critical psychology

Biopolitics

Critical Theory - UC Berkeley

Talks 4 faves

politics

Neoliberalism

In following the moderns in the making of scientific knowledge, STS scholars have shown an interesting discrepancy between what scientists do in practice and what they say they do in theory. Indeed, scientific objectivity has been entirely reconfigured and reinterpreted in very different ways. In continuity with this endeavor, and because the definition of the object goes hand in hand with the definition of the subject, one of my obsessions has been to re-interrogate the definition of the knowing subject. If another definition of scientific objectivity emerges, and if science is socially or collectively and materially made—depending on our conception of the social—what does this do to our classical notion of the knowing subject? What does it do to the most powerful and operative myth of the modern: “the disincorporated brain”? And by extension, what does it do to our notions of the person, the individual genius, the rational actor, the psyche, and or subjectivity, to which this myth is anchored?

Hélène Mialet is a Scholar-in-Residence with The Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley 2013-2014. More information can be found at http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of The Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

Respondent: Églantine Colon, Professor of French, UC Berkeley

Politics Beyond the Human: How to Think the Knowing Subject Anew?... | Helene Mialet | 4/2/2014

The opening session of the Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Working Group provides a space for discussion of the lasting insights, limitations, and potential applications of Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Linking neoliberalism and biopolitics at both the historical and conceptual level, Foucault’s prescient lecture series lays the groundwork for the working group’s concern with the contemporary management of populations through diverse practices of economization, privatization, and financialization.

Hans Sluga is a Professor of Philosophy and William Callison is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Revisiting Foucault: The Biopolitics... | Hans Sluga | 9/17/14

In this session, we reflect on how norms and practices of neoliberal governmentality are disseminated and transformed across borders. Professors Rofel and Bargu’s extensive studies of China and Turkey respectively, offer new insights into how different forms of neoliberalism transform social and political life in various contexts, while also calling into question the enduring viability of neoliberalism as an analytic frame. We aim collectively to problematize and contest Eurocentric approaches to the study of neoliberalism, while also investigating the role under neoliberalism of NGOs, IGOs, corporations and state institutions. We hope to foster a comparative and interdisciplinary dialogue to reassess both how neoliberalisms function as practices in the contemporary world, and what limitations the overall framework of neoliberalism may pose for the analysis of contemporary transformations of social life. We consider questions concerning the privatization of public goods, international investment and development programs, the dissemination of norms of entrepreneurship, the role of experts in development projects, micro-lending, and the effects of such developments on “public culture,” sexual and gender norms, and kinship structures.

Introduction: William Callison, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, UC Berkeley. More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Globalizing Neoliberalism(s)? | Julia Elyachar | 10/8/14

In this meeting we discuss the potential uses and limitations of Marxist approaches to the contemporary theorization and study of neoliberal capitalism. While some have described neoliberalism as a modification in the mode of production, entailing new ideological categories and a retrenchment of class power, others have emphasized its non-unified character and its unique forms of governmentality, which have reconfigured relations between the state, economy, and citizen-subjects. This session hopes to engage and think with Marxist traditions by asking which central insights remain essential to account for neoliberal capitalism–from surplus value and capital accumulation to commodification and fetishism–and whether new analytical tools are required to grasp changes in contemporary capitalist power relations. This interdisciplinary dialogue may consider the distinctive elements of neoliberalism such as financialization, human capital, economization, and entrepreneurialism.

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Rhetoric and interdisciplinary graduate program in Critical Theory. A scholar of historical and contemporary political theory, her most recent books are Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), The Power of Tolerance (with Rainer Forst, 2013), and Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015).

Michael Burawoy has studied industrial workplaces in different parts of the world — Zambia, Chicago, Hungary and Russia — through participant observation. Throughout his career he has engaged with Marxism, seeking to reconstruct it in the light of his research and more broadly in the light of historical challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley. She is the author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2005), a study of the making of “Asiatic racial form” through the interactions of naturalist literature and U.S. policy in an era of U.S. expansion across the Pacific. Currently she is working on a new project on Asian American literary formation after the 1960s and its relationship to the globalization of knowledge economies.

