Foucault News

Danger, Crime and Rights: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

12 May 2016

Danger, Crime and Rights: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon.
Edited and transcribed by Stuart Elden.Theory, Culture & Society May 10, 2016

doi: 10.1177/0263276416640070

Abstract
This article is a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been published and is transcribed on the basis of a tape recording made at the time. Foucault and Simon begin with a discussion of Foucault’s 1977 lecture ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry’, and move to a discussion of notions of danger, psychiatric expertise in the prosecution cases, crime, responsibility and rights in the US and French legal systems. The transcription is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction and a retrospective comment by Simon.

Archive: William Davies: A Bibliographic Review of Neoliberalism (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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11 May 2016

William Davies: A Bibliographic Review of Neoliberalism, Theory Culture and Society, 7 March 2014

The term ‘neoliberalism’ has become increasingly familiar over recent years. The term was relatively unheard-of until the 1990s, but was then adopted principally by the critics of a perceived free market orthodoxy, which was spreading around the world under the auspices of the ‘Washington Consensus’. The ‘anti-globalisation movement’, which rose to prominence with the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organisation, further advanced the pejorative sense of neoliberalism as a form of market fundamentalism, imposed upon developing nations by the United States government and multilateral institutions. The assumption underlying this account of neoliberalism was typically that it arose with the elections of ‘new right’ political leaders, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in particular, in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. But there was relatively little scholarly work done at this time on the longer history of neoliberal thought preceding that political shift.

II Seminário Internacional Michel Foucault: Cinquentenário de As palavras e as coisas (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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11 May 2016

II Seminário Internacional Michel Foucault: Cinquentenário de As palavras e as coisas

Foucault and Gay Counter-Conduct (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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10 May 2016

Siisiäinen, L.
Foucault and Gay Counter-Conduct
(2016) Global Society, pp. 1-19. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2016.1144567

Abstract
In his late work, Michel Foucault elaborates on the notion of resistance in a meticulous fashion, introducing the more precise concept of counter-conduct. This article contributes to this topical discussion within a specific framework: the gay mode of life. First, the article underlines the fundamental role of relatedness, which is characterised in terms of existential sharing and participation, and also as an affective dynamics of traversal. Second, what is addressed and elaborated is Foucault’s idea of “becoming homosexual” or “becoming gay”. Gay or queer relations, due to their very manner of existence, flee as well as pervasively disrupt the functioning of those discourses, institutions and apparatuses through which governmental power conducts our conduct. The article claims that gay/queer counter-conduct in Foucault’s sense not only intersects with, but also significantly differs from care of the self and parrēsia, that is, the central form of counter-conduct in late Foucault. There is no need to construct any hierarchic setting, in which one set of counter-conductive practices would be deemed as pre-eminent, and the other one as secondary or subjugated. Instead, we can see the different modalities as interrelated and mutually supplementary.

Colin Gordon: A Comment on Fassin and Chatterjee (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 May 2016

Colin Gordon: A Comment on Fassin and Chatterjee, 12/13 blog, 5 May 2016

Among the valuable Foucault 13/13 series of video and written discussions of Michel Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, recently coordinated at Columbia University by Bernard E Harcourt and Jesus R Velasco, I was struck by the following comments, linked to the session held on Oct. 12, 2015, addressing Foucault’s 1972-3 lectures entitled The Punitive Society, in written contributions by two participants, Didier Fassin and Partha Chatterjee:

Fassin writes:

“In accordance with his usual method, Foucault relies [in Discipline and Punish] on analyses of normative discourses from legal texts, institutional rules, criminology treatises, rather than of actual practices described in reports, testimonies or letters. As historians of nineteenth-century prison [sic] have shown, such research would have revealed, far from the fantasied projects of surveillance and discipline, the mere routine of neutralization, arbitrary power, physical and psychological abuse.” [1]

Chatterjee writes:

Didier also made an important point about the specificity of the prison as an institution and the lack of fit between Foucault’s discussion of the reformed modern prison and actual prisons in France or the United States today. […] Interestingly, the criticism of actual prison practices even today largely points to the failure of those practices to conform to the normative humane principles of modern power analyzed by Foucault. [2]

It is true that a disqualifying rendition of Foucault’s work as an ideas-based version of history which posits the frictionless and unresisted implementation of intellectual programmes as systems of power has been with us since the 1970s. It was part of Jean Baudrillard’s case for “forgetting Foucault”; it features in the 90s in Subaltern Studies, the illustrious journal which Partha Chatterjee co-founded. It is nevertheless surprising and regrettable to find this view recycled here by two of today’s globally admired academics, who have themselves in the past not disdained to make some use of Foucault’s ideas, in the form of comments which can easily be shown to be inaccurate and ill-informed.

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Assessment-based curriculum: globalising and enterprising culture, human capital and teacher–technicians in Aotearoa New Zealand (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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8 May 2016

O’Neill, A.-M.
Assessment-based curriculum: globalising and enterprising culture, human capital and teacher–technicians in Aotearoa New Zealand
(2016) Journal of Education Policy, pp. 1-24. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2016.1150520

Abstract
This policy chronology traces the institution of globalised school curriculum and assessment discourses, as a vernacular and specific form of public rationalisation and educational governmentality in Aotearoa New Zealand. Without functional national standards or national testing, official discourses constructed an assessment-driven framework as a public measurement and performance regime. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ‘toolkit’, this genealogy traces attempts by the government’s review and audit agency (the ERO), to lift achievement through establishing national standards, normalising assessment and strengthening market-managerial accountabilities. Therapeutic technologies of personal re/development supplemented the above through managed literacy partnerships. This was the basis for the managed reprofessionalisation of techno-entrepreneurial teachers around stipulated, data-driven and measured performances. The paper examines the centrality of the New Zealand Curriculum Framework to the reconstruction of an Enterprise Culture and the psycho-cognitive re/making and re/moralisation of individuals as responsibilised, self-managing and calculative. It posits that within a busnocratic rationality (merging business, entrepreneurial and technical-management), a calculative governmentality required educational data-systems for future population knowledge and control. The genealogy demonstrates the inextricable connection between ‘public’ rationalities, technologies of control and the re/construction of ‘private’ identity, subjectivity and ethics, under neoliberal governmentality. © 2016 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
curriculum/assessment; economisation; education policy; enterprise; genealogy; Neoliberal governmentality; re/moralisation; reprofessionalisation; standards

A Foucauldian Take on Border Violence and Mediterranean Acts of Escape (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

7 May 2016

A Foucauldian Take on Border Violence and Mediterranean Acts of Escape, Maurice Stierl, 04/25/16
CIR/UC Berkeley
Consortium for Interdisciplinary Research (CIR) / UC Berkeley
Berkeley, United States

Audio Lecture on Soundcast

Identité nationale et politique de la langue (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 May 2016

Bernaz, Oleg, Identité nationale et politique de la langue, Peter Lang, 2016
Une analyse foucaldienne du cas moldave
Series: Critique sociale et pensée juridique – Volume 4

ISBN 978-2-87574-343-5 br. (Softcover)

PDF Table des matières

Intro et préface

Table des matières

Remerciements 13
Préface. Y a-t-il une « épistémè géolinguistique » ? 15
Marc Maesschalck
Introduction 23

Partie I archéologie et émancipation
Chapitre 1. Nation, nationalisme, émancipation 35
Introduction 35
1.1 Le point de vue des linguistes 37
1.2 analyse du discours des historiens 41
1.3 Ernest gellner et l’étude du nationalisme 46
1.4 L’« ethnicité fictive » du peuple 61
1.5 grammaires de la langue et identité imaginaire du peuple 71

