Category: Foucault
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By Gordon Hull Privacy plaintiffs have a hard time getting their cases heard in court for a variety of reasons. One of them is that courts lack a coherent and workable understanding of what privacy harms actually are, and how one might articulate them judicially. This problem bleeds into one of standing, which is what…
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Here's the current draft of a new paper – "Translating Privacy for Data Subjects." And here's the abstract: This essay offers a theoretical account of one reason that current privacy regulation fails. I argue that existing privacy laws inherit a focus on judicial subjects, using language about torts and abstract rights. Current threats to privacy,…
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By Gordon Hull I’ve been developing (first, second, third, fourth) some reflections on what Foucault means by a reference to “Chardino-Marxism,” a disturbing trend that he credits Althusser with “courageously fighting.” The real opposition point seems to be Roger Garaudy, a PCF intellectual who is a leader in the effort to establish a post-Stalinist humanist…
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By Gordon Hull The last couple of times (here then here), I’ve started trying to work through a disparaging reference in the mid-1960s Foucault to “Chardino-Marxism.” Foucault is associating it with Marxist humanism, and comparing it unfavorably to the Althusserian alternative. As I noted, the name Foucault uses is Teilhard de Chardin, but the consistent…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I noted that mid-late 1960s Foucault aligned himself in favor of Althusser’s work on Marx, and against what he called “Chardino-Marxism,” which turns out to be a shorthand for humanist Marxism, in particular any efforts to synthesize Marx and Teilhard de Chardin, as well as (or rather, as exemplified by)…
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By Gordon hull In a 1966 interview with Madeline Chapsal, Foucault proposes that “our task currently is to definitively liberate ourselves from humanism” and offers the following example: “Our task is to free ourselves definitively from humanism, and it is in this sense that our work is political work, insofar as all the regimes of…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I followed up on a reference in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code to Foucault’s short text “Message ou bruit” (1966). Here I want to trace out some of the political implications of that text, or at least to suggest a path from it to some of his later work in the…
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By Gordon Hull Last time, I offered a quick synopsis of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s excellent new book Code. Here, I’d like to track one specific Foucault reference in it. Geoghegan takes Lévi-Strauss’s Savage Mind as a central text in the ambivalence French theorists came to feel about American communication theories, and he notes that the…
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By Gordon Hull I made myself wait until I was settled into the summer to read Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. It was absolutely worth the wait. Code offers a look into the role of cybernetic theory in the development of postwar French theory, especially structuralism and what Geoghegan calls…
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By Gordon Hull Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT burst into public consciousness sometime in the second half of last year, and Chat-GPT’s impressive results have led to a wave of concern about the future viability of any profession that depends on writing, or on teaching writing in education. A lot of this is hype,…
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