This project looks to fill a critical gap in our knowledge of the emergence of new forms of power, knowledge, and subjectivation that emerged during the industrial period in the United States and that continue to operate today. This critical hole is the role of what we will term "numerical mediation," which is the means by which the chaotic flux of the world can be bounded into discrete things--subjects, objects, associations between them, etc.--that can then be sensed and known by humans. Enumeration will be seen as primary: a necessary prerequisite to recognition and representation, language and nomination, classification and categorization. The project will demonstrate that American governmentality cannot be understood outside of numerical mediation, as governmentality arose within a "big data" problematic that demanded an increasing enumeration of the sociopolitical world. This "big data" problematic inflected sociopolitical problems such that they were understood as problems of data collection, processing, storage, and transmission, and always-already implied the birth of computation as their solutions. The first part of the project will offer an in-depth examination of Michel Foucault, the foundational theorist of governmentality. The first chapter will situate the inherent "big data" problematic behind governmentality, and argue that this necessitates an investigation of numerical mediation and computation. The second chapter picks up from the first, examining Foucault's methods of archaeology and genealogy as potential tools for investigating numerical mediation and its technical catalysis by computation. The second part of the project will provide an analysis of the rise of governmentality in America. The third chapter traces the emergence of the first electromechanical computer, which was built to solve a data processing problem in the 1890 U.S. Census. It argues that the emergence of biopower is clearly rooted in a "big data" problematic that implied computation as the appropriate solution. This numerical mediation totalized the American population, and thus made it available for human knowledge in unprecedented ways. The fourth chapter examines the social problem of risk and vitality and the history of actuarial calculations and insurance agencies in the United States. These calculations required the ongoing individuation of 'big' data to produce increasingly personalized policies. The demands of the insurance industry also lead to many important advances in computational technologies. The fifth and sixth chapters collectively analyze the manifestation of problems in public opinion and democracy within the "big data" problematic. They trace the rise of public opinion polling and statistical sampling techniques meant to offer an ongoing feedback mechanism that could produce continuous--i.e. "real-time"--feedback for governance. The seventh and final chapter will jump ahead to examine the ways in which Google researchers respond to the social problem of automating data collection and knowledge production to keep pace with the information produced in the physical and social world. This chapter cannot demonstrate the full scope of the "big data" problematic in either the intervening years, or across the contemporary sociopolitical world. It will, however, serve to demonstrate the contemporary critical and analytical efficacy of the concepts of "big data" problematic, numerical mediation, and computation that we have traced throughout the emergence of governmentality in America. Finally, the conclusion will look to tie the themes of the project together into the grounds for contemporary critical and analytical interventions into the sociotechnical systems grounded in the "big data" problematic and governmentality. Our continued focus on numerical mediation will afford us insight into the affirmative dimensions of power, while our historical analyses will demonstrate how deeply entangled these new technologies of power are with the emergence of the nationalized United States that we know today. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.). [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]