Foucault News

Lee H., Lee T. The TraceTogether Matrix Has You – Surveillance, Rationalisation and Tactics of Governance in Singapore’s COVID-19 App (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

18 March 2023

Lee H., Lee T.
The TraceTogether Matrix Has You – Surveillance, Rationalisation and Tactics of Governance in Singapore’s COVID-19 App
(2022) Platform, 9.2 (Special Issue), pp. 77 – 91
Open access

ABSTRACT:
In the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic, Singapore rolled out TraceTogether; a contact-tracing mobile app that uses proximity sensing to track the movements of its population. TraceTogether was initially voluntary, and used solely for contact tracing. By December 2020, the system became mandatory. This sparked a mass adoption that made TraceTogether possibly the most successful application in Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. When it emerged in January 2021 that the data had been used by the police for criminal investigation, images of a totalitarianism sprang to mind, where technology permits the state an invasive awareness of the movement of individuals. In this paper, we defer from common arguments that Singaporeans are intrinsically trusting of the government or have been conditioned to accept ‘Big Brother’ modes of surveillance. Instead, we argue that the success of TraceTogether reflects a Singapore society that, through the rationalisation of surveillance, willingly participates in their own surveillance. In uncovering the genealogy of media discourse that surrounds TraceTogether, we highlight that it is the regular practice of voluntary surveillance, of subscribing oneself to the apparatuses of state control, rather than specific technologies, that characterises the Singapore surveillance state. We describe a matrix of reason, layered-on and normalised through media discourse, that exemplifies what Foucault has termed ‘governmentality’, which asserts a government’s power of control not over, but within, citizens. © Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia licence.

AUTHOR KEYWORDS: Covid-19; Genealogy; Governmentality; Media discourse; Singapore; Surveillance

Bronwen M.A. Jones, Stephen J. Ball (eds), Neoliberalism and Education (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 March 2023

Bronwen M.A. Jones, Stephen J. Ball (eds), Neoliberalism and Education, Routledge, 2023. Forthcoming

The ongoing neoliberalisation of education is complex, varied and relentless. It involves increasingly diverse material and structural changes to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment and at the same time transforms how we are made up as educational subjects. It rearticulates what it means to be educated. This collection brings together creative and unanticipated examples of the adoption and adaptation of neoliberal practice, both collective and individual. These examples not only demonstrate the insidiousness of neoliberal reform but also suggest that its trajectory is uncertain and unfixed. The intention is that these examples might embolden education scholars and practitioners to think differently about education.

This book is shaped by a reading of the processes of the neoliberalisation of education as a dispositif. This heterogeneous dispositif encompasses and spans an uneven, miscellaneous and evolving network of educational regimes of knowledge, practice and subjectivities, as well as artifacts and non-human actants. The papers included address different aspects or points within this complex arrangement at different levels and in different sectors of education. They have been chosen to illustrate the evolving and multi-faceted penetration of market thinking and practice in education and also points of deflection and dissent. They also offer coverage of some of the uneven geography of neoliberalisation. They consider the potential for the production of subjectivities to provide the ‘wriggle’ room that can exist to refuse or subvert neoliberal identities. This book will have appeal across the social sciences and specifically to those working in education.
The chapters included here were originally published in various Taylor & Francis journals.

Archive: Carol Carpenter, Power in Conservation. Environmental Anthropology Beyond Political Ecology (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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16 March 2023

Carol Carpenter, Power in Conservation. Environmental Anthropology Beyond Political Ecology, Routledge, 2020

Book Description
This book examines theories and ethnographies related to the anthropology of power in conservation.

