Foucault's Analytics Research Articles

The Things of Order: Affect, Material Culture, Dispositif

Abstract: Commenting on Frantz Fanon's account of the material culture created by European colonizers in the aftermath of invasion, Achille Mbembe notes that the colony is fundamentally a state of war, a contest of forces, in which "sensory life"—the continuum of bodies, objects, and landscapes—is a battlefield. "From this point of view," he writes, "colonial domination requires an enormous investment in affect and ceremony and a significant emotional expenditure." This essay argues for a reappraisal of the work of Michel Foucault as a theory of material culture. Linking Foucault's work on power to studies of material culture, it reviews Foucault's late concept of the dispositif , which specifies the ways power is projected by objects like the scaffold and the panopticon. The article then puts Foucault's approach to material culture in conversation with two strands of contemporary critical thought—New Materialism and affect theory—to show how a full-fledged analytics of power–matter–affect might emerge. What Foucault calls the "analytics of power" supports the critical study of affect and ceremony—the streams of force that constitute subjectivity above, beneath, or outside of language. By way of example, this article explores how this emergent framework can provide new resources for moving beyond liberal approaches to the problem of Confederate monuments. Although Foucault is often read as a theorist preoccupied with discourse, a reconsideration of the dispositif shows that Foucault's analytics of power enhances our understanding of the role of material culture in guiding political affects.

Constitutional Imaginaries and Legitimation: On Potentia, Potestas, and Auctoritas in Societal Constitutionalism

This article focuses on the presence of non‐political power in societal constitutions and their imaginaries. The theory of societal constitutions recontextualizes constitutionalism beyond public law, statehood, and polity. However, it also raises the question of legitimation and the authority of these non‐polity‐based constitutional regimes operating independently of public reasoning. Societal constitutions enhance power through specific knowledge regimes and imaginaries transform them into generally shared systems of rules and norms. This constitutionalization of the systemic facts of power as legitimizing values of the system can be identified in political as much as societal constitutions. The theory of societal constitutions, therefore, needs to use Foucault's analytics of power and Teubner's democratic proceduralization of dissent as well as Luhmann's ironies of autopoietic social systems to formulate a genealogy of legal normativity and its societal legitimation.

Conduct of Conduits: Engineering, Desire and Government through the Enclosure and Exposure of Urban Water

AbstractThis article scrutinizes the relationship between governmental reform and infrastructural change in Singapore. Focusing on the role of engineers, it is argued that neoliberal decentralization has occurred through the physical reconfiguration of drainage. Neoliberalization is conceived as a localized technical response to a public health crisis resulting from infrastructural enclosure, which is orchestrated on and through the material‐ecological environment. A closed drainage system consisting of trapezoidal canals and concrete culverts had produced an ideal breeding environment for dengue‐carrying mosquitoes, undermining the state's centralized approach to water governance. This article reorients Michel Foucault's analytics of government around engineering and the ‘milieu’ to consider how drainage infrastructure was consequently opened up to an emerging civil society to relieve pressure on the state and allow greater public participation in the surveillance and management of canals, pipes and culverts. Alongside landscape architects, engineers would increasingly turn to naturalized waterways and open catchment policy to encourage citizens to form an affective bond with water and to inculcate principles of individual ownership and responsibility through physical contact. The article contends that with the proliferation of integrated resource management systems, governmental power is increasingly exercised through the liveliness as well as the fetishization of urban infrastructure.

