“Recursive Colonialism and Speculative Computation”- tgiFHI

Please join the FHI for its Friday morning faculty speaker series, tgiFHI! tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

All tgiFHI events take place at 9:30 a.m. on Friday mornings. The series will be virtual for the 2020-2021 academic year, and there will be an opportunity to join a facilitated discussion with the speaker and other participants after the lecture.

Talk description:

Recursivity is a generic dispositif of power at the core of the colonial logic of capital. It defines the entanglement of algorithmic functions in computational prediction with the rules of knowing. Recursive algorithms give us the droste effect of a spiral of the same. Today, recursivity returns in the automated condition of planetary incarceration through hyperdisciplinary confinement and necropolitical killing enmeshed with algorithmic solutions of self-governance packed in our mobile phones. However, since speculative computation has indeterminacy as input, it has the capacity to trans-originate collective, cosmotechnical, abolitionist conditions of knowing. The COVID-19 contingency summons us to refuse the recursive violence defining immunity and to embrace the mutations of collective desire demanding the total abolition of the exceptional auto-immunity of the Universal Man.

Speaker bio:

Luciana Parisi’s research is a philosophical investigation of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. She is a Professor in Media Philosophy at the Program in Literature and the Computational Media Art and Culture at Duke University.  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). She is completing a monograph on alien epistemologies and the transformation of logical thinking in computation.

This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Literature; Computational Media, Arts & Cultures; and the Department of English at Duke University; and the Department of Communication Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill.