“They Were Neither One Thing Nor the Other”: Media Technology’s Challenge to the Subject

Abstract

This essay will examine the way in which media technologies, through object agency, produce intersubjectivity and, thus, challenge the autonomy of the self. For H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), the image produced by the cinema bridges differences created by conventional language, culture, and nationality. Her poems, “Projector” and “Projector II (Chang),” celebrate the importance of the projector that reasserts light as deity. By contrast, Virginia Woolf privileges sound in her search for intersubjectivity. Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, presents a much bleaker view—particularly of machine-generated intersubjectivity—of the loss of autonomy in the rise of Hitler and Fascism.