Foucault's Thinking Research Articles

Exploring the Foucauldian interpretation of power and subject in organizations

AbstractThis paper assesses the recent contribution of Michel Foucault to the study of power and subject in organizations. First, we theoretically examine Foucault's thinking by dividing his works into archaeological, genealogical and aesthetic/ethical phases. We then conduct a review of 113 international journal articles from between the years 2000 and 2009. We do this in order to obtain an overview of the phases of Foucault's thinking that are prevalent in recent organization studies. We find that recent academic studies drawing on Foucault are increasingly leaning towards Foucault's writings on governmentality, as well as on his genealogical works, which have sustained their popularity. Reflecting the growing interest in governmentality and genealogy, we end by pointing out some avenues for future research.

FOUCAULDIAN INTERPRETATION OF POWER AND SUBJECT IN WORK ORGANIZATIONS - A NORDIC PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACT This paper examines Michel Foucault's concepts of power and the subject. In order to acknowledge the changes in Foucault's intellectual career, we examine Foucault's thinking by dividing his works into archaeological, genealogical and aesthetic/ethical phases, as is commonly done. We also explore how these concepts have been applied to the study of organizations in the Nordic countries, and find that relatively few Foucault-orientated empirical articles about Nordic countries have been published in the last fifteen years.

O exercício ético na constituição do sujeito político como cidadão

Este artigo discute a construção do sujeito ético-político a partir das experiências relacionais engendradas nos espaços de um fórum popular em Vitória -ES. Recorre, principalmente, ao pensamento de Michel Foucault acerca do poder e da ética, de modo a problematizar a idéia de sujeito político atrelada, basicamente, à idéia de sujeito de direito. Propõe pensar a experiência política situada na trama articulada entre o poder e a resistência, tomada nos termos éticos do cuidado de si

"Corpo e Alma" nas organizações: um estudo sobre dominação e construção social dos corpos na organização militar

Este trabalho tem por objetivo discutir como ocorre o processo de construção social do sujeito militar e os mecanismos de controle subjacentes a essa socialização. Resultado de uma pesquisa de mestrado, a análise aborda o corpo como elemento central desse processo, devido ao seu caráter performático na atividade militar. Nesse sentido, autores como Pierre Bourdieu e sua articulação campo-habitus como elemento de reprodução do social, em conjunto com as reflexões de Michel Foucault sobre o poder disciplinar e as tecnologias de docilização dos corpos, nos ajudam a compreender como se processam esses corpos, a partir de uma tecnologização inerente à socialização militar. A metodologia utilizada foi o estudo de caso com a observação não-participante, entrevistas em profundidade e análise documental e de conteúdo. Com base nos resultados, concluímos que há uma variação nas formas de dominação, no sentido de privilegiar técnicas que vão desde uma pedagogia corporal para os soldados, até uma pedagogia moral para os oficiais, como principais instrumentos que visam, sobretudo, a uma espécie de dominação total do sujeito, ou seja, possuí-lo de corpo e alma na organização militar.

Foucault: a loucura como figura histórica e sua delimitação nas práticas psiquiátricas e psicanalíticas

Percorrem-se algumas linhas do pensamento de Michel Foucault. Tematiza-se o percurso histórico da loucura e a inserção desta em um campo de oposição entre a razão e a desrazão. Destaca-se a desapropriação, sofrida pela loucura, da possibilidade de falar a verdade de si. Neste sentido, a criação da psiquiatria, nos primórdios do século XIX, caracteriza-se pelo silenciamento moral da loucura; silenciamento este com o qual a psicanálise mais tarde compactua. Em um segundo momento, aborda-se o desenvolvimento histórico da relação médico-paciente enfatizando as práticas psiquiátricas e a contestação destas pela antipsiquiatria.

O conceito foucaultiano de literatura

This paper aims to analyse the concept of literature in Foucault's thoughts in the sixties. Departing from Foucault's thoughts about the ontology of literature, we demonstrated that the emergence of literature was possible as a consequence of the modern experience. Foucault shows that literature is the manifestation of the being of the language in its relation with death. We discuss the relation of literary writing with the modern experience, pointing its limits in sexuality, language and madness. Literature is seen here as the derangement of language, where we can observe the creation of its deciphering principals. Through this article, we observe that the literary writing is characterized by a basic transgressivity that refuses all tradition: past or future.

