Foucault News

Éric Fassin, Daniel Defert : archives et actualité d’un legs (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

26 February 2023

Éric Fassin, Daniel Defert : archives et actualité d’un legs, AOC, 17 février 2023

Sociologue, fondateur d’Aides, la première association de lutte contre le sida, Daniel Defert est mort le 7 février 2023. Il fut aussi le compagnon de Michel Foucault, et de son deuil, il a su faire œuvre de vie en pensant politiquement non seulement la santé, mais aussi l’intimité. Dix ans après la loi de 2013 ouvrant le mariage aux couples de même sexe, à notre tour de faire travailler ses legs.

En 2013, Daniel Defert m’a accordé un entretien pour préparer une édition augmentée d’Herculine Barbin[1]. En 1978, Michel Foucault avait complété par quelques archives les « Souvenirs et impressions d’un individu dont le sexe avait été méconnu », publiés une première fois en 1874 par le médecin légiste Ambroise Tardieu après le suicide d’Abel Barbin.

Pour l’édition en anglais de 1980, Foucault avait ajouté une préface : « Le vrai sexe ». Dans ma postface de 2014, « Le vrai genre », j’ai relaté la quête qui aura permis de recouvrer à la fois le nom et le prénom de ce « pseudo-hermaphrodite », selon la médecine, dont le récit fait désormais référence pour le mouvement intersexe. Car « on ne savait pas où ça s’était déroulé, on n’en avait aucune idée : dans le manuscrit, il n’y a que des initiales », raconte alors Daniel Defert. Avec son compagnon, ils ont dû partir à la recherche d’archives.

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Nancy Ettlinger, Algorithms and the Assault on Critical Thought. Digitalized Dilemmas of Automated Governance and Communitarian Practice (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

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24 February 2023

Nancy Ettlinger, Algorithms and the Assault on Critical Thought. Digitalized Dilemmas of Automated Governance and Communitarian Practice, Routledge, 2023

Book Description
This book examines the digitalization of longstanding problems of technological advance that produce inequalities and automated governance, which relieves subjects of agency and critical thought, and prompts a need to weaponize thoughtfulness against technocratic designs.

The book situates digital-era problems relative to those of previous sociotechnical milieux and argues that technical advance perennially embeds corrosive effects on social relations and relations of production, recognizing variation across contexts and relative to entrenched societal hierarchies of race and other axes of difference and their intersections. Societal tolerance, despite abundant evidence for harmful effects of digital technologies, requires attention. The book explains blindness to social injustice by technocratic thinking delivered through education as well as truths embraced in the data sciences coupled with governance in universities and the private sector that protect these truths from critique. Institutional inertia suggests benefits of communitarianism, which strives for change emanating from civil society. Scaling postcapitalist communitarian values through communitybased peer production presents opportunities. However, enduring problems require critical reflection, continual revision of strategies, and active participation among diverse community citizens.

This book is written with critical geographic sensibilities for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences, humanities, and data sciences.

Nancy Ettlinger is a Professor of Critical Human Geography at the Ohio State University. Her current research focuses on problems and possibilities of digital life. She has published widely in journals such as New Left Review, Big Data & Society, New Formations, Political Geography, Journal of Economic Geography, and Antipode.

Ncube, L., Mare, A. “Fake News” and Multiple Regimes of “Truth” During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Zimbabwe (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 February 2023

Ncube, L., Mare, A.
“Fake News” and Multiple Regimes of “Truth” During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Zimbabwe (2022) African Journalism Studies

DOI: 10.1080/23743670.2022.2072925

Abstract
Debates around the sociocultural phenomenon known as “fake news” have gathered storm since the 2016 US Presidential elections. Our study problematises the notion of “truth” in a politically polarised and trust-deficit Zimbabwean society, where audiences are balkanised and pigeonholed into predefined filter bubbles. In order to make sense of this phenomenon during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we fuse three analytical frameworks—Foucauldian discourse, social construction of the truth and peripheral actors in journalism. This is pertinent in a context where politicians often dismiss news disseminated through mainstream private and social media platforms as “fake”. This deployment of the term “fake news” as a (de)legitimation ritual creates the impression that there are certain media organisations whose civic duty is to dispense “authentic” news. Although the government of Zimbabwe presented itself as the “authentic” voice on issues related to COVID-19, inconsistencies were observed through our analysis. The article demonstrates the multiple and systemic layers and structures embedded within the discourse of “fake news” related to the mediation of COVID-19 in Zimbabwe. Our article also argues that the multiple regimes of (non)truth must be understood in the context of power relations between public officials, professional journalists and peripheral actors in journalism. © 2022 iMasa.

