Conferences

Pre-Announcement

XXVI International InkriT-Conference

The Berlin Institute of Critical Theory (InkriT) invites you to its XXVI International Conference from May 9-12, 2024 at ver.di-Bildungs- und Begegnungszentrum Clara Sahlberg in Berlin-Wannsee.

The conference will be held in cooperation with the Institute for Critical Social Analysis of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation and is co-funded by the Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) of the FRG.

The general theme of the conference is:

Exit: The Human?

The title does not provide a prognosis, but rather asks a question. Its apocalyptic tint is not new. Throughout the centuries it has caused a stir in times of crisis-ridden transition. Even now it is buzzing in many different ways in the discourse of our time. Just think of the warning from the head of Open AI, who embodies a pinnacle of current AI progress, that AI could spell the end of humanity. The danger of exit that threatens the human species due to the climate emergency was brought into general consciousness by Greta Thunberg at the UN climate summit on September 23, 2019, when she accused the rulers of all countries before the eyes and ears of the world public: How dare you not to listen to science!

In short: the exit question is on the agenda. We are not so much asking it as inviting to face it, and to do so in a historically materialist way. Starting from the distinction between productive forces, relations of production and – as a result of their contradictory unity – mode of production, supplemented with Gramsci’s concept of a mode of living that interacts with it, we approach the currently dominant mode of production of social life: high-tech capitalism based on the computer as the leading productive force in the transition from its online phase to AI capitalism. And this in particular in regards to the changes in the conception of the human being and its conditions of realization.

If we understand ›being human‹ as a species-specific product of the postnatal appropriation of the historical substance ›of the human‹, the question arises as to how the current revolutions affect its appropriation as respective individual realization of the ›essence‹ of the human. Marx sees it as both prerequisite and result of a ›human society‹ or ›societal humanity‹ (10th Feuerbach thesis). What will happen to humanity and humankind if ‘the human‹ in the sense of this objective no longer exists? The AI machinery, which cannot itself become a human subject, could contribute to the disappearance of the ›human’ if it, in its mimetic omnipotence, gets the human subjectification under control.

Moreover, the present is increasingly pregnant with the possibility, long since spelled out in science fiction, that the divide between the AI-capitalist billionaire class and its service elite on the one hand and the large masses on the other hand will become a species divide within our species between genetically and by chip implants also psychophysically potentized specimens and those growing ›naturally‹ [naturwüchsig] and culturally. Such techno-scientific power possibilities, which already exist, form the breeding ground for ideologies and dystopias, accompanied by discourses in which new materialisms are combined with trans-, post- and anti-humanisms. The ideology-critique of such tendencies will have to prove itself through the resistant attempt to reconstruct a critical conception of humanism and humanity under high-tech conditions and with a view to the unsurmountable asymmetrical intertwining of humans and nature.

(WFH)

Plenary session on the general theme

Projected are lectures and contributions by Gesa Foken* (Würzburg), Jason Moore (New York), Miguel Vedda (Buenos Aires), and others who are involved in the current production of Argument issue 343 with contributions on the title question.

*requested

Among others, the following workshops on HCDM article drafts are scheduled: