(Text of the speech by Ágnes Básthy on the first day of Metaforum X, Budapest, October 25, 2024)
“‘Krisis’ was originally a medical concept which designated, in the Hippocratic corpus of texts, the moment when the doctor decided whether the patient would be able to survive the disease. Theologians reprized the term to indicate the final judgement that occurs during the last day. If we look at the state of exception which we are now experiencing, we could say that the medical religion combines the perpetual crisis of capitalism with the Christian idea of the end times, of an eschaton where the extreme decision is constantly ongoing and where the end is simultaneously rushed and deferred in an incessant effort to govern it, without its ever being resolved once and for all. It is the religion of a world that feels itself to be at its end, and yet it cannot—like the Hippocratic doctor—decide whether it will survive or die.” Giorgio Agamben
These sentences are taken from Agamben’s provocative essay ‘Medicine as religion’,[1] written during the Covid pandemic.[2] As he formulates, ‘crisis’ used to be a useful word but for now it has become incorporated into the vocabulary of governance. I may add that in the pseudo-scientific language of managerialism it is used for decades to cover up responsibility and as a helping hand in managing the unmanageable historically since the 1973 oil crisis. We know from Boltansky and Chiapello that in the self-adapting system called capitalism, such words as crisis are only phrases for phases of temporary dysfunction mostly followed by something more insidious and advanced structure.[3] Because of these, I have serious doubts concerning the use of ‘crisis’ as a descriptive notion of the situation in which we are living. The intensification of destruction and anxiety is the consequence of the logic of rationalized, continuous and endless extraction of late modern capitalism. We are living in the late phase of the historical and material process based on a self-destroying logic.
If we not only look at economic indicators but at the big picture, it looks much more like a one-way direction process than an unstable system which is, however, striving for equilibrium.
I don’t believe that words on their own can change the world. However, I do believe that notions are fundamentally shaping our perspective on the world around us and our consciousness. You can call it ideology, or just accept that certain notions have agendas and agendas have certain notions (and these can change over time). I have to assert that in our times ‘crisis’ justifies new, more extreme ways of governing. Justification and legitimization are key notions in our case. Shosanna Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism[4] penned her concerns based on Agamben’s thoughts:
“The declaration of a state of exception[5] functions in politics as cover for the suspension of the rule of law and the introduction of new executive powers justified by crisis.” So, the last and most dangerous turn in the career of the notion of crisis was that it became a speech act, a favorite magic spell of contemporary political black magic. Declaring crisis nowadays is an ultimate legitimization not just for austerity measures in the economy, but the most widespread and harmful antisocial measures. Crisis can be ‘caused’ by migration,[6] war or pandemic, terrorism, or ecological catastrophe, but the pure declaration itself is an active component in executing the most oppressive, authoritarian, tyrannic political actions. We can say otherwise that declaration of crisis is summoning the so-called self-appointed often nefarious saviors in the sphere of politics.
Power, Technology and Surveillance
Since Michel Foucault subverted the way we think about power it is more or less evident for the intelligentsia that power is exercised through a diffuse and widespread apparatus in which surveillance has an outstanding role.[7] This is why Zuboff emphasizes that we are not only living in “digital capitalism” but in “surveillance capitalism” which means that the component of power in contemporary communication technology is based on the few centuries old practice of surveillance. Concerning the latest evolution in the technology of surveillance, Zuboff highlighted the notion of “surveillance exceptionalism” which she connected to the date of 2001 which was the year of the notorious terrorist attack against the World Trade Center in New York City, USA. This was a game-changing and life-changing event since it was the big push for the cooperation of the CIA and Google, that is, the establishment of the engaged alliance between surveillance capitalists and secret services. Although I was only a child back then, I do remember, and I guess many of you remember as well, the so-called “war on terrorism” of the Bush era.
The ambience of propaganda, war, racism and paranoia, the intensifying securitization, the scandalous and later unveiled political lies and secrets, and the rigorous measures legitimated by the politics of the ‘state of exception’[8] had a deep, widespread and long-lasting effect on international politics and even on the more private and local social milieus almost everywhere on the planet. My conviction is that the ‘state of exception’ generated by the declaration of crisis during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 was very similar in many aspects, mostly because it was a global event with global consequences. The application of digital technologies in and for the surveillance of the population ranging from the ‘track and trace” apps to the authoritarian and obtrusive measurements which violated the private sphere supports the perspective to see this event as the next level of “surveillance exceptionalism” which was made possible not just by the network of the internet but by the mobile digital technology attached to our body which became a seemingly essential form of living during the last two decades. But what kind of political intentions, ideologies and industrial interests can be discovered behind these developments?
