Foucault News

Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

6 February 2016

Lawrence D. Berg, Edward H. Huijbens, Henrik Gutzon Larsen, Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University
Forthcoming in The Canadian Geographer/le Géographe Canadien
Special issue on
Critical Reflections on Cultivating an Ethic of Wellness in Geography
Guest edited by Linda Peake, Kate Parizeau, and Beverley Mullings

Draft on Academia.edu

Abstract:
This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the neoliberal production of anxiety in academic faculty members in universities in Northern Europe. The paper focuses on neoliberalization as it is instantiated through audit and ranking systems designed to produce academia as a space of economic efficiency and intensifying competition. We suggest that powerful forms of competition and ranking of academic performance have been developed in Northern Europe. These systems are differentiated and differentiating, and they serve to both index and facilitate the neoliberalization of the academy. Moreover, these audit and ranking systems produce an ongoing sense of anxiety among academic workers. We argue that neoliberalism in the academy is part of a wider system of anxiety production arising as part of the so-called ‘soft governance’ of everything, including life itself, in contemporary late liberalism.

Keywords:
Neoliberalism, Higher Education, Human Capital, Academic Audit Systems, Anxiety and Mental Health

Key Messages:
This article investigates processes of neoliberalization of the academy. It argues that neoliberalism entails shifts from exchange to competition, from equality to inequality, and turns academics into human capital. It suggests that auditing systems are key mechanisms of neoliberalization and produce unhealthy levels of anxiety and stress in the academy

Foucault 8/13 | Richard R.W. Brooks on Foucault’s “The Birth of Biopolitics” (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 February 2016

Foucault 8/13 | Richard R.W. Brooks on Foucault’s “The Birth of Biopolitics” (1979)
By Richard R. W. Brooks

My comments on Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics will focus on the distinctions he observes (in discussing neoliberalism) between abstract economic and legal subjects (subject of interests and subject of rights) and actual individuals in concrete interactions of civil society. Interestingly, a number of the features and fractures that Foucault identifies between the German ordo-liberalism and the American (Chicago School) neo-liberalism, surfaced earlier in the U.S. context between advocates of the marginalist revolution in economics and their counterparts among progressive institutional economists (themselves, to a non-trivial extent, influenced by the German historical tradition) at the turn of the nineteenth century. I hope to usefully relate this marginalist-institutionalist debate to Foucault’s insightful analysis of economic subjects as developed by the Chicago School, significantly in the Journal of Political Economy, and particularly through Gary Becker’s theories on human capital and criminality.

Governing Health Care through Free Choice: Neoliberal Reforms in Denmark and the United States (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 February 2016

Lars Thorup Larsen & Deborah Stone (2015): “Governing Health Care through Free Choice: Neoliberal Reforms in Denmark and the United States”, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 40(5): 941-70.

doi: 10.1215/03616878-3161162

Abstract
We compare free choice reforms in Denmark and the United States to understand what ideas and political forces could generate such similar policy reforms in radically different political contexts. We analyze the two cases using our own interpretation of neoliberalism as having “two faces.” The first face seeks to expand private markets and shrink the public sector; the second face seeks to strengthen the public sector’s capacity to govern through incentives and competition. First, we show why these two most-different cases offer a useful comparison to understand similar policy tools. Second, we develop our theoretical framework of the two faces of neoliberalism. Third, we examine Denmark’s introduction of a free choice of hospitals in 2002, a policy that for the first time allowed some patients to receive care either in a public hospital outside their local area or in a private hospital. Fourth, we examine the introduction of free choice among private managed care plans into the US Medicare program in 1997. We show how policy makers in both countries used neoliberal reform as a mechanism to make their public health care sectors governable. Fifth, on the basis of our analysis, we draw five lessons about neoliberal policy reforms.

Un moment de l’histoire de la psychiatrie (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 February 2016

Un moment de l’histoire de la psychiatrie
Mercredi 10 février 2016 , 9h-13h, Salle Beckett, 45 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris

Un moment de l’histoire de la psychiatrie.
Autour de l’ouvrage Foucault à Münsterlingen. À l’origine de l’« Histoire de la folie », Paris, EHESS, 2015, éd. par Jean-François Bert et Elisabetta Basso

Matinée d’étude organisée par le CAPHÉS – UMS 3610 (CNRS-ENS)
sous la responsabilité de Elisabetta Basso, Mireille Delbraccio et Emmanuel Delille

9h-9h15
Ouverture par Mathias Girel, Directeur du CAPHÉS UMS 3610 (CNRS-ENS)