Discursos produzidos por colonos do sul do país sobre a matemática e a escola de seu tempo

O artigo apresenta resultados parciais de uma investigação que teve como propósito analisar discursos sobre a escola e a matemática escolar produzidos por um grupo de colonos, descendentes de alemães e evangélico-luteranos que freqüentavam uma escola rural do município de Estrela (RS), quando da efetivação dos decretos que instituíram a Campanha de Nacionalização - uma das medidas do Estado Novo (1937-1945), implementado no Brasil por Getúlio Vargas. A sustentação teórica do estudo encontra-se no campo da etnomatemática - constituído mediante os entrecruzamentos das teorizações pós-estruturalistas, em especial o pensamento de Michel Foucault, e das idéias formuladas por Ludwig Wittgenstein em sua obra Investigações filosóficas. O material de pesquisa examinado no artigo consiste em narrativas produzidas por sete colonos que estudaram naquela escola no período enfocado e em um texto elaborado por um dos participantes da pesquisa. O exercício analítico realizado mostrou que: a matemática escolar praticada naquela instituição foi sendo constituída como um conjunto de jogos de linguagem marcados pela escrita e pelo formalismo; as matemáticas geradas nas atividades cotidianas dos participantes do estudo podem ser significadas como conformando jogos de linguagem regidos por outra gramática, que utilizava regras como a oralidade, a decomposição, a estimativa e o arredondamento, constituindo critérios de racionalidade diferentes daqueles presentes nos jogos que engendravam a matemática escolar.

Foucault and the Architecture of Surveillance: Creating Regimes of Power in Schools, Shrines, and Society

Michel Foucault's critical studies concerning regimes of power are of special interest when applied to architecture. In particular, he warned of the hazards of building surveillance into architectural structures for the purpose of monitoring people and took as his historical exemplar English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's “Panopticon,” a structure originally used to assist in rehabilitating prisoners. He felt this kind of regulatory control resulted in maintaining power of one group over another. This article discusses what Foucault called the general ordering of the visible and the invisible by examining architecture as he viewed it—as an operation of power, control, and domination. More to the point, it places this belief in the context of power constructions in both sacred and school architecture and how this, in turn, creates a carceral society. This article also puts forward some of Foucault's thinking on architecture and connects this to his ideas of perceptual visibles and invisibles. The suggestion of schools as institutions of conformity and how their built environment functions as a regulatory force for this conformity is also explored.

Foucault, Power and Participation

AbstractIn this paper, I argue that Foucault's work on power offers a distinctive and original perspective with the potential to afford insights into the nature of participation. I begin by providing a brief exegesis of Foucault's conceptualisation of power in his middle to late work. The notion of governmentality is drawn out as a potentially useful tool in understanding participation as a profoundly ambiguous phenomenon. I conclude by outlining some of the possible implications of Foucault's thinking about power for studying children's participation.

The History and Critique of Modernity: Dewey with Foucault against Weber

In bringing the philosophical traditions of pragmatism and genealogy to bear upon contemporary debates regarding modernity, the work of both John Dewey and Michel Foucault has been subjected to misinterpretations that portray both traditions in a way that depletes them of the full force of their critical insight. The source of these misinterpretations is in many cases an attempt to squeeze the philosophical projects of pragmatism and genealogy into the mold that shapes the thought of most participants on both sides of the modernity debates. This mold can usually be traced back to the work of the influential sociologist, political economist, and philosopher Max Weber. One unfortunate residue of the subtle dominance of Weberian concepts in contemporary debates over modernity is that many thinkers who operated largely outside of these concepts cannot be brought into these debates without filtering their thought through this conceptual prism. In the case of Dewey and Foucault, their contributions to our understanding of the basic problems of modernity are widely misunderstood due to being filtered through Weberian concepts that simply were not central in Dewey's or Foucault's thinking. By distancing Dewey and Foucault from Weber as concerns their interpretations of modernity a significant point begins to emerge: a hitherto unnoticed convergence between pragmatism and genealogy. This convergence is significant because comparative analyses of pragmatism and genealogy, like those of these two traditions and Weber described above, generally tend to miss the important points of resonance which prove these traditions much closer than is commonly thought. After explicating Weber, Dewey, and Foucault I will conclude my discussion by considering briefly the attractive philosophical possibilities of combing Dewey's work on inquiry as reconstructive problem-solving with Foucault's work on critique as genealogical problematization.

