Common Room, Heyman Center, Columbia University
The Institute for the Study of Comparative Literature (ICLS) will host the Technopolitical Form and the Global South symposium.
Organizers: David Bering-Porter (New School), Joshua Neves (Concordia), and Arvind Rajagopal (NYU)
Registration: Please RSVP at this link. Registration will be capped at 40, as this is meant to be an intimate workshop.
Is a philosophy of technology out-of-date even as it arrives, just as Minerva’s owl takes flight only at dusk? Even so, the idea of technopolitical form has arguably been influential, if only as concrete thought or as real abstraction. If struggle becomes political only by acquiring form, the modes of mediating form are technopolitical. Technopolitical form names a battlefield where alliances across race, class, nationality and sexuality are targeted and interdicted if possible, in the face of insurgence and resolute assertion.
If Empire appeared as a deterritorializing force at the beginning of the century, the disintermediation of imperial force today is reminiscent of territorialized authority. But now, the territory is that of the imagination. The vacuum of absolute space has turned into an interior geography of knowns and unknowns, of allies and aliens. Against the conventional view that information supersedes form, we ask: if the content of technopolitics is anti-imperial, what forms does it take, and what forms could it take?
If colonialism has always operated through the extraction of resources, the conscription of labor, and the appropriation of knowledge, these emergent regimes may represent its latest and most intimate formation, one in which the human subject itself becomes the territory to be colonized. Generative AI and the digital doppelgänger extend colonial logics through dispossession, enclosure, and substitution, mapping human capacity as planetary resource and positioning the Global South as both the site of extraction and the spectral labor force training the very systems that disavow its contributions. What technopolitical forms have been inherited, are emergent, or are yet to be imagined and how might we contest this interior colonization of the imagination?
Our symposium takes up the question of technopolitical form at a moment when the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution envisions all domains of life rendered as operational data; as vitality decomposed into discrete, manipulable, and interoperable units that can be isolated, stored, exchanged, and accorded value across time, space, and context. If technopolitical narratives have shifted from mid-century critiques of disequilibria and planetary exhaustion toward regimes of optimization operating at molecular and metabolic scales, what forms of political imagination become possible or foreclosed? How do we understand a new geography of late industrialism oriented not toward twentieth-century notions of core and periphery but toward the production of relative surplus value at a planetary scale, and what anti-imperial forms might emerge from or against it?
Participants: Sareeta Amrute (New School), Ahmed Ansari (NYU), Neda Atanasoski (University of Maryland), Sudipto Basu (Concordia), David Bering-Porter (New School), Heather Davis (New School), Aditi Dey (New School), Christine Goding-Doty (New School), Shikhar Goel (NYU), Debashree Mukherjee (Columbia), Joshua Neves (Concordia), Emma Park (New School), Arvind Rajagopal (NYU)
