Annie Ring
Annie Ring is Associate Professor in German and Film at University College London. Her research focuses on topics of surveillance and subjectivity in modern German and comparative culture, and she teaches German and comparative film, literature and philosophy.
She is the author of two monographs: After the Stasi, Bloomsbury 2015, paperback 2017, and The Lives of Others, BFI Film Classics, 2022. She is joint-editor with Kristin Veel and Henriette Steiner of the volume Architecture and Control (Brill, 2018) and contributing joint-editor with Daniela Agostinho, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Catherine D'Ignazio and Kristin Veel of the MIT glossary of cultural and computational keywords, Uncertain Archives (MIT 2021), which is forthcoming in Chinese translation. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming book Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture, edited by Annie with her UCL colleague Lucy Bollington, due to be published in Legenda’s Visual Cultures book series.
She received a prestigious Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2020-21 to work on the book she is currently writing on German cinema, surveillance and ‘the digital’.
Her other publications include articles on critical data studies, on Harun Farocki’s repurposing of film archives, Bartleby and Hito Steyerl, surveillance and complicity in German workplace documentaries, Kafka and pleasure, temperature and the spectatorship of pornography, and theories of the archive.
Prior to joining UCL, Annie held a research fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where she was also Director of Studies in German for the year 2013-14 and lectured and taught for the BA and MPhil degrees in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at University of Cambridge.
Annie is a member of the Uncertain Archives international research collective. She sits on on the steering group of the German Screen Studies Network, which aims to introduce UK audiences to German-language cinema. She is also on the editorial board of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory.
She is the author of two monographs: After the Stasi, Bloomsbury 2015, paperback 2017, and The Lives of Others, BFI Film Classics, 2022. She is joint-editor with Kristin Veel and Henriette Steiner of the volume Architecture and Control (Brill, 2018) and contributing joint-editor with Daniela Agostinho, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Catherine D'Ignazio and Kristin Veel of the MIT glossary of cultural and computational keywords, Uncertain Archives (MIT 2021), which is forthcoming in Chinese translation. She is also co-editor of the forthcoming book Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture, edited by Annie with her UCL colleague Lucy Bollington, due to be published in Legenda’s Visual Cultures book series.
She received a prestigious Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2020-21 to work on the book she is currently writing on German cinema, surveillance and ‘the digital’.
Her other publications include articles on critical data studies, on Harun Farocki’s repurposing of film archives, Bartleby and Hito Steyerl, surveillance and complicity in German workplace documentaries, Kafka and pleasure, temperature and the spectatorship of pornography, and theories of the archive.
Prior to joining UCL, Annie held a research fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where she was also Director of Studies in German for the year 2013-14 and lectured and taught for the BA and MPhil degrees in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at University of Cambridge.
Annie is a member of the Uncertain Archives international research collective. She sits on on the steering group of the German Screen Studies Network, which aims to introduce UK audiences to German-language cinema. She is also on the editorial board of Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory.
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Books by Annie Ring
Annie Ring analyses the film's cinematography, mise-en-scène and editing, tracing connections with Hollywood movies such as Casablanca and Hitchcock's Torn Curtain in the film's portrayal of an individual rebelling against a brutal dehumanising regime. Exploring the film's strong but much-disputed claims to historical authenticity, she examines the way the film tracks the world-changing political shift that took place at the end of the Cold War – away from the collective dreams of socialism and towards the dreams of the private individual. In doing so, she highlights why The Lives of Others is a crucial film for thinking at the horizon between film and recent world history.
Reading works of literature since German unification in the light of previously unseen files from the archives of the Stasi, After the Stasi uncovers how writers to the present day have explored collaboration as a challenge to the sovereignty of subjectivity. Annie Ring here interweaves close analysis of literary fiction and life-writing by former Stasi spies and victims with documents from the archive, new readings from literary modernism and cultural theories of the self. In its pursuit of the strange power of the Stasi, the book introduces an archetypal character in the writing of German unification: one who is not sovereign over her or his actions, but instead is compelled by an imperative to collaborate – an imperative that persists in new forms in the post-Cold War age.
