1. Event
  2.  / Deepfake

Deepfake

A Rhetorical and Economic Alternative to Address the So—Called “Post-Truth Era”

An & Automedias.org event

University of California, Berkeley
Illustration Lyes Hammadouche

    Presentation

    Since Greek antiquity, the rhetorical tradition has proposed to conceive and apprehend the search for truth differently from the Western philosophical tradition that was born with Plato. Platonic politics wished to control the city by subjecting political expression to the philosophical concept, whereas rhetoric opposed the logocratic and universal claim of philosophy, in the name of the diversity of subjectivities and forms of life that composed the demos, and justified democratic deliberation as a form and process of agreement and democratic agency.

    This symposium aims to develop a critique of the current debates against Post-Truth and fakeness, led today by Big Tech in an effort to ensure its hegemony on the process of subjectivation and to control the political expression of the demos through the control of the digital economy, which today includes the economy of creation and economy of imagination. In addition to the critical force of the rhetoric that we wish to rehabilitate, in order to denounce the illusion of a digital democracy through the current platforms of digital capitalism, this colloquium would like to suggest a different approach to the problems related to the deepfake by proposing an articulation between a Critical Digital Rhetoric and a Digital Political Economy.

    Rather than censoring the new combination of Fakeness and Artificial Intelligence, called the deepfake, as Big Tech is doing today, we wish to reintegrate the production of deepfake in a new digital political economy, which would exploit the rhetorical potential of deepfake in a new economy of digital democracy. The latter would face the challenge of revealing the democratic value of the deepfake through the possibility of a circulation and a reappropriation of symbolic images as well as a digital hermeneutic. It is thus a new rhetorical paradigm of digital democracy that we wish to promote as an alternative to the alienating alliance of surveillance capitalism, computational capitalism, computational sciences, and data sciences.

    Read the argument

    Program

    • Deepfake

      • Opening

        • -
          opening

          By Igor Galligo

      • Rhetoric, Democracy and “Post-Truth”

        How are rhetoric and fakeness consubstantial with democracy? To what conception of truth does the notion of "post-truth" correspond? And why is Post-Truth a problematic notion for the rhetorical tradition?

        • -

          By James Porter

        • -

          By Linda Kinstler

        • -
          Discussant

          By Chiara Cappelletto

        • -

          collective discussion with the audience

      • Break

      • Subjectivity, Digital Computationalism and Artificial Intelligence

        How does the theorization of contemporary computing, which gave birth to the Internet and artificial intelligence, and which is based on computationalism, constitute a problematic conception of subjectivity? How is this conception opposed to the rhetorical and hermeneutic tradition? What conceptions of truth are discarded by computationalism?

        • -

          By David Bates

        • -

          By Warren Neidich

        • -

          By Morgan Ames

        • -

          collective discussion with the audience

      • Lunch

      • Critical Digital Rhetoric

        What renewals can be made within the rhetorical tradition to adapt it to the digital political and Artificial Intelligence contexts? What critical political powers can digital rhetoric retain in the face of computational digital media, fed by data sciences in the new social spaces that are the Internet and social networks?

        • -

          By Nina Begus

        • -

          By Justin Hodgson

        • -

          By Nathan Atkinson

        • -

          collective discussion with the audience

      • Break

      • Computational Capitalism and Surveillance Capitalism in light of the Deepfake

        What conceptions and productions of truth do computational capitalism and surveillance capitalism promote? And against what conceptions or practices of producing truth do they discriminate? To which social groups, does this discrimination pose problems of expression and individuation today?

        • -

          By Marion Fourcade

        • -

          By Igor Galligo

        • -

          By Konrad Posch

        • -

          collective discussion with the audience

      • Break

      • For a New Digital Political Economy of Deepfake

        How to extend the digital political economy to the symbolic and iconic economy? What new rhetorical and hermeneutic economy of truth can political economy invent? What circuits of collective truth production can political economy develop to grant the deepfake political meaning and value?

