Foucault’s Les mots et les choses at Year 50: An International Conference – Friday, April 17, 2015, 12:00pm to Saturday, April 18, 2015, 6:30pm, The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, sponsored by History and Theory. Vincent Descombes is the keynote speaker.
This seems a year ahead of time, as the book was published in 1966, but maybe they mean from date of finished manuscript. Thanks to Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz for the link.
New issue of Society and Space out – including a review essay by me on recent work on territory.
At New APPS Catarina Dutilh Novaes reflects on a problem – ‘Reliable referees: a rare commodity‘.
With this post, I want to bring up for discussion what I think is one of the main issues with the peer-reviewing system… namely the extreme difficulties journal editors encounter at finding competent referees willing to take up new assignments. Until two years ago, my experience with the peer-review system was restricted to the role of author (and I, as everybody else, got very frustrated with the months and months it often took journals to handle my submissions) and the role of referee (and I, as so many others, got very frustrated with the constant outpour of referee requests reaching my inbox). Two years ago I became one of the editors of the Review of Symbolic Logic, and thus acquired a third perspective, that of the journal editor. I can confirm that it is one of the most thankless jobs I’ve ever had.
I can certainly relate to this – ten or more requests to get two useable reports is not at all uncommon. I wrote an editorial for Society and Space back in 2008, after I’d been editor for a couple of years. It was entitled ‘The Exchange Economy of Peer Review‘ (open access) – basically making the point that it is not editors, or publishers, who create the need for reviews, it is authors. And authors are also reviewers, which means that to make the system work we should do three times as many reviews as we make submissions – submissions, not published papers.
There are distortions in the system of course, because more senior people are probably asked more, and more junior people less. But I know I am not alone in reviewing far far more than that. In an average year, I accept and deliver on 30-40 review requests (articles, books or proposals, grants). This doesn’t count the papers I process for Society and Space, the ones I review for Theory, Culture and Society as a board member, or the grant applications I review as International Officer for the Geography section in the British Academy. I regularly think I need to say ‘no’ to review requests much more often, but I still feel guilty, because I know editors are struggling to get reports. I’m unconvinced by suggestions for paying referees or other incentives, but it is a problem. It’s undoubtedly part of the wider issue – recently raised in The Times Higher – about how ‘academic citizenship’ is under increased pressure.
To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Lire Capital and Pour Marx, Le magazine littéraire interviews Balibar, Rancière, Lévy and Milner. It also announces two forthcoming volumes of previously-unpublished material.
“Counter-terrorism and security bill is a threat to freedom of speech at universities”, letter in The Guardian from UK academics, in opposition to government plans. I’m one of over five hundred signatories (full list here).
More on this in The Guardian and The Independent.
Update 5.2.14 – developments on this story here.
In November 2014, Bruno Latour was in Chile for a Festival of Ideas in Valparaíso and was interviewed by Patricia Junge, Colombina Schaeffer and Leonardo Valenzuela. The interview is available in Spanish and English – Issuu and PDF.
Thanks to Colombina for sending me the link. It’s a very interesting and readable interview with a good introduction to his work.
Speaking of Latour, Philip Conway’s article ‘Back down to Earth: reassembling Latour’s Anthropocenic geopolitics’ is now available in Global Discourse (requires subscription, or ask the author).
The principal intuition of this article is that Bruno Latour’s explicitly or implicitly ‘geopolitical’ works – strewn as they are across many years and innumerable texts – have not yet been coherently assembled in such a way that their critical interrogation relative to contemporary debates in political geography can gainfully proceed. Such a reassembly must consider ‘earlier,’ ‘later’ and whatever other Latours. Although ‘politics’ per se has, in his more recent works, become just one ‘mode of existence’ among others, every aspect of Latour’s thought has political ramifications. Consequently, his works must be read ‘anthropologically’ – that is to say, in cognisance of the interimplicatedness of every typological strand of ‘the social’ taken altogether. In short, this article attempts not only to read Latour’s works more interconnectedly than have other readers, but, furthermore, to read Latour’s ‘geopolitical’ writings in a more joined-up fashion than he has himself written them. To this end, it (1) introduces the major elements of Latour’s political philosophy, highlighting the importance of geopolitical issues and concepts from his early works onwards; (2) précises his 15 ‘modes of existence,’ laying out the philosophical resources that will be subsequently rewoven; (3) examines six key allies with whom he rearticulates first geo (James Lovelock, Peter Sloterdijk) and politics(Walter Lippmann, John Dewey) separately and then geopolitics (Michel Serres, Carl Schmitt) itself; and, finally, (4) details his Anthropocenic geopolitics conceptually by speculatively intertwining the above with his recent Gifford Lectures. The reassembly attempted – or, rather, initiated – herein is, therefore, neither disinterested nor definitive. It is a working through of the possibilities internal to a specific, albeit sprawling, bundle of texts. It presents a reading both constructive and ‘charitable’ – not in order to obviate critical interrogations but in the hope of provoking a more incisive debate concerning Latour’s works in relation to political geography.
I’ve previously posted some requests for help in locating some difficult-to-find short texts by Foucault, and thanks to readers of this site have received copies of some of these. I’ve updated the requests for help page, along with a few more requests.
I’ve also updated the list of links to pieces I’ve been able to locate – these are basically short pieces which are not in Dits et écrits or major collections of his work in English. Additions to that last list very welcome – though this list, as stated there, does not aim to replicate Richard Lynch’s important work on English translations of pieces in Dits et écrits.
Foucault’s 1973 lectures On The Punitive Society are forthcoming in English in June August 2015. I have a review of the French text at Berfrois (open access); and a review essay forthcoming in Historical Materialism (preprint here).
These thirteen lectures on the ‘punitive society,’ delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society.
Presumed to be preparation for Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, in fact the lectures unfold quite differently, going beyond the carceral system and encompassing the whole of capitalist society, at the heart of which is the invention of a particular management of the multiplicity of interweaving illegalisms.
The lectures, which stand as an essay in its own right, bring together hitherto unpublished historical material concerning classical political economy, the Quakers, English ‘Dissenters,’ and their philanthropy – the discourse of those who introduce the penitentiary into the penal – and the moralization of the worker’s time. Through his criticism of Thomas Hobbes, Michel Foucault offers an analysis of civil war that is not the war of all against all, but a ‘general matrix’ that makes it possible to understand the functioning of the penal strategy, the target of which is less the criminal than the social enemy within. On the Punitive Society is one of the great texts recounting the history of capitalism. Our human sciences prove to be, in the Nietzschean sense, ‘moral sciences.’
The page on Palgrave’s website is now available, and it’s also available via Amazon. Thanks to Chathan Vemuri for the Amazon info; and Jeremy for the updated publication date.
