Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Mark Cousins (1947-2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 October 2020

Ryan Dillon, Mark Morris, Denis Macshane
Mark Cousins: Architectural theorist who captivated experts and enthusiasts alike, Independent, 22 October 2020

(photo: Pichan Sujaritsatit)


For more than 30 years, Mark Cousins’s Friday evening lectures at the Architectural Association were the place to be, not only for those who worked and studied at the school in London, but for people from all walks of life. An intellectual and theoretician, he was much loved by students and staff alike; a constant presence in the spaces of the AA and always ready to engage in or instigate an impromptu conversation.
[…]

Cousins was widely recognised as one of the best minds amongst his contemporaries, and a brilliant speaker, whether sitting around a dinner table or standing behind a lectern delivering countless talks and lectures. Despite co-authoring (with Athar Hussein) Michel Foucault (1984), his only completed book, he was mostly unable to translate the copious notes he took on every book read, nor his own research and thinking into anything more than the occasional article.

In contrast to the Anglo-Saxon model of the intellectual and university teacher that is based on written output, Cousins functioned more like the academic French masters, who delivered talks to groups of students who were tasked with the recording and transcribing of speeches into printed texts suitable for distribution. His intellectual contribution lay in la parole, not la page ecrite. Like his Oxford contemporary and friend, Christopher Hitchens, Cousins was better known for his wit and fluent pause-less deconstruction of modernity rather than doorstop bricks of many pages.
[…]

School leadership, school inspection and the micropolitics of compliance and resistance: Examining the hyper-enactment of policy in an area of deprivation (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 October 2020

Colman, A.
School leadership, school inspection and the micropolitics of compliance and resistance: Examining the hyper-enactment of policy in an area of deprivation
(2020) Educational Management Administration and Leadership

DOI: 10.1177/1741143219898479

Abstract
This paper examines the influence of intense scrutiny from Ofsted on school leadership and policy enactment. Data was collected in a coastal area of deprivation, providing the setting for a detailed case study of school leadership in a state secondary school and a state primary school, both with recent or ongoing experience of intense scrutiny from Ofsted. Seventeen interviews were undertaken with staff involved in leadership roles. The analyses of data and discussion form an understanding of how policy is enacted in relation to the dual responsibility that school leaders negotiate between the local context at Seatown and Ofsted. This paper suggests that Ofsted forces a privileging of a compliant and consistent enactment of policy; a hyper-enactment of policy, that reduces the capacity of school leaders to address the significant social context of the school. Foucault’s work on self-disciplinary technologies provides insight into the micropolitical spaces which open up for some school leaders. The discussion on the micropolitics of compliance and resistance offers insight into the tensions pertinent to school leadership teams and explores issues relevant to those interested in policy and inspection activity, particularly those within areas of deprivation. © The Author(s) 2020.

Author Keywords
deprivation; hyper-enactment of policy; micropolitics of compliance; micropolitics of resistance; policy enactment; school inspection; School leadership

Eva Hartmann, Janja Komljenovic, The employability dispositif, or the re-articulation of the relationship between universities and their environment (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 October 2020

Eva Hartmann, Janja Komljenovic, The employability dispositif, or the re-articulation of the relationship between universities and their environment (2020) Journal of Education Policy
https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2020.1725983

Abstract
This paper focuses on how universities are increasingly made responsible for the employment of their students. Drawing on Governmentality Studies, we suggest framing this pressure as an employability dispositif. We join critical studies which link the employability imperative to a neo-liberal transformation of the higher education landscape. However, we criticise them for not paying enough attention to how the dispositif is put into practice by different universities and countries. As a consequence, they overlook important differences in terms of its institutionalisation. This contribution presents an overview of the dispositif’s variegation, based t on the findings of a survey with responses from 84 European universities in 26 European countries, which makes our study the most comprehensive in the field to date. Using an abductive approach, we aim, in addtion, to find explanations for the variegation. We show that a high youth unemployment rate has little explanatory power for the strength of the employability dispostif, in contrast to tuition fees and the country typology that we use and further develop. The dispositif is most advanced in Liberal Market Economies, indicating that universities in these countries seem to be on the way to becoming labour market institutions in their own right. © 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Foucault; Graduate employability; labour market; social media; university; varieties of capitalism

