Agenda

"Learning With" Workshop Series
On Instrumentality and Sylvia Wynter's "Black Metamorphosis"

Luciana Parisi in dialogue with Antonia Majaca Friedman

Tuesday, May 12, 2026
10:00–13:00
Aula Biral, Dorsoduro 3484/D, Calle Contarini, 30123 Venezia

Can the relation between technics and culture open modes of cognition that break with the logic of capital abstraction and value extraction, or does the post-human critique of intelligence leave that logic intact? Haraway's cyborg, Hayles on distributed cognition, and Stiegler on the originary technicity of the human have each unsettled the boundary between human and machine, but the cultural authority that adjudicates which forms of life, labour, and matter will count as outside value has not been touched by these reconfigurations. Sylvia Wynter's Black Metamorphosis locates that authority historically. The plantation was the site at which labour was stripped from prior social forms and reconstituted as a commodity, and "Blackness" names both this reconstitution and the cultural labour enslaved peoples performed within and against it. Simondon's account of culture as a "value judgment" on the technical object (Du mode d'existence des objets techniques, 1958) identifies a parallel estrangement, but stops short of asking whose dispossession underwrites the authority doing the judging. The session reads Wynter and Simondon together to ask what a critique of instrumentality looks like when it begins from this history: the colonial and patriarchal mentality that has cast nature and technics as alien to humanity, reason, and life, and the work of undoing it.

Luciana Parisi is Professor in the Program in Literature and core faculty for the Graduate Program in Computational Media Art and Culture at Duke University. A former member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and co-founding member of the CCB (Critical Computation Bureau), her research is a philosophical investigation of technology in culture, aesthetics, and politics. She is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum, 2004) and Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (MIT Press, 2013), and is completing a monograph on automation and philosophy (MIT, forthcoming) and co-editing Colonial Fractals: The Racial Politics of Planetary Computation (Duke University Press, forthcoming).

“Learning With” is an experimental workshop series and the primary methodology of the Radical Epistemologies cluster at NICHE.

Registration: antonia.friedman@unive.it