Foucault's Model Research Articles

Pre-War Greek “Open” Prisons: A Dynamic Spatial Condition

The article explores the unique nature of pre-war Greek agricultural prisons, arguing that these settlements offered aprogressive spatial condition to the enclosed communities. In contrast to Foucault's model of central control andisolation, these prisons incorporated agricultural work and open-air spaces, aiming for rehabilitation through: a)connection with the natural environment and b) assigning responsibilities to the inmates. As Yi-Fu Tuan suggests, wecross-examine conceptual, built, and experienced spaces to explore "...how abstract ideas develop out of those givendirectly to the body...". Following a qualitative research method, we examine three aspects of prison space: spacedefined by the legal system, the built space, the lived space. We present findings on the built structures and lifewithin them, concluding with how culture of enclosed societies contributes to a state's legal and political civilization.We highlight these places as valuable heritage deserving further interdisciplinary investigation by architecture,criminology and anthropology.

Dispatches from Utopia: Black Queer Nightlife in Shakedown

Abstract Many critics have discussed the ways in which Cheryl Dunye's groundbreaking 1996 film The Watermelon Woman employs an exploration and interrogation of history as a means of creating and reshaping the present and future, a utopian extraction (which is ultimately an invention) of a symbolic Black lesbian figure who has been obscured and ignored throughout history. In this vein, this essay examines a work that similarly uncovers Black queer utopias of the past and actualizes queer potential for existence in the present: the 2018 documentary Shakedown, directed by Leilah Weinraub, which depicts a series of Black lesbian strip events in early-2000s Los Angeles. Drawing from a theoretical background that expands the political implications for queer sexuality, community, and performance, including queer of color critique, performance theory, queer utopia, and queer temporality, I present the ways in which joyful and utopic possibilities for Black lesbian being and belonging are opened in the strip clubs depicted by the film. Putting Foucault's model of heterotopias, or actualized utopic spaces existing across cultures, in conversation with these theories, I develop the concept of the “homotopia,” a queer utopian countersite that is both historically relational and temporally detached, existing affectively for queer viewers in multiple times and spaces. I argue that the film therefore not only represents an archival project of capturing and preserving a homotopic nightlife, but, further, carries it across space and time to shape an affective, digital utopia for the viewer. In this way, the documentary's depiction of these events constructs a homotopic space of its own, stimulating the spectator to engage in imagining alternative queer futures.

After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China by Howard Chiang

Reviewed by: After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China by Howard Chiang Y. Yvon Wang yyvon.wang@utoronto.ca Howard Chiang . After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 391 pp. $65.00 (cloth), $26.00 (paper). After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China, based on the author's Princeton University doctoral dissertation, is the first monograph-length historical account of transformations that both established and challenged sexual binaries in the Sinosphere from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It is wide ranging and ambitious in its themes and scholarly engagements. A succinct introduction surveys the work's narrative arc: Howard Chiang posits a "genealogical relationship" (7) between palace eunuchs, men castrated to qualify for service in imperial households since China's early dynasties, and Cold War–era sexual reassignment, which saturated the Taiwanese press under the Nationalist (Guomindang) Party after its retreat from the Communist-ruled mainland in 1949. The connection, Chiang argues, was a transformation in ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender between the 1920s and the 1940s. Chiang sees this shift as comparable to Michel Foucault's model of the rise of scientia sexualis, 1 anchored by state power and scientific/medical expertise, in modern Europe. In China, too, new notions about sex grew symbiotically with nationalistic ideas about the naturalness of "China." The opening chapter focuses on representations of eunuchs from the late Qing empire (1644–1912) to the Republic of China (1912–1949). The nineteenth-century court was forced by military and diplomatic reversals to grant increasing concessions to foreign states and individuals. Eunuchs surfaced in venues from expatriate European medical experts' publications to the emergent Chinese news media; Chiang also cites published recollections by eunuchs themselves. The ambiguity of what castration entailed and self-contradictory characterizations of eunuchs, including those who had self-castrated, Chiang contends, did not stop either foreign observers or increasingly nationalistic Chinese commentators from linking castrated bodies with China's weakness and backwardness, paralleling the contemporaneous condemnation of female footbinding as symptomatic of "the sick man of Asia." Chiang's subsequent chapters take up three facets of the transformation of Chinese sexuality and gender across the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: "visibility," "new layers of visual evidence that made it possible for sex to become an object of observation" (71); "carnality," would-be sexological experts' debates about desire in the urban press; and "malleability," knowledge about sex hormones and intersexuality that made it possible to imagine any human body changing sex. [End Page E-6] Chapter 2 charts three phases of visualizing sex in textbooks and other texts of scientific expertise; they explain "how and why Western biological notions of sex" became the intellectual default (107; emphasis original). A novel "anatomical aesthetic" emphasized mapping organs and tissues and defining sexual difference physiologically. Next came "morphological sensibility," which compared male and female animals, drawing links to human sexual difference. Finally, Chiang describes the "subcellular gaze," which construed chromosomes and gonadal tissues as proof of sexual dimorphism. Chapter 3 documents "epistemic modernity" (129–33) in the new field of sexual science, mainly through writings by French-trained philosopher Zhang Jingsheng (張競生 1888–1970) and American-educated eugenicist Pan Guangdan (潘光旦 1898–1967) and responses thereto in the urban media. Chiang calls sexological discourse "heterogenous—and perhaps even ambiguous" (158) though it reified the "science" of sex and the authority of scientific expertise. Debates over the category of homosexuality and its threat or value to modern Chinese society illustrate this point. Sexologists formulated "homosexuality" as a totalizing identity distinct from older status- and performance-based understandings even as they projected it anachronistically backward. In chapter 4, Chiang traces an unprecedentedly fluid view of sexual difference. A hormonal conception of sex based on Euro-American research prevailed among Chinese intellectuals by the 1940s. Chiang takes the 1935 coverage of Yao Jinping (姚錦屏 ca. 1915–?) to exemplify the flexibility of sex in this endocrinological perspective. Yao, a young woman, claimed to have undergone "physical sex change" literally overnight (209) media, doctors, and the army general who had commanded her missing father...