2020 Foucault and Chomsky meme

Clare O'Farrell

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25 October 2020

From the National Meme Board of Canada facebook page

[Editor: 10 March 2026. This was posted on Facebook and is no longer available. I have updated with a link to the Instagram page]

Vittoria Borsò, Bio-poetics and the dynamic multiplicity of bios: How literature challenges the politics, economics and sciences of life (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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25 October 2020

Vittoria Borsò, Bio-poetics and the dynamic multiplicity of bios: How literature challenges the politics, economics and sciences of life (2020) In: Kulcsár-Szabó, Z., Lénárt, T., Simon, A., Végső, R. (eds) Life After Literature. Perspectives on Biopoetics, Series: Literature and Theory. Numanities – Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 12. Springer, Cham pp. 17-32.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33738-4_2

Abstract
This article questions the assumptions of Darwinian “biopoetics,” as well as the premises of Foucauldian biopolitics. While poetic Darwinism still searches for poetic patterns capable of perfecting humans, according to Foucault, bios is still dependent on external constraints (such as politics, economy, and other social factors), and these external determinations form the target of his critique. In searching for an onto-epistemology that goes beyond human exceptionalism while ensuring, within the entanglement of bios and poetics, that both bios and poetics are asserted in their own right, I propose the concept of “bio-poetics.” I will discuss this concept in the context of Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledge” and Roberto Esposito’s non-vitalistic and affirmative concept of “biopower.” According to recent theories of “New Materialism,” literature is a material practice that makes it possible to write life experiences that exceed life-forms. A bio-poetical reading challenges the economic politics of global capitalism, as shown in the example of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah (2006/2007) and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004). In addition, I also intend to argue that visual and literary aesthetics understood as “aisthesis,” i.e., sensitive experience, intensity, and affective mode of thinking, is the realm where the dynamic multiplicity of life inscribes itself. Thus, an aesthetics of the sensible, as explored by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, and Brian Massumi has political relevance, as Jacques Rancière has also argued. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

Bernard E. Harcourt, Critique and Praxis (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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24 October 2020

Bernard E. Harcourt, Critique and Praxis, Columbia University Press

Critical philosophy has always challenged the division between theory and practice. At its best, it aims to turn contemplation into emancipation, seeking to transform society in pursuit of equality, autonomy, and human flourishing. Yet today’s critical theory often seems to engage only in critique. These times of crisis demand more.

Bernard E. Harcourt challenges us to move beyond decades of philosophical detours and to harness critical thought to the need for action. In a time of increasing awareness of economic and social inequality, Harcourt calls on us to make society more equal and just. Only critical theory can guide us toward a more self-reflexive pursuit of justice. Charting a vision for political action and social transformation, Harcourt argues that instead of posing the question, “What is to be done?” we must now turn it back onto ourselves and ask, and answer, “What more am I to do?”

Critique and Praxis advocates for a new path forward that constantly challenges each and every one of us to ask what more we can do to realize a society based on equality and justice. Joining his decades of activism, social-justice litigation, and political engagement with his years of critical theory and philosophical work, Harcourt has written a magnum opus.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. An editor of Michel Foucault’s work in French and English, Harcourt is the author of several books, including The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (2018) and The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011). He is a social-justice litigator and the recipient of the 2019 Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Bar Association for his longtime representation of death row prisoners.

Judith Butler on the Violence of Neglect Amid a Health Crisis (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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23 October 2020

Wade, F. “Judith Butler on the Violence of Neglect Amid a Health Crisis. A conversation with the theorist about her new book, The Force of Nonviolence, and the need for global solidarity in the pandemic World.” The Nation May 13 (2020).

