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.

What does it mean to speak of, resist or appeal to a new beginning in the name of decolonization? What positionality and form of knowledge does the speaking of decolonization involve that allows distinguishing and moving between a colonized past and a decolonized future to come? How does this form of knowledge facilitate the necessary cognitive operations of commensuration, calculation of equivalence, and valuation? What is the ontological status of the tertium comparationis for these operations to work? Does the unavoidably implicit valuation mean a call for justice and accountability to the law that invokes a common humanity? In what sense can and for what reasons should this refer to a horizon of planetary hospitality?

Speaking of the planetary instead of the global redirects attention to a contemporary shift from a humanity struggling to control its environment to a humanity struggling to understand its entanglements with other-than-human beings and to lean into them. Speaking of hospitality here employs the sense given to this term by Emmanuel Levinas, Jacque Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Michael Jackson and others in this genealogy: one’s own humanity can only be learned from the Other, by hosting the Other in a horizon of unconditional hospitality. These are questions that we wish to address in this workshop.

Abstract:
In order to decolonize the history of philosophy against the fabrication of translatio studiorum as the unilinear path connecting Greek thought and sciences to medieval European Christianity, we need to pluralize that history. And to manifest in our textbooks that translatio studiorum is not just Jerusalem-Athens-Rome-Paris or London or Heidelberg … but, as well: Athens-Nishapur-Bagdad-Cordoba-Fez-Timbuktu …. To decolonize the history of philosophy is also to take into account the plurality of languages, in order to consider the perspectives introduced by tongues other than European, and thus undo the “ontological nationalism” upon which rests the assumption that philosophical exercise is intrinsically tied to certain (European) languages.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is currently Professor of Francophone Studies, and Chair of the Department of French and Romance Philology with a secondary appointment in the Department of Philosophy, at Columbia University in New York. His field of research and teaching interests includes the history of logic and mathematics, history of philosophy, Islamic philosophy and Sufism, African philosophy and literature.

A group of invited participants debate with Emmanuel Didier ways to examine the emergence, disappearance and impact of key indicators.

Abstract:
Nowadays, « big data » is everywhere. There is a clear excitement about them, which has been stated, for example, like this: “One way to think about the issue today […] is this: big data refers to things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract newinsights or create new forms of value, in waysthat change the mar- kets,organizations, the relationships between citizens and governments, and more”. (Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor., and Kenneth. Cukier. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Trans- form How We Live, Work, and Think. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. p.6.)
This impressive statement, since it says that data will transform everything from the market to government, raises several questions. First, is this really possible? Can information, quan- tities,whichdescribeelementsof the world, can in fact really beactors,agenciesforits transformation? How is this possible? Second question: is this that extensive? Can really these data change that many things, how far the transformation can go? Finally, is that so new? Did it ever happen before that methods of quantification had been a transformati- ve force of societies? To answer these questions, we go back in the history of statistics since the beginning of the XXth century, and to study cases where quantification techniques had precisely been tools of governance, and thus a transformative force of society.

Emmanuel Didier is a founding member and permanent researcher at Epidopo (Epigenetics, Data, Politics), a joint research unit funded by the French CNRS and UCLA and located in the latter. He is an associate researcher with the Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CNRS, Ecole normale supérieure and EHESS) and a member of the Center for Study of Invention and Social Process at Goldsmiths, the University of London.

In this weekly colloquium we discuss participants’ work in progress and selected authors. Since the number of participants is restricted, new participants are kindly requested to approach Richard Rottenburg well in advance.

Current participants:
Nadine Rea Intisar Adam,  Benjamin Beck, Stefanie Bognitz, Sandra Calkins, Pauline Claudot, Lorenz Gosch, Armin Höland, David Kananizadeh, Laura Matt, Fazil Moradi, Ronn Müller, Sung-Joon Park, Eva Riedke, Richard Rottenburg, Tabea Scharrer, Timm Sureau, Alena Thiel, Bertram Turner, René Umlauf

This workshop is the second iteration of “Measure of Future Health.” The first took place in Berlin October 8-9, 2016. A series of papers from that workshop were selected to become part of a second conference, in which they will be revised and finalized for publication in a special issue of a peer reviewed journal. This second conference will be held in New York under the auspices of the New School for Social Research.

