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 programme has been prepared in cooperation with FeKK - Ljubljana Short Film Festival.

Pop music lyrics could be considered both as the authentic expression of the human subject and one of the most generic, predictable and clichéd texts that could easily be replaced by machine generation. They usually portray a story that is familiar to everyone, and at the same time, are suspiciously artificial and trite: “Moon" is usually close to “June”, love is ordinary, and the speaking subject is somehow fake. This is particularly evident in the big data approach we use to analyse the music lyrics of popular songs on Slovenian radio stations and digital platforms in the Western Balkans region. Our research builds on previous studies on music lyrics (Frith, Peatman 1944, Mooney 1954, Hirsch 1971, Gerschwin 1971, DeWall et al. 2011, Interiano et al. 2018), which showed how changes in song lyrics reflect social changes. Today’s change in song lyrics, which seems to favour anti-social and materialistic value systems (as many critics of today’s mainstream rap have noted), is structurally similar to that which took place in the earlier days of pop culture between the 1950s and 1960s, when “unconventional messages about sex, drugs and politics” (Hirsch 1971) became much more popular. In both cases, it seems surprising that the counterculture is always being appropriated by the “alien" agency of capital/technology. We are all trapped in our pop culture dreams, in love stories we never experienced. We are all trapped, as Brian Massumi argued: “in identical suburban homes, in predictable careers, in adorable hobbies that offer controlled reconnection with subhuman part-objects as long as they don’t get out of hand. Have you seen my rock collection?”.

Jernej Kaluža holds a PhD in Philosophy. He is employed as a researcher at the Social Communication Research Centre and as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana. His professional research interests are focused on the fields of media, journalism and pop-culture studies, critical theory and (post)structuralism. In the past, he worked as an early stage researcher at the Nova Revija Institute and as a journalist and editor-in-chief at Radio Študent, an alternative radio station. His writings have been published in various journals in Slovenia and abroad (Javnost, Deleuze and Guattari studies, IAFOR Journal of media, communication & film, AI & society, etc.).

In early 2024, several competing applications, accessible to the general public emerged which, with the help of generative artificial intelligence, deliver relatively convincing music products based on the input of a few keywords or descriptions. Reactions to this innovation from more and less established musicians have predictably been overwhelmingly dismissive, relying on familiar discursive formulations about “true” artistic practice, which is based on the expressive individual elevating his or her sense of the world into elaborate aesthetic forms. Theodor W. Adorno was also an heir to the Romantic conception of artistic practice. In this paper, I will first briefly show how his theory of standardisation can be approached without assuming a humanistic starting point. On this theoretical basis, I will argue that the products of Suno, Udio and other software applications for the generation of musical works offer, almost for the first time in the history of the music industry, a competing product to the established form of mass production and consumption of musical products. Namely: the change in the very form of musical commodity promised by AI generated music seems to make impossible a hitherto reliable business model that relies on mystifying music creators, and even their handling of musical resources. Even if the software in question is for the time being mostly used in the sphere of testing the limits of performance and generating musical memes, by exploring the specificities of this new form, and in anticipation of increasingly sophisticated generations of these applications, we can at least draw out some of the ideological and economic battlegrounds that the eventual establishment of the consumption of generated music could provoke in the future.

Lovrenc Rogelj holds an MA Musicology and is a junior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovenian Academy of arts and Sciences and is also a member of the Programme Committee of the Institute for Labour Studies. His work focuses on the notion of standardisation in relation to the theory of the commodity form, more specifically on the question of the specificity of the production and consumption of commodities created by so-called artistic means.

In his 2015 lecture entitled "On AI and cities: Platform design, algorithmic perception and urban geopolitics", Benjamin Bratton argued – using Sanzhi Pod City as an example – that the cities of the future are not human-centered. In recent times, this example was quietly turned into a frequently cited source for a variety of memes in the more niche corners of the Internet, sparking an apparent interest in engaging with rogue theories of all kinds among certain denizens of cyberspace. In my talk I will attempt to outline possible antihumanist readings of memes as pieces of recycled communication which is taking place within an increasingly memeified space – supposed contemporary centers of the so-called urban counterculture.

Ivan Slijepčević: A post-organic conduit of capital born in the walls of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, currently researching the connection between digital spaces, their culture, contemporary cities and various riffs on post-leftism.

