Abstracts
Russia on Edge: Reclaiming the Periphery in Contemporary Russian Culture
Interdisciplinary Workshop, 11-12 December 2009 (CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
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London Metropolitan University
Idiocy and New Media
The concept of idiocy is profoundly explored over centuries in the context of religious experience, philosophy and aesthetics. This paper seeks to find ways of understanding idiocy as a contemporary aesthetic, infiltrating itself as a network effect and an abstract concept across a range of media and social strata, redefining relationships between local and global, renowned and marginal, glamour and vernacular. Many of such ways of the unfolding of idiocy take place through certain technical ecologies, forming human-technical ensembles which amplify idiocy to produce large scale effects not devoid of certain kinds of brilliance. These social network effects, technical assemblages, and aesthetic differences will be explored to account for a new idiocy that exhibits connections to amateurism, brutalism, minimalism and formalism, in its formation of specific new media phenomena that will be addressed. The paper will focus on the analysis of a few Russian cultural artifacts that are digitally born, and will trace their unfolding as global network celebrities. It is through reciprocal technically mediated formation of marginal and fashionable, stupid and brilliant that these local cultural events infiltrate the global scale without losing their sense of humour.
The new idiocy is a phenomenon that redefines the relationships between the global and the local, and I will focus specifically on examples from the Russian cultural domain to rethink their self-reflexivity, sensibilities they develop and the specificity they acquire communicating within their culture, cross-culturally and globally through new means of new media. Such reflection will also reposition specific national culture in relation to global networks and centres of power.