During Dopamine

This talk examines disparate phenomena like Mark Carney’s unexpected political appeal and the exaggerated “Russian lip flip” trend among social media influencers to argue that contemporary politics and digital culture thrive on dopamine-driven attraction — fleeting, addictive sensations that bypass critical engagement. Just as dopaminic media appeals, so too does it foreclose the capacity to launch an appeal. As such, we contend that framing dopamine as the primary source of pleasure reinforces a (n)eurocentric discourse, obscuring the broader political and technological forces shaping the dynamics of dopaminic doldrums. By exposing the assumptions required to treat dopamine as a self-evident explanatory locus, we suggest that its dominance in technocultural discourse stems not only from its role as a cause but also as a symptom of deeper (and stranger) structures.

This talk is adapted from a chapter of our short book manuscript BAD Media, which we’ve written as a provocative exploration of the ways contemporary media technologies mediate — and are mediated by — our lived experiences, reshaping reality in unsettling and often unrecognizable ways. The essay (and the book more broadly) is written as a guide to a register of contemporary techno-brutality that is hiding in plain sight: in the petty frustrations of 2fas and pop-ups, the seduction of wooden technocrats and the relentlessly interruptive silence of smartphones. In short, as AI, algorithmic governance, and neuropolitics accelerate, we aim to provide a vocabulary for the creeping sense that nothing coheres — and that this incoherence is the system working as designed.

Katherine Behar is Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is an interdisciplinary artist and media theorist whose work interrogates digital culture through feminism and materialism. Behar is the author and editor of several books, including "Object-Oriented Feminism" (University of Minnesota Press). Her solo exhibition catalogs include Data’s Entry | Veri Girişi (Pera Museum) and E-Waste (Tuska Center for Contemporary Art). Ack! Knowledge! Work!, an expanded catalog for her critically-acclaimed solo exhibition at the Beall Center for Art + Technology, is forthcoming from punctum books.

David Cecchetto is Professor of Critical Digital Theory at York University (Toronto). David is founding co-editor of the "Proximities: Experiments in Nearness" book series (University of Minnesota Press) and is past President (2020-2024) of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. He is author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles, including "Listening in the Afterlife of Data" (Duke UP, 2022), "Ludic Dreaming" (Bloomsbury, 2017), and "Humanesis" (Minnesota, 2013). David performs and records as part of the musical group Bitstance. davidcecchetto.net

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Philosophical Technologies (CPT).

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