9h15-9h45
Présentation de la Matinée par Mireille Delbraccio, CAPHÉS

9h45-10h30
Chantal Marazia (IEA Paris)
La révolution thérapeutique entre psychiatrie biologique et psychiatrie anthropologique

10h30-11h15
Emmanuel Delille (Centre Marc Bloch Berlin/CAPHÉS)
Henri Ellenberger à Münsterlingen : remettre le jeune Foucault dans le contexte de la psychiatrie dynamique des années 1950

11h15 : Pause

11h30-12h15
Elisabetta Basso (Université de Lisbonne/CAPHÉS)
L’expérience de Rorschach entre Münsterlingen et Paris dans les années 1940 et 1950

12h15-12h45 : Discussion

Planting Foucault in Juárez (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 February 2016

Planting Foucault in Juárez. A Translator’s Reflections on the Story of Two Teenage Murderers Separated by Almost Two Centuries by John Washington

“He donned his holiday clothes, had his sister sing a canticle beginning ‘O happy day! holy joy!” and, his mind wholly deranged, his weapon, an ax, in hand, he executed his mother, his sister, and his young brother.”

So one Dr. Vastel describes Pierre Rivière’s parricide-fratricide of June 3, 1835 in the rural French village of Faucterie. The description comes from the book, edited by Michel Foucault, I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother. The astonishing volume includes the seventy-page memoir (“of remarkable eloquence,” according to presiding judge M. Daigrement) written by the nineteen-year-old murderer, Pierre, in which he candidly describes the particulars of his difficult family life and the details before, during, and after he murders his mother, his sister, and his brother, in that order.

Conor Heaney, What is the University today? (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

1 February 2016

Conor Heaney, ‘What is the University today?’, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 13 (2), 2015, 287-314

Full PDF here and here

Abstract
What is the University today? In this paper, a Foucault and Deleuzo-Guattarian inspired approach is taken. I argue that the University is, today, a site of ‘neoliberal governmentality’, which governs students and academics as sites of human capital. That is, students and academics are governed to self-govern themselves as sites of human capital. This transformation in how students and academics are governed will be identified as a recent trend through the examination of relevant UK-government reports on higher education. Furthermore, it will be identified as a trend that ‘decodes’ knowledge – in the specific sense developed by Deleuze and Guattari – which renders academic knowledge (the knowledge the student ‘consumes’ and the knowledge the academic ‘produces’) meaningless.

Keywords:
Foucault, University, Deleuze and Guattari, neoliberal governmentality, knowledge

Lars Thorup Larsen, The problematization of fertility treatment: biopolitics and IVF policy in Denmark (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

31 January 2016

Lars Thorup Larsen (2015): “The problematization of fertility treatment: biopolitics and IVF policy in Denmark”, Distinktion 16(3): 318-36.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2015.1089520

Abstract:
With the demographic challenges facing many European states, one would perhaps expect the state to invoke a biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre’, as Foucault termed it, and attempt to regulate birth rates. This expectation is too simple, however, as this article shows both theoretically and empirically. In order better to understand the possible counterweights to biopolitical concerns about the birth rate, the conceptual distinction between biopolitics and governmentality is useful. Scholarly debates about biopolitics and governmentality have been surprisingly silent on what constitutes the internal relationship between the two or how they may come into conflict. The article elaborates this conceptual distinction and demonstrates its relevance in a genealogy of how fertility treatment has been problematized in Danish assisted reproduction policy. Since access to IVF treatment does not appear to follow a biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre’, it is interesting to explore and compare how IVF treatment – and its doctors, patients, and children – has been problematized instead. In a variety of different ways, the biopolitical concern about the low birth rate has been overshadowed by concerns about how to govern. Either the new treatment has been problematized as an unnecessary cover for private or special interests, for instance doctors’ illegitimate attempts to self-govern, or problematization has centered on prospective parents characterized as demanding or selfish. The interface between biopolitics and fertility treatment is thus only understandable with a view to problems of governing and the resulting tension between governmentality and the biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre’.

Critical agency in education: a Foucauldian perspective (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 January 2016

Dirk Postma, Critical agency in education: a Foucauldian perspective, Journal of Education, No. 61, 2015, 31-52

Full text

Abstract
While the neoliberal order is associated with the economy, government and globalisation, as a form of governmentality it effects a particular subjectivity. The subject is the terrain where the contest of control plays out. The subject is drawn into the seductive power of performativity which dictates its agency, desires and satisfactions and from which escape is difficult to imagine. Neoliberalism is particularly interested in an education which provides it with the much needed powers of production and consumption. This dependency of the neoliberal order on a particular kind of agential subjectivity is also its weakness because of the indeterminacy of the self. Within this openness of the human subject lies the possibility to be different and to escape any form of subjectification.

