Pub Date : 2023-03-12DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2186819
Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren, Alexander Paulsson
ABSTRACT Cars are nowadays being programmed to learn how to drive themselves. While autonomous cars are often portrayed as the next step in the auto-motive industry, they have already begun roaming the streets in some US cities. Building on a growing body of critical scholarship on the development of autonomous cars, we explore what machine learning is in open environments like cities by juxtaposing this to the field of mobilities studies. We do so by revisiting core concepts in mobilities studies: movement, representation and embodied experience. Our analysis of machine learning is centred around the transition from human senses to sensors mounted on cars, and what this implies in terms of autonomy. While much of the discussions related to this transition are already foregrounded in mobilities studies, due to this field's emphasis on complexities and the understanding of automobility as a socio-technological system, questions about autonomy still emerge in a slightly new light with the advent of machine learning. We conclude by suggesting that in mobilities studies, autonomy has always been seen as intertwined with technology, yet we argue that machine learning unfolds autonomy as intrinsic to technology, as the space between the car, the driver and the context is collapsing with autonomous cars.
{"title":"From senses to sensors: autonomous cars and probing what machine learning does to mobilities studies","authors":"Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren, Alexander Paulsson","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2023.2186819","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2186819","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Cars are nowadays being programmed to learn how to drive themselves. While autonomous cars are often portrayed as the next step in the auto-motive industry, they have already begun roaming the streets in some US cities. Building on a growing body of critical scholarship on the development of autonomous cars, we explore what machine learning is in open environments like cities by juxtaposing this to the field of mobilities studies. We do so by revisiting core concepts in mobilities studies: movement, representation and embodied experience. Our analysis of machine learning is centred around the transition from human senses to sensors mounted on cars, and what this implies in terms of autonomy. While much of the discussions related to this transition are already foregrounded in mobilities studies, due to this field's emphasis on complexities and the understanding of automobility as a socio-technological system, questions about autonomy still emerge in a slightly new light with the advent of machine learning. We conclude by suggesting that in mobilities studies, autonomy has always been seen as intertwined with technology, yet we argue that machine learning unfolds autonomy as intrinsic to technology, as the space between the car, the driver and the context is collapsing with autonomous cars.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82008264","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-12DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2023.2188439
Benjamin Nicoll
EXTENDED ABSTRACT Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. As Andreas Malm (2020, p. 119) puts it in Climate, Corona, Chronic Emergency , “a politics of conscious intervention is precisely what now must be revived”. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls jouissance , or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. For psychoanalysis, the conscious wish to overcome the climate crisis may conceal an unconscious satisfaction in the repetition of loss and failure afforded by the crisis (Burnham and Paul Kingsbury, 2021, p. 3; McGowan, 2020, p. 200; and Morton, 2016, p. 129). A psychoanalytic response to the existential challenge of climate change, then, would focus not on consciousness raising but on revealing where and how our unconscious enjoyment has become implicated in the very crisis that, consciously, we may accept or deny. To better understand how our unconscious enjoyment has become entangled in the climate crisis, we have an unlikely aid in the medium of the videogame. As Lawrence May (2021, n.p.) argues, an “ecocritical encounter with ecological monstrosity” demands a confrontation with “the monstrosity within”—that is, a confrontation with the “bitter form of ‘pleasure’” derived from the various forms of suffering wrought by climate inaction—and videogames, he suggests, may be the ideal medium through which to encounter this “bitter form of ‘pleasure’”. Taking inspiration from May, this paper contends that videogames are the ideal medium through which to grasp the
{"title":"Enjoyment in the Anthropocene: the extimacy of ecological catastrophe in Donut County","authors":"Benjamin Nicoll","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2188439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2188439","url":null,"abstract":"EXTENDED ABSTRACT Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. As Andreas Malm (2020, p. 119) puts it in Climate, Corona, Chronic Emergency , “a politics of conscious intervention is precisely what now must be revived”. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls jouissance , or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. For psychoanalysis, the conscious wish to overcome the climate crisis may conceal an unconscious satisfaction in the repetition of loss and failure afforded by the crisis (Burnham and Paul Kingsbury, 2021, p. 3; McGowan, 2020, p. 200; and Morton, 2016, p. 129). A psychoanalytic response to the existential challenge of climate change, then, would focus not on consciousness raising but on revealing where and how our unconscious enjoyment has become implicated in the very crisis that, consciously, we may accept or deny. To better understand how our unconscious enjoyment has become entangled in the climate crisis, we have an unlikely aid in the medium of the videogame. As Lawrence May (2021, n.p.) argues, an “ecocritical encounter with ecological monstrosity” demands a confrontation with “the monstrosity within”—that is, a confrontation with the “bitter form of ‘pleasure’” derived from the various forms of suffering wrought by climate inaction—and videogames, he suggests, may be the ideal medium through which to encounter this “bitter form of ‘pleasure’”. Taking inspiration from May, this paper contends that videogames are the ideal medium through which to grasp the","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81198884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-02DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2023.2178476