Chapitre 2. Pour une archéologie de la naissance des nations 81
Introduction 81
2.1 Le cadre conceptuel de Les mots et les choses 83
2.2 L’épistémè de la Renaissance 86
2.3 L’épistémè classique 93
2.4 L’épistémè moderne 104
2.5 L’épistémè soviétique 117

Chapitre 3. Questions de méthode dans l’archéologie foucaldienne du savoir 139
Introduction 139
3.1 Kant avec Foucault 141
3.2 Figures de la littérature dans l’archéologie
foucaldienne du savoir 150
3.3 Voir et dire : analyse de l’« énoncé » 157
3.4 Retour à la littérature 169
3.5 Conclusion intermédiaire 177

Partie II généalogie et émancipation
Chapitre 4. Le devenir généalogique de la raison gouvernementale 183
Introduction 183
4.1 Éléments de méthode pour analyser la généalogie
de la raison gouvernementale 185
4.2 Ratio pastoralis et ratio gubernatoria 190
4.3 gouverner sous le prisme réflexif de la « raison d’État » 198
4.4 « Il faut défendre la nation » 204
4.5 La pratique gouvernementale moderne 210
4.6 analyse de quelques éléments centraux du dispositif soviétique 212
4.7 Conclusion intermédiaire 215

Chapitre 5. Pédagogie et émancipation 217
Introduction 217
5.1 La « pédagogie négative » chez Rousseau et Tolstoï 220
5.2 Développement psychique et pratique pédagogique
chez Vygotski 228
5.3 La genèse du rapport entre la pensée et le langage 228
5.4 apprentissage scolaire et zone prochaine de développement 238
5.5 Le développement du sujet apprenant, de Tolstoï à Vygotski 248
5.6 Conclusion intermédiaire 251

Chapitre 6. Le discours sur l’émancipation selon l’herméneutique du sujet 255
Introduction 255
6.1 Pratiques d’émancipation et pratiques de soi 257
6.2 Le travail sur le flux des représentations et son rapport
avec la pédagogie vygotskienne 261
6.3 Le statut axiologique des objets dans la pédagogique
vygotskienne 265
6.4 La pratique de dire-vrai entre la politique et la pédagogie 267
6.5 Conclusion intermédiaire 269

Conclusion 273
Bibliographie 279

Every breath you take

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 May 2016

Memento Literati

Do you ever feel like you’re being watched when you’re studying in the library?

This is a question I’ve been asking a number of students lately as part of my research study- which has resulted in some interesting points for consideration. It’s a question that often needs a bit of unpacking, because what I really mean when I ask this question is whether they experience Foucauldian concepts of surveillance as a result of the power structures related to the library and university, as a whole, including the formation of docile bodies with regard to hierarchies of social control and disciplinary powers.

Yes. Him again.

fuucoo Image by Juan Nahuel Novelletto

If we start by looking at Foucault’s Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, we begin to understand how the education system is entwined with power and how it relates to the development of ‘docile bodies,’ surveillance…

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Asking the ‘right’ questions: the constitution of school governing bodies as apolitical (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 May 2016

Young, H.
Asking the ‘right’ questions: the constitution of school governing bodies as apolitical
(2016) Journal of Education Policy, 31 (2), pp. 161-177.

DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2015.1062145

Abstract
School governing bodies in England have considerable powers and responsibilities with regard to the education of pupils. This paper draws on an analysis of policy and on qualitative research in the governing bodies of four maintained schools. It explores two policy technologies through which education and the work of school governing bodies are constituted as apolitical. Firstly, it considers the move to recruit governors with (unspecified) ‘skills’, rather than those with a representative role who might provide diverse perspectives. Secondly, it considers the technology of ‘prescribed criticality’, through which ‘effective’ governors are provided with the ‘right’ questions to ask. The paper argues that the operation of these policy technologies has significant implications for possibilities for democratic engagement in schools. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
democracy; education policy; Foucault; policy technology; school governing bodies