Papers by Ryan Engley
Comparative Literature and Culture, 2022
Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or... more Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only occur after we understand it at the nexus of where the group impinges on the individual. I revisit one of psychoanalytic theory’s primary gambits, interrogating the effect the social has on the individual psyche, to examine the fact of the social itself as a problem. Working from this premise, this essay has two ambitions: 1. To show that social media is always already a site to see the psyche as understood by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, meaning that social media is space for the psychoanalytic conception of the psyche prior to any intervention on behalf of psychoanalytic theory/ theorists; and 2. To show what we gain by reflecting that argument back on to psychoanalytic theory itself.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In recent years, television has undergone an artistic and critical reevaluation. This essay aims ... more In recent years, television has undergone an artistic and critical reevaluation. This essay aims to add to the study of television aesthetics by examining a form particular to American television-the bottle episode. The bottle episode first arose as a solution to the budgeting "bottlenecks" experienced by U.S. television series in the 1950s and 60s. I find that this form presents a logic of the limit, establishing a formal, narrative, and existential aesthetic that is unique to television. Far from simply being cheap TV, a close study of the bottle episode shows that what began as a financially necessary production format works through the dialectical method of thought that unfurls in G.W.F Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I turn to NBC's Community, a series replete with bottle episodes, to show that by pushing through bottled confinement, the new and transformative takes place. Ultimately, I argue that bottle episodes show how dynamic collectivity forms through isolation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Continental Thought & Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom, Dec 7, 2021
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This essay argues that the ethics Serial suggests has its basis in an ethics of desire inextricab... more This essay argues that the ethics Serial suggests has its basis in an ethics of desire inextricably bound to its structure. That is to say, critics and lovers of the show have found fault and virtue in the exact same aspect of the series: its form. Serial's landmark first season generated both massive listener interest and critical condemnation. Experts in the field of journalism lauded the series as a revelation, while others questioned just how " ethical " it was for Sarah Koenig to be reporting a story that she had not finished, thus allowing the fissures, inconsistencies, speculations, and tensions of the investigative process into her storytelling as Serial episodes began to air. To see more fully the ethical territory that Serial charts, it is useful to look not at models in journalism but models in philosophy. This essay turns first to Michel Foucault and his ethics of truth-telling known as parrhesia. Foucault's notion of parrhesia is dependent upon one's relationship with an interlocutor, just as Sarah Koenig's reporting in Serial's first season relies on her relationship with the accused and convicted Adnan Syed (and vice versa). But Foucault alone does not take us far enough. To bring us further—specifically, to the territory of desire—we turn to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Through a careful negotiation of what each thinker brings to bear on Serial, this essay claims: 1. That the ethical questions posed by Serial are opened up by its form. 2. That seriality reveals the process by which a journalist assumes a role in a story. And 3. Seriality, then, opens space for relationships to form (journalist to investigation, journalist to subject) and for desire to emerge as a mode of inquiry. By engaging with the ethical projects that Foucault and Lacan proffer, we can see that Serial uses the "problems" of seriality—the very form of the show itself—to advance a different ethics of journalism, an ethics more concerned with uncovering truth through the embrace of desire, speculation, and the vicissitudes of interlocutorship than in any previously validated "journalistically responsible" method of investigation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Reviews by Ryan Engley
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Talks by Ryan Engley
In this podcast, Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley discuss a variety of topics--from contemporary cine... more In this podcast, Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley discuss a variety of topics--from contemporary cinema to sports to politics--from the perspective of a psychoanalytically informed dialectical theory.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Ryan Engley
Book Reviews by Ryan Engley
Talks by Ryan Engley