Guiding Questions for Roundtable Discussions

SECTION 1: FEAR/MEDIA/MEDIATION

The connections between media and fear are multifaceted and multilayered. First of all, fears are a content of media: the latter represent the former, appropriating them from the everyday, and at the same time transforming them into something that fits the formats and narrative of media themselves. Media spread the fears they represent, leading them to become topics for the public sphere. Media can also be fearsome objects: their presence and relevance within society, as well as the functions they fulfill, can look detrimental (cinephobia in early decades of the 20th Century is a good example). Finally, fear deals not only with media, but also generally with mediation. Fear is a way of facing—but also of coming to term with—oneself, the world, and others. It is a way of negotiating what surround us and understanding ourselves. In this perspective, while deeply based on the being there of the beings, and on the care for what it is there (Heidegger), fear reveals the “dark face” of this being-there (the entities in the world can always be detrimental) and of this taking care (the concern is a form of interest, but also a form of anxiety). It speaks of the intrinsic risk of every relationship.  

Against this backdrop, how do arts, literature, and architecture deal with fear, today?  Do they provide a mirror of the social fears, or some forms of protection? Do they represent a moment of reflexivity or complicity with the current “economy of fear”?

(Francesco Casetti)

SECTION 2: MEDICAL/BODY/SELF

Fear emerges amid feedback loops between the individual body and consciousness, their surrounding environments—including the immediate object of one’s fear—and a broader cultural background of cultural norms, habits, and expectations. To look for a point of origin or authenticity within these loops—or a clear distinction between content and media—often proves futile. We fear the unknown, but also represent the unknown to ourselves in all-too-familiar ways. Our bodies may exceed our conscious control, but they are partly shaped by the environments we co-create; the language through which we express and reflect on our fear is often idiosyncratic, but never purely of our own making. One might be tempted, at this juncture, to throw up one’s hands and declare fear’s unknowability—or else arbitrarily to espouse some cultural, linguistic, or physiological essentialism. What alternative approaches exist between these extremes? And what can our attitudes toward, and explanations of, fear, tell us about our implicit ontologies, epistemologies, and politics?

(Marta Figlerowicz)

SECTION 3: CATASTROPHE/ CATASTROPHIZING 

A catastrophe is defined as an event causing great and often sudden damage or suffering, a disaster; catastrophizing, as the tendency to imagine the worst possible outcome of a given situation or event, to irrationally expect and fear a catastrophic outcome. How do media—ranging from medieval music notation to recent soccer fan club graffiti—conjure the specter of looming catastrophe? Whom does catastrophizing serve, and how does it shape or reshape the catastrophizing mind, the media that inspire and participate in its spread, as well as formation of communities of various sizes and geographic spreads? What relationship do such imaginaries posit between the present as the past, not to mention the (frightening) future? Are particular media especially prone to, or effective at, imagining and spreading news of looming disaster? Is there a counter to catastrophizing? The last three decades, with the advent of the world wide web and the more recent ubiquity of social media as the Web 2.0, have witnessed a remarkable in change in the widespread perception of these new technologies: from the representation—by other, news, media as well as in art, fiction, and film—as inherently emancipatory and linked to future possibilities of direct democracy, to the increasingly pervasive fear that democracy will not survive the internet. This panel will explore the long and diverse durée of such fears of media, and of our mediated imaginaries of disaster.

(Marijeta Bozovic)

SECTION 4: POLITICS/MEMORY/REMEDIATION

How does fear—as an amorphous, unregulated, but frequently manipulated force—shape the political world? Can fear be harnessed to specific political ends, or does it inevitably escape efforts to contain and deploy it? How is it mediated by the state, the military, state bureaucracies, social organizations, and news outlets? If fear emerges out of the potential for unpredictable outcomes and unanticipated consequences, does good governance also entail the management of fear on a civic and social plane?

The spread of fear is often described as an epidemic. Yet such broad metaphors belie the particular shapes it takes in different genres and media of expression, as well as the difference a given fear's histories make to its transmission. The memory of fear can shape collective trauma on large socio-political scales, affecting political systems, precipitating mass migration and war, and creating new policies and laws. Its various remediations render it amorphous and omnipresent, but also give its objects an odd, frequently misleading sense of knowability and particularity. How is a resurrected fear different from a new one--and indeed, is there really such a thing as a new fear? What politically significant differences exist between our various media and genres of fear's transmission, and can one make use of these differences in a productive, reflexive way?

(Ayesha Ramachandran)