Review

Foucault, the Digital Humanities, the Method

Author: Simon Ganahl orcid logo (University of Vienna)

  • Foucault, the Digital Humanities, the Method

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Abstract

Starting from a review of the book Foucault, digital published by Bernhard J. Dotzler and Henning Schmidgen in 2022, this article deals with the question of how Michel Foucault's theoretical and methodological concepts can be operationalized in digital humanities research. It takes a critical stance on the assumption that discourse analysis is a quantitative, "big data" method and makes the case for translating the concept of the dispositive into qualitative digital projects. Finally, the essay relates Foucault's late works on governmentality and self-care to post-phenomenology and interaction design, advocating theorization by building digital tools and platforms.

Keywords: Michel Foucault, digital humanities, discourse analysis, dispositive analysis, maker culture, qualitative methods, governmentality, self-care, phenomenology, interaction design

How to Cite: Ganahl, Simon. "Foucault, the Digital Humanities, the Method." Genealogy+Critique 9, no. 1 (2023): 1–13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.10313

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2023-04-19

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Bernhard J. Dotzler and Henning Schmidgen published a German-language book entitled Foucault, digital at meson press in spring 2022. Because the topic concerns both my own field of research and the scope of Genealogy+Critique, my initial plan was to write a short review. However, reading the monograph was stimulating enough to continue its thought process in a somewhat longer article.

The following essay consists of three sections. In the first, I present Dotzler and Schmidgen's proposed rereading of Michel Foucault's book Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) in the light of the digital humanities and embed it in the preliminary work done on the topic by the editors of the foucaultblog and of Le foucaldien. Based on this summary, I ask the question whether the plea for computational quantitative discourse analysis can still be innovative, given that the social sciences and especially commercial enterprises have already developed and applied similar approaches.

The second section goes beyond Dotzler and Schmidgen's concentration on the "early Foucault" of the 1960s and examines whether it is not in fact his following network concept, the dispositif, that lends itself to application in the digital humanities. In this context, I take the liberty of referring to my mapping project Campus Medius, the results of which were published in a book edition at the same time as Foucault, digital. This reference is based on the suggestion that media scholars ought to participate in the maker culture of the digital humanities and thereby focus on qualitative methods.

Following the chronology of Foucault's work, the article concludes with the question whether the concepts of governmentality and self-care can also be digitally operationalized. It seems to be mainly the approaches of post-phenomenology, partly in dialogue with Foucault's late work, that intersect with current problems of interaction design or, more generally, with the practical fashioning of media experiences. Instead of adopting an academic defensiveness, culture and media scholars should not only enter into a conversation with computer scientists and designers but work together with them to create tools and platforms that shape the Internet. This would be a theorization appropriate to the digital humanities, making its concepts tangible beyond the discursive treatise.

1. Pattern Recognition in Discourse Analysis

Before I turn to Foucault, digital by Bernhard J. Dotzler and Henning Schmidgen, I have to—or rather want to—go into the history of Genealogy+Critique, which is also mentioned briefly in the introduction of their book.1 At the beginning of this journal was the foucaultblog, which a group of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, including myself, founded at Philipp Sarasin's chair of history at the University of Zurich in 2013. Sarasin had not only codeveloped the knowledge management software LitLink but had also repeatedly emphasized in his papers on historical discourse analysis that Foucault's method was compatible with approaches in computer science.

In an introductory article from 2007, he likened discourse analysis to pattern recognition in the natural sciences, "all of which cannot ask for 'meaning' to give direction to their inquiry and test the coherence of their results, but must search for the ultimately mathematically formulable algorithms that produce the complex patterns and shapes in nature."2 In 2012, for example, Sarasin published a piece on Foucault and the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which concludes with the sentence: "'Culture' appears here, in the style of Foucault, as something that must be measured, described, and analyzed before one can attempt to understand it."3

