Event overview
Public lecture by Grégoire Chamayou. Hosted by the Centre for Research Architecture and Centre for Cultural Studies.
Intelligence agencies are apparatuses of knowledge. As such, they can be submitted to an epistemological enquiry, guided by a very classical philosophical question: how do you know what do you pretend to know? With this question in mind, I would like to focus on the history of NSA’s methodologies over the past fifteen years. What kind of ways of knowing have been developed? Under which postulates and with what effects? The central idea has been that certain patterns of activities emerging out of masses of collected data could form the basis for an automatized process of target detection. I will sketch the genealogy of this “signature detection” model, exposing its contradictions and its ongoing reformulation. This attempt of an historical epistemology of signals intelligence aims at providing a renewed critique of the contemporary practices of surveillance.
Grégoire Chamayou is a research scholar in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Cerphi - ENS Lyon). He is the author of A Theory of the Drone (forthcoming from The New Press) and Manhunts: A Philosophical History (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 26 May 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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