Regime Of Truth Research Articles

Armastusest: tõerežiimid, kultuurilised kujutelmad ja kehaline ilmakogemus / On Love: Regimes of Truth, Cultural Imaginaries and the Bodily Experience of Being in the World

Teesid: Artikkel lähtub teesist, et armastus kui tunne on lahutamatu sellest, kuidas seda tunnet sõnastatakse ja mõistetakse, ning analüüsib armastust kui kultuurilist kujutelma, mille äratundmine toimub vastavalt ühiskondlikele tõerežiimidele. Analüüsin armastusekujutust kirjandusteostes Alain Badiou armastusmudelite abil ning lisan juurde „omailma-armastuse mudeli“, mis rõhutab armastatu lahutamatust teda ümbritsevast ruumist: armastus ei hõlma vaid armastatut kui kindlalt piiritletud kehalist üksust, vaid ka seda, kuidas armastatu suhestub teda ümbritseva ruumiga ja inimestega. This article presents and analyses Western cultural models for speaking and thinking about love. According to Michel Foucault, each society establishes its regimes of truth: certain types of discourses are approved as truthful while others are declared unreliable. Each society includes mechanisms of control, which distinguish true statements from false, and assign some people (but not others) the authority to judge the true and the false, the acceptable and the unacceptable. Regimes of truth also establish paradigms for judging the truthfulness of love: according to the romantic regime, for example, love is something ephemeral, ungraspable and immeasurable, it transgresses established boundaries and norms; according to the pragmatic regime, by contrast, love can be expressed in economic terms and thus measured: a precious gift expresses commitment (else it would be a waste of money). There may be no common ground for one regime to concede legitimacy to a value asserted by a competing regime. In the view of the romantic regime, for example, the pragmatic regime might be judged as cynical and failing to grasp the essence of love – such weighing of feelings belongs to modern regimes of truth. Both romantic and pragmatic regimes of truth belong to the larger field of cultural imaginaries. Regimes of truth order and systematize the sphere of cultural imaginaries. I understand cultural imaginaries as the common ground for cultural identifications, a cultural complex that links together cultural memory, the value systems of one’s present era, and commonly shared expectations of the future. Cultural imaginaries are grounded partly in national culture, including the cultural knowledge shared by the national community and communicated in classic texts of that culture. In addition to specifically national cultural knowledge, cultural imaginaries of course include supranational value systems. The sphere of cultural imaginaries includes many inconsistencies and incoherences and it is always in flux. Alain Badiou outlines four philosophical models of love: romantic, practical, sceptical, and existential. I suggest that only two of these, romantic and practical (which I call pragmatic), have attained the status of truth regimes. Badiou foregrounds the existential model: according to this model, love is the refashioning of the world through the two, the replacement of an egocentric perspective with a new perspective based on difference. The greatest enemy of such love is not an intruder from the outside, but the self itself that prefers its own egocentric world to the love-world that is constituted through difference. Following some popular models of romantic relations in novels, I point to frequent tensions between the different models of love in fiction: contract-love versus romantic love, love as desire versus love as a friendly attachment, and I promote a model of love as encompassing not simply the figure of the beloved, but also his or her surrounding world. The conglomerate of relations that surrounds the human body and plays part in its identification could be called, following Jacob von Uexküll, an environing world of love. Thus, in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen or in Kasuema by Silvia Rannamaa, the female protagonist loves her male counterpart within the context of his environing world, where the beloved’s situatedness in the world becomes a defining part of the amorous relationship. Novels and films offer also a model of love which runs against Badiou’s ideal model of existential love: in some texts, the reader witnesses the birth of agency through love. In Asta Willmann’s short story “Patu vili”, the main character Berit grows from a passive, suffering, violated woman into an active, powerful figure who has strength enough to make groundbreaking decisions. She does not experience love as an existential relationship that offers her the possibility to relate to the world through the two, but she does grow as a human being and she finds strength and support in her relationship. The article concludes with the analysis of Mäetaguse vanad by Anton Hansen Tammsaare – in face of the death of one of the longterm partners, this short story exemplifies important qualities of shared life.

