Michel Foucault

• No theorist from the last 50 years has had their “general” ideas travel as widely as Michel Foucault.   No field has been untouched by him.  Major foci include:

– Discourse -- an institutionalized way of thinking, a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic

• Not just written or spoken words, but also institutions, architectural buildings, laws, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, philanthropic propositions, as well as what is conspicuously absent

– Power – Unlike Marx, who saw power as centralized and often deceitful; Foucault saw power as diffuse, self-imposed via technologies of corecsion and present in the little interactions of life

– Biopolitics – He was particularly interested in how power acted on the body, how different bodies were classify as desirable or not based on how productive they were made to be, and the efforts to repress the inevitable fact of human difference.

Questions

• Graham and Shelton

1.  What is Laney’s definition of big data? According to Graham and Shelton, big data “could perhaps be defined as…” (pg 256)

2. What might big data do to other ways of knowing the world (pg 257)?  Is Big Data “value neutral”? (pg 258)

3. What can critical social scientists contribute to a critique of big Data?

4. How does Big Data impact how we interact with cities? (pg 258-259)

5. Are we keeping data on everything or just some things?   Who decides what “things” we have big data about?   Are the implications of what we are keeping clear? (pg 258-259)

• Foucault

6. What is a Panopticon? Why is the Panopticon the opposite of the dungeon?

7. What is discipline?  What is the capillary functioning of power?

8. Why does a panopticon  represent the automatic functioning of power?  Can anyone use the machine regardless of purpose?

9.  Why is the panopticon/discipline a laboratory that strengthens social forces? What is low cost have to do with discipline?  Does it divide and categorize?  How does this increase “productivity”?

10. Does discipline displace other powers or infiltrate/work with them?

11. Why can disciplines be considered as counterlaw to equal citizenship?

12. Does what Foucault writes in this chapter apply only to prisons?  What are some other examples where what he describes apply?