Weheliye, Alexander G. "Introduction" to _Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human_

Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human Alexander G Weheliye

(Northwestern University, pub. book on politics of music)

Questions:

* Given whatever shortcomings/lacks we see in Foucault, what is our view of taking those up in our own work?

     * Uber-philosophical mode tends to be adversarial

     * What would it mean to productively engage Agamben

     * Call at the end of the chapter would be to apply Agamben on the plantation —> this seems like the way to do this work, “without linking with the demon of comparison” to discuss other instances of these racializing assemblages

* What does the Agamben and Foucault criticism have to do with the discussion beginning on p.65 the “Born Free” music video?

     - Why 

     - Why that example?

     - Why one privileged example? rather than historical examples

* What is “ethnic racism” and biopolitical racism? 

* What is the status of the critique of the Foucault?

* What is the explicit intervention (p. 56 and 57)

* What do we learn about biopolitics that we don’t already know after this critique?

* What is W’s own view of the relationship between ethnic and biopolitical racism?

     It is fair to say that F should have looked, thought, etc. but at least a sense in which biopolitics emerge as a way of thinking about where the  other sites of power that are not as visible because power makes them invisible.

     Race comes in not as exactly the place where race is the only place that 

how within a political space that is supposed to foster life, it can still justify death —> the whole point is not to highlight that function and to assume that what biopolitics is 

     the death function is a sort of challenge to what F wants to do (he introduces the genocide as a counter argument… then he needs an explanation. If the assumption is that the form of politics .. then genocide … then biopolitical racism

     But if you replace “biopilitlcs” with genocide, you lose explanatory power

     The subtle thing was to say why we don’t look at other sites where the question of normalization is much more subtle. (healthcare, sexuality)

Title: black feminism doesn’t seem to be anywhere in this?: pg 65 and MIA in lineage of “women of color”

- when you tell someone that you missed this amazing site where political power gets to be expressed. 

- W even locates influence on F as Angela Davis, black panther movement (60, 62) 

          Denial of a certain presence (but it is known that F never quotes anything; how do you measure - esp. in the lectures - that he wasn’t giving proper credit)

          - This was about “colonial expropriation” without mentioning the person and thus exploits that person without

          - Similar things have been said about Derrida

—> What do we do with people we agree with?!?: is this a plausible mode of philosophical and theoretical precedents  (F not quoting Marx or Nietszche to avoid being read solely for their quotes, mentions); is this different than when you are appropriating from the black panthers? is that different? why’?

          - different because people are already familiar with Marx, etc. but when you appropriating from a less well known, or disavowed, it is a different; his audience can more easily detect the Marx, etc than the black panther party

Is this the way of saving Foucault: the lacunae (63) but here is a way that Foucault is connected with postcolonial thinking as well. The point isn’t to get rid of F, but to show F’s limits and the points in his thinking that have much more significant and radical ties.

Minolo as indicated for stealing from Peruvian thinkers; but this is a different critique because Minolo is already a decolonial thinker.

- Conflates the politics of scholarship with the potential politics of the influence of scholarship what should be two separate questions.

- He could be a good progressive about punishment and be on the wrong side with respect to who to cite and when.

- "I have this idea about political something” vs. if the idea should have political weight, doesn’t that depend on the purchase of that idea, the take up by others, the making it their own?

- The scholarship question: F got his ideas about discipline and punishment and state racism from the black panthers and the act of universalizing those ideas erased those bodies from the ideas.

- Is it the real thing that F ignores where he got the ideas, or 

     (F’s book was not initially about prisons in the 18th/19th century but would he not have written that book without people saying that prisons work in a certain way in the 1970s; even though he doesn’t quote them doesn’t mean that he doesn’t register that their thought is not thought)

     ( and more undergrads would know Davis than Foucault)

- So Foucault is missing ethnic racism (59): what is the “ontological differentiation” or a paradigmatic form that we get with biopower? Fouclat is making a historical point, not an ontological point about these two different forms of racism.

- what lis the order of operation with ethnic, biological, modern racism (most of modern forms of racism looks to the biological for epistemic authority). The ethnic and national are synonyms (ideology(. His claim is that F separates this from the biological and ∆ introduces the ontological and ∆ F leaves the door open for biological racism. W wants to 

          - Do you need that kind of order?

          - F is more about how does biopolitical discourse get going —> it draws on race war discourse and biological/evolutionary

- But this was a guy who was TALKING here, giving a lecture, but then to make a big deal from a recording

- Then his claim that F elides ethnic racism as doesn’t attend that form of productive power (like nazism and the atomic bomb) but that argument only works if ethnic racism only works by way of oppression. But F tries to see oppressions as productive, yes-saying, that leads to it. (it is not English hatred of the Irish, but English love of self; and  fear that the self that is so awesome is threatened // move about the Bourgie and sexuality) Fear in service of “let’s make them more like us” which F says this is NOT oppression but injustice of ego/normalization

- Is it problematic that the ways these things get classified as poor, indigent, etc. —> F reads a logic of the normal/pathological and certain logic underlies the ways that certain discriminations begin that will probably function in racism as well to a certain extent

(race is just a technology but W takes race to be the dominant term that produces the dichotomy, where for F race is a form by which differences are produced; “reason” and “unreason” is one dichotomy that produced the madman)

- MIA example: shows point of intersection between biopolitical and ethnic racism? the positive part of the chapter: exemplary of the assemblages (what F and A kept apart) - the ethnic and biopolitical racism. 

        - if you don’t decouple these different forms of racisms; where is the force of the theoretical points —> we can imagine racial orders differently

          - the point is that biological is always articulated through the ethnic and warrants the treating the populations as such

          - the gingers are exemplar of a "future ethnicity” that is performed in the video

Half of the sentence about scholarship on biopolitics, “taken together”  ignores race, at least initially  is true (though Stohler, McWhorter, Bernasconi, and Ellen Fetterer, Huggen) 

Neocleous, Critique of Security (Ch.1)

Notes for 

12 February 2015

CGC

Critique of Security, Mark Neocleous (2008)

Questions

1)    What is Neocleous's working df of 'security'?  What are the merits of rejecting security rather than redefining?  (What is Neocleous's argument vis-à-vis Ken Booth, page 5?)

2)    What is his conception of critique (page 7) vis-à-vis Foucault?  Is this a critical project that is Foucaultian in orientation, or Marxist, or ... ?

3)    What is MN's argumentative relationship to 'liberalism'?  How is liberalism being envisioned, as an object of critique (is it a theory, an ideology, a set of techniques, a rationality, a practice?)?  And how does this enable MN to position liberalism as a project that contradicts itself?  What other alternatives are available?  Why not say that liberalism fails to live up to its own ideals?

4)    What was the pre-Lockean conception of prerogative?  What was the pre-sovereign conception of prerogative?

5)    Why is the rule of law not governed by necessity whereas the rule of prerogative is governed by necessity?  (pp. 21-23).

6)    MN reads liberalism less as an ideology, more as a "technique of security" in which "security is deployed as liberty" (pp. 31-32).

Discussion

2) Critique as preliminary to judgment? What’s the primary investment, critique or judgment? Security discourse that begins in liberalism. (7) – MN really at core a Marxist, but he likes Foucault’s concept of historical critique? Critique in the sense of unmasking contradictions?

à 3) liberalism as ideology – Is it okay to conflate liberalism with liberty? Liberalism as a technique of security (31) In actual fact, are liberals deploying security rather than liberty? Does that make it a technique? Related to not seeing critique in Foucault’s sense. MN wants both worlds, but without realizing he can’t have both worlds: C-O-P of theory, and the unintelligibility, and wants the historical component of C-O-P. Can you attempt to conditions on the theoretical level (what is liberalism, show a self-contradiction within the very theory of lib.), and attempt the conditions on the historical level (as in Foucault) – theoretical and historical critique potentially mutually exclusive. How these contradictions are grounded in a historical moment? Modes of thought – practices don’t have to function at the same level as that of thought?

