Foucault News

Gucci and Foucault (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

30 September 2019

Jocelyn Silver, Watch A$AP Rocky Getting His Life at Gucci, Paper Magazine, 22 Sept 2019

Today, Sunday, in Milan, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele delivered a sanitarium-inspired show, and a statement on capitalism and sanity and whether or not the two can actually co-exist. The show notes (written by Michele’s partner Giovanni Attili, an urban planning professor) quoted Michel Foucault and questioned the purpose of the fashion industry itself.

“Can [fashion] offer itself as an instrument of resistance?” Attili wrote. “Can it suggest experimental freedom, ability to transgress and disobey, emancipation and self-determination? Or [is] fashion itself [at risk] to become a refined device of neo-liberal government that ends up imposing a new normativity, turning freedom into a commodity and emancipation into a broken promise?”

It’s probably the latter. But as great and gutsy as the show was (we love a Girl, Interrupted moment) Gucci is still a business that needs to sell things, and so there were tons of celebrities in the front row.
[…]

“that microphysics of powers that permeates our existences”!
[…]
A few designers are bucking the cliches. That microphysics quote came from Gucci, which created a stir on social media during its Sunday show with its brief, almost inscrutably dense press release. It also name-dropped the French social theorist Michel Foucault and proposed fashion as a tool of self-expression—a tool “to let people walk through fields of possibilities, giving hints and evoking openness, cultivating promises of beauty, offering testimonies and prophecies, sacralizing every form of diversity, feeding indispensable self-determination skills.” The militant intellectual, it seems, is the new influencer.

See also this article in Pink News by Josh Milton

And
this article in The Guardian

Also
The New York Times

In the welcome note emailed to attendees, the designer had name-checked Michel Foucault (source of Erterotopia or, in English, Herterotopia, and refers to Foucault’s worlds within worlds) and his theory of “biophysics” and the way the power of the dominant social group that “imposes conducts and paths, that prescribes thresholds of normality.”

And from 2018
Gucci put turbans on white models and explained it with cyborgs and Foucault 02.23.18

Foucault’s Politics of Philosophy Power, Law, and Subjectivity (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 September 2019

Sandro Chignola, Foucault’s Politics of Philosophy, Power, Law, and Subjectivity. Routledge, 2018

Review

Description
Oriented around the theme of a ‘politics of philosophy’, this book tracks the phases in which Foucault’s genealogy of power, law, and subjectivity was reorganized during the 14 years of his teaching at the College de France, as his focus shifted from sovereignty to governance. This theme, Sandro Chignola argues here, is the key to understanding four features of Foucault’s work over this period. First, it foregrounds its immediate political character. Second, it demonstrates that Foucault’s “Greek trip” also aims at a politics of the subject that is able to face the processes of the governmentalization of power. Third, it makes clear that the idea of the “government of the self” is – drawing on an ethics of intellectual responsibility that is Weberian in origin – an answer to the processes that, within neoliberal governance, produce the subject as an individual (as a consumer, a market agent, an entrepreneur, and so on). Fourth, the theme of a ‘politics of philosophy’ implies that Foucault’s research was never simply scholarly or neutral; but rather was characterized by a specific political position. Against recent interpretations that risk turning Foucault into a scholar, here then Foucault is re-presented as a key figure for jurisprudential and political-philosophical research.

Michel Foucault, Folie, langage, littérature (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

28 September 2019

Michel Foucault, Folie, langage, littérature
Édition établie par H.-P. Fruchaud, D. Lorenzini et J. Revel. Introduction par J. Revel. Vrin 2019

La folie, le langage et la littérature ont longtemps occupé une place centrale dans la pensée de Michel Foucault. Quels sont le statut et la fonction du fou dans nos sociétés « occidentales », et en quoi se différencient-t-ils de ce qu’ils peuvent être dans d’autres sociétés? Mais également : quelle étrange parenté la folie entretient-elle avec le langage et la littérature, qu’il s’agisse du théâtre baroque, du théâtre d’Artaud ou de l’œuvre de Roussel? Et, s’il s’agit de s’intéresser au langage dans sa matérialité, comment l’analyse littéraire s’est-elle elle-même transformée, en particulier sous l’influence croisée du structuralisme et de la linguistique, et dans quelle direction évolue-t-elle?

Les conférences et les textes, pour la plupart inédits, réunis ici illustrent la manière dont, à partir des années 1960 et pendant plus d’une décennie, Foucault n’a eu de cesse de tisser, de reformuler et de reprendre ces questionnements. Éclairant d’un jour nouveau des thématiques que l’on croyait connaître, ils permettent également de percevoir l’étonnant regard de lecteur que Foucault portait par exemple sur La Recherche de l’Absolu de Balzac, ou sur La Tentation de saint Antoine et Bouvard et Pécuchet de Flaubert.

