Plenarveranstaltung I / Plenary session I: Power and security in times of precarity
"De-politicizing security through technology and the question of power in the 21 century"
Sprecherin / Speaker:
Ursula Rao (Universität Leipzig)
The lecture examines the process of de-and re-politicization of security regimes in an era of digital governance to generate a deeper understanding of the organising principles that frame political orientations and produce the terrain of plausible political action.Today, digital technologies have become the new trusted partners in the fight againstdisorder, misery, exclusion and suffering. The introduction of mechanized forms of decision-making is coterminous with structural change that alters the character of the state. For example, policing takes the form of technical surveillance exercised at a multiplying number of de-central portals that regulate movement in spaces of restricted sociality. In the field of social security, the state moves from re-distributing resources to efficiently coordinating the activity of countless public and private providers. Through these operations, the state is reimagined as a platform to give citizens frictionless access to the services they need, desire or deserve. Concerns over surveillance aside, such visions are an extreme instance of a trend within neoliberal statecraft to de-politicize the social and shrink the space for political action. Is this the end of negotiations? I argue for a nuanced analysis of digital governance in order to understand the effects of de-politicization and the new forms of political actions that grow in its shadow.
Datum: Sonntag, 29. September 2019