Abstract

This talk explores three insights from my current research and collaborations examining cultures of optimization and the entanglement of big data and big pharma. One key starting point for this work is what Paul Preciado, in Testo Junkie, calls somatechnics to describe processes whereby media technologies are not merely added to or encountered by bodies/subjects – as with McLuhanist “extensions” or ideas about spectatorship, and the like - but are rather “the very means by which corporeality is crafted.” While Preciado’s main concerns are the operations of sexuality and subjection under the new biocapitalism, his recognition that pharmaceutical and digital media industries are crucial to the reproduction of the present has yet to be taken seriously by media theorists. Building on these and related debates, this brief presentation focuses on somatechnics and three aspects of our techno-pharmacological condition – or what this lecture series terms media care – namely: changes in how we understand and perform resilience; the critical role of stimulation in animating modes of media enfleshment; and emergent forms of mood conditioning. These insights do not promise a comprehensive view, but rather signal intensifying relations between data and drugs in practices of self-making, wellness, and work.

Biography

Joshua Neves is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab at Concordia University. His research focuses on global and digital media, cultural and political theory, and questions of development and legitimacy. Dr. Neves is co-author (with Aleena Chia, Susanna Paasonen, and Ravi Sundaram) of Technopharmacology (Minnesota University Press / Meson Press, 2022) and author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (Duke University Press, March 2020). He is also co-editor (with Bhaskar Sarkar) of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017), as well as co-editor of recent or forthcoming journal issues examining convenience, paranoia, optimization, and populism. His work is published in Media Theory, Cultural Critique, Social Text, Discourse, Culture Machine, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Sarai, The Routledge Companion to Risk and Media, among others.