Archive | Vol. 15/2022 | No. 2. Algorithmen der Alterität – Alterität der Algorithmen

Berg, Sebastian; Koster, Ann-Kathrin; Maschewski, Felix; Matzner, Tobias; Nosthoff, Anna-Verena [Publishing editor]

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Content

Scientific article

Algorithmen der Alterität – Alterität der Algorithmen : Überlegungen zu einem komplexen Verhältnis / Nosthoff, Anna-Verena [Autor:in] … – 2022

Nosthoff, Anna-Verena; Maschewski, Felix; Koster, Ann-Kathrin; Matzner, Tobias; Berg, Sebastian

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Pages: 1-16

Scientific article

“Human-Centered AI” : towards a guiding culture for humans and machines in the field of tension between culture, politics and science

Engel, Alexander; Krosch, Kathrin

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Pages: 17-25

Scientific article

Big Other und die Automatisierung der symbolischen Ordnung / Beinsteiner, Andreas [Autor:in] – 2022

Beinsteiner, Andreas

Abstract:

In her discussion of surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff addresses the omnipresent and omnipotent agent of algorithmic behavior capture and modification as “Big Other”, thereby adopting a term from Lacanian psychoanalysis: In psychoanalytic cultural theory, Big Other refers to the fictional instance that guarantees the validity of the symbolic order, providing the normative background against which subjectivity and society are constituted. In view of a decline of symbolic efficiency (Slavoj Žižek), various authors have observed a replacement of social interactions and institutions by algorithmic processes. In this context, the article poses the question whether Zuboff’s Big Other might be understood as an algorithmic surrogate of the psychoanalytic Big Other that henceforth operates in the real; substituting the symbolic efficiency of words with the material efficiency of code and social negotiations with computational regulation. From this perspective, which is in line with Antoinette Rouvroy’s diagnosis of a bypassing of interpretation, law and subjectivity in algorithmic governmentality, potentials for alterity to come into play need to be reassessed.

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Pages: 26-36

Scientific article

Reciprocity and the alteritarian third: towards the interweavings of PageRank and social media

Schulz, Christian

Abstract:

Google's PageRank algorithm plays a crucial role for the infrastructures of social media platforms. With citation analysis and link topology, it not only combines two central principles from network analysis. Rather, as this paper will show, already on the technological implementation level of PageRank, a principle of reciprocity plays a central role, which is always to be thought of as two-sided and essential for the production of sociality, as it is known, for example, from gift theory. Based on this, the reciprocal interweavings of this algorithm with a simultaneously establishing blogosphere will be examined, which equally forms the hinge for an algorithmization of social media beginning in 2009. Finally, the theoretical significance of these interconnections for contemporary social media platforms and their modes of operation will be demonstrated.

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Pages: 37-47

Scientific article

Decoding interfaces : algorithmised-ethnosexualizing profiling and othering on queer/cis-gay dating-platforms

Fixemer, Tom

Abstract:

The elimination of so-called ethnicity filters on geo-social dating-platforms has been called in the context of international critiques of racism by the Black Lives Matter movement. Making reference to theoretical perspectives on doing ethnosexualisation and algorithmisation as well as current debates in queer media und queer migration studies, this article explores practices through algorithmised-ethnosexualizing profiling and othering in interfaces on queer/cis-gay dating-platforms. It becomes clear digital infrastructures play a certain role in practices of ethnicising, culturalising, and sexualizing othering on queer/cis-gay dating platforms. At the same time, ethnosexist profiling and othering in platforms for queer/cisgay communities cannot be reduced to interfaces. They also take place in interactions, to the same extent as practices critical of racism. This paper argues for a (cyber-)discrimination-critical participatory development of dating platforms.

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Pages: 48-63

Scientific article

Images on hold : algorithmised temporality under the reflection of visual cultures

Klipphahn-Karge, Michael

Abstract:

The mechanisation of the image is directly related to an erosion of temporality. Therefore, the focus of the paper lies on the condition of an image after its transformation into a file through digitalisation, as well as on the notions of time changing as a result. After an introductory reflection on the situatedness of art history considering an increasing emergence of image processing techniques that use AI technologies based on image sets, the research focusses particularly on the machine-readability of the individual digitalised image. The paper discusses the extent to which focusing on the relationship between this image and the data file holds insights for art historical reflection on mass media image production and shows how existing temporal systems become anachronistic through this connection. Specifically, the status of the digitalised image is measured against its alter ego, the data set. On this basis, it is analysed how the alterity of the image changes through datafication.

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Pages: 64-76

Scientific article

Totalitarian ideology : conditional relationsships between politics and epistemology and an attempt do locate them in discourse history

Janßen, Sandra

Abstract:

The connection between totalitarianism and ideology is as empirically obvious as it is disturbing for any attempt to grasp it intellectually. The defendant’s confessions to improbable crimes in the so-called Moscow Processes provide a striking instance of it: Are they expressions of unshakable belief or results of coercive power – or of a necessary conjunction of these two? The article discusses three theoretical positions that attempt at an explanation of how totalitarianism and ideology are related: Marcel Gauchet’s, Hannah Arendt’s, and the author’s own. While the first two tend to regard either totalitarianism in function of ideology, or ideology in function of totalitarianism, a third possibility is to historicize the relation of both terms as such. It then appears as a specific moment in discursive history that implies a particular conception of the subject and of intersubjectivity, as it can be observed in Karl Mannheim or Mikhail Bakhtin. A parallel reading of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon lends probability to all three positions but gives particular weight to the third.

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Pages: 77-95

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