Foucault in Ireland is a one-day symposium at the Royal Irish Academy, 24 March 2017. Attendance is free but you are required to register, https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/foucault-in-ireland-tickets-30873446309.
Programme
9.30. Registration
9.45. Introductions
10.00. Roundtable on Stuart Elden’s Foucault: the birth of power (Polity, 2017) and Foucault’s final decade (Polity, 2016). With Stuart Elden, University of Warwick; Gerry Kearns, Maynooth University; Mick Wilson, Gothenberg University; and Audronė Žukauskaitė, Lithuanian Culture Research Institute.
11.00. Session 1. Institutions
Chair. Karen Till, Maynooth University
Stephen Wilmer, Trinity College Dublin, Using Foucault to unmask Ireland’s Control Society
Caroline McGregor, NUI Galway, Application of Foucault’s history of the present to child welfare and social work in Ireland
Kevin Lougheed, King’s College London, “Move outside the institution”: Foucault and the emergence of national education in Ireland
Tim Stott, Dublin Institute of Technology, Foucault and the Ludic Museum
12.00. Lunch
13.00. Session 2. Law
Chair. Kevin Lougheed, KCL
Deirdre McGowan, Dublin Institute of Technology, Foucault and Law – An uncomfortable marriage?
Merav Amir, Queen’s University Belfast, Bordering normality: New security technologies, statistical objectivity and identity formation
Teresa Degenhardt, Queen’s University Belfast, Applying Foucault’s understanding of war to Criminology
John Morison, Queen’s University Belfast, “A sort of farewell”? Sovereignty and the Irish constitutions
14.00. Session 3. Subjectivation (1)
Chair. Mick Wilson, Gothenburg University
Karen E. Till, Maynooth University, Decolonising theories of ‘Care of Self’ through a place-based ethics of care
Lisa Godson, National College of Art and Design, Discipline, techniques of the self and the model ethical subject in nineteenth-century religious praxis
Michael Cronin, Maynooth University, Foucault and the histories of sexuality in Ireland
Anne Mulhall, University College Dublin, Biopolitics and ‘Irish Queer Studies’
15.00. Tea
15.30. Session 4a. Subjectivation (2)
Chair. Lisa Godson, NCAD
Alex O’Connell, Maynooth University, Transcending identity: Northern Irish politics and ethnography
John Moran, Dublin City University, Framing film’s sex scenes through a Foucaultian lens: How Foucault’s insights inform an analysis of cinematic sexual representation
Radek Przedpełski, Trinity College Dublin, Délire/Art Machine as a Map of Potentialities: Deleuze/Guattari Hack Foucault’s Diagram
Maighread Tobin, Maynooth University, A Foucauldian perspective on literacy in twentieth-century Ireland
Zizhen Wang, University College Dublin, The mechanism of pedagogic power management in High School for Repeating Students
Ivanka Antova, Queen’s University Belfast, Using Foucault for emancipatory purposes: Governmentality and emancipatory disability research in the context of a welfare reform
15.30. Session 4b. Governmentality
Chair. Stephen Wilmer, TCD
Simon Gilbert, Queen’s University Belfast, The power of the algorithm
Adam Harkens, Queen’s University Belfast, The ghost in the legal machine: Algorithmic governmentality and the practice of Law
Stephen Strauss-Walsh, University of Limerick, Victimology from a Foucauldian perspective
Rachael Dickson, Queen’s University Belfast, Solidarity in a post-Brexit EU: Lessons from the counter-conduct of the migrant crisis
Gisele Eugenia Connell, Maynooth University, The geopolitics of blood
Nusha Yonkova, University College Dublin, Gender-sensitive approach to protection and assistance of trafficked persons, with a focus on sexually exploited women
16.30. Final Roundtable
17.30. Reception and book launch for S.E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė (eds), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, political and performative strategies (Routledge, 2016). Hoey Ideas Space, Second floor, Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, TCD.
