Prosthetic culture

Definition

Prosthetic culture is the idea that human culture is made of interaction between people and objects, covering the whole set from the earliest tools to the most advanced artificial limbs. Applied to digital culture, it treats the computer as an external brain or cybernetic mental attachment. Humans shed prosthetic devices, whether virtual or physical, increasingly quickly.

The term comes from Celia Lury, then a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity was published by Routledge in 1998, 248 pages, in the International Library of Sociology.

Her argument is that the manipulation of photographic images, and of ways of seeing, redefines the relation between consciousness, the body, and memory, and that the result is a prosthetic culture whose capacities both extend and threaten our humanity. She describes the body's ability to act outside itself both mechanically and perceptually.

The prosthesis she is concerned with is the camera and what it does to memory. Some memories can be falsely implanted in a person while others are stored in video archives of images. Her cases are photo-therapy, family albums, Benetton advertising campaigns, false memory syndrome, and the lives of cartoon characters.

Her conclusion is that the eyes made available by contemporary visual technologies supply not only specific ways of seeing but ways of life.

The book also identifies a consequence that has aged well. Apparently voluntary actions get redefined as the effect of previously invisible determinations, which supplies new grounds for denying individual responsibility and poses new ethical problems. Lury notes that questions of gender remain troublesome in this redrawing of the line between character and personality.

Outside Lury's specific argument, prosthetic culture is used more loosely for the whole account of human capacity as distributed into objects.

The lineage runs back to Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964), where he treats every medium as an extension of a human faculty, with a corresponding numbness in the faculty extended. See Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Andy Clark and David Chalmers made the philosophical version of this argument in "The Extended Mind" (1998), arguing that cognitive processes can extend into the environment, so a notebook can be part of a person's memory in the same sense their hippocampus is.

In the digital sense, one may treat a computer as an external brain, which is not a metaphor under this account; it is a description of where certain functions are performed. Contact lists replaced the memorization of numbers, navigation replaced route knowledge, and search replaced recall of facts. Each transfer is an extension and an amputation at once.

Shedding

The stub's final sentence is the part worth expanding, because it distinguishes contemporary prosthetic culture from earlier versions.

A tool that lasts a lifetime becomes part of the person who uses it. A tool replaced every eighteen months does not, and the difference has consequences.

The cycle keeps shortening. Physical devices are discarded on a two-to-three-year replacement schedule, applications on a shorter one, and accounts and profiles faster still. Each discarded prosthesis takes its accumulated skill with it, since the muscle memory and the mental model were fitted to a specific object that no longer exists.

This is where prosthetic culture meets the durability question. A prosthesis that cannot be maintained, repaired, or kept is not an extension of the person so much as a rental of a capacity, and the capacity ends when the arrangement does.

Related Reading

• The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future
• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
• Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media
• The Cyborg Handbook
• Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
• Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg
• How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
• Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer
• The Body in Society: An Introduction
• Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches
• The System of Objects
• Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series
• The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
• Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity by Margaret MacLean
• Mind Uploading
• Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects

Key texts

• Lury, Celia. Prosthetic Culture: Photography, Memory and Identity. Routledge, 1998.
• Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. "The Extended Mind." Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7-19.
• Smith, Marquard, and Joanne Morra, eds. The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. MIT Press, 2006.
• McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw Hill, 1964.

External Links

• Prosthetic Culture, Internet Archive, lending copy