Conor Heaney

In the case of R (on the application of Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police ([2020] EWCA Civ 1058), the England and Wales Court of Appeal held that the South Wales Police Force’s facial recognition technology (FRT) pilot programme was unlawful: it breached privacy rights, data protection laws and equality law. But while human rights organisation Liberty hailed the judgment as a “major victory in the fight against discriminatory and oppressive facial recognition” and called for the FRT pilot to “end immediately”, South Wales Police stated that “this is a judgment that we can work with” and that they would continue to use the technology with minor changes. What is it about Bridges that enabled both parties to claim victory? In this paper, we read the legal reasoning and effects of the case in their political context, from the point of view of philosophies of technosocial ecologies. We show that although findings of unlawfulness were made on three grounds, these findings do not address the politically salient features of facial recognition tech. Rather, Bridges demonstrates that predominant litigation-dependent legal regulatory mechanisms operate to normalise and adjust public authorities’ use of new information technologies, despite their impact on political life. ‘Lawfulness’ litigation, we therefore suggest, has the perverse effect of facilitating authorities’ use of technology in a way that transforms, rather than preserves, the politico-legal community. Amidst dominant rights-based approaches to the regulation of facial recognition technology, we argue that such approaches are limited by the securitizing logic of the liberal legal notion of the ‘interests of the [political] community’ that they necessarily entail. After briefly contextualising the problem with Bridges as common to ‘media-neutral’ legal responses to new information technologies (as well as exemplifying political liberalism’s relationship with technology), we conclude by turning to an alternative conception of technology, subjectivity and politics in philosophers of technology such as Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler and Yuk Hui. We call for further legal attention on these non-liberal ontologies of technosocial life – and we outline how the recently-commenced project at Kent Law School, ‘The Future of Good Decisions’, is working to reimagine human-AI legal decision-making on this basis.

Rather than individualising mental health, Conor Heaney takes seriously the notion of a shared mental environment and the importance of theorising everyday life in our endeavours to grasp and transform our everyday experience. Drawing particularly on the work of Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler, and Henri Lefebvre, Heaney develops the idea of rhythmanalysis as an original and interdisciplinary approach to the politics of mental health. He offers both a renewed methodological and philosophical approach to rhythmanalysis (scraping) and deploys it with respect to the relationship between contemporary capitalism and mental health.

In this paper, I seek to extract what I call an empiricist mode of existence through a combined reading of two under-researched vectors of Gilles Deleuze's thought: his ‘transcendental empiricism’ and his ‘affirmative naturalism’. This empiricist mode of existence co-positions Deleuze's empiricism and naturalism as pertaining to a stylistics of life which is ontologically experimentalist, epistemologically open, and immanently engaged in the world. That is, a processual praxis of demystification and organising encounters towards joy.

This text has already been published, in La Deleuziana – online journal of philosophy – n. 10 / 2019 – rhythm, chaos and nonpulsed man.: This paper explores the question of the relationship between art, rhythm, and life through a mobilisation of Giorgio Agamben's discussion, first, of Nietzsche and the active nihilist's relation-ship to art, and second, on his diagnosis of rhythm as pertaining to the “original structure” of the work of art in The Man Without Content. Agamben's notion - Philosophie – Nouvel article

This paper explores the question of the relationship between art, rhythm, and life through a mobilisation of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion, first, of Nietzsche and the active nihilist’s relationship to art, and second, on his diagnosis of rhythm as pertaining to the “original structure” of the work of art in The Man Without Content. Agamben’s notion of the “rhythmic” and “poietic” encounter is one which situates the experience of rhythm as the experience of the originary dimension of temporality and of the human’s relationship to the world. Turning to Nietzsche, this paper seeks to complicate Agamben’s picture by discussing Nietzsche’s under-discussed explorations of rhythm and its connection to art. Three distinct rhythms will be identified: Apollonian, Dionysian, and the tragic or joyful rhythms of the Apollo-Dionysus relation. Reading Agamben through Nietzsche, it will be discussed how Agamben’s notion of rhythm blends Apollonian and Dionysian elements; does not through this blending however offer a tragic or joyful notion of rhythm, which, for Nietzsche, follows from their double affirmative rhythmisation. Instead of a rhythmic-poietic encounter opening an originary and authentic experience of temporality and dwelling, Nietzsche offers an account of tragic and joyful rhythms which continually create new worlds.

In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Bernard Stiegler develops an account of the pedagogical responsibilities which follow from rhythmic intergenerational flows, involving the creation of milieus which care for and pay attention to the future, toward the creation of nootechnical milieus. Such milieus are defined by their objects of attention: intellectual life, spiritual life, and political life; taken together: noetic life. Such is the claim Alfred North Whitehead makes when arguing that the sole object of education is life and the creation of an art of life which is itself a rhythmic adventure.The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, to clarify the importance of Stiegler’s reading of Aristotle’s notion of the noetic soul in our thinking about the role, purpose, and function of educational institutions in relation to intellective, spiritual, and political life. In this paper, I will fuse this discussion with a Whiteheadian approach to rhythm, developing what I call a ‘rhythmic nootechnics’ in the service of ‘nootechnical evolution’ as, I argue, Whitehead’s approach to rhythm allows to clarify and enrich Stiegler’s reading of Aristotle. Second, and as indicated, to explore the relationship between Whitehead and Stiegler, insofar as the former has become an increasing reference point for the latter, but this relationship remains unexplored in the literature. Third, to apply this concept of ‘rhythmic nootechnics’ to think about what transformations at the level of pedagogy and politics are necessary to reinvent the university from this Stieglerian and Whiteheadian perspective.