Annie Ring | University College London (original) (raw)

Books by Annie Ring

This book offers a fresh approach to the remarkable German film The Lives of Others (2006), known... more This book offers a fresh approach to the remarkable German film The Lives of Others (2006), known for its compelling representation of a Stasi surveillance officer and the moral and ethical turmoil that results when he begins spying on a playwright and his actress lover.

Annie Ring analyses the film's cinematography, mise-en-scène and editing, tracing connections with Hollywood movies such as Casablanca and Hitchcock's Torn Curtain in the film's portrayal of an individual rebelling against a brutal dehumanising regime. Exploring the film's strong but much-disputed claims to historical authenticity, she examines the way the film tracks the world-changing political shift that took place at the end of the Cold War – away from the collective dreams of socialism and towards the dreams of the private individual. In doing so, she highlights why The Lives of Others is a crucial film for thinking at the horizon between film and recent world history.

Why did so many citizens of the GDR agree to collaborate with the Stasi? Reading works of litera... more Why did so many citizens of the GDR agree to collaborate with the Stasi?

Reading works of literature since German unification in the light of previously unseen files from the archives of the Stasi, After the Stasi uncovers how writers to the present day have explored collaboration as a challenge to the sovereignty of subjectivity. Annie Ring here interweaves close analysis of literary fiction and life-writing by former Stasi spies and victims with documents from the archive, new readings from literary modernism and cultural theories of the self. In its pursuit of the strange power of the Stasi, the book introduces an archetypal character in the writing of German unification: one who is not sovereign over her or his actions, but instead is compelled by an imperative to collaborate – an imperative that persists in new forms in the post-Cold War age.

Ring's study identifies a monumental historical shift after 1989, from a collaboration that took place in concert with others, in a manner that could be recorded in the archive, to the more isolated and ultimately less accountable complicities of the capitalist present. While considering this shift in the most recent texts by East German writers, Ring provocatively suggests that their accounts of collaboration under the Stasi, and of the less-than-sovereign subjectivity to which it attests, remain urgent for understanding the complicities to which we continue to consent in the present day.

Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate terms relevant to critical studies of big data, ... more Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate terms relevant to critical studies of big data, from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability.

This groundbreaking work offers an interdisciplinary perspective on big data and the archives they accrue, interrogating key terms. Scholars from a range of disciplines analyze concepts relevant to critical studies of big data, arranged glossary style—from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. They not only challenge conventional usage of such familiar terms as prediction and objectivity but also introduce such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm. The contributors include a broad range of leading and agenda-setting scholars, including as N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Johanna Drucker, Lisa Gitelman, Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts and Nicole Starosielski.

Uncertainty is inherent to archival practices; the archive as a site of knowledge is fraught with unknowns, errors, and vulnerabilities that are present, and perhaps even amplified, in big data regimes. Bringing lessons from the study of the archive to bear on big data, the contributors consider the broader implications of big data's large-scale determination of knowledge.

Architecture and Control addresses the urgent question residing at the intersection of architectu... more Architecture and Control addresses the urgent question residing at the intersection of architectural and cultural theory: how can the interplay between designed structures and practices of control foster an emergence of the unforeseen and the uncontrolled in post-2000 architectures and infrastructures?

Peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters by Annie Ring

Oxford German Studies Volume 53, 2024 - Issue 1: Special Issue: Relationality in Contemporary German Literature and Culture, part 1. Guest Editors Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove, 2024

This article argues that the Internet is a relational space. It draws on a provocative, multimedi... more This article argues that the Internet is a relational space. It draws on a provocative, multimedia trilogy by German video artist Brenda Lien to analyse the challenges to notions of sovereign subjectivity posed by the digital age. Lien’s Call of … trilogy explores the ambivalences of life on the participatory Internet, deploying at times shocking images of violence to undermine Web 2.0’s appealing aesthetics and cheery injunctions to its users to self-optimize and so gain personal sovereignty. The Internet’s spread in the 1990s into mass consumer use coincided with conservative ideologies aimed at promoting the ‘sovereign individual’ (Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, 2008), capable of profiting in the dotcom era from neoliberal codes of conduct and low regulations. Since then, dataveillance via Internet platforms has grown to reduce technology users’ agency and privacy, framing Internet connectivity as a forcibly relational state, despite the individualist self-optimization opportunities it offers. The article reveals networked connectivity as an ambivalent mode of relationality, both necessary due to the communication and affiliation the Internet makes possible, and worrisome due to the connection it forces between technology users and corporations, unanswerably profiting from human needs in a way that challenges the sovereignty of the networked subject radically.

