Category: Events

I’m giving this philosophy talk (in Arabic) at AUC Tahrir on 27 April 2019, at 6pm, that will explore technology’s assault on the human condition, employing the works of German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han. This is part of the AUC’s new ‘Bel Arabi Falsafa’ project and the spring series is called ‘Philosophy and Modern Life.’ Entry is free and open to the public.

‪”The rise of the information age and digital revolution gave hope that immediate access to a plethora of sources, interactive and always visible, was within easy reach. In many respects, this was an encouraging development in places like Egypt, where libraries and access to books were rare or difficult to access for the public. However, it came at a price. In 1996, British psychologist David Lewis coined the term Information Fatigue Syndrome (IFS) after noticing that workers who dealt with vast quantities of information were suffering from a weakening of their analytic capacity, attention deficits, inability to bear responsibility and traits of depression. It was unimaginable that this rare condition at the time would eventually engulf, in various degrees, the entire world. With the inundation of information, boiling matters down to their essence has become an arduous task.‬
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‪This lecture will employ the works of German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han who argues that on its own, a mass of information generates no truth. It sheds no light into the dark. The more information is set free, the more confusing and ghostly the world becomes. After a certain point, information ceases to be informative. It becomes deformative. Simply having more information and communication does not shed light on the world. Nor does transparency mean clairvoyance. Thinking is underpinned by discernment, discrimination, selection, and even forgetfulness – qualities that are frequently bulldozed in the online world.‬
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‪However, this is not about fleeing from the digital realm as much as it is to ask the question: How do we reconcile the digital order with the terrestrial order? The German theorist Carl Schmitt celebrated the earth for its solidity which enabled clear demarcations and distinctions in which character is formed. Whereas the digital order equals the “sea,” where “firm lines cannot be engraved”, that is to say, no character. The smooth open spaces of the digital medium are without end, but a better appreciation of the world of shadows with its nooks, corners, crannies, and alleys that not only filter and impede the information pollution and trolls, but allows slowness, reflection, and mediation processes back into the thinking fold and the realm of authenticity.‬”

“لقد بعث عصر المعلومات والثورة الرقمية الأمل في النفوس بأن عالمًا من الموارد الوفيرة – المرئية منها والتفاعلية – قد أصبح بين أيدينا. وكان ذلك تطورا مشجِّعا من نواحٍ عِدة في دول مثل مصر، حيث كانت المكتبات قليلة وفرصة الجمهور في الحصول على الكتاب نادرة. لكن الثمن كان كبيرا. ففي عام 1996، خرج الإخصائي النفسي البريطاني ديفيد لويس بمصطلح “متلازمة الوهن المعلوماتي” (IFS)، بعد أن استرعى انتباهه أن العاملين الذين يتعاملون مع كم هائل من المعلومات يعانون من ضعف في القدرة التحليلية ونقص في الانتباه، وعدم القدرة على تحمل المسئولية، بالإضافة إلى ظهور أمارات الاكتئاب عليهم. ولم يخطر ببال أحد عندئذٍ أن تلك الحالة النادرة سوف تسري بين البشر في أنحاء العالم كافةً حتى تلتهمهم جميعا ولو بدرجات متفاوتة. ومع الإغراق المعلوماتي، صار تحليل أي مسألة من أجل الوصول إلى جوهرها مهمة شاقة.
الفيلسوف الألماني-الكوري بيونج تشول هان، الذي يؤمن بأن كتلة المعلومات وحدها لا يمكن أن تتولد من بين طياتها الحقيقة؛ فهي لا تشع نورا يبدد الظلام، بل إن كل سيل من المعلومات ينطلق باعثاً معه حالة من التشويش يستحيل معها العالم عالماً للأشباح، وفي لحظة ما ستصبح المعلومات عاجزة عن تنويرنا أو إعلامنا بشيء؛ بل سوف تنتقص مما لدينا من معرفة؛ فالحصول على مزيد من المعلومات، وتحقيق مزيد من التواصل لا يجعل العالم أكثر وضوحا ولا استنارة، ولا الشفافية تعني وضوح الرؤية، حيث أن التفكير يرتكز على الإدراك والملاحظة والتمييز والانتقاء، بل وحتى على النسيان – تلك عمليات يتم تدميرها والإجهاز عليها في عالم الإنترنت.
كما تتناول الندوة فكرة أنه رغم كل ذلك، فالأمر لا يُعد دعوة للهروب من العالم الرقمي، بل دعوة لكي نسأل أنفسنا: كيف لنا أن نحقق التصالح بين النظام الرقمي، والنظام الأرضي؟ لقد عبر العالم الألماني كارل شميدت عن أن عظمة الأرض تكمن في صلابتها، حيث رُسمت الحدود وَوضَحت الفروق، فصنعت ملامح شخصيتها المتفردة، بينما يترامى النظام الرقمي “كبحر بلا شاطئ”، يستحيل فيه “أن تحفر خطًا واحدًا”، أي لا شخصية له على الإطلاق، كما أن الفضاءات الشاسعة الناعمة التي يفتحها الوسط الرقمي أمامنا لانهائية، لكن إذا تيسر لنا أن نتذوق عالم الظلال بأركانه وزواياه وشقوقه المظلمة وأزقته الضيقة، إذن لتمكننا من تنقية المعلومات وصد الملوث منها، وقطع الطريق على الغيلان القابعة فيها، بل ولحظينا ببعض الفرصة للتمهل، والتفكُّر، والتأمل -الشيء الذي سيعيدنا إلى مساحة التفكير وإلى عالم الأصالة.”

