Where Bodies End and Artefacts Begin

Abstract

Our use of artefacts has at different moments been characterised as either replacing or impoverishing our natural human capacities, or a key part of our humanity. This article critically evaluates the conception of the natural invoked by both accounts, and highlights the degree to which engagement with material features of the environment is fundamental to all living things, the closeness of this engagement making any account that seeks to draw a clear boundary between body and artefact problematic. By doing this I seek to clarify the nature of our embodied relationship with various kinds of artefacts; moving from tools to machines to digital interfaces, I consider their differing potentials to be gathered into the body schema, and thus change our embodied horizons of perception and action. While much research currently seeks to facilitate a more ‘natural’ mode of interacting with technology, I argue that such a mode of interaction does not exist outside the particularity of our relationships with specific objects. As a result, rather than trying to cater to supposedly more natural modes of action and perception, future technologies should aim to enrich our experience with new modes, inviting novel relationships that produce new kinds of sensory and other experience.

Strawberry feel forever: understanding metaphor as sensorimotor dynamics

“…Developing physical practice demands extending one's natural sensorimotor capacity into the cultural sphere, assimilating its artifacts (Black 2014;Malafouris 2013;Varela 1999). In so doing, novices are not left to their own devices.…”

“…The cellist is to develop the hand-bow juncture as articulating one more joint in the concatenation of shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers. Just as we do not dwell upon our shoulder, elbow, wrist, or fingers as we go about our daily manual routines, so we are to graft the bow, this culturally-historically evolved prosthetic, onto our naturally evolved organic corporeal device (Black 2014). Doing so takes practice.…”

From Margin to Center? Theoretische Aufbrüche in der Geographie seit Kiel 1969

“…Aber sie sind in der Regel meilenweit entfernt von den aktuellen gesellschaftlichen Problemfeldern, als da sind: Klimawandel, wachsende Fremdenfeindlichkeit, neuer Nationalismus, Aufstieg rechtsradikaler politischer Kräfte, weiteres Aufgehen der Schere zwischen Arm und Reich. Carolin Schurr: Als ich diese Kritik an aktuellen Arbeiten das erste Mal in Deinem Lehrbuch "Sozialgeographie" (Weichhart, 2019(Weichhart, [2008 (Barnes, 2001;Berndt und Boeckler, 2008;Bonds, 2013;Castree, 2004;Gibson-Graham, 2014;Jessop und Oosterlynck, 2008;McDowell und Court, 1994;Oberhauser, 2000;Pickles, 2012;Pollard et al, 2009;Thrift und Olds, 1996). Der Kern des Faches wurde Donut-gleich ausgehöhlt, und die Kräfte an den Rändern wurden buchstäblich zentrifugal und immer durchlässiger zu Nachbar-und anderen Subdisziplinen.…”

“…Denn ja, Gentechnologie und Klimawandel sind Beispiele dafür, dass das auf der Natur-Kultur-Dichotomie aufgebaute ontologische Modell spätestens seit Donna Haraway (1991) und Bruno Latour (1993) transkorporeal, wie Stacy Alaimo (2010) es nennt. Egal, ob man von den Interdependenzen zwischen unterschiedlichen Spezies ausgeht (Haraway, 2008;Hodgetts und Lorimer, 2015), vom Mensch als Cyborg Assemblage, dessen Grenzen durch neue Formen der Technologie, Robotik und künstlicher Intelligenz hybrider werden (Black, 2014;Franklin, 2006;Haraway, 1991;Latour, 2002) oder von der Wirkmächtigkeit von Materie selbst (Braun, 2011;Müller und Schurr, 2016;Tolia-Kelly, 2013), die Plastizität des menschlichen Körpers entsteht durch Intra-Aktionen mit anderen Menschen, Technologien, Tieren, Ökologien und Umwelten. Peter Weichhart: Soweit stimme ich dir zu.…”

Good Vibrations: Charting the Dominant and Emergent Discursive Regimes of Sex Toys

“…Despite, as noted in the extant literature, the scarcity of research concerning the benefits stemming from the employment of vibrators and dildos, the self-affirmative emotional effects of female masturbation and the positive functional effects in terms of lubrication, orgasm, absence of sexual pain, and overall sexual functioning (Black, 2014;Fahs & Swank, 2013) have been repeatedly noted. However, the meaning of sex toys by far transcends their functional dimension, inasmuch as the cultural implications of the discourse of sexuality exceed sex as biological need and brute act, as noted repeatedly by Foucault (1978Foucault ( , 1988.…”