Foucault’s governmentality lectures at the Collège de France analyze the history of the state through the lens of governmental reason. However, these lectures largely omit consideration of the relationship between discipline and the state, prioritizing instead raison d’État and liberalism as dominant state technologies. To remedy this omission, I turn to Foucault’s early studies of discipline and argue that they provide materials for the reconstruction of a genealogy of the “disciplinary state.” In reconstructing this genealogy, I demonstrate that the disciplinary state marks the “dark side” of the liberal state, a dark side which is, moreover, largely obscured in the governmentality lectures. I further construe the difference between this early genealogy of the state and the later governmental studies in methodological terms. At stake in this difference is the historiographic status of capitalism and social conflict. Foucault’s governmentality lectures employ what I term an “idealist disavowal,” thereby treating capitalism and social conflict as irrelevant to the history of the state. The early disciplinary studies, on the other hand, enact a “materialist avowal,” by which these objects are avowed as central to the explanation of how and why the state develops. Finally, I argue that Foucault’s governmental genealogy of the liberal state is explanatorily and analytically incomplete, while the genealogy of the disciplinary state contributes to its completion on both fronts.
{"title":"On the Ways of Writing the History of the State","authors":"Eli B. Lichtenstein","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6074","url":null,"abstract":"Foucault’s governmentality lectures at the Collège de France analyze the history of the state through the lens of governmental reason. However, these lectures largely omit consideration of the relationship between discipline and the state, prioritizing instead raison d’État and liberalism as dominant state technologies. To remedy this omission, I turn to Foucault’s early studies of discipline and argue that they provide materials for the reconstruction of a genealogy of the “disciplinary state.” In reconstructing this genealogy, I demonstrate that the disciplinary state marks the “dark side” of the liberal state, a dark side which is, moreover, largely obscured in the governmentality lectures. I further construe the difference between this early genealogy of the state and the later governmental studies in methodological terms. At stake in this difference is the historiographic status of capitalism and social conflict. Foucault’s governmentality lectures employ what I term an “idealist disavowal,” thereby treating capitalism and social conflict as irrelevant to the history of the state. The early disciplinary studies, on the other hand, enact a “materialist avowal,” by which these objects are avowed as central to the explanation of how and why the state develops. Finally, I argue that Foucault’s governmental genealogy of the liberal state is explanatorily and analytically incomplete, while the genealogy of the disciplinary state contributes to its completion on both fronts.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42551032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Genealogy as Multiplicity, Contestation, and Relay: Response to Samir Haddad, Sarah Hansen, and Cressida Heyes","authors":"Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6072","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46870465","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, journalist Jason Burke—who has written extensively on terrorism—frames a commentary on the 2019 Christchurch shootings with the observation that terrorism is effective because “it always seems near. It always seems new. And it always seems personal.” Burke continues that “ever since the first wave of terrorist violence broke across the newly industrialized cities of the west in the late 19th century, this has been true.”1 This narrow casting of terrorism as a western industrial phenomenon only 150 years old is perhaps enough to show why Genealogies of Terrorism is a necessary book. Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson has also more interestingly demonstrated, however, that while terrorism may feel near, new, and personal, this is itself a contingent response that deserves to be unseated with the more careful historical and conceptual analysis she offers. Indeed, to the extent that contemporary western states iteratively reinvent terrorism as whatever feels near, new, and personal, we are held captive by an unexamined picture of terrorism (and the terrorist) that easily serves propaganda purposes—perhaps especially purposes of state security. This book has a complex argument, and I am not a scholar of terrorism. Rather, I have worked with a similar Wittgensteinian-Foucauldian method (most notably in my book Self-Transformations,2 and here I have little to say about the historical work that forms the body of the book (and which clearly relies on a deep grasp of a diverse and difficult archive). Instead, I focus on the book’s intriguing method and on the later chapters, which constitute an important intervention in contemporary political philosophy and a corrective to much contemporary political rhetoric about terrorism. Suffice to say that Erlenbusch-Anderson is arguing that a Foucauldian genealogical approach to the conditions of the emergence of “terrorism” best addresses the methodological challenges in its articulation. Rather than make ahistorical, stipulative assumptions about what terrorism is, Erlenbusch-Anderson suggests that it is best understood as a plural and contextual phenomenon that, as Wittgenstein might have said, gains meaning from the
