Foucault News

Koopman, C. Information before information theory: The politics of data beyond the perspective of communication
(2019) New Media and Society, . Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1177/1461444818820300

Abstract
Scholarship on the politics of new media widely assumes that communication functions as a sufficient conceptual paradigm for critically assessing new media politics. This article argues that communication-centric analyses fail to engage the politics of information itself, limiting information only to its consequences for communication, and neglecting information as it reaches into our selves, lives, and actions beyond the confines of communication. Furthering recent new media historiography on the “information theory” of Shannon and Wiener, the article reveals both the primacy of communication in midcentury information theory, and also a striking resonance between these postwar communication theories and Habermas’s more recent communicative theory of democracy. To achieve a critical perspective beyond communication, the article proposes a media genealogy of the politics of subjects as a methodology for developing an analysis of how information formats us as subjects of data. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
Communication; data; formats; Foucault; Habermas; infopower; information; Shannon; Wiener

Pariseau-Legault, P., Holmes, D., Murray, S.J. Understanding human enhancement technologies through critical phenomenology (2019) Nursing Philosophy, 20 (1), art. no. e12229

DOI: 10.1111/nup.12229

Abstract
Human enhancement technologies raise serious ethical questions about health practices no longer content simply to treat disease, but which now also propose to “optimize” human beings’ physical, cognitive and psychological abilities. These technologies call for a reassessment of our relationship to health, the human body and the body’s organic, identity and social functions. In nursing, such considerations are in their infancy. In this paper, we argue for the relevance of critical phenomenology as a way to better understand the ethical issues related to human enhancement technologies (HET). In so doing, we seek to problematize HET and assess their influence on the future development of nursing science and practice. It is difficult to anticipate the concrete effects of HET, we suggest, because these practices reconfigure the meaning of normativity and disorient our conventional ethical landscape. In this context, we argue that the later work of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault invites a critical perspective into how techno-scientific discourses modify our relationship to care, to health and to our own social and corporeal identities. Despite the traditional philosophical opposition between phenomenology and critical theory, we maintain that a hybrid critical phenomenological approach opens new ways to assess the integration of technology and practice. Our analysis understands HET as a process of “hybridization” between technological objects and human subjects. Critical phenomenology thus effectively questions anthropocentric definitions of technology, challenges the dichotomy between curative treatment and enhancement and, finally, prompts valuable reflection on the implications of HET for nursing theory and practice. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Author Keywords
Foucault; Heidegger; phenomenology; technology; the self

Michel Agier, Camps, Encampments, and Occupations: From the Heterotopia to the Urban Subject (2019) Ethnos, 84 (1), pp. 14-26.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1549578

Abstract
This article aims to understand the main principles that design a worldwide landscape of precarious spaces. I argue that the increasing and more constraining policies of exclusion provoke the repeated creation of limits and ‘outsides’ and that this represents a major aspect of contemporary urban and world governance. Contemporary ‘out-places’ [‘hors-lieux’] or concrete ‘heterotopias’ (Foucault) are linked to one another by policies of exclusion, organisation and control, subjective experiences, and routes. The formation and proliferation of heterotopias as an ensemble of margins and precarious spaces, turn visible as a global political fact the question of (in)equality. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Camps; encampments; favelas; places; urban margins

Gunawan, M. Navigating human and non-human animal relations: Okja, foucault and animal welfare laws (2018) Alternative Law Journal, 43 (4), pp. 263-268.

DOI: 10.1177/1037969X18802459

Abstract
This article draws upon a Foucauldian analysis of power to conceptualise the human and non-human animal relations throughout the Netflix film Okja. The article examines how ‘super-pig’ Okja’s experiences (and subjectivities) are deeply shaped by the ‘apparatuses’ within which Okja is situated. As the power relationships and practices of ‘domination’ portrayed in Okja highlight, the legal categorisation of animals and their foundations within mainstream discourses reflect, and perpetuate, society’s understanding of the moral significance of animals. Okja’s transformation throughout the film, as well as her very existence as a hybrid ‘super-pig’, confuses the legal categorisation of non-human animals and highlights a double standard in the law. © The Author(s) 2018.

Author Keywords
Animal law; Animal rights; Art; Arts and entertainment; Arts and law; Critical legal theory

Bennett, C. Drugs, moral panics and the dispositive (2018) Journal of Sociology, 54 (4), pp. 538-556.

DOI: 10.1177/1440783317727877

Abstract
The concept of ‘moral panics’ continues to be used as a framework for analysing the causes, structures and functions of social and political crises. Nonetheless, as an analytical tool, such a framework is limited in its capacity to explain the ongoing and interconnected relationships between drugs and society. Drawing first on an interdiscursive and intertextual framework, the field of analysis is broadened to consider how recent drug panics in Australia depend upon, signify and condense wider social and historical anxieties around drugs and other social problems. However, such an approach also has its limitations given that the play of intertextuality is conditioned by relations of power at the level of what Foucault calls a ‘dispositive’, a historically contingent configuration that strategically orientates our responses to the problem. Three dispositional drug-related prototypes are considered and how they work together to shape, reinforce and condition the drug problem and our responses to it. © The Author(s) 2017.

Author Keywords
convergence; dispositive; drugs; Foucault; interdiscursivity; intertextuality; moral panic