Re-Imagining a ‘We’ Beyond the Gathering of Reductions: Propositions for the Three Ecologies

In this article Lila Athanasiadou and Goda Klumbytė engage in a conversation with Antoinette Rouvroy to revisit Guattari’s "Three Ecologies" and discuss their dynamics in and for the digital age. While a lot of the discourses on algorithms and digital future invoke catastrophic imaginaries of totalizing control, this conversation works with a propositional format, teasing out affirmative politics by pointing to spaces of potentiality within the environmental, the social and the mental realm. Starting from the environmental ecology and thinking of data as a waste, Rouvroy discusses  planetary exhaustion as the result of the depletion of natural resources, forced labour practices and the assumption that data hold the answers to the problems posed by global capital. Proposing a space for material experimentation, she speculates on the potential of emerging subjectivities that remain irreducible to data flows. Within social ecology, Rouvroy advocates for the urgency to center digital policy as the space in which the new forms of institutions emerge in order to reorient the power of computation towards the commons. Lastly, within the mental ecology, Rouvroy reconceptualizes the legal subject as a performance that operates within the proliferation of asignifying data signs, reimagining a “we” beyond the gathering of reductions. 


 


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has become more costly than digital overconsumption.Most of the time, data is collected and stored by default not because data as such conveys valuable meaning.In digital capitalism, meaning would rather be conceived as an impairment, because meaning presupposes a referentiality 'attaching' data to its context, while digital capitalism pursues an acceleration of flows of deterritorialised digital signals, meaningless yet prone to be correlated with other individually meaningless data, so as to produce predictive patterns or clusters.
In the era of big data, it is the quantity and speed of data rather than the density of information of each piece of data that matters.Jean Baudrillard, in one of his dazzling affirmations, said that 'we are in a universe where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning'. 3Among the different hypotheses explaining this state of affairs, Baudrillard refers to what he calls Claude Shannon's hypothesis that, being a purely instrumental, technical medium, information has nothing to do with meaning.It is something else, an operational model of another order, external to meaning and to the circulation of meaning itself … A kind of code, as the genetic code can be: it is what it is, it works like that, meaning is something else that comes after in a way … In this case there would be simply no significant relation between the inflation of information and the deflation of the meaning. 4t in fact, as Erich Hörl suggested, machine learning algorithms are indeed generative of a novel kind of 'techno-ecological' meaning (semiosis); they produce a different, 'alien' meaning, which is no longer attested or attestable alphabetically by a transcendental subject of reading and writing. 5Or, as Jean-Louis Déotte puts it: 'the digital arch-writing … in a certain way, starts only from itself to meet only its effects, because it is an elementary language that no speaker can speak.' 6e proliferation of data, or 'signaletic matter', doesn't contribute at all to what Bernard Stiegler the digital age, what tweaks and changes we need, and how we can create more affirmative politics and propositions alongside critique.

Environmental ecology: countering exhaustion
Maybe we can start with the environmental ecology, and specifically the digital-material binary pair or dichotomy that seems to haunt the relationships within and to this ecology.In a recent interview you called for treating data a waste product that exhausts the planet's resources and minerals to support the growing need for sensor-building, cloud computing and storage power. 1 You also suggested that 'big data does not allow itself to be disturbed by the materiality of the word'. 2 So there seems to be a complex relation between the digital and the material when it comes to big data.Big data is completely dependent on worldly materialities, from fibre cables to energy resources, while it also encroaches on materiality, colonising and extracting value.We wonder whether and how we could understand the material-digital as non-oppositional but rather as entangled, overlapping?And if you think it important to break this oppositional thinking to begin with, would the focus on data as waste-product help with that?AR: Ok, I'll try to respond.Suggesting the possibility to think of digital data as waste was meant as a provocation to challenge the currently prevailing dataism: the central dogma of both data behaviourism and digital capitalism.The metaphor of the computational turn evokes a certain transformation of the linguistic turn.The unit of perception, of understanding the world is no longer the sentence, the word, the sign -always bearers of meaningbut data, individually a-significant but computable With planetary reticulation, a threshold has been crossed: the biosphere itself, in totality, has become a hypercomplex functional exorganism, and in so doing it is reaching its anthropic limit in the form of the systemic exhaustion of all singularities through informational calculation placed in the service of making certain that there are gains to be had for speculators who thus become disinvestors.This disinvestment, which is the accomplishment of nihilism as such, consists in prohibiting all neganthropic bifurcations that would reintroduce uncertainty with respect to such gains. 