It was Philipp Sarasin who suggested at his Zurich chair to launch a weblog on the thought of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984), which went online under the title foucaultblog on April 1, 2013. We published posts and articles, but also organized conferences and workshops, e.g., in 2015 first in Zurich in spring on the question "What is: Historicizing Foucault?" and then in Vienna in fall on the topic "Distant Reading and Discourse Analysis." The latter event is of particular relevance for this article; its presentations were published in 2016 in the form of a special issue in the journal Le foucaldien, which had emerged from the foucaultblog. In the introduction, we formulated the central question we had discussed at the Vienna workshop as follows: "Can historical discourse analyses as practiced by Michel Foucault be carried out with the aid of computers?"4 In order to be as concrete as possible, we had decided to compare Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge with the research practice at the Literary Lab at Stanford, which its then director, Franco Moretti, named "distant reading."5

We juxtaposed Moretti's computer-assisted literary analyses with the knowledge-historical approaches that Foucault had used in his books of the 1960s and reflected in the Archaeology of Knowledge. We found clear similarities in their connections to the historians of the Annales school but also emphasized the differences between Moretti's essentially sociohistorical distant reading and Foucault's discourse analysis as a method for immanently establishing regular statements in textual series. In the debate with computer scientists and practitioners of the digital humanities, however, it became apparent that precisely the core of Foucault's approach, the indeterminate notion of statement (énoncé), "seems to programmatically resist operationalization in the context of digital analysis methods."6 We attributed this problem to the fact that Foucault's archaeology "aims at a structural analysis not of the signifier but of the signified, thus that which is referred to and not the chains of signs with which both structuralism and text mining are concerned."7 The Vienna workshop and hence the special issue argued for an ongoing dialogue between the humanities and informatics in order to be able to computationally analyze discourses in the Foucauldian sense.

This is where Dotzler and Schmidgen come in with their book Foucault, digital published in spring 2022. However, the reader should not expect concrete instructions for the digital application of discourse analysis. On this question, the two authors have actually come no further than we did in 2015/16—in contrast to Heidi Karlsen, who in her dissertation, completed in 2020, sought and found a Foucauldian way to examine the discursive places of women in nineteenth-century Norwegian society by using a combination of "topic modeling" and "bag of words."8 Dotzler and Schmidgen's book is productive primarily in terms of the history of knowledge, namely in carrying out the assumption expressed in the introduction "that the form of discourse analysis described by Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge was not developed solely in critical dialogue with linguistics, but from the outset also with reference to the emerging digital humanities."9

Dotzler and Schmidgen elaborate this thesis in several chapters. Following the doctoral dissertation of Onur Erdur, who cofounded and coedited the foucaultblog, they point out that Norbert Wiener, whose book Cybernetics had been released by a French publishing house in 1948, was a visiting professor at the Collège de France in the early 1950s and in 1962 took part in a conference near Paris on the concept of information in biology, in which Foucault's teacher Jean Hyppolite actively participated. Moreover, Foucault was familiar with contemporary developments in molecular biology through the physician and philosopher Georges Canguilhem, who accompanied his studies from matriculation to doctorate.10 According to Dotzler and Schmidgen, Foucault's interest in statistical methods in psychology and in serial procedures in art, above all the literature of Raymond Roussel, also speak for his openness to the emerging computer technology.

Apart from these rather atmospheric influences, Foucault, digital shows with concrete data that the Archaeology of Knowledge actually emerged synchronously with the digital humanities avant la lettre: the founding of computational linguistics journals and associations, the organization of conferences bringing the humanities into contact with informatics in the late 1960s. Dotzler and Schmidgen emphasize that Foucault's anti-hermeneutic discourse analysis overlaps with the early projects of computational linguistics. Yet they also see this overlap in the focus on mere words as "discursive events,"11 whereas we had concluded in 2016, as cited above, that Foucauldian discourse analysis is difficult to operationalize with information technology precisely because it focuses not on signifiers as strings of characters, but on significates or rather on the structure of what is signified.12

In this context, two other references in the book are worth mentioning, namely: first, to the development of computer-assisted content analysis and, second, to the fact that discourse analysis is basically about recognizing patterns of relations. Regarding content analysis, Dotzler and Schmidgen emphasize that its computational application emerged at the same time as the Archaeology of Knowledge.13 This is quite relevant from a historical point of view. However, in order to answer the question of how discourse analysis could be automated today, it would be necessary to discuss, on the one hand, how text mining is currently carried out in quantitative social research and, on the other, how business ventures are already applying similar approaches. The first issue can be addressed through scholarly dialogue. The second, however, is a commercially secured black box that causes academic research to constantly lag behind economic practice.