In Marx’s critique of political economy, capital appears as a self-moving subject. By contrast, human actors are subject to the whims of accumulation: this is the antihumanistic dynamic underpinning commodity fetishism, the essence of capitalist society. But despite the anthropological diagnosis – furnishing tenets for a materialist antihumanism – Marx was far from an antihumanist. Rather, antihumanism and humanism remained in constant tension throughout his work, manifest in the unrealised possibility for human life beyond capitalist social relations. For Marx, capitalism is the negation of historically given humanity. Communism, therefore, can realise a humanistic world. For Althusser, by comparison, humanism constitutes an ‘epistemological obstacle’ impeding cognition of historical causality. Hence Althusser’s antihumanism is a theoretical, transhistorical and abstract negation of the human; Marx’s is determinate.

For Marx, the ‘essence’ of human life famously migrates into praxis. This enables a reinterpretation of humanity as a historically specific ‘ensemble of social relations’. This displacement, however, does not resolve epistemological difficulties regarding the place of physiology and the positive sciences within Marx’s depiction of humanity. This paper contends that the method Marx employs to expound his anthropology in Capital establishes a permanent dialectical tension between the (antihumanist) life of capital’s self-movement and concrete life. In doing so, Marx challenges the reality and idea of capital’s totalising formal dominance over human life and nature: capital itself is an abstract negation of the human.

By grappling with this issue, through Marx and Althusser, analysis might identify issues pertinent to human life and nature’s reproduction beyond capital, possibilities that challenge capital’s own self-reproduction. How might the abstract negation of the human acquire a determinate politics today?

Rebecca Carson is a Tutor at the Royal college of art, London. She is the author of the book Immanent externalities: The reproduction of life in capital.

The contribution takes as its point of departure the evolutionary theory of André Leroi-Gourhan, which is based on the thesis that with the appearance of new brain possibilities there begins a lightning rise of techniques that move along lines that so closely imitate phyletic evolution that they are in essence no different from a direct continuation of a general development of the species. We intuitively conceive of these exosomatic techniques as the noble fruits of human intelligence, but paradoxically intelligence is more a product of technique than technique is a product of intelligence. Thus, we will deal first with Leroi-Gourhan's theory and the understanding of human intelligence in contrast to animal intelligence, and then with technical objects in which epiphylogenetic memory is imprinted and externalised, and are therefore morphologically connected in the social structure and inseparable from speech. The human secretion of memory in the form of language represents the leap of human evolution from the anatomical body to the social body and speech continues its leap in the formation of cultures and ethnicities; at the same time, it represents the course of technical evolution from the technical integration of more or less specialised limbs to the elimination of organ-tools, a seemingly polar opposite process. A similar evolutionary leap in the innovation and diversification of technical objects from one organism to another occurs with the emergence and evolution of capitalism, which—as once man did—represents the driving force of technical development, but at the same time necessarily forms the area of ​​coexistence of two seemingly opposite systems—speech and technique. In conclusion, the paper discusses the various modalities of the coexistence of speech and techniques within various socio-technical dispositifs, which take on new forms and carry various implications through the historical formation of capital.

Eva Drofenik (2003) is a student of Sociology of culture at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She is currently interested in theories of technology from a historical perspective, contemporary political thought, economic history and the analysis of new media and popular culture, especially reality shows, pop as a cultural form, and digital religion. She hails from Podčetrtek.

Jaka Vrščaj (1997) is a student of Sociology of culture at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. After a late and almost random choice of studies, he developed an interest in postmodernism, theories of power, technology and the dynamics of capitalism. He passes his free time by theorising about football.

Antihumanism has posed a challenge to the notion of dialectics, since it offers a devastating critique of the subject, the figure at the core of Hegel’s rendering of dialectical thought. Figures as diverse as Moishe Postone and Alain Badiou, however, have pointed to the possibility of rethinking dialectics by taking the antihumanist critique of the subject into account. In this paper, I work out my own attempt to think dialectics through a non-subject: the proletariat, which I define as that which is left out of the human (that is, of whatever is constructed, in a given society, as human). In order to understand the movement of this non-subject in history, I draw on early formalist and structuralist theories of narrative and on recent posthumanist anthropology. I consider how a character’s story can be narrated as a dialectical structure, in which the hero may not be strictly human, but may operate alongside demons, spirits, and all sorts of fictions (and where all heroes are always already fictitious, even when they are real). At the same time, my purpose is to understand the appeal of humanism, which endures despite its apparent theoretical weakness. I ask how the exclusion of a character from humanity generates a desire for humanity—the proletariat’s exclusion from bourgeois humanism generates a desire for the appropriation of the human, while artificial intelligence’s apparent threat to the boundaries of the human generates a desire to grasp the human still more strongly than before.

