Stop being negative: you are harming economic recovery!

Foucault states that power can be discursive in both content and execution. The power of speaking about something, gives that thing power (just as the academe allow certain new permitted  knowledges to become accepted within their discipline). Which is why talking down the economy near a recession should be illegal – scaremongering just makes people jittery, risk averse and thus they keep their money ‘safe’ at home or in the bank – they don’t speculate, spend on new projects or plan new expenditures – they want to ride out the storm intact. Yet this conservativeness is the death knell to finance-based economies such as the UK. If you do not have money flow the economy will fall apart. If you don’t spend, then manufacturers and service-providers wont produce, then they wont buy materials, hire labour or pay taxes, the government will have insufficient funds to support the unemployed as well as meet their other obligations – safety, health, etc.

We didn't win WWI and WWII by being down-at-the-mouth depressed - we were positive, confident and brave - even if this bravura was created through propaganda films and encouraging posters.

Virilio's vitality

"Closely tied to the growth of the panopticon is Virilio’s fixation on acceleration and speed. He sees scientific and technological advances as forcing a constant acceleration of reality that has compressed time and space, radically flattened the globe, and destroying our ability to tell reality from fiction. The logical consequence of such acceleration is the end of democracy and the effective normalization of disinformation and information warfare. This is different from Baudrillard’s similar notion of hyperreality in that Virilio believes in truth but mourns its brutal erasure by the forces of progress."
http://antilibrarium.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/information-bombs/

Foucault without the footnotes

Well, wouldn't this be nice? Academic work without the toil of references! Here is a long quotation found on Claire O'Farrell's blog - to her insight and superior research skills, I am indebted.

"No-one is forced to write books, or to spend years elaborating them or to claim to be doing this kind of work. There is no reason to make it obligatory to include footnotes, bibliographies and references. No reason not to choose free reflection on the work of others. It is sufficient to indicate well and clearly what relation one is establishing between one’s own work and the work of others."

"Nul n’est forcé d’écrire des livres, ni de passer des années à les élaborer, ni de se réclamer de ce genre de travail. Il n’y a aucune raison d’obliger à mettre des notes, à faire des bibliographies, à poser des references. Aucune raison de ne pas choisir la libre réflexion sur le travail des autres. Il suffit de bien marquer, et clairement, quel rapport on établit entre son travail et le travail des autres."

    Michel Foucault, (1994) [1983] ‘A propos des faiseurs d’histoire’. In Dits et Ecrits vol. IV. Paris: Gallimard, p. 413. This passage translated by Clare O’Farrell

The transformative nature of writing according to Michel Foucault

'(J)’écris pour me changer moi-même et ne plus penser la même chose qu’auparavant.’

Michel Foucault, (1994) [1980]. Entretien avec Michel Foucault. In Dits et écrits, t. 4. Paris: Gallimard. #281, p. 42.

I write in order to change myself and in order not to think the same thing as before.’

Michel Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault” J. Faubion, ed., Power (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 240.

This quotation from an interview with Foucault expresses how he is not a theorist who writes to analyse the world better. Foucault is writer whose purpose is to change himself - a sort of self-actualisation, if you will.

How many of us are changed by our writing but are too busy to notice?

Foucault's peripatetic lifestyle

Foucault's meteoric rise to infamy and academic success was astonishing for a gay man and one who most deliberately kept beyond the confines expected of a scholar. A lively sense of style - he was famous for his kimono, leather jacket, corduroy suit, turtle necks, green cape. He caused scandal when he appointed his lover, Daniel Defert as his assistant in the University setting. He conceived of a new way of perceiving theory through action: an 'ontology of the present'. Foucault moved between institutions and turned down job offers in equal numbers according to Eribon (1991). He spent time in Tunisia, Iran, Poland and in the GIP, which he ended up running from his apartment, but when the prisoners' developed their own representative organisation, it disbanded - just as, I suspect, was Foucault's intention - for the convicts to find their own voice. The research (surveys, etc.) Foucault instituted to ascertain the true nature of prison life was foundational in initiating Foucault's belief in the 'strategic importance of information' (Foucault's New Domains, Mike Gane & Terry Johnson), which in turn led to him supporting the Libération newspaper. In learning about Iranian political life, Foucault decreed that modernity and secular ways were considered corrupt and archaic by the people. He stated that wearing the veil had become a strong political gesture. Later with the Iranian Revolution, his activist friend, Ahmed Salamatian, had to flee the country and it is not recorded whether Foucault was reconsidering his position on the Iranian government.

His trip to Poland to support the popular cause in September 1982 was 'an attempt to establish information centres, and liaisons between intellectuals and unions.' (Foucault's New Domains, Mike Gane & Terry Johnson). This period stimulated his thinking over the 'art of government' and whether he ought to write something about 'governing in a different way' (Eribon 1991: 306). Practical concerns (whether France was being governed smartly) were linked to his intellectual project on governmentality: 'On governmentality' (1978, 1979).

Moving forward, his concerns of governing shifted from institutional perspectives inwardly to the more personal - the governing of oneself. These concepts of defining and confining a life, a lived experience, through one's own actions would play out through his drug taking and sexual exploits. He carved for himself a life and a death from his own folly (some would say), with his demise being attributed to an AIDS-related complication.

