Interview

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Ina Dietzsch: Von Pfützen und Lücken. Urbanes Wasser posthumanistisch gelesen [Of puddles and gaps. Urban water read posthumanistically]. In: Oliwia Murawska/Torsten Cress/Annika Schlitte: Posthuman? Perspektiven auf Natur/Kultur. Tagungsband zum 4. Mainzer Symposium der Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften am Forschungsschwerpunkt SoCuM, Mainz, 19. – 20. September 2019. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 202
Ina Dietzsch: Waterworlds revisited. In: Hamburger Journal für Kulturanthropologie 2021, Heft 13 (Welt. Wissen. Gestalten. Themenheft zum 42. Kongress der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde in Hamburg 2019), S. 79-95, https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/hjk/article/view/1725

For many years, I have been particularly interested in the connection between mathematics and culture. With digitization, we are in the midst of a mathematization of all processes relevant to everyday life on a completely new scale. To apply a perspective from cultural anthropology to these dynamics seems to me not only appealing, but absolutely necessary. At the moment, I am working on various projects in which digitization and nature come together. In the context of communicating climate change, for example, I am working on what I call "digital water" - processes of calculating and technologizing water as a basis for its economization and politicization.¹

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Alexa Färber: How does ANT help us to rethink the city and its promises? In: The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory. New York 2020, S. 264–272 ; https://urban-ethnography.com/2018/09/06/kickoff-keynote-the-city-as-promissory-assemblage-prof-alexa-farber/

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https://forschdb2.unibas.ch/inf2/rm_projects/object_view.php?r=4483825

Digitization as a social process is above all a promise of the future. Alexa Färber has developed an interesting concept of the promise as "promissory assemblage" and has shown in relation to urbanity how such promises work.² In our project on the digitization of agriculture in Switzerland³, we were also able to show this very well. Furthermore digitization raises questions about the future that present themselves as challenges and fundamentally shake up the demarcations between humans, machines, and nature. Relationships between familiar entities are questioned and renegotiations are required. Within this field of challenges technologies are actors themselves. They can only be truly "useful" in situations in which we understand what they do. And for that, we need new knowledge and new cultural systems as much as academic conceptual approaches which give digital technologies their appropriate place in everyday practices and research. Only if we understand their potential, affordances, dangers and limitations in relation to human beings and social life, can we ask the right questions when it comes to making decisions if and where digitization makes sense at all. For me, this question is too rarely asked, both in professional contexts and in everyday life. Digitization is above all driven by economic processes and leads to new powerful clusters that still operate in the logic of growth. And I think we should allow ourselves to ask the question, whether we can even afford, in terms of resources, to fulfill all the promises of digitization.

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See Michel Foucault (1974). Die Ordnung der Dinge [Les mots et les Choses]. Suhrkamp.

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See Anthony Giddens (1993). The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford University Press. 

Absolutely, and not just one. In general, it can be said that changes in technology are always accompanied by renegotiations of knowledge and constructions of reality. At the latest since the rise of network technologies, we are confronted with challenges to modern ideas such as the depth episteme.⁴ Also, the person as an analytical category has again become more important than the individual. We can very well say something about the technological generation of persons, but it is also becoming increasingly clear that individuals consciously deal with what they are willing to reveal about themselves. This is where a whole host of interesting phenomena come to bear. Consider, for example, the cultural concept of intimacy.⁵ In my generation it was primarily information relating to sexuality that has been felt to be "intimate." Lately, in conversations with students and young people in general, I have repeatedly come across the opinion that also consumers’ choices or voting decisions are "intimate.”

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What we now in Germany call Cultural Anthropology or Empirical Cultural Studies has developed since the 1970s, emerging from a critique of traditional folklore studies (Volkskunde) and Ethnology and being influenced by the work of well-known scholars in European and US-amercican Cultural Anthropology.

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Some examples of publications: Farias, Ignacio / Bender, Thomas (Hg.) (2010): Urban assemblages: how actor-network theory changes urban studies. London ; New York: Routledge.Fenske, Michaela (2013): Wenn aus Tieren Personen werden. Ein Einblick in die deutschsprachigen „Human Animal Studies“[When animals become persons. An insight into the German-language „Human Animal Studies“. In: (...)

