In a broad stroke of interdisciplinarity, I am an organizer of a seminar entitled Intertechnical Bodies at the American Comparative Literature Conference this Spring with my good friends Megan McCabe and Theodora Danylevich. We have just finished sending invitations to some amazing papers and the seminar looks like it is going to be great. So what is an “intertechnical body” you ask?

This seminar considers how the term “local culture” relates to concepts of embodied subjectivity. We argue that the embodied subject is a manifestation, distillation, or representation of local culture, and subsequently ask: To what extent do global communications and global technologies constitute a threat not only to “local cultures” but also to individual (human) bodies?… This seminar invites both a literal and a broad interpretation of the term “technology,” following Heidegger and Foucault with respect to discourse and philosophical heuristics.

My contribution is entitled Authoring the Single-Use Identity: Intertechnical production of the non-persistent subject on craigslist Missed Connections, and takes a look at some of my current work on Foucault and attempts to account for the role of the technology as a collaborator in the production of digital identity.

Given the rise of Internet based communication, we must reconsider the nature of the subject and body once they are mediated by technology. This mediation requires that users of technology repeatedly produce online identities and profiles for each new system, reifying a culture of the self in which legible subjects are produced and persisted in precodified terms, resulting from a negotiation between users, software, and communities of practice.

Biopolitics, governmentality, and human-computer interfaces: Tasty, eh?

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ACLA 2009 – Intertechnical Bodies