Richard Walker’s research is focused on economic geography, regional development, capitalism and politics, cities and urbanism, resources and environment, California, class and race. Professor Walker’s best known work is in economic geography, especially The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology and Industrial Growth (Blackwell, 1989), with Michael Storper – one of the most cited books in the field.

Introduction: William Callison, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, UC Berkeley. More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Neoliberalism and Marxist... | Brown, Burawoy, Lye, Walker | 11/12/14

The first full critical biography of Benjamin in any language, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard 2014) is the capstone of a twenty-year collaboration between scholars Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings on Walter Benjamin’s life, work, and critical legacy. The Program in Critical Theory brings them together with Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters for a discussion of the book’s implications for Benjamin scholarship. Critical Theory co-director Martin Jay moderates a conversation on the genesis of the project and the possibility of writing a “Benjaminian” biography.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

On Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life | Howard Eiland | 11/4/14

Policing of illegal markets has contributed significantly to the strengthening of international law as an institutional presence. Such policing efforts both mediate and contribute to anxieties related to globalization. They also generate other significant effects in international space–including the formation of a global demos that may lay the groundwork for greater levels of global regulation in the future. The implications of this dynamic are strikingly at odds with traditional liberal theories of governance and of internationalization, suggesting that the foundation for governance is not contractarian but security-based. This project considers particular instances of this phenomenon, such as the growing international legal framework against trafficking in persons. It suggests that cultural and historical conceptions of gender and sexuality may be informing how policing and punishment tactics engage with disparate, feminized, precarious labor markets in the globalized economy. (Thomas)

Chantal Thomas is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where she directs the Clarke Initiative for Law and Development in the Middle East and North Africa. Her scholarship focuses on the relationship between international law, political economy, and global social justice in a variety of contexts. With Joel Trachtman, she is the author of Developing Countries in the WTO Legal System (Oxford University Press 2009).

Saba Mahmood, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Disciplining the Global Social Body: Criminalization... | Chantal Thomas | 11/19/14

For his lecture “Foucault and Marx: A Disjunctive Synthesis?”, Étienne Balibar discusses connections and disjunctions between Michel Foucault and Karl Marx, using Foucault’s 1972 Collège de France lectures on La société punitive as an alternative lens for the question of “reproduction” and its relationship to class struggles. With Foucault and Marx as a starting point for a new confrontation, he also reconsiders the idea of “communism” today. Response by Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Foucault and Marx: A Disjunctive Synthesis | Etienne Balibar | 12/9/14


The Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference is the culminating event in a series of working group meetings and presentations on neoliberalism and biopolitics that are also organized by graduate students William Callison and Zachary Manfredi.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference | Banu Bargu, Response by Judith Butler | 2/27/15

The Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference is the culminating event in a series of working group meetings and presentations on neoliberalism and biopolitics that are also organized by graduate students William Callison and Zachary Manfredi. 

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference | Michel Feher, Response by Albena Azmanova | 2/27/15

The Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference is the culminating event in a series of working group meetings and presentations on neoliberalism and biopolitics that are also organized by graduate students William Callison and Zachary Manfredi.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference | Étienne Balibar | 2/28/15

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference | Bernard Harcourt, Response by Jonathan Simon | 2/27/15

Often defined as “presentism,” the regime of historicity of the beginning of the twenty-first century posits a kind of perpetual present, absorbing in itself both past and future. It corresponds with a neoliberal ethos that eternizes the current economic order and condemns any form of collective action. It avoids any critical elaboration of the past and promotes its reification (the “realms of memory”), neutralizing at the same time all its potentialities for a recollection oriented towards a political action in the present. Thus, in contrast with the two preceding centuries, which were shaped by the impact of the French and Russian Revolutions, the twenty-first century has begun under the sign of the eclipse of utopias. The disappearance of a visible “horizon of expectation” has generated a charged memory of the past century as a time of violence, totalitarianism and genocide, encapsulated by the image of their victims. The commemorations of May 8, 1945—the anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of the Sétif massacre in Algeria—are the mirror of three main spaces (entangled and not always geographically separated) that define the memory landscape of our global age: a Western space shaped by the remembrance of the Holocaust transformed into a “civil religion” of liberal democracy; an Eastern European space dominated by the legacy of Communism; and a postcolonial space exhuming imperial atrocities (from slavery to colonialism). The common feature of these mnemonic realms is their selective character that, focusing almost exclusively on victims, forgets the vanquished and rejects any idea of collective agency: antifascism, revolution, and anti-imperialism disappear from the history of the last two centuries. Between cultural industry and neoliberal Lebensführung, the legacy of past struggles becomes a kind of Marrano memory.

