Antoinette Rouvroy "Algorithmic Realism: Anarchive or Utopia" DGS24, TU Delft

Day 3 Keynote Lecture byAntoinette Rouvroy at the 2024 Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference organised by the Architecture Philosophy and Theory academic group of the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft.
www.dgs2024.nl/
"Algorithmic Realism: Anarchive or Utopia"
The contemporary world is characterised by an increasing reliance on automated systems that substitute computation for representation in order to comprehend and manage reality. This technological dynamic of algorithmic realism, or algorithmic an-archive, shifts the boundaries and thresholds of an-optic perception to include pre- and infra-semiotic, infra-political digital signals, virtually pushing back the limits of representability to infinity, and in the same 'gesture' - by abolishing its outside - abolishing representation itself. In this talk, I will argue that the fundamental challenge that the algorithmic (an)archive poses to the persistence of critique is not so much the lack of transparency of algorithmic black boxes, but the denial or disavowal of the opacity of the world itself, an ontological opacity and indeterminacy that forces us to speak, to convene, to imagine, to interpret in common, to take shape in the f(r)êlure (frailty/failure) through which the universality of the negative, of the non-totalisable, of incompleteness, of “the refusal to disappear and the refusal to comply” (Denise Ferreira da Silva), manifests itself in the particular, as an immanent utopia, or a project without prediction rather than a prediction without project.
Antoinette Rouvroy (Doctor of Laws of the European University Institute) is permanent research associate at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), and senior researcher at the Research Centre Information Law and Society, University of Namur (Belgium). She authored Human Genes and Neoliberal Governance: A Foucauldian Critique (Routledge-Cavendish, 2008) and co-edited (with Mireille Hildebrandt) Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing: Philosophers of Law meet Philosophers of Technology (Routledge, 2011). Her current interdisciplinary research interests revolve around the concept of algorithmic governmentality. Under this foucauldian neologism she explores the semiotic-epistemic, political, legal and philosophical implications of the computational turn.

[@inlieuofsense9521]

thorougly enjoyable talk, i will order her book right away