Foucault News

Ben Anderson, Population and Affective Perception: Biopolitics and Anticipatory Action in US Counterinsurgency Doctrine (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

18 January 2012

Anderson, Ben (2011). “Population and Affective Perception: Biopolitics and Anticipatory Action in US Counterinsurgency Doctrine”. Antipode, 43 (2), p. 205-36.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00804.x

Abstract
This paper analyses the biopolitical logics of current US counterinsurgency doctrine in the context of the multiple forms of biopower that make up the “war on terror”. It argues that counterinsurgency doctrine aims to prevent spectral networked insurgencies by intervening on the “environment” of insurgent formation-the relations between three different enactments of “population” (species being, logistical life and ways of life) and a fourth-affectively imbued perception. Counterinsurgency is best characterised, then, as an “environmentality” (Foucault M 2008 The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978-1979. Translated by G Burchell. London: Palgrave Macmillan) that redeploys elements from other forms of biopolitics alongside an emphasis on network topologies, future-orientated action and affective perception.

Daniele Lorenzini, Le rôle de la vérité dans la généalogie foucaldienne du sujet moderne (2012)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 January 2012

« Le rôle de la vérité dans la généalogie foucaldienne du sujet moderne ».
Public lecture by Daniele Lorenzini
(Université Paris-Est Créteil/Università « La Sapienza » di Roma)

Saturday, the 21st January 2012, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (escalier C, premier étage, salle Lalande)

Hosted by the Séminaire Foucault, organised by Jean-François Braunstein,

The aim of this lecture will be to investigate the meaning and the scope of Michel Foucault’s “history of truth”, i.e. his genealogy of the relationship between truth, power and subjectivity in western societies. Its basic argument will be that Foucault’s history of truth has to be understood as an ethical and political task, far more than as an epistemological one, since it is clearly presented as a study of the different “truth-regimes” (lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-80) which represent the conditions of possibility for the government of human beings and, at the same time, the conditions of intelligibility for the processes of subjectivation in which these human beings are involved.

James Schmidt, Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 January 2012

Schmidt, James (2011). “Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault”. History of European ideas, 37 (1), p. 43.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2010.08.002

Abstract
In his 1969 Trevelyan Lectures, Franco Venturi argued that Kant’s response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” has tended to promote a “philosophical interpretation” of the Enlightenment that leads scholars away from the political questions that were central to its concerns. But while Kant’s response is well known, it has been often misunderstood by scholars who see it as offering a definition of an historical period, rather than an attempt at characterizing a process that had a significant implications. This article seeks (1) to clarify, briefly, the particular question that Kant was answering, (2) to examine using Jurgen Habermas’ work as a case in point – the tension between readings that use Kant’s answer as a way of discussing the Enlightenment as a discrete historical period and those readings that see it as offering a broad outline of an “Enlightenment Project” that continues into the present, and (3) to explore how Michel Foucault, in a series of discussions of Kant’s response, sketched an approach to Kant’s text that offers a way of reframing Venturi’s distinction between “philosophical” and “political” interpretations of the Enlightenment

Laura Jenkins, The Difference Genealogy Makes: Strategies for Politicisation or How to Extend Capacities for Autonomy (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 January 2012

Jenkins, Laura (2011). “The Difference Genealogy Makes: Strategies for Politicisation or How to Extend Capacities for Autonomy”. Political studies, 59 (1), p. 156-74.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00844.x

Abstract
Processes of politicisation and depoliticisation have become the empirical and theoretical focus for a growing body of political studies. However, the disparate literatures on these processes conceptualise and explore them in quite different ways. This article seeks to make some inroads into these debates by re-evaluating the concept of (de)politicisation and considering how academics can themselves participate in such processes. It suggests that (Foucauldian) genealogical critique offers a particularly fruitful analytically informed strategy for politicisation. Drawing on the work of David Owen, it is suggested that genealogical strategies help to address a depoliticising condition of aspectival captivity and extend human capacities for autonomy, without intensifying states of domination.

