“With the postfordist colonization of affect and the concomitant valorization of affective difference, a body has no choice but to speak. A body speaks whether it wants to or not. This is the genius of the ” page rank” algorithm used by search engines: use graph theory to valorize pure heterogeneity, show how quality is an emergent property of quantity, as Barbara Cassin has written in her book on Google. Data mining is often considered in terms of location and extraction of nuggets of information from a sea of background noise. But this metaphor is entirely wrong. Data mining is essentially a plastic art, for it responds to the sculpture of the medium itself, to the background noise itself. I t valorize s the pure shape of relationships. Not “can” but “does” the body speak ? Yes, it has no choice. Making a phone call from the slums of Cairo or Mumbai or Paris , the subaltern “speaks ” into a database – just as much as I do when I pick up the pho ne . The difference for difference is no longer actual, it is technical. The subaltern speaks, and somewhere an algorithm listens” (A. Galloway, “The Interface Effect”, 2013)
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