Information Technology, Ideology and Governmentality

Abstract

This article seeks to identify the political and ideological dimensions of the contemporary presence of information technology or infotech. This presence is experienced as the progressive unfolding of technology as the logic of the social itself. Rather than approaching these dimensions through their reduction to a ground, a symbolic totality or a specific interest, and argument is constructed from Laclau and Mouffe's concept of `antagonism' in conjunction with Claude Lefort's notion of `invisible ideology'. This gives the argument the advantage of relating the constitution of ideology to a historically specific political formation, instead of positing a timeless relation to the constitution of an abstract subject as the ground of an explanation. The argument is that insofar as information technology appears as a substance that absorbs the dynamic of community, which I call autotechnopoiesis, then ideology constructs the identity of this space with itself. The political is understood as the failure of this self-presence. In conclusion, these issues are located in terms of the governmentality of the `performative state' which seeks the recruitment of subjects to the `promotion of the social' through an investment in the banality of communication.

Public sector software and the revolution: digital literacy in communist Kerala

“…Surveillance studies (see Lyon, 2007) has intentionally dealt with the exercise of power and new technologies and Andrejevic (2007) has made links with online interactivity as a form of control mainly exerted by businesses associated with the mining of personal information (Dataveillance) but also by governments. Henman (2010: 33) has written of the 'Governmentality of E-government', while other scholars have explored the vast increase in the state's investments in technology-mediated governmentalities (see Drake, 2011;Lippert, 2009;Mehta and Darier, 1998;Valentine, 2000). One of the ways to deal with this conundrum is to conceive of the liberal state's relationship with its citizenry as inherently ambivalent.…”

Médias sociaux, idéologie invisible et réel :pour une dialectique du concret

“…Ne représenterait-elle pas le passage vers un ordre social post-politique (Zizek, 2004), où le pouvoir ne nécessiterait plus le recours à une norme ou à un idéal régulateur pour se légitimer autre que celui de la valeur économique ? De fait, la légitimation de l'ordre social dans le monde numérique semble reposer essentiellement sur les règles de l'efficience technique et de la capacité organisationnelle fondées sur le calcul input/output (Valentine, 2000), conforme en cela à la définition que faisait Heidegger de la technique moderne : « Peutêtre est-il une pensée plus sobre que le déferlement irrépressible de la rationalisation et l'emportement qu'est la cybernétique. C'est plutôt cet emportement qui pourrait bien être le comble de l'irrationnel.…”

Knowledge management and the vision machine: Paul Virilio and the technological constitution of knowledge

“…Instead, technology is becoming 'our own nature' (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997: 28) in terms of being what we encounter in everyday life. Working in an office is no longer the wrestling with mechanical typewriters or copy machines but is instead the long-term engagement and interaction with advanced forms computer systems enabling for a broad variety of operations and activities such as information processing, distribution of files and documents, on-line interactions with coworkers, and so forth (Brown and Lightfoot, 2002;Valentine, 2000;Zuboff, 1988). The benefit from these computer systems are that they have a remarkable ability to store, process and distribute various materials, but the backside is that the machinery is very much determining the activities.…”