Refracted Input

Clare O’Farrell’s blog on books, TV, films, Michel Foucault, universities etc. etc.

More on academic blogging (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

March 10, 2011

There has been quite a discussion of late going on in the academic blogosphere about both the advantages and difficulties associated with academic blogging. (See links at the end of this post).

I have found references in this discussion to an avoidance by academics of public exposure particularly interesting. This kind of avoidance has become a notable trend in certain sectors of the humanities and social sciences. Too much public exposure and too public a statement of position (unless it supports the status quo) is tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, seen as detrimental to one’s career in the university institution as it is currently structured.

The publication of large numbers of articles which are able to be counted by metrics systems which measure academic performance is the type of academic output currently preferred by institutions. Such activity can be easily quantified and ranked by money dispensing bureaucrats with little knowledge of the truly byzantine rules which govern the academic field. The actual content of this kind of production is of secondary importance to those doing this kind of measuring. As for other types of academic publishing – books, magazine and newspaper articles, blogs – these are simply too difficult to evaluate in terms of their relative status and impact by those outside the relevant fields.

This is having the effect of pushing many academics down very narrow paths in relation to the dissemination of their work. In the current fearful environment which surrounds academic appointments and cut-throat promotion processes, many academics are only too willing to comply with this metricised vision of their role and their work.

As various studies have shown, and which have been cited in the current discussions, the readership of journal articles in the humanities is extremely low. The end result of the institutional insistance on this form of academic publication is thus the implied censorship of academic work. I might qualify this, however, by drawing attention to the growing practice of university libraries in publishing ‘eprints’ of journal articles produced by the academics of their associated institutions. This practice (at least from the statistics of hits on these sites) seems to have boosted the readership of journal articles.

The narrow set of rules concerning what counts as valid academic output is a sad state of affairs – surely it is the social duty of the humanities academic to try to push not only the boundaries of knowledge and critique but also how this work is disseminated. One can reasonably argue that one of the social functions of taxpayer funded academics is to offer their expertise to the broader academic community and to the wider social body in every way possible. Participation in online communication technologies therefore seems obvious. Otherwise why research and write if nobody can see what you are doing?

Many of the counter-arguments in relation to academic blogging seem to assume that it is an either or situation – but any academic blogger will point out that blogging is simply only one of their publishing activities which complements their publications in journals or books for example. Blogging enhances and enriches these other avenues of publication allowing new ideas and trains of thought to be tried out in a public forum without the lengthy delays and formal requirements that refereed and commercial publication involve. Blogging also allows for the sharing of information and the creation and maintenance of intellectual networks.

Another counter-argument is that blog posts are ephemeral and soon forgotten – but my own experience looking at the statistics of readership on my own blogs is that people use search engines to find blog posts that have been posted at any time. Blogs may once have operated this way – but this is no longer the case.

Blogs are, I would argue, an ongoing continuation of the ideal of the ‘republic of letters’, [1] an informal network held in high esteem in early modern Europe which fostered the global interchange of scholarship and ideas. As far as I am concerned, the blogosphere is nothing less than a wonderful way of continuing that utopian and generous ideal.

I’ve listed some links below to current entries in the discussion on academic blogging. I’ve listed them as much for my own records as in the interests of the dissemination of information. If you know of any other contributions to the debate – send them on!

Alex Reid on Digital Digs
Tim Morton’s Ecology without nature
Scu at Critical Animal
Stuart Elden at Progressive Geographies
In Socrates’ Wake
Immanence blog
JoVAnEvery.ca Helping you be a better academic
Another comment from Jo
Craig McFarlane at Theoria
Ray Brassier makes some incendiary remarks in an interview

Links added later…

Nigel Thrift, ‘The power of blogs..’, The Chronicle of Higher Education

[1] I am indebted to Christian Callisen and Barbara Adkins for this idea.

The Australian floods of 2011

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

January 19, 2011

In the Western imagination, reason has long belonged to terra firma. Island or continent, it repels water with a solid stubbornness: it only concedes its sand. As for unreason, it has been aquatic from the depths of time and that until fairly recently. And more precisely oceanic: infinite space, uncertain … Madness is the flowing liquid exterior of rocky reason.

