About this Episode

In this continuation of Chapter 6, we explore Miloš Ranković's concept of vertical disciplining—the process by which complexity at one level is flattened to enable complexity to emerge at another level. Building on the distinction between the human being and the social agent, this episode examines how social complexity is achieved through the attenuation of behavioural diversity, and how the individual is socially conditioned to become a predictable “interface” within a larger communal system. Drawing on holography, Dennett’s intentional stance, and Miloš Ranković’s concept of “the bulk and the conspicuous,” we ask: is the flattening of the human being into the social agent a necessary sacrifice? Or is there a cost to this compression of self?

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

- Dennett, Daniel. Freedom Evolves. Harlow: Penguin, 2004.- Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

- Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books, 1990.

- Koestler, Arthur, and John R. Smythies. Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.

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

- Ranković, Miloš. “Frozen Complexity.” In Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research, edited by Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge, 160–64. Oxon: Routledge, 2006.

- Ranković, Miloš. “The Bulk and the Conspicuous: A Turn on Žižek’s Plea.” Unpublished paper (2009). https://www.academia.edu/23519401/The....

- Ranković, Miloš. "‘Something like thinking, that is, intervenes:’ ‘The spectral spiritualisation that is atwork in any tekhnē.’” Unpublished paper, 2011. https://www.academia.edu/5879590/

- Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin, 2007.