Nootechnics
Guest Edited by Anaïs Nony
In today’s digital societies, it can be difficult to grasp the political stakes of the technical. While the technical pushes us to face the past while backing up into the future, the digital is rushing up on us from behind, reminding us that we are late in our own present. This feeling of losing control of one’s time is caused by the data-driven quality of digital devices that constantly implement new parameters into future actions. The digital has recently sur- passed the technical realm due to the economy’s use of highly addictive, yet intuitive, relations to digital platforms that are designed to function without the mastery of any user skills. While other technical revolutions that shaped knowledge production on a large scale – such as writing and printing – required years of effort and dedication, the digital tools produced by the market annihilate the very need to invest in apprenticeship. This gap between technological advancement and the cultural development of signifi- cant skillsets is the grounding basis from which to address the political stakes of today’s digital condition.
A nootechnics of the digital takes the temporal gap created by the drastic acceleration of technological advancement seriously. It addresses the cultural delay that prevents us from developing meaningful relations to digital tools on a larger scale. Indeed, cultural practices fostered by our relation to tech- nical objects are the operating forces that structure our relation to temporal- ity. Being out of pace with the digital means being in a temporality that is no longer in sync with the technicity that fundamentally shapes processes of individuation today. Located at the heart of our technical modernity, processes of individuation take place in a drastically changing environment in which the digital now plays a fundamental role in shaping the relation between minds, bodies, and technics. (access full introduction here).
Table of Contents
Aesthesis and Nous: Technological Approaches. Sara Baranzoni
For a Critique of Noology. Benoît Dillet
Symptomatology of Collective Knowledge and the Social to Come. Paolo Vignola
Biosphere, Noosphere, Infosphere: Epistemo-Aesthetics and The Age Of Big Data. Alexander Wilson
On Withdrawal, Abandonment and the Limits of Algorithmic Apprehension. Ashley Scarlett