Foucault News

Aryal, Affective politics and non-sovereign identity (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

18 May 2020

Aryal, Y.
Affective politics and non-sovereign identity
(2020) Textual Practice, 34 (1), pp. 67-85.

DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1508059

Abstract
The paper proposes a new political philosophy of non-sovereign identity based on the model of politics without coercive sovereignty as a source of our political life. It argues that the formation of our identity is not only determined by the existing power relations, but also by our capacity and strategy to work on our own creative self-formation or self-fashioning. The paper combines Michel Foucault’s ethical project of self-fashioning and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of ‘lines of flight’ together invoking Lauren Berlant’s idea of ‘the political’ in order to observe the constitution of non-sovereign identity beyond and within the given power relations. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Affect; identity; nonsovereign; power; self-fashioning; the political

L. Margolin, Rogerian Psychotherapy and the Problem of Power: A Foucauldian Interpretation (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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17 May 2020

Margolin, L.
Rogerian Psychotherapy and the Problem of Power: A Foucauldian Interpretation
(2020) Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 60 (1), pp. 130-143.

DOI: 10.1177/0022167816687640

Abstract
Guided by Foucault’s argument that “knowledge is an ‘invention’ behind which lies something completely different from itself: the play of instincts, impulses, desires, fears, and the will to appropriate,” this study considers the possibility that “nondirectivity” in Rogerian psychotherapy operates as a trope for power. This is partly based on Edwin Kahn’s observation that nondirective therapists may be less mindful of their own fallibility than other therapists, less wary of their capacity to influence clients, and therefore, less prepared to interrogate the ways they might actually be influencing them. Nondirective, client-centered therapists, in short, may be less likely to have doubts about their comments and interventions, and thus more likely to exercise influence. What I show in this study is how Rogers did just this in his famous session with Gloria, how—without telling Gloria about his personal and theoretic biases, without first discussing them with her to see if and how they fit her goals—he continually pushed her to view herself through the lens of those biases. © The Author(s) 2017.

Author Keywords
Carl Rogers; Gloria; Michel Foucault; nondirective psychotherapy; Rogerian psychotherapy

Truth and Knowledge for Michel Foucault, with Ann Stoler (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

13 May 2020

Truth and Knowledge for Michel Foucault, with Ann Stoler
Great Books 31, Think About It | Podcast
Conversations on big ideas and great books hosted by Uli Baer.

Why is everyone talking about Michel Foucault these days? How can Foucault’s work have so many resonances in our contemporary world? What were his insights and discoveries that have influenced disciplines as diverse as cultural studies, gender and queer studies, or post-colonial studies? There is no doubt that Michel Foucault was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. His work —always critical— between philosophy and history, resists easy labels. Some regard him as a historian of knowledge, while others think he is a philosopher. He thought of his own method as genealogy, and I wanted to understand what this means. His celebrated four-volume work History of Sexuality, published between 1978 and 2018 —the final volume posthumously— and his conferences in the Collège de France —among others— are fundamental to understand how concepts such as knowledge, power, gender, sexuality, desire and affect are not neutral but culturally and historically determined.

Our guest today was able to attend some of Foucault’s conferences in Paris. Ann Stoler is Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York City. In this new episode, I talked with Ann about her first encounter with the work of the French philosopher to better understand some key points of his investigations. How can we think of “truth” as something historically and culturally specific, rather than an absolute, unending value. I learned how Foucault’s investigations influenced Ann Stoler’s pathbreaking work on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and the ethnography of the archives.

Penser l’après : Sciences, pouvoir et opinions dans l’après Covid-19 (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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12 May 2020

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Penser l’après : Sciences, pouvoir et opinions dans l’après Covid-19, The Conversation, May 3, 2020

[…]

Michel Foucault souligne le contraste entre ce modèle archaïque de la quarantaine où un pouvoir souverain autoritaire régit depuis un état central la vie des populations, et les dispositifs stratégiques de contrôle diffus de la vie mis en place depuis « le décollage médical et sanitaire de l’Occident » grâce à la médecine scientifique. Or la plupart de ces dispositifs basés sur la science – mesures statistiques des taux de mortalité et de morbidité, hygiène, vaccinations, contrôle des flux migratoires – se retrouvent dans la gestion actuelle de la crise, côte à côte avec des mesures archaïques que l’on croyait depuis longtemps périmées.

[…]

Blake Smith, Foucault on Liberal Democracy, Historicism and Philosophy (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

11 May 2020

Foucault on Liberal Democracy, Historicism and Philosophy
Blake Smith. Tocqueville 21, 9 May 2020

Liberal democracy is an oxymoron. Or rather, it’s a site of confrontation between contradictory discourses, between the universalist aspirations of philosophy and the partisanship of historiography. So insinuates Michel Foucault in the lecture series “Society Must be Defended,” delivered at the Collège de France in the spring of 1976.

This is not the ostensible point of his lectures. Foucault eschews normative claims about the nature of our regime, and insists he has no desire to ask something so naive as a “theoretical question.” Instead he pursues a historical investigation into the ways that armed struggle has been used in the modern West as a metaphor for and within domestic politics. He traces the origin of the war-metaphor from early modern writers through nineteenth and twentieth-century prophets of wars of class and race, with whom he concludes the series. But these were not his real target.

Rather, as Foucault told his audience in the first of the lectures, he wanted to explain the bewildering moral, social and political transformations that had taken place in the liberal democratic West during the 1960s and 70s. Searching for the mechanisms that had made these transformations possible, Foucault develops a provocative account of the genesis and nature of the liberal democratic regime. Our political order, his account implies, is an unhappy marriage of philosophy and historicism.

