Foucault News

Marx, Foucault, & COVID-19: PRODUCTIVITY

Clare O'Farrell

18 April 2020

In these days of quarantine against COVID-19, I frequently see essays on social media aimed against normal mandates of worker productivity. These reports are aimed at the privileged, that is, those who still have jobs and are working from home. As such, these anxious stabs against the perceived persistent expectation of professional productivity–resistance expressed in light of the anxiety of the world and about the virus itself–succinctly caption the neoliberal subject as self-entrepreneur. We neoliberal professionals are so deeply formed by the need to prove ourselves productive–increasingly productive and productive in increasingly new ways–that when psycho-social conditions render this mandate impossible, we turn our productivity to producing accounts of why we can’t be productive.

Productivity and unproductivity appear in our news feeds about the virus in another, quite different way: the cough symptomatic of COVID-19 is what they call “unproductive.” If you have a productive cough, you probably…

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Zachary Braiterman, Plague Discipline & Bio-Power (Foucault) (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

18 April 2020

jewish philosophy place

dance of death discipline and punsih Bergman

Throwing up my hands, re-reading after many years the famous chapter on Panopticism in Foucault’s classic study Discipline and Punish, first published in France in 1975. Readers today, responding to the Coronavirus, have already noted that plague quarantines and other practices of social control start his analysis. But what are we supposed to make of that analysis except to place it in historical context and parse out something of a confusion between history, literature, philosophy, policy, and politics?

We could start first by submitting Foucault’s thesis to the judgment of historians and intellectual historians while understanding, at the same time, as non-historians, that it might, in fact, be unarguably true that it was, indeed, the plague that “gave rise to disciplinary projects” and “disciplined society” (p.198). Fitting the timeline that determines so much of Foucault’s analysis about disciplinary politics here and elsewhere are the great pandemics of the 17

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Free Foucault. Cours dispensés par Michel Foucault au Collège de France entre 1972 et 1984 (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

18 April 2020

Free Foucault
Foucault for the rest of us

Free Foucault est une plateforme décentralisée et non-censurable donnant accès à une version restaurée des enregistrements – ainsi débarassés de leurs grésillements – des cours dispensés par Michel Foucault au Collège de France entre 1972 et 1984.

On s’étonnera peut-être qu’il ait fallu attendre 50 ans pour que les enregistrements des cours de « l’auteur en sciences humaines le plus cité au monde » – hier encore réservés aux amis du Collège de France – soient enfin restaurés et rendus à l’écoute des nigauds ordinaires. On s’étonnera aussi qu’il ait fallu, pour cela, l’intervention d’un pangolin. Ne s’en étonneront en vérité que les fonctionnaires médiocres, nuls, imbéciles, pelliculaires, ridicules, râpés, pauvres, impuissants de la république.

Cette plateforme repose sur la technologie IPFS. Chaque enregistrement y est découpé en une multiplicité de petits fragments eux-mêmes éparpillés à travers une multiplicité de serveurs. Cette fragmentation-dispersion de la donnée, rendant inassignable « l’hébergeur » de ces enregistrements, constitue la meilleure défense contre la censure.

Nous pensons aussi que Michel Foucault aurait apprécié le procédé : c’est, après tout, par ce type de dispersion que s’organise l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné. Sa voix se dupliquera désormais de serveurs en serveurs, de fragments en fragments, comme une épave heureuse. Nous espérons ainsi que cette technologie permettra à la voix de Michel Foucault de vivre éternellement.

Pour des raisons techniques nous publierons un cours par semaine. Actualité oblige, nous inaugurons le lancement de cette plateforme avec la publication de « Naissance de la bio-politique ». Dans ce cours, dispensé entre 1978 et 1979, Michel Foucault analysait « la manière dont on a essayé, depuis le XVIIIe siècle, de rationaliser les problèmes posés à la pratique gouvernementale par les phénomènes propres à un ensemble de vivants constitués en population : santé, hygiène, natalité, longévité, races… »

Crying for Repression: Populist and Democratic Biopolitics in Times of COVID-19 (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

15 April 2020

Crying for Repression: Populist and Democratic Biopolitics in Times of COVID-19.
by Karsten Schubert • Critical Legal Thinking— Law and the Political —1, April 2020

We live in very Foucauldian times, as the many think-pieces published on biopolitics and COVID-19 show. Yet what is remarkable—biopolitically—about the current situation has gone largely unnoticed: We are witnessing a new form of biopolitics today that could be termed populist biopolitics. Awareness of this populist biopolitics helps illuminate what is needed today: democratic biopolitics.

