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Toward a Theory of Technological Embodiment http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/RAAC3 CHAP TER 3 Toward a Theory of Technological Embodiment Lisa Meloncon The lived body is a how, not a what. (Aho & Aho, 2008, p. 33) In 1974, the Six Million Dollar Man premiered on network television. Air Force Colonel Steve Austin was almost killed in a plane crash, but as the episode opens, the viewer hears the narrator, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster” (Bennett, 1974–1978). Colonel Austin receives a series of bionic parts—an arm, both legs, and one eye; thus, he becomes one of the first cyborgs—an amalgamation of body and machine—born in U.S. popular culture. Haraway’s (1991) cyborg was initially conceived to critique traditional representations of the feminine, but it is now more widely used as a mechanism to theoretically discuss the relationships between people and machine. For this chapter, “the cyborg reflects the dynamic synergy of indi- vidual, technologies, and the contexts they share, a flexible and simultaneous emphasis that previous names for ages, eras, and periods could not provide” (Inman, 2004, p. 14). Two years later, the Bionic Woman began as a spin-off from the Six Million Dollar Man series (Bennet & Siegel, 1976–1978). Played by Lindsey Wagner, the bionic woman was Jaime Sommers, a pro tennis player. After a devastating parachuting accident, Jaime Sommers, too, was made “better, stronger, faster.” Her surgery replaced one ear, one arm, and both legs with bionic counterparts. Bodies, like Jaime Sommers’s, that fall outside of the realm of the “normal” are often stigmatized as deformed, grotesque, crippled, or retarded. Historically, narratives and descriptions of these bodies focus almost exclusively on the single part that is deficient or not “normal,” such as the hunchback, the one-armed 67 68 / RHE TOR I CAL ACCESSABILITY man, or the village idiot. But for Jamie Sommers there was not a single part to emphasize. She did not look freakish; she looked normal. It was only in moments of dramatic distress, such as a fight scene with a known enemy, when an injury may reveal the technology beneath her skin. Jaime Sommers helps to explain, in part, what I mean by technological embodiments. Most simply defined, “embodiment is all the many and various ways that we (self and other) accomplish relations to being in possession of the bodies that we are” (Titchkosky, 2007, p. 13). When embodiment incorporates technology, the body and its actions become technologically embodied. As an iconic cultural symbol, Jamie Sommers reflects the merging of bodies and tech- nologies and the shifting of the lived body toward technological embodiment. Jamie Sommers also represents the idea of Aho and Aho’s (2008) epigram. He newly bionic body was not a “what.” Instead, her newly bionic body reflected “how” she was going to live and how her body and its meaning had changed to one that was technologically embodied. “We tend to think of our body as a given, but its meaning evolves all the time” (Hacking, 2007, p. 93), and Jaime Sommers body evolved to become a way to a both/and compromise. She is both human and inhuman. She is both abled and disabled. She is embodied and technologically embodied. She illustrates the impact of technologies on the making and remaking of bodies, no matter whether those bodies are classified as abled or disabled. By destabilizing categories of the body, technological embodiment erases differences by focusing on the dispersal of embodiment through technol- ogies. Working within the framework of the posthuman and Merleau-Ponty’s (1962/2002) notion of embodiment, this chapter discusses the ways theories of technical communication can be enhanced through technological embodiments. For the technical communicator, a malleable body that can be remade through technologies is more than a manifestation of cyborg, but rather the manifesta- tion of a complex user, which can have wide ranging impacts on some of the most basic work of technical communication. POSTHUMANISM AND EMBODI MENT Posthumanism owes much to the work of Hayles (1999), who famously declared we have never been human, and it is a “general category for theories and methodologies that situate acts and texts in the complex interplays among human intentions, organizational discourses, biological trajectories, and tech - nological possibilities” (Mara & Hawk, 2010, p. 3). This scholarly trajectory moves in and out of multiple fields, including technical communication and disability studies. While the scholarship on posthumanism in technical communi- cation is growing (see Mara & Hawk, 2010), my concern is to make more visible the connection between technological possibilities and human intentions by drawing on the work of “body studies” (Hawhee, 2004, p. 10). Coming from a variety of fields (e.g., Butler, 1993; De Lauretis, 1989; Foucault, 1994; Scarry, TO WARD