Agora Philosophical Forum

دوستان سلام
یک نشست ویژه با عنوان " کنترل و کنترل شدن" خواهیم داشت. سخنران این نشست مریم کریمی است که توضیحات ایشان را در زیر می بینید. سخنرانی به فارسی برگزار خواهد شد ولی پخش زنده و ضبط شده نخواهیم داشت
برای آمادگی بیشتر برای این نشست می توانید به دو متن زیر رجوع کنید

1- Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7

2- Martin Heidegger, “The question concerning technology” Garland Science (1977), pp 3–35

Foucault investigated the historical transition of modes of power from authoritarian models of sovereignty to 18th/19th century disciplinary societies. If power used to enforce its authority physically or through direct commands, in disciplinary societies it shifted its modes of operation to more psychological ones. The modern state dispersed itself in the molds of its institutions, hospitals, schools, factories, and prisons. If the goal of sovereign societies was to tax rather than organize production, disciplinary societies administer life for optimum production. Gilles Deleuze in the Postscript on the Societies of Control conceptualized a new paradigm succeeding Foucault’s disciplinary societies. The shift was characterized as a transition from “molding” to “modulation”, from a “form-imposing mode” to a “self-regulating mode”. While enclosures construct distinct disciplinary castings, control forms a “self-deforming cast” that continuously transforms itself. The old disciplinary measures that were operationally tied to particular times and locales are substituted for the “ultra-rapid” fluid modalities of control. We may have been liberated from the confines of spatial enclosures, only to be caught within the immaterial web of harsher confinements.

Technology as a pharmakon is both a promise and a poison. It would be a paradoxical situation to deny the support of technology in making the facticity of a past not lived available to us. Technology has made possible a progressive continuity in time, the means to document history as well as scientific knowledge. However, it would also be an integral mistake to view technology only as its visible, material structures. As Foucault describes “the machines are social before being technical”. Modern technology is a spirit, it is a decisive mode of thinking affecting the realness of everyday reality. A spirit that results in new conditions of subjectivity that are formed in alliance with economic, social, and cultural forces under capitalism. There exists a human technology before any mechanic construction that is changing its forms and updating itself in its new tools. It is not so much the technologies themselves but the way they are socially and economically implemented that has led to the new models of oppression and arborescent socioeconomic structures. The socio-technical assemblage of capitalism and its means of production have led to new forms of slavery and produced a common state of poverty.

Question:
Searching the new methodologies of resistance
The shift towards societies of control was a change not just in institutional forms, but the machinic ones. In the globally networked society of control digital technologies have enabled and accelerated circulation of electronic information beyond any border or limits. In fact, these new societies are the direct products of the new media controlled by incessant cybernetic feedback. Public and private spaces that provide the enclosures for human interactions have been progressively replaced by a ubiquitous digital landscape. Normal human activities are measured and modulated based on their social or market value. Dividuals as database constructions derived from information and the behavioural behind have replaced individual bodies. The neoliberal politics of maximum profit, the accelerated forms of capitalism, and the technologically manufactured cultures have permeated every aspect of our collective psyche and our communal existence. In the construction of homogeneous social structures based on the standards of moral and economic values, human desires and dreams are channeled and the new forms of psychological oppression dominate life. Rational skills of calculation have taken the place of more creative encounters, and mechanical reflexes have altered the conscious processes of self-reflection. Individuals are entangled in advanced and unfamiliar mechanisms of subjectification, impersonal and obscure. Humans of today are not so much normalized, disciplined, and self-controlled as Foucault describes, they are “controlled in advance”.

As the old forms of power structures are dispersed in the bigger, faceless structures of corporations, the possibilities of resistance are diminished and at times rendered impossible. The old forms of resistance are obsolete and simple revolutions are not viable options anymore. In a society that advertises itself as an open and free society, how would be possible to expose the invisible framework of subjugation and to persuade people to mass resistance? How would be possible to propose novel processes of self-discovery in the face of smooth, seamless forces that promote homogeneity. In a landscape where our sensorial reality is saturated with continuous circulation of data and images, how would it be possible to open a passage to foster personal and interpersonal relations?

About Maryam Karimi:

Maryam Karimi is a candidate for a doctoral degree in philosophy practice-based Ph.D. in visual arts at York University. She completed a Masters degree in Architecture (M.Arch.) and a Bachelors in Architectural Science (B.Arch. Sci) from University of Waterloo. She is currently a professor at the interior design program at Yorkville University where she teaches courses in studio and lighting. Her Ph.D. research focuses on the changing technologies of power and the relationship between architecture and the physical and sociopolitical spaces of experience. Her current material of exploration is light in conceiving spatial diagrams that render material realities. Maryam Karimi's studio practice encompasses sculptures, objects, and public installations.