Informationalisation

This chapter describes how bureaucratic-managerial organisations are drawn to substitute a purely informational reality that is plastic to algorithmic logic for the concrete world, which is resistant and ‘sticky’. Informationalisation is the process of translating social life and individual experience into abstract information. Complex social realities are represented through conceptual categories, quantitative measures, indices, datasets, abstract schematics, and simplified models, which have the advantage of being widely communicable and readily manipulable. Individual instances of informationalisation are embedded in a broader historical process by which society becomes more information-based, driven by state-building, trade, monetisation, industrialisation, mediatisation, bureaucratic-managerial organisation, and information technology. Informationalisation processes have the goal of reducing the diffuse contents of social reality and individual experience to a determinate series of objects, whose interrelations are capable of being deconstructed, reassembled, and reprogrammed, at first discursively and then ‘in real life’. The separation of knowledge from social contexts and individual experience and its transposition into a format which appears objective or ‘object-like’ requires the thoroughgoing simplification, abstraction, and schematisation of the phenomena represented. Informationalisation initiates a process of ‘creative destruction’, decomposing the fabric of social reality and stripping away the connective tissue of history and context, qualities and values, so that the remaining fragments can be reassembled in a more ‘rational’ pattern according to the technocratic logic of optimisation and efficiency.