Given that digitisation and datafication go hand in hand with post-truth phenomena and claims to neutrality, we plead for an agility of critique. The problems of post-truth phenomena and claims to neutrality are that they are associated with relativistic and technocratic tendencies. These tendencies require an agility of critique that contrasts post-truth phenomena with a movement from contextualisation to objectivation and the claimed neutrality with a movement from objectivation to contextualisation. However, such agility of critique faces significant challenges: Conceptually, this agility is accused of being relativistic itself, and from a scientific-historical perspective, objectivation and contextualisation are regarded as incompatible forms of reflection. The goal of our contribution is therefore a rehabilitation of the agility of critique, which we theoretically substantiate with Bourdieu’s participant objectivation and the concept of the divided habitus.
Both climate change and the covid-19 pandemic have increased interest in a contemporary discourse around questions of planned economies. This discourse had been boiling up over the last decade and now meets a political landscape that has rather quickly and substantially re-assessed its relation towards planning. However, if the concept of planned economies is not to merely mean a more extensive role of the state within a social market economy, but fundamentally different types of political economy, substantial open questions need to be addressed. This article analyses the current discourse around non-capitalist planned economies and argues that there is a need for new conceptions of planned economies that neither resort to central planning nor variants of market socialism. For further work towards such alternative conceptions it proposes the term distributed planned economies.
The term of critique is deeply embedded in the history of modernity. However, it seems that the current media technologies of algorithmic prediction transcend the temporal semantics of modernity and its forms of subjectivation. What does this mean for critique and the critical subject? Is critique still possible when (future) events are not only predicted but also captured and modified? This article takes up these questions by addressing Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism and Antoinette Rouvroy’s notion of algorithmic governmentality. Additionally, the article takes the historical framework of the project of critique and its forms of subjectivation into consideration to finally evaluate the question whether it is possible to think beyond history with the help of history.
