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The Algorithm Dispositif (Notes Towards

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An Investigation)
January 23, 2019 | By Davide Panagia Philosophy Society

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Davide Panagia
Professor of Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]

How can we speak of algorithms as political?

The intuitive answer disposes us to presume that algorithms are not political. They are
mathematical functions that operate to accomplish specific tasks. In this regard, algorithms
operate independently of a specific belief system or of any one system’s ideological ambitions.
They may be used for political ends, in the manner in which census data may be used for voter
redistricting, but in and of themselves algorithms don’t do anything political.

In recent years, with the development of a field of research generally referred to as “critical
algorithm studies,” the sense of the politically neutral standing of algorithms has been placed
under suspicion. Scholars from diverse fields – including cultural, film, media, and literary
studies as well as race and ethnicity studies, sociology, philosophy, and the law – have begun
to explore the extent to which, as socially effective structures, algorithms aren’t merely

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abstract recipes for task completion, but they also create and exacerbate extant conditions of
inequality, exploitation and social domination. An algorithm contains within it a “cultural logic”
(as David Golumbia has named it) that carries with it, in its coded programming, a social
imaginary of how things ought to be classified, organized, and operationalized. 1 Taina Bucher,
in her recent book If… Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics , also raises the issue of how
algorithmic structures, once they are embedded in everyday life and practice, don’t simply
help us complete mundane tasks more efficiently, but also produce (and – crucially –
re produce) everyday conditions of perceptibility and intelligibility. 2 In short, this growing area
of research shows how algorithms are constituent participants in everyday life management.
More than abstract practical instruments, they are life coefficients that, as the political
geographer Louise Amoore has argued, are tasked with managing uncertainty through
probability calculations and risk assessment. The end result is that not only present life, but
future events too, may be managed and administered. As Amoore states, “the emphasis of risk
assessment ceases to be one of the balance of probability of future threat and occupies
instead the horizon of actionable decisions, making possible action on the basis of
uncertainty.” 3 The shift that Amoore notes is an ontological one: uncertainty used to be a
reason not to act, both morally and politically. We would wait to act until we had all the facts.
But now, thanks to the deployment of probabilism in everyday life, uncertainty is a legitimate
justification for preemptive action. That is, we act when we are uncertain precisely so as to
mitigate possible outcomes.

As a contributor to this area of inquiry and research, I wish to raise some issues regarding the
difficulties and challenges of thinking about the politicality of algorithms. Specifically, I wish to
consider how an algorithm is a medium (first) and a political medium (second). My very
rudimentary and initial notes towards such an investigation stem from a general frustration
that begins with the following question: are all media political in the same way? Here’s what I
mean by asking that question. One has the sense, when thinking critically about the status of
algorithms in everyday life, that if they are to be considered a political medium, then they
operate no differently than a microphone, or a television, or a film. That is, their status as a
political medium is located in their ability to transmit information. And as instruments of
transmission, they are “influence machines.” 4 Thus, the effectivity and extent of their influence
(otherwise imagined as their power of coercion) is what makes them political.

“Influence machine” is a term coined by the Viennese neurologist and psychologist Victor
Tausk (1879-1919) who, prior to his work in the field of psychoanalysis, was a distinguished jurist
and journalist. Tausk defines the influence machine as a “delusional instrument” that “serves to
persecute the patient and is operated by its enemies.” 5 Typically, patients describe such
devices as possessing the following characteristics: 1. It makes individuals see pictures; 2. It
manipulates the mind by inducing and removing thoughts; 3. It has physical effects upon the
body that are beyond a person’s control; 4. It creates strange and indescribable sensations –
that is, new sensations that have yet to be named in language; 5. It produces physical and
pathological maladies. According to Tausk, patients recount how these machines are
immensely complicated, with many parts, and that they operate by means of obscure
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constructions. They are, to use modern parlance, “black boxes” – devices that operate
effectively but are also fantastical. Finally, as Tausk accounts for it, the influence machine is
perceived by the patient as a “hostile object” 6 or a “diabolical apparatus.” 7