[…]

The city in a time of plague (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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10 May 2020

The city in a time of plague
By PEPE ESCOBAR, Asia Times, APRIL 17, 2020

See also How to think post-Planet Lockdown By PEPE ESCOBAR. Asia Times, APRIL 28, 2020

History teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers

The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies – this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city.

– Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

Predictably eyeing the Decline and Fall of the American Empire, a serious academic debate is raging around the working hypothesis of historian Kyle Harper, according to whom viruses and pandemics – especially the Justinian plague in the 6^th century – led to the end of the Roman Empire.

Well, history actually teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers.

Patrick Boucheron, a crack historian and a professor at the esteemed College de France, offers a very interesting perspective. Incidentally, before the onset of Covid-19, he was about to start a seminar on the Black Death medieval plague.

[…]

H. Downey and T. Clune. How does the discourse surrounding the Murray Darling Basin manage the concept of entitlement to water? (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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10 May 2020

Downey, H., Clune, T.
How does the discourse surrounding the Murray Darling Basin manage the concept of entitlement to water?
(2020) Critical Social Policy, 40 (1), pp. 108-129.

DOI: 10.1177/0261018319837206

Abstract
Globally, the challenges of climate change have resulted in significant water policy reform. Australia’s Murray Darling Basin (MDB) Plan is a complex transboundary water management system that aims to balance the need for environmental protection with the needs of social and economic users of water. In July 2017, media reports argued that some MDB irrigators were misappropriating water destined for the environment and downstream users. This article uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to explore this flashpoint in the long-standing tensions between all stakeholders including the Basin jurisdictions. Diverse understandings of who is entitled to water that are shaped by the historical, political and social context are central to this conflict. Findings suggest that both neoliberal governmentality and the agrarian discourse are threatened by an emerging governmentality that embraces non-farming interests. The broader experience of water scarcity in a rapidly changing climate suggests comparable issues will become evident across the world. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
Foucault; governmentality; irrigation farming; transboundary water management; water scarcity

Index Keywords
climate change, environmental protection, governance approach, irrigation, policy reform, resource scarcity, river management, stakeholder, transboundary cooperation, water management, water resource, water supply; Australia, Murray-Darling Basin

Archive: Jean M. Langford, Avian Bedlam: Toward a Biosemiosis of Troubled Parrots (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

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9 May 2020

Jean M. Langford, Avian Bedlam: Toward a Biosemiosis of Troubled Parrots, Environmental Humanities 9:1 (May 2017)
DOI 10.1215/22011919-3829145 © 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Abstract
At an urban parrot sanctuary in the Midwestern USA, humans care for eighty-some parrots from more than a dozen species. Many of these parrots have personal histories that include various forms of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. The article explores the forms of interspecies communication through which human caretakers interpret and respond to the psychic lives of these parrots—psychic lives that are marked by troubles ranging from social withdrawal to self-destructive behavior. These interspecies communications include body language, gesture, nonverbal vocalizations, and human-language phrases. While biosemiotic theory offers a provocative starting point for understanding these communications, sanctuary interactions destabilize certain semiotic distinctions, drawing attention to ambiguities between semantic and nonsemantic vocalization, vocalization and body language, informative speech and expletive, and communication and symptom. Building on ideas about metacommunication in animal play, I suggest that both psychic trouble and interactions to ease that trouble might be considered forms of biosemiotic creativity. By loosening and opening up the distinctions frequently drawn between human and other-than-human semiosis, it is possible to develop subtler accounts of the semiotic improvisations that emerge in uniquely configured multispecies communities such as the sanctuary.

Keywords
parrots, biosemiosis, multispecies, madness, interspecies communication

Jürgen Portschy, Times of power, knowledge and critique in the work of Foucault (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 May 2020

Jürgen Portschy, Times of power, knowledge and critique in the work of Foucault, Time and Society Volume: 29 issue: 2, page(s): 392-419
Article first published online: May 7, 2020; Issue published: May 1, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20911786

Abstract
While Michel Foucault is commonly considered as a thinker with a primary interest in space and spatiality, his use of temporal categories, tropes and metaphors has until recently been only partially reconstructed. Working through different phases of his writings and lectures, this paper argues that Foucault opened a complex and interesting – yet to be acknowledged – analytical perspective on historically dominant, but fundamentally contested forms of social time-regimes, which accounts especially for contingent ruptures, silent continuities and the power-structured contexts of their emergence. Elucidating conceptual tools designed towards the analysis of rationalities and practises of temporal government and approaching social time regimes along the axes of power, knowledge and subjectivity, the aim of this paper is twofold: on the one side, it tries to further contribute to a ‘temporal turn’ in Foucault studies; on the other, it attempts to develop a Foucauldian vocabulary of temporal analysis as an alternative or supplement to established approaches in the field of critical social time studies.

Keywords Time, temporality, Foucault, power, governmentality, subjectivity, knowledge, political philosophy

The Early Foucault Update 32: Unable to finish a manuscript during lockdown

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 May 2020

Progressive Geographies

While these are strange and disruptive times, as much as I’m able, I’m trying to make progress on this book manuscript. I’d intended to submit it to Polity by the end of April, but that unfortunately wasn’t possible. I can manage without the days I’d planned on having in Uppsala when I cut that trip short, and the work I would have done at Yale and Princeton was mainly for the next book on Foucault in the 1960s, so I hope to reschedule that trip when the situation has improved. But I do need some more time in Paris to complete this manuscript, and I am not sure when that will be possible.

Although I have most of my French theory books at home, there are a few things in my Warwick office that I can’t currently access. The Warwick library is closed, and there are few things I want…

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