Call for Abstracts: Critical Perspectives on Digital Technology and Political Subjects

Call for Abstracts

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) [TBC]
Yuk Hui (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Orit Halpern (TU Dresden)
Jathan Sadowski (Monash University)

 

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.

A range of the problems arise from the fact that technological mediations filter the way we approach and know the world in ways that are not always evident to the knowing subjects themselves. In a context of algorithmic opacity, datafication of knowledge, and asymmetries in technological design and production, the epistemic position of the subject invites further inquiry.
A specific issue is that the techno-politics of smartness operates with the assumption of crisis – financial, ecological, and political. The promise of making environments and citizens smart appears as a narrative of technological salvation in a general cultural atmosphere of impotency towards the future. Moving away from technological instrumentalism, which portrays technologies as neutral, allows us to reconsider political subjectivity and democracy in the context of technology’s co-constitution with the human.

Another set of problems stems from the complicity of smart technology, market, and capital. The operations of capital are adapting to the digital age, while also still maintaining the same essential features of exclusion, extraction, and exploitation, this time through datafication. As a product of this complicity, digital technology reifies and perpetuates forms of existing power, often amplifying the implicit biases and inequalities.

A further problem consists in the fact that while the risks of technology have gained widespread recognition, concrete alternatives within the techno-scientific and economic system remain elusive. In this context, the role of critical philosophy of technology becomes pivotal, especially in understanding the anthropological dimensions of smartness. Thus, contemporary philosophers of technology have to conceptualize a plurality of paths in technological development to allow for diverse subjectivities and historical trajectories.

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 by exploring a cluster of interrelated questions:

(i) What forms of knowledge and praxis are linked to smartness and its inbuilt machinic intelligence? If smartness offers an epistemology, does it simply transfer machinic principles to citizens, or are machines and citizens part of a singular socio-technical ensemble? As smart technological systems display self-regulatory, learning, and adaptive skills, do they interpellate political subjects as incapable subjects, i.e., as subjects who do not know or are not capable enough? How can the epistemic gap between technology users and experts be bridged, allowing technology to be redesigned for a freer society? How do criteria of computation, adaption, and predictive intelligence shape the agency of subjects and groups?

(ii) Does the hybridization of spaces and subjects with digital technology challenge or provide opportunities for critical theorization and imagining alternative futures? Is there a plurality of digital logics, and what makes one prevail over the other? Who benefits from smartness? Does difference (geographic, economic, social, ethnic) factor into the techno-politics of smartness? Can technology be liberated from the imperatives of capitalism, the economic system that has guided most inventions for the last few hundred years? In what sense can technology be universal apart from the ‘universality’ of capitalism?

(iii) How does technology shape existing subjectivities and create new ones? In what way does smart technology interpellate the subject? What is the relationship between technology and democracy, and what role does technology play in shaping political agency, citizenship, and resistance? Is there a smart citizen? If yes, is the smart citizen any more than a consumer? How does smartness structure habits and reconfigure subjects in a way that it transforms political agency, citizenship, and resistance? What kind of normativity can inspire alternative futures toward a democratic politics of technology?

 

We invite contributions to answer these questions and/or to address particularly the following topics: subjectivity and identity in the digital age; political agency and citizenship in the digital era; technology as interpellation, subjectivation, or individuation; digital technologies and power dynamics: surveillance, control, and resistance; the role of imaginaries and ideologies in technological design; digital divides and inequalities: access, inclusion, and exclusion; algorithmic decision-making and its impact on political subjects; the implications of digital technology on democratic processes and institutions; the role of digital technology in social movements and collective action.

 

Organizational details:

Please submit a 300-500 words abstract proposal, by 1st December 2023. Please indicate the full name and institutional affiliations. Decision notices will be emailed by 15th December 2023. Each speaker will have 20 minutes for presentation, followed by 10 minutes of questions and discussion. The working language is English. There is no conference/registration fee.

We are glad to announce that a selection of papers will be included in an edited volume published by an internationally renowned academic publisher. 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.