Dans l’imagination occidentale, la raison a longtemps appartenu à la terre ferme. Ile ou continent, elle repousse l’eau avec un entêtement massif : elle ne lui concède que son sable. La déraison, elle, a été aquatique depuis le fond des temps et jusqu’à une date assez rapprochée. Et plus précisement océanique : espace infini, incertain… La folie c’est l’extérieur liquide et ruisselant de la rocheuse raison.

Michel Foucault, (1994) [1963] ‘L’eau et la folie’. In Dits et Ecrits vol. I. Paris: Gallimard, p. 268. [This passage translated by Clare O’Farrell]

The Australian floods in 2011

In choosing a reflection by Foucault on water and madness, I wanted to mark the occurrence of the disastrous floods in Australia this January 2011. 75% of the tropical state of Queensland has been inundated and more rain is on the way. The area covered by water is larger than France and Germany combined. Currently the state of Victoria is also experiencing the worst floods on record with 58 towns affected so far. The other eastern states of New South Wales and Tasmania are also flooding. On the other side of the continent, Western Australia is suffering from extreme heat and bushfires. Australia has long been a country of environmental extremes making human habitation a challenging and precarious affair and this long before the arrival of European settlers in the eighteenth century.

People have lost their lives in flash flooding which swept away their houses while they were inside. Farmers barely recovering from a decade long drought are seeing their entire crops under water and others have lost their livelihoods, houses and all they own with many others affected to varying degrees. Brisbane, the third largest city in Australia, built somewhat riskily on a flood plain has seen its CBD, inner suburbs and many outer suburbs drowned under water and layers of silt. Two of Brisbane’s universities were closed for a week due to major flooding on their campuses.

But for all this, one of the most inspirational things to emerge from the disaster has been the extraordinary level of community spirit and the sheer efficiency of the organisational response to these events. Contemporary communications media have been key in linking people and keeping them informed. The Queensland Police Service Facebook site kept people up to the minute and quelled rumours, the Department of Transport and Main Roads website, kept people up to date on road closures and the Bureau of Meteorology website provided up to the minute warnings on weather and flood levels. Three free to air television channels broadcast flood information round the clock. People used twitter and their personal Facebook pages to keep others apprised of local and more general developments.

In 1974, Brisbane suffered an even bigger flood, but at that time, large numbers of people had no means of communicating with each other. Even landlines were a luxury, with people having to wade through flood waters in search of working public phones to inform each other that they had survived. People owned far less and were forced to simply clean and make do with what they had, whereas the tendency in 2011 has simply been to throw damaged items away. Indeed with many items -particularly electrical appliances – they have had no choice.

I live in one of the flood affected areas in inner city Brisbane right on the river. The whole street and the riverside park went under. Fortunately the block of units (apartments) in which I live is built on a small hill and although the front garages went under, the water rose to just one brick below the first floor. Sheer luck, as it seems the water in the 1974 floods had invaded the first floor of the building. All the occupants of the block precipitously left to stay with friends and family as the waters rose on Tuesday night. Last Friday as the waters started to retreat, the street was a sea of mud and huge piles of completely ruined possessions. Hundreds of people – grimly shell-shocked home-owners, renting tenants and volunteers just turned up with brooms, shovels, gloves, wheelbarrows and high pressure hoses and got to work. People literally walked around the streets, shovel and broom in hand ready to help anybody who looked as though they needed assistance. The local councillor provided a stall with a sausage sizzle and tea and coffee. A few police (part of the anti-looting taskforce) were there as well as the media and news helicopters circled continuously overhead.

Four days later, the rubbish was gone and a great deal of the mud had been swept back into the park and the river with street sweeper trucks cleaning up the residue. Workers in the park on the river contemplated the damage with park lamps completely snapped off at the base by the sheer force of the river’s current. The river level remained still well over the banks. I ran into two electricians who had seen the news and had generously undertaken the day long drive from the neighbouring state of NSW just to volunteer their help. They got the electricity back on in my block of units where the power boards had gone completely under water.

