Marius Gudmand-Høyer

Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research:

While Foucault’s work has had a crucial impact on organizational research, the analytical potential of the dispositive has not been sufficiently developed. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the notion of the dispositive as a key conception in Foucault’s thought, particularly in his lectures at the Collège de France, and to develop dispositional analytics with specific reference to matters of organization. Foucault’s dispositional analysis articulates a history of interrelated social technologies that have been constructed to organize how we relate to each other. The article distinguishes various dispositional prototypes. It shows how dispositional analytics leads the way beyond general periodizations and established dichotomies such as the either-or of the discursive and non-discursive, power and freedom, determinism, and agency; and it demonstrates how dispositional analytics can contribute to a more complex understanding of organizational dynamics, power, strategy, resistance, and critique. Dispositional analytics allows for a new interpretation and use of Foucault in relation to organization studies.

Lacan and the lack of humanity in HRM

This article offers to the field of organization studies and the critique of Human Resource Management (HRM) important theoretical insight implied by the ‘practical anti-humanism’ in Jacques Lacan’s theory of subjectivity. Drawing on Lacan’s notions of ontological lack and fantasy, it suggests that this anti-humanism may provide a challenge of the critical aspirations found in the studies of HRM that have maintained an insurmountable gap between the humanity of the human subject and the inhumanity of the managerial prescription. Turning the traditional critique on its head, the article explores the consequences of confronting the inhuman core of humanity itself instead of maintaining the humanity of the human by exposing the inhumanity of HRM. Following Lacan it questions the idealization of ‘the human’ and asks what it would mean to critical management studies to focus instead on the fallibilities and shortcomings of subjectivity.

Displacements and Development: A Familiar Foucault

“What I am attempting to do and what I have always attempted ever since my first real book Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique,” Foucault explains in a conversation dating from 1978, “is, through intellectual labor, to dispute and question various aspects of society by drawing attention towards their weaknesses and boundaries. My books are, nonetheless, not prophetic, nor do they encourage anyone to take up arms. It annoys me intensely for them to be seen in such a light. The challenge put forth by the books is, in the most explicit manner — and although the vocabulary is difficult — to elucidate the areas of bourgeois culture and institutions that have direct influence upon man’s everyday activities and thoughts.”1

Discipline, Penitentiary, and Delinquency

The intolerable. A pamphlet with the title L’intolerable was published in the early spring of 1971. Written and signed by Foucault along with two others, it presented a critique of insufferable conditions among the courts, police, health sector, school, military, and media. The immediate aim of the flyer was a critique of circumstances in the prisons, which had come into focus because a Maoist group had begun a hunger strike to protest against prison conditions. The manifesto marked the establishment of GIP: Groupe d’information sur les prisons, which had participation from judges, lawyers, journalists, doctors, and psychologists who met at Foucault’s home address and sought to generate and distribute information about the prison, its role and its conditions.1 The movement resulted in the inmates of French prisons getting access to the press and the ability to establish relations with other groups. They therefore came to understand that others were interested in their plight and supported them. This engagement indirectly paved the way for a number of extensive prison riots in France in the years after the Attica revolt.

Exit: Challenges for a Diagnosis of the Present

The conditions for diagnosis. In his critical analysis, Foucault takes an outset in the experience of a specific, current movement. His diagnosis of the present begins by observing the present as a special disruption that takes place as an event in which we participate so as to examine what that present involves for us.1 Here, the present takes on a relational existence that we are involved in and whose consequences we must unfold or explicate. For a diagnosis of the present, the present appears as a yet to be settled score that needs further examination in order to elucidate what is at stake for us and where it might lead us.