Agamben and Colonialism

Agamben and Colonialism

Roxana and Other Feminist (Hi)stories

Roxana and Other Feminist (Hi)stories The Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender by Anne Emmanuelle Berger, translated by Catherine Porter. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. 240 pages. $29.00 paperback, $110 hardcover.While many U.S. scholars have turned their attention away from and queer those working in other parts of the world-such as France or Spain-have only recently recognized and welcomed these discursive frameworks. The fact that Anne Emmanuelle Berger is active in both and French academic contexts allows her to examine the dislocated scene of and queer and to perform a series of analytical gestures that provide novel insights into current feminist and debates. Berger thus manages to challenge the reductive narratives and assumptions that are unfortunately still reiterated in most of the discourses on queer, and feminism in the West.One of these analytical gestures is Berger's insistence that and queer should be understood as heterogeneous and productively inconsistent fields. This approach underlines arguments presented in the second chapter (11-82) in which she traces a genealogy of the theatre of and the 'queering' of feminist thought. More specifically, Berger challenges the narrative that gender theory arose in the United States in the 1980s as a provocation by the so-called French thought of the 1970s and has subsequently returned to Europe after its American invention. According to Berger, the conception of as most famously articulated by Judith Butler does not stem solely from the latter's rereadings of Foucault's analytics of power. Rather, has been theorized as since the 1950s both in the United States (by John Money and later by Robert Stoller, Esther Newton, and Erving Goffman) and in France by Jacques Lacan, who drew on Joan Riviere's notion of the feminine masquerade.Throughout the second chapter, Berger also contests the conventional and chronological distinction between and queer theory. First, she argues that has always been queer. This is because, as she illustrates with her readings, evolved in close proximity to what normative discourses call sexual deviance and because without drag (i.e., the theatricality of gender) there is no possibility of erotic relation and sexuality. Second, Berger contends that gay and lesbian studies cannot do without and its (feminist) theory. She supports this claim with her analysis of Sexual Traffic, the famous interview between Butler and Gayle Rubin, in which Rubin rejects as both a tool and an object of her analysis and leans instead toward a postfeminist study of sex and sexuality.1 Berger shows, gender, however, continues to haunt Rubin's wishfully gender-free discourse.The decision to challenge dominant narratives also characterizes the third chapter of the book, Paradoxes of Visibility in/ and Contemporary Identity Politics. Here, Berger discusses how the couples of gender and performance and gender and queer theory, as introduced and analyzed in the previous chapter, relate to current identity politics. Berger identifies what she calls the demand for visibility to be a major feature of the struggles of minority identities and sexualities and their analytical appropriations (83-106). She further claims that the demand for visibility cannot be explained solely as an attempt to complete the typical program of Enlightenment. Rather, the desire to be visible is inscribed in the theatrical structure of as well as its theoretization. According to Berger, this demand for visibility is also perpetuated by its avatar, queer theory. Queer questioning of does not simply imply a way out of the paradigm of visibility: As soon as there is theatre, there are roles, and as soon as there are roles, tends to reconstitute itself visibly, even in a queer fashion (88). …

Governing sexual behaviour through humanitarian codes of conduct.

Since 2001, there has been a growing consensus that sexual exploitation and abuse of intended beneficiaries by humanitarian workers is a real and widespread problem that requires governance. Codes of conduct have been promoted as a key mechanism for governing the sexual behaviour of humanitarian workers and, ultimately, preventing sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA). This article presents a systematic study of PSEA codes of conduct adopted by humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and how they govern the sexual behaviour of humanitarian workers. It draws on Foucault's analytics of governance and speech act theory to examine the findings of a survey of references to codes of conduct made on the websites of 100 humanitarian NGOs, and to analyse some features of the organisation-specific PSEA codes identified.

Driving the City: Taxi Drivers and the Tactics of Everyday Life in Beijing

This article examines the ways in which taxi driving and China's quest for global ascendency are interlinked and enmeshed. Inspired by de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life and his conceptual formulation of “strategy” and “tactic”, this article explores how taxi drivers, through their everyday practice of driving, found ways and moments to tactically challenge and appropriate so-called “civility campaigns” and a rising China. By demonstrating the numerous instances of tactics taxi drivers used, I argue that their socio-economic marginality did not, in fact, reduce them to a “powerless” position. I bring in Foucault's analytics of power and governmentality to add to de Certeau's work by helping to explain the intertwined relationship between government and governed to shed light on the complexity implicated in the dynamics of power relations and resistance. I examine the period around the 2008 Beijing Olympics as it involved large-scale attempts to showcase China through (urban) transformation.

Social Exclusion/Inclusion: Foucault's analytics of exclusion, the political ecology of social inclusion and the legitimation of inclusive education

This article offers a broad philosophical and historical background to the dyad of social exclusion/inclusion by examining the analytics and politics of exclusion first by reference to Michel Fouca...

School Leaders' Discursive Constructions of Low-Income and Minority Families Identities: A Marketplace Racism/Classism

Informed by Foucault's analytics of power, this critical discourse analysis focuses upon the discursive construction of minority and low-income family identities, primarily using text from interviews of Texas school leaders within the neoliberal context of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Qualitative content analysis was used to discover whether the discourses of school leaders, through their construction of minority and low-income family identities, supported or countered ideologies of racism and/or classism. The analysis revealed that school leaders discourses both support and counter classism and racism. The themes of the dominant discourse were congruent with marketplace ideological presumptions of choice, individualism, meritocracy, and a level playing field. Induced by multiple power/knowledge relations, the dominant discourse of school leaders constructed deficit identities for low-income and minority families. There was also a counter discourse, drawing from a subordinated discourse of systemic inequities and social justice, that contested and resisted the construction of deficit identities for traditionally underprivileged families. Intertextuality between the dominant and counter discourses of school leaders and leading educational leadership journals was also found.

Tracing Lines of Flight: Implications of the Work of Gilles Deleuze for Narrative Practice

The philosophical groundwork of Gilles Deleuze is examined for its relevance for narrative practice in therapy and conflict resolution. Deleuze builds particularly on Foucault's analytics of power as "actions upon actions" and represents power relations diagrammatically in terms of lines of power. He also conceptualizes lines of flight through which people become other. These concepts are explored in relation to a conversation with a couple about a crisis in their relationship. Tracing lines of power and lines of flight are promoted as fresh descriptions of professional practice that fit well with the goals of narrative practice.

(re)Imagining the global, rethinking gender in education

This paper develops new lines of analysis for understanding the relationships between globalisation, the imagination and emergent models of the ‘girl-citizen’. It begins by outlining a new critical framework for studying globalisation that takes as its object of study not what globalisation is, but what globalisation does. Making use of Foucault's analytics of governmentality, it argues that globalisation can be usefully understood as a complex and contradictory set of movements that establish new modes of regulation over the conduct of individual citizens. It further argues that within the current global milieu, the imagination operates as part of a broader neo-liberal project of government that situates the global citizen in the role of entrepreneur of the self. For girls and young women the imagination becomes a tool for constructing and governing their gendered selves alongside idealised models of global citizenship and cosmopolitan identity. Finally, it is proposed that examining the role and effects of the imagination in ‘making’ and ‘managing’ global citizenship-subjects is vital to understanding the emergent models of girl-citizenship both within and outside schooling contexts.

Theoretisch keine Brüder

Theoretically no Brothers: Marx and Foucault as Antagonists_ In spite of Foucault'sfrequent and positive references to Marx he does not deal with the critique of politicaleconomy. Foucault defines power in demarcation to Marxism and to approaches that theorizepower in relation to economy. This leads to serious flaws in Foucault's analytics of power. If wecompare Foucault's analysis of discipline and law to Marx' we can see that the two theories areincompatible. Attempts to merge Foucault and Marx otten lack methodological considerations.However it may be possible to re-interpret certain of Foucault's findings from a Marxian perspectiveand in doing so connecting Foucault and Marx.

Critical Practices in Organizations

This article deals with the phenomenon of criticism in organizations. Existing organizational literature, where it has addressed criticism, mostly tends to see it as an extraordinary phenomenon. By contrast, in this article, the authors argue that criticism may also originate from strongly embedded and more ordinary practices. Thus, there is a theoretical need for considering those critical practices that are structurally and/or formally institutionalized within the organization. They reflect the organizational status quo and promote a reproduction of existing structures of power/knowledge. Drawing on ideas from practice theory, institutional theory, and Foucault's analytics of power/knowledge regimes, the authors introduce a typology that distinguishes forms of criticism according to the degree to which they are coupled with particular organizational practices, their rationalities, and corresponding power relations. They then focus on those forms of criticism that are strongly linked to organizational practices and illustrate the ambiguous effects of such an “organization of criticism.”

Staatlichkeit, Gouvernementalität und Neoliberalismus

The paper examines Foucault's analytics of the state based on the concept and history of governmentality. While the approach has a promising critical-analytical potential, the latter is not always realized in the works of the governmentality studies. These problems that are particularly related to the conceptualisation and analysis of Neo-Liberalism as a governmentality are examined from the perspective of Bob Jessop's Neo-Marxist strategic-relational theory of the state. It is suggested to adopt some of the insights developed in this approach to realize the potential of Foucault's analytlcs of state more thoroughly.

Michel Foucault's Analytics of War: The Social, the International, and the Racial

The absence of the international as a distinct socio-political sphere in Michel Foucault's work forms a major part of the postcolonial critique of his writings. The absence of the international has a number of consequences for any critical engagement with Foucault in the context of global politics. The significance of these consequences becomes apparent when we consider Foucault's analytics of war and power, situate these in relation to the particularity of the international, consider the very pertinent critiques of Foucault emanating from postcolonial writings, and finally re-locate Foucault in the international not, as is the predominant approach in International Relations, through the application of Foucaultian concepts, but through Foucault's own political writings on the non-western arena, specifically his engagement with the Iranian Revolution. While limited in their scope, an evaluation of these writings appears to vindicate postcolonial critiques of Foucault, though with some revealing qualifications.

From micro-powers to governmentality: Foucault's work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power

This article revisits Foucault's analytics of power in the light of his lectures on governmentality and biopolitics in Society must be Defended (1975-6), SecuritA©,territoire, population (1977-8) and Naissance de la biopolitique (1978-9). Foucault is renowned for his criticisms of state theory and advocacy of a bottom-up approach to social power; and for his hostility to many theoretical and practical manifestations of orthodox Marxism. Yet these lectures, especially those on governmentality, are directly and explicitly concerned with statehood, state formation, statecraft, and state power and the subsequent role of new forms of government and political calculation in guiding capitalist reproduction. They cast new light on Foucault's alleged antistatism and anti-Marxism and offer new insights into his restless intellectual development. Accordingly, this article reviews Foucault's hostility to Marxism and theories of the state, considers his apparent turn from the micro-physics and microdiversity of power relations to their macro-physics and strategic codification through the governmentalized state, and suggests how to develop an evolutionary account of state formation on the basis of these new arguments about emerging forms of statecraft.

The Dangerous Individual('s) Mother: Biopower, Family, and the Production of Race

Even as feminist analyses have contributed in important ways to discussions of how gender is raced and race is gendered, there has been little in the way of comparative analysis of the specific mechanisms that are at work in the production of each. Feder argues that in Michel Foucault's analytics of power we find tools to understand the reproduction of whiteness as a complex interaction of distinctive expressions of power associated with these categories of difference.

Power, Action, Signs: Between Peirce and Foucault

This paper argues that pragmatists must be more cognizant of the concept of and its consequences. To demonstrate this, I show how Foucault's analytics of power can be brought into Peirce's theory of signs. Central to both philosophers is the role of action. Using the concept of action, I explain that Foucault's conception of power, action on actions, can be understood as structuring Peircian habits, which are rules for action. From here I build out to Peirce's semiotics, illustrating how power channels the meanings of signs in certain directions. The rest of the paper is dedicated to reconstructing in light of Foucault Peirce's claim that the is nothing more than the signs it uses. I argue that any understanding of the must account for the being distributed through a field of power. The paper concludes by proposing a new philosophy of the subject which seeks to reconcile Foucault's concerns with those of pragmatism.

Culture and Politics in the Information Age: A New Politics? (review)

