Foucault News

Examining uncertainty and trust among irrigators and regulatory bodies in the Murray-Darling Basin (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

27 July 2015

Bryant, L., George, J.
Examining uncertainty and trust among irrigators and regulatory bodies in the Murray-Darling Basin
(2015) International Journal of Water Resources Development, 14 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/07900627.2015.1028584

Abstract
Due to changing climate and water legislation in South Australia, Australia’s oldest water trust, the Renmark Irrigation Trust (RIT), and the community it serves have faced unprecedented changes in water allocations. Using participatory research methods, this article examines irrigators’ perceptions of risk, uncertainty and trust in relation to changing water legislation and drought. The social, cultural and regulatory relationship between irrigators and the RIT and the conditions in which trust is given are also explored. Foucault’s understanding of power provides the analytical context in which we examine how power and knowledge are constituted, negotiated and reconstructed at the local level to shape trust between individuals and the RIT. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
drought; Murray-Darling Basin; regulation; rural community; trust

Index Keywords
Drought, Risk perception; Analytical context, Murray-Darling Basin, Participatory research, Perceptions of risks, regulation, Regulatory relationships, Rural community, trust; Laws and legislation

Foucault’s Punitive Society: Visual Tactics of Marking as a History of the Present (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 July 2015

Phil Carney, Foucault’s Punitive Society: Visual Tactics of Marking as a History of the Present, British Journal of Criminology (2015) 55 (2): 231-247. First published online: January 7, 2015

doi: 10.1093/bjc/azu105

Abstract
Applying a form of genealogical method rooted in Nietzsche’s use of history, this article seeks an understanding of ‘marking’ punishments in our own mass-mediated culture. First, Foucault’s analysis of the punitive tactic of marking in his 1973 course, The Punitive Society, will be considered. Second, his concept of ‘virtual marking’ will be extended and applied to the case of the pitture infamanti in the early renaissance. Third, I will use these insights in a genealogical spirit in order to examine the rise of virtual marking in modernity. We will discover that Foucault was mistaken to tether marking punishments so closely to sovereign power. Instead, with certain antecedents in ancient Rome, virtual marking emerged in a largely ‘bourgeois’ society during the early renaissance and re-emerges in our own society of mass, photographic spectacle.

Key words

visual criminology
spectacle
culture
punishment
Foucault

Foucault and Human Rights: Seeking the Renewal of Human Rights Education

Clare O'Farrell

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24 July 2015

Michalinos Zembylas, Foucault and Human Rights: Seeking the Renewal of Human Rights Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Article first published online: 30 JUN 2015

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9752.12148

Abstract
This article takes up Foucault’s politics of human rights and suggests that it may constitute a point of departure for the renewal of HRE, not only because it rejects the moral superiority of humanism—the grounding for the dominant liberal framework of international human rights—but also because it makes visible the complexities of human rights as illimitable and as strategic tools for new political struggles. Enriching human rights critiques has important implications for HRE, precisely because these critiques prevent the dominance of unreflexive and unproductive forms of HRE that lead toward a declarationalist, conservative and uncritical approach. It is argued that Foucault’s critical affirmation of human rights—that is, an approach which is neither a full embrace nor a total rejection—provides a critique that can be disruptive to the conventional HRE approach and creates openings that might renew HRE, both politically and pedagogically.

The paradox of the ‘under-performing professor’

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

23 July 2015

This is the society of control outlined by Deleuze (1990). Foucauldian (sequential) disciplinary regimes (Morrish, 2011) give way to ones in which, just as one hurdle is surmounted, another, higher one presents itself, with the end point always at the far horizon. We find this reflected in management documents on performance review with a lexicon of journeys, milestones and checkpoints, but the individual is never allowed to arrive at the promised reward. Gatekeeping measures such as the imposition of perpetual training, perpetual review of publications or multiple-staged applications for promotion, must be endured, even to participate.

Academic Irregularities

This post has been inspired by an apparent declaration of hostilities towards professors in a number of universities. The weapon of choice has been performance management, and some aspects of audit culture have been liberated from their usual role of absorbing academics’ time to becoming instruments of punishment.