{"title":"Situating Genealogies of Terrorism","authors":"Cressida J Heyes","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6071","url":null,"abstract":"In an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, journalist Jason Burke—who has written extensively on terrorism—frames a commentary on the 2019 Christchurch shootings with the observation that terrorism is effective because “it always seems near. It always seems new. And it always seems personal.” Burke continues that “ever since the first wave of terrorist violence broke across the newly industrialized cities of the west in the late 19th century, this has been true.”1 This narrow casting of terrorism as a western industrial phenomenon only 150 years old is perhaps enough to show why Genealogies of Terrorism is a necessary book. Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson has also more interestingly demonstrated, however, that while terrorism may feel near, new, and personal, this is itself a contingent response that deserves to be unseated with the more careful historical and conceptual analysis she offers. Indeed, to the extent that contemporary western states iteratively reinvent terrorism as whatever feels near, new, and personal, we are held captive by an unexamined picture of terrorism (and the terrorist) that easily serves propaganda purposes—perhaps especially purposes of state security. This book has a complex argument, and I am not a scholar of terrorism. Rather, I have worked with a similar Wittgensteinian-Foucauldian method (most notably in my book Self-Transformations,2 and here I have little to say about the historical work that forms the body of the book (and which clearly relies on a deep grasp of a diverse and difficult archive). Instead, I focus on the book’s intriguing method and on the later chapters, which constitute an important intervention in contemporary political philosophy and a corrective to much contemporary political rhetoric about terrorism. Suffice to say that Erlenbusch-Anderson is arguing that a Foucauldian genealogical approach to the conditions of the emergence of “terrorism” best addresses the methodological challenges in its articulation. Rather than make ahistorical, stipulative assumptions about what terrorism is, Erlenbusch-Anderson suggests that it is best understood as a plural and contextual phenomenon that, as Wittgenstein might have said, gains meaning from the","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45674035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire is a rich text. Its analyses range across two centuries in the histories of terrorism at the same time as it makes an important contribution to methodological debates taking place among those working in Foucault’s wake. While I very much appreciated and learned from the careful genealogical work that Erlenbusch-Anderson does in tracing the various meanings and functions that terrorism has had in France, Russia, Algeria, and the United States, I will restrict my remarks in this brief intervention to questions of method that the book raises, specifically regarding genealogy as a method and its use as a tool of critical intervention. Towards the beginning of Genealogies of Terrorism’s concluding chapter, ErlenbuschAnderson very helpfully classifies recent scholarship on Foucault into three different kinds. First, there are the interpreters of Foucault, i.e., those scholars for whom Foucault’s work is the object of their analysis. Such scholars have, in Erlenbusch-Anderson’s words, “done much to advance our understanding of Foucault’s place in contemporary philosophy, the development of his thought, the viability of his methodological innovations, and perceived tensions between different periods of his intellectual production and activist engagement.”1 Second, there are other scholars who take a Foucauldian concept, “like biopolitics, governmentality, or subjectivation,”2 and use it to analyze a contemporary issue that Foucault himself may not have examined. Third, there are scholars who, rather than take up concepts from Foucault, use his methods or practices of inquiry, also to analyze issues or topics outside of Foucault’s own purview. These scholars show us a different way of “staying truthful to what Foucault did by being users of his work rather than mere readers”.3 In terms of its relation to Foucault, Genealogies of Terrorism does in fact mobilize certain Foucauldian concepts to advance its claims (“biopolitics” and the “dispositif” are two
{"title":"Examining Genealogy as Engaged Critique","authors":"Samir Haddad","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6069","url":null,"abstract":"Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire is a rich text. Its analyses range across two centuries in the histories of terrorism at the same time as it makes an important contribution to methodological debates taking place among those working in Foucault’s wake. While I very much appreciated and learned from the careful genealogical work that Erlenbusch-Anderson does in tracing the various meanings and functions that terrorism has had in France, Russia, Algeria, and the United States, I will restrict my remarks in this brief intervention to questions of method that the book raises, specifically regarding genealogy as a method and its use as a tool of critical intervention. Towards the beginning of Genealogies of Terrorism’s concluding chapter, ErlenbuschAnderson very helpfully classifies recent scholarship on Foucault into three different kinds. First, there are the interpreters of Foucault, i.e., those scholars for whom Foucault’s work is the object of their analysis. Such scholars have, in Erlenbusch-Anderson’s words, “done much to advance our understanding of Foucault’s place in contemporary philosophy, the development of his thought, the viability of his methodological innovations, and perceived tensions between different periods of his intellectual production and activist engagement.”1 Second, there are other scholars who take a Foucauldian concept, “like biopolitics, governmentality, or subjectivation,”2 and use it to analyze a contemporary issue that Foucault himself may not have examined. Third, there are scholars who, rather than take up concepts from Foucault, use his methods or practices of inquiry, also to analyze issues or topics outside of Foucault’s own purview. These scholars show us a different way of “staying truthful to what Foucault