When we consider algorithms critically and reflect on their status as political media, we tend
to treat them as influence machines in the Tauskian sense. That is, the critical paradigms we
deploy to analyze the status of algorithms carry within their critical imaginary an account of
algorithms as influence machines, hostile objects that manipulate mind and soul, not to
mention the body. Hence the indisputable persuasiveness of the “black box” metaphor. In
part, this treatment of algorithms arises from a characteristic of the dominant critical
apparatus throughout the humanities and social sciences, as well as critical legal studies, that
considers the task of criticism to be one of negating various forms of structural domination
through the exposition or the unearthing of the mystical operations of power that sustain and
proceduralize practices of subjection. In this regard, the image of the Tauskian influence
machine is both normatively and conceptually provocative and helpful to our critical
investigations. This, because that image corresponds to our sense that domination operates
through channels of coercive influence, as Thomas Hobbes reminds us in his Leviathan when
he describes human psychology as inclined to limit the freedom of others for the purposes of
self-aggrandizement.

In recent years, scholars have developed an alternative, and compelling, account of criticism
that isn’t reducible (but is also not adverse) to the view of criticism outlined above. This novel
approach to criticism is more experientially focused – that is, it looks to activities, practices,
and actions – rather than ideational specters. As the literary scholar, Toril Moi, accounts for it,
“actions aren’t objects, and they don’t have surfaces or depths.” 8 This view of criticism is less
concerned with unmasking underlying structures of domination, and thus imagining that there
exists a hidden world of power beneath the surface of experience. Rather, it considers
experience as its starting point. In this respect, it is a radically empiricist mode of criticism
that does not depend exclusively on the cognitive expertise of the critic to see things that
others, uninitiated in the epistemic ambitions of a specific school of criticism, cannot. 9 If a
task of criticism is to develop an understanding of what something does, and how, then
treating the doings of technical objects as if they only perpetuate the operations of
domination seems to go against the idea of an activity as an embodied practice. This doesn’t
mean that activities and practices, including the political effectivity of technical objects, are
transparent or self-evident. It is, rather, to treat practices and activities as things done in the
world and not merely as delusional, automated habits like those characterized by Tausk’s
influence machine.

What does this alternative approach to the practice of criticism mean for the political study of
algorithms? It means that alongside our understandings of algorithms as complicit in
ideological domination operating along the same lines, and within the same register, as other
media like television or film, we also consider algorithms in terms of their technical milieu and,
crucially for my purposes, we examine the forms of participation they enable, disable,
10
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constrain, and proliferate. 10 By “participation” I mean something like the ways in which
algorithms take part in everyday life. In short, the political study of algorithms that I am
proposing looks to the ways in which new forms of relationality are introduced in a specific
lived context, and how extant or already existing modes of association are reproduced or
rearticulated within that same context.

How might this be understood as a specifically political form of criticism? Politics (as I propose
to analyze it – though, of course, not just me) isn’t merely the exercise of domination (as it has
been classically defined), but is fundamentally a pluralist activity for the creation of value
through the forging and fomenting of relations between peoples, things, places, and times.
Politics exists when things exist in relation to one another, and this fact of relationality is itself
based on the sense that our individual and collective worlds are constituted by a plurality of
beings, both human beings and non-human objects. This fact of pluralism – of there being not
just something rather than nothing (as Plato had famously noted), but multiple somethings (or
what the philosopher William James calls the pluriverse) – creates the possibility of
relationality and hence, of things and people coming together and wrenching apart. In short,
relationality creates worlds. As James affirms, “knowledge of sensible reality thus comes to life
inside the tissue of experience. It is made ; and made by relations that unroll themselves in
time.” 11

In this respect algorithms are political because a fundamental function of the algorithm is to
generate world-making relations, and what seems to me to be of central political import are
the experiences of relationality that algorithms generate. Consider, in this regard, something
as basic as a sorting algorithm like the purchasing recommendation algorithm on Amazon.com.
Anyone who has shopped on Amazon has experienced both the frustration and the excitement
of these recommendations. And clearly, there is an element of the influence machine built into
these sorting mechanisms: through the correlational realist magic of artificial intelligence, we
receive a suggestion about how to extend (or reproduce, or replicate, or alter) our
experiential pluriverse. The algorithm sorts our previous views, purchases, and (crucially) our
attentions (not just mine, by the way, but those of all who have attended to the same object)
in such a way as to generate an expectation of future taste as invested in this other (perhaps
previously unimagined … by me) object of enjoyment. That the magic of correlation functions
within a capitalist climate of profit maximization is surely a contextual truth about the sorting
algorithm, but that insight tells me little or nothing about the politicality of the algorithm. It
simply confirms what I already know: that most everything created and operationalized in my
world is done so for the purpose of augmenting the revenues of a particular organization – in
this case, Amazon.com.