Time for Foucault? Reflections on the Roman Self from Seneca to Augustine

The essay approaches the idea of the self as this was most often formulated in antiquity from Heraclitus to Augustine—not as the object of self-fashioning and self-care, but as an irresolvable problem that was a productive if disconcerting source of inquiry. The self is less cultivated than it is “unbounded,” less wedded to regimes of truth and discovery than it is exposed, precariously, to crises of identity and coherence in the face of a constantly changing and unfathomable world. The self on this view of it does not conform to the accounts that are given by Foucault, Hadot, or Gill. Readings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Augustine are used to support this first attempt at an alternative picture of the self in antiquity.

Regimes of Truth and Pseudo-Environment : from Epistemic Chaos to Epidemic Contagion

People “live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones”. In his book Public Opinion (1922), Walter Lippmann uses these words to develop the notion of pseudo-environment. The latter is crucial if we have to understand in what contexts, with what forces and by what coordinates a process of continuous cognitive simplification – a so-called “non-truth” – is publicly created in a relevant and influential form, and subsequently becomes truth. According to Walter Lippmann, the “real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance between people and their environment”, and the pseudo-environment is an evolutionary trick, organized to withstand the pressure of increasing complexity. Lippmann’s work was published in an era of “analogical pseudo-environments”. Over ninety years have passed since then. We now live in the digital age and in a world of “digital pseudo-environments”. One might question, therefore, whether the American scholar’s view remains valid. What, in specific terms, are the global implications of the proliferation of environmental niches in relation to new media? My answer to this question is affirmative: Lippmann’s thesis is still valid, but it should be reversed. The digital pseudo-environment is not a shelter to the increasing complexity of the world. It is a complex, algorithmically mediated cage, which seeks to reduce complexity to banality. Engaging in human relations is no longer a process of evolution, but rather a process of involution.

The sustainable development labyrinth

Rather than try to give an account or definition of sustainable development of different schools of thought, what follows describes the evolution undergone by the discourse on sustainable development or the 'environmentalist' problem in Latin America in the last four decades by examining the work of Enrique Leff. His vast work represents a regime of truth, which has circulated around world. The examination of his most important texts, theoretical transformations and its problems are reflected in today's movements and discourses that advocate some form of sustainable development strategy. But as I will argue, some of the proposals do not reach their full potential; there are other theoretical paths out of the labyrinth if we reconfigure the sustainable development discourse with the support of the Latin American structuralism or centre-periphery, conception of the economy. The work of Leff is an outstanding regional - Latin American - autochthonous creation.

The sustainable development labyrinth

Rather than try to give an account or definition of sustainable development of different schools of thought, what follows describes the evolution undergone by the discourse on sustainable development or the 'environmentalist' problem in Latin America in the last four decades by examining the work of Enrique Leff. His vast work represents a regime of truth, which has circulated around world. The examination of his most important texts, theoretical transformations and its problems are reflected in today's movements and discourses that advocate some form of sustainable development strategy. But as I will argue, some of the proposals do not reach their full potential; there are other theoretical paths out of the labyrinth if we reconfigure the sustainable development discourse with the support of the Latin American structuralism or centre-periphery, conception of the economy. The work of Leff is an outstanding regional - Latin American - autochthonous creation.

The making of competitive bureaucracy: A case of bureaucratic reform in West Java province

AbstractIn this study, bureaucratic reform is understood as the practice of power operating through discursive process, that is, through the creation of a claim of truth on certain reform model, which subsequently is followed by disciplining practice to transform bureaucrat’s behavior. To analyze it, this study uses a case study of the implementation of Competition Funding Program to accelerate the achievement of Human Development Index in West Java Indonesia during the period of 2005–2010. The result shows how normalization and performativity is operated as technologies of power to construct an identity of innovative bureaucracy. This construction is justified by the idea of competition as a system of knowledge to produce regime of truth of competitive bureaucracy as a counter identity for conventional bureaucracy. Through normalization, bureaucracy is categorized into innovative bureaucracy (an expertise-based identity) and conventional bureaucracy (an clerical-based identity). Performativity is embodie...

