Intervolution by Mark C. Taylor

Author:Mark C. Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

The frontier where the Internet of Things meets the Internet of Bodies is the digital pancreas I wear on my belt.

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Internet of Bodies

Where does my body begin? Where does it end? What is inside my body? What is outside? What is primary? What is secondary? What is natural? What is artificial? What is original? What is supplemental? In his exceptionally illuminating book, Prosthesis, literary critic David Wills writes,

Where would such a thing, a prosthesis, have to start in order to have started? How would it begin? To be made, built, or constructed? To be told or written? … Any occlusion at the beginning is the effect of transfer, the fact of its being already in process.… From earthbound gallop to quadrupedantic flight, from leg of flesh to leg of steel, it is necessary to transfer otherness, articulated through the radical alterity of ablation as loss of integrity. And this otherness is mediated through the body, works through the operation of a transitive verb … signifying first of all something carried by the body. In translation, what is carried across or transferred is borne by the body. But it doesn’t just carry itself; it carries a self that is divided in its function—walking, carrying. Before it begins to carry anything external to itself it bears that effect of its own internal scission. Thus it is the otherness that the body must carry in order to move that begins—and a first-person adjective is now ready to bear it—this is our prosthesis.1

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