Foucault's discourse analysis, developed in the 1960s, is certainly related to quantitative methods for textual analysis. More than half a century later, however, it seems to me that this inclination toward big data, which Dotzler and Schmidgen also emphasize,14 is counterproductive. For the humanities—and the social sciences as well—can here only imitate, with a time lag, what has long been a business reality. In other words, a digital archaeology of knowledge is already taking place, just not—or only in isolated cases—at universities, but rather in commercial enterprises. The second abovementioned reference from Foucault, digital, according to which discourse analyses aim at "capturing relational frequencies,"15 will be elaborated in the following section.

2. Dispositive Analysis as a Qualitative Method

In his contribution to the special issue "Distant Reading and Discourse Analysis," Maurice Erb explained that Foucault's early work was still concerned with the "spatial dimension of knowledge orders" and that it was only in the Archaeology of Knowledge that he concentrated on the "serial repetitions of similar elements."16 While Erb here has the concept of "statement" in mind, Dotzler and Schmidgen emphasize the "question of the regularities of relations" in discourse analysis.17 Both comments remind us that in Foucault's work, methodologically speaking, the focus is not on textual series but on patterns of relations. This approach is explicitly termed dispositif in the 1970s, a French noun that can be translated into English as "apparatus" or—though linguistically incorrect—by nominalizing the adjective "dispositive."18

The dispositif appears in Foucault's 1975 book Discipline and Punish and there refers to the panopticon, i.e., the prison designed around 1800 by Jeremy Bentham to facilitate an efficient control of criminality.19 For Foucault, this architectural design typifies the disciplinary regime that, according to his analysis, spread throughout modern societies in the nineteenth century. Having also used the concept prominently in the book The Will to Knowledge that followed in 1976,20 Foucault was asked in a panel discussion in 1977 what he actually meant by dispositif. He said, an ensemble or network of quite heterogeneous elements, statements as well as things, but above all he was concerned with their specific type of connection and the question of which social problem was to be solved with each particular dispositive.21

Why does the term dispositif hardly play a role when Foucault's relationship to the digital humanities is discussed? The word does not appear in Dotzler and Schmidgen's book, not even in its German version, Dispositiv. We had also focused on discourse analysis and the Archaeology of Knowledge in 2015/16. Would it not be obvious to respond to the question of cultural-historical patterns of relations with procedures that model realities via defined structures of entities and their connections? For this is essentially what the informatic concepts of "semantics," "mapping," and "ontology" are all about.22

I think it has to do with the notion "big data," that is, with the idea that Foucault's discourse analysis is a quantitative approach and that the computer is only relevant where large amounts of data are involved. This attitude, however, limits the digital humanities to such an extent that neither culture scholars nor computer scientists can exploit their capabilities. In his discourse analyses, Foucault did not in fact proceed in a standardized way but read all texts himself and evaluated them quite originally. There definitely can be no question of a quantitative method in his dispositive analysis of the panopticon. In reviewing the historical documents on the emergence of the modern prison, he recognized that a social shift can be detected in Bentham's design, that the functioning of the panopticon can be used to show micro-historically how European societies of the nineteenth century were organized. It was, entirely in line with Max Weber's ideal type,23 an exaggeration that concentrated the view of the historical problem and produced a theory of modernity that Foucault would later revise.24

These are characteristics of a qualitative method that is certainly suitable for operationalization in digital humanities research. At least this was the methodological starting point for my mapping project Campus Medius, the results of which appeared in book form at the same time as Foucault, digital.25 From the outset, the goal was not to analyze large amounts of historical data, but to translate the concepts of the dispositive and the related actor-network into a data model, and to establish close cooperation of culture and media scholars with computer scientists and designers. Over the course of ten years, this collaboration resulted in several versions of the website campusmedius.net, which attempts to analyze mediality as a field of experience in the Foucauldian sense by means of a historical case study. Campus Medius understands digital humanities not as an organizational dialogue between university departments or as the activity of individual scholars, but as teamwork along the lines of scientific laboratories or the performing arts.26

