Prosthetically, Poetically, Post-Humanly - Supplementing the End of History

On the University of Chicago's Theories of Media online glossary Sarah Coffey offers an interesting genealogical mapping of the concept of prosthesis. The glossary and Coffey's essay itself performs the concept itself. 

Combining the Latin pro (forward) with thesis (stressed syllable), prosthetics denotes addition or extension. The OED defines "prosthetics" in its plural form as "the branch of surgery concerned with the replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by artificial substitutes." "Prosthetic" derives from the word "prosthesis," which can refer to the addition of a syllable or letter at the beginning of a word, or to surgical prosthesis. The shift from the literal connotation of grammatical prosthesis to the figurative connotation of surgical prosthetics took place in the 16th century, when "prosthesis" was adopted by medical terminology to denote the substitution of an artificial body part for missing limbs or teeth (Jain 32). This article will examine prosthetics in reference to both the actual extension of the body by artificial means, and the virtual extension of the body by various forms of media.

Media theory examines the double meaning of prosthetics, as simultaneously supplementing a deficiency and signaling deficiency in the object to which it is supplied. In Marshall McLuhan's seminal text, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, he uses the concept of prosthesis to explain media's function as "any extension of ourselves" (7). Stressing the physicality of media extensions, McLuhan describes the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, and electric technology as an extension of the central nervous system. Yet as media extends, it also amputates. Although electric technology extends the central nervous system, "such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness or blocking of perception" (McLuhan 43). Thus McLuhan asserts that a process he terms "autoamputation" accompanies any extension of media.

Prosthesis is a doing, a making, and a placing of the supplement. The addition to bodies includes something previously existing outside itself. Prosthesis ruptures the relations between man’s tripartite divisions, psyche, soma and soul. Yet in modern times, it has become not simply an addition but a replacement. Prosthesis begins to work by removing the previously deviant aspects of man’s existence. A reconstitution of ability inaugurated in the shadow of man’s uncanny wounded self. 

 

Does posthistorical man create the edifices like birds build nests, as Kojeve posits? Out of the question itself emerges the definitive characteristic of man, defined not in terms of attributes but an imperative, to know thyself through experimental investigation. Whereas disability, disease and madness previously were seen as a source of disclosing truths hitherto unknown to average man, in modernity, disability is exhausted of its vital force “by way of investment in believing that disability makes a person available for excessive experiment” (Snyder & Mitchell, 37). Man’s “speculation parading as empiricism” is most intense and uncertain at the limits of the anomalous body. “cultures thrive on solving the riddle of disability’s rhyme and reason” (25). 

In this sense Agamben’s work offers a promising site for investigating the disabled body. Politics in modern times has been depoliticized, emptied of its life force, by reducing the question of politics, history and ethics to a preordained reaction, not response, to the injunction to end suffering, cure the pathology, or fulfill the abstract containers of ‘human’ rights. The inability to reconcile the disabled body with the defining characteristics of man’s constitution performs an “interruptive labor” (53). The internal divisions of man are exposed as the conditions of possibility for any limit to be drawn between the human and non-human, as the fuel for the anthropological machine’s fire.

When all that is solid melts into thin air

It should not be surprising that there has been resistance to our most recent readings in class discussions. If Brennan is right about the power of the fantasies structuring our everyday lives and the desire to hold on to the illusion of a self-contained subject then the attempt to work through these questions should not be an easy task. 

 Brennan bombards the reader with a litany of attacks for being duped into thinking that they are discrete and disembodied. But for all of her grandstanding about why the subjectivist paradigm falters, she in many ways reifies its force. The Transmission of Affect begins with the subject in search of an infantile origin of the foundational fantasy (although I think she would argue that she is criticizing a completely genetic or essentialist explanatory principle for guiding human action, I think there are times where her principles become seemingly transcendent). She proceeds to present a mix of recent scientific developments in understanding pheromones and an analysis  of the theories surrounding group psychology and crowd theory. And finally ends by constructing a somewhat speculative theory for finding a way out of the contemporary impasse. All of this amounts to a humanist reformism.

Massumi, on the other hand, begins with a larger question, the “intrinsic connection between movement and sensation” (1). He starts in media res because that’s where everything interesting happens. Massumi’s exemplary method is frustratingly brilliant. His experimental form of affirmative critique allows him to merge the metaphysical with the everyday. In the chapter on threats and the logic of preemption he goes on to indicate that what is needed is a metaphysics of feeling. Thus making his project much more ambitious in scope. While I refer above to Brennan as making speculative conjecture about the nature of experience I do not mean it in a disparaging way but rather to accuse her of not being abstract enough.

