Vincent Kancans
9 Pleasant St SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
The main research question guiding my dissertation project (Unraveling the Nostalgia for Magnetic Tape) has been the origin and outcome of the rapidly increasing contemporary interest in tape media, which is considered an ‘obsolete’ medium in western society. In other words, what are the psychic motivations for using and dwelling on tape, and how does this widespread individual nostalgia result in social change while also opening a critique of existing society?
My theory is that the individual and social worlds represented in tape, which in previous generations led to greater autonomy and self-actualization for ordinary citizens – especially home recording and the Walkman – appear as a utopian ‘past future’ in a world where people have much less control over digital media. In the past, the social phenomena around the consumption of then-new media led to moral panics because they troubled existing social norms and conflicted with the interests of the state and private institutions. In the present day, I argue that the nostalgic consumption of obsolete media, rather than being a reactionary fixation on the past as critics have often believed, is another form of resistance that holds open an alternative future. In either case, people may be (re)appropriating media to reclaim their individual time (Bergson's durée), which according to Max Horkheimer has been effaced under mass culture.*
My work combines several distinct and seemingly incompatible scholarly approaches such as literary theory, media archaeology, phenomenology, sound studies, and critical social theory. The broader, more speculative stakes of my project are resistance to grand narratives of technological progress and the maintenance of ‘past futures’ that hold out hope for a more open, sustainable, and humane relationship with media that reconciles people with each other and themselves – in other words, overcoming alienation.
*Stephen Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction, pg. 77.
Educational Background
- MA: Germanic Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 2020
- BA: German (summa cum laude, ΦΒΚ), University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 2015
Specialties
- media theory
- sound studies
- game studies (ludology)
- 20th-21st century German literature
- Soviet and East German literature, media, and history