Foucault News

Michel Foucault THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE (1) Table of Contents

Clare O'Farrell

13 March 2023

Publication of an unpublished book manuscript by Michel Foucault: PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE.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

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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

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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

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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

Nesbet, Anne, Discipline Made Visible: Abram Room’s The Ghost That Never Returns and the Fantastic Origins of Foucault’s Panopticon (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

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10 March 2023

Nesbet, Anne,
Discipline Made Visible: Abram Room’s The Ghost That Never Returns and the Fantastic Origins of Foucault’s Panopticon (2023) Russian Review,
DOI: 10.1111/russ.12397

ABSTRACT:
In 1967 Abram Room’s film, The Ghost That Never Returns (1929), traveled to the Cinémathèque de Toulouse (France) and was conspicuously featured in the following year at a major festival held in Perpignan. This essay suggests that Room’s film may have been part of what set the scene for the emergence of the “Panopticon”–Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century design for a prison structure that would maximize visibility–in Michel Foucault’s 1975 Surveiller et punir. The film’s French reception (with reviews appearing in Les Lettres françaises and in Midi-Minuit Fantastique between 1968 and 1970) emphasized its status as an example of the boundary-blurring genre of the “fantastic.” It is this article’s suggestion that Abram Room’s prison film and the accompanying French debate about the nature of the fantastic are important facets underlying the Panopticon’s shift from relative obscurity into visibility (or even obviousness) in Michel Foucault’s writings of the 1970s. © 2023 The Russian Review.

Christofidou, A., Milioni, D.L. Art heterotopias against hegemonic discourses: Dancing the Cyprus conflict (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

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9 March 2023

Christofidou, A., Milioni, D.L.
Art heterotopias against hegemonic discourses: Dancing the Cyprus conflict
(2022) European Journal of Cultural Studies

DOI: 10.1177/13675494221118385

Abstract
We provide an analysis of dance as a practice and an ‘Other’ space; a counter-hegemonic ‘space’, which is affected by the existing social ordering, while simultaneously resisting it. We employ Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ to analyse dance’s potential to disrupt and deconstruct hegemonic discourses of the past in a conflict-ridden environment such as Cyprus. We analyse three dance works by choreographers who are living and working in Cyprus, and while we focus on the interrelated dimensions of time, space and the (choreographic) subject, we demonstrate how dance may (1) provide a space to problematize the past and recraft the present, (2) enable the re-signification of places of conflict into places of communication and peace and (3) invite artists to reflect on their subjectivities and transform into agents of peace. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
Conflict; Cyprus; dance; heterotopia; peace; resistance

Archive: Jeff Justice, Biopolitics of Disasters: Hurricane Irma and Climate Change (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

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8 March 2023

Jeff Justice, Biopolitics of Disasters: Hurricane Irma and Climate Change. Green European Journal, 3 November 2017

Recent hurricanes and natural disasters give rise to the question of how countries and people can recover and where they should get support from. French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics can reshape how to view human-aided natural disasters and their aftermath.
[…]

Michel Foucault, the 20th century French philosopher, turned theories of governance and human relations on their heads when he introduced his own concept – biopolitics – in the 1970s, one that continues to dominate much analytical discussion on these subjects. The scholarship following his own work offers a variety of interpretations as to what biopolitics actually means, and defining anything Foucauldian can take several chapters in philosophy texts.
[…]

Tebkew, M., Atinkut, H.B. Impact of forest decentralization on sustainable forest management and livelihoods in East Africa (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

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7 March 2023

Tebkew, M., Atinkut, H.B.
Impact of forest decentralization on sustainable forest management and livelihoods in East Africa (2022) Trees, Forests and People, 10, art. no. 100346

DOI: 10.1016/j.tfp.2022.100346

Abstract
The paper examines how forest decentralization affects forest management and sustainable livelihoods in East Africa. For this review, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania were chosen as case study nations, and study sites implementing decentralization. We used Google Scholar to find about 280 pieces of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Further, we used the Foucault’s approach and the Policy analytical approach (PAA) to distill our review. Finally, we applied assessment indicators: forest conditions, species composition, forest cover, income level, food security status, wealth equality, and equity.

Our review of the forest decentralization reforms process based on empowerment and accountability yields the following results: (1) intended to increase efficiency and ecological services are not being implemented properly, (2) forest policy reforms resulted in a net loss of forest area in East Africa, (3) forest status of some forests is stable, and the current decentralization reforms, with the exception of the Duru-Haitemba community-based forest management (Tanzania), do not address the sustainability of the forests. Understandings of the current institutional frameworks and power configurations are insufficient to devolve resources and rights to lower levels of government. This necessitates the development of new viable forest governance systems capable of deviating significantly from established modes of government. Our review suggests that decentralization forest governance and sustainable agricultural resources utilization rely on multilevel institutional architecture, actors’ collaboration at all levels and with regional integration, complement each other to form successful systems within forest landscapes. © 2022 The Authors

Author Keywords
Agro-ecology; Agro-food systems; Agroforestry; Decentralization; Resilient livelihood strategy; Sustainable forest governance

Diego Andreucci, Christos Zografos, Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

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6 March 2023

Diego Andreucci, Christos Zografos,
Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change, Political Geography, Volume 92, 2022,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102512.
(https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629821001724)

Abstract:
In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a “technology of government” operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly “green” mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of “vulnerability” in adaptation policies; and the governing of “climate migrants”. We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as “in need of improvement”. And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations.

Keywords:
Political ecology; Othering; Climate change; Climate migrants; Biopolitics; Racism; Just transitions; Sacrifice zones; Development; Green extractivism; Green New Deal; Postcolonial theory

Luke, T.W. Investment and Rapid Climate Change as Biopolitics: Foucault and Governance of the Self and Others through ESG. (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

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5 March 2023

Luke, T.W. Investment and Rapid Climate Change as Biopolitics: Foucault and Governance of the Self and Others through ESG. Sustainability 2022, 14, 14974.
https://doi.org/10.3390/su142214974

Abstract:
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment strategies today are an established practice in personal and public finance. They also provide crucial benchmarks for corporate social responsibility policy in gauging the performance of due diligence and return on investment by financial managers. This study explores the growing conflict within these economic and policy networks over “value-oriented”, or total financial return, and “values-oriented”, or comprehensive non-financial impact, capital investment in recent years. How to balance these two discursive constructions of value in the pursuit of “sustainability” for both the economy and the environment at the same time is an operational challenge that managers, environmentalists and scientists have not yet fully answered. It also indicates how Michel Foucault’s approach to the power/knowledge nexus in biopolitics provides a useful perspective on these ideologically and politically charged debates over how to invest capital and steer business activity to deliver solid returns in the market as well as support more ethical and economical public policies to respond to climate change, social injustice and governance failure.

Keywords:
Foucault; discourse; dispositive; dispositional analytics; corporate social responsibility; environmental social governance; sustainability; corporate accountability; risk management