Foucault News

Dent, C. (2011). “‘Gray, meticulous and patently documentary’: Foucaultian historical methods and the patent system”. Journal of sociology , 47 (3), p. 297-312.
doi: 10.1177/1440783311407944

Abstract
Patents are seen as a key part of the modern economy and operate as a mode of regulation of technology and innovation. The histories of the system, to date, have not explored the role that patents have in the governance of our society. This article suggests that the historical methods of Michel Foucault are broad enough to undertake this task. The article, then, explores both the archaeological and the genealogical methods in order to assess the benefits, and limitations, that arise from the use of each of them in the context of a history of the laws, and practices, as they relate to patents of invention.

Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, A. (2011). Organizations as Discursive Constructions: A Foucauldian Approach. Organization Studies, 32(9), 1247-1271. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840611411395

Abstract
A growing body of literature suggests that communication constitutes organizations, but this argument requires refinement to address its remaining flaws. This essay suggests the tremendous potential of using Michel Foucault’s work to grasp the underlying meaning of this argument and to respond to its shortcomings. The proposed Foucauldian-based process model highlights links across Foucault’s main lines of thought, applied to the relationships among technology, discourse, discipline, control, subject, and identity in an organization. By reframing the concept of technology as a discursive and nondiscursive practice that constrains and enables everyday life, this approach offers better understanding of the argument that communication constitutes organizations. The conceptual model also serves as a backdrop for exploring a problematic field situation with a case study. Technology appears part of processes by which technology, organizations, and subjects get redefined. The organization is dynamically constituted as an evolving, political, negotiated order through power-knowledge relationships.

Tarver, E.C. (2011), New Forms of Subjectivity: Theorizing the Relational Self with Foucault and Alcoff. Hypatia, 26: 804-825.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01235.x

Abstract
Taking seriously Linda Martin Alcoff’s suggestion that we reevaluate the extent to which poststructuralist articulations of the subject are truly socially constituted, as well as the centrality of Latina identity to her own account of such constitution, I argue that the discussion Alcoff and other Latina feminists offer of the experience of being Latina in North America is illustrative of the extent to which the relational and globally situated constitution of subjects needs further development in many social-constructionist accounts of selfhood. I argue, however-contra Alcoff-that Michel Foucault’s mode of investigating subjectivation, particularly as it is articulated in his later work, has room for just such an account, especially when it is supplemented by postcolonial theory. With this end in mind, I take as a case study the public discourse surrounding Sonia Sotomayor prior to her confirmation as the first Latina woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court, suggesting that an analysis of this discourse (including its position within and contribution to wider discourses of ethnicity, race, gender, and class) shows why the accounts of relational subject-constitution offered by both Foucault and Alcoff are indispensable.

Evans, Patrick. (2011). “Modernity and the Holocaust counter-memorial: Janet Frame’s American fiction”. Journal of Commonwealth literature (0021-9894), 46 (3), p. 513.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989411409800

Abstract
Janet Frame’s novels Intensive Care (1970/1987), Daughter Buffalo (1972), and Living in the Maniototo (1979) were written in the United States and, like her final novel, The Carpathians (1988), in part set there. These works might be termed her “American” fiction, as against the fiction of her earlier “European” phase, to which it is linked by the common experience of western modernity and episodes of the Cold War and, more particularly, the analogies with Jewish experience in Nazi Germany first expressed in Faces in the Water (1961). This article examines Frame’s more specific explorations of Holocaust themes in some of this later fiction and An Autobiography (1989), and suggests a recontextualization of her work in recent theories of Holocaust remembering and especially in Foucault’s concept of the counter-memorial, which emphasizes the importance of individual, idiosyncratic and small-scale remembering and the formal implications this has for art.