Michel Foucault

philosopher · 49 mentions across 15 readings

In this course

Foucault appears primarily through Agamben's critical engagement with his concept of biopolitics—the management of populations through quantifiable life—which frames how contemporary AI systems extend governmentality into algorithmic control. The readings invoke Foucault's framework of power operating through standardization and normalization (evident in protocols and computational systems) while simultaneously staging Agamben's argument that Foucault's biopolitical analysis remains incomplete without addressing bare life and its political stakes. His genealogical method implicitly structures how these texts examine how power operates through systems of knowledge, measurement, and categorical control in both historical and computational contexts.

Mentioned in 15 readings

Karen Barad

Agential Realism from Meeting the universe halfway_ quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning -Duke University Press (2007)

16

not only to Newtonian physics and metaphysics but to representationalism and concordant epistemologies, such as conventional forms of realism and social constructivism, as well. Poststructuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault and Judith…In what follows, I provide a detailed explication of this agential realist ontology. I begin with a detailed examination of the nature of the apparatus, including two significant analytical shifts that are important emendations to Bohr’s fo…One task that stands before us is to further elaborate Bohr’s immensely important insights while removing the less savory anthropocentric elements, including his dependence on the notion of human concepts and laboratory setups. As we have s…

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Claire Colebrook

A Globe of One’s Own, In Praise of the Flat Earth

7

Lamenting the fall of modernity into a biopolitics that manages populations according to a general and quantifiable “life,” Giorgio Agamben argues that it will be possible to arrive again at a genuine politics only by considering what Fouca…Literal globalism, perceived as humanity’s alienation from itself and its earth through dead technical systems (such as the market, mechanization, computerization and speculation), is to be cured by figural globalism. Life as zoe, the mere …Foucault, however, suggests an opposite path. The problem with biopolitics is not its inattention to bios or self-making but, rather, its maintenance of organic—or what I will refer to here as “global”—thinking. One could be misled by readi…

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Tiqqun

The Cybernetic Hypothesis (2001)

7

individual and all metaphysics of the subject -- and 1917 sanctioned its historical contestation by the Bolshevik "revolution," 1940 on the other hand marked the extinction of the idea of "society," so obviously brought about by totalitaria…Like any discourse, the cybernetic hypothesis could only check to verify itself by associating the beings or ideas that reinforce it, by testing itself through contact with them, and folding the world into its laws in a continuous self-vali…What Foucault's listeners are here supposed to know well and which he refrains from pointing out, is that at the end of the 20th century, the image of piloting, that is, management, became the cardinal metaphor for describing not only polit…

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James Brusseau

Deleuzes Postscript on the Societies of Control Updated for Big Data and Predictive Analytics

6

Finally, the triptychal structure of Deleuze’s original composition is maintained here. Each of the three parts begins with a brief review of the original essay section, and then recontextualises the ideas within the big data reality. Hist…The second clarification is the adjustment of central examples. Thirty years ago, the distinction between discipline and control adhered well to the difference between the cement walls of a prison and the electronic collar of house arrest. …Brunton, F. and H. Nissenbaum. 2016. Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest. Boston: MIT Press. Cohen, J. 2018. ‘Biopolitical Public Domain: The Legal Construction of the Surveillance Economy’, Philosophy & Technology 31 (2): …

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Matt Colquhoun

Acid Communism

3

Acid Communism is a project beyond the pleasure principle. It is not only a project for the recuperation of the counterculture’s lost potentials but also the expression of a desire for an experimental (rather than prescriptively utopian) le…For Marx, “desire” is so often inseparable from the commodity. It is never without object. On the very first page of Capital, quoting Nicholas Barbon, Marx defines it in a footnote: “Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and …Barbon, Nicholas. 1696. A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter. In Answer to Mr. Locke's Considerations, &c, London. Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. “Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts & Interviews 1…

Benjamin H. Bratton

Platform and Stack, Model and Machine

1

massive quantities of identical tangible and intangible items. Because protocols are in place to standardize physical and immaterial properties of integral components and discontiguous manufacturing processes—from the width and direction of…

China Mieville

On Social Sadism - Salvage

1

The constitutive, superpositionally avowed and disavowed supersadisms of capitalism test, inform and shape politics by breaching its limits. Even decried. In this decadence, essence and excrescence are inextricable – in the first issue of S…

Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum

from Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest

1

Location-based services take advantage of the locative capabilities of mobile devices to create various services, some of them social (e.g., FourSquare, which turns going places into a competitive game), some lucrative (e.g., location-aware…

Jean Baudrillard

The evil demon of images, 1987

1

Is this evolution an historical one? I do not think it is. It is, rather, a metaphysical one: the universe of the media which we are currently immersed in is not the magical universe or the cruel universe which we had at an anterior stage, …

Joseph Matheny

Incunabula Papers

1

2) The World Congress of Free Religions, a brochure-manifesto arguing for a “fourth way”, a non-authoritarian spiritual movement in opposition to mainstream, fundamentalist and New Age religion. The WCFR is said to include various sects of …

Manuel DeLanda

Introduction to Philosophy and Simulation_ The Emergence of Synthetic Reason-Continuum

1

Adding to the explanation of emergence a mechanism-independent component will involve introducing entirely new ideas so it will be useful at this point to justify the need for the extra complexity. So far the concept of emergence has played…

Mark Fisher

SF Capital

1

Cash is depotentiated capital: an enterprise cannot realise its capital, only a 'private' individual can, but this is effectively a translation from one kind of currency (fluid finance capital) to another (purchasing capital). In the proces…

Notes on Thinking Machine Imaginaries_ Llull

Leibniz, and Lovelace to 'Shoggoth with a Smiley Face'

1

The labyrinth of time is folded back upon itself – Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth Caption: Gottfried Leibniz, 1666 (publ. 1690). frontispiece of De Arte Combinatoria (On the Art of Combination) Figure text: IGNIS. REMISSA. SIC-CITAS. SVM…

Paul M. Churchland

Eliminative Materialism

1

Third, even if our current conception of rationality—and more generally, of cognitive virtue—is largely constituted within the sentential/propositional framework of FP, there is no guarantee that this framework is adequate to the deeper and…

Reza Negarestani

from Intelligence and Spirit

1

[^49]: The term ‘universe of discourse’ originates from Augustus De Morgan’s phrase universe of a proposition specifically meaning ‘the whole of some definite category of things which are under discussion’ but not at all ‘the totality of al…

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