Reverse-Engineering Touch: Sense-Making and Making Sense with Prosthetic Neurostimulation
Publikation: Bidrag til tidsskrift › Tidsskriftartikel › Forskning › fagfællebedømt
At the frontier of research in neuroprosthetic limb technology, experimenters are developing systems for sensory feedback (prosthetic touch). Drawing upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork chronicling neuroprosthetic clinical trials, I interpret neurostimulation experiments as a reverse-engineering: in which efforts to engineer sensory feedback recursively inform basic scientific understanding about touch itself. In this article, I analyse reverse-engineering as technoscientific practice, phenomenological experience, and mode of knowledge-making, in which gaps between natural and artificial (or ‘electric’) touch get sustained and undone. In tracing the ways touch becomes constructed, abstracted, and experienced – including through phantom sensations and syn-aesthetic description – I examine how multiple coinciding versions of touch get produced at the level of the nervous system. I analyse the consequences of this multiplicity on theorizations of human and nonhuman touch, haptic experience, and touching subjects, sustaining epistemological and ontological openness amid efforts to pinpoint touch as a site of knowledge-making.
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Tidsskrift | Body & Society |
| Vol/bind | 30 |
| Udgave nummer | 1 |
| Sider (fra-til) | 3-30 |
| Antal sider | 28 |
| ISSN | 1357-034X |
| DOI | |
| Status | Udgivet - 2024 |
Bibliografisk note
Funding Information:
The research, authorship, and publication of this article was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (#1850672) and the European Union (ERC, SHOW&TELL, #949050).
Funding Information:
I thank Alison Gerber, Tobias Olofsson, Isak Engdahl, and Kenneth Ravn, for their helpful input and insights on earlier versions of this article. An incipient version of this work was presented at a seminar hosted by the Health and Life Conditions Research Group in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, and I thank the participants for comments that seeded the interests of this article. I wish to thank Elizabeth (Lisa) Davis, João Biehl, and Carolyn Rouse for their engagements and contributions to my thinking on touch, subjectivity, and sensory studies over the years. I thank Francis Lee for his thorough engagements with an earlier draft of this article along with a stimulating discussion about subdermal touch. I also thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Body & Society for their generative and valuable feedback and comments. The research, authorship, and publication of this article was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation (#1850672) and the European Union (ERC, SHOW&TELL, #949050).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.
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