Filip Andjelkovic | University of Toronto (original) (raw)

PhD Thesis by Filip Andjelkovic

In our contemporary media environment, the past behaviour of network users is surveilled and coll... more In our contemporary media environment, the past behaviour of network users is surveilled and collated in anticipation of their future behaviour. As a result, visual culture automatically mutates as a response to being consumed. The aim of producing increasingly accurate predictive models necessitates that the very interiority of users – the desires and fantasies which capture their attention – is subjected to the logic of computation. In order to ostensibly optimize a platform’s use, algorithmic prediction strives to eliminate any gap between embodied subjects and their data doubles.

I contend that the algorithmic organization of visual culture institutes a particular aesthetic and form of reception which I call algorithmic realism. Just as socialist realism derealized a totalitarian reality through idealized imagery, algorithmic realism nullifies the individual subject’s ability to imagine the world to be anything other than what is calculated to arouse the most spellbinding of affects. Although digital images appear – like photography and cinema – to be increasingly accurate representation of the visible, this revelation is really a form of production. Thus, representation begets a new reality, one which ensures that the traces of its own computationally instituted nature are erased. In this way, the algorithmic organization of images administers our future for us. And the ability to dream, to reflect on our fantasies and to negotiate our desires, is eroded. Life itself collapses into a state of datafied undeath.

I begin by tracing a genealogy – from public relations to big data – of the entanglement between behavioral optimization and psychological exploitation. I then outline the concept of algorithmic realism, suggesting that images which are wholly generated by machine learning –especially deepfake pornography – provide a model for understanding the algorithmic organization of visual culture. I then conceptually link the logical limits of such a culture to the familiar-unfamiliar category of monstrosity. Finally, relying on Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev as an example, I suggest that the image, bearing a relationship to both cultural memories and fantasies, can nevertheless facilitate life. As much as it can dehumanize, reify, and reduce, the screen can also be a site of negotiation and transcendence.

Articles (Peer-Reviewed) by Filip Andjelkovic

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sex and Sexuality in Game Studies, 2025

Preternature, 2023

In the 1970s, the Toronto Society for Psychical Research conducted a series of experiments in whi... more In the 1970s, the Toronto Society for Psychical Research conducted a series of experiments in which they attempted to prove that the psychokinetic phenomena that were normally described in the context of spirit communication were indicative of a dormant, psychological power
within the individual. The group created a fictional character—Philip, the imaginary ghost— and spent several years of regular séances successfully producing table raps and levitations as they attempted to communicate with him. Importantly, the group often compared their experiences
with each other and with Philip as a form of “group therapy.” This article examines the collaborative, playful nature of the Philip Experiment in relation to psychoanalytic theories of play, transitional and intersubjective experiences, and the mediated communication of unconscious fantasies in the context of clinical analysis.

The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2022

This paper examines several narratives of techno-horror in literature and film. Special attention... more This paper examines several narratives of techno-horror in literature and film. Special attention is paid to the recurring trope of monstrosity arising from a technologically augmented sense of sight. Utilizing a psychoanalytically informed analysis, this paper argues that fictions can express latent, untenable dimensions of very real experiences. In the case of techno-horror, narratives of sight, imagination, and projection-made-monstrous are rooted in contemporary relationships with technology and its capacity for depicting and transmitting unconscious fantasies. In this relationship, the technological is the extension of a tangible category of humanity, while nevertheless containing the fear that this extension dissolves its stability. Thus, the genre of techno-horror is unique in expressing the role of unconscious fantasies-our unattainable ideals for becoming "prosthetic Gods," as Freud put it (1930)in our relationship with technology. Like the ideal of transcendence in religion, this technological ideal is a desire for both an impossible future, as well as the wish to return to an equally impossible, infantile past. Ultimately, this paper suggests that techno-horror narratives are expressions of a failure in taking responsibility for the othered unconscious fantasies that motivate our relationship with technology. Understanding these narratives within the context of psychoanalytic projection and situating them within the long tradition of imagining a transcendence of the human subject affords a better understanding of the cultural work accomplished by these contemporary expressions of the human-made-monstrous.

