Community Tied in Common Body and Bodies Created by a Common Affect

The concept of “enactment” refers to the idea of the contingency of the body/technology boundary and as such it’s the basis for the emerging multiple ontologies of bodies in the Annemarie Mol’s texts. However, “enactment” does not mean the absolute malleability of the body. For authors working within the framework of actornetwork theory the body has its own irreducible materiality. Following diabetic patients, Mol and John Lo show the tensions and permeabilities existing in bodies. The concept of permeability allows them to show that bodies are capable of making mixtures with each other. In this process, bodies articulate and become cognizable. How the body and its capacity for articulation form different types of social? A sub-section of a reddit forum dedicated to the use of transcranial direct current stimulation devices was chosen as a case. The article shows that the central theme of the forum participants’ discussions is pain and illness, which avoids medication and acquires a special reality in their narratives. The way to work with this pain is through body control by attaching tDCS to the body. In such mixtures of body, electricity and medication, various forms of articulation emerge. Knowledge of articulated bodies is standardized and a specific language and visualization schemes emerge. The formation of the shared body as a assemblage of articulated bodies tied by shared affect in a single space created by internet infrastractures is the consequent of the unification processes of tDCS practices. At the same time, the fluid nature of tDCS devices causes the materiality of the common body to be blurred and then destroyed by multiplying practices of articulation

Body schema · Hierarchy · Negotiation · Unification · Workaround · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Technology, Environment, Urban Planning