Progressive Geographies

Discussing Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (or, to be more accurate, that portions of it that turn up in The Foucault Reader) in a seminar I taught this spring, I was struck, once again, by a sentence that reminded me why — prior to Foucault’s last discussions of Immanuel Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” — there was a tendency to see Foucault as one of the more effective (and intransigent) modern critics of the Enlightenment.

An Enemy of the Enlightenment?

The sentence comes towards the end of the discussion of “Panopticism”, at the point when Foucault considers the ways in which the “formation of the disciplinary society” was connected with “a number of broad historical processes — economic, juridical-political and, lastly, scientific …” Considering the second of these three processes, he reflects on the way in which the rise of the bourgeoisie to the status of…

Lecture of 28th January, 1981

Foucault distinguishes between the Graeco-Roman concept of aphrodisia, the Christian concept of flesh and the modern concept of sexuality. These are not three domains of distinct objects. They are three modes of experience, that is three modalities of the relation of the self with itself, in the rapport that we have with a particular domain of objects. Foucault is suggesting that the relation with sexual activity is always about a self-relation and about sexual activities which are joined in a changing modality.

Artemidorus did not make moral judgements, but looked at what was favourable or unfavourable in events to come, in the interpretation of dreams which he presumes refers to future events. It is, however, an ethical perception, presumably in the sense that the ethical is what concerned with with relation of the self with itself. Foucault appears to assume a distinction between morality as…

The Higher Education Funding Council for England are reviewing the idea of using metrics (or citation counts) in research assessment. We think using metrics to measure research quality is a terrible idea, and we’ll be sending the response to them below explaining why. The deadline for receiving responses is 12pm on Monday 30th June (to metrics@hefce.ac.uk). If you want to add an endorsement to this paper to be added to what we send to HEFCE, please write your name, role and institutional affiliation below in the comments, or email either ms140[at]soas.ac.uk or p.c.kirby[at]sussex.ac.uk before Saturday 28th June. If you want to write your own response, please feel free to borrow as you like from the ideas below, or append the PDF version of our paper available here.

Response to the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment
June 2014

Authored by:
Dr Meera Sabaratnam, Lecturer…