Living in the Interregnum: Artificial Intelligence, Technology, and Society.

Introduction.

In one of Antonio Gramsci's most well-known prison notes, the Italian philosopher asserts: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This excerpt from the Quaderni del carcere, due to its unusual conceptual fusion between analytical generality and, simultaneously, theoretical fecundity, has at times been subject to uncritical abuse, its dissemination turning it into a worn-out currency passed from hand to hand. Nevertheless, some authors have reclaimed the critical capacity of the passage, developing the premises it contains and applying it in a situated manner from and within the present. Thus, the idea of the "interregnum" has become an effective tool for grasping the scope of systemic poly-crisis and mutations in the temporal structures of late capitalism: Is the crisis the punctual, decisive, and crucial yet transitory moment between two phases, or rather is the endless crisis – the interregnum – identified with social order?

The post-2020 Zeitgeist would seem to indicate the latter: apocalypse as contemporaneity (environmental destruction, risk of nuclear conflagration, etc.), permanent crisis (application of shock economic therapies, diffusion of fear and anxiety as predominant emotional states, etc.), exception as "new normality" (health emergencies, state of war, etc.). This monographic issue aims to shed some light on a present crowded with disruptive transformations for historical, ethical, and philosophical reflection, following the DILEMATA principle of exercising a "practical ethics" or "ethics in action" oriented towards a plurality of questions, problems, and domains. To fulfill this theoretical intent, the monographic issue finds in technology a timely guiding thread to account for the ensemble of transformations taking shape in our contemporary social reality. Technology constitutes an undeniable factor of social change but also an index thereof, insofar as the direction of its historical development is coordinated with the dynamics governing human sociability in each case. Moreover, it represents a form of societal self-representation, as the composition of the technological in a certain era cannot be detached from the way social articulation occurs. Therefore, the consideration of technology as an object of philosophical reflection cannot be divorced from a context defined by specific modes of socialization and concrete subjective and communal imaginaries.

This monograph aims to offer the reader the opportunity to judge the place technology occupies in our contemporaneity based on the different thematic blocks that comprise it and will be detailed below:

1) The problematization of the relationship between technique and historical modes of being, namely, our present inherits a tradition of secular thought that has reflected on its own scientific and technical endeavors. Therefore, our approach to the range of possibilities facilitated to our era by this sphere of human praxis must be mediated by our self-understanding as homo technicus. Philosophical discourse allows access to the contents of consciousness specific to a historical moment through their abstract formalization by individuals participating in a specific material culture, which involves certain uses, relationships with objects, and possibilities of action. Consequently, by exploring recurrent conceptual figures or relatively systematic thought patterns elaborated by specific authors, a window of opportunity opens to interpret the genealogy of the conditions defining our time;

2) Judgment on technologies of power or, in other words, the relationships between technique and politics. Far from Ortega's optimism in his Meditation on Technique, at this point, the investigation does not content itself with assuming at the origin of technique "the satisfaction of needs, for the time being, elemental" and "to achieve that satisfaction with minimal effort" but addresses the creation of objects, procedures, systematizations, tools, and machines as a sphere that opens up a set of specific problems of human coexistence and social organization;

3) Discovering the emancipatory possibilities contained in aesthetic praxis as it is instrumentally mediated by technique. Contrary to the reductionist thesis of a domination conveyed by science and technology, our aim in this third part is to try to understand different cultural objects as functional utensils in the subjective expression of non-normative forms of life or non-codifiable political emotions in traditional representational media, but also in the revelation of non-productivist uses of technique or unconventional views of processes of disciplining and valorizing human labor. Thus, in a movement ranging from visual cultures to bodily expressiveness, through the discursive formation of identities, or their construction through new digital narratives, the authors of this final section emphasize in their approach to technique its potential as a mechanism for strengthening the agency capacity of subjects in order to open a field of autonomous configuration of identity.

Specific thematic lines:

- Artificial intelligence.
- Cryptocurrencies and digital currencies.
- State of war and technology.
- Metaverses.
- History of technologies.
- Tech-utopia and neo-Luddism.
- Technology and the environment.
- Contemporary identities.
- Digital aesthetics.
- Ethics and robotics.

Key dates:

- Call for papers: May 6, 2024.
- Deadline for submission: August 31, 2024.
- Publication: December 1, 2024.

Submissions:
Instructions for authors | Dilemata
For more information, contact daniel.lopez@csic.es (associate editor)