(p.18) – sovereignty and prerogative – as a form power can take under specific conditions – prerogative as the instance of sovereign power within the liberalism tradition.  – sovereignty being subsumed under the prerogative , making Locke more Hobbesian (Lockean account not one of consent).  Locke à need a consent mechanism in order to bring about order (if we don’t consent, we’re in a state of war with the state). If prerogative is fundamental for Locke, perhaps he looks more Hobbesian. à How is prerogative fundamental for Locke?

5) States of emergency when action not according to the rule of law is necessary (21-23) – (17) – is the necessary justifiable without consent? Consenting to something that responds to the emergency situations. à Locke – consent as actual. Consent to the function of the prerogative power or to the ways in which the prerogative power obtains in a very specific emergency moment. Being in a state of rebellion. Negation of the possibility of the clause of exception? Limiting the instances or the places where the clauses of exception attain. (35-6) – Legitimacy of prerogative lies in its legality. Argument made for states of emergency for long periods of time, or no ends to the states of emergency? Prolonged states of emergency justified by liberal statecrafts. Arbitrary power of the prerogative is a trust (a consent).

– Whatever critique you give will have to cohere with what solution you give to the problem you’ve identified. Liberal theory inherently self-contradictory at the theoretical level à abandon security rather than redefine it – question of the strategy of the argument is that while both can show a failure or self-contradiction, none is giving us insights of how to move forward. 1) Conceptual project 2) Historical project (not functioning at the same level) à how do you put them into dialogue? MN wants both levels, but the question remains how do you move from one level the other?

à Contradiction applying to the level of theory, meeting contradictions within practice? (2 of intro) – contradictions found in practice. Why go all the way back to Locke for a contemporary project of security? à Looking for the conditions that created something like this (theoretical conditions) – MN blocking the desire to bring back liberal human rights protections.

What MN means by security? – uses social security, examples from introduction (6) False binary (security-liberty) – handing over liberties for our security-fetish.

Amoore, 'Politics of Possibility', Chapter 6

Masked philosopher: Often Foucault’s interviews were done anonymously. If everything is predictable then there is no space for critique. If everything is predictable there is not space for anything new to emerge, no event. Foucault--if everything is predictable then there is no space for new thoughts. Space of critque within a politics of possibility as to take some of that novelty. Foucault felt when became know, the encounter with readers was predetermined.

It felt as though the space of critique was both internal and external to politics of possibility. Politics are only possible when you open a space of critique. Critique was construed negatively--critique is supposed to tell us how the world could be but doesn’t point us in the way it should be. Foucault says we need to bring critique in to create space for things to be otherwise, but there is no claim about the world should be. Art is sight of potentiality where alterity emerges. Are these politics realist enough?

She needs a space where the politics of possibility cannot contain the entire politics of potentiality. We could assume that we live in totalizing politics of possibility where potentiality is foreclosed. Why isn’t this is the case? Does possibility imply potentiality? You have to assume a difference between potentiality and possibility. If possibilities do not cover the space of potentiality, where can we see this? Her answer is art. The differnce between possibility and potentiality--something is possible when there is the probability that it could obtain. Potentiality remains the space where new things can emerge. As soon as in-betweenness emerge, isn’t it already there.  A life never becomes the life. A life is not actualized -- it exists in a different space that is not the same as the real life. Imminent life exists in a virtual space. If we make something legible isn’t it always already part of the politics of possibility?  Are possibilities limited to a certain space? What kind of spaces can the logic of the algorithm can be extended too? The space between the operating logic of possibility and its application into other spaces is the space of critique (I may have misunderstood). When we think terms of human potentiality, we can see uncertain futures.

If there is an ontology, the space of potentiality is one that contains smaller spaces of possibility. She posits this distinction because she has to have a space where critique is possible. Assumption--the space of potentiality is the sum of all the subsets of possibility. Her ontological assumptions is that this space of potentiality always exceeds these subsets of possibility. Amazon example about predictive preferences. In-betweeness is the actual body, the idea that the algorithm can’t attach predictions to certain bodies. Collaborative filtering solves this problem. Does the amazon example eliminate personal ruptures?

