Foucault News

Vaseková, V., Müller, M., Kročil, O. Acting like Living in a Panopticon? Hong Kong Social entrepreneurs’ Perceptions of Risks and Vulnerabilities (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

6 September 2024

Vaseková, V., Müller, M., Kročil, O.
Acting like Living in a Panopticon? Hong Kong Social entrepreneurs’ Perceptions of Risks and Vulnerabilities
(2024) Journal of Social Entrepreneurship

DOI: 10.1080/19420676.2024.2388042

Abstract
Hong Kong faces significant business and social uncertainty, which affects social entrepreneurs’ perceptions of risks and vulnerabilities. This study examines their narratives, taking into account the influence of Chinese propaganda, discourse and fear. Their experiences are likened to Foucault’s panopticism, where entrepreneurs feel constantly monitored, which influences their behaviour and statements. This study investigates 26 Hong Kong social enterprises through semi-structured qualitative interviews, where entrepreneurs expressed vulnerabilities, particularly of products, marketing, business model, staff, finance, low capacity and mission-related issues. Entrepreneurs also cited significant risks such as financial, operational, marketing, competitive, market, existential and political risks. © 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Governmentality; Michel Foucault; panopticism; risks; social entrepreneurship; vulnerabilities

Krupar, S., Ehlers, N. The Racial Spectacular: Pandemic Governance Through Dashboards and State Biosecurity (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 September 2024

Krupar, S., Ehlers, N.
The Racial Spectacular: Pandemic Governance Through Dashboards and State Biosecurity (2024) Science Technology and Human Values

DOI: 10.1177/01622439241265641

Abstract
Data visualizations related to COVID-19 operate as forms of spectacle essential to the racialized governance of the pandemic. Guy Debord theorized spectacle as separation—between subjects, populations, regions, dots on a map. We extend and revise Debord’s framework of spectacle, drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism and Sylvia Wynter’s critique of monohumanism to position spectacle as ways of seeing as separation: constructed ways of seeing that divide and partition. In this sense, spectacle contributes to material geographies of race and racism: what W.E.B. Du Bois referred to as the global color line and Michel Foucault called the caesura of race. We deploy this anti-racist interpretative methodology to analyze research from the 2020–21 period of the COVID-19 pandemic: first, COVID-19 dashboards that map infections, death, and other pandemic data; and, second, state biosecurity measures of lockdown in so-called areas of concern during the Delta outbreak in Sydney, Australia. Our methodology positions all real-time pandemic monitoring as part of the recursive operation of administering race as problem space, where the biopolitical twinning of life-and-death-making meet. We conclude by asking: what alternative forms of accounting of or for race are possible? © The Author(s) 2024.

Author Keywords
biosecurity; COVID-19; dashboards; pandemic; race; spectacle

Karl Katz Lydén, Critique and the Care of the Self: The Economy of Truth and Government in Michel Foucault’s Late Work (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 September 2024

Karl Katz Lydén, Critique and the Care of the Self: The Economy of Truth and Government in Michel Foucault’s Late Work, 2024
Doctoral thesis, monograph

Södertörn University, School of Culture and Education, Philosophy. Södertörn University, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Baltic & East European Graduate School (BEEGS).

Alternative title
Kritik och omsorgen om sig : sanningssägandets och regerandets ekonomi i Michel Foucaults sena verk (Swedish)

Abstract [en]
This thesis engages Michel Foucault’s late work on ancient philosophy in relation to his earlier investigations of modern forms of government and events in his political present. Beginning with a reinterpretation of the function of style in Foucault’s oeuvre, it demonstrates that the ancient notion of the care of the self – the style of existence – unfolds as a critical project. The thesis considers Foucault’s last three lecture courses at the Collège de France: “The Hermeneutics of the Subject” (1982), “The Government of Self and Others” (1983), and “The Courage of the Truth” (1984). It shows that what is at stake in the ancient notions of truth-telling and the technologies of the self is not reducible to an ethical, individual subject in Greco-Roman antiquity, but rather something that bears on Foucault’s previous critical work on modern forms of subjection, on his notion of critique, and on political, collective subjects in the present.