Foucault’s account of the critical agent portrays a form of difference that opposes and transcends neoliberal ordering. Foucault finds the principle of practices of freedom in the Greco-Roman ethics of the care for the self. It is an ethics where the subject gains control of itself through the ascetic and reflective attention in relation to available ethical codes and with the guidance of a ‘master’. Such as strong sense of the self is the basis for personal and social transformation against neoliberal colonisation. The development of critical agency in education is subsequently investigated in the light of Foucault’s notions of agency and freedom. The contest of the subject is of particular importance to education interested in the development of critical agency. The critical agent is not only one who could identify and analyse regimes of power, but also one who could imagine different modes of being, and who could practice freedom in the enactment of an alternative mode of being. The educational implications are explored in relation to the role of the teacher and pedagogical processes.

Archive: “To read, write, and cast accounts”: Foucault, Governmentality and Education in Upper Canada/Canada West (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 January 2016

McGarry, Michael (2013) “To read, write, and cast accounts”: Foucault, Governmentality and Education in Upper Canada/Canada West, Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto

Full text

ABSTRACT

Contributing to the work of philosophers of education who have been examining issues of economy and emancipation, this dissertation employs a set of critical lenses drawn from Foucault’s investigation of governmentality to trace correspondences between economic liberalism and public schooling in Upper Canada/Canada West, the historical antecedent of present day Ontario. The analysis adheres to Foucault’s advice that philosophical critique involves a question asked of the present but answered in history. Thus through a Foucauldian genealogy it is argued that a series of transformations in the deployment of governmental power occurred in Upper Canada/Canada West that entailed the entry of an economic rationality into deliberations over the creation of a school system.

To support this argument evidence is presented that demonstrates how race, biopolitics, and the burgeoning science of political economy combined in the first half of the nineteenth century to form the conditions of possibility for governmental control of schooling. In particular, it is illustrated how these conditions favoured a pedagogy based in Locke’s epistemology, and were legitimized by the providential status accorded political economy. This pedagogy, which was promoted as mild and so conducive to student engagement, and the authority of political economy are revealed as integral to the methods of instruction and curriculum of the province’s common schools, and indicative of the legacy of economic liberalism that persists, albeit transformed, in Ontario education to this day.

The result of this critical analysis is a redescription or, in Foucault’s terminology, a “countermemory” of Ontario educational history that challenges the presumed naturalism of the ideals characteristic of economic liberalism, such as autonomy, accountability, entrepreneurialism, and consumer choice. The dissertation contends that these ideals are active in local educational regimes long legitimized by economy, and dangerously aimed at fostering political consent by manipulating subjects into locations of restricted agency.

Providing insight into the historical role played by liberal governmentality and economy in the local context contributes to the study of Foucault and the philosophy of education, and also suggests a change in approach to questions regarding the corporatization or marketization of education. Instead of viewing economy as either a necessary component of schooling or a contemporary affront to educational ideals, it is proposed that it be re-evaluated according to its persistent, but contingent, historical correspondence with liberal government and its institutions.

Foucault 8/13 | François Ewald on Foucault & Neoliberalism (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 January 2016

Foucault 8/13 | François Ewald on Foucault & Neoliberalism

Transcribed and edited by Raphaëlle Jean Burns
Reviewed and approved by François Ewald

[Editors’ Note (Raphaëlle Jean Burns): This is an edited transcription of François Ewald’s talk at Hunter College CUNY on Tuesday, September 29, 2015, 2:30-4:00 pm Room 204 Roosevelt House, Hunter College. The talk was titled “Foucault’s Neoliberalism: European and American Perspectives.” The talk was sponsored and moderated by Professor Sanford Schram of Hunter College, CUNY. The audio version can he listened to here]

François Ewald
I will try to respond to your questions regarding Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism from my own point of view and by way of a series of remarks.

My first remark concerns my astonishment at this identification between Foucault and liberalism. For me this question makes absolutely no sense. I remember these lectures [Birth of Biopolitics], as I was naturally in the room at the Collège de France when Foucault delivered them, and there were absolutely no indications that he shared any of the ideas of Gary Becker or anyone else from that school of thought.