Colin Gordon

This is an ad hoc, unstructured compilation of some online information sources-including a few books-dealing with who or what is behind Brexit, plus some materials on allied forces and influences inside and outside of the UK. Its origin is a question from a fellow pro-EU activist, asking for information about pro-Leave activity and on its organizations, platforms and messages. This document doesn't claim to answer all of these questions; in particular it does not go into much detail on current Pro-Leave campaign activities and messaging, which we need to monitor and to be able to combat.

O artigo oferece uma série de reflexões a respeito de uma fase dos trabalhos de Michel Foucault e de alguns de seus colaboradores apresentada no volume The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality (1991), coeditado pelo autor. Tais reflexões se organizam em três partes. Primeiro, há uma revisão de alguns aspectos das aulas de Foucault sobre governamentalidade que, por diferentes razões, foram deixados de lado quando o livro foi publicado. Em seguida, faz-se um balanço de temas importantes que, embora presentes no livro, não receberam suficiente atenção dos leitores. Finalmente, no eixo que ocupa a maior parte do artigo, examinam-se as últimas discussões de Foucault a respeito do que o autor denomina múltiplos nascimentos da política, a fim de demonstrar a continuidade da pertinência do empreendimento foucaultiano nos anos 1970, tornado possível devido à noção de governamentalidade, ao mesmo tempo tão estranha e operacional. Tal atualidade é indicada não somente pelo incremento do...

The leaked Cabinet Office memo on Brexit (or memo by a Deloitte consultant which the Cabinet Office denies having commissioned), leaked to the Times yesterday, seems to be based on credible sources and contacts inside government. http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-memo-text-idUKKBN13A0UO Some of its comments are, indeed, comment or opinion, although probably very astute and well-informed. Some are also extremely damaging. The one key point that has been immediately, widely and correctly reported it that " there is no plan ". The Prime Minister's famous hand of secret negotiating card is empty. The author indeed thinks that government is up to six months away from having an agreed strategy and negotating position for EU withdrawal. Six months from now is, of course, well beyond Theresa May's deadline for Article 50 notification and even further beyond the point when any Parliamentary vote could be informed by clear information on government strategy. The report adds that the Brexit economic strategy is in any case only being developed in piece meal, ad hoc fashion, " on a case-by-case basis as specific decisions are forced on Government ". The writer links this to the following other considerations – some of which at least were already well known:

Argument: People in the Labour Conference are thinking outside the Brexit box. - Worries about freedom of movement don't necessarily mean an inevitable hard Brexit. - Owen Smith's pro-Remain campaigning merits respect and Jeremy Corbyn's supporters should not all be assumed to be dogmatic Lexiteers.

This big and potentially influential volume is one sign among others of Michel Foucault’s ongoing elevation to classic status within the history of recent thought. The publishers say that the 117 entries in this volume are written by ‘the world’s leading scholars in Foucault’s thought’. Some of the 72 contributors certainly fit that billing. Alongside many established experts, there are also younger scholars whose renown lies, hopefully, in the near future; this mix gives a range of generational perspectives which is to be welcomed.

“The Christian art of being governed”

Colin Gordon

Like all previously published volumes of his lectures, the content of The Government of the Living defies brief summary. It shows us Foucault  in 1980 mapping out a major new phase in his work in terms that complicate our existing understanding of his unfinished project. My review looks in turn at the two parts of the course: an unusually lengthy discussion of method and heuristics, followed by a tightly focussed study of early Christian regimes of truth. I suggest that the complex opening theoretical reflections in these lectures go well beyond mapping the course of the immediately following historical analysis. They need to be seen in coordination with other conceptual innovations introduced over the following years, setting a task which Foucault calls here a 'history of the power of truth' on his agenda alongside, and in integral connection with the previously defined goals of a history of governmentality and the subject. A newly published discussion in Berkeley later in 1980 adds crucial context to these Paris lectures, spelling out the linkage of structures of subjectivation to governability and of penitential ascetics to pastoral power. Taken together, the later books and lectures can now be seen to establish a framework of what I suggest we can call 'alethic' or 'aletheological' analysis,  analysing and mapping across the span of Western history the modes of engagement of life and truth, with a view to enabling a renewed analysis of the political present.

