Foucault's Ideas Research Articles

Psihološke implikacije Fukoovog panoptikona u današnjem društvu

The author of the paper explains Foucault's basic ideas related to the use of panopticon in public institutions and society, with the aim to control and impose identity, in order to accomplish the interests of centres of power. The aim of this paper is to explain the ways in which panopticon operate in today's society, through procedures of supervision and punishment. The author tries to apply Foucault's initial ideas to today's reality and explain the way in which the panopticon functions by forcing certain points of view in science which validity has not been empirically confirmed, forming a consumer society through imposed identities. The application of panopticon is based on the fear of people that they will be excluded from society and lose their positions, if they do not follow the roles imposed on them. They very easily give up their own identity for the sake of existential security and social status. The task of those scientists, psychologists and psychiatrists who have decided not to serve the interests of the centres of power is to be as clear and effective as possible, pointing out all the factors that lead to the formation of an unhealthy consumer society, as well as the mechanisms of their action.

The Concept of Discourse in Relation with Law and Language and Michael Foucault

The author examines the concept of discourse with its different meanings and its understandings by various critics as discourse has acquired a whole new palette of diverse meanings in the past few decades. The discussion in the paper covers the areas of law and language in relation with discourse; both law and language are parts of society. Language being a medium for law, law is mediated, interpreted and constructed through language. As a result, legal discourse is formed with different ideologies sweeping through it. In view of this kind of formation, Michael Foucault's idea of discourse is significant to analyse the role of law in our society and its formation.

O trabalho para a vida e a vida para o trabalho: uma confluência entre Nietzsche e Foucault acerca do homem moderno

O principal objetivo deste artigo é o de compreender alguns aspectos fundamentais ao modo de pensar e fazer política tal como se desenvolveu a partir da modernidade tendo como referência principal a contraposição entre pequena política e grande política a partir da obra de Friedrich Nietzsche em relação com a concepção de biopolítica pelos ditos e escritos de Michel Foucault. Mais especificamente, a presente abordagem constituir-se-á a partir da relevância dada ao trabalho na construção das sociedades modernas dentro da avaliação feita pelo filósofo alemão e pelo pensador francês supracitados. Nos termos de Nietzsche, uma cultura que não valoriza o espírito, mas que é elaborada por “escravos” modernos, tendo em vista justamente a centralidade do trabalho na construção da vida social bem como da política, mais acentuadamente a partir do século XIX. Pelas ideias de Foucault, indivíduos constantemente disciplinados e regulados através do trabalho como aspecto fundamental da governamentalidade moderna a fim de promover o biogoverno de vidas úteis e ao mesmo tempo dóceis. Trazendo, ademais, o papel da formação, isto é, aquilo que se põe como objetivo à educação nos dois autores a fim de clarear as características principais da sociedade moderna. Notando, desse modo, a relação entre Nietzsche e Foucault quanto ao apontamento de que a formação educacional que se desenvolve desde o capitalismo industrial busca estruturar o sujeito a fim de que se torne trabalhador, isto é, no intuito de integrá-lo ao sistema de produção-consumo para deles exaurir o máximo de contribuição à manutenção do modelo já estabelecido.

‘All the time watched’: an analysis of disciplinary power within the Irish Direct Provision system

ABSTRACT Initially launched as a temporary measure, Direct Provision is two decades old and home to 7,400 asylum seekers. Since inception, it has been the target of internal and external criticisms along with academic scrutiny documenting the system's functions and failings. This article builds on these analyses to examine the crucial role fulfilled by disciplinary power in maintaining the system and conducting its residents. It draws upon Michel Foucault's ideas regarding the application of power in carceral institutions to examine common experiences of observation, normalisation, hierarchisation and examination as related by Direct Provision residents. Their testimonies detail aspects and effects of a complex system reliant on discipline to conduct conduct at the ‘street level’, while also working alongside other modalities of power to influence broader strategies of population management and governance.