The Social Power of Literature: How Could a Novel Resist to What is Wrong with a Culture?

This paper represents an attempt to describe the society of and ideals which lead to the destruction of the body. The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood lends itself well to an exploration of this complex condition. This is particularly true if we consider the fact that Margaret Atwood writes about the female body in terms of the culture that determines it. Atwood's female bodies tell the story of the subjects' experience within a system that seeks to consume them. Susan Bordo finds Foucault's model of self-surveillance useful for the analysis of femininity is reproduced through a process of self-normalization to cultural ideals of the perfect face or the perfect body. According to Susan Bordo anorexia must be defined within a cultural context. Bordo feels that it is through eating disorders that resistance to the dominant ideological system is made known. But at the same time this resistance also destroys the contemporary female body. In conclusion we could claim that body image is strongly influenced by social norms about physical beauty. We will see how the human body is introduced in a mechanism of power with a social basis, that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it.

World Series

Many practitioners of ‘world art studies’ are sceptical of systematic global models of world art history and of material and visual culture developed by such recent writers as John Onians and David Summers, though such models were common in art history in the past. The article distinguishes two theories of history in ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ world art history respectively, identified with the historiography of George Kubler and Michel Foucault respectively. Kubler's ‘rule of series’ stresses determined and developmental serial order whereas Foucault's model of ‘conjunction’ stresses contingent occurrence and unintended consequences. Though seemingly opposed, both models can be useful in describing the worldwide topography and chronology of visual and material culture and both have certain limits. The article suggests that they can be combined to yield a model of ‘devolution’ in the global or worldwide transcultural replication of series of visual and material culture – of causally ordered series that are nonetheless not governed by any ‘rule’. This model may be more palatable to sceptics of systematic models of art history than the existing evolutionary models.

Hard-Hearted Women: Sentiment and the Scaffold

To dramatize his argument about disappearance of torture as public spectacle, Michel Foucault juxtaposes graphic drawing and quartering of Damiens regicide in 1757 with regimented schedule for penitentiary inmates published eighty years later. Flesh torn, wounds doused with molten liquid, Damiens's tortured horrified onlookers into submission. In this way, public execution served as of truth, scene of public expiation that solidified state power by publishing prisoner's crime and justice meted out to him by bearing [the of what he had been charged with I physically on his body (43). A century later, Foucault argues, object of punitive discipline had shifted from to the modern soul, product of new economy of punishment (23). Subsequent histories of American punishment have followed Foucault's model, tracing historical shift from colonial-era display of to nineteenth-century discipline of soul. (1) This contrast usefully distinguishes colonial-era punishment from modern penitentiary's technologies of power, architecture, space, and disciplinary regimes. But Foucault's theory of public punishment does not adequately explain tenor and purpose of colonial American execution accounts, which sought to produce a moment of truth not by torture, nor through mere spectacular display of body, but by promising access to soul of condemned. The condemned galvanized spectators because she or he stood seemingly on precipice of eternal salvation or damnation. Ministers overseeing public execution strove desperately to (re)produce this feeling of immediacy both in condemned and in spectators, which meant making both parties open and receptive to God's saving grace. While modern readers tend to find these ritual performances rote and formulaic, ministers, spectators, and often condemned themselves expressed deep interest in persuasive and affecting qualities of execution sermons and confessions. It was not enough to have condemned confess guilt or recite familiar narrative of sin's slippery slope from disobeying one's parents or failing to observe Sabbath to committing murder. Instead, narratives sought to assess and convey sincerity and felt urgency of condemned's spiritual readiness for death. (2) This meant complex rendering of on scaffold, one with both surface (capable of expressing gesture, posture, and other semiotics of penitence) and an interior, defined most crucially by heart--the seat of both emotion and spirituality and, hence, an invaluable space for representing process of religious conversion. As result, execution rituals that developed in colonial New England were variations on early modern anatomy theaters, laying bare interior--the heart--of condemned in order to move spectators to self-examination and spiritual knowledge. (3) While any prisoner on scaffold served as potential vehicle of affect, women were more frequently used to dramatize both hard-heartedness of sin and heart-melting processes of religious conversion and confession. This is especially evident through 1740s, period when Protestant spiritual practice heavily shaped form and function of published execution accounts prior to genre's gradual secularization. Thus, modifying Foucault, I argue that execution's gendered power effects shape its power affects, its ability to produce an affective response in condemned and in those watching her or his execution. Replacing of Damiens with bodies of Sarah Threeneedles, Esther Rodgers, and Margaret Gaulacher allows us to see lesser-understood mechanisms of affective exchange at work in early American execution rituals, transactions grounded not only in Protestant spiritual practice but also in shifting scientific and medical understandings of body. By asking scholars of punishment to think more rigorously about what it means when of woman becomes figure not merely of public shame but also of communal identification, embodying wider social body's possibilities of reform and redemption, this essay complicates modern theories of punishment that are shaped by assumption that ritual of scaffold can produce kind of truth. …

The panoptic gaze in a non-western setting: self-surveillance on Merapi volcano, Central Java

Jeremy Bentham's late eighteenth century concept of the ‘panopticon’, popularized by Foucault two centuries later, has become a ubiquitous model for thinking about not merely surveillance but self-surveillance in the modern state. Foucault's analysis of the panopticon, and indeed perhaps the panopticon itself, is tied to a particular time and place of state development. What are the implications for this scholarship of different, non-western traditions of state surveillance? An effort is made to answer this questions drawing on a body of beliefs about volcanic hazard from the Sultanate of Yogyakarta in Central Java. It is believed that there is a spirit world inside the crater of Merapi volcano that mirrors the world of humans. By monitoring the volcano, it is thought that insight can be gained into what is happening in the everyday world. These beliefs thus represent a model for monitoring, for surveillance, for self-surveillance. The ways that this both resembles and differs from Bentham's and Foucault's model of the panopticon offers new insights into the cultural and historical dimensions of our current understandings of the state gaze. This analysis will also offer new insights into the applicability of Foucault's work on surveillance and governance in non-western contexts.

Revising Foucault's Model of Modernity and Exclusion: Gauchet and Swain On Madness and Democracy

This article reveals how Marcel Gauchet and his late wife Gladys Swain revise Foucault's history of madness and modernity by arguing that the history of modern civilization represents a recognition of the mad, rather than their exclusion. Turning to the French Revolution, the article then examines the relationship between disciplinary practices and a wider democratic context. It shows that while Foucault reduces democratic societies to proto totalitarian practices, Gauchet and Swain give a broader and more historically complex account of asylums and the democratic context in which they emerge. This allows them to see resistance in the asylum and in democratic societies in general: while Foucault thought the panoptic asylum revealed modernity's ultimate success, for Gauchet and Swain it proved only its failure. However, the article ends by arguing that, despite all their differences, Gauchet and Swain's critique of contemporary societies remains in some respects indebted to Foucault.