Author Keywords
COVID-19; discourse; fake news; Foucault; misinformation; peripheral actors; professional journalists; truth; Zimbabwe

Määttä, S.K. Discourse and ideology in French thought until Foucault and Pecheux (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 February 2023

Määttä, S.K.
Discourse and ideology in French thought until Foucault and Pecheux. In Määttä, Simo K. and Hall, Marika K. Mapping Ideology in Discourse Studies. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513602

DOI: 10.1515/9781501513602-002

Abstract
Since many, if not most, of the early sources of critical approaches to discourse and ideology come from France, the parallel and sometimes divergent development of these concepts may help to explain some of the contradictions present in today’s theorizations and applications. This chapter provides a succinct account of the etymology, history, and evolution of the concepts from their first usage until the early years of French discourse analysis in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The focus rests on the similarities, overlaps, and coincidences in the theorizations of some of the most important thinkers for the critical study of discourse, particularly Michel Foucault and Michel Pecheux. The goal is to explain how the theory of discourse and ideology is contingent upon the political and intellectual context and the relations between theorizations coming from different sources. The chapter concludes by arguing that the divergence of later approaches and the frequent difficulty of integrating discourse and ideology are due to different factors. These include the polysemy and diverse historical usages of the word discours in French and other languages and the fact that Foucault’s concept of discourse is a hybrid configuration integrating several contemporary ideas, including Althusserian considerations of ideology. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter Inc. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Critical discourse analysis; Discourse; Discourse analysis; Foucault; French discourse analysis; Ideology; Pecheux

Elyamany, N. Postcyberpunk dystopian cityscape and emotion artificial intelligence: A spatio-cognitive analysis of posthuman representation in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

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22 February 2023

Elyamany, N.
Postcyberpunk dystopian cityscape and emotion artificial intelligence: A spatio-cognitive analysis of posthuman representation in Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
(2022) Convergence

DOI: 10.1177/13548565221122913

Abstract
Within visual culture, postcyberpunk films are best approached as places of Otherness whereby human identity and agency are downplayed and posthumans are magnified in highly technopolic societies marked with scientific determinism. Postcyberpunk treats the posthuman enclave as a heterotopic site, oscillating between utopian and dystopian spaces, potentially and optimistically, creating a space for humanity to be reassessed and renegotiated. Against this backdrop, the current research endeavor proposes a Spatio-Cognitive Model of Posthuman Representation focusing attention on heterotopic ‘spaces’ and ‘bodies’ in hyperconnected environments. While the model owes a substantial debt to Foucault’s writings on heterotopia and the utopian body, in tilting the focus of enquiry, this paper is informed by the tenets of polyrhythmia, hypermimesis, spatial repertoires, semiotic assemblages and cognitive embodiment as insightful interventions. Blade Runner 2049 is taken as a fertile case study grounded in paradoxes and ambiguities around the contradiction between humans and replicants, artificial intelligence and super-large enterprises.

The hybridity pertinent to the postcyberpunk film genre and the inner and outer topographies of posthuman representation proved to be insightful investigative vantage points of multimodal inquiry for the socio-political and technocratic implications they underlie. With technology seamlessly integrated into social spaces and posthuman bodies, Blade Runner 2049 is arguably structured as an emotional journey composed of multiple heterotopias (spatial layers, ruptures and bifurcations expressed through socio-political capitalist projections). The article adamantly argues for new philosophical perspectives and praxis in redefinition of the social relationship between human and posthuman. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
Blade Runner 2049; cognitive embodiment; embodied aesthetics; emotion artificial intelligence; hypermimesis; image schemas; linguistic landscape; mimetic schemas; polyrhythmia; postcyberpunk cityscape; posthumanism; semiotic assemblage; spatial repertoire; spatio-cognitive; transhumanism

