Category: Biopolitics
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By Gordon Hull I’m going to be teaching Harold Demsetz’s “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” (1967) tomorrow, and noticed a couple of things that I hadn’t before. I suspect they’re related, and say something about the moment the article appeared. At least, that’s what I want to propose here. To set it up: Demsetz…
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By Gordon Hull A recent piece in the Guardian points to the limitations of models in understanding the spread of COVID-19: principally, those models are often not based on reliable data specific to the disease, so they can be wildly off. As I argued earlier, the bottom line is that we really have no idea…
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By Gordon Hull In a follow-up to a controversial piece in which he argued (in late February) that the social distancing and quarantining in Italy presented the temptation to universalize the state of exception, Agamben says this: “Fear is a bad counsellor, but it makes us see many things we pretended not to see. The…
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By Gordon Hull Consider the following, too brief summary: following Foucault, one can say that biopolitics is about optimizing populations, or something to that effect. This involves a lot of work on the part of the administrative state, which sets itself up to provide services, everything from sewers and other infrastructure to social safety nets. …
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I'm very pleased to announce that my new book, The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property, is now out in print/electronically on Cambridge UP. Here's a blurb: "Intellectual property is power, but what kind of power is it, and what does it do? Building on the work of Michel Foucault, this study examines different ways of understanding…
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There is an interesting copyright case before the Supreme Court this term, Georgia v. Public Resource.org. It is settled law that official edicts of the government – statutory texts, judicial opinions, agency rules – are not copyrightable. More about that in a moment. In this case, Georgia entered into a contract with Lexis to produce…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, following a new paper by Andrea Rossi, I suggested that Hobbes’s reformulation of the Stoic “security” in terms that we would recognize as biopolitical – oriented toward human flourishing, and not just survival – enables him to reformulate the Ciceronian salus populi suprema lex (“the welfare of the people is…
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By Gordon Hull Foucault aligns Hobbes with juridical power, not biopower. Juridical power is repressive and takes life away; it is epitomized by monarchy. Biopower, in contrast, is power that “exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (HS 1, 137). …
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By Gordon Hull A couple of weeks ago, I noted my newly discovered appreciation for Philip Agre’s “Surveillance and Capture” and outlined why I think his development of capture (and retreat from surveillance) is particularly applicable to the privacy concerns surrounding big data. Here, I’d like to suggest that Agre’s distinction is also helpful in…
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By Gordon Hull A current paper by Mireille Hildebrandt sent me to a paper from 1994 that I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t read before: Philip Agre’s “Surveillance and Capture.” Agre’s paper has been cited over 300 times, but it’s missing in a lot of the privacy literature I know. After reading it, I’ve decided…
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