The power of blogs for political activism?

Updated.

In a recent post I quoted Glen Greenwald:

Appointing John Brennan to a position of high authority would be to affirm and embrace, not repudiate, the darkest aspects of the last eight years.

AP now reports:

In a letter Tuesday, Brennan wrote letter to Obama that he did not want to be a distraction. His potential appointment has raised a firestorm in liberal blogs who associate him with the Bush administration’s interrogation, detention and rendition policies.

Update.

Jane Hamsher appeared on the Rachel Maddows show last night (about the only liberal political show there is on traditional media). Hamsher runs the blog Firedoglake and discusses Brennan withdrawing.

Parrhesia new issue: Elden, Bowden, Armstrong on Fink, Badiou, Zizek and Foucault

A new issue of Parrhesia is available (h/t Ali Rivzi).

Parrhesia is the pactice of frank speech, of speaking liberally, and was discussed in a number of Foucault’s lectures during the 1980s (eg., see Hermeneutics of the Subject).

Here is the table of contents:

FEATURES
‘You cannot make a living just being a theoretician’: An Interview with Jean-Michel Rabaté With
Jeroen Lauwers & Thomas Van Parys

Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology
Rudi Visker

ESSAYS
Beyond Resistance: a response to Zizek’s critique of Foucault’s subject of freedom Aurelia
Armstrong

Alain Badiou: Problematics and the Different Senses of Being in Being and Event
Sean Bowden

Eugen Fink and the Question of the World
Stuart Elden

Between Rupture and Repetition: Intervention and Evental Recurrence in the Thought of Alain
Badiou
Hollis Phelps

REVIEWS

Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology
Miguel de Beistegui

Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (eds.) Transcendental Heidegger
Ingo Farin

Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge
Sam Rocha
——–

Parrhesia is completely open access, and is a member of the Open Humanities Press

Nottingham talk: Michel Foucault in the Business School

Today’s talk:

Monday 24th November 2008, 6 – 8 pm
Stranger in a Strange Land: Michel Foucault in the Business School
Ken Starkey

BioCity Lecture Theatre
BioCity Nottingham
Pennyfoot Street
Nottingham
NG1 1GF

Foucault is regularly cited in business management literature. At first sight, says Professor Ken Starkey, this might seem “strange”. However, his investigations included prisons, schools and hospitals, now seen by managers as potential business opportunities. However, the complicated workings of modern corporations shouldn’t be simply seen as replicating the all-controlling ‘panopticon’. In the current economic crisis we need to escape from our own intellectual prisons, drawing on Foucault’s thoughts to prise open possibilities.

Ken Starkey is professor of Management, Organisational Management and Organisational Learning at Nottingham University. He has published widely on management theory and co-edited Foucault, Management and Organisation Theory (1998) with Alan McKinlay.

Obama, Foucault and the Surveillant Society

A new Obama administration would be a timely opportunity to re-examine some of the surveillant practices of the last few years, and in particular the clandestine surveillance on Americans performed by the government (warrantless wiretapping).

Two stories today, one in the New York Times by Eric Lichblau and James Risen (who broke the warrantless wiretapping story in 2005, forcing the Bush administration to admit it was breaking the law) and one at EFF’s blog situate FISA and surveillance. Obama technically has the power to overturn or decline to appeal rulings against the government, in distinction to the Bush administration (EFF is the Electronic Frontier Foundation). But will he? Commentators are starting to say that the signs are poor that Obama will undermine the surveillance society:

This is what President Obama could end, even without Congress acting. He could instruct his agencies to follow the old FISA rules and United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, or USSID 18 — an NSA rule that bars overseas surveillance of Americans without authorization and probable cause. Those protections, and the basic Constitutional fourth amendment protection, have been all but eradicated by the Bush administration and have to be restored if the Obama administration hopes bring this country back under the rule of law.