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(This is a modified lecture of one I gave in Goethe Alexandria last November)

 

Eight years ago, Tunisia’s dictator Ben Ali was overthrown in a popular revolution that set off a chain of new political realities and possibilities of transformation in the Arab world. Much of that elation and momentum was eventually submerged under the inferno of counter-revolutions, crackdowns, wars, terrorism, coups, and regional restlessness. Only the original protagonist, Tunisia, considerably weathered the storm. However, rather than simply “moving on”, the seminar explores the long arm of the momentous events in how they shape the present spectrum: from the growing violent methods of paranoid regimes that sees a journalist like Jamal Khashoggi murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, to the Arab public’s heterogeneous ways of countering repression by, for example, adopting Egyptian footballer Mohamed Salah into the continuing, albeit increasingly weary, search for dignity.

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Organised by the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), Lund University and Forum for Africa Studies, Uppsala University, 17 scholars of African cities (in Zambia, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo) will run a workshop titled ‘African Cities and the Materiality of Suspicion’, which will take place in Lusaka, Zambia, 9-10 December 2018. The purpose of the workshop is to compare experiences, discuss perspectives, and chapter ideas. Publication due out in late 2019 based on the workshop discussions. 

Abstract: 
“What is city life like when suspicion comes to underlie everyday interactions with the familiar world? What happens when the suspicion grabs a hold of you that the other passengers in the minibus is a band of armed robbers disguised as commuters, or that the person on the seat next to yours is a government intelligence agent? What do you do when you start wondering whether or not the person you bought your house from was in fact the real owner, or if the butcher put poison in the meat you are about to feed to your family? How does it feel to wonder whether the soundscapes created by public sermons are signs of piety or terrorists’ hidden agendas? What is it like to be almost entirely sure that the electricity company has tampered with the prepaid meter on your wall? Or to discover that the label on your supposedly genuine Honda generator uses a different font than the one your neighbour has?

This is an invitation to participate in a workshop on the materialities, affects, imaginaries, practices, social interactions, and experiences that form when suspicions of this kind come to besiege city life and contribute to an edited volume or special issue in a journal. The theme has grown out of the four organizing researchers’ experiences from Egyptian cities such as Cairo and Port Said, and from Jos and Port Harcourt in Nigeria. Here, long-term dramatic changes are transforming landscapes, relationships and networks, causing a general sense of suspicion to seep into ordinary interactions with familiar matters. There is a deep-seated notion that objects, people, relationships, society, or indeed the world at large, are not what they appear to be, and often, this world of mirages seems to be animated by concealed malevolent agencies.

Recent theory grown out of experiences of fast growing African cities highlights ambiguity as a fundamental condition of everyday life, as intricate webs of economic and cultural logics, value systems, interpretations and expectations, allow for the simultaneous existence of irreconcilable truths.

A shared observation by the four conveners is that suspicion thrives when the familiar emerges as a site of ambiguity – when things and experiences that induce normalcy, security or monotony, simultaneously provoke doubts regarding the true nature of things, people, and relationships. People are continually compelled to try to anticipate which potentialities will solidify into realities. The array of anxieties that emerge from these moments of suspense form a useful starting point for investigating suspicion.

Another observation by the organisers is the close links between suspicion and materiality, in a broad sense, including objects, buildings, the physical environment, but also sounds, vibrations, smells, etc. The matters of this world haunt us. They concern us. They compel us to engage with them. We are caught in their force fields. We use them, but at the same time, they dictate what is possible and impossible. They map out the boundaries of our world. They push and pull us in different directions. Their vectors become our own. They are in our dreams. They invade our living spaces. They have the power to betray us, to open our intimate spheres to the real or perceived agency of others. Interaction with objects and other aspects of the physical environment is an important arena of social, political and cultural articulation that accommodates experiences and sentiments that are otherwise too ambiguous and fleeting to be captured. Once manifested in the material world, otherwise vaporous sentiments of suspicion become graspable, at the level of everyday life as well as academic enquiry. When objectified, attached to a specific matter, doors are in turn opened to larger contexts as each object, site, sound, touch and smell speak about their place in the world.

With this call, we want to delve into the spaces of ambiguity, the moments of suspense while hunches are yet to solidify into tangible truths, and explore what happens if we study suspicion not simply as a lack of trust, but as a phenomenon in its own right. What would be its defining characteristics? Which forms would it assume? What would be its social, political, cultural, or affective dynamics? Is suspicion the lived truth of a world where social contracts have crumbled? Is it a state of mind, or a way of being-in-the-world? Is it an effect of affect, is it matter that matters, or is it not about what we feel at all, but about what we do – a set of prescribed practices in a precarious world? Is it in fact a social force that makes transactions possible?”

