Foucault News

Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Kybernetik und Kritik. Eine Theorie digitaler Regierungskunst (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

6 March 2026

Anna-Verena Nosthoff, Kybernetik und Kritik. Eine Theorie digitaler Regierungskunst, Suhrkamp, 2026.

Elon Musk bezeichnet die Plattform X als »kybernetische Superintelligenz«, Mark Zuckerberg denkt Unternehmen als »lernende Organismen«, und der Erfinder der Datenbrille Google Glass sagt: »Die Kybernetik ist überall, wie Luft.« Diese Aussagen kommen nicht von ungefähr. Wer die Digitalisierung verstehen will, muss auf ihre kybernetischen Ursprünge schauen. In ihrem grundlegenden Buch zeichnet Anna-Verena Nosthoff ein umfassendes Panorama der Kybernetisierung der datafizierten Gegenwartsgesellschaft – von den ersten Prämissen der »Wissenschaft von Kommunikation und Kontrolle« über die Emergenz des Cyberspace bis hin zum aktuellen KI-Hype und zu technikautoritären Strömungen. Es zeigt sich: Die Kybernetisierung erfasst auch die Kritik – die sich daher neu erfinden muss, um zu überleben.

Anna-Verena Nosthoff ist Juniorprofessorin für Ethik der Digitalisierung an der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg und Ko-Direktorin des Critical Data Lab (Humboldt-Universität/Universität Oldenburg).

Rainer Mühlhoff, The Ethics of AI. Power, Critique, Responsibility (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 March 2026

Rainer Mühlhoff, The Ethics of AI. Power, Critique, Responsibility, Bristol University Press, 2025

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

In a world where artificial intelligence increasingly influences the fabric of our daily lives, this accessible book offers a critical examination of AI and its deep entanglement with power structures. Rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios, it emphasises how AI impacts our everyday interactions and social norms in ways that fundamentally reshape society. By examining the different forms of exploitation and manipulation in the relationship between humans and AI, the book advocates for collective responsibility, better regulation and systemic change.

This is a resounding manifesto for rethinking AI ethics through a power-aware lens. With detailed analysis of real-world examples and technological insights, it is essential reading for anyone invested in the future of AI policy, scholarly critique and societal integration.

Contents
Introduction: What Does It Mean to ‘Do’ a Power-Aware Ethics of AI? – A Note to Readers

Part I: The Power of AI
Chapter One: What AI Are We Talking About?
Chapter Two: Human-Aided AI
Chapter Three: Digital Counter-Enlightenment and the Power of Design
Chapter Four: Subjectivity and Power in the Ethics of AI

Part II: The Power of Prediction
Chapter Five: AI Systems as Prediction Machines
Chapter Six: Predictive Privacy
Chapter Seven: The Culture of Prediction – Ethics and Epistemology

Part III: The Power of Control
Chapter Eight: AI Cybernetics
Chapter Nine: Opacity in Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics
Chapter Ten: Bias in Cybernetic AI Systems
Chapter Eleven: Collective Responsibility in the Ethics of AI
Conclusion: Manifesto for a Power-Aware Ethics of AI

Author
Rainer Mühlhoff is Professor of Ethics and Critical Theories of Artificial Intelligence at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Institute of Philosophy at the University of Osnabrück.

Jan-Philipp Siebold, Annemarie Witschas, Rainer Mühlhoff, When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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4 March 2026

Jan-Philipp Siebold, Annemarie Witschas, Rainer Mühlhoff, 2026. “ When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act.” Future Humanities 4: e70026.
https://doi.org/10.1002/fhu2.70026.

ABSTRACT
This article develops the concept of ‘AI resignation’ to capture how young people encounter AI not only as a helpful or flawed tool, but as an overpowering and seemingly inevitable force that can foreclose their sense of political and personal power to act in relation to the future. Building on qualitative work with high school students in Germany (ages 15–18), we conceptualize AI resignation as a future-oriented sensibility that emerges at the intersection of pervasive data-driven infrastructures and hegemonic narratives of AI inevitability. Drawing on Foucault’s late work on subjectivation and subjectivity, as well as extensions in media and affect theory, we identify four contradictory pulls that structure adolescents’ everyday engagements with AI—between enthusiasm and dependency, effortless access and eroded learning, self-governance and repeated failure, aspiration and foreclosed futures—and show how these double binds gradually hollow out experiences of self-efficacy. We further argue that AI resignation fulfils a strategic affective function within digital capitalism: by naturalizing dependence on predictive AI infrastructures and normalizing diminished expectations of the power to act, it stabilizes the very sociotechnical structures that produce it. The article concludes by outlining implications for re-politicizing AI and education, emphasizing power-critical curricula and collective spaces of reflection that enable young people to meaningfully participate in shaping sociotechnical futures.