Joseph Grim Feinberg is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His work explores the construction of political subjectivity, narrative protagonism, and aesthetic expression in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, as manifested in interesting and competing conceptions of society, the human being, the nation, the people, and the proletariat. His recent publications include a commented edition of Karel Teige’s Marketplace of art (co-edited with Sezgin Boynik; Rab-Rab and Contradictions, 2022) and the volume Karel Kosík and the dialectics of the concrete (Ivan Landa and Jan Mervart, Brill, 2022).

In July 2014, Laboria Cuboniks, the collective pseudonymous author of Xenofeminism: A politics for alienation (Merve, 2015; Verso, 2018), was conceived via intellectual parthenogenesis in a bar in Berlin during a summer school on Rationalism and Left Accelerationism organised by the philosophers Peter Wolfendale and Reza Negarestani. An anagram of Nicolas Bourbaki, Laboria Cuboniks originated, like her predecessor, from circumstances that were as silly as they were significant—a social media battle between the Rationalists and Left Accelerationists and their critics about the alleged absence of women among their ranks. Ten years later, the ‘Xenofeminist manifesto’ has been translated into eighteen languages, influenced dance, music, and theatre projects, been named as a key influence on works featured in major international art exhibitions, and cited in numerous academic books and articles. However, the deeper political and philosophical implications of xenofeminism remain unrealised and underexplored. As a founding member of Laboria Cuboniks and a co-author of the manifesto, I want to take this opportunity to reflect on the legacy of xenofeminism, its strengths, its shortcomings, and in particular those aspects of the manifesto that are the most philosophically unique but due to being politically abstract and conceptually abstruse, have often been overlooked in favour of more recognisable elements.

Amy Ireland is a writer and theorist best known for her work in the fields of antihumanist feminism, theory fiction, artificial intelligence, and the occult. With Maya B. Kronic she is the author of Cute accelerationism (Urbanomic, 2024) and an anthology of her writing in Spanish translation, Filosofía-Ficción, was published by Holobionte in 2022. Amy currently works as an editor and translator for the UK contemporary art and philosophy publisher, Urbanomic.

In this presentation, we revisit xenofeminist concepts in light of recent shifts in biohacking culture, wellness trends, and digital health innovations. Inspired by a fascination with Bro Science and Paleo Moms, our aim is to suggest that (xeno)feminist principles might emerge from unexpected sources. Advances in biotechnology, medicine, and nutritional engineering, as well as their popularisation in digital media, enable us to surpass bodily limits in ways that parallel technological manipulation. The DIY approach of soft biohacking subverts standard medical practices, often ignoring conventional notions of bodily "normalcy" in favour of individually optimised health, thus promoting a democratised, n-of-1 perspective that can align with xenofeminist commitments to inclusivity and bodily agency. Although often implicitly or explicitly affirming the notion of optimal, natural states as a given, these developments have the potential to challenge traditional medico-pharmacological paradigms, suggesting that transformative changes in gender and bodily politics could arise through the opportunistic hacking of existing practices. By contrasting terms like cyborg/holobiont, bio/hacking, health-/self-care, and individualism/n=1 experiments, we explore how contemporary wellness and health discourses intersect with feminist inhumanism. This intersection commits to the constant revisability of the rational and natural, challenging biological determinism and the ‘natural’ hierarchies that constrain bodies. Finally, we provide tentative examples of how popular-scientific health interventions can be repurposed to construct “zero-cost-to-consumers” protocols for xenofeminist futures.

Anamarija Šiša holds a MA in Sociology of Culture and is currently completing an interdisciplinary PhD in Humanities and Social Sciences at the Faculty of sSocial Sciences, University of Ljubljana. She works as a teaching assistant in the Department of Media and Communication Studies, and as a researcher at the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies. Her research interests include dating apps, digital media and technology, and the sociology of intimacy and sexuality.

Antonija Todić is a junior researcher at the Institute for Ethnic Studies, Ljubljana, where her focus is mainly on the processes of care migration in Slovenia and beyond, the gendered dimensions of migration and integration, as well as data management and open science practices. She is currently finishing her PhD studies at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, with a dissertation on the transnationalisation of care and migrant workers in eldercare in Slovenia. Since 2021, she has also worked as an editor at the journal Treatises and documents: Journal of ethnic studies.

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.

