Human life as digitised data assemblage: health, wealth and biopower in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

I With recent and emerging developments in technology, we are witnessing a process of cultural and social redefinition where the foundations of how we understand the body, the human and the parameters of health are being radically transmuted. These changes resonate both across global political discourses and within individuals’ personal lives; they are both intimate and remote affecting broad sociopolitical understandings, and the minutiae of everyday lived experience. At the core of these redefinitions is a scientific and, primarily, biological discourse that reduces all forms of life to the molecular level and that uses a technological metaphorical landscape as its medium.1 Under this techno-biological logic, which has become a dominant discursive frame, the human body, and human life, is increasingly conceived of as an assemblage of data and information flows, genetic and otherwise.2 3 The emergence of the conception of life as...
Source: Medical Humanities - Category: Global & Universal Authors: Tags: Science Fiction and Medical Humanities Source Type: research