The next Theatre of Thought lecture, Ambiguous Promises and the Fragmentation of Responsibility, will take place on 1st November 2018 at Goethe’s Tahrir Lounge. The session will be in Arabic.
Click here for the Facebook event.“Responsibility has traditionally meant a duty of care to someone or power over something, a moral obligation to act deferentially to another, and to be held accountable for the good or bad that might unfold under one’s control. These meanings typically aggregate and animate within the idea of a citizen. Yet in recent decades, the undermining of responsibility was soundly argued to be the fault of the consumer encroaching on the citizen category. Responsibility, the hallmark of the citizen, is being degraded by the consumer that lacks responsibility due to the tendency to follow personal inclinations. However, these blurred lines simply paved the way for the problems of the digital age that are exacerbating the diminishing of responsibility.

The notion of responsibility is dependent on temporal conditions and the supposition of obligations that make acts of trust, promise, and forgiveness possible in order to heal the past and stabilize and secure a steadfast future. However, what does it mean for responsibility when today’s digital communications are perilously thrusting the individual into a world of arbitrariness, non-binding obligations, and short-term gains? Rapidly, responsibility is torn from its past and future commitments as the present is pushed as the absolute priority and, therefore, it is scattering time into, as German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han would argue, ‘a mere sequence of purely disposable presences.’

This seminar will explore further questions of consequence. Among them, if it is possible to delineate the features of passivity that overwhelms responsible agency? Does the slow brewing of trust required to form a mature social praxis lose meaning when hyper-visibility is all-pervasive, privacy is suspected, and rapid information access is readily available? or given that responsibility is tied to names and naming in order to confer recognition, then what are the implications of perceiving the other, in terms of trustworthiness and reliability, when they are dissolved in a digital swarm?”
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يستكمل مشروع #التحرير_لاونج_جوته سلسلة حلقات #مسرح_الفكر الموسم الثاني بخامس حلقاته ومحاضرة تحت عنوان “النفاق وتفتيت الشعور بالمسئولية”، والتي سيتناول فيها المتحدث بالندوة د. عمرو علي موضوع المسئولية بأشكالها في العصر الحديث، والاثار المترتبة على تطبيقها في ظل العصر الرقمي الذي نعيشه الان.
تعني المسئولية على نحو تقليدي واجب الرعاية لشخص ما أو السلطة على شيء ما، التزام أخلاقي للتصرف بشكل مختلف عن الآخر، وتحمل المسؤولية عن الخير أو الشر التي قد تتكشف تحت سيطرة المرء. هذه المعاني عادة ما تكون مجمعة ومتحركة في إطار فكرة المواطن. لكن في العقود الأخيرة، قيل إن تفويض المسؤولية كان خطأ المستهلك الذي ينتهك فئة المواطن. إن المسؤولية، السمة المميزة للمواطن، تتعرض للتدهور من جانب المستهلك الذي يفتقر إلى المسؤولية بسبب الميل إلى اتباع الميول الشخصية. ومع ذلك، فإن هذه الخطوط غير الواضحة مهدت الطريق ببساطة لمشاكل العصر الرقمي التي تؤدي إلى حدة تناقص المسؤولية.
يعتمد مفهوم المسؤولية على الظروف الوقتية وفرض الالتزامات التي تجعل أعمال الثقة والوعد والمغفرة ممكنة من أجل مداواة الماضي وتحقيق الاستقرار وتأمين مستقبل راسخ. ومع ذلك، ما الذي تعنيه المسؤولية عندما تكون الاتصالات الرقمية اليوم هي التي تدفع الإنسان إلى عالم من التعسف والتزامات غير ملزمة ومكاسب قصيرة الأجل؟ بسرعة، انشقت المسؤولية عن التزاماتها السابقة والمستقبلية، حيث يتم دفع الحاضر كأولوية مطلقة، وبالتالي فإن الوقت قد بدأ يتناثر، كما يقول الفيلسوف الألماني-الكوري بيونغ-شول هان، “مجرد تسلسل للوجودات التي يمكن التخلص منها على نحو مجرد.”
هذه الندوة -التي ستنعقد يوم الخميس 1 نوفمبر الساعة 7 – 9 مساءً بمقر مشروع التحرير لاونج جوته- سوف تكشف العديد من الأسئلة الناتجة. من بينهم، إذا كان من الممكن تحديد ملامح السلبية التي تكتسح الوكالة المسؤولة؟ هل الثقة البطيئة المخمرة مطلوبة لتشكيل تطبيق عملي اجتماعي ناضج تفقد معنى عندما تكون الرؤية الفائقة منتشرة، الخصوصية مشتبه بها، والوصول السريع للمعلومات متاح بسهولة؟ أو إذا كانت تلك المسؤولية مرتبطة بأسماء وتسمية من أجل منح الاعتراف، ثم ما هي الآثار المترتبة على إدراك الآخر، من حيث الثقة والدقة، عندما يتم حله في سرب رقمي؟