Foucault News

Jusionyte, I.
For social emergencies “We Are 9-1-1”: How journalists perform the state in an Argentine Border Town
(2014) Anthropological Quarterly, 87 (1), pp. 151-181.

Abstract
This article focuses on Puerto Iguazú, an Argentine town bordering Brazil and Paraguay, where the local media create a patchwork of substitute social services that form the basis of governance. More than 1,200 kilometers away from the federal capital, Iguazú was historically neglected by the central government: water shortages, power cuts, natural gas and fuel scarcity, impassable roads, and squatter settlements contributed to infrastructural collapses in a territorial periphery. Local news coverage has been consistently critical of the failing state in Iguazú, treating governmental neglect as social emergency, which requires an urgent media intervention. Through their routine news itineraries and agendas, social solidarity, and assistance campaigns, Iguazú journalists have taken on certain pragmatic functions ordinarily understood to be the task of the government. In reference to Foucault’s theory of capillary power, I call this locally embedded performance of the state, separate from official policies and projects, capillary governance. I pay special attention to the role of infrastructure, showing how different infrastructural networks-from power and water supply to communications technologies-interconnect, at times enabling and other times disabling the work of journalists. Merging anthropology of journalism with political anthropology, this article analyzes media practices on a remote border, where official governmental policies and actions are tentative and uneven, showing how Iguazú journalists take on the role of state actors. © 2014 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University.

Author Keywords
Argentina; Border; Governance; Journalism; Media; State; Triple frontera

DOI: 10.1353/anq.2014.0004

Rosol, M.
On resistance in the post-political city: Conduct and counter-conduct in Vancouver
(2014) Space and Polity, Published online Feb 2014

Abstract
The paper contributes to understandings of contestation and resistance in urban politics, using a land use struggle against a “big-box” development in Vancouver, Canada as an example. It surveys Foucault’s work on “governmentality,” highlighting the centrality of the notion of resistance in this work before focusing in particular on Foucault’s yet underexplored conceptions of “conduct” and “counter-conduct”. These concepts offer an analysis of urban politics beyond the binary of successful implementation of city policies or their failure, and of cooption or revolt; therefore, proving especially useful in the analysis of urban governance which is increasingly characterised as “post-political”.

Author Keywords
counter-conduct; Foucault; governmentality; post-political city; urban geography; urban politics; Vancouver

DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2013.879785

van Winsen, R., Henriqson, E., Schuler, B., Dekker, S.W.A.
Situation awareness: some conditions of possibility
(2014) Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, Published online Feb 2014

Abstract
Situation awareness (SA) has become a ubiquitous object of knowledge in our discourses of human performance and accident explanation. Based on Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach, in this paper, we examine SA by mapping the ‘conditions of possibility’ for this object to emerge. By highlighting the logic that SA builds upon, the political need that it intends to address, and the knowledges that delimitate it in its constitution, we aim to display the contingent nature of this object. Ultimately, we argue that as a discursive object, SA has effects.

Author Keywords
archaeology; conditions of possibility; Foucault; human factors; situation awareness

DOI: 10.1080/1463922X.2014.880529

Boano, C., Leclair-Paquet, B.
Potential, freedom and space: Reflections on Agamben’s potentialities in the West Bank
(2014) Space and Polity, Published online Feb 2014

Abstract
A special kind of infrastructure has emerged around the West Bank, which lays bare Israel’s capacity to spatialise its colonial power and to constantly solidify its presence. Reading these spatial devices through Agamben’s work, this paper proposes a reflective attempt to read this site of contemporary occupation through a “resistant” lens as a novel take on Agamben’s spatial topology and political aesthetics. The paper offers preliminary remarks on the search for alternative theoretical construction of Agamben “potentialities”. The paper allow speculations on the heterotopian nature of Israeli produced infrastructures, perceived at once as actualised potentials in space, and spaces of potential.

Author Keywords
Agamben; conflicted spaces; Foucault; heterotopian infrastructures; Israel; potentiality; West Bank

DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2013.880010

Hardie, M.
Making Visible the Invisible Act of Doping
(2014) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 27 (1), pp. 85-119.