From Distant Horizon to the ‘Uncoercive Rearrangement of Desire’: Institutional Pedagogy and Collaborative Learning in an Instance of Arts and Curatorial Education

AbstractIn politics and philosophy, the question of horizons, the vanishing point that is always out of reach, but provides direction and guidance, underpins utopic thinking. This is a strange phenomenon since, as Jodi Dean suggests, horizons are ‘real’ insofar as they exist both spatially and temporally. Dean invokes the Lacanian concept of the real to demonstrate how horizons are omnipresent, even when we are unable to see them. Here, we disagree with Dean. Rather than view them as a fixed and constant entity, with Deleuze & Guattari we agree that horizons, understood as spaces of possibility, must be constructed through communal enunciations of desire. Following Dean's (re)formulation of horizons alongside of Deleuze & Guattari's concept of desire, we propose that Foucault's idea of ‘heterotopia’, a real, but inverted and potentially uncomfortable counter‐site, is a better schema for thinking the possibilities of arts education's horizon. This article thinks through the construction of other, emancipated, spaces of learning in arts education through the methodological approach of institutional analysis and the work done by the Institutional Pedagogy movement in post‐war France. Drawing from this movement, the work of Fernand Oury and Aïda Vasquez and Félix Guattari, ‘institution’ here is understood loosely as anything that institutes forms of sociability. As such, institutional analysis seeks to radically transform institutions from within and without by creating spaces to facilitate the reconfiguration of desire. Our analysis will be grounded in our own pedagogical practices in universities where we have made use of the techniques of Institutional Pedagogy.

The existential spatiality of rebellion: Insubordination, counter‐conduct, and places

AbstractThis article reviews the current discourse on urban struggles to bring to the surface strategies of interpretation, which deal with theoretical concerns insinuated by the situated existence of struggling subjects. The first part, concentrating on the domain of “negative places,” contrasts interpretive strategies distinguished by their orientation to the phenomena of local solidarities, alternatively, solidarities organized by collective projects. The second part turns from “negative places” to “other places” to consider the strategy of interpretation operating with the concept of affective solidarities. The article argues for a critical reinterpretation of affective solidarities in reference to Foucault's idea of “other places” to disclose how the disobedient subject's transfiguration into collective subjects of solidarity is entwined with the diversity of modes in which the corporeal existence of subjects is situated in the world.

Dynamics of Surveillance and Discovery of Self in Musharraf Ali Farooqi's The Story of a Widow

This qualitative research identifies Foucault's idea of panoptical surveillance (1995) based on Jeremy Bentham's ideal prison in The Story of a Widow by Musharraf Ali Farooqi. Research draws parallel between 'panopticon' and societal surveillance which is in the form of traditions, norms, male gaze and resistance strategies and traces behaviour of characters in response to surveillance. The character of novel's protagonist – Mona is particularly analyzed through panoptic lens of theory. This study traces notion of “ideology” and “interpellation” from Althusser's essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1971) in order to depict struggle of Mona against ideological surveillance. Social ideologies form identity of individuals and thrust their power and subjection on Mona who in turn fights for creating her own identity. The research endeavours to explore struggle of women in finding 'Self' under societal surveillance and ideologies which hail people as 'subjects'. It also aims to study whether it is possible for a woman to attain self-satisfaction by rebelling against prevailing societal notions which act as hurdle in practicing their rights or not. This research will further help to discover dynamics of power and authority for both genders and shall establish humanistic approach of gender equality. It will aid in inculcating the notion that societal surveillance should be beneficial for growth of all individuals rather than restricting the autonomy of some (women) in society which leads to social unrest.

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, FOUCAULDIAN ASCENDANCY ON THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL MATERIALISM MOVEMENTS

Purpose of the study: This paper analyses the prominent movements that have been significantly influenced by Foucauldian conceptions particularly power relations and knowledge. This paper focuses on two critical movements namely Historical movement and Cultural materialism movement.
 Methodology: This is a review paper and largely based on secondary data analysis. Foucault's ideas influenced some movements such as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism. I will discuss how Foucault was inspired and influenced by some thinkers like Nietzsche. So, the present appears to be the issue to be studied historically. This point of view led to the rise of some movements, which are focusing on present issues and problems.
 Main Findings: The current study shows firstly that the German philosopher Michel Foucault has a great influence on many literary movements particular the new one such as Cultural materialism and new Historicism and so on. Secondly, it appears Foucault's inspiration by some thinkers and philosophers like Louis Althusser, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli.
 Applications of this study: Foucault has an impact on the other movements and thinkers in which many types of research in contemporary age deal with issues that Foucault involves in his works, such as social, political and economic issues. One of the materials that Foucault focusing it, the significance of past and relate to the present.
 Novelty/Originality of this study: The reader can feel the obvious influence of Michel's writings through a variety of features of Althusser and Nietzsche particularly Foucault regarded Nietzsche's idea as the departure point for his power theory.

Nexus between Exceptionalism and Rule of Law in the light of Governmentality

One of the most common reactions to emergency situations is taking emergency measures based on necessity. Nowadays, it is also claimed that due to the transformation of the threatening factors to the society, collective security is permanently at serious risk. Therefore, the state of emergency is the normal state of our time. According to these circumstances should be changed in favour of public interest and security as one of its elements. Thus, the central issue of this idea, called exceptionalism, is how to resolve the conflict between rights and public security. In response, different theoretical approaches have been put forward. This article claims that extra-legal measures approach that, by emphasising on unusual practices, first avoids the normalisation of emergency actions and their generalisation to normal situations, secondly, it prevents us to make a distinction between notions of 'us and them', finally, points out the need for an ex-post ratification, is justifiable in the light of Foucault's idea of governmentality.

The Juridical Practices and the Judicialization at Social Assistance Work

The objective of this article is to analyze how the legal practices of social workers are connected with the judicial flows of work, as well as the processes of counter-conduct created by them. The tools used to produce information in the research-intervention were: team activities monitoring, observation, interviews, informal talks and photograph workshop. Michel Foucault's ideas supported the analyzes that showed that in the work of social assistance there are judicialization forces, as well as the juridical practices rooted through the mechanisms of the test, the exam, the testimony and the fear of becoming criminal. However, the study also indicated the presence of conter-conducts to the judicialization forces, established through the coletivization of and at work and how much the research-intervention can contribute to the analysis of the work processes and to the collective construction of alternatives to problems in such process.

Individuality and Loyalty to Truth under Tyranny

Individuality and Loyalty to Truth under Tyranny George Kateb (bio) a person can be loyal to a principle or betray it. a common criticism leveled at someone in authority, or in a position where people look to him or her for guidance or inspiration, is that this person has betrayed a principle that he or she had professed allegiance to and usually upheld but now, in especially difficult circumstances, has abandoned. My chief concern is with loyalty to truth, to the principle of seeking or holding on to the truth in difficult, indeed unusual or unprecedented, circumstances, where serious personal and external obstacles to understanding the truth exist. I am disposed to believe that only a small number of individuals in such circumstances can maintain loyalty to this principle. The burden of truth is always likely to be carried by only a few individuals, who thereby earn, in my judgment, a complex kind of honor, which I will try to delineate. I impute to these individuals the capacity for inner freedom; specifically, inner freedom of mind, which is necessary if loyalty to truth is to be possible, when one's responses to the conditions of society militate powerfully against seeking or holding fast to the truth. For a few persons, betrayal of truth would feel like a self-betrayal equivalent to suicide, to a loss of self. Let us notice that every conscious loyalty is to a principle, but not all principles are abstract as, say, an intense commitment to truth is. Yet when a principle is not abstract, it is nonetheless likely that imagination helps to shape it. So loyalty to family, for example, although it might begin in what seems to be instinct, will become under duress a conscious affirmation or rejection. The idea of the family [End Page 607] must play a role in the process by which loyalty to the principle of family solidarity emerges or endures betrayal. Correspondingly, the imagination helps to constitute loyalty to a country; or, at least there is no instinct to it. To be sure, there are many pragmatic concerns that sustain it, but the imaginary, even in the form of fantasy, often permeates pragmatism. Since I promote the concept of the inner freedom of individuals and tie it so closely to a commitment to truth in extraordinary circumstances, I wish along the way to place this concept in relation to other concepts of individualism, especially two others: democratic individuality and care of the self. From the perspective of loyalty to truth-seeking and truth-remembering as the highest loyalty, inner freedom is the kind of individualism that is central. This means that democratic individuality, the concept that I have tried to promote since the 1980s, can no longer figure in certain kinds of speculation about the future, nor can Foucault's idea of care of the self. However, in reflection on the present condition of society, the concept of democratic individuality still has work to do. If inner freedom of mind is an uncommon achievement, perhaps one should also say the same about care of the self and, almost paradoxically and more disappointingly, about democratic individuality. The almost insuperable obstacle to these kinds of individualism, when they are present as cultural possibilities, or any other kind, is the ease with which people everywhere fall into group identity. Ethnicity, patriotism, religious affiliation, nationality, race, and color are, singly or in combination, widespread forms of intense group identity. Individuality cannot coexist with strong group identity, which substitutes itself for reflexive and active personal identity. To think of oneself as, above all, a member of this or that group means that the group is the most important fact in one's life; group membership defines all the cultural possibilities of the self in the world. Such membership, which begins in imitation and often remains submerged beneath full consciousness, seems to give definitive answers to troublesome questions about personal identity and also makes the [End Page 608] questions it purports to answer the only questions about a person's identity that can possibly arise. Group identity hides existential questions that it does not want to recognize or is even afraid to recognize and makes...

EXPOSING THE NATURE OF ARAB ISLAMIC REASONING AND ITS INFLUENCE TOWARD INDONESIA (Experiment of the Approach of M. Abed al-Jabiri’s Post Structuralism)

The post structuralism approach is no longer a conventional approach. The emergence of this new approach was not only to respond to structuralism, but also to answer the bluntness of the old approach which was barely able to read the very complex reality and to break down the so complicatedly cultural lines. What al-Jabiri practises in dismantling the nature of Arabic reasoning is his experiment in examining the Arab community reasoning. Interestingly, in practicing the post-structuralism approach, al-Jabiri does not only immediately practice it, but he reconstructs the post-structuralism approach by borrowing others for sharper analysis. It means that the post-structuralism approach is not the final approach. However, criticism and development are needed to achieve the establishment of theory.The foundation of the first theory of this research stems from Foucault's idea of archeology-genealogy of knowledge. The foundation of the next theory that the author takes from Foucault's thinking is about discourse. This research is entirely library research; therefore, the first step that researchers did is to collect primary data, especially data related to the focus of this research. The data analysis phase was carried out using the following methods: method of interpretation, analysis and historical.The results of the research indicate that the advantages of the post-structuralism approach are the methodological implications of very different readings and producing something else and new. The results are quite astonishing that al-Jabiri is able to examine the logic of Arabic construction and find the character of reasoning that had been thinkable and unthinkable. The post-structuralism approach is ultimately able to distinguish the nature of the Arab community's reasoning which can be distinguished into forming and formed reasoning.

Governmentality in EU external trade and environment policy: between rights and market

While the European Union's external trade policy has always engaged with such values as development, human rights and environmental sustainability, this rhetoric has been significantly stepped up over the last years. The unprecedented politicization of major trade deals and accusations that the EU ignores normative concerns in practice have led the European Commission to declare in 2015 that ‘trade policy … will not only project our interests, but also our values’. A growing number of scholarly contributions address the EU's response to contestation over trade policy and its attempts to increase legitimacy. Governmentality in EU external trade and environment policy contributes to this debate from a critical perspective. Although it is grounded in transnational legal studies, Jessica Lawrence's work reaches beyond the mainstream of her discipline, providing an insightful analysis of the EU's external policy based on Michel Foucault's idea of governmentality. It is this interdisciplinary approach that gives the book its richness.

Ten Days in a Mad-House: 'Akıl Hastası' Göçmenin Amerikan Islah Sistemine Hapsedilişi

1887 senesinde Nellie Bly mahlasını kullanan gazeteci Elizabeth Cochrane, The New York World gazetesi adına Blackwell's Island Akıl Hastanesindeki dinamikleri ifşa etmek için gizli göreve gittikten sonra Ten Days in a Mad-House adlı yazısı gazetede basıldı. Bu amaçla akıl hastası bir kadın rolüne, daha da ilginci akıl hastası Kübalı bir kadın rolüne giren Bly'ın Ten Days in a Mad-House adlı anlatısı akıl hastası göçmen bedeninin 19. yüzyıl Amerikan toplumunda olduğu kadar dönemin çağdaş enstitülerinde de nasıl karşılandığını göstermektedir. Metin, 'gözden çıkarılabilir' akıl hastası göçmen bedenin Amerika Birleşik Devletleri'nin kapitalist yapısına bir yük olarak görünmesinden dolayı ırk ıslahı, biyopolitika ve göçmen bedenin ulussuzlaştırılması gibi temel kavramlar ile birlikte incelenmektedir. Foucault'nun biyopolitika ve ıslah sisteminin işleyişleri üzerine fikirleri, erk sistemi içerisindeki kurumsal işleyişleri daha da sorgulamak için Bly'ın metnine uygulanmaktadır. Buna ek olarak Agamben'in homo sacer (kutsal insan)'in çıplak hayatı hakkındaki savları akıl hastası göçmenin özgürlüğünün ıslah sisteminde nasıl elinden alındığını göstermek için kullanılmaktadır. Bu makalede istenmeyen göçmenin hapsedilişi, Nelly Bly'ın deliliği biyopolitik bir performans olarak nasıl sergilediği ve akıl hastası göçmen bir kadını canlandıran beyaz bir kadın olarak hem ırksal hem de sosyal sınırları nasıl geçtiğiyle ilişkili olarak incelenmektedir.

Political discourse in the hospital heterotopia.

To what extent do we pay attention to the text and images that cover our hospital walls and do we offer any critique either as professionals or service users? In the past we might have expected to see functional or helpful instructions about where to go (or not to go) and in more well-endowed buildings, perhapswe would see some works of art, sculpture, stained glass even, with the intention to encourage, distract or even forewarn us. However,it is now common in UK hospitals, for wall space to be used asa portal for a range ofinstitutional political messages, thatconvey information about everything from its ownvalues, behavioursto advertisements for products and servicesto requirements forrule following. Michel Foucault's ideas about Heterotopic space can help us tosee that hospitals tend to fall (awkwardly) between being a public and personal health care space, and this is a possibleexplanation for the confused material culture and messages that are shared there. This paper draws on ethnographic methods to reflect on personal experiencein order to offer a critiqueof thecontemporary political discourse which has become 'literally' written onto ourhospital walls.

Boundaries of the Episteme: Decolonising the International Law Curriculum

ABSTRACTDebates on many university campuses call for a refocused or “decolonised” university curriculum. These demands reject curricula that are considered narrow and unreformed and cultures that position many in the university as unwelcome outsiders. In response to these calls, there have been attempts at a renewal of the South African higher education system, and several universities are currently revising their curricula in an endeavour to be responsive to students’ concerns. Drawing on Michel Foucault's idea of the “episteme”, this article narrates a university professor's quest to reconceptualise the undergraduate and postgraduate international law curricula at the university where she lectures, and highlights the lessons she has learnt in the process about the boundaries of her and other international law scholars’ knowledge and ways of knowing.

Progress in Education: A Deconstructionist View

In this paper, Foucault's ideas, commonly termed deconstructionism, are employed to argue that there are several perennial myths in educational thought and research (e .g., all change is progressive and what is promoted as change is novel). These are discussed with specific reference to statements by two instructional psychologists, R.M. Gagne and B.F. Skinner. Three commonly held assumptions about progress in education that have likely lead to such myths are also discussed from a deconstructive perspective. Work of earlier educators and researchers such as Quintilian, Bloom and his associates, Elkind, and Popper are presented to support this particular method of criticism.

