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Name: Antoinette
Family Name: Rouvroy
Affiliation: FNRS (chercheur qualifié) / Centre de Recherche Informatique et Droit, Université de Namur
Personal web-site: http://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/
Short BIO
Antoinette ROUVROY is FNRS (National Fund for Scientific Research) research associate and researcher at the Information Technology and Law Research Centre (CRID) of the University of Namur, Belgium. She is particularly interested in the mechanisms of mutual production between sciences and technologies and cultural, political, economic and legal frameworks. Her doctoral research at the European University Institute of Florence (Human Genes and Neoliberal Governance: A Foucauldian Critique. Abingdon and New-York, Routledge-Cavendish, 2008), looked at the knowledge-power relations in the post-genomic era. Her current interdisciplinary research interests revolve around the ethical, legal and political challenges raised by the new information, communication and surveillance technologies (biometrics, RFIDs, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, persuasive technologies,…) and their convergence.
Title of the presentation
Are autonomic computing and the statistical governance of the “real” compatible with the preservation of the “virtual” dimension of human identity and legal subjectivity?
Abstract
The paper is an attempt to identify the impacts of the current turn towards a statistical governance of the "real" resulting from a strategic convergence of technological and socio-political evolutions epitomized by the increasing involvement of autonomic computing in security and marketing applications. The suggestion is made that this epistemic transformation and its resulting regime of visibility and intelligibility affects a specific attribute of the human subject, which is the fact of being always "virtual" (as opposed to "actual"), and thus implying both a chronological "différance" (“being over time”) and an essential dimension of contingency or potentiality. This virtual quality of the self, being a precondition to the experience of utopias (spaces without location, according to Foucault), it is also a precondition to cultural, social and political vitality. Seeing the impacts of autonomic computing on human personality and legal subjectivity in these terms may allow for normative considerations about what it is that the right to privacy and to data protection are meant to protect: a certain level of virtuality of both individual human beings and the social organizations they live in.
On-line publications
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