Science, Technology, & Human ValuesJain / The Prosthetic Imagination The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling

This article critically examines the ways in which the trope of prosthesis has been used in recent theory to understand human-technology relationships. Analyzing the trope from a number of angles, including disability, factory labor practices, mass production, and marketing, the author scrutinizes ways in which technologies are simultaneously wound-ing and enabling in ways for which the prosthesis trope cannot account. Freud ([1930] 1962) echoed a common teleological fantasy of the prom-ises of prostheses by pronouncing: With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning.... Man has, as it were, become a prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent: but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times. (p. 42) Freud’s hesitant caveat surely referred to his own prosthesis, a palate replac-ing an original that was removed as a result of throat cancer in 1923. His pros-thesis, without which he could neither speak nor eat, caused him immense pain. Yet, if he went without it for more than two hours, the tissue circum-scribing the chasm between the mouth and nasal cavity would shrink—necessitating yet another agonizing fitting session and prosthesis (Wills 1995).1 Freud’s speculations on godlike magnificence stem, perhaps