This article provides a critical evaluation of Ben Golder’s and Peter Fitzpatrick’s recent Foucault’s Law, which it characterizes as a decisive intervention into both legal theory and Foucault scholarship. It argues in favour of Golder’s and Fitzpatrick’s effort to affirm the multiplicity of Foucault’s work, rather than treat that work as either unified by a consistent position or broken into a series of relatively stable periods. But it also argues against Golder’s and Fitzpatrick’s analysis of Foucault’s understanding of the law (...) through a conceptual framework borrowed from Derrida, and especially Derrida’s distinction between law and justice. It shows how this approach to reading Foucault effectively transforms some of his more powerful criticisms of the law into defences of justice. In place of this interpretation, the second half of this paper initiates a reading of Foucault’s later work on ethics and the self in the ancient world. It develops the theme of an ethics, or a way of life, that takes shape at a distance from politics on the one side and law on the other. (shrink)

Prominent consumer depression manuals issued in recent years circulate a standard depression script as scientific knowledge. The script, asserting that a broad spectrum of depressions are brain illnesses that require antidepressant treatment, is in fact highly contested among researchers. This paper reviews the logical problematics of these manuals, and how such discourse promotes the diagnosis and pharmaceutical treatment of behaviors ranging from mild symptoms to severe depression. In keeping with the trends of pharmaceutical advertising and State health policy, these manuals (...) encourage consumers to self-scrutinize risky behavior, and to treat common behavioral and mood distresses with antidepressants. Ultimately, these activities of self-management function to produce a more productive citizen population. (shrink)

This article proposes to approach issues around the self and its derivate concepts such as motivation through a methodology of rearticulation. For this, we build on the idea developed in the Vygotskian tradition of the self as mediated by cultural artifacts in activity, viewed as a transformative social process that reconfigures sense and meaning. We aim at suggesting these potentials by rearticulating activities in which people display their motives. Most contemporary ‘motivational technologies’ stage a pragmatic self-calculation. For some, these technologies (...) confirm a common-sense, managerial self; others read them as a ‘poetics of practice’ that performs and produces new motives and selves in a liminal space of discursive creativity. These two readings are superseded as we – with art theory from Vygotsky through Brecht to Groys, Bourriaud and Rancière – consider drug counsellors’ experiments with aesthetic practices of self-display in which sense is reconfigured as dis-sensus, as meaning deferred. Aesthetics provide a lense through which we can appreciate how an artifact-mediation can be also a struggle for recognition that reconstitutes emerging selves, senses, and motives. (shrink)

In the twenty-first century, a widening array of unassuming fruits, vegetables, seeds and grains have been crowned “superfoods.” While many are exotic imports marketed to Western consumers through neocolonial narratives, others are familiar domestically-grown supermarket staples spectacularly rebranded. Why has “superfood” status become so central to the American produce industry? What sort of subjectivities does a superfood cultivate among consumers? This paper charts the ascent of the almond to superfood status as the latest in a series of spatial fixes alleviating (...) the pains of chronic overproduction. The spatial-fix is a material-semiotic process with important psychosocial dimensions often downplayed in the historical materialist tradition. Drawing on historical archives, advertising materials, interviews with current and recently retired almond industry marketing professionals, and observation at the annual industry conference from 2015 to 2018, I show that as almond production surges the industry must constantly work to change the way consumers see almonds and the way they see themselves. While consumers resist and reinterpret the shifts in food meanings fashioned to compensate for overproduction, a century of effective material-semiotic fixes attests to the industry’s influence on foodways. The case of almonds is used here to theorize the broader superfood trend and its imagined “super” subjects as produced through the political economy of industrial agriculture. Understanding the political economic underpinnings of superfoods reveals not only the historical foundation of this contested contemporary food phenomenon, but also sheds light on the metamorphoses of food meanings fundamental to agrarian capitalism. (shrink)

‘Individualisation’ is a well-known societal phenomenon of late modernity. At the organisational level it shows up in different managerial forms and HRM technologies that focus more and more intensively on the employee as an individual person. In order to assess an employee’s personal contribution and commitment emphasis is put on the characteristics of individuals: their talents, performance and personality. Reporting on research on an individualised pay system in Denmark, this paper illustrates the empirical complexity of this personalisation process. It shows (...) how the employee is created and ‘codified’ as an individual person. It occurs in three different ways according to the codes of learning, love and the moral. It indicates that the postulated regime of individualisation follows a variety of trajectories to reach its target making for a quite subtle way of intimately managing human relations. (shrink)

Since the early 1970s humanistic psychology has struggled to remain a relevant force in the social and psychological sciences, we attribute this in part to a conceptualisation of the self rooted in theoretically outmoded thinking. In response to the issue of relevancy a sociocultural turn has been called for within humanistic psychology, which draws directly and indirectly on the conceptual insights of Michel Foucault. However, this growing body of research lacks a unifying conceptual base that is able to encompass its (...) new perspectives and the movement’s theoretical antecedents. This analysis suggests a way forward by offering a potential reconceptualisation of the self in humanistic psychology through the existential-phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. We argue that Heidegger’s conception of the self takes account of subjectivities produced in discourse and institutional practice, while acknowledging the human capacity for actualisation in his concept of the authentic-self. (shrink)

In the three published volumes of his History of Sexuality Foucault reflects on themes of anxiety situated in the Christian doctrine of the flesh that led to a pastoral ministry establishing the rules of a general social economy—rules that enabled, over time, a discourse on the flesh that took thrift, prudence, modesty, and suspicion as essential ethical premises in the emerging “art of the self.” Rather than sensing flesh as a charged, motile potentiality of attachment and intimacy, it came to (...) be seen as skin—as the limit of a sovereign body, embedding guilt and shame into the texture of its expression. This essay pursues the psychological and communication problematic of intimacy as a critical and developmental experience of the flesh. Foucault's concept of self-care and parrhesia, Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh and embodiment, and Bataille's concept of glory and eroticism contribute to a phenomenology of human development that seeks to articulate an idea of a self diffierentiated from the unspoken binds of familial anxiety and emotionality. (shrink)

The final report of the Australian Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse comprises 17 volumes, one of which addresses its findings in relation to schools. In this arti...

