Author: techsocjal

Marcin Kozak
(Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
Usually gaming world is strictly associated with the sphere of pure joy and amusement. Even if certain video games are designed to be exceedingly difficult or competitive, in the end their purpose should be separated from the work. In fact, video games gameplay and mechanics are often more interlinked to the concept of “labour” than to “play”. We play during our worktime and we work during our playtime. It is not a coincidence that game thinking and game-based tools are used in a strategic manner to integrate with existing business processes. Steven Pool, the author of the article Working for the Man. Against the Employment Paradigm in Videogames argues that games hire us for imaginary, meaningless jobs that replicate the structures of real-world employment. An overview of modern computer games shows us that in last years the significant share of the products from game industry reproduce the world of repetitive jobs (in particular: sandboxes with large open worlds). Moreover, even the act of gaming is framed into the labour system due to the AI systems constantly learning from very digestible food for thoughts – from the IT perspective – basically, our behaviors translated into code. However, the goal-oriented approach, Sim-lifestyle, simulators of real-life job (for example, Garbage Truck Simulator, Farming Simulator, Euro Track Simulator) and other unsettling examples are just a beginning. The presentation ventures to explore question whether we are able to separate labour and joy within the existing set of mechanics. If not, there is a necessity to investigate further: to what extend contemporary shape of video games are rooted in neoliberalism? what distinguishes “corrupted” practices from those devoted to entertainment? What is the role of storytelling? The speech will examine both single- and multiplayer titles, as well as varied genres, in order to track theoretically relevant common grounds.

Marcin Kozak pursues his PhD at the faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw. He graduated in law, philosophy and liberal arts within the College of Inter-Area Individual Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw and Charles University in Prague.

Eli Kramer
(Assistant Professor, Department of the Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
Since the dawn of professional philosophy in the nineteenth century the rich variety of -philosophical-literary genres have been eclipsed by the academic essay. This kind of academic exercise typically focuses on a linear and lucid argument (as I am doing right now, the irony is not lost on me). This narrowness of what counts as serious and legitimate modes of philosophical-literary genres has greatly weakened professional philosophy’s ability to offer support for robust and enriched cultural life. As secure tenure line/habilitation line positions ever shrink, and the justifications of pure scholarship in the humanities become ever hollower (for good and for ill), the dominance of this very kind of academic essay, never mind its presentation at an academic conference, is doomed for “real deletion.” As one step toward recovering robust philosophical-literary genres beyond the essay, ones that can thrive in the digital and post-digital world, the paper will articulate and defend what can be called the philosophical oeuvre of “dynamic images.” Dynamic images are reflectively charged versions of what Susanne Langer called “presentational symbols.” Presentational symbols are what the arts give us. Think of the way a painting, or even a good novel, can be educative and enriching for us, and yet we cannot fully determine a discursive story that exhaustively captures the kind of knowledge they give us. Unlike a presentational symbol, a dynamic image needs to be charged to incite a “reader” to new reflective and discursive engagement with the subject matter. Plato’s dialogues, Montaigne’s Essays, Emerson’s Nature, Eco’s philosophical novels like The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum, and Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Сталкер) are examples of works written as dynamic images. Unlike a Van Gogh painting, the whole purpose of their significant forms is to incite our reflective life and discursive reasoning.

Eli Kramer is an Assistant Professor at the Department of the Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, and an Editor at Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture (www.eidos.uw.edu.pl). He is a philosopher of culture who specializes in meta-philosophy, as well as the history and philosophy of higher learning. He is the co-editor of a new edited collection: Contemporary Philosophical Proposals for the University: Toward a Philosophy of Higher Education. His work has appeared in journals such as Syndicate Philosophy, the Philosophy of Education Yearbook, The Journal of School and Society, Democracy and Education (forthcoming) and as an introduction to a new anthology on Richard Rorty (that he is co-editing) entitled, Rorty and Beyond (Lexington Books, forthcoming). His areas of specialty are Philosophy of Culture, European and American Idealism, Classical American Philosophy, and Process Philosophy.