In such projects, the "author" cannot simply be understood as the creator of a work, nor "place" as the intersection of longitude and latitude, etc. Rather, these concepts must be operationalized in a state-of-the-art way in both the humanities and informatics. This requires precise and patient interdisciplinary collaboration that will not lead to universal infrastructures but ideally develops an adequate digital lab in each case. Digital humanities cannot let computer scientists dictate their concepts and methods, but it also leads nowhere to speak patronizingly of the poor positivism of digital research projects, as is quite common in culture and media studies. In this scholarly field, one has to get one's hands dirty, tinker and craft, build counter-sites as laboriously as playfully, digital "heterotopias" as Foucault would have called them.27

3. Government of Media Experiences

Let me repeat: Discourse analysis tends to computational approaches, but it is questionable whether the humanities can or even should close the knowledge gap in quantitative methodology to the social sciences and, above all, to commercial enterprises. Dispositive analysis, on the other hand, is suitable for (qualitative) digital projects that not only attempt to link heterogeneous elements in a meaningful way, but also want to raise awareness of how these types of connection emerged historically and which ideologies, which worldviews are associated with them. Practical fields of application for the dispositive concept are, for example, digital monographs or digital exhibitions, opening up a methodological dialogue with the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model—an informatic ontology common in digital curation, which was also used for the Europeana.28

In the chronology of Foucault's work, we are now at the end of the 1970s. But what about the "late Foucault," i.e., the concepts he developed and applied in the last years of his life until 1984? Can notions such as self-care and parrhesia also be translated into digital projects? Self-care refers to techniques of governing oneself, while parrhesia means speaking the truth in order to convert another person.29 Foucault reconstructed both approaches from ancient philosophy, but it is not difficult to recognize them (in a corrupted form) in current digital communication. There are countless applications available for the smartphone that are supposed to help users become more productive, relaxed, slim, sensual, etc. On so-called social networks, speech is not only (too) open and frank, but mostly also inspired by the will to guide others onto the right path in life.

Of course, these are not scientific applications, at least not according to basic research. Here, too, Foucault's concepts seem to be compatible with the digital economy, even if the developers of the tools and platforms in question would hardly make this reference. However, I do not want to get into the discussion about Foucault's relationship to neoliberalism,30 but rather attend to the notion of experience expressed in self-care and parrhesia.

In his 2015 book on sociality and alterity, Bernhard Waldenfels addresses parrhesia, among other things, pointing out that the concept is located at the intersection of Foucault's axes of experience: knowledge, power, and subject. He contrasts truth-telling with truth-hearing and thus relates the approach to his responsive phenomenology: "Answering consists in the fact that I myself, in everything that I say and do, begin elsewhere, following a pathos or an appeal as that to which I answer."31 Foucault's parrhesia also needs a counterpart, a dialogue with another person, but the focus is on active speech, not on the reactive answer. However, the interplay of pathos and response, as Waldenfels calls it, can be found in another of Foucault's concepts, namely in the dispositif as a formation "which at a historically given moment has the major function of responding to an urgent demand."32

In terms of sociology, Foucault refers here to the macro level, to processes of society as a whole, but he also applies the dispositive to the meso-level, that is, to organizations or institutions such as the prison, and additionally speaks of a "micro-physics of power"33 directed at the body. Can we use his approach for the phenomenological analysis of corporeal everyday experience that Waldenfels discusses? In the second volume of his History of Sexuality, which introduces the concept of self-care, Foucault understands experience as "the correlation between fields of knowledge, types of normativity, and forms of subjectivity in a particular culture,"34 but maintains distance from classical phenomenology, to which he always had an ambivalent relationship.35 Gilles Deleuze likewise distances Foucault's method from the phenomenological search for a raw, primordial experience, instead interpreting the techniques of self-care with the motif of the fold, which is also found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, that is, as the capacity to employ the practices of governing others to the government of the self.36

