Urbana Campus Research Calendar (OVCRI)

This presentation grows out of Hay’s critical reassessments of the McLuhanist legacy of “media studies” in the current technological regime of Smart Objects and Hong’s recent interest in Actor Network Theory as a lens for rethinking the assumptions and objectives in research about fandom, in “qualitative” methods in Audience Studies, and in studies about the role of media in political mobilization.

“Liberal objects” refers both to the material things (such as screen devices, instruments for self-administering health, toys, doorbells, kitchen and household tools, self-tracking tools) through which liberalism has been and is performed in daily life and to these objects’ relation to the changing objectives and rationalities of liberalism. Hay and Hong draw the term, liberal objects, partly from the proposals advanced explicitly and implicitly by historians of 19th century liberalism such as Chris Otter (2007) and Patrick Joyce (2003), who rethink the early history of liberalism through the material performativity and operationalization of its post-Enlightenment governmental rationalities and liberties. The panel’s title also is informed by Michel Foucault’s histories of liberal subjectivity and governmentality, Bruno Latour’s rumination about a “ding politik” (2005) and Thomas Lemke’s proposal for coordinating Science and Technology Studies and Governmentality Studies to examine “the government of things” (2021).

Hay’s contribution to the presentation revisits his earlier account of everyday, “smart” household appliances (2018), the fraught everydayness of the face mask during the COVID pandemic (2021, 2023), and the long and recent history of wearable measuring devices (forthcoming) as liberal objects. He will discuss the current generation of META eyewear through this genealogy.

Hong examines the K-pop light sticks as a contemporary liberal object, demonstrating how governance today increasingly operate through collective affect. Widely used in concerts and recently repurposed in South Korean protest movements, light sticks coordinate bodies through networked technologies, bridging consumption, fandom, and dissent through synchronization and improvisation.

Together, these two parts of the presentation suggest that liberal objects are not only technologies of governance, but material instruments/mediums through which liberal subjects are shaped via practices of self-discipline, automation, political participation, and collective affect.

James Hay is a Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Acting Head of the Department of Media & Cinema Studies  https://media.illinois.edu/hay-james/

Yewon Hong is PhD student in the Institute of Communications Research  https://media.illinois.edu/yewon-hong/

Please feel free to bring a brown bag lunch!