Vol. 4 No. 1 (2025): General Issue

This article examines how contemporary media technologies transform the conditions of visuality, challenging anthropocentric models of perception historically grounded in the human gaze. Drawing on the philosophies of Gilbert Simondon and Bernard Stiegler, it argues that vision is not merely extended by technical apparatuses but reconfigured through processes of technological individuation and transindividuation. From optical devices and perspectival systems to algorithmic media and machine vision, the image progressively detaches from embodied human perception and becomes an operational entity within technical infrastructures. Through an analysis of historical and contemporary media systems, the article develops the concept of distant visuality to describe modes of seeing that function beyond phenomenological experience. In this context, vision emerges as a distributed process shaped by material, computational and mnemonic systems, marking a transition toward the deanthropologization of perception and the emergence of posthuman and nonhuman regimes of visuality.

The concept of intelligence is deeply ambiguous and entangled with historical narratives of colonialism and eugenics. The contemporary understanding of intelligence still reflects such narratives: it is understood in human-centric terms, as a property defined by goal-oriented cognitive capacities. This leads to what we term a politics of control, which relies on historically established patterns of exclusion to establish political structures with colonial connotations. In response, this paper proposes an alternative framework called the Assemblage Theory of Intelligence (ATOI). ATOI understands intelligence in terms of the dynamic relationships and activities within an assemblage and moves us from a politics of control to a politics of configuration. We illustrate ATOI through a discussion of the human-in-the-loop (HITL) methodology in AI development. Contrary to the dominant narrative, where humans are seen as controlling the loop, we reconceive HITL as an assemblage where human and machine elements configure and mutually shape each other.

This paper develops a theoretical framework to analyse human and non-human entities as socio-biotechnical configurations shaped by historically sedimented power relations. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, post-ANT developments, and Andrew Feenberg’s critical constructivism, the argument integrates these perspectives within a Marxist approach that foregrounds the dialectic between contingency and necessity. The concepts of threads and fabrics conceptualise how networks stabilise asymmetries, consolidate exclusions, and produce fractured totalities. Capital is theorised not as a background condition but as a structuring actant that inscribes values, configures topologies, and organises the logic of valorisation. Technical codes materialise hegemonic positions within socio-biotechnical entities, while resistance and obduracy mark the persistence of the non-identical. The paper further examines how class position and subjective identification mediate technological design, showing how socio-biotechnical entities embody contested inscriptions of meaning, function, and control. Through this lens, technology is reinterpreted as a site of struggle within a historically structured socio-biotechnical totality.

In this article, I reflect on Deleuze’s provocative critique of the second law of thermodynamics in Difference and Repetition by drawing his philosophy into conversation with cosmology—specifically quantum physics. In dialogue with the work of the late Bill Ross, whose recent Order and the Virtual represents the most substantial critical engagement with the entropic principle vis-à-vis Deleuze, I turn to the physicist David Bohm’s distinction between explicate and implicate orders, which Ross argues bear strong similarities to Deleuze’s actual and virtual, respectively. Bohm’s theory, as Ross and others have pointed out, entails a recognition of the pluripotent creative potential of the quantum dynamisms that give rise to the spatiotemporal order—what Deleuze would describe as non-exhaustive intensive differences that are only apparently cancelled out in extensity. Here, with reference to Deleuze’s distinction between the divine and human games, and their respective distributions of chance, I propose—following Ross and Bohm, as well as contemporary loop quantum gravity—an alternative to string theory most commonly associated with the physicist Carlo Rovelli: that whereas the emergent regularities of the macroscopic world are inexorably bound to the arrow of time and thus to the law of entropy, this is not the case for the divine game that takes place within the quantum foam, and that it is here that the Eventum tantum takes place in which all of chance—including said laws—are continuously redistributed. Turning to the both non-continuous and continuous nature of this evental dynamism relative to quantum and macrophysical realities respectively, I close by considering Ross’s eschewal of dynamic systems theory in favour of other quantum-theoretic resources and suggest that perhaps both can be usefully employed to think the reciprocal becomings of Deleuze and the philosophy of cosmology.

