Author: techsocjal

Alicja Antosz
(University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
Literature is no joy but essential happiness. It does not please, instead it constitutes sense. Brings no peace, yet harmonizes all within itself. Its paradox consists of its extreme nature which makes one who accesses it touch sometimes the very opposite of the expected.
The greatest or the only form of being, according to Franz Kafka, being literature has nothing of a triumph unless the triumphant is literature itself. For it does not call with the sweetest of songs, but haunts a writer, demanding him to give up his voice in favor of a howl. Kafka’s thoughts concerning writing, in Diaries or Letters (to Felice, to Milena), give the idea of getting closer to literature, mastering one’s technique, achieving real happiness which grows accordingly to what seems to be a still deeper misery. For the happiness of writing demands enduring its impossibility of embodiment.
The speech will consist on question: what is or appears to be cruel in relation between literature and the writer. The main reference will be the case of Kafka’s interest in frontier of knowledge, being an almost ecstatically captured border between sane and insane. Fragments of intime pieces by Kafka will be accompanied by the context of ecstatic-epileptic boundaries in Paul Virilio’s “The Aesthetics of Disappearance” (2009).

Bio:
Alicja Antosz MA – I am a recent graduate at the faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw. I have obtained my master’s degree (2024) by defending the thesis entitled “Creation – the Need for Indiscretion. The Necessity of Revelation of Marcel Proust and Ludwik Hering”. My interests concern questions about the essence of literature, especially the idea of literature’s fragility, meaning it to be a subject exposed to be potentially harmed, faulted or sinned against by its author. Since 2022 I am in constant cooperation with Instytut Literacki “Kultura” (eng. ‘Kultura Literary Institute’) in Maisons-Laffitte, realizing grants (2024), traineeships (2022-2024) and projects which concern activity of the Institute, as well as my own scientific interests.

 

Eero Suorsa
(University of Turku)

Abstract:
In my paper, I conceptualize the concept of the colonized body during late capitalism in aesthetic surgery. My central question is: how the representations of aesthetic surgery reproduce brutalized figures of oppressed people in popular culture? The case study of my paper, and the article behind it, is Nip/Tuck-television series (2003-2010).
Aesthetic surgery is no more the luxury of the upper classes; smaller operations, such as breast operations and dangerous, permanently harmful, different vaginoplasties and hyaluronic acid operations, are readily available for working-class people and other groups in society that live in the most harmful position. Aesthetic surgery has been advertised as an easy way to improve employment opportunities in precarious working conditions, especially for various marginalized groups, such as people of color, gay men, and working-class women.
I use as my framework Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Matthew Beaumont’s How We Walk: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of the Body (2024). I want to ask if the philosophy has been unable to answer the questions posed by the growing culture of cosmetic surgery. As my empirical framework, I use Bonnie Perry’s Appearance Bias and Crime (2019) to demonstrate how the brutality of appearance does not stay on the TV screen.
My main argument is that philosophers must take clear standpoints when analyzing representations of popular culture. The argument is normative and goes beyond descriptive accounts; why it will be necessary to talk about aesthetic surgery and how it is reinforced in popular culture and why we will need to talk about the harmful beauty norms we often take for granted. These beauty norms often harm marginalized groups both in the Global North and South.

Bio:
Eero Suorsa (he/him) is a doctoral researcher in the Unit of Philosophy at the University of Turku. He is working on his Ph.D. Ethics of Aesthetic Surgery. Other research interests include the history of philosophy and aesthetics. He also writes regularly about class, popular culture, and the philosophy of history both in academic and mainstream platforms.

 

Jakub Momro
(Jagiellonian University in Krakow)

Abstract:
Contemporary cultural and scientific doxa states that we live in the power of the gaze, of sight, subjected to the need to look as a necessity to rule over the external world. It is not difficult to find various versions of narcissism in this diagnosis: from perceptual, through social, to civilizational. But it is not sight that is the most important way of the senses today. In contrast to the re-representational nature of sight, the sound sphere is filled with certain formations of objects over which we only seemingly have no control (as in composition). Sounds touch us to the core in their directness, but at the same time they constitute something like the principle of incoherence and evasion. The cruelty of sounds results from the fact that it touches the body of the one who hears and listens, but it is also the cruelty of presence, about which Antonin Artaud wrote. Namely it is violence present in several places at the same time: from sound as a mathematical point, through sound as a material object, to sound as an element of composition (both harmonic and heterogeneous). In this context, I would like to look at the territory of the ear in three variants: psychoanalytical (in the case of the psychotic exile), biopolitical (the cruelty of sounds as permanent elements of torture in the concentration camps and contemporary detention camp), and ontological (in a more general reflection on sounds as components of the territory and environment).

