Contrivers' Review - #Datapolitik: An Interview With Davide Panagia

Contrivers' Review - #datapolitik: An Interview with Davide Panagia 11/14/17, 9(00 AM
#datapolitik: An Interview with Davide

Panagia
The use of Facebook advertising and fake Twitter accounts by Russian hackers to
influence the US election and infiltrate activist groups like Black Lives Matter are the
most recent and perhaps most dramatic demonstrations that algorithms, bots, and big
data are now at the foundation of our political milieu. These technologies help shape
the field of possible political organization and action, for better and worse. The
cultural and political theorist, Davide Panagia explores this situation through his
concept of #datapolitik. Panagia coined this term because he believes that we lack an
adequate critical vocabulary and theoretical tools to articulate the shifting nature of
politics today. For Panagia, the horizon of possible forms of political organization
and collective action has been transformed by the ubiquity of algorithms and the
reduction of political subjects to data points amenable to behavioral analysis and
control. In this interview with Contrivers Review editor alar Kseolu, Panagia
discusses both how the ever-growing governmental infrastructure of non-human
agents constrains our politics and how this same milieu of #datapolitik holds the
possibility of emergent forms of political organization and action, solidarity and
emancipation.
alar Kseolu: Recently you have proposed the concept of datapolitik (or
#datapolitik) and described it as an underappreciated form of modern political
power and the unique constellations of political forms available to our
contemporary techno-digital condition. Datapolitik seems to be in dialogue with
other relatively new concepts such as informational politics and algorithmic politics.
Could you, to start off, expound on what datapolitik broadly entails and why you
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have chosen for this particular variationpolitikinstead of the more common

politics?
Davide Panagia: First off, alar, let me thank you for getting in touch with me and
inviting me to do this interview. Its very generous of you to be interested in my work
which is very much in an early stage of development. And quite frankly, your
questions are inordinately helpful in giving me the opportunity to orient my thoughts
which are, as you suggest, in dialogue with many, many conversations and writings
appearing currently in both academic and non-academic spaces. You are absolutely
right, in this regard, to note the potential affinities of the term #datapolitik with other
kindred terms like informational politics and algorithmic politics. The fact of the
matter is that I draw quite substantially from people working with these other terms
and ideasespecially thinkers like Colin Koopman, Orit Halpern, Louise Amoore,
Jairus Victor Grove, Tiziana Teranova, Richard Grusin, Neal Thomas, Mika La-
Vaque Manty, Rita Raley, Brian Massumi, and Antoinette Rouvroy (amongst many
others) whose work on algorithmic governmentality (another term to add into the
mix) Ive recently discovered.
What these and other thinkers seem to be latching onto as an urgent task of political
thinking is the fact that our systems of governance are operated by non-human agents
who have the capacity not only to govern everyday life, but more crucially to make
autonomous decisions. These non-human, sovereign agents are the algorithmic
equations that animate us. This, it seems to me, is a concern that goes well beyond
the kind of analysis typically provided of the politics of social networkinganalyses
that rely on pre-established conceptions of both psychology, action, and sociality. In
other words the rise of #datapolitik to me means that our established critical
vocabularies, theories, and conceptual innovations are insufficient for the demands
posed by this ever growing governmental infrastructure of non-human agents that
possess an impressive degree of sovereignty over people.
For instance, it seems limiting to me to exclaim the scandal of neoliberal capital as a
symptom of our digital age. Of course neoliberal capital is complicit with the spread
of information networks. But thats hardly a compelling insight because its not clear
that the jaccuse directed at neoliberal capital does anything other than point to yet
another instance of exploitation. And once weve itemized yet another structure of
domination, what have we done? That is to say, are the various sophistications of
ideology-critique the best that our political thinking can do in this case? And are the
transformations of power, governance, and self under #datapolitik reducible to the
image of political thought that ideology-critique perpetuates?
What to me was exciting about many of the critical ventures that developed around
media and aesthetics in the twentieth century was the concerted effort on the part of
various thinkers to develop their political-theoretical positions in relation to the
specificity of technical media. Im thinking here of Benjamin and Kracauer on film,
Adorno on film and music, Foucault on spatial architectures, Derrida on reading and
writing, Butler on gender, and so on and so forth. Technical media in the cases of
these thinkers werent simply physical objects of investigation, they were dynamic
perceptual milieus that participated in the disposition of worlds. This is why I very
much prefer the term dispositif or dispositive when speaking of technical objects
rather than the term apparatus. And I prefer the term dispositif because I share
James Chandlers intuition about the Roman rhetorical sense of the dispositio of
technical media, which refers to how matter is disposed, how its component parts are
arranged, ordered, and organized.
That Roman rhetorical sense of dispositio is also at the heart of Foucaults own
notion of governmentality as the right disposition of things.
A dispositio regards the arrangement of peoples, things, and sensibilities and,

