This article contributes to governmentality studies and state theory by discussing how to understand the centrality and importance of the state from a governmentality perspective. It uses Giorgio Agamben’s critique of Michel Foucault’s governmentality approach as a point of departure for re-investigating Foucault as a thinker of the state. It focuses on Foucault’s notion of the state as a process of ‘statification’ which emphasizes the state as something constantly produced and reproduced by processes and practices of government, administration and acclamation. (...) As a result of this, the state appears as a given entity which is necessary for the multiplicity of governmental technologies and practices in modern society to function. Only by reference to the state can governmental practices be effective and legitimized. Finally, the article conceptualizes the centrality of the state through Foucault’s (preliminary) notions of the state as a ‘practico-reflexive prism’ and a ‘principle of intelligibility’. (shrink)

This article interrogates the specter of resistance in the writings of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, arguing they open up divergent ways of theorizing resistance to power. This article’s focus is on both philosophers’ use and interpretation of the dispositif, or apparatus, which controls and orders subjects, and which is the target for forms of resistance. Whereas for Foucault resistance is a practice existing as a transcendent possibility for any individual, Agamben reads such transcendent forms of resistance as ultimately reinforcing (...) the control of the dispositif, arguing that only a turn to ontology and immanent politics can resistance be meaningful. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of an aging world population increasingly affected by a diverse range of abilities and disabilities as well as the rise of ubiquitous computing and digital app cultures, this paper questions how mobile technologies mediate between heterogeneous environments and sensing beings. To approach the current technological manufacturing of the senses, two lines of thought are of importance: First, there is a need to critically reflect upon the concept of assistive technologies as artifacts providing tangible solutions for a specific (...) disability. Second, the conventional distinction between user and environment requires a differentiated consideration. This contribution will first review James Gibson’s concept of “affordances” and modify this approach by introducing theories and methods of Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory. Then, we present two case studies where we explore the relations between recent “assistive” app technologies and human sensory perception. As hearing and seeing are key in this regard, we concentrate on two specific media technologies: ReSound LINX2, a hearing aid which allows for direct connect with iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and Camassia, an IOS app for sonic wayfinding for blind people. We emphasize the significance of dis-/abling practices for manufacturing novel forms of hearing and seeing and drawing on sources like promotional materials by manufacturers, ads, or user testimonials and reviews. Our analysis is interested in the reciprocal relationships between users and their socio-technical and media environments. By and large, this contribution will provide crucial insights into the contemporary entanglement of algorithm-driven technologies, daily practices, and sensing subjects: the production of techno-sensory arrangements. (shrink)

Recent criticisms of the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) Oxford campaign have problematized the presence of Black bodies within British higher education by reference to an ideal image of the impartial and discerning academy. In this article, I historically and intellectually contextualize the apprehension, expressed in the debates over RMF Oxford, that an intimate Black presence destabilizes the ethos of higher education. Specifically, I argue that much more than Rhodes’ statue implicates the British academy in the Empire’s southern African interests. I (...) excavate a genealogy of academic debates regarding the effects of an increased proximity of Black presence to empire’s white spaces. These debates were initiated by social anthropologists in the interwar years primarily (albeit not solely) with regards to studies of southern Africa’s urbanizing spaces. What is more, such debates were highly influential to the study of ‘race relations’ in Britain’s postwar era of Commonwealth immigration. Critically, all these debates problematized the cognitive competency of African/Black peoples to inhabit white cultural spaces – including the academy – in ways that were not destabilizing of imperial order. Current campus campaigns such as RMF should not be evaluated against an ideal image of the academy. Rather, they form part of a continued confrontation with the afterlives of academic dispositions that were implicated in the imperial project that Rhodes was integral to. (shrink)

The emergence of topics such as reprogenetics and genetic testing for hereditary diseases attests to the continued salience of Foucault's analyses of biopolitics. His various discussions pose at least two problems for contemporary appropriation of the work. First, it is unclear what the "life" on which biopolitics operates actually refers to.1 Second, it is unclear how biopolitics relates to the economy, either in the classical form of the family/household (oikos) or in the current form of neoliberalism.2 In what follows, I (...) argue, first, that modern biopolitics is marked less by the entry of biological life into the polis than by a new consideration of the form of life proper to humans. This is because Foucault's .. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the relationship between architecture and social movements in general and the indeterminate architecture of ruin and an event of squatter protest in particular. As a speculative project it reflects upon an architectural setting in which a protest took place in 2011 at the University of Sydney in Australia. Examining the architecture of this specific event and the ways architecture allows such turbulent moments to emerge are the focus of this paper. In this examination I combine (...) the Foucauldian notion of dispositif with the emerging notion of studentification in order to understand the role of architecture as a significant element in the rise of urban uprisings. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 4, Page 570-587, December 2021.

