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    Category: Neoliberalism

    • Join, or Die: Neoliberalism, Epistemontology, Social Harmony and the (Invisible) Invisible Hand

      There's been a good bit conversation recently about the merits and demerits of "public philosophy" and, as someone who considers herself committed to public philosophy (whatever that is). I'm always happy to stumble across a piece of remarkably insightful philosophical work in the public realm.  Case in point:  Robin James (Philosophy, UNC-Charlotte) posted a really…

    • Aereo, Cable TV, and the Privatization of the Public Sphere

      In the most anticipated Copyright decision this term, the Supreme Court today ruled, 6-3 (opinion by Breyer, dissent Scalia) that Aereo’s service for watching broadcast TV online violates the Copyright Act.  Briefly:  Aero operates a large number of tiny antennas.  Subscribers pick a program they want to watch, and get exclusive access to an antenna. …

    • Using Medicaid to Produce Homo Economicus

      I am increasingly convinced that any Foucauldian effort to understand neoliberalism needs to focus on it as a strategy of subjectification (more specifically, it’s the strategy of subjectification specific to contemporary biopower, and it says that the truth of the human being is as homo economicus).  One reason I think this is that one finds…

    • Tuition and the Privatization of College Education

      Thomas Frank has a nice analysis up on Salon.com on college tuition and debts.  In it, he points out that the crisis is of long duration, and people have been asking for more than a generation when the “college bubble” will burst.  Along the way, he shows that a number of standard explanations (overpaid professors,…

    • Facebook’s Social Factory

      I’m currently teaching a summer gen-ed class on the topic of “Ethical Issues: Technology,” and when I teach this class, I always make a point to discuss Facebook early-on. Specifically, this time we’re talking about the “is Facebook making us lonely” question, using a piece from the Atlantic and a critique of it that appeared…

    • Smoking and Two Strands of Biopolitics

      Biopolitics – even when understood in its narrow sense of life itself being a political issue – comes in at least two different strands.  The first, which historically precedes the second, was concerned with what Foucault called a “politics of public health.”  In so doing, it takes on standard biopolitical issues of population optimization, public…

    • From Discipline to Control to “Please Hold while I transfer your call”

        In a famous essay, Deleuze suggests that our society has moved beyond Foucauldian disciplinary power to a more fluid “control society,” where the various sites of disciplinary control merge into a modulated network of interlocking sites of power, the primary technique of which is access control.  As Deleuze notes, the move is “dispersive,” and…

    • Excellence, Schmexcellence Part IV*: an attempt to be clearer about the main problems with assessment.

      In comment #9 at this post, Susan makes a kind of canonical case I've heard from lots of assessment people. First, I should say that I agree with 95% of the intended answers to Susan's rhetorical questions. We should be much clearer about what we want our students to get out of their degrees, and…

    • Even Foucault couldn’t make this up (hat-tip Rod Dreher)

      Why do things like "professional development," "continuing education," "team-building," and (yes, this too) "assessment" always have to tend towards infantalizing the poor people subjected to them? It's one thing to bureaucratically humiliate people by making them waste huge gobs of time. But this business of making them engage in ritualistic idiotic performances (which always involve…

    • Individualized grading, combative philosophy, and neoliberal subjects

      Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber responds to Jonathan Wolff and to Brian Leiter on the question of the combative style in philosophical discussion. Bertram:  Sometimes combat might be the right stance, but seeing that as the default mode for philosophical discussion leads far too often to destructive Q&A sessions that aim at destroying the opponent and bolstering the amour…