Steffen Krüger
Biographic Data
| ID | 3867155 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steffen Krüger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steffen |
| FAMILY NAME | Krüger |
| SIGNATURE | KRUGER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9538-5393 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 18 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy
The debt of privilege
In a narrative interview study on how academic staff in humanities and social science departments at a Scandinavian university live their lives in academia, we encountered a conspicuous narrative about being privileged . ‘It is an immense privilege to hold a university position’, our interviewees stated repeatedly and in a variety of ways. In this article, we argue that this narrative of privilege is more than a simple display of modesty. Rather,…
Unlearning, relearning, staying with the trouble
In times of turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity—the so-called TUNA conditions—our experience of the past may prove a poor guide to the future times in which our decisions and their consequences will unfold. Under such conditions, the manufacture of scenarios that are plausible future contexts for a given issue and are designed to enrich strategic thinking by challenging expectations can help to inform decisions and debates. Education …
The problem with trust
This commentary draws critical attention to the ongoing commodification of trust in policy and scholarly discourses of artificial intelligence (AI) and society. Based on an assessment of publications discussing the implementation of AI in governmental and private services, our findings indicate that this discursive trend towards commodification is driven by the need for a trusting population of service users to harvest data at scale and leads to …
Have your cake and feed it forward too
Focusing on the case of recommendations on the video streaming platform YouTube, this article revisits questions of media addiction and addictive media that continue to trouble research in the field. Based on a close reading of Google/YouTube’s engineering papers, this paper argues that the platform’s recommender system — the machine learning system responsible for the personalisation and customisation of what videos users are offered — has been …
The fall of the East German trickster
Anal sexuality and male subcultures online
Judging books by their covers – Tinder interface, usage and sociocultural implications
Public discourse on Tinder depicts the dating app as marking the end of traditional – as well as healthy – notions of love and romance, permeating them with a logic of consumption and commodification. Our article offers a close reading of the Tinder user interface in order to inquire into how – and in how far – the contours of such commodity culture can be traced into the design and usage of the app. Guided by critical and Foucauldian theory, we …
Critical theory of communication
I remember discussing the work of Christian Fuchs with a colleague at the sidelines of an academic symposium in Oslo. ‘Oh, Fuchs ... ’, my colleague exclaimed, ‘but is he not very normative?’ – ‘Yes’
Facing Fanon
In this article, I examine the Machinima film Finding Fanon II , by London-based artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, for what it can tell us about the relationship between video gaming and the postcolonial. Evoking Frantz Fanon, one of the most piercing voices of the decolonisation movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), one of the most technologically advanced and, at the same time, scandalous video game…
Social media abyss
Coping with Shame in a Media-saturated Society
Since its launch in late 2015, the Norwegian web-series Skam ( Shame), produced by public broadcaster NRK, has become one of the most notable successes in Norwegian television history, both in terms of ratings and critical acclaim. A high-school web-series about teenagers, mostly girls, coming of age in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, the series not only depicts young people in their everyday digital-media use but also reaches its audience through…
Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry
Reviewed by: Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry: The Unconscious on the World Scene by William R. Meyers Steffen Krüger (bio) Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry: The Unconscious on the World Scene. William R. Meyers. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 253 pp. This book is conceived as a guidebook and toolbox, a "how-to" manual for inquiries into the psychodynamics of world politics. Offering small and easily ac…
Alienation and Digital Labour—A Depth-Hermeneutic Inquiry into Online Commodification and the Unconscious
At the core of this paper is a psychosocial inquiry into the Marxist concept of alienation and its applications to the field of digital labour. Following a brief review of different theoretical works on alienation, it looks into its recent conceptualisations and applications to the study of online social networking sites. Finally, the authors offer suggestions on how to extend and render more complex these recent approaches through in-depth analy…
The Legend of the Artist
The essay provides a theoretical and historical analysis of Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz’s study of The Legend of the Artist , first published in German in 1934 and republished in English in 1979. While Kris and Kurz’s book has been recognized as an essential scholarly compendium of artist biographies and a crucial contribution to art history, its nuanced thesis on the afterlife of mythical thinking has usually passed unnoticed. This essay explores b…
Fresh Brains
Fresh Brains:Jacques Lacan's Critique of Ernst Kris's Psychoanalytic Method in the Context of Kris's Theoretical Writings Steffen Krüger (bio) Introduction Jacques Lacan's attack on ego psychology became specifically identified with his polemics against Ernst Kris (1900-1957), a Viennese-born analyst of the ego-psychological tradition, who from 1940 until his death practiced in the United States. It was particularly Kris's 1951 Psychoanalytic Qua…
Coping with Shame in a Media-saturated Society
Since its launch in late 2015, the Norwegian web-series Skam ( Shame), produced by public broadcaster NRK, has become one of the most notable successes in Norwegian television history, both in terms of ratings and critical acclaim. A high-school web-series about teenagers, mostly girls, coming of age in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, the series not only depicts young people in their everyday digital-media use but also reaches its audience through…
