Event overview
Marco Deseriis
This talk offers a genealogy and theory of the “improper name,” which I define as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors. Although collective pseudonyms such as Ned Ludd, Luther Blissett, and Anonymous were originally introduced to pursue specific objectives, they have been subsequently appropriated for unforeseen and diverging purposes.
The talk examines the tensions arising from the struggle for control of a shared alias by considering the ability of its varying authorizing contexts—such as unions, artistic networks and activist collectives—to delimit the mode of disposition and use of a shared alias. After covering four case studies, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the second part of the presentation focuses on the hacktivist network Anonymous.
Rather than discussing Anonymous as a marker of anonymity, I contend that this moniker expresses an a-subjective form of discourse and "con-dividual" process of subjectivation. Drawing from Gilbert Simondon’s notion of transduction, I finally discuss Anonymous as a “metastable system” that undergoes three individuations as it couples human and technical ensembles with a high degree of indetermination.
Biography
Marco Deseriis is Assistant Professor in the Program in Media and Screen Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. His book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous has recently been published by the University of Minnesota Press. Deseriis is also co-author of Net.Art: The Art of Connecting, the first Italian book on Internet Art, and has published in journals such as Theory & Event, Radical History Review, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Critical Communication/Cultural Studies, Subjectivity and Mute.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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11 May 2016 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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