It implies an established concept of data protection. In the future digital knowledge will be processable in ways we cannot even imagine. Yet, we have to make responsible decisions today on the basis of this non-knowledge. Above all, this means that we have to have confidence into social dynamics which will play out in the future. This is a great challenge, both in everyday life and in political responsibility. In terms of cultural anthropology and studies of culture (in German Empirische Kulturwissenschaften⁶), it is also relevant in so far as the reference to individuals as persons falls far too short and current concepts of data protection no longer adequately reflect the potential dangers to personal rights. This has not only implications for the protection of what we hold dear such as privacy. It also points to the fact that technological change is also accompanied by a fundamental shift in the practices by which we construct entities and realities in research. In recent decades, strongly subject-oriented disciplines such as empirical cultural studies or cultural anthropology have therefore undergone a massive transformation. Their empirical work is increasingly driven by theoretical considerations of complexity, their questions have moved away from what has been located in the individual into the direction of relational concepts or the idea of hybridity – in regard to human beings as well as in regard to relationships between human beings, technologies, and non-human organisms.⁷

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Marilyn Strathern, Partial connections, Walnut Creek, CA : AltaMira Press, 2004

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John Law and Annemarie Mol (éd.), Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, Duke UP, 2002.

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Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Cambridge Medford (MA.): Polity press.

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Rose, N. S. (2007). The politics of life itself : Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

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Tsing, A. L., & Pignarre, P. (2017). Le champignon de la fin du monde : Sur la possibilité de vivre dans les ruines du capitalisme. Paris: les Empêcheurs de penser en rond-la Découverte.

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Donna Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. New York : Routledge, 1991.
Donna Haraway: Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™ : Feminism and Technoscience. New York : Routledge, 1997. (ISBN 0-415-91245-8) (Prix Ludwik Fleck, de la Society for Social Studies of Science)

My inspiration comes from scholars like Marilyn Strathern⁸, John Law, Annemarie Mol⁹, Rosi Braidotti¹⁰, Nikolas Rose¹¹, Anna Tsing¹² and, of course, Donna Haraway¹³. In German-speaking cultural anthropology, there is also much interesting work going on at the moment, be it in Science and Technology Studies or on multimodal methodologies, research on digitization in everyday life, on more-than-human relationships or ontological debates.

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Braidotti, Rosi (2021): 2021, Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge, Polity Press. For summary and introduction in German see also: https://janinaloh.de/

In terms of the history of knowledge, this is, of course, always a question of our capacity to imagine. Technology or technological change does not just come out of the blue. Rather, it is a question of power relations, within the framework of which it is decided what kind of imagination is generated and allowed to become hegemonic. This does not mean that imagination not also strongly materializes itself. However, since hegemonic belief in progress and growth has brought us to where we are at the moment, I am grateful for all activities of an anthropology of the future and to all those, who for many years already have been dealing with hopes, fears, abilities to imagine and speculate and thus to shape the future. In my opinion, there is still some socio-political catching up to do when it comes to the question about who is included in and excluded from taking part in shaping the future. The debates of critical posthumanism are certainly of great importance here.¹⁴

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Descola, Philippe : Cognition, Perception and Worlding. In : Interdisciplinary Science Reviews Volume 35, 2010 - Issue 3-4: History and Human Nature

Today, when we speak of assemblages or ontologies rather than cultures, we are trying to do justice to the complex processes of worlding ¹⁵ taking place wherever humans are involved. We are increasingly looking for complex structural models that try to capture processes of emergence, movement, subjectivations, materializations, stabilization, fluidization, etc., and to represent them in a reasonably adequate way, thereby engaging in a lively exchange of metaphors between the technical, natural and social sciences and the humanities.

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https://www.goingdigital.de/

In the initiative “Digitization in Everyday Life,”¹⁶ a group of researchers documents the daily life of digital practices in the folds of society (leisure, work, writing...) and questions the methods used to study them - can we still distinguish these digital information and communication technologies from what surrounds them?

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Madianou, Mirca / Miller, Daniel (2012): Migration and new media: transnational families and polymedia. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge

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Note de l’éditeur du numéro : For France we can point to the sociology of use, which has started to investigate the sociocultural frames of digitization way before the public internet, see for example : Wilhelm, Carsten and Thévenin, Olivier (2017). The French Context of Internet Studies: Sociability and digital practice. Stefanie Averbeck-Lietz. Kommunikationswissenschaft im internationalen Vergleich : Transnationale Perspektiven, Springer VS, pp.161-184.

