Human | Not | Human

Technics and Subjectivity across Media

Dávid Levente Palatinus

This book examines the ways in which (human) subjectivity has become inexorably linked to the haunting presence and prevalence of technological mediation. It explores the ways in which technological mediation, and in close connection to it, media themselves are used to produce and circulate understandings of human subjectivity, and to examine how media objects contribute (as agents) to various conceptualisations as well as critiques of the human-nonhuman relation.

To that end, Human | Non | Human: Technics and Subjectivity across Media mobilizes a wide range of examples that inscribes themselves into the respective histories of technics, subjectivity, and mediation. Moving from the mediatization of 19th century autopsy, through contemporary forensic crime television and medical dramas, to manifestations of affect and agency in television’s participatory culture, to examples of prosthetic media, to posthuman television, the author argues that what articulations of the human via technology entail is not so much a dismantling of demarcations via disembodied and re-embodied forms of subjectivity, but rather a history of abstracting and emulating the human via technology. These admittedly disparate arenas are linked by a scrutiny of the irreversible temporality of human, technics and mediation. The chapters in the book showcase The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp, CSI and medical dramas, the SLO Seeing Machine, or Ex Machina appear as pivotal media texts in their own historic and cultural contexts, and offer takes on a dialectic underpinning the (re-)embodiment of that which the human is not (but hopes to be), gesturing at a sense of becoming, always-already en-route to its own transcendence.

Human | Non | Human: Technics and Subjectivity across Media argues that cultural imaginaries of nonhuman otherness also constitute a political agenda that moves beyond binary oppositions, opening up further dimensions and configurations of animate and inanimate materialities.

About the author

David Levente Palatinus is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Ruzomberok (Slovakia), and the Technical University of Liberec (Czech Republic). His research moves between and across visual studies, digital media, and cultural theory. He has worked and written on violence in serial culture, autoimmunity and war, and digital subjectivity in the Anthropocene. He is co-editor of the ECREA section of CSTOnline. He is co-editor of the volumes Crime and Detection in the Age of Electronic Reproduction (2018, Americana Ebooks), and (with Maurizio Ascari and Serena Baesi) of Gothic Metamorphoses across the Centuries: Contexts, Legacies, Media. Peter Lang, 2020. He is founder of the Anthropocene Media Lab at the University of Ruzomberok.