Author: techsocjal

Marcin Rychter
(Department of the Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
In the late 20th century many (e.g. Marshall McLuhan, Vilém Flusser, and Ray Kurzweil) prophesied the end of the book and its transformation into something better suited to digital media. These expectations do not seem to have come to fruition, since the quantity of books and articles being published grows exponentially. On the other hand, most of them have their digital editions and more often than not these are the ones that get the most attention from readers. Text, reading and writing did not vanish, but they moved into the realm of the digital and went online for good. The first part of the presentation, will focus on some of the consequences of that process for the ontology of the text itself – such as its growing non-linearity, transience, hybrid structure and the minimized distance separating the reader from the author. Then, it will inquire about the model of subjectivity that is embedded in this new digital culture of reading. The previous, pre-digital figure of the author/reader was presented in a powerful manner by Descartes and – in a more ironic way – by Cervantes. It was an elevated figure of an autonomous, self-sufficient, rational subject, which was somehow detached from the world or even juxtaposed to it. By no means does this figure still reflect the experience of digital text culture. A contemporary writer/reader is no longer “outside,” but “in-the-very-middle” of things and other text-users. He or she does not need to prove self-sufficient anymore, since there is plenty of procedures ready to help with the work to be done. What is even stranger, the contemporary writer/reader does not even need to be human. Can we find a new cultural model of subjectivity in this new, digital culture of writing or is it better to described it within postmodern frameworks?

Marcin Rychter is a philosopher, translator, and Assistant Professor at the Department of the Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. He is also the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture (www.eidos.uw.edu.pl). He has translated the works by authors such as Alfred North Whitehead, D. H. Lawrence, Jonathan Lear, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, W. K. C. Guthrie, Simon Armitage, and many others. His main interests are philosophy of culture, philosophy of contemporary music, philosophy of technology, new trends in continental philosophy and contemporary literature.

Krzysztof Skonieczny
(Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
The last chapter — or the “Post-Scrpit” — of Gilles Deleuze’s Negotiations introduces “control societies” as a new form of government which supplants disciplinary societies described by Foucault. While he borrows the term “control” from Burroughs, Deleuze claims that the notion is already present not only in Foucault’s own work, but also in that of Paul Virilio. Scholars such as Philippe Mengue and Julian Ferreyra have underscored the importance of the short “Post-Script” as a crucial point in Deleuze’s political philosophy, although it remains unclear whether it is a continuation of the analysis of capitalism present in Anti-Oedipus (Ferreyra) or a new point in Deleuze’s theory signaling his distancing himself from the collaborations with Guattari (Mengue). The Deleuzian notion of control societies is important for the analysis of work in the digital age for two reasons. (1) While disciplinary societies were linked to “thermodynamic machines”, in control societies it is the “information technology and computers” that take central stage, moving from production and accumulation to the “metaproduction” of services and activities; (2) This shift also brings a change in the practices of education and work, which in disciplinary societies were restricted to their respective spheres of confinement (the school and the factory). In control societies the spheres of education and work are closely intertwined and take the floating form of continuous assessments and new modes of (auto)motivation in- and outside the school and the company, so that, as Deleuze says, “in control societies you never finish anything”. The talk will proceed by (1) analyzing and defining the notion of “control societies” based on Foucault’s and Virilio’s work as well as Deleuze’s; (2) examining if this notion — introduced in 1990 — is still a valid tool for the analysis of work and education in the present incarnation of the “digital age”; (3) asking if today, 29 years after the “Post-Script on Control Societies”, we can envision any “forms of resistance against control societies” Deleuze called for.

Krzysztof Skonieczny is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw. In 2011/2012 he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature at SUNY at Buffalo, and in 2012/2013 he spent six months as a researcher at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours. In 2014, he received his PhD in Philosophy from the Polish Academy of Sciences, having completed the International PhD Program “The Traditions of Mediterranean Humanism and the Challenges of Our Times: the Frontiers of Humanity” at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales.” He co-edited (with prof. Szymon Wróbel) the volume Ateizm. Próba dokończenia projektu (Atheism. Attempting to finish the project), Warsaw: DiG 2018, in press [in Polish]. His interests include political philosophy, psychoanalysis, posthumanities, animal studies and contemporary American literature, which he occasionally translates. He is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled  The Immanent Animal. An Essay in Philosophical Zoology.

