This paper is published in the first issue of Jianghai journal in 2020
Author brief introduction
Lan Jiang, professor and doctoral supervisor of the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University, researcher of the research center of Marxist social theory of Nanjing University.
Foucault put forward the concept of life power and life politics in his lecture of French Academy in 1976, and corresponded it with the discipline mechanism. However, in the following year, Foucault proposed that there is a security mechanism that is not based on disciplined individuals. In today's intelligent age, the development of digital technology provides a new form for the security mechanism proposed by Foucault. This new form is digital life politics, which is based on algorithmic governance such as data collection and intelligent analysis. It can accurately govern many individuals without requiring individuals to act according to unified norms. This kind of "laissez faire" governance does not bring disorder, but effectively controls the behaviors and thoughts of diverse individuals under a huge invisible data network.
Key words: intelligent age Foucault digital life politics precise governance
This is a familiar era, but also a strange era.
The reason why I am familiar with it is that I walk home today, turn on my mobile phone and look at the number of steps, barely up to 10000 steps. In my circle of friends, I'm probably in the top 40. One app told me that it consumed 128 calories in this step; the other app told me the average heart rate during exercise and gave detailed health suggestions, such as what kind of food, how much can I eat and drink according to the amount of exercise today; the other app told me the quality of sleep last night, when I didn't carry it for more than half an hour in the daytime Move, this app will automatically alarm, remind me that I can't sit in a place for too long, should get up and walk This is our most common daily life today. Under the supervision of smartphone app, I repeat the same actions day after day, year after year. I'm so familiar with this whole set of procedures. According to the app's suggestions, I carry out physical exercise and nutrition matching, shape my body, and strive to make all indicators of my body reach normal. The way I rely on is an intelligent monitoring method.
The reason why I'm strange is that I can't help wondering if it's still me? In the days when smartphone apps were not very popular, I worked in front of the computer, read books in front of my desk for a long time, forgot the time, and galloped freely in the text. Now, this kind of free gallop may be awakened by a short alarm bell at a certain moment, reminding me that I should walk. Although I fully understand, APP warnings and suggestions are for me to have a body recognized by monitored values. But I lost full control of my body. These apps, which are dedicated to discipline my body and keep its numerical indicators normal, can be regarded as a kind of benign assistance. But other apps let us gradually lose self-control. People grow with each passing day on the platforms of WeChat friends, tiktok and micro-blog. Sometimes it's just a chance to look at the message of the mobile phone, but in the circle of friends, I've been swiping the screen for more than ten minutes. There are also mobile games such as glory of the king, hero League, etc., which let the players who were only ready to play for half an hour at the beginning to stop fighting for three hours in a row These phenomena, which happened in the era of high popularity of smart phone app, are increasingly affecting every user who uses smart phone. Behind the screen of mobile phone, we seem to be facing a strange self. We can't help but sigh: "we are alienated!"
Indeed, in this digital and intelligent era, we do have a sense of alienation. However, this kind of alienation is no longer the materialization in the sense of Lukacs, but a new kind of Alienation: Digital alienation. However, it is not enough to understand all the problems we encounter today only from the alienation theory of Western Marxism, because what we are facing is not only an abnormal alienation, but also all our social life has been reshaped by intelligent technology and digital technology, which not only makes our life deviate, but also produces The sense of alienation, more importantly, is that this life reshaped by intelligent tools may not be a deviation at all, but a normal life. In the normal life, we rely on various intelligent technologies and digital technologies to reproduce ourselves. To be more in-depth, we are a product ourselves, which is conducive to the optimal configuration management of large digital and intelligent platforms, so as to truly transform each of us to a platform control level. So what we are facing today is a new kind of governance technology. If we continue the plan given by Foucault in the lecture of French Academy from 1976 to 1979, it is the governance technology of life politics. However, different from Foucault's era, the situation we are facing today is more thorough than the former. This is the ultimate governance of Foucault's panoramic openness, that is, the governance technology closely combining intelligent control with everyone's digital management. We can call it "digital biopolitics". In a certain sense, we can think that this "digital life politics" is not the continuation of Western Marxist logic such as Lukacs, but the expansion of the form of "life politics" put forward by Foucault in the lecture of French Academy. So we have to go back to Foucault and look for the key to understanding new governance technologies in the age of intelligence.