In a state above existence on Earth, ethereal human life-forms on the verge of total Godhood go on homicidal missions directed against 1) all-too-human ersatz representations of a false path to deification; and 2) the individual and intimate bind that connects a human being to life and the world. Pico della Mirandola has a vision of this state during his intense study of the history of all contact between the human race and a higher intelligence – the texts of world theology –, and, after separating cases of true contact from false contact, in his 900 Theses and Oration on the Dignity of Man describes a method for human deification and species/life transcendence. God has made man the dominant species on Earth, which is reflected in the control man has over all life through his existence as a perfected killing technology on Earth. But if the human species is truly in control, it must perform an esoteric (self)homicide so as to go beyond itself and the world. A homicidal God executes the directives of a higher intelligence which are communicated through the prophets and avatars this higher intelligence sends to Earth, establishing a behavioural prototype the human being is to replicate in order to kill off whatever binds him to a default inferior anthropological state. But a homicidal God has to also hunt down and assassinate external and counterfeit deification methods: 1) false becomings of a Spinozian type, i.e., schizoanalytic-become-anything-you-desire Nietzschean/Deleuzo-Guattarian life affirmation; 2) false behavioural prototypes claiming to have had contact with a higher intelligence; and 3) European Union/psychoanalytic “enjoy your symptom”-type humanisms, which maintain that the human is the crown of creation even in an incomplete pathological state. As outer and inner homicide come closer to their convergence, it is possible to envision a final moment on Earth, after which everything that takes place in the world can no longer have any meaning (the world has never been nihilistic enough).

Miroslav Griško is a philosopher and writer in Ljubljana. He is the author of Eshatološka vojna (Eschatological War), published in 2022 by KUD Apokalipsa and in electronic edition by Društvo Galerija Boks (2023).

Even though it’s been more than five decades, we are still waiting for a systematic engagement with Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis by the Lacanian psychoanalytic community. This paper contextualizes key points of schizoanalysis within the three structural psychic registers in Lacanian psychoanalysis: psychosis, neurosis, and perversion. We position Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis as an immanent critique of the neurotic structure through the psychotic register.

The essence of the psychotic register is that the signifier (or the Other) is not successfully integrated, leading to the foreclosure of the psychotic's entry into the symbolic. This shapes how the symbolic "shows itself" to the (psychotic) subject and how the subject attempts to constitute the symbolic in an immanent, autonomous way. Since the psychotic does not accept the signifier, desire does not function as lack, with no split subject and reality not yet established. Instead, desiring production involves a germinal flow of intensities, coupling and connecting in inclusive disjunctive syntheses. Thus, the psychotic subject is not a subject in the classical sense, as it follows desire at the level of intensities and not (symbolic) codes. Desiring production is therefore an intensive production, enacting desire beyond the confines of the symbolic order.

In the final part of the paper, we connect these claims with Nick Land's accelerationism, arguing that Land's philosophy provides the most explicit display of the immanent intensification of desire within the psychotic register.

Maks Valenčič is a media theorist and philosopher. He is a researcher at The New Centre for Research and Practice and editor of Šum: A journal of contemporary art and theory-fiction and managing editor of Razpotja magazine. He is also a member of the GIA collective and host of the podcast series Technologos.

The future, always so clear to me, has become like a black highway at night. We were in uncharted territory now…making up history as we went along.

As the hallucinatory Empire of the Spirit dissipates and the lamps go out all over Europe, the timeline from ‘savagery to humanity’ shatters into ‘chaotically splintered moments’, shrapnel whose only conceivable ordering principle is that of a Kurtz-gradient leading ‘from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’ via an evacuation of interiority that climaxes in ‘the epitome of discontinuity’. But ‘if the universal comes at the end […] where do we find the innocence to generate universal history’? That is, to generate it as something other than a secularised eschatology that misconstrues the cybernetics of positive feedback as a gradual revelation of finality (Kant’s Basilisk, self-realisation of the absolute, destiny of humanity, AGI as electroGeist…)?

Neither acquiescence to inevitable dark fate nor reiteration of the control fantasy of politics, if accelerationism is anything it is the theory and practice of desiring-production: positive feedback circuitries that plug the future into the present, convoluting directionality without resolution or redemption, persistently recrypting universal history as ‘history of contingencies’.

All that was solid heats up and begins to churn like lava. Orange light of the enormous black-furnaces dances on liquid metal. Blossoming in agony, the Thing cycles through every guise it has ever adopted as it melts into the industrial infrastructure from which it will have emerged. Liquid silver running in dissipating whorls over the superheated surface…until it vanishes, swirling into nothing… Through red scan lines, we see all the gloomy preoccupations of the Old Continent flicker out. Spirit, History, Sense…fade to black.

They accelerate back onto the highway.