crucially, the limits of those arrangements and designations. In any case, what
happened in twentieth century critical thinking was the emergence and elaboration of
philosophical vocabularies that exposed the limitations of dispositifs, but also
showed the transformations of worlds that those same techno-mediatic dispositional
arrangements enliven. If you go back to the ideas innovated in the twentieth century,
it is truly stunning to see the extent to which technical media are implicated in the
development of ideas that today we typically take for rote as our terms of political
criticism.
I should note that I come to the work on #datapolitik as someone whose research thus
far studies the relationship of aesthetics and politics. Through such work, I have
come to a deep appreciation of the complicity of technical media with and in our
thinkingwhich is why #datapolitik for me presents an (urgent) opportunity to
develop new conceptual artifices and critical vocabularies that attempt to answer,
among other things, what are the different modes of political transformation in the
digital age. And rather than adapt critical vocabularies from other technical media
and transpose them upon our current scenarios, I think it is important that we exploit
and investigate the dynamics and limits of the most prevalent technical media of our
day. For me, these include the perceptual milieus enabled by the technical medium of
the algorithm, the ontology of the feedback loop, and the heterotopia of ubiquity.
So to get at the second part of your questionwhy the k in #datapolitik? In part,

this is a heuristic. When I started thinking about these issues, I wanted a term that
pressed upon me the political dimensions of the project of inquiry, but that in some
sense also distracted me from more conventional uses of the term politics for all of
the reasons I spell out above. There is to me something unique happening today that
definitely has a history, but that is also importantly different from the understandings
of power, governance, and humanness that have come before. So, the hashtag matters
to me because it signals the various tactics of ubiquity that current technologies
enable. And the k matters because it rehabilitates an older language of powerof
realpolitikprevalent in some corridors of history and political science
departments.
But to get back to what I was hinting at earlier, what is new to me about #datapolitik
is that it is a form of realpolitik of and by non-human agents. Thus it begs of us the
need to rethink our assumptions about the motivations of action in politics. The older
term realpolitik was designated to describe an account of politics that tried to
explain the actions of great statesmen who saw the accumulation of power through
territory and war as the motivational purpose of nation-states. So decisions were said
to be made on the basis of how to aggrandize power, territory, and domain.
#datapolitik is not that, in part because I dont think the anthropomorphism that
assumes states are rational actors fits here. There are other relational dynamics at
play. I hesitate to say this, but it feels as if that idea of the state is almost irrelevant to
#datapolitik in part because the algorithm is indifferent to the content of any identity
whether state, self, or nation. That is, what kind of a relation is interest when
non-sovereign agents (to abuse a term from Sharon Krauses book Freedom Beyond
Sovereignty) are developing domains and modalities of influence that help determine
political outcomes. In any case, I am currently exploring the idea that #datapolitik is
not a power of sovereignty but it is fundamentally a police power.
CK: One of the people you mentioned, Antoinette Rouvroy, chartsin a lecture
given in Amsterdam in 2013three dimensions that have been significantly and in
novel ways transformed by what she terms algorithmic governmentality:
knowledge production (becomes knowledge without truth), power exercise (becomes
power without authority), subjectivation (becomes personalization without subject).
You, too, seem to focus on roughly the same categories and map the current shifts in
a conceptual language that is reminiscent of Foucault. Could you indicate or perhaps
speculate to what extent #datapolitikin particular its non-human aspect and fairly
new techniques like the algorithmcan be grasped in a Foucaldian framework of
governmentality?
DP: Your intuition is right to the extent that, like Rouvroy, I am indebted to
Foucaults morphology of aesthetic and political sensibilities. And, like Rouvroy and
others, I also consider Gilbert Simondons work as important to the study of
#datapolitik. But for me its less the conceptual language that I find compelling in
these and many other thinkers (i.e., Deleuze, Rancire, Barad, Chamayou, Latour,
Massumi, Berlant, etc.), than the sites and emphases their work generates, and
(especially with Foucault) the relevance of the micropolitical practices that operate in
the age of the algorithm. Foucault didnt begin with concepts but began with
practices that were attached to institutions and their forms. And here, an institution is
not necessarily an established construct but, again, a series of activities and
sensibilities that operate in more or less identifiable and consistent ways, though not
always as consistently as wed like. I like to call such a mode of analysis an affective
pragmatics. It is affective because it is interested in dispositions, perceptibilities, and
sensibilities; it is pragmatic because it is interested in how all of these things work
together and apart.
As Ive suggested, with my exploration of #datapolitik Im less interested in issues of

