The Data Episteme

Recent developments in media technology, and the growth of cybernetic culture over the past one hundred years, have made our reliance on authoritative knowledge structures even more tenuous than we originally thought they could be. Thinking of Foucault’s own queries, we might ask today how are things given to representation in the age of meta- and micro-data? If it is true that code is indifferent to content, does this mean that we’ve reached the absolute limit of representation in either its political or aesthetic modes? And if so, can we still speak of a subject – political, aesthetic, or otherwise? This symposium takes on these and many other questions by exploring the precarity of truth and knowledge in the data episteme.

Participants:

• David Panagia – Political Science, UCLA (organizer)
• Colin Koopman – Philosophy, University of Oregon
• Orit Halpern – History, The New School for Social Research & Eugene Lang College
• David D. Kim – Germanic Languages, UCLA