Necromedia by Marcel O’Gorman (review)

Marcel O’Gorman’s Necromedia is an ambitious, important and timely contribution to the fields of media theory, philosophy, technoculture studies and art history. As the 33rd entry in University of Minnesota Press’s remarkable ‘Posthumanities’ series, it is also an experiment in cross-disciplinary documentation: it hybridises its discourses and embodies a performative technics constituted in an oscillating assemblage of digital artworks, performance pieces, personal anecdotes, poetry and citations. In other words, Necromedia is a book of technological strategies and tactics critical of and resistant to various technocultural hero systems ‘designed to help humans deny their own finitude’ (3). It makes sense that O’Gorman sustains a similarly critical and resistant perspective throughout the book with reference to the human in transcendental thought, thereby providing a unique opportunity to question and to reassess the state of posthumanism today.

The book adopts a rotating structure, alternating between chapters that focus on theory and chapters that focus on digital media. In its succinct introduction, O’Gorman explains, ‘The result is what might be called a compendium of objects-to-think-with, a term borrowed from Sherry Turkle’ (4). Because of its experimental design and its investment in compiling a multitude of objects-to-think-with, there are many instructive connections – some explicit and some implicit – to be discovered among its pages. The book’s myriad accomplishments stem mainly from its resistance to discursive simplicity and from its commitment to motivating affective social change, in addition to its singular approach to doing the work of scholarship, which successfully walks the already muddled line between high theory and embodied practice. This means that Necromedia often reaches beyond its lofty epistemic grasp and becomes a productive and stimulating technology in itself, making it is an excellent resource for scholars and artists operating across multiplicities of fields and mediums.

In chapter one, O’Gorman follows David Wills’s notion of dorsality, and explaining that what he tries ‘to outline in this book is a dorsal mode of technological production that requires transforming media theorists into media artists’ (15). On the one hand, then, Necromedia is a rigorous study of those digital media that call to our attention both human technicity and human finitude. On the other hand, however, it is designed to help generate the framework for an alternative technoculture committed to the development of a creative politics of production grounded in the raw materialisms of death and technology. O’Gorman’s conception of applied media theory, which responds in part to Quentin Meillassoux’s questioning of humanist biases, represents a most welcome addition to the work of communication and new media studies, in addition to the digital humanities.

However, as this is a cross-disciplinary work, it is not difficult to imagine Necromedia finding a place outside its immediate horizon of media theory. Quite provocatively, for example, the book is also an attempt to conceive of a therapeutic ontology resistant to ‘postmodernist theories that provide nothing more than increasing complexity and problematization’ (20). Put bluntly, the book is an innovative, self-reflexive and rewarding work of pragmatic existentialism that folds together Ernest Becker’s theories of death denial with Jane Bennett’s ethics of generosity to challenge the contemporary tendency towards affective malaise by developing ‘a technical therapeutics that treats the toxicity inherent in our current technocultural hero system’ (25). The ways in which O’Gorman introduces theories of cultural anthropology and social psychology into a book of media theory are important for scholars interested in examining the contemporary proliferation of affective illnesses in North America, and also demonstrate the book’s impressive ability to cross disciplinary borders.

Chapter two confronts the existential terror disseminated by surveillance technologies vis-à-vis O’Gorman’s own experiences with crossing a literal border, the Canada–US border, following 9/11. In response to the dehumanising effects of various technologies employed to induce claustrophobia and agoraphobia in commuters (e.g., RFID sensing carpets and radioactive detection devices), the author follows Rita Raley’s notion of border hacks and demonstrates a mode of...