854
Towards Critical Sociocybernetics: The Role of Power in the Steering Processes of Social Systems
Language: English
This session seeks to gather researchers and social scientists interested in reflecting upon their conceptual tools in their experiences producing sociological and politological analyses. The aim of this session is to take concepts from critical theory and see how they work within a sociocybernetical, second–order cybernetics complexity studies and social systems theory framework. We are particularly interested in observing the role of power in the steering processes of social systems. Some of the subjects that may be addressed are:
What is the place of power relations in systems theory, complexity studies and sociocybernetics?
How is violence to be understood from a sociocybernetical approach?
How power relations and violence practices become naturalized? How is it possible to denaturalize them?
This session invites contributions that address these questions through topics concerning power relations, violence, injustice and environmental problems, among other contemporary issues. Contributions should draw from concepts pertaining to contemporary critical theories. Contributions may compare or contrast the functioning of categories like subject, dispositif, antagonism, capital or culture industry with the conceptual supply of sociocybernetics, complexity studies and systems theory.
With critical theory we refer not only to its origins with the first school of Frankfurt (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin), but include a wide range of thinkers such as Foucault, Agamben, some linked to psychoanalysis (e.g. Slavoj Žižek), schizoid-analysis (e.g. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), feminist perspectives (e.g. Judith Butler or Gayatri Spivak), and de-colonialist thinkers such as Boaventura De Sousa Santos, or Walter Mignolo.