Foucault News

Interviews on Foucault’s Last Decade – one out, one discussion forthcoming

Clare O'Farrell

14 August 2016

0745683916 Peter Gratton kindly links to my Interview with Eugene Wolters at critical-theory.com, which I shared at the weekend, and also mentions that he is currently interviewing me, along with Eduardo Mendieta and Dianna Taylor, for Symposium. The interview uses the book as a starting point, but is really a discussion of mid-late Foucault around a range of themes. Peter says “it will appear early in the fall (if not sooner if we can make it open access)”. There are also at least three reviews of the book in progress.

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Wave At The Surveillance Cameras Day (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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14 August 2016

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveil¬lance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison, (A. Sheridan, Trans.), New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1975). Pt 3. Chapter 3 : Panopticism, p. 201

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August 10, 2016

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6th Annual Wave at Surveillance Day

“To Be Observed”

It’s no secret that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg covers his laptop camera and microphone jack, as reported by The New York Times on June 22nd. The paper also notes documents unveiled by Edward Snowden reveal that at least two National Security Agency programs are designed to ‘take over’ home computers.

Even more alarming, sousveillance has brought to light the often deadly acts of those officially tasked with watching over us. Security cameras. Bodycams. Dashcams. The tide of the watchman shows no sign of receding. For good or for evil? One is led to wonder: Surveillance. Is it our new moral compass?

August 16th will mark the world’s 6th annual Wave at Surveillance Day, a chance for the watched to reach out to the watchers both at home and in public venues.

When discussing last year’s event…

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Critical review on power in organization: empowerment in human resource development (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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14 August 2016

Jo, S.J., Park, S.
Critical review on power in organization: empowerment in human resource development
(2016) European Journal of Training and Development, 40 (6), pp. 390-406.

DOI: 10.1108/EJTD-01-2016-0005

Abstract
Purpose: This paper aims to analyze current practices, discuss empowerment from the theoretical perspectives on power in organizations and suggest an empowerment model based on the type of organizational culture and the role of human resource development (HRD). Design/methodology/approach: By reviewing the classic viewpoint of power, Lukes’ three-dimensional power and Foucault’s disciplinary power, we discuss power and empowerment in organizational contexts. Findings: Power in organizations can be conceptualized based on the classic view, Foucault and critical view and Lukes’ three-dimensional power. We found that true employee empowerment is related to the third dimension of power. The role of HRD for empowerment can be categorized into enhancing motivation and commitment in terms of psychological empowerment and bringing real power to employees. The proposed empowerment model assumes that organizational culture influences the dimensions of empowerment and the role of HRD for supporting empowerment. Practical implications: HRD needs to critically assess the meaning of power in particular contexts (Morrell and Wilkinson, 2002) before planning and implementing specific training and development interventions for performance improvement and/or organization development interventions for innovation. Originality/value: This study attempts to review, analyze and discuss issues regarding employee empowerment from HRD perspectives. Implications for the roles of HRD and the empowerment model are proposed. © 2016, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Author Keywords
Classical viewpoint of power; Employee empowerment; Employee participation; Foucault’s disciplinary power; Luke’s three-dimensional power; Organizational culture

Masking over ambiguity: Suburban Johannesburg police reservists and the uniform fetish (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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13 August 2016

Hirtenfelder, C.T.
Masking over ambiguity: Suburban Johannesburg police reservists and the uniform fetish
(2016) Policing and Society, 26 (6), pp. 659-679.

DOI: 10.1080/10439463.2015.1012168

Abstract
Using McClintock’s theoretical concept ‘fetish’ and Foucault’s ‘bio-power’, this article explores what ambiguous perceptions of themselves reservists use the uniform to mask and how these are articulated through difference. Conducting an analysis of discourses using data collected from interviews with 23 suburban Johannesburg reservists, this article finds that the most prevalent ambiguities reservists manage circulate vulnerability and control as well as fear of belonging and legitimacy. However, these anxieties are not purely managed through the uniform and are further complicated by expectations of particular bodies shaped through history. Exploring fetish and ambiguities through data and discourses relating the uniform provides a novel means from which to grapple with the complexity of reservists’ subjugation without falling into a dichotomous, a-historical trap. © 2015 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
fetish; identity; Johannesburg; policing; reservists; SAPS

Securing Dangerous Children as Literate Subjects (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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12 August 2016

Kelly, S.
Securing Dangerous Children as Literate Subjects
(2016) Children Australia, pp. 1-10. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1017/cha.2016.16

Abstract
This paper examines how the education of children as literate subjects in schools and community settings is implicated in the politics of securing civil society. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics is used to consider how young people are produced as securitised subjects. The emergence of the concept of human security as a technology for measuring human development is problematised using Bacchi’s methodology. The analysis uses the Northern Territory intervention to question representations of young people as subjects of danger and as potentially dangerous subjects. This paper argues that the use of literacy by the apparatus of state and non-state governmentalities functions as a technology of risk mitigation and biopolitical government: a way of contingently positioning the freedoms of children as subjects to forms of rule. The paper concludes by suggesting that literacy has been deployed as a techne of an authoritarian form of liberalism in which the power to delimit entangles children in biopolitical strategies and sovereign intervention. Copyright © The Author(s) 2016

Author Keywords
biopolitics; children; civil society; literacy; security

Archive: Successful Failure: What Foucault Can Teach Us About Privacy Self-Management in a World of Facebook and Big Data (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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11 August 2016

Hull, Gordon, Successful Failure: What Foucault Can Teach Us About Privacy Self-Management in a World of Facebook and Big Data (December 2, 2014). Ethics and Information Technology,
Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2533057 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2533057

