Inhuman Hermeneutics of the Self: Biopolitics in the Age of Big Data
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i34.6939Schlagworte:
Algorithms, surveillance, digital, capitalism, infopower, philosophy of technology, riskAbstract
In this paper, I present a Foucauldian reflection on our datafied present. Following others, I characterize this present as a condition of “digital capitalism” and proceed to explore whether and how digital conditions present an important change of episteme and, accordingly, an importantly different mode of subjectivity. I answer both of these concerns affirmatively. In the process, I engage with Colin Koopman’s recent work on infopower and argue that, despite changes in episteme and modes of subjectivity, the digital capitalist present is continuous with biopolitics as Foucault understood it, though it does raise serious worries about the possibility of transgressive resistance.
Literaturhinweise
Alpaydin, Ethem, Machine Learning: The New AI. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016.
Anderson, Chris, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obso-lete,” Wired 16:1 (2008). https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/.
Barry, Laurence, and Arthur Charpentier, “Personalization as a Promise: Can Big Data change the Practice of Insurance?,” Big Data & Society 7:1 (2020), 1-12
Blair, Ann, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, and Anthony Grafton, eds., Information: A Historical Companion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Bouk, Dan, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Bowker, Geoffrey C., “The Theory/Data Thing: Commentary,” International Journal of Com-munication 8 (2014), 1795-1800.
Burrell, Jenna, “How the Machine ‘Thinks’: Understanding Opacity in Machine Learning Algorithms,” Big Data & Society 3:1 (2016), 1-12.
Cabrera, F., “The Fate of Explanatory Reasoning in the Age of Big Data,” Philosophy and Technology 34 (2021), 645–665.
Cao, Longbing, Data Science Thinking: The Next Scientific, Technological, and Scientific Revolu-tion. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018.
Cortada, James W., All the Facts: A History of Information in the United States since 1870. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Couldry, Nick, and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Are Colonizing Hu-man Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020.
Daston, Lorraine, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Eu-rope,” Critical Inquiry 18:1 (1991), 93-124.
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison, Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007.
Day, Ronald E., The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power. Carbon-dale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.
De Beistegui, Miguel, The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2018.
Elden, Stuart, “The Problem of Confession: The Productive Failure of Foucault’s History of Sexuality,” Journal for Cultural Research 9:1 (2005), 23-41.
Fisher, Eran, and Yoav Mehozay, “How Algorithms See Their Audience: Media Epistemes and the Changing Conception of the Individual,” Media, Culture & Society 41:8 (2019), 1176-1191.
Foucault, Michel, The Archeology of Knowledge [1969], trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 [2004], trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1974], trans. Alan Sheridan. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction [1976], trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure [1984], trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Volume 4: The Confessions of the Flesh [2018], trans. Robert Hurley, ed. Frèdèrick Gros. New York: Pantheon, 2021.
Foucault, Michel, “Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason” [1981], trans. Robert Hurley, in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, 298-325. New York: The New Press, 1997.
Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966]. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Foucault, Michel, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973—1974, [2003], trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Jacques Lagrange. New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006.
Foucault, Michel, “Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 [1997], trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. New York: Pic-ador (2003)
Foucault, Michel, “Technologies of the Self” [1988], trans. Robert Hurley, in Ethics: Subjec-tivity and Truth: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, 223-252. New York: The New Press 1997:
Foucault, Michel, “What is Critique?” [1990], in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 41-82. New York: Semiotext(e), 2007.
Foucault, Michel, “What is Enlightenment?” [1984], in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lot-ringer, 97-120. New York: Semiotext(e), 2007.
Foucault, Michel, “What is Revolution?” [1986], in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotring-er, 83-96. New York: Semiotext(e), 2007.
Foucault, Michel, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice [2012], trans. Stephen W. Sawyer, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Fourcade, Marion, and Kieran Healy, “Seeing Like a Market,” Socio-economic Review 15:1 (2017), 9-29.
Galison, Peter, “Algorists Dream of Objectivity,” in Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI, ed. John Brockman, 231-239. New York: Penguin, 2019.
