Datocracy.

Datocracyis 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.Datocracyevolves from the often-violent separation of data from its habitual matrices, by virtue ofdispositifs, or apparatuses, as defined by Michel Foucault and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. This paper examines material examples of the functioning of suchdispositifsthrough Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, François Rabelais (through Mikhail Bakhtin) and William Burroughs. These examples demonstrate how emancipated data are 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 experience a protosemantic moment, a pre-definitional state, which offers the promise of a momentary escape from, or rather within, value relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]