Paragraph, 2023

This article argues that ‘the digital’ and ‘big data’ are metaphors of obfuscation, which are use... more This article argues that ‘the digital’ and ‘big data’ are metaphors of obfuscation, which are used to screen the real effects of technologies on lived experiences and the planet. Now that technology consumers are connected 24/7 to the Internet (or ‘Web’), their data can be gathered and monetized on a vast scale. The new data economies and AI technologies that have emerged as a result require careful evaluation regarding their effects on bodies, environments and new forms of knowledge. In this piece, I therefore lay out the material impacts of so-called digital phenomena: of data, their large-scale storage in the ‘Cloud’, and their use in training algorithms and emergent forms of artificial intelligence (AI). Building on scholarship by cultural theorists of technology including Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Elena Esposito, as well as long-standing philosophies of metaphor and violence by Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt, I make the case that thinking about new media and technology is more ethical where it is less metaphorical, and so more conscious of the entangled nature of technology with human and posthuman life, including AI. The resulting concept of data that matter is proposed with a view to more justice-oriented uses of data and machine cognition in the future.

German Life and Letters , 2021

In this article I analyse the primary rejections depicted in Herman Melville’s Urtext on the with... more In this article I analyse the primary rejections depicted in Herman Melville’s Urtext on the withdrawal of complicity, Bartleby (1853), and Hito Steyerl’s video installation How Not to be Seen (2013), which experiments with a Bartleby-like withdrawal from surveillance through becoming illegible to machine vision. My focus is on the potential of primary rejection to reveal the disavowed content of racist violence foundational to the regimes (financial, sociotechnical) rejected in these texts. Adopting a hermeneutic of hauntology, my reading of Bartleby emphasises its publication context amid the slow struggles over the abolition of slavery in the US, to explore the connections between Bartleby’s strike and the history of racist violence lingering in Melville’s depiction of an oddly vacant Wall Street. Turning to Steyerl’s video installation, I evaluate the techniques it proposes for becoming Bartlebys of the digital age, emphasising the complexity of Steyerl’s mobilisation of mixed-footage montage to explore the dangers of legibility and invisibility in a racist internet era. Throughout, I set these two works in dialogue with leading interpretations of Bartleby, with Adorno and Horkheimer’s interpretation of Hegel’s ‘determinate negation’, hauntological analyses of German and other texts, and current theories of race and surveillance to pose the question: for whom is primary rejection affordable and who, like Bartleby, will perish if they try to exit dominant schemes of legibility?

Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data, ed. by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D'Ignazio and Kristin Veel. MIT Press, 2021

Complicity is the powerful element, with the translucency and insidiousness of water, through whi... more Complicity is the powerful element, with the translucency and insidiousness of water, through which technology users move in today's increasingly networked and datafied environments. The large-scale use of smart networked devices by people all around the world, including many of us writing and reading this volume, allows vast archives of data to be routinely captured and analyzed and the results mobilized to generate profit and influence through techniques as dangerous and divisive as racialized profiling and personalized political propaganda. Such abuses of data often occur without the full knowledge of technology users, but the big data archives captured from everyday technology use represent an insistent sediment of complicity on the part of technology consumers, revealing us to be unofficial participants in the data-mining practices that are radically undermining the already delicate foundations of our contemporary shared world.

The German Cinema Book, Vol. 2, ed. by Erica Carter, Deniz Göktürk and Claudia Sandberg , 2020

Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World, ed. by Mererid Puw Davies and Sonu Shamdasani (London: UCL Press, 2020

In this chapter I make the case for viewing therapies used in the treatment of work-related burno... more In this chapter I make the case for viewing therapies used in the treatment of work-related burnout as an inhuman medical apparatus, geared as they are toward exploiting recovered health for recovering profits. The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 had major health effects on contemporary workforces, but global-North governments and employers have dealt with these effects not via systemic change but via therapeutic treatment of individuals as if they were at fault for the structural insecurities besetting their workplaces and societies. To analyse the inhumanity underpinning burnout therapies used in work settings, this chapter offers close readings of Katharina Pethke’s direct-cinema documentary of 2009, In dir muss brennen (Burning Within), which I treat here as a work of cold cinema.