Butler—who is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley—spoke to The Nation as the Covid-19 pandemic continued to reveal deep structural inequalities in many Western nations, bringing into sharper focus the words of the French philosopher Étienne Balibar, whose work she refers to in the book: “Our world is one marked by…the radical inequality of the forms and experiences of death itself.” The Trump administration’s response to the effects of the pandemic among low-income communities provided a lens through which to examine forms of nonphysical violence—in particular, those of neglect and discrimination—that Butler seeks to throw greater light on. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

—Francis Wade

Francis Wade: There is, as your book argues, a clear problem with the tendency to view violence as a physical act, for it ignores the more institutional forms of violence playing out right now in the US and beyond. What would the adoption of a wider view allow us to see?

Judith Butler: A single act cannot stand for repeated patterns or for structural or institutional forms of violence. The physical blow is most graphic and imaginable, and when violence takes that form, it is easier to find and hold the person accountable for its delivery. Accountability becomes more complex and no less urgent when the person who strikes the blow claims to be following an unjust police or prison policy or acting in the name of national security. And it is complex in another way but still no less urgent if whole populations are “left to die,” as Foucault put. Farmworkers crammed into small housing spaces and deprived of medical care are exposed to serious illness and death under the present conditions of pandemic. Something quite similar could be said about the population of Gaza, where confinement is imposed by force and where a slow genocide may well take place.

[…]

Martin Hardie, Governing the Society of Competition. Cycling, Doping and the Law (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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22 October 2020

hardieMartin Hardie, Governing the Society of Competition. Cycling, Doping and the Law, Hart Publishing, 2020

This book considers the manner in which the making and implementation of law and governance is changing in the global context. It explores this through a study of the deployment of the global anti-doping apparatus including the World Anti-Doping Code and its institutions with specific reference to professional cycling, a sport that has been at the forefront of some of the most famous doping cases and controversies in recent years. Critically, it argues that the changes to law and governance are not restricted to sport and anti-doping, but are actually inherent in broader processes associated with neoliberalism and social and behavioural surveillance and affect all aspects of society and its political institutions.

The author engages with concepts and arguments in contemporary social theory, including: Dardot and Laval on neoliberalism; Agamben on sovereignty; Hardt and Negri on globalisation; and others including Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Louis Dumont. The work seeks to answer a question posed by both Foucault and Agamben; that is, given the growing primacy of the arts of government, what is the juridical form and theory of sovereignty that is able to sustain and found this primacy? It is argued that this question can be understood by reference to the shift from a social or public contract that was understood to be the foundation of society, to a society that is constituted by consent, private agreement and contract.

In addition, the book examines the juridical concepts of the rule of law and sovereignty. Commencing with the Festina scandal of 1998, the Spanish case of Operación Puerto and concluding with the fall from grace of the American cyclist Lance Armstrong in 2012, the principal processes examined include:

– The increasing crossing of the borders between different legal regimes (whether supranational or simply particularised) and with it the erosion of what we knew as state sovereignty and constitutionalism;

– The increasing use of judgment achieved through the media and how this arrives at new configurations of moral panic and scapegoating;

– The creation of a need for rapid outcomes at the expense of the modernist value or version of the rule of law;

– The increasing use of new and alternative methods of guilt, proof and ultra-legal detection.

Table Of Contents

Prologue: Before and after Festina
The Festina Tour
An Incomplete History of the Origins of Cycle Sport
The Convicts of the Route
A Few Brief Words about the Role of the Grand Tours
An Aside on Bike Booms – Now and Then

1. Introduction
The Armstrong Era – Cycling in the Age of Empire
A Note on Terminology
The New Way of the World
The Law-governance Continuum
The End of Modernity?
Chapter Summary

2. Operación Puerto – It’s not about the Blood
Operación Puerto
Puertas Abiertas
Fuentes, Pantani and Chaba
‘We Don’t Want to Know’
Spectacle, Exception and Functionality
Law, Beyond a Boundary
Valverde 1
An Italian Passage
Valverde 2
Valverde 3
The Puerto Trial

