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This article approaches social media from the theory of the religio-political practice of acclamation revived by Agamben and following twentieth-century social and political thought and theology (of Weber, Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz). It supplements that theory by more recent political-theoretical, historical and sociological investigations and regards acclamation as a ‘social institution’ following Mauss. Acclamation is a practice that forms publics, whether as the direct presence of the ‘people’, mass-mediated ‘public opinion’, or a ‘public mood’ decipherable through countless social media postings. The article surveys issues of differential geographies of access, weighting of posts, value-creation, orality and gesture, algorithmic governmentality, and Big Data and knowledge production. It argues that social media constitute a public from a mass of individualized, private postings. It concludes that they make possible forms of political calculability and action, yet are continuous with ritual and liturgical elements of political life. This study contributes to an analytics of publicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the notion of power is less important as a theoretical concept that can guide research than as an orientation towards the present. As such, it foregoes a focus on agencies of power for an engagement with relations and mechanisms of power and what Foucault terms a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’. It notes that the first decade of the 21st century has witnessed different series of catastrophic events, such as 9/11 or the financial meltdown of September 2008. These events appear as markers of a crisis of neoliberalism as both governmentality and metaphysics. The elements of an emerging set of relations of power include the security complex characterized by the language of the exception, the rationality of precautionary risk, new techniques of security, and recharged and often militant forms of sovereignty capable of delegation by and derogation from the state. It is the understanding of this ‘dispositif ’, its ambiguities and consequences, captured by a broad range of cultural, political and social studies, which locates the relations of power that lie at the heart of many current contestations. Given the fecundity and creativity of these analyses, such studies would appear to call into question the project of a theory of power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information about governing societies as a developing notion in the contemporary social sciences. The notion of governing society has for a long time seemed selfevident. Society was conceived as a totality coincident with a certain space, a territory, and occupied by a population. Governing was undertaken by a unified agency that acted upon the society of which it was also a specialized part, the government, or, more broadly, "the state." The notion of "governing society" thus referred unproblematically to the binary of state and society.

Explores a series of themes raised by a certain use of the term `technology,' particularly in expressions such as `technology of power' or `technology of government.' Consequences of reducing the `technologies of government' to the merely technological; Investigation of the use of the concept; Necessity of the concept to the critical history of rationality.