Foucault News

Lisa Downing (ed.) After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century – forthcoming with Cambridge UP

Clare O'Farrell

22 April 2018

Lisa Downing (ed.) After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century – forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Thanks to James Tyner for the alert.

The work of Michel Foucault is much read, widely cited, and occasionally misunderstood. In response to this state of affairs, this collection aims to clarify, to contextualize, and to contribute to Foucauldian scholarship in a very specific way. Rather than offering either a conceptual introduction to Foucault’s work, or a series of interventions aimed specifically at experts, After Foucault explores his critical afterlives, situates his work in current debates, and explains his intellectual legacy. As well as offering up-to-date assessments of Foucault’s ongoing use in fields such as literary studies, sexuality studies, and history, chapters explore his relevance for urgent and emerging disciplines and debates, including ecology, animal studies, and the analysis of neoliberalism. Written in an accessible style, by leading experts, After Foucault…

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Governmentality of the Arctic as an international region (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

22 April 2018

Albert, M., Vasilache, A.
Governmentality of the Arctic as an international region
(2018) Cooperation and Conflict, 53 (1), pp. 3-22.

DOI: 10.1177/0010836717703674

Abstract
Linked to the image of a wild and still-to-be-explored territory, as well as to images of the region as one of new economic opportunities, discourses on the Arctic also tie in with issues of climate change, cooperation and conflict, Arctic governance, international law and the situation and rights of indigenous people, as well as Great Power politics. Taken together, these aspects characterize a region whose formation is different from regionalization processes in other parts of the world. As the regional peculiarity of the Arctic is reflected by a variety and plurality of representations, discourses, perceptions and imaginaries, it can usefully be analyzed as a region of unfolding governmentality. The present article argues that the prospects for the Arctic are strongly intertwined with perceptions and depictions of it as an international region subject to emerging practices of governmentality. By drawing on both Foucault’s texts and governmentality studies in international relations (IR), we discuss how the Arctic is affected by governmental security rationalities, by specific logics of political economy and order-building, as well as becoming a subject for biopolitical rationalizations and imaginaries. The discourses and practices of governmentality that permeate the Arctic contribute to its spatial, figurative and political reframing and are aimed at making it a governable region that can be addressed by, and accessible for, ordering rationalities and measures.

Author Keywords
Arctic; biopolitics; Foucault; governmentality; pole; regionalization

The Early Foucault update 17: Canguilhem, Beinecke library and back to Foucault

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 April 2018

Progressive Geographies

I wrote the last update on this book over two months ago, just as I was finishing up an extended research visit to Paris. Since then I’ve mainly been focusing on the Canguilhem manuscript, which is inching toward a near complete draft. I will share more about the Canguilhem book in due course. While that has taken up most of my time, I did also write a long review essay on Foucault’s Les aveux de la chair, the fourth volume of his History of Sexuality. It’s available open access on the Theory, Culture & Society blog, and should appear in the journal itself later this year.

In early April I was in New York for a workshop at Columbia University, and used the opportunity to take a side-trip to the Beinecke rare books and manuscripts library at Yale University. This library owns the Michel Foucault Library of…

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Alan Ruiz, Life After Sundown: Disco Architecture in the Global City (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 April 2018

Life After Sundown: Disco Architecture in the Global City | Features | Archinect, By Alan Ruiz, Feb 7, 2017

Samuel Delaney describes the disco as one site of “inter-class contact,”² rehearsing a now familiar understanding of the dance floor as teeming with the possibility for alternative forms of sociality. In this sense, the disco is the heterotopia par excellence, a space outside all other spaces. While Michel Foucault located the heterotopia in sites of control such as the colony, prison, or psychiatric hospital, the disco certainly might also qualify as a space for “individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm.”³ After all, it was people of color and queer bodies that not only popularized disco culture, but also found respite inside them from the racist, homophobic and hegemonic ideology of urban life. We might then consider the dance club as a space in which non-normative subjectivity was produced relationally through collective social formations. For many, the disco was a space of becoming. Yet, while the Dionysian narrative of the disco is well rehearsed, we might also consider the disco as a post-industrial site of unproductive labor. It was a site for a kind of spatial practice of self-making where a body could be mechanized by electronic BPMs, while still navigating the disciplining of a routinized, assembly line production, scored to the repetitive and mechanic pulse of Detroit techno.

