After Free Speech: #datapolitik and the Failures of Liberalism

Our modern political and aesthetic critical vocabularies are inadequate to the political ontology of algorithms. The reason is quite straight forward: algorithms are not mimetic media whereas our critical practices are rooted in judgments of and about representations. This means that attempts at the legislation of digital life are both misinformed and misguided if they assume that the dilemmas arising from algorithmic governance may be adequately managed by appeals to liberal conceptions of the individual, free speech, or privacy.

This paper seeks to explain how and why this is the case. In doing so the paper elaborates the possibility of new forms of critical thinking that attend to the dispositional powers of algorithms.

About

Davide Panagia is Professor & Chair of Political Science at UCLA. Prior to his position at UCLA, he was Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at Trent University. He is a political theorist with multidisciplinary interests across the humanities and social sciences including contemporary political theory and the history of political thought, aesthetics, critical algorithm studies, and the philosophy of media. His book publications include The Poetics of Political Thinking (Duke, 2006), The Political Life of Sensation (Duke, 2009), Rancière’s Sentiments (Duke, 2018), Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics (Minnesota, Forerunners, 2016) andImpressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). He has two forthcoming books: Sentimental Empiricism: Politics, Philosophy, and Criticism in Postwar France and Intermedialities: Political Theory and Cinematic Experience. His current research project, #datapolitik, is a study of the forms of power in the age of the algorithm.