But there is something else interesting going on here with this sorting algorithm: by presenting
its recommendations as it does, it articulates relations not just between me and another
commodity of desire, but also between an expectation of taste (based on something I may
have enjoyed in the past) and a future value. Now, regardless of whether this recommendation
is accurate or not, worthwhile or not, or ultimately profitable or not for the company, the
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simple fact that a relation has been posited is a politically relevant fact about algorithms. And
this is a politically relevant fact independent of (though not innocent of) the particular
ideological context of its operation.

To treat an algorithm more broadly as a relational medium allows us to say this about them:
algorithms exist in the human condition of separateness. They are technical media that have
been invented in order to mediate separateness – of time, of space, of awareness, of attention.
In short, algorithms intermediate the separateness of the in-between which is the condition
sine qua non of human pluralism. And this radical empiricist insight helps get at a possible
answer to the question, how do algorithms participate in politics? They participate by
partaking in scenes of intermediation that exist in the in-between of peoples, places, things,
and events. When we think of a sorting algorithm as an intermediator of separateness we
begin to appreciate that the algorithm is political because what it is actively doing is
participating in the arrangement of worlds. Our worlds. The worlds we experience in the here
and now. The political matter for me, then, is not one of how algorithms constrain my
freedoms. But, rather, how do algorithms participate in the formation of worlds, including the
worlds within which I participate on a daily and hourly basis? Where “participation in the
formation of worlds” stands as a short-form for a coming-to-understanding of the algorithm’s
powers of arrangement, association, and dissociation.

In this respect, I consider algorithms not simply as tools of domination but as “sentimental”
media. Sentimental here is not synonymous with emotions and feelings (although emotions and
feelings emerge out of a sentimental operation). By sentimental I refer to the ordering,
structuring, and arranging of sensibilities: emotions and feelings (to be sure), but also
perceptibilities and intelligibilities. In their capacities as sentimental media, algorithms first
and foremost coordinate attention and awareness and make it so that we exist differently in
relation to one another. An acknowledgment of the algorithm’s claim on our all too human
condition of separateness brings us face to face with their standing as political media. They
are political because they arrange worlds. And out of these arrangements, intermedial power
dynamics that may include (but aren’t exclusive to) domination emerge.

It is for this reason, then, that rather than speaking about algorithms in general – or about any
one specific algorithm – I prefer to think about the “algorithm dispositif.” What is the algorithm
dispositif? In part I have answered this question above. But a few words on this Frenchism
might help clarify things further. “Dispositif” is a Latinate word that arrives to English from
France and is typically untranslatable – though it has often been mistranslated as “apparatus.”
Elaborating the distinction between “dispositif” and “apparatus” must be deferred for another
discussion, but the distinction more or less rests on the difference between an influence
machine and an intermedial object. The term dispositif has its root in the Latin dispositio that
refers to practices of arrangement and, to use a cognate English word, dispositions. More
specifically still, the dispositif comes to us from the tradition of rhetoric – its classical sources
are Aristotle’s Rhetoric , Cicero’s De Oratore , and Quintillian’s Institutio Oratoria . The
dispositio in rhetoric refers to the arrangements of the parts of speech in an oration, and how
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the order of ideas, of words, and of formulations, may be organized in such a way as to
maximize persuasion. The dispositio is that part of an experienced oration that disposes the
audience to attend to the speaker’s words – not to listen, understand, or interpret them – but
to attend to them, to lend them attention, to orient one’s attention to them. Listening,
understanding, interpreting may follow from this – indeed, usually do follow from this if the
dispositio is successful. But the principal aim of the dispositio is not the transmission of an
intention; this, because the dispositio is not a demonstrative proof. 12 It is, rather, oriented
towards the disposing (in the sense of attuning) of one’s perceptibilities and forms of
intelligibility. Consider in this regard the first line of Mark Antony’s famous funeral oration
from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar , “[f]riends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”
(Act III, Scene 2) To lend one’s ears – the disposing of the ears towards speech – is the
exhortation of the dispositio . What matters here is not language as expressing intention, but
how what is said is posed (and poised) so as to call attention and bestow notice: dispositio is a
modality of collective participation, an active placing upon of parts, one in relation to the
other, resting between and among each other.

