More-than-Human Collaborations. Performative Image-Making in Contemporary Biomedical Imaging Techniques

Subjectivity is increasingly intertwined with technological apparatuses that influence processes of subjectification and change the possibilities of action available to the subject. Based on a performative understanding of biomedical image-making, we suggest that subjectivity emerges and acts as part of more- than-human collaborations. Consequently, we argue that subjectivity must be reframed as more-than-human subjectivity. In this paper, we offer such a reframing based on notions of distribution and composition, addressing both processes of subjectivation in collaboration with image-making techniques and subjectivity itself as emerging and enacted in more-than-human collaborations. We conclude on a tentative suggestion, how such a reconceptualized subjectivity is useful for the orientation within the contemporary and future technosphere.