Journées d’étude internationales : Techniques et mondes
Journées d’étude internationales : Techniques et mondes
International Workshop : Worlds and technologies
Université Paris 8, 28-29 Novembre 2016
Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Arnaud Regnauld
Appel à contributions (English below)
Bref, les technologies contemporaines produisent-elles une apocalypse, réelle ou imaginaire ?
Worlds and technologies
In The Origin of Geometry, Husserl considered landsurveying as a technique that fostered the overlaying of the world of life by a world of science whose objects are characterized by an infinite determinability. A certain number of contemporary authors such as J.-L. Nancy, B. Stiegler or T. Morton reportedly see digital technologies as a novel transformation of the world, relative to its very shape as well as the status of its own objects whose meaningful dimension is reduced by digital technologies, so to speak diminishing their potential infinity.
Do contemporary technologies represent the end of the world, or that of a certain world? To what extent do the new modes of communication, a certain form of ubiquity maybe made possible by contemporary technologies, alter the fabric of time and space within which the various regions of our world are enmeshed? To what extent do globalization, the uniformization of desires in ads and commercials transform the status of the objects of our world? Can the image of a nature, of an underlying plane or an isolated regions, impervious to technology and as an image, constituted an ingredient of the notion of world, survive contemporary technologies? And if not, how significant is that? And what about the islands, those images of an elsewhere conveyed by the railways that used to take us to the seashore as much as the enticing ads and commercials for garishly colored chewing gum or exotically scented shower gels? Are those islands bound to disappear because of the rise of sea levels and that, caught within contemporary globalization (taking all sorts of shapes), there no longer is an out there there.
In sum, do contemporary technologies produce an apocalypse, real or imaginary?
Please send proposals before Nov. 1st to Pierre Cassou-Noguès and Arnaud Regnauld :