No previous study has treated this relation between Foucault’s notion of the care of the self and his theory of critique. And while shorter attempts have noted their conceptual common basis in “virtue” and “government,” this thesis opens new perspectives. Through a formal analogy to Kant’s critical project, it proposes a model of three Foucauldian kinds of critique: the historical-philosophical practice of theoretical work, truth-telling in the political field, and the individual or collective “art of not being governed like that.” Moving between the theoretical work and lesser discussed materials – specifically Foucault’s engagement with the Polish trade union “Solidarność” and the French labor union CFDT – important continuities are identified. It is demonstrated that Foucault understands critique, the care of the self, and collective movements in his own time, not only by the same conceptual framework of government, virtue, and truth, but also as non-discursive forms or practices in which means and ends merge. This is significant in relation to Foucault’s definition of modern economic government in his lecture course on neoliberalism, “The Birth of Biopolitics” (1979): a government guided by an equally non-discursive “veridiction of the market.” Building on these continuities in Foucault’s oeuvre, it is concluded that the ancient notions of truth-telling and of the style of existence offer significant tools in the art of not being governed like that: as collective configurations of critique in the present.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2024. , p. 254
Series
Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations, ISSN 1652-7399 ; 229

Keywords [en]
Foucault, Critique, Care of the self, Governmentality, Socialist Governmentality, Neoliberalism, Means and ends, Self-finalization, Parrēsia, Parrhesia, Truth-telling, Veridiction of the market, Solidarność, labor unions, CFDT, Style, Performativity, Montage

Abstract [sv]
Denna avhandling tar upp Michel Foucaults sena verk om antik filosofi i relation till hans tidigare undersökningar av det moderna regerandet och händelser i hans politiska samtid. Utifrån en omtolkning av stilens funktion i Foucaults arbeten visas här att den antika idén om omsorgen om sig – levnadsstilen – hos Foucault läggs fram som ett kritiskt projekt. Avhandlingen tar upp Foucaults tre sista föreläsningsserier vid Collège de France: ”Subjektets hermeneutik” (1982), ”Styrandet av sig själv och andra” (1983), och ”Modet till sanning” (1984). Den visar att det subjektsbegrepp som introduceras i den grekisk-romerska antikens läror om sanningssägande och självteknologier inte kan reduceras till ett etiskt, individuellt subjekt begränsat till sin egen historiska situation, utan står i relation till Foucaults tidigare kritiska verk om moderna former av ”subjektion” eller underkastelse (asujettissement), hans kritikbegrepp och hans diskussioner om politiska kollektiva begrepp i samtiden.

Detta är den första svenska avhandlingen i filosofi om Michel Foucaults arbete. Internationellt har ingen längre studie behandlat denna relation mellan Foucaults begrepp om omsorgen om sig och hans definition av kritik. Medan kortare forskningsbidrag har noterat deras begreppsliga gemensamma nämnare i ”dygd” och ”regerande” öppnar denna avhandling nya perspektiv. Med en formell analogi med Kants kritiska projekt föreslås här en modell av tre foucauldianska typer av kritik: det teoretiska arbetets historisk-filosofiska praktik, sanningssägandet inom det politiska fältet och den individuella och kollektiva ”konsten att inte låta sig styras på ett visst sätt”. Genom att undersöka både de teoretiska arbetena och mindre uppmärksammat material – som Foucaults engagemang i ”Solidarność” och den franska fackföreningen CFDT – kan viktiga kontinuiteter uppmärksammas. Här visas att Foucault förstår kritik, omsorgen om sig och kollektiva rörelser i sin egen samtid inte bara genom ett och samma begreppsliga ramverk av regerande, dygd och sanning, utan också som icke-diskursiva former eller praktiker i vilka mål och medel sammanfaller. Detta är viktigt med avseende på Foucaults definition av modernt ekonomiskt regerande i föreläsningarna om nyliberalism, ”Biopolitikens födelse” (1979): ett regerande grundat på ”marknadens veridiktion”. Utifrån dessa kontinuiteter dras slutsatsen att de antika idéerna om sanningssägande och levnadsstilen erbjuder avgörande verktyg för konsten att inte låta sig styras på ett visst sätt: som kollektiva konfigurationer av kritik i samtiden.

Keywords [sv]
Foucault, kritik, omsorgen om sig, regerande, socialistisk regeringskonst, nyliberalism, medel och mål, parrēsia, parrhesia, sanningssägande, marknadens veridiktion, Solidarność, fackföreningar, CFDT, stil, performativitet, montage.

