规训:现代社会的权力技术与策略——解读福柯的《规训与惩罚》

后现代思想大师福柯的名著《规训与惩罚》,通过对18世纪到19世纪西方社会对犯罪的惩罚形式的变化轨迹的历史分析,揭示了现代社会赖以组织与存在的政治技术——“规训”的强大而微妙的作用,并揭示出西方现代社会的监狱式组织结构,深刻地反思了现代理性带来的人类生存困境,从而解构了启蒙主义所塑造的现代性神话。福柯对知识、真理与权力的共谋与同构关系的揭示,更是道出了现代知识生产机制的隐秘真相。他的微观权力理论则是对马克思的阶级、经济权力理论的补充和修正,也是对整体革命理论、二元对立思维的质疑。     

主体是如何被解构的——重读福柯

福柯解构主体的原因在于他将主体看作现代社会所有问题的根源.考古学提供了解构主体的认识论基础,谱系学提供了解构主体的方法论工具.对主体观念的解构,表明了主体观念是历史性建构起来,并且正在消解.对主体实践的解构,指出了现代人被主体、权力所奴役的历史性境遇,并提出了解放方案.福柯对解构主体有重要的意义,但是,不能全盘否定主体.     

权力的眼睛——论福柯对权力的分析

权力问题是贯穿福柯思想的核心问题。传统权力理论未能正确理解权力关系与支配关系,导致将权力视为占有之物,将权力分析局限在政治与法律系统内,习惯从宏大性、否定性、压抑性上来理解权力,特别是传统权力理论始终未能将权力从行为关系扩展到整个社会的复杂关系网络,未能将权力看作是活生生的多种＂力量＂的竞争消长过程。福柯通过一种＂微观物理学＂的权力机制拆散、肢解、分割、打碎、解构和冲毁了传统权力理论,揭下了权力神秘的面纱,让我们得以窥视权力真实的面孔。在福柯那里,权力是什么不重要,重要的是权力如何实施和运作;权力关系是一张复杂的、多元的力量关系图,是动态、循环的技术与策略。权力无处不在,不是因为它有特权能把每件事强置在它那无敌的统整之下,而是因为它无时无刻,在每一点上以及点与点之间的每一个关系上被生产出来。     

Foucault and the politics of critical management studies

This paper explores the different ways in which we read Foucault in management and organisation studies but, more particularly, some of the features of his project that we seem often to exclude. In the context of a growing interest in more ‘engaged’ forms of scholarly practice among management academics, we argue that further consideration of Foucault might have something more to offer. Setting the main arguments in context, we suggest an outline of the dominant ways in which we read Foucault: the identities we assign to him. Hence we know Foucault primarily as a social theorist, genealogist, neo‐Weberian, and postmodernist. We then consider some of the engaged aspects of his project, focusing on his emergence as an activist intellectual in the 1970s. Possible implications for critical management scholars are then considered.     

权力拯救灵魂?——福柯牧领权力思想探析

政治犹如牧羊,治理术诞生于羊圈。通过引导灵魂以拯救灵魂的牧领权力遭致反引导力量的抵抗。近代国家在基督教牧领权力制度的背景下崛起。基督教牧领制度因典型地构建近代绝对而连续臣服的主体而成为西方社会权力史上的决定性时刻之一。作为其政治哲学核心内容之一,福柯的牧领权力思想促使我们深思重要的生存问题:我们究竟该如何被治理?我们该如何从事政治理性批判?     

从福柯的生存美学视角解读《第二十二条军规》

为了展现小说《第二十二条军规》中小人物的生存状态和生存美学,运用福柯的生存美学原理,对小人物的生存环境和各自的出路进行研究.研究发现：在规训化的社会里,小人物生活得悲惨无助;然而通过奉行隐忍型和普罗米修斯式的生存美学,仍有人在军规中寻求自由、在无助中寻求自救、在绝望中寻求生路,成为反抗权威、捍卫自由的英雄.该解读有助于引导现代人选择积极向上的生活方式.     