Julia Krzesicka
(Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
Taking as a starting point the thesis of Eva Illouz about the creation of “emotional capitalism” as a result of, among others, “therapeutization” of public and organizational discourse (Illouz, 2010: 98). I want to reflect on the role of emotions in the future of work. On the one hand, emotions become an important element of cognitive capitalism, in which the dematerialization of work and the subsequent domination of the service sector has reduced the importance of physical skills – manipulation of things – in favor of interpersonal competences – the ability to manipulate people and their emotions. (Szahaj 2014: 16-17). On the other hand, emotionality is closely related to the creation of an “individual self”, which increasingly becomes a subject of therapeutic culture based on “communicative competence”. The connection of the economic sphere with “communicative competence” made this first “deeply soaked by affect” (Illouz, 2010: 37). Although the imposed paradigm of communication frameworks (along with a whole set of procedures to manage emotions) makes it rather “rationalized emotionalism”, expressing emotions in the form of a message neutralizes emotional dynamics, requiring “suspense of someone’s emotional entanglement” (Illouz, 2010: 58) and at the same time allows to legitimize feelings by “the very fact of expressing them” (Illouz, 2010: 59). Work, as a social activity, has not escaped the influence of the paradigm of “therapeutization” both in the case of the “working subject” (whose success depends on the “emotional capital”), as well as in the case of the object and purpose of the work (which is being increasingly entangled with the problem of user experience – an experience that should be designed in such a way as to evoke certain emotions). Finally, looking into the future, it is worth asking a question about the possible role of widely understood “social robots” in such emerging fields of work.

Illouz, E. (2010). Uczucia w dobie kapitalizmu. Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa.
Szahaj, A. (2014). Kapitalizm kognitywny jako ideologia. Etyka, 48, 17-25.

Julia Krzesicka – MA of Sociology, PhD Student within the Nature-Culture Program at University of Warsaw, Faculty of “Artes Liberales”.

Michał Krzykawski
(Faculty of Philology, University of Silesia in Katowice)

Abstract:
In his Farewell to the Working Class, controversial and stimulating essay published in 1980, André Gorz posits that “the abolition of work will only be emancipatory if it also allows the development of autonomous activity.” Breaking with Marx’s theory of the historical role of proletariat identified with the working class, Gorz points out that the immediate interests of neo-proletarians (re)produced by technologically advanced capitalism are not consonant with a socialist rationality, their skills being in service solely to the rationality of capital. In this situation, going “beyond socialism” was meant to invent a different rationality. The whole theoretical effort of Gorz was to lay foundations for a civilization based on free time and being able to take social benefits from the technological evolution of capitalism. However, facing the new stage of proletarianization in the age of functional stupidity, as Bernard Stiegler has it in Automatic Society 1. The Future of Work, this new civilization is rather not to come. Although the liberation from labour should be seen as our near future, the free time this liberation gives us back is immediately captured by algorithms and plunge us into a kind of uber-misery. The different rationality André Gorz tried to install must be thought anew in the age of libertarian capitalism and its disruptive innovations.

Michał Krzykawski, Ph.D., assistant professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland and member of Internation/Geneva2020 research group founded on the initiative of Bernard Stiegler. He has written extensively on contemporary French philosophy and translated Stiegler, Descombes and Noudelmann. He is the author of two monographs: L’effet-Bataille. De la littérature d’excès à l’écriture. Un texte-lecture (Katowice, 2011) and (in Polish) The Other and the Common. Thirty-Five Years of French Philosophy (Warszawa, 2017). His book (in Polish), Desiring the Future. The Project of a General Technocritique, is forthcoming. His recently published works in English are: “The Amorous Frenzy of Things. Bataille’s Basely Material Love” (Routledge 2017) “J’accepte. On Jacques Derrida’s Cryptic Love by Unsealed Writing” (Avant 2/2017) and “Re-animalizing Animals, Re-animating Humans” (Routledge, forthcoming).

Kuba Kulesza
(grupa.robocza.org)

Abstract:
For Marx, labour is a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and closest surrounding. In the context of infosphere the main tool that enables the interaction is interface. By establishing and managing the process of exchange between two complex systems, interfaces are shaping new form of cognitive labour based mostly on information processing. We move from object-oriented tasks to system-oriented ones, where the results of our work become unspecified and hardly graspable. The switch from ‘hands to heads’, from objects to systems, establish new forms of labour control, based mostly on attention and time management. In my short talk I would like to characterise the anatomy of interface in the context of cognitive labour. I am going to present how interacting with interfaces shapes not only work environments, but also workers. It would be also an opportunity to speculate how interaction design can define the future of labour and post-work society.

Kuba Kulesza has been working as interaction designer on various projects and products. He is also co-founder and strategist at grupa.robocza.org, the interdispciplinary research and design unit. He has got a great pleasure to conduct classes on Interface Design, Interaction Psychology and Design Strategy at the Faculty of Humanities, within the AGH – University of Science and Technology in Cracow. He graduated with degree in Philosophy, Electronical Information Processing and Visual Culture studies at Jagiellonian University in Cracow.

