Vorlesungsverzeichnis
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Lehrveranstaltungen
Slavery 4.0? (Seminar)
Dozent/in: Cheryce von Xylander
Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 16:15 - 17:45 | 12.10.2020 - 29.01.2021 | C 12.111 Seminarraum
Inhalt: Recent protests have put the history of slavery and its exceptionable cultural legacy front and center of public concern. The past haunts the present social order as new modalities of enslavement may be unleashed by the digital transformation. Industry 4.0 refers to an industrial production strategy launched by Germany in 2016. It aims to digitize industrial manufacturing using smart modern technology such as machine-to-machine communication (M2M) and the internet of things (IoT). Automation shall obviate the need for human involvement, so the claim. A vision of frictionless abundance that conjures the age-old promise of a future of toil-free work. This fantasy sounds enticing to its beneficiaries, i.e. those who expect to be relieved of drudgery. But, if history is any guide, then such disruptive, new technology-driven re-alignments of the labor market come at a price. The reflexive dynamics of human-machine entanglement have unexpected consequences. Subjectivity itself has become a resource to be exploited. Sentient mind is being harvested and commodified. Might slavery return through the back door of a psycho-physical entrapment incumbent upon ubiquitous mediation? Historical slavery involved taking bodies captive. Slavery 4.0 threatens to subjugate the mind. If so, the time to act would be now. Yet, it is unclear how to oppose the instrumental rationalities upon which we are collectively reliant. Let us imagine ways of coming together that allow resilient forms of agency to be asserted. Recommended Literature (a selection): 1619 Project, New York Times (www) James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1962/1990) Paul Beatty, The Sellout (2015) David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage. The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006) Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black. American Attitudes towards the Negro 1550-1812 (1968) Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944) Couldry, Nick and Ulises Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (2019) Sasha Cohen, Keynote Talk for the Anti-defamation League (www) Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019)
Social Prosthetics and the Illusion of Reason (Kant) (Seminar)
Dozent/in: Cheryce von Xylander
Termin:
wöchentlich | Donnerstag | 18:15 - 19:00 | 12.10.2020 - 29.01.2021 | C 12.111 Seminarraum
Inhalt: Reason is not an innate quality. It more resembles a disposition that human beings are born with. But it cannot come to fruition of its own accord. Our sensory apparatus needs exposure to the kind of stimulation, which full immersion in socio-cultural environs provides. Humans make reason happen together – and the struggle to accomplish this feat of ingenuity is plotted across centuries. The work is far from complete. Enlightenment thinkers began to articulate a sophisticated secular vision of human betterment and Kant arguably systematized the project. His critical philosophy has a prosthetic quality in that it enables the very dexterities it lays out. Prosthetics commonly refers to a range of medical devices that serve to replace body parts such as a missing leg, missing eye, cardiopulmonary bypass during open-heart surgery and so on. Prosthesis in Greek literally means “addition, application, attachment”. Social prosthetics imagines the individual as a functional part of a greater whole. Although this line of inquiry has a long philosophical tradition, it needs to be updated in light of the material import of our networked condition. Towards that end we will focus on a close reading of texts by key architects of today’s social prosthetic contingencies, namely Kant and Turing. Select Bibliography: Immanuel Kant, “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment” (1784) Immanuel Kant, “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” (1798) Allan Turing, “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936) Sergey Brin, Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” (1998) Larry Page, Sergey Brin, “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web“ (1998)