Foucault News

Ondrej Ditrych, From discourse to dispositif: States and terrorism between Marseille and 9/11 (2013) Security Dialogue, 44 (3), pp. 223-240.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010613484076

Abstract
This article is a historical study of how states have articulated statements about terrorism since the 1930s; under what conditions these statements have been articulated; and what effects the discourses made up of these statements have had on global politics. This includes the constitutive role of the present discourse on what is posited as a terrorism dispositif. The inquiry is inspired by Foucault’s historical method, and comprises the descriptive archaeological analytic focused on the order of the discourse (including basic discourses in which the terrorist subject is constituted) and the genealogical power analysis of external conditions of emergence and variation of discursive series, whose treatment benefits also from Carl Schmitt’s concept of the nomos.

Author Keywords
discourse; Foucault; genealogy; nomos; Schmitt; terrorism

Carla Edgley, A genealogy of accounting materiality, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Volume 25, Issue 3, 2014, Pages 255-271
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2013.06.001

Abstract
This study explores the relevance of the historical dimensions of the materiality concept and its past role. Metaphors applied to materiality provide insights into conditions and traces of power that have shaped its discursive configuration. Rather than viewing materiality as the gradual development of a technical idea over time, metaphorical discourses suggest that it has been constituted as multiple categories of knowledge, with divergent roles, as: a moral responsibility; a solution to the problem of over-auditing; a solid epistemic foundation for financial reporting; a scientific technique; a quantitative rule of thumb; a risk management concept; and a mysterious shield. The malleable nature of the concept has allowed the profession to realign and reinvent it to meet shifting priorities and challenges. Divergence in the trajectories of materiality discourses is relative to certain conditions, events, actors and financial scandals. The paper draws on the metaphor of performance, to interpret materiality as a performative activity at the crux of truth games about making visible, controlling, taming, managing and hiding translation errors in accounting inscriptions. The extent to which a genealogical analysis identifies different styles of reasoning that have shaped its meaning over time has implications for debate about its future development.

Author Keywords
Critical; Foucault; Genealogy; Materiality; Social

James Lee, Ethopoiesis: Foucault’s late ethics and the sublime body (2013) New Literary History, 44 (1), pp. 179-198.
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2013.0005.

Abstract
This paper argues that Neil Hertz’s model of the sublime turn allows us to perceive the aesthetic, and specifically literary, consequences of Foucault’s late ethics reimagined as a sublime poetics. In doing so, the present analysis attempts to reanimate the concept of the sublime as a powerful ethical category reconceiving the subject in terms of the acts of writing that structure a constitutive aesthetic relationship to her own body. More generally, this account of Foucault proposes that his late ethics, and not necessarily the politics of his earlier work, holds the most interest for literary critics, since these ideas explicitly rethink ethics as a poetics, and thus foreground the frequently under recognized force of literary creation, and not simply cultural representation, in shaping subjects of power.

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2013.0005

John Roberts, Testing the limits of structuration theory in accounting research (2013) Critical Perspectives on Accounting., Volume 25, Issue 2, Pages 135-141
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2012.12.002

Abstract
In 1985 I published a paper in Accounting Organizations and Society with Bob Scapens titled ‘Accounting Systems and Systems of Accountability; understanding accounting practices in their organisational contexts’. The paper suggested the potential usefulness of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory for efforts to understand accounting in its organisational contexts. Rather than engage in a further review of the use of structuration theory in accounting, this paper sets out to test our original proposition as to the usefulness of Giddens ideas for accounting research. I explore three points of possible criticism in the paper. That structuration theory does not take the ‘agency’ of accounting sufficiently seriously; that Foucault and Lacan allow us to get much closer to the ways in which accounting information works back upon human subjects; and that Giddens and accounting share a lack of ethics.

Author Keywords
Accountability; Actor network theory; Modalities of interaction; Structuration theory