Anne-Sofie Dichman
{"title":"More-than-human gender performativity","authors":"Anne-Sofie Dichman","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2178476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2178476","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84099710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-28DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2023.2177319
Richard Groß, Susann Wagenknecht
ABSTRACT In this paper, we employ John Dewey’s notion of the situation as an analytic lens for observing and theorizing machine learning. Based on two ethnographic case studies in art and science, we account for machine learning as practice and examine the dynamics of the situations it gives rise to. Following Dewey, our observations focus on the transformation of situations from an initial state of indeterminacy through to problematizations and their resolution. Rethinking machine learning through the situation, we analyze how cooperating machine learners, both human and non-human, resolve situations and thereby refine their mutual attunement. With Dewey, we first explain how machine learners train through disruption and adaptation as they identify and solve problems. Second, we show that these problems concern issues of latency and addressability in efforts of cooperation between heterogeneous machine learners. Third, we discuss how machine learning practices cultivate situations that feature careful calibrations of problems that allow for their productive transformation. Our empirically grounded approach offers a pragmatist account of machine learning as a continually indeterminate and dynamic situated practice. As a contribution to ongoing discussions in social theory, we reframe existing characterizations of machine learning as issues of latency and addressability in cooperation.
{"title":"Situating machine learning – On the calibration of problems in practice","authors":"Richard Groß, Susann Wagenknecht","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2023.2177319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2177319","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this paper, we employ John Dewey’s notion of the situation as an analytic lens for observing and theorizing machine learning. Based on two ethnographic case studies in art and science, we account for machine learning as practice and examine the dynamics of the situations it gives rise to. Following Dewey, our observations focus on the transformation of situations from an initial state of indeterminacy through to problematizations and their resolution. Rethinking machine learning through the situation, we analyze how cooperating machine learners, both human and non-human, resolve situations and thereby refine their mutual attunement. With Dewey, we first explain how machine learners train through disruption and adaptation as they identify and solve problems. Second, we show that these problems concern issues of latency and addressability in efforts of cooperation between heterogeneous machine learners. Third, we discuss how machine learning practices cultivate situations that feature careful calibrations of problems that allow for their productive transformation. Our empirically grounded approach offers a pragmatist account of machine learning as a continually indeterminate and dynamic situated practice. As a contribution to ongoing discussions in social theory, we reframe existing characterizations of machine learning as issues of latency and addressability in cooperation.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84134590","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-02-12DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2023.2173268
Mikkel Flohr
{"title":"Karl Marx’s critique of the state as an alienation of society in his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of State","authors":"Mikkel Flohr","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2173268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2173268","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83643582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-19DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2023.2168717
Jason C. Mueller
{"title":"Universality, Black Lives Matter, and the George Floyd Uprising","authors":"Jason C. Mueller","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2023.2168717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2023.2168717","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83512362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-12DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2022.2146732
Erdoğan H. Şima, Ali Rıza Taşkale
{"title":"Avengers’ anti-Oedipal endgame","authors":"Erdoğan H. Şima, Ali Rıza Taşkale","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2022.2146732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2022.2146732","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89354589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-12DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2137546
Fabian Ferrari, F. McKelvey
ABSTRACT Platformized cultural production is in flux. Artificial intelligence is often seen as a key driving force of this shift. This article examines the proliferation of AI-generated media to introduce a new concept to theorize cultural production: hyperproduction. This notion designates the penetration of cultural life with deep generative models. Juxtaposing two empirical use cases–autonomous vehicles and virtual influencers—the article problematises the convergence of simulation and reality through the lens of video game engines. Although those case studies seem to be at odds with each other, they illustrate the mechanisms of new profit models built on rent extraction. Consequently, far from ushering a Matrix-style simulation that cannot be theorized, hyperproduction remains not only grounded in, but also bounded by, reality: the reality of rentier capitalism.
