The no-body problem

A project organized with Sarah Kareem (UCLA) starting May 2025

Collaborative project in eighteenth-century studies under the heading of what we are calling “The No-Body Problem,” the long history of thinking about the yields of—and yieldings to—disembodied media. The eighteenth century is a natural moment to launch these questions, since it witnessed the emergence of modern media (including print), new collectivities in so-called republics of letters, the epistolary novel, widespread literacy, theories of information and social complexity, and forms of being attending on communication at a distance. That age is rich in reflections upon, and responses to, innovations in communication media, since it was encountering modes of disembodied relationality which anticipate our own.

Our goal is to think collectively, in person, about the long history of thought about the relationship between embodiment and modern media; we aim to unearth the roots of modern patterns of thought in early experiments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, offering a historical counterweight to arguments over virtuality which are anything but novel. 

NBP Activities