Descartes writes in his Meditations: “This is similar to the way in which we might ‘see’ people down in the street when all we really see are coats and hats. Our intellect—and not our eyes—judges that there are people, and not automata, under those coats and hats.” But what if these “people” or “automata” started collectively slipping and falling or throwing pies at each other? We end with humour and Bergson’s famous diagnosis: “The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine.” We laugh at human automatisms, but we at the same time laugh mechanically, or as Bergson puts it: “Laughter is simply the result of a mechanism set up in us by nature”. The comic may “not exist outside the pale of what is strictly HUMAN”, but is in a way a mediation between two automatisms: the mechanical activity laughed at and the mechanical laugh. Humour may be a corrective, but in the name of what: humanism or inhumanism? De Quincey's Kant may be the absentminded comic character Bergson is talking about, but let's not forget Bergson that becomes one too when debating Einstein.

Marko Bauer is a translator, editor, mememaker and non-writer. With Primož Krašovec, he co-edits the Izhodi/Exits book series (at the publishing house Sophia), which seeks links between humanities, science, technology and literature. In other words, his main interests are zeitgeist (hype, pop) and humour. He’s based in Ljubljana, which is a joke in itself.

As the gap in capabilities between artificial neural networks and humans seems to be unavoidably closing, we are drowning in the incomprehensible buzz of hype, fear and denial. The technology gradually developed over the last few decades, is often portrayed as something both altogether newborn and at the same time entirely too abstract and alien to be considered human in any capacity. Historically, antihumanisms can be construed as more or less discrete deconstructions of humanist exceptionalism’s many manifestations, while still proceeding from its essentialist premises all the same. An attempt at stating this pseudo-dichotomy’s central problem anew, inhumanism is a distillation of the human rational core as the capacity-for and commitment-to continuous normative self-revision in the discursive space of reasons. In this paper, we argue that there are meaningful similarities between how large language models (LLMs') and humans structure our respective images of the world, and that these similarities can inform our self-understanding and our commitments. To this end, we present a preliminary exploration of artificial neural networks (ANN's) as the mirror of humanity’s self-examination in view of how LLMs’ latent spaces robustly embed semantic maps of meaning as vectors. The same process is at work in platform user data embeddings, materialised through informing corporations’ counterintuitive algorithmic meta manoeuvres with massive quantities of vectorized behavioural data. Through the lens of a disembodied topological model of reason and in light of speculative insight into the metastability of LLMs’ semiotically encoded orientation, we see the volatility of ANN’s vectorial value alignment not only as a challenge, but simultaneously as a chance.

Lea Sande is a student in the Sociology of Culture programme at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She works as a journalist at the alternative community radio station Radio Študent, where she writes for the Department for Culture and Humanities. In her work she reports on new technologies and their implementation in culture, writes reviews, contextualises newly released works of theory, and critically analyses often discarded forms of media such as comic books and video games.

Tisa Troha is exploring the edge conditions of the architectural field. Since 2021, she holds an MArch from the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Architecture. Her theory-fictional final thesis project charts the inhuman perspective of architecture as an inhuman technics of the outside. She is part of the editorial board of Šum, a journal for art theory and fiction, and moonlights as a graphic and sound designer.

A definition of the spectral plane as a non-binary alternative to the physical-mental dichotomy and accentuating its importance in the context of modern philosophy and political discourses. An attempt at creating its “map” made up of memes of the spectral plane that replace ever-changing utterances and buzzwords with their stationary subjective and moral location inside the plane. A discussion about the inhuman nature of humanity as an entiry of collective consciousness confronting the individual and territories that said individual consequently draws in order to reclaim the illusion of power and agency. A link between spectral and physical territories, the city as an identity/discourse/avatar.

Stefan Kafidov is a chronically online student at the Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ljubljana (Cultural Studies), who is currently attempting to research the nature of digital discourses, their evolution and emerging tendencies, and their influence on the understanding of the self and psychic drives.

This talk explores the possibility of an Eastern European philosophy of technology, focusing on its inhuman or posthuman potential. Drawing on the works of Polish novelist, philosopher, and doctor Stanisław Lem, it examines how his writings reflected Poland's modern history, investigating why Eastern European intellectuals, unlike those in many other post-colonial and post-imperial regions at the time, embraced rather than rejected technological acceleration. It also considers how Lem's technological perspective challenges both humanist principles and dominant philosophies of his time, presenting a distinct "antihumanist stance" informed by his experiences of Nazi and Soviet occupations, his education as a doctor of medicine with an interest in biotechnology, and his studies of theology, information theory, and philosophy. Re-reading his work in the contemporary moment, the talk argues that technology itself is not merely a vessel for political and social dynamics, but an inhuman and not fully controllable causality. Furthermore, it explores possibilities for technological design that align with long-term evolutionary pathways, rather than contingent social morality.