Archive: Ghamkhah, A., Khazaeefar, A. The Role of Translation in the Reception of Foucault in Post-revolutionary Iran (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 February 2023

Ghamkhah, A., Khazaeefar, A.
The Role of Translation in the Reception of Foucault in Post-revolutionary Iran(2021) inTRAlinea, 23

Open access

Abstract
This study focuses on how the ideas of Michel Foucault were received and interpreted in the post-revolutionary Iran during two significant political periods stretching from 1979 to 2005, covering two eight-year administrations, the Reconstruction administration and the Reformist administration, presumed to very different publication policies and degrees of openness towards Western thought in general and Foucault’s ideas in particular. Foucault’s support of the Islamic Revolution is a long- debated topic among Iranian intellectuals as well as French journalists who were so critical of Foucault after his visit to Iran in September 1979. Significant as Foucault’s positive remarks concerning the Islamic revolution are, the study also investigates whether Foucault’s ideas were received by his left-wing translators independently of his supportive stance on the Islamic Revolution. The findings of this study indicate that the policies of the two administrations toward translations of Foucault’s ideas were essentially the same but that in the Reformist period there was a boom in the diffusion of Foucault’s discourse through translations. Moreover, we have established that Foucault’s idea of ‘power relations’ was the most frequent theme discussed in translations and journal articles written on Foucault in these two periods. © in TRAlinea & Azam Ghamkhah & Ali Khazaeefar (2021)

Author Keywords
history of translation; Iran; Michel Foucault; post-revolutionary Iran; translator studies

Ju, R. Producing entrepreneurial citizens: Governmentality over and through Hong Kong influencers on Xiaohongshu (Red) (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 February 2023

Ju, R.
Producing entrepreneurial citizens: Governmentality over and through Hong Kong influencers on Xiaohongshu (Red) (2022) Policy and Internet, 14 (3), pp. 618-632.

DOI: 10.1002/poi3.324

Abstract
Building on Foucault’s perspective of governmentality, this article focuses on how influencers in Hong Kong China (HK) operate as agents/mediators of governmentality and how “governmentality” occurs over and through lifestyle influencers as responsible, productive, and self-disciplined citizen subjects on the Chinese biggest lifestyle sharing platform—Xiaohongshu (Red). By employing a collaboration of walkthrough and ethnographic methods, this article examines how Red’s influencer governance, intersecting both HK and Mainland Chinese contexts, guides, trains, and controls influencers and users to become relevant to the practices of entrepreneurial citizenship, and how influencers and their followers act through, rely on and negotiate with the governmental practices and authoritative discourses. These practices and discourses motivate influencers to not only transform themselves into entrepreneurial citizen subjects who could produce individualizing knowledge about self-care and self-governance as techniques of disciplining the community, but also expand the key governmental strategies of reconstructing an entrepreneurial identity with their followers on behalf of the government. Although Red is not a mainstream influencer platform in HK, “the governmentality over and through influencers” on Red provides fruitful cases that demonstrate how HK’s model of influencer governance is based on the bottom-up networks through little ways in which management, guidance, and control occur with the active engagement of individual citizens, social organizations, professional associations, and businesses to meet the desired goals of the central and HKSAR government. © 2022 The Authors. Policy & Internet published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Policy Studies Organization.

Author Keywords
citizenship; entrepreneurial; governmentality; Hong Kong China; influencer governance; platforms

Cline, D.H. Sensory Disorientation during Crisis: Foucault’s “Heterotopia” and the Plague in Ancient Athens (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 February 2023

Cline, D.H.
Sensory Disorientation during Crisis: Foucault’s “Heterotopia” and the Plague in Ancient Athens (2022) Classical World, 115 (4), pp. 325-359.