Gnosis, 2021

This article examines the ways in which gnostic ideas of spiritual growth, enlightenment, and tra... more This article examines the ways in which gnostic ideas of spiritual growth, enlightenment, and transcendence resonate with the “cyber-gnostic” ideology presented through the viral “Cicada 3301” internet mystery. The content of the mystery situates traditionally spiritual enlightenment in the libertarian concerns of freedom of information and privacy, and in the tiered cosmology of the “surface/deep/dark” web. Additionally, this article evaluates the potential for classifying the Cicada 3301 mystery and its surrounding community as an online form of religious expression. Ultimately, it is argued that the mystery offers an insight into how philosophical notions of identity and communication interface with spiritual notions of enlightenment and transcendence through the experience of cybertechnology.

Conference Presentations by Filip Andjelkovic

DSR Colloquium, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 2023

Phantoms and Philosophy - the Annual Philosophy Course Union Halloween Lectures, 2022

This presentation examines the role of the unconscious as it is replicated and accelerated within... more This presentation examines the role of the unconscious as it is replicated and accelerated within digital media networks - not least of all through algorithms that act as a kind of nonnconscious cognition that thinks for us, proliferating affectively viral content, encouraging “transgressive” behaviours/beliefs, and perpetuating divisiveness. Although the aim of these algorithms is to foster increasingly predictable online behaviours, what is also altered is our capacity for autonomous self-reflection, our relationship with the unconscious.

International Society for Religion, Literature, and Society Conference, University of Chester, Chester, England, 2022

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many have turned to virtual platforms for work and socialization. I... more During the COVID-19 pandemic, many have turned to virtual platforms for work and socialization. Increasingly, we are aware of our dependence on the digital networks which afford us instantaneous and ubiquitous connectivity. Yet technology is not just the extension or amplification of our capacities and senses. Technological extensions are, instead, humanity’s imperfect attempts at an impossible transformation. Like the ideal of transcendence in religion, technology is motivated by the unconscious wish for an unattainable, and thus transgressive, omnipotence – the desire to make the human into a “prosthetic God,” as Freud observed in 1930.

Our tangible technological practices are, in this sense, the reified forms of a kind of cultural dreaming. Thus, I argue that fictional narratives of technology – especially narratives of techno-horror in which technology hybridizes the human with its other – express the unconscious, untenable dimension which motivates our everyday, real relationships with technologies. I examine several narratives of techno-horror (Videodrome, From Beyond, and Demonlover), paying special attention to the recurring trope of a technologically augmented sense of sight which unveils monsters. These monsters, moreover, unite the other and the untenable with its origins: the denied dimensions of the human and the familiar.

Ultimately, I argue that techno-horror narratives express a human failure to take responsibility for the unconscious fantasies that motivate our relationship with technology. I examine these narratives within the frameworks of both Freudian psychoanalysis and critical theory of the Frankfurt School – both offering explorations of the limits of human autonomy – and I situate these narratives within the long religious tradition of imagining human transcendence. In doing so, a better understanding is fostered of the cultural work accomplished by these contemporary expressions of the human-made-monstrous.

These narratives express deeply desired yet impossible futures, while pointing to the latent origins of these futures in an equally desired and impossible infantile past. As Cornelius Castoriadis noted – tracing the connections between Freud and the Frankfurt School – the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, ego and id, is not one of conquering the untenable portions of ourselves. It is, instead, an autonomy achieved through acknowledgement, through the recognition that the other is a part of oneself. In the increasingly virtual augmentation with which we live our lives, we have a responsibility to recognize the othered dimensions of ourselves as they confront us through our ever-evolving technological advances and practices.

The Supernatural in Contemporary Society Conference, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, 2018

