Foucault News

Villadsen, Kaspar Heidegger and Foucault on modern technology: does Gestell ‘correspond perfectly’ to dispositif? (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

18 September 2024

Villadsen, Kaspar
Heidegger and Foucault on modern technology: does Gestell ‘correspond perfectly’ to dispositif? (2024) Journal of Political Power

DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2024.2390408

Abstract
This article compares Heidegger and Foucault on modern technology, taking its clue from Agamben’s claim that Gestell and dispositif are ‘perfectly corresponding’ concepts. So far, however, the task of a detailed comparison of Gestell and dispositif remains unresolved. At first glance, the two terms appear compatible, designating how we moderns began objectifying nature as well as ourselves as manipulatable raw material. Significant for the discussion is Heidegger’s and Foucault’s contrasting readings of Nietzsche – the ‘last metaphysician’ versus ‘the first genealogist’ which present modern technology as humanity’s nearly inescapable condition, or as ‘functionally indeterminant’, evolving in multiple, intersecting, and unexpected ways. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
dispositif; Foucault; Gestell; Heidegger; modern technology

Jordi Collet-Sabé & Stephen J. Ball, The School Is Irredeemable: Proposing Discomfort for a Different Future for Education (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 September 2024

Jordi Collet-Sabé & Stephen J. Ball, (2024). The School Is Irredeemable: Proposing Discomfort for a Different Future for Education. In: Beasy, K., Maguire, M., te Riele, K., Towers, E. (eds) Innovative School Reforms. Education, Equity, Economy, vol 11. Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64900-4_11

Abstract
The chapter argues that the modern school is an ‘intolerable’ institution. Contrary to the sensibilities of educational research that look for more and/or better schooling as a way of making education more equal and more inclusive, our position is against the modern European school as an institution of normalisation and exclusion within which equality and inclusion are impossible. Using Foucault’s strategy of reversal and the commons approach as a critical mirror, we propose the urgency of creating times and spaces of discomfort as a commoning activity in education. We thus ask fundamental questions of both the modern episteme and prevailing truths of education; ourselves as modern educators; and schools as places of persistent failure and irredeemable injustices. The reversal strategy and the commons as critical tools are used to create discomforts and to re-politicise, question and unlearn the current ethics of extinction. This opens up new possibilities for the ethics of continuance; a new order of things that can allow for new grammars of living, new subjectivities, new forms of educating. Finally, the chapter offers some sketches of what a new education could look like. That is, an education understood as self-formation, as the care of the self, others and the world as a political activity more related to ethics than to truth.

Clare O’Farrell, Michel Foucault: The Unconscious of History and Culture (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 September 2024

Clare O’Farrell, Michel Foucault: The Unconscious of History and Culture. In Foot, S & Partner, N (Eds.) The SAGE handbook of historical theory. Sage Publications, 2013, pp. 162-182.

Open access at the link above

Extract
The French thinker, Michel Foucault (1926-84), is noted for his extensive and controversial forays into the historical disciplines. When his work first began to circulate in the 1950s and 1960s, historians did not quite know what to make of it and philosophers resented the appearance of what they saw as the importation of the tedium of concrete events into the pure untainted realm of ideas. If these responses to his work remain alive and well decades after Foucault’s death, the uptake of his work has become far more complex. To restrict ourselves to the discipline of history here: if one very visible and vocal camp of historians remains deeply ambivalent about his work, this merely disguises the fact that a far larger contingent of historians of all kinds – not just those located in history departments – use his ideas quite unremarkably as they go about their daily business. Further, in areas of specialist institutional history and the history of the professions, Foucault has had a wide-ranging impact. Indeed, he has made the very idea of a history possible in some of these domains – where previously they had existed in an ahistorical limbo. He has also done much to historicise the sciences and to throw into question their claim to an unchanging and superior truth which sets the benchmark for all other forms of knowledge.
[…]

CFP: 23rd annual meeting of the Foucault Circle (2024-5)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 September 2024

CALL FOR PAPERS
The twenty-third annual meeting of the Foucault Circle

Stockholm, Sweden
June 26-29, 2025

We seek submissions for papers on any aspect of Foucault’s work, as well as studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking.

Paper submissions require an abstract of no more than 750 words. All submissions should be formatted as a “.doc” or “.docx” attachment, prepared for anonymous review, and sent via email to the attention of program committee chair Daniel Schultz (schultdj@whitman.edu) on or before December 20, 2024. Indicate “Foucault Circle submission” in the subject heading. Program decisions will be announced during the week of January 20, 2025.

We expect that the conference will begin Thursday morning and will conclude around lunch time on Sunday. Presenters will have approximately 40 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined; papers should be a maximum of 3500 words (20-25 minutes reading time). Please note that conference presentations will be in person and in English.

Logistical information about lodging, transportation, and other arrangements will be available after the program has been announced.