Science and technology studies scholars have turned their attention to the materiality of objects and buildings in order to examine what they make users do in practice. Taking a close look at a therapeutic community in a psychiatric day care center for teenagers, this paper joins these discussions by exploring the materiality of “spaces of care” as part of the center’s everyday practice. The analysis incorporates the concepts of scripts and dispositifs to describe the conditions of possibility in which caregivers (...) and youths may position themselves in relation to others and to the space itself. This paper describes how spaces of care offer open, enticing, and variable conditions for fostering a dynamic of personal and relational responses as part of the care work. In this sense, the material environment entails potentialities in ways that are unpredictable but nonetheless consequential. Rather than arguing that material arrangements and things act, this paper draws attention to their impact via their potential within dispositifs of care that request participants’ attentiveness and responsiveness. Describing these potentialities brings out the subtler requirements of material environments in care practices that aim at circumventing the coercion of disciplinary spaces and their impersonal classifications. (shrink)

This article theorizes the contemporary government of psychological life as neo-liberal enterprise. By drawing on Foucauldian critical social theory, it argues that the constellations of power identified with the psy-function and neo-liberal governmentality can be read through the problematic of everyday practice. On a theoretical level, this involves a re-examination of the notion of dispositif, to uncover the dynamic, ambivalent and temporal practices by which subjectification takes place. Empirically, this point is illustrated through a reflection of one case of neo-liberal (...) psychological life: life coaching. (shrink)

This article takes a genealogical approach to the material origin of what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘anthropological machine’, analyzing the dispositif by which the ontological and axiological dualism between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ first took place in archaic societies. Using some key concepts of René Girard’s anthropology, it is possible to argue that this dualism is rooted in the violent practice of victimage sacrifice. In other words, I claim that the anthropological machine is originally performed by (...) a sacrificial dispositif. Though in modern society the human/animal dichotomy is performed by other dispositifs, the trace of this origin remains in the form of what Gianfranco Mormino calls sacrificial survivals. An analysis of the survival of the violent parameter of equality demonstrates that making a conceptual shift to equality as equal vulnerability is the key to creating a break with the long-lasting effects of the sacrificial dispositif. Continental and feminist approaches to animal studies reflect deeply on vulnerability since it appears to be a promising dimension with which to ground human-animal relations in non-violent ways. If we link these attempts with the Girardian context, it is possible to understand their radical potential for creating socio-political change. (shrink)

This edited volume brings together experts from across the field of education to explore how traditional pedagogic and didactic forms and processes are changing, or even disappearing, as a result of new technologies being used for education and learning. -/- Considering the use, opportunites and limitations of technologies including interactive whiteboards, tablets, smart phones, search engines and social media platforms, chapters draw on primary and secondary research to illustrate the wide-reaching and often salient changes which new digital technologies are introducing (...) into educational environments and learning practices around the world. Neither claiming that traditional forms of learning must be replaced, nor calling for a restoration of the school, Education in the Age of the Screen offers a nuanced exploration of the implications of digitization for education. Taking a broad view on education as a social and cultural phenomenon, the volume focuses on three major dimensions: the wider conditions against the background of which we educate and are educated today, detailed examples of aesthetic practices and educational initiatives in the current media culture, and concrete answers to the challenges that come our way. -/- A comprehensive and timely consideration of the state of education in the digital age, this will be of interest to researchers, academics and post-graduate students in the fields of education and pedagogy, media and cultural studies, as well as teacher educators and trainee teachers. (shrink)

The article investigates Giorgio Agamben’s turn to, and radicalization of, Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which Agamben argues constitutes a ’decisive point’ in the Homo sacer-series. The article shows that in the investigation of the Trinitarian oikonomia, Agamben finds the point of intersection between the ‘totalizing procedures’ of the state and ‘individualizing techniques’ of biopolitics thereby disclosing the ‘zone of indistinction’ between sovereignty and government and politics and economy, which constitutes power in the West. Furthermore, the article argues that Agamben shows (...) how the economy is not something distinct from politics, encroaching on its logic, but rather how the governmental paradigm of the West constitutes the continual administration of the given, the continual and perpetual government of the economy and thereby of the existing economic and political power-relations. (shrink)