TECHNOLOGY AND AUTHORITY, NETWORK ORGANIZATION AND RESISTANCE (READING GROUP)

Technology and Authority, Network Organising and Resistance reading group

GETS - GRUPO DE ESTUDOS EM ESTÉTICA, TÉCNICA E SOCIEDADE Universidade Federal da Paraíba (João Pessoa)
CNPq - Brazilian National Research and Development Council

Aecio Amaral has launched a reading group on Technology and Authority, Network Organization and Resistance, at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil.

The reading group will explore the link between technology and authority. Its epochal reference is the cybernetic and computational turn in governmentality, or what has been named algorithmic governmentality (Antoinette Rouvroy). Part of contemporary social theory and political philosophy has been discussing the impact of tele-statistic systems of collection, processing, and framing of big data over domains such as sovereign decision-making, security, and capital reproduction. It is assumed that these informational systems give rise to an apparatus of modelling reality based on prediction and pre-emption of individual behaviour, something propitiated by the strong pervasivity of data mining either within the making of self-identity or the molecular heritage. In a range of events, political or economic authority no longer rely on summoning the individual as subject of law (whose individuality used to be inter-subjectively constituted and based on a discourse ethics). Authority now works at the level of pre-individual potentiality.

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The study of the intertwining of technology and authority will take two directions. First, the technicity inherent to authority will be explored. Insofar as there is no authority without the support of political technologies (law is exemplary here, as it supposes the iterability necessary for authority to be effective), the relationship between authority and technology is constitutive. If this is so, one needs to grasp the epochal ground of contemporary authority, one which is based on the suspension (by autodidact algorithmic systems) of modern subjectivity, and which conceives of individuals as disparate non-normative relation. Given the constitutive relationship between authority and technology, one needs then to revisit political philosophy's critique to anthropological and utilitarian understandings of modern technology. Finally, the second direction consists in assuming that, as is the case with technics, authority fosters contingency whereas struggles to domesticate it engender something excessive to itself. Current anti-governmentality network movements are seen as examples of a kind of technologically mediated collective action that take algorithmic informational technologies as platforms for both the inscription of testimony and the articulation of a mode of collective organization that authorizes political actors occupying positions of subordination based on the (disparate) balance between potentiality and actuality.


Schedule:

March 18 (Ambiente 29/CCHLA, 11h-12:30h)
Antoinette Rouvroy & Thomas Bern, "Governamentalidade algorítmica e perspectivas de emancipação: o díspar como condição de individuação pela relação?", trad. bras. Pedro Henrique Andrade, em Revista Eco Pós, vol. 18. n. 2, 2015. (Dossiê "Tecnopolíticas e Vigilância") (Available at www.pos.eco.ufrj.br)
Complementary reading:
Antoinette Rouvroy, The end(s) of critique: data-behaviourism vs. due-process. in M. Hildebrandt and E. De Vries (Eds.), Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn. New York: Routledge, 2012. Available at http://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/44

April 1 (Ambiente 29/CCHLA, 11h-12:30h)
Jacques Derrida, Força de lei: o "fundamento místico da autoridade", trad. bras. Leyla Perrone-Moisés. São Paulo: Martins Fontes: [1990]2007.

April 8 (Ambiente 29/CCHLA, 11h-12:30h)
Giorgio Agamben, "O que é um dispositivo?", trad. bras. Nilcéia Valdati. Outra Travessia, Ilha de Santa Catarina, n. 5, 2005. (Available at https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/Outra/article/view/12576)

April 22 (Ambiente 29/CCHLA, 11-12:30)
Gilles Deleuze, Conversações, trad. bras. Peter Pál Pelbart. São Paulo: Editora 34, [1990]1992. (Parte V - Política)

6 de maio (Ambiente 29/CCHLA, 11-12:30)
Rodrigo Nunes, Organisation of the organisationless: collective action after networks. London: Mute Books. (Available at www.postmedialab.org/publications)

Complementary reading: Manuel Castells, Redes de indignação e esperança: movimentos sociais na era da internet, trad. bras. Carlos Alberto Medeiros. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2013. (Opening, Ch. 6 and 7, Posfácio)

May 20 (Ambiente 29/CCHLA, 11-12.30)
Howard Caygill, On resistance: a philosophy of defiance. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. (Ch. 5 - The Contemporary Capacity to Resist)


The reading group is coordinated by Aécio Amaral (Social Sciences Department, UFPB)

Contact: [email protected] and [email protected]