Neoliberal deregulation as biopolitical paradigm of contemporary capitalist society

The main task of this paper consists in the analysis of neoliberal deregulation as biopolitical paradigm of contemporary capitalist society. The paper starts from the premise that the political strategy of deregulation clearly can be unmasked as a change of direction and the domain of government intervention or as some kind of re-regulation which implies a shift from state interventionism towards management that enables market. The neoliberal premise of deregulation does not imply a lack of government intervention in general, but rather a lack of government intervention in the economy while providing the same (market) economy to prosper. However, this is not (just) the result of actually existing neoliberalism, which would in practice of its implementation significantly departed from what could be called a postulates of neoliberal theory.Following the arguments of Michel Foucault, it becomes clear that neoliberalism is already in its theoretical and conceptual core a new technology of government, given that significantly departs from the political principles of the release of the market to operate as a self-regulatory mechanism, or the liberal premise of laissez-faire. This shift does not imply a change just in the economy of liberalism as much as in the liberalism as art of governing or governmentality doctrine. At the same time, the paper stresses that, despite the erosion of national sovereignty, biopolitical organization of power over life in the era of neoliberalism is not disappeared, but has taken on a new global and hegemonic form. It is not more biopolitics of single population, which has a clearly delimited border. It is now the overall organization of power over life, one that govern ?without government?, because it is handled by human aspirations, wishes, happiness, fears, etc., internalizing as a global common sense, unquestionable modus vivendi and the global regime of truth.

Bio-power, medical gaze and negotiation: Narrative experiences of anti-aging practices among Thai women

This qualitative study aimed to investigate anti-aging practices among Thai women and was conducted using an ethnographic approach. More specifically, the research methods included narrative interviews of participants, in-depth interviews with key informants, participant observation, and document analysis. Triangulation through multiple research data sources and methods was used for data validation purposes. Foucault's theory of bio-power inspired the inquiry and analytical process. The key findings from this study were: (1) the senses of body-self were both positive and negative, including media of happiness and good-spirit, inferiority complexes and worries, changes of the blood and circulatory system, unwanted/undesirable appearance, and reduction in passion and sexual attractiveness; (2) the anti-aging praxis of women involves dominant medical discourse operating a series of diverse knowledge practices. Those have become a truth regime embodied into the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of women. The discourse practices of anti-aging were health, beauty, and lifestyle choices. However, women have fluidity of self as an agency to negotiate with those discourse practices fixed to life contexts. This study revealed the subjective experiences of aging bodies as a sense of body-self and diversity of anti-aging practices reproduce discourse practices to regulate women bodies as bio-power and to increase awareness of narrative experiences of women attempting to understand the agency of women in multiple anti-aging practices in various contexts.

Forced Confession as a Ritual of Sovereignty

Torture and confession are like ‘the dark twins’ as Foucault argued. Definitions of torture from the 3rd century to the 21st century indicate confession as its primary motive. Systematic use of torture and confession has also characterised the Turkish state’s policy in Diyarbakır Military Prison against the Kurdish prisoners in the early 1980s. The detainees and the prisoners were routinely forced to repent and confess regardless of their organisational links or the crimes attributed to them. Wide, systematic and routine use of forced confessions in the prison showed that the significance of confession policy in Diyarbakır prison does not arise from their truth status or their effectiveness in intelligence gathering, but from their truth-effects. Although intelligence gathering was one of the objectives of the regime, the policy of confession was used primarily to establish dominance over the accused and to discipline and control the prisoners and the Kurdish population. Drawing upon Foucault, I will further argue that forced production of confession functioned as a ritual of truth-production and subjectification binding the prisoner to the dominant regime of power and truth and transforming him into a docile and obedient subject.

Jeanette Beer. In Their Own Words: Practices of Quotation in Early Medieval History-Writing .

