Foucault News

From Canada to Russia, every government is being selective in releasing coronavirus data (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

15 June 2020

From Canada to Russia, every government is being selective in releasing coronavirus data
Anton Oleinik, The Conversation, Scroll.in
Jun 08, 2020

Covid-19 has affected almost every country around the globe. The World Health Organisation has confirmed cases in 216 countries and territories, a total that represents more than 85% of 251 entities recognised by the United Nations. Yet each government has responded differently to the coronavirus pandemic – including how data on the disease have been shared with each country’s citizens.

The selectiveness with which governments release information about the number of confirmed cases and the deaths caused by the coronavirus suggest techniques of “bio-power” may be at play.

French philosopher Michel Foucault invented the concept of bio-power in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1977-’78. He defined bio-power as a “set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power.”

Foucault found an early example of bio-power in the smallpox vaccine developed by the end of the 18th century – one of the first attempts to manage populations in terms of the calculus of probabilities under the banner of public health. While a Covid-19 vaccine is still in the making, the concept of bio-power may help make better sense of how we see governments deal with the ongoing pandemic.

[…]

What Type of Governmentality is This? Or, how do we govern unknowns (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 June 2020

Robert D. Smith, What Type of Governmentality is This? Or, how do we govern unknowns, Somatosphere, Science, Medicine, and Anthropology, May 26, 2020.

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

In Le Temps, a French newspaper, anthropologist Julie Billaud wrote that the governance of COVID-19 represents “a move towards a biopolitical mode of governance that aims to manage human collectives through statistics, indicators, and other measurement tools.”[i] Others are less convinced. Social theorist Joshua Clover has written in Critical Inquiry, a French online journal,that COVID-19 represents not a push towards biopolitics, but an abandonment of it; suggesting that instead we have embraced a post-biopolitical era where we have ironically returned to “capitalism [as] sovereign.”[ii]
[…]

Kyle Willmott, From self-government to government of the self: Fiscal subjectivity, Indigenous governance and the politics of transparency (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 June 2020

Willmott, Kyle. 2020. From self-government to government of the self: Fiscal subjectivity, Indigenous governance and the politics of transparency. Critical Social Policy, 40(3): 471-491.

DOI: 10.1177/0261018319857169

Abstract
In 2013 the Canadian Parliament passed the First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA). Subject to immediate controversy, the law generated legal and political resistance from Indigenous leaders and scholars. The law requires First Nations governments to post audited consolidated financial statements and the salaries of chiefs and councillors online for public consumption. The article traces the use of transparency as a technology of government to examine how disclosure acts as an organizing mechanism of commensuration and moral scrutiny. The article then shows how transparency and disclosure was directed to rescale critique of the state away from the Canadian government, and toward First Nations governments. The article concludes by examining how bureaucrats envisioned how Indigenous peoples would use transparency and disclosure to reform their political conducts into that of a calculating taxpayer citizenship.

Keywords
audit, settler colonialism, First Nations, governmentality, indigeneity

The Biopolitics of Covid-19 (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

13 June 2020

The Biopolitics of Covid-19
Seán Brennan on April 2, 2020, Slugger O’Toole (news and opinion blog)

[…]
Increasingly, states will have to choose between the ‘bare life’ theories of Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben or the ‘social care’ theories of French philosopher Michel Foucault. Agamben argues, left to their own devices, states will provide minimal social security and maximum disciplinary powers. In contrast, Foucault argues, if a population becomes aware of its power, it can radically transform a state through the everyday administration of social care so people can better take control of life or death issues. In support, the Italian theorist, Roberto Esposito suggests, Foucault’s aim for social care offers new opportunities to immunise communities from a raft of pandemics, from the economic to the medical.
[…]

On non-fascist life with Natasha Lennard. Interview (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 June 2020

On non-fascist life with Natasha Lennard, Politics, Theory, Other, Tribune Magazine
Podcast interview by Alex Doherty

Natasha Lennard joins me to discuss her book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life. We spoke about whether or not Donald Trump and the movement that has coalesced around him ought to be characterised as fascist, we also talked about the contributions of Wilhelm Reich, Michel Foucault, and other figures in the anti-psychiatry movement to theorising fascism. We discussed the legitimacy and history of anti-fascist violence and its treatment by the media, and finally we spoke about Natasha’s writing on suicide and how the act of suicide brings into question capitalism’s positing of the idea of the sovereign individual.

