Foucault's Account Research Articles

Playing games/playing us

The impact of Foucault's work can still be felt across a range of academic disciplines. It is nevertheless important to remember that, for him, theoretical activity was intimately related to the concrete practices of self-transformation; as he acknowledged: `I write in order to change myself.'1 This avowal is especially pertinent when considering Foucault's work on the relationship between sex and power. For Foucault not only theorized about this topic; he was also actively involved in the S&M subculture of the 1970s. Although his explicit discussions of S&M are somewhat piecemeal, in this article I will show how they provide a useful point of access into his broader conception of power relations. Having first reconstructed Foucault's quasi-Sartrean account of creative self-transformation — specifically through one's sexuality — I will then explain why his defence of S&M (as embodying `strategic' power) is insufficiently sensitive to the inherent ambiguities of this `game'.

Foucault's Hölderlin

Summary This article traces the dispersal of language, its significance for Foucault's idea of Literature in modernity, and the paradigmatic role of Hölderlin's writings within it. This path centrally involves outlining the interface, in the modern episteme, between language and Literature, the double withdrawal of the gods/God, the double division between reason and madness, and the “mad poet/philosopher/genius” within it. The article draws together Foucault's archaeological account of Literature, and his genealogy of madness and of genius, in order to elucidate the “truth”, judged by the terms of a genealogical account, and the “falsity”, judged by the terms of an archaeological account, of the proverbial epithet “the mad genius/poet/philosopher” associated with the name of Hölderlin.

The rise of the detective in early nineteenth-century popular fiction

Heather Worthington's book challenges the traditional account that finds detection before Poe's Dupin and Doyle's Holmes only in Gothic and Newgate novels and some police memoirs. In fact, the popular press, from broadsides to periodicals, is where both the fictional detective and the investigating case structure developed, in line with major changes in the real discipline of crime fighting. The well-known masters of early crime fiction, including Collins and Dickens, drew on and redefined the raw riches of the popular field, found in texts that have rarely been reprinted or even discussed, but which are analysed in depth in this book. The book benefits from extensive archival research and is theoretically informed by Foucault's account of disciplinary power. No study has examined this material in anything like the detail or with the explanatory approach offered here. With full references, comprehensive narrative description and written in an accessible and readable style, The Rise of the Detective is essential reading for those researching in, studying, or just fascinated by crime fiction.

Foucault, Dewey, and the Experience of Literature

What is the work of literature? Can we expect that poetry, or literature, or art, should engage in the world of action, the world of doing things? Do we reluctantly accept, with Auden, that poetry makes nothing happen, or do we adopt Seamus Heaney's optimism that poetry might be able to stop tanks? This paper addresses these questions by drawing on Foucault's idea of the transformability of experience, and Dewey's analysis of the way that art works in our experience. It argues that the force and value of literature comes from its capacity to get into and transform the experience of the reader, and it explains this capacity primarily in terms of Foucault's account of the way that "being is historically constituted as experience". This transformation of experience, it is argued, constitutes the distinctive action of literary works.

From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower

This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heidegger's reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucault's account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agamben's presentation of biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality. Foucault's ethical turn within biopolitical govern-mentality, along with Agamben's messianic gesture towards a utopian community to come, are questioned as political responses to biopower regimes.

The production of the psychiatric subject: power, knowledge and Michel Foucault

The issue of power has become increasingly important within psychiatry, psychotherapy and mental health nursing generally. This paper will suggest that the work of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and historian, has much to contribute to the discussion about the nature, existence and exercise of power within contemporary mental health care. As well as examining his original and challenging account of power, Foucault's emphasis on the intimate relationship between power and knowledge will be explored within the context of psychiatry and mental health nursing. This is to say that the paper will investigate Foucault's account of how power and knowledge are central to the process by which human beings are 'made subjects' and therefore how 'psychiatric identities' are produced. In doing so, it will be suggested that Foucault's work can not only make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions about power and knowledge, but can also provide a significant critique and reconceptualization of the theoretical foundations and associated diagnostic and therapeutic practices of psychiatry and mental health nursing.

