Recent Posts

OAT: Problems — 12 hours ago

“The Chinese are very adept at reducing big problems to small problems, then reducing small problems to nothing at all, as the saying goes. It’s a survival skill they’ve developed over millennia.” Beiing Come, Ma Jien, Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani, \NY Times, July 4, 2008

VSS: Convergence of Bioenergy, Economic Vulnerability & Synthetic Genomics — 22 hours ago

Here is an interesting piece from NY Times on some familiar issues we have been dealing with the OEP research.  The record storms and floods that swept through the Midwest last month struck at the heart of America’s corn region, drowning fields and dashing hopes of a bumper crop. They also brought into sharp relief a new [...]

VSS: Governing the Future: The Paradigm of Prudence in Political Technologies of Risk Management — 11 days ago

Here is a new and interesting article that engages some of the VSS work: Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the `precautionary principle’ (Ewald), `preparedness’ (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or `pre-emption’ (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the [...]

Biopower: Your Sunday Morning Foucault — 34 days ago

I know, I’m a total sucker for this stuff, but just a few soaring lines (of both methodological and conceptual interest) from the newly released (in English) Birth of Biopolitics to remind ourselves (at least some of us) why we do this: “If we want to analyze this absolutely fundamental phenomenon in the history of Western [...]

Biopower: Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur — 37 days ago

Whew. Pardon me while I blow the dust off this blog. If anyone is still out there, let me herewith announce another ARC Working Paper: no 12, “Responsibility: McKeon and Ricoeur” which is by me, and is part of the project on nanotechnology. I’m keen to have any comments, suggestions, critiques etc… [...]

VSS: Homeland Security Grants, Redux — 40 days ago

The New York Times has an article today that is worth a read on the distribution of Homeland Security Grants to states. The basic topics are pretty familiar, so it doesn’t bear saying too much about it (but read the full text after the jump). A couple notes that resonate with various work we [...]

VSS: Cybernetics and China’s Population — 42 days ago

In her recent book Just One Child, anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh traces the origins of China’s infamous ‘one child policy’ to a group of defense scientists who specialized in cybernetics and ‘control theory’. Her book is unabashedly both an analytic project and a criticism of the roots of the policy, that is to say, she [...]

VSS: Housing and the Labor Markets: Management of the Interfaces of Economic Subsystems — 93 days ago

The ongoing crisis in the housing market seems to illustrate how the economy can be thought of as a vital system and how that system and its governing can be conceptualized. The article points to how the labor market and the housing market can interact in unexpected ways and prevent markets to reach equilibrium. The [...]

OAT: Rabinow on Contemporary Equipment — 94 days ago

In February 2008 Rabinow was interviewed by ADRD (Architecture and Design Research and Development) in Paris on the concept of contemporary equipment and its relevance to the relation of the human sciences and the life sciences. Here is the link to that interview: http://www.adrd.net/adrd_wip/

VSS: Kupperman in Santiago? — 99 days ago

Not really, but almost. The Times today has a truly amazing article about an attempt during the Allende administration to use computers to manage the Chilean economy. For those of us who have spent time thinking about OEP, it will all seem familiar, if strangely displaced. Seems that beginning in 1971 the government set out [...]