SKC Project Seminar: Immediate Connectivity, Connected Immediacy? Reconsidering the Self as a Derived, Established Relation in the Culture of Immediacy

Description

As networked Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) accelerate our ‘derived, established relations’ to ourselves, to others and to the world to the ‘real time’ of instantaneous transmissions, these technologies of immediacy have also established a new sense of ‘immediate connectivity’ and ‘connected immediacy’. In consideration of our current technological existence-situation, I would like to revisit some of the existential themes in Kierkegaard’s work, centered around the notions of immediacy and new immediacy. Consequently, I claim that these notions should be revaluated at the very least. Drawing on philosophy of technology, but rooted in Kierkegaard studies at the same time, my talk will address some of the internal and external determinants at play in the actions and interactions that constitute how we relate to our technologically mediated existence. In tune with Kierkegaard, the latter should be conceived as an existential-ethical task. However, when it comes to our existence-orientation and existence-constitution, how does this new mode in which the world is somehow ‘made immediate’ alter our aesthetic sensibilities and ethical horizons? And how is that even possible if, either in the classic sense, we take immediacy as unalterable and unmediatable, or, in a more Kierkegaardian sense, as unsurmountable? Where does technological mediation come into this contradiction? And how can the notions of irony (as a way of realization) and new immediacy (as a dying and returning to immediacy) contribute to a resolution?

Period	17 Apr 2020
Held at	University of Copenhagen, Denmark