Damon Ross Young: Selfie/Portrait

The Centre for Culture and Technology (UofT)

Faculty Fellow Damon Young offers a critical account of technologies of the self and reflects on our 2022-23 Artist in Residence exhibition.

The Centre for Culture and Technology - University of Toronto

Lecture series: Our Selfies, Our Selves

"Our Selfies, Our Selves" brings together our Artist in Residence and three Faculty Fellows in a 4-part lecture series that engages the Artist's work with our annual theme—Our Selfies, our Selves—to offer critical accounts of technologies of the self.

In this lecture, Dr. Damon Ross Young argues that it is precisely in the way the selfie appears banal and superficial that this ubiquitous media form of the 21st century indexes a larger transformation of subjectivity, akin to the kind Walter Benjamin, one hundred years ago, associated with the invention of early photography. As scholars such as Nicole Erin Morse and Jodi Dean have argued, the “self” of the selfie appears in a fundamental relationship to transformation, in the context of a circulation economy. Often said to embody a contemporary “narcissism”—itself a feminized concept—the selfie puts on view a subject who is no longer an individual but is becoming-generic. At the fault line between historically transforming media paradigms in their intersection with transforming paradigms of gender, sexuality, and desire, the selfie allows us to take the measure of the tensions between the common and the singular, the generic and the particular, as well as the self-satisfied and the anxious, that shape the contours of a contemporary cultural logic and its registers of desiring subjectivity.Note: this lecture will be live-streamed. Link will be sent to registrants 30 minutes before start time.<h2>About the speaker</h2>Dr. Damon Ross Young (External Faculty Fellow) is Associate Professor of French and Film &amp; Media at the University of California, Berkeley and Visiting Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College. He is the author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (shortlisted for the 2019 ASAP Book Prize) and co-editor of “The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism,” a special issue of Social Text, and of “Proximities: Reading With Judith Butler,” a special issue of Representations. He is completing a book project on media technologies of the self.

Damon Ross Young: Selfie/Portrait

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Damon Ross Young: Selfie/Portrait

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