Is this a kind of "post-phenomenology," i.e., a philosophical analysis of individual experiences that is aware of the problems of traditional phenomenology and develops the approach accordingly? What does not satisfy Foucault and Deleuze, nor explicit post-phenomenologists such as Don Ihde, is the subjectivism or anthropocentrism of Husserlian philosophy, that is, basically the notion that the human being is the beginning and end point of experiential analysis.37 Waldenfels, who has developed a phenomenology of intersubjective corporeality following Merleau-Ponty, also addresses the everyday interplay of humans and things, but concedes to the latter only a "cooperation" and emphasizes, contrary to Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, that humans engage with nonhumans and not the other way around.38

The philosophical movement of "new materialism" goes beyond this view and tries to explore how the modes of experience of nonhuman entities can be understood. In his book Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost sets himself apart from Waldenfels and attends not to the experience of others in the sense of intersubjectivity, but to the question of what experiences nonhumans themselves have.39 This is, philosophically speaking, difficult to comprehend, since the classical concept of experience implies on the one hand a process of cognition and on the other a responsibility for one's own actions. Is a chair, a tree, a dog, or a telephone capable of experience in this sense? In any case, more and more technical everyday things are proving their agency, that is, they not only make us act (e.g., ringing, beeping, and vibrating phones), but also learn and behave independently to a certain degree (e.g., robotic cleaners that map and vacuum rooms).

For most new materialists, Foucault is a representative of the social constructivism from which they want to distance themselves.40 Yet his late work, which deals with the art of governing, contains conceptual tools to analyze the everyday interaction of people and things without having to undermine the notion of experience. While Foucault cannot be used to understand the experiences of mice or tablets, his later works can certainly be applied to analyze the regimes that govern human experience, that is, people's relationships to themselves and to others, be they humans or nonhumans. However, Foucauldian analysis always entails the critical question of how these regimes, dispositives, infrastructures—whatever one wants to call them—could be organized differently, how the underlying demands could be answered in other ways.

Even if one does not want to follow Bogost in his speculative zeal, his book offers good approaches for changing positions in the networks of everyday experiences. One of them he calls "carpentry," by which he means the making of things as a philosophical practice.41 He speaks from his own experience as a developer of video games and coincides with the abovementioned maker culture in the digital humanities. In my own research, I am currently establishing a dialogue between post-phenomenology and interaction design to build a platform for describing and visualizing media experiences from multiple perspectives. I hope that the future of the digital humanities lies in such projects that open up emancipatory alternatives to the established, commercial use of the Internet. The role model would then not be Elon Musk, but rather Don Quixote.

Acknowledgements

I thank Maurice Erb, Philipp Sarasin, Sergej Seitz, and Mathias Schönher for their helpful comments on the drafts, as well as Maria Slater for proofreading this article.

Notes

  1. See Bernhard J. Dotzler and Henning Schmidgen, Foucault, digital (Lüneburg: meson press, 2022), 12 and 17, https://doi.org/10.14619/1983. Unfortunately, the authors only mention the titles without considering the associated research results that will be discussed in the following. [^]
  2. Philipp Sarasin, "Diskursanalyse," in Geschichte: Ein Grundkurs, ed. Hans-Jürgen Goertz, 3rd ed. (Reinbek near Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2007), 214 [my trans.]. [^]
  3. Philipp Sarasin, "Sozialgeschichte vs. Foucault im Google Books Ngram Viewer: Ein alter Streitfall in einem neuen Tool," in Wozu noch Sozialgeschichte? Eine Disziplin im Umbruch, ed. Pascal Maeder, Barbara Lüthi, and Thomas Mergel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 174 [my trans.]. [^]
  4. Maurice Erb, Simon Ganahl, and Patrick Kilian, "Distant Reading and Discourse Analysis," Le foucaldien 2, no. 1 (2016): 2, https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.16. [^]
  5. See Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London/New York: Verso, 2013). [^]
  6. Peer Trilcke and Frank Fischer, "Fernlesen mit Foucault? Überlegungen zur Praxis des distant reading und zur Operationalisierung von Foucaults Diskursanalyse," Le foucaldien 2, no. 1 (2016): 17 [my trans.], https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.15. [^]
  7. Erb, Ganahl, and Kilian, "Distant Reading and Discourse Analysis," 6 [emphases in original]. [^]
  8. See Heidi Karlsen, "Foucault's Archeological Discourse Analysis with Digital Methodology: Discourse on Women Prior to the First Wave Women's Movement," Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38, no. 1 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac022. [^]
  9. Dotzler and Schmidgen, Foucault, digital, 16 [my trans.]. [^]
  10. See Dotzler and Schmidgen, Foucault, digital, 24–30, based on Onur Erdur, Die epistemologischen Jahre: Philosophie und Biologie in Frankreich, 1960–1980 (Zurich: Chronos, 2018). [^]
  11. See Dotzler and Schmidgen, Foucault, digital, 49–50 and 58–59. [^]
  12. Heidi Karlsen tries to solve the problem by distinguishing between statements (énoncés) and enunciations (énonciations), searching for the latter algorithmically, and then inferring the former by interpreting the results. See Karlsen, "Foucault's Archeological Discourse Analysis with Digital Methodology," 198. [^]
  13. See Dotzler and Schmidgen, Foucault, digital, 60–64. [^]
  14. See Dotzler and Schmidgen, Foucault, digital, 44. [^]
  15. Dotzler and Schmidgen, Foucault, digital, 68 [my trans.]. [^]
  16. Maurice Erb, "Alles oder gar nichts lesen? Foucault, Moretti und die Verheißungen des Algorithmus," Le foucaldien 2, no. 1 (2016): 5 [my trans.], https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.14. [^]
  17. Dotzler and Schmidgen, Foucault, digital, 68 [my trans.]. [^]
  18. See Jeffrey Bussolini, "What is a Dispositive?," Foucault Studies 10 (2010), https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i10.3120. [^]
  19. See Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 197–229. [^]
  20. See Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir: Histoire de la sexualité 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 99–173. [^]
  21. See Michel Foucault, "Le jeu de Michel Foucault" [1977], in Dits et écrits: 1954–1988. III: 1976–1979, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 299. [^]
  22. See Erb, "Alles oder gar nichts lesen?," 8. [^]
  23. See Max Weber, "Die 'Objektivität' sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis" [1904], in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988), 190. [^]
  24. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 [French 2004]), esp. 87–114. [^]
  25. See Simon Ganahl, Campus Medius: Digital Mapping in Cultural and Media Studies (Bielefeld: transcript, 2022), https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839456019. [^]
  26. I follow here as in general Anne Burdick et al., Digital_Humanities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012). [^]
  27. On the concept of "heterotopia," see Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces" [French 1984], trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), https://doi.org/10.2307/464648. On the maker culture in the digital humanities, see Jentery Sayers, ed., Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452963778. [^]
  28. See https://cidoc-crm.org/ and https://pro.europeana.eu/page/edm-documentation. [^]
  29. See Michel Foucault's books The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, published originally in French in 1984, as well as his lectures at the Collège de France from 1980 to 1984, all of which are edited and published. [^]
  30. On this matter, see Stephen W. Sawyer and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, eds., Foucault, Neoliberalism and Beyond (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). [^]
  31. Bernhard Waldenfels, Sozialität und Alterität: Modi sozialer Erfahrung (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 421 [my trans., emphases in original]. [^]
  32. Foucault, "Le jeu de Michel Foucault," 299 [my trans.]. I would like to thank Andreas Gelhard for pointing out this connection between Foucault's and Waldenfels' thought. [^]
  33. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [French 1975]), 26. [^]
  34. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [French 1984]), 4. [^]
  35. See Gerhard Unterthurner, Foucaults Archäologie und Kritik der Erfahrung: Wahnsinn – Literatur – Phänomenologie (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2007). [^]
  36. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 [French 1986]), 94–123. [^]
  37. See Don Ihde, Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). [^]
  38. Waldenfels, Sozialität und Alterität, 248 [my trans.]. [^]
  39. See Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), esp. 34, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816678976.001.0001. [^]
  40. On this and the following, see Thomas Lemke, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms (New York: NYU Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479808816.001.0001. [^]
  41. See Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 85–111. [^]

References

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Bussolini, Jeffrey. "What Is a Dispositive?" Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 85–107. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i10.3120

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Erb, Maurice. "Alles oder gar nichts lesen? Foucault, Moretti und die Verheißungen des Algorithmus." Le foucaldien 2, no. 1 (2016): 1–9. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.14

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