There is an ethical turn. The politics of possibility is indifference to whether or not a possibility comes to pass. So there is a problem decision, algorithm makes judgements not decisions. Politics emerges from decisions and responsibility. Politics of possibility lead to a politics of indifference. But are these decisions illusory? But are the stakes high in amazon purchases? They are high in drone attacks.

Are there differences between infopolitics and biopolitics? Is the goal of the algorithms to justify killing without responsibility? Is it more than that? You come to believe that is not a decision because the facts lead you to it. Is there space opened up by the act of decision.

Amoore, 'Politics of Possibility,' Ch. 2

We began, as per custom, with questions:

1. What's the difference between seeking a causal relationship, and working on and through the relation itself (cf. 59)?  See also the "ontology of association" (p. 64)?

2. From what is the risk calculus derived?  If it's a derivative, what is it a derivative of? (See page 57, 61, 75, etc..)

3. The shift from risk management to acting on the basis of the unknown, and the merely possible (p. 57; cf. 62). What would it mean to act on the basis of the unknown? And how does this shift take place?

4. Amoore's discussion of the correlation that is "indifferent" to the specificity of persons, places, and events (p. 64) -- So what are the stakes of this supposed indifference?  Is it really an indifference or is it a mask for specific differences that are otherwise attended to?

5. How is intuition encoded into this model of possibility-based assessment?  Amoore quotes an e-Borders official to this effect (p. 66).  What does this mean?  What is going on here?

6. "Not because the world become a more dangerous place after 9/11..." (p. 59).  Is Amoore right about this?

7. Amoore discusses Foucault on page 72, distinguishing disciplinary apparatus from a security apparatus.  And she links discipline with prevention and security with mobility.  Does that fit our reading of Foucault?

And, then, my friends,... our discussion began:

Discussion of shift from risk society to 'possibility' society.  This is an epistemic shift, not a shift in actual reality (as it were).   ....   But how does the Cold War fit into this?  Was the Cold War not itself premised on the politics of possibility, at least as the threat of possible nuclear attack played out in the West?

Discussion of <i>derivatives.</i>   Amoore defines derivatives on p. 57, and there are two elements to her defintiion: 1) derived from "multiple past data elements", 2) "toward which it is largely indifferent" (57).  In this case, as is in many others, Amoore is using finance as a metaphor (or analogy? or precipitant?) for her discussion of political security apparatus?

There is a broader trend in the book here that is worth noticing: in Chapter 1 & 2 we are told that the current security apparatus has its origins in financial practices (data mining for M&S in Ch. 1, financial derivatives in Ch.2; see page 73 bottom).  This is counter to other political histories that would seek to excavate the contemporary in terms of its military origins (e.g., information theory is a WWII phenomenon (cf. Kittler)).  But how do these techniques migrate and mobilize?  The story in Ch.1 is clear, but not all that clear to us in Ch. 2.

Can we read Amoore's critical method in terms of the distinction in 'new media theory' between socio-cultural analysis and more technical-hardware analysis?  She seems to be largely focused on the latter, at least in Part I.

What does this chapter have to do with the earlier discussion of Agambenian sovereign power?  How does the discussion of security apparatus (cf. p. 72) hook up with the discussion of sovereign power earlier on?  This comes up earlier on page 65 where Amoore says, "In contrast to a world in which biopolticis eclipses sovereign and disciplinary power, we see a security appratus that mobilizes specific techniques for deploying the n orm to govern uncertain and unfolding populations" (65).  What is the contrast here?  Is it between security and biopolitics?  Or is it between biopolitics as post-sovereign and biopolitics-security as connected to but modulated sovereignty?  It's unclear, but what is clear is that what is new is the breaking up of subjects and objects into elemental degrees of risk (65).  That's the logic of the derivative.  The subject gets divided up.  And security work takes place on the basis of amalgamation and aggregation and algorithmic processing of separate data points that some times coalesce in what looks like what we used to call the subject. (?????)

And that's where we ended...

