2 Big Data, governmentality and social acceleration: the industrialization of politico-institutional mediation

This proposal builds on Rosa's work on social acceleration (Rosa, 2012). It examines the deployment of technologies that have brought about societal changes, particularly those having to do with social (re)production. We posit that the concept of social acceleration plays a major role in the Big Data phenomenon, more specifically Big Data as industrializing dynamic of politico-institutional mediation. To support this assertion, we draw on the work of Freitag (1986), which homes in on the symbolic dimension of social issues and conceives of society essentially as a (re)production dynamic that is individuated through time. From this perspective, one of the main characteristics of society is its strict reproduction arrangements, which require a comprehensive synthesis (representation) of the social realm. Once transcendental in nature (a reproduction mode based on symbolic politico-institutional mediation), this synthesis now tends to appear in decision-making/operational reproduction practices. There society abandons the "yet to be" mode to take explicit, and absolute, present-tense form as systemic technical efficiency. Big Data epitomizes this intensifying trend through its deployment of  industrial-grade tools for automating symbolic politico-institutional mediation processes and promoting their incorporation into marketing channels as productive activities in their own right (Manard, Mondoux et al., 2016). This so-called "real-time" dynamic itself, in requiring that acceleration be perpetual, indeed proves problematic given that symbolic politico-institutional mediation is no longer a political matter (Mouffe 2005). Instead, mediation is subsumed by technical devices engendering normative processes that assume apolitical and non-ideological guises.