Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work theory The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Evaluative playgrounds Audit and government after neoliberalism

Evaluative playgrounds

Audit and government after neoliberalism

Dr. Will Davies

Assistant Professor, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies
4-5.30pm, Monday 11th February
Cowling Room, S2.77, Social Sciences Building

Neoliberalism depends on forms of audit and government, through which activity can be subjected to independent economic evaluation and critique. The epistemological crisis of neoliberalism consists of the collapse of the distance between auditor and audited, model and reality, in which the claims to ‘objectivity’ on the part of the evaluators are no longer tenable. But what can or might succeed this type of auditory or governmental gaze? This paper uses metaphors of ‘play’ to understand different ways in which relationships of judgement can be organised. It proposes the idea of the ‘playground’ – spaces in which agents freely assemble and interact, but have their behaviour constantly assessed for its sustainability – as a formal model for emerging modes of government. Emerging approaches to financial and behavioural regulation (such as macro-prudential regulation and happiness education) recognise the role of values and valuations within socio-economic systems; but they add a judgement as to how these values and valuations are affecting the system as a whole.