Bio:
Jakub Momro, PhD, is a full professor at Jagiellonian University (Krakow), Department of Polish Studies. He is a philosopher, literary scholar, essayist, and translator (e.g. books and texts of J. Derrida, P. Lacoue-Labarthe, J.-L. Nancy, J. Kristeva, R. Barthes, P. Szendy). He published a monograph of Samuel Beckett: Literature of Consciousness. Samuel Beckett – Subject – Negativity (polish edition, 2010, Universitas, Krakow, English edition: Peter Lang, 2015), and (in polish) study: Hauntologies of Modernity. Geneses, IBL PAN Editions, Warsaw, 2014, and “Ear has no Eyelid”. The Sonic Primal Scenes, WUJ, Krakow 2020. His is a member of Editorial Board of bi-monthly Journal “Second Texts”, and is a member of the editorial committee of the New Humanities publishing series. He is currently preparing a book on the natural history of radical modernity.

 

Monika Rogowska-Stangret
(University of Bialystok)

Abstract:
In the following paper I wish to examine the case of exhaustion as an illustration of “slow brutalism”, entanglement of “sadistic Superego” and “masochistic Ego” as well as a point of departure to think through the entanglement of oppressive power structures and self-exploitation, that is complicity in oppression. I suggest to view exhaustion in broad terms – not limited to human and its societies (vide Han’s “burnt-out society” (2010)) but instead grasped as operating across scales of bodies-environments and Haraway’s naturecultures (2003). Positioned in this way exhaustion proves to be in line with diagnoses of “our today” conceptualized as times of crises (and – I would argue – exhaustion) of several interlinked layers (or scales): of ways of thinking, imagining, and acting, of humans and societies, of economics and politics, of nature, non-humans, landscapes, so called “resources”, or even planet as a living system. To grasp the nuances of exhaustion and how it might be understood today, I offer a concept of “cross-scale ethics”. As exhaustion happens across scales, we need ways to respond to it that will think through the concept of scale itself. Scale is more and more recognized as one of the key issues to consider today (e.g. Clark 2012, Oppermann 2018, Smith 1992, Zylińska 2014) and is seen not merely as a methodological tool but rather a (politico-) ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad 2007) concept, with “fundamental political, ecological, and ethical implications” (van der Tuin and Verhoeff 2022: 167). How, then – through the phenomenon of exhaustion – scale is generated and to what effects? How scale is generative and to what effects? How can we „do analyses that move through the range of scales of injustice [of slow brutalism], not by pointing out similarities between one place or event and another, but by understanding how those places or events are made through one another” (Barad 2007: 246)? “Cross-scale ethics” is offered here as a feminist, posthumanist response to slow brutalism of exhausted bodies-environments and is developed with reference to arts of noticing (Tsing 2015), entanglement (Barad 2007), and anthropo-de-centering.

Bio:
Monika Rogowska-Stangret, Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bialystok, philosopher conducting research at the intersection of feminist philosophy, environmental humanities, and critical posthumanism, translator. She was a member of the Management Committee in the European project New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on “How Matter Comes to Matter” (COST, 2013-2018). She is a recipient of a number of national and international grants and awards, most recently the National Science Center supported her project Anthropocene Ethics. Redefining the Concept of the Human in Posthuman Philosophy (nr 2022/45/B/HS1/00849). She published in, among others, “Feminist Theory” (2020), “Philosophy Today” (2019), “The Minnesota Review: A Journal of Creative and Critical Writing” (2017). She is the author of Ciało – poza innością i tożsamością. Trzy figury ciała w filozofii współczesnej [The Body – Beyond Otherness and Sameness. Three Figures of the Body in Contemporary Philosophy] (Gdańsk 2016, 2019) as well as Być ze świata. Cztery eseje o etyce posthumanistycznej [Be of the World. Four Essays on the Posthuman Ethics] (Gdańsk 2021). She is the editor-in-chief of “Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research”.