Bogna Konior is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts (IMA) at NYU Shanghai. She is also a Research Fellow in the Antikythera Program on Speculative Computation at the Berggruen Institute, and a mentor in the Synthetic Intelligence program at Medialab-Matadero Madrid. Her current academic project is on Polish science fiction writer and philosopher, Stanislaw Lem, and his neglected contribution to the theory of the biotechnological evolution of autonomous reason. She is also conducting a multimedia research project on female Catholic mysticism as an early form of cyberfeminism.

Technologically permeated societies are a global reality, and feminist, queer, critical race, decolonial, and crip theories are pivotal in offering critical analyses and ways of imagining, producing, and using technologies differently. This round table offers a sneak peek into a special issue of the journal Feminist Encounters dedicated to feminist techno-imaginaries (upcoming in Autumn 2025). The issue re-inspects the entanglements between technology and imagination from a range of feminist perspectives in disciplines like STS, philosophy and critical theory, media history and media archaeology, cultural history, and cultural and comparative literature studies. Guest-edited by Katja Čičigoj, Natalija Majsova, and Jasmina Šepetavc, the issue brings together diverse contributions that articulate in novel ways how, through emancipatory social imaginaries of technological innovation, technology and feminism impact one another in modern societies. Anti-humanist theoretical legacies and their recent post-humanist articulations have offered important resources to feminists and other peripherally positioned subjects for articulating their exclusion from mainstream technological design, development, and use, and for imagining alternatives. Yet it remains difficult to see how one can utterly divorce feminist, queer, critical race, and decolonial emancipatory takes on technology from a humanist ethos and theoretical framework: how can we reflect upon oppressive and emancipatory forms of technology development and use without reference to humanist notions such as agency, responsibility, or justice? Inhabiting this tension constitutive of emancipatory theories' and practices' relation to anti- and posthumanist thought, this round table refracts the main theme of the conference by speaking to it from a variety of feminist and emancipatory perspectives.

Participants:
Jennifer L. Lieberman is a professor of English and director of interdisciplinary programs at the University of North Florida. She is the author of Power lines: Electricity in American life and letters, 1882-1952, which was published by the MIT press in 2017 and which earned honourable mention for the Michelle Kendrick book prize in literature and science in 2019. She has also published over a dozen articles that examine the interplay between bodies, technology, and culture. An interdisciplinary scholar, Jennifer has held fellowships at the Bakken library and museum, the Smithsonian institution, the Humanities research institute at the University of Illinois, and the National science foundation.

Stephanie B. Jordan is an assistant professor at the Department of media and information and a core faculty in the Centre for gender in a global context at Michigan state university. Her work explores the social and ethical consequences of big data in the climate and ocean sciences with a focus on infrastructure development, labor and policy. She has been awarded honorable mention the ACM Conferences on Human factors in computing systems (CHI) and Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and has been published in the Journal of communication, Interactions magazine and the Routledge handbook on art, science and technology studies, amongst others. Her work contributes to and draws from a diversity of fields and subfields, particularly feminist technoscience and infrastructure studies, computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, labor studies, queer studies, critical race studies, science and technology studies, and science policy.

Maruška Nardoni is a doctoral research fellow at the Centre for social studies of science and a teaching assistant at both the Faculty of social sciences and the Faculty of mathematics and physics, University of Ljubljana. Her PhD thesis explores the monetisation of user data within platform ecosystems, with a particular focus on the role of machine learning. Her research integrates approaches from the sociology of science and technology with political economy. More broadly, her academic interests include the history of science, epistemology, complex engineered systems, and technology acceptance modeling.

Pia Brezavšček is a philosopher and art historian, the editor-in-chief of Maska, a bilingual journal for contemporary performing arts, based in Ljubljana. She works as a cultural worker in several roles - editor, publicist, critic, theatrologist and dramaturge (she collaborated with Saška Rakef, Magdalena Reiter and Bara Kolenc). She was amongst the co-founders and first editors of the internet site www.neodvisni.art that focuses on local performing arts’ criticism. From 2017-2020, she was the president of the Society for contemporary dance of Slovenia. She teaches (contemporary dance history and theory) courses and workshops and has published articles in various publications.

