The Science and Technology Studies Program, Department of Cinema and Digital Media, and the Institute of Social Sciences cordially invite you to a colloquium event:

Digitizing Intersubjectivity: A Critical Reading of Both Turing and Wiener’s Freudian Inspirations

Dr. Jan De Vos Postdoctoral Researcher University of Ghent

April 5th, 12:00 - 2:00 PM

STS/CSIS Conference Room, Social Science Building 1246

Lunch will be served.

Please RSVP here if you are interested in attending: https://goo.gl/forms/Sqd5MuuFKpAOO7De2

Abstract:

One could be tempted to understand the digitalization of (inter)subjectivity with the help of psychology or the neurosciences. In the same vein, one would want to construct our ICT (our social media, our avatars, our smart environment…) based on sound psychological and neuroscientific knowledge (to make ICT easy, manageable, accessible… in short, human-friendly). In opposition to both assertions, I argue in this talk that psychological and neuroscientific knowledge is in itself a technology. The issue then is not to try to salvage a pre- or non-psychologized/neurologised/digitalized a priori subject in order to claim “subjectivity will not be digitalized” (i.e. the idea that there is too much subjectivity for the digital), but, rather, to reverse this and argue that the excess is at the site of digitalization: the subject only sees light as the excess of logos and technology itself.

Dr. De Vos is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He is interested in the critique of (neuro)physiology and physiologisation and the subject of the digital turn. His inspirations include continental philosophy, culture-and-ideology critique, and Freudian and Lacanian theory. He is currently writing a new book entitled Digitalizing Subjectivity: From Psychologisation and Neurologisation to Digitalization... and Back.