Doctoral students

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

This doctoral project explores the ambivalent experiences of indigenous communities against the backdrop of ever-emerging development projects. Through ethnography, I investigate how an indigenous Sindhi community experiences, makes sense of, and questions the everyday realities of changing local ecologies and microclimates resulting from the onslaught of neoliberal imaginations. How do these transformations redefine the dynamics of local and non-local, human and non-human relations through shifting temporalities and disruptions for the Sindhi community in Malir? How is the everyday shaped amid new, abandoned, or contested housing and construction projects placed under stay orders or conservation efforts due to environmental concerns?

Konstantin Mitrokhov 
Doctoral project “Machine Play: On deep learning and autonomy in computational thought”

Current deep learning (DL) systems and their concrete effects on life, society, and technology are posing challenges to the established critique in the philosophy of artificial intellience as well as recent perspectives in critical data, algorithm, and software studies. Furthermore, through the uptake of these systems in cultural production, political decision-making, and scientific and engineering practices, DL is reshaping the dominant paradigm of computing and the notion of computation itself. This doctoral project seeks an account of general purpose computing that gives rise to a distinct, socio-technically constructed logos. Drawing on empirical research in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), it synthesises emerging positions in the philosophy of computation, media theory, and the sociology of technology.

Here, the core theoretical problem is computational worlding, that is, the ways in which computation figures the world and reconfigures itself in its own image. I approach the problematic through the notion of the ludic, encompassing the use of games, game engines, and game theory that is fundamental to the DL field. The ludic enables a bottom-up mode of inquiry that reaches beyond the instrumental and speculative views, allowing me to trace the emergence (and the failure to emerge) of general purpose computing in the age of DL. At the same time, this ludic epistemology yields a frame for thinking about computation on DL-native terms: as interactive, based on artificial neural networks, and increasingly reliant on synthetic data. My contribution to the critical discourse on AI/ML will include an elaboration of the emerging registers of this kind of computation and exploring the intersections of DL with theoretical positions on computation.

Benedikt Kuhn 
Doctoral project "Imputation. Sensibility and Technics in Kant, Marx, and Stiegler"

This dissertation sets out from the premise that the relation between technology and sensibility poses a central challenge for a critical theory of the contemporary. Through a mutually transformative reconstruction of the philosophies of Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Bernard Stiegler, the project examines how two central conditions of the present –technological media and the life form of capitalism – shape the basic forms of sensibility today. With particular attention to the constitution and transformation of temporal consciousness, as well as imaginative and practical abilities within the ubiquitous media ecologies of the present, the project aims to reflect on and develop foundational critical and analytical concepts for an understanding of how autonomous modes of relating to ones self and others are being mediated today. Werner Hamacher’s metaphorical description of technics as ‘imputation’ is proposed as a tentative conceptual figure for the primordial relation of aesthetic receptivity and technical gesture, which lies at the center of this dissertation project. Essential to this project is a way of acting that is fundamentally informed by the provisionality and contingency of empirical experience and takes place against the horizon of finitude as the absolute condition of living beings. Drawing on Kant’s theory of sensible experience and conceptual abstraction, Marx’s theory of the social abstraction of value, and Stiegler’s concept of exteriorization as a technical dialectic of internal and external processes, this project aims to demonstrate how the imputation of sensibility can serve as a fundamental resource for a critique of contemporary forms of domination and liberation.

Julian Jestadt 
Doctoral project "Political Economy of Depoliticisation: 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 "Free Dissociation. Figures of Negativity in Contemporary Trans Poetics"

Dissociation—a feeling of depersonalization, derealization, a feeling of unfeeling—is a recurring figure in contemporary trans cultural production. This doctoral project examines it in three registers: as a symptom, a conceptual resource, and a formal cue. While mainstream psychiatry and critical theory often frame dissociation as pathological detachment, recent trans literature and art mobilize it differently: to unsettle dominant views of gender as either an inner truth or universal fluidity. Instead, dissociation can situate gender—negatively—within infrastructures of feeling, in the uncanny space between personal dysphoria and political alienation, irreducible to both identity and material conditions. Analyzing works such as Jackie Ess’s Darryl, P. Staff’s moving-image pieces, and Juliana Huxtable’s ketamine poetry, I develop dissociation as a poetic mode. Related to registers such as camp, deadpan, irony, and noise, a dissociative poetics offers ways to grasp trans form on its own terms. Drawing on psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s theory of the unconscious and Marxist-feminist accounts of social reproduction, I theorize dissociation as an ordinary infrastructure of gender: a way of metabolizing the antagonisms of reproduction, intimacy, and more-than-survival under racial capitalism. Riffing on the prompt underlying psychoanalytic technique, I ask: What might free dissociation look like?

Freya Häberlein
Doctoral project "Technics and Tragedy: Axiologies of Excess and Disruption“ 

This project seeks to investigate an axiology of disruption by exploring tragic thinking in the work of Bernard Stiegler, drawing on his references to Nietzsche, Simondon, and Heidegger. As Nietzsche shows in his early reflections on pre-Socratic philosophy, tragedy is about the cyclicity of life and death, as well as continuous change, decay, and renewal of the individual. Following Nietzsche, tragedy also found its way into philosophy of technology in the 20th century. While Heidegger, for example, emphasizes that the value of technological achievement, as well as its mirroring of reality, is ultimately transient, Simondon argues that the technical object should not be understood as a substance sharply distinct from the individual and the collective, but is always embedded in a dynamic indeterminacy. The (technical) individual is thus always characterized by excesses; Such excess is defined here as a counter-concept that offers continuity where disruption, according to Stiegler, marks the absence of an epochal imaginary. According to Stiegler, in the 'age of disruption,' that era of 'automatic nihilism,' Nietzsche's tragic philosophy is necessary to re-value the conditions of the present. A present that requires the dynamic definition of the ontological ambiguity of technical objects (especially digital objects), which is simultaneously also an axiological ambiguity. For Stiegler, disruption also describes a loss of knowledge and normativity through the automation of desire, expectation, and will. By including tragedy at the political level, Stiegler invokes Sophocles' Antigone as an icon of an ethical-affective autonomy for a contemporary activism that understands reality as operative and pointing beyond its own structure.

 

Completed doctoral projects:
 

Milan Stürmer
"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.