Martina Tazzioli, Politiche della verità. Michel Foucault e il neoliberalismo (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 January 2012

Martina Tazzioli, Politiche della verità. Michel Foucault e il neoliberalismo Ombre Corte, 2011

Si può parlare di una funzione critica del liberalismo inteso come “stile governamentale” e non (solo) come tecnologia di potere? Fino a che punto, tuttavia, è possibile mantenere quest’attitudine critica dal momento che il liberalismo contemporaneo si struttura in un “regime di veridizione”? In una prospettiva foucaultiana, la posta in gioco consiste precisamente nell’individuare “la verità nei suoi effetti di potere e il potere nei suoi effetti di verità”. Intorno a questi due interrogativi si sviluppa l’indagine di Foucault in “Nascita della biopolitica”, vero e proprio work in progress di un’ontologia storica del presente che dà luogo a un compito etico-politico che si esprime in un “giornalismo filosofico” da intendersi come atteggiamento critico nei confronti del proprio presente e indirizzato a far emergere la configurazione attuale dei rapporti di forza, al fine di mettere in luce sia la sua contingenza storica, sia le linee di fragilità del potere su cui è possibile agire. Foucault individua nella governamentalità neoliberale uno scarto essenziale rispetto al liberalismo classico: con il neoliberalismo è in gioco una tecnologia governamentale che ridefinisce completamente il potere di normazione, che investe non tanto l’individuo come soggetto psicologico ma la razionalità contemporanea. Prefazione di Judith Revel.

Martina Tazzioli si è laurea in Filosofia all’Università di Pisa. Attualmente è dottoranda al Goldsmiths College di Londra, con un progetto su una lettura foucaultiana del governo della mobilità umana e delle politiche migratorie dell’Unione europea. Fa parte del comitato di redazione della rivista on line “Materiali foucaultiani”.

Via Variazione foucaultiane

Uschi Bay, Unpacking neo-liberal technologies of government in Australian higher education social work departments (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 January 2012

Bay, U. (2011). “Unpacking neo-liberal technologies of government in Australian higher education social work departments”. Journal of social work, 11 (2), p. 222.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1468017310386696

Abstract
The Summary: This article analyses how neo-liberal and managerialist policies, over the last two decades in Australia, have positioned university staff as self-managing individuals. Social work academics are positioned as ‘free agents… empowered to act on their own behalf while “steered from a distance” by “policy norms and rules of the game”’ (Marginson, 1997, p. 63, italics added). Using governmentality theories as developed by Bacchi (2009), Burchell, Gordon, and Miller (1991), Dean (1996, 1999a, 1999b), Foucault (1983, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991), Hindess (1997, 2003), Miller (1992), Barry, Osborne, and Rose (1996) and Rose (1999) and an analysis of how staff are positioned in higher education settings is explored.

Findings: This article identifies the ways neo-liberal policy and managerialism operates to enable power relations that both individualize and totalize academic staff, including social work academics. Efforts to transform power relations require an understanding of how particular situations are problematized and the identification of the governmental technologies employed to constitute the political identities of social work academics.

Applications: Identifying how neo-liberal technologies of government affect social work academics could stimulate a renewed struggle for change and reinvigorate political action in social work university departments and social work settings more broadly.

Nancy Vansieleghem, Philosophy with Children as an Exercise in Parrhesia (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 January 2012

Vansieleghem, Nancy (2011). Philosophy with Children as an Exercise in Parrhesia: An Account of a Philosophical Experiment with Children in Cambodia. Journal of philosophy of education, 45 (2), p. 321-37.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9752.2011.00803.x

Abstract
The last few decades have seen a steady growth of interest in doing philosophy with children and young people in educational settings. Philosophy with children is increasingly offered as a solution to the problems associated with what is seen by many as a disoriented, cynical, indifferent and individualistic society. It represents for its practitioners a powerful vehicle that teaches children and young people how to think about particular problems in society through the use of interpretive schemes and procedures especially designed for this. It typically conceives of truth-telling as the work of dialogical reasoning, which is understood in turn as leading to increasing awareness of mental and methodological processes. This article starts from another point of view. What is at stake, I shall argue, is not so much the question of how to think for oneself in an appropriate way. Rather, in line with Michel Foucault, I want to identify philosophy as a practice oriented by the care of the self and of transformation of the self by the self. From this angle, philosophy with children will not be understood as something that orients us towards valid knowledge claims, but as an act of becoming present in the present. This way of conceiving of philosophy with children will be explored in the context of a concrete philosophical experiment with children that I planned and carried out in Cambodia.

