Datocracy

Frearson, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5223-7972 (2017) Datocracy. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 15 (2-3). pp. 168-175. ISSN 1470-2029 doi: 10.1080/14702029.2016.1228807

Abstract/Summary

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 is 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 experiences a protosemantic moment, a pre-definitional state, which offers the promise of a momentary escape from, or rather within, value relations.