Jeanette Beer’s In Their Own Words: Practices of Quotation in Early Medieval History-Writing is a welcome addition to an expanding field. Her approach in this study of various medieval historical works dating from between the ninth and thirteenth centuries involves a series of case studies foregrounding texts that broke, or appear to have broken, new ground substantively or stylistically or both: Nithard’s Historiae de dissensionibus filiorum Ludovici Pii, which contains the first extant sequence of vernacular French in the form of the famous Strasbourg Oaths; the Gesta Francorum, the earliest eyewitness account of the First Crusade (although this is a status that has been problematized in recent research); Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s and Robert of Clari’s accounts of the Fourth Crusade, the first prose histories written in French; and Li Fet des Romains, an early-thirteenth-century prose compilation and translation of all the materials that were then known concerning the career of Julius Caesar, which Beers argues is the first work of ancient history, and the first biography, to appear in French. The book’s central argument is that a close examination of each text’s practices of quotation—which can assume many forms, from the rendering of ipsissima verba to free indirect discourse, literary quotation, citation, allusion, and self-referencing—is an optimal route into an understanding of medieval historiographical practice and the influences upon it of both inherited classical forms and contemporary vernacular poetics. In so arguing, Beer sets her face against positivist minings of such texts for serviceable historical data. The point is well made, although there may be an element of pushing at an open door in light of the recent expansion of scholarly understanding of the complexity of medieval historiographical culture, in particular with respect to its regimes of truth.

The Ambivalent Autonomy of Mobile “Pocăiți” between Vicovu de Sus, Romania and Turin, Italy after 1989

AbstractIntra-EU labour migration literature is fairly limited within migration studies and it has seldom considered migrants' embodied experiences and processes of subjectivation as a constitutive element of translocal economic transformations. The present paper focuses on the popular economies enacted by a segment of the migrant working class moving from Vicovu de Sus in Suceava district, Romania to Turin, Italy after 1989 as entangled in the production of “neoliberalism from below” (Gago, 2015). Mobilizing oral histories collected during an ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2012 and 2013, I will present some aspects related to the fields ofproductionandreproductionwithin the movements of migrants belonging to a pentecostal community affiliated to theCultul Penticostal – Biserica lui Dumnezeu Apostolică. Pentecostalism is here understood as a performative regime of truth and practices (Foucault, 1987; Marshall, 2009), through which migrant bodies perform processes of subjectivation to actively “inhabit” the borders of the State and Capital. Bukovinean pentecostal discourse, through an entrepreneurial drive, a cultural shift towards material prosperity and a strict gendered division of labour, seems to have fostered the creation of a self-organized translocal community whose economic practices obey/re-enact rather than escape/re-signify the dynamics of exploitation and dispossession proper of Romania's peripheral incorporation into contemporary global regimes of production, accumulation and division of labour.

‘La Femme’ Before and After the Tunisian Uprising: (Dis)continuities in the Configuration of Women in the Truth Regime of ‘Tunisianité’

The rights of Tunisian women have been safeguarded in the aftermath of Tunisia’s popular uprising, despite initial and widespread fears of the contrary following the democratic victory of the Islamist Ennahdha party. Article 46 of the new constitution not only reinforces ‘les droits acquis’ of Tunisian women, but also seeks to expand them. The post-uprising preservation of women’s rights can be explained by the persistent hegemony of the image of the professional, modern and emancipated ‘Femme Tunisienne’ – since independence presented as a role model for women to live up to – and its crucial role in the truth regime of Tunisian modernist identity (‘Tunisianité’). In order to understand the (dis)continuities of this imaginary after the overthrow of Ben Ali, the paper traces the origins of the hegemonic yet ambiguous ‘Femme’ and discusses the role of Tunisia’s women’s movements in its reconstruction since the uprising.

