A long time ago, as a hopeful undergrad, I bought a copy of each of Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of" books. As a young, white, middle-class man, something about the taxonomic certainty of the titles appealed, embodying as they did a sort of imperial drive to categorise. Dividing up European history into four ages - of … Continue reading Thoughts on Thompson
I’ve been sitting on a new version of my ‘The Book I’m Writing’ post for a few weeks because I’m not super happy with how it’s turned out. The guts of the post is that, having read Foucault, I’d like to have each chapter talk about the ‘birth’ (read: contingent construction) of an idea that … Continue reading A review of Melissa Gregg’s “Counterproductive”
Having finished the two Foucault lecture series I wanted to read, I’ve moved on to critique of Foucault. Gentle critique, it must be said, in that the book I’m now reading is Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller’s Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Rose and Miller have been working in the governmentality … Continue reading On the Neoliberal employment bargain
Both ‘work’ and ‘job’ are key words today. Neither had its prominence three hundred years ago. Both are still untranslatable from European languages into many others. Most languages never have one single word to designate all activities that are considered useful. Some languages happen to have a word for activities demanding pay. This word usually … Continue reading Words matter
I want to pick up where last week’s post left off, because there were a few more titbits from Birth of Biopolitics that will have bearing on what I’m trying to do. After he makes the claim that Marx’s theory of labour power rendered the worker inert, Foucault moves on to talk about the idea … Continue reading Foucault, Arendt, Human Capital, and Consumption.
So, after my last post, I’ve been given the green light to keep publishing on the blog. It was all a bit of a formality in the end, but given how much synergy there is between the day to day of my job and the stuff I’ve been reading on Governmentality, it was a worthwhile … Continue reading Foucault on Work
My boss recently told me that in order to do my job I’d need to take work home with me. This is not the first time this has happened, but this time was different. I work in sales, and what my boss was trying to tell me was that to generate leads I needed to … Continue reading Discipline and Governance in the Neoliberal Workplace
Performance Anxiety 