Conservation thought and practice is power laden—conservation thought is powerfully shaped by the history of ideas of nature and its relation to people, and conservation interventions govern and affect peoples and ecologies. This book argues that being able to think deeply, particularly about power, improves conservation policy-making and practice. Political ecology is by far the most well-known and well-published approach to thinking about power in conservation. This book analyzes the relatively neglected but robust anthropology of conservation literature on politics and power outside political ecology, especially literature rooted in Foucault. It is intended to make four of Foucault’s concepts of power accessible, concepts that are most used in the anthropology of conservation: the power of discourses, discipline and governmentality, subject formation, and neoliberal governmentality. The important ethnographic literature that these concepts have stimulated is also examined. Together, theory and ethnography underpin our emerging understanding of a new, Anthropocene-shaped world.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of conservation, environmental anthropology, and political ecology, as well as conservation practitioners and policy-makers.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Discourses and their Power in Foucault
3. Seminal Works on the Power of Discourses
4. Discourses of Conservation
5. The Triangle in Foucault
6. Sovereignty, Discipline, and Governmentality in Ethnographies
7. States and Centers, Simplifying and Calculating
8. Articulations between Knowledges in Ethnographies
9. Subject Formation in Foucault
10. Subject Formation in Ethnographies
11. Capitalism and Neoliberal Governmentality in Foucault
12. Cultivating Neoliberal Subjects in Ethnographies
13. The Economy in Ethnographies
14. The Invisibility of Implementation and Governmentality
15. Practices of Assemblage and Assemblages of Effects
16. Universals, Collaborations, and Global Agreements
17. World-Making in the Anthropocene
18. Conclusion

Carol Carpenter is Senior Lecturer in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, US. She is co-editor of Environmental Anthropology: A Historical Reader (2007).

Mascaretti G.M. Brothers in arms: Adorno and Foucault on resistance (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 March 2023

Mascaretti G.M.
Brothers in arms: Adorno and Foucault on resistance
(2023) Philosophy and Social Criticism,
DOI: 10.1177/01914537221150497

ABSTRACT:
This article offers a comparative exploration of the practices of resistance Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault champion against the structures of modern power their enquiries have the merit to illuminate and contest. After a preliminary examination of their views about the relationship between theory and praxis, I shall pursue two goals: first, I shall illustrate the limitations of Adorno’s negativist portrait of an ethics of resistance and contrast it with Foucault’s more promising notion of resistance as strategic counter-conduct, which in his late ethico-political writings becomes the heart of a distinctive politics of the governed. Second, despite their dissimilarities, I shall argue that their ideas can be brought together to elaborate a ‘compounded’ account of resistance, where Adorno’s politics of suffering figures as the necessary pre-condition for the creative practices of freedom Foucault seeks to encourage. © The Author(s) 2023.

AUTHOR KEYWORDS: Adorno; critique; Foucault; resistance; suffering

Min Lin & Weili Zhao, Untangling the making and governing of Hong Kong teachers through neoliberal, Confucian, and affective technologies: with and beyond Foucault (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 March 2023

Min Lin & Weili Zhao (2023) Untangling the making and governing of Hong Kong teachers through neoliberal, Confucian, and affective technologies: with and beyond Foucault, Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education

DOI: 10.1080/1359866X.2023.2174074

ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the making and governing of Hong Kong teachers along and beyond a Foucauldian governmentality lens, untangling how the three technologies along neoliberalism, Confucian thesis, and affective dimensions play with and against one another in conducting the conduct of teachers. Through a discourse analysis of 27 local teachers’ interview texts, we find Hong Kong teachers are both morally divided and redeemed as an effect of the entangled governing dynamics. First, the neoliberalized technologies of performativity and accountability are turning teachers into “service providers” accountable for incessant evaluations from the institutions, students, and parents. Second, such neoliberal rationalities collide with a Confucian respect for teachers to the extent that teachers feel not-respected, sad, and disappointed. Last, some teachers, amidst such contested situations, turn to affective support, i.e., a family-like teacher-student relationship, that ends up redeeming them from a negative governing grid towards maintaining a congruent self-identification. With this finding, this paper further explicates Confucian affective teacher-student relationship as a foundational historical-cultural episteme that largely conditions today’s teaching and learning in Confucian context. This recognition enables us to re-ponder the theoretical-methodological-epistemological complexities in applying Foucault’s framework to an Asian context along a (de/anti/post)-colonial gesture.