Whether this will happen is now seriously in question, with reports that former National Counterrorism Center head John Brennan is the favorite for the CIA director nomination. This pick could create real conflict within the new administration: Brennan continues to defend the “enhanced interrogation” techniques and rendition that Obama himself has renounced. On this, I can only reiterate what Glenn says:

To appoint someone as CIA Director or Director of National Intelligence who was one of George Tenet’s closest aides when The Dark Side of the last eight years was conceived and implemented, and who, to this day, continues to defend and support policies such as “enhanced interrogation techniques” and rendition (to say nothing of telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping), is to cross multiple lines that no Obama supporter should sanction. Truly turning a page on the grotesque abuses of the last eight years requires both symbolism (closing Guantanamo) and substantive policy changes (compelling adherence to the Army Field Manual, ensuring due process rights for all detainees, ending rendition, restoring safeguards on surveillance powers). Appointing John Brennan to a position of high authority would be to affirm and embrace, not repudiate, the darkest aspects of the last eight years.

EFF:

We at EFF — along with many of Obama’s supporters — were sorely disappointed when he failed to uphold his promise to filibuster any bill that contained immunity, and instead reversed course and ultimately voted for passage of the FAA.

Plus ça change. So the panopticon is not dismantled.

Ron Johnston on David Harvey and neoliberalism

This month’s Annals of the AAG carries a book review essay by Ron Johnston which discusses four recent books by David Harvey on neoliberalism. It might be interesting to read these books against Birth of Biopolitics.

For instance, Harvey defines neoliberalism as:

a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.

Which is fair enough but note the huge role of the state that is adopted here. The neoliberal response to this role is suspicion:

The neoconservative, neoliberal response to this is to become increasingly authoritarian, at the same time putting more of what was formerly part of the state apparatus, such as the central bank that sets interest rates, outside electoral-political control and into the new elite’s hands (thereby creating a “democratic deficit.”

Following the Conservative party’s long stint in government during the 80s and 90s, which while neoliberal was not programmatically so (Johnston argues Thatcher was too much of a pragmatist to be doctrinaire), the Kinnock/Smith/Blair Labour party adopted neoliberalism in order to become electable. (One would suspect that Harvey would situate Obama in this category as well.)

Johnston doesn’t conclude with any definitive trends from Harvey, although he does cite six reasons why neoliberalism may fail (#4, the US is “free-falling into indebtedness” sounds familiar). But “change” (an overworked word during the presidential campaign), “is accelerating” so who knows?

Philosophers and politics: oil and water?

Since Barack Obama was elected two weeks ago, it has been open season on the president-elect. Open letters, advice and commentary has been pouring into Obama HQ (or at least have been made public). Obama would have to be some kind of contortionist to meet even a fraction of the demands being placed on him. He would need to be a conservative (for, after all this is a “center-right country,” at least according to Karl Rove), he would need to focus on the economy, on health care, protect net neutrality and on free choice of joining a union. He would need to repeal the Patriot Act, stop warrantless wiretapping and at the same time move beyond “partisan” politics.

Many of these pieces of advice have come from those engaged in the political process, either as members of the commentariat on TV or the traditional media, or former members of the Bush/Clinton/Bush administrations (how ironic to see, by the way, that many Clintonistas are being tapped to be part of the Obama administration after one of this summer’s talking points that Hilary Clinton was unacceptable because she would bring back…. so many members of the Clinton administration).

But this has not stopped those more distantly related to the American political process from offering their own two cents/pence/euros. Far be it from me to erect entry barriers to this game (ones I would very likely balk at myself) but isn’t it premature to say that Obama has failed already (or will inevitably fail)? Žižek for example calls him already “Bush with a human face” who “will pursue the same basic policies in a more attractive way and thus effectively strengthen the US hegemony, damaged by the catastrophe of the Bush years.” For added impact he cites a friend of his who cried when Obama was elected (with tears of joy or sorrow was not stipulated, but someone who apparently does not read polls during presidential elections: “Obama’s victory was clearly predictable for at least two weeks before the election, but it was still experienced as a surprise” he claims, when most politicos were predicting a Democratic victory from oh, about 2006 onwards–remember the Midterms anyone?).

But as to whether Obama will increase American hegemony:

I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.