{"title":"Hyperproduction: a social theory of deep generative models","authors":"Fabian Ferrari, F. McKelvey","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2022.2137546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2137546","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Platformized cultural production is in flux. Artificial intelligence is often seen as a key driving force of this shift. This article examines the proliferation of AI-generated media to introduce a new concept to theorize cultural production: hyperproduction. This notion designates the penetration of cultural life with deep generative models. Juxtaposing two empirical use cases–autonomous vehicles and virtual influencers—the article problematises the convergence of simulation and reality through the lens of video game engines. Although those case studies seem to be at odds with each other, they illustrate the mechanisms of new profit models built on rent extraction. Consequently, far from ushering a Matrix-style simulation that cannot be theorized, hyperproduction remains not only grounded in, but also bounded by, reality: the reality of rentier capitalism.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90701002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-04DOI: 10.1080/1600910x.2022.2148116
L. Farrell
{"title":"Toward a critique of neo-republican reason: the subject, discursive control, and power in Pettit’s political theory","authors":"L. Farrell","doi":"10.1080/1600910x.2022.2148116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2022.2148116","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87120158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2099232
Hannah Richter
The special issue that this paper introduces is published in 2022, two and a half years after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept large parts of the world, in many cases prompting political measures that meant the interruption of economic production and social life as we knew it. While the pandemic is still unfolding, and it remains uncertain whether and how societies will learn to live with COVID-19’s viral threat, many countries have eased or even completely abolished pandemic restrictions, putting an end to the above moment of interruption. There is, at least for now, and at least in the Western world, a collective sense of easing, the perception that we have passed the peak of the pandemic, that the worst is over. This position of relative hindsight both creates an opportunity and poses a challenge for a collection of papers on the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, the moment seems apt to reflect on and examine the pandemic in its entirety, its conditions, stages of unfolding and consequences (Wark 2020). Especially the early months of the pandemic were marked by a flood of philosophical dispatches issued from the homes to which theorists suddenly found themselves confined. Some were speculating about the politically transformative potential of the pandemic rupture, the chance to create a new collectivist politics out of the ruins of neoliberalism that the pandemic would leave behind (Žižek 2020a, 2020b; Nancy 2020; Stimilli 2020). Others prompted readers to look behind the curtain of the pandemic emergency to either uncover how self-reproductive sovereign power was orchestrating a global crisis in response to a relatively harmless virus (Agamben 2020) or to reveal climate change as the underlying, actual catastrophe (Latour 2021; Malm 2020). Beyond the euphoric dreams, premature dismissals and catastrophism of these early accounts, papers written and published in the long durée of the pandemic are able to produce a more measured, nuanced assessment of the changes and continuities that mark pandemic societies. But on the other hand, any such theoretical retrospective is, at this point, confronted not with one but indeed with two pandemics: the global spread of COVID-19, and the philosophical event that followed when social theory, with viral speed and exponential growth, became infected with the pandemic event. The above thinkers are just some of
{"title":"COVID-19, viral social theory and immunitarian perceptions – a case for postfoundational critique","authors":"Hannah Richter","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2022.2099232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2099232","url":null,"abstract":"The special issue that this paper introduces is published in 2022, two and a half years after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept large parts of the world, in many cases prompting political measures that meant the interruption of economic production and social life as we knew it. While the pandemic is still unfolding, and it remains uncertain whether and how societies will learn to live with COVID-19’s viral threat, many countries have eased or even completely abolished pandemic restrictions, putting an end to the above moment of interruption. There is, at least for now, and at least in the Western world, a collective sense of easing, the perception that we have passed the peak of the pandemic, that the worst is over. This position of relative hindsight both creates an opportunity and poses a challenge for a collection of papers on the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, the moment seems apt to reflect on and examine the pandemic in its entirety, its conditions, stages of unfolding and consequences (Wark 2020). Especially the early months of the pandemic were marked by a flood of philosophical dispatches issued from the homes to which theorists suddenly found themselves confined. Some were speculating about the politically transformative potential of the pandemic rupture, the chance to create a new collectivist politics out of the ruins of neoliberalism that the pandemic would leave behind (Žižek 2020a, 2020b; Nancy 2020; Stimilli 2020). Others prompted readers to look behind the curtain of the pandemic emergency to either uncover how self-reproductive sovereign power was orchestrating a global crisis in response to a relatively harmless virus (Agamben 2020) or to reveal climate change as the underlying, actual catastrophe (Latour 2021; Malm 2020). Beyond the euphoric dreams, premature dismissals and catastrophism of these early accounts, papers written and published in the long durée of the pandemic are able to produce a more measured, nuanced assessment of the changes and continuities that mark pandemic societies. But on the other hand, any such theoretical retrospective is, at this point, confronted not with one but indeed with two pandemics: the global spread of COVID-19, and the philosophical event that followed when social theory, with viral speed and exponential growth, became infected with the pandemic event. The above thinkers are just some of","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74229028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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