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Social Flux - A fusion of:
At an early stage in my PhD research, I was directed to look at Foucault’s influence on educationists. As my research was in a business faculty I was unsure of the relevance. Soon after that I read a feature article on Foucault in the Australian Financial Review, which led me to believe that perhaps there was some merit in reading a little Foucault. I had already read Davies and Harré’s (1991) seminal work on positioning theory.
After reading a little Foucault and then participating in some Foucault internet discussion lists I realised that Davies and Harré (1991) must have been influenced by Foucault. So, I looked at their bibliography. As it turned out, 8 of the 22 references drew extensively on Foucault – including one of Davies’ own works. This began three years of focus on Foucault and the development of a post Foucauldian theory that drew on gaze, governmentality and other ideas out of Foucault’s work.
It would appear that Harré supports my ideas, as he has included my work as a chapter in his latest work on positioning theory with Moghaddam, The Self and Others.
I would not have made much sense of Foucault if it were not for the help of those on several Foucault lists. Some of these are Stewart, Clare, and Ali. I note their help in my thesis acknowledgements.
What follows is a list of links to Foucualt and other internet sites that I collected. It is a somewhat of a jumbled mess and one day I might tidy up the spelling and format. Disregarding the mess, it was especially helpful to me and perhaps others might find it useful too. You can read my thesis if you click on welcome (to the left of this text).
NARRATIVES
METAPHORS
FLUX
BAKHTIN
SOCIAL THEORY
CLASSICS
KANT
Umberto Eco Semiotics
Meme
MICHEL FOUCAULT
McKinlay&Starkey (1998) Foucault, Management and Organization Theory
The Dreyfus and Rabinow book give a good account of the relationship between Foucault and English speech-act theorest John Searle---including a letter foucault wrote to searle admitting that his initial seperation of the 'statement' in _the archeology_ from a 'speech act' was a premature and
hasty one.Source
"Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it
offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates,
unites, or re-unites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave.
Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must
be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm,
thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is
in itself an action--a perilous act." -Michel Foucault (Page 5 of Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Right after the table of contents)
James Bernauer, Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Towards an Ethics of Thought, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1990. Arnold I Davidson, (ed.), Foucault and his Interlocutors, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology, London: Routledge, 1994.
Dominique Lecourt, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault, translated by Ben Brewster, London: NLB, 1975 Gary Gutting, Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Scientific Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Barry Smart (ed.), Michel Foucault (1) Critical Assessments, London: Routledge, Three Volumes, 1994; Michel Foucault (2) Critical Assessments, London: Routledge, Four Volumes, 1995.
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Paris: Fayard, 1994. (mais en francais)
Alan Rosenberg & Alan Milchman (eds.), Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. (forthcoming )
Foucault discusses introduces the notion of bio-power in the last section of The History of Sexuality, Vol. One: An Introduction. You also might look at James Bernauer's discussion of bio-power in his book Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward and Ethics for Thought.
With respect to ethics, Foucault himself never presents a prescriptive ethical theory, which all people would be subject to. Instead, Foucault's works seem to indicate that he affirmed the notions of treating one's life like a work of art and the notion of caring for oneself. The best places to
look for Foucault's views on ethics are the later interviews collected in Ethics and Subjectivity: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. one. There Foucault discusses what it is that we might learn from the Greeks and Romans even though we cannot apply their answers to our problems.
polemicist (used by Faucalt in his 1984 interview with Rabinow)
normativity (used in someone's recent post to this list)
Foucault is a moral philosopher. His choices of topics are not those of random historical curiosities and his every inclusion of one detail over another has a purpose to it. He is not some blind grouper of facts for some one else to sift. He IS ambiguous in that he does not give clear theoretical structures, yet his works are thoroughly ethical in nature. He just disrupts traditional notions of what it means to do ethics, but he the entire interest of his studies depend on a moral "gotcha" hiding in the wings. He endeavors to describe our ethical relations and their different forms, and this can nt be received nor compiled in an ethically neutral way. Unless, we're going to imagine that Foucault (or any one for that matter) has elevated himself that far out of practical power/knowledge discourses to be "simply a historian!"
