After the Digital Turn: On Felix Stalder’s The Digital Condition

How, since the mid 199os, the internet has changed our lives? How the digital technology has saturated almost all the spheres of our societies? How it has brought about an unprecedented cultural transformation? Why the genealogy of this transformation can be traced back to the rise of knowledge-economy at the end of the 19th century and what the increasing digitalization of all that exists has to do with the culturalization of economy and, at the same time, with the technologization of culture?

The course will explore the concept of “digitality” and discuss its far-reaching effects on all the forms of contemporary culture. It will pay particular attention to the deep change in the way we (re)produce and distribute knowledge today, a change directly caused by the digital turn. It will also explicitly ask how this change has affected the disciplinary division of modern sciences. Last and not least the course will focus on the political consequences of digitalization and ask how are they shaping our future in terms of its post-democratic and commons-based developments.

Readings:

Felix Stalder, The Digital Condition, trans. Valentine Pakis, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018.

Felix Stalder, „Scientific Writing Beyond Peer Revview“, transversal texts, 06/2014. https://transversal.at/transversal/0614/stalder/en

Felix Stalder, „Digital solidarity“, Eurozine, 2/14 https://www.eurozine.com/digital-solidarity/

Felix Stalder, “Relax! Producing culture in a weak intellectual property environment”, Eurozine, 1/11 https://www.eurozine.com/relax/

„Mission Interconnectedness: A Roundtable on 20 Years of Net culture“, Konrad Becker, Josephine Berry Slater, Felix Stalder, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Eurozine 2/15 https://www.eurozine.com/mission-interconnectedness/

Consists in the active participation and contribution (discursive, textual and performative). The module grading is based on the mentioned contribution, active in-class participation and submission of written assignments (word minimum of 500 total) presentation (10 min.) to be held during WS 2021.

“Students from other departments or universities will be given a place on the course subject to room capacities.”