Forms Of Political Rationality Research Articles

Cidade inteligente e governamentalidade algorítmica: liberdade e controle na era da informação

Partindo das reflexões de Michel Foucault no final dos anos 1970 e da noção desenvolvida mais recentemente de “governamentalidade algorítmica”, entendida como um novo regime de poder e saber baseado na coleta, mineração e cruzamento de grandes volumes de dados, o presente artigo pretende analisar criticamente as chamadas “cidades inteligentes” (smart cities), nas quais a infraestrutura e os serviços são interligados de maneira supostamente mais racionalizada e eficiente, oferendo finalmente o sonhado bem-estar e a vida feliz. Essa utopia de organização social será associada a uma nova forma de racionalidade política e estratégia de governo por meio de algoritmos, que colocam importantes e inquietantes questões. Neste trabalho, ressaltaremos a capacidade que os algoritmos possuem de nos governar, no sentido de conduzir nossas condutas e estruturar o campo das ações possíveis. E o foco deste artigo recairá sobre a tensão entre liberdade e controle inscrita nessa nova governamentalidade, que tem por objeto mais imediato os dados, as relações e os ambientes.

Re-politicising the Gender-Security Nexus: Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy

Sweden’s feminist foreign policy is founded on the broad idea that gender equality is central to security. This article focuses on how the politicisation of this gender-security nexus is discursively articulated and practiced in the case of feminist foreign policy. The problematic is unpacked by analysing the politicisation of the women, peace and security agenda and global gender mainstreaming. To empirically illustrate the gender-security nexus more specifically, we analyse how these politicisation processes are reflected in Sweden’s support for global peace diplomacy and gender protection. The article concludes by offering three final remarks. First, Sweden’s feminist foreign policy is an expression of several, at times competing, forms of political rationality. Second, while the fluctuation between de-politicisation and re-politicisation of security may seem productive in terms of policy outcome it can also create contradictions and ambiguities in regards to feminist foreign policy practice. One such outcome is the tendency to conflate gender and women across a number of de-politicised policy initiatives launched by the Swedish government. Third, the re-politicisation and contestation of the gender-security nexus is likely to increase in the coming decades because of shifting global power configurations in the global world order.

Le sujet du (néo)libéralisme

This article aims to show that one cannot reach an opening to new forms of political rationality from the manner in which Foucault thinks the subject in liberal modernity. The difference between "concurrence" understood as form or as norm distinguishes Foucault's diagnosis regarding liberal modernity from the diagnosis presented by Dardot and Laval. This difference lies at the basis of the possibility of thinking with Dardot and Laval a counter-rationality or, with Foucault, of remaining within the epistemological framework of liberalism itself. This is because the status of this (neo)liberal rationality, in Foucault's analysis, has as its counterpart the (neo)liberal subject. Therefore, to indicate the theoretical and political limitation that rationality as an essential form of modernity implies to Foucault's thought, I will rely on some critical considerations to the analysis of Dardot and Laval, opposite in this point to Foucault's reading of modern rationality and of the (neo)liberal subject.

Resistencias contra el neoliberalismo: una conceptualización de su ejercicio entre lo local y lo global

Desde la década de 1970 se han implementado políticas neoliberales que afectan distintas esferas de la vida social. Por ello, definir el neoliberalismo como una forma de racionalidad política resulta útil para entender sus variadas manifestaciones y efectos, así como los distintos tipos de resistencia que se construyen en su contra. Este artículo hace una propuesta conceptual desde un marco neogramsciano en relaciones internacionales, que permite entender las resistencias contra el neoliberalismo como prácticas locales y globales diversas que retan el orden establecido y cuestionan su carácter hegemónico. Todo esto en un proceso de cambio social que abarca tanto experiencias individuales como globales, que confluyen en el denominado “movimiento alterglobalización”. Para tales fines, en primer lugar, se caracteriza el neoliberalismo como una forma de racionalidad política, mostrando sus efectos más allá de las dimensiones socioeconómicas; en segundo lugar, se conceptualizan las resistencias en su contra como se ha descrito anteriormente; en tercer lugar, se presenta un análisis del movimiento alterglobalización, entendiendo que no es un actor unificado sino un proceso de cambio social apuntalado por la diversidad; y, finalmente, se presentan una serie de conclusiones que resaltan la importancia académica y política de esta perspectiva.

Review: Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution

This review of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos considers the claim that contemporary processes of neoliberalism are damaging the core principles of democracy. It is argued that Brown is right to follow Foucault in defining neoliberalism as a form of political rationality, but that core arguments of the book could be developed further through attention to the following points: (1) the operation of neoliberal politics and practices outside of the US context; (2) the position of Austrian thought within the history of neoliberal reason; (3) the problematic status of homo economicus within neoliberal thought; (4) why the ‘soft power’ of neoliberalism has proved so effective; and (5) how a Marxist theory of capital might be developed alongside Foucauldian critique of neoliberalism.

Eternal Life and the Time of Death

Where survival sickness reigns, desire to live lays hold spontaneously of weapons of death: senseless murder and sadism flourish. For passion destroyed is reborn in passion for destruction. If these conditions persist, no one will survive era of survival. (Vaneigem 2001: 162)This paper takes up problematic raised by Miguel Vatter in his recent text Republic of Living: Biopolitics and Critique of Civil Society: namely, that biopolitical governance, which following Foucault is understood as constant and positive intervention that seeks to develop and improve productive capacities of (human) species, can turn over into its opposite, thanatopolitics or necropolitics1 instituting regimes of mass death. I will begin by outlining theoretical context and conceptual contours of this problem, arguing that this possibility is inherent rather than external to logic of biopolitics. Vatter's text proposes resolution to this problematic in form of reconceptualization of eternal in philosophical and atheistic terms. I will reconstruct and assess this proposal, arguing that, although provocative, it is ultimately inadequate to task and in fact reproduces logic of thanatopolitics.1. AFFIRMATIVE BIOPOLITICSBiopolitics, according to Vatter and following Foucault, is entrance of biological or species into calculations carried out by political rationality (Vatter 2014: 2). As late modernity gave rise to what we now call civil society, issue of politics became less matter of state sovereignty, and more matter of government of biological life (Vatter 2014: 2). Rather than establishing explicit laws whose transgression would occasion state intervention, this new biopolitical regime developed apparatuses of policing and normalization that amount to, as Foucault puts it, a permanent and positive intervention in behavior of individuals (Foucault 2000: 415). Foucault's analyses identify decisive historical shift in form of political rationality, object of which ceases to be human beings as individual organisms, becoming instead population as statistical whole, whose biological well-being is object of governmental management undertaken in order to make life, considered now as species, more productive. (Cf. Foucault 2003b, 2008, 2009)In volume 1 of History of Sexuality, Foucault underscores that this has consequence of gradually replacing laws with norms as primary modality of political potestas: The law always refers to sword. But power whose task is to take charge of needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms. is no longer matter of bringing death into play in field of sovereignty, but of distributing living in domain of value and utility (Foucault 1990: 144). Importantly, he also emphasizes that regulatory apparatuses of biopower do not constitute closed circuit of normative networks that fully determine life: It is not that has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them (Foucault 1990: 143; emphasis mine). This apparent capacity of for constant escape, its irrepressible ability to elude regulatory techniques that aim at total closure, provides basis for an understanding of biopolitics that is affirmative: itself resists biopolitical administration, and very functioning of power occasions creative potentialities of living being.2 Vatter argues that diverse bodies of work by Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito all take up this thread, analyzing possibilities and stakes of biopolitics conceived as affirmative, and he situates his own project within this trajectory.3Vatter marks his distance from these thinkers insofar as, on his reading, they understand and law to be mutually exclusive or antinomic.4 antinomian logic of their analyses commits them, he contends, to claim that the politics and governance of global system of universal human rights would be nothing but ideological cover for universal expansion of 'state of exception' that, under neoliberalism, has become 'normal' condition of political life (Vatter 2014: 224). …

The Sociology of Knowledge, Citizenship and the Purification of Politics

We reinterpret citizenship using Mannheim’s classical sociology of knowledge and through a more recent variant on them in Latour’s argument that “we have never been modern” (Latour, 1991). On that basis, we understand citizenship as a recursive effect of disputes over belonging and membership (Isin, 2002), where those disputes entail the three forms of political rationality or “thought styles” which Mannheim and Latour variously suggested: the linearly individual rationality of liberalism; dialectically collective socialism; and culturally collective conservatism. Marshall defines citizenship as a “status bestowed on those who are full members of a community” (Marshall, 1973). He presents an image of evolutionary progress, from civil to political rights and finally to the social form, in Britain. We argue that Marshall was entangled in evolutionary and teleological images of citizenship. We reinterpret citizenship using Mannheim’s classical sociology of knowledge. We suggest that sociologies of knowledge allow a re-reading of “citizenship” that can accommodate conceptual difficulties. Mannheim called into question the “progress” implied or stated in theories of “stages”. He stressed instead the continuing interaction between different ways of knowing social reality, or between what he called “thought styles”. We apply Mannheim to “citizenship” in order to lift two “purifications”, so that humanity is both natural and political.

TOURISM, RACE AND THE STATE OF NATURE

The ethno-historical study of tourism can lend a new focus to the theorization of governmentality, demonstrating the ways in which it rests on the systemic, performative, and affective interpenetration of human and environmental bios (‘nature’), built form, economy, and the technologies of the state. This paper examines Rotorua, a tourism centre in New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, suggesting that it operated as a laboratory for the forms of political rationality associated with the emerging liberal state, in particular those concerned with race. It analyzes town planning and environmental engineering initiatives, the medical discourses relating to the spa complex constructed by the government, and tourists’ accounts of the geo-thermal attractions of the area. In each of these cases, tourism was oriented towards the production of white subjects, and the ‘liberalization’ of Māori populations, through reflexive work on what Foucault called the ‘conduct of conduct.’ In each of these cases, bio-political imperatives relied on a repertoire of bio-poetical performances, investing the subject imaginatively in forms of conduct that are viscerally embodied, expressive, creative, improvisatory, and even eroticized. Where the literature of governmentality focuses predominantly on the rationalities, technologies, and generalized institutional loci of bio-politics, attending ethno-historically to tourism attunes us to its affective registers, performative repertoires, its intimate relationship with locality and spatiality, and the symbolic (a)logics through which it achieves its purchase on the immanently political territory of natural life.

Governable catastrophes: a comment on Bougen

Bougen's analysis of catastrophe insurance has considerable and damaging implications for the 'risk society' thesis. First, it outlines how insurance 'imaginaries' render even catastrophic and 'incalculable' modernization risks insurable. It also highlights the fact that such insurance has been mobilized and shaped by specific forms of political rationality, something which falls beneath the gaze of grand theory. Finally, the paper indicates that risk and uncertainty - far from being mutually exclusive - are frequently assembled together into governing technologies, and that uncertainty may denote a variable set of technologies through which catastrophes can be and are managed.

Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture, Creativity and Government in the BBC

The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions of markets, efficiency, accountability and audit were translated into the public sector. The focus of this paper is an analysis, based on ethnographic research, of the BBC's culture of markets, accountability and audit in the mid to late nineties. Indebted in part to the Foucauldian concern with the relations between forms of political rationality and specific technologies of government, the paper charts the substance and the anti-creative effects of these techniques. But it stresses also their contestability and negotiability, how they evoke ambivalance and coexist with diverse forms of resistance. In particular, through the case of the BBC, the paper sketches the contours of a sociology of reflexivity based on a more differentiated account of reflexivity than is found in the speculative, often normatively-directed writings of Beck, Giddens and Lash. It points to the layering of reflexivities in and around the contemporary BBC, and to the competing and antagonistic reflexivities that may inhabit any social space.