The Practices of the Self

Subject formation in practices of the self. In the programmatic introduction to L’Usage des plaisirs, Foucault describes his histories of sexuality succinctly as a study of “the forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognize themselves” as subjects of sexuality.1 He immediately goes on, however, to situate his investigation of sexuality within a more general approach to subjectivity that focuses on “the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject.”2 The study of “the history of desiring man” is thus situated as a specific “domain of reference” within a more overall approach to the problem of “forming oneself as subject.” Sexual behavior exemplifies the theoretical framework within which Foucault attempts to analyze ‘the subject’. The underlying object of Foucault’s study is the “pragmatics,” “techniques,” or “practices of the self.” In an interview he playfully emphasizes this point: “I must confess that I am much more interested in problems about techniques of the self and things like that than sex.... Sex is boring.”3

Philosophy, Enlightenment, Diagnostics

Some ten years after Foucault’s characterization of philosophy as a diagnostic activity associated with “a kind of radical journalism,”1 he returns to this theme in a number of short articles and conversations found at the end of his authorship. At this point, he emphasizes that the origins of his conception of philosophy reaches further back than to Nietzsche. In particular, he focuses on a number of occasional writings published by Kant. At the close of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, Foucault develops his ideas about philosophy as a diagnosis of the present by relating to Kant and the Enlightenment tradition rather than Nietzsche as a precursor to his own thought. However, the aim for Foucault is still to articulate how one can understand philosophy as historically situated. More precisely, he focuses on the three following questions: What are the precursors to a conception of philosophy as a diagnosis of the present? How has such a conception of philosophy been developed? Finally, what does such a conception of philosophy imply? This endeavor regards writing the history of how philosophy comes to understand itself as a historically situated activity, the purpose of which is to diagnose its own epoch. Foucault seeks to write the generative history of contemporary diagnostics, or a genealogy, so as to explicate the conception of philosophy as diagnosis of the present.

A Genealogy of Structuralism and Language

Les mots et les choses. Une archeologie des sciences humaines was published in 1966 when the controversies surrounding structuralism were heating up. It was a decisive contribution to the structuralist trend in the wider public and became a phenomenon to be taken into account, not only in the humanities and social sciences but also philosophically. Despite it being a large and inaccessible work on the scientific and philosophical history of Western societies since the Renaissance, it was also — to the yet unknown Foucault’s surprise — a huge success and had to be reprinted five times that year.1 This success happened because the book contained a number of claims that were viewed as controversial at the time.

Contextuality and Transversal Categories: A Less Familiar Foucault

It cannot and should not be denied that Foucault was a thinker who continuously developed his guiding ideas and constantly revised his previous thoughts. Yet, this restless identity was not absolute or purely negative but rather expressed a consistent and coherent conception about how to put philosophy into practice in contemporary terms. In spite of the numerous revisions, adjustments or alterations that characterize Foucault’s authorship as it developed over a period of around 30 years, it nevertheless comprises a thorough aspiration to practice philosophy so that it contributes appreciably to a given context of contemporary importance. Discussing consistent definitions of oeuvre and conceptions of what it means to think philosophically, this chapter presents an alternative and less familiar view of the unity of Foucault’s authorship. Throughout his works, Foucault remains faithful toward a kind of philosophical activity, which will be elucidated below. His thought takes the form of a dedicated, normative reflection and this form of philosophy is contextual as it focuses analytically on events and experiences in order to unfold relationships and broader horizons. In following Foucault’s definitions of “authorship” and “thought,” we reach an understanding of his work that will no longer seem discontinuous and conflicted. Rather, the various phases may be perceived as expressing an ongoing basic concern, which is re-articulation under ever-changing conditions.

Warfare as a Model of Power Relations

In light of Foucault’s work in the 1970s, it is crucial to recognize how the description of power as a social technology involves a distinction between various kinds of power and a mode of inquiry capable of differential analysis. In his lectures from the first half of the 1970s, Foucault primarily examines discipline as such a technology of power. In the resume of “Il faut defendre la societe”, the College de France lecture course held at the beginning of 1976, he brings together an important outcome of these analyses of disciplinary power: “In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical model of sovereignty. That model in effect presupposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights or primitive powers; it sets itself the task of accounting for the ideal genesis of the State; and finally, it makes the law the basic manifestation of power. We should be trying to study power not on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but on the basis of the relationship itself, to the extent that it is the relationship itself that determines the elements on which it bears: rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look at how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects.”1