Interview Series: Strategic Communication Perspectives in Global Media | Interviewer: Gökhan Çolak
Identity & Representation
How do you navigate and balance the different layers of your professional identity—as a CEO, a crisis communication expert, and a public figure? What key dynamics determine which aspect of your identity comes to the forefront in different contexts?
Balancing the different layers of my professional identity is less about choosing one over the other and more about consciously integrating them while staying anchored in purpose. At the core, my role as a CEO defines my responsibilities: I lead, make strategic decisions, and ensure short and long term impact. This perspective is always present, especially when navigating high stakes situations where business continuity is on the line. My identity as a crisis communication expert comes to the forefront in moments of uncertainty or reputational risk. In those contexts, precision, clarity, and timing become critical. I shift into a mode that prioritizes rapid assessment, stakeholder mapping, and message discipline, ensuring that every word and action supports stability and credibility.
As a public figure, I operate with an awareness that visibility amplifies both influence and accountability. Here, authenticity and consistency are key. It’s not just what I communicate, but how I embody values over time that shapes trust with broader audiences. The dynamic that determines which aspect leads is context: Urgency and risk level activate the crisis expert mindset, strategic direction and leadership decisions call forward the CEO mindset. Visibility and public engagement highlight the public figure and opinion. What ties them all together is a clear internal compass of my values, knowledge, experience, and a deep understanding of responsibility. Rather than seeing these roles as separate, I view them as complementary lenses that allow me to respond with both agility and integrity. Ultimately, the balance comes from being intentional: knowing when to support and empower, when to guide, and when to represent—and ensuring that all three are aligned in service of trust and the most professional service in our industry.
Image & Institutional Authority
How would you theorize the relationship between personal image and institutional authority? In high-visibility roles, how do individual representation and organizational credibility interact?
This relationship is not neutral, it’s a power exchange. In high visibility roles, your personal image doesn’t just reflect the institution, you actively compete with it for trust. The audience is constantly asking: Do I believe the system, or do I believe the person standing in front of me? And in many cases, they decide faster about the person than they ever will about the institution. Institutions don’t speak, people do. And when they do, they compress complexity into something emotionally legible. A single appearance, a single sentence, can either reinforce years of institutional credibility—or unravel it. So the interaction is not passive. It’s volatile.
When alignment is strong, personal image becomes an amplifier. It accelerates trust, humanizes authority, and makes the institution feel coherent and real. But when there’s even a slight gap (between what the institution claims and how the individual behaves) that gap becomes a fracture line. And in today’s environment, fracture lines don’t stay small. They scale instantly.
There’s also a strategic tension most leaders underestimate: the more visible and trusted the individual becomes, the more fragile the institution can become behind them. You can unintentionally centralize credibility in yourself, and that is a hidden risk. Because the moment you step back, the question becomes: Was the authority ever institutional, or was it always personal?
So the task is not to “balance” the two it’s to actively manage the transfer of trust. Sometimes you step forward and embody the institution, especially in moments of crisis, when people need clarity, not structure. But in moments of stability, you have to deliberately step back and let the institution carry the weight. That’s how you build resilience beyond personality. Because ultimately, if your presence is the only thing holding credibility together, you don’t have authority, you have dependency. And dependency is not leadership. It’s a liability.
Crisis Communication Theory
Do you approach crisis communication primarily as a process of perception management, or as the construction and reframing of reality? How can these two dimensions be balanced in practice?
Crisis communication is often framed as a choice: perception management or the construction of reality. I think this is dangerous. Because in a real crisis, perception is reality, at least in its immediate consequences. Markets react to it. Stakeholders make decisions based on it. Reputations rise or collapse because of it. So if you treat perception as something secondary, you’ve already lost control of the situation.
Crisis communication is not just about managing how reality is seen. It is about actively shaping what reality becomes next. Every statement, every silence, every framing choice sets direction. You are not just describing events, you are defining meaning, assigning responsibility, and opening or closing pathways for what happens after. In that sense, crisis communication is an act of leadership, not just messaging.
So the real challenge is how you operate in both dimensions at once, without losing credibility. If you focus only on perception management, you risk manipulation. You might stabilize the surface, but the underlying reality will eventually break through, and when it does, the trust deficit is far worse. If you focus only on “objective reality,” you risk irrelevance. Because »reality« that is not translated, framed, and understood might as well not exist in the public space.
The balance comes from discipline: You align narrative with facts, but you also recognize that facts don’t speak for themselves. You move fast on perception, but you anchor it in verifiable truth. You simplify, but you don’t distort. And most importantly, you understand timing. Early in a crisis, perception leads. People need clarity before they have complete information. Later, reality must catch up, and it must confirm what you signaled at the start. That’s where credibility is either built or destroyed. Because ultimately, crisis communication is not about choosing between perception and reality. It’s about closing the gap between them, fast enough to lead, and honestly enough to be believed.
Transparency & Strategic Boundaries
In moments of crisis, where should the boundary be drawn between transparency and strategic communication? How can organizations balance full disclosure with controlled messaging from both an ethical and operational standpoint?
Transparency is often treated as an absolute virtue in a crisis. It isn’t. Because the real question is not how much you disclose, but whether what you disclose is meaningful, responsible, and timely. Total transparency sounds principled, but in practice, it can be reckless. Incomplete data, unverified details, or prematurely shared information can escalate harm, create confusion, or even compromise legal and operational outcomes. On the other hand, overly controlled messaging, what people instinctively label as “spin”, erodes trust just as quickly. So the boundary is not fixed. It’s strategic, and it’s ethical. Transparency is about truthfulness. Strategic communication is about timing, framing, and impact.
You owe stakeholders the truth. Always. But you do not owe them chaos. In the early stages of a crisis, clarity matters more than completeness. People need to understand what is happening, what it means for them, and what is being done about it. That requires discipline, choosing what to say now, what to confirm later, and what must remain temporarily undisclosed for valid reasons, whether legal, security related, or operational.
The mistake organizations make is thinking that withholding information is the primary risk. It’s not. The real risk is misalignment, when what you say, what you know, and what eventually becomes public don’t match. That’s where trust collapses. Ethically, the line is crossed the moment communication becomes deceptive, when omission turns into manipulation, or when framing distorts responsibility. Strategically, the line is crossed when speed overrides accuracy, or when control overrides credibility. You should communicate early, but you signal uncertainty where it exists. You disclose facts, but you contextualize them so they are not misinterpreted. You protect sensitive information, but you explain why it cannot yet be shared. And most importantly, you treat communication as a sequence, not a single act. Transparency is not a dump of information, it’s a commitment to progressively reveal the truth as it becomes reliable. Because in a crisis, people don’t expect you to know everything immediately. But they do expect that whatever you say is true, and that tomorrow, it won’t contradict what you said today. That consistency, that integrity over time, is where transparency and strategy stop being in tension and start reinforcing each other.
Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
In environments defined by uncertainty and time pressure, what methodological or cognitive framework guides your decision-making process? How do you weigh data, intuition, and experience?
In a crisis, you are never choosing between a good option and a bad one. You are choosing between incomplete versions of risk, with limited time, imperfect data, and very real consequences. So the idea that decisions are purely datadriven is at least partialy a myth. Data is critical, but in a crisis, it is usualy late, partial, or contested. If you wait for full clarity, you are no longer leading, you are reacting.
You must first structure the unknown: You rapidly define what you know, what you don’t know, and what would change your decision if you knew it. That prevents paralysis and sharpens focus. Then anchor in principles, not just information, cause when data is unstable, principles become your decision making infrastructure. What do we protect first: people, reputation, continuity? If that hierarchy is clear, decisions become faster and more consistent. And integrate intuition. Intuition is compressed experience. It’s pattern recognition built over time. But it only works if it’s been trained in real environments, and if you are disciplined enough to question and use it under pressure.
Experience, in that sense, is what allows you to sense signal in noise. It tells you when something is escalating, even before the data fully confirms it. But here’s the critical tension: Data gives you justification, experience gives you orientation and intuition gives you speed. And in a crisis, speed matters, because delay is also a decision, just an unspoken one. So the balance is not equal weighting. It’s dynamic. Early in a crisis, intuition and experience often lead, because you don’t have the luxury of time. As the situation stabilizes, data must take a stronger and primary role, because decisions need to scale, align, and hold up under scrutiny.
But there’s one more layer that is often overlooked: decision visibility. In high stakes environments, it’s not enough to make the right decision, you have to make it understandable. Because if stakeholders cannot follow your reasoning, they won’t trust the outcome. So ultimately: Act before you are fully ready. Ground decisions in principles, not pressure. Continuously update your position as reality becomes clearer. Because in uncertainty, the goal is not perfect decisions. It’s decisions that remain defensible as the truth unfolds.
Rationality vs Intuition in Leadership
How do you position the relationship between rationality and intuition in leadership? Particularly in crisis situations, how should leaders balance analytical thinking with rapid, instinctive decision-making?
We often talk about rationality and intuition as if they are opposites. They’re not. They are two different speeds of thinking, and in leadership, especially in crisis, you need both operating at once. Rationality is structured. It’s analytical, deliberate, evidence based. It gives you defensibility. It allows your decisions to hold under scrutiny, internally, externally, and over time. Intuition, on the other hand, is fast. It’s immediate. It cuts through complexity before it’s fully articulated. And in high pressure situations, that speed is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. Because in a crisis, if you rely only on rationality, you will be too slow. And if you rely only on intuition, you will/could eventually be wrong. So the question is which one leads and when?
Early in a crisis, intuition often moves first. It signals that something is off before the data is complete. It allows you to act while others are still analyzing. But intuition without discipline is dangerous. It needs to be interrogated and pressure tested against facts, challenged by diverse perspectives, and translated into a decision that can be explained, not just felt. That’s where rationality comes in. Rational thinking doesn’t replace intuition, it stabilizes it. It turns instinct into strategy. It ensures that what feels right can also stand up to reality. But here’s the deeper point: intuition is not irrational.
It is pattern recognition built through experience. It is what allows leaders to recognize escalation, reputational risk, or stakeholder reaction before it fully materializes. And that means not all intuition is equal. Untrained intuition is bias. Trained intuition is expertise. So the real responsibility of leadership is to develop intuition that deserves to be trusted, and to build systems that prevent it from going unchecked. Because in the end, the balance is not static. You move fast, but you validate. You trust your instinct, but you make it explainable. You analyze, but you don’t hide behind analysis. And most importantly: you don’t confuse confidence with correctness. Because in crisis leadership, the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. It’s to make decisions that are fast enough to matter and grounded enough to last.
Power: Structural vs Relational
Do you conceptualize power primarily as a structural position, or as a relational and contextual phenomenon? How does this perspective shape your leadership and communication strategies?
We tend to think of power as something you have. A title. A position. Authority defined by structure. But in practice, especially in crisis, that version of power is often the least reliable. Because structural power gives you permission to decide. It does not guarantee that others will follow. Real power is relational. It exists in how people respond to you, how much they trust you, and whether they are willing to act on your words, especially when the situation is unclear, uncomfortable, or high-risk. And that makes power inherently unstable. You can hold the highest position in an organization, and still lose influence in a moment if credibility fractures. At the same time, someone without formal authority can become highly influential if they are trusted, consistent, reliable and clear when it matters most.
So the challenge is how consciously you manage the gap between the two. Because leadership happens in that gap. Structural power sets the stage, it gives you access, visibility, and formal responsibility. But relational power determines whether your leadership actually works. And communication is the bridge between them. Every message you deliver either strengthens or weakens that bridge. It either reinforces trust, or introduces doubt.
Power is contextual. In a crisis, power shifts quickly. Stakeholders, employees, media, regulators, the publics, can all redefine the landscape in real time. Authority becomes negotiated, not assumed. So leadership is no longer about holding power. It’s about earning it continuously, in every interaction, under pressure, in full visibility.Because in the end, structural power may give you a voice. But relational power determines whether that voice is believed and whether it results in action.
Gender, Perception & Legitimacy
In the context of female leadership, how do you analyze the impact of physical appearance on professional legitimacy? What strategies have you developed to navigate or counter such perceptual biases?
When we talk about leadership, we like to believe it’s evaluated on competence. But it’s filtered (constantly) through perception. And for women in leadership, physical appearance remains one of the most persistent and least acknowledged filters of all. It shapes first impressions. It influences perceived authority. And, whether we like it or not, it still affects how legitimacy is granted, or withheld. The paradox is sharp: If you align too closely with traditional expectations of appearance, you risk being underestimated. If you deviate from them, you risk being judged as less credible, less “appropriate,” or less authoritative. So the margin for interpretation is narrower. And the scrutiny is higher. But here’s where I take a very clear position. The goal is not to escape perception. That’s impossible.
The goal is to strategically control what perception is anchored to. For me, it comes down to:
consistency of presence Over time, people recalibrate what they focus on. If your communication is precise, your decisions are coherent, and your behavior is aligned, attention shifts, from how you look to how you lead and operate.
clarity of voice Ambiguity invites projection. The clearer and more structured your communication, the less space there is for bias to fill in the gaps.
ownership, not avoidance Trying to minimize visibility rarely works, it often reinforces the very bias you’re trying to escape. Instead, I treat visibility as an asset. If you are seen, then be seen on your terms, with intention, coherence, and control over the narrative you project. So the objective is not just to succeed within existing perceptions. It’s to shift them. To expand what (moral) authority and profesionalism looks like. To normalize different expressions of leadership. And to make competence (not conformity) the dominant signal.
Because legitimacy should not be something women have to negotiate through appearance. But until that changes, the reality is this: You don’t ignore perception. You don’t submit to it. You outgrow it by making it irrelevant to the value you deliver.
Digital Media, Truth & Disinformation
How do you assess the erosion of the concept of ‘truth’ in the context of the rapid development of digital media and increasing disinformation, and how is this transformation reshaping the way the tension between ethics and pragmatism is managed in crisis communication?
We often say that truth is under pressure. I think that’s an understatement. What we are actually witnessing is not just the erosion of truth, but its fragmentation. Digital media hasn’t simply accelerated information. It has multiplied realities. Today, the question is no longer “What is true?”It’s “Which version of the truth gains traction and why?” Because in a hyper connected environment, visibility is no longer tied to accuracy. It’s tied to speed, emotion, and amplification. And that changes the rules fundamentally. Disinformation doesn’t win because it’s credible. It wins because it’s fast, simple, and emotionally compelling, which puts crisis communication in a very uncomfortable position. Because traditionally, ethics and pragmatism were seen as complementary: You tell the truth and you communicate it effectively. Today, that alignment is under strain. If you move too slowly in the name of accuracy, you lose the narrative. If you move too fast in the name of control, you risk compromising truth. So the tension is no longer theoretical. It’s operational: minute by minute, decision by decision.
The critical shift is that crisis communication is no longer just about delivering truth. It’s about making truth competitive. That means understanding the mechanics of attention, amplification, and belief, without surrendering to them. It means framing facts not only correctly but also resonantly. Because facts that don’t travel might as well not exist in the public space, but this is where the ethical line becomes sharper, not weaker. Because the temptation is real, to simplify too much, to over frame, to push narratives that win attention but stretch reality. And the moment you do that, you enter the same logic as disinformation, just with better intentions. That’s the trap. So the question becomes: how do you remain effective without becoming compromised? The answer is high discipline: Competing on clarity, not distortion. Competing on speed, but not at the expense of truth. Competing on relevance by connecting facts to what people actually care about.
And you must accept something difficult: You will not win every narrative battle. But if you lose credibility, you lose everything. Because in an environment where truth is contested, credibility becomes the last stable currency. And credibility is not built in the moment of crisis. It is built before and tested during. So this transformation is not just technological. It is deeply ethical. It forces leaders to decide, under pressure and in full visibility: Do you optimize for attention? Or do you anchor in integrity and find ways to make it visible? Because in the end, crisis communication is no longer just about protecting reputation. It’s about defending the conditions under which truth can still matter. And that is no longer just a professional responsibility. It’s a leadership one.
Future of Crisis Communication
How would you conceptualize the interplay between power, communication, and trust within a unified theoretical framework? From this perspective, what structural directions do you see for the future evolution of crisis communication, and what fundamental principle could be formulated to contribute to the academic literature?
From an analytical perspective, the interplay between power, communication, and trust can be conceptualized as a triadic, co/constitutive system, in which each element is conditioned by the others. Power, in this framework, is not treated solely as a structural attribute (position, hierarchy, institutional authority), but as a relational capacity to shape meaning and coordinate action under conditions of uncertainty. Communication functions as the operational mechanism through which this capacity is exercised, it is the medium that translates authority into influence. Trust, in turn, operates as the legitimizing currency of the system: it determines whether communicated meaning is accepted, contested, or rejected by relevant stakeholders.
Crucially, this relationship is dynamic rather than linear. Communication does not simply transmit power; it actively produces and redistributes it, while trust serves both as an outcome of prior interactions and as a precondition for future effectiveness. In this sense, trust can be understood as a form of deferred validation, a temporally extended evaluation of consistency between communicated claims and observable reality. Within crisis contexts, this triadic relationship becomes particularly visible and accelerated. Crises function as stress tests of systemic coherence, exposing misalignments between institutional claims (power), communicative practices, and stakeholder expectations (trust). When communication fails to align with either the realities of the situation or the perceived legitimacy of authority, trust deteriorates, and with it, the effective capacity to exercise power.
Building on this, we can conceptualize crisis communication as a process of dynamic alignment across three dimensions:
Epistemic alignment: the degree to which communication corresponds to verifiable reality (truth conditions).
Relational alignment: the degree to which communication resonates with stakeholder expectations, values, and perceptions (trust conditions).
Institutional alignment: the degree to which communication reflects and reinforces legitimate authority structures (power conditions).
Effective crisis communication occurs at the intersection of these three axes. Misalignment in any one dimension (factually correct but socially tone deaf communication, or strategically persuasive but factually weak messaging) produces instability in the overall system. From this theoretical standpoint, several structural shifts are likely to shape the future evolution of crisis communication:
From centralized authority to distributed credibility Digital media environments decentralize the production and validation of information. Authority is no longer monopolized by institutions but is continuously negotiated across networks. This implies a shift from control based to coordination based communication models.
From information asymmetry to transparency ecosystems The declining feasibility of information control necessitates a move toward structured transparency. where organizations design communication as an ongoing, staged process rather than episodic disclosure.
From message delivery to meaning competition Crisis communication increasingly operates within environments of competing narratives. The task is not only to provide accurate information but to ensure that it achieves interpretive dominance without compromising epistemic integrity.
From reactive to anticipatory communication systems The integration of data analytics, real-time monitoring, and scenario planning will shift crisis communication toward pre-emptive framing, where potential crises are partially shaped before they fully materialize.
The effectiveness of crisis communication is determined by the continuous alignment between communicated representations of reality, the relational expectations of stakeholders, and the perceived legitimacy of authority. Sustainable influence emerges not from the control of information, but from the capacity to maintain coherence across these dimensions over time. This principle emphasizes that credibility is neither static nor unidimensional. It is dynamically produced through the interaction of truth, perception, and authority, and can only be sustained through their ongoing alignment.
In this sense, the future of crisis communication lies not in refining isolated techniques, but in developing integrated systems of meaning management, where power, communication, and trust are understood as mutually constitutive elements of a single, evolving “structure”.
Your work challenges the dominance of vision within Western epistemology. How does a sonic epistemology reconfigure our understanding of knowledge production in cinema?
Visual epistemology is an epistemology of autonomous bodies and events. These are thus measurable, classifiable and nameable. The visual relies on the separating function of the gaze, to see the thing before seeing its contexts and relationships which appear in a secondary viewing or measuring. Its knowledge system reflects this priority. And even when it seeks a knowledge of connection, this connection is understood as a measurable connection of two normally separate bodies. In sound this state of separation is impossible. Everything sounds together. Sonic knowledge is thus not the knowledge of a thing or body. Instead, it is the knowledge of relationships and relationalities. And instead of bringing separate items into contact, sound manifests as indivisibility: there is no sound alone, the tone or the phoneme are constructs of a visual, musical and linguistic system. Sound is everything at once, it is the contact, it is how we relate rather than me or you. Therefore, to know what we perceive to be a thing we need to listen to how it sounds with other bodies and more than human bodies to sense what it is contingently. Steven Feld called this sonic epistemology an acoustemology, bringing together the notion of acoustics and epistemology. He was influenced in this naming by the Kaluli people in the Papua New Guinea rain forest where he did his field work in the 1970s and where he abandoned his visual anthropology and ethnographic methodology that named and classified separate object and events to engage in the all together. Because the sensory density of the rainforest did not allow a discrete view. There you cannot see the tree from the trees, but you have to listen to everything together with everything else to come to know from the together and that together includes you the listener. This articulates an acoustic epistemology that we could engage outside the rainforest too. To hear the world from its indivisibility and appreciate the knowledge that the dense simultaneity of sounds provides about contingent relationship rather than concrete objects.
