Between the Post and the Com-Post:Examining the Postdigital ‘Work’ of a Prefix

In examining the work of the prefix ‘post’, we aim to contribute to the current postdigital dialogue. Our paper does not provide a rationale for the use of ‘postdigital’ in the title of this journal: that has been thoroughly explored elsewhere. We want instead to consider the work the prefix might do. We look at ‘post’, as it appears to ‘act’ in the terms of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘posthumanism’, suggesting that modernism and humanism are in need of questioning and reworking. We also examine what gets ‘post-ed’, or sometimes ‘com-posted’. (Com- is another interesting prefix, meaning ‘with’.) We then consider how these inquiries inform our understanding of a ‘postdigital reality’ that humans now inhabit. We understand this as a space of learning, struggle, and hope, where ‘old’ and ‘new’ media are now ‘cohabiting artefacts’ that enmesh with the economy, politics and culture. In entering this postdigital age, there really is no turning back from a convergence of the traditional and the digital. However, this is not simply a debate about technological and non-technological media. The postdigital throws up new challenges and possibilities across all aspects of social life. We believe this opens up new avenues too, for considering ways that discourse (language-in-use) shapes how we experience the postdigital

Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence