Foucault News

Thinking beyond the lockdown: On the possibility of a democratic biopolitics (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

29 November 2020

Sotiris, P.
Thinking beyond the lockdown: On the possibility of a democratic biopolitics
(2020) Historical Materialism

DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-12342803

Abstract
Covid-19 is not only a health emergency but also a strategic challenge for any politics of resistance, struggle and transformation. Understanding the social and political dynamics associated with morbidity and mortality and the many ‘ecologies of disease’ associated with the pandemic is necessary if we want to think beyond the limits of the lockdown strategy. It is here that the possibility of a democratic biopolitics emerges as part of a broader strategy for communism.

Author Keywords
Biopolitics; Communism; Covid-19; Foucault; Lockdown; Public health

Raymond Blake Stricklin, “I have nothing to say”—John Cage, biopower, and the demilitarization of language (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

28 November 2020

Raymond Blake Stricklin,
“I have nothing to say”—John Cage, biopower, and the demilitarization of language
(2020) Journal of Modern Literature, 43 (3), pp. 98-115.
https://dx.doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.43.3.06

Abstract
In 1975, John Cage read from his chance-generated piece, Empty Words, at the Schizo-Culture conference held at Columbia University. The conference connected Cage with post-1968 theorists like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Cage’s experimental literary compositions are analogous to Foucault and Deleuze’s analysis of a new developing power that they name biopolitics and control. For both Foucault and Deleuze, this new power depends on clear communication in order to monitor and regulate populations. Cage’s attempts to “demilitarize language” with his chance-generated and rule-based writing, then, suggest a new weapon against this new power that demands constant communication and connection.

Author Keywords
Biopolitics; Gilles Deleuze; John Cage; Michel Foucault; Schizo-Culture

Hakem Al-Rustom, Internal orientalism and the nation-state order: Turkey, Armenians, and the writing of history (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 November 2020

Hakem Al-Rustom, Internal orientalism and the nation-state order: Turkey, armenians, and the writing of history (2020) Ariel, 51 (4), pp. 1-31.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ari.2020.0026

Abstract
This essay reads Edward Said’s Orientalism not only as a history of the idea of the Orient in Europe but as a book of oppositional history that challenges institutions of power and reflects Said’s critical project as a future-oriented practice. Said develops his critical theory of history by synthesizing Michel Foucault’s determinism and Giambattista Vico’s emphasis on human agency in order to argue that, despite great power imbalances, there are always spaces for human agency to remake history, oppose power, and create an alternative future to the status quo. The essay investigates the writing of history in post-Ottoman Turkey by addressing two aspects in Orientalism: The first is that the representation of otherness is not only spatial but also temporal, and the second highlights that while otherness is often represented in binary opposites such as West/East, Said speaks of “intra-Oriental spheres” that constitute “internal Orientalism” as a discourse of representation within regions and nation-states. This essay examines how Turkey constructed an internal Orient and the effects this had on the writing of historical accounts of the republic s treatment of Ottoman Armenians, and the ways in which the Armenian genocide denial is framed within an Orientalist discourse.

Author Keywords
Armenians; Bernard Lewis; Edward Said; Internal Orientalism; Nationalist historiography; Temporality; Turkey

Michael A. Peters, Tina Besley, Pandemic Education and Viral Politics (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 November 2020

Pandemic Education and Viral Politics
By Michael A. Peters, Tina Besley, Routledge, 2020

Book Description
Viral modernity is a concept based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and their basic application to understanding the role of information and forms of bioinformation in the social world. The concept draws a close association between viral biology on the one hand and information science on the other to understand ‘viral’ technologies, conspiracy theories and the nature of post-truth. The COVID-19 pandemic is a major occurrence and momentous tragedy in world history, with millions of infections and many deaths worldwide. It has disrupted society and caused massive unemployment and hardship in the global economy. Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley explore human resilience and the collective response to catastrophe, and the philosophy and literature of pandemics, including ‘love and social distancing in the time of COVID-19’. These essays, a collection from Educational Philosophy and Theory, also explore the politicization of COVID-19, the growth of conspiracy theories, its origins and the ways it became a ‘viral’ narrative in the future of world politics.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction: education, philosophy and viral politics
2. Viral modernity? Epidemics, infodemics, and the ‘bioinformational’ paradigm
3. A viral theory of post-truth
4. On the epistemology of conspiracy
5. Love and social distancing in the time of Covid-19: the philosophy and literature of pandemics
6. The Plague: human resilience and the collective response to catastrophe
7. Philosophy and pandemic in the postdigital era: Foucault, Agamben, Žižek
8. The disorder of things: quarantine unemployment, the decline of neoliberalism, and the Covid-19 crash
9. ‘Reality is an activity of the most august imagination’. When the world stops, it’s not a complete disaster – we can hear the birds sing!
10. The Chinese dream encounters COVID-19 11. Biopolitics, conspiracy and the immuno-state: an evolving global politico-genetic complex

Authors

Michael A. Peters is Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University and Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois. He is the Executive Editor of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. His interests are in education, philosophy and social policy, and he is the author of over 100 books, including The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future (2019), Wittgenstein, Education and Rationality (2020) and Wittgenstein: Antifoundationalism, Technoscience and Education (2020).

Tina Besley is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. She is Founding President of the Association for Visual Pedagogies (AVP) and Immediate Past President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). She has published over 12 books and many articles and is Deputy Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory and the Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, and an Associate Editor for the Beijing International Review of Education. She works closely with Professor Michael A. Peters and with a wide international network of scholars.

Timothy W. Luke, Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society (1989/2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 November 2020

Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society (paperback)
by Timothy W. Luke
With a Foreword by Ronald J. Deibert
Telos Press, Coming December 1, 2020. New edition. First published in 1989

This new edition of Screens of Power: Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society, first published in 1989, reintroduces the innovative critique of informational culture, politics, and society outlined by Timothy W. Luke in Telos and other publications during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Working with insights derived from the Frankfurt School, Christopher Lasch, Michel Foucault, Guy Debord, and Jean Baudrillard, Luke maps out decisive conflicts and contradictions that leading modern economies and societies faced during the Cold War. At stake here is how to organize effectively the challenging political, social, and cultural transitions from industrial to informational institutions, practices, and values—a far-reaching transformation that continues to unfold today. The original edition has influenced research in the fields of visual studies, sociology, rhetorical analysis, politics, mass communications, government, information studies, economics, and cultural studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic of the 2020s, far more people are reconfiguring key aspects of their everyday life to flow across billions of screens. As they connect through the signs and systems of application platforms, computer networks, data centers, and software servers, this new edition highlights the significance of Luke’s original explorations of the politics behind informatics as well as Telos‘s ongoing project of developing “a critical theory of the contemporary.”

Gordon Hull, Foucault on Public Opinion (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 November 2020

Gordon Hull, Foucault on Public Opinion, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 29 October 2020

If you’re like me, you spend too much time – way too much time – these days looking at polling data. I ran across some interesting remarks by Foucault on opinion yesterday, which I’ll share here as a technique of distraction. He makes them in the context of a 1976 conversation with J. P. Barou and Michelle Perrot (whose work on resistance to disciplinary power he favorably cites near the end of the conversation) that was published as the preface to an edition of Bentham’s Panopticon writings. It appears as “L’oeil du pouvoir” (D&E #195, pp. 190-207 in my 2 volume edition) and is translated in Foucault Live (=FL). For context, then, the conversation appears in the year after Discipline and Punish. It covers a range of topics, including Foucault’s own path to discovering the panopticon (initially via hospital architecture, which had the dual need to see patients and keep them physically separated to avoid the spread of disease).

