Category: Biopolitics
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By Gordon Hull Since we’re in the interregnum between “sign up for health insurance” time and “eat yourself into a stupor” time, it’s appropriate to notice something about pastoral power and our healthcare system. First, we’ll go back in time. Foucault proposes that pastoral power under medieval Christianity: “Gave rise to an art of conducting,…
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by Gordon Hull This is shameless self-promotion, but I've just posted "Equitable Biopolitics: What Federal School Desegregation Cases Can Teach us about Foucault, Law and Biopower" to SSRN. This is my SPEP paper from 2014, and I've referenced it in a few blog posts here. So here it (finally!) is. The abstract is: The present…
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By Gordon Hull As Melinda Cooper notes (recall here), one of the reasons Gary Becker – as opposed to other neoliberal theorists – was interesting to Foucault because of his emphasis on microeconomics, particularly the quotidian institutions through which micropower functions, such as the family. At the same time, Becker’s human capital theory has become…
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In her contribution to recent the Vatter/Lemm-edited collection of essays on biopolitics, Melinda Cooper argues that Foucault’s work on neoliberalism needs to be read in the context of his interest in the Iranian revolution. If she’s right, this stands current complaints about Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism on its head. The standard complaint about the work…
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A while ago, Daniel Zamora’s (re)publication of a series of essays designed to say that Foucault ended up embracing neoliberalism caused quite a stir in the blogosphere. As one of those invited to contribute to a forum in An und für sich), I argued that Foucault saw both that neoliberalism realized the need to create…
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By Gordon Hull Foucault made a big deal in the lectures contained in Security, Territory, Population of the linkage between medieval pastoral power and modern governmentality. Although there have been skeptics – most notably Mika Ojakangas, who thinks Foucualt reads the ancient sources nearly backwards: it was the Greeks and Romans who practiced eugenics, and…
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By Gordon Hull The legal doctrine of substantive equality – roughly, that one look at not just the presence of stipulated, formal equality, but that one incorporate outcomes as relevant to whether or not equality has been reached – strikes me as a biopolitical concept, whereas its more formal counterpart is more juridical. Consider the…
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Publishing in general, and for the visual arts in particular, has moved to what’s called a “permission culture,” which basically means that nobody will publish your work unless you get explicit permission from the rights owner. This is often an arduous process, since art often includes many copyrighted images or other materials. A documentary film…
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