As my mention of an anti-looting taskforce indicates, there have of course been opportunists all too ready to profit from other people’s misery, humans being what they are, but this kind of behaviour has been far outstripped by those willing to help in any way they can. The Brisbane City Council which had also organised evacuation centres for flood refugees, organised pick up points and buses to send the thousands of ready volunteers out to help those affected. In some cases, so many people wanted to help that they had to be turned away and sent to other areas of need. The army helped with some of the more heavy duty lifting and cleaning. Musicians turned up in some streets to provide live music for those working and a bit of a street party atmosphere took over in spite of the devastation. Charities have been overwhelmed by offers of goods and people have been extraordinarily generous in financial donations to the Queensland Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal.

There has also been criticism of sightseers from non affected areas driving around to look at the devastation, or lining the Kangaroo Point cliffs in central Brisbane in their thousands to watch the water rise. But in my view, people need to see events unfolding with their own eyes and not all sightseers were simply uninvolved voyeurs. Those locals I have spoken to who only saw what was happening on the news rather than in person, had quite a different and perhaps more cynical appreciation of events. Of course, the media is always prone to exaggeration and disaster mongering but there is nothing like seeing things first hand to allow people to develop a true empathy for those affected and also an appreciation and respect for continuing human vulnerability – for all the hubris engendered by technology – to natural occurrences such as these.

I also cherish the optimistic but perhaps vain hope that all of this might lead some people to reassess their participation in the excesses of contemporary consumerism and also their subjection to increasingly regulated and performance oriented work place practices which dominate workers’ lives to the exclusion of all other considerations – be those of health, family and friends or spiritual development.

And of course now party politics has already kicked back into gear, and recriminations are starting to flow. Could people have been given more warning of the flash floods, could dam overflow management been better? Why have so many houses been built in such vulnerable places in Brisbane? Why have materials that are not flood-proof been used in construction? And what about the intricacies of insurance policies which may or may not cover such events? How is Australia and how are insurance companies going to be able to pay for all of this and what of the impact on crops and food supplies?

The consequences of this disaster – which is by no means over yet – will be felt for years to come and in the instance of Brisbane will no doubt permanently change the direction of its urban development. Brisbane has undergone an unprecedented level of expansion in the last ten years, sustained by the myth that the Wivenhoe dam built after the infamous 1974 floods and completed in 1984 would prevent further flooding in Brisbane and also by the large migration of people to the city during the drought in the first decade of the new millenium: people who had little awareness of the extremes of weather to which subtropical Brisbane can be subject. Even with the worst of the flood over, severe afternoon thunderstorms continue to drench the city with trees uprooted demolishing still further houses and cars and causing local flooding. Interesting days lie ahead.

Another notable thing in all of this is that Australia is in the fortunate position of having the social, organisational, communication and financial resources to mitigate the worst aspects of this natural disaster. People in other countries such as Brazil, Pakistan, China or cities such as New Orleans, are not so lucky.

But I would like to turn to the passage I have quoted from Foucault to close these reflections. In his remarks Foucault elegantly sets out his vision of a Reason and Unreason in the Modern Age made historically into opposing binaries – the Same and the Other. People have sought to maintain rigid boundaries between the two so that the chaos of the Other cannot swamp the orderly and reasoned constructions of the Same. The untameable force of the flood disrupts the orders so carefully put in place by humans and erases the prescribed boundaries between rocky land and dangerous and uncertain waters revealing the vanity of those orders so proudly and heedlessly imposed by landlocked reason.

See here for some before and after aerial photos of Brisbane

After Finitude (2008)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

December 5, 2010

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008

After FinitudeAfter Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux

This book written by a young French philosopher has been taken up with great enthusiasm by a small group of English language philosophers -notably Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier members of the London-based “Speculative Realism” and Atlanta-based “Object-Oriented Ontology” movements. (See also Larval Subjects for an interesting discussion). Alain Badiou in his preface praises the book in glowing terms claiming that the author ‘has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy’. (p.vii) I wasn’t able to track down the French original on interlibrary loan, so I have read the book in English (a rather good translation by philosopher Ray Brassier I am happy to say).

