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Papers and panels are invited for the interdisciplinary conference, “The Loss and Recovery of the World”, which will take place in Warsaw from 6-7 November 2023. The conference is organized by the Faculty of Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw (Poland) and is part of the  „Technology and Socialization” project.

The pandemic took away our „right to” and „joy of” the world. In the short time of „closure in home”, man ceased to be a “worldly being” and became an „alone animal” re-domesticated and fully controlled by “algorithmic governmentality”. The world has become a problem, rather an “assumption” than a “reality”. The main question we would like to ask during the conference is if there’s a possibility of regaining the world and the joy derived from being in the world. Is the world still “something to live in”?

For a long time, philosophy talked about man who is “of the world” and spoke about the world which is “for man”. Regardless of whether our point of departure was Husserl’s phenomenology with the postulate that „every consciousness is the consciousness of something”, or Heidegger’s onto-theology postulating the primality of „being in the world”, or the philosophy of immanence that sees „consciousness already” in the world”. Even Alain Badiou‚s mathematical ontology studies, in its second phase, the possibility of the emergence of the world and its donations, or finally, a critical theory analyzing and following Karl Marx, the limits of commodity fetishism and the transformation of the world into a „department store” governed by the principle of generalized equivalence; well, regardless of these multiple strategies and starting points, „care for the world” remains crucial.

We ask: whether today’s philosophy is too easily reconciled with the idea of a world „without man” and „not for man”? Then, after the discussion about „things in themselves” (noumens) and „things for us ” (phenomena), we will discuss „things after man” and „freed from us”. Surely the world does better „without a man” than a man “without the world”. But does this mean, however, that philosophy in its “last step” is to become a philosophy of doom, a theory of extinction or „final disappearance”, i.e., generalized nihilism?

Was the “common world” only a particular illusion created by a small and privileged part of humanity, who wanted to justify the conquest of this world, or to reduce it to a mere „collection of variables”, or the collection of all things amenable to instrumental rationality? Has the world long been merely an energy and material resource called to reveal its as-yet-unseen treasures? Does modern set theory, refusing the concept of the set of all sets, not problematize the very concept of a “finite world” and the possibility of its closure? Is the world still to be recovered? And what kind of world would we like to regain? 

At the beginning of the 20th century, György Lukács, in The Theory of the Novel, wrote – “Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths-ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars; the world and the self, the light and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never become permanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of all light and all fire clothes itself in light” (Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, MIT Press, 1971, p. 29) Is the “happy world”, described by young Lukács, still conceivable and habitable? Is it „for us”, i.e., is it a „real possibility” for us – still “humane, all to humane”? Is the joy of „being in the world” possible at all? Or has the only possibility become „cosmic pessimism” condemning us to laments, elegies or hymns sung „after the loss of the earth”, and the only worldly mood (Stimmung) is „cosmic melancholy” as a reaction to the loss of the earth?

Presentations are expected to be between 20 and 30 minutes. Please send abstracts of up to 300 words, attached in a word document, with a short bio to technologyandsocialization@gmail.com by the 31^st of August, 2023 24th of September, 2023. Should you need any further information, do not hesitate to contact us at the same e-mail address. All information related to the conference and the “Technology and Socialization” project can be found here. We are looking forward to your participation and to hosting you in Warsaw.

Organizing Committee:
Professor Szymon Wróbel
Dr Krzysztof Skonieczny
Dr Katarzyna Szafranowska
Mgr Adam Cichoń

We are delighted to invite you to the conference Perpetual Peace Project which will take place in Warsaw, 9th November 2022.

The Perpetual Peace Project has never been a traditional acade-
mic philosophical debate about, for or against, Kant’s political philosophy. Instead, over the past fourteen years and three major international curatorial initiatives, we have employed the preliminary and definitive articles from Kant’s 1795 treatise Toward Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden) to stage several major interventions between philosophers, diplomats, and artists to challenge our institutional knowledges around the idea of peace. Consequently, the firstprinciple of the 2008 initiative with the United Nations was: “The Perpetual Peace Project is predicated on the belief that no one institution or individual can clearly claim or guarantee a mastery of the concept of peace” (See Principles). Because the first event in this new phase, reinstated to address the idea of perpetual peace in the immediate context of the war in the Ukraine, is a gathering of mostly academic philosophers and theorists, we have asked our main speakers today to respond to the following provocation:

If, as Deleuze says, philosophy and only philosophy can lay claim to concepts, can philosophy today lay any claim to the concept of peace? Or has this concept or idea been relegated to what Foucault described as the “military-diplomatic apparatus” (dispositif) that belongs to the biopolitical mechanisms of “security”? Moreover, given the fact that most of the disciplinary and technical knowledges that deal with issues of global and regional security do not belong to academic philosophy, but are mostly located within the periphery of the state apparatus itself, the question of contemporary philosophy’s relation to idea of “perpetual peace” needs to be re-examined, especially in light of the war in Ukraine.

Click here to view the conference program

The fifth event of the Technology and Socialization Project — the conference Wondering about Materialism will take place in Warsaw, 7-8 November 2022.