[…]

Special Issue: Foucault Before the Collège de France (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 November 2020

Special Issue: Foucault Before the Collège de France, Theory, Culture and Society, Online November 17, 2020

Special issue Co-edited by Stuart Elden, Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera

PDF of table of contents

Matthew J. Dennis, Cultivating Our Passionate Attachments (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 November 2020

Matthew J. Dennis, Cultivating Our Passionate Attachments
Routledge Published September 14, 2020

Does a flourishing life involve pursuing passionate attachments? Can we choose what these passionate attachments will be? This book offers an original theory of how we can actively cultivate our passionate attachments.

The author argues that not only do we have reason to view passionate attachments as susceptible to growth, change, and improvement, but we should view these entities as amenable to self-cultivation. He uses Pierre Hadot’s and Michel Foucault’s accounts of Hellenistic self-cultivation as vital conceptual tools to formulate a theory of cultivating our passionate attachments. First, their accounts offer the conceptual resources for a philosophical theory of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments. Second, the exercises of self-cultivation they focus on allow us to outline a practical method though which we can cultivate our passionate character. Doing this brings out a significantly new dimension to the role of the passionate attachments in the flourishing life and offers theoretical and practical accounts of how we can cultivate them based on the Hellenistic conception of self-directed character change.

Cultivating Our Passionate Attachments will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working in virtue ethics, moral philosophy, and ancient philosophy.

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this reference

The Public Intellectual Series So Far (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 November 2020

The Public Intellectual Series So Far, Cassandra Voices
David Langwallner, November 7 2020

The Public Intellectual Series offers inter-disciplinary journalism, focusing on relevant authors and subject-matters crucial to negotiating our current age of extremes. We avoid specialisation, demystifying topics to provide readers with access to a broad view on contemporary challenges. Our aim is to contribute to a revival in the idea of the public intellectual, which we consider a necessary ingredient in a healthy body politic.

A public intellectual is a generalist, who brings together disparate strands of knowledge with a view to placing events in context. At one level this is a Sisyphean task, but throughout the ages intellectuals have faced the same challenges as today, forcing heavy objects up steep hills only to see them roll down again the following day.

The news media focus on the particular and the immediate sensationalism of soundbites, or the bric-a-brac of our existences, which occludes a wider field of vision.

In authoring this series as a lawyer I have strengths but also weaknesses. I studied history and lectured on the philosophy of law for many years. I read widely and as a mongrel – half-Irish-half-Austrian, now resident in London, and formerly a student in the London School Of Economics and Harvard University in the U.S. – I am lucky to have enjoyed a wide variety of cultural, educational and workplace settings.
[…]

Michel Foucault is the acceptable face of postmodernism, in that his focus is on empirical – adopting historical methods, not absurd generalisations. In that sense he is truth-seeking and many of the ideas stand up to serious scrutiny. He seems to have anticipated the mass surveillance society now upon us in the Covid-19 panopticon, with ever more extreme and intrusive regulation of our intimate behaviours.
[…]

A new global psychiatric power? Intro (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 November 2020

A new global psychiatric power? Intro (2020), Psypolitics blog
by Federico Soldani – 6th Nov 2020

More than one year ago I presented the talk “Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power?” at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London, in the summer of 2019.

The overdue transcript, with this introduction and brief comments, subdivided in thirteen parts will be published over the next few months on PsyPolitics.

[…]

Of note, some of the themes above discussed in 2019 such as power and biopolitics, as ideated by Michel Foucault, are now prominently presented in the medical literature about the 2020 pandemic, including an editorial of a few days ago on the British medical journal The Lancet by its historical editor Sir Richard Horton: ‘COVID-19 – a crisis of power’.

Foucault 1970s and 1980s lectures are cited and public health is put in relation to the global crisis of power: “We continue to live in this era of governmentality, where individual actions are shaped by power that claims its legitimacy in scientific truth. Public health developed amid these social and political currents.” “The growing importance of health to industrial societies led to the valorisation of doctors and the growth of medical science. An alliance formed between medicine and the state—“a politico–medical hold on a population”.

[…]