[Commlist] CFP - "Technically Yours": Technicity, Mediality, and the Stakes of Experience

*“Technically Yours”: Technicity, Mediality, and the Stakes of Experience*

An international conference organized by the Department of Foreign 
Languages and Literatures of National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, 
to be held October 18-20, 2019

//

Abstracts submission deadline: February 22, 2019

Conference website: https://ntuyours.wordpress.com/

//

*Keynote Speaker:*

Martin E. Jay (Emeritus Professor, Department of History, University of 
California, Berkeley, USA)

*Plenary Speakers:*

Eyal Amiran (Professor, Department of Comparative Literature + 
Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Irvine, USA)

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (Senior Lecturer, Department of Digital 
Humanities, King’s College London, UK)

Kate Marshall (Associate Professor, Department of English, University of 
Notre Dame, USA)

****

*I.*

In a co-authored monograph, media theorist Alexander Galloway retells 
the story of how Hermes kills the hundred-eyed, all-vigilant Argus: the 
arch-messenger just keeps talking and talking on end, about the 
invention of the reed pipe, and slowly the giant’s eyes close out of 
fatigue. “Argus,” as Galloway has it, “was bored to death by the most 
boring thing of all, tales about technology.”^[1]

For better or worse, at this juncture in history we need no reminder as 
to the centrality of technology: technology easily stands as the 
paramount medium relaying tales about the contemporary world; or, 
according to many, technology /is/ the very story that now textures our 
times.

Inquiries into technology and media—and, perhaps more importantly, their 
conceptual cognates—have significantly shifted the grounds of debate in 
the humanities. Up to today, however, they have each developed on their 
own terms. Presumably bound up closely, queries about technology, 
technics or technicity and those about media, mediation or mediality do 
not always engage with the critical vocabulary of the other strand. To 
make matters thornier, the relation among the concepts within each set 
is never one of congruity.

This conference proposes to bring these lines of investigation together 
and examine their shared agendas or the tensions between them. More 
specifically, we are interested in the critical and theoretical 
ramifications revolving around these concept clusters and, further, in 
the configurations of experience thus emerging. For postlapsarian 
creatures like ourselves, stories about experience always seem to come 
/in medias res/, with the cause proper withheld from us. To what extent, 
then, can a joint consideration of technicity and mediality help to 
advance our thinking of the human condition?

*II.*

If earlier studies of technology approached technologies mostly from a 
cultural-history perspective, propositions on technicity and technical 
object have come to reframe the terms of debate. They bring to light the 
possibility that the human encounter with technology may very well be an 
experience that is not thoroughly lived and internalized. Thinkers in 
this stream have also opened up space to address the human-technology 
relation in light of potentiality, virtuality, and processes of 
concretization. On the other hand, the “originary technicity” thesis 
pushes the envelope by understanding technics as “the pursuit of life by 
means other than life,”^[2] and human experience as an exteriority, 
posing a powerful countervailing force to anthropocentric assumptions.

In a related light, media theorists have written extensively about how 
technical media punctuate human experience by instances of 
exteriorization. Others probe into the ways in which a human practice 
turns into a cultural//technique, that is, the ways in which a technique 
mediates collective forms of life. While their foci may vary, these 
theorists are concerned with how a material object or process becomes 
“medial.” This postulate has inspired literary scholars and cultural 
critics alike to construe /medium/ broadly, and what may be considered 
medial now include not only artefacts, technologies, and 
infrastructures, but also natural forces.

At the same time, scholars in new media studies have contributed 
important insights. Critics have suggested considering the intersection 
of different bodies (biochemical, technological, etc.) in terms of 
intermediation. Others have sought to bring to the fore the emancipatory 
dynamic of digital technology by philosophizing its expansion of human 
experience. There are also scholars who call attention to the ways in 
which the logic of digitality and coding has become the cultural (and 
epistemological) dominant of today.

Looming behind all this is the age-old question regarding experience 
mediated vs. experience unmediated. While conversations about this 
contrariety have never been confined merely to the technological, 
digital technology is here to complicate the whole scenario thanks to 
its tricky mediality: its capacity to produce other realities, and to 
simulate the very reality that many of us take to be the grounding of 
our experience.

This conference proposes to think progressively about the mediation of 
experience in relation to technology or technics widely defined. We 
invite refreshing theoretical interventions, as well as innovative takes 
on specific examples. Discussion of any period and any cultural, 
historico-technical situation is welcome.

*III.*

Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:**

  * Mediation of experience (temporal, spatial, affective, aesthetic,
    cognitive, libidinal or epistemological) via a specific technical
    medium
  * Technically mediated experience presented in a literary work, film,
    or art work
  * Realities that appear un-mediated (e.g., literary inspiration,
    virtual reality, etc.)
  * Technicity and embodiment; techniques of the body
  * Technicity and the issue of cultural practice and formation of a
    collective
  * Mediation and the question of representability, figurability
  * Mnemotechnology
  * Media technologies and experience of the yet-to-come
  * Media technologies and nature; media technologies and second nature
  * The economy of desire or economy of need—or economy per se—in
    conjunction with a technical medium
  * Revisit to theses of technical object and technicity
  * Question of mediality in philosophy and critical theory
  * Critical reflections on the state of current media theory, including
    new media studies,  media archaeology, history of culture
    techniques, among others
  * Contemporary humanistic fields attentive to the question of mediated
    or immediate experience, including affect theory, image studies,
    feminist and queer theories of the body
  * Approaches to the issue of mediation in theories that are also
    centered on material objects and materiality, such as thing theory
    and new materialism
  * With more and more possibilities of “human experience” being churned
    out, amid a range of life forms and material entities that the
    humans must coexist with, does the human/nonhuman divide still serve
    as an effective analytical tool? (Critics have, for instance, put
    forth the cognizer/noncognizer alternative, with intelligent
    machines included in the cognizer category.)
  * Does thought, as media theorist Adiran MacKenzie suggests, have a
    technicity?^[3] Is the thinkability of experience always already a
    question of technicity?
**

*Notes:*

^[1] Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, 
/Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation/ (Chicago: 
University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 36.

^[2] Bernard Stiegler, /Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus/, 
trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford 
University Press, 1998), p. 17.

^[3] Adrian MacKenzie, /Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed/ 
(London: Continuum, 2002), p. 10.

****

To be considered for inclusion in the conference program, please send an 
abstract of 300-500 words and a brief curriculum vitae (which should 
include _contact information_, _education_, _current institutional 
affiliation and position_, and _select publications_ if available) as 
separate Word attachments (not PDF) to the email address 
<*(ntuconf /at/ hotmail.com)*> no later than *February 22, 2019*. Please do not 
include the author’s personal identity in the abstract proper.


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