To map that multipolar field, an idea of inverse prostheticization is necessary to pinpoint symmetrical reversals of the human/animal distinction, where the human is now ridden and no longer the rider. The physiognomic, communicative, and emotional continuities and discontinuities between species are restaged by mutual identification and invention, exemplified by robotics laboratories that draw from animalian anatomies to solve for locomotion and adaptation: robot dogs, robot fish, robot birds, robot insects, and so on. For human purposes, the graduation from biological to synthetic animal machines is not difficult to understand — there is no design without some biomimesis — but what those animals might make of their robotic cousins is another matter. Surely perhaps some of the attraction and wariness that humans feel for humanoid robots might be played out for them as well, including fascination, indifference, and hostility. But instead of transposing animal machines into robots, how might animals use robots? What does it mean to install an animal body into the User position of a complex robot, especially an animal with whom anthropomorphic identification is all but impossible? Back in 2004, Garnet Hertz designed a table-sized mobile robot, navigable through a rollerball interface, and introduced a Madagascar hissing cockroach into the pilot ’ s nest. <sup>40</sup> When cooperative, the cockroach did what cockroaches do and scurried about on the rollerball, which in turn caused the entire robot to scurry around the room like a giant cyborg cockroach, because that is exactly what it was. The effect was startling and uncanny, and it had everything to do with the degraded station of the cockroach. The creature occupies some liminal space between animal and matter, living dirt, filth that is but should not be in motion. If dirt is “ matter out of place, ” watching the living dirt in the driver ’ s seat of complex technology is upsetting, a sensation that runs up and down the spine of autonomic prejudice. <sup>41</sup> This is so, first because the unequivocal User in this demonstration is a bug, that all-purpose figure of primordial mindlessness and repetitious swarming aggregation, and second, because the robot prosthesis amplifies the scale of the bug ’ s “ intentions, ” transforming it into a grotesquely outsized coparticipant in our immediate habitat. The observer is forced to identify with the cockroach as a fellow User and to do so despite the absolute minimum of Cartesian credentials that it may possess. Cybernetics, of course, refers to the piloting of systems, and Garnet ’ s roaches, now learning to fly, present a precise example of subjectivization through the apparatus because of, not despite, their dubiousness.
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