My way of viewing the film is guided by leading cultural theories of burnout and self-optimisation, particularly from German-language and German Studies contexts, and by more longstanding analyses of psychic responses to crisis, beginning with writing by Helmuth Plessner and Georg Simmel from the early twentieth century, when German-language philosophy contributed its most important insights into subjectivity in the modern age, and drawing on Helmut Lethen’s influential analysis of the stream of early-twentieth century German thought he terms Cool Conduct (1994). Against the background of these German philosophies of subjectivity in crisis, I draw out the entrainment of cool, calm, temperate conduct in the recipients of contemporary burnout therapy, and I argue for a rejection of the complicity of those therapies with new codes of cool conduct, which (among other things) restore the burnt-out worker’s health for the sake of further exhausting work. The training of a cool, profitable subject is made starkly visible by the screen aesthetic employed by Pethke, whose work of cold cinema generates images that are abrupt, laconic, empty and chilling in service of a powerful critique of the self-optimising subjectivity elicited by neoliberal economies after the Global Financial Crisis.

To study burnout from the perspective of languages and cultural studies means considering the subjectivity it interacts with: who gets to be burnt-out, and who can access therapeutic treatment? It also means analysing the language that has been developing alongside the syndrome, a language that both shapes the experience and treatment of burnout and can provide ways into critiquing the invidious problem whereby treatment does not cure the syndrome but rather exploits the patient’s recovery from it. In what follows, I therefore pay attention to the under-explored metaphors through which current therapeutic practices handle burnout, namely the metaphors of temperature endemic to the syndrome’s name. I approach these metaphors by means of cultural theories not only of burnout and self-optimisation, but also of coolness and subjective sovereignty, theories which can help us to understand the experiences, of individuality and often of isolation, the syndrome of burnout implies. In my close reading I demonstrate how Pethke’s film offers a valuable aesthetic response to the burnout epidemic, and by looking closely at the film in relation to theories of subjectivity in crisis, I propose a much-needed critical viewpoint on burnout, one capable of challenging the inhumanity underlying its causes and indeed much of its treatment in the present day.

Surveillance and Society, 2019

From global search engines to local smart cities, from public health monitoring to personal self-... more From global search engines to local smart cities, from public health monitoring to personal self-tracking technologies, digital technologies continuously capture, process, and archive social, material, and affective information in the form of big data. Although the use of big data emerged from the human desire to acquire more knowledge and master more information and to eliminate human error in large-scale information management, it has become clear in recent years that big data technologies, and the archives of data they accrue, bring with them new and important uncertainties in the form of new biases, systemic errors, and, as a result, new ethical challenges that require urgent attention and analysis. This collaboratively written article outlines the conceptual framework of the Uncertain Archives research collective to show how cultural theories of the archive can be meaningfully applied to the empirical field of big data. More specifically, the article argues that this approach grounded in cultural theory can help research going forward to attune to and address the uncertainties present in the storage and analysis of large amounts of information. By focusing on the notions of the unknown, error, and vulnerability, we reveal a set of different, albeit intertwined, configurations of archival uncertainty that emerge along with the phenomenon of big data use. We regard these configurations as central to understanding the conditions of the digitally networked data archives that are a crucial component of today's cultures of surveillance and governmentality.

