About this Episode

In this episode, we unpack the distinction between the social agent—the consistent character we present to others—and the human being: the universal character-playing machine that runs it. The video explores how society encourages character consistency while masking our underlying capacity for behavioural diversity. Drawing on Erving Goffman's phrase—"the bureaucratisation of spirit"—we consider how social roles become fixed, how character predictability facilitates social cooperation and how personal diversity is often sacrificed in favour of social coherence. What do we stand to lose and gain when we accept the habitual conflation of the social agent with the human being?

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.

Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series

PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

References

- Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. London: Routledge, 2011.

- de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. London: Vintage Books, 2011.

- Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.

- Ranković, Miloš. “Something like thinking, that is, intervenes.” Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/5879590/_Som....

- Santayana, George. Cited in Erving Goffman, _The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life_. London: Penguin, 1990.

- Shakespeare, William. _As You Like It_. Edited by H. J. Oliver. London: Penguin, 2015.

About this Episode

In this introductory video for Chapter 6, The Holographic Human: A Romance of Many Dimensions, we begin a speculative exploration into what it means to be a character-playing human being, beyond the limits of social identity. Drawing inspiration from Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland and holography, this episode lays the groundwork for a deeper distinction between the social agent and the human being. What happens when we mistake a flattened social identity for the full complexity of self? How might a holographic model of the human being invite new ways of understanding character, selfhood, and personal multiplicity?

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.

Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series

PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

Tallulah Bankhead Performance Sketch

References

- Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. London: Penguin, 1998.

- Thorpe, Jerry. “The Celebrity Next Door.” The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, Season 1, Episode 2. CBS, 3 December 1957. Image source: https://papermoonloveslucy.tumblr.com...

About this Episode

What does it mean to do research “in character”? In this concluding episode of Chapter 5, we explore how different internal personas—like the academic, the runner, the cynic, or the dreamer—might shape the kind of knowledge we produce. Extending the well-known concept of research positionality beyond the social agent, this video asks: what if the diversity of self within a single human being could enrich academic inquiry, just like diversity across a community does?

Through a critical reflection on authorship, epistemology and performance practice, this video proposes that acknowledging and even inviting inner character diversity could improve the rigour and scope of research.

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.

Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series

PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

References

- Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.

- Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

- Crawford, Kate, and Trevor Paglen. “Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets.” September 19, 2019. https://excavating.ai.

- de Lange, Catherine. “Know Yourself.” New Scientist, May 21, 2022, 42–45.

- Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane, 2021.

- Gross, Rachel E. Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022.

- Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.

- Ranković, Miloš and Slavica. “Art in the Time of Contractions.” MIDIRS Midwifery Digest 24, no. 4 (December 2014): 536–38.

- Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

About this Episode

This episode explores how the character adopted during a process of research or writing unconsciously influences the kind of knowledge that that process can produce. The video asks: Who is really doing the writing in academic contexts? And how does the character of scholarly rigour sometimes produce unintended outcomes?

This chapter continues the exploration of a “politics of inner self,” highlighting the momentum and blind spots that even supposedly neutral character frames can carry. Performance, art, authorship and critique intersect here in a candid analysis of the forces shaping knowledge production.

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.

Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series

PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

References

- Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

- Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.

- Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

- Ranković, Katarina. “The Shape of a Thinking Thing.” In Goldsmiths PhD Art Publication, edited by Marie-Alix Isdahl, Dani Smith and Nina Wakeford. Independently published in an edition of 500, 2021.

- Samanani, Farhan. How to Live with Each Other: An Anthropologist’s Notes on Sharing a Divided World. London: Profile Books, 2022.

- Wolfram, Stephen. A New Kind of Science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002.

About this Episode

In this video, we explore the classification of character types through the lens of performative research, culminating in a new distinction: tethered versus tangential characters. How do different characters within us get assigned power, expression time, or even social legitimacy? From early taxonomies like “fictional vs real” to “dominant vs subordinate,” this episode investigates how we unconsciously manage our inner diversity—and what happens when one character dares to speak back.

Through an experimental letter written by a rarely-expressed character to her more dominant counterpart, we witness a confrontation with the very politics of selfhood. What does it mean for a character to be tethered to social expectations, while others are allowed to emerge freely, if briefly, in artistic space?

This episode is a continuation of Chapter 5: Classes of Character and a Politics of Inner Self from the Scripting for Agency series.

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.

Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series

PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

References

- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. J. W. Burrow (London: Penguin, 1985).

- Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Vintage, 2011).

- David L. Stern, “The Genetic Causes of Convergent Evolution,” Nature Reviews Genetics 14 (2013): 751–64. doi:10.1038/nrg3483.

- Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh, “The Coloniality of Planting: Legacies of Racism and Slavery in the Practice of Botany,” _The Architectural Review_, 27 January 2021. https://www.architectural-review.com/....

- Chief Seattle, “Chief Seattle’s Speech,” Suquamish Tribe website. https://suquamish.nsn.us/home/about-u....

About this Episode

In this first episode of Chapter 5 in Scripting for Agency, we dive into a performance experiment that stages an internal dialogue between two distinct characters—both played by the artist. What begins as a performance exercise quickly reveals a power dynamic between dominant and subordinate aspects of the self. Through this improvised conversation, the video explores questions of character hierarchy, expressive scarcity and the ethics of inner multiplicity. Can multiple selves coexist equitably? And what does it mean to manage the soul-space of the self?

In this video, theory, performance and philosophy converge in an improvised seance of identity and agency. While this section describes the performance experiment, Section 5.1b will discuss its implications.

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-seriesPhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

Politics of Inner Self

References

- Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

- Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. London: Penguin, 1990.

About this Episode

In this opening to Chapter 5, we explore Elif Shafak’s “choir of discordant voices” as a model for understanding the self—not as a unified whole, but as a dynamic society of competing characters. Drawing on Shafak’s metaphor of inner governance, this episode introduces the idea that not all characters within us are equal, and that their interplay reflects social and cultural hierarchies.

We begin with a performance experiment that first revealed the unequal status of characters in Katarina's own practice, and use this to propose a new framework: a politics of inner self. This theory offers a way to think critically about identity, authorship, and the internal distribution of agency. Who gets to speak? Who gets silenced? And which character gets to even think up this thesis?

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.

Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series

PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

References

- Butler, Samuel. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Edited by Henry Festing Jones. London: A. C. Fifield, 1912.

- Shafak, Elif. Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing. London: Penguin, 2013.

- Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.