Bernard Harcourt, On critical genealogy (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

3 September 2024

Bernard Harcourt, On critical genealogy. Contemporary Political Theory (2024).

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-024-00715-y

Open access

Abstract
Today most critical theorists who deploy history use a genealogical method forged by Nietzsche and Foucault. This genealogical approach now dominates historically inflected critique. But not all genealogical writings today, nor all philosophical debates surrounding genealogy, advance the goals of critical philosophy. It is crucial now that we assess the value of genealogical critiques. The proper metric against which to evaluate such work is whether it contributes to transforming ourselves, others, and society in a valuable way. In this article, I propose that we use the term “critical genealogy” to identify those genealogical practices that positively nourish our activity and, thereby, advance the ambition of critical philosophy.

Foucault Studies, Number 36, September 2024

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 September 2024

Foucault Studies

Number 36: Special Issue: Foucault’s Legacy in Contemporary Thinking: Forty Years Later (1984-2024)

Editorial
Sverre Raffnsøe et al.

Special Issue: Foucault’s Legacy on Contemporary Thinking

Introduction: Foucault’s Legacy in Contemporary Thinking: Forty Years Later (1984-2024)
Valentina Antoniol, Stefano Marino

On Foucault’s Legacy: Governmentality, Critique and Subjectivation as Conceptual Tools for Understanding Neoliberalism
André Duarte, Maria Rita de Assis César

Thinking and Unthinking the Present: Philosophy after Foucault
Martin Saar, Frieder Vogelmann

The Actualité of Philosophy and its History: Michel Foucault’s Legacy on a Philosophy of the Present
Orazio Irrera

The Future Perfect of Suspicion and Prediction as a Dispositive of Security Today? The Legacy of Foucault (1977)
Didier Bigo

Who, in our present, might the Pierre Rivières be? Political Subjectivation and the Construction of a Collective “We”
Valentina Antoniol

Foucault and Ecology
Manlio Iofrida

Foucault and Somaesthetics: Variations on the Art of Living
Richard Shusterman

Overcoming “the Penetration Model”: Rethinking Sexuality with Foucault, Shusterman, and Contemporary Feminism
Stefano Marino

Power + Fashion
Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas

Discipline and Power in the Digital Age. Critical Reflections from Foucault’s Thought
Silvia Capodivacca, Gabriele Giacomini

Untruth as the New Democratic Ethos: Reading Michel Foucault’s Interpretation of Diogenes of Sinope’s True Life in the Time of Post-Truth Politics
Attasit Sittidumrong

Gaze and Norm: Foucault’s Legacy in Sociology
Dušan Marinković, Dušan Ristić

‘The Subject and Power’ – Four Decades Later: Tracing Foucault’s Evolving Concept of Subjectivation
Kaspar Villadsen

Pastoral Power, Sovereign Carelessness, and the Social Divisions of Care Work or: What Foucault Can Teach Us about the “Crisis of Care”
Lucile Richard

History, Markets, and Revolutions: Reviewing Foucault’s Contribution to the Analysis of Political Temporality
Alessandro Volpi, Alessio Porrino

A Critic on the Other Side of the Rhine? On the Appropriations of Foucault’s Political Thought by the Heirs of the Frankfurt School
Rodolpho Venturini

Genealogy as an Ethic of Self-determination: Husserl and Foucault
Enrico Redaelli

Foucault and Wittgenstein: Practical Critique and Democratic Politics
Lotar Rasiński

Articles

Foucault’s Hegel Thesis: The “Tragic Destiny” of Life and the “Being-There” of Consciousness
Oliver Roberts-Garratt

Luther and Biopower: Rethinking the Reformation with Foucault
Samuel Lindholm, Andrea Di Carlo

Vervoort, T. How Does Neoliberalism Form Our Lifes? A Praxeological Approach with Jaeggi and Foucault (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 September 2024

Vervoort, T.
How Does Neoliberalism Form Our Lifes? A Praxeological Approach with Jaeggi and Foucault (2024) Critical Horizons