My Body, My Self

This essay reconsiders a position I took in my book Bodies and Pleasures regarding Foucault's work on normalization and the status of mind/body dualism in contemporary Western culture.1 I argued that Foucault's account of normalization, which I took to be a fairly accurate depiction of Western experience in the late twentieth century, effectively displaces dualistic accounts of selfhood. Foucault shows that, increasingly since the nineteenth century, bodies are understood as intersections of developmental processes, including processes of intellectual maturation, which leaves no theoretical room for an incorporeal mind. Dualism thus recedes as normalization extends itself; its power to shape experience is dissipated. I concluded, therefore, that further attempts to dismantle mind/body dualism were unnecessary. I suggested that feminists might use our energy better by investigating the forces of normalization instead. Rather than shift attention away from the perceived threat of mind/body dualism, however, feminists have continued to critique it. Recent work in ecofeminism displays strong interest in dismantling mind/body dualism as a component of reason/nature dualism. If anything, more feminist effort is being concentrated on attacking these two intimately related dualisms than ever before, which leads me to wonder whether I was hasty in writing the obituary of mind/body dualism at the end of the last millennium. In this essay, after recapitulating my Foucaultian argument that normalization displaces mind/body dualism, I examine ecofeminist critique-first to highlight the apparent contrast between the two analyses, but then to show how reason/nature dualism might persist in the midst of a normalized society. I will conclude by arguing that effective resistance to normalization may require a devaluation of reason and cultivation of experience and awareness of reason's dependence upon non-reasoning beings and ecosystems.2 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault gives an account of how Cartesian mind/body dualism gradually overcame itself and gave rise to a kind of physiological monism. His story begins with the Cartesian body and the disciplinary practices instituted to control and exploit it. I will recount that story here before going on to re-examine it in light of ecofeminist work. The Cartesian body was a mechanical body, a body understood as a collection of extended parts occupying contiguous space and subject to laws of motion that pre-existed them. Disciplinary practices predicated upon that conception of the body focused on rearrangement of parts in relation to one another and to the tools with which bodies were trained to interact. The point of such training was to produce an efficient ensemble-a "body-weapon, body-tool, body-machine complex."3 Some disciplinarians, however, were dissatisfied with the ensembles thus produced. J. A. de Guibert is Foucault's prime example. Guibert was bothered by what he saw as over-stylized movement in military drill. He came to believe in a kind of natural force within the body itself that could not simply be overridden but instead had to be cultivated and channeled. Through the work of Guibert and others like him, it was gradually acknowledged that the body had, so to speak, "a mind of its own." Foucault holds that this and similar shifts in thinking in the late eighteenth century brought about an important change in the ways bodies were seen, manipulated, and experienced. Bodies were no longer inert matter arranged in space. They were organic processes occurring through time. Each body had its own developmental force, a naturally given trajectory that could be observed, measured, normed, and-most importantly for disciplinarians-bent. Normalizing discipline was not about rearranging bits of extended substance, as mechanical discipline had been; it was about altering the direction and rate of natural bodily development-natural here meaning simply the trajectories that would be manifest in the absence of deliberate intervention. …

Performing Breastfeeding: Embodiment, Ethics and the Maternal Subject

Many feminist sociologists would agree that most breastfeeding research to date has been primarily undertaken from the perspective of medical and public health discourses. While there is evidence of a shift in research on breastfeeding to qualitative studies that focus on the lived experiences of breastfeeding women, this article addresses a number of concerns remaining in the literature surrounding breastfeeding. First, it questions the absence of breastfeeding as a legitimate philosophical topic, and, as a corollary, the invisibility of breastfeeding women as moral or ethical subjects. Second, by drawing on Michel Foucault's account of ethics and Judith Butler's notion of performativity, it is suggested that breastfeeding is best conceptualized as a gendered and embodied ethical practice rather than an aspect of one's being. Finally, this materialist approach to theorizing breastfeeding is discussed in relation to the Lucy Lawless poster that was released in Aotearoa New Zealand to launch World Breastfeeding Week in August 2002.

Sanctuary Practices, Rationalities, and Sovereignties

All human behavior is scheduled and programmed through rationality. There is a logic of institutions and in behavior and in political relations. --Michel Foucault These people are not cases to us. They are human beings with names and faces. --Southern Ontario Sanctuary Coalition Placing on display a masked and hooded Guatemalan migrant threatened with immediate deportation by immigration officials at a televised press conference in January 1984, an ecumenical group of church officials pronounced Saint Andrew's United Church on the outskirts of Montreal to be a public sanctuary. Referred to only as Raphael, the migrant, positioned next to church officials and who had been living concealed in the church building for weeks, remained silent during the entire spectacle. Within hours, the minister of immigration had publicly announced that all deportations to Guatemala would be temporarily halted and that sanctuary providers would be spared prosecution. This unprecedented act of granting sanctuary to this migrant, the first of its kind in Canada, was exceptional, its spectacular character programmed and rational. At least two issues have endured in the innovative literature inspired by Michel Foucault's later writings and lectures. One is how liberal and nonliberal governmental rationalities of rule relate to one another. If liberalism as a governmental rationality is not to be understood as totalizing or systematizing (1) and having surpassed or incorporated all other logics, then nonliberal rationalities may be present in particular instances of governing society today. Questions about their current character and relevance and how they relate to dominant liberal rationalities therefore warrant more attention. A second but related issue concerns sovereign power and its relationship with governmentality. It has been increasingly recognized in the governmentality literature that sovereign power cannot be easily dismissed as archaic or as altogether superseded by governmentality. (2) However, sovereign power has been narrowly conceived, assumed to be essentially coercive and to take the form of symbolic punishment, violence, or exclusion. (3) This coercive form of power also tends to be foreseen to flow from a single space and source, the (nation-)state. (4) Sanctuary practices in Canada, along with immigration practices that they at once parallel and challenge, promise to shed some light on these two issues. Sanctuary entails churches and communities harboring in a physical shelter individual migrants or migrant families faced with imminent arrest and deportation by immigration authorities and actively seeking to display the existence of their protection efforts. (5) This article draws from detailed research pertaining to twenty-eight sanctuary incidents that occurred in Canada from 1984 to 2002. (6) The vast majority of the approximately 239 migrants who received sanctuary in these incidents were refugee claimants, or immediate family thereof, who had attempted, but failed to gain, formal legal status through official means. (7) This article seeks to clarify via empirical research how the various powers--liberal, nonliberal, and sovereign--can be distinguished, the relations among them better understood. (8) I first briefly discuss what sanctuary practices reveal about a nonliberal pastoral rationality and how this specific logic relates to a dominant neoliberalism. Following Foucault's account of sovereign power, I then show how sanctuary is an instance of sovereign power. Sanctuary suggests that sovereign power is not restricted to the (nation-)state, that it can flow from other spaces and sources, and that it is not always coercive in nature. This analysis has several implications for understanding governing society today, the most basic of which is to suggest the need to allow for a plurality of sovereignties and rationalities in specific contexts. …

Drug use as a ‘practice of the self’: is there any place for an ‘ethics of moderation’ in contemporary drug policy?

This paper offers a series of critical interrogations of the principles and practice of harm minimisation. This critique draws from Michel Foucault's account of ethics, pleasure and moderation in pointing to some significant gaps and conceptual problems within Australia's National Drug Strategy. I argue that this strategy has had only indirect impacts upon the ways in which illicit drugs are consumed in Australia, and on the behaviour of individual users. Part of this problem lies in the ways in which the cultures and the contexts of illicit drug use have been conceptualised within contemporary drug policy. Following Foucault, I argue that drug use ought to be conceptualised as a distinctive ‘practice of the self’. I argue further that Foucault's work on pleasure and ethics offers important new ways of understanding the changing nature of drug use for young people, as well as providing new conceptual bases for the design and delivery of harm minimisation strategies within those settings and contexts in which drug use takes place.

Anarchic Bodies: Foucault and the Feminist Question of Experience

The article shows that Michel Foucault's account of the sexual body is not a naive return to a prediscursive body, nor does it amount to discourse reductionism and to the exclusion of experience, as some feminists have argued. Instead, Foucault's idea of bodies and pleasures as a possibility of the counterattack against normalizing power presupposes an experiential understanding of the body. The experiential body can become a locus of resistance because it is the possibility of an unpredictable event.

Beyond the Panopticon: Victorian Britain and the Critical Imagination

Critics' imagining of Victorian history has been profoundly influenced by Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogies. Yet Foucault's famous account of modern discipline is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its “liberal” disdain for state interference.Discipline and Punishoffered a mid-1970s response to Marxist dilemmas and to the problems of twentieth-century welfare states. In the early 1980s, Foucault discerned the resurgence of liberal economic ideologies, including neo-Victorian beliefs in free trade, self-help, and laissez-faire. Foucault's later essays on today's neoliberal “governmentality” therefore provide better critical tools for the study of nineteenth-century Britain than doesDiscipline and Punish. Literature offers a key context for this reimagined history. Works by self-consciously progressive writers such as Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Stuart Mill elucidate a distinctive liberal quandary: the quest for a modern governing or “pastoral” agency that would be rational, all-embracing, and effective but also antibureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory.

Structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-liberalism: assessing Foucault's legacy

This article traces Foucault's distinctive commitment to ‘post-structuralism’ through tracing the affinities and departures from structuralism. It is argued that under the infuence of Nietzsche, Foucault's approach marks a distinct break with structuralism in several crucial respects. What results is a materialist post-structuralism which is also distinctively different from the post-structuralism of writers such as Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrilliard. Foucault's account of neo-liberalism as an historically formed discourse is presented as an example of materialist post-structuralist analysis.

"My Body, This Paper, This Fire"

In a lecture from 1978, Foucault suggested that modern reflection on the art of government arose out of a spirit of resistance to practices of early state formation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: not that critics refused government altogether, but that they were confronted with "a perpetual question . . .'how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them'" (1997, 28). The primacy of resistance, epistemological and political, is what links Foucault and Kant in their best moments as in their worst. It strikes me as ironic, therefore, that Foucault is criticized for making inappropriate rhetorical appeals to emotion rather than seeking a dispassionate rational justification for his political perspective-at the same time as he is accused of denying the moral and emotional significance of subjectivity. What brings his critics together is an assumption that emotion, whether morally troubling or morally motivating, is a property of more or less identical subjects, rather than a product of individualizing power relations that cultivate the authority to act or the obligation to accept others' direction. Fraser (1989, 42-43), Habermas (1990, 282-84), Dews (1987), and Hartsock (1989), among others, have criticized Foucault for refusing to ground his histories of the human sciences and his political analyses in the sort of epistemologically and/or normatively universalist frameworks we find in Kant. On the one hand, they contend, Foucault makes normative suggestions about the injustice of certain social practices (past and present) through rhetorical presentation rather than argument, while denying reason's ability to establish the truth behind rhetoric. On the other hand, Foucault's attempt to historicize the subject of knowledge and ethics seems to deny the normative significance of individual emotion and judgment, including his own, thereby "aestheticising" morality.1 For example, Dews (1987) and Levin (1989) have protested that Foucault's account of the human body is too abstract to explain moral evaluation. Megill (1985) and Wolin (1986) tend to interpret "aesthetics" as a state of desensitization rather than a sensibility that reveals worthy situations of moral concern. Far from liberating modern individuals to discover their own forms of agency, they suggest that Foucault imposes the idiosyncratic conditions of his own agency on others to whom it is poorly suited, disempowering and denying them self-defense through mutually valid reasons. For these reasons, he falls victim to the same "fanaticism" (Schwarmerei) or claims of privileged insight into the nature of socio-political "things in themselves" that plagued Kant's rationalist predecessors and Romantic heirs. Despite differences, the abovementioned writers are united by alarm at Foucault's desire to "dispense with the constituent subject" of phenomenological experience and political action, as expressed in The Order of Things 'proclamation of the "death of man," his critique of social contract theory during the 1970s and his 1982 suggestion that "maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are" (1983, 216). Their reasons for defending the subject are twofold. Without a subject, on the one hand, they believe that individuals would be unable to respond to situations with "judgment," not to mention good judgment: to criticize and resist their own emotional impulses and to require others to give reasons for their own actions. On the other hand, the subject is a metaphysical support for emotion, in whose absence actions would lose their existential, if not their moral value. Without a subject, there would be no way to identify emotions as phenomena deserving of moral consideration and protection by others-even if the subject is supposed to ignore its emotions when judging and acting. …

What's Literature Got to Do with It?

In Foucault in Tunisia,' penultimate chapter of this formidable introduction to postcolonialism, Robert Young points out that an tension' a articulation' is central to the most challenging postcolonial theory, for example work of Bhabha and Spivak,' and goes on to argue that this tension could be said to operate kernel of postcolonial itself (410). What is nature of this unresolved tension, and what does he mean by phrase articulation? Answering these questions provides an ideal point of entry for a discussion of Young's book, not only because it gives us a good sense of his overall take-or, we will see, his double-take-on postcolonialism, but also because it helps make sense of book's self-consciously disjunctive structure. The particular form of articulation that Young identifies theoretical kernel of postcolonial theory involves (dis) connections between two different types of materialism: Marxist and Foucauldian. In this chapter on Foucault, Young contends that analysis has a lot to learn from Foucault's resolutely non-dialectical historical materialist and institutional account of discursive events,' but only once it has forgotten a great deal of what Edward Said did with Foucault's idea of in his massively influential Orientalism. Said, Young argues convincingly, betrayed Foucault's materialist argument by giving it a primarily textualist turn in which colonial discourse ended up consisting of little more than ideological (mis) representations,' whereas Foucault's actual account of discourse, once its firmly materialist aim is grasped, opens up possibility of what for Young is a far more useful understanding of colonialism as an institutional performative of power-knowledge (410). Foucault, he reminds readers, is not interested in ideology-versus-reality distinction or signifier-signified distinction [s] but, rather, in way that knowledge works in realm of materiality and body, in domain of objects and specific (399). It is this emphasis on materiality and practices that Young finds sadly absent from a great deal of post-Orientalist analysis, which has been turned into just a form of literary criticism that focuses on a certain category of texts (394). The materialist understanding of that Young champions in this chap-

Figuras da loucura em Histoire de la Folie

In the present essay, we aim to describe, in their general lines, the patterns that madness assumes in Michel Foucault's archeological account in his Histoire de la Folie (1961), since, for the French thinker, madness is a rather historical than natural event. To cope with this presentation, we took on a semantic interpretation of the book.

The Liberal Government of Unfreedom

Perhaps the most influential aspect of Michel Foucault's work on government has been his treatment of liberalism as distinctive form of political reason. Liberalism is commonly regarded as normative political doctrine or theory that treats the maintenance of individual liberty as an end in itself and therefore views liberty as setting limits of principle both to the legitimate objectives of government and to the manner in which those objectives may be pursued. Foucault's account of liberalism as rationality of government also accords central place to individual liberty, which is seen as giving rise to prudential concern that one might be governing too much. The suggestion is that, rather than pursue its objectives through the detailed regulation of conduct in the manner of police, it might be more effective for the government of state to work through the maintenance and promotion of certain forms of individual liberty. According to this account, underlying the liberal fear of governing too much are two distinct but related perceptions of the population to be governed. It is seen first as containing number of self-regulating domains of social interaction, and secondly as consisting of individuals endowed with capacity for autonomous, self-directing activity. In liberal political thought, Foucault observes, the market epitomizes both perceptions, serving, in effect, as a locus of privileged experience where one can identify the effects of excessive governmentality.1 Liberal political reason, then, sees individual liberty as limit, not simply to the legitimate reach of government, but also to its effectiveness. More recent scholars have adapted this account of liberalism to the analysis of neoliberal attempts to govern through the decisions of autonomous individuals.

D. H. Lawrence and Michel Foucault: A Poetics of Historical Vision

This paper examines in what way the historical visions of Lawrence and Foucault are similar to each other; how these visions were formed; and what idea of historical process they imply. Both writers derive an optimistic vision from an apparently bleakly pessimistic one. The author explores Lawrence's account of how the extrarational drives become mechanised and instrumentalized by the effects of industrialism, juxtaposing it with Foucault's account of how human bodies are shaped and manipulated by 'bio-power'. The author also connects Lawrence's historical vision of destructive and creative power with Foucault's historical vision of continuity and discontinuity, in the light of their shared view of history as cyclical. Lawrence and Foucault share a historical (and philosophical) vision which rejects the centrality of the conscious human subject, with its prohibition or marginalisation of the unconscious, spontaneous and instinctive. Their vision is also one which repudiates conventional historical chronologies and orderings based on principles of progress, evolution, and the development of the human spirit through time. They 'excavate' to find kinds of knowledge long forgotten, excluded and 'subjugated' in the Western historical tradition, with its emphasis on only continuity and progress. Through their 'archaeological' approach to history, Lawrence and Foucault see it as a cyclical process of destruction and creation, continuity and discontinuity.

Power as an art of contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault

This article recovers the conceptual content of Michel Foucault's model of power as ‘action upon actions’. The principal argument is that the innovations of this model are intelligible only against the background of a broader social-theoretical distinction between ‘substance’ and ‘emergence’. The suggestion is that the idea of bio-power, as distinct from sovereignty, becomes clearer, and more productive, if it is seen as a figure of emergence. More specifically, it is suggested that the logic of acting upon actions, which encapsulates so many of the vital innovations of Foucault's account of power, may be defined as a relation of ‘non-indifferent difference’. In explaining these concepts, the article makes connections between Foucault's project and the work of Niklas Luhmann and Gilles Deleuze. The object of this method is to open Foucault's analyses of power to some particularly illuminating and incisive theoretical complements.

“Whom does this discourse serve?” Some requirements for communication suggested by Foucault's analysis of power

Michel Foucault ‘s incisive analysis of power and its discourse profoundly influenced our understanding of the ways authority communicates with minds and bodies. His search for those commanding this discourse was more fitful and in part reflected ageless myths about individual leadership. Foucault's account of power‐discourse and its relation to its owners is applied to aspects of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when new technologies have multiplied the capacity of power‐discourse to intervene in lives. This paper identifies the industrial urban crowd as a vital target for discourse, and considers this conjunction in the light of Foucault's theories. By examining the older ‘heroic’ myth in connection with totalitarian self‐proclaimed ‘heroic’ leaders of the crowd, and the power of the crowd itself as charted by some of its most critical and influential observers, some delineaments of Foucault's owners of discourse are suggested.