Nice library

(via michel-foucault.com)

Papers I wish I’d seen last week

Was unable to get to the Foucault conference last week. Apparently the challenge of going to 2 conferences at once was too much!

Here’s a paper or 2 I wish I’d seen:

Catherine Bliss (New School for Social Research) blisc162@newschool.edu
Genome Sampling and the Biopolitics of Race
This paper applies Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to scientific knowledge about race via a genealogy of global genome project sampling strategies. Using internal records, publications and news coverage of three major projects, I show how global genomics has moved from population-blind sampling to continent-based, race-conscious sampling. I argue that this tactical change was motivated by pressures from the U.S. federal government to incorporate specific sociopolitical racial redress policies. Here, the state produces a framework for accessing bodies that generates a specific definition and administration of life. Due to funding structures, this American framework has become the leading global paradigm.

The paper will be structured into five parts. The first part discusses the inception of the Human Genome Project, presenting its structural formation, scientific relevance, and its initial race-free sampling measures. I provide evidence of the absence of dialogue over race, ethnicity, and population representation that was the norm of late twentieth century global science. The second part tracks the rise of government mandates about race by examining two Department of Health and Human Services policies launched mid-project. Here, a new paradigm emerges for all federally funded research enforcing population inclusion. Part three presents the Human Genome Diversity Project – a project that attempted to sample from a wide array of ethnic
populations. I argue that the reason this project failed to garner international support was its lack of reflection about US federal racial categories. Part four explores the closing policies of the Human Genome Project, looking specifically at two federally funded micro-projects that emerged from within the Human Genome Project. One micro-project applied a sampling protocol similar to the initial race-free paradigm and the other introduced new race-specific measures. In the final part, I show how this latter micro-project wasable to sustain itself and metamorphosize into a new global project: the International HapMap Project. I conclude by discussing the significance of these events for the management of national populations.

This window into contemporary biopolitics closely tracks race-based policies and knowledge pertaining to human genomics. Still, the shifts I cover have relevance for all biomedical science since the inception of the molecular turn. Indeed, human genomics is increasingly the central framework of the biological sciences. Understanding the brief but rich history of global genomic sampling policies can tell us much about how states and disciplines are constructing the body, the human, and the nation.

This is a fascinating study… and perhaps the most interesting-looking paper at the conference (in my opinion of course, others will be interested in different things). There’s already been a lot of criticism of this project within anthropology (which for me is a better discipline to understand race than sociology, but hey).

David Sealy (York University) dsealy@yorku.ca
On the War of the Races, Biopolitics and the Society of Control
In the 1975-1976 lectures translated into English as “ Society must be defended” Michel Foucault, in formulating an implicit critique of Marxist historiography, and the claim that class warfare grounds society, argues that the pre-eminent conflicts that grounds the constitution of modern European nation states, is what he calls the “war of the races”. (Stoler 1996) These “war of the races” are conflicts between, for example the Normans and the Saxons, or the Gauls and Franks.[1] So that, for example, “English law and English political theory, Foucault tells us are devoted to suppressing or pushing away the Conquest.” (Valverde 2007:166) Thus, it can be said that it is these “race wars” that form the ground of what Marx calls class conflict. So that it could be argued that in grounding modern society in class conflict or class antagonism, Marx, although aware of the role of racial conflict in the development of what he calls primitive accumulation, ignores the way “race “ is “always already” inscribed in the class conflicts that
ground capitalism..

Drawing on contemporary critical theorization of race, Deluze theorization of the society of control, and Foucault’s conception of biopower, and using Canada as an example, this paper argues for extending Foucault’s analysis of the ”race wars”, beyond his location of them at the inception of the European nation states, to an analysis of the colonial and then post-colonial states, in what has come to be called the New World. Here, following Foucault’s comment, about “ …law as born in the blood and mud of battle”’ there will be an exploration of the racial conflicts that extended into peaceful social relations grounding these postcolonial “societies of control”. On this constitution of the modern post-colonial nation states, it could be argued that the “race wars” that frame the European empires are internalized, and translated into the constitutive fabric of initially the colonial societies and later post colonial societies of control The argument is that race is turned into the foundational code of first the colonial, and later the post-colonial nations.

As Goldberg argues, “modern states have taken shape in part, in relation to their specific embodiments of racial conditions. In short the modern state is the racial state in one version or another.”( Goldberg 2002: 34)

This one has potential as well and I’m hoping that we will see a real engagement with Foucault’s promising work on race, despite its somewhat problematic assertions.

