Organiser: René Umlauf, Eva Riedke, Uli Beisel, Richard Rottenburg
The editorial workshop sets out to explore the inescapable intertwinement of ‘technisication’ and the ‘lifeworld’ – on the topic of which the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1963) points out that the two cannot readily be treated apart, and that “technicisation is lifeworld”. Related thereto, we aim to turn attention to technology in relation to processes of rationalisation and standardisation – as an integral element of the infrastructures of modernity, deeply implicated in its institutions, industrial systems of production, the capitalist economic system, administrations and bureaucracies, military and surveillance infrastructures, and in the shaping of cultural symbols, categories and practices.
The workshop aims to engage with and re-open current debates around infrastructures, and to fine-tune some of the therein dominant conceptual notions through the SPP’s numerous case studies, paying attention to empirical details across a range of divergent contexts. Starting from an understanding of ‘infrastructuring’ as inherently processual, relational, material and non-material, stable and elusive – all at once – we aim to explore its entanglements in life-worlds. How does Hans Blumenberg’s notion of a ‘waiver of meaning’ (Sinnverzicht) provide new critical vantage points within the ongoing discussions around infrastructuring, power, posts-colonialism, signification, affect, and good life.