The Discourse on Primal Religion

This article presents a formalized way to distinguish different regimes of truth in the historiography of religion. By focusing on the nineteenth-century European discourse on the origins of humanity and its (primal) religion in Africa, I will show how narratives of the origin always oscillate between a scientific and a religious regime of truth. The article further outlines a possible method to formally differentiate between insider and outsider positions by redefining them asthe assignment to a certain way of organizing a discourse or a semantic field according to a regime of truth. A discourse analysis and sociology of knowledge approach reveals possibilities to distinguish different constructions of insider perspectives by heuristically identifying codes, rarefactions, rules of formations, and regimes of truth.

Unconscious dying: the lightly tilled soil of palliative care and psychodynamics

It goes without saying that death, and foreknowledge its inevitability, has always been the ultimate human challenge, that drives, at conscious and unconscious levels, everything that is done, thought and believed. Given the dominant worldview of logical positivism, scientific mastery and personal control, coupled with modern epidemiological realities, decision-making and care for people who are approaching death is a major challenge for society and health systems. For over 50 years the lead has been taken by the hospice/palliative care ‘social movement’, and recently more broadly in health, especially in aged and intensive care, and by policy-makers. The overwhelming discourse and methodological approach tends to be linear, empirical and logical, in line with the zeitgeist, the ‘regimes of truth’ and ‘evidence base’ that are dominant in the system. This paper explores the possible unconscious personal and organisational forces at play when health services and society engage with the threat of death. It posits the view that a wider reticence to acknowledge the possibility of deep instinctual forces limits the capacity of the health system, its professional teams, individuals and wider society to work towards ‘healthier’ relationships with death, the dying, the dead and ourselves as ‘mortally threatened’ at all times. Concepts such as identification, projection, transference and ‘organisation in the mind’ will be explored in the death, grief and palliative care context, as well as a notion of ‘ingestion’ or ‘transmission’ of pain and loss of others as a driver of organisational discord and burn out.

The Politics of Sustainability and Development

This review examines the relationships between politics, sustainability, and development. Following an overview of sustainability thinking across different traditions, the politics of resources and the influence of scarcity narratives on research, policy and practice are explored. This highlights the politics of transformations and the way these play out under combinations of technology-led, market-led, state-led, and citizen-led processes. In particular, this review points to the politics of alliance building and collective action for sustainability and development. Transformations cannot be managed or controlled, but must draw on an unruly politics, involving diverse knowledges and multiple actors. This review highlights how politics are articulated through regimes of truth, rule, and accumulation, and how understanding such political processes has implications for institutional and governance responses. The conclusion reflects on future research priorities and the methodological stance required for an effective response to the political challenges of sustainability and development.

Missing theSavoirfor theConnaissance

This conceptual review addresses the bifurcation of content area and disciplinary literacy by examining each as regimes of truth. We look specifically at the ways in which both approaches comprise, in Foucault’s terms, “regimes of truth” within their respective epistemological domains. Following a brief history of adolescent literacy, extant research is considered. By employing a theoretical framework based on Foucault’s notions of “ connaissance” referring to a particular corpus of knowledge, and “ savoir” or knowledge in general, research and discourse surrounding the current debate over content area literacy and disciplinary literacy are taken up to deconstruct stances within these domains with the aim of a reconstruction that captures the affordances of both. Suggestions for moving the field out of this binary through a collaborative focus on interdisciplinary approaches are discussed.

Narrating the “Asylum Story”: Between Literary and Legal Storytelling

In 2014 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees reported that the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide had exceeded 50 million for the first time since the Second World War. The entanglement of literary and legal technologies in the asylum decision-making process as it operates today in legal, advocacy and creative circles excludes asylum seekers from incorporation as rights-bearing individuals if they do not conform to a particular narrative of persecution. In a moment of anxiety over “the meaning and scope of citizenship” comparable to that of the postwar period – and facing a refugee crisis of a similar scale – an investigation of the means by which asylum protection is constituted by and enacted through narrative forms is long overdue. This essay analyses the procedural characteristics of the asylum decision-making process, which produces what I call the “asylum story”: an idealized version of refugeehood on which the civic incorporation of the asylum seeker depends and which circulates in a narrative economy that sets the terms for the enunciation of refugee experience. It considers how the notion of a discoverable truth has inflected literary engagements with asylum, which are beset by the same anxieties around veracity and authenticity endemic to the legal process of decision-making on asylum, and ends with an analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story “The American Embassy” from her 2009 collection The Thing Around Your Neck. I argue that the story exposes the narrative instabilities of the asylum determination process, highlighting the ways in which those international institutions designed to protect human rights continue to be deeply implicated in regimes of truth which regulate upon whom they may be conferred.