The question – what is materialism today? – seems to be extremely important because we do not have any uniform concept of matter and we do not have a uniform concept of materialism. During the conference, the question about matter will be asked from three perspectives. First, from a historical perspective, we ask: what does it mean to be a “historical materialist”? Is historical materialism possible at all? Perhaps historical materialism is doomed to an alternative: it is either materialism or historicism? What does it mean that “matter” has historical form? Second, what is the relation between matter and information? The physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed the radical it from bit (all from bit) hypothesis, according to which information underlies all matter, and every “it,” that is, every particle or energy field, is an organization of differences and therefore information. Are we ready to accept this hypothesis? Finally, we ask about the subject in the world of “intelligent matter”. What does it mean that matter is capable for self-organization? What does it mean to be a subject in the word of intelligent matter?

We hope to find answers to these and similar questions or at least clarify them during this conference.

Confirmed keynote speakers included Gregg Lambert, Adam J. Nocek, Nick Nesbitt, Dominic Pettman, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Tom Tyler

Click here to view the conference program, call for papers and information about the organisers.

The conference is organized by the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw (Poland) in collaboration with the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University.

Papers and panels are invited for an interdisciplinary conference ‘Wondering about Materialism’, which will take place in Warsaw, 7-8 November 2022. The conference is organized by the Faculty of Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw (Poland) and is a part of the project Technology and Socialization.

The question – what is materialism today? – seems to be extremely important because we do not have any uniform concept of matter and we do not have a uniform concept of materialism. During the conference, the question about matter will be asked from three perspectives. First, from a historical perspective, we ask: what does it mean to be a “historical materialist”? Is historical materialism possible at all? Perhaps historical materialism is doomed to an alternative: it is either materialism or historicism? What does it mean that “matter” has historical form? Second, what is the relation between matter and information? The physicist John Archibald Wheeler proposed the radical it from bit (all from bit) hypothesis, according to which information underlies all matter, and every „it,” that is, every particle or energy field, is an organization of differences and therefore information. Are we ready to accept this hypothesis? Finally, we ask about the subject in the world of “intelligent matter”. What does it mean that matter is capable for self-organization? What does it mean to be a subject in the word of intelligent matter?

We hope to find answers to these and similar questions or at least clarify them during this conference.

Proposals are welcome on, but not limited to, the following topics:

– Recent constellations of materialist – actor-network theory, new materialisms, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology – have begun to call into question the continued relevance of cultural materialism. However, is the difference between cultural materialism (holds that subjects are by-products of their respective cultural milieus) and new materialism (emphasizing the moment of being entangled in strictly material conditions of action) politically well-motivated and intellectually credible?

– New materialists understand matter as possessing its own modes of self-transformation and self-organization, which means that matter is no longer a passive, opaque entity but is recognized as constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways. We most often formulate this diagnosis in the form of the statement that „matter becomes” rather than „matter is”. But what does this mean? And what kind of interpretation should be given to this statement about the becoming of matter?

– If we accept that cultural materialism is an „anti-realist” position (constructivism), the question is: what kind of realism does the new materialism offer us? We would like to rethink the problem of the relationship between materialism and realism. Does being a materialist imply a realistic obligation regarding the existence of objects independent of the will and consciousness of the knowing subject?

– Prior to Kant one of the principal problems of philosophy was to think “substance”, following Kant philosophy has primarily consisted of trying to think “subject”. We ask the question: is the task of philosophy today to link “substance” and “subject”, i.e. to empower substance (Hegel), but also to desubstantialise the subject (Freud)? What is the place of the subject in the new materialism?

– Slavoj Žižek reading Hegel claims that, from the dialectical materialist standpoint, the true formula of materialism is that “material reality is non-all”. But what does it mean? Does it mean not only accepting the incoherent vision of reality, but also the reality which in some sense is always unfinished?

– What kind of materialism do we need? Do we need very consistent, rough, radical materialism without ideas, without rest, but full of fear of mystification, occultism, fear of falling into immaterialism, as it “principle enemy”. Or do we need materialism corrected by something that constantly eludes it, materialism that is uncertain of its status, uncertain of multiple types of being, allowing many forms of being, materialism ready to write such entities into the register of existence?

Presentations are expected to be between 20 and 30 minutes.

Please send abstracts of up to 300 words, attached in a word-document,
with a short bio, to technologyandsocialization@gmail.com by 31 August 2022.

Should you need any further information, do not hesitate to contact us at the same e-mail address. All information related to the conference and the Technology and Socialization project and can be found here. We are looking forward to your participation and to hosting you in Warsaw.

Organizing Committee:
Professor Szymon Wróbel
Dr Krzysztof Skonieczny
Dr Katarzyna Szafranowska
Mgr Adam Cichoń

The fourth event of the Technology and Socialization Project — the conference Many Regimes of the Capital in the Postdigital Age will be held online from 20 to 22 October 2021.

The starting point of the conference was a fact that capitalism today is gaining new meaning and looking for a new name, new theorethical and practical approaches: from cognitive, affective, and neoliberal capitalism to computational, surveillance, necro-, and anarcho-capitalism. These are just several of the ways to name an era marked by the capitalization of nearly everything—work, attention, affect, and even life itself.  This conference wishes to address not only the varieties of capitalist production today but also whether and to what extent the different manifestations of capitalism are only different types of capital. In other words, is mental and emotional health a commodity in the same sense as the products of our hands and brains are commodities? Does capital therefore have an essence with many different appearances? And if capitalism does have an essence, then is it reducible to the permanent expansion of economic transactions to every domain of human and nonhuman activity? We hope to find answers to these and similar questions during this conference.

Here you could view the conference program, book of abstracts,  call for papers and information about the organisers.