Cultural Technologies within a Technological Culture. On the Hybrid Construction of Social Life

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Papilloud
• Subject Area: Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2008 to 2009
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 72865036

In the cultural and social sciences, the contemporary discourses on identity largely take place within the scope of the debates on the death of the Subject inaugurated by the critical contemporary readings of the structuralist tradition after WW-II, particularly the related work of the French philosopher and social scientist Michel Foucault. Today, this kind of interpretation is a commonplace within the sociology of identity, which is impossible to circumvent. It is reinforced by its convergence and its complementarities with the critical theses againsUnodern colonialism, arid the security stake in the industrialized countries underlines by the recent public policy research. In this concert of harmonised voices not only in the field of the scientific disciplines, but also on an international level, one often misses to consider the other facet of the coin, namely: the rebuilt of identity. The book which we propose introduced this problematics considering the word « rebuilt» not as a metaphorical one, but as an ensemble of operations related to the intervention of technology in the life of the individuals and in society, with which one makes identity without pun, i.e. where the identity becomes a field of experimentations, where one reparameters its resources, pre-defines and prefabricates its limits. If social sciences will undoubtedly live still for a time in the probabilistic ideal of individuals and societies considered as achievements of some few possibles among a world of other ones, the reflexion conducted on the experimentation of identity pragmatises the prospect. The technological instrumentation seen as a new cultural layer within modern societies, and their products distributed in the public as current human consumption goods become today the agents of a world of possibles which are embedded in our daily life. These possibles are more or less technologically contextual\zed, predefined, pre-directed, pre-registered. Thus, their world is not more a "metaphysical" one, but the world of the conditions favouring the rebuilt of identity, which becomes its experimental plan. The description and the analysis of the conditioning of these possibles are the first stake of each contribution presented in this book by various specialists coming from Germany, England, Canada, France and the United States. Each contribution provides a thought on this topic from its particular point of view, which can be differentiated according to three complementary levels of the analysis on identity that they support, namely the anthropological level, the psychosocial and the social-political one.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants