Critical Themes in Media Studies

Closing Keynote: Dominic Pettman

"After the Beep: Answering Machines and Creaturely Life"

April 4, 2009

6:00 PM

Wollman Hall

The New School

65 West 11th Street

This talk explores the different ways in which the capacity to "respond" has been figured, and reconfigured, through different technologies over the past century and a half. Using Eric Santner's notion of "creaturely life" as a conceptual lens, Pettman will argue that the melancholy poetics which often accompanies the sub-field of media hauntology are still too anthropocentric, given the continued investment in human exceptionalism (albeit of an abject kind). Rather, the cybernetic interdependence of humans, animals, and machines should be fully acknowledged and appreciated, in order to avoid the conflation of pathos with the human; thereby perpetuating Descartes' (other) error: the assumption that animals and/or machines can react, but not respond.