Abstracts
Merav Amir, Queen’s University Belfast, Bordering normality: New security technologies, statistical objectivity and identity formation
Within the matrixes of normalizing power, Michel Foucault distinguishes between two types of normal. The first is the normal as it appears within disciplinary apparatuses (such as mental disability or gender non-conformity). This “normal” functions in relation to a model, a pre-given standard of propriety, health, efficiency or productivity to which one should conform: “the normal being precisely that which can conform to this norm, and the abnormal that which is incapable of conforming to the norm” (Foucault, 2007 Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78: 85). The processes of measuring against this module and adopting subjects to it he then calls normation. The second type of normal is that of biopolitics. Within this domain “normal” is not defined by a pre-given social model—marking a “good” or a “should” to which one must conform—but is extrapolated from natural processes; it is derived from empirical reality rather than being imposed on it in order to shape it. This, in short, is the normalising technology of security: a calculation of the frequency of a given phenomenon, which is inferred from the natural flow of things and living beings, their patterns of movement and modes of action. While Foucault’s analysis provides elaborated accounts for these two kinds of normalisation processes, and despite alluding to the fact that this clear separation may not, at times, be sustained, Foucault himself had little to say about instances in which this distinction collapses. Through an examination of the evolving technologies which are increasingly embedded into airport security apparatuses, this talk will analyse instances in which procedures which are designed to sort people based on the statistically-calculated empirical normal, end up, in fact, reinstating what can be easily identified as processes of normation. Thinking with and beyond Foucault, this talk aims to examine what this disciplinary-biopolitical hybrid of “normal” entails.
Ivanka Antova, Queens University Belfast, Using Foucault for emancipatory purposes: Governmentality and emancipatory disability research in the context of a welfare reform
Since 2010, disabled people have been subjected to unprecedented in their impact changes to the social security system, including the scrapping of non-means tested disability benefits, the abolishment of the Independent Living Fund and the use of controversial work capability assessments, reversing policy back to outdated models of disability. My work discusses the welfare reform as a social and political phenomenon much more complex than previously anticipated. The reform policies are not so much about managing the public budget in a more cost-effective way, as it is often suggested, but about managing the behaviour of benefits claimants and transforming deviant populations into productive and responsible citizens. The social model of disability and emancipatory disability research (EDR) have been important tools for the disability movement in their struggle for equality, independent living and inclusive citizenship. Since 2010, however, the obscure tactics of controlling social deviants via reform policies have presented challenges that the familiar theoretical approaches have not been able to address fully. This paper offers a methodology where the Foucauldian concept of governmentality has been combined with EDR to illuminate the dark side of the reform as a strategy for the control of deviant populations. A methodology that understands the welfare reform policies as tactics of power that produce narratives, identities and knowledges allows for practical examples of empowerment to be discussed. This is where EDR and the work of Michel Foucault thread on common ground: empowerment through the creation of alternative ‘truths’, or how Foucault can be used for emancipatory purposes.
Gisele Eugenia Connell, Mayooth University, The geopolitics of blood
Blood is the ultimate vital fluid that enables bodies to both function and flourish. Even accounting for blood’s universality, blood is engineered as a space to infer, perform and mediate between bodily difference. And yet despite occupying a materially and discursively prominent position between body and state, geographers who typically approach the study of bodies and environments do so by focusing entirely on bodily ‘surfaces’ to the detriment of bodily parts, thereby failing to provide conceptual clarity on what blood ‘is’, how it is experienced spatially, and indeed what power assemblages can ‘do’ with these bodily components in tandem with other political-geographical processes. In this paper, I re-think Foucault’s (1990: 147) discursive post-modern shift from a ‘symbolics of blood’ to an ‘analytics of sexuality’ by arguing instead that the securitization or governmentality of blood since the AIDS crisis demonstrates that both blood and sex are indexes of modern power that are central to the symbolic and somatic reproduction of the state (Strong, 2009). The Foucaultian concept of govermentality has been widely applied by geographers to the study of populations, and to the regulation of sexuality and disease (see; Kearns 2014; Ingram 2011; Elbe 2004) but has been notably absent from a conversation regarding the geographies of blood. Drawing upon ethnographic, archival and interview material from an empirical case study in Ireland, I consider how blood securitization functions as a form of governmentality on the international and domestic scale, with profound implications for some of Ireland’s most marginalised blood donors.
Michael Cronin, Maynooth University, Foucault and the histories of sexuality in Ireland
We now know that during the twentieth century Irish society incarcerated in Magdalene asylums, Industrial Schools and Reformatories those bodies – of poor and working-class women and children – which were designated as deviant and beyond the bounds of respectability. The confined, abused body of the young working-class woman or orphan silently but powerfully affirmed the healthy respectability of their middle-calls compatriots pursuing fulfilment and happiness outside the walls of those institutions. In other words, we cannot understand the functioning of Ireland’s ‘architecture of containment’, in Jim Smith’s phrase, without also understanding the cultural reproduction of respectability, and the positive affirmation of bodies and subjects adhering to its norms.
