Josef Barla The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production Science Studies Josef Barla is a postdoc researcher in the Biotechnology, Nature and Society research group based at Goethe University Frankfurt. He studied Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on questions at the intersection of technology, ecology, (techno-)biopolitics, and care. Josef Barla The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production A New Materialist Theory of Technology and the Body Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na- tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: »Gamochonia. – Trichterkraken« (Detail, image edited by Ines Handler), Copyright: Giltsch Adolf and Ernst Haeckel; CC0 Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4744-0 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4744-4 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839447444 Table of Contents Acknowledgments | 7 Introduction | 9 1 Mapping the Terrain | 19 Technology Beyond Determinism | 19 The Technological is Political | 25 Technology and the Body: An Asymmetrical Relation | 38 2 Locating the Technological with/in Rhizomatic Networks | 57 The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects | 59 Technical Mediation as Processes of Mutual Mobilization | 67 Power and Agency in Heterogeneous Networks | 71 Relational Ontology and the Question of the Political | 80 The Absent Present Body | 92 3 Re(con)figuring the Apparatus | 101 On Material-Semiotic Actors and Generative Nodes | 102 Apparatuses as Boundary-Drawing Practices | 124 Figurations Matter: The Techno-Apparatus as Figure and Method | 144 4 Cutting Technology and the Body Together-Apart | 151 Difference that Matters: The Biopolitics of the Spirometer | 152 Materializing Authentic Bodies: The Human Provenance Pilot Project | 168 Conclusions: A New Materialist Theory of Technology and the Body | 182 References | 209 Acknowledgments As an entanglement itself, this book would not exist if it were not for the help, ideas, and contributions of friends, colleagues, and many other things of material and immaterial nature. Setting up a list cannot do justice for the friendships, in- tellectual and personal encounters, and the companionships that made it possible to write this book over the last few years – which went by all too quickly. Never- theless, I wish to thank all those minds and hearts that inspired and encouraged me to write this book, hoping that one way or the other they will find themselves in it. I would like to express all my gratitude to Mona Singer who introduced me into the world of feminist science fiction and from there to the fabulous work of Donna Haraway in the first place. More than for her patience, I would like to thank her for profoundly shaping my critical thinking and for constantly remind- ing me that ‘we’ are always already in the thick of things. Thank you also for the many meetings and the highly productive discussions we had in the doctoral seminar group. I am deeply grateful to Karen Barad for inviting me as a visiting fellow to the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the academic year of 2012/2013. Thank you for establishing our small theory group and for introducing me to Magdalena Górska, Bue Thastum, and Elaine Gan – I still miss the discussions we had at campus as well as our inspir- ing meetings off campus. I would also like to thank Jenny Reardon and Andrew Mathews for welcoming me warmly and for providing me with a workspace at the Science and Justice Research Center as well as my other colleagues at Oakes College for all the stirring debates we had. My profound thanks go to the faculty of the Initiativkolleg “Gender, Vio- lence and Agency in the Era of Globalization” (GIK) at the University of Vienna – Nikolaus Benke, Eva Flicker, Susanne Hochreiter, Elisabeth Holzleithner, Eva Kreisky, Elke Mader, Maria Mesner, Birgit Sauer, Mona Singer, and Sabine Strasser – for making my work and those of my fellow colleagues possible by initiating the GIK (a process that took several years and consumed a lot of 8 | The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production energy and resources), as well as to Sigrid Schmitz who not only shared the of- fice with us but also her ideas and expertise on our projects. I would also like to thank Cecilia Åsberg and Iris van der Tuin for their generous reviews and highly valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this book. I wish to thank all my friends who supported me by reading and commenting on drafts of this manuscript, for providing me with invaluable feedback that strengthened my work, and for reminding me that there is, and should be, a world beyond academia. Thanks especially to Isabella Amir, David Hoffmann, Christoph Hubatschke, Susi Kimm, Mathis Kronschläger, Katharina Maly, Anna Petran, Louise Thiel, Ina Tiefenbacher, and Sam Wade for reading my work and for providing me with helpful insights and remarks that enriched my draft. Finally, I am especially indebted, once again, as always, to Ines and Maggie who gave me courage to pursue the project when I lost faith in it. Introduction What we need is to make a difference in material-semiotic apparatuses, to diffract the rays of technoscience so that we get more promising interference patterns on the recording films of our lives and bodies. Diffraction is an optical metaphor for the effort to make a differ- ence in the world. —Donna Haraway/Modest Witness Over the last few decades, the idea that technology is not the Other of the body has become more and more pervasive in poststructuralist and posthumanist theo- ries. Jacques Derrida, for example, reminds us that “there is no natural, originary body: technology has not simply added itself, from the outside or after the fact, as a foreign body” (Derrida 1995: 244). For Derrida, technology is “‘originally’ at work in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the ‘body and the soul’” (ibid). Similarly, Donna Haraway argues that “technologies are not mediations, something in between us” but rather “what Merleau-Ponty called ‘infoldings of the flesh.’ What happens in the folds is what is important.” (Haraway 2008: 249) Both Derrida and Haraway seem to suggest that technologies and bodies are inextricably entangled with one another. Technologies are to be understood as always embodied technologies while material bodies have to be considered as always technologized bodies. What remains unclear, however, is the question as to how to understand the embodiment of technologies, and how to make sense of the role of technologies and technoscientific practices in the processes of the calling into being of particularly materialized bodies. Discourse theories and especially the concepts of performativity and inter- pellation have been crucial tools for understanding how and which subjectivities and consequently also bodies come to matter, but they also remain limited. Judith Butler, for example, provides us with a robust account of how regulatory