Lhub Seminar Series: Prof. Bernhard Siegert (Bauhaus Universität Weimar), Melting into Space: Enemies of Mankind (Pirates and Other Incalculable Environmental Contingencies)

The study of cultural techniques explores how infrastructures enable worlds and make actions in the world appear meaningful through operations that process distinctions. In the case of constructs that have a universalistic character, such distinctions produce the figure of the included excluded; in the case of the “international community” or “mankind”, that included excluded is the pirate. The talk sketches the mutations that the enemy of mankind has undergone as his maritime environment has changed from the Oceans of Law in the 17th and 18th centuries to the seas of the big city in the 19th century and to the Seas of Data in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The focus here is on the association of the enemy of mankind with his environment, from which he is becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Does the enemy of all dwell in the discrete, computable continuum of the “digital quagmire” today?
 
Chair: Dr Raghavi Viswanath, LHub & SOAS

Speaker: Bernhard Siegert is Gerd Bucerius Professor for the History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at Bauhaus Universität Weimar. From 2008 to 2020 he was co-director of the International Research Center for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy at Weimar (IKKM). Since 2021 he leads the project “The New Real – Past, Present, and Future of Computation” funded by the NOMIS Foundation.
Siegert was Max Kade Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara (2008 and 2011), Phyllis and Gerald LeBoff Visiting Scholar at the Department for Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (2015), International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada (2016), Eberhard Berent Visiting Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Department of German, New York University (2017), Guest Lecturer at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden (2018), and Visiting Professor at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University (2019).
Translations in English of his work have appeared as Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford University Press, 1999) and Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (Fordham University Press, 2015). His most recent book FINAL FRONTIERS. A Media Archaeology of the Sea has just been published with Brill (2024, in German).

Discussant: Dr Simon Layton, Lecturer in Early Global History at Queen Mary University of London. His work explores sea power and maritime violence, considering specifically how discourses of piracy shaped empire building in the nineteenth century. His forthcoming book is entitled Piratical States: British Imperialism in the Indian Ocean world, c.1780-1850.

The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants.