This Element outlines the environments of loving in contemporary technoculture and explains the changes in the manner of feelings in technologically mediated relationships. Synchronic and retrospective in its approach, this Element defines affection in the reality marked by the material and affective 'intangibility' that has emerged from the rise of digitalism and technological advancement. Analysing the constructions of intimacy, it describes our sensual and somatic experiences in conditions where the human body, believed to be extending itself by means of (...) the media and technological devices, is in fact the extension of the media and their technologies. It is a study that outlines shifts and continuums in the 'practices of togetherness' and which critically rereads late modern paradigms of emotional and affective experiences, filling a gap in the existing critical approaches to technological and technologized love. (shrink)

1. Introduction: Kairopolitics: The Politics of Realtime -- 2. Thought-Time: Immediacy and Live Theory -- 3. Control-Time: Immediacy and Constant Capitalism -- 4. Conclusion: Defense-Time: Immediacy and Realtime Resistance.

In the case of the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008 two primary discourses generative of biopolitics in the global matrix of war can be identified as a framework of knowledge about mobile technologies: first, that national security is threatened by the use of digital information technologies heavily symbolized by the use of mobile devices and the perceived manipulation of otherwise neutral forms of media by those deemed to be enemies; and, second, that national security is enhanced by the utilization (...) of these technologies on the level of individuals and non-state groups within the nation to better practice democracy and to identify as citizen-consumer subjects. In the global matrix of war, the emphasis on digital information technologies and new media — especially mobile iterations — as weapons has generated the subjects of globalized and local technoculture in historically specific, militarized directions. In this context, contemporary media operate in ways that call for critical engagement rather than romanticization of a purely emancipatory sphere of social networking over and against a fully networked, enemy ‘other’. (shrink)

Two ways of self‐interpretation merged in Western thought: the Hebrew and the Greek. What is unique, if anything, about the human species? The reinterpretation of this problem has been a constant process; here I am referring to Philip Hefner and the term created co‐creator, and particularly to Donna Haraway and the term cyborg. Simultaneously, humans have been fascinated by the thought of transgressing the boundaries that seem to separate them from the rest of nature. Any culture reflects the ways it (...) relates to nature. Our nature is technonature, and our culture is technoculture. Our reality can be best approached by the metaphor and symbol cyborg. Donna Haraway's cyborg is not just an interesting figure of speech, it is also a description—of ourselves and our culture. Also, contemporary fiction reflects the return of ontological questions: What is a world? What is the self? The cyborg acknowledges our mode of existence and destabilizes the traditional procedures of identity construction. (shrink)

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Comparing the ways in which the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the Australian cybernetic performance artist Stelarc criticize or defend technological cultural practices, this article argues that Virilio's ambiguous responses to avant-garde art highlight his key ideas far move clearly than his single-minded critique of 'termninal' mass-cultural practices - without any relationship to art - in Polar Inertia and Open Sky. Virlio's The Art of the Motor attacks the strategies of 20th-century technological avant- gardes for their apparent eugenicist and (...) fascist sympathies, but Virilios more recent interviews in Cyberrnonde and Voage d'hiver defend the ways in which the pre-technological avant-gardes resist the realist perspective of photography, and argue that the technological arts should offer similar resistance to the impact of cyberculture. Whereas Virilio concludes that such technological 'resistance' is probably impossible, Stelarc's recent research identifies exceptions to Virilio's rules. (shrink)

Starting with the Apollonian Greek theory of techne, Means Without End presents a history of transformations of ideas about technology, viewed within their broader philosophical, theological, and scientific contexts. Critically focusing on the ideological genealogy of technology without limits and finding its cultural roots in Christian theology, it details ideological developments in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and 19th century which prepared the way for a theory of autonomous technology and for postmodern technoculture in the 20th century.

