"知识-权力"与规训社会——对福柯《规训与惩罚》的解析

《规训与惩罚》是福柯一生中最重要的作品之一。在该书中，他对现代社会的权力运作机制进行了深入的分析。福柯认为，权力的运作不仅与知识紧密相关，而且就是知识的实践活动。全景敞视监狱的出现和普及促使了规训社会的形成。现代社会在本质上就是一个规训社会。规训社会的运作借助“知识——权力”这种连带关系来进行。     

权力实现方式的演变——福柯《规训与惩罚》探析

福柯《规训与惩罚》一书,为我们展示了一种微观权力技术在现代西方社会中强大的规训作用。本文重点通过对全景敞视模式这个福柯创造的新术语的分析,突出了它在现代西方社会权力运行机制中这个关键的环节。而通过对它的分析,从而揭示出人的危机这个《规训与惩罚》一书的主旨,这也为我国建构和谐社会中人的自由而全面的发展提供了反面的借鉴意义。     

评后现代解构主义代表人物福柯的“反抗权力统治论”

后现代主义政治思想就是文化和社会政治批判意义上的后现代主义。后现代主义政治思想最主要的特征之一是,它侧重于从文化的角度对当代西方社会政治的微观方面进行分析、探讨和批判,其代表性的研究成果主要有福柯的反抗权力统治论和利奥塔的“差异”统治论,其特点是力图解构和反抗现代政治表现出来的权力中心化趋势,而将边缘、局部、分散的权力作用视为是后现代政治应关注的主要内容。     

何为考古学——浅析福柯对现代哲学先验基础的认识论批判

《知识考古学》是一部奇书，其中层层堆叠的概念与认识方式可能让许多希望了解福柯思想的人望而却步。本文从特定的问题出发：知识考古学是如何批判先验哲学的这样一个视角切入福柯的著作本身。通过考古学与思想史的比较恢复文献的“事件性”，对于话语事件形成条件的分析就成为了考古学独特的问题视域，进而从福柯的“陈述”概念出发，在其稀少性、多样性、历史性这三重维度上突出考古学对于先验哲学起源、连续性和总体性的批判。     

反本质主义语境下的后现代主义

实用主义对本质主义的批判,揭开了哲学上后现代性取代现代性的序幕.海德格尔既反对本质主义又反对实用主义.他关于实用主义与本质主义之间具有深层关联的观点,成为后现代哲学家激进批判现代性的理论起点.利奥塔通过对科学知识与叙事知识两个不同方面的拆解,成功点破了本质主义成为现代人生活的一种普遍模式的奥秘.福柯则揭示出,在现代性条件下,文本和权力关系怎样通过话语对社会和它的文化生产行使着一种有效的控制.德里达把文本看作是与外在权力无关的东西,既表明了他与福柯之间的重大分歧,也推进了海德格尔对本质主义的批判,同时还把哲学拓展到文学领域.本文试图在所有这些方面建立起联系,并且把追溯的源头引向古希腊哲学的理论特质.     

以“生命政治”之名：在数字时代重思福柯的治理术

治理术是理解福柯治理思想的重要切面,通过对不同时代治理术的剖析,可以找到福柯有关生命政治思想的诞生源头。治理术可以被划分为16世纪之前的治理权术、16至19世纪的治理技艺、20世纪以来的治理算术,它们分别由统治权力、规训权力和摆置权力创制,旨在实现的治理则分别为“对人口的治理”“对国家的治理”以及“对想象力的治理”。其中,治理算术作为数字时代治理术的被异化形式,以一种隐蔽但强力的方式操纵社会,并由此产生了许多自身难以化解的风险。数字时代的治理应当重新回到“人的解放”这个核心议题,将实现“生命平等”和提高“生命质量”作为建构一种新治理术的核心主张。这种新治理术的实质是一种政治哲学,而福柯的“生命政治”概念则为建构这种政治哲学提供了相当充分的思想资源。     

