Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Kirsten Bell
(King's College London)
Bruce Kapferer (UCL University of Bergen)
Marina Gold (University of Zurich)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 7 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel will address the methodological implications of anthropology in the digital age – an era of radical transformations in the imagination and formation of socio-political realities and potentially the very nature of human being itself.
Long Abstract:
The digital era promises profound changes and disjunctions in the constitution of humanity and the socio-economic and political situations of experience that has no clear parallels. Even the changes and consequences of the printing press (documented by Elizabeth Eisenstein and numerous others) are dwarfed by the digital, which is reaching into the realities of almost everywhere in the globe in a way far more expansive than did the effects of print.
In this panel, we begin to grapple with the implications of this transformation, which, we suggest, represents nothing less than the total restructuring (and reimaginationing) of the nature of sociality and, indeed, human being itself. Our goal is to examine such processes (accelerated under conditions of covid) and their impact on all aspects of life at all levels of scale – from political and economic orders, to the intimate and mundane (the everyday life of the digital).
The changes that are imagined, and even now being realized, raise issues of a thoroughly anthropological nature that may question hitherto prevailing assumptions. By centring the digital as a vital point of anthropological questioning, we explore its methodological significance for anthropology at this significant moment in history.
We aim for a mix of participants drawn from diverse geographic locations addressing critical areas of the digitalizing process including:
• the reimagination of interpersonal everyday life
• the restructuring of political/economic orders
• new dynamics of control and freedom
• reconfigurations of humanity and identity
• the social contradictions of digital realities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 7 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
If this is the era of 'cruel optimism' as Lauren Berlant has noted then cruel optimism for anthropologists is the attachment to concepts like 'the social' in the compromised condition of their possibility. A.I. illuminates the attachment to problematic subjects and objects in advance of their loss.
Paper long abstract:
The development of Artificial Intelligence demands a radical rethinking of anthropology at its core. As we move from the anthropological to the datological (Clough 2018) and into the arena of big data, the algorithmic-social and the post-probabilistic, key fundamentals of social science methodology and its ontological assumptions are being challenged and potentially overturned. All manner of defensive reactions are underway. Anthropologists and social scientists generally cling desperately to the ideas of Society, Culture, Reason, Meaning, Communication, Sexuality, Language. There are attempts to align anthropology with other university disciplines and build an inter-disciplinary responsibility and a critical ethics which amount to not much more than a techno-capitalist 'nihilism of care' and 'relationality.' Part of this exploration will be to track the transmutation of the university into a new artificially intelligent organizational corporate assemblage: the meta-versity. If it is to survive and flourish in the (non)age of the meta-versity then anthropology urgently needs radical re-thinking. Taking up the case of the 2020 launch of the 'large language model' GPT-3 by the OpenAI group and the development of the companion A.I. company Replika this paper examines the technological event binging about the breakdown and re-engineering of the most cherished notions of what it is to be human - particularly the human in love.
Paper short abstract:
The industry and practice of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'robotics' presents a dangerous operationalization of Aristotle's slave ontology - the fiction of woman, man and property merged into one to create a 'living piece of property'. This talk will explore these themes.
Paper long abstract:
The industry and practice of 'Artificial Intelligence' and 'robotics' presents a dangerous operationalization of Aristotle's slave ontology - the fiction of woman, man and property merged into one to create a 'living piece of property'. Aristotle's slave ontology relied on the absolute power of property-owning man, the pornographic uses of women and children, the breaking of human bonds and attachments and a surplus of fiction. This politics is dominant today.
Aristotle's slave ontology is to be found everywhere in the corporate abolition of human attachments through 'artificial intelligence', 'social robots' pornography, digital 'life' and the 'metaverse'. Unfortunately mainstream anthropological responses to it have ushered in different versions of property relations - from cyborgs, to pro porn politics where the subordination of women and children is reproduced on a mass scale, to other fashionable paradigms that dissolve dualisms between humans and property.
In this talk I present the research of my latest book 'sex robots: the end of love' and the findings of nearly 20 years of anthropological research of 'robots' and 'AI'. I present an alternative ontology that informs the politics of love rooted in attachment and the abolition of property relations.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how intimacies be invented in cyberspace and how the discourse of enjoyment and its intermediary representation operate in cyberspace and affect everyday life, through the understanding of the characteristics of structured thought.
Paper long abstract:
We are exploring interactive and safe ways to (re)connect intimately in times of lockdown and social distancing, such as live streaming, online activities via video-conferencing platform, and online erotic games or chatbots. With the internet, we are moving away from environmental and situational constraints, and freely experience pleasure, various identities and fantasies via a floating body. This paper attempts, by referring to libidinal economy in psychoanalysis: there is no enjoyment without discourse and no discourse beyond the discourse of enjoyment, to enter the discussion of the intimacy of the cyberspace. It draws on fieldwork of cyber-individual and the purpose of the research is to prepare for dealing with the nexus between reality and virtuality. Cyber-individual in the paper refers to the part of cyberspace where a person puts most of one’s desires, emotions and power into it. When they leave cyberspace, they either use symbolic order to cybernetize real life, or they will not adapt to everyday reality. Once the gap between cyberspace and real social space be hidden, a new mode of intimacy will be desired under the superficial violent gaze. Examing the idea that cyberspace is completely the representation of the externalization/cybernization of thinking, this paper explores why both disembodied intimacy and embodied intimacy are researches for the lost intimacy.