Appearing between two historical touchstones—the alleged end of communism and the 100th anniversary of Nietzsche’s death—this book offers a provocative hypothesis about the philosopher’s afterlife and the fate of leftist thought and culture. At issue is the relation of the dead Nietzsche and his written work to subsequent living Nietzscheanism across the political spectrum, but primarily among a leftist _corps_ that has been programmed and manipulated by concealed dimensions of the philosopher’s thought. If anyone is responsible for what Geoff Waite (...) maintains is the illusory death of communism, it is Nietzsche, the man and concept. Waite advances his argument by bringing Marxist—especially Gramscian and Althusserian—theories to bear on the concept of Nietzsche/anism. But he also goes beyond ideological convictions to explore the vast Nietzschean influence that proliferates throughout the marketplace of contemporary philosophy, political and literary theory, and cultural and technocultural criticism. In light of a philological reconstruction of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished texts, _Nietzsche’s Corps/e_ shuttles between philosophy and everyday popular culture and shows them to be equally significant in their having been influenced by Nietzsche—in however distorted a form and in a way that compromises all of our best interests. Controversial in its “decelebration” of Nietzsche, this remarkable study asks whether the postcontemporary age already upon us will continue to be dominated and oriented by the haunting spectre of Nietzsche’s corps/e. Philosophers, intellectual historians, literary theorists, and those interested in western Marxism, popular culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the intersection of French and German thought will find this book both appealing and challenging. (shrink)

Despite high employment, low wages and job insecurity leave many families at or below the poverty line. The career instability previously experienced mostly by blue-collar workers has spread to middle managers and high-level executives caught in the rapid movement of capital and technologies. In light of these facts and the anxiety about employment prevalent in our society, Aronowitz argues for a new social contract between employers and workers.

Big historians are attempting to construct a general holistic narrative of human origins enabling an approach to studying the emergence of complexity, the relation between evolutionary processes, and the modern context of human experience and actions. In this paper I attempt to explore the past and future of cosmic evolution within a big historical foundation characterized by physical, biological, and cultural eras of change. From this analysis I offer a model of the human future that includes an addition and/or reinterpretation (...) of technological singularity theory with a new theory of biocultural evolution focused on the potential birth of technological life: the theory of atechnogenesis. Furthermore, I explore the potential deep futures of technological life and extrapolate towards two hypothetical versions of an ‘Omega Civilization’: expansion and compression. (shrink)

Defining technology : technology as apparatus -- Multimodal critical discourse analysis -- Analysing multimodal discourse : a toolkit approach -- Discourses of technology as progress -- Discourses of technological determinism -- Discourses of technological fetishism : (over)valuing technologies -- Discourses of technological (dis)satisfaction : consuming technologies.

Material culture and technoculture not only provide openings to study culture, but raise questions about contemporary materialism and technology more generally as well. Material culture tells a story, though usually not the whole story. The meanings of things are various, and finding out what they are requires a variety of approaches, from simply asking people what their things mean or observing how they use or don’t use them, to backtracking their history, or contextualizing them in broader cultural context. The (...) transition from hunter-gatherer life to that of agriculturally-based civilization some twelve thousand or so years ago was a great watershed of consciousness, not only radically altering the relation to the living environment, but also producing the origins of materialism. One of civilization’s dubious distinctions was to introduce poverty as well as property and wealth. Consumption is clearly a driving force on the globe today, powering economies, promising identities, providing a cornucopia of commodities. Technoculture is at its center, both in material devices and in the ideas they communicate about how what one has affects what one is and can be. The problem of materialism is not whether to have materials for living, but in allowing them to become goals in themselves. (shrink)

Creations of many contemporary artists indicate the emergence of technoculture. Although artistic manifestations of technoculture may appear to be a provocation, they encourage fundamental ontological questions, such as whether a person has unchanging nature; what was and is our relationship to the Other, and what it should be; to what extent can body and mind be altered before they stop being “human”; what is the future of our species. To properly understand the works of technoculture artists, it (...) appears necessary to have a thorough grasp post- and transhumanism as their key sources of inspiration. As a result, the developed tools will be employed to indicate which aspects of technoculture are a manifestation of post- and transhumanist ideas. This analysis is based primarily on the works of Stelarc and Orlan – two widely commented artists of technoculture. (shrink)