did by being users of his work rather than mere readers”.3 In terms of its relation to Foucault, Genealogies of Terrorism does in fact mobilize certain Foucauldian concepts to advance its claims (“biopolitics” and the “dispositif” are two","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46088068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s Genealogies of Terrorism is an attempt to “loosen the grip of habitual frameworks of thought” vis-a-vis terrorism and genealogy.1 In the aftermath of so many violent events in our world, debates about the meaning of terrorism follow predictable arcs and strategies. Generally, we think that we know terrorism when we see it, or, if there is confusion, we think that we can define terrorism via descriptive, classificatory, or normative analyses. However, “unquestioned and implicit assumptions about what we already recognize as terrorism” shape our perceptions and definitions.2 To navigate this impasse, Erlenbusch-Anderson uses Foucault’s method of genealogy to excavate the material and discursive conditions of terrorism and to contextualize different modes of understanding it today. In the process, she also disrupts some habitual patterns of genealogical thought, especially the tendency to mobilize genealogies toward normative ends. Very often, normative theorists treat genealogies as the material on which they work, abstracting the theorist from their discursive and material conditions and implying a distinction between theory and practice. Erlenbusch-Anderson concludes Genealogies of Terrorism by considering how theory can serve “as a relay among a plurality of concrete practices of resistance and transformation.”3 What it means to be a “relay” is a fascinating question in Genealogies of Terrorism. How should genealogists avoid foisting prescriptive or speculative theories on others? How should genealogists “derive norms from the practices of those who are fighting”?4 In loosening the rigidity of our thought, Erlenbusch-Anderson spurs the multiplication of alternative archives and genealogies. Through what relays do these genealogies promise “alternative futures [...] for those of us who [...] look for new ways of thinking and knowing”?5 Erlenbusch-Anderson’s genealogy focuses on a French lineage of the concept of terrorism, beginning with its emergence during the French Revolution. Challenging the
{"title":"Genealogy, Terrorism, and the \"Relays\" of Thought","authors":"Sarah K. Hansen","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6070","url":null,"abstract":"Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s Genealogies of Terrorism is an attempt to “loosen the grip of habitual frameworks of thought” vis-a-vis terrorism and genealogy.1 In the aftermath of so many violent events in our world, debates about the meaning of terrorism follow predictable arcs and strategies. Generally, we think that we know terrorism when we see it, or, if there is confusion, we think that we can define terrorism via descriptive, classificatory, or normative analyses. However, “unquestioned and implicit assumptions about what we already recognize as terrorism” shape our perceptions and definitions.2 To navigate this impasse, Erlenbusch-Anderson uses Foucault’s method of genealogy to excavate the material and discursive conditions of terrorism and to contextualize different modes of understanding it today. In the process, she also disrupts some habitual patterns of genealogical thought, especially the tendency to mobilize genealogies toward normative ends. Very often, normative theorists treat genealogies as the material on which they work, abstracting the theorist from their discursive and material conditions and implying a distinction between theory and practice. Erlenbusch-Anderson concludes Genealogies of Terrorism by considering how theory can serve “as a relay among a plurality of concrete practices of resistance and transformation.”3 What it means to be a “relay” is a fascinating question in Genealogies of Terrorism. How should genealogists avoid foisting prescriptive or speculative theories on others? How should genealogists “derive norms from the practices of those who are fighting”?4 In loosening the rigidity of our thought, Erlenbusch-Anderson spurs the multiplication of alternative archives and genealogies. Through what relays do these genealogies promise “alternative futures [...] for those of us who [...] look for new ways of thinking and knowing”?5 Erlenbusch-Anderson’s genealogy focuses on a French lineage of the concept of terrorism, beginning with its emergence during the French Revolution. Challenging the","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46684506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Applying Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and technologies of the self to the ex-periences of social work academics in English universities, this articles reveals their carceral existences, arguing that social work academics and their students exist within a “carceral network” which controls and normalises behaviour by simultaneously trapping them with-in and excluding them from succeeding in academic practices. While social work academics become “docile bodies” as they are shaped and trained by competing norms of neoliberal higher education and professional social practice, their position as insiders and outsiders to both can also enable them to resist certain disciplinary expectations. The findings of the qualitative study discussed in this article support Foucault’s analysis of powerful institu-tions but problematise binary positions of docility or resistance to disciplinary power with-in them. Lived experiences of ‘becoming academic’ in English social work education reveal how normalising judgements and hierarchical observation intersect with neoliberal forms of responsibilisation to create a carcerality rooted in “incompetence”; how “technologies of relationships” are used to mediate individual forms of responsibilisation, and how having to negotiate multiple disciplinary regimes can create opportunities for resistance to each.
