Foucault's Inheritance/Inheriting Foucault

This paper outlines a set of considerations on the politics of reading by suggesting a concept of inheritance to think about the reception of Michel Foucault in organization studies. On the one hand we consider what Foucault inherited from others, the interpretations and decisions he made in relation to an earlier tradition, while on the other hand we consider how Foucault s work has been inherited as it has moved into organization studies. We read Foucault with the assistance of concepts of reading and inheritance that we, in turn, have appropriated from Jacques Derrida, which offer potential ways of considering relations between writers and the way that inheritances are instituted in practices of reading. This involves insisting on the necessity of engaging with a number of complexities, contradictions and double-binds in the texts of Foucault (and others).     

Modernist misapprehensions of Foucault's aesthetics

Abstract

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

Speaking trajectories: Meaghan Morris,antipodean theory and Australian cultural studies

Over the last 30 years, the term discourse has spread throughout both the social sciences and the humanities. There is a widespread consensus that the current usage of the term ‘discourse’ originated with Foucault. This paper has three related goals: first, it demonstrates that the current usage of ‘discourse‘ did not originate with Foucault, and in some ways contradicts his own limited technical usage. Second, an intellectual history is presented that explains where the term originated – in French and British theory of the 1960s and 1970s – and how it was propagated and transformed by Anglo-American cultural studies theorists. By extending this intellectual history through the 1990s, the paper documents how Anglo-American scholars increasingly began to attribute the concept to Foucault, and how this has contributed to two important misreadings of Foucault. In conclusion, this history is drawn upon to explore and clarify several competing usages of the term in contemporary cultural studies.     

Remembering the impossible possibility: Kierkegaard and human capital

Kierkegaard is classified as an existentialist. The irony of course is if he were authentically existential, then he would escape any categorisation. Rather than reading Kierkegaard as yet one more item on the shelves of the history of philosophy, why not read him as though he were relevant to our lives? Our argument is that modern capitalism has taken a subjective turn, and therefore reading Kierkegaard is as timely as ever. This isn’t a matter of constructing a politics out his texts but applying it to our lives. The modern subjective form of capital is human capital as was already diagnosed by Foucault in his prophetic lectures on bio-politics. At the heart of human capital is the ideology of the subject as a form of investment. We want to show how Kierkegaard’s own account of subjectivity resists this appropriation of the self by capital through a new ontology of subjectivity. At the heart of this ontology is a reversal of Aristotle. It is not the actual that determines the possible, but the possible the actual.     

The power of discourse: Michel Foucault and critical theory

Abstract

The debate that contrasts Marxism and the work of Michel Foucault often overlooks that both projects share a political and ethical commitment. Both have moreover engaged that commitment by challenging what Marx called ‘traditional ideas’, viewing them as historically compilcit with the exercise of power. This ‘radical rupture’ with traditional ideas has been the hallmark of the critical theory project since The Communist Manifesto. By challenging traditional notions of power and language, however, Michel Foucault went further than the Marxist tradition in carrying out the critical theory project. Foucault's alternative ideas of discourse/practice and of power as ‘positive’ are moreover intricately linked in a way that has not been sufficiently appreciated. This is evident in a genealogy of Foucault's early work, where neither notion is able to take hold in the absence of the other. It only after The Archaeology of Knowledge, where Foucault rethought the relationship of language to reality, that he was able to formulate the notion of power as positive in works to come. This link should cause us to rethink our relationship to Foucault's work, of it to Marxism, and of the critical theory project to the power.     

Cut the Crap: Language — Risks and Relationships in Systemic Therapy and Supervision

This article concerns the use of language in both therapy and supervision, and how it contributes to the necessary risk‐taking that will be a part of therapists' and supervisors' repertoires. The focus will be on my own examples in both roles, and will refer to both successes and failures, while questioning the usefulness of either concept. Within a postmodern paradigm, and influenced by thinkers including Foucault and Bakhtin as well as systemic clinicians, I will examine the use of language (including in cross‐cultural settings where risks can sometimes be amplified) and of humour and self while exploring the meanings of identity. I contend that all relationships contain some element of risk and the ways in which we create a safe enough context, through the uses of language as well as nonlinguistic means, are the crucial elements in our endeavours as supervisors and therapists. I favour the idea that therapy is more of an art than a science and that this is most exemplified in the graceful use of language by which we strive to engage rather than alienate people. The article may be considered by some as being useful advice, and by others as a risk too far, such is the controversial nature of language, which highlights the importance of relationships and context.     

A different life?: Barthes,Foucault and everyday life

How might the injunction to ‘think differently’ in the work of French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have informed a re-thinking of everyday life? In Barthes’ work, a critical analysis of myth and ideology in the contemporary everyday life of the late 1950s gives way to counter-ideological strategies that might seem to move away from the everyday and towards the utopian. However, the utopian imagination at work in Barthes’ thought is effective precisely in its insistence on the everyday detail. This is reflected in the later work in the attention given to the incident and the haiku. In his later work, Foucault turns towards antiquity in response to his own assessment of the ubiquitous diffusion of relations of power and the need to ‘think differently’. It is, however, in the interviews and specifically in a series of comments on homosexuality that Foucault is most attentive to the ‘possibilities for new life’ in his own time. It is through the undoing of already established relations and the experimentation with different modes of relation that a locus of difference can be found in everyday life. This is characterized by Foucault as a heterotopia. Foucault’s tentative suggestions of different possibilities are oriented towards an intensification of pleasures, counter to the psychoanalytic attention to desire. However, Foucault’s account of pleasure is associated with mortality, suggesting the question: is this different life one destined only to posterity and its own transcendence? Deleuze’s reading of Foucauldian subjectivation suggests a different strategy of resistance, more attuned to the immanence of a life.     

Beyond normalization and impairment: theorizing subjectivity in learning difficulties – theory and practice

Normalization and social role valorization continue to play a central role in shaping debates and practice relating to learning difficulties. In the context of recent arguments this paper draws on the work of Foucault to deconstruct these theories. Foucault’s work alerts us to a conceptual confusion at their heart which reproduces a common but problematic individual–society dualism. There is an implicit, and problematic, presence in the theories of a pre‐social individual conceived as having essential impairments and who is passive in the face of negative socialization. We propose that Foucault’s ‘ethical’ domain of inquiry, with its concern for how people actively understand themselves and govern their conduct in relation to specific values and a ‘truth’ that they are obliged to recognize in themselves, provides the basis for returning the individual‐as‐subject to theories in an active, critical manner.     

Toward a genealogy of the liberal government of youth

While discourses that define and demarcate young people such that they become legitimate targets of negative practices of marginalisation and exclusion have not disappeared, these are no longer the dominant discourses and modes of governing youth. Constructions of youth as self-determining subjects and empowerment polices of youth participation increasingly animate contemporary approaches to governing young people throughout the West and beyond. Until recently, the dominant critique of such developments consisted of accusations of failed attempts to realise certain principles in practice or of their ideological functions. There is however an emerging critical youth studies literature that analyses such developments drawing on the work of Beck and Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’. In this paper, I argue that while these studies challenge some of the assumptions upon which such developments rest, they are yet to challenge the extent to which these contemporary ways of constructing and governing youth are new. Using Foucault’s genealogical method my research traces an unacknowledged nineteenth century history of these common ways of constituting and governing youth today. To conclude I consider the strategic usefulness and ramifications of these findings for critical youth studies and policies of youth participation.     

Moses and nation-building Zora Neale Hurston's Moses,Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European

Abstract

This article examines the significance of the representation of Moses as an Egyptian in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain and Edward Said's Freud and the Non-European. Pairing Hurston and Said continues Said's project of seeing authors 'contrapuntally', so exposing imperialism as a neglected, if submerged, context for Hurston's response to nationalism in Moses. I argue that Hurston's novel cannot be read as a straightforward critique of race-based nationalism. Although Moses is of a different ethnic group to the Hebrews he leads, Hurston's portrayal of his rule is haunted by imperialism, in which one ethnic group exploits another. In this sense, Moses, Man of the Mountain bears the signs and strains of her struggle against racialist thinking.     