Here’s a provocative one:

Machiel Karskens (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands) mkarskens@phil.ru.nl
Biopower – A Slip of the Polemical Mind: On Foucault’s Invention and Rejection of Biopower
In 1976 Michel Foucault puts biopower on the stage of the philosophical discussion in the fifth chapter of his Will to Knowledge. In 1978 he openly drops it. From that moment on biopower is replaced by governmentality, which finally dissolves into bundles of disciplinary tactics, administration technologies, and their play of power.
What happened?
A chronological description of the genesis of the idea of biopower in Foucault shows that the cradle of biopower or biopolitics proves to be his genealogy of medicalization and public health. In 1975/ 1976 biopower is integrated in Foucault’s general theory of power as a specific modern technology of control of a population next to disciplinary power being control of individual behavior. At the same moment, however, biopower is included in the analysis of political power as a continuation of war with other means (see the Cours of 1976, <Society must be defended>).
In a critical assessment, it is shown why this “war model” of power proved to be inconsistent with Foucault’s conception of positive power. The crucial factor is the acceptance or rejection of violence as a central characteristic of political power. Since 1977, Foucault actually rejected the war model, but only in 1982 he somehow openly explained why (see The Subject and Power).
It is argued that this inconsistency also prevented a coherent development of the idea of biopower as a modern replacement and reversal of pre-modern sovereign power of life and death. As a consequence Foucault completely dropped the notion of biopower or biopolitics in his lectures of 1978 and 1979. It is replaced by governmentality,
Finally, I would like to argue that the re-use of biopower, among others by Giorgio Agamben, is doomed to repeat the antinomy of power as either violence and killing, or productive government of men.

I think this talk of “rejecting” etc is overblown personally. I certainly think emphases shifted, but for me the project is remarkably coherent. But even if it wasn’t I don’t see a great dead hand of history “dooming” other people’s projects.

Here’s one I regret missing:

Christopher Alderson (Carleton University, Institute of Political Economy) calderso@connect.carleton.ca
The Geographies of Risk
Expanding upon the work addressing risk as a technique of liberal governance (Dillon, Ewald,
O’Malley), I explore in my forthcoming paper the relationship between racism, racialization and the increased use of advanced risk assessment technologies. While marketed to the public as mathematical and scientific—and therefore objective and impartial—security algorithms and screening processes deployed by intelligence and bordering agencies are put in place and formulated by human actors, who carry with them pre-constructed notions of what it is to be legitimate or illegitimate, normal or deviant. These conceptions help formulate a complex rubric of social stratification that is based on raced identities and other subjectivities of liberal citizenship. While much of the literature on biopolitics has tended to focus upon the more extreme practices of extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention, these extremes are situated in the much more mundane and increasingly prevalent deployment of risk assessment technologies that now proliferate advanced liberal regimens and mentalities.
In my critical assessment of these practices, I argue the fundamental problem that arises from the use of risk-mitigation algorithms in the “war on terror” is that the terrorist comes to exist not as an individual committing a prohibited act, but as a “dangerous individual”: a certain kind of being with inherent incorrigible and dangerous characteristics (Foucault, 1978). With this distinction at play, the state is not searching for an individual who has committed a specific crime, but a type of person identified as a risk based on a mapped profile of “the terrorist”—constructed through a host of identifying markers such as religion, ethnic origin, gender, educational background, financial behaviours and country of origin. Because the
ontological stability of identity is limited, I argue that risk algorithms that securitize certain subjectivities demonstrate the tension between the racist state and the ability to effectively govern through riskmanagement. What is more, as racist typologies deployed correspond to already marginalized groups within society, risk-management techniques may actually serve to further racialize and emphasize differences within the geographical and cultural space in which they are deployed. Identifying what behaviours are understood as normal, how they relate to other constructions of identity, and how racializing techniques can converge to (mis)identify non-violent populations as deviants and terrorists, is critical if we are to develop more equitable methods of reducing all kinds of political violence.

This has some nice geographical intersections and is close to the work of people like Matt Hannah.

The recent lectures obviously quite a bit of material, with liberalism getting plenty of attention. Also prominent are papers on self-governance–as we have often seen in this blog, a favorite of theology school professors.

Altogether a very interesting looking conference and I look forward to the inevitable special journal issue and/or book.

Bill Bunge at AAG

The following manifesto was available at last week’s AAG conference in Boston. It is signed by Bill Bunge, who was also rumored to actually be the conference (though I did not confirm that). Apropos several sessions on “subversive cartography” at the conference the map is also interesting.

Fidel Castro’s America (W. Bunge) (pdf).

On DVD: I, Pierre Riviere…

DVD of the 1976 film I, Pierre Riviere… is available, details here. Not sure if this is a new DVD release but looks like it. Region 0, comes with a featurette.

Full text of Foucault’s foreword to I, Pierre Riviere… is here.