 

Tirza Ben-Ezzer
(Emory University in Atlanta)

Abstract:
This paper investigates digital cultural practices involving anonymity and humor in order to elucidate psycho-social undercurrents for the ever-urgent question: Why do the masses desire fascism? These selected aspects of digital cultural practices share in common a paradoxical relationship with the principle of identity in homogeneity. The drives are multiplicitous – there are contradictory drives that coexist together simultaneously. On the one hand there is the heterological drive to escape the demands of homogeneous identity, on the other hand it is specifically this heterological drive that will act as a key unifying force in social practices that cultivate libidinal bonds in a homogeneous community, in all forms on the spectrum, including facism.
Practices of anonymity online and distributing memes based on a shared humor can be seen as the products of social compromises between competing drives and the condition of existing with others. These digital practices are consolatory gratifications – by producing contained means for simulated heterogeneity, social stability can be maintained. So it is specifically that there are practices that allow for the temporary gratification of heterogeneous expenditure which sustains a will to maintain the homogenous identity. This expenditure is further linked to erotic and ecstatic affectual experiences such as the pressure of libidinal forces, laughter, self-annihilation, sadomasochistic indulgence, etc. This is why these sorts of practices take up shape in various forms across demographics and social groups – which is also what makes them distinctly suitable strategies for radicalization online. It is at this conflictual and paradoxical crossroads that fascism strategizes its entry. The crucial point to emphasize is that the contemporary rise of fascism is mobilized through tapping into libidinal drives and erotic gratifications which are not merely present in those explicitly aligned with fascist political ideologies, but are inherent in us all.

Bio:
Tirza Ben-Ezzer is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University. Their main areas of study are Social and Political Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy of the Digital, and Philosophy of Sexuality. They have received a certificate in Psychoanalytic Studies and have additionally completed a fellowship at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, which focuses on the study of psychoanalysis in the clinical context. They have written and presented multiple works on the intersections of
politics, the psyche, and digital cultures, including papers on psychoanalysis and conspiracy theories, memes and humor, libidinal economies of abjection, as well as their Masters thesis on digital “subjectivity” and the mythology of the End of History. The submitted abstract is a condensed sample from their dissertation project which brings together the thought of Bataille, Fanon, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Freud, Klein, and other various psychoanalytic thinkers in order to link the psyche, politics, and digital technologies in the context of the contemporary re-emergence of fascism.

 

Denis Petrina
(Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, European Humanities University in Vilnius)

Abstract:
In his seminal text “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, Deleuze famously proclaims that “the language of control is made of codes”. In this presentation, I draw heavily on queer theory, where the heteronormative arrangement of society is understood as “coding of sexuality” (Cockayne 2017), to problematize the normative, and thus cruel, implications of code as “the language of control”. In his formulation of biopolitics, Foucault distinguishes between disciplinary norms and biopolitical normalization, the latter characterized by its immanent nature, processuality, and modulation. Within the monstrous coupling of ever-growing digital governance techniques and the neoliberal regime, often referred to as cybercapitalism, coding takes the form of affective modulation, molding, and management (Lazzarato), marking a decisive break from the panopticon to the panopsychon, as extensively argued by Byung-Chul Han. Despite its neutral or even progressive appearance, this pervasive, control-driven governmentality permeates both the body and the mind, reaching into arguably most intimate domains of its recipients – their brains, as illustrated by Warden Neidich, who exemplifies the new modus operandi of digital control through the governance of the prefrontal cortex via meticulously coded “assemblages of attraction”. Meanwhile, Patricia Clough emphasizes the paradoxical nature of control, astutely noting that it operates without the need of targeting a particular subject. The presentation encompasses the designated problematic field, viewing coding and codes as (a) mechanisms of digital and social regulation, (b) tools of translation of the analog affective into the digital, and, ultimately, (c) as an epistemological principle of normalization underpinning the latent yet cruel “semiotics of exploitation”.

Bio:
Denis Petrina (he/him) is a Researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute (Department of Contemporary Philosophy) and a Scientific Fellow at European Humanities University (Vilnius). He has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on philosophical interpretations and biopolitical implications of the notion of affect (Vilnius, Lithuania, 2022). His research interests include affect theory, new materialism and speculative epistemologies in both media and philosophical contexts, digital studies, posthumanism, queer and sexuality studies.

