- Animal User
For McLuhanite prostheticization, we invest and amplify agency by projecting it away from ourselves and into specific parts of the world, such that our embodiment might be augmented by the capacities of those objects (a hammer ’ s solidity) just as that object is augmented by our soulful agency (the hammer knows what to hit). In this cooperation, the world folds into the extended will and wisdom of the human body, but today, the reverse of this fold is perhaps a more critical process for exploration. The biological informationalism of the universal and absolute User also turns the animalhuman body into another kind of matter, leading to a decentering disenchantment of its agency. Instead we watch the world fold into the body, now itself a prosthetic extension of that world, correlated and piloted by it. In this reverse prostheticization, the human figure is set in motion from some other position in the field; the subject becomes object, self becomes substance, body becomes metabolic reserve, food machines consume you. Even for such multipolar mutual extension, the influence and self-identity of human subjects are by no means excluded (just look around you), but it is made conditional by multidirectional chains of association and by the recognition of previously inert media as potential colleague Users. In particular, animals are one key metabolic reserve that have been essential, if not always willing, enablers of human evolution. Proteins in their flesh were consumed for ours, their skins became our clothes and allowed migration to new places that we explored while riding on their backs on our way. The terms of this relationship already seem ugly. As the unfolding disenchantments brought by genetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology continue to undermine the human/animal distinction (according to Agamben, critical to the historical provision of political sovereignty onto the former), the contested space of animalian identification has been the site where posthumanism is being actively articulated for the humanities. <sup>39</sup>
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User Layer