ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the historical and conceptual convergence of governance, design, and algorithmic technologies. The essay reworks the conceptual architecture of Michel Foucault's notion of governmentality in order to expose how design and automation technologies emerge within the strategic operations of governing. So conceived, modern designing shows itself to be woven into the material operations of governmentality, and the computational and machine-learning techniques that are becoming ubiquitous in personal, corporate, and legal domains are a part of much longer-term strategy of ‘governmental designing.’ What emerges from this discussion is a preliminary outline for a critical and speculative design brief that charts a very different way of thinking about the genealogical emergence of modern designing, how the latter works across divergent materials and institutions, and how algorithmic apparatuses have become central to the neocolonial project of designing the conditions under which contemporary subjectivation unfolds.
