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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

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Theorizing presents:

Anna McCarthy
NYU/Annenberg scholar-in-residence

"Cyranoids and Screen Performance"

November 7 6 p.m. Kelly Writers House 3805 Locust Walk

In 1984, shortly before his death, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments with what he called cyranoids. "Cyranoids," Milgram wrote, "are people who do not speak thoughts originating in their own central nervous system. Rather, the words that they speak originate in the mind of another person who transmits these words to the cyranoid by means of a radio transmitter." In constructing his cyranoids, Milgram's often paired individuals of different sex, age, educational, and socioeconomic backgrounds, enlisting unwitting individuals to interact with them in social settings. These hybrid selves, he speculated, were an experimental tool that could be used to test the limits of perception and personality, the relationship between embodiment and inhibition, and the durability of concepts of self in the process of social interaction. In this talk, I ask whether a reconstructed version of Milgram's cyranic paradigm might provide a template for thinking about some undertheorized aspects of screen performance, particularly in instances that distinguish televisual mode of address from those of other media: cue card reading, televangelism, the pledge drive, and George W. Bush's presidential addresses, among others.

Anna McCarthy is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Cinema Studies at NYU, and Co-Editor of the journal Social Text. She is author of Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Duke University Press, 2001) and coeditor of the anthology Media/Space: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age (Routledge, 2004). Her work in film and television history and theory includes articles in October, Journal of Visual Culture, GLQ, Montage/AV and the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Her current research traces fantasies of governing by television in the postwar U.S.

Co-sponsored by the Annenberg School of Communication, the Graduate Group in Comparative Literature and The Kelly Writers House.

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