From ‘connecting the dots’ and finding ‘the needle in the haystack’ to predictive policing and data mining for counterinsurgency, security professionals have increasingly adopted the language and methods of computing for the purposes of prediction. Digital devices and big data appear to offer answers to a wide array of problems of (in)security by promising insights into unknown futures. This article investigates the transformation of prediction today by placing it within governmental apparatuses of discipline, biopower and big data. Unlike disciplinary and (...) biopolitical governmentality, we argue that prediction with big data is underpinned by the production of a different time/space of ‘between-ness’. The digital mode of prediction with big data reconfigures how we are governed today, which we illustrate through an analysis of how predictive policing actualizes between-ness as hotspots and near-real-time decisions. (shrink)

Since Foucault introduced the notion of biopolitics, it has been fiercely debated—usually in highly generalized terms—how to interpret and use this concept. This article argues that these discussions need to be situated, as biopolitics have features that do not travel from one site to the next. This becomes apparent if we attend to an aspect of biopolitics that has only received scant attention so far: the knowledge practices required to constitute populations as intelligible objects of government. To illustrate this point, (...) the article focuses on processes of biopolitical bordering: the delineation of the target population that is to be known via statistical practices. Drawing on the example of Estonia I show that methodological decisions involved in this work have important biopolitical implications as they affect the size and composition of the population, thus shaping the design of programmes of government aiming at its regulation. (shrink)

This article theorizes the biopolitical production of embodiment through a consideration of biopolitical metaphor. It is argued that much recent theoretical work on biopower fails to provide an adequate account of embodiment, and particularly the question of the habitualization of bodily experience. However, read through the lens of biopolitical metaphor, and drawing on the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, a dynamic account of the biopolitical shaping of bodily memory and embodied habit becomes possible. Moreover, it is argued that (...) a theory of biopolitical metaphor provides provocative openings for thinking together the recent discursively oriented work on biopower and other approaches associated with the affective turn, specifically around the problems of mimesis and supplement. New research directions are proposed, centered on common experiences of biopolitical domination among marginalized groups drawn from shared experiences of habit and embodiment. (shrink)