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From the End of Man to the Art of Life: Rereading Foucault’s Changing Aesthetics
Get PDFIn Foucault’s writing throughout the 1960s, in which he foregrounds the critical function of language and signification, works of art and literature – and works of avant-garde art and literature in particular – appear prominently and are the objects of sustained theoretical investment. In the 1970s, however, as Foucault moves away from his earlier concern with language’s capacity to dissolve “man” and begins to concentrate instead on the ways in which man is governed, works of art and literature no longer possess the same political promise for him and drop out almost completely from his writing. Yet the question of aesthetics does not disappear for him entirely, and, in his final years, he returns to it, though with his analysis now directed at what he calls an “art” or “aesthetics of life.” In this paper, I examine these developments with the aim of drawing out the connections between Foucault’s changing view of aesthetics and the larger transformations that take shape within his overall project. Against this background, I argue that Foucault’s call for an art of life, in which the individual develops techniques for continually reinventing his or her existence, does not necessitate abandoning the avant-garde aesthetic practices that he had previously advocated. Rather, I assert, his conception of an art of life – when read in conjunction with his theorization of critique as a “permanent” questioning of the limits imposed on us – offers a new framework for reimagining both the function of those practices and their legacies in culture today
The Third Modulation: Foucault, Security and Population
Get PDFEvolving as Foucault’s third modulation of power, security power marks a radical departure from previous eras of sovereign and disciplinary power. Dramatically decentering the individual, altering the means by which government acts and shifting from a static to a dynamic conception of temporal activity, an understanding of Foucauldian security power provides a number of critical insights into modern governance. This paper seeks to explain and analyze Foucault’s conceptualization of security power as the new language of governance and apply it in relation to the pervasive phenomena of government attempts to control fertility. Using the cases of inter-war France and post-colonial India, the theorization of security power will be grounded in the realities of natalist policy demonstrating the universality of the exercise of security power and its applicability to numerous contexts and settings. The concretization of theory in case study not only illuminates the workings of a new model of power but highlights the difficulty of resisting this novel type of government control. Understanding power to understand modes of resistance is central to the Foucauldian method, and drawing from Foucault’s newly translated lectures, this paper will bring to light a fascinating mode of analysis which helps illuminate the evolving nature of power and control in the modern era
Shitstorms, bobler eller sagsorienterede offentligheder? Digitale metoder og kontroverser på sociale medier
Get PDFKontroversen om planerne for en betalingsring i København afstedkom blandt andet en række sider på Facebook. Eksemplet er ikke enestående: Sociale medier lægger i disse år ofte brugerflade til folkelige protester og kontroverser. Sociologien har med digitale metoder fået en række værktøjer til at indsamle data om dem. Flere af de digitale teknikker er formet af et teoretisk udgangspunkt hos Bruno Latour. Artiklen undersøger, hvilke metodiske retningslinjer der følger af en Latour-inspireret forståelse af politik og demokrati. Først afsøges Latours inspirationskilder i den amerikanske pragmatisme. Dernæst diskuteres Noortje Marres’ bud på konsekvenserne for digitale metoder. Endelig analyseres betalingsringskontroversen for at give et eksempel på en undersøgelse med digitale metoder, der tager udgangspunkt i idéen om demokratisk offentlighed som noget, der opstår i anledning af konkrete problematiske sager. Analysen bygger på 4.500 posts og kommentarer fra syv forskellige Facebook-sider om betalingsringen, der opsummeres i en co-wordvisualisering. Artiklen fremfører, at et Latour-inspireret fokus på sagsorienterede offentligheder tilbyder et interessant alternativ til affejende begreber som shitstorms og ekkokamre, og diskuterer de metodiske udfordringer, som tilgangen medfører for digitale metoder. ENGELSK ABSTRACT Andreas Birkbak: Shit storms, bubbles or issue publics? Digital methods and controversies on social media The controversy around plans to introduce congestion charges in Copenhagen included a number of protest pages on Facebook. This is not unique since social media are often used for popular protests these days. With the rise of digital methods, sociology has obtained a number of tools for collecting data about such protests. Several of the digital techniques are inspired by the work of Bruno Latour. This article investigates the methodological challenges that arise from a Latour-inspired understanding of politics and democracy. First, Latour’s inspiration from American pragmatism is explored. Next, Noortje Marres’s arguments about the consequences for digital methods are discussed. Finally, the congestion charge controversy is analyzed in order to provide an example of an inquiry with digital methods that is based on the idea that publics emerge in relation to problematic issues. The analysis is based on 4,500 posts and comments from seven different Facebook pages about the congestion charge controversy. The article argues that a Latour-inspired focus on issue-oriented publics offers an interesting alternative to sweeping concepts like shit storms and echo chambers, and explores the methodological challenges that the approach entails for digital methods. Keywords: Digital methods, Facebook, publics, controversy, Latour, congestion charge
Dybdedyk efter inspiration - Københavns Universitetsbibliotek på Innovationstur Down Under
Get PDFMens de fleste informationsspecialister hjemme i Danmark forberedte årets afslutning med alt hvad det indebærer af eksamensstressede studerende, afslutning af årsregnskaber og julefrokoster, rejste ni medarbejdere fra Københavns Universitetsbibliotek (KUB) på studietur til Australien for at samle inspiration til, hvordan fremtidens bibliotek kan se ud
What a difference 15 years can make!
Get PDFEn sammenligning af litteraturlister fra 40 specialer med 15 års mellemrum
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution and the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), ISBN: 978-0-8166-9949-0.
Get PDFListening to Unreason: Foucault and Wittgenstein on Reason and the Unreasonable Man
Get PDFIn this paper I examine Wittgenstein’s appeals to madness in On Certainty in light of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie. A close look at these works, usually conceived as disparate, belonging to entirely different schools of thought, reveals they actually have much in common. Both can be read as investigations into the grounds of reason, and while they offer quite different and distinct perspectives on the matter, they share some central insights. In both we find that the boundaries of reason are not only vague but also largely founded upon the relations - social in Foucault, socio-linguistic in Wittgenstein - between the reasonable person and the unreasonable person. Both perspectives reveal a curious state of affairs whereby the reasonable person is the one who dominates discourse, and yet, in his claim for reason, remains forever dependent upon the unreasonable person and his rejection. The pressing question triggered by Foucault's account is whether the boundary between reason and unreason is at all necessary. This undermines Wittgenstein’s thesis that this boundary is a matter of logical necessity upon which discourse depends. I flesh this point out in the paper also by examining the differences in Wittgenstein’s and Foucault’s treatments of Descartes’ Meditations. I conclude that Wittgenstein’s criticism of Cartesian skepticism presented in On Certainty loses much of its fortitude once examined in light of Foucault's Histoire de la folie
South Africa as postcolonial heterotopia: The racialized experience of place and space
Get PDFThis essay claims that heterotopia is characteristic of post-Apartheid South Africa, i.e. where heterotopia is usually the exception in society, it is the norm in South Africa. This claim reinterprets and expands Foucault’s concept: heterotopia here refers to the racialization of place and space, and hence to otherness and difference as primary. The ubiquity of heterotopia post-Apartheid is evident in the life-worlds of white suburbia and the black township. A case study is undertaken of white suburbia through a series of phenomenological descriptions of contemporary South Africa using heterotopia as a heuristic tool. This study demonstrates how Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is relevant but also too narrow when related to the postcolonial context. An expanded notion of the term as denoting a racialized experience of space and place is necessary for the purposes of coming to terms with the strangeness of post-Apartheid South Africa, where contradiction and otherness are the norm rather than the exception