About this Episode
In this episode, we explore the distributed self—a model of personhood that challenges the idea of the self as a centralised essence contained within the body. Drawing on thinkers such as Daniel Dennett, Marilyn Strathern, and Virginia Woolf, the video proposes that the self may instead be constituted across objects, others, places, and time.We follow Virginia Woolf's protagonist Mrs Dalloway through the streets of London as she experiences herself as “everywhere”, and consider how this reframing of selfhood may shift our understanding of death, loneliness, and authorship. The distributed self is not only a philosophical proposition, but a way of living in relation, of becoming communal even in solitude.This is the second of three episodes in Chapter 2 of the thesis, Scripting for Agency, exploring the shapes we use—often unconsciously—to model the 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
- Bourdieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 14–25.
- Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
- Forbes, Shannon. “Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway’s Victorian ‘Self’ in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 38, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 38–50.
- Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
- Hildyard, Daisy. The Second Body. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.
- Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. London: Routledge, 1990.
- Ranković, Miloš. “Meteoric Theory of Art.” Lecture video. Meteoric Theory of Art
- Ranković, Slavica, and Miloš Ranković. “The Talent of the Distributed Author.” In Modes of Authorship in the Middle Ages, edited by Slavica Ranković et al., 52–75. Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies Press, 2012.
- Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
- Strathern, Marilyn. “Art and Anthropology after Relations.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 2 (2016): 425–439.
- Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin, 2007.