Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d'é mancipation

Abstract

Algorithmic governmentality is characterized primarily by the following dual movement: a) abandoning all forms of "tscale", "benchmark", or hierarchy, in favour of an immanent normativity evolving in real time, from which a "dual statistics" of the world emerges and which seems to do away with the old hierarchies devised by normal or average people; and b) avoiding all confrontation with individuals, whose opportunities for subjectification have become increasingly scarce. This dual movement seems to be the fruit of contemporary statistics' focus on relations. We seek to assess the extent to which these two aspects of the "algorithmic governmentality" thereby outlined, with its sole reliance on relations, could facilitate, first, processes of individuation through relations (Simondon) and, second, the emergence of new forms of life through the plane of immanence overtaking the plane of organization (Deleuze-Guattari). Through this comparison with the main contemporary philosophies of relations, it thus appears that thinking about the evolution and processes of individuation through relations necessarily pertains to the "disparate" a heterogeneity of orders of magnitude, a multiplicity of regimes of existence - which algorithmic governmentality precisely incessantly suppresses by enclosing (digitized) reality on itself. Algorithmic governmentality tends rather to foreclose such emancipation perspectives by centring individuation processes on the subjective monad.