Biopolitical Screens - 9780262027472

In Biopolitical Screens, Pasi Väliaho charts and conceptualizesthe imagery that composes our affective and conceptual reality under twenty-first-centurycapitalism. Väliaho investigates the role screen media play in the networks that today harness humanminds and bodies -- the ways that images animated on console game platforms, virtual realitytechnologies, and computer screens capture human potential by plugging it into arrangements offinance, war, and the consumption of entertainment. Drawing on current neuroscience and politicaland economic thought, Väliaho argues that these images work to shape the atomistic individuals whopopulate the neoliberal world of accumulation and war.

Väliaho bases his argumenton a broad notion of the image as something both visible and sayable, detectable in various screenplatforms but also in scientific perception and theoretical ideas. After laying out the conceptualfoundations of the book, Väliaho offers focused and detailed investigations of the current visualeconomy. He considers the imagery of first-person shooter video games as tools of"neuropower"; explores the design and construction of virtual reality technologies totreat post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan; and examines threeinstances of video installation art that have the power to disrupt the dominant regime ofsensibility rather than reinforce it.