governmentality per se than of governmentalitys service animal, the police. And
again, Im not interested in the police as a specific entity that interpolates, but as a set
of operations that regulate circulation through space and time. These operations
include modes of thinking (i.e., cause and effect, teleology), technologies (i.e., the
cybernetic feedback loop), practices (i.e., predation, tracking, and capture), attitudes
(i.e., safety and security), and beliefs (i.e., an immanent threat or potential
catastrophe). And so its undoubtedly true that whenever we do any kind of
conceptual work we do so by invoking an archive of referents: authors, terms,
concepts, and intelligibilities. But the question for me isnt so much the potential
repetition that comes with ones occupation of an archive, but the people, places,
events, and activities that ones own specific displacing and disordering of an archive
put on display. The task of intellectual indebtedness for me is one of the
transmediation of archive, or what Miriam Hansen refers to as the heaping of broken
images that is an an-archive.
This is also why I remain committed to David Humes psychology of impressions.
I want to offer opportunities for giving attention to things, events, forces, and
collectivities that have, as of yet, been underprivileged in our thinking about the
relation of politics and digital objects. And the way that I wish to proceed is to look
at how the development and application of cybernetics today, its history, the
motivations behind its emergence, its psychologies, and so forth, are impacting
everyday life and, especially given my own political sensibilities, the ways in which
we think about political organization and action, solidarity and emancipation. This is
why Ive begun to articulate #datapolitik as a police power, to the extent that it is a
coordination of technologies and sensibilities oriented towards the cynegetic
predation of actions that take shape as information or data-points, or what we
otherwise call clicks. This idea came to me by accident.
In the fall of 2015 I was reading a great deal about cybernetics, thanks in part to Orit
Halperns important book, Beautiful Data.
Its that book that sent me to read the works of Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, and
W. Ross Ashby. Now, one thing you must realize about me is this: I am innumerate.
In fact, I came to political theory because I dropped a Calculus class in my freshman
year in college and so needed to pick up a credit for the year so that I might graduate
on schedule. I decided to take an intro course in Political Science taught by a legal
and political theorist, and the rest is pretty much history. This to say that when I read
the cyberneticists I focus on the way in which their description of what mathematical
calculations are apt to do inform their motivations of what they imagine possible.
At the same timeand heres the accident part of the an-archive storyI began
reading an important book by the philosopher Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement,
that many colleagues had told me I had to read. The book is a phenomenology of
solitary confinement punishment in the American prison-industrial complex. Its an
extraordinary work that everyone should read, even though the tenor and site of the
work is an incredibly demoralizing topic. But Guenther is the most hopeful and
inspirational of writers and she refuses to deny her readers the vitalism necessary to
engage the horrors of the practices she describes by being merely disenchanting. I
never thought a book on solitary confinement and social death could be so uplifting!
Its one of the beautiful things about the tradition of phenomenologyit really is
committed to embodied life.
Moving on. In the book there are a series of chapters devoted to behavior
modification, a topic and a literature I hadnt entertained for some time. And
Guenther goes back to Merleu-Pontys early work, The Structure of Behavior, and
shows its relevance to the ideas of behavioral psychology behind solitary
confinement. More importantly for my immediate purposes, however, is that the
connection to Merleau-Ponty struck a note as I was also reading of and about
Simondons critiques of Aristotelian hylomorphism in his engagements with
cybernetics, and his theory of individuation. Simondon, of course, was a student of
Merleau-Ponty (amongst others) and cybernetics is an offshoot of I. Pavlov and B.F.
Skinners behaviorism. If you combine all of these messy strands together, you arrive
at the possible idea that what were dealing with when we consider something called
#datapolitik is a collaboration of sensibilities for behavior modification that emerges
and derives from a set of techniques, practices, and affections for capturing things in
motion that we might otherwise call police sensibilities.
Of course, this should be of no surprise given that cybernetics is one of the many
military technologies that find their way into everyday life. And as Weiner and
Ashby make clear, cybernetics is a technology that adopts a recursive calculus of
repetition for the taming of difference so as to enable the infinite predictability (and
thus availability) of a moving target. In fact, its impossible for me now to read Gilles
Deleuzes Difference and Repetitiona work that has always been part of my
intellectual lexiconas anything other than a retort to cybernetics, and its equally
impossible for me to consider the turn to affect that Deleuzes work procures
anything other than a response to behaviorisms confidence that experience is
representable, identifiable, and trackable.
Cybernetic innovations involve the application of technical objects (i.e., algorithms)

