Theoretical Puppets: G is for Genealogy (Michel Foucault), December 12 2022
Genealogy is a crucial concept in Foucault’s conception of historical research. Here, he explains the difference between “genealogy” and “archaeology.” He also discusses his important essay on “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” underscoring the importance of masquerades and “concerted carnivals.” However, he leaves open the question as to whether or not he himself is part of this historical theater…
Alessandro Michele’s five best moments at Gucci, Hunger, 24 November 2022
Following last night’s news that Michele will be departing Gucci, HUNGER takes a look back at some of his best sartorial moments, as we bid farewell to his double G genius for now.
[…]
Message for the masses
The SS20 Gucci show was opened by a series of ivory and beige reformulated straight jackets. “Biopolitics,” Michele said of the show, “it’s the power over life and body. The power that legitimises some existences, confining others. A power that imposes conducts and paths, that prescribes thresholds of normality, classifying and curbing identity, and chaining it to what is preconceived.” Quoting French philosopher Michel Foucault in his inspiration, the blank-designed jackets represented that through fashion, power is the ultimate force that is exercised. Model Hari Nef even made her own personal protest in the show, writing ‘Mental Health is not fashion’ on her palm. Michele explained that the designs block and restrict to make the individual anonymous, and go past individual expression to reflect upon uniformity. Though with no intention of glamorising mental illness, the message Michele put out was further reinforced when he revealed the jackets were not for sale, and were for those who chose to listen carefully.
[…]
Leib, R.S.
Goffman and Foucault: Framing the micro-physics of power
(2022) The Routledge International Handbook of Goffman Studies
Edited By Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Greg Smithpp, Routledge, 349-360.
Abstract
The works of Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault are theoretically and practically complementary in many ways. First, I review areas of overlap between Goffman and Foucault’s perspectives and methods. Second, I describe several higher-order concepts – order, episteme, regime, framing, agonism, and containment – which for both thinkers describe the relations between individuals and institutions. Third, I develop their connection through Foucault’s disciplinary power – highlighting concepts of territory, visibility, documentation, mortification, and looping – which describe the primary techniques of analysing space and controlling the distribution and interaction of bodies within it. Fourth, I argue that their analyses are also complementary under what Foucault calls security power. I establish this by analysing Foucault’s 1978 lectures, Security, Territory, Population (2007), alongside Goffman’s Strategic Interaction (1969). From Foucault, I focus on the concepts of risk, population, and danger, which describe how governments aim to keep all individual choices within an acceptable range. I propose a new figure of selfhood arising through population management, the ‘statistical self’, which describes the risks inherent in one’s demographic identity. From Goffman, I draw concepts of strategic interaction and gameworthiness, and I propose the concept of the ‘security self’, the existential object of an individual’s experience within a security milieu.
Hofmeyr, B.
Knowledge work in the age of control: capitalising on human capital
(2022) Acta Academica, 54 (1), pp. 40-68.
DOI: 10.18820/24150479/aa54i1/3
Abstract
The main claim that I aim to substantiate in this article is that power in the form of control is exerted in a more insidious manner now that knowledge work has become ‘networked’. To this end, I first describe societal control in the current epoch. Given the fact that my focus is on knowledge work, I next revisit the human capital literature with the aim of coming to a more precise understanding of what knowledge work is. The literature on “leveraging human capital” (Burud and Tumolo 2004) evidences how human capital theory draws on the conditions of free-floating control to optimally capitalise on knowledge workers. Models of overt management have come to be replaced by more expansive and insidious models of control that extend beyond the sphere of work into the intimate recesses of private life. Control operative at the societal level (Castells 1996) extends beyond the macro-level (neoliberal), to the meso-level (organisational), and the micro-level (self-governance). Next, I critically consider the implications of these conditions of control for the (self-)governance of the knowledge worker by drawing on Han’s (2017) further specification of control as “smart power”. I come to the conclusion that under the conditions of apparently greater autonomy and discretion that is so pervasive in the management literature discussing knowledge workers, governance as “control” induces constant work erasing the boundaries between work and private life. Neoliberalism with its mantra of investment in human capital has succeeded in producing an optimally efficient, ever-working subject. Throughout my analyses are informed by Foucault’s (2008) concept of “governmentality”, which fuses the presiding rationality (knowledge) with governance (power as control) to throw light on how human conduct is being conducted (orchestrated) for optimal efficiency. © Creative Commons With Attribution (CC-BY).
Author Keywords
control; human capital; Knowledge work; neoliberal governmentality; organisations
Villadsen, K.
Goodbye Foucault’s ‘missing human agent’? Self-formation, capability and the dispositifs (2022) European Journal of Social Theory
DOI: 10.1177/13684310221125350
Abstract
A steady stream of commentary criticizes Foucault’s ‘agentless position’ for its inability to observe, much less theorize, the ways in which human actors manoeuvre, negotiate, transform or resist the structures within which they are situated. This article does not so much refute this critical consensus but seeks to reconstruct a framework from Foucault’s writings, which allows space for ‘human agency’, including individuals’ pursuit of tactics, attempts at solving problems, reactions to unexpected events and their reflexive work on their own subjectivities. The revised analytical framework, ‘dispositional analytics’, integrates the study of self-techniques with the analysis of dispositifs. Recognizing that Foucault’s work eschewed an adequate consideration of individuals’ capacity to affect the forces that bear upon them, the article discusses the sociopolitical conditions for self-formation. Finally, a case study of ‘voice-hearers’ who use self-techniques to reconstitute themselves in opposition to institutional psychiatry is reinterpreted through the framework of dispositional analysis. © The Author(s) 2022.
