Negotiating Collective Agencies and Digital Pharmacology in Contemporary Anglophone Novels – ‘Cure’ and ‘Poison’ for Female and Black Collectivities

Abstract The essay focuses on anglophone novels that critically examine the promises and risks associated with digital media for female and Black collectivities – two groups that have had little share in building and curating the digital infrastructures that ostensibly constitute our shared spaces. Novels by writers such as Lauren Oyler, Sarah Rose Etter, Patricia Lockwood, Teju Cole, Yomi Adegoke, and Kiley Reid underscore that desires for digital connectivity, collaborative action, and socio-political alliance have a flip side, as they also entangle the individual in unwanted relations, creepy collectivities, and infrastructural vulnerabilities. Despite flaunting some of the more toxic effects of the digital, the novels do not simply discredit it. Rather, they probe intermedial connectivities beyond the antagonism of the paragone , programmatically pointing towards possibilities of living and being with different media. To develop a nuanced understanding of the ambivalences of digital media as depicted in literary texts, we will draw on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of the ‘digital pharmakon’ (2012), which invites us to rethink agency, affects, and collectivity from the perspective of digital technologies. The pharmakon serves to reframe the intermedial relationship between the novel and the digital as reciprocally entwined and as potentially co-regulating agents. Simultaneously, the essay moves beyond seemingly neutral concepts of ‘digital users’ and accounts for differential subject positions by linking the notion of the ‘digital pharmakon’ with Feminist Studies, Black Studies, and Critical Internet Studies. Within this theoretically and methodologically sophisticated framework, the essay then moves on to analyze how Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This and Yomi Adegoke’s The List imagine the social and affective complexities of the digital in relation to female and Black collectivities.