Go to school with Foucault

Foucault Spring School. March 17-21 2008 Leuven:

 

Mission
The work of Michel Foucault has gained an increasing popularity in a number of sub-disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities in general. Despite its popularity, a profound knowledge of this work often remains a weakness of many researches who focus mainly on the empirical application of this theory. To counter this issue, the Foucault Graduate School aims at creating a space which allows for an in-depth reading and discussion of a number of key texts of Michel Foucault. To accommodate this process, three leading Foucault-scholars will give a public lecture and a Master class.

 

Aim

The work of Michel Foucault has gained an increasing popularity in a number of sub-disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities in general. Despite its popularity, a profound knowledge of this work often remains a weakness of many researches who focus mainly on the empirical application of this theory. To counter this issue, the Foucault Graduate School aims at creating a space which allows for an in-depth reading and discussion of a number of key texts of Michel Foucault. To accommodate this process, three leading Foucault-scholars will give a public lecture and a Master class.

Concept

The Foucault Spring School will be spread over four days.

• Introductory class: an introductory class will be given on the first day to situate Foucault’s work intellectually and philosophically.
• Public lecture: Foucault-experts will give a public lecture on a central theme in the work of Foucault. The participants will take this lecture as a basis for the further reading and discussion of the Foucault texts.
• Collective reading/discussion: the morning after each public lecture, participants will meet in small groups to discuss the lecture, keeping closely in touch with Foucault’s original texts. This reading session will also serve as a preparation for the Master class with the speakers.
• Master class: the participants will reconvene with the Foucault-expert for further elaboration on certain aspects of the lecture. The purpose of this Master class is to identify some interesting or problematic aspects in the work of Foucault (or the public lecture of the speaker) and to discuss these collectively. Participants are also encouraged to draw on their own research to participate in the discussion.

Central themes: the three central themes and key note speakers are:

1. Agency/subjectivity: Prof. Lois McNay
2. Governmentality: Prof. Thomas Lemke
3. Discourse/knowledge: (to be confirmed)

To allow for collective in-depth study, participants will be asked to read a number of texts prior to the Foucault Spring School.

Participants

The Spring School aims at gathering a selected group of 30 to 40 young researchers (graduate & post-doctoral) engaged with Foucauldian theory. We hope to reach both national and international students from in- and outside Europe. Participants will be selected on the basis of their research interest.

More here.

Foucault Circle final program

The Foucault circle have distributed the final program for the 2008 meetings. It’s not yet online but is linked below.

fc08program.pdf

Here are the initial details:

Flight
The closest airport is located in Dayton, Ohio.  The other two
accessible airports are located in Cincinnati, Ohio and Indianapolis, Indiana.  Van service will be available from the Dayton airport throughout the afternoon on Friday to take people to the hotel.  (Vans will also return people to the airport on Sunday afternoon). People flying into Cincinnati and Indianapolis will need to rent a car.  Driving directions from all three airports to the hotel will be provided soon.

Lodging
A block of rooms has been reserved at the Hampton Inn and Suites in Richmond, Indiana.  The rate is $99 per night for a room with a king or two queen beds.  The hotel’s phone number is 1-765-966-5200.  When making your reservation please indicate that you are part of the Foucault Circle.  You should reserve your room as soon as possible.  Check-in is 3 pm and check-out is 11 am.  Van service will be available to take people from the hotel to the conference site at Earlham College.

http://www.foucaultcircle.org

Colin Wilson takes on Foucault

Colin Wilson offers the arguments against Foucault from a Marxist perspective:

Foucault’s ideas are radical but not Marxist, which helps explain his current prominence. His ideas fit a time when Marxists are a minority and non-Marxist radicals such as Noam Chomsky are greatly respected.

Foucault’s approach leads to some serious problems. He rightly rejected both capitalism and Stalinism. This was a necessary first step, but he never explained how ideas relate to the material reality of society – where ideas come from, or what role radical ideas can play in changing the world.

The closest he comes to an overall explanation of society is in his writings from the 1980s about “power”.

By “power” Foucault means all non-economic forms of social domination. But he describes power as existing everywhere – so you cannot say that one group of people has it and another does not. Foucault was right to stress the importance of non-economic factors, but his explanation is too vague to be useful.

He concludes:

There are serious political weaknesses in Foucault’s work. But many people are inspired by the radical side of his writing. He may not be easy to read – but what he does have to say is almost always thought provoking.

