About this Episode

In this opening to Chapter 5, we explore Elif Shafak’s “choir of discordant voices” as a model for understanding the self—not as a unified whole, but as a dynamic society of competing characters. Drawing on Shafak’s metaphor of inner governance, this episode introduces the idea that not all characters within us are equal, and that their interplay reflects social and cultural hierarchies.

We begin with a performance experiment that first revealed the unequal status of characters in Katarina's own practice, and use this to propose a new framework: a politics of inner self. This theory offers a way to think critically about identity, authorship, and the internal distribution of agency. Who gets to speak? Who gets silenced? And which character gets to even think up this thesis?

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.

Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series

PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

References

- Butler, Samuel. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Edited by Henry Festing Jones. London: A. C. Fifield, 1912.

- Shafak, Elif. Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing. London: Penguin, 2013.

- Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.