Author: techsocjal

Artur Szarecki
(University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
Launched in 2013, Coffitivity is a website that streams ambient sounds of a cafe in order to enhance the creative capacities of individuals and help them work better. Invoking the findings of an independent psychological research on background noise and cognition to validate its effects, it is visited by millions of users seeking to improve their work productivity. The premise behind Coffitivity suggests a confluence of cultural logics underpinning ambient noise and work in contemporary neoliberal capitalism, both increasingly becoming a contrived, ever-present background to our lives. In fact, by establishing a link between everyday sounds and creativity, Coffitivity facilitates an extension of the labor process in space and time. It constitutes an always-on digital interface that provides immediate access to a sonic stream specifically designed to induce creative work. Consequently, the paper argues that Coffitivity is at the forefront of a global trend to capture and harness the potential of ubiquitous work that has emerged with the increasing pervasiveness of digital technologies in our lives. The commodification of the sonic commons is one way to advance neoliberal capitalism, in which work is no longer fixed on a specific tasks, but rather consists in constant and inexorable pressure to innovate and produce results. To that end, the presentation will provide a socio-political analysis of Coffitivity, demonstrating how it establishes discursive links between cultural imaginaries of creative work, scientific expertise, and the coffee shop experience, while, at the same time, organizing affective flows between the multitude of bodies through the distribution of sonic intensities, so as to preserve public participation and engagement in generating surplus value under ever more precarious conditions of labor.

Artur Szarecki is a cultural researcher and music journalist from Poland. He received his PhD in cultural studies from the University of Warsaw in 2013. His research interests are focused on embodiment, power, and popular culture. His book, Kapitalizm somatyczny. Ciało i władza w kulturze korporacyjnej (Wydawnictwa Drugie, 2017), investigates regimes of control over the working body in twentieth-century capitalism. Most recently, he turned to exploring power relations that emerge at the junction of sound and the body in posthegemonic perspective.

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
(Kyung Hee University, South Korea)

Abstract:
My presentation will recount the process of colonialisation from the perspective of cosmotechnics by rethinking technology. Technology always contains interality from within and serves as mediation between scientific knowledge and nature. The inbetweeness of technology rethinks the meaning of modernity. In this vein, the paper will argue that technology is still already political in the process of modernization. In the first Korean modern novel Heartless, which was entirely influenced by Japanese modern literature, protagonist Yi Hyongsik encourages his friends to study abroad and come back to build up the nation with their scientific knowledge. Exclaiming “Science! Science!,” He urges three fellow travellers to return to “give the Korean people science.” The climatic scene of the novel, written by Yi Kwangsu, sets forth the way in which the intellectuals in colonial Korea regarded science as the fundamental element of the strong nation. For them, then, to strengthen the country comes along with modernization and science is the very foundation of modernity. The primal milieu of the Korean modern literature betrays the relation between scientific knowledge and colonialism, even though the novel does not clarify what science means by its narrative. The term science here symbolizes the power of Western civilization and the knowledge must be brought to the nascent nation for an independent country. Without science, from this perspective, there is no possibility of national independence. Yi Kwangsu seemed to convince that scientific knowledge is necessary for bringing forth the strong nation-state. For him, the strength of one country depends on mature culture as well as economic development. Science is nothing less than the technological foundation of cultural and economic achievements. It is not accidental that Yi Kwangsu considers science, or more precisely technology, as the fundamental motor of modernization. According to Yuk Hui, modernization cannot be separated from the change of scientific knowledge, in particular, of cosmology. Colonialisation was the process of imposing Western cosmology onto the non-Western countries and implementing Western science as a universal knowledge of nature. As Bently Allan argues, the ideas of scientific cosmology transformed the international order since 1550. The cosmological concepts of Western science facilitated the shift from the pre-modern order founded on divine providence to the current order premised on economic growth. The ideas of the connections between scientific cosmology and international politics strongly influenced Asian power elites who sought to find out the problem of their countries. The Chinese translation of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International law with a Sketch of the History of the Science (萬國公法) accelerated Asian elites’ concerning the relation between scientific cosmology and its practical realization, i.e. international law. Law re-enframing life was inseparable from colonial biopolitics. The new global order as such was for colonial elites the technological incarnation of the Western cosmology.

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of cultural studies at Kyung Hee University. He is an academic advisor for Gwangju Biennale, and one of the founders of Asian Theories Network(ATN). He organized The Idea of Communism Conference in Seoul with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek in 2013 and edited the volume of The Idea of Communism 3.