Having said all of this, I believe we could see from sound the contingent relationality of the world. What stops us seeing relationally is not the eye as a physiological apparatus, but the entrainment in a cultural visuality that is ideologised by the notion of ownership, extraction, grasping and comprehending the world, rather than knowing with it also ourselves.
Caption: courtesy chaosmagicmusic, Cologne 2023, Kai Niggemann
Ontology of Sound
You argue that sound does not represent the world but produces its own reality. Could you elaborate on the ontological status of sound in relation to the audiovisual image?
I do not actually say it quite like this. What I suggest is that, given the sonic makes a relational world of many encounters, and sounds its indivisible reality, as described in response to your last question, what sound reveals is that the singularity of the world is an illusion. Instead, sound makes accessible as in thinkable the relational plurality of the world. There is not one actual world, that is verifiably true for all of us. Instead, the real world exists in plural slices some of which we find more actual than others, others remain possible only and others appear even impossible, but that does not mean they are not actual. This world thus exists as many possible worlds from which we negotiate in contingent moments of encounter, a temporary actual world. A shared life-world.
The world that I live is actual for me but only possible for you. However, the sonic possible worlds I talk about are not irrealities or literary fictions, parallel worlds easily subsumed into a greater, unified real actuality. Instead, they are the plurality of this world that questions the singular appearance of what we might term actual, even though we are not verifiably sure that we agree on this actuality. Because the possibilities of this world questions the value and norms of the actual. Their invisible plurality reveals them as an arbitrary and ideological selection and a construct, and not the only real.
Rethinking “Added Value”
Michel Chion’s concept of “added value” suggests that sound enriches the image. Do you see this as a limitation, in the sense that it still subordinates sound to the visual?
Michel Chion is a structuralist for whom the world and by extension film is a text, a semantic system. It is thus readable and knowable on the terms of its signifying structure. His theories unfold within film as such a cultural text to be read and interpreted. Thus when he says sound is “added value” he refers to how in film sound represents added value to the visual, without questioning the separation and consequent hierarchy between visual and sonic film track thus assumed. The film industry is very visually oriented. The visual makes the “pictures”. The sound can contribute to those pictures, adding layers of storytelling and affect, but it is not, within the privilege of the visual, the driving force or the orienting sensorium.
Therefore, when I disagree with him on the notion of added value, I disagree on two counts: one that film is visual and sound can add value to that visual a priori. As instead I understand film to be multi-material and multisensory and the question has to be about producing sense from a complex multisensoriality, not about adding value to a visual thing. Secondly, I disagree with his use of terminology because the sonic is not a thing added post-production, to add value to the primary of the visual. Instead, the sonic is there at the moment of writing the screenplay, on location scouting, in rehearsals, on set, etc. I know it is the reality of much film production that the sound is not part of the pre-production discussions. It is something apparently “added”, sometimes as Foley, sometimes as ADR after the event. And even if it is recorded on location it is added to the film track not as a sound track. But this is Hollywood inspired filmmaking that is a picture book film making of stories on celluloid. There is another kind of filmmaking that understands the indivisibility of the audio-visual, that is a materialist film making that does not add sound to film but understand how their indivisibility produces a scene. And conversely the film critique engaged in that multi-sensory world cannot speak about adding value to a visual track but must contemplate the simultaneity of all tracks, even the absent ones. So nothing gets added because nothing is apart.
Photo: BBC Radio 3 – Late Junction, Max Reinhardt with Salome Voegelin
Phenomenology and Embodiment
Your approach often intersects with phenomenology. How does listening as an embodied experience reshape the spectator’s relation to cinematic space and time?
Again, we need to be particular as to what sort of film-making we mean and what sort of spectator we mean. If my expectation of film is narrative clarity, storytelling in a semantic way, it is probably not desirable for the viewer to propose they should listen to the sound track to sense their being in the film as a being in the world of the film and the film becoming the film through that intersubjective and reciprocal experience. Phenomenology, unlike structuralism, engages perception as a reciprocal process of being in the world which becomes the world it is for us through our being in it. It performs a reduction, an époché, in order to understand this experience rather than an a priori object or event. Phenomenology brackets the apparently known, to get to the experience at that moment. It does not read the world or film, from a pre-existing vocabulary or signifying system, but engages in the experience as a particular vis-à-vis constituted in our being with. Viewing thus becomes a ‘sensory-motor action,’ a doing perception also of sound that generates rather than perceives what it sees, hears and senses. Consequently, given that this sensory motor action of a listening-viewing generates the world of the film, our engagement demands responsibility and care. I am responsible for how I listen and what I hear, and also for what I do not hear. These sensory motor engagements with the world generate my life-world, my sensory world that I understand myself with. I am responsible for this world/ film world I generate from my being in the world/film world.
In this phenomenological understanding of the world as constituted in sensory-motor actions as life-worlds and the understanding of the film world as such a life-world, there is no distance that enables reading. The suspense of filmic reality is not a theoretical but an actual suspense, an époché, that allows us to see things differently and thus to engage in the experiential reality of the film as a reciprocal and responsible world.
Photo: Salomé Voegelin – University of the Arts London
Silence and the Sonic Negative
Within your framework, how can silence be theorized beyond absence— _as a productive, material, and even disruptive sonic condition?
Silence is not the absence of sound but the beginning of listening. I wrote something like this over 15 years ago in my first book Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. To me this has only become more pertinent, particularly in relation to politics and what we cannot or do not want to hear and how to start hearing it. It is important to note that silence and noise are not binaries. Instead, they are on a perceptual spectrum, where they’re not in opposition to each other, but highlight extremes that are part of all sounds when they are listened to beyond a referent or name, in the contingency of the relationship that sounds. All sounds can be noisy and all sounds can be silent. And silence can engender disruption and as much as noise can calm things down. Silence can disrupt the flow of the usual, what we think we hear, and how we hear it. It can create uncertainty and fear as we lose the baseline of the signal path.
We talk about noise in relation to noise-signal ratio and how noise disrupts what we can hear, as in understand and make sense of, turning it illegible, and how in this way noise is the undesirable sound of telecommunication, science and writing. However, silence can equally be heard as “no signal”. Its undesirability is not loud, and thus it is not even noticed. It does not impede the signal but holds the signal in the thick ambience of what we do not know to hear or listen out for. It sounds the conceit of a clear signal by sounding the condition of the unheard, and the excluded. Once we tune into silence, once we become aware of its potential to make us hear differently, more and otherwise, then we can start to hear the silent hum that is the no signal of a different speech. And that is why I think the notion that silence is the beginning of listening remains and gains in relevance. Because at this political conjuncture we need to hear also what you hint at by the term Negative: that which seems upside down and strange but holds the imagination of a different world, which in the process of photographic development gets rendered into the shapes and forms we recognise.
Subjectivity and the Unconscious
If sound engages the listener on a pre-reflective or unconscious level, how does this affect the construction of subjectivity in film experience?
I do not think sound engages the listener in a pre-reflective level but demands of us that we not only suspend our disbelief in relation to the veracity or feasibility of the narrative, but that we suspend the reality of the filmic apparatus, its visual organisation and distance, so we might come to understand film as a reciprocal and intersubjective life-world and appreciate our responsibility for what we see and hear. This presumes an ethical listening and an ethical subjectivity that is aware of their participation in the heard and also in the silent, the unheard and ignored. To still use the prefix pre-, I would say that this listening with responsibility and a participatory ethics, understanding one’s role in generating the heard and also what remains inaudible, engages in the ‘preliminary’ rather than the ‘pre-reflective’. I am thinking this term with Hannah Arendt who in her 1954 text ‘Understanding and Politics’ suggests that we have lost the ability to make sense of the new because we rely on the familiar to grasp what is entirely unfamiliar – what cannot be understood within the rules of common sense and the ‘normal’ by which we tend to measure and recognise the real, and to which we thus reduce it. In particular, she addresses the failure to understand totalitarianism, by confusing it with imperialism because of reading it through old signifiers which prevent us from seeing its own particular and new evil. This renders us unable to pursue appropriate political actions in resistance and to develop a relevant political subjectivity. In response she suggests an emphasis on the preliminary, the not yet named, where a word first appears as a new word and a new sound, and where its newness can be understood. In its preliminary articulation – before it has been folded into existing categories and meanings. Film that engages enables this preliminary, that does not seek to tell the actual from its past representation but allows us to experience the possible on its current terms, can encourage a sense of the preliminary. I suggest sound can enable the imagination of the preliminary, as it does not close itself off in representation but invites an uncertain listening. And from this listening in a preliminary mode, that is as a sensory-motor action which generates the heard in its unfamiliar newness, a new understanding can be reached and a relevant (political) subjectivity imagined.
Salomé Voegelin – 4th Council of Europe Platform Exchange on Culture and Digitisation, Photo: ZKM
The Political Dimension of Listening
Can listening be understood as a site of resistance? How might sonic practices destabilize dominant regimes of visibility and representation?
Listening in a sense that it is a sensory-motor action, a movement forward from listening into action, is always already engaged in action and thus also in the possibility to refuse or reject an action. I am invested in thinking listening as a paradigm shift; to shift a conventional scopic regime and its focus on things, towards an acceptance and practice of the indivisibility of this world. This in itself represents a rejection of the dominant visual regime which starts from the separate and the discrete, and pursues to measure, name and classify it before bringing it into context and relationality. And thus keeping it always still apart. This rejection is not a not looking, instead it means to practice listening to film work and the world, to appreciate its multisensory indivisibility, and turning the visual sense on its head. What we are left with is how things are by being together and in contingent encounters. This requires a new sense of thinking the world, and ourselves in this world, which naturally destabilizes how we look and what we see. This implies new values and a new understanding and a new imaginary so radical and different that it will never happen. This does not mean we should not pursue it however. Since indivisibility also means reciprocity and demands responsibility, creating an awareness for interdependence, which are all competencies and sensibilities which we need to understand and live with this complexly interwoven and interdependent world and its various political, economic, ecological and social crises.
Your work operates at the intersection of philosophy, sound art, and media theory. What methodological shifts are necessary for film studies to fully integrate sound as a primary analytical category?
I think there are wonderful films that practice great awareness of the sonic as a concept and materiality and that produce fantastic sound tracks that enable a little what I mention above: the appreciation of the film as a multi-sensory possible world that invites the understanding of the plurality of filmworlds generated. The problem, or rather the emphasis and priority of the visual is strong and maybe unsurmountable. The technology, the way a film set operates is clearly driven from the image. Therefore, on the one hand, to undertake such a methodological shift into a sonic film theory, we would have to reset the film set, rethink how we make films, how we act, direct, edit and track lay. And then we would have to have training for listening to film, to generate a sonic sensibility and come to understand how film generates the plural slices of its indivisible world rather than proposing the meeting of the discreet, the story, the character, the action.
In a sense, and referring to an earlier answer to one of your questions, we would need training to listen to the film’s preliminary experience, conjured in sound, and we would need courage and desire not to fold it always already into history and the familiar but to follow the uncertainty, the perpetual present of sound into the film’s unfamiliar materiality. To start to see film from its sound and thus from its indivisibility of which we are part. To become sonic subjects, human bodies with other human and more-than-human bodies, in a close relationality and responsibility, and write from there. This would not hinder criticality. A criticism often levied against sound for its lack of critical distance when it is not treated in a structuralist scheme. Instead, a sound theory of film could develop a more relevant and pressing criticality, of lived and heard relationships of a vibrational film practice. It could work from the motor-sensory-action of listening relationally and reciprocally, understood as an effort of generating rather than viewing the film. Thus, we would become vibrational bodies and write theory from our entanglement in the vibrational sphere of film. Always aware of the vulnerability and responsibility of the viewer as listener to what they see and hear and what finally they write about. The task would be to theorise from that entangled position understanding its responsibility and understanding that thus the rigour of this criticism would be legitimised by the body of the critique rather than canons and pre-existing contexts of how film is written about.
Photo: Texts + Talks | Salomé Voegelin
Technology and Artificial Sound
With the increasing presence of synthetic and AI-generated sound, how might we rethink authenticity, presence, and materiality in sonic experience?
This is a huge question and I am not sure it is answerable, or that I can answer it truly at this stage. The problems with AI for sound tracks as I see them at this moment, are very similar to the problems of AI in literature or philosophical or any writing. AI does not think in terms of relationship, it does not understand its indivisibility, and contextualisation. It only recognises patterns and frequencies. In that sense it is a scopic tool. And in its quest for the most frequent it erases that which is not often sounded, the marginal, the excluded and discriminated against, and amplifies the most prevalent. In this way it speeds up a hyper-hegemonisation of the visual regime and pursues a data standardisation of its materiality and sense. Thus it erases difference, diversity and plurality and it erases the body as a site of multi-sensory response: In the end we will only have a hand full of sounds and a handful of words, and the body has gone. AI is the great depletion machine. It does not so much make us rethink authenticity and reality but erases our thinking altogether. We will be confronted with frequency presence whose authenticity has nothing to do with experience and relationships but only with numbers and how often they might appear. AI authenticity is probability and speed. This fits quite well incidentally with the hype of future betting’s markets, markets for trading the future by guessing what somebody might say or do and how often or when. This form of betting on a probable incident rather than on analytical predications accelerates the status of the stock market as casino, and appears to represent AI’s total realisation of the world in frequency terms. This is of course the very opposite of what I hope for with a paradigm shift towards sonic indivisibility, complexity and responsibility. As instead, we are moving with great speed and zero responsibility towards the erasure of an experiential world by numbers and words as numbers. As sound designers and sound artists as well as critically listening viewers, we must ask ourselves at what cost and for what benefit do we want to work with AI?
On the other hand or at the same time sound and a sonic thinking might reveal themselves as the perfect resistance tools against an AI frequency world. And my desired for paradigm shift will happen due to necessity to keep our bodies to keep our lives.
Conceptual Closing
If cinema were to be theorized primarily through listening rather than vision, what would be the most significant conceptual shift for film theory?
To write about film not as interpretation of scenes, and dialogue, and moments and plots but as indivisible materiality that thinks in connecting rather than things by themselves and that creates sonic possible worlds: the plural slices of this world and of the film world, would mean to write about everything at the same time. I am not sure we can write that way. It would be a challenge. But we surely should try so we could develop a cultural visuality from our ears, able to understand the vibrational, indivisible and relational experience of film and sense ourselves within it.
Interview Series: The Transformation of Public Relations in the Digital Age | Interviewer: Gökhan Çolak
The Academic Development of Public Relations
Public relations was long perceived primarily as a practice-oriented profession. However, your work played a significant role in establishing it as a theoretical and academic field. In your view, what were the most critical turning points in the academic development of public relations?
This is a fascinating question, but it also would require the writing of a book or, at least, a journal article to answer it adequately. Fortunately, I coauthored an article in 2023 that addressed this question in detail.1 1 I must point out, however, that the article exclusively addressed the academic development of public relations in the United States. Other regions and countries may have experienced a different academic development of the discipline. The United States generally has been credited with leading the public relations discipline, but some scholars in other countries have challenged that assumption.
The article to which I am referring was published as part of a special issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly that celebrated 100 years of publication of the journal. JMCQ is the premier journal of the (U.S) Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. In the United States, public relations was taught first in schools of journalism and mass communication, although it now is taught equally in departments of communication and, occasionally, in other academic departments. My program at the University of Maryland, for example, was housed in the College of Journalism until it was moved to the Department of Communication in 2005. The special issue contained 22 articles reviewing articles published in JMCQ over its first 100 years for specialized areas such as journalism, mass communication, advertising, and (in my case) public relations. I am proud to say that the first author of the article was my grandson, James Hollenczer, who at the time was a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma.
I will quote directly from this article, but first I would like to provide a general overview of the history of public relations education in the United States. The first courses in public relations generally were offered at the time of World War I in schools of journalism and generally were taught by the public information officers of the university or by local practitioners. It wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s that schools of journalism (and sometimes) mass communication employed full-time public relations educators. Most were former practitioners who did not hold an advanced degree. Exceptions were Scott Cutlip of the University of Wisconsin and Otto Lerbinger and Edward J. Robinson of Boston University. They used research from disciplines such as psychology, sociology, mass communication, and political science in textbooks that they authored. Theories of persuasion and public opinion were prominent, and the emphasis was on messaging and persuasion to influence public opinion and behavior. In the 1960s, I was among a few young scholars who developed specialized theories of public relations. Glen Broom and I, who were in that group, were both Ph.D. students at the University of Wisconsin at the time—where we were influenced by Cutlip. My first theory was the situational theory of publics, which focused on the public side of public relations rather than the organization side. Broom originally focused on coorientation theory, which was a forerunner of current theories of organization-public relationships. Later, in collaboration with David Dozier, a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, Broom developed a theory of managerial and technical roles. At about the same time, I introduced the models of public relations, and both roles and models became components of Excellence theory. Robert Heath, who was educated at the University of Illinois and was another prominent scholar at the time, applied principles of rhetoric to public relations.
In the late 1990s and the turn of the century, rhetorical and critical scholars (often in Europe and outside the United States), challenged our approach, which I believe used theory and research to professionalize the practice of public relations. They argued that public relations was mostly a means for organizations to exercise their power over publics. Recently, many have insisted that public relations theory and research should turn away from organizations and focus on empowering publics. I generally disagree with the critical argument that my theories and similar ones are exclusively means to benefit organizations. I began my research career by focusing on publics with my situational theory. The purpose of both the symmetrical model and the Excellence theory was on developing the profession of public relations in a way that would benefit both organizations and publics.
The article in JMCQ used Thomas Kuhn’s historical theory of the stages of development of a scientific discipline to describe the 100 years of public relations scholarship. The following quote provides a conclusion to my answer to this question:
This article discusses the evolution of public relations from its pre-science period to the present day, according to Kuhn’s classic model. In the early days, public relations was focused on systematic efforts to influence public opinion, but scholars began to doubt the accuracy of this approach by the 1950s. In the 1960s, the field faced conceptual challenges and was stagnant in its pre-theoretical formula, but in the 1970s, researchers began to conceptualize people as active communicators with motives and interests. The 1980s and 1990s saw a focus on understanding the different models of public relations, and in the 21st century, the field shifted toward a multifunctional definition of public relations, with a focus on relationship theories, ethics, public behavior, and technology. . .
At a qualitative level, the fundamentals of the discipline have undergone a “revolutionary” development that can be traced over a century, leading public relations scholars and professionals to rethink themselves and revise their disciplinary culture. In the pre-theoretical stage, public relations was mostly reduced to the mechanistic dimension of “influence” and “propaganda.” This produced an asymmetrical search for visibility and persuasion in which organizations sought to impose themselves and their own private scopes over an abstract idea of “public opinion.” Then, in the second half of the 20th century and along with the development of the mass media system, some decisive challenges enlarged the traditional vision of public relations: the reconceptualization of “receivers” in terms of “active communicators” and the segmentation of an undifferentiated “environment” into specific categories of stakeholders and strategic “publics.”
Indeed, the historical evolution of the discipline in the context of JMCQ suggests that, in a hyper-mediated and post-pandemic world, public relations is reaching a mature stage of development. A model shift at the theoretical level, as the one mentioned, encourages the idea that public relations is a resource not only for corporate leaders and organizations generally, but also anyone interested in the study of group behavior. (pp. 948-949)
The Four Models of Public Relations
Your four models of public relations remain among the most influential conceptual frameworks in the discipline. Considering the current digital media environment, do you believe these models still retain their explanatory power?
My first research in the 1960s was on the behavior of publics, which I believed had been ignored in public relations research. I began this research in my Ph.D. dissertation, which was on communication and agricultural development in Colombia. In the dissertation, I studied large landowners (latifundistas), and I followed this with a similar study of peasant farmers (minifundistas). I returned to the United States after two years in Colombia believing that organizations were more often responsible for a lack of economic development than were publics. Thus, I began a period of about 15 years of research on the public relations (communication) behavior of organizations, while also continuing my research on publics.
