Badiou interviews Foucault

Newly posted video of Alain Badiou interview with MF from 1965 on the question of psychology and philosophy.

Iran

The events in Iran over the last two weeks have brought to mind for many people the revolution of 1978-9 and Foucault’s “journalism” during a couple of trips he made there. The latest is Bernard-Henri Lévy, who offers his thoughts in the Huffington Post today.

Some of Foucault’s reporting is online if you want to read it, eg., here, and a lot of stuff here associated around the Afary and Anderson book at the University of Chicago Press.

Added:By the way, there is a great feature of Youtube called Citizentube, where people are posting cell phone video from Iran of the protests. It includes the sad footage of Neda, a girl who was shot by a sniper and who has been described as both a martyr and the face of the movement.

Please also see Nico Pitney in the HuffPo for daily video and liveblogging.

New Protevi essay

John Protevi announces a new essay on Foucault:

And I posted the draft of an essay on Foucault and neoliberalism for volume 21 of Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. I haven’t published that much on Foucault despite teaching him quite often, so this was a very interesting project. It turned out to be more on Foucault’s historical methodology than on the content of what he says about neoliberalism. But maybe I’ll be able to come back to that topic.

Foucault as fictional character

MTL: What did the Michel Foucault character represent for you? Hope? An example? A dream?
AT: The man who worked for the “Salvation Army” in Geneva in the third part of the book looked exactly like French philosopher Michel Foucault. I have always been fascinated by Foucault. Not only intellectually but also physically. When I was 19 years old, I had this fantasy of being his student and perhaps more, his slave. My first name, Abdellah, means the “slave of God” in Arabic. Michel Foucault is a kind of god to me.

From:

SALVATION ARMY By Abdellah Taïa Semiotexte (semiotexte.com ) $14.95; 160 pages “Salvation Army” is the first novel by Abdellah Taïa, acknowledged as modern Morocco’s first openly gay autobiographical writer. Now a resident of Paris, he is also the author of the non-fiction books “Mon Maroc” and “Le Rouge du Tarbouche,” as well as other works.

More here.

Lettres de cachet: La vie des hommes infâmes

The Foucault Archives have released materials (sound file and manuscript facsimiles) from Foucault’s work with Arlette Farge, Michelle Perrot, and André Béjin on the so-called “lettres de cachet.”

This work is perhaps one of the most important remaining texts that has not seen an English translation.

Brief sound clip (in French).

Foucault’s manuscript page corrected typescript.

Is anything left of Stan Fish?

Brian Leiter (law professor at Chicago who we’ve had occasion to mention on Foucaultblog before) launches a critique of Stanley Fish, the reformed enfant terrible of 1980s philosophy. Fish, you may recall, was at Duke during the height of the culture wars, but is now at Florida Atlantic International University in Miami and a columnist for the New York Times.

“Philosophically incompetant” and “sophomoric prattle” accuses Leiter. Fish has written two columns discussing religion in the USA (the first focused on Terry Eagleton’s new book) which are attracting a lot of attention (the first column has over 700 comments attached to it!).

In his latest piece, Fish examines the case offered by some of his commenters for the separation of religion and science, or between “faith and reason.” Drop the assumptions and blinkers, he quotes them as saying, and you will come to the world as it is in itself (the way of science). Such an ability to come to the world is especially enhanced by the fact that it is clear to all what counts as evidence (and what doesn’t count).

In contesting this possibility, Fish reaches for Foucault’s famous piece “What is an author”:

suppose, you think (in the manner of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault) that the idea of the individual author is a myth that emerges alongside the valorization of property and property rights so central to Enlightenment thought? Suppose you believe that the so-called author is not the source of the words to which he signs his name, but is instead merely a site transversed by meanings neither he nor any other so-called “individual” originates? (“Writing,” says Barthes, “is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”)

In fact iirc Foucault argued that the notion of authorship varied historically and thought that today we place too much weight on assessing a piece by the status of the author rather than the quality of the content. this lead Foucault to whimsically wish that he could be faceless or “masked.” The price of fame no doubt (Jacko probably feels the same way.)

By the way, Foucault’s notion has been empirically supported from studies of authorial affiliation in journal submissions. In the experiment, the same article was submitted to multiple journals with varying authorial affiliations, say Harvard and FAU, with the more prestigious affiliation getting further through the peer-review process.