As I will outline in this contribution, Foucault’s conception of modern power as productive, and of the interrelationship of such forms of power with sexual discourses, provided an indispensable framework for approaching this question. Specifically, my engagement with Foucault’s work provided an interpretative framework for reading an archive of advice literature aimed at Catholic teenagers. But, as I will also discuss, I became aware of the limitations of drawing on Foucault’s ideas, for understanding the history of a postcolonial society but, more urgently for my project, for merging a Foucauldian hermeneutic with a commitment to a Marxist political analysis. Thus, I will conclude with some reflections on my recent engagement with the radical thought of Herbert Marcuse; a figure severally critiqued – reductively dismissed, one could argue – by Foucault.
Teresa Degenhardt, Queen’s University Belfast, Applying Foucault’s understanding of war to criminology
I would like to trace the uses of Foucault within my discipline – criminology – and beyond. In particular, I plan to start from his analytics of power and focus on the concept of war to consider current assemblages of military and criminal justice practices applied in the international sphere, especially after 9/11. After broadly presenting an overview of how Foucault has been used in criminology, highlighting the new avenues of study his work has opened up for scholars of criminal justice, I will focus on how I have come to use his work, especially the lectures at the College de France, Society Must be Defended, in the current context of global war. I will re-count Foucault’s understanding of war and look at its utility in his analytics of power; I will explain how this helped make me sense of military and police practices used across state borders, for both the pacification and the reconstruction of some post conflict societies, and for fighting terrorism internationally. I will argue that we may need to transgress Foucault’s admonition to cut off the king’s head to study contemporary manifestations of sovereign and juridical power in their practical manifestation and in their rationalities. Despite attempts at disciplining conflict and sovereignty, the current conjuncture seems to re-offer state sovereignty as the only solution to violence. States, despite obvious changes in their configurations, remain powerful in their ability to control our lives. In what ways are they still involved? In what ways do they employ new forms of control to target individuals and populations?
Rachael Dickson, Queens University Belfast, Solidarity in a post-Brexit EU: Lessons from the counter-conduct of the migrant crisis
My doctoral research centres on how the EU’s tactics of governmentality in the management of migration are at odds with solidarity as framed in the discourse of human rights. I explore the alternative position that the EU is addressing migration through a language of rights in order to ameliorate the symptoms of a wider condition of solidarity; examining tactics of governmentality and the subjectivity of the migrant.
My presentation will detail how the tactics employed by EU border staff operate an exclusionary system which prevents migrants claiming and accessing their rights. I will examine instances and possibilities for what Foucault terms ‘counter-conduct’ at the border and propose how this provokes a re-defining of solidarity within the EU. I will then discuss some implications for both Ireland and Northern Ireland and address the importance of solidarity moving forward into a post-Brexit EU.
Simon Gilbert, Queens University Belfast, The Power of the algorithm
My research examines the emerging concept of ‘algorithmic governmentality’, the idea that we are experiencing a technologically-driven shift in the way power operates in society, based on increasing reliance on predictive models drawn from ‘Big Data’.
It is argued that this shift is underpinned by a deeply capitalist ideology, based on the monetization of digitized personal data and a push for looser data protection legislation. Although rooted in the emergence of statistics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘algorithmic governmentality’ is distinct from previous statistical projects both because of the sheer volume of data produced and because this data is often deeply personal in nature. My research examines the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (the ‘Snooper’s Charter’), arguing that this legislation facilitates state access to increasingly valuable data. The research explores the possibility of resistance to algorithmic governmentality, including via EU measures such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
I am particularly interested in how classification and numbering can operate as forms of power, and how Big Data, processed via algorithms, can be used (or misused) to render people and groups ‘knowable’ and therefore open to governmental intervention.
My research uses the work of Michel Foucault, particularly his ideas on governmentality, as a means of exploring this new form of power and the forms of knowledge that sustain it. It also draws on work from the emerging field of Critical Data Studies, which offers critical insight into the role now played by data in society.
