CUNY Brooklyn College
Santa Clara University
Wilfrid Laurier University
Minnesota State University, Mankato
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University
Gettysburg College
Izmir University of Economics
Chapman University
Slamdance Film Festival 2023 Introduction,
2023
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Slamdance Film Festival 2023 Introduction, William L. Blizek
Journal of Religion & Film
Introduction to the 2023 Slamdance Film Festival
Sundance Film Festival 2023 Introduction,
2023
University of Nebraska Omaha
Sundance Film Festival 2023 Introduction, John C. Lyden
Journal of Religion & Film
Introduction to our coverage of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality,
2023
St. Mary's University
“For The Moment, I Am Not F*Cking,” I Am Tweeting: Platforms Of / As Sexuality, Jacob Johanssen
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This article develops the argument that digital platforms are significantly infused with originary (and unconscious) residues of the sexual. Drawing on Laplancheian conceptualizations of sexuality, I argue that the digital has always been sexual(ised) in itself – a process that precedes and exceeds the erotic or pornographic. For Laplanche, sexuality is constitutive of the human subject as such. Infantile sexuality is shaped and transformed in an enigmatic relation with the caregiver. Drawing on this model as an analogy, I claim that users are drawn to platforms because they (unconsciously) desire to return to infantile sexuality and a holding environment but …
Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, And Digital Life,
2023
University of North Texas
Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, And Digital Life, Marshall N. Armintor
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In late 2011, ex-Amazon developer Steve Yegge’s rant about his former company described Amazon’s rapid transformation from an online bookstore to a web-services entity with a ruthlessly unified platform, all guided by the idea that the company’s effort to streamline its internal efficiency could be monetized, and the resultant software products sold through Amazon Web Services. The media consumerism that fed Amazon’s early years funded a surveilling behemoth, one that everyone feared Microsoft would become. As such, AWS has become a manifestation of the internet’s Lacanian unconscious (even providing the services and hosting for Reddit), structured around the optimization of …
Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, And Automate Our Intersubjective Unconscious As Data,
2023
SUNY University at Buffalo
Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, And Automate Our Intersubjective Unconscious As Data, Macy Mcdonald
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Ever since ProPublica published their groundbreaking analysis of Northpointe’s Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions Core Risk and Needs Assessment software (COMPAS) in 2016, this web-based decision support system (DSS) has spawned a wide range of critiques and charges of racial bias. COMPAS provides a full suite of decision support applications to the US prison-industrial complex, including algorithmically derived recidivism predictions that increasingly guide parole decisions. The larger conversation surrounding COMPAS raises the question of how we analyze powerful, and yet opaque, data assemblages. In this article, I model an allegorical analysis of data assemblages. I argue the skills …
Community Despite Connection: Resisting The Digital Logics Of Optimization And Failure,
2023
Brown University
Community Despite Connection: Resisting The Digital Logics Of Optimization And Failure, Irina Kalinka
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together …
The Social Sinthome,
2023
Pomona College
The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …
#Emotional: Exploitation & Burnout In Creator Culture,
2023
Memorial University of Newfoundland
#Emotional: Exploitation & Burnout In Creator Culture, Sarah Thorne
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In recent years, a growing list of content creators have published videos announcing that they are leaving YouTube, taking a break, or reducing their upload schedule (Alexander). Many of these young creators state that their decision resulted from burnout, caused by a relentless schedule and obsession with YouTube’s algorithm and analytics— tools essential to success on this highly competitive creative platform (Srnicek). Its opaque algorithm, however, induces anxiety; an affect described as that which “arises when the subject is confronted by the desire of the Other and does not know what object he is for that desire” (Evans 12). Here, …
Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism,
2023
Goldsmiths College, University of London
Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the …
“There Is No Pandemic”: On Memes, Algorithms And Other Interpassive Forms Of Right-Wing Disbelief,
2023
Colorado College
“There Is No Pandemic”: On Memes, Algorithms And Other Interpassive Forms Of Right-Wing Disbelief, Scott Krzych
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This essay examines several prominent memes that have circulated on Right-wing social media during the Covid-19 pandemic. The memes coordinate what I describe as a mode of interpassive humor, which positions those who “believe” in the crisis as naïve dupes, infantilizing those subjects who have fallen prey to the idea that they should take the pandemic seriously, and thereby delegating fearfulness to the other so that reactionary Covid-19 denialists may continue with their lives unaffected. The essay thereby seeks to draw suggestive lines of affiliation between studies of digital memes, evolutionary mimetics, and psychoanalytic theory, pointing to the algorithmic …
“Love Thy Social Media!”: Hysteria And The Interpassive Subject,
2023
Sheffield Hallam University
“Love Thy Social Media!”: Hysteria And The Interpassive Subject, Jack Black
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
According to the 2020 docudrama, The Social Dilemma, our very addiction to “social media” has, today, become encapsulated in the tensions between its facilitation as a mode of interpersonal communication and as an insidious conduit for machine learning, surveillance capitalism and manipulation. Amidst a variety of interviewees – many of whom are former employees of social media companies – the documentary finishes on a unanimous conclusion: something must change. By using the docudrama as a pertinent example of our “social media malaise,” and while remaining aware of the problems and unethical practices encompassing international digital/social media companies, this paper …
Lacan And The Algorithm,
2023
Simon Fraser University
Lacan And The Algorithm, Clint Burnham
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in …
Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?,
2023
University of Winnipeg
Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?, Matthew Flisfeder
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
When Sexuality Becomes Healing: An Interview With Elsbeth Fraanje On Her Documentary Sexual Healing,
2023
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
When Sexuality Becomes Healing: An Interview With Elsbeth Fraanje On Her Documentary Sexual Healing, Johan Roeland
Journal of Religion & Film
This is an interview with Elsbeth Fraanje, the director of Sexual Healing.
Sexual Healing,
2023
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Sexual Healing, Johan Roeland
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of Sexual Healing (2022) directed by Elsbeth Fraanje.
Okay! (The Asd Band Film),
2023
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Okay! (The Asd Band Film), Michele M. Desmarais
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of OKAY! (The ASD Band Film) (2022) directed by Mark Bone.
A Still Small Voice,
2023
Truman State University
A Still Small Voice, Dereck Daschke
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of A Still Small Voice (2023), directed by Luke Lorentzen.
Bagdad On Fire,
2023
University of Nebraska Omaha
Bagdad On Fire, John C. Lyden
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of Bagdad on Fire (2023), directed by Karrar Al-Azzawi.
Good Grief,
2023
University of Nebraska Omaha
Good Grief, John C. Lyden
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of Good Grief (2023), directed by Rob Sharp.
Don't Worry About It,
2023
University of Nebraska Omaha
Don't Worry About It, John C. Lyden
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of Don't Worry About It (2023), directed by Melissa Kong.