DOI: 10.1353/clw.2022.0014

Abstract
This article explores the sensory experience of being in Athens during the plague (430–426 bce). By approaching the ancient epidemic from a perspective of sensory archaeology, we discover that the intensity of suffering caused by the two-pronged calamity of overcrowding inside the city walls plus the plague was likely exacerbated by unexpected sensory stimuli in once-familiar places (Foucault’s “heterotopia”), thereby causing a profound sense of disorientation for the inhabitants. The calamity transposed Athenian pleasure gardens, monument-lined streets, and sanctuaries from places of delight into a heterotopia of decay and death. © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Athens; crisis; disorientation; elite; epidemic; Foucault; Greece; plague; plague; senses; sensory

Archive: Daniel Defert, Interview on Oxford University mosaic site (2008)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 February 2023

Daniel Defert, Interview (in French), on Oxford University mosaic site Around 1968: Activism, networks, trajectories,
Interview conducted in Paris 7 April 2008, audio recording and transcript.
Interviewed by Robert Gildea and transcribed by Koisse Said

English translation and audio

[…]
RG : Et c’est quand vous étiez à Saint-Cloud que vous avez rencontré Foucault ?

DD : Oui, la première semaine où je suis arrive à Paris en 60, il se trouve que j’avais un de mes professeurs de la fac de Lyon qui était un ami de Foucault. Qui était à Normale avec Foucault et qui voulait que je représente encore au concours. Et pour me convaincre m’a invité à rencontrer Foucault. Et alors quand je suis rentré à Saint-Cloud j’avais un de mes camarades qui était entré un an avant moi – qui a fait une grande carrière diplomatique – et quand il m’a revu il a trouvé que j’affichais trop mon homosexualité. Et il m’a conseillé d’avoir une vie politique, comme thérapeutique (rire). Il m’a conseillé de me présenter aux élections des représentants des élèves de l’École Normale. Je vous dis ça parce que ça fait partie de l’histoire politique. Nous étions dans les Écoles Normales ‘élèves-maîtres’. C’est-à-dire que nous étions à la fois représentés dans les syndicats d’enseignants et les syndicats d’étudiants. J’avais jamais été militant, j’avais juste une fois fait le service d’ordre pour Mendès-France à Lyon pendant la guerre d’Algérie. Bon j’étais contre la guerre d’Algérie mais je ne m’étais pas impliqué d’abord j’étais interne à Lyon. Et puis à Saint-Cloud donc, je me suis présenté d’abord comme candidat pour représentant des élèves. J’ai été élu représentant à l’UNEF en 60. J’arrive juste en 60, la première semaine où j’arrive à Saint-Cloud je rencontre Foucault et je suis élu à l’UNEF alors que j’aurais pu être élu au syndicat des profs. Et j’ai la chance par hasard d’être élu à l’UNEF, c’était la guerre d’Algérie et l’UNEF est le principal mouvement social contre la guerre d’Algérie. Je me suis trouvé politisé par cette élection à l’UNEF.
[…]

Johan Wennström,The soul of Swedes (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 February 2023

Johan Wennström, The soul of Swedes,
On the contested state of Swedish cultural identity, The Critic, 8 February, 2023

n the late 1950s, French philosopher Michel Foucault spent three years as a researcher in the Swedish university town of Uppsala. The encounter between Foucault and Sweden seems to have been an unhappy one, perhaps inspiring him to begin work on his first study of institutional control, Madness and Civilization (1961), as he in fact did during this period. A decade later, Foucault reflected in an interview on “the mutism of the Swedes, their silence and their habit of talking with elliptical sobriety”, describing a society in which “a human is but a moving dot obeying laws, patterns and forms”. He went on, “In its calmness, Sweden reveals a brave new world where we discover that the human is no longer necessary.”

Foucault’s critical words about his Swedish hosts crystallise the widespread view, also espoused by British author Roland Huntford in his book The New Totalitarians (1971), that Sweden is a country where the individual and his social relationships are suffocated by an excessively interventionist state, producing loneliness and alienation. A much more nuanced analysis of life in the Swedish welfare state is offered by historian Henrik Berggren and sociologist Lars Trägårdh in a book that instantly became a classic when it was published in Sweden more than fifteen years ago and appeared, in slightly reworked form, in English last year.