BIO
Aleksandar Talovic is a PhD candidate at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen and a member of The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). His fields of interest include various theoretical approaches to cultural and narrative analysis, poststructuralist and critical theory along with growing fields of philosophical and theological Post-humanism. His current research deals with notions of subjectivity within the Post- and Trans-humanist theoretical trajectories, with the special emphasis on New Materialism, Actor-Network-Theory, Object-Oriented-Ontology, Performativity Studies, Embodiment and Affect Theory, Gender Studies et. sim.
TITLE
“The Screaming Silence of Servers: Computer Malware as a Posthuman Negotiator”
ABSTRACT
The recent chain of events that took place in mid-December 2019 at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany brought up to the fore a set of questions on the ''agential turn'' within the posthumanist conceptual framework (Barad, 2007). Namely, a serious IT security breach forced the University authorities to shut down the servers ''until further notice''. As a result, the complete digital infrastructure which comprises of Internet access, email services and internal networks architecture, including the entire academic management system, went offline, significantly disturbing the University’s operative dynamics. The ongoing investigation successfully located the trojan malware ''Emotet'' and ransomware ''Ryuk'', the two highly intuitive programs that spread with lightning speed and quickly shift their behavior during the life cycle to mislead malware investigator attempts. Such behavioral ''queerness'' calls for an updated, eminently posthuman approach to the issues of cyber security. Instead of unsustainable notion of human-centered cyberattack (by pre-setting the conventionally imagined static subject as the ''original culprit'') it rather prompts for a conceptual inclusion of a group of entities with ''subjectivity properties'', as networked co-actants (Latour, 2005) loaded with nonhuman ''intra-culturality'', which run pretty much on their own terms and vernaculars. In a form of a theoretical amendment to a given case study, this paper offers certain analytical tools for challenging the ultimate human exclusivity on the matter, with a special emphasis on the malware performativity and the pluriverse of relational and processual ontologies, sym- and trans-poietically shared among each entity involved (Bennett, 2010; Haraway, 2016). This implies an examination of the alternative forms of commonality and politicality throughout which the nonhuman entities tend to be recognized as a specific form of semiotic presences whose agency operates as a constitutive ingredient of ''our'' own ontology: they are here to-negotiate-with.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
Aleksandar Talovic is a PhD candidate at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen and a member of The International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC). His fields of interest include various theoretical approaches to cultural and narrative analysis, poststructuralist and critical theory along with growing fields of philosophical and theological Post-humanism. His current research deals with notions of subjectivity within the Post- and Trans-humanist theoretical trajectories, with the special emphasis on New Materialism, Actor-Network-Theory, Object-Oriented-Ontology, Performativity Studies, Embodiment and Affect Theory, Gender Studies et. sim.
TITLE
“The Screaming Silence of Servers: Computer Malware as a Posthuman Negotiator”
ABSTRACT
The recent chain of events that took place in mid-December 2019 at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany brought up to the fore a set of questions on the ''agential turn'' within the posthumanist conceptual framework (Barad, 2007). Namely, a serious IT security breach forced the University authorities to shut down the servers ''until further notice''. As a result, the complete digital infrastructure which comprises of Internet access, email services and internal networks architecture, including the entire academic management system, went offline, significantly disturbing the University’s operative dynamics. The ongoing investigation successfully located the trojan malware ''Emotet'' and ransomware ''Ryuk'', the two highly intuitive programs that spread with lightning speed and quickly shift their behavior during the life cycle to mislead malware investigator attempts. Such behavioral ''queerness'' calls for an updated, eminently posthuman approach to the issues of cyber security. Instead of unsustainable notion of human-centered cyberattack (by pre-setting the conventionally imagined static subject as the ''original culprit'') it rather prompts for a conceptual inclusion of a group of entities with ''subjectivity properties'', as networked co-actants (Latour, 2005) loaded with nonhuman ''intra-culturality'', which run pretty much on their own terms and vernaculars. In a form of a theoretical amendment to a given case study, this paper offers certain analytical tools for challenging the ultimate human exclusivity on the matter, with a special emphasis on the malware performativity and the pluriverse of relational and processual ontologies, sym- and trans-poietically shared among each entity involved (Bennett, 2010; Haraway, 2016). This implies an examination of the alternative forms of commonality and politicality throughout which the nonhuman entities tend to be recognized as a specific form of semiotic presences whose agency operates as a constitutive ingredient of ''our'' own ontology: they are here to-negotiate-with.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
