Foucault News

Principal self-government and subjectification: the exercise of principal autonomy in the Western Australian Independent Public Schools programme (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

11 February 2014

Gobby, B.
Principal self-government and subjectification: the exercise of principal autonomy in the Western Australian Independent Public Schools programme (2013) Critical Studies in Education, 54 (3), pp. 273-285.

Abstract
The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault and Foucauldian scholarship, this article examines how the IPS programme functions as a regime of government and self-government. Data collected from two IPS principals is used to examine the subjective effects of power as it is exercised in the IPS regime. The article finds that the IPS initiative introduces new possibilities for principals to actively participate in practices of self-formation, through which these principals self-steer, exercise their freedom and govern themselves and their schools. It illustrates how governmental mechanisms depend on, harness and shape the autonomy of these principals, and how their individual practices of self-government align with neoliberal governmentalities.

Author Keywords
governmentality; Independent Public Schools; neoliberalism; school principals; self-management

DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2013.832338

Stuart Elden, Beyond Discipline and Punish: Is it time for a new translation of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir? (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 February 2014

Progressive Geographies

Alan Sheridan’s translation of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir as Discipline and Punish is almost forty years old, and it is sometimes said that great works of literature need to be retranslated each generation. (For some examples of this for works of theory, see my post here). Foucault scholarship has advanced quite dramatically in the last forty years. The collected shorter writings, and especially the lecture courses, have given us a new sense of what Foucault was doing. The debates in the secondary literature have moved on too – Sheridan’s Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth was the first book on Foucault in English in 1980. Compare that book to more recent secondary studies and you’ll get a sense of how debates have changed.

Sheridan deserves enormous credit for the work he did, translating several of Foucault’s books and writing that first, important, study of his work. A good many…

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The eye of power(-lessness): On the emergence of the panoptical and synoptical classroom (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 February 2014

Landahl, J.
The eye of power(-lessness): On the emergence of the panoptical and synoptical classroom (2013) History of Education, 42 (6), pp. 803-821.

Abstract
This article considers the emergence and meaning of a particular kind of surveillance in classrooms: the one represented by the gaze of the teacher. Drawing on teaching manuals and other normative material published between the 1820s and the 1960s, it is argued that the optical regime of the classroom underwent a decisive change during the second half of the nineteenth century, when monitorial teaching was superseded by teacher-led whole-class teaching. This new method of teaching implied a new kind of surveillance in which the teacher was expected to remain at his/her desk in order to see the class. The meaning of this optical regime is discussed in relation to Foucault’s concept of the panopticon and Mathiesen’s concept of the synopticon. While both concepts highlight important aspects, it is argued that they do not fully capture the essence of specific features of surveillance in the history of the classroom. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
history of the classroom; panopticon; school discipline; synopticon; whole-class teaching

DOI: 10.1080/0046760X.2013.832408

Cycle Foucault: psychiatrie et psychanalyse (I). Conférence exceptionnelle d’Elisabeth Roudinesco (14 mars 2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 February 2014

Cycle Foucault: psychiatrie et psychanalyse (I). Conférence exceptionnelle d’Elisabeth Roudinesco (14 mars 2014)
« Foucault à l’épreuve de l’historiographie de la psychanalyse »

Further info

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Centre de philosophie contemporaine de la Sorbonne (PhiCo EA3562)

Date et horaires: 14 mars 2014, 16h-18h

Lieu: salle Lalande, UFR de philosophie – 17, rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris, 1er étage, esc. C

Entrée libre dans la mesure des places disponibles

With thanks to Alexandre Klein for this link

Cycle Foucault: psychiatrie et psychanalyse (II). Journée d’étude internationale (15 mars 2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 February 2014

Cycle Foucault: psychiatrie et psychanalyse (II). Journée d’étude internationale (15 mars 2014)

31 janvier 2014

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Centre de philosophie contemporaine de la Sorbonne (PhiCo EA3562)

Further info

Organisation: Judith Revel et Pascale Gillot

Date et horaires: 15 mars 2014, 9h15-18h

Lieu: salle Lalande, UFR de philosophie – 17, rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris, 1er étage, esc. C

Entrée libre dans la mesure des places disponibles

Matinée :

9h15 : Accueil des participants et présentation

9h30 : Jean Allouch, (Ecole lacanienne de psychanalyse), « Ce que Foucault apprend à l’analyse »