Traditional analyses of biopolitics focus on state and medical institutions and how they govern the behavior of individuals and the people. These analyses carve out the (potentially) repressive effects of such biopower on individuals and communities. Governing in the time of an epidemic is biopolitics in its purest form—it is no surprise that Agamben (Foucault et al. 2020) interpreted the severe measures that the state implemented in terms of their repressive effects.

[…]

Openness and innovation in online higher education: a historical review of the two discourses (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 April 2020

Kyungmee Lee (2020) Openness and innovation in online higher education: a historical review of the two discourses, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, Published online: 14 Jan 2020

DOI: 10.1080/02680513.2020.1713737

ABSTRACT
This article tackles a critical question:‘to what extent can online higher education (HE) be open and innovative at the same time?’ To provide a more comprehensive answer to the question, the author takes up a notion of discourse and situates the analysis in a specific online HE setting: Athabasca University (AU), Canada. In this article, the author first unpacks how the openness and innovation discourses originally emerged in AU throughout its early years and how the original conceptualisation of the two and their relationships have shifted in more recent years. The results demonstrate that there has been an increasing level of discontinuity between the conceptualisation of openness and innovation as independent principles and the operationalisation of the two, incompatible in course design practice at AU. Being fully open to diverse student groups and being technologically innovative by integrating a state-of-the-art technology cannot be achieved in a single online course. In addition, being pedagogically innovative by increasing interactivity among students while maintaining the same level of flexibility provided by the independent study model seems very challenging. This article also discusses the institutional conditions that make teaching-oriented innovation more difficult to achieve.

KEYWORDS: Distance education, open university, learning designer, discourse analysis, text analysis, Foucault

Theoretical Puppets: S is for Sand — and for Sea. (Michel Foucault) (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 April 2020

The Deleuze Seminars, Website Launch (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 April 2020

The Deleuze Seminars

We are delighted to announce the virtual launch of a new archive site, The Deleuze Seminars (deleuze.cla.purdue.edu), devoted to the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). The site has several goals:

— To provide English translations and French transcriptions, many newly developed for the site, of the seminar lectures Deleuze gave at the University of Paris, Vincennes-St. Denis, between 1971 and 1987.

— To provide additional documents — course notes, lectures, video links, and interviews — that complement the formal course lectures.

— To provide a location for ongoing data rescue. Most of Deleuze’s seminars were recorded by his students, yet very few recordings from the 1970s have been archived, or even survived, and some gaps remain for the 1980 seminars. The Deleuze Seminars is hosting a data rescue effort to retrieve and save as many of these recordings as possible.

We welcome you to explore the resources available at the The Deleuze Seminars by visiting deleuze.cla.purdue.edu. The site includes new English translations (and many new French transcriptions) and already several of Deleuze’s complete seminars on Foucault (1985-86) and Leibniz (1980, 1986-87), with several other seminars currently in development. For queries about the archive or to discuss possible rescue of extant data, please contact us.

The Deleuze Seminars site is an ongoing project that has been undertaken with support from Purdue University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (gallica.bnf.fr/conseils/content/gilles-deleuze), the Université de Paris 8 (www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze) and Web Deleuze (www.webdeleuze.com).

Daniel Smith (Purdue University), Charles J. Stivale (Wayne State University)

***

Nous sommes heureux de vous annoncer la mise en place d’un nouveau site d’archives, The Deleuze Seminars (deleuze.cla.purdue.edu), consacré aux oeuvres du philosophe français Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Les buts du site sont les suivants:

— Offrir les traductions en anglais et le transcriptions en français, dont beaucoup sont disponibles pour la première fois, des séances dans les séminaires annuels de Deleuze à l’Université de Paris entre 1971 et 1987.