Vulnerabilidade e vida nua: bioética e biopolítica na atualidade

The study had the objective of analyzing the notion of vulnerability that is used by bioethics to debate research involving human beings today, from reflections on biopolitics in contemporary culture. For this, the starting point was Giorgio Agamben's reading of Foucault's model of power (Sovereignty and Biopolitics), with the aim of subsequently analyzing the notion of bare life: "life without any value". If the devices of power in modern democracies conjoin biopolitical strategies with the emergence of the strength of sovereign power that transforms life into bare life, in fact bioethics must be an instrument for protecting people who have become vulnerable. Nevertheless, beyond the territory of the rule of law, bioethics must also penetrate the undifferentiated zones where sovereignty and techniques become mixed, disrespecting the frontiers of biopolitics and questioning the condition of vulnerability itself.

Romantische Wissenspoetik: Die Künste und die Wissenschaften um 1800 by Gabriele Brandstetter, Gerhard Neumann

II74 Reviews and then as a part of the twenty-two texts comprising the cycle Abendrote, inwhose second half the night instructs the imagination. After a textual and metrical ana lysis which demonstrates how 'Schlegel succeeds in blurring the boundaries between the wanderer and moonlight' (p. I76), Parsons turns to Schubert's setting, which at first appears to provide closure to Schlegel's open-ended journey; on closer analysis, though, the song's final tonic suggests yet another start, with the penultimate mea sure being amodified repeat of the first. Loges, in turn, makes clear how the persona in Brahms's song emphasizes the praise of the beloved, overriding all evidences of her cruelty: 'in the case of op. 32, no. 7, Brahms rescues Daumer's poem from its own sentimentality by providing a gently questioning musical subtext' (p. I96). Both interpretations make judicious use of tables and selections from themusical scores as complements to their verbal analyses, allowing even the musically untutored reader to follow their argumentation. They, the editors, and the publisher all deserve praise for an elegantly produced volume. Clearly, not all topics relating to the theme of 'Music and Literature in German Romanticism' can be treated within a single volume. But the ample footnotes both within the individual contributions aswell as those of the learned introduction by the editors provide copious references to other valuable studies on the subject, including German opera. There is no doubt in this reviewer's mind thatMusic and Literature inGerman Romanticism is destined to be an indispensable reference-point for future interdisciplinary studies in this field. UNIVERSITYOFVERMONT DENNIS F. MAHONEY Romantische Wissenspoetik: Die Kuinste und die Wissenschaften um i8oo. Ed. by GABRIELE BRANDSTETTER and GERHARD NEUMANN. (Stiftung fur Romantik forschung, 26) Wiirzburg: K6nigshausen & Neumann. 2004. 4i8 pp. ?48. ISBN 3-8260-2632-2. This volume presents the proceedings of a symposium on the shifting relationship between the arts and the sciences around i8oo, and in particular on the role of (models of) perception within this dynamic. The seventeen contributions are divided into five sections-(I )The Fine Arts, Dance, Music; (2)Medicine, Psychology, Jus tice; (3) Anthropology; (4) Optics; (5) Religion, Philosophy, Philology-and, with some notable exceptions (Gabriele Brandstetter on Carlo Blasis, Hubert Thiiring on Giacomo Leopardi), are based mainly on German sources. Given the topic, amore comparative orientation might have seemed desirable; however, the volume's strength is its coherence, although it covers a truly wide range of topics from mesmerism in E. T. A. Hoffmann (Julrgen Barkhoff) to Indology (Axel Michaels) and etymology (Stefan Willer) inRomanticism. In one way, the various chapters offer a rich and detailed illustration of Foucault's model of an epistemic paradigm shift at the threshold between the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. In another way, and more interestingly, they demonstrate that any such model falls short of the complexity of the actual historical process. Two of the best examples are Roland Borgards's 'Kopf ab', on the discussion surrounding the invention of the guillotine and the question of knowledge regarding the pain of those executed, and Harald Neumeyer's 'Unkalkulierbar unbewuBt: Zur Seele des Verbrechers um i8oo', a reading of the interaction between criminal justice and empirical psychology. Both pieces integrate literary texts into their argument (Brentano's Geschichte vom braven Kasperl und dem schinen Annerl, and Schiller's Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre). More importantly, they show, by drawing on lesser known historical sources, that epistemic convictions about the evidence for pain or the causes of human behaviour and questions of moral responsibility are not developed MLR, IOI .4, 2oo6 I I75 inmonolithic master discourses of any one-old or newly emerging-discipline, but in exchanges between scientific, medical, legal, and literary writing as well as actual juridical practice. This leads to an important qualification of Foucault's general thesis that the production of knowledge and control over the individual go hand in hand: in fact, the philosophically sophisticated reflections of medical and legal practitioners, while producing knowledge, at the same time produce awidening margin of doubt and uncertainty. Although no stone is left unturned to achieve clarity about the mo ment of death, the explanation for a delinquent's...

