Diff’rent Level : Governmentality Blues – Written by Alexander Martin. From circa 1992. Posted Nov 10 2016
Diff’rent Level : Governmentality Blues – Written by Alexander Martin. From circa 1992. Posted Nov 10 2016
Leah Ashe (2017). “Knowing food, knowing men: Some thoughts on food, knowledge, and violence.” Presentation at L’Institut Européen D’Histoire et des Cultures de L’Alimentation (IEHCA) Université d’Été, Tours, France, 28 August – 2 September 2017.
Video presentation on YouTube
Text available at academia.edu
[Update 31 July 2026. Link above is to the archived paper on the Wayback Machine]
In a return to the world of food studies, I draw from my larger line of research, Knowing Violence, a project whose title reveals its dual focal interests in (the act of) knowing violence and in (the thing-that-is) the knowing-violence, the violence of knowing. In that project, I examine the modern construction and dominance of scientific/scientistic medical knowledge and authority and engage wide critiques of technoscientific modernity. In this paper, I consider how the content and critique carried in Knowing Violence might communicate with food studies in any aspect of its variety.
With my anchor still firmly planted in the selfishly compelling knowing/violence juncture, I’ve called this small paper Knowing Food, Knowing Men, and I propose several ways that food and eating, in their simultaneous carnality and transcendence, stand problematically astride the line that technic contemporaneity – and technic man – draws between the scientific and the sacred.
I hope to broach, by way of so many empirical stories and conjecturing connections, three questions:
1. How might we characterize the relationships between food and knowledge?
2. How might we characterize the relationships between food and violence?
3. How might we situate food as a connective pathway between knowledge and violence?
I draw from a very particular experience: my own medical misadventure in the UK, which pinnacled in my misdiagnosis as anorexic and consequent sequester and maltreatment. Beyond its radical consequences of personal interest, the machinations of the anorexic prison dispositor illuminate and articulate the unintelligible and inarticulate machinations of the modern food-world writ larger. Here I examine three of these bigger characteristics by way of three small stories:
1. “Science says.”
2. “That’s not normal.”
3. “It violates order and discipline.”
More than anything else, I hope that this small exploration of the modern food-world’s discursive and epistemic infrastructures might invite your reflections on what other forms these foundational understructures take; on how they affect real people’s real lives; and whether or not and to what extent they are good ones.
See also
Leah Ashe (2017). “Knowing violence: Psychiatric hegemony and the corruption of care.” Presentation at the European Association of Social Anthropology – Medical Anthropology Network Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, 5-7 July 2017.
Video presentation
In this paper, I propose the concept of unpersoning: a violence so total that it transmutes its object permanently from person into thing: a being that, though living, is and has no possibility to be an I or a Thou. The species of unpersoning produced by and within the context of medicine is especially grotesque, the sort of phenomena that Illich captured as exemplars of corruptio optimi pessima: the moral character of medicine is perverted in performing the psychiatric intervention, for example. I argue here that psychiatry is foundationally violational, planting its practices in stances that flagrantly privilege the psychiatrist above the patient in matters of epistemic, social, juridical, carceral, and corporal power. In their ensemble, these privileges can metastasize into the total violence that I attempt to capture as unpersoning.
The paper differs from others in the panel in two important ways. First, it speaks to the intersection between these two domains, care and violence, in a way that challenges our very conceptualizations of their constitutions (and, of course, of the relationships between them). Second, (and in addition to drawing on ideas from anthropological, decolonial, feminist, and critical thinkers), I inform the exploration with a truly emic narrative. In 2014, I was diagnosed as anorexic in a failing British hospital and forcibly interned in a psychiatric hospital for anorexics. Having lived for 10 months trapped within this Rosenhan-ish, Kafkaesque hell where regularized acts of humiliation, corporal injury, and (even) torture completely circumscribed the set of circumstances in which consciousness could occur, that I was wrongly diagnosed is here irrelevant; that I lived the brutal consequences of that diagnosis is germane. This lived experience unveiled to me a privileged view upon psychiatry’s discourse – its words and its practices – and I deliver this paper not only to make its theoretical proposition but also to report its autobiographical truth. The paper draws upon a finite, irreproducible, and individuated experience in a way that critically engages ethnography’s project of, as Geertz characterized it, at least giving insight into larger truths; not saying everything, to be sure, but saying something. I claim that it is something important.
Meet Brujas, NYC’s Newest Streetwear Skateboarding Collective With a Feminist Mission, 9/25/2017 by Brett Berk, Billboard
Brujas is a diverse and radical feminist youth skateboarding collective from New York’s Bronx and Lower East Side. It was founded three years ago by a group of young women to reclaim space from the white/male dominated skater culture that slighted them. (The name means Witches, in Spanish.) But at heart, the Brujas mission has always been empowerment, education, and community outreach.
