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Start > Leuphana Bachelor (B.A./B.Eng./B.Sc./LL.B.) -> Major Cultural Studies: Organization, Society, and the Arts -> Subjectivity and Power

Lehrveranstaltungen

Indifference and Technology (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Eleonora Antonakaki Giannisi

Inhalt: In the face of the increasing use of digital technological media within the span of only a few decades, and, amid a growing interest in the desensitizing and immobilizing effects of the use of these technologies, this seminar offers a structural analysis of the phenomenon of indifference and traces its roots in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. We will be concerned with the question whether the indifference produced by our consistent use of technologies is solely a superficial effect or whether it has structural causes that run deep in the modern organization of life. For this block seminar, I am proposing to explore the notion of what Karl Marx and Georg Simmel call the indifference of money as well as its repercussions on subjectivity. We will start by a close reading of appropriate passages of Marx’s Grundrisse that reference the indifference of money, and, in a Hegelian manner, identify it as the indifference of quantity towards quality. We will then turn to chapter 1 in Capital volume 1 on “The Commodity” and focus on the production of the money form that gives it its character as a measure of values which mediates the circulation process, and which renders the differences between commodities commensurable. We will be asking the question: why is the commensurability of the difference between commodities that money makes possible an indifference? How does the indifference of money relate to the indifference of the individual? To answer these questions, we will then move on to Simmel’s analysis of the indifference of money in his 1900 work, The Philosophy of Money. Simmel identifies money as “indifference itself” early in the book. Money is identified by Simmel as an abstract as well as pure means that has a function comparable to technology. Technology and money are both identified by Simmel as means. Money is an abstract means that communicates its character to everything that it touches thus passing on its abstract indifference to both the world and the individual and creating a blasé individuality. The theorization of the blasé attitude is one of Simmel’s most interesting additions to the phenomenon of indifference. Simmel determines the blasé attitude as the indifference towards the “specific differences” of things but also as the result of overstimulation made possible by the acceleration of the tempo of life, and, today, of the flow of information through digital technologies. Simmel claims that “the overly strong stimuli eventually pump out all responsiveness out of the nerves” . We will explain the overstimulation of the nervous apparatus through Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of trauma, developing around the same time that Simmel is writing. By performing a media-theoretical reading of Simmel, we will ask whether we can posit him as one of the first figures to gauge the influence of technologies in perception. We will end by referring to the contemporary work of media theoretician Alexander Galloway who defines the digital as “a form of abstraction, if not simply abstraction as such” reflect on the role of indifference as an effect of abstraction for the codification of information in digital technologies today but also see concrete exemplifications of that in the work of Wendy Chun.