The political technology of the ‘Camp’ in historical capitalism

Welsh, John

doi:10.1057/s41296-020-00402-8

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…John Welsh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7136-1001 Notes 1. For a relevant treatment of the difference between 'willingness' and 'wilfulness', see Ahmed, 2014;Welsh, 2021a. 2.…”

Section: Fundingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although coercions perhaps closer to disciplinary power are both present and increasingly likely in the post-COVID-19 context, audit regimes integrate but exceed the ‘disciplinary technology of labour’ (Foucault, 2003: 242), and so must be rearticulated in meta-disciplinary terms that are closer to, but not synonymous with, the governmental power identified by Foucault in his genealogy of power. Similarly, the camps of gulag emerged because of the insufficiency of the disciplinary prison as a technology of labour control (Solzhenitsyn, 2007a, 2007b: 75; Welsh, 2017, 2018), and because of the need to fashion and mould more appropriately governable subjectivities for capital (Welsh, 2018: 38–41; Welsh, 2020c, 2021a; see also Lazzarato, 2014).…”

Section: Governmental Power In Audit Regimes and The Technology Of The Campmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the ‘qualitative leap’ from prison to camp experienced by Eugenia Ginzburg marked a genealogical shift in the modality of power from disciplinary towards a quasi-governmental power (Ginzburg, 1967: 266; see Foucault, 2010). The camp graduated from the static panopticism and somatic dispositions of prison into a dynamic economy of the will that more effectively bound its inhabitants into willing compliance with its rationality (Welsh, 2021a). The result was a somewhat ‘meta-disciplinary’ modulation of control, which was more subtle and efficient in its application (Welsh, 2018), and which was more congenial to the capitalist imperatives both to govern more effectively (Foucault) and accumulate more successfully (Marx).…”

Section: Governmental Power In Audit Regimes and The Technology Of The Campmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is in this spirit that I want to bring our academic audit regime into juxtaposition with the quasi-governmental or meta-disciplinary technology of the 'camp' (see Welsh, 2018Welsh, , 2021a. In their work on academic audit, Shore and Wright want us to analyse the effects of audit regimes 'on the conduct of human action' and how they 'do not so much steal our subjectivity as actively constitute it' (Shore and Wright, 2015b: 27).…”

Section: Introduction: a Post-covid-19 Conjuncturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is in the analogy of the camp that we can both identify and engage with the kind of ‘power at a distance’ that has become typical of our increasingly virtual audit regimes, power that is not exercised simply by fiat, sovereign command, or by the disciplinary formation of habits, but that combines a certain spatial dispositioning of its objects with transformation of the very subjectivity of the object of that power. It is through the image of the camp that we can understand how positive power elicits complicity and ‘willingness’ on the part of those subjected to it in ways that disciplinary power no longer encompasses (see Welsh, 2021a).…”

Section: Introduction: a Post-covid-19 Conjuncturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-COVID-19 audit regimes

Welsh

2021

Anthropological Theory

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Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies, and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques, what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the ‘camp’ that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that ‘techniques of the self’ are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of tukhta is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.

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“…John Welsh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7136-1001 Notes 1. For a relevant treatment of the difference between 'willingness' and 'wilfulness', see Ahmed, 2014;Welsh, 2021a. 2.…”

Section: Fundingmentioning

confidence: 99%