We live, at least in the Americas and most of Europe, in post-disciplinary collectivities: we live in collectivities that are not anymore (or not completely) regulated through the procedures which Michel Foucault associated with disciplinary forms of government. More precisely, we have been assisting, for some time now, to the progressive demotion of the particular form of disciplinary governement which was "societal government," government "from the social point of view" (N. Rose). Therefore, we are at the beginning of a "'post-societal' phase" (J. Urry) of what were formerly "societies." At the same time, we ,as art, music, literary critics, are constantly confronted with "products" (should we use this term?) which don't allow easily themselves to be addressed with categories (work, event, form, matter, not to speak of the rethoric of "aesthetic values") which were elaborated in the framework of the disciplines, as ways of organizing "sensuous practices" and a body of knowledge about them. We increasingly find ourselves not knowing how to speak about the mostly hybrid and mobile sorts of things (configurations of sounds, images, words, actions, exchanges) which roam in the institutions of art, of literature, of music. Moreover, we don't have much in the way of concepts that allow us to connect both processes: the collapse of disciplinary forms of government (and the apparition of new forms of humanity), and the loss of power of the disciplines as modes of organizing "sensuous practices."

Tracking, monitoring, regulating: these are the operations that define governmentality in "post-societal" societies; but they (more than forming, differentiating, analyzing) are also the operations deployed in a lot of the most innovative practices of sound, image, text in the last few years. My work in progress is oriented to the construction of categories to speak in more adequate terms about post-disciplinary practices in the "arts" (a term that I use in this context only for the sake of brevity), and connect them to the development of post-societal
forms of government (and non-subjective forms of humanity). I've been recently conducting this program along three routes:

1. through an exploration of the potentialities of Bruno Latour's concept of attachment risque in relation to "artworks";
2. through a deployment of the consequences of certain properties of hypertext ("underdetermination" (M. Poster), non-disponibility, etc.) for the figure of "literature," as this figure was constructed in the environment of a culture of the book;
3. through a reading of the status of the "documentary" in the field of recent (mostly electronic) sound practices, in its connection with the possibility of a "plastic listening" (P. Szendy), a listening oriented to tracking "allowances."

July, 2001