DOI: 10.1080/14409917.2024.2390335

Abstract
Michel Foucault’s work has immensely enriched the way critical social theorists understand power. Beyond his work on disciplinary normalisation, Foucault’s genealogy of the modern state has discussed governmental power as the conduct of conduct of subjects and populations. Foucault reserves his understanding of norms and normalisation for explaining the prescriptive force of disciplinary power. Accordingly, he hardly uses the language of norms to explain how neoliberal policies interfere in social conduct. In this paper, I aim to elucidate what kind of normative intervention neoliberal governmentality encompasses. By mobilising Rahel Jaeggi’s understanding of forms of life as ensembles of normatively imbued social practices, I suggest that neoliberal governmentality introduces the rationality of market competition into the problem-solving horizon of social conduct, thereby creating and instituting a “neoliberal form of life”. Hence, I argue that neoliberal governmentality is a form of domination that intervenes in ethical norms and social practices that build everyday forms of life. © Critical Horizons Pty Ltd 2024.

Author Keywords
critique; forms of life; neoliberalism; norms; power

Grafton Tanner, Foreverism (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 September 2024

Grafton Tanner, Foreverism, Polity, 2023

Description
What do cinematic “universes,” cloud archiving, and voice cloning have in common? They’re in the business of foreverizing – the process of revitalizing things that have degraded, failed, or disappeared so that they can remain active in the present. To foreverize something is to reanimate it, to enclose and protect it from time and the elements, and to eradicate the feeling of nostalgia that accompanies loss. Foreverizing is a bulwark against instability, but it isn’t an infallible enterprise. That which is promised to last forever often does not, and that which is disposed of can sometimes last, disturbingly, forever.

In this groundbreaking book, American philosopher Grafton Tanner develops his theory of foreverism: an anti-nostalgic discourse that promises growth without change and life without loss. Engaging with pressing issues from the ecological impact of data storage to the rise of reboot culture, Tanner tracks the implications of a society averse to nostalgia and reveals the new weapons we have for eliminating it.

Extract

A nostalgic subject became, in the words of Foucault, “an individual to be corrected”: the one who is “regular in his irregularity” and who “appears to require correction because all the usual techniques, procedures and attempts at training… have failed to correct him”. (pp. 6-7)

About the Author
Grafton Tanner is a professor at the University of Georgia and the author of The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia.

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

31 August 2024

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. Duke University Press, 2023.

In Code Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code, Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization.

Fehr, Burkhard, and Panagiotis Roilos, eds. Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual. Studies Presented to Demetrios Yatromanolakis (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 August 2024

Fehr, Burkhard, and Panagiotis Roilos, eds. Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual. Studies Presented to Demetrios Yatromanolakis (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2024)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004679740

The studies included in Mythogenesis, Interdiscursivity, Ritual. Studies Presented to Demetrios Yatromanolakis , a pioneering scholar— shed new light on a variety of areas: the encounters of ancient Greece with other societies and cultures in antiquity; the interplay between art (vase-painting and sculpture) and broader ideological developments/mentalities in antiquity; ritual in ancient Greek contexts; political ideologies and religion; history of scholarship, textual criticism/critical editing, and hermeneutics; the reception of myth and of archaic and classical Greek culture and philosophy in diverse discursive, mediatic, and sociocultural contexts — from impressionist painting, to modernism and the avant-garde, to Foucauldian thought.

Christopher O’Neill, Foucault And Information Theory: On “Message Or Noise?” (1966) (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 August 2024

Christopher O’Neill, Foucault And Information Theory: On “Message Or Noise?”, Parrhesia , 39 · 2024 · (1966)1-17

Extract
“Message or Noise?” is a short but highly suggestive essay, in which Michel Foucault takes up the question of medical thought and practice through the frame of information-theory – one of the few occasions throughout his enormous œuvre in which he directly engages with the question of the computational. Despite being included as text 44 of the Dits et Écrits, the piece has not before been translated into English, and has led a somewhat subterranean life within Foucault’s reception. Amidst a renewed interest in the impact of cybernetics and information theory on French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and indeed within something of a neocybernetic turn in critical theory tout court, the significance of the piece comes into focus – even if Foucault’s analysis is perhaps conducted in an ambiguous or somewhat ironic frame. Here I establish the context of its publication, reception, and place in contemporary debates surrounding information theory in the French academy, especially in relation to the more anxious critique of information theory offered by Foucault’s mentor Georges Canguilhem. I also consider the significance of new archival resources which show Foucault was an attentive reader of developments in information theory and cybernetics from even very early in his career, and suggest some potential future research paths regarding Foucault and information theory towards which “Message or Noise?” gestures.