Not quite clear how shutting down Gitmo is hegemonic, or promises on the campaign trail to withdraw troops in 18 months. Nor is it clear how Obama’s success with the vast majority of different people in this country is indicative of “failure.” Here for example is a graphical representation, based on the exit polls of which constituencies Obama won (in blue) or lost (in red):

Now it seems to me that if you want to direct your analysis of failure at anyone from the standpoint of saying that they aren’t leftist enough, you would do better than to pick Obama. How about them Democrats in Congress? As usual, Glenn Greenwald provides a timely reminder:

It is worth remembering that the Democrats who are going to exert dominant political control are the same ones who have provoked so much scorn — rightfully so — over the last several years, and particularly since 2006.  This is the same Democratic Party leadership which funded the Iraq War without conditions (and voted to authorize it in the first place); massively expanded the President’s warrantless eavesdropping powers; immunized lawbreaking telecoms; enacted the Patriot Act and then renewed it with virtually no changes; didn’t even bother to mount a filibuster to stop the Military Commissions Act; refrained from pursuing any meaningful investigations of Bush lawbreaking; confirmed every last extremist Bush nominee, from Michael McConnell to Michael Mukasey; acquiesced to even the worst and most lawless Bush policies when they were briefed on them; and on and on and on.  None of that has changed.  That is still who they are.

To this we could add the fact that today Senate Dems vote on whether Joe Liberman keeps his main committee chairmanship; all signs point to the fact they will allow him to do so despite the fact that he campaigned against the Democratic party and for John McCain.

But I guess railing against Congress doesn’t get you into the LRB on a regular basis! I guess that’s what blogs are for.

There’s no point being naive here. If Žižek really wanted to provide political analysis instead of empty rhetoric, why didn’t he look at what is actually going on to determine Obama’s position on Gitmo and extraordinary rendition? Paul Rosenberg shows how it’s done in a recent piece on Open Left. Rosenberg focuses on John O. Brennan, who with Jami A. Miscik is in charge of Obama’s intelligence transition team. Brennan in particular, as Chief of Staff for former CIA Director Georege Tenet is associated with the corrupt CIA culture of dubious evidence for the Iraq war and extraordinary rendition and even warrantless wiretapping. NPR have attributed Obama’s reversal on FISA and the issue of telecom immunity to advice from Brennan (if you remember, THE major policy push last spring by bloggers was to oppose such retroactive immunity: they failed).

Mel Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst said recently:

John Brennan has defended the warrantless eavesdropping. John Brennan has basically defended all of the violations that were committed at the CIA in the run-up to the war and in the postwar period. So the signal this sends to CIA employees who tried to get it right-and there were a few who tried to get it right-is the worst kind of signal. And if this is Obama’s judgment about a national security team, it’s very reminiscent of what Bill Clinton did in 1993, when he appointed people such as Jim Woolsey and Les Aspin and Warren Christopher and Tony Lake to the national security positions, and all of them had to be removed before the first term was over. So this is very disquieting, what we’re learning now.

Well if it gets too bad, Žižek can always join the ELITE program:

* * *

Simon Critchley suffers a different problem: bad political timing. In 2006, the same year that change first swept America, he published Infinitely Demanding, in which he argued that the Bush administration had so dulled political sensibility in America that…change was inconceivable. We are all nihilists now, he argues:

there is a motivational deficit at the heart of liberal democratic life…if secular liberal democracy doesn’t motivate subjects sufficiently, then…[what will] are frameworks of belief that call that secular project into question (p. 7)

By this Critchley means radical Islamic, Jihadist and Christian fundamentalism (he draws a parallel between Bush and bin Laden). But even as Critchley was writing, that’s not what happened.

In reality, Bush’s popularity ratings had been in decline since about September 12, 2001, and 9/11 marked not the apogee of his presidency, but the beginning of its destruction and failure. Or if the 2006 Midterms are too thin gruel for you, despite it being a “wave” election (not a single sitting Democratic lost their seat), Critchley published his book just 24 months before part II, an election being called a radical realignment of the political landscape. Candidate Obama announced he was running for president in early 2007 and presumably encapsulates the rejection of nihilism Critchley identifies in the contemporary zeitgeist.

Certainly, Critchley is no Žižek:

[Obama's victory] will have hugely beneficial consequences for how the United States is seen throughout the world.

Critchley’s argument is at least more reality-based than Žižek’s. It seems Žižek’s self-appointed role is to provide his readers with knowing nods and winks without providing any substance. In this, he adopts the philosophical equivalency of Sarah Palin.