Sometimes it is worth trusting your intuition whether you are a social scientist or an artist and attempting to make visible the invisible. Anything we or our leaders mean under the notion of crisis, it’s more and more visible that social and technological phenomena are converging towards a new kind of order in social control. A dangerously tightening entanglement of science and technology with capital emerging as political power supported by a propaganda apparatus which penetrates and interlaces the media. This is why the Covid situation seemed so apocalyptic, and this proves the importance of analyzing the ‘crisis of science’ which remained with us after the scandalously managed pandemic. The latter and the recent ‘crisis of science’ was and is the culmination point of processes which have been ongoing for decades: “The politics of the life sciences — the politics of life itself ~ has been shaped by those who controlled the human, technical and financial resources” as Nikolas Rose pointed out this fact.[9]
Biopower merged with high-end technologies which transformed or expressively abolished most of the moral and ethical constraints related to living bodies. To quote Rose again: “The classical distinction made in moral philosophy between that which is not human — ownable, tradeable, commodifiable and that which is human — not legitimate material for such commodification — no longer seems so stable.” Concluding these still and even more relevant words, the subversion and transformation of moral economies of societies are not without resistance or backlash. When the big capital implements new strategies to define our relationship to life and subordinates us to its own logic, there will be consequences, which means problems and crises and finally new forms of control.
As the Hungarian poet once wrote “Én nem így képzeltem el a rendet!” [This is not how I imagined the order],[10] let’s see how Zuboff describes our situation:
“It may be possible to imagine something like the “Internet of things” without surveillance capitalism, but it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without something like the “Internet of things.” Every command arising from the prediction imperative requires this pervasive real-world material “knowing and doing” presence. The new apparatus is the material expression of the prediction imperative, and it represents a new kind of power animated by the economic compulsion toward certainty. Two vectors converge in this fact: the early ideals of ubiquitous computing and the economic imperatives of surveillance capitalism. This convergence signals the metamorphosis of the digital infrastructure from a thing that we have to a thing that has us.”
Unless the strategy seems new, the constellation of capital, technology and control has been with us since modernity, this is why we shouldn’t leave any of these components out of our analysis. Zuboff is very explicit at this point when she writes:
“Surveillance capitalism employs many technologies, but it cannot be equated with any technology. Its operations may employ platforms, but these operations are not the same as platforms. It employs machine intelligence, but it cannot be reduced to those machines. It produces and relies on algorithms, but it is not the same as algorithms. Surveillance capitalism’s unique economic imperatives are the puppet masters that hide behind the curtain orienting the machines and summoning them to action. These imperatives, to indulge another metaphor, are like the body’s soft tissues that cannot be seen in an X-ray but do the real work of binding muscle and bone. We are not alone in falling prey to the technology illusion. It is an enduring theme of social thought, as old as the Trojan horse. Despite this, each generation stumbles into the quicksand of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests. In modern times this means the interests of capital, and in our time it is surveillance capital that commands the digital milieu and directs our trajectory toward the future.”
Subjectification and Technology
What is our personal relationship to this all as human beings? We can ask the question otherwise: How do the often repeated slogans of trans-humanism and post-humanism like “shifting boundaries of humanity” relate to the Capital, and here I mean transnational and globalized Capital, especially to digital and biotechnology created by Big Tech and Big Pharma?
Nikolas Rose emphasized the power of capital in subjectivization processes since the beginning of the millennia, for example when he wrote:
“The philosophical status’ — indeed the very ontology — of human beings is being reshaped through the decisions of entrepreneurs as to where to invest their capital and which lines of biomedical research and development to pursue.”
Therefore some of the biggest, hardest and most uncomfortable questions of our time are how this technological apparatus driven by the capitalist interest shapes our subjectivity, how it affects our subjectification…our relation to ourselves, our desires and our choices or whatever we mean under the notion of identity. This leads us back to the question of power and subjectification conceptualized by the aforementioned Foucault. [11] What we are seeing today is that the boundaries between the self and the market are blurring gradually with the means and media of invasive and ubiquitous persuading apparatus which behavioural manipulation and modification[12] – and I have to add chemical interventions[13] – which are directly targeting our self.