Lisa Godson, National College of Art and Design, Discipline, techniques of the self and the model ethical subject in nineteenth-century religious praxis
This paper addresses the dramatic changes in religious practice in Ireland from c.1835-1880 as comprehensible through Michel Foucault’s writings on disciplinarity and techniques of the self, and his later work on ethics and biopower.
In the wake of Catholic Emancipation (1829) and demographic change following the Famine of the 1840s, Irish Catholics were evangelised by a greatly strengthened missionising church that effected a tridentine and ultramontane revolution involving the physical and mental re-shaping of the world of the faithful. With a new focus on sacramental theology, self-discipline and self-knowledge were made central, for example through the promotion of the examination of conscience deemed necessary for confession, figured by Foucault as a mode of power fundamental to modern subjectivity.
The disciplinary power of the church was deeply embedded through a new relationship with material culture that, particularly through the widespread use of devotional objects and acts that derived their efficacy ex opere ecclesia (‘from the work of the church’), caught Irish Catholics in a nexus of what Foucault described as ‘small acts of cunning’ that came to be ‘endowed with a great power.’ The second half of the nineteenth century also saw the rise of public displays of faith, enacting Foucault’s ‘docile bodies’ that are capable of being trained, and subject to a new ‘modality of control’.
The paper further considers how the conflict Foucault identified between spirituality and theology played out by discussing Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the priest as the model ethical subject, examining in particular the relationship of a newly systematised material culture to the edict of ex opere operato (‘from the work worked’), contrasting this modern ontology of duty with the classical ethical ontology of being.
Adam Harkens, Queen’s University Belfast, The Ghost in the legal machine: Algorithmic governmentality and the practice of Law
This presentation introduces my attempts at reconciling Foucault’s theory of ‘governmentality’ with new forms of governance brought about by the increasing effectiveness of artificial intelligence. AI uses algorithms to interpret correlations between big data sets, thereby producing an ‘immediately operational’ knowledge, judged upon the efficiency it creates, and the economic fluidity it allows (Rouvroy, 2012). This holds distinct persuasive power, in that algorithms are often viewed publicly as objectively ‘crunching numbers’, rather than being recognised for their ability to construct a ‘staged’ reality – as opposed to the immanence of the ‘lived world’ (Boltanski, 2011). Therefore, forms of critique can become inscribed in ‘established’ test formats and qualifications, thus constraining any true systematic change. By taking the world – and its future – as its object(s), algorithms can ‘conduct the conduct’ of certain populations by presenting such ‘staged’ realities, and producing deterministic guiding principles on how one should (re)act in a given situation (Foucault, 2008). This can normalise certain practices, whether intentionally done or not. This presentation focuses upon one such population: the legal profession. As argued by Morison and Leith (1992), the best legal point is often the ‘one that works’, and gets the job done persuasively and efficiently, because courts require ‘truth within given times’. What better tool to employ here then, than an algorithm? Nevertheless, constrained legal appraisal is a particularly worrying prospect and I aim to provide contemporary examples of the use of AI in legal practices, before setting out some hopeful possibilities of critique.
Kevin Lougheed, King’s College London, “Move outside the institution”: Foucault and the emergence of national education in Ireland
“Move outside the institution and replace it with the overall point of view of the technology of power.” Foucault, 1978
This paper illustrates how Foucault’s work on governmentality is vital in understanding the creation of national education in nineteenth-century Ireland. In moving beyond the institution it allows us to see educational reform as part of a wider governmental rationale by the British administration, transforming disciplinary mechanisms so that their focus shifted to acting on the whole Irish social body. Foucault’s work firstly helps understand the functions of the school as a disciplinary mechanism. The new curriculum, aimed at uniting children of different creeds, along with the centralised teacher training attempted to shift the conduct of the uniquely Irish child towards an imperial norm. The influence of national education went well beyond the classroom, however, transforming education in Ireland so that it acted on the whole social body. Foucault states that power was generated through social relations on a local level which were centralised in the form state institutions. National education exemplifies this as the regulations of the new system allowed the state to colonise microsites of power by linking local actors, including the clergy, into a centralised system. Once connected to system, the network of relations was subject to the regulations and surveillance of the state, and were subject to the power of the system as much as the children within the school walls. The understanding of these networks also explains the unique geography of the emergence of the system.
Deirdre McGowan, Dublin Institute of Technology, Foucault and Law – An uncomfortable marriage?
