Foucault News

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

Clare O'Farrell

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.

Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

18 July 2015

Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment.Edited by David Kreps, Ashgate, February 2015

Mapping the resonances, dissonances, and linkages between the thought of Gramsci and Foucault to uncover new tools for socio-political and critical analysis for the twenty-first century, this book reassesses the widely-held view that their work is incompatible.

With discussions of Latin American revolutionary politics, indigenous knowledges, technologies of government and the teaching of paediatrics in post-invasion Iraq, complexity theory, medical anthropology and biomedicine, and the role of Islam in the transition to modern society in the Arab world, this interdisciplinary volume presents the latest theoretical research on different facets of these two thinkers’ work, as well as analyses of the specific linkages that exist between them in concrete settings.

A rigorous, comparative exploration of the work of two towering figures of the twenty-first century, Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment will appeal to scholars and students of social and political theory, political sociology, communication and media studies, and contemporary philosophy.

Contents: Foreword: an archaeology of the future, to be excavated by the post-modern prince?, Stephen Gill; Preface; Introduction, David Kreps; The politics of truth: for a different way of life, Alex Demirović; Rethinking the Gramsci-Foucault interface: a cultural political economy interpretation oriented to discourses of competitiveness, Ngai-Ling Sum; Power and resistance: linking Gramsci and Foucault, Marcus Schulzke; Building a Gramsci-Foucault axis of democracy, Jean-Paul Gagnon; Subalternity in and out of time, in and out of history, Sonita Sarker; The passive revolution of spiritual politics: Gramsci and Foucault on modernity, transition and religion, Jelle Versieren and Brecht de Smet; Post-neoliberal regional integration in Latin America: Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA), Efe Can Gürcan and Onur Bakıner; The hegemony of psychology: the practice and teaching of paediatrics in post-invasion Iraq, Heather Brunskell-Evans; The complexity of social systems: could hegemony emerge from the micro-politics of the individual?, David Kreps; Index.

About the Editor: David Kreps is Senior Lecturer in Information Systems and Director of the Centre for Information Systems, Organisations and Society at the University of Salford, UK. He is the author of Cyborgs: Cyborgism, Performance and Society.

Reviews: ‘This provocative, pluralistic, and wide-ranging volume explores critically and productively convergences, dissonances, and potential synergies between the work of Gramsci and Foucault. Ranging from philosophical reflections through the staging of virtual dialogues to exemplary case studies that demonstrate significant complementarities, this is an important, timely, and unique contribution to rounding out the literature on these two critical intellectuals and political activists.’

Bob Jessop, Lancaster University, UK

‘Foucault and Gramsci is a much better alternative for our times, than the polemically overdetermined formulation Foucault or Gramsci. In reassessing Foucault and Gramsci and their respective legacies conjuncturally, this volume goes a long way in clarifying and elaborating the relationship between macropolitics and micropolitics, between a politics anchored in hegemony and post- and counter-hegemonic practices of resistance and speaking truth to power, between the world as irreducibly local and the world as necessarily global and relational.’

Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, University of California Irvine, USA; author of Edward Said: A Dictionary and History, The Human, and the World Between

Arkitect | Foucault’s Dream (music)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 July 2015

Heterotopia Remixes Vol. 2 Astral Plane Recordings .

Play list
Music available on site

1.Jacques Gaspard Biberkopf — Public Love (Air Max ’97 Bootleg)04:22
2.Kid Antoine — Nightvision (Mike G Remix)05:13
3.Rushmore — Moment X (Victoria Kim’s Kowloon Edit)03:48
4.Celestial Trax — Illuminate (Iglew Remix)05:01
5.Victoria Kim — Apgu Freeway (Rushmore Remix)04:11
6.Arkitect — Foucault’s Dream (Riley Lake Remix)06:04

Securing the social: Foucault and Social Networks (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 July 2015

Securing the social: Foucault and Social Networks | Tiziana Terranova – Academia.edu.

