Event Details:

A Discussion with Dr. Thomas Lamarre.

DR. THOMAS LAMARRE teaches in the departments of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Publications on media, thought, and material history include work on communication networks in 9th century Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan, 2000); silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen, 2005); animation technologies (The Anime Machine, 2009) and infrastructure ecologies (The Anime Ecology, 2018). Major translations include Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences (2012), Muriel Combes’s Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2012), David Lapoujade’s William James, Empiricism, and Pragmatism (2019), and Isabelle Stengers’s Making Sense in Common (2023).

In studies of platforms, the gap between a cultural studies approach and a media studies approach continues to widen. When culture is in question, critical attention focuses on how users (conceived as subjects) negotiate or interact with the cultural paradigms and contents they encounter. When media are in question, the focus is the ways in which material and technological affordances affect or orientate conduct. The concept of platformativity is intended to work in the gap between these two approaches, while acknowledging the importance of these quite different ways of understanding the subjectivity and agency of platform users. Judith Butler’s account of performativity offers a productive point of departure, for it constructively works across mechanisms of identification and techniques of self, by reference to interaction with a specific interface, looking in the mirror. Here, to work toward a concept of platformativity, I propose to move in two directions, drawing examples primarily from television, streaming, and social media platforms. While the psychoanalytic turn encourages us think of platforms as mirror-like in terms of their consequences for self-formation, a focus on techniques and technologies invites to inquire into the consequences of mediatic affordances. What happens when the mirror is considered as screen, platform, and infrastructure?