Katja Čičigoj (University assistant, Institute of philosophy, University of Klagenfurt/Celovec) has published on 20th century European philosophy, critical theory, feminist thought and aesthetics. She translated and wrote the scholarly introduction to Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of sex (2019) and edited a volume of articles on the topic (2023). She is coediting special issues on visceral corporeality (Studies in the maternal) and queer cinema in Eastern Europe (Apparatus). Katja is student member of the Steering committee of the international Simone de Beauvoir society where she coordinates a research group on Beauvoir and Marxism that she co-founded. She is starting a research project on pre-pregnancy.

Jasmina Šepetavc is an assistant professor of cultural studies at the University of Ljubljana. Her research interests include film-, feminist- and queer theory. Her work has been published in various magazines and journals (Ekran, Kino!, Social science forum, Studies in European cinema, Studies in Eastern European cinema etc.). She is a part of editorial teams at the Slovenian academic journal Social science forum, as well as Slovenian magazine for film and television Ekran. She is currently co-editing two special issues: Peripheral visions of alternative futures: Feminist technoimaginaries (Feminist encounters) and queer cinema in Eastern Europe (Apparatus). She also works as a film critic and film festival selector and is a member of Fipresci – International federation of film critics.

Natalija Majsova is an associate professor of cultural studies at the University of Ljubljana (Faculty of social sciences). Majsova’s research cuts across memory studies, film and media studies, heritage interpretation, and (post)socialist popular cultures. She is especially interested in the mechanisms of collective memory and remembrance practices at the nexus of projections of the future and imaginaries of the past in the context of technological transformations. She is the author of Memorable futures: Soviet SF cinema and the space age (Lexington Books, 2021) and main co-editor of the Social science forum journal.

Althusserian theoretical antihumanism must be understood in terms of the complex and multi-layered reasons that motivate it. Firstly, at historiographical reason: basing his argumentation on the concept of ‘problematics’, elaborated in a famous passage from the German ideology, as well as on the concept of coupure taken from Bachelardian epistemology, Althusser elaborates a reconstruction of Marxian thought that allows us to identify its originality precisely in its distancing from Feuerbach's theoretical humanism. This historiographical reconstruction allows Althusser to take a theoretical position that we could summarise in the terms of a structuralist reading of Marxism that is both in dialogue and in critical tension with the Lacanian reading of Freud. This theoretical reason brings with it two important political stances: on the one hand, a stance against so-called Western Marxism, which by valorising the Feuerbachian humanism of the Manuscripts of 1944 in fact offers an interclassist reading of Marx, and, on the other hand against Krushcov's socialist humanism that ends up not coming to terms with Stalinism. From this reconstruction we will try to explore the limits and prospects of these stances for the contemporary theoretical-political horizon.

Vittorio Morfino is Full Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Milan-Bicocca, and Director of the Master's programme in Critical Theory of the Society. He has been visiting professor at the Universidade de São Paulo, the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne and the Universidad nacional de Cordoba, and has been Directeur de Programme at the Collège international de philosohie. He is the author of Il tempo e l’occasione. L’incontro Spinoza Machiavelli (Milano, 2002, Paris, 2012), Incursioni spinoziste (Milano, 2002), Il tempo della moltitudine (Roma, 2005, Paris, 2010, Madrid, 2013, Santiago, 2015), Plural Temporality. Transindividuality and the Aleatory between Spinoza and Althusser (Leiden, 2014), Genealogia di un pregiudizio. L’immagine di Spinoza in Germania da Leibniz a Marx (Hildesheim, 2016), and Intersoggettività e transindividualità. Materiali per un’alternativa (Roma, 2002). He is an editor of Quaderni materialisti and Décalages. An Althusserian journal.

Antihumanist starting points are woven into the texture of four animated shorts that dismantle classical notions of human worth and the future. Ark dunks the illusion of luxury into a metaphor of civilisational emptiness, Microcassette foregrounds a discarded object to demonstrate that our existence is coincidental, www.s-n-d.si collages digital artefacts into apocalyptic portraits of the end of humanity ... Altogether, this selection of shorts questions anthropocentric thought and illuminates the fragility of humanist ideals, interrogating the place and future of the human in the relentless universe.