“We’re trying to integrate a lot of different elements in the Brujas project,” says Ariana Gil, a musician and recent graduate of Oberlin College and one of the group’s founders. “We’re intellectuals, we love critical theory. We’re fashion-heads, we love streetwear. And then, you know, we’re also trying to build a participatory community model.”
[…]
“If you look at the logo on the shirts, there is a school burning on the top of it,” says Robin Giordani, a recent Cooper Union graduate and the group’s lead designer. “And underneath, there’s these two hands and the ‘Each One Teach One’ on the bottom. It’s about this exchange of knowledge through this very classic gesture, like a pound or a dap that you might give somebody in the street or passing by. That we can do the same thing with education and be able to take what we have and our own knowledge, and share it and have that come back two-fold.”
If it sounds heady, that’s because it very intentionally is. “We’re very influenced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who, in his text Discipline and Punish, draws connections between prison, the school, and the hospital,” says Gil. “So, just moving down the Foucauldian line is how we’ve been talking about it.”
Willmott, K. (2017). Taxpayer governmentality: governing government in Metro Vancouver’s transit tax debate. Economy and Society, Pages 255-274 | Published online: 25 Aug 2017
DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2017.1359441
Abstract
In a 2015 plebiscite, voters in Metro Vancouver, British Columbia rejected a proposed sales tax dedicated to funding a regional transportation plan. Opposition was spearheaded by a taxpayer group that focused on the perceived incompetence and wastefulness of the region’s transportation authority. Exercising a liberal imperative of ‘permanent critique of government’, the taxpayer group assembled evidence addressed to ‘taxpayers’. Developing a theoretical account of ‘taxpayer governmentality’, the paper analyses how people are addressed and fashioned as taxpayer subjects, empowered and responsibilized to govern government, and their own political conduct, as sceptical, calculating, non-political, economic actors. The paper concludes by suggesting that this taxpayer subject may be productive for understanding the practice of liberal critique and limitations of the state.
Keywords: governmentality, taxpayer groups, liberalism, subjectivity
Gordon Hull, Foucault and Marx: on Subjectification and Exhaustion, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 25 September 2017
I have been circling around the relation between Marx and Foucault for a while, and thinking in particular about the ways that they can be viewed as productively engaged, particularly at the intersection of primitive accumulation and subjectification (e.g., here, here and here) This of course flies in the face of Foucault’s acerbic dismissals of Marxism, as when in the early parts of Society must be Defended, he dismisses it as “totalitarian,” or in the Trombadori interviews more generally. But there is a renaissance of interest in the topic, and there are a number of Foucault texts only now being studied in the English-speaking world that can be brought to bear on it. Most prominent perhaps is the recently translated “Mesh of Power” lecture, where Foucault specifically credits chapters 13-15 of Capital for moving toward a non-juridical understanding of power. As Foucault says, what Marx shows there is that “one power does not exist, but many powers” and that power is productive, not repressive:
Lev Marder, Rethinking homo economicus in the political sphere. Constellations, 31 August 2017
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12295
Abstract:
Homo-economicus, this rational cost-benefit calculating interest-pursuing subject, in political analysis usually stands for the ordinary citizen little interested in unprofitable political knowledge. This subject appears as an obstacle to democratic governance, but it does not have to appear as such. On the basis of Michel Foucault’s analysis of homo-economicus in The Birth of Biopolitics, I argue that others who rely on his account and political scientists too quickly dismiss the possibility that homo-economicus may support the democratic system. As long as this subject’s image remains antithetical to democratic governance, its potential remains unrealized and its treatment focuses only on its destructive behavior.
Extract from introduction
Various versions of the homo economicus story highlight different aspects. At a very general level of understanding, there seems to be agreement that homo economicus is the subject of economic rationality, and it is an analytic tool that does something. It may be a fiction, but it is a useful one that affects the way scholars and policy makers treat societal concerns. Beyond that, scholars amplify some of the characteristics of homo economicus over others as it suits their purposes. Economists including Vilfredo Pareto focus on the economic, profit-maximizing principles that homo economicus represents (1909/1927); rational choice scholars are quite comfortable with the economists’ accounts and record homo economicus’s appearance in politics and how it operates in electoral politics in particular (Carpini & Keeter, 1997; Congleton, 2001; Downs, 1957); Michel Foucault traces the evolution of homo economicus to understand shifts in governmentality (2010); and some political theorists—picking up on Foucault’s insights—warn about the devastating activity of homo economicus in politics.
