Foucault News

Foucault’s archaeology: science and transformation (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

14 January 2015

Jamie Melrose. Foucault’s archaeology: science and transformation, Review of Foucault’s archaeology: science and transformation , by David Webb, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 181 pp., £65 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7486-2421-8, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, December 2014

DOI:10.1080/13642529.2015.985974

Extract from review

At root, David Webb’s Foucault’s Archaeology: Science and Transformation is an attempt to firm up ‘commonplace’ (Dews 1995, 39) claims about Michel Foucault’s association with the history of science. Webb has set out to ensure Foucault’s notion of archaeology in The Archaeology of Knowledge (AoK) is put in its proper intellectual context. He contends that Foucault should be unambiguously placed alongside thinkers in the French tradition of the history of science (or historical epistemology) such as the pioneering figure of Gaston Bachelard and the philosophers of science and mathematics, Jean Cavaillès and Michel Serres. Through a close reading, Webb propounds that AoK is a specific response to a problematic present in Bachelard, Cavaillès and Serres, and acknowledged by Foucault at the end of AoK‘s precursor The Order of Things (1966): how does one move beyond ‘the impasse in which thinking had been caught in modernity … the disappearance of man’ (7–11). How should man’s finitude affect critical inquiry?

In Foucault’s Archaeology, Webb gets right to it. Structurally, the book starts with a background section, spelling out AoK‘s link to Bachelard, Cavaillès and Serres, before Webb comments on AoK chapter by chapter. He then provides a concise closing remarks section. Foucault’s Archaeology is mainly exposition, so familiarity with AoK is somewhat expected, as well as an acquaintance with Heidegger, who pops up at regular intervals in the book. Indeed, more so than Foucault’s three compatriots, it is arguably Heidegger who is writ largest throughout Foucault’s Archaeology. There are several points of consideration of the relationship of Heidegger’s phenomenology to Foucault’s discursive account of historical experience (9 and 10, 34–37, 114–116). Webb notes the overlaps (and differences) between Heidegger’s temporal but primary ontology and Foucault’s account of the temporal but fundamentally constitutive discursive rendering up of the intelligible. Webb’s phraseology is also quite involved in Foucault’s Archaeology. It makes no concession to idioms other than those of Foucault, Bachelard, Cavaillès, Serres or Heidegger.

Michael C. Behrent, Liberalism without humanism: Michel Foucault and the free-market creed, 1976–1979

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

13 January 2015

Michael C. Behrent, Liberalism without humanism: Michel Foucault and the free-market creed, 1976–1979, Modern Intellectual History / Volume 6 / Issue 03 / November 2009, pp 539 – 568
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244309990175

Editor’s note: This article appears in French translation in the recent volume edited by Daniel Zamora Critiquer Foucault, Les années 1980 et la tentation néo-libérale, Aden, Bruxelles, 2014. This volume will appear in English translation later this year. With thanks to Stuart Elden at Progressive Geographies for details on this article.

Abstract
This article challenges conventional readings of Michel Foucault by examining his fascination with neoliberalism in the late 1970s. Foucault did not critique neoliberalism during this period; rather, he strategically endorsed it. The necessary cause for this approval lies in the broader rehabilitation of economic liberalism in France during the 1970s. The sufficient cause lies in Foucault’s own intellectual development: drawing on his long-standing critique of the state as a model for conceptualizing power, Foucault concluded, during the 1970s, that economic liberalism, rather than “discipline,” was modernity’s paradigmatic power form. Moreover, this article seeks to clarify the relationship between Foucault’s philosophical antihumanism and his assessment of liberalism. Rather than arguing (as others have) that Foucault’s antihumanism precluded a positive appraisal of liberalism, or that the apparent reorientation of his politics in a more liberal direction in the late 1970s entailed a partial retreat from antihumanism, this article contends that Foucault’s brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between antihumanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety. Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical antihumanism that is the hallmark of Foucault’s thought.

Peter Levine, Foucault and neoliberalism (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

11 January 2015

Peter Levine, Foucault and neoliberalism on his blog.

If you’re intellectually and ideologically eclectic, then you will find important ideas all over the map. It will not surprise you to learn that a person generally associated with the left has benefited from F.O. von Hayek or Gary Becker: leading libertarians. An excellent example is James C. Scott, who likes to call himself (I suspect partly for the frisson of it) “a crude Marxist,” but who has been deeply influenced by Hayek. Scott’s analysis of the high-modernist state is indispensable, however you choose to classify it.