 

Brett Zehner
(The University of Exeter)

Adam Kingsmith
(Independent Researcher)

Abstract:
Instead of critiquing the far right as simply weird, we need to look behind its conceptual apparatus to its ideological and financial backers. For instance, in a bad, un-ironic ripoff of Deleuze’s Control Society, Balaji Srinivasan in his Network State, writes that –

“Tech loyalists (“Grays”) will don Gray shirts, and carry Gray ID cards (for swiping into the Gray sectors of town). Everyone would be welcome at the Gray Pride march—everyone, that is, except the Blues. Blues (liberals) will be banned from the Gray-controlled zones, unlike the Republicans (“Reds”).”

Here it seems gray is the new white. In this remarkable passage, Srinivasen re-racializes white supremacy while calling for the ethnic cleansing of liberals. But despite the violence of the passage, the term Gray evades the woke callouts toward yt subjects. Gray also invokes exposed brutalist functionalism merging the self-interest of the white citizen subject, the white invested worker who identifies up toward their founder gods, and the gray middle manager cog.
Now the gray race has not taken hold yet. However, Project 2025 does propose to abolish racial categories in future census reports. So, this isn’t just about coercion or turning the individual consciousness towards fascism or hailing white subjects. It is instead the class unconsciousness of the moderates, the ironic bros, and the dopamine-infused behavioral habits that link liberals, libertarians, fascists, and even social democrats together in ways that are uncomfortable to acknowledge.
This essay aims to unpack these dynamics, exploring how the greying of society is symptomatic of the broader collapse of clear ideological boundaries. Through the lens of media and political theory, we will delve into the paranoia, political angst, and anomie that define our current moment, where both sides of the spectrum are, perhaps unknowingly, in the words of Felix Guattari – part of the same brutal machine of subjection.

Bios:
Brett Zehner is a writer working on a book called Capital and White Anxiety Volume 1: The Automation of White Anxiety. His research spans digital culture and cultural politics. He is also an experimental language artist working across media. Brett received his MFA from UCSD and his PhD from Brown University. He is currently a Lecturer in Media Theory and Artificial Intelligence at The University of Exeter.

Adam Kingsmith works on the politics of mental health and the development of emotion-AI systems to improve social and economic outcomes. He has a Ph.D. from York University, where his dissertation focused on the political economy of anxiety and the rise of biomedical industry. He is also co-founder and managing director of EiQ Technologies Inc., an emotion-AI startup previously incubated at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative Innovation Studio.

 

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
(Kyung Hee University)

Abstract:
This paper reexamines Walter Benjamin’s concept of technical reproducibility (technische Reproduzierbarkeit) through the lens of cruel technicity, focusing on his analysis of Mickey Mouse and its implications for understanding contemporary artificial intelligence. By exploring Benjamin’s use of the suffix -barkeit and his notion of translatability, we offer a critical framework for interpreting the cruel aspects of modern AI systems, particularly LLM. Benjamin’s analysis of Mickey Mouse as a paradigm of “post-human mimesis of mechanical reproduction” serves as my starting point. I argue that the cartoon character’s deconstruction of the “hierarchy of creatures” and embodiment of anti-anthropocentrism prefigure the unsettling nature of AI-generated content. The paper draws parallels between Benjamin’s view of Mickey Mouse as a “dream for contemporary man” and the current fascination with AI, highlighting the underlying cruelty inherent in both forms of technological representation. I examine how Benjamin’s concept of Mickey Mouse as “mimesis without resemblance to a human being” resonates with the non-human yet eerily familiar outputs of advanced language models. This analysis reveals the cruel technicity in AI systems – their capacity to mimic human-like outputs while fundamentally lacking human experience and understanding. Furthermore, I investigate Benjamin’s idea that Mickey Mouse represents a “radical disavowal of experience” concerning AI’s processing and generation of information. This perspective illuminates the cruel nature of “machine intelligence,” which operates without human-like experiences yet profoundly impacts human knowledge and interaction in the digital age. The paper posits that Benjamin’s ideas about the “virtual that lurks beneath the actual” and the “hidden relationship between the actuality of translation and the potentiality of the text” offer a framework for understanding the cruel interplay between human and machine-generated content. We argue that this cruelty manifests in AI’s ability to produce simultaneously familiar and alien content, challenging our notions of creativity and authorship. By revisiting Benjamin’s concepts through the lens of cruel technicity, this paper aims to provide new insights into the nature of AI and its relationship to human experience, creativity, and knowledge in the contemporary technological landscape.