10h30 : Elisabetta Basso (Technische Universität Berlin, Institut für Philosophie), « L’archéologie foucaldienne de la folie entre psychiatrie et psychanalyse »

11h30 : Pause

11h45 : Mario Colucci (psychiatre au département de santé mentale de Trieste, psychanalyste, rédacteur de la revue de philosophie aut aut) : « Foucault et Basaglia : une critique de la psychiatrie est-elle encore possible ? »

Après-midi :

15h : Michel Tort (psychanalyste, ancien professeur à l’université Paris VII, Sciences humaines cliniques) « Michel Foucault chez les psychanalystes »

16h : Eric Fassin, (département de science politique et Centre d’études féminines et de genre, Université Paris 8 LabTop/CRESPPA) : « ’La science s’inclina convaincue.’ Pouvoir médical et agency dans les ‘Souvenirs’ d’Herculine/Abel Barbin ».

Contacts : Judith Revel (judith.revel@univ-paris1.fr), Pascale Gillot (gillot.pascale@wanadoo.fr)

With thanks to Alexandre Klein for this link

Stuart Elden, Discipline, Punish, Examine and Produce: Foucault’s La société punitive (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 February 2014

Stuart Elden (2014), Discipline, Punish, Examine and Produce: Foucault’s La société punitive, Review of La société punitive: Cours au Collège de France 1972-1973, by Michel Foucault, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt, Seuil/Gallimard: Paris.

Update September 2025. This review originally appeared on the now defunct Berfrois site and is now held on Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies site

Delivered between January and March 1973, La société punitive was Foucault’s third annual course at the Collège de France. It is the eleventh of his thirteen courses there to be published, in what have been uniformly excellent editions under the general editorship of François Ewald and the recently deceased Alessandro Fontana. This course has been edited by Bernard E. Harcourt, Julius Krieger Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Chicago. Harcourt previously co-edited Foucault’s lectures at the University of Louvain from 1981, Mal faire, dire vrai with Fabienne Brion; a course soon to be published as Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling.

With thanks to Daniele Lorenzini for this link

Repenser Foucault (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 February 2014

Angèle Kremer Marietti, Repenser Foucault, Propos recueillis par Bencherki Benmeziane et publiés dans la revue de l’Université d’Oran At-Tadwin de décembre 2012, Dogma : Revue de Philosophie et de Sciences Humaines, octobre 2013

Full PDF

Editor’s note: Angèle Kremer Marietti’s 1974 book Michel Foucault et l’archéologie du savoir, was amongst the very first books to be published on Foucault’s work.

Que reste-t-il aujourd’hui de la pensée de Foucault ? Pensez-vous que les problématiques discutées dans l’œuvre de Foucault soient toujours d’actualité ?

Je vous remercie de me permettre d’évaluer l’héritage Foucault dans sa réception actuelle. Sans doute, la richesse de l’œuvre de Foucault explique que soient abordés, sous son égide, des thèmes tels que « gouvernement et société », « les maladies du pouvoir », ou « le rôle de la vérité dans la généalogie foucaldienne », qui sont traités actuellement dans le séminaire de mon ami le professeur Jean-François Braunstein à la Sorbonne. Mais il reste que l’actualité historique pourrait bénéficier d’une œuvre particulièrement exigeante comme l’est celle de Foucault. Tout comme l’essence du pouvoir, l’essence des forces sociales en action est à la fois permanente et tacite, relevant à la fois d’une microphysique autant que d’une globalité transparente. Nous ne devons pas oublier qu’immanent et variable, le pouvoir lié au savoir a été la cible de Michel Foucault.

Suite

With thanks to Alexandre Klein for this info.

Moving away from Bourdieu and reproduction: Foucault, resistance and gender in secondary school (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 February 2014

Ali Meghji (2014), Moving away from Bourdieu and reproduction: Foucault, resistance and gender in secondary school, Paper for ‘Foucault and education: Retrospect and Prospect‘ conference (University of Sheffield).