On the other hand, if you’re a committed leftist intellectual, it may well come as a surprise to you that Michel Foucault read Hayek and Becker and said positive things about neoliberalism. That is the theme of Daniel Zamora’s forthcoming volume Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale. In the left magazine The Jacobin, Zamora presents it as puzzling and even potentially scandalous fact that Foucault should have showed “indulgence … toward neoliberalism.”

I do not know the relevant texts and statements by the late Foucault. But I think the affinity between Foucault’s style of critique and libertarianism is important although not very surprising, and I would understand it in the following contexts:

1. The “revolution” of May 1968 was led by activists and intellectuals who considered themselves Marxists and often especially favored Maoism. Yet their successful concrete demands were for greater individual freedom, especially vis-a-vis the state. They won a lower age of consent for sex (1974), abortion rights (1975), freedom of information (1978), and many other reforms traditionally recommended by classical liberals. They also reformed the state by reducing the power of the president, making elections more important, and strengthening NGOs. In Marxist terms, ’68 was a bourgeois revolution, not a proletarian one. So it shouldn’t be shocking that perhaps the greatest political thinker of ’68 was a bourgeois liberal (of a kind).

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Sverre Raffnsøe, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Morten S. Thaning, Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 January 2015

Sverre Raffnsøe, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Morten S. Thaning, Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research, Organization September 17, 2014
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508414549885

A full version of this paper can be found here

Abstract
While Foucault’s work has had a crucial impact on organizational research, the analytical potential of the dispositive has not been sufficiently developed. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the notion of the dispositive as a key conception in Foucault’s thought, particularly in his lectures at the Collège de France, and to develop dispositional analytics with specific reference to matters of organization. Foucault’s dispositional analysis articulates a history of interrelated social technologies that have been constructed to organize how we relate to each other. The article distinguishes various dispositional prototypes. It shows how dispositional analytics leads the way beyond general periodizations and established dichotomies such as the either-or of the discursive and non-discursive, power and freedom, determinism, and agency; and it demonstrates how dispositional analytics can contribute to a more complex understanding of organizational dynamics, power, strategy, resistance, and critique. Dispositional analytics allows for a new interpretation and use of Foucault in relation to organization studies.

Analytics
critique
discipline
dispositive
Foucault
law
power
resistance
security

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Daniel Zamora – A Reply: Was Foucault Speaking in His Own Voice?

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

9 January 2015

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Daniel Zamora – A Reply: Was Foucault Speaking in His Own Voice?, An und für sich blog, January 6, 2015

First I would like to thank the four contributors and AUFS for devoting this series to the theme of Foucault and neoliberalism. All the interventions are highly stimulating and take us to the heart of a debate of great current moment. Obviously I am not able to undertake a general discussion of all the interventions and all the central questions they pose. But I am sure that the debate will not end here, that it will continue when the book is published in English. However, I would like to revisit the reasoning behind my argument, and why I do not think that it is a problem of interpreting Foucault’s words.

It is indeed true, as Stuart Elden notes in his response, that “Foucault’s mode of reading texts often makes it look like he is agreeing with arguments, when he is really trying to reconstruct them, to understand their logic, and so on.” Verena Erlenbusch, for her part, adds that I “[fail] to recognize that Foucault is not speaking in his own voice but paraphrasing important representatives of neoliberal thought.” The argument made by Stuart Elden clearly applies to Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France. But while I am largely in agreement with his critique, I do not think it affects my argument. This is the case for two reasons.

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Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Thomas Nail – Michel Foucault, Accelerationist (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

8 January 2015

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Thomas Nail – Michel Foucault, Accelerationist, An und für sich blog, January 5, 2015

The Debate: So far the debate over Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism is split between two positions. On one side there are those (Daniel Zamora, François Ewald, Michael Behrent, and others) who argue that Foucault’s “sympathy” for neoliberalism marks his later work as at least partially “compatible” with neoliberalism. On the other side many more (Stuart Elden, Peter Gratton, Steven Maynard, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others) argue that although “Foucault’s mode of reading texts often makes it look like he is agreeing with [neoliberal] arguments, he is really trying to reconstruct them, to understand their logic, and so on.” Furthermore, given Foucault’s commitment to Leftist groups like Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons, GIP and others, the argument goes, Foucault could not have been a neoliberal.

But perhaps this debate has been made unnecessarily polemic. The question of the debate is not, “was Foucault a neoliberal or not?”. As far as I can tell, no one is explicitly arguing that he was, only that he shared “some sympathies” with neoliberal theory: some anti-statism, some anti-authoritarian values, and so on. Is it not possible to share some points of interest or critique with a position that one does not fully accept? Thus, the more interesting question I think we should be asking is, “what commonalities or shared interests might exist between Foucault’s political thought and certain neoliberal ideas, and to what degree?”