Representations of Chinese gendered and racialised bodies in contemporary media sites (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 September 2019

Pang, B., Hill, J.
Representations of Chinese gendered and racialised bodies in contemporary media sites
(2018) Sport, Education and Society, 23 (8), pp. 773-785. Cited 1 time.

DOI: 10.1080/13573322.2018.1489226

Abstract
Social media are influential sociocultural forces that construct and transmit information about gender, health and bodies to young people in the digital age. In health and physical activity, Chinese people are often represented and positioned differently to other (minority) ethnic groups. For example, Black young people are often understood as having low academic motivations and aspirations but as ‘natural’ athletes; in contrast, Chinese young people, seen as the ‘model minority’ who excel in STEM subjects, are fragile, reserved and disinterested in physical movements. These public forms of representation may sit in opposition to the young people’s embodied identity. When these misrepresentations are internalised, issues such as micro-aggression and racism may have an impact on Chinese young people’s health and wellbeing. This paper aims to examine how Chinese bodies are gendered and racialised in contemporary social media sites (e.g. Google News, LiveJournal, Medium, WordPress). Drawing on critical discourse analysis and Foucault’s concepts of normalisation and discursive practice, the paper will problematise the often taken-for-granted gendered and racialised stereotypes related to Chinese physicality and health on social media sites. Implications for developing future research and teaching resources in critical media health literacy for young people on issues related to gender and equity will be provided. The results affect how we understand, represent, and discuss Chinese (young) people on social media sites, thereby how Chinese young people engage, construct, and perform their embodied identities in Western, English speaking societies. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Chinese bodies; critical discourse analysis; critical media health literacy; gender; race; social media

Index Keywords
aggression, article, Chinese, discourse analysis, drawing, female, gender, health literacy, human, identity, male, organization, racism, social media, speech, stereotypy, teaching, wellbeing

Mathematics education in the neoliberal and corporate curriculum: the case of Brazilian agricultural high schools (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 September 2019

de Toledo e Toledo, N., Knijnik, G., Valero, P.
Mathematics education in the neoliberal and corporate curriculum: the case of Brazilian agricultural high schools
(2018) Educational Studies in Mathematics, 99 (1), pp. 73-87.

DOI: 10.1007/s10649-018-9825-4

Abstract
The pedagogical principle learning by research guides the current curriculum in agricultural high schools in Brazil. A problematization of the principle shows how (1) it feeds into current neoliberal and corporate agendas in the education sector, and (2) it associates mathematical formalism and abstraction as necessary conditions for the production and use of biotechnology. Data consists of official national and institutional policy documents, as well as interviews conducted with nine former students, along with their school notebooks and tests. The theoretical and methodological framework draws on the work of Michel Foucault. It is argued that neoliberal market values are embedded in the mathematics education, through the articulation of abstract and formal reasoning with techno-scientific knowledge, for the purpose of competitive production. The learning by research principle shapes students’ subjectivities to desire becoming techno-scientificized individuals. The ethical question of the subordination of the value of mathematics education to a neoliberal, predominantly marketized logic is raised as a challenge to the role of mathematics in contemporary cultures. © 2018, Springer Nature B.V.

Author Keywords
High school agricultural education courses; Mathematics education; Mathematics education and subjectivation; Mathematics in agricultural education

Jan C. Zoellick, Lock them up! Lock them up? A critique of the prison mosaic (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 September 2019

Jan C. Zoellick, Lock them up! Lock them up? A critique of the prison mosaic (2018) Futures, 101, pp. 1-9.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2018.04.010

Abstract
Incarceration has become the routine response to severe criminal offence and is presented as the most humane form of punishment. Yet, multiple biases combine to form a discriminatory criminal justice system targeting poor men of colour. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Loïc Wacquant, and Angela Davis the development of prisons to the hegemonic form of managing misconduct and ultimately poverty is analysed. These include analyses of the prison-industrial complex as a close connection between incarceration and industry, as well as the role of neoliberal ideology and agenda in transforming the state based on discipline and control as responses to social ills. Following Castoriadis’ “decolonisation of the imaginary” these fundamental critiques are connected with alternatives to incarceration. Finally, exemplary alternatives to the neoliberal state complete the mosaic of social injustice and provide a broader picture on this important debate. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

Author Keywords
Alternatives to incarceration; Decolonisation of the imaginary; Degrowth; Neoliberalism; Restorative justice; Transformative justice

Index Keywords
crime, decolonization, hegemony, neoliberalism, poverty, social justice, theoretical study

Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault, the Will, and Freedom in Somatic Practice (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 September 2019

Heyes, C.J.
Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault, the Will, and Freedom in Somatic Practice
(2018) Human Studies, 41 (4), pp. 527-544.

