Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Dis/continuity and Political Subjectivation: Thinking Media and Revolution With Ranciére and Barad

Sun, May 28, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua Salon F

Abstract

“Digital revolution”, “digital disruption” and even “disruption revolution” say the enthusiasts. “Same same, no change” say the sceptics. This paper thinks with Jacques Ranciére and Karen Barad to revisit the discussion of the revolutionary potential of “new” media. First, the paper maps its concepts: With Ranciére, our current era is understood as an “era of consensus”, and revolution is understood as those moments “in which there is an abrupt interruption in an entire symbolic order, and where things appear possible which were previously absolutely unthinkable; when the people, who previously had no place on the stage, emerge as an actor” (Ranciére 2014: 216). With Barad (2010), the binary opposition between rupture and stability is questioned through the concept of “dis/continuity”. Second, the paper focuses on one aspect of revolution: What forms of political subjectivation are enacted through digital media? The paper draws on two ethnographic vignettes of young people using digital media in school settings (the archetypical institution of consensus building) to illustrate how young people are emerging as actors on a school stage where they previously had no place. However, the vignettes also show how this emergence is simultaneously contained within consensus practices. Thus, the paper concludes, the symbolic order is interrupted, but also reproduced: These educational media practices are best interpreted as dis/continuity in the symbolic order. The political subjectivation enacted in the ethnographic vignettes is not abruptly revolutionary, but perhaps it is subtly revolutionary: In the sense that the seeds of destruction of the symbolic order are planted within a core institution of that order.

Author