Author: techsocjal

Nikita Sazonov, (Faculty of Philosophy, Lomonosov Moscow State University)

 

The postsecular diagnosis’ main thesis consists in unfolding of a viral power of religiosity. It penetrates the most sheltered places of ratio and worms into its blindspots. Our daily existence is interpassive (Robert Pfaller), our speculative sources is completely theological (Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux). But the main territory of this religious insurrection is a technology (Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Jussi Parikka). How to grasp this intermutations between religion and technology? Computer-generated reality is a digital technology that makes today’s collision of various religious practices precisely clear. The religious core of VR (virtual reality) tries to struggle against the religious core of AR (augmented reality), and vice versa. I will try to clarify the significance of dominantion of AR technology under the other digital media in discussions about the modes of existence (of/in) post-secularity in the cases of NianticLab and Apple AR projects.

 

E-mail: darkcryptasite@gmail.com

Ekaterina Nikitina, (Ph.D. in Literary Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Independent researcher)

 

The boundaries between animal and the machine have always been unclear and human culture has never been sure about the division of the living and the non-living, the natural and the artificial, or the technological. The concept of technologically mediated naturecultures (Donna Haraway) / medianatures (Jussi Parikka) has brought a refreshing outlook to this issue. Naturecultures opens up that human and non-human actors participate in simpoietic, material-discursive processes of becoming – body, subject, agent, human, animal etc. In my paper I attempt to radicalize the question about sympoietic human/animal/machine becomings discussing an animal disability and prostheticity. Augmented by technologies, prosthetic bodies of chimeric dogs, cats, pigs, donkeys, horses presented in art, literature and real life define our posthuman condition. Their corporeality is a point of intersection of nature and culture, of zoe and bios. Overcoming the distinctions between the natural and the technological, prosthetic beings push away the mechanistic thinking about animal as the machine that is capable/incapable of instrumental function. They offer us a “breakage” in this kind of thinking turning the mechanistic question “What are animals/machines capable of?” into “Can they not be able?”. Such approach opens that humans along with animals and machines share the ability to be unable, “the possibility of sharing the possibility of non-power” (Jacques Derrida), in other words, mortality, or capacity to be dead. In this perspective, prosthesis appears as primordial, intra-active relations between the human and the non-human (Bernard Stiegler) which allows us to understand that to be able-bodied means to be engaged in prosthetic relationships with someone with a disability (Karen Barad). What ontological questions arise in such context of disability? What happens when two prostheticities — human and non-human — meet? When two inabilities encounter each other? How does the condition of animal change when it comes to technological? Are the boundaries between the animal, the human and the machine so important and why can’t we just abolish these borders? I am going to discuss these issues circulated between prosthetisity and animality in the discourse of posthumanism and its critics of postanthropocentric processes which propel the today’s world.

 

E-mail: katya.althea@gmail.com

Marcin Miłkowski (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences)

 

According to Steven Pinker, one of the powerful forces in the decline of violence was the widespread adoption of print and electronic media. Thanks to both technological revolutions, the violence has become easier communicable, and therefore more difficult to hide. His argument is that the human rights movements in the 20th century were helped by the television and radio that made it possible to organize people around the idea of human rights. However, at the same time, the role of two factors in spreading violence and denying human rights is difficult to deny. First, mass propaganda, which is required for the spread of genocidal political ideologies, also uses the same technological means. Second, online communities, in particular social media, have an undeniable role in spreading ignorance and ideology, such as fake news, conspiracy theories, flat-Earth beliefs, neonazism, or deadly health advice. In my talk, the focus will be on technological mechanisms that create echo chambers and make the vast spread of rumour possible. The question is what makes social amateur institutions such as Wikipedia so vastly different from echo chambers in social media. To answer this question, I will delve into the technological foundations of the scientific revolution that made the social institution of science so unique in its epistemic credentials.

 

E-mail: marcin.milkowski@gmail.com

Ewa Mazierska (Professor of contemporary cinema at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Central Lancashire)

 

My paper will try to account why prophetic character is attributed to music and what the current state of music can tell us about its future, as well as the future of other areas of human activities. In particular, I will focus on the combined effects of two changes, located in the last decade of the twentieth century: convergent digitisation and neoliberalisation. My question is whether twenty years later music business, musicians and consumers of music embrace them or oppose them. My paper is largely based on the chapters for the collection on this topic, prepared for Bloomsbury, edited by Les Gillon, Tony Rigg and myself.

