Prosthetic Semiosis: Thinking Beyond the Prosthetic Metaphor
As we search for ways to describe our technologically-suffused contemporary moment beyond the cyborg, theoreticians and artists alike have turned to the prosthetic as metaphor to encompass our manifold anxieties and desires. Yet this shorthand for technological mediation insufficiently describes the complexities of our relationship to our technologies, be they artistic, medical, or critical. Rather than thinking beyond stultifying binaries, like able/disabled, male/female, and biological/synthetic, the prosthetic metaphor codifies these dichotomies by presupposing a normative state to which the prosthetic object is attached. The prosthetic itself—be it a medical object or a metonymic application—is emphasized to the point of technofetishism, while the human subject is elided for the sake of a transhumanist fantasy. Asked to span across any given theoretical concept that involves intimate encounters between technology and the body, the prosthetic metaphor is stretched too thin to bear weight. But rather than denying this impulse toward the prosthetic, I propose we reconfigure its usage as process rather than representation. In her 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Donna Haraway asserts that, “Prosthesis is semiosis, the making of meanings and bodies, not for transcendence, but for power-charged communication.” I would like to explore the implications of reframing prosthesis on both a literal and conceptual level in such a way that acknowledges the semiotic power of the prosthetic object as contingent, mutually constitutive with the subject, and as a generative maker of meaning.
Visual and Critical Studies MA Candidate
California College of the Arts
Mailee Hung is a California native who received her bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2012. Fascinated with the mechanisms driving her sculptural practice, she decided to pursue a more rigorous examination of their conceptual frameworks. She is currently a second-year candidate in the Visual and Critical Studies graduate program at California College of the Arts.
Hung is primarily interested in challenging the physis/techne binary. She is suspicious of the categorically biological and is interested in exploring the ethical and ontological implications of the always-already technologized body. Her transdisciplinary work ranges across a diverse set of sources, including bio- and cyborg art, posthumanism, fashion, prosthetics, biotechnology, science fiction, and body modification.
