The Itches: Embodiment and Distributed Meaning in the Age of Technological Entanglement

This short, arbitrary, and by no means complete list of bodily replacements, corrections, extensions and constrictions signals the diversity of materiality, scale, contexts, and politics of things with prosthetic qualities. Certain technologies are easier to accept as belonging to the category of prosthesis than others, and that analytical wrestling itself maps the ontological difficulties, dangers, and opportunities that prosthetics generate. The precision and fairness of that negotiation is of particular importance, as it does not only serve theoretical exercise or accuracy. Rather, it conditions the embodied experience of humans and other sentient beings, often determining who gets included in those categories, whose personhood might be temporarily suspended, and who is thought of as being one which has a body. Such political responsibility requires a much more subtle methodological move than creating a concept of prosthetics flexible enough to ensure inclusion of all the bodily replacements, extensions and constrictions. Therefore, the act of mapping the category of prosthetics needs to include empathy as part of its logic, not as something introduced or executed at a level of implementation by ‘real life’ organisations, such as public health systems, or even more dangerously, by the dynamics of the market.