Smith, M. & Morra, J. (Eds.). (2006). The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 340 pages, $34.95, Cloth 0-262-19530-5.

Reviewed by C. Richard King, Washington State University

Although theorists have long found the prosthesis to be a useful metaphor for thinking about the human condition, the past decade has witnessed an increased use of the prosthetic as a critical frame in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The rapid proliferation of prosthetics as a means to describe, decenter, and dream connections among bodies, technologies, and worlds has too often flirted with technofetishism, while ignoring uneasy issues associated with (dis)ability, marginalization, and embodied experience. In this context, The Prosthetic Impulse is most welcome. It initiates a consistently engaging and thought provoking series of dialogues, which ably interrogate contemporary theoretical preoccupations and establish new directions for scholarly inquiry. Shaped by disparate personal, philosophical, and disciplinary commitments, the contributors explore the connections and contradictions between the material and the metaphoric, machine and organism, and biology and culture that have converged around prosthetics and proven central to the construction of humanity and its alters. Addressing cultural icons from Sigmund Freud to Aimee Mullins, the collected essays highlight the ways in which the worlds of art and fashion, science, psychology, and medicine, as well as the military and music have taken up prostheses and through them fashioned the seemingly natural (bodies, sexualities, and genders for instance) and the cultural (identities, experiences, and institutions).

Uniting the contributions and animating the collection is (as the title foretells) "the prosthetic impulse." Conventionally, the editors suggest this construct refers to the progressive integration of machines into bodies that extend and enhance the capacities of subjects and societies. More importantly, as this volume amply illustrates, "the prosthetic impulse" names those flows, limits, and points of contact through which prostheses become interconstitutive of humanity and humanness.

The Prosthetic Impulse opens with a sharp and succinct discussion of the key themes of the volume, which simultaneously situates the collection in the literature and foreshadows the individual contributions. The editors have arranged the subsequent 12 essays into two sections: whereas the essays in the first part concern themselves with prosthetic embodiment, unpacking its phenomenological and representational features, the contributions in the second part trace the relationship between inside and outside as they work through the uniqueness of prosthetic technologies.

Vivian Sobchack opens the first section with a critical reading of technofetishism that argues for a corporeal and experiential grounding of technologies and their limits. On this foundation, Marquard Smith examines the sexualization of prosthetics within the discourses of medicine, fashion, and art. Philosopher Alphonso Lingis keeps the focus on the erotics of prostheses through a wonderful reading of apotemnophilia, a fixation on self-amputation. The following two essays by Lennard J. Davis and Gary Genosko, respectively, move from the psychosexual to the biocultural, probing race and the new genetics and the place of the articulated bodies of insects in the discourses of science fiction and the military industrial complex. Nancy Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb return the collection to more familiar but no less insightful territory as they probe the intersections of subjectivity, body, and neural prostheses. David Serlin closes the first section with a innovative reading of non-normative bodies in military culture since 1945, highlighting the entanglements of queerness and disability.

Elizabeth Grosz's essay begins the second section on mimesis with an analysis of representation as an extension and enhancement of the body, underscoring the centrality of visuality to such processes. Lee Manovich pushes the limits of current conceptions of prosthetics as well, arguing that visual technologies have offered forms of cognitive augmentation and externalization. With these ambitious rethinkings as a background, Raiford Guins and Omayara Zaragoza Cruz examine the use of the phonograph as prosthetic technology in urban environments to highlight and contest issues of race and power. Next, David Wills probes the externalization of memory through an analysis of Bernard Stiegler's work. Finally, Joane Morra seeks to move theorization of the prosthetic beyond language to drawing and in the process illuminate the work of Robert Rauschenberg and complicate the thinking of Jacques Derrida.

In the end, The Prosthetic Impulse is an exemplary work that promises to push conversation about humanity, technology, and (dis)ability in novel directions. Although its sophistication makes it unsuitable for classroom use outside of specialized graduate seminars, it should become required reading for scholars—not only those working in disability studies, but also those in the humanities and social sciences who concern themselves with bodies, technologies, and identities made real metaphorically and materially through extension, supplementation, and replacement.