I-cyborg: disability, affect and public pedagogy

Abstract

In 2008 Elizabeth underwent a cochlear implant. The necessary but traumatic operation was approached in her usual creative way. To begin, Elizabeth researched the medical process and the ways other individuals had experienced the procedure and its aftermath. Then she set about documenting her personal response through Facebook, providing often confronting images of her transformation (as she put it) into a cyborg. This paper is a conversation between the two authors of this article, reflecting on and analysing Elizabeth's experience within the wider context of bodily enhancement and cosmetic surgery and exploring the role of the social networking site Facebook as a kind of public pedagogy that functions through affect. The two authors reflect first on Elizabeth's experience and her motives for such a public performance. Second, they explore some of the wider, underlying questions of negotiated subjectivity impacted by our ever-growing intimate and symbiotic relationship to new technologies. They argue that human beings evolving into ‘cyborgs’, as a result of new technological applications together with greater media convergence and digital technologies of social networking, offers an exciting potential for affective cultural interventions, new understandings of what it means to be human.

Keywords:

• cochlear implant
• bodily enhancement
• social networking
• public pedagogy
• affect
• Facebook
• disability
• blogging

Notes

1. To simplify the account and discussion for the reader, Elizabeth and Gerry have decided to write about the surgery and experience of Elizabeth's cochlear implant in the third person for this article. This enables the two authors to interrogate the broader issues together.

2. Elizabeth talks of the process of her surgery as ‘being implanted’; the implied loss of agency in this sentence – a surgical process that requires action from another being done to one's body – is significant for its complexity. Meredith Jones, who has written extensively on ‘makeover culture’ and cosmetic surgery (see Jones, 2008; Jones & Sofoulis, 2002) provides valuable insights about the negotiated processes of subjectivity that are equally applicable to CIs and similar procedures. Elizabeth's procedure and her response can also be understood as part of contemporary ‘makeover culture’, ‘the process of becoming something better’ (Jones, 2008, p. 1) with all of its inherent ambivalence and concerns about bodily and identity transformations.

3. The sounds that a cochlear implantee hears are not ‘biological’ sounds but computer generated which the brain has to learn to identify. The website www.earinstitute.org/research/aip/audiodemos.htm offers a simulation for people who are NOT deaf or hearing impaired to demonstrate what speech and music would sound like through a cochlear implant. These simulations generated using the noise-band vocoder are a close approximation to what an implantee would hear (Shannon, Zeng, Kamath, Wygonski, & Ekelid, 1995).

4. Aristotle argued that the senses should be considered as a hierarchy with ‘sight’ as the highest of the senses, followed in order by hearing, smell, taste, and touch (Jutte, 2005, p. 61). This sense hierarchy has not been uncontested for others have argued that this hierarchy is universal but a social construct influenced by philosophy, human evolution, and technological progress (see Jutte, 2005, p. 61).

5. Perhaps this is because the device is placed inside the body and takes over brain function.

6. Retrieved June 18, 2009, from www.alldeaf.com/blogs/neecy/

7. One useful tool to think through some of these implications in terms of the relationship between human and non-human is Actor Network Theory (ANT), an innovative sociological approach developed by Science and Technology Studies scholars Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, together with the British sociologist John Law, and others (see Latour, 1993, 1994; also Haney, 2006). Their approach aimed to map the relations between humans, technology and material objects as they argued that all cultural processes are created by the interactions of the material and the ‘semiotic’ – interactions which are not fixed but evolve and change over time. Meredith Jones found such insights ‘a particularly important idea when considering implants’ (2008, p. 59).

8. Elizabeth's experience of the negative views on CIs was echoed in our related research into disability in 3D Virtual environments such as Second Life (SL). There we learnt that there were very strongly polarised opinions expressed in blogs and online forums about whether residents in SL who identified with a physical disability should represent themselves as such in the virtual world. (See Wood, 2008; Hickey-Moody & Wood, 2008, 2009; Bloustien & Wood, 2009.)

9. Graeme Clark's ‘Lecture 5: Brain Plasticity Gives Hope to Children’ in the Boyer Lecture series – Restoring the Senses (http://www.abc.net.au/rn/boyerlectures/stories/2007/2084251.htm).

10. In popular culture, this issue has been tackled effectively in the 1986 film and play Children of a Lesser God (director Haines, 1986). In this film the protagonist, Sarah Norman, a deaf teacher battles in her relationship with a hearing man who tries to make her use speech rather than her sign language.

11. The use of the term ‘Deaf’ as well as lower-case ‘deaf’ is deliberate. Within the Deaf community those who are hearing-impaired argue that the use of the lower-case deaf is someone who does not identify as being part of the Deaf community.

12. Elizabeth: Just to clarify, when referring to myself I use the lower-case word ‘deaf’ to distinguish from being culturally Deaf. Culturally Deaf would mean that I have taken on a Deaf identity. Aside from some time in pre-school, I went to mainstream schools (not one for the Deaf) and I don't use – much less know – sign language. So just to clear up any confusion: Deaf with a capital = culturally Deaf and lower-case deaf just refers to a significant hearing loss.

13. It seems as though one of the aims of new technology and the design of the prosthesis is to make them as close as possible to looking ‘authentic’ or ‘natural’ – in other words hiding the appearance of the disability.

14. The potential of new engagement, empathy and immersion with the other through the physiological affective stimuli of visual and digital media has long been noted by other scholars, most notably by Taussig (1993) and Shaviro (1993). However, the extension into public pedagogy is still relatively new, as in Albrecht-Crane and Daryl Slack (2003), Sontag (2004a, b), Giroux (2004), and Hickey-Moody (2007, 2009).