Foucault News

Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

11 June 2018

Review by Nicholas Till, Times Higher Education.

Olivia Bloechl, Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France
University of Chicago Press,
272pp, £41.50ISBN 9780226522753Published 10 April 2018

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Bloechl turns to writers such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Agamben, who have all theorised the ways in which power operates not only through the exercise of violence – actual or threatened – and reward, but also in the micro-regimes of a culture that becomes naturalised and internalised in the subject.

Obligatory displays of ritualised grief at the passing of public figures are re-enacted in the scenes of choral lament in tragédie lyrique. The passivity of the subject in the face of power is replicated in the lack of agency of the chorus.

Foucault’s self-disciplinary regime of the “confessing society” is conveyed through the ubiquity of self-punishing confessions in French opera, in which there is a transition from an externally imposed sense of moral obligation in the 17th century to an internalised mode that is represented by the advent of the “tormenting orchestra” in 18th-century operas. Bloechl also demonstrates that in the near century of tragédie lyrique’s ascendancy, power in the ancien régime shifted from the personal absolutism of Louis XIV to the more remote rulership of his great-grandson Louis XV. This is conveyed in dramatic narratives in which it is not the god or ruler who exercises authority or justice, but a mediating representative. And Pluto’s underworld? It resembles “nothing so much as an absolutist monarchical state”, founded on the principle of the precarity of the subject under the permanent threat of death.

Nedim Karakayali, Burc Kostem, and Idil Galip, Recommendation Systems as Technologies of the Self: Algorithmic Control and the Formation of Music Taste (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

10 June 2018

Nedim Karakayali, Burc Kostem, and Idil Galip, Recommendation Systems as Technologies of the Self: Algorithmic Control and the Formation of Music Taste
(2018) Theory, Culture and Society, 35 (2), pp. 3-24.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276417722391

Abstract
The article brings to light the use of recommender systems as technologies of the self, complementing the observations in current literature regarding their employment as technologies of ‘soft’ power. User practices on the music recommendation website last.fm reveal that many users do not only utilize the website to receive guidance about music products but also to examine and transform an aspect of their self, i.e. their ‘music taste’. The capacity of assisting users in self-cultivation practices, however, is not unique to last.fm but stems from certain properties shared by all recommendation systems. Furthermore, unlike other oft-studied digital/web technologies of the self which facilitate ‘self-publishing’ vis-à-vis virtual companions in social media, recommender algorithms themselves can act as ‘intimate experts’, accompanying users in their self-care practices. Thus, recommendation systems can facilitate both algorithmic control and creative self-transformation, which calls for a theorization of this new cultural medium as a space of tension.

Author Keywords
algorithms; care of the self; Foucault; last.fm; online music recommendation; recommendation systems; technologies of the self

“This Tale Is About You!”: On Bini Adamczak’s “Communism for Kids” – Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 June 2018

“This Tale Is About You!”: On Bini Adamczak’s “Communism for Kids” – Los Angeles Review of Books, By Ross Wolfe JUNE 27, 2017

BINI ADAMCZAK’S Communism for Kids isn’t just for kids. The book is meant for readers of all ages, but its style is deliberately naïve. Adamczak addresses everyone as children in order to awaken their childlike sense of imagination and ability to dream. She reminds them that the world has not always been this way, and need not stay as it is. Adopting the language of make-believe, Adamczak introduces the problem posed by capitalism so those still young at heart might arrive at a solution. “[G]enuine fairy tales,” the Marxist critic Siegfried Kracauer maintained during the Weimar years, “are not stories about miracles but rather announcements of the miraculous advent of justice.”
[…]

The crucial reference for Adamczak is Deleuze’s colleague, Michel Foucault. She quotes him as saying that “the role of intellectuals today must be to restore the same level of desirability for the image of revolution that existed in the 19th century.” Foucault wavered on this, though, unsure if revolution was really so desirable after all (citing Horkheimer’s doubts). He told Bernard-Henri Lévy that “something quite different is at stake in Stalinism [than the viability of revolution]. You know very well […] that the very desirability of the revolution is the problem today.” Asked whether revolution was something he desired, Foucault refused to commit himself.

