Archive | Vol. 14/2021 | No. 2. Futures of critique : theorising governmentality and power in the digital age
Herder, Janosik; Maschewski, Felix; Nosthoff, Anna-Verena [Publishing editor]
Content
Editorial
Editorial: Futures of critique in the digital age / Herder, Janosik [Autor:in] … – 2021
Herder, Janosik; Maschewski, Felix; Nosthoff, Anna-Verena
Pages: 1-5
Scientific article
“How is history a priori possible?” : algorithmic prediction and the conditions of critique
Warnsholdt, Lotte
Abstract:
The term of critique is deeply embedded in the history of modernity. However, it seems that the current media technologies of algorithmic prediction transcend the temporal semantics of modernity and its forms of subjectivation. What does this mean for critique and the critical subject? Is critique still possible when (future) events are not only predicted but also captured and modified? This article takes up these questions by addressing Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism and Antoinette Rouvroy’s notion of algorithmic governmentality. Additionally, the article takes the historical framework of the project of critique and its forms of subjectivation into consideration to finally evaluate the question whether it is possible to think beyond history with the help of history.
Pages: 6-18
Scientific article
Why ethic standards are not enough, and how current critiques of digitalization preserve power
Prietl, Bianca
Abstract:
This article deals with AI ethic guidelines and standards as the currently dominant form in which society articulates critique of digital data technologies and searches for solutions for the respective upheavals. Based on a discourse-analytical reflection, it is argued that the premises underpinning the societal critique of digitalization have several conceptual limitations – especially when it comes to understanding and questioning social relations of power and the role that digital data technologies play in their reproduction. Against this backdrop, the currently dominant form of societal critique of digitalization is described as essentially preserving power relations. Therefore, it is pleaded for strengthening rationality- and power-critical perspectives in the debates on digitalization and its challenges.
Pages: 19-30
Scientific article
Agility of critique : the interrelation of contextualisation and objectification in the digital age
Haker, Christoph; Otterspeer, Lukas
Abstract:
Given that digitisation and datafication go hand in hand with post-truth phenomena and claims to neutrality, we plead for an agility of critique. The problems of post-truth phenomena and claims to neutrality are that they are associated with relativistic and technocratic tendencies. These tendencies require an agility of critique that contrasts post-truth phenomena with a movement from contextualisation to objectivation and the claimed neutrality with a movement from objectivation to contextualisation. However, such agility of critique faces significant challenges: Conceptually, this agility is accused of being relativistic itself, and from a scientific-historical perspective, objectivation and contextualisation are regarded as incompatible forms of reflection. The goal of our contribution is therefore a rehabilitation of the agility of critique, which we theoretically substantiate with Bourdieu’s participant objectivation and the concept of the divided habitus.
Pages: 31-47
Scientific article
Kritik als Urteilskraft – wenn Trolle post-kritisch nachahmen / Gräfe, Anne [Autor:in] … – 2021
Gräfe, Anne; Wagner, Ellen
Abstract:
The extent to which the totalizing appropriation through subversive practices, in the visual arts and political activism, can be turned around in order to experience the possibility of a different present is the subject of the proposed contribution. Using the hashtag #DCBlackout and looking at Amalia Ulman’s Instagram performance „Excellences and Perfections“ (2014), the aim is to examine how ‚trolling‘ strategies, previously primarily used as populist manipulation by the political right, are reflexive and subversive and thereby can develop enlightening critical potential. Our thesis is arguing that through the use of mass media rhetoric and distribution channels inside social networks, ‚aesthetic trolls‘ provoke an art and political world that is concerned with criticality and honesty and can present its own defaults and blind spots. In addition to the resulting doubts about the digitally postulated existing, thus something like digital authenticity itself, the reflexive moment, i.e. the influence of the doubt on the individual her/ himself who spreads the digital message, is examined.
Pages: 48-60
Scientific article
Landnahme analog und digital : ursprüngliche Akkumulation in den Kontrollgesellschaften / Nigro, Roberto [Autor:in] … – 2021
Nigro, Roberto; Stubenrauch, Heiko
Abstract:
In this article, we characterise the digitisation of the lifeworld led by platform companies as digital land grabbing and look at it in the mirror of the (analogue) land grabbing described by Karl Marx as primitive accumulation. While through analogue land grabbing, a situation was violently brought about in which the workers were forced to enter into exploited wage employment or die of starvation, through digital land grabbing, a situation emerged in which one has to enter into exploited data employment (and produce data for platform companies) or die social death. Just as Silvia Federici understands analogue land grabbing as a counter-revolutionary reaction to late medieval peasant uprisings, we want to interpret digital land grabbing and the emergence of data labour as a counter-revolutionary reaction to the micropolitical liberation movements that put pressure on Fordist and post- Fordist capitalism in the 20th century.
Pages: 61-74
Scientific article
Distributed planned economies in the age of their technical feasibility
Groos, Jan
Abstract:
Both climate change and the covid-19 pandemic have increased interest in a contemporary discourse around questions of planned economies. This discourse had been boiling up over the last decade and now meets a political landscape that has rather quickly and substantially re-assessed its relation towards planning. However, if the concept of planned economies is not to merely mean a more extensive role of the state within a social market economy, but fundamentally different types of political economy, substantial open questions need to be addressed. This article analyses the current discourse around non-capitalist planned economies and argues that there is a need for new conceptions of planned economies that neither resort to central planning nor variants of market socialism. For further work towards such alternative conceptions it proposes the term distributed planned economies.
Pages: 75-87
Review
[Rezension von: Louise Amoore: Cloud ethics : algorithms and the attributes of ourselves and others] / Maschewski, Felix [Autor:in] … – 2021
Maschewski, Felix; Nosthoff, Anna-Verena
Pages: 88-94