Wired Heart Cyborgs and the Materiality of Everyday Life

Abstract

To understand the merging of humans with technologies, STS and post-phenomenology have developed a rich vocabulary and heuristics, including entanglement, human-machine unions, and incorporation. Although this conceptual vocabulary is very important for understanding how the technologically transformed body comes into being and is enacted in everyday life, technologies inside bodies pose another challenge to theorizing body-technology relations. How are we to understand human-technology relations in which technologies should not entangle with bodies because they serve other purposes? For wired heart cyborgs, activities such as passing security controls at airports, or using electromagnetic machines, electrical domestic appliances and electronic devices, and even intimate contacts with their loved ones, can turn into events where the proper functioning of their devices may be at risk. Moreover, people having tele-defibrillators are at risk of being hacked. Anticipation of potentially harmful events and situations thus becomes an important part of the choreography of everyday life. To capture the active engagement involved in avoiding such intertwinement, I introduce the term ‘disentanglement work,’ that is, work involved to prevent entanglements with objects and people that may inflict harm upon devices implanted in bodies. This chapter explores what forms of disentanglement work are enacted during physical encounters with objects and people and which responsibilities emerge during these interactions.