Full text available

Abstract:
The “privacy paradox” refers to the discrepancy between the concern individuals express for their privacy and the apparently low value they actually assign to it when they readily trade personal information for low-value goods online. In this paper, I argue that the privacy paradox masks a more important paradox: the self-management model of privacy embedded in notice-and-consent pages on websites and other, analogous practices can be readily shown to underprotect privacy, even in the economic terms favored by its advocates. The real question, then, is why privacy self-management occupies such a prominent position in privacy law and regulation. Borrowing from Foucault’s late writings, I argue that this failure to protect privacy is also a success in ethical subject formation, as it actively pushes privacy norms and practices in a neoliberal direction. In other words, privacy self-management isn’t about protecting people’s privacy; it’s about inculcating the idea that privacy is an individual, commodified good that can be traded for other market goods. Along the way, the self-management regime forces privacy into the market, obstructs the functioning of other, more social, understandings of privacy, and occludes the various ways that individuals attempt to resist adopting the market-based view of themselves and their privacy. Throughout, I use the analytics practices of Facebook and social networking sites as a sustained case study of the point.

Keywords: Foucault, biopolitics, privacy, neoilberalism, Facebook, social networking

Climate risks and forest practices: forest owners’ acceptance of advice concerning climate change (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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11 August 2016

Uggla, Y., Lidskog, R.
Climate risks and forest practices: forest owners’ acceptance of advice concerning climate change
(2016) Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research, 31 (6), pp. 618-625.

DOI: 10.1080/02827581.2015.1134648

Abstract
Based on qualitative interviews with Swedish forest owners this study focuses on climate change, risk management and forest governance from the perspective of the forest owners. The Swedish forest governance system has undergone extensive deregulation, with the result that social norms and knowledge dissemination are seen by the state as important means of influencing forest owners’ understandings and practices. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality this study contributes knowledge on how forest owners understand and manage climate-related risk and their acceptance of advice. From the interview study, three main conclusions can be drawn: (1) forest owners’ considerations largely concern ordinary forestry activities; (2) knowledge about forest management and climate adaptation combines experiences and ideas from various sources; and (3) risk awareness and knowledge of “best practices” are not enough to ensure change in forestry practices. The results of this study show that the forest owners have to be selective and negotiate about what knowledge to consider relevant and meaningful for their own forest practice. Accordingly, local forest management can be understood as situated in a web of multifarious interests, claims, concerns and knowledges, where climate change adaptation is but one of several aspects that forest owners have to consider. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
adaptation; advisory practices; climate change; Forestry; governmentality; risk

Index Keywords
Forestry, Risk management, Risk perception, Risks, Timber; adaptation, advisory practices, Climate change adaptation, Climate related risks, Forestry practices, Governmentality, Knowledge dissemination, Qualitative interviews; Climate change

Shaunna Barnhart, Environmentality (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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10 August 2016

Environmentality

By Shaunna Barnhart
This post is part of the Discard Studies Compendium, a keyword text.

Environmentality is a term used to describe an approach to understanding complex interplays of power in environmental governance of human-environment interactions. It builds on philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Governmentality argues that a governing body manages a complex web of people and objects with the purported intent to improve the welfare and condition of the population through changing the relationship between the governing body and those it governs, mediated through objects of concern such as waste. This is achieved through scaled relationships of power, technologies of government, knowledge production, and discourse which results in individuals changing their thoughts and actions such that they then self-regulate and further the goals of the governing body (Foucault 1991).

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Foucault, Gary Becker and the Critique of Neoliberalism (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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9 August 2016

David Newheiser, Foucault, Gary Becker and the Critique of Neoliberalism, 13, 2016,
Theory, Culture & Society September 2016 vol. 33 no. 5 3-21

doi: 10.1177/0263276415619997

Abstract
Although Foucault’s 1979 lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics promised to treat the theme of biopolitics, the course deals at length with neoliberalism while mentioning biopolitics hardly at all. Some scholars account for this elision by claiming that Foucault sympathized with neoliberalism; I argue on the contrary that Foucault develops a penetrating critique of the neoliberal claim to preserve individual liberty. I show that the Chicago economist Gary Becker exemplifies what Foucault describes elsewhere as biopolitics: a form of power applied to the behaviour of a population through the normalizing use of statistics. Although Becker’s preference for indirect intervention might seem to preserve the independence of individuals, under biopolitics individual liberty is itself the means by which populations are governed indirectly. In my view, by describing the history and ambivalence of neoliberal biopolitics, Foucault fosters a critical vigilance that is the precondition for creative political resistance.

Keywords
biopolitics critique economics Foucault neoliberalism normalization power

See also video of author presenting paper

Josh Jones, Chez Foucault, the 1978 Fanzine That Introduced Students to the Radical French Philosopher (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

8 August 2016

Josh Jones, Chez Foucault, the 1978 Fanzine That Introduced Students to the Radical French Philosopher, Open Culture Blog, 5 March 2015

Extract

Into this fomenting intellectual culture stepped French theorist Michel Foucault, who first lectured in the U.S. in 1975 after the publication of his History of Sexuality. Foucault was a true product of the French university system and an academic superstar of sorts, as well as a gadfly of revolutionary movements from Paris in ’68, to Iran in ’79, to Berkeley in the 80s. His work as a philosopher and political dissident prompted one biographer to refer to him as a “militant intellectual,” though his politics could sometimes be as obscure as his prose. By 1981, he had risen to such cultural prominence in the States that Time magazine published a profile of him and his “growing cult.” One of Foucault’s American acolytes, Simeon Wade, befriended the philosopher in the mid-seventies and wrote an unpublished, 121-page account of Foucault’s alleged 1975 LSD trip in Death Valley (referred to in James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault). Wade, along with a number of other University of California students, also interviewed Foucault the following year.

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