Media & Paranoia: Reading Group

The GEM Lab's 2018-19 Seminar in Media and Political Theory is focused on Media & Paranoia. This year’s Seminar will include an ongoing reading group, visiting lectures, and will culminate in an international workshop on April 26-27, 2019. The seminar will be co-lead by Joshua Neves (GEM Director) and Clemens Apprich (Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow), and focus on the intersections of critical theory and digital media studies.

Image: Google Deep Dream

The reading group will meet twice each month on Wednesday evenings from 5:30-7:30pm in the GEM Lab (FB 630.15).

Winter 2019 Calendar:

January 16 – Orit Halpern

• Orit Halpern, “Cybernetic Rationality,” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 15, no. 2 (May 4, 2014): 223–38

• Orit Halpern, “Schizophrenic Techniques : Cybernetics , the Human Sciences , and the Double Bind,” 2014.

January 28 – Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention

• Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 1 edition (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2017).

March 6 – New Attentional Forms: Evidentiary Aesthetics and Counter-Forensics (Patrick B. Smith)

• Keenan, Thomas. "Counter-Forensics and Photography." Grey Room 55 (April 2014): 58–77.

• Weizman, Eyal. "Introduction." In Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, edited by Forensic Architecture, 9-34. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.

• Optional: Mesquita, André. "Counter-Cartographies – The Insurrection of Maps." In This Is Not an Atlas, 26-31. London: Transcript-Verlag, 2018.

March 20 - White Paranoia (Neda Atanasoski & Kalindi Vora)

• Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2019).

• Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora“The Surrogate Effect: Technoliberalism and Whiteness in a ‘Post’ Labor Era | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.”

• Judith Butler: Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia

April 3 – Porn Studies

• Anne Helmond, “The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready,” Social Media + Society 1, no. 2 (July 1, 2015).

• Brandon Arroyo, “From Flow to Float: Moving through Porn Tube Sites,” Porn Studies 3, no. 3 (July 2, 2016): 308–10.¡

Fall 2018 calendar:

September 26 – Introduction + Screening (Joshua Neves)

• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re so Paranoid You Probably Think this Essay is About You”

• Thucydides, “The Revolution at Corcyra”

• Screen: Serial Mom (John Waters, 1994, 95')

October 10 – Introduction/Lacan (Clemens Apprich)

• Henning Schmidgen, “Successful Paranoia: Friedrich Kittler, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and the History of Science”

• Wendy Chun: “Control and Freedom” (pp. 247-297)

• Optional: Clemens, “The Paranoid Machine - Five Reflections on Digital Cultures”

• (recommended: Lacan, The Psychosis/Seminar III; Kittler, Discourse Networks, 290-311)

October 24 – Kittler (Clemens Apprich)

• Kittler: “The World of the Symbolic - A World of the Machine”

• Pasquinelli: “Machines that Morph Logic: Neural Networks and the Distorted Automation of Intelligence as Statistical Inference”

• Optional: Clemens, “Secret Agents: A Psychoanalytic Critique of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning”

• (recommended: Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis; Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”)

November 6 – Chun and Steyerl (Clemens Apprich and Joshua Neves)

• Hito Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Pattern Recognition and Corporate Animism (Forked Version),” in C. Apprich et al.: Pattern Discrimination (Minneapolis/Lüneburg: University of Minnesota Press/meson press, 2018).

• Wendy Chun, “Queerying Homophily,” in C. Apprich et al.: Pattern Discrimination (Minneapolis/Lüneburg: University of Minnesota Press/meson press, 2018).

• Optional: Clemens Apprich, “Data Paranoia. How to Make Sense of Pattern Discrimination,” in Clemens Apprich et al.: Pattern Discrimination (Minneapolis/Lüneburg: University of Minnesota Press/meson press, 2018).

November 21 & 22 – Public Library Workshop: Out of the Shadows

• Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak: The System of a Takedown

• Custodians.online letters

December 5 – The Cybernetic Unconscious (Thomas Lamarre)

• Lydia H. Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010): 288–320.

• Gilles Deleuze et al., Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, 6th printing edition (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2009).

- Joshua Neves & Clemens Apprich