Enzo Traverso is a historian specializing in contemporary Europe with a focus on intellectual history of the twentieth century in a comparative perspective. He studied at the University of Genoa, Italy, and received his Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1989). He specializes in contemporary Europe, focusing on intellectual history of the twentieth century in a comparative perspective. Before coming to Cornell, he was a professor of political science at the University Jules Verne of Picardy, France, and a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He has also been visiting professor at several European as well as Latin American Universities. His publications include The Origins of Nazi Violence (The New Press, 2003); Fire and Blood: The European Civil War (Verso, 2016); The End of Jewish Modernity: History of a Conservative Turn (Pluto Press, 2016); Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2016).

Presentism: The Politics of Memory in the Age of Neoliberalism | Enzo Traverso | 9/14/16

Are the analytical tools of the past adequate to identify and assess what we perceive as the revival of fascistic tendencies today? My contention is that most academic and non-academic efforts to denounce contemporary forms of fascism fail to come to terms with the structural roots of the problem. Critical theory has never contented itself with describing surface appearance—and there’s no reason why it should today. If history is valuable for understanding fascism, it is not because it enables us to describe or define what happened, but rather because it allows us to deduce from a specific combination of structures and elements the effects that similar constellations are likely to produce today. This is why I prefer to follow not classical theories of fascism from left to right, but the path opened up by Hannah Arendt’s study of the origins of the totalitarian regimes. Arendt does not fall into the historiographic trap that establishes positivistic causalities. Nor does she overstate the importance of intellectual traditions or ideologies. Her concern is rather with the structural conditions of possibility of total domination. I point out four novel attributes of power that can be detected in Arendt’s study, and that run like a red thread in such a way as to enable us not only to identify fascistic as well as totalitarian trends irrespective of ideological and historiographic differences, but also to criticize them. These attributes, namely limitlessness, self-referentiality, perpetual motion, and the propensity to produce superfluous bodies, while being exacerbated under totalitarian conditions, nevertheless precede them. If we concede that not all totalitarianisms need to be fascist, but that all fascisms tend towards totalitarianism, we have good reason to believe that the typology of power that can be deduced from Arendt’s analysis can help us see what specific features of the present social order made the re-emergence of fascism highly probable. The point is to distill from Arendt’s elaboration of the possible connections between imperialism and totalitarianism various social dispositions that would enable us to see whether the gesture could be repeated today, but this time between neoliberalism and new fascisms.

Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory at Boğazici University. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Paris VII in 1999. Her work focuses on collective agency, ethics, and public space. She has carried out extensive research on the transformation of the conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement, with particular emphasis on space as a vector of relationality. She collaborated with Joost Jongerden to edit the special issue of The Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies on the spatial dimensions of the Kurdish question in Turkey. She has also published several theoretical articles and book chapters on Hannah Arendt’s political thought and subjectivity, in particular, “The Agent Is the Void! From the Subjected Subject to the Subject of Action,” in Rethinking Marxism (2005), and “Conflict, ‘Commun-ication’ and the Role of Collective Action in the Formation of Public Spheres” in Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa (edited by Seteney Shami, SSRC Publications, 2009). She is the co-editor of Rhetorics of Insecurity: Belonging and Violence in the Neoliberal Era (with Marcial Godoy-Anativia, New York University Press, 2013), The Kurdish issue in Turkey: A Spatial Perspective (with Joost Jongerden, London/New York, Routledge, 2015), and Vulnerability in Resistance: Politics, Feminism, Theory (with Judith Butler and Leticia Sabsay, Duke University Press, 2016).

