International Conference: “Critical Perspectives on Digital Technology and Political Subjects”
International Conference
Which Smartness? Whose Intelligence? Critical Perspectives on Digital Technology and Political Subjects
13-14 May 2024
Centre of Philosophy, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon
Event organized as part of the activities of Praxis-CFUL
Keynote speakers:
Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser University)
Yuk Hui (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Orit Halpern (TU Dresden)
Gavin Mueller (University of Amsterdam)
Digital technology has profoundly transformed our societies, shaping the way we interact, govern, and understand ourselves as subjects and political agents. From social media to videogames and digital platforms, the digital has become much more than a means of communication and information transmission. Digital environments are now spaces for existence, work, play, and politics. In other words, the digital has merged with social and physical environments. The digitalization of environments, from homes, to cities, and even forests, reinforces the infrastructural blurring of the boundaries between physical and digital. The deeply material consequences of cyberwarfare, the digitalization of work and communication, the “Internet of Things” – all point to a general interpenetration of the digital and the physical to constitute a new hybrid milieu.
Concomitantly, the current regime of digitalization associates with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning, their blend being at the core of the techno-political category of “smartness”. Technologically, “smart” refers to digital technologies that exhibit properties of machinic intelligence, as suggested by its acronym “Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology”. However, through data collection, smart technology reveals itself as an instrument of power, control, and extraction of value. With self-regulatory, learning, and adaptive skills, smart technological systems display a specific epistemology of machinic and societal learning. At the same time, through the narrative that every problem requires a technological solution – more data and more machine learning – smartness shows its ideological dimension. On this basis, smartness can be considered not just a set of technologies but an epistemology and a politics. Thus, the overarching theme of this conference centres on the implications of smartness for political subjectivities, and its premise is that the digital socio-technical ensembles are the new spaces of subjectivation, interpellation, and co-constitution of subjects.
The growth of the smartness paradigm raises significant philosophical issues. On one hand, the question of smartness can be seen as part of a broader trajectory of critical questioning that saw technology as making humans “one-dimensional” (Marcuse) and “standing reserve” (Heidegger), as intimately bound up with the human (Latour, Stiegler), or even leaning toward obsolescence (Anders) or total control (Deleuze). On the other, as a historically determinate socio-technical ensemble, the smart paradigm generates new problems.
The main aim of this conference is to problematize the paradigm of smartness and to critically examine it as a mode of subjectivation, interpellation, and co-constitution of subjects.
Organizational details:
School of Arts and Humanities (Library Building – Rooms B112B & B112C)
University of Lisbon
Cidade Universitária, Alameda da Universidade, 1649-004 Lisboa, Portugal
Attendance is free and open to all
For further details or questions, please contact smartness.criticalperspectives@gmail.com
Organizers:
Antonio Oraldi (Praxis-CFUL, University of Lisbon) & Tamara Caraus (Praxis-CFUL, University of Lisbon)
This event is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., in the scope of the project UIDB/00310/2020.