Phenomenologists like Foucault’s teacher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argue that the successful performance of everyday bodily tasks depends on the mutual incorporation of the instruments used to perform a task into the body and the dilation of ou…the sight of myself hunched in its black framework of aluminum and plastic” (p. 46). In her Quickie P100, Mairs is at one and the same time positioned and situated in the world. (Diedrich 2001, 218–19)Diedrich points out that for Mairs the Quickie P100 is not merely a bodily auxillary but an integral part of Mairs’s body. I want to suggest that there may be important intertwined ontological and ethical points to be made here that go beyo…
Nancy Mairs
writer · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Nancy Mairs is a disability theorist and memoirist whose phenomenological account of inhabiting a motorized wheelchair grounds arguments about embodied technology and prosthetics in the course readings. Her reflections on the Quickie P100 wheelchair—treated as both extension and constitution of the body rather than mere assistive device—enable Diedrich's intervention into how we theorize the boundary between self and instrument, a question central to cybernetic thinking about human-machine integration. Her work thus moves the course's focus from abstract systems theory to the lived, affective experience of technological mediation and what it means to be posthuman not as speculation but as embodied practice.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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