Philosophical and technoculture studies surrounding the existential understanding of the human–technology–world experience have seen a slow but steady increase that makes a turn to material hermeneutics in the second decade of the twenty-first century (Ihde in Postphenomenology: essays in the postmodern context. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1993; Capurro in AI Soc 25(1):35–42, 2010; Romele in Digital hermeneutics: philosophical investigations in new media and technologies. Routledge, Abingdon, 2020; among others). This renewed focus makes sense because human–technology–world experiences need to be (...) interpreted. And many of these are more complicated to study, precisely because technology is at the root of the experiences. One interesting subset of technologies is media technologies, also called digital media, which intertwines the device and the content to mediate together in the world (Irwin in Digital media: human-technology connection. Lexington Books, Lanham, 2016). Visual media technologies and media content, together, through what is called moving image technologies, create virtual role-playing, virtual and augmented reality, video games, and social media focused worlds that have become central experiences in contemporary culture. Just as image-based scientific instruments read the world in different ways, so to do these visual mediated experiences. How might this comingled “reading” of technology explain the digital film language and experience? I contend that understanding the existential “early” film experience helps understand the new age of cinema, with implications for digital media, digital representation of the visual, and technoscience and technoculture studies. The material hermeneutics perspective called postphenomenology is one way to study these visually focused human–technology–world perceptual and interpretive experiences. Don Ihde’s methodological framework (1990, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2019) is both an idea from technoscience studies and a set of nuanced vocabulary that helps to explore and reveal variations, patterns, and trajectories of the whole-body experience of technology. This use case will first explore traditional cinema and then the “new age” term “moving image”, to learn more about this complicated and radically transforming technological experience. Work by Don Ihde and Vivian Sobchack is considered. (shrink)

This book bridges media, technocultural, urban and journalism studies to examine the role of journalism in relation to a smart city project on Toronto’s waterfront. From the announcement of the public-private partnership called Sidewalk Toronto to the project’s termination, a mediatized controversy unfolded. Through an assemblage approach and a comprehensive case study of the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, it follows the actors and chronicles the Quayside project story as a conversation about the promise and perils of a (...) future “smart” neighbourhood. In the news of Waterfront Toronto, Sidewalk Labs, other actors, events and developments, there were multiple voices and views, interpretations and arguments, that manifested conflicting interests and values. As a situated actor, journalism produced a porous discourse where the prognostic value of the project to come could be expressed. The Quayside story not only described the project and the process with an active propose-and-public pushback movement but articulated relations of transparency and trust, governance and accountability. Journalist’s work of mediation conditioned the project’s emergence and dissolution within asymmetrical relations of power. Sidewalk Lab’s bid for legitimacy would face an oppositional dimension that indented the project’s enactment. Moreover, a time lag between project time and governmental policymaking made the mediatized controversy intractable. With their residual symbolic power, quality journalism contributed to dialogical urban learning. (shrink)

Despite a predominantly digital, 21st century music production landscape, analogue hardware professional audio technologies persist. In the discoursal throes of the leading online audio technology message forum Gearslutz, such technologies are routinely objectified, sexualized, fetishized and socialized into gear. Situated in a contemporary critical, interdisciplinary framework of fetish, masculinity and sexuality studies, this research interrogates how audio technologies manufactured and intended for music production contexts become sexy. Applying a mixed-mode methodology, including an intensive discourse, image and material-semiotic analysis of an (...) ‘epic’ sexy gear thread, we collated extensive data about technological fetishization. Sexy gear discourse articulates themes of voyeurism, acquisition, control and animation – linking the fetish value of technological objects and their connoisseurship with the erotic potential of sexualized objects. Such discourses ultimately serve to maintain social order, and become sites for performing the maintenance work of hegemonic masculine formations. This research provides new insights into how hegemonic masculinities depend upon the organization of online and offline sociability around fetishized material objects. Furthermore, our findings align with those of current scholarship focused on representational politics of technoculture. (shrink)

Technology's impact on and implications for the social, ethical, political, and cultural dimensions of our world must be seriously considered and addressed. Philosophy of Technology is a clear introduction to one of philosophy's newest issues. Don Ihde critically examines the impact of technological developments on various cultures throughout history-from the earliest feats of engineering and architecture to the cutting-edge developments in artificial intelligence- with an aim to understanding the human implications within a world technological culture. Using a wide variety of (...) concrete examples and illustrations, including artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy, the author looks at both the current situation and future directions. In a final chapter, he takes the position that the foundational concern for the twenty-first century is the global environment, followed closely by multiculturality and its effect on technoculture, the future of warfare, and the distribution of wealth in a world economy. Special Features Provides an introduction to the best and most recent literature on the subject Places the philosophy of technology within the overall project of philosophy Provides a clear and comprehensive overview of the main issue in the field Promotes understanding of the special role of philosophical criticism Contains a wealth of often humorous and highly imaginative examples that have become the hallmark of this author. (shrink)

