Category: Biopolitics
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In a new paper, Maximilian Fochler conducted a series of structured interviews with scientists to make an STS point: when we think of capitalism as a system that depends on “accumulation,” there are many different kinds of things that one can accumulate, many of them non-financial. I think Fochler makes an important point, but I…
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Big Data theorists have, for a while, been warily eyeing the growth of the “Internet of Things” (IoT), which is when “smart” technology is integrated into ordinary household devices like refrigerators and toasters. New fridges all have warning lights that remind you to change the water filter; IoT fridges will order the new filter for…
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(From the Dept. of Shameless Self-Promotion) I have just uploaded to ssrn a paper on Foucault's last two College de France lecture courses, On the Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth, looking at main concept Foucault analyzes there: parrhesia (roughly: frank speech). Those of you who were at my SPEP paper…
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Today, the Fourth Circuit – which covers North Carolina – allowed to let stand its earlier ruling legitimating the Department of Education’s definition of “sex discrimination” to include “gender discrimination.” The case was specifically about a Virginia trans* male high school student who was banished to the women’s room. No doubt there will be an…
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The Supreme Court today issued a much-anticipated ruling in Zubik v. Burwell, the latest lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive provision. The ACA requires that insurance plans offer contraceptive coverage at zero cost, and includes a clause that employers who object to providing such coverage can request exemption from it, in which case the…
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In critical work on neoliberalism, there’s probably two or three main schools of thought. One approaches the subject as a matter of political economy. David Harvey, whose analysis is explicitly Marxian, is the most well-known figure in this approach; another prominent author in that camp is Philip Mirowksi. The other major school is broadly Foucauldian,…
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In adding a clause to Hegel, Marx remarked once that the great world historical events occur twice: first as a tragedy, and then as a farce. For a 21st century version, I propose adding that it’s getting harder to tell the difference. I am of course talking about North Carolina’s infamous HB2, which requires trans*…
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In an interesting new piece, Jim Thatcher, David O'Sullivan and Dillonn Mahmoudi propose that big data functions in the context of capital as “accumulation by dispossession,” which is David Harvey’s term for what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” the process by which capital adds to its wealth by taking goods from others and adding them to…
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So we all know that there’s a difference between “sex,” taken as a biological characteristic, and “gender,” as a social one. Maybe the heuristic is overdrawn (put down the updated theory; that’s not where this is going), but it works pretty well as a heuristic. It also has just led to a (maybe not so…
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By Gordon Hull We’ve known for a while, thanks to work by scholars such as Stephen Menn, that Descartes was in many ways a deeply religious and conservative thinker, one who took great care to try to align his work with Church doctrine, and who engaged scholastic thought with a good deal more precision than…
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