From the review:

The film is slow moving, particularly at the beginning, and the occasional awkwardness of the staging in the early parts may make some viewers impatient. But it acquires a cumulative power and, largely through Claude Hebert’s performance, becomes hard to forget. There is a refusal to label Pierre as one thing or another. Was he a psychopath? Mentally alienated? A religious maniac? Perhaps he was just a misogynist who hated seeing women gain the upper hand. The film flirts with all these explanations – through a variety of other voices – but never comes down on one side or the other and the explanations given by the scientists are curiously unsatisfying, as if one man’s mind defies simple analysis. The ending, even though it is unsurprising, is genuinely moving and the complexity of the film means that it stays with you – haunting, provoking – long after the final credits.

Update: There is a Youtube clip from a stage performance, with details at this site and a short review at the Hertfordshire Mercury (UK)…

New Book: French Theory

French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (University of Minnesota Press).

This book is getting some serious attention and it’s not even out yet! (It’s a translation.)

Stanley Fish in the NYT:

The book’s author is Francois Cusset, who sets himself the tasks of explaining, first, what all the fuss was about, second, why the specter of French theory made strong men tremble, and third, why there was never really anything to worry about.

…

…what was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the “I” facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the “I” and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many.

Mark Bauerlein adds in a post entitled “Where deconstruction went wrong”:

Fish cites Bacon on the problem, and we could add Hegel, too (“if cognition is the instrument for getting hold of absolute being, it is obvious that the use of an instrument on a thing certainly does not let it be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it”); and Kant on the Table of Categories (which forever exile us from things in themselves, whatever “they” “are”); and Nietzsche on “immediate certainties” (a quaint notion, he thinks); Heidegger on the “always already” . . .

Fish comes back with:

The Cartesian trick of starting from the beginning and thinking things down to the ground can’t be managed because the engine of thought, consciousness itself, is inscribed (written) by discursive forms which “it” (in quotation marks because consciousness absent inscription is empty and therefore non-existent) did not originate and cannot step to the side of no matter how minimalist it goes. In short (and this is the kind of formulation that drives the enemies of French theory crazy), what we think with thinks us.

It also thinks the world. This is not say that the world apart from the devices of human conception and perception doesn’t exist “out there”; just that what we know of that world follows from what we can say about it rather than from any unmediated encounter with it in and of itself. This is what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he said that after a paradigm shift — after one scientific vocabulary, with its attendant experimental and evidentiary apparatus, has replaced another — scientists are living in a different world; which again is not to say (what it would be silly to say) that the world has been altered by our descriptions of it; just that only through our descriptive machineries do we have access to something called the world.

Join the debate…about 600 comments on the article so far…mostly contra-Fish.

As insulation, the book also carries a blurb from Derrida:

In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the reference on both sides of the Atlantic.

New discussion blog

Untimely Mediations is a class discussion blog that covers a range of readings, including some of Foucault and secondary Foucauldian literature (Nealon).

Untimely Mediations: Ancient Rhetorics and Emergent Technologies

The itinerary for this directed study begins through a solid engagement with sophistry and pre-Socratic rhetorics before branching off into questions concerning the possible return of sophistic strategies in relation to contemporary information technologies. Texts include works by Gorgias, Aristophanes, Isocrates, Plato, Hegel, Foucault, Deleuze, Alexander Galloway, Leroi-Gourhan, Merlin Donald, Jeffrey Walker, Kathleen Welch, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Marx, Bernard Steigler, Werner Jaeger, Derrida, Lacan, Bataille, Isabelle Stengers, and Zizek.

Recent discussions have addressed Nealon’s Foucault Beyond Foucault and parrhesia.

Screening of Foucault?

This blog indicates there will be a free screening of Foucault (his lectures and interviews?) at the French Cultural Center (ECF) but I’m not sure in what city. These are the details given:

Monday 7th April
ECF
(French Cultural Center)
11.00

Student cine-club: Michel Foucault on French TV
Screening of TV excerpts – lectures at the College de France and interviews from Michel Foucault
With the cooperation of IMEC (Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine)
In French – Free entrance

If anybody knows any more please leave a comment.

An example of hupomnemata

This post seems to encapsulate some aspects of self-writing or hupomnemata in Foucault’s terms.

Foucault (1982, p. 791) appears to criticise Habermas suggesting that power comes from deep within society. Habermas contended that power was external to the public sphere, whereas notions of civil society as proposed by Dean and others side with Foucault positioning power as an integral part of civil society.

Now the content of the post is unremarkable and not especially exciting, but the author remarks that this is a post designed to help him think through some issues. It’s not the content, it’s the process. And when he has finished thinking through this issue he may actually remove parts of the post:

Please note: this post is under construction whilst I read the article below. This notice will be removed when it’s complete.

So the post is not static and may change later. And this takes place in public view.

It’s perhaps no accident then that the author is investigating blogging:

During 2008 I will write a thesis that aims to examine how employees use private blogs for personal emancipation. How will efforts toward personal emancipation show up in a blog? Is a struggle really indicative of efforts toward emancipation? How are the concepts of privacy and free speech related to such a notion?