In this interview, Paul Virilio talks at length about his life and numerous published works ranging from Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology to the recently translated Polar Inertia. Considering important theoretical themes and questions relating to post- and 'hyper'- modernism, poststructuralism, modernity and postmodernity, Virilio discusses his often controversial views on the cultural writings of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Baudrillard. In so doing, Virilio not only clarifies many of his architectural, political and cultural concepts such as 'military space', (...) 'dromology' and the 'integral accident' but also provides much food for thought for all those presently concerned with the social implications of the 'disappearance' of aesthetics, technoculture, information warfare, cloning and 'cyberfeminism'. (shrink)

The cyborg that Donna Haraway appropriated in ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ as a metaphor for political action and theoretical inquiry has ceased to have the potency it did 20 years ago. While Haraway has turned from a central focus on technoculture to companion species, much important cultural work remains to be done, especially in networked and programmable media. Problems with the cyborg as a metaphor include the implication that the liberal humanist subject, however problematized by its hybridization with cybernetic mechanism, (...) continues as a singular entity operating with localized agency. In a word, the cyborg is not networked enough to encompass the emergent possibilities associated with the Internet and the world-wide web and other phenomena of the contemporary digital era. Instead I propose the idea of the cognisphere. As operational concept and suggestive metaphor, the cognisphere recognizes that networked and programmable media are not only more pervasive than ever before in human history but also more cognitively powerful. It is closely associated with what many researchers regard as a major insight: the idea that the physical world is fundamentally computational. While these scientists regard computation as a physical process, the cultural critic is apt to see it as an over-determined metaphor. The binary choice between seeing the computational universe as a literal description of the physical world and reading it as an over-determined metaphor misses a crucial aspect of contemporary cultural dynamics: the interaction between means and metaphor, technology and cultural presupposition. Taking this dynamic into account leads to a more complete understanding summed up in the aphorism, ‘What we make and what we are co-evolve together.’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:WisCon 46Laurie Fuller, Jenna N. Hanchey, and E. OrnelasExistence as Resistance, WisCon 46, May 26–29, 2023, Madison, Wisconsin, United StatesIn a world that seems structured to kill most of its occupants, there is a utopian impulse in the act of existence itself. WisCon 46 represented a prefigurative utopian impulse through centering continued marginalized existence as resistance.1 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls “prefigurative politics” the “fancy term for the idea (...) of imagining and building the world we want to see now,” particularly in terms of access needs.2 The structure as well as the content of the convention itself created a space in which to set the groundwork for utopia: the ways that we live and act to resist structures of oppression in order to prefigure a better world.Since WisCon’s founding in 1977, its intended audience has been fans, authors, and academics interested in the intersection between feminism and “science fiction, fantasy, and speculative literature of all sorts.”3 While neither feminism nor speculative fiction could be solely defined as utopian, both do explore utopian impulses that inspire change for the better. Therein lies the hope of Alessa Johns’s proposal that “the utopian imagination has been crucial for feminists.”4 Lisa Yaszek agrees: “for nearly 200 years writers have used speculative fiction consciously and collectively to dramatize the political issues most central to women living in a technocultural world and to create a sense of wonder about the interrelated possibilities of social and scientific change.”5 Envisioning a liberatory world is a feminist imperative, and speculative fiction offers a unique venue to do so. This imperative informed WisCon this year, as participants collectively worked to imagine and enact a better future for marginalized folks, in and beyond the space of the conference. [End Page 618]Enabling Existence through Con StructuresWisCon is unique in attuning its organizational structure to the creation of liberatory futures in the here and now. WisCon is strongly attentive to disability access of all kinds, COVID safety, antiracist/anti-oppression principles, and safety and anti-abuse support for all these areas. In the contemporary US context—where COVID-19 remains a major barrier to disabled people wishing to participate in conventions, where racist violence continues to threaten BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) life, where queer and trans folks are under exacerbated legal attacks—creating a convention space that protects and enables marginalized participation becomes a means of prefiguring utopian potential through embodied praxis. As mask, capacity, and vaccination mandates disappear (despite these ongoing pandemic times), and as bigotry of all forms continues relatively unabated, WisCon 46 remains steadfast in its commitment to safety. In short, the conference itself aims to become a utopian space.WisCon organizers are also keenly aware of the challenges that many different bodyminds might encounter in large group settings.6 Trained monitors oversee in-person and online programming in an effort to discourage harmful words and actions as well as ensure the fullest participation for those most impacted. Hence, disability justice lies at the center of the Con’s policies and practices. The event is made as accessible as possible through careful attention to venue selection, including the availability of gender-neutral bathrooms, scent-free spaces, and quiet rooms, as well as the use of color communication badges.This year’s event followed strict masking and testing protocols: individually packaged rapid COVID-19 tests were available without cost at registration, as were KN95 masks. The Con kept an anonymized record of self-reported positive COVID-19 tests, in case of possible exposure. This mutual responsibility reflects the kind of utopianism inherent to disability politics; that is, disability “allows for reformulation of in/dependence and community,” a way of rethinking how we share space and produce knowledge together.7The conference’s decidedly feminist approach “to creating a space for feminism and its consideration within the science fiction community” is applied at every level. The Con’s general organization and procedures are structured as nonhierarchically as possible. There is a board of directors as well as co-chairs, but these are rotating positions. This “commitment to feminism” is [End Page 619] reflected... (shrink)

This article addresses computational procedures that are no longer constrained by human modes of representation and considers how these procedures could be philosophically understood in terms of ‘algorithmic thought’. Research in deep learning is its case study. This artificial intelligence technique operates in computational ways that are often opaque. Such a black-box character demands rethinking the abstractive operations of deep learning. The article does so by entering debates about explainability in AI and assessing how technoscience and technoculture tackle the (...) possibility to ‘re-present’ the algorithmic procedures of feature extraction and feature learning to the human mind. The article thus mobilises the notion of incommensurability to address explainability as a communicational and representational issue, which challenges phenomenological and existential modes of comparison between human and algorithmic ‘thinking’ operations. (shrink)

. John Caiazza presents the current technoculture as the latest development in the ongoing conflict of science and religion that began with Tertullian in the third century. I argue that his presentation is historically inaccurate, because for most of Western history science and religion interacted with and cross‐fertilized each other. Contrary to Caiazza's misleading presentation, Western thought did not follow the dichotomous model polemically posed by Tertullian. I take issue with Caiazza's portrayal of postmodernism and his claim that technology (...) is the foundation of an inherently secularist culture. I conclude by highlighting certain ethical challenges engendered by the prevalence of new technologies and present the dialogue of science and religion as uniquely qualified to address these challenges. (shrink)

Abstract:Trains, a representation of Western technology and civilization, entered China in the early twentieth century. Han Bo poeticizes this train-induced Chinese modernity and its ongoing processes by mobilizing female images and characters on, of, or around the train, itself a complex of technocultural material forces entering into the vision of the modern Chinese people both individually and collectively. This essay analyzes such a train of train images in two poems by Han Bo, “Modern Sexual Equipmentality” and “Mass-Murdering Equipmentality,” while providing (...) a brief contextual and conceptual framework for understanding some of the literary and philosophical aspects of contemporary Chinese poetry with some focus on their gender dynamics. (shrink)

This essay traces the increased centrality of technology to social life across the period of modernity. It examines major shifts in thinking about technology which underpin the shift from industrial to post-industrial society, and the emergence of concepts such as ‘technoscience’ and ‘technoculture’. It argues that a critical analysis of technology must probe the way that histories of technological progress have been implicated in colonial hierarchies privileging the West. In examining the extension of technology from machines that make things (...) to ‘machines that think’, including biotechnology and computerized ‘aritificial life’, something implied in every historical iteration of technology is laid bare: defining the technological activates the border between nature and culture, and goes to the heart of what it means to be human. (shrink)

resumo: Neste artigo propomos abordar a relação entre os conceitos de natureza e de artefato a partir de uma racionalidade química e alquímica. Pretendemos mostrar que essa racionalidade é originariamente tecnocientífica e apontar o modo como alquimistas e químicos construíram um quadro conceitual ancorado no laboratório do químico e no laboratório do orgânico. Nosso propósito é explicitar as transgressões e a capilaridade tecnocultural dos materiais criados nos laboratórios, bem como da existência de um estilo químico de raciocinar com suas particularidades (...) ontológicas, epistemológicas e metodológicas. abstract: In this article we propose to treat the relation between the concepts of nature and artifact from a chemical and alchemical rationality. We intend to show that this rationality is originally technoscientific and to point out the way alchemists and chemists built a conceptual board anchored in the laboratory of the chemical and in the laboratory of the organic. Our proposal is to explain the transgressions and technocultural capillarity of the materials created in the laboratories, as well as the existence of a chemical style of reasoning with its ontological, epistemological and methodological particularities. (shrink)