3. Form(s) of Law
Forms of Law – Whereabouts are We
Weber and Formal Law
Dicey and the Law of Constitution
Dicey’s Critique of Administrative Law
Law’s Deformalisation and the Need for Speed
Private Governance and the Growth of Arbitrative Demand
The Police

4. A Global Apparatus of Control
Anti-Doping Law and Global Governance
Anti-Doping Offences
Whereabouts Surveillance
Panopticism? and the Internalisation of Control
The Panopticon as Paradigm
Beyond Panopticism
Biopolitical Passports
Trust the Science
The Great Observer

5. The Society of Competition
Another Rule of Law (Is Possible)?
The Third Way!
The Rules of the Game
Competition as Government
‘They are Learning’
Sport as Governance and the Problematisation of the Individual Doper
The Complementary Nature of Free Competition and Anti-Doping Regulation
The Smear of Jouissance
The Pleasure/Performance Apparatus
The Athlete – An Expert of the Society of Competition

Excursus: Competition, Jouissance and the Non-language of Sport
6. Conclusion
Functionality – Exception – Spectacle
Cycling in the Age of Empire
The Athlete as a Paradigm of Life within Empire
The Sovereign, the Kingdom and the Glory of the Wolf

Epilogue
A is for Armstrong
Lance 1.0
Lance 2.0
Lance 3.0
Floyd
Novitsky and USADA
Lance 4.0

Laval, Paltrinieri, Taylan, Marx et Foucault: Lectures, usages, Confrontations. Part III. “Reading Marx after Foucault”

Clare O'Farrell

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21 October 2020

mghamner's avataraffecognitive

It’s now been the better part of a year since I finished this book. Our pandemic world makes it extraordinarily difficult for me to accomplish the mundane academic task of producing summary statements of what I’ve read. I offer this belated set of notes on the third part of Laval, Paltrinieri and Taylan’s text because these essays are rich and important. I hope these partial reflections (long though they are for a ‘blog post’) might inspire some of you to tackle the French original.

  1. Tony Negri, “Subjectivity rediscovered: A Marxist Experience of Foucault.” Negri’s essay focuses on modes of subjectivation, modes of class struggle, and biopower, and the struggle to produce the commons. Negri lists four points that frame Marx’s project:  radical historicization of the critique of political economy; recognition of class struggle as motor of capitalist development; subjectivation of the workforce of living work in struggle; and the adequation…

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Chenchen Zhang, Governing (through) trustworthiness: technologies of power and subjectification in China’s social credit system (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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21 October 2020

Chenchen Zhang (2020) Governing (through) trustworthiness: technologies of power and subjectification in China’s social credit system, Critical Asian Studies, 
https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2020.1822194

Open access

Abstract:
This article examines the technologies of power and subjectification in China’s social credit system through a theoretically informed analysis of policy and legal documents as well as the narratives of social credit practitioners, including local officials and representatives of business partners. The ongoing project is a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, regulations, policies, and any number of programs aiming to govern social and economic activities through problematizing, assessing, and utilizing the “trustworthiness” of individuals, enterprises, organizations, and government agencies. Drawing on governmentality studies, the article explicates the operation of governmental and disciplinary-pastoral modalities of power in the project, which are interrelated in their logics and overlap in the tactics employed. Whereas the strategy of governmental/biopolitical power is centered on achieving effective economic governance and improving regulatory compliance through technological fixes, disciplinary-pastoral power aspires to shape individual behavior and the collective mores of a locality according to a mixture of market-oriented and socialist-traditional values. Social credit is envisioned to produce and channel homo economicus and homo moralis. However, the relationships between liberal and socialist subjectivities and between rationalization and moralization are by no means coherent. The assemblage of social credit government is characterized by contradictions and contestations.

Keywords
Social credit system, governmentality, China, data-driven governance

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