James Livingston’s talk, “Fuck Work” is now online! Livingston gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
James Livingston says Fuck Work. That was the original title of the book that now appears as No More Work: Why Full Employment Is A Bad Idea (2016). For centuries we have believed that work is where we build character, and that the labor market allocates incomes more or less rationally. These beliefs have become delusions. What then? Why do we hold fast to full employment as the cure for what ails us, and retain faith in the labor market’s efficiencies?
James Livingston teaches History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. He is the author of Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (2011).
David Golumbia’s talk, “Mirowski As Critic of the Digital” is now online! Golumbia gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
Although Philip Mirowski’s work has been profoundly influential in fields as diverse as economics, history of science, political theory, and even literary studies, it is less well-known in the emerging complex of fields which are sometimes referred to as “digital studies,” meaning all the fields that directly analyze the social, cultural, and political-economic impact of the computer. This is unfortunate enough from the perspective of political economy, since Mirowski’s writings on neoliberalism resonate strongly with some of the most incisive political-economic work in digital studies. It is even more unfortunate when Mirowski’s work is seen at a larger scale, wherein he emerges as one of the most serious thinkers anywhere regarding the myriad impacts of the computer, especially but not only on intellectual practice over the last hundred or so years. From his writings on the neoliberal grounding of concepts like “open science,” to his recent “fictionalist” account of the function of information in economics, and especially in his thorough and uncompromising analysis of the computer and its metaphorics across a variety of disciplines in Machine Dreams, Mirowski’s work constitutes an unmatched source of critical thought that deserves to be far more widely disseminated among scholars of the digital.
David Golumbia is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (2016), and The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009).
Chris Connery’s talk, “China, Neoliberal Constellations and the Left” is now online! Connery gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 17, 2017.
Chris Connery is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Donald E. Pease’s talk, “The Cultural Fantasy-Work of Neoliberalism” is now online! Pease gave this talk at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
Political commentators have adopted contradictory interpretive frames – the end of neoliberalism tout court, the end of progressive neo-liberalism, the emergence of quintessential neo-liberalism, the continuation of neo-liberalism by populist, or fascist, or ethno-nationalist means – to describe the significance of Donald Trump’s election. In his talk, Pease borrows conceptual metaphors and quasi-juridical criteria from Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis get to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown to sort out and critically evaluate these sundry accounts.
Donald E. Pease is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth, where he is also the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities. He is an authority on 19th- and 20th- century American literature and literary theory and founder/director of the Futures of American Studies Institute. He has written numerous books, including most recently Theodor Seuss Geisel (2010), and over 100 articles on figures in American and British literature. He is editor of The New Americanist series, which has transformed the field of American Studies.
Annie McClanahan’s talk, “Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late” is now online! This lecture was given as part of b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh on March 18, 2017.
This talk attempts to think critically about the way neoliberalism functions as a periodizing term in cultural and literary studies. It explores the representation of so-called “neoliberal subjectivity”—particularly its association with an ostensibly rich individualism optimistic (if “cruelly” so) about its own entrepreneurial human capital—and argues that this characterization misses what is most quantitatively and qualitatively new about the present. By looking at the way the university has become a privileged site of these critiques, McClanahan argues that accounts of the “neoliberalization” of higher education depend on a historically inaccurate story about the university’s supposedly non-economic past, and also misunderstand the affective and material condition of students today. Turning instead to other sites—the payday loan shop, the homeless encampment, and the prison—she argues for a reframing of how we understand the subjects proper to our current historical epoch.
Annie McClanahan is Assistant Professor of English at UC Irvine. She is the author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture(2016). She has previously been a System Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Faculty Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies. Her research interests include contemporary American literature and culture, economic thought and history, Marxist theory, and theory of the novel.
Frank Pasquale’s talk, “Relocating the Knowledge Problem: Preserving Professional Judgment in an Era of Metric Power” is now online! This talk was given as part of b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh, on March 17, 2017.
Could a robot do your job? For many business leaders, professions like medicine, education, and law are relics, destined to be replaced by some combination of software, artificial intelligence, and Uber-ized, precarious labor. But this disruptive vision of robotization is based on a naïve view of the quality of existing data, and the nature of progress in these fields. Preserving judgment and autonomy in professional work is critical both for humane labor policies, and improving quality in these fields.
Frank Pasquale researches the law of big data, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. He has testified before or advised groups ranging from the Department of Health and Human Services, the House Judiciary Committee, the Federal Trade Commission, and directorates-general of the European Commission. He is the author of The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015), which has been translated into Chinese, Korean, French, and Serbian. The book developed a social theory of reputation, search, and finance. He has served on the NSF-sponsored Council on Big Data, Ethics, & Society, and the program committees of the Workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency and the NIPS Symposium on Machine Learning and the Law. Frank has co-authored a casebook on administrative law and co-authored or authored over 50 scholarly articles. He co-convened the conference “Unlocking the Black Box: The Promise and Limits of Algorithmic Accountability in the Professions” at Yale University. He is now at work on a book tentatively titled Laws of Robotics: The Future of Professionalism in an Era of Automation (under contract to Harvard University Press).
Philip Mirowski’s talk, “Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late” is now online! This was the keynote lecture at b2’s conference, Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, at the University of Pittsburgh, March 17, 2017.
Critics and analysts of neoliberalism seem to miss one of its key tenets: that markets are better than people when it comes to thinking. This talk explores the consequences of this blind spot for modern Marxists, for ‘fake news’, and for the utopia of ‘open science.’
Philip Mirowski is Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He is also Director of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values. He is the author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013) and ScienceMart: Privatizing American Science (2011), along with four other books focused on the intersection of economics and science.
Carey Balaban’s talk, “Operationalizing Basic Research and Scholarship: A System-of-Systems Approach for the Militarization of Knowledge” is now online! This talk opened b2’s conference on The Militarization of Knowledge at the University of Pittsburgh, November 13, 2015.
Dr. Balaban is a Professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology, Neurobiology, Communication Science & Disorders, and Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the Director of the Center for National Preparedness.
Julian Bourg’s talk, “Of Partisans and Paranoid Experts: How We Came to Think About Terrorism,” was part of boundary 2’s recent conference on The Militarization of Knowledge at the University of Pittsburgh. Bourg is an Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean of the Core at Boston College.