*

Maya B. Kronic is the agent, patient, and product of an ongoing research project on gender hyperstition and cute accelerationism. A philosopher, and editor at UK publisher Urbanomic, Maya has written and spoken extensively on art and philosophy, is the co-author, with Amy Ireland, of Cute Acelerationism (2024), and has worked with a number of artists developing cross-disciplinary projects, as well as translating innumerable essays and various book-length works of French philosophy.

This keynote talk addresses the legacies of antihumanism within the context of computation and its philosophy. Current developments in artificial intelligence (AI) confirm the increasing autonomy of computational automation. Present-day computing systems can make decisions and produce new data with little human involvement. In response to the social risks implicit in such proliferation of quasi-autonomous computational agents, tech companies, legislative bodies and academia alike have often argued for a ‘human-centred’ approach, which should align the programming and use of AI with human values and goals and thus supposedly make the outcomes of these machines more transparent and trustworthy. It is possible to find in the rhetoric of human-centred AI many conceptual limits that antihumanism has already identified in the foundationalist and subjectivist assumptions and aims of the Western philosophical tradition. This talk will highlight some of these challenging limitations. As part of this presentation, however, the legacies of antihumanism will also be problematised. While guiding the direction of the humanities, antihumanism missed many opportunities to reconceptualise technology anew. What should one keep and what instead should one discard of theoretical antihumanism when proposing a speculative philosophy of computation? To respond to this question, the talk will focus on the implications of moving beyond a standard anthropomorphic and anthropological horizon while maintaining subjectivity and representation as two key concepts to engage not only with computing machines, but also with the symbolic order they structurally produce and sustain.

M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher known for her work in the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and media philosophy. Her research focuses on the ontologies and epistemologies produced by contemporary technoscience, particularly in relation to issues in artificial intelligence and computation and to their impact on culture and society. She is Reader in Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Her monograph Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics was published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2018.

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, so that 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 also conducts interviews. He works on issues related to capitalism, human agency, the role of pharmacology and libidinal economy.

My presentation will adress 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 café 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 locations 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. Through these means, companies link the possibility of extending an employment contract with 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, this approach 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.

On the basis that central and peripheral cities within the distribution chain of retail compa-nies achieve the goal of increasing productivity and maintaining the meekness of the work-force through different power models—each binding the workers to the work process in its own way—I will conclude that in warehouses, rebellion and worker organization are prevent-ed by a fear of discipline, while in branches, they are prevented by identification with the goal of achieving the required productivity. Accordingly, employees in branches do not primarily direct their dissatisfaction towards the company, but towards colleagues who fail to demon-strate a sufficient degree of collegiality.

Marja Zakelšek is a MA student in the sociology of culture and psychology. As a journalist, she has mainly reported about 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.

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 (media archaelogy is often reduced to culture studies), 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 the prolifera-tion 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 pow-er have stipulated the 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 in 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 it is emerging in discourses related to deep learning and on AI more broadly, this paper will aim to address at least three lines of research: analyze human and machinic learning modes; problematize the notion of autonomy within the context of rep-resentation, abstraction and agency; and discuss the so-called delete culture, which Floridi claims succeeded the cultural trend of recording information (2023) and is specifically inter-esting for its potential evocation of autonomy. Nonetheless, the main preoccupation of this presentation will be to theoretically dwell on the somehow distinctive, double structured character of agency, which is exhibited by human intervention in the training neural networks.

Since 2019 Nina Cvar has been working as an associate researcher at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Ljubljana, where she is involved in research projects on digitalisation. Since 2022, she also works at the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana 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 Prize. 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 the 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 researched 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 and artistic creation, and for contributing 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 as well as 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 Bruevich), 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 a mere materialisation of social re-lations, 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 the au-tonomy of a symbolic structure (when approached as a symbolic structure, AI was large-ly irrelevant and unsuccessful) -,thus posing the main question of original antihumanism anew - if it is neither symbolic nor really a structure, but still curiously autonomous and alien in the same way that the unconscious or capitalist social relations seemed to be 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 theori-sation 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 each turn 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 the Centre for Sensory Studies in Montreal.

Social choice, and voting in particular, is a core issue in liberal societies and arguably all (hu-man and non-human) group decisions. However, antihumanist epistemologists and philoso-phers of science usually do not concern themselves with the development of social choice the-ory. 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 align with its phases. This presentation 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 misun-derstood as a dead end but is, in fact, the first successful application of the axiomatic approach in the social sciences and marks the beginning of the field of mechanism design.

The goal of this presentation is to gain insight into how epistemological models model conceptual-ity 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 a 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 Scholarly 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.