ABSTRACT FOR THE CONFERENCE ON GENERAL ORGANOLOGY.

THE CO-INDIVIDUATION OF MINDS, BODIES, SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS AND TECHNÈ.

20-21-22 NOVEMBER 2014, UNIVERSITY OF KENT, CANTERBURY, UK

Page 1 / 2

Data Without (Any)Body? Algorithmic governmentality as hyper-disadjointment and the role of

Law as technical organ.
Antoinette Rouvroy
The Big Data mythology is not a cause but a symptom of a 'passion for the real' - not for the realism
representation, but the real as such - the ambition of reaching the world without any kind of mediation
(except virtually transparent, almost naturalized computers), bypassing language itself, emancipated
from all kinds of truth regimes (Foucault), from all kinds of tests, from all kinds of - even statistical -
norms (the average man, the normal man). The advent of 'data behaviorism' (which is also a radical
return to positivism), appears as a revenge of the plane of immanence, the advent of a body without
organs where the role of the body is eclipsed or taken over by data, closing the digital upon itself
through a recursive loop, and eroding the very idea of a situated point of view or perspective on the
world. In the Big Data mythology, the territory becomes its own map, a seismograph anticipating
fluctuations in a digital world where sign(al)s and things have become indistinguishable, and where
modelization performs its own designs. The dream of seamless shaping of the social by the (digital,
real time transcription of the) social itself, in the name of « reality » itself rather than in the name of
any antecedent social or legal norm, may appear to some people as a tempting alternative to political
government and the rule of law.
I have called « algorithmic government», a mode of government (structuration of possible fields of
thought and actions)
a) fed mostly with "raw data" (infra- personal signals, computable despite carrying no meaning by
themselves), and therefore invested with dreams of absolute immanence and objectivity (reliability
without truth);
b) operating through a systematic actualization and thus neutralization of what only exists as
potentiality or virtuality (preemption);
c) knowing (in)dividuals not as individual or collective persons endowed with (real or supposed)
capabilities of will and understanding, but merely as temporary aggregates of infra-personal data
which are exploitable at an industrial scale;
d) yet, affecting the infinitely indexable and profileable individuals by ways of alerts or stimuli (often
at a pre-conscious stage, in a rather haptic mode) generating reflex responses in an economy of
reputation, risk and opportunity (rather than of project).
Leading to an « hyper-operational » disadjointment, algorithmic government may cause radical
proletarisation – especially when personalization and profiling benefit private or public actors whose
interests are not aligned or are opposed with those of the moving segments of populations (in data
mining, patterns are moving all the time) personalized or profiled according to their consumption and
other behavioral propensities. But, in so far as this disadjointment also means that a lot remains
unaccounted for in algorithmic rationality, that there is a fundamental inadequation of the world to the
reality under which algorithmic governmentality pretends to subsume it (all that makes the singularity
of a life, the affects of people, their bodies which, according to Deleuze, are their ultimate reasons to
believe in the world they inhabit, the limitation of resources, of lifespan, duration, fatigue and
boredom,…), this disadjointment might also rather be invested as an occasion of « declosion »
(opening and eclosion, against all attempted enclosures) of the algorithmic rationality, or as an
occasion to re-introduce mediations allowing to render visible and dicible all that is silenced in the
algorithmic perceptual regime, and, first of all, the fact that we are bodies, flesh and blood (whereas –
in the indistinction between sign(al)s and things, the algorithmic perceptual regime has silenced this
trivial data). « Mettre l’homme dans la machine », following Guattari’s recommendation, might
amount to give agency to « the body-functions », including, in particular, the « body-limitations » in
curving the computational turn: duration (rather than real-time), limitation (rather than illimitation),
selectivity and situated points-of-views (rather than totality), etc. are incurving forces.
 ABSTRACT FOR THE CONFERENCE ON GENERAL ORGANOLOGY.
THE CO-INDIVIDUATION OF MINDS, BODIES, SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS AND TECHNÈ.
20-21-22 NOVEMBER 2014, UNIVERSITY OF KENT, CANTERBURY, UK

Page 2 / 2
Accounts of all these remains, of all these incurving inactualities – can be given through human
language in which one addresses or one is interpellated by (not one’s profiles, which make each of us
a multitude without others but) the others. Addresses or interpellations arise by necessity, because
there is a lack, because everything has not been foreseen for us. A virtue of the government by the law
– despite all the critiques which may reasonably be addressed to legal systems and how they operate in
practice - is that, having everything to do with juris-prudence, it is bent to stand in a « just » attitude
towards its own ignorance (its « outside », unlike government by algorithms) – the mechanisms of
legal presumptions, legal fictions, of judicial review, appeals, etc. do just that - and therefore organizes
for itself the conditions of its own hermeneutic critique and reappraisal of its own productions. But, of
course, the Law is one among many other possible mediations through which the share of irreducible
ignorance about what bodies could do – the puissance or potentialities of bodies - can be made to
count.