福柯生命政治思想的认识论反思

福柯的生命政治学是一种诞生于当代资本主义国家中的生命治理技术，他在生命政治批判范式建构过程中采用了一种思想史的考察方式，以谱系学为方法对权力作用于生命的机制进行分析，走出了一条独特的生命政治批判路径。一方面，这一路径承袭了法国认识论传统中的“断裂”与“非连续性”逻辑，呈现出一种强烈的批判认识论色彩；另一方面，这一路径基于知识、权力与谱系的分析确立了微观权力批判的范式。但它并未真正在差异化或者断裂性的总体性中找到一条主体的解放之路，因此有必要对这一批判范式展开认识论反思，而这一反思必然走向历史唯物主义。只有在后者的批判逻辑中，对资本主义的总体性批判才能展开。     

波斯特超级全景监狱与福柯全景监狱比较研究

福柯在阐明规训技术或权利技术时常用全景监狱这一带有比喻意味的词语。超级全景监狱是波斯特从福柯的话语概念出发,在信息方式下结合电脑数据库的特点提出的一种新型权力技术或统治模式。波斯特的超级全景监狱从监视和规训范围,运作方式从"主体化"到"客体化"等方面阐述其与福柯全景监狱的不同之处。并且超级全景监狱瓦解了私人活动与公共活动的界限,重构个体身份,强化了政府或权力机构对人民的统治。     

福柯与马克思历史观的微观比较

马克思的历史观通常被解读为经济决定论、本质主义、宏大叙事.福柯历史观通常被解读为间断性、差异性新史学,微小叙事.因此,二者被认为是冲突的.然而,深入的分析表明,马克思历史观从三个方面展开了微观视阈,福柯的历史观也有其宏观维度.马克思的微观史学视角为福柯的微观权力思想所吸取和发扬,既突显了福柯的创新,也突显了马克思哲学的本性和精神.     

反本质主义语境下的后现代主义解读

实用主义对本质主义的批判,揭开了哲学上后现代性取代现代性的序幕。海德格尔既反对本质主义又反对实用主义。他关于实用主义与本质主义之间具有深层关联的观点,成为后现代哲学家激进批判现代性的理论起点。利奥塔通过对科学知识与叙事知识两个不同方面的拆解,点破了本质主义成为现代人生活的一种普遍模式的奥秘。福柯则揭示出,在现代性条件下,文本和权力关系怎样通过话语对社会和它的文化生产行使着一种有效的控制。德里达则把文本看作是与外在权力无关的东西。所有这些方面应建立起联系,并把追溯的源头引向古希腊哲学的理论特质。     

Power and Responsibility: Should We Spare the King's Head?

Michel Foucault calls for the head of the king in political theory. In doing so he seems to sever the concept of power from its relation to human responsibility. However, for theoretical 'monarchists' such as Stephen Lukes, the whole point of identifying a relationship of power is to fix responsibility for its exercise. Given the contingency of political action, I agree with Foucault that it is not always possible to attribute responsibility for the effects of power to a particular agent. However, Foucault stretches the concept of power too far beyond its ethical association with human responsibility. Consequently, the idea of power becomes practically meaningless.     

Neoliberalismus, Staat und Selbsttechnologien. Ein kritischer Überblick über die governmentality studies

While the reception of Foucault’s work in Germany is still dominated by highly polarized philosophical and academic debattes, his concepts and ideas inspired many studies in the social and political sciences in the Anglo-Saxon world. Part of this general theoretical interest are the so called governmentality studies refering to the notion of governmentality coined by Foucault. This articles begins with an outline of the theoretical principles underpinning this research framework. Foucault uses the concept of government in a comprehensive sense adumbrating the close link between forms of knowledge, power techniques and processes of subjectivation. In the second part follows a brief presentation of some subsequent work inspired by Foucault’s account. By confronting Ulrich Beck’s notion of risk society with the governmentality approach it will be demonstrated that this kind of theoretical perspective could be very useful for a critical analysis of neo-liberal modes of regulation. It links political rationalities to the micro-techniques of every day life and explores the field of the government which ranges from “governing the self” to “governing others” encompassing the state and civil society. Yet, there still remain unsolved problems and ambiguities, especially the role of the state and the question of resistance in the governmentality studies. These points are taken up in the third part of the text.     

