‘Seeing like a Cyborg’ Professor of International Politics at Richmond is a contributor to new book on the digital world
Dr Paul Rekret, Associate Professor of International Politics at Richmond, is participating this week in the launch of a new book, ‘Digital Objects, Digital Subjects’ which includes a chapter by Dr Rekret.
The new open access book asks whether optimists or pessimists are correct about the digital future. Focusing on Big Data capitalism in an age of unprecedented autonomous digital activity, the book explores how current forms of technology and economic activity are shaping notions of subjectivity and labour.
The chapter written by Dr Rekret, entitled ‘Seeing Like a Cyborg? The Innocence of Posthuman Knowledge’, examines the way concepts of ‘hybridity’ have been deployed by scholars as a means of understanding changes wrought by digital capitalism.
Dr Rekret focuses on influential theories of the ‘posthuman’, which look primarily to contemporary technological developments as the basis for articulations of a fundamental transformation of experience in a digital era. He argues that such theories tend to neglect the entrenched global divisions in access to the rewards, and exposure to the perils, that recent technological advancements imply, along with the continuity of historical structures of inequality this entails.
Further information about the book can be found here
In addition, on Thursday 31st January, Dr Rekret will be in Berlin speaking at the CTM Festival for Adventurous Music and Art. The annual festival pairs 10 days of concerts, club nights and performances together with a vast daytime programme of talks, screenings, workshops, networking events, installations and exhibitions spread over some of Berlin’s most exciting cultural and nightlife venues.
In a talk entitled ‘Melodies Wander Around as Ghosts on Playlist Ambience’, Dr Rekret will be speaking at the CTM Festival about music streaming as a cultural form, looking at the tendency towards a “chill” aesthetic in popular music.
Dr Paul Rekret, who teaches political theory at the University, is the author of Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence as well as the book Philosophy, Politics, Polemics: Derrida and Foucault. His work has appeared in Frieze, the New Inquiry and the Quietus, among others.