for the tracking and capture of difference, pure and simple. Their field of application
is undetermined, because ubiquitous, and they work on exactly the same basis and
principal that Skinners approach to the study of human action does; namely, the idea
that an action is independent of any content, or thick description of the human
essence (like soul, or an identity, or a will), because what counts is automatic
stimulus (i.e., the clicking of the like button on Facebook) and not the biography of
the agent. And this attitude towards actions automaticity also has a historyand that
history is an enlightenment inheritance of post-humanism that finds progenitors in
people like Descartes (of course), but more dramatically in the French philosophe La
Mettrie who attempted to defend atheism (and thus deny the concept of the soul) by
imagining the possibility that the human animal is simply an animated machine.
Skinner confirmed the autonomic nature of animation when he learned how a
salamanders tail would move when pricked, even after it had been cut off from the
salamanders body. And he (as well as everyone else) had had practice with the idea
of human automata given that automata were amongst the most prevalent form of
entertainment throughout the modern period,
especially if you consider the fact that cinema is a ubiquitous technology that
animates humanoids on a screen automatically.
Like I said, its a big mess, its an an-archive; but what Im sensing is a way of
describing what (today) we experience on an everyday basisthat is, the
development and implementation and adoption of behavioral systems of control that
track and capture movement on a micro-temporal basis. And this to me sounds a lot
like a police sensibility of cynegetics and predation, and I want to learn more about
it. And I dont know (yet) if my learning will produce a different kind of critique
altogether, as you suggest, or not. In part because, as I mentioned earlier, its
inordinately difficult for me to conceive of critique in light of the fact of ubiquity and
in light of our unwillingness (or, perhaps, the impossibility) of giving up on our
collective technical existence. As I see it, critique is always based on technology; it is
responsive to systems that produce things: the printing press, industrialization,
photography, etc. And in part, what is implicit in the notion of critique is the
possibility of having some distance between subject and object, between critic and
work. I may be critical of x because it is collusive to freedom and thus will
commend its demolition or, at the very least, ones turning away from it. But I dont
believe that is possible with contemporary digital objects given the immersive nature
and ubiquity of this abstract things like data and algorithms and, indeed, given our
entangled complicity with their perpetual workings.
CK: In your previous research you have been expressly committed to an aesthetic
understanding of politics. On your view, how could one make sense of the
fundamentally cynegetic techniques and processes of the police in aesthetic terms?
In other words, what is the exact aesthetic dimension, status or workings of some of
the key digital objects of our present? And, on the basis of this, do you think that
#datapolitik points toward a particular form, mode or site of political action?
DP: This is a very interesting question. Heres how I would begin answering it: We
live in the age of ubiquity that has supersededor at the very least, is surpassing
the age of the particular.
I think that one way to begin to tackle the spirit of your questions, then, is to think
about our relationship to the dispositif of #datapolitik that I am isolating, namely the
algorithm and its ubiquity in everyday life. The #datapolitik project is a continuation
and extension of my research on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in
contemporary life given its commitment to pursuing a study of the dispositifs of our
digital age. So first, a few words on this notion dispositif that is in some circulation
today. Allow me to add to the comments about the dispositif Ive already made (see
the answer to Question 1). The term has an interesting aesthetic and political history
that isnt quite available to non-French readers. In English, dispositif is typically
translated as apparatus and the substitution is rarely, if ever, noted. But as Alain
Brossat has shown, the language of the dispositif has a historical specificity that
marks the emergence of a novel conceptual and theoretical imaginary that, to put it
bluntly, represents a movement from science to politics.
Now Brossat is referring specifically to Michel Foucaults lexicon. But I think that
his point can be generalized, and we can talk about a general shift in sensibilities
from the idea of a technical apparatus to that of the dispositif. And that shift regards a
shift in our conceptions of power, its operations, and the perceptibilities that emerge
from an ensemble of technical and human forces. The apparatus (exemplified, for
instance, in Althussers mechanical engineering metaphor of ideological state
apparatuses) are devices that control from the top down and impose a certain order of
operations in society. Dispositifs are, to use the language of the sentiments,
dispositional arrangements that dispose a milieu of perceptibilities and sensibilities.
In his recent Aisthesis Jacques Rancire offers a helpful formulation: A medium is

neither a basis, nor an instrument, nor a specific material. It is the perceptible milieu
of their coexistence.
Now I may be making the mistake of using the term medium and dispositif
interchangeably, but for the time being I think we can allow ourselves that slippage
only so that we might emphasize this domain of coexistence of a variety of technical
and perceptual forces that are disposed in a particular way and produce certain
effects. Thus, when we translate dispositif as apparatus we end up missing this
aesthetic and political specificity, this shift between the idea of technical media as
tools of domination to talking about them as participants in the arrangements of
sensibilities and perceptibilities of a techno-human milieu.
The aesthetic and political point, for me, is to acknowledge this experiential milieu
and to consider its terms of operations, its workings, but also its distensions, its
capacities, and its transformations. And, finally, how we might engage it critically:
What are the dispositifs of the age of ubiquity, we might therefore ask? And we may
begin to answer this question by noting that one of the principal effects of
#datapolitik is its transformation of the field of operations of everyday life from
whatever it may have been to one of tracking and capturing changes and alterations;
in short, the age of ubiquity generates a cultural politics of cynegetics and predation.
To answer your question explicitlyhow could one make sense of the