Amoore, "Politics of Possibility," Ch.1

<b>Questions:</b>
- Near the end of the ch (pg 54): What is the “shift in the epistemic status”?
- What is the justification for the “move to the intuitive”? p. 44, 45 ...
          - Relation between intuitive and speculative and algorithms p.44
- Relation between the sovereign and the subject in this “shift”? (specifically, what is the relationship between the democratic political apparatus and the type of sovereignty being described)?
- Relationship btwn sovereign exception and lineage of probabilistic and possibilistic analysis (two lines - one of exception and one about probability/possibility) p.52  —> how is this trad sovereign power rather than a politics of possibility that has colonized sovereignty; how is this soveirgn in line with Agamben, Schmidtt, etc.
- What does Amoore think of 9/11 - “dispel the myths of a post-9/11 radical break” (31) and "the
- What is missing: cf. BM’s book on sovereign masculinity… where is gender in the analysis, or is it hiding behind some fate ithings she is describing… the forms of calculations and logics that are coming into play here are masculinely coded activities… how does entering gender in to the analysis reveal more depth into her analysis.
                    Discussion drew us to p. 51: “A ‘new person’” - isn’t this good old fashioned biopower?
                    - Project of categorization: race and gender might be produced slightly differently than what categories do for themselves

<b>Discussion:</b>
- Intuition/speculation:  “a piece o f the translation from probability to possibility"
               - race conditions are going to shape the way calculations assert risk
               - “X” can signify anything - within what X can be, race and gender have more than fashion, action, etc.
               - Does race carry an inherently higher “risk value"
                   - But does Amoore need this?
- in the question of race and gender —> VISIBLE … p. 47
and point to the limits of such technology - camouflage so that you don’t present those threatening marks.
     - Charlie Hebdo Terrorists were using “spam format” for their emails.
     - She does not even broach the subject of race enough to even dismiss it, when one would expect her to justify it at least (esp. given she is discussing the aspects of the war on terror).
- What are you missing by not regarding race and gender?
- Race seems to be relevant enough to regard - wether the algorithms build in race into their calculations.   If she did look - what did she find?
- Other ways race can travel though this : patterns of interaction, coded as dangerous from the beginning they would carry more risk, higher probability that the “new person” coming in to the system will not be a stranger because they are already more likely to be picked up. They have associations
- Gender: may be that males are more heavily coded as females
          - BM's book: all of the people in a room discussion the effects of dropping nuclear warheads in certain places… outburst re: 30,0000 people. Impact: side of decision making. Like a new kind of “man of reason” - man understood in terms of technical calculations.
(I would have liked an example of such an algorithm)
- Racist state plays a key role in F’s account of biopower.
               - when F talks about race, he has a problem to solve to understand biopolitical society can still kill. Hey, here is race, that’s how you kill.
- what plays, what makes the algorithm run, we can continue inventing ways to keep killing ourselves
- but her example is war on terror, is it possible to avoid race?

