Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Archive: Anti-Apocalypse. Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (1994)

Clare O'Farrell

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2 January 2016

Lee Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse. Exercises in Genealogical Criticism, University of Minnesota Press, 1994

As the year 2000 looms, heralding a new millennium, apocalyptic thought abounds-and not merely among religious radicals. In politics, science, philosophy, popular culture, and feminist discourse, apprehensions of the End appear in images of cultural decline and urban chaos, forecasts of the end of history and ecological devastation, and visions of a new age of triumphant technology or a gender-free utopia. There is, Lee Quinby contends, a threatening “regime of truth” prevailing in the United States-and this regime, with its enforcement of absolute truth and morality, imperils democracy. In Anti-Apocalypse, Quinby offers a powerful critique of the millenarian rhetoric that pervades American culture. In doing so, she develops strategies for resisting its tyrannies.

Drawing on feminist and Foucauldian theory, Quinby explores the complex relationship between power, truth, ethics, and apocalypse. She exposes the ramifications of this relationship in areas as diverse as jeanswear magazine advertising, the Human Genome project, contemporary feminism and philosophy, texts by Henry Adams and Zora Neale Hurston, and radical democratic activism. By bringing together such a wide range of topics, Quinby shows how apocalypse weaves its way through a vast network of seemingly unrelated discourses and practices.

Tracing the deployment of power through systems of alliance, sexuality, and technology, Quinby reveals how these power relationships produce conflicting modes of subjectivity that create possibilities for resistance. She promotes a variety of critical stances-genealogical feminism, an ethics of the flesh, and “pissed criticism”-as challenges to apocalyptic claims for absolute truth and universal morality. Far-reaching in its implications for social and cultural theory as well as for political activism, Anti-Apocalypse will engage readers across the cultural spectrum and challenge them to confront one of the most subtle and insidious orthodoxies of our day.

The Uses of Reason in Times of Technical Mediation (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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2 January 2016

Dorrestijn, S.
The Uses of Reason in Times of Technical Mediation
(2015) Foundations of Science, 5 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1007/s10699-015-9443-x

Abstract
The art of living idiom suits well a practice-oriented approach in ethics of technology. But what remains or becomes of the functioning and use of reason in ethics? In reaction to the comments by Huijer this reply elaborates in more detail how Foucault’s art of living can be adapted for a critical contemporary ethics of technology. And the aesthetic-political rationality in Foucault’s ethics is compared with Wellner’s suggestions of holding on to the notion of code but with a new meaning. Foucault’s fourfold scheme of subjectivation and a distinction of “below and above reason” structure the argument. © 2015 The Author(s)

Author Keywords
Ethics; Foucault; Fourfold of subjectivation; Technical mediation; Uses of reason

Index Keywords
Social sciences; Ethics, Foucault, Fourfold of subjectivation, Technical mediation, Uses of reason; Philosophical aspects

Governing civil society: How literacy, education and security were brought together (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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1 January 2016

Stephen John Kelly, Governing civil society: How literacy, education and security were brought together, PhD Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2015

Abstract
This study investigates the representation and deployment of the categories literacy, education and security in government policy. Each of these categories is the foci of significant inquiry and occupies distinct spaces in academic literature. Taken independently, questions about education, literacy and security generate academic, political, public and private debate over concerns about the material effects of government policy and intervention. The question of how human subjects and civil society are discursively and non – discursively produced, are shared by investigations in education, literacy and security. The study questions how the categories of security, education and literacy, can be thought about together as related elements of a whole – of – government strategy in the production of civil society.

The key focus of this study was to examine the deployment of literacy and education by the Australian Government when expressing concerns about the security of the nation and its geopolitical interests. A Foucauldian conceptualisation of discourse and governmentality was used to form the theoretical basis for the analysis of political texts, while Foucault’s conceptions of genealogy and archaeology informed the epistemology and research design. The primary analytical focus was on texts selected from 1995 – 2007, although texts from the beginning of the Enlightenment, starting with Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1651 to the emergence of human security in 1994 were used to establish a network of relations and continuities in political discourse. Three key discursive fields are identified in the analysis: human capital, national identity and the government of human security. These fields are examined for the way dispersed government practices can be connected by a whole – of – government strategy. In addition key political statements were examined at length for whether they drew together realms of government activity into an intelligible statement about the role of government. In staging an analysis of diverse practices and key texts , the study was concerned to identify an emergent relationship between education, literacy and the government of security. The analysis questioned how representations of “problems” in political discourse produced consequences for human subjects and the nature of civil society. The examination of texts was concerned about the government of human life through the formation of cultural and geographical spaces; containment of uncertainty and complexity; the management of population through distribution of risk across social fields and the discursive and non – discursive responses to situations of perceived crisis. Assumptions about the nature of rule, liberalism, national identity and the effects of globalisation are examined for their use in government strategies that deploy constructs of literacy, education and security.

The study argues that the categories of education and literacy have been used in diverse ways in the production of national, social, economic and geopolitical security interests. As dialogue about security has intensified, rationalizations about the national interest have engaged notions of security leading to the legitimation, proliferation, re – contextualisation and implementation of a diverse set of policy instruments, incorporating literacy as a cultural and political tool engaging notions of capability, economic productivity, and cultural capital. The analysis suggests that government apparatuses have been strategically used in order to contain the rise of complex social forces and protect a set of homogenous cultural values. The purposes of education and uses of literacy are seen as instruments for the inscription of a coded set of values understood to be synonymous with neoliberal civil society. The incorporation of education and literacy into a whole – of – government security strategy can be seen as a feature of biopolitical government interested in governing the conduct of diverse and unpredictable populations.

May 1968’s Black Sheep (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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31 December 2015

Michael Scott Christofferson, May 1968’s Black Sheep, Interview with Daniel Zamora, Jacobin, 26 December 2015

André Glucksmann died last month. Why did he and so many other French intellectuals turn to the right after May 1968?

Extract
DZ: You underline in your book the strange episode of Michel Foucault’s review of Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers. This gushing review does not correspond with the idea that one has of Foucault today. The book was violently anticommunist and anti-revolutionary — even anti-Keynesian one could say. It seems astonishing that Foucault, that one classifies as on the Left, could support such a book. Foucault apparently said that Glucksmann’s earlier The Cook and the Cannibal was a “very important” book. How do you explain this?

MSC: First, I think it is important to understand that the 1970s was a decade in which the very definition of the “Left” was in debate. Foucault was no less hostile than Glucksmann to the traditional Left of the French Communist Party and the Union of the Left.

Foucault had concluded that the old idea of revolution as a seizure of state power was misguided because it did not address the disciplining micro-powers that constituted the subject and were at the origins of abhorrent institutions like the prison system. Fundamental change had to begin at this level of reality, Foucault believed.

These were ideas embraced by Glucksmann in the mid-1970s. More than that, they were ideas developed by Foucault during his association with the Maoist Gauche prolétarienne and the Prison Information Group that began as a Maoist initiative. Some of Foucault’s notions from this period, like the value he placed on plebian resistance, may indeed have been borrowed from Glucksmann and the Maoists.

In short, Foucault was no ivory tower theorist; rather he was in the midst of “the movement” alongside the Maoists and participated in many of the era’s preoccupations and illusions. Among the latter is his dismissal of the state, an institution that he saw as doing no good.

But, Foucault was a subtle thinker, and Glucksmann’s polemical The Master Thinkers was not. The Master Thinkers denounced the coercive state and, like The Cook and the Cannibal, argued that plebian resistance was the only viable politics.

The book went beyond his earlier condemnation of Marxism to argue that Western philosophy was essentially a philosophy of the state that justifies its power and thereby squashes plebian protest at its inception by making it inconceivable. Intellectuals, science, and reason are all complicit in the project of state domination. Against it, revolution is not an option because it only reinforces state power. The French Union of the Left was little more than a ruse of the state to increase its domination. The only defensible politics was the unreflective, self-interested action of plebian resistance.

Why would Foucault endorse this? One reason, most certainly, is his own dismissal of state-based politics and of the Union of the Left. Foucault, like Glucksmann, believed that the state was the enemy, and that the Union of the Left failed to understand that a progressive (a term the Foucault, the Nietzschean, did not use) politics could not be based on state power. Also, like Glucksmann, Foucault believed that the masses, acting on their own, would challenge disciplinary institutions and thereby bring about real, consequential change that would never come from the state, no matter who controlled it.

So, there were important convergences between Foucault and Glucksmann that reflected the period’s presuppositions and, in my view at least, point to important weaknesses in Foucault’s thought. If Glucksmann was rather more simplistic than Foucault, Foucault probably felt that The Master Thinkers, which praised him to the skies, was still useful as a vulgarization of his ideas in the intense ideological battle of 1977.

