The Statistical Subject in the Age of Data
(2018) Digital Initiative, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT) — Location: Columbia Law School, Jerome Greene Hall 807, Columbia University-NY.New-York. (10.May.2018)
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- Abstract
- How are quiet statisticians changing our world? Are they still taming chance, as Ian Hacking has contended? New decisional statistics are seeking less to discriminate people into categories (that create identity group constrains) than to extract, from massive data that collects the most anodyne things of our lives, a knowledge about our most private desires. What does Markov Chains, which allows Google to create a score that ranks the Internet’s every page, teach us about our data world and its rationality? What does the new correlations of the algorithms of the Machine Learning teach us about our desires? What does the Brownian movement, related to Markov Chains, tell us about our contemporary shape of chance? What becomes our subjectivity in the age of data when our desires are predicted by algorithms as objective reality? How should we understand the “contagion” between a “machinical” functioning and the subjectivity in the age of data? Retracing the powerful moments of the history of probabilities, the aim of this workshop is to show that the data world is freeing itself from the probabilistic world and, drawing from this analysis, to better pinpoint our data world. In particular, Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking have very well described the emergence and the conditions of possibility of the probabilistic world; man and language were consequently promoted in Western culture. A contemporary statistical subject emerges from this liberation, beyond – as well as below – links of probability and causality. It thus becomes necessary to figure out what is at stake now.
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Deprins, D. (2018). The Statistical Subject in the Age of Data. Digital Initiative, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT), Columbia Law School, Jerome Greene Hall 807, Columbia University-NY.New-York. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/172470