The theme proposed for the issue is “Measures of Future Health”, an inquiry into the metrics through which “future” and “health” are conjoined, and how this conjunction might open up new possibilities for thinking about well-being. On one level, it encompasses dominant debates about healthy futures in which the social and environmental conditions of the health of individual bodies and delineated populations are at stake. On another, it lends momentum to debates about the futures of health, such that the concept of health itself becomes expanded to incorporate not just human health and medicine, but its relation to climate, environment and non-human species, including the new wild life of geneticallymodified plants and animals, as well as data, nanobots and algorithms.

Program

Description

Fazil Moradi presents the book “Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation”, co-edited with Ralph Buchenhorst and Maria Six-Hohenbalken, at the University of del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia.

Regularly organized at the end of the semester, the Jour Fixe brings together members of the LOST Research Network for discussing current research questions, identifying communalities and exchanging strategies to develope the research network further.

Participants: Amal Fadlalla, Andrea Behrends, Konstantin Biehl, Stefanie Bognitz, Pauline Claudot, Enrico Ille, David Kananizadeh, Laura Matt, Fazil Moradi, Songi Park, Eva Riedke, Richard Rottenburg, Bertram Turner, Timm Sureau, René Umlauf

Program

The aim of the Workshop is to set up a symmetrical dialogue between the field of DMDU and Anthropology. The challenge is that this dialogue takes place between two disparate fields with different frames. Since both study uncertainty in policy-settings, we expect it should produce insights of relevance. The formulation of themes for future research for both anthropology and DMDU.

Program

International workshop, co-funded by the OIB and the IRD (France).

The initial workshop on “Framing Variance” (April 2016) investigated debates and practices challenging normative implications of gender. Firstly, the aim of the workshop was to investigate an array of approaches to understanding the normative implications of representations of sexuality and gender by comparing different local contexts in relation to globally circulating narratives of gender roles and experiences. The workshop explored similarities and differences in local responses to normative redefinitions of gender identities as well as their representations on local, regional and global scales. A special emphasis was placed on the visual and textual representation and recollection of contested and problematized identities in media, art worlds, academia, museums and archives. A second focus was placed on African, especially South African discourses about gender(ed) identities. Finally, the conference offered a critical interrogation of the concept of “non-normativ gender identities” itself, which inevitably embodies a certain political project, and tried to find new pathways for intellectual discussion as well as empirical observation of the phenomena described above.

The editorial workshop on “Framing Variance” (April 2017) follows-up on these debates and offers the space to discuss and re-work the draft chapters that have been developed out of the individual conference papers.

Program

In this weekly colloquium we discuss participants’ work in progress and selected authors. Since the number of participants is restricted, new participants are kindly requested to approach Richard Rottenburg well in advance.

Current participants:
Nadine Rea Intisar Adam,  Benjamin Beck, Konstantin Biehl, Stefanie Bognitz, Sandra Calkins, Pauline Claudot, Lorenz Gosch, Philippe Gout, Armin Höland, David Kananizadeh, Siri Lamoureaux, Laura Matt, Fazil Moradi, Ronn Müller, Sung-Joon Park, Eva Riedke, Richard Rottenburg, Tabea Scharrer, Timm Sureau, Alena Thiel, Bertram Turner, René Umlauf

Guests:
Amal Fadlalla

Regularly organized at the end of the semester, the Jour Fixe brings together members of the LOST Research Network for discussing current research questions, identifying communalities and exchanging strategies to develope the research network further.

Participants: Aarjun Appadurai (Discussant), Arlena Liggins, Benjamin Beck, Bert Turner, David Kananizadeh, Eva Riedke, Fazil Moradi, Hlonipha Mokoena (Discussant), Lorenz Gosch, René Umlauf, Sandra Calkins, Songi Park, Stefanie Bognitz, Uli Beisel.