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Foucault Studies Number 20: December 2015: Civil Society

Clare O'Farrell

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30 December 2015

New Issue of Foucault Studies
Number 20: December 2015: Civil Society

All articles open access

fs-20

 Table of Contents

Editorial

Editorial PDF
Sverre Raffnsøe et al. 1-3

Special Issue on Civil Society

Introductory Note: Foucault and Civil Society PDF
Miikka Pyykkönen 4-7
Liberalism, Governmentality and Counter-Conduct; An Introduction to Foucauldian Analytics of Liberal Civil Society Notions PDF
Miikka Pyykkönen 8-35
Foucault, Ferguson, and civil society PDF
Samantha Ashenden 36-51
Haunted by the Rebellion of the Poor: Civil Society and the Racialized Problem of the (Non-)economic Subject PDF
Anna Selmeczi 52-75
Civil Society and Biopolitics in Contemporary Russia: The Case of Russian “Daddy-Schools” PDF
Pelle Åberg 76-95
Civil Society Organizations and Care of the Self: An Ethnographic Case Study on Emancipation and Participation in Drug Treatment PDF
Riikka Perälä 96-115

Section in collaboration with Foucault Circle

Introduction PDF
Margaret McLaren, Dianna Taylor 116-121
Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy PDF
Lynne Huffer 122-141
Foucault, Laughter, and Gendered Normalization PDF
Emily R. Douglas 142-154
Against Totalitarianism: Agamben, Foucault, and the Politics of Critique PDF
C. Heike Schotten 155-179

Articles

“Is power always secondary to the economy?” Foucault and Adorno on Power and Exchange PDF
Deborah Cook 180-198
Academic Subjectivities: Governmentality and Self-Development in Higher Education PDF
Fabian Cannizzo 199-217
Technologies of the Other: Renewing ‘empathy’ between Foucault and psychoanalysis. PDF
Andrea Lobb 218-235

Review Symposium

Introduction to Review Symposium: On Government of the Living PDF
Alan Milchman, Alan Rosenberg 236-242
The Christian Art of Being Governed PDF
Colin Gordon 243-265
Foucault’s On the Government of the Living PDF
David Konstan 266-276
“Spiritual Gymnastics”: Reflections on Michel Foucault’s On the Government of the Living 1980 Collège de France lectures PDF
Jeremy Carrette 277-290

Review Essay

Foucault’s Flirt? Neoliberalism, the Left and the Welfare State; a Commentary on La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault and Critiquer Foucault PDF
Magnus Paulsen Hansen 291-306

Book Reviews

Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault and Power: The Influence of Political Engagement on Theories of Power (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014), i-ix, 1-221, hb $120.00 (US), ISBN: 9781441180940 PDF
Ben Golder 307-311
Keith Ansell-Pearson (ed.), Nietzsche and Political Thought (New York: NY: Bloomsbury, 2013), 256, $120, ISBN: 978-1-4411-2933-8. PDF
Eric Guzzi 312-316
Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 256pp., $23.95 pb ISBN: 978-0-8223-9904-9. PDF
Martin Paul Eve 317-319
Claudio Colaguori (ed.), Security, Life and Death: Governmentality and Biopower in the Post 9/11 Era (Whitby: De Sitter Publications, 2013), $39.00, ISBN: 978-1-897160-81-7 PDF
Carlos Torres 320-323
P. Cesaroni and S. Chignola (eds.), La forza del vero; Un seminario sui Corsi di Michel Foucault al Collège de France (1981-1984) (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2013), 7-179, € 15.00, ISBN: 978-88-97522-54-6 PDF
Giovanni Maria Mascaretti 324-328
Hutter, Horst, and Eli Friedland (eds.), Nietzsche’s Therapeutic Teaching for Individuals and Culture (New York: NY: Bloomsbury, 2013), 264 pp., $ 130, 978-1-4411-2533-0. PDF
Eric Guzzi 329-333
John Protevi, Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2013), Pagination, Price, ISBN: 978-0-8166-8102-0. PDF
Mohammad-Ali Rahebi 334-338

Toolbox

Editorial: Toolbox PDF
Sverre Raffnsøe et al. 339
The Uncollected Foucault PDF
Stuart Elden 340-353

Exchanges

Editorial: Exchanges PDF
Sverre Raffnsøe et al. 354-355
Neoliberalism, Governmentality, Ethnography: A Response to Michelle Brady PDF
Mitchell Dean 356-366
Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethnography: A rejoinder PDF
Michelle Brady

An Archaeology of Adam Smith’s Epistemic Context (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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29 December 2015

Vigo de Lima, I., Guizzo, D.
An Archaeology of Adam Smith’s Epistemic Context
(2015) Review of Political Economy, 21 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2015.1082819

