Foucault and Technology

This article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) employed the terms ‘technology’ and the ‘technique’ over the course of his intellectual career. His use of these words in his mature writings, it is argued, reflects a profound ambivalence: Foucault sought to denounce the pernicious effects of what he called modern ‘technologies of power,’ but also deliberately evoked the more positive values associated with ‘technology’ to develop a philosophical standpoint shorn of the ‘humanist’ values he associated with existentialism and phenomenology. The article situates Foucault’s condemnation of power technologies within the broader skepticism towards ‘technological society’ that pervaded French intellectual circles following World War II. In the first phase of his career (1954-1960), Foucault built on these attitudes to articulate a conventional critique of technology’s alienating effects. Between 1961 and 1972, the theme of ‘technology’ fell into abeyance in his work, though he often suggested a connection between the rise of technology and the advent of the ‘human sciences.’ Between 1973 and 1979, ‘technology’ became a keyword in Foucault’s lexicon, notably when he coined the phrase ‘technologies of power’. He continued to use the term in the final stage of his career (1980-1984), when his emphasis shifted from power to ‘technologies of the self.’ The essay concludes by addressing Paul Forman’s thesis on the primacy of science in modernity and of technology in modernity, suggesting that in many respects Foucault is more of a modernist than a postmodernist.     

Foucault toujours

Miller, J., The Passion of Michel Foucault (Simon & Schuster, 1993), 493pp., ISBN 0 671 69550 9

Mahon, M‐, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy— Truth, Power, and the Subject (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1992), 255pp., ISBN 0 7914 1150 8

Salmagundi — A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences (hiver 1993, no. 97), £3.00     

Michel Foucault

Despite his repudiation of antisemitism, Renan influenced the development of antisemitic ideologies in both France and Germany. His typology of ‘Semite’ and ‘Aryan’ was adopted especially in Germany and and combined with biological concepts of race to become the foundation of the concepts of ‘Semitism’ and ‘Antisemitism’. Renan, however, always insisted on a linguistic/cultural definition of race and regarded the biological conception, while it might have had some primitive reality, as outmoded and immoral in European civilization. After 1870 the growth of German racial antisemitism led Renan to elaborate repeatedly on race as a civilisational phenomenon that in modern Europe should have lost its biological origins. His argument that modern Jews were integral members of the French ‘nation’ and ‘civilization’ was profoundly influential on the emergence of the theory of the modern ‘nation’ as the liberal state. Gobineau's theory of race also lent itself to exploitation by racial antisemites, though it was not overtly antisemitic. Unlike Renan, however, Gobineau in his later years inclined to a vague personal antisemitism. The main difference was one of temperament as well as devotion on Renan's part to a liberal idea of the nation, as opposed to Gobineau's aversion to liberalism and modern civilization.     

Foucault and Radical Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative democracy is a flourishing variant of democratic theory. John Dryzek and Iris Young are two of its more radical exponents, and here I bring some Foucaultian complications to their work. The radicalness I highlight in both thinkers owes to their different but comparable commitments to equality between different voices in deliberation. Foucault's histories are all histories of expert knowledges and the objects they usher into the world. In this sense, expert knowledges present problems for deliberative democracy, not only because they carry greater status than other knowledges but also because they have ontological effects. As I illustrate with the example of economics, although the programs of Dryzek and Young can cope quite well with the first, the second is a more serious problem, although possibly a positive one.     

Foucault and the politics of our selves

Exploring the apparent tension between Foucault's analyses of technologies of domination -- the ways in which the subject is constituted by power-knowledge relations -- and of technologies of the self -- the ways in which individuals constitute themselves through practices of freedom -- this article endeavors to make two points: first, the interpretive claim that Foucault's own attempts to analyse both aspects of the politics of our selves are neither contradictory nor incoherent; and second, the constructive claim that Foucault's analysis of the politics of our selves, though not entirely satisfactory as it stands, provides important resources for the project of critical social theory.     

Foucault and the French tradition of historical epistemology

A recently published volume – edited by Walter Tega and Luigi Turco – celebrates the Italian historian of philosophy Antonio Santucci. One of the founders of the neoilluminismo (new-Enlightenment), Santucci blended strong civil commitment with rigorous textual analysis and contributed to the popularisation of British and American philosophy in Italy. The book describes Santucci's contribution to the historical research on empiricism and stimulates a reappraisal of the heated cultural debate which flourished in Italy after the Second World War.     

Foucault,space and primary school dining rooms

This paper takes up recent debates within Children's Geographies as to the ‘usefulness’ of theory and its application to school dining rooms. The paper argues that in particular, Foucault's notions of governmentality have the potential to advance theoretical understandings of the spatiality of school dining rooms, the social relationships that occur within them and that in addition this can have relevant practical and policy implications that could impact upon the everyday lives of children that are both constituted by and constitutive of this space.     

Free Christian Speech: Plundering Foucault

Abstract

This article explores the meaning of free speech through an analysis of Michael Foucault's lectures on parrhesia in order to show how questions of freedom are bound up with questions of truth. The activity of speaking freely is a function of truth-telling rather than merely subject to regulative principles that underwrite claims of sovereignty. The Christian proclamation of the gospel extends Foucault's insights into a theological register and supplies a foil for considering some of the shortcomings of his constructive proposal. By surveying parrhesia in the New Testament, together with some attendant political implications, this article attempts to explain the political transformation enacted by those who bear witness to the gospel without sovereign benefits. The freedom of such speech, it is asserted, is irrespective of these benefits.     

Foucault,deleuze, and the ontology of networks

The concept of the network has become embedded in social thought and imagery, articulating what at root is inarticulable. The network metaphor occupies an ontological space, but this space, insofar as it is posed as a philosophical question, seems to assume a network-like shape itself. It may be particularly rewarding to read the constellations studied by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze from this point of view, in light of the analysis of the preconditions of networks. This paper examines how the question of the ontology of networks is addressed by these thinkers, especially with regard to the historicity of ontology.     

Inventing modern Japan: Hobsbawm,Foucault and Meiji history

Takashi Fujitani. Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. US$40.00, hardcover.

James Edward Ketelaar. Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and its Persecution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. US$35.00, hardcover; US$17.95, paper.