Zukunftssicherung: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, ed. by Johannes Becker, Benjamin Bühler, Sandra Pravica, Stefan Willer, 2019

In this chapter, I analyze two examples of contemporary German documentary film, in which the wor... more In this chapter, I analyze two examples of contemporary German documentary film, in which the working life of office workers and freelancers in Germany after the turn of the millennium is presented. Work Hard Play Hard by Carmen Losmann (2011) and In dir muss brennen by Katharina Pethke (2009) cast their critical gaze upon the construction of middle-class work in the era of late capitalism: as we see here, this is a kind of work that always takes place under conditions of monitoring and self-monitoring. I show how these films critique the working and leisure circumstances of today's middle-class workers, as they are surrounded by the latest and most subtle techniques of surveillance, techniques that lead them to become ever more engaged in the multi-faceted improvement of their own selves. Through self-optimization, and despite the superficial freedom and 'flexibility' represented by late capitalist working conditions, the figures in these films become subjects of a futuristic working model which recruits the working subject as a resource for corporate growth. I argue that one of the most important contributions of these two films is the vision they provide of new, late capitalist codes of conduct. Like the 'distant man' in the post-World War One writing of Helmuth Plessner, who practices codes of conduct that protect him from feeling vulnerable and powerless, the individuals shown in these films made after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 learn to display a ritualized behavior that promises to bring security and even a personal sense of sovereignty through its own forms of ritual and play. But these new codes of conduct secure the ongoing complicity of middle-class workers with their position of insecurity and utter lack of sovereignty, even as their working conditions appear to become more and more flexible and even enjoyable.

This article sets itself against the bulk of scholarship on surveillance, which is characterized ... more This article sets itself against the bulk of scholarship on surveillance, which is characterized by emphasis either on Michel Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon, or on Gilles Deleuze’s too-brief “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” In contrast to these dominant critical paradigms, the article recuperates a mode of governmentality proposed in Foucault’s last lectures on “Security,” in order to draw out the latent instabilities that beset contemporary surveillance systems and hence reveal the possibility of resisting them. The article’s recuperation of “Security” proceeds by way of close readings of workplace documentaries by radical filmmakers Harun Farocki (Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten, Ein neues Produkt, and other films) and Carmen Losmann (Work Hard Play Hard). When analyzed in concert with Foucault’s neglected late lectures, and in a final move with the post-Freudian theory of perversion, these films prompt new reflection on complicity with surveillance and, importantly, the unexpected potential of that complicity as an error in the systems of contemporary workplaces and leisure-spaces.

Keywords: complicity, documentary, Harun Farocki, governmentality, Carmen Losmann, Panopticon, perversion, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (Gilles Deleuze), psychoanalysis, Security, Territory, Population (Michel Foucault), surveillance

Paragraph, Nov 1, 2014

This essay turns its attention to the accounts that Foucault and Derrida made following their enc... more This essay turns its attention to the accounts that Foucault and Derrida made following their encounters with archives, and it relates these accounts to the files of the former East German secret police. Derrida and Foucault located differing qualities of authority in the archives that they examined, yet they are shown here to converge around a problem of non-integrity in the structuration of the archive as supposed guarantor of epistemological sovereignty. A terminology of sovereign integrity dominates the Stasi’s files and, as might be expected, they come into clashing contact with the cinematic and literary texts that grapple with the Stasi’s legacy, texts that are beset with images of perforation. When read in dialogue with poststructuralist theories of the archive, these spy files and the cultural texts that emerged after their opening enable new reflection on the ethics of visiting archives, as an act of doing justice that nonetheless risks collapsing the fragments of complex pasts into the narrative wholes of the political present.

"Franz Kafka is famous as an author of bureaucratic oppression and human hopelessness. However, i... more "Franz Kafka is famous as an author of bureaucratic oppression and human hopelessness. However, it is possible to read his work in another way. This essay makes the argument for reading Kafka’s best-known work, Der Proceß (The Trial), as a text about pleasure: albeit not a conventionally “pleasurable” pleasure. In particular it highlights the tactile experiences that Kafka’s protagonist Josef K. enjoys in the novel, part of an odd encounter in which K. seems to be seduced into bringing about his own downfall at the hands of Kafka’s mysterious court.

Hands have a special role in this counterintuitive dynamic, working as they do between poles of sovereign self-possession and powerlessness. In the text hands make incomprehensible gestures; they are clothed in tight gloves and enticing excesses of skin; they also caress K. even as they punish him, giving rise thereby to sadomasochistic pleasures, especially between K. and Kafka’s other masculine characters. Drawing on psychoanalytic and queer theories, the essay sets out a critical framework to decipher the textual and fleshly complexities of K.’s case, and to consider the literary and material legacies of Kafka’s writing into the present day."

