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    Category: Neoliberalism

    • Bless Me Fitbit, for I have sinned…

      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,…

    • Gary Becker’s Deus ex Machina on Health Behaviors

      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…

    • Cooper on Foucault on Iran and Neoliberalism

      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…

    • Occupy, Parrhesia, and (Virtual) Camps

      In the current issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric, Kelly Happe has an interesting paper interpreting Occupy Wall Street (or at least the Zuccotti Park component) as an example of cynical parrhesia.  In a time when all expression is always already co-opted by neoliberal capital as a source of surplus value (this point has been canvassed…

    • Facebook and the Ideology of Big Data Neutrality

      It must be summer: Facebook has released a controversial study of its users.  Last year, it was the demonstration that the emotional contagion effect did not require direct contact, and could in fact spread across social networks without direct, face-to-face contact (the controversy wasn’t in the result, it was in the fact that FB did…

    • Neoliberal Handwashing

      By Gordon Hull We’ve all heard that regulations are bad, because they interfere with businesses doing what they want (rules about dumping toxic chemicals get in the way of dumping toxic chemicals.  Laws against murder hamper the business model of assassins.  And so on.).  New North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis made the media rounds this…

    • Responses to Zamora’s “Can We Criticize Foucault?”

      Daniel Zamora’s interview in Jacobin (following the publication of a book he edited), in which he claims that Foucault ended up de facto endorsing neoliberalism, has generated a lot of renewed discussion about Foucault’s late work.  Over at An und für sich, Mark William Westmoreland has organized a series of posts responding to Zamora.  I’m…

    • Big Data and the Hyper-Reserve Army

      By Gordon Hull At the end of my time in high school, I worked part-time bagging groceries.  There was some modest union influence on the job, and its scheduling was pretty predictable: the longer you’d been there, the better schedule you’d get.  Your first few weeks, you knew you’d be working late into the evening,…

    • Health Informatics, Negative Spaces, and Corporate Privacy

      by Gordon Hull Judge Richard Posner’s well-known application of law and economics to privacy yields results that appear, well, ideological.  First, he considers what individuals do with informational privacy. What is an interest in privacy of information, he asks?  Well, it’s an interest in enforcing an information asymmetry in markets.  Information asymmetry is presumptively bad…

    • Ferguson and American Apartheid

      America has been and remains an apartheid state. That sad but increasingly undeniable fact was made apparent last night in Ferguson, Missouri to a group of peaceful protesters amidst tanks, deafening LRADs, a haze of tear gas and a firestorm of rubber (and real) bullets.