My keynote lecture for the Hostile Intelligence conference at Pratt Institute in New York (5.30pm, Design Gallery, Brooklyn Campus). Abstract here:
Territories of Trauma and Abstraction: On Some Definitions of Economic and Cybernetic Power in Contemporary Philosophy
Many accounts of political and economic power believe that these superstructures are based on a general and positive normative power, that is the power to generate stable norms and subjectivities. Foucault’s notion of biopower is often understood as the power to constitute new norms (against abnormalities) via sophisticated technologies of the Self. On the other hand (following Marx’s idea of determinate abstraction), Deleuze and Guattari have stressed the deterritorializing tendency of capitalism, that is the capacity to continuously open up new territories and inaugurate further zones of instability and turbulence — that is the capacity to orchestrate and manipulate abnormalities instead of normalities. In my contribution I will try to explain that any notion of collective intelligence also has to consider error, abnormality, trauma and catastrophe as part of its own modus operandi.
