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Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny
Get PDFWhat do the Pixelvision videos of artist Sadie Benning and the ‘tentatives’ of philosopher and social educator Fernand Deligny have in common, and what links these works to the question of models? Both Benning and Deligny criticize existing models and decidedly do not want to create new models. Both want to change the existing view of the world and its respective models, which are firmly anchored in society and its values, feelings, and affects. And both build on the singularity and contingency of the present in order to initiate a practice of worlding that is less exclusive and less violent. And yet, as Deuber-Mankowsky will show, models play a crucial role for both Benning and Deligny in their explorations of different forms of worlding. The question is, of course, what one means by model? Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is Professor Emerita of Media Studies and Gender Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She was Visiting Professor at the Centre d’études du vivant, Université Paris VII (2007), Columbia University (2012, 2017), and Northwestern University (2023), as well as Senior Fellow at IKKM Weimar (2013) and Fellow at the DFG Research Group ‘Media Anthropology’, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2022). She is also Associate Member at the ICI Berlin, External Affiliate at the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (Goldsmiths University of London), and Member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Deutsches Historisches Museum
Fratriarchy and Sisterhood:Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis
Get PDFSimone de Beauvoir considered that fratriarchy could bring about the liberation of women; feminism’s politicization of ‘sisterhood’ has revealed that this is far from the case. Freud’s Totem and Taboo can be re-examined to understand the sibling origin of the sexual violence of social brothers against social sisters. Shakespeare who has his boy actors performing as girls who then play boys also has Isabella in Measure for Measure counter her brother’s request for her to prostitute herself with “it t’were a kind of incest”. Psychoanalysis can contribute to the urgent need for us to think about sexual violence (‘Me too’) as a characteristic feature of our lateral social life. Juliet Mitchell was born in New Zealand in 1940. In 1944 she went to England by wartime convoy and lived in London until 1998 when she moved to Cambridge. She first lectured in English literature (1962-1971) but following her publication of Women: The Longest Revolution in 1966, curiosity about hostility to Freud in the rising Women’s Movement led to her publishing a series of short interventions culminating in Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). This was followed by training to become a psychoanalyst and continuing to lecture as an academic on a free-lance basis. In 1998 she returned to a full-time university post in the University of Cambridge and since then she has been writing and lecturing about a horizontal axis of sociality starting with siblings. She established and directed a Centre for Gender Studies in the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Theoretical Psychoanalysis at University College London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the International Psychoanalytic Association
Neural ‘Freedoms’:Population, Choice, and Machine Learning
Get PDFThis talk interrogates the history of models of decision making and agency in machine learning, neo-liberal economic thought, and finance in order to interrogate how reactionary politics, population and sex, and technology are being reformulated in our present. While the relationship between the Right, post-truth, suggestion algorithms, and social media has long been documented, rarely has there been extensive investigation of how ideas of choice and freedom become recast in a manner amenable to machine automation and to the particular brands of post-1970s alt-Right discourses. An analysis of this history demonstrates a new logic within algorithmic and artificial intelligent rationalities that intersects with, but is also not merely a recursive repetition of, earlier histories of eugenics and racism. This situation provokes serious challenges to political action, but also to our theorization of histories of race and sex capitalism. Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of automation, intelligence, and freedom; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. She has also published widely in many venues including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, and Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. Her first book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her second book The Smartness Mandate (with Robert Mitchell, 2023) is a genealogy of the current obsession with smart technologies and artificial intelligence.
