Homo Datum: Emerging Outlines

What are the consequences of the foreclosure of the political in an un-free form during the epoch of supermodern capitalism? What are the implications of the emergence and general diffusion of networked digital computer technology, along with the mathematicised formal logic that underpins its functioning, in relation to this foreclosure of the political? This paper begins by tracing the ways in which (following Reiner Schurmannand Martin Heidegger) modern subjectivity – which forms the political through the functioning of the three recursive relations to, near, and for oneself – is grounded in the human being seeking meaning in making sense of the relationship with itself; the human being is the ground, the originary source for making sense of everyday life. However, another trajectory of the political emerges with the evolution of capitalism, characterized by instrumental reasoning, a form that becomes dominant in our time. Supermodern capitalism is thus characterized politically by what Gilles Deleuze called “societies of control”. In the thirty years that passed since Deleuze’ essay, what he outlined has now become more concretely perceivable. There is the fundamental change denoted by the socialization of mathematized formal logic, that underpins the now-ubiquitous digital networked computers and associated technologies and symbolic practices. The incorporation of this new formal system of reasoning into capitalist economic structures has a fundamental social impact: the generalization of instrumental-calculative reasoning into the political, which means the interruption of the formation of political subjectivity through the interruption of the movement of the recursive relations centered on the self. This interruption marks a new process of socialization, where political concepts become transformed into digital social objects. ...