Foucault’s work has had a mixed reception in legal studies, ranging from Hunt and Wickham’s assertion that he expelled law from modernity to Golder and Fitzpatrick’s construction of a Foucauldian jurisprudence. Rejecting these attempts to essentialise ‘law,’ I focus on Foucault’s concepts of government and genealogy to examine how the ‘legal complex’ operates as a process of normalisation. In this paper, using the example of Irish marriage law reform, I discuss how Foucault’s work facilitates an analysis of what ‘law’ is doing, how legal rules, techniques, knowledge and discourse operate, in conjunction with other techniques of government, to shape individual lives.
Marriage law has been, both historically and in the recent past, the subject of significant political debate. Campaigners focus on the legal concepts of rights and equality to demonstrate the oppressive and exclusionary nature of marriage law. The starting point for my concern with marriage law is its inefficacy as a solution to the practical problems arising following relationship breakdown. Using an analysis of the political discourse surrounding marriage law reform since 1945, I identify the political problems that marriage law was intended to address and the strategic effects of the solutions deployed. This approach facilitates a movement away from binary rights-based claims to a more nuanced understanding of the role played by the marriage law complex in managing our collective lives.
Caroline McGregor, NUI Galway, Application of Foucault’s history of the present to child welfare and social work in Ireland
This paper provides an overview of how I have used Foucault’s history of the present in my social work research. It outlines how I applied his concepts of history of the present to an analysis of the nature and form of social work in Ireland in general and child protection and welfare practice in particular. It demonstrates how the concepts of genealogy and archaeology were applied to guide a research approach. It demonstrates some of the challenges involved in the application of the theoretical and conceptual ideas underpinning a history of the present approach by showing an example in my research where on hindsight, the application was not effective. This is balanced with another example where the application was more effective and authentic to the principles underpinning it. Through these illustration, some guidance to researchers is offered on how best to engage with the methods of history of the present work. The paper ends with a more general commentary on the contribution that Foucault’s work makes to the discipline of social work observing that more has been drawn out from the work on surveillance, power, discourse and regulation and less on the application of History of Sexuality 1-3 and especially the notion of care of self, a counterpoint to a common term used in social work presently (‘self-care’). This is an area of ongoing work in progress for the presenter.
John Moran, Dublin City University, Framing Film’s Sex Scenes through a Foucaultian Lens: How Foucault’s insights inform an analysis of cinematic sexual representation
This paper outlines how Foucault’s insights, especially those offered in his History of Sexuality, provide a theoretical framework for addressing the apparent divergence between academic approaches to cinematic representations of sexual behaviour. This divergence appears between a film studies perspective that focuses on the transgressive potential of a reconfiguration of pornographic aesthetics, and a social science approach that explores the negative effects of children’s and adolescent exposure to cultural texts in which sexual themes and explicit imagery proliferate and have become more accessible. I shall begin by setting out the standard narrative relating to sexual representation in the cinema, in which sexual representation becomes more liberal after the 1960s Sexual Revolution, giving rise to a discourse of transgression as cinema’s sex scenes become ever more explicit. I then show how Foucault’s thinking challenges this standard narrative, which appears to perpetuate “the repressive hypothesis”, and opens up opportunities to study sex in cinema by addressing the paradoxical situation in which a continuing regime of classification and restriction of sexual content in film prevails in an age of cultural pornification and sexualisation.
My research is funded by the Irish Research Council through the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme.
John Morison, Queen’s University Belfast, “A sort of farewell”? Sovereignty and the Irish constitutions
This contribution offers a constitutional lawyer’s perspective. It outlines several attempts to follow through on some of the implications for constitutional theory of acting on Foucault’s famous proposition about cutting off the king’s head. In contrast to most constitutional theory, and its focus on the traditional concepts of rule of law, legitimacy and sovereignty, a governmentality approach must refuse to equate government with the state and develop instead a wider view of what power is, how it is exercised, and by whom. As Foucault reminds us, the analysis of power relations within a society cannot be reduced to the study of a series of institutions, not even to the study of all those institutions which would merit the name “political”. This understanding necessitates developing an account that looks less at the formal institutions of treaties, parliaments and courts and concentrates more on the actual operations of power where they occur. For Foucault this involves bidding “a sort of farewell” to sovereignty and thinking instead about the reality of how power operates in the constitution aside from the formal state and its traditional sources of (sovereign) authority. Research on the role of the voluntary sector in governance, public consultation and e-government has provided opportunities to explore some of these themes. The various constitutional relationships in Ireland are also a fertile ground for such an approach. In contrast to the constituting document that is Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Belfast Agreement offers a non-foundationalist foundation for a constitution of understandings and practices that are intended to develop beyond the complex institutional structures created for politicians. After outlining briefly how this may be working this paper explores how such an approach may address issues around a post-Brexit Ireland and even the constitutional futures involved in any all-Ireland settlement.
