Foucault News

Anthias, P., Hoffmann, K. The making of ethnic territories: Governmentality and counter-conducts (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

7 April 2021

Anthias, P., Hoffmann, K.
The making of ethnic territories: Governmentality and counter-conducts
(2021) Geoforum, 119, pp. 218-226.

DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.06.027

Abstract
“Ethnic territories” were a central political technology of colonial rule, which also shaped strategies of anti-colonial resistance in diverse contexts. Today, in former colonies, the making of ethnic territories remains a key site of both governmentality and political struggle.

This Special Issue brings together six ethnographic case studies (from Argentina, Bolivia, Cambodia, DR Congo, Paraguay and Peru) to explore how discourses of ethnicity and territory are combined and deployed in various technologies of government and resistance – from colonial native policies, to land titling programs, to struggles for territorial self-rule and recognition. In this Introduction, we set out an analytical approach to understanding the contemporary nexus between ethnicity, territory and governmentality in postcolonial states. Rather than being the result of “top-down” governmental projects, or forms of resistance “from below”, we explore how “ethnic territories” are created by diverse subjects engaged in situated struggles over categories, recognition and boundaries. Our approach draws on Foucault’s concepts of “governmentality” and “counter-conducts” in order to capture how struggles may simultaneously contest and reproduce dominant ethno-territorial regimes of truth, and how subjects may consciously refuse the “conduct of conduct” of governmentality. We extend this analysis by drawing inspiration from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship to highlight how subaltern actors engage with, appropriate, problematise or refuse governmental interventions in pursuit of their own political projects and visions for self-determination, which may exceed the scope of governmental knowledges. At the same time, we seek to problematise accounts that essentialise ethnic territories as bounded sites of ontological difference and indigenous resistance. Building on recent work by indigenous scholars, we propose an approach that takes seriously subaltern agency and the endurance of alternative ways of being and knowing, while keeping the persistent constraining effects of the colonial nexus between ethnicity, territory and governmentality firmly in view. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Author Keywords
Colonialism; Counter-conduct; Decoloniality; Ethnicity; Governmentality; Indigeneity; Territory

Disciplinary Power and Impression Management in the Trials of the Stansted 15 (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 April 2021

Hayes, G., Cammiss, S., Doherty, B.
Disciplinary Power and Impression Management in the Trials of the Stansted 15
(2020) Sociology

DOI: 10.1177/0038038520954318

Abstract
We bring Foucauldian and Goffmanian frameworks into dialogue to show how repressive and disciplinary power operate in the criminal trials of social movement activists. We do so through an ethnographic account of the trials on terrorism-related charges of a group of anti-deportation direct action protesters known as the Stansted 15, complemented by interviews with defendants. We argue that the prosecution of these activists on terrorism-related charges creates conditions of constraint which effectively serve to collapse the space for political and normative challenge, and obliges them to develop impression management strategies internalising and reproducing the court’s expressive regime. We see these trials therefore as a normalising procedure whose goal is not the repressive application of custodial sentences, but rather a disciplinary disarming of radical critique so that leniency can be applied. At stake here, therefore, is the production through trial of the ideal disciplined liberal political subject. © The Author(s) 2020.

Author Keywords
deportation; direct action; disciplinary power; Foucault; Goffman; impression management; protest trial

Archive: I’m Not Like Everybody Else. Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

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5 April 2021

Jeffrey T. Nealon, I’m Not Like Everybody Else. Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music, University of Nebraska Press, 2018

About the Book
Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a copier and Iggy Pop’s music in luxury cruise advertisements, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been co-opted in the American capitalist present. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism has, in fact, found a central organizing use for the values of twentieth-century popular music: being authentic, being your own person, and being free. In short, not being like everybody else.

Through a consideration of the shift in dominant modes of power in the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from what Michel Foucault calls a dominant “disciplinary” mode of power to a “biopolitical” mode, Nealon argues that the modes of musical “resistance” need to be completely rethought and that a commitment to musical authenticity or meaning—saying “no” to the mainstream—is no longer primarily where we might look for music to function against the grain.

Rather, it is in the technological revolutions that allow biopolitical subjects to deploy music within an everyday set of practices (MP3 listening on smartphones and iPods, streaming and downloading on the internet, the background music that plays nearly everywhere) that one might find a kind of ambient or ubiquitous answer to the “attention capitalism” that has come to organize neoliberalism in the American present. In short, Nealon stages the final confrontation between “keepin’ it real” and “sellin’ out.”