Abstract
This paper describes the construction of the visual space of surveillance by the global anti-doping apparatus, it is a space inhabited daily by professional cyclists. Two principal mechanisms of this apparatus will be discussed-the Whereabouts System and the Biological Passport; in order to illustrate how this space is constructed and how it visualises the invisible act of doping. These mechanisms act to supervise and govern the professional cyclist and work to classify them as either clean or dirty in terms of the use of prohibited doping substances or methods. Contrary to the analysis of liberal anti-doping scholars such as Hanstad, Loland and Møller this paper argues that Foucault’s Panopticon paradigm is a useful tool for the analysis of this apparatus. The Whereabouts System and Biological Passport are the instruments by which the anti-doping apparatus intensifies the construction of the space of surveillance in professional sport. This space of surveillance not only locates and makes visible the physical location of each individual cyclist, but it also makes visible their internal bodily functions, in this case the composition and the fluctuations of the composition of their blood. In making the cyclist visible the instruments do not allow the cause of doping, or the event of doping to be known or observed. Rather what they do is cast the body in terms of abnormalities of time, place or blood. In the case of an abnormality of the cyclist’s blood, the cause itself cannot be identified with any certainty, all that is made visible is a suggestion, or a probability, that doping may have occurred. The ultimate effects are twofold-an internalisation and continual monitoring of one’s self as well as by the authorities, and a radical change in the nature and the definition of the offence of doping. No longer is it positive evidence of doping that is punishable, but what becomes punishable is an abnormality, in the cyclist’s location, or their body, which suggests a probability that the invisible act of doping may have occurred. In the course of this process accepted manners of proving an offence by the use of scientific evidence and expert commentary are transformed. The Whereabouts System and the Biological Passport open up a new manner in which the invisible can be visualised. Through the discourse and the attendant commentary of the expert a new alliance between doping and the law is constructed. The result is a redistribution of the way in which the law visualises and treats the symptoms (the signifier) and the signified act of doping. The Whereabouts System and Biological Passport are the instruments by which the anti-doping apparatus intensifies the construction of the space of surveillance in professional sport. This space of surveillance not only locates and makes visible the physical location of each individual cyclist, but it also makes visible their internal bodily functions, in this case the composition and the fluctuations of the composition of their blood. In making the cyclist visible the instruments do not allow the cause of doping, or the event of doping to be known or observed. Rather what they do is cast the body in terms of abnormalities of time, place or blood. In the case of an abnormality of the cyclists’s blood, the cause itself cannot be identified with any certainty, all that is made visible is a suggestion, or a probability, that doping may have occurred. The ultimate effects are twofold-an internalisation and continual monitoring of one’s self as well as by the authorities, and a radical change in the nature and the definition of the offence of doping. No longer is it positive evidence of doping that is punishable, but what becomes punishable is an abnormality, in the cyclist’s location, or their body, which suggests a probability that the invisible act of doping may have occurred. In the course of this process accepted manners of proving an offence by the use of scientific evidence and expert commentary are transformed. The Whereabouts System and the Biological Passport open up a new manner in which the invisible can be visualised. Through the discourse and the attendant commentary of the expert a new alliance between doping and the law is constructed. The result is a redistribution of the way in which the law visualises and treats the symptoms (the signifier) and the signified act of doping

Author Keywords
Biological passport; Biopower; Doping; Foucault; International cycling union; Panopticon; Professional cycling; Society of control; Society of the spectacle; Whereabouts; World anti doping code

DOI: 10.1007/s11196-013-9311-3

Viernes, N.
The Magistrate is the Muse: Law and Visual Economy in Bangkok
(2014) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 27 (1), pp. 27-46.

Abstract
Governmentality is a spatial formation negotiated within historically-constituted political landscapes. In Bangkok, this spatialization of power is manifested in the militarization of urban life and the protocols of security procedure, but also in anti-government protests and an increasingly politicized visual culture. The memory and meaning of the city’s streets exist as an overlooked legibility that challenges the visual strategies of government control. Monuments, travel routes, and other public sites of national recognition now compete in an extended urban arena of images, such as literature and cinema, which re-stage governmentality and the material contours of Thailand’s contemporary political disagreements outside of its institutional norms. I read this intersection between governing and image circulation through the development of a visual economy in Bangkok and depict how different communities-including a bureaucratized military and a populist political party, but also writers and filmmakers-intervene in its circulation. Each group zooms in on key spaces of the city in the attempt to speak to changing forms of governmentality.

Author Keywords
Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Bangkok; Foucault; Governmentality; Street politics

DOI: 10.1007/s11196-013-9318-9

Webb, P.T.
Policy problematization
(2014) International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27 (3), pp. 364-376.

Abstract
This article places Michel Foucault’s concept of problematization in relation to educational policy research. My goal is to examine a key assumption of policy related to “solving problems” through such technologies. I discuss the potential problematization has to alter conceptions of policy research; and, through this discussion, I provide a set of alternative pragmatics with which to conduct research for, and on, education policy.

Author Keywords
Foucault; policy; problematization

DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2012.762480