In the early 1970s, a group of eight members of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research (T.S.P... more In the early 1970s, a group of eight members of the Toronto Society for Psychical Research (T.S.P.R.) conducted an informal experiment which resulted in what is now known as the “Philip phenomenon.” The group’s intention was to explore the possibility of achieving mediumistic, psychokinetic phenomena – such as raps, table-tilting, table-levitation, and apparitions – under conditions where there was no clear “medium” among the group, and, most importantly, where there was a clearly fictional ghost. The group invented a plausible historical figure by the name of Philip and consistently spent time together, meditating on his personality and recreating the light-hearted, social atmosphere of Victorian séances. The group was able to produce psychokinetic phenomena: table-tiltings, table-levitations, electrical manipulation of the room’s lighting, and especially raps and scratching noises, some of which were recorded on audio and video. Philip became an additional interlocutor and “presence” at the group’s meetings, a striking example of fiction erupting into fact and the inner world of the mind penetrating external reality. What is most relevant for this paper is strikingly apparent from the group’s own framing of the experiment: their emphasis not on the question of discarnate spirits and human survival, but on the relationships between the group members themselves and with their collectively created entity. Philip, apart from his penchant for rearranging furniture, was understood to be nothing more than a subjective, or rather, an intersubjective entity. Philip was an “imaginary ghost.”

This paper briefly establishes the historical context of the Philip Experiment and the T.S.P.R. within the earlier perspective of the original Society for Psychical Research, whose aim was to mediate the closed-system perspectives of Victorian science and religion by straddling the approaches of scientific empiricism on one hand and the subject of spiritual phenomena on the other. Importantly, this mediating perspective participated in a much larger, radical re-working of the Western notions of rationality and subjectivity which culminated in the recognition of the human mind’s irrational, multiple, and dynamic nature in Freudian Psychoanalysis.

This paper goes on to suggest a psychoanalytic interpretation (grounded in the theory of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, and Ogden) of the intersubjective nature of the Philip Experiment’s phenomena. The purpose of this is methodological, as this approach elucidates how it is beneficial to retain an understanding that the “supernatural” – as a cultural category – has its roots in the late 19th/early 20th century revision of the self and subjectivity. By examining the phenomena in this way, it is argued that a psychodynamic reduction is necessary to a degree. That is, as long as it is a reduction which does not negate the importance of the total experience – its subjective and its physical aspects. Yet, focusing on the former, as this paper does – employing concrete theories of psyche as well as elaborating on their historical, sometimes unacknowledged and repressed antecedents in explorations of spirit – leads to a better understanding of the affective, intersubjective, and regressive elements which seem to “haunt” the occurrences of supernatural phenomena themselves.

The Graduate Student Conference for South Asian Religion (GCSAR), University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 2017

Ritual recitations are central to the content of the R̥gveda. They are not only operations which ... more Ritual recitations are central to the content of the R̥gveda. They are not only operations which work within the structure of the Vedic ritual’s worldview, but are instead active constructions of such a world, expanding outwards from the ritual ground and the subjectivity of the ritual participants. Through a primary focus on the Agni and Indra hymns of R̥gveda III, this paper will examine ritual speech as ‘embodied’ – that is, as much an object to be sacrificed as are the literal oblations – and constructive of the participants’ perspectives and subjectivities. Speech as a tangible, creative act paradoxically blurs and defines the limits of the outer and inner worlds of experience.
This perspective exposes the similarities between the relationships of participant/deity within Vedic ritual and of analysand/analyst in modern psychoanalysis. Through a parallel exploration of the R̥gveda and the manner in which psychoanalysis discusses intersubjectivity, we will explore how both address a subjectification of one’s world that enables its construction through expression. In the contrasting of notions such as Winnicott’s ‘transitional phenomena’ and Ogden’s ‘intersubjective analytic third’ with the Vedic ritual, we will ultimately address the capacity for psychoanalytic and religious experiences to become ‘translations’ of each other. These translations express the perennial experience of constructing and de-constructing oneself as a subject, and, most importantly, the interplay this entails between the self, the other, and the liminal third, whether sacred or psyche.

Keywords: R̥gveda, ritual, psychoanalysis, transitional phenomena, intersubjectivity

Translations by Filip Andjelkovic

Znakovi vremena: Časopis za filozofiju, religiju, znanost i društvenu praksu, 2019