The Ark
Natko Stipaničev, Croatia, 2020, 15'
A luxury ocean-going cruise ship sails the seas.

Microcassette - The smallest cassette I've ever seen / Mikrokazeta: najmanja kazeta koju sam ikad vidio
Igor Bezinović, Ivana Pipal, Croatia, 2020, 19'
Zoki accidentally finds a microcassette on a pile of rubbish in the middle of a large landfill on the island of Lošinj. Through the exploration of the discarded object, the film pays homage to chance and imagination.

www.s-n-d.si
Sara Bezovšek, Slovenia, 2021, 14'
The author was drawn to various apocalyptic scenarios that could lead to the end of the world as we know it. She collaged visual material found online in the form of short videos, memes, photos, gifs, emoticons and various external links with her own works to create a complex and visually saturated narrative.

+Surprise Film

The legitimacy of humanism derives from the pretension to explain human activity as something that arises from man's own subjectivity, his free will, values and beliefs. In contrast, the Freudian psychoanalytic framework offers an alternative explanation for human activity, according to which the human psyche is defined by the laws of the psychic apparatus, according to which conscious or volitional activity is only a secondary response. The economic dimension of metapsychology (the theoretical corpus of knowledge acquired through psychoanalytic practice) focuses, already in early Freud, on the dynamics of the escalation of arousal and its withdrawal, the former representing pleasure and the latter discomfort. Psychic impressions thus cause the escalation of irritation, and it is the function of the psychic apparatus to discharge it. The concept of the drive, an instinct that delivers irritation “from within” and independently of external stimuli, plays a special role in this respect. Freud's discovery of these insights led him to conceive of a libidinal economy, an economic sphere of the psyche in which trading, investing and borrowing take place, and in which psychic energy is the currency. The paper further starts from the thesis that some of the findings derived from this theoretical framework can also explain the widespread use of psychoactive substances such as alcohol, illicit drugs or psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants. Since substances, in addition to their material effects, also have effects linked to their social value, their use is closely intertwined with the libidinal economy. This paper will attempt to outline the ontology of this interplay and demonstrate the relevance of a Freudian theoretical framework for understanding agency as it manifests itself in 21st century capitalism.

Marko Miočić holds a MA in pharmacy, philosophy and sociology. He is currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy. He is involved in translation, mainly for the Association for theoretical psychoanalysis, which publishes the book collection Analecta and the journal Problemi. His translation of Slavoj Žižek's Christian atheism has been published and a translation of Noam Yuran's The sexual economy of capitalism is forthcoming. He works as a journalist at the Culture and humanities section of Radio Študent, where he writes news and theoretical articles and conducts interviews. He works on issues related to capitalism, human agency, the role of pharmacology and libidinal economy.

My presentation will be about the differences in AI development between the USA and China and the geopolitical implications of said difference.

Andrea Jovanović is a researcher at the Institute for political studies (Belgrade) and a marquee presence in Belgrade social life. She is known for slipping during a terrace dance and landing on her behind as well as for straddling a dolphin statue in front of a popular Belgrade caffe to wide public acclaim.

“It's like we are goingto war” is how a worker in a retail warehouse describes his working day. “Every month they evaluate the branches, every month you find out where you are,” says a worker in a retail branch about her work. Using the analysis of interviews with workers in retail warehouses and branches, I will show that they are at work in two different places in the logistics chain of retail companies—in central warehouses, which are the center of the logistics chain, and in branches, which represent peripheral parts of this chain. two specific models of workforce management, which in differentiated ways ensure the productivity and meekness of workers.

In warehouses, productivity and discipline are ensured by a combination of measuring the efficiency of an individual worker (the norm or the number of scanned products in a working day) and the use of exceptions in Slovenian labor legislation, which enables employment through uniform residence and work permits. With this, companies tie the possibility of extending the employment contract to the employee's ability to achieve the norm at the workplace, and the employment contract to the residence permit in Slovenia and the European Union. In retail branches, productivity is measured differently: as a ratio between the realised turnover and the number of employees, which allows comparing the productivity of different branches, monitoring fluctuations in the productivity of one branch over time and taking immediate action when a deviation is detected in the statistics. At the same time, it does not require precise and continuous disciplinary control over individual workers, since achieving the required level of productivity is not the task of an individual worker, but the common goal of the collective.