The Object, the Image, and Equipo Hexágono: Rediscovering an Influential ’80s Collective (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 April 2018

The Object, the Image, and Equipo Hexágono: Rediscovering an Influential ’80s Collective, Cuban Art News, Published: May 30, 2017

Editor’s note: old news

Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective (Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos) The object and the image (this is not a chair either) opened this spring at the new and promising Concrete Space Projects in Doral. Aluna, known for producing excellent curatorial projects, has once again demonstrated that its heart—and mind—are in the right place.
[…]

The object and the image (a paraphrase of Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, “The Words and the Things”) brings together photographs that reflect on the ability to unfold an object within another object, and to alter its traditional use value. The exhibition also presents the object itself, the “original,” not as raw material but giving it the autonomy or weight of any installation work or sculpture.

This is perhaps the first exhibition in which such a revelation occurs. And as indicated in the second part of the exhibition title (“this is not a chair either”), in reference to the well-known Ceci n’est pas une pipe of René Magritte, the show points to the entrails of the representation. The thing in itself in the other thing in itself and so on. The mystery of the ordinary or The Anxious Object.

The Object, the Image, and Equipo Hexágono: Rediscovering an Influential ’80s Collective

Como Tapes (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 April 2018

Como Tapes is a non-profit public press based in Burlington, VT and Cherry Hill, NJ trying to put out strange music and other songs in a freeing way on cassettes.

From their Manifesto…

more thoughts re: Como Tapes
updated sept. 2015

Okay, so… last time we spoke (see below) I described the DIY tape label as a sort of ‘micropolitical technology ‘ (callinicos 1989) thru which we might resist the suffoc8ing practices of a capitalist hegemony by creating/distributing art ‘valid on its own terms’ (d+g 1987) that operates in the logics of local systems that don’t tessellate that nicely with larger market operations. After running this thing for another five months tbh i am not wholly convinced that this is the case.
[…]
So if we want to be anti-corporate actually we have stop acting like just a poorly-run corporation; we need 2 define a new approach. foucault had an interview w/ a french gay magazine in the early ‘80s where he was talking about why the establishment feels so threatened by homosexuality. “To imagine a sex act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people,” but instead, he suggests, it is “the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force” that relations of love between those who are not institutionally expected to love each other can open up. tho the case may seem less relevant in light of the more open/intensified concepts of queerness more widely unpacked today, the point is still compelling: when people relate with each other in ways that are not institutionally informed, it opens up new ways of understanding and practicing the interpersonal.

what mf gets at here is friendship — “freely chosen, defined, and negotiated” as jim igoe put it, as a powerful subversive force*. a friendship is p much the only space where you can write your own rules, or it’s the only inter-personal institution that you actually have a meaningful role in writing the rules. Friendship “introduce[s] love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or habit” (foucault ‘81) and in that way necessitates that its volunteers to act out what ashton crawley (2014) calls “ the inventive impulse ” through which they “invent from A to Z a relationship that is still formless” (foucault)

Foucault quote: Political rationality

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

17 April 2018

Reason of state is not an art of government according to divine, natural, or human laws. It doesn’t have to respect the general order of the world. It’s government in accordance with the state’s strength. It’s government whose aim is to increase this strength within an extensive and competitive framework…

Political rationality has grown and imposed itself throughout the history of Western societies. It first took its stand on the idea of pastoral power, then on that of reason of state. Its inevitable effects are both individualization and totalization. Liberation can come only from attacking not just one of these two effects but political rationality’s very roots.’

