CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Zekany, Eva Edina |
|---|---|
| Title | A Biopolitics of Media Addiction |
| Summary | What do we do with media technologies, and what do they in turn do to us? These questions underlie much of the philosophy of media and technology, and they provide the context in which this project wishes to situate itself. I aim to investigate the construction of human-media relationships in the biopolitical arrangements of postindustrial capitalism, in which the management of the somatic individual and the regulations of its various intimacies play a prominent role. I argue that contemporary media addictions, such as Internet and gaming addiction, exist as paradigmatic formulations of the way in which biopolitical subjects engage with media; more than that, media addictions are pivotal in sustaining the production and maintenance of a media-infused ‘politics of life itself’ (In Nikolas Rose’s formulation). In order to support this argument, I will investigate some possibilities to reformulate the ontological basis of media-human relationships so as to re-read media addiction as a self-affirming and fruitful intimacy with the in/nonhuman, i.e. media technologies, based on desire, pleasure and drive towards alternative relationalities. This project can be distilled into three main theoretical strands: the exploration of the biopoliticization of the phenomenon of media addiction one the one hand, a potential refiguration of media use as a form of intimacy with the in- and non-human on the other, and finally an investigation into the place of gender and materiality within media philosophy. The crux of the project is the proposition that the ontology of media, in the context of Western metaphysics, is in a perpetual oscillation between the poles of humanity and nonhumanity. Because of this unstable process, media technology is positioned as a threatening figuration that destabilizes the privilege accorded to the category of the human, while at the same time redrawing its boundaries. Contemporary Western biopolitics, the ‘politics of life itself’, relies precisely on the uncertain status of media in order to codify the character of the media addict as a paradigmatic figure of the contemporary climate, as a techno-somatic individual. The goal of the work is to understand the role of media within contemporary Western biopolitics, and to survey the dynamics between the various ontological states attributed to media in political and academic discourse, and the human users who engage with them. |
| Supervisor | Timar, Eszter |
| Department | Gender Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/zekany_eva.pdf |
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