Since in the central and peripheral cities in the distribution chain of retail companies, the goal of increasing the productivity of the work process and maintaining the meekness of the workforce is achieved with different power models, each of which in its own way binds the workers to the work process, in conclusion, I will conclude that the rebellion and worker organisation in in warehouses it is mainly the fear of disciplining, and in branches identification with the goal of achieving the required productivity. Therefore, employees in branches do not primarily direct their dissatisfaction towards the company, but towards colleagues who fail to demonstrate a sufficient degree of collegiality.

Marja Zakelšek is a MA student in Sociology of culture and Psychology. As a journalist, she mainly reported on the activities of the Student organisation on Radio Študent. She also worked for a short time at the Center for investigative journalism in the Adriatic region (Oštro) and reported on cases of virtual outsourcing. Since 2021, she has been active in the Centre for social research (Cedra), where she helps organise workers in the retail industry.

This paper makes the claim, in dialogue with Levinas and psychoanalysis (inter alia), that anything that shits is worthy of ethical consideration. Along the way, I address the figure of prosopopoeia and the giving of face and voice to others as inadequate ethics for our current crisis. Animals have historically been denied ethical status because they lack a voice: they cannot respond, they’re irresponsible. But an ethics rooted in the voice and, metonymically, the face is, in the end, a humanist ethics, excluding anything nonhuman from the sphere of ethical consideration. Our current ecological and political crisis, however, requires an ethics of the nonhuman. I present a third way in the field of animal ethics, which historically has been divided between the humanist traditions of deontology (animal rights) and utilitarianism (animal liberation). Counter to many arguments for the nonhuman, the shit(mus) test excludes robots and artificial intelligence and I argue that it is very important at our current junction to do just that. To conclude, I turn to poetry and music historically rejected as being too cacaphanous: that is, rejected as sound and fury, signifying nothing—a mere playing with shit—to establish the ethics of shit, not sublimated into the love of money, as an ethics of play rather than an ethics of work. In other words, the ethics of shit is not just an antihumanist ethics, but an anticapitalist ethics of the excluded.

Eric Powell is a Visiting researcher in the Faculty of arts at the University of Ljubljana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in ELH, Textual practice, Thinking verse, Essays in romanticism, Romance, revolution and reform, Romantic textualities, Socialist forum, and Chicago review, among other places. From 2018–2020 he was the editor of Chicago review at the University of Chicago.

I will talk about antihumanist theories of the 21st century, using the example of media archaeology and its position within related theoretical scenes (contacts with accelerationism are rare) and academic scenes (it is mainly reduced back to culture), as well as internet culture (memes about media archaeology do not exist!). Indeed, radical media archaeology, in particular the work of Wolfgang Ernst, is not only rooted in a conceptual shift from culture to technology but wants to get rid of the references to the human being and its cultural and cognitive bias altogether. It dispenses with the historical consciousness and eschatology generated by discourse and writing, as well as the ghosts of dead media: time only continues in the function of technology. With the increasing presence of machine intelligence in human culture, the coldness of media archaeology, as Maks Valenčič puts it, is thus only deepened. I will be interested in the next step of media-archaeological anti-humanism: the automation of the humanities.

Robert Bobnič is a PhD student in Media studies and a researcher at the Department of cultural studies at the Faculty of social sciences at the University of Ljubljana. His primary interest lies in the sociology of algorithmic and internet cultures, media archaeology, and computational media theory. He is a member of GIA collective.

Datafication encourages automation on a large scale, including the most basic aspects of life (Couldry and Mejias 2019). This pushes for increased data demand, resulting in proliferation of public, private and public-private data repositories (Thylstrup 2022). On the other hand, developments in Big data (Beyer & Laney 2012) and the increase in computational power have stipulated capitalization of AI research, in particular of artificial neural networks (Fazi 2020). However, the low level of interpretability of deep neural networks (Kelleher 2019) has ushered a myriad of discourses on deep learning. In this regard, Campolo and Crawford argue, that these discourses are not just producing techno-optimism, but enchanted determinism as well, shielding creators of these systems from social accountability (2020). By focusing on determinism, as emerging in discourses, related to deep learning and on AI more widely, this paper will aspire to address at least four lines of research: analyze human and machinic learning modes; problematize the notion of autonomy within the context of representation, abstraction and agency; discuss the so-called delete culture, for which Floridi claims it succeeded the cultural trend of recording information (2023), being specifically interesting for its potential evocation of autonomy. Nonetheless, the main preoccupation of this presentation will be to theoretically dwell on somehow distinctive, double structured character of agency, conducted by human intervention when training neural networks.

