This article critically examines the ways in which the trope of prosthesis has been used in recent theory to understand human-technology relationships. Analyzing the trope from a number of angles, including disability, factory labor practices, mass production, and marketing, the author scrutinizes ways in which technologies are simultaneously wounding and enabling in ways for which the prosthesis trope cannot account.

Conceptualizing and investigating the interarticulation of disparate registers of value expression, this article treats, specifically, the imbrication of anxieties about sexual ambiguity and counterfeit money. The expressions of such anxieties and the metaphoric slippage between them are shown in a variety of venues and cultural texts, but the main come from a reading of William Friedkin's film, To Live and Die in LA.

In feminist analyses of HIV/aids and heterosexuality it is often suggested that the constitution of sexual difference and gender concerns the specific image of heterosexual women's bodies. Such understandings of power and embodiment are especially at play in analyses of safer-(hetero)sex advertisements where the object of the condom is considered to represent a diseased female body. But while the object of the condom in AIDS heterosexual culture is generally understood to concern a female `other' and in addition a disappearing male (...) body, in this article I call into question this understanding of the condom. Specifically, through an analysis of AIDS research findings on safer heterosex practise, I suggest that the object of the condom concerns not sexed female bodies but a heterosexual masculine self-identity. (shrink)

Are we rapidly approaching the end of the work-centered society? This article contends that at the century's end we may witness the disappearance of the great productivist utopias of the 1920s and 1930s. The crisis of productivist systems and ideologies may be far more significant than the more narrowly defined crisis of communism, or of `Fordism', that many critics have identified. Shifts in the forms of metaphor and the technology of work are taking place which call into question traditional notions (...) of the biopolitics of work. Modern productivism - the productivism of the industrial revolution - was governed by the belief that human society and nature are linked by the primacy and ultimate interchangeability (convertibility) of all productive activity. It presupposes a metaphor of the motor which first appeared during the first quarter of the 19th century. With the eclipse of the metaphor of the human motor, we can ask whether the end of the `work-centered model of society' might be attributed to the decline of its most compelling metaphor. If the body no longer occupies the central metaphor of productivism, what does this mean for the new configuration of labor and the model of labor based on information processing rather than the generation of things or the conversion of force? (shrink)

In the aftermath of 9/11, world leaders addressed the nation as a body under threat and hastened in new policies to bolster border protection and ‘securitize’ immigration. While the terrorist attacks cast new forms of public attention on the risks posed by mobile agents, the link between national security and regulating migration has always been at the forefront of the constitution of the nation state. Despite this persistent anxiety towards the social impact of migration and the status of people on (...) the move, a more general understanding of mobility is not only missing in public debates, but has been a lacunae in the social sciences. What is mobility — a state, a force, a set of shifting co-ordinates? How does the definition of mobility shape social attitudes and personal experiences? This article examines the use of organic and mechanistic metaphors that have underpinned the classical paradigm for understanding of mobility in the social sciences. It argues that the global patterns of migration and the contemporary forms of hybrid subjectivity do not fit well with this paradigm. The limits and kinetophobic associations generated by the classical paradigm are examined through Harald Kleinschmidt’s theory of residentialism. The final part of this article outlines an alternative conceptual frame that is based on key terms from complexity theory. (shrink)

In this article, the sociocultural meanings and social relations and expectations that cohere around `road rage' and serve to invest it with its particular resonance in contemporary Western societies are examined. It is argued that the combination of car and driver in the driving experience produces a cyborg body, which influences the ways in which people experience, perceive and respond to driving and other cars/drivers. But in contemporary societies the expression of such `negative' emotions is problematic and complex. In this (...) context, `road rage' is deemed to evidence loss of appropriate self-control and as `uncivilized'. (shrink)

Neuroadaptive technology (NAT) is a closed-loop neurotechnology designed to enhance human–computer interaction. NAT works by collecting neurophysiological data, which are analysed via autonomous algorithms to create actions and adaptations at the user interface. This paper concerns how interaction with NAT can mediate self-related processing (SRP), such as self-awareness, self-knowledge, and agency. We begin with a postphenomenological analysis of the NAT closed loop to highlight the built-in selectivities of machine hermeneutics, i.e., autonomous chains of algorithms that convert data into an assessment (...) of psychological states/intentions. We argue that these algorithms produce an assessment of lived experience that is quantitative, reductive, and highly simplistic. This reductive assessment of lived experience is presented to the user via feedback at the NAT interface and subsequently mediates SRP. It is argued that congruence between system feedback and SRP determines the precise character of the alterity relation between human user and system. If feedback confirms SRP, the technology is regarded as a quasi-self. If there is a disagreement between SRP and feedback from the system, NAT is perceived to be a quasi-other. We argue that the design of the user interface shapes the precise ways in which NAT can mediate SRP. (shrink)

This thesis traces the developments of imaging technologies used for medical diagnosis. Giddens' sociological theory of modernity serves as a basis for the consideration of the bureaucratisation of medicine and the use of the patient file as source of information about health. The importance of 'inscriptions', in relation to scientific knowledge and power, is analysed through Bruno Latour's theory. Donna Haraway's call to rethink objectivity, not as a quality of universal knowledge, but as a given point of view, also influence (...) the approach of this discussion of diagnostic practices. (shrink)