8 a way, this rejoins Ray Brassier's critique of Nick Land's acceleratinionist nihilism: 9 'When you accelerate, your ability to accelerate is limited by material constraints, but there must also be a transcendental speed limit at some point.The ultimate limit … is death, or cosmic schizophrenia.It is the ultimate horizon.' 10 I wish to add that, of course, the digital economy appears very immaterial, and the 'imperative of innovation' that is now at the core of the agenda of European and other institutions endogenous and self-learning ordering systems. 17 In the absence of a common frame of reference, strategies of power mutate in (at least) two directions.The absence of common referentiality attests both to an apparent emancipation from the yokes of stable and recurrent norms (always inadequate to the spontaneous emergences in the world) and to a drastic de-semiotisation or digital abstraction (as digital data is rendered amnesic of the organic, material, cultural compositional plane from which they proliferate).This is what emancipates algorithmic governmentality, and the vectorialist class that thrives on it, from both the institutional, legal, and social-normative constraints, and from the limitations imposed by organic life's intelligence of limits (negentropic organic regulation).Algorithmic governmentality is instrumental to the infinitisation of capitalism: 'data science fiction' nourishes fantasies of transformation of the perspective of extinction into a perspective infinite growth.Under the guise of making power immanent, technofeudal corporations are taking the lead, as Yanis Varoufakis recently argued. 18Whereas, on the side of those called users and consumers -whose possibility to act in their capacity of citizens, contributing with others to deliberative processes about matters relevant to the common good irreducible to the mere juxtaposition of individual interests, is radically circumvented -their strategies of power consists in maximising their capacity to be known, to attract 'followers', and therefore to impose themselves numerically, as nodes in the network's mesh. 19GK:  I wish there was a nodding emoji I could use here.☄️ AR: When it comes to big data and the materiality of the world, I meant that the technological ideology of big data includes the pretensions of 'exhaustion' (big data as a huge statistical database where n=all), and the illusion that, if one has enough data, one does not need to interrogate the world in its materiality to generate 'reliability' or 'credit' (rather than knowledge).to think of the physical environment not as an object to be observed or manipulated but as a co-designer.
Do you think there is potential to this argument? 21AR: Yes, I would say that the way to hell is paved with good abstractions!It is hard not to perceive the naïve realism of those who believe that crunching data provides direct, unmediated, objective access to the world in itself.Jacques Lacan's formula that 'Les non-dupes errent' is perfectly suited to that 'ideology of big data' (or algorithmic realism) assuming an indistinction between the world and data proliferating from the world, and denying that reality is always structured by symbolic fiction.
The 'alien thinking' of machines, however, as Luciana Parisi calls it, may offer another perspective, from unprecedented angles, on the universe, on emergences, or on discrete regularities that are only observable on large numbers… the new possibilities opened by this 'alien thinking' must be preserved from the new kind of extractivism (the transformation of the virtual into surplus value) allowed in digital capitalism. 22For the moment, the virtual (in the Deleuzian sense) is the new target of extractivism, whereas it could have been and should become a preserve for… imagination, creation, collective fabulation, a heterotopic site of openness to what is not any more or not yet present, a site of investment -rather than over-consumption -for the sake of the common over time.After all, machine learning algorithms metabolise the world in small, discrete, abstract units, which they recompose in their own way, with an automatic curiosity that is not tamed by anything but their objective functions, which reflect the particular sectoral rationalities (of the interests) they serve. 23To a certain extent, they remain much too 'human' but in a way that is mostly obfuscated, as they also tend to absolve human actors -those at the service of whom these optimisation machines function -from assuming responsibility for the negative externalities and costs of their highly speculative The internal logic of these procedures (statistics, probabilities, 'operational cybernetics') is certainly rigorous Indeterminacy is an un/doing of identity that unsettles the very foundations of non/being. 25 is precisely that in/determinacy of matter that digital capitalism both feeds on and neutralises.I really believe Mark Fisher was right when saying that 'it is now our task to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable'. 28The crucial thing is, he said, 'the futures that we expected in the 20th century have failed to happen and the perspective must come from that'. 29Building a critique not from the past but from the future that has not arisen, that is, from what has not so far and not yet left any computable digital signal, from the blind spots of the digital.

