New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    Category: Biopolitics

    • Occupy, Parrhesia, and (Virtual) Camps

      In the current issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric, Kelly Happe has an interesting paper interpreting Occupy Wall Street (or at least the Zuccotti Park component) as an example of cynical parrhesia.  In a time when all expression is always already co-opted by neoliberal capital as a source of surplus value (this point has been canvassed…

    • School Desegregation, Biopower and the Cold War

      One of my summer projects is to work up my SPEP paper from last year, which used the school desegregation decisions (like Brown v. Board) as a way to think about the relations between juridical power and biopower in the courts.  The role of the courts in the transition from hegemonic juridical power to hegemonic…

    • Facebook and the Ideology of Big Data Neutrality

      It must be summer: Facebook has released a controversial study of its users.  Last year, it was the demonstration that the emotional contagion effect did not require direct contact, and could in fact spread across social networks without direct, face-to-face contact (the controversy wasn’t in the result, it was in the fact that FB did…

    • Healthcare, Statutory Interpretation, and Court Legitimacy

      By Gordon Hull The Affordable Care Act was in the Supreme Court again today, this time for oral argument in King v. Burwell.  For those who don’t follow the ACA’s legal woes, the challenge in Burwell is this: under the ACA, states are supposed to establish exchanges where citizens can purchase healthcare on the individual…

    • 23andMe has a new business model…

      By Gordon Hull A couple of weeks ago, in a post on Theranos, which has been developing a new – and very fast and cheap – technique for blood-testing, I mentioned the woes of 23andMe.com, a site which originally offered direct to consumer genetic testing, before the FDA shut it down for any medical claims…

    • Responses to Zamora’s “Can We Criticize Foucault?”

      Daniel Zamora’s interview in Jacobin (following the publication of a book he edited), in which he claims that Foucault ended up de facto endorsing neoliberalism, has generated a lot of renewed discussion about Foucault’s late work.  Over at An und für sich, Mark William Westmoreland has organized a series of posts responding to Zamora.  I’m…

    • Theranos and the Biopolitics of Blood-Testing

      By Gordon Hull The current New Yorker includes a profile of Theranos, a Silicon Valley start-up that is developing new techniques of blood-testing, and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes.  In the old way, you’d go to the doctor, who’d order some tests.  You’d then get a blood draw of a couple of vials of blood, and…

    • Taylor Swift’s Platonism

      By Gordon Hull Over on Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James has a post up about Taylor Swift’s promotion of her new album.  James focuses on two moments in that promotion: on the one hand, Swift has removed her music from the free streaming part of Spotify, on the grounds that it insufficiently compensates her (and…

    • The Surveillance State at the Intersection of Bio, Juridical and Sovereign Power

      By Gordon Hull As I’ve suggested here before, one of the undertheorized aspects of biopower is the relation between biopower and the juridical power it supposedly supplants.  Now, I think it’s a mistake to think that biopower simply replaces juridical power, at least not on Foucault’s considered view (for the sorts of reasons given in…

    • Cloud Computing and the Extension of the Price Mechanism

      by Gordon Hull Cloud computing – where users keep their data (and often their applications) online – poses significant theoretical and regulatory problems.  Many of these concern jurisdiction: it’s very hard to even know at a given moment where data is kept, and it’s often unclear (in the case of privacy, for example), which jurisdiction’s…