To explain my development of the models, it is helpful to understand that researchers generally look for two sets of characteristics (variables) to explain something they are interested in: independent and dependent variables. The dependent variables are the characteristics we want to explain (such as public relations behavior), and the independent variables are the characteristics that explain or sometimes predict when the dependent variables occur. I tried several dependent variables to describe public relations behavior and eventually settled on the four models as a good description of how public relations professionals behave. I also tried several independent variables to explain why PR departments practice different models—such as the nature of an organization’s environment, the type of technology used in an organization, the hierarchical structure of the organization, and the power of the public relations department. Eventually, I found that the education and knowledge of PR people and the beliefs of organizational leaders of what public relations is and does best explained which model was practiced. In addition, our research showed that organizations that practiced the two-way symmetrical model were more successful, socially responsible, and ethical than those who practiced other models.
After many studies of these models, my colleagues and I concluded that they were useful descriptions of different types of public relations behavior, although they probably were overly simple. In addition, we found that organizations often use more than one of the models at the same time and use different models for different communication programs (such as media relations, community relations, or marketing communication.) In the Excellence study, we identified four dimensions that lie beneath the models: symmetrical vs. asymmetrical, one way vs. two-way, mediated vs. interpersonal, and ethical vs. unethical.
For example, the press agentry model is asymmetrical, one-way, mediated, and unethical. Ideal public relations behavior, therefore, is two-way, symmetrical, either mediated or interpersonal, and ethical. These four dimensions, therefore, provide better descriptions of how public relations is practiced and of a normative ideal practice than the four models alone. However, although simple, the four models are still useful to explain public relations to students, organizational leaders who choose a type of PR practice, journalists, and people in general who don’t understand public relations. In addition, I don’t believe the current digital environment has reduced the explanatory power of the models or their underlying dimensions. Instead, digital methods have simply provided new ways of implementing the models.
Two-Way Symmetrical Communication
The two-way symmetrical model is often described as the ideal form of public relations. Yet, in practice, many organizations continue to rely on one-way communication strategies. Do you see symmetrical communication as a realistically achievable model, or primarily as a normative ideal?
The four models of public relations, and the underlying dimensions I just described, have proven to be good descriptions of the different ways that public relations is practiced by different kinds of organizations. Such theoretical descriptions of public relations practice are variables in what is called a positive (or descriptive) theory. The two-way symmetrical model is a positive theory, and it was found to be practiced in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in the Excellence study. Other researchers have found that the model is practiced in many other countries, although it is not used everywhere.
The symmetrical model also is a normative theoretical concept. Many critics of the model seem to misunderstand the nature of a normative theory. They seem to believe that a normative concept only exists as an ideal and not as a reality. However, a theory would not be a good normative theory if it could not be found in real life. A normative theory must exist in real life and do what it is theoretically supposed to do, such as improve relationships between organizations and publics. I believe symmetrical theory meets this standard and that our research has identified organizations that practice it. As a result, it provides a benchmark for effective and ethical public relations.
At the same time, we know that it is difficult to practice the symmetrical model in some organizations, countries, and cultures. Organizations that believe public relations is a way to dominate their publics aren’t interested in symmetrical communication. Many organizational executives have never heard of public relations being practiced in that way. Public relations practitioners who come from other disciplines such as marketing, advertising, or journalism practice what they know. Marketing and advertising people usually practice the press agentry or two-way asymmetrical models. Journalists typically practice the public information model. Many practitioners, also, cannot practice the symmetrical model because they lack the knowledge or experience to do so.
The question, therefore, is whether all the different ways of understanding, practicing, and teaching public relations are equally good. Would we recommend them to organizational executives or clients or teach them to students: Is every model or every dimension of the models an ideal or normative model? My answer is no. I recommend and teach the two-way symmetrical model. I think it produces relationships that have greater value for publics, organizations, and society. Nevertheless, I know that the model is more difficult to practice in some cultures and political and economic systems than in others. If the model can’t be practiced, I believe the problem is with the culture and political and economic system—not with the public relations profession. In some systems, public relations strives to keep the powerful in power, and it deserves all the criticism it typically receives. However, I believe there is a gradual way to get around this problem. If we as scholars and practitioners can subtly introduce the symmetrical model in practice, it might gradually change the system in which it is practiced. That is not easy, but I could not practice public relations in any other way regardless of the situation in which I work.
Excellence Theory
Excellence Theory positioned public relations as a strategic management function within organizations. Today, do you believe communication professionals are truly integrated into organizational decision-making processes?
As this question states, the major finding of the Excellence study was that participation in the strategic management of an organization was the most important characteristic of excellent public relations. It was even more important than the symmetrical model. Excellent public relations departments were most likely to practice that model, but they also practiced one or more of the other models. Most commonly they practiced both the two-way symmetrical and two-way asymmetrical models. The common element of those models is two-way communication, and the best way to practice two-way communication is to conduct research as a form of organizational listening. In subsequent research, four colleagues and I found that conducting or using research was the major indicator of public relations’ participation in strategic management.2 If a public relations department does not use research, it seldom has anything to contribute to strategic management and is generally not integrated into organizational decision-making processes.
The other reason many practitioners are not included is because of what I call institutionalization. This means that traditions, beliefs, and customs reinforce the idea that public relations is a one-way, asymmetrical, and unethical practice used to reinforce the interests of the powerful. Institutionalization occurs among organizational executives, clients of PR firms, journalists, PR practitioners themselves, and people in general. It is extremely difficult to break free from an institutionalized set of ideas; and, as a result, public relations often continues to be practiced as it always has been. I have done everything I can to break out of this institutionalized means of practicing public relations, and I have encouraged other scholars and professionals to do the same.
The answer to this question, then, is yes and no. Research on and observation of public relations people have identified examples of practitioners in many countries who are integrated into strategic management. Integration is most common in multinational corporations, but it also can be found in small organizations that are less institutionalized and where public relations can be changed more easily. Most practitioners, however, still are not part of strategic management; and much work is needed to change the practice to make it possible for them to be included.
Public Relations and Democratic Society
Your work frequently highlights the constructive role that public relations can play in democratic societies. However, critics often associate public relations with manipulation. To what extent do you think these criticisms are justified?
As I said in response to your previous questions, many, if not most, public relations practitioners and their client organizations still believe that public relations is a way to manipulate the media, government, employees, customers, stockholders, and other stakeholders to think and behave as the organization wants. This manipulation wouldn’t be so bad if these practitioners truly understood and had the interests of publics in mind. A good example is health communication, where communicators with good intentions try to persuade their publics to engage in healthy behaviors. Often, however, health communicators don’t understand why publics engage in seemingly unhealthy behaviors; and their messages are ignored. If they researched—listened to—their publics before preparing messages, these communicators generally would be more effective. Unfortunately, communicators and their clients typically believe that an organization’s interests are the same as public interests. Sometimes they are right; more often they are wrong.
I recently wrote an essay on the role of public relations in facilitating social inclusion in a democratic society.3 At this point in my life, social inclusion seems to be the thread that has run through my work, beginning with my research on ways to include Colombian peasant farmers in the decision making of the organizations with which they need relationships and with society in general. Publics typically have different identities, as defined, for example, by race, wealth, poverty, sexual orientation, location, culture, occupation, gender, education, or political philosophy. Organizations typically include the problems of some of these publics in their strategic decision making and exclude others. Publics that are excluded, however, often have problems they would like organizations to help solve. Others encounter problems created by the consequences of organizational decisions. Public relations, I believe, can provide a means of organizational listening that includes these otherwise socially excluded publics. To serve as a means of social inclusion, however, public relations usually must be practiced as a strategic, symmetrical, research-based profession—i.e., following the principles of the Excellence theories.
Digital Platforms and Symmetrical Communication
Digital platforms and social media theoretically enable more interactive communication between organizations and their publics. Do you think these developments have strengthened the model of symmetrical communication, or have they produced new forms of asymmetrical communication?
When digital platforms for communication were first introduced, I was optimistic that they would encourage symmetrical communication and make organization-centric asymmetrical communication difficult. Public relations practitioners once believed that they could control the information going to their publics. However, now that many sources of information are available on the internet and social media, it is almost impossible to control the information going to publics. Search engines, and now artificial intelligence, make it easy for actively communicating members of publics to get information about organizations—their decisions, behaviors, products, ethics, social responsibility, and competitors. At the same time, these platforms make it easy for organizations to research and listen to their publics, understand their problems, and give them a voice in strategic decision making. Thus, symmetrical communication should have become institutionalized by now.
However, a new phenomenon has emerged that I called de facto social exclusion in the article I described in my last answer. Individuals, organizations, and publics typically communicate with others who share the same identities and problems and exclude themselves from communicating with those who are different. De facto social exclusion has been encouraged by narrow-minded media and digital platforms. It also makes people susceptible to misinformation. The phenomenon is particularly evident in political communication in the United States, in which organizations and publics have organized themselves into warring ideological factions. Therefore, I believe you are correct in suggesting that digital platforms have encouraged new forms of asymmetrical communication.
I don’t yet have a firm solution to this problem of de facto social exclusion. I believe the eventual solution will be to educate young people about different forms of thinking and communicating so that they don’t fall into the trap of close-mindedness and confirmation bias when they communicate with others. Cognitive scientists and communication scientists know a lot about these processes, and we need to teach people about them at early ages. It’s also important to include these theories in the education of public relations professionals.
Algorithms and Organizational Communication
Communication environments today are increasingly shaped by algorithms. How do you think algorithmic media environments are transforming the relationship between organizations and their publics?
On the one hand, algorithms can be helpful to both organizations and publics by channeling relevant information to and from publics and minimizing the onslaught of irrelevant information that most of us typically receive in traditional and digital media. Identifying what information is relevant to information seekers has been the primary focus of my situational theory of publics, and that theory is relevant to this question. The theory explains that people are most likely to actively seek or passively acquire information that is relevant to problems they recognize, that involve them, and that they can do something about. I call these variables problem recognition, involvement recognition, and constraint recognition. These variables explain when, why, and about what people communicate.4 In doing so, they explain what information members of publics are most likely to use. Algorithms can filter such relevant information from irrelevant information—thus increasing the probability of successful messaging. The same principles can be used to explain the information coming from publics that public relations practitioners are likely to pay attention to.
However, both active and passive communication behaviors can lead to de facto social inclusion. The result is a dilemma: How can publics and organizations seek information from each other that is relevant to problems they face without falling into the trap of de facto exclusion of sources with different identities and solutions to problems? Algorithms can filter information into categories that either include others or exclude them. Algorithms derived from our previous communication behaviors, therefore, could be inclusive or exclusive. A solution to this dilemma is to expand our communication behaviors to include relevant information from sources we might usually avoid—thus expanding the algorithm and eventually organization-public relationships.
Ethics and Public Responsibility in Public Relations
There is often a tension between organizational interests and the broader public interest. In your view, how should public relations professionals navigate this balance?
Public relations scholars and professionals have debated whether the public relationsfunction should be the ethical conscience of an organization or of organized publics. Critics of the profession, however, believe that public relations is inherently unethical and could never serve this role. Those of us who have an expansive view of public relations believe its role should include monitoring and supporting ethics and public responsibility in strategic management. The question, therefore, is what is required for public relations people to serve in this role. I have addressed this question in detail in another article.5
In that article, I described seven ethical problems that public relations people typically encounter. These included personal ethical decisions; relationships with clients and other practitioners; loyalty to organizations, publics, and society; choice of a client or organization; advocate and counselor roles; secrecy and openness; and digital media.
In that article, I also constructed a theory of public relations ethics and social responsibility. I believe that public relations professionals need a theory of ethics before they can advise others on what behaviors are ethical or unethical. Ethical scholars have developed two types of theories: consequentialist (teleological or utilitarian) and rules-based (deontological). A consequentialist theory maintains that the morality of a decision or behavior depends on the consequences it has on others, such as whether an organization’s behavior has positive or negative consequences on its publics. The same theory would apply to the consequences that a public has on an organization or requests from that organization. Consequentialist ethics becomes complicated, however, when a decision or behavior has positive consequences for the organization but not its publics, or vice versa. Or, when the decision or behavior has positive consequences for some publics but not others or for society at large. This is why the term utilitarian also is used for the consequentialist approach. The proposed solution is “the greatest good for the greater number.” With that rule, however, some participants generally experience positive consequences and others negative consequences. As a result, minorities usually are disadvantaged.
Rules-based or deontological ethicists, on the other hand, solve this problem by proposing moral rules for judging the ethics of a decision or behavior. Shannon Bowen, of the University of South Carolina, developed such a set of rules for public relations in her doctoral dissertation at the University of Maryland, and I recommend reading her research. She developed these rules mostly from the work of Immanuel Kant. Her dissertation and several other articles on ethics can be found on the research website ResearchGate.net (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shannon-Bowen), including an article on the ethics of artificial intelligence.
Two rules that I think are especially important for public relations are disclosure and symmetrical communication. With these rules, I have constructed an uncomplicated ethical theory for public relations that contains both consequences and rules:
Teleology: Ethical public relations professionals should monitor the consequences that potential organizational decisions or behaviors might have on publics.
Deontology: Ethical public relations professionals then have the moral obligation to disclose these consequences to publics that are affected and to engage in symmetrical communication with them about resolving the consequences.
The same rule applies to publics, such as activist groups, that request or even demand consequences from organizations and to organizations that affect each other, such as governments and corporations. In addition, the disclosure rule can be used to make asymmetrical communication activities morally acceptable. That is, the rule states that organizations using asymmetrical communication methods have the moral obligation to disclose the source of their communications. This rule, for example, would rule out such activities as forming front groups with fake name, news releases that don’t disclose the source of the alleged “news story,” or activist groups that don’t reveal their funding sources.
I also believe that the concept of consequences helps to understand the nature of social or public responsibility. Socially responsible organizations should attempt to eliminate or manage the negative consequences of their behaviors on publics, such as pollution, discrimination, or overpricing of products. In addition, publics or other organizations, such as regulators, that request consequences from organizations need to acknowledge and manage those consequences. When consequences conflict, these different groups again have the moral obligation to engage in symmetrical communication to acknowledge the competing consequences and attempt to negotiate their differences.
Organizations can also judge the value of proactive social responsibility programs, such as charitable contributions, sponsorships, or special events, by assessing the potential positive consequences of these programs on publics with which they have a relationship or need to have a relationship—rather than developing such programs only for publicity or “image making.”
The Future of Public Relations Education
Public relations education has expanded significantly around the world. Yet there are ongoing debates about the gap between academic education and professional practice. Do you believe such a gap still exists today?
Ideally, education for professional public relations should work like education in other professions, such as medicine. The most important contribution of educators is research. They develop theories to improve practice and then do research to determine if these theories have worked or could work in practice. They consult with practitioners to learn about problems they experience that research could help to solve and advise them on new approaches suggested by research. The research is published in academic journals for peer review. The theories and examples of the theories being used in practice then form the substance taught in university classrooms and for continuing education of practitioners through professional organizations, short courses, and occasional lectures. In the Excellence study, for example, we learned that excellent public relations practitioners have relevant knowledge gained in one of four ways: undergraduate or graduate education in public relations, continuing education, reading academic and professional journals, and consulting with academics or other practitioners with similar advanced knowledge.
This approach to professional education is becoming more common in public relations, but it is not found universally. There are several reasons. Academics often conduct research that has little relevance to practice, and professionals ignore it. Many practitioners have little formal knowledge of public relations, make little attempt to gain it, and badmouth it to others. Other practitioners learn outmoded ideas from each other and pass them on to client organizations. That explains why the press agentry model, which is the least effective and ethical, is still probably the model most practiced around the world. For these reasons, there often is a gap between academic education and professional practice. I have seen notable progress in my 65 years of public relations practice and education. Nevertheless, we still have work to do.
The Future of Public Relations
Finally, in an era marked by rapid technological transformation, how do you envision the future of public relations? Which research areas should the next generation of scholars focus on?
I think there is little question that digital and social media along with artificial intelligence will dominate the future of public relations. Scholars already are devoting a great deal of attention to these new forms of communication. At the same time, I don’t think these new technologies make our best current public relations theories outmoded.
Unfortunately, these technologies can be used for ineffective and unethical public relations, just like old technologies. They also can be used to implement theories such as the Excellence theory. I have become excited about artificial intelligence, for example, just from my personal use. It is a wonderful way to explore several sources to learn what publics are experiencing and the problems they face. Thus, AI can be used for research. It also can be used to monitor the ethics and social responsibility of organizations. At the same time, we have seen that the new technologies can be used for similar purposes as old technologies were used in ineffective, unethical, and irresponsible public relations practice. Therefore, we need ethics scholars and critical scholars to continue to shine light on these practices.
I hope that research will continue to be done to learn how to implement the strategic, symmetrical, and ethical principles of Excellence theory in different settings around the world. At the same time, theories should never be static and should grow and be improved by continuing research. For example, my colleagues and I proposed several years ago that the Excellence principles are generic principles that can be used in different cultures and political and economic systems, if they are adapted to specific conditions in different settings. We call this theory generic principles and specific applications. I have seen a great deal of research in different countries that has done just that. The same is true for other theories such as principles of crisis communication, ethics, and dialogue. I urge scholars not to throw out older theories just so they can contribute something new. I believe we should merge the old and the new so that the profession grows and scholars avoid reinventing the wheel.
Interview Series: Media Arts, Visual Communication Design, and Technologies | Interviewer: Gökhan Çolak
Esen Kunt | Istanbul Nişantaşı University Faculty Member and Author; Founder and Creative Director of Istanbul Deleuze Studies.
Image, Thought, and Film Theory
How do your studies, which center on the relationship between image and thought, establish a theoretical affinity with Gilles Deleuze’s theories of cinema and the image? Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze remains a central reference in film studies. In your view, how should this concept be rethought in the face of digital and post-cinematic images?
I conceive the relationship between image and thought not as a hierarchical link between an image that represents and a consciousness that reads it, but as two thresholds that mutually produce and transform one another. For this reason, the image is not, for me, the visual counterpart or illustration of thought; rather, it is a surface upon which thinking itself takes place—an evental field.
This approach, of course, establishes a direct connection with Deleuze’s texts—particularly Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. However, this connection is not so much a mode of reading that applies Deleuze’s concepts as it is a relationship that folds the possibilities of thought he opened toward other directions. Deleuze’s treatment of the image not as a mental representation but as a force operating through the body, space, and time constitutes one of the fundamental thresholds of my work.
I often approach the relationship between image and thought on a cartographic plane. In other words, the image is not an object that carries a fixed meaning; rather, it is a practice of mapping that traverses memory, the body, geography, and time. Deleuze’s notion of the ‘brain-screen’ marks a critical turning point for me: thought is no longer an internal representation but becomes an event that occurs outside—on the surface, on the screen. At this point, the image is no longer a vehicle for thought; it becomes thought itself.
In my own work, I develop this approach particularly through rhizomatic memory, cartographic imagination, and bodily surfaces. I treat the image not as a record that represents the past, but as a passage—continually rewritten—that opens between past and present. This intersects with Deleuze’s understanding of the time-image: a nonlinear, branching, and layered conception of time. For me, however, this temporality is not only cinematic; it is also geological, bodily, and spatial.
For this reason, I interpret the relationship between image and thought less through ‘meaning production’ than through relations of force. What interests me about an image is not what it shows, but what it sets into vibration—which layers of memory, which bodily sensations, and which spatial associations it activates. This orientation leads me not so much to read the image as to think with it, even to observe the image in the act of thinking.
In short, Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema and the image functions in my work less as a reference point than as a threshold for thinking. My effort to remove the image from the domain of representation and approach it instead as a shared surface of thought, memory, and the body establishes a line that both converses with Deleuze and opens toward other directions. I sustain this line as a field of production that moves between text, image, map, and body—fluid, unsettled, and resistant to fixation.
Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze remains powerful because it makes unmistakably clear that the gaze is never innocent—that seeing is always bound up with power, desire, and the body. However, in my view, this concept is no longer sufficient on its own in the face of digital and post-cinematic images. The issue today is not merely who is looking, but where the gaze is constructed, how it circulates, and the extent to which it no longer belongs to any single subject.
In classical cinema, the gaze was largely fixed within a single perspective—anchored in the position of the camera and at the center of the narrative. In digital and post-cinematic images, however, the gaze loses its center. What we now encounter is not merely the gaze of a male subject, but dispersed, fragmented, and plural regimes of vision produced by algorithms, interfaces, platforms, and data flows. For this reason, I believe it is necessary today to rethink the male gaze not as belonging to a stable subject, but as a visual apparatus.
At this point, Deleuze’s understanding of the image becomes decisive for me. The image is no longer an object viewed by a subject; rather, it is a field of force that affects the body, time, and space. In post-cinematic images, the gaze spreads beyond the eye to encompass the entire body—manifesting in scrolling movements, tactile gestures, and repetitive viewing loops. The gaze is no longer purely visual; it transforms into a haptic, temporal, and embodied experience.