It is right to bring up Kant; Foucault is a philosopher and it is always valid to check for connections or reactions to Kant when dealing with a post Kantian philosopher.
Perhaps the time has come to examine transendental standards and their possibility. Perhaps, since F's philosophy, much like Neitzche's, is based purely in corporeal reality and cannot, therefore, determine the truth or falsehood of a priori standards. The fact that they are normative speaks nothing of their truth or falsehood. And since F never tells us that we shouldn't operate under norms, he has no indictment of them.
It seems, then, that there is no necessary clash between Kant and Foucault. They could be used in a complimentary duo.
***
From: Jill Molan
Would someone be able to comment in relation to Donzelot's
conceptualisaton of 'technologies', 'programs' and 'strategies' in
relation to Foucault's conceptualisations of the same terms? I notice
that Donzelot's article using these terms came out the same year that
Foucault published his well-known article on Governmentality, and i
wonder what the connections are.
Many thanks, the extract is below with references. Jill
The following quote is from O'Malley, P. 1996, 'Risk and
responsibility', in Foucault and political reason, eds A. Barry, T.
Osborne and N. Rose, University College Press (UCL), London, pp.
189-207.
That article is citing from an article Donzelot, J. 1979, 'The poverty
of political culture', Ideology and Consciousness, vol. 5, pp. 71-86.
I haven't been able to get the Donzelot article from the library, am
waiting for it to arrive on interlibrary loan.
In this conceptualization, technologies, of which the panopticon and
insurance are examples, emerge as always local and multiple,
intertwining, coherent or contradictory forms of activating and managing
a population (Donzelot 1979). Technologies, although they have their
own dynamics, nevertheless develop primarily in terms of their role in
relation to specific political programmes. Political programmes focus
upon doing something about a practicable object, for example the
reduction of levels of unemployment, rates of crime or youth
homelessness. They are recipes for corrective intervention [and]
redirection. In turn, such programmes are formed in terms of more
abstract strategies - formulae of government, theories which explain
reality only to the extent that they enable the implementation of a
program (Donzelot 1979: 77). Keynesianism and laissez-faire liberalism
provide examples of the latter.' (OMalley 1996, p. 193)
Rose, N. 1996, 'Governing 'advanced' liberal democracies', in Foucault and
political reason, eds A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose, University College Press (UCL), London, pp. 37-64.
Foucault wrote intermittently about governmentality, never did apparently
complete a single comprehensive work on it. There is one other paper - a lecture in English 'Omnes et singulatim' ('all and one' - government of the population as well as government of the individual subject). It was originally published as:
Dean, M. & Hindess, B. (eds) 1998, Governing Australia: studies in contemporary
rationalities of
government, trans. Translator, Reshaping Australian Institutions, Cambridge
University Press,
Cambridge.
Dean, M. 1999, Governmentality: power and rule in modern society, SAGE
Publications, London.
Rose has been using the idea for a while:
'Government at a distance' Rose refers to particularly in those two cited
at the top, as well as in Powers of Freedom. In Miller and Rose they refer to the term 'action at a distance' as coming from:
References
***
Jeffrey Pfeffer's organizations as political arenas
Pfeffer, J (1978) Organizational Design. Arlington Heights, Ill: AHM Publishing
Pfeffer, J (1981) Power in Organization Structures. Marshfield Mass: Pitman Publishing
Jeffrey Pfeffer has build on March and Simon's work to create a model of organizational theory that encompasses power coalitions, inherent conflict over goals and organizational-design decision that favor the self-interest of those in power.* Pfeffer proposes that controls in organizations becomes an end rather than merely a means to relational goals such as efficient production or output. Organization's design represents the result of the power struggles by these diverse coalitions. Pfeffer argues that if we want to understand how and why organizations are designed the way they are, we need to assess the preferences and interests of those in the organizations who have influence over the design decisions. This view is currently very much in vogue.
Identity as a Verb, by Gower
Garfinkel
Essay
Wetherell, M. (1998) 'Positioning and interpretative repertoires: Conversation analysis and
post-structuralism in dialogue', Discourse and Society, vol.9, pp.431-56.
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