Benjamin Slavík
(Department of Aesthetics, Charles University of Prague)

Abstract:
The first part of the proposed paper introduces new comments on D.N. Rodowick´s conception of digital image, as it´s presented in his two influential books Virtual life of the Film (2007) and What Philosophy Wants from Images (2018). Each of these books proposes a different perspective; the first one is more pessimistic, the second one is rather optimistic. While in Virtual Life of the Film Rodowick states that the digital image is a symptom and an event of looses of a fixed meaning of the outside world, which was put before apparatus, in What Philosophy Wants from Images he introduces digital image as a medium of new possibilities. Digital image is no more a medium of representation, because its surface provides a deeper cascade of its medial memory. The second conception intoduces notion of new image in the age of digital: the digital image is neither represential, nor meaningless; its new-meaning is rather stored in his own memory, which is unstable and disseminative. The second part of the proposed paper focuses on the problem of perception of the digital image, which is inspired by Deleuze´s non-represential notion of the affect. In case of the new image, we deal more with an affective event than with a purely meaning-based image. While affective sensation remains in the image, image´s fixed-meaning disappears, Finally, the paper points out that the digital – cinematographic, photographic or multi-medial – technology may not be a mere attraction; it can provide a kind of a new experience of the medial memory and an aesthetic feeling of the event.

Benjamin Slavík is graduate student of The Film studies department at Charles University of Prague. In currently student of Aesthetics at the same university. Author of study “Play of shifts, diffractions, discontinuities and ruptures. Seijun Suzuki’s film sign seen from philosophical perspective of Jacquese Derrida” (2018). He works on following researsch topics: relationships between Jacques Derrida’s and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, post-structuralism film theory, german medial philosophy, medial archeology and philosophy of affect. He will attend Derrida et la Technologie / Derrida and Technology conference in Paris (2.-4. 5. 2019).

Giuseppe Sofo
(Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia)

Abstract:
Digital Humanities have produced a large number of tools of great utility and interest for textual analysis, introducing significant changes with respect to our approach to textual studies, especially in the field of linguistic and stylistic analysis, or for textual comparison within the same language. In the field of interlingual analysis, i.e. the comparison between texts in different languages, the tools are still lacking and are not always of great help for an in-depth study of the implications of each passage between languages, or between different systems of signs and ideas. The greatest challenge to date, therefore, is to conceive and build tools that are able to allow not only a linguistic and stylistic analysis between several languages, but also a different perception and readability of translation, as a tool that introduces fluidity and plurality in the text. What are the tools, software, or devices that would allow the reading of the text no longer together or in parallel with its translations, but in combination with its translations? The paper aims to stimulate reflection on the possibility of perceiving the literary work as a text that is structurally non-definitive, but rather plural, fluid, open to its multiple versions, even in multiple languages, and on the possibilities that digital humanities have of favouring this process.

Giuseppe Sofo is a researcher of French language and translation at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He holds a Ph.D. and a Doctor Europaeus from the University of Avignon and the University of Rome, La Sapienza. He has taught translation and literature in Italian, French and American institutions, and he has published a work on translation, rewriting and the fluidity of the literary text (I sensi del testo, Novalogos, Rome, 2018), co edited a collection of essays on translation (Sulla traduzione, Solfanelli, 2015), and has translated literary works intoItalian.

Michael Stemerowicz
(Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences)

Abstract:
This presentation aims to look at a possible reevaluation of the concept of work in the background of Heidegger’s thought on modern technology. In recent times our world has been inconspicuously flooded by a plethora of technological devices, which are increasingly determining and shaping human everyday life. Our immersion in a digital world based on electricity has reached a point in which it has become questionable whether the devices used to access it, still qualify as mere tools and not rather as digital and electrical extensions of our self. However, every activity mediated by technological devices which are enabling us to navigate the digital realm is potentially subject to financial exploitation as it generates additional value in the form of data that can be accumulated, classified and sold. In other words, the digital world requires the electrical self to undergo a process that reduces it to a resource which may be the subject of some further utilization. Therefore, it may be argued that in the digital world the classical division between leisure and work is challenged as the self never leaves the cycle of production. Even when it is concerned purely with consumption the self is still at work as it is itself being the product. Thus, the question can be asked whether in contemporary times the attempt to withdraw from the digital world and the refusal to participate in it through modern technological devices can be considered a form of unemployment. A form of unemployment that is paradoxically becoming an expensive luxury as the possibility of withdrawal itself is becoming a product.

