2023 Theses Doctoral

In Search of a Political Theory of the Digital Age:Technology and the Social Imaginary

Biondi, Charleyne

Critical theory remains incapable of evaluating the impact of digital transformation on the socio-political order. On the one hand, constructivist approaches of technology tend to reduce its effects to the ad-hoc interests of those who instrumentalize it, thus providing a piecemeal and tactical understanding of its political stakes. On the other hand, epistemological critiques of technology keep describing the many ruptures provoked by new digital practices, but say nothing about the structural, political dimension of these radical mutations.

This dissertation proposes to bring these critiques into a unified, epistemic perspective, in order to articulate the impact of digital transformation on the implicit theoretical framework which underlies the legitimacy, and more fundamentally, the condition of possibility of liberal democracy. It combines critical theories of technology with a more classical approach of political theory, by insisting on the contingency of political regimes, which always rely and depend on certain social conditions (understood not only as social practices, but also as a embodying the symbolic, epistemic component of reality).

The political stakes of digital transformation are thus approached through the lense of the social imaginary—not so much to show the influence of technology on the representations that institute the common world, but rather to suggest that the issue is first and foremost poetic: theory must reclaim its creative power, and dare to imagine a radically transformed socio-political (and conceptual) horizon.