From Foucault and the History of Our Present, edited by Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci, and Martina Tazzioli

Extract

What do we talk about when we talk about social networks? Is it an actu-ally existing social reality, a structuralist paradigm in the social sciences, or a series of web-based services with specific technical features? Or, as a Foucauldian perspective might have it, a new dispositif of power taking the social as its object and the network as its form? One of the most common arguments to be found about the deploy-ment of Foucault’s work in thinking about social networks is that the latter constitutes a contemporary version of Bentham’s Panopticon – a specific organization of visibility that Foucault described in his book on disciplinary societies (Foucault, 1993; Kampmark, 2007; Bucher, 2012). Commenting on the ‘recent exposure of mass surveillance activity’ by the US National Security Agency (NSA), however, William Davies reflects on how such revelations not only expose the ways in which ‘social networks’ have become the object of the state’s gaze, but also seem to point to a larger phenomenon, what he calls the ‘revenge of the social’. Davies reminds us that for a long time neoliberals have opposed ideas of society and the social but argues that recently this trend has reversed into an ‘explosion of new types of accounting, governance and policy interven-tion which come dressed in the rhetoric of the social. Social enterprise, social media, social indicators, social impact bonds, social neuroscience’ (Davies, 2013). Realizing that ‘individuals are quite manifestly unable to operate as isolated, calculating machines, with only the law and the market to guide them’, for Davies, neoliberalism has found a model of the social in social media that suits its epistemic commitments. Social media provide the techniques by which the social can be finally known:

Foucault: from libertine to neoliberal (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

15 July 2015

Patrick West Foucault: from libertine to neoliberal , Spiked, 3 July 2015

Was the French philosopher really a Reaganite in poststructural clothing?

Was Foucault a neoliberal?’ So asked an accusatory headline the other day in Le Nouvel Observateur, France’s centre-left news weekly. It’s a grave allegation. ‘Saint Foucault’, as the article sarcastically calls him, was a heavyweight figure in the humanities, and his theories about truth and power have filtered down into society’s mainstream. He remains a legend of postwar philosophy in France, and queer theory in general. To accuse him of Anglo-Saxon right-wingery is tantamount to lèse majesté.

Michel Foucault popularised the idea that power and truth are intimately intertwined, and that who is making a statement is as important as what is being said. As he wrote in his iconic 1975 text, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison): ‘It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge.’ Truth is perspectival: it is the mere creation of the strong. Might makes right. Power is knowledge.

Several generations of teachers, social-policy strategists, professors and politicians would have been taught Foucault at university at the height of his academic celebrity in the 1980s and 1990s. His thoughts have been widely disseminated as a consequence.

Foucault said that power was omnipresent. Hospitals and schools are no better or worse than factories or prisons: all are based on the same desire to inspect, classify, control, monitor. A security camera is a manifestation of power in action, but so, too, is a restaurant menu or a double-yellow line on a road.

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CFP: Faire l’histoire du pouvoir “psy” après Foucault (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 July 2015

Faire l’histoire du pouvoir “psy” après Foucault

Further info.

Journées suisses d’histoire 2016
Bureau du congrès

Section d’histoire, Faculté des Lettres
Université de Lausanne
Anthropole, Bureau 5156
CH-1050 Lausanne

Les travaux sur les disciplines psychiques se rangent en deux catégories : les démarches critiques du pouvoir « psy* » (psychiatrie, psychanalyse, psychologie, psychothérapie) d’une part, contre les approches bienveillantes à l’égard de ce pouvoir, soit par une défense délibérée, comme Marcel Gauchet par exemple, soit simplement en évitant d’évoquer les dimensions politiques des pratiques et des discours psy. La tradition critique se donne comme pères fondateurs — il n’y a que des hommes — des chercheurs tels que Erving Goffman, Robert Castel, et bien sûr Michel Foucault. Elle est liée à des mouvements sociaux qui contestent le pouvoir psychiatrique, que l’on qualifie souvent d’ « antipsychiatriques », notamment des mouvements de personnes psychiatrisées, mais qui compte aussi des psys célèbres comme Franco Basaglia, Ronald D. Laing, David Cooper ou Thomas Szasz. Cette première vague critique s’en prend principalement à la psychiatrie comme « régime disciplinaire » (Foucault), à l’asile comme « institution totalitaire » (Goffman) ou au « mythe de la maladie mentale » comme prétexte d’un contrôle étatique politique (Szasz).

Cette histoire du « complexe psy » se conjugue souvent avec une conception foucaldienne du pouvoir relevant moins d’une oppression matérielle que d’une forme d’« aliénation mentale » que produirait le discours psychologique en offrant des catégories de pensée sous la forme d’un langage pour « dire le sujet ». Les sociétés occidentales, en particulier, seraient ainsi devenues des « sociétés thérapeutiques » dominées par cette grille d’analyse. Par ailleurs, on voit se multiplier des travaux qui s’intéressent à ce qui est nommée la « psychologisation » de phénomènes sociaux. Bien souvent, ces travaux envisagent les pratiques psychologiques, notamment psychothérapeutiques, en suivant Foucault, comme autant de « dispositifs de pouvoir », de perfectionnement de « technologies du soi », qui ne laissent aucune possibilité de concevoir une transformation des rapports de pouvoir dans ces institutions psy. Il semble au contraire nécessaire de pouvoir faire une histoire des pratiques et discours psy qui prennent en compte non seulement les rapports de pouvoir, mais également un projet d’émancipation, de façon à non seulement mieux saisir les ambitions politiques de nombre de psy* qui n’opposent pas leur pratique à une lutte politique, voire la conçoive au contraire comme liée à celle-ci, mais surtout pour penser de façon plus réaliste les liens entre l’individuel, comme le psychologique est conçu, et le collectif.

