Search results for "Subjectivity"
showing 10 items of 180 documents
Pleasurable music affects reinforcement learning according to the listener.
2013
Mounting evidence links the enjoyment of music to brain areas implicated in emotion and the dopaminergic reward system. In particular, dopamine release in the ventral striatum seems to play a major role in the rewarding aspect of music listening. Striatal dopamine also influences reinforcement learning, such that subjects with greater dopamine efficacy learn better to approach rewards while those with lesser dopamine efficacy learn better to avoid punishments. In this study, we explored the practical implications of musical pleasure through its ability to facilitate reinforcement learning via non-pharmacological dopamine elicitation. Subjects from a wide variety of musical backgrounds chose…
Human-technology relations in an age of surveillance capitalism. Towards an anthropological theory of the dialectic between analogue and digital huma…
2021
What can anthropology contribute to the current debates about the negative effects of social media on people? Starting from a critique of anthropological work that sees human subjectivity and culture as ontologically unaffected by social media use, I propose that human engagement with these digital technologies produces significant ontological transformations that deserve more attention. I develop my analysis in dialogue with Boellstorff’s ontology of the digital, Nardi’s theorisation of virtuality and affordances, and Zuboff’s formulation of surveillance capitalism, and I use empirical illustrations from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal to highlight key theoretical junctures. My main c…
(Re)creating “society in silico” : surveillance capitalism, simulations and subjectivity in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal
2021
This article provides a different angle to understand the Cambridge Analytica (CA) data scandal. It focuses on the role of models and simulations in the big data campaigning tools CA allegedly used, and their epistemological and ontological potential to produce and reproduce voters' digital doubles that would first colonise and eventually replace the analogue selves they were related to. By integrating and revising Zuboff's surveillance capitalism framework with Debord's classic theory of the Spectacle, the article argues that the dystopian simulations played as real life experiments by surveillance capitalist firms such as CA have the ultimate goal of replacing analogue humanity with digit…
Dialectic Logos and Internal Critique. The Pre-Socratics and the Origins of Political Argument
2018
The present essay makes the claim that political argumentation in the form of internal critique was already present in Pre-Socratic thought, specifically in Heraclitus’ dialectic conception of logos. This conception, which implies the human capacity of arguing for and identifying correct inferences, is valid in a contemporary context as well, and it underlies the idea of political life as an intersubjective condition of human existence.
La producción de la subjetividad en los tiempos del neoliberalismo: hacia un imaginario con capacidad de transformación social
2003
La hegemonía neoliberal de las últimas décadas ha traído aparejadas inmensas transfor-maciones económicas, políticas y sociales. El relativo equilibrio que se estableció en las sociedades occidentales de posguerra en la dialéctica entre ciudadanía, subjetividad y emancipación social comenzó a transformarse drásticamente a partir de los años ochenta (Santos 2000). La reorganización del sistema capitalista que surge de este periodo se ha concretado socialmente, en el incremento de la vulnerabilidad social y en el crecimiento de las desigualdades sociales, dando lugar a la emergencia de la llamada ‘nueva cuestión social’ (Robert Castel 1977). El territorio de la globalización, nombre que toma …
Il sigillo spezzato. Moderno e antimoderno nell’interpretazione habermasiana di Nietzsche
2022
Starting from the analysis of the concept of modernity, this contribution focuses on Habermas' critique of Nietzsche. In particular on the idea that Nietzsche is a break point with modernity and the basis of the post-modern. On the line of defense of modernity and its universalistic normative contents, Habermas re-proposes the transcendental in an anti-relativistic sense. The explosive power of "philosophy with the hammer" and the "total critique of reason" undermine the emancipatory demands of modernity with conservative effects. According to Habermas, the radical critique of truth demolishes itself and the claim to validity. The modern, on the other hand, can be reformed through a model o…
Il paradigma honnethiano del riconoscimento: interazione, antropogenesi e normatività
2017
"Reification" demonstrates a number of discontinuities with Honneth’s earlier and later works and constitutes a bold attempt to ground a social normative theory on ontological and anthropological grounds. In order to respect the importance of this effort, I try to reconcile some of the more incompatible aspects of this work by pointing to the deep unity of the Honnethian path as a whole. First, I focus on the status of recognition itself, in order to reveal the unity of thought behind the different versions proposed by Honneth. Then, I concentrate on his references to psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology, in an attempt to bring together the ideas of symbiosis and neonatal imitation. T…
Recognition, Work, Treatment
2017
The article I am going to propose is a reflection on the theme of recognition in working and social contexts, and focuses on problems and troubles people cope with in this historical moment. This is a period during which reciprocity and recognition relationships involving our education and work career seem to have no more value, because the world of work now focuses on involving people in production and does not care about involved subjects' life plans. I also wish to point out risks and sufferance affecting subjects who perceive with always greater precision that they are more and more often oppressed by labor and mind exploitation, rather than considered human resources with a working com…
What is a child? Childhood’s images and narratives in Lucía Puenzo
2016
La producción de la escritora y cineasta Lucía Puenzo (Argentina, 1976) indaga insistentemente sobre el estatuto de la infancia a partir de personajes marcados por la anomalía o el exceso: desde la monstruosidad que asoma en los cuerpos de Alex (en XXY, 2007) y Lilith (Wakolda, 2013), la extraña naturaleza de la leyenda y el narrador de El niño pez (2009) hasta los chicos bordelines de La maldición de Jacinta Pichimahuida (2007). De un modo u otro, la “rareza” de estos niños no se acomoda a la distribución de especies, géneros, familias e identidades que establecen los dispositivos disciplinarios del poder en nuestra época y salta allí donde la vida no se contiene o no se define bajo el sig…
Il soggetto e l’azione
2021
In this contribution, I provide a sketch of the possible meanings that the concept of agency-widely used in philosophy of mind and analytic philosophy, particularly in the declinations provided by Anscombe (1957)1 and Davidson (1963)2, but less explored in the phenomenon-logic tradition-can take on when placed under the lens of Husserlian theory of subjectivity.