Circulating through the Pipeline. Algorithmic Subjectivities and Mobile Struggles

We are living within a transformation that has been variously labelled as industrial revolution 4.0, platform economy, digital capitalism. Nevertheless, this change is still mainly conceptualized through the vocabulary of factory system. In this article we aim to contribute to the development of an emerging framework on the 'new capitalism' without any nostalgia for the past by exploring some of its potential interpretative categories (pipeline, algorithmic subjectivities, mobile struggles), based in particular on its spatial configurations and on the production of living labour' subjectivities. Indeed, we are witnessing not simply a wave of technological innovation but a more general transformation of the forms of capitalist valorisation which rely on the role played by spaces and social cooperation. These changes do not affect only spatialities but also the subjective forms of living labour, including his/her practices of organization and struggle

Cybernetics and contingency, codes and programs : an account of social system thinking in law and legal theory today

The thesis discusses aspects of current Social Systems Theory, with the main attention devoted both to the level of the compassing social system society and to that of function systems, especially law. Throughout, I refer to the version of social systems theory developed and presented as theory of social autopoiesis in Niklas Luhmann's mature work, while a limited but important part of the thesis will explain this choice and serve as a comparative and genealogical guideline. Central will be the notion and idea of what Luhmann calls a Contingency Formula — term that both functions as a problem outline and that indicates how the problem can be solved, within the context of the Legal System. Equally centre-staged is the scientific, even the philosophical background the Contingency Formula is based upon. The reporting and explaining of this background, to which luhmannian Social System Theory is indebted in its initial inspirations as well as in its relentless efforts of ‘doing justice’ to every new empirical finding, involves, among others, elements of cybernetics, Boolean algebra, biology, and approaches to mathematics and topology - as well as of some pivotal concepts in philosophy (e.g. contingency). The Contingency Formula and the problematic of modern society in relation to Law and Justice of which it constitutes the pivot, constitute the focus of my PhD. They are approached through a comparison with traditional theories of justice and pre-systemic views of society; as it is generally the case of systems theory, the decisive difference-marker is provided by the notion of a function. The systemic narrative also involves the divide of coding and programming, and the claim that, in modern society, with its constant overproduction of complexity, these are part of its arsenal of modes of systemic reducing that complexity. It finally implies contingency formulas. These operate as system-immanent second-order observation devices that allow function systems to manage their steering dilemmas without unrealistically claiming to have access to a (function system transcending) first-order observation of its own interventions. I am addressing both the Contingency Formula as general concept and Luhmann's endorsement of Justice as Contingency Formula of the function system law (plus Teubner’s alternative offer of a Transcendence Formula Justice), up to a compared analysis of modernity and post-modernity according to the social-systemist approach of modern society

The Transatlantic Sixties

This collection brings together new and original critical essays by eleven established European American Studies scholars to explore the 1960s from a transatlantic perspective. Intended for an academic audience interested in globalized American studies, it examines topics ranging from the impact of the American civil rights movement in Germany, France and Wales, through the transatlantic dimensions of feminism and the counterculture movement. It explores, for example, the vicissitudes of Europe's status in US foreign relations, European documentaries about the Vietnam War, transatlantic trends in literature and culture, and the significance of collective and cultural memory of the era

Failed futures, broken promises, and the prospect of cybernetic immortality: toward an abundant sociological history of cryonic suspension, 1962-1979

