Foucault News

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

Clare O'Farrell

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

no comments

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

no comments

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

no comments

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…

View original post 1,031 more words

Ugo Mattei & Federico Soldani, From Citizens to Patients: A Threat to Resist (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

8 May 2020

From Citizens to Patients: A Threat to Resist.
Pandemic Lectures at the the International University College of Turin- Ugo Mattei & Federico Soldani, May 4, 2020

The decline of law as a tool for social control and its supplanting by technological, mental, and medical management aimed at preventing deviant behavior, with nary a concern for such substitution’s deleterious effects.

Other interesting lectures in the series can be found here

Thinking Through Covid-19 Responses With Foucault – An Initial Overview (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

7 May 2020

Matthew G. Hannah, Jan Simon Hutta and Christoph Schemann, Thinking Through Covid-19 Responses With Foucault – An Initial Overview, Antipode online, 5 May 2020 (Department of Geography, University of Bayreuth)

Open access

This intervention originally appeared as the second half of a longer essay intended as a basis for discussion in a Masters seminar at our university (original essay available here). It has been revised and updated for publication on AntipodeOnline.org The first part of the longer essay is an extended overview of Foucault’s analyses of power relations. As this background is not included in what follows, readers lacking a basic familiarity with the concepts of “sovereignty”, “discipline”, “biopower”, “biopolitics” and “governmentality” as these have been understood in the literature building on Foucault’s work are encouraged to consult Part I of the original version (or any of the numerous excellent book-length overviews of Foucault’s thoughts on power relations such as Dean 1999; Deleuze 2006; Elden 2017; Lemke 2019).

Over the last months, there has been a true explosion of critical scholarly contributions aimed at making sense of the political responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only is the multiplicity of interventions and contributions that have been made at a global scale increasingly hard to track, writing during a pandemic also risks illuminating pre-established theoretical frameworks more than the unfolding events themselves. This is especially true where theorists use the pandemic as “raw material for metaphysical speculation”, as Warwick Anderson (2020) has pointed out with respect to authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek. It is our conviction that some of the ideas of Michel Foucault, whose methodology has always been oriented towards differentiated empirical and historical analysis rather than abstract theorization, can avoid this danger while illustrating possibilities for making detailed sense of ongoing events.

read more

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 May 2020

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire (New Directions in Critical Theory), Columbia University Press (July 31, 2018), 296pp, ISBN-13: 978-0231187275

What is terrorism? What ought we to do about it? And why is it wrong? We think we have clear answers to these questions. But acts of violence, like U.S. drone strikes that indiscriminately kill civilians, and mass shootings that become terrorist attacks when suspects are identified as Muslim, suggest that definitions of terrorism are always contested. In Genealogies of Terrorism, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson rejects attempts to define what terrorism is in favor of a historico-philosophical investigation into the conditions under which uses of this contested term become meaningful. The result is a powerful critique of the power relations that shape how we understand and theorize political violence.

Tracing discourses and practices of terrorism from the French Revolution to late imperial Russia, colonized Algeria, and the post-9/11 United States, Erlenbusch-Anderson examines what we do when we name something terrorism. She offers an important corrective to attempts to develop universal definitions that assure semantic consistency and provide normative certainty, showing that terrorism means many different things and serves a wide range of political purposes. In the tradition of Michel Foucault’s genealogies, Erlenbusch-Anderson excavates the history of conceptual and practical uses of terrorism and maps the historically contingent political and material conditions that shape their emergence. She analyzes the power relations that make different modes of understanding terrorism possible and reveals their complicity in justifying the exercise of sovereign power in the name of defending the nation, class, or humanity against the terrorist enemy. Offering an engaged critique of terrorism and the mechanisms of social and political exclusion that it enables, Genealogies of Terrorism is an empirically grounded and philosophically rigorous critical history with important political implications.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson is assistant professor of philosophy at Syracuse University.