STP reading

Foucault’s Minions (!) are doing a reading of chapter 1 from Security, Territory, Population this week.

People are free to comment there. I don’t know how successful these things can be when held virtually. Perhaps we need some specific question to respond to.

Essay: Revising Foucault, the future of Foucault studies

An essay called Revising Foucault, the future of Foucault studies, by Colin Koopman, is available (pdf).

Koopman is doing a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz (and left a comment to a post below that links to his review of Paras). He’s working with David Hoy.

Koopman begins the Revising Foucault essay by questioning the recent interest in the newly published lectures:

But Paras and others err if they are willing to base these reinterpretations on a prioritization of the course lectures over Foucault’s carefully-polished primary publications.

Perhaps refocusing Foucault scholarship around the course lectures is motivated by the aim of setting Foucault’s thought to work in contexts where it previously has not ranged. But is the only way of achieving this worthwhile aim to discount Foucault’s primary texts in favor of secondary texts, unedited drafts, and scraps rescued from his trash bin?

An atlas of radical cartography

An atlas of radical cartography opens today in LA.

One exhibitor is Trevor Paglen, at Berkeley who has worked on the CIA extraordinary rendition. In an interview Paglen observes:

Trevor: I’ve actually tried to stay away from cartography and “mapping” as much as possible in my work. The “God’s eye” view implicit in much cartography is usually not helpful in terms of describing everyday life, nor in describing the qualities of the relationships that cartography depicts. Because of what cartography cannot represent, as you mentioned, it becomes pretty clear why it (and the forms of power that the cartographic viewpoint suggests) have traditionally been such powerful instruments of both colonialism and the contemporary geopolitical ordering of the world (which of course very much comes out of colonialism).

Yet Paglen’s own maps (one showing the CIA flights is reproduced here) belie this essentialising (which is common in critical work).

No homosexuality please, we’re Iranian

Ever since Ahmadinejad’s comments at Columbia University that there’s no homosexuality in Iran:

In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals. In Iran we don’t have this phenomenon. I don’t know who has told you we have it,

comment has been rife, much of it amused, some of it outraged, some of it informative.

Two reviews of Paras

Two reviews of Paras, Foucault 2.0 address the question of whether Foucault reintroduced the notion of the subject in his later writings. Additionally, on this week when the president of Iran visits Columbia U, they comment on Foucault’s journalism in the late 1970s with the Iranian revolution.

These topics speak to the different Foucaults that are out there. There’s the one that is seen by say cultural studies people and cultural anthropologists. Then not too far away, there’s the Foucault of sexuality. There’s the Foucault seen by those interested in political theory and governmentality. And there’s the Foucault that is seen by Serious philosophers studying the ramifications of archeology and genealogy. As I’ve learned doing this blog, there’s also the Foucault of modern theology students (ethics and culture of the self). (Then of course there are all the Foucaults, with egghead glistening, who play the role of villain in the nightmares of David Frum and co.)

Citizen journalism: where did the Israelis bomb?

Read this fascinating entry by Ogle Earth to see how citizen journalism can use geoweb tools to discover the facts behind the headlines. OG uses several threads of information and Google Earth to come up with a convincing candidate for the target site.

‘Singularity’

A guy called Tobias Reed is posting some stuff over at a blog called anthropos.net (linked I believe to the slumbering ‘Biopower and the Contemporary’ project at Berkeley) and yesterday he wrote about the notion of the singularity:

And yet, what “singularity” actually means, what its connotations and implications are is not quite clear. One way to approach the problem is to ask how others – who are somehow associated with it – use the term, e.g., Foucault.

The surprise was considerable: It appears that Foucault almost never uses the term singularity (at least not in French).

Saturday photo blogging

The new “digital” stained glass window in the Cologne cathedral by Gerhard Richter:

The house of Sennett

The NYT has a feature on Richard Sennett’s house. I didn’t know he was married to Saskia Sassen.

Foucault: historian or philosopher?

Kevin Turner provides (in Foucault-l) a couple of links to a short debate between Gary Gutting and Beatrice Han on the question of whether Foucault was a historian or philosopher.