Speculative Machines and Us: Genealogies of More-than-Human Intuition

Following the Affective Turn

Dr Carolyn Pedwell will lecture on speculative machines and intuition, as part of Following The Affective Turn's lecture series.

Join us each month for lectures and events that 'follow the affective turn', as we hear from leading scholars working in and around the field of affect studies. To view our lecture series line-up and information about our summer symposium, <a href="https://followingaffect.wixsite.com/research/lecture-series" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">click here</a>.Lecture descriptionThis talk foregrounds ‘intuition’ as a generative concept and lens to elucidate the affective genealogies, nature and possibilities of human-machine relations in post-war transatlantic cultures. As a transdisciplinary concept and embodied capacity, intuition brings together process of movement, sensing and cognition, which variously involve anticipation, speculation, recognition, decision-making, duration, and recursion. With intuition as my lens, I focus on three key historical moments which, I suggest, enable us to retrospectively glimpse an emerging condensation of interest and urgency concerning our changing relationships with ‘new’ technologies in Britain and North America – 1) 1950s: The birth of AI and cybernetics; 2) 1980s: The rise of personal computing and software culture and; 3) 2010s: Inhabiting algorithmic life. I consider how, in each historical period, different aspects of intuition emerge as significant in animating our emergent affective entanglements with computational technologies – and consider the particular versions of ‘the human’ they assume, contest, or imagine. My discussion opens out to a post-war genealogy of more-than-human intuition with critical implications for present and future imaginaries of affective technologies and speculative machines. Carolyn Pedwell is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent. She is the author of Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021), Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014), and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010). Her current Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2020-21) explores ‘Digital Media and “The Human”: The Social Life of Software, AI and Algorithms’.Following the Affective Turn is an interdisciplinary research project that hopes to invite discussion and reflection on the current state of affect studies. Formed between Royal Holloway UoL and the University of Brighton, we are excited to run a short series of informal reading groups, a public lecture series and a graduate symposium. This lecture series is kindly supported by the techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership. <a href="https://followingaffect.wixsite.com/research" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">More here.</a>Join us for our next event, Queer Witcheries, with Shaka McGlotten (Purchase College) on the 25th August.

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Speculative Machines and Us: Genealogies of More-than-Human Intuition

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Speculative Machines and Us: Genealogies of More-than-Human Intuition

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