Choice reviews our book

Choice, the influential journal of the American Library Association, has a review of our book in its December 2007 issue:

Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography, ed. by Jeremy W. Crampton and Stuart Elden. Ashgate, 2007. 377p bibl index; ISBN 9780754646549, $114.95; ISBN 9780754646556 pbk, $39.95. Reviewed in 2007dec CHOICE.

The work of French philosopher Foucault is here excavated, translated, interpreted, assessed, and applied. During his life, Foucault indulged critical thinking concerning, especially, social institutions, power, and knowledge. This is apparently the first book to negotiate Foucault’s questions placed before the French geography journal Hérodote in the 1970s. The work’s first section relates essentially to Foucault’s writings on space, accompanied by selected Francophone responses (1977) and Anglophone responses (2006). The remainder of the book consists of essays developing context for Foucault’s work, translations of several of his essays, and further extension of his work in the shape of nondisciplinary but critical and discursive inquiry. This is a thoughtful and imaginative undertaking, replete with utile index. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. — G. J. Martin, emeritus, Southern Connecticut State University

Birth of Biopolitics announced

The English translation of The Birth of Biopolitics is scheduled for an 11 April 2008 release.

From the publisher:

Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics, pursue and develop further the themes of his lectures from the previous year, Security, Territory, Population.  Having shown how Eighteen century political economy marks the birth of a new governmental rationality – seeking maximum effectiveness by governing less and in accordance with the naturalness of the phenomena to be governed – Michel Foucault undertakes the detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality.  This involves describing the political rationality within which the specific problems of life and population were posed:  “Studying liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics”.

What are the specific features of the liberal art of government as they were outlined in the Eighteenth century?  What crisis of governmentality characterises the present world and what revisions of liberal government has it given rise to?  This is the diagnostic task addressed by Foucault’s study of the two major twentieth century schools of neo-liberalism:  German ordo-liberalism and the neo-liberalism of the Chicago School.  In the years he taught at the Collège de France, this was Michel Foucault’s sole foray into the field of contemporary history.  This course thus raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics.  A remarkable feature of these lectures is their discussion of contemporary economic theory and practice, culminating in an analysis of the model of homo oeconomicus.

Foucault’s analysis also highlights the paradoxical role played by “society” in relation to government.  “Society” is both that in the name of which government strives to limit itself, but it is also the target for permanent governmental intervention to produce, multiply, and guarantee the freedoms required by economic liberalism.  Far from being opposed to the State, civil society is thus shown to be the correlate of a liberal technology of government.    

Foucault as phenomenologist

Barry Stocker, a philosopher in Istanbul, makes the case for Foucault as phenomenologist:

My main thoughts are that Foucault is not the kind of social constructivist he is often taken to be; and that his epistemology can be better understood if it is interpreted in a Phenomenological context. The Phenomenological aspect of Foucault should orientate understanding away from intellectual construction to embodiment, the extended mind, and perceptibility. All the discussion of archeology, genealogy, the order of discourse and so on, can be better understood as bringing perception into the conceptual than as conceptual construction.

Throughout the phases of his work, there is a constant underlying concern with Phenomenological themes. If he’s talking about abstract discourse or about punishment of criminals, Foucault is always concerned with the revelation of truth. Truth is appearing, there is a coming into light. The last phrase is very reminiscient of Heidegger. Heidegger turned Husserl’s abstract transcendental forms of Phenomenology into Being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is a big thought in Heidegger, but here we can say it includes the concrete experience of always existing in a world of care, concern and Being-with.

More.

Return of the panopticon? New super prisons in the UK

New Titan super-prisons have been proposed for the UK to deal with overcrowding:

 And yet the next generation of prisons is to be the Titan, giant super-prisons packed with biometric scanners and other gadgetry. Despite all this new technology, a quick glance at the early plans for the Titans conjure up echoes of their Victorian ancestors.

…

Dwarfing anything in the current system, a key quality will be “optimal sight lines which would result in better staff utilisation and deliver staff savings”.

Such a demand harks back to a crucial crossroads in the development of Britain’s prisons at the beginning of the 19th Century.

“To induce… a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.”

This could be a criticism from one of the opponents of Britain’s “CCTV society”. In fact, it is from French philosopher Michel Foucault’s attack on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a landmark concept in the British prison system.