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Foucault’s Last Decade – Update 17

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 January 2015

Progressive Geographies

I’ve made good progress on Chapter 9 around Christmas and the New Year. A productive day in the British Library today filled in some missing references to primary or secondary material Foucault utilised, as well as tracking down two little-known pieces by Foucault himself. I have also updated the list of Foucault’s uncollected notes, lectures and interviews on this site.

The chapter begins with a section on the two different historical plans (as opposed to the 1976 thematic plan) of the History of Sexuality: the one that culminates with a draft of a large manuscript on antiquity in March 1983; and the one that takes that draft and rearranges its contents into the actually published volumes two and three. In the first plan a volume on Christianity will follow as volume III; in the second it is shifted down to be the projected volume IV. I talk a bit about…

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Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Johanna Oksala – Never Mind Foucault: What Are the Right Questions for Us? (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

7 January 2015

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Johanna Oksala – Never Mind Foucault: What Are the Right Questions for Us? An und für sich blog, January 4, 2015

Daniel Zamora’s recent interview in Jacobin titled “Can We Criticize Foucault?” has sparked another discussion on Foucault’s alleged endorsement of neoliberalism. For those of us who did not know Foucault personally, the evidence for such a claim can only be found in his writings. I, for myself, have not found any such evidence yet. Zamora’s revelations that Foucault met with Lionel Stoléru several times seem inconclusive at best.

More importantly, this debate itself seems misguided to me. Whether Foucault had some secret sympathies for neoliberalism might obviously be of some biographical or historical interest, but theoretically the answer to this question would only be relevant if it disqualified his thought as a useful toolbox for the academic left today. Zamora’s aim seems to be to show that this is in fact the case. In a follow-up article to the initial interview he claims that Foucault was not asking the “right questions” due to his neoliberal leanings, and that his thought has therefore contributed to the disorientation of the left and to the dismantling of the welfare state.

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Foucault on Parrhesia – translation of a 1982 lecture forthcoming in Critical Inquiry

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

6 January 2015

Progressive Geographies

A lecture by Foucault in 1982 at Université de Grenoble, on “Parrēsia” was first published in French in 2012 in the journal Anabases. Another lecture from this same trip, “Rêver de ses plaisirs”, was published in 1983, and is a variant of the first chapter of Le souci de soi/The Use of Pleasures. I outline and discuss the differences here.

The French version of the “Parrēsia” article will be available online in October 2015. A translation by Graham Burchell is forthcoming in Critical Inquiry in early 2015. For the moment, that journal has just posted the first two paragraphs:

Thank you very much for inviting me. I am here, as you know, as a supplicant. What I mean is that, until four or five years ago, my field, at any rate the domain of my work, had scarcely anything to do with ancient philosophy; and then, following a number of zigzags…

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Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Gordon Hull – Why Foucault is Still Helpful on Neoliberalism (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

6 January 2015

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Gordon Hull – Why Foucault is Still Helpful on Neoliberalism, An und für sich blog, January 3, 2015

The conceptual core of Daniel Zamora’s “Can We Criticize Foucault,” in which he argues that Foucault’s late writings end up advocating the same things neoliberalism does, seems to me to be the proposal that Foucault “seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.” In a follow-up piece, Zamora concludes that Foucault “doesn’t advocate neoliberalism, but he adopts all of its critiques of the welfare state.” That’s clearly a problem, though I am aware that I’ve got the benefit of a generation of hindsight about neoliberalism. I also don’t know many of the writings in question, and so I’m reluctant to say anything about the (for lack of better terms) sociological and biographical questions at play.

However, I have no trouble saying that if Foucault thought neoliberalism wouldn’t project its models of subjectivity onto individuals, he was mistaken. I’m also not sure he (consistently) thought that: the Birth of Biopolitics lectures emphasized that one of the main innovations of neoliberalism over classical liberalism was precisely the awareness that markets weren’t natural, and had to be nurtured by the state (Bernard Harcourt underscores the point here), and he emphasizes entrepreneurship of the self as a neoliberal vision of subjectivity. Whatever he thought about social welfare programs, phrasing things this way allows us to focus on the important question: Foucault says that “writing only interests me to the extent that it is incorporated into the reality of a battle.” Does Foucault’s writing offer any weapons against neoliberalism, even if he didn’t realize it?

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