In universities we have seen a deprofessionalization of academic staff which has manifest itself in a number of ways. In, many areas, disciplinary groups have been broken up and atomized across the university, in response to management‘s fear of ‘silos’. In others, productive interdisciplinary groups have been disrupted by reorganizations which have obstructed innovation. In at least one famous case, an entire centre was vandalized (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 2002) because its members refused to surrender to the neoliberal commandment that research must be a competitive and self-important process.

The one thing that academics were…

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Alex Lee, Formalized Epistemes: Foucault’s Incomplete Order of History (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 July 2015

Alex Lee, Formalized Epistemes: Foucault’s Incomplete Order of History, Entropy January 9, 2015

Review of The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault

Update October 2025: Link is to the archived page on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

To answer why do things make sense, in The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault starts by drawing historical periods of sense making. Because he cannot account for why change has happened to determine how our sense making operates, he instead presents a view that historically-speaking sense making comes in stages.

This trajectory is threefold: in the sixteenth century and before we had resemblance as the episteme of knowing. This past heuristic did not distinguish as strictly between valid and invalid modes as our current epoch of sense making might. For example, today astrology isn’t considered valid but modern scientific formulation is. For the previous the seventeenth century, Foucault writes:

The world is covered with signs that must be deciphered, and those signs, which reveal resemblances and affinities, are themselves no more than forms of similitude. To know must therefore be to interpret: to find a way from the visible mark to that which is being said by it and which, without that mark, would lie like unspoken speech, dormant within things.

This is another way of saying that before the Classical era, knowledge was the ability to name and relate signs to one another heuristically. Likewise, our knowledge about manipulating the material world was through access to those named marks. As Foucault adds “This is why the plants that represent the head, or the eyes, or the heart, or the liver, will possess an efficacity in regard to that organ; this is why the animals themselves will react to the marks that designate them.” This is an understanding of the world in terms of the names of things, or what we might dismiss as interacting with the world through wordplay. We can draw a parallel with how the secret Agent Sterling Archer in the animated TV show “Archer” resolves his conflicts through wordplay with other characters. The application of discursive meaning on the material world reflects the violent process of discourse alignment through his aggressive puns, and seemingly non-sequitur connections, which are always revealed to have an interior logic that is respectful to the reality of the Other (be this other a steak, or a wild ocelot, or a gigantic St. Bernard). Often, Archer’s wordplay slides between his fulfillment of his desires, and as a kind of justification to his mother or to mother figures (the men around him also all answer to mother figures, or at least other women in the office). Nonetheless, violence and disobedience coexist in his ability to get what he wants. In other words, minimally justifying his spy actions from his domineering mother is simultaneous with his hermeneutics. In pre-Classical applications of knowledge, this is akin to Archer being a sorcerer, to needing to say all the magic words to change material and social situations to hide his indiscretions.

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Advertisement for Dean of Education Faculty, QUT (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 July 2015

Editor: The Faculty I am located in (Education, Queensland University of Technology) is currently advertising for a new Dean. See this link for details.

Governmentality in the East (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 July 2015

Partha Chatterjee, Governmentality in the East, lecture delivered 27 April, 2015, at the University of California, Berkeley.

There is a complete audio of the lecture on the site (Program in Critical Theory)

Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality as described in Security, Territory, Population is entirely West European. What would a genealogy of modern state practices look like in a former colonial country in Asia?

Looking at India, one finds that early governmental practices, including those of rational bureaucracy, rule of law and the knowledge of populations, were motivated mainly by raison d’État: it was the creation and maintenance of the sovereign power of British colonial authority that was the objective. In the 19th century, notions of liberal governmentality were introduced by officials influenced by utilitarian ideas to make Indian society the target of policy in order to improve productivity as well as morality. Indian nationalists in the 20th century rejected colonial governmentality and demanded full rights of sovereignty over the state. However, the postcolonial state retained the colonial apparatus of security based on raison d’État while expanding liberal governmentality to include an agenda of welfare of the people. In the more recent period, the spread of governmentality alongside the politics of electoral representation has produced in India forms of claim-making and resistance that go well beyond Foucault’s framework. (Chatterjee)

Partha Chatterjee is a political theorist and historian. He divides his time between Columbia University and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he was the Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of more than twenty books, monographs and edited volumes and is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. He as awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize for 2009 for outstanding achievements in the field of Asian studies. His books include: The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (2012), Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (2011), The Politics of the Governed: Considerations on Political Society in Most of the World (2004); A Princely Impostor? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar of Bhawal (2002); The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (1993), and Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1993).

Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization Inside the Factory of the Future (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 July 2015

Alan McKinlay, Philip Taylor Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization: Inside the Factory of the Future, Routledge Research in Employment Relations, 2014

About the Book
This book traces how abstract managerial ideas about maximizing production flexibility and employee freedom were translated into concrete, day-to-day practices at the Motorola plant in East Kilbride, UK. Using eyewitness accounts, the book describes how employees dealt with the increased freedom Motorola promoted amongst its employees, how employees adapted to managerial changes, specifically the elimination of large-scale management, and where the ‘managerless’ system came under strain. This book will be of essential reading for researchers, graduate students, and undergraduates interested in the areas of management studies, human resource management, and organizational studies, among others.

Table of Contents

1. The Will to Empower: Governing the Workplace 2. Working for the Yankee Dollar 3. Greenfield Site, Green Labour? 4. ‘Not just Another Number’: Empowerment, Discipline and Teamworking Freedom 5. Confession, Discipline and Freedom 6. ‘Just Like Any Other Factory’

Alan McKinlay is Professor of Human Resource Management, Newcastle University Business School, UK. He has written extensively about long-run developments in industrial relations and work organization. He has contributed to journals such as Business History and Organization, among others. His most recent edited book is Creative Labour Working in the Creative Industries, with Chris Smith, which has gone into a second edition.

Philip Taylor is Professor of Human Resource Management at Strathclyde University, UK. He is a world-leading expert on management strategy and work organization in call centres. He has written articles for the International Journal of Human Resource Management, Industrial Relations Journal, Human Relations, New Technology, and Work and Employment journals.He was the co-author of The Meaning of Work in the New Economy and co-edited Future of Worker Representation.

The new other Victorians: the success (and failure) of queer theory in nineteenth-century British studies (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 July 2015

Kaye, R.A.
The new other Victorians: the success (and failure) of queer theory in nineteenth-century British studies
(2014) Victorian Literature and Culture, 17 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1017/S1060150314000291

Abstract
Much of the critical writing on Queer Theory and Sexuality Studies in a Victorian context over the last decade or so has been absorbing, exploring, complicating, and working under the burden of the influence of Michel Foucault’s theoretical writings on erotic relations and identity. The first volume of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978), in fact, had begun with a gauntlet thrown down before Victorian Studies, a chapter-long critique of Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians (1966), a work that had offered an entirely new and at the time, quite bold avenue of exploring nineteenth-century culture – namely, through the pornographic imagination that Marcus taxonomized with precise, clinical flair as a “pornotopia” in which “all men . . . are always infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexhaustibly with sap or both. Everyone is always ready for everything” (276). In Foucault’s telling, however, Marcus demonstrated a theoretically impoverished faith in Freudian models of “repression” in Marcus’s examination of “underground” Victorian sexualities. It was Marcus’s reliance on the “repressive fallacy,” his conviction that there existed a demarcated spatial and psychic Victorian counter-world that The History of Sexuality had so forcefully undermined.

Michel Foucault and the administering of lives (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 July 2015

Mennicken, Andrea and Miller, Peter (2014) Michel Foucault and the administering of lives. In: Adler, Paul S., du Gay, Paul, Morgan, Glen and Reed, Michael, (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory, and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 11-38. ISBN 9780199671083

Further info

Abstract
This chapter suggests that Michel Foucault is a nuisance for scholars of organizations, albeit a productive one. Foucault disavowed the study of organizations, yet his work was fundamentally concerned with the administering of lives, a central concern of scholars of organizations. The chapter explores this tension by examining four displacements that Foucault sought to effect: first, a move from asking ‘why’ type questions to ‘how’ type questions; second, a concern with subjectivity that discards the ethical polarization of subject and object in favour of an analysis of the historically varying ways in which the capacities and attributes of subjects are constituted; third, a focus on practices rather than organizations, and a concern to analyse sets or assemblages of practices in terms of how they emerge and how they are stabilized over time; fourth, a focus on rationalities in the plural. It then examines the ‘Foucault effect’ in organization studies.