Foucault News

The Writer Raymond Roussel and His Legacy, at Galerie Buchholz (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

20 August 2015

RAYMOND ROUSSEL

Galerie Buchholz
17 East 82nd Street, Manhattan
Through Aug. 29 2015
via Review: The Writer Raymond Roussel and His Legacy, at Galerie Buchholz – The New York Times.

The German dealer Daniel Buchholz, long a fixture on the contemporary art scene in Cologne and Berlin, has opened a gallery in Manhattan and, for his debut show, given us something wonderful that we haven’t had before: a retrospective of the French writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933).

Born into the Parisian beau monde, as a child Roussel had Marcel Proust for a neighbor; as an adult, he befriended Jean Cocteau when the two were patients in drug rehab. Rich, gay, habitually solitary, Roussel developed a literary mode in poetry, fiction and drama based on linguistic ingenuity and the use of super-realism to lift off into fantasy. Although his work was met with public scorn at the time — Roussel was crushed and died by suicide — it has been hugely influential to artists and writers since. Marcel Duchamp and Michel Foucault claimed him as a liberating hero. Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell revered him. The poet John Ashbery has written brilliantly about him.

This show — organized by Mr. Buchholz, the art historian Christopher Müller and the Roussel scholar François Piron — is an archival exercise in literary and art-world ephemera. It pieces together Roussel’s elusive private life from rare surviving images (photographs of his adored mother; a unisex childhood portrait of the writer) and personal effects (treasured editions of Jules Verne novels; a cookie that he saved from a landmark literary lunch and enshrined like a relic). It traces the path of his writing career through often self-financed publications and calamitous stage presentations. And it concludes with a section demonstrating his continuing influence, on Mr. Ashbery’s poetry and collages, and on artists like Zoe Beloff, Lucy McKenzie and Henrik Olesen.

The selection is scrupulously annotated, and every scrap of information is worth reading. (Although a contemporary art specialist, Mr. Buchholz comes from a background in antiquarian book selling.) If this show were at the Museum of Modern Art, you’d pay to see it and still feel rewarded. At Galerie Buchholz, it’s a free introductory welcome to a new space, which should feel strongly encouraged to enliven New York with comparable offerings in seasons ahead.

Governmentality, Neoliberalism, Economy: strategies for critiques of power (7 – 9 December 2015) | CBS – Copenhagen Business School

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

19 August 2015

Governmentality, Neoliberalism, Economy: strategies for critiques of power
(7 – 9 December 2015)
CBS – Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

PhD School
Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies
Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy

Faculty

Mitchell Dean, Professor of Public Governance, CBS
Stuart Elden, Professor, Monash University
Ute Tellmann, Fakultät Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, Universität Hamburg
Kaspar Villadsen, Professor (mso), Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy, CBS, Denmark
Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Post.Doc. Scholar, Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy, CBS, Denmark

Course coordinator
Kaspar Villadsen and Mitchell Dean

Prerequisites

Only PhD students can participate in the course.

The course requires the submission of a short paper that deals with conceptual problems or analytical designs in relation to Foucauldian inspired/governmentality studies. Furthermore, papers that apply Foucauldian concepts to empirical problems in a variety of domains are welcomed. The paper should state the theme and the analytical strategy of the PhD project and it should be approx. 5 pages. In the paper, the PhD student should state his/her main analytical challenge/concern at his/her current stage in the project.

Papers must be in English. DEADLINE is 2 December 2015.

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that the student attends the whole course.

Aim

The course will provide the participants with:

a) An updated introduction to key analytical concepts in the governmentality literature, and the potentials and limits of these concepts will be discussed

b) Possibilities for supplementing the governmentality approach with other analytical resources will be discussed. and

c) a discussion of Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism and his understanding of the economy

In brief, the course aims to provide participants with a thorough understanding of the governmentality framework, that is, its analytical possibilities, its current status, and its possible directions of development with a particular emphasis on contemporary debates on neoliberalism and the economy.