It’s in this sense of dispositio that the algorithm dispositif is a sentimental medium. As the
sentimental philosophers of the eighteenth century showed, David Hume chief among them,
sentiments are the forces that connect us to one another, through technical media like
language (i.e., promising) and contracts, and to political life as a whole. The sentimental, in
other words, is a category of experience that is world making. As a sentimental medium, the
algorithm dispositif arranges and disposes us to the world. In doing so, it organizes worlds by
orienting relations of time and space, subject and object. This is what I mean when I say that
algorithms exist in the human condition of separateness. Their dispositional powers operate in
such a way as to coordinate and negotiate the in-between of separateness – just like a
sentiment like sympathy is what organizes my separateness from other humans so that I may
build something like social trust. 13

To be clear, I’m not saying the algorithms are emotional devices, though there is much
evidence to suggest that algorithms are emotion-triggering devices. What I am proposing is
that the social and political study of algorithms proceed in a manner akin to how we
understand the dispositional powers of the sentiments – powers that dispose us to move and
extend ourselves within the in-between space of separateness that conditions human
existence. The algorithm dispositif is political, in other words, because it operates in the
intervening spaces of separateness and does so by a power of mediation that is dispositional.
And this, I wish to say further, is substantially different from claiming that algorithms are
structures of domination and that their political function is one of subjection. Humans
dominate one another. Of this there is no doubt. But the work of arrangement in and of
political societies is not reducible to domination.

The preceding offers notes towards the possibility of asking the following question: What are
the conditions in and through which we can think the politicality of the algorithm dispositif?
The ambition for broaching this question rests on what I take to be a unique impasse for the
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history of critical thinking that the algorithm dispositif affords. Much of our critical tradition
rests on two important – indeed, essential – gestures. The first, inherited from Plato, is that to
think critically about the politicality of technical experience requires the capacity to turn away
(through reflection, cognition, rationalization) from the coercive operations of power implied
or presumed in technical objects. The second is akin to the first: our sense or acceptance of
the workings of a technical object rests on a reflective experience we may have of it. We
experience a film by viewing it, a musical score by listening to it, a food morsel by eating it, a
novel by reading it. The impasse that the algorithm affords our critical tradition challenges
both these premises: the fact of algorithmic ubiquity in everyday life makes turning away an
unavailable critical response; moreover, we don’t experience algorithms. We experience inputs
and outputs, data and data’s mediation. 14 But we don’t experience the technical medium of
the algorithm, not in the way we appreciate our experiences of other, more established,
media. At the interstice of these impasses in our critical traditions we may begin to reflect
anew on the tissues of experience that the algorithm dispositif affords.

By Davide Panagia, Professor, UCLA Dept. of Political Science

1. David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009). 

2. Taina Bucher, If… Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (2018). 

3. Louise Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability 58 (2013). 

4. Victor Tausk, On the Origin of the “Influence Machine” in Schizophrenia , 1 Journal of

Psychotherapy Practice and Research 185–206 (1992). 

5. Id. at 186. 

6. Id. at 189. 

7. Id. at 191. 

8. Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell
180 (2017). 

9. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (2013). 

10. Gilbert Simondon, Du Mode d’existence des Objets Techniques 70 (2012). 

11. James, supra note 9, 30. 

12. Chaïm Perelman & Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation
(1971). 

13. Stephen Mumford, Dispositions (2003). 

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14. Richard Grusin, Radical Mediation , 42 Critical Inquiry 124–148 (2015). 

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