The Intimate Panopticon: The techno-body at the dawn of the third millennium.

Abstract

Technological innovations bring the machine ever closer to everyday life, as our bodies, minds and social environment – things we regard as vital elements of what constitutes being human – become increasingly interwoven with technology and cyberspace. Whereas our merging with technology offers new possibilities for self-fashioning, it simultaneously makes us more controllable and steerable than ever before, causing notions such as autonomy, freedom and subjectivity to shift. How does the intimate-technological revolution, in pushing the human body into a ‘malleable’ entity comprising both natural and technological elements, affect and reshape the contemporary subject? A dialectical analysis of a selection of Foucault’s and Braidotti’s main work will allow for a refreshing synthesis, that has the shape of a highly contemporaneous account of the (post)human subject.