Yuval Kremnitzer

The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center, Humboldt University of Berlin

Yuval Kremnitzer is a Post-Doctoral fellow at The Humboldt University in Berlin. A graduate of Columbia University, Kremnitzer is a philosopher, media critic and literature scholar. He is currently completing two book projects. Unwritten No More: New Authoritarianism and The Digital Obscene (MIT), and How to Believe in Nothing: Nihilism and The Media of Tradition. 

Speaking at the conference

Friday, 23 September, 6pm, Kosovel Hall

Master, Drive: The Authority of Knowledge and The Knowledge of Authority

There seem to be two major contexts in which the problematics of mastery is evoked: the mastery of humanity over nature, the complex of science and technology, and the social-political complex, the rule of man over others, the complex of political power and social inequality. For a while now, we have been told that our politics have become, increasingly, the object of a technological form of control ever more decentralized, a process which renders personal authority progressively impotent and empty. And yet, we observe that a new form of authoritarianism has emerged coextensively with the transition into a new technological medium, the internet, which has been seen as the apex of the aforementioned process of decentralization and democratization. How are we to understand the contemporary entanglement of authority and technology?  What, if anything, do the striking characteristics of this new mode of political legitimation, its brazen infringements of unwritten rules, have to do with the manner in which contemporary media and technology are restructuring our experience?

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