The Vulnerability of Cyborgs

Abstract

This article contributes to Science and Technology Studies on vulnerability by putting cyborgs at center stage. What vulnerabilities emerge when technologies move under the skin? I argue that cyborgs face new forms of vulnerability because they have to live with a continuous, inextricable intertwinement of technologies and their bodies. Inspired by recent feminist studies on the lived intimate relationships between bodies and technologies, I suggest that sensory experiences, material practices, and cartographies of power are important heuristic tools to understand the vulnerabilities of hybrid bodies. Based on an analysis of how patients in the Netherlands and the United States cope with appropriate and inappropriate implantable cardioverter defibrillator shocks, I describe how defibrillators introduce two new kinds of vulnerabilities: vulnerability as an internal rather than an external threat, and as harm you may try to anticipate but can never escape. Despite these vulnerabilities, some heart patients don’t position themselves as passive victims of faulty machines. They actively engage in material practices of resilience by using magnets to stop inappropriate shocks. I conclude that anticipating and taming the improper working of technologies inside bodies constitutes a new form of invisible labor that is crucial to diminishing the existential uncertainties of cyborgs.

Health beyond the carbon barrier

“…As the philosopher of science Alfred Nordmann (2007, 219) has stated regarding American notions of convergence, 'the expansion of power and control is accompanied by new dependencies, new kinds of ignorance, new problems even of human or ecological survival' (also see Coeckelbergh 2011). Nelly Oudshoorn (2016), for example, has worked with people who do not feel fully comfortable with their implanted defibrillators because the device is primed to deliver a shock when it picks up an event that resembles a stroke. That shock may come in response to a real or nonreal threat, it might be a lifesaver or a false alarm, but either way it both constitutes and denotes the vulnerabilities, human and post-, that patients live with, what Oudshoorn calls the 'existential uncertainties of cyborgs'.…”

How does health feel? Towards research on the affective atmospheres of digital health

“… 56 People can be reliant on life-giving devices like insulin pumps and pacemakers and they can gain reassurance and a sense of security from using them. 57 , 58 These at-home or in-body technologies, along with the human caregivers attending patients, can contribute to therapeutic affective atmospheres. The opposite is also true, however.…”

“…This can be even more the case of they are relying on the technologies to support their health or provide relief from illness or pain. As Oudshoorn 57 has noted, the vulnerabilities that these dependencies may generate are rarely acknowledged. Some people do not like how their homes are transformed into medical clinics when they are encouraged to engage in self-care and self-monitoring, finding the technologies and their notifications intrusive and constant reminders of their illness, or resent the invisible labour that is required of them to learn about and tinker with the technologies to make them useful and domesticate the technologies into their mundane routines.…”

Hybrid bodies and the materiality of everyday life: how people living with pacemakers and defibrillators reinvent everyday routines and intimate relations

“…Scholars in science and technology studies and medical sociology have described how contemporary medical devices permeate all aspects of human life and contribute to a reconfiguration of human bodies (Brown and Webster , Casper and Morrison , Lehoux ). Whereas most studies have addressed technologies external to bodies, more recently there is a growing interest in devices that operate under the surface of the body, including artificial hips, knees and hearts, breast and cochlear implants, prosthetic arms and legs, pacemakers, implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), spinal cord stimulators, and emerging human enhancement technologies such as brain implants and nano‐chips for diagnosis and drugs delivery (Brown and Webster , Blume , Dalibert ,, Mauldin , Morrison and Bliton ,Oudshoorn , , Pollock ). Because this increased (bio)medicalisation of the body (Clarke et al .…”

“… In addition to disentanglement work they also have to engage in forms of labour required to protect their body from internal threats, most notably inappropriate ICD shocks, and fractured leads, and work involved in taking care of appropriate adjustments of pacemakers and ICDs to their activities during the two‐yearly device controls at the cardiology clinic (Oudshoorn and ). …”