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6 Secrecy, Prosthetics, Aesthetics Gaps seem to give us somewhere to extend: space for our prosthetic devices. Absent expertise, the features of a distant kinsman, a glimpsed spirit elicit their imagining while also eliciting the perception that all images are borrowed images. A sense of excess or insufficiency, then, of lack of proportion, of connections being partial suggest[s] we could extend the perceptions themselves. —Marilyn Strathern 1991, 115–6 —We can understand phenomenology only by seizing upon it as a possibility. —Martin Heidegger [1962] 2002, 39 Introduction This chapter is intended to be a reflection on forms of description and theorizing , that is, on the aesthetics of knowledge practices. The aim is to provide a “cultural description” of cultural categories such as “subjectivity,” “personhood,” “embodiment,” and “agency,” and not to be a “sociological analy­ sis” (Strathern 1988, 274). I envisage the task by reflecting on the aesthetics that underpin theoretical models and the processes through which theoretical models emerge. To address the labor of imagination that theory and ethnography entail, I propose an engagement with “prosthetics,” as a criti­ cal tool and a concept-­ metaphor (Moore 1999; 2004) of considerable imaginative potential for an analy­ sis of secrecy and insurgency in Guatemala , and one that lends itself to a series of performative (re-­ )inscriptions and (re-­)articulations. There exist numerous sites of articulation of “prosthetics” in the imagination of cultural theory. “Prosthetics” evoke debates over relations between the organicity of the body and the in-­ organicity of technology (Downey et al. 1995; Gray 1995; Haraway 1991; Stone 1996; Zylinska 2002). From this perspective, “prosthetics” suggest meditations on the status of the nature/­ culture boundary usually resulting in both augmentation and excen­ tricity of the agentic prosthetic subject. In point of fact, prostheses mark the limi­ Secrecy, Prosthetics, Aesthetics / 177 nal space between the organic and the inorganic, the animate and the inanimate . The relation between inorganic prostheses, more or less permanently attached to organic bodies, points to a series of questions concerning the type of sociality that may be established between organic humans and inorganic technology and the kinds of embodied subjects that may be said to emerge in the context of organic/inorganic interactions. Further, through a questioning of dualisms, prosthetics invite reconfigurations of what may be understood by “embodiment,” “subjectivity,” and “agency.” Donna Haraway (1989; 1991; 1997) offers a groundbreaking attempt at rethinking the relationality of humans and machines. It is Haraway’s contention that the interaction between the two is not unidirectional or, indeed, anthropocentric. Rather, Haraway suggests that humans and machines are both produced through mutuality of interaction. Agency is thus posited as a product of mutual interworkings of the human subject and the machine, and this insight in turn leads to a reconfiguring of the subject in terms of a cyborgian imaginary: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important po­ liti­ cal construction, a world-­ changing fiction . . . The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 1991, 149). In Haraway’s cyborgian imaginary, the hybrid cyborg is enmeshed in fact and fiction, to the extent that the boundary between lived reality and representation appears to be a perspectival effect, an optical illusion. The cyborgian subject is further defined as a normative, if simulated, effect of Foucauldian bio-­ power (Haraway 1991, 163) and West­ ern hegemonic teleology. The cyborg’s hybrid and illegitimate conception engenders the possibility of a counter-­ hegemonic po­ liti­ cal strategy. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras , theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics . . . The cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the “West’s” escalating dominations of abstract individualism, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space . . . The cyborg skips the steps of origi­ nal unity, of identification with nature in the West­ ern sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. . . . The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppo- [3.143...

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