fundamentally cynegetic techniques and processes of the police in aesthetic
terms?one thus needs to consider these diverse techniques in terms of the
dispositional milieu they arrange; that is, the dynamics of sensation, perception,
movement, and transformation they effect, the capacities they make available, their
structures of support, and their limits.
Given this, the important thing to note is that with #datapolitik were not talking
about those familiar, Benthamite, surveillance and disciplining procedures and
tactics. The specificities of the dispositif have changed substantially from Foucaults
studies on utilitarianism. Because frankly, there is no looking and no surveying going
on today; this despite our heightened anxiety about NSA spying techniques. The
reality is that nobody actually cares about what you look like, how you look, and
what you are doing. Nobody is listening, transcribing, or recording. We are eons
away from The Wire (2002-2006) or The Conversation (1974). What matters today is
your movements and how they may be tracked by a highly sophisticated set of
algorithmic calculations that monitor the differential positions of your signal
transmitterswhether your cell phone, or your computer, or your smartwatch, or
your body. What were talking about is what Rita Raley refers to as dataveillance,
a concept initially proposed by Roger Clarke
in 1988 that deserves a full research agenda of its own.
Now, its crucial to realize that dataveillance is nothing new, to the extent that it has
been at the heart of so many of our modern practices in marketing and economics,
political science, policy analysis, and everyday life. Once the human was recognized
as being the bearer of information by, for instance, Francis Galton (1822-1911) or
Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), then it became possible to track and capture humans
as never before. Hence the development of what Grgoire Chamayou identifies as
our papered subjectivity in the passport that is, for him, central to the emergence of
police dataveillance.
As weve noted, the basic operation of dataveillance is to measure differentials in

human movements, gestures, ticks, and clicksand there are a variety of technical
instruments, some digital, some not, that enable this. This is different from classic
Benthamite surveillance for a variety of reasons: At one very basic level,
dataveillance is not motivated by any correctional norm or ambition. It doesnt want
you to change your behavior, at all. It is a classic example of Rancires police qua
traffic cop: it doesnt interpellate but says Move along! There is nothing to see
here!
Dataveillance just wants to measure a differential, and collect data on that, not to
correct anything that may be wrong about your behaviorwhether that behavior is
that of the criminal, or that of the student, or that of the delinquent. And this is
evident by the fact that while the Benthamite panoptic scenario required the subjects
knowing (or at the very least intuiting) that they were being observed, in the case of
dataveillance no such self-knowledge or subjectivity is necessary in order for its
operation to be effective. This doesnt mean that we dont suspect that were being
watched, especially after Snowdens release of NSA documents; but our knowledge
of surveillance doesnt change dataveillances operation or, for that matter, ours. No
one I know has ever stopped using computers, email, cell phones, or any digital
channel of transmission as a result of Snowdens revelations.
In short, one major difference between panoptic surveillance and dataveillance is that
the latter has absolutely no interest in the interior lives of humans, or in changing
those lives. And this is a consequence of its behavioral origins, as noted earlier.
Behavioral psychology offers a way of thinking about human movement as automatic
and independent of will, or intention, or soul. Human movement is automatic and it
provides data about how movement works. It does not offer insight into the inner
workings of the souland, frankly, why does that even matter? Hence the great and
groundbreaking formula of cybernetics: information behaves. For #datapolitik, then,
there is absolutely no difference between the tracking and capturing of information

about a NASDAQ transaction, the tracking and capturing of a terrorists movements,
or the tracking and capturing of consumer trends. Our subjectivity is
indistinguishable from our objectivity in that our existence matters because we are
bearers and transmitters of data differentials. The human in #datapolitik is a human
derivative, fully automated, and indistinct from any other automated object.
Given this, lets look at an object of dataveillance that opens up a potential milieu for
the experience of #datapolitik. If you consider the example of any random customer
survey, like the end of semester class survey North American undergraduates are
asked to take, you see dataveillance at work. A classroom survey charts an external
expression of experiencenot the motivations of your experience, but its naked
externalitythe fact that there is a differential between a before and an after,
between where the student was and where she is now. I cant know how satisfied you
are with my class lectures, for instance, or how I can make it better for you, and so
my teaching institution generates a set of questionnaires that can be easily answered
by coloring in, or clicking, a small bubble that registers a condition. That is, I have
no access to your interiority and frankly, who cares? All I have to do is prompt a
sequence of gestures that register a position in space and time. Those movements
delimit a differential that can be trackedthe location before the movement and
the location after the movement. And the click marks the physical difference of
that differential: you were somewhere between 1-5 on the what you know spectrum
before you took the class, now (hopefully) you are somewhere between 5-10.
In his classic study on cybernetics, W. Ross Ashby asserts that:
The most fundamental concept in cybernetics is that of difference, either that

two things are recognizably different or that one thing has changed with time
All the changes that may occur with time are naturally included, for when plants
grow and planets age and machines move some change from one state to another
is implicit.
So the class survey is a classic instance of the customer satisfaction report that
provides differential data that can be examined and analyzed. It marks a change in
ones dispositions to the scene of learning, and the learning subject (i.e., the student)
is like a machine to the extent that its satisfaction is tracked by that gesture which
marks a differentiala changein its sense of how its world is arranged. The
classroom survey is a classic dispositif of dataveillance that enables the tracking of
success or failure of the learning experience by the eighteen year-old undergraduate
student. This data is then collected and used to ascertain the positive or negative
value of the instructor who isnt in the classroom to occasion learning but is in the
classroom as a prompt for the students charting a differential that is measured
exclusively as a + or -.
Now, this is a charged example and a controversial one too. But I use it to offer the
sense of the extensiveness of the police dispositif I am trying to assemble. And with
it we see aesthetics and politics at work at all levels and in different modes,
modalities, and media. Your last question asks me about a particular form of
#datapolitiks expressionbut I dont think thats possible; because what Im trying
to chart is a generalized series of dispositifs that distend and extend throughout our
contemporary condition, that are manifest in such a rich and complex variety of
forms, that any one form is simply an instance of a general operation of our cynegetic
milieu. The example of the classroom survey is a manifestation of what Im looking
at, but Im sure we can come up with a million plus one other examples of that milieu
of forces, perceptibilities, and effectivities. And that perhaps is the point, that the age
of the network has made the specific or the particular more and more difficult to
value because for #datapolitik, any particular is collectable as a part of a ubiquitous
whole that doesnt require any specific rule or identity for organizing its collectivity.
More than the age of the network, then, we should speak of the age of ubiquity and
how the operational logic of ubiquity raises problems for political and aesthetic
collectivization.
CK: Your description of the dispositif calls to mind Rancires distribution of the
sensible, which too refers to the simultaneous constitution and delimitation of our
perceptibilities and sensibilities. For him, as you know, a given distribution of the
sensible can be disrupted and reconfigured (i.e. redistributed) by the appearance of a
political subject, which he defines by the (speech) act of partaking. How much
possibility do you see for political agency under #datapolitik and what kind of
modalities and planes would this involve? What would a political practice against
#datapolitik look like as we are so dependent on #datapolitiks countless technical
milieus, #datapolitik is so indifferent to the content of our actions and #datapolitik
has permeated many of the operations that make up our daily lives? The final
sentence of your last answer indicates that the ubiquity of the dispositif of
#datapolitik complicates a practice of collectivization. Could you expound on this a
bit more, in particular on its implications for what you have just called political
organization and action, solidarity and emancipation?
DP: Honestly, I feel that anything I could say to reply to your question will be
thoroughly dissatisfyingin part because I think the task is precisely to consider not
only the implications of #datapolitik for collective politics, but also the
transformations wrought to our ambitions and sensibilities of collectivization by an
entirely new (at least for the enterprise of political thinking) arrangement of techno-
human forces. And the first challenge (at least for me) is that its not clear that a
position of negationthe idea of developing political practices against #datapolitik
is an option on the table. Im sufficiently persuaded by the work of Jonathan
Sterne, Orit Halpern, Richard Grusin, and others that write about the operational
milieus that shape contemporary perceptual technics (to use Sternes wonderful
expression) that Im challenged to conceptualize a position of negation vis--vis
#datapolitik. The simple fact that I would never consider replying to any of your
questions on pen and paper and then mailing them to you (rather than typing my
replies on a keyboard and sending the file electronically) suggests to me that any
against strategy needs to come terms with a certain inevitable hypocrisy.
That said, youre correct in sensing a proximity between my use of the term dispositif
and Rancires partage du sensible. As Ive suggested throughout our exchange, with
the term dispositif I am also invoking the rhetorical tradition of dispositio; and as
weve also noted the term dispositif has an interesting genealogy in the twentieth
century, especially in the French context. Of course, the term is mostly associated
with Foucaults studies on governmentality and biopolitics. But Foucault is, in
adopting and adapting this term, himself indebted to Georges Canguilhem who, as far
as I know, was the first to develop the idea of technical dispositifs in a brilliant essay
entitled Machine and Organism. And then, of course, we have Louis Althusser who
abandons his own commitment to the term apparatus and picks up on the language
of dispositif in his later writings on Macchiavelli, and in his explorations of aleatory
materialism. In short, dispositif is a political conceptand for my interest in
#datapolitik, it is a central political concept. This because a dispositif registers the
entanglement of human and machine forms of sensorial arrangement. A dispositif
both generates and constrains techno-human ensembles. More than merely extending
human capacities (McLuhan) or being an oppressive influence machine
(Tausk/Mulvey/Metz/and the early Althusser), technical dispositifs generate what
Gilbert Simondon calls associational milieus that arrange what is and what isnt
available to ones political sensibilities.
All of this preamble to say: Yes, without a doubt there is political agency with
#datapolitik. Of this I am certain. The question remains as to what political agency
looks like in and with #datapolitik. There is the agency of non-human bots, of auto-
genetic algorithms, and all sorts of automated systems, there is the distensive agency
of fake news (about which we have learned a lot recently); there is also a more
classical form of agency in #datapolitik of communication control, which is the
cybernetic ambition of much of our data world; there is the agency of hacking, of
cyber-espionage, and cyber-terrorism; and there are many other forms of political
agency too numerous to list here that include the whole world of virtuality and
military training, of drone warfare, and immigration control.
In short, I dont want to give the impression that #datapolitik is oppression and
domination all the way down. The task of political theorizing is (for me) to think
beyond the normative and deontological and to explore the potential power of
collectivization in #datapolitik. Despite the celebrated marriage of technical media
and collective political movements that followed the Tahrir Square uprising and
Occupy Wall Street, there has been surprisingly little inquiry into how these
collective events that were enabled by #datapolitik are different from more traditional
forms of collectivization that we associate with the pre-digital world. Im thinking
here (for instance) of Jason Franks important work on the incipience of the people in
revolutionary America, and his insightful readings of the literary excess of words that
both enabled and produced what he calls constituent moments,
and I want to ask how we can think of collectivization and incipienceof radical
democratic constituencywith our contemporary technical milieus?
I dont think one needs to ontologize technology in order to ask whether