For this reason, it seems more meaningful to me today to read the male gaze not merely as a ‘male’ gaze, but as normative modes of looking. Although this normativity may appear independent of gender in digital images, it establishes a regime that re-disciples the body through speed, exposure, transparency, and constant visibility. In other words, the gaze does not disappear; it changes form.
In my work, what interests me about this transformation is not so much reversing the gaze as dispersing it. I engage with images that disrupt the camera’s dominant position, refuse to fix the gaze, and do not place the viewer in a position of comfort. This is less a feminist counter-gaze than a strategy that destabilizes the gaze itself. Here, the image does not satisfy desire; it suspends it, delays it, and leads it astray.
In this sense, post-cinematic images do not invalidate the male gaze; rather, they multiply it, branch it out, and render it less visible. We are no longer speaking of the dominance of a single gaze, but of gazes that intersect, collide, and at times become subjectless. This invites us to ask not so much who wields the gaze, but what the gaze does. For me today, the central issue is this: an image concerns not only whom it belongs to, but also whom it touches. And perhaps the most political question now is not how these images compel us to look, but how they compel us to feel.
Visual Culture and the Agency of the Image
Within the context of W. J. T. Mitchell’s question ‘What do pictures want?’, what does it mean for you to approach visual culture not merely at the level of representation, but as an active and thinking field? How does Hans Belting’s anthropological approach to the image offer a theoretical framework for understanding the historical and cultural circulation of images in your work?
For me, W. J. T. Mitchell’s question ‘What do pictures want?’ became a threshold that radically transformed the direction of how I understand images. This question invites us to move beyond seeing the image as a passive representation and instead to think of it as if it were a subject endowed with desire, demand, and agency. What matters here is not whether images literally ‘want’ anything, but how we come to recognize them as a field of activity.
I approach visual culture not as a display window through which meanings are presented, but as a field in which thought, memory, and the body are set into motion. The image does not merely show something; it calls, compels, unsettles, and delays. Mitchell’s question shifts the focus from ‘What does the image say?’ to ‘What does the image do?’ This is a crucial displacement in my work, because here the image is no longer a representation—it is an event.
At this point, Hans Belting’s anthropological approach to the image provides a complementary theoretical ground for my work. Belting treats the image neither solely as a mental representation nor merely as a material object; rather, he conceptualizes it as an entity that circulates between body, environment, and media. While this approach explains the historical and cultural continuity of images, it also takes into account how they are experienced in embodied ways.My concept of Pellicule Corporalis comes into direct contact with Belting’s line of thought. Here, the body is not the carrier of the image; it is the surface upon which the image takes place. The image inscribes itself onto the body, resonates within it, and is deferred through it. When it comes to cinematic or post-cinematic images, the image no longer resides solely on the screen; it circulates across the skin, within the folds of memory, and along sensory thresholds.
While Belting’s image anthropology demonstrates how images historically change hands and migrate, my interest concentrates on the traces this migration leaves on the body. As images circulate across cultures, they do not merely change form; they also transform regimes of embodied perception. For this reason, visual culture is, for me, not only a domain in which images proliferate, but an ecology in which bodies are recalibrated.
When I think Mitchell and Belting together, the image is no longer a silent object nor merely a text to be read. It becomes an entity that demands, circulates, relocates, and compels us to shift our own positions. In my work, the relationship established with the image aims less at decoding it than at thinking alongside it. Because, to my mind, the image wants this:
Not to be looked at, but to be responded to.
Not to be understood, but to be sustained within the body. And perhaps most of all, to be displaced.
Performativity, Text, and the Body
With the work of Judith Butler in particular, debates on performativity have redefined the relationship between text and body. How do you position performative literary texts within this theoretical framework?
Judith Butler’s notion of performativity fundamentally transformed the relationship between text and body, because it demonstrated that language does not merely represent—it acts. What is spoken, written, and repeated comes to constitute the body, revealing identity, gender, and subjectivity not as outcomes but as processes. This marked a critical threshold for me: the text is no longer about the body; it happens within the body.
I position performative literary texts within the framework opened by Butler, yet by extending it further. I conceive of the text not as a vehicle of expression, but as a bodily event. Writing here is not a structure that carries meaning; it is a sequence of actions that leaves traces on the body, generates rhythm, and organizes breath and time. The reader, in turn, is no longer simply one who ‘reads’ the text, but becomes a body that shifts position along with it.The concept of rhizomatic memory carries this performativity onto a non-linear plane. A performative text is not a structure with a single beginning or end; it is a multi-centered network that connects different temporalities, voices, and bodily sensations. As the text is repeated, it does not become fixed; with each reading, it activates another layer of embodied memory. In this sense, the performative text operates within a regime of repetition, as Butler suggests—but this repetition produces less the reproduction of the norm than a deviation that sets the norm into vibration.
The concept of Pellicule Corporalis defines the surface of the text here. The body is not the carrier of the text; it is the pellicle upon which the text is inscribed. Words come into contact with the skin, spread through the voice, and are cut by the breath. The performative literary text does not exist to be read, but to take place within the body. For this reason, such texts often do not feel complete; they remain open, fragile, and inclined toward incompletion—because the body itself is never a closed whole.
For me, performative literature releases language from representation and places it within a bodily temporality. The text here is not a repository of meaning, but an instruction for movement, a call to gesture, a sensory threshold. The reader does not decode the text; rather, they pause with it, walk with it, wait, and hesitate. In this way, literature ceases to be a silent domain and becomes an encounter between bodies.
In this context, the performative text is also politically significant. Every text written upon the body is simultaneously negotiating with regimes of power, normativity, and visibility. My interest is drawn not to forms that stabilize the body, but to those that displace it—disturbing its comfort and disrupting its rhythm. This constitutes a writing practice that reverses the normative repetitions of Butlerian performativity and opens lines of flight.
Ultimately, for me, the performative literary text is neither merely a literary genre nor simply a theoretical application. It is a form of writing that thinks together with the body.
“The text does the following here: It does not narrate. It touches.
It does not define. It sets into vibration. It does not represent. It happens.
And perhaps most importantly: It remains in the memory of the body.”
Space, Visual Culture, and Poetic Cartography
Considering figures such as Edward Soja and Henri Lefebvre, who think visual culture together with space, how does your approach of ‘poetic cartography’ relate to this body of literature? In your work The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus, you address space as intertwined with narrative and thought. Is it possible to read this approach alongside Michel de Certeau’s understanding of space and everyday practices?
“To think space together with visual culture does not, for me, mean treating it as a measurable or representable surface. On the contrary, I conceive of space as a process woven through time, memory, and embodied experience. In this respect, Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space and Edward Soja’s concept of Thirdspace mark important thresholds for me, as they demonstrate that space is neither merely a physical nor a mental category, but a domain that is lived, felt, and continuously reconstituted.
However, my approach of poetic cartography establishes less a relation of full alignment with this literature than one of deviation. While Soja and Lefebvre open space through social relations and structures of power, I approach space also as a sensory, fragile, and tacit entity. Poetic cartography is not a map that explains space; it is a practice of drawing that renders perceptible the inner rhythms, gaps, and interruptions of space. The map here is not an outcome. The map is the movement of thought. The line does not impose a boundary; it carries vibration.The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus emerged precisely as a result of this approach. I did not treat the Bosphorus as a historical or geographical object, but as a layered memory—an embodied, geological, political, and affective entity. Space here is not the backdrop of the narrative; it is the narrative itself. Stone, water, current, and silence shape the language of the text.
This approach can certainly be expanded—without confining it—by extending the discussion to Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion and reading it alongside Michel de Certeau’s understanding of space and everyday practices; indeed, such a reading generates a productive tension. De Certeau’s idea of ‘writing space through walking’ intersects, for me, with the notion of space as a surface of bodily inscription. Yet I do not regard this walking as solely a human-centered practice. In The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus, it is not only the body that walks; geological time, currents, sediments, and suppressed memories walk as well.
While de Certeau demonstrates how space is appropriated through everyday practices, my interest lies in how space resists, how it remains tacit, how it never fully discloses itself. Poetic cartography is a practice that respects this reticence. It does not attempt to render everything visible; rather, it deliberately leaves certain gaps and silences outside the map. For this reason, my maps are never complete—because space itself is never complete.
Poetic cartography is not an aesthetic that represents space within visual culture; it is a mode of writing that thinks alongside space. Here, space is not read; it is listened to. It is not merely seen; it is excavated. The map does not orient; it disorients.
And perhaps most importantly, it proposes this:
“Space is not a surface that belongs to us;it is a memory through which we pass.“
The Digital Image, Circulation and the Archive
In the context of the circulation of digital images, Hito Steyerl’s concept of the ‘poor image’ makes visible not only the loss of resolution, but also the historical and spatial layers of images. Within your approach of poetic cartography, what kind of intellectual and aesthetic possibility does this ‘impoverished yet dense’ state of the image offer?
Hito Steyerl’s concept of the ‘poor image’ is highly significant for me because it demonstrates that digital images are not merely copies degraded by a loss of resolution; rather, they are entities that intensify, accelerate, and leave traces through circulation. As the poor image loses visual quality, it gains historical and spatial weight. In a sense, the more the image relinquishes resolution, the closer it moves toward memory.
In my approach of poetic cartography, this ‘impoverished yet dense’ image is not an object to be represented, but a line of circulation to be mapped. The image’s loss of pixels is not, for me, a deficiency; it is the way layered time rises to the surface. Low resolution strips the image of smoothness, producing cracks, gaps, and delays. It is precisely within these fissures that the image begins to think.
A sentence I frequently return to from The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus in this context is this:
“Blur is sometimes not the absence of vision, but the density of memory.”
Steyerl’s poor image operates in my poetic cartography as a trace in displacement. The image does not belong to a fixed location; it circulates between screens, loses context, and reconnects. This circulation renders the image less archivable and more experiential. The map here is not a collection, but a network of passages.
When considering questions of the archive, memory, and layered temporality in visual culture, at which points does Georges Didi-Huberman’s approach to the image intersect with your work?
At this point, a strong intersection emerges with Georges Didi-Huberman’s understanding of the image. Didi-Huberman never conceives of the image as a completed whole; for him, the image is a remnant, a shell, a burn mark. It does not represent the past; it carries the wound that the past continues to open in the present. This approach directly resonates with my conception of rhizomatic memory.
Following what glimmers in the dark—what remains unsaid, what is unseen—has profoundly shaped my methodologies of writing and thinking with both passion and insistence. I am, moreover, an ardent and even obsessive reader of Didi-Huberman’s texts—devoted enough to follow the trail of the fireflies.
Didi-Huberman’s relationship with the archive is particularly decisive for me: the archive is not a sealed repository of memory, but a structure that continually reopens, leaks, and remains incomplete. Poetic cartography is concerned precisely with this leakage. The image does not freeze within the archive; on the contrary, it displaces the archive.
In this context, Pellicule Corporalis offers a critical threshold for thinking about the embodied dimension of the digital image. The poor image is not merely a file circulating across screens; it is a vibration that resonates within the body. The condition of ‘survival’ that Didi-Huberman seeks in the image acquires here a form of embodied continuity. The image may lose resolution, yet it does not lose its bodily impact. As I often emphasize in my texts and visual works:
“The more the image becomes impoverished,the closer it moves to the body.“
For this reason, the circulation of digital images is not, for me, a story of loss, but a geography of intensified memory. Steyerl’s poor image and Didi-Huberman’s residual image converge in poetic cartography: both read the image not through lack, but through its capacity to survive. Ultimately, in my work, the digital image is not data to be archived, but a layered sediment of time. It is not mapped; it is traced.
It does not represent; it wounds. And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us of this:
“Even in its poorest state, the image continues to think.“
Theoretical Communities and Interdisciplinarity
How do the discussions carried out under the umbrella of Istanbul Deleuze Studies provide a theoretical opening for visual culture, cinema, and philosophy studies in Türkiye?Rosi Braidotti approaches interdisciplinarity as a mode of thinking that transcends anthropocentric regimes of knowledge while carrying ethical and aesthetic dimensions. In your work—particularly in The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus—which brings academic production into dialogue with creative writing, mapping, and aesthetic experience, what kind of intellectual and productive positioning does this posthumanist interdisciplinarity represent for you?
The most significant contribution of the discussions conducted under the umbrella of Istanbul Deleuze Studies to visual culture, cinema, and philosophy in Türkiye lies in approaching Deleuze not as a ‘theoretical authority,’ but as a practice of thinking. Here, Deleuze does not offer a closed system of concepts; rather, he creates an open intellectual field that circulates across disciplines, branches outward, and comes into contact with local experiences. Such a theoretical community functions by decentering theory. As cinema, visual culture, architecture, literature, and philosophy become articulated with one another under this framework, concepts lose their fixed meanings; they shift, relocate, and become re-embodied. In a city like Istanbul—dense with historical, political, and geological layers—discussing Deleuzian thought in this way prevents concepts from remaining abstract, bringing them instead into contact with space, the body, and everyday experience.
For me, the primary space opened by Istanbul Deleuze Studies lies in transforming theory from an individual domain of expertise into a collective ground for thinking. Within this terrain, theory is used not to explain, but to think together, to deviate, and to take risks. This, in turn, offers visual culture and film studies in Türkiye a perspective oriented toward becoming, process, and force—one that moves beyond representation-centered readings. Additionally, there is a long-developed project of mine—emerging from my postdoctoral research, which will begin operating interdisciplinarily in 2026. Let us simply say that it is a multilayered initiative through which we will establish significant entanglements among architecture, contemporary art, visual culture, literature, performance arts, and, of course, philosophy—very soon.
At this point, Rosi Braidotti’s understanding of interdisciplinarity as a posthumanist ethical and aesthetic practice provides a highly formative framework for my own work. Braidotti conceives interdisciplinarity not merely as a passage between methods, but as a positioning that transcends anthropocentric regimes of knowledge. The issue, then, is not simply to place different disciplines side by side; it is to rethink, together, the subject who produces knowledge, the body, and the world.
The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus can be read as a work in which this posthumanist interdisciplinarity becomes concrete. In the text, the human is not the center of the narrative. Geological layers, currents, stone, sediment, and silence become active components of thought. Writing here is not a human story, but a field of encounter with nonhuman forces. This approach, as Braidotti suggests, renders thought not only a critical practice, but also an ethically responsible one.
When I think of academic production as intertwined with creative writing, mapping, and aesthetic experience, interdisciplinarity becomes for me not a method, but a mode of existence. Text, map, and image do not explain one another; they displace one another. This disrupts the linear progression of knowledge. In The Tacit Geologies of the Bosphorus, the map does not represent geography; it thinks alongside writing. Writing does not explain; it excavates.
In this context, posthumanist interdisciplinarity signifies, for me, the redistribution of thought—no longer as an activity belonging solely to the human mind, but as something dispersed among bodies, materials, spaces, and images. This distribution is as much an aesthetic gesture as it is an ethical choice. For a mode of thought that does not place the human at the center is also one that is more attentive, slower, and more responsible.
Ultimately, theoretical communities such as Istanbul Deleuze Studies and Braidotti’s posthumanist interdisciplinarity converge in a shared space within my work: theory here is not a closed domain of knowledge, but a common ground opened by thinking, writing, and mapping together.
And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us of this:
“Thought is never produced alone. It gathers, circulates, and transforms— toward what shimmers in the dark.“
I would also like to thank you for these thoughtful and evocative questions; it is truly valuable for us, as a journal, to be part of this collective project. I extend my gratitude to the entire team for their meticulous and dedicated work.
Interview Series: Surveillance Capitalism, Public Sphere, and Digital Regimes | Interviewer: Gokhan Colak
Influencer Culture, Creative Labor, Authenticity
Alice Marwick’s conceptualizations of micro-celebrity and self-branding examine howauthenticity is produced within influencer culture. In your research on influencers, creative labor, and particularly the representation of marginalized identities, at what points do you observe this discourse of “authenticity” becoming empowering, and at what points does it turn into an exploitative mechanism?
For marginalized creators, authenticity is a double-edged sword. In both my research and professional experience as a content creator, authenticity is a contentious strategy. You need to simultaneously prove authenticity while also accept that you’re going to be scrutinized by a platform’s algorithmic recommendation system and audiences alike. This becomes complicated when your identity becomes a brand.
How do you convey “realness”when working and speaking with audiences that may be conditioned to devalue or distrust you? And how do you “keep it real” while simultaneously working to build your platform? As a disabled content creator, I encountered this all the time: DMs asking me to “prove” my disability. I would often finding mutual creators on the subreddit pager/IllnessFakers, where 200,000 members hope to expose disabled and chronically ill creators for “faking it” because they were showing their disability too much.
In this case, authenticity became damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Sure, social media and content creation platforms are spaces where disabled and other marginalized creators can communicate and work, but it doesn’t mean that we still don’t encounter ableist ideas about who gets to do the work and whose work is valued. Authenticity is complicated, and for many creators, it’s more of an “idea” than a reality.
Digital Activism, Platforms, Sustainability
Zeynep Tufekci argues that while activism in the digital age has gained speed, it often lacksorganizational depth. In your analyses of micro-activism shaped through disability, bodypolitics, and everyday experiences on platforms such as TikTok, how do you evaluate the capacity of this form of visibility to generate long-term political transformation?
In the first big wave of social media and content creation platforms (late 2000s, 2010s), Internet spaces were hubs for marginalized communities to challenge mainstream narratives about political existence and current events. (Definitely not just something unique to disability communites!) Twitter, especially, was an important tool for various disability communities.
Hashtags served as indexing tools to link different conversations together. Movements like #CripTheVote, #PowerToLive, and #DisabilityTooWhite catalyzed important conversations about ableism, racism, and political power. It also brought other people into the conversation. The hashtags weren’t gatekept behind closed doors. While these hashtag movements weren’t always “big,” they also brought attention to every day experiences about disability and political change.
However, the enshittification of Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform in 2022 really dissolved disability communities and organizing on the platform. In this case, micro-activism becomes a verybprecarious circumstance and isn’t always possible when the platform removes protections for hate speech or is filled with spam bots. This doesn’t mean people aren’t organizing on other platforms, like Bluesky or TikTok, but the centralized hub of advocacy isn’t the same.
Affective Publics, Emotional Labor, Public Sphere
Zizi Papacharissi’s concept of affective publics suggests that the digital public sphere is constituted through emotions. In your work on TikTok narratives, personal storytelling, and the visibility of marginalized bodies, how do you define the boundary between the solidarity- producing potential of emotional publics and the instrumentalization of emotional labor?
For many disabled creators, the personal truly is political and embodied. Digitally mediated work like content creation, influencing, and livestreaming aren’t just about obtaining social, economic, and cultural capital for disabled creators who monetize their labor. There’s also an embodied, emotional feeling to this work. In my research and personal experience as a disabled creator who made disability-centric content, emotional appeals and advocacy become central to creative work. That boundary is often murky and messy. This can differentiate based on the type of creative labor you engage with, but the instrumentalization of emotional labor can contribute to some of the authenticity negotiation problems I spoke about in a previous response. Yes, disability advocacy and self-branding can help build awareness and support creators from an economic standpoint, but at what cost?
Public Relations, Ethics, Public Interest
Grunig’s normative theory of public relations proposes an ethical model of communicationbased on dialogue and reciprocity. From your perspective at the intersection of critical PR andactivism, particularly within a platform-based visibility economy, to what extent do youbelieve such symmetrical and ethical communication models are feasible in practice?
I’m thinking about these very questions in some new projects about what authenticity means in creator culture now that GenAI tools are pervasive in platform economies. For instance, in one forthcoming book chapter I’m working on, I examine the labor of human influencers who promote GenAI Technologies through false storylines and personae. This is becomign increasingly common on platforms that prioritize short-form content and e- commerce, such as TikTok and Instagram.
One such creator went viral in late 2025 for claiming her Ph.D. advisor stole her research. But when other creators looked into it, there were many inconsistencies between what she was telling audiences. What her content showed. The creator claimed she was a sociology phd student, but there was no concrete evidence that she was even enrolled as a university student, and all of her videos featured the same GenAI product. Like consumers in the early 2000s with print advertising, we’re currently experiencing an authenticity overload, where audiences are oversaturated with information, and it’s more diffuclt to tell if a creator’s “realness” is actually genuine. This has some dangerous implications for symmetical and ethical brand communication in the creator economy. Why should I invest in a product, idea, or belief if I can’t prove that it’s authentic? I believe we’re entering an authenticity collapse, where there is little distinction between fact and fiction. İt’s all about how platforms, brands, and creators can profit from spectacle, even if that spectacle isn’t rooted in reality.
