"The Dorsal Turn," Dorsality

This will be an attempted response to Wills' first chapter in Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics, "The Dorsal Turn."  This book is what you call hard. His first line says that he doesn't mobilize arguments; these arguments "mobilize themselves here."


One of the most important parts of the Wills' very dense first several paragraphs is this: "The technological turn describes the turn into a technology that was always there" (3). When Wills talks about technology, he talks about something very, very fundamental.  Technology isn't simply the laptop I'm typing on.  It is...something to be determined more precisely later on.

"As soon as there is articulation, the human has rounded the technological bend, the technological turn has occurred, and there is no more simple human. Which, for all intents and purposes, means there never was any simple human" (3).  Again: very, very fundamental.  As soon as what was before human became human it was no longer simply human.  Clearly, our lackluster language here is at fault for making this confusing; the language--and thinking--we've inherited from modern conceptions of the human makes this confusing as all heck, hence the usual "huh?" when we have to resort to a term like posthuman, which is all types of confusing.  I can see why Wills doesn't really use the term "posthuman" because the term "posthuman" necessarily inherits the language of our conceptual predecessors; when one talks posthumanism they inhabit humanism. Really, when we talk about a "posthuman," we simply mean "human." Wills, thankfully, makes this leap and avoids dredging through the term posthumanism.

Wills then asserts that articulation comes before the emergence of the limb; in fact, it comes through first in the self-division of a cell.  Because of this, "we should think technology beyond the confines of a traditional concept of human-mechanical relation, as developmentally upstream from the articulation of a limb. We should think of a technology that grows, and of the bios in general as following the technological turn, as bending outside itself deep within itself" (4). Technology isn't simply the extension of articulation through tools (like my laptop).  Technology, as Wills says, "grows." Its inextricably linked with the life that articulates. Articulation outside/inside...is technological/technology?

This is the first two pages of Dorsality.  There will be more.  These beginning thoughts form the basis of Will's arguments throughout the book.  While Wills extends his arguments on technology to (as can be seen in the title) ethics and politics, I hope to mobilize (I'm mobilizing! I have agency!) his argument to understand the technological behavior manifested through selfies.