Alex Midlen, Rethinking environmental governance for development: the blue œconomy dispositif (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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4 March 2026

Alex Midlen, Rethinking environmental governance for development: the blue œconomy dispositif, Political Geography, Volume 126, 2026
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103494

Abstract:
The Blue Economy is a recent development paradigm, created in response to a refocusing of sustainable development during preparations for the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 2012 in which the ‘green economy’ was proposed. Coastal and island states called for a ‘blue’ equivalent in recognition of the importance of oceans to their economic futures. In the years since, the ‘blue economy’ has been enthusiastically received by many, but its exact nature remains uncertain and contested. In this paper I examine in more detail the practices, the technologies, and the materialities of the BE ‘dispositif’ to address the question of ‘place’, as it is only in the context of place, I argue, that we can really understand how the Blue Economy is enacted. In doing so, I make the argument that the Blue Economy is a ‘security dispositif’ (referencing Michel Foucault) and that to govern Blue Economy places well we need to pay attention to the emergent space-time relations of the dispositif ‘in place’. Finally, I argue for a rethinking of economy and of blue economy governance, drawing on relational analysis of empirical cases in Kenya to call for a blue economy that is more sensitive to communities and the places they inhabit – a blue œconomy.

Keywords:
Blue economy; Dispositif; Place; Ocean governance; Sustainable economy; Development practice

James I. Porter, Foucault, Kant, and Antiquity (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

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1 March 2026

James I. Porter, Foucault, Kant, and Antiquity. Representations, 1 February 2024; 165 (1): 120–143.
https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2024.165.5.120

Abstract
Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s “Anthropology” (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant’s theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984) and elsewhere. Foucault’s final studies surface isolated, private, and autonomous subjects who are at once premodern, proto-Christian, and uncannily modern. Fashioned by ascetic and aesthetic models of self-care, they testify to “a genealogy of the modern subject.”

Shelza Jalan, The Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Dam and the shifting grounds of resistance (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 February 2026

Shelza Jalan, The Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Dam and the shifting grounds of resistance, Social Sciences & Humanities Open, Volume 12, 2025,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2025.102118

Abstract:
The Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project (LSHEP), India’s largest hydropower initiative in Northeast India, exemplifies the tensions between state-led developmentalism and civil society resistance in ecologically fragile regions. While envisioned as a cornerstone of modernization and regional integration, the project has triggered decades of contestation over ecological risks, cultural disruption, and political exclusion. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Gerukamukh, Lakhimpur, and Dhemaji in 2024, supplemented with secondary sources, this article examines the evolving dynamics between the Indian state, civil society organizations (CSOs), and local communities.

Using Arturo Escobar’s critique of development discourse, Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality, and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and passive revolution, the analysis demonstrates how the state’s strategies have shifted from coercion to persuasion, employing livelihood schemes, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, and infrastructural “gifts” to cultivate manufactured consent. At the same time, CSOs have navigated a trajectory from conditional engagement to open dissent, while communities oscillated between symbolic resistance and gradual accommodation. The findings highlight how persuasive politics and fragmented resistance reconfigure the politics of legitimacy in large dam projects, producing uneven consent while leaving core ecological and social contradictions unresolved. This case contributes to broader debates on development, power, and resistance in South Asia’s borderlands, underscoring both the resilience of democratic protest and the subtle recalibration of statecraft in contested ecologies.

Keywords:
Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project (LSHEP); Civil Society Organizations (CSOs); Anti-dam movement; Hydropower development; Northeast India; Development Politics

Antti Saari, Nelli Piattoeva, and Katja Brøgger. Introduction: Critical times? Conditions, constraints, and cooptions in contemporary educational critique (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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24 February 2026

Antti Saari, Nelli Piattoeva, and Katja Brøgger. (2026). Introduction: Critical times? Conditions, constraints, and cooptions in contemporary educational critique. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–12.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2025.2611004

Extract
In educational research, various conceptions of critique and criticality serve as markers for distinct genres of scholarship and writing, as well as for particular types of journals and monographs (Molla, 2021; Savage et al., 2021). Critique operates as a means of delineating disciplinary boundaries and signaling theoretical allegiances, each shaped by specific historical, political, and cultural contexts. Despite its widespread use as a signifier of certain scholarly orientations, the meaning of critique remains a persistent subject of debate. There is no singular or universally accepted definition of the term, nor a fixed way to practice critique.
[…]

In Christianity, building on classical Greek and Hellenic philosophy, critique also developed avant la lettre in the form of an attitude and an ethico-political virtue—a way of thinking, speaking, and acting that reflects one’s relationship to knowledge, power, society, and others. It became a mode of governing and knowing oneself, as well as a means of being subjected to detailed governance (Foucault, 2024). Foucault traces the genealogy of this critical attitude to medieval Christian monasticism, where individuals were governed, and governed themselves, through intricate forms of spiritual oversight. This variety of pastoral power involved practices of examining the contents of one’s soul and exposing them to scrutiny through confession. Here, even the most innocuous inner movements were interpreted as potential signs of moral or spiritual failure (Foucault, 2021, 2024). This deep suspicion toward appearances laid the groundwork for modern forms of critical inquiry and what later became the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur, 2008), an interpretive approach that assumes the presence of underlying power structures, ideologies, or hidden meanings beneath surface texts or social practices. In this sense, philological and spiritual critique converged in cultivating a disposition of vigilance, toward oneself, others, and the world, that continues to inform contemporary critical traditions.

