The Phantom Publics of Algorithmic Governance

Algorithmic systems produce particular kinds of subjects: fluid ‘clusters’ and ‘patterns’ of data points only tentatively and temporarily tied together. Decisions about our lives, inferences of who we are or what we want, are increasingly derived from our placement within these ephemeral collectives. This talk will reflect on these ‘phantom publics’ and the problem their emergence poses in political practice and social theory. These problems can be described as a degradation of the social and the debilitation of collective political claims. Yet, in many ways, these phantom publics reflect what was long desired in salient strands of critical theory: they are emergent, relational, indeterminate collectives – rejecting the reductive modernist categories of being and belonging together. This raises theoretical as well as regulatory dilemmas: which categories of political subjectivity – of inclusion and exclusion – can we (and should we) fall back on in facing the fractures of algorithmic governance? What becomes of the – always already insufficient – standards of non-discrimination as these liberal categories of political identity and protection are bypassed and displaced? This talk thinks with the work of Fred Moten and Ramon Amaro towards alternative practices and vocabularies for becoming-common in the encounter with algorithmic agencies – an opening towards the undercommons, opacity and fugitivity.

Dimitri Van Den Meerssche is a Lecturer in Law and Fellow of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) at Queen Mary University of London. His research studies the impact of new digital technologies on global security governance. He is interested in the forms of inequality and exclusion enacted by practices of algorithmic governance, and how these practices impact political subjectivity and the prospects of collective action. With Fleur Johns and Gavin Sullivan, he is currently co-editing a volume on Global Governance by Data – Infrastructure of Algorithmic Rule (CUP). Dimitri also writes on the practices and politics of international law in international organisations. In this field, he recently published his first book – The World Bank’s Lawyers: The Life of International Law as Institutional Practice (OUP). Dimitri has a strong interest in new methodological and (post)critical approaches to international law, around which he currently convenes a new lecture series - Underworlds. Dimitri is a founding committee member of the ESIL Interest Group on International Law and Technology, an Affiliated Fellow at the Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ) at New York University (NYU), and an Associate Fellow as the T.M.C. Asser Institute. He holds a PhD and an LLM in International Law from the European University Institute, an LLM from NYU as Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) Fellow, and a Master of Laws degree from Ghent University (Summa Cum Laude).