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    Category: Foucault

    • Republican Thanatopolitics

      Foucault reminds us that biopolitics is describes a kind of power structure according to which some will be compelled to live (or have their lives as members of a favored population optimized), while others will be allowed to die.  As he puts it, “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by…

    • 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,…

    • 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…

    • 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…

    • Regimes of Accumulation

      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…

    • The Internet of Nature

      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…

    • New paper: Parrhesia under Neoliberalism

      (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…

    • Reading List: Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

      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,…