Michel Foucault. (2000) [1980]. ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Power The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Three. New York: New Press, pp. 317, 325.

Aidan Dunne, From the Burren to Belfast: Sean Lynch removes our heritage from its neat packaging (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

16 April 2018

What Is An Apparatus? (2016-2017) (Still) by Sean Lynch. Courtesy the artist, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, and Ronchini Gallery, London

Aidan Dunne, From the Burren to Belfast: Sean Lynch removes our heritage from its neat packaging, The Irish Times, Feb 28, 2017

Lynch leaves us pondering on a kind of cultural uncertainty principle, and that notion carries over into his video fables in What Is an Apparatus? The title is taken from an essay by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The apparatus or dispositif in question is the late Michel Foucault’s vaguely defined but often-used term. Agamben proposes that it is any of myriad constructions, including cultural and technological constructions, that have the capacity to influence, persuade, control or divert our judgment, behaviour and perceptions. The smartphone is an obvious and extreme example.

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Il faut renvoyer mai 68 au passé (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 April 2018

« Il faut renvoyer mai 68 au passé . Entretien dans Politis. | «Le site de Geoffroy de Lagasnerie
[…]
Vous vous intéressez beaucoup à Foucault, à Bourdieu. Comment voyez-vous l’effet de mai 68 sur eux et dans l’espace intellectuel aujourd’hui ?

Peut être l’un de éléments le plus important de mai 68 est d’avoir fait naître dans le champ universitaire ce que Bourdieu appelait une « humeur anti-institutionnelle ». Des auteurs comme Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze ou Derrida ont été transformés par 68. En se politisant , ils ont rompu avec les formes académiques pour produire d’autres manières d’écrire et de penser, d’autres manières de se rapporter au public. Et c’est cette tradition que j’essaye avec d’autres de faire vivre aujourd’hui. Cette humeur anti-institutionnelle est aussi ce qui a donné naissance à des lieux nouveaux comme l’université de Vincennes qui posait la question des disciplines, de l’accès à l’université, de la pédagogie, de la politique des savoirs.

Le problème est qu’aujourd’hui cette humeur à quasiment disparu de la gauche académique. L’université qui était démonétisée s’est relégitimée. Le mot académique était une injure en 68. C’est aujourd’hui un mot valorisé. Ce retour à l’ordre académique est problématique car il produit des censures idéologiques et éthiques, il menace les conditions subjectives de la création et il produit des habitus de la soumission et de la conformité. L’université – peut-être plus que les médias – exerce un quasi-monopole sur la formation des cerveaux et des corps, des habitus et des idéologies, et en refaire un lieu branché sur la contestation me semble un enjeu essentiel.

Archive: Georges Canguilhem and the Philosophical Problem of Error (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

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14 April 2018

Talcott, Samuel (2013). Georges Canguilhem and the Philosophical Problem of Error. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 52, pp 649-672
doi:10.1017/S0012217313001200

Abstract
There is still a question about what it means to say that Georges Canguilhem was a philosopher of error. This paper, unlike other work on the topic, investigates archival sources and early texts, up to and including the publication of the Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological in 1943, in order to reveal Canguilhem’s early thoughts on error and to formulate the basic philosophical problem therein, as he understood it. This work reveals a partial transformation of his thinking as he seeks to develop this question through the study of concrete human problems.

La question demeure de savoir en quel sens Georges Canguilhem peut être considéré comme un penseur de l’erreur. Cet article, par contraste avec d’autres textes sur le même sujet, s’intéresse aux documents d’archives et à des écrits de jeunesse, jusqu’à l’Essai sur quelques problèmes concernant le normal et le pathologique de 1943, en vue de mieux comprendre la première pensée de Canguilhem sur l’erreur et de formuler le problème philosophique fondamental auquel elle est associée. Ce travail montre qu’il y a eu une transformation partielle de sa pensée alors qu’il entreprend de répondre à cette question par le biais d’une étude des problèmes humains concrets.