KEYWORDS: Foucauldian governmentality performativity and accountability Confucian respect for teachers affective teacher-student relationship foundational episteme

Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi, Debating Biopolitics New Perspectives on the Government of Life (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

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13 March 2023

Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi, Debating Biopolitics. New Perspectives on the Government of Life. Edward Elgar, 2022

Emerging out of the theoretical and practical urge to reflect on key contemporary debates arising in biopolitical scholarship, this timely book launches an in-depth investigation into the concept and history of biopolitics. In light of tumultuous political dynamics across the globe and new developments in this continually evolving field, the book reconsiders and expands upon Michel Foucault’s input to biopolitical studies.

Featuring rigorously structured investigations into the genealogies, dimensions, and practices of biopolitics, this incisive book introduces novel voices and perspectives into the biopolitical corpus. Contributions from eminent scholars investigate core topics of governing populations, community, and sovereignty, as well as exploring areas that remain undertheorized in the field of biopolitics, including the political accounts of non-human entities, developments in sexual health policy, and the biopolitics of time. Broad in scope, the book draws from the foundations of the biopolitical canon to forge new horizons and create opportunities for novel theoretical and empirical analysis.

Debating Biopolitics will be an invaluable tool for scholars and postgraduate students of political science and political philosophy. Its empirically driven research will also benefit practitioners and policymakers interested in the biopolitical dimension of decision-making and policy analysis.

Contents

Foreword viii
Mika Ojakangas and Sergei Prozorov

Introduction 1
Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi

PART I GENEALOGIES
1 Subjectivity in Foucault and Agamben: the enigma of
sovereignty and biopolitics 12
Sara Dragišić

2 Fear, the sovereign, and authority: Roberto Esposito and
the escape from the Hobbesian State 30
Vappu Helmisaari

3 Governing according to nature: Jean Bodin on climates,
humours, and temperaments 49
Samuel Lindholm

PART II DIMENSIONS
4 Glenn Gould’s mastery of not-playing: style and manner in
the work of Giorgio Agamben 68
Katarina Sjöblom

5 Biopolitics of time in Foucault and Agamben 86
Jürgen Portschy

6 Identities on the border 109
Ott Puumeister

PART III PRACTICES
7 Governing by prevention: neoliberal management of
sexual health in France 129
Théo Sabadel

8 Biopolitics of authoritarianism. The case of Russia 151
Anastasya Manuilova

9 Biopolitics, New Materialism and Latin-American
constitutionalism: A linguistic encounter? 171
Gonzalo Bustamante-Kuschel

10 The two faces of biopolitical theory: genealogies and
current approaches 193
Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi

Michel Foucault THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE (1) Table of Contents

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 March 2023

AGENT SWARM

Publication of an unpublished book manuscript by Michel Foucault: PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE. Text established by Daniele Lorenzini and Orazio Irrera, under the direction of François Ewald – to be published by Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, in May 2023

The manuscript dates from 1966, it was written after THE ORDER OF THINGS, published in 1966, and before the publication of THE ARCHEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE in 1969.

As will be seen from the table of contents, and as the dating of the writing suggests, this book provides the perfect bridge between those two established works. Further, this posthumously published book is of far more than nostalgic value.

Foucault’s meditations are “untimely” and so may serve again today where we are confronted with a reactionary revision (Domenico Losurdo, Jan Rehmann) in Theory, trying yet again to liquidate the heritage of the great French post-Nietzschean thinkers.

What follows is my translation of the detailed Table of Contents that Daniele Lorenzini…

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Archive: Vito De Lucia, Beyond anthropocentrism and ecocentrism: a biopolitical reading of environmental law (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 March 2023

Vito De Lucia, Beyond anthropocentrism and ecocentrism: a biopolitical reading of environmental law, Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 8 No. 2, September 2017, pp. 181–202

https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2017.02.01

Abstract
The ‘rise of ecosystem regimes’ is increasingly seen as the key for the resolution of the unfolding ecological crises that are the mark of the Anthropocene. These ecosystem regimes are seen as a crucial passage in resolving environmental law’s internal contradictions and evident shortcomings. Indeed, ecosystem regimes are understood to signal a crucial step in a long progression from anthropocentric to ecocentric articulations of environmental law. This narrative, whether in normative or descriptive terms, informs much, and perhaps most, environmental legal scholarship. In this article I intend to problematize this linear narrative through an ‘analytics of biopolitics’. Situated within the critical space tentatively called ‘critical environmental law’, this approach aims at opening the field of inquiry rather than producing closures. Rather than a simplified, linear narrative of increasing interpenetration between law and ecology – a narrative where law becomes, or ought to become, increasingly ecocentric – an analytics of biopolitics transposed to the specific critical environmental legal terrain aims at outlining the slippages that intervene at the margins of intersection between law and ecology, and at articulating a biopolitical critique of both ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘ecocentric’ articulations of environmental law.

