Session Abstract
In many religious traditions, as well as in the history of poetry, the notion of “mysticism” plays aIs the "self" of the selfie the same as the "self" of Rousseau’s Confessions? Rousseau's text, often taken to be the first modern memoir, constitutes an attempt to access self-knowledge through retrospection and introspection in the form of writing. With the invention of photography in the 19th century, selfhood enters a new relation with the image, which now promises to capture the truth of the self via means of a new technology. In the 21st century, under the emergent regime of digital capitalism, these earlier practices of confessionality and imaging persist, but the self now becomes aggregated into data, the new commodity. The self still trades on authenticity, but now as an exercise of branding, even as it becomes associated with a range of affects and activities specific to networked media environments: FOMO, doomscrolling, catfishing, and a lethargy that coexists with a perennial anxiety. This talk show how the humanities, and media and critical theory, offer compelling speculative and interpretive tools for understanding how the self is bound up in its media supports, and suggest that it may be an entity for which, as Marshall McLuhan once said, the medium is the message.
Speaker Bio
Damon R. Young is Associate Professor of French and Film & Media, and author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Duke University Press, 2018), shortlsted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize, and a forthcoming book titled Century of the Selfie (Harvard). He serves on the board of the journal Representations, where he is co-editor (with Stephen Best and Mia You) of a recent special issue titled Meme Aesthetics.