Promises of Community

by Freya Hermann, Marten Flegel, Anna Froelicher, Michael Kranixfeld, Marie Rogg, Marleen Wolter and Felix Worpenberg

On the last day, transeuropa2012 was waiting to dissolve again. In these last hours we invited Sebastian Vehlken (University of Lüneburg) and Carolin Wiedemann (University of Hamburg) to persevere with us.

Sebastian Vehlken spoke about ‘swarming between collective collaboration and computer simulation’. His thesis: Swarms can be understood as zoo technologies. They combine ‘zoé’, the inanimate animal life in the swarm, with the experimental epistemology of computer simulation. This specific view on media determines the complex resonancies between euphoria about networks, new ideas of control and aesthetics of the collective.

In her lecture ‘Between network, swarm and multitude. Anonymous and the technologies of the common’, Carolin Wiedemann analyzed the phenomenon of critical collectiveness. Since its establishment in the 1980s, the internet inspired a recurring discourse about liberation, which envisioned the emancipation from ruling orders and new ways of communities without hierarchies. Even if those theories have been abolished as ‘hippie rhetoric’ quickly and its neoliberal implications got revealed, it cannot be denied that the internet holds features that could avoid a current governmentality, a biopolitical capitalism and its logic of representation: It enables shared and anonymous thinking and modifies itself constantly (social software), thus allowing anonymous exchange.