Reviewed by: Culture and Politics in the Information Age: A New Politics? David Lyon Frank Webster , ed, Culture and Politics in the Information Age: A New Politics?London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 231 pp. Two kinds of social change, technological and political, come together in this volume of essays. Without suggesting that one might somehow simply be the product of the other, the authors discuss in part one some issues of "new media, politics, and culture" and in part two, of "new social movements." What holds the chapters together is a concern with common themes such as globalization, and with its corollary, an uneven erosion of national sovereignty, alongside capitalism as an uncontested mode of social organizing, pervasive networked media of many kinds, and a social flux relating to shifts in class, community, and individual choice. Older political parties have been somewhat eclipsed, and lifestyle questions are fore-fronted within new social movements. Because new communication and information technologies are prominently implicated in both technological and political change, it comes as no surprise that the work of Manuel Castells is frequently invoked. This provides a stimulating and productive foil for debate, given Castells' bench-mark studies of the "information age" (Castells 2000). Castells sees information flows, the key feature of "network society', as a key factor in the emerging volatility of old social and political institutions such as labour unions or state welfare. But such flows also enable new modes of organizing, from collective identities to government responsiveness, yielding possibilities for enhanced democratic participation. No less than seven of the twelve authors, plus Webster, engage with Castells' arguments (including the crucial question of how far the concept of "network" can be generalized in the technology/political sociology relation). Despite the use of the word "new" in both parts of the book, doubts about newness are expressed throughout. The volume is a welcome contribution to subtle and careful argument that stresses long-term continuities while acknowledging that profound alterations in the social environment do occur as technology [End Page 240] and economy mutate. Alan Scott and John Street, for instance, show that while politicians may nod to popular culture in their use of language, and while some demonstrations are increasingly carnivalesque, familiar instrumental motives lie behind them, not necessarily a new way of doing politics. However, John Tomlinson proposes, intriguingly, that the content of politics may alter significantly as time-space compression — a consequence of using new communication technologies — helps produce a world in which certain issues are highlighted due to their "global proximity." The collection also includes a variety of interpretations of "new" social movements, including studies of how Friends of the Earth (FoE) has become increasingly "translocal" — rather than "networked" — using information technologies, and of how those same technologies were also implicated in the demise of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. The key moment in the latter story was when the February 1997 draft was posted online such that a public space was opened for participation. At the same time, such victories also depend on the organizational skills of NGOs, and their capacity to exploit technological potential. This is also underlined in Jenny Pickerill's chapter on FoE which suggests that in the case of three British environmental groups, new technologies facilitate recruitment, but mobilization still relies on integration into existing networks. If a crucial test of sociological leadership is whether one's work is widely debated, Castells certainly qualifies. This book is one of a number now appearing that both take his work very seriously and also subject it to searching critique. The authors in this volume take a variety of positions vis-a-vis Castells, but several question both the extent to which new technologies really have the effect of producing profound social change, and how far optimism about these effects is warranted. Additionally, Nick Stevenson acutely observes that while Castells' agenda is implicitly critical — the public sphere possibilities of informational society — it stops short of the moral and ethical. Kate Nash expands this point, arguing for a thoroughgoing cultural turn in politics, as both an analytic and a normative stance. To do so, she opposes Foucault's analytics of power to Castells' more limited view...

Is Power All There Is?

One of the most interesting and perplexing aspects of Michel Foucault's analytics of modern is the claim that all social relations are inflected by relations, that is `always already there', that one is never 'outside' it.1 What follows, we should ask, from this claim that relations are omnipresent? Foucault immediately qualifies this statement, noting that the possibility of resistance to is included within the dynamics of relations, so power's omnipresence does not imply that resistance is impossible. Nevertheless, this thesis constitutes a very broad claim, one subject to misunderstanding. What is the relationship between omnipresent relations and other types of social relations, like sexual, economic, and kinship relations? Is Foucault saying, for instance, that relations are the only-or even the most important-kind of relations present in social situations, or are other kinds of relations omnipresent, too? By explicating Foucault's understanding of relations' omnipresence, I hope to answer these questions and show that, for Foucault, this omnipresence entails neither that relations are the only omnipresent relation nor that relations are the most important relations in social situations. I suggest that in some cases, we can best understand a social interaction by looking at the relations between parties; in other cases, while we can and should recognize that relations are present, they are not the most important for understanding the situation. Two caveats need to be noted before we begin. First of all, I will not attempt to give a thorough or systematic presentation of Foucault's analytics of power. Although I will delve beyond it, the central point upon which I will focus is the claim that relations are omnipresent. Second, this argument will be complicated because of the periodization of Foucault's writings. From the publication of Discipline and Punish in 1975 through the late 1970s, in what is often called his genealogy or period, the analytics of was one of Foucault's central concerns.2 In the 1980s, until his death in 1984, Foucault's interests shifted toward the self's constitution of itself; this was the later period of ethics.3 The interrelationships between these periods' work are unclear, and some scholars see the turn as a break leaving few if any continuities. I do not want to take up this issue at length. However, we shall see that although Foucault does introduce some new distinctions with respect to his understanding of power, the basic conceptions remain unaltered; in particular, the view that relations are omnipresent is unchanged. As I draw from sources from both periods, this continuity will be illustrated in the course of my argument. To understand how it is that relations are omnipresent, according to Foucault, we must first make a very brief survey of what relations are. Foucault's most explicit, focused discussion of relations is given in volume one of The History of Sexuality, from the middle period.4 Power relations, Foucault tells us, are micro-processes, which must be distinguished from the macro-forms in which they often manifest themselves. Such macro-forms, which include state sovereignty and domination of one group over another, are end-products constituted out of many particular instances of the microrelations.5 It seems to me that must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.6 These micro-processes, these force relations, are strategic relationships. More precisely, power is the effect of interactions between unequal positions in the social landscape. (We can think of these positions as being held by various kinds of agents, such as persons and institutions .)7 Power's condition of possibility . . . …