Blog Archives

TECHNOLOGY AND AUTHORITY, NETWORK ORGANIZATION AND RESISTANCE (READING GROUP)

16/3/2016

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.

Transforming the Fisheries - Neoliberalism, Nature and the Commons - Patrick Bresnihan

9/3/2016

“Eloquently written, deeply researched, deftly argued. This is a brilliant, critical reappraisal of capitalism’s relationship with the sea and should
be read by anyone concerned with environmental crisis more generally.”

Christian Parenti, master teacher of liberal studies at New York University and author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence

New book: Space, Power and the Commons

9/3/2016

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

"Space, Power and the Commons is an important and timely contribution in an lively and exciting area of scholarship and praxis. In particular, it offers us insights into the practice of ‘commoning’: the multiple practices, enactments and engagements that constitute the commons. The commons, the contributors remind us, does not precede its performances. Given that the commons constantly faces erasure and dismissal, the book itself, a collective endeavor, is itself an important form of commoning. It helps to make the commons visible. While attentive to the dangers of its romanticization, it is alert to its urgent political promise."

Nicholas Blomley. Professor of Geography, Simon Fraser University