GK+LA: 💥 💥
Building a critique from a future that has not arisen presupposes building a scene, a space-time, a heterochrony, an hyperstition -or write a constitution -where not the past but the future may emerge as a persona -as impersonal singularity -with claims on the present.A critique built from a future is another aporia, another hyperstition.Not only do written constitutions span the absence of origin, they also thwart and renew the absence of recipients of the written commitments towards 'a people who are missing', a people that always exceeds its present representations. 30The possibility to address a critique to the present in the name of the yet-to-come is at the heart of constitutional inscription as I understand it. 31  would there be in asking the question 'where?', 'where tomorrow?('whither?'). 33r the moment, the reflex responses of the law, in Europe at least, attest at best to a nostalgia for the liberal subject (insisting on personal data protection interests; -reducing the commons to the juxtaposition of sectorial logics; -reducing 'the people that are missing' to present political representation; -reducing the future to the optimisation of the state of affairs; -reducing the virtual to 'real time'; -reducing social justice to post-actuarial calculation; -reducing justice to law; -reducing hermeneutics to digital seismography; -reducing imagination and creation to innovation; -reducing foresight to the extrapolation of past trends; -reducing work to employment; -reducing the plasticity and alterability of life to the execution of a genetic programme; -reducing life to flows of digital information; -reducing the human person to the sum of his or her digital records and interactions; -reducing the public to the audience; -reducing 'right measure' to high-resolution; -reducing people to their behaviour; -reducing existence to pure presence; -reducing singularities to symptoms, and so on.
The redeployment of differances or differences between those terms requires a constitutional moment which is a moment where negativity -the not-yet-there, the irrepresentable, the to-come, the

AR:
Here is a list of some of the reductions, which are also toxic abstractions, that would need to be overcome in order to re-open the space-time, the collective assemblages, and the spaces of possibilities that appear increasingly foreclosed.I say 'toxic', because they deny the primary, secondary and tertiary retentions, that is, the epiphylogenetic milieu we live in and that we live by on this planet.rather it makes possible its ever renewed upsurge and virginity.However, it radically destroys any possibility of a simple self-identity. 40hat also operate like endorphins -of credit, notoriety or reputation.
The value of each piece of data is not contained in itself, but is essentially relational.It is the (co-) relations discoverable among data that give it its usefulness, a value, and also possibly a more or fragments, a proliferation rather than a transcription of the world.That's what I call data behaviourism.As default automated data collection and storage no longer requires any conscious effort, archival classification or curation, data storage has become cheaper than curation, erasure or depletion.In this regard, data is comparable to toxic waste: getting rid of it is more expensive than storing it.Digital sobriety 123 obfuscates the materiality of the extractivism that it presupposes. 11For example, the exploitation of forced labour in Foxconn and other factories, the exploitation of children in coltan mines in Congo, and so on.The digital economy is a cannibalistic economy.'Data as waste' is thus also a provocation to think beyond the increasingly dominant assumption in the post-industrial western world that 'current and future economic growth and societal well-being is increasingly based on the value created by data'. 12Dataism carries the sense that it has become possible to translate the virtual into surplus value by the grace of an algorithmic semiosis generating immediately and automatically actionable operational information without the intervention of human perception, imagination or understanding.Not factories, not workers, not even knowledge: data -rendered amnesic of all conditions of production (including the heavily material logistics involved) -is perceived as the privileged site of value production.LA: The point you're making is spot-on!  Could you elaborate on that complex transformation further?AR: In his visionary 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', Gilles Deleuze rightfully observed that the advent of computers and cybernetics was not only a technological revolution but also a transformation of capitalism. 13It represented a shift from a capitalism dedicated to production to a capitalism having relegated production to the periphery of the Third World, and therefore a capitalism repurposed to buy shares, sell services, assemble components produced elsewhere, advertise and sell imported products.To western post-industrial capitalism, data -as that which allows 'smarter marketing' and other speculative (rather than productive) practices -is indeed what creates value.What change would it make if we started to think of data as waste rather than as an asset, based on the negative externalities generated by the digital economy?Would it allow for a bifurcation away from toxic consumerism towards the needed sobriety?Would it help us recover the intelligence of limitations?called the epiphylogenetic milieu.Instead of a transgenerational sedimentation (the inherited psychic representations, or forms, transmitted through the symbolic milieu, through language, through symbolic materials in general, objects, icons, all forms of memory supports), non-selective data proliferation, as over-abundance of digital a-signifying signals, or raw data, amounts to a de-sedimentation of primary, secondary and tertiary retentions in a cybernetic perspective according to which the biological, social and symbolic dimensions of existence would only be apprehended as pure computable data flows, updated in real time. 7This production of life itself as eminently plastic, re-combinable data flows, as exorganic computation overcoming/leveraging emergences, conceived in and reinforcing an imaginary of infinite growth, of infinite acceleration, while 'freeing' life from the forms in which constantly confine it, is in fact exhausting/consuming/disinvesting the future.As Bernard Stiegler puts it: The excessive proliferation and expansion of the digital universe, corresponds, in the techno-semiological stratum, to what Patrick Tort recently referred to as 'hypertelia' in the organic stratum: the development of an anatomical part or character beyond its optimal level of usefulness [such as the] giant antlers of the fossil deer Megaloceros giganteus, hypertrophied upper canines of ancient 'sabre-toothed tigers', disproportionate tails of peacocks … such structures, by continuing to grow much more than their initial function required, would have become 'monstrous' and harmful to their holders through a disabling growth inertia, maladaptation, and tendency to be fatal to the survival of the species during a subsequent change in life conditions. 14This overload of appearance, endowing them with symbolic assets in sexual selection, exposed their holders to obvious survival disadvantages.In a similar vein, the excessive proliferation of digital data, or what I call, in the techno-semiological stratum, digital pheromones, doesn't ensure any survival advantage for our species.Of course, in digital neoliberalism (or algorithmic governmentality -which is but the last recombination of capitalism), homo economicus gives way to homo numericus, as injunctions to maximise production-performance and consumption-enjoyment are supplemented or even superseded by the injunction to of maximise digital human capital or self-branding. 15Individual performances are evaluated against hyper-mobile metrics, varying according to the behaviours of all others.The algorithmic regime intoxicates individuals with an insatiable thirst for credit.Individual self-branding is the hollowed-out personology in anomic digital capitalism where (in)dividuals are thrown in absolute competition at the quasi-molecular scale of the digital pheromone. 16You see then that whenever normative, institutional systems and their stable, recurrent, recognisable patterns (what Foucault called hegemony) give way to apparently and 'scientific', yet somewhere along the line it doesn't stick to anything, it's a fabulous fiction whose refraction index in a reality (true or false) is zero.This is even what makes these models strong, but it is also what leaves them with no truth other than that of paranoid projection tests of a caste, or a group, which dreams of a miraculous adequacy of reality to their models, and thus of an absolute manipulation. 20LA: They get a life of their own, often appear more valid than real life in some ways.AR:Yes! It's really a regime of indistinction between signals and things, but where things as things disappear and are replaced by speculative patterns or clusters.In a way, the constantly proliferating digital universe appears like a map that produces its own territory (a purely speculative territory of risks and opportunities).LA: Do you think that this false imagery of digital as immaterial posited against materiality of nature and real life is somehow what also prevents us from operating differently in the environmental ecology?There is an argument advocated by Benjamin Bratton that the power of the digital allows us to enact certain epistemological shifts and enables us a mental ecology.What could the antidote to the persistence of exhaustion be?AR: Exhaustion -or exhaustivity -triumphs only to the extent that the technical ideology of dataism becomes hegemonic, and succeeds in persuading that other practices of 'mattering' (making things matter) are obsolete.The antidote to dataism, or digital capitalism, or algorithmic governmentality, is to allow speakability, visibility and authority (conceived not in the axioms of domination but in the axioms of enunciation, as the authority to speak) of what remains irreducible to data flows, the singularities articulated to forms of life, to the people to come… justice as an ideal of perfectibility of the present, rather than as an optimisation of the state of facts.Social ecology: re-inventing institutions as practices of mattering LA: In some ways, though, it is also a matter of the use of that computational potential and the instrumentalisation of its alien logic.Large scale computation is what enabled us to start to understand climate change.One can claim that computational power is wasted on surveilling for the state and private corporations, financially speculating, extracting value from everything that is or could be and spamming individuals -all of which centres the human once again.From the Anthropocene to the transhumanists undercut by global capitalism, computation's goals are very anthropocentric.How can we re-imagine computation as less mirroring individuals and more reoriented for the commons?⭐ AR : Yes, Lila!  It is a matter of use!Big data and algorithms are very useful to detect regularities that are unnoticeable otherwise because they are observable only in 'big numbers' -that is, from a perspective that is alien to situated human subjects.'How can we re-imagine computation as less selfmirroring individuals and more reoriented for the commons?' Great question!I try not to be trapped in my lawyer's tropism, but I believe that this is a matter result of computation performed in a black box, rather than as an arbitrary choice or option, human agency appears resorbed in the hidden layers of neural networks.Failure to question the finalities (or objective functions) of automation, on the assumption that algorithmic decision-making is necessarily an improvement of rationality, waives the possibility to decide about its deployment.LA: The tech circles' solutionist imperative indeed tends to jump into 'digital products', before a problematique is even articulated.In order to explore the full capacity of digital abstraction, we will have to drop the extractivist attitude ⭐ ⭐ AR: You know, I'm thinking right now about what Karen Barad has to say about the void… GK: Do tell us...AR:The dominant evil, for the moment, is the glutony of digital capitalism, and the imperative of optimisation which really forecloses thinking.24In French we can say that algorithmic governmentality consists in an operation of dé-penser (both spending in the sense of exhausting, and un-thinking) the future.It's a way of managing uncertainty by neutralising the virtual (through preemption or optimisation).Barad writes that even the smallest bits of matter are an enormous multitude.Each 'individual' is made up of all possible histories of virtual intra-actions with all Others.

