Foucault News

Future work and summer plans – Shakespeare, Canguilhem, Lefebvre and back to Foucault

Clare O'Farrell

1 July 2018

Although the Shakespeare Territories book is coming out in a few months, I’ve been back working on Shakespeare. Initially this was for a summary article of the book’s argument for a short article for Territory, Politics, Governance, which should be published fairly soon. Then it has been for the third in what is becoming a sequence of pieces on Foucault and Shakespeare – the others were on ceremony (open access) and madness (forthcoming). This new piece is on contagion, for a conference organised by the Kingston Shakespeare seminar on 23 June. I’ve enjoyed returning to Shakespeare again for this new piece, which has a long discussion of Troilus and Cressida, and a shorter one of All’s Well That Ends Well – two plays I only mentioned briefly in Shakespearean Territories. I’ll also be a speaking about Shakespeare at an event organised by Warwick and RADA for sixth-form…

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SCA graduate students create immersive VR project (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

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1 July 2018

SCA graduate students create immersive VR project | Daily Trojan By KARLIE TERUYA, November 8, 2017

With the growth of virtual reality technology, many students are exploring innovative ways to incorporate the technology into artistic and media-related projects. Two students from the School of Cinematic Arts’ media arts and practice program have integrated a virtual reality world in an immersive work, titled “Heterotopias.”

Created by graduate students Noa Kaplan and Szilvia Ruszev, Heterotopias is a virtual reality essay that allows viewers to interact with everyday spaces differently. Set in common areas such as a garden or a cemetery, the project looks to change the way people view their own behavior when responding to their surroundings.

According to Kaplan and Ruszev, the project was inspired by a 1967 lecture given by French philosopher Michel Foucault. The lecture, titled “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” focused on places that people inhabit both physically and mentally. One example he mentioned was mirrors. Foucault questioned the rules that govern people’s behavior in different spaces, the students said, and explored the connection between location and people’s actions.

Prince’s Sign O’ The Times: celebrating 30 years of genius (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

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30 June 2018

Prince’s Sign O’ The Times: celebrating 30 years of genius | British GQ BY GEORGE CHESTERTON, 07 Aug 2017

Thirty years ago, Prince released his ninth album, a collection of extraordinary songs that became the greatest record of its generation. The pop prodigy’s postmodern magnum opus obsessed with sex, death and faith remains a milestone of Eighties culture – and the late singer’s ultimate legacy
[…]
Prince’s need to distance himself from the past is evident in his 1986 side-project Camille, in which he assumed an androgynous alter ego, recording his vocals at a slower speed then speeding up the tape to feminise his voice (an old trick of Clinton and Wonder). The electro-R&B songs were a calculated move away from the pop of The Revolution. The idea for Camille came from the 19th-century journals of the French hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, who was in vogue among American Francophiles (of which Prince was one) thanks to the writings of philosopher Michel Foucault. Like Dream Factory, this would become one of the building blocks of the near-perfect album to come. Prince felt able to shelve Camille as easily as he retired several albums’ worth of material with The Revolution. Producing so much music meant he could always move on to something new – there was no need to see everything through to the end. For him there was no end.

Teaching mathematics to lower attainers: dilemmas and discourses (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 June 2018

Alderton, J., Gifford, S.
Teaching mathematics to lower attainers: dilemmas and discourses
(2018) Research in Mathematics Education, pp. 1-17. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/14794802.2017.1422010

Abstract
This article draws on Foucault’s concepts of power and discourse to explore the issues of teaching mathematics to low attainers in primary schools in England. We analyse a data set of interviews, from a larger study, with the mathematics teachers of one child across three years, showing how accountability practices, discourses of ability and inclusion policies interrelate to regulate both teachers and student. We demonstrate the impact of neoliberal policy discourses on teachers’ practices and how they are caught up in conflicting ways by an accountability regime that subverts inclusive pedagogies, requiring teachers to monitor, label and assign within-child deficits. In spite of these regulatory technologies we identify contradictory fault lines between mathematics education policy discourses which we argue provide the potential for developing critical awareness of accepted practices and opportunities for change. © 2018 British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics

Author Keywords
ability; accountability; discourse; Foucault; inclusion; low attainers; Mathematics education

Schumpeter, Michel Foucault’s lessons for business (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

27 June 2018

SchumpeterMichel Foucault’s lessons for business, The Economist, Jun 21st 2018

Editor: Hidden behind Paywall

Forget McKinsey. A Gallic intellectual is the key to controlling how companies are perceived

NOT many businesspeople study post-war French philosophy, but they could certainly learn from it. Michel Foucault, who died in 1984, argued that how you structure information is a source of power. A few of America’s most celebrated bosses, including Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett, understand this implicitly, adroitly manipulating how outsiders see their firms. It is one of the most important but least understood skills in business.

Foucault was obsessed with taxonomies, or how humans split the world into arbitrary mental categories in order “to tame the wild profusion of existing things”. When we flip these around, “we apprehend in one great leap…the exotic charm of another system of thought”. Imagine, for example, a supermarket organised by products’ vintage. Lettuces, haddock, custard and the New York Times would be grouped in an aisle called “items produced yesterday”. Scotch, string, cans of dog food and the discounted Celine Dion DVDs would be in the “made in 2008” aisle.

