Content

Objective

This course consists of exploring the most fundamental characteristics of the network society as the hearth of informational exchanges, or the information society short and simple. In order to achieve this objective, the course adopts four axes of debate as the conceptual foundations of society: (1) Network; (2) Technology; (3) Posthumanism; (4) Knowledge. Each axis includes sections that represent the most prominent debates.

Course Content

The contemporary world offers an image of a multi-faceted prism, whose surface and the shape of each facet present a unique characteristic. Light refracts on each of them through an unparalleled abundance, often difficult to define with words familiar to us. Current social questions seem today like a landscape of conflicts and interactions that are both complex and interpenetrated. Every social fact is observed as an inseparable component of a set of extremely intertwined reciprocal links, of interdependences of varying intensities, of varied tensions between actors whose trajectories cross momentarily. The totality of existing social facts floats in a kind of uncertain plasma that covers the entire globe. The new stage of capitalism, which consists of exploiting not material goods but information in constant circulation on a global scale, functions as a conceptual matrix that reconfigures relationships, values, norms, and conventional symbols. Social facts gradually acquire an interactional character and are much less isolated and isolable from environmental circumstances. On the other hand, the social is redefined in terms of its plurality; it no longer appears as anthropocentric. Because of this, the social is henceforth conceived, by sociological theory, as a set of interdependent relationships between actors in continuous action within a global network of exchanges. We are therefore faced with a radical change in the very concept of the social, bringing together dynamism, interdependence, and above all, networked action between various types of actors, whether human or non-human, including the inorganic world and machines, all in the form of a continuous flux. This profound transformation is essentially generated by technological progress, which has currently reached a dizzying speed of renewal, the consequences of which seem to imply the emergence of the post-human phenomenon. Finally, the redefinition of the social consists not only of a material change but also, and more profoundly, a realignment of the regime of knowledge, perhaps even a change in the episteme.

Course Learning Outcomes

• To know the general features of contemporary theories or theoretical debates.
• To be able to analyze theoretical texts in sociology.
• To be able to write texts of conceptual reflection.
• To be able to conduct theoretical debates through oral expression.
• To be able to reflect on the epistemological and methodological questions of the social sciences.
• To be able to exchange intellectually supported ideas with peers.

Teaching and Learning Methods

The course requires students to meticulously complete the mandatory readings assigned each week. Optional readings are also offered to students who have a deeper interest. Students will be responsible for preparing a presentation whose subject would be a specific social question, and preferably empirically supported, around a theme of the course. The student's oral presentation will be summarized in writing at the end of the semester.

References

1. Introduction (lectures préliminaires optionnelles)
a. Qu'est-ce qu'un « réseau » ? L'origine du concept
- Heidegger, Martin. (1967). What is a Thing? Lanham: University Press of America (“Various Ways of Questioning About the Thing”, pp. 1-54)
- Heidegger, Martin. (1977). Question Concerning Technology & Other Essays, New York: Garland Publishing. (“The Question Concerning Technology”, pp. 1-35)
b. L’assemblage et être-en-relation
- Latour, Bruno (2013). Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, Essai d’anthropologie symétrique, Paris : La Découverte. (“Redistribution”, pp. 178-198)
c. La reconfiguration des réseaux
- Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, U.S.A.: Duke University Press. (“Meeting the Universe Halfway”, pp. 39-70)
- Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. (“The Agency of Assemblages”, pp. 20-38)
- Coole, Diana - Frost, Samantha (Eds.) (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, Durham & London: Duke University Press (Coole, D. & S. Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms”, pp. 1-43)

2. Réseau
a. Information et communication
- Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. (“The Edge of Forever: Timeless Time”: pp. 460-499)
- Bigo, Didier - Isin, Engin, - Ruppert, Evelyn (2019). Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights. London, New York: Routledge. (Robert J. Deibert & Louis W. Pauly, “Mutual entanglement and complex sovereignty in cyberspace” (pp. 81-99))
b. Échanges et dépendances
- Wallerstein, Immanuel (2004). World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham: Duke University Press. (“The Modern World-System in Crisis. Bifurcation, Chaos, and Choices”, pp. 76-90.)
- Zuboff, S. (2023). “The age of surveillance capitalism” in Social theory re-wired. London: Routledge. (pp. 203-213)
c. Conception non-anthropocentrique
- Campbell, Norah – O’Driscoll, Aidan – Saren, Michael (2010). “The Posthuman: the end and the beginning of the human”, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 9, 86-101.

3. Technologie
a. Le contexte culturel
- Winner, Langdon (1986). The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (“A Philosophy of Technology”, pp. 3-58)
- Feenberg, Andrew (2002). Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (“Postindustrial discourses”, pp.91-113)
b. L’idée de progrès et l’idéal de perfectionnement
- Habermas, Jürgen (1984). La technique et la science comme idéologie, Paris : Denoël. (pp. 3-74)
- Coeckelbergh, M. (2026). “Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism”, AI & Society, 41, 5163-5176.
c. La technologie médicale
- Odorcák, Juraj (2019). “Exorganic Posthumanism and Brain-Computer Interface Technologies”, Postmodern Openings, 10(4), 193-208.
- Thacker, Eugene (2006). The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture, Cambridge: The MIT Press. (“Bioinformatic Bodies and the Problem of ‘Life Itself’”, pp. 51-90)
- Rose, N. (2007). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press. (“Politics and Life”, pp. 41-76)

4. Posthumanisme
a. Concepts et historicité
- Haraway, Donna (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge. (“A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, pp. 149-181)
- Braidotti, Rosi (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press, Malden: Polity Press. (“Post-Humanism beyond the Self”, pp. 13-54)
b. Récits et imaginaires
- Jasanoff, Sheila - Kim, Sang-Hyun (2015). Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (Jasanoff, S., “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity”, pp. 1-33)
- Manjikian, Mary (2014). “Becoming unmanned: The gendering of lethal autonomous warfare technology”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 16(1), pp. 48-65.
c. Questions éthiques
- Chamayou, Grégoire. (2015). A Theory of the Drone, New York: The New Press. (“Killing from a Distance”, pp. 114-124)
- Amoore, Louise (2020). Cloud ethics: Algorithms and the attributes of ourselves and others. Durham: Duke University Press. (“The Cloud Chambers: Condensed Data and Correlative Reason”, pp. 29-55)
- Nath, R – Manna, R. (2023). “From posthumanism to the ethics of artificial intelligence”, AI & Society, 38, 185-196.

5. Savoir
a. La circulation du savoir
- Latour, Bruno (2005). La Science en action, Introduction à la sociologie des sciences, Paris : La Découverte. (“L’action à distance”, pp. 524-557)
- Knorr-Cetina, Karin (1999). Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. (“What is a Laboratory?”, pp. 26-45)
b. La pluralité du savoir
- Harding, Sandra (2015). Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (“Pluralism, Multiplicity, and the Disunity of Sciences”, pp.105-126)
- Haraway, Donna (1991). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, New York.
c. La discursivité du savoir
- Foucault, Michel (2002). L’archéologie du savoir, Paris : Gallimard. (“Les formations discursives”, pp. 44-54)
- Foucault, Michel (1991). “Politics and the Study of Discourse” in Burchell, Graham - Gordon, Colin - Miller, Peter (eds.), Foucault Effect, Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 53-72.

Weekly Contents

Assessment System

ECTS