For more information about the Foucault Circle, please see our website:
http://www.foucaultcircle.org
or contact our Coordinator, Edward McGushin:
emcgushin@stonehill.edu

Civitarese, G., Distel, E. “Thus far and no further”: Inquiry into a dreamless society (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 September 2024

Civitarese, G., Distel, E.
“Thus far and no further”: Inquiry into a dreamless society (2024) International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies

DOI: 10.1002/aps.1889

Abstract
Humans are highly social primates who naturally seek out groups in which to live. Our individual psychology is inherently intertwined with that of the group, forming an inextricable link between the two. In keeping with Bion’s insights into group dynamics, we approach contemporary conflicts by examining them through both social and psychoanalytic lenses. Drawing on Foucault’s and Deleuze’s analyses of societies, as well as considering the impact of technology and the COVID-19 pandemic, we illustrate how modern societies function under the influence of three behaviors observed by Bion. Activated as a result of a psychological disaster, the ruins consist of the symptomatologic triad of arrogance, stupidity, and curiosity. We have called this functioning Bion’s disastrous triad. We suggest that when it is set in motion, it leads to a withdrawal from the beauty of life, as Bion well expresses with the phrase “Thus far and no further.” Using Meltzer’s notion of aesthetic conflict, we suggest that while operating under the mandates of the triad, recognition of the other becomes an impossibility. A plea for relationships based on mutual recognition—namely, aesthetic relationships—is in order. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Author Keywords
aesthetic conflict; arrogance; contagion; groups; infection; intersubjectivity; technology

David Langwallner, The Relevance of Jurisprudence to Law Part 3 (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 September 2024

David Langwallner, The Relevance of Jurisprudence to Law Part 3, Cassandra Voices, 12 September 2024

Extract
[…] Foucault makes very relevant contributions to Jurisprudence and the practice of law.

First, the transplantation of Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon – the all-seeing surveillance prison such as Kilmainham in Dublin – is in Foucault’s view a depiction of modern society, where a uniform doctrine is enforced in schools, law courts and hospitals, leading to blind conformity.

Foucault presaged the age of Surveillance Capitalism and 24-hour data surveillance in Ireland, achieved in camera in the Quirke Case through the representations of the Minister for Justice Helen McEntee. Thus, we have a global panopticon wherein the value of privacy and freedom is thrown to the wolves.
[…]

Reiner Keller, Michel Foucault, 2. überarbeitete Auflage (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 September 2024

Reiner Keller, Michel Foucault, 2. überarbeitete Auflage Köln, Herbert von Halem Verlag, 2023. Reihe Klassiker der Wissenssoziologie [classics in the sociology of knowledge]

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) gilt als einer der wichtigsten, eigenwilligsten und aktuellsten Denker des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Bis zu seinem frühen Tod im Jahre 1984 war er Inhaber eines philosophischen Lehrstuhls für die ‘Geschichte der Denksysteme’ am renommierten Pariser Collège de France. Seine Arbeiten waren aus gegenwartsbezogenen Fragestellungen abgeleitet und zielten auf das allgemeine Projekt einer ‘Geschichte der Gegenwart’, einer ‘Ethnologie unserer Kultur’ oder einer Untersuchung der historischen Abfolge von ‘Wahrheitsspielen’. Ihn interessierte insbesondere der Zusammenhang von Wissen, Macht und Subjektkonstitution. Anhand unterschiedlicher historisch-gesellschaftlicher Praxisfelder – etwa der Umgangsweisen mit Wahnsinn oder der Veränderungen des Überwachens und Strafens – untersuchte er die Veränderungen der jeweiligen Wissens- und Machtbeziehungen.

Der einleitende Band von Reiner Keller stellt das Foucault’sche Werk in seinem biografischen und zeitgenössischen Kontext vor und geht dabei sowohl auf Foucaults Arbeitsweise wie auf die Inhalte und Wirkungen seiner Studien ein. Dies geschieht entlang einer originellen, in der deutschen Foucault-Rezeption bislang kaum verfolgten Perspektive: Keller schlägt vor, Foucault als einen ‘Klassiker der Wissenssoziologie’ neu zu lesen und aus seinem Werk Anregungen für heutiges soziologisches Forschen zu gewinnen.

Michel Foucault, 2nd updated edition

Description
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is considered one of the most important, idiosyncratic and topical thinkers of the twentieth century. Until his untimely death in 1984, he held a chair for the ‘History of Systems of Thought’ at the renowned Collège de France in Paris. His work was and is interested into contemporary issues and aimed at the general project of a ‘history of the present’. He particularly focused the connection between knowledge, power and the constitution of the modern subject. Using different historical and social fields of practice – such as ways of dealing with madness or sexuality – he examined the changes in the respective regimes of knowledge and power. The book provides a consistent reading of Foucault as an original, ‘experimental’ thinker and ‘grounded’ researcher inquiring into historical fields and practices of discourse, knowledge and dispositives, and coming back with stimulating conceptual diagnostics – an amazing way of working and thinking which still challenges our today’s research activities across the social scienes and humanities.