Svetlana Racanović, Art in a Glass Box: Phantasies, Disasters and Shelters in the (Post-)Human Zoo (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

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21 February 2026

Svetlana Racanović, (2024). Art in a Glass Box: Phantasies, Disasters and Shelters in the (Post-)Human Zoo. Život umjetnosti, 115 (2), 144-163.
https://doi.org/10.31664/zu.2024.115.07

Open access

Abstract
Whether experiencing the oppressive “Rules for the Human Zoo” as inspected by Sloterdijk or “long shadows” of Foucauldian disciplinary-biopolitical society or/and being situated within the Deleuzian society of control, we are witnessing how “shelter” (the word ecology comes from the Greek word oikos meaning nest, house, shelter) has become the “box,” the “glass-shouse,” the entrapment where disciplining and controlling forces that constrain us, dis-able us, disjoin us also hypnotize us with the phantasy of life, euthanized life that is shimmering like a spectacle “larger than life”. Here selected artworks (Haake’s, Quinn’s, Hirst’s, Kulik’s, Wertheim, Sea & Sun (Marina) performance), arranged in/with glass boxes or as enclosures, function like a magnifying glass that might, under a certain theoretical or interpretative angle, cleanse or sharpen the view on those “crime scenes” of the Anthropocene. Mancipatory trajectory within the theory of Foucault, Deleuze, Sloterdijk, Guattari and Haraway, traced here in specific artworks, is not about preventing or controlling natural disasters, climate changes or guiding rules of the Anthropogenic Garden. It is about staying with those troubles, living attentively and caringly. Art shows the capability of imagining or rehearsing a new or renewed world in which humans become caring towards and sheltered within themselves and the indiscriminate, knotty environments they inhabit.

KEYWORDS
Art in glass tanks, artificial garden, anthropogenic zoo, biopolitics, phantasmagoria, Michel Foucault (care for the self).

William Guschwan, The Iliad as Leadership Curriculum: A Mythopoeic Framework Through LARP (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 February 2026

William Guschwan (2026). The Iliad as Leadership Curriculum: A Mythopoeic Framework Through LARP. In: Thomas, A., Meyer, M., Zank, M. (eds) Serious Games. JCSG: Joint International Conference on Serious Games 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 16243. Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-10518-9_30

Abstract
This paper proposes a live action role-playing game (LARP) curriculum that unites philosophical reflections on the gnomic self, as articulated through Michel Foucault’s hermeneutics of the self, with a mythic-embodied pedagogy modeled on Achilles’ journey through the stages of ego-death. By framing Achilles’ transformation in The Iliad as a metaphor for leadership maturity, the work situates ancient myth within a modern framework of conscious business. True leadership, it is argued, is not a function of control but the radical alignment of truth and will—a process enacted through self-observation, symbolic death, and ritual embodiment. Using the LARP structure and emotional-introspective exercises, I develop a praxis for cultivating responsibility, emotional mastery, and agapic leadership.

Stephanie Assmann, Food Education and Rural Resilience in Japan Nourishing National Identity (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

15 February 2026

Stephanie Assmann, Food Education and Rural Resilience in Japan Nourishing National Identity, Routledge, 2025

Food education initiatives exist worldwide, but Japan remains unique with its food education law known as shokuiku. The country’s impressive health metrics — high life expectancies, low obesity, and affordable health care — often lead observers to praise this approach. This book presents a more nuanced analysis. First, it challenges the assumption that food education is wholly a “good thing” by exposing underlying power mechanisms. Through food diagrams, food fairs, and school lunch programs, government ministries promote both nationalism and traditional gender roles. Second, it explores how food education operates in Japan’s rural regions, where educators champion resilience and food self-sufficiency to alleviate depopulation and economic decline. This emphasis on local food persisted even in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Using Foucault’s concept of governmentality, historical contextualization, and extensive fieldwork in rural Japan, this study reveals the complex political agenda driving food education in a non-Western society.

Author
Stephanie Assmann’s research interests are foodways and culinary politics, life in rural Japan, employment and diversity. She is co-editor of Japanese Foodways, Past and Present (with Eric C. Rath, 2010, University of Illinois Press) and editor of Sustainability in Contemporary Rural Japan: Challenges and Opportunities (2016, Routledge).