Immaterial Bodies—Affect, Embodiment, Mediation

Blackman (media and communications, U. of London at Goldsmith) theorizes "the thorny question of the body's potential for mediation." She does so "within the context of increasing evidence that suggests bodies cannot be reduced to materiality" while returning to "nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates which primarily concerned the nature of perception, selfhood and embodiment." To this end, she explores affect in the contexts of spiritualism, cybernetics and contemporary media cultures attending to experiences like suggestion, voice-hearing and telepathy "which are always already open the subject to the other." She introduces the subject of affect, crowds and the problem of personality, media technologies and the problem of telepathy, new materialisms, affect and energy in rhythm and transmission, the problem with automatism, and what neuroscience has shown us about the bicameral brain and our apparent double consciousness. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)