In response to growing concerns of bias, discrimination, and unfairness perpetuated by algorithmic systems, the datasets used to train and evaluate machine learning models have come under increased scrutiny. Many of these examinations have focused on the contents of machine learning datasets, finding glaring underrepresentation of minoritized groups. In contrast, relatively little work has been done to examine the norms, values, and assumptions embedded in these datasets. In this work, we conceptualize machine learning datasets as a type of informational infrastructure, (...) and motivate a genealogy as method in examining the histories and modes of constitution at play in their creation. We present a critical history of ImageNet as an exemplar, utilizing critical discourse analysis of major texts around ImageNet’s creation and impact. We find that assumptions around ImageNet and other large computer vision datasets more generally rely on three themes: the aggregation and accumulation of more data, the computational construction of meaning, and making certain types of data labor invisible. By tracing the discourses that surround this influential benchmark, we contribute to the ongoing development of the standards and norms around data development in machine learning and artificial intelligence research. (shrink)

In October 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would not participate in a $17 billion ‘WaterFix’ plan to remake California’s water conveyance system by drilling two massive tunnels und...

Our work offers a new answer to a growing theoretical and practical demand within diverse domains of investigation by redefining the concept of political action. It grounds and elucidates some of the manifestations of a distinctive mode of the political. Its regulative idea is that of the assemblage. The overall aim of this volume is to show that the political assemblage should be productively distinguished from both the limiting concepts of proceduralist and identitarian politics. One can broadly define proceduralist politics (...) as being grounded in autonomous individuals pursuing their own self-interests under the standardized rules of the political game. Identitarian politics is a mode of communitarian... (shrink)

This article analyzes the emergence of a political rationality of groundwater in contemporary California. It contrasts a new government of nature that we call a ‘political physics of vital processes’, operative in the case of the Orange County Water District, with juridical and biopolitical rationalities of groundwater governance. To do so, we propose a genealogical account grounded in a reading of a key concept in Aristotle’s first book of Politics. The case is analyzed along the axes of subjectivity, space, and (...) temporality, opening to a novel way of conceptualizing the relation between power and nature. (shrink)

La notion de déprise joue un rôle central dans le traitement de la subjectivité chez Michel Foucault. Notre objectif est d’établir que cette notion ne peut pas être réduite à une économie du soi, comme il est communement admis par les commentateurs de son oeuvre. Dans ce sens, il faudrait la distinguer à la fois du souci de soi et de la pratique de la sagesse. De manière positive, il s’agit de montrer que la déprise joue plutôt comme modalité politique (...) de désubjectivation. L’analyse de la stultitia chez Sénèque nous permettra de montrer que la déprise est investie non pas comme modalité de subjectivation, mais comme pratique de disqualification de soi. (shrink)

Chez les commentateurs de l’oeuvre de Michel Foucault, le concept de sujet est communément analysé en termes de processus historiques de subjectivation. Contrairement à ce type d’analyse, l’enjeu de ce travail est de montrer l’émergence d’une problématique de la désubjectivation à partir de la notion foucaldienne de déprise de soi. Il s’agit de montrer d’abord que cette notion aménage à la fois la dispersion et l’effacement de l’auteur. Deuxièmement, la conceptualisation de la déprise sera traitée à travers l’analyse de pratiques (...) spécifiques d’écriture. Enfin, nous verrons comment la déprise de soi est investie dans le champ de l’identité subjective. (shrink)

During the afternoon of December 21, 1989, in Bucharest, a mass of demonstrators gather in a public square at the request of Nicolae Ceausescu, then president of Romania. In the previous days, students had shaken the country by taking to the streets in protest in the city of Timisoara. These mass protests had been preceded that year by a wave of other social movements that took place in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Now in a broadcast from the (...) balcony of the square, Ceausescu tries to reassure the population while making distressed appeals to preserve the unity of the political regime in the country. In the front row of the assembled crowd... (shrink)

I will begin with the end. Marcel Hénaff's sudden death in June 2018 opened a space of silence and surely did not prepare me to speak or write publicly about his passing. In his unexpected death, as a friend, Marcel left me with a problem. His death is now my problem. Yet, death is not a persistent question in Marcel Hénaff's thinking. At the very least, I will start by positing here that in his last book, Violence dans la raison? (...) Conflit et cruauté, both death and cruelty are enigmas.I will now attempt to elucidate the relationship between these two concepts by articulating two enigmas of death.First enigma: We usually say that in death, one deserves to eternally rest in peace.1 This claim is not totally... (shrink)