Algorithms, Visibility, Inequality
José van Dijck’s “platform society” approach argues that digital platforms are not neutral tools but normative structures. Based on your research into algorithmic visibility, content moderation, and the experiences of marginalized communities, which aspects of platformdesign do you see as most actively reproducing social inequalities?
Platform companies also want to accrue the biggest possible profit. If they believe the presence of disabled people will turn brands and audiences alike away, and drive down their profits, they will not prioritize disability visibility. This is also the case for other marginalized groups across race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Platforms reflect dominant social values and beliefs about who we should see and who holds power. İf disabled people are devalued and pushed out of physical public and labor spaces, this will be reflected into the platform’s design and algorithmic recommendation systems—the latter which ultimately shapes visibility and participation in digital publics. It’s not that an algorithmic recommendation system is doing something new when it censors or decides to remove protections for disabled users. They’re drawing on previously existing ideas and beliefs that ultimately come from the contexts they’re designed and created in.
Academia, Activism, Public Knowledge
Considering your work that brings together influencer culture, digital activism, disability studies, and critical communication scholarship, what do you see as the most urgent responsibility of academia today: to document these practices, to critique them, or to develop directly transformative interventions?
I think this is ultimately an industry issue. Communication and media scholarship is truly behind other sibling fields (e.g., anthrolopology, sociology, English and cultural studies, gender studies) when it comes to disability centered research. İn the last five years, there has been one job in North American higher education that specifically called for expertise in disability and communication/media studies. I’m focused on that context because that’s where I live and work. I would imagine it’s a similar issue across other geopolitical contexts. We won’t be able to document, critique, or develop interventions if universities and industries aren’t investing in disability studies. And not just “studies of disabled media users or workers,” but disability critique as central to knowledge making and creative practices that can contribute to worlds where EVERYONE counts.
In your research on the representation of disability, body politics, and everyday experiences on digital platforms, how do you construct counter-narratives to the “inspirational stories” so often reproduced by mainstream media? Do you believe these counter-narratives are genuinely capable of producing transformation within the digital public sphere?
I think disabled creators’ engagement with platform affordances can absolutely challenge ableist narratives and tropes such as the “tragedy” of disability, supercrips, and inspiration porn. In my research on disabled TikTok creators pushing back against algorithmic suppression and heightened harassment, I found that creators used play and strategic engagement to both bring attention to social issues while also pushing back agains the idea that disabled people need to be saved or need pity from nondisabled audiences.
In North American culture (the geopoltical context I create, research, and write from) disabled people are historically pushed out of public life and are not seen as “equals” or even “human.” So platforms definitely offer an avenue to support communities, bring people together, and challenge these harmful, ableist mediations (though people may still face ableist harassment or suppression).
Digital Ethnography, Researcher Positionality
In the context of your research with influencers, TikTok communities, and marginalized groups, how should the ethical positioning of the researcher be rethought within digital ethnography and qualitative analysis? What limits and responsibilities have your own studies Revealed to you in this regard?
Nondisabled researchers often ask me, “Can I research disability and creators if I’m not disabled myself?” I think-at least in North American academia—there is this belief that you must be disabled yourself in order to write and research about disability. But lived experience does not automatically mean you are an academic expert in that subject. I’m not here to poliçe or control what other scholars are writing about. Moreover, I believe disabled scholars, who are underrepresented in academia, should not be left to do the labor of disability research. İ do think researchers need to bring an ethics of care to their work. There’s a difference between writing and researching and theorizing lived experiences. Disability isn’t a monolith, and i don’t claim that my theoretical and ethnographic work is the end-all-be-all of disability media studies. We need a multiplicity of voices, findings, and ideas. And we need to be responsible when we do that.
Interviewer: Arzu Karaduman Interview Guest: Dan Amernick
Dr. Dan Amernick is a Senior Professional Lecturer of Media Arts, teaching Screenwriting for Film & Television and Advanced Screenwriting for Film & Television. Prior to teaching, Amernick worked for a number of years in the entertainment industry, notably on the writing staff of the CBS sitcom The Nanny.
Your career bridges both the professional entertainment industry and academic teaching. Could you describe the pivotal moments that led you from writing for a major networks sitcom like The Nanny to pursuing a doctoral degreeand ultimately teaching screenwriting and media arts?
There wasn’t like a tipping point. There was more of a series of events. Once the show went off the air, then I was doing different types of non-sitcom writing, which was fine because it paid the bills. I was working at SoapCity, doing all the writing, the soap opera features, interviews, and episode recaps. It was great, but I really wasn’t a soap person. The Nanny went off the air in 1999, and I continued working in the soap world until about 2009. And at the time I was already thinking that I wanted to do something with teaching. But, around 2008 or 2009, I was so against the idea of going back to college. I just couldn’t imagine doing it at my age. And at that time, my goals were still different. I was still thinking “Oh, I’ll teach creative writing to third graders,” because that was the age when I had this really good third grade teacher, and I wanted to kind of pay it forward. At some point, though, I started thinking bigger. I started to think college level. And I was cold-calling places, and they told me I needed a master’s. At the time, my arrogant self thought: “Oh, who needs a master’s!” And of course, after going through the process, I did say “I do, and even a Phd!”.
At this point, I was in Vegas working at a job that was not paying well. It was interactive training videos. I was in my early 40s. I knew if I didn’t take the risk and go back to school, then I would just be going from one sort of unfulfilling freelance contract writing gig to the next. And so that was really that kind of pivotal moment. I wanted to teach, so I thought “I’m going to have to go full throttle and go back to school”. After that first year of the media studies master’s program at Syracuse, the Newhouse School, I thought it was all starting to come together, and next I know I was getting a PhD in mass comm. So that’s the evolution, definitely a combination of career, different priorities, growing older, not wanting to be hustling for writing gigs.
Initially, I hoped to teach TV history and topics that excite my mentor, advisor and friend, Dr. Robert Thompson –I have to name-check Bob obviously. But it turned out my research portfolio was very different than the research of the people who do critical cultural studies. And so it’s made much more sense –when things opened up– to teach screenwriting and media writing classes instead.
Working on the writing staff of The Nanny placed you within a successful network television environment. What lessons about narrative structure, creative collaboration, and television production did you take from that era? And what do you see as the value of practitioner-scholars within media studies today?
It was just a great era because it was still broadcast TV, and there were still these mass audiences during the network run of The Nanny. We were really lucky. There’s all this creative collaboration. Even as production assistants, once they knew we wanted to write, after we’d been there for a year, my brother and I, they were letting us sit in. They were really good about that in general, respecting everybody’s talent, wanting to bring people up and promote from within; they were really excellent at that. And I think I have to thank them for that.
We were allowed to pitch story ideas early on, with support from people like Fran Drescher, her then-husband Peter Marc Jacobson, and co-creators Robert Sternin and Prudence Fraser. We also had support from writers and producers like Diane Wilk, Frank Lombardi, and early supporter Janis Hirsch. They all read our sample portfolios, which was part of the creative collaboration. The mentorship was important—they saw potential in people, not just us, but others who wanted to direct or learn about camera work. Everyone got a chance.
When we got our first assignment, the writers provided just the right amount of mentorship. We worked through the story, scene by scene, learning why certain changes were needed. We went through multiple drafts before the script was tabled. It was a process of learning how to structure a script, understanding when a scene needs a stronger punchline or a different type of laugh, or when to end on a blow. It was also a lesson in collaboration. The writers’ room was key to that. Even when we were done with our production assistant jobs, they let us sit in on the room and pitch jokes. It was like auditing a class at night. I always say this wistfully because I understand that this type of writers’ room, as we knew it, is disappearing for various production reasons; that writers room was a real hot bed of collaboration. That kind of multi-cam, live-audience broadcast show, like The Nanny, is becoming less common, especially with the rise of streaming.
Back then we were learning even in our day-to-day tasks. I remember schlepping as a phone page/production assistant and analyzing scripts. We’d take home drafts that changed daily and evaluate what stayed and what didn’t work. For example, a joke that got a laugh in a Monday run-through might not make it to the final version. I think anybody who, if you logged in as much sitcom watching as I did as a child, would know there is an innate sense of the story, of the commercial breaks, the rising action, the act breaks, and the conflict, and people bring that to their screen experiences. Looking back at the whole process now, I remember in one episode there was a scene where a joke run went on for probably a page and a half, but they condensed it to one strong joke. Well, I certainly didn’t bring that to my life as a teacher, the idea of not repeating the same joke over and over; but I learned that from The Nanny.
To not forget your second part question, I think both practitioners and those with a theoretical background bring so much to the table. When I was in grad school, they recognized the value of the practitioner-scholar. And the current leadership at where I’m working definitely has made a point of seeing the practitioner and the scholar that I am. There is no substitute for what we have learned in that writer’s room in those years; working with that particular group of people was the ultimate masterclass. And without that experience, I would not have been able to offer what I’m offering in the classroom.
Sitcom writing often balances formulaic expectations with creative invention. How do you think narrative innovation happens within highly structured formats like network television? Can constraints of genre or industry conventions actually foster creative risk-taking?
Historically, the constraints have forced a certain creativity. That’s not to say that the creative freedom of other formats isn’t great. Going back to what you could or couldn’t do or say on television, writers, in sitcoms especially, would come up with, clever workarounds. The one example that comes to mind automatically is Seinfeld’s “The Contest,” right? A whole episode about that particular topic, which they never mention by name, because of the network standards and practices, they had to come up with clever workarounds. It was within sort of our expectations of what you can get away with on a network television at that time, how they were sort of breaking the boundaries while but being so subtle about it. On the flip side of that is the two-part Maude abortion episode in 1972 where they don’t they don’t mention abortion by name, but we know that the character of Maude Findlay, played by the late Beatrice Arthur, is pregnant and does not want to carry the baby to term. So our expectations, generic genre what have you, have always been disrupted; sitcoms in the 70s started blurring the lines between comedy and drama. Think MAS*H, think All in the Family, think Norman Lear! And then in the 80s dramas like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere start to blur the line between the serious drama and comedy. They bring comedic moments on these life-or-death scenarios, and then The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. Both of those shows were outside of the panopticon of network television, and so they were given those freedoms, but I think there’s something to be said for that.
Make no mistake; those constraints can be challenging and creatively stifling. To my knowledge, we never had to deal with really ridiculous notes. But historically, there’re these network executives and all these stories. There’s a book of notes from network executives called A Martian Wouldn’t Say That: Memos TV Execs Wish They Hadn’t Written. Because you’re dealing with this specific set of guidelines, you come up with ways to subvert it. I think that’s been historically true. And now that’s, you know, just the norm: the sort of subversion of expectations.
How do you see contemporary television, especially in the era of streaming, relating back to the broadcast sitcom structures you experienced earlier in your career? As someone who teaches screenwriting, how do you approach the transformation of practical industry knowledge into structured classroom pedagogy? Are there particular frameworks or case studies you find most effective in guiding students to professional-level scripts?
There’s still this sort of throughline: the delivery system has changed in terms of the contemporary landscape. But the contemporary television has revamped some of the earlier structures. For example, on The Nanny, we were working with the classic two-act structure, multicamera show filmed in front of a live studio audience. And in terms of contemporary television, that earlier structure, I think, has largely gone away. You don’t see multi-cam sitcoms with live audience, with the exception of some of the reboots. But the two-act structure also gave way to a three-act structure modeled more closely on the three-act screenplay paradigm. But even that three-act structure gave way to this sort of four-act structure, which is pretty much the networks squeezing in extra commercial breaks in there to make a little extra money. At the end of the day, though, the basic narrative structure has remained, and I don’t want to say “static” because with streaming there’s more experimentation; they’re not building to a commercial break; they’re not forcing the same sort of pronounced act break. What we did, and how we did it back then, is very different than what’s going on today. But at the same time, it’s still helpful pedagogically to teach the students the three-act screenplay paradigm and show them how these three acts are broken down into sequences: the setup, the confrontation, and the resolution.
If you want to think of that two-act sitcom structure, take the first two acts in the typical three-act structure, the set up establishing the characters and their needs, and the confrontation. Usually in the middle of act two would be a midpoint, where not only is the character’s dream denied, but now they go in a whole other direction because their dramatic need is even more jeopardized, or their need has been upended. The two-act sitcom then continues into a second act of more rising action before that highest point of the climax and a final resolution. Later on, a sitcom condensed that larger real estate of the Hollywood three-act structure and modeled similarly timed act breaks. In the more contemporary four-act structure, they just cut the middle of act three to add that extra commercial break, which in many cases interrupted continuity rather than help sustain it.
When you think about Hollywood and the three-act structure, each act essentially has a beginning, middle and end, so you can break a three-act screenplay down into nine plot points or sequences. You can show students Star Wars and break it down into sequences, and then they’ll understand how a season of streaming series works. For example, each episode of a nine-episode series, like Stranger Things, is one sequence of the whole. So the season becomes an extended screenplay in many ways. Once they understand this basic structure, they can think about what the entire season they want to write looks like.
It’s a good way to show them the foundational structure, even though contemporary shows tend to be more complex with non-linear storytelling, jumping back and forth. To fully understand their film and TV vocabulary, they need to see both classic and contemporary examples. For example, to better understand Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, or Abbott Elementary, they need to watch the original Mary Tyler Moore Show pilot for character development. If they want to understand Pluribus, they should look at what influenced Vince Gilligan, like Twilight Zone or even the philosophy of the original Star Trek—he’s obviously well-read and influenced by classic TV that he pays homage to. Without that context, they’ll watch Pluribus and only compare it to Netflix’s Black Mirror, missing the broader storytelling influences. Expanding their vocabulary is key. They might resent me for it, but once they understand the references, like in WandaVision, they know they see the connections thanks to what is taught in class.
Your research interests include television history and popular culture. For example, you have spoken publicly about your long-standing interest in the Muppets. What draws you to Henson’s creative philosophy, and how do you understand the Muppets’ cultural legacy within the broader history of American media? In what ways do Henson’s world-building practices — his fusion of puppetry, humor, and emotional sincerity — inform your perspective on storytelling, character creation, or the pedagogical approaches you bring into your screenwriting courses?
I’ll start with the chronological answer, then move to the emotional one. Being of a certain age, I was the ideal target audience for all things Muppet. I was a first-generation Sesame Street viewer, born in the same year the show came on. So, I formed an early emotional bond with Sesame Street Muppet characters. By the time I was too old to watch a show aimed at preschoolers, The Muppet Show came on, which felt like a natural progression.
But on a deeper emotional level, I realized why I connected with the Henson philosophy and the Muppet characters as I got older. They were all eccentric non-conformists, marching to the beat of their own drum. Sometimes literally. These characters, Fozzie Bear, Kermit, Gonzo, Miss Piggy, had relatable needs each with unique emotional needs baked into them. For anyone growing up with a need for creative expression but no platform for it, these characters resonated deeply.
Jim Henson’s philosophy, that we all have something to offer and that it’s okay to be weird and different, was powerful. Growing up in the 70s, when everyone seemed to be wanting to fit in and conform to the norm, it was very appealing to see characters who just wanted to perform and express themselves. Fozzie Bear, for example, is not a good comedian, but he needs approval, undeterred by the two hecklers, Statler and Waldorf. He just keeps trying! That perseverance and willingness to fail and keep going was incredibly appealing. In the classroom, I try to instill that same sense of individuality and encourage students to think not just about the words on the page but about what they bring and their unique experiences. It’s about embracing their creativity and individuality in the work they produce. I often end my advanced class with a quote attributed to Jim Henson: “Take what you’ve got and fly with it.” I think it’s just great advice!
Students really connect with that, especially when they’re exploring characters and stories about finding themselves, like in many of the shows and films they love. I can see how the Muppets, with their unique blend of individuality and perseverance, are very much in line with 70s culture and its focus on nostalgia and pastiche. But that’s a whole other conversation!
Your recent podcast conversation offered a nuanced reading of Saturday Night Live’s transformation. Prior to the podcast, you published on Saturday Night Live’s “lost seasons” and archival visibility. How did that project shift your understanding of media preservation, institutional memory, and cultural value? In what ways might this perspective be relevant to current debates about digital media and platform ephemerality? And perhaps, through another angle, what does SNL’s trajectory reveal about the changing dynamics of risk, innovation, and political discourse within American broadcast comedy?
One of my friends and colleagues from Newhouse, Dr. Charisse L’Pree, has a regular podcast on SNL. During the 50th anniversary celebration, they invited me to discuss how the show had evolved, which ties into an area I was particularly interested in. I think “the lost seasons project” really informed my understanding of the archive. It was an archival defense, and that’s where I had to define it through Derrida. It wasn’t easy, but it was key to the project. The idea of who controls the archive has, by extension, control over the historical narrative is central. The two ideas, that is archiving and the lost seasons, went hand in hand. That project became a way to challenge the narrative around those years of SNL, particularly from 1980 to 1985, which were often dismissed. The general historical narrative, for example, has been that after Lorne Michaels left in 1980 and Jean Doumanian briefly took over, followed by Dick Ebersol, the show was inferior. How do you follow the well-earned mythology surrounding the original cast? The myth was that these seasons were nothing more than an inferior imitation of SNL, and that Lorne Michaels’ return in 1985 saved the show.
That narrative was perpetuated by how the episodes from that period were archived. Many of those episodes are either missing or heavily edited, even in places like Peacock. They’ve shown up in syndication, but they’re not there in their entirety. The 80s episodes are often cut down to about 20 minutes, so you don’t have the chance to really get the full picture. Aside from occasional clips of Eddie Murphy, the breakout star of that time, you don’t see much of those seasons. I think this downplays the contributions of those seasons. The general theme that went on was that the show became dumber and apolitical. And my argument was maybe there was more than they were given credit for.
In the most general sense, we talk about media ephemerality. Students mock me when I pull out a DVD; I might as well be pulling out a Betamax. But you want this, because your favorite show can just get pulled from circulation, which is what’s been happening for various reasons. Sometimes it’s about agendas, or cost-cutting, but things are disappearing from the archive. Look at what’s been going on with HBO Max, the streaming service for Warner Bros., a legacy studio, which should house the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons, some of the most iconic animated characters alongside Disney’s. You’d think HBO Max would be a natural home for those cartoons, but under Zaslav they were pulled for cost-cutting reasons. So now you can’t even watch a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon on HBO Max.
That’s just one example, but it speaks to a larger issue of how streaming as this rotating library has become the ultimate ephemeral entity, because they might be permanently out of stock or taken away because of rights clearances, which really reinforces the importance of having physical access to original materials. Sometimes that means owning the physical media, DVDs or whatever format, because streaming has made media completely ephemeral.
For researchers too, there’s always this sense of incompleteness. If the entirety of a series isn’t available, it really affects the work. When I did my analysis of The Muppet Show, it was hindered because only three seasons were available on DVD. I randomized episodes from those, but some had to be disqualified because of music clearance issues, and even then the episodes themselves were incomplete.
Ideally, you want archives to be as complete as possible, for consumption, yes, but especially for research. There are things that are out of our control, like when they erased all those old episodes of The Tonight Show. With Saturday Night Live, for example, the materials exist; it’s just a matter of access. They’re there, but it would be great to have full availability so we can do real analysis. There’s probably no better show to analyze the latter 20 th century pop culture than Saturday Night Live. The music, the political satire, the mood of the country; you can see shifts over time, especially as it becomes more political during the Reagan and Bush years. It all comes back to the same point: preserving the archive as much as possible.
Given the widespread popularity and critical success of many current television series, are you ever struck by audience reactions to shows that, from a screenwriting standpoint, you find less compelling or even structurally weak? I’m thinking in particular of the kinds of heated debates that unfold among scholars andTV/film enthusiasts across social media platforms. For example, recently I have seen many similar discussions on Pluribus; however, being a scholar of film aesthetics and sound, I don’t think I bring the same critical attention to storytelling that you do.
I come at it from a few different perspectives: as a former TV writer, a screenwriting professor, and just a regular viewer. My issue isn’t that the writing itself is weaker. That’s not what bothers me. The hill I die on is how the streaming season structure has changed storytelling. When I was working in TV, we did 24 or 26 episodes a season. Over time that number kept shrinking, and now the streaming norm is eight to ten episodes, sometimes followed by a couple of years of disappearance. Writers and producers are doing good work within that framework, but shorter seasons and dropping everything at once don’t always let stories breathe.