Anal sexuality and male subcultures online
Facing Fanon
In this article, I examine the Machinima film Finding Fanon II , by London-based artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, for what it can tell us about the relationship between video gaming and the postcolonial. Evoking Frantz Fanon, one of the most piercing voices of the decolonisation movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), one of the most technologically advanced and, at the same time, scandalous video game…
Fresh Brains
Fresh Brains:Jacques Lacan's Critique of Ernst Kris's Psychoanalytic Method in the Context of Kris's Theoretical Writings Steffen Krüger (bio) Introduction Jacques Lacan's attack on ego psychology became specifically identified with his polemics against Ernst Kris (1900-1957), a Viennese-born analyst of the ego-psychological tradition, who from 1940 until his death practiced in the United States. It was particularly Kris's 1951 Psychoanalytic Qua…
Alienation and Digital Labour—A Depth-Hermeneutic Inquiry into Online Commodification and the Unconscious
At the core of this paper is a psychosocial inquiry into the Marxist concept of alienation and its applications to the field of digital labour. Following a brief review of different theoretical works on alienation, it looks into its recent conceptualisations and applications to the study of online social networking sites. Finally, the authors offer suggestions on how to extend and render more complex these recent approaches through in-depth analy…
The Legend of the Artist
The essay provides a theoretical and historical analysis of Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz’s study of The Legend of the Artist , first published in German in 1934 and republished in English in 1979. While Kris and Kurz’s book has been recognized as an essential scholarly compendium of artist biographies and a crucial contribution to art history, its nuanced thesis on the afterlife of mythical thinking has usually passed unnoticed. This essay explores b…
Social media abyss
Coping with Shame in a Media-saturated Society
Since its launch in late 2015, the Norwegian web-series Skam ( Shame), produced by public broadcaster NRK, has become one of the most notable successes in Norwegian television history, both in terms of ratings and critical acclaim. A high-school web-series about teenagers, mostly girls, coming of age in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, the series not only depicts young people in their everyday digital-media use but also reaches its audience through…
Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry
Reviewed by: Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry: The Unconscious on the World Scene by William R. Meyers Steffen Krüger (bio) Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry: The Unconscious on the World Scene. William R. Meyers. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 253 pp. This book is conceived as a guidebook and toolbox, a "how-to" manual for inquiries into the psychodynamics of world politics. Offering small and easily ac…
Critical theory of communication
I remember discussing the work of Christian Fuchs with a colleague at the sidelines of an academic symposium in Oslo. ‘Oh, Fuchs ... ’, my colleague exclaimed, ‘but is he not very normative?’ – ‘Yes’
Facing Fanon
In this article, I examine the Machinima film Finding Fanon II , by London-based artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, for what it can tell us about the relationship between video gaming and the postcolonial. Evoking Frantz Fanon, one of the most piercing voices of the decolonisation movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), one of the most technologically advanced and, at the same time, scandalous video game…
Judging books by their covers – Tinder interface, usage and sociocultural implications
Public discourse on Tinder depicts the dating app as marking the end of traditional – as well as healthy – notions of love and romance, permeating them with a logic of consumption and commodification. Our article offers a close reading of the Tinder user interface in order to inquire into how – and in how far – the contours of such commodity culture can be traced into the design and usage of the app. Guided by critical and Foucauldian theory, we …
Anal sexuality and male subcultures online
The fall of the East German trickster
The problem with trust
This commentary draws critical attention to the ongoing commodification of trust in policy and scholarly discourses of artificial intelligence (AI) and society. Based on an assessment of publications discussing the implementation of AI in governmental and private services, our findings indicate that this discursive trend towards commodification is driven by the need for a trusting population of service users to harvest data at scale and leads to …
Have your cake and feed it forward too
Focusing on the case of recommendations on the video streaming platform YouTube, this article revisits questions of media addiction and addictive media that continue to trouble research in the field. Based on a close reading of Google/YouTube’s engineering papers, this paper argues that the platform’s recommender system — the machine learning system responsible for the personalisation and customisation of what videos users are offered — has been …
Unlearning, relearning, staying with the trouble
In times of turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity—the so-called TUNA conditions—our experience of the past may prove a poor guide to the future times in which our decisions and their consequences will unfold. Under such conditions, the manufacture of scenarios that are plausible future contexts for a given issue and are designed to enrich strategic thinking by challenging expectations can help to inform decisions and debates. Education …
Lacan, Kris and the Psychoanalytic Legacy
The debt of privilege
In a narrative interview study on how academic staff in humanities and social science departments at a Scandinavian university live their lives in academia, we encountered a conspicuous narrative about being privileged . ‘It is an immense privilege to hold a university position’, our interviewees stated repeatedly and in a variety of ways. In this article, we argue that this narrative of privilege is more than a simple display of modesty. Rather,…
Political science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (5 works) · Literature (5 works)