On December 2nd, 2025, the Center of Excellence in French and Francophone Studies, alongside Villa Albertine and the Consulat Général de France à San Francisco, welcomed Associate Professor Armen Khatchatourov of the University Gustave Eiffel, Paris. Khatchatourov led research at Institut Mines-Télécom and Sony Computer Science Lab Paris, bringing his insight and background in engineering and philosophy of technology to explore whether artificial intelligence can be disentangled from governmentality through a Foucauldian lens, allowing questions to be raised about continuity and rupture in historical paradigms of governance.
Khatchatourov began by framing governmentality as a broad historical formation that not only defines specific methods of governance but also shapes the larger vision of society. From this perspective, he’d explain that governance can take different forms, including discipline, security, neoliberal adjustment, and states of exception. The central question of his talk was whether we remain within the neoliberal paradigm or whether AI technologies mark the emergence of a new formation.He emphasized that neoliberalism is not simply the idea that markets rule everything, but rather a dominant mode of governmentality today. Neoliberalism, he noted, is deeply intertwined with digital technologies, extending beyond issues such as bias, discrimination, or attention economies to the very foundations of how society and subjectivity are imagined. To further this point, Khatchatourov introduced four figures of normativity that compare social normativity with AI normativity: fair discipline, which defines norms as ideal models such as fairness in admissions; optimized liberal equilibrium, which establishes averages and ranges of acceptability; reward-dependent adjustment, which governs through continual recalibration and reflects neoliberal control; and force-of-exception, which mirrors the irregularities in AI systems. A notable moment in the lecture was Khatchatourov’s parallel between Foucault’s notion of social normativity and AI normativity, by highlighting how algorithmic systems replicate disciplinary and regulatory structures. He also argued that the very term “AI” itself is misleading, since it’s functioning more as an umbrella label that hides important differences between distinct technologies.
In his closing remarks, Khatchatourov believed that we’re still within the neoliberal stage of governmentality, marked by control, modulation, and the shaping of the “neoliberal individual.” He contrasted this with earlier forms, where discipline produced obedient subjects and security or biopolitics produced liberal individuals, suggesting that AI technologies strengthen the neoliberal mode rather than replace it. The lecture opened to a Q&A from the audience questioning the intersections of Foucauldian theory and contemporary AI. Khatchatourov’s historical framework offered a nuanced way of thinking about algorithmic governmentality, allowing us to question whether AI represents a break from the past or a continuation of existing forms of governance.