A THE ORY OF TECH NO LOG I CAL EMBODIMENT / 69 1987), body studies place the body “in direct relations with the flows or particles of other bodies or things” (Grosz, 1994, p. 168). In other words, body studies ensure that posthumanism doesn’t forget about the living, breathing body since “the body and its specific behavior is where the power system stops being abstract and becomes material. The body is where it succeeds or fails, where it acceded to or struggled against” (Fiske, 1992, p. 162). Speaking of not forgetting the living, breathing body, technical communication is almost guilty of that very thing. The field has too long assumed an unprob- lematic and disembodied body. There are only a few instances where technical communication scholars directly take up the issue of embodiment (Haas & Witte, 2001; Sauer, 2003). The idea of embodiment “is contextual, enmeshed within specifics of place, times, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment,” and it is “akin to articulation in that it is inherently performative, subject to individual enactments” (Hayles, 1999, pp. 196–197). The explicit claim to action and performance, which is an important part of embodiment, connects embodiment to phenomenology. Phenomenology provides “an opening, a space, for things to reveal themselves differently from what we are accustomed” (Aho & Aho, 2008, p. 12), and it does so because it “inquires into how we are engaged participants in a shared world” (Aho & Aho, 2008, p. 25). A key to understanding the “how” is through the body’s engagement and experience with the world. Since we gather and obtain knowledge beyond the physical limitations and restrictions of our bodies, our bodies are often extended into different locations. For example, we can smell things from some distance away; we can extend our understanding of our world by touch. Even disabled bodies are extended through assistive devices or by the idea that one sense grows stronger in the absence of others (e.g., a person without sight is much more sensitive to sound). The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty has been highly influential in his work on the body and embodiment.1 In one of his key texts, Phenomenology 1 Readers may be thinking throughout this section of other philosophical works that discuss the body, such as those by Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the body and technology corpus of Don Ihde or Andrew Feenburg. Additionally, readers may also bring to mind the work of disability scholars, such as Tom Shakespeare, or the interdisciplinary work of Graham Pullin’s Design Meets Disability or the work by systems theorists, such as Niklus Luhmann, Humerto Maturnara and Francisco Varela, and Gregory Bateson. In thinking of “things” as extensions of self, one may see a direct relationship to Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, which emphasizes all objects—both human and non-human—as important actants nodes on the network. Even though actor-network theory can be usefully applied to the large idea discussed here, my focus is solely on a single point in the network, the interaction between human and technological things. All of these works have influenced the information presented here, but the length of this chapter prohibits an in-depth engagement with these works and others like them. Rather, I take all of this work as a starting point to be more inventive than evaluative. 70 / RHE TOR I CAL ACCESSABILITY of Perception (1962/2002), Merleau-Ponty takes to task Cartesian dualism: “In fact every habit is both motor and perceptual, because it lies, as we have said, between explicit perception and actual movement” (p. 175). Thus, he remakes the body by merging it once again with the mind. Here he recombines the mind (perceptual) with the body (motor) because the body is a “nexus of living meanings” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, p. 175). Merleau-Ponty (1962/2002) uses the example of a blind man learning to use a cane. When he is learning to use the cane, the man is experiencing a motor habit. But the cane is also an example of a perceptual habit. Once the stick has become a familiar instrument, the world of feelable things recedes and now begins, not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the stick. the stick is no longer an object perceived by a blind man, but an instrument with which he perceives. It is a bodily auxiliary, an extension of the bodily synthesis. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/2002, pp. 175–176) This example illustrates the ways in which a tool—a cane—had become part of the body. The blind man could feel and guide himself through the everyday- ness of life, no longer aware of the cane itself but of the world the cane revealed. Using Merleau-Ponty’s (1962/2002) concept of extending the body through a specific tool as a foundation, let us shift to a more specific everyday example.
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