Foucault News

John Iliopoulos, “Foucault Understood Critical Psychiatry.” BJPsych Advances, 2021, pp. 1–10.
doi:10.1192/bja.2021.22

Summary
Critical trends in psychiatry are abundant today. Their impact on how psychiatry is currently practised is considerable. Yet what deserves close examination is the extent to which these modes of critique (anti-psychiatry, liberation movements, activism, existential, narrative or hermeneutic approaches, theories of values, psychoanalysis) inherently belong to or have become part of the very system that they criticise. Despite their political, social or scientific influence, which is undeniable, their critical power is often limited by their inability to radically challenge the deeper anthropological and philosophical presuppositions on which mainstream psychiatry rests. It can be argued that Foucault offers such a challenge. Implementing his historico-philosophical method, Foucault is sceptical of the anti-psychiatric quest for non-oppressive modes of psychiatric power and the humanist and postmodern efforts to moralise or relativise psychiatric truth. All these modes of critique rest on preconceived notions of nature, power and truth and have been integrated by the pluralism of the psychiatric universe. Yet Foucault’s critique seeks precisely the opposite: to explore a new anthropological conception of insanity that has the power to challenge the legal, moral or reductionist constraints under which medical truth currently operates.

Keywords
Critical psychiatry Foucault enlightenment theory of values anthropology

Magee, P (2020) ‘Alternative futures for the creative writing doctorate (by way of the past)’, TEXT: Journal of writing and writing courses 24, 1
Open access

Abstract
This paper contributes to the project of mapping alternative futures for the creative writing doctorate, by way of deep excavation into the history of scholarly forms. A key aim is to undermine the apparent necessity of an exegetical component to any current creative writing doctoral portfolio. To this end, the paper attempts to think through those traditions of humanities scholarship that have long assumed the presentational forms of novelistic and poetic art. It has a specific eye to works in the post-structuralist tradition, in particular those of Michel Foucault, the scholarly writer whom Georges Canguilhem saw fit to label a ‘poet’ in the course of examining the doctorate that we would come to know as Histoire de la folie. The paper asks why that naming makes intuitive sense. A philosophical engagement with Anthony Grafton’s work on the form and origins of the footnote suggests that normative scholarly texts are ruled by a bifurcation between what is said and the story of how one came to say it, a story offered there at the bottom of the page, or in some other like apparatus or mode. The self-justificatory functions associated with the footnote are minimised in Foucault’s and his peers’ work, just as they are banished from art itself. In their place, if anything, we find strategies devised for the fomenting of doubt, that have the emotional and intellectual effect of making knowledge the responsibility of the reader. In other words, a form of creative intellectual work without exegetical documentation is not only possible in humanities scholarship, it is a feature of some of the most valorised work in the field. Could we not take our bearings from there?

Author Keywords
Creative writing doctorate; Epistemology; Footnotes; Foucault; Poetics

Sheehey, B.
Ethics beyond transparency: Resisting the racial injustice of predictive policing
(2020) Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 24 (3), pp. 256-281.

DOI: 10.5840/techne202087128

Abstract
This paper responds to recent work highlighting the problematic racial politics of predictive policing technologies. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s account of ethics as counter-conduct, I develop a set of ethical techniques for resisting the racial injustice at work in predictive policing. This framework has the advantage, I argue, of not reducing the ethical issues of predictive policing solely to epistemic concerns of transparency. What I suggest is that we think about the ethics of technology less as an epistemic problem than as a problem for action or practice. By thinking of ethics in terms of resistant practices, we can begin to consider a notion of responsibility that holds us and the technologies we bind ourselves to accountable for the harms created by this bond. © 2020 Philosophy Documentation Center. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Algorithms; Ethics; Foucault; Predictive policing; Racial injustice

Niki Kasumi Clements, Foucault’s Christianities, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 89, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 1–40,
https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfab024
Open access

Abstract
The publication of Michel Foucault’s Les Aveux de la chair (History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh) thirty-four years after his death highlights and complicates the relevance of Christian texts—notably from the second through fifth centuries—to Foucault’s forms of critical analysis between 1974 and 1984, as his interests migrate from monastic disciplines to pastoral power to governmentality to the care of the self. What begins as suspicion towards confession as a tool of Catholic power anticipating modern psychoanalysis becomes a critical genealogy of subjectivity from western antiquity to modernity. To frame Foucault’s dynamic engagement with forms of Christianity, I establish three stages over his last decade as he moves from diagnosing mechanisms of power to analyzing ethics as care of the self. Tracing Foucault’s textual and critical developments enables better analysis of Confessions of the Flesh and affirms methodological possibilities in the study of religion today.

Glouftsios, G.
Governing border security infrastructures: Maintaining large-scale information systems (2020) Security Dialogue,

DOI: 10.1177/0967010620957230

Abstract
This article explores the maintenance of large-scale information systems that are used for, among other purposes, border security in the European Union. My argument is that information systems do not always operate according to their design scripts. They materialize as unruly, unstable and failing infrastructures that are governed through maintenance in order to correct any identified functional anomalies and address potential future failures by adapting them to emerging technologies and the service needs of end-users (e.g. border guards, police). To conceptualize the maintenance labour through which information systems are governed, I synthesize ideas developed in Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics and governmentality with contributions that explore the agentic forces and proclivities of technoscientific matter. By unearthing the very mechanics of maintenance processes, I make two contributions to the literature that interrogates the digitization and smartening of border security. First, I demonstrate that attending to maintenance permits a more complete understanding of the agency of information systems. Second, I broaden the research agenda that explores border security as practice by directing attention towards the often invisible, but politically significant, labour of maintainers who, by rendering information systems functional, sustain the power to govern international mobility by digital means. © The Author(s) 2020.

Author Keywords
Border security; information systems; maintenance; Michel Foucault; New Materialisms