{"title":"The carceral existence of social work academics: a Foucauldian analysis of social work education in English universities","authors":"D. Simpson, Sarah Amsler","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6073","url":null,"abstract":"Applying Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and technologies of the self to the ex-periences of social work academics in English universities, this articles reveals their carceral existences, arguing that social work academics and their students exist within a “carceral network” which controls and normalises behaviour by simultaneously trapping them with-in and excluding them from succeeding in academic practices. While social work academics become “docile bodies” as they are shaped and trained by competing norms of neoliberal higher education and professional social practice, their position as insiders and outsiders to both can also enable them to resist certain disciplinary expectations. The findings of the qualitative study discussed in this article support Foucault’s analysis of powerful institu-tions but problematise binary positions of docility or resistance to disciplinary power with-in them. Lived experiences of ‘becoming academic’ in English social work education reveal how normalising judgements and hierarchical observation intersect with neoliberal forms of responsibilisation to create a carcerality rooted in “incompetence”; how “technologies of relationships” are used to mediate individual forms of responsibilisation, and how having to negotiate multiple disciplinary regimes can create opportunities for resistance to each.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48484432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Foucault makes clear in his later lectures that the notion of parrhesia has a long and varied history, which he merely sketches in his investigations of ancient politics and philosophy. Recent research extends and modifies Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia as an aspect of the practice of the adviser or counsellor of a monarch or prince, showing how parrhesia informed notions of counsel at other times: in later antiquity, the middle ages as well as early modern Europe. Here we seek to show that the ancient notion of parrhesia reappears as a graft in another domain of modern truth telling: that of bureaucracy in Britain, in the debates over the organisation of the offices of government, with the middle years of the nineteenth century a decisive moment of rupture. We consider the fate of bureaucratic frank counsel in our own era. Interpreters of Foucault’s later lectures on governmentality have analysed the consequences of neoliberal rule for the government of public servants during the era of Margaret Thatcher. Presenting a reappraisal of the era, we show how important counter-discourses also emerged in this era, bringing the ethics of office to the fore, as civil servants argued for the formal codification of bureaucratic ethics, including frank counsel, as they tried to defend their professional ethics. Our discussion therefore addresses a key, early moment in the emergence of the ideal of codifying frank counsel and bureaucratic ethics. We consider the consequences of codification, arguing that a deep ambivalence now characterises the way in which political authorities seek to govern this domain of ethical practice.
{"title":"Parrhesia and the ethics of public service – towards a genealogy of the bureaucrat as frank counsellor","authors":"E. Barratt","doi":"10.22439/FS.V1I28.6076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.V1I28.6076","url":null,"abstract":"Foucault makes clear in his later lectures that the notion of parrhesia has a long and varied history, which he merely sketches in his investigations of ancient politics and philosophy. Recent research extends and modifies Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia as an aspect of the practice of the adviser or counsellor of a monarch or prince, showing how parrhesia informed notions of counsel at other times: in later antiquity, the middle ages as well as early modern Europe. Here we seek to show that the ancient notion of parrhesia reappears as a graft in another domain of modern truth telling: that of bureaucracy in Britain, in the debates over the organisation of the offices of government, with the middle years of the nineteenth century a decisive moment of rupture. We consider the fate of bureaucratic frank counsel in our own era. Interpreters of Foucault’s later lectures on governmentality have analysed the consequences of neoliberal rule for the government of public servants during the era of Margaret Thatcher. Presenting a reappraisal of the era, we show how important counter-discourses also emerged in this era, bringing the ethics of office to the fore, as civil servants argued for the formal codification of bureaucratic ethics, including frank counsel, as they tried to defend their professional ethics. Our discussion therefore addresses a key, early moment in the emergence of the ideal of codifying frank counsel and bureaucratic ethics. We consider the consequences of codification, arguing that a deep ambivalence now characterises the way in which political authorities seek to govern this domain of ethical practice.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42843789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article aims at introducing the relation between the use of CCTV systems in urban spaces and social control. More specifically, its purpose is to problematize and reaffirm the use of the theoretical background of the panopticon in order to interpret such a relation. In CCTV studies, as a consequence of literal interpretations, as well as the existence of a hegemony in ethnographic studies carried out in control rooms, the theoretical use of the panopticon is then questioned. In this article, based on an ethnographic study conducted in the public spaces surveilled by a CCTV system in a Brazilian city, it can be concluded that the effects of social control through surveillance are paradoxical. The indifferent way in which citizens deal with surveillance, or even the lack of awareness of it, imposes limits to the interpretation of the system as a tool of social control. Thus, the use of the panopticon becomes problematic. However, this research has shown how the presence of cameras in public spaces makes it conducive for a state of control in the form of a network whose project would be a mythical and homogeneous ordering of the spaces. The importance of the interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon by Michel Foucault is then reaffirmed, that is, panopticism as a trend of normalization and moralization of the public spaces.