Unfortunately, so far I can’t see the reflective, profound and radical critique of the above-mentioned social processes, and neither are these hard questions asked in the mainstream of contemporary art. This latter takes the role of “a mirror” which only reflects and neither analyzes nor criticizes. I also see that despite the intensifying social control, pressure and obvious manipulation, most of the philosophers are affirmative if not enthusiastic and quailing in front of the power of the technological apparatus whose heart beats the rhythm of the Capital if it’s not one with it. I see little intent to face, understand and contextualize the manipulative nature of the power relations in which this technological culture is embedded. But the stakes have never been so high. Meanwhile, the so-called progress which made our life easier in some ways, and moderately transformed our possibilities, has many biopolitical consequences as well.
Key components of obedience are the lack of knowledge and real choices which sharply limits autonomy. Nowadays it seems like the intelligentsia accepted that there is no chance for diverting the ongoing technological trajectory. According to Zuboff, the colonization of our intellectual critical apparatus is intentional and she denominated it as ‘inevitabilism’. According to her, the concept of inevitability is a Trojan horse for powerful economic imperatives, it is an ideology and a marketing strategy in the aggressive colonization and transformation of the material world. For these purposes, it applies distorting rhetoric, based on the false premise that the trajectory of technological progress is inevitable.[14] Here is how Zuboff disassembles it:
“The image of technology as an autonomous force with unavoidable actions and consequences has been employed across the centuries to erase the fingerprints of power and absolve it of responsibility. The monster did it, not Victor Frankenstein. However, the ankle bracelet does not monitor the prisoner; the criminal justice system does that. Every doctrine of inevitability carries a weaponized virus of moral nihilism programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility. Inevitability rhetoric is a cunning fraud designed to render us helpless and passive in the face of implacable forces that are and must always be indifferent to the merely human. This is the world of the robotized interface, where technologies work their will, resolutely protecting power from challenge.”
Inevitabilism is a self-fulfilling prophecy of modernist thought, and today the utopianism of Silicon Valley. But never forget that somebody’s utopia apparently can be somebody else’s dystopia.
The Last Bulwark: Effectivity and Sustainability of Modernity
It is dangerous that social, political and art theory and a considerable part of the art world take, use and set in motion some notions of late-modernist managerialism uncritically and without reflection. Do we want to sustain the unsustainable and manage the unmanageable? Do we want to be contributors to the neoliberal agenda of “managing the consequences” of antisocial governance? The notion of crisis implied a temporary rupture or reparable malfunction of a system that more or less works. Is it something that describes our world at this very moment? Can we truly believe in this? And I don’t think that completing the notion with prefixes -like “perma” and “poly”- can help us, neither in thinking nor in acting. I have a strong feeling that they are suffocating, and just further intensifying anxiety, sometimes to the point of psychological paralysis.
Engaging in building a more radical vocabulary which enables more radical actions we should reconsider what is power, control, freedom, and autonomy and realize that the cardinal question is still who or what exerts them. You might say that this is just a question of priorities but I would call it vigilance or awareness. Understanding the modernist roots of our thinking about technology and empowerment is key to finding new ways of thinking and getting rid of the role offered to us as ‘useful’ social engineers – meanwhile, we are artists, cultural workers or theorists – moreover in a system which is obviously not working according to the moral or social values we believe in. In my opinion, all ways lead back to the project of modernity, the reconsideration, the understanding and the critique of it. Since modernity, the developed technologies were originally created as control tools based on the results of scientific knowledge. And this also leaves its mark on the unintended consequences of their operation, not least forming their users through their inherent logic based on effectivity. But the component of power is always can be found in the relationship of the ‘subject’ or ‘actor’ and the ‘tool’ or ‘means of technology’ as Domonkos Sik pointed out:
“The most basic expectation towards technology is that the device itself is fully controlled by its user, that is, it should not have its own will, but should always follow the intentions of the actor. Another expectation is that it helps the subject to increase the efficiency of the rule exercised over the world.”
These expectations are subverted by Artificial Intelligence because it seems like a border state of human-technology hybrids in which the latter becomes dominant. So this change in the power relation is the real and cardinal turning point, and not ‘hybridization’, which is the favourite buzzword, and magic spell of contemporary theory. ‘Hybridisation’ is an ongoing but actually unreflected process since the dawn of human history if we can believe Latour[15]. But why are we afraid of this turn and what can we win or lose in this process?