Paper available on Academia.edu site

Abstract
The way in which I will be defending the utility of Foucault’s works for educational research is through the idea that Foucault’s analytics of power enables us to analyse resistance in schools. Many Foucauldians analyse how educational systems create particular subjectivities, however I wish to put Foucault on a spectrum with Bourdieu; with Bourdieu on the one side illuminating reproduction and focusing on the macro, and Foucault on the other side emphasising resistance and focusing on the micro in educational institutions. My example of resistance will be homosexuals and masculinity – how dominant masculine-gender norms are challenged in educational institutions. This will draw on a series of in-depth qualitative interviews demonstrating how particular homosexual individuals constructed their identities through resistance to hegemonic discourses and practices. This way of using Foucault also answers the Habermasian critique that Foucault never offers any examples of resistance in his ‘analytics’ of power.

I will thus strongly disagree with Marshall’s comment that ‘Foucault has little to offer to practising educators’.

Origins of Truth: Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

4 February 2014

Origins of Truth: Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know

February 21-22, 2014
Stony Brook Manhattan
387 Park Avenue South
New York, NY 10016

A conference presented by The Foucault Society and the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University

In celebration of the publication of Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970-1971 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), we invite participants to a conference in New York City.

As the first of Foucault’s annual courses, Lectures on the Will to Know set an agenda for his intellectual journey of the 1970s and 1980s. Its publication in English translation opens up new directions for research into power, knowledge and the “formation of discourses.”

This conference gathers a group of established and emerging scholars to analyze Lectures on the Will to Know – its sources, themes and intellectual, historical or political contexts. What are the multiple ways that “truth” and “origins” are developed in Foucault’s work? How do philosophy and history intersect in this text? What is “will” in a Foucaultian context and how can we think of “the will to know” without reinstalling sovereign subjectivity? How do Foucault’s encounters here with Aristotle, the Sophists, Nietzsche, Deleuze – indeed, with the possibility of an origin of Western knowledge — complicate our understanding of his genealogical approach?

Keynote: Todd May, Clemson University: “Michel Foucault’s Will to Know”
Guest Speaker: Eduardo Mendieta, Stony Brook University

Paper Presentations:

Bernard Gendron, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee:
“Foucault in 1971: Turbulence, Discontinuity, Uncertainty”

Verena Ehrlenbusch, University of Memphis:
“Foucault’s History of Sovereignty”

Neil Brophy, Villanova University:
“Will, Knowledge and Truth in Aristotle, Nietzsche and Foucault”

Johan Boberg, Uppsala University:
“Writing the History of Truth: Foucault & Heidegger”

Maxime Lallement, Manchester Metropolitan University:
“Justice, Judgment, Positivity and Discourse in Michel Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know“

Daniel Schultz, Yale Divinity School, and University of Chicago:
“The Will to Know: The Ethics of Genealogy”

Kerem Eksen, Istanbul Technical University:
“The ‘Event’ Called Philosophy: From the Lectures on the Will to Know to Hermeneutics of the Subject”

Abubakr Khan, State University of New York–Binghamton:
“To Will the Event: Nietzsche, Foucault & Deleuze”

Corey McCall, Elmira College:
“Foucault’s Faust and Saint Anthony”

Dean Casales, Kean University:
“A Third Way of Knowing: A Critique of Foucault’s ‘Oedipal Knowledge’”

Wai Kit Choi, California State University, Los Angeles:
“Theorizing Money and Modernity: Implications from Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know“

Peter Macapia, Pratt Institute:
“Distributions: Ceramics, Money, and Events”

Deleuze / Foucault: A Neoliberal Diagram (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

3 February 2014

Deleuze / Foucault: A Neoliberal Diagram, Mediatropes Vol 4, No 1 (2013)

Link to issue. Full PDFs available

Table of Contents

Editorial Introduction: Neoliberal Diagrammatics and Digital Control
Matthew Tiessen, Greg Elmer

IPO 2.0: The Panopticon Goes Public
Greg Elmer

Resilience versus Resistance: Affectively Modulating Contemporary Diagrams of Social Resilience, Social Sustainability, and Social Innovation
Petra Hroch

Monetary Mediations and the Overcoding of Potential: Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari and How the Affective Diagrammatics of Debt Have Gone Global
Matthew Tiessen

Info Nymphos
Erika Biddle

A New Individuation: Deleuze’s Simondon Connection
Andrew Iliadis

Special Semiotic Characters: What is an Obstacle-Sign?
Gary Genosko

Tweets Speak: Indefinite Discipline in the Age of Twitter
Steven James May