{"title":"The Paradoxes in the Use of the Panopticon as a Theoretical Reference in Urban Video-surveillance Studies: A Case Study of a CCTV System of a Brazilian city","authors":"Iafet Leonardi Bricalli","doi":"10.22439/fs.v27i27.5895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v27i27.5895","url":null,"abstract":"This article aims at introducing the relation between the use of CCTV systems in urban spaces and social control. More specifically, its purpose is to problematize and reaffirm the use of the theoretical background of the panopticon in order to interpret such a relation. In CCTV studies, as a consequence of literal interpretations, as well as the existence of a hegemony in ethnographic studies carried out in control rooms, the theoretical use of the panopticon is then questioned. In this article, based on an ethnographic study conducted in the public spaces surveilled by a CCTV system in a Brazilian city, it can be concluded that the effects of social control through surveillance are paradoxical. The indifferent way in which citizens deal with surveillance, or even the lack of awareness of it, imposes limits to the interpretation of the system as a tool of social control. Thus, the use of the panopticon becomes problematic. However, this research has shown how the presence of cameras in public spaces makes it conducive for a state of control in the form of a network whose project would be a mythical and homogeneous ordering of the spaces. The importance of the interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon by Michel Foucault is then reaffirmed, that is, panopticism as a trend of normalization and moralization of the public spaces.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43362453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The aim of this article is to contribute to the recently revived debate over the normativity of Foucault’s genealogical method. More specifically, I shall respond to Fraser’s charge that Foucault’s rejection of humanism is unjustified because he cannot state why a totally panopticized, autonomous society would be objectionable. After dismissing a non-normative defence strategy of Foucault’s work, I shall proceed as follows: firstly, I shall clarify Foucault’s model of critique as a practice of problematization geared to free his addressees from their captivation to the system of truths sustaining the power mechanisms of modern biopolitics. Secondly, I shall argue that Fraser’s society should be resisted because it would reproduce this regime of captivity, thereby obstructing the exercise of freedom as self-transformation. Thirdly, I shall contend that Foucault’s normative orientation to a post-humanist conception of freedom as self-transformation finds a contextual, explanatory account in his attempt to revitalize the emancipatory project of Enlightenment modernity through a transformative problematization of our normative commitments. Moreover, I shall show that the standard of validity of this effort is represented by Foucault’s exemplary embodiment of the critical ethos of the Enlightenment in both his style of existence and theoretical activity. Finally, the article terminates by illustrating three shortcomings of Foucault’s normative approach.
{"title":"Foucault, Normativity, and Freedom: A Reappraisal","authors":"G. Mascaretti","doi":"10.22439/fs.v27i27.5890","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v27i27.5890","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this article is to contribute to the recently revived debate over the normativity of Foucault’s genealogical method. More specifically, I shall respond to Fraser’s charge that Foucault’s rejection of humanism is unjustified because he cannot state why a totally panopticized, autonomous society would be objectionable. After dismissing a non-normative defence strategy of Foucault’s work, I shall proceed as follows: firstly, I shall clarify Foucault’s model of critique as a practice of problematization geared to free his addressees from their captivation to the system of truths sustaining the power mechanisms of modern biopolitics. Secondly, I shall argue that Fraser’s society should be resisted because it would reproduce this regime of captivity, thereby obstructing the exercise of freedom as self-transformation. Thirdly, I shall contend that Foucault’s normative orientation to a post-humanist conception of freedom as self-transformation finds a contextual, explanatory account in his attempt to revitalize the emancipatory project of Enlightenment modernity through a transformative problematization of our normative commitments. Moreover, I shall show that the standard of validity of this effort is represented by Foucault’s exemplary embodiment of the critical ethos of the Enlightenment in both his style of existence and theoretical activity. Finally, the article terminates by illustrating three shortcomings of Foucault’s normative approach.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41363781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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