Ensino de filosofia para não-filósofos. Filosofia de ofício ou ofício de professor: os limites do filosofar

O presente artigo é o resultado de um pensamento filosófico acerca do ensino de filosofia. O principal objetivo de nossa pesquisa foi entender o que faz o filósofo quando seu ofício é ser professor de filosofia. Para tal, utilizamos como referencial teórico-metodológico o pensamento de Foucault para pensar o filósofo-professor de filosofia em seu lócus - ensino de filosofia - enquanto uma ontologia do presente, e o pensamento de Deleuze e Guattari para indicar uma possível maneira de entender esse ofício de professor que acreditamos se dar em um fazer artístico, filosófico e científico.

Stratification without Class

I read Mark Edele's text great pleasure for simple reason that it does not place different generations of scholars at odds one another, but instead insists on their continuity. Less concerned revision at all cost, piece in this way opens path to a cumulative history that relies more on truths of past research. Since debate on revisionism in 1986-87, we have become accustomed to considering that social history is by definition incompatible theory of totalitarianism and that social historians must reject heritage of Sovietology of 1950s. Edele, however, convincingly demonstrates that in Harvard Interview Project, adhesion to notion of totalitarianism did not prevent description of a living Soviet society, which state by no means destroyed: let us consider, for example, what Bauer, Inkeles, and Kluckhohn write about peasant, angry man of Soviet (1) The same proposition could be demonstrated respect to classic text by Merle Fainsod on Smolensk, which contains more than one chapter on social history in most classic sense of term--for example, on criminality, peasant protests against collectivization, or complaints of industrial workers. (2) On whole, I agree Edele's perspective. In discussion that follows, I leave aside certain points for lack of expertise. I am too unfamiliar ideas of Talcott Parsons, for example, to appreciate his contributions to conceptualization elaborated by Bauer, Inkeles, and Kluckhohn. I do not elaborate at length on theoretical apparatus of Stephen Kotkin except to raise a question: are three references to Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau truly reconcilable? I wonder, since in L'Invention du quotidien Certeau has broken Bourdieusian model of habitus (est en rupture avec le modele bourdieusien de l'habitus). (3) As for Foucault's thinking, it counts a lot for him, but Certeau does diverge from it quite significantly. (4) For Certeau, it is, in effect, a question of excavating arts de faire (art of everyday practices), which manifest creativity of actors, rather than emphasizing social determinisms or anonymous disciplinary logics. Another problem, which Edele does not address, merits discussion: Stephen Kotkin insists just cause on learned practice of speaking Bolshevik and notes that use of language involved some degree of internalization by subjects. (5) But is it not imprudent to assert that the state was able ... to render opposition impossible? (6) Certainly other passages in book are more nuanced: Elements of 'belief' and 'disbelief' appear to have coexisted within everyone, along a certain residual resentment. (7) Kotkin nevertheless concludes positive integration of class that allowed it to find a place in official society. (8) In no way do I intend, this critique, to call for primacy of cases of workers' resistance; these, in my opinion, constitute exceptions and not common phenomena. (9) Rather, it seems to me that task for historians is to analyze diverse positions in population's attitudes toward regime, considering examples of vigorous resistance and protest but also taking into account instances of enthusiastic support, morose loyalty, retreat into private life, and so on. (10) As a social historian, I agree entirely critique of popular versions of theory of totalitarianism. Yet I must also acknowledge that positions of in 1980s suffered from two weaknesses. First, certain revisionists advocated social history with politics left out in tradition of G. M. Trevelyan, a position difficult to defend in Soviet context and in particular under Stalin, when state played such an important role in social engineering. (11) Second, revisionists' writings in general made use of word particularly in expression working class, without questioning specific nature of social stratification in USSR. …

Passing through the screen: Pierre Boulez and Michel Foucault

Summary In this paper I examine Foucault's little essay, “Pierre Boulez: Passing through the Screen”, in which he looks back from the vantage point of the 1980s at Boulez's music of the 1950s and his contribution to the project of aesthetic modernism. Before making a fairly detailed reading of the paper, I examine Boulez's role in the twentieth‐century serial tradition inaugurated by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Foucault's reading of Boulez focuses initially on the composer's radical break with the past; I suggest that Foucault was in a certain sense talking about his own break with a philosophical tradition founded in experience and conventional meaning. Boulez's experiment in the scientific and formal, I continue, had much in common with the methodologies from the history of science that were to become central to Foucault's thinking. Departing briefly from Foucault's essay, I argue that Gilles Deleuze fully understood why Foucault considered the project of serial music an important model; in fact Deleuze's notion of an “atonal logic” shows how the bodies of statements (énoncé) in different epistemes have the same relationship to each other as do different manifestations of the series in a serial composition. Returning to Foucault's commentary on Boulez, I briefly examine important settings of Char and Mallarmé, showing how they share features of a Foucauldian analysis: conjunctions between words, image and music are never subordinated to conventional meaning but are “justified only by the new necessity they have established”. Finally I look at Boulez as a conductor and interpreter who approaches the past in music with a belief that what he is doing in the present can change it; again the project seems Foucauldian. In conclusion I reflect that both Boulez and Foucault were similarly and at the same time creative and analytical in their work, able always to use thought in order to be able to think differently.

