Date: April 20 2023
Time: 13:00 - 15:00

There is by now a plethora of studies about how rogue—insurgent, supremacist, terrorist, radical, fringe—groups far from the mainstream of public discourse, have used social media to build community identity, recruit new members, and compete in the global attention economy. Most of these studies, particularly those that follow a humanistic approach, have focused on narrative, imagery, and discourse to understand how rogue groups penetrate public discourse: how they construct and convey meaning, how they exalt the self and excoriate the enemy, and how they compel responses from other actors by taking advantage of the algorithmic logic of social media.

The purpose of this master class is to elaborate an approach to what I call “rogue digital culture,” through a blend of affect theory and elementalism. Particularly, we will explore how and why fire is a potent tool of communication in digital culture. Fire has a peculiar capacity to alter our perception and stir our feelings. A stimulus to the imagination, the flame is “one of the great operators of images,” wrote the French chemist and philosopher Gaston Bachelard (Bachelard, La flamme d’une chandelle). It is no surprise, then, that fire entered the media lexicon. Film historians have likened the magic of cinema to fire’s capacity to enchant (Moore, Savage Theory, 2000). Others have equated the rise of the internet itself to a rediscovery of fire (Anderson, “The Rediscovery of Fire,” 2011). 

In the networked, instantaneous, and stealth ecosystem of social media, fire’s potency for rogue digital actors resides in its ability to aggregate, channel, and redirect affect. Fire helps rogue digital content creators deploy what I call “projectilic” and “prophylactic” images by changing the affective valence of objects and images, from love to hate, from fun to fear, affectively shaping extreme identities and binding communities to these identities. Drawing on affect, elementalism, and actor-network theory, and on a few selected examples, this master class will encourage participants to think of how deep elemental “structures”—fire, but also water, air, and earth—animate digital culture, and may inspire new ways to think about affect, agency, and attention. 

To make the most of this Rogue Digital Cultures master class, participants are asked to read three short texts in advance. You will receive these texts after registration:

• Ahmed, Sara (2014). The Promise of Happiness. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [Read Chapter 1, “Happy Objects”].
• Anderson, Chris “The Rediscovery of Fire,” In John Brockman (Ed.), Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? The Net’s Impact on our Minds and Future (pp. 35-37). New York: Harper Collins.
• Bachelard, Gaston (1988). The Flame of a Candle, trans. Joni Caldwell, Dallas: The Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture. [Read Preface].
• Kraidy, Marwan M. The Projectilic Image: Islamic State’s Digital Visual Warfare and Global Networked Affect, Media, Culture & Society, 39(8), 1194-1209. 

Please note that this event is in person only, at the University of Amsterdam. 

Marwan M. Kraidy is professor of communication and the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture at Northwestern University in Qatar. In 2021, Kraidy founded the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South, which hosts multidisciplinary teams of faculty and students dedicated to evidence-based storytelling on the diverse histories, cultures, societies, and media of the Global South. A scholar of global communication and an authority on Arab media, culture, and politics, Kraidy is a leading figure in global media studies. His interdisciplinary expertise spans culture and geopolitics, theories of identity and modernity, humanistic inquiry, comparative media systems, images and effects, media industries, and digital sovereignty. He has authored 13 award-winning books and more than 130 articles, essays, and chapters. Kraidy's latest project is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow endowed book on war machines in the digital age, focusing on the projectilic imagery of extremist movements. Other projects focus on the geopolitics of Turkish television drama, the aesthetics and politics of music video, political graffiti in the digital age, and the rise of a digital-native Arab news sphere. Through these projects, he continues to develop an abiding interest in South-to-South relations and “Theory from the South”. See also: https://www.qatar.northwestern.edu/directory/profiles/kraidy-marwan.html 

More Recommended Readings:

• Anderson, Chris “The Rediscovery of Fire,” In John Brockman (Ed.), Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? The Net’s Impact on our Minds and Future (pp. 35-37). New York: Harper Collins.
• Kraidy, Marwan M. The Projectilic Image: Islamic State’s Digital Visual Warfare and Global Networked Affect, Media, Culture & Society, 39(8), 1194-1209.
• Bachelard, Gaston (1964). The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Candea, Matei (2008). Fire and Identity as Matters of Concern in Corsica, Anthropological Theory, 8(2), 201-216.
• Clark, Nigel & Yusoff, Kathryn (2014). Combustion and Society: A fire-Centered History of Energy Use, Theory, Culture & Society, 31(5), 203-226.
• Moore, Rachel O. (2000). Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Peters, John Durham (2015). The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (particularly Chapter 3, “The Fire Sermon.”