— Offrir d’autres documents – notes de cours, conférences, liens aux enregistrements vidéos et audios, et entretiens – qui se lient aux séances des séminaires.

— Offrir un lieu pour promouvoir la récupération des données deleuziennes. La plupart des séminaires ont été enregistrés par ses étudiants, mais nous possédons très peu des enregistrements faits pendant les années 70, avec des lacunes également pendant les années 80. The Deleuze Seminars offre donc un site pour soutenir l’effort de retrouver ces ressources afin d’ouvrir un dépôt actif pour les enregistrements, notes de cours, ou vidéos qui n’ont pas encore été partagés.

Nous vous invitons d’explorer les ressources déjà disponisbles au site en le visitant à deleuze.cla.purdue.edu. Le site contient de nouvelles traductions en anglais (et de nouvelles transcriptions en français) et déjà plusieurs séminaires entiers, dont Foucault (1985-86) et Leibniz (1980, 1986-87), avec d’autres séminaires actuellement sous développement. Pour des renseignements à propos de l’archive ou pour fournir des données deleuziennes en vue de les contribuer au site, veuillez nous joindre ici.

Le site The Deleuze Seminars est un effort actif rendu possible grâce au soutien de Purdue University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, et la collaboration de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (gallica.bnf.fr/conseils/content/gilles-deleuze), l’Université de Paris 8 (www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze) et Web Deleuze (www.webdeleuze.com).

Daniel Smith (Purdue University), Charles J. Stivale (Wayne State University)

Matthew Hannah, Jan Simon Hutta, Christoph Schemann, Thinking Corona measures with Foucault (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

6 comments

12 April 2020

Matthew Hannah with Jan Simon Hutta and Christoph Schemann, Thinking Corona measures with Foucault, University of Bayreuth, 2020

The thoughts to follow have been formulated as a spur to discussion about some of the power relations manifested in state responses to the Covid-19 pandemic up to early April, 2020. While it touches themes covered by others, the essay is significantly longer and more detailed than most that have appeared at the time of writing. This is due to its pedagogical intent: it was conceived as a reading for a Masters seminar scheduled to take place in the summer of 2020. Its purpose is to introduce students to Foucault’s work in a tailored summary of his thinking on power relations, and to deploy Foucault’s ideas in a broad (and necessarily provisional) analysis of the current Corona crisis. Readers already familiar with Foucault’s analyses of power relations may wish to skip directly to Part II (page 16). In the interest of timely distribution, the essay has not been subjected to a comprehensive review process, only discussed internally by the three authors. Lacking complete access to notes and sources, the text is relatively thinly and unevenly sprinkled with citations to the academic literature. There is likewise no attempt to reference more than a handful among the hundreds of useful critical interventions that have been proliferating rapidly in recent weeks. Finally, it includes almost no specific citations of current reporting on the Corona situation. Familiarity with the unfolding of current events is simply assumed. All errors and omissions are the responsibility of the lead author.

Editor: With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this link

Theoretical Puppets: Foucault on the Coronavirus, Biopolitics, and the “Apparatus of Security” (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

4 comments

12 April 2020

Foucault on the Coronavirus, Biopolitics, and the “Apparatus of Security”, Apr 5, 2020

Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 April 2020

In the Moment

Daniele Lorenzini

In a recent blog post, Joshua Clover rightly notices the swift emergence of a new panoply of “genres of the quarantine.” It should not come as a surprise that one of them centers on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, asking whether or not it is still appropriate to describe the situation that we are currently experiencing. Neither should it come as a surprise that, in virtually all of the contributions that make use of the concept of biopolitics to address the current coronavirus pandemic, the same bunch of rather vague ideas are mentioned over and over again, while other—no doubt more interesting—Foucauldian insights tend to be ignored. In what follows, I discuss two of these insights, and I conclude with some methodological remarks on the issue of what it may mean to “respond” to the current “crisis.”

Exif_JPEG_PICTURE The “Blackmail” of Biopolitics