David Wills

from Prosthesis

“All we can say with any certainty is that within the space inhabited by the phantom, we have suddenly switched to another mode. What has occurred above all else is that rapid transfer; a transfer not so much from the artificial, for instance, to the natural, or vice versa, but into the ghostly space of the prosthetic. If, as we are bound to do, we read the pain as the return of some repressed, then it will not be, for me, the body reasserting its primacy over the ratiocinations of everyday existence, calling from some 30 years back to say ‘you cut me and it still hurts,’ not that so much as the body in its prosthetic function, in its artificial and contrived articulations, coming like some metallic specter to haunt the well-sewn surface of originary flesh.” (11-12)

“Thus it is the otherness that the body must carry in order to move that begins—and a first-person adjective is not ready to bear it—this our prosthesis.” (13)

“At the risk of provoking an abyssal indistinction, I’d like to call every rhetorical form that comes into effect a prosthetic transfer, I’d like prosthesis to be the figure here for differential, and differantial, relations in general. I’d like to ask what it would mean for the term to assume such a universality insofar as reference to it—at least in this instance of which there will be none other, not quiet ever—remains connected, in ways that are the whole story here, to my father’s wooden leg, and in turn to his reluctant body. How would the particular idiomatic and idiosyncratic pathos of this leg that is like no other, the singular event of my father’s prosthesis I am claiming here, how would that remain in and through the inevitable and necessary, imprecise and generalized transfer that occurs the moment this writing begins, and even before? One answer is quite clearly that there never was any such event in its pure singularity: prosthesis is the idea of that. The fact that all this comes down by way of my father is a convenient instantiation of its divisibility; the partial and artificial body that I claim, with dubious authority, as my own, as the basis for at least a part of my text, is a counterfeit countersignature of his suffering and infirmity. Prosthesis is the idea of that and at the same time the insistence on this instance, the singular pathos of this leg. The articulation of one with the other, this leg and that idea, can only be contrived, for instance by means of quotation marks or other diacritical forms, the drawing of distinctions between prosthesis, “prosthesis,” and Prosthesis, in other words by effects of writing. But all that functions only because of prosthesis, because the whole never was anywhere, neither in the singular nor in the total, because the parts were always already detachable, replaceable, because the transfer effect upon which the general is constructed is there at the very beginning, in the nonintegrality of that beginning, called prosthesis.” (15)

“I can find no name for this complex relation that a quotation, to begin with, here puts into play; no name to compete with prosthesis, no more pertinent name, no name for this pertinence, the peculiar appurtenance of the same and the other. So I name it prosthesis, I give a name to the configuration that is too complex and imprecise to have a single name, I let the name generalize out of all bounds, in order to resist or have done with the taxonomical rage or necessity that would presume to account for something that begins as a phantom pain or an ambulatory peculiarity extracted from Virgil. In order to insist that there is no simple name for a discourse that articulates with, rather than issuing from, the body, while at the same time realizing that there is no other discourse-in the sense of no other translation, transfer, or relation—no other conception of it except as a balancing act performed by the body, a shift or transfer between the body and its exteriority. The name for it is the name for the possibility of naming or uttering in general, and thus there is an urgent necessity to name it. To name it with a name that limps into existence; name it, as I do, prosthesis. And then to relate it against the implacable necessity of naming.” (20)

“In this way the wooden leg represents the duality of every prosthesis, its search for a way between emulating the human and superseding the human. A particularly supplemental duality once again.” (26).

“Secondly, the question of order is thrown into doubt by the paradoxical play of analogy, by the fact that the model—wooden leg, robot, computer—well before the advent of any artificial intelligence, can always surpass the original in its functioning, simply do the job better; or rather do all sorts of other jobs the original could not conceive of, like generate this renegade piece of writing.” (29)

“One cannot simply write about prosthesis when one is automatically, just by virtue of writing, writing prosthesis, entering into prosthetic relations, being prosthetic.” (30)

“Prosthesis is about nothing if it is not about measuring distance—that of the necessary separation and unavoidable complication between animate and inanimate form, between natural and artificial; that between types of writing, between memory and art criticism—about the necessity for and impossibility of precision in these relations. It is about close and distant connections of close and distant relatives.” (40)

“By means of prosthesis the relation to the other becomes precisely and necessarily a relation to otherness, the otherness, for example, of artificiality attached to or found within the natural. The relation to the other is denied the reconfirmation of sameness that freezes its differential effect, rigidifies the oedipal structure, and ultimately represses the feminine, the homosexual, and so on. For in spite of the importance of amputation, that relation, once it is a question of prosthesis, cannot be reduced to a matter of presence or absence, of possession or dispossession. It cannot be reduced to a matter of having or not having the prosthesis, for prosthesis is in no way reducible to a wooden leg. Instead, prosthesis of necessity prosthetizes whatever it relates to by automatically inscribing its effect of otherness. Quite plainly, once an artificial limb comes to be attached to a human body, then any second, or rather third body that relates to that divided first one necessarily relates to it as difference, even if it be another divided or prosthetic body.” (44)