Putting this observation about Foucault’s article aside, what Fish is doing is pointing out that perhaps the grounds for assessing evidence are not in fact clear to all. Fish:

Evidence, understood as something that can be pointed to, is never an independent feature of the world. Rather, evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions – there are authors or there aren’t — that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which (and only in the context of which) something can appear as evidence.

So far so familiar. Terry Eagleton says something similar in Literary Theory regarding what counts as data (ie we can only know what counts in light of theory).

Indeed the idea of freeing oneself from all “chains” and just being in the world “raw” as it were, certainly flies in the face of the Heidegger tradition which finds its way into Foucault. This is the famous “always already” –we are always already in the world. we have to make some assumptions–take it on faith.

Fish is then able to deny a split between science and reason:

Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith.

But then we get to a more problematic argument: for Fish this all means that religion too is coinstantly critiquing what we know (fear of backsliding, crisis of faith etc.). But isn’t it rather that faith has a pre-desired goal (call it unproblematic belief in…) whereas critique qua critique never rests and continues to critique?

CFP: Politics of Life

The Politics of Life: Michel Foucault and the Biopolitics of Modernity
Call for papers

Södertörn University College, Stockholm
September 3-5, 2009

Confirmed Speakers:
Thomas Lemke
Maurizio Lazzarato
Julian Reid
Boris Groys
Catherine Mills
Johanna Oksala
Frédéric Gros
Vikki Bell

Ever since the concepts of “biopolitics” and “biopower” appeared in the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality in 1976, they have continued to provoke responses. In 1976 Foucault picks up themes already developed in Discipline and Punish, and describes a shift in the structure of power that takes us from the epoch of sovereignty, in which the right of the ruler is to take life or let live, to the modern conception of power as a way to enhance, render productive, compose, maximize, and administer life. In some respects this is an undeniable progress toward a more “humane” world, but, as Foucault underlines, it also leads to a biological conception of politics. To exterminate the enemy, to expel the degenerate, the enemy of the people or the class from the social body in order to attain purity—all of this will become possible precisely because the body politic comes to be perceived as a living entity that must be attended to, and not just a source of disturbances that must be repressed.

More here (link fixed). Deadline extended to May 31. For more information, contact Sven-Olov Wallenstein (sven-olov.wallenstein (at) sh.se.

Update. Information about the deadline extension was contained in this message sent to crit-geog.

Another contact listed in the cfp isjakob.nilsson (at) mail.film.su.se

“Foucault advised me…”

One of those little insights that come up from time to time of a person’s personal legacy:

Q. You’ve written extensively about the criminal justice system and in particular about parole, which California uses to monitor ex-offenders in the community after their release from prison. How did you originally get interested in parole?

A [Jonathan Simon]. Largely by accident. As a graduate student here at Berkeley’s law school in the 1980s, I was hunting around for a dissertation topic and was very interested in risk, dangerousness, and assessments of risk. (The French sociologist Michel Foucault, a visiting scholar here in 1983, had advised me to pursue those themes. And my Berkeley mentor, the late Sheldon Messinger — a leading scholar from the golden age of prison sociology in the 1960s — suggested that I consider looking at parole, since to some extent it’s about assessing risk.)

Biopolitics talk by Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean, who blogs at I Cite, has given an interesting-sounding talk on “Biopolitics is Post Politics” (hmm). One of her auditors posted the following summary:

Although the title was a reference to what Zizek said ’somewhere’, the talk mostly focused on Foucault and his rethinking of biopolitics from his own earlier work from 1975-6 on state phobia in which he promotes a ’sloppy move from social security to Nazi death camps’. Jodi’s point, as I saw it, was that Foucault turned away from such an analysis in the later work, The Birth of Biopolitics 1978-9, to account for the neo-liberal rejection of the state or raison d’Etat (as Foucault calls it) that leads to a concern with producing freedom in peculiar ways. This requires limiting the reaches of the state. In short, the question for Foucault in the biopolitics lectures seems to be: what are the stakes of liberalism taking the ‘risk’ of producing freedom?

More here.