Teaching in university education programmes, can, at times, involve the uncomfortable situation of discriminatory speech.A situation that has often occurred in our own teaching, and in those of our colleagues, is the citation of homophobic and heterosexist comments.These are comments that are more likely to occur in foundation subjects such as philosophy and sociology of education.The occurrence of such situations has prompted debate regarding ‘silencing words that wound’. This has prompted the question, ‘should we keep students from stating such discriminatory (...) speech?’ Our article takes up this issue, and considers it from the perspective of the importance of critique.Working with Foucault’s What is Critique? together with his discussion of subjectivation in the 1981–82 lectures at the Collège de France, we set out to make the case for the significance of the relationship between truth and critique.This leads us to a position where we ask the question, if we silence, what do we risk doing to critique? (shrink)

The problem with authenticity—the idea of being “true to one’s self”—is that its somewhat checkered reputation garners a complete range of favorable and unfavorable reactions. In educational settings, authenticity is lauded as one of the top two traits students desire in their teachers. Yet, authenticity is criticized for its tendency towards narcissism and self-entitlement. So, is authenticity a good or a bad thing? The purpose of this article is to develop an intimate understanding of authenticity by investigating its current interpretation (...) and criticisms, its struggle with narcissism and relation to freedom. Examining authenticity as multilayered self-exploration reveals a composite of understanding, care, and acceptance. While a side current of acceptable tension shifts our understanding of authenticity from the security of self-determination to the messy interplay involved in being “true to one’s self” and being “in-the-world”. (shrink)

Analyses of government have had little to say about the management of people within the modern corporation. This paper seeks to remedy this neglect by examining the transformation of the principles and practices for governing the factory which occurred in the USA across the last two decades of the twentieth century. This transformation included changes to the technology and physical layout of factories, changes to the concepts according to which manufacturing is organized, and changes in the public discourse concerning work (...) and the worker. The reshaping of identities for workers and managers, and the construction of new ideas of economic citizenship, represented new ways of governing economic life. “Rethinking the factory” meant both a physical reconstruction of the factory, as well as a reconstruction of ideas and practices about how to govern the actions of persons within the reengineered customer-driven factory. (shrink)

This article considers the ‘creative education’ of influential Aotearoa/new Zealand art educator Elwyn Richardson, which is based on what he calls the ‘discovery method’: the ‘concentrated study of material from [students’] own surroundings’. Through a game that his students play with tyres, we explore the role that tools play in Richardson’s classroom and in the imaginary ‘worlding’ of his students’ play. By taking the ‘early world’ of the children’s development to be a product of the tools through which they describe (...) it, we reveal Richardson’s educative process to be essentially technological. His idea of the whole child who emerges through a process of experience and observation—of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, in the well-known phrase of Wordsworth cited by Richardson—conflates the nature of the child and nature of the ‘natural’ world. By this act of ‘natural settlement’ not untypical of settler narratives in Aotearoa/new Zealand, the child’s—and, by implication, other settlers’—relation to the world of nature is naturalized. Instead, we would argue that the child’s relation to nature is altogether unnatural: it is imprinted by the technological means through which she explores the world and makes it her own—and by which she is made over. The ‘tyre-child’ is no child of nature, but a child of technology, for whom creative errors—acts of ‘mis-taking’ like the ones Richardson’s children make in playing with tyres—reveal an imaginary capacity at once theoretical and unsettling. (shrink)

In this paper I interpret Montaigne’s essay, “On Educating Children”, as a pedagogical text through its performance of a distinct epistolary function, one that addresses the letter-recipient for the purpose of shaping the ideas, actions, and beliefs of that individual. At the same time, I also read “On Educating Children” within the context of the wider project of Montaigne’s Essays, which, as I suggest, is an ethical-aesthetic project of self-fashioning and self-cultivation. The net result is an interpretation of teaching as (...) an ethical-aesthetic practice of the self, one that is in concert with the interpretation of Montaigne’s writing of the Essays as a similar practice of the self. In order to build this case, I employ Michel Foucault’s fourfold schema of ethical subjectivity, mapping that schema onto “On Educating Children”, so as to reveal a unique pedagogy of self-formation—a pedagogy that works as much upon the self of the teacher as it does the self of the student. (shrink)

This dissertation responds to a recent zeitgeist and climate of controversy surrounding issues of "virtuality" and "simulation" Such terms are treated as problematic and essentially contested when framed in reference to notions of a fixed observable "reality" rather than considered in terms of socially constructed facts, relationships and identities. The concept of the "virtual stage" advanced in this thesis, refers to the current historical moment in communications technology development as well as to the dramaturgical perspective which informs the theoretical approach (...) and argument. (shrink)

The authors interrogate genital examinations as events in which both client and practitioner are `produced' as relational subjects in quite specific ways. This article explores the way one female sex health worker talks about her work as a form of cultural exchange, noting what she requires of her clients and seeks to give of herself. Of particular importance is the way the practitioner produces the client as a social subject amenable to intimate examination, while resisting some traditional means for doing (...) so. The authors use a Foucauldian conceptual framework to signal their departure from feminist analyses which explain such practices in terms of a patriarchal medical system. (shrink)