Foucault News

Graham, Helen (2012). “Scaling governmentality: Museums, co-production and re-calibrations of the ‘logic of culture'”. Cultural studies, 26 (4), pp. 565-92.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2012.679285

Abstract
This article explores contemporary uses of museum co-production for public policy through a sustained theoretical engagement with Tony Bennett’s work on museums as an ‘object of government’. The specific focus is a theoretical discussion of the ‘logic of culture’ as it relates to new UK policy uses of participants’ ‘experience’ as the desired site of authenticity at the very same time as the process of expressing this authenticity is located as a site for reform. It is argued that Bennett mobilizes two techniques of scale (fixing the analytic lens of governmentality and drawing on a strong scalar correspondence of power) in order to secure a relatively disciplinary reading of governmentality and to foreclose the resistant possibilities of cultural politics. Drawing on the differences between practices associated in UK museums with ‘access’ (which works through the dis-intensification of the difference between the museum and everyday life) and with ‘social impact’ (which requires a re-intensification of this difference in order to increase the visibility of effect), this article concludes by countering Bennett’s more disciplinary uses of Foucault with the Foucault of ‘The Subject and Power’. It is argued that the ‘logic of culture’ can be calibrated to varying intensities in considering the coming-into-relationship between the museums and those-to-be-involved. It is specifically argued – following Foucault’s spatializaton of ‘thought’ as distance (limit-attitude) and ‘counter-conduct’ as proximity – that the ‘logic of culture’ might be actively re-calibrated to use the spatialized dynamic of distance and proximity to create spaces which might allow the museum and its associated policy – not just those involved – to be affected by the co-production encounter.

Author Keywords:
museums; governmentality; Cultural Studies; cultural policy; co-production; community engagement

Esposito, R. The dispositif of the person, Law, Culture and the Humanities, Volume 8, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 17-30
https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872111403104

Abstract
In this essay one of Italy’s leading philosophers examines the category of person from legal, historical, and biopolitical perspectives. Reading texts ranging from Roman law to Christian theology to bioethics, Esposito shows how person functions in Foucault’s terms as a dispositif, that is as a way of arranging the relation between the human and animal in contemporary subjectivity. Drawing on the etymology of person from persona or mask, Esposito shows how the term allows a subject to dispose of his or her animal half through the gift of grace in order to become a human person. Reading Saint Augustine, Simone Weil, and others, Esposito shows how the archaic role played by the person in Roman law returns today in liberalism’s objectification of the body as a thing. Esposito concludes by elaborating a counter dispositif of the impersonal as a way of transforming our political lexicon.

Author keywords
Classical sovereignty; Giorgio Agamben; Human rights; Impersonal; Living being; Roman law; Saint Augustine; Simone Weil; Slave as property

Street, A.A , Coleman, S.B. Introduction: Real and imagined spaces, Space and Culture, Volume 15, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 4-17
https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331211421852

Abstract
The hospital’s ambiguous relationship to everyday social space has long been a central theme of hospital ethnography. Often, hospitals are presented either as isolated “islands” defined by biomedical regulation of space (and time) or as continuations and reflections of everyday social space that are very much a part of the “mainland.” This polarization of the debate overlooks hospitals’ paradoxical capacity to be simultaneously bounded and permeable, both sites of social control and spaces where alternative and transgressive social orders emerge and are contested. We suggest that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia usefully captures the complex relationships between order and disorder, stability and instability that define the hospital as a modernist institution of knowledge, governance, and improvement. We expand Foucault’s focus on the disciplinary, heterotopic qualities of the hospital to explore the heterotopia as a space of multiple orderings. These orderings are not only biomedical. Rather, hospitals are notable for the intensity and heterogeneity of the ongoing spatial ordering processes, both biomedical and other, that produce them. We outline an approach to heterotopias that traces the contingent configuration of hospital space through relationships between the physical environment, technologies, and persons, while simultaneously considering the kinds of spatial imaginings, hopes for the future, and emotional responses that are rendered possible by those configurations. We provide three thematic frameworks through which the heterotopic and contingent qualities of hospital spaces might be explored: boundary work, generating scale, and layered space.

Author keywords
biomedicine; heterotopia; Hospital ethnography; medical anthropology; STS

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Biebricher, Thomas & Frieder Vogelmann, Governmentality and State Theory: Reinventing the Reinvented Wheel?, Theory & Event, Volume 15, Issue 3, 2012

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/484422

Abstract
In this paper we pose the question what constitutes the originality of governmentality as a state analytical framework by confronting it with alternative contemporary approaches in state theory, suggesting that the latter may already contain many of the insights Foucaultians sometimes tend to ascribe to the governmentality perspective exclusively and thus run the risk of reinventing the state theoretical wheel. Still, we argue that there is something unique to the governmentality perspective, namely a particular kind of unwieldy knowledge about the state it aims to produce. Generating such knowledge would no longer be state theory but rather state philosophy in a specifically Foucaultian sense.