e-flux lectures: Luciana Parisi, “Digital Automation and Transcendental Instrumentality”

What is the medium of thought today? If the post-Kantian critique of technology saw in the means of thinking (from writing to cinema) the promise of an anti-metaphysical image of thought, how can the critique of the digital address the medium of thought beyond the sheer instrumentality of mindless networks of decision-making? By reference to computational design, it will be suggested that the big data explosion subtending our mediatic infrastructures requires a critique of technology that refuses the image of singularity. As computational design thinking has exposed the limits of human reason (notational modeling and deductive planning), it has also entered the logic of the machine, experimenting with its inhuman aesthetics and perhaps mediatic metaphysics.

Luciana Parisi researches the philosophical consequences of technology in culture, aesthetics, and politics. She is a Reader in Cultural Theory at Goldsmiths University of London and currently a Visiting Professor of New Media Philosophy at the Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley. She is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004, Continuum Press) and Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013, MIT Press).  

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.