Foucault News

Robin Rymarczuk, The Heterotopia of Facebook, Philosophy Now, Issue 107, August/September 2016

The other spaces and faces of Michel Foucault by Alex Lawrence
Foucault images © Alex Lawrence 2015 Please visit preposterous.carbonmade.com

Robin Rymarczuk is Michel Foucault’s ‘friend’.

Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University room-mates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. What started out as an on-campus online ‘hot or not’ tool resulted in the registration of a billion users by 2012. Its rapid growth and perpetually expanding corporate power, as well as its part in the ‘digital privacy’ controversy, has attracted many seeking to explain its remarkable popularity as well as peoples’ discontent with it. Although interesting and important, these studies focus predominantly on what users do on Facebook, leaving underexposed what Facebook does to the user.

Facebook possesses properties that can be construed not just in terms of globalized online networks, but also in terms of a type of space. In these terms, Facebook is a world within the world that attracts or repels people by its geography as much as by its social life. So what kind of space is Facebook? I claim that it’s what philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) ingeniously called “un espace autre” – “an other space”; better known as a heterotopia. As I will elaborate, understanding Facebook as a heterotopic space offers a style of critical thinking that invites moral reflection on digital culture and its relation to other spaces in our everyday lives.

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Kojiro FUJITA, Comment la philosophie de Foucault voyage-t-elle ?
Ici et ailleurs, Association pour une Philosophie Nomade, 14 juin 2016

Introduction

La question qui m’intéresse particulièrement est : « comment la philosophie, les théories et les concepts voyagent-ils ? » ; plus précisément, « la philosophie, les théories et les concepts occidentaux peuvent-ils se transférer à l’Orient sans y apporter aucune domination coloniale ou commerciale ? » Or, moi, chercheur extrême-oriental, je travaille depuis longtemps sur une philosophie occidentale, la pensée de Michel Foucault : après l’avoir étudiée en France pendant longtemps, j’ai soutenu l’année dernière ma thèse portant sur un aspect théorique des travaux foucaldiens (1) et c’est avec ce résultat de recherche que je suis récemment retourné à mon pays d’origine, le Japon, pour développer cette philosophie occidentale dans notre contexte oriental. Ainsi, dans mon cas, il conviendrait de spécifier la question ainsi : « comment la philosophie de Foucault voyage-t-elle ? » ; plus précisément, « peut-elle se transférer au Japon sans colonisation ni commercialisation ? »

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Sam Kriss, Flat-Earthers Have a Wild New Theory About Forests – The Atlantic SEP 9, 2016

What it means to believe that “real” trees no longer exist.

Something tremendous is happening; over the last few weeks, without too many of its globe-headed detractors noticing, a surprisingly vast community on the tattered fringes of intellectual orthodoxy is in turmoil. A bizarre new theory has turned the flat earth upside down. The flat earth is still flat, but now it’s dotted with tiny imitations of the truly enormous trees that once covered the continents, and which in our deforested age we can hardly even remember.
[…]

Against both the panpsychicism of hippie ecology, the bleary-eyed invocations of some dismally all-encompassing Mother Earth, and the pedantic materialism of most sciences as they’re actually practiced, ‘No Forests on Flat Earth’ proposes a kind of hylothanatism, a pessimism for our own weary age: this world was once alive, everything was once beautifully connected, but not any more. This earth has been dead for millennia; what we think of as progress is just the rot spreading through the cadaver of the world.

There are mythic assonances here—beyond the familiar world-trees of Norse cosmogony, the notion of a world built on a corpse has always fascinated people; Babylonian mythology, for instance, has the entire universe butchered out of the body of Tiamat, the primordial mother. Its mode of argument—‘this thing looks like this other thing, therefore they’re the same thing’—is also familiar. In The Order of Things, Foucault describes the medieval episteme: “It was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.” The world was configured as one single text, a great chain of being explicable to those who knew how to read the signs. Bestiaries would record not just the physical characteristics of various animals, but their symbolic attributes. If a plant resembled a part of the human body, it could be used to treat its diseases; the map of the cosmos is also a map of the human body, and the pattern of the stars is also a horticultural manual. Foucault quotes Crollius: “Just as each herb or plant is a terrestrial star looking up at the sky, so also each star is a celestial plant in spiritual form, which differs from the terrestrial plants in matter alone.”

Foucault himself has a very ‘No Forests’ sadness for the loss of this world of interlinking resemblances in the 16th century, lamenting that “there is nothing now that still recalls even the memory of that being. Nothing, except perhaps literature.” The experience of modernity is one of a lost unity, and with an emerging capitalism came a world no longer required to be explicable, only fungible. But this lost world is not just something that falls away with modernity—as Freud points out, the formation of the conscious mind is similar: the ego is a “precipitate of lost objects.”