As Agamben wrote about modernity: “The fundamental architectural problem becomes visible only in the house ravaged by fire, then you can now see what is at stake in the history of the West, what it has tried so hard to grasp, and why it could not help but fail.”[16] The whole set of problems is beautifully highlighted by the sociologist Domonkos Sik, in his text, titled ‘Only an AI can save us.’[17] In this essay, he presents that what is really frightening in the AI for our human societies is in reality the heart of the modernist thought: the naked instrumental rationality as its inhumanity made visible by this entity (if we can call it like this). He asserts that facing this hard and harsh truth is giving us a chance to save ourselves and change the world we built around us. Sik follows the intellectual tradition of the critique of modernity when he highlights that totalitarian tendencies are embedded in the premises of modernity :
“It is important to emphasize that behind this fear are specifically the silenced taboos of modernity. The modern man is the one who measures the value of things by the effectiveness of control, who considers everything that is not efficient enough to be worthless, disposable, and destroyable. And the modern man is the one who asserts the amorality of technical rationality organized according to the exclusive aspects of efficiency. Centuries of colonialism, genocides based on race theory, and Nazism all exemplify where the absolutization of superiority identified with efficiency can lead – although not in the relationship between man and tool, but between man and man.
All this, moreover, does not require artificial intelligence. Modern man applied this principle himself in the past, when he set out to destroy fellow human beings he deemed unnecessary. And it also enforces it in the present, when it reproduces the extreme forms of social suffering through the indirect mechanisms of exploitation along the chains of global inequality. Moreover, endangering not only certain groups, but humanity as a whole.”
Then he goes on:
“The artificial intelligence that emerged as a result of instrumental rationalization poses a threat to human identity only if we accept the moral order of modernization narrowed down to efficiency, if we can only give enough meaning to life to dominate the world and others. In such an approach, we will necessarily lose against technological systems and AI: because sooner or later it will dominate the world and us in it more efficiently than we do. However, nothing determines us to get stuck in the amorality of efficiency: if we find a value and meaning that can be the basis of a life worthy of man, then the picture is already rearranged.”
AI as a new product in the process of functional-instrumental rationalization wakes up the ‘bad conscience of modernity’ and forces us to re-evaluate our social values. The ideological bases of this technology which we elaborated above also makes it clear that we can’t hand over the fate of humanity and our planet to our wrongly tamed creature and have to take responsibility for what we created. In the other hand we can’t get rid of the notion of ‘humanity’ so easily (as some theorists suggested). It’s time to decide what is worth preserving in human existence, in other words, what is it about being human that makes it worth staying human? What is this all to do with dignity or dignified existence? Since we can’t turn back history and we also shouldn’t, the potential strategy is exceeding or ‘the way of escape forward’ which means that we need to rediscover the human values that we have forgotten in the process of efficiency maximisation, and we have to save and reposition them through further ‘hybridisation’ process.
Our Powers: Awareness and Autonomy
What we can also conclude is that we need awareness in the first place. Every threat to human autonomy begins with an assault on awareness, and this is why our consciousness is attacked by surveillance capitalism. This phenomenon is carefully analyzed by Zuboff in her book.
“Individual awareness is the enemy of telestimulation because it is the necessary condition for the mobilization of cognitive and existential resources. There is no autonomous judgment without awareness. Agreement and disagreement, participation and withdrawal, resistance or collaboration: none of these self-regulating choices can exist without awareness.”
Meanwhile, what we call self-control is a set of practices which are interiorized by human socialisation, hence in this sense not independent from the power relations and other cultural specificities which define a certain society, but the connection of autonomy with awareness and the ability to self-control is crucial. Moreover self-determination and autonomy are also deeply connected to what the ancient Greeks called ‘parrhesia’ which means ‘fearless speech’ or ‘speaking the truth’.[18]
“Philosophers recognize “self-regulation,” “self-determination,” and “autonomy” as “freedom of will.” The word autonomy derives from the Greek and literally means “regulation by the self.” It stands in contrast to heteronomy, which means “regulation by others.” The competitive necessity of economies of action means that surveillance capitalists must use all means available to supplant autonomous action with heteronomous action.”
