Visual Cultures

My paper will investigate ‘the emergence of the writing that writes itself’.

In Technics and Time Bernard Stiegler introduces us to ‘the question of technics’,

which is ‘what is the relationship between technics and time?’ Stiegler points out that

the ‘question of technics’ can be examined with the help of Derrida’s différance, the

trace or writing.  Technologies of inscription, printing and reproduction owe their

existence to the structure of the grammē, which for Derrida is the movement of the

history of life. 

Writing is life continually supplementing itself through prosthesis and the inscription

into the nonliving.  However, at some point in the movement of the grammē there is a

change in form that occurs which is reflected in the change of anticipation into the

anticipation of death.  So there is a new form of différance that emerges, which

Stiegler identifies as ‘a new prosthetic configuration’ or a new mirror stage for

humanity in which it reflects on itself through technics.

My paper will look at the possibility of another later shift that occurs in the 17th

century with the advent of the first digital calculator invented by Blaise Pascal. The

beginning of what Foucault calls the classical episteme gave rise to another form of

writing, a form of writing that writes itself.  This writing adheres to the structure of

the grammē but perhaps does not anticipate its own death like the anthropocentric

writing before it.  How are we to understand this new form of inscription and the

technics that it brings forth?

Urban spaces are usually identified through the borders and boundaries drawn on a geographical map. City lines, streets and corridors are often worked out in great detail. Today, however, another city has emerged, which cannot be detected directly from physical characteristics, with borders that are no longer easy to identity – a computational city.

My paper will investigate the crisis in the concept of Nature. The concept of Nature is currently in high use due to global environmental turmoil. Climate change or global warming elicits a variety of different definitions of the concept and yet none of them suffice. As such the concept of Nature has lost its purpose and function in environmental and political debates. And yet it is Nature that we are trying to save from our polluting technological tyranny. It is Nature that suffers under our ever-increasing addiction to fossil fuel.

My paper would like to suggest that any concept of Nature could only be reinvented in opposition to a new and more elaborate concept of technics. Through a rereading of the second half of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment new possibilities for a concept of Nature related to technics will be investigated. After all Kant constructs his idea of Nature precisely by contrasting it with technics as he opposes the machine to the organism and claims the organism is self sufficient while the machine, such as the clock, requires a clockmaker to start it.

My paper will take Kant’s position a step further and consider the role the environment plays in the organism, that both the organism and the machine operate within a given milieu and that the distinction between where the machine starts and where it ends within its milieu is not as clear as it once was. It is at this point that the
crisis appears. Nevertheless, the distinction between machine and organism needs to hold for any concept of Nature to be maintained.

I will conclude that the crisis in the concept of Nature needs to be understood as a crisis in our grasp of technology.

Human made technical objects are constantly changing, taking on new forms that are appropriate to their epoch.  Technical objects in the digital age are no exception.  In fact, the digital object’s rate of change at the moment is one of rapid acceleration.  Only a few years ago email went out of fashion only to be replaced by Facebook and Twitter.  The digital form of the technical object is in full flux and yet neither philosophy nor engineering is able to grasp its ever-changing essence.  Here lies the premise of Yuk Hui’s On The Existence of Digital Objects published by University of Minnesota Press in 2016.  Hui is no stranger to the nuances of either technical or the natural object having studied both Computer Engineering at The University of Hong Kong and philosophy at Goldsmiths at the now defunct Culture Studies department where he met his mentor Bernard Stiegler who offers his views on the book in the preface. Evidence of Stiegler’s influence is seen in many parts of the book but most prominently in Hui’s choice of thinkers, Husserl, Simondon and Heidegger, three figures that feature repeatedly in Stiegler’s own work most notably the three volumes of Technics and Time (Stiegler, 2009).

The article contends that the algorithms on which today’s dating sites rely are unable to discern the users’ deeper lying desires and their inherent power structures. A theoretical approach which combines research from the fields of deep learning and artificial intelligence as well as Gabriel Tarde’s theory of societal imitation seems more apt to disclose the structures of the „libidinal economy“ of desire. Against this background, the article discusses the extent to which the technology of deep neural networks could be implemented for the creation of online-dating chatbots. Such chatbots might possibly penetrate the patterns of desire that up to now have been blocked.

The social wealth fund opens up important questions of common ownership and democratic control. It can also serve to start a conversation around the ways in which we value socially useful goods. The production of socially beneficial economic activity through the social wealth fund could, and should, not consider ‘profits’ as an economic metric. Instead, every time a socially beneficial task is completed, such as tasks implied in social care services, the provision of universal basic services, or production of additional housing, the social wealth fund accounting system could record the ‘cost’ of the task rather than the ‘profit’ made from delivering the service. Here are the reasons why this is a good idea.