Another Becoming for Technics

When the works we have mobilized collectively collide with the contemporary biopolitical dispositif, the latter cracks and reveals its complex morphology. It is forced to abandon its condition of invisibility, its materiality offers itself to the gaze, and a strategic intentionality is brought into relief. This intentionality aspires to reduce the teeming diversity of the world, in order to make of it a set of disconnected sectors, artificially homogenized within themselves. The real is thus partitioned, including the human collective itself. Moreover, we have seen, again on the basis of the works, how the biopolitical dispositif seeks to distribute visibilities and invisibilities asymmetrically, in a fundamentally “panopticizing” approach. What takes shape is a system which, by drowning the intelligibility of its own infrastructure, seeks to capture and process every sign of life coming from the physical world in order to track it, model it and predict its behavior. Through the prism of the works, the contemporary biopolitical dispositif turns out to be a heterogeneous entity: the technological component seeks to legitimize its action by articulating itself with the legislative element, while wrapping itself in a mythical aura: the myth of immateriality, which aims to ensure the invisibility of the dispositif; the myth of the increased interconnection of the human factor, whereas it is increasingly disaggregated; the myth of innovation, which strives to secure the growth of the dispositif; and finally, the myth of the superiority of the machine, which seeks to inhibit the human factor and to discourage any attempt at resistance.

The action of contemporary power appears, admittedly, associated with a form of fluidity introduced by digital technics, consistent with a discourse that privileges “information” – conceived as a disembodied entity – and the flow, at the expense of matter. Now, according to this discourse, the action of power should henceforth be grasped exclusively within the framework of societies of control, which operate by “modulations” and no longer by “molds¹,” as was the case with the disciplinary societies described by Foucault, an old rigid paradigm that the more fluid societies of control would have replaced².

However, these works in particular make forcefully sensible not the survival but the full vitality of principles that were already at the heart of Foucauldian disciplinary societies³: we have seen how power seeks to transform the circulation of networked digital images into a panopticon of planetary reach; we have seen how the system carries out partitionings that affect the individual and collective physicality of the human factor… Everything happens as if the tools within the reach of power had not been “changed,” but rather improved, completed, extended: the modulations of the social body have been superimposed on control by “molding”; in other words, the effects of power on flows have been added to the effects on traces. More concretely, Jean-Paul Fourmentraux describes as follows the double playing field, real / “virtual,” on which the biopolitical dispositif now unfolds, recently extended on the pretext of security reasons (terrorism, Covid…):

The most technologically sophisticated surveillance has been combined with the most archaic control and management of bodies: Web trackers, StopCovid tracing apps (which became TousAntiCovid), but also thermometers, drones, cameras and police patrols⁴.

This ambivalent nature of the action of power today has thus not entirely escaped discursive analysis, especially when the latter emerges from a sensible approach in contact with the works.

We have thus seen how the theories of the apparatus make it possible to conceptualize, both locally and within a more general framework, the action of these works, which function through the strategic orchestration of the failures of the technological system and which, by this means, manage to unveil the mode of existence of the biopolitical dispositif as it is set up today. These creative gestures suggest the possibility of a liberated technics, freed from any teleological scope: by relegating the function imposed by the instances of power, by bracketing the efficiency of uses, it offers to the gaze its true functioning and its domain of possibles. Outside any task to be accomplished, by short-circuiting the prerogative of labor, it is the expression of a playful spirit that is unveiled in the creation of forms through disruptions of the technological element. At the moment when technics unfolds outside any constraint, a place opens up for bricolage, for craft, through which technics restores links with its origins at the same time as the human is in turn liberated. From then on, technics offers itself as a means capable of restoring to the real all its richness, rather than simplifying it in order to grasp it in its totality.

Through art, the possibility of an emancipatory reformulation of the human’s bond with technics can be glimpsed. Technics, now de-essentialized, sees its role and its effects depend above all on what the human does, or lets be done, with it.

1. See in this regard Yuk Hui, «Modulation after control ». New Formations [en ligne]. Lawrence & Wishart, 2015, n° 84–85, p. 74–91.↩︎

2. Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972-1990, op. cit., p. 244.↩︎

3. According to Jean-Paul Fourmentraux: “Michel Foucault’s biopolitics has perhaps never reached such a level of accomplishment.” In Jean-Paul Fourmentraux, Sousveillance: l’oeil du contre-pouvoir. Dijon : les Presses du réel, 2023, p. 15.↩︎

4. Ibid., p. 14.↩︎