Pop and camp nostalgia for the lofty ziggurats, teardrop automobiles, sleek ships of the airstream, and even the alien BEMs with imperiled women in their clutches, are one thing; the cyberpunk critique of “wrongheadedness,” whether in Gibson’s elegant fiction or Sterling’s flip criticism, is another. Each provides us with a stylized way of approaching SF’s early formative years, years usually described as “uncritical” in their outlook on technological progress. But neither perspective can give us much sense of the sociohistorical landscape (...) of the thirties on which these gleaming technofantasies were raised. To have some idea of the historical power of what Gibson calls the “Gernsback Continuum,” we need to know more, for example, about the entrepreneurial activities and scientific convictions of Hugo Gernsback himself, a man often termed the “father” of science fiction because he presided over its market specialization as a cultural genre. In Gernsback’s view, SF was more of a social than a literary movement. We need to know more about the hallowed place of engineers and scientists in public consciousness in the years of boom and crisis between the wars, the consolidation of industrial research science at the heart of corporate capitalism, and the redemptive role cast for technology in the drama of national recovery and growth. We also need to know about the traditions of progressive thought that stood behind the often radical technocratic philosophy of progressive futurism in the thirties. My description of North American SF’s period of genre formation will show the crucial influence of the national cults of science, engineering, and invention as well as discuss the role of technocracy in the social thought of the day. I will also consider the ways in which pulp SF escaped or resisted the recruitist role allotted to it not only by shaping figures like Gernsback, who devoted himself directly to enlisting his readers in the cause of “science,” but also by subsequent critics of early SF, including those writers, like Gibson and Sterling, who have lamented its naïve celebration of technological innovation. Andrew Ross teaches English at Princeton University and is the author of The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry and No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture . He is also the editor of Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism and the coeditor, with Constance Penley, of Technoculture. (shrink)

In a range of digital creative productions and digital culture, questions of how to deal with finitude are on the rise. On the one hand, sectors of the digital entertainment industry – specifically computer games developers – are concerned with the question of how to manage `death' digitally. On the other hand, death and suicide have become the impetus for humorous artistic expression. This article tracks the emergence of a digital ethos that is cognizant of consequence, finitude and even death. (...) Rather than pit a 1990s `will to life' against an emerging `death drive', I argue that the shift to an ethos in which dark consequences ensue from digital actions must be understood by working through digital code's technicity and unfolding this relation of technics to both ethics and politics. Although Bernard Stiegler's analysis of technicity goes some way toward unfolding a political analysis of the aesthetics of digital code, his articulation of noopolitics fails to provide us with a way to conduct ourselves digitally in an era of cognitive capitalism. I look to critical software practices and their provisional networked publics, with potential lines of flight for contemporary technoculture via novel digital `codings'. (shrink)

The debate about computational literary studies (CLS) is stuck. Forceful arguments are repeatedly made as to why literary studies must now—or could never—involve quantification, statistics, and algorithms (not least in this journal) with little sense of either side convincing the other of their case. Surveying this debate over the past decade, I propose that what seems a complete divergence of opinion obscures a fundamental agreement: that computation is separate from literary phenomena. For the field’s critics, this distinction makes CLS an (...) oxymoron; for its proponents, both ways of knowing can contribute to literary studies, and there is critical potential in working across the divide. Yet the perception of a divide remains, and it prevents either effective critiques of reductive uses of computation (in literary studies and beyond) or productive engagements with computation’s constitutive effects (including for literary textuality and subjectivity). In charting this divide as it characterizes and limits apparently very different arguments, I connect claims about technology and subjectivity made in critiques and defenses of CLS to the separation of matter and meaning commonly referred to as Cartesian dualism. With both sides maintaining this arrangement, the debate about CLS is sealed off from technocultural inquiries in multiple fields (including literary studies) and from much of what matters in and as contemporary literary phenomena. The performative approaches to scientific and literary materiality I use to elucidate problems with the existing debate also help to characterize, explain the need for, and make legible where it already exists, a different—performative—CLS. Attuned to the coconstitution of computational methods and objects, with each other, and with literary subjectivities and textualities, this CLS builds on and extends existing critical paradigms to enable literary studies in the postprint era. (shrink)

