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    Category: Biopolitics

    • RFID Tags and Commodification

      by Gordon Hull In a recent post, and by way of an important paper by Katherine Hayles, I suggested that “insofar as RFID chips negotiate the boundary between informatics and objects, and transitions between those, they should be studied as sites for the primitive accumulation of capital.  That is, they are places where objects can…

    • RFID Tags, Informatized Subjects and Biopolitics

      By Gordon Hull Several months ago, I argued here that big data is going to make a big mess of privacy – primarily because of a distinction between “data,” understood as the effluvia of daily life, generated by such activities as moving around town or making phone calls, and “information,” which implies some sort of…

    • Privacy, Chastisement and Biopower

      I’m teaching a course on privacy and surveillance this fall, and one of the things I’ve been doing is reading up on aspects of privacy theory that I didn’t know much about, such as the feminist critique of privacy.  The basic feminist argument is that “family privacy” has been historically used as a cover to…

    • Working for The Man: Reflections on the Hobby Lobby Opinion

      Suspecting that a disappointing Court decision is coming doesn’t make it any better when it arrives, as did the Hobby Lobby opinion this morning, in which a 5-4 majority (led by Justice Alito) said that it violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1992 to require a “closely held corporation” (“family-owned,” but expect lots of…

    • Using Medicaid to Produce Homo Economicus

      I am increasingly convinced that any Foucauldian effort to understand neoliberalism needs to focus on it as a strategy of subjectification (more specifically, it’s the strategy of subjectification specific to contemporary biopower, and it says that the truth of the human being is as homo economicus).  One reason I think this is that one finds…

    • The Biopolitical Death Penalty at SCOTUS

      An important and somewhat neglected topic is what happens when biopolitics intersects with juridical power in courts of law.  Today, we got a good example of one way it can happen.  Several years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not execute the “intellectually disabled.”  They also let the states decide what that meant. …

    • Copy this Sheep!

      A few days ago, the Federal Court of Appeals issued a decision denying patentability to Dolly the Sheep.  Dolly, as one will recall, was the first successful mammalian clone from an adult somatic cell.  Essentially, researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh took an unfertilized donor egg, replaced the nucleus with one taken from a…

    • Smoking and Two Strands of Biopolitics

      Biopolitics – even when understood in its narrow sense of life itself being a political issue – comes in at least two different strands.  The first, which historically precedes the second, was concerned with what Foucault called a “politics of public health.”  In so doing, it takes on standard biopolitical issues of population optimization, public…

    • Gary Becker (1930-2014)

      Gary Becker, the Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago, has died. Becker is perhaps best known for "human capital" theory, which talks about how one might, for example, come to think of education as an investment in one's future earnings.  As the absolute normalcy of a statement like this would suggest, I think…

    • Botched or Normal? Pathologies of Violence in the Killing State

      Tuesday’s execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma has many people wondering just how far the state is willing to go to kill its own citizens.  I think @gideonstrumpet said it best: It’s tempting to understand the torture of Clayton Lockett as a “botched” execution, an unfortunate exception to the rule.  But it's important to remember…