Since 2019 Nina Cvar has been working as an Associate researcher at the Faculty of electrical engineering at University of Ljubljana, where she is involved in research projects on digitalisation. Since 2022, she works at the Department of sociology at the Faculty of arts, University of Ljubljana too and collaborates in research projects at the Faculty of social sciences, University of Ljubljana. Between 2008 and 2017 she was a professional film critic, contributing to all major Slovenian publications. For her work she was awarded with the Nika Bohinc’s award. In 2021, she published a scientific monograph Digital image and global capitalism: Technology, politics, resistance for one of the central Slovenian humanities and social sciences publishers, Sophia.

Prof. dr. Andrej Kos is currently a full professor at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana and head of the Laboratory for Telecommunications. His research areas include distributed cyber-physical systems, digitalization and security. Technology areas include the Internet of things, communication protocols, 5G and 6G networks, cyber security, blockchain and data. The vertical sectors supported by these technology areas in his work are smart cities, villages and communities, industry, critical infrastructure and public safety. In 2020, he received the Gold Plaque of the University of Ljubljana for outstanding merits in the development of scientific, pedagogical or artistic creation and for strengthening the reputation of the University of Ljubljana. He is an associate editor of the scientific journal Elektrotehniški Vestnik and an associate editor of the international scientific conference Cobcom and the VITEL conference, and a member of the program committee of several international conferences. As a visiting professor, he has lectured at several prestigious foreign universities, including in Graz at the Technical University Graz, in St. Petersburg at the University of Telecommunications (Bonch Brojevich), in China in Jinan at Jinan University, and in Beijing at Beijing Normal University (BNU). As an invited lecturer he has also lectured in Berlin, Dublin, Qufu, Xian and Patras.

Despite the humanist chorus that would reduce AI to mere materialisation of social relations such as capitalist exploitation, colonial resource extraction or obsession with surveillance on the part of the modern state, AI exhibits a curious autonomy both in its development and in its behaviour - an autonomy that it is at the same time not an autonomy of a symbolic structure (when attempted as symbolic structure AI was largely irrelevant and unsuccessful) and thus poses the main question of original antihumanism anew - if it is neither symbolic nor really a structure, but still curiously autonomous and alien in the way that the unconscious or capitalist social relations seemed in the 1960s, how can AI be theorised in an antihumanist way? Which weaknesses and blindspots of the original, structuralist inspired antihumanist theory would such theorisation reveal?

Primož Krašovec is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where he teaches courses on epistemology, ideology, theory of technology and digital cultures. His current research areas are: capitalist automation and real subsumption; artificial intelligences; and new media cultures. In 2021 he published his first book Tujost kapitala (Alien capital).

Intellectual history is full of turns. Starting from the 1950s, we have seen a flood of supposed paradigm shifts, which make up a theoretical trend that displays the tendency of becoming an independent discipline within the humanities. This theoretical fascination began with the linguistic turn in the 1960s, which was succeeded by the pictorial and bodily turns in the 1980s, followed by the affective turn in the 1990s, and, most recently, by the sensory turn. The talk sets out to rethink this – by no means exhaustive – trajectory of turns by relating them to the humanism/antihumanism divide.

Lidija Šumah, Ph.D., is regular faculty in the Department of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. She specializes in affect theory, (post)-structuralism, theoretical psychoanalysis, critical theory, and early modern philosophy (Descartes, Spinoza). Currently, she is visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and Centre for sensory studies in Montreal.

Social choice and voting in particular is a core issue in liberal societies and arguably all (human and non-human) group decisions. However, antihumanist epistemologists and philosophers of science usually don't concern themselves with the development of social choice theory. This paper makes use of the (pre)history of social choice theory (from Pliny the Elder, Lull and the French Enlightenment to Arrow's theorem [1951] and beyond) to explore how models of selected epistemologies would fit onto its phases.

Particular attention will be paid to Arrow's impossibility theorem which can easily be misunderstood as a dead end but is in fact the first successful application of the axiomatic approach in the social sciences and marks the start of the field of mechanism design.

The goal of this attempt is to gain insight into how epistemological models model conceptuality in relation to social choice theory and what if anything we can learn about conceptuality itself from this encounter.