Understanding the self as becoming and relational opens up the possibility for new lines of thought. One that can provide a theoretical vocabulary more adept at dealing with “an understanding of our information-and image-based late capitalist culture, in which so called master narratives are perceived to have foundered” (27). The recent financial crisis demonstrates even better than Massumi’s last story in chapter 1 the ways in which the immaterial has become material in the postmodern era of late capitalism. Stock market fluctuations in times of crises demonstrate the virtual nature of global economies in which the signs of value are almost completely divorced from their physical referent. Massumi writes “The ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory” (45). This is not simply a typical postmodern move that would reduce the realities of material production to the realm of representation. Rather it evinces the ways that affect materially functions in the tensions of capital’s contradictions. It is a materialist analysis of the immaterial functioning of capital. It is almost a hyper-materialism, an extension of the realm that we consider as material.

Reality Snowballs

Massumi’s metaphor feeds forward into the beginning of the first chapter. It begins with a story about the video of a man who builds a snowman that then melts. This video embodies the “productive paradox” (38). The snowman is simultaneously virtual and actual, structured yet dynamic, cultural and natural. The snowman is the product of man and a specific cultural artifact but it can only be constructed in the fleeting moments when the snow and conditions allow. It is a real thing that exists or did exist yet the participants of the study only experience it through the video. The snowman illustrates the potential to animate nature but also the ways in which the laws of nature move us. In my next post on Massumi I will extend this analysis to point to the ways that an understanding of affect holds the potential for a radical post-humanism.

The Grammatron of Cybertexts

Grammatron is a hypertext created by Mark Amerika. Amerika views himself as a “cyborg-narrator creating a discourse network that serves as a distribution point for various lines of flight to pass through and manipulate data linked together by the collective-self.” Inspired by Post-Humanism, specifically the works of Deleuze & Guattari and Donna Haraway, Amerika argues that hypertexts function as “an alternative to the more rigid, authoritarian linearity of conventional book-contained text.” The experiential aspect of reading a hypertext, supercharges the way in which reading and writing always occurs in the middle of things, the reader/participant is not constrained to what is immediately before them, but is free to pursue a multiplicity of connections and linkages through clicking “their way into new writing or textual spaces (at this point we would expand the concept of writing to include all manner of text, graphics, moving pictures, sound, animation, 3-D modeling, etc.).” Reading and writing thus ought to be conceived as machinic, as part of a process of assemblage and composition. Books and discourse in general always-already occur within a network, a specific milieu. We do not possess language rather it is given to us indirectly.

Amerika is making a descriptive more than prescriptive statement about the nature of texts that cyberculture hypercharges. Amerika writes; “on the net, nobody knows how sexy you really are, how bad the dog gets whipped, how crude the sadistic brute can be, how ambiguous the thought patterns generally are, what race makes you salivate, what gender makes you cringe, what age you first got laid, in whose biology you are now swimming, in what hospital you gave birth, in what signal you now divest.” Amerika’s point is that we need to “rethink representation.” The fact that what virtual documentation is “always already fictionalized” means that we are “moving beyond the knowing and entering a world of immersive topographies that open up unknown narrative worlds composed of unstable identities, ambiguously located intentions, and surrogate lovers.”

While Amerika’s work may seem overly abstract, out of touch, or romanticized, its force as an analytic nonetheless contains an immense potential for political liberation. Activist, performance artist and critic Guillermo Gomez-Pena crosses borders physically, academically and virtually through his work on multiculturalism and Chicano Studies. Gomez’s notion of the Cyber-Aztec in his work “The New World Border” views cyberculture as a resistant space that fragments and frustrates traditional identity categories and forms of hegemonic thought. Gomez is highly indebted to Gibson and cyberpunk in general, “The New World Border” narrates a science-fiction “gringo-stroika” about the future of the U.S. Gomez does not just unwittingly celebrate border-crossing but uses his works to point to the paradox of identity politics and resistance in a postmodern economy. Resistance must simultaneously occur locally and dispersed while retaining its trans-cultural or global aims in order to ensure the desire for fluidity does not compromise the necessity of strategic essentialisms. Capital simultaneously deterritorializes rigid forms of identification with the nation-state or race while finding ways to commodify the dispersion of identities.