Irina Kalinka, Ph.D.

Micro Introduction Talk:

"Local Politics, Digital Media, and the Public Good" 

at Brown University (5min)

Read the Pilot Article for the Book Here:

The Political Imaginary of User Democracy

Public Culture 37.1, 39-59.

Book Project Talk:

"The Political Imaginary of User Democracy" 

at Columbia University (45min + Q&A)

Publications

The Political Imaginary of User Democracy

Public Culture 37.1, 39-59.

Does digital media revitalize or undermine democracy? This essay makes the case that this popular debate obscures another crucial development: tech corporations design and promote their own normative understanding of democracy through the services they oversee. The result is the political imaginary of user democracy. User democracy is a technocratic understanding of politics, valorizing data, automation, predictability, and systematization. Under this paradigm, digital public–political life is imagined as operational and thus potentially programmable. Democracy becomes popularly framed as a project of technological optimization and management by a technocratic elite. 

By contrast, this essay argues for an emancipatory understanding of democracy, which emphasizes that popular sovereignty is not an object to be facilitated by unaccountable tech monopolies from above, but a continuous struggle to build collectivity from below. This essay situates user democracy amid a change in the self-;understanding of tech corporations, as they move away from presenting themselves as mere facilitators to increasingly embrace the role of governing powers. The author analyzes public speeches and leaked internal memos from the tech sector together with tech-;corporate social-;responsibility campaigns, such as YouTube's efforts to diversify the results of its search algorithm and Meta's decision to downrank content labeled “political” altogether.

Reading in Dark Times:

Toward a Queer Politics of Repair. 

Media Theory 7.1. 125-146 (2023).

The essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’ by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997; 2003) has been frequently cited as a foundational text of post-critique, especially in literary and queer theory. In this article, I make the case for reparative reading as a consciously political project, inspired by Sedgwick’s deep commitment to making oppositional strategy, and bring this understanding in critical conversation with examples of its uptake during the post-critical “reparative turn” in the Humanities. 

I further posit that Sedgwick was already engaging in such reparative projects even before she explicitly theorized this practice through a close-reading of her 1991 article ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.’ My overarching argument is that reparative reading, while at times misappropriated, can still provide the foundation for a larger project of queer repair – a prefigurative politics of the imagination.

If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable.

This project rejects such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together by technology, and instead, proposes that ‘community’ is best understood as a negative and inoperative phenomenon in conversation with Lacanian psychoanalytic feminism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community. Though the two understandings of community discussed here are ultimately different, they both emphasize a structuring absence, a void at the heart of social relations, leading to a rejection of the politics of communal essence and wholeness. Together, they articulate a critique of what I see as the main danger of platform capitalism's insistence on its specific vision of community: the foreclosure of a dimension of generative antagonism and of an opening for the unexpected, for ‘the political’ (le politique). While the dimension of ‘the political’ can never be fully foreclosed, the efforts of platform capitalism nonetheless alienate us from experiences of community understood as negative presence and thus as an ongoing work-in-progress and common responsibility.