This dissertation offers an interpretation of cryonic suspension, or "cryonics," the practice of preserving human corpses by way of perfusing them with chemical protectants and gradually subjecting them, at the pronouncement of legal death, to extremely low temperatures (-360◦ F, -196◦ C), which are then controlled and maintained over the long term by liquid nitrogen filled "cryocapsules." Cryonics is ultimately motivated by the hope that medicine will at some future point achieve the requisite kinds and levels of technology to facilitate the rejuvenation and "reanimation" of the "deanimated," those who lay in cryonic suspension. The interpretation of cryonic suspension that I set forth departs quite abruptly from existing academic engagements with the practice—it is rooted in a wealth of previously unutilized archival materials from the 1960s and 70s, all of which are virtually inaccessible to those operating outside the cryonics community. The interpretation cuts across, takes as its substantive focus, and is periodized with respect to three different though related moments in the history of cryonic suspension: 1) the emergence of cryonics in 1962 and the previously unexamined ties of the practice to the postwar science of cybernetics and NASA’s Cyborg Spaceflight Program; 2) the subsequent performance and material instantiation of cryonics, marked by the plights of those who froze and were frozen throughout the American 1960s and 70s; and, tied to and fomented by the lattermost especially, 3) catastrophic failure, marked by the collapse of the Cryonics Society of New York in 1974, and the discovery, in 1979, of several abandoned, thawed, and radically decomposed cryonics "patients" interned in the Cryonics Society of California’s underground "cryo-crypt" at the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California; what is infamously known in cryonics circles as the "Chatsworth Scandal." The dissertation as such offers several novel interpretive claims about cryonic suspension, all of which take shape in sustained dialogue with cultural studies of science and technology, and especially the history of cybernetics. The dissertation’s principle theoretical intervention involves deploying these claims to offer an alternative to prevailing interpretations of cryonic suspension, both popular and academic, as an unintelligible pseudoscientific "anomaly." I argue to the contrary that cryonic suspension emerged in a space produced by what Anthony Giddens and especially Zygmunt Bauman regard as the principle constitutive feature of modern social life—the ultimately futile yet pervasive modern impulse to sequester death, dying, and the dead from the realm of the living. I furthermore argue that the distinctly modern logic of sequestration is replicated in the reigning epistemic norms and practices that shape sociological theory and research proper, in that academic sociology, whatever its professed stripes and leanings, tends overwhelmingly to regard death, narrowly conceived in decidedly modern terms as an "end of life event," as being only marginally important to apprehending the shape of the modern social, when in fact death's sequestration constitutes the social realities upon which sociologists tend to train their analytical focus. The key to the intervention I make with respect to cryonic suspension's intelligibility thus hinges upon recognizing that the otherwise seemingly "anomalous" practice emerged in a space produced by the institutional shortcomings death's sequestration under western modernity, and thus presents a lived reality that places considerable strain upon the conceptual comfort zones of modern epistemology and historiography. It is in this sense that cryonic suspension, as I argue following Robert Orsi, evidences an abundant phenomenon. Instead of "passing over in silence" the epistemic discomfort presented by cryonic suspension's abundance, the narrative accounts of cryonics that I develop are pressed into the service of countering those authorized ways of knowing that safely accord with modernity's sequestration of death. I thus opt for an historical sociological treatment of cryonics, one centered about death's sequestration—that is to say, an abundant sociological history of cryonic suspension

Data’s Intimacy: Machinic Sensibility and the Quantified Self

Today, machines observe, record, sense the world – not just for us, but sometimes instead of us (in our stead), and even indifferently to us humans. And yet, we remain human. Correlationism may not be up to a comprehensive ontology, but the ways in which we encounter, and struggle to make some kind of sense of, machinic sensibility matters. The nature of that encounter is not instrumentality, or even McLuhanian extension, but a full-blown ‘relationship’ where the terms by which machines ‘experience’ the world, and communicate with each other, parametrises the conditions for our own experience. This essay will play out one such relationship currently in the making: the boom in self-tracking technologies, and the attendant promise of data’s intimacy. This essay proceeds in three sections, all of which draw on a larger research project into self-tracking and contemporary data epistemologies. It thus leverages observations from close reading of self-tracking’s publicisation in the mass media between 2007 and 2016; analysis of over fifty self-tracking products, some of it through self-experimentation; and interviews and ethnographic observation, primarily of the ‘Quantified Self’ connoisseur community. The first section examines the dominant public presentations of self-tracking in early twenty-first century discourse. This discourse embraces a vision of automated and intimate self-surveillance, which is then promised to deliver superior control and objective knowledge over the self. Next, I link these promises to the recent theoretical turns towards the agency of objects and the autonomous sensory capacities of new media to consider the implications of such theories – and the technological shifts they address – for the phenomenology of the new media subject. Finally, I return to self-tracking discourse to consider its own idealisation of such a subject – what I call ‘data-sense’. I conclude by calling for a more explicit public and intellectual debate around the relationships we forge with new technologies, and the consequences they have for who – and what – is given which kinds of authority to speak the truth of the ‘self’