Datocracy

ABSTRACT

Datocracy is a compound neologism that embraces transhistorical liberations and reconfigurations of data, in its multiple perceptual-linguistic forms, into new value relations and systems of governance, democratic or otherwise. Datocracy evolves from the often-violent separation of data from its habitual matrices, by virtue of dispositifs, or apparatuses, as defined by Michel Foucault and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. This paper examines material examples of the functioning of such dispositifs through Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, François Rabelais (through Mikhail Bakhtin) and William Burroughs. These examples demonstrate how emancipated data are readily recuperated into new relations of governance, as liberatory socio-political tools (or apparatuses), or vehicles of tyranny. In its passage between liberation and recuperation, in its state of utterance, perhaps, data experience a protosemantic moment, a pre-definitional state, which offers the promise of a momentary escape from, or rather within, value relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Data
• dispositif
• protosemantic
• democracy
• tyranny
• value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Annabel Frearson is an artist and lecturer based in London, UK.

Notes

1. Datocracy is my own term created in a series of playful neologisms, including infomanticism, LouisQuatorzisation, and methodology maudite, all of which correspond to my thinking around the reconstitution of cultural value in post-digital, economy-of-attention realm.

2. Julia Kristeva later names this function ‘abjection’ (Kristeva 1982).

3. It is contested that Bakhtin published a number of works under the names of different authors, Voloshinov being one of them (see Holquist 1990, 193).

4. I explore the concept of ‘infomanticism’, a conjoining of information and Romanticism that reflects on and through our narcissistic mediation with sublime data, in QGJCPLB (Frearson 2013).