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.     

科学哲学视野中的福柯研究

福柯哲学是法国科学史发展的重要环节,具有鲜明的法国科学哲学特色。福柯在科学哲学领域颇有建树。20世纪80年代,主流科学哲学界发现了福柯,SSK(科学知识社会学)等都深受其影响。从科学哲学发展史来看,福柯哲学进入科学哲学的视野具有重要的价值和启迪意义。     

Southerly winds: Family therapy and Latin America

This article serves as a conversational and conceptual introduction to this special issue. It is written not in Latin America – as the other articles are – but in Australia and it is written by a Chilean who left Chile due to the ravages that the 16 year long dictatorship had on those lands. Using reflections on my experience – as a citizen and later as a student in psychology and in family therapy – both in that country and since, I touch on post-colonial issues and on epistemic violence to interrogate ‘invisibilities’ held in mainstream forms of knowledge in the field, invisibilities that come to us from the Western North. Using references to the work of Edward Said and Gabriel García Márquez, the article invites us to review core assumptions and postures in the conceptual frame of systemic work and proposes a methodology that supports alternative forms of knowledge – knowledges of the South – to forge a voice, a resistance to globalising tendencies that threaten to undermine the work we strive to do.     

Theorizing surveillance and social spacing through football: The fan-opticon and beyond

This article critically examines the temporal mobilizations of a 25-year football supporter social movement against the all-seating (stadia) legislation in England and Wales, to unpack, and advance, (neo-)Foucauldian panoptic theorizations of surveillance power and counter-power. Drawing upon prior empirically informed analysis of this movement; ‘Safe Standing’, the article interrogates new policy-based outcomes, including the early adoption of ‘licensed (Safe) Standing’ technology in 2022, to argue, that whilst publicly framed as a movement victory, it simultaneously serves to prefigure a new regulatory regime in football; one which extends the regulation and surveillance of fans within the wider social and corporate lifeworld. Introducing our new concept; the ‘fan-opticon’, the article discusses how Safe Standing continues to normalize a momentum of surveillance in sport and highlights the contradictory nature of security-related projects in the twenty-first century. We conclude that the governmentality of the state through football, to be characteristic of temporally sensitive hermeneutic struggles of power and resistance, through the discipline, and self-discipline of social actors. New forms of subjectivity are remoulded in ways which extend the power of surveillance and regulation, despite multiple counter-conduct, and discursive, resistance practices.     

The social power of algorithms

ABSTRACT

This article explores the questions associated with what might be thought of as the social power of algorithms. The article, which introduces a special issue on the same topic, begins by reflecting on how we might approach algorithms from a social scientific perspective. The article is then split into two sections. The first deals with the issues that might be associated with an analysis of the power of the algorithms themselves. This section outlines a series of issues associated with the functionality of the algorithms and how these functions are powerfully deployed within social world. The second section then focuses upon the notion of the algorithm. In this section, the article argues that we need to look beyond the algorithms themselves, as a technical and material presence, to explore how the notion or concept of the algorithm is also an important feature of their potential power. In this section, it is suggested that we look at the way that notions of the algorithm are evoked as a part of broader rationalities and ways of seeing the world. Exploring the notion of the algorithm may enable us to see how algorithms also play a part in social ordering processes, both in terms of how the algorithm is used to promote certain visions of calculative objectivity and also in relation to the wider governmentalities that this concept might be used to open up.     

Governmentality,subjectivity, and the neoliberal form of life

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the appropriate answer to the question of the form contemporary neoliberalism gives our lives rests on Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as a particular art of governing human beings. I claim that Foucault’s definition consists in three components: neoliberalism as a set of technologies structuring the ‘milieu’ of individuals in order to obtain specific effects from their behavior; neoliberalism as a governmental rationality transforming individual freedom into the very instrument through which individuals are directed; and neoliberalism as a set of political strategies that constitute a specific, and eminently governable, form of subjectivity. I conclude by emphasising the importance that Foucault’s work on neoliberalism as well as the ancient ‘ethics of the care of the self’ still holds for us today.     

Subjectivity as “evidence”: an exploration of medication adherence in the treatment of schizophrenia using in-depth interviews

Anti-psychotic medication is considered one of the most efficaciousinterventions for the treatment of severe schizophrenia, yet ratesof adherence are notoriously and consistently low despite volumesof medical research. Scientific knowledge has failed to improvemedication adherence because it systematically rejects subjectiveexperience in conceptualizing mental illness. In this paper, thecontent of interviews with people diagnosed with schizophreniareceiving Assertive Community Treatment are interpreted from aFoucaldian perspective to illuminate how disciplinary assumptionsperpetuate power inequities and may be a barrier to adequateresearch generation and effective treatments. Implications for futureresearch methodology and clinical approaches are discussed.     

主体的死亡与复活—福柯生存美学的审美主体及其当下启示

从现代性的主体到后现代性的主体,从审美主义的主体到消费社会的消费美学的主体,主体的命运俨然一曲死亡与复活的变奏曲。福柯反对现代性的主体概念,宣告了“主体之死”,但他晚期的生存美学则关注人如何将自己构成为主体,借助审美的创造性、灵活性、叛逆性等特质寻求主体性的可能,丰富了主体性的内涵。因其针对现代性理性、知识、道德主体而倡导感性、身体等,福柯的审美主体常常被比附为消费社会中的欲望主体、身体主体。但是,消费社会中的主体失去了对消费权力系统的抵制而成为驯顺的消费符号,按照福柯的思想只能说是主体的再度死亡。主体的再度复活既是必需的也是必然的,福柯的审美主体不失为对主体的客体化命运实行疗救的一种参照。     

福柯的话语历史观及其与萨特的歧异

观念史因假定先验主体具有构建和奠基事物的作用而坚持起源、连续性和总体性这三大论题.作为话语考古学家,福柯极其怀疑和敌视这类历史主义及其基础主体.福柯把话语看作隶属于同一个散布体系的全体陈述.话语作为实践,既是一个匿名的和历史的关系体系,又是那些把主体散布在大量可能位置和功能中的并合的、间断的和个体化的事件系列.因此,对话语所作的分析就无需参照先验主体.因萨特对间断的和偶然的话语事件和实践极为恐惧,就指责福柯拒斥和谋杀了历史.而福柯则在好几个场合答复了萨特.     

韦伯与福柯之权力观比较

由于所处的社会环境不同,韦伯与福柯两人也分别代表了两种不同的权力观。他们对权力的概念、研究范围、核心问题及目的上均有不同的认识。分析两种权力观的不同点,对现实社会具有积极作用。