But for Critchley, Obama is a hypocrit:

Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, the put aside our differences and achieve union. Obama’s politics is governed by a longing for unity, for community, for communion and the common good. The remedy to the widespread disillusion with Bush’s partisan politics is a reaffirmation of the founding act of the United States, the hope of the more perfect union expressed in the opening sentence of the US Constitution.

Common good to be achieved through post-partisanship, is I think, likely to be the enduring weakness of an Obama administration. It is what leads to the decision to keep the Republican Robert Gates as Secretary of State and to appoint Brennan to your transition team. So Critchley is correct I think that Obama comes in emphasising a change from the extreme and toxic partisanship of the Bush administration.

But how structural is this? Would say President Hilary Clinton also have had to position herself this way? Maybe Obama’s policies are formed by the times as much as form them, at least at this point. The people have spoken and as Karl Rove said, they have spoken clearly: they want change from Bush, and they want both Congress and the White House in the hands of the Democrats.

Critchley also finds Obama to be lacking in radicalism; he will “normalize” capitalism by reversing deregulation (a question mark is warranted over that argument; perhaps better to say he will overturn elements of unregulated neoliberalism, espcially in the financial sector where the credit default swaps and subprime mortgages have resulted in the current recession) and return to the Constitution. Hard to argue against those and Critchley wisely doesn’t.

What he is really concerned about is what next. He sees a real possibility that prticipatory politics as a populist movement will dissipate.

The second possibility is the reverse, namely that the popular force that has been mobilized around Obama’s presidential campaign simply exhausts itself in its governmental victory. On this view, once Obama has been elected, citizens can switch off politically and sit back and watch how well his administration does. Politics becomes reduced to a spectacle of media and governmental representation. Furthermore, this possibility is undoubtedly the one favoured by the Obama campaign itself, which explains the somber, slightly disappointed tone to Obama’s speech on the night of his victory: ‘The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term’. On this view, the rhetoric of change (‘Together we can change the country and change the world’) was simply what it took to get people mobilized. Once the victory is secure, there must be no further mobilizations at the popular level. All must henceforth be mediated through the apparatus of government. Politics as the experience of a people suddenly present to itself and aware of its awesome power has to die at the precise moment when a representative government is elected.

I think this whole paragraph is wrong. First, the Obama campaign shows no evidence that it wishes YouTube, blogs, ActBlue, the Voter Activation Network, VoteBuilder, small donations etc. to go away. After all, he has to run again in four years.

Second, the popular political movement centered around the netroots and grassroots did not emerge around Obama, it pre-existed Obama, and as such it will continue with or without Obama. The political blogosphere for example, which is a large part of this, started over ten years ago with MoveOn.org. It will continue now that Obama has been elected. Of course the campaign is over and the campaign offices have closed (for now). But there are thousands if not millions of new registered voters, predominantly Democrat, and young (18-29) voters in their millions, again going heavily for the Democrats. Catalyst and VoteBuilder are going to track, contact and network these voters. Sure, the intensity will die down (we’re 2+ weeks after the conclusion of a two year campaign; a little rest is perhaps not unwarranted).

This year (and to some extent 2006) really saw the rise to the first stages of maturity of the netroots as a voice and outlet for alternative political views and activism beyond the traditional media (all of whom, by the way now have blogs–tell me again why that model is broken). GOTV practices, using VoteBuilder on the Democratic side (and VoterVault on the GOP side) are now well established and nationally implemented. They work (well most of the time; as a sometime data entry volunteer during the campaign, response times were a little slow to the database). Over $82 million has been raised in amounts averaging just $98.16 through ActBlue, the leading Democratic online fundraising site. Millions of people, not hundreds, not thousands, visit blogs every day (Daily Kos has a viewership larger than almost all the political programming on TV).

If anything I think the political blogosphere and loical political activism will be emboldened by its success this year. Everyone knows Obama’s campaign during the primaries and later the election was powered through local activism and by taking advantage of online networking (though that full story has yet to be adequately told). They will work to install and support more progressive candidates to replace the “Blue Dogs,” and to nullify and rebut conservative talking points (see Media Matters). Partisanship, Critchley should note, is vibrant here.