Representation, Categorization, Identity, and Sex

Pamela Cheek. Sexual Antipodes: Enlightenment Globalization and the Placing of Sex. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. xi + 246 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4663-X (cl). William Stafford. English Feminists and their Opponents in the 1790s: Unsex'd and Proper Females. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. ix + 239 pp. ISBN 0-7190-6082-6 (cl). Scholars of eighteenth-century Britain and France continue to debate the effects of print culture on the status of women, the extent of women's contributions to the formation of public opinion, and the relation between print representations and lived experience. The two books under review approach these issues in such radically different ways that reading them in tandem produces distracting but ultimately productive questions regarding methodological and disciplinary conventions. Pamela Cheek presents a study steeped in postmodern theory that pulls together an array of texts that range widely temporally and geographically. William Stafford rattles the theoretical models that scaffold Cheek's analysis as he seeks to recover the views of a small, interconnected group of women writers and their reception in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Sexual Antipodes sets out to explain "how the idea of sexual order and disorder became a primary tool in British and French print culture for imagining globalization and defining modern national and racial identity" (2). Cheek finds Jürgen Habermas's model of the Enlightenment bourgeois public sphere, with its facilitation of the free exchange of ideas, relevant to Britain and Michel Foucault's model of increasing institutional encroachment into private lives more applicable to France. She extends the Foucauldian notion of sex becoming the central element of individual identity in Western Europe to national identities. The first half of Sexual Antipodes examines the different ways in which English and French writers used sexuality as a fundamental point of distinction in competing notions of selfhood and statehood in support of her first main contention, that "identity in modernity is contingent on the placing of sexuality" (7). Although women in both countries had access to the public sphere while simultaneously being inundated with prescriptive literature on the virtues of domesticity, a common perception persisted that excessive mingling of the [End Page 201] sexes in France produced a national character of politeness and gaiety. Concern regarding female influence in public life, particularly at court, brought the libidinization of the absolutist monarchy. Sexual attacks on the British monarchy, in contrast, ceased with the ideology of constitutional liberty that took hold after the Restoration period, "indicative of a major reaction in public life against any alignment of publicity and sexual performance" (36). Enlightenment enquiries into the role of sex in the social order by Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pierre Chonderlos Laclos, and others, and in the popular genre of the Oriental tale, explored the contentious power relations between men and women and produced paradoxical constructions of sex both as natural and moral and as conducive to artificiality and vice. Sex then became the glue of society—the means of bonding with one's own kind—but the foundation of inequality as well. Cheek builds upon previous studies of the desacralization of the French monarchy with an analysis of two sorts of "public women" associated with the degeneracy of the court. She first considers representations of actresses in the Mémoires secrets (1777-89), a clandestine journal chronicling the Parisian cultural scene. While British actresses cultivated reputations as domestic paragons, their French counterparts were assumed to practice depravity in private. As they portrayed royal and aristocratic characters on the public stage, star actresses displaced the court as the embodiment of publicity. Cheek then turns to the reports that the Paris police gathered on prostitutes, a practice rumored to have originated with Madame de Pompadour's desire for salacious material to keep Louis XV entertained. These reports provided fodder for a new genre of publication, the scandalous chronicles, and framed the narrative of Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets. In this Oriental tale, Mangogul, a sultan, alleviates...