Le possible : alors et maintenant. Comment penser avec et sans Foucault autour du droit pénal et du droit public
The Possible, now and then. How to think public law and criminal law with and without Foucault?
p. 111-134
http://conflits.revues.org/18899
Cultures & Conflits

http://conflits.revues.org/

94-95-96 | Critique de la raison criminologique

http://conflits.revues.org/18876

English-language version is in preparation

Seeking to contextualise the issues of Michel Foucault’s interventions relating to penal law, and to trace the logic of their development through the course of his work, this paper tries to recapture how Foucault was able in a singular way to open up for his time a new sense of the possible. This involves identifying both the invariants and the areas of displacement in Foucault’s viewpoint on law. Alongside his well-known rejection of a juridified mode of political analysis, one needs to notice and retrieve a positive, rich and complex historical analysis of the intermeshing of law, power and truth. Taking up side by side Foucault’s “premonitory” analyses of neoliberalism and his research in the 1980s on games of truth, the paper concludes by seeking to elicit some heuristics to help open up, in our own, altered present, a sense of the possible in juridico-penal practice.
En essayant de contextualiser les enjeux des interventions de Michel Foucault à propos du droit pénal et de retrouver leur logique à l’intérieur du déroulement de son travail, ce texte tente de dégager en quoi Foucault a pu alors aider, d’un façon singulière, à ouvrir au moins pour un moment de nouvelles conceptions du possible. Pour faire ceci, il faut repérer à la fois les constantes et les éléments de déplacement dans le point de vue de Foucault sur le droit. Sous son refus notoire d’une juridification de l’analyse politique, il faut remarquer et prendre en acte une analyse historique positive, riche et complexe des engrenages entre droit, pouvoir et vérité. En reprenant en même temps les analyses (dites « prémonitoires ») de Foucault sur le néolibéralisme et ses travaux des années 1980 sur les jeux de vérité, on essaie enfin de dégager quelques pistes pour réouvrir, en notre présent à nous, une conception du possible en matière juridico-pénale.

“Expelled questions: Foucault, the Left and the law” in Ben Golder ed. Re-reading Foucault: On Law, Power and Rights, Routledge 2013.

The piece was written as a sequel to a workshop discussion with Peter Fitzpatrick and Véronique Voruz at the Critical Legal Studies Conference Genealogies: Excavating Legal Modernity,
(Leicester, 2009), and to  discussion during and around with the Conference The  Foucault Effect 1991-2011 (Birkbeck College, 2011) with Peter Fitzpatrick and Ben Golder about their book Foucault's Law.
The title of the piece alludes to the so-called 'expulsion thesis', an influential suggestion put forward two decades early in a book by Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham that Foucault's work 'expels' the study of law from the analysis of modernity. Vigorously contesting this analysis and its underlying political motivations,  the paper argues the need for much greater attentiveness to the original and substantive treatments of legal, juridical and penal subject-matter across much of Foucault.

Foucault Studies, No. 14, Sept. 2012, p. 98-114
http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/3894/4239

«Considérations sur le marxisme, la phénoménologie et le pouvoir»
Cités, No. 52, Déc. 2012, p. 103-126
http://www.puf.com/Revues:Cit%C3%A9s_2012_-_N%C2%B0_52
http://www.cairn.info/revue-cites-2012--p-101.htm

This is an interview with Michel Foucault by Colin Gordon and Paul Patton conducted at Foucault's Paris apartment in April 1978 and published in the original French and in English translation in 2012. There is an introductory note by Alain Beaulieu who arranged the authorised publication, and a note on the background to the interview by Colin Gordon.

This piece accompanied the first translation, in Ideology & Consciousness 4 (Autumn 1978), of the papers by Pasquale Pasquino and Giovanna Procacci, both subsequently included in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1991). Following my review of Robert Castel's Le Psychanalysme,  this continued the coverage in this journal of work by a group of researchers collaborating with and inspired by Foucault. Pasquino and Procacci were co-editors, with Alessandro Fontana, of the volume of Foucault's shorter writing and interviews Microfisica de Potere,  which served as the model for my edited collection Power/Knowledge.

Radical Philosophy 17, Autumn 1977

A review article on Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality 1. Published in 1977, prior to the translation of either book,  this may have been the first extended analysis in English of the two books which did most to establish Foucault's international reputation.  The piece was reprinted in  the Radical Philosophy Reader, eds. Richard Osborne and Roy Edgley (Verso 1985), with minor corrections and a short postscript.

The report was prompted by information about the Groupe de recherche sur l'Enseignement Philsophique (GREPH), in an interview with Jacques Derrida published in the volume  Politiques de la Philosophie  (M Foucault, F Châtelet, J-F Lyotard, M Serres, J Derrida, ed. D Grisoni: Grasset, Paris 1976). The interview in the report was with Michèle Le Doeuff. The section “School philosophy essays” was written by CG, the section on the journal Le Doctrinal de Sapience  by JR; the other sections were authored jointly.

[By the way I have another, later article available on this site, dealing with education as a theme in Michel  Foucault's work:  it is called "Pedagogy, Psychagogy, Demagogy".]

This is an early, longer version of a chapter on History of Madness contributed to A Companion to Foucault, eds. Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary. Jana Sawicki,  (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). This explores Foucault's conception in his 1961 preface of a history of exclusion, and sets his book in a context of subsequent historical explorations of excluding practice in European societies.

in  Folie et justice : relire Foucault eds. Ph. Chevallier, Tim Greacen.  ERES 2009. An invited presentation at an international public conference, Culture psychiatrique-culture juridique : relire Michel Foucault, Folie et justice,  at La Villette, Paris in Sepember  2008 organized by Philippe Cheavllier and Tim Greacen. The event which included an intervention by Robert Badinter, was focussed on new security and carceral policies and proposals of the Sarkozy administration in France.

A short discussion of the (limited) impact of Madness and Civilisation on anti-psychiatric thought in Britain, plus some more general remarks on the political and academic reception of Foucault's book. Translated by Mauro Bertani from an unpublished English and French text. Translated by Davide Bertani.

In Aut Aut 351. Foucault e la “Storia dell follia” (1961-2011)  Milano, 2011.

Translated by Ariane Revel with introduction by Philippe Chevallier.
In Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique de Michel Foucault. Regards critiques 1961-2011. Eds. Ph. Artiere, J.-F. Bert, Ph. Chevallier, F. Gros, L. Paltrinieiri, J. Revel, M. Potte-Bonville, M. Saar. Presses Universaires de Caen 2011.

The text that follows brings together two papers about resonances between late lectures: Weber's lectures of 1918 on science and politics as vocations, and Foucault's final courses (1980–84) on subjectivity, truth and the political. The title alludes to Foucault's 1983 discussion of Plato's political experiences in Sicily, as narrated in his Seventh Letter, juxtaposed to Weber's public interventions in Germany at the time of the foundation of the Weimar Republic. Linked to this is an exploration of the centrality in the work of both Weber and Foucault of an historical ethnography and ethology of the political, and of the forms of connectivity in our cultures between ethics, truth and government.

Short review of an exceptionally informed and insightful study of this major theme in later Foucault, including rare information on unpublished manuscript material. This book is cited by Michel Senellart in his edition of Foucault's 1980 College de France lectures.

Published by Clare O'Farrell on Foucault News here:
http://foucaultnews.com/2012/07/07/foucault-et-le-christianisme/

The Birkbeck Centre for Law and the Humanities

THE FOUCAULT EFFECT 1991-2011

A Conference at Birkbeck College, University of London Reflecting on 20 years of The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality


This is the unabridged text of my talk given in June 2011 at this conference.

I don’t have the competence to survey, still less to assess the vast and varied body of studies in governmentality which have been undertaken since we published The Foucault Effect. What I would like to offer instead, by way of an introduction, is a brief personal afterthought on our book, with the benefit of hindsight, in the light of subsequent history and publications, and with an eye to our current interests and problems. What did we (and I) miss or overlook that might have helped in writing the history of later presents? (I will look here especially at the first lectures of the 1979 series: liberalism and liberty, ways of limiting government, the liberal international order.) Conversely, what things did we notice and highlight, which may have subsequently been given less attention to date than they merit? (I will mention the idea of a collective, continuous history of governmentality, some points about law and neoliberalism, and some challenges about socialist governmentality and the culture of contemporary political critique).

This brings me to my main topic. A lot of discussion focussed on ideas of stand‐off or disjunction between Foucault’s notion of governmentality and some thing or things (such as sovereignty, the juridical, rights and political theory) which function as governmentality’s other. I know I am not alone in feeling that, without lapsing into undifferentiated eclectic blandness, we need to move beyond some of these disjunctions and the brand‐differentiated sectarian silos they might be at risk of imprisoning us in. I want to argue here in particular that the vast wealth of posthumous Foucault publication now allows us to see a number of ways in which the history of governmentality which Foucault and others undertook enables, implies and demands an accompanying genealogy of politics, that is to say of political culture, conduct, sociability and subjectivity. To start with, we can look at a number of suggestions in Foucault’s lectures about instances of what one might call the multiple births of politics. Along with these hints, I will draw here on some key, complementary sources outside the 78‐79 lectures which became available after TFE was published (notably ‘What is critique?’ and ‘Society must be defended’), look rapidly at the implications of the novel reflections on philosophy and the political developed in the recently published lectures of 1983‐4, and reflect on that basis about what Foucault might have been planning to do next, having promised his audience, in early 1984, an imminent ending of his ‘Greco‐Roman trip’.

Reading that promise today is a reminder of the simple fact that Foucault’s work was unfinished, and, as a consequence, that alongside the ever‐valid option to instrumentalise Foucault’s work, in whatever area one chooses and with as much freedom, inventiveness and faithful infidelity as one is capable of, there is also the possibility, within the limits of our powers, of trying to finish what Foucault left unfinished, or at least of taking up some of what may have been his work’s unfulfilled aims and ambitions.

Hints or clues to how this might be attempted include some points of useful connectivity with other scholars’ work on the history of early modern thought and politics (Donald Kelley and Peter Donaldson) and some brief but promising encounters with the governmentality theme in some other important currents of contemporary work (Ann Stoler, Duncan Ivison, Keith Baker, Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee). Finally I will ask how and under what conditions this kind of genealogy can make a useful contribution to public discourse.

References

Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995)

Donald R Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation. (1981)

Peter S Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (1992)

Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983, 2006) and ‘Nationalism, Identity and the Logic of Seriality’ in The Spectre of Comparisons (1998)

Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (2004)

Keith Baker, “A Foucauldian French Revolution?” in Foucault and the Writing of History. Ed. Jan Goldstein (1994)

UTS Review Vol 5 No 1 1999
A review of (1) Foucault, the Legacy, ed. Clare O'Farrell (Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 1997), and (2) Governing Australia. Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government, eds. Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess (Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1998)

Published in "Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government" eds. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (UCL/Chicago 1997),  this chapter was an expanded translation of a 1986  article seeking to explain to a French audience the local context of debate on history and politics in which Foucault's work was (or was not)  received in the UK during his lifetime.  The paper compares themes in Foucault's work on governmentality and Enlightenment with J.G.A.  Pocock's reflections on the problematisation by early modern British  thinkers of the status of civic virtue in a commercial society. An added section in this version looked at the contemporary prospects in the UK for inventing a socialist rationality of government.

This paper consists of comments and reflections on the legacy of Canguilhem's work, especially in Britain. After reviewing some aspects of the reception of Canguilhem's thought in Britain, the paper defends Canguilhem's vitalist philosophy, and concludes with hints as to the political uses of Canguilhem's thought in today's bio-political age.
Keywords: Canguilhem; Foucault; vitalism

Economy and Society, 27:2-3, 182-189, DOI: 10.1080/03085149800000011

Edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller
With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault

Based on Michel Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collège de France on governmental rationalities and his 1977 interview regarding his work on imprisonment, this volume is the long-awaited sequel to Power/Knowledge. In these lectures, Foucault examines the art or activity of government both in its present form and within a historical perspective as well as the different ways governmentality has been made thinkable and practicable.

Foucault's thoughts on political discourse and governmentality are supplemented by the essays of internationally renowned scholars. United by the common influence of Foucault's approach, they explore the many modern manifestations of government: the reason of state, police, liberalism, security, social economy, insurance, solidarity, welfare, risk management, and more. The central theme is that the object and the activity of government are not instinctive and natural things, but things that have been invented and learned.

The Foucault Effect analyzes the thought behind practices of government and argues that criticism represents a true force for change in attitudes and actions, and that extending the limits of some practices allows the invention of others. This unique and extraordinarily useful collection of articles and primary materials will open the way for a whole new set of discussions of the work of Michel Foucault as well as the status of liberalism, social policy, and insurance.

Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Governmental Rationality: An Introduction
Colin Gordon
2. Politics and the Study of Discourse
Michel Foucault
3. Questions of Method
Michel Foucault
4. Governmentality
Michel Foucault
5. Theatrum Politicum: The Genealogy of Capital - Police and the State of Prosperity
Pasquale Pasquino
6. Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing 'The System of Natural Liberty'
Graham Burchell
7. Social Economy and the Government of Poverty
Giovanna Procacci
8. The Mobilization of Society
Jacques Donzelot
9. How Should We Do the History of Statistics?
Ian Hacking
10. Insurance and Risk
Francois Ewald
11. 'Popular Life' and Insurance Technology
Daniel Defert
12. Criminology: The Birth of a Special Knowledge
Pasquale Pasquino
13. Pleasure in Work
Jacques Donzelot
14. From Dangerousness to Risk
Robert Castel
Index

Chicago University Press
ISBN: 9780226080451 Published July 1991