What is the relation between material hermeneutics, bodies, perception and materials? In this article, I shall argue cultural learning processes tie them together. Three aspects of learning can be identified in cultural learning processes. First, all learning is tied to cultural practices. Second, all learning in cultural practice entangle humans’ ability to recognize a material world conceptually, and finally the boundaries of objects, the object we perceive, are set by shifting material-conceptual entanglements. All these aspects are important for material hermeneutics (...) in a technoculture. Postphenomenology has expanded the connection between hermeneutics and phenomenology by focusing on studies of how perception, bodies, materials, the sensual realm and hermeneutics are entwined when we perceive the world through technologies. Following Don Ihde, hermeneutics expands beyond interpretation of texts in the humanities. We can interpret materials as for instance animal bones to make new sense of the Bible. New technologies have expanded material hermeneutics, when we can ‘look’ into bodies and ‘perceive’ below surfaces. Interpretation via such tools in a technoculture, both limit and extend our hermeneutic horizons in the humanities as well as in the natural sciences. Furthermore, from the perspective of cultural learning processes, material hermeneutics in the human and natural sciences depend on more than mediating instruments. Material hermeneutics also involve the material cultural environments of scientific apparatuses and the scientists’ processes of learning in cultural practice. This changes the focus from relations in postphenomenology to processes of relations. (shrink)

Media archaeological methods for extending the lifetime of new media into ‘old media’ have experienced a revival during the past years. In recent media theory, a new context for a debate surrounding media archaeology is emerging. So far media archaeology has been articulated together with such a heterogeneous bunch of theorists as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and to a certain extent Friedrich Kittler. However, debates surrounding media archaeology as a method seem to be taking it forward not only (...) as a subdiscipline of (media) history, but increasingly into what will be introduced as materialist media diagrammatics. This article maps some recent media archaeological waves in German media theory. The text addresses Wolfgang Ernst’s mode of media archaeology and his provocative accounts on how to rethink media archaeology as a fresh way of looking into the use and remediation of media history as a material monument instead of a historical narrative and as a recent media theoretical wave from Germany that seems to not only replicate Kittler’s huge impact in the field of materialist media studies but develop that in novel directions. However, as will be argued towards the end, Ernst’s provocative take that hopes to distinguish itself as a Berlin brand of media theory in its hardware materiality and time-critical focus resonates strongly with some of the recent new directions coming from US media studies, namely in software and platform studies. (shrink)

This paper seeks an urban poetics under the pressures of flux, polyglot babble and the rise of technoculture. In so doing it traces the intertwinements of aesthetics and politics as they manifest over the last 150 years. Charles Baudelaire’s poetry is characterised as a delirious response to the delirium of capitalist modernity, in which ‘words rise up’, as he puts it, but it is a also a barometer, which measures the degrees of entwinement of aesthetics and revolutionary politics in (...) the subsequent years, for one in Walter Benjamin’s interpretation in the 1930s and in the wild translations of the poet by Sean Bonney in 2008 in the collection ‘Baudelaire in English’. (shrink)

This paper examines the theoretical and practical aspects of geodesic dome architecture in North America as part of an aesthetic of virtualization. Geodesic domes can be conceived of as virtual environments designed as alternatives to the contemporary world and its internal crises. They were originally a tool of the American counterculture of the 1960s to search for futuristic housing solutions which responded to ecological concerns. The contribution traces some of the most important phases of dome architecture, which crossed paths with (...) the emerging technoculture linked to the rise of virtual reality. Indeed, the idea of the dome as a means of imagining new virtual environments, as was the case of Biosphere 2, intersects with the career of VR pioneer Jaron Lanier. Today, virtual reality technologies have merged geodesic architecture with visualization devices, as happens in the case of “virtual domes”, offering a unique way to experience virtual reality and connect with others in a shared environment. (shrink)

Unquestionably, the zeitgeist of Web 2.0 is symbolized by the dominance of social networking sites (SNS) and user-created content (UCC). MySpace, Facebook, and Cyworld mini-hompy are but a few examples of SNS that are becoming increasingly part of urban everyday life and interwoven into the historicity of the Internet. Web 2.0 has promised much about new forms of participation, creation, collaboration, and authorship, and yet within each location, we can find examples of both empowerment and exploitation. This is particularly the (...) case in the divergent region of the Asia-Pacific. Rather than the region being a sum of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983), this paper argues that the distributed social networks of Web 2.0 UCC is formed, informed, and maintained through the perpetual process of “imaging communities.” These imaging communities can be seen in the visual, textual, and aural modes of UCC and can be seen to reflect the region’s new technocultural cartographies. (shrink)

This paper discusses the history of human being as a process of increasing inadaptation from nature and, at the same time, of adaptation to the technocultural environment, which human beings have built upon nature. The components of this environment have been easily identifiable as artificial until this century. Nevertheless, we are now creating copies of natural entities--living beings among them--which are so well designed that it is almost impossible to be able to distinguish between original and replicas.

