Discussion Lead – Stone, Sobchack, Dixon
1) In ‘A Leg to Stand On’ it is quite clear that Sobchack is in no way offended by metaphor of ‘technology as prosthesis’ – however she finds it rather incomplete. In my understanding and reading of this chapter I found myself questioning my own usage of the term prosthetic in terms of technology. I caught myself in my own work romanticizing the term and fetishizing it, similar to those she is discussing, I found myself reevaluating my own language as I have with many things over the course of my academic career, to find better suited words to describe the ways in which we use technology and how we have become connected to and with technology in this day and age. Although I have not found a new term in my own language, I will be refraining from metaphor after reading this. But this aside, what I find most helpful about this article is the idea that the metaphor of ‘technology as prosthesis’ removes agency, lived experience, and embodiment from the amputee body. The amputee body becomes invisible and silenced by the representation of the prosthetic as having agency. This metaphor also privileges the whole physical body, rather than a body compiled of ‘parts.’
In this metaphor we see the prosthetic receive specific types of agency, Sobchack refers to popular culture examples to explain this concept – “as an effect of the prosthetic’s amputation and displacement from its mundane context, the animate and volitional human beings who use prosthetic technology disappear into the background – passive, if not completely invisible – and the prosthetic is seen to have a will and life of its own… For example, Alison Landsberg, in “Prosthetic Memory,” cites an Edison film, made as early as 1908, called The Thieving Hand in which an armless beggar is provided with a prosthetic arm that once belonged to a thief and, against his will – but not the arm’s – starts stealing” (211). But I’m curious to see what the class thinks about the physical body losing its own agency in both the metaphor and popular culture examples of the prosthetic and prosthetic technologies, because a technological prosthesis is something that acts as an extension of the body while an actual prosthesis is a part of the body.
2) In the piece Split Subjects Not Atoms I’d like to focus on this argument that Stone posits of power relations and location technologies. To continue on this line of thought, Stone suggests that digital technologies change the ways in which governmental institutions or the government more broadly, display power over our bodies or tries and maintain control over bodies. Our bodies exist in multiple locations (and are no longer fixed objects) and therefor governments “[respond] to [this] fragmentation of their subjects [by developing] a hypertrophy of location technologies. These [technologies] work by fixing people in place in a fiduciary sense, by creating a paper trail that attaches to a particularized physical body; for example, social security numbers, passports, and street addresses.” I’d like to probe this a little bit in terms of surveillance as well as power and/or perceived power. Thinking also about technologies as not only digital and what this means in the terms of this class.
3) While going through Dixon’s chapter entitled ‘Liveness’ I must pose the question, is this all to say that reproduction is not authentic? Continuing this line of questioning, What does it mean to be authentic, to have authenticity, or even exist authentically? [Even going back to the discuss we had about the virtual and the actual — which we struggled to define.]
3b) What about media involvement — does this devalue the liveness of something?
3c) As I continued reading I also started to again approach some ideas of seeing and the visual. The section entitled Ontologies of Media made me think of film in terms of our eyes. Each blink a shutter closing and giving us “blackness,” similar to a film projection gives us blackness (or rather did) — so here lies another instance of the question I posed, what does it mean to see and experience seeing?