“All That is Solid Melts into Aerial Karate: Environmentality, Predictive Analytics, and the Banal Beyond”

This talk will use a particular example drawn from contemporary predictive data analytics to address an issue that Michel Foucault raised briefly about ‘environmentality’ toward the end of his 1978–79 seminar on The Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault sees—in a futural glimpse of where biopolitics is already heading—that  “the technology to be employed is not discipline-normalization, but action on the environment ... modifying the terms of the game, not the players’ mentality.” Gregory will explore how we might understand this whole field modulation of bodies and territories as a chief aim of predictive analytics: engaging ‘the banal beyond’ of an aggregative nonconsciousness with the mimetic lures of non-sensuous similarity.