work by following these questions. Therefore, we will go through a constellation of foucaultian concepts and reflections that would be like declinations of the notion of experience, which leads our way. Investigating these declinations involves questioning the appropriation of parts of the thoughts of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot by Foucault.”

Goran Gaber, Small Words, Big Consequences. On Michel Foucault’s Genealogy of the Critical Attitude (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 November 2021

Goran Gaber, Small Words, Big Consequences. On Michel Foucault’s Genealogy of the Critical Attitude, The Philosophical Salon, 8 November 2021

Michel Foucault has been called many things, from a young conservative to a faux radical, from a neo-liberal to an infantile leftist. Whatever the hermeneutical value of these epithets may be, there is a term with which Foucault is almost unequivocally associated, namely, critique.

As for the latter, it is, almost as inevitably as with Foucault, tied with the notion of history. In other words, it is difficult to imagine a properly critical philosophical enterprise that would not, at least to some extent, investigate concrete historical phenomena or present its argument with reference to particular historical events or general historical processes.

William Davies, Theory wars: how postmodernism became weaponised (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 November 2021

William Davies, Theory wars: how postmodernism became weaponised, New Statesman, 10 November 2021.

How did a philosophical movement embracing consumer culture become a target for today’s anti-woke brigade?

Postmodernism, as the journalist Stuart Jeffries demonstrates in Everything, All the Time, Everywhere, is a tricky phenomenon to describe. The term is usually assumed to originate in architecture in the early 1970s, where the work of Robert Venturi, Charles Moore and others defied the austere tenets of the modernist movement that had swept the world under the influence of Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. As Venturi and his co-authors articulated in Learning from Las Vegas (1972), the carnivalesque opulence of consumerism and post-industrial capitalism is something to be enjoyed and appropriated. Postmodernism also mandated a remixing of past styles, which yielded such British peculiarities as Poundbury new town and Venturi’s Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery.

[…]
In the past five years, however, the term “postmodern” has been revived, largely by people with no real interest in any of its historical movements or debates. Liberals have blamed “postmodernists” for the decline of “truth”, clearing the ground for opportunistic liars such as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Conservatives have constructed an enemy in the form of “postmodern Marxism”, that is alleged to inject “woke” ideology into the heads of the young at universities. The nadir of this paranoia in the UK was reached in 2020 when the Equalities Minister, Liz Truss, blamed the “fact” that children in Leeds in the 1980s were taught about racism, but not how to read and write, on “postmodernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault”.

Martínez-Bello, V.E. et al, The representation of athletes during Paralympic and Olympic Games: a Foucauldian analysis of the construction of difference in newspapers (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 November 2021

Martínez-Bello, V.E., Bernabé-Villodre, M.D.M., Cabrera García-Ochoa, Y., Torrent-Trilles, L., Vega-Perona, H.
The representation of athletes during Paralympic and Olympic Games: a Foucauldian analysis of the construction of difference in newspapers
(2021) Disability and Society

DOI: 10.1080/09687599.2021.1983413

Abstract
Our first aim was to evaluate the representation of athletes in the top newspapers in a continental European country during two editions of the Paralympics and Olympics Games (London 2012 and Rio 2016), by means of quantitative content analysis. The second aim was to critically analyse how athletes are constructed in newspapers using Michel Foucault’s theoretical framework on the construction of subjectivities and difference. The newspapers acting as an instrument, use a set of strategies to reinforce the differential treatment of Paralympic versus Olympic athletes: focusing on the effort, dedication and suffering only of athletes participating in the Paralympic Games, newspapers construct a discourse in which they separate, in an apparently natural way, some (Paralympic) athletes from other (Olympic) athletes. Two decades into the 21st century, even the newspapers of a liberal European democracy are using the same pathological model to cover Paralympic athletes who actively participate in sports competitions.

Points of interest
The newspapers analysed in this study and the way they represent athletes during the Paralympic Games reinforce discrimination. The way newspapers portray athletes participating in Paralympic games are almost exclusively based as victims or courageous people who suffer from personal struggles. By contrast, during the Olympic Games there is no evidence of a personal, social, or political history of suffering. In the newspapers analysed, women athletes participating in the Paralympic Games are underrepresented compared to women and men athletes participating in the Olympic Games. When athletes are shown in the newspapers during the Paralympic Games, they are not treated just as athletes, but also as professionals, doctors, good students, in other words, in order to become an athlete, the Paralympian must also be something else. Our study may provide information necessary for developing teaching strategies targeted at journalists and mass media students about inclusion and gender balance. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
body; disability; Foucault; newspapers; Paralympic and Olympic Games

Index Keywords
adult, article, competition, conceptual framework, content analysis, controlled study, democracy, disabled athlete, England, female, gender, human, human experiment, journalism, male, mass medium, quantitative analysis, teaching, victim

Marcelo Hoffman, The FBI File on Foucault (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 November 2021

Marcelo Hoffman The FBI File on Foucault, Viewpoint Magazine, November 8, 2021

Open access

Nearly a decade ago, two Brazilian researchers, Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues and Maria Izabel Pitanga, made a remarkable discovery. They requested materials on the French philosopher Michel Foucault from the National Archive of the Ministry of Justice in Brasília and obtained a file on him compiled by an intelligence agency established by the Brazilian dictatorship, the National Intelligence Service (SNI). The file revealed that Foucault’s participation in a protest at a student assembly in São Paulo in 1975 had become the focal point of his surveillance by the SNI. Conde and Pitanga’s discovery left me with an elementary but irrepressible curiosity: did the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States compile a file on Foucault? It did not seem outlandish to think that Foucault would have caught the attention of the FBI. He had visited the United States with great frequency in the 1970s and 1980s. Foucault had also established a reputation as a radical intellectual with a history of militant engagements at the time of his initial visits to the United States. He had thrown his support behind Marxist students in Tunisia who had revolted against the authoritarian regime of Habib Bourguiba in the late 1960s