Johan Andreas Trovik
(Department of Politics, Princeton University)

Abstract:
The social and economic transformations brought about by the introduction of digital technologies have resuscitated old debates about the “end of work”. In the face of widespread anxiety at the prospect of the “end of work”, radical political theorists seize on these transformations to maintain the need for a new politics based on the demand to transcend work. What does this demand mean in the post-digital age? What are the potentials for a post-work political project in our time? In this paper, I follow the recent turn to social practices in critical theory to try to give some answers to these questions. Work, I argue, names a social practice with the purpose of maintaining a society’s form of life. Work emerged as a social practice during industrialism, with the emergence of the labour-market as a dominant social institution. Though there is no logical overlap between work and the market in labour, the labour-market is understood as organising the division of the activities comprising this practice. The digital revolution is significant because it has destabilized the dichotomy between activities that are and activities that are not “necessary” for the maintenance of our society’s form of life, to the point, I contend, where the distinction no longer makes sense. Post-work politics must take aim at further destabilizing the social practice of work. But post-work politics, I argue, must also demonstrate how the goods that today are associated with work, through being embedded in the social practice, can be realized elsewhere.

Johan Andreas Trovik is a student in the Department of Politics. In his dissertation research, he explores the idea of work as it figures in the discourse of welfare capitalism, in critiques of work and in both utopian and dystopian “post-work” imaginaries. In particular, recognizing how deeply the idea of work has taken hold of our understanding of democratic participation, and the modern ethical imagination more broadly, he is interested in investigating attempts to unsettle its hegemony. Trovik also has broad interests in the history of political thought, social philosophy and critical theory. Before coming to Princeton, Johan completed a B.A. in philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford. 

Ewelina Twardoch-Raś
(Jagiellonian University, Institute of Audiovisual Arts, Kraków)

Abstract:
The presentation proposes to investigate the problem of post-affective forms of work presented in contemporary bioartistic projects and pop-culture narratives. Post-affective work is understood here as a mode of body labour carried out using special technologies (mostly biometric ones) that measure, control and process affective body’s functions. The speech refers to the bioartistic projects of Rafael Lozano Hemmer: “Performance Review” (2013), “Pulse Index” (2010) and “Vicious Circular Breathing”(2013) and confront them with the vision of postaffective work presented in the episode “Fifteen Million Merits” of dystopian television series “Black Mirror”. In the both cases affective exploitation of living bodies is shown as a result of process of developing and common using of biometric technologies – a perfect tool for post-capitalist control and management. But – as projects present – it is something more than the reality of personal dataveillance (J. van Dijck). These technological systems based on dataveillance, process not only the obtained data, but also biological, affective body’s reactions and activities themselves (as muscle work or respiratory efficiency). Combining affects with technologies they create the broad area of contemporary post-affective forms of work based on biometric-driven exploitation of organism’s vitality. A simple reference to this type of practices in contemporary society can be found among others in the so-called sweat factories, but also in the necessary efficiency during the co called intellectual work. In the context of projects’ analysis the paper will consider problem of politicizing biological body and affective experiences (in reference to the considerations of Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage – categories of mediatized affect and vulnerable body). It will also refer to the category of ethos of health (Paul Rabinow, Nicolas Rose) – vision of body’s vitality that is categorized as an absolute social duty. Disabilities and disfunctions are therefore considered as a specific “state of emergency” that should be normalized, but only as an exceptional form of body condition (Giorgio Agamben). Moreover, the presentation will consider categories of self-cultivation (Michel Foucault) and self-invigilation (Thomas Lemke) as a binary opposition that constitute contemporary, dissonant biopolitical thinking of body’s developing, body which should always be able to work and be effective. Lastly, the paper will show how art and popular dystopian narratives reshapes, embodies and co-creates many problems raised by this socio-cultural paradigm.

Ewelina Twardoch-Raś – PhD in humanities (art sciences), assistant professor at Jagiellonian University (Institute of Audiovisual Arts), absolvent of doctoral studies and SET-program. She took part in many national and international conferences (in Vienna, Prague, London, etc.), she published her articles in many periodicals (“Przegląd kulturoznawczy”, “Kultura popularna”, “Kultura i historia”, “Topos”) and monographs (e.g. “Perception of culture, culture of perception”). She was an editor of four scientific books (the last one is “Perception of culture – culture of perception”). Her PhD dissertation concerns the representations and functions of biometrical data in the new media art. Now she is working on the book based on the PhD dissertation’s research. She teaches her students about changes in contemporary television, new media art and cyberculture’s phenomena. She is leading the scientific grant Preludium 8: “New media art and biometric data in the perspective of post- and transhumanist philosophy”.

Szymon Wróbel
(Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
Among theoretical errors with practical consequences irritating Marx the most are always those involving the very word “labour.” According to Marx’s main intuition it is not labour but its disappropriation that forms the proletarian. What the proletarian learns at work is how to discard the status of a worker. If the proletariat comes to be the agent of history, it is not because it creates everything but because it is dispossessed of everything. Thus the proletarian is nothing else than the negation of the worker. By the same token, the worker who is not yet a proletarian can be christened with a variety of names that are all equivalent: artisan, lumpen, petty bourgeois, ideologue. Starting from this kind of premises, the paper will ask whether today, in the post-digital world, we are dealing with the birth of a proletariat deprived of work and in this sense liberated from the status of a worker. Or, rather, what we are dealing with is the production of an army of workers who are just waiting for work, who are ready to work, who are in the disposition to render work – though themselves they never work and never rest. In post-digital age, everywhere, there are productive bodies liberated from the prison of the soul. Everywhere there is meaning at work. This is the word of generalized production. The creative industry, financial capitalism, and non-material work have all become the sign of our times. This world has brought to life new apparatuses of power, economies of meaning, textual machines, and productions of desire. There has been an unexpected reversal of the hierarchy of souls and bodies: there are more or less productive bodies, organs, and productions more or less liberated from the soul, in other words; from anti-production. Is this a world of working machines and without a worker or a world of mass of proletarian without work?

Szymon Wróbel is a professor of philosophy at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” of the University of Warsaw and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He graduated in psychology (specialization: clinical psychology) at the Institute of Psychology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. For many years associated with the Pedagogical and Artistic Faculty of Adam Mickiewicz University in Kalisz. He is the author of numerous books and articles scattered in various scientific journals. His latest books include Deferring the Self and Grammar and Glamour of Cooperation. Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Language and Action, published in 2013 and 2014 by Peter Lang. In Polish: Exercises in Friendship, Retroactive Reading. Pedigrees of Contemporary Philosophical Thought and Polish Depressive Position. From Gombrowicz to Mrożek and Back published by the Krakow Publishing House Universitas in 2012, 2014 and 2015. His last book, also in Polish, Philosopher and Territory. The Policy of Ideas in the Thoughts of Leszek Kołakowski, Bronisław Baczko, Krzysztof Pomian and Marek J. Siemek was published by the IFiS PAN Institute in 2016. He leads the experimental Laboratory of Techno-Humanities at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales.” His current interests focus on “ontologies of failure” and “humanities of looting” based on the tactics of studying the remains of other discourses, shreds of incomprehensible languages, obsolete thoughts, abandoned sentences, interrupted gestures, unfinished intentions, dead poses, enigmatic images.

Adrian Zabielski
(Institute of Philosophy, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń)

Abstract:
Modern world of work is getting more and more precarious. One of the aspects of this process is that the division between labor and leisure is blurring. The former colonizes the latter – worker is always at work, even after punching out. On the other hand, elements of leisure, such as play, are implemented into the labor, for example as motivational tools, but in a result as tools of power and control. Time of work is being gamified. According to this mode of production, creativity, playfulness and labor should go hand in hand. In addition, we face ideological constructs, that work should be fun, or that if one turns his passion into a career, one will never have to work again. This opens up a space for exploitation of modern workers, especially the ones working in creative industries, such as art, IT or academia. To describe this phenomenon, Julian Kücklich proposed the term playbor. It made a small career in critical game studies, but in my presentation I will argue that this notion can be extended to other areas of life. I will present examples of playbor and theoretical approach behind them to show that we are all, in one way or another, playborers.

Adrian Zabielski – doctoral candidate at Department of Contemporary Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland. Interested in broadly considered utopistics, philosophy of politics, philosophy of (pop)culture and STS.

Krzysztof Ziarek (Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo)

 

This paper will look at Heidegger’s reflections on the essence of technology in the context of his remarks on power and planetarism. Heidegger’s approach to the essence of technology is often misunderstood as a “critique” of technology. In fact, Heidegger makes it explicit that the essence of technology (Technik) is nothing technological (it is not technology, techno-science, production, or technological products) but instead a modality of revealing characteristic of the modern, increasingly globalized, world. That is why, as the paper will show, Heidegger on technology cannot be understood apart from the question of the alternative, poietic revealing. Technology in Heidegger needs to be thought in tandem with the poietic, just as calculative thought has to be juxtaposed with poetic thinking. Though Heidegger’s writings date from half a century ago, since (what he calls) the technic revealing only keeps intensifying, the exigency of the poetic becomes all the more apparent.