I just wanted to make a few brief observations at this stage. Let’s begin by saying that the book is clearly written and well argued. Meillassoux appears to be arguing that there is indeed a universe out there which is independent of our existence and that science, or more precisely mathematics, is capable of having an absolute knowledge of that existence which is independent of our subjective perceptions. He then claims to solve the problem of the dogmatism that usually goes hand in hand with the claim that absolutes exist by arguing that it is not a question of a necessary absolute and that the absolute could just as easily not exist. Metaphysical arguments about the absolute usually assume that the absolutes they posit (God, truth, beauty) must necessarily exist and mould the universe in a certain direction.

I quite like some aspects of Meillassoux’s arguments – namely that things have an existence independent of our perception and that they can just as easily not exist as exist, that science is a useful form of knowledge and that the absolute cannot be identified with an entity, but I am not convinced that any of this is earth shatteringly transformative in terms of the history of thought. It is certainly an argument which removes humans from the centre of the universe and valorises other objects which again I quite like. Saying that things could just as well not exist as exist is also an interesting position which introduces a welcome element of freedom into proceedings.

But ultimately this does not prevent this line of argumentation from being a form of neo-empiricism – that is it posits a form of knowledge (mathematics) which claims to offer an absolute description of the material universe. Claiming the absolute is not essential and has an equal possibility of not existing and that scientific knowledge is always subject to Popperian falsification does not solve the problem. And the problem is – at the risk of sounding like a clicheed follower of Foucault – the problem of power relations and their role in the production of knowlege and truth. I am not arguing here for the relativity of truth or knowledge, but I am arguing that they are always the object of human struggle.

Meillassoux argues that mathematics can be used to measure things as they are in themselves. He also makes a lot of the fact that we can talk about a world that existed before humans. I suppose because I have never had any difficulty with the idea that we are simply one entity amongst other entities in the universe I find this all a bit of a non problem. The real problem, for me at least, is how we formulate our relation to other elements – through knowledge or other forms of activity – and the relations of power which inevitably accompany these interactions.

The absence of this consideration of power relations in the production of knowledge is also probably one of the reasons I find the book very male (to the exclusion of a female point of view) like much other speculative philosophy. Female readers of this style of thought cannot help but notice that such forms of knowledge operate unproblematically in a speculative void and claim a comfortable and unquestioned relation to the truth which in the process somehow reduces other practitioners and more ambiguous forms of knowledge – unintentionally or not – to complete silence and non-existence.

Although perhaps more generally sympathetic to Meillassoux’s approach than I am myself, Stuart Elden has written an interesting article which, amongst other things, draws attention to the problem of the status of mathematics in Meillassoux’s argument, noting: ‘The return of mathematical ordering – not merely in terms of a way of understanding the world, but as a suggestion that this is actually how the world is-is one that should be contested.’ (p. 2649). He also offers the useful reminder that ‘We should not take the limits of our grasp of the world as the limits of the world.’ (p.2649) [1]

[1] Stuart Elden, ‘Dialectics and the measure of the world’ Environment and Planning A volume 40, 2008, pp 2641-2651.

Blogging and the Republic of Letters

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

November 10, 2010

I was interested by this comment by Rhiannon Bury in an interview on Henry Jenkin’s blog

Let me close by saying that Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way I disseminate research on fandom. The norm in academia is to analyze our data behind closed doors and not report on it until we have a finished “product” in the form of a conference paper, a journal article, a book chapter, etc. With the use of blogging and microblogging technologies, I plan to informally report on findings as I work my way through the data in the coming months. I hope this will provide opportunities for dialogue with fans and fan scholars, and in turn provide feedback to inform my analysis.

Christian Callisen and Barbara Adkins have written an interesting paper (published in New Media and Society) arguing that the academic blogosphere is actually a contemporary rendition of the early modern ‘Republic of Letters’.

The Mapping the Republic of Letters project, describes the Republic of Letters as follows:

When early modern scholars (from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment) described the broadest community to which they belonged, they most frequently called this international community of scholars the “Republic of Letters.”

