Technoecologies of Participation
New Perspectives from Media Philosophy and Anthropology
’Technoecologies of Participation‘ is one subproject of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Media and Participation. Between Demand and Entitlement‘.
By using ’medial participation‘ as a key concept, the research group of ’Media and Participation‘ proceeds on the supposition that participation is to be located in media-cultural exchange processes. This reconceptualization is founded on a processual understanding of media, which allows the description of the relations between demand and entitlement in the structures of subjects, technological objects, practices and communities. The interdisciplinary project combines media-historical, -ethnological, -aesthetic, -sociological, -philosophical as well as artistic and literary case studies. This is in order to fill the unmet need of grasping the relations between media and participation taking into consideration the full scope of its sociopolitical and cultural implications and to enrich the currently mainly application-oriented approaches with a deliberation of participation from a media theoretic perspective.
’Technoecologies of Participation‘ is led by Prof. Dr. Erich Hörl, member of the Centre for Digital Cultures and Senior Researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Lab.
The project opens up two discursive lines of development that are of great importance to the genesis and proliferation of the concept of participation in the 20th and early 21st centuries, yet which have until now been neglected. The focus is on philosophical and anthropological reevaluations of the concept, which affect to a great extent the re-description of our present that is currently taking place. The theoretical currents to be re-contextualized range from Lévy-Bruhl’s speculations regarding pre-modern participatory modes of being, via Simondon’s amodern philosophy of the participation-based, physic-biological and psycho-collective processes of individuation, to the participatory cosmologies and human and nonhuman powers of action characterising the combinatorial collectives of New Animism, Perspectivalism and Multinaturalism, which are at the forefront of the contemporary search for nonmodern forms of thinking.
Please visit the website of the project for further information and a full project description: