Foucault News

Žitko, M.
Governmentality verus moral economy: notes on the debt crisis
(2018) Innovation, pp. 1-15. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/13511610.2018.1429897

Abstract
In this paper we revisit the concepts of governmentality and moral economy in the context of subordinate or dependent financialization. Michel Foucault and E.P. Thompson have introducted these concepts in order to capture the operational principles of liberal order in the moment of collision struggle with “anti-liberal” discursive forms such as moral economy of the poor or Keynesian economics. Furthermore, both of these concepts aim at capturing and analyzing the key sites of subjectivity formation. Contemporary debt relations as they appear at the level of household represent the point at which structural development of financialized capitalism intersects with the logic of household economy and calls for type of analysis that takes on board insights drawn from heterodox political economy, but move further and captures the norms, morals and practices that, sometimes laterally and indirectly, impact and modify the underlying economic trajectory. © 2018 The European Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences

Author Keywords
Financialization; governmentality; household debt; moral economy; post-socialism

Keshet, Y., Popper-Giveon, A.
The undisciplined patient in neoliberal society: conscious, informed and intuitive health behaviours
(2018) Health, Risk and Society, pp. 1-18. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/13698575.2018.1432757

Abstract
Applying Foucault’s theoretical concept of discipline, the present article uses the term undisciplined patients to describe those who resist medical authority, defy conventional medical interpretations concerning health risks and adopt non-normative health behaviours. There is considerable scholarly literature available on non-normative health behaviours, such as out-of-hospital birth, refusal to vaccinate or homoeopathy. While differentiating each such issue from the others has its merits, we argue that these health behaviours have much in common and ought to be perceived as a social phenomenon characteristic of Western neoliberal societies, in which health consumers are expected to assume responsibility for their own health behaviours and to avoid health risks. The objective of the research on which this article is based was to explore the common attitudes underlying the health behaviours of undisciplined patients, or, using Foucault’s terminology, determining which technologies of the self they implemented. We conducted in-depth interviews with 10 Jewish Israeli undisciplined patients during 2016. We identified four different practices that undisciplined patients implement: critical awareness of the medical hegemony; willingness to challenge by asking questions, collecting information and involvement in a continuous process of inquiry; using intuition in making health-related decisions and possessing a powerful internal locus of control; and willingness to control their fear and anxiety. Their health behaviours varied widely, including non-normative and normative practises alike, rendering it impossible to address them as one coherent discipline. Situating the social phenomenon of undisciplined patients is of importance to researchers who study risk, as well as to health policy experts. It will also benefit those who study specific non-normative health attitudes and behaviours. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Author Keywords
Foucault; health behaviour; neoliberalism; risk; undisciplined patients

Index Keywords
adult, anxiety, article, attitude to health, awareness, clinical article, continuous process, female, health care policy, human, interview, intuition, locus of control, male, nomenclature, scientist

Foth T, Lange J, Smith K. Nursing history as philosophy—towards a critical history of nursing. Nursing Philosophy. 2018

DOI: 10.1111/nup.12210

Abstract
Mainstream nursing history often positions itself in opposition to philosophy and many nursing historians are reticent of theorizing. In the quest to illuminate the lives of nurses and women current historical approaches are driven by reformist aspirations but are based on the conception that nursing or caring is basically good and the timelessness of universal values. This has the effect of essentialising political categories of identity such as class, race and gender. This kind of history is about affirmation rather than friction and about the conservation of memory and musealization. In contrast, we will focus on how we imagine nursing history could be used as a philosophical, critical perspective to challenge the ongoing transformations of our societies. Existing reality must be confronted with strangeness and the historically different can assume the function of this counterpart, meaning present and past must continuously be set in relation to each other. Thus, critical history is always the history of the present but not merely the pre‐history of the present – critique must rather present different realities and different certainties. In this paper, we use this approach to discuss the implementation of the nursing process (NP) in Germany. The nursing process appears to be a technology that helped to set up an infrastructure ‐ or assemblage ‐ to transform nursing interventions into a commodity exchangable between consumers and nurses in a free market. In our theoretical perspective, we argue that NP was a step in the realization of the German ordoliberal program, a specific variety of neoliberalism. In order to implement market‐orientation in the healthcare system it was necessary to transform hospitals into calculable spaces and to make all performances in the hospital calculable. This radically transformed not just the systems, but the ways in which nurses and patients conveived of themselves.

Brendon Murphy & Jay Sanderson (2018) Soft law, responsibility and the biopolitics of front-of-pack food labels, Griffith Law Review, 26:3, 355-377.

DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2017.1436371

ABSTRACT
Front-of-pack (FOP) food labels are increasingly used by government and industry to provide nutrition information to consumers for the promotion of healthier eating habits. However, quantitative and qualitative research into the effectiveness of FOP food labelling schemes is in its infancy and, at this stage at least, is largely unconvincing. Using Australia’s health star rating system as an exemplar, in this article we provide a novel perspective on FOP food labels and in so doing make two (related) arguments about FOP food labels and in many ways about food label schemes more broadly. The first argument is that FOP food labels enliven a combination of hard and soft law. The second argument, informed by Foucault’s notion of governmentality, is that FOP food labelling functions as a technology of the self. Drawing these two arguments together, we conclude that FOP food labels rely on a distorted rationality, because (i) the main actors in the process – food companies – are placed in a position of self-regulatory actors, fundamentally oriented to an economic rather than biopolitical agenda; and (ii) the biopolitics of population health through FOP food labels assumes particular kinds of rational consumers, when the reality of social life is far more complex.

KEYWORDS: Law, regulation, Foucault, FOP food labels, governmentality, biopolitics

Alister Wedderburn, Tragedy, genealogy and theories of International Relations
(2018) European Journal of International Relations, 24 (1), pp. 177-197.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116689131

Abstract
This article interrogates the role of tragedy within the work of International Relations theorists including Michael Dillon, Mervyn Frost, Richard Ned Lebow and Hans Morgenthau. It argues that a tragic sensibility is a constituent part of much thinking about politics and the international, and asks what the reasons for this preoccupation might be. Noting that a number of diverse theoretical appeals to tragedy in International Relations invoke analytically similar understandings of tragic-political subjectivity, the article problematises these by building on Michel Foucault’s intermittent concern with the genre in his Collège de France lecture series. It proposes that a genealogical consideration of tragedy enables an alertness to its political associations and implications that asks questions of the way in which it is commonly conceived within the discipline. The article concludes by suggesting that International Relations theorists seeking to invoke tragedy must think carefully about the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political claims associated with such a move.

Author Keywords
Foucault; genealogy; International Relations theory; Morgenthau; raison d’état; tragedy; tragic vision