THE WEB MARRIAGE GAME,THE GENDERED SELF,AND CHINESE MODERNITY

This paper examines the web-based virtual marriage game craze that emerged in the 1990s. These online interactive games may have opened up moments of liberation and formulated new ideologies of sexual relations. However, web-based marriages only ensure a male-dominated system and conform to dominant patriarchal standards – regardless of the number of females involved. Re-enacting the rules of marriage, the cyber game is ideologically directed against free unions, mobility, promiscuity, and parafamilial fluidity – all in order to stabilize individuals for reasons of social and political control; at the same time, it promotes the acquisition of skills needed by individual players in a free market, as if paralleling the drastic re-articulation of the economy. I understand the virtual game to be a safe haven for both China and the Chinese people to imagine that they can re-strengthen and re-virilize themselves in a rapidly changing world. They co-fabricate a depthless interface or a pure semblance of a looming powerful China ruled by a male-oriented system. Just as China dreams of achieving modernity through a consistent, dependable, controlled, and ‘clean’ path, the virtual reality of the marriage game reveals a social imaginary in which contemporary Chinese people picture their social existence in an unstable transitional moment.     

Finding the ‘Neo’ in Neoliberalism

‘Liberalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’ have become important shorthand terms in critical work that seeks to incorporate issues of economics into ideological and epochal analyses. Yet, these terms incorporate theoretical histories and refer to historical contexts so vast that they can seem ambiguous and boundaryless. This ambiguity threatens to reduce the analytical usefulness of the terms liberalism and neoliberalism. In this paper, I map the legacies and meanings of the terms liberalism and neoliberalism and diagram the complexity and specificity of what neoliberalism is today. First, I engage a small set of definitions and uses of these terms to try to make sense of liberalism and neoliberalism as historical-theoretical concepts. Second, I group current academic uses of the term neoliberalism into Foucauldian, Marxist and epochalist camps, explaining the limits of each. Third, drawing on a fourth minor strand of work on neoliberalism that opens a path to better defining and using the term, I present my own definition of neoliberalism that distinguishes between a theoretical mode and an articulation mode. I conclude by proposing that what is new in neoliberalism is what I call corporism, the privileging of the form and position of corporations.     

Counter-conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest

The influence of Foucault on studies of social movements, dissent and protest is not as direct as might be imagined. He is generally regarded as focusing more on the analysis of power and government than forms of resistance. This is reflected in the governmentality literature, which tends to treat dissent and protest as an afterthought, or failure of government. However, Foucault's notion of ‘counter-conducts’ has much to offer the study of dispersed, heterogeneous and variegated forms of resistance in contemporary global politics. Using the protests that have accompanied summits including Seattle, Johannesburg, Prague, London and Copenhagen to illustrate an analytics of protest in operation, this article shows how a Foucauldian perspective can map the close interrelationship between regimes of government and practices of resistance. By adopting a practices and mentalities focus, rather than an actor-centric approach, and by seeking to destabilize the binaries of power and resistance, and government and freedom, that have structured much of political thought, an analytics of protest approach illuminates the mutually constitutive relationship between dominant power relationships and counter-conducts, and shows how protests both disrupt and reinforce the status quo, at the same time.     

Foucault,plague, Defoe

For Foucault, the experience of plague is a vital moment in the development of new techniques of power and ways of thinking about the social world. Plague compels city or state authorities to take extreme measures to control disease. Quarantine, of the home, the city, and the nation forces assessments of issues of state power, individual liberty and medical knowledge. The most important study of plague during this period was provided by Daniel Defoe’s (1722 Defoe, Daniel. 1722. Due preparations for the plague as well for soul as body London [Google Scholar]) A journal of the plague year. Defoe’s narrative style blurred the line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, an authorial strategy similar to Foucault’s. If quarantine marks the turn towards disciplinary power and knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then its failure to check the cholera epidemic of 1832 signalled the shift toward ‘biopower’, the assumption by the state of pastoral as well as disciplinary roles to public health. The state’s new role in preserving or improving the health of the population relied upon the steady accumulation of detailed empirical data. The administrator gradually displaced the author as the chronicler of disease, health and normality.