PANEL 19 / INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND SOCIAL SUBJECTIVITY IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL AGE
CONVENORS: JAN H. WASSERZIEHR, MELANIE ERSPAMER, BARNABY RAINE
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].
How should aspirations for individual freedom reckon with the social formation of the self? What kind of free life becomes thinkable when we are increasingly dependent on technology in an expanding realm of necessity? Across three papers, this panel explores answers to those two questions from Hegel, then from Marx and twentieth-century Black Marxism, then from Arendt and Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
In the first paper, Melanie Erspamer sets up the first question by reconstructing Hegel's view of freedom as positive and (which is less often stressed) negative too: refusing either to treat the individual subject as pre-social or to abandon aspirations for freedom from the oppressive intrusions of others. Turning to Marx's Grundrisse, Barnaby Raine finds Marx building on that Hegelian step with a hopeful account of machinery opening up a new "free individuality" through the reduction of labour, in a passage later critically reworked by Black Marxists whose vision of free time was less reliant on technological development. Jan H. Wasserziehr then explores more pessimistic accounts of the relation between technology and freedom in the twentieth century, in fears of subservience to new technological imperatives and of a collapsing line between freedom and necessity.
All inquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].
How should aspirations for individual freedom reckon with the social formation of the self? What kind of free life becomes thinkable when we are increasingly dependent on technology in an expanding realm of necessity? Across three papers, this panel explores answers to those two questions from Hegel, then from Marx and twentieth-century Black Marxism, then from Arendt and Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
In the first paper, Melanie Erspamer sets up the first question by reconstructing Hegel's view of freedom as positive and (which is less often stressed) negative too: refusing either to treat the individual subject as pre-social or to abandon aspirations for freedom from the oppressive intrusions of others. Turning to Marx's Grundrisse, Barnaby Raine finds Marx building on that Hegelian step with a hopeful account of machinery opening up a new "free individuality" through the reduction of labour, in a passage later critically reworked by Black Marxists whose vision of free time was less reliant on technological development. Jan H. Wasserziehr then explores more pessimistic accounts of the relation between technology and freedom in the twentieth century, in fears of subservience to new technological imperatives and of a collapsing line between freedom and necessity.