Zuboff also invoked some research which confirms that the most important determinant of one’s ability to resist persuasion is premeditation which means that someone who can harness self-awareness to think through the consequences of their actions is more disposed to chart their own course. The other most important factor is commitment. So those who are consciously committed to a course of action or set of principles are less likely to be persuaded to do something that violates that commitment. If we recognize autonomy as a moral principle it is time to ask the question of what we are going through as a society by losing these important abilities. Could we see it as a kind of demoralization that also affects our intellectual capacities, or will the disintegration of our intellectual capacities turn into a kind of demoralisation? Zuboff points out:
“A rich and flourishing research literature illuminates the antecedents, conditions, consequences, and challenges of human self-regulation as a universal need. The capacity for self-determination is understood as an essential foundation for many of the behaviours that we associate with critical capabilities such as empathy, volition, reflection, personal development, authenticity, integrity, learning, goal accomplishment, impulse control, creativity, and the sustenance of intimate enduring relationships.”
It is so telling and says so much about our awareness (or indeed the lack of it) that how we just dropped the notion of “autonomy” for “agency” and “empowerment” for suspiciously embracing and an almost cult-like worship of trauma, victimhood and “vulnerability” which latter in a sense is the agenda of impotence hereupon disempowerment in an age which badly needs our energies, our power to transform it. It doesn’t suggest a healthy relationship with power, more seems like belittling, shaming and taming the powerful in us to take away this power and let ourselves be ruled. I know this strategy painfully well because I’m a woman. I would like to emphasize that I’m not talking against empathy. Empathy and solidarity are some of the most important things in human society. But building our personality and our central social values around glorifying and aestheticizing suffering and even placing them in the middle of the competition, the struggle for attention is destructive.
Power is more important than just letting it pass on who knows whom. To deconstruct the totalizing understanding of the notion, we have to understand that power is not the same as authority or violence and we must relearn to distinguish among these terms. Just like in the Hungarian language ‘erő’, ‘hatalom’ és ‘erőszak’ are different notions, meanwhile in English ‘power’ is often and unreflectively used as a synonym for ‘authority’. Power is not purely negative, it’s not just destruction, it’s also energy and most of all: creation, knowledge, will, passion, life, autonomy, and in a sense it is the precondition of any action. Something we can share or generate in others as well. As Bifo wrote in Futurability:[19]
“Possibility is content, potency is energy and power is form.”
He goes on and calls “possibility a content inscribed in the present constitution of the world (that is, the immanence of possibilities). Possibility is not one, it is always plural: the possibilities inscribed in the present composition of the world are not infinite, but many. The field of possibility is not infinite because the possible is limited by the inscribed impossibilities of the present. Nevertheless, it is plural, a field of bifurcations. When facing an alternative between different possibilities, the organism enters into vibration, then proceeds making a choice that corresponds to its potency.”
Then he calls “potency the subjective energy that deploys the possibilities and actualizes them. Potency is the energy that transforms the possibilities into actualities.”
And he calls “power the selections (and the exclusions) that are implied in the structure of the present as a prescription: power is the selection and enforcement of one possibility among many, and simultaneously it is the exclusion (and invisibilization) of many other possibilities.”
In short: you need power to live and to fight, to help yourself and to help others. It is more practical than an “ideological” way of thinking and a useful interpretation of the real possibilities in social and political transformation.
Meanwhile, agency as a notion offers a different and probably a narrower horizon of formulation, articulation and action and this is not an accident. As David Armstrong notes:[20]
“A theory of agency emerged in economics when it was realised that, despite extensive work on the theory of the firm and of markets, there was ‘no theory which explains how the conflicting objectives of the individual participants are brought into equilibrium so as to yield this result’ At the same time, sociologists grappled with the problem of how the actions of the autonomous agent could be explored in a world hitherto dominated by structure. As Lash and Urry noted, over the previous half decade or so, forms of agency had increasingly come to take the place of purely structural determinations in explanations of collective action.”
This is why I find it very important to reclaim and redefine power as a notion and to reintegrate into our awareness not just as something against which we define our activity, but something we also possess. As I mentioned above power encompasses much more than the relation of agency and structure, and not just leaves but generates much more space for the imagination and the incidental. As the often misunderstood Foucault phrased it:[21]
“It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them.”
Which means that there is always hope.
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Ágnes Básthy is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral School of Sociology at Eötvös Lóránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary and a lecturer at Rajk László College for Advanced Studies Budapest, Hungary where she teaches social theory and biopolitics. Her doctoral research focuses on the transformation of the art field in Hungary after the regime change, analyzing the relationship between art, politics and social changes in a global context focusing on Eastern Europe. She has been working at the intersection of culture, sociology and art for more than a decade as a researcher, critic and organizer. As an independent publicist, she follows an interdisciplinary approach to interpreting contemporary art production in the context of recent cultural and social phenomena and tendencies.
