Foucault News

Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

12 March 2016

Michael R. Griffiths, Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, Routledge, 2015

About the Book

From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to the United Nations Permanent Memorial to the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, many worthwhile processes of public memory have been enacted on the national and international levels. But how do these extant practices of memory function to precipitate justice and recompense? Are there moments when such techniques, performances, and displays of memory serve to obscure and elide aspects of the history of colonial governmentality? This collection addresses these and other questions in essays that take up the varied legacies, continuities, modes of memorialization, and poetics of remaking that attend colonial governmentality in spaces as varied as the Maghreb and the Solomon Islands. Highlighting the continued injustices arising from a process whose aftermath is far from settled, the contributors examine works by twentieth-century authors representing Asia, Africa, North America, Latin America, Australia, and Europe. Imperial practices throughout the world have fomented a veritable culture of memory. The essays in this volume show how the legacy of colonialism’s attempt to transform the mode of life of colonized peoples has been central to the largely unequal phenomenon of globalization.

Michael Peters, Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Foucauldian Perspective (2001)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

11 March 2016

Michael Peters, Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Foucauldian Perspective, Journal of Educational Enquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2001 58
https://ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/EDEQ/article/view/558

Abstract
The notion of ‘enterprise culture’ emerged in the United Kingdom as a central motif in political thought under Margaret Thatcher’s administration. The notion represented a profound shift away from the Keynesian welfare state to a deliberate attempt at cultural restructuring and engineering based upon the neo-liberal model of the entrepreneurial self – a shift characterised as a moving from a ‘culture of dependency’ to one of ‘self-reliance’. In education this shift took the form of the ‘enterprise education’ and the ‘enterprise curriculum’. This paper, utilising the perspective of Michel Foucault, analyses the ‘generalization of an ‘enterprise form’ to all forms of conduct’ (Burchell) and the way in which the promotion of an enterprise culture has become a style of government characteristic of both neoliberalism and Third Way politics.

How ‘Treat Yourself’ Became a Capitalist Command (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

11 March 2016

Ester Bloom, How ‘Treat Yourself’ Became a Capitalist Command. The Atlantic 19 Nov 2015

Corporations love telling Americans they “deserve” fancy electronics and indulgent food.

In a 1982 lecture that went on to be published as an essay called “Technologies of the Self,” the French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that looking after oneself, rather than being a form of navel-gazing or narcissism, is a kind of “vigilance” that dates back to antiquity. For Socrates, Plato, and their ilk, Foucault writes, “taking care of yourself eventually became absorbed into knowing yourself.”* As the thinking went, only with the proper amount of time set aside for the “active leisure” of reading, studying, and ruminating could a person come to grips with the profound nature of the universe and his own mortality.

After bubbling up through academic communities in the ‘80s, the term “self-care” accumulated health-related connotations as it gained mainstream renown. In the ‘90s, it referred to the way that patients could take supplementary responsibility for themselves in conjunction with their doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. This was not particularly surprising: Foucault once advised that “one must become the doctor of oneself,” and his theories inspired individual-focused health care even before WebMD.

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From Panopticon to Prisoner’s Dilemma: Neoliberal Subjects as Prisoners of Reason (2106)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 March 2016

S. M. Amadae, From Panopticon to Prisoner’s Dilemma: Neoliberal Subjects as Prisoners of Reason

25th April, 4pm

RHB 150, Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW

In this talk, S. M. Amadae (MIT and University of Helsinki) will explore how the pedagogy of game theory and practice of institutional design generates neoliberal subjects and neoliberal governance. This analytic approach enables us to understand the legitimation of a reactionary interventionist security state as well as the neopaternalism of ‘nudge’. Neoliberalism is staunchly counter-Enlightenment in reducing agency to consumptive preference satisfaction. It anticipates the further step toward algorithmic governance and mindless rationality consistent with treating information as signals sustaining rational choice rather than elementary ingredients to be vetted and shared to jointly create horizons of meaning and institutions based on shared expectations.

S. M. Amadae is author of Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy(Cambridge, 2016) and Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, 2003)

All are welcome and no registration is necessary. Details on how to find Goldsmiths are here.

Archive: Neoliberalism: a Foucauldian Perspective (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

9 March 2016

Călin COTOI, Neoliberalism: a Foucauldian Perspective, International Review of Social Research, Volume 1, Issue 2, June 2011, 109-124

Full PDF

Abstract:
The contemporary investigations on power, politics, government and knowledge are profoundly influenced by Foucault’s work. Governmentality, as a specific way of seeing the connections between the formation of subjectivities and population politics, has been used extensively in anthropology as neoliberal governmentalities have been spreading after the 1990s all over the world. A return to Foucault can help to clarify some overtly ideological uses of ‘neoliberalism’ in nowadays social sciences.

