Juridico-political

Two readings, a night and a morning apart:

1. The way that “monsters” (the monstrous, the abnormal) came under a politico-judicial scheme (or later, a “juridico-political” scheme).

(Abnormal, p. 61)

2. A review of a book about how smuggling is increasing due to globalization, which the reviewer is skeptical about. Particularly the idea that borders are now transparent:

Similarly, all the hype over today’s international mobility must be taken with a grain of salt, if not the entire shaker. Before World War One, people who had the means were able to cross frontiers at will. Those who utter platitudes about today’s borderless world might try crossing the US-Mexico border during a trade dispute or drug alert. They will soon discover why it has been called the new Iron Curtain. All that has really happened is that borders which once had a fiscal (or conventional military) purpose now have more of a political one – for example, to interdict ‘criminals’ or ‘terrorists’.

So borders are still there, they are now (bio-)political rather than military, a biopolitics that winnows out the abnormal, the monstrous?

New Scull essay

Joseph Kugelmass has a new essay on Scull’s review of History of Madness (unfortunately it’s x-posted which means that comments on it appear in two places–1 post is enough guys!).

Anyway, Kugelmanmass entitles his piece “debunking Andrew Scull.”

Being-seeming

Just read the novel The Interpretation of Murder, which is set in New York 1909 and centers on Freud and Jung’s visit to America (in Freud’s case, his only visit).

There is some discussion in the book about Hamlet, mostly because of the Oedipal aspects, but also the scene where Hamlet responds to his father’s death.

Self-policing

Katt asks below if Foucault uses the term “self-policing” in his work.

Sometimes when I have a question like this I use books.google.com to search (they have digitized many though not all Foucault books). In this case you will not find that phrase (or “self-police,” or either of those without the hyphen).

But need we just be limited by that phrase? The idea is prominent enough in Foucault (a related term is “conduct of conduct” which refers to the conduct of others and oneself,) and receives a lot of attention in his “technology of the self and others” phase of his work toward the end of his life; that is, the “governmentality” phase.

These ideas are nicely summarized in the piece known as “The Subject and Power” which forms an afterword to Rabinow and Dreyfus’ book Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1983). For example, see pp. 220-1.

The Security, Territory, Population series of lectures coming out this week also discuss “conduct” a lot.

I think we know also that Foucault’s use of the term “police” refers to the historical usage of it, which was originally much wider than its current meaning, and was related to governance.  And therefore could indeed include “self-policing.”

So there is plenty of discussion of this idea in Foucault (another one is the great interview, actually a favorite of mine “Ethics of the concern for the self as a technology of freedom.”)

Curiouser and curiouser

I didn’t know this (long extract from much longer post).

Objects of curiosity were often collected during the Grand Tour – the leisurely traverse of the Continent that a young gentleman undertook as a rite of passage. Often taking years, the Grand Tour was an active curiosity seeking adventure. Because of the tyranny of distance, the Age of Discovery was populated by thrill seekers eager to discover new lands; physical explorations of classical architecture on the Continent; private displays of Cabinets of Curiosity; people gathering in coffee houses to digest the latest curious and wondrous thing. It was clearly an Age of Curiosity.

What is the 21st Century version of the Grand Tour or the Cabinet of Curiosity? Is curiosity an active seeking of something? If so, then because our world is stuffed full of digital information and abundance, perhaps we are now merely passive seekers. Everything is at our fingertips via the PC and the Internet; we can meet other humans on MySpace or Facebook; we can take any voyage of discovery we like just by sitting and clicking.

And so it is a new reality we face. Maybe we are still curious but it’s a different type of curiosity. It is no longer fuelled by discovering new lands or scientific curios; it is fuelled by a thirst to know our identity in a postmodern world. Maybe curiosity has returned to a need to reconnect ourselves with nature and the environment. So it’s an internal process rather than a public one of displaying curiosity.

The Age of Discovery was a public space of curiosity: explorers physically walking, sailing and mapping the world; Newton dropping apples to learn about gravity; Galileo staring into the night sky discovering planets. Perhaps our so-called Modern Age is too smug with its reliance on science and we no longer feel the need to engage in the public space of curiosity. And so we have turned inward and discovered the New Age, the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Me and My PC. The accumulated knowledge of society is available at our fingertips on the internet to be called up Just in Time. We are no longer compelled to be curious as in the past. But we seem to be compelled to be curious about conquering of the self for beauty, health and spiritual well-being. Curiosity now equates with curiosity about me, the individual – self-knowledge.

Mmmmm…okay not sure where I am at this point in my rant. I’ve only just started thinking about all this. In the meantime, I’ve put together the thinkingshift-guide-to-being-curious.doc, which encompasses ideas and tips on how to foster curiosity in ourselves.

I’ll finish this post with a couple of things. Michel Foucault in the Masked Philosopher spoke eloquently about curiosity. He said:

“The word (curiosity) pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes “concern”; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.”

Coincidentally, the Bodleian Library has just digitized their “Book of Curiosities” an Arab cosmological treatise originally compiled in Egypt in the 11th century. This is the map (South at the top, the Mediterranean is on the right).

President Carter visits GSU

President Carter gave a talk last night to the GSU community. I was unfortunately too late to get in the main auditorium and watched in the overflow room with about 50 other people (meaning there were about 650 people there).

Carter discussed the situation in the Middle East and his new book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (which he pointed out is unpunctuated, so that you could read it in many different ways). This may have been an attempt to deflect criticism of the title’s use of the word “apartheid” but if so in his remarks he made it clear that the wall between Israel and the West Bank pretty much is a form of apartheid.

Our book

Was pleased to see this last week at the AAG! They told me they sold out by the end of the conference (I didn’t ask how many they’d brought with them!).

Key term: problematization

What is Foucault’s notion of “problematization”?

This is a key term in Foucault (as indicated by the valuable discussion over it at the Biopower and the Contemporary blog). It is defined in the late interview with Francis Ewald (“The concern for truth” May 1984, DE350) and addressed in “Problematics” (OT-08 in the Lynch bibliography). Another important interview is “Polemics, politics and problematizations” (DE 342).

Problematization is an example of Foucault’s difference from regular historians:

The history of thought–that means not simply a history of ideas or of representations, but also the attempt to respond to this question: how is that thought, insofar as it has a relationship with the truth, can also have a history? (DE 350.4, p. 456).

So this is a history of how things have been problematized, that is “reflected upon and thought about”:

Problematization doesn’t mean the representation of a pre-existent object, nor the creation through discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It’s the set of discursive or nondiscursive practices that makes something enter into the play of the true and false, and constitutes it as an object for thought (whether under the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.). (DE350.4, pp. 456-7).

A number of things to note: this is not an analysis of representations, nor is this purely discursive, nor does it mean that everything is socially constructed. There is material analysis of practices.

It is, therefore, a history of truth.

Neil Smith, revolution and Iran

Neil Smith has an editorial in EPD:

Another revolution is possible: Foucault, ethics, and politics
It is time to think about revolution again. After the failures of the Russian revolution signaled by Stalin’s defensive slogan, “socialism in one country” (every bit as oxymoronic as “capitalism in one firm”), the 1960s reawakened a sense of revolution from something of a slumber.

Sex offender geosurveillance

Microsoft have just proudly announced that an application of their software is being used in geosurveillance of sex offenders in North Carolina.

This public facing site was designed to keep families and communities safe by allowing citizens to know when offenders move into their neighborhoods and where those offenders live. In addition to searching for all offenders within a geographic region, citizens can can track specific offenders and can sign up to receive e-mail alerts when an offender registers to an address in their community.