Gregg Lambert
(CNY Humanities Corridor, Humanities Center, Syracuse University)

Abstract:
Education has traditionally been associated with the idea of “value,” and the university has long been understood to be an engine for reproducing – at the level of populations – the forms of value that are the most sought after by society. This basic understanding can be applied almost universally to the function of the institution, historically, as well as to the role of the contemporary university, regardless of geographical or national location – which is to say, globally. However, something peculiar has occurred, and is occurring, with regard to the three values I have highlighted in my title: the value of the human (under the different historical regimes of humanism), the epistemological value of the “Liberal Arts and Humanities” (basically, the values associated with an 18th European vision of the national role of the university), and; finally, the economic value of what today is called “human capital.” Simply put, while the first two can be said to have suffered (or are suffering) an ongoing period of intensive devaluation, the third has clearly emerged as the principle unit of measurement by which the goals of higher education are defined globally. The question I would like to raise concerns how closely these values are interrelated so that the change – let us say, “crisis” – registered in the evaluation of one term has caused a perceptible shift in our conception of the other two, making it appear as if previous forms of value are in the process of disappearing, as Foucault once speculated, “like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea”.

Gregg Lambert received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with Emphasis in Critical Theory from University of California at Irvine in 1995, finishing his dissertation under the direction of the late-French philosopher Jacques Derrida and German literary theorist Gabriele Schwab. In 1996, Professor Lambert joined the Department of English at Syracuse University, N.Y., and was later appointed as Chair between 2005 and 2008. He currently holds a research appointment as Dean’s Professor of Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he also served as Founding Director of  The Syracuse University Humanities Center and Principal Investigator of the Central New York Humanities Corridor, a collaborative research network between Syracuse University, Cornell University, and University of Rochester funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Professor Lambert is internationally renowned for his scholarly writings on critical theory and film, the contemporary university, Baroque and Neo-Baroque cultural history, and especially for his work on the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. He has lectured internationally and in 2010 was appointed as the BK21 Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea, and; currently, he serves as International Scholar at Kyung-Hee University, South Korea, and as a Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University, Australia.

Jędrzej Maliński
(Institute of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)

Abstract:
Gilbert Simondon in his seminal work On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects creates a psycho-physiological philosophy of alienation based upon his notion of technical individual. Simondon – just like others before him – situates the alienation in context of 19^th-century industrialization, when the technical individual (machine) replaced the human individual as a tool-bearer. In opposition to Marx, however, Simondon claims that the human mode of being as an individual is necessarily connected with its status as a technical individual. Hence, the resulting alienation (or, as Bernard Stiegler calls it, ‘proletarization’) is not only economical oppression of working class, but rather the problem on the level of the human individuation in industrial age. According to Simondon, both the working class and the owners of means of production are equally affected by this process, since the former are pushed below the level of a technical individual and the latter are staying above the technical individuality (and since the creative activity emerges only on the individual level, they are unable to grasp the current state-of-affairs without individuation as technical individuals). Simondon appeals for creation a new technical culture, based on ‘mechanology’ – the post-cybernetic way of rethinking the technology which should allow to create a new technical individuality as mediators between non-human technical individuals. Simondon’s oeuvre is important in the terms of post-digitality, as he was one of the first thinkers who created a philosophy of technical objects – and technical objects are crucial when trying to define the post-digital condition. On the other hand, the rise of the IT in the ‘80s made many parts of his project outdated. In my presentation I intend to analyse what his notion of alienation can do when applied to the post-digital notion of work.

Jędrzej Maliński is trying to finish his PhD about the notion of technical object in the contemporary philosophy. He studies in Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. His research interest are expanding outside the field of my PhD into post – and transhumanism, alt-right movement, critical theory and post-structuralism.

Ewa Mazierska
(School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Central Lancashire)

Abstract:
My paper concerns the cinematic representation of cleaners (a broad category, which also includes maids/domestic servants, as well as housewives) in contemporary cinema. It is divided into two parts. The first part consists of discussion about the economic and social position of ‘real cleaners’ and the specificity of their labour. My argument is that cleaning can be seen as an activity suspended between work and non-work, hence as an epitome of contemporary work, which is equally borderless and diffuse. This, in my opinion, is to the disadvantage of cleaners, as it makes them vulnerable to exploitation. In the second part I focus on contemporary portrayals of cleaners, in films such as ‘Yes’ by Sally Potter, ‘The Maid’ by Sebastian Silva, ‘Pani z Ukrainy’ by Paweł Łoziński and ‘Roma’ by Alfonso Cuarón, comparing them with the film from 1975: ‘Nightcleaners’ (1975) by Berwick Street Collective. My argument is that, although nominally all these contemporary films are sympathetic to the plight of cleaners, they ultimately normalise their conditions as precarious workers. There is no attempt in them to liberate cleaners, most likely because they are made by people who themselves use them. My talk also touches on the issue of the difference between representation ‘from above’ and self-representation.