The Return of Panopticism: Supervision, Subjection and the New Surveillance

This article revisits Foucault's concept of panopticism as in pertains to research on the new surveillance. Drawing on the work of neo-Foucauldian authors in surveillance studies the paper shows how the figures of the supervisor and inmate within the Foucauldian diagram suggest different directions for pursuing surveillance theory. On the one hand, there is a concern with processes of subjection and normalization that arise through the internalization of the gaze, while on the other there is a concern with processes of administration, social sorting and simulation that occur independently of embodied subjects. Foucault's model both allows for these twin concerns within the context of the new surveillance while serving as a source of further insight into the empirical nuances of contemporary surveillance relations.

"Soul" in Blake's Writing: Redeeming the Word

Why wilt thou Examine little fibre of my Spreading them out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry The is beautiful but its anatomy Horrible Ghast & Deadly (Erdman 302, 167) (1) To show outrage at this objectifying examination by a person who was once a part of the speaker's own self, each of the speakers in this repeated passage invokes the rhetorical weight of the word soul, a word that in the Christian tradition defines the most essential, sacred, and inviolable aspect of the human self. By insisting on its materiality, however, -- every little fibre ... spread [...] out before the Sun like Stalks of flax to dry, a dessicating anatomy/Horrible Ghast & Deadly--the speaker is not simply literalizing an imaginative metaphor but bringing together with ironic force a cluster of older spiritual meanings and newer materialistic meanings for soul. In this ironic constellation, a precarious Judeo-Christian unity of the self as an autonomous subject claiming moral agency and thus capable of redemptive choice is pulled in one direction by a Platonic, dualistic definition of as a repudiation of bodily materiality for spiritual redemption and pulled in another by an Enlightenment science that was discovering the fibres of a nervous system linked to a material brain. Associated with this Enlightenment science through the speaker's invocation of a materialist infant joy is still another shift of meaning for soul, a center of emotional response to the senses, a defined by sensibility. To read these lines from Blake's late epics as totally material is to make the speaker sound like a victim from an Amnesty International report--or like the dismembered traitor Foucault so famously describes in his opening chapter of Discipline and Punish. To read the punishment as psychological is to make Enion or Albion, the examiners, into agents of surveillance like the prison workers in Bentham's Panopticon, which Foucault describes in a later chapter. Such a reading would seem more modern in Foucault's historicizing schema of punishment, and of social order more generally, as an increasingly internalized discipline. Yet the history of usages for the word soul in Blake's time--and the practice of his own usages--traces changes in subjectivity or selfhood that are messier than Foucault's powerful model for epistemic change in Discipline and Punish. This pattern in usage for the word soul during Blake's era is historically opposed to Foucault's model, which turns from spiritual or mental to physica l and material--and then, a little later, back to a secularized psychological meaning. In Blake's own writing, the linguistic polyvalence is wonderfully fluid, with many usages appearing even in the same work. Richard Rorty claims that such multivalence in a single, culturally central word reflects a gradual, collective, and only semi-conscious shift in episteme (Rorty 6-7); in an era of transition the multiplicity of meaning in soul would generate ironies even without conscious artistry or intention to direct them. I will argue, however, that Blake is aware of these historical shifts in the meaning of soul and that he plays creatively with those shifts. A deconstructive argument like Molly Rothen-berg's might conclude that even Blake's intentional creative play with meaning can act only as a critique of existing structures and beliefs and cannot build new structures and beliefs. That is, creative play with multiple meanings of soul might use materialist meaning to criticize a rigid dualism or a rigid a nti-corporeal morality, but it could assert no coherent new synthesis--irony would destroy agency (Rothenberg 4-6). In another critical space, I suggest that Blake uses these multiple meanings of soul to aim toward a resurrected spiritual corporeality, an embodied and imagined self based both upon Enlightenment materialism and upon Paul's I Corinthians 15:3944: All flesh is not the same flesh. …

Modernist misapprehensions of Foucault's aesthetics

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present.

Digital Rule

This article develops a theoretical model of `digital rule'. This is a form of at-a-distance monitoring which becomes possible with the advent of certain electronic technologies. It is argued that this form of monitoring gives rise to a related form of decision-making, and to particular forms of punishment, both directly and indirectly. The article begins with a review of Foucault's work on `discipline'. It is argued that while his general approach remains useful, his `technology of power' model requires updating, because of certain moves within many criminal justice systems away from reliance on the disciplinary techniques Foucault associates with modernity. I argue that comments by Deleuze suggest a way of developing a theoretical adjunct to Foucault's model, and this new control form I characterize as one of `digital rule'. Various emerging electronic technologies are examined, and it is shown how they operate specifically through restrictions specified in terms of time and space. The relationship between formal control, exclusion and punishment measures is considered, and it is concluded that in this emerging form of rule, these aspects continue to have a very close relationship, manifest here in a particular new way.

Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity

In this collection of essays, historians and literary theorists assess the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his History of Sexuality, on the study of classics. Foucault's work presents a theory of sexuality for both ancient and modern times. These essays should help the reader to explore Foucault's model of Greek culture and see how well his interpretation accounts for the full range of evidence from Greece and Rome.

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.

The Ethics of Indecency: Censorship, Sexuality, and the Voice of the Academy in the Narration of Jacob's Room

Although much of plot of Jacob's Room deals with Jacob's sexual education, narrative voice is spectacularly reticent when it comes to actually recording his progress. Throughout novel, anything spoken on topic of sexual desire or sexual activity is subjected to very specific and ostentatious kind of censorship that cuts overt discussion of sex or sexual desire out of text even as it directs reader's attention to lacunae left behind. This artificial and deliberate . . . narrative reticence (Zwerdling 900) is partially critique of how Jacob's (and Woolf's) contemporaries dealt with sexuality; it also helps Woolf parody conventions of bildungsroman, which require hero's sexual education to assume central role.(1) But narrative's refusal to record Jacob's sexual education is more than just satire on Edwardian prudery. The narrative censor in Jacob's Room dramatizes what Foucault calls the great process of transforming sex into (22); it speaks verbosely of its own silence and takes great pains to relate in detail things it does not say (Foucault 8). Its object is not to remove sexuality from novel, but to police it by turning it into narrative that can be controlled. By deliberately incorporating this censor into narration, and by inviting reader to observe its methods and motives, Woolf makes policing of sexuality in Edwardian England one of central issues of Jacob's Room. The main business of this study is to trace operations of that censor and examine intimate relationship between project of regulating sexuality and other, apparently unrelated, effects of power that are dramatized in novel, including Jacob's death in World War I. Naturally Foucault's discussion of regulation of desire in The History of Sexuality will provide much of framework and some of vocabulary for this argument; but while Foucault's model is in many ways peculiarly applicable to this novel, there are also some important points of divergence between Foucault's construction of sexual discourse and discourse circulating in Jacob's Room. Perhaps most significant point of divergence is that while Foucault is infamous for eliding question of agency and refusing to locate power that regulates sexuality in any specific of institutions and mechanisms or any discrete system of dominance exerted by one group over another (92), narrative construction of Jacob's Room argues that Woolf had specific ideas about who and what wielded that power. Woolf carefully entwines narrative strand that follows Jacob's sexual education with one following his intellectual education until two finally become inseparable; same narrator that regulates sexual discourse in novel also trumpets values of intellectual culture that molded Jacob. By showing that success of this regulatory project is necessary to continued dominance of academy and its values, Woolf ensures that reader's knowledge of censor's misdeeds also indicts Cambridge and what it represents, and that war that rips out of his narrative finally becomes damning metaphor for academy's attempt to protect its secrets. Before we can discuss this peculiar form of censorship we must come to some understanding of how narration works in Jacob's Room. Critical opinion on this head has evolved over time from an assumed equation between Woolf and narrative voice of her novel to recognition of complicated ironic distance between Woolf and her characters (Morgenstern 351). Still, puzzling determination to see narrator as monologic, unitary voice with distinct identity seems to prevail. Writing in 1972, Barry Morgenstern announced that narrator of Jacob's Room was in fact a thirty-five year old and proceeded to draw her short profile (353); 14 years later, Karen Lawrence's more sophisticated critique of narrative voice in Jacob's Room still insists on single narrator who is a woman, ten years older than Jacob with a distinct personality (33-4). …

Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (review)

