Andrey V. GASILINInstitute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences, Russian Academy of Science
3, Dmitry Ulyanov ul., Moscow, Russian Federation, 119333
Research Associate
e-mail: yottolk@gmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0003-2271-0399
Between Comics and Protest. The Genesis of Anonymous Identity in Modern MediaAbstract: The research is dedicated to the genesis of a special type of identity, represented in the modern media environment in the figure of an “Anonymous” and conventionally designated by the author as "anonymous identity". The article explores the logic of the formation and development of anonymous identity within the framework of a dystopian narrative, on the material of the graphic novel "V for Vendetta" and the movie of the same name by James McTeigue. The author reveals close relationship of anonymous identity with the problem of the fundamental inexpressibility of the camp experience of some former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, noted by several researchers of the Holocaust tragedy, and at the same time with a special type of transgression, associated with the archaic cultures of death masks. Anonymous identity is considered in this paper in three main forms of media representation: 1) graphic novel, 2) movie and 3) news broadcasts. The author insists on principal inhuman quality of this image, which is associated not with the classical figure of the Other, inherent to the Existential and Psychoanalytic traditions, but with the figure of the Alien, arising in modern Posthuman studies and suggesting some kind of transcending beyond the human dimension. The author uses the physical metaphor of compression-explosion, as well as the biological metaphor of viral infection, to explain the dynamics of the development of the anonymous identity, and to show the ways in which artistic narrative of a modern graphic novel transforms into a political narrative of decentralized protest movements.
Key words: identity, death, Holocaust, transgression, masks, me-dia, anti-utopia, protest, Nothing, posthumanism.
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For Citation: Gasilin, A. Between Comics and Protest. The Genesis of Anonymous Identity in Modern Media. International Journal of Cultural Research, 3 (44). 18–34. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2021_3_18
DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2021_3_18