‘homo sacer’ out of left field: communist “slime” as bare life in 1930s and second world war sweden

This article maps ways in which radical left‐wing politics in 1930s and Second World War Sweden were conceived in medico‐biological and eugenic terms that expressed strong dehumanizing sentiments. The article engages Agamben's and Foucault's thinking on ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biopower’, and extensively exemplifies dehumanizing discourse as deployed by leading Social Democratic politicians, leading figures of government within the police and military, as well as by editors of both right‐wing and Social Democratic press. Ways in which individuals labelled ‘Communists’ were spatially managed in terms of extensive surveillance, registration, detainment planning and forms of incarceration are addressed. I further discuss state measures that may be seen as elements of a state of exception, some measures implemented against ‘Communists’, and others against individuals deemed to have undesirable characteristics seen to be hereditary. In employing Agamben's notion of ‘inoperosity’ in a discussion of a state paradigm of social productivity, eugenic measures in the building of the Swedish welfare state are then related to the dehumanizing framing of ‘Communists’. In conclusion, conditions for regaining a place in the body politic are briefly addressed. The article's focus on ways in which the ethnic and racial same was dehumanized within a democracy on political grounds results from a conscious effort to complement studies of dehumanization as related to colonialism, dictatorial regimes as well as identity politics.

Michel Foucault, Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell, London and New York, Verso, 2004, pp. xxvi, 374, 25.00 (hardback 1-85984-539-8).

Michel Foucault, Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell, London and New York, Verso, 2004, pp. xxvi, 374, 25.00 (hardback 1-85984-539-8).

Edward Said and Michel Foucault: Affinities and Dissonances

Edward Said played a key role in introducing Foucault's work to academics in the United States. While this initial appreciation of Foucault's thought was also reflected in his own work, it was not to last, however. Said's growing disenchantment with Foucault's thinking is reflected in the many essays he wrote and the interviews he gave over the years following the publication of Orientalism. At the same time, while Said's reflections point to his reasons for rejecting a Foucaultian approach to texts and the world, they also reveal a number of misunderstandings regarding Foucault's purpose. Said would eventually rectify these misperceptions and offer an eloquent and succinct analysis of Foucault's contribution to contemporary critical theory in the last essay he wrote on the French thinker.

Assujettissement et subjectivation: réflexions sur l'usage de Foucault en éducation

In this article, the author explores the possibility of using Foucault's thought in the field of education. At first sight, school seems to be a place where nobody can escape this form of power Foucault calls discipline. As Foucault's thinking develops, it tries to overcome this pessimism, but not to the point of giving back supremacy to the idea of the subject as an unconditional principle: it leads rather to an ethics of the concern for self. It is not impossible to link this ethics to educational practices but it is more difficult to consider it as a pure model for the educational act. Perhaps we should rather consider Foucault's thought as an invitation to vigilance and invention. And we should try to remain aware of the problem it points out: the difficulty of conceiving (and being) a self or a subjectivity which would not be simply the effect of techniques of subjection and, a fortiori, the difficulty of thinking the educational act as able to train such a self.

