With the publication of this special issue, Le foucaldien continues its experiment of updating the thought of Michel Foucault. Can historical discourse analyses be carried out with the aid of computers? In order to examine this question, we compare Franco Moretti's Distant Reading with Foucault's archaeological method. Despite their common origins in the French Annales School, the two approaches differ fundamentally. While Moretti interprets literary data by means of social history, Foucault seeks the immanent meaning of discourses. Our preliminary conclusion: digital archaeology appears to founder on the operationalization of the complex concept of the statement (énoncé).
Campus Medius explores and expands the possibilities of digital cartography in cultural and media studies. Simon Ganahl documents the development of the project from a historical case study to a mapping platform. Based on the question of what a media experience is, the concepts of the apparatus (dispositif) and the actor-network are translated into a data model. A time-space of twenty-four hours in Vienna in May 1933, marked by a so-called "Turks Deliverance Celebration" (Türkenbefreiungsfeier), serves as an empirical laboratory. This Austrofascist rally is mapped from multiple perspectives and woven into media-historical networks, spanning from the seventeenth century up to the present day.
The collection attempts both to historicize Foucault and to historicize Foucault. That is, the focus not only lies on the historical contexts of Foucault's thought (e.g., cold war, cybernetics, Maoism, structuralism), but also on the question if we should start to forget Foucault (as Baudrillard already suggested in a polemic from 1977). Do Foucault's concepts, thirty years after his death, still enable us to understand our contemporary world? Or do we have to adjust, to update the Foucauldian tool-box?
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