Keywords:
governmentality, governance, ethnography, neoliberalism

Stephen Legg, Subject to truth: Before and after governmentality in Foucault’s 1970s (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

9 March 2016

Stephen Legg, Subject to truth: Before and after governmentality in Foucault’s 1970s, Environment and Planning D, February 25, 2016
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816633474

Abstract
In this article, I situate Foucault’s governmentality analytics between his first lecture course (On the Will to Know, 1970–1971) and his first course after his two ‘governmentality’ lectures (On the Government of the Living, 1979–1980). The lectures are interconnected by a shared interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as well as by different but related obsessions with the production of truth: the earlier, with truth as fact; the latter, with truth as self-relation. The former analyses discourses of truth, law, inquiry and sovereignty in ancient Greece. The latter focuses on early Christian individual manifestations of truth (baptism, penance and spiritual direction) forming a genealogy of confession and, Foucault suggests, of western subjectivity itself. This article uses the analytical categories of governmentality, usually used to analyse regimes of government, to perform a comparative reading of the lecture courses, charting the continuities and ruptures in their various studies of episteme, techne, identities, ethos and problematisations. This suggests that the earlier lectures outline the birth of the sovereign–juridical compact that modern governmentalities would emerge through and against, whereas the later lectures use the term ‘governmentality’ less, but enable the analysis of the conduct of conduct to progress to the ethical scale of self-formation.

Keywords
Foucault governmentality truth subjectivity Christianity confession

Surveillance Is Still About Power (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 March 2016

Jeffrey Vagle, Surveillance Is Still About Power, Just Security, February 9, 2016

Since the Snowden revelations in 2013, surveillance has gone from a somewhat arcane term of art used mainly by scholars, spies, and tinfoil hat types, to a household word that now comes up in conversations on such far ranging topics as national security, law enforcement, advertising, education, health and fitness, and even toys. While the general concept appears straightforward — one party watching another — the conversation can quickly become bogged down in technical details that can easily confuse non-experts. But what we should not lose in the noise is the fact that surveillance is, at its core, about the establishment, use, and maintenance of power, a relationship Michel Foucault understood well.

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S’écrire soi-même (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

7 March 2016

Delphine Merx, S’écrire soi-même, Implications philosophiques

Open access article

Résumé
Résumé : La notion de « subjectivation » interroge ce processus qui, d’un sujet malléable et à déterminer, fait surgir une certaine constitution du soi, et les moyens de cette formation. Paul Ricœur et Michel Foucault se sont chacun à leur tour penchés sur cette question, en étudiant plus précisément le rôle de l’écriture dans cette structuration éthique du soi : du récit classique ricœurien aux écrits mineurs foucaldiens, du sujet comme lecteur puis comme créateur, les deux philosophes ont chacun développé une conception originale de la fonction de l’écriture. En adoptant deux méthodes profondément différentes, Paul Ricœur et Michel Foucault, à travers un dialogue fécond, mettent en avant deux pôles distincts à l’œuvre dans le rapport à l’écriture, celui de la maîtrise de soi chez le premier, celui de la création de soi chez le second.

Abstract
The notion of « subjectivation » questions the process that turns a malleable subject into a determinate subject, and the means of this formation. Paul Ricœur and Michel Foucault investigated this issue by analysing the role of writing in the ethical structuration of the self: both philosophers developed an original conception of the function of writing by studying either classical narrative or minors writings; the subject as reader or as writer. With very distinct methods, and through fruitful dialogue, they highlighted two different roles of writing in relationship to the subject: one of self-discipline and one of self-creation.

Living the Neo-liberal University (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 March 2016

Stephen J. Ball, Living the Neo-liberal University, European Journal of Education, Volume 50, Issue 3, pages 258–261, September 2015

DOI: 10.1111/ejed.12132

Full pdf available on research gate

Opening paragraphs
‘Each of my works is a part of my own biography. For one or other reason I had occasion to feel and live those things’ Truth, power, self: an interview (Foucault, 1988, p. 11)

I was a child of Beveridge , of the British post-War welfare state, of free milk and orange juice, of NHS dentistry. I am now a neo-liberal academic working for a global HE brand, ranked in international comparison sites for performance-related pay. Increasingly, in relation to this shift and the life I lead, I am, as Judith Butler puts it, ‘other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself’ (Butler, 2004).

The practices of government and technologies of policy that make up and constantly re-make higher education (HE) nationally and globally have transformed the life of the university over the past 25 years. The funding and accountability of and access to HE have been changed in many material and affective ways. Concomitantly, what it means to learn, to teach and research in HE have also changed. The practices and technologies to which I refer include annual reviews, league tables and rankings, impact narratives, CVs, performance-related pay, the granting of degree-awarding powers to commercial providers, off-shore campuses, student fees, expanding overseas recruitment, and Public-Private Partnerships of all sorts.

How to Desire Differently: Home Education as a Heterotopia (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

5 March 2016

Harriet Pattison, How to Desire Differently: Home Education as a Heterotopia, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 49, Issue 4, pages 619–637, November 2015

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9752.12130

Abstract
This article explores the co-existence of, and relationship between, alternative education in the form of home education and mainstream schooling. Home education is conceptually subordinate to schooling, relying on schooling for its status as alternative, but also being tied to schooling through the dominant discourse that forms our understandings of education. Practitioners and other defenders frequently justify home education by running an implicit or explicit comparison with school; a comparison which expresses the desire to do ‘better’ than school whilst simultaneously encompassing the desire to do things differently. These twin aims, however, are not easy to reconcile, meaning that the challenge to schooling and the submission to norms and beliefs that underlie schooling are frequently inseparable. This article explores the trajectories of ‘better than’ and ‘different from’ school as representing ideas of utopia and heterotopia respectively. In particular I consider Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia as a means of approaching the relationship between school and other forms of education. Whilst it will be argued that, according to Derrida’s ideas of discursive deconstruction, alternative education has to be expressed through (and is therefore limited by) the dominant educational discourse, it will also be suggested that employing the idea of the heterotopia is a strategy which can help us explore the alternative in education.