contemporary media operate on different levels of transmission and interruption than
earlier forms of papered or visual media. And if they do, then one must assume that
the forms of collectivization that can emerge out of #datapolitik constellate
differently than those that might arise from, say, the nailing of 95 theses on a church
door, or the penning of a revolutionary pamphlet. At a very basic level, it might be
the case that there is a radical mediation in our conception of publics as spaces of
spectatorship and/or readership. This is a point that Richard Grusin has recently
raised in revising his term remediation and introducing the idea of radical
mediation. And I take great inspiration from his insight that mediation should be
understood not as standing between preformed subjects, objects, actants, or entities
but as the process, action, or event that generates or provides the conditions for the
emergence of subjects and objects, for the individuation of entities within the world.
Mediation, he says, is not opposed to immediacy but rather is itself immediate. It
names the immediacy of middleness in which we are already living and moving.
Following from this, the question to me isnt whether collectivization is possible
because #datapolitik is so pervasive, ubiquitous, and dominating. But, rather, how do

ubiquity and #datapolitik mediate (in Grusins sense of the term) forms of solidarity
and emancipation, what are the limits of solidarity and emancipation in #datapolitik,
and what are the permeabilities of those specific limits?
The issue I currently consider most politically constraining of #datapolitik isnt the
fact of ubiquity so much as the ubiquity of prediction as the logistical metaphysic of
everyday life. This is a particular behaviorist malady that despite decades of criticism
nonetheless persists without end. At its basis, this is what an algorithm is designed to
do: namely, to predict future outcomes and to coordinate action (and therefore
movement, and therefore logistical operations, and therefore futures) so as to attain a
goal (that typically translates into profit or some analogous form of earthly
salvation); more specifically, an algorithm has in its DNA the ambition to strike a
target, and to adapt in every possible way so as to achieve target success. Richard
Grusin has called this premediation, Brian Massumi calls it the operational logic of
preemption, Louise Amoore has called this the politics of possibility, and Orit
Halpern has identified it as the new (post-cybernetic) rationalism.
So the issue for me isnt how we stand against #datapolitik, but how we can
collectively enable modalities of incipience that glitch the urge and ambition to
predict. What temporal forms are possible in and through #datapolitik other than the
strict Aristotelian teleology implicit in operational logistics and predictive analytics.
Interestingly, this same issue was taken up (within a different media context) by
Nouvelle Vague filmmakers of the 1950s who developed technical editing practices
(most famously, Jean-Luc Godards jump cut) to challenge the dominance of
Aristotelian mimesis that governed much French filmmaking at the time. Ive written
about this elsewhere, but the basic point was that one of the sites of critical attack
that emerges from the Cahiers du Cinema directors of the period was the reigning
commitment to Aristotelian narrative emplotment defined in terms of the right action
at the right time. And these figures, rather than simply denouncing cinema, took on
the challenge of altering what the medium could do and thus what the associative
powers of the technical milieu could be.
Now, this example is one that I like to bring up often because, being a cinephile, Im
always enthused by it. But I think its a relevant example not because it is especially
instructive of what to do, but because it points to the possibility of forms of incipient
collectivization that both acknowledge and engage the limits of technical practices
and technical media and push these limits beyond the extant modes of media
handling. It is at this juncture of techno-human incipience that I want to explore
emergent forms of political organization and action, solidarity and emancipation in
#datapolitik. But this is far from a solitary task. The age of individualized, monastic,
theorizing and critique is over. New collective forms must emerge from collectivized
thinking and doing, and this cant simply be an abstract endeavor. The pen was
mightier than the sword; but the mouse (or trackpad, or touchpad) is mightier than
the pen or the sword ever was. Lets see what queer adjacencies and practices are
now possible with the mouse that neither pen nor sword could enable.
1. James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in