The Pitfalls of South Africa's "Liberation"

In recent years, the figurative face of politics in America often quite literally has become the face of a celebrity. This trend finds citizens in democratic society willing to yield up their political consciousness to media-created celebrities. Drawing on the theories of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, this article argues that the investiture of authority in celebrities represents a continuation of the trend by which social bodies operate as the site where relations of power are played out, and by which the media serve as a means in which real democracy has been replaced by a simulated one. Alongside grassroots participation, and in some cases leading it, society is incorporating a new language that deploys celebrities as chief vehicles for the simulation of political consent, thereby overcoming public apathy, and buttressing the existing political order.     

Foucault and Liberalism: Rationality,Revolution, Resistance

Abstract

In 1978 and 1979, the concept of governmentality was introduced by Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France. Foucault finds the genealogical origin of this concept in the Christian figure of the shepherd. From this starting-point, he then embarks on a eulogy of liberalism, in stark contrast to the Marxist critique of political economy. These two grand narratives of modern liberalism differ markedly in their political and philosophical presuppositions. The latter, rooted in the tradition of natural law, is directed towards revolution. The former, rooted in the tradition of English radicalism, is directed towards resistance. Beyond their different reconstructions of liberalism, however, the article concludes by showing how these two narratives, can in fact be combined in a politically fruitful way.     

Shadow boxing in family politics: reply to Martin Durham

In his writings on government foucault commonly uses term ‘political’ as if it were equivalant to a certain understanding of governmental. Thus, in the title of his cotribution to the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ‘Omnes et Singulatim, towards a criticism of ”political reason“, the object of Foucault's usage of the term ‘political’ to refer to a kind of govrmetal reason. Second, I argue that the practice of what Foucault understands by political reason in fact creates coditions for the emergence of a politics and a political reason of a very different kind. The appearance of this latter political reason poses a range of problems which must be addressed by any political (in the sense of governmental) reason but which play little part in Foucault's discussion. It Suggests, in particular, that Foucault's account of the liberal rationality of government is seriously incomplete. Third, I consider the grounds for Foucault's counterposition of political reason to liberation, noting that his critique of political reason as a principle of subjectivation raises a more general issue, which he describes as ‘the politics of ourselves’ (Foucault 1993: 223). I conclude by noting that Foucault's discussions of political reason lead in two very different directions: towards a powerful analysis of the practices and rationalities of government in the modern West or towards a radical critique of most forms of government, including the modern government of oneself.     

DIALOGUE SECTION

Absract The categories of biopolitics and biopower were invented by Michel Foucault, who wanted to underline a shifting in state political power toward the caring of biological life of the entire social body. This transformation of political power allowed a combination of techniques that aimed to control the individual body and the standardised multitude of bodies. This paper analyses the biopolitical mechanisms and how did they work during the era of totalitarian states, and how do they act today. During the totalitarian era, biopolitics became a tool of surveillance and regulation of the social body, shifting toward racism. During the second half of the 20th century, biopolitics sought to minimise social risks. Criminal and underclass policies, as well as new genetics, are all aspects of the new authoritarian biopolitics. Far from being a neutral tool to improve people's well being, the spectre of eugenics casts a shadow over the new biopolitics.     

Philosophers,Activists, and Radicals: A Story of Human Rights and Other Scandals

Paradoxically, the political success of human rights is often taken to be its philosophical failing. From US interventions to International NGOs to indigenous movements, human rights have found a place in diverse political spaces, while being applied to disparate goals and expressed in a range of practices. This heteronomy is vital to the global appeal of human rights, but for traditional moral and political philosophy it is something of a scandal. This paper is an attempt to understand and theorize human rights on the terrain of the social actors who put them to use, particularly radical activists that have a more critical relationship to human rights. Attempting to avoid the philosophical pathology of demanding that the world reflect our conception of it, we base our reflection on the ambiguous, and potentially un-patterned, texture of human rights practice—taking seriously the idea that human rights express a relationship of power, importantly concerned with its legitimate arrangement and limitation. In both the philosophical literature and human rights activism, there seems to be a consensus on basic rights as undeniable moral principles of political legitimacy. This use of human rights is contrasted with radical social movements that reject this conception of rights as ideological and illegitimate, making specific reference to the Zapatista movement (Chiapas, Mexico) and the Landless Peasant Movement of Brazil (MST, from the Portuguese Movimento dos trabalhadores rurais Sem Terra), which are critical of the human rights discourse, but also make strategic use of the idea and offer alternative articulations of political legitimacy.     

Working on the Ground. A Collective Biography of Feminine Subjectivities: Mapping the Traces of Power and Knowledge

In this paper we map the traces of power and knowledge as we read them at play in our own memories and as we make sense of them from a Foucauldian perspective. Our question here is twofold: how might we use Foucault to read our embodied memories of power and knowledge; and how might we use the analysis of those stories to enable us better to see the implications of Foucault's writing for the analysis of subjects' enmeshment in power/knowledge relations? We use as the ground of our analysis our own embodied memories of achieving ourselves as appropriate(d) subjects (as girls and women, in relation to men--fathers, lovers, and husbands). Our trajectory in this paper is double. First, it has been towards uncovering the ways in which girls and women might be said to be powerful, even when they are complicit in their own subjection. Second, it has been to show that when Foucault defines all acts of power to involve the possibility of resistance and freedom, and he takes the opposite, a state of domination, to arise from 'economic, political, or military means', he has not fully acknowledged the extent to which the repeated, minute accretions of everyday practices can generate sedimentations of lines of force that may also be understood as a state of domination.     

Foucault and the Telos of Power

In this paper, I argue that the unique contributions of Foucault’s late work to critical social theory can be identified in the ways in which power relations are refined as the material condition of “politics” as distinguished from that of law, where “politics”: (a) includes both competitive and goal-oriented strategic actions and interactions, (b) excludes the coercive technologies of law embodied in State institutions, (c) presupposes “incomplete” reciprocity between actors engaged in directing others, (d) always entails modes of revealing truth and acting upon the self. By contextualising the break between pastoral power and direction in the 1979–1980 lectures, I show how for the late Foucault, power relations constitute the material condition of “politics” precisely because, unlike relations of control or coercion, their aims and objectives remain open to the possibility of building new relationships and potentially more “political” forms of social action. I conclude by situating this major distinction within Foucault’s unfulfilled project to study the “military dimension” of society, and the relevance and urgency of this project for contemporary struggles against new forms of militarism and austerity.     

Of(f) Course: Michel Foucault,the Mobile Philosopher and his Dreamworlds

Foucault extolled the Iranian revolution and, anticipating the havoc that his public intervention in favour of the revolution would create, he wrote: “I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong”. Examining Foucault’s (so unlikely) valorisation of certainty and the partisan affectivity it bestows upon knowledge and truth, I read his unusual engagement with the Iranian revolution against the grain. A major tendency is to approach Foucault’s Iranian writings as aberration; against this tendency, I read them as an effect of Foucault’s specific epistemic and utopian optics. Through a critical reading of neglected aspects of Foucault’s comments on Iran, I argue that much nuance is missing when damning critiques fail to see why and how Foucault’s interest in an active rather than folklore non-European political identity unveils deeper tensions of his own worldview and outlook on international politics and interrogates mainstream appraisals of Foucault’s political philosophy.