Why is she doing this (this=not discussing race, etc.)
- Strategic avoidance b/c
          - Questions is not wether or not you can look into the past and see how race produces this and try to infer… then you are limiting the extent of the unexpected
          - Statistical extrapolation from past events to make the best inference  is missing the point… When looking at the data, you look at more than just race.
          - “Judgment by Computation” : the “veneer of objectivity”; “techno-scientific gleam” p.51-52 —> can the lack of discussion of race reflect the operation of the form of power that she is discussing in that data-mining, etc. replace, stand-in for other kinds of decision making. Then it makes sense (Ex: bottom of page 51)
- The desired result of these comp. logics would be to hide these other considerations. What goes into the algorithm? —> she doesn’t say exactly how they run
                    * Analogy to a project on aspects of the politics of information: re: Galton - struggling with how to treat eugenics in… it would overrun the project. ∆ "infopolitics is dangerous is because it’s racist” —> But there are other injustices in addition to racial injustice.
- “intuititve and imaginative inference”: is this a way to
               - Does this distract us from other ways that intuition works? If the kinds of persons that these calculations get a grip on don’t conform to our traditional categorizations ...
               - There are different logics of justice at work :
                              - Her argument assumes "Not all systems of oppression interlock” or demand/produce each other. Though it would have helped her argument in a way that it is not reducible to race.
                                - to p. 18: “must produce a particular economy of decision” - dig in to the politics that is concealed by this technoscientific apparatus, then raising the questions of other forms of power that we are used to dealing with would be one way of asking after what those politics are. To avoid them is to risk missing the ways in which this particular, if not new, the way this form of power takes shape.
                              - Is it the case that, historically speaking, forms of oppression feeds on each other; still does answer the other question that one form of oppression cannot exist without. Not how, but ?necessarily so?
                              - Can it be the case that we can have a space of possibility separate from the space of historicity?
                              - She is desiring this different politics that is present, which is differ than what happens in practice. This politics operates on radicalized, gendered lines but it is not necessarily so —> p.51 ∆ She seems to be describing what is happening on the theoretical level. Can she make this without assuming that race operates on the theoretical level?
                    - What is the role of race in the formation of these algorithms?
                    - But, if race has a historical function within this society. She looks at the function and sees what is the function and she feeds the function with different variables. “Yes, I can see the logic behind race”
- Charles Mills “The Racial Contract”: original production conceals a racial operation
                    - is this a diff btwn british academic left and american academic left?
Question: What is the picture of authority that she is giving us? She really believes Connolly’s thesis (and Schmitt) - if you start assuming that the sovereign is not just one but is multiple
                                   - For Schmitt, the sovereign decision is VERY time sensitive. ∆ you can get a decision fast within a sense of emergency, but when you pluralize how do you deal with the time issues
the assumption is there is an integration between the plurality of forces, they always output decision X.   Are all those tiny forces working together?
- It would be very sensible if the sovereign is masculine, it would be very sensible to adopt this system.
- but any project puts limits on how it’s fulfilled.
- But the objectivity that is produced ultimately reifies the notion of sovereign, reinscribes what it means to be a sovereign.
- Asking about the processes or asking about the justification?
               - Some scholars are concerned with the way that this gets justified while this project may be more concerned with the functioning —> might be a way of disting. the intents and understand Amoore’s decision to not address race.
- Foucauldian and Deleuzian pluralism: “there is no locus of great refusal” but a strategic fight on multiple fronts.

- Her argument seems to enact the logic that she is tracking.

- We wish she had devoted an entire chapter on ONE instantiation of a particular algorithm (some would critique her work as not 'anthropological' enough)

Amoore, "Politics of Possibilitiy", Intro

We began, as per custom, with questions...

What notion of the sovereign is she working with? (p3)

What are the politics of the possibility of risk (p8)

What is an apparatus? (p4) Referencing Deleuze and Guattari

Distinguishing between the norm and becoming the norm

What is her relationship between biopolitics and the sovereign?

Relationship between probability and possibility? (p24) Are we pointing to a new kind of power?

Moving from discipline to risk (p8) have we left discipline behind?

Why does she neglect climate change? Even when she lists terrorist organizations, border security, etc. it is not that new risks come into being but that society comes to understand

How does she decide to stabilize her cases and why are they not inflected with climate change?

What is Agamben’s distinction between civil society and bare life? (p13) what renders bodies governable?

Discussion ensued...

How do we define the exception? The role of the sovereign is decide btwn friend and foe also to decide the state of exception (for both Agamben and Schmidt). Is this a being rather than a state of being? An exceptional process instead of a state of exceptionality. She is pluralizing the possibility of sovereignty claiming an exceptional space. Maybe is happens in governance, border control, etc. is she assuming a split between the economy and the sovereign? (p20) even though they share an entymology? Although she uses economy in its broadest sense (p15). Drawing attention to the reintegration of soverignity into arena that were traditionally biopolitical. Sept 11th brings biopolitics to a close and now were are again within a sovereignty, her intervention is complicating this move increasingly present in political theory. Is it the same sovereignty (that which can institute an exception) that came before? Most would say no. Another read says there is an interrelation between the two – it is was takes the lead in a given apparatus – it is not an epoch or an era.

She may or may not be tweeking Agamben. Some reads of Agamben say it is simply re-emerging in the same form because it was always inside it. Logic of sovereignty is present even if we can’t point to one particular sovereign. Expands the places in which sovereignty can take place.