Kerstin Hensel’s poetics of exaggeration, her representations of excess and the grotesque have be... more Kerstin Hensel’s poetics of exaggeration, her representations of excess and the grotesque have been interpreted as highlighting practices of violence and marginalisation. In this article I consider Hensel’s engagement in her 1994 novella, Tanz am Kanal, with margins and borders – subjective, topographical and aesthetic. I argue that her portrayal of Gabriela von Haßlau’s excessive victimhood articulates a ‘topography’ of the traumatised subject, one that raises the question of border- security and -insecurity on several levels.

A number of instances of shame and shaming in the novella show up the violence suffered by Gabriela as exceeding her borders both literally, in her bodily wounds, and metaphorically, in the mimetic encounters that inform her sense of self. Contrasting her characterisation with the border-secure (and for Ruth Leys ‘anti-mimetic’) subject of recent shame theory, I show here how Hensel’s portrayal of this ashamed subject is integrally linked to her plotting of an urban topography. Her fictional flesh-city, Leibnitz, reflects in its excessive landscape the dissolution by violence of Gabriela’s subjective ‘surface’.

While Hensel depicts a cityscape of disintegrating borders, this does not mean that structures of violence disintegrate with them. There are few spaces of resistance in Hensel’s city, and Gabriela finds it difficult even to provide a testimony to her experience that is not bound up with the intervention of others. In this sense Hensel’s account of violence surpasses even that of Giorgio Agamben’s recent Holocaust testimony theory, thus posing an urgent challenge for situating her work within historical boundaries.

Why did so many citizens of the GDR agree to collaborate with the Stasi? Reading works of litera... more Why did so many citizens of the GDR agree to collaborate with the Stasi?

Oxford German Studies Volume 53, 2024 - Issue 1: Special Issue: Relationality in Contemporary German Literature and Culture, part 1. Guest Editors Anne Fuchs and Mary Cosgrove, 2024

Paragraph, 2023

German Life and Letters , 2021

Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data, ed. by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D'Ignazio and Kristin Veel. MIT Press, 2021

The German Cinema Book, Vol. 2, ed. by Erica Carter, Deniz Göktürk and Claudia Sandberg , 2020

Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World, ed. by Mererid Puw Davies and Sonu Shamdasani (London: UCL Press, 2020

Surveillance and Society, 2019

Zukunftssicherung: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, ed. by Johannes Becker, Benjamin Bühler, Sandra Pravica, Stefan Willer, 2019

Paragraph, Nov 1, 2014

German Life and Letters, Jul 1, 2010

"This article deals with the case of collaboration portrayed in Monika Maron’s novel Stille Zeile... more "This article deals with the case of collaboration portrayed in Monika Maron’s novel Stille Zeile Sechs. Her protagonist, Rosalind Polkowski, has been celebrated as resisting the disciplinary state structures represented by her employer, former SED Party functionary Herbert Beerenbaum. Meanwhile the text’s narrative structure and a curious mimetic function in the heroine’s behaviour appear to encourage a psychoanalytical reading: Polkowski as traumatised victim of Communism. But her role transcribing Beerenbaum’s memoirs positions her as a more problematic double-agent, a handmaid of power.

Polkowski’s double-agency has an interesting historical counterpart in the author’s own brief affair as a Kontaktperson (code-name ‘Mitsu’) for the foreign intelligence service of the East German secret police. Maron’s involvement in ‘Stasi’ operations worked in contradiction to her oppositional stance, and reflected a ‘hateful bind’ that she felt in relation to the GDR.

To read the double-agency that the fictional and historical cases share in terms of guilt or victimhood is insufficient. Placed alongside the ‘Mitsu’ case, Polkowski’s fictional double-bind brings to light what we might call a ‘security complex’, a network of subjective and state securities in which collaboration and resistance are matters of constant negotiation between power and the subject."