Indeed they are still working on behalf of those races which are not yet over; such as Jim Martin here in Georgia, or Al Franken in Minnesota, raising money, providing the latest voter tallies and providing reporting from the ground.

I love both politics and philosophy, but I do wonder (if Žižek and Critchley are exemplars) if they can really mix.

Michel Foucault and art after Minimalism

Thomas Hirschhorn 24H Foucault » (Auditorium), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2-3 octobre 2004
(Photo Romain Lopez)

Today’s Nottingham talk:

Monday 17th November, 6 – 8 pm
Michel Foucault and art after Minimalism
Lisa Le Feuvre

BioCity Lecture Theatre
BioCity Nottingham
Pennyfoot Street
Nottingham
NG1 1GF

“A glance, stare or gaze is a function of power,” states Lisa Le Feuvre. “Looking involves taking, giving and refusing permissions – a process predicated to control.” In this lecture she relates Foucault’s theories of surveillance to the concerns of art after Minimalism, revealed particularly in the work of Dan Graham, Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman. Acconci’s attempted invisibility, Graham’s investigations of the politics of vision and architecture, and the conflict with regulation in Nauman’s work are all explored. Their work attempts to revoke the dominating authority that determines bodies in time, space and ultimately, what we see.

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer and lecturer based in London. She is Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Maritime Museum. She lectures on the Curatorial MA at Goldsmiths College and recent writing includes essays on Robert Morris and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Review of Agamben Il Potere e la Gloria

My colleague Claudio Minca (Royal Holloway) offers a review of Agamben’s latest book:

This is an astounding book that stands to fundamentally transform how we look at all things
economic and also the very ways in which we understand power in the Western tradition.

…

Agamben inaugurates this exploration by asking two crucial questions: “Why does power
need glory?” and “What is the relationship between power and glory?” By attempting to answer these questions, he claims, we can recover their theological dimension and identify in the relationship between oikonomia and gloria, the inner, intimate structure of the Western governmental machine. He is also very explicit about the fact that this project must be located in the gaps in Michel Foucault’s work on the genealogy of governmentality; indeed, it may allow us to understand the very reasons behind Foucault’s unaccomplished attempt. The shadow that this novel, theoretical `interrogation of the present’ projects on the past, Agamben argues, reaches out well beyond the chronological limits that Foucault assigned to his own research.

This points to one of the fundamental questions in fact for Agamben fans, namely, how much is this derivative of Foucault. Indeed, one major way that Foucault’s work on governmentality was “unaccomplished” was that his life was curtailed. What would be interesting would be a longer examination of the Agamben-Foucault engagement.

Minca is impressed with the end of the book where apparently Agamben finds a void at the center of the “governmental machine,” because in the same way that acclamations of the glory of power in Christian political theology, then it is the media that do the same thing today. And these links between Christian theological politics and government are not accidental.

Yet reading this review 1.5 weeks after at least in the US the (conservative) Christian movement was defeated however, makes me wonder if this book is not already obsolete.

More here (pdf).

Review: Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida

Review in the LRB (login req’d) of Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by William McCuaig.

Among other observations in this long review, it is remarked:

It is a terrible irony of the Foucauldian anti-medicalisation argument that Foucault himself died of Aids at the age of 57, that he didn’t practise safe sex, and didn’t know about HIV transmission until a few months before his death. (It is even said that Foucault initially discounted Aids as a mythical homosexual-targeting disease invented by the medical superstructure to control male homosexuality; in this sense, he was a literal victim of his own conspiracy theories.) In other words, we might all have benefited had Foucault undergone some ‘medicalisation’ and ‘hygienisation’.

Yes, if what Batuman says is true then that is an irony–but don’t we need to separate out “anti-medicalisation” from anti-normalization? Foucault after all went to hospital (Salpêtrière) and took advantage of medical services during his illness. And I suppose it will not be known for sure outside his friends and family how much it was clear to them and to Foucault that this was AIDS (Macey says several of Foucault’s colleagues understood it was AIDS); remember this was 1984 when it was still called the “gay cancer” and as such rather unbelievable–why would a cancer target gays and only gays? Foucault was certainly not the only one to wonder about this–if we even grant he did so (citations please).She also repeatedly accuses Foucault of being a conspiracy theorist.