Ewa Mazierska is Professor of Film Studies, at the University of Central Lancashire. She published over twenty monographs and edited collections on film and popular music. They include Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology (Routledge, 2018), with Lar Kristensen, Poland Daily: Economy, Work, Consumption and Social Class in Polish Cinema (Berghahn, 2017), Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm (Palgrave, 2016), Marxism and Film Activism (Berghahn, 2015), with Lars Kristensen, Relocating Popular Music (Palgrave, 2015), with Georgina Gregory, From Self- Fulfillment to Survival of the Fittest: Work in European Cinema from the 1960s to the Present (Berghahn, 2015) and European Cinema and Intertextuality: History, Memory, Politics (Palgrave, 2011). Mazierska’s work was translated into many languages, including French, Italian, German, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Estonian and Serbian. She is principal editor of a Routledge journal, Studies in Eastern European Cinema.

Stankomir Nicieja
(Department of Anglophone Cultures, University of Opole)

Abstract:
In the contemporary job market characterized by stagnant wages and precarious work, vast social groups are forced into an increasingly desperate struggle to maintain their livelihood and status. Assuming that one of the chief attractions of fiction films is their ability to provide imaginary solutions to pressing social problems, in my paper I want to investigate some popular contemporary cinematic representations of the post-digital life and work. I will base my presentation on close readings of three films: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012, dir. by John Madden), Ex Machina (2015, dir. by Alex Garland) and Downsizing (2017, dir. by Alexander Payne). As I will attempt to show, they may be treated as highly symptomatic expressions of the current attitudes concerning work, leisure and consumption. Moreover, the films present revealing dramatizations as well as diagnoses of the changing character of employment in the post-digital world. My analysis will focus primarily on the ideological implications of the solutions to the characters’ problems portrayed in the film. The core of my argument is that despite the ostensible triviality and absurdity of the plots, the films offer useful vantage points from which various dysfunctions of the neoliberal workplace may be examined and the mechanism sustaining them exposed.

Stankomir Nicieja is an assistant professor at the Department of Anglophone Cultures, and vice-director for research and cooperation at the Institute of English Studies, University of Opole. He has published on various aspects of the relations between literature, film and politics as well as utopian studies and film theory. He is the author of the monograph In the Shadow of the Iron Lady: Thatcherism as a Cultural Phenomenon and Its Representation in the Contemporary British Novel (published by the University of Opole Press in 2011). He also co-edited a number of volumes including Evil and Ugliness Across Literatures and Cultures (2012), Faces and Masks of Ugliness in Literary Narrative (2013), Poisoned Cornucopia: Excess, Intemperance and Overabundance Across Cultures and Literatures (2014) and The Outlandish, Uncanny, Bizarre: Culture, Literature, Philosophy (2016). His academic interests include cinema, contemporary British and American fiction and utopian studies. His latest book, Lessons from the East: Representations of China and East Asia in Contemporary Anglophone Films and Novels, was published by Peter Lang in 2018.

Adam Nocek
(School of Arts, Media, and Engineering and the Design School, Arizona State University)

Abstract:
This talk examines the future of work in the (post-)digital age in the context of the computational biosciences. In particular, the paper demonstrates how the emergence and popularity of time-based visual media—cellular and molecular animation—in computational and complex systems biology result from successfully integrating forms of labor and subjectivation into scientific practice that are productive for neoliberal governance. The talk examines how these labor practices take shape at the intersection of two very different genealogies over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: scientific epistemology, on the one hand, and popular entertainment media, on the other. It is the eventual convergence of these genealogies in molecular and cellular animation that makes possible a regime of scientific work and subjectivation that coincides with popular modes of consumption and production. Along the way, the paper revises Michel Foucault’s work on the entrepreneur of the self, as well as Gilles Deleuze’s late reflections on the dividual in the “Postscript,” in order to pave the way for a conception of digital subjectivation that can no longer distinguish between what’s productive for scientific knowledge and for popular entertainment.

Adam Nocek is an assistant professor in the philosophy of technology and science and technology studies in the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering and the Design School at Arizona State University (ASU). He is also the founding director of the Center for Philosophical Technologies at ASU. Nocek has published widely on the philosophy of media and science, speculative philosophy (especially Whitehead), design philosophy, and on critical and speculative theories of computational media. Nocek is the co-editor of The Lure of Whitehead and has just completed a manuscript titled, Molecular Capture: Biology, Animation, and Governance. Nocek is currently working on two book projects: the first project addresses computational governance and the emergence of new regimes of design expertise, and the second project reimagines the role of mythology within speculative design philosophy. Nocek is also a visiting researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Study and is The Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Visiting Professor.