The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production

Abstract

What if the terms "technology" and "the body" did not refer to distinct phenomena interacting in one way or another? What if we understood their relationship as far more intimate - technologies as always already embodied, material bodies as always already technologized? What would it mean, then, to understand the relationship between technology and the body as a relation of indeterminacy? Expanding on the concept of the apparatus of bodily production in the work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, Josef Barla explores how material bodies along with their boundaries, properties, and meanings performatively materialize at sites where technological, biological, technoscientific, (bio-)political, and economic forces intra-act.

Probing ‘instaworthiness’: Siting the selfie

“…The use of spatial coordinates like geotagging, and likewise, the filters and applications that allow photo-editing including manipulation of sharpness, hue and saturation etc. 'softwarize' (Manovich, 2013) the image, ascribing an agency to the non-human actors, what Barla (2019) calls the 'techno apparatus of bodily production'. A socio-spatial proposition combining various technologically mediated interventions is then furnished as selfie, 5 wherein the 'networked self' (Papacharissi, 2011(Papacharissi, , 2018 intersects the 'spatial self' (Schwartz and Halegoua, 2014).…”

“…The specific manifestation of space and self, their demarcation, their 'agential separability' (Barad, 2007) achieved through an aesthetic of visual apartnessare the result of many intertwined discursive-material practices that determine how the selfie as a text is ought to be 'read'. In other words, the self is not transcendental but locational and situated in the complex genealogies of 'techno-apparatuses of bodily production' (Barla, 2019). The 'chequered floor' (see Figure 1), the greenery and crockery (see Figure 2) of Roastery Coffee House Kolkata, the glow sign at Hard Rock Cafe Kolkata (see Figure 3), the unique wood panelling in Oudh 1590 (see Figure 4)each constituent element in-itself banalare manifestations of the desire for situating the self against a visual cue that is 'emblematic' of the placeor, as a respondent frames it, 'something that is eye-catchy'so that the self(ie) can be pegged around the social and cultural coding of the place.…”

“…The images that are deemed suitable for circulation and consumption thus pivot around the heuristics of 'instaworthiness'. Although the digital self-gesturing, aesthetic of sharing and practices of spatiality notionally function as 'intra-active' agencies in the performative realm, these ideal exhibitable images, in effect, make the requisite 'agential cut' (Barad, 2007) agential cuts separate and institute boundaries between intertwined phenomena; in this case, the 'techno-apparatuses of bodily production' (Barla, 2019) and the discourses of spatiality 9to conceive differential social spaces, which is the visual outcome of the selfie.…”

The Afterlife of Breast Cancer: Exploring the Digital Performativity of Post-Treatment Patienthood

“…It is what is said in language about what is observed and, although medical discourses have become more objective with the inflation and precision of the gaze, it is not bereft of the 'social codes' that co-constitute its taxonomies. 4 Against this 'institutionalised' appraisal of illness-'a science on the exercise and decisions of the gaze' (Foucault, 1975, p. 108)-digital health subjectivity (Kent, 2020;Petrakaki et al, 2020) emerges as a generative, affectual, self-reflexive, de-corporealised, agentic enactment (Petersen et al, 2019;Pols, 2005), which expresses hitherto reticent meanings and identities of illness using certain 'techno-apparatus of bodily production' (Barla, 2019) to narrativise an 'auto/pathography' (Nayar, 2015) of multiple intertwining affects and temporalities. Consider, for example, the place of uncertainty within the illnessexperience, relating to etiology, the course of the treatment, the physiological impact, and behavioural aspects.…”