Philosophy As Interdisciplinary Intensity – An Interview With Giorgio Agamben (2017

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

8 June 2018

Philosophy As Interdisciplinary Intensity – An Interview With Giorgio Agamben (Antonio Gnolio/Ido Govrin) – RELIGIOUS THEORY Feb 5 2017

The following is an interview with the famed Continental philosopher Giorgio Agamben conducted by journalist Antonio Gnolio. Originally published in La Repubblica on May 15, 2016. the interview is translated from the Italian by Ido Govrin, whose bio is given at the end. It is translated with permission of La Repubblica.

[…]

AG: In recent years you have intensified your call on “biopolitics.” Is this a concept we owe in large part to Michel Foucault?

GA: Certainly. But just as important to me was the problem of method in Foucault, namely the archeology. I’m convinced that these days the only way to access the present is through investigation of the past, the archeology. It should be made clear, as Foucault does, that archeological researches are not just the shadow that the interrogation of the present projects on the past. In my case, this shadow is often longer than that sought after by Foucault and probes fields such as theology and law, which Foucault hardly looked at. It certainly may turn out that the results of my research are disputed, but I hope at least that the purely archeological researches I developed in State of Exception,[6] The Kingdom and the Glory,[7] or in the book on oath,[8] help us understand the time in which we live.

Une archéologie de l’épistémè de l’union (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

7 June 2018

Oleg Bernaz, Une archéologie de l’épistémè de l’union, in Oleg Bernaz et Marc Maesschalck (éds), Approches philosophiques du structuralisme linguistique russe, Peter Lang, Bruxelles, 2018.

Cette entreprise foucaldienne se déploie en trois étapes. Il s’agit premièrement d’analyser le statut du savoir de ce que Foucault appelle « l’épistémè moderne ». Nous montrons, à ce stade de notre enquête archéologique, que l’articulation des savoirs de l’économie, de la linguistique et de la biologie modernes se fait d’une manière singulière. Ce parcours nous permet de montrer deuxièmement en quoi consiste l’originalité de l’articulation que l’on peut établir entre l’économie, la biologie et la linguistique dans le cadre de ce que nous proposons de nommer « épistémè de l’union » dans le contexte de l’URSS des années 1920-1930. La troisième étape de notre analyse est consacrée à une réflexion sur le rapport non plus entre la biologie, l’économie et la linguistique, mais entre les deux épistémès identifiées précédemment. L’idée d’une histoire sérielle, centrale pour comprendre ce que Foucault entend par « savoir », nous sert de fil conducteur pour thématiser ce nouveau rapport entre les épistémès moderne et de l’union.

Kehinde Wiley review – black souls sail between empowerment and exploitation (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 June 2018

Kehinde Wiley review – black souls sail between empowerment and exploitation | Art and design | The Guardian

by Skye Sherwin, Sat 25 Nov 2017
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Editor’s note: old news

Kehinde Wiley: In Search of the Miraculous is at Stephen Friedman gallery, London, until 27 January.

The US artist picked as Obama’s official portraitist plots a romantic, maritime course for his show “In Search of the Miraculous”

Kehinde Wiley is the superstar American painter famed for placing anonymous, beautiful black men in kitsch pastiches of Old Master portraits of the ruling class. He is also that rare thing, an artist who has broken through to a mass audience. In addition to his street-cast “boys”, as he has called his models, he’s painted a black pantheon, from hip-hop stars to Michael Jackson. Fox’s most-watched soap, Empire, uses his paintings as a sure-fire sign of black empowerment. Topping it all, it was recently announced that he is to be the official portraitist of Barack Obama.

[..]

Ship of fools … the film installation Narrenschiff. Photograph: Mark Blower/courtesy Kehinde Wiley and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

He’s also made his first film, which speaks, amid paradisal swimming scenes, of how the self (so central to the romantics) has been violently denied to black people. In voiceover, we get quotes from philosopher Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, and African-Caribbean philosopher, revolutionary and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, about “otherness”, engendered by colonisation or imposed on the mad, as well as the medieval “ship of fools” and its pilgrimage for selfhood. While this brings an intellectual framework behind the seascapes somewhat neatly into focus, the thinkers’ weighty ideas about psychic violence and cultural trauma are never convincingly borne out in the works themselves.

Occupation as refrain: territory and beyond in Occupy London (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 June 2018

Matthews, J.
Occupation as refrain: territory and beyond in Occupy London
(2018) Social Movement Studies, 17 (2), pp. 127-143.

DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2018.1427056

Abstract
Emerging with the wider ‘movements of the squares’ of 2011, Occupy London was defined by occupation, and by participants’ negotiation of what occupation meant. Its forms and meanings changed as London’s Occupiers moved between occupied sites, through uprootings by eviction, and into post-eviction attempts to extend Occupy’s territorial politics without the camps. This paper builds on three years of ethnography to consider occupation as an unfolding process, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘refrain’. This describes territory in three ‘moments’: the marking of a fragile centre; the stabilization of a bounded ‘home’; and the breaching of boundaries, extending in progressive directions. This rubric is used to analyze London’s occupations, and their defining tension, between an expansive desire to ‘Occupy Everywhere’–connecting to the wider ‘99 percent’–and the tendency to become embedded in the protest camp ‘home’. The features of ‘home’ are analyzed using Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’, highlighting an alterity with ambivalent consequences for Occupy’s project. The paper argues that despite a desire to ‘deterritorialize’ occupation, Occupy London stalled in the moment of ‘home’, a consequence of the camp’s status as the ‘common ground’ of an often disparate movement, and the reduction of productive capacities characterizing Occupy’s terminal downswing. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
heterotopia; occupation; Occupy movement; protest camp; refrain; social movement territory

Queer contestation of neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies during #occupygezi (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 June 2018

Erol, A.E.
Queer contestation of neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies during #occupygezi
(2018) Sexualities, 21 (3), pp. 428-445.

DOI: 10.1177/1363460717699768

Abstract
During the summer of 2013, Turkey witnessed the largest protest movement in the history of the republic. The protests began with environmentalist concerns to save a public park in central Istanbul, Gezi Park, from becoming a shopping mall. However, in a matter of days, the protests turned into a reaction against what many protestors perceived to be the authoritarian rule of the prime minister at the time. While the mainstream protest discourses focused on reacting against such perceptions, which produced sexist and heterosexist discourses, queer discourses were centered on celebrating coexistence and diversity through resistance. Drawing on literatures of queer theory that focus on queer space and moral geography, this article builds on Foucault’s notion of heterotopic space. Using queer linguistics to investigate blog posts that were written at the time of the protest by queer individuals who were taking part in protest, this article investigates the ways in which queer discourses construct the moral geography of the Gezi Park and at the same time challenge neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies.

Author Keywords
Gezi Park; heteronormative space; heterotopia; neoliberal space; queer space

Society, like the market, needs to be constructed: Foucault’s critical project at the dawn of neoliberalism (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

3 June 2018

Palacios, C.
Society, like the market, needs to be constructed: Foucault’s critical project at the dawn of neoliberalism (2018) History of the Human Sciences, 31(1), pp. 74-96.

DOI: 10.1177/0952695117746045

Abstract
It has been commonplace to equate Foucault’s 1979 series of lectures at the Collège de France with the claim that for neoliberalism, unlike for classical liberalism, the market needs to be artificially constructed. The article expands this claim to its full expression, taking it beyond what otherwise would be a simple divulgation of a basic neoliberal tenet. It zeroes in on Foucault’s own insight: that neoliberal constructivism is not directed at the market as such, but, in principle, at society, arguing that the value of this insight goes beyond the critique of a neoliberal present. The neoliberal rationale rather helps him to reveal a unique historical architecture, a latent approach to the social dissimilar to the one that has long predominated in the human sciences. The inversion of homo œconomicus in neoliberal theory amounted to the unearthing of a ‘social subject of interest’ within civil society. Such a subject, barely recognized by neoliberals who simply instrumentalize it for the sake of the market, demonstrates that the social is not necessarily the natural product of ethical subjects, that society may also need to be constructed.

Author Keywords
Civil society, constructivism, economization, Michel Foucault, neoliberalism

Freedom can also be productive: The historical inversions of “the conduct of conduct” (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 June 2018

Palacios, C.
Freedom can also be productive: The historical inversions of “the conduct of conduct” (2018) Journal of Political Power, pp. 1-21. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2018.1478641

Abstract
The Foucauldian conception of power as ‘productive’ has left us so far with a residual conception of freedom. The article examines a number of historical cases in which ‘relationships of freedom’ have potentially come into existence within Western culture, from ‘revolution’ and ‘political truth-telling’ to ‘cynicism’ and ‘civility’. But the argument is not just about demonstrating that there have in fact been many historical inversions of ‘the conduct of conduct’. It is about theorizing how freedom can be ‘productive’ or give rise to cultural norms if any such inversion can only come into being as an event in itself.

Author Keywords
Foucault; Judith Butler; Arendt; parrhesia; performativity