Anne Mulhall, University College Dublin, Biopolitics and ‘Irish Queer Studies’
My engagement with Foucault’s work follows the trajectory of its influence in the field of Queer Studies – that is, from Sedgwick’s and Butler’s focus on the production of the normative subject in Western modernity to the analysis of the bio/necropolitical uses of sexuality in the racist state’s technology of population management. The work of Siobhan Somerville and Ann Stoler in the mid-90s provided a much-needed corrective to the elision of race and racialisation in the analysis of the heteronormativity and the production of the queer, as did Lisa Duggan’s analysis of homonormativity in The Twilight of Equality (2003). However, it was the ongoing work within trans and queer people of colour critique that insisted on the centrality of race, racism and postcoloniality to queer politics, community and scholarship, and within this diverse field of analytical perspectives and territorities the ‘biopolitical turn’ in Queer Studies was definitively galvanized by Jasbir Puar’s analysis of ‘homonationalism’ in Terrorist Assemblages (2007). In the Irish context, with a few notable exceptions, the influence of the biopolitical framework in cultural and literary analysis (as distinct from qualitative work in the social sciences) and queer critique has not been substantial. In my contribution to the roundtable I will ask why this is the case, taking into consideration the fact that the development of a bio/necropolitical queer analysis (as well as a decolonial queer critique) outside of the North American context has only recently come to prominence in the scholarly, activist and creative work collected in Queer Necropolitics (2014) and Decolonizing Sexualities (2016). In thinking about what such interpretative frames might still bring to analysis of the Irish context, I will raise the long-standing issues of the archaeology of ‘race’ and the elision of coloniality in Foucault’s biopolitics, and the rearticulations and critiques of the biopolitical via (for instance) Achebe’s ‘necropolitics’ and Mignolo’s ‘decoloniality’.
Alex O’Connell, Maynooth University, Transcending Identity: Northern Irish politics and ethnography
Foucault’s idea of governmentality has become central to explorations of the tension between abstract citizenship ideals and the everyday politics of communalism. Categorising, enumerating, and policing distinct populations is seen as straightforward coercion: an exercise in bio-power that shapes peoples into manageable section at the expense of liberal aspirations of equality. But at a deeper level, discussions of power sidestep obvious spheres of power like the state to focus on daily subjectivities of power, and their everyday intrusion and shaping of individual lives. The subjectivities of gendered, religious and ethnic identity have been explored in Northern Ireland as part of negotiating political parity between ‘communities’. These explorations raise fundamental questions about the ability of liberal conceptions of individualism and to promote freedom or agency, indeed they often point to the coercion inherent in liberal discourse.
I want to examine these questions through discussion of identity, policy and agency in Northern Ireland, and the continued politicisation of identity there. The Good Friday Agreement and subsequent political establishment have been criticised as perpetuating communal divisions while strangling alternate civic identities. Such critiques leave little room for subjective identifications with religious identity, dismissing it as false essentialism and proscribing civic equality. This firstly ignores the role such policies played in fostering exclusion in the past and, secondly, leaves little room for the importance of subjective identities outside of sectarianism.
Radek Przedpełski, Trinity College Dublin, Délire/Art Machine as a Map of Potentialities: Deleuze/Guattari Hack Foucault’s Diagram
This paper charts the Deleuzoguattarian elaboration of Foucault’s notion of the diagram—as ‘a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. (…) a spatio-temporal multiplicity’ (Deleuze 2006: 34) encapsulated in the figure of the panopticon—and its relevance to art. It will be argued that a movement of thought consonant with the Foucauldian diagram is taken up in Anti-Oedipus as the schizo-artistic world-historical délire—detected in Nietzsche, Schreber and Lenz—which conjoins geographical and historical designations with intensive passages traced on the body. In other words, the Deleuzoguattarian diagram does not so much stake out the existing power (pouvoir) relations as their archive or index; but becomes a productive map of potentialities (puissance) flush with, yet irreducible to, a social assemblage. As such, thus conceived diagram finds its correlate in the Deleuzoguattarian notion of abstract machine developed in A Thousand Plateaus. The paper will subsequently present a range of art diagrams operating in selected art-works.
