Cinema and Media Studies PhD student, Gerrit Krueper, travels virtually to Denmark to present at Robophilosophy 2020. This year, the topic of this international research conference is “Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics.”
Gerrit’s pre-recorded talk, “Becoming Cyborg: Liberating One’s Real Species – Being in Cognitive Capital,” will be available from August 10 – 22. Registered participants can leave comments and questions on the video feed once it becomes available.
Link to Gerrit’s talk: https://bit.ly/38Y6Lvp
Link to all pre-recorded talks: https://bit.ly/2Cb1O6u
Link to conference: https://bit.ly/390VXgc
Abstract:
The material is essential to the ontological question of being human. Cognitive capitalism and its rise of technology translates the human body into literal instruments of labor. However, the link of technology with the laborer enables a transfer of skills and powers that extend the body’s capabilities, creating a cyber-body. The material reality of the cyber-body is ambivalent: It is a reality of exploitation and abstraction, designed to eventually create infinite capital accumulation, as well as a reality of liberation potentials (through re-appropriating one’s cyborg body to connect to nature and the social). Put together, this ambivalence recovers the real species-being.
Gerrit Krueper
Gerrit Krueper Biography:
(BA, American, English and German Studies, University of Wuerzburg, Germany; MA, Comparative Literature, University of Rochester, New York.)
Current Studies: Ph.D. Cinema and Media Studies
Supervisor: Dr. Ernest Mathijs
Gerrit proposes a trans-/post-humanistic theory of the cyborg theorized with the help of Japanese cyberpunk animation. His theory reads the cyborg on the means of both the cyber-body (production, resources, labor force, tools of labor/production, organization) and the cyber-brain, its immaterial realm (consciousness, species-being, social-relations, power struggles, networks). Illuminating the depth of Marx’s concept of humanity’s species-being, he demonstrates that its theorization reveals the true potential of liberation and transcendence in both sense consciousness/species-being progression, and towards an alternative to capitalism. Inspired and influenced by theorists such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Nick Dyer-Witheford, he further develops a cyber-Marxist understanding of culture, economy and politics – one that argues that in order to become human, one must become cyborg.
To learn more about Gerrit’s presentations at conferences and publications: https://bit.ly/393PDEE