Co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Exploratory Notes on New Fascisms | Zeynep Gambetti | 3/19/18

Speaker(s): Professor Nikolas Rose | This talk considers what it means to approach psychology as a 'social' science in a specific sense - that is to say it sketches out an approach to the analysis of the part that psychology - its languages, techniques, forms of expertise, self-technologies - played across the twentieth century in the development of social-welfare rationalities and technologies of government. Copyright (c) Mon, 5 Feb 2007 18:30:00 GMT

Psychology as Social Science [Audio]

This is the first of three UC Berkeley campus events with Veroónica Gago. She also delivered a lecture and facilitated a seminar while on campus as an ICCTP visiting scholar. 

“Neoliberalism” has become the name for mainstream political economy since 1990: a characterization used by many of this economy’s detractors and sometimes by its proponents. In their work, Wendy Brown and Verónica Gago encourage us to go beyond this popularized understanding, in which neoliberalism is reduced to an economic doctrine of deregulation and austerity. Brown and Gago’s work focuses on the neoliberal regimes’ political implications for the “demos” or democracy. This conversation will engage with neoliberalism in a global frame. Gago’s work focuses on Latin America and draws on a Deleuzian framework, while Brown’s focuses on the Euro-Atlantic world and is informed by a Foucauldian perspective. Taken together, Brown and Gago’s approaches reveal how neoliberalism tends to undo established forms of democratic functioning and organizing from above, while also opening up new democratic spaces and allowing for the emergence of a popular anti-neoliberalism from below.

Verónica Gago, Professor, Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina and Universidad de Buenos Aires, Visiting Scholar, International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, teaches Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is also Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Gago is the author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Tinta Limón 2014, Duke University Press, 2017) and of numerous articles published in journals and books throughout Latin America, Europe and the US. She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones, and she is now a member of Ni Una Menos.

Wendy Brown, Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley, works on the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory and theories of contemporary capitalism.  She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies.  In recent years, her scholarship has focused on neoliberalism and the political formations to which it gives rise.

Co-sponsored by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Verónica Gago and Wendy Brown in Conversation | 9/20/18

This is the second of three UC Berkeley campus events with Verónica Gago. While on campus, she also participated in a conversation with Wendy Brown and hosted a seminar on the International Feminist Strikes of 2017 and 2018.

In Latin America, the meaning of neoliberalism remains contested, and debates on neoliberalism are ongoing. Complicating previous diagnoses, current feminist movements in the region have proposed new definitions grounded in concrete struggles. These have led to a rethinking of neoliberalism from below: an effort to rework the programs introduced by so-called “progressive” governments. The new definitions of neoliberalism have also spurred debates on the horizons of radical possibility open to an anti-neoliberalism produced in and through struggle.

Response by Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley

Verónica Gago teaches Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is also Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Gago is the author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Tinta Limón 2014, Duke University Press, 2017) and of numerous articles published in journals and books throughout Latin America, Europe and the US. She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones, and she is now a member of Ni Una Menos.

Leslie Salzinger is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. She got her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and and Boston College. She is an ethnographer, focused on gender, feminist theory, economic sociology, and neoliberalism. Much of her research has focused on Latin America. Her primary theoretical interests lie in the cultural constitution of economic processes, and in the creation of subjectivities within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories, analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production. Her current work in progress, Model Markets: Peso Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.” Her work on the role of masculinity in the evolution of contemporary global capitalism across sites from both projects is encapsulated in the 2016 essay “Re-Marking Men: Masculinity as a Terrain of the Neoliberal Economy.” In addition to the Sociology Department, Professor Salzinger is affiliated with Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory.

Co-sponsored by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Anti-Neoliberal Feminism: A Reading From Within Present Struggles | Verónica Gago | 9/24/18

Howard Gardner, professor at the Harvard Ed School, reflects on his academic "greatest hits" and shares insight on where he does his best thinking.

Howard Gardner's Greatest Hits | Harvard Graduate School of Education

David Pilgrim - A Critical Realist Response to the DSM-5 (April 2013)

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) was established in 2013 by UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Sciences: Division of Arts and Humanities with a mission to support the programming and development of several dynamic interdisciplinary research units in the humanities and social sciences.

Currently CICI serves The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley, three programs led by a highly diverse community of 200 faculty, advisors, scholars and graduate students from nearly 30 campus departments and schools.