The counter-argument is that longer broadcast seasons meant more misses than hits, and that’s fair. But they also gave shows time. Sitcoms especially needed room to find their voice. Many shows we’re still talking about decades later needed that runway. Take The Golden Girls: as strong as it was out of the gate, you can still see them figuring out rhythm, relationships, and voice in those early episodes. That’s what I think is missing now.
To their credit, some streamers are adjusting. Netflix realized that dumping everything at once kills the cultural conversation, so they split the final season of Stranger Things. Apple TV has been smart about weekly releases. Shows like Pluribus benefited from that because they stayed part of the conversation longer. And Pluribus in particular became a kind of Rorschach test; Stuart Hall would be smiling! It’s a dream case study. Honestly, every humanities professor should probably send Vince Gilligan a thank-you basket, because it’s endless material for philosophy and sociology classes. What’s exciting is that people are engaging with a show intellectually. That doesn’t happen often anymore.
That tension between intention and audience reception isn’t new. When All in the Family aired, teachers requested study guides to use it in classrooms. At the same time, you had Archie Bunker for President T-shirts, which was first ironic, but then worn unironically. People would come up to Carroll O’Connor, a lifelong Democrat, and tell him, ‘You’re the man.’ They were emotionally identifying with Archie and missing the point. As one writer noted, those mugs and T-shirts kept selling long after teachers stopped asking for study guides. That tug-of-war never goes away.
I think Pluribus sustains that tension better than most. Like Severance, it is driven by ideas rather than aesthetics. There’s less danger of what happened with Succession, whose viewers missed the critique of moral bankruptcy of the filthy rich and instead focused on lifestyle fantasy. That’s not a knock on the creators; it’s about reception. When I watched the pilot of Pluribus, I immediately read it through my own experience, being the lone liberal in a family that’s gone conservative. But at the same time, I’m realizing an anti-vaxxer is probably seeing this as a metaphor for their worldview, and a right winger is seeing this as a metaphor for the dangers of communism. It taps into philosophical ideas such as “Paradise without free will is just a pretty prison” and homages to that false-paradise idea in The Twilight Zone’s ‘A Nice Place to Visit’. And also, maybe that’s my TV-nut brain, but Koumba Diabaté surrounded by models felt very much like Harry Mudd surrounded by beautiful androids in his second appearance on Star Trek (“I, Mudd”). Those references deepen the show and open it up to multiple readings. Everyone sees their own message reflected back. You see that online, too; people saying the hive mind -the joining- doesn’t sound so bad. That’s what makes it such an effective utopia/dystopia.
That ties back to something else I took from Pluribus: the idea of groupthink. The constant use of ‘we,’ the chanting ‘Carol, please,’ felt like an allegory for the meme/the hashtag culture. Whether intentional or not, it’s a perfect image of contemporary culture, where ideas circulate endlessly and become consensus before anyone stops to question them. And that’s exactly why the show invites this kind of layered, sustained analysis. The challenge now is season two. That’s the downside of the streaming landscape; long gaps risk losing the cultural conversation. Look at Wednesday. Too much time passed, and people just forgot about it.
Looking ahead, what emerging questions in screenwriting, television history, or media arts are you thinking about in your research, teaching, or even in daily conversations? And finally, just remembering the recent two strikes of the Writers and the Actors Guilds in the US, I would like to ask how you think AI is going to affect the industry, from screenwriting to production and post-production processes?
The emerging question now is artificial intelligence: what it’s going to do, and where it’s going to leave us. And that’s tough. I don’t want to be alarmist or paranoid, but without guardrails, I understand why people are genuinely worried. There are serious implications: people being put out of work, craftsmanship being slowly replaced. Those concerns aren’t abstract; they’re real.
When it comes to teaching screenwriting, this is what makes the moment so challenging. Sometimes I feel a bit like Howard Beale at the end of Network, not the ‘I’m mad as hell’ speech, but that quieter moment after he’s won, when he realizes the system has already moved on, and the individual no longer seems to matter. Because how do I stand in front of students and talk about the value of the individual voice when the landscape has been so radically disrupted?
Even without AI, opportunities have been shrinking. The old origin stories with the right place, right time, getting a foot in the door through production assistant work and slowly moving up those paths are far less accessible now. Students today are going to need even more luck than we had. And that’s hard to say out loud.
So when you’re teaching screenwriting now, you’re not just teaching craft. You’re also making a case for the value of human creativity, the individual voice, and the individual perspective. And you also have to be honest: the odds have gotten harder. Shorter seasons mean fewer scripts, smaller writing staffs, fewer jobs. Sitcoms, in particular, are at a disadvantage in the streaming landscape. A ten-episode half-hour season can be blown through in a night or two, whereas hour-long dramas at least linger longer in the culture.
The takeaway I keep coming back to is that students have to do this for the love of it. The money isn’t guaranteed the way it once was. The opportunities are in flux. That means people are going to have to find ways to tell stories on their own terms—through smaller, more personal, handmade projects. People have access now to tools and mini- studios we never had. They may not reach Game of Thrones–level audiences, but that can’t be the only metric.
What matters is continuing to tell stories. That’s the part AI can’t replace. There will always be audiences who consume whatever is put in front of them, but there will also always be people who can tell the difference. Just like when you read a student paper and immediately know whether a human mind is really there, audiences will recognize authentic voice and intention. That’s the value we’re fighting to preserve.
Interview Series: Beyond Synchrony: Dialogues on New Media and Sensory Aesthetics
1. Within the framework of your academic trajectory and theoretical orientation, what were the main intellectual or aesthetic motivations that led you to focus on moments in which synchronization breaks down? Could you explain how this interest emerged and what kind of shift it created in your research path?
My focus on asynchrony emerged from a moment of analytical failure. One evening at Georgia Tech, I was watching Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia with friends from the Turkish Student Organization who organized the screening. Midway through a dialogue scene, something happened that stopped me cold: the characters’ voices continued, but their lips no longer moved. I remember physically turning to scan the faces of my friends sitting next to me, curious to see whether anyone else was as startled as I was. The shock of the moment of my realization that I witnessed a genuinely new technique of cinematic audiovisual asynchrony compelled me to consult with my cohort as well as my professors in the Moving Image Studies program at Georgia State University. I knew this new technique was not an instance of internal monologue, not acousmatic voice, not a voice-over, not an ellipsis; none of the established categories in film sound theory applied. Out of my fascination with this technique emerged the concept of the “cryptic voice,” a voice that is simultaneously present and absent, uttered and withheld, audible yet refusing to align with the moving lips of its speaker. One of my most exciting publications is the forthcoming chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Media and Vocality, because it will introduce this foundational term more fully with an extended analysis of the dialogue scene in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia as well as another scene in Ceylan’s Three Monkeys.
The cryptic voice became the conceptual spark that redirected my research toward identifying and naming the new sound-image relations as they emerge in contemporary cinema. This shift eventually led to my broader methodological framework, anasonicity, which examines what I describe as spectral, barely audible, or structurally “unsyncable” sounds in contemporary global cinemas. My project “Sounding Anew: Anasonicity in Contemporary Global Cinemas” revisits existing film sound terminology and proposes “anasonicity” as a new methodological approach designed to address emerging sound techniques that transform conditions of audibility and inaudibility in contemporary cinematic experiences. Taken together, these sounds radically disrupt synchronization and require new modes of listening, while the films that deploy them unsettle linear temporality by rendering the sounds of past, present, and future indistinguishable within their narrative worlds.
I call “Sounding Anew” the sonic counterpart of Akira Lippit’s Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). The conceptual seed for anasonicity –or asonority, as I use the terms interchangeably– was planted in Lippit’s formulation of avisuality, his term for the paradox of what is visual yet invisible, an impossible type of visuality that emerges with the birth of cinema, the X-ray, and psychoanalysis in 1895. Lippit’s insight is that by the late twentieth century, the image itself had begun to exceed the limits of visibility. Anasonicity takes up that provocation on the terrain of sound. If avisuality charts the limits of seeing, anasonicity attends to a parallel shift in our experience of hearing that happens a hundred years later: sounds that slip between the audible and the inaudible, voices that fall out of synchronization in completely new ways, sounds that refuse to anchor themselves in time. Attending to the contemporary anasonic nature of cinema then, I name the emerging sonic techniques that trouble what we think sound is supposed to do in cinema, and, by doing so, ask us to critically attend to such moments that demand a new ear and a new thinking.
2. Your work appears to resonate with Michel Chion’s approach to the sound–image relationship. How has Chion’s theoretical framework shaped your scholarly orientation, and in what ways do you expand, reinterpret, or challenge the conceptual space he opened?
Michel Chion remains foundational for thinking about cinematic sound: his attention to the phenomenology of listening created the conceptual template many of us have inherited. While serious scholarly engagement with sound and sound–image relations began in earnest with the 1980 Cinema/Sound special issue of Yale French Studies under Rick Altman’s editorship, it was Chion’s Audio-Vision that became truly indispensable to the evolution of film sound studies. Since the 1980s, the field has expanded and transformed, but Chion’s framework endures as one of its most generative intellectual anchors.
I was particularly impressed by Chion’s capacity to generate incisive terminology in Audio-Vision, especially his formulation of the acousmêtre, which offered a model for how conceptual precision can illuminate phenomena that had long remained elusive. Among all the formal elements of cinema, sound is notoriously difficult to analyze, and Chion’s work demonstrates a rare patience, rigor, and passion for close listening.
Chion visited Atlanta to give a talk at Emory in 2017. Having encountered the cryptic voice in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, I carried my bewilderment directly to him. After his lecture, I approached him to recount the dialogue scene and to ask what he made of the voice emerging from unmoving lips. He knew the film well and immediately remembered the scene, and yet his response, “It’s just the ambience!” sounded unexpectedly dismissive and was invaluable precisely because it exposed the limits of our established vocabulary. My aim is not to overturn Chion’s legacy but to expand and complexify the conceptual field by naming new audiovisual phenomena that contemporary cinema is producing. In this sense, I see terms such as anasonicity, cryptic voice, echoing sonic flashback, and muted image as the next theoretical steps after Chion: concepts that build on his groundwork but are calibrated for an emerging audiovisual landscape and explained through deep philosophical engagements.
3. The original English terms you have developed to describe moments in which synchronization slips, breaks, or is intentionally disrupted offer a significant contribution to the literature. How does your process of conceptual creation unfold? What theoretical, aesthetic, or phenomenological criteria guide the emergence of a new term?
A new term never precedes the phenomenon; it arises only when a film insists on it. My process is grounded in close listening —what I call a gesture of “listening through,” borrowing from Derrida’s method of “reading through” texts against themselves— and in allowing films to challenge the limits of the theoretical lexicon we already possess. This careful act of listening through these films involves returning to a scene again and again, hearing it anew each time, in repetitions that arrive with difference and produce something new each time. After all, many of the sounds I study are barely audible, and some of the techniques I name appear only fleetingly in most films rather than in extended sequences like the example in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. So an attentive ear is the key to the process.
Sometimes colleagues and friends help direct my attention to certain films. After my first presentation on the “echoing sonic flashback” in The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015) at the Sinefilozofi Symposium in 2022, Dr. Serdar Öztürk mentioned a brief but striking use of the cryptic voice in Pelin Esmer’s Something Useful (2017), which I am presenting on at this year’s symposium. I am equally grateful to Jordan Chrietzberg, who recommended The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023); to Jazmine Hudson, who pointed me toward Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025); and to Cameron Kunzelman, who suggested Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021). These recommendations become invitations to texts that demand to be listened to with care. I am currently extending my research on what I term The Anasonic Zone of Interest, have begun developing a piece on Sinners, and still await the opportunity to encounter Memoria, whose limited circulation has made it particularly difficult to find.
To clarify the process of conceptual creation, I could list three simultaneous criteria that guide the emergence of terminology: • Phenomenological precision: What exactly is being heard? At what level of perception: audible, barely audible, spectral, remembered, virtual? • Narrative function: How does the sound alter temporality, embodiment, relations to memory, or the ethical space between characters? • Theoretical necessity: Can existing terminology account for the phenomenon? If not, what new concept is required, and what conceptual gap does it fill?
I call these subcategories of anasonic sounds “impossible,” because their functions stretch the boundaries of audiovisual asynchrony as defined in established film sound scholarship. Cryptic voice, for instance, emerged from recognizing a voice that is spoken, heard by other characters, and fully audible—yet unaccompanied by lip movement. Echoing sonic flashback, which I explore through Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance in my recent chapter for Derrida and Film Studies, names a distinctive form of aural flashback that operates like an echo, where past sounds reverberate closely following the present sounds like an echo. The muted image (bridge), which I introduce in a forthcoming 2027 article for a Derrida Today special issue on Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet, 2023), describes an impossible form of synchronization between images and sounds across two scenes, creating an impossible match that dislocates spatial or temporal continuity.
In each case, I am identifying an impossible doubleness: sounds that are both present and absent, synchronous and asynchronous, grounded or embodied and spectral. I guess my genuine curiosity drives the will to coin new terms each time I notice a mismatch between sound and image in contemporary films. Ultimately, conceptual creation begins with listening to what cinema is doing—and inventing terminology only when existing language can no longer describe its operations.
4. In contemporary cinema and television, the sound–image relationship is increasingly heterogeneous, fragmented, and often deliberately detached. How do you interpret this trend in relation to the broader transformation of contemporary narrative structures? What does this growing separation reveal about the perceptual habits of today’s audiences?
Contemporary audiovisual storytelling has moved further from classical notions of linearity, audiovisual unity, and strict synchronization, even in realist films or TV dramas. Rather than treating the soundtrack as a stable accompaniment to the image, or simply as its subordinate, many contemporary films mobilize sound as an autonomous and sometimes unpredictable force, which I find exhilarating. This fragmentation or destabilization reflects a broader transformation in contemporary narrative structures; stories increasingly unfold not as single temporal continuums but as intertwined temporal planes: memory, anticipation, dream, trauma, regret, and potentiality. For instance, my work on “crystal sounds” in contemporary global cinema and television traces multiple instances of these destabilizing sonic formations, even in otherwise completely disparate texts such as Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and HBO’s Westworld. And I am certain there are further cases that similarly stray from conventional sound–image coherences.
New forms of asynchrony, in this context, become a perceptual challenge even in the already fragmented and contemporary narratives. These texts ask audiences to feel before they identify, to listen before they decode, and, to borrow from my own method, to “listen through,” again and attentively. Their refusal of easy comprehension is not unwarranted; I think they resist disposability. These works gain their ontological power from their radical sonic, audiovisual, and narrative experimentations. They force us to return to certain scenes repeatedly, to be able to engage with them at the philosophical level they operate.
Contemporary viewers are accustomed to media environments where multiple temporalities and sources coexist; streaming interfaces, multi-screen displays, algorithmic feeds inundate our everyday realities. Their perceptual habits have become layered, fragmented, and non-linear. Cinema is responding in kind, producing radical forms of asynchrony that not only resonate with these habits but also challenge the audiences further by demanding deep philosophical engagements.
Many of the films I study enact what Derrida calls différance, a temporal and spatial deferral, or what Deleuze theorizes as the “crystal,” an indiscernibility between the actual and the virtual. In this sense, the separation of sound from image is not fragmentation for its own sake. It is a mode of attunement to contemporary subjectivity, a way of making perceptible the disjunctions, overlays, and spectral echoes that define our media-saturated lives. And it is often precisely this radical rethinking of audiovisual relations that allows these films to do philosophy.
The digital media ecosystem—including streaming platforms, social media videos, and multi-screen environments—introduces new technical and aesthetic challenges to sound–image synchronization. How do you think these environments reshape the audiovisual relationship? Do you see these synchronization shifts evolving from technical glitches into deliberate aesthetic strategies?
Yes, what once appeared as “errors” or “glitches” are now being absorbed as expressive strategies. Digital media environments including streaming platforms, TikTok videos, algorithmically compressed sound files, autoplay transitions, and skip functions normalize the experience of rupture, elision, and discontinuity. Cinema has responded by formalizing these experiences: asynchronous editing, displaced soundtracks, spectral voices, or echoes of the past that intrude on present time. For example, the echoing sonic flashback or the cryptic voice are not accidents of mishandling but deliberate manipulations that express heterogeneity of time through memory, trauma, displacement, or temporal paralysis.
Of course, tight synchronization between image and sound and the accompanying expectations of temporal continuity and linear narrative progression remain the norm if we consider the thousands of films produced globally each year. However, the shift from analog to digital has introduced new aesthetic sensibilities and technical possibilities that continue to reshape what filmmakers can do with the soundtrack. For example, Mark Kerins was one of the first scholars to trace a level of sonic complexity to the creative potential of surround-sound multichannel formats. Others have similarly noted the increasing indistinction between sound effects and music in contemporary digital sound design, where layers of sonic material can be manipulated with extraordinary precision.
Digital tools have made it possible to craft soundtracks that are denser, richer, and more structurally complex. As a result, synchronicity is no longer the default formal expectation but merely one option among many. Digital media and digital culture defined by compression artifacts, algorithmic modulation, nonlinear temporality, and platform-specific listening habits have fundamentally transformed the conditions of auditory perception. In my scholarship, I see that cinema has responded the transformed conditions of audibility by experimenting with the dramatic and philosophical possibilities of what I call “unsyncability”. Conversely, and perhaps more intriguingly, we can argue that cinema has anticipated and even instructed the audiovisual logics of emerging technologies and those who design them. For instance, I claim that the technique of the muted image that foregrounds voice as media in the impossible synchronization between the voice and a pair of foreign lips reappears today in the artificial synthesis of prosthetic voices and faces in deepfakes and AI-generated content of our current media ecology.
Publishing all your work and terminology in English makes your concepts more visible in international scholarship. How does this linguistic choice influence your theoretical framework? In what ways does producing terminology in English shape the nature or boundaries of your conceptual work?
To be completely honest with you, I have never pursued scholarly work in any language other than English. I attended Zonguldak Atatürk Anatolian High School, where nearly all courses were taught in English. My B.A. in American Culture and Literature and my M.A. in Media and Visual Studies at Bilkent University continued this trajectory, as English was the institutional language of instruction. As a result, my intellectual formation, reading habits, writing practices, and theoretical vocabulary have all been shaped entirely in English.
At the same time, English is the primary language of global academic discourse in Film and Sound Studies, and developing my terminology in English ensures that the concepts circulate widely beyond national contexts. I see scholars writing in languages other than English like German, Portuguese, or Finnish citing my published works. I am not sure that publishing these concepts first in Turkish would have enabled that kind of international reach.
English also imposes a productive rigor. It demands conceptual precision: a new term must justify itself etymologically, analytically, and philosophically. This pressure toward clarity ultimately strengthens the concepts. For example, asonority could not have existed merely as a convenient linguistic parallel to Lippit’s avisuality, that is an elegant analogy invented in the final sentences of a 16-hour comprehensive exam. That day at GSU, I simply coined it without knowing what it meant or how to fully theorize it, and I finished my exam with a long list of questions in the space allocated for answers. Asonority/anasonicity had to accrue methodological and analytical clarity, enough to withstand the scrutiny of my dissertation committee: Angelo Restivo, Alessandra Raengo, Calvin H. Thomas, and especially Akira Lippit as my outside reader. I am deeply grateful for their patience, which allowed the concept to mature into the methodological framework it finally evolved into. In short, English, despite being my second language, has been a conceptual and philosophical playground for me throughout my entire academic life.
Looking toward the future of your research, what new theoretical questions are you pursuing within the study of sound–image relations? Are there particular themes or conceptual directions you plan to deepen in your upcoming work?
My current trajectory continues to expand the conceptual umbrella of anasonicity. At present, I am in conversation with Palgrave regarding my first book project, which will likely take the form of a short pivot, given that I have already published several peer-reviewed articles and chapters that have divided the larger project into smaller, thematically coherent components. I am also working on an article titled “Au revoir to voix: Muted Images in Anatomy of a Fall,” which introduces the term muted image as a technique that produces an impossible synchronization by pairing the visuals of one scene with the soundtrack of another. To my knowledge, the first use of this technique appears in Park Chan-wook’s Lady Vengeance (2005) and later at the climax of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall (2023).