Contra Beck – relationship to science and expertise expand

Whole person is a criminal of a certain kind, now segmentation in to different selfhoods, parsing out parts of ourselves seems to parse out, multiply, expand risk. Does this give rise to a multiplicity of authorities?

Norms function in this way (p17). But wasn’t risk always present? Only in the fact that we are attempting. Risk has not change just the calculus of risk has changed – shift to risks of “low probability but high consequence” this is the shift between logics of probability that works against playing out of events vs. unfolding of events through a ray of imagined possible futures. Logic of possibility actuality math moves to predictual math – power will lay with those who can access data and articulate a solution , not so much arrangement of risk factors and the correlation itself, it is the translation of a best strategy. Is this the Deleuzian idea of the virtual?

Could war “Terroist attack” was not probabilistically or conceptually possible. Then it becomes a possibility so it joins together a series or range of disparate acts. Being able to mobiltze the kinds and size of BIG DATA produces something new that maybe doesnt translate (she traces actuarial math to predictive formulas) to earlier models of soverignity.

P9-10 change in the status of science expertise and decision are rearticulated so the distinction btwn scicen and non-science becomes more malleable. What logic is operating here? Imagined scenarios are not lead by the data but how the data is used?

Identify threat that one can articulate threats that competitors cannot, would win the bid on her argument.

Creative ways to bring about terrorists threats to the country. Is there a difference between the large positron collider – is one more made up politically, more explicitly value laden? Influence decision making in governmental activity. The arguments for building the collider (funding) are going to be value laden – it is hard to get big science projects built

Probability is based on predictive based on past events, and the move to possibility based on complex algorithms of computerized very remote possibilities – what is the difference? The difference is that the probability of these new possibilities are so low.

In disciplinary case, you run probabilities and try to control at the end of the situation. Whereas now, control come much sooner, you control the combination of possibilities, by controlling what can become possible.

How does this translate into the dividuated self? You could actually stop people at the border and search them

Is she right to conceptualize the argument this way? If she is right then the people who do security this way are crazy? Travel patterns, communication history, is hypothetically the process at getting at possbilitites and getting at intervening.

Is the infopolitical age merely an outgrowth of biopolitics? What do we gain with this conceptual shift? What can we say with this that we could not say before? There is a significantly quantitative data, she is describing the shift that makes big data possible. We have always had too much data. Possibilities lend themselves better to sovereign-power but probabilities lend themselves better to biopolitics which would have to be true if her argument is correct. Is it neoliberalism, is it sovereignty redux? Maybe these are useful terms, maybe not but within political theory this helps us understand what is new.

Are we assessing high concentrations of risk in individuals and then eliminating them, by drone attack. Does the military still use probalistic analysis in that this person is 80% likely to carry out a terrorist attack so they should be eliminated

She believes there is something new – first page “in an era after the events of 9/11”- she is proposing a new epoch.

Right plays catastrophe on terrorism while the left play catastrophe on climate change.

She grasps the commodification of the state of exception.

Winter 2015 Meeting Schedule

We will begin our Winter readings with Louise Amoore's The Politics of Possibility and move on to other selected texts from there. Our schedule is as follows:

All meetings are Thursdays 2.00p - 3.30p(ish).

Week 1 - Pass
Week 2 - Jan 15 - EMU, S Dining E (Room 113A) - Amoore, Politics of Possibility, "Introduction"
Week 3 - Jan 22 - EMU (Room 113A) - Amoore, Ch. 1
Week 4 - Jan 29 - move to SCH 111A - Amoore, Ch. 2
Week 5 - Feb 5 - SCH 111A - Amoore, Ch. 6
Week 6 - Feb 12 - SCH 111A - Neocleous, Critique of Security, Ch.1

Week 7 - Feb 19 - SCH 111A - Foucault, On the Government of the Living, Ch. 1

Week 8 - Feb 26 - SCH 111A - Foucault, On the Government of the Living, Ch. ???
Week 9 - Mar 5 - SCH 111A - TBD???
Week 10 - Pass

Other Winter term readings: perhaps some selections (chs. 1 & 4?) from Foucault's On the Government of the Living?, and what else?

Spring term will be workshops featuring our own work and that of visitors.