Ekaterina Nikitina, (Ph.D. in Literary Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Independent researcher)
The boundaries between animal and the machine have always been unclear and human culture has never been sure about the division of the living and the non-living, the natural and the artificial, or the technological. The concept of technologically mediated naturecultures (Donna Haraway) / medianatures (Jussi Parikka) has brought a refreshing outlook to this issue. Naturecultures opens up that human and non-human actors participate in simpoietic, material-discursive processes of becoming – body, subject, agent, human, animal etc. In my paper I attempt to radicalize the question about sympoietic human/animal/machine becomings discussing an animal disability and prostheticity. Augmented by technologies, prosthetic bodies of chimeric dogs, cats, pigs, donkeys, horses presented in art, literature and real life define our posthuman condition. Their corporeality is a point of intersection of nature and culture, of zoe and bios. Overcoming the distinctions between the natural and the technological, prosthetic beings push away the mechanistic thinking about animal as the machine that is capable/incapable of instrumental function. They offer us a “breakage” in this kind of thinking turning the mechanistic question “What are animals/machines capable of?” into “Can they not be able?”. Such approach opens that humans along with animals and machines share the ability to be unable, “the possibility of sharing the possibility of non-power” (Jacques Derrida), in other words, mortality, or capacity to be dead. In this perspective, prosthesis appears as primordial, intra-active relations between the human and the non-human (Bernard Stiegler) which allows us to understand that to be able-bodied means to be engaged in prosthetic relationships with someone with a disability (Karen Barad). What ontological questions arise in such context of disability? What happens when two prostheticities — human and non-human — meet? When two inabilities encounter each other? How does the condition of animal change when it comes to technological? Are the boundaries between the animal, the human and the machine so important and why can’t we just abolish these borders? I am going to discuss these issues circulated between prosthetisity and animality in the discourse of posthumanism and its critics of postanthropocentric processes which propel the today’s world.
E-mail: katya.althea@gmail.com