Early start!

The Journal of Bisexuality from The American Institute for Bisexuality has the following editorial board:

• Editor-in-Chief: Jonathan Alexander, PhD - University of California, Irvine
• Assistant Editor: Regina U. Reinhardt, PhD - Board of Directors, American Institute of Bisexuality
• Book Review Editor: David van Leer, PhD - University of California, Davis
• Film/Video Review Editor: Wayne Bryant - President, Bisexual Resource Center

Editorial Board:

• Serena Anderlini-D'onofrio, PhD - University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez
• Jana Evans Braziel, PhD - University of Cincinnati
• Amity Buxton - Director, Straight Spouse Network
• Eli Coleman, PhD - University of Minnesota
• Clive Davis, PhD - Syracuse University
• Sharon Dean, PhD -University of Cincinnati
• Sari Dworkin, PhD - California State University, Fresno
• Ron Fox, PhD - Saybrook Graduate School & Research Center
• Alexei Guren - BiNet USA and National Bisexual Advisory Board
• Marty Klein - Sex Therapist and Author
• Robyn Ochs -Tufts University
• Larry Peterson, PhD - University of Delaware
• Paula C. Rodriguez Rust, PhD - SUNY, Geneseo
• Ron Jackson Suresha, Rev. Br., ULC - Independent Queen Masculinities Author
• Geri D. Weitzman, PhD - Private Practice and Bisexuality-Aware Professional Directory
• Karen Yescavage, PhD - Colorado State University, Pueblo

These academics may well be worth keeping an eye on.

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How is it that I haven't heard of homonormativity until now? From Wikipedia:
"Homonormativity is the assimilation of heteronormative ideals and constructs into LGBTQ culture and individual identity. The term was coined by Lisa Duggan in 2003. According to Penny Griffin, Politics and International Relations lecturer at the University of New South Wales, homonormativity upholds neoliberalism rather than critiquing monogamy, procreation, and binary gender roles as heterosexist and racist. Duggan asserts that homonormativity fragments LGBTQ communities into hierarchies of worthiness. LGBTQ people that come the closest to mimicking heteronormative standards of gender identity are deemed most worthy of receiving rights. LGBTQ individuals at the bottom of the hierarchy (transsexuals, transvestites, intersex, bisexuals, non-gender identified) are seen as an impediment to this elite class of homonormative individuals receiving their rights."

• Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack On Democracy. Beacon Press, 2003.
• Griffin, Penny. “Sexing the Economy in a Neo-liberal World Order: Neo-liberal Discourse and the (Re)Production of Heteronormative Heterosexuality.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9.2 (2007): 220-238. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. MCTC LIBRARY. 30 June 2009.

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Bilerico did two great things today: mentioned bisexuality AND Michel Foucault!
Check out their great article here.
This is a snippet:
"The public conception of homosexuality coincided with a growing concern with effeminacy that appeared in England in the eighteenth century. Boys typically wore girl's clothing until they were sent away to boarding school. Men's clothing was frilly in the Elizabethan Age. However, clothing became more sharply differentiated from the 1770s on. There were diatribes against fops and dandies. By the nineteenth century, men no longer dared embrace in public or shed tears."

It occurs to me that American history at some point has to switch to a shared British history, as the behaviours/cultural phenomena of today are fed by the origins of these practices. These origins are almost uniquely British (with some Dutch influence, etc.) - it isn't until much later that other countries come to the melting pot of cultures that became USA. As the arriving families came to seek a better life in the new land, the new West, they brought their own ideas and norms. But until then the reference points for Americans lay within British soil. Understanding American practices by referring to Elizabethan clothing may seem odd, but it is accurate - there are linkages that cannot be denied - a continuation of stories through the ages.

Mapping reality

Hat-tip to Jeremy from the Foucault Blog.

Here is a link to a marvellous mapping project whereby over 17 days a researcher walked the campus of Warwick to produce a pedestrian map. The walker included amusing and useful false steps - paths that are not normally taken but when added to the map provide scale, compass, etc.


You really should stop and look at it.

The difficulties of taxomomy: categories are not so easy to proscribe.

When moving my emails to my Gmail account from Hotmail, I wanted to replicate the folders in the new labelling system. It proved tricky as the system allows multi-labelling and it lead to me wanting to describe things more fully than the previous folder system had allowed. This made me want to then limit myself as too much explanation was becoming worse than too little. So, I voted for Gmail to move to a folder system in their suggestions box, along with asking for a better sorting system for labels/folders (sent date, read date, sender, subject, etc.) - a more advanced search function would also be helpful - I want to search for certain words within labels but that isn't currently possible.

Foucault's Order of Things has a preface that describes his reading of "a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a 'certain Chinese encyclopaedia' in which it is written that 'animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off 'look like flies'."

Well, it would seem from item (h) that this is really just an appendix to the 'real' list and travels from ownership (a, g), physical attributes (b, e-f, j, n), others (h, l), to how one renders their physical attributes (k) and their habits (c, d, i, m). There isn't even a system within the design and order of the system.