The Uses of Foucault's History of Sexuality in the Visual Arts

This is philosophy not as thought, but as theater. -a different thought, the thought of difference-a In these two passages of his essay Theatrum Philosophicum, Michel Foucault characterized what he believed to be an important achievement of Gilles Deleuze's book Difference and Repetition.' The achievement was to write a philosophical work that broke with existing forms in life and thought, and therefore was a creative act-was theater or pure event. It was an achievement to which Foucault himself continually aspired. Like his other books, the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, published in 1976 (six years after the essay on Deleuze), is meant to be such a creative act. The creative act was Foucault's alternative to theory, to which he objected because he felt it was reductionist and abstract.2 As a creative act, The History of Sexuality is best understood if examined in its entirety, taking into account how its form and its content interact with each other to produce meaning. If we focus on certain parts of the book at the expense of others, we risk seriously distorting what Foucault is saying. It would be like analyzing a painting through looking at only one detail of the composition. Given his complex approach to producing meaning, and given his avoidance of theory, applying Foucault's thoughts to studies in particular disciplines is a difficult challenge. Yet so compelling is The History of Sexuality-for what it says but also, for some scholars, because it is hip or at least in wide circulation that thinkers in virtually every field of the humanities and social studies have found occasion to use it to either support their own arguments or, contrarily, in order to disagree with it. In the field of study with which I am affiliated, art history, uses of The History of Sexuality, which are plentiful, have their own history in addition to the history they share with other fields. Foucault had a strong interest in visual art, and incorporated discussions of art into several of his writings, the two best known of these being a provocative analysis of Diego Velazquez's famous painting Las Meninas, in The Order of Things, and a consideration of the relationship between words and images in Rene Magritte's paintings, in the slim volume This Is Not a Pipe. The discussion of Las Meninas, especially, prompted passionate debates among art historians from around 1980 onward about the meaning of Velazquez's painting, and, more importantly, about what art history is.3 Therefore, when art historians in England and the United States began in the mid1980s to cite The History of Sexuality--it was translated into English in 1978-there already existed within the field a tradition of taking into account Foucault's work, and his work for many art historians had come to represent an alternative to conventional art history. Thus, when I enthusiastically set out to research the present overview of the ways art historians have cited Foucault's book, I was initially surprised-and disappointed-to discover two separate but in some cases related phenomena. First, I found that fairly often art historians had misunderstood Foucault's book due in large part to their failure to comprehend the book in its totality, as a creative act. Second, I realized that some art historians whom I had expected to make fruitful positive use of the book instead attacked sections of it forcefully. For a while, these two realizations upset me, because I did not anticipate writing, nor want to write, an essay that focuses on my disagreements with the thought processes of other art historians. I am still not pleased with this predicament, but at least I can make clear from the outset that my disagreements usually are with the authors' interpretations of Foucault, and not with what they say about the visual imagery about which they write; this point will be evident in my discussions of specific art-historical writings. …

Foucault's interpretive analytics of power 1,2

In this paper an interpretation of Foucault's work on power is presented. One aim is to introduce this aspect of Foucault's work to the emerging debate on Critical Systems Thinking. Another goal is to clarify how Foucauldian discourse about power can be framed within the notion of “interpretive analytics” (a term that describes Foucault's work, conceived by Dreyfus and Rabinow). This metalogical thinking proposes that archaeological and genealogical dimensions are proper methods for the study of the History of Thought. The interpretive space of experience-in which knowledge, power, and self are the axes of experience-is presented as a comprehensive model of the critical task of the History of Thought. Foucault's work is analyzed according to this model. Two conceptions of power arise from this analysis: the first conception is a peripheral view of power which raises key questions that drive the second, microphysical conception of power. We then demonstrate how the latter absorbs the former. The microphysical conception is based on a nominalistic view, which raises issues about nominalism in Foucault's critical thinking. These are addressed at the end of the article.

Intellectuals at War: Michel Foucault and the Analytics of Power

Take the case of Michel Foucault. All of the dizzying chaos that we call the humanities can be seen cavorting around him and his name. He is involved in so many areas and issues in criticism, history, politics, and the social sciences that honest men and women find it hard to study or work in any of these fields without stumbling across him if only to kick him aside. Foucault is immensely plastic. Scholars seem to make whatever they want of him, which is a risk attendant on his unusual style and interests. He is at once celebrated, castigated, and caricatured and sometimes even critically examined. But despite the relative ease with which the distribution network has circulated images of Foucault and his work, there always seems to be something at stake for intellectuals who write on and after Foucault. At issue, even though it is rarely, if ever, acknowledged, is the investment intellectuals have made in certain discourses, institutions, and practices. Above all, what seems to be at risk is the image which intellectuals (and others) have of themselves as intellectuals, and the very means by which they sustain their role in society as representatives of perspicacious intelligence and producers of symbols and values for society and/or the State. Foucault actually offers very little support to those who want to preserve or defend this leading intellectual role. In fact, I would suggest, Foucault's thinking about and analysis of power is fully intelligible only when seen as a challenge to the legitimacy of the leading intellectual as a social subject. Taken in this context, many important critical discussions of Foucault can be seen, above all, as defenses of the discourses and practices which always and variously validate and extend the privileged social and psychological position of both hegemonic and oppositional intellectuals. Many radical intellectuals with differing attitudes towards Foucault warn that his work should not become dogma to be celebrated and endlessly explicated in pursuit of the final Word. Rather, they argue, Foucault's work should