 

E-mail: e.mkerr@wp.pl

Michał Krzykawski (University of Silesia in Katowice)

 

In this paper I will tackle the Cartesian famous assumption that some evil genius [genius malignus] employs his whole energies [omni sua industria] in deceiving us and use this assumption as a starting point to ask about the problem of evil in the age of platform capitalism from a radically non-theological and deliberately Greek perspective. Drawing upon the vital though forgotten difference between smart and intelligent, I will take new technologies for what Bernard Stiegler refers to as pharmaka and comment on his concept of psychopower as opposed to Foucault’s biopower. The heuristic aim of my talk is to defy the tricky idea of smart culture (from phones to cities) and oppose to this ignorant culture [fr. inculture], out of elitist/technophobic claims, what I call intelligent digitalopolis. At this challenging moment we are all stateless in this both fascinating and disturbing space, which is entirely to be reinvented and may be given a new lease of the actual and updated political life, provided that we’re smart enough to spot the error and find the techno-logical metron of our times. I should like this presentation to be a harbinger of my forthcoming book (in Polish) Larval Words. A Philological Critique of Political Economy in the Age of Big Data.

 

E-mail: michal_krzykawski@poczta.fm

Eli Kramer (Visiting Assistant Professor [as of October 2018], The Department of the Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw).

 

Pierre Hadot’s conception of Philosophy as a Way of Life has revitalized questions about the meaning, purpose, training, and vocation of philosophers today. It has inspired and supported Neostoic, Neoplatonist, and other philosophical online communities of inquirers seeking to practice philosophy as a way of life. These new kinds of communities differ greatly from the in person communally reinforced practice of ancient philosophy, and the kind of individualized scholastic, philosophical education available in undergraduate and graduate departments today. Although the practice of this way of life is localized in sincere adepts across the world, their “community” is largely non-local and digital. In this presentation, I explore the prospects and dangers of this digital philosophical education. These digital spaces, like any others, allow for anonymity, trolling, and mythic manipulation, for example by far-right Neo-Stoics who create false quotes and manipulations of Marcus Aurelius to reinforce their own narrow way of life. I argue that although these digital spaces indeed include such dangers, and are no replacement (so far) for the quality of experience made available by in person philosophical communities, they do open up opportunities for wider, more diverse, philosophical education outside of the traditional boundaries of the modern university. I will suggest that these communities are a techne for what Hadot called “spiritual exercises,” and for what Foucault called “technologies of the self.”

 

E-mail: eliornerkramer@gmail.com

Gregg Lambert (Dean’s Professor of Humanities, Principal Investigator, CNY Humanities Corridor Founding Director, Humanities Center)

 

My lecture will present the genealogy of the concept of dispositif, which has been the subject of much commentary, especially the influence of biologist and historian Georges Canguilhem upon Foucault’s use of  this term specifically to avoid three other dominant terms in the history of political philosophy: organism, machine, and structure. The uniqueness of Foucault’s approach to the nature of power is that he combines both biological and technical forms in explaining its evolutionary path, which becomes more multiple and dispersed throughout modern societies. In other words, sometimes power resembles a living system that is undergoes change through the confrontation with powerful external anomalies (such as madness, sexuality, and race); at other times, it is the effect of the invention of new techniques and “concrete assemblages” (agencements concrete) that will comprise the new biopolitical dispositifs of population, security, and territory that Foucault begins to diagram in his writings and lectures of the mid-1970’s onward. As I will discuss, Canguilhem’s earlier essay “Machine and Organism” (1953) directly influenced Foucault’s own conceptualization of the nature of the dispositif, which differentiates its concept from the idea of mechanism that belongs to modern science after Descartes. According to Canguilhem, the major result of Cartesianism was to rationalize the idea of mechanism as a knowledge that is particular to the human species, and not as a biological capacity that is found to be present in most living organisms. In turn, this was responsible for anthropomorphizing the relation between machine and organism, introducing a fundamental dehiscence between these forms, one that continues to be played out today in the relations between human, animal, and cybernetic forms.

