materia Reading Session: Micropower and the Non-human

We are very pleased to invite you to materia's first event of the academic year: a very multidisciplinary Reading Session!

This reading session will be an introduction to our yearly theme: Micropower and the Non-human. Micropower, or the microphysics of power, is a category established by Foucault early on in his thinking, before his turn towards biopolitics. In Discipline and Punish (1975), Foucault posits that the microphysics of power’s “field of validity is situated in a sense between [state apparatuses] and the bodies themselves with their materiality and their forces.” (26).If, on the one hand, we understand bodies in an expanded sense, without privileging the human,and, on the other, we probe in de facto contemporary state apparatuses from the bottom up(algorithmic governance, corporate takeover of attention span, etc.), we find multiple opportunities to intervene. We would like to rekindle the spirit of the original formulation, revise Foucault, and set him into conversation with different archives, in keeping with the group’s orientation, Latin Americanist and otherwise. 

We will read a selection that includes excerpts from Foucault Discipline and Punish, Jane Bennett's "The Force of Things",  an excerpt from Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star and a selection from Nerea Barjola Ramos' The Sexist Microphysics of Power. You can access all texts and some related materials here.

We kindly ask you to focus on Foucault's excerpt and read one of the additional texts as you like (though of course you're welcome to read all!) For the Barjola Ramos reading, we recommend pages 1-6 of the PDF. We will present briefly the texts mentioned here.

We look forward to seeing you there!

RSVP for the materia Reading Session