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Towards a foucauldian analysis of animal trials (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 June 2018

Koyuncu, Emre, Animals as criminals: Towards a foucauldian analysis of animal trials
Parergon, Vol. 35, No. 1, June 2018: [79]-96

Abstract:
Scholarship on the early modern practice of animal trials in Europe has grown substantially in the last few decades. After a critical literature review pointing at the shortcomings of positivist approaches and of the interpretation of the phenomenon as a purely religious practice, I present Foucauldian genealogy as a more rigorous framework for understanding the purpose this peculiar practice may have served. The benefits of adopting a Foucauldian perspective are twofold. First, it allows for a subtle functionalism that does not treat this tradition as a homogeneous block. Second, it gives an opportunity to introduce the animal body into Foucault’s genealogy of power, which rather focuses on the human body and interhuman relationships.

Atmospheric governance: Gassing as law for the protection and killing of life (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

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25 June 2018

Nieuwenhuis, M.
Atmospheric governance: Gassing as law for the protection and killing of life
(2018) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 36 (1), pp. 78-95.

DOI: 10.1177/0263775817729378

Abstract
Breathing is the activity which all forms of animated life share in common. The breath has been symbolised across cultures as the meaning of life itself. If breathing is imagined as life, gassing is the very opposite. Gassing is the intended (or unintended) means to prevent or obstruct breathing. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Nazi concentration camps are remembered as expressions of technological as much as metaphysical terror. The 2013 and 2017 Syrian chemical attacks show how gassing remains a ‘red line.’ This paper deals with the historical significance and complexity of air and breathing in law. Human dependency on the air has in early treaties been protected at times of war between ‘civilised’ nations but was exploited as an instrument against the breather during colonialism. Today, non-lethal-weapons, a more-than-technical term, are used extensively to discipline the biological body into political order. Engaging with the work of Foucault, Sloterdijk and others, I seek to make sense of the legal status of this contradictory political technology, which does not directly attack the body but rather conditions the atmospheric requirements for its animation. I argue for a move towards understanding law atmospherically as an extension of the body. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.

Author Keywords
Air; atmosphere; breath; gas; law; life

Index Keywords
air, colonialism, environmental legislation, environmental politics, environmental protection, governance approach, quality of life

CFP: Third Meeting of the Critical Genealogies Workshop (2018-19)

Clare O'Farrell

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24 June 2018

Call for Papers
Third Meeting of the Critical Genealogies Workshop

website
Philevents
PDF of call for papers

Venue: University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon, United States, United States

Date: May 9–11, 2019

The Critical Genealogies Workshop provides a space of collaboration and experimentation for scholars who deploy genealogy in order to investigate problematizations of the contemporary. The purpose of the event is to present in-progress genealogical work so as to thematize and reflect on larger questions of research design, strategy, and structure and practical questions about conducting genealogical research.

We seek submissions from scholars from any disciplinary or field background who deploy genealogical methods and practices in their work: previous events have included scholars from Philosophy, Political Science, History, Media Studies, and other backgrounds. Approaching genealogy largely through the lens of Foucault and Nietzsche, we also welcome other genealogical approaches of diverse inspiration. Above all, we endeavor to take seriously Foucault’s challenges to inherited practices of philosophical critique by taking up genealogy to interrogate the history of the present.

The format of the workshop involves pre-circulation of in-progress work. This will be a pre-read event; participants are expected to share their papers by March 2019 and are expected to read papers from other participants prior to arrival. Concurrent sessions will feature paper presentations consisting of two sets of brief commentaries (5 minutes each) followed by group discussion (35 minutes). The event will also feature a plenary roundtable on method and research design as well as a methods workshop session.

Please send an abstract of no more than 750 words in “.pdf” format to the event co-directors Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (University of Memphis), Colin Koopman (University of Oregon), and Bonnie Sheehey (University of Oregon) at criticalgenealogies@gmail.com by Nov. 2, 2018. Indicate “Critical Genealogies Workshop submission” in the subject line. Decisions will be conveyed by Dec. 15, 2018.

Logistical information about accommodations & transportation will be provided with program decisions. There will be no registration fees associated with this event.

For further information see our website (criticalgenealogies.weebly.com) or contact CGW co-founders Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (vrlnbsch@memphis.edu) and Colin Koopman (koopman@uoregon.edu).

Zheng Yiran, Foucault fever in contemporary China (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

22 June 2018

Opinion: Foucault fever in contemporary China – CGTN

By Zhao Hong. CGTN, 2017-02-24
Guest commentary by Zheng Yiran

On September 11, 2016, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Art Museum, a thousand people squeezed into an auditorium that can accommodate only four hundred audience. It was the Beijing Premiere of Wang Min’an’s documentary, “Michel Foucault”. Hundreds of people were standing on the aisle to watch this 83-minute film, considered to be the epitome of the “Foucault Fever” in contemporary China.
[…]
In Douban, a very popular Chinese SNS website allowing people to share comments related to books, films and other cultural products and activities, the reading group of Foucault has gathered 12,000 people. The number of Foucault fans beats that of Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, G. W. F. Hegel. Interestingly, Foucault’s group is also bigger than other groups tagged “French culture,” “French literature” and “Sophie Marceau,” who is considered as the most popular French movie star in China.

It is worth thinking about the wide acceptance and spread of Foucault in China, who inspired Chinese intellectuals and changed their ways of thinking. When China has experienced dramatic transformations in the recent decades, people can find explanations from Foucault.