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Notes:
[1] Giorgio Agamben: Medicine as religion, Quodlibet, 2th May, 2020
original Italian: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-la-medicina-come-religione English translation: https://itself.blog/2020/05/02/giorgio-agamben-medicine-as-religion/ Published here: Where We Are Now – Epidemics as Politics, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York, London, 2021.
[2] Giorgio Agamben is one of the greatest living philosophers of our time, and he was among the first public intellectuals who criticized the disproportionality of state measures during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. In his articles published in the Italian journal Quodlibet he regularly wrote about overreaction of the state apparatus from a biopolitical perspective, as well as the long-term consequences of the extreme conditions created by the state of exception and also about the collective social and cultural stakes of the interventions. As an intellectual heretic he was heavily criticized by other philosophers and was publicly attacked by the media and apparently was compared to the Holocaust deniers. The writer of these lines translated Agamben’s aforementioned essays to Hungarian during the epidemic, and had to face the fact that certain platforms refused to publish them for openly political reasons. Meanwhile, after the normalization of the situation Agamben’s essays proved to be the most important social and political theoretical analysis of the pandemic times. But before this, during the pandemic, reflections to Agamben’s perspective generated a wider discussion, a debate among leading intellectuals like Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito, which was accessible on the web but then disappeared and Routledge published it in 2021 as a book titled ‘Fernando Castrillón and Thomas Marchevsky (ed.) Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy Conversations on Pandemics, Politics, and Society’.
[3] Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello: The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso [1999], 2007.
[4] Shoshana Zuboff: The age of surveillance capitalism – The fight for a human future at the frontier of power, Public Affairs, New York. 2019.
[5] Giorgio Agamben: State of Exception, Chicago University, Press 2005.
[6] New Keywords Collective: Europe/Crisis: New Keywords of “the Crisis” in and of “Europe”, Zone Books Near Futures Online, https://nearfuturesonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/New-Keywords-Collective_12.pdf.
[7] Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish, Pantheon Books, [1975]1977.
[8] Rens van Munster: The war on terrorism: When the exception becomes the rule, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law – Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, January 2004.
Gervin Ane, Apatinga: “State of Exception”: A Tool for Fighting Terrorism ,Journal of Law, Policy and Globalization, 2017 Vol. 66 pp.2224-3240.
[9] Nikolas Rose: The politics of life itself. In. Theory, Culture & Society, 18(6), 1-30, 2001.
[10] József Attila: Levegőt! https://mek.oszk.hu/05500/05570/html/jozsef_attila0020.html.
[11] Michel Foucault: Subject and Power. In. Hubert L Dreyfus & Paul Rabinow: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, University of Chicago Press, 1988.
[12] These are not new technologies. Since the end of the Second World War they were in the focus of scientific research and secret services. For further reading see: Shoshana Zuboff : The age of surveillance capitalism – Chapter 10 Make Them Dance – What were the means of behavioral Modification?
[13] Ágnes Básthy, Zoltán Lengyel: Pharmacological Biopolitics Part 1 – Chemistry of the Soul, Replika Journal of Social Sciences 2023 (129): 11–41.
[14] It is worth noting that the concept’s almost religious character is reveal itself by its similarity to the concept of ‘predestination’.
[15] Bruno Latour: We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, 1993.
[16] Giorgio Agamben: When the House is on Fire, Quodlibet, 5th October 2020. Original Italian: https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-quando-la-casa-brucia. English translation: https://illwill.com/when-the-house-is-on-fire. Published: Giorgio Agamben: When the House Burns Down – From the Dialect of Thought, Seagull Books, 2022.
[17] Sik Domonkos: Csak egy AI menthet meg minket, szuverén.hu, 2023, https://www.szuveren.hu/tarsadalom/csak-egy-ai-menthet-meg-minket.
[18] Michel Foucault: The Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
[19] Berardi, “Bifo” Franco: Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Verso Books, 2017.
[20] David Armstrong (2013): Actors, patients and agency: a recent history. Sociology of Health and Illness, 36:(2) pp.163-174.
[21] Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality, Volume I, An Introduction, Pantheon Books,[1976] 1978.
