Hi everyone

This is my blog post for this week's assignment:

http://ablersite.org/2012/10/10/sobchack/comment-page-1/#comment-1285

And find below my actual text:

Hi Sara!

Thanks for this post, I enjoyed looked at the images and your comments about the prosthetic. I especially liked how you used Vivian Sobchack’s thinking around the lived experience (or the phenomenology of lived experience) of the amputee and prosthesis user and how important this is to acknowledge in thinking about ways to dismantle or at least rupture the problematic abundance of metaphorical use of the prosthetic in seemingly unrelated contexts and discourses. The phenomenology of lived experience, then, is important because the body itself becomes a sign of political discourse – the body has political objecthood that has power to demonstrate certain truisms about the world in which we live, or at least, to destabilize what we may have previously thought as universally true for a range of human subjects.

For example, S. Kay Toombs says that “phenomenology provides important information for those engaged in activities such as developing ways to re-constitute public space (both physical and social) so that it is accommodating to different modes of being-in-the-world.”1 Beyond thinking of phenomenology as a vehicle for changing ablest social and physical architecture in our environment, Maureen Connolly and Tom Craig critically state that “working with the body as a sign of political discourse allows us to examine how disability, stressed embodiment, and bodily contingency transgress the logics and inscriptions of a culture based in ablism, capitalism, and normative productivity.”2 In this way, they are outlining that much of our perceptions of shared understanding, perceiving and sensing of the world is actually based on cultural ideals of a ‘normal’ healthy body. We presume what ‘normal’ is but “the processes and outcomes of typical inquiry of stressed embodiment have been guided…by distanced scripts of productivity, commodity exchange, and myths of non-contingent bodies and thorough-going concordance.”3 I argue that this critical distance can be overcome and even removed by looking at the personal experience and the anecdote in order to shed light on alternative experiences and educate us to these new modes of being.

Another way of thinking about the phenomenology of lived experience and your interest in this is as one who might be engaged in a type of ‘sensory ethnography’ (to use Sarah Pink’s terminology).4 Within your ‘field work’ as the sensory ethnography, you would attend to the senses that arise through the use of the everyday prosthesis by various amputees, and consider how their embodied knowledge can help you – us – understand human perception in new ways. How can we come to understand the intersection of embodied knowledge, difference and technology in multi-sensorial ways?

Like Sobchack, I really believe the use of the prosthesis (especially in contemporary art practices as a scholar ensconced in art history) demands a more rigorous, nuanced reading than those that have previously been undertaken, in synergy with the ethics and practices of a sensory ethnographer. Part of this new reading involves incorporating and examining work by disabled and nondisabled artists where embodied experiences of the prosthesis can inform the imaginative and metaphorical constructs of it, such as the prostheses as a form of fashion, as an intervention in public space or as a mobile sensorial device exchanged within a socially-engaged art experience with a group, prostheses as inter-relational affective limbs, or prostheses as violent rupture, subversion and transgression through a trickster’s game. To use prosthesis-specific language, I believe it is critical for contemporary artists, designers and critics etc. to begin to re-think and re-fit the prosthesis within new frameworks and to make adjustments within a framework of complex embodiment. While I am not suggesting that contemporary artists completely abandon their imaginative use of the prosthesis to convey metaphorical notions such as the obscene, abject or traumatic, I do think it necessary that they bring into their representations a more informed, sensitive and responsible framing that supports complex embodied disabled and able-bodied experiences.

While you suggest this in your final sentence, I wonder how you mean to continue your own engagement with prosthesis as helpful, productive metaphor within a discourse and context in which Sobchack and myself might find transformative? Is the prosthesis really just the easiest, most available grammar for externalizing our many stitched-together parts? How can the ‘failure’ of available grammar be useful in yielding a productive conversation in how we might engineer another grammar, in how we might be able to un-think the prosthetic in the narrativizing and metaphorical-bending ways that it is currently being used?

Cheers,
Amanda Cachia

CITATIONS
1 S. Kay Toombs, “The Lived Experience of Disability” in Human Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, Intersubjectivity as a Practical Matter and a Problematic Achievement (Jan., 1995), 10.
2 Maureen Connolly and Tom Craig, “Stressed Embodiment: Doing Phenomenology in the Wild” in Human Studies, Vol. 25, No. 4, 25^th Anniversary Issue (2002), 456.
3 Ibid.
4 Sarah Pink, "Preparing For Sensory Research: Practical and Orientation Issues" in Doing Sensory Ethnography, London, New York: Sage, 2009.