Deleuze, Gilles [1986] (2006) Foucault, trans. Seán Hand and Paul Bové, London; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tim Stott, Dublin Institute of Technology, Foucault and the Ludic Museum
Liberal governance consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organize it.
Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978-1979.
This paper will study a key feature of contemporary art exhibitions, which is that they invite visitors to play. Many laud such play as a gain in freedom or agency for gallery visitors, a generous and egalitarian move on the part of artists and arts institutions alike, in contrast to the more conventional, hands-off and top-down approach to the experience of art in public exhibitions. However, Foucault’s work on liberal governance allows us to complicate this picture of the benefits of the ludic museum. As engagement with art turns into play, perhaps a previous mode of governance simply becomes another, one that is liberal rather than disciplinary.
Governance faces compelling problems in the organisation of such play, because play is something a player must freely choose to do. How to govern without governing too much, how to let things happen, how to produce “natural freedoms,” these are problems at the heart of what Foucault called “the game of liberalism.” The emergence of play in contemporary art exhibitions allows us to analyse the rules, constraints, and freedoms of this game. In the ludic museum we might no longer think of play and governance as opposites but as correlates.
Stephen Strauss-Walsh, University of Limerick, Victimology from a Foucauldian perspective
This paper explains the contribution Foucault has made to Victimology. This involves contemplating the nature of victim reintroduction through an examination of Foucault’s’ ‘axis of individualisation’ – which explains how power creates identities. The aim is to extend this to include victims, as subjects and targets of power. This will extrapolate how victim subjectivity was created and emerged within Irish society.
The paper will demonstrate how I intend to use Foucault to construct ‘histories of the present’ This involves exploring rifts within “history” which subvert preconceptions (Roth 1981:43).This “antihistory” constructs “history” as a part of our present that can be transcended (Roth 1981:44).The paper will assess how the eighteenth century ‘badly regulated distribution of power’ (Foucault 1979: 79) allowed the nineteenth century move from scaffolds to states where ‘… law operates more and more as the norm’ (Foucault 1979: 144).
This paper will eventually conclude by briefly surmising the main conclusions which can be drawn from this study; namely that Foucauldian theory provides several insights into the transfer from eighteenth century victim inclusive justice to nineteenth century governmentality and helps clarify the birth of Victimology by explaining how the ‘axis of individualisation’ has shifted from offender to victim. The objective of this paper is to essentially outline how I intend to use Foucault to gauge victim re-emergence.
Karen E. Till, Maynooth University, Decolonising theories of ‘care of self’ through a place-based ethics of care
This paper attempts to bring insights from Foucault’s writings on the ‘care of self’ into conversation with feminist, postcolonial and indigenous political theory and practice. Foucault critically challenges Western normative ethics as being an abstract normative code or customary conduct, and instead asks how individuals have been invited or incited to apply techniques to themselves that enable them to recognize themselves as ethical subjects. As a mode of self-formation, ethics for Foucault can also be how we fashion our freedom. His positive ethic of self-formation is similar to arguments made by indigenous scholars to decolonize the mind (Yellow Bird and Waziyatawin) in interrogating ‘what type of being is one attempting to become by means of’ the types of activities ‘people engage in order to form themselves, to moderate their behavior, to decipher what they are, to eradicate their desires (the ascetics)’ (Foucault, 1985: 26-28). If we consider the self as not isolated, we can consider feminist (Young, Tronto), indigenous (Waziyatawin, Yellow Bird, Smith), and postcolonial theorists (Gregory, Pieterse, Myers) who directly or indirectly attempt a reconciliation of care with justice. Western gendered divisions of morality and knowledge production pose problems when thinking about structural forms of violence and injustice. Instead, thinking spatially about care and memory encourages a critical awareness of environmental and intergenerational rights beyond merely the individual self.