We all start more or less from a basic understanding in which we speak of media practices and media ecologies. And as Madianou and Miller have already shown in 2012¹⁷, this is a productive approach to look at how interactions between human beings and technologies work in concrete terms. Underlying is, of course, a much more fundamental question. On the one hand, we need to ask whether it still makes sense to speak of explicit digitization research in the future. On the other hand, there is some expertise among early digitization researchers that many others in cultural studies do not possess¹⁸. This contradictory situation is at the moment a current issue, which is discussed within the group.

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Cécile Dolbeau-Bandin and Carsten Wilhelm, “Comment apprivoiser son public avec un robot dit social ?”, Communication, technologies et développement [Online], 10 | 2021, http://journals.openedition.org/ctd/5790; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ctd.5790

Robotics – as an example - already very present in industrial production - seeks to convince us of an artificial sentience of humanoid social robots¹⁹ - this project goes beyond the search for productivity, what is the purpose of this "script" according to you, its influence on our relationships, our desires, and how can we understand it from a humanities and social science perspective?

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https://www.hansonrobotics.com/

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Donna Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. New York : Routledge, 1991.
Donna Haraway: Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™ : Feminism and Technoscience. New York : Routledge, 1997. (ISBN 0-415-91245-8) (Prix Ludwik Fleck, de la Society for Social Studies of Science)

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Richardson, Kathleen (2015): An Anthropology of Robots and AI. Annihilation Anxiety and Machines. Routledge. See also: campaignagainstsexrobots.org; Joy Buolamwini: https://www.media.mit.edu/people/joyab/overview/

It is an old desire of human beings to overcome their vulnerability as living creatures, which is often understood as inadequacy and imperfection. However, and this is where it gets interesting for me again, we should take a closer look at whose wishes are once again being elevated and hegemonized as generally human ones. These desires can be analyzed very clearly in projects such as Sophia.²⁰ The principle of Sophia includes a range of technologies ostensibly representing “white male” desire and thoughtlessness in the sense of a traditional modern humanism. Although recently it has been completed by “female” emotional intelligence. Such projects are very contrary to what Donna Haraway once imagined as a feminist-emancipatory cyborg ²¹ and they promote massive criticism most of all by feminist scholars around the globe. See for example anthropologist Kathleen Richardson and her fight against sex robots in the shape of female bodies and robotic technologies which cut female bodies into pieces, or computer scientist Joy Buolamwini and her research on biases in facial recognition.²²

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Knorr Cetina, Karin (2014): Scopic media and global coordination: the mediatization of face-to-face encounters. In: Lundby, Knut (Ed.): Mediatization of Communication. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 39-62.

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Masure, A. (2013). Lev Manovich, Le logiciel au pouvoir, Software takes command, New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Interfaces numériques, 2 (3). https://www.unilim.fr/interfaces-numeriques/2192

By developing Karina Knorr Cetina's concept of scopic media²³, which create "synthetic" situations of potentially global communication, and Manovich's software studies²⁴, which position the code as a transcoded actor between technology and culture, you put forward the concept of a synthetic-human assemblage of half-local half-global situations. In these assemblages, how can we think of different local and collective (cultural, ethnic or national) communicative contexts?

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For a summary of the debate see: Peters, Michael A., And Priya Venkatesan. “Biocapitalism and the Politics of Life.” Geopolitics, History, and International Relations, vol. 2, no. 2, Addleton Academic Publishers, 2010, pp. 100–22, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26804354.

First of all, this field of research shows clearly that digitization also requires cultural historization. Not only do we find an impenetrable web of electrical engineering, automation and digital objects there. It is also about accounting numeracy and sequencing/molecularizing biotechnologies, all of which have prepared what we now call digitization. In particular, I have been exploring how ideas of life and the categorizations made on their basis are changing. The digitization in agriculture can be seen as an extensive infrastructural transformation within the framework of what might also be called digital biocapitalism.²⁵ This involves sociotechnical imagining, infrastructuring, and blackboxing; humans, animals, plants, and artifacts become equals by being molecularized and sequenced for digital processing. Along the way, familiar boundaries become irrelevant, and others emerge anew. It is a huge interdisciplinary field that is opening up here.