The Republic of Letters was an intellectual network initially based on the writing and exchange of letters that emerged with and thrived on new technologies such as the printing press and organized itself around cultural institutions (e. g. museums, libraries, academies) and research projects that collected, sorted, and dispersed knowledge. A pre-disciplinary community in which most of the modern disciplines developed, it was the ancestor to a wide range of intellectual societies from the seventeenth-century salons and eighteenth-century coffeehouses to the scientific academy or learned society and the modern research university. Forged in the humanist culture of learning that promoted the ancient ideal of the republic as the place for free and continuous exchange of knowledge, the Republic of Letters was simultaneously an imagined community (a scholar’s utopia where differences, in theory, would not matter), an information network, and a dynamic platform from which a wide variety of intellectual projects – many of them with important ramifications for society, politics, and religion – were proposed, vetted, and executed.

I very much like the idea of the academic blogosphere as a continuation of these utopian ideals of intellectual community and the free sharing of ideas in an environment which minimises institutional hierarchy (although one can certainly debate how far this latter ideal can actually ever be realised). It is a way for academics and other intellectuals to sidestep the increasingly regulated and corporatised institutional environment of the university and continue their collaborations, work and outreach to other sectors in the social body.

Incidentally, for an amusing and, alas, all too accurate a take on this issue of academic versus corporate university culture see Joseph Gora and Andrew Whelan’s opinion piece: ‘Invasion of the Aca-zombies’

Foucault on lectures and seminars

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

October 27, 2010

I would like to say that it is often rather difficult giving a series of lectures like this without the possibility of comebacks or discussion, and not knowing whether what one is saying finds an echo in those who are working on a thesis or a master’s degree, whether it provides them with possibilities for reflection and work … On the other hand, you know that in this institution … we cannot give closed seminars, reserved for just a few auditors… All the same, what I would like, not so much for you, but selfishly for myself, is to be able to meet Off-Broadway, outside of the lectures, with those of you who who could possibly discuss the subjects I will be talking about this year, or that I have talked about elsewhere and previously.

Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, Lectures at the College de France, 1982-1983 Lectures at the Collège de France (Volume 7). Translated by Graham Burchell; Edited by Frédéric Gros; General Editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana; English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. p. 1

Random thoughts in response
Foucault commented a number of times on the difficulty of lecturing at the Collège de France. These lectures were public and anybody could attend. On a couple of occasions he tried to open the floor up to questions but this didn’t really work given the large number of people in attendance. He remarked that he would see the same people attending week after week and would wonder who they were and what they thought of his lectures, but there was no means of making contact with them. At the end of each lecture, people would race to the front podium where he sat, not to ask him questions but to collect their tape recorders. In truth, it was actually rather difficult to approach Foucault after these lectures. He would be surrounded by an intimidating group of young men and everything in their demeanour and his own demeanour suggested that you could only approach him at your peril.

Foucault tried to counteract this alienating effect by organising private work seminars where specialist work could be done on subjects he found of interest. Foucault enjoyed these kind of specialist collaborations. Although Foucault did not regard his lectures at the College as a ‘teaching activity’ more as ‘public reports’ on his research [1] it might be worth drawing attention to comments he made elsewhere on the difference between the lecture and the seminar when these do function as teaching tools. In the lecture, he says, in spite of appearances, there is less of a relation of power between the teacher and the students than in a seminar. The auditors of a lecture can freely adopt a take it or leave it approach to the content and could admire the lecture (or not) as one would admire a well-crafted shoe. Foucault comments

‘I see myself more as an artisan crafting an object and offering it for consumption rather than a master making his slaves work’. On the other hand, seminars with discussion meant that by the end of the series, students could no longer be sure whether their ideas were their own or had been subtly and insidiously moulded by the seminar leader during the course of discussion. [2]

[1] Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. Translated by David Macey; Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana; General Editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana; English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 p. 1

[2]Michel Foucault, ‘Conversation avec Michel Foucault’, Dits et Ecrits, vol II. Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 190-191.

