Foucault News

Hull, Gordon, Infrastructure, Modulation, Portal: Thinking with Foucault about how Internet Architecture Shapes Subjects, SSRN (January 22, 2021).
Open access

Abstract
Following Foucault’s remarks on the importance of architecture to disciplinary power, this paper offers a typology of power relations expressed in different models of Internet governance. Infrastructure governance understands the Internet as a common pool or public resource, on the model of traditional infrastructures like roads and bridges. Modulation, which I study by way of Net Neutrality debates in the U.S., understands Internet governance as traffic shaping. Portal governance, which I study by way of data collection policies of dominant platform companies, understands the Internet as creating a user experience that facilitates data mining. The latter two are forms of architectural disciplinary power that undermine the first. I then argue that the rise of portal and modulation governance primarily serves to remake parts of civil society by fostering market norms of consumption and entrepreneurialism. In that sense, efforts to shape Internet architecture need to be understood as techniques of subjectification.

Keywords: infrastructure, platform, portal, net neutrality, disciplinary power

George Kokkinidis and Marco Checchi, Power matters: Posthuman entanglements in a social solidarity clinic (2021) Organization, Vol 30, Issue 2
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508420973304

Abstract
This paper develops a materialist and performative conception of power, proposing a theoretical framework that bridges Barad’s intra-active agential ontology and Foucault’s microphysics of power. The article uses empirical data collected from a social clinic in Greece where the traditional apparatus of the clinic is contested and experimentally reconfigured. We focus on three overlapping themes and reflect on how power relations materialize themselves through everyday practices and multiple entanglements between human and non-human agents. We argue that these entanglements constitute the dynamic matter of power: their performative reiteration determines how power matters. By showing how power materially exceeds the manifest intentions of human agents, our case study aims to contribute to an idea of alternative organising that accounts for the materiality of mundane posthuman entanglements within an antagonistic understanding of power. © The Author(s) 2021.

Author Keywords
Alternative organizing; Barad; entanglements; Foucault; intra-action; performativity; power; social clinic; sociomateriality

Carol S. Walther, Stephanie D. Jones, Corrine M. Wickens, and Rodrigo Martinez, “The Numbers Are Eye Popping”: Statistical Consciousness as a Discursive Tool to Monitor Same-Sex Demography (2021) Social Currents, vol 9, Issue 1
https://doi.org/10.1177/2329496520983850

Abstract
In this article, we examine newspaper accounts of same-sex demography to examine how journalists use U.S. Census Bureau statistics to discuss changes in lesbian and gay households from 1990 to 2015. We utilized Foucault’s discussion of discourse and discussed what we call statistical consciousness, the use of statistics in everyday life. We support these findings with qualitative examples of each same-sex household increase to show how journalists present statistical data to exaggerate or misrepresent the number of same-sex households in the United States. We argue that the journalists report using U.S. Census Bureau statistics which the journalist then use dramatic and exaggerated reports of same-sex demography. The dramatic and exaggerated reports of same-sex demography influence how people think about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) people and the census. © The Southern Sociological Society 2021.

Author Keywords
Foucault; same-sex demography; statistical consciousness