Truth by Narration—Why Autobiographical Conversion Accounts are so Compelling: The Case of H.A. Kaundinya, the First Indian Pastor in the Basel Mission

ABSTRACTThis essay investigates the significance of autobiographical conversion narratives using a case study from the Basel Mission, active in India in the mid nineteenth century. I argue that such narratives are pivotal for the realisation of conversion in the discourse-oriented Protestant mission. Taking up Foucault's idea of ‘regimes of truth’, I understand autobiographical accounts of conversion as ‘acts of truth’. Such acts shape and contribute to a certain discourse formation that has a normative function for the individual and the community involved. The autobiographical conversion narrative thus not only reports events and experiences, it also brings an aura of authenticity and genuineness to the individual conversion, and it reinforces the validity of the norms expressed through the experiences of the subject for the community that subscribes to the discourse.

The Pedagogy and Politics of Twenty-First-Century Luso-Hispanic Urban Cultural Studies

The Pedagogy and Politics of Twenty-First-Century Luso-Hispanic Urban Cultural Studies Susan Larson Keywords capitalism/capitalismo, cultural studies/estudios culturales, pedagogy/pedagogía, space/espacio, urban studies/estudios urbanos Response to "The City as Organizing Principle in Twenty-First-Century Luso-Hispanic Studies" Since the 1980s Anglo-American scholars in the field of Luso-Hispanic Studies have had plenty of time to think through the so-called "spatial turn" that built disciplinary bridges between the Humanities and the Social Sciences. It took approximately 20 years for key texts written in French (those of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, for example) to be translated into English and work their way into the field. One example of such a text is "Of Other Spaces," (a 1967 lecture of Foucault's that was not published in English until 1984) on the everyday experience of space, where he explains that [t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. (22) Foucault's ideas about space had such an impact on academics in many disciplines because he explained that space was neither a mere empty container nor a backdrop for events and actions (see Tally). Rather, as Benjamin Fraser reminds us in his essay above and in much of his work on Henri Lefebvre, space is at the same time a product and a creative process. It produces each one of us, in fact, through a complex network of economic, political, social and cultural forces. Fredric Jameson (2001) subsequently took this concept of the spatial and used it to better explain the culture of late modernism, calling on cultural critics to rethink these specialized geographical and cartographic issues in terms of social space, in terms, for example, of social class and national or international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national and international class realities. (585–86) If Jameson wasn't exactly celebrating the postmodern in his The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he acknowledges that its combination of high and low culture forced us to stop thinking of art as autonomous like many of the artists and cultural critics of the Modern period tended to do. Jameson encouraged us to get our hands dirty—to "abolish all sort of critical distance" (580). Jameson called this an "aesthetic of cognitive mapping—a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system" (586, emphasis mine). Much of the recent history and future potential of urban and spatial directions in Luso-Hispanic scholarship that Benjamin Fraser outlines in his essay [End Page 143] is the inevitable outcome of this spatial turn. These philosophies of space from decades ago and this call of Jameson's to a "pedagogical political culture" are at the heart of how many of us now think about how language, image, sound and all other possible systems of meaning can and should be understood in our scholarship and should be taught in our classrooms. Urban studies and the broader spatial turn have given literary critics, film scholars and linguists in Luso-Hispanic Studies the tools to better connect the complex workings of written, visual and spoken systems of meaning to social life. It's given us the inspiration to get our hands dirty. I strongly suspect that this has happened in no small part as a response to some of the pedagogical realities we currently face. We can't ignore that our students themselves are inherently interdisciplinary. In Luso-Hispanic studies the vast majority of our students are double-majors or minors with no intent to pursue their studies in the Humanities. As professors we've had to let go of aesthetic practices and values elaborated on the basis of historical situations and elitist dilemmas which are no longer ours (if they ever were). Cognitive mapping forces us to consider the real world in which we and our students...

The Power of Satire

The Power of Satire