Foucault News

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

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

6th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology Historical Epistemology and Epistemology of History (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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21 October 2020

As the 6th edition of the Workshop on Historical Epistemology – Historical Epistemology and Epistemology of History – could not take place last spring, we have rescheduled it in a new format. We are thus very glad to invite you to the Month of Historical Epistemology! During November 2020, we will hold weekly meetings on Zoom to discuss different aspects of the relationships between historical epistemology and epistemology of history. 

Sessions will take place every Wednesday in November, from 17h to 19h (Paris time). Since Wednesday, November 11 is a holiday in France, that week’s session will be an exception and take place on Thursday, November 12, 17h-19h. 

In order to participate and receive relevant information concerning the weekly discussions and meeting links, please register at the following link: https://forms.gle/bzTgrrzu5XGkUaND7

The abstracts of the talks and all Workshop updates can be found at https://episthist.hypotheses.org/

6th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology
Historical Epistemology and Epistemology of History

November 4, 12, 18, 25  2020 ; 17h-19h (Paris time) on Zoom

Inscription required:
https://forms.gle/bzTgrrzu5XGkUaND7

The workshop is organized by Épistémologie historique. Research Network 
on the History and the Methods of Historical Epistemology
https://episthist.hypotheses.org/

With the support of École doctorale de Philosophie – ED 280 (Paris 1)
IHPST (UMR 8590, Paris 1/CNRS)
PhiCO/ISJPS (UMR 8103, Paris 1)

République des Savoirs (USR 3608, ENS/ Collège de France/CNRS)
École doctorale Lettres, Arts, Sciences humaines et sociales –
ED 540 (ENS) – EUR Translitteræ (PSL)
Maison d’Auguste Comte

**
Wednesday, November 4
17h-19h (Paris time)

Paul Roth (University of California, Santa Cruz), Hacking’s Historiography?

Matteo Vagelli (Université Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne), Does historical
epistemology need a theory of history?

Lucie Fabry (École normale supérieure & Centre Marc Bloch), Epistemologies
of history with a Bachelardian background: Granger, Althusser and
Foucault.

**
Thursday, November 12
17h-19h (Paris time)

Stefanos Geroulanos (New York University), Concepts, Metaphors, and
Historical Epistemology.

Annagiulia Canesso (Università degli Studi di Padova, Istituto Italiano
per gli Studi Filosofici di Napoli), L’histoire errante de la vérité entre
Gaston Bachelard et Georges Canguilhem.

Alberto Vianelli (Università degli Studi dell’Insubria), Marc Bloch, un
historien entre métier et méthode.

**
Wednesday, November 18
17h-19h (Paris time)

Perrine Simon-Nahum (CNRS, École normale supérieure), Le jeune Aron : de
la biologie à la philosophie de l’histoire.

Massimiliano Simons (Ghent University), History as engagement: The
Historical Epistemology of Raymond Aron.

Iván Moya Diez (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Dès l’universalité
à la contingence des valeurs. La problématisation du jugement historique
chez Canguilhem.

***
Wednesday, November 25
17h-19h (Paris time)

Sophie Roux (École normale supérieure), La question de l’historicité des
sciences chez les bachelardiens.

Silvia De Cesare (Université de Genève), L’idée de « progrès » entre
histoire des sciences et histoire de la vie : analyse d’une analogie
proposée par Thomas Kuhn.

Masahito Hirai (University of Tokyo), Le principe des conditions d’existence et son
application en sociologie comtienne.

Organizing committee

Matteo Vagelli
Ivan Moya Diez
Lucie Fabry
Caroline Angleraux
Marcos Camolezi
Victor Lefèvre

Scientific Committee

Christian Bonnet, CHSPM Paris 1
Jean-François Braunstein, PhiCo Paris 1
Hasok Chang, Cambridge University
Cristina Chimisso, Open University, UK
Arnold I. Davidson, Université de Chicago
Moritz Epple, Université de Francfort
Pierre Wagner, IHPST Paris 1

David Beer, A History of the Data Present (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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21 October 2020

Beer, David. “A History of the Data Present.” History of the Human Sciences, (October 2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695120959254.

How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person

Colin Koopman, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 269 pp. ISBN: 9780226626581

Watching TV I start to wonder if I should be more mindful of my credit score. Am I neglecting my own future? Am I risking the viability of my ‘data shadow’? Am I not being attentive enough to my data? The often repeated advert suggests to me that my credit score – as a representation of my riskiness and worthiness – is something that I should be spending time tracking, monitoring, and maintaining. The implication is that I should actively learn how to manage this metric in order to maximise the opportunities presented to me by the capitalist structures of credit and debt with which I am confronted.