Author Keywords
Agency; capability; dispositif; Foucault; self-techniques
Foucault Studies. Number 33, December 2022
Editorial
Sverre Raffnsøe et al
Articles
The Use and Misuse of Pleasure: Hadot contra Foucault on the Stoic Dichotomy Gaudium-Voluptas in Seneca
Matteo Johannes Stettler
The Subject of Desire and the Hermeneutics of Thoughts: Foucault’s Reading of Augustine and Cassian in Confessions of the Flesh
Herman Westerink
Philosophy From the texture of Everyday Life: The Critical-Analytic Methods of Foucault and J. L. Austin
Jasper Friedrich
Review essays
Foucault’s New Materialism: An Extended Review Essay of Thomas Lemke’s The Government of Things
Thomas Lemke, The Government of Things. New York: NYU Press, 2021. Pp. 312 (ISBN: 9781479808816 hardback)
Mark Olssen
Book Reviews
Marta Faustino and Gianfranco Ferraro (eds.), The Late Foucault: Ethical and Political Questions. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Pp. 304.
ISBN: 978-1350134355 (hardback).
Matteo Stettler
Bibliography of Foucault’s shorter works in English translation
by Richard Lynch.
Richard Lynch has updated his very valuable bibliography of Foucault’s shorter works in English translation. You can find the bibliography and associated material on this page on Foucault News
Daniele Lorenzini will be updating the Bibliography from 2023 onwards.
Sławomir Kozioł, Futures of the Human Subject. Technical Mediation, Foucault and Science Fiction, Routledge, 2022
Book Description
Futures of the Human Subject focuses on the representation of the effects of technology use on human subjectivity in several recent near-future science fiction novels. Sharing the idea that human subjects are constructed in the world in which they exist, this volume inscribes itself in the wider field of posthumanism which contests the liberal humanist notion of people as self-contained, autonomous agents. At the same time, it is the first substantial study of literary representations of the human subject carried out within the conceptual framework of Foucault-inflected philosophy of technical mediation, which examines the nature of the relation between people and specific technologies as well as the way in which this relation affects human subjectivity. As such, the book may help readers to exercise more effective control over the way in which they are constituted as subjects in this technologically saturated world.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. Technical Mediation, Subjectivity and Science Fiction
Early philosophy of technology and utopia/dystopia syndrome
Empirical turn
Posthuman perspective
Philosophy of technical mediation—key concepts
Technical mediation and Foucault
Modes of human–technology interaction
Ethics of technology
Science fiction
Chapter 2. The Circle: Embracing Social Media and Personal Transparency
Utopian vision of ICTs as subjectifying discourse
Self-conception, social self and the internet as archive
Subjectifying power of the algorithm
Pressure for social media activity
Gamification and the quantified self
Surveillance and personal transparency
Chapter 3. Rainbows End: New Vistas through Displays in Contacts
New life after Alzheimer’s
Materiality of discourse
Wearing: the physical mode
Cognitive enhancement
Personal interaction and multitasking
Belief circles and play
Cognitive labour and control
Chapter 4. Maddadam trilogy: Alleviating Existential Fears
Life in the Compounds
Ethical subjectification of God’s Gardeners
Makover culture
Producing patients
Becoming Crake
Author
Slawomir Koziol is an assistant professor at the University of Rzeszów, Poland. His academic interests include science fiction, posthumanism, theories of the human subject, philosophy of technical mediation, social space and new-media art. He has published articles in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Extrapolation, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, Papers on Language and Literature and Science Fiction Studies, among others.
Michael C. Behrent (2022) A Case for the Young Foucault, Critical Review,
DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2022.2152253
ABSTRACT
Between 1949 and 1961 (or, arguably, 1966), three interconnected dimensions of Foucault’s early thought emerged. First, the young Foucault offered a Hegelian perspective on Kant’s notion of the transcendental. The a priori conditions of thought, Foucault suggested, both shape and arise from historical experience. Second, Foucault drew on Heidegger’s study of Kant to argue that modern thought rests on the premise of human finitude and embraces a problematic epistemology rooted in philosophical anthropology. Foucault argued that anthropology enabled a vast extension of the scope of possible knowledge predicated on the falsely modest pretense that human understanding is inherently limited, even as it embraced a diminished conception of human existence. Third, Foucault developed a pointed critique of contemporary psychology and psychiatry, maintaining that they fallaciously seek to acquire positive knowledge of human beings, despite the fact the latter are inherently defined by what Foucault called “negativity.” This three-pronged interpretation of the young Foucault allows us to better situate Foucault’s work in intellectual history, to clarify his key arguments, and to grasp the articulation of his youthful and his mature thought.
Keywords: FoucaultvFreudvHegelvHeideggervNietzschevtranscendentalvyoung Foucault
Piasentier, M.
Foucault, Sellars, and the “conditions of possibility” of science
(2022) Philosophy and Social Criticism
DOI: 10.1177/01914537221131944
Abstract
Foucault and Sellars are representatives of conflicting philosophical traditions: whereas Foucault famously insisted that “power is everywhere,” Sellars proposed the well-known scientia mensura dictum. The tension between the two perspectives seems to be so strong that each of them ends up reducing the other to an epiphenomenal illusion. In this article, I shall attempt to show that the works of Sellars and Foucault are not necessarily irreconcilable. The common ground for this dialogue is what I shall define as a historico-practical conception of science. I will build this concept by tracing a connection between the Foucauldian notion of “conditions of possibility” of science and Sellars’s thesis about the “indispensability” of the manifest image. Finally, I will argue that this conception of science problematizes the clash between the scientific and manifest images of the world, paving the way for a different relationship between naturalism and critical theory. © The Author(s) 2022.
Author Keywords
critical theory; Foucault; naturalism; science; Sellars
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