Digital Automation and Transcendental Instrumentality

On Monday, December 11, the Humanities Council will host the fourth lecture in a new, seven-part, year-long speaker series about the field of Media Studies, Positions and Prospects, organized by Devin Fore (German). Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths, University of London, will deliver a talk on “Digital Automation and Transcendental Instrumentality.”

Abstract
What is the medium of thought today? If the post-Kantian critique of technology saw in the means of thinking (from writing to cinema) the promise of an anti-metaphysical image of thought, how can the critique of the digital address the medium of thought beyond the sheer instrumentality of mindless networks of decision-making? By reference to computational design, it will be suggested that the big data explosion subtending our mediatic infrastructures requires a critique of technology that refuses the image of singularity. As computational design thinking has exposed the limits of human reason (notational modelling and deductive planning), it has also entered the logic of the machine, experimenting with its inhuman aesthetics and perhaps mediatic metaphysics.

Speaker
Luciana Parisi researches the philosophical consequences of technology in culture, aesthetics, and politics. She is a Reader in Cultural Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and currently a Visiting Professor of New Media Philosophy in the Department of Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004, Continuum Press) and Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013, MIT Press).

Luciana Parisi, Reader in Cultural Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London

Sponsored by the Humanities Council.