Literature and Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
2. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect:
Studies in Governmentality (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
3. Sharon Krauss, Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal

Individualism (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
4. Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter

Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011), 36.
5. Davide Panagia, Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of

Discontinuity (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013); Davide Panagia, A
Theory of Aspects: Media Participation and Political Theory, New Literary

History 45, no. 4 (2014): 52748.
6. Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke
University Press, 2015).
7. Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines (Harvard University Press,

2011); Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans,
and Cultures of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
8. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film

(Harvard University Press, 1979).
9. Alain Brossat, La notion de dispositif chez Michel Foucault, in Miroir,

appareils et autres dispositifs, ed. Soko Phay-Vakalis (Editions LHarmattan,
2009), 201.
10. Jacques Rancire, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Verso,
2013), 193.
11. Rita Raley, ed., Dataveillance and Countervailance, in Raw Data Is an

Oxymoron (MIT Press, 2013), 12145.
12. Roger Clarke, Information Technology and Dataveillance, Commun. ACM 31,
no. 5 (May 1988): 498512.
13. Grgoire Chamayou and Kieran Aarons, Fichtes Passport - A Philosophy of

the Police, Theory & Event 16, no. 2 (2013).
14. Jacques Rancire, Rachel Bowlby, and Davide Panagia, Ten Theses on
Politics, Theory & Event 5, no. 3 (2001). Available online as a PDF.
15. W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (Martino Fine Books, 2015),
9.
16. Simondon asserts this: On peut donc affirmer que lindividualisation des tres
techniques est la condition du progress technique. Cette individualization est
possible per la recurrence de causalit dans un milieu que ltre technique cre
autour de lui meme et qui le conditionne comme il est conditionn par lui. Ce
milieu la foie technique et naturel peut tre nom milieu associ. Gilbert
Simondon, Du mode dexistence des objets techniques (Editions Aubier, 2012),
70. [We can therefore affirm that the individualization of technical beings is
the condition for technical progress. This individualization is possible through
the recurrence of a form of causality within a milieu created by the technical
being, with which it surrounds itself, and that it conditions as well as being
conditioned by it. This milieu at once technical and natural may be called an
associational milieu. DP, trans.]
17. Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary

America (Duke University Press, 2010).
18. Richard Grusin, Radical Mediation, Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (September 1,
2015): 129. Available online as a PDF.

Contrivers' Review - #Datapolitik: An Interview With Davide Panagia

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Contrivers' Review - #datapolitik: An Interview with Davide Panagia 11/14/17, 9(00 AM

#datapolitik: An Interview with Davide

have chosen for this particular variationpolitikinstead of the more common

For instance, it seems limiting to me to exclaim the scandal of neoliberal capital as a

A dispositio regards the arrangement of peoples, things, and sensibilities and,

So to get at the second part of your questionwhy the k in #datapolitik? In part,

As Ive suggested, with my exploration of #datapolitik Im less interested in issues of

This is also why I remain committed to David Humes psychology of impressions.

Cybernetic innovations involve the application of technical objects (i.e., algorithms)

In his recent Aisthesis Jacques Rancire offers a helpful formulation: A medium is

To answer your question explicitlyhow could one make sense of the

a concept initially proposed by Roger Clarke

in 1988 that deserves a full research agenda of its own.

As weve noted, the basic operation of dataveillance is to measure differentials in

there is absolutely no difference between the tracking and capturing of information

In his classic study on cybernetics, W. Ross Ashby asserts that:

The most fundamental concept in cybernetics is that of difference, either that

I dont think one needs to ontologize technology in order to ask whether

Following from this, the question to me isnt whether collectivization is possible

because #datapolitik is so pervasive, ubiquitous, and dominating. But, rather, how do

powers of the technical milieu could be.

1. James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in

3. Sharon Krauss, Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal

4. Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter

5. Davide Panagia, Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of

Theory of Aspects: Media Participation and Political Theory, New Literary

7. Minsoo Kang, Sublime Dreams of Living Machines (Harvard University Press,

8. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film

9. Alain Brossat, La notion de dispositif chez Michel Foucault, in Miroir,

11. Rita Raley, ed., Dataveillance and Countervailance, in Raw Data Is an

13. Grgoire Chamayou and Kieran Aarons, Fichtes Passport - A Philosophy of

15. W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (Martino Fine Books, 2015),

17. Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary

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