Foucault

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Schedule and Expectations, Presentations
Mobility, Neoliberalism, and Worlds in Motion
Play, Travel and Knowing
Foucault Appadurai ( Yasmeen) Valentine
Holloway Michele, de Castell Jenson
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Plan about 15 minutes of Presentation, Bring your
Top three Questions, Make good use of your peers
to get feedback, and pull apart conceptual
problems -- your unhelpfully grey areas.
Mary Paulina
Linda Michele
Dai Pearl
Rachel Indira
Yasmeen Valerie
Jocelyne Gordon
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Mobility, Neoliberalism, and Worlds in Motion
Play, Travel and Knowing
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Foucault and Subjectivity.

• A History and Critique of Reason.
• Foucault in this tradition.
• Examines historical circumstances that gave rise
  to the modern type of person.
• Madness, Punishment, Government, and Sexuality
  and subjectivity.
• Linked to his history of the subject is a history
  and critique of reason.
• Critique of the Enlightenment

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Knowledge as a new form of power.

• Knowledge, for Foucault, doesnt develop in a
  vacuum.
• Inextricably linked to emergence of institutions.
  
• Knowledges involve doing things with bodies.
• They invade the self-determination of the
  individual body.
• Power of rational expert invades/ moulds/ shapes
  the individual body

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Governmentality, Science, Knowledge and Power.

• Statistics - make it possible to think in an
  entirely new way .
• Government impossible without statistics.
• Counting, classifying and recording of people
• People and populations a new object of analysis
  and manipulation.
• Sociology can be conceived of as part of this
  tradition.
• For Foucault the state is not a thing - a single
  centre of power- it is the accumulation of many
  centres of governmental expertise.

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Technologies of the Self.

• Normalisation through sexuality -one aspect of a
  wider process that Foucault calls the development
  of technologies of the self.
• Great projects of objectification, knowledge and
  normalisation turned inwards into a project of
  self mastery, self discipline and self control.
• A technology of the self.

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An historical shift in the nature of social
identities.

• Pre-modern identities emphasise membership of
  collectivities
• Modern forms of identity emphasise the importance
  of the subjects ability to articulate and reflect
  upon private experience.

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Issues Questions Raised by reading Foucault.

• How are we merely products of an exercise of
  power that we dont always recognise?
• Are we better off for this discipline?
• Power is not just something that represses.
• Power produces things, it produces the insane, it
  produces, the delinquent, it produces sexuality,
  and it produces the free, rational subject.
• The Enlightenment linkage between knowledge,
  removal of power, and emancipation - that runs
  through German Idealism, Marxism, the Frankfurt
  School and so on - is broken.
• Whats left? (of agency, subjectivity)

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Ubiquitous mobility
Everyone it seems has the ability to be mobile
and networked these days, even some groups who we
do not typically associate with mobility Read
the article Call to give the homeless broadband
http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4396372.stm
How do you think that social exclusion is
impacted by being on the wrong side of the
digital divide?
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You may have heard of the wandering scribe, a
homeless women living in her car whose blog has
found an international audience Read about her
in the article Park and write by Sean
Coughlin http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4923
488.stm It's a tale of our time - about being
cut off from everything around you but still
connected to people thousands of miles away
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Liz Jensens (2001) novel The Paper Eater
begins thus If theres one thing to be said
about life in captivity, its that you get to
travel. This sentence juxtaposes two images
that dont normally go together prisoners and
mobility Recently, it has come to light that
the US has been sending terrorist suspects to be
interrogated in countries where torture is often
used on prisoners (so-called rendition
flights) Read the article CIA jails
allegations http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/ame
ricas/4495730.stm
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Networks, flows and mobility

• Networks, flows, and mobility are some of the
  most important ideas associated with
  globalization, and some of the biggest themes
  right now in the social sciences
• Today, we will focus on three theoretical
  approaches
• Manuel Castells work on network society
• Arjun Appadurais work on scapes and flows
• John Urrys work on mobility

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Castells on globalization
For Castells, networks are a key feature of
globalization. Networks have no centre, but
consist of nodes and linkages. A world of
nation-states (space of places) has been replaced
by a world of networks (space of flows)
Dominant networks are those of global
capital, management, and information The
network state is the response of political
systems to the challenges of globalization. The
European Union may be the clearest manifestation
of this emerging form of state (Castells 2000
364)
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Read an excellent interview with Castells
entitled Identity and change in the network
society Parts 4,5,6 of the interview are most
relevant to this lecture The interview can be
found at http//globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/
Castells/castells-con0.html
Castells on network society
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Castells on the network society
Read a short essay by Castells on The network
society at www.jmk.su.se/global99/carin/netwsoc
.html The network society is a capitalist
society. This brand of capitalism is different
from its historical predecessors. It is global
and it is structured around a network of
financial flows
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Urry on mobility
John Urry argues that the idea of society is
no longer as useful as it once was Trans-nationa
l networks and the flows of people, money, and
information mean that it is mobility that we
should be studying He looks at the example of
airports increasingly air terminals are
becoming like cities, and in the frisk society
cities are becoming like airports (Urry, 2004
32) What do you think he means by the frisk
society? Read Urrys article on new
mobilities at www.sfb536.mwn.de/veranstaltungen/
B3_Workshop_0104_Dokumentation.pdf
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Why staying at home is the new going out
Zygmunt Bauman (1998 77) says that nowadays we
are all on the move We are on the move even
when we are at home we are glued to our
chairs and zap the cable or satellite channels
jumping in and out of foreign spaces with a
speed much beyond the capacity of supersonic
jets and cosmic rockets, but nowhere staying
long enough to be more than visitors Do you
think he is suggesting that too much mobility
means that we are never really at home?
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Appadurai is best known for the idea of scapes
outlined in his essay Disjuncture and difference
in the global cultural economy (Appadurai,
1990) Under conditions of globalization economy,
culture, and politics can no longer exist in
unity, as they did within the nation-state You
can read an except on this theme by Appadurai
at www.intcul.tohoku.ac.jp/holden/MediatedSocie
ty/Readings/2003_04/Appadurai.html
Arjun Appadurai
To Yasmeens .ppt/facilitation
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Valentine and Holloway Overview

