Foucault News

Colin Koopman, From Biopower to Infopower?: A Genealogy of One Aspect of Contemporary Politics

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Colin Koopman, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, spoke at Oregon State University on December 3rd, 2013. A wide number of contemporary political assemblages from mass surveillance to finance capitalism to big data suggest that we may be in the midst of new political conditions. Some have sought to conceptualize these assemblages in such terms as “the information society” or “new media culture” while others would amalgamate them as part of a hybrid beast named “neoliberalism”.

In his presentation, Koopman here argues for a different conceptualization of what is at stake for us today politically. His analysis is Foucaultian in that it focuses attention away from state capacities and institutional formations toward the problems internal to emergent modes of power (or the conduct of conduct). Building off of Michel Foucault’s analyses of biopower and adopting a methodological approach grounded in genealogy, Koopman calls for a new concept entitled infopower (specifying the intersection between information and power).

Colin Koopman is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research is primarily in, through, and on the philosophical traditions of Pragmatism and Genealogy, with an eye toward using these distinctive approaches to engage current issues in Political Philosophy broadly-construed.

With thanks to Dirk Felleman for this item