La parte di Tersite. Verità e democrazia dopo la democrazia

Abstract

[The Part of Thersitis. Truth and Democracy after Democracy]. This article presents the crisis of governability due to an “excess of democracy” diagnosed by the 1975 report The Crisis of Democracy as a crisis of control and shows how its corrective in the neoliberal transformation of the State coincides with a “revolution of control”. The passage from the traditional bureaucratic control of legitimacy to the automation of control generates what Foucault called the “society of the norm”, marked by the invisibility of the decision. Here the “oligarchic alliance between wealth and science” (Ranciére) constitutes the backbone of the neoliberal program of “digitalization of politics” and leads to an “algorithmic governmentality” approaching a “pure governmentality”: the empire of the intangible and inevitable evidence that both Lyotard and Foucault prefigured as the “terror” – the condition where truth paralyzes.

Keywords

• democracy
• algorithmic governmentality
• neoliberalism
• evidence-based policy
• terror