Bio:
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of cultural studies and a founding director of the Centre for Technology in Humanities at Kyung Hee University, Korea. He is also a visiting professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton (UK) and Graduate School at The University of Santo Tomas (Philippines). He served as an academic advisor for Gwangju Biennale in 2017 and as a program manager for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021. He edited the third volume of The Idea of Communism (2016) and Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (2023), and his forthcoming monograph, Communism After Deleuze, is scheduled for publication in February 2025.

 

Jakub Babuśka
(University of Warsaw, University of Edinburgh)

Dorota Orzechowska
(University of Warsaw, University College London)

Abstract:
This paper investigates the concept of cruelty the cinematic exploration of violence in Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence. The focus will be placed on the character of Tigrero, played by Klaus Kinski, who is ruthless bounty hunter who stands out from the usual cliché by achieving his cruel and clandestine deeds always adhering to normative law and abstaining from manifesting his desire. The aim of this paper is to examine whether violence exercised by a desiring subject is still thinkable. The key coordinates for this exploration will be provided by oeuvres of three authors, namely Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Antonin Artaud.
Lacan, in a lesser-known chapter of his Écrits, contrasts the Marquis de Sade’s ‘delight in evil’ with Kant’s universal imperative, ultimately suggesting that the pursuit of absolute cruelty – or its opposite, absolute altruism – requires the erasure of the subject as an enjoying being.
Furthermore, Baudrillard’s analysis of the era of simulation, complemented by Adam Curtis’s I Can’t Get You Out of My Head, underscores a contemporary landscape where cruelty seems to lose its substance, becoming a spectacle without real consequence.
Finally, the inclusion of Artaud further directs this inquiry. The Theater of Cruelty, which demands a visceral, transformative experience that shatters the boundaries between reality and representation, contrasts sharply with the cold, detached cruelty of institutions depicted in The Great Silence and Baudrillard’s world of simulacres.
Despite the intensity of political hysteria, outcomes that once might have threatened reality now merely reinforce the status quo. Hence, in these hyperreal times, we need to find out how to address more diffused cruelty which is detached both from subjectivity and from its old-fashioned transgressive allure.

Bios:
Jakub Babuśka graduated with an LLB from the University of Warwick and an MA in Medical Ethics and Law from King’s College London. He is currently continuing his legal studies at the University of Warsaw and is set to start a PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

Dorota Orzechowska holds a Mechanical Engineering degree (MEng) from the University of Warwick and is now studying for an MSc in Data Science and Ecology at University College London, as well as pursuing a Master’s in Philosophy at the University of Warsaw.

 

Felix Birch
(Independent Researcher)

Abstract:
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe military engineering quietly became civil engineering, and the new practice set about building substitutes for making war. Distinct from architecture or the work of journeymen, engineering had been shaped by the demands of warfare. The rapid construction of forts and military roads that were key to the organisation of defendable territory outpaced the work of architects and demanded new construction techniques which could quickly utilise unspecialised labour. This discipline was used to deliver a nascent civil life. The public works which civil engineering created were a new means of social organisation, containing a military division of labour that set the rules for each closed environment, famously barracks, prisons, and schools. However, unexplored among these spaces, is the transport infrastructure that proliferated in the early modern period.
This presentation treats transport infrastructure as a key technology in shaping modern subjectivity. Infrastructure organises the perception of each person who uses it because it mediates our relationship with the world. Its rules and codes must of course be followed for it to operate, but its ubiquity begins to overshadow all other space, the natural environment, and even the image of thought. As a space created by the state, infrastructure fosters a dependency, where the modern subject relies upon the mediation of the state to negotiate its environment. There is no space for a sensitive spatial awareness when the structures of everyday life rest on the brutalist foundations of military engineering. Our surroundings are organised by a logic which bypasses the vernacular of local environment or the particular skill of an individual, and instead requires quantifiable and interchangeable labour. This presentation will give examples of the subtle occupation of civilian space, and politicise infrastructure to show its role in producing and circulating alienated subjects.

Bio:
Felix Birch is a geotechnical engineer for Network Rail, in Glasgow. After finishing his masters in Civil Engineering at Edinburgh University in 2021, he worked as a researcher in the Geosciences department where he started investigating the history and philosophical foundations of engineering practice. His papers and conference presentations have all sought to politicise engineering practice and situate its development within a broader history of capital. He is not affiliated with any academic institution.