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    Category: Biopolitics

    • Squaring the Circle on Big Data, Class, Value and Primitive Accumulation

      A recent paper by Hamid Ekbia presents an interesting Marxian theory of the relation between exploitation and computer networks.   The paper is intended as an intervention in to discussions of the accumulation of value in what is now called cognitive capitalism (I’ve attempted to synthesize some of that literature here).  The most interesting part of…

    • Notes on Big Data, Marx, Time, and the Production of Value

      There is a running debate in critical theory circles about the applicability of Marxian analysis to big data specifically, and to an economy dominated by immaterial goods, more generally (I have blogged about this periodically, circling primarily around the concept of primitive accumulation: see here and here).  As part of working through that literature, here…

    • Self-Tracking, Big Data, and the questions of Subjectification and Primitive Accumulation

      One question surrounding big data – in addition to well-established worries about privacy and discrimination – that is starting to get attention is how it functions as a mode of capitalist accumulation.  There is an emerging literature on capitalist value creation and big data, but a lot of that is about the creation of surplus…

    • Agency Biopower: The Juridical Force Awakens

      One of the most prominent features of biopolitics is the emergence of administrative law.  Created by statutory authority, numerous governmental agencies engage in rulemaking at a very granular level to interpret and apply broad statutory provisions.  For example, if a statute says that “banks” are to be regulated in the context of lending, an administrative…

    • Shameless Self-Promotion Dept: Papers on Foucault, and on Spinoza

      I've just uploaded a (relatively minor) revision of my SPEP paper from this fall in Salt Lake City to SSRN.  The paper is ""Confessing Preferences: What Foucault’s Government of the Living can tell us about Neoliberalism and Big Data," and the abstract is: Foucault’s 1979-80 Collège de France lectures, On the Government of the Living,…

    • More on the Troubling Neoliberal Privatization of Health Care

      Developments this week highlight the problems with the neoliberal decision to privatize medicine in the U.S.  Certainly the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which entrenches responsibility for access to healthcare to private insurance companies and then attempts to contrive a market for patients to shop between insurance plans as some sort of proxy for shopping for…

    • Trump and Neoliberalism

      What does the Trump election mean for neoliberalism as a doctrine?  Adam Kotsko over at An und für sich has some interesting thoughts on the matter; what follows is intended as a constructive engagement.  As I posted last week, I think Trump’s victory is inseparable from what Foucault calls state racism, and the appointment of…

    • The 2016 Election and Racism, Soft and Structural

      Foucault famously proposed that biopolitics – the power to foster life, or allow it to die – tended to produce its own outside in the form of state racism: not only might life be allowed to die, but there might be those who must die, literally or metaphorically, so an inside “we” could live. That…

    • Quiet Neoliberalism: K-12 Edition

      One of the important parts in understanding neoliberalism as a particular dispositive of power (or perhaps a mode of biopower – that sort of distinction doesn’t matter here) lies in understanding the various techniques it deploys.  After all, there is no “neoliberalism” or “neoliberal power” existing in the abstract; as Foucault repeatedly demonstrates, power can…

    • Issue Opinion Polls are Bad Biopolitics

      I am not the first to say this (I believe Habermas critiqued opinion polls in Theory of Communicative Action, though I bet he didn’t use the Foucauldian language I’m about to), but I live in what is now considered a “purple” state, which means my vote might actually matter, and so I am inundated with…