Abstract
Adam Smith played a key role in Foucault’s archaeology of political economy. This archaeology, which Foucault accomplished in The Order of Things, is the focus of this article. Foucault may have disagreed with the writings of the classical political economists but he widens our perspective through new possibilities of understanding. It is very illuminating to understand Smith’s thinking as following a discursive practice that economic thought shared with the knowledge of living beings (natural history) and language (grammar). Foucault’s archaeology highlights some ontological and epistemological conditions that shed light on some of the pillars of Smith’s thinking: the centrality of exchange, the division of labour and the labour theory of value. The proximity between Newton and Smith is also examined in ontological and epistemological terms which can be understood through an investigation of that interdiscursivity practice. Beyond testing Foucault’s considerations, our aim is to demonstrate their potential for the current scholarship of Smith’s works. Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge offers a range of elements that warrants greater analysis by historians of economic thought. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
Adam Smith; archaeology; Foucault; interdiscursive practice; Newtonian method; ontological and epistemological conditions

From self-regulation to regulation – An analysis of gambling policy reform in Finland (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 December 2015

Selin, J.
From self-regulation to regulation – An analysis of gambling policy reform in Finland
(2015) Addiction Research and Theory, 10 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.3109/16066359.2015.1102894

Abstract
Responsible gambling is a form of gambling industry self-regulation, covering the multiple ways of gambling operator’s promises to prevent and reduce gambling addiction. In Finland, where the gambling operators consider themselves to be among the most responsible operators in the world, the amendment of the Lotteries Act aimed to shift the balance from industry self-regulation to more stringent state regulation. Our study data consisted of operators’ annual reports, government documents related to the approval and addiction-potential assessment of new gambling products, and government documents related to the supervision of the marketing of gambling products.

Theoretically, the paper draws most notably on Michel Foucault’s analytics of liberal forms of government and political rationality. Discourse analysis and quantitative content analysis were used to analyse the data. The analysis focused on the interaction between the regulators and gambling operators, with special importance given to self-regulation’s role in the interaction. The aim was to find out whether or not the more stringent regulations have been successfully implemented, and what role self-regulation has played in the implementation. The results show that a partial shift has taken place due to the more stringent market regulations, but the operators’ self-regulation has hindered the shift in the context of the addiction-potential assessment of new gambling products. More critical discussion and research are called for if effective and credible self-regulatory measures against gambling addiction and other gambling-related problems are to be developed. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
Finland; gambling problems; government; policy implementation; regulation; responsible gambling; self-regulation

Negotiating domination and resistance: English language learners and Foucault’s Care of the Self in the context of English-only education (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 December 2015

Bondy, J.M.
Negotiating domination and resistance: English language learners and Foucault’s Care of the Self in the context of English-only education
(2015) Race Ethnicity and Education, 21 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2015.1095171


Abstract
This article explores the basis for resistance to the normalizing technologies associated with English-only legislation and resulting educational practices. The dominance of English-only education in US public schools has normalized English first language speakers and English language learning by appropriating the technology of language in order to become ‘Americanized.’ Because of the growing number of English language learners (ELL) in US public schools, it is important to understand how the normalizing educational practices and disciplinary power associated with English-only education also cultivate possibilities for resistance. I draw upon Foucault’s analytic care of the self to explore the space of English-only education by asking: ‘What alternatives to the normalization of ELL students might be mobilized for resistance?’ This analysis suggests that to shift from a normalized ‘American’ identity requires questioning the racist and nativist discourse on English-only education, and focusing attention on contradictory and multilayered notions of ‘American’. The article concludes with recommendations for teacher education on how to cultivate prospective teachers’ resistance to English-only education. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
care of the self; English language learners (ELL) students; English-only; language; race; resistance

Keep Calm and read Foucault with your friends

Clare O'Farrell

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25 December 2015

Best wishes for the festive season from Foucault News!

 
keep-calm-and-read-foucault-with-your-friends-1

You can purchase this poster and related merchandise from the Keep calm-o-matic website.

A Critical Use of Foucault’s Art of Living (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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24 December 2015

Huijer, M.
A Critical Use of Foucault’s Art of Living
(2015) Foundations of Science, 5 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1007/s10699-015-9441-z

Abstract
Foucault’s vocabulary of arts of existence might be helpful to problematize the entwinement of humans and technology and to search for new types of hybrid selves. However, to be a serious new ethical vocabulary for technology, this art of existence should be supplemented with an ongoing critical discourse of technologies, including a critical analysis of the subjectivities imposed by technologies, and should be supplemented with new medical and philosophical regimens for an appropriate use of technologies. © 2015 The Author(s)

Author Keywords
Care of the self; Ethical vocabulary; Foucault; Problematization; Technology

Index Keywords
Social sciences, Technology; Care of the self, Critical analysis, Critical discourse, Ethical vocabulary, Foucault, Problematization; Philosophical aspects

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