“Prosthesis reads this possibility from the following point of view: if an utterance, such as a figure in the center of a painting, can be grafted onto another context, this means that it has no “natural” place, never did have, and that the relations it forms with subsequent contexts inevitably reinscribe that fall out of naturalness. And prosthesis adds the emphasis that what therefore governs recontextualization are forms of contrivance and principles of artificiality. In this sense a principle such as that of analogy, which means, for instance, that the wooden leg is designed to function as much as possible like the amputated one, can occlude neither the fact that the leg is wooden or steel nor the fact that before the principle of analogy could come into effect, the principles of detachability and artificiality already had to be in play.” (45)

“This enfolding or abyssal effect would therefore be the prosthetic deconstruction of difference that is already familiar to this discussion. according to its logic there never was any idea of the human constituted without reference to prosthetic articulations, relations to supposed external othernesses; what seem to be the possibilities of subsequent prosthetic attachments—principles of nonintegrality, detachability, and replacement—are in fact the constituting principles of the human mechanism.” (71)

Perhaps the shift here is simply from the prosthesis of the body to a prosthesis of the mind, but the point is precisely that once soft-ware becomes biological, it can no longer simply be worn; it has become the same sort of commodity as the body, or else the mind itself has become such a commodity, in any case the distinctions among software, body, and mind can no longer be maintained by means of criteria of naturality and artificiality. Similarly it is no longer relevant to ask whether information systems or artificial intelligences do in fact function like the human brain. They become prosthetized to the brain, at least in terms of this reading of a science fiction, in such a way as to insist that the brain is always already designed or destined for them, not just functioning like them but infected by them, always already an intelligence determined by the sense of the artificial, the detachable, the replaceable; always already the site of the prosthetic deconstruction of difference that it contains or produces and that inhabits or infects it.” (72)

“Jacked in, prosthetized, there is no structural distinction between body and machine, indeed between the mechanics of the switching and the fluidity of immersion in one or the other mode. Yes, there is a switch, everything depends on it; no, the switching doesn’t take you to an opposite mode, not opposite in the binary sense that the on/off, in/out function of the switch would seem to presume. Yes, the leg is off, he dives in, the waves smother his infirm body while the boy dances at the water’s edge; no, this is no less prosthetic than the morning’s wakening, shuffling to the side of the bed, easing the stump into the leg and clamping the buckle of the harness, like settling a waterpan on one’s head and setting off up the hill; no less jacked in, in one or the other mode.” (85)

“Let us return to the question: what does it mean to write in the quick of prosthesis? […] It is an old and naïve question, one that has been both raised and repressed by the whole contemporary inquiry into the sign as articulation between word and thing. From a prosthetic perspective, the thing in question can only be the body. That is in any case the hypothesis as well as the thematic undertaking of everything elaborated here. What one talks about here and in general, what language refers to when it names the other, is the body. The linguistic relation, as a form of translation, is articulated through the body as relay for alterity, my own body, that of my mother, of my father, and so on; it is articulated through the experience of the body as experience of the other. Now, still within the perspective of prosthesis, the body, as articulation of this linguistic relation will necessarily be infirm, or lacking, in need of the other. Before any physiology and beyond any psychopathology, the body to be found at the scene of prosthesis is deficient, less than whole, and has always been so. Thus, to the extent that the relation called the prosthetic regulates the operations of sense in general, and to the extent that the body functions in that relation as the reference of first and last resort in the terms that I am about to describe, the the prosthetic body will not be an exception but the paradigm for the body itself. If you will, it is by means of prosthesis that I wish to insist on the non-originary status of the body, on the nonintegrality of its origin, in order to resist the idea that the originary dissemination of sense might be weakened by the presumption of a corporeal entity (a supposition that subsumes the concept of the individual and the law of the proper name). I would hold on the contrary that it is precisely from the disarticulation of the body that the idea of dissemination derives its force. My hypothesis is thus as follows: language’s first reference is made to a body, a non-originary and divided body.” (135-137)

“The struggle here is therefore with a reciprocity of body and word that cannot be reduced to reference, that continues beyond any hope of unity, and that on the contrary installs divisibility as the principle of any enunciation whatsoever.” (141)

“Or else, what ethical interests are served by the exploitation of an entanglement between word and body such as I am encouraging here? In favor of whom and what does this series of chiastic twists turn?” (143)

“I would suggest that it is precisely what I call the prosthtization of the body, its originary and final nonintegrality, that produces the ethical problematic surrounding death, as well as that of life, as a result of which a classical response or solution to the question becomes inconceivable. Ethics (the presumption of integrality) and convenience (the recourse to artifice) collapse into the same sort of chiastic embrace as the body and the word, and if indeed some way out can be found it will no longer have the classic form of a question.” (143).