About this Episode
This episode offers a cross-disciplinary overview of the major thinkers and traditions that shape contemporary ideas about selfhood, identity, and agency. From Judith Butler and Paul Ricoeur to Daniel Dennett and cultural psychology, it traces how the self has been theorised as fluid, scripted, contextual, and computational. The video also contrasts how academic and artistic practices handle influence and authorship, and introduces “character” as a transferable script that plays out across bodies, cultures, and media. This foundational review sets the stage for the thesis’ central proposition: that scripting and agency may not be opposites, but intimately entangled.
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
- Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.
- Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. London: Vintage, 2010.
- Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 2014.
- Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2001.
- Dennett, Daniel C. Freedom Evolves. London: Penguin, 2004.
- Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
- Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin, 1998.
- Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
- Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.
- Hofstadter, Douglas R. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
- Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
- Ranković, Miloš. “Meteoric Theory of Art.” art:language:location art festival, Cambridge, 25 November 2014. YouTube video, Meteoric Theory of Art .
- Ranković, Slavica. “Spectres of Agency: The Case of Fóstbrœðra saga and its Distributed Author.” In In Search of the Culprit: Aspects of Medieval Authorship, edited by Lukas Rösli and Stefanie Gropper, 175–192. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021.
- Ranković, Slavica and Ranković, Miloš. “A Formula is a Habit Colliding with Life.” In The Formula in Oral Poetry and Prose, edited by Daniel Sävborg and Bernt Øyvind Thorvaldsen. Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming.
- Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
- Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- West, Alexandria L., Rui Zhang, Maya A. Yampolsky, and Joni Y. Sasaki. “The Potential Cost of Cultural Fit: Frame Switching Undermines Perceptions of Authenticity in Western Contexts.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (20 December 2018). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02622.