Most philosophical Lacanians instinctively take Lacan’s engagement with Descartes – not to mention his explicit formulations about not only the identity of the psychoanalytic and Cartesian methods but also, moreover, that of the subject of psychoanalysis and the cogito – as comprising a crucial and unequivocal philosophical repère. Nonetheless, there is a line of thought in Lacan’s oeuvre that this orientation leaves completely unaccounted for: Lacan’s decisive point regarding knowledge as accumulation. In his recently published twelfth Seminar (Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse) from February of this year, Lacan argues that the cogito is a hinge between knowledge “in its pre-accumulative state,” to the extent that it is capable of being doubted, and knowledge as a “mode of production” which predates and even motivates capitalist accumulation. It is on this basis that we can comprehend Lacan’s seemingly conflictual or even contradictory claims that, on the one hand, Descartes inaugurates modern science by leaving the eternal truths to God (Seminar XI) and, on the other hand, that modern science forecloses truth (“Science and Truth”).

This paper argues that a modern technological society devoted to socially determined ends is impossible. This “Grimdark Thesis” assumes a posthumanist “New Substantivist” theory of technology whose upshot is that modernity renders technical entities abstract and highly repeatable. Abstract technology is functionally indeterminate and counter-final, lacking either intrinsic or extrinsic teleology. In particular, I argue that extrinsic teleology – e.g., socially determined ends – is foreclosed by modelling a technological society as a Hyperagent – a maximally mutable being capable of arbitrary changes to its technical or material substrate. Finally, I consider whether this technological “Outside” can be reintegrated into the normative space of reasons as lack or negation, along the lines explored in contemporary Hegelian/Lacanian theories of the Subject. I argue that there are no grounds for assuming that the barred subject assumed by Hegelians/Lacanians is a transcendental invariant, implying the Technological Outside is a subtracted but not a constitutive lack.

Technology has a long history of influencing humanity. While this statement seems monolithic and perhaps deterministic, this essay intends first to illustrate, in small part, the impacts of technology, and second, to discuss a possible way forward amid the technological change. I will follow the impact of electric light on Japanese aesthetics, particularly from the perspective of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and his essay, In Praise of Shadows. Then, I will extend the conception of electric light into digital technologies in general, the goal being to connect the loss of beauty in Tanizaki’s view to the broader detriment of humanity via the digital environment. As electric light redefined beauty for Tanizaki’s Japan, so, too, have digital technologies redefined what we consider human interaction and information. Lastly, in a call for awareness and human solidarity, I will suggest that resistance is not futile. Indeed, it is imperative if we intend to free ourselves from the matrix we have fashioned and enabled. 

This article examines the intersection of philosophy and cybernetics, proposing Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory as a crucial foundation for renewed cybernetics in the twenty- first century. By revisiting Norbert Wiener’s foundational insights and reinterpreting key cybernetic principles, it explores how Luhmann’s second-order observation and the concept of meaning challenge the traditional distinctions between human consciousness and technology. The paper argues that Luhmann’s approach not only addresses concerns of dehumanization in a technologically advanced society but also offers a dynamic framework for rethinking human self-perception and social organization without denying it cybernetic foundations. This exploration highlights the potential of systems theory to redefine the philosophical significance of cybernetics, providing tools for understanding the evolving interactions among humans, machines, and society in modernity.

Our article aims to analyse the significance of dialectics for philosophical reflection on technology. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, this article first of all reconstructs the progressive artefactualisation of thought and action, by indicating the transition from labour through tool use to the emergence of intelligent machines in the field of practice, secondly, by indicating the importance of dialectical thinking for the media theory, and thirdly, by pointing out that dialectics delivers both a conceptual and a practical understanding of the possibilities of emergence for cognitive technologies we encounter today (AI and the noosphere). Dialectics captures these dynamics in a non-linear manner, offering a conceptual grounding for addressing developments that are both universal and concrete, offering Hegelian dialectics as a dynamical method of thinking about technological progress without falling into schematism and simplifications.

Book review of Aden Evens’s The Digital and its Discontents.

Audrone Žukauskaitė’s book is a concise analysis of the place and role of the organism, or perhaps organic thinking, within the tradition of continental philosophy. In particular, it is interested in how the legacy of post-war French thought intersects with how we think biological systems today and suggests that this thinking should be renewed in order to address some of the more massive political deadlocks of the present namely the status of biopolitics and what to do with the concept of the anthropocene.

A book review of Andrew Feenberg's The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse's Philosophy of Praxis that emphasizes how Feenberg develops a critical philosophy of technology from Marcuse's work.