Digital Sovereignty and Its Differend (Panel Discussion)
21. May
The Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) invites you to a panel discussion with Prof. emerit. Dr. Joseph Vogl (Princeton University), moderated by Dr. Johannes Bennke (Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg) and Dr. Irina Kalinka (Columbia University).
Thursday, May 21/ 6 – 7:30 pm / C5.
This talk takes place in German language.
Registration is not necessary.
Contact: cdcforum@leuphana.de
We are pleased to welcome Prof. Emeritus Dr. Joseph Vogl (Princeton University) as our guest speaker for the evening session of our workshop. Joseph Vogl translated Lyotard’s Le Différend into German in the 1980s and will discuss with us the relevance of Lyotard’s philosophy of the differend to current debates on digital sovereignty. Our starting point is an observation from our first workshop in Potsdam: the concept of digital sovereignty is often used uncritically in public discourse, as if there were still a position that could claim unrestricted sovereignty. This is precisely where Lyotard’s The Differend (1983) comes in: an underrated, prophetic work, in our view, that demonstrates why legitimacy is fundamentally contested and why universal rules of judgment cannot simply be claimed. No actor—neither states, corporations, digital platforms, more or less informal networks, nor individuals—can claim sovereignty for themselves unquestioningly. Dr. Johannes Bennke (Konrad Wolf Film University Babelsberg) and Dr. Irina Kalinka (Columbia University) discuss with Joseph Vogl the consequences this has for the legitimacy of forms of digital sovereignty, the role played by related concepts such as autonomy and self-determination, as well as platform capitalism, protocols, and forms of social organization.