Foucault, pastoral power, and optics

2015

The article shows that in Foucault’s late 1970s and early 1980s analyses of pastoral, conductive power—most essentially in early and medieval Christianity—the issue of sight and visual perception recurs and occupies a crucial status. In Foucault’s discussion, these Christian relations of power, knowledge, and truth are attached with a surveying gaze that is both totalizing as well as individualizing, one that is mobilized by the thrust towards perfect visibility, transparency, and illumination of the subject turned into an object. The intention is also to develop Foucault’s analysis further, by demonstrating how Christian, providential government can be and actually has been detached from …

Foucault and deaf education in Finland

2016

The influence of Michel Foucault’s thinking in critical disability studies, and to social studies of deafness, can hardly be doubted. Foucault has offered valuable tools for the critical rethinking of deaf education and pedagogy with respect to normalization and disciplinary power, which are integrally related to the historical construction of deafness as deficiency and pathology by modern, medical, and psychological knowledge. This article explores the applicability and critical potential of the Foucauldian concepts of disciplinary power, surveillance, and normalization within the specific context of the history of deaf education in Finland. The article focuses on the modernization of the …

The noisy crowd: The politics of voice in Michel Foucault's final Collège de France lectures

2010

Confession, Voice and the Sensualization of Power: The Significance of Michel Foucault’s 1962 Encounter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau

2012

Michel Foucault is known for his critiques of the intertwinement of empirical knowledge, perception and experience, and power. Within this general framework, this article focuses on a fairly unnoticed text of Foucault’s: his 1962 Introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dialogues. The article shows that Foucault’s Introduction is central for more than one reason: Firstly, it is apparently the first piece, in which Foucault focuses in detail on confession as an individualizing mode of power and truth-utterance. Secondly, in this text, Foucault treats confession as an empirical, sensual and affective form of power. Thirdly, in this early text, Foucault presents what can be called his critique …

Foucault's voices : toward the political genealogy of the auditory-sonorous

2010

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is not really known as a thinker of music, or more generally, as a thinker of the voice, of the sound, of audition and listening. Often, one comes up with the portrait of Foucault as a visualist of some sort, one who either was not interested in the other sensory modalities, or at least, did not have much, if anything, to say about them. However, in this study I attempt to argue against this portrait. The aim is to bring to the fore the occurrence of the theme of the voice, sound and audition in various occasions and contexts, as we follow the course of Foucault’s intellectual history. Furthermore, the aim is to show that it is not just any sort of occurrences th…

Critical Inquiry and/or Art of Critique: Koopman’s Genealogy as Critique

2014