In fact, Foucault was rather accused of being “silent” about AIDS (by Jean-Paul Aron for example). Foucault’s partner, Daniel Defert also created AIDES after Foucault’s death, in partnership with the UK Terrence Higgins Trust and the UN HIV/AIDS program (UNAIDS). AIDES is (according to Wikipedia) the largest NGO in France working on HIV and I don’t think it supports a thesis of being “anti-medical.”

I’ve read through some of Elif’s blog and its dry, witty sense of humor appeals to my quirky side. And perhaps Batuman would agree with the remarks above, for she writes of Roudinesco’s treatment of Canguilhem:

In her first chapter, ‘George Canguilhem: A Philosophy of Heroism’, Roudinesco relates Canguilhem’s work as a doctor in the French Resistance to The Normal and the Pathological, the influential book in which he challenged the prevailing definition of normality. Canguilhem defined health as the ‘stable’ condition of life, and pathology as a reaction or a process rather than a ‘fixed constitution’. Roudinesco plausibly argues that Canguilhem’s thesis was informed by his experience tending to wounded résistants under an occupation which must have presented all the features of an unfathomable pathology. For Canguilhem the maquisard, the Resistance had to be assimilated into the realm of the possible – just as, for Canguilhem the philosopher of medicine, pathology had to be assimilated into the realm of normality.

Overall, the book (and review) might be most interesting for readers of Althusser. Roudinesco, who was friends with him and his wife, whom he murdered, apparently spends some length defending him. Batuman doesn’t make this book sounds appealing, and at the end of the review I’m not much wiser as to what the book is about, except that it is a “Freudo-Marxist biography.”

Anyway, finally we have this:

Sartre would have liked House, in which people get sick from existence rather than essence.

Touché! I’ve never seen House (not having cable TV) but my biggest question is why it stars a British comedian, Hugh Laurie, best known for Blackadder and his show with Stephen Fry…?

The reviewer, Elif Batuman, blogs here.

Followup on Nottingham events–starts today!

The Impossible Prison exhibition.  Photography David Sillitoe

Back in early October I mentioned a series of Foucault-related events were going to take place in Nottingham. That series has now started. Here is further information about today’s and forthcoming talks.

Monday 10th November 2008, 6 – 8 pm
Meaning, Truth and Prisons: The Legacy of Michel Foucault
David Macey in conversation with Jonathan Rée

BioCity Lecture Theatre
BioCity Nottingham
Pennyfoot Street
Notttingham
NG1 1GF

David Macey, Foucault’s biographer, will discuss the astounding contribution of this very  “uncomfortable thinker.” Although he died over two decades ago, his work continues to inform contemporary life and culture, whether that is our understanding of madness, prison as a model for many modern institutions, or the self-constructed individual who still relishes the audacity of this activist-philosopher today.

Jonathan Rée is Visiting Professor at Roehampton University and the Royal College of Art. Aiming to find new audiences for philosophical debate, he is the author of more than a dozen books and a journalist for many publications including the Times Literary Supplement and The Independent. He is also a frequent broadcaster.

David Macey is a writer and translator who lives and works in Leeds. His books include The Lives of Michel Foucault (1994) and Frantz Fanon: A Biography (2000). His many translations from French include Michel Foucault’s Society Must be Defended, 2003.

There is also Foucault reader (pdf, 4 mb).

Table of Contents:

Introduction
David Macey: After Foucault
Michel Foucault: The Eye of Power
Harun Farocki: Controlling Observation
Ken Starkey: Stranger in a Strange Land: Foucault in the Business School
Lisa Le Feuvre: Preferring not to: Acconci, Graham, Nauman, Foucault
Gilles Deleuze: Postscript on the Societies of Control
Alessandro Petti: Asymmetry in Globalized Space: Postscript on the Society of Control
Daniel Defert: The Emergence of a new Front: Prisons
Thomas Hirschhorn: 24h Foucault

Introduction
This reader is published to accompany our exhibition
The Impossible Prison which features 16 artists whose videos,
sculptures, drawings and photographs are incarcerated in the
cells and corridors of an Edwardian police station, which remains
much as it was when it closed in 1985. Three of the artists also
feature as authors in this publication: Harun Farocki, Thomas
Hirschhorn and Alessandro Petti of Multiplicity.