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of several books, including Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 and Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism.

S. Walby, The COVID pandemic and social theory: Social democracy and public health in the crisis (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 April 2021

S. Walby,
The COVID pandemic and social theory: Social democracy and public health in the crisis
(2021) European Journal of Social Theory, 24 (1), pp. 22-43.

DOI: 10.1177/1368431020970127

Abstract
Social theory is developing in response to the coronavirus (COVID) crisis. Fundamental questions about social justice in the relationship of individuals to society are raised by Delanty in his review of political philosophy, including Agamben, Foucault and Žižek. However, the focus on the libertarian critique of authoritarianism is not enough. The social democratic critique of neoliberalism lies at the centre of the contesting responses to the COVID crisis. A social democratic perspective on public health, democracy and state action is contrasted with the anti-statists of left and right. This is addressed in debates on the relationship between science and governance, the place of crisis in theories of change and the conceptualisation of alternative forms of social formation. The crisis initiated by the pandemic, cascading through society, from health to economy, to polity and into violence, includes a contestation between social democratic and neoliberal visions of alternative forms of society. © The Author(s) 2020.

Author Keywords
Agamben; COVID; crisis; pandemic; public health; social democracy; social theory

Maximilian Brichta, Juxtaposing Foucault: Towards an incorporation of the phenomenological subject in prison analysis (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 April 2021

Maximilian Brichta, Juxtaposing Foucault: Towards an incorporation of the phenomenological subject in prison analysis
To Sense. 28 Mar 2021

If one wishes to analyze prisons from the communication perspective, they will inevitably grapple with Foucault. His 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison has become a canonical assessment of power relations in houses of punishment and myriad other neoliberal institutions in modern society. While this original assessment continues to be highly generative, it is worth stopping and assessing its strengths and highlighting its limitations. Need we be tethered to the Foucauldian framework for analyzing prisons? The question goes beyond direct engagement, for countless other works have extended his framework into the realms of public discourse, race relations, interpersonal interactions, and beyond. In the following pages I trace the work of Foucault through various authors to offer a survey of his impact on contemporary prison scholarship.
[…]

Le Foucauldian: Special Collection Medieval and Early Modern Places and Spaces of Knowledge (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

2 April 2021

Sabrina Corbellini and Margriet Hoogvliet (eds.): “Medieval and Early Modern Places and Spaces of Knowledge,” in: Le foucaldien, 7/1 (2021),

Collection launched: 29 Mar 2021
This special collection welcomes articles discussing places and spaces connected to knowledge and its practices in the premodern period. In order to be fully understood and investigated, knowledge should be spatialized and studied in relation to the spaces, either physical or conceptual, in which it is produced, transformed, and disseminated. In addition, practices of knowledge are spatially determined and create social and discursive spaces as such, through the dialogical relationship between the participants. Ideally the contributions will address lieux de savoir (Christian Jacob) and situated knowledge in the premodern world, with a special attention to micro-historical approaches and urban contexts, including cartographic representations.

See also
Corbellini, S., & Hoogvliet, M. (2021). Introduction: lieux de savoir and archéologie du savoir. Le Foucaldien, 7(1), 3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.94

Abstract
The introduction to this special collection addresses a fundamental issue: the link between savoir/knowledge and the spatial turn in the humanities. This point, which will be the connecting thread of the articles to be published in the collection, is addressed and discussed through an analysis of two books that have significantly influenced theoretical reflection in the mentioned field: Michel Foucault’s L’Archéologie du savoir (1969) and Christian Jacob’s Qu’est-ce qu’un lieu de savoir? (2014). Keeping in mind the theoretical developments of the past half century, the introduction will look back on Foucault’s concepts in order to see how they can be re-read in the light of recent developments in the spatial humanities and in particular in connection with the concept of lieux de savoir and the history of (religious) reading and knowledge transfer in medieval and early modern culture.

Keywords: spatial turn, knowledge, lieux de savoir, history of reading, medieval and early modern culture

Dodd, S. The pleasure of dark places: heterotopia in Mishima Yukio’s Inochi urimasu (Life for Sale) (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 April 2021

Dodd, S.
The pleasure of dark places: heterotopia in Mishima Yukio’s Inochi urimasu (Life for Sale)
(2020) Japan Forum.

DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2020.1791229

Abstract
While utopia implies an ideal space, and dystopia a site of dysfunction, Michel Foucault coined the word heterotopia to depict a space containing multiple, overlapping and sometimes conflicting layers of meaning. This article first considers Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) himself as a heterotopian body, both physical and textual, and then goes on to examine how his novel, Inochi urimasu (Life for Sale, 1968), employs a range of heterotopian tropes as a means to critique post-war Japanese society. The novel, which was first serialized in the Japanese Weekly Playboy Magazine, is one of Mishima’s many popular novels that have not attracted much attention to date because it was not considered ‘serious’ enough: it may be described as trashy, kitsch, camp, shallow and sexy. However, I argue that Inochi urimasu conveys a serious intent by employing those very qualities in order to analyse critically a breakdown in human relations that emerged from the ashes of Japan’s wartime defeat. Moreover, beneath the novel’s fast-paced and humorous veneer, there lurks a bleak nihilism–represented through themes such as prostitution, vampirism, violence, and sadomasochism–that provided Mishima with the opportunity to construct alternative and what he considered to be more positive paradigms in the face of an unbearably bourgeois and anodyne lived experience in post-war consumerist Japan. © Copyright © 2020 BAJS.

Author Keywords
Foucault; heterotopia; Inochi urimasu; Life for Sale; LSD; Mishima; Star; Sutaa; television; vampire

‘Psyspeak’ on PsyPolitics and ‘therapy-speak’ on The New Yorker (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

31 March 2021

Federico Soldani, ‘Psyspeak’ on PsyPolitics and ‘therapy-speak’ on The New Yorker (2021) – 30th Mar 2021

[…]
Among others, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, in a volume written by 37 contributors titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” (2nd Edition, 2019), asserted explicitly: “Those who pretend that we are in the realm of politics when we are really in the realm of psychopathology make the situation even more dangerous, because they will not be prepared while the future of the planet and the human race are at stake.”

Former DSM-IV chief Allen Frances, in his essay “Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” (2017) argued: “Trump isn’t crazy. We are.”

Michel Foucault, in his 1973-74 lecture series on “Psychiatric Power” at the Collège de France, pointed to the madness of King George III of England, monarch of a global British empire, as reported by Philippe Pinel in the seminal “Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale; ou la manie,” published in 1800 in Paris. According to Foucault, such emblematic scene of madness marked the birth of psychiatry as well as the passage from sovereign to disciplinary power in the modern world.
[…]

Jeffrey T. Nealon, Fates of the Performative. From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

31 March 2021

Jeffrey T. Nealon, Fates of the Performative. From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism, University of Minnesota Press, 2021

From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned with linguistic meaning but rather constitutes an insight into the workings of immaterial force.

Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this “performative force” to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative’s mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith.

Ultimately, Nealon’s inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what’s living and what’s dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon’s stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative’s continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy.

Contents

Preface: Why the Performative?

Part I. Genealogy of the Performative

1. The Truth Is a Joke? Performatives in Austin and Derrida

2. Two Paths You Can Go By: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

3. The Bodacious Era: Thoreau and New Materialism; or, What’s Wrong with the Anthropocene?

Part II. Performativity and/as/into Biopolitics

4. Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

5. What Is a Lecturer? Performative, Parrhesia, and the Author-Function in Foucault’s Lecture Courses

6. Literary RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather

Conclusion: On the Returns of Realism and the (Supposed) Exhaustion of Critique

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy at Penn State University. His most recent books are I’m Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music; Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life; and Post-Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism.

Translator Kate Briggs among this year’s Windham-Campbell prize winners (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 March 2021

Translator Kate Briggs among this year’s Windham-Campbell prize winners. The Guardian
Alison Flood
Tue 23 Mar 2021 06.15 AEDT

Editor: Kate Briggs translated Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology

One of the world’s richest literary awards, the Windham-Campbell prizes give an unrestricted grant of $165,000 to eight writers each year, celebrating “extraordinary literary achievement” by allowing them to “focus on their work independent of financial concerns”. This year’s recipients range from Briggs to the 85-year-old American memoirist Vivian Gornick. Organisers said the writers were all “pushing boundaries with brilliantly bold work, exploring deeply personal and political ideas around identity, race, sexuality and the immigrant experience”.

Briggs, who was born in the UK and now lives and teaches in Rotterdam, has published one book of her own, This Little Art, a mix of memoir and history about the art of literary translation, and has also translated writers including Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. She described herself as “astonished by the news” of her win.
[…]