Boxes of Poison

Rich and complex meaning making experiences, such as those associated with virtual play, sit uneasily with the view of literacy reflected in and sustained by current systems of accountability in education. This article develops a baroque perspective as a way of destabilizing the “regime of truth” associated with simple models of literacy—models that have emerged through educational reform. Building on post-structural approaches, we suggest that a baroque sensibility can help assert the messiness of educational experience and the contingent nature of meaning making that lie at the heart of literacy and learning. We draw on six techniques of the baroque exemplifying their use in an original methodological approach that we call “stacking stories.” These stories offer different accounts of actions and interactions in and around a virtual world visited by 9- and 10-year-old children in a U.K. classroom. The stories, together with the gaps, contradictions, continuities, and discontinuities between them, read together through a baroque lens, trouble the taken-for-granted. They evoke the affective intensities produced through interactions between body, text, and place as they infuse each other in multiple acts of meaning making. This baroque approach disturbs ways in which meanings are represented in both research and practice adding to post-structural accounts that foreground multiplicity and complexity. We suggest that such an approach provokes generous, ebullient, and vivid accounts of literacy that are elided by simple models of literacy.

Privacy for all students? Talking about and around trans students in “public”

ABSTRACTThis paper places under examination the arguments used to fight against school policies and legislation intended to guarantee and protect the rights of trans students. That is, the paper's central investigation works to uncover the regimes of truth about children, gender, race and privacy implicit in the methods employed by activists who seek to counter the expansion of rights for trans students. Using critical discourse and document analyses influenced by queer theories and Critical Race Theory, this paper examines the group Privacy for All Students and the arguments it makes in campaign documents against California State Assembly Bill 1266 – the statewide trans students’ right law passed in 2013. First, this paper unpacks the intertwined constructions of children before moving to an examination of how notions of innocence are founded by gendered, sexual, and racial regimes of truth. Then, it explores how the foundational logics of the public sphere make possible for PFAS to address their arguments about children and innocence to “the public” and suggest why close, critical readings of the seemingly implicit ways of knowing and thinking about gender, race, and privacy in their documents are important towards ensuring trans students have a place in school.

Corpos-ouvidos destes tempos: implante coclear na mídia

Resumo Este artigo apresenta uma reflexão sobre as relações entre mídia e a fabricação dos sujeitos surdos. Do conjunto de materiais, recortamos do Programa Fantástico especificamente o quadro sobre saúde, na reportagem intitulada “Crianças que nasceram surdas escutam pela primeira vez”. Tornamos a mídia um campo social a partir das ferramentas teóricas foucaultianas – discursos e sujeitos – analisando textos e imagens, extraindo deles seus enunciados e os regimes de verdade que produzem, de forma minuciosa, com regularidade e suposta legitimidade, um padrão social de referência e correção por meio do implante coclear – corpos-sujeitos-ouvidos – desejável. Ainda é possível perceber a invisibilização da língua de sinais e a produção de discursos que tratam a surdez como uma deficiência, localizada em um lugar de possível correção pelo implante coclear Abstract This article presents a reflection about the relations between the media and the fabrication of deaf citizens. The set of materials, we cut of the program “Fantastic” specifically the presentment of health, story titled "Children that was born deaf hear for the first time". We make the media a social field from Foucault's theoretical tools – speeches and subjects – analyzing texts and images, extracting them their statements and the truth regimes that produce, in detail, on a regular and supposed legitimacy, a social pattern and correction by means of cochlear implants – body-subject-ears – desirable. It is still possible notice the invisibilization of sign language and the production of speeches that treat deafness as a disability, located in a place of possible correction by the cochlear implant.