The latter stories of homo economicus based on Foucault’s account in the Birth of Biopolitics (2010) describe the harm homo economicus inflicts on homo politicus (Brown, 2011, 2015), the suffocating neoliberal policies that reduce political decisions to market rationality (Brown, 2015; Callison, 2014; Peters, 1995), the constriction of possibilities of collectively changing existing conditions (Read, 2009), and the responsibilization that is inseparable from this subject’s invasion of the political sphere (Hamann, 2009). Not all these works highlight homo economicus’s destructive nature, as the notable exceptions of the works of John Clarke (2009) and Jason Weidner (2009) show. Yet none of the narratives exalt homo economicus when it comes to its activity in the political sphere and, more specifically, democratic rule, by which I mean the representative democracy model that conflates the rule of the people with electoral politics.1
To re-evaluate what homo economicus does in the political sphere I offer an account that emphasizes this subject’s ignorance, based on Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics. Considering that Foucault associates homo economicus with ignorance only in the 18th century and does not follow this thread into the 20th century, I take his theorization as the starting point and enhance it. My account of homo economicus, based on Foucault’s text, is no more complete than the others. However, it differs from the others in that (a) it puts in question the assertion of homo economicus’s inherently destructive nature when it comes to democratic politics and (b) taking this a step further, it allows us to link homo economicus positively with democratic governance.
Jane Perryman, Meg Maguire, Annette Braun, Stephen Ball, (2017). Surveillance, Governmentality and moving the goalposts: The influence of Ofsted on the work of schools in a post-panoptic era. British Journal of Educational Studies, September 2017, 1-19.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2017.1372560
ABSTRACT
This paper asks the question: to what extent do inspection regimes, particularly the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), influence the work of a school, and how might that influence be conceptualised? It draws on an ESRC-funded study of ‘policy enactments in secondary schools’, which was based on case-study work in four ‘ordinary’ schools. Here the data set is re-examined to understand the extent to which Ofsted had an ongoing influence on the work of the leadership, management and teachers in these schools. We undertook a process of secondary analysis of the data from the project and found that the influence of the inspection agenda was strong in the schools, policy decisions were often being made to conform to Ofsted’s expectations and the influence on leadership and management was clearly apparent. In resisting this agenda we also found that schools to some extent performed ‘the good school’ for inspections. Finally, we relate this empirical evidence to conceptions of governmentality and post-panopticism to shed new light on their theoretical relevance to contemporary inspection regimes.
Keywords: inspection, Foucault, policy, schools
Deranty, J.-P., Dunstall, A.
Doing justice to the past: Critical theory and the problems of historicism
(2017) Philosophy and Social Criticism, 43 (8), pp. 812-836.
Abstract
In this article, we argue that the usual restriction of critical theory to ‘modern’ norms is subject to problems of coherence, historical accuracy and moral obligation. First, we illustrate how critical theory opposes itself to societies designated as pre-modern, through a summary of Honneth’s recognition theory. We then show how an over-emphasis on modernity’s normative novelty obscures counter-currents in ethical life that threaten the unity of the modern era. Those two steps prepare the main analysis: that the ‘exceptionalist’ modernism of critical theory distorts our view of history and ignores normative dimensions of the past. We show how medieval and early-modern societies in Europe experienced many conflicts and possessed institutions that create illuminating configurations with modern norms. As a result, we articulate several kinds of moral and political link to the past that should lead critical theorists to expand the historical reach of their analyses. © The Author(s) 2017.
Author Keywords
Axel Honneth; Medieval society; Michel Foucault; Modernity; Walter Benjamin
Todorof, Maria Borisof, Foucault and the Poster-Child for Conformism or the Cost of Identity in the Same-Sex Marriage Context (August 21, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2364097 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2364097
Open access
Also on academia.edu
Abstract
The paper discusses the reconciliation between state and same-sex marriage which it is suggested could be seen as employment of a progressive agenda for the purposes of shepherding new subjects into the system of normativity and control which family is. The promise of allegiance inherent into sanctioned by society enterprises, a promise coming as much from the hetero as it comes from the homosexual community, creates a dynamic contributing to compliance. Foucault’s ideas are used here to highlight the possible cost attached to this trade-off.
Keywords: Foucault, same-sex marriage, Butler, queer theory, power and control, normativity, identity, manipulation
Allain, K.A., Marshall, B.
Foucault retires to the gym: Understanding embodied aging in the third age
(2017) Canadian Journal on Aging, 36 (3), pp. 402-414.
DOI: 10.1017/S0714980817000216
Abstract
In light of recent social pressures leading to a reimagining of the “Third Age” as a time of constant activity rather than repose and relaxation, this article explores the pressure on individuals to age “successfully” by engaging in physical activity in later life. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 retired or semi-retired gym-goers (eight women and seven men), the article examines how this call to increased activity impacts the ways active mid-life and older adults understand themselves and others. Drawing on Foucault’s understandings of the productive nature of power, we argue that those who perceive themselves as successfully heeding the call to active aging position themselves in contrast to inactive peers. Within a neoliberal framework, these participants self-identify as morally responsible citizens who, as a result of engagement in fitness activities, are authorized to survey and discipline the bodies of those “others” who will not or cannot engage in regular exercise. © Canadian Association on Gerontology 2017.
Author Keywords
Aging; Embodiment; Exercise; Fitness; Foucault; Third age
Index Keywords
adult, aging, clinical article, drawing, exercise, female, human, leisure, male, physical activity, semi structured interview, social problem
