Abstract
This chapter starts off with distinguishing in what ways the contemporary call for transparency is not a perpetuation of the principle of publicity, but marks a different paradigm. Among the dispositives which address this call for transparency, and which will be subsequently analyzed, one stands out in particular: algorithmic governmentality. This concept, which has been developed by Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy in previous works and has been taken up in the debate, can be easily misunderstood. The target of algorithmic governmentality is not the individual subject, but the relations. This approach of algorithmic governmentality and the specific ontology it implements will be made with the help of Gilbert Simondon’s ontology of relations. But with this nuance: algorithmic governmentality also leads to an individualization of relations.
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Notes
- 1.
Directive 98/34/CE of the European Parliament and Council.
- 2.
On this point, a comparison between legal acts of qualification and new practices of definition that seek to normalize the real needs to be urgently undertaken.
- 3.
- 4.
This restraint can be seen as a quest to govern without governing, an idea the origins of which I attempted to unearth in my book Gouverner sans gouverner. Une archéologie politique de la statistique (2009).
- 5.
Communication of the Commission to the European Council, “Integration of Environmental Aspects into European Standardisation.”
- 6.
While this is not tragic in and of itself—all beings, and not only human beings, have always benefited from the correlations that run through them—it is nonetheless important to underline how certain correlations, such as the one that links a certain rate of public debt to a decrease in growth (Reinhart and Rogoff ), can be dangerous depending on the lessons that are drawn from them. In any case, and I will come back to this later, it is urgent to no longer be satisfied with this sufficiency of correlations.
- 7.
Even though these conventions are never questioned or debated.
- 8.
The word “relation” is meant in the rawest and least affected sense of the term, by which data is qualified. It is used only to indicate an operation linking a to b while ignoring what lies behind the two terms. As we will show, the whole strength of algorithmic governmentality lies in its ability to “monadologize” this relation, to the point that it can no longer grasp the becoming that is the relation.
- 9.
Muriel Combes, Simondon. Individu et collectivité (1999), was also of great help in our framing of Simondon .
- 10.
Simondon dedicates several pages to the dangers of a loss of reality implied by the subjectivist and probabilistic nature of contemporary physics.
- 11.
For a nuanced commentary of the Austin /Derrida /Searle debate see R. Moati , Derrida/Searle. Déconstruction et langage ordinaire (2009).
- 12.
The reader may also refer to the consequences I draw from this debate in “Insulte et droit post-souverain” (2015: 120–125).
- 13.
This conventionalization of the performative—which completely incorporates the saying (illocutionary) into the doing instead of seeing the action as unfolding the saying with the perlocutionary latitude it allows—is certainly a specific theoretical understanding of the performative, but it is also the encounter of several sovereign dynamics: the hailing of the subject, of the subject subjected to the hailing (and whose sovereignty is denied), the State which controls language and confirms the hailing by giving in to the fear of the unknown future of words. It is nothing else than a certain face of the law, thought in terms of sovereignty, that is defined in this manner.
- 14.
There is nothing tragic about this realization. It intends rather to open up new potentialities for becoming a subject within algorithmic governmentality, potentialities which necessarily rely on the ability to alter the repetitions that ensure government’s performativity.
Works Cited
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———. 2015. Insulte et droit post-souverain. Multitudes 59.
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Berns, T. (2018). Not Individuals, Relations: What Transparency Is Really About. A Theory of Algorithmic Governmentality. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_12
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