We are never too far from a reminder that we have, as Koopman’s (2019) revealing new book suggests, become our data. It is hard not to get trapped in the glare of the shiny devices and predictive systems that present our data back to us. Momentarily a new development gives us a fleeting glimpse into just how powerful data have become. A data leak, for instance, or maybe a flash crash, or perhaps a misjudged roll-out of an overly surveillant new product or service: these give us little moments of insight into the power of the data acting upon us. Such moments provide only fleeting glimpses before the data formations become familiar and return to the background of social life. As a result, things like credit score self-monitoring become something that is hardly even noticed, let alone questioned. Koopman’s answer is to look backwards in order to get a new perspective on the role of data in the present.

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Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 October 2020

Antoine Traisnel, Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition, Minnesota University Press, 2020

University of Minnesota Press | 368 pages | September 2020
ISBN  978-1-5179-0964-2 | paper | $27.00

ISBN  978-1-5179-0963-5 | cloth | $108.00

Reading canonical works of the nineteenth century through the modern transformation of human-animal relations

Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon. Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century.

From Audubon’s still-life watercolors to Muybridge’s trip-wire locomotion studies, from Melville’s epic chases to Poe’s detective hunts, the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of artistic, literary, and scientific treatments that sought to “capture” the truth of animals at the historical moment when animals were receding from everyday view. In Capture, Antoine Traisnel reveals how the drive to contain and record disappearing animals was a central feature and organizing pursuit of the nineteenth-century U.S. cultural canon.

Capture offers a critical genealogy of the dominant representation of animals as elusive, precarious, and endangered that came to circulate widely in the nineteenth century. Traisnel argues that “capture” is deeply continuous with the projects of white settler colonialism and the biocapitalist management of nonhuman and human populations, demonstrating that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction. Tracking the prototyping of biopolitical governance and capitalist modes of control, Traisnel theorizes capture as a regime of vision by which animals came to be seen, over the course of the nineteenth century, as at once unknowable and yet understood in advance—a frame by which we continue to encounter animals today.

Federico Soldani: intervista TV su politica, linguaggio medico-psicologico e tecnocrazia (2020)

10 October 2020


The Archaeology of Foucault update 3: Early versions of some texts, the Port-Royal Grammar, Foucault’s work on literature, Bataille and Nietzsche, and a writing break in Wales

Clare O'Farrell

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9 October 2020

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

The view back from the Devil’s Staircase

The hairpins on the way up Penrhiw-Wen

The valley road to the Devil’s Staircase

A lot of the time recently has been spent revisingThe Early Foucault, but that is nowdone, and in the run-up to term I spent a bit of time onthis manuscript. Ordinarily I’d have had to spend this time preparing teaching, but this coming academic year is very different and so I’ve not been able to do this. It was only a few days before term started that I was definitively told what I’d be teaching, which is mainly to run seminars on one of our big undergraduate modules on the history of political thought. Some seminars are in person, and some online. I’ve taught on this module before, but not for almost twenty years… My own module on European Political Theory is being…

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From liberalism to biopolitics: investigating the Norwegian government’s two responses to Covid-19 (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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4 October 2020

Lars Erik Løvaas Gjerde (2020) From liberalism to biopolitics: investigating the Norwegian government’s two responses to Covid-19, European Societies, DOI:10.1080/14616696.2020.1824003

Open access

Abstract
In this text, I investigate the Norwegian government’s two responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, utilizing a Foucauldian discourse analysis. The pandemic forces us to ask questions about political leadership – about how successful political programmes appear to be, as well as the rationalities underpinning them. I will focus upon the latter and find the Norwegian government to have initially articulated a liberal rationality that was later replaced by a biopolitical one. The former entails perceiving the pandemic as a phenomenon to be handled through a laissez-faire approach, by leaving things free to run their natural course. The latter revolves around discarding this liberalism in favour of an interventionist approach that restricts freedoms and economic progress in favour of safeguarding the health of the population. I investigate the links between the laissez-faire discourse and the government’s initial hesitation, as well as the biopolitical discourse and the draconian measures and contradictions between these two approaches.

KEYWORDS:
Biopolitics, Covid-19, discourse analysis, liberalism

 

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