Via BBC 

Review: Psychiatric Power

Metapsychology Online Reviews Psychiatric Power:

In these lectures [Foucault] sets out the program for a genealogy of psychiatry, of its characteristic knowledge/power relations. Thus, Psychiatric Power pursues the history started with Madness and Civilization which undertook the archaeology of the division between the insane and the sane in Western society.

In order to give an account of this form of psychiatric and medical knowledge about madness, one must start with an analysis of the apparatuses and the techniques of power that organized the treatment of the mad in the period that spans from Philippe Pinel to Jean-Martin Charcot. Psychiatry is not born as a consequence of progress in the knowledge of madness but from the disciplinary apparatuses within which the regime imposed on madness is organized. From this point of view, Psychiatric Power continues the project of a history of human sciences.

…

At the very end of his course, when Foucault returns to the relations of power between hysteric and doctor, to hysterical resistance to medical power, the scene of sexuality is center stage. And Foucault draws the remarkable conclusion that “this sexuality is not an indecipherable remainder but the hysteric’s victory cry, the last maneuver by which they finally get the better of the neurologists and silence them” (p.322). But, in the final diagnosis, this great pleasure of hysteric’s victory becomes the great misfortune of our subjection to the apparatus of sexuality. And Foucault focuses our attention on that moving stratum of force relations that underlies the instability, of relations of power/resistance.

New Review: Naissance de la Biopolitique

New review of Naissance de la biopolitique by Francesco Guala:

The title of this book is rather misleading. “Birth of neoliberal governmentality,” or something like that, would have been more faithful to its contents. In Foucault’s vocabulary, “biopolitics” is the “rationalisation” of “governmentality” (p. 261): it’s the theory, in other words, as opposed to the art (governmentality) of managing people. The mismatch between title and content is easily explained: the general theme of the courses at the Collège de France had to be announced at the beginning of each academic year. It is part of the mandate of every professor at the Collège, however, that his lectures should follow closely his current research. As a consequence it wasn’t unusual for Foucault to take new directions while he was lecturing. In 1979, for the first and only time in his career, he took a diversion into contemporary political philosophy. His principal object of investigation became “neoliberal” political economy. More precisely, he got increasingly interested in those strands of contemporary liberalism that use economic science both as a principle of limitation and of inspiration for the management of people.

Naissance de la biopolitique is the latest instalment in a series of publications that will eventually cover Foucault’s entire period as “Chair of the History of Systems of Thought” at the Coll`ege de France (1970–84). The books are based on tapes recorded by students and other members of the audience, edited using Foucault’s own notes, and complemented by comprehensive bibliographical material. The course of 1978–79 is not Foucault’s only engagement with economic science, of course, for a decade earlier he had devoted many pages of The Order of Things (1966) to outline the transition of economics from immature to mature science. As we shall see however there are several differences between Foucault’s perspective in The Order and in Naissance, which make the latter much more interesting quite independently of its topical character.

Economics and Philosophy 22 (2006), pp. 429-439.

DOI: 10.1017/S0266267106001052

Sex and ethics: Nussbaum vs. Foucault

From Bosphorus Reflections:

Michel Foucault and Martha Nussbaum covered some similar territory with regard to the ehtics of the Ancient world with regard to desire, sexuality, eros and love. In Foucault’s case, this was work towards the end of his life in Hermeneutics of the Subject, Uses of Pleasure, and Care of the Self (the last two were volumes two and three of History of Sexuality). In Nussbaum’s case, this was the work that really made her name: Fragility of Goodness and Therapy of Desire.

Comparisons of the two are not very frequent. Foucault tends to be best known amongst literary theorists; Nussbaum is known to philosophers (particularly those working in Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature, and Ethics) and also to people in legal and political theory. There would be great benefits in more philosophers reading Foucault, there would also be benefits in cultural theorists reading Nussbaum.

Concluding:

Foucault was an irresponsible provocateur, Nussbaum is the New Engşand moralist. Clearly Nussbaum is the greater scholar of Antiquity, by a very long way, but she is not convincing when she tries to criticise Foucault for emphasising the distance between Antique ethics and general theories of obligation. It is important that at this time Foucault was developing a more nuanced view of different types of political regime. In all cases he was trying to learn from Antiquity how politics always refers to particularistic sovereignty.