Ce panel veut constituer un lieu de débat de ces questions. Les contributions peuvent ainsi amener des positions historiographiques variées, pour autant qu’elles s’inscrivent dans cette interrogation du traitement du pouvoir psy* dans les travaux d’histoire des disciplines psychiques.

CFP: The sixteenth annual meeting of the Foucault Circle (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

13 July 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS
The sixteenth annual meeting of the Foucault Circle

Sydney, Australia
June 29-July 2, 2016
(hosted by the University of New South Wales)

PDF of Call for papers

We invite individual papers and roundtable proposals (4-5 panelists) on any aspect of Foucault’s work. Studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking are all welcome. We will aim for a diversity of topics and perspectives.

Abstracts should be prepared for anonymous review, and are to be submitted to the program committee chair, Richard A. Lynch, by email (lynchricharda@sau.edu) on/before Friday, Nov. 20, 2015. Please indicate “Foucault Circle submission” in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a “.docx” attachment.

Individual paper submissions require an abstract of no more than 750 words; roundtable submissions require a 500-word abstract describing the theme and 150-word summaries of each panelist’s talking points.

Program decisions will be announced in December.

Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined—papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes reading time). Roundtables will have approximately 50 minutes total for presentation and discussion combined; individual panelists should plan to speak for no more than 5-7 minutes. In addition to paper and roundtable sessions, the conference will also feature a “reading group” discussion session (texts TBA) open to all participants.

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:

The Foucault Circle at UNSW will be held immediately before the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference which in 2016 is being hosted by Monash University at the Caulfield campus. AAP

Dates are: Sunday 3rd July – Thursday 7th July 2016. Scholars planning to attend the Foucault Circle may also wish to attend the AAP.

Biopower and school surveillance technologies 2.0 (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 July 2015

Hope, A.
Biopower and school surveillance technologies 2.0
(2015) British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2014.1001060

Abstract
In recent years the proliferation, speed and reach of school-based surveillance devices has undergone what could be labelled as a revolution. Drawing upon Foucault’s concept of biopower to explore the disciplining of bodies and the biopolitical management of populations, this paper examines ‘new’ school surveillance technologies enabling biometric measurement, electronic detection, substance screening, video observation and data monitoring. Klein’s notion of surveillance 2.0 is utilised to further examine emerging features of school monitoring practices, including the impact of ‘data doubles’, playful student resistance and the commodification of surveillance. It is concluded that invasive school surveillance practices are becoming normalised, that politically motivated, data-driven simulations could increasingly be used to support education interventions and that a function creep is occurring as recreational devices become embroiled in institutional surveillance practices.

Author Keywords
biopolitics; biopower; body; data; discipline; resistance

Lebensfuhrung and veridiction: Weber, Foucault (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 July 2015

Colin Gordon, Lebensfuhrung and veridiction: Weber, Foucault

Podcast in a series on Daoism and Capitalism

Daoism is philosophical, political and devotional movement that emerged in early China as a critique of Confucian orthodoxy. At a crucial point in the development of the critique of political economy in the 20th and 21st centuries, a diverse array of thinkers converged upon Daoism as the image of an anti-authoritarian, non-coercive, and counter-governmental alternative to state power. Bringing together experts from sociology, political theory, cultural theory, German literary studies, philosophy, and Jewish studies to examine the composite image of ancient and modern China in contemporary political economy, this event engages with a little known, but geopolitically consequential lynchpin in the work of Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, and their interpreters. Exploring their interconnections and ramifications for the first time, the lectures grapple with how Daoism is integrated within the political economy of modern China, and within our understanding of political economy as a whole.

Colin Gordon is the editor and translator (with Graham Burchell and Peter Miller) of The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago UP, 1991) and Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge (Pantheon, 1980). He has written extensively on political theory and history of political thought, social and cultural theory, Foucault and Weber, governmentality, and neoliberalism, and is a contributor to numerous essay collections and journal issues on Foucault’s writings and lectures.