New Google Earth controversy in Japan similar to Bowman Expeditions controversy

In this computer screen image taken from the Google Earth software, a feudal map of a village in central Japan from hundreds of years ago, superimposed on a modern street map, is shown. The village is clearly labeled “eta,” an old word for Japan’s outclass of untouchables known as “burakumin.” The word literally means “filthy mass” and is now considered to be a racial slur. The burakumin still face prejudice based on where they live or their ancestors lived, and fear that Google’s software can be used to easily pinpoint the old villages and match them up with modern neighborhoods. (AP Photo/Google Earth)

Google has recently got into trouble with its new Google Earth layers in Japan. Although they’re not providing any new information that wasn’t already out there, the “power of the Google” has brought on a fresh controversy. As always, it’s not about the technology.

I’ve written about these cross-cultural misunderstandings and controversies elsewhere, mostly in reference to the recent controversy in geography concerning community mapping in Oaxaca, Mexico. During the AAG for example there was much discussion about mapping, GIS and indigenous participation and objection around the work of Jerry Dobson and Peter Herlihy of Kansas University–the so-called Bowman Expeditions. (See here for a page of documents concerning the issue.)

One of the main lines of argument centers around the response “we did nothing wrong; we declared our sources of funding; we got local agreement; and our intentions are honorable.” What we’ve learned I think is that the debate is not about those facts per se; or perhaps more exactly that those responses, which might be thought to be controversy-ending in and of themselves, are either insufficient or irrelevant, even if they’re true.

I think I’m satisfied in my own mind that the Bowman Expeditions (regrettable name, as I told Jerry Dobson) did declare their funding from the DoD, were going to make their findings public and not just for the military, and have good intentions (reducing US arrogance and ignorance about foreign cultures, doing what Edward Said called for, ie letting the indigenous speak, and yes I know about Spivak). But once they took DoD funding they opened themselves to the same problems as the Human Terrain System (HTS) has.* It’s also evident that local groups differ one fro another, or even over time (agreements can be given and later withdrawn).

As I say above, the issue comes when two “worlds” come into contact. You can’t just do what is right by your lights, getting your IRBs signed off etc.If this post has any relevance to the blog, and it doesn’t, much, it’s that being-in-the-world (Heidegger), or the practice of freedom (Foucault) is not a set of rules or procedures that can be codified by eg a code of ethics. Who was it who said that the system is unable to account for anything outside the system?

When worlds collide, so to speak, it’s not the technology itself that lies at the heart of the matter, but the worldview, cultural orientations, expectations and histories that matter.

Here for example are some quotes from the story:

The company provided no explanation or historical context, as is common practice in Japan. Its basic stance is that its actions are acceptable because they are legal, one that has angered burakumin leaders.

“If there is an incident because of these maps, and Google is just going to say ‘it’s not our fault’ or ‘it’s down to the user,’ then we have no choice but to conclude that Google’s system itself is a form of prejudice,” said Toru Matsuoka, a member of Japan’s upper house of parliament.

Asked about its stance on the issue, Google responded with a formal statement that “we deeply care about human rights and have no intention to violate them.”

The more issues of this sort there are (and currently we not only have this Google issue, the Bowman Expeditions issue, but also the $10 million lawsuit against Jared Diamond, as well as the ongoing HTS issue) the more calls we will see for “codes of ethics” and indeed HTS-like solutions.

Here’s more. Notice the first quote. The maps come from David Rumsey, a well-known map collector who puts a lot of his collection online for free.

“This is a classic example of Google outsourcing the risk and appropriating the benefit of their investment,” said David Vaile, executive director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Center at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

The maps in question are part of a larger collection of Japanese maps owned by the University of California at Berkeley. Their digital versions are overseen by David Rumsey, a collector in the U.S. who has more than 100,000 historical maps of his own. He hosts more than 1,000 historical Japanese maps as part of a massive, English-language online archive he runs, and says he has never had a complaint.

It was Rumsey who worked with Google to post the maps in its software, and who was responsible for removing the references to the buraku villages. He said he preferred to leave them untouched as historical documents, but decided to change them after the search company told him of the complaints from Tokyo.

“We tend to think of maps as factual, like a satellite picture, but maps are never neutral, they always have a certain point of view,” he said.

* Incidentally I met and had a long conversation with two geographers in the HTS at the AAG meetings. I don’t think we agreed on things, but they were open to dialog, not secretive, gave me their names etc. I would like to see a dialog on this in geography, perhaps at next year’s AAG meetings in DC.