Call for Abstracts: International Conference
Which Smartness? Whose Intelligence?
Critical Perspectives on Digital Technology and Political Subjects
May 13-14, 2024
Centre of Philosophy,  University of Lisbon, Portugal
Event organized as part of the activities of Praxis-CFUL
https://cful.letras.ulisboa.pt/praxis/events/digital-technology-political-subjects/

Submission deadline for abstracts: December 1, 2023

Digital technology has profoundly transformed our societies, shaping the way we interact, govern, and understand ourselves as subjects and political agents. From social media to videogames and digital platforms, the digital has become much more than a means of communication and information transmission. Digital environments are now spaces for existence, work, play, and politics. In other words, the digital has merged with social and physical environments. The digitalization of environments, from homes, to cities, and even forests, reinforces the infrastructural blurring of the boundaries between physical and digital. The deeply material consequences of cyberwarfare, the digitalization of work and communication, the “Internet of Things” – all point to a general interpenetration of the digital and the physical to constitute a new hybrid milieu.

Concomitantly, the current regime of digitalization associates with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning, their blend being at the core of the techno-political category of “smartness”. The growth of the smartness paradigm raises significant philosophical issues. On one hand, the question of smartness can be seen as part of a broader trajectory of critical questioning that saw technology as making humans “one-dimensional” (Marcuse) and “standing reserve” (Heidegger), as intimately bound up with the human (Latour, Stiegler), or even leaning toward obsolescence (Anders) or total control (Deleuze). On the other, as a historically determinate socio-technical ensemble, the smart paradigm generates new problems.

The main aim of this conference is to problematize the paradigm of smartness and to critically examine it as a mode of subjectivation, interpellation, and co-constitution of subjects by exploring a cluster of interrelated questions:

(i) What forms of knowledge and praxis are linked to smartness and its inbuilt machinic intelligence? If smartness offers an epistemology, does it simply transfer machinic principles to citizens, or are machines and citizens part of a singular socio-technical ensemble? As smart technological systems display self-regulatory, learning, and adaptive skills, do they interpellate political subjects as incapable subjects, i.e., as subjects who do not know or are not capable enough? How can the epistemic gap between technology users and experts be bridged, allowing technology to be redesigned for a freer society? How do criteria of computation, adaption, and predictive intelligence shape the agency of subjects and groups?

(ii) Does the hybridization of spaces and subjects with digital technology challenge or provide opportunities for critical theorization and imagining alternative futures? Is there a plurality of digital logics, and what makes one prevail over the other? Who benefits from smartness? Does difference (geographic, economic, social, ethnic) factor into the techno-politics of smartness? Can technology be liberated from the imperatives of capitalism, the economic system that has guided most inventions for the last few hundred years? In what sense can technology be universal apart from the ‘universality’ of capitalism?

(iii) How does technology shape existing subjectivities and create new ones? In what way does smart technology interpellate the subject?  What is the relationship between technology and democracy, and what role does technology play in shaping political agency, citizenship, and resistance? Is there a smart citizen? If yes, is the smart citizen any more than a consumer? How does smartness structure habits and reconfigure subjects in a way that it transforms political agency, citizenship, and resistance? What kind of normativity can inspire alternative futures toward a democratic politics of technology?

We invite contributions to answer these questions and/or to address particularly the following topics: subjectivity and identity in the digital age; political agency and citizenship in the digital era; technology as interpellation, subjectivation, or individuation; digital technologies and power dynamics: surveillance, control, and resistance; the role of imaginaries and ideologies in technological design; digital divides and inequalities: access, inclusion, and exclusion; algorithmic decision-making and its impact on political subjects; the implications of digital technology on democratic processes and institutions; the role of digital technology in social movements and collective action.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Andrew Feenberg (Simon Fraser University)
Yuk Hui (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Orit Halpern (TU Dresden)
Jathan Sadowski (Monash University)

ORGANIZATIONAL DETAILS

Please submit a 300-500 words abstract proposal, by 1 December 2023.

Please indicate the full name and institutional affiliations.

Decision notices will be emailed by 15 December 2023.

Each speaker will have 20 minutes for presentation, followed by 10 minutes of questions and discussion. The working language is English. There is no conference/registration fee.

We are glad to announce that a selection of papers will be included in an edited volume published by an internationally renowned academic publisher.

For further details or questions, please contact smartness.criticalperspectives@gmail.com.

For more information, see https://cful.letras.ulisboa.pt/events/digital-technology-political-subjects/

Oorganizers: Antonio Oraldi (Praxis-CFUL, University of Lisbon) & Tamara Caraus (Praxis-CFUL, University of Lisbon).

This event is funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., in the scope of the project UIDB/00310/2020