LA:
Exhaustion seems to be the theme permeating all three ecologies.Earlier you referred to it as the cannibalistic depletion of energy in the environmental realm, but also the exhaustion of possibilities for fabulation of a future in the social realm, and the physical and psychological state of workers, let alone the numbing of consumers withinThe crucial question, from a constitutional point of view, is this: how to imagine and enact social forms, or how to constitute these forms -beyond the nation-state and its institutions, and beyond liberal dualisms and oppositions -capable of committing scientific and technological practices not towards the intensification and hegemony of integrated world capitalism, but rather towards the growth of the living world (growing trees, raising children, deproletarianising grown-ups).The urgent question is not -as Guattari argued -how to 'keep the human in the loop' but rather 'how to keep life in the loop' against the algorithmically boosted human obsession with growth (of extraction, production, consumption, profit).Therefe, we don't need 'innovation' as much as we need scientific inventions and political imaginations.
and so on), whereas issues are obviously collective, structural, common, and involve future generations as well as all living beings of our planet.The prism of current liberal constitutions -social contracts committing states and citizens -is too narrow to address the urgent planetary stakes.Moreover, the deployment of digital infrastructures -such as 5G and maybe soon enough 6G -presented not as options or choices to be made collectively despite their potential to radically transform the collective assemblages and the intricated semiotic components that characterise territories and forms of life, are typically constitutional matters.GK:This is a very good point. Lila and I were thinking, though, that at the same time there is a crisis of governance, with both laissez-faire selforganization of market forces on the right, and suspicion of any forms of government on the left.How do we deal with this crisis and distrust across the political spectrum?Is the answer to go more towards digital literacy or perhaps new institutional forms?What kind of institutional forms are we missing that allow for collective fabulation?AR: The stakes are high in the question or problem of institutions.See the new forms of digital populism, the emergence, on social networks, of 'crowds' of supporters for and opponents to a person like Donald Trump having transformed politics into the branding of insurrection against the state apparatus itself… How should one conceive of institutions capable of blocking the rise of this new kind of digital populism that, in their book Sovereignty.Inc., William Mazzarella, Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster powerfully describe as driven by the desire and enjoyment of 'brands' like Donald Trump? 34 (The Trump name was and is a brand before being the name of a former 'insurrectional' president.)I think the new institutional forms should reconnect to the idea of institutions like Pierre Legendre's 'populated empty spaces'. 35Institutions in this sense are conceived primarily as affordances for new practices of mattering, as new ways of occupying 'constitution', what I have in mind is the absolutely aporetic character of the constitutional moment as heterochronic moment par excellence, an efficient ritual ensuring in a hyperstitional mode of writing, the being over time of a people that always misses and overcomes itself.Against the de-historicising imaginary (des)institution of (dis)society propelling and propelled by digital capitalism, the word 'constitution' evokes a task Nietzsche assigned to nature: 'to breed an animal that is permitted to promise'. 32What I have in mind is a notion of constitution that allows for the breaking into the present of everything that is only there in the form of stigmata or prefiguration, and committing the actual(and taming actualisation) to not exhaust (épuiser) or neutralise the virtual: the contrary of digital abstraction and gluttonous recursivity, an extreme attention to and support for processes of mattering.What is at stake, what must be defended against the pre-emptive power-temporality of algorithmic governmentality, is an openness of time, or an heterochronicity, which is also a precondition for the possibility of justice, as Jacques Derrida reminds us in Specters of Marx: No justice … seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond any living present, in that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, victims or not of wars, of political or other violence, of nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist or other exterminations, of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or of all forms of totalitarianism.Without this non-contemporaneity of the living present to itself, without what secretly misaligns it, without this respect for justice towards those who are not there, those who are no longer or not yet present and alive, what sense These reductions condemn us to what I call an acquiescence to a transcendental platitude: -reducing singularities (or processes of individuation or subjectification) to particularities (the detected or inferred infra-individual attributes or supra-individual patterns