Keynote lecture at the Women in German Studies annual conference, University of Exeter, 2-4 Novem... more Keynote lecture at the Women in German Studies annual conference, University of Exeter, 2-4 November 2023

Talk on the panel ‘Post- and Transhumanism in German-language Culture’ at the Association of German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS) Conference, Trinity College Dublin, 29-31 August 2023

Talk at the German Research Seminar, University of Melbourne, March 2023

Book launch and lecture at the Australian National University, Canberra, hosted by the Cultures o... more Book launch and lecture at the Australian National University, Canberra, hosted by the Cultures of Screen, Performance and Print network, March 2023

Invited talk at ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Relationality in Contemporary German-Language Cul... more Invited talk at ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Relationality in Contemporary German-Language Culture – A German Studies Workshop’, hosted by UCD, TCD and the Museum of Literature Ireland, 10 March 2022

Invited talk at the Webinar Series, Secrecy and Knowledge: Social and Cultural Responses to Secre... more Invited talk at the Webinar Series, Secrecy and Knowledge: Social and Cultural Responses to Secrecy. Webinar 3: Surveillance in relation to secrecy, privacy and knowledge, 07 March 2022
Webinar recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvpb_4P_a8

Invited talk at Law on Trial: Privacy, Surveillance and Technology Birkbeck, 14 June 2019

talk on the panel ‘Circulating Cinema’ at the Association for German Studies, Bristol, September ... more talk on the panel ‘Circulating Cinema’ at the Association for German Studies, Bristol, September 2019

Talk at ‘Primary Rejections: Comparative Workshop on the Refusing Personality in German and Europ... more Talk at ‘Primary Rejections: Comparative Workshop on the Refusing Personality in German and European Literature, History, and Culture’ at University of Cambridge, 28 September 2018

Introduction to screening of The Cat Has Nine Lives (Ula Stöckl, Germany, 1968) at BFI Southbank.... more Introduction to screening of The Cat Has Nine Lives (Ula Stöckl, Germany, 1968) at BFI Southbank. Event part of the ‘Revolt She Said: Women & Film after ’68’tour presented by Club des Femmes and the Independent Cinema Office. Event listed as a highlight on Radiant Circus’s Screen Guide Daily: Films in London today 07.08.18, 7 August 2018

Dataveillance and the surface of the subject Surveillance today oscillates between surface observ... more Dataveillance and the surface of the subject
Surveillance today oscillates between surface observation and a seemingly deeper knowledge that appears to be produced by dataveillance, knowledge thought to be unavailable in past, majority-visual regimes. In this presentation I screen clips from Hito Steyerl’s installation ‘How Not to Be Seen’ of 2013, that trains viewers in eluding visual surveillance. Steyerl’s piece playfully depicts the oscillation between depth and surface surveillance and in so doing elucidates the impossibility of protection from view in the era of dataveillance. Moreover, part of the installation’s power resides in its willingness to invoke the higher frequency of surveillance against minority identities. In my analysis, I draw on cultural theories by Giorgio Agamben and Eric Santner, who located the operation of power in or on the subject of modernity. I build on these established spatial plottings with the help of Simone Browne’s new writing on the surveillance of blackness and Wendy Chun’s concept of race as technology. By setting these theories in dialogue with Steyerl’s film installation, I show how understanding the spatial and epidermal logics of surveillance can help us analyse the apparently ‘deep’ knowledge dataveillance seeks to gather concerning the subjectivities it captures.

Talk at the seminar ‘Balance, Burnout and Exhaustion’, Medical History and Humanities Seminar Ser... more Talk at the seminar ‘Balance, Burnout and Exhaustion’, Medical History and Humanities Seminar Series, University of Exeter, 26 January 2018

Club des Femmes: Culture Club, 2021

Russell T. Davies’ show, It's a Sin, robs the character Jill of ambivalence in a way that made me... more Russell T. Davies’ show, It's a Sin, robs the character Jill of ambivalence in a way that made me wonder how we can avoid queer kinship relationships being complicit with neoliberal reductions of the state. Thinking through ambivalence, as I do in this article with reference to Roszika Parker’s feminist psychoanalysis, can help by contrast to build more critical kinship for viral times.