BOOK NOTES final two sections look beyond the "imagetext" itselfand consider how it functions in society. In examining the relations between pictures and power, Mitchell adopts Foucault's model to the double demands of representation. Whereas illusionism involves power over subjects, he argues, realism involves power directed at objects. Translated into the social arena, this opposition assumes the form ofspectacle and surveillance, which "epitomize the basic dialectic between illusionism and realism in contemporary visual culture" (327). By contrast, Mitchell (after Habermas) imagines the public sphere as a place outside the realm of power, a scene where verbal and visual discourses circulate freely. Looking outward from this Utopian space, public art, film, and television attempt to penetrate and transform the codes of modern visual culture. Picture Theory is not only a welcome contribution to word and image studies, in short, but a basic text that is destined to become a classic. By any standards it is an exceptional achievement. Willard Bohn Illinois State University LINDA HUTCHEON. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. viii + 248 pp. Linda Hutcheon's essay on irony betokens more than the author's evolution from her 1 984 book on Narcissistic Narrative. It also bears witness to a fairly general transformation of criticism over the last 10 years. Her famed works on metafiction, parody (1985), and postmodernism (1988 and 1989) reflect the last decade's gradual shift from textual to contextual approaches, or from the "poetics of . . ." to the "politics of . . .," so to speak. In this light, both the title and subtitle ofthe new book are highly relevant: her essay sees irony as an "edgy" discourse (37) that "would seem to ingratiate and to intimidate, to underline and to undermine . . . bring[ing] people together and drivfing] them apart" (56). It is the ironic "edge" that renders irony a political phenomenon and Hutcheon's account a political one, interested in how ironic situations "bring people together" or "drive them apart." In other words, the "politics of irony" draws on the various responses ironic discourse elicits from various communities. In effect, community may well be the essay's core notion. To my knowledge, Linda Hutcheon's analysis is the first to focus systematically not on the community of"insiders" that irony sets up but on the extant communities that specifically react to ironic messages. "It is not so much," she points out, "that irony creates communities or in-groups; instead, I want to argue that irony happens because what could be called 'discursive communities' already exist and provide the context for both the deployment and attribution of irony" (18). Irony's Edge thus lays down the terms for a pragmatics ofirony, more precisely, for a pragmatic approach to the responses ironic enunciations prompt. Unlike rhetorical (Wayne Booth) or philosophical inquiries (Jankélévich) into the production ofirony, this book draws our attention to the ways in which "discursive communities" respond to irony. It is not the "ironist" that attracts the critic, but the "interpreter." The latter "attributes" ironic meaning to a message according to his/ her specific and sociocultural background. Irony, Linda Hutcheon claims, is enVoI . 20 (1996): 202 THE COMPAnATIST dowed with a "transideological identity" (15, 27, 35, etc.). It can be "both political andapolitical, both conservative andradical, both repressive anddemocratizing." Its political meaning—and very presence—may be ignored, read offfrom, orjust read into texts and images depending upon the groups to which the readers belong. In mis regard, Linda Hutcheon's pluralist view of irony addresses a concrete, multicultural urgency. She convincingly argues that ironic meaning is fundamentally "relational," bringing "together ... the said and the unsaid, each of which takes on meaning only in relations to the other" (59). Irony does not only "dissemble ," as its Greek etymology suggests; as a "relational strategy," it also reunites people and meanings. Most importantly, while underscoring the contribution of "discursive communities" to the actual enactment of ironic connotations, the critic rejects the canonical definition ofirony as antiphrasis (58). Ironic discourse does notjust mean different things to different people; these meanings (interpretations) need not write each other off since the ironic signification, the "unsaid," is not simply the opposite ofthe "said...

Management accounting as disciplinary practice: the case of ITT under Harold Geneen

The work of Michel Foucault has been influential in social science research generally and recetn scholarship on management accounting history more specifically. This paper evaluates a key section of his seminal text, Discipline and Punishment by applying it to recent corporate events. The principles of disciplinary control based on the analogy of the 'panoptical gaze' are elaborated and used to analyse the management of ITT, especially during the tenure of Harold Geneen as its Chief Executive Officer. The paper argues that Geneen's method, hailed as exemplary managerial practice, bear correspondence to Foucault's model. By applying management accounting principles, Geneen constituted managers as subjects and amenable, docile, obedient bodies, and established ITT as a large international conglomerate. However, Foucault's approach did not fully capture all of the important factors germane to this period and its aftermath. The paper concludes that political economy approaches to these events are not necessarily incommensurate or discordant with a Foucauldian approach and that both may be used in a complementary fashion to critique and reform managerial practices.