        • -

          By Martin Kenney

        • -

          By Mark Nitzberg

        • -

          By John Zysman

        • -

          collective discussion with the audience

    Guests

    • Chiara Cappelletto

      State University of Milan, CSTMS

    • David Bates

      UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Department

    • Igor Galligo

      Founder

      Université Paris 8, Université de Technologie de Compiègne COSTECH , Université de Leuphana ICAM

      Igor Galligo initially trained in humanities, leading to three master’s degrees: contemporary philosophy and aesthetics at the University Paris 1 Sorbonne, and political science at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). Since late 2012, he developed his reflection on the topics of ambiance, epistemic, libidinal and attentional devices, under the direction of Bernard Stiegler, director of the Institute of Research and Innovation at the Centre Pompidou, where he directed three international seminars on the transformations of attentional abilities. In 2013, he joined the research program Reflective Interaction at the EnsadLab, the research laboratory of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, school of art and design in Paris. He also became associated researcher at GERPHAU, a research center in architecture and urbanism. In 2015, he became research officer at the Ministry of Culture and Communication in the Department of Research, Higher Education and Technology. Since 2016, he enrolled a PhD in aesthetic and design at the Research Center on Arts and Langage (CRAL) at School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), and at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) in Basel, Switzerland, under the co-supervision of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), and Claudia Mareis, director of IXDM. in May 2018, he becomes associated researcher at IXDM. The same month, he founded NOODESIGN, a new think tank on the design of the operations of the mind, studied by NOOLOGY.

    • James Porter

      UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Department

    • John Zysman

      UC Berkeley, BRIE, CITRIS

    • Justin Hodgson

      Indiana University, Department of English

    • Konrad Posch

      UC Berkeley, Political Science, N2PE

    • Linda Kinstler

      UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Department

    • Marion Fourcade

      UC Berkeley, Social Sciences Matrix, N2PE

    • Mark Nitzberg

      UC Berkeley, BRIE, BCHC, BAIR

    • Martin Kenney

      UC Davis, Department of Human Ecology, BRIE

    • Morgan Ames

      UC Berkeley, School of Information, CSTMS

    • Nathan Atkinson

      UC Berkeley, Rhetoric Department

    • Nina Begus

      UC Berkeley, CSTMS

    • Warren Neidich

      Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art

    Practical info

    • Joins us

      The event will be held at UC Berkeley, in Matrix Conference Room, and online with Zoom.
      • May 10, 2023, from 9a.m. to 7 p.m.
        Matrix Conference Room Please be sure to register Register link University of California, Berkeley 820 Social Sciences Building Berkeley, CA 94720-1922

    • Participating online

      A Zoom link will be provided after registration. Please be sure to register early. Register link

    Organization

    Project owners:

    • Igor Galligo
      Researcher in Media Sciences and founder of the Automedias.org project

    Co-organizers:

    • David Bates
      Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley
    • Marion Fourcade
      Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley
    • James Porter
      Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley
    • Morgan Ames
      Professor of Science of Information and Communication at UC Berkeley

    Production Help:

    Faith Enemark, Heather Reilly, Davinderjeet Sidhu, Lupita Rodriguez, Eva Y Seto, Julia Sizek, Chuck Kapelke, Oscar Calva, Warren Neidich and Andres Sandoval.

    • Funding and Scientific Partners

      • European Union
      • UPL
      • Nest
      • Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley

    • Scientifics Partners of UC Berkeley

      • Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley
      • Social Sciences Matrix
      • Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society
      • Network for New Political Economy
      • Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative

    • Other Scientific Partner

      • Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative

    This project has received funding from the MSCA-RISE program under grant agreement No 101007915

    Linked publication

    • Dessin : Illustration Lyes Hammadouche
    • Type : Epilogue, ETC
    • Design : bnjm.eu
    • Composé, dans un navigateur web, avec PagedJs
    ↑