[Commlist] Call for Abstracts: Pharmacologies of Media (Reminder)

Call for Abstracts: Pharmacologies of Media (Reminder)



"We invite 300 word abstracts for a forthcoming special issue of /Media 
Theory/ exploring “pharmacologies of media.”//


/Media Theory <http://mediatheoryjournal.org/about/>/ is an independent, 
online and open access journal of peer-reviewed, theoretical 
interventions into all aspects of media and communications. There are 
_no_ article processing charges 
<http://mediatheoryjournal.org/editorial-policies/publication-charges/> 
for authors.

//

/Are media doing us more harm than good?/ This question has shadowed 
accounts of new technologies for millennia, from the advent of writing 
right through to the emergence of social media. Beginning with Plato’s 
reflections on writing’s effects on memory, and under the influence of 
work by philosophers like Jacques Derrida (1981) and Bernard Stiegler 
(2011), media scholars often explore this question using the concept of 
the /pharmakon/.

In its Platonic sense, the /pharmakon/ is both a remedy and a poison, or 
something that can both heal and harm. To describe media as 
/pharmacological/ is to acknowledge that they can have both positive and 
negative effects. But this concept is difficult to disentangle from its 
medical origins. The /pharmakon/ is a substance, a drug or a medicine, 
that might be intoxicating or beneficial. Like drugs, this double 
capacity is not inherently value-laden, or good and/or bad, but is a 
function of how the media operate. Like drugs, this capacity informs how 
media operate on, extend, or curtail our capacity to sense, think, or 
act. But here the analogy falls apart. Media and drugs address different 
domains of the body and have distinct cultures. If this analogy can only 
stretch so far, what are we to make of the concept of the /pharmakon/ today?

In this special issue, we want to revisit this concept in order to trace 
its histories and to test its utility for contemporary media studies. 
Alongside exploring the moral and embodied genealogies of the 
/pharmakon/, we also want to trace a third: whether and how the 
concept’s double capacity works at the level of materiality. The 
/pharmakon/ provides us with a conceptual means of apprehending how 
media are entangled with and shaped by the political, economic, and 
ecological distribution of matter. If the material dimension of media is 
conjoined with a politics of material harm/cure, our proposition is that 
the concept of the /pharmakon/ could be developed into a rich resource 
for thinking not only of the social impact of contemporary media, but 
the distributed, material reality in which they’re enrolled.

**

We use the term /pharmacologies of media/ to mark our interest in media 
in the present, where ‘media’ is understood in an expanded sense, across 
domains, and at many different scales, and in the role that this 
concept--and its cognates--have played in the study of media past and 
present. By examining the limits of the concepts of pharmakon and media, 
this issue seeks to expand and transform discussions of race, toxicity, 
body, mediation, affordance, in areas such as science and technology 
studies, feminist and queer theory, biopolitics and the body, media 
archaeology and theory, visual studies, environmental and medical 
humanities.**

**

The biopolitical role that media play in governing the circulation of 
resources establishes relations of power that the /pharmakon/ can help 
us to identify and to critique. Media’s large-scale role as essential 
infrastructures establishes /pharmacological/ relations between the 
consumption of new technology, the waste produced by its dynamics of 
obsolescence, and the sometimes-violent processes of extraction that 
underlie the production of technology, as we see with minerals like 
Coltan or Lithium. The large-scale and, crucially, deep-time effect of 
technological progress on the Earth’s dwindling range of species has a 
pharmacological dimension. So, too, does the body’s material-chemical 
relationship to particular atoms or molecules used in the production of 
media, or - as with testosterone, for instance (Preciado, 2013) - as 
specific techniques of individuation. The /pharmakon/ not only helps us 
to underscore the reality of these relations; crucially, it also focuses 
our analyses of media on the actual processes and operations that media 
technologies or cultural techniques enact.

We envisage that this issue will be divided into two main parts: one 
dedicated to reflecting on the conceptual history of the pharmakon and 
assessing its relevance to the study of media, and a second that 
exploring what might pharmacology of media’s /material/ dimensions look 
like.

Could the /pharmakon/ inform methods and theories for engaging with 
material media processes? What are its histories and inheritances? How 
has it informed our conceptions and critiques of media? Does it need 
repurposing for the twenty-first century, and if so, how? Most 
crucially, what does pharmacological critique look like today, in practice?

We are interested in submissions that address this concept in any way 
related to media/theory. We are particularly interested in the way that 
the concept of the /pharmakon/ might intersect with race and/or 
ethnicity, and would encourage submissions that explore the interfaces 
between this concept and racialisation in the context of data 
collection, tracking, personalisation, and discrimination.

*Suggested topics might include (but are not limited to):*

Conceptual histories of the /pharmakon/, existing or possible

Pharmacological conception of race and ethnicity

Embodied pharmacologies: medicine, drugs, toxicity

Pharmacologies of substances: plastics, minerals, chemicals across scales

Hormones and technologies of gender

Pharmacology and individual/collective individuation

Viral pharmacologies: quarantine, lockdown, masking, distancing

Pharmacologies of extraction, infrastructure, logistics, trade

Petrochemicals and media culture

Pharmacology and postcoloniality

Pharmacology and genetics

Body, milieu, techniques

McLuhan’s “extensions” in the 21st Century

Mediated feeling, extended sensing, and perception-at-a-distance**

*The timeline for submissions is as follows:*

Abstracts due *March 08, 2021*

Notification of acceptance by *March 22, 2021*

Full papers due for peer-review: *August 01, 2021*

Decisions and peer-review feedback: *November 01, 2021*

**Revised articles due: *January 15, 2022*

             Projected special issue publication date: *mid-2022*

*Please send abstracts - or any queries - to Yiğit 
Soncul*((y.soncul /at/ lcc.arts.ac.uk) <mailto:(y.soncul /at/ lcc.arts.ac.uk)>)*and* 
*Scott Wark* ((s.wark /at/ warwick.ac.uk) <mailto:(s.wark /at/ warwick.ac.uk)>) *by 
March 08, 2021*"



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