In Spring of 2026, Amazon Web Services announced the construction of its biggest data center outside of US soil. By the time of its completion in the Iberian region of Aragón, the complex will consume more electricity than the 1.4M people currently living in the region. The construction of this new data center, the announced revolution brought about Artificial Intelligence as a new “regime of true” (Hao, Sadin, Stiegler, Malabou, Vioulac) triggers the set of questions that this panel proposes to inquire about regarding how the technical mentality in the machine age forces scholars in the humanities to rethink their relation with knowledge both in research and teaching practices as well as in their daily lives.
In “The Era of Adherence and the Biotechnologies of Habit-Building”, Prof. Caballero questions what it means to adhere to a pill. In 2000, the World Health Organization announced that we live now in the age of adherence to medicines that make previously deadly diseases into chronic manageable conditions. This has given rise to what Clay Davis has called the homo adhaerens, a new way of understanding human life in terms of the capacity to self-manage chronic treatments by building good habits (the habit of adherence) and the moralization of non-compliance. HIV is a paradigmatic case of a deadly disease turned chronic through adherence to treatment. The pharmaceutical industry has also developed data-driven technologies for the surveillance of pill consumption, resulting in the biomedical division of people into “good” and “bad” adherents. To explore this, Caballero examines the imaginary of adherence in contemporary Spanish literature and visual culture, alongside interviews he has conducted with social workers and professionals in the pharmaceutical industry.
Prof. Viestenz’s “Anthropotechnics and the Immunitary Declension of Biopolitics” discusses how theoretical and historical understandings of the tendency of biopolitical mandates to slide into a thanatopolitical frame as an anxiety surrounding the rapid expansion of genomic editing technologies reemerges. The presentation will include close analysis of the 2022 novel Mater by Martí Domínguez, a dystopian narrative set in a future where bio-genetics have modified the human in ways both banal (the elimination of male-pattern baldness) and transformational to the human condition (expropriating childbirth to external ectogenesis chambers, largely eliminating the experience of chronic pain). Mater poignantly affirms Peter Sloterdijk’s framing of the human as an anthropo-technic species forever compelled to pursue the impossible via self-enhancement, while also demonstrating the need for a new paradigm of transformation that transcends previous binaries upon which politics have been traditionally understood.
In “Artificial Intelligence, Negativity and the Infrapolitical” Prof. Aguilera-Mellado offers a close reading of Víctor Ballcell’s Discotecas por Fuera, a novel in which young generations are influenced by internet domains that allow them to identify former partners with different monsters via a software-designed test, become influencers that post on maternity, and undergo different levels of addictions to pornography and video games. After a cyberattack, a mysterious system glitch named “Halo” installs an overspread change in the behavior of digital users.Aguilera-Mellado offers through his reading some light on how AI-driven technologies increasingly distance the subject from the Lacanian Real–the other, Being, Nothingness, extinction, the constitutive void of human psyche–thus leaving us with an existential, infrapolitical, conundrum on a liminal future and which these new technologies exploit human anxieties.
Some further questions of the panel are:
- How are the recent technological innovations reconfiguring human daily experience? How do they relate to the mad spiral of capital accumulation (Harvey) and the accelerated alteration of Earth Systems (Crutzen, Crawford)?
- Given the unprecedented impact in scale and scope of these new technologies, how can the field of Iberian Studies grapple with the limits of traditional fields or Area Studies? Finally, how can the MLA contribute to critical thinking about generative textualities and datification?