skip to main content
Goldsmiths - University of London
  • Staff & students
  • Search
  • Main menu
 
Main menu

Primary

  • Home
  • Course finder
  • Study with us
  • Departments
  • Research
  • Services for Business
  • For the local community
  • Alumni and friends
  • News
  • Events
  • About us
Staff & students

Staff + students

  • Students
  • Library
  • Timetable
  • Learn.gold - VLE
  • Email - Outlook
  • IT support
  • Staff directory
  • Goldmine - staff intranet
  • Graduate School - PGR students
  • Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre
  • Events admin
In this section

Breadcrumb navigation

  • Events
    • Radical New Cross
    • Degree shows
    • Fixing It
    • Black History Month
  • Calendar
Open social sharing
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Whatsapp
Lecture

Grégoire Chamayou, “Patterns of Surveillance: An Epistemological History of the NSA"


26 May 2015, 5:00pm - 7:00pm

LG02, Professor Stuart Hall Building

Event overview

Cost Free
Department Centre for Research Architecture,
Contact shela.sheikh(@gold.ac.uk)

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
  • apple
  • google
  • outlook

Accessibility

If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.

Event controls

  • About us
  • Accessibility statement
  • Contact us
  • Cookie use
  • Find us
  • Copyright and disclaimer
  • Jobs
  • Modern slavery statement
Admin login
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
© Goldsmiths, University of London Back to top