Demography and the rise of modern life politics
In a lecture given by the French Academy on March 10, 1976, Foucault talked about the nature of the French Republic established by the new class represented by the third class after the French Revolution. In other words, the French Revolution faced such a problem: whether France is France because of the Bourbon royal family or because of a nation that can be called "France". Louis XVI's head has been cut off by the great revolution. France will not disappear from the surface with the fall of the last king of the Bourbon Dynasty. France still exists, but not in the name of the king. "According to the monarchy, a nation does not exist, or even if it exists, it can only exist if the king himself finds the possible conditions and entities," Foucault said However, in the view of the revolutionaries, especially the third level, there is a need to redefine what the French state and nation are. During the great revolution, a low-level priest named siey è s wrote a book on the third level of privilege? 》And distribute it on the street. "What is the third level?" he declared? Everything in France If the third level is not free, then the nation as a whole, or even any special level, is not free at all. " In Foucault's view, this also means the change of the concept of state, that is, from the former concept of monarch centered state to the concept of nation-centered state. The former representative of Frances is the king of the Bourbon Dynasty who declares "I am the state", while the third level after the great revolution It changed all these, whether it was sieas or later Augustine tieri, who insisted that the French nation should constitute the country, that is to say, the population of France as a whole, which means the transformation of the West from a traditional monarchy to a modern nation-state.
In the next week's lecture, Foucault consciously compared some differences between monarchy and nation-state. One of the differences is the right of the two countries to deal with life and death. The monarch embodies "fair more" and "laisser vivre". Ordinary life and death are not under the jurisdiction of the monarch's power, and the monarch's power is not reflected in daily life. However, at a certain special time, the monarch shows his power within the Kingdom: "the monarch's power can only be effective when the monarch can kill people. In the final analysis, the essence of the power of life and death he holds is the power of killing people. Only when the monarch kills people, can he exercise the power of life. This is essentially the power of the blade. " Foucault's remark shows that the center of traditional monarchy is the body of the monarch, and any behavior that violates the body or meaning of the monarch will urge the monarch to exercise power, that is, the monarch tries to eliminate any possibility that endangers his center status. On the contrary, any subjects who do not touch the body and meaning of the monarch actually maintain their own particularity. Their lives (vies) are not directly controlled by power, so they can maintain their relative uniqueness.
There are different ways to govern a nation-state. As the origin of the legitimacy of the state has shifted from the body of the monarch to the nation, the implementation of power has turned into the faire vivre and laisser mort. Foucault concluded: "the power of a monarch is to make people die or live. Then, the newly established power is: the power to make people live and to make people die. " In French, the word "faire" is an active verb, that is to say, faire represents the object of the active implementation of power. In a monarchy, the implementation of power is to take people's lives, that is, to show initiative when killing people. On the contrary, laisser in French stands for laisser, that is, power does not actively enter into the field, or power does not care or let go of this phenomenon and activity. In a monarchy, how ordinary people live is not under the direct authority of the monarch. Correspondingly, the core of modern nation-state is no longer killing others at will, but exerting power on the lives of ordinary people, that is, the production of their own lives.
How to understand the power of making people live or producing their lives in modern national state power? In previous studies of prison and criminal theory, Foucault has come to the conclusion that making people alive is "a group of people who try to dominate people, so that this group can and should be broken down into individuals, who are monitored, trained, used and possibly punished." Foucault's description of new governance technologies, even the rise of human living power, is noteworthy. The key to making people live is to break down the group that appeared as a whole into individuals, and monitor, discipline and use these individuals separately. In feudal society or monarchy society, people's life is not isolated in fact. People still form communities because of blood, geography and business relationship. Their participation in politics is actually closely related to the whole community. Individuals can't simply be independent from the community. On the contrary, their activities always represent a family, a guild or a city. However, the emergence of the nation-state or new governance technology has made the traditional consanguinity and land