Category: Foucault
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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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One of the standard talking points about data gets summed up in the “data imperative:” that the drive to accumulate data seems insatiable, and that firms will pursue accumulating it well beyond and definable economic end. There’s a lot of literature on why this might be; I’ve tended to approach the question with the resources…
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I'm very pleased to be able to say that my new book, The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property, now has a publisher's webpage on Cambridge UP! It's currently in production, and should be coming out this winter. Here's the blurb from the site: "As a central part of the regulation of contemporary economies, intellectual property (IP)…
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By Gordon Hull In a new paper in Big Data and Society, Jathan Sadowski argues for a shift in how we conceive data. Typically, it’s viewed as a commodity. Better, Sadowski argues, to view it as capital. Following Marx (who offers a basic formula for capital) and Bourdieu (who extends it to cultural and social…
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By Gordon Hull As is well-known, Foucault pretty-much detested orthodox Marxism and the PCF. At the same time, his relation to Marx’s own thought, and that of Marx’s better commentators, is more complex. One way to approach this topic is via primitive accumulation (recall here). Another is by way of intermediaries. Here I’d like to…
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By Gordon Hull In what seems like a distant, more innocent time in surveillance (viz. 2003), Andy Clark was able to use as an example in his Natural Born Cyborgs an implanted tracking chip for pets. Does your cat tend to wander off? Now you can know where Whiskers is at all times! (no doubt…
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By Gordon Hull In Sleights of Reason, Mary Beth Mader makes the point that there is an ontological distinction between the members of a normalized “population” and the individuals they represent. Mader is talking about statistics and bell curves; as she summarizes the part of her argument that’s relevant here, “statistical social measurement is ontologically…
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