Ginān je kolekcija religiozne literature Ismailija iz Južne Azije. Ovi tekstovi obrađuju veliki b... more Ginān je kolekcija religiozne literature Ismailija iz Južne Azije. Ovi tekstovi obrađuju veliki broj tema, među kojima su sveta ljubav, kosmologija, meditacija, ritualni običaji, eshatologija i etičko ponašanje. Konačno, riječ “ginān” potiče iz Sanskritskog korijena džñāna i etimološki je vezan za grčku riječ γνῶσις ili gnosis, od koje su izvedene riječi u većem broju jezika. Stručnjaci su primijetili dvostruki značaj riječi ginān među Ismailijama, koja se odnosi i na njihovu svetu literaturu i na stanje gnosisa. Ovaj obimni rad istražuje smisao i upotrebu riječi “ginān” u samoj ginānskoj tradiciji. Pošto je većina gināna kazivana uz određene melodije, organizacija ovog rada ginānske tradicije je inspirisana tradicionalnom simfonijom. Simfonija, koja je produžena kompozicija klasične muzike na Zapadu, je obično podijeljena na četiri dijela. Isto tako je ova studija “Simfonije Gnosisa” sastavljena od četiri poglavlja, svako istražujući drugačiji način na koji ginānska tradicija definiše samu sebe.

Znakovi vremena: Časopis za filozofiju, religiju, znanost i društvenu praksu, 2018

Pojam dana stvaranja, koji kulminiraju u posvećenom sedmom danu, ili Sabatu, se nalazi u sve tri ... more Pojam dana stvaranja, koji kulminiraju u posvećenom sedmom danu, ili Sabatu, se nalazi u sve tri Avramove vere. Dok su neki vernici literalno tumačili ove dane, drugi su insistirali da ova doktrina ima dubok ezoteričan značaj. U islamskoj tradiciji, oni koji su se zalagali za ulogu uma u razumevanju vere i svetih pisama su podržali upotrebu simboličkog tumačenja (ta'vila). Arapska reč ta'vil znači izazvati povratak nečega svom postanku ili izvoru. Među najstrastvenijim pristalicama simboličkog tumačenja se nalaze Ismaili, jedna od dve glavne grane šīʼizma. Ovaj rad istražuje način na koji je Hakim Nasir Hosrov, poznati perzijski pesnik i ismailijski velikodostojnik, shvatio dane stvaranja i njihov odnos sa hijerarhijom religije (hudud-i din) koja bi dovela vernike do kranjeg spasa.

MA Research Project by Filip Andjelkovic

This paper explores three transgressive models of subjectivity. The first emerges out of a psycho... more This paper explores three transgressive models of subjectivity. The first emerges out of a psychoanalytic examination of the matrix, a regressive technology of wish-fulfilling omnipotence which is central to the world of William Gibson’s cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer. The second subjectivity is expressed through the reactionary credo of self-sacrifice developed by Georges Bataille’s secret society of Acéphale – headless. The third subjectivity calls to us from the dehumanizing gods that populate the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Each of these transgressions share a common element. They depict a method or practice that seeks to dominate the rational, human subject by way of turning it into the raw material of cultural production. For this purpose, technology (Gibson), religion (Bataille), and ontological systems of knowledge (Lovecraft) are twisted into their antitheses.
Each transgressive model of subjectivity implements a tool of enlightenment in order to subjugate and regressively re-orient the course of reason, elucidating the dark inhumanity which is tangled around the deepest roots of the human subject. These transgressions, and their resultant power to transform the human into something wholly other, something inhuman, are the precise points at which the rational subject of the Enlightenment “abrogates itself,” to quote Adorno and Horkheimer, revealing its ever-present potential for reversion back to a repressive, mythic, and irrational antithesis.

Drafts by Filip Andjelkovic

This article examines the ways in which Gnostic ideas of spiritual growth, enlightenment, and tra... more This article examines the ways in which Gnostic ideas of spiritual growth, enlightenment, and transcendence resonate with the “cyber-gnostic” ideology presented through the Cicada 3301 internet phenomenon. Specifically, Cicada 3301 engaged the community of puzzle-solvers through the interactive medium of an internet mystery, which framed the idea of gnosis within the libertarian concerns of freedom of information and privacy in relation to the tiered cosmology of the surface/deep/dark web.

Additionally, this article evaluates the potential for classifying the Cicada 3301 mystery and its surrounding online community as a form of online religious expression. Ultimately, it is argued that the mystery offers an active exploration of the ways in which philosophical notions – those of identity and communication – interface with spiritual notions – of enlightenment and transcendence – through the experience of cybertechnology.

Articles by Filip Andjelkovic

Culture: An Undergraduate Humanities Journal (vol. 1, issue 2), 2018