 

E-mail: glambert@syr.edu

Aleksandra Derra (Institute of Philosophy, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland)

 

There are two research areas which shape my philosophical reflection on science: critical feminist tradition of philosophy of science and science and technology studies (STS). Both of them still seems to be fresh and sometimes controversial currents in reflection on technoscience, but with an already informative and inspiring tradition which can be dated back to the 1970s and 1980s. They also have much in common. They treat science as inevitably social giving up with the idea of scientist as individual genius acting in isolation and producing scientific knowledge independently of all factors. They reformulate the idea of objectivity, impartiality and neutrality of science, denying the assumption that technoscience is value-free enterprise. Analysing the history of science and technology and interpreting various case-studies, feminist and STS thinkers underline the role of technoscience in creating and sustaining ‘social relations’. It is worth noting that I prefer to use the term ‘the social’ here rather than the notion of society, following Bruno Latour’s idea that society is not something ‘pre-given’, static and self-explanatory. On the contrary, we should rather think in terms of assemblages which have to be assemble and sustain in order to produce locally and temporarily stable social networks. Such networks (with semiotic and material, political and technological tools) legitimize certain power relations, also within science, helping to construct the social (in)equalities. Both feminist and STS scholars develop theoretical frameworks which make important ethical and political statements and introduce various non-epistemic values into the research. They admire the approaches informed by egalitarian goals, which take into account factors like gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, social class etc. This in turn is supposed to allow for the development of ‘science for humans’, including those who have been excluded from science both as subjects producing knowledge as well as objects of research. The aim of my paper is to present selected results of STS research on the social (in)equalities, pointing out the advantages of its methodology and convince the audience that they are cognitively and ethically beneficial.  

 

E-mail: aldewicz@umk.pl

James Besse (Graduate School for Social Research, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences)

 

As Luciano Floridi has compellingly argued, starting in the middle of the 20th Century, with the advent of computing, people in many societies have begun to understand, and live, our lives informationally. The role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in reshaping human social affairs cannot be understated, and Floridi will boldly use the term “re-ontologizing” to describe this process. What does this mean for the “softer” side of sociality, such as caring, intimacy, and emotion? Sociologists and neuroscientists have long ago realized that emotions, like many mental processes, operate at the intersection of cultural and natural phenomena. Feeling an emotion, therefore, is no less subject to re-ontologization than driving a car, washing dishes, or scheduling a meeting. This paper examines the role of ICTs in emotions, and the way, as Illouz shows in her examination of the beauty industry’s advertising campaigns, in which the role of technology in a given emotion changes (we might say “re-ontologizes”) the emotion itself.  Rather than aligning this observation with the work of technological determinists (such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Karl Jaspers, Robert Heilbroner, and Jürgen Habermas), I examine the role of ICTs in emotions through the “postphenomenological ethics of things” formulated by Peter-Paul Verbeek (2005). Postphenomenology (a term which may irk many traditional philosophers) was initially developed by the American philosopher of technology Don Ihde, in what he calls “nonfoundational and nontranscentdental phenomenology which makes variational theory its most important methodological strategy.” (Ihde, 1993) Verbeek, who has emerged as one of the most outspoken advocates of postphenomenology, is presently focused on developing a theory which brings ethical considerations to Ihde’s perspective. After introducing the problems of emotional expression and reception in a digital age, the paper examines Verbeek’s “ethics of things,” tracing its development through Ihde’s abandoned Heideggerianism, Foucault’s “technologies of the self,” and Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The paper then defends the relevance of Verbeek’s perspective and the application of ethics to emotions in general. Because of the significant impacts of ICTs upon our emotional lives, I argue that ethicists have a role to play in this issue. Following its theoretical explication, the paper will go through each of Verbeek’s “types of relation” in application to a specific instance of technological mediation of emotions. In each case, questions will be asked about the ethical implications of such mediation. This paper concludes by looking at the political implications of this phenomenon. It asks the following questions: Is it possible to design our emotions in more ethical ways? If so, what starting principles and ideas can guide this design, and what is the role of philosophers, sociologists, and ethicists in engineering? Moreover, is the recognition that we can design our own emotions an invitation to fascism, or is the recognition of this ability important to mitigate the damage of unethical design (and to liberate, as Critical Theory scholars might suggest, us from the sway of this design?)

 

E-mail: besse.jw@gmail.com