Jan Kostanjevec is a philosopher, social scientist, and programmer, interested in philosophy of science, mathematics, and technology, focusing on expressivity, thinkability, and areas related to ideas, skills, and machines. He is writing a PhD thesis on software development in news organizations. He is part of the IT team at Radio Študent, a member of GIA and kompot.si. He published in Javnost, Šum, and Razpotja. He has spoken at LMU Munich, BudPT, Socratic Lectures, and mur.at.

The presentation challenges the widely cited theory of surveillance capitalism, as proposed by Shoshana Zuboff, an American scholar whose work posits a “new logic of accumulation and operations” that allegedly claims human experience as free raw material for conversion into behavioural data. Zuboff argues that this “rogue force,” driven by novel economic imperatives, exploits the “virgin territory” of private human experience, with the development of platforms such as Google and Facebook serving as prime examples. The presentation pinpoints some of the most exaggerated claims within surveillance capitalism theory, which fail to account for various forms of indifference toward moral values rooted in human nature. These assumptions, symptomatic of contemporary anxieties about technology, often adopt a paranoid tone and employ echoes of Orwellian dystopia instead of actual concepts. Moreover, Zuboff’s framework positions privacy as the cornerstone of democratic order and concludes with a sino-phobic fable portraying the final stage of surveillance capitalism’s destructive effects: a future where “true individualism” will perish and machines manipulate people into uniform subjectivities. By offering three counter-arguments – drawing on examples from common online marketing practices, routine data collection and processing, and machine learning development – the presentation will demonstrate that much of what is referred to as “surveillance revenues” or “surveillance capital” can, in fact, be understood as typical online advertising activities rather than fundamentally new or sinister form of capitalism.

Maruška Nardoni is a doctoral research fellow at the Centre for social studies of science and a teaching assistant at both the Faculty of social sciences and the Faculty of mathematics and physics, University of Ljubljana. Her PhD thesis explores the monetisation of user data within platform ecosystems, with a particular focus on the role of machine learning. Her research integrates approaches from the sociology of science and technology with political economy. More broadly, her academic interests include the history of science, epistemology, complex engineered systems, and technology acceptance modeling.

Due to rapid developments in advanced algorithms and computational power, thinking machines have begun to consume much of the current philosophical debate about technology. Though inherently linked to AI, significantly less attention is given to feeling machines and to the substantial strides made in their recent technological development. The talk takes its cue from three distinct loci of the ongoing collapse of the distance separating humans from our technological appendages. Sketching out the conceptual value of the notions of bio-mimetics, bio-fabrication, and bio-hybridisation for philosophical inquiry, the talk proceeds by staging an encounter between present-day bio-technological research, on the one hand, and, on the other, Freud’s old anti-humanist insights into the nature of the human as a prosthetic deity.

Simon Hajdini is Senior research associate in the Department of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, where he teaches social and political philosophy. He specialises in critical theory, political economy, (hyper)structuralism and psychoanalysis. At present, he is researching and writing on the sensorial politics of social divisions. His latest book is What's that smell? A philosophy of the olfactory (MIT Press, 2024).

For many commentators, user-friendly generative AI technologies, such as Dall-E, ChatGPT, and Runway, herald an onslaught of unreal, informatic simulacra. Media theorist Matthew Kirschenbaum, for example, has predicted a “textpocalypse” in which human-authored texts will be lost in a sea of machine-generated facsimiles. (Indeed, who among us that teaches classes with any sort of intensive reading and writing has not wondered if our students’ critical faculties will be nipped in the bud, snuffed out before they've even been ignited, by the ease and accessibility of generative AI?) But is the situation really so simple and well-defined, such that we can speak of an inhuman informatics that stands opposite the supposed agency, originality, and critical spirit of human readers and writers? This talk argues for a new formulation of the problem, attentive to how recent AI technologies threaten to consolidate and even elevate an anachronistic humanism. Only by transfiguring this entrenched opposition between technics and the human can we achieve a properly humanist (or, for that matter, antihumanist) philosophy equal to the demands of the present.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and co-chair of the SCMS Philosophy and theory special interest group. He has taught at universities in New Haven, Paris, London, Evanston, and Gothenburg. Duke university published his book Code: From information theory to French theory in 2024 and his essays on media history appear in journals including Representations, Critical inquiry, and Grey room. He also works as a curator in the areas of media and environmental studies.