“…Individuals observing a rubber hand will sometimes attribute sensation to that hand rather than to their own. For example, experimental subjects will make this false attribution if they see the ‘alien hand’ being stroked by a brush while their own equivalent hand is stroked in the same way but is hidden from sight. After a few minutes, they will ‘feel’ the stroking on the rubber hand , even though it is separate from their body, rather than in their own, hidden, hand. It seems that the brain has attributed the sensation to a physically distinct object within its field of vision, and in the process, it has somehow incorporated that alien object into the body.” (Rose & Abi-Rached, 207)

“The chosen fragment converts itself into a text no longer a bit of a text, a part of a sentence or a discourse, but a chosen bit, an amputated limb, not yet a transplant, but already an organ, cut off and placed in reserve.” Antoine Compagnon

I fear the revelation of seams: I will wake up and realize I am patchwork—

An integration of many, assemblages of technology.

Joints are just operable disjunctions, and I have learned to ignore the sutures. If I spend my hours parsing parts,

Organizing organs,

I’ll lose my self between the meat.

 

Stroked hands stroking hands

My neurons are phonemes placed in synaptic sentences.

The prosthetics of text,

Language accumulates language accumulates body.

 

Hands are a point of manipulation: sculpting, digits to clay.

Hands are a point of integration: eating, digits to lips.

 

How much trust must we lend before something is rendered identifiable?

How absent must our own hands be before we begin to feel for another’s?

Empathy is a loophole in our theory of mind—

Will our own hands dissolve if we don’t look at them enough?

 

Hands signify humanity: they are flesh turned culture, rods of carbon capable of theft.

Hands, organs of bunched flesh, are the means of mediating self and other, to a point of contamination: hands become other. Culturally portent, there is a reason for the cinematic trope of the revolting hand—a hand in revolt. Although disembodied, a hand refuses to die; it has yet to recognize a dis-integration.

 

We incorporate, and wait for our body to betray us.

Trust comes easy.

Trust, our fleshless organ.

“In each generation, unsurprisingly, these arguments are made on the basis of whatever happens to be the current mode of objectivity about the development of children—habits, the will, instinct theory, psychoanalysis, and today the brain. Social justice, it seems, lies not in tackling the causes of structural inequality, poverty, poor housing, unemployment, and the like, but in managing parents in the name of the formation of good citizens.” (Rose & Abi-Rached, 196)

 

What’s the essence of morality?

Is it an alloy of metals, cheap and bendable like a steel-aluminum compound,

Or is there a crystalline rigidity to its composition,

Built by a singular, signature element?

 

The gavel is a leveling technology:

It fattens out specificities of who’s and when’s and where’s—

I’m mostly scared of losing the why’s—

The insistence of comparability that assumes all murders are congruous.

 

Dogs bite the hand that feeds them for a reason.

You put too much trust in your fellow man,

Assuming that he’s not carrying poison.

 

People have always been reactionary:

We do things for reasons.

 

Retell my body repeatedly.

Use different languages, tenses.

Interpretation or translation?

Let my arteries reveal a map of intent

And my breath a cipher of childhood.

Explain my brain, my heart, my core

Toil away, spiraling closer

Towards anything that can be claimed

The most precious.

 

If you asked me to read my form,

I could explain every inch of weight.

I would tell you how freckles were once sun

Flesh once fruit

And scar once entry.

Every pock an imprint from another surface:

My boundaries are only explainable when read as nexus.

I don’t claim interiority:

I have never seen my insides;

If I had to guess how my body manages to stay together,

I’d explain that I’m a product of pressure.

Layers of sediment squeezed into shape.

Social concentrate.

Neuro, Chapter 5 

“Perhaps arguments from neuroscience are merely being invoked to give such proposals a sheen of objectivity—for they are often criticized as arising from hopes rather than facts.” (Rose & Abi-Rached, 162)

 

Every time science attempts to locate a neurological basis of some social phenomena, there’s a concretization of importance: social values are substantiated as biological inevitabilities. This process of naturalization frequently serves the dominant order, as it reifies and concretizes traditional value systems.

Example: competition is a necessity within capitalism. Systems of competition are justified within Darwinian evolutionary science, leading proponents of capitalism to say, “Look, we can’t help but compete. It’s in our genes.” Repeat justifications of the social order through science ad infinitum.

 

Within science, the greatest disagreements arise over findings that disrupt the social order.

 

The scientific community has been squabbling about the existence of mirror neurons, and I wonder if they’re proving to be so controversial because they naturalize social values like empathy, reciprocity, and connectedness. Science is giving us a neurological impetus to be nice to each other—an incentive that throws a few wrenches in the cogs of modern living.