Academic publication 2

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

September 23, 2010

Stuart kindly responded to the comments in my previous post with some further interesting observations. I am adding a couple of clarifications here to clear up the amibiguities in my initial comment. I should emphasise that I am coming from the point of view of readership and impact, rather than production. The problem of readership is something that has interested me for a long time. Essentially it is the question of how academics can best disseminate their ideas to their own community and also to the broader non academic community.

Stuart remarks

Thanks Clare. That’s not where my comments were heading – nor would I agree! From my perspective, journal articles and books accomplish different things. I prefer books, and see those as my major outputs. But as preparatory works that feed into books, collaborative ventures, or side-projects, articles have also been important to me. I have prioritised books (and will continue to do so), but wouldn’t want to have chose one entirely over the other.

I was debating recently the idea of not writing anything to do with a book for a year – I’ve written my books to date almost back-to-back – and just write articles and other shorter pieces. I’m not sure I will accomplish this – I know the next two books I want to write after The Birth of Territory…

I should also add that as a journal editor, I do think it matters who reads articles! Nonetheless, I definitely agree on the problems of quantification of outputs.

My remarks were of course provocative. As a former journal editor myself I agree very strongly that it matters a great deal who reads the articles and my statement: ‘who cares who reads the articles’ was perhaps too ambiguously ironic. It was intended to criticise certain institutional interests in quantity at the expense of any interest in the actual content of what is being written.

What worries me is academic writing that is published but not read. In this case one could argue that this work is not serving its social function and that forms of quasi censorship are in operation by requiring too hermetic a form. Some forms of journal article writing can close down the impact of academic work, rather than opening it up In this sense they operate like a closed club – or in Foucault’s terms ‘a society of discourse’ whose rules are only accessible to a very restricted few.

Of course one needs specialist discussion to advance knowledge – but if this is not being read even by other specialists then there is a problem.

You can find Stuart’s reply to this and further comments here.

Academic publication

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

September 22, 2010

Stuart Elden has a number of particularly interesting posts on academic writing on his blog Progressive Geographies. Recently he put up a post offering excellent advice on preparing for journal publication and then another on his own writing practices which has prompted the following reflections on my part.

Stuart notes that his book:

The Birth of Territory is almost completely new material, rather than reprinting previously published work. In fact, though it might not appear so, in the last few years I’ve actually submitted very little to journals, concentrating on the book…
I currently have no articles in review, due, or awaiting revision. I don’t owe any book chapters or other pieces, apart from a short dictionary entry on ‘Foucault and Space’ for the end of the year. I just have three book projects – one authored, one edited and one five-volume collection for which I’m managing editor – to complete in the next three-six months…

This may not necessarily be where Stuart’s comments were leading, but my own personal view is that journal publishing is not really where it’s at if you want to make a real contribution to the field that people actually read – at least in the humanities area. Many journal articles I find turgidly unreadable and not tractible for use as lecture or teaching fodder either.

Journal articles are something the institution has fixated on as being a quantifiable measure of academic performance. Who cares whether anybody actually reads them? I would argue that those who measure such things are in the rear guard in relation to new developments in how academics actually do their work as academics (as opposed to their work as employees of an institution). It’s rather like Bourdieu’s point that those who are not part of the educated elites think that impressionism is great modern art and a sign of culture – whereas the educated elite are all looking at bleeding edge contemporary art..

It’s a different situation in science – well perhaps not – as the publishing lead times are too long and scientists are resorting to online publication to get their work out before somebody else beats them to it in their chosen research areas.

Journals articles are, in my view, the impressionist art of academe for those not quite in the cultural know.

La philosophie sur grand écran (2007)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

September 13, 2010

Olivier Dekens, La philosophie sur grand écran: Manuel de cinéphilosophie. Paris: Ellipses, 2007
My rating: ***

La philosophie sur grand écran : Manuel de cinéphilosophieLa philosophie sur grand écran : Manuel de cinéphilosophie by Olivier Dekens

I really like the format of this book – in terms of how it works as a teaching text. Each short chapter consists of a brief commentary on a set philosophical concept, a short text from a well-known philosopher (and not just the old ones – but thinkers such as Lacan and Foucault) and then a review of a relevant film. The concepts examined are all part of the curriculum for the final year program for philosophy in French schools.