Archive: Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

12 June 2020

Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism, Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series, 2018

Summary
Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing.

What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?
—from Carceral Capitalism

In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)’s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang’s influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.

Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.

Theoretical Puppets: Foucault on Puppet Theaters, Flaubert and the Modern Imagination (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 June 2020

Foucault on Puppet Theaters, Flaubert and the Modern Imagination 1 March 2020

Michel Foucault and Salvador Dalí visit an exhibition in the “Museum of Imagination” displaying various versions of the “Temptation of Saint Anthony”…

Ethan Zuckerman, Why filming police violence has done nothing to stop it (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

11 June 2020

Why filming police violence has done nothing to stop it
Ethan Zuckerman, MIT Technology Review
June 3, 2020

After years of police body cams and bystander cellphone video, it’s clear that evidentiary images on their own don’t bring about change. What’s missing is power.

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers was captured on video, not once but half a dozen times.

[…]

Much of what we think about surveillance comes from the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault examined the ideas of the English reformer Jeremy Bentham, who proposed a prison—the panopticon or Inspection-House—in which every cell was observable from a central watchtower. The possibility that someone might be watching, Bentham believed, would be enough to prevent bad behavior by prisoners. Foucault observed that this knowledge of being watched forces us to police ourselves; our act of disciplining ourselves as if we were always under observation, more than the threat of corporal punishment, is the primary mechanism of “political technology” and power in modern society.
[…]

It turns out that images matter, but so does power. Bentham’s panopticon works because the warden of the prison has the power to punish you if he witnesses your misbehavior. But Bentham’s other hope for the panopticon—that the behavior of the warden would be transparent and evaluated by all who saw him—has never come to pass. Over 10 years, from 2005 to 2014, only 48 officers were charged with murder or manslaughter for use of lethal force, though more than 1,000 people a year are killed by police in the United States.
[…]

Neoliberalism, accounting, and the transformation of subjectivities in social work: A study on the implementation of personal budgets (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 June 2020

Chow, D., Bracci, E.
Neoliberalism, accounting, and the transformation of subjectivities in social work: A study on the implementation of personal budgets
(2020) Financial Accountability and Management, 36 (2), pp. 151-170.

DOI: 10.1111/faam.12231

Abstract
This study examines, through the case of Personal Budgets in England, the role of accounting in transforming the subjectivities of social workers through a Foucauldian lens. The findings show how accounting can reshape the subjectivities of social workers serving as intermediaries responsible for the frontline implementation of neoliberal reforms. It does so through an empirical demonstration on how accounting harnesses an individual’s autonomy and responsibility to nurture “productive” relationships between citizens and the state. Furthermore, the findings also highlight the vulnerability of social workers’ subjectivities from the installation of an accounting infrastructure with multiple capabilities. This study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how neoliberal policies transform subjectivities in social work and adds to the literature on accounting’s biopolitical role in the reconstitution of such subjectivities. It also addresses the relative neglect of studies examining the role of accounting in neoliberal transformations of social work that, despite its significance for an ageing society and its attendant consequences for public finances, receives far less attention than healthcare reforms. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Author Keywords
accounting; Foucault; neoliberal; social work; subjectivity

Jordan Jochim, Aristotle, Tyranny, and the Small-Souled Subject (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 June 2020

Jordan Jochim, Aristotle, Tyranny, and the Small-Souled Subject (2020) Political Theory, 48 (2), pp. 169-191.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719851802

Abstract
Political theorists converge in identifying modern techniques of domination as habit-formative and psychologically invasive, in contrast to earlier, more blatantly coercive forms of repression. Putting Aristotle on tyranny in conversation with Michel Foucault on subject formation, this article argues for continuity across the pre- and postmodern divide. Through a close reading of the “three heads of tyranny” in Politics 5.11 (1314a13-29)—those being the tyrant’s efforts to form subjects who (1) have small thoughts (2) are distrustful of one another, and (3) are incapable of action—I argue that central to Aristotle’s account of tyrannical domination is how tyrants cultivate the ethical vice of “small-souledness” (Nicomachean Ethics 1123b7), thus producing subjects with humbled desires for a proportionate distribution of political power. This article deepens our appreciation of the social and psychological registers of Aristotle’s theorization of domination and gives reasons for continuing to take Aristotle’s insights into tyranny seriously today. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
Aristotle; desire; domination; Foucault; justice; tyranny