Algorithmic Governance and Racializing Affect

Abstract

Algorithms have become ubiquitous in social life. From macro governmental decision making to our everyday quotidian acts, we interact with algorithms as they learn from and shape our becoming, seeking to compress patterns and rhythms into their existing logics. Algorithms attempt to enfold the variability of knowing into the political-juridical, transparent, or self-determining subject. The performative force of algorithms lies not in predicting behavior but rather in violently shaping behaviors while simultaneously becoming futures. How, then, to account for the enfolding of Man in technosocial systems? This chapter argues that Sylvia Wynter's sociogenic principle can be helpful to rethink how algorithmic rhythms and patterns of sociopolitical relations become ontogenic via the flesh/body, shaping the always already mattering flesh, and as such producing racializing affect. Racializing affect, the chapter argues, is inseparable from the patterns and rhythms of technosocial systems and the historicity of colonialism.