TY - JOUR

T1 - Reverse-Engineering Touch

T2 - Sense-Making and Making Sense with Prosthetic Neurostimulation

AU - Middleton, Alexandra

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2024.

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - biotechnology

KW - body

KW - embodiment

KW - prosthetics

KW - senses

KW - social studies of science

KW - touch

U2 - 10.1177/1357034X231223685

DO - 10.1177/1357034X231223685

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85182646239

VL - 30

SP - 3

EP - 30

JO - Body & Society

JF - Body & Society

SN - 1357-034X

IS - 1

ER -