Ring's study identifies a monumental historical shift after 1989, from a collaboration that took place in concert with others, in a manner that could be recorded in the archive, to the more isolated and ultimately less accountable complicities of the capitalist present. While considering this shift in the most recent texts by East German writers, Ring provocatively suggests that their accounts of collaboration under the Stasi, and of the less-than-sovereign subjectivity to which it attests, remain urgent for understanding the complicities to which we continue to consent in the present day.
This groundbreaking work offers an interdisciplinary perspective on big data and the archives they accrue, interrogating key terms. Scholars from a range of disciplines analyze concepts relevant to critical studies of big data, arranged glossary style—from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. They not only challenge conventional usage of such familiar terms as prediction and objectivity but also introduce such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm. The contributors include a broad range of leading and agenda-setting scholars, including as N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Johanna Drucker, Lisa Gitelman, Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts and Nicole Starosielski.
Uncertainty is inherent to archival practices; the archive as a site of knowledge is fraught with unknowns, errors, and vulnerabilities that are present, and perhaps even amplified, in big data regimes. Bringing lessons from the study of the archive to bear on big data, the contributors consider the broader implications of big data's large-scale determination of knowledge.
Peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters by Annie Ring
My way of viewing the film is guided by leading cultural theories of burnout and self-optimisation, particularly from German-language and German Studies contexts, and by more longstanding analyses of psychic responses to crisis, beginning with writing by Helmuth Plessner and Georg Simmel from the early twentieth century, when German-language philosophy contributed its most important insights into subjectivity in the modern age, and drawing on Helmut Lethen’s influential analysis of the stream of early-twentieth century German thought he terms Cool Conduct (1994). Against the background of these German philosophies of subjectivity in crisis, I draw out the entrainment of cool, calm, temperate conduct in the recipients of contemporary burnout therapy, and I argue for a rejection of the complicity of those therapies with new codes of cool conduct, which (among other things) restore the burnt-out worker’s health for the sake of further exhausting work. The training of a cool, profitable subject is made starkly visible by the screen aesthetic employed by Pethke, whose work of cold cinema generates images that are abrupt, laconic, empty and chilling in service of a powerful critique of the self-optimising subjectivity elicited by neoliberal economies after the Global Financial Crisis.
To study burnout from the perspective of languages and cultural studies means considering the subjectivity it interacts with: who gets to be burnt-out, and who can access therapeutic treatment? It also means analysing the language that has been developing alongside the syndrome, a language that both shapes the experience and treatment of burnout and can provide ways into critiquing the invidious problem whereby treatment does not cure the syndrome but rather exploits the patient’s recovery from it. In what follows, I therefore pay attention to the under-explored metaphors through which current therapeutic practices handle burnout, namely the metaphors of temperature endemic to the syndrome’s name. I approach these metaphors by means of cultural theories not only of burnout and self-optimisation, but also of coolness and subjective sovereignty, theories which can help us to understand the experiences, of individuality and often of isolation, the syndrome of burnout implies. In my close reading I demonstrate how Pethke’s film offers a valuable aesthetic response to the burnout epidemic, and by looking closely at the film in relation to theories of subjectivity in crisis, I propose a much-needed critical viewpoint on burnout, one capable of challenging the inhumanity underlying its causes and indeed much of its treatment in the present day.
Keywords: complicity, documentary, Harun Farocki, governmentality, Carmen Losmann, Panopticon, perversion, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (Gilles Deleuze), psychoanalysis, Security, Territory, Population (Michel Foucault), surveillance
Hands have a special role in this counterintuitive dynamic, working as they do between poles of sovereign self-possession and powerlessness. In the text hands make incomprehensible gestures; they are clothed in tight gloves and enticing excesses of skin; they also caress K. even as they punish him, giving rise thereby to sadomasochistic pleasures, especially between K. and Kafka’s other masculine characters. Drawing on psychoanalytic and queer theories, the essay sets out a critical framework to decipher the textual and fleshly complexities of K.’s case, and to consider the literary and material legacies of Kafka’s writing into the present day."
A number of instances of shame and shaming in the novella show up the violence suffered by Gabriela as exceeding her borders both literally, in her bodily wounds, and metaphorically, in the mimetic encounters that inform her sense of self. Contrasting her characterisation with the border-secure (and for Ruth Leys ‘anti-mimetic’) subject of recent shame theory, I show here how Hensel’s portrayal of this ashamed subject is integrally linked to her plotting of an urban topography. Her fictional flesh-city, Leibnitz, reflects in its excessive landscape the dissolution by violence of Gabriela’s subjective ‘surface’.
While Hensel depicts a cityscape of disintegrating borders, this does not mean that structures of violence disintegrate with them. There are few spaces of resistance in Hensel’s city, and Gabriela finds it difficult even to provide a testimony to her experience that is not bound up with the intervention of others. In this sense Hensel’s account of violence surpasses even that of Giorgio Agamben’s recent Holocaust testimony theory, thus posing an urgent challenge for situating her work within historical boundaries.
Annie Ring analyses the film's cinematography, mise-en-scène and editing, tracing connections with Hollywood movies such as Casablanca and Hitchcock's Torn Curtain in the film's portrayal of an individual rebelling against a brutal dehumanising regime. Exploring the film's strong but much-disputed claims to historical authenticity, she examines the way the film tracks the world-changing political shift that took place at the end of the Cold War – away from the collective dreams of socialism and towards the dreams of the private individual. In doing so, she highlights why The Lives of Others is a crucial film for thinking at the horizon between film and recent world history.
Reading works of literature since German unification in the light of previously unseen files from the archives of the Stasi, After the Stasi uncovers how writers to the present day have explored collaboration as a challenge to the sovereignty of subjectivity. Annie Ring here interweaves close analysis of literary fiction and life-writing by former Stasi spies and victims with documents from the archive, new readings from literary modernism and cultural theories of the self. In its pursuit of the strange power of the Stasi, the book introduces an archetypal character in the writing of German unification: one who is not sovereign over her or his actions, but instead is compelled by an imperative to collaborate – an imperative that persists in new forms in the post-Cold War age.
Ring's study identifies a monumental historical shift after 1989, from a collaboration that took place in concert with others, in a manner that could be recorded in the archive, to the more isolated and ultimately less accountable complicities of the capitalist present. While considering this shift in the most recent texts by East German writers, Ring provocatively suggests that their accounts of collaboration under the Stasi, and of the less-than-sovereign subjectivity to which it attests, remain urgent for understanding the complicities to which we continue to consent in the present day.
This groundbreaking work offers an interdisciplinary perspective on big data and the archives they accrue, interrogating key terms. Scholars from a range of disciplines analyze concepts relevant to critical studies of big data, arranged glossary style—from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. They not only challenge conventional usage of such familiar terms as prediction and objectivity but also introduce such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm. The contributors include a broad range of leading and agenda-setting scholars, including as N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Johanna Drucker, Lisa Gitelman, Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts and Nicole Starosielski.
Uncertainty is inherent to archival practices; the archive as a site of knowledge is fraught with unknowns, errors, and vulnerabilities that are present, and perhaps even amplified, in big data regimes. Bringing lessons from the study of the archive to bear on big data, the contributors consider the broader implications of big data's large-scale determination of knowledge.
My way of viewing the film is guided by leading cultural theories of burnout and self-optimisation, particularly from German-language and German Studies contexts, and by more longstanding analyses of psychic responses to crisis, beginning with writing by Helmuth Plessner and Georg Simmel from the early twentieth century, when German-language philosophy contributed its most important insights into subjectivity in the modern age, and drawing on Helmut Lethen’s influential analysis of the stream of early-twentieth century German thought he terms Cool Conduct (1994). Against the background of these German philosophies of subjectivity in crisis, I draw out the entrainment of cool, calm, temperate conduct in the recipients of contemporary burnout therapy, and I argue for a rejection of the complicity of those therapies with new codes of cool conduct, which (among other things) restore the burnt-out worker’s health for the sake of further exhausting work. The training of a cool, profitable subject is made starkly visible by the screen aesthetic employed by Pethke, whose work of cold cinema generates images that are abrupt, laconic, empty and chilling in service of a powerful critique of the self-optimising subjectivity elicited by neoliberal economies after the Global Financial Crisis.