Keywords: environmental law, biopolitics, anthropocentrism, ecocentrism, critical legal theory

Garlen, J.C., Hembruff, S.L. Children as ‘difference makers’: viral discourses of childhood innocence and activism in #Blacklivesmatter (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 March 2023

Garlen, J.C., Hembruff, S.L.
Children as ‘difference makers’: viral discourses of childhood innocence and activism in #Blacklivesmatter
(2022) Children’s Geographies, .

DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2022.2142037

Abstract
Viral images on social media during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 brought heightened attention to the debate over children’s political participation. Therefore, our inquiry sought to discover what the circulation of and response to viral images of children engaged in protest might tell us about the discursive landscapes of childhood in regard to children’s social and political participation. We describe the historical and discursive context that has positioned children’s agency in opposition to innocence. Informed by Foucault’s theory of discourse, we situate Internet virality as a social practice and analyze the videos and still images alongside the accompanying commentary from online news and social media. We ask what these viral image responses reveal about the socially and historically situated construct of childhood innocence and what implications these revelations might hold for adult perspectives on children as political actors and co-participants in social change. We explore themes of participation, privilege, and protection that emerged from a cross-comparison of the video commentary and consider how these themes could inform ongoing efforts to reframe childhood discourse in light of social justice. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
child activism; child agency; Childhood innocence; social media

Rana et al, Green governmentality and climate change risk management: the case of a regulatory reform in Bangladesh (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 March 2023

Rana, T., Lowe, A., Azam, M.S.
Green governmentality and climate change risk management: the case of a regulatory reform in Bangladesh (2022) Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal

DOI: 10.1108/AAAJ-05-2021-5286

Abstract
Purpose: This study examines green investment reforms carried out in Bangladesh. The reform process curated significant changes by promoting green investment and fostering the adoption of risk management (RM) rationalities. This study’s focus is on revealing changes in behaviour and explaining how RM can act as an effective generator of climate change mitigation practices.

Design/methodology/approach: Building on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, the authors apply a “green governmentality” interpretive lens to analyse interviews and documentary evidence, adopting a qualitative case study approach. The authors explore how green governmentality generates RM rationalities and techniques to induce policies and practices within banks and financial institutions (FIs) for climate change mitigation purposes.

Findings: The findings provide valuable insights into the reform process and influence of RM rationalities in the context of environmental concerns. The authors find that the reforms and creation of RM rationalities affect the management of climate mitigation practices within banks and FIs and identify the processes through which the RM techniques are transformed as climate concerns are emphasised. The authors illustrate green governmentality as persuasive strategies, which have generated specific ways of seeing climate change reality and new ways of inserting RM into organisational activities, through the green governmentality effects they created. These reforms made climate change actionable and governable through the production of RM rationalities, supported by accounting conceptualisations and processes.

Research limitations/implications: The insights from this study can assist with how we act upon questions of climate change from an RM perspective. Governments, policymakers and regulators who develop climate change-related laws, regulations and policies can draw on these insights to help foster green governmentality for climate change mitigation actions informed by RM practices. Originality/value: This study offers insights into how climate change is not simply a biophysical reality but a site of power-knowledge dynamics where RM rationalities are constructed, and accounting processes are transformed. The authors show the application of RM and accounting efforts to change investment practices and how changes were encouraged and promoted by using regulation as a persuasive force on knowledgeable subjects rather than a repressive or oppressive power. The analytic power of green governmentality can be applied to increase understanding of how RM rationality contribute to the creation of useful conceptualisations of climate change and provide insights into how organisations respond to green governmentality. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Author Keywords
Accounting for climate change; Climate change; Green governmentality; Green investment; Regulatory reform; Risk management