Description:

Join us Friday, May 10 at 3:30pm in Kresge 1-515 for "The Phatic Self" — a guest lecture by Damon Young (Associate Professor of French and Film & Media, UC Berkeley).

Part of a larger study of selfies and other networked media, this talk considers a major contemporary site of self-narration, and thus of gendered and sexual self-fashioning: the vernacular genre of the vlog. At once textual and audiovisual, the vlog exists in a lineage with written forms of self-narration, such as the diary, and more recent forms such as reality TV, while also exemplifying a form of subjectivity specific to the network. Via a study of Elisa Giardina Papa’s artwork need ideas?!?PLZ!!, in which desperate tweens beseech the viewer to give them ideas about what to record, and in dialogue with work by James Hodge and others, I argue that across the media platforms of the “always-on network,” a contemporary subject emerges whose nonstop self-narration is less confessional than phatic, establishing its presence rather than communicating contents. Departing from the confessional mode of autobiography, the voice of vloggers is the medium of a “personality" that seeks viewers, and as such embodies a neurosis--an anxiety about what the Other wants--that is less personal than infrastructural. Under such conditions, the zany, the cute, and the interesting (Sianne Ngai’s names for the "aesthetic categories” of contemporary capitalism) are at constant risk of tipping over into the manic, the pornographic, and the paranoid or conspiratorial.