Michael Stemerowicz is a PhD student at the Graduate School for Social Research of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His academic interest focuses mainly on the philosophical discussions of questions concerning technology. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation that aims to evaluate the technological phenomena of our contemporary world on the basis of the conceptual framework of Martin Heidegger’s thought on modern technology.

Bernard Stiegler
(Institute for Research and Innovation)

Abstract:
The meaning of work has been interpreted in misleading ways ever since the co-birth of philosophy (in ancient Greece, as denial of the technicity of noesis) and monotheism (in ancient Judea, as the original sin of knowledge), then again under the influence of Newtonian and ‘Wattian’ physics, and yet again after Marx’s disastrous misinterpretation of Hegel’s Herr/Knecht dialectic. This lecture will try to show why the time has come to go beyond these metaphysico-theological ideologemes. In the Anthropocene, ‘to work’ rediscovers its meaning, namely: to struggle against entropy, as well as against what we will call anthropy, and to do so from the perspective of a neganthropology. Today, bio-logical, psycho-logical, socio-logical and techno-logical automatisms have all combined, thanks to their algorithmic treatment and exploitation by ‘platform capitalism’, giving rise to a generalized entropy and anthropy bearing the worst, just as clouds bear the storm. We shall see that only the redefinition of work as distinct from labour or employment gives us any hope of overcoming the Anthropocene era – and of opening the Neganthropocene era, as the power and knowledge to dis-automatize.

Bernard Stiegler is a director of IRI at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmith College in London and a professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne where he teaches philosophy. Before taking up the post at the Pompidou Center, he was program director at the International College of Philosophy, Deputy Director General of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, then Director General at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). Bernard Stiegler has published widely on philosophy, technology, digitization, capitalism, and consumer culture. Among his writings, his three volumes of La Technique et Le Temps (English Translation: Technics and Time), Acting out, translated by David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan, Stanford University Press, 2009, two volumes of De La Misère Symbolique, three volumes of Mécréance et Discrédit and two volumes Constituer l’Europe are particularly well known. Professor Stiegler has a long term engagement with the relation between technology and philosophy, not only in a theoretical sense, but also situating them in industry and society as practices. He is one of the founders of the political group Ars Industrialis based in Paris, which calls for an industrial politics of spirit, by exploring the possibilities of the technology of spirit, to bring forth a new “life of the mind”. He published extensively on the problem of individuation in consumer capitalism, and he is  working on the new possibility of an economy of contribution.

Monika Stobiecka
(Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw)

Abstract:
The shift from “spade-work” do “screen-work” (Edgeworth 2015) in archaeology was a radical revolution that has influenced the ways of practicing the study of the past. However, it did not provide the discipline with new, appropriate to digital work-flows, theoretical frameworks. Even though many of the researchers in the digital and cyber field announced the birth of a “digital culture” or “digital ecosystems” (Forte 2007, Jones and Levy 2018), this significant shift in data gathering, data representation and the afterlife of digital, virtual and cyber imagery did not contribute to formulation of a new, vital theory that could respond to the digital and cyber advances in the study of the past. The paper seeks to propose a theoretical approach to supplementary technologies in archaeology — a project of prosthetic archaeology, that is about the processes of “prostheticizing” (Wills 1995) archaeology with the presence of digital turn in the discipline of things. It will examine the processual potential of a technological prosthesis as an active addition that does, makes, transforms, refers, evokes, (re)constructs, and generates meanings. By focusing on the disruptive ontology of the “digital-material”, the presentation will investigate its temporal character. Moving from the nominal to the verbal understanding of the ontology of the so-called “digital-material” the considerations will be placed in the broad horizon of material and entanglement studies, new materialism, and relational ontologies.

Monika Stobiecka is a PhD student at the Faculty of „Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw. She received MA in History of Art (specialization: modern art) and MA in Archaeology (specialization: museum studies and popularization of archaeology) from the University of Warsaw. She is currently completing her thesis on the status of archaeological artifacts in museums. In 2014 she was granted with an award for students given by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education — „Diamond Grant”. She collaborated with National Museum in Warsaw, Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, Foksal Gallery and Zachęta Polish National Gallery. She was granted scholarships by Lanckoroński Foundation in 2016 (research at British Museum and John Soane’s Museum) and Kościuszko Foundation in 2018 (research stay at Stanford Archaeology Center).

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.