Overview

Over the last 20 years, post-Foucauldian “governmentality studies” have come to growing prominence. These studies have been effective in critically analysing new types of liberal government, in particular by demonstrating ‘the active side of laissez faire’. They describe how the motto of ‘pulling back the state’ has been accompanied by a series of governmental strategies and technologies aimed at shaping institutions and subjects in particular ways. Perhaps most noticeably, they have presented a diagnosis of a proliferation of regimes of enterprise and accounting in new and surprising places. But a wide range of other domains have been subjected to governmentality analysis spanning from genetic screening and risk calculation, new crime prevention strategies, to health promotion by self-responsibilisation. In this respect the concepts in governmentality studies continue to constitute effective tools for critical social analysis.

Nevertheless, in recent years critical objections have been raised against the governmentality approach. It has been noted by some observers that the Foucauldian and post-structuralist language, originally used for critical academic purposes, seems to be increasingly appropriated by ‘the powers’ that were the object of such critique. Most notably, this point has been voiced (although in different versions) by Zizek, Boltanski, and Hardt & Negri. These thinkers suggest that a post-structural ’politics of difference’ increasingly seems to be an integral part of the ways, in which institutions and companies organise themselves. Contemporary liberal ways of governing have begun to speak for the dissolution of binary essentials, the destabilisation of rigid power structures, the creation of space for the subject’s self-transforming work upon itself, and so on. In light of this development, we need to think of how to revitalise the Foucauldian concepts of critique/criticism or whether we must push a critical perspective beyond Foucault. A central theme of the PhD course is the search for effective analytical strategies for critique of power (some perhaps less noticed) in the works of Foucault and other writers within and outside the governmentality tradition.

The course gives importance to the need for contextualizing both the concepts that we use for making analysis, both in terms of being aware of how concepts emerge in a particular historical-political context that shape them. We shall hence discuss how to do intellectual history on recent thinkers, including Foucault himself. Foucault’s most intensive reflection on political questions was in the 1970s. Given that the key source of his reflections here are lectures and interviews, we should attend to this reflection less as elaborated theory and more as a kind of performance in a definite context with specific interlocutors. A Foucault very different from his Anglo-American decontextualized reception as a theorist of omnipresent micro-powers emerges if we do so. There are of contemporary events and political currents: European terrorism, state socialism, French Maoism, the Iranian Revolution, the prospects of a Socialist government in France, etc. But there are specific interlocutors including his assistants (Kriegel, Ewald), seminar participants (Pasquino, Procacci, Rosanvallon), colleagues (Donzelot, Castel, Deleuze), auditors, political fractions such as the Second Left and Italian autonomist Marxists. If statements should be read in terms of what they do as much as what they mean, then the diverse trajectories of these thinkers are also relevant to reading Foucault’s political thought.

Teaching style

The course will use lectures given by specialists in the field, round table discussions, and presentation of papers from PhD students. Participation in the course requires a paper with an outline of PhD project or parts of the project. See more details above.

Enroll no later than
Wednesday, 28 October, 2015

Jiang, M. Managing the micro-self: the governmentality of real name registration policy in Chinese microblogosphere (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 August 2015

Jiang, M.
Managing the micro-self: the governmentality of real name registration policy in Chinese microblogosphere
(2015) Information Communication and Society, 18 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2015.1060723

Abstract
This paper investigates the real name registration (RNR) policy introduced by Chinese authorities in 2011 to regulate its vibrant microblogosphere by encouraging users to manage their ‘micro-self’. Foucault’s concept of governmentality is adopted to understand how the Chinese state ‘governs at a distance’ its colossal microblog population through technologies of the state and technologies of the self. We provide a critical case study of the governmentality of the RNR policy in Chinese microblogosphere by detailing the broad range of user experiences based on 22 in-depth interviews conducted in 2012 and 2013 with users and weibo editors. Shedding a new light on the practices of Chinese Internet regulation through the perspective of governmentality, we challenge the notion of the Chinese state as an omnipotent agent, contest popular media’s portrayal of the Chinese microblog subject as either obedient or resistant, and foreground the importance of Internet firms in mediating the negotiation between the state and users. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
anonymity; censorship; Chinese Internet; governmentality; identity; microblog; policy; real name registration; self-expression; Sina; Tencent; Weibo

A Foucauldian analysis of literary text selection practices and educational policies in Ontario, Canada (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 August 2015

Greig, C.J., Holloway, S.M.
A Foucauldian analysis of literary text selection practices and educational policies in Ontario, Canada
(2015) Discourse, 14 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2015.1043239