This article develops a multi-level framework for the analysis of a bottom-up politics of technology at the workplace. It draws on a multi-case study on algorithmic management of manual labor in manufacturing and delivery platforms in Germany. In researching how workers influenced the use of algorithmic management systems, the concept of technopolitics is developed to refer to three different arenas of negotiation: (1) the arena of regulation, where institutional framings of technologies in production are negotiated, typically between state actors, employers’ (...) associations, and unions. (2) The arena of implementation, where strategies of technology deployment are negotiated—in the German production model typically between management and works council. (3) The arena of appropriation, in which different organizational technocultures offer contesting schemes for the actual use of technology at work. Whereas most recent research on digitalization of work conceptualizes workers as mere objects of digitalization processes, this paper focuses on worker agency as a “technopolitics from below.” It thus demonstrates how workers influence the concrete outcome of digitalization projects. (shrink)

Human simultaneously is the acting person of a few autonomous and interdepending forms of evolutional process. Accordingly, it is possible to select three forms of adaptation and three constituents of evolutional strategy of survival of humanity – biological, sociocultural and technological adaptations. The actual and potential consequences of development of so-called High Hume technologies (technologies of the guided evolution)  most essential from major technological adaptations of humanity  are analyzed. The phenomenon of bio-power within the framework of global coevolutional (...) methodology as one of central elements of mechanism of mutual co-ordination of biological and sociocultural forms of evolutional process from one side and technocultural balance, with other is examined. (shrink)

The molecule, as a perfect and ageless building block of matter that exists beyond human reach, has been an object of fascination and admiration since the 19th century. However, the discourse surrounding nanotechnology – at least at its most optimistic – promises the possibility of human mastery over this domain and, as a result, over all matter. This belief carries forward the old idea of a division between a realm of the base, material and particular, on one hand, and a (...) realm of the perfect, immaterial and abstract, on the other, one which today is most powerfully expressed in information discourse. Within this framework, nanotechnology promises the ability to negotiate and even dissolve this division, allowing matter itself to be treated as a kind of information. The most enthusiastic adherents of this idea believe that this will one day allow us to ‘reprogram’ material reality itself. (shrink)

A multitude of techno-natures emerge through discourses and practices of the new technosciences. While some philosophers and science studies scholars argue that model organisms and artefacts are getting more and more disembodied and decontextualised in the laboratory, I want to show how ontic dimensions of model organisms and artefacts are made invisible as well as visible in different practices of technosciences like Artificial Life and robotics.This analysis opens up possibilities for an understanding of how ontic dimensions of non-human actors are (...) made visible and invisible in technoscientific practices. At the same time it allows the development of a concept of nonhuman actors beyond reifying, velontriquist practices of representation as well as a critical intervention in the co-construction of our technoculture. German Mannigfaltige Techno-Naturen an der Schnittstelle von Sozialem, Technischem und Natürlichem entstehen in den und durch die Diskurse und Praktiken der neuen Technowissenschaften. Entgegen der verbreiteten These von der Entkörperung und Dekontextualisierung von Modellorganismen im Labor zeige ich in meinem Beitrag auf, wie auf je unterschiedliche Weise ontische Dimensionen von Modellorganismen und Technofakten in der Artificial Life-Forschung und Robotik sichtbar bzw. unsichtbar gemacht werden.Gerade die Untersuchung der Konstruktion der ontischen Dimension nichtmenschlicher Akteure in unterschiedlichen Forschungspraktiken eröffnet Möglichkeiten, nichtmenschliche Akteure ernst zu nehmen, erlaubt ein genaueres Verständnis des Un/Sichtbarmachens von spezifischen ontischen Dimensionen nichtmenschlicher Akteure und zeigt Wege für kritische Interventionen in unsere Technowissenschaftskultur auf. Sie vermeidet jene bauchrednerischen Erzählpraktiken, die mit der Stimme aus dem Off den nichtmenschlichen Akteuren Eigenschaften verordnen und sie damit einmal mehr zum Verstummen bringen. (shrink)