Workshop description

Well before the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), the deployment of language into production, or rather into work, was already the focus of the debates on the knowledge economy and information society. If computers and AI have become central means of production, it is because language has always been a means of production and a means of their design. The linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933: 24) once argued that the division of labour is possible only thanks to language, hinting that language is the inner constitution of labour. Noticing the centrality of language in post-Fordism, already in the 1990s the economist Christian Marazzi (1994) and others advocated for a linguistic turn in political economy, predating somehow the linguistic turn in automation that takes place with LLMs. Later, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (2015) linked the financial crash of the late 2000’s to the ‘failure of language’ in finance. In this workshop, insights from sociolinguistics, political economy, and anthropology of finance are brought to the debate on AI. Language works, produces, and valorises, and its products – commodities as well as machines – have in fact the same fabric of language.

Workshop participants

  • Chair: Matteo Pasquinelli, Ca’ Foscari University
  • Christian Marazzi, SUPSI (Switzerland), ‘Capital and Language Today’
  • Daniele Gambetta, University of Pisa, ‘Social AI and Large Language Models’
  • Angelo Nizza, Centro Studi Filosofici Scholé, ‘Labour as Language: Bianciardi vs Rossi-Landi’
  • Juliette Farjat, Paris Nanterre University, ‘For a Critical Philosophy of Linguistic Practices’
  • Giorgio Cesarale, Ca’ Foscari University, ‘Labour and Language in Hegel’s Jena Period’
  • Paolo Caffoni, HfG Karlsruhe, ‘Tokens of Translation: The Political Economy of the Sign’
  • Emanuele Lepore, Ca’ Foscari University, ‘Language Between Ideology and Automation: AI and Labour.’
  • Discussants: Giorgio Pirina, LARIS; Marco Baravalle, Ca’ Foscari University