Abstract
Like schools, curricula are socially constructed and constituted within broader social, political, and historical relations of power, powerfully shaping students’ beliefs and attitudes about themselves and their relationship toward the world. In light of this, the importance of literature selection cannot be overstated. School-sanctioned texts often provide the core curriculum, and secondary school English teachers rely on them heavily. The self-regulatory practices a teacher engages in will shape not only how the teacher begins to understand the self, but also works to construct an ‘appropriate’ teacher identity. Using a Foucauldian theoretical lens, this paper draws upon findings from a synthesis of school board policies and interviews with English teachers and department heads in Ontario, Canada, to explore the discursive practices that shape literary text selection. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
curricula; discourse; Foucault; literary text selection; literature; power

Beyond power/knowledge—developing a framework for understanding knowledge ‘flow’ in international social work (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 August 2015

Hardy, M., Jobling, H.
Beyond power/knowledge—developing a framework for understanding knowledge ‘flow’ in international social work
(2015) European Journal of Social Work, 18 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/13691457.2015.1043240

Abstract
How are different ‘forms’ of knowledge developed, transmitted and institutionalised in social work? Foucault’s concept of ‘power/knowledge’ famously enabled us to understand such developments via the evolving methodological approach he variously referred to as archaeology, genealogy and governmentality. In this paper, we will use this and other conceptual resources as the basis for advocating an adapted and flexible methodological framework which constitutes knowledge as local, situated and embedded, but also dynamic, interactive and ‘flowing’ between actors, institutions and jurisdictions at an international level. The model has the potential for integrating two distinct cross-disciplinary approaches to understanding the operation of power within society: first, ‘an analytics of government’, specified by Dean as particularly useful in addressing ‘how’ questions and second, the potentially complementary approach known as historical–political sociology which seeks to integrate explanatory and descriptive causal formulations. Together, these act as a basis for extending Foucault’s formulation of power/knowledge to accommodate the dynamic nature of trans-disciplinary, intercontinental knowledge flow. We will examine the potential relevance and utility of the model using the example of how one ‘form’ of knowledge, in this case, policy knowledge, has informed the development of a particular approach to social work practice—supervised community treatment in mental health—in various Western jurisdictions over the last few decades. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
community treatment orders; governmentality; historical–political sociology; knowledge; mental health; social work

Pawns, pirates or peacemakers: Fishing boats in the inter-Korean maritime boundary dispute and ambivalent governmentality (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 August 2015

Song, A.M.
Pawns, pirates or peacemakers: Fishing boats in the inter-Korean maritime boundary dispute and ambivalent governmentality
(2015) Political Geography, 48, pp. 60-71.

DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.06.002

Abstract
Extractive activities such as oil drilling, mining and fishing often appear implicated in international maritime boundary disputes. While natural resources’ crucial role as a catalyst for conflict has been well-noted in the literature, such an approach has typically assumed a contextual and passive position of natural resources with little political agency for altering the dynamics of a confrontation. This paper provides an alternative perspective in which resource activities constitute a willful agent that works in part to govern the course of the boundary dispute. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I look at how South Korean fishing activities near a disputed maritime border between the two Koreas, called the Northern Limit Line, may be imbued with intentionality representing an indirect arm of the state’s geopolitical agenda. Mobilizing the realist narrative of an immovable border and the mundane tactics of education sessions and at-sea radio communication, I suggest that the South Korean government is seeking to create subjects in fishers to reinforce the state objectives of boundary legitimization and defense of claimed waters. The analysis, however, also demonstrates an ambivalent nature of governmentality, with fishers muddling the state interventions through their own conduct and rationale. The South Korean government thus faces a delicate task of managing the fishing operation vis-à-vis the boundary dispute. Taking the seemingly innocuous resource activity such as fishing to the center stage of power relations, this paper also tables one way of engaging with maritime boundaries, one of the understudied domains in political geography. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd.

Author Keywords
Ambivalent governmentality; Government-at-a-distance; Korea; Maritime boundary dispute; Northern Limit Line; Small-scale fisheries

Index Keywords
boundary dispute, fishing community, geopolitics, governance approach, marine resource, maritime boundary, political geography, power relations, territorial delimitation; North Korea, South Korea

Governmentality as critique: the diversification and regulation of the Australian housing sector (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 August 2015

Jacobs, K., Travers, M.
Governmentality as critique: the diversification and regulation of the Australian housing sector
(2015) International Journal of Housing Policy, 19 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/14616718.2015.1046209

Abstract
As the housing affordability crisis in Australia deepens, policy-makers have expended considerable resources in establishing new regulatory practices to enhance the role of the community housing sector. Ostensibly, the rationale for a new tier of regulation is to assure potential institutional investors (e.g. pension funds, investment trusts and banks) that community housing organisations are accountable and safe places to invest. Our paper adopts an alternative reading of diversity and housing regulation, drawing upon the governmentality thesis advanced by Michel Foucault in an empirical study about the early stages of regulation of affordable housing providers. Amongst our claims are: first, that policies to diversify and regulate the housing sector constitute a radical political project to commercialise welfare provision and second, these policies are likely to generate additional bureaucratic burdens and close off possibilities for progressive reform. The paper also considers the value of the governmentality approach for critical investigations in the field of housing. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
Australia; Foucault; governmentality; housing policy; regulation

Interview with Paul Rabinow (2008)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 August 2015

An interview of the American anthropologist Paul Rabinow about his life and work in Morocco and in the philosophy of anthropology and science studies. Filmed by Alan Macfarlane on 31st October 2008. Edited by Sarah Harrison. Generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Includes a transcript.


Created:	2011-04-12 14:55
Collection:	Film Interviews with Leading Thinkers
Publisher:	University of Cambridge
Copyright:	Professor Alan Macfarlane

Here is the section from the transcript on Foucault:

10:12:12 When I went to California as a professor in 1978, I had heard of Foucault before but had never been very interested in his work; Dreyfus, John Searle and I talked a lot and in my first year at Berkeley, Dreyfus and Searle were giving a seminar on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida; Dreyfus and Searle interpreted Foucault as a structuralist which I didn’t think was correct; Dreyfus and I discussed the issue at length and decided to write an article together, I began to convince him that what he said should be nuanced; at that point someone mentioned that Foucault was coming to Stanford (near Berkeley) to give a lecture;

I suggested calling him and asking him to talk with us; Foucault agreed and we went to fetch him; Dreyfus tape records everything that he does as he claims not to have a memory; we talked for eight hours that first day; basically, Foucault felt isolated in Paris; this is very common in France where the boundaries of who you can talk to and confide in are rigorously policed, isolating people more the higher they go; Foucault was suffering from this half-voluntary half-involuntary control; so there we were, neither Dreyfus nor I were particularly interested in Foucault’s work or had any stakes in the matter, but we thought he was confused about some things and needed to clarify his method, Foucault responded extraordinarily well; it was a gift for him to actually engage in discussion without being so guarded;

he said once that if in Paris you said that you were talking about the Enlightenment, the one thing that everyone would be sure of was the Enlightenment was not the real subject; in Berkeley and in the US more generally he found the opposite is the case; the lack of Parisian sophistication pleased him, we developed a strong intellectual connection; my then wife and I became friends with Foucault and his partner, Daniel Defert, and spent a year and a half in Paris (1980-81);

during this period Foucault was returning to Berkeley regularly, this lasted until his untimely death (1984); during the course of our discussions the structuralism issue fell away, and another way of putting together rigorous concept work with detailed empirical work began to be exciting to me; that is what I like about anthropology and why I am an anthropologist with philosophic interests, but very few if any philosophers combine the two; since what he and I were doing was never the same, it was possible to work alongside him and also to be independent at the same time; This was a tremendously important turning point for me; I didn’t want to go back to Morocco, I was exploring the possibility of working in Vietnam; through discussions with Foucault, I began to formulate a conceptual framework which would be a kind of archaeological history of the present; I continue to think he was a great thinker but also that what he did had its limits;

much of the Foucault literature I find wrong or boring, especially the British governmentality work; as the gradual publication of his lectures indicate many unexpected things continue to be opened up by Foucault; like McKeon, he was a great influence but it was always impossible for me to be a disciple, and that is the position that I want; Foucault also wanted people to govern themselves; Bourdieu wanted you to be part of his state and his party, Foucault hated that; that suited me so I have continued with that as one of the things that I do; personally, Foucault was a very unhappy, deeply private man; he was extremely kind, and very attentive to small human things; at that level he was comfortable to be around; on the other hand you always had the sense that he was somewhere else; he was quasi-suicidal during these years, deeply in the process of changing his thought, and his relationship with Daniel was not good;

if you buy the argument that with Heidegger and Wittgenstein traditional Western metaphysics was over, then those people who wanted to continue to do philosophy or to lead a philosophic life had to figure out a different form; Richard Rorty tried and didn’t know how to do it because most philosophers can only do traditional philosophy even though they know that that tradition is over; Foucault figured out a different way of leading the philosophic life which included a Nietzschean, but also anthropological, attention to detail; in his case art and historical archaeological detail, but he spent his life not arguing concepts with people but working through material;

reading Foucault’s books and some of the lectures, their engagement with detailed historical context, with options and constraints, with settings and milieu, that combination of attention to detail combined with a passion for conceptual clarification, seems to me unique; with Dumont, you knew what his theory was, similarly with Bourdieu, theory and examples; Foucault developed a very different relation between theory and examples; I know he didn’t have any theory; this is in the tradition of concepts, experiments and results which then become problems; for me his was a philosophic life and, in many ways, a deeply anthropological life, always engaged outwards while thinking all the time; hence one needs to read his books, and particularly the recent lectures, as examples of experiences and experiments rather than theory or doctrine.

New ‘archive’ category on Foucault News

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 August 2015

Note from Editor: I often come across interesting material on Foucault that has been around for some time, that either predates this blog or that I have missed.

I have decided, therefore, to start a new category on Foucault News for these items. Postings of this material will be occasional, clearly labelled ‘Archive’ and will be posted at a different time of day from my normal news posts.

Unpacking Foucault (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 August 2015

Unpacking Foucault

The Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Directed by Professor Bernard E. Harcourt, Set to Host a Major Series of Seminars Reassessing the Famed French Philosopher

Media Contact: Public Affairs, 212-854-2650 or publicaffairs@law.columbia.edu

New York, August 6, 2015—More than 30 years after his death, French philosopher Michel Foucault continues to influence contemporary thinkers with his critical explorations of criminal justice, power, sexuality, surveillance, and numerous other issues.

Now his work will be the subject of a yearlong series hosted by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought and The Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. The series—Foucault 13/13—will cover Foucault’s 13 landmark lectures at the Collège de France and will convene distinguished scholars from across a diverse range of disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy, art criticism, political theory, and history.

Columbia Law School Professor Bernard E. Harcourt, director of the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, will moderate the series along with Professor Jesús R. Velasco, chair of Columbia University’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. Harcourt is a noted Foucault scholar who has edited the philosopher’s work in French and in English. He recently oversaw the publication of the last of the Collège de France lectures to be collected, Théories et institutions pénales. 1971-1972 (published in May 2015).

“With the publication now of the entire series of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, it is time to read them chronologically to grasp the overall project of those lectures, to analyze the development of the critical ideas, and to continue to excavate our own research avenues, building on Foucault’s,” Harcourt said.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, left, is the subject of a new seminar series,
Foucault 13/13, created and moderated by Professor Bernard E. Harcourt, right,
director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.

The seminar series will be structured as conversations among Columbia law faculty, including professors Katherine Franke, Jeremy Kessler, and Kendall Thomas, Columbia faculty from the Arts and Sciences, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Etienne Balibar, Partha Chatterjee, Axel Honneth, and Alondra Nelson, and guests including Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Achille Mbembe, Paul Rabinow, Pierre Rosanvallon, and other leading theorists from around the world.

The Foucault 13/13 series is also sponsored by the Maison Française, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures.

“The Center for Contemporary Critical Thought has curated an extraordinary series for this coming year–a true intellectual “happening”–and I very much look forward to participating,” said Nelson, professor of sociology and gender studies and Dean of Social Science at Columbia University. “I certainly hope to be on hand for the entire seminar series if I can manage to get a seat!”

The series will be open to Columbia faculty, fellows and students in addition to faculty and students from other New York universities. The seminars will also be webcast for the public. View the complete schedule of seminars.

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