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-018-9475-7

Abstract
This essay identifies two kinds of awareness of one’s body that occur in a variety of literatures: awareness as psychologically or spiritually enabling or therapeutic, and awareness as undesirable self-consciousness of the body. Drawing on Foucault’s account of normalizing judgment, it argues that these two forms of awareness are impossible to separate, if that separation is into authentic versus extrinsic somatic experience. Nonetheless, awareness is an important component of embodied freedom, but a freedom understood with Spinoza and Nietzsche as grounded in necessity rather than only in the will, and with Arendt and Foucault as a practice rather than an achievement of a sovereign subject. Somatic practices grounded in awareness and acceptance of the body’s necessities, along with attention to the I-can (rather than the I-will) cultivate a form of embodied freedom that bridges care of the self and the political. © 2018, Springer Nature B.V.

Author Keywords
Awareness; Body; Foucault; Freedom; Will

The Panopticon in Singapore (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 September 2019

Shech, Singapore Prison Service’s choice of name for its newsletter draws flak, The Independent, Singapore September 16, 2019

Singapore — Concerned netizens and academics alike were not happy with the Singapore Prison Service’s (SPS) choice of name for their quarterly newsletter.

The newsletter is currently called the Panopticon, an architectural infrastructure with a loaded concept.
[…]

The Panopticon newsletter was named as such in 2009 and was intended to allows inmates to be effectively and efficiently supervised.

The newsletter was made available for public access on the SPS website in July 2019.

“The features of the Panopticon are seen in many modern prisons today, and the name is consistent with SPS’ mission to ensure the secure custody of offenders, while at the same time rehabilitating them,” according to the SPS spokesperson.

The SPS stated that they will be conducting a review to rename the newsletter following the backlash.
[…]

Colleen Kelsey, Accidental Style Icon: Michel Foucault (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 September 2019

Colleen Kelsey, Accidental Style Icon: Michel Foucault, Garage magazine on the Vice site, Sep 15 2019

Editor: Update 11 February 2026. The link above is to the archived page on the Wayback Machine.

The French philosopher, who literally recommended care for the Self, is proof that so-called “public intellectuals” tend to have the best style.

[…]
I have regularly Googled, “Where did Foucault shop?” hoping for some unearthed cache of details. A bespoke suit maker? Specific sock purveyor? Anything custom? Foucault’s stylistic appeal is that of the simple, of the uniform, of the (I hate to actually say it) effortless. For myself, I crave the streamlined utility of a cinematic construction of a post-graduate, every element falling into place seamlessly—jacket, pant, boot. I will think deeply, once, about what sweater I want to wear. In my daily struggle under late capitalism, who has the time for anything else?

[…]
When Foucault was invited to debate Noam Chomsky on the idea of “innate” human nature in the Netherlands in 1971, he works the power of the matching set: a casual gray-brown bellbottomed suit. The jacket has an abbreviated collar and left side breast pocket with a whiff of a military jacket. Slices of the neck and wrists of his beige-ish turtleneck peep out. Foucault appears relaxed, yet in control. He pulls off the feat we are usually attempting, to “look like yourself.” The suit is soft, comfortable armor. Chomsky looks like the rumpled New England prof he is, with a knit tie and what my grandmother would call a “sport coat.” A comment on a YouTube video of the debate posits, “Foucault would have made a stellar Bond villain.”

Ethics, Subjectivity, and Sociomaterial Assemblages: Two Important Directions and Methodological Tensions (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 September 2019

Bazzul, J.
Ethics, Subjectivity, and Sociomaterial Assemblages: Two Important Directions and Methodological Tensions
(2018) Studies in Philosophy and Education, 37 (5), pp. 467-480.

DOI: 10.1007/s11217-018-9605-8

Abstract
Research that explores ethics can help educational communities engage twenty-first century crises and work toward ecologically and socially just forms of life. Integral to this research is an engagement with social theory, which helps educators imagine our shared worlds differently. In this paper I present two theoretical-methodological directions for educational research that centres ethics: Ethics and (human) subjectivity; and Ethics-in-assemblage. While both approaches might be seen as commensurable, they can also be seen as quite divergent. Using Michel Foucault’s later work on subjectivity and ethics, as well as recent work in Anthropology, I present a methodological direction for research into ethical subjectivity, how students come to see themselves as self-reflective ethical actors. Relevant here is the tension between ethics and politics, individual and collective modes of being, as both are crucial to both struggles for justice on a damaged planet. The second direction involves a sociomaterialist approach that employs Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘assemblage’ as well as Karen Barad’s notion ‘entangled responsibility’ to show that ethics can also be seen to co-emerge with/in phenomena that exceed human relations. In short, exploring ethics through educational research means simultaneously examining ethics as subjectivity and ethics as co-emergent larger assemblages/phenomena. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature.

Author Keywords
Assemblages; Ethics; Foucault; Justice; Materialisms; Politics; Subjectivity