 

E-mail: kziarek@buffalo.edu

Marcin Zarod, (Kozminski University. MINDS Group)

 

Studies of science and technology usually focused on regular academic practices, treating hybrids, paradoxes and exceptions as cases to be solved by normal science. Rather than following formalized technoscientific practices, I will focus on informal practices of hacking. In my paper, I will show how hackers and computer security experts construct vulnerabilities in computer systems. Using data from ethnograhpy of computer security tournament, I will focus on reversing approach usually taken by Actor-Network Theory. Rather than following rules, objects and actants, I will track how breach of irregularity is constructed, stabilized and transfered in different networks. In second part of my paper, I will try to show what elements of theory of infrastructure should be updated by study of exploits. Moving from Susan Leigh Star’s approach toward Moulier-Boutang’s critique of cognitive capitalism, I will discuss some differences between digital and non-digital infrastructures.

 

E-mail: marcin.zarod@gmail.com

Szymon Wróbel (Faculty of “Artes Liberales” of the University of Warsaw)

 

The ultimate, though only outlined here, purpose of this text is to think about the enigmatic concept of „techno-utopia”, i.e. to look for its new, more awaited and less obvious meaning. The term „techno-utopia” is a strange fusion of utopia and technology. We do not know whether domination is on the side of utopia or on the technical side. We would like the meaning of this term to be determined not by „struggle” but by the kind of „reconciliation”, amalgam, i.e. the creation of „third meaning” in which „technology” would be socialized from the very beginning, and that what is „social” would be already technicalized at the time of conception of the so-called „social fact”. Techno-utopia is a „new place” for a utopia, it is a „different place”, or the „real place” of utopia, but also a „different technology” of producing the social. As part of the techno-utopia, what is social would not brutally eliminate what is non-social, what is not living, or that what is only material. This is the hope permeating this text. That is also why one of the titles of this text could be a paraphrase of the famous Heidegger’s text and ensuing – question concerning techno-utopia.

 

E-mail: wrobelsz@gmail.com

Yael Vishnizki-Levi (Faculty of “Artes Liberales” of the University of Warsaw)

 

A contemporary observation on Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic inside Łódź’s biggest shopping leisure and arts complex, located in the former industrial complex founded in the end of the 19th century by Izrael Poznański, a Łódź based businessman. My talk will focus on my upcoming film project Manufaktura, which was shot at the Manufaktura complex in Łódź. The film is a semi-documentary project examining the relationship between the huge complex and its history as a spinning mill and a textile factory. The film draws inspiration from Metropolis, the 1927 classic by Fritz Lang as well as uses parts of its script and its artistic structure as a silent movie. Metropolis, which does not relate to any particular place or time, presents a futuristic observation on the city’s structure and appearance and explores concepts of modernisation, industrialisation and mass production, which all were significant topics and foci in Europe of the interwar period. Our contemporary perspective allows us to examine Metropolis in relation to our times where its spectaculous futuristic, science-fiction elements stay in the past as a nostalgic comprehension of the future. The Manufaktura uses its historical atmosphere and industrial architecture of the old factory as a starting point (which also explains the name of the complex) in order to create a nostalgic quality and a unique appearance which differs the complex from other shopping centres in an era that requires to attract visitors and costumers. The film Manufaktura is a documented journey around the complex, which results in a collection of contemporary representations of machines. In the film the exact time is indicated and the location of the Manufaktura plays a significant role. While the concept of the Manufaktura is being challenged in the digital era, the film allows us to observe this phenomenon before its next transformation. I would like to divide the talk into three parts: (a) In the first part, I will show the beginning and the end of the film Metropolis (1927 dir. Fritz Lang) and rethink its artistic qualities as one of the first futuristic, science-fiction movies and its social and political relevance for the contemporary digital age. (b) In the second part, I will show the beginning of my upcoming film Manufaktura, discuss its artistic concept as a semi-documentary, the editing process and the decision to link between the footage shot inside the Manufaktura and the text quoted from Metropolis. (c) In the third part, I will present an analysis of the relationship between the films (Metropolis and Manufaktura) and the terms future and transformation both as practical concepts and as philosophical, socio-political and utopian terms.

 

E-mail: yael.wisznicki@gmail.com