M/F

We frequently hear that we are living in an “age of fear.” Fear is undoubtedly an increasing presence in our world: our modernity seems to be characterized by it. We know our lives to be precarious because we are exposed to stories of illness, poverty, misfortune, and death—and also because we are threatened by a polluted environment, a hectic financial market, an unpredictable climate, an often-absent health care system, the expropriation of human decisions, and so on.

Many of the fears we face today seem specific to the modern era. For instance, the fear of technology, or “technophobia,” arises with particular force in response to the rapid emergence of new machines and forms of communication, exchange, transportation, and representation typical of modernity. The fear of failure responds to the need to perform that affects social subjects under late capitalism and post-capitalism. As our identities are—at least apparently—no longer predetermined, the fear of lacking or losing a “true” self has become a preoccupation. At the same time, traditional fears remain, and are arguably enhanced. For example, the fear of enemies has become particularly acute in the midst of a global political climate leaning toward populism. The fear of the Other has been amplified in response to an increasingly diverse and integrated society, leading to new forms of oppression in turn. The fear of the unknown, which Thomas Hobbes identified as a driving force behind many human endeavors, continues to motivate us today while acquiring a new dimension. Conspiracy theories, mistrust of the medical establishment, social media bubbles, and the rapid spread of fake news all shape an era that has imagined itself more than once as “post-truth.” A fear of “fear itself,” which Franklin Roosevelt assured Americans was all they had to worry about the face of economic depression, seems more prevalent than ever as we confront the effect this widespread fear will have on our political system, culture, and economy.

Media at once amplify these fears and elicit new ones. From film to video games, from manuscripts to social networks, our media bear testimony to the fears that substantiate our lives by acting as both representation and arena for confronting them. At the same time, fear targets media. New media forms have been implicated in the spread of misinformation, conspiracy theories, social isolation, narcissism, and the loss of privacy, leading to what Kirsten Drotner has termed “media panic.” As both purveyors and objects of fear, media rework and reshape fears and our response to them.

This conference will embark on an archeology of fear and its mediations from a global perspective. We will investigate how the nature, objects, forms, representations, and dynamics of fear emerge across different places and times, and how these have converged into the major trends in the world today. Our goal is both to identify the major sources of our contemporary fears and their genealogies, and also to analyze how such fears work on us, thank and through media, thereby affecting social, political, and personal behavior.

Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s distinction between anxieties—which do not have a specific object—and fear—which is always a fear of something—we want to probe the objects of our fears. What kinds of objects induce and elicit fear, and why do certain objects seem particularly threatening and terrifying at specific times? How do we classify worry, concern, fright, horror, panic, and terror? In what different degrees, scales, and intensities can fear exist, and when does fear transform into something else? How do contemporary fears—of oil spills, school shooters, Russian hackers, or global warming—tap into historical bogeymen such as deluge, monsters, double agents, and hellfire? How do the particulars of local cultural expression trouble the notion of fear as a human universal?

We will also question the very impulse to control or quell our fears. Fear fuels mechanisms of social control that can become a paranoid and vicious cycle. From medication to distraction, from illusion to “self-help,” we have found many ways to ignore, abate, and overcome our fears. How can we cope with fear in ways other than avoiding it or its objects? What are the political stakes of changing our responses to fear; might we thus challenge what Gilles Deleuze terms a “society of control,” as well as its role in the formation of our subjectivities?

Fear has been studied as a phenomenon of culture, psychology, politics, history, sociology, and many other areas; it is understood quite differently in these distinct fields. We will borrow strategies from across these disciplines as well as from media studies, semiotics, cognitive and neural sciences, biology, political science, and economics, in an attempt to bring these fields into productive dialogue with one another. We will also engage in comparative studies of different regional narratives and geographies of fear—where and when does fear strike? Which fears are deeply local, peculiarly transnational, or seemingly universal?

M/F: Mediating Fear, Fearing Media is an initiative led by Marijeta Bozovic, Francesco Casetti, Marta Figlerowicz, Ayesha Ramachandran, and Carolyn Jacobs at Yale University.