Maighread Tobin, Maynooth University, A Foucauldian perspective on literacy in twentieth-century Ireland
This presentation is based on a PhD research study that examines literacy in Ireland from a Foucauldian perspective. Pride in the literary proficiency of the Irish people is an important feature of Irish cultural heritage, and reverence for literacy forms an enduring element of official nationalism in the Irish nation-state. The popular retrospective narrative of the twentieth century imposes a grand synthesis, where the Irish are uniformly constructed as a fully literate population. The research examines this unquestioned, taken for granted, comfortable assumption about literacy, one that marginalizes and stigmatizes those with literacy difficulties in the present day. The study examines how the illiterate person is constituted in the twentieth century, using historical documents that are publicly available in the National Library of Ireland, the Irish National Archives and the Irish Military Archives.
The analytic framework is derived from Foucault’s genealogical writing, and the analysis is orientated towards the discursive level, reflecting Foucault’s contention that ways of speaking often have material consequences. The analytic findings are used to explicate a set of intertwining discourses circulating in twentieth century Ireland. These contemporaneous discourses offer a range of subject-positions for the illiterate person, ranging from celebration to demonization. In doing so, they acknowledge the existence of illiteracy in Ireland.
The presentation draws on the research findings in the context of Foucault’s conceptualisations of racial purity and nationalism, offering an alternative account of literacy in twentieth century Ireland in order to trouble existing accounts.
Zizhen Wang, University College Dublin, The mechanism of pedagogic power management in a High School for Repeating Students–Based on fieldwork in Blackstone College in China
This research explored the mechanism of pedagogic power management and control techniques deriving from the fieldwork data on teacher-student interaction in Blackstone College, China via participant observation. Every year there are more that 2,000,000 high school students returning back to school for a second try on the National College Entrance Examination (Leaving Certification Exam) in China. How to manage this special group of students in class and the difference of interactions between teachers and repeating students in comparison with normal students is of vital importance to understand in Chinese educational context.
Drawing from Foucault’s theory of power, especially from Discipline and Punishment, this study suggests that teachers used systematic and strategic power management skills to deal with different classroom scenarios according to their stock knowledge at hand. Through space control and panopticism, teachers surveilled students by standing at the backdoor and post students’ dreams publicly for mutual-supervision between students. Through time control, timetable different from the official one was created, as well as new punishment methods for unpunctuality. As to the aspect of presentation skills, teachers used power techniques such as changing the sequence of ranking and using different styles of Chinese calligraphy on blackboard, as well as deliberately leaving blanks on transcripts, to discipline students.
Stephen Wilmer, Trinity College Dublin, Using Foucault to unmask Ireland’s Control Society
This paper uses Foucauldian theory to analyze the mother and baby homes in Ireland as an example of biopolitical control and social exclusion. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), Michel Foucault reveals how governments have used penal institutions to isolate and exclude undesired elements in society, and that in the 19th Century such institutions adopted new procedures for controlling the behavior of deviants by introducing certain forms of discipline that gradually became normative. In a similar way the Roman Catholic religious orders in Ireland developed a network of power to control social behavior and devised methods to justify the exclusion and disappearance of those who deviated from their moral teaching. The Church provided an institutional framework that forced unwed mothers such as Philomena Lee to become invisible and buried children in mass graves, such as in Tuam and Drumcondra, in order to maintain order and cleanse society of what were perceived as unhealthy influences. Moreover, as Foucault (1980, 93) points out: “In any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse.”
Nusha Yonkova, University College Dublin, Gender-sensitive approach to protection and assistance of trafficked persons, with a focus on sexually exploited women
The research focuses on the recovery of victims of human trafficking and the policy response to their needs in selected EU countries. In light of the gendered nature of human trafficking, reflected in the demographic profile of the victims, as well as in the harm they experience, EU Member States are bound by strict international obligations. This research aims at studying, comparing and analysing systems of service provision in Ireland, UK, Bulgaria and Croatia with reference to international agreements, and the extent to which gender considerations are taken into account in their implementation in each selected country. The overall aim of the research is to produce an in-depth comparative analysis of gender-sensitive services and supports for victims of trafficking across the EU aimed at establishing their greater effectiveness in achieving social recovery for victims. The research encompasses a study of the national contexts in the selected countries, including their law, policy and monitoring systems in place, drawing on interviews with policy makers, service providers and survivors of human trafficking. The four countries selected are representative of existing variations in the EU in terms of size, economy, influence and length of EU membership on the one hand, and human trafficking crime trends on the other. The analysis of the data is underway with a delivery of preliminary results by March 2017.
IRC Employment based scholar