To study burnout from the perspective of languages and cultural studies means considering the subjectivity it interacts with: who gets to be burnt-out, and who can access therapeutic treatment? It also means analysing the language that has been developing alongside the syndrome, a language that both shapes the experience and treatment of burnout and can provide ways into critiquing the invidious problem whereby treatment does not cure the syndrome but rather exploits the patient’s recovery from it. In what follows, I therefore pay attention to the under-explored metaphors through which current therapeutic practices handle burnout, namely the metaphors of temperature endemic to the syndrome’s name. I approach these metaphors by means of cultural theories not only of burnout and self-optimisation, but also of coolness and subjective sovereignty, theories which can help us to understand the experiences, of individuality and often of isolation, the syndrome of burnout implies. In my close reading I demonstrate how Pethke’s film offers a valuable aesthetic response to the burnout epidemic, and by looking closely at the film in relation to theories of subjectivity in crisis, I propose a much-needed critical viewpoint on burnout, one capable of challenging the inhumanity underlying its causes and indeed much of its treatment in the present day.
Keywords: complicity, documentary, Harun Farocki, governmentality, Carmen Losmann, Panopticon, perversion, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (Gilles Deleuze), psychoanalysis, Security, Territory, Population (Michel Foucault), surveillance
Hands have a special role in this counterintuitive dynamic, working as they do between poles of sovereign self-possession and powerlessness. In the text hands make incomprehensible gestures; they are clothed in tight gloves and enticing excesses of skin; they also caress K. even as they punish him, giving rise thereby to sadomasochistic pleasures, especially between K. and Kafka’s other masculine characters. Drawing on psychoanalytic and queer theories, the essay sets out a critical framework to decipher the textual and fleshly complexities of K.’s case, and to consider the literary and material legacies of Kafka’s writing into the present day."
A number of instances of shame and shaming in the novella show up the violence suffered by Gabriela as exceeding her borders both literally, in her bodily wounds, and metaphorically, in the mimetic encounters that inform her sense of self. Contrasting her characterisation with the border-secure (and for Ruth Leys ‘anti-mimetic’) subject of recent shame theory, I show here how Hensel’s portrayal of this ashamed subject is integrally linked to her plotting of an urban topography. Her fictional flesh-city, Leibnitz, reflects in its excessive landscape the dissolution by violence of Gabriela’s subjective ‘surface’.
While Hensel depicts a cityscape of disintegrating borders, this does not mean that structures of violence disintegrate with them. There are few spaces of resistance in Hensel’s city, and Gabriela finds it difficult even to provide a testimony to her experience that is not bound up with the intervention of others. In this sense Hensel’s account of violence surpasses even that of Giorgio Agamben’s recent Holocaust testimony theory, thus posing an urgent challenge for situating her work within historical boundaries.
Polkowski’s double-agency has an interesting historical counterpart in the author’s own brief affair as a Kontaktperson (code-name ‘Mitsu’) for the foreign intelligence service of the East German secret police. Maron’s involvement in ‘Stasi’ operations worked in contradiction to her oppositional stance, and reflected a ‘hateful bind’ that she felt in relation to the GDR.
To read the double-agency that the fictional and historical cases share in terms of guilt or victimhood is insufficient. Placed alongside the ‘Mitsu’ case, Polkowski’s fictional double-bind brings to light what we might call a ‘security complex’, a network of subjective and state securities in which collaboration and resistance are matters of constant negotiation between power and the subject."
Webinar recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvpb_4P_a8
Surveillance today oscillates between surface observation and a seemingly deeper knowledge that appears to be produced by dataveillance, knowledge thought to be unavailable in past, majority-visual regimes. In this presentation I screen clips from Hito Steyerl’s installation ‘How Not to Be Seen’ of 2013, that trains viewers in eluding visual surveillance. Steyerl’s piece playfully depicts the oscillation between depth and surface surveillance and in so doing elucidates the impossibility of protection from view in the era of dataveillance. Moreover, part of the installation’s power resides in its willingness to invoke the higher frequency of surveillance against minority identities. In my analysis, I draw on cultural theories by Giorgio Agamben and Eric Santner, who located the operation of power in or on the subject of modernity. I build on these established spatial plottings with the help of Simone Browne’s new writing on the surveillance of blackness and Wendy Chun’s concept of race as technology. By setting these theories in dialogue with Steyerl’s film installation, I show how understanding the spatial and epidermal logics of surveillance can help us analyse the apparently ‘deep’ knowledge dataveillance seeks to gather concerning the subjectivities it captures.