A second term I am developing is the “meta-burden of representation,” which I use to analyze the self-reflexive structure of Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction. Here, Jefferson responds to the long-discussed “burden of representation” placed on artists from marginalized communities, yet does so within a work that becomes, through its very critique, burdened by the same representational expectations. This concept expands existing theories of race and representation by foregrounding the recursive, self-conscious pressures placed on creative labor itself. Concurrently, I am pursuing a chapter for Bloomsbury’s The Music Video Industry: Interviews, Close Looks, and Takes, in which I examine the expanded terrain of the music video through an interview-based study of The Seasons, a large-scale audiovisual collaboration between composer Sebastian Currier and filmmaker Paweł Wojtasik. Among the questions I will bring to the artists first and then elaborate upon analytically in the second part are: How might we understand the lineage between expanded cinema as presented in concert halls (where films are screened with live accompaniment) and in museums (as installation-based, multi-format objects) and the contemporary music video? And, conversely, do music videos or experimental films with a music-video logic—Álvarez’s Now!, Conner’s Cosmic Ray and A Movie, Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Workman’s Precious Images, Devo’s Mongoloid—inform The Seasons’ approach to structure, rhythm, and montage?
Finally, although my published scholarship has thus far been exclusively in English, I intend to return to Turkish cinema with sustained attention. I have long been drawn to the sonic textures of New Turkish Cinema (mid-1990s to the present). Therefore, my next major project will be a second monograph on the sounds of this cinematic movement, exploring how the oeuvres of Reha Erdem, Pelin Esmer, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Emin Alper, and Tayfun Pirselimoğlu respond sonically—as much as thematically—to the country’s evolving political landscape. This project will allow me to bring my conceptual framework into dialogue with the cinematic traditions that shaped my sensibilities, potentially in a bilingual format.
Across these endeavors, the guiding question remains constant: What new forms of listening does contemporary media demand, and what new vocabulary must we devise to account for them?
Interview Series: “Memory, Representation and Resistance: Thinking Alternative Media Cinematically through Academic Perspectives.”
I. Feminist Art History and Representation
In Differencing the Canon, you propose a feminist re-reading of Western art history. How does this approach challenge traditional ideas about “greatness” and the exclusion of women artists? > [Reference: Differencing the Canon (1999)]
This is a slight misreading of the purpose of my book Differencing the Canon. A canon is the official version of knowledge, and it is official story of Western art that I am challenging Not only does this official story exclude almost all women artists, but it does also so because the issue is structural. The canon is formed to achieve a particular purpose: to establish a mythology of masculine creativity, that is further shaped by racial and geopolitical hierarchies, sexual normativity, and a hierarchy of materials and processes favouring the chosen media used in Western art ( painting and sculpture versus ceramics and cloth).
Firstly, I had to establish what a canon is: a body of accepted knowledge and method for making this knowledge appear to be an unquestioned truth. So, we have to show how the official story of art is constructed both by what it excludes and makes unthinkable and by what it presents as being transparently the sole truth. The title of the book identifies such selectivity, suppression and exclusion as an active ideological process.
Feminist deconstruction of the canon is neither offering an alternative nor trying to include what was systematically excluded. It has to reveal the power systems and their ideologies which naturalize a version one version of knowledge making invisible the ‘politics’ that produce these systematic exclusions and hierarchies of value. Another version of this idea is from British literary critic Raymond Williams who proposed an idea of a ‘selective tradition’ created by scholars that favours the dominant class, and I add, gender and socio-geo-political nations. dominant religions and normative sexualities.
Differencing is a grammatical form— a gerund—of a verb that does not exist in English. To differ is to disagree. To be different is the condition of variety. To difference is my invention of a word that enables me to create a feminist concept. It is drawn from the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his theory of deconstruction, and also indirectly from Michel Foucault. Derrida’s deconstruction is a process that reveals how the ‘the selective tradition’ is created and suppresses certain knowledge and produces a smooth surface that makes any alternative unimaginable. Foucault , writing about the formation of the archive, taught us, however, that what has been made to become invisible has not disappeared. Rather it is folded out of sight. We can open the fold and find that history that was suppressed. So, we are not adding women back into art history. My book exposed how actual history is suppressed through folding some knowledge out of sight or by suppressing historical and social conditions of production or denying the role of ideology: systems of belief and ideas that favour the dominant social groups.
Knowledge of women as artists was folded out of sight, given the massive documentation in history of their constant presence, for the purpose of creating a mythology about the individualism of each artist ( personality, intellect, interests, desires expressed in art: the expressionist thesis of art) in a society in which individualism was granted only to men of certain privileged classes. To exclude artists as women can only happen in societies in which their social and ideological systems have already created a hierarchy amongst human beings on the basis of gender. Gender divisions are no more natural than class divisions or religious divisions.
These are created divisions, and the word woman signifies not a just a person of one type or another. Woman means not-man and the term functions as a negative through which Man comes to signify the only pure type of the human. The canonical denial of artistic and intellectual creativity to women is necessary for men to claim that they alone are the pure human with intellect and creativity. We have to deconstruct the process by which man and woman are not two equal forms of humanity but are an opposition of plus and minus. This is why however many times we put on exhibitions or write books about women artists, we make almost no change, no progress. For 50 years I have watched this happen over and over again and every new exhibition gathers women artists together as ‘rediscoveries’. Differencing the Canon was an analysis of the ideological structure that has in effect defeated our feminist attempts to normalize the creativity of both women and men. Greatness like genius has also been stolen by men for men alone. From a feminist deconstructionist perspective, we are not wanting to select some women for ‘greatness’. We have to develop as curators and art historians and critics ways of seeing their art, ways of interpreting what women in all their diversity and singularity are creating, not because women all share some essential femininity. Each artist-woman is unique as an artist but also is living in a patriarchal, racist, often religiously fundamentalist, capitalist and sexist and heteronormative world. Artists challenge us to see the world differently and from many perspectives. The issue is what art does, what it reveals, what we learn. The art market is not interested in art. It buys and sells brands. Contemporary art world is based on names of artists that become brands for a massive speculative investment market.
Your early work in Vision and Difference critiques how women have historically been portrayed in art. In what ways do these gendered visual patterns continue to influence today’s cultural and visual practices? > [Reference: Vision and Difference (1988)]
Let me make another small correction. Vision & Difference is a collection of ‘essays’ addressed to Art History, the academic discipline that studies art while the essays challenge the story that Art History has made canonical: the only authorized version of art and its histories. The essays are also about studying art as representation: that means not as the individual expression of one artist’s imagination. Representation means that all artists participate in a cultural activity in which there are traditions of visual representation and also patterns of ideological meanings that these representations have affirmed or sometimes contested and even changed.
Whose interests have the visual arts served? What visions of the world and how it is ordered have the visual arts produced by means of signs, materials, media, scales, locations. Whose vision of world has dominated, become normal? We know in the past the powerful rulers, religious leaders, ruling classes commissioned artists to make works for the purposes of confirming the vision of the world of the powerful. This is why the central essay in this book is ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ which was my feminist conversation with and challenge to the social historian of art, T J Clark, who had transformed my understanding of 19th century French art by focusing on the significance the new metropolis and its new urban culture.
My question was: what does the modern city mean for women of different classes. The bourgeois women do not work but can go to the park, go shopping, drive around in carriages, or go to the theatre. Working class women are exposed in their often-visible work to predatory sexual exploitation by the men of the leisured classes. So, I analysed which spaces of the city the men and women involved in creating Impressionism, an egalitarian independent art society with both women and men artists involved in its creation, chose to paint and how.
I then asked myself if I can discern a difference in the space they chose and the way they represented women in these spaces. Thus, I introduced the idea of the gaze, developed in film theory. Who is looking at whom? Who is being subjected to a sexualizing gaze? How did Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot not only reveal the pressure of the masculine heterosexual gaze in public places but also represent the mutual gazing between women, or between adults and children? This is another earlier example of differencing the canon of Impressionist painting and revealing that the division between what artist-men and artist-women represented was not public space versus private space, but between those parts of the city where men and women of all classes moved about and those spaces where bourgeois men looked at or purchased working class women for sexual reasons.
Does this still happen? In the West, the sexualization of women is even more rampant and normalized in certain cultures overtly or secretly. Why do we think we have made any progress at all when we look at the major platforms of representation today: social media. It reflects back to us a picture of the dominant imagination. People believe that progress will happen. Being a structuralist feminist, I do not hope. I analyse the systems of representation and the social systems and their ideologies. We appear to have forgotten these terms and these modes of deconstructive analysis. Representation of women has deteriorated and with social media, and beyond on the dark web, the brutalization and dehumanizing sexual abuse of women is beyond horror. Given that one woman is killed every 40 minutes world-wide by a partner or family member, we must stop believing childishly in automatic progress and start naming patriarchal and phallocentric systems that produce ‘men’ as beings who believe they have rights—including to life—over women and ‘women’ who accept that this is normal. I see very little evidence of any real or systematic change in the representation of women because we have made so little progress to changing this system.
II. Trauma, Memory, and Feminist Aesthetics
In After-affects / After-images, you explore how trauma shapes the experience of art. How can visual art provide a space for processing or representing traumatic experiences? [Reference: After-affects / After-images (2013)]
My argument in this book is not that traumatic experiences are processed or represented. Neither is possible. The core conclusion of that book is that artists, who have endured horrendous experiences such as famine, near death in genocide, sexual abuse, bereavement, exile and survival of extreme suffering may spend a lifetime of making art to create a formal framework for a possible ‘encounter’ with the trauma which is then transformed aesthetically. This is not about cure or relief. It is about the relations between forms, colours, processes, time, spaces and the potential for this encounter with trauma that was a missed encounter: an event that overwhelmed the psyche’s capacity to process it and left the artist possessed or haunted by a shapeless pressure of an unknown ‘thing’ that occupies her or his psyche without she or he being able to grasp it .
In all the case-studies in the book, I noted that the processing of this shapeless, unknowable pressure of the trauma was not a cathartic event but a matter of a lifetime of creating an aesthetic procedure or structure for a transformation through aesthesis: colour, mark, form, process: some painting, some film making, some sculpture, some video and installation. Each case study needed the most rigorous formal, material, structural analysis of how each artwork did its work. Work in German is Arbeit and Freud chose that word for what the psyche does in processing life events: in his terms the work of mourning, Trauerarbeit, working through: Durcharbeiten. I want to stress the importance of psychoanalytical theory rather than everyday psychology. You will know that I have drawn in this book on the theories proposed by artist and psychoanalytical theorist Bracha L Ettinger who created the term artworking, Kunstarbeit as it were, to propose a specific mechanism for understanding what I was naming aesthetic transformation in which aesthetic is not about the beautiful but about how we, the viewers, are affected by colour, touch, movement, duration, sound: the senses when we experience artworks.
Trauma cannot be a topic or subject matter for art: that would merely represent something as an event. Particularly in the wake of modernist acknowledgement of the autonomous affects of colour, field, medium, temporality, etc. art can be a site for this managed ‘encounter’ with residues of trauma that can also touch and move a spectator not with a topic or sense of specific event, but to compassion and hospitality to suffering.
In Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum, you argue that memory is not only personal but also political. How does feminist aesthetics reshape our ways of remembering? [Reference: Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum (2007)]
It is not feminist aesthetics that reshapes our way of remembering, it is that aesthetic practices may facilitate new ways of our responding to the encounter with art, as I suggested in the last question. Are there feminist aesthetics? Certainly, there are philosophers who ask questions about the aesthetic experience from feminist perspectives: that is to challenge the masculine as the sole position of such experience or analysis.
Feminist is not an entity but a position of questioning, that is constantly questioning itself. Since women are the majority of the population and the only group who is systematically killed just for being women on a mass scale (femicide is the term for this), attention to the life and dying of women is a preoccupation of feminist thought. This means defining patriarchy as a form of socio-political-economic domination and phallocentrism as the psychological, linguistic and ideological justification of a system of male domination and privilege. Feminist means analysis, deconstruction, contestation of how phallocentric patriarchies intersect with and are integrated with various economic systems such as capitalism or feudalism and with religious-theological-political systems. Feminist is a mode of enquiry and research, not a women’s alternative. Feminist means caring for all oppressed, disadvantaged and suffering minorities including the world’s majority, women and girls. If art and its histories form cultural memory, the canons of art preserve and that justify male domination and hence the violation of the human rights of women and girls whose humanity is diminished and whose lives are put at risk.
My virtual feminist museum is a concept and a device for asking: what would the world be like and what would we as people be like if we encountered in museums those forms and works of art that were oriented to and celebrated life: the preservation of life? Without idealizing women, who are as deformed as men are in their mentalities and ideologies by the phallocentric and patriarchal systems of power, feminist thought and analysis functions as a critical space of resistance and transformation that has to question and challenge itself, to learn from its own blind spots and negotiate its internal differences and potential hierarchies of privilege.
I do not work with feminist aesthetics but what I termed feminist desire: desire for the end of oppressive dehumanizing systems of power, of the kind of greed that is destroying our planet and rendering millions of lives almost unliveable and dehumanized. Rather than worrying about keeping women in their places, we all need to ally to keep the planet alive, and to do so we need feminist thought that names and challenges the basis of inhumanity: which is that one group of humans treat their fellow humans as instruments not people.
In 1972, a French writer, Françoise D’Eaubonne, an art historian, wrote a book titled Feminism or Death. It was the first feminist eco-critical texts linking the fate of nature and the planet to the fate of women… feminism is thus not a specialty for feminists. It is a condition of future existence for the planet and humanity. Can art do some work in this direction? Yes. Must we all deconstruct and denounce patriarchy and phallocentric thinking. Indeed.
III. Visibility, Institutions, and Feminist Curating
What curatorial practices or institutional strategies have you seen succeed in making space for women and other marginalized artists within mainstream art institutions?
Very few, for the reason that the issue is structural and cannot be mended by gestures of mere correction. But we can and must study strategies that propose different models and address the key elements of curation. These are not packaging ‘art’ as an experience for visitors to gain pleasure or acquire cultural capital. Currently museums and galleries, shaped above all by a rampant art market and art fairs where vast amounts of money are being made and from whom they get their funding to make exhibitions and purchase artwork, are not examining alternative models. They are about entertainment, cultural capital and further securing financial investment in objects branded by artist names by giving collectors and foundations that now own lots of works of art the seal of high cultural value.
I used to teach courses on exhibition histories and focused on a history of five DOCUMENTA exhibitions since 1989, a key moment in European history with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall. This was a study of curatorial strategies in this major exhibition of contemporary every five years and its was fascinating since these platforms of the biennials are now the major exhibition form.
In the few exhibitions I have curated, the framework has been conceptual: not just a theme, a period, an artist, a topic. My aim has been to encourage visitors to grasp the relations between the works they encounter and the histories, concerns, traumas, and indeed aesthetic transformations that are being tipped into visibility and aesthetic encounter by artworking. It is not that the art is made a woman, a category, already defined by the hierarchy of value of men versus women. It is the position from which she intervenes into a field of meanings, a pattern of discourses, a conversation about practices and modes of art making. How do these works of art do their work to transform my understanding of the world, my sense even of self, of others, of changing perspectives. My recent exhibition was titled Medium & Memory, and I selected eight artists all of whom have different practices, different concerns, yet all were brilliant transformers of their chose media: painting, video, drawing, collage, photography. All were deep thinkers about their practices. All were very engaged with different kinds of memory: memory of a book that has been read, memory contained in images that we collect and encounter that shape patterns of thought, memories that are missing because political trauma made them beyond imagining and remembering. I try to bridge the worlds of critical social historical feminist art historical writing and the intense issues of the present world through artworks that provoke responses and indeed incite words as we describe what the artwork is doing and how they lead us to discuss issues and concepts.
Medium refers to the great lesson of modernism. Memory addresses the burden we carry from our consciousness of the modern world that we inherit and this fearful, endangered and violent world in which we are now living, with uncertainty and dread. Can we, will we ever create a humanity shared by all and with the living planet on which we depen? Can we come together in thoughtful, ethically sensitive and life-oriented artmaking that is not about speculative profiteering of the very few who having made billions and get richer and richer while people starve, are washed away in floods caused by climate change caused by fossil fuel use, die from heat, or are murdered, as women are with relentless regularity.
Art has been a rich and brilliant site of creative thought in aesthetic languages. I still believe in its criticality. But as you ask me questions about my project over 50 years as a feminist art historian, I am hoping that some memory of what feminism has tried to achieve over 200 years worldwide will survive or even now challenge our complacency as disaster looms even as it has already has destroyed life worlds of many vulnerable peoples.
Feminist is one form of attention to women, certainly, but also to life, a life that is human for all and in being human, knows that we are the ones who must care for this planet or die. Art is not about entertainment, prices, fashion, celebrity or an even earning a living writing about it. It is a uniquely human activity that is called to account for the same responsibility. Often it is already performing that, if only we knew better how to read what it is doing and can do to affect us and change our understanding.
You often reflect on “absence” in dominant art histories. Can absence itself become a meaningful feminist strategy of presence or resistance?
Not at all! Resistance comes through being present, writing, creating, arguing, surviving, persisting. I do not have confidence that the feminist revolution of which I was a part since 1968 is being preserved, fully studied and remembered, understood in all its complexity and intellectual and artistic brilliance. It can become a category, an investment potential. For me it has always been a politics of practice and of knowledge. It is continuing and self-challenging and adapting and learning. The artists are always one-step ahead.
Feminism is now a memory, sometimes presented in distorted and reductive fashion. It has a very long history and dispersed geography. It was never one thing. It is a partner in continuously imagining how we might all live together, all living forms, in dignity and safety from violence and impoverishment of spirit and bodily life. This is very urgent. Those called men and those prepared to be the women that patriarchal cultures design and the violently police must be challenged to realize that this a moment of choice for humanity and life on this planet itself. Capitalism is still a force that has not been tamed for life, and we see this is an obscenity of the divisions of wealth and poverty , greed and indifference on this planet. Feminism, art and thought are partners in this continuing struggle.
Interview Series: Climate Crisis in Cinema: Rewriting the Planet’s Story Through Visual Narratives
Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Cinema & Media Arts Professor of English | German, Russian, and East European Studies Vanderbilt University
Cinema and the Anthropocene
In Inhospitable World, you explore how cinema functions not only as a medium of representation but also as a site of environmental struggle and aesthetic refusal. How do you think cinema—especially narrative cinema—responds to the epistemological and material challenges of the Anthropocene?
Narrative cinema, as opposed to documentary, responds to the Anthropocene in a few different ways. And, of course, much depends on how the Anthropocene is defined as a political and environmental crises, historical phenomenon, and/ or cultural logic. I’ve been interested in narrative films that thematize anthropogenic weather and pointedly artificial environments, on one hand, and others that bring to the fore, as a matter of design, massive infrastructure projects such as mega-dams, highways, big agriculture (to name a few) that have altered, profoundly and at a planetary level, the surface of the earth and the movement of water, animals, and people. There are contemporary narrative films that respond to the Anthropocene thematically by taking up plots about climate change. But there are others that can be more interesting to study that set fictional stories against backdrops in which the forces of the Anthropocene are on display, but not at the forefront of the story.
And we can also study fiction films made in studios, long before the Anthropocene was discovered, that thematize weather and atmosphere as designed or artificially produced rather than naturally given. Sometimes this is obvious in the plotting or a matter of knowing production history. This idea of artificial or anthropogenic weather, “nature,” and world have always been at the center of narrative films where the need to control and reproduce environmental conditions is paramount to efficient production, perhaps especially when, in the film, the effect is supposed to look contingent and natural. In this way, we can see designed environments (including calamitous weather) as an aesthetic practice of cinema that is connected to the cultural forces and impacts that give rise to Anthropocene conditions.
The term “inhospitability” that you foreground resonates with the unlivable conditions of both planetary ecosystems and cinematic spaces. How does this notion help us understand the aesthetic or ethical function of discomfort in environmental film?
Inhospitality is meant to describe a few things. First, it refers to the world of the Anthropocene that is increasingly unlivable to most Holocene life. I focus on the 20 th century and period of the Great Acceleration in which the explosive rise of consumer capitalism and visions of a “good life” in the mostly white western world destroy the environmental conditions on which all life on the planet are predicated. Cinema is complicit with this culture of accumulation.
Historically Hollywood films have advertised images of “the good life” to spectators all over the world to imitate, and cinema is, for the most part, a resource-intensive entertainment in all phases of production, distribution, and exhibition, whether as celluloid projected in the theater or as streaming content. But this also an artform that sheds light on the climate catastrophe. The world we see projected on screen represents and may mirror the one we inhabit. Thus, cinema offers a way of viewing our world at a remove from which we may contemplate the relationship between a pattern of life and the natural resources or petrochemicals that give rise to it.
Second, hospitality speaks to the ethical relationship between guests and hosts, of who welcomes whom. Inhospitality gestures to a refusal of these terms, and not only between people. Hospitality between people presumes that the earth is a home to the lifeforms that have evolved here. The earth’s hospitality is no longer assured. Finally, I am interested in the world of the film and the image. What does it mean to take up residence in an image? Are there forms of environmentally-minded cinema that refuse that invitation? Other films may welcome us to an image where we may not find a place for living in the world.
