Potentially “human”: Paolo Virno and the media

Abstract

The paper explores how the media theories which tend to avoid touching on the realm of political utterances complement the new approaches in political anthropology that shun the category of “mediation”. An example of the latter attitude one finds in Paolo Virno. Representatives of both trends are forced to recur to certain patterns in anthropology which they recast anew under the constraints of defining the “human” through the technological (for media theorists, it is the danger of an anthropogenic technological milieu structuring the manifestations of the “human”; for Virno, it is the danger of mechanization of the “highest manifestations of humanity”, such as the social intellect and language, being alienated at a biological level).