• Valentine and Holloway weave together an
  examination of how on-line and off-line worlds
  are integrated and interdependent in young
  peoples lives. The relationship between these
  spaces is often posed in a zero/sum game in which
  time spent with the former detracts from and
  reduces young peoples engagements with the
  latter. They suggest this simplifies the way
  young people move back and forth between these
  spaces and the interdependencies between each
  realm. Centrally, the article is an challenge to
  those who are either simplistic boosters or
  detractors about the role of ICTs in childrens
  lives. To take one or the other of these
  positions, they argue, is to interpret ICTs in
  terms of older narratives that have typically
  surrounded the development of new technologies.
  This underestimates the way ICTs are used and
  absorbed into students lives and the way such
  technologies might act as a catalyst for change.

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Utopian/Dystopian Thinking

• A great deal of utopian thinking surrounded the
  early development of ICTs.
• In conjunction with this, fear-mongering
  suggested potential threats from this technology
• Children are at the centre of these debates

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The Problem

• Little is still known about how children actually
  employ ICTs within the context of their everyday
  lives
• Because children remain relatively
  under-researched and there are few empirical
  studies of peoples actual use of ICTs

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Boosters

• Delivers users from constraints of physical
  bodies/material limitations, offering users
  utopian possibilities to create and play with
  on-line identities (304)
• Creates new forms of social relationships that
  are potentially global in reach. This allows for
  the development of more genuine relationships
  because they are formed on the basis of genuine
  interests
• It is a hyperrealization of the real all the
  best features are accelerated and made easier to
  access a zone of freedom, fluidity, and
  experimentation that is insulated from the
  mundane external realities of the material world
  (304)

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Detractors

• The virtual is a bad imitation of the real world
  disembodied identities are inauthentic and
  on-line communication is commodified, privatized
  and individualized in contrast to the more
  communal forms of face-to-face communication
  (304).
• Invites people to become detached from the social
  world, removed from full human experiences
• Children in particular are threatened they turn
  away from the real, withdraw from social life
  and social space
• The real is a fragile world under threat from
  the lure of the virtual (304)

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Theoretical Framework

• Premised on a rejection of the real/virtual and
  the booster/detractor dichotomies
• Working with a dialectic of technology where
  humans are understood to be inextricably
  entwined with our material surroundings, to the
  point that we need to recast the social to
  include nonhumans (306).
• This principle underlies Actor Network Theory
  where society is produced in and through
  patterned networks of heterogeneous materials in
  which the properties of humans and nonhumans are
  not self-evident but rather emerge in practice
  (306) See my example of film and vision in our
  online discussion.

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Theoretical Frame Cont

• Computers are envisioned as things that
  materialize for children as diverse social
  practices We recognize that computers may
  play different roles within childrens different
  communities of practice and so emerge as very
  different tools, depending on the way different
  communities of practice make use of them.

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The Study

• ICTs allow children to reconfigure their social
  relationships and identities in on-line spaces
  (313).
• The anonymity of virtual spaces allows children
  to produce on-line spaces separate from their
  off-line worlds.
• But off-line worlds still impact on-line
  identities. In fact, these identity spaces are
  interconnected.
• Suggest four ways children incorporate off-line
  into on-line worlds
• childrens on-line identities directly re-present
  off-line selves and activities
• even when children make up new identities on-line
  these often depend on off-line identifies and
  communities
• on-line identity worlds reproduce class/gender
  relations
• economic and temporal realities limit affect how
  kids can be on-line

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The Study II

• Childrens virtual worlds are incorporated into
  their real worlds because
• Children use on-line activities to maintain and
  reconfigure distant and local off-line
  relationships/friendships.
• Kids use ICTs to find info about their off-line
  hobbies and interests
• Kids talk on-line about their off-line interests
  and make virtual friends
• Participation with ICTs can reconfigure kids
  off-line identities in positive and negative ways.

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Conclusion

• The Internet-connected PC does not have any
  inherent properties or universal impacts. Rather,
  it emerges as a very different tool for different
  groups of children in what we might call
  communities of practice (316)

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What are scapes?
The term scapes indicates that the cultural
flows that Appadurai is talking about are
perspectival constructs rather than fixed
relations Flows and scapes impact on people in
different ways Different actors (governments,
businesses, individuals) will have different
perceptions of their place within global processes
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• According to Appadurai there are five scapes
  which constitute the shifting political terrain
  and endless mobility of a world in motion
• ethnoscapes people in motion migrants,
  tourists, refugees
• mediascapes media images of the world
• technoscapes transborder communications
• finacescapes global flows of capital
• ideoscapes conflicts between state and non-state
  ideologies

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The key thing about these scapes is that they
show a world in which it is not possible for
economy, politics, culture to fit together
easily It is the disjunctures between these
elements that facilitate global
flows Appaduarai points to a world of
fragmentation and uncertainty, but also to the
imagining of new political possibilities
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The importance of imagination

• Imagination is the means by which individuals
  connect with new global possibilities.
  Imagination is no longer
• fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is
  elsewhere)
• escape (from a world defined principally by more
  concrete purposes and structures)
• an elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives
  of ordinary people)
• Imagination is now central to all forms of
  agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key
  component of the new global order (Appadurai,
  1996 31)