Destaques

Rui Alexandre Grácio [2024]

«This chapter is thus about a vertiginous matter. Formulated as an inquiry about the state of knowledge, power and subjects after the computational turn, it turns out as a reformulation of the question of the possibility of critique, recalcitrance and subjectivation in an epistemic and political universe gradually deserted by empirical experiment and deductive, causal logic, and with regard to a mode of government appearing to disregard the reflexive and discursive capabilities (as well as their ‘moral capabilities’) of human agents, in favour of computational, pre-emptive, context- and behaviour-sensitive management of risks and opportunities. In other words, I wonder whether it is still possible to practice critical thinking after a computational turn which, despite its pretences to ‘objectivity’, appears as a turning away from the ambitions of modern rationality anchored in empirical experiment and deductive – causal- logic, and, despite its promises of personalization and better taking into consideration of individual merits, needs, abilities, preferences, does not address individuals through their reflexive capabilities, nor through their inscription within collective structures, but merely through their ‘profiles’.» p. 2

«Data, information, knowledge are thus more or less taken to be the same things. Such ‘knowledge’ thus does not appear as a ‘production of the mind’, with all the artificiality and cognitive and emotional biases unavoidably connoting mental productions, but as always already ‘given’, immanent to the (digitally recorded) world, in which it is merely automatically ‘discovered’, or from which it literally flourishes thanks to algorithmic operations rendering invisible correlations operational.» p. 4

«Raw data function as de-territorialized signals, inducing reflex responses in computer systems, rather than as signs carrying meanings and requiring interpretation. Everything goes as if meaning-making was not necessary anymore, as if the world was already, absent any interpretation, saturated with meaning.» p. 4

«This atopy sheds some doubts about the possibility of speaking of knowledge at all in this case if knowing, as Didi-Huberman, (2009:11) argues, requires ‘taking position’, that is, situating oneself two times at least, on the two fronts at least that each position comprises as any position is, necessarily, relative. It goes, for example with affronting something, but, in front of that thing, one must also take into account everything one leaves aside, the off-frame that exists behind us, that one may refuse but which, for a substantial part, affects our movement itself, thus our position. It also implies to situate oneself over time. Taking position, it is desiring, requesting something, it is situating oneself in the present and aiming at a future.» p. 5

«Here one perceives, at last, that ‘due process’, ‘subjectivation’ and ‘critique’ may well be three different names for a same exigency: we speak, precisely, because we are on the edge of the abyss, because no subject is antecedent his enunciation, and thus, to rejoin a ‘common’ that is crumbling under our words, that is never securely acquired, that happens only as unexpected fulguration. The exigency is this one: convening this impersonal form of the common through a language which gives us individual and collective consistence – at safe distance from both algorithmic profiling and neoliberal injunctions of performance and maximization of jouissance.» p.14

«Algorithmic government, failing to acknowledge anything else than infra-individual data and supra-individual profiles, and avoiding confrontations with subjects either physically or linguistically (testimony, avowal, and other forms of biographical representation are becoming useless in the big data era), may be understood as the culmination of a process of dissipation of the institutional, spatial, temporal and linguistic conditions of subjectivation for the sake of the ‘objective’ and operational pre-emption of potential behaviours.» p. 14