In diesem Kapitel analysiert Annie Ring zwei Beispiele des aktuellen Dokumentarfilms, in denen da... more In diesem Kapitel analysiert Annie Ring zwei Beispiele des aktuellen Dokumentarfilms, in denen das Arbeitsleben von Büroangestellten und Freiberuflern in Deutschland nach der Jahrtausendwende dargestellt wird. Work Hard Play Hard von Carmen Losmann (2011) und In dir muss brennen von Katharina Pethke (2009) werfen kritische Blicke auf die Konstruktionsbedingungen der Mittelschichtsarbeit in der Epoche des westlichen Kapitalismus: einer Arbeit, die, so zeigen diese Filme, immer unter Bedingungen von Überwachung und Selbstüberwachung stattfindet. Kritisiert werden in diesen Filmen die Arbeitsumstände und teilweise auch die Freizeitumstände der heutigen Mittelschichtsarbeiter, die umgeben von den neuesten und subtilsten Überwachungstechniken und beschäftigt mit der vielseitigen Verbesserung des eigenen Selbst gezeigt werden. Durch Selbstoptimierung werden sie zu Subjekten eines futuristischen Arbeitsmodells, innerhalb dessen durch Rekrutierung der arbeitende Mensch trotz oberflächlicher Liberalität der Arbeitsverhältnisse und des Arbeitsmilieus zur Ressource für das Wachstum des multinationalen Konzerns wird. Einer der wichtigsten Beiträge dieser zwei Filme zu einer Reflexion zeitgenössischer Arbeit ist, so Ring, der Nachweis neuer spätkapitalistischer Verhaltenslehren. Wie der distanzierte Mensch in der Theorie Helmuth Plessners, der nach der Krise des Ersten Weltkrieges Verhaltenslehren übt, die ihn vor Verletzlichkeit und Kraftlosigkeit schützen, lernt das Individuum in diesen Filmen ein ritualisiertes Verhalten, das durch die ihm eigenen Masken und Spielformen Sicherheit mit sich bringen soll. Diese Verhaltenslehren stellen die Komplizität der Mittelschichtsarbeiter mit dem Unternehmen sicher, insofern ihnen Flexibilität und sogar Glück versprochen wird, sie dabei aber eigentlich in unsichere Arbeitsverhältnisse verstrickt werden.

Paragraph

Architecture and Control, 2018

UCL Press eBooks, Nov 10, 2022

Paragraph, Nov 1, 2014

This article turns its attention to the accounts that Foucault and Derrida made following their e... more This article turns its attention to the accounts that Foucault and Derrida made following their encounters with archives, and it relates these accounts to the files of the former East German secret police. Derrida and Foucault located differing qualities of authority in the archives that they consulted, yet they are shown here to converge around a problem of non-integrity in the structuration of the archive as supposed guarantor of epistemological sovereignty. A terminology of sovereign integrity dominates the Stasi&amp;amp;#39;s files, so that they sit in stark contrast with the literary and cinematic texts that grapple with the Stasi&amp;amp;#39;s legacy — texts that are beset with images of inconsistency and perforation. When read in dialogue with the poststructuralist accounts of the archive, these spy files and the cultural works that emerged after their opening enable new reflection on the ethics of visiting archives, as an act of doing justice that nonetheless risks collapsing the fragments of complex pasts into the narrative wholes of the political present.

Modern Language Review, 2010

Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World, 2020

German Life and Letters, 2021

East European Politics, 2018

Secret police files from the Eastern bloc. Between surveillance and life writing, edited by Valen... more Secret police files from the Eastern bloc. Between surveillance and life writing, edited by Valentina Glajar, Alison Lewis and Corina L. Petrescu

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2016

Paragraph, 2014

This article turns its attention to the accounts that Foucault and Derrida made following their e... more This article turns its attention to the accounts that Foucault and Derrida made following their encounters with archives, and it relates these accounts to the files of the former East German secret police. Derrida and Foucault located differing qualities of authority in the archives that they consulted, yet they are shown here to converge around a problem of non-integrity in the structuration of the archive as supposed guarantor of epistemological sovereignty. A terminology of sovereign integrity dominates the Stasi's files, so that they sit in stark contrast with the literary and cinematic texts that grapple with the Stasi's legacy — texts that are beset with images of inconsistency and perforation. When read in dialogue with the poststructuralist accounts of the archive, these spy files and the cultural works that emerged after their opening enable new reflection on the ethics of visiting archives, as an act of doing justice that nonetheless risks collapsing the fragments ...

German Life and Letters, 2010

Surveillance & Society, 2019

Edinburgh German Yearbook 9