that are the grips of subjection of machinic enslavement in semiocapitalism); -reducing the status of citizens to that of consumer-user; -reducing politics to the juxtaposition of individual is always cosmetic; processes of individuation or subjectivation are masquerades: putting on and editing our persona (mask); but this remains at the individual level.There is perhaps another way to subvert the individualistic logic of -for example -the European data protection regime, which flatters the possessive individualism of users-consumers by focusing on free, prior and informed individual consent to data processing.The insistence on individual consent, on individual autonomy and self-determination nurtures and is nurtured by the illusion that problems that concern the commons can be contractualised and, to some extent, addressed by relying on each individual's self-determination and responsibility, or treated as a matter of selfregarding individual preferences.In a context of algorithmic governmentality, the forms of power that are exercised are much less about the processing of personal data and the identification of individuals than about algorithmic forms of impersonal, continuously evolving evaluations of opportunities and risks statistically correlated with life forms (attitudes, trajectories One then sees quickly that the presence of the perceived present can appear as such only inasmuch as it is continuously compounded with a nonpresence and nonperception, with primary memory and expectation (retention and protention).These nonperceptions are neither added to, nor do they occasionally accompany, the actually perceived now; they are essentially and indispensably involved in its possibility.…As soon as we admit this continuity of the now and the not-now, perception and nonperception, in the zone of primordiality common to primordial impression and primordial retention, we admit the other into the self-identity of the Augenblick; nonprescnce and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant There is a duration to the blink, and it closes the eye.This alterity is in fact the condition for presence, presentation, and thus for Vorstellung in general; it precedes all the dissociations that could be produced in presence, in Vorstellung.…Onceagain, this relation to nonpresence neither befalls, surrounds, nor conceals the presence of the primordial impression; less sensitive character.Data -in the context of algorithmic governmentality -in fact has less to do with any pre-constituted individual than with the ways opportunities and risks are and will be distributed in the whole society.Therefore, it deserves a 'social' protection, and the requirement of free, prior and informed consent (to data processing) should be as much a collective as an individual right: a collective right of the people not so much inspired by post-war bioethics (medical deontology and the principles of human dignity and inviolability of the individual human body), as by the idea that government is only legitimate if it has the consent of the governed.Therefore, perhaps the infrastructures and practices of data processing should cease to be considered exclusively as matters of contractual relations between platforms and users-consumers but also as constitutional issues.In the context of algorithmic governmentality, to paraphrase Guattari, the individual is the illusion that hides, obfuscates, denies voice to the people (including the people that are missing).In a context where knowledge, power, individuation happen mostly through operations of statistical correlations, we need to stop talking of individuals in isolation.As in systems theory, but also in theories of institutions emerging from deconstruction, the person and the individual are not the constitutive elements of social systems; rather, what is constitutive of social systems, and what conditions the very possibility of their existence, what both requires and conditions the dynamism of their continuous institution is their self-overcoming, their exposure and openness to otherness, to the not-yet, to the to-come as something that cannot be inferred or deduced from the past or the present, to the incomputable or the impersonal Yes I see, almost as if data is a stand-in for or equivalent to materiality.
practices, which are to be suffered by actual and future others.The reason for this is that, because the algorithmic decision imposes itself as the necessary GK: You know, what is at stake is, I believe, the tion-performance and consumption-enjoyment are supplemented by the injunction to maximise one's digital human capital, that is, to produce oneself as a brand in a communicationary universe where the belief in our own existence increasingly depends on our ability to attract purely quantitative signals AR: GK: Yes! Drawing on that -this also seems to require different imaginaries of what a subject is, both collective and individual.You mentioned that there is a resistance to letting go of the liberal subject; we can see that in AI ethics, in data protection law, and so on.What other figurations of subjectivity could we enlist or envision here?Or do we try to re-appropriate the dividual and find some kind of remedying aspects of this?AR: The dividual is a figure still haunted by the individual... it is still a nostalgic dis-figuration.