Cultural Considerations
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Diverse and Contradictory Posthuman Paradigms in Popular Culture Studies and in Popular Culture Itself: Case Study of Vampire Narrative View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patrycja Pichnicka Trivedi
In popular culture posthuman paradigms are present in two different ways. They are to be used in studying it and, in 21st century pop culture, they also happen to be represented inside it. Posthuman paradigms do not only stand in controversy to traditional humanistic paradigms. The plurality of posthuman insights makes them stand in controversy with each other. This happens with the most basic notions, such as those of agency, subjectivity or personhood, which are differently defined by such researchers are B. Latour or E.M. Schlesser. Things get even further complicated when paradigms are embodied in narratives: a paradigm embodied, a paradigm promoted by the narrative and a paradigm used to study can differ considerably. That is a situation in famous Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Here vampire is the thing with agency, which would agree with Latourian conception. However vampire is showed as abomination, abnormality: and this would be in accordance with Schlosser’s conception of agents as subjects only. It is same with apparently so different new narratives, such as Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. There, vampires need to be subjectified and even humanised to appear as positive heroes. It seems that not only posthuman paradigms are useful to analyse popular culture, but also popular culture can give insight into posthuman theories. While examining vampire narrative we can notice that some of posthuman paradigms (like Schlosser’s one) are in fact quite in line with humanistic modern tradition: they are based on exclusion of some actors from the domain of agency/subjectivity.
Featured Eliza and Heterodoxy as Pedagogy: Between Algorithmic Flow and Aesthetic Deviance View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dora Kourkoulou
Video games have, in the last two decades, received revived attention on playful technologies as alternative spaces of public pedagogical interest, where institutional and disciplinary boundaries have faded, and innovative ways of creating and disseminating knowledge emerged. Play holds, in this context, an affective appeal, which lies on its perceived heterodoxal character with respect to learning, and the institutions that it occupies, on the one hand, and on the deployment of playful agon imaginations, on the other. There is, however, ambivalence in this reception of heterodoxy: game-based platforms are dependent on story and community cohesion, while either suppressing dissenting voices, or logging them as temporary disruptive drives towards innovation -and ultimate (re-)integration. Cutting through these opposites, the relationship between algorithmic harmonious flow and narrative dissent, I argue, constitutes a public pedagogical event, the mechanisms of which beg examination. Drawing on critical theories, I am proposing a framework for interpreting rhetorics of heterodoxy on contemporary technological design, by asking how aesthetic conflate with often conflicting structural elements. These conflation points serve to obscure encoded rigidity, epistemological introversion, and the identity politics that intersect them. This paper utilizes case study material from an interactive novel game, Eliza, in order to examine heterodoxy as a narrative trope, methodology, and public pedagogy. Through the examination of game instances where deviation from predictive algorithms are allowed and evaluated, new insights on how orthodoxy is remediated, transmitted and critiqued in contemporary cultural texts emerge.