Gamez, Patrick, “The Place of the Iranian Revolution in the History of Truth: Foucault on Neoliberalism, Spirituality, and Enlightenment,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 45:1 (2019), 96-124
Hacking, Ian, "Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers," in Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, ed. Nicolae Morar and Vernon W. Cisney, 65-80. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Hacking, Ian, “Historical Ontology,” in In the Scope of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, ed. Peter Gärdenfors, Jan Wolenski, and Katarzyna Kijania-Placek, 583-600. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2002.
Han, Byung-Chul, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler. New York: Verso, 2017.
Headrick, Daniel R, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Helbing, Dirk, “Machine Intelligence: Blessing or Curse? It Depends on Us!” in Towards Dig-ital Enlightenment, ed. Dirk Helbing, 25-39. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019.
Helbing, Dirk, Bruno S. Frey, Gerd Gigerenzer, Ernst Hafen, Michael Hagner, Yvonne Hof-stetter, Jeroen Van Den Hoven, Roberto V. Zicari, and Andrej Zwitter, “Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?" in Towards Digital Enlightenment, ed. Dirk Helbing, 73-98. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019.
Kitchin, Rob, "Big Data, New Epistemologies and Paradigm Shifts," Big Data & Society 1:1 (2014), 1-12.
Kitchin, Rob, Data Lives: How Data Are Made and Shape Our World. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021.
Kitchin, Rob, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Conse-quences. Los Angeles: Sage, 2014.
Kline, Ronald, The Cybernetics Moment or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. Balti-more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Koopman, Colin, How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Koopman, Colin, “Michel Foucault’s Critical Empiricism Today: Concepts and Analytics in the Critique of Biopower and Infopower,” in Foucault Now: Current Perspectives in Fou-cault Studies, ed. James D. Faubion, 88-111. Medford, MA: Polity, 2014.
Koopman, Colin, “The Political Theory of Data: Institutions, Algorithms, & Formats in Racial Redlining,” Political Theory 50:2 (2021), 337-361
Koopman, Colin, “Two uses of Michel Foucault in Political Theory: Concepts and Methods in Giorgio Agamben and Ian Hacking,” Constellations 22:4 (2015), 571-585.
Koopman, Colin, and Tomas Matza, “Putting Foucault to Work: Analytic and Concept in Foucaultian Inquiry,” Critical Inquiry 39:4 (2013), 817-840.
Lam, Tong, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011.
Lemke, Thomas, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms. New York: NYU Press, 2021.
Massumi, Brian, Ontopower: War, powers, and the state of perception. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Mau, Steffen, The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social. Medford MA: Polity, 2019.
Mazzochi, F., “Could Big Data Be the End of Theory in Science,” EMBO Rep 16 (2015), 1250-5.
May, Todd, The Philosophy of Foucault. Chesham, UK: Acumen, 2006.
Mbembe, Achille, Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Mirowski, Philip, “Postface: Defining Neoliberalism,” in The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, 417-456. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Morar, Nicolae, and Colin Koopman, “The Birth of the Concept of Biopolitics – A Critical Notice of Lemke’s Biopolitics,” Theory & Event 15:4 (2012). muse.jhu.edu/article/491206.
Pasquinelli, Matteo, “How to Make a Class: Hayek’s Neoliberalism and the Origins of Con-nectionism,” Qui Parle 30:1 (2021), 159-184.
Poovey, Mary, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A., Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke Uni-versity Press, 2016.
Reckwitz, A., The Society of Singularities [2017], trans. Valentina A. Pakis. Medford MA: Polity, 2020.
Revel, Judith, “‘What Are We At the Present Time?‘ Foucault and the Question of the Pre-sent,” in Foucault and the History of our Present, ed. Sophie Fuggle, Yari Lanci, and Marti-na Tazzioli, 13-25. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Sadowski, Jathan, Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020.
Shapiro, Barbara J., A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.
Williams, James, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Attention in the Attention Economy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Zamora, Daniel and Mitchell Dean, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolu-tion. New York: Verso, 2021.
Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.
Downloads
Veröffentlicht
Zitationsvorschlag
Ausgabe
Rubrik
Lizenz
Copyright (c) 2023 The Author
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung - Nicht-kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International.
Authors retain copyright to their work, but assign the right of the first publication to Foucault Studies. The work is subject to a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, but despite these restrictions, authors can take for granted that Foucault Studies will permit articles published in Foucault Studies to be translated or reprinted in another format such as a book providing a full reference is made to Foucault Studies as the original place of publication.
