Doctoral students

Milan Stürmer
Doctoral project "Inheriting debt"

Debt is a technics of the transmissibility and transmission of binding relations. The transfer of debt from one moment to the next, from one phase of life to the next, or from generation to generation, produces continuity in increasingly discontinuous and fractured biographies and societies. Across precarious working conditions and income that is, at best, intermittent, across insecure and unsteady political conditions, indeed across the entire logic of permanent rupture, (ostensibly) unifying relations are transmitted through debt.

With the proliferation of forms of debt since the de facto end of the Bretton Woods system and the rise of neoliberal economic orders as well as, crucially, beyond their end, my work negotiates the possibility of an explicit media-philosophical critique of contemporary political economy. The preservation of modern, western civilization in full recognition of its fractures and crises has long been, as Geoff Mann has recently shown, the raison d'être of political economy as a science of the state. Posing the question of debt in its ability to create continuity while suspending all coherence opens up a genuinely media-philosophical approach to political economy. This is the core argument that my work wants to advance.

Hiba Naeem
Doctoral project "Floods, Debris, and Mangroves: Ecological Warfare in South Asian Anglophone Literature"

This doctoral research will then investigate; the representation of disruption(s) or crises through instances of specific and local ecologies in South Asia. The cross-disciplinary research methodologies between literary and ethnographic study will examine the indigenous Sindhi and Baloch people and their close ties with the land and its environment. I contend that sites of abandonment, such as infrastructural plans like flyovers and plazas, enable a reconvention in how these spaces are used. From informal economies of standby trucks, street hawkers and dhabas, local cafes, and small-scale fishing to the recreational use of debris, canals and viaducts by street children, the ecological degradation and the methods of recycling make for a significant understanding of how we can redefine disruptions and their unconventional use.

Konstantin Mitrokhov 
Doctoral project "Games Agents Play: On Game-like Simulations and the Possibility of Generalist Artificial Intelligence"

I propose a study of modelling and simulation practices in artificial intelligence research, focusing on game-like environments designed by the means of video game engines. Machine learning in game-like environments is a novel approach that encodes manifold assumptions about the real world as playable virtual models. Such environments are used in artificial intelligence research and often rely on commercial game engines, third-party components, and readymade assets. These software toolkits prescribe what is cognisable to artificial agents that learn from them without human supervision. The playable simulations are modelled to fulfil the agency to learn, acting as testbeds for algorithmic modelling of intelligence. These techniques anticipate the shift from historical to synthetically generated datasets, thus disrupting existing concepts of agency and creating the conditions of possibility for open-ended modes of knowledge production. By asking how game-like simulations for machine learning are designed, I set out to explore the consequences of this paradigmatic shift for what we understand as “learning” and “intelligence”.

Benedikt Kuhn 
Doctoral project "Aesthetics of Disruption. Temporal Subjectivity in Kant, Marx and Stiegler"

This project aims to formulate the conceptual foundations of an “aesthetics of disruption”. “Disruption” is a concept developed by Bernard Stiegler in order to describe a subjective and collective experience of the historical present in the early 21st century, which is increasingly felt and understood as a form of permacrisis. Main determinants of this condition identified by Stiegler are the effects of digital network cultures in their entanglement with neoliberal capitalism. The project “Aesthetics of Disruption” focuses on one question that is central in this regard: How is the complex mediation and synchronization of sensory perception conceivable today, in a globalized world which is interconnected in real time, shaped by affect politics and coexisting contemporaneities? A (post-)Kantian aesthetics seems to offer valuable resources for describing the structure of sensibility (aisthesis) as well as its discursive reality (in the form of aesthetic judgments). These resources are to be combined with Karl Marx’s critical theory of social reproduction, which will be examined as the basis of an understanding of the mediation of individual and collective experience in capitalist societies. One hypothesis of the project is that this can best be done by following the value-theoretical tradition of an interpretation of Marx. Finally, Stieglers thinking about an irreducible technicity of perception is to be reconstructed as a media-philosophical rearticulation of core aspects of Kant’s and Marx’s theories of subjectivity. The project sets out from the basic thesis that all three examined philosophies are characterized by the articulation of a central connection between subjectivity and temporality. Therefore its goal consists in a constellation of the three positions along the leading thread of a concept of “temporal subjectivity”. Within the framework of the elaboration of a critical aesthetics of the present they are supposed to complement and reciprocally illuminate each other.

Julian Jestadt 
Doctoral project "Political Economy of Depolitisization: Neoliberalism, Post-Politics and Necessity"

In the past decades, Western democracies have increasingly been diagnosed with a tendency towards depoliticisation. This post-political development is mostly attributed to the neoliberal turn that began in the 1970s and that culminates in several phenomena of anti-politics today. Against this diagnostic backdrop, radical democratic theory and the concept of the political difference disclose a sphere of a second order politics. Politics is not just a struggle over specific policies, but also a preconditioning struggle over what can count as object of a political struggle. Particularly in the economic context, however, this second order struggle seems to be dominated by a politics of necessity which contradicts the key insight of radical democratic theory: the contingency of every social order. Based on democratic contingency, a political economy of depoliticisation would provide an analytical toolkit to deconstruct the politics of necessity in the field of second order politics. By uncovering the discursive and institutional devices of depoliticisation as well as by confronting supposedly economic necessities with alternatives, a political economy of depoliticisation would contribute to a revitalisation of the democratic imaginary and, thereby, opens the horizon of political possibility and transformation in the neoliberal era.

Maxi Wallenhorst
Doctoral project "Disjunctions of Sex – Dissociative Trans Poetics"

Trans and queer lives find themselves in the midst of the socio-historical experience of disruption: They are confronted with the fact that their mere presence, in liberal as well as reactionary discourses, stands for rupture, for both breakup and breakdown of social continuity. (Disruptor Elon Musk, for example, explains his takeover of Twitter with the transition and political radicalization of his daughter and also with his his belief that "wokeness" must be stopped in the name of a multi-planetary future for our civilization). In this context, the dissertation project asks: under which conditions does precisely the mutability of gender become an allegory for the impossibility of history? In doing so, the thesis sets itself the task of thinking trans life neither as an image nor as a counter-image of current crises of social reproduction, but rather as a way navigating them, making palpable some of their discontinuities: in the midst of the crisis of the heterosexual family forms since the 1970s, in research gaps in biomedical institutions, in the informal economies of DIY health care and sex work, etc. Dissociative poetics make up the material for this project. Starting from the concept of dissociation – a clinical model for discontinuities of thinking – it contrasts psychoanalytic, decolonial and   to describe how gender and sexuality themselves are experienced in and as disjunction. Specifically, the project works through aesthetic practices, from lyrical line break to noise signal, that make dissociation itself a conceptual or formal register. Without demanding integration or romanticizing disintegration, the project argues, they approach disjunctions of gendering in a capitalist present – and how to break with them.