How might film’s aesthetic choices—such as composition, sound, duration—contribute to either revealing or concealing ecological fragility?
Cinema is an aesthetic arrangement of material that viewers may not otherwise perceive or take the time to notice in the real world, and this goes for a range of phenomena people, animals, places, and environments. Cinema allows us to take another look and have a second or third thought about the things we see and hear; a film may give us a view on the world that exceeds or defamiliarizes human perception and attention. I am among scholars interested in so-called slow cinema, Tsai Ming-liang, Jia Zhang-ke, Kelly Reichart, to name just three directors with environmental attunements and a penchant for long takes that give us time to become absorbed in an image and its sounds and also to become curious about what is beyond the frame. At the same time, cinema may also keep the world and its crises from view. It all depends on who is conceiving of the film, controlling the camera, and making decisions about what film-goers get to see.
Genres and Forms
There is often a tension between mainstream cinema’s spectacular tendencies and its capacity to provoke ecological awareness. Do you believe that popular genres (sci-fi, disaster, thriller) are capable of engaging critically with the Anthropocene—or does this role fall more effectively to experimental or documentary forms?
Big-budget mainstream films may not take the political risks of documentary and experimental films, and so it makes sense to look beyond the cineplex for meaningful work about our climate crisis. But this is also where film criticism intervenes to consider how even seemingly apolitical or banal genre films are saying something worthy of attention. For example, I find the totally banal Geostorm to be kind of interesting as a post-apocalyptic film. The scenario is that the planet’s entire climate system has collapsed and is now regulated through satellites. When we encounter this post- apocalyptic world, however, it is exactly like the pre-apocalyptic world that brought about the catastrophe in the first place; i.e. the current world. Nothing has changed (not that any character remarks on this fact). And, thus, this silly genre film says something about climate catastrophe, a fantasy of geo-engineering, and a desire to maintain the unsustainable the status quo.
Are there particular films, auteurs, or cinematic practices that you believe manage to narrate environmental precarity without reducing it to cliché or moralism?
There are genres that I think of as having an environmental sensitivity if not sensibility. For example, film noir and its attraction to built environments, bad air, and desiccated urban spaces has deep connections to naturalism and pessimism in ways that show how urban worlds built for human life become unlivable for these characters who rarely survive the film. These are low-budget movies, often shot on location, and feature characters who want but who cannot achieve the “good life” of consumer capitalism that is underwriting the Great Acceleration.
How do genre conventions affect how we conceptualize ecological time, space, and agency?
The film historian and theorist Karl Schoonover is currently writing about auteurs like Max Ophüls and Douglas Sirk in terms of their attention to soot and waste (Ophüls) and the byproducts of petroleum—from plastic to make-up—that are everywhere in the mise- en-scene (Sirk). Another film scholar, Nadine Chan, researches the history of colonial cinema in Malayasia. Chan focuses on the relationship between colonial extraction and the educational films made for colonial subjects whose labor is being extracted along with the colony’s raw materials. Cinema both archives this process and participates in the colonial economy. Finally Brian Jacobson’s recent book The Cinema of Extractions considers how the form of early cinema, especially, is parallel to the raw materials and infrastructures on which cinema relies. If there are many early films about trains, to take just one example, it is because trains carry the materials needed for cinema.
Temporality, Scale, and Representation
The Anthropocene demands that we think across scales—geological, planetary, human. What role can cinema play in making “deep time” and slow violence perceptible to audiences who are accustomed to fast-paced storytelling?
No one film or even group of films alone can tackle a crisis that is so totalizing, planetary, and yet uneven in its signs and stresses. One challenge of representing the Anthropocene is that it is not reducible to a singular event so much as a “step change” in socio-economic activity that accumulates in impact and changes quickly in geological- scale time, but slowly in terms of human perception. Films that have attempted explicitly to illustrate the Anthropocene concept or thesis – such as The Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018) or Erde (2019)—can be a bit mystifying to viewers not already familiar with the nomenclature. The visual evidence is not always clear in its illustration. But these films do provide a kind of snapshot of resource extraction and resource depletion, the kinds of human labor and modes of living occurring all over the world that have reshaped the planet and changed its chemistry, with attention to those who suffer most to sustain a way of life in the wealthy global North. The films show us the uneven distribution of wealth and risk, and they move between the scales of satellite images of earth down to the microscopic. The scales of space find a rejoinder in strategies of representing deep time through stratigraphic layers of rock or ice. But the data that geologists use to make the case for a new epoch are not always the most compelling material for films (even if the evidence they produce can be breathtaking). There is also the threat of producing a generalized humanity as opposed to a particularized history of exploitation, racialized capitalism, and the uneven impacts of global warming. As numerous historians and anthropologist tell us, there is nothing inevitable about the way our climate culture has developed, and this is also a danger.
In what ways might film temporality challenge anthropocentric or progress-based narrative structures?
As a geological term, the Anthropocene is also a projection into a deep future. It is a concept that concerns not only the place of human history in the context of Earth’s 4.5 billion-year existence; it is also about the trace that human culture will have left on the planet millions and billions of years from now. The very question should have us consider the long legacy of modern industrial culture. What will be nested in the geological strata to announce that people once roamed this earth? Likely not the meaningful archives of literatures, laws, art, film, and history, but plastics, nuclear materials, and so-called “techno-fossils” discarded by wealthy nations in pursuit of an unsustainable, resource intensive, quality of life and an equally destructive and toxic property of war. A few geologists have proposed that the fallout from nuclear testing has already left a distinct mark all over the planet that could be the most distinct trace of the Anthropocene, since many of the radioactive materials are not “naturally” of this Earth. What is likely to remain in the geological record are not the artifacts we hold dear, but the refuse that capitalist culture discards along with the weapons that destroy us all. In its arresting opening scenes, Wall-E (2008) gives us one version of this future: a planet with abundant trash minus humans and all signs of natural life. How does a robot sort the significance of these remains? This will be the task of alien archeologists who visit our planet the deep future.
What dangers exist in making climate stories overly personal (e.g., through individual heroes or family dramas) or too abstract (e.g., anonymous data, satellite imagery)? Can cinema cultivate a collective emotional register—one that resists neoliberal optimism but still affirms the urgency of ecological care?
There are genres that I think of as having an environmental sensitivity if not sensibility. For example, film noir and its attraction to built environments, bad air, and desiccated urban spaces has deep connections to naturalism and pessimism in ways that show how urban worlds built for human life become unlivable for these characters who rarely survive the film.
What ethical obligations arise when filmmakers attempt to visualize planetary scale processes or speculative environmental futures?
It is a challenge to keep all of these data points in mind and hard not to feel utterly full of despair. So, it is important to find important stories of resistance and scenarios of world repair. We learn that our current state of disastrous ecology is not a natural progression of human life on earth, but a consequence of colonial land-grabs and the capitalist bid to turn the earth and many of its people into raw material and profitable commercial resources. Darwin’s Nightmare (2004) explores the ecology of Lake Victoria and the disastrous commercial cultivation of invasive species of Nile Perch in its waters. The trade in perch has led to a neo-colonial economy and massive extinction events in the world’s second largest fresh-water lake. Bacurau (2019) turns the table on who or what counts as an invasive species. Still Life (2006) and This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (2019) are movies of quiet but powerful protest against state-sponsored mega-dam constructions that force the relocation of everyone in the floodplain and submerge entire cultures under the devastating waters of “development.” There is no way to completely reverse the course of modern industry and rapacious capitalism, but we may glimpse visions of repair. Honeyland (2019) is one such vision where taking only what you need in moderation is the difference between life and death, not only of bee colonies, but of all life on the planet. If Hollywood once projected an image of the good life based on American style consumer capitalism, cinema can now show us a different way of living, a new version of “the good” in light of our entangled and differently endangered lives.
Narrative Language and Ethics
Do you think cinema must cultivate a new narrative grammar in the Anthropocene—one that goes beyond individual agency or resolution?
Cinema, like the Anthropocene by some accounts, is a product of the industrial revolution. The medium’s radical possibilities with regard to space and time are already attuned to the epochal rupture of the Anthropocene. Indeed, I think cinema is one of the best archives of the Anthropocene because it is so fully implicated in the industrial, cultural, racial, and colonial practices that have laid waste to the planet. It is also a medium that can, as I write above, shows us a vision and version of the world without us. How might cinematic ethics be redefined to account for nonhuman entanglements, multispecies justice, or posthuman subjectivity? While much of narrative cinema revolves around people and their psychology, cinema has long been celebrated as an optical medium that, like photography, flattens the ontology between humans, animals, and things, and that may allow us to see a world outside of our ideas and feelings for it. This is a theme in much classical film theory that cinema is a non-human if not post-human artform. By this I do not mean that the cinematic image is neutral. But this possibility for cinema means that it is possible to decenter or even eliminate altogether the human in the frame. There are few films—outside of nature documentaries and experimental films-that do this. But one way to think of film’s role with regard to multi-species justice is to simple look at other creatures, take in their mysteries, their separateness from us, on one hand, and our entanglement with them, on the other.
What risks do filmmakers face when trying to “represent” ecological devastation? Is there a line between visualizing collapse and aestheticizing it?
There is a risk in representing climate change that we see in more mainstream climate fiction and eco-disaster movies, such as The Day after Tomorrow (2004, dir. Roland Emmerich), The Road (2009, dir. John Hillcoat), and the Mad Max franchise. These are movies that frighten or distress us with the future loss of a familiar world and homey habitat: a projected future without nature. Rather than push us to reorder the status quo, they threaten with scenarios of its withdrawal. Rather than opening a portal to a new, and hopefully more just world, such dystopic projections want us to want things as they are, to prevent the current world from changing or disappearing. These films make us worry more about the big storm or unnamed event that wipes out the contemporary world. Some eco-disaster movies may even prevent us from seeing that the current state of the world – our giant coastal cities, monocrop agriculture, fossil-fueled mobility – is itself the environmental catastrophe.
Emotions and Audiences
Climate narratives often rely on affect—fear, hope, grief—to mobilize audiences. In your view, what role should emotion play in ecological cinema?
E. Anne Kaplan has written about how climate disaster movies can prompt a form of pre- traumatic stress. These are symptoms viewers suffer not from the violent past, but, proleptically, from the future as it is envisioned on film. In immersive and alarming detail, these eco-disaster movies confront us with a version of a future human subject in motivate viewers to prevent that future ecological collapse, they also keep the emergency in the present from view. As I write above, the petro-cultures and habits of global North consumerism (these are shorthand terms for larger and historically longer phenomena) are the catastrophes. An alternative to this narrative tendency may be found (to provide just one example) in the films of Tsai Ming-liang, a master auteur for the Anthropocene, and not only because he features inclement weather, failing infrastructure, and epidemiological emergencies in his films (I have written about Tsai’s work in the edited collection What is Film Good For?). Tsai’s queer narrative arcs and long-take slow cinema reveal characters living in a post-apocalyptic world of the present. The catastrophe has arrived, and its effects are already felt, especially by those living on the economic and social margins of Taipei and Kuala Lumpur. Lingering with these people who hardly speak—they convey themselves by the way they walk, gesture, cough, eat—we come to care for them and the conditions that render their world unlivable. Rather that mourn the loss of the world to come, his films may bid us to pause and to consider leaving behind all that was already unwelcoming to these characters, a world we should not want to preserve or carry with us beyond the catastrophes of our current moment.
What dangers exist in making climate stories overly personal (e.g., through individual heroes or family dramas) or too abstract (e.g., anonymous data, satellite imagery)? Can cinema cultivate a collective emotional register—one that resists neoliberal optimism but still affirms the urgency of ecological care?
I think long form documentary, for those with the patience to watch it, can be such a powerful re-set. One film I especially admire is Frederick Wiseman’s Zoo (1993). Today we are in the midst of what several researchers label the Sixth Mass Extinction. Half of the species on Earth are experiencing rapid population declines as a result of human activities, or what one 2023 study in Biological Reviews calls “Anthropocene defaunation.” Zoos and national parks are the few places designated for animal welfare and species management. Wiseman’s observational documentary takes place in the Miami Zoo, celebrated for its new, more natural habitats and limited use of cages. We learn about complex care for animals, the artifice of their surroundings, and the curious ways that wild, domestic, and feral animals are labeled and handled. As an enclosure separated from the rest of the city or the natural world, the zoo resembles a theme park and a film studio. It is as if each species of animal has its own fake backdrop. Wiseman takes us behind the scenes of this institution, which is the last refuge for many species. I find this film deeply sad and, at the same time, so frank about the conditions of animals and humans living in a second nature. It made me curious about scenarios of re-wilding, on one hand, and the ways that nature, animals, and people are partitioned and, in many ways, lonely.
Interview Series: Eco-Media Dialogues: Climate, Culture, and Critical Communication
Based on the Book Apocalyptic Authoritarianism
In your book, you introduce the term “apocalyptic authoritarianism.” What led you to develop this concept, and how do you see it shaping media narratives around the climate crisis?
Critical scholars of social change often refer to particularly influential ruptures or events in historical time as “critical junctures” or “hot moments”, within which there is the opportunity to both challenge the status quo and imagine different societal relations and more equitable political structures, as well as the profound risk of falling back onto traditional structures of power and simplified narratives that deepen as opposed to upend existing inequities. The year 2016 in the US—where I am originally from and was living at the time—certainly felt like a very “hot moment” where a lot was in flux, and this heat hasn’t come close to letting up with yet another highly fraught Trump electoral victory in November 2024.
In place of uncovering and combatting Trump’s authoritarian aspirations head-on, however, in this “hot moment” of heightened national anxieties, I found that US news reports and commentaries opted for an apocalyptic rendering that obscured—as opposed to illuminated—what was going on. It became difficult to distinguish one catastrophe from another, let alone remember and keep track of each specific assault on democracy that merged into one indecipherable throng of disarray. And within this reported disarray, simplified narratives came to steer news media coverage. Through these simplified narratives, traditional figures of power were positioned as “visionary sages” that needed to be followed in order to return the US back to its supposed previous steady state. Conversely, young progressives who questioned these traditional figures and who demanded more transformative change were cast as destabilizing forces that needed to be stopped for the sake of the nation. It’s here where, in my new book, I identified a new mode of reactionary politics that I’ve called “apocalyptic authoritarianism” to describe the reactionary posturing and political alignment of historically privileged figures transcendent of the partisan center and right who are united through a common enemy of the so-called “new” New Left and a shared appeal to apocalyptic visions of “total crisis.” According to this reactionary logic, only “traditional” authorities and “pro-American” saviors can bring back order by eliminating all “unruly” Others leading the nation astray and away from the US’s exceptional and supposedly God-ordained and glorious destiny. In my book, I show how many mainstream news stories and commentaries on climate change—which for the first time was extensively picked up and covered by the US press in the late-2010s—was subsumed within this “total crisis” narrative. In turn, climate journalism in the US began to entrench as opposed to question the reactionary currents of apocalyptic authoritarianism.
Many climate stories in mainstream media carry a nostalgic tone, often idealizing the past. How do you think this framing impacts society’s perception of the crisis? Does it discourage meaningful action?
Yes, notably, at the center of the US climate beat today are nostalgic memories of America’s yesteryears that have been especially brought forward in news stories, images, and commentaries since 2016 to, in part, provide a clearer sense of direction amid the perceived “total crisis” of the present. National myths of grandeur, exceptionalism, and dominion are reactivated and used to orient the news media’s interpretation of unfolding events. Significantly, there is an evident desire for a return to an imagined post-World War II “golden age” in particular—which is a period when many Americans imagine that the US was at its pinnacle of global power.
It is not inconsequential that this romanticized postwar period pre-dates the Civil Rights movement and radical, pro-democracy politics of the late-1960s. This pre-Civil Rights, early postwar era was a period when historically privileged figures were on more solid ground in the US. This privilege is precisely what young social and climate justice activists are again questioning today just like their progressive forbears, and also precisely what traditional centers of power are desperately trying to cling to, protect, and fortify once more. Ultimately, the rampant media fearmongering of climate justice activists across the US national press, concerningly, works in favor of an antidemocratic political project and it is often a deliberate strategy used to delay and obstruct any and all climate action by those with a stake in maintaining the status quo.
You note that climate reporting increasingly relies on “us versus them” framings. How does this affect democratic dialogue? Did you notice a specific shift in this narrative during the Trump era?
In my book, I show how via an “us versus them” media framing, there is a concerning concretization of the boundaries around who should and who should not be included in climate decision-making process and in American politics altogether. Young progressives—and especially young, progressive women of color such as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is a key champion of the Green New Deal— are clearly being Othered and delegitimized as dangerous and militant “Others” who should not be included in climate, party, or national deliberations. There is a growing consensus across the US national press from the center to the right that a “woke” or so-called “new” New Left is a de-stabilizing force that must be stopped. At the same time as these young, progressive women of color are being represented as threatening to national stability and impeding a return to “normalcy,” many news reports conversely celebrate green tech and market “fixes” developed by older, whiter, and more “moderate” and “reasonable” men as the “right” response to climate change, fully capable of steadying the ship and reorienting the nation back on to its previous course of Manifest Destiny. This demarcation of right and wrong responses to climate change via the disparagement of young women of color – a historically marginalized group in the US, and glorification of older white men – a historically privileged group in the US, is indicative of wider, patterns in U.S. media and political discourse following Trump’s 2016 election of which I refer to as apocalyptic authoritarianism.
Are issues like class, race, and geography sufficiently addressed in climate reporting today? What role can alternative or community-based media play in making these dimensions more visible?
My book shows how in the age of Trump, the most prominent news publications of record in the US are not sufficiently reckoning with issues of class, race, gender, and justice. And with the increasingly privatized enclosure of social media spaces, such as Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, coupled with the increased physical policing of progressive movements and gatherings on the ground, there are fewer and fewer alternative forums where these mainstream narratives can be countered and contested.
Climate journalism does not need to be like this. It can move beyond a nostalgic longing for an imagined national past and overt celebration of traditional figures of power. But despite notable efforts by a few climate media initiatives such as Covering Climate Now’s recently launched “89% Project”—which urges journalists to report on the 89% of people in the world who want strong, government-led climate policy programs like the Green New Deal, most major news publications still continue to cover the “climate story” with wary caution directed at protest movements and grassroots politics. A reimagined climate journalism capable of contending with and combatting apocalyptic authoritarianism must engage with as opposed to fear and fearmonger about radically democratic politics. This is an entirely possible as well as incredibly needed task that many community-based and local climate media outlets are already doing despite the many financial and political obstacles they face.
Media, Culture, and Activism
How should global media approach the climate crisis? Is it possible to reshape the language of news reporting? What does a critical climate communication framework offer as an alternative?
In the conclusion of my book, I detail some tangible proposals for how to begin this re-imaginative work. One thing is clear: apocalyptic authoritarians gain their legitimacy through the construction of a so-called “woke” and “extreme” contingent of leftist “radicals” who are blamed for present-day chaos. Fearmongering and dualisms of “us versus them” are used to legitimize antidemocratic dynamics of power and must be broken. A reimagined climate journalism capable of contending with and combatting apocalyptic authoritarianism, therefore, must center many different subjectivities, knowledges, and experiences in stories on climate change.
What role do artists, designers, and activists play in the visual narrative of the climate crisis? Can visual culture shift the way people engage with ecological issues?
A visual culture that moves away from apocalyptic renderings is crucial. Artists and activists can create more deeply contextualized images and can show how there are many possible responses to climate change proposed by lots of different people from diverse places. Different ways of visually representing climate change beyond an apocalypse can poke holes in the fantasies of would-be apocalyptic authoritarians. It’s here where the myth of a “silver-bullet” technological or green capitalist “fix” can be countered by alternative media and open more radically democratic pathways.
You work across media studies and environmental studies. What are the strengths and challenges of this interdisciplinary approach when thinking about the climate crisis?
An interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach that integrates and learns from different knowledges and experiences is essential. While it’s challenging to do this kind of work, all climate scholarship should be interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, I think!
What potential does digital media hold in the struggle for climate justice? Can alternative digital platforms or local media initiatives help reshape dominant narratives?
Local and digital media that actively reclaim spaces that are currently dominated by authoritarian figures and a wealthy and powerful few are needed now more than ever. It’s so important that we push back against the antidemocratic seizures of public forums for communication. We can and must push back. Many amazing activists and media-makers are already leading the way on this. It’s so crucial to support the work of independent and local media-makers, especially amid this boiling hot moment of antidemocratic and climate threats.
prcarnetworld.com 