Research: Artifices of Truth. A Genealogy of Data as Governmentality
As the notion of “algorithmic governmentality” clearly demonstrates, the algorithmic turn has both expanded and radically redefined the relationship between knowledge and power. Yet the scope of these transformations cannot be reduced to the domain of technologies of power, nor to their logics, and their functioning: the government of algorithms—government through algorithms—does not merely reconfigure geopolitical boundaries or the techniques of normative production. This work aims to analyze the connection between the new, intelligent global order and the regime of truth that underlies it. If algorithmic technologies transform the meaning, means, and ends of governmental action, the resulting forms of truth ultimately redefine both. Through the method of Foucauldian genealogy, this thesis examines the status of truth within the existing power relations and traces its tensions along two lines of analysis. The first concerns probability: a form of power that seeks not only to prevent an event from occurring but to neutralize the very eventuality that it might become possible. The other concerns possibility and what is and remains incalculable, therefore ungovernable. What emerges from this tension is a politics of truth that recognizes its artifices not as property to be administered, but as a common good: a politics of the common.