Foucault News

Mark B. N. Hansen, Foucault and Media: A Missed Encounter?, South Atlantic Quarterly 2012 Volume 111, Number 3: 497-528
http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1596254

Abstract
This essay stages an encounter between Michel Foucault’s work—especially his final thought concerning biopolitics, security, and population—and contemporary theorization of media’s experiential impact. The essay argues that the opportunity for such an encounter has been obscured largely due to the role played by Gilles Deleuze (in particular by the concept of “control society”) in filtering Foucault’s work for media theory. The essay develops an approach to Foucault’s late work that centers on the population as a vehicle for rethinking individualization beyond substance; such an approach makes it possible to retain certain aspects of the category of the individual that are simply jettisoned in the contemporary embrace of Deleuze’s “dividual.” The essay concludes by exploring how this rethinking of Foucault’s work on individualization facilitates exploration of the impact of twenty-first-century “atmospheric” media on human individuation.

Mathieu Potte­‐Bonneville, Michel Foucault’s Bodies, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 43, 1 (2012) 1-32

Extract

The case seems settled: both in the field of the social sciences and in the discourses that accompany various contemporary political protests, Michel Foucault’s legacy is that of an eruption of bodies in at least two respects. Firstly, as an object of research, as is shown by the countless studies that borrow, more or less explicitly, from the programme announced in Discipline and Punish and developed in The Will to Knowledge, a programme whose categories are criticized only to better accept its fundamental horizon. This programme comprises a "political history of bodies" that carefully transfers their constitution from nature to history and that underlines how much the definition of their identity and reciprocal relations (whether of class, race or genre) is traversed by various forms of domination.

rest of article

Iliopoulos, J. Foucault’s notion of power and current psychiatric practice, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, Volume 19, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 48-58
https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ppp.2012.0006

Abstract
Underlying Foucault’s accounts of asylums, hospitals, prisons, and schools was a continuing concern with power and knowledge. In the field of mental health, his preoccupation with power relations and the construction of narratives of exclusion and repression in the History of Madness have led many scholars to consider Foucault an anti-psychiatrist (Freeman 1967; Laing 1967; Leach 1967; Shorter 1997, 274). They question the book’s historical data, which prioritize power relations and political analysis over the actual experience of doctors and patients, undermining its scientific worth. Even thinkers sympathetic to Foucault’s ideas argue that, despite the cultural discontinuities that he sought to foreground in his historical analysis, he nevertheless offered a continuous narrative of confinement and exclusion as a result of the oppressive powers of reason (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, 4). But for Foucault, power is not unilateral, dominant, and oppressive, but distributional. Power is not a substance or a property one can claim to possess. It is not a political structure, a government or a dominant social class. Power is mobile, unstable, and reversible and is not blind but is determined by an internal logic. There is a form of rationality behind the exercise of power, and when that form of rationality is undermined, power loses its foundations. This can be observed in current forms of psychiatric practice, where psychiatric power is in fact being undermined while apparently being ever more closely inscribed in social practices.

Author keywords
Community psychiatry; Dangerousness; Deinstitutionalization; Forms of rationality; Foucault; Governmentality; Power