CFP: Ethnographies of Neoliberal Governance (2012)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 January 2012

Call for papers: Panel on Ethnographies of Neoliberal Governance

Part of the 7th International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis. The conference for 2012 is titled ‘Understanding the Drama of Democracy. Policy Work, Power and Transformation’. The International Conference in Interpretive Policy Analysis has travelled through Europe. After visiting Birmingham, Amsterdam, Essex, Kassel, Grenoble and Cardiff, interpretivists of various kinds will gather in Tilburg, the Netherlands in July 2012.

Panel Chairs
◦Dr. Michelle Brady
Assistant Professor @ University Of Victoria
◦Dr. Tara Ney
Assistant Professor @ University Of Victoria

July 5, 2012 – July 7, 2012

This panel is seeking papers that focus on the processes and practices through which neoliberalization occurs. We invite papers that examine specific cases through the use of ethnographic or quasi-ethnographic methodologies (interviews and observations). Collectively, the panel will exemplify the geographic and historic diversity of neoliberal governmentalities. A fundamental premise of this panel is that neoliberal forms of governance seek to organize social and political life according to the structure of competition, to encourage enterprising subjectivities, and to move forms of governance downwards to policy practices, individuals, and communities. As Foucault perceptively noted in 1979, neoliberalism assumes that competition can only appear if it is produced through active governance by the state (Foucault, 2008). Thus neoliberal practices emphasize governance of the market and social life through what Dorow (2007) calls “the interplay of coercive regulation and voluntary participation”. As Larner (2011) argues, many initial studies of neoliberal thinking incorrectly assumed that these ideas would be short-lived. However, such scepticism and dismissal was quickly replaced by equally problematic “monolithic narratives” of a uniform shift from the collectivist welfare state to individualistic neoliberal governance. Recently, a small number of interpretivist policy analysts from diverse disciplines have attempted to be more attentive to specific local cases thereby drawing attention to the geographical and historic specificity of neoliberal policy practices. These are what Larner (2007) calls ethnographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”. We are seeking papers that highlight the diversity of contemporary neoliberal practices of governance.

Contacts:
Dr. Michelle Brady mabrady@uvic.ca
Dr. Tara Ney: tney@uvic.ca

Paper proposal deadline 31 January 2012.

Stephen Legg, Assemblage/apparatus: using Deleuze and Foucault (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

8 January 2012

Legg, Stephen (2011). “Assemblage/apparatus: using Deleuze and Foucault”. Area, 43 (2), p. 128.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01010.x

Abstract
In this commentary I would like to offer some reflections on the Deleuzian concept of ‘assemblage’ (agencement) from the perspective of my grounding in ‘governmentality studies’ and, secondly, on the latter’s central concern with the concept of the security ‘apparatus’ (dispositif). I would like to suggest that the two be thought of dialectically, both as concepts and as actually-existing things in the world. After outlining my use to date of these concepts, and their deployment in my research into colonial India, I will counterpoise Giorgio Agamben’s and Giles Deleuze’s reflections on Michel Foucault’s use of the term dispositif/apparatus. Deleuze’s obvious and acknowledged indebtedness to Foucault’s work, but his explicit re-rendering of the Foucauldian interest in order with the Deleuzian conceptualisation of dis-order, will be used to conclude with some methodological suggestions regarding how Deleuze and Foucault, agencement and dispositif, assemblages and apparatuses, can and should be thought together.