Reiner Keller & Marting Blessinger, Positionierungsmacht – Über Formierung und Regierung der Marktakteure (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 September 2024

Reiner Keller & Marting Blessinger, Positionierungsmacht – Über Formierung und Regierung der Marktakteure, Weinheim: BeltzJuventa 2023

Der Begriff Positionierungsmacht greift die foucaultsche Machtanalytik auf. Er bezeichnet eine gouvernementale Machtform, die sich in den gegenwärtigen Phänomenen des Wertens und Bewertens, in Castings, Rankings, Ratings usw. entfaltet. Diese aktuellen Formen der gesellschaftlichen Konstruktion des Wertvollen bilden neue Komplexe der Formierung und Regierung von Marktakteuren, deren Wirkweise über die bekannten foucaultschen Machtdiagnosen hinausweisen.
Der Band entwickelt zentrale Aspekte und Dimensionen der Positionierungsmacht und illustriert deren Wirkweise anhand zweier Fallstudien.

Positioning power – On the formation and government of market actors

The term positioning power takes up the Foucaultian analysis of power. It denotes a governmental form of power that unfolds in the current phenomena of valuing and assessing, in castings, rankings, ratings, etc.. These current forms of the social construction of the valuable form new complexes of the formation and government of market actors, whose mode of operation points beyond the familiar Foucauldian diagnoses of power.

The volume develops central aspects and dimensions of positioning power and illustrates its mode of operation by means of two case studies

Reiner Keller, The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse Foundations, Concepts and Tools for a Research Programme (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 September 2024

Reiner Keller, The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse Foundations, Concepts and Tools for a Research Programme, Springer 2024

About this book

Sets out the basic principles of a genuinely social-science oriented discourse perspective
Presents concrete steps of ‘how to do SKAD research’
Uses exemplary case studies from sociology, political sciences, area studies and education

In this updated version of a contemporary classic of discourse research, Reiner Keller develops the theoretical and methodological foundations of the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD). Translated from the original German into English for the first time, this book brings together two previously unconnected domains of knowledge analysis in social science: the rich traditions of sociology of knowledge and symbolic interactionism on one hand and the works of discourse studies, especially in relation to Michel Foucault, on the other. It presents a critical discussion of key developments in sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionist, and related interpretive approaches, explains the communicational turn of recent work in the field, and examines how traditions within sociology of knowledge shifted focus or converged over time. Following this, the book discusses the development of discourse theory and discourse analysis since the 1960s, including critical discourse analysis, hegemony analysis, or cultural studies approaches. Embarking from a profound reconstruction of Michel Foucault’s work, the book then sets its own distinctive course by integrating major elements of Foucault’s perspective with the sociology of knowledge. Along this path, Reiner Keller establishes the heuristics and methodology for a sociology of knowledge approach to discourse, providing a comprehensive research programme for the study of social relations of knowledge and politics of knowledge. Since its first publication in 2005, SKAD has informed a multitude of studies worldwide and across several academic disciplines. Today it can be considered as one of the major perspectives in discourse research in social science and beyond.

Keywords
dispositive, discourse, discourse analysis, discourse studies, discourse theory, Foucault, methodology, politics of knowledge, power/knowledge, science studies, social constructionism, sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionism

About the author
Reiner Keller is Chair of Sociology at the University of Augsburg (Germany). He has made major contributions to the establishment of empirical discourse research in German social sciences since the late 1990s. Some of his main research interests include social science discourse research, sociology of knowledge and culture, sociological theory, interpretive methods, and analysis of discursive struggles in contemporary societies. His numerous publications include books such as Doing Discourse Research: An Introduction for Social Scientists; Michel Foucault; Das Interpretative Paradigma (“The Interpretive Paradigm”), Müll. Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion des Wertvollen (“Waste. The Social Construction of the Valuable”).

Davoudi, S., Schoneboom, A., Díaz-Aldret, A. Counter-Conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Popup Civic Actions in Mexico (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 September 2024

Davoudi, S., Schoneboom, A., Díaz-Aldret, A.
Counter-Conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Popup Civic Actions in Mexico (2024) Global Society

DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2024.2387010

Abstract
This paper draws on Foucault’s concept of counter-conduct to move beyond the binary understandings of civil society and social movement. Using illustrative examples of popup civic actions in the aftermath of a flooding disaster that hit the Mexican state of Guerrero in 2013, we argue that for many grassroots and indigenous people with a longstanding struggle for recovery of communal lands (ejidos) and autonomy, mutuality (perceived as the domain of civil society) and resistance (perceived as the domain of social movement) are co-constitutive and continually invoked in their counter-conducts. That, their ethical desire for “being otherwise” and “doing things differently” is constitutive of their political will “not to be governed like that”. Using a Foucauldian analytics of counter-conduct, we discuss how self-organised popup actions in Guerrero both unsettled power relations by creating new fields of visibility, techniques, and knowledge, and imbued critical self-reflections, engendering new political identity. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
civil society; Counter-conduct; disaster; Mexico; social movement