A conversation on madness: Foucault and Ripa

Written as a fictitious dialogue between two of this generation’s most prolific social theorists, this unique analysis explores the similarities and divergences of Michel Foucault’s and Yannick Ripa’s scholarship on madness. During an imagined meeting at a local café, a spirited dialogue emerges addressing mutual agreement and unwavering criticism of each author’s perspective of how madness was constructed and managed throughout the classical and Victorian eras. Ripa’s primary motive is to challenge Foucault for ignoring the feminine critique within his over-arching theories of social and patriarchal systems of control. On the other hand, Foucault’s vested interest is to explore Ripa’s narrowed historical scope that he feels was essentially built upon his own scholarship without acknowledgement. Drawing upon a comparative study of Foucault’s History of Madness and Ripa’s Women and Madness, the two theorists engage in a revealing conversation about aspects of political economy, shifting roles of religious ideology, gender effects, the social construction of insanity, and the historical methods of incarceration.     

Through the Looking-glass: Colonial Encounters of the First Kind

Abstract Notwithstanding Gramsci or Foucault, there remains a tendency, in historical sociology, to explain processes of domination in terms of political and economic forces. In the study of state formation and imperialism, realpolitik is given precedence over ritual, material factors over the moral suasion of the sign. Yet European colonialism was also a cultural project. In Southern Africa, nonconformist missions, the vanguards of empire, conjured up new maps, new systems of relations, new notions of time, production and personhood. From their very first encounters with native communities, it is argued, they sowed the state of colonialism on which the colonial state - and a more enduring condition of dependency - was founded.
About sunset the king, attended by his brothers and a few more persons, came to our tent…I said that I had brought a small present for him, as a token of friendship—while opening it he remained silent, not moving even his head, only his eyes towards the parcel. I then took from it a gilded copper comb and put it into his hair, and tied a silver spangled band and tassel round his head, and a chain about his neck, and last of all presented him with a looking glass…     

Reviving agency: taking time and making space for rethinking diversity and inclusion

The path of social inclusion has proven difficult for minority groups in the European context. In this article, we focus on the inclusion of refugees, particularly in the labor market, and show how the difficulties they faced were related to dominant discourses on migration. Uncovering the hegemonic assumptions within these discourses is crucial in order to enable a rethinking of diversity issues and inclusion. We addressed this through an intervention research, which was part of an empowerment project for refugees. The research included and connected refugees engaged in searching for work to Dutch professionals engaged with diversity issues. Through social intervention, this research aimed to create empowerment through critical reflection on the ways that the power of dominant discourses works in the practice of everyday life. By contrasting the discursive positioning of participants with different backgrounds, the research created alternative spaces for reflection. This, in turn, led to the production of alternative narratives and allowed participants to claim agency in the face of the dominant discourses.     

Mining photographs: David Goldblatt’s On the Mines

David Goldblatt’s photographs in On the Mines create a narrative of the mining industry. They can be read individually as fragmented emblems of the ways that mining has shaped both the city of Johannesburg and its people, and they can also be read in relation to our present perspective as testaments of history. Even in the most seemingly straightforward photographic image, photographs can offer vital metaphors that enhance our understanding of a place. As in the case of Goldblatt’s photographs, these pictures show Johannesburg’s mining-town beginnings, which transcend the specifics of the moment they were taken. They depict the economy and process of extracting gold from the earth, and likewise utilise an exacting economy of vision. His photographs include only essentials, but these photographs go beyond abstract economics to show the humanitarianism of the photographer too. Many of David Goldblatt’s photographs focus on the built environment, the structures of mining, housing and religious buildings. However, Goldblatt is not an architectural photographer. As such, we may speak, as Philip Ursprung evocatively put it, of both “pictures of architecture and the architecture of pictures.” Viewed from the perspective of “the architecture of the picture,” his images speak about Johannesburg’s social, economic and political context. Taken almost 50?years ago, these images have endured because they go beyond documentation. Goldblatt’s incisive vision is mute testimony to the deep critical thinking that he brings to bear in the making of images. As the citation for the 2006 Hasselblad Foundation Award asserts, “almost all of Goldblatt’s photographs have different layers of interpretation through which viewers, according to their experience and previous knowledge, unravel a tale.” This paper will begin by examining the tradition of documenting architectural structures, situating Goldblatt’s work in relation to the techniques and approaches adopted by photographers of architecture in the twentieth century and the meanings that their images convey. Thereafter, a discussion of the layers of interpretation that some of Goldblatt’s images yield will follow.     

