DANM Prof. Warren Sack will present the following paper at The Digital Subject Coference 4: Codes
Title: “Code and Critical Theory,” for the panel “Theories Workshop,”
Location/Date: Salle du Conseil, University of Paris 8, 11h30, November 18, 2015
Abstract: As Maurizio Lazzarato points out in a recent book, “…machines … can be found everywhere except in contemporary critical theory” (in Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, 2014). How can we understand our present conditions if we cannot write about the machines with which we are entangled? My message to critical theorists is that we need to invent new, critical, machine languages to challenge the machine languages now in power and, specifically, we need to improve upon the lexicon of “machinic assemblage” still in circulation in science studies, finance studies, and critical studies of capitalism (incorporated into, for example, actor-network theory) now decades after Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari assembled that machine language. In short, critical theorists of today need to become skillful coders because to write about and – especially -- to rewrite the machines of today is to write software.
Conference Program: http://sujetdigital.labex-arts-h2h.fr/sites/sujetdigital.labex-arts-h2h.fr/files/Codes-2015-programme-A5.pdf