Agenda

Workshop series
Language in Minds, Machines, and Milieus: A Modern Perspective on AI
Workshop series June-July 2024

The ERC project AIMODELS at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice organises a series of workshops to explore the intellectual and social history that prefigures the rise of AI in the 21st century.

All workshops are also part of the activities of the Political Epistemology Research Network and in collaboration with other research groups. For proposing a paper or registering write to Prof. Matteo Pasquinelli matteo.pasquinelli@unive.it.

Workshop II - 14 June 2024, 10.00-13.00 and 15.00-17.00

Well before the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), the deployment of language into production, or rather into work, was already the focus of the debates on the knowledge economy and information society. If computers and AI have become central means of production, it is because language has always been a means of production and a means of their design. The linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933: 24) once argued that the division of labour is possible only thanks to language, hinting that language is the inner constitution of labour. Noticing the centrality of language in post-Fordism, already in the 1990s the economist Christian Marazzi (1994) and others advocated for a linguistic turn in political economy, predating somehow the linguistic turn in automation that takes place with LLMs. Later, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2015) linked the financial crash of the late 2000’s to the ‘failure of language’ in finance. In this workshop, insights from sociolinguistics, political economy, and anthropology of finance are brought to the debate on AI. Language works, produces, and valorises, and its products – commodities as well as machines – have in fact the same fabric of language.

Chair: Matteo Pasquinelli, Ca’ Foscari University
Christian Marazzi, SUPSI (Switzerland), ‘Capital and Language Today’
Daniele Gambetta, University of Pisa, ‘Social AI and Large Language Models’
Angelo Nizza, Centro Studi Filosofici Scholé, ‘Labour as Language: Bianciardi vs Rossi-Landi’
Juliette Farjat, Paris Nanterre University, ‘For a Critical Philosophy of Linguistic Practices’
Giorgio Cesarale, Ca’ Foscari University, ‘Labour and Language in Hegel’s Jena Period’ 
Cecilia Rofena, Ca’ Foscari University, ‘Notes on Rossi-Landi’
Paolo Caffoni, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘Tokens of Translation: The Political Economy of the Sign’
Emanuele Lepore, Ca’ Foscari, ‘Language in between Ideology and Automation’
Discussants: Giorgio Pirina and Francesco Pontarelli, LARIS; Marco Baravalle, Ca’ Foscari University