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.

Space, Power and the Commons: The Struggle for Alternative Futures, edited by Sam Kirwan, Leila Dawney and Julian Brigstocke
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