One small quibble I had with this work is that although the film reviews were quite good and interesting – they didn’t integrate except superficially with the philosophical concepts under discussion.

Nonetheless this would serve as a fairly good introduction to European philosophy using the medium of film.

Philosophie en séries (2009)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

September 5, 2010

Thibaut de Saint-Maurice. Philosophie en séries, Paris: Ellipses, 2009.
My rating: **

Philosophie en sériesPhilosophie en séries by Thibaut de Saint-Maurice

This book is quite a good introduction for senior school students doing philosophy and is intended as such. It systematically addresses concepts set for the final year program in philosophy in France using illustrations from a number of popular American television series. It does not have any ambitions to be a ground breaking foray into either philosophy or television studies.

The author mounts the highly contestable thesis that somehow television produced in the new millenium has been more substantial or philosophical than television series produced prior to that date. Many television scholars and fans might even argue the reverse. He also has a rather weak argument for limiting his choice to American series. The argument would have been far more convincing if he had just said straight out that these are the series the students are watching and as such, using them to explain philosophy, is far more expedient than using other material.

There is also quite an interesting overview of some definitions of art in a final chapter, but again the discussion over whether television constitutes an art form or not is a rather old fashioned one and not one that worries many television analysts these days. (That is apart from the debate over ‘quality’ versus ‘entertainment’ television).

At a technical level there are also errors in the English citations from various TV series and also in the name of one of the series selected for study: The Soprano instead of The Sopranos.

But these criticisms aside, this book is a good workmanlike introduction to classic European philosophy for beginners using some popular American TV series.

Foucault and the disciplinary society 2

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

September 1, 2010

Posted on my site michel-foucault.com

What is to be understood by the disciplining of societies in Europe since the eighteenth century is not, of course, that the individuals who are part of them become more and more obedient, nor that all societies become like barracks, schools or prisons; rather, it is that an increasingly controlled, more rational and economic process of adjustment has been sought between productive activities, communications networks, and the play of power relations.

Michel Foucault, (2000) [1981] ‘The Subject and Power’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Power The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Three. New York: New Press, p. 339.
Random thoughts in response
I have posted a slightly different version of this comment before, but seem to want to keep returning to it!

Critics have often read Foucault’s notion of a disciplinary society as meaning that people subject to its effects behave like automatons. That is certainly the aim of the disciplinary regime, but not necessarily the result in practice. In fact, people continually resist attempts to rationalise and organise their behaviour whether with a deliberate program of resistance in mind, or piecemeal in specific situations just because they don’t like it. Unfortunately as disciplinary regimes become more refined, people have to become more and more creative – or just simply destructive – in their attempts to get around these regulatory systems.

Foucault’s ideas have often been blamed – particularly by conservative commentators – for the perceived contemporary breakdown in social order and for fostering the resistance to traditional seats of authority which has marked ethical systems in the post World War II period. I would argue, rather, that Foucault’s work – as was the work of other thinkers who emerged in the 1960s – was in fact a warning about certain directions in social organisation which have now become all too apparent. The disciplinary society is not something that had its heydey in the nineteenth and up to the mid twentieth centuries and now only exists in Charles Dickens novels or the histories of totalitarian regimes. It has evolved using sophisticated techniques of governmentality to become a system of extraordinary complexity and regulatory effectiveness.

What is perhaps most disturbing at present (but then perhaps nothing has changed!) is the high degree of volontary and unquestioning compliance by individuals with mechanisms which seek to restrict their freedom. Mechanisms of social order are, of course, essential to the survival of human beings at all levels, but the question becomes, and indeed has always been, where to draw the line between rules essential for harmonious social function, and regulation that simply enslaves people, locking them into inequitable relations of power.

Much of Foucault’s work focuses on this dangerous narrow and wavering line and seeks to warn people that they must be constantly alert to the dangers this line entails. Foucault and other thinkers of his generation who lived through the modernist debacle which was World War II and totalitarianism were determined to see that this never happened again, but the lessons of history are soon forgotten (particularly when the study of history has been wiped off both school and university curricula) and the re-emergence of old problems in new guises is frequently not recognised for what it is.

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