Author: techsocjal

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.

Mi Young Park
(Independent Researcher)

Abstract:
Is the entrepreneur of the self the ideal of a liberated individual who earns what s/he works for? Anthony Giddens has argued that self-identity has become a personal project that could be resistant to contemporary capitalist society. Yet, the self has become increasingly precarious under neoliberal withdrawals of social welfare and has emerged as the entrepreneur of the self.

The smartphone produces a dominant mode of visuality and aesthetic experiences which socializes the user into the ethic of neoliberal entrepreneurship. The computer screen, often discussed as “post-cinematic,” generates a sense of freedom in the process of interaction with multiple windows, unlike the classical Hollywood cinema spectator who bound to a perspectival position on the screen. The attractions of participation in on-screen activities provide a subject position as both a democratic citizen and efficient labor in the post-industrial age. This paper starts by drawing connections between the perceptual experience of the computerized mobile screen and one’s changing relations to work in post-industrial, neoliberal society. It is the embodied perception of the neoliberal work ethic through interaction with media. Then, it discusses the reconfiguration of free time after the 1997 financial crisis and the rise of self-improvement culture in S. Korea through an analysis of bestselling self-help books. Lastly, it examines the case of S. Korean young mothers’ autobiographical writing on the Facebook app transformed into the management of emotions, that is, self-therapy through a new mode of autobiographical narrative. This case study helps to elaborate the concept of the mobile screen as a temporal dispositif where a user’s free time has become incorporated into a practice of the neoliberal work ethic, of being an entrepreneurial self as well as the expression of the individual’s free will.

Mi Young Park received her doctoral degree from the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She has presented papers at the annual conference of Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the International Communication Association, and Film-Philosophy. Her current research focuses on the relationship between media technologies and the cultures of neoliberalism.

Badrinath Rao
(Department of Liberal Studies, Kettering University)

Abstract:
The unprecedented changes wrought by the inexorable march of new technologies have forced us to confront our most foundational assumptions about our collective lives and values. Novel technologies generate huge profits, confer staggering benefits, and yet inevitably engender colossal socio-economic dislocations. Optimists tend to argue that the current social upheavals are transitory; new forms of work will enhance the common weal. Pessimists fear that new technologies will exacerbate socioeconomic inequalities and create mass unemployment. Regardless of one’s perspective on the future of work in the postdigital age, certain elements of the current renegotiation of work and their implications for workers are incontrovertible. First, with the emergence of platform economy job security is a thing of the past. Precarity, lack of human security, and diminution of bargaining power are the new realities of the working class. Second, useful though they may be, new technologies will create disempowerment, dehumanization, and loss of dignity, particularly for the digital have-nots. Third, new forms of surveillance and extreme demands of the gig economy will lead to alienation and the erosion of community bonds. Arguing from a social philosophy perspective, the paper posits as follows. First, drawing on Taylor and Fraser’s philosophy of recognition and dignity, it contend that no matter how profitable, technology must not be allowed to eclipse the inherent dignity of human beings. Thus, absent meaningful alternatives, the use of technologies that corrode the identity and self-worth of workers and result in their misrecognition must be consciously eschewed. Second, viewed from the human capabilities approach of Sen and Nussbaum, fostering human capabilities which enables leveraging new technologies must be accorded priority. Social policies must incentivize investments in the development of human potential. Third, recognizing the negative externalities of our obsession with efficiency, we must reinstate humanness and reaffirm our commitment to human security. Lastly, given the worldwide mobility of capital, these innovations cannot be carried out in isolation. What is required is a global effort to protect the sacrosanct nature of work through the adoption of enlightened international covenants and policies.

Badrinath Rao is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian Studies at Kettering University in the United States. His expertise is in the law, politics, and society in India and China. Dr. Rao is also a licensed attorney. In 2018-19, Dr. Rao was the Kosciusko Foundation Visiting Professor at the University of Warsaw in Poland. Dr. Rao has taught in six countries: India, China, the United States, Spain, Poland, and Canada. He was a visiting faculty in the Master’s Program at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, University of the Basque Country, Spain in 2005-07. Dr. Rao was also a Visiting Professor at Sichuan University, Chengdu, China in 2009. In 2014, he was a Visiting Professor at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China, and at the Harbin Institute of Technology, School of Law, Harbin, China. In the summer of 2017, Prof. Rao was a Visiting Faculty at the School of Law in Hunan University, Changsha, China. Besides, he has visited China 11 times and lectured in 36 Chinese universities on issues concerning the law, social sciences, and leadership and ethics. Dr. Rao has lectured and presented papers in several countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, S. Korea, Serbia, Spain, and USA. Dr. Rao is currently working on a monograph on the justice system in India.

Mikołaj Ratajczak
(Research Group on Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. “Praktyka Teoretyczna” Journal for Marxist and Critical Theory)

Abstract:
Any Marxist approach to the critique of political economy of digital or cognitive capitalism should begin from the basic dichotomy between concrete and abstract labour. The key theoretical problem here is whether abstract labour – the substance of value – is still produced and measured the same way that is was done in the regime of industrial capitalism. The presentation will propose a philosophical analysis of the difference between concrete and abstract labour in cognitive capitalism. The thesis will be based on Paolo Virno’s project of linguistic philosophical anthropology and the theories of cognitive capitalism. The paper will then analyse the “immaterial” aspect of labour, which is increasingly central to contemporary processes of labour and production, as “application of rules”, with the act of utterance (the application of linguistic rules) as a paradigm. From there it will ask the question, how today this immaterial aspect of labour (of life, basically) is transformed into abstract activity and how it is measured, i.e. how application of rules is transformed into economic value (and surplus value). Such a perspective allows to formulate a coherent economical and philosophical critique of digital / cognitive capitalism that includes both the problems of exploitation, tendency towards crisis and the question of alienation. The paper will hence be also a discussion and further elaboration of basic terms and notions of the post-Operaist critique of contemporary capitalism. Starting from the theories of immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism, I will try to show, to what extent they can be still relevant and perform their critical function.

Mikołaj Ratajczak – assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a member of the editorial collective of “Praktyka Teorethyczna”, an on-line journal for critical and Marxist theory. His work focuses on political philosophy and history of ideas, especially the history of intersection between political theories and philosophy of language, political theology, political economy and biopolitics. Currently he is focused on the idea of the common and the problem of crisis.