Hayek and the Methodenstreit at the LSE

ABSTRACT

Friedrich Hayek’s Inaugural Address at the London School of Economics (LSE), ‘The Trend of Economic Thinking’ (1 March 1933), has been recognized as of particular importance for the understanding of his work. In it, Hayek argues that economics has a key role of showing what we cannot achieve: of showing that some attractive ideals are utopian. In developing this theme, Hayek referred to Mises’ arguments about the problems of economic calculation under socialism; but the idea – which I suggest might be seen as a theory about the structural constraints imposed by a flourishing market economy – becomes a more general motif in Hayek’s work. In the lecture, Hayek’s ideas are developed through engagement with the younger German Historical School of economics, which is criticized for espousing methodological ideas that would call the idea of such constraints into question. In this article, I suggest that there were also local targets at the LSE. I discuss the way in which William Beveridge, the Director of the LSE, and Lancelot Hogben, who held a Chair in Social Biology there, were engaged in an extended empiricist critique of the methodological ideas of the LSE economists and of theoretical economists more generally in ways close to the younger German historical school.     

Allen Ginsberg’s Blakean Albion

Abstract

Focusing on a selection of poems written during Allen Ginsberg’s visits to Britain between 1958 and 1979, an attempt is made to show how Ginsberg’s British poetry might productively be read in the context of William Blake’s mythopoetic system, particularly in so far as it relates to the Blakean figures of Albion and Jerusalem. Ginsberg’s poetic vision of a Blakean Albion is revealed to be more complex, and more problematic, than might be supposed. This is partly because Ginsberg’s own position is conflicted; as a key representative of American Beat poetry and later of American counterculture, he is nonetheless engaged in these ‘British’ poems in re-envisioning and reshaping Blake’s Albion. Such nationalist tensions are not, however, restricted to Ginsberg’s work; they can also be linked to similar conflicts between nationalism and internationalism which already exist within Blake’s own vision of Albion.     

Using conceptual models as a planning and evaluation tool in conservation

Conservation projects are dynamic interventions that occur in complex contexts involving intricate interactions of social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental factors. These factors are constantly changing over time and space as managers learn more about the context within which they work. This complex context poses challenges for planning and evaluating conservation project. In order for conservation managers and evaluation professionals to design good interventions and measure project success, they simultaneously need to embrace and deconstruct contextual complexity.In this article, we describe conceptual models—a tool that helps articulate and make explicit assumptions about a project's context and what a project team hopes to achieve. We provide real-world examples of conceptual models, discuss the relationship between conceptual models and other evaluation tools, and describe various ways that conceptual models serve as a key planning and evaluation tool. These include, for example, that they document assumptions about a project site and they provide a basis for analyzing theories of change.It is impractical to believe that we can completely eliminate detail or dynamic complexity in projects. Nevertheless, conceptual models can help reduce the effects of this complexity by helping us understand it.     

Bio-citizens online: A content analysis of pro-ana and weight loss blogs

Current neoliberal ideology in Western society encourages individuals to self-monitor their body to control population health. The resulting self-surveillance includes weight management, promoted as a marker of health. Disordered eating, like anorexia, is framed as a health disorder. However, weight loss is framed as a health initiative; we argue that these framings are engaging with the same body project, encouraging thinness as a marker of health and good bio-citizenry. Using content analysis to compare online blog context created by individuals engaged in weight loss and individuals who identify as pro-anorexia, we argue and evidence that both groups are engaged in body projects